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+Foreword
+
+WITH ITS PARADOXICAL TITLE, Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde’s most
+influential book of prose, is ever more trenchant twenty-three years
+after its first printing—surpassing even the reputation of her poetry,
+which is no minor feat. Were she here among us in the funky U.S.
+instead of floating somewhere over the Guinea Coast, Lorde would
+still want and have to claim that “outsider” stance. These prose
+works, much like her poetry, position her (and us), as Akasha Gloria
+Hull said many years ago, “on the line,” refusing the safety of that
+inside perimeter. I return to these texts again and always—in these
+times of imperial and unnatural acts, like the war in Iraq and the
+federal abandonment of the Gulf Coast survivors in the wake of
+Hurricane Katrina. Sister is my sister no matter how I may reject her
+counsel: “As Black people … we must move against not only those
+forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those
+oppressive values which we have been forced to take into
+ourselves.”1 No matter how angry Sister makes me with her
+seemingly easy aphorisms: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle
+the master’s house.”2 No matter how much Sister still asks the hard
+questions: “Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury
+and disappointment for each other? Who is it we must destroy when
+we attack each other with that tone of predetermined and correct
+annihilation?”3
+On the shelf with or at the bottom of that stack of other wellmined tomes—The Black Woman: An Anthology; Conditions: Five, The
+Black Women’s Issue; Lesbian Fiction; Top Ranking—Sister is never far
+from me. I retain several dog-eared, underlined, coffee-splotched
+copies of her—at home, at work, on my nightstand—as necessary as
+my eyeglasses, my second sight.
+A fall semester of teaching my women’s studies seminar never
+passes without deploying one of the following texts in theorizing
+
+feminist activism: “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining
+Difference,” “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” or “The Uses of Anger:
+Women Responding to Racism.” In one paragraph, Lorde can
+simultaneously blow away the entire Enlightenment project and use
+its tools, too.
+In 1990 I quoted myself in “Knowing the Danger and Going There
+Anyway,” an article I wrote on Lorde for the Boston feminist
+newspaper, Sojourner; I’ll change the sister trope and quote myself
+again: “I said that Audre Lorde’s work is ’a neighbor I’ve grown up
+with, who can always be counted on for honest talk, to rescue me
+when I’ve forgotten the key to my own house, to go with me to a
+tenants’ or town meeting, a community festival’.”4 In 1990, Lorde
+was still walking among us. Sister Outsider has taken its creator’s
+place as that good neighbor. And with this new edition, we will
+have our good neighbor and sister for another generation. May
+those of us who are Sister Outsider’s old neighbors continue to be
+inspired by her luminous writing and may those new neighbors be
+newly inspired.
+—CHERYL CLARKE
+2007
+
+Introduction
+
+WHEN WE BEGAN EDITING Sister Outsider—long after the book had been
+conceptualized, a contract signed, and new material written—Audre
+Lorde informed me, as we were working one afternoon, that she
+doesn’t write theory. “I am a poet,” she said.
+Lorde’s stature as a poet is undeniable. And yet there can be no
+doubt that Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches drawn
+from the past eight years of this Black lesbian feminist’s nonfiction
+prose, makes absolutely clear to many what some already knew:
+Audre Lorde’s voice is central to the development of contemporary
+feminist theory. She is at the cutting edge of consciousness.
+The fifteen selections included here, several of them published for
+the first time, are essential reading. Whether it is the by now
+familiar “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” opening us up to
+the potential power in all aspects of our lives implicit in the erotic,
+When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion
+of the life-force of women; of that creative energy
+empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now
+reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our
+loving, our work, our lives.1
+or the recently authored “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and
+Anger,” probing the white racist roots of hostility between Black
+women,
+We are Black women born into a society of entrenched
+loathing and contempt for whatever is Black and female. We
+are strong and enduring. We are also deeply scarred.2
+
+Lorde’s work expands, deepens, and enriches all of our
+understandings of what feminism can be.
+But what about the “conflict” between poetry and theory,
+between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We
+have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states
+what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment,
+while the theorist’s mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that
+one is art and therefore experienced “subjectively,” and the other is
+scholarship, held accountable in the “objective” world of ideas. We
+have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and
+that we have to choose between them.
+The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we
+believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what
+we think—between poetry and theory. We are easier to control
+when one part of our selves is split from another, fragmented, off
+balance. There are other configurations, however, other ways of
+experiencing the world, though they are often difficult to name. We
+can sense them and seek their articulation. Because it is the work of
+feminism to make connections, to heal unnecessary divisions, Sister
+Outsider is a reason for hope.
+Audre Lorde’s writing is an impulse toward wholeness. What she
+says and how she says it engages us both emotionally and
+intellectually. She writes from the particulars of who she is: Black
+woman, lesbian, feminist, mother of two children, daughter of
+Grenadian immigrants, educator, cancer survivor, activist. She
+creates material from the dailiness of her life that we can use to help
+shape ours. Out of her desire for wholeness, her need to encompass
+and address all the parts of herself, she teaches us about the
+significance of difference—“that raw and powerful connection from
+which our personal power is forged.”3
+A white Jewish lesbian mother, I first read “Man Child: A Black
+Lesbian Feminist’s Response” several years ago as I was struggling
+to accept the inevitability of my prepubescent son’s eventual
+manhood. Not only would this boy of mine become a man
+physically, but he might act like one. This awareness turned into a
+
+major crisis for me at a time and place when virtually all the lesbian
+mothers I knew (who I realized, with hindsight, were also white)
+either insisted that their “androgynous” male children would stay
+that way, would not grow up to be sexist/misogynist men, or were
+pressured to choose between a separatist vision of community and
+their sons. I felt trapped by a narrow range of options.
+Lorde, however, had wider vision. She started with the reality of
+her child’s approaching manhood (“Our sons will not grown into
+women”4) and then asked what kind of man he would become. She
+saw clearly that she could both love her son fiercely and let him go.
+In fact, for their mutual survival, she had no choice but to let him
+go, to teach him that she “did not exist to do his feeling for him.”5
+Lorde and I are both lesbian mothers who have had to teach our
+boys to do their own emotional work. But her son Jonathan is Black
+and my son Joshua is white and that is not a trivial difference in a
+racist society, despite their common manhood. As Lorde has written
+elsewhere:
+Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You
+fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and
+testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged
+from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn
+your backs upon the reasons they are dying.6
+I read “Man Child,” and it was one of those occasions when I can
+remember something major shifting inside me.
+I came to understand it was not merely that Lorde knew more
+about raising sons than I did, although I had been given expert
+advice. I realized how directly Lorde’s knowledge was tied to her
+difference—those realities of Blackness and lesbianism that placed
+her outside the dominant society. She had information that I, a
+white woman who had lived most of my life in a middle-class
+heterosexual world, did not have, information I could use,
+information I needed.
+
+For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is
+as american as apple pie have always had to be watchers …7
+I was ashamed by my arrogance, frightened that my ignorance
+would be exposed, and ultimately excited by the possibilities
+becoming available to me. I made a promise to my future to try and
+listen to those voices, in others and in myself, that knew what they
+knew precisely because they were different. I wanted to hear what
+they had to tell me.
+Of course, the reverberations continue.
+When I read “Man Child” again several years later, having done a
+lot of work reclaiming my Jewish identity in the interim, I thought
+about the complexities of my son being a white Jewish man in a
+white Christian society. I had not seen this as an issue the first time
+around; it is hard now to reconstruct my shortsightedness.
+When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place
+in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like
+you, I’m not excluding you from the joining—I’m
+broadening the joining.8
+There is a further reduction of the distance between feeling and
+thinking as we become aware of Lorde’s internal process. We watch
+her move from “the chaos of knowledge … that dark and true depth
+within each of us that nurtures vision”9 to “the heretical actions that
+our dreams imply.”10 Understanding—the figuring out and piecing
+together, the moving from one place to the next, provides the
+connections.
+What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge
+available for use, and that’s the urgency, that’s the push,
+that’s the drive.11
+Movement is intentional and life-sustaining.
+Nowhere is this intentionality more evident than in “The
+Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Here Lorde
+
+grapples with a possible diagnosis of cancer. “I had the feeling,
+probably a body sense, that life was never going to be the
+same….”12 She deals in public, at an academic gathering, in front of
+700 women. She tells us that she is afraid but that silence is not a
+protection.
+And it [speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the
+harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of
+death. But we have lived through all of those already, in
+silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now,
+that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained
+an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have
+suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for
+establishing perspective.13
+Lorde’s commitment to confront the worst so that she is freed to
+experience the best is unshakeable. Although Sister Outsider spans
+almost a decade of her work, nine of the fifteen pieces in this book
+were written in the two years following Lorde’s discovery that she
+might have/did have cancer. In the process of her growth, her
+coming to terms and using what she has learned, she shows us
+things we can take with us in our struggles for survival, no matter
+what our particular “worst” may be.
+What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we
+have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it?
+Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who
+can ever have power over me again?14
+Audre Lorde asks no more of us than she does of herself: that we
+pay attention to those voices we have been taught to distrust, that
+we articulate what they teach us, that we act upon what we know.
+Just as she develops themes, reworking and building on them over
+time to create theory, so, too, can we integrate the material of our
+lives.
+
+Black woman, lesbian, feminist, mother of two children, daughter
+of Grenadian immigrants, educator, cancer survivor, activist. The
+essays and speeches in Sister Outsider give new resonance to that
+fundamental but much abused feminist revelation that the personal
+is political. We are all amplified by Audre Lorde’s work.
+I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you
+like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I
+discover you in myself.15
+—NANCY K. BEREANO
+December 1983
+
+Notes from a Trip to Russia*
+SINCE I’VE RETURNED from Russia a few weeks ago, I’ve been dreaming
+a lot. At first I dreamt about Moscow every night. Sometimes my
+lover and I had returned there; sometimes I would be in warmer,
+familiar places I had visited; sometimes in different, unfamiliar
+cities, cold, white, strange. In one dream, I was making love to a
+woman behind a stack of clothing in Gumm’s Department Store in
+Moscow. She was ill, and we went upstairs, where I said to a
+matron, “We have to get her to the hospital.” The matron said, “All
+right, you take her over there and tell them that she needs a kidney
+scan and a brain scan …” And I said, “No, they’re not going to do
+that for me.” And she looked at me very strangely and she said, “Of
+course they will.” And I realized I was in Russia, and medicine and
+doctor bills and all the rest of that are free.
+My dreams don’t come every night anymore, but it seems as if
+they’ve gotten deeper and deeper so that I awake not really
+knowing any of the content of them but only knowing that I’ve just
+dreamt about Russia again. For a while, in my dreams, Russia
+became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet
+exist anywhere I have been. The possibilities of living in Russia
+seem very different in some respects, yet the people feel so Western
+European (so American, really) outside of Tashkent. And the
+afternoons in Moscow are so dark and gloomy.
+
+I
+The flight to Moscow was nine hours long, and from my
+observations on the plane, Russians are generally as unfriendly to
+each other as Americans are and just about as unhelpful.
+There was a marvelously craggy-faced old blue-eyed woman in
+her seventies wearing a babushka, with a huge coat roll. On the
+plane everyone had one kind of huge coat roll or another except me.
+When I stepped out into the Moscow weather I realized why. But
+this woman was sitting in the seat right in front of me. She was
+traveling alone and was too short to wield her roll easily. She tried
+once, and she tried twice, and finally I got up and helped her. The
+plane was packed: I’d never seen a plane quite so crowded before.
+The old woman turned around and looked at me. It was obvious she
+did not speak English because I had muttered something to her with
+no reply. There was in her eyes a look of absolutely no rancor. I
+thought with a quick shock how a certain tension in glances
+between American Black and white people is taken for granted.
+There was no thank you either, but there was a kind of simple
+human response to who I was. And then as she turned to sit back
+down, under her very dowdy cardigan I saw on her undersweater at
+least three military-type medals, complete with chevrons. Hero of
+the Republic medals, I learned later. Earned for hard work.
+This is something that I noticed all over: the very old people in
+Russia have a stamp upon them that I hope I can learn and never
+lose, a matter-of-fact resilience and sense of their place upon the
+earth that is very sturdy and reassuring.
+I landed on September 10th about 3:30 P.M. Moscow time and
+stepped out into a very raw, familiar greyness. There was a winter
+smell to the air; almost nostalgic. The trees were Thanksgivingturned and the sky had that turkey-laden grey-pumpkin color. I saw
+three large, square-faced women arm-in-arm, marching across the
+airfield laughing and joking as they came. They were evidently
+workers just going off shift — they had grey coveralls and jackets
+
+with engineer caps and carried lunch buckets. They stopped beside a
+truck that had paused and started beating against the closed
+window, drawing the attention of the other woman inside with
+some half-hello/half-joke at the driver, who was obviously their
+buddy, because they all pointed fingers at each other laughing
+uproariously together there on the Moscow airstrip in the grim light,
+swinging their lunch pails and cutting up.
+My Intourist guided name was Helen, a very pleasant and
+attractive large-boned young woman in her thirties. She was born in
+the East, near Japan, and her father, who’d been a military man,
+was dead. She lived with her mother now, and she said that she and
+her mother had to learn to do a lot of things for themselves since
+there are so few men around these days and service is so hard to
+get.
+In Russia you carry your own bags in airports and hotels. This, at
+first, struck me as oppressive because, of course, carrying a laden
+bag up seven flights of stairs when the elevator isn’t working is not
+fun. But the longer I stayed there the fairer it seemed, because in
+this country it appears that everything is seen in terms of food. That
+is, the labor of one’s hands is measured by how much food you can
+produce, and then you take that and compare its importance to the
+worth of the other work that you do. Some men and women spend
+their whole lives, for instance, learning and doing the infinitely slow
+and patient handwork of retouching Persian Blue tiles down in
+Samarkand to restore the ancient mausoleums. It is considered very
+precious work. But antiquities have a particular value, whereas
+carrying someone else’s bag does not have a very high priority
+because it is not very productive either of beauty or worth. If you
+can’t manage it, then that’s another story. I find it a very interesting
+concept.
+It’s about thirty miles from the airport to the city of Moscow, and
+the road and the trees and the drivers could have been people from
+Northern Westchester in late winter, except I couldn’t read any of
+the signs. We would pass from time to time incredibly beautiful, old,
+uncared for Russian-Orthodox-style houses, with gorgeous painted
+wooden colors and outlined ornate windows. Some of them were
+
+almost falling down. But there was a large ornate richness about the
+landscape and architecture on the outskirts of Moscow, even in its
+grey winter, that seemed to tell me immediately that I was not at
+home.
+I stayed at the Hotel Younnost, which is one of the international
+hotels in Moscow. The room was a square studio affair with
+Hollywood bed couches, and a huge picture window looking
+towards the National Stadium, over a railroad bridge, with a very
+imposing view of the University buildings against the skyline. But
+everything was so reminiscent of New York in winter that even as I
+sat at 9:30 P.M. after dinner, writing, looking through the blinds,
+there was the sound of a train and light on the skyline, and every
+now and then the tail lights of an auto curving around between the
+railroad bridge and the hotel. And it felt like a hundred nights that I
+remembered along Riverside Drive, except that just on the edge of
+the picture was the golden onion-shaped dome of a Russian
+Orthodox church.
+Before dinner I took a short walk. It was already growing dark,
+but down the street from the hotel was the Stadium stop on the
+Metro, which is a subway. I walked down there and into the Metro
+station and I stood in front of the escalators for awhile just watching
+the faces of the people coming and going. It felt like instant 14th
+Street of my childhood, before Blacks and Latins colored New York,
+except everyone was much more orderly and the whole place
+seemed much less crowded. The thing that was really strangest of all
+for the ten minutes that I stood there was that there were no Black
+people. And the token collector and the station manager were
+women. The station was very large and very beautiful and very
+clean — shockingly, strikingly, enjoyably clean. The whole station
+looked like a theater lobby — bright brass and mosaics and shining
+chandeliers. Even when they were rushing, and in Moscow there’s
+always a kind of rush, people lack the desperation of New York. One
+thing that characterized all of these people was a pleasantness in
+their faces, a willingness to smile, at least at me, a stranger. It was a
+strange contrast to the grimness of the weather.
+
+There are some Black people around the hotel and I inquired of
+Helen about the Patrice Lumumba University. This is a university
+located in Moscow for students from African countries. There were
+many Africans in and around the hotel when I got back from the
+Metro station and I think many of them were here for the
+Conference. Interestingly enough, most of them speak Russian and I
+don’t. When I went downstairs to dinner, I almost quailed in front of
+the linguistic task because I could not even find out where I was
+supposed to sit, or whether I should wait to be seated. Whenever the
+alphabet is unfamiliar, there are absolutely no cues to a foreign
+language. A young Black man swaggered across my eyesight with
+that particular swagger of fine, young Black men wanting to be
+noticed and I said, “Do you speak English?” “Yes,” he said and
+started walking very rapidly away from me. So I walked back to him
+and when I tried to ask him whether I should sit down or wait to be
+seated, I realized the poor boy did not understand a word that I
+said. At that point I pulled out my two trusty phrase books and
+proceeded to order myself a very delicious dinner of white wine,
+boiled fish soup that was lemon piquant, olive rich, and fresh
+mackerel, delicate, grilled sturgeon with pickled sauce, bread, and
+even a glass of tea. All of this was made possible by great tenacity
+and daring on my part, and the smiling forebearance of a very
+helpful waiter who brought out one of the cooks from the kitchen to
+help with the task of deciphering my desires.
+
+II
+It’s very cold in Moscow. The day I arrived it snowed in the
+morning and it snowed again today, and this is September 16th. My
+guide, Helen, put her finger on it very accurately. She said that life
+in Moscow is a constant fight against the cold weather, and that
+living is only a triumph against death by freezing. Maybe because of
+the cold, or maybe because of the shortage of food in the war years,
+but everyone eats an enormous amount here. Tonight, because of a
+slight error on the part of the waitress, Helen had two dinners and
+thought very little about eating them both. And no one is terribly
+fat, but I think that has a good deal to do with the weather. We had
+wine at dinner tonight, and wine seems to be used a lot to loosen up
+one’s tongue. It almost seems a prescription. At every dinner meal
+there are always three glasses: one for water, one for wine, and one
+for vodka, which flows like water, and with apparently as little
+effect upon Russians.
+A group from the conference with our Intourist guides went
+sightseeing today. It’s hard to believe that today’s Sunday because
+the whole city seems so full of weekday life, so intent on its own
+purposes, that it makes the week seem extended by an extra day.
+We saw the Novagrodsky Convent Museum and the brilliant, saucy
+golden onion steeples that shock me back from the feeling this is
+Manhattan. We went to see the University and of course many
+plaques for many heroes, but I never saw one that moved me as
+much as the tough old lady coming in on Aeroflot. And the Bolshoi
+Ballet Theatre. It was rainy and grey and overcast — a New York
+December day — and very imposing in the way the Grand
+Concourse at 161st Street in the Bronx can be imposing in the
+middle of December, or Columbus Circle. The golden onion steeples
+on some older buildings are beautiful and they glisten all the time,
+even in this weather, which makes them look like joyful promises on
+the landscape, or fairy palaces, and the lovely colors of greens,
+whites, yellows and oranges decorating and outlining windows
+
+make a wonderfully colorful accent in the greyness. I hope that I get
+a chance to see the Pushkin Museum.
+I was interviewed by a sweetly astute, motherly woman who was
+one of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. She was doing a
+study of “Negro policy,” as she said, and of course she was very
+interested in women in the States. We talked for a good two hours
+and one of the things I told her was about the old woman on the
+plane with the medals, and I asked her if she had any idea what
+they were. She said the woman was probably an older farm worker
+who had been awarded and named a “Hero of the Republic.” Those
+were mostly given to people who worked very hard, she said. It was
+interesting because earlier, at lunch, I had seen a side of Helen, my
+interpreter, that surprised me. She was quite out of sorts with one of
+the waitresses who did not wait on her quickly enough, and it does
+take a long time to get waited on. Helen made a remark that the
+workers rule the country, and her manner and response to that
+seemed to be one of disgust, or at least rather put-off. I think Helen
+felt that she was being discriminated against, or that she was at a
+disadvantage, because she was an “intellectual,” a translator as well
+as an interpreter. Which struck me as an odd kind of snobbishness
+because Helen worked at least as hard, if not harder, than any
+waitress, running after me and living my life as well as hers.
+Because always, she stuck to me like white on rice.
+We were at the University and our guide was talking to us, in
+English, about the buildings, which had been built during Stalin’s
+time. Material had been brought down from the Ukraine to sink into
+the earth to build such buildings because Moscow, unlike New York,
+is not built upon bedrock. This strikes me as strange, that this city of
+oversize, imposing stone buildings should not be grounded on
+bedrock. It’s like it remains standing on human will. While we were
+standing in front of the reflecting pool having this discussion, a little
+tow-headed boy sidled up to me with a completely international air,
+all of ten years old, stood in front of me and with a furtive sideways
+gesture, flipped his hand open. In the center of his little palm was a
+button-pin of a red star with a soldier in the middle of it. I was
+completely taken aback because I did not know what the kid wanted
+
+and I asked Helen who brushed the child off and shooed him away
+so quickly I didn’t have a chance to stop her. Then she told me that
+he wanted to trade for American buttons. That little kid had stood
+off to the side and watched all of these strange Black people, and he
+had managed to peg me as an American because, of course,
+Americans are the only ones who go around wearing lots and lots of
+buttons, and he had wanted to trade his red star button. I was
+touched by the child, and also because I couldn’t help but think that
+it was Sunday and he was probably hitting all the tourist spots. I’m
+sure his parents did not know where he was, and I really wondered
+what his mother would do if she knew.
+The woman from the Writers’ Union who was doing her book on
+Negro policy was, I’d say, a little older than I was, probably in her
+early fifties, and her husband had been killed in the war. She had no
+children. She offered these facts about herself as soon as we sat
+down, talking openly about her life, as everybody seemingly does
+here. I say seemingly because it only goes so far. And she, like my
+guide and most women here, both young and old, seem to mourn
+the lack of men. At the same time they appear to have shaken off
+many of the traditional role-playing devices vis-a-vis men. Almost
+everyone I’ve met has lost someone in what they call the “Great
+Patriotic War,” which is our Second World War.
+I was interviewed by Oleg this evening, one of the officials of the
+Union of Soviet Writers, the people who had invited me to Russia
+and who were footing the bill. In my interview with him I learned
+the hotel that we’re staying in was originally a youth hostel and
+Oleg apologized because it was not as “civilized,” so he said, as
+other Moscow hotels. I came across this term civilized before, and I
+wondered whether it was a term used around Americans or whether
+it meant up to American standards. Increasingly I get a feeling that
+American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether
+one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be
+reckoned with. This is rather disappointing. But coming back to the
+hotel, I notice that the fixtures here are a little shabby, but they do
+work, and the studio beds are a bit adolescent in size, but they are
+comfortable. For a youth hostel it’s better than I would ever hope
+
+for. Of course, I can’t help but wonder why the African-Asian
+Conference people should be housed in a youth hostel, particularly
+an “uncivilized” one, but I don’t imagine that I’ll ever get an answer
+to that. All hotel rooms cost the same in the Soviet Union. Utilities,
+from my conversation with Helen while we were riding the Metro
+down to send a cable, utilities are very inexpensive. The gas to cook
+with costs sixteen kopecs a month which is less than one ruble
+(about $3.00) and the most electricity Helen says that she uses,
+when she’s translating all day long in winter, costs three rubles a
+month. That is very expensive, she says. The two-room apartment
+which she and her mother share costs eight rubles a month.
+Oleg does not speak English, or does not converse in English. Like
+many other people I was to meet during my stay in Russia, he
+understands English although he does not let on. Oleg said through
+Helen that he wants me to know it was very important for us to
+meet other writers and that the point of the Conference was for us
+to get together. I thanked him for the twenty-five rubles I had been
+given as soon as I arrived here in Moscow, which I have been told
+was a gift from the Union of Soviet Writers for pocket money. I
+spoke of the oppressed people all over the world, meeting to touch
+and to share, I spoke of South Africa and their struggle. Oleg said
+something very curious. “Yes, South Africa is really very bad. It is
+like a sore upon the body that will not heal.” This sounded to me
+both removed and proprietary. Unclear. Willy, my South African
+poet friend, lives in Tanzania now and he may be here, which I am
+very excited about.
+
+III
+We traveled south to Uzbekistan for the Conference, a five-hour
+journey that became seven because of delays. We arrived in
+Tashkent after dark following a long, exhausting plane ride. As I
+have said, Russian planes are incredibly packed, every single inch
+being taken up in seats. They absolutely utilize their air space. Even
+coming from New York to Moscow it was like air mass transit.
+Certainly from Moscow to Tashkent this was true since there were
+150 delegates to the African-Asian Writers Conference, myself, one
+observer, interpreters, and press personnel. All together, a traveling
+group of about 250 people, which is a large group to move around a
+country at least four or five times the size of the United States (and
+in a standard, not wide-bodied, plane).
+As we descended the plane in Tashkent, it was deliciously hot and
+smelled like Accra, Ghana. At least it seemed to me that it did, from
+the short ride from the airport to the hotel. The road to the city had
+lots of wood and white marble all around broad avenues, and bright
+street lights. The whole town of Tashkent had been rebuilt after the
+1966 earthquake. We arrived tired and hot, to a welcome that
+would make your heart grow still, then sing. Can you imagine 250
+of us, weary, cramped, hungry, disoriented, overtalked, underfed? It
+is after dark. We step out of the plane and there before us are over a
+hundred people and TV cameras, and lights, and two or three
+hundred little children dressed in costumes with bunches of flowers
+that they thrust upon each of us as we walked down the ramp from
+the plane. “Surprise!” Well, you know, it was a surprise. Pure and
+simple, and I was pretty damn well surprised. I was surprised at the
+gesture, hokey or not, at the mass participation in it. Most of all, I
+was surprised at my response to it; I felt genuinely welcomed.
+So off to the hotel we went and I had the distinct feeling here, for
+the first time in Russia, that I was meeting warm-blooded people; in
+the sense of contact unavoided, desires and emotions possible, the
+sense that there was something hauntingly, personally familiar —
+
+not in the way the town looks because it looked like nothing I’d
+ever seen before, night and the minarets — but the tempo of life felt
+hotter, quicker than in Moscow; and in place of Moscow’s
+determined pleasantness, the people displayed a kind of warmth
+that was very engaging. They are an Asian people in Tashkent.
+Uzbeki. They look like the descendants of Ghengis Khan, some of
+whom I’m sure they are. They are Asian and they are Russian. They
+think and speak and consider themselves Russian, for all intents and
+purposes so far as I can see, and I really wonder how they manage
+that. On the other hand, the longer I stayed the more I realized
+some of the personal tensions between North Russian and Uzbek are
+national and some racial.
+There are only four sisters in this whole conference. In the plane
+coming to Tashkent, I sat with the three other African women and
+we exchanged chitchat for 5½ hours about our respective children,
+about our ex-old men, all very, very heterocetera.
+
+IV
+Tashkent is divided into two parts. There’s the old part that
+survived the huge earthquake of 1966, and there’s the newer part
+which is on the outskirts of old Tashkent. It’s very new and very
+modern, rebuilt in a very short time after the earthquake that
+practically totaled the area. It was rebuilt by labor from all over the
+Soviet Union. People came from the Ukraine, from Byelo-Russia,
+from all over, and they rebuilt the city. And there are many
+different styles of architecture in the new part of town because
+every group who came built their own type of building. It’s almost a
+memorial to what can be done when a large group of people work
+together. It was one of the things that impressed me greatly during
+my stay in Tashkent. The old part, which is really the center of
+Tashkent, looks very, very much like a town in Ghana or Dahomey,
+say Kumasi or Cotonou. In the daylight it looks so much like some
+parts of West Africa that I could scarcely believe it. In fact, if
+Moscow is New York in another space, in another color — because
+both New York and Moscow have a little over eight million
+population and should apparently have many of the same problems,
+but Moscow seems to have handled them very differently — if
+Moscow is New York, Tashkent is Accra. It is African in so many
+ways — the stalls, the mix of the old and the new, the corrugated
+tin roofs on top of adobe houses. The corn smell in the plaza,
+although the plazas were more modern than in West Africa. Even
+some flowers and trees, Calla lilies. But the red laterite smell of the
+earth was different.
+The people here in Tashkent, which is quite close to the Iranian
+border, are very diverse, and I am impressed by their apparent
+unity, by the ways in which the Russian and the Asian people seem
+to be able to function in a multinational atmosphere that requires of
+them that they get along, whether or not they are each other’s
+favorite people. And it’s not that there are no individuals who are
+nationalists, or racists, but that the taking of a state position against
+
+nationalism, against racism is what makes it possible for a society
+like this to function. And of course the next step in that process
+must be the personal element. I don’t see anyone attempting or even
+suggesting this phase, however, and that is troublesome, for without
+this step socialism remains at the mercy of an incomplete vision,
+imposed from the outside. We have internal desires but outside
+controls. But at least there is a climate here that seems to encourage
+those questions. I asked Helen about the Jews, and she was rather
+evasive, I think, saying only that there were Jews in government.
+The basic position seems to be one of a presumption of equality,
+even though there is sometimes a large gap between the expectation
+and the reality.
+We visited a film studio and saw several children’s cartoons
+which handled their themes beautifully, deeply, with great humor,
+and most notably, without the kind of violence that we have come
+to associate with cartoons. They were truly delightful.
+After two very busy days of meetings in Tashkent, we started out
+at about 7:30 one morning by bus for Samarkand, the fabulous city
+of Tamerlane the Great. After a short snooze on the bus I began to
+feel a little more human, to look about me and the countryside.
+We’re heading southeast from Tashkent, and Tashkent was
+southeast of Moscow. The countryside is very beautiful. It feels
+strange and familiar at the same time. This is cotton country. Miles
+and miles of it, and trainloads of students were coming south from
+Moscow on a two-week vacation to party and pick cotton. There was
+a holiday atmosphere all around. We passed through small villages
+where I could see little markets with women sitting cross-ankled on
+the bare earth selling a few cabbages or a small tray of fruit. And
+walls, behind which you could see adobe houses. Even the walls
+themselves reminded me very much of West Africa, made of a clay
+mud that cracks in the same old familiar patterns that we saw over
+and over again in Kumasi and south of Accra. Only here the clay is
+not red, but a light beige, and that is to remind me that this is the
+USSR and not Ghana or Dahomey. Of course, the faces are white.
+There are other differences that creep through also. The towns and
+the villages are really in very good repair and there is a powerful
+
+railroad running parallel to our road. Long, efficient looking trains
+and tanker cars and ten-car passenger trains pass by us, going
+through switch houses with blue and white ceramic tiles and
+painted roofs, all managed by women. Everything looks massive,
+bigger, in Russia. The roads are wider, the trains longer, the
+buildings bigger. The ceilings are higher. Everything seems to be on
+a larger scale.
+We stopped for a harvest festival lunch at a collective farm,
+complete with the prerequisite but very engaging cultural
+presentation, while vodka flowed. Then we all danced and sang
+together with the busloads of students who had come to help pick
+cotton. Later on along the roads there were literally hills of cotton
+being loaded onto trains.
+Each town that we pass through has a cafe, where the villagers
+can come and spend an evening or chat or talk or watch TV or listen
+to propaganda, who knows, but where they can meet. And all over,
+in between very old looking villages, there are also new four story
+buildings in progress, factories, new apartment houses. Trains full of
+building slabs and other kinds of materials, coal and rock and
+tractors pass by, even one with row after row after row of small
+automobiles. There are three different Russian automobiles. This is
+the cheapest, and most popular — hundreds and hundreds of cars
+stacked, all the same lemon color. Obviously, that month the factory
+was producing yellow.
+I watched all of this industry pass and it came through to me on
+that bus ride down to Samarkand that this land was not industrial so
+much as it was industrious. There was a flavor of people working
+hard and doing things and it was very attractive. On top of that, I
+learned that this area between Tashkent and Samarkand was once
+known as the “Hungry Desert” because although it was fertile, no
+rain ever fell and it was covered with a coat of salt. Through
+technology devised to lift the salt, and a great deal of human hands
+and engineering, this whole area has been made to bloom, and it
+really does bloom. It is being farmed, mostly with cotton. People
+live here and there are massive irrigation ditches and pipes that
+maintain trees where there are towns and collective farms. All
+
+through Uzbekistan the feeling of a desert having been reclaimed
+and bearing huge fruit is very constant. Later on, as we headed on
+south after the great feast, we stopped at an oasis, and I picked
+some desert flowers that were growing — small little scrub flowers
+that were growing in the sand. And just for so, I tasted one of them
+and as honeysuckle is sweet, so is this flower salt. It was as if the
+earth itself was still producing salt or still pouring salt into its
+products.
+There’s very beautiful marble throughout Uzbekistan. The stairs
+of the hotels and sometimes the streets have a beautiful pink and
+green marble. That was in Tashkent, which means “Stone City.” But
+on this ride from Tashkent to Samarkand I saw no stones or rocks of
+any kind near the road. I don’t know why, except that it is a
+reclaimed desert. The roads felt very good, and they were very
+broad because of course there was always heavy machinery and
+trucking traveling back and forth.
+We had another glowing welcome in Gulstan, which means the
+“Hungry Desert.” This is now the village of roses. We visited a
+collective farm, went into a house, saw the kindergarten. The
+woman’s house into which we went was very impressive, as I said to
+someone later at lunch who asked me what I thought. I said, “She
+lives better than I do,” and in some ways she did. The collective
+farm in Gulstan, called the Leningrad Collective, is one of the
+wealthiest collectives in the area. I will never know the name of the
+very kind young woman who opened her home to me, but I also will
+not forget her. She offered me the hospitality of her house, and even
+though we did not speak the same language, I felt that she was a
+woman like myself, wishing that all of our children could live in
+peace upon their own earth, somehow make fruitful the power of
+their own hands. Through Helen, she spoke about her three
+children, one of whom was only a nursing infant, and I spoke of my
+two. I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very
+strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue.
+I was reminded of her a few days later in Samarkand when Fikre,
+an Ethiopian student at Patrice Lumumba University, and I went
+shopping in the market. I remember the Moslem woman who came
+
+up to me in the marketplace, and she brought her little boy up to
+me asking Fikre if I had a little boy also. She said that she had never
+seen a Black woman before, that she had seen Black men, but she
+had never seen a Black woman, and that she so much liked the way
+I looked that she just wanted to bring her little boy and find out if I
+had a little boy, too. Then we blessed each other and spoke good
+words and then she passed on.
+There was the accomplished and very eloquent young Asian
+woman, an anthropology student, she said, who acted as our
+museum guide in Samarkand and shared her great store of historical
+knowledge with us. The night that we arrived in Samarkand and
+again the next day in looking through the museums, I felt that there
+were many things we were not seeing. For instance, we passed a
+case where there are a number of coins which I recognized as
+ancient Chinese coins because I’d used them for casting the I Ching.
+I asked our guide if these were from China. She acted as if I’d said a
+dirty word. And she said, “No, these were from right here in
+Samarkand.” Now obviously they had been traded, and that was the
+whole point, but of course I couldn’t read the Russian explanation
+under it, and she evidently took great offense at my use of the word
+China. In all of the women I’ve met here I feel an air of security and
+awareness of their own powers as women, as producers, and as
+human beings that is very affirming. But I also feel a stony rigidity,
+a resistance to questioning that frightens me, saddens me, because it
+feels destructive of progress as process.
+We arrived in Samarkand about 9:30 P.M., quite wearied by a very
+full day. We got into the main square just in time to catch the last
+light-show at Tamerlane’s tomb. The less said about that the better.
+But the following day, Helen, Fikre, and I played hooky from one
+mausoleum and ran across the street and went to a market. It is very
+reassuring and good as always. People in markets find a way of
+getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want.
+The tile tombs and the midrasas (ancient schools) of Samarkand
+are truly beautiful, intricate, and still. Incredibly painstaking work is
+being done to restore them. I could feel stillness in my bones,
+
+walking through these places, knowing that so much history had
+been buried there. I found two feathers in the Tomb of Bebe,
+Timor’s favorite wife, and I felt almost as if I had come there to find
+them. The Tomb of Bebe has beautiful minarets, but the Tomb itself
+was never used. The mosque was never used. There is a story that
+Bebe was Tamerlane’s favorite wife and he “loved her with all of his
+heart.” However, he had many, many journeys to go upon and he
+left her so often that he broke her heart and she died. When he
+returned and found she was dead, he was very upset because he had
+loved her so much, and he vowed that he would build the biggest
+mausoleum in the world, the most ornate mosque for her, and that
+is what he did. But then, just before it was completed, it collapsed.
+They say it was due to an error of the architect, but it was never
+used. One up for the lady shades.
+The tile tombs and the midrasas are engrossing, but it’s the
+market that caught my heart. We went later in that afternoon to
+another meeting of solidarity for the oppressed people of
+Somewhere. The only thing that I was quite sure of was that it was
+not for the oppressed Black people of America, which point, of
+course, I had questioned a number of days before and was still
+awaiting a reply. So we stood in the hot sun at the porcelain factory
+and it almost baked my brains, and I thought about a lot of things.
+The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as
+people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they
+will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me
+about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore
+has so little room to move toward hope. I think that in America
+there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain
+kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start
+from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a
+position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very
+different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But
+I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here,
+either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in
+the U.S.
+
+I had a meeting the following day with a Madam Izbalkhan, who
+was the head of the Uzbekistan Society of Friendship. This meeting
+came about as a result of my request for clarification of my status
+here at the Conference. When all was said and done, why was there
+no meeting for oppressed peoples of Black America? Enough said.
+Madam Izbalkhan talked two hours and she essentially said, well,
+here’s what our revolution has done for us. And I felt she was
+implying that any time you want to get yours going, you know, be
+our guest, just don’t expect us to be involved.
+But she talked most movingly of the history of the women of
+Uzbekistan, a history which deserves more writing about than I can
+give it here. The ways in which the women of this area, from 1924
+on, fought to come out from behind complete veiling, from Moslem
+cloister to the twentieth century. How they gave their lives to go
+bare-faced, to be able to read. Many of them fought and many of
+them died very terrible deaths in this battle, killed by their own
+fathers and brothers. It is a story of genuine female heroism and
+persistence. I thought of the South African women in 1956 who
+demonstrated and died rather than carry passbooks. For the Uzbeki
+women, revolution meant being able to show their faces and go to
+school, and they died for it. A bronze statue stands in a square of
+Samarkand, monument to the fallen women and their bravery.
+Madam went on to discuss the women of modern Uzbekistan and
+how there was now full equality between the sexes. How many
+women now headed collective farms, how many women Ministers.
+She said there were a great many ways in which women governed;
+there was no difference between men and women now in the Union
+of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was touched by these statistics, of
+course, but I also felt that there was a little more to it than met the
+eye. It sounded too easy, too pat. Madam spoke of the daycare
+centers, of kindergartens where children could be cared for on
+collective farms. The kindergartens are free in large cities like
+Moscow and Tashkent. But in Samarkand, there’s a nominal fee of
+about two rubles a month, which is very little, she said. I asked her
+one question, whether “men are encouraged to work in the
+kindergartens to give the children a gentle male figure at an early
+
+age.” Madam Izbalkhan hesitated for a moment. “No,” she said. “We
+like to believe that when the children come to the kindergarten they
+acquire a second mother.”
+Madam Izbalkhan was a very strong and beautiful and forthright
+woman, excellently in charge of her facts, with a great deal of
+presence, and I returned from my meeting with her almost
+overwhelmed and over-graped.
+The grapes in Uzbekistan are incredible fruit. They seem to have a
+life of their own. They’re called “the bridesmaid’s little finger,” and
+that’s about the size of them. They’re very long, and green, and
+they’re absolutely the most delicious.
+I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel
+very much now still that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the
+mouth of the dragon. As I’ve always suspected, outside of rhetoric
+and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves.
+When I asked directly about the USSR’s attitude toward American
+racism, Madam said reproachfully that of course the USSR cannot
+interfere in the internal affairs of any other nation. I wish now I had
+asked her about Russian Jews.
+In Samarkand, Helen and I went looking for a fruit market. She
+inquired directions from a man who had passed by with either his
+little girl or his granddaughter, but I tend to think his little girl
+because so many of the adults here in Uzbekistan look much older
+than they are. It must be a quality of the dry air. Anyway, Helen
+stopped to inquire directions to the market and this gave him an
+opening, as frequently happens in Russia, to discuss anything. He
+wanted to know from Helen whether I was from Africa, and when
+he heard I was from America, then he really wanted to discuss
+American Black people. There seems to be quite an interest in Black
+Americans among the peoples of Russia, but it’s an interest that is
+played down somewhat. Fikre, my Ethiopian companion who
+studied at the university, was often questioned about me in Russian.
+I had developed enough of an ear for the language to be able to
+notice that. Fikre frequently did not say I was from America. Most
+people in Tashkent and Samarkand who I met thought I was African
+or from Cuba, and everyone is also very interested in Cuba. This
+
+fascination with all things American is something that keeps coming
+up over and over again.
+This man wanted to know from me whether American Black
+people were allowed to go to school. I said yes, and Helen said yes
+to him, and then he wanted to know if we were allowed to teach,
+and I said yes, I was a professor at the University of the City of New
+York. And he was surprised at that. He said that he had seen a
+television program one time about the Black people of America.
+That we had no jobs. So Helen started to answer him and he stopped
+her. Then she angrily said he wanted me to speak because he
+wanted to look at my face so he could see how I answered. I told
+Helen to tell him that the question was not that we could never go
+to college, but that frequently even when Black people went to
+college, we had no jobs when we came out. That it was more
+difficult for Black people to find work and make any kind of living,
+and that the percentage of unemployment among American Black
+people was far higher than that of American white people.
+He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black
+people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that’s what TV
+programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it’s not only
+Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all
+people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don’t have
+the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don’t have the money to pay,
+sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even
+though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him
+looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square
+with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me,
+as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of
+medical care. It’s things like that that keep me dreaming about
+Russia long after I’ve returned.
+There’s much that I think that Russian people now take for
+granted. I think they take for granted free hospitalization and
+medical care. They take for granted free universities and free
+schooling as well as the presumption of universal bread, even with a
+rose or two, although no meat. We are all more blind to what we
+have than to what we have not.
+
+One night after midnight, Fikre and I were walking through a
+park in Tashkent and we were approached by a Russian man with
+whom Fikre had a short, sharp conversation, after which the man
+bowed and walked away. Fikre would not tell me what they’d said,
+but I had the strong feeling he had tried to pick one of us up, either
+Fikre or me. Tashkent is, in some respects, a Russian playground. I
+asked Fikre what the Soviet position was on homosexuality, and
+Fikre answered that there was no public position because it wasn’t a
+public matter. Of course, I know better than that, but I have very
+few inroads into finding out the truth, and Helen is much too proper
+to discuss anything sexual.
+
+V
+The last few days after we returned to Moscow I got to meet one
+woman I had noticed all through the Conference. She was an
+Eskimo woman. Her name was Toni and she’s Chukwo. They are
+from the part of Russia closest to Alaska, the part that wasn’t sold
+by the Russians, across the Bering Straits. Toni did not speak English
+and I didn’t speak Russian, but I felt as if we were making love that
+last night through our interpreters. I still don’t know if she knew
+what was going on or not, but I suspect that she did.
+I had been extremely moved by her presentation earlier in the
+day. We sat down to dinner, about ten of us, and Toni started
+speaking to me through our interpreters. She said that she had been
+searching for my eyes in the crowd all through her speech because
+she felt as if she were talking to my heart. And that when she sang
+the little song that she did, she sang it for a beginning that she
+hoped for all of our people. And this lady cast, let me tell you, a
+very powerful spell. There are only fourteen thousand Chukwo
+people left. In her speech at one point she said, “It is a very sad
+thing when a whole people ceases to exist.” And then she sang a
+little song which she said her people sing whenever something new
+happens. Her dark round eyes and seal-heavy hair flashed and
+swung in time to her music. It sent a chill down my spine at the
+time, because although there are 21 million Black Americans, I feel
+like we’re an endangered species too, and how sad for our cultures
+to die. I felt as if we alone, of all the people at the Conference,
+shared that knowledge and that threat, Toni and I. At dinner Toni
+kept telling me how beautiful I was, and how it was not only my
+beauty that she would carry with her always but my words, and that
+we should share our joys as well as our sorrows, and someday our
+children would be able to speak freely with each other. She made
+toast after toast to women and to their strength. All of this was
+through our interpreters. I was trying to decide what to make of all
+this when Toni got up, moved over, and sat down beside me. She
+
+touched my knee and kissed me, and so we sat all through dinner.
+We held hands and we kissed, but any time we spoke to each other,
+it was done through our interpreters, blond Russian girls who
+smirked as they translated our words. I suppose Toni and I
+connected somewhere in the middle of the Aleutians.
+She kissed my picture on my book before she got up, thanked us
+for dinner, and went off with the male Latvian delegate from Riga.
+
+VI
+Now it is back to Moscow again, which is still cold and rainy.
+Moscow across rainy rooftops looks about as dreary as New York
+does, except the skyline is broken up by huge building cranes. There
+is an incredible amount of building, it appears, going on all the time
+in Moscow. There is in New York also, but it’s not so obvious on the
+skyline. The buildings are not built in solid blocks the way they are
+in New York. You’ll have perhaps two large apartment houses to a
+block, set at different angles, with a lot of greenery and perhaps
+some parks in between. In other words, it appears that quite a bit of
+thought has been given to urban planning and how people like or
+need to move about where they are. Both New York and Moscow
+have a population of about eight million and in Moscow it is
+possible and pleasant to walk out after dark without fear. Crime on
+the streets seems not at all a problem in Moscow. The official reason
+why and the actual reason why may be very different, but it is a
+fact. I was struck by the sight of many people, even children,
+walking through the parks after sundown.
+Earlier, when I had first come to Moscow from the airport, I had
+noticed quite heavy steady traffic, but there did not appear to be a
+traffic jam or great delay although this was the time when most
+people were coming home from work. It seemed quite an
+achievement in a city of eight million people, and I thought Moscow
+must be handling her problems of urban transportation in a new and
+creative way. Of course, when I saw the Metro, I realized why. Not
+only are the stations spotlessly clean, but the trains are quick and
+comfortable, and I’d never really thought that it could be an actual
+joy to ride on the subways.
+
+VII
+It will take a while and a lot of dreams to metabolize all I’ve seen
+and felt in these hectic two weeks. I haven’t even discussed the
+close bonding I felt with some of the African writers and how
+difficult it was to get to know others. I have no reason to believe
+Russia is a free society. I have no reason to believe Russia is a
+classless society. Russia does not even appear to be a strictly
+egalitarian society. But bread does cost a few kopecs a loaf and
+everybody I saw seemed to have enough of it. Of course, I did not
+see Siberia, nor a prison camp, nor a mental hospital. But that fact,
+in a world where most people — certainly most Black people — are
+on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot. If you
+conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look
+around at the others.
+So, for all of the double messages I received (and there were
+many — because of the places in which I stayed, because of a kind
+of both deference and unpleasantness that I received as an
+American, and because no matter how much is said and done,
+America still appears to have some kind of magic over many
+countries), no matter what the shortcomings were, there is
+enthusiasm about the people that I met in Russia, particularly the
+people I met in Uzbekhistan. And I recognize some of the
+contradictions and problems that they have. I am deeply suspicious
+of the double messages that kept coming and of the fact that when
+they are finished with you (and by they, I mean the government),
+when they are finished with you, they drop you and you can fall
+very far. So what’s new? I also am intrigued by the idea that there
+are writers who are paid to be writers and that they survive and
+they wield considerable power. I am also very well aware that if
+what they write is not acceptable, then it never gets read or it never
+gets printed. So what’s new?
+But you do have a country there that has the largest reading
+population in the world, that prints books of poetry in editions of
+
+250,000 copies and those copies sell out in three months.
+Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being
+harvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no matter
+what you may say about censorship, they are still reading, and
+they’re reading an awful lot. Some books are pirated from the West
+because Russia does not observe International Copyright. In
+Samarkhand, Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
+was the latest best seller. Now, how many Russian novels in
+translation have you read this past year?
+* These are edited journal entries from a two-week trip to Russia that I made in 1976 as
+
+the invited American observer to the African-Asian Writers Conference sponsored by the
+Union of Soviet Writers.
+
+Poetry Is Not a Luxury*
+THE QUALITY OF LIGHT by which we scrutinize our lives has direct
+bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes
+which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this
+light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and
+make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through
+poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem
+— nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That
+distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births
+thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as
+knowledge births (precedes) understanding.
+As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within
+it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within
+our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences
+begin to lose their control over us.
+For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where
+hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as
+chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/”** and
+of impotence.
+These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they
+are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong
+through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us
+holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined
+and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power
+within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is
+ancient, and it is deep.
+When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to
+be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these
+were what the white fathers told us were precious.
+But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, noneuropean consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced
+
+and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our
+feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from
+where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes.
+At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves
+the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for
+survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I
+speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not
+the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the
+word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for
+imagination without insight.
+For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of
+our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we
+predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first
+made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
+Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be
+thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by
+our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
+As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and
+the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning
+grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a
+safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the
+conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could
+name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or
+incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams
+and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the
+true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to
+respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they
+can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our
+poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and
+vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the
+foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what
+has never been before.
+Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain
+belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to
+establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are
+expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or
+
+threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by
+the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek
+for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the
+falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of
+changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I
+altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving
+you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is
+no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a
+need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives.
+The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black
+mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I
+feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express
+and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that
+freedom.
+However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also
+necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they
+cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them
+the real food without which their dreams will be no different from
+ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have
+to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.
+Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head
+will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new
+ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human.
+There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations,
+extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves — along with
+the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly
+encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions
+that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In
+the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to
+hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications
+of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring
+action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most
+cherished terrors.
+For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by
+institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to
+survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes,
+
+feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected
+to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are
+no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that
+fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They
+surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to
+freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that
+give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to
+dare.
+If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and
+directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then
+we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our
+womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
+For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making
+them felt — of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on
+Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making
+war, giving birth, mourning our dead — while we suffer the old
+longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and
+impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.
+* First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977).
+** From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live
+
+(Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton
+and Company, New York, 1982) p. 53.
+
+The Transformation of Silence into Language and
+Action*
+I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most
+important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at
+the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking
+profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a Black
+lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I
+am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago I
+was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would
+have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent
+chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the
+actual surgery, there was a three-week period of the agony of an
+involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was
+completed, and the growth was benign.
+But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself
+and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still
+shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women,
+by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that
+time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the
+transformation of silence into language and action.
+In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and
+of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be,
+priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light,
+and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever
+been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant
+pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the
+time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand,
+is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without
+regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had
+only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to
+speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize
+
+a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge
+that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear
+into a perspective gave me great strength.
+I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had
+ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence
+will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every
+attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still
+seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined
+the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our
+differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women
+which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials
+of my living.
+The women who sustained me through that period were Black
+and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and
+we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave
+me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived
+intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge —
+within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle
+and otherwise, conscious or not — I am not only a casualty, I am
+also a warrior.
+What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to
+say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to
+make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in
+silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of
+your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am
+lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing
+my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?
+And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into
+language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always
+seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our
+topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re
+never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s
+always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out,
+and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter
+
+and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and
+punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
+In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear
+— fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition,
+of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the
+visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country
+where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of
+vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible,
+and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the
+depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement,
+we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also
+renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the
+mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first
+and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive. Not
+as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or
+not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that
+which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the
+machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we
+speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and
+our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and
+destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners
+mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
+In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the
+African-american festival of harvest which begins the day after
+Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of
+Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means
+unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and
+community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was
+Kujichagulia — self-determination — the decision to define
+ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being
+defined and spoken for by others. Today is the third day of Kwanza,
+and the principle for today is Ujima — collective work and
+responsibility — the decision to build and maintain ourselves and
+our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems
+together.
+
+Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a
+commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the
+reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against
+us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is
+vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her
+function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital
+within that transformation.
+For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the
+truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we
+speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that
+are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach
+by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know
+beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by
+taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is
+growth.
+And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of
+scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived
+through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind
+myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or
+had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I
+would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for
+establishing perspective.
+And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must
+each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to
+read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to
+our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that
+have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our
+own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing —
+their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years
+have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or
+another, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to
+say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or
+my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have
+no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob
+ourselves of ourselves and each other.
+
+We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same
+way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we
+have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for
+language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final
+luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
+The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an
+attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences
+between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but
+silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
+* Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,”
+
+Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The
+Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980).
+
+Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to
+Women and Loving*
+Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over
+all others and thereby the right to dominance.
+Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and
+thereby the right to dominance.
+Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one
+pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.
+Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one’s
+own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.
+THE ABOVE FORMS of human blindness stem from the same root — an
+inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human
+force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined
+self, when there are shared goals.
+To a large degree, at least verbally, the Black community has
+moved beyond the “two steps behind her man” concept of sexual
+relations sometimes mouthed as desirable during the sixties. This
+was a time when the myth of the Black matriarchy as a social
+disease was being presented by racist forces to redirect our
+attentions away from the real sources of Black oppression.
+For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we
+do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others
+— for their use and to our detriment. The development of selfdefined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and
+interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war
+for Black liberation. The image of the Angolan woman with a baby
+on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful.
+When Black women in this country come together to examine our
+
+sources of strength and support, and to recognize our common
+social, cultural, emotional, and political interests, it is a
+development which can only contribute to the power of the Black
+community as a whole. It can certainly never diminish it. For it is
+through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female
+and male, that any real advances can be made. The old sexual
+power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model
+between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals.
+Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond the
+sphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor the
+realized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals.
+Black women and Black men who recognize that the development of
+their particular strengths and interests does not diminish the other
+do not need to diffuse their energies fighting for control over each
+other. We can focus our attentions against the real economic,
+political, and social forces at the heart of this society which are
+ripping us and our children and our worlds apart.
+Increasingly, despite opposition, Black women are coming
+together to explore and to alter those manifestations of our society
+which oppress us in different ways from those that oppress Black
+men. This is no threat to Black men. It is only seen as one by those
+Black men who choose to embody within themselves those same
+manifestations of female oppression. For instance, no Black man has
+ever been forced to bear a child he did not want or could not
+support. Enforced sterilization and unavailable abortions are tools of
+oppression against Black women, as is rape. Only to those Black
+men who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition
+can the self-actualization and self-protective bonding of Black
+women be seen as a threatening development.
+Today, the red herring of lesbian-baiting is being used in the Black
+community to obscure the true face of racism/sexism. Black women
+sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not
+the enemies of Black men. Too frequently, however, some Black
+men attempt to rule by fear those Black women who are more ally
+than enemy. These tactics are expressed as threats of emotional
+rejection: “Their poetry wasn’t too bad but I couldn’t take all those
+
+lezzies.” The Black man saying this is code-warning every Black
+woman present interested in a relationship with a man — and most
+Black women are — that (1) if she wishes to have her work
+considered by him she must eschew any other allegiance except to
+him and (2) any woman who wishes to retain his friendship and/or
+support had better not be “tainted” by woman-identified interests.
+If such threats of labelling, vilification and/or emotional isolation
+are not enough to bring Black women docilely into camp as
+followers, or persuade us to avoid each other politically and
+emotionally, then the rule by terror can be expressed physically, as
+on the campus of a New York State college in the late 1970s, where
+Black women sought to come together around women’s concerns.
+Phone calls threatening violence were made to those Black women
+who dared to explore the possibilities of a feminist connection with
+non-Black women. Some of these women, intimidated by threats
+and the withdrawal of Black male approval, did turn against their
+sisters. When threats did not prevent the attempted coalition of
+feminists, the resulting campus-wide hysteria left some Black
+women beaten and raped. Whether the threats by Black men
+actually led to these assaults, or merely encouraged the climate of
+hostility within which they could occur, the results upon the women
+attacked were the same.
+War, imprisonment, and “the street” have decimated the ranks of
+Black males of marriageable age. The fury of many Black
+heterosexual women against white women who date Black men is
+rooted in this unequal sexual equation within the Black community,
+since whatever threatens to widen that equation is deeply and
+articulately resented. But this is essentially unconstructive
+resentment because it extends sideways only. It can never result in
+true progress on the issue because it does not question the vertical
+lines of power or authority, nor the sexist assumptions which dictate
+the terms of that competition. And the racism of white women
+might be better addressed where it is less complicated by their own
+sexual oppression. In this situation it is not the non-Black woman
+who calls the tune, but rather the Black man who turns away from
+
+himself in his sisters or who, through a fear borrowed from white
+men, reads her strength not as a resource but as a challenge.
+All too often the message comes loud and clear to Black women
+from Black men: “I am the only prize worth having and there are
+not too many of me, and remember, I can always go elsewhere. So if
+you want me, you’d better stay in your place which is away from
+one another, or I will call you ‘lesbian’ and wipe you out.” Black
+women are programmed to define ourselves within this male
+attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to
+recognize and move upon our common interests.
+The tactic of encouraging horizontal hostility to becloud more
+pressing issues of oppression is by no means new, nor limited to
+relations between women. The same tactic is used to encourage
+separation between Black women and Black men. In discussions
+around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the
+charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired
+than are Black men. For this reason, Black women’s problems of
+promotion and tenure are not to be considered important since they
+are only “taking jobs away from Black men.” Here again, energy is
+being wasted on fighting each other over the pitifully few crumbs
+allowed us rather than being used, in a joining of forces, to fight for
+a more realistic ratio of Black faculty. The latter would be a vertical
+battle against racist policies of the academic structure itself, one
+which could result in real power and change. It is the structure at
+the top which desires changelessness and which profits from these
+apparently endless kitchen wars.
+Instead of keeping our attentions focused upon our real needs,
+enormous energy is being wasted in the Black community today in
+antilesbian hysteria. Yet women-identified women — those who
+sought their own destinies and attempted to execute them in the
+absence of male support — have been around in all of our
+communities for a long time. As Yvonne Flowers of York College
+pointed out in a recent discussion, the unmarried aunt, childless or
+otherwise, whose home and resources were often a welcome haven
+for different members of the family, was a familiar figure in many of
+
+our childhoods. And within the homes of our Black communities
+today, it is not the Black lesbian who is battering and raping our
+underage girl-children out of displaced and sickening frustration.
+The Black lesbian has come under increasing attack from both
+Black men and heterosexual Black women. In the same way that the
+existence of the self-defined Black woman is no threat to the selfdefined Black man, the Black lesbian is an emotional threat only to
+those Black women whose feelings of kinship and love for other
+Black women are problematic in some way. For so long, we have
+been encouraged to view each other with suspicion, as eternal
+competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection.
+Yet traditionally, Black women have always bonded together in
+support of each other, however uneasily and in the face of whatever
+other allegiances which militated against that bonding. We have
+banded together with each other for wisdom and strength and
+support, even when it was only in relationship to one man. We need
+only look at the close, although highly complex and involved,
+relationships between African co-wives, or at the Amazon warriors
+of ancient Dahomey who fought together as the King’s main and
+most ferocious bodyguard. We need only look at the more promising
+power wielded by the West African Market Women Associations of
+today, and those governments which have risen and fallen at their
+pleasure.
+In a retelling of her life, a ninety-two-year-old Efik-Ibibio woman
+of Nigeria recalls her love for another woman:
+I had a woman friend to whom I revealed my secrets. She
+was very fond of keeping secrets to herself. We acted as
+husband and wife. We always moved hand in glove and my
+husband and hers knew about our relationship. The villagers
+nicknamed us twin sisters. When I was out of gear with my
+husband, she would be the one to restore peace. I often sent
+my children to go and work for her in return for her
+kindnesses to me. My husband being more fortunate to get
+more pieces of land than her husband, allowed some to her,
+even though she was not my co-wife.*
+
+On the West Coast of Africa, the Fon of Dahomey still have twelve
+different kinds of marriage. One of them is known as “giving the
+goat to the buck,” where a woman of independent means marries
+another woman who then may or may not bear children, all of
+whom will belong to the blood line of the first woman. Some
+marriages of this kind are arranged to provide heirs for women of
+means who wish to remain “free,” and some are lesbian
+relationships. Marriages like these occur throughout Africa, in
+several different places among different peoples.** Routinely, the
+women involved are accepted members of their communities,
+evaluated not by their sexuality but by their respective places within
+the community.
+While a piece of each Black woman remembers the old ways of
+another place — when we enjoyed each other in a sisterhood of
+work and play and power — other pieces of us, less functional, eye
+one another with suspicion. In the interests of separation, Black
+women have been taught to view each other as always suspect,
+heartless competitors for the scarce male, the all-important prize
+that could legitimize our existence. This dehumanizing denial of self
+is no less lethal than the dehumanization of racism to which it is so
+closely allied.
+If the recent attack upon lesbians in the Black community is based
+solely upon an aversion to the idea of sexual contact between
+members of the same sex (a contact which has existed for ages in
+most of the female compounds across the African continent), why
+then is the idea of sexual contact between Black men so much more
+easily accepted, or unremarked? Is the imagined threat simply the
+existence of a self-motivated, self-defined Black woman who will not
+fear nor suffer terrible retribution from the gods because she does
+not necessarily seek her face in a man’s eyes, even if he has fathered
+her children? Female-headed households in the Black community
+are not always situations by default.
+The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I
+must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically
+uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular
+vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or
+
+affirmation of self is an attack upon my self — or that my defining
+myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The
+supposition that one sex needs the other’s acquiescence in order to
+exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons
+toward a common goal.
+This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It
+is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and
+particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us,
+with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the
+victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for
+more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie.
+Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing
+and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black
+women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a
+right to freedom, instead of seeing each other’s struggles as part of
+our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women
+fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of
+seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this
+last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white
+women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)
+At a recent Black literary conference, a heterosexual Black woman
+stated that to endorse lesbianism was to endorse the death of our
+race. This position reflects acute fright or a faulty reasoning, for
+once again it ascribes false power to difference. To the racist, Black
+people are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate a
+whole lineage; to the heterosexist, lesbians are so powerful that the
+presence of one can contaminate the whole sex. This position
+supposes that if we do not eradicate lesbianism in the Black
+community, all Black women will become lesbians. It also supposes
+that lesbians do not have children. Both suppositions are patently
+false.
+As Black women, we must deal with all the realities of our lives
+which place us at risk as Black women — homosexual or
+heterosexual. In 1977 in Detroit, a young Black actress, Patricia
+Cowan, was invited to audition for a play called Hammer and was
+
+then hammered to death by the young Black male playwright.
+Patricia Cowan was not killed because she was Black. She was killed
+because she was a Black woman, and her cause belongs to us all.
+History does not record whether or not she was a lesbian, but only
+that she had a four-year-old child.
+Of the four groups, Black and white women, Black and white
+men, Black women have the lowest average wage. This is a vital
+concern for us all, no matter with whom we sleep.
+As Black women we have the right and responsibility to define
+ourselves and to seek our allies in common cause: with Black men
+against racism, and with each other and white women against
+sexism. But most of all, as Black women we have the right and
+responsibility to recognize each other without fear and to love
+where we choose. Both lesbian and heterosexual Black women today
+share a history of bonding and strength to which our sexual
+identities and our other differences must not blind us.
+* First published in The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 7 (1978).
+* Iris Andreski, Old Wives Tales: Life-Stories of African Women (Schocken Books, New
+
+York, 1970), p. 131.
+
+** Melville Herskovits, Dahomey, 2 vols. (Northwestern University Press, Evanston,
+
+Illinois, 1967), 1:320–322.
+
+Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power*
+THERE ARE MANY kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or
+otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a
+deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our
+unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself,
+every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of
+power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy
+for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as
+a considered source of power and information within our lives.
+We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused,
+and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the
+superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female
+inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and
+to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
+It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the
+suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can
+women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is
+fashioned within the context of male models of power.
+As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from
+our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned
+against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of
+feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the
+service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to
+examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are
+maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked,
+much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a
+life-giving substance for their masters.
+But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force
+to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the
+belief that sensation is enough.
+
+The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against
+women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the
+psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often
+turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as
+a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite,
+the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of
+the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.
+Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
+The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of
+self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of
+satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can
+aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling
+and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require
+no less of ourselves.
+It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our
+lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the
+encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But
+giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury
+only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those
+who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
+This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from
+the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible
+from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates
+everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what
+we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the
+doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling
+that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe
+which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
+The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the
+lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the
+celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a
+conscious decision — a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and
+from which I rise up empowered.
+Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to
+separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other
+
+than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and
+satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of
+what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even
+at its most difficult?
+The principal horror of any system which defines the good in
+terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines
+human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional
+components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is
+that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life
+appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of
+necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves
+and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and
+then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of
+painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
+As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can
+be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing
+the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of
+how we move toward and through them.
+The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the
+personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and
+personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the
+erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women;
+of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which
+we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing,
+our loving, our work, our lives.
+There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism,
+two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these
+attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual
+(psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as
+contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic
+revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have
+attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing
+the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic
+who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth.
+For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest
+
+immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling
+obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.
+The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false,
+resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For
+the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic — the
+sensual — those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of
+what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being
+shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.
+Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to
+me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge,
+for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light
+toward any understanding. And understanding is a hand-maiden
+which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born.
+The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest
+knowledge.
+The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in
+providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit
+with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical,
+emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the
+sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is
+not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
+Another important way in which the erotic connection functions
+is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the
+way my body stretches to music and opens into response,
+hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense
+also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is
+dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
+That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know
+myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for
+feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity
+for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within
+the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have
+to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
+This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often
+relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For
+
+once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to
+demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in
+accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.
+Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which
+we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate
+those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our
+lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each
+of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the
+conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
+During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white,
+uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring
+perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would
+leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would
+pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich
+yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it
+carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and
+forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the
+whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.
+I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from
+its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life
+with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens
+all my experience.
+We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest
+cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our
+future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires
+keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress
+any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we
+cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within
+ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined,
+and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
+When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external
+directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs,
+when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves,
+then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we
+conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human
+
+need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from
+within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within
+ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our
+actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible
+to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our
+deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied
+with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so
+often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts
+against oppression become integral with self, motivated and
+empowered from within.
+In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept
+powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not
+native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement,
+depression, self-denial.
+And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between
+painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity.
+And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem
+and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.
+This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the
+power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s
+feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way
+from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share
+the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with
+us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.
+In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The
+need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the
+european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain
+proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost
+always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of
+calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence,
+or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the
+deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and
+obscenity — the abuse of feeling.
+When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the
+development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away
+from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others,
+
+we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy
+in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities
+and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling
+at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a
+large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to
+the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.
+The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist,
+I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those
+sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This
+deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted
+actions not possible before.
+But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue
+to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I
+know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my
+consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.
+Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave
+enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having
+to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and
+creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the
+erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine
+change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of
+characters in the same weary drama.
+For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source,
+but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a
+racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.
+* Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount
+
+Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. First published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books. Now
+published as a pamphlet by Kore Press.
+
+Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface*
+BLACK FEMINISM is not white feminism in blackface. Black women
+have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black
+women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less
+Black. To attempt to open dialogue between Black women and Black
+men by attacking Black feminists seems shortsighted and selfdefeating. Yet this is what Robert Staples, Black sociologist, has
+done in The Black Scholar.
+Despite our recent economic gains, Black women are still the
+lowest paid group in the nation by sex and race. This gives some
+idea of the inequity from which we started. In Staples’ own words,
+Black women in 1979 only “threaten to overtake black men” [italics
+mine] by the “next century” in education, occupation, and income.
+In other words, the inequity is self-evident; but how is it justifiable?
+Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do
+not need others to speak for us. It is for Black men to speak up and
+tell us why and how their manhood is so threatened that Black
+women should be the prime targets of their justifiable rage. What
+correct analysis of this capitalist dragon within which we live can
+legitimize the rape of Black women by Black men?
+At least Black feminists and other Black women have begun this
+much-needed dialogue, however bitter our words. At least we are
+not mowing down our brothers in the street, or bludgeoning them to
+death with hammers. Yet. We recognize the fallacies of separatist
+solutions.
+Staples pleads his cause by saying capitalism has left the Black
+man only his penis for fulfillment, and a “curious rage.” Is this rage
+any more legitimate than the rage of Black women? And why are
+Black women supposed to absorb that male rage in silence? Why
+isn’t that male rage turned upon those forces which limit his
+fulfillment, namely capitalism? Staples sees in Ntozake Shange’s
+
+play For Colored Girls “a collective appetite for black male blood.”
+Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding
+all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers.
+Into what theoretical analysis would Staples fit Patricia Cowan?
+She answered an ad in Detroit for a Black actress to audition in a
+play called Hammer. As she acted out an argument scene, watched
+by the playwright’s brother and her four-year-old son, the Black
+male playwright picked up a sledgehammer and bludgeoned her to
+death. Will Staples’ “compassion for misguided black men” bring
+this young mother back, or make her senseless death more
+acceptable?
+Black men’s feelings of cancellation, their grievances, and their
+fear of vulnerability must be talked about, but not by Black women
+when it is at the expense of our own “curious rage.”
+If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not
+allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our
+lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? And why
+should Black men accept these roles as correct ones, or anything
+other than a narcotic promise encouraging acceptance of other
+facets of their own oppression?
+One tool of the Great-American-Double-Think is to blame the
+victim for victimization: Black people are said to invite lynching by
+not knowing our place; Black women are said to invite rape and
+murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too
+seductive, or too …
+Staples’ “fact” that Black women get their sense of fulfillment
+from having children is only a fact when stated out of the mouths of
+Black men, and any Black person in this country, even a “happily
+married” woman who has “no pent-up frustrations that need
+release” (!) is either a fool or insane. This smacks of the oldest sexist
+canard of all time, that all a woman needs to “keep her quiet” is a
+“good man.” File that one alongside “Some of my best friends
+are …”
+Instead of beginning the much-needed dialogue between Black
+men and Black women, Staples retreats to a defensive stance
+reminiscent of white liberals of the 60s, many of whom saw any
+
+statement of Black pride and self-assertion as an automatic threat to
+their own identity and an attempt to wipe them out. Here we have
+an intelligent Black man believing — or at least saying — that any
+call to Black women to love ourselves (and no one said only) is a
+denial of, or threat to, his Black male identity!
+In this country, Black women traditionally have had compassion
+for everybody else except ourselves. We have cared for whites
+because we had to for pay or survival; we have cared for our
+children and our fathers and our brothers and our lovers. History
+and popular culture, as well as our personal lives, are full of tales of
+Black women who had “compassion for misguided black men.” Our
+scarred, broken, battered and dead daughters and sisters are a mute
+testament to that reality. We need to learn to have care and
+compassion for ourselves, also.
+In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our
+children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter
+what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for selfvalue and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples
+must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out
+of self-hatred.
+The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on
+these questions is not the responsibility of Black women. We have
+too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak
+everyone else’s position but our very own. Black men are not so
+passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my
+fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must
+examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by
+the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male
+professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in
+Black women’s work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to
+extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
+For Staples to suggest, for instance, that Black men leave their
+families as a form of male protest against female decision making in
+the home is in direct contradiction to his own observations in “The
+Myth of the Black Matriarchy.”*
+
+Now I am sure there are still some Black men who marry white
+women because they feel a white woman can better fit the model of
+“femininity” set forth in this country. But for Staples to justify that
+act using the reason it occurs, and take Black women to task for it,
+is not only another error in reasoning; it is like justifying the actions
+of a lemming who follows its companions over the cliff to sure
+death. Because it happens does not mean it should happen, nor that
+it is functional for the well-being of the individual nor the group.
+It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s
+mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a
+sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If Black men continue
+to define “femininity” instead of their own desires, and to do it in
+archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each other’s
+energies. Freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing
+the dominant white male disease of sexism.
+As Black women and men, we cannot hope to begin dialogue by
+denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if Black males
+choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason — raping,
+brutalizing, and killing Black women — then ignoring these acts of
+Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our
+destroyers. One oppression does not justify another.
+It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal
+choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that
+case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and
+those choices are becomingly increasingly self-assertive and femaleoriented.
+As a people, we most certainly must work together. It would be
+shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the
+above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege. But
+the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that
+sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his
+liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same
+constellation that engenders racism and homophobia. Until that
+consciousness is developed, Black men will view sexism and the
+destruction of Black women as tangential to Black liberation rather
+than as central to that struggle. So long as this occurs, we will never
+
+be able to embark upon that dialogue between Black women and
+Black men that is so essential to our survival as a people. This
+continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive
+system within which we live.
+Men avoid women’s observations by accusing us of being too
+“visceral.” But no amount of understanding the roots of Black
+woman-hating will bring back Patricia Cowan, nor mute her
+family’s loss. Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who
+are hurting. As the poet Mary McAnally said, “Pain teaches us to
+take our fingers OUT the fucking fire.”*
+If the problems of Black women are only derivatives of a larger
+contradiction between capital and labor, then so is racism, and both
+must be fought by all of us. The capitalist structure is a manyheaded monster. I might add here that in no socialist country that I
+have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the
+eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the
+abolition of capitalism as an institution.
+No reasonable Black man can possibly condone the rape and
+slaughter of Black women by Black men as a fitting response to
+capitalist oppression. And destruction of Black women by Black men
+clearly cuts across all class lines.
+Whatever the “structural underpinnings” (Staples) for sexism in
+the Black community may be, it is obviously Black women who are
+bearing the brunt of that sexism, and so it is in our best interest to
+abolish it. We invite our Black brothers to join us, since ultimately
+that abolition is in their best interests also. For Black men are also
+diminished by a sexism which robs them of meaningful connections
+to Black women and our struggles. Since it is Black women who are
+being abused, however, and since it is our female blood that is being
+shed, it is for Black women to decide whether or not sexism in the
+Black community is pathological. And we do not approach that
+discussion theoretically. Those “creative relationships” which
+Staples speaks about within the Black community are almost
+invariably those which operate to the benefit of Black males, given
+the Black male/female ratio and the implied power balance within a
+supply and demand situation. Polygamy is seen as “creative,” but a
+
+lesbian relationship is not. This is much the same as how the
+“creative relationships” between master and slave were always those
+benefiting the master.
+The results of woman-hating in the Black community are
+tragedies which diminish all Black people. These acts must be seen
+in the context of a systematic devaluation of Black women within
+this society. It is within this context that we become approved and
+acceptable targets for Black male rage, so acceptable that even a
+Black male social scientist condones and excuses this
+depersonalizing abuse.
+This abuse is no longer acceptable to Black women in the name of
+solidarity, nor of Black liberation. Any dialogue between Black
+women and Black men must begin there, no matter where it ends.
+* First published as “The Great American Disease” in The Black Scholar, vol. 10, no. 9
+
+(May-June 1979) in response to “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black
+Feminists” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar, vol. 10, no. 8 (March-April 1979).
+
+* “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy” by Robert Staples in The Black Scholar, vol. 1, no.
+
+3–4 (January-February 1970).
+
+* From We Will Make A River, poems by Mary McAnnally (West End Press, Cambridge,
+
+Massachusetts, 1979), p. 27.
+
+An Open Letter to Mary Daly
+The following letter was written to Mary Daly, author of
+Gyn/Ecology,* on May 6, 1979. Four months later, having
+received no reply, I open it to the community of women.
+DEAR MARY,
+With a moment of space in this wild and bloody spring,** I want
+to speak the words I have had in mind for you. I had hoped that our
+paths might cross and we could sit down together and talk, but this
+has not happened.
+I wish you strength and satisfaction in your eventual victory over
+the repressive forces of the University in Boston. I am glad so many
+women attended the speak-out, and hope that this show of joined
+power will make more space for you to grow and be within.
+Thank you for having Gyn/Ecology sent to me. So much of it is full
+of import, useful, generative, and provoking. As in Beyond God The
+Father, many of your analyses are strengthening and helpful to me.
+Therefore, it is because of what you have given to me in the past
+work that I write this letter to you now, hoping to share with you
+the benefits of my insights as you have shared the benefits of yours
+with me.
+This letter has been delayed because of my grave reluctance to
+reach out to you, for what I want us to chew upon here is neither
+easy nor simple. The history of white women who are unable to
+hear Black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long
+and discouraging. But for me to assume that you will not hear me
+represents not only history, perhaps, but an old pattern of relating,
+sometimes protective and sometimes dysfunctional, which we, as
+women shaping our future, are in the process of shattering and
+passing beyond, I hope.
+I believe in your good faith toward all women, in your vision of a
+future within which we can all flourish, and in your commitment to
+
+the hard and often painful work necessary to effect change. In this
+spirit I invite you to a joint clarification of some of the differences
+which lie between us as a Black and a white woman.
+When I started reading Gyn/Ecology, I was truly excited by the
+vision behind your words and nodded my head as you spoke in your
+First Passage of myth and mystification. Your words on the nature
+and function of the Goddess, as well as the ways in which her face
+has been obscured, agreed with what I myself have discovered in
+my searches through African myth/legend/religion for the true
+nature of old female power.
+So I wondered, why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an
+example? Why are her goddess images only white, western
+european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and
+Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the
+Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? Well, I
+thought, Mary has made a conscious decision to narrow her scope
+and to deal only with the ecology of western european women.
+Then I came to the first three chapters of your Second Passage,
+and it was obvious that you were dealing with noneuropean women,
+but only as victims and preyers-upon each other. I began to feel my
+history and my mythic background distorted by the absence of any
+images of my foremothers in power. Your inclusion of African
+genital mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any
+consideration of female ecology, and too little has been written
+about it. To imply, however, that all women suffer the same
+oppression simply because we are women is to lose sight of the
+many varied tools of patriarchy. It is to ignore how those tools are
+used by women without awareness against each other.
+To dismiss our Black foremothers may well be to dismiss where
+european women learned to love. As an African-american woman in
+white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience
+distorted and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being
+done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own.
+When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that
+dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and
+
+makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this
+depth within each of us that nurtures vision.
+What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and
+the heritage of all other noneuropean women, and denied the real
+connections that exist between all of us.
+It is obvious that you have done a tremendous amount of work for
+this book. But simply because so little material on non-white female
+power and symbol exists in white women’s words from a radical
+feminist perspective, to exclude this aspect of connection from even
+comment in your work is to deny the fountain of noneuropean
+female strength and power that nurtures each of our visions. It is to
+make a point by choice.
+Then, to realize that the only quotations from Black women’s
+words were the ones you used to introduce your chapter on African
+genital mutilation made me question why you needed to use them at
+all. For my part, I felt that you had in fact misused my words,
+utilized them only to testify against myself as a woman of Color. For
+my words which you used were no more, nor less, illustrative of this
+chapter than “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” or any number of my other
+poems might have been of many other parts of Gyn/Ecology.
+So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read
+the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you
+merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might
+valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old
+and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical
+question.
+To me, this feels like another instance of the knowledge, croneology and work of women of Color being ghettoized by a white
+woman dealing only out of a patriarchal western european frame of
+reference. Even your words on page 49 of Gyn/Ecology, “The
+strength which Self-centering women find, in finding our
+Background, is our own strength, which we give back to our Selves,”
+have a different ring as we remember the old traditions of power
+and strength and nurturance found in the female bonding of African
+women. It is there to be tapped by all women who do not fear the
+revelation of connection to themselves.
+
+Have you read my work, and the work of other Black women, for
+what it could give you? Or did you hunt through only to find words
+that would legitimize your chapter on African genital mutilation in
+the eyes of other Black women? And if so, then why not use our
+words to legitimize or illustrate the other places where we connect
+in our being and becoming? If, on the other hand, it was not Black
+women you were attempting to reach, in what way did our words
+illustrate your point for white women?
+Mary, I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive
+forces of racism and separation between women — the assumption
+that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and
+sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and
+background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are
+noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female
+victimization. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this
+dismissal has upon the community of Black women and other
+women of Color, and how it devalues your own words. This
+dismissal does not essentially differ from the specialized
+devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance, to the
+murders even now happening in your own city. When patriarchy
+dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When radical lesbian
+feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise.
+This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between
+us. This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely
+than to attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices.
+Should the next step be war between us, or separation? Assimilation
+within a solely western european herstory is not acceptable.
+Mary, I ask that you re-member what is dark and ancient and
+divine within yourself that aids your speaking. As outsiders, we
+need each other for support and connection and all the other
+necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together
+we must recognize each other. Yet I feel that since you have so
+completely un-recognized me, perhaps I have been in error
+concerning you and no longer recognize you.
+I feel you do celebrate differences between white women as a
+creative force toward change, rather than a reason for
+
+misunderstanding and separation. But you fail to recognize that, as
+women, those differences expose all women to various forms and
+degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share and some
+of which we do not. For instance, surely you know that for nonwhite
+women in this country, there is an 80 percent fatality rate from
+breast cancer; three times the number of unnecessary eventrations,
+hysterectomies and sterilizations as for white women; three times as
+many chances of being raped, murdered, or assaulted as exist for
+white women. These are statistical facts, not coincidences nor
+paranoid fantasies.
+Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my
+life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio
+handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have
+to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk
+into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the
+only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both
+Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.)
+The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries,
+true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.
+Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries.
+To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our
+commonality as well as our difference.
+For then beyond sisterhood is still racism.
+We first met at the MLA panel, “The Transformation of Silence
+Into Language and Action.” This letter attempts to break a silence
+which I had imposed upon myself shortly before that date. I had
+decided never again to speak to white women about racism. I felt it
+was wasted energy because of destructive guilt and defensiveness,
+and because whatever I had to say might better be said by white
+women to one another at far less emotional cost to the speaker, and
+probably with a better hearing. But I would like not to destroy you
+in my consciousness, not to have to. So as a sister Hag, I ask you to
+speak to my perceptions.
+Whether or not you do, Mary, again I thank you for what I have
+learned from you.
+This letter is in repayment.
+
+In the hands of Afrekete,
+Audre Lorde
+* Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, Boston, 1978).
+** In the spring of 1979, twelve Black women were murdered in the Boston area.
+
+Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response*
+THIS ARTICLE IS NOT a theoretical discussion of Lesbian Mothers and
+their Sons, nor a how-to article. It is an attempt to scrutinize and
+share some pieces of that common history belonging to my son and
+to me. I have two children: a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old daughter
+Beth, and a fourteen-year-old son Jonathan. This is the way it
+was/is with me and Jonathan, and I leave the theory to another
+time and person. This is one woman’s telling.
+I have no golden message about the raising of sons for other
+lesbian mothers, no secret to transpose your questions into certain
+light. I have my own ways of rewording those same questions,
+hoping we will all come to speak those questions and pieces of our
+lives we need to share. We are women making contact within
+ourselves and with each other across the restrictions of a printed
+page, bent upon the use of our own/one another’s knowledges.
+The truest direction comes from inside. I give the most strength to
+my children by being willing to look within myself, and by being
+honest with them about what I find there, without expecting a
+response beyond their years. In this way they begin to learn to look
+beyond their own fears.
+All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.
+My adolescent son’s growing sexuality is a conscious dynamic
+between Jonathan and me. It would be presumptuous of me to
+discuss Jonathan’s sexuality here, except to state my belief that
+whomever he chooses to explore this area with, his choices will be
+nonoppressive, joyful, and deeply felt from within, places of growth.
+One of the difficulties in writing this piece has been temporal; this
+is the summer when Jonathan is becoming a man, physically. And
+our sons must become men — such men as we hope our daughters,
+born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not
+grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our
+
+daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully,
+our sons have what they have learned from us, and a howness to
+forge it into their own image.
+Our daughters have us, for measure or rebellion or outline or
+dream; but the sons of lesbians have to make their own definitions
+of self as men. This is both power and vulnerability. The sons of
+lesbians have the advantage of our blueprints for survival, but they
+must take what we know and transpose it into their own maleness.
+May the goddess be kind to my son, Jonathan.
+Recently I have met young Black men about whom I am pleased
+to say that their future and their visions, as well as their concerns
+within the present, intersect more closely with Jonathan’s than do
+my own. I have shared vision with these men as well as temporal
+strategies for our survivals and I appreciate the spaces in which we
+could sit down together. Some of these men I met at the First
+Annual Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays held in
+Washington D.C. in October, 1979. I have met others in different
+places and do not know how they identify themselves sexually.
+Some of these men are raising families alone. Some have adopted
+sons. They are Black men who dream and who act and who own
+their feelings, questioning. It is heartening to know our sons do not
+step out alone.
+When Jonathan makes me angriest, I always say he is bringing
+out the testosterone in me. What I mean is that he is representing
+some piece of myself as a woman that I am reluctant to
+acknowledge or explore. For instance, what does “acting like a man”
+mean? For me, what I reject? For Jonathan, what he is trying to
+redefine?
+Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a
+racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot
+love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And
+in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach —
+love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go. For each of
+these, the ability to feel strongly and to recognize those feelings is
+central: how to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be
+overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply.
+
+I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor
+settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who
+mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a
+Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his
+hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that
+programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black
+self.
+For me, this task begins with teaching my son that I do not exist
+to do his feeling for him.
+Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their
+feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly
+“inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny
+themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in
+dependency and fear.
+As a Black woman committed to a liveable future, and as a
+mother loving and raising a boy who will become a man, I must
+examine all my possibilities of being within such a destructive
+system.
+Jonathan was three-and-one-half when Frances, my lover, and I
+met; he was seven when we all began to live together permanently.
+From the start, Frances’ and my insistence that there be no secrets
+in our household about the fact that we were lesbians has been the
+source of problems and strengths for both children. In the
+beginning, this insistence grew out of the knowledge, on both our
+parts, that whatever was hidden out of fear could always be used
+either against the children or ourselves — one imperfect but useful
+argument for honesty. The knowledge of fear can help make us free.
+for the embattled
+there is no place
+that cannot be
+home
+nor is.*
+
+For survival, Black children in america must be raised to be
+warriors. For survival, they must also be raised to recognize the
+enemy’s many faces. Black children of lesbian couples have an
+advantage because they learn, very early, that oppression comes in
+many different forms, none of which have anything to do with their
+own worth.
+To help give me perspective, I remember that for years, in the
+namecalling at school, boys shouted at Jonathan not — “your
+mother’s a lesbian” — but rather — “your mother’s a nigger.”
+When Jonathan was eight years old and in the third grade we
+moved, and he went to a new school where his life was hellish as a
+new boy on the block. He did not like to play rough games. He did
+not like to fight. He did not like to stone dogs. And all this marked
+him early on as an easy target.
+When he came in crying one afternoon, I heard from Beth how
+the corner bullies were making Johathan wipe their shoes on the
+way home whenever Beth wasn’t there to fight them off. And when
+I heard that the ringleader was a little boy in Jonathan’s class his
+own size, an interesting and very disturbing thing happened to me.
+My fury at my own long-ago impotence, and my present pain at
+his suffering, made me start to forget all that I knew about violence
+and fear, and blaming the victim, I started to hiss at the weeping
+child. “The next time you come in here crying …,” and I suddenly
+caught myself in horror.
+This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin — in
+the name of protection and to ease our own pain. My son get beaten
+up? I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the
+corruption of power, that might makes right. I could hear myself
+beginning to perpetuate the age-old distortions about what strength
+and bravery really are.
+And no, Jonathan didn’t have to fight if he didn’t want to, but
+somehow he did have to feel better about not fighting. An old
+horror rolled over me of being the fat kid who ran away, terrified of
+getting her glasses broken.
+About that time a very wise woman said to me, “Have you ever
+told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?”
+
+The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he
+came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see
+that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had
+created in his head of mother/woman. This image of woman being
+able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a
+household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his
+forthright older sister. At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly
+female.
+And because our society teaches us to think in an either/or mode
+— kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated — this meant that he
+must either surpass or be lacking. I could see the implications of this
+line of thought. Consider the two western classic myth/models of
+mother/son relationships: Jocasta/Oedipus, the son who fucks his
+mother, and Clytemnestra/Orestes, the son who kills his mother.
+It all felt connected to me.
+I sat down on the hallway steps and took Jonathan on my lap and
+wiped his tears. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to be afraid
+when I was your age?”
+I will never forget the look on that little boy’s face as I told him
+the tale of my glasses and my after-school fights. It was a look of
+relief and total disbelief, all rolled into one.
+It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not
+omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge
+is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as
+something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is
+an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when
+he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel,
+or if he wins.
+I thought about all this one year later when Beth and Jonathan,
+ten and nine, were asked by an interviewer how they thought they
+had been affected by being children of a feminist.
+Jonathan said that he didn’t think there was too much in
+feminism for boys, although it certainly was good to be able to cry if
+he felt like it and not to have to play football if he didn’t want to. I
+think of this sometimes now when I see him practising for his Brown
+Belt in Tae Kwon Do.
+
+The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach
+my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the
+best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn
+from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be
+himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within
+himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening
+voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him
+to be.
+And that is hard enough.
+Jonathan is learning to find within himself some of the different
+faces of courage and strength, whatever he chooses to call them.
+Two years ago, when Jonathan was twelve and in the seventh grade,
+one of his friends at school who had been to the house persisted in
+calling Frances “the maid.” When Jonathan corrected him, the boy
+then referred to her as “the cleaning woman.” Finally Jonathan said,
+simply, “Frances is not the cleaning woman, she’s my mother’s
+lover.” Interestingly enough, it is the teachers at this school who
+still have not recovered from his openness.
+Frances and I were considering attending a Lesbian/Feminist
+conference this summer, when we were notified that no boys over
+ten were allowed. This presented logistic as well as philosophical
+problems for us, and we sent the following letter:
+Sisters:
+Ten years as an interracial lesbian couple has taught us
+both the dangers of an oversimplified approach to the
+nature and solutions of any oppression, as well as the danger
+inherent in an incomplete vision.
+Our thirteen-year-old son represents as much hope for our
+future world as does our fifteen-year-old daughter, and we
+are not willing to abandon him to the killing streets of New
+York City while we journey west to help form a LesbianFeminist vision of the future world in which we can all
+survive and flourish. I hope we can continue this dialogue in
+
+the near future, as I feel it is important to our vision and our
+survival.
+The question of separatism is by no means simple. I am thankful
+that one of my children is male, since that helps to keep me honest.
+Every line I write shrieks there are no easy solutions.
+I grew up in largely female environments, and I know how crucial
+that has been to my own development. I feel the want and need
+often for the society of women, exclusively. I recognize that our own
+spaces are essential for developing and recharging.
+As a Black woman, I find it necessary to withdraw into all-Black
+groups at times for exactly the same reasons — differences in stages
+of development and differences in levels of interaction. Frequently,
+when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how
+difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil
+every time you want to send a message.
+But this does not mean that my responsibility for my son’s
+education stops at age ten, any more than it does for my daughter’s.
+However, for each of them, that responsibility does grow less and
+less as they become more woman and man.
+Both Beth and Jonathan need to know what they can share and
+what they cannot, how they are joined and how they are not. And
+Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more
+into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does
+not have to be threatening.
+When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my
+daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species —
+thinking for life.
+Most likely there will always be women who move with women,
+women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time
+when women with women, women with men, men with men, all
+share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for
+obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our
+children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are
+jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that
+they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species.
+
+Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of
+the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to
+be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within
+each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special
+savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives.
+Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now
+fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian
+parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human
+sensitivity.
+Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist
+relationship, one in which this society’s pseudo-natural assumptions
+of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because
+Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians
+who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power
+relationships.
+These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned
+because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of
+success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our
+feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore
+with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed
+between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise.
+A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this
+exploration.
+As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our
+openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most
+importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model
+— not only of a relationship — but of relating.
+Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and
+asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked
+Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest
+positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents.
+He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he
+knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he
+knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some
+other boys did about men and women.
+
+And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the
+ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents.
+“You mean, from your peers?” I said.
+“Oh no,” he answered promptly. “My peers know better. I mean
+other kids.”
+* First published in Conditions: Four (1979).
+* From “School Note” in The Black Unicom (W.W. Norton and Company, New York,
+
+1978), p. 55.
+
+An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich*
+Adrienne: What do you mean when you say that two essays,
+“Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” are really
+progressions?
+Andre: They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t
+know what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling
+out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever wrote.
+One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions —
+pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever …
+Adrienne: And however much they were denied.
+Audre: And however painful some of them were. When I think of
+the way in which I courted punishment, just swam into it: “If this is
+the only way you’re going to deal with me, you’re gonna have to
+deal with me this way.”
+Adrienne: You’re talking about as a young child?
+Audre: I’m talking about throughout my life. I kept myself
+through feeling. I lived through it. And at such a subterranean level
+that I didn’t know how to talk. I was busy feeling out other ways of
+getting and giving information and whatever else I could because
+talking wasn’t where it was at. People were talking all around me
+all the time — and not either getting or giving much that was useful
+to them or to me.
+Adrienne: And not listening to what you tried to say, if you did
+speak.
+Audre: When you asked how I began writing, I told you how
+poetry functioned specifically for me from the time I was very
+young. When someone said to me, “How do you feel?” or “What do
+you think?” or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem,
+and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of
+information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was
+my response.
+
+Adrienne; Like a translation into this poem that already existed of
+something you knew in a preverbal way. So the poem became your
+language?
+Audre: Yes. I remember reading in the children’s room of the
+library, I couldn’t have been past the second or third grade, but I
+remember the book. It was illustrated by Arthur Rackham, a book of
+poems. These were old books; the library in Harlem used to get the
+oldest books, in the worst condition. Walter de la Mare’s “The
+Listeners” — I will never forget that poem.
+Adrienne: Where the traveler rides up to the door of the empty
+house?
+Audre: That’s right. He knocks at the door and nobody answers.
+“ ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.” That poem imprinted itself on
+me. And finally, he’s beating down the door and nobody answers,
+and he has a feeling that there really is somebody in there. Then he
+turns his horse and says, “ ‘Tell them I came, and nobody answered.
+That I kept my word.’ ” I used to recite that poem to myself all the
+time. It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, “What is it
+about?” I don’t think I could have told you. But this was the first
+reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say
+otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve.
+Adrienne: You had to make your own.
+Audre: There were so many complex emotions for which poems
+did not exist. I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I
+used to memorize my poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to
+write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head. And I
+remember trying when I was in high school not to think in poems. I
+saw the way other people thought, and it was an amazement to me
+— step by step, not in bubbles up from chaos that you had to anchor
+with words … I really do believe I learned this from my mother.
+Adrienne: Learned what from your mother?
+Andre: The important value of nonverbal communication, beneath
+language. My life depended on it. At the same time, living in the
+world, I didn’t want to have anything to do with the way she was
+using language. My mother had a strange way with words: if one
+didn’t serve her or wasn’t strong enough, she’d just make up
+
+another word, and then that would enter our family language
+forever, and woe betide any of us who forgot it. But I think I got
+another message from her … that there was a whole powerful world
+of nonverbal communication and contact between people that was
+absolutely essential and that was what you had to learn to decipher
+and use. One of the reasons I had so much trouble growing up was
+that my parents, my mother in particular, always expected me to
+know what she was feeling and what she expected me to do without
+telling me. And I thought this was natural. My mother would expect
+me to know things, whether or not she spoke them …
+Adrienne: Ignorance of the law was no excuse.
+Audre: That’s right. It’s very confusing. But eventually I learned
+how to acquire vital and protective information without words. My
+mother used to say to me, “Don’t just listen like a ninny to what
+people say in their mouth.” But then she’d proceed to say something
+that didn’t feel right to me. You always learned from observing. You
+have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell
+you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself,
+whatever it is that you need in order to survive. And if you make a
+mistake you get punished for it, but that’s no big thing. You become
+strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way
+genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but
+it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability. When I
+went to high school, I found out that people really thought in
+different ways — perceived, puzzled out, acquired information
+verbally. I had such a hard time. I never studied; I literally intuited
+all my teachers. That’s why it was so important to get a teacher who
+I liked because I never studied, I never read my assignment, and I
+would get all this stuff — what they felt, what they knew — but I
+missed a lot of other stuff, a lot of my own original workings.
+Adrienne: When you said you never read, you meant you never
+read the assignments, but you were reading?
+Audre: If I read things that were assigned, I didn’t read them the
+way we were supposed to. Everything was like a poem, with
+different curves, different levels. So I always felt that the ways I
+
+took things in were different from the ways other people took them
+in. I used to practice trying to think.
+Adrienne: That thing those other people presumably did. Do you
+remember what that was like?
+Andre: Yes. I had an image of trying to reach something around a
+corner, that it was just eluding me. The image was constantly
+vanishing. There was an experience I had in Mexico, when I moved
+to Cuernavaca …
+Adrienne: This was when you were about how old?
+Andre: I was nineteen. I was commuting to Mexico City for
+classes. In order to get to my early class I would catch a six o’clock
+turismo in the village plaza. I would come out of my house before
+dawn. You know, there are two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and
+Ixtacuhuatl. I thought they were clouds the first time I saw them
+through my windows. It would be dark, and I would see the snow
+on top of the mountains and the sun coming up. And when the sun
+crested, at a certain point, the birds would start. But because we
+were in the valley it would still look like night. But there would be
+the light of the snow. And then this incredible crescendo of birds.
+One morning I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came
+up. And then the birds, the sound of them I’d never really noticed,
+never heard birds before. I was walking down the hill and I was
+transfixed. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t been writing all the time I
+was in Mexico. And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was
+so important … And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I
+could bring those two together. I could infuse words directly with
+what I was feeling. I didn’t have to create the world I wrote about. I
+realized that words could tell. That there was such a thing as an
+emotional sentence. Until then, I would make these constructs and
+somewhere in there would be a nugget, like a Chinese bun, a piece
+of nourishment, the thing I really needed, which I had to create.
+There on that hill, I was filled with the smell and feeling and the
+way it looked, filled with such beauty that I could not believe … I
+had always fantasized it before. I used to fantasize trees and dream
+forest. Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were
+green clouds. When I read Shakespeare in high school, I would get
+
+off on his gardens and Spanish moss and roses and trellises with
+beautiful women at rest and sun on red brick. When I was in Mexico
+I found out this could be a reality. And I learned that day on the
+mountain that words can match that, re-create it.
+Adrienne: Do you think that in Mexico you were seeing a reality as
+extraordinary and vivid and sensual as you had been fantasizing it
+could be?
+Audre: I think so. I had always thought I had to do it in my head,
+make it up. I learned in Mexico that you can’t even make it up
+unless it happens, or can happen. Where it happened first for me I
+don’t know; I do remember stories my mother would tell us about
+Grenada in the West Indies, where she was born … But that
+morning in Mexico I realized I did not have to make beauty up for
+the rest of my life. I remember trying to tell Eudora about this
+epiphany, and I didn’t have the words for it. And I remember her
+saying, “Write a poem.” When I tried to write a poem about the way
+I felt that morning, I could not do it, and all I had was the memory
+that there must be a way. That was incredibly important. I know
+that I came back from Mexico very, very different, and much of it
+had to do with what I learned from Eudora. But more than that, it
+was a kind of releasing of my work, a releasing of myself.
+Adrienne: Then you went back to the Lower East Side, right?
+Audre: Yes, I went back to living with my friend Ruth, and I began
+trying to get a job. I had had a year of college, but I could not
+function in those people’s world. So I thought I could be a nurse.
+And I was having such a hard time getting any kind of work. I felt,
+well, a Practical Nursing license, and then I’ll go back to Mexico …
+Adrienne: With my trade.
+Audre: But that wasn’t possible either. I didn’t have any money,
+and Black women were not given Practical Nursing fellowships. I
+didn’t realize it at the time because what they said was that my eyes
+were too bad. But the first thing I did when I came back was to
+write a piece of prose about Mexico, called “La Llorona.” La Llorona
+is a legend in that part of Mexico, around Cuernavaca. You know
+Cuernavaca? You know the big barrancas? When the rains come to
+the mountains, the boulders rush through the big ravines. The
+
+sound, the first rush, would start one or two days before the rains
+came. All the rocks tumbling down from the mountains made a
+voice, and the echoes would resound and it would be a sound of
+weeping, with the waters behind it. Modesta, a woman who lived in
+the house, told me the legend of La Llorona. A woman had three
+sons and found her husband lying in another woman’s bed — it’s
+the Medea story — and drowned her sons in the barrancas, drowned
+her children. And every year around this time she comes back to
+mourn the deaths. I took this story and out of a combination of ways
+I was feeling I wrote a story called “La Llorona.” It’s a story
+essentially of my mother and me. It was as if I had picked my
+mother up and put her in that place: here is this woman who kills,
+who wants something, the woman who consumes her children, who
+wants too much, but wants not because she’s evil but because she
+wants her own life, but by now it is so distorted.… It was a very
+strange unfinished story, but the dynamic …
+Adrienne: It sounds like you were trying to pull those two pieces
+of your life together, your mother and what you’d learned in
+Mexico.
+Audre: Yes. You see, I didn’t deal at all with how strong my
+mother was inside of me, but she was, nor with how involved I was.
+But this story is beautiful. Pieces of it are in my head where the
+poetry pool is, phrases and so on. I had never written prose before
+and I’ve never written any since until just now. I published it under
+the name Rey Domini in a magazine …
+Adrienne: Why did you use a pseudonym?
+Audre: Because … I don’t write stories. I write poetry. So I had to
+put it under another name.
+Adrienne: Because it was a different piece of you?
+Audre: That’s right. I only write poetry and here is this story. But I
+used the name Rey Domini, which is Audre Lorde in Latin.
+Adrienne: Did you really not write prose from the time of that
+story until a couple of years ago, when you wrote “Poetry Is Not a
+Luxury”?
+Audre: I couldn’t. For some reason, the more poetry I wrote, the
+less I felt I could write prose. Someone would ask for a book review,
+
+or, when I worked at the library, for a precis about books — it
+wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills. I knew about sentences by that
+time. I knew how to construct a paragraph. But communicating
+deep feeling in linear, solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method
+beyond me.
+Adrienne: But you’d been writing letters like wildfire, hadn’t you?
+Audre: Well, I didn’t write letters as such. I wrote stream of
+consciousness, and for people who were close enough to me this
+would serve. My friends gave me back the letters I wrote them from
+Mexico — strange, those are the most formed. I remember feeling I
+could not focus on a thought long enough to have it from start to
+finish, but I could ponder a poem for days, camp out in its world.
+Adrienne: Do you think that was because you still had this idea
+that thinking was a mysterious process that other people did and
+that you had to sort of practice? That it wasn’t something you just
+did?
+Audre: It was a very mysterious process for me. And it was one I
+had come to suspect because I had seen so many errors committed
+in its name, and I had come not to respect it. On the other hand, I
+was also afraid of it because there were inescapable conclusions or
+convictions I had come to about my own life, my own feelings, that
+defied thought. And I wasn’t going to let them go. I wasn’t going to
+give them up. They were too precious to me. They were life to me.
+But I couldn’t analyze or understand them because they didn’t make
+the kind of sense I had been taught to expect through
+understanding. There were things I knew and couldn’t say. And I
+couldn’t understand them.
+Adrienne: In the sense of being able to take them out, analyze
+them, defend them?
+Audre: … write prose about them. Right. I wrote a lot of those
+poems you first knew me by, those poems in The First Cities,* way
+back in high school. If you had asked me to talk about one of those
+poems, I’d have talked in the most banal way. All I had was the
+sense that I had to hold on to these feelings and that I had to air
+them in some way.
+Adrienne: But they were also being transformed into language.
+
+Audre: That’s right. When I wrote something that finally had it, I
+would say it aloud and it would come alive, become real. It would
+start repeating itself and I’d know, that’s struck, that’s true. Like a
+bell. Something struck true. And there the words would be.
+Adrienne: How do you feel writing connected for you with
+teaching?
+Audre: I know teaching is a survival technique. It is for me and I
+think it is in general; the only way real learning happens. Because I
+myself was learning something I needed to continue living. And I
+was examining it and teaching it at the same time I was learning it. I
+was teaching it to myself aloud. And it started out at Tougaloo in a
+poetry workshop.
+Adrienne: You were ill when you were called to go down to
+Tougaloo?
+Audre: Yes, I felt … I had almost died.
+Adrienne: What was going on?
+Audre: Diane di Prima — that was 1967 — had started the Poets
+Press. And she said, “You know, it’s time you had a book.” And I
+said, “Well, who’s going to print it?” I was going to put those poems
+away because I found I was revising too much instead of writing
+new poems, and that’s how I found out, again through experience,
+that poetry is not Play-Doh. You can’t take a poem and keep reforming it. It is itself, and you have to know how to cut it, and if
+there’s something else you want to say, that’s fine. But I was
+repolishing and repolishing, and Diane said, “You have to print
+these. Put ’em out.” And the Poets Press published The First Cities.
+Well, I worked on that book, getting it together, and it was going
+into press … I had gotten the proofs back and I started repolishing
+again and realized, “This is going to be a book!” Putting myself on
+the line. People I don’t even know are going to read these poems.
+What’s going to happen?
+It felt very critical, and I was in an absolute blaze of activity
+because things were so bad at home financially. I went out and got a
+job; I was with the two kids in the daytime and worked at the
+library at night. Jonathan used to cry every night when I left, and I
+
+would hear his shrieks going down this long hall to the elevator. I
+was working nights, and I’d apprenticed myself to a stained-glass
+window-maker, and I was working in my mother’s office, and
+making Christmas for my friends, and I became very ill — I had
+overdone it. I was too sick to get up, and Ed answered the phone. It
+was Galen Williams from the Poetry Center asking if I’d like to go as
+poet-in-residence to Tougaloo, a Black college in Mississippi. I’d
+been recommended for a grant. It was Ed who said, “You have to do
+this.” My energy was at such a low ebb that I couldn’t see how. It
+was very frightening to me, the idea of someone responding to me
+as a poet. This book, by the way, hadn’t even come out yet, you
+understand?
+Adrienne: And suddenly you were already being taken seriously by
+unseen people out there.
+Andre: That’s right. In particular, I was asked to be public; to
+speak as, rather than to. But I felt as if I’d come back from the dead
+at that point, and so everything was up for grabs. I thought, hey,
+very good, let’s see — not because I felt I could do it, I just knew it
+was new and different. I was terrified to go south. Then there were
+echoes of an old dream: I had wanted to go to Tougaloo years
+before. My friend Elaine and I were going to join the Freedom
+Riders in Jackson when we left California in 1961 to return to New
+York, and Elaine’s mother got down on her knees in San Francisco
+and begged us please not to do this, that they would kill us, and we
+didn’t do it. So going to Tougaloo in Jackson was part of the
+mythic …
+Adrienne: But it sounds as if earlier you had been more romantic
+about what going south would mean, and six years later, with two
+kids and everything that had happened in between in the south …
+Audre: I was scared. I thought: “I’m going.” Really, it was the first
+thing that countered the fury and pain I felt at leaving that little boy
+screaming every night. It was like — all right, if I can walk out and
+hear that child screaming in order to go down to the library and
+work every night, then I’m gonna be able at least to do something
+that I want to find out about. So I went.
+
+Adrienne: Were you scared at Tougaloo, in terms of teaching,
+meeting your first workshop?
+Audre: Yes, but it was a nurturing atmosphere. I lived there for
+two weeks before I went around really gathering people, and there
+were eight students who were already writing poetry. The ways in
+which I was on the line in Tougaloo … I began to learn about
+courage, I began to learn to talk. This was a small group and we
+became very close. I learned so much from listening to people. The
+only thing I had was honesty and openness. And it was absolutely
+necessary for me to declare, as terrified as I was, as we were
+opening to each other, “The father of my children is white.” And
+what that meant in Tougaloo to those young Black people then, to
+talk about myself openly and deal with their hostility, their sense of
+disillusionment, to come past that, was very hard.
+Adrienne: It must have been particularly hard since you knew by
+then that the marriage was going nowhere. It’s like having to defend
+something that was not in itself defensible.
+Audre: What I was defending was something that needed defense.
+And this moved it out of “I’m defending Ed because I want to live
+with him.” It was, “I’m defending this relationship because we have
+a right to examine it and try it.” So there’s the northern Black poet
+making contact with these young southern Black people who are not
+saying, “This is what we need you for,” but were telling me by who
+they were what they needed from me. In the poem “Black Studies”*
+a lot of that starts coming through. Tougaloo laid the foundation for
+that poem, that knowledge born five years later. My students
+needed my perception, yet my perception of their need was different
+from what they were saying. What they were saying aloud was, “We
+need strong Black people,” but what they were also saying was that
+their ideas of what strong was had come from our oppressors and
+didn’t jibe with their feelings at all.
+It was through poetry that we began to deal with these things —
+formally. I knew nothing. Adrienne, I had never read a book about
+poetry! I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro, a little thin
+white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. “Poetry
+doesn’t sell Cadillacs.” It was the first time I’d ever talked about
+
+writing; always before I’d listened — part of my being inarticulate,
+inscrutable; I didn’t understand in terms of verbalization, and if I
+did I was too terrified to speak anyway. But at Tougaloo we talked
+about poetry. And I got the first copies of my book there at
+Tougaloo.
+I had never been in this relationship with Black people before.
+Never. There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the
+Harlem Writers’ Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really
+accepted — that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of
+it all. Johnny Clarke adopted me because he really loved me, and
+he’s a kind man. And he taught me wonderful things about Africa.
+And he said to me, “You are a poet. You are a poet. I don’t
+understand your poetry but you are a poet, you are.” So I would get
+this underlining of me. “You’re not doing what you’re supposed to
+do, but, yes, you can do it and we totally expect you to. You are a
+bright and shining light. You’re off on a lot of wrong turns —
+women, the Village, white people, all of this, but you’re young yet.
+You’ll find your way.” So I would get these double messages, this
+kind of underlining and rejection at the same time. It reduplicated
+my family, you see. In my family it was: “You’re a Lorde, so that
+makes you special and particular above anybody else in the world.
+But you’re not our kind of Lorde, so when are you going to
+straighten out and act right?”
+Adrienne: And did you feel, there in the Harlem Writers’ Guild,
+the same kind of unwritten laws that you had to figure out in order
+to do right?
+Audre: Yes, I would bring poems to read at the meetings. And
+hoping, well, they’re gonna tell me actually what it is they want,
+but they never could, never did.
+Adrienne: Were there women in that group, older women?
+Audre: Rosa Guy was older than I, but she was still very young. I
+remember only one other woman, Gertrude McBride. But she came
+in and out of the workshop so quickly I never knew her. For the
+most part, the men were the core. My friend Jeannie and I were
+members but in a slightly different position; we were in high school.
+
+Adrienne: And so Tougaloo was an entirely different experience of
+working with other Black writers.
+Audre: When I went to Tougaloo, I didn’t know what to give or
+where it was going to come from. I knew I couldn’t give what
+regular teachers of poetry give, nor did I want to, because they’d
+never served me. I couldn’t give what English teachers give. The
+only thing I had to give was me. And I was so involved with these
+young people — I really loved them. I knew the emotional life of
+each of those students because we would have conferences, and that
+became inseparable from their poetry. I would talk to them in the
+group about their poetry in terms of what I knew about their lives,
+and that there was a real connection between the two that was
+inseparable no matter what they’d been taught to the contrary.
+I knew by the time I left Tougaloo that teaching was the work I
+needed to be doing, that library work — by this time I was head
+librarian at the Town School — was not enough. It had been very
+satisfying to me. And I had a kind of stature I hadn’t had before in
+terms of working. But from the time I went to Tougaloo and did that
+workshop, I knew: not only, yes, I am a poet, but also, this is the
+kind of work I’m going to do.
+Practically all the poems in Cables to Rage* I wrote in Tougaloo. I
+was there for six weeks. I came back knowing that my relationship
+with Ed was not enough: either we were going to change it or end
+it. I didn’t know how to end it because there had never been any
+endings for me. But I had met Frances at Tougaloo, and I knew she
+was going to be a permanent person in my life. However, I didn’t
+know how we were going to work it out. I’d left a piece of my heart
+in Tougaloo not just because of Frances but because of what my
+students there had taught me.
+And I came back, and my students called me and told me — they
+were all of them also in the Tougaloo choir — they were coming to
+New York to sing in Carnegie Hall with Duke Ellington on April 4,
+and I covered it for the Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, so I was there,
+and while we were there Martin Luther King was killed.
+Adrienne: On that night?
+
+Audre: I was with the Tougaloo choir at Carnegie Hall when he
+was killed. They were singing “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”
+And they interrupted it to tell us that Martin Luther King had been
+killed.
+Adrienne: What did people do?
+Audre: Duke Ellington started to cry. Honeywell, the head of the
+choir, said, “The only thing we can do here is finish this as a
+memorial.” And they sang again, “What the World Needs Now is
+Love.” The kids were crying. The audience was crying. And then the
+choir stopped. They cut the rest of it short. But they sang that song
+and it kept reverberating. It was more than pain. The horror, the
+enormity of what was happening. Not just the death of King, but
+what it meant. I have always had the sense of Armageddon and it
+was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of
+chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were
+dying, that we were killing our world — that sense had always been
+with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that
+was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the
+edge. That this was the most we could do while we constructed
+some saner future. But that we were in that kind of peril. And here
+it was reality, in fact. Some of the poems — “Equinox”* is one of
+them — come from then. I knew then that I had to leave the library.
+And it was just about this time that Yolanda took my book, The First
+Cities, to Mina Shaughnessy* who had been her teacher, and I think
+she said to Mina, “Why don’t you have her teach?” — because that’s
+the way, you know, Yolanda is.
+Adrienne: But also, Mina would have listened to that.
+Audre: So Yolanda came home and said, “Hey, the head of the
+SEEK** English program wants to meet you. Maybe you can get a
+job there.” And I thought, I have to lay myself on the line. It’s not
+going back south and being shot at, but when Mina said to me,
+“Teach,” it was as threatening as that was. I felt at the time, I don’t
+know how I’m gonna do it, but that’s the front line for me. And I
+talked to Frances about this, because we’d had the Tougaloo
+experience, and I said, “If I could go to war, if I could pick up a gun
+to defend the things I believe, yes — but what am I gonna do in a
+
+classroom?” And Frances said, “You’ll do just what you did at
+Tougaloo.” And the first thing that I said to my SEEK students was,
+“I’m scared too.”
+Adrienne: I know I went in there in terror. But I went in white
+terror; you know, now you’re on the line, all your racism is going to
+show …
+Audre: I went in in Audre terror, Black terror. I thought, I have
+responsibility to these students. How am I going to speak to them?
+How am I going to tell them what I want from them — literally —
+that kind of terror. I did not know how to open my mouth and be
+understood. And my commadre, Yolanda, who was also a student in
+the SEEK program, said, “I guess you’re just going to have to talk to
+them the same way you talk to me because I’m one of them and
+you’ve gotten across to me.” I learned every single thing in every
+classroom. Every single class I ever walked into was like doing it
+anew. Every day, every week. But that was the exciting thing.
+Adrienne: Did you teach English 1 — that back-to-back course
+where you could be a poet, a writing teacher, and not teach
+grammar, and they had an English instructor to teach the grammar?
+That was the only way I could have started doing it either.
+Audre: I learned to teach grammar. And then I realized that we
+can’t separate these two things. We have to do them together
+because they’re integral. That’s when I learned how important
+grammar is, that part of the understanding process is grammatical.
+That’s how I taught myself to write prose. I kept learning and
+learning. I’d come into my class and say, “Guess what I found out
+last night. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.” I
+learned that grammar was not arbitrary, that it served a purpose,
+that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing
+as well as restrictive. And I sensed again how as children we learn
+this, and why. It’s like driving a car: once we know it we can choose
+to discard it or use it, but you can’t know if it has useful or
+destructive power until you have a handle on it. It’s like fear: once
+you put your hand on it, you can use it or push it away. I was saying
+these things in class and dealing with what was happening with
+Frances and me, what was going on with this insane man I lived
+
+with who wanted to continue pretending life could be looked at one
+way and lived another. All this, every bit of it funneling into that
+class. My children were just learning to read in school, and that was
+important too because I could watch their processes. Then it got
+even heavier when I went up to Lehmann College and was teaching
+a class on racism in education, teaching these white students how it
+was, the connections between their lives and the fury …
+Adrienne: You taught a course on racism for white students at
+Lehmann?
+Audre: They were inaugurating a program in the Education
+Department for these white kids going into teaching in the New
+York City schools. Lehmann used to be 99 percent white, and it was
+these students coming out of the Education Department who were
+going to teach Black children in the city schools. So the course was
+called “Race and the Urban Situation.” I had all these white students
+wanting to know, “What are we doing? Why are our kids hating us
+in the classroom?” I could not believe that they did not know the
+most elementary level of interactions. I would say, “When a white
+kid says 2 + 2 = 4, you say ‘right.’ In the same class, when a Black
+kid stands up and says 2 + 2 = 4, you pat him on the back, you
+say, ‘Hey, that’s wonderful.’ But what message are you really
+giving? Or what happens when you walk down the street on your
+way to teach? When you walk into class? Let’s play act a little.” And
+all the fear and loathing of these young white college students
+would come pouring out; it had never been addressed.
+Adrienne: They must have been mostly women, weren’t they? In
+the Education Department?
+Audre: Yes, mostly women, and they felt like unwilling sacrifices.
+But I began to feel by the end of two terms that there ought to be
+somebody white doing this. It was terribly costly emotionally. I
+didn’t have more than one or two Black students in my class. One of
+them dropped out saying this wasn’t right for him, and I thought,
+wait a minute, racism doesn’t just distort white people — what
+about us? What about the effects of white racism upon the ways
+Black people view each other? Racism internalized? What about
+Black teachers going into ghetto schools? And I saw there were
+
+different problems, that were just as severe, for a Black teacher
+going into New York City schools after a racist, sexist education.
+Adrienne: You mean in terms of expectations?
+Audre: Not just in terms of expectations, but of self-image, in
+terms of confusion about loyalties. In terms of identifying with the
+oppressor. And I thought, who is going to start to deal with that?
+What do you do about it? This was where I wanted to use my
+energies. Meanwhile, this is 1969, and I’m thinking, what is my
+place in all this? There were two Black women in the class, and I
+tried to talk to them about us, as Black women, having to get
+together. The Black organizations on the campuses were revving up
+for the spring actions. And the women said, “You are insane, our
+men need us.” It was a total rejection. “No, we can’t come together
+as women. We’re Black.” But I had to keep trying to straighten out
+the threads because I knew the minute I stopped trying to straighten
+this shit out, it was going to engulf me. So the only hope I had was
+to work at it, work on all the threads. My love with Frances, Ed, the
+children, teaching Black students, the women.
+And in ’69 came the Black and Puerto Rican occupation at City
+College. Black students outside of class on the barricades. Yolanda
+and I would bring over soup and blankets and see Black women
+being fucked on tables and under desks. And while we’d be trying to
+speak to them as women, all we’d hear is, “The revolution is here,
+right?” Seeing how Black women were being used and abused was
+painful — putting those things together. I said, “I want to teach
+Black students again.” I went to John Jay College and discussed a
+course with the dean on racism and the urban situation, and he said,
+“Come teach it.” I taught two courses, that one and another new
+course I introduced to the English Department, which approached
+remedial writing through creative writing. It was confrontation
+teaching.
+Adrienne: John Jay was largely a police college, right?
+Audre: It had been a police college, but I began in 1970 after open
+admissions started, and John Jay was now a four-year senior college
+with a regular enrollment as well as an enrollment of City
+uniformed personnel. There were no Black teachers in English or
+
+history. Most of our incoming freshmen were Black or Puerto Rican.
+And my demeanor was very unthreatening.
+Adrienne: I’ve seen your demeanor at John Jay and it was not
+unthreatening, but that was a bit later …
+Audre: … and also, I was a Black woman. So then I came in and
+started this course and really meant business. And it was very
+heavily attended. A lot of Black and white policemen registered for
+it. And literally, I used to be terrified about the guns.
+Adrienne: They were wearing guns?
+Audre: Yes. And since open admissions made college accessible to
+all high school graduates, we had cops and kids off the block in the
+same class. In 1970, the Black Panthers were being murdered in
+Chicago. Here we had Black and white cops, and Black and white
+kids off the block. Most of the women were young, Black, together
+women who had come to college now because they’d not been able
+to get in before. Some of them were SEEK students, but not all, and
+this was the one chance for them. A lot of them were older. They
+were very streetwise, but they had done very little work with
+themselves as Black women. They had done it only in relation to,
+against, whitey. The enemy was always outside. I did that course in
+the same way I did all the others, which was learning as I went
+along, asking the hard questions, not knowing what was coming
+next. I wish I had recorded some of it. Like the young white cop in
+the class saying, “Yeah, but everybody needs someone to look down
+on, don’t they?” By then I’d learned how to talk. Things weren’t all
+concise or refined, but enough of it got through to them; their own
+processes would start. I came to realize that in one term that is the
+most you can do. There are people who can give chunks of
+information, perhaps, but that was not what I was about. The
+learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a
+riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.
+By that time the battle over the Black Studies Department had
+started at John Jay. And again I saw the use and abuse of women, of
+Black people, saw how Black studies was being used by the
+university in a really cynical fashion. A year later, I returned to the
+English Department. I had made a number of enemies. One of the
+
+attempts to discredit me among Black students was to say I was a
+lesbian. Now by this time I would have considered myself
+uncloseted, but I had never discussed my own poetry at John Jay,
+nor my sexuality. I knew, as I had always known, that the only way
+you can head people off from using who you are against you is to be
+honest and open first, to talk about yourself before they talk about
+you. It wasn’t even courage. Speaking up was a protective
+mechanism for myself — like publishing “Love Poem” in Ms.
+magazine in 1971 and bringing it in and putting it up on the wall of
+the English Department.
+Adrienne: I remember hearing you read “Love Poem” on the Upper
+West Side, a coffeehouse at 72nd Street. It was the first time I’d
+heard you read it. And I think it was about that time, the early
+seventies. You read it. It was incredible. Like defiance. It was
+glorious.
+Audre: That’s how I was feeling, back against the wall, because as
+bad as it is now, the idea of open lesbianism in the Black
+community was — I mean, we’ve moved miles in a very short time
+— totally horrible. My publisher called and literally said he didn’t
+understand the words of “Love Poem.” He said, “Now what is this
+all about? Are you supposed to be a man?” And he was a poet! And
+I said, “No, I’m a loving woman.”
+Adrienne: Well, don’t tell me that your publisher had never heard
+of lesbians.
+Audre: I’m sure he had, but the idea that I’d write a poem …
+Adrienne: … That one of his poets in the Broadside Series …
+Audre: That’s right. And he was a sensitive man. He was a poet.
+Adrienne: But he did print your work.
+Audre: Yes, he did. But he didn’t print that poem, the first time
+around. “Love Poem” was supposed to have been in From a Land
+Where Other People Live.
+Adrienne: And it wasn’t published in that book? You took it out?
+Audre: Yes. But when you heard me read “Love Poem,” I had
+already made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be worrying any
+more over who knows and who doesn’t know that I have always
+loved women. One thing has always kept me going — and it’s not
+
+really courage or bravery, unless that’s what courage or bravery is
+made of — is a sense that there are so many ways in which I’m
+vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I’m not going to be
+more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’
+hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy,
+although being closeted is even harder.
+When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills
+and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive
+because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into
+conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to
+each other which is desperate and very deep. And that is what
+happens between Black men and women because we have certain
+weapons we have perfected together that white women and men
+have not shared. I said this to someone, and she said, very rightly,
+the same thing exists within the Jewish community between Jewish
+men and Jewish women. I think the oppression is different, but the
+same mechanism of vulnerability exists. When you share a common
+oppression you have certain additional weapons against each other
+because you’ve forged them in secret together against a common
+enemy. It’s a fear that I’m still not free of and that I remember all
+the time when I deal with other Black women: the fear of the excomrade.
+Adrienne: In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” you wrote: “The white
+fathers told us, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and the Black mother
+within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams, ‘I feel,
+therefore I can be free.’ ” I’ve heard it remarked that here you are
+simply restating the old stereotype of the rational white male and
+the emotional dark female. I believe you were saying something
+very different, but could you talk a little about that?
+Audre: I have heard that accusation, that I’m contributing to the
+stereotype, that I’m saying the province of intelligence and
+rationality belongs to the white male. But if you’re traveling a road
+that begins nowhere and ends nowhere, the ownership of that road
+is meaningless. If you have no land out of which the road comes, no
+place that road goes to, geographically, no goal, then the existence
+
+of that road is totally meaningless. Leaving rationality to the white
+man is like leaving him a piece of that road that begins nowhere
+and ends nowhere. When I talk about the Black mother in each of
+us, the poet, I don’t mean the Black mothers in each of us who are
+called poets, I mean the Black mother …
+Adrienne: Who is the poet?
+Audre: The Black mother who is the poet exists in every one of us.
+Now when males or patriarchal thinkers (whether male or female)
+reject that combination, then we’re truncated. Rationality is not
+unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It
+serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor
+those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what
+happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic,
+analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don’t see feel/think as a
+dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.
+Adrienne: Which we are constantly making. We don’t make it once
+and for all. We constantly have to be making it, depending on where
+we are, over and over.
+Audre: But I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify
+information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain
+ways. The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in
+that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings
+for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and
+to which our understanding can only build roads, But we have been
+taught to deny those fruitful areas of ourselves. I personally believe
+that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for
+a humanity that men are not without. But they have taken a
+position against that piece of themselves, and it is a world position,
+a position throughout time. And I’ve said this to you before,
+Adrienne, I feel that we’re evolving. In terms of a species …
+Adrienne: That women are evolving …
+Audre: That the human race is evolving through women. That it’s
+not by accident that there are more and more women — this sounds
+crazy, doesn’t it — women being born, women surviving … and
+we’ve got to take that promise of new power seriously, or we’ll
+make the same mistakes all over again. Unless we learn the lessons
+
+of the Black mother in each of us, whether we are Black or not … I
+believe this power exists in men also but they choose not to deal
+with it; which is, as I learned, their right. Hopefully this choice can
+be affected, but I don’t know. I don’t believe this shift from
+conquering problems to experiencing life is a one-generational shot
+or a single investment. I believe it’s a whole signature which you try
+to set in motion and have some input into. But I’m not saying that
+women don’t think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I’m
+saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos
+which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark
+which is rejected which is messy which is …
+Adrienne: Sinister …
+Audre: Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting …
+Adrienne: I think we have to keep using and affirming a
+vocabulary that has been used negatively and perjoratively. And I
+assume that’s the statement you’re making in that sentence, that
+you make over and over in your poetry. And it’s nothing as
+simplistic as saying “Black is beautiful,” either.
+Audre: There’s nothing beautiful about a black machine. You
+know, Adrienne, when I was in high school, the editor of the school
+magazine said to me, softening her rejection of a poem, “After all,
+Audre, you don’t want to be a sensualist poet.”
+Adrienne: I was told, as a poet, you’re not supposed to be angry,
+you’re not supposed to be personal.
+Audre: After I published “Uses of the Erotic,” a number of women
+who read it said that this is antifeminist, that the use of the erotic as
+a guide is …
+Adrienne: Antifeminist?
+Audre: Is reducing us once again to the unseen, the unusable. That
+in writing it I am returning us to a place of total intuition without
+insight.
+Adrienne: And yet, in that essay you’re talking about work and
+power, about two of the most political things that exist.
+Audre: Yes, but what they see is … and I address this at the very
+beginning: I try to say that the erotic has been used against us, even
+the word itself, so often, that we have been taught to suspect what is
+
+deepest in ourselves, and that is the way we learn to testify against
+ourselves, against our feelings. When we talk in terms of our lives
+and our survival as women, we can use our knowledge of the erotic
+creatively. The way you get people to testify against themselves is
+not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is
+to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves
+that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in
+themselves to begin with, so you don’t even need to stamp it out. A
+Black woman devaluating another Black woman’s work. The Black
+women buying that hot comb and putting it in my locker at the
+library. It wasn’t even Black men; it was Black women testifying
+against ourselves. This turning away from the erotic on the part of
+some of our best minds, our most creative and analytic women, is
+disturbing and destructive. Because we cannot fight old power in
+old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating
+another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence,
+at the same time as we are resisting.
+Adrienne: And as you were saying about courses, Black studies,
+women’s studies: this is not just a question of being “allowed” to
+have our history or literature or theory in the old power framework.
+It is every minute of our lives, from our dreams to getting up and
+brushing our teeth to when we go to teach …
+Audre: There are different choices facing Black and white women
+in life, certain specifically different pitfalls surrounding us because
+of our experiences, our color. Not only are some of the problems
+that face us dissimilar, but some of the entrapments and the
+weapons used to neutralize us are not the same.
+Adrienne: I wish we could explore this more, about you and me,
+but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written
+about: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as
+Black and white women. There is a danger of seeing it in an all-ornothing way. I think it is a very complex thing. White women are
+constantly offered choices or the appearance of choices. But also
+real choices that are undeniable. We don’t always perceive the
+difference between the two.
+
+Audre: Adrienne, in my journals I have a lot of pieces of
+conversations that I’m having with you in my head. I’ll be having a
+conversation with you and I’ll put it in my journal because
+stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space
+of Black woman/white woman where it’s beyond Adrienne and
+Audre, almost as if we’re two voices.
+Adrienne: You mean the conversations you have in your head and
+your journal, or the conversations we’re having on this earth?
+Audre: The conversations that exist in my head that I put in the
+journal. This piece, I think, is one of them — about the different
+pitfalls. I’ve never forgotten the impatience in your voice that time
+on the telephone, when you said, “It’s not enough to say to me that
+you intuit it.” Do you remember? I will never forget that. Even at
+the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total
+wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating.
+Adrienne: Yes, but it’s not a wipeout of your modus. Because I
+don’t think my modus in unintuitive, right? And one of the crosses
+I’ve borne all my life is being told that I’m rational, logical, cool — I
+am not cool, and I’m not rational and logical in that icy sense. But
+there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to
+mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m
+afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” You
+remember, that telephone conversation was in connection with the
+essay I was writing on feminism and racism. I was trying to say to
+you, don’t let’s let this evolve into “You don’t understand me” or “I
+can’t understand you” or “Yes, of course we understand each other
+because we love each other.” That’s bullshit. So if I ask for
+documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us
+that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times
+when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless
+you show me what you mean.
+Audre: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as
+a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in
+the process of discovering.
+Adrienne: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s
+what I’m trying to say to you.
+
+Audre: But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it
+only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by
+which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it
+down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They
+can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other. But I’m
+not rejecting your need for documentation.
+Adrienne: And in fact, I feel you’ve been giving it to me, in your
+poems always, and most recently in the long prose piece you’ve
+been writing,* and in talks we’ve been having. I don’t feel the
+absence of it now.
+Audre: Don’t forget I’m a librarian. I became a librarian because I
+really believed I would gain tools for ordering and analyzing
+information. I couldn’t know everything in the world, but I would
+gain tools for learning it. But that was of limited value. I can
+document the road to Abomey for you, and true, you might not get
+there without that information. I can respect what you’re saying.
+But once you get there, only you know why, what you came for, as
+you search for it and perhaps find it.
+So at certain stages that request for documentation is a blinder, a
+questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I
+hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that
+moves throughout The Black Unicorn.* I had to laugh. I’m a poet, not
+a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go
+document it, if you wish.
+I don’t know about you, Adrienne, but I have a difficult enough
+time making my perceptions verbal, tapping that deep place,
+forming that handle, and documentation at that point is often
+useless. Perceptions precede analysis just as visions precede action
+or accomplishments. It’s like getting a poem …
+That’s the only thing I’ve had to fight with, my whole life,
+preserving my perceptions of how things are, and later, learning
+how to accept and correct at the same time. Doing this in the face of
+tremendous opposition and cruel judgment. And I spent a long time
+questioning my perceptions and my interior knowledge, not dealing
+with them, being tripped by them.
+
+Adrienne: Well, I think that there’s another element in all this
+between us. Certainly in that particular conversation on the
+telephone where I said you have to tell me chapter and verse. I’ve
+had great resistance to some of your perceptions. They can be very
+painful to me. Perceptions about what goes on between us, what
+goes on between Black and white people, what goes on between
+Black and white women. So, it’s not that I can just accept your
+perceptions unblinkingly. Some of them are very hard for me. But I
+don’t want to deny them. I know I can’t afford to. I may have to
+take a long hard look and say, “Is this something I can use? What do
+I do with this?” I have to try to stand back and not become
+immersed in what you so forcefully are pronouncing. So there’s a
+piece of me that wants to resist wholly, and a piece that wants to
+accept wholly, and there’s some place in between where I have to
+find my own ground. What I can’t afford is either to wipe out your
+perceptions or to pretend I understand you when I don’t. And then,
+if it’s a question of racism — and I don’t mean just the overt
+violence out there but also all the differences in our ways of seeing
+— there’s always the question: “How do I use this? What do I do
+about it?”
+Audre: “How much of this truth can I bear to see/ and still live/
+unblinded?/ How much of this pain/ can I use?”* What holds us all
+back is being unable to ask that crucial question, that essential step
+deflected. You know the piece I wrote for The Black Scholar?** The
+piece was useful, but limited, because I didn’t ask some essential
+question. And not having asked myself that question, not having
+realized that it was a question, I was deflecting a lot of energy in
+that piece. I kept reading it over, thinking, this isn’t quite what it
+should be. I thought at the time I was holding back because it would
+be totally unacceptable in The Black Scholar. That wasn’t it, really. I
+was holding back because I had not asked myself the question:
+“Why is women loving women so threatening to Black men unless
+they want to assume the white male position?” It was a question of
+how much I could bear, and of not realizing I could bear more than
+I thought I could at the time. It was also a question of how could I
+use that perception other than just in rage or destruction.
+
+Adrienne: Speaking of rage and destruction, what do you really
+mean by the first five lines of “Power”?***
+Audre: “The difference between poetry/ and rhetoric/ is being/
+ready to kill yourself/ instead of your children.” What was I feeling?
+I was very involved in a case …
+Adrienne: The white policeman who shot the Black child and was
+acquitted. We had lunch around the time you were writing that
+poem and you were full of it.
+Audre: I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio
+that the cop had been acquitted. I was really sickened with fury, and
+I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook
+to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick
+and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down — I was just writing,
+and that poem came out without craft. That’s probably why I was
+talking to you about it because I didn’t feel it was really a poem. I
+was thinking that the killer had been a student at John Jay and that
+I might have seen him in the hall, that I might see him again. What
+was retribution? What could have been done? There was one Black
+woman on the jury. It could have been me. Now I am here teaching
+in John Jay College. Do I kill him? What is my effective role? Would
+I kill her in the same way — the Black woman on the jury. What
+kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding to
+take a position …
+Adrienne: Against eleven white men …
+Audre: … that atavistic fear of an articulated power that is not on
+your terms. There is the jury — white male power, white male
+structures — how do you take a position against them? How do you
+reach down into threatening difference without being killed or
+killing? How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as
+theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and
+effect and change? All of those things were riding in on that poem.
+But I had no sense, no understanding at the time, of the connections,
+just that I was that woman. And that to put myself on the line to do
+what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet
+absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And
+putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the
+
+sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and
+dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our
+world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not
+because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of
+survival — that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my
+spiritual son’s death over and over. Once you live any piece of your
+vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of
+horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities.
+Adrienne: I was going to say, tell it on the other side.
+Audre: Of wonders, absolute wonders, possibilities, like meteor
+showers all the time, bombardment, constant connections. And then,
+trying to separate what is useful for survival from what is distorted,
+destructive to self.
+Adrienne: There’s so much with which that has to be done —
+rejecting the distortions, keeping what we can use. Even in work
+created by people we admire intensely.
+Audre: Yes, a commitment to being selectively open. I had to do
+that with my physical survival. How am I going to live with cancer
+and not succumb to it in the many ways that I could? What do I
+have to do? And coming up against, there’s no one to tell you even
+possibilities. In the hospital I kept thinking, let’s see, there’s got to
+be someone somewhere, a Black lesbian feminist with cancer, how’d
+she handle it? Then I realized, hey, honey, you are it, for now. I
+read all of those books and then I realized, no one can tell me how
+to do it. I have to pick and choose, see what feels right.
+Determination, poetry — well that’s all in the work.
+Adrienne: I’m thinking about when you had just had the first
+biopsy, in 1977, and we were both supposed to speak on a panel in
+Chicago. On “The Transformation of Silence into Language and
+Action.” And you said there was no way you were going to the MLA
+— remember? That you couldn’t do it, you didn’t need to do it, that
+doing it could not mean anything important to you. But in fact you
+went out there and said what you said, and it was for yourself but
+not only for yourself.
+Audre: You said, “Why don’t you tell them about what you’ve just
+been through?” And I started saying, “Now that doesn’t have
+
+anything to do with the panel.” And as I said that, I felt the words
+“Silence,” “Transformation.” I hadn’t spoken about this
+experience.… This is silence.… Can I transform this? Is there any
+connection? Most of all, how do I share it? And that’s how a setting
+down became clear on paper, as if the connections became clear in
+the setting down. That paper* and “A Litany for Survival”** came
+about at the same time. I had the feeling, probably a body sense,
+that life was never going to be the same. If not now, eventually, this
+was something I would have to face. If not cancer, then somehow, I
+would have to examine the terms and means as well as the whys of
+my survival — and in the face of alteration. So much of the work I
+did, I did before I knew consciously that I had cancer. Questions of
+death and dying, dealing with power and strength, the sense of
+“What am I paying for?” that I wrote about in that paper, were
+crucial to me a year later. “Uses of the Erotic” was written four
+weeks before I found out I had breast cancer, in 1978.
+Adrienne: Again, it’s like what you were saying before, about
+making the poems that didn’t exist, that you needed to have exist.
+Audre: The existence of that paper enabled me to pick up and go
+to Houston and California; it enabled me to start working again. I
+don’t know when I’d have been able to write again, if I hadn’t had
+those words. Do you realize, we’ve come full circle, because that is
+where knowing and understanding mesh. What understanding
+begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that’s the
+urgency, that’s the push, that’s the drive. I don’t know how I wrote
+the long prose piece I have just finished, but I just knew that I had
+to do it.
+Adrienne: That you had to understand what you knew and also
+make it available to others.
+Audre: That’s right. Inseparable process now. But for me, I had to
+know I knew it first — I had to feel.
+* This interview, held on August 30, 1979 in Montague, Massachusetts, was edited from
+
+three hours of tapes we made together. It was commissioned by Marilyn Hacker, the guest
+
+editor of Woman Poet: The East (Women-In-Literature, Reno, Nevada, 1981), where a
+
+portion of it appears. The interview was first published in Signs, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer
+1981).
+
+* The First Cities (Poets Press, New York, 1968).
+* New York Head Shop and Museum (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1974), pp. 52–56.
+* Cables to Rage (Paul Breman, Heritage Series, London, 1970).
+* First published in From a Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973),
+
+and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982),
+pp. 39–40.
+
+* Mina Shaughnessy (1924–78), then director of the SEEK Writing Program at the City
+
+College, City University of New York.
+
+** “Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge”: A pre-baccalaureate program in
+
+compensatory education in the City University of New York in which a number of writerteachers participated in the 1960s and early 1970s.
+
+* Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, originally published by Persephone Press in 1982 and
+
+reissued by Crossing Press in 1983.
+
+* The Black Unicorn (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978).
+* From “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices” in Chosen Poems, p. 115.
+** “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” see p. 45.
+*** The Black Unicorn, pp. 108–110.
+* See “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” see p. 40.
+** The Black Unicorn, p. 31.
+
+The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s
+House*
+I AGREED TO TAKE PART in a New York University Institute for the
+Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I
+would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of
+difference within the lives of american women: difference of race,
+sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations
+weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.
+It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of
+feminist theory without examining our many differences, and
+without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third
+World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian
+feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at
+this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is
+represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is
+sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are
+inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and
+Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic,
+women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or
+heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and
+political terms when even the two Black women who did present
+here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when
+the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that
+same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of
+change are possible and allowable.
+The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the
+consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within
+this conference and within the papers presented here. For example,
+in a paper on material relationships between women, I was
+conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed
+my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no
+
+examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared
+support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and womenidentified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of
+nurturance that women “who attempt to emancipate themselves pay
+perhaps too high a price for the results,” as this paper states.
+For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not
+pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that
+our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so
+feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is
+maternity the only social power open to women.
+Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which
+allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be
+creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active
+being.
+Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is
+the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of
+difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but
+seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity
+can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for
+interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that
+interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal,
+can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as
+well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no
+charters.
+Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences
+lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of
+knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the
+concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that
+future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection
+from which our personal power is forged.
+As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences,
+or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than
+as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only
+the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual
+and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of
+
+our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do
+not exist.
+Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s
+definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged
+in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are
+lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not
+an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and
+sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those
+others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek
+a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our
+differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never
+dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat
+him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about
+genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women
+who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
+Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference
+between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution
+because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white american
+feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and
+the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal
+with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your
+children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for
+the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory
+behind racist feminism?
+In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay
+the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic
+feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to
+reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and
+conquer must become define and empower.
+Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this
+conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a
+consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black
+feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an
+important and powerful connection of love between women, what
+about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each
+other?
+
+In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is
+often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion
+of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art
+out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most
+feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World
+Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But
+as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have
+educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past
+ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about
+Black women and the differences between us — white and Black —
+when it is key to our survival as a movement?
+Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the
+gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and
+our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep
+the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear
+that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women — in
+the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our
+differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a
+diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal
+thought.
+Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the
+genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to
+live and our reasons for acting.”
+Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this
+place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep
+place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of
+any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the
+personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
+* Comments at “The Personal and the Political Panel,” Second Sex Conference, New
+
+York, September 29, 1979.
+
+Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining
+Difference*
+MUCH OF WESTERN EUROPEAN history conditions us to see human
+differences
+in
+simplistic
+opposition
+to
+each
+other:
+dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a
+society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in
+terms of human need, there must always be some group of people
+who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus,
+to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society,
+that group is made up of Black and Third World people, workingclass people, older people, and women.
+As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of
+two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I
+usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant,
+inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in american society, it is
+the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to
+stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives
+and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive,
+those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have
+always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language
+and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for
+some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of
+communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call
+upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the
+responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their
+mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my
+children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are
+expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are
+expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to
+educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their
+position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a
+
+constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining
+ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present
+and constructing the future.
+Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in
+a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As
+members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to
+respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing
+and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if
+that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if
+we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating
+across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences
+have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and
+confusion.
+Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age,
+and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are
+separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences,
+and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming
+them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.
+Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others
+and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent
+superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance.
+Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.
+It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these
+distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize,
+reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed.
+For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions
+were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy
+needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending
+those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not
+exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and
+treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for
+using human difference as a springboard for creative change within
+our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human
+deviance.
+Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a
+mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that
+
+is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin,
+male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is
+with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within
+this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify
+one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the
+primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around
+difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and
+large within the women’s movement today, white women focus
+upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race,
+sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a
+homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does
+not in fact exist.
+Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’
+energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective
+made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry
+was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our
+creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is
+the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which
+requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one
+which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the
+subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years,
+writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous
+differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As
+we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor,
+working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a
+necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter,
+and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual
+arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In
+this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our
+painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based
+women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and
+economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.
+As we move toward creating a society within which we can each
+flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which
+interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to
+repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool
+
+for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community
+view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they
+will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of
+the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This
+gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the
+wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.
+We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old
+lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass
+on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. For
+instance, how many times has this all been said before? For another,
+who would have believed that once again our daughters are
+allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles
+and high heels and hobble skirts?
+Ignoring the differences of race between women and the
+implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to
+the mobilization of women’s joint power.
+As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and
+define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women
+of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and
+tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. An example of this is the
+signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for
+women’s studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom
+included in women’s literature courses and almost never in other
+literature courses, nor in women’s studies as a whole. All too often,
+the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only
+be taught by Colored women, or that they are too difficult to
+understand, or that classes cannot “get into” them because they
+come out of experiences that are “too different.” I have heard this
+argument presented by white women of otherwise quite clear
+intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching
+and reviewing work that comes out of the vastly different
+experiences of Shakespeare, Molière, Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes.
+Surely there must be some other explanation.
+This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons
+white women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is
+because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and
+
+different from themselves. To examine Black women’s literature
+effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual
+complexities — as individuals, as women, as human — rather than
+as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this
+society in place of genunine images of Black women. And I believe
+this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are
+not Black.
+The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our
+lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the
+real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one
+of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must
+be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of
+stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency
+of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.
+Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the
+different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.
+Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a
+major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and
+white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black
+women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not
+because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for
+Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the
+oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our
+communities. This same problem does not exist for white women.
+Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share
+it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we
+have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other
+that are not duplicated in the white community, with the exception
+of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men.
+On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced
+into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This
+possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The
+tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to
+join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that
+quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended
+
+choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its
+tools.
+Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and
+increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to
+believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty
+enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave,
+hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be
+allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a
+man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And
+true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to
+remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
+But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is
+stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do
+not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys,
+or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us,
+increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living
+— in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic
+and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman,
+the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.
+Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear
+your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against
+you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down
+in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are
+dying.
+The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of
+Color. Those of us who are Black must see that the reality of our
+lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of
+ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities
+where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem
+dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a
+need for homogeneity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for
+betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the
+continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black
+men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are
+also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black
+women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but
+
+implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease
+striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it
+disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of
+powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often
+becomes a standard within our communities, one by which
+manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely
+discussed as crimes against Black women.
+As a group, women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in
+america. We are the primary targets of abortion and sterilization
+abuse, here and abroad. In certain parts of Africa, small girls are still
+being sewed shut between their legs to keep them docile and for
+men’s pleasure. This is known as female circumcision, and it is not a
+cultural affair as the late Jomo Kenyatta insisted, it is a crime
+against Black women.
+Black women’s literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not
+only by a racist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity
+for and history of shared battle have made us, Black women,
+particularly vulnerable to the false accusation that anti-sexist is antiBlack. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is
+sapping strength from Black communities, and our very lives. Rape
+is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not
+aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. As Kalamu ya
+Salaam, a Black male writer points out, “As long as male domination
+exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made
+conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop
+rape.”*
+Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being
+misnamed and used to separate us from one another. As a Black
+lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of
+my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom
+from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck
+out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful
+whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a
+destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of
+energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I
+am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to
+
+flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without
+the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I
+bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those
+struggles which I embrace as part of my living.
+A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led
+many Black women into testifying against themselves. It has led
+some of us into destructive alliances, and others into despair and
+isolation. In the white women’s communities, heterosexism is
+sometimes a result of identifying with the white patriarchy, a
+rejection of that interdependence between women-identified women
+which allows the self to be, rather than to be used in the service of
+men. Sometimes it reflects a die-hard belief in the protective
+coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate
+which all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.
+Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there
+are particular resonances of heterosexism and homophobia among
+Black women. Despite the fact that woman-bonding has a long and
+honorable history in the African and African-american communities,
+and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many strong
+and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social
+and cultural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore
+or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians. Part of this
+attitude has come from an understandable terror of Black male
+attack within the close confines of Black society, where the
+punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of
+being a lesbian and therefore unworthy of the attention or support
+of the scarce Black male. But part of this need to misname and
+ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear that openly
+women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon
+men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of
+social relationships.
+Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white
+woman’s problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to
+Black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically unBlack. These accusations, coming from the very women to whom we
+look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many
+
+Black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women
+and the homophobia of their sisters. Often, their work has been
+ignored, trivialized, or misnamed, as with the work of Angelina
+Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry. Yet womenbonded women have always been some part of the power of Black
+communities, from our unmarried aunts to the amazons of
+Dahomey.
+And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are assaulting women
+and raping children and grandmothers on the streets of our
+communities.
+Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979
+following the unsolved murders of twelve Black women, Black
+lesbians are spearheading movements against violence against Black
+women.
+What are the particular details within each of our lives that can
+be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we
+redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which
+separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences
+and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from
+the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.
+As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to
+recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those
+differences which exist between women and men. And we have
+learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all
+oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work
+or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and
+negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only
+continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human
+relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’
+difference in order to survive.
+But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate
+within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns
+of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most
+superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize
+differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor
+
+superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich
+our visions and our joint struggles.
+The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women
+to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns
+of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us,
+nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how
+cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to
+cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same
+old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
+For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and
+response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at
+the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of
+those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the
+master’s house.
+As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,*
+the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the
+oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the
+oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows
+only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.
+Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we
+sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle
+together with those whom we define as different from ourselves,
+although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and
+young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new
+paths to our survival.
+We have chosen each other
+and the edge of each others battles
+the war is the same
+if we lose
+someday women’s blood will congeal
+upon a dead planet
+if we win
+there is no telling
+
+we seek beyond history
+for a new and more possible meeting.**
+* Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980.
+* From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya
+
+Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).
+* Seabury Press, New York, 1970.
+** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem.
+
+The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism*
+Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all
+others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.
+Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have
+lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it
+before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it
+in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing.
+Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
+Women responding to racism means women responding to anger;
+the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial
+distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness,
+misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.
+My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and
+presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with
+other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your
+attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the
+same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But
+for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks
+in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our
+futures.
+Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I
+am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women
+that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut
+them short. I want you to know there were many more.
+For example:
+• I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic
+conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but
+don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner
+that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life
+may change?
+• The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a
+Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and
+
+white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most
+vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black
+women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better
+idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the
+core of the racist problem.
+• After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to
+address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still
+hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of
+racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that
+statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach
+their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a
+problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.
+• After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in
+Rage,”* a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with
+how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I
+ask, “How do you use your rage?” And then I have to turn away
+from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to
+participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger
+for her.
+• White women are beginning to examine their relationships to
+Black women, yet often I hear them wanting only to deal with little
+colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved
+nursemaid, the occasional second-grade classmate — those tender
+memories of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral.
+You avoid the childhood assumptions formed by the raucous
+laughter at Rastus and Alfalfa, the acute message of your mommy’s
+handerkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been
+sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos ’n
+Andy and your daddy’s humorous bedtime stories.
+• I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a
+supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding
+past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a
+baby maid!” And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct
+you. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can
+still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of
+terror and dis-ease.
+
+• A white academic welcomes the appearance of a collection by
+non-Black women of Color.* “It allows me to deal with racism
+without dealing with the harshness of Black women,” she says to
+me.
+• At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known
+white american woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of
+women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an
+“important panel.”
+If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it
+will require recognizing the needs and the living contexts of other
+women. When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may
+mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available
+money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she
+means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely
+subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet
+the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a
+conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet
+refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of
+Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made
+it impossible for many women of Color — for instance, Wilmette
+Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework — to participate
+in this conference. Is this to be merely another case of the academy
+discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy?
+To the white women present who recognize these attitudes as
+familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and
+survive thousands of such encounters — to my sisters of Color who
+like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes
+question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the
+two most popular accusations) — I want to speak about anger, my
+anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its
+dominions.
+Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to
+remember this when you are accused of destruction.)*
+Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially
+useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which
+brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become
+
+a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when
+I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a
+temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel
+good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those
+assumptions underlining our lives.
+I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark,
+resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain
+silent because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within
+them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first
+woman of Color who talks about racism.
+But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of
+our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of
+clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that
+we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave
+differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
+Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of
+women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of
+Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her
+invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical
+with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from,
+lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I
+participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and
+she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets
+the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And
+yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s
+voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself
+have contributed.
+In this place we speak removed from the more blatant reminders
+of our embattlement as women. This need not blind us to the size
+and complexities of the forces mounting against us and all that is
+most human within our environment. We are not here as women
+examining racism in a political and social vacuum. We operate in
+the teeth of a system for which racism and sexism are primary,
+established, and necessary props of profit. Women responding to
+racism is a topic so dangerous that when the local media attempt to
+discredit this conference they choose to focus upon the provision of
+
+lesbian housing as a diversionary device — as if the Hartford
+Courant dare not mention the topic chosen for discussion here,
+racism, lest it become apparent that women are in fact attempting to
+examine and to alter all the repressive conditions of our lives.
+Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly
+white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted
+as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like
+eveningtime or the common cold.
+So we are working in a context of opposition and threat, the cause
+of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather
+that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color,
+lesbians and gay men, poor people — against all of us who are
+seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our
+oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.
+Any discussion among women about racism must include the
+recognition and the use of anger. This discussion must be direct and
+creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to
+deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard
+work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the
+choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest
+assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us
+and of what we are trying to do here.
+And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s
+anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me
+caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the
+streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those
+streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather
+than merely indulge in academic rhetoric.
+This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of
+those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and
+destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its
+object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been
+raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for
+destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each
+other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in
+itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon
+
+a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions
+which history has created around our difference. For it is those
+distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who
+profits from all this?
+Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of
+anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when
+we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of
+humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its
+service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have
+had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us
+apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for
+strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us
+who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of
+my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.
+Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury
+when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To
+those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than
+their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women
+of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all
+aspects of our lives?
+It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our
+refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to
+move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap
+that anger as an important source of empowerment.
+I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor
+answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts.
+Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions
+or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it
+is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too
+often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness
+destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect
+ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the
+ultimate protection for changelessness.
+Most women have not developed tools for facing anger
+constructively. CR groups in the past, largely white, dealt with how
+to express anger, usually at the world of men. And these groups
+
+were made up of white women who shared the terms of their
+oppressions. There was usually little attempt to articulate the
+genuine differences between women, such as those of race, color,
+age, class, and sexual identity. There was no apparent need at that
+time to examine the contradictions of self, woman as oppressor.
+There was work on expressing anger, but very little on anger
+directed against each other. No tools were developed to deal with
+other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it
+under a blanket of guilt.
+I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only
+another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the
+pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm
+that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in
+anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your
+head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your
+bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?”
+This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s
+telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was
+then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just
+refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth
+Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of
+women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that
+amendment.
+The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate
+them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with
+at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner
+of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we
+will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely
+familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as
+its limitations.
+For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation.
+In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives
+depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of
+others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to
+be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls,
+
+come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we
+accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.
+But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between
+us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we
+inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The
+angers of women can transform difference through insight into
+power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and
+the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a
+sign of growth.
+My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into
+my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It has
+also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the
+work and history of Black women was less than a vapor. It has
+served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white
+women who see in my experience and the experience of my people
+only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not
+dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results
+of your own actions.
+When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many
+of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are
+“creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from
+getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting
+communication and action.” All these quotes come directly from
+letters to me from members of this organization within the last two
+years. One woman wrote, “Because you are Black and Lesbian, you
+seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.” Yes, I am
+Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not
+suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.
+To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the
+pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power — it is merely
+another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of
+unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. Guilt is only another
+form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to
+stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and
+humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the
+service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over.
+
+My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and
+before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at
+least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
+What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that
+she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What
+woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary
+to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold
+winds of self-scrutiny?
+I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly
+because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to
+recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children
+do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children
+because her insides are rotted from home abortions and
+sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to
+have children, the woman who remains closeted because her
+homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who
+chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified
+lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize
+them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to
+each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which
+stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual
+empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I
+am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are
+very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person
+of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
+I speak here as a woman of Color who is not bent upon
+destruction, but upon survival. No woman is responsible for altering
+the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in
+another woman. I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have
+used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where
+there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not
+goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of divine forgiveness; we are not
+fiery fingers of judgment or instruments of flagellation; we are
+women forced back always upon our woman’s power. We have
+learned to use anger as we have learned to use the dead flesh of
+animals, and bruised, battered, and changing, we have survived and
+
+grown and, in Angela Wilson’s words, we are moving on. With or
+without uncolored women. We use whatever strengths we have
+fought for, including anger, to help define and fashion a world
+where all our sisters can grow, where our children can love, and
+where the power of touching and meeting another woman’s
+difference and wonder will eventually transcend the need for
+destruction.
+For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down
+over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that
+launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on
+missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in
+cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our
+daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which
+corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the
+annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our
+power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live
+and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by
+painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating
+difference and the earth to support our choices.
+We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond
+objectification and beyond guilt.
+* Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs,
+
+Connecticut, June 1981.
+
+* One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and
+
+Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.
+
+* This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe
+
+Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first
+published in 1981.
+
+* From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live
+
+(Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton
+and Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.
+
+Learning from the 60s*
+MALCOLM X IS a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I
+stand here now — Black, Lesbian, Feminist — an inheritor of
+Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his
+voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you
+doing yours?
+There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we
+cherish breath and power in our own living. I’m not going to
+pretend that the moment I first saw or heard Malcolm X he became
+my shining prince, because it wouldn’t be true. In February 1965 I
+was raising two children and a husband in a three-room flat on
+149th Street in Harlem. I had read about Malcolm X and the Black
+Muslims. I became more interested in Malcolm X after he left the
+Nation of Islam, when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad for his
+comment, after Kennedy’s assassination, to the effect that the
+chickens had come home to roost. Before this I had not given much
+thought to the Nation of Islam because of their attitude toward
+women as well as because of their nonactivist stance. I’d read
+Malcolm’s autobiography, and I liked his style, and I thought he
+looked a lot like my father’s people, but I was one of the ones who
+didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death.
+I had been guilty of what many of us are still guilty of — letting
+the media, and I don’t mean only the white media — define the
+bearers of those messages most important to our lives.
+When I read Malcolm X with careful attention, I found a man
+much closer to the complexities of real change than anything I had
+read before. Much of what I say here tonight was born from his
+words.
+In the last year of his life, Malcolm X added a breadth to his
+essential vision that would have brought him, had he lived, into
+inevitable confrontation with the question of difference as a creative
+
+and necessary force for change. For as Malcolm X progressed from a
+position of resistance to, and analysis of, the racial status quo, to
+more active considerations of organizing for change, he began to
+reassess some of his earlier positions. One of the most basic Black
+survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience,
+good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four
+hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most
+of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners.
+Malcolm knew this. We do not have to live the same mistakes over
+again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon
+them.
+Before he was killed, Malcolm had altered and broadened his
+opinions concerning the role of women in society and the
+revolution. He was beginning to speak with increasing respect of the
+connection between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose
+policies of nonviolence appeared to be so opposite to his own. And
+he began to examine the societal conditions under which alliances
+and coalitions must indeed occur.
+He had also begun to discuss those scars of oppression which lead
+us to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our
+enemies.
+As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it
+is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we
+must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from
+the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have
+been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the
+combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the
+dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to
+alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage
+for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. In the
+1960s, the awakened anger of the Black community was often
+expressed, not vertically against the corruption of power and true
+sources of control over our lives, but horizontally toward those
+closest to us who mirrored our own impotence.
+We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective
+places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a
+
+particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other
+than to the originators of our common problem. Historically,
+difference had been used so cruelly against us that as a people we
+were reluctant to tolerate any diversion from what was externally
+defined as Blackness. In the 60s, political correctness became not a
+guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal
+part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not
+mean unanimity — Black people are not some standardly digestible
+quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix
+of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized
+chocolate milk. Unity implies the coming together of elements
+which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular
+natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity
+encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either
+ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless
+or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make
+the past work for the future is our energy in the present,
+metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen
+automatically, nor is it a passive process.
+The 60s were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous
+solutions. They were vital years of awakening, of pride, and of error.
+The civil rights and Black power movements rekindled possibilities
+for disenfranchised groups within this nation. Even though we
+fought common enemies, at times the lure of individual solutions
+made us careless of each other. Sometimes we could not bear the
+face of each other’s differences because of what we feared those
+differences might say about ourselves. As if everybody can’t
+eventually be too Black, too white, too man, too woman. But any
+future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be
+complex and expanding, not easy to achieve. The answer to cold is
+heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic
+solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the
+conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them,
+wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the
+same disease. By seeing who the we is, we learn to use our energies
+
+with greater precision against our enemies rather than against
+ourselves.
+In the 60s, white america — racist and liberal alike — was more
+than pleased to sit back as spectator while Black militant fought
+Black Muslim, Black Nationalist badmouthed the non-violent, and
+Black women were told that our only useful position in the Black
+Power movement was prone. The existence of Black lesbian and gay
+people was not even allowed to cross the public consciousness of
+Black america. We know in the 1980s, from documents gained
+through the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI and CIA used
+our intolerance of difference to foment confusion and tragedy in
+segment after segment of Black communities of the 60s. Black was
+beautiful, but still suspect, and too often our forums for debate
+became stages for playing who’s-Blacker-than-who or who’s-poorerthan-who games, ones in which there can be no winners.
+The 60s for me was a time of promise and excitement, but the 60s
+was also a time of isolation and frustration from within. It often felt
+like I was working and raising my children in a vacuum, and that it
+was my own fault — if I was only Blacker, things would be fine. It
+was a time of much wasted energy, and I was often in a lot of pain.
+Either I denied or chose between various aspects of my identity, or
+my work and my Blackness would be unacceptable. As a Black
+lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some
+part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices
+of who I should be. That is how I learned that if I didn’t define
+myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies
+for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life, my work, my energies
+for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match
+somebody else’s norm. I learned that not only couldn’t I succeed at
+that game, but the energy needed for that masquerade would be lost
+to my work. And there were babies to raise, students to teach. The
+Vietnam War was escalating, our cities were burning, more and
+more of our school kids were nodding out in the halls, junk was
+overtaking our streets. We needed articulate power, not conformity.
+There were other strong Black workers whose visions were racked
+and silenced upon some imagined grid of narrow Blackness. Nor
+
+were Black women immune. At a national meeting of Black women
+for political action, a young civil rights activist who had been
+beaten and imprisoned in Mississippi only a few years before, was
+trashed and silenced as suspect because of her white husband. Some
+of us made it and some of us were lost to the struggle. It was a time
+of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great
+waste. That is history. We do not need to repeat these mistakes in
+the 80s.
+The raw energy of Black determination released in the 60s
+powered changes in Black awareness and self-concepts and
+expectations. This energy is still being felt in movements for change
+among women, other peoples of Color, gays, the handicapped —
+among all the disenfranchised peoples of this society. That is a
+legacy of the 60s to ourselves and to others. But we must recognize
+that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change
+did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now
+being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection
+of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and
+insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any
+struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the
+force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in
+the 80s.
+There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not
+live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr.
+knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are
+not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our
+errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can
+read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice
+Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because
+somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn
+from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard
+work of becoming ourselves, and effective.
+We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the
+New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe
+because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because
+we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest
+
+truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s,
+even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both
+our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not
+to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate
+what she gave me — Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize
+our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not
+have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of
+the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as
+deep understanding.
+We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is
+not to lie to ourselves.
+We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is
+all about — survival and growth.
+Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that
+knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates
+crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are
+to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from
+establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school
+ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack
+against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our
+interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one
+of us here is a link in the connection between antipoor legislation,
+gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks
+against women, and resurgent violence against Black people. I ask
+myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the
+particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for?
+Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the
+subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight
+must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the
+bread we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons
+which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes
+blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive
+calculators?
+We are women trying to knit a future in a country where an Equal
+Rights Amendment was defeated as subversive legislation. We are
+Lesbians and gay men who, as the most obvious target of the New
+
+Right, are threatened with castration, imprisonment, and death in
+the streets. And we know that our erasure only paves the way for
+erasure of other people of Color, of the old, of the poor, of all of
+those who do not fit that mythic dehumanizing norm.
+Can we really still afford to be fighting each other?
+We are Black people living in a time when the consciousness of
+our intended slaughter is all around us. People of Color are
+increasingly expendable, our government’s policy both here and
+abroad. We are functioning under a government ready to repeat in
+El Salvador and Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government
+which stands on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation
+taking place upon this globe; a government which has invaded and
+conquered (as I edit this piece) the fifty-three square mile sovereign
+state of Grenada, under the pretext that her 110,000 people pose a
+threat to the U.S. Our papers are filled with supposed concern for
+human rights in white communist Poland while we sanction by
+acceptance and military supply the systematic genocide of apartheid
+in South Africa, of murder and torture in Haiti and El Salvador.
+American advisory teams bolster repressive governments across
+Central and South America, and in Haiti, while advisory is only a
+code name preceding military aid.
+Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for
+dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being
+made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses
+with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to
+bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired
+to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their
+lives anyway.
+Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to
+reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here
+still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole
+and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or
+religion, or sexuality, or class?
+Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant
+for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in
+
+established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to
+address each other’s difference with respect.
+We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in
+isolation from others simply because their differences make us
+uncomfortable. We know what it is to be lied to. The 60s should
+teach us how important it is not to lie to ourselves. Not to believe
+that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens
+around us rather than inside of us. Not to believe that freedom can
+belong to any one group of us without the others also being free.
+How important it is not to allow even our leaders to define us to
+ourselves, or to define our sources of power to us.
+There is no Black person here who can afford to wait to be led
+into positive action for survival. Each one of us must look clearly
+and closely at the genuine particulars (conditions) of his or her life
+and decide where action and energy is needed and where it can be
+effective. Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us,
+wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we
+choose. For while we wait for another Malcolm, another Martin,
+another charismatic Black leader to validate our struggles, old Black
+people are freezing to death in tenements, Black children are being
+brutalized and slaughtered in the streets, or lobotomized by
+television, and the percentage of Black families living below the
+poverty line is higher today than in 1963.
+And if we wait to put our future into the hands of some new
+messiah, what will happen when those leaders are shot, or
+discredited, or tried for murder, or called homosexual, or otherwise
+disempowered? Do we put our future on hold? What is that
+internalized and self-destructive barrier that keeps us from moving,
+that keeps us from coming together?
+We who are Black are at an extraordinary point of choice within
+our lives. To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to
+give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security
+(they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do).
+Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means
+guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for
+change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is
+
+coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary
+to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which
+coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means
+knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of
+whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not
+fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means
+fighting despair.
+And in the university, that is certainly no easy task, for each one
+of you by virtue of your being here will be deluged by opportunities
+to misname yourselves, to forget who you are, to forget where your
+real interests lie. Make no mistake, you will be courted; and nothing
+neutralizes creativity quicker than tokenism, that false sense of
+security fed by a myth of individual solutions. To paraphrase
+Malcolm — a Black woman attorney driving a Mercedes through
+Avenue Z in Brooklyn is still a “nigger bitch,” two words which
+never seem to go out of style.
+You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each
+other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the
+same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can
+include each other and to work toward that future with the
+particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do
+this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as
+we recognize our sameness.
+If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change
+directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is
+not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair
+oppression plants within each of us — that thin persistent voice that
+says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother,
+accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction
+that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until
+it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other. But we can put our
+finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us
+and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its
+potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across
+our differences.
+
+Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do
+our enemies’ work by destroying each other.
+What does it mean when an angry Black ballplayer — this
+happened in Illinois — curses a white heckler but pulls a knife on a
+Black one? What better way is there to police the streets of a
+minority community than to turn one generation against the other?
+Referring to Black lesbians and gay men, the student president at
+Howard University says, on the occasion of a Gay Student Charter
+on campus, “The Black community has nothing to do with such filth
+— we will have to abandon these people.” [italics mine] Abandon?
+Often without noticing, we absorb the racist belief that Black people
+are fitting targets for everybody’s anger. We are closest to each
+other, and it is easier to vent fury upon each other than upon our
+enemies.
+Of course, the young man at Howard was historically incorrect. As
+part of the Black community, he has a lot to do with “us.” Some of
+our finest writers, organizers, artists and scholars in the 60s as well
+as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.
+Over and over again in the 60s I was asked to justify my existence
+and my work, because I was a woman, because I was a Lesbian,
+because I was not a separatist, because some piece of me was not
+acceptable. Not because of my work but because of my identity. I
+had to learn to hold on to all the parts of me that served me, in spite
+of the pressure to express only one to the exclusion of all others.
+And I don’t know what I’d say face to face with that young man at
+Howard University who says I’m filth because I identify women as
+my primary source of energy and support, except to say that it is my
+energy and the energy of other women very much like me which has
+contributed to his being where he is at this point. But I think he
+would not say it to my face because name-calling is always easiest
+when it is removed, academic. The move to render the presence of
+lesbians and gay men invisible in the intricate fabric of Black
+existence and survival is a move which contributes to fragmentation
+and weakness in the Black community.
+In academic circles, as elsewhere, there is a kind of name-calling
+increasingly being used to keep young Black women in line. Often as
+
+soon as any young Black woman begins to recognize that she is
+oppressed as a woman as well as a Black, she is called a lesbian no
+matter how she identifies herself sexually. “What do you mean you
+don’t want to make coffee take notes wash dishes go to bed with
+me, you a lesbian or something?” And at the threat of such a
+dreaded taint, all too often she falls meekly into line, however
+covertly. But the word lesbian is only threatening to those Black
+women who are intimidated by their sexuality, or who allow
+themselves to be defined by it and from outside themselves. Black
+women in struggle from our own perspective, speaking up for
+ourselves, sharing close ties with one another politically and
+emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men. We are Black women
+who seek our own definitions, recognizing diversity among
+ourselves with respect. We have been around within our
+communities for a very long time, and we have played pivotal parts
+in the survival of those communities: from Hat Shep Sut through
+Harriet Tubman to Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer to Lorraine
+Hansberry to your Aunt Maydine to some of you who sit before me
+now.
+In the 60s Black people wasted a lot of our substance fighting
+each other. We cannot afford to do that in the 80s, when
+Washington, D.C. has the highest infant mortality rate of any U.S.
+city, 60 percent of the Black community under twenty is
+unemployed and more are becoming unemployable, lynchings are
+on the increase, and less than half the registered Black voters voted
+in the last election.
+How are you practicing what you preach — whatever you preach,
+and who exactly is listening? As Malcolm stressed, we are not
+responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our
+own liberation. It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have
+learned and what we have been given that is useful. We have the
+power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the
+place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and
+sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his
+words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use
+to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the
+
+future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the
+present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.
+* Talk delivered at the Malcolm X Weekend, Harvard University, February 1982.
+
+Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger*
+Where does the pain go when it goes away?**
+EVERY BLACK WOMAN in America lives her life somewhere along a
+wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
+My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my
+most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a
+powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is
+an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I
+set the essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at
+any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the
+landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny
+it has been one of the major tasks of my life.
+Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that
+pool of anger. I know this, no matter what the particular situation
+may be between me and another Black woman at the moment. Then
+why does that anger unleash itself most tellingly against another
+Black woman at the least excuse? Why do I judge her in a more
+critical light than any other, becoming enraged when she does not
+measure up?
+And if behind the object of my attack should lie the face of my
+own self, unaccepted, then what could possibly quench a fire fueled
+by such reciprocating passions?
+When I started to write about the intensity of the angers between
+Black women, I found I had only begun to touch one tip of a threepronged iceberg, the deepest understructure of which was Hatred,
+that societal deathwish directed against us from the moment we
+were born Black and female in America. From that moment on we
+have been steeped in hatred — for our color, for our sex, for our
+effrontery in daring to presume we had any right to live. As children
+we absorbed that hatred, passed it through ourselves, and for the
+
+most part, we still live our lives outside of the recognition of what
+that hatred really is and how it functions. Echoes of it return as
+cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other. For each of us
+bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have each learned to be at
+home with cruelty because we have survived so much of it within
+our own lives.
+Before I can write about Black women’s anger, I must write about
+the poisonous seepage of hatred that fuels that anger, and of the
+cruelty that is spawned when they meet.
+I have found this out by scrutinizing my own expectations of
+other Black women, by following the threads of my own rage at
+Blackwomanness back into the hatred and despisal that embroidered
+my life with fire long before I knew where that hatred came from,
+or why it was being heaped upon me. Children know only
+themselves as reasons for the happenings in their lives. So of course
+as a child I decided there must be something terribly wrong with me
+that inspired such contempt. The bus driver didn’t look at other
+people like that. All the things my mother had warned me not to do
+and be that I had gone right ahead and done and been must be to
+blame.
+To search for power within myself means I must be willing to
+move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my
+most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can
+remove the source of that pain from my enemies’ arsenals. My
+history cannot be used to feather my enemies’ arrows then, and that
+lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be
+used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came
+to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your
+me-ness, as I discover you in myself.
+America’s measurement of me has lain like a barrier across the
+realization of my own powers. It was a barrier which I had to
+examine and dismantle, piece by painful piece, in order to use my
+energies fully and creatively. It is easier to deal with the external
+manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the
+results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of
+ourselves and one another.
+
+But what is the nature of that reluctance to connect with each
+other on any but the most superficial levels? What is the source of
+that mistrust and distance maintained between Black women?
+I don’t like to talk about hate. I don’t like to remember the
+cancellation and hatred, heavy as my wished-for death, seen in the
+eyes of so many white people from the time I could see. It was
+echoed in newspapers and movies and holy pictures and comic
+books and Amos ’n Andy radio programs. I had no tools to dissect it,
+no language to name it.
+The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch my mother’s sleeve, her
+arms full of shopping bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of
+winter clothes, the train’s lurching. My mother spots an almost seat,
+pushes my little snowsuited body down. On one side of me a man
+reading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me.
+Her mouth twitches as she stares and then her gaze drops down,
+pulling mine with it. Her leather-gloved hand plucks at the line
+where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She
+jerks her coat closer to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible
+thing she is seeing on the seat between us — probably a roach. But
+she has communicated her horror to me. It must be something very
+bad from the way she’s looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me
+away from it, too. When I look up the woman is still staring at me,
+her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realize there is
+nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want
+her coat to touch. The fur brushes past my face as she stands with a
+shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred
+a New York City child, I quickly slide over to make room for my
+mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. I’m afraid to say
+anything to my mother because I don’t know what I’ve done. I look
+at the sides of my snowpants, secretly. Is there something on them?
+Something’s going on here I do not understand, but I will never
+forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate.
+My three-year-old eyes ache from the machinery used to test
+them. My forehead is sore. I have been poked and prodded in the
+eyes and stared into all morning. I huddle into the tall metal and
+
+leather chair, frightened and miserable and wanting my mother. On
+the other side of the eye clinic’s examining room, a group of young
+white men in white coats discuss my peculiar eyes. Only one voice
+remains in my memory. “From the looks of her she’s probably
+simple, too.” They all laugh. One of them comes over to me,
+enunciating slowly and carefully, “OK, girlie, go wait outside now.”
+He pats me on the cheek. I am grateful for the absence of harshness.
+The Story Hour librarian reading Little Black Sambo. Her white
+fingers hold up the little book about a shoebutton-faced little boy
+with big red lips and many pigtails and a hatful of butter. I
+remember the pictures hurting me and my thinking again there
+must be something wrong with me because everybody else is
+laughing and besides the library downtown has given this little book
+a special prize, the library lady tells us.
+SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU, ANYWAY? DON’T BE SO
+SENSITIVE!
+Sixth grade in a new catholic school and I am the first Black
+student. The white girls laugh at my braided hair. The nun sends a
+note home to my mother saying that “pigtails are not appropriate
+attire for school,” and that I should learn to comb my hair in “a
+more becoming style.”
+Lexie Goldman and I on Lexington Avenue, our adolescent faces
+flushed from springtime and our dash out of high school. We stop at
+a luncheonette, ask for water. The woman behind the counter smiles
+at Lexie. Gives us water. Lexie’s in a glass. Mine in a paper cup.
+Afterward we joke about mine being portable. Too loudly.
+My first interview for a part-time job after school. An optical
+company on Nassau Street has called my school and asked for one of
+its students. The man behind the counter reads my application and
+then looks up at me, surprised by my Black face. His eyes remind
+me of the woman on the train when I was five. Then something else
+is added, as he looks me up and down, pausing at my breasts.
+My light-skinned mother kept me alive within an environment
+where my life was not a high priority. She used whatever methods
+she had at hand, few as they were. She never talked about color. My
+
+mother was a very brave woman, born in the West Indies,
+unprepared for america. And she disarmed me with her silences.
+Somewhere I knew it was a lie that nobody else noticed color. Me,
+darker than my two sisters. My father, darkest of all. I was always
+jealous of my sisters because my mother thought they were such
+good girls, whereas I was bad, always in trouble. “Full of the devil,”
+she used to say. They were neat, I was untidy. They were quiet, I
+was noisy. They were well-behaved, I was rowdy. They took piano
+lessons and won prizes in deportment. I stole money from my
+father’s pockets and broke my ankle sledding downhill. They were
+good-looking, I was dark. Bad, mischievous, a born troublemaker if
+ever there was one.
+Did bad mean Black? The endless scrubbing with lemon juice in
+the cracks and crevices of my ripening, darkening, body. And oh,
+the sins of my dark elbows and knees, my gums and nipples, the
+folds of my neck and the cave of my armpits!
+The hands that grab at me from behind the stairwell are Black
+hands. Boys’ hands, punching, rubbing, pinching, pulling at my
+dress. I hurl the garbage bag I’m carrying into the ashcan and jerk
+away, fleeing back upstairs. Hoots follow me. “That’s right, you
+better run, you ugly yaller bitch, just wait!” Obviously, color was
+relative.
+My mother taught me to survive from a very early age by her own
+example. Her silences also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, selfrejection, and sadness. My survival lay in learning how to use the
+weapons she gave me, also, to fight against those things within
+myself, unnamed.
+And survival is the greatest gift of love. Sometimes, for Black
+mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost. My
+mother bore me into life as if etching an angry message into marble.
+Yet I survived the hatred around me because my mother made me
+know, by oblique reference, that no matter what went on at home,
+outside shouldn’t oughta be the way it was. But since it was that
+way outside, I moved in a fen of unexplained anger that encircled
+me and spilled out against whomever was closest that shared those
+hated selves. Of course I did not realize it at the time. That anger lay
+
+like a pool of acid deep inside me, and whenever I felt deeply, I felt
+it, attaching itself in the strangest places. Upon those as powerless
+as I. My first friend asking, “Why do you go around hitting all the
+time? Is that the only way you know how to be friends?
+What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had
+to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep
+going?
+It is shortly after the Civil War. In a grey stone hospital on 110th
+Street in New York City a woman is screaming. She is Black, and
+healthy, and has been brought here from the South. I do not know
+her name. Her baby is ready to be born. But her legs have been tied
+together out of a curiosity masquerading as science. Her baby births
+itself to death against her bone.
+Where are you seven-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of Little Rock,
+Arkansas? It is a bright Monday morning and you are on your way
+to your first day of school, draped in spittle, white hatred running
+down your pink sweater and a white mother’s twisted mouth
+working — savage, inhuman — wide over your jaunty braids held
+high by their pink ribbons.
+Numvulo has walked five days from the bleak place where the
+lorry deposited her. She stands in the Capetown, South Africa rain,
+her bare feet in the bulldozer tracks where her house once was. She
+picks up a piece of soaked cardboard that once covered her table
+and holds it over the head of her baby strapped to her back. Soon
+she will be arrested and taken back to the reserve, where she does
+not even speak the language. She will never get permission to live
+near her husband.
+The bicentennial, in Washington, D.C. Two ample Black women
+stand guard over household belonging piled haphazardly onto a
+sidewalk in front of a house. Furniture, toys, bundles of clothes. One
+woman absently rocks a toy horse with the toe of her shoe, back and
+forth. Across the street on the side of a building opposite is a sign
+painted in story-high black letters, GOD HATES YOU.
+
+Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise
+McNair. Four little Black girls, none more than ten years of age,
+singing their last autumn song in a Sunday church school in
+Birmingham, Alabama. After the explosion clears it is not possible to
+tell which patent leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found leg.
+What other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still
+functions?
+Black women have a history of the use and sharing of power, from
+the Amazon legions of Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen
+Yaa Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, to the
+economically powerful market-women guilds of present West Africa.
+We have a tradition of closeness and mutual care and support, from
+the all-woman courts of the Queen Mothers of Benin to the presentday Sisterhood of the Good Death, a community of old women in
+Brazil who, as escaped slaves, provided escape and refuge for other
+enslaved women, and who now care for each other.*
+We are Black women born into a society of entrenched loathing
+and contempt for whatever is Black and female. We are strong and
+enduring. We are also deeply scarred. As African women together,
+we once made the earth fertile with our fingers. We can make the
+earth bear as well as mount the first line of fire in defense of the
+King. And having killed, in his name and in our own (Harriet’s rifle
+speaks, shouldered in the grim marsh), we still know that the power
+to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending
+rather than the beginning of something new.
+Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or
+misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred — an emotional habit
+or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger,
+used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
+Racism and sexism are grown-up words. Black children in america
+cannot avoid these distortions in their living and, too often, do not
+have the words for naming them. But both are correctly perceived
+as hatred.
+
+Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am
+Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough,
+because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM.
+On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the
+hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends,
+for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful
+fuel.
+And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it
+burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is
+an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred,
+but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but
+in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force
+which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such
+strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies
+behind, upon what created it — hatred. And hatred is a deathwish
+for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
+To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that
+eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the
+negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and
+cruelty.
+We are African women and we know, in our blood’s telling, the
+tenderness with which our foremothers held each other. It is that
+connection which we are seeking. We have the stories of Black
+women who healed each other’s wounds, raised each other’s
+children, fought each other’s battles, tilled each other’s earth, and
+eased each other’s passages into life and into death. We know the
+possibilities of support and connection for which we all yearn, and
+about which we dream so often. We have a growing Black women’s
+literature which is richly evocative of these possibilities and
+connections. But connections between Black women are not
+automatic by virtue of our similarities, and the possibilities of
+genuine communication between us are not easily achieved.
+Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and
+connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed
+the barriers to these possibilities, nor fully explored the angers and
+fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black
+
+sisterhood. And to acknowledge our dreams is to sometimes
+acknowledge the distance between those dreams and our present
+situation. Acknowledged, our dreams can shape the realities of our
+future, if we arm them with the hard work and scrutiny of now. We
+cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for parodies of selflove. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest levels
+because we fear each other’s angers, nor continue to believe that
+respect means never looking directly nor with openness into another
+Black woman’s eyes.
+I was not meant to be alone and without you who understand.*
+
+I.
+I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my
+heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be angry than to hurt.
+Anger is what I do best. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning.
+Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening
+universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each
+other.
+As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences.
+Why doesn’t this commonality bring us closer together instead of
+setting us at each other’s throats with weapons well-honed by
+familiarity?
+The anger with which I meet another Black woman’s slightest
+deviation from my immediate need or desire or concept of a proper
+response is a deep and hurtful anger, chosen only in the sense of a
+choice of desperation — reckless through despair. That anger which
+masks my pain that we are so separate who should most be together
+— my pain — that she could perhaps not need me as much as I need
+her, or see me through the blunted eye of the haters, that eye I
+know so well from my own distorted images of her. Erase or be
+erased!
+I stand in the Public Library waiting to be recognized by the Black
+woman library clerk seated a few feet behind the desk. She seems
+engrossed in a book, beautiful in her youth and self-assuredness. I
+straighten my glasses, giving a tiny shake to my bangles in the
+process just in case she has not seen me, but I somehow know she
+has. Otherwise motionless, she slowly turns her head and looks up.
+Her eyes cross mine with a look of such incidental hostility that I
+feel pilloried to the wall. Two male patrons enter behind me. At
+that, she rises and moves toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no
+inflection at all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. I’ve never seen this
+young woman before in my life. I think to myself, “now that’s what
+you call an attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of me.
+
+The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girl’s face as she cuts her
+elegant sidelong glance at me. What makes her eyes slide off of
+mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or
+disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do
+not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister’s face? My daughter’s
+mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious
+and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide
+your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals?
+Keep vigil for you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister,
+where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together?
+Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in dirty type all the
+views fit to kill, me and you, me or you. And whose future image have
+we destroyed — your face or mine — without either how shall I look
+again at both — lacking either is lacking myself.
+And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed our brown flesh to
+from fear, self-preservation, or to what brothered altar all innocent of
+loving that has no place to go and so becomes another face of terror or
+of hate?
+A dumb beast endlessly recording inside the poisonous attacks of
+silence — meat gone wrong — what could ever grow in that dim lair and
+how does the child convert from sacrifice to liar?
+My blood sister, across her living room from me. Sitting back in her
+chair while I talk earnestly, trying to reach her, trying to alter the
+perceptions of me that cause her so much pain. Slowly, carefully,
+and coldly, so I will not miss one single scathing word, she says, “I
+am not interested in understanding whatever you’re trying to say —
+I don’t care to hear it.”
+I have never gotten over the anger that you did not want me as a
+sister, nor an ally, nor even a diversion one cut above the cat. You
+have never gotten over the anger that I appeared at all. And that I
+am different, but not different enough. One woman has eyes like my
+sister who never forgave me for appearing before she had a chance
+to win her mother’s love, as if anybody ever could. Another woman
+wears the high cheekbones of my other sister who wanted to lead
+
+but had only been taught to obey, so now she is dedicated to ruling
+by obedience, a passive vision.
+Who did we expect the other to be who is not yet at peace with
+our own selves? I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out
+so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
+We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other.
+Because we see in each other’s face our own face, the face we never
+stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for
+more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we
+try to obliterate it.
+Why don’t we meet each other’s eyes? Do we expect betrayal in
+each other’s gaze, or recognition?
+If just once we were to feel the pain of all Black women’s blood
+flooding up to drown us! I stayed afloat buoyed by an anger so deep
+at my loneliness that I could only move toward further survival.
+When one cannot influence a situation it is an act of wisdom to
+withdraw.*
+Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of
+hatred, where even in the candy store cases of our childhood, little
+brown niggerbaby candies testified against us. We survived the
+wind-driven spittle on our child’s shoe and pink flesh-colored
+bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of
+the super’s boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday
+School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to
+metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it
+because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat
+arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I’d have hated
+to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed
+because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the
+catabolic process throws off waste products of fury even when we
+love.
+I see hatred
+I am bathed in it, drowning in it
+since almost the beginning of my life
+
+it has been the air I breathe
+the food I eat, the content of my perceptions;
+the single most constant fact of my existence
+is their hatred …
+I am too young for my history**
+It is not that Black women shed each other’s psychic blood so
+easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of
+bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If I have learned to eat
+my own flesh in the forest — starving, keening, learning the lesson
+of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind
+— if I must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at
+yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon
+my breast and I weep for your going, oh my sister, I grieve for our
+gone.
+When an error of oversight allows one of us to escape without the
+full protective dose of fury and air of contemptuous disdain, when
+she approaches us without a measure of distrust and reserve flowing
+from her pores, or without her eyes coloring each appraisal of us
+with that unrelenting sharpness and suspicion reserved only for each
+other, when she approaches without sufficient caution, then she is
+cursed by the first accusation of derision — naive — meaning not
+programmed for defensive attack before inquiry. Even more than
+confused, naive is the ultimate wipeout between us.
+Black women eating our own hearts out for nourishment in an
+empty house empty compound empty city in an empty season, and
+for each of us one year the spring will not return — we learned to
+savor the taste of our own flesh before any other because that was
+all that was allowed us. And we have become to each other
+unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous. I am writing
+about an anger so huge and implacable, so corrosive, it must destroy
+what it most needs for its own solution, dissolution, resolution. Here
+we are attempting to address each others’ eyes directly. Even if our
+words taste sharp as the edge of a lost woman’s voice, we are
+speaking.
+
+II
+A Black woman, working her years, committed to life as she lives it,
+the children fed and clothed and loved as she can into some strength
+that does not allow them to encyst like horse chestnuts, knowing all
+the time from the start that she must either kill them or eventually
+send them into the deathlands, the white labyrinth.
+I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table listening to my daughter talk
+about the university and the horrors of determined invisibility. Over
+the years I have recorded her dreams of death at their hands,
+sometimes glorious, sometimes cheap. She tells me of the teachers
+who refuse to understand simple questions, who look at her as if she
+were a benign — meaning powerless — but unsightly tumor. She
+weeps. I hold her. I tell her to remember the university doesn’t own
+her, that she has a home. But I have let her go into that jungle of
+ghosts, having taught her only how to be fleet of foot, how to
+whistle, how to love, and how not to run. Unless she has to. It is
+never enough.
+Black women give our children forth into a hatred that seared our
+own young days with bewilderment, hoping we have taught them
+something they can use to fashion their own new and less costly
+pathways to survival. Knowing I did not slit their throats at birth
+tear out the tiny beating heart with my own despairing teeth the
+way some sisters did in the slaveships chained to corpses and
+therefore was I committed to this very moment.
+The price of increasing power is increasing opposition.*
+I sat listening to my girl talk about the bent world she was
+determined to reenter in spite of all she was saying, because she
+views a knowledge of that world as part of an arsenal which she can
+use to change it all. I listened, hiding my pained need to snatch her
+back into the web of my smaller protections. I sat watching while
+she worked it out bit by hurtful bit — what she really wanted —
+feeling her rage wax and wane, feeling her anger building against
+
+me because I could not help her do it nor do it for her, nor would
+she allow that.
+All mothers see their daughters leaving. Black mothers see it
+happening as a sacrifice through the veil of hatred hung like sheets
+of lava in the pathway before their daughters. All daughters see
+their mothers leaving. Black girls see it happening through a veil of
+threatened isolation no fire of trusting pierces.
+Last month I held another Black woman in my arms as she sobbed
+out the grief and deprivation of her mother’s death. Her
+inconsolable loss — the emptiness of the emotional landscape she
+was seeing in front of her — spoke out of her mouth from a place of
+untouchable aloneness that could never admit another Black woman
+close enough again to matter. “The world is divided into two kinds
+of people,” she said, “those who have mothers and those who don’t.
+And I don’t have a mother anymore.” What I heard her saying was
+that no other Black woman would ever see who she was, ever trust
+or be trusted by her again. I heard in her cry of loneliness the source
+of the romance between Black women and our mommas.
+Little Black girls, tutored by hate into wanting to become
+anything else. We cut our eyes at sister because she can only reflect
+what everybody else except momma seemed to know — that we
+were hateful, or ugly, or worthless, but certainly unblessed. We
+were not boys and we were not white, so we counted for less than
+nothing, except to our mommas.
+If we can learn to give ourselves the recognition and acceptance
+that we have come to expect only from our mommas, Black women
+will be able to see each other much more clearly and deal with each
+other much more directly.
+I think about the harshness that exists so often within the least
+encounter between Black women, the judgment and the sizing up,
+that cruel refusal to connect. I know sometimes I feel like it is worth
+my life to disagree with another Black woman. Better to ignore her,
+withdraw from her, go around her, just don’t deal with her. Not just
+because she irritates me, but because she might destroy me with the
+cruel force of her response to what must feel like an affront, namely
+
+me. Or I might destroy her with the force of mine, for the very same
+reason. The fears are equal.
+Once I can absorb the particulars of my life as a Black woman,
+and multiply them by my two children and all the days of our
+collective Black lives, and I do not falter beneath the weight — what
+Black woman is not a celebration, like water, like sunlight, like rock
+— is it any wonder that my voice is harsh? Now to require of myself
+the effort of awareness, so that harshness will not function in the
+places it is least deserved — toward my sisters.
+Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury and
+disappointment for each other? Who is it we must destroy when we
+attack each other with that tone of predetermined and correct
+annihilation? We reduce one another to our own lowest common
+denominator, and then we proceed to try and obliterate what we
+most desire to love and touch, the problematic self, unclaimed but
+fiercely guarded from the other.
+This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of
+hate with which we were inoculated from the time we were born by
+those who intended it to be an injection of death. But we adapted,
+learned to take it in and use it, unscrutinized. Yet at what cost! In
+order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now
+we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest.
+How do I alter course so each Black woman’s face I meet is not
+the face of my mother or my killer?
+I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked to you for hours in my sleep
+sitting under a silk-cotton tree our arms around each other or braiding
+each other’s hair or oiling each other’s backs, and every time I run into
+you on the street or at the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I want
+to wring your neck.
+There are so many occasions in each of our lives for righteous fury,
+multiplied and dividing.
+• Black women being told that we can be somehow better, and are
+worse, but never equal. To Black men. To other women. To human
+beings.
+
+• The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This
+Bridge Called My Back* exists, because now it gives her a chance to
+deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black
+undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to
+examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal
+with the angers of Black women. So get away with your dirty ugly
+mean faces, all screwed up all the time!
+• The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I had handled so
+patiently and well. I didn’t blow up his damned machine. I
+explained how his racial blindness made me feel and how his film
+could be altered to have some meaning. He probably learned
+something about showing Black images. Then I came home and
+almost tore up my house and my lover because some invitations
+happened to be misprinted. Not seeing where the charge of rage was
+born.
+• A convicted Black man, a torturer of women and children, armytrained to be a killer, writes in his journal in his death cell:
+“I am the type of person you are most likely to find driving a
+Mercedes and sitting in the executive offices of 100 big
+corporations.” And he’s right. Except he’s Black.
+How do we keep from releasing our angers at them upon
+ourselves and each other? How do I free myself from this poison I
+was force-fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger at the
+least scent of anything nourishing, oh my sister the belligerent lift of
+your shoulder the breath of your hair.… We each learned the craft of
+destruction. It is all they knew to allow us, yet look how our words
+are finding each other again.
+It is difficult to construct a wholesomeness model when we are
+surrounded with synonyms for filth. But not impossible. We have,
+after all, survived for a reason. (How do I define my impact upon
+this earth?) I begin by searching for the right questions.
+Dear Leora,
+For two Black women to enter an analytic or therapeutic
+relationship means beginning an essentially uncharted and
+
+insecure journey. There are no prototypes, no models, no
+objectively accessible body of experience other than
+ourselves by which to examine the specific dynamics of our
+interactions as Black women. Yet this interaction can affect
+all the other psychic matter attended profoundly. It is to
+scrutinize that very interaction that I sought you out
+professionally, and I have come to see that it means picking
+my way through our similarities and our differences, as well
+as through our histories of calculated mistrust and desire.
+Because it has not been done before or at least not been
+noted, this particular scrutiny is painful and fraught with
+the vulnerability of all psychic scrutinies plus all of the
+pitfalls created by our being Black women in a white male
+world, and Black women who have survived. This is a
+scrutiny often sidestepped or considered unimportant or
+beside the point. EXAMPLE: I can’t tell you how many good
+white psychwomen have said to me, “Why should it matter
+if I am Black or white?” who would never think of saying,
+“Why does it matter if I am female or male?” EXAMPLE: I
+don’t know who you are in supervision with, but I can bet
+it’s not with another Black woman.
+So this territory between us feels new and frightening as
+well as urgent, rigged with detonating pieces of our own
+individual racial histories which neither of us chose but
+which each of us bears the scars from. And those are
+particular to each of us. But there is a history which we
+share because we are Black women in a racist sexist
+cauldron, and that means some part of this journey is yours,
+also.
+I have many troubled areas of self that will be neither new
+nor problematic to you as a trained and capable
+psychperson. I think you are a brave woman and I respect
+that, yet I doubt that your training can have prepared you to
+explore the tangle of need, fear, distrust, despair, and hope
+which operates between us, and certainly not to the depth
+
+necessary. Because neither of us is male nor white, we
+belong to a group of human beings that has not been
+thought worthy of that kind of study. So we have only who
+we are, with or without the courage to use those selves for
+further exploration and clarification of how what lies
+between us as Black women affects us and the work we do
+together.
+Yet if we do not do it here between us, each one of us will
+have to do it somewhere else, sometime.
+I know these things: I do not yet know what to do about
+them. But I do want to make them fit together to serve my
+life and my work, and I don’t mean merely in a way that
+feels safe. I don’t know how they can further and illuminate
+your life and work, but I know they can. It is sometimes
+both the curse and the blessing of the poet to perceive
+without yet being able to order those perceptions, and that
+is another name for Chaos.
+But of course it is out of Chaos that new worlds are born.
+I look forward to our meeting eye to eye.
+Audre
+
+III
+There has been so much death and loss around me recently, without
+metaphor or redeeming symbol, that sometimes I feel trapped into
+one idiom only — that one of suffering and its codicil, to bear. The
+same problem exists with anger. I have processed too much of it
+recently, or else the machinery is slowing down or becoming less
+efficient, and it creeps into my most crucial interchanges.
+Perhaps this is why it is often easier for Black women to interact
+with white women, even though those interactions are often a dead
+end emotionally. For with white women there is a middle depth of
+interaction possible and sustainable, an emotional limit to
+relationships of self upon self acknowledged.
+Now why is this not so with Frances, who is white, and whom I
+meet at a depth beyond anyone? When I speak of Frances and me I
+am talking about a relationship not only of great depth but one of
+great breadth also, a totaling of differences without merging. I am
+also speaking of a love shaped by our mutual commitment to hard
+work and confrontation over many years, each of us refusing to
+settle for what was easy, or simple, or acceptably convenient.
+That middle depth of relationship more usually possible between
+Black and white women, however, is less threatening than the
+tangle of unexplored needs and furies that face any two Black
+women who seek to engage each other directly, emotionally, no
+matter what the context of their relationship may be. This holds true
+for office workers and political activists as well as lovers. But it is
+through threading this tangle that new visions of self and possibility
+between Black women emerge. Again, I am speaking here of social
+relationships, for it is crucial that we examine dynamics between
+women who are not lovers as well as between women who are.
+I ask myself, do I ever use my war against racism to avoid other
+even more unanswerable pain? And if so, doesn’t that make the
+energy behind my battles against racism sometimes more tenuous,
+or less clearheaded, or subject to unexpected stresses and
+
+disappointments? White people can never truly validate us. For
+example: At this point in time, were racism to be totally eradicated
+from those middle range relationships between Black women and
+white women, those relationships might become deeper, but they
+would still never satisfy our particular Black woman’s need for one
+another, given our shared knowledge and traditions and history.
+There are two very different struggles involved here. One is the war
+against racism in white people, and the other is the need for Black
+women to confront and wade through the racist constructs
+underlying our deprivation of each other. And these battles are not
+at all the same.
+But sometimes it feels like better a righteous fury than the dull
+ache of loss, loss, loss. My daughter leaving her time of
+daughterhood. Friends going away in one way or another.
+… as those seemingly alike mature, nature emphasizes their
+uniqueness and the differences become more obvious.*
+How often have I demanded from another Black woman what I
+had not dared to give myself — acceptance, faith, enough space to
+consider change? How often have I asked her to leap across
+difference, suspicion, distrust, old pain? How many times have I
+expected her to jump the hideous gaps of our learned despisals
+alone, like an animal trained through blindness to ignore the
+precipice? How many times have I forgotten to ask this question?
+Am I not reaching out for you in the only language I know? Are
+you reaching for me in your only salvaged tongue? If I try to hear
+yours across our differences does/will that mean you can hear
+mine?
+Do we explore these questions or do we settle for that secret
+isolation which is the learned tolerance of deprivation of each other
+— that longing for each other’s laughter, dark ease, sharing, and
+permission to be ourselves that we do not admit to feeling, usually,
+because then we would have to admit the lack; and the pain of that
+lacking, persistent as a low-grade fever and as debilitating?
+Do we reenact these crucifixions upon each other, the avoidance,
+the cruelty, the judgments, because we have not been allowed Black
+goddesses, Black heroines; because we have not been allowed to see
+
+our mothers and our selves in their/our own magnificence until that
+magnificence became part of our blood and bone? One of the
+functions of hatred is certainly to mask and distort the beauty which
+is power in ourselves.
+I am hungry for Black women who will not turn from me in anger
+and contempt even before they know me or hear what I have to say.
+I am hungry for Black women who will not turn away from me even
+if they do not agree with what I say. We are, after all, talking about
+different combinations of the same borrowed sounds.
+Sometimes exploring our differences feels like marching out to
+war. I hurl myself with trepidation into the orbit of every Black
+woman I want to reach, advancing with the best of what I have to
+offer held out at arms length before me — myself. Does it feel
+different to her? At the same time as I am terrified, expecting
+betrayal, rejection, the condemnations of laughter, is she feeling
+judged by me?
+Most of the Black women I know think I cry too much, or that I’m
+too public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft
+and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the
+price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one that’s paid
+most easily and most often.
+I fight nightmare images inside my own self, see them, own them,
+know they did not destroy me before and will not destroy me now if
+I speak them out, admit how they have scarred me, that my mother
+taught me to survive at the same time as she taught me to fear my
+own Blackness. “Don’t trust white people because they mean us no
+good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because their hearts
+are as Black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the
+darkest one?) It is painful even now to write it down. How many
+messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many
+different voices, how many different ways? And how can we
+expunge these messages from our consciousness without first
+recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they
+were?
+
+IV
+What does it take to be tough? Learned cruelty?
+Now there is bound to be a voice saying that Black women have
+always helped one another, haven’t we? And that is the paradox of
+our inner conflict. We have a strong and ancient tradition of
+bonding and mutual support, and the memorized threads of that
+tradition exist within each of us, in opposition to the anger and
+suspicion engendered by self-hate.
+When the world moved against me with a disapproving frown / It was
+sister put the ground back under my feet.*
+Hearing those words sung has always provoked the most profound
+and poignant sense of loss within me for something I wanted to feel
+and could not because it had never happened for me. There are
+some Black women for whom it has. For others of us, that sense of
+being able to depend upon rock bottom support from our sisters is
+something we dream about and work toward, knowing it is possible,
+but also very problematic across the realities of fear and suspicion
+lying between us.
+Our anger, tempered over survival fires, shuttered behind
+downcast eyelids, or else blazing out of our eyes at the oddest times.
+Looking up from between the legs of a lover, over a notebook in the
+middle of a lecture and I almost lost my train of thought, ringing up
+groceries in the supermarket, filling out the form behind the
+unemployment office window, stepping out of a, cab in the middle
+of Broadway on the arm of a businessman from Lagos, sweeping
+ahead of me into a shop as I open the door, looking into each others
+eyes for a split second only — furious, cutting, sisters. My daughter
+asking me all the time when she was a little girl, “Are you angry
+about something, Mommy?”
+As Black women, we have wasted our angers too often, buried
+them, called them someone else’s, cast them wildly into oceans of
+racism and sexism from which no vibration resounded, hurled them
+into each other’s teeth and then ducked to avoid the impact. But by
+
+and large, we avoid open expression of them, or cordon them off in
+a rigid and unapproachable politeness. The rage that feels illicit or
+unjustified is kept secret, unnamed, and preserved forever. We are
+stuffed with furies, against ourselves, against each other, terrified to
+examine them lest we find ourselves in bold print fingered and
+named what we have always felt and even sometimes preferred
+ourselves to be — alone. And certainly, there are enough occasions
+in all our lives where we can use our anger righteously, enough for
+many lifetimes. We can avoid confrontation with each other very
+readily. It is so much easier to examine our anger within situations
+that are (relatively) clearcut and emotionally unloaded. It is so
+much easier to express our anger in those middle depth
+relationships that do not threaten genuine self-exposure. And yet
+always that hunger for the substance known, a hunger for the real
+shared, for the sister who shares.
+It is hard to stand up in the teeth of white dismissal and
+aggression, of gender hatred and attack. It is so much harder to
+tackle face-on the rejection of Black women who may be seeing in
+my face some face they have not discarded in their own mirror, who
+see in my eyes the shape they have come to fear may be their own.
+So often this fear is stoked between Black women by the feared loss
+of a male companion, present or sought after. For we have also been
+taught that a man acquired was the sole measure of success, and yet
+they almost never stay.
+One Black woman sits and silently judges another, how she looks,
+how she acts, how she impresses others. The first woman’s scales
+are weighted against herself. She is measuring the impossible. She is
+measuring the self she does not fully want to be. She does not want
+to accept the contradictions, nor the beauty. She wishes the other
+woman would go away. She wishes the other woman would become
+someone else, anyone other than another Black woman. She has
+enough trouble dealing with being herself. “Why don’t you learn to
+fly straight,” she says to the other woman. “Don’t you understand
+what your poor showing says about us all? If I could fly I’d certainly
+do a better job than that. Can’t you put on a more together show?
+
+The white girls do it. Maybe we could get one to show you how.”
+The other woman cannot speak. She is too busy keeping herself
+from crashing upon the ground. She will not cry the tears which are
+hardening into little sharp stones that spit from her eyes and
+implant themselves in the first woman’s heart, who quickly heals
+over them and identifies them as the source of her pain.
+
+V
+There are myths of self-protection that hold us separate from each
+other and breed harshness and cruelty where we most need softness
+and understanding.
+1. That courtesy or politeness require our not noticing each other
+directly, only with the most covert of evaluating glances. At all
+costs, we must avoid the image of our fear. “How beautiful your
+mouth is” might well be heard as “Look at those big lips.” We
+maintain a discreet distance between each other also because that
+distance between us makes me less you, makes you less me.
+When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is
+a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But
+when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or
+threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping
+people separate, of putting distance between us.
+2. That because we sometimes rise to each other’s defense against
+outsiders, we do not need to look at devaluation and dismissal
+among ourselves. Support against outsiders is very different from
+cherishing each other. Often it is a case of “like needs like.” It
+doesn’t mean we have to appreciate that like or our need of it, even
+when that like is the only thin line between dying and living.
+For if I take the white world’s estimation of me as Black-womansynonymous-with-garbage to heart, then deep down inside myself I
+will always believe that I am truly good for nothing. But it is very
+hard to look absorbed hatred in the face. It is easier to see you as
+good for nothing because you are like me. So when you support me
+because you are like me, that merely confirms that you are nothing
+too, just like me. It’s a no-win position, a case of nothing supporting
+nothing and someone’s gonna have to pay for that one, and it sure
+ain’t gonna be me! When I can recognize my worth, I can recognize
+yours.
+3. That perfection is possible, a correct expectation from ourselves
+and each other, and the only terms of acceptance, humanness. (Note
+
+how very useful that makes us to the external institutions!) If you
+are like me, then you will have to be a lot better than I am in order
+to even be good enough. And you can’t be because no matter how
+good you are you’re still a Black woman, just like me. (Who does
+she think she is?) So any act or idea that I could accept or at least
+examine from anyone else is not even tolerable if it comes from you,
+my mirror image. If you are not THEIR image of perfection, and you
+can’t ever be because you are a Black woman, then you are a
+reflection upon me. We are never good enough for each other. All
+your faults become magnified reflections of my own threatening
+inadequacies. I must attack you first before our enemies confuse us
+with each other. But they will anyway.
+Oh mother, why were we armed to fight with cloud-wreathed swords
+and javelins of dust? “Just who do you think you are, anyway?” Who
+I am most afraid of (never) meeting.
+
+VI
+The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves
+and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss
+and suspect each other. Too pretty — too ugly. Too Black — too
+white. Wrong. I already know that. Who says so. You’re too
+questionable for me to hear you. You speak THEIR language. You
+don’t speak THEIR language. Who do you think you are? You think
+you’re better than anybody else? Get out of my face.
+We refuse to give up the artificial distances between us, or to
+examine our real differences for creative exchange. I’m too different
+for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not-you.
+And the road to anger is paved with our unexpressed fear of each
+other’s judgment. We have not been allowed to experience each
+other freely as Black women in america; we come to each other
+coated in myths, stereotypes, and expectations from the outside,
+definitions not our own. “You are my reference group, but I have
+never worked with you.” How are you judging me? As Black as you?
+Blacker than you? Not Black enough? Whichever, I am going to be
+found wanting in some way …
+We are Black women, defined as never-good-enough. I must
+overcome that by becoming better than you. If I expect enough from
+myself, then maybe I can become different from what they say we
+are, different from you. If I become different enough, then maybe I
+won’t be a “nigger bitch” anymore. If I make you different enough
+from me, then I won’t need you so much. I will become strong, the
+best, excel in everything, become the very best because I don’t dare
+to be anything else. It is my only chance to become good enough to
+become human.
+If I am myself, then you cannot accept me. But if you can accept
+me, that means I am what you would like to be, and then I’m not
+“the real thing.” But then neither are you. WILL THE REAL BLACK
+WOMAN PLEASE STAND UP?
+
+We cherish our guilty secret, buried under exquisite clothing and
+expensive makeup and bleaching creams (yes, still!) and hair
+straighteners masquerading as permanent waves. The killer instinct
+toward any one of us who deviates from the proscribed cover is
+precise and deadly.
+Acting like an insider and feeling like the outsider, preserving our
+self-rejection as Black women at the same time as we’re getting over
+— we think. And political work will not save our souls, no matter
+how correct and necessary that work is. Yet it is true that without
+political work we cannot hope to survive long enough to effect any
+change. And self-empowerment is the most deeply political work
+there is, and the most difficult.
+When we do not attempt to name the confusion of feelings which
+exist between sisters, we act them out in hundreds of hurtful and
+unproductive ways. Never speaking from the old pain, to beyond. As
+if we have made a secret pact between ourselves not to speak, for
+the expression of that unexamined pain might be accompanied by
+other ancient and unexpressed hurtings embedded in the stored-up
+anger we have not expressed. And that anger, as we know from our
+flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned
+in the bleakness of too-early battles for survival. “You can’t take it,
+huh!” The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and
+name-calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb
+verbal abuse without faltering.
+A piece of the price we paid for learning survival was our
+childhood. We were never allowed to be children. It is the right of
+children to be able to play at living for a little while, but for a Black
+child, every act can have deadly serious consequences, and for a
+Black girl child, even more so. Ask the ghosts of the four little Black
+girls blown up in Birmingham. Ask Angel Lenair, or Latonya Wilson,
+or Cynthia Montgomery, the three girl victims in the infamous
+Atlanta murders, none of whose deaths have ever been solved.
+Sometimes it feels as if I were to experience all the collective
+hatred that I have had directed at me as a Black woman, admit its
+implications into my consciousness, I might die of the bleak and
+
+horrible weight. Is that why a sister once said to me, “white people
+feel, Black people do”?
+It is true that in america white people, by and large, have more
+time and space to afford the luxury of scrutinizing their emotions.
+Black people in this country have always had to attend closely to the
+hard and continuous work of survival in the most material and
+immediate planes. But it is a temptation to move from this fact to
+the belief that Black people do not need to examine our feelings; or
+that they are unimportant, since they have so often been used to
+stereotype and infantalize us; or that these feelings are not vital to
+our survival; or, worse, that there is some acquired virtue in not
+feeling them deeply. That is carrying a timebomb wired to our
+emotions.
+There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living
+between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must
+be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the
+experience to change, to be transformed into something else,
+strength or knowledge or action.
+Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of
+unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain
+without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power
+that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some
+movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over
+and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is
+suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.
+And true, experiencing old pain sometimes feels like hurling
+myself full force against a concrete wall. But I remind myself that I
+HAVE LIVED THROUGH IT ALL ALREADY, AND SURVIVED.
+Sometimes the anger that lies between Black women is not
+examined because we spend so much of our substance having to
+examine others constantly in the name of self-protection and
+survival, and we cannot reserve enough energy to scrutinize
+ourselves. Sometimes we don’t do it because the anger’s been there
+so long we don’t know what it is, or we think it’s natural to suffer
+rather than to experience pain. Sometimes, because we are afraid of
+what we will find. Sometimes, because we don’t think we deserve it.
+
+The revulsion on the woman’s face in the subway as she moves
+her coat away and I think she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred
+in her eyes because she wants me to see the hatred in her eyes,
+because she wants me to know in only the way a child can know
+that I don’t belong alive in her world. If I’d been grown, I’d
+probably have laughed or snarled or been hurt, seen it for what it
+was. But I am five years old. I see it, I record it, I do not name it, so
+the experience is incomplete. It is not pain; it becomes suffering.
+And how can I tell you I don’t like the way you cut your eyes at
+me if I know that I am going to release all the unnamed angers
+within you spawned by the hatred you have suffered and never felt?
+So we are drawn to each other but wary, demanding the instant
+perfection we would never expect from our enemies. But it is
+possible to break through this inherited agony, to refuse
+acquiescence in this bitter charade of isolation and anger and pain.
+I read this question many times in the letters of Black women,
+“Why do I feel myself to be such an anathema, so isolated?” I hear it
+spoken over and over again, in endless covert ways. But we can
+change that scenario. We can learn to mother ourselves.
+What does that mean for Black women? It means we must
+establish authority over our own definition, provide an attentive
+concern and expectation of growth which is the beginning of that
+acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers. It means that
+I affirm my own worth by committing myself to my own survival, in
+my own self and in the self of other Black women. On the other
+hand, it means that as I learn my worth and genuine possibility, I
+refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the
+possible in myself, at the same time making a distinction between
+what is possible and what the outside world drives me to do in
+order to prove I am human. It means being able to recognize my
+successes, and to be tender with myself, even when I fail.
+We will begin to see each other as we dare to begin to see
+ourselves; we will begin to see ourselves as we begin to see each
+other, without aggrandizement or dismissal or recriminations, but
+with patience and understanding for when we do not quite make it,
+and recognition and appreciation for when we do. Mothering
+
+ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by
+giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in
+the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not
+misnaming either.
+When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have
+to cover emptyness with pretense.*
+We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other
+without always understanding what will be created.
+As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will
+come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within
+our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering.
+Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that
+such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing
+that only through the use of that power can we effectively change
+those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak,
+timid, and damaged — without despisal — the protection and
+support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint
+explorations of the difference.
+I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the
+Queen Mother of Benin, entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It
+depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a
+circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in
+practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out
+of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female.
+
+VIII
+Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women
+can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I
+can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing
+who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can
+make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked.
+Admit that I am kinder to my neighbor’s silly husband most days
+than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the
+stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything
+other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was
+the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the
+shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not
+acceptable as human.
+Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a
+simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond and
+deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is
+certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and
+each other remains there, then we risk another superficial
+measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost
+as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial. Certainly it is no
+more empowering. And it is empowerment — our strengthening in
+the service of ourselves and each other, in the service of our work
+and future — that will be the result of this pursuit.
+I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your
+loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or
+accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach
+out for each other. Not cover that sense of worthlessness with “I
+don’t want you” or “it doesn’t matter” or “white folks feel, Black
+folks DO.” And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an
+environment that consistently encourages nonlove and cover-up, an
+environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other,
+by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities
+as unobtainable.
+
+Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to
+each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There
+have been few external examples of how to treat another Black
+woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative
+smile in passing, just because she IS; an understanding of each
+other’s shortcomings because we have been somewhere close to
+that, ourselves. When last did you compliment another sister, give
+recognition to her specialness? We have to consciously study how to
+be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was
+native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each
+other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being
+gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each
+other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to
+hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of
+us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We
+can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy
+toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment.
+Maybe then we will come to appreciate more how much she has
+taught us, and how much she is doing to keep this world revolving
+toward some livable future.
+It would be ridiculous to believe that this process is not lengthy
+and difficult. It is suicidal to believe it is not possible. As we arm
+ourselves with ourselves and each other, we can stand toe to toe
+inside that rigorous loving and begin to speak the impossible — or
+what has always seemed like the impossible — to one another. The
+first step toward genuine change. Eventually, if we speak the truth
+to each other, it will become unavoidable to ourselves.
+* An abbreviated version of this essay was published in Essence, vol. 14, no. 6 (October
+
+1983). I wish to thank the following women without whose insights and support I could
+
+not have completed this paper: Andrea Canaan, Frances Clayton, Michelle Cliff, Blanche
+
+Wiesen Cook, Clare Coss, Yvonne Flowers, Gloria Joseph, Adrienne Rich, Charlotte Sheedy,
+Judy Simmons and Barbara Smith. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sheila
+Blackwell Pinckney, 1953–1983.
+
+** From a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph.
+
+Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report*
+THE FIRST TIME I came to Grenada I came seeking “home,” for this was
+my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me.
+Vivid images remained of what I saw there and of what I knew it
+could become.
+• Grand Anse Beach was a busy thoroughfare in the early, direct
+morning. Children in proper school uniforms carrying shoes, trying
+to decide between the lure of a coco palm adventure to one side and
+the delicious morning sea on the other, while they are bound
+straightforward to well-worn chalky desks.
+• The mended hem of the print dress the skinny old woman wore,
+swinging along down the beach, cutlass in hand. Oversized, high
+rubber boots never once interfering with her determined step. Her
+soft shapeless hat. Underneath, sharp, unhurried eyes snapped out
+from chocolate skin dusted grey with age.
+• Another woman, younger, switch held between elbow and waist,
+driving seven sheep that look like goats except goats carry their tails
+up and sheep down.
+• The Fat-Woman-Who-Fries-Fish-In-The-Market actually did, and
+it was delicious, served on the counterboards with her fragrant
+chocolate-tea in mugs fashioned from Campbell’s Pork ’n Beans cans
+with metal handles attached.
+• The full moon turning the night beach flash green.
+I came to Grenada for the first time eleven months before the
+March 13, 1979 bloodless coup of the New Jewel Movement which
+ushered in the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of
+Grenada under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. This brought an end
+to twenty-nine years of Sir Eric Gairy’s regime — wasteful, corrupt,
+and United States sanctioned.
+The road from tiny Pearl’s Airport in Grenville, up over Grand
+Etang mountain through Beauregard and Birch Grove, a rainbow of
+
+children calling after us down the one narrow road through these
+hamlets cut into the hills. Tree ferns straight up like shingles along
+the mountainside. In 1978 there was only one paved road in
+Grenada. During the People’s Revolutionary Government, all roads
+were widened and reworked, and a functioning bus service was
+established that did more than ferry tourists back and forth to the
+cruise ships lying at anchor in the careenage. Wild banana fronds,
+baligey, in clumps below the road’s slope. Stands of particular trees
+within the bush — red cocoa fruit, golden apple, mango, breadfruit,
+peach-ripe nutmeg, banana. Girls on the road to Annandale, baskets
+of laundry balanced on their heads, hands on hips, swaying,
+reminiscent of 100 roads through Africa.
+Grenada, tiny spice island, is the second largest producer of
+nutmeg in the world. Its cocoa has a 45 percent fat content and sells
+for premium prices on the world market. But Grenadians pay eight
+times more than that price if they wish to drink processed hot
+chocolate, all of which is imported.
+The second time I came to Grenada I came in mourning and fear
+that this land which I was learning had been savaged, invaded, its
+people maneuvered into saying thank you to their invaders. I knew
+the lies and distortions of secrecy surrounding the invasion of
+Grenada by the United States on October 25, 1983; the
+rationalizations which collapse under the weight of facts; the facts
+that are readily available, even now, from the back pages of the New
+York Times.
+1. That the St. Georges Medical School students were in danger.
+Officials of the school deny this.1 Students deny this.2 The U.S.
+government had received assurances from General Hudson Austin of
+the Revolutionary Military Council guaranteeing the students’
+safety. These assurances were ignored.3
+2. That the U.S. was invited to intervene by the signers of an
+Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Treaty. This would only have
+been internationally legal had Grenada invaded another island.4 The
+decision to invade was made by four of the seven signatories. The
+invitation itself was actually drafted by the U.S. State Department
+and sent down to the Eastern Caribbean nations.5
+
+3. That Grenada threatened U.S. security because of the construction
+of a military airport and the stockpiling of an arsenal of modern
+weapons. Grenada’s new airport is a civilian airport built to
+accommodate tourists. It has been in planning for over twenty-five
+years, half financed by several western european countries and
+Canada. According to Plessey, the British firm who underwrote the
+project, the airport was being built to civil, not military, standards.6
+All U.S. reports on Grenada now stress the necessity of this airport
+for a Grenadian tourist industry.7 The “stockpile” of weapons was
+less than two warehouses. Of 6,300 rifles, about 400 were fairly
+modern; the rest were very old, and some antique.8
+As even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed, “Now we launch a sneak
+attack on a pathetic island of 110,000 people with no army, no navy
+or air force, and claim a glorious victory.”9
+A group of men and women mend the road ahead of us with hoes
+and rock hammers, wheelbarrows, and other hand tools. They step
+to one side as we pass by. One woman wipes her face with the end
+of her headcloth, leaning upon the handle of her scythe. Another
+woman is barefooted, young, but when she smiles I see all of her
+front teeth are missing. The PRG brought free medical care to
+Grenada, and no more school fees. Most estate workers and peasants
+in the small villages saw a dentist for the first time in their lives.
+Literacy was raised by teacher education and a planned each-oneteach-one program through the countryside.
+Revolution. A nation decides for itself what it needs. How best to
+get it. Food. Dentists. Doctors. Roads. When I first visited Grenada
+in 1978, one-third of the farmable land in the country lay idle,
+owned by absentee landlords who did not work it. The PRG required
+that plans be filed either for farming that land, turning it over to
+those who would, or deeding it to the state. Small banana
+collectives started. Fishing cooperatives. Beginning agro-industry.
+The World Bank notes the health of the Grenadian economy,
+surpassing all other Caribbean economies in the rate of its growth
+and stability despite the opposition of the U.S. Unemployment dips
+from 40 percent to 14 percent. Now there is no work again.
+
+Four years ago, the U.S. acted through the International Monetary
+Fund to assure that there would be no western money available for
+the Grenadian economy, much less for protecting her shores from an
+invasion threatened by Gairy operating out of San Diego, California,
+where he had sought asylum. When the PRG sought economic aid
+from the U.S. in 1979 to help rebuild the infrastructure of a country
+fallen into despair during the twenty-nine years of Gairy’s regime,
+the U.S. response was to offer the insult of $5000 from an
+ambassador’s discretionary fund! Now it is 1983, post-invasion, and
+the conquerors are promising Grenadians welfare, their second main
+exportable drug. Three million dollars thus far, administered under
+U.S. guns, so long as the heads that take it are bowed.
+Had the amount this invasion cost each one of us in taxes been
+lent to the PRG when it requested economic aid from the U.S. five
+years ago, the gratitude of Grenadians would have been real, and
+hundreds of lives could have been saved. But then Grenada would
+have been self-defined, independent; and, of course, that could not
+be allowed. What a bad example, a dangerous precedent, an
+independent Grenada would be for the peoples of Color in the
+Caribbean, in Central America, for those of us here in the United
+States.
+The ready acceptance by the majority of americans of the
+Grenadian invasion and of the shady U.S. involvement in the events
+leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop
+both happen in an america whose moral and ethical fiber is
+weakened by racism as thoroughly as wood is weakened by dry rot.
+White america has been well-schooled in the dehumanization of
+Black people. A Black island nation? Why, don’t be ridiculous! If
+they weren’t all so uppity, we’d have enough jobs and no recession.
+The lynching of Black youth and shooting down of Black women, 60
+percent of Black teenagers unemployed and rapidly becoming
+unemployable, the presidential dismantling of the Civil Rights
+Commission, and more Black families below the poverty line than
+twenty years ago — if these facts of american life and racism can be
+passed over as unremarkable, then why not the rape and annexation
+of tiny Black Grenada?
+
+The Pentagon has been spoiling for a fight it could win for a long
+time; the last one was the battle for Inchon in the 1950s. How better
+to wipe out the bitter memories of Vietnam defeats by Yellow
+people than with a restoration of power in the eyes of the american
+public — the image of american marines splashing through a little
+Black blood? “… to keep our honor clean” the marine anthem says.
+So the american public was diverted from recession, unemployment,
+the debacle in Beirut, from nuclear madness and dying oceans and a
+growing national depression and despair, by the bombing of a
+mental hospital where fifty people were killed. Even that piece of
+proud news was withheld for over a week while various cosmetic
+stories were constructed. Bread and circuses.
+If the United States is even remotely interested in seeing
+democracy flourish in the Caribbean, why does it continue to
+support Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two of the most corrupt
+and repressive governments in the Americas? The racism that coats
+the U.S. government lies about Grenada is the same racism that
+blinded american eyes to the Black faces of 131 Haitians washed up
+on shore in Miami, drowned fleeing the Duvalier regime. It is the
+same racism that keeps american eyes turned aside from the
+corrosive apartheid eating like acid into the face of White South
+Africa and the Reagan government which shares her bed under the
+guise of “constructive engagement.” White South Africa has the
+highest standard of living of any nation in the world, and 50 percent
+of Black South Africa’s children die before they are five. A statistic.
+The infant mortality rate for Black americans is almost twice that of
+white americans — in the most highly industrialized country in the
+world. White america has been well-schooled in the acceptance of
+Black destruction. So what is Black Grenada and its 110,000 Black
+lives?
+Unemployment in Grenada dropped 26 percent in four years.10
+On October 25, 1983 american Corsair missiles and naval shells and
+mortars pounded into the hills behind Grenville, St. Georges,
+Gouyave. American marines tore through homes and hotels
+searching for “Cubans.” Now the Ministries are silent. The state
+farms are at a standstill. The cooperatives are suspended. The
+
+cannery plant in True Blue is a shambles, shelled to silence. On the
+day after the invasion, unemployment was back up to 35 percent. A
+cheap, acquiescent labor pool is the delight of supply side
+economics. One month later, the U.S. Agency for International
+Development visits Grenada. They report upon the role of the
+private sector in Grenada’s future, recommending the revision of tax
+codes to favor private enterprise (usually foreign), the development
+of a labor code that will ensure a compliant labor movement, and
+the selling off of public sector enterprises to private interests.11 How
+soon will it be Grenadian women who are going blind from
+assembling microcomputer chips at $.80 an hour for international
+industrial corporations? “I used to work at the radio station,” says a
+young woman on the beach, shrugging. “But that ended in the war.”
+This short, undeclared, and cynical war against Grenada is not a
+new direction for american foreign policy. It is merely a blatant
+example of a 160-year-old course of action called the Monroe
+Doctrine. In its name america has invaded small Caribbean and
+Central American countries over and over again since 1823,
+cloaking these invasions under a variety of names. Thirty-eight such
+invasions occurred prior to 1917 before the Soviet Union even
+existed. For example, in 1897, U.S. marines landed in Puerto Rico to
+fight the Spanish-American War. They never left.
+Beginning in 1981, the United States rehearsed the invasion of
+Grenada openly. It practiced the war game Ocean Venture in which it
+bombed the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, calling it “Amber of the
+Amberdines” (Grenada of the Grenadines). In this grisly makebelieve, a situation is supposed to occur where americans are held
+hostage. As we know, this was the first excuse used to justify the
+invasion of Grenada. As for americans really being in danger, there
+were still over 500 resident american citizens who chose to remain
+in Grenada during and after the invasion. But since Ocean Venture
+appears to be the script, we must remember that it also calls for the
+assassination of the Prime Minister of Amber. Are we now to believe
+that the U.S./CIA was not involved directly or indirectly with Prime
+Minister Maurice Bishop’s death? Was the coup which served as the
+opening for Ocean Venture to become a reality merely an unhappy
+
+coincidence of personal intrigue, or was it an event lengthily
+orchestrated by clever manipulators?
+The Pentagon has admitted in secret Congressional briefings that
+it knew of the coup against Bishop two weeks before it happened.12
+The Ranger unit participating in the invasion had spent six days
+between September 23 and October 2, 1983 practicing the takeover
+of an airport and the liberation of hostages, a maneuver about
+which the Pentagon had requested no publicity.13 One Senator
+disclosed that there were CIA agents accompanying the seventy
+students flown out of Grenada on October 26, the day after the
+invasion.14
+There will be a long and painstaking search for answers to these
+questions.
+P.S.Y.O.P.S., the psychological operations unit of the U.S.
+occupation forces — a new development heard from in combat here
+for the first time — was quick to plaster St. Georges and the rest of
+Grenada with posters of Bernard Coard and General Hudson Austin,
+stripped naked and blindfolded, holding them up to ridicule and
+scorn as the slayers of the Grenadian people’s beloved Maurice
+Bishop. It is well known that had Bishop lived, Grenada would have
+fought any invasion down to the last child. So scapegoats for his
+death were essential. The details of the power struggles which
+occurred within the New Jewel Movement Party — if such they
+were — are yet to be known and assuredly complex. Yet months
+later, these men are still being held incommunicado in Richmond
+Hill prison, St. Georges, by “security forces,” non-Grenadian. They
+have not been charged nor brought to trial as of this writing, nor
+have the forty-odd other Grenadians still detained with them.
+Nothing is now heard of the two americans known to have been
+involved in the last days of the Bishop regime, one of whom was
+wanted on a weapons charge here in the U.S., and one of whom
+holds passports in two countries.15 Who were they working for and
+on what side? Their identities have never been divulged — a
+favorite tactic to cover destabilization operatives — and their
+existence attested to only by one line in the back pages of the New
+York Times. So, too, was the assertion by Ambassador to France
+
+Evan Galbraith on public TV that the U.S. was involved in Grenada
+“weeks before Bishop’s death.”16
+A West German nurse working in Grenada, Regina Fuchs, reports
+she was jailed and relentlessly interrogated after being falsely
+accused of harboring fugitives by two americans, one of whom,
+Frank Gonzales, identified himself to her as CIA.17
+The action in Grenada served many purposes for the United
+States, provided the grounds for many tests. A major one was
+addressed to the concern long expressed by the Pentagon as to
+whether or not Black american soldiers could be gotten to fire upon
+other Black people. This becomes a vital question as the U.S.
+military-industrial complex executes increasingly military solutions
+to this country’s precarious position in the Third World, where the
+U.S. either ignores or stands upon the wrong side of virtually every
+single struggle for liberation by oppressed peoples. Of course, there
+were also lesser tests. In addition to trying out new armaments,
+there was the question of whether the marines liked their new Nazistyle helmets. They did not because they couldn’t shave in them.
+And whether the new army uniforms were too heavy to be worn
+comfortably in the tropics. They were.18
+Listen to the language that came from the Pentagon, orchestrated
+by the psychological warfare experts operating in Grenada.
+• We got there just in time.
+• Not an invasion, a rescue mission.
+• Mopping up.
+• It was our turf. We had every right.
+• Armed thugs (the Grenadian militia).
+• An Idi Amin-type character, capable of taking hostages (General
+Austin.)
+• Imprisoned for spreading ill will among the people.
+This language is calculated to reduce a Black nation’s aspirations
+in the eyes and ears of white americans already secretly terrified by
+the Black Menace, enraged by myths of Black Progress, at the same
+
+time encouraged by government action never to take the life of a
+Black person seriously.
+Even many Black americans, threatened by some spectre of a
+socialism that is mythic and undefined at best, have bought the
+government line of “them” against “us.” But which one of us as a
+Black american has ever taken the time to examine this threat of
+socialism for any reality nearly as destructive as racism is within all
+of our lives? With the constant manipulation of the media, many
+Black americans are honestly confused, defending “our” invasion of
+Black Grenada under a mistaken mirage of patriotism.
+Nineteen eighty-four is upon us, and doublethink has come home
+to scramble our brains and blanket our protest.
+In addition to being a demonstration to the Caribbean community
+of what will happen to any country that dares to assume
+responsibility for its own destiny, the invasion of Grenada also
+serves as a naked warning to thirty million African-americans.
+Watch your step. We did it to them down there and we will not
+hesitate to do it to you. Internment camps. Interrogation booths.
+Isolation cells hastily built by U.S. occupation forces. Blindfolded
+stripped prisoners. House-to-house searches for phantom Cubans.
+Neighbors pressured to inform against each other. No strange gods
+before us. U.S. soldiers at roadblocks and airports, assisted by
+former members of Gairy’s infamous Mongoose Gang, carrying
+notebooks with lists of Bishop and PRG sympathizers.19 The tactics
+for quelling a conquered people. No courts, no charges, no legal
+process. Welfare, but no reparation for damaged businesses,
+destroyed homes and lives. Street passes. Imprisonment of “troublemakers.” The new radio station blaring The Beach Boys rock group
+music hour after hour.
+Whose country was Grenada?
+Hundreds of Grenadian bodies are buried in unmarked graves,
+relatives missing and unaccounted for, survivors stunned and
+frightened into silence by fear of being jailed and accused of
+“spreading unrest among the people.” No recognition and therefore
+no aid for the sisters, mothers, wives, children of the dead, families
+disrupted and lives vandalized by the conscious brutality of a
+
+planned, undeclared war. No attention given to the Grenadian
+bodies shipped back and forth across the sea in plastic bodybags
+from Barbados to Grenada to Cuba and back again to Grenada. After
+all, they all look alike, and besides, maybe if they are flown around
+the world long enough they will simply disappear, or become
+invisible, or some other peoples’ sacrifice.
+“My brother died in Calliste when they shot up the house,” Isme
+said, “because they thought Cubans were living there. My father lost
+his arm and a leg. They took him to hospital in Barbados but he
+passed away there. His body was brought back to Pearl’s Airport but
+I’ve got to borrow some money now to bring him home for his
+funeral.”
+Weeks after the invasion, Grenadians were still smelling out and
+burying bodies which lay all over the island. The true casualty
+figures will never be known. No civilian body count is available.
+Even the bodies of Maurice Bishop and his slain ministers are never
+positively identified, no doubt to forestall any possible enshrinement
+by the people who loved him, no doubt to make the task of
+smearing his popular memory more easily accomplished. It has
+already begun.
+For the first time in an american war, the american press was kept
+out until the stage could be set. This extends by precedent the
+meaning of military censorship in this country. At the time, it also
+deflected attention from the invasion itself. Mission accomplished
+with “surgical precision” meant attempting to conceal the bombing
+and destruction of civilian homes, the destruction of a hospital and
+a radio station and police headquarters; attempting to conceal the
+american heavy transports left mangled on the side of the road by
+soldiers not trained to drive to the left, and the civilian cars those
+army vehicles collided with. It meant the appropriation, use, and
+destruction of homes and stores and other businesses with no
+compensation. When the american press was finally admitted after
+the cosmetic cleanup, we were treated to photographs of smiling
+Grenadians welcoming their conquerors (look what your tax dollars
+have bought). But no photos of the signs calling for information
+
+about neighbors. No photos of the signs throughout the countryside
+calling for an end to yankee imperialism. NO BISHOP NO REVO.
+So what did Revolution in Grenada mean? It meant the
+inauguration of an agro-industry which for the first time in the
+island’s history processed the island’s own fruit, its own coffee,
+under its own brand, Spice Isle Foods. Canned products from their
+own soil available in stores. The beginning of a fishing and fishprocessing industry. In a country rich with tropical fruit, whose
+waters abound with fish, why should the most common fruit juice
+be Florida orange juice, the most commonly used fish, imported
+saltfish from Canada?
+It meant almost doubling the number of doctors on the island
+from twenty-three to forty, a health center set up in every parish for
+the first time, a dental clinic. It meant a public health anti-mosquito
+cleanup campaign implemented by the National Youth Organization
+that successfully protected Grenada from the wave of Dengue Fever
+sweeping through the rest of the Caribbean in the summer of
+1981.20
+It meant twelve-year-old Lyndon Adams of L’Esterre, Carriacou,
+teaching a seventy-three-year-old woman how to read and write as
+part of the each-one-teach-one program against functional illiteracy
+conducted by the Center for Popular Education. This highly
+successful program enlisted the aid of one of the most brilliant
+educators of all time, Paulo Friere, head of the World Council of
+Churches’ literacy program. When the echos of Ocean Venture
+drifted across the Caribbean from Vieques in 1981, and the stench
+of the threat of U.S. invasion hung over the hills from Grand Etang
+to Harvey Vale, Lyndon, one of the youngest teachers in the CPE
+program, was quoted as saying: “Before the revolution we were not
+in the light. I will never give up. I rather they kill me dead than I go
+work for them if they come to take over we land and try to oppress
+we again.” His seventy-three-year old neighbor and student says: “In
+L’Esterre now, I find things is plenty better and getting better still.
+And look how the children developing and doing good! For that
+boy’s age I find he was doing all right!”21
+
+The american medical student who witnessed the shooting of the
+first american marine killed landing on Grenada resists the
+prompting of her TV interviewer. Pockets of foreign resistance. Cubans
+hiding in the hills. “Oh no, he wasn’t shot by Cubans. It was an old
+man and his son, firing from their house.” Lyndon Adams and his
+neighbor are not Cuban. The old man and his son defending their
+home were not Cubans. They were Grenadians who dared to believe
+that they could have a right to define themselves and the future of
+their nation independent of the United States.
+Grenada is a highly stratified society made up of a large,
+extremely poor mass of estate workers and small land-holding
+peasants, a small but growing group of urban service workers, and a
+tiny well-to-do middle class, civil servants and landed, who
+traditionally have involved themselves with the economics of
+import-export rather than the economics of national production. The
+Bishop government was becoming a successful bridge between these
+different groups. Problems of color ism and classism are deep, farreaching, and very complex legacies left from successive
+colonialisms. Grenadians, rightly so, are highly resistant to any
+external suggestions of a superficial solution. By bringing the goals
+of these diverse groups together, the Revolution became even more
+threatening to the U.S.
+To the average Grenadian, the United States is a large but dim
+presence where some dear relative now lives. Until the information
+campaigns of the PRG, the lack of international news coverage and
+commentary kept Grenadians largely unaware of the U.S. position in
+world politics and its history of institutionalized racism and
+classism. Ronald Reagan was seen as a fatherly movie star
+unconnected to policies of systematic economic and military
+oppression of people of Color throughout the developing countries
+of the world.
+But the average Grenadian is also extremely involved with the
+political affairs of his and her own country, wherever there is room
+beyond survival concerns for such involvement. Facets of the
+October events surface in every conversation, guarded or
+unguarded, casual or otherwise.
+
+The conflicts in the New Jewel Movement, Bishop’s house arrest,
+the subsequent demonstration of ten thousand Grenadians, the
+second smaller march which resulted in Bishop’s liberation and
+murder along with other Ministers and hundreds of Grenadians on
+Richmond Hill, and the four-day military curfew that followed these
+events left terror in the hearts of all Grenadians. Any ending seemed
+preferable at the time.
+The U.S.-operated Spice Island Radio went into operation the
+afternoon of the invasion, and most Grenadians obtained whatever
+information they got about events from posters and handbills put up
+around the countryside by P.S.Y.O.P.S. Rumors have been rife
+among the people, attempting to explain the inexplicable. One
+shopgirl in St. Georges told me she had heard the reason why the
+army fired upon the people at Fort Rupert was because “the
+Russians had put tablets into their milk that would make them shoot
+anybody on sight.”
+It remains to be seen if the future plans of the U.S. for Grenada
+will justify the vision of many Grenadians of the United States as
+savior. Even now this view is not nearly as widespread as the
+american media would have us believe. Says a newly unemployed
+nineteen-year-old laborer in St. Georges, “They can call it a rescue
+mission all they want, but I haven’t been rescued yet.” There is
+much pain beneath the veneer of gratitude: too many fathers and
+uncles and brothers and daughters injured and killed because “the
+americans thought there were Cubans living in there.” All over
+Grenada I felt the deadening effect of horror and disbelief in every
+conversation about the war, often beneath a surface animation.
+I came to Grenada my second time six weeks after the invasion,
+wanting to know she was still alive, wanting to examine what my
+legitimate position as a concerned Grenadian-american was toward
+the military invasion of this tiny Black nation by the mighty U.S. I
+looked around me, talked with Grenadians on the street, the shops,
+the beaches, on porches in the solstice twilight. Grenada is their
+country. I am only a relative. I must listen long and hard and ponder
+the implications of what I have heard, or be guilty of the same quick
+
+arrogance of the U.S. government in believing there are external
+solutions to Grenada’s future.
+I also came for reassurance, to see if Grenada had survived the
+onslaught of the most powerful nation on earth. She has. Grenada is
+bruised but very much alive. Grenadians are a warm and resilient
+people (I hear my mother’s voice: “Island women make good wives.
+Whatever happens, they’ve seen worse”), and they have survived
+colonizations before. I am proud to be of stock from the country that
+mounted the first Black english-speaking People’s Revolution in this
+hemisphere. Much has been terribly lost in Grenada, but not all —
+not the spirit of the people. Forward Ever, Backward Never22 is more
+than a mere whistle in the present dark.
+
+Preface
+
+This book is the product of a deep sense that we cannot
+and do not want to make sense of the world alone. In
+our individual academic projects, we consider state
+racism from the perspectives of the disciplines we work
+in: law, anthropology, geography, international relations,
+sociology, cultural studies and literature. In our political
+organising, we try to push back against the state, to
+imagine new horizons of possibility outside of its logic,
+and to form bonds of solidarity capable of challenging its
+power. In collaborating on this book, we sought to create
+a space apart from the pressures of academic research and
+without the urgency of activism; a space to think, together,
+about the changing face of racism in Britain.
+As we were working on the book, friends and colleagues
+often asked how, as a group of eight, we were writing
+together. More than once we were asked what we were up to.
+Was this some strange new cult? Who was ventriloquising
+who? The actuality was less dramatic. Rather than divide
+into smaller groups which would each produce a chapter,
+we opted for an anarchic mix of collective thinking, noisy
+and very funny discussion, silent writing and remote
+editing. We usually met for a few hours in one of our offices
+(or via video link during the Covid-19 lockdown), with
+some questions in mind, usually generated from an initial
+exchange of gossip or fury. As our discussions evolved,
+someone would map the conversation on a whiteboard or
+
+PREFACE
+
+◆
+
+ix
+
+flipchart paper, tracing the connections and keeping track
+of key points. Realising we were running out of time, we
+would wind down the discussion to write, separately, in
+silence (exam conditions!) for an hour or so. We would
+then collate the pages and read through each other’s work.
+The more we worked like this, the more synergy our
+writing took on.
+Our aim was that when we read the final product, we
+would no longer be able to recall who had written what. In
+a landscape of personal brands and an academic culture
+that values celebrity over collaboration, working against
+the imperative to be a distinct, singular voice offered us a
+different approach to the challenge of writing. Collaboration also helped us to cope with the dizzying instability of
+life in contemporary Britain. We wrote the book between
+March 2019 and July 2020, during which time the mood
+music of authoritarian nationalism grew louder and
+louder. Meeting in person was a way to listen more closely
+to that music, to try to distil the relationship between what
+was being said and what was being done by the state, and
+to examine the cacophony of timeline media by placing it
+at a remove, if only for a few hours. Critical inquiry was a
+kind of group therapy, as the final throes of Theresa May’s
+short, disastrous premiership gave way to Johnsonism.
+The book’s title, Empire’s Endgame, reflects our starting
+point. This project began life as an homage to an earlier
+collectively authored book, The Empire Strikes Back,
+published in 1982 by a group at Birmingham’s Centre for
+Contemporary Cultural Studies. We wanted to explore
+what a collective project to analyse and dismantle state
+racism might look like in our differently troubled and
+
+x
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+troublesome time. One parallel has been the dominance
+of the fantasy blockbuster in our collective cinematic
+imagination, something Greta Thunberg has decried,
+with some accuracy, by saying:
+How can we tackle climate change if the adults are
+obsessed over a children’s movie series based on Legos?1
+And so the ‘Endgame’ in our title is less a clever reference
+to the Samuel Beckett play and more a reference to the
+Avengers film. Avengers: Endgame is, infamously, the
+much marketed crescendo of a series of films depicting
+the Marvel universe. Through the second decade of
+the twenty-first century, an extensive series of Marvel
+superhero movies – plus a smaller parallel DC universe
+and a resurrection of the Star Wars series – dominated
+English-language cinema culture. As the world became
+increasingly chaotic, with an end to any pretence that there
+existed a political class fit to address the urgent and deadly
+challenges of forced migration, internal war and climate
+catastrophe, the displacement and spectacularisation of
+collective fears into a neo-mythic world of superheroes felt
+both symptomatic and all too understandable. Yet, despite
+the will to distraction, the endgame analysis of Marvel also
+echoed our own. In both of our accounts, and in the face
+of violence and climate disaster, something cataclysmic
+seemed to be on its way. Underneath all the bravado and
+show of the immensely powerful, there was weakness and
+the threat of imminent obsolescence. For all the fanfares
+of a remade authoritarian nationalism, all the buffoonish
+
+PREFACE
+
+◆
+
+xi
+
+showing off and refashioned fantasies of omniscience, the
+period we examine is one of imperial decline.
+The ascendancy of authoritarian nationalism that
+we trace here – however triumphant the national mood
+music – only makes sense through the lens of decline. We
+are familiar with the many premature announcements
+of end-times, and laughed about this often in our time
+together, but remain convinced that we are witnessing,
+at last and with so many casualties, the endgame of one
+imperial phase. Of course, and again learning from
+Marvel, we are also aware that the endgame itself can take
+a long time to play out.
+Nevertheless, and in the spirit of trying to think
+historically about an all too troubling present, what we
+present here is a peculiarly British experience of endings.
+There are, no doubt, global parallels. Clearly there are
+other buffoons, although refracted through the class
+performances of other cultures. There are other places
+where the state remakes itself by rendering populations
+unintelligible or disentitled. Other forms of almost similar
+(but not quite) collapse of our planet on fire. At the same
+time, what we describe in the following chapters should
+be understood as the last gasp of one imperial formation,
+with all the excess, irrationality and clapped-out posturing
+of a former power’s demise. We started out hoping that
+this endgame might, eventually, open the possibility of
+something better. Now, as we complete our work, it looks
+as if a lot more of us might have to die first.
+Another impetus for this work was our collective desire
+to extricate ourselves from the relentless immediacy of
+the internet, with far too much political energy taken
+
+xii
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+up in digesting, decrying and responding to non-debate
+via social media. Working together was also a way of
+quietening that noise and pausing to reassess what we felt
+the noise could tell us about the larger political landscape,
+with all of its dangers and possibilities.
+We’re not immune to the confected dramas of social
+and timeline media; indeed, many of our conversations
+began with one of us enraged at the latest scandal dividing
+anti-racist Twitter. But gathering together in person to
+think, write and plot together offered some respite from
+the atomising effects of digital life. Taking time to write
+sometimes felt like an indulgence, given the scale of our
+political and ecological crises. But while none of us believe
+writing or thinking is any substitute for political action,
+this project has offered us some sustenance for the messy
+work of organising. We hope something here sustains you
+in taking action too.
+
+Introduction: Racialised
+Mythologies in Times of Neglect,
+Cruelty and Expulsion
+
+Living in a world long disfigured by the violent,
+world-making force of racism, we have no choice but to be
+anti-racist. However, to act effectively against racism, we
+need to be able to describe it, to keep up with its shifting
+forms. As Cedric Robinson puts it: ‘Race presents all the
+appearance of stability. History, however, compromises
+this fixity. Race is mercurial – deadly and slick.’1 Cultures
+and practices of racism are rooted (and routed) in empire
+and yet they are constantly shifting in form and function.
+Racism is historically specific. We therefore need to ask
+how racial meanings and hierarchies are made and remade
+in our times. This book is our attempt to describe how
+racism has been working its deadly magic in contemporary
+Britain over the last few years. Because we view racism as
+historically specific and messy, we have found it necessary
+to map some of the complex relations between empire,
+racist culture, state practices and political economy. This
+means connecting the most overt manifestations of racist
+culture – the name calling, the racist street violence, the
+zealous anti-immigrant politics – to the shifting practices
+of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of
+unbearable economic uncertainty.
+
+2
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+Britain is not a happy place. The market-oriented
+prosperity promised by Thatcherism and New Labour
+has proved for many to be hollow. While some aspects of
+the post-war consensus remain influential and continue
+to be circulated as the underlying common sense of UK
+political life, in reality the NHS and council homes that
+defined the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s are being
+privatised and stripped to the bone, accelerating the crises
+in housing, health and social care. The austerity imposed
+on other parts of the welfare state which followed the 2008
+financial crisis has brought increased hardship and frustration, through both a lack of services and cuts to public
+sector jobs. On top of this, a deregulated labour market,
+zero-hour contracts and the gig economy mean that work,
+if you can get it, is precarious and low paid. In this context,
+reactionary nationalism is mobilised for political gain, and
+migrants, whether constructed as workers or scroungers,
+documented or illegal, have shouldered much of the blame
+for finance capitalism’s fiscal calamities. A nostalgia for
+empire and the euphoria of world war victory has displaced
+demands for a return to post-war welfarism.2 The crisis of
+legitimacy for governments that cannot provide the jobs
+and prosperity promised by market-led growth has been
+partially reconciled by new covenants, promises to protect
+the nation from violent crime, terrorism and immigrants.
+In the following chapters we trace how shifting ideological repertoires of race and nation legitimate new
+forms of state power and practice in the context of this
+‘organised abandonment’.3 Many of the questions which
+frame this book take the earlier work of cultural studies
+as their prompt and guide – particularly that of Stuart
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+3
+
+Hall, Paul Gilroy and others working at the Centre for
+Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.4 We are
+interested in how crises of political legitimacy are articulated in relation to themes of race, cultural difference,
+law and order, militarism, nationalism, gender, sexuality
+and the family – often expressed in profoundly visceral
+and violent registers. We recognise that shifts in economic
+relations fundamentally shape political, ideological and
+cultural formations, and that crises of capital accumulation and profitability organise the more immediate terrain
+of political struggle. However we refuse the class reductionism which imagines that political interventions need
+focus only on the ‘economic base’, and all else will follow,
+and we reject the view that racism is a straightforward
+effect of economic crisis.5
+We are interested in the political practices and logics
+that work through race, that signal race explicitly or
+implicitly, and that make and remake race in the present.
+This is why we ask throughout the book: what kind of
+state do we have now, and how is its programme of cruelty,
+neglect and expulsion justified ideologically? When
+trying to understand race and racism in Britain today, we
+need to analyse how racist state practices – immigration
+controls, counter-terror measures and criminal justice
+policies – seem to address people’s real problems and
+lived experiences. In other words, we need to think about
+the relationship between state racism and the making
+of political subjectivities. This project of making and
+remaking political subjectivities cannot be understood
+without attention to the place of (post)imperial racial
+
+4
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+anxieties and the sense of pervasive loss that animates
+political imaginations.
+Our argument is not simply that racism tricks people into
+blaming their economic hardship on racialised outsiders.
+This is true but it is too flat. Beyond ‘false consciousness’
+arguments, we are interested in the kinds of affects and
+political subjectivities that are brought into being through
+practices and representations of state neglect, cruelty and
+racialised expulsion. These practices do not only make
+racists, they also produce political subjects who long for
+authority, closure and certainty in ways which exceed the
+racial and implicate all of us. In our view, these desires and
+frustrations are inevitably shaped by the digital character
+of so much political and social life today, and thus our
+analysis of racism is also about how people communicate
+and imagine collectively on social media.
+Mapping this terrain is far from straightforward.
+Racialised crises reveal the fault lines of a wider destabilisation, and thus the difficulty of even describing racism is
+a measure of our collective confusion in these unsettling
+times. That said, there is value in describing and drawing
+connections, even as the ground moves beneath our feet.
+For us, the return (if it ever went away) of race as an
+organising term in a time of crisis is the opening question
+not the closing answer. In part, this stems from a shared
+belief that defeating the dehumanising violence of racism
+requires an agility and openness to surprise, because
+the one thing our enemies do well, do better than us, is
+to retain the element of surprise. The weary cynicism of
+anti-racists who proclaim that they have seen it all before,
+that racism is endless, timeless and monolithic, prevents
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+5
+
+us from seeing how things change. The point is not to say
+how things are always the same but to understand how we
+and ours continue to be shafted in spite of other changes.
+Things might still be awful but they are not awful in the
+same way.
+This, then, is where we begin – with the shared belief
+that it is not so easy to understand the times we are in. In
+particular, strange and multiple remakings of racism have
+taken on a heightened significance, but connecting these
+eruptions to economic and national crisis is no simple
+task. From this difficult starting point, this book seeks to
+deepen our understanding of racism in Britain, beyond
+Tory-bashing and outside the restrictive tempos set by
+public scandal and parliamentary squabbling.
+Hopefully this book also offers some tools for moving
+beyond accounts of racism that become stuck documenting structural inequalities or interpersonal humiliations,
+realities which should not be taken lightly, but which
+cannot, on their own, offer us a way out analytically. We
+hope the book provides some useful tools for thinking
+the problem differently, for understanding the present
+moment in new ways and, ultimately and most importantly, for building analytical connections that can inform
+political struggle. Before we begin our analysis of racialised
+folk devils in contemporary Britain, we thought it would
+be useful to explain what we mean by the neglectful state,
+which frames our argument in the subsequent chapters. In
+the next section, we offer a brief account of how neglect,
+cruelty and expulsion have defined British state practices
+over the past ten years of austerity.
+
+6
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+‘You cut, we bleed’ was the cri de cœur popularised by the
+feminist direct action group Sisters Uncut in the second
+decade of the twenty-first century, highlighting the relationship between austerity and gender-based violence.
+While it can be read as a direct demand to re-invest in
+services for survivors of domestic violence, this powerful
+assertion also speaks to the wider context of state abandonment and violence. It challenges a post-financial crisis
+common sense, in which those most in need of welfare
+support now face scrutiny, neglect and criminalisation
+– or a combination of all three. In more ways than one,
+cuts lead to bloodshed, and while these new cruelties
+disproportionately impact racialised people, the resulting
+poverty, despair, violence and death are by no means
+confined to them.
+Unlike some of its European neighbours, Britain did
+not experience austerity as an external imposition. There
+were no European Bank bailout conditions to meet, no
+fraught negotiations with the Troika. Instead, Britain’s
+twenty-first-century austerity has been coded in terms of
+regaining control after the alleged profligacy of an earlier
+New Labour administration. As a result, British austerity
+has been narrated as an expression of sovereignty – ‘we are
+all in it together’ – as opposed to an external imposition
+undermining sovereignty, as in Greece and Italy. Despite
+this, the punishing features of twenty-first-century
+austerity in Britain are similar to those of other austeritystricken European economies.
+What is distinctive is the folding of ‘austerity’ (always
+presented as a necessity, an emergency response that is
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+7
+
+beyond political challenge) into a longer-standing British
+political narrative and a decades-long attack on any vestige
+of the state as a redistributive actor. Britain had deregulated
+its labour market under the Blair government, proclaiming the benefits of ‘flexibility’ at work. The UK economy
+fell into its dangerous reliance on financial services in this
+period, a factor that impacted heavily following the 2008
+crash, when income inequality increased further, making
+Britain one of the most unequal societies in Europe –
+establishing what Danny Dorling calls ‘peak inequality’.6
+All of this began long before the arrival of post-crash
+austerity. Indeed, the demonisation of welfare recipients
+similarly predates austerity, and it is these economic and
+social policies that together set the stage for the breaking
+apart of cultures of mutuality.
+In an echo of the enforced austerity imposed in parts of
+southern Europe, Britain has seen a massive rolling back of
+state spending more broadly. In particular, services administered through local government have been slashed, with
+an extreme impact on libraries, children’s centres, youth
+services and support for the vulnerable, including notable
+cuts to services relating to domestic violence, mental
+health and disability support. Alongside this squeeze on
+services and public spaces, the terms of state support
+have changed. Conditionality has become central to the
+benefits system – claimants must fulfil various demands
+in order to receive assistance, with requirements ranging
+from evidencing an active pursuit of employment and
+attending assessment meetings, to undertaking unpaid
+work placements. This has been pursued independently of
+the pressures of austerity. Taken together, the long-stand-
+
+8
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+ing political campaign to delegitimise claiming welfare
+benefits, even for the most vulnerable and including those
+in very low-paid work, and the stripping back of state
+spending, have worked together to create levels of poverty
+and hardship unseen for many decades. When we refer
+to the neglectful, as opposed to the welfarist, state, this is
+what we mean.
+We have lived through several decades of the state in
+retreat, except in its punitive functions. Healthcare and
+state schools remain national structures of provision,
+but even here the segmentation through restructuring
+(health trusts) and creeping privatisation (academies)
+reframes our contact with these services. We might think
+of ourselves as becoming accustomed to the radically
+transformed landscape of a post-crash global economy.
+This means that some devastating practices of dividing,
+rationing and excluding have become pretty much
+institutionalised across the board. Think here of welfare
+sanctioning, societal tolerance for street homelessness and
+food insecurity, the assorted practices of bordering, and
+perhaps the end of demands for a ‘good job’ by mainstream
+political parties. Taken together these represent a lessening
+of expectations and so a grudging acceptance that life’s
+hardships will not, and perhaps cannot, be ameliorated by
+state intervention. Meanwhile, we can observe a greater
+tolerance for state-administered punishment for those
+deemed lesser or alien – the criminal, the migrant, the
+benefits ‘cheat’. Assessments and algorithms connect the
+police and border officials who lurk in what remains of
+the welfare state, while hospitals, schools and community
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+9
+
+centres become sites where ‘terrorists’, ‘gangsters’ and
+‘illegals’ can be best rooted out.
+At least two generations have been disciplined to
+expect (and receive) little or nothing from the state except
+punishment or the threat of punishment. While claiming
+subsistence benefits, such as the dole or housing benefit,
+always included humiliation before bureaucratic power,
+the process of claiming the means of survival today has
+been made increasingly onerous, requiring repeated
+evidence, and exposing the claimant to the risk of further
+punishment if the demands of the claims process are
+mis-performed. Of the 130,000 preventable deaths arising
+from austerity,7 the most tragically sickening stories
+recount the impact of benefit sanctions as a form of social
+murder: the cutting off of all means of sustenance, systemic
+‘failures’ leading to emaciated bodies, empty fridges and
+signs of self-harm. The suicides.
+These are tragedies coming not from direct cuts,
+although the squeezing of resources shapes the practices.
+Instead, suffering is inflicted as punishment for failure to
+adhere to the terms of conditionality. We are interested
+in how this threat of punishment for expressing need
+reshapes popular consciousness. Previously, studies of
+British racism would interpret the punishment of some as
+a form of reassurance to others. It was thought that those
+who ‘belonged’ were those who were not being punished,
+and who were therefore invited to identify with the state
+that acted to exclude Others in their name. But are there
+any constituencies at present who feel embraced by a sense
+of belonging that is staged by affirmative state practices? It
+seems hard to imagine.
+
+10
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+In an earlier moment of cultural studies there is the sense
+that in the 1960s and 1970s (perhaps even into the 1980s)
+the response to tense ‘race relations’ vacillated between
+more policing and carceral punishment, on the one hand,
+and various kinds of social reform on the other. Scholars
+associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
+Studies described the former as repressive and the latter
+as preventive. Now we have entered a period where social
+reform is off the table altogether. There is much less talk
+about lack of investment in communities, or deprivation
+as a cause of crime or unrest. Instead the approach to
+prevention simply involves more social control. This
+approach is based on containment and partial or complete
+exclusion via prevention orders, ASBOs, omnipresent
+surveillance, digital technologies of control and, as we
+will explore shortly, pre-criminal forms of punishment.
+In effect, there is no such thing as inclusion or belonging
+in positive terms, only in negative terms. And there is no
+social reform option. Only the promise of security for
+some (rarely fulfilled), and more coercion, prevention and
+repression for others.
+The neglectful and/or punitive state employs long-standing practices of racialised exclusion, punishment and
+scapegoating, but the terms of secure belonging are much
+more unstable than they were before. There remains a
+spectacular element to state racism, a familiar theatrics in
+which some are monstered as an example to and entertainment for others. Yet the harshness of the times also
+rebalances this process away from the pleasures of racist
+spectacle (‘these abject people are nothing like us and this
+is what they deserve’) and towards the increasingly explicit
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+11
+
+threat of racist example (‘there is little that distinguishes
+me and mine from these abject people; what is done to
+them could be done to us and this realisation further fuels
+my rage’).
+In recent memory, and in particular in the first ten to
+15 years of the twenty-first century, we observed manifold
+attacks on allegedly unproductive groups, particularly
+welfare claimants defined as ‘scroungers’. These attacks
+appeared to be central to the justification for the further
+retrenchment of the welfare state, austerity and increasingly conditional access to public goods. But after over a
+decade of austerity the terms of exclusion and belonging
+have changed. The British public is well aware that the
+majority of the poor and the majority of those dependent
+on food banks are actually working but in menial, low-paid
+jobs. If not in the grind of poverty pay, the burgeoning
+poor are the recipients of the innovative punishments of
+the welfare state, a fall into abjection which increasing
+numbers must fear.
+In this shift from an external social enemy to internalised fear of abjection, some of these arguments about
+‘idle benefit scroungers’ have lost their popular appeal.
+The spectacle of the ‘scrounger’ seems of another time,
+occasionally resurrected by one or other new right-winger
+eager for clicks, but no longer a reliable hook for popular
+rage. In their place, ever-present racialised threats have to
+come to carry even more of the ideological load. In other
+words, we are suggesting that after ten years of brutal
+austerity, the welfare-bashing of ‘idle whites’ has lost
+much of its resonance and ideological efficacy. As a result,
+racism and nativism are being enlisted to do more work as
+
+12
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the rightward political forces seek to capture the loyalties
+of dispossessed white Britons by emphasising their
+‘nativeness’ and besiegement by the nation’s enemies. And
+all of this despite an ongoing confusion, demonstrated by
+Brexit, about what the terms of nativeness and nationalism
+might be in this time.
+In this strange moment when political parties of the
+right seem to offer few or no concrete promises, and the
+Conservative Party can win a general election with the
+slimmest pretence of a manifesto, we might surmise that
+the privations of austerity and a socio-economic system
+structured to maintain extreme inequality have become
+recoded as a loss of racialised power and prestige. Material
+hardship and the humiliations associated with showing
+need threaten to unravel the ‘wages of whiteness’. We
+borrow this term from W.E.B. Du Bois, who posited that
+racial identification offered working-class whites a sense
+of racial superiority to ‘compensate’ for their exploitation
+and prevent them from finding common cause with black
+workers.8 The racialised nationalism of this moment,
+then, is one that redirects the very real disappointment
+and dispossession arising from economic crisis, the fragmentation of the welfare state and the doubling down of
+punitive state practices. Multiple privation is re-articulated
+as a fall from grace. And grace is misremembered as a state
+of happy racialised prestige.
+The strong sense that we might not all make it and,
+perhaps, that we are not supposed to, seems to range
+across the fears articulated by racists about territory
+and culture, by schoolchildren about the planet, by the
+government about global pandemics, and by everyone in
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+13
+
+the struggle to make ends meet. Our fear is an outcome
+of state practices of engineered neglect, so that we learn
+to fight and fear each other in the contest for the means
+of life. Something here is also aligned to the emergence of
+a global economy which seems to render ever increasing
+numbers of people disposable. It feels different from the
+disposability of people during violent periods of colonialism and global war in previous centuries. There is an
+‘end-of-the-worldism’ that seems to characterise our dark
+times.
+As should be evident from this brief discussion, our view
+is that there is no simple causal relationship between the
+economic and the cultural. It is not simply that economic
+realities determine racist culture – there is always struggle,
+negotiation, setbacks, contradictions and unpredictability.
+The mood of our times, structured by the economic, is
+one of atomisation, anxiety and unsteadiness. The lived
+experience of crisis makes the racist politics of fear and
+expulsion resonate in new ways. In the chapter which
+follows this introduction, we apply some of these points to
+help explain the racialised mythologies and most salient
+‘folk devils’ that have taken hold in British politics over the
+last few years. In the context of inequality and precarity,
+austerity without end, and when the state has nothing to
+offer except the impossible promise of security, the figures
+of the ‘gangster’, the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘terrorist’ work
+their perverse magic, distorting democratic possibilities
+and licensing the worst kinds of authoritarianism.
+The book is split into five parts. The first four parts are
+composed of three short chapters and the final part of two
+concluding chapters. In Part 1, ‘Racialising the Crisis’, we set
+
+14
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the scene in contemporary Britain, drawing connections
+between different racialised ‘folk devils’ who have been
+conscripted to help explain and resolve Britain’s multiple
+crises. Racialised ‘folk devils’ have long been enlisted to
+justify relations of domination and obscure the real causes
+of people’s insecurity. But our intention in Part 1 is to say
+something more precise about how racism is working in
+this moment. As such, we are interested in who becomes
+a racialised ‘folk devil’, and how they are constructed, and
+then with what kinds of state practices they help legitimate.
+In Chapter 1 we ask who is to be punished, and who might
+be contingently exempt, by critically examining the 2018
+‘Windrush scandal’. In Chapter 2 we discuss the so-called
+‘knife-crime epidemic’ and the use of pre-criminal forms
+of control and prevention in response to it. Finally, in
+Chapter 3 we discuss the myriad ‘gangs’ of Britain, whose
+apparent ubiquity licenses new forms of control, criminalisation and expulsion.
+In Part 2, we examine ‘The Persistence of Nationalism’.
+In Chapter 4 we discuss the colonial amnesia, nostalgia
+and melancholia that fuel Britain’s confused nationalist convulsions. We think it necessary here to discuss
+Powellism in some detail, and to outline the characters
+from the racial drama who still populate public discourse.
+In Chapter 5 we develop a critique of leftist nationalisms,
+so-called ‘progressive patriotisms’. We argue that demands
+for a welfare state which ignores or plays down the
+question of borders and citizenship plagued the Corbyn
+project and remains unresolved by the British left. In
+Chapter 6 we tackle the limits of representation, those
+entrepreneurial and state-friendly anti-racisms that have
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+◆
+
+15
+
+been developed with gusto in recent years, energised by
+the Twitter timelines which favour hot takes, call-outs and
+easily quantifiable measures of influence, legitimacy and
+fame. We dwell on the power of social media to undo the
+historically informed, internationally contextualised and
+carefully thought-out analyses of racism so desperately
+needed in these times of multiple crises.
+In Part 3, ‘State Patriarch’, we analyse state racism and
+nationalism through gender. In Chapter 7 we discuss the
+relationship between gender, sexuality and the nation
+state in historical perspective. We trace the changing
+nature of the state patriarch in the move from welfarism
+to neoliberal authoritarianism and ask: what kind of state
+patriarch do we have today? In Chapter 8 we engage with
+the political scandals that emerged when large numbers
+of girls were sexually exploited in post-industrial towns
+in northern England. During the time of the abuse, local
+institutions largely ignored the young victims (white
+and Asian), who were tainted by their class position and
+proximity to Asian men. Yet when these cases became a
+national scandal, these white girls were transformed into
+symbols of national purity who had been violated by
+racial Others (Muslim men in particular). Rather than
+addressing the sexism, misogyny and institutional neglect
+which leaves vulnerable girls exposed to predatory men
+and sexual violence, the demand for ‘justice’ became part
+of a racist campaign that reaffirmed the nation’s role as
+patriarchal protector. Finally, in Chapter 9 we consider the
+increased salience of the buffoon in the theatre of British
+politics, most obviously in the figure of Boris Johnson. We
+ask how and why are buffoonish strongmen at the helm
+
+16
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+of so much nationalist resurgence, and why is their antielitist posturing somehow seductive?
+In Part 4, ‘Send in the Army’, we explore the centrality
+of militarism and marshal metaphors to British racism.
+In Chapter 10 we discuss the longing for authority that
+underwrites authoritarianism in contemporary Britain,
+made plain in the repeated calls to ‘send in the army’ to
+deal with ‘social problems’. In Chapter 11 we route the
+militarisation of everyday life, and policing in particular,
+through a colonial history of counterinsurgency and
+conflict. Finally, in Chapter 12, we engage in a short
+discussion of the wider logics of zero-sum-game politics.
+We observe that this logic underwrites not only debates
+about race and migration, but also men’s rights activism
+and trans exclusionary feminisms.
+In Part 5 we conclude by first reflecting on the Covid-19
+pandemic – which emerged as we were trying to tie this
+book project up. In Chapter 13 we discuss the ways in which
+our analysis in the book proved depressingly prescient
+when it came to the political (mis)management of the
+coronavirus crisis. In response to the pandemic, the UK
+government turned to nativist posturing, war analogies,
+strongman buffoonery and new policing powers. The
+neglectful-cum-authoritarian state was in full display and
+tens of thousands died needlessly as a result. In Chapter 14
+we offer some final reflections on languages and practices
+of collective grief, hope and survival.
+
+PART 1
+
+Racialising the Crisis
+
+C HAPTE R O NE
+
+Windrush
+
+‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’, it
+began. This wartime quote by Winston Churchill … is
+to me the most apt way of expressing the gratitude of
+the Caribbean high commissioners and the West Indian
+diaspora for the incredible work by Amelia Gentleman.
+– The High Commissioner for Barbados,
+quoted in the Foreword by Katherine Viner to
+Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal (2019)1
+
+It wasn’t Labour who cut the Border Force. It was the
+Tories. Labour’s last manifesto committed to adding
+five hundred extra border guards, over and above the
+level we will inherit from this Government. They are
+vital in the fight against people-traffickers, and the
+drug and gun smugglers, as well as preventing illegal
+immigration.
+– Diane Abbott’s speech on Labour’s plans for a simpler,
+fairer immigration system, September 20182
+
+In spring 2018, British politics was dominated by what
+came to be known as the ‘Windrush scandal’. The scandal
+concerned older Caribbean migrants who had moved to
+the UK before 1973, and who therefore should have had
+a ‘right of abode’ (permanent and unconditional right of
+residence and re-entry), but who instead had been treated
+
+20
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+as ‘illegal immigrants’ and denied access to healthcare,
+welfare benefits and housing. In some cases, ‘Windrush
+migrants’ were deported. In one case, a man who had lived
+in the UK since 1969 lost his job at a local council because
+new immigration rules stipulated he had to have a passport
+to work. Having never left the country since his arrival in
+Britain, he could not produce the necessary documentation and so was left with no job and no recourse to claim
+out-of-work benefits. Another member of the ‘Windrush
+generation’ had lived in the UK since he was five months
+old. After travelling to the Caribbean to visit his sick
+mother he was denied re-entry at the UK border. Another
+man of Caribbean heritage who had lived in the UK for
+40 years was given a £5,000 hospital bill after his immigration status was checked. Finding he had no residency
+status, the council evicted him from his home, and he was
+discharged from hospital onto the streets, ineligible for a
+state-funded hostel as an ‘illegal immigrant’.
+There were over 50,000 people of Caribbean heritage
+who potentially faced similar problems, as the border
+moved from the airports and docks to housing offices, job
+centres, hospitals, schools, workplaces and streets. This
+expansion and internalisation of the border was part of
+the Conservative Party’s policy to make the UK a ‘hostile
+environment’ for undocumented migrants (although these
+policies were very much a continuation/extension of New
+Labour immigration policy). In responding to moral panic
+about immigrants stealing jobs, welfare benefits, or both,
+the government made proof of legal status mandatory
+for access to the basic means of existence: employment,
+housing, healthcare, education, a bank account, a driving
+
+WINDRUSH
+
+◆
+
+21
+
+licence. This is the hostile environment: the system of
+immigration checks and data-sharing which saw the
+expansion of everyday, everywhere bordering.
+Over a number of months in 2018, left and liberal media
+outlets began to collect the stories of these long-settled
+British Caribbeans who had been illegalised, made destitute and banished. Soon, other sections of the press,
+including those on the right, began to cover the ‘Windrush
+scandal’. One Daily Mail editorial summed up the paper’s
+position: ‘The Windrush scandal is yet another example
+of how poorly Britain treats those to whom it owes a
+great debt and how twisted our bureaucratic morals are.’3
+Meanwhile, Brexit campaigner and far-right Conservative
+MP Jacob Rees-Mogg described the ‘hostile environment’
+as ‘fundamentally un-British’.4 Both the Mail and ReesMogg used the scandal in an attempt to revalorise people
+from the Commonwealth as ‘deserving migrants’, while
+petitioning for a ‘hard Brexit’ that would extricate Britain
+from the EU’s ‘twisted’, ‘un-British’ bureaucracy, and make
+the lives of many EU nationals in Britain increasingly
+difficult and insecure.
+In other words, outrage was not directed at the ‘hostile
+environment’ per se, which the government had created
+to root out ‘illegal immigrants’. Rather, the scandal was
+seen by the Mail and others as an example of ‘how it is
+those who play by the rules and do the right thing who get
+punished – while those who act on the sly seem only to
+get rewarded for it’. The ‘Windrush scandal’ demonstrated
+the lack of respect for good old British ‘common sense’:
+the ‘bad migrants’ flood in, stealing jobs and benefits,
+while the good ones get punished. The story was thereby
+
+22
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+made familiar in a very particular way: the point was that
+the Home Office was totally dysfunctional, rather than
+immigration controls being inherently punitive, violent
+and racist.
+Across the political spectrum, ‘Windrush migrants’
+were celebrated for their contributions to the nation. The
+fact that the treatment of this particular group of ‘migrants’
+became a national scandal, with a consensus across the
+political spectrum that the Home Office had acted not
+only unlawfully but also immorally, was surprising for a
+number of reasons. First, it was surprising because the
+tabloids are always talking about Britain as ‘a soft touch
+for migrants’. Normally we are told that migrants are
+bad and controls are too weak, so it was disorienting to
+have a public scandal where the migrants were good and
+the controls were too harsh. But the consensus on the
+treatment of Windrush victims was even more surprising
+given that all of the Windrush generation were black
+and many of them worked in lower-income jobs or were
+welfare claimants. This is the same economic demographic
+– ‘benefit scroungers’ and ‘job stealers’ – who are the target
+of popular outrage in debates about immigration.
+However, unlike in most of the hateful political and
+media discourse on migrants, victims of the Windrush
+scandal were portrayed as elderly, respectable and
+law-abiding, and the well-rehearsed yarn about them
+having been invited over to help with the post-war effort
+prevailed. The ‘Windrush generation’ did not summon
+images of ‘illegal border crossings’, ‘breaking point’, or
+threats of crime and terrorism. They were not dangerously
+mobile, but settled, orderly and respectable. Thus, the
+
+WINDRUSH
+
+◆
+
+23
+
+‘Windrush generation’ were folded into the national ‘we’,
+reclaimed as our war veterans, our bus conductors and our
+caring nurses. The Windrush scandal clearly played on
+the politics of respectability, economic contribution (even
+if historical) and good citizenship. As ever, the incorporation of black people into the national fold was partial,
+conditional and retractable.
+Importantly, the opportunity to connect the Windrush
+scandal to the decimation of the welfare state and the
+wider demonisation of ‘illegal immigrants’ was missed by
+the left. The scandal became ultimately about immigration
+policies being applied to the wrong migrants, or applied in
+the wrong way. We should pause at this point to reiterate
+that ‘hostile environment’ policies involve denying ‘illegal
+immigrants’ the right to healthcare, housing, employment
+and education, as well as a driving licence and the ability
+to open a bank account – effectively denying people access
+to the means of life on the basis of immigration status.
+Many people incensed by the ‘Windrush scandal’ were
+against these immigration policies in general, but the
+overall tenor of the public debate involved special pleading
+for one particular group of ‘citizens’, rather than a wider
+interrogation of the exclusionary and expulsive logics of
+the immigration regime as a whole.
+With some political imagination, the Windrush scandal
+should have allowed us to challenge received understandings of ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘foreign criminals’ and ‘welfare
+claimants’. After all, it should be easy enough to recognise
+that ‘illegal immigrants’ are simply those non-citizens who
+have been categorised as ‘illegal’ by law, a juridical group
+rather than a social one. ‘Illegal immigrants’, who share
+
+24
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+their lives with other migrants and citizens, are illegal only
+insofar as they have been subjected to an arbitrary legal
+process. Furthermore, the racist treatment experienced
+by the Windrush generation in the 1950s and ’60s, widely
+acknowledged across the political spectrum, should not
+be disconnected from the disproportionate enforcement
+of immigration controls against black and brown people
+today. Not all migrants are policed equally, and thus some
+are more likely to be made foreign through subjection to
+coercive state power. However, politicians, journalists and
+activists from across the left emphasised that Windrush
+migrants were distinct from ‘illegal immigrants’. David
+Lammy MP, in a rare and rousing speech in the Commons,
+suitably timed for maximum social media shares, reminded
+us that victims of the scandal included ‘a British citizen
+who paid taxes for 40 years’. Lammy’s steadfast separation
+of Windrush migrants, who were to be understood as
+citizens, from the real ‘illegal immigrants’, was repeated
+across the Labour Party.
+These repeated references to tax records and national
+insurance contributions were more than proof of longterm residency. They served to construct the ‘Windrush
+generation’ as respectable, industrious people who ‘play
+by the rules’. Referring to Windrush scandal victims as
+‘citizens’ (which in law was not quite true) worked to
+separate their treatment from the violence enacted against
+other non-citizens – the violence of immigration raids,
+indefinite detention and mass deportation flights, to
+destinations which include the Caribbean. While some
+commentators reminded us that post-war migrants were
+hardly welcomed by white Britons or the British state
+
+WINDRUSH
+
+◆
+
+25
+
+when they arrived, and others sought to historicise British
+citizenship as an imperial form of political membership
+later restricted to exclude ‘coloured’ migrants, there was
+a strong tendency, even among the left and anti-racists,
+to separate the violation of ‘Windrush migrants’ from
+the wider treatment of ‘migrants’. Indeed, Diane Abbott
+appeared on BBC’s Question Time to explain that the issue
+of ‘illegal immigration’ must not be confused with the
+ill-treatment of ‘Windrush migrants’, before promising
+that the Labour Party would ‘bear down on the numbers
+of illegal immigrants’ once in power. Evidently, immigration enforcement becomes visible as violence only when it
+affects certain groups – in this case ‘Windrush migrants’
+who migrated, legally and respectfully, way back when.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+Perhaps the clearest indication of the limits of this
+newfound hospitality came when Sajid Javid, as Home
+Secretary, explained that members of the ‘Windrush
+generation’ with criminal records would be fully excluded
+from compensation and legal recourse. Having a criminal
+record, however minor or from however long ago, was
+enough to erase over 45 years of residence. Even in that
+rarest of moments in British politics when there was widespread sympathy for one particular group of ‘migrants’,
+the spectre of ‘criminal history’ was enough to brand some
+‘Windrush migrants’ as unwanted guests who had abused
+our hospitality. Exile remained perfectly proportionate in
+these cases, never mind what people were returned to. The
+
+26
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+mere mention of criminality was enough to set the nation
+into default mode: ‘send them back’.
+Clearly, if the ‘Windrush migrants’ were to be considered
+British, and welcomed into the national fold, they were
+incorporated because they were law-abiding. They had
+proved, over time, that they were not ‘lesser breeds without
+the law’. Indeed, the Windrush migrants were contrasted
+explicitly and implicitly with younger, law-breaking black
+Britons during this period. Newspapers which sympathetically covered the Caribbean grandparents you might help
+cross the road, or allow in front of you in the queue at
+the post office, presented at the same time a very different
+image of ‘Black Britain’ in their inner pages. The national
+outrage over the ‘Windrush scandal’ was matched by a
+much more hostile collective outrage over youth violence,
+because the other big news story of spring 2018 was the
+so-called ‘knife-crime epidemic’.
+Commentators made a point of emphasising statistics
+from particular cities (mainly London), in which the
+majority of ‘knife crime’ victims and perpetrators were
+black men and boys – and often the focus was specifically
+on ‘black Caribbean’ teenagers. ‘Black youth’ were once
+again vilified as sources of danger, violence and moral
+decline, and violence was linked to the family (read ‘absent
+fathers’) and the nihilism of contemporary urban life (read
+‘black culture’). While wayward black youth symbolised a
+national crime crisis, their soft, neglectful or inept parents
+were also held responsible. As such, these later generations were separated from the sympathetic protection and
+welfare afforded to the ‘Windrush generation’ who came
+before them. Echoing repeated moral panics directed at
+
+WINDRUSH
+
+◆
+
+27
+
+black Britons over the last seven decades, ‘knife crime’
+called for a law-and-order response. It was time for the
+police and the state to reassert control in the context of
+spiralling lawlessness, urban decline and a nation lacking
+discipline and confidence.
+While the state tends to have a clear line when it comes
+to dealing with crime, the British left have struggled with
+how to respond to problems of violence in oppressed,
+lower-income communities. At best, the left is able to
+identify the social harms caused by a lack of social provision (housing, education, healthcare), and to recognise
+how this can lead young people in particular to be more
+likely to be affected by and implicated in violence. But
+the British left mostly seem unable to say that while one
+individual harming another is morally wrong, so is having
+uniformed agents force human beings into cages. Without
+a compelling critique of police and prisons, much of the
+left falls back on the carceral logic which divides society
+into victims and perpetrators. It then becomes possible
+to argue for the effectiveness of ‘evidence-led’, ‘targeted’
+policing – perhaps with a sprinkling of unconscious-bias
+training for good measure.
+Arguments are made for policing to be carried out
+by officers who are ‘part of the community’, which in
+addition to black and brown officers also sees police
+occupying schools, youth clubs and places of worship.
+Without a critical language, the left implicitly consents
+to these police powers which are then challenged only for
+being used ‘at random’ (as if those subjected to stop and
+search are ever identified randomly), or for being used in
+a discriminatory manner (as if there were any other way
+
+28
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+in which such powers could be used). This poverty of
+understanding, and lack of effective articulation, results
+in the left focusing on a defence of the welfare state, which
+includes the call for more police. Indeed, more bobbies
+on the beat has a homely leftish resonance as well as an
+authoritarian rightish one. Constrained by this logic, the
+police and the prison system are perceived as flawed,
+but still fundamentally necessary. Such constraints limit
+demands to diversity drives, community consultations,
+equality impact assessments, increased funding and, in
+extreme cases, public inquiries.
+What should have been learnt from the ‘Windrush
+scandal’ – from the illegalisation and expulsion of
+long-settled Commonwealth citizens – was that racist discrimination persists across a range of state institutions
+and practices, and that this takes new forms as punitive,
+everyday borders proliferate. The exclusionary logic of
+immigration controls – according to which ‘migrants’
+take jobs, resources and public goods and therefore need
+to be excluded – operates to justify and obscure the wider
+disentitlement and abandonment of citizens. Conditionality and punitiveness in the benefits system can then
+be reframed as protecting citizens from queue-jumping
+immigrants. Moreover, the total surveillance and exclusion of ‘illegal immigrants’, managed via comprehensive
+data-sharing initiatives, allows the government to trial
+new forms of conditionality and punitiveness that can
+then be rolled out more widely – just as charging migrants
+to use the NHS provides an ominous trial run for further
+privatisation. Defining ‘Windrush migrants’ as wronged
+
+WINDRUSH
+
+◆
+
+29
+
+citizens, and contrasting them with ‘illegal immigrants’,
+does little to illuminate these connections.
+All this is to say that the ‘Windrush scandal’ was not
+some un-British aberration, but an inevitable outcome
+of aggressive immigration policies enforced by racist
+institutions as part of a larger bid to further delegitimise
+any remaining investment in the caring, welfarist state. In
+short, ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies work in
+combination with the politics of austerity. And policies
+surrounding immigration, welfare and crime can only
+be understood when considered in their relation.5 We
+have observed that the sympathy for Windrush migrants
+was highly conditional and had no effect on the ongoing
+demonisation of over-policed and criminalised young
+black people. Indeed, declarations of the Windrush
+migrants’ worthiness may have even been nourished and
+vindicated by their being placed in opposition to young
+people accused of ‘knife crime’. In the next chapter we
+examine the ‘knife-crime epidemic’ in more detail, considering the state practices which are trialled and licensed
+through this racist politics of law and order.
+
+CH APT E R T WO
+
+‘Knife Crime’:
+Prevention and Order
+
+[There are] definitely more younger people involved …
+more knives involved with the serious violence on the
+streets … This, for my officers, in 2016/17/18, felt like
+the extra use of extraordinary force by groups on other
+young people to be a new phenomenon.
+– Cressida Dick, Met Police Commissioner, 20191
+
+I want criminals to feel terror.
+– Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel, 20192
+
+Debates about crime in the second decade of the twentyfirst century have been dominated by moral panic about
+‘knife crime’. This panic has been based partly on a real
+problem of violence in lower-income communities.
+Figures released in 2019 indicated that police-recorded
+violent crime had risen by almost a fifth in England and
+Wales. In the same year, crimes involving blades rose by
+12 per cent and almost 40,000 such offences were reported
+to police (although the 2019 figures fell short of the 2006
+peak for injures involving knives).3
+However, crime statistics are always slippery, reflecting
+policing practices and the uneven enforcement of the law
+as much as some discrete and measurable thing called
+
+‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER
+
+◆
+
+31
+
+‘crime’. ‘Knife crime’ is not a criminal offence in itself, but
+an amalgam of already existing offences (carrying a bladed
+article, robbery, burglary, grievous bodily harm, murder,
+etc.). By grouping together a number of existing offences,
+the police, politicians and the press can convey the idea
+that ‘knife crime’ is new, or is at least worse than anything
+Britain has seen before. This begs the question of why the
+category of ‘knife crime’ has risen to such prominence in
+national politics. Like new categories of crime from earlier
+periods, such as ‘mugging’, the problem of ‘knife crime’
+is seen to have been introduced to Britain by racialised
+outsiders, therefore requiring new forms of policing and
+penalisation. Such moral panics are effective because they
+promise that the expansion of violent policing will be
+reserved for racialised outsiders, from whom the nation
+needs protecting.
+The racism that associates violent crime with black youth
+in Britain has been well-documented.4 For example, Tony
+Blair declared in 2007 that the problem of violent crime
+would not be solved ‘by pretending it isn’t young black kids
+doing it’,5 paving the way for the racialised policing of the
+‘gang’ which we unpack in the next chapter. More recently,
+the Metropolitan Police’s response to the evidence of
+racial disproportionality in stop and searches has been to
+suggest that young people of ‘African-Caribbean heritage’
+are more likely than white people to be perpetrators and
+victims of ‘knife crime’.6 Quite how police officers are
+able to distinguish people of ‘African-Caribbean heritage’
+from other people racialised as black is unclear, but the
+police assure us that stop and search offers a crucial way to
+apprehend criminals and keep young people safe.
+
+32
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+Similarly, in March 2019, in a TV debate on ‘knife crime’
+with the rapper and writer Akala, Piers Morgan stated:
+‘statistically, it looks like in London, right now … the
+perpetrators and the victims appear to be almost exclusively young black men’. Morgan went on to ask Akala,
+‘do you think there is a racial element to that in terms of
+any cultural issues, racial issues?’ The statistic, it turned
+out, was a fabrication, but Akala’s response to Morgan was
+instructive. He said, ‘clearly throughout human history,
+black people have not remotely had anything resembling
+a monopoly on violence. Over the last few years [in] some
+of the most horrendous knife attacks, both the victims and
+the perpetrators have been white and they’ve not been
+from London.’
+The local geographies of violence and policing are
+therefore worth remarking on here. In areas coded as
+‘black’ – like Brixton, Tottenham and Ladbroke Grove in
+London, Moss Side in Manchester, Chapeltown in Leeds,
+and Handsworth in Birmingham – stabbing incidents are
+less newsworthy, unless the victim is especially young.
+‘Knife crime’ in these areas is considered notable in news
+and political discourse less because the victims deserve
+our sympathies but more as a quantitative confirmation
+of the association between race and criminality (‘black on
+black crime’). Not coincidentally, these are the areas that
+are most heavily policed and in which there have been
+historic confrontations between the police and young
+black people.
+On the other hand, when stabbing victims are seen to
+be innocent – which often means white and from less
+urban areas – offences tend to be especially newsworthy.
+
+‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER
+
+◆
+
+33
+
+When 17-year-old Jodie Chesney was murdered in a park
+in Romford, a part of London that is almost in Essex, the
+story was on the front pages for some time. The suspected
+attackers were reported to be black males. Two young
+men, aged 17 and 19, were later convicted after admitting
+to killing Jodie in a case of mistaken identity. Peter
+Chesney, Jodie’s father, featured regularly in London and
+national newspapers, in the aftermath of the murder and
+during the trial, invited to offer his opinion on how the
+government should better tackle ‘knife crime’ – the
+­­ moral
+authority and demands of the victim have long been at
+the centre of Britain’s carceral culture. Peter Chesney went
+on to found the Jodie Chesney Foundation, which ‘aims
+to set up a hotline, staffed by youth workers and ex-gang
+members, that parents, siblings and friends of at-risk
+children can call with their concerns about knives and
+county lines drug gangs’.
+The inclusion of county lines drug gangs is telling,
+referring to concerns about urban gangs expanding their
+supply chains into towns and rural areas. This is about
+familiar crimes (read: urban, black) occurring in new
+places (read: non-urban, white). Despite the language
+of ‘protecting young people from grooming’ within
+government talk on county lines, the real fear is that
+black criminality is migrating out of black urban enclaves
+and spreading, virus-like, into unsuspecting parts of the
+country. In short, where crime happens matters, and
+contested geographies of policing, racism and belonging
+get mobilised in debates about the ‘knife-crime epidemic’
+and ‘county lines drug gangs’. Part of the fear is that the
+
+34
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+police will lose the ability to contain if not to control such
+instances of (black) violence and criminality.
+The circulation of a discourse around the so-called
+‘knife-crime epidemic’ is therefore significant not simply
+for the ideological association of race and crime. Just as
+with the ‘mugging crisis’ of the early 1970s, today’s moral
+panic has also led, unsurprisingly, to calls for an increase in
+police powers, particularly stop and search. The Conservative Party manifesto of November 2019 confirmed their
+core commitment to tougher policing of ‘knife crime’:
+Police will be empowered by a new court order to target
+known knife carriers, making it easier for officers to
+stop and search those convicted of knife crime. Anyone
+charged with knife possession will appear before magistrates within days not weeks. Those who use a knife as a
+weapon should go to prison.7
+The police, politicians and much of the press have
+repeatedly ignored research indicating the failure of
+stop and search to yield crime prevention and detection
+outcomes. Available statistics suggest that disproportionality in the use of stop-and-search powers has increased
+in the context of the ‘knife-crime epidemic’, with black
+people being 4.3 times more likely to be stopped than
+white people in 2018, compared with 2.6 times in 2014.8
+However, in our view the variable scale factor here only
+tells us so much. Whether black people are two times, five
+times, eight times, or 26 times more likely to be stopped
+by the police, the number is always too high, and the
+
+‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER
+
+◆
+
+35
+
+number itself feels unreal. What actually changes in our
+understanding when we modify the multiplier?
+What is clear is that young black boys and men in
+particular neighbourhoods are intensely over-policed,
+repeatedly stopped and searched, often humiliated and
+treated with disrespect by the police. During most searches,
+the police do not find anything, and when they do it tends
+to be small amounts of cannabis.9 In this context, the
+discourse surrounding ‘knife crime’ seems only to fuel the
+disproportionate and racist policing practices that already
+deny working-class young black men rights to freedom
+of association, free movement in public space and the
+presumption of innocence.
+And yet, documenting the racial disproportionality and
+ineffectiveness of policing practices risks taking the police
+at their word, assuming that there could be a rational and
+proportionate way of enforcing racially conceived laws.
+The racism surrounding ‘knife crime’ is about more than
+the uneven implementation of the law, it is about the very
+conception and formulation of ‘crime’. If racism forms
+the definition of criminal problems from the outset,
+then ‘fact-checking’ the police only gets us so far. When
+a particular ‘criminal problem’ (i.e. knife crime) is fixed
+onto a particular ‘criminal population’ (i.e. young black
+men), policing is racial and racist by definition. In this
+instance, aggressive stop-and-search policies, apparently
+targeting ‘knife crime’, but in practice primarily identifying ‘drugs offences’, are enforced against young people
+long familiar with heavy-handed, racist policing. None
+of this is likely to have any positive impact in reducing
+youth violence. But if the primary motivation for heavier
+
+36
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+policing is not preventing harm, but the symbolic demonstration of authority, order and discipline, then this is
+hardly surprising.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The response to ‘knife crime’ has not only been to conduct
+more stop and searches, but also to criminalise young
+people who are suspected of carrying knives. During the
+time we were writing this book, the government was legislating ‘knife-crime prevention orders’ (via the Offensive
+Weapons Act 2019), which like ASBOs before them
+operate without the due process protections of criminal
+law. Under these prevention orders, the police need only
+to convince a magistrate that an individual is ‘more likely
+than not’ to have carried a blade on at least two occasions.
+That is, the individual subject to a knife-crime prevention
+order does not need to have been convicted of carrying
+a knife, caught by police while carrying a knife, or even
+seen by a member of the public carrying a knife. Thus,
+the offences do not have to have been proven beyond
+reasonable doubt, only evidenced on a ‘balance of probabilities’, as more likely than not to have been committed, a
+much lower standard of proof.
+These prevention orders can be used against individuals as young as twelve – enforcing curfews and placing
+restrictions on where they can go, who they can associate
+with, and even imposing limitations on social media
+use, apparently to stop gang rivalries escalating online.10
+Young people merely suspected of knife carrying will thus
+be subject to limitations on their movements and associ-
+
+‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER
+
+◆
+
+37
+
+ations, and any breach of the order is a criminal offence
+that can result in up to two years in prison. A twelve year
+old might be accused of knife carrying based on police
+intelligence, receive a knife crime prevention order, and
+then risk incarceration if they travel to a certain area, meet
+with a particular friend or relative, or access Instagram or
+Snapchat. A moral panic centred on ‘knife crime’, a new
+category of crime, creates a new problem that is then
+subject to prevention and order.
+However, referring to these processes as criminalisation largely misses the point. These forms of control are
+pre-criminal, post-criminal or extra-criminal. Indeed,
+knife-crime prevention orders present obvious links with
+counter-terror policing (which involves intense online
+surveillance and the criminalisation of associations and
+sympathies) and immigration policy (which sees people
+deported because their removal is deemed ‘conducive to
+the public good’, or denied citizenship because they are
+deemed ‘more likely than not’ to be of ‘bad character’).
+The connection here between knife-crime prevention
+orders, counter-terror policing and immigration policy is
+that they all rely on expelling racialised people from the
+albeit limited protections of criminal law. Processes of
+racialisation are both cause and effect of this pre-criminalisation.
+In relation to ‘knife crime’, police and politicians have
+also turned, again, to the problem of ‘black culture’ – and
+this time the culprit is drill music (a subgenre of rap). The
+police have defined drill music as an apparent driver of the
+purported increase in ‘knife crime’, and then, borrowing
+from anti-gang initiatives used by the LAPD, have
+
+38
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+convinced judges to pass injunctions that prevent artists
+from referring to specific names, places or events in their
+lyrics, arguing that their mere mention would constitute
+an incitement of violence. Suspended sentences have been
+handed out to musicians with no criminal record, while
+the media have stoked moral panic around the genre,
+reproducing similar panics to those around rock and roll,
+reggae and grime music.11
+For example, Valentini, a rapper from Thurrock in
+Essex, had an injunction imposed that prevented him
+from wearing hoodies or face coverings and stipulated
+that he could not produce ‘any audio or video online that is
+threatening, abusive, insulting, incites violence, promotes
+criminal activity, shows weapons or makes reference to
+gang affiliations’.12 In late 2019, using a ‘rap translator’
+(a native informer perhaps?), the police were able to
+convince a court that Valentini had rapped about weapons
+in a newly released song. Valentini was then jailed for 19
+weeks as a result. What is important here is that the police
+were not able to present evidence of Valentini committing
+violent crime or selling drugs, but successfully argued that
+his music depicting these themes constituted guilt and
+demonstrated his involvement in ‘gang crime’. In another
+example, two drill rappers from Brixton, Skengdo and
+AM, were targeted by police and sections of the media.
+Following violence in south London, the rappers were
+banned from referring to any specific people, places or
+events. Detective Inspector Luke Williams of the Lambeth
+and Southwark Gang’s Unit confirmed: ‘The court found
+that violence in drill music can, and did in this case,
+amount to gang-related violence.’13 Some months later,
+
+‘KNIFE CRIME’: PREVENTION AND ORDER
+
+◆
+
+39
+
+after performing their song, ‘Attempted 1.0’, at a London
+concert in December 2018, the Metropolitan Police
+handed both rappers a two-year suspended sentence
+(meaning that if they were to offend during those two
+years, they would be incarcerated for nine months).
+In the policing of drill, we see again the evasion of due
+process protections and the extension of police powers
+through injunctions and pre-criminal modes of social
+control. The policing of sympathies and incitements,
+involving online surveillance and data capture, echoes
+the policing and (pre-)criminalisation of ‘terror suspects’.
+Indeed, the police reached for new powers precisely by
+labelling drill artists as terrorists.14 Like the anti-terror
+powers used in the UK’s anti-radicalisation policy, Prevent,
+these restrictions did not target violence or unlawful
+behaviour itself, but the alleged ‘promotion’ of such
+behaviour, in this case through artistic expression. Most
+pressingly for our argument, these authoritarian moves to
+control and police racialised threats, whether of the ‘black
+gang’ or the ‘Muslim terrorist’, are not distinct phenomena,
+but implicate and refer to one another. Counter-terror
+powers can be employed against drill artists, just as ideas
+about dangerous ‘gangs’ prove mutable in the context of
+widespread racial threat. We develop these points in the
+next chapter.
+By constructing ‘knife crime’ as both new and ‘on the
+rise’, the problem becomes something alien, something
+which descends on the respectable and law-abiding people
+of Britain from outside. And yet, these offences occur in
+British cities, committed by young men raised in Britain.
+In this way, ‘knife crime’ is both alien – unlike other kinds
+
+40
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+of street crime and violence – and yet cultivated in those
+uncontrolled spaces in the heart of the national territory,
+in urban centres, housing estates and black families. In
+this way ‘knife crime’ induces panic because it reminds
+‘decent’ and ‘hard-working’ Britons that their country is
+not their own and is not safe for their children. Criminal
+youth subcultures offer a dystopian vision of where the
+nation is headed. These fears invariably play on wider
+concerns about immigration – past and future – and
+fuel alarm surrounding demographic shifts and moral
+decline. These feelings of existential threat explain why
+‘knife crime’ becomes the main news story at a particular
+moment: not because of concern about young black
+men at risk of violence, but because the spectacle of that
+uncontrolled violence mobilises widespread anxieties
+over national identity, cultural difference and insecurity
+in ways that prove politically useful.
+
+CH APT E R T HR E E
+
+Gang Land
+
+Commander Jim Stokley, Scotland Yard’s most senior
+officer responding to gang crime, told The Times ‘there
+isn’t specific legislation’ for gangs, adding: ‘Clearly we
+can’t use terrorism legislation [but] in consultation with
+the CPS, we have found some existing legislation which
+we are going to use.’
+– ‘Police to treat gangs like terror suspects with
+tough new laws’, Telegraph, 30 May 20181
+
+As a cop I always used to stop and search, but now
+police live in fear of being called racist.
+– Andrew O’Hagan, Telegraph, 13 November 20182
+
+The spectre of the ‘gang’ has a long history in Britain.
+While it was long used to denote groups of outlaws in
+various forms, in the twentieth century the term became
+racialised through a number of interconnected problems,
+including Irish migration to the British mainland early in
+the century and later the policing of ‘gangs’ of dissidents in
+British colonies including Kenya and Malaya.3 In post-war
+Britain, the influence of American frames on race and
+racism bolstered concerns about ‘gangs’ of ‘coloured’
+criminals. By the twenty-first century, dispersal orders
+introduced by New Labour gave the police the power to
+
+42
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+break up gatherings larger than two, as both black and
+Asian youths came to symbolise Britain’s ‘gang’ problem.
+As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to
+a close, the media became fixated on ‘gangs’. London’s
+Evening Standard published investigative reports into
+the ‘Gangs of London’, while other regional newspapers
+decried the gangsters of ‘Gunchester’ and ‘Shottingham’
+(Manchester and Nottingham).4 These ‘gangs’ were represented by images of young black men, hooded, masked
+or in mugshots. None of this felt new necessarily, except
+perhaps in its intensity. For over a decade the police had
+lobbied for more power and weapons, implementing
+targeted programmes, such as Operation Trident, with
+the explicit aim of policing ‘gangs’ in black communities. These were accompanied by calls for longer prison
+sentences, massive increases in stop-and-search powers,
+and public hand-wringing about the breakdown of the
+nuclear family, the lack of suitable role models, and a justice
+system weakened by political correctness and concerns
+about human rights. We can trace these discourses on
+race, crime and disorder through Enoch Powell, Margaret
+Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Theresa May, and
+now Boris Johnson.
+However, it is worth pausing to question the specific
+work performed by the image of ‘the gang’. Crucially, ‘the
+gang’ mediates between the individual offender and the
+wider group from which they hail, with its alien culture,
+propensity to violence and incorrigible cultural difference.
+The inherently racial character of ‘the gang’ explains the
+flurry of policies and laws designed to identify, contain
+and criminalise ‘gangs’.
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+43
+
+Since 2012, the Metropolitan Police have been using
+a database called the Gangs Violence Matrix to identify,
+assess and measure potential harm and risk emanating
+from particular young people. This risk-assessment tool
+is designed to give the police a means of defining and
+ranking people described as ‘gang-associated’. However, it
+is not clear how someone gets on the Matrix, or how they
+get off it. What is clear is that the vast majority of those on
+the Gangs Matrix are black, which does not correspond to
+rates of ‘serious youth violence’.
+Researchers Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke analysed
+gangs policing in London, Nottingham and Greater
+Manchester. They found that 72 per cent of people on the
+London Gangs Matrix were black, while only 27 per cent of
+serious youth violence was committed by black people in
+London (the figures in Greater Manchester were starker:
+81 per cent of ‘gang members’ were black while only 6 per
+cent of serious youth violence was committed by black
+people).5 Amnesty International found that ‘40 per cent of
+people listed on the Matrix have no record of involvement
+in any violent offence in the past two years and 35 per cent
+have never committed any “serious offence”’.6
+As the same Amnesty report explains, the policing of
+gangs relies on online surveillance:
+The type of data collection that underpins the Gangs
+Matrix focuses law enforcement efforts disproportionately on black boys and young men. It erodes their
+right to privacy based on what may be nothing more
+than their associates in the area they grow up and how
+they express their subculture in music videos and social
+
+44
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+media posts. Officials in borough Gangs Units monitor
+the social media pages and online interactions of people
+they consider to be ‘at risk’ of gang involvement, interfering with the privacy of a much larger group of people
+than those involved in any kind of wrongdoing.
+Here we see the use of social media analysis and online
+surveillance within contemporary policing practices. The
+use of big data reflects the wider turn towards predictive
+policing technologies. As others have noted, the opacity of
+policing combined with the opacity of machine-learning
+algorithms portends troubling times ahead for those
+concerned with limiting the reach of the state.7
+Being gang-identified, despite the absence of substantive
+evidence, can have significant implications beyond the
+criminal justice system. Information on ‘gang associations’
+is regularly shared between government agencies, which
+can impact the ability of an individual, and their family,
+to access social housing, education and welfare benefits.
+Increasingly, for those who lack British citizenship, police
+intelligence on ‘suspected gang involvement’ is used to
+build deportation cases, often against individuals who
+moved to the UK as infants, and who have no criminal
+record, but who it is decided on a ‘balance of probabilities’
+are more likely than not to have committed crimes. Under
+a policy called Operation Nexus, many people have been
+deported on the basis of such ‘non-convictions’.8
+While the ‘gang’ is used to construct racialised forms of
+suspect criminality, it also makes possible certain forms
+of collective punishment, especially in criminal cases
+involving ‘Joint Enterprise’. Joint Enterprise is ‘a doctrine
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+45
+
+of common law which has been developed by the courts
+in cases where more than one person is to be prosecuted
+for the same offence’, the logic being that if a group of
+people were ‘in it together’, and had ‘common purpose’ in
+conspiring to commit crime together, they should be held
+collectively responsible. This means that people can be
+held liable for crimes committed by other people, even if
+they were not present when the crime was committed. This
+has particular implications for young black men identified
+as belonging to ‘a gang’, and many Joint Enterprise cases
+rely on invoking ‘the gang’ as the narrative thread for
+such ‘common purpose’. This is worrying when the very
+definition of ‘gangs’ through police intelligence is both
+empirically flimsy and heavily racialised.9
+To give one example, in Manchester in 2016 a teenager
+was stabbed to death in Moss Side. Thirteen young men
+and boys were charged with his killing; eleven were sent
+to prison, with seven sentenced to life for murder (one
+of them had remained in his car during the fight, and
+another was twenty metres away when the stabbing took
+place), and four convicted of manslaughter. In this case,
+like many others, it was the image of ‘the gang’ that held
+the prosecution’s argument together, weaving together a
+case from patchy evidence, but successfully persuading
+the judge to ignore the simple claim made by all the
+defendants: that they were not part of a gang and thus
+there was no ‘common purpose’.
+Unsurprisingly, the number of black people serving
+custodial sentences for Joint Enterprise convictions –
+mostly for murder with sentences of over 15 years – is
+highly disproportionate. While the incarceration of black
+
+46
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+people in Britain is already more disproportionate than
+in the US, the rate for Joint Enterprise cases is even more
+striking. For those convicted under Joint Enterprise at
+the time of writing, 57.4 per cent are black and minority
+ethnic (37.7 per cent black/black British, 4.7 per cent
+Asian and 15.5 per cent mixed race). Non-white people
+also serve longer sentences under Joint Enterprise than
+white groups, and ‘the gang’ is invoked much more often
+to justify their ‘common purpose’. According to Patrick
+Williams and Becky Clarke, who surveyed 241 prisoners
+convicted under Joint Enterprise laws, over three quarters
+of the black and brown interviewees (78.9 per cent)
+reported that references to ‘gangs’ featured in their cases
+in court, whereas only 38.5 per cent of white interviewees
+had ‘the gang’ mentioned in their cases. Moreover, 97 per
+cent of those who reported that ‘gangs’ were introduced in
+court disputed the ‘gang’ label and ‘dismissed it as untrue,
+a “made up” feature of the prosecution’s argument’.10
+Because ‘gangs’, like other fears around crime and
+disorder, concern ‘black youth’, a set of seasoned arguments about black cultural pathology find renewed
+articulation. The racialisation of ‘black Britons’, especially
+African-Caribbeans, has long operated through ideas
+about ‘cultural deprivation’. Perhaps more urgently, these
+cultures of criminality and outlawry are seen to be contagious, as sometimes appealing to white Britons, visible
+in the fact that multi-racial urban cultures seem particularly shaped by black cultural forms. In short, ‘black
+criminality’ is a reflection of cultures which themselves
+might poison other young people living in urban Britain,
+and this is another factor motivating heavy-handed
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+47
+
+punishment. Ideas about black culture as contagion have
+a long history, as does the appeal of black cultural forms
+within youth culture. Perhaps black cultural forms do have
+greater appeal to wider British society – not as poison but
+as inspiration – following the retreat of the welfare state
+and the concomitant waning of political legitimacy. As
+Stormzy’s intervention in electoral politics in November
+2019 reminds us, there is good reason for the Conservative
+Party and its backers to be concerned that these energies
+might one day be organised into more effective support
+for social democracy.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The Conservative Party Manifesto of November 2019
+should be read with these cases in mind. Where it
+promises to provide 10,000 more prison places, and to
+ensure that serious criminals receive tougher punishments – ending automatic release at the halfway point for
+example – we can predict where the heavy punishment
+will fall. It was Boris Johnson as Mayor of London who
+announced plans to punish gangs collectively for the acts
+of individual members, even when Joint Enterprise was
+not being pursued by prosecutors.11 This racist collective
+punishment gets justified through the discursive and
+cultural work performed by ‘the gang’. As we have argued,
+‘the gang’ works incredibly well to justify the most severe
+punishments available to the British state: the curtailment
+of civil liberties (such as freedom of movement and
+self-expression), life imprisonment and, in the case of
+non-citizens, permanent exile.
+
+48
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+However, while there is a particular history to its racialisation as black, ‘the gang’ is a highly mobile and protean
+signifier of racial otherness which can be qualified in
+other ways. There are Albanian, Somali and Asian gangs,
+and ‘illegal immigration’ is blamed on ‘trafficking gangs’
+and ‘gang-masters’. Perhaps most visibly, child sexual
+exploitation has been blamed on ‘Pakistani grooming
+gangs’, which have become the most visceral marker of
+anti-Muslim sentiment in British politics. We discuss
+‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ at length in Part 3 of the book,
+but it is important to note here that this concern about
+‘grooming gangs’ reveals a wider set of crises and contestations over gender, sexuality and culture.
+The ‘Pakistani grooming gang’ has been mobilised as
+a unique and existential threat to white girls, rehashing
+familiar fears of miscegenation, paedophilia and the
+civilisationist rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’. The far-right
+has made political capital out of the organised abuse of
+young women and girls by claiming that white men need
+to protect their women from this alien threat, further
+arguing that the state has been weakened by political correctness. Alongside this reading of ‘grooming gangs’, there
+has been a more liberal concern over the anti-feminist
+and anti-LGBT positions of Britain’s Muslim communities
+themselves. The ‘grooming gang’ encapsulates here the
+depraved sexualities of Muslim men, whose male pathology
+is seen to be nurtured by ethnic segregation, patriarchal
+family structures and by Islam itself. Meanwhile, the
+‘black gang’ is also seen to be an effect of deficient masculinities, particularly with reference to ‘absent fathers’
+and a ‘lack of good role models’, which then produce the
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+49
+
+violent and nihilistic expressions of masculinity exhibited
+by those wayward and rootless teenagers carrying knives
+and producing drill music.
+It is hardly surprising that the racialisation of particular
+‘folk devils’ works through gender and sexuality, and that
+figurations of ‘the gang’ seem well placed to capture the
+group threat. However, what is particularly threatening
+about ‘the gang’ is that it represents an alternative form
+of social organisation. Part of this racial threat presented
+by black people, Muslims and various racial Others
+relies, therefore, not only on individual wrongdoing but
+on what that wrongdoing supposedly tells us about the
+group. These collective threats to the nation are imagined
+to play by their own, different, rules, and therefore to be
+acculturated within some other moral order and system
+of authority, embedded in an alternative and unknowable
+form of social organisation – both dangerous and
+seductive. As well as the ‘grooming gangs’ themselves,
+gangs involved in ‘knife crime’, county lines drug dealing,
+or terrorist cells each do their own kinds of ‘grooming’
+– with their own lexicon, imagery and sinister system of
+values. This produces the conviction that this alternative
+system should at the very least be visible to the state and
+the nation, giving birth to an industry of interpreters,
+investigators, rehabilitators and enforcers, in a typically
+colonial/anthropological mode.
+Importantly, these alternative forms of social organisation become particularly threatening at a time of
+waning political legitimacy and nationalist resurgence.
+And so Muslims must condemn terrorism and confirm
+their commitment to tolerance, democracy and the rule
+
+50
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+of law. Black people must ‘disprove stereotypes’, while
+stressing their claim to the Commonwealth and therefore
+to British citizenship and belonging. Immigrants must
+speak English, learn ‘British values’, and pass the Life in
+the UK test. This compulsory demand to perform loyalty
+to the nation symbolically guards against ‘home-grown
+terrorism’, ‘grooming gangs’ and ‘knife crime’ among
+other things, but it is clearly connected to the broader
+realisation that many people in Britain are finding sources
+of authority and belonging elsewhere. People are not
+comporting themselves in accordance with the ideals of
+nationalist respectability, which is why David Cameron’s
+‘muscular liberalism’ professed that it was not enough
+merely to abide by the law – citizens must actively invest
+in Britishness itself. The British state demands a monopoly
+on the legitimate use of grooming.
+There is a recognisable colonial lineage to these dynamics. Alternative currents of power have, from colonial
+contexts to modern multicultural Britain, been tolerated
+by the state if they organised people into productive work
+relations and respectable family structures. Indirect rule
+and multiculturalism both rely on respecting cultural
+leaders and customary law so long as this does not challenge the ultimate authority of the British government.
+This managerial calibration of difference is what the
+‘British value’ of tolerance amounts to. When racialised
+groups present more substantive challenges to state
+authority, however – when they protest, riot and resist –
+they can then be suppressed legitimately, and the British
+state can remain virtuous in the face of ungrateful and
+uncivilised groups. Equally, it was colonialism which used
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+51
+
+race to determine who was worthy of the law – and who
+was subject to civil law and who to martial law. Colonial
+regimes also produced propertied white men as the individual bearers of rights, while racially inferior groups
+could be subject to collective punishment without any
+concern for due process rights.
+‘Gang crime’, ‘knife crime’ and ‘radicalisation’ are not, it
+is worth restating, criminal offences in themselves. They
+are categories of crime, produced by melding together a
+collection of already existing offences, popular fears and
+racist images. The definitions of ‘the gang’ or of ‘extremism’
+remain so fluid and ambiguous that they allow for the
+production of suspect communities, rather than individual
+suspects. Black working-class boys – in both urban areas
+where policing is most prevalent and in more rural areas
+(particularly since the rise in ‘county lines’ policing) – are
+all potential gang members. Muslims from a range of
+ethnic backgrounds, of all age groups from primary school
+upwards, are assumed to be potentially ‘radicalised’ and
+susceptible to ‘extremism’. Non-citizens, and indeed all of
+us, must prove our right to reside before renting a house,
+taking up employment or visiting the doctor – we are all
+perpetually demonstrating our ‘legality’. Surveillance and
+data-gathering technologies enacted through the Gangs
+Matrix, Prevent and the immigration system advance
+the pre-emptive policing of racialised populations. The
+Muslim, the immigrant and the black become subject
+to collective punishment precisely because their criminality and deviance represent an existential threat, and
+narratives on ‘the gang’ are fundamental to the production
+of this feeling of siege. Muslims want to overthrow liberal
+
+52
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+democracy and impose an alternative religious order,
+while young black people threaten our safety and civility
+while seducing urban white working-class youth to their
+ways.
+Politicians are right when they observe that the nation is
+losing its lustre for many young people, but most often it
+is not displaced by any coherent alternative form. Instead,
+we have individualised media environments, in which
+social and timeline media determine cultural value(s).
+Relatedly, public institutions and public spaces have been
+decimated, and it is corporations that increasingly define
+where we go, what we see and how we feel, organising
+social and cultural life in ways beyond the reach of the
+hollowed-out state. In this context, the reaction of the state
+to the ‘gang’, in its many incarnations, illustrates that its
+authority is threatened. In responding to various pressures
+on its legitimacy, law-and-order policing is used both to
+repress alternative currents of power and to replace the
+state influence formerly occupied by the welfare system.
+In this way, the policing of gangs is a kind of displacement
+from the wider concerns about waning state authority and
+governmental legitimacy. As a result, it is hard to imagine
+how the state would define itself, in terms of a necessary
+defence of the nation, without ‘knife crime’, ‘terrorism’
+and ‘mass migration’ – especially when war has become so
+unpopular in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. With the
+abandonment of welfarism, the state’s main purpose and
+promise is to keep us safe. This promise of security underwrites the authoritarianism and militarism of political
+culture at this moment of crisis, as we discuss in Part 4.
+
+GANG LAND
+
+◆
+
+53
+
+Importantly, it seems to us that ‘gangs’ are central to
+several different configurations of racial threat. The
+construction of migrants, criminals, terrorists and sex
+offenders as members of ‘gangs’ works to racialise the
+source of danger, emphasising that alternative modes of
+social organisation fuel violence and criminality. This
+then licenses the exclusion of particular populations
+from legal protections and due process rights (through,
+e.g., knife-crime prevention orders, control orders, deprivation of citizenship and deportation). Law has always
+operated to segment the population into those who can be
+saved, rehabilitated, protected or included, and those who
+cannot. Those excluded from legal protection become
+the defining boundary of ‘state responsibility’. Today, the
+racialisation of national insecurity licenses wider moves to
+expand executive power and circumvent the meagre protections afforded by the independent judiciary, thereby
+transforming the state and the fundamental practices
+through which it gets defined. It is worth keeping in mind
+that by highlighting the authoritarian nature of the state,
+we are not valorising the liberal state’s laws and practices
+of previous decades. Rather, we are seeking to trace transformations in how the political is delineated and therefore
+what new forms of authoritarian power become possible in
+their wake. It is in this vein that the chapters which follow
+in Part 2 seek to trace the form and content of nationalist
+appeal in Britain today.
+
+PART 2
+
+The Persistence of Nationalism
+
+C HAPTE R F O UR
+
+Nationalist Convulsions
+
+[T]he word we used to use was sovereignty. It’s about
+self-government. It’s about identity. It’s about whether
+we are a proper nation or not. This is about us governing
+our country, it’s about us controlling our borders ... We
+need to be saying ‘we want our country back’. And we’re
+going to get it. And June 23 is going to be Independence
+Day.
+– Nigel Farage, April 2016
+
+If politics in the West is ever to return to normal
+rather than becoming even more polarized, white
+interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very
+controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white
+group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an
+era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is
+absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.
+– Professor Eric Kaufmann, author of Whiteshift1
+
+As we were completing this work, the dangerous forces
+of nationalism were all too apparent. The heart-breaking
+2019 general election saw the resurrection of an overtly
+nationalistic and racist government led by Boris Johnson.
+The right was consolidated as the Tory Party swept up the
+votes of erstwhile UKIP and Brexit Party voters. Johnson’s
+
+58
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+government took victory with the enthusiastic endorsement of Trump, following a political playbook influenced,
+if not scripted, by Steve Bannon. More broadly, as the
+troubled decade of the twenty-teens has ended, the full
+violence of exclusionary nationalisms has been unleashed
+across the globe – with re-education camps for Uighur
+Muslims in China, and the spectre of mass internment
+and statelessness targeting Muslims in India. Meanwhile,
+in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi defended the genocidal
+violence against the Rohingya as a matter of national
+security, and in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s
+popular campaign to harden the eastern flank of Fortress
+Europe has trapped people on the border, starving in
+camps. The richest nation on earth continues to cage
+children at its border, and while the infrastructure for this
+violence was developed during the ‘liberal years’ of Clinton
+and Obama (as well as Bush), the aggressive and spectacular violation of racialised Others is absolutely central to
+Trump’s mode of governance in the USA. Comparable
+regimes in Brazil under Bolsonaro, and Turkey under
+Erdogan, point to the wider set of alliances and confluences being forged between authoritarian strongmen and
+their ultra-nationalist mandates.
+In this chapter we focus on the British story, considering the stubborn allure of nationalism in British political
+culture. Importantly, appeals to the nation transcend neat
+political divisions of left and right. Although as a group
+we do not subscribe to a singular ‘line’, we all approach the
+pull of nationalism with scepticism, even in its welfarist
+incarnations. Historically, the British nation has only
+ever existed with colonies and has therefore constructed
+
+NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS
+
+◆
+
+59
+
+a national identity through a triumphalist sense of its own
+imperial greatness, in which the British national character
+is defined in opposition to the uncivilised nature of
+colonial subjects. British nationalism necessarily relies on
+the structured and purposeful forgetting of the violence
+and domination that characterised empire, while simultaneously lamenting the loss of global power and prestige
+when Britannia ruled the waves. Perversely, in the context
+of Brexit, the Leave side were able to narrate the UK’s
+membership in the European Union as one of colonial
+subjugation: Boris Johnson claimed the EU ‘relegated
+Britain to the status of a colony’, and Nigel Farage hailed
+the referendum result as Britain’s ‘Independence Day’.
+This distinctly British, or more accurately English, mix of
+colonial amnesia, nostalgia and melancholia underwrites
+the persistence of racism in British political and cultural
+life and explains the profound longing for authority,
+repression and the expulsion of racialised outsiders that
+this book charts. Put most simply, the history of this
+political and social formation means that British nationalism is unavoidably racial and racist, and any attempts to
+repurpose it for progressive or leftist ends are myopic and
+dangerous (see Chapter 5).
+Others have gone into far greater detail demonstrating
+how British nationalism and racism are co-constitutive,
+with Paul Gilroy remarking that ‘British nationalism
+cannot be purged of its racialized contents any more easily
+than a body can be purged of the skeleton that supports
+it.’2 More recently, social theorist Sivamohan Valluvan has
+argued that European colonial legacies mean ‘Western
+nation-making projects render race an inevitable and
+
+60
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+indispensable presence that is continually remade.’3 As he
+argues, the nation’s content, its inside, only gains meaning
+and substance through what it excludes, the outside. The
+challenge for us, then, is to theorise racism in relation
+to the shifting work performed by nationalism, which
+remains dangerous and persistent precisely because it
+successfully appeals to various political constituencies
+and imaginaries – including sadly on the left. There is
+no salvation in left nationalisms. However, in our view,
+sometimes the desire to name and centre race can obscure
+the centrality of nationalism to contemporary racisms. In
+other words, a willingness to talk about race sometimes
+forecloses a more careful analysis of the politics of nation.
+In some cases this encourages a politics of representation
+and inclusion that, as we argue, bolsters rather than
+challenges nationalist rhetorics.
+Unlike some other states, Britain struggles to pin
+down its definitive nation-building moment. As a result,
+nationalistic nostalgia may be referencing quite different
+incarnations of the nation (although this is true for most
+nationalisms). Sometimes it is the apparently austere
+Victorian values championed at the height of imperial
+power, but more often it is the euphoria of victory in the
+Second World War and the boom years that followed. The
+post-war establishment of the NHS and Britain’s welfare
+state can therefore associate the nationalism of war with
+the humanity underpinned by the social democratic
+reforms that followed it, not to mention the defeat of
+Nazism. This nostalgia, then, is not only for an imagined
+national greatness, but also for a time when the state could
+really do something, really police behaviour, really embody
+
+NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS
+
+◆
+
+61
+
+patriarchal authority, and really act on the world stage.
+For this reason, the remaking of state practices – which
+have become increasingly defined by cruelty, neglect and
+austerity – is experienced, culturally, as a diminution of
+national status. In other words, the moment of English
+nationalism that finds form through Brexit takes the
+disruption and disappointment of state neglect and
+rearticulates it as an outcome of national decline. In an
+echo of other English and British nationalisms, this
+iteration of nationalism includes a strange amalgamation
+of anti-elitism with a longing for authoritarianism.
+In this nostalgia, there is a desire for the state to
+demonstrate its power in a manner that we, the citizenaudience, can understand. This power is not necessarily
+coercive, but it is always firm. There remains a collective
+memory of a state – the welfare state – whose interventions
+demonstrated understanding and care, a state that sought
+to provide the healthcare, housing and education we
+all wanted. But this power was also authoritative. It
+instilled values and, when necessary, imposed law and
+order, meting out the justice we deserved. Some of the
+eruptions of racialised panic we describe in this book
+circle back to this nostalgia for an imagined powerful,
+competent state. The repetitive quest for a ‘progressive’
+nationalism is therefore perhaps best understood as a
+response to the widely circulated view that something has
+been lost. This view of the nation, which frames it as an
+almost empty vessel into which progressive, rather than
+reactionary, policies can be poured, means that demands
+to provide more funding for police officers on our streets
+are considered a simple defence of essential, benevolent,
+
+62
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+public services, rather than calls bound up in the violent
+project of nation-building.
+While it remains clear that the gains of the welfare
+system – council housing, free education and universal
+healthcare – are being eroded, these material losses are
+often combined with other narratives of cultural loss and
+national decline. This register of loss attaches most strongly
+to the mythic ‘white working class’, who are understood to
+have been ‘left behind’ by globalisation. The formulation
+of the ‘left behind’ is framed as a loss not simply to the
+gain of elites, but also to the gain of ethnic outsiders who
+have been favoured by political correctness and reverse
+discrimination. The suggestion that ‘multiculturalism’ has
+been imposed on a native population by the elite, without
+discussion or consent, echoes long-standing far-right
+narratives which present ‘the elite’ as predominantly
+Jewish, conspiring to dilute or eradicate the apparent
+whiteness of the indigenous working class by encouraging
+immigration and multiculturalism.
+While ‘the great replacement’ theory is a far-right
+ideological repertoire, similar arguments find voice
+through political demography, the most respectable form
+of scientific racism in our times. Respected professors
+with prominent media profiles publish popular books
+on the ‘legitimate concerns’ of white majorities faced
+with demographic decline.4 In order to understand the
+stubborn persistence of these nativist currents – whether
+conservative and traditionalist, or liberal and even leftist
+– it is necessary to introduce the cast of characters British
+nationalism seeks to organise. To do so, we should return
+
+NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS
+
+◆
+
+63
+
+to the paradigmatic expression of this drama: Enoch
+Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+In a Birmingham speech calling for an end to ‘coloured’
+immigration, forewarning the scourge of black criminality
+and announcing the moral decline of the nation, Powell
+helped to reinvigorate English racism and fascism. He
+claimed that ‘the decent, ordinary Englishman’, the rightful
+protagonist of the national drama, faced an existential
+threat, as a deluge of immigrants, enabled by a mischievous Labour government, threatened his livelihood, his
+culture and his autonomy. The element of Powell’s speech
+that continues to resonate is the story he tells of Britain
+as a nation under threat, and the dichotomy he sets up
+between the ‘ordinary working man’ – white and a citizen
+– and the migrant worker. The migrant always remains
+both racialised and outside of Britain’s national story,
+regardless of the rights granted to Commonwealth and
+colony subjects by the 1948 British Nationality Act, and
+the centuries of military, economic, social and political
+connections forged by empire. Indeed, for Powell, black
+and brown Britons born in the UK would remain migrants
+(and so we remain: second and third generation migrants
+still). Though Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was viewed
+by many of his contemporaries as a blatant and embarrassing expression of racism, in its long afterlife it has been
+transformed into an apocryphal story of globalisation.5
+Powell’s famous anecdote has become an enduring story
+that goes something like this:
+
+64
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain a
+full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination
+between one citizen and another, and he was granted
+the same rights as every other citizen, from the right to
+vote to the right to free treatment under the National
+Health Service. But while for the immigrant entry to this
+country was an admission to privileges and opportunities,
+the implications for the existing population were not so
+rosy. For reasons they could not comprehend, ‘ordinary
+Englishmen’ found themselves made ‘strangers in their
+own country’. They found their wives unable to obtain
+hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain
+school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed
+beyond recognition and their plans and prospects for
+the future thwarted. At work they found that employers
+hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards
+of discipline and competence required of the native-born
+worker. These ordinary Englishmen began to hear, as time
+went by, more and more voices which told them they were
+now unwanted.
+The story has three main characters. The first is
+the migrant – who may not technically be any more
+of a ‘migrant’ than someone moving from Cardiff to
+Canterbury, but is a migrant in the sense of being a
+racialised outsider. The migrant has been gifted the opportunity to escape the inevitable destitution of the kind that
+befalls his countrymen ‘back home’, and he now hopes to
+enjoy the comforts of Western life – which he did not build
+and to which he is not inherently entitled. The second
+character is the ‘global/metropolitan elite’ – the bosses,
+the government, the PC brigade – whose unexplained
+
+NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS
+
+◆
+
+65
+
+affinity for immigrants, whether it be metropolitan ‘virtue
+signalling’ or employer demand for cheap and exploitable
+labour, has led to Britain’s undoing. The final character is
+the white native: Powell compellingly centred ‘the decent,
+ordinary fellow Englishman’, what some among the contemporary right, as well as the centre and left, now call
+the traditional working class or, better yet, the ‘left behind’.
+It is at the expense of these respectable and indigenous
+Englishmen that the processes of post-war migration and
+multiculturalism have wrought their disruption.
+In order to make way for these racial aliens, the white
+citizen had to lose out – losing their industrialised jobs
+to outsourcing and undercutting foreign workers, their
+high streets to foreign shops and foreign crowds, and
+their safety and security to ‘black crime’. The majority
+lost control of how their country looks and feels – and,
+fast-forwarding to 2016, it was the language of sovereignty which fuelled the campaign of those who wanted
+their country back. In this story, Powellism is reheated to
+suggest that immigrant workers are the nefarious winners
+of neoliberal globalisation; their coalition with the global
+and political elite has left the white citizen-worker behind.
+Perhaps it is this last part of the story that resonates most
+sharply with sections of the left – where the exclusion of
+immigrants is enlisted primarily to defend and revalorise
+the native worker.
+Central to the Powellist narrative is the claim that
+‘races’, or civilisations, exist in irreconcilable silos. Fixed
+in their immutable difference, they must compete with
+one another for scarce resources. This zero-sum-game
+logic has infused racism since Powell’s fateful interven-
+
+66
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+tion. During the apparently ‘liberal’ years of Blair and
+Cameron, Britain went about this management of difference more politely: through the language of integration,
+British values, security and fiscal responsibility. Britain’s
+political establishment became slick advocates of a putatively modern, liberal nationalism, attempting to weave
+seamlessly between multicultural inclusivity and the muscular exclusivity of nationalism. Powellism remained an
+implicit anchor, but one which could remain submerged
+except at crisis points, such as the 7/7 bombings or the
+2011 riots, where the ungrateful children of Commonwealth migrants were once again in the spotlight as an
+existential danger to the nation. Cameron, nonetheless,
+tried to maintain a crisper, more corporate vision of the
+nation, setting his own party up as an antidote to the
+bigoted ramblings of the tabloid press and the ‘fruitcakes,
+loonies and closet racists’ of UKIP, as he described them.
+It was, perhaps, his underestimation of the potency rather
+than the absurdity of Powellite nationalism that precipitated Cameron calling a referendum on Britain’s EU
+membership, a vote which he and his allies in New Labour
+were confident they would win.
+As blind to the power of British nationalism as some
+of their adversaries on the progressive left, the Remain
+establishment (in its Tory, Labour and other incarnations)
+was as surprised by the resurgence of a presumed-dead
+Powellism as they were by the Leave victory in the EU
+referendum. For New Labour, neoliberal multiculturalism
+– the promotion of a colour-blind take on Thatcherism’s
+meritocratic promise – was generally seen as an effective
+antidote to Powellite racism, which was framed primarily
+
+NATIONALIST CONVULSIONS
+
+◆
+
+67
+
+as narrow-minded ‘intolerance’ of other cultures which
+could be educated or legislated away. Even after Cameron
+declared multiculturalism a failure,6 the Remain alliance
+still presumed the political project of a monocultural
+nation to be a thing of the past. How wrong they were. The
+rest, as we know, is history. After the EU referendum, and
+the elections which followed, naked nationalism moved
+from supporting actor to leading role. As a result, many
+liberal and even left-wing actors now set their sights on
+reforming rather than defeating nationalism – a point we
+discuss in the next chapter.
+Falling back on the familiarity of nationalism, then, is
+not confined to party politics. The longing for the anchor
+of nationalism, with its heady mythologies and promise
+of a shared emotional world, extends notably to socialists and anti-racists. As we warn, however, the attempt to
+reform nationalism, or to develop a ‘progressive patriotism’ that can render progressive policies more appealing
+to ‘traditional voters’, is a dangerous strategy. There is no
+nationalist appeal without nostalgia and loss, and as Owen
+Hatherley rightly reminds us: ‘whenever the left thinks it
+can turn the past to its own advantage, it is outplayed by
+the right’.7 In the next chapter, we develop this critique of
+‘progressive patriotism’.
+
+C HAPTE R F I VE
+
+Progressive Patriotism
+
+To win back the ex-industrial towns where people have
+turned out in large numbers for Farage, Labour needs
+to talk about more than economics. It needs to fight
+personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour
+and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights
+racism. It needs to sideline all voices who believe having
+a strong national security policy is somehow ‘imperialist’. It needs to forget scrapping Trident. The reluctance
+to speak this language this is, I believe, what left Labour
+over-reliant on triangulating to accommodate the proBrexit views of some voters in these towns.
+– Paul Mason1
+
+Nationalism is never simply a means to other political
+ends, not least left collectivism. Nationalism is always,
+in the final instance, about its own exclusionary racisms
+– anything else is a convenient bedfellow rallied to make
+its appeal more likely.
+– Sivamohan Valluvan2
+
+In this chapter, we consider the puzzling and yet continuing appeal of nationalism for the progressive and
+anti-racist left, despite the many horrors unleashed by
+nationalist forces in our time. Most of all, we try to unpack
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+69
+
+what is at stake in the various calls for a ‘progressive
+nationalism/patriotism’. Such calls have been particularly
+insistent in the United Kingdom, despite, or perhaps due
+to, the uneasy binding of nations that are ‘united’ in this
+overarching ‘nation’. Yet the explicitly stated goal of the
+Scottish Nationalist Party – to hold another referendum
+on Scottish independence and secede from the United
+Kingdom – is only intermittently included in musings on
+the progressive potential of a differently imagined nationalism. Similarly, the political aspirations of Northern
+Ireland seem far away from the attempts to remake Britishness in a manner that can encompass the multicultural.
+Given these peculiar silences, we can presume that when
+British commentators propose a progressive nationalism,
+they mean a nationalism that can include and perhaps
+even embrace black and brown people, rather than a
+nationalism that addresses and resolves the challenges of
+the union. So, if talk of progressive nationalism must be
+understood as talk about race, ironically, it is also simultaneously a refusal to acknowledge the unresolved and
+volatile issues which continue to unsettle this nation of
+nations.
+In the previous chapter we emphasised the importance
+of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech for setting the terms
+of debate on issues surrounding race and immigration
+in British politics. It is on the discursive terrain shaped
+by Powellism that attempts at liberal and left nationalisms compete with their authoritarian counterparts.
+While New Labour’s use of focus groups and the processes
+of population segmentation perfected by corporate
+marketing teams might look rather quaint against our
+
+70
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+new algorithmic horizons, the habit of viewing the electorate as divided into tidy sociological categories has come
+with disastrous effects, not least in shoring up the view
+that people’s beliefs and desires are inherent rather than
+shaped by political processes. For New Labour, this view
+birthed the myth of triangulation: the idea that one simply
+had to promise policies that would mediate between
+two data points, a third way, thereby appealing to a large
+enough cross-section of the electorate to win an election.
+It is in this attempt to find a third way between nationalism and anti-racist socialism that the left too often paints
+itself into a corner.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The basic premise of the progressive nationalist argument is
+that patriotism is at once desirable and a basic, immovable
+fact of the British national psyche. The problem for progressive nationalists is that the right (and worse, the
+far-right) have obtained a political monopoly on its use
+and thus fill it with regressive or conservative content.
+Race and racism play a key role in the construction of
+this argument. The right’s nationalism is problematic for
+the progressive nationalist because it is used to articulate
+nativism, racism, jingoism, xenophobia, etc.
+Rather than interrogating how the nation has become
+the primary mechanism through which racism is articulated in Britain, progressive nationalists instead tell us
+we simply need to fill this signifier with new, progressive,
+maybe even anti-racist content. In fact, they argue that not
+doing so is precisely the reason why right-wing nation-
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+71
+
+alism is winning this particular ideological battle. In The
+Progressive Patriot, Billy Bragg put it thus: ‘Reluctant to
+make any concessions to reactionary nationalism, we
+have, by default, created a vacuum, leaving it to the likes of
+the BNP and the Daily Mail to decide who does and who
+doesn’t belong here.’3 More recently Zoe Williams wrote:
+‘bad nationalism’, the suspicious and anti-immigrant
+kind, the ‘hostile environment’ kind, the static kind,
+the kind that, out of nowhere, thinks sovereignty is the
+burning issue of the day and that building a wall will
+solve anything, thrives not because the majority secretly
+thought this all along, but because there is no countervailing narrative of ‘good nationalism’.4
+A key part of the progressive nationalist argument is
+therefore about changing the national story Britain tells
+of itself. This, we are told, will allow for a patriotism no
+longer grounded in the love of British (white) supremacy
+but instead found in histories of working-class solidarity
+and social justice. Williams described this as ‘Danny Boyle
+Nationalism’ in reference to the ‘radical’ and ‘inclusive’
+story told by Boyle in the opening ceremony of the 2012
+London Olympics. Here, the ‘Greatness’ of Britain was
+retold through the abolition of slavery, the Suffragettes,
+the making of the NHS, the arrival of SS Empire Windrush,
+and J.K. Rowling.
+However, such ‘radical’ re-imaginations of British
+history have produced an uneasy consensus across the
+political spectrum. In the aftermath of the 2019 general
+election, Labour MP Liam Byrne diagnosed Labour’s
+
+72
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+electoral defeat as rooted in its inability to contend with
+‘the allure of patriotism’ and emphasised its importance
+in reviving support for the Labour Party. Curiously, a few
+weeks later, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP, also
+suggested Labour’s electoral defeat could be explained
+by Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of patriotism. In their interventions, both Byrne and Hannan expressed a pride in the
+Levellers, Chartists and the Suffragettes.5 The invocation
+of radical history in the service of patriotism is clearly not
+restricted to the left, then. Indeed, in 2014, on winning
+the parliamentary seat for Rochdale for the right-wing UK
+Independence Party (UKIP), MP Mark Reckless declared
+that his party stood in the tradition of the Levellers and
+Chartists, adding, ‘The radical tradition, which has stood
+and spoken for the working class, has found a new home
+in UKIP.’
+That explicitly racist and xenophobic political forces
+have been able to cash-in on ‘progressive’ articulations of
+nationalism should perhaps give left-wing advocates pause
+for thought. Indeed, this cross-party consensus betrays
+the racial work performed by nationalist discourses. Each
+offer selective readings of British history where the nation’s
+constitutive imperial violences are suppressed precisely
+to enable feelings of pride and love. Whereas right-wing
+nationalism practices an imperial nostalgia, progressive
+nationalism appears to depend on imperial aphasia – a
+deliberate forgetting of a colonial past. At the same time,
+the histories that make the cut of progressive nationalist narratives tend to erase ostensibly ‘working-class’ or
+‘radical’ movements that placed the imperial-national
+formation of Britain itself into question.6 We are encour-
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+73
+
+aged to remember the Chartists but not the Mau Mau; the
+Suffragettes but not the British Black Panther Party.
+The allure of progressive patriotism therefore relies on a
+set of assumptions about the value of differently racialised
+people; foreigners are placed outside of progressive narratives of a nation supposedly grounded in working-class
+solidarity. These foreigners might be included as desirable
+and redeemable, but only when placed in the service of
+the nation. When they do not perform this function, they
+remain undesirable or unseen. In turn, the existence of
+the nation and its reproduction is placed beyond question
+or challenge, especially when that challenge is expressed
+by Britain’s Others. Progressive nationalism, in spite of
+its disavowals of xenophobia and its celebration of multi­
+culturalism, reproduces an imperial ordering of British
+politics.
+The ideological contortions of progressive nationalism
+are most clearly visible in contemporary debates around
+immigration. Indeed, the ‘progressive’ often comes to
+a battle over nationalism armed with little more than a
+paternalistic notion of immigration as the source of some
+welcome ‘cultural diversity’ and, more importantly, a
+seemingly bottomless ‘migrant work ethic’ that runs our
+economy. In this fashion, the left finds itself using the
+same playbook as the so-called centre. As a ‘Remainer’ on
+the BBC’s Question Time asked, ‘If we stop migration, who
+will serve us our coffees in Pret?’ While ostensibly offering
+a sensible pro-migrant position, such interventions articulate colonial logics of value extraction, whereby racialised
+Others are allowed to survive on the condition that they
+
+74
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+service our consumption requirements, or clean up our
+(sometimes literal) shit.
+The left’s focus on migrants as workers – even if it is
+emphasised that they pay in more than they take out
+– merely sharpens the tensions that right-wing nationalism claims to reconcile. The migrant worker, with his
+robot-like body and his ability to work for hours and
+hours without toilet breaks, a living wage, or complaint,
+does indeed appear as a threat to your job and your livelihood. The progressive nationalist logic accepts that
+because racialised minorities are undervalued, it is inevitable that their labour will be sold on the market for less.
+The poor conditions for migrant workers are presented
+as a rational outcome of market forces – a constructed
+social inferiority coupled with an imposed ‘migrant work
+ethic’ which undermines the collective bargaining power
+of native workers. While Powell’s infamous speech focuses
+on culture rather than economics, it nonetheless supplies
+a highly compelling emotional repertoire for progressive nationalism; we have to keep them and their robotic
+bodies out, so we aren’t forced to compete unfairly with
+them in the labour market.
+The Powellite instincts of progressive nationalists thus
+preclude alternative political possibilities: what if we were
+to challenge the movement of capital rather than labour?
+What if we were to prioritise improving the working conditions and collective bargaining of migrant workers?
+What if migrants who did not work at all were still ‘valued’?
+Such responses would require progressive nationalists to
+question the borders which separate workers into citizens
+and migrants, and thus the very boundaries of the nation
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+75
+
+that they seem at such pains to protect and reproduce.
+In contrast, an understanding of race as a construction undermines bordering as a solution. If we see race
+as something put on us, rather than coming from us, it is
+clear that the state doesn’t respond to race but endlessly
+remakes it – borders are the mechanism that categorises
+and racialises us, making some of us cheaper, less entitled
+to welfare, care and safety than others, and positioning
+migrant workers in a perpetual state of violence, neglect
+and intraclass conflict.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+When Jeremy Corbyn’s first engagement after his surprise
+election as leader of the Labour Party in 2015 was to speak
+at the Refugees Welcome rally, we saw a glimpse of possibility that a left-wing electoral project might resist the
+urge to compete on the dangerous terrain of nationalism.
+Indeed, the energy and optimism of the Corbyn project
+suggested a decisive break with the technocratic politics
+championed by Labour since Blairism. The emergence of
+the Corbyn project showed that this technocratic approach
+was one that could potentially be discarded. In the explicitly socialist rhetoric of ‘the many not the few’ there was
+the potential to revive an understanding of social divisions
+as political and, as a result, subject to change.
+Further, there was an implicit understanding of a multiracial working class as the constituency whose needs and
+desires the Labour Party ought to represent. Unfortunately, many associated with the Corbyn project happily
+swallowed the myth of the ‘white working class’ as a
+
+76
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+discrete social group and regurgitated the New Labourite
+project of triangulation as the means to win their support.
+Their indulgence of this myth, though indefensible, is not
+difficult to understand. Following the success of the Leave
+campaign and Trump’s victory in the USA soon after, the
+media coalesced around the Powellist idea that the ‘white
+working class’ had been ‘left behind’ by globalisation. The
+Brexit vote was viewed, then, as the ‘white working class’
+in revolt.
+Commentators attached to the Corbyn project, but
+sceptical about its ability to win an election without
+appealing to the ‘white working class’, sought a return to
+triangulation, in the form of a Labour immigration policy
+that would offer the necessary racist sop. Pundits closely
+aligned with the Corbyn project, such as Paul Mason, have
+been disturbingly quick to adopt this approach.7
+In 2017, Mason stated: ‘Free movement does not just
+suppress wage growth at the low end. It says to people
+with strong cultural traditions, a strong sense of place and
+community (sometimes all they have left from the industrial era) that “your past does not matter”.’8 The claim here
+is that ‘mass migration’ negatively impacts wage growth –
+although it is not made clear how migration is to blame
+for precarity and poor labour market regulation – while
+also having negative ‘cultural impacts’. These negative
+‘cultural impacts’ are presented as primarily felt in crestfallen postindustrial towns, those forgotten places always
+contrasted with apparently thriving metropolitan cities.
+This distinction between the ‘metropolitan multicultural
+bubble’, and the ‘left-behind post-industrial town’ is a
+trope that captivates pundits across the political spectrum
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+77
+
+despite the fact that age, profession and home ownership
+work as much better predictors for voting patterns.
+Depressingly, these lazy binaries between city and town,
+multicultural and white, thriving and forgotten, have been
+echoed increasingly by people associated with the Labour
+Party in the wake of the 2019 December election. To the
+extent that such distinctions between city and town hold,
+they are an effect of the UK’s constituency-based, firstpast-the-post electoral system, wherein voters in marginal
+seats hold all the electoral sway. Rather than critiquing
+this system, and the limitations it sets on the formation
+of left-wing constituencies, these commentators have
+decided to reinvigorate tropes about the ‘left behind’ and
+their ‘legitimate concerns’, joining the chorus of politicians
+floundering to resolve the issues in ‘towns’ and ‘heartlands’.
+Even the Corbyn continuity candidate, Rebecca LongBailey, made a play for ‘progressive patriotism’ in her bid
+for leadership, while in April 2020 the party’s new leader,
+the apparently ‘forensic’ Sir Keir Starmer, entertained
+some erstwhile Labour voters in Bury, Greater Manchester,
+over a Zoom call, reassuring them that he did not think
+their vote for Brexit, love of the monarchy, or flag-waving,
+represented anything like racism. He later confirmed, ‘I
+wouldn’t be leader of the Labour Party if I wasn’t patriotic’,
+to preface his pro-police, pro-armed forces positions.9
+One might argue that there is no purity in party politics,
+and winning elections takes strategy and compromise. For
+some this might indicate a limit point for any electoral
+project, for others a question over what constitutes an
+acceptable ‘compromise’. For many left nativists, however,
+the desire to exclude ‘immigrants’ is not only about
+
+78
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+winning over voters or even protecting workers. Many
+on the left imagine politics in decidedly national terms;
+questions of liberty, equality and justice become questions
+about British people and the relations between them.
+This means not only abandoning internationalism but
+also, often, blaming immigrants. In this view, immigrants
+not only undercut wages, they also bring disintegration
+and unwanted social change: terrorism, crime and alien
+cultures – too many, too quickly. And this concerns more
+than the numbers; immigrants represent the disruption of
+an imagined working-class community, established across
+generations and firmly rooted in place, at home.
+This, the story goes, has been the basis of labour
+movement strength in this country: industries located
+in communities where traditions of work, of mobilisation and of resistance all flow down through generations
+and beyond the workplace into the community. This is a
+model of labour organisation that relies not only on people
+knowing each other, but also on knowing each other’s
+people – a familial saga where class identity and political
+education are remade as part of the experience of being
+together in a place. The incursion of ‘newcomers’ brings
+new challenges and, in the most frenzied of left nationalisms, is regarded as an attack on the working class.
+Versions of this nostalgia for a different moment of
+class experience can be seen in Gordon Brown’s uncomfortable call for ‘British jobs for British workers’ in 2007,
+and its anticipation of Brexit’s reheated Powellism. The
+pop-sociological arm of this nostalgic nativism can be
+found in David Goodhart’s warped claims for rootedness as a defence against the metropolitan elite (‘Is your
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+79
+
+tribe the “Somewheres” or the “Anywheres”’?).10 Finally,
+as discussed above, in the flurry of post-voting punditry
+(following both the Brexit referendum and the 2019
+general election), we saw the entire left commentariat
+offer their strategy for how to capture the hearts, minds
+and votes of the ‘left behind’, those town-dwellers in
+former heartlands.
+Our point is that many who are broadly aligned to the
+left also desire nationalist certainty and patriotic homeliness, and there is a troubling convergence between left
+and right on issues relating to race and nation. The ‘progressive’ in ‘progressive nationalism’ might translate as
+‘we will exclude immigrants for the sake of workers and
+equality’, but the forms of statecraft and the racist logics
+licensed by these arguments are much the same. This is
+why the Corbyn project was so hopeful, such a sharp turn
+from the ‘controls on immigration’ mugs of Ed Miliband’s 2015 campaign. Corybn’s political programme and
+his base was much less easily seduced by the politics of
+nativism, and much more unwilling to concede ground in
+the race-to-the-bottom politics of excluding immigrants.
+This was not because the movement was especially ethnically diverse, or always avowedly anti-racist (although
+both of these things may have played some part in some
+places), but because Corbynism mobilised more substantively ‘progressive’ forces, people on the left who had
+otherwise engaged in social movements rather than parliamentary politics.
+The danger in the wake of the 2019 election result – and
+the mass desertion of the party by radical, socialist and
+anti-racist younger members – is that Labour’s misguided
+
+80
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+attempts to ‘win back voters’ will now fall back on the
+lowest common denominator: the popular, violent and
+wholly negative desire to punish, exclude and expel ‘foreigners’, ‘criminals’ and racialised outsiders of various
+stripes. Early signs from Keir Starmer suggest that this
+looks likely.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The electoral left’s attempts to capture the pull of
+nationalism have been predictable and dispiriting, as was
+the failure of the Corbyn project to cultivate a politics of
+pro-migrant internationalism that could challenge nativist
+racism. Yet it is worth remembering that in the 1960s,
+Powell was an outlier, not just from polite society but
+also from his own party. The first to call for privatisation,
+Powell upturned assumptions by revealing that a host of
+working-class Tories could be won by nationalist appeal,
+anti-immigrant politics and the aspirational possibilities
+that would later define Thatcherism. Powell’s movement
+previewed the break up of the post-war social-democratic
+consensus, but sixties Britain was the wrong moment,
+and this kooky imperial throwback the wrong man.
+After ‘Rivers of Blood’, Powell left the political main stage
+humiliated, but, unbeknown at the time, Powellism laid
+the foundations for the remaking of Britain. The thinktanks that had championed Powell, such as the Institute
+of Economic Affairs, had the ear of the Conservative
+Party, and the anti-immigration army Powell inspired
+were waiting for another leader to speak to their fears.
+Following a few false starts, ten years after ‘Rivers of
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+81
+
+Blood’, the new right found their messiah. Thatcher rode
+to power on a path cleared by Powellism, privatising
+industries and passing the British Nationality Act 1981,
+making real things that seemed impossible in the 1960s.
+There is now the idea being advanced across the left
+that, following the rejection of Corbynism at the 2019
+general election, the only path to victory for Labour in
+the future is to triangulate towards nationalism.11 We are
+being told that we must accept that Powellism has so fundamentally transformed the British electorate that the left
+can only hope to win voters back by embracing ‘legitimate’ fears around identity, immigration and culture. This
+is the wrong lesson to learn from Powellism. It may have
+been a joke at the time, but Britain has now sold almost
+every state industry, almost every newspaper spews daily
+anti-immigrant bile, and Nigel Farage was, for a time, the
+country’s kingmaker.
+The failure of Corbynism as an electoral project in
+2015–19 is absolute. Corbyn was toxic to a Brexit-hungry
+Britain. But the idea that this era can be dismissed as a cult
+of personality, or student politics writ large, or a throwback
+to the 1970s, is misplaced. Though Jeremy Corbyn is no
+longer the leader of the Labour Party, ideas like the Green
+New Deal or Universal Basic Income are not going away
+(even more so following the state responses to Covid-19),
+and neither are the constituencies that formed around the
+Corbyn project likely to disappear completely (we must
+hope that we will assemble in new and imaginative ways).
+The networks of new media and intellectual hubs are
+here to stay. The 18–30 year olds, with their precarity and
+uncertain futures, are highly politicised and remarkably
+
+82
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+quick to mobilise, their younger comrades even quicker.
+More importantly, the issues that pushed Corbyn into his
+unlikely leadership will remain with us – in fact, they will
+likely get worse with income inequality, precarious jobs
+and housing crises, the threat of climate change and automation all gathering speed. In another historical moment,
+with another leader and with the lessons of this failure
+having been learnt, the historical forces and ideas that
+drove ‘Corbynism’ may yet still remake British politics.
+Let us conclude by re-emphasising the key problem
+faced by left nationalisms: they must, from their very
+inception, draw boundaries between what or whom is
+inside the nation, and what or whom remains outside its
+borders. This necessity does not simply disrupt solidarity, it is necessarily anti-solidarity. Describing ‘progressive
+patriotisms’ as nativist is not simply name-calling. Nativism literally means the politics of ‘natives first’, and while
+people might pursue a ‘left nativism’ in a desperate bid
+for electoral gain, this hand is always played better by
+the right. The deck has been rigged in their favour, and
+the characters positioned by the Powellist narrative make
+much more sense on their terms. Importantly, once mobilised, the forces of nativism cannot be contained, especially
+in times of uncertainty, abandonment and neglect. Yet the
+progressive nationalists still imagine that there is some
+middle ground up for grabs where they can win votes and
+stem the forces of racist nationalism.
+In our critique of progressive nationalists, we often
+accuse them of ‘throwing migrants under the bus’, but
+perhaps this is the wrong metaphor. Progressive nationalism means letting ‘them’ drown and watching ‘them’ fall
+
+PROGRESSIVE PATRIOTISM
+
+◆
+
+83
+
+from the undercarriages of planes. In times of deepening
+global crises and ecological catastrophe, any arguments for
+controlling immigration converge with lifeboat ethics, in
+which some must die so others can live – ‘they’ must die so
+that ‘we’ can live. In this context, ‘internationalism’ is not
+only a well-worn socialist slogan, but a strategy for survival
+on a drastically changed planet, and one that is much
+harder to dispense with for the migrants and ‘minorities’
+already here, whose familial, cultural and affective worlds
+do not end at the white cliffs of Dover. Considered this way,
+the apparently ‘progressive’ character of patriotism reveals
+itself, like the cliffs, as necessarily white, even if it likes
+to accommodate some colour for marketing purposes.
+
+CH APT E R SI X
+
+The Limits of Representation
+
+Our head of state [the Queen] represents the nation and
+its people, and symbolises our values and culture. In a
+diverse multicultural society, surely it is wrong to automatically, a priori deny this honoured, revered role to
+our non-white citizens?
+– Peter Tatchell1
+
+Together, we stand in solidarity with the Black
+community – our employees, customers, and partners –
+in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.
+– Amazon2
+
+As we have shown, the electoral and trade union-affiliated British left continues to flirt with nationalism, law
+and order, and other elements of Powellist politics, in an
+attempt to win over the mythic ‘white working class’. To
+challenge and dismantle this dangerous configuration, we
+need to nurture vibrant anti-racist political cultures and
+institutions. However, anti-racists of several generations
+have often been ensnared by the politics of representation.
+This can be seen in calls to bring diversity to the police
+force, to the boardrooms of the FTSE 100, and to any
+and every institutional space we inhabit. The implication
+underlying such calls is that changing the faces of those ‘in
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+85
+
+power’ will, in itself, change the outcomes of institutional
+power, where anti-racism becomes little more than representation, inclusion and diversity. This is a non-solution
+to the problem of racism.
+The call for representation promises to combat the
+exclusion of racialised minorities from spaces of prestige
+and influence (often articulated through the language of
+‘erasure’ or ‘taking up space’), while offering a point of identification and affirmation for other people of colour. The
+politics of representation feels as if it should work because
+it can be a relief to finally see someone who looks like
+you in your place of work making institutional decisions.
+Representation is not empty – it means something when
+people who are not white, not middle class, and not men
+take up roles from which they were formerly excluded.
+And of course it matters how people feel, and what reaches
+their hearts; the emotional register of being is an essential
+element of any effective political project. However, we
+want to argue that more is at stake when we are persuaded
+to scale back our political imaginations in this way. In this
+sense, the politics of representation limits claims; it says
+‘no more than representative participation and no more
+transformation than having enough of each constituency’.
+It also leads us into a very particular conceptualisation of
+the space of politics and the workings of racism.
+Importantly, representation serves to anchor anti-racist
+mobilising back within the tight confines of the nation.
+The normative logic of representative democracy, in
+which your MP represents your views, filters through the
+omnipresent discourse of racial essentialism to suggest
+that someone who looks like you will represent your views
+
+86
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+better. This plays out in miniature elsewhere, but the idea
+remains tied to the notion that anti-racism is essentially a
+demographic question in which the only way to offset the
+(inevitable) marginalisation of being a ‘minority’ is to be
+better represented among the powerful.
+Let us begin this critique of representational politics,
+somewhat unimaginatively, with the university. In the
+last decade, student campaigns have appeared at multiple
+universities, often under the heading of ‘decolonising the university’ but comprising various demands and
+approaches. The most cited demands in the mainstream
+media have been for universities to diversify both teaching
+staff and the curriculum. However, there have been many
+more demands, some of which take more symbolic forms
+(removing statues, changing decor), or take student
+welfare and belonging as their central concern (better
+well-being services for students of colour). In these
+demands, many of which might improve university life on
+some level, the university itself – its formal structures, its
+purpose, its organisation – remains intact. Other demands
+are more structural – calling for universities to divest from
+research linked to military funding, to lower or abolish
+tuition fees, to cut the rate of rent in student halls – and
+would involve a more radical reorganisation of the institution. Yet these too presuppose the desirability of the
+university and often take place at relatively elite, Russell
+Group or University of London universities. Part of the
+reason it matters that these conversations take place in
+elite spaces is because of the ways in which they tend to
+focus on the experience of students of colour in a predominantly white environment – which is not the case at many
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+87
+
+lower-ranked universities. As such, many of the demands
+(both the more symbolic forms, as well as those relating to
+curriculum and academic staff) aim to change the experience of isolation for students of colour.
+The point here is that representational politics, in the
+first instance, tends to begin from those who already have
+some kind of institutional affiliation: university students,
+professionalised employees, British citizens. Part of the
+reason for its seductive power then is the practical ease
+with which it can be incorporated into institutional structures. Though demands for diversity are still sometimes
+met with hostility (both from within the institution in
+question, and beyond it), we nonetheless underscore the
+ways in which representational politics often sideline the
+question of what is being diversified. To give a historical
+example, Cambridge University was more diverse in the
+early twentieth century than it is now, as it was a key site
+for the education of native elites, who were instrumental
+to indirect rule in the British Empire. We can see, then,
+the central function of class in questions of representation. Though articulated across the political spectrum,
+including by many working-class people, representation
+is largely an elite discourse. The question of who would
+clean the ‘decolonised’ university is rarely asked.
+These days, it seems as though every institution is ripe
+for a conversation about diversity. When Meghan Markle
+officially joined the royal family, the press searched for
+responses from liberal anti-racists. Many lined up to offer
+their celebratory assessments, claiming that the inclusion
+of a black (or ‘mixed race’, depending on the pundit)
+woman into the monarchy was evidence that Britain had
+
+88
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+progressed far beyond its racist past (or in a less enthusiastic register, that if we want evidence of Britain’s ongoing
+problem with race and racism, then we need look no
+further than the media’s negative coverage of Markle).
+While commentators rejoiced or cautioned, more critical
+observers noted that late capitalism loves multiculturalism, so there is little reason why late feudalism shouldn’t
+also be giving it a go – such institutions of power need to
+reform in order to conserve and reproduce their power.
+Anti-racist thinkers, from Sivanandan to Gilroy, have
+remarked on the cynical opportunism of individuals from
+racialised minorities in Britain, who have stepped forward
+to be representatives of both black politics and the British
+state or big business. All that is required of these liberal
+anti-racists, therefore, is for them to shout loud enough for
+capital and/or the state to hear them – with social media
+providing a useful platform for their worthy bellows. The
+number of supposedly radical or anti-racist figures who
+happily take up their place on the honours list – in which
+recognition is explicitly tied to the celebration of empire –
+offers a biannual example of how an anti-racism focused
+on representation treats the nation as the sole receptacle of
+politics. Within this logic, the nation state’s symbolic head,
+the monarch, appearing more diverse is a common-sense
+victory for anti-racism. By positing racism as a process
+of exclusion from sites of power and of public visibility,
+we imagine politics as a bounded community where to be
+included is to overcome racism. The validity of the British
+nation is consequently treated as beyond question, now
+naturalised and legitimated through the politics of representation.
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+89
+
+Representative anti-racism also offers its own distinctive
+form of anti-racist nationalism through a set of assumptions about precisely who or what is represented. Usually
+this ‘who’ or ‘what’ is understood as a coherent and discrete
+‘community’ defined by some homogeneous and absolute
+racial, ethnic or cultural lineage. While this might furnish
+the representational authority of ‘community leaders’, it
+is also the same assumption that informs racist demands
+for racialised communities to speak out against so-called
+‘atrocities’ or ‘crimes’ carried out by their members. It is
+now a common part of Britain’s racist repertoire to demand
+‘the Muslim community’ denounce acts of ‘terror’, or for
+‘the black community’ to distance itself from ‘gang crime’.
+A common and quite legitimate anti-racist response to
+such racism is to question why a shared ethnicity should
+imply shared responsibility or accountability, especially
+when this demand is never directed at white people.
+However, this anti-racist criticism is often forgotten –
+even by its own proponents – when applied to the wider
+politics of anti-racist representation and identification.
+In fact, the notion of homogeneous and coherent ‘communities’ is conjured afresh when individual experience
+and identity is centred as a source of authority on ‘black’
+or ‘brown’ issues (or even, indeed, ‘white’ guilt). Discrete,
+homogeneous and coherent ‘communities’ reappear when
+anti-racists encourage individuals to root out specific
+forms of racism or other oppressions in ‘their own communities’. Equally, when inclusion, diversity or representation
+is advocated, one underlying assumption is that representatives – community leaders, CEOs, MPs, etc. – will
+either better support the interests of their ‘communities’
+
+90
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+or enable some sort of anti-racist trickle-down that will be
+to the benefit of the whole ‘community’.
+The assumption here – that a sociological category of
+people share a discrete and homogeneous set of beliefs or
+interests – flattens significant political, class, gendered and
+other differences between people who ostensibly share the
+same ‘community’. While disavowing the possibility of
+political difference, this anti-racist nationalism rests on
+(and actively reproduces) an ethnic or racial absolutism
+whereby distinct and hermetic communities exhaust the
+identities and politics of individuals within them. Here,
+race is seen less as a construction, even less so as a historically specific power relation, and more as some fixed
+and pre-social essence that determines social being. A
+politics of representation thus reproduces not only the
+nation but also the same understandings of race, ethnicity
+and nation that underpin racist thinking. In its most
+grotesque forms, representational anti-racism finds itself
+policing community boundaries and judging the validity
+of anti-racist politics on the basis of pseudo-biological categorisations and ethnic lineage.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+While, at best, demands for representation by anti-racists
+in previous generations, both in Britain and its colonies,
+were accompanied by more radical critiques of the state,
+representation for the sake of inclusion and not transformation is the norm today. Such liberal anti-racisms have
+built transnational links across Europe, with ‘People of
+Colour’ networks across the continent being developed,
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+91
+
+unseen in previous generations. These networks can be
+partly attributed to emergent communities of colour across
+Europe establishing themselves following migration from
+the continent’s various colonies. But rather than these
+networks – convened mostly online and at conferences
+– providing a gateway for black and brown Brits to build
+transnational links with non-Anglophone peoples and
+struggles in the Global South, the conversations remain
+Euro-parochial. Questions of where in Europe representation is better or worse dominate debates, with the renewed
+language of ‘coloniality’ emptied out of its anti-colonial
+content and used to refer to a simple lack of institutional
+representation.
+This politics of representation can often rely on a
+reading of anti-racist histories which both begins with
+post-war migration and remains focused on the confines
+of European nation states. Its narrative in which hopeful
+‘economic migrants’ from the colonies arrived in Europe,
+looking for a new life in the mother country, but were
+shocked to experience racism, presents the history of
+anti-racism as a campaign to be represented. This is flawed
+for two broad reasons. First, the diversity quotas, affirmative action policies and representation drives demanded
+by liberal anti-racists are not new to European governance.
+The colonial project required very similar initiatives. For
+indirect colonialisation, the training of civil servants led to
+huge numbers of ‘natives’ becoming state representatives.
+As noted above, senior colonial state agents were trained
+at Oxford and Cambridge. French overseas departments
+such as Martinique in the Caribbean required similar
+processes of black representation. Furthermore, decolo-
+
+92
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+nisation in colonies with settlers, such as Kenya, led to a
+second wave of diversity initiatives as ‘natives’ were incorporated into the highest seats of state power in an attempt
+to ensure their allegiance to the old colonial power.
+The second problem with this ahistorical and parochial
+reading of the genealogy of anti-racism is that it separates
+anti-racism from anti-imperialism. Rather than simply a
+series of nation-building projects, seeking national sovereignty for each colonised nation (perhaps the preeminent
+form of representation), anti-imperialism understood its
+goal as breaking the global colourline. This meant dismantling the world system in which states compete for
+power and building a new world system based on solidarity and co-operation. This fundamentally anti-state
+and anti-capitalist component of anti-racism’s genealogy
+remains, at best, a legacy to which lip service is paid
+by liberal anti-racists demanding representation. For
+example, a short film circulated widely on social media,
+putatively aimed at celebrating the lives of Olive Morris
+and Claudia Jones, was brought to the viewer in partnership with Uber. The grotesque contradiction of this
+corporate tie-in was obscured by the film’s presentation of
+these women as examples of the power of black feminism,
+actively obscuring the anti-imperialist, socialist politics
+for which they fought.
+Previous generations of anti-racists looked to the
+Global South for transnational links, and we can partially
+attribute this to the polarised political landscape of the
+1960s and ’70s, in which decolonisation and struggles
+against apartheid provided clear goodies and baddies, as
+well as winners and losers. Palestine remains the most
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+93
+
+committed site of anti-imperial solidarity today, precisely
+for this reason (although the repeated claim that criticism
+of the Israeli state is motivated by anti-Semitism has
+rendered this conversation more messy and difficult).3
+With the rise of the far-right in states such as India, Turkey
+and Brazil, there is a renewed urgency to connect anti-racism with radical change in the Global South. While we
+do not wish to romanticise the anti-racist movements of
+previous decades, there can be little doubt that connections to the Global South, socialism and anti-imperialism
+were stronger (although such interconnecting solidarities are becoming more amplified again as we write). The
+question therefore is how can the visible injustices often
+most easily illustrated by a lack of representation be used
+as an avenue for a more material anti-imperialist and
+anti-racist political praxis, in a world which is no longer
+decolonising, and in which new internationalist possibilities need desperately to be affirmed? This is a question
+which becomes all the more difficult as anti-racist debate
+and discourse becomes not only limited by the succour of
+inclusion, representation and celebrity, but must also be
+performed and broadcast within the confines of 280 characters.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+Digital media does not act as a neutral medium for the
+transmission of political ideas but actively shapes contemporary politics. The politics of representation are no
+exception. Arguably, the liberal politics of representation
+have been uniquely transformed by social media, which
+
+94
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+has reshaped our sense of the individual, community
+and society. It is on social media that ostensibly radical
+demands for representation are pursued with the most
+vigour and volume. Twitter threads, YouTube vlogs and
+Tumblr pages have been effective ways for individuals and
+groups to harness digital technology and reach large audiences. While some of these uses of social media platforms
+provide an alternative and radical criticism of state and
+corporate media outlets, others demand inclusion, representation and often, most importantly, payment.
+Pay and conditions for workers are some of the oldest
+demands of leftist politics, but today’s timeline demands
+remain rooted in individual, neoliberal logics. Ensuring
+an institution pays an anti-racist organiser or educator for
+their labour is of course not a bad thing in and of itself. The
+problem is when demands for payment sit within the logic
+of market competition rather than collective bargaining.
+While these market logics are structurally reproduced by
+the atomised nature of work, they lead to zero-sum games,
+where cultural producers, educators and journalists are
+compelled to compete with each other over limited spaces
+online, in exhibitions and on other platforms. Who, or
+what, takes up space in these areas of social, cultural and
+political life becomes about who is doing the work rather
+than what work is actually being done.
+This environment compels people gendered or racialised into different categories or identities to compete with
+each other, to be the most underrepresented, the most
+oppressed, and therefore most worthy of platform, space
+and payment. Rather than seeing connections between
+different forms of oppression, a hierarchy is constructed,
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+95
+
+in which one oppressed category, identity or group is
+implicated in the oppression of another, based on where
+they sit in this hierarchy. In its crudest form, this can
+look like a mathematical appraisal, in which some social
+privileges put people lower down the hierarchy of oppression. Recounting your list of identities by beginning a
+political statement with those two all-important words
+‘as a…’ demonstrates the degree of validity, authenticity, accurateness and radicalism of the observation or
+analysis which follows. Declaring the oppressive attitudes
+you have expressed in the past, or that exist within ‘your’
+community, is one of the ways people pre-empt being
+‘called out’ or ‘cancelled’. Anti-racism becomes a challenge
+for activists to ‘talk to your racist uncle’, as if intercommunal bigotry were the source, rather than the symptom, of
+racism. Similarly, a political criticism can be easily rejected
+if it is posed by someone from a privileged identity, even
+when the identity in question is unrelated to the criticism
+in question.
+Much of the language of this form of liberal online
+anti-racism is wrapped up in the language of radical
+politics. Its advocates demand representation and rehearse
+individualising analyses of privilege, but they also cite revolutionary activists and thinkers, asserting that racism
+is ‘systemic’ and considering their politics to be ‘decolonial’. Yet, unlike earlier anti-colonial traditions which
+articulated a separatist nationalism – the creation of a
+black nation with its own institutions and power structures, for example – more recent articulations appear
+more ambiguous as to their end goal. Their criticisms of
+the system are structural and revolutionary, but the tactics
+
+96
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+proposed are generally individualistic and demands are
+limited to reforming institutions to better pay, include and
+represent individuals from specific identity groups.
+This process is best illustrated through the ways in
+which campaigners like Olive Morris or Claudia Jones
+are presented through the prism of identity, as described
+above. What is important is that they are working class, not
+communists or socialists. The focus is on the fact that they
+are black women, not black feminists. Thus, the identities
+of these organic intellectuals and activists are not a starting
+point for their political campaigns and ideas. Rather, their
+identities are their politics. Crucially, lionising a member
+of the working class, a black person, or a woman is compatible with state and profit-making institutions. The
+problems arise only when a political position which seeks
+to dismantle the state or capitalist social relations is taken
+into account, and therefore ideas, or better yet quotations
+from such individuals, are carefully selected and curated
+to mystify radical politics, or reduce them to the status
+of footnote. The winner, here, is the social industry – the
+tech platforms making money from Angela Davis memes
+and images of Jayaben Desai on the picket line in a sari
+– while anti-racist movements are reduced to a dazzling
+digital spectacle.
+We observe on social media a particular tendency
+towards what Paul Gilroy variously terms ethnic absolutism, purity-seeking and the longing for racial fixity,
+certainty and closure.4 These anti-humanist tendencies have been fashionable for a long time, well before
+the introduction of timeline media, but they are perhaps
+taking new form, or new salience, in the context of Twitter
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+97
+
+politics. While Twitter can be a medium for expressions of solidarity and care, it is scandal that tends to
+prove most generative of likes, retweets and replies, and
+therefore proves most valuable to Twitter’s (algorithmic)
+business model. This inbuilt tendency to scandal fuels a
+culture of outrage and malice in which individuals and
+their character are subject to often brutal assaults – in
+particular when they are determined to have been inauthentic and deceitful, and especially when this relates to
+their racialisation. Conflicts over who speaks about what
+seem particularly heated online, and in ways which are
+often disconnected from a wider critique of power. This
+is a reflection of the zero-sum game politics we discuss in
+Chapter 12, but it also rewards forms of ethnic and racial
+authenticity which we view as profoundly troubling.
+Conversations about political blackness – as well as the
+erasures inherent in the government-speak, ‘Black and
+Minority Ethnic’ (BAME) – are especially tense sites of
+conflict in this context. While we recognise that there is
+an important conversation to be had about relations of
+power and voice within anti-racist organisations, debate
+online often seems totally disconnected from political
+action and strategy – and from a wider critique of the state
+and big business. To give one example, when the British
+army posted a tweet as part of its #blackhistorymonth
+campaign, the tweet was widely condemned not because
+it came from the army, which saw fit to use black history
+month as a marketing opportunity, but because the tweet
+wrongly included Asians. The moral of the story is that
+Asians are not black, and the army showed its disdain for
+black people through its lazy disregard for racial specificity,
+
+98
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+rather than in their attempt to recruit them to contemporary imperialist wars via the opportunistic white-washing
+of colonial history.
+Social and timeline media fuel the prevalence of forms
+of race-talk which hinge on privilege and cultural appropriation, where racism becomes what Fanon calls a
+‘mental quirk … a psychological flaw’.5 It is in the realm of
+sovereign experience that the ultimate truths of racial difference and hierarchy can be gleaned, and these can then
+be shared through online testimony. Of course, people are
+not wrong to be outraged by interpersonal, racist humiliation, but in our view the affective registers of social
+media tend to reward expressions of outrage and distrust,
+leading us all to the inevitable conclusion that multi-racial
+coalition is impossible because we can never understand
+the experiences of someone with a different identity.
+The purity of experience finds a particular affective
+charge on the timeline, and this explains why we saw young
+white people joining the 2020 BLM protests holding signs
+that read: ‘I will never understand, but I stand.’ Why does
+not understanding constitute a necessary and primary
+qualification in the context of a street mobilisation against
+racist police violence? Another sign read, ‘I am racist
+because the system is racist.’ White guilt and self-flagellation have become the order of the day, and this is clearly
+connected to the centring of experience and testimony
+online. When experience is centred in this way, authenticity and purity hold sway, and this often proves toxic when
+political movements and organisations seek to build coalitions and develop their strategies. Scandals concerning
+impurity and inauthenticity abound. Sadly, in-fighting
+
+THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION
+
+◆
+
+99
+
+has always been characteristic of progressive movements,
+because we really care about what we are fighting for. But
+online it is not even clear that there is any, even vague,
+shared project.
+Our interest here is not with fixing social media as one
+thing; all darkness and doom. Our own friendships and
+collaborations were mediated by social media, as we too
+vied for attention, offered our own ‘hot takes’, and ended up
+incredibly anxious after public Twitter spats with the politically adjacent. We inhabit the same fraught terrain (even
+if some of us have deleted our accounts). It is important
+to remember, then, that the highly addictive attention
+economy trades on our outrage and on scandal, but we also
+know that alongside the compulsive consumer hits there is
+the emergence of something like a political education based
+on sharing and non-deference, where there is little distinction between serious analysis and comedy. The timeline
+can be a component of a dispersed and uncontainable
+alternative political culture, memefied but not hopeless.
+
+PART 3
+
+State Patriarch
+
+C HAPTE R SE VE N
+
+Our Heart Belongs to Daddy
+
+The expansion of Europe was not just a matter of ‘Christianity and commerce’, it was also a matter of copulation
+and concubinage.
+– Ronald Hyam1
+
+Families matter. I don’t doubt that many of the rioters
+out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they
+come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s
+standard for children to have a mum and not a dad …
+where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a
+male role model, looking to the streets for their father
+figures, filled up with rage and anger. So if we want to
+have any hope of mending our broken society, family
+and parenting is where we’ve got to start.
+– David Cameron’s speech on the fightback
+after the riots, August 2011
+
+Our moment, in which capitalist production is increasingly digitised, has enabled a hitherto unknown
+proliferation of sexual representation. In fact, the not-soslow creep of social media into all aspects of everyday life
+leads to an increasingly blurry line between sexual act and
+sexual representation. Alongside its other functions, the
+internet continues to serve as an enormous global porn
+
+104
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+machine. Sex is present everywhere, spoken covertly and
+overtly, but the fiction of its separateness from geopolitics, nation-building and state power must be continually
+maintained. We are encouraged to view sex through the
+prism of private, individual choice, reducing ‘sexual politics’ to a question of removing any barriers to individual
+sexual freedom. This limited and neoliberal conception of
+sexual politics emerges from a racialised social formation
+in which sex has long been a barometer of ‘civilisation’, and
+discourses of respectability have proven both flexible and
+durable.
+As we know from the contribution of post/anti-colonial
+feminist theory, sexuality and gender have always been
+central to the constitution of race. Alongside skulls and
+jawbones, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomy
+and anthropology textbooks displayed diagrams of the
+genitals of colonised, and specifically enslaved, peoples.2
+The perceived ‘overdevelopment’ of sexual organs such as
+the penis, clitoris and labia was read as empirical evidence
+of a biologically determined, dysfunctional, sexual excess.
+This is extrapolated to mean an animalistic and morally
+deficient or unevolved character. Sex is therefore part
+of the process of racialisation that has persisted across
+colonial and postcolonial settings.
+Imperial discourses in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe constructed national cultures around
+ideals of respectability, rationality and honour.3 The prescribed order of the nuclear, heteronormative family
+represented the appropriate form of socialisation for
+national citizens of European states. The poor of the British
+mainland, but more acutely the ‘savage’ cultures found
+
+OUR HEART BELONGS TO DADDY
+
+◆
+
+105
+
+in the colonies, became the antithesis of the respectable
+British family. The absence of respectable family structures was enlisted to explain the inability of both groups
+to comply with social and legal norms. For colonised
+subjects, only civilising missions, colonial penal justice,
+or the whip gave any hope of reform. The legacies of this
+family-nation nexus continue to play out in the spectacles surrounding migrant Others in Britain, with their
+purportedly alien cultures, steadfastly unwilling or unable
+to commit themselves to the familial norms of European
+civilisation. In the European imagination, sexual deviance
+is a vital signifier for identifying how and why racialised
+Others come to embody moral degeneracy. By unpacking
+this process, we point to the manner in which the patriarchal nation/state remakes itself in our time, with the moral
+panic surrounding ‘grooming gangs’ explored in the next
+chapter as a central case study.
+As we know, sexuality and gender have been central to
+justifications for twenty-first-century imperialism. This
+logic is epitomised in Spivak’s famous idiom, ‘white men
+saving brown women from brown men’, which neatly
+summarises gendered colonial logics, from the British
+Raj to the occupation of Afghanistan.4 Spivak’s formulation focuses on the position of the racialised woman who
+must be ‘saved’ from her backward culture and barbaric
+menfolk. More recent work such as Jasbir Puar’s conceptualisation of ‘homonationalism’5 and Sara Farris’s
+‘femonationalism’6 extend this principle in order to
+theorise how contemporary formations of Euro-American imperialism are justified as a means of defending
+the rights of women and/or LGBT+ communities, most
+
+106
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+often from ‘Islam’. In the mid-2000s, new migrants to the
+Netherlands were shown a video of two men kissing and a
+woman sunbathing topless and asked to give their opinion
+as a test of their suitability for Dutch society’s ‘liberal’
+mores. More recently, a test administered as part of the
+Prevent regime in the UK asked children for their opinion
+on homosexuality. By baking a particular brand of liberal
+gay rights into state practices, the state confirms itself as
+the arbiter of sexual norms. Those who fall outside of these
+norms – or, indeed, are perceived to do so – are viewed as
+threats to the nation. We also know that sexuality plays
+an integral role in the constitution of the state. Jyoti Puri’s
+seminal work on the sexual state outlines how, particularly in times of crisis or weakness, the state turns to the
+government of sexuality in order to (re)produce itself as
+cohesive and in control.7
+With this in mind, we want to think about the state in
+terms of the figure of the patriarch. If the state can usefully
+be described as a patriarch, then what kind of a patriarch
+is it? In the post-war years, the welfarist state sought to
+organise populations through the management of gender
+roles and family units, rewarding some normative behaviours and penalising the deviant through the allocation
+of welfare. This involved creating systems of discipline
+designed to corral the wayward back into socially acceptable and economically productive lifestyles. This previous
+moment referenced the role of the patriarch explicitly,
+positioning the state as a substitute for inadequate, absent
+or improper fathers. The fantasy of happy (white) nuclear
+families is there in Beveridge’s original vision of the welfare
+state, with the family allowance and national insurance
+
+OUR HEART BELONGS TO DADDY
+
+◆
+
+107
+
+designed to supplement and bolster the fragile nuclear
+household. For the citizens who received the benefits of
+universal provision, there was an attendant obligation to
+demonstrate worthiness; if not respectability, at least the
+ability to be made respectable. After so many years of austerity, we are in danger of forgetting the humiliations of
+the previous era of welfarism. Even when the payment was
+there to be made, performing abasement, gratitude and
+forbearance was all part of demonstrating deservingness.
+Since then state policies have been remade and state
+bureaucracies transformed. The state no longer enters
+everyday life as the audience for our respectable conduct.
+The safeguards put in place to ensure poor and low-income
+individuals weren’t ‘cheating’ the system have shifted.
+This was illustrated by New Labour’s ‘No Ifs, No Buts’
+campaign against benefit fraud, and the Conservative’s
+image of benefit claimants ‘with the blinds down’ while the
+rest of us go to work. These moral panics conjured images
+of the hypervisible claimant taking home two salaries, or
+the invisible claimant hiding from respectable society –
+markers of which had to be avoided by those attempting
+to navigate the welfare system.
+More recently, screen cultures have depersonalised
+encounters with state power, stripping away the opportunity to explain personal circumstances and impending
+catastrophe, and displacing respectability as a useful
+element in dealing with bureaucracies. The online portal
+does not care about your manners, or the cleanliness of
+your children, or whether you are signalling an aspirant
+attitude. It is open only to hear if there is any reason to
+bar you from access or to delay your punishment – upload
+
+108
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+documents here (‘Computer says No’). The increased
+punitiveness and conditionality at the heart of the benefit
+system has seen hundreds of thousands of people sanctioned and their benefits removed each year, while the
+number of rough sleepers has doubled. It bears repeating
+that such policies of cruelty and neglect led to an estimated
+130,000 excess deaths in the years 2010–17.8
+Yet, despite this decimation of the welfare state, the
+nation remains a family matter. We are schooled to
+consider ourselves as (largely undeserving) members
+of a national family, albeit a family in crisis and decline.
+It is this long shadow of familial thinking in the name
+of nation that returns us to considerations of the state
+and state power as the actions of a patriarch. Again, our
+question is: what kind of state patriarch emerges in a time
+of post-welfare securitisation?
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+We started this book by describing the last ten years of
+state practice in terms of cruelty and neglect, and these
+are surely terms – ‘cruelty’ and ‘neglect’ – that summon
+gendered images of power and protection (or lack thereof).
+Like an unloving and angry father, the state patriarch
+is cold and often brutal. Increasingly, he abandons and
+expels those within the family, kicking us out of the house,
+renouncing his role as protector of our welfare, even as
+he puffs up his chest at any mention of possible foreign
+invasion. Most of the time he ignores us, no matter what
+we do to get his attention, until there is some wider gain
+to be made from him playing saviour. Perhaps it is too
+
+OUR HEART BELONGS TO DADDY
+
+◆
+
+109
+
+easy to imagine the state as a man in this way (when in
+fact the state is never just one thing). Yet it is important
+to remember that the very languages of power as well as
+the terms we use to critique them have gendered associations and implications. When Britain is described as a
+‘soft touch’ for migrants, for example, it is clear that the
+feminisation is inseparable from the complaint; these are
+institutions that should be tough and firm, not soft. In our
+view, by sharpening our appreciation for the work done by
+gender, and thus by characterising the state as a patriarch,
+we might be able to describe contemporary statecraft in
+useful ways.
+The mantra of the state patriarch is that its citizens and
+those within its jurisdiction live by the grace of the state.
+What they get is neither a question of what they deserve
+nor of what they are entitled to. Rather, what they get they
+should be grateful for and they should not depend upon
+its continued provision. The welfare state, rather than
+ensuring that basic needs are met within a system based
+on solidarity, is now a bureaucratised torture chamber,
+symptomatic of the state patriarch’s contempt for its
+‘unproductive population’. The neglectful state prioritises
+punishment above redistribution. In fact, this shift in style
+arises from a concerted attack on the attempts to institute
+a redistributive state. The transformation of welfare (and
+of all state services) is the culmination of a long-standing campaign to discredit state-managed endeavours in
+general. We have been trained to regard the state as a
+poor manager, an inefficient distributor of resources and
+an inhibitor of human innovation.9 Only by protecting
+our individual freedom, defending borders, neutralis-
+
+110
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+ing foreign threats and maintaining law and order, can
+the state be trusted. In other words, the state patriarch
+is neglectful, inefficient and abusive, and we cannot rely
+on him to support us – but he is good in a fight, or so he
+says.
+The job of the state patriarch today is to convince
+the national population that his role is and should be
+limited to securing the nation from war and terrorism.
+The state patriarch’s focus on national security and law
+and order as its primary motivation means the national
+project remains a racial project, one in which a besieged
+whiteness continues to connote innocence and (partial)
+entitlement, in a context in which people racialised as
+black or Muslim, in particular, are constructed as violent
+and threatening.
+While the threat of death from a terrorist attack is seen
+as violence from which the state is obligated to protect
+its citizens, premature death as a result of not having the
+means to keep oneself and one’s family alive is, most often,
+considered the failing of an individual and their family.
+Keeping citizens alive is only necessary when the threat
+is posed by deviant Others, not by the slower, but more
+pervasive, more deadly, violence of post-welfare capitalism. Again, the patriarch will not have anyone else coming
+into his home and harming his children, but if they die or
+are killed on his watch then that is nobody else’s business.
+When large numbers of people die suddenly due to structural violence, such as was the case in the Grenfell Tower
+fire, the coronial and legal process is only interested in the
+immediate causes of death. Once this is determined, the
+matter of premature death is laid to rest. Whilst the law has
+
+OUR HEART BELONGS TO DADDY
+
+◆
+
+111
+
+never been concerned with the individual as embedded
+in a social reality, its depoliticising role is amplified in a
+context in which the state has increasingly withdrawn
+from providing for its citizens’ basic needs. The law plays
+an important role in legitimising the state patriarch’s
+organised neglect and cruelty towards its citizens and
+those within its jurisdiction.
+What in fact keeps citizens and those within Britain’s
+jurisdiction alive in these crises are the responses of civil
+society, religious organisations, charities and philanthropists. Whereas once upon a time those of us on the left
+might have criticised or warned against these interventions for fear that they replace the state, or send a signal
+that the state need not fund particular initiatives, now we
+are forced into a position of both accepting and building
+such community responses – now we know that the alternative is that people are left to die, as many have been as a
+result of austerity policies.
+As we have argued, the techniques of dispossession and
+disrespect have already been trialled on black and brown
+populations, both through the previous incarnations of
+institutional racisms and in the long-standing violence of
+immigration control. We might add that a segment of the
+‘white working class’ – the roughs, those who would not
+or could not become respectable – has shared this long
+history of understandable distrust of the state patriarch.
+Yet the palpable disappointment in the face of such rapid
+national decline has been experienced by many as a loss
+of racialised privilege and status. The problem is less that
+foreigners have arrived to take over public services than
+the sense that the loss of access to public goods is a loss
+
+112
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+of the wages of whiteness. This story of loss at the hands
+of racial Others takes on a violently misogynistic cast in
+relation to ‘grooming gangs’, our focus in the next chapter,
+in which the bodies of white girls are implicitly viewed as
+the threatened property of white men.
+
+C HAPTE R E I GH T
+
+‘Pakistani Grooming Gangs’
+
+Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping
+and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that
+make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this
+horrifying problem for what it is?
+– Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, 2017
+
+British citizenship is a privilege that confers particular
+entitlements and benefits, including the right to a British
+passport and the right to vote in general elections. It is
+not in the public interest that individuals who engage
+in serious and/or organised crime, which constitutes
+a flagrant abuse of British values, enjoy those entitlements and benefits.
+– Home Office in notice of decision
+to deprive three members of the
+‘Rochdale grooming gang’ of their citizenship
+
+The term ‘child sexual exploitation’ was used officially
+in the UK for the first time in 2009 in a Department of
+Education document. Since then, Britain has seen a
+series of high-profile convictions of groups of men found
+guilty of child sexual exploitation. The vast majority of
+publicised convictions have been of British Asian men,
+which was quickly translated into the media-speak of the
+
+114
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+‘Pakistani Grooming Gang’. This moral panic replayed
+familiar mythologies of the ‘gang’ – characterised by alien
+cultural practices, operating under a racialised honour
+code, and demonstrating an uncontainable deviant masculinity – and yet the spectre of the Pakistani grooming
+gang also added something new to the repertoire of
+both official and popular racisms. The far-right English
+Defence League rebuilt its crumbling organisation on the
+basis of revulsion to what they termed ‘rape jihad gangs’.
+Sarah Champion, then Labour MP for Rotherham, was
+forced to resign from the Shadow Cabinet after authoring
+an article in The Sun titled ‘British Pakistanis ARE raping
+white girls … and we must face up to it’ – an article quoted
+approvingly by (even) more explicitly racist columnists,
+and criticised by both the Muslim Council of Britain and
+the Board of Deputies of British Jews. For our project,
+these troubling events exemplify a particular moment in
+the reshaping of state racism.
+The ‘grooming gangs’ story has been a key site of
+contestation in recent years – always with a racial
+modifier, whether ‘Asian’, ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Muslim’. The
+interchangeability or collapsing of the racialising term
+here is important but not our main focus; we will refer to
+‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ for the rest of this chapter, not
+least because the old slur ‘Paki’ sits within the discourse
+as a silent but animating term. The term ‘gang’ is heavily
+freighted and operates to connect this moral panic to others
+that have emerged during moments of crisis (see Chapter
+3). Claire Alexander’s work on ‘the Asian Gang’, which
+emerged as a folk devil in the late 1990s, is helpful here.
+She suggests that ‘The Asian Gang carries with its more
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+115
+
+embracing generic counterpart the assertion of threat, of
+anger, of alienation, of violence, but it also carries its own
+culturally specific twists – of culture conflict, religious
+antipathy, of alienness and unknowability, of introspective,
+intra-ethnic hatred.’1 The return of this idea of ‘the Asian
+Gang’ in a new, highly sexualised register builds on this
+older discourse. Further, and as argued in Chapter 3, ‘the
+gang’ in general is a racialised signifier that is in a constant
+state of renewal in Britain, but which always refers back to
+black youth coded as criminal, feckless, hyper-masculine
+and dangerous; a reboot of the ‘mugger’ folk devil of the
+1970s. In the coinage of the ‘Pakistani grooming gang’
+the various associations act upon each other, allowing for
+multiple and overlapping racial registers to interact and
+become strengthened in their connections.
+The ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ have been leveraged
+for Islamophobic purposes by both state and non-state
+actors with remarkable success. ‘On street CSE’ (Child
+Sexual Exploitation) is viewed as the result of a degenerate, uniquely Muslim, culture of sexual deviancy. The
+narrative goes that white girls are chosen precisely for
+their whiteness, as Pakistani men have a unique disdain
+for white women, viewing them as ‘easy targets’ while
+apparently respecting girls in their own community whose
+‘honour’ must be protected. ‘Culture’ and ‘honour’ here
+are the operative racialising terms, signalling an incorrigible otherness defined by atavistic and insular gender
+roles, and a violent, excessive masculinity that is, in the
+end, an overcompensation for an inherent lack of genuine
+manliness, which is coded as respectable, bourgeois and
+
+116
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+civilised. In this discourse, real men are restrained but not
+too restrained, and kept in check by the nuclear family.
+The idea of degraded white femininity plays an important
+role here too. The statutory bodies charged with protecting young people (social services, children services, the
+police, the CPS, and so on) knew that many teenagers were
+being systematically abused but viewed this as a result of
+a set of poor lifestyle choices made by feckless, underclass
+girls with chaotic lives who were beyond the help of the
+state. Essentially, these institutions viewed white girls as
+choosing to engage in voluntary sexual relationships with
+much older men, in voluntary group sex, in voluntary
+prostitution. The ethnicity of the perpetrators becomes
+evidence of a sexual deviancy in the victims too, confirming them as beyond the help of the state because they have
+betrayed the codes of whiteness-as-respectability, both in
+the ways that poor women, across race, are always coded
+as sexually excessive, and more specifically because of
+their association with Pakistani men. Take, for example, a
+case in Rochdale which the CPS didn’t prosecute because
+they thought there was no chance of a conviction, despite
+physical, DNA evidence. Essentially, it did not think a jury
+would believe the victims. The disbelief and disregard
+shown by state services is projected onto the public.
+As well as breathing new life into age-old discourses
+surrounding the sexual excess and dysfunction of
+‘dangerous brown men’,2 the grooming gangs framework
+consolidated key far-right talking points about the state
+that have now found their way into the mainstream. The
+far-right argued not only that brown men were more likely
+to commit sexual violence – and that the sexual violence
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+117
+
+of brown men was more savage and degrading than that
+of white men – but that the inaction of the authorities
+was a consequence of the state being too soft on immigrants and minorities. It became the ‘gotcha’ question
+levelled at anyone mildly progressive, positioned as irrefutable evidence that this whole anti-racism business
+(understood through the prism of ‘political correctness’)
+had gone too far – that police and local government did
+not take action because they were afraid of being seen as
+racists. A spectre filled the British public’s imagination, of
+towns like Rochdale and Rotherham being run by ‘Asian
+gangs’, who were so locally powerful they were above the
+law and local politics; whole towns were ‘no-go-zones’ for
+whites. It was a manifestation of Enoch Powell’s dystopic
+premonition (see Chapter 4), that ‘one day, the black man
+will have the whip hand over the white man’.
+The state was portrayed as ‘soft’ on migrants and
+‘minorities’, even afraid of them, and in turn as betraying
+the nation, which had been mapped onto the bodies of
+young white girls. The possibility of there being grooming
+victims of colour was not only ignored, but actively
+refuted. The moral panic relied on the idea that ‘Pakistani
+grooming gangs’ targeted white women because they were
+white. As a result, there has been very little press attention
+when girls of colour have come forward regarding the
+same men, as in the case of Shabir Ahmed, whose identity
+was concealed from the press during the first trial as a
+second was pending. That the second trial involved an
+Asian victim had no discernible impact on the narrative
+that white women were targeted for their whiteness.
+Indeed, the vulnerability and naivety of the young white
+
+118
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+women came to represent the weakness of the liberal state,
+besieged by multiculturalism.
+The nation, made vulnerable by unfettered immigration
+is, like these young girls, in need of protective intervention from the sensible, firm authority of the nationalist
+state. The idea of state and financial elites (what Steve
+Bannon calls ‘globalists’) as allies of immigrants and
+people of colour against the ‘white working class’ was
+strongly consolidated in this story. This framing achieved
+several things: it created political space for excessive performances of state force to compensate for this appearance
+of weakness; it consolidated and reinforced racialised
+notions of belonging and ‘invasion’; it gave the far-right
+an opportunity to position itself as the only voice willing
+to ‘speak the truth’ on behalf of the victims, providing the
+space for legitimisation and support; and it enabled the
+far-right to position itself as the primary anti-state/antielite force, creating a sense of ‘emergency’ and need for
+‘intervention’ at the state level. Importantly, this racialising set of processes also meant that the interaction
+between patriarchal violence and state neglect, which led
+to so many young people being harmed, was minimised
+and obscured.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+Despite our concerns about the racist forces mobilised
+around so-called ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’, we are also
+cautious about enlisting ‘grooming’ primarily as a hook on
+which to hang an analysis of resurgent racisms or reconfigurations of the state. It is also important to sit with
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+119
+
+the scale of this organised sexual exploitation and abuse
+of young women and girls in Rotherham, Rochdale and
+elsewhere, even while dissecting the racism which frames
+how it became a public scandal. That said, we resist the
+idea that any attempt to historicise and understand can
+be seen as an expression of sympathy, a tendency that
+has been amplified through online culture. None of what
+we identify constitutes ‘an excuse’. Instead, our concern
+is to comprehend how and why certain issues became
+speakable, and how this speakability was framed as a reassertion of white nationalism.
+In 2014, Operation Stovewood was created as the
+largest law enforcement investigation into non-familial
+child sexual abuse in the UK. This occurred in response
+to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation led by Alexis Jay, which estimated that 1,400 children
+in Rotherham had been subjected to sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. The scandal of Rotherham
+contributed to a greatly increased public awareness and
+understanding of child sexual exploitation. The early
+coverage focused almost exclusively on the allegation that
+Pakistani men were predisposed to acts of paedophilia
+against white girls. Meanwhile, the parallel scandals of
+large-scale abuse by the celebrity Jimmy Savile, plus the
+long-running cases against the Catholic Church brought
+by victims of child abuse, were treated as matters of
+criminal justice and individual pathology, not national
+security or societal breakdown. The institutional culture
+of the BBC or the religious teachings of Catholicism were
+not enlisted to explain widespread abuse and subsequent
+cover-ups. More broadly, while the sexual exploitation of
+
+120
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+children by Muslim men became speakable, it was not
+connected to the more widespread issue of abuse within
+families and households. The nuclear family, the most
+consistent and prevalent site for sexual abuse, continues
+to be flagged as a bulwark against sexual violence, rather
+than as an incubator of it.
+Of course, it is unsurprising that the revelations in
+Rotherham and other northern towns were immediately explained through Pakistani and/or Muslim cultural
+practices. The ‘grooming gangs’ story had especially
+visceral political effects because of the wider force of
+anti-Muslim racism. Muslims have been constructed as
+‘enemies within’, the foremost racialised outsiders of the
+twenty-first century, a century thus far disfigured by the
+unending violence of the ‘War on Terror’. Therefore, the
+sexual violence of particular Muslim men against particular white girls readily came to symbolise a wider existential
+threat. Without attenuating the scale of the violence in
+places like Rotherham and Rochdale, the most important
+factor in the making of a public scandal and national crisis
+was the fact that the perpetrators were Muslim. This much
+should be obvious. However, we also want to extend this
+account to consider, albeit briefly, some less discussed
+factors that shaped the grooming scandal.
+We suggest two important and under-remarked frames
+to the belated recognition of large-scale abuse. Firstly, the
+impact of feminist-informed practice among key workers
+in local government and social services. The transformation in public understanding of child sexual exploitation
+and the sexual abuse of children more generally has arisen
+through the concerted efforts of activists and profession-
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+121
+
+als, influenced by the availability of feminist approaches
+to practice.3 Certainly, it has been a struggle to persuade
+a range of authorities that sexually active teenagers could
+be ‘victims’, but in the belated recognition of this fact by
+some practitioners, it was possible to push back against
+the misogynistic dismissal of these young women.
+Secondly, we are particularly interested in how the
+processes of institutional retreat in deindustrialised landscapes frame this story. Rotherham, along with other
+increasingly mythologised ‘northern towns’, exemplifies
+one aspect of changing urban geographies. The landscape
+of smaller cities and towns in England, particularly in the
+Midlands and the North, reflects a longer history of deindustrialisation, the death of local high streets, and a crisis
+of local services and institutions exacerbated by austerity.
+We might note that this remaking of public space without
+amenities, either public or retail, and the attendant retreat
+from occupying public space in day-to-day life, is experienced across many locations. For our purposes, what is
+of interest is the manner in which the remaking of public
+space, the retreat of official institutions and the decline
+of the formal economy come to be narrated together as a
+racialised story.
+There are some points to note: the so-called ‘night-time
+economy’ outside larger conurbations revolves disproportionately around take-aways and taxi ranks.4 For most
+of Britain, this is what the 24-hour economy looks like –
+low-cost take-aways and transport alongside old and new
+forms of low-paid work such as cleaning, call centres,
+security and logistics. Whereas larger cities have sought
+to regenerate their local economies through enhancing
+
+122
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+hospitality industries (as can be seen in Newcastle and
+Birmingham for example), smaller towns have had little
+access to the new economies of conferences, hotels, bars
+and restaurants. Instead, segments of economic activity
+which were already highly racialised come to make up
+the landscape of local ‘night life’ – small-scale take-aways
+often associated with particular minority communities,
+and taxi and chauffeur work undertaken disproportionately by British Pakistani men. For young people who
+cannot or do not want to go home, these are the only
+places to go.
+The combined impact of cumulative deindustrialisation, uneven state presence and the increasing visibility
+of alternative networks of economic activity coincided
+with another set of racialised anxieties. As local political
+landscapes became less predictable – a trajectory that
+anticipated the outcome of the EU referendum – the accusation that some racialised communities had infiltrated
+mainstream politics and official institutions through the
+use of illegitimate networks of kinship and alliance came
+into play. After scandals around the alleged misuse of
+postal votes among South Asian communities in Britain,
+the idea of the ‘kinship network’ that evades and overrides
+official structures in order to grab political power has
+become associated with Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in particular.5 The heightened inspection of
+Pakistani and Bangladeshi political participation arose
+also as a result of surprise and suspicion at the relatively
+rapid ascendance of these communities in the tightly gated
+world of UK party politics. Particularly at a local level,
+the ‘clan’, a group bonded by kinship and able to bypass
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+123
+
+the niceties of formal politics or business, was regarded
+as the secret source of community power.6 When the
+long-running horror of street grooming and child sexual
+exploitation became associated with Pakistani men, the
+implication that secret clans had colonised previously
+respectable places, replacing or overriding or corrupting
+reliable systems of authority, hovered in the background.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The significance of the ‘Pakistani grooming gangs’ as a
+symptom of our current crisis is, we think, the way that
+the state’s systematic marginalisation and neglect of vulnerable people is then mobilised to justify a rapidly
+expanding authoritarianism. Sexual moral panics offer an
+effective way to do this as sex is always viewed through the
+ahistorical prism of morality – sex is assumed to be totally
+private, yet sexual deviance quickly becomes the subject
+of public scrutiny. This moral panic is particularly durable
+because it seems to threaten the stability of white gender
+roles and, crucially, the white family. National sovereignty
+becomes a way to rescue a beleaguered white masculinity
+which has the capacity to defend its women. However, the
+nation state has no monopoly on the exploitation of this
+moral panic – the far-right have made more effective and
+triumphalist use of it.
+That said, in taking an extraordinary approach to
+sentencing, the state has sought to keep pace with the
+far-right. Abdul Aziz, Adil Khan and Qari Abdul Rauf,
+who were convicted alongside six others in Rochdale,
+have been stripped of their citizenship and are due to be
+
+124
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+deported to Pakistan at the end of their prison terms. The
+idea of citizenship as a ‘privilege’, something which can be
+taken away, is an ascendent and aggressive trend in British
+politics. Its presence here is notable, we think, for what it
+shows us about the tremendous animating force of race
+within the state’s authoritarian arsenal.
+Traditionally this power has been used as part of
+Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, with ‘suspected terrorists’ stripped of their British citizenship, usually while
+abroad, and sometimes to allow for their extrajudicial
+execution via drone strike. Though there was some initial
+controversy regarding this policy of denationalisation, it
+was easily folded into the authoritarian logics of the War
+on Terror. But the case of Aziz, Khan and Rauf is the first
+instance of citizenship stripping following serious criminality without a national security component. It represents
+an important case in the expansion of powers to denationalise and therefore to banish.
+Another deprivation of citizenship case which made the
+headlines – causing controversy and stimulating public
+debate – was that of Shamima Begum, who in 2019 had
+her citizenship stripped for travelling to Syria to ‘join
+the Islamic State’.7 This decision was made surprisingly
+quickly given that she was born in the UK and had only
+ever lived in Britain until her departure in 2015. In this
+case, the government suggested that Shamima Begum and
+her child (implicitly guilty by dint of parentage) should
+apply for Bangladeshi citizenship, which she, and her
+child, would be able to claim through their parents or
+grandparents. Not only does this enable the British government to circumvent legal protections against making
+
+‘PAKISTANI GROOMING GANGS’
+
+◆
+
+125
+
+its citizens stateless, but it also speaks to the relationship
+between race and national citizenship. The framing of
+Begum as a ‘jihadi bride’ speaks to the fantasy of Muslims
+as hyper-fertile, a claim Samuel Huntington maintains
+in his meticulous cataloguing of birth rates in majority
+Muslim countries in The Clash of Civilisations.8 Despite
+Begum having been a minor when she left Britain, she
+is not framed as a misguided victim like the British girls
+targeted by ‘grooming gangs’, but as an enthusiastic participant in archaic, repressive and authoritarian Islamic
+family relations. These differently sexualised teenagers
+became contrasting representations of the nation’s moral
+decline.
+While the white girls of Rochdale and Rotherham
+symbolised the (threatened) purity of the nation, the
+treacherous Begum became its antithesis. Begum became
+not-British, only British-born. In her legal expulsion
+from the nation, we see in starkly material terms how
+black and brown Britons are made foreign, demonstrating with particular clarity the link between racist culture
+and legal process, which operate together to ensure that
+minoritised British citizens can be sent ‘back’ to where
+they are ‘really from’. For both ‘groomers’ and ‘ISIS brides’,
+citizenship stripping is made both possible and acceptable by their racialisation as Muslim, which implicitly
+connects these acts of sexual violence and abuse to issues
+of national security. Defending the respectable national
+family becomes the primary job of the state patriarch, to
+be achieved by whatever means necessary, international
+and human rights laws be damned.
+
+C HAPTE R NI NE
+
+(Powerful) Men Behaving Badly
+
+If parliament were a reality TV show the whole lot of us
+would have been voted out of the jungle by now. But at
+least we could have watched the speaker being forced to
+eat a kangaroo testicle.
+– Boris Johnson, first speech to
+Conservative Party conference as leader
+
+Yet the factor that more often than not the fascist leader
+appears as a ‘ham actor’ and ‘asocial psychopath’ is a
+clue to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity,
+he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the
+follower, he has to be a ‘great little man’.
+– Alberto Toscano, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, 20171
+
+The state patriarch is a figure through which we imagine
+the changing incarnations of state practice and power. Of
+course, he is a character – a way of thinking of the state
+as embodied. This embodiment is a kind of domestication, maybe even an eroticisation; it’s a way of thinking
+of the state as a man. In this chapter we ask, what kind
+of a man is he? And although we are poking fun a little,
+we also adopt this approach as a continuation of far more
+orthodox accounts of statecraft. While we reject the naturalisation of the nation state as a family, we take seriously
+
+(POWERFUL) MEN BEHAVING BADLY
+
+◆
+
+127
+
+the impact of this common-sense conception. If the
+nation state is a family, the public behaviour of its patriarchal head is a sign. In a time of insistently mediatised
+sociality, the performances of masculinity by government
+are part of how the state’s patriarchal imperatives – the
+processes of neglect and expulsion we have described –
+are enacted and justified. So, we see a kind of old-style
+‘being a man’ become, once again, central to the theatre of
+UK politics. As always, phallic women can ascend in the
+ranks, though never in the role of buffoon, which has now
+eclipsed that of the statesman in this drama. Meanwhile,
+the performance of a gentle or ambiguous masculinity
+retains its stigma.
+When we say this, it can seem too obvious and too
+familiar. Of course, we know already that the state engages
+in displays of hegemonic masculinity, and puts forward the
+body of the leader as a point of identification. If anything,
+we learn our languages of political performance through
+these histories of display; the monarch enacts the power
+of the office, but also embodies that power with reference
+to the hand of God; the elected leader presents himself as
+the essence of the nation, whether as an everyman or as
+an emblematic fragment of the national whole. However,
+in the rise and convergence of authoritarian leaders we
+see the displacement of a familiar slick, managerial masculinity with something more aggressive. As others have
+noted, we appear to be living in the age of the buffoon. Not
+only Boris Johnson, all mumbles and blond dishevelment,
+but also Trump’s violently assertive stupidity, Bolsonaro’s
+inexplicable denial of coronavirus, and Modi’s claim that
+drinking cow urine could guard against Covid-19. We
+
+128
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+are witnessing the emergence of the elite buffoon as the
+incarnation of state power in our time of democratically
+enabled authoritarianism.
+The buffoon appears as an apparent response to the disappointments of formal politics. A significant component
+of the performance of political buffoonery revolves around
+purporting to understand and share popular dissatisfaction and distrust of the political class. Buffoonery is a
+method of disassociating from the political class, which
+is viewed as inauthentic because it is controlled, managed
+and overly concerned with its image and the need to triangulate every issue. The buffoon bypasses these niceties
+of political propriety. Instead, we are led to believe, he is
+just like us – undisciplined, authentic, out of patience with
+politics as usual.
+Wilful idiocy becomes, then, a seemingly fitting
+response to the limits and disappointments of politics as
+we have known it. It would be a foolish person indeed who
+underestimates the attraction of the clown in such circumstances. The buffoon’s power is that he offers an alternative
+to the carefully calibrated messages of the managed politician. This is not a polished deception. The clown wrecks
+the place and looks to us – the audience, taught for so long
+to know our place and be grateful – for approval. Don’t we
+all want to wreck things, break the rules, tear it all apart?
+The buffoon plays out our fantasies of destructive power;
+he acts as our undisciplined avatar, reaches into our unruly
+hearts and says, forget about civility and obedience, this is
+what power really looks like.
+The buffoon is a version of the familiar irreverent
+man-child, remade for our anti-political times. Physi-
+
+(POWERFUL) MEN BEHAVING BADLY
+
+◆
+
+129
+
+cally undisciplined, sexually questionable, clownish in his
+disregard for the niceties of self-presentation and personal
+grooming, these are men who seek to embody power in
+a way that asserts they are beyond ridicule. Laugh as you
+wish – it doesn’t change who is in charge here. Say they are
+inappropriate or uncouth and you reveal only the limits of
+your own understanding. The point is that the whole repertoire of the inappropriate – the employment of improper
+speech, the call to the profane as a gesture of populism – is
+central to this particular project to personify power. There
+is, perhaps, a harking back to an anti-clerical mode of
+politics, where disruption is performed as a release from
+authority. But in this carnival, it is the already powerful
+who adopt the costume and mannerisms of the irreverent
+fool. This is the king playing court jester, rather than the
+jester mocking the king.
+Of course, the buffoon is never really one of us. Far
+from demonstrating a disruption of politics, his antics
+act to consolidate unaccountable power. Perhaps you
+still believed in some outdated fictions of democracy?
+Perhaps you thought that power should be accountable?
+The buffoon is here to let you know that power is immune
+from reason and there is no evidence, no argument, that
+can sway the actions of the state patriarch gone rogue. If
+anything, the wilful performance of idiocy itself becomes
+a demonstration of power. If the buffoon pretends to be
+beyond reason or argument, then reason and argument
+become irrelevant as checks on the exercise of power.
+This process should be understood as another aspect of
+the refiguring of the state patriarch. It works to dismantle
+expectations of state accountability because how can a
+
+130
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+fool be accountable to anyone? This wilful embrace of
+irrationality, which produces a dangerously unpredictable political terrain, has become part of the new legend
+of power. We all search for the meaning behind and the
+reason for the decisions of the government, only to find
+that power has no need to make itself legible to us. In Westminster’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, we
+saw this play out with fatal consequences as numbers were
+fudged, deaths were dismissed and scientific evidence was
+discarded daily. The neglectful state presents the buffoon
+as the best we can hope for, as the father-figure for whom
+we long but who can only let us down. He is the embodiment of the state patriarch for our times of tactical neglect;
+the veering between know-nothingness and aggression
+confirms how little we can expect from this particular
+mode of the daddy-state.
+The theatre of politics constructs a façade that persistently and aggressively distracts from rather than blocks
+out the processes of neglect, expulsion and hostility that
+characterise the neglectful state. This theatrical rendering
+of political manoeuvres is purposefully hapless, though
+we all know that the bumbling is a front. Indeed, we’re
+supposed to know that it’s a front; like the lies, the silliness
+is a demonstration of power. The disintegration of the
+already bankrupt political system into a series of personality contests, set pieces, Twitter spats and petty scandals
+ensures that the workings of government feel foolish and
+distant, emphasising the huge gulf between the political
+elite and the rest of the population. This gap serves to
+underscore a sense of powerlessness, much like the
+workings of austerity. Everyone knows that the system
+
+(POWERFUL) MEN BEHAVING BADLY
+
+◆
+
+131
+
+by which your benefits are sanctioned is immoral and
+illogical, but it cannot be challenged. Just as everyone
+knows the government is not fit for purpose and suspects
+that the mechanisms of representative democracy are
+incapable of holding the buffoons to account.
+This age of the buffoon feeds on the popular resonance
+of elite masculine misbehaviour. We know that rich men
+behave badly – we are inured to this ‘fact’. Knowing it is
+part of joining the world of the citizen-observer. So we
+witness one scandal after another, each seemingly more
+unlikely and ridiculous, and with a particular focus on
+sexual scandals. But this all passes as little more than
+entertainment. Admittedly, there is something pleasurably anti-establishment in poking fun at the powerful, but it
+is a distraction nevertheless. At the same time, the famous
+buffoons of our age are revealed to be sexually ill-disciplined and also (probably) guilty of sexual assault, yet the
+repetition of such revelations ensures that such candidates
+build a following and public presence where such matters
+are already accounted for. Their misogyny is a ballast
+against the #MeToo movement rather than something
+that can be held to account by it.
+In the process, it is confirmed again in the minds of the
+public that political leaders are, necessarily, buffoonish.
+Perhaps our ability to recognise and laugh at their buffoonery works to reassure us that politics is not so serious, that
+the collapse of effective political institutions is unimportant. We have not been fooled this time, we congratulate
+ourselves, we understand that politics is the arena of fools.
+But while the public is persuaded increasingly of the
+worthless and laughable character of leading members of
+
+132
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the political class, in the process accepting that democracy
+is broken and we should now just enjoy the spectacle of
+scandals, the resources of the state are redeployed for
+other ends. There are, after all, still publicly owned assets
+to be diverted into cronyish hands. Networks of the global
+right to be squeezed into new arenas of public life. Private
+providers to be introduced to the opportunities arising
+from state retreat. Speculators interested to benefit from
+the turbulence unleashed by politically powerful buffoons.
+Dispossession is experienced and narrated as racialised rage – because what was once (imagined to be) given
+as an unquestionable right of citizenship, with citizenship here unquestioned for white populations, must now
+either be earned or cannot be accessed at all. There is little
+sign of this rage turning against the political class. Instead,
+there is widespread disinterest and disillusionment with
+political institutions. How can we be angry at such fools?
+Their wilful triviality seems to devalue our anger – eager to
+turn any disagreement into another trivialised moment of
+entertainment, with no arena for serious politics. Politics
+seems unable to be serious now, despite the hardship and
+the deaths. Why waste our breath trying to engage with
+those unable to do anything at all except pursue their
+own individualistic careerism? The neglectful state has
+trained us to lower our expectations of both institutions
+and political process. Even if we get his attention, this state
+patriarch can do nothing but terrorise.
+
+PART 4
+
+Send in the Army
+
+C HAPTE R T E N
+
+Longing for Authority
+
+If these thugs want war, let’s give it to them. Either send
+in the Army to sort them out, or better still, put them in
+the Army and arrange for them to be sent to Afghanistan and bring our brave troops home.
+– P. Adams, Bexhill, East Sussex,
+letter to the Daily Mail following the 2011 riots
+
+Ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to
+deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages
+if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.
+– Sunday Times, 29 July 2018
+
+The UK armed forces ‘stand ready’ to intervene in the
+knife-crime epidemic, the defence secretary has said.
+Gavin Williamson said military personnel ‘would
+always be ready to respond’ to calls for help, while the
+Ministry of Defence ‘always stands ready to help any
+government department’.
+– Independent, 6 March 2019
+
+Up to 20,000 military personnel are being put on standby
+in a new Covid Support Force and could ‘backfill’ police
+counter terrorism roles, act as prison guards or help
+with Border Force checks.
+– Daily Express, 20 March 2020
+
+136
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+The military will support the Home Office in their work
+to combat Channel crossings.
+– Ministry of Defence source, BBC News, 10 August 2020
+
+In the last few years, calls to ‘send in the army’ have
+become recurrent and increasingly insistent. This
+reveals something important about our present crisis.
+The demand to ‘send in the army’ points to a popular
+desire for authority and order – a desire that blurs into
+the enraged will to contain, constrain and ‘order’ those
+untidy Others who seem to threaten the nation. In other
+words, calls to ‘send in the army’ reflect the intensity of the
+anger reserved for racialised ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘gangsters’, those internal enemies we discussed
+in the first part of the book. At the same time, calls for
+paramilitary intervention to deal with social problems, or
+perceived social problems, are reinforced by a widespread,
+social obligation to honour the armed forces and official
+versions of their history. What, then, might we learn about
+racism in Britain through reflecting on these intensifying
+calls to ‘send in the army’?
+If ‘criminals’, especially racialised figures such as ‘terrorists’ and ‘gangsters’, are defined as failed and unwanted
+citizens, who deserve nothing from state and society, and
+who should be excluded and expelled, then soldiers are
+their polar opposite. Soldiers – our boys (and for progressive nationalists, our girls) – put their lives on the line for
+queen and country, and by extension for us, the people.
+British people, therefore, owe them a debt which is to be
+paid in unlimited, unwavering support. Soldiers, we are
+constantly told, understand better than anyone else the
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+137
+
+importance of the nation, its security and its interests.
+The compulsory requirement that we honour, respect and
+remember ‘our boys’ constructs the soldier as the model
+British citizen, which is a central tenet of militarisation.
+In this way, the soldier-citizen could not be further from
+the ‘terrorist’ or the ‘gangster’, even as both groups are
+imagined as working-class young men engaged in collective violence. The British citizen who chooses to join
+the armed forces, and so to serve queen and country,
+thus reminds us that the ‘terrorist’ and the ‘gangster’ also
+choose not to serve but to defile this great nation.
+But why do people long for the intervention of the
+military, rather than the police or non-coercive forms of
+state intervention? In part, it is because the basic requirements of life are not in place for many and are only
+uncertainly accessible for others. The army stands in
+here as an effective authority, unlike the failing and ineffectual post-welfare state. The longing for authoritarian
+intervention belongs to this sense of disempowerment:
+things have always been like this and there is nothing we
+can do – but there is someone stronger than us, if only they
+can be called upon. The call for the army is also a refusal
+of the niceties of human rights and the assorted procedural conventions of civil society. So, despite the worrying
+acceptance of violence and violation, the call of popular
+militarism is a call to be saved from the disorder and overindulgence of modern life; a call for protection from the
+enemies that exist in foreign lands, at our borders and
+on our streets. Alongside these appeals to patriarchal
+authority, summoning the army is also an admission of
+weakness and frailty. It concedes to our desperate and
+
+138
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+lonely existence, recognising that promises of fulfilment
+and autonomy, to be achieved through the (technologised
+and hyper-mediatised) market, are ringing hollow. For all
+the rhetoric of choice, the call to send in the army reveals
+the fear that there are no meaningful or effective social
+agents in sight. Not me, with my personal brand and my
+atomised existence, nor anyone else. For all the talk about
+doing for oneself, there is a pervasive uncertainty about
+how the world might be shaped and a doubt about our
+ability to make any mark on it.
+This is also a time in which the state, if acknowledged, is
+regarded as weak or failing or corrupt. ‘The people’ cannot
+rely on this broken machinery. Instead, we are encouraged
+to imagine another non-democratic state that can really
+meet our needs, unencumbered by the procedural politics
+of quangos, red tape and ‘experts’. Into this terrain, the
+army enters as a forgotten agent from an earlier time. This
+is the agency of the state, but instructed by emergency and
+therefore regarded as above the corruptions of political
+life. The army wields state power, but deals in matters of
+life and death, emerging to defend the nation in times of
+existential crisis. Importantly, it is regarded as above and
+apart from the political class. When it acts, it is not based
+on self-interest, but on the national interest. The army
+becomes the vernacular term for ‘the law’, the real law
+beyond the ugly skirmishes between competing groups,
+the law writ large that cannot be escaped. The deployment
+of the law may be violent, even to the point of death, but it
+is not unfair. Consequently, embodying both the law and
+the nation provides the army with impunity and protection from government, courts and national culture.
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+139
+
+There are, unsurprisingly, a number of racialised
+elements to this formation. The army suggests an underlying ability to distinguish between full citizens and hidden
+enemies. If the structures of entitlement are in disarray,
+the army promises to be among the last institutions to
+‘know’ who is the us that deserves protection, and who
+requires exclusion, expulsion or incarceration. Inevitably, militarism is a reassertion of the nation. The army is
+the martial expression of the nation and the ability of the
+army to act, as the last standing effective political agent,
+rehabilitates the nation. The rush to militarise everyday
+life through incursions into schools, television and high
+streets, as well as celebrations of military endeavour
+and guilt-trips about what the government is and is not
+doing for ‘our heroes’, are all attempts to resurrect a kind
+of national backbone.1 These martial overtures allay the
+deep-seated fears that we are alone, weak and unable to do
+anything to defend ourselves against the multiple threats
+we face. The enactment of state violence upon the bodies
+of variously racialised groups serves as a kind of distraction from the extent of political decline. This is everyday
+militarism as spectacle, at once designed to reassure and
+threaten, doling out punishments to those who do not
+quite belong as a counter-intuitive method of quieting the
+fears of others.
+However, this longing for the intervention of the armed
+forces cannot be explained without a close interrogation
+of the policies designed to inculcate this very longing.
+In other words, it is not simply that the British people
+currently long for military authority because of state
+failure and economic woe, but also because lots of money
+
+140
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+and resources have been committed to positioning the
+armed forces in particular ways over recent years. Military
+values are not organic and bottom-up, and policies surrounding the armed forces also reflect the specific actions
+of military leaders and elites who have lobbied successive
+governments into taking particular positions. There is a
+complicated story to be told here about the relationship
+between military leaders, the government, and different
+sections of the public.
+In more general terms, we may consider war and
+army-worship to be central to all processes of nation-building, but in the UK we can observe since the 2003 invasion
+of Iraq a very concerted effort to ensure the armed
+forces are honoured, memorialised and made visible.
+For example, in 2007 Gordon Brown ordered a review of
+the armed forces which made tens of recommendations
+that were subsequently implemented. These included
+recommendations for: the wider wearing of uniforms, a
+British Armed Forces Day, improving contact between the
+military and civilians, and encouraging support for servicemen and women through military and veterans’ cards
+and military discounts. The review also suggested efforts
+to increase engagement with the armed forces among
+young people, for instance via the expansion of Combined
+Cadet Forces in state schools, putting military topics into
+the national curriculum and bringing soldiers into schools
+(for example, in 2012 the government introduced the
+‘troops to teachers’ scheme, designed to support people
+leaving the armed forces and to promote military values in
+schools). Furthermore, the centenary anniversaries of the
+Great War, celebrated in 2014 and 2018, carefully curated
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+141
+
+the memorials so as to edit out the anti-war sentiment
+that ran through so many of the cultural offerings of those
+who lived through the conflict. Instead, the centenary
+exhibitions romanticised the sacrifice of the soldiers of
+yesteryear through over 2,500 memorials across Britain
+(there are now so many that Historic England is unable to
+keep count) as well as temporary installations such as a sea
+of poppies covering the grounds of the Tower of London.
+These efforts to consolidate the standing of the armed
+forces must be situated in the context of the long and
+difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was
+unpopular from the beginning, while the war in Afghanistan became increasingly so as the number of troops dying
+in Helmand increased markedly from 2006 onwards.
+Indeed, while the armed forces are overwhelmingly
+venerated in public opinion, war is often not. However,
+as these wars became less popular, soldier worship only
+intensified (at least as a policy, if not necessarily in the
+public imaginary). It is in this context that we might
+interpret the calls to ‘send in the army’ at home. The army
+should be sent in not only because it is above and outside
+both politics and political correctness, but also because
+soldiers themselves will be much safer when deployed at
+home. A win-win scenario emerges in which the absolute
+authority and overwhelming force of the army can be
+channelled to restore order and neutralise the nation’s
+outlaws, while ‘our boys’ will be invulnerable to death and
+maiming. Expensive and pointless wars abroad should be
+aborted and the armed forces should be redeployed here,
+as and when necessary. We see similar arguments made
+in relation to ‘aid’: why are we spending all our money
+
+142
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+abroad when we can’t look after our own? This extends
+the meaning of those calls to ‘bring our troops home’. The
+troops, once home, might remain troops, fighting in wars
+they cannot lose against the nation’s internal enemies.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+In the context of fears surrounding the UK crashing out of
+the European Union without a trade deal, the armed forces
+were again called upon to deliver food and medicine,
+to assist with traffic problems at ports and to deal with
+shortages of fuel and other essentials in the event of Britain
+withdrawing without a deal. It was notable that some supporters of the UK’s departure from the EU turned to the
+(fabricated) memory of rationing to argue that the British
+people could easily weather any shortages inflicted by a
+no-deal Brexit:
+I was born before the start of World War Two and
+brought up during the war … we all suffered from
+extreme food rationing, fuel shortages, cold houses,
+clothes rationing, walking everywhere, and the rest.
+Folks moaned a bit but, generally speaking, we got on
+with it. We kept our freedom from foreign domination,
+and that’s all we want now. (Letter to Derby Telegraph,
+21 December 2018)
+The latest absurdity from the renewed Project Fear
+is that a no-deal Brexit would lead to serious food
+shortages. Quite apart from the fact that we managed
+perfectly well before we joined the European project,
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+143
+
+I remember that, in my early childhood, we lived with
+food rationing, and did not suffer unduly. We did so
+because we valued our democracy more than we feared
+any temporary inconvenience. This is true today, as
+we struggle to regain our freedom to control our own
+affairs. (Letter to Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2019)
+The EU referendum created the conditions for a resurfacing of an all-too-familiar British imperial nostalgia,
+although one that works most often without any explicit
+reference to empire. The narratives on what a vote to exit
+the European Union could offer Britain were expressed in
+terms of ‘taking back control’ over our laws and borders.
+Clearly, discussions of reclaiming sovereignty and putting
+the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain invoke the history and
+loss of imperial greatness, even if this cannot be spoken.
+This is why the Second World War is made to carry the
+apparently great and noble history of this white island
+nation. As Valluvan argues, the ‘pivot towards the Second
+World War circumvents the ghosts of colonial brutality
+that otherwise threaten to haunt Britain’s past’.2 In this
+way, invocations of Second World War triumph – with
+their Keep Calm and Carry On spirit, all rationing and the
+Blitz – hark back to a time when the nation knew itself,
+before mass migration, ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘black
+street crime’, a time when Britannia ruled the waves, not
+in the name of naked imperialism but in the service of civilisation, liberty and development.
+In comparison to the romanticised tragic glory of the
+world wars, the era of imperial Britain’s global supremacy
+is remembered in far less detail. Culturally, the world
+
+144
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+wars have been immortalised as the essential moments of
+Britain’s self-image. From the cinema of The Dam Busters
+and Dunkirk, to the literature of The Railway Children
+and Birdsong, the experience of enduring the world wars
+is so seared into the national consciousness that Winston
+Churchill was voted the greatest ever Briton in a 2002 BBC
+poll for his inspiration as a wartime leader. By contrast,
+the key figures and details of the British Empire are hazy
+within our collective memory. The East India Company or
+Royal Niger Company attract nowhere near the same level
+of memorialisation, and once famous imperial folk heroes
+like the missionary David Livingstone or Charles Gordon
+(the martyr of British Sudan) have largely disappeared
+from the British public consciousness. Even Churchill’s
+own history as an imperialist was hardly mentioned in his
+celebration as the greatest Briton.
+Furthermore, what is notable about all of the books
+and films that have built up Britain’s ongoing fascination
+with the world wars is that they reimagine both wars as
+a primarily domestic story, making Britain the site of the
+conflict. Britain never endured an invasion during either
+war but this doesn’t stop them operating as popular touchstones for imagining the consequences of not aggressively
+policing Britain’s borders. The popular memory of the
+Second World War goes straight from Dunkirk, the Battle
+of Britain and the Blitz in 1940 to the D-Day landings in
+1944. Major British operations in the intervening years
+– such as the Battle of Cape Matapan fought off the Mediterranean coast in 1941, or Operation Torch in North
+Africa from 1942 – barely get a mention in these cultural
+representations of the Second World War, perhaps because
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+145
+
+they would underline the global scale of both the war and
+the British Empire. They might also disrupt the self-image
+of Britain by showing how it spent the majority of the war
+years defending the empire as opposed to saving Europe
+from the Nazis. The (warped) memory of the war does
+a great deal to reinforce the feeling that Britain – the
+country that has invaded the most nations on earth – is a
+land haunted by an ever-present threat of invasion. Those
+who promise to prevent such invasions, the brave British
+armed forces, remain peerless national heroes.
+This psychic structure reveals a deeply set imperial
+amnesia which allows Britain to be constructed in political
+discourse as an isolated island-nation, standing small
+and alone in the face of threats to its sovereignty from
+the imperial EU.3 Britain’s perceived loss of sovereignty
+to the EU is symptomatic of a politics that is articulated
+and enacted as a zero-sum game, wherein one individual or group’s political gain is necessarily understood as
+another’s loss. Such thinking seems to resonate because
+of its alignment with a well-worn common sense in the
+practice of international relations and diplomacy: that
+the conditions of security for one nation are by necessity
+the conditions of insecurity for other nations; that the
+national interest, understood as security and survival, is
+never the same as that of other nations; and that authority
+can only be legitimately practised within the boundaries
+of the nation.
+That this ‘realism’ has re-emerged in the last few years
+with exceptional popular vigour is telling. It articulates a
+distrust of a ‘globalist’ political class that has supposedly
+prioritised liberal cosmopolitanism over the nation (for
+
+146
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+example through the EU, market integration, standardisation of laws and norms, and freedom of movement).
+Against these ‘globalists’, our new realists insist on preserving the priority and sanctity of the nation as the
+most desirable, indeed the only possible, form of political
+community and authority. This produces an ideological
+alignment between demands for sovereignty and a politics
+of racism articulated through various perceived threats to
+the nation: the loss of authority to the EU and ‘globalism’,
+but also the migrants the EU brings, the terrorists whose
+travel the EU facilitates, the human rights legislators of the
+European courts that protect various ‘gangs’ from punishment or expulsion. Appeals to sovereignty animate British
+racism with renewed legitimacy while appearing to offer
+the solution to various racialised ‘problems’, namely the
+authority to put up borders against external threats and
+punish or expel internal ones.
+This is perhaps why for Britain the unforeseen cataclysm of Brexit funnels pre-existing tendencies – colonial
+nostalgia, distrust of the political class, disengagement
+from democratic processes and mainstream media, loss
+of employment stability and the ability to plan one’s lifecourse, and the all-round decline of some regions – into a
+political rhetoric that appears to centre almost exclusively
+around the question of sovereignty. Our view is that sovereignty here functions as a kind of fetish-object, collapsing
+a range of desires and anxieties, but is never itself the thing
+at issue. Instead, it might be more helpful to think of this
+as a moment of longing for someone else to take power.
+Despite the calls to take back control, what is being enacted
+is a deep desire to be controlled, to be under control, for
+
+LONGING FOR AUTHORITY
+
+◆
+
+147
+
+someone to make the situation controlled. It should come
+as no surprise that the military (sexy uniforms, a flair for
+violence) repeatedly appear as one possible candidate for
+this job.
+As the state retreats from much of its former biopolitical role, and the landscapes of everyday life are remade
+as dangerous spaces of contest between increasingly
+desperate populations, the call for violent state intervention enters the repertoire of populism. It infects the
+discourse of both left and right as well as an everyday
+populism with no established political home. Anti-politics might be a global phenomenon, but in contemporary
+Britain it is racialised in a manner which reflects both a
+colonial past and a declining imperial present. This is why
+calls to send in the army resonate most clearly when the
+sources of disorder are marked by ‘race’, alien religion and
+a stubborn foreignness.
+The call to enable the military to act with impunity –
+articulated as a response to human rights gone too far,
+particularly in relation to attempts to hold British military
+personnel to account for war crimes against civilians –
+signals a wider wish to institute an authority beyond any
+accountability. Such fantasies of authoritarianism are only
+a hair’s breadth away from other dangerous fantasies of
+the supremacist nation. Even when ideas of nation and
+race are not referenced explicitly, the desire to replace
+inadequate, corrupt civilian institutions with efficient,
+honourable military ones becomes tied to other illiberal
+tendencies that enable a revamped state racism. This
+includes the view that political institutions do not ‘work’,
+that is, do not deliver the basics of life or security. Instead,
+
+148
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+we are persuaded that forces unconstrained by the niceties
+of political accountability are more effective and, because
+of this, more able to give us what we want and need. In
+this context, state racisms against recognisable racialised
+folk devils serve to answer the popular call for an effective
+authoritarianism, demonstrating the coercive power of
+the state and repositioning the population as grateful
+recipients of unquestionable authority.
+
+CH APT E R E LE VE N
+
+Militarisation on the Mainland
+The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the
+jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people. The
+shooting side of this business is only 25% of the trouble
+and the other 75% lies in getting the people of this
+country behind us.
+– Sir Gerald Templer, 19521
+
+‘You are not a criminal, but you are on the wrong side.
+You must be restrained until this trouble is over.’ It was
+of course contrary to the principles of British justice but
+it was merciful.
+– Sir Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs
+[in British Kenya], 1960
+
+We’re in a far more dangerous society than we have
+ever been and so we have to have the correct equipment
+to deal with that … We’re not asking for mandatory
+arming of all officers, but what they are asking for is for
+more specially-trained officers. We have to stick to the
+stringent criteria, and the criteria for handling a firearm
+in the UK is still the toughest in the world … If you look
+at the last two to three years, the number of assaults
+on police are going up unrecognisably. The average
+constable doesn’t hold the same authority. When I was a
+child, you didn’t dare blink at a police officer.
+Ken Marsh, Chairman of the Metropolitan
+Police Federation, 20172
+
+150
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+Honour, self-restraint and efficiency were the selfdeclared defining features of UK militarism in the twentieth
+century. Respect for civilians, commitment to the rules of
+engagement and the pursuit of ‘just wars’ against tyranny
+are fundamental to Britain’s national self-image in the
+history of European power politics. Nineteenth-century
+Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz provided
+the canonical account of international conflict between
+European states with his famed treatise, On War. Warfare
+between recognised states came to be determined by a set
+of traditional markers: uniformed combatants, clear and
+measurable military objectives, an idea of a point of conclusion and a distinction from the operations of everyday,
+peaceful life. However, conflicts within the colonial sphere
+did not take the form of Clausewitzian warfare; they
+blurred the lines between war and policing. Colonial and
+imperial wars differed from inter-state conflicts among
+European nations, and this was particularly pronounced
+in the twentieth century, as European powers sought to
+hold onto crumbling empires in a changing global order.
+The British state has prided itself on its ‘hearts and
+minds’ military tactics in the colonies, and its approach
+to ‘policing by consent’ on the mainland – apparently
+only using violence as a last resort in both instances.
+However, Britain’s approach to countering ‘terrorism’ has
+seen military occupations, spectacular violence, and in
+some instances resettlements and expulsions on a scale
+approaching ethnic cleansing. Indeed, both direct and
+indirect colonial rule worked partly because the threat
+of direct domination was always apparent. India in the
+1850s, Morant Bay in Jamaica in the 1860s, Malaysia in
+
+MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND
+
+◆
+
+151
+
+the 1940s and Kenya in the 1950s are just some examples
+of when the British army rounded up suspects in their tens
+of thousands, incarcerating, interrogating and massacring
+‘terrorists’, ‘insurgents’ and ‘rebels’ in an effort to maintain
+colonial order. Mass arrest, indefinite detention and violent
+paramilitary policing were key policies in these ‘Emergencies’, and went on to stain Britain’s enduring legacy in the
+north of Ireland. Across the British Empire, on the front
+lines of colonial occupation, policing and militarism were
+often indistinguishable. State violence was designed not to
+detect or prevent crime but to maintain order.
+In colonial conflicts, little distinction is made between
+armed combatants and everyday civilians. This kind of
+conflict does not have a fixed point which allows one to say,
+‘the war is won’. Rather, militaristic violence becomes part
+of the fabric of everyday life under occupation. Despite
+these realities, Britain’s reputation as a civil, respectable and
+law-abiding military force remains essential to the nation’s
+image of itself, and cultivating the myth of a peaceful end
+to empire, and an orderly transition into the British Commonwealth, is as important as Churchillian myths about
+Britain’s brave and solitary resistance to fascism in the
+Second World War. This moralism at the heart of British
+militarism underwrites the popular campaigns which
+have railed against the application of human rights law
+in cases against ‘our boys’ for their actions in Afghanistan or Iraq (after all, murder is not murder in the ‘fog
+of war’).3 Soliciting equal fury among these same patriots
+and armed forces enthusiasts are the calls for apologies, or
+even reparations, for colonial crimes. Pundits and politicians are aghast at this dredging up of alleged crimes from
+
+152
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+a different time, for which they claim there is little substantial evidence (perhaps it was lost with the burning of
+colonial records?),4 and which they say were far too long
+ago to render a trial fair or appropriate now anyway.
+Several scholars have argued that a reckoning with
+colonial histories can help us understand the character
+of war and militarism today.5 Of course, many people
+thinking and writing about war have observed the decline
+in traditional warfare since the end of the Second World
+War – the increasing proportion of civilian casualties in
+conflicts and wars against counterinsurgents rather than
+other states – but this becomes less novel when considered in light of colonial conflict. The distinction between
+military and civilian, war and peace, battleground and
+safe zone has been further eroded in the twenty-first
+century, not least because of developments in total surveillance and precision drone strikes. Nightmarishly, the
+zone of conflict can now be totalled in on an individual
+– within a room, within their house.6 The global War on
+Terror is everywhere and without end. Importantly for our
+purposes, these logics of contemporary militarism inflect
+how racism functions in contemporary Britain. Of course,
+the British nation is produced through its exclusions, and
+the language of war remains pivotal: the War on Terror,
+the war on county lines, the ‘all-out war on gangs and
+gang culture’.7 Dominant ideas about enmity, counter-terrorism and security, with their colonial lineages, today
+frame the militarisation of British political culture, and
+this helps explain how militarised policing practices are
+justified with regard to familiar racial foes: the Muslim,
+the immigrant and the black criminal.
+
+MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND
+
+*
+
+*
+
+◆
+
+153
+
+*
+
+The militarisation of everyday life in contemporary
+Britain may appear to be a new phenomenon, but, like so
+many innovations, it is a colonial aftershock, making its
+belated appearance on the shores of the mother country.
+The British state ‘sending in the army’ to deal with a civil
+crisis is often considered an historical exception, confined
+to events like the Peterloo Massacre or the Troubles in
+Northern Ireland (the military occupation of Ireland is,
+of course, only exceptional in as far as it is a colony which
+became part of the United Kingdom). However, Britain’s
+more distant colonies were, and in some cases continue
+to be, subject to paramilitary force when the natives
+were considered threatening or unruly. It should come as
+little surprise, therefore, that today people from formerly
+colonised populations living in Britain are not only
+framed as exceptionally threatening or unruly, but are also
+subjected to militarised forms of governance. As we have
+argued throughout this book, the racialised folk devils of
+the terrorist, gangster and immigrant are all subjected to
+policies and practices which, in one way or another, legitimate ‘sending in the army’.
+The creeping militarisation of the police in contemporary Britain follows the emergence of non-white
+Commonwealth migrants moving to and settling in the
+mother country. The Troubles in Ireland provided the
+material infrastructure for militarised policing on the
+British mainland, while the ever increasing presence of
+racialised immigration provided the discursive justification. From the 1980s onwards, in response to the urban
+
+154
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+revolts which began in St Paul’s, Bristol in 1980, and Brixton, south London, before spreading across England in
+1981, paramilitary policing techniques were transplanted
+from the colonial context. Armoured police were trained
+to use rubber bullets and CS spray: the latter of which was
+used for the first time in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1981, while
+police armed with rubber bullets were deployed to contain
+the Broadwater Farm uprisings in 1985. While officers
+were not ordered to fire in the latter case, Sir Kenneth
+Newman of the Met Police warned that such tactics were
+now necessary for dealing with urban disorder (rubber
+bullets have been fired in Northern Ireland but never on
+the British mainland).
+We should here reflect on the civil unrest in August
+2011, sparked by the police killing of an unarmed black
+man, Mark Duggan, who was shot dead in a manner reminiscent of the shoot-to-kill policies of the paramilitary
+forces in Northern Ireland. Duggan was being pursued by
+the police as part of the decade-long Operation Trident,
+established to focus specifically on serious violence within
+the black population; referred to as ‘black on black’ crime
+in the early 2000s, but now more frequently referred to
+as ‘gang crime’. The police killing of Duggan followed a
+three-year spike in police use of stop-and-search powers
+designed to combat so-called ‘gang violence’. In August
+2011, David Cameron, speaking from a professionally
+graffitied youth centre in his Oxfordshire constituency,
+announced his ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture’.
+He described gangs as a ‘major criminal disease’ that had
+‘infected our streets’.
+
+MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND
+
+◆
+
+155
+
+As noted in Part 1, the policing of ‘gangs’ involves ‘intelligence gathering’ using (native) informants, cultural
+analysts surveying social media, and the broader criminalisation of those who simply live, study or socialise
+together. This rounding up of suspects is not dissimilar
+to counterinsurgency policing in Britain’s colonies, and
+the militarisation of policing provided additional weight
+to Cameron’s declaration of war, accompanied by the
+increased use of tasers, the purchase of water cannons and
+the expansion of the number of armed officers. A decade
+before, Tony Blair had launched his own war at home with
+the domestic ‘War on Terror’, proudly proclaiming, ‘the
+police tell me what power they need and I give it to them’.
+Part of these new police powers allowed officers ‘to take
+account of a person’s ethnic origin in selecting persons to
+be stopped in response to a specific terrorist threat’.8 This
+power was eventually repealed following a ruling of the
+European Court of Human Rights. Despite such successful legal challenges, the War on Terror continues: teachers,
+doctors, academics and social workers are all incorporated
+into Britain’s counterinsurgency programme through the
+Prevent policy, enlisted to identify signs of ‘radicalisation’
+and ‘extremism’ among ‘service-users’.
+This policing of sympathies – the desire to identify and
+record ‘radicalisation’ and support for ‘terrorism’, and
+to chart the interiority of the nation’s potential ‘internal
+enemies’, which of course ends up capturing much broader
+anti-imperialist impulses – has been accompanied by more
+overt forms of militarism. One year on from the ‘2011 riots’
+following the police murder of Mark Duggan, thousands
+of uniformed soldiers were deployed to provide security
+
+156
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+for the 2012 London Olympics, the biggest deployment
+of troops on the mainland since the Second World War
+(13,500 troops in total). London was ‘wired up with a
+new range of scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate
+and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking
+systems, new police control centres and checkpoints’,
+while surface-to-air missile systems scanned the skies
+and unmanned drones surveilled the stadiums.9 We now
+expect to see police officers armed with machine-guns at
+major travel terminals, and armed operatives trained by
+Northern Ireland paramilitary forces exercising shootto-kill operations in civilian areas, such as that which led
+to the police killing Brazilian plumber Jean Charles de
+Menezes in 2005.
+The firearms unit that killed Menezes were part of
+Britain’s domestic counter-terror police, but received their
+training from the SAS. The shoot-to-kill policy which saw
+Menezes executed as he walked through Stockwell underground station mirrored the tactics of British Special
+Forces. Through a global circulation of counter-terror
+military strategists, practices and consultants, paramilitary policing in Palestine, Northern Ireland and Britain
+now all share the hallmarks of lethal force as first resort.
+Here, the British military mythology of minimum force,
+due process and ‘hearts and minds’ becomes exposed
+for its frank absurdity. The racial nature of paramilitary
+policing is hard to miss here; a Catholic Brazilian plumber
+is mistaken for a Muslim Arab due to them both ‘having
+Mongolian eyes’, according to the officers responsible for
+the killing, which illustrates the slippery character of ‘the
+
+MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND
+
+◆
+
+157
+
+Muslim’ as a racial category and the persistence of the
+racial taxonomies of colonial science.
+Perhaps the most consistent racialised folk devil, for
+which the armed forces must be called into action, has
+been the spectre of the recently arrived, or imminently
+arriving, migrant. Migrants are often constructed as potential ‘terrorists’, ‘criminals’ and ‘sex offenders’, but they are
+more widely demonised for taking jobs, claiming out-ofwork benefits and putting a strain on public services. ‘The
+migrant’ is effectively an empty vessel into which myriad
+anxieties can be poured. This has found renewed urgency
+in the last few years, as increasing numbers attempt to
+enter Britain on small boats travelling from France. This
+requires we ‘send forth the navy’. Right-wing commentators have recently declared the need for gunboats to
+patrol Britain’s maritime borders, while politicians claim
+sea-crossing migrants must be turned away as a matter
+of deterrence.10 In summer 2020, we saw the Home
+Office request that the Ministry of Defence deploy navy
+vessels in the Dover Straits, while Home Secretary Priti
+Patel appointed a former Royal Marine to the new role
+of ‘Clandestine Channel Threat Commander’. While this
+reassertion of naval power silently reaffirms the hope that
+Britain might once again ‘rule the waves’, it also reflects
+the paranoiac convulsions of a political culture obsessed
+with scanning the border for signs of danger and restlessly
+pursuing the expulsion of all foreign pollutants. These
+anti-immigrant anxieties and revulsions inevitably culminate in militarised calls for further securitisation, closure
+and expulsion.
+
+158
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+It seems worth reflecting for a moment on the case of
+the Stansted 15, a group of radical environmental-migrant
+activists who successfully grounded a mass deportation
+charter flight in March 2017. After their action prevented
+the deportation of roughly 60 migrants to Ghana,
+Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the Home Office changed
+tactics. Rather than fly from commercial airports, some
+mass deportation charter flights now fly from Royal Air
+Force bases, such as Brize Norton. Of course, charter
+flights were already a form of militarised border control;
+they emerged largely because of difficulties entailed in
+deporting people on commercial flights, especially in the
+wake of some passengers and pilots refusing to fly with
+people resisting deportation. Charter flights – usually
+leaving from Stansted airport, even if by cover of darkness
+in the early hours – were therefore a means of undercutting the possibility of resistance and solidarity, especially
+in its spontaneous forms. The use of military bases for
+charter flights marks another escalation, crystallising the
+sense that migrants, by virtue of not being citizens, are
+not civilians either. Their expulsion, like that of ‘terrorists’,
+occurs in a murky extra-legal space created by an excess of
+state sovereignty and a disregard for human rights.
+Having watched the prosecution and sentencing of
+those undertaking similar actions before them, the
+Stansted 15 protestors expected to be charged with aggravated trespass. They were, at first, only to then have the
+charges upped to ‘intentional disruption of services at
+an aerodrome’, a terrorist offence introduced under the
+1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act, a law passed
+in response to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. The 15
+
+MILITARISATION ON THE MAINLAND
+
+◆
+
+159
+
+activists were convicted of these offences in Chelmsford
+Crown Court in December 2018, and potentially faced
+sentences of up to life imprisonment for endangering the
+safety of the airport. Fortunately, none of them were incarcerated. They were given fines and community service.
+But their treatment – particularly as a mostly white, university-educated group with an excellent legal team – is
+indicative of some important shifts. They were treated
+not as civilian protestors, acting on conscience, defending
+human rights and exercising their right to free speech
+within a liberal democracy, but as enemies of the state –
+not only criminals but terrorists.
+In their treatment we see the ways in which dissent is
+increasingly viewed as treachery and sedition. The observation that they would have received prison terms had
+they been black or Muslim – which became one of the hot
+takes on Twitter around the time of the trial – was not
+only obvious and patronising (clearly this was something
+the groups had considered and strategised around), it also
+missed the most disconcerting aspect of this case for all
+of us who might want to engage in acts of dissent and
+resistance. If middle-class presenting and mostly white
+activists can be convicted of terrorism offences for non-violent political actions, then the goalposts have shifted. The
+terrorism net has been cast even wider, and this limits all
+of our political horizons.
+As David Gee explains:
+a culture of militarism is part of our way of life as a
+society. A militarist outlook is embedded in certain
+perceptions of British nationhood and its security, in
+
+160
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+political orientations and the policies that come from
+them, in our fears and hopes for the future, in the
+language we use and the stories we tell about the way
+the world works, and in our entertainment, arts, and
+media productions.11
+Another important way in which the army is being
+called in is through the interpellation of people as surveilled and securitising subjects, willing to report and
+always reminded that the threat of terror is everywhere
+(‘see it, say it, sorted’). If militarisation can be defined as
+‘the contradictory and tense social process in which civil
+society organizes itself for the production of violence’,12
+then contemporary processes of militarisation rely on the
+persistent production of banal yet ubiquitous threats. In
+daily life, a whole range of people are encouraged, and
+sometimes instructed, to participate in the practices of
+everyday security (this is true with the Prevent duty for
+example). These instructions and encouragements are not
+designed to ‘change our minds’. These are not practices
+based in conceptions of consciousness. You do not have to
+believe in the War on Terror, for example. What you must
+do is be edged into co-operation through actions, so that
+the bureaucratic organisation of public life or working life
+or educational life places you in a position of participation
+and complicity. There is something in this that prefigures
+a deeper authoritarianism. Once participating, you are no
+longer the suspect. When they come for the suspect, you
+are just another bystander.
+
+CH APT E R T WE LVE
+
+Zero-sum Game
+
+All I ever wanted was to love women, and in turn to
+be loved by them back. Their behavior towards me has
+only earned my hatred, and rightfully so! I am the true
+victim in all of this. I am the good guy. Humanity struck
+at me first by condemning me to experience so much
+suffering. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t
+start this war … I wasn’t the one who struck first … But
+I will finish it by striking back. I will punish everyone.
+And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show
+the world my true worth.
+– Elliot Rodger manifesto (killed six and
+injured 14 in Isla Vista, California)
+
+Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you
+PC-ravaged clowns.
+– Piers Morgan, 2019
+
+Following the Conservative victory in the 2019 general
+election, news surfaced on social media of an upswing in
+racist abuse. Incidents of people of colour being goaded,
+mocked and jeered at in public spaces were undergirded
+by more intimate kinds of aggression, including black
+and brown families being informed by their neighbours
+that the Tory victory meant they ought to pack their bags;
+repatriation was nigh. In many ways, this was a rerun of
+
+162
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the days following the Brexit referendum result in 2016.
+Then, much of the tone was elated, triumphant – we won!
+Following the Tory landslide in 2019, the triumphalism
+took a new form. Instead of merely cawing over their
+victory, the right seemed to be most virulent when celebrating our defeat. Even as the final results were trickling
+in on December 13th, a jubilant white man took to the
+streets of Brixton, shouting ‘you lose! you lose!’ at black
+and brown commuters entering the tube station. Our
+loss was their gain, but it was our loss that tasted sweetest
+to them. More importantly, this man and many others
+viewed this zero-sum game through the prism of race; it
+was a triumph not only against the Remoaners, and not
+only against the racialised folk devils we have been discussing, but against all immigrants, their children and
+their children’s children.
+It was also seen as a victory against constraint of all kinds,
+against the idea that one must keep one’s bigotry behind
+closed doors. That said, bigotry has been out in the open
+– selling newspapers, winning election campaigns and
+greasing the wheels of nationalism’s constitutive exclusions – for decades. But the myth that people are policed
+by the diktats of ‘political correctness’ or ‘woke culture’
+nonetheless holds firm. As a result, Johnson’s record of
+calling gay men ‘tanktop-wearing bumboys’, saying that
+women who wear the burkha look like ‘letterboxes’, and
+having an altercation with his girlfriend that sounded so
+aggressive the neighbours called the police was, for many,
+an attractive, perhaps even a reassuring, prospect rather
+than a sign of being unfit for office. In Johnson, many saw
+their own bigotry, albeit with the money, position and
+
+ZERO-SUM GAME
+
+◆
+
+163
+
+power necessary to cast those views as common sense (see
+Chapter 9).
+As such, it should be no surprise that it was not just
+racist attacks that rose following Johnson’s victory, but
+also an onslaught of homophobia and transphobia.1 The
+gender politics of the authoritarian turn bear some consideration here. We are witnessing the rapid development
+of ‘culture wars’ that thrive off a zero-sum thesis on all
+resources, material or otherwise: one person’s gain is
+another’s loss. If basic respect is shown to black and brown
+people, it must come at the cost of white people’s access to
+dignity. The culture wars can thus frame the increase in
+relative power and dignity of women or trans people as a
+threat to men or cisgender people, laying the foundation
+for men’s rights campaigners and TERFs (‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’). The zero-sum thesis is the key
+driver of the culture wars; it offers some rationale for why
+highly insignificant phenomena (a vegan sausage roll, a
+stranger’s gender) can become charged sites of conflict.
+If you believe the fulfilment of another’s desire is always
+at the expense of your own, then someone else’s gain,
+however minor, will always be your loss.
+The logic of a zero-sum game underpins the network of
+interconnected moral panics, some of which we map out
+in this book, around which political discourse converges
+and congeals. Social life is understood in increasingly
+Darwinian terms; the survival of the fittest has been
+reimagined as a shoot-em-up platform game – singular,
+disembodied, territorial, violent, masculine, exhilarating,
+yet simultaneously scared, defensive, nativist in the most
+privatised of conceptions with lesser and/or dangerous
+
+164
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+others representing a threat that must be quashed if the
+embattled family is to survive. We see this in TERFism,
+which claims that trans women are in fact devious men
+threatening and usurping the place of ‘real’ women, as well
+as their sexual dignity. There are only enough resources
+(emotional and moral as well as material) either for trans
+women or for cis women, but not both – it’s them or us.
+We might note the prominence of an organisation called
+Woman’s Place UK2 in the TERF landscape as an interesting example of the retrograde politics produced by
+this logic – the name at once spoofing a previous patriarchal framing of the world yet also seeking to reclaim
+an imagined territory of women’s rights, a place where
+the sovereign claims of cis-women are beyond question
+or disruption. TERF logic relies on strict hierarchies and
+schematic divisions – women have a particular place,
+violated by men, they must also guard it against trans
+interlopers.
+An event held by an anti-trans organisation called ‘We
+Need to Talk UK’, entitled ‘“Transgenderism” and the War
+on Women’, offers an instructive example. The name of the
+organisation echoes a key tenet of the culture war, which
+is that opinions that diverge from or contest a set of liberal
+orthodoxies are being silenced. Further, the event was
+originally to be held at Millwall football club but had to be
+moved after the venue received complaints. As a result, the
+group collaborated with Conservative MP David Davies
+to hold the event in the House of Commons – the same
+David Davies who voted against gay marriage, is sceptical
+about climate change and is a staunch critic of the Human
+
+ZERO-SUM GAME
+
+◆
+
+165
+
+Rights Act. Trans exclusionary radical feminists find
+themselves making strange bedfellows indeed.
+The expanding terrain of digital subcultures organised
+around renewing the primacy of masculinity operates
+through a similar premise. The gains made by feminism
+over the second half of the twentieth century are viewed
+as having displaced men from their rightful place of
+dominance. Crucially, the story goes that feminism has not
+brought us closer to equality but has created a situation of
+female supremacy: a feminisation of society that puts men
+at a disadvantage, a disadvantage imagined as the coming
+together of a loss of ‘jobs for men’, a loss of the unquestioned
+social status of manhood apparently enjoyed by previous
+generations, and a loss of sexual access to women’s bodies.
+Though this backlash against the successes of the women’s
+liberation movement has been a staple of public discourse
+for decades, the early 2000s saw a new iteration in the form
+of the claim, stridently expressed, that men were, in fact,
+the victims of a society run by and for women. Fathers4Justice were the most prominent exponents of this idea;
+they sought to redress what they viewed as institutionalised discrimination against fathers, particularly in family
+courts. While the case for co-parenting after divorce, and
+the expectation that men share equally in the labour of
+childcare, are prominent feminist concerns, Fathers4Justice viewed feminism as the source of their suffering. This
+position chimed with the ‘postfeminist’ rhetoric of New
+Labour, which viewed equality as a question of legislation
+and common sense and attempted to sever the residual
+connections between the Labour Party and the feminist,
+anti-racist and anti-war movements that had come out of
+
+166
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the New Left. As a result, while the stunts Fathers4Justice
+pulled were viewed as unnecessary or hysterical, the
+underlying premise that feminism needed to be kept under
+control and equality managed by the state remained, and
+has helped to usher in these digital subcultures.
+Within this new global ‘mens’ rights’ network, disproportionate rates of male suicide3 and homelessness,4
+as well as poor provision for male victims of domestic
+violence, are taken to be the outcome of feminism.5
+Further, the fact that men are, globally, more likely to be
+conscripted as soldiers becomes similarly implicated in
+female supremacy. The fact that Men’s Rights Activists
+(MRAs) focus on these gendered discrepancies – rather
+than aligning themselves with anti-war activists, housing
+campaigners or organisations for survivors of domestic
+violence – helps to illuminate the porous membrane
+between MRAs and the wider alt-right political movement.
+Incels (short for involuntary celibates), on the other hand,
+turn their attention to the iniquities of the sexual marketplace. Incels view the world according to strict sexual
+hierarchies, with ‘Chads’ and ‘Staceys’ (conventionally
+attractive men and women) at the top. This rather adolescent understanding of sexual life takes a more sinister turn
+in its detour through evolutionary psychology, through
+which incels assert that even women on the lower end of
+the sexual hierarchy are ‘programmed’ to be demanding,
+high maintenance and committed to dating men who
+are at the top of the scale, leaving ordinary men, such as
+themselves, at a disadvantage. It is worth noting here that
+this elaboration of the old adage that ‘nice guys finish last’
+evidences forms of loneliness, alienation and resentment
+
+ZERO-SUM GAME
+
+◆
+
+167
+
+that could be taken as paradigmatic of the current conjuncture. Yet it is their organisation along the lines of the
+zero-sum game that connects this emotional terrain to the
+militarisation of social life and the turn to authoritarian
+nationalism. However, across all of these domains, men
+understand themselves to be under threat – whether physically, socially or psychologically – from powerful and
+malicious women protected by the conspiracy of ‘political
+correctness’ or ‘woke culture’. Taken together, we can see
+TERFS, incels and Men’s Rights Activists as key players
+in the ‘culture wars’ that now dominate the political
+landscape, and which both feed off and intersect with the
+more explicitly racial dynamics.
+However, as indicated, the zero-sum game is at its most
+visible when it concerns race. The language of ‘white genocide’, perhaps the most explicit rendering of this idea, has
+gained significant purchase in the mainstream, including in universities. As mentioned previously, Professor of
+Politics Eric Kaufmann asserts that people have ‘natural’
+racial affinities and that ‘racial self-interest’ is an intelligible sentiment, distinct from racism. In his book Whiteshift,
+Kaufmann develops his particular brand of demographic
+racism, arguing that as ‘white people’ become a smaller
+global plurality, Western nations ought to orient their
+immigration policies around the ‘cultural comfort’ of
+these white national majorities. To promote his book,
+Kaufmann appeared at an event hosted by the libertarian (perhaps, more accurately, contrarian) website Spiked,
+whose panellists were asked to respond to the question:
+‘Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the West?’ The fact
+that these moral panics regarding shifting demograph-
+
+168
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+ics, gender norms and sexual practices express themselves
+in the language of ‘debate’ is notable for retaining a rhetorical connection to the old forms of democracy (and
+to their theatrical forms) which are, increasingly, viewed
+as anachronistic, idealistic and failed. Yet the notion of
+rational debate serves to rehabilitate these ideals, and
+recast the left, feminists and anti-racists as the enemies of
+free speech – the real agents of repression.
+These ‘debates’ are highly visible as televised spectacles, but they begin on social media, which functions as
+a kind of anti-democracy, like looking at democracy in
+a funhouse mirror. The appearance of being able to say
+whatever you want to the whole world is a powerful and
+seductive illusion. In fact, utterances on social media
+are highly ritualised within a dense set of formal codes.
+In many ways, the world of social media is the perfect
+microcosm in which to view the internal workings of
+ideology; the sheer volume of material and relative ease
+of identifying trends and tropes allows us to watch ideas
+form, fracture and renew. But the chaotic, cacophonous
+chamber of social media hides the direction of power.
+Consider the way in which social media backlash offers
+the illusion of collective power; a celebrity or brand will say
+something racist or sexist, tweets and Instagram posts will
+accrue, critiquing their mistake and demanding redress,
+and the company or celebrity will issue an apology. This
+process is often swift and exhilarating – it can feel highly
+compelling, like watching a sport – and gives the sense
+that powerful figures are accountable to ordinary people.
+In fact, these processes strengthen our affective ties to
+
+ZERO-SUM GAME
+
+◆
+
+169
+
+celebrities or brands, while also making profit for social
+media platforms.
+The sense of democratic potential operates through a
+binary functionality; like/don’t like, retweet/ignore. This
+binary functionality precludes most forms of uncertainty
+or nuance but, perhaps most importantly, interpellates us all to have an opinion. It demands engagement
+and encourages us to view that engagement as a social
+necessity. This binary functionality has an educative
+function for the new authoritarianism. We become accustomed to polarised, violent, divisive, individualistic and
+mob-like discourse, centred around moral purity and
+evacuated of political content. These technologies are also
+highly anxiety-inducing, which further encourages the
+desire for forms of collectivity, calm and certainty.
+The falling standards of living induced by neoliberal
+capitalism and an aggressive programme of austerity,
+alongside increasingly violent forms of detention, incarceration and social death for the poorest and the racialised in
+Britain, must be taken as primary. Nonetheless, the modes
+of mediation and consumption that structure everyday
+life are indivisible from the operations of the authoritarian state. What we can begin to see is the way in which
+these binary discursive regularities encourage a desire for
+older forms of political collectivity centred on the nation.
+Portions of the left (and some liberals) who desire this
+kind of collectivity (or, interestingly, assume others do) are
+trying to harness these desires through the non sequitur of
+progressive nationalism, while most others have dropped
+the progressive part altogether, and are advocating for variations on the theme of militarised nationalism. This has
+
+170
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+become audible in the refrain – sung by MPs from across
+the political spectrum, as well as their compadres in the
+media with whom they share the hymn sheet – to ‘send
+in the army’. This desire for a military presence is more
+than a capitulation to the sense of eternal and omnipresent threat orchestrated by the everyday theatrics of the
+War on Terror; rather, it is a kind of forward-looking
+nostalgia. It is both the desire for the Blitz-spirit version
+of national collectivity (hence all the elated talk of postBrexit rationing) and the yearning for the certainties of
+collective national stability post-democracy, overseen by a
+militaristic state patriarch.
+
+PART 5
+
+What Now?
+
+C HAPTE R T HI RTE E N
+
+Covid-19: A Real Crisis
+
+We go out and we clap. We clap awkwardly. We clap reluctantly because healthcare workers should not be troopified,
+because they are not our blood sacrifice, because they should
+not have to go to work and put themselves and their families
+at risk. We clap reluctantly because Boris and Matt Hancock
+are clapping too, the very people who are responsible for the
+social murder of hundreds of thousands of people, by refusing
+to act against the spread of the virus, but also by presiding
+over a decade of austerity. We clap because our neighbours
+are clapping, even the ones who irritate us, the ones who
+closed the door in the face of canvassers, telling them they
+don’t vote. If they’re clapping, this has to mean something.
+We don’t want to clap. We want to rage, but we clap anyway.
+Why? Because this is as close to anything in-person and collective as we have encountered in this crisis. We are tempted
+to give in to the cynicism which would see us retreat inside,
+but we don’t. We continue to clap awkwardly. We want
+to shout, ‘don’t fucking vote Tory next time’, but we don’t,
+because we don’t want to break this. Not yet.
+We are already grieving. We can’t sit still. Our hands shake
+and we need to keep them busy. We can’t think about what
+we thought about before. We feel guilty eating nice things,
+guilty when the postman comes to the door. Yesterday a
+13-year-old child died alone. His parents and sisters can’t
+
+174
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+go to his funeral because they are all in isolation. There are
+people on ventilators, there are people choking on their own
+phlegm, there are people who can’t breathe, there are people,
+so many people, dying alone.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+We have been writing about ‘crisis’ throughout – that has
+very much been the point – and yet to call the coronavirus pandemic ‘another crisis’ obviously underplays the
+epochal transformations now underway. In short, this
+is what a real crisis looks like. Millions abruptly unemployed; the prime minister telling people to ‘stay at home’;
+police given powers to disperse any individual from public
+space; and the skies empty of planes and full of police helicopters, while the ambulance sirens reverberate, so often,
+too loud, on otherwise quiet roads. We do not yet know
+what will come in its wake, but a deep global economic
+recession seems unavoidable. The crisis will also shift
+state practices and political subjectivities in ways that
+we cannot yet predict. However, before looking, despairingly or otherwise, to what lies in store, we first reflect
+on how the arguments presented so far can help explain
+the UK government’s woeful response to the coronavirus
+pandemic. If any doubted the extent to which state neglect
+has become normalised in Britain, the Covid-19 crisis has
+confirmed the ascendancy of that neglect as an active,
+wilful, targeted technique of state power. Under Boris
+Johnson, the UK has lurched from one half-articulated
+non-policy to another – in the process, seemingly referencing many of the recurring symbols of British popular
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+175
+
+nationalism in a manner that goes beyond farce to all-out
+horror-show.
+Throughout this book we have tried to describe the
+neglectful state from several angles and with different
+lighting. Much of what we have discussed belongs to the
+aftermath of the 2008 financial crash: austerity amalgamated with the securitisation practices honed through
+the War on Terror, and the bordering machinery that has
+become so central to disciplinary techniques across the
+world. However, this moment might just be passing, and
+this book has been our attempt to understand the world
+moving beneath our feet. We have suggested that the will
+to balance targeted neglect at racial others with some
+meaningful appeal to belonging or entitlement for a significant section of the population seems almost gone. The
+ability of the state to administer a totalised machinery at
+all, even if only to administer differential neglect, is now
+in question. If anything, we are entering a new phase of
+rapid realignment in state practices and an active disruption of what has gone before. And yet, just as we were
+working on concluding this book and trying to reflect on
+the new Boris Johnson-led government, with its particular brand of authoritarianism, the Covid-19 pandemic hit
+and with it the contours of our political, economic and
+cultural conjuncture twisted and warped.
+The deadly costs of the neglectful British state have
+been made tragically clear over even the first stages of the
+Covid-19 crisis, which seems likely to haunt the political
+and economic structure of the globe for the foreseeable
+future. At the time of writing, a combination of incompetence, malice and an investment in the economy above
+
+176
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+people have led to the UK suffering the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe. However, we can already see that
+those in power are appealing to the nation’s patriotism
+and nativism to distract from their murderous mismanagement which has caused Britain’s death toll to be so
+much worse than comparable European neighbours. It is
+this dynamic – of fatal neglect cross-cut with exuberant
+jingoism, of corporate state capture behind a flimsy screen
+of strongman theatrics – that we have explored through
+this book and which has intensified during the present
+crisis. The actions – and more importantly the inactions
+– of the British state in the face of the global pandemic
+appear to confirm our earlier analysis of the emergence
+of a neglectful state that works through the militarised
+figure of the patriarch. We have been alarmed to see how
+prescient our terms for the embodiment of parallel state
+practices have been.
+Unsurprisingly, the language of war has been mobilised.
+We were called to enter into battle. We were asked to
+protect NHS workers on the frontline by staying at home.
+We would summon our Blitz spirit to get through this as
+a great nation. We were now in a war with an invisible
+but deadly enemy. We were told to pull together to ensure
+victory. As a result, the government press releases and the
+mostly unhelpful journalistic commentary (a poor substitute for investigation and proper reportage) amounted
+to little more than health and martial metaphors falling
+in on one another, or tying one another in knots, without
+actually telling us very much. But the martial metaphors
+were not only that. In fact, the state’s most decisive and
+immediate action was to introduce emergency measures
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+177
+
+through the Coronavirus Act. The Act introduced
+‘certainly the most severe restrictions ever imposed, going
+further than the regulations made under, respectively,
+the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and the Emergency
+Powers (Defence) Act 1939] during the two world wars’.1
+This was not just a metaphorical war, but a war made real
+by emergency laws and state practices. The Coronavirus
+Bill breezed through Parliament with literally no opposition from the Labour Party or the Lords, despite it quite
+evidently being extreme, authoritarian, lacking proper
+oversight and with an expansive time limit. That the
+emergency might become the norm was already predictable at this early stage of legislating, while the government
+still floundered on public health policy and responsible
+action to save lives.
+The celebration of the 75th anniversary of VE day in
+the midst of the lockdown allowed for the romanticisation of the Blitz, Dunkirk and all things Second World
+War that we have argued creates an image of Britain as
+the heroic underdog, rather than an oppressive imperial
+overlord. As people up and down the country broke
+lockdown to celebrate the myth of an innate, British
+spirit of sacrifice, the line between historical re-enactment and history repeating itself became eerily blurred.
+Comparisons between the coronavirus lockdown and the
+Blitz emerged almost immediately, despite the deaths this
+time being caused by state mismanagement rather than
+Luftwaffe bombs. Nativism has also served as an answer to
+this existential crisis of the British state, with echoes of the
+anti-Chinese rhetoric that was common in Britain at the
+end of the nineteenth century following the aftermath of
+
+178
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+the opium wars. Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage claimed
+that coronavirus shows us that ‘it is time we all challenged
+China’, and blamed the initial location of the virus as the
+cause of the problem, despite that reasoning’s inability to
+explain the striking difference in the death toll between
+Britain and, say, Germany. Any mention of the disproportionate number of deaths suffered by Britain’s black and
+Asian communities during this crisis has been dismissed
+as ‘divisive’, or, perhaps more perniciously, as attributable
+to genetic difference. As ever, biological ‘race’ retains its
+allure, especially in matters of health and medicine, as the
+certainties of absolute genetic difference safely cloud the
+ongoing force of structural racism as social fact.
+In the days following UK lockdown, online cultures
+began to comment on the (perhaps uniquely British, in its
+popular articulation) love of boot-licking. To lick the boots
+of the strict and unresponsive authority figure is a jokey
+recurrent theme in the British pornographic imagination
+– arising, no doubt, from the disproportionate cultural
+influence of militarised forms of upper-class schooling
+and the ritualised sexualised punishment within these
+spaces. This image is an apt index of and uncomfortable
+commentary on Britain’s oddly unresolved class politics.
+Despite histories and presents of militant working-class
+resistance, the idea that many of us bow to our masters,
+and, more than this, love the process of prostration,
+registers something peculiar but undeniably persistent
+about British political culture. In both his militarised and
+neglectful incarnations, the state patriarch can be positioned as the recipient of boot-licking abjection – and he
+is suitably unresponsive to such gestures. However, what,
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+179
+
+Covid has painfully revealed is the absence of any effective
+authority figure wearing the boots. The British state has
+been floundering, talking tough or talking us down, but
+revealed every day as unable to exercise the titillatingly
+militarised authority promised before Covid. Instead, we,
+the population, look to our habits of boot-licking only to
+find the emptiness and the terror of longing for authority
+when that authority reveals its inadequacy.
+*
+
+*
+
+*
+
+The myth that drove Conservative austerity policies in the
+aftermath of the last economic crisis – the myth that ‘we
+are all in it together’ – appears to have been jettisoned by
+the new leadership of Boris Johnson and his chief strategist Dominic Cummings, seemingly the only person
+to whom Johnson feels an undying loyalty. Johnson and
+Cummings make little pretence that their policies are for
+the greater good. They represent and defend ‘their people’
+and feed off the politics of division. Both built their careers
+through the Brexit referendum by tying Britain’s relationship with the European Union to a culture war about
+British identity, and calling on their supporters to relive
+the imagined glories of yesteryear. Specifically linking
+Brexit to the most romantic moments in British military
+history, Johnson argued that Remainers had forgotten that
+‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out ... The EU
+is an attempt to do this by different methods.’ After that
+approach proved successful in the referendum, Johnson
+and Cummings have continued to repeat a similar refrain
+as they have gained greater and greater state power.
+
+180
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+The entry of Boris Johnson to the elected office of prime
+minister with a large majority (previously his ascent had
+bypassed the electorate) has empowered, apparently,
+the still shadowy figure of Cummings. Cummings’s
+own understanding of British history is one in which,
+following the Shangri-la of the Victorian Empire, Britain
+spends the twentieth century making ‘colossal error after
+error’;2 now that he has his hands on the instruments of
+state, Cummings appears determined to use them to once
+again provide the British ruling class with the power it
+had enjoyed in the past. Under his direction, we have seen
+displays of carelessness towards previously settled niceties
+of political life. Despite the highly questionable partisanship (in favour of the Conservative Party) of much of
+the news media, key journalists were asked to leave an
+early Johnson press briefing in an orchestrated display
+of overturning public accountability. Any dissent within
+the cabinet, however weedy, has been shut down, most
+notably with the theatrical expulsion of Sajid Javid. Judges
+have been put on notice – with government plans to limit
+access to judicial review, a particularly chilling threat after
+the battle between Johnson’s previous government and
+the judiciary on the issue of proroguing Parliament. A
+few months later, in August 2020, Home Secretary Priti
+Patel attacked ‘activist lawyers’ and promised that her new
+immigration laws would ‘send the left into meltdown’.
+What we are being promised, it seems, is not a better
+functioning state (the axing of Public Health England in
+August 2020 is telling here), but rather the fulfilment of
+the electoral promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’, and to ‘crush
+the saboteurs’.3
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+181
+
+We seem set for another strange experiment, the imposition of the shock doctrine on a domestic population. If
+this is the endgame of empire, then it really is a nasty case
+of the colonial subject coming home. In this openly celebrated coming disruption, breaking apart institutions
+is always considered a good thing. Such a gambit can be
+popular, for a while, because institutions of state have failed
+so miserably to meet the needs of much of the population.
+However, despite its claims to be decentring a political
+elite, this is no democratising project. Instead we see a still
+undecided process of realignment within the ruling class.
+The British state has been captured by a far-right cabal and,
+despite the forwarding of imperial nostalgia, is subject to
+the whims and interests of a transnational capitalist class,
+even as this class is undergoing transformation. Already
+in its first months, the Johnson government announced
+legislation that disregards and bullies ‘business interests’,
+who are told to give up their reliance on migrant labour,
+learn to retain staff, automate or die. It is hard to shake the
+sense that this is a planned chaos, which includes actively
+shrinking the economy (for a time at least), perhaps introducing even more punitive policies, including varieties
+of workfare and fast-tracking automation with all of the
+resulting political disruption. While some voters might
+have been attracted by the implicit promise that whiteness
+would count for something again, what comes next might
+be shocking and painful for us all.
+Without wishing to be over-dramatic (and in the full
+awareness that the left frames every defeat as an opening
+for fascism), the odd standoff between the new government and ‘business interests’ reveals something new
+
+182
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+at play. On the one hand, the expulsion of dissent from
+cabinet also enabled the inclusion of another well-connected member of the transnational billionaire class
+(Rishi Sunak, unexpected and unlikely heart-throb of
+middle England). On the other, British business is being
+ordered to withdraw from practices established through a
+relative ease in hiring migrant workers and an expectation
+of relative ease when trading across borders. The changing
+set of class alliances, brokered by a state machinery willing
+to abandon recent practices of elite alliance-building, is
+something to which we must be alert. In 2019 the Home
+Office announced that it was moving forward with the
+government’s promise to introduce ‘a points-based immigration system’, dropping the previously oft-repeated
+rhetorical descriptor, ‘Australian-style’. In vox pop Twitter
+videos, Priti Patel, surrounded by scientists in white coats,
+repeated the mantra that Britain is ‘taking back control of
+its immigration system’. What this means in reality is far
+from what the Australian system actually entails. The UK’s
+proposals make for a far more restrictive immigration
+system which significantly limits permanent settlement
+prospects for skilled and qualified migrants. Those who
+come must fulfil the English-speaking requirement, and
+the proposals make no allowance for visas for ‘low-skilled’
+migrants. The government’s rationale is that
+UK businesses will need to adapt and adjust to the end
+of free movement, and we will not seek to recreate the
+outcomes from free movement within the points-based
+system. As such, it is important that employers move
+away from a reliance on the UK’s immigration system
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+183
+
+as an alternative to investment in staff retention, productivity, and wider investment in technology and
+automation.4
+Essentially this is a reiteration of the British jobs for
+British workers slogan, but one which envisions British
+workers properly as being machines. Meanwhile, there is
+some allowance made for ‘seasonal workers’, who will be
+able to come to perform particular agricultural tasks for a
+maximum period of six months, ensuring that settlement
+is not an option for so-called low/unskilled migrants. The
+‘seasonal workers pilot’ increased the number of seasonal
+workers the agricultural sector is permitted to employ
+from outside the EU from 2,500 to 10,000 in time for the
+2020 harvest. This scheme is described as a response ‘to
+the specific temporary requirements’ of the sector. The
+government is taking its cue from the right-wing, nationalist political moment, stating in its press release that it has
+‘listened to the clear message from the 2016 referendum
+and the 2019 general election and will end the reliance on
+cheap, low-skilled labour coming into the country’. It is
+clear that the government considers itself to be delivering
+on Brexit’s promise to ‘take back control’. It proclaims it is
+‘ending free movement, taking back control of our borders’.
+It is well aware that its new immigration policies will create
+a gap in terms of labour market needs, stating that: ‘It is
+estimated 70% of the existing EU workforce would not
+meet the requirements of the skilled worker route, which
+will help to bring overall numbers down in future.’5
+How quickly the tables have turned, then, as Britain
+struggles to come to terms with the woeful unprepared-
+
+184
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+ness of its health service in the midst of a global pandemic.
+The NHS in particular is ill-equipped and unprepared for
+coping in a pandemic after more than a decade of underfunding and privatisation. During lockdown, migrant
+NHS staff whose visas were about to expire were told that
+they would be automatically renewed so that they could
+focus on fighting Covid-19. Having faced daily abuse
+from patients, asking if they can see a white doctor – and
+harangued by a media unquestioningly rehearsing the line
+that there are too many migrants in Britain, taking jobs
+not for them, not paying taxes and draining the welfare
+state – NHS staff are now being told they are needed.
+They were applauded weekly by the public, as though they
+were soldiers marching into war. ‘Key-worker’ migrants,
+working in the NHS, in transport, as refuse collectors,
+were told they were needed more than ever and must put
+themselves and their families at risk to save a people who
+so recently elected a government on the promise that it
+would rid the country of people like them.
+After the War on Terror, the 2008 financial crash
+and Brexit, the Covid-19 crisis appears to be the fourth
+horseman heralding a dramatic redeployment of state
+violence in the twenty-first century to redraw the contours
+of British society. Johnson announced a ‘New Deal’,
+drawing on the language of American social reform, to
+convince his new supporters in the former Labour heartlands of his commitment to investing in the ‘left behind’
+areas. Of course, Johnson will offer some rewards to those
+who catapulted him to electoral victory in December
+2019. However, the cabal of transnational capitalists associated with the Johnson and Cummings project – both
+
+COVID-19: A REAL CRISIS
+
+◆
+
+185
+
+those within government, such as Somerset Capital Management partner, Jacob Rees-Mogg, or those outside of
+government, like James Dyson – will act as a counterbalance to even the most limited form of nationalist social
+welfare. The ultimate aim of the Johnson government
+until the next election is to use this moment to open up
+new opportunities for British capital, both at home and
+overseas, whilst also depriving cultural institutions that
+have been set up as ‘enemies of the people’ – the BBC, universities, artistic institutions, an independent judiciary
+– of the ability to challenge the narrative set by the state.
+
+CHAPTE R F O URTE E N
+
+Shared Grief,
+Hope and Resistance
+
+We began this book by observing that Britain is not a happy
+place, not least for those of us committed to challenging racism. However, throughout the process of writing
+the book, events plunged us into new depths of despair.
+For those who had campaigned for the Labour Party in
+the 2019 election – including us – the days following the
+decisive defeat were marked by painful, thwarted and
+largely unsuccessful attempts to grieve the lost opportunity. Even before the votes were counted, think-pieces
+amassed trying to explain why the mythic ‘Red Wall’ had
+crumbled, and each factor (Corbyn, anti-Semitism, the
+media, Brexit, deindustrialisation) was seized upon and
+discarded in turn. Solutions were offered (community
+organising, protest, Keir Starmer), in an attempt to stave
+off the depression. These proclamations, refutations and
+solutions were marked by a kind of desperation; the turn
+to authoritarianism was undeniable, irresistible. Though
+the Tories had fought the election on a manifesto so thin
+and sloganeering that it was difficult to determine the
+precise outlines of the Cummings–Johnson agenda, it was
+clear that it would be contoured by an intensified nativist
+racism. And then 2020 hit, with a global pandemic that
+only sharpened the dividing line between those who get to
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+187
+
+live and those who are left to die. And yet, even as we tried
+to close out this book with some final words on Covid-19,
+the country was rocked by the largest anti-racist street
+mobilisation in British history following the brutal police
+murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. How to make
+sense of it all, again?
+Our sense is that while the apocalypse looms globally,
+the end-times take on a particular flavour in the UK.
+The core argument framing this book is that we cannot
+describe this moment in Britain solely in terms of the rise
+of something, of nativist authoritarianism perhaps, but
+must also pay attention to the overbearing sense of decline
+– the decline of Britain’s greatness, the end of empire. This
+acute awareness of being at the end of one thing, and the
+beginning of something else, whose form is unstable and
+unclear, is a condition that inspires both hope and dread.
+In the few months since lockdown, we have watched
+with horror as fascists effectively mobilised in ‘defence’
+of everything – from Brexit, to Tommy Robinson, to the
+statue of Winston Churchill. But the lows of witnessing
+Nazi salutes in Parliament Square were matched by the
+highs of watching a multi-racial crowd pull down a statue
+of the slave trader Edward Colston, before throwing him
+into the Bristol harbour where his ships used to dock.
+The cacophonous moment we are in suggests multiple,
+contingent openings through which the languages and
+grammars of a new world might emerge. Looking at the
+form and reception of the UK Black Lives Matter (BLM)
+movement in 2020, it is clear that something significant
+has shifted since the first iteration of BLM four years
+ago. As in 2016, the protests against racist state violence
+
+188
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+emerged hand in hand with demands for the toppling
+of statues of colonisers and slave traders (in 2016, it was
+Rhodes Must Fall). Activists, again, made connections
+between histories of colonial violence and contemporary
+forms of state racism. But the scale and context of the 2020
+movement has revealed new outcomes and opportunities.
+Protestors in 2016 were denounced as fringe, far too
+radical to be entertained. The removal of statues was
+rejected outright – with Oxford chancellor and former
+colonial governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten calling
+on protesting students to ‘think about being educated
+elsewhere’, proposing China as a potential destination.1
+By 2020, institutions from the Metropolitan Police to the
+Conservative Party clamoured to express sympathy for
+the movement – especially while it still remained largely
+a conversation about the US. The hundreds of thousands
+who took to the streets condemning systemic, institutional racism shook the British establishment. Suddenly,
+the removal of statues appeared an easy compromise, in
+the face of the largest anti-racist protest movement in
+British history. Removals of statues which uncritically
+commemorate colonialism from museums, universities
+and town squares proliferated in 2020. Concurrently, such
+a concession has enabled the more radical demands of
+BLM, such as defunding the police, to enter mainstream
+political debate.
+Before Covid, we had already observed the resurgence
+of a more expansive street politics, more multiple, more
+promiscuous, something beyond the usual deference and
+good manners of British political life. This re-awakening
+of the street is, in part, what powered the Corbyn moment;
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+189
+
+the coming together of an assorted multitude, spanning
+street and community organisers, new or reinvigorated
+party members, Momentum, trade unionists and all sorts
+of people who didn’t really believe in a parliamentary road
+to socialism but could not pass on the possibility this particular Labour leadership might open. All of this chimed
+with the re-emergence of a street politics that seemed
+to confirm a general understanding of politics moving
+beyond formal institutional practices and out into the
+spaces of everyday life.
+Even before the Corbyn moment, the twenty-first
+century was already a time of renewed street politics,
+including in Britain. While the heady hopes of Occupy or
+of the revolutions of the squares remained distant for most
+of the country, the habit of protest has extended. Now,
+Britain too has an established culture of street protest,
+perhaps characterised by dressing up, face-painting and
+twee and/or scatological placards. The energies unleashed
+in the protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq laid a
+foundation here. The coming together of very diverse
+segments of the population, including notably the whiter
+middle classes with Muslim and migrant working-class
+communities, combined with memorable home-made
+protest accessories, signalled an opening to previously
+rare forms of political communication and conversation.
+Fast forward to Remain – a movement unable to shake
+its middle-class cultural references, despite a wider base
+among supporters. Once again, tweeness stands in for a
+particular political sensibility – respectable outrage, performance of a shared consciousness; jokes and costumes
+abounded. The reported good humour of Remain events
+
+190
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+became part of the political message, insinuating that
+Leavers were angry, violent, lacking in such genteel
+good manners. Some anti-racists whispered quietly their
+uncomfortable suspicion that Remainers had never had
+their sense of entitlement questioned before. Worse still,
+it was difficult to avoid the more cosmopolitan nationalist undertones of the EU flag-waving. In its own way, this
+performance subtly (and not so subtly) excluded racialised Others seen as not belonging within the borders of
+the European project. But still, at least people were out on
+the street.
+When Extinction Rebellion came on the scene, the
+critique of hidden and not-so-hidden racism and nationalism was less whispered. XR presented a particularly
+and peculiarly British incarnation of the authority-loving
+rebel. Despite the rhetoric of rebellion, the overly friendly
+relationship with the police revealed the imagined membership of such actions. Groups involved in legal observing
+at protests and support for those suffering police violence
+warned against the XR approach, with its failure to understand the persistence of state violence and police racism.
+Yet, in the context of many years of wilful state neglect and
+a takeover of formal political spaces by the performance of
+buffoonery, we might understand the plaintive tweeness
+of both Remain and Extinction Rebellion as a kind of call
+for an effective state patriarch.
+Despite the costume of protest, often quite literally the
+most costumed of protests, these are movements that long
+for authority to take control and to make things work again.
+Remainers were openly nostalgic for a time they characterised as a European idyll of tolerance, free movement
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+191
+
+and excellent cheese and wine, handily skipping over the
+violences of Fortress Europe and the archipelago of camps
+and detention centres making up the other landscape
+underlying ‘free movement’. If only we could return to a
+grown-up politics where a sensible authority figure could
+put their foot down, overturn the silly tantrum of the referendum vote to leave the European Union, and make
+things go back to normal. XR, despite a more astute reading
+of the enormity of the climate crisis, also revealed a deep
+love of authority, garlanding the police force in the hope
+that a renewed authoritarianism could be repurposed to
+save a humanity who really don’t know what is good for
+them or for the planet. This critique is not an attempt to
+write off the movement altogether, and certainly not the
+many thousands of people who took to the streets in both
+XR and anti-Brexit protests. We recognise that the specific
+motivations and prescriptions of participants in these
+mass protests are not homogeneous.
+That said, we think the whole idea of mass protest to
+force governments to take action on climate crisis often
+represents a form of longing for an effective and more
+authoritarian state. For some of the younger climate protesters on the other hand – especially the school strikers
+– there was no longing for the caring state that came before
+the neglectful one, and no cuddly deference to the police.
+This generational shift is also racially contoured, and it
+should therefore be unsurprising that these young activists
+held placards that read ‘Fuck the Home Office’, intuitively
+connecting climate breakdown to global migration flows
+and the dehumanisation of people moving across and into
+Europe. This was in stark contrast to XR’s comms strategy,
+
+192
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+which emphasised the ‘destruction of all we hold dear’
+precisely by invoking our nation, our people, our ecosystems and our future generations to come. XR deferred
+to the nation, even if strategically, in ways that the
+school strikers found uninspiring and irrelevant. Related
+questions of generational change and difference were also
+manifest in the BLM mobilisations.
+Again, it is worth remarking on the sheer scale of the
+BLM mobilisation in May and June. Following the police
+murder of George Floyd, protests against police brutality
+and anti-black racism spread across the globe. In Britain,
+we witnessed several weeks of repeated protests, sometimes every day, and not only in multicultural cities but in
+towns and villages with seemingly no memory of anti-racist street mobilisation. Indeed, the protests were recurrent
+and country-wide. It is particularly significant that the
+issues Corbyn’s Labour conceded on most – the case
+against police, prisons and violent borders – became the
+very issues around which one of the most geographically
+and racially diverse street mobilisations in generations
+galvanised. Indeed, from 2017–19, Corbynism moved
+from its more grassroots and explicitly anti-racist political
+positions towards its own particular brand of law-andorder posturing. Apparently as part of its anti-austerity
+programme, Labour promised to invest in border guards,
+prisons and police, offering citizens the personal and
+national security that Tory cutbacks failed to deliver. The
+failure of this manoeuvre undoubtedly contributed to the
+shift from the ballot box back to the street as the focus of
+collective anti-racist energy. The youthfulness of the protestors was especially notable on the streets, in London at
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+193
+
+least (which is not unrelated to the dangers of Covid-19
+infection for older people). The people organising the
+protests were also young, often engaging in radical politics
+for the first time, learning as they went.
+The protests in smaller towns, sometimes in very white
+places, were especially interesting, and reflect not only
+a sense of disgust at violent police murder, but a wider
+rejection of the Johnson–Cummings project, a rejection
+of the ways in which people are being interpellated as
+white natives by the authoritarian government. In other
+words, it was not only about the video of George Floyd
+– although we should not underestimate the power of
+repeatedly watching and sharing the footage of a person
+being brutally murdered – it was also a wider chorus of
+people saying: if this is the project of whiteness, we do not
+want it, not in our names, we want other cultural coordinates, not this absurd closure to the world, not this inflated
+sense of national significance and superiority. It matters,
+then, that the protests emerge as the far-right consolidates global power. People on the streets were screaming
+their fury at Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Brexit.
+Put simply, far-right nationalism has bolstered people’s
+energies for anti-racist solidarity. But it is also hard to
+imagine these protests emerging in the same way without
+the pandemic and the lockdown.
+With Covid-19 and lockdown, everything was blown
+open. People were spat out of their normal, routine,
+regulated ways of being, and suddenly lots of things were
+up for grabs. We were told to stay at home, millions of
+people were paid not to go to work, schools were closed,
+cities went quiet and we grew bored, frustrated, fearful
+
+194
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+and appreciative. Despite the suffering, there was a sense
+of renewed possibility. Business as usual went on pause
+and it became clear that things could be radically remade,
+in terms of how or if we worked, how we related to each
+other, how we spent time and money. We discovered that
+our jobs are fake or bullshit, and that our employers and
+governments put profit before our welfare. We came to
+appreciate that we were really living through history, and
+there was a new world being reborn.
+In the UK (and in the US), the pandemic revealed the
+neglect and withdrawal of the state in all other functions
+but the punitive. The state could not distribute basic masks
+for nurses, but retained an incredibly well-resourced, militarised, police force. They now patrolled the parks, asking
+people to sit further from one another, or to keep moving,
+or to go home, sometimes fining people, especially black
+people, for breaking the new Covid-19 rules. Meanwhile,
+the extent to which employers were willing to exploit
+and disregard the safety of workers became more clearly
+exposed. Covid confirmed that we are living in a failed state
+(or what Pankaj Mishra usefully termed a ‘flailing state’),2
+and the bobbies on the beat seemed to offer scant protection from a deadly virus. In this context, the widespread
+protests against police racism were about several things: a
+reflection of various forms of frustration combined with a
+new sense of opened possibility; a rejection of the Johnson
+government and its nativist appeals; and a feeling for some
+that when society is remade after Covid-19, these are the
+kinds of political projects we want to align ourselves with.
+That said, there are more guarded and cautious ways to
+interpret the ubiquity of support for the BLM cause. We
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+195
+
+shared our collective annoyance at overbearing displays
+of white guilt and self-flagellation, along with empty
+celebrity and corporate promises to ‘take responsibility’. As white individuals asked, often very publicly: how
+can I abdicate from my privilege? The answer was often,
+by ‘doing work on yourself ’, or, perhaps more usefully,
+by shedding money. This was a kind of (neo)liberal reparation. In this version, structural racism is hardly the
+product of state power or capitalist exploitation, but a collective lack of privilege-checking on the part of a white
+majority. Moreover, the immediacy of George Floyd’s
+death in the UK clearly reflects the dominance of events
+and frames from the US. Police racism in the US is often
+afforded more press attention, and reported on more critically than similar instances in the UK. Consequently, this
+can further embolden arguments which acknowledge the
+need for radical change in America, but reduce racism to
+individual bias in ‘far less racist’ Britain. Yet at many of
+the protests, people held posters and chanted the names
+of some of the many people who have been killed by the
+police, or in state custody, in the UK – Mark Duggan, Joy
+Gardner, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell, Sarah Reed – and
+it was clear that a certain kind of historical and political
+education was happening as the mobilisations developed
+and endured.
+The United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC), a
+coalition of families from across the country campaigning for justice for loved ones killed in state custody, was
+an important presence at the BLM protests, and a key
+site of political education. UFFC, which holds a protest
+march on the last Saturday of October every year, is not
+
+196
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+a campaign that anyone chooses to join, but one that
+families and friends are forced to join when their loved
+ones are killed at the hands of the state. As a result, UFFC
+is not a campaign made up solely of black people, because
+those who are killed by state agents are not divided neatly
+along racial lines, even as black people are disproportionately impacted. Neither state violence nor anti-racist
+organising are neatly configured along racial lines, and in
+Britain our families – the ones we choose and those we
+do not – are often not set up that way. There are always
+other people in the room. And so any sense of static racial
+hierarchies, with those always at the bottom and those
+always at the top, comes into conflict with what happens
+on the ground. UFFC reflects this. It remains a campaign
+for which the most visible leadership and spokespeople
+are black women, but it is still necessarily a multi-ethnic
+group. Importantly, radical black politics is a vital part of
+the campaign, defined by a version of anti-racism which
+draws links between colonialism, class struggle and police
+racism. We make this point because during the BLM mobilisation, and attendant debates online, we witnessed the
+co-articulation of some very radical and some very essentialist ideas. Arguments that separated racism from class
+struggle were most commonly conveyed through the idea
+that white people should be individual ‘allies’. This call for
+individual self-reflection and change, though important,
+came to replace a tradition of collective struggles (in solidarity) with people of colour. UFFC is one example of how
+resistance to state violence exceeds neat divisions of fixed
+racial categories or racialised experiences. This complicates the individualising categories of victim and ally by
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+197
+
+demonstrating how struggles for collective liberation are
+shared and the possibility of solidarity is explored (and
+perhaps tentatively realised) not through abstract debate
+but through collective struggle.
+The connections made between the Grenfell campaign
+and BLM were especially heartening in this regard. Until
+now it has been difficult for the Grenfell Tower victims’
+families to politically organise around questions of racism
+as a causal factor in the fire. This is partly due to their
+racialisation as Muslim and/or migrants, unable to articulate their subjection to racism in the context of the
+War on Terror and a hostile environment that excludes
+migrants from housing and social rights. Indeed, the
+Grenfell Tower inquiry excluded the question of racism
+from its terms of investigation. But in the context of the
+BLM uprisings, Grenfell survivors responded by making
+the crucial connection between the fire and racist police
+killings, asserting that their loved ones couldn’t breathe
+either. Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in
+the fire, drew parallels between the killing of George Floyd
+and the fire. He said, ‘When my sister rang the fire brigade
+she said, “We cannot breathe.” This is a similar phrase
+used in America at the moment.’3 On Monday, 6 July 2020,
+the words ‘We can’t breathe’ were projected onto Grenfell
+Tower. This powerful action pronounced that the Grenfell
+disaster was also an effect of racist state violence. Leslie
+Thomas QC, who is representing a group of bereaved
+families at the inquiry, stated:
+The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum … A
+majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people
+
+198
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+of colour. Grenfell is inextricably linked with race. It is
+the elephant in the room. This disaster happened in a
+pocket of one of the smallest yet richest boroughs in
+London. Yet the community affected was predominantly working class. That is the stark reality that cannot
+be ignored.4
+This development marks a powerful and necessary
+embrace of a coalitional anti-racist politics and an acknowledgement of the limitations and depoliticising
+effect of formal channels such as that of the inquiry. It is
+through interventions like those made by Grenfell United and UFFC that the connections between anti-racism
+and class struggle are forged, articulated and emboldened.
+Despite the essentialising tendencies of some of its supporters, then, the BLM protests have been the largest
+anti-racist street mobilisation against state violence we
+have seen, ever, with tens of thousands of mostly young
+people out in the streets, collectively registering their rage,
+grief and determination to build another world. Amid
+these mobilisations, lively conversations on (prison and
+police) abolition offered an exciting frame through which
+to forge radical new multi-racial constituencies. Importantly for us, theories and principles emerging out of
+prison abolition avoid the traps we have delineated in this
+book. Abolition centres state violence, and focuses on how
+punitive, surveilling and carceral state practices make and
+remake racial division and hierarchy. For the new generation of abolitionists, racism is never reduced to the
+interpersonal. There is a rejection of both the authoritarian state practices and the political subjectivities we have
+
+SHARED GRIEF, HOPE AND RESISTANCE
+
+◆
+
+199
+
+charted in this book – a rejection of punishment and retribution – and instead a gesturing towards a politics of care,
+openness to the Other, and love. These radical critiques
+of state racism also orient themselves to the future, and
+therefore snub any nostalgia for the homey nation that
+orients so many on the ‘white left’. Central to conversations about abolition is also a gendered analysis of the
+state, and a commitment to supporting survivors of sexual
+and gender-based violence. If this book has looked at
+neglect and authoritarianism – as well as the subjectivisation of people as longing for authority, racist closure,
+the past and daddy – then the abolition frame rejects this
+offering, and moves us towards that socialist anti-racist
+future that we stubbornly keep dreaming up, imagining
+and sometimes tasting.
+That abolition politics is now speakable in Britain
+suggests something other than the familiar longing for
+post-war welfarism; don’t let us mourn for a time before
+the neglectful state, and don’t promise you’ll send a good
+cop, instead let us clear out the space for something new and
+different. If we are to survive these particular end-times,
+and build liveable futures on a warming planet, we cannot
+stay oriented to that less bad past. The abolition frame is
+deceptively simple perhaps because it remains so oriented
+by something like love; abolish prisons, abolish police,
+abolish capitalism, but also let us learn to see and care
+about one another here and now. Empire’s endgame, on
+the other hand, offers smaller and smaller constituencies
+less and less. The fear and fantasises of disaster nationalism demonstrate that capitalism really seems not to be
+working for many of us. As crises multiply, the weaknesses,
+
+200
+
+◆
+
+EMPIRE’S ENDGAME
+
+contradictions and empty promises are further exposed,
+and opportunities for radical new visions emerge. It is
+impossible to predict the course of this new set of abolitionist energies. The only certainty is that every end is
+also a beginning. Britain’s decline is an invitation to build
+futures in which more of us, all of us, can breathe.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE RISE AND FALL OF TOMORROW
+
+The child, the future of nations, must be tended to with all the elements necessary
+to the production of civilization, progress and social perfection.
+—Ramón Rosa, Primer Congreso Pedagógico Centro Americano 1893
+
+The military raped them [women]. It didn’t even respect the right to live of those
+not yet born. The Army [soldiers] grabbed pregnant women, they cut them, they
+opened their stomachs, they took out their babies. They also murdered the newly
+born, they took babies from their mothers’ breasts and one-­year-­olds and threw
+them into the river and they drowned. One of the soldiers who threw a child into
+the river called out, “Adiós, niño.”
+—Massacre at Río Pixcayá, Aldea Estancia de la Virgen, San Martín Jilotepeque,
+March 18, 1982, Caso Ilustrativo numero 50, Memoria del Silencio
+
+When the woman entered the small apartment [in Guatemala City’s Zone 3] that
+she shared with her nephew [a member of the gang Mara Salvatrucha], she saw a
+blurred rush of movement and heard her nephew yell, “Get out of here!” She stood
+for an instant, shocked to realize that her nephew and several boys hovered over
+two girls whom they had tightly tied up. The woman turned and ran for help. A few
+hours later, the dead bodies of these two girls, marked by rape, were found in the
+street a few blocks away.
+—Personal communication, Guatemala City, November 2003
+
+I
+
+n the 1800s and most of the 1900s, first the Guatemalan Liberal Party and
+later reformists and revolutionaries envisioned “La Juventud” (Youth) to be
+in the vanguard of a modernity that would arise from within a city conceived
+as a beacon in a rural and savage wilderness.1 Following the defeat of the
+popular and revolutionary organizations and years of neoliberal policies, by
+
+2000 Guatemala City was among the poorest and most dangerous cities on
+the continent, and La Juventud had gone down the drain with it.2 Catapulted
+from the category of “heroic” into that of “criminal,” urban youth replaced
+los subversivos as the enemies of society. For two hundred years a symbol of
+beautiful tomorrows, La Juventud has been turned upside down to signify
+the radically dangerous present, chaos and death, an obstacle to the future
+instead of its herald.
+The experiences of urban youth at the outset of the twenty-­first century
+are haunted by the last century’s catastrophic failure to win the struggle that
+shaped it: the fight for a different Guatemala, one with a dignified life for
+all, one beyond mere survival.3 The terrifying boys and the murdered girls in
+the third epigraph live and die within the legacy of devastation shown in the
+second one. The ideological use of the child in the first represents the salvation fantasy of liberalism: the continual displacement of the inequalities of
+capitalism to a more just future that has never arrived and that now seems
+to have vanished from the horizon. Today the big question for many youth is
+how to cross borders to find work.
+When I first arrived in Guatemala in 1978, the now-infamous gangs
+called Maras had no discursive or literal presence. Instead, the vitality of the
+popular movement permeated everywhere I went, from aldeas in Huehuetenango to Guatemala City. The year before, over 100,000 Guatemala City residents had turned out to greet 80 Maya Mam miners who had walked from
+the Cuchumatanes Mountains to the capital to publicize their struggle to
+win a union in a tungsten mine, and all along the way, down the 370 kilometers of the winding Pan-­American Highway, villagers and townspeople
+had prepared food, fiestas, and sleeping space for them. In 1978, shantytown dwellers, bus drivers, factory and state workers, students, and almost
+everyone else in Guatemala City brought it to a halt to raise wages and stop
+an increase in bus fares. In mid-­1979 the call for a democratic and revolutionary Guatemala was pervasive, and many people sat by their radios listening to the Sandinistas take Managua. In early 1980, the entire workforce of
+the plantations and mills of the Southern Coast struck, arming themselves
+with machetes and with the esprit of their slogan “Cabeza Clara, Corazón
+Solidario, Puño en Alto” (Clear Head, Strong Heart, Fist Raised). It did not
+seem unrealistic to think revolution was on the horizon. Not only did tens of
+thousands join the revolutionary fronts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in
+some areas of Guatemala these new recruits pushed the guerrilla leadership
+to take stronger military initiatives.
+Urban youth have a long history within this landscape of social protest.
+Even though they were a numerical minority in the midst of their peers, the
+2
+
+Introduction
+
+primary, secondary, and university students who joined political movements
+were a dominant presence in the public school system from the 1950s (if
+not earlier) until the early 1980s. They were among the first to openly challenge the post-­1954 military regimes, when a handful of secondary students
+from the Escuela Normal and the Instituto Rafael Aqueche organized the
+dynamic and militant Frente Unido del Estudiantado Guatemalteco Organi­
+zado (United Front of Guatemalan Students, fuego) in 1958 and configured a new generation of radical militants, even before the Cuban Revolution.4 Thousands of city students became activists over the coming decades.
+Urban students joined rail and other workers in April–May 1962, Guatemala
+City’s “May 1968,” six years early. They enthusiastically—even euphorically—­
+supported peasant and worker groups throughout the 1960s and 1970s. They
+went into the countryside to learn from the rural poor; they secretly joined
+the guerrilla groups; and, despite increased disappearances of students,
+they marched against the state in Guatemala City in the tens of thousands
+after the Panzós Massacre in 1978. On May 1, 1980, they marched in greater
+numbers, this time with their faces covered, under banners reading “For a
+Revolutionary and Democratic Guatemala,” and “Nicaragua Today, Guatemala Tomorrow,” in the last truly massive demonstration of the century.
+The uproar about the Maras came on the heels of the military’s breakneck
+defeat of that possible future of popular revolution that was achieved by
+the scorched-­earth genocidal campaigns of the early 1980s. The Maras made
+their first public appearance in 1985, when they joined students from the
+Instituto Rafael Aqueche to protest a bus fare increase. The subsequent massive publicity generated by the media, politicians, and the National Police
+about the presumed dangers of these new gangs contrasted sharply with
+the absence of news about the army campaigns in the countryside. This new
+discourse concerning unruly urban youth not only furthered the silence surrounding state violence in the 1980s, it put into motion an astonishing reversal of truth, a lie that was part of the war: youngsters were the source of
+violence and other dangers from which the state would protect its good citizens in order to create a new social reality. A study done in these same years,
+however, refuted the propaganda that the Maras were a threat: it showed
+that the mareros offered clues, but not danger, to the world around them.
+Although anxious about life, they celebrated it, and they concerned themselves with the communities that surrounded them. Their “us” included the
+poor, and the burgueses and the “asshole wealthy” constituted their “them.”5
+But the Maras changed. By the time of the 1996 Peace Accords the gangs
+had become morbid, and that has only increased with time. Worlds unto
+themselves, the gangs have come to form a subjective “us,” and everyone
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+3
+
+else, including the poor, constitutes “them.” Too many gang members in
+Guatemala City have become the victimizers that they were once falsely accused of being (see figure intro.1). Although without a doubt still accused of
+far more crimes than they commit, as the Mexican scholar Rossana Reguillo
+Cruz points out, the Maras also “unfortunately actively participate in the
+propagation of their own legend.”6 Invented and real, they huddle together
+around violent identities and practices that make them more than “a series
+of photos and video clips” to turn the public toward mano dura (iron fist)
+politics.7 Within them has settled, to quote the Guatemalan epidemiologist
+Dr. José García Noval, “a violence that . . . concretizes itself in actions of extreme cruelty.”8
+Cut Out of History
+The youth in Maras have become increasingly involved not only in violence, a
+term that describes many modalities, but in violent deaths. I argue that their
+turn from life toward death is related to larger transformations that have
+taken place in a short period of time in Guatemala. I suggest that the way the
+gangs changed, and not just how they are in a frozen snapshot in time, needs
+to be understood within a historical context of several overlapping dynamics. One is the defeat of a decades-­old urban subculture in working-­class
+barrios that emanated from the popular movements of 1954–80. Another
+is the inextricably related means and effects of that defeat, which include a
+military victory through genocidal war, neoliberal policies that have diminished social services for the urban poor, unemployment in a city where employment refers to a physically exhausting job at not even survival wages, and
+a legal system that is currently in complete collapse. In addition, and most
+emphasized by journalists and many researchers, in the mid-­1990s members of two gangs from Los Angeles, Mara-­18 (m-­18) and Mara Salvatrucha
+(ms-­13), arrived, and they had ties to the sale of drugs. The growth of the
+drug trade, and of drug use in urban neighborhoods, has been rapid. By
+one estimate, by 2000 almost 80 percent of the cocaine shipped from South
+America to the United States flowed through Guatemala. The appearance of
+skilled entrepreneurs who use violence as a marketing strategy in a country in permanent economic crisis is an element in the history of the gangs.
+One thing facilitates another: a weak economy and an inoperative legal system allow global organized crime to flourish and to incorporate mareros as
+cheap labor within a system of networks that employs down-­and-­out youth
+everywhere in the world, and keeps them that way by making sure they have
+little cash.
+4
+
+Introduction
+
+FIGURE INTRO.1 Mareros in El Hoyón Prison, Escuintla, 2005. However
+real, this photograph of threatening and tattooed mareros exemplifies
+the clichéd image that has been used with success everywhere in Guatemala to incite fear, to garner support for politicians from the extreme
+Right, and to justify increased military ­involvement in civilian life.
+Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+I underline historical specificity and politics to argue that in many ways
+these young people’s coexistence with violent death, including with their
+own murders, is intimately related to what can be framed as the Guatemalan
+state’s successful use of spectacular and reverberating necropolitics.9 Starting roughly in 1980 and into the 1990s, sovereignty rested on the absolute
+negation of life in order to put an end to over fifty years of unfinished history
+in which radical political movements had polarized Guatemala in a battle
+for its destiny. The cohabitation with death that has come to inform Maras
+is tied to the success of a violence that was, in the words of the Guatemalan writer Juan Carlos Mazariegos, “an excess of reality.”10 It is the product
+of what this military victory and its consequences have spawned in subjectivities and everyday life: a Guatemala wherein practices and mentalities of
+solidarity, trust, and mutual concern have been ripped apart to strain and
+erode, in the words of the late Jesuit psychologist Ignacio Martín-­Baró, assassinated by the Salvadoran Army in 1989, the “collective capacity to work
+and love.”11
+An extreme and a minority among youth in Guatemala City, a small painful intrusion that hurts and impairs, the splinter in the eye that is the “best
+magnifying glass,” the apolitical Maras have crystallized necropolitics into
+what I call necroliving.12 In the city, the postwar mareros control life through
+their power to take it away. For many youth in the Maras, threatening to kill
+and killing have become practices about the scarce daily options for earning
+a living, and about maintaining order, teaching lessons, and achieving identity and respect, especially for young men for whom the values tied to other
+male identities—such as the gallant breadwinner—and the possibilities of
+achieving alternate masculinities have diminished. This does not mean that
+every marero kills. Rather, I am suggesting that within the mareros’ social
+imaginary, in Charles Taylor’s sense of that “common understanding which
+makes possible common practices,” violent death controls the management of life, short as that may be.13 The average marero is murdered by the
+time he or she is twenty-­two. Perhaps even worse: one’s own early demise is
+part of the marero imaginary, and the average gang member expects to die by
+that age.14
+Hardly any members of the violent Maras of the 1990s and onward directly experienced war, although a few did or thought they did. Most were
+born in the 1980s or later, and they came of age in a Guatemala City largely
+remade and reassembled by violence. They remember the stories of cadavers
+and not of the struggles for social justice. In her commentary on the juvenile
+mareros in a reform center who danced after tearing out the heart and other
+internal organs of a teacher named Jorge Emilio Winter Viaurre on March 3,
+6
+
+Introduction
+
+2009, a Guatemalan journalist wrote that Guatemalan children live in “a society in which problems are generally resolved by death.”15 Immersed in the
+legacy of political sovereignty through the manufacture of horrific deaths
+and surrounded by violent deaths, by murdering or by imagining death in
+their magical religious rites, gang members struggle to control death as well
+as life. Necroliving deracinates death. The Guatemalan psychiatrist Rodolfo
+Kepfer points out that mareros’ preoccupation with death is part of a prevalent thanatophobia. He thinks, “In Guatemala death is perceived as a traumatic event that depends on others, it is not seen as a natural part of life.
+This creates the phobia that death is everywhere, lurking in other people and
+‘I too’ [referring to youth] can arrest it with violence.”16 Murder becomes
+“natural death,” the normal way to die. Making the living dead starts to seem
+to be what humans do to one another, by their very nature. This materializes
+what the Chilean psychologist Elizabeth Lira calls the “devaluation of life,”
+hatred or the dehumanization of self and others, that has its grand finale in
+the morgue.17
+A Planet of Gangs
+Guatemala City’s Maras are not the only gangs or the only very violent ones
+currently in cities on our “planet of slums,” and the literature devoted to
+them is vast.18 A variety of approaches are evident in sociology, psychology,
+criminal justice, communications, and several other disciplines, with no
+single definition of “gang” emerging. However, some strong common core
+arguments are apparent. Most studies of urban gangs in Central America
+and the rest of the Americas see them as consequences of an array of “multiple marginalities”—a key phrase in the literature—that includes urban decay and unemployment; social abandonment and domestic abuse; school
+absenteeism; and the lack of mobility, community, social recognition, and
+identity.19 In addition, many authors emphasize that for males gaining masculine identity can be particularly important aspect of gang life, and they
+underscore how lethal “performing male” can be when violence, masculinity, and gaining respect bleed into one another.20 However, neither the
+pursuit of masculinity nor multiple marginalities explain change or differences, describe subjectivities, or suggest how cruel or kindly a turn masculinity can take.21
+From those outlaw bands of Robin Hoods and the gangs that fortify urban
+political machinery, to the Almighty Latin King/Queen Nation (alkqn), a
+gang that developed a male identity based on respect for women, different
+gangs have varied worldviews, principles, and social relationships, and they
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+7
+
+change over time. Within their short lifetime, Guatemala City’s Maras have
+gone, as Adiós Niño discusses, from protecting neighbors to abusing them.
+All that is encompassed by history—whether unemployment, racism, military recruitment, or the criminalization of immigration—counts. This point
+is elucidated in many studies, such as those by José Miguel Cruz about Maras
+in El Salvador, and the works of David Brotherton and Luis Barrios on the
+alkqn, of Tom Hayden on gangs in Los Angeles, and of John Hagedorn,
+whose book about global gangs makes arguments similar to mine about
+the connections between gangs, the fall of social movements, and the rise
+of neoliberal polices.22 The Mexican writer Marco Lara Klahr wryly underscores that gangs evolve out of contemporary histories in his book Hoy te
+toca la muerte: El imperio de las Maras visto desde dentro, when he quotes the distinguished Honduran dramatist Tito Estrada: “Look, after all is said and done,
+what we should ask about the Maras is what happened to the Latin American
+working class.”23
+Adiós Niño focuses on the connections among transformations in the
+Maras, Guatemala, and Guatemala City. It is situated within an emergent literature about youth gangs in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, where the misleadingly dubbed “Central American gangs” exist.24
+Generally these studies are based on respect for what gang members say,
+as well as on surveys and official data, and on considerations of the tattoos, language, music, graffiti, and clothes that distinguish them. No one
+doubts that graffiti stake a gang’s urban space or that clothes mark a collective ­identity. Most writers approach gangs as emotional communities, and
+try, to quote Rossana Reguillo Cruz, to “develop a vision that doesn’t lose
+youth as subject but instead understands their multiple ‘roles’ and social
+interactions.”25
+Adiós Niño addresses several questions that hover over this growing literature. One concerns the notion that the gangs and their violence are apolitical. I argue that this is a misleading conceptualization. While it is descriptively accurate that neither the Maras nor their violence fall within the realm
+of what one sociologist defines as political violence, a “politico-­ideological
+conflict between authoritarian states and more or less well defined armed
+or unarmed opponents,” the Maras have come out of a political crucible,
+and politicians have found political uses for them that range from no doubt
+paying them to disrupt rallies for rival candidates to using images of them
+to garner support for right-­wing candidates.26 The politically generated depoliticization of youth is in itself a historical watershed that has changed
+Guatemalan urban politics. That Maras are not “political” is politics.
+A tendency to depoliticize the discussion about the gangs is inherent in
+8
+
+Introduction
+
+studies that downplay the importance of state violence in favor of an analysis
+that invokes a more general barrio violence that has origins in, and is intertwined with, social exclusion.27 This is a second knotty theme within discussions about gangs in the Central American region. Using declared war as
+the marker, a deductive argument gets made that because Honduras had no
+such war, the wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua could not have
+much explanatory power in relationship to the Maras and, by extension, if
+these are “LA gangs,” war has no significance whatsoever because Los Angeles has not been the site of declared war since 1846. Yet Honduras has had
+extraordinary state terror, as the Honduran sociologist Leticia Salomón discusses in her work. Official wars are not all that is at stake in terms of histories of political violence. Nicaragua, which had a war, has far less violent
+pandillas. The war was different: the 1980s Contra War was not about Nicaraguan state terror against its own population, and the destruction of political
+groups in Managua did not take place on the scale of that in Guatemala City.
+No doubt many distinctions could be added. In emphasizing the influence
+that the means and results of state terrorism have had on the history of the
+Maras in Guatemala City, I keep company with the political scientist José
+Miguel Cruz, who urges researchers to complicate their analysis of gang life
+in San Salvador and go beyond focusing on the “back and forth” between
+San Salvador and Los Angeles by giving greater consideration to the impact
+El Salvador’s long war has had.28
+The related question in the literature is, simply put, whether or not the
+gangs are “LA gangs.” The relationship between Maras in Los Angeles and
+those in Central America is a subject that has attracted scholars, particularly
+given the interest in global and transnational studies, as well as journalists
+and agencies such as Homeland Security. The dynamics of the cross-­border
+movements of youth and organizations between Los Angeles and San Salvador, and the effects of these on urban geography that Elana Zilberg and
+Juan Carlos Narváez Gutierrez analyze, seem more intense than do those
+between Los Angeles and cities in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala,
+where a murder in Pico-­Union at dawn does not spell a killing in Guatemala
+City at dusk, to use Narváez Gutiérrez’s example.29 But even in the case of
+San Salvador, what does it mean, as José Miguel Cruz asks, that most youth
+in San Salvador’s gangs have never been outside of El Salvador?
+The topic of the consequences of peoples, institutions, and cultures moving across borders is a vast one. At least since the heyday of the Mexican
+Pedro Infante movies and on through Mexican rock ’n’ roll, Pink Floyd,
+heavy metal, and so on, Guatemalan youth have felt the effect of “world”
+youth cultures. Because of immigration and new forms of communication,
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+9
+
+they do now at an amazing rate. There is a difference between living in Guatemala City and listening to the Beatles and living in Guatemala City and being
+on Facebook with kin, even with their U.S. friends, in Lynn, Massachusetts.
+Yet either way, the manner in which youth interpret and use received culture is not determined by that culture, and questions concerning how it is
+understood and how it changes remain. Discussions about the global processes acknowledge the fundamental importance of “local actors” and conditions.30 The young man in cholo-­style pants who related to me the ms-­13
+“born in Ramparts” story and used codified hand gestures from LA street
+gangs is part of an “imaginary community” whose members may never cross
+borders.31 As we talked, we stood in front of his mother’s barely roofed-­over
+two-­room home in Tierra Nueva II, a shantytown partly inhabited by war
+refugees and their children, and one with a turbulent history of political mobilization and demobilization. He has no work, and he left school because,
+as he puts it, it was “a waste of my time.” His gang world in Guatemala City
+is as much if not more about the close-­ups of political, economic, cultural,
+and social geography as it is about the Los Angeles that he and others evoke.
+Although Adiós Niño looks at the Maras at three levels of analysis—the transregional, the national, and the city—it privileges the last two.
+To situate the young men and women in these gangs in Guatemala City’s
+barrios and in Guatemalan history does not mean that the Maras are not informed by events, cultures, people, and commerce beyond national borders,
+as I make clear. Likewise, to argue in favor of the Maras’ historical specificity does not imply that the Guatemalan gangs do not share similarities
+with gangs elsewhere in the world where cities have high rates of unemployment, drugs, violent officials, and a population in which almost 50 percent is under twenty-­five years. No doubt for youth everywhere, there exist
+versions of the banners on the border between Guatemala and Mexico that
+advertise the wages, three meals a day, and “security” offered by Zeta, the
+Mexican drug mafia.
+Unfortunately Guatemala is not the only country in the world in which
+anxious elites try to handle the growing numbers of those excluded from
+the labor market through forms of terror, and convert those without steady
+work into a central piece of their politics of “citizen security.”32 In addition,
+it is hardly the only country where state terror has a home. The manufacture
+of slow and horrific deaths by sovereign power is not so uncommon, and
+“the state of exception” is less exceptional than suggested by much scholarship about modern political power that has concentrated heavily on political
+control through the smooth operations of social engineering. Guatemalan
+military and civilian professionals learned terrorism from their counterparts
+10
+
+Introduction
+
+from, among other places, Algeria, Argentina, France, Israel, the United
+States, and South Africa because, from Europe to Africa and other parts of
+the world, the modern condition has included acts of genocide and political control through psychologically and physically crude and sophisticated
+methods of inflicting pain. Moreover, ritual mutilations and the savor with
+which they have been carried out belong to a few centuries’ worth of modern cross-­cultural, racist, and political atrocities that include the lynching of
+African Americans and grotesque massacres of Native Americans enjoyed by
+victimizers and onlookers. Whether public or private, state terror has been
+a part of a modern global times in every continent, and so have the consequential troubled individual and collective subjectivities.
+Especially within the last few decades of the twentieth century and the
+first of the twenty-­first, violent urban gangs have multiplied within what
+Robert Desjarlais and Arthur Kleinman title “violence and demoralization
+in the new world order.” It is not inspiring to younger generations that the
+increase of poverty in countries that have immense wealth continues, and
+that the world’s greatest material production is of the means to destroy life.
+That this is accompanied by the ever-­creative market-­bound manufacture
+of complex cultural arrangements consisting of images, sounds, and narratives that display varieties of violent deaths and make clear the adrenal
+thrills and existential highs of killing, and sometimes of being killed, in
+countless movies and other increasingly intimate forms of media hardly encourages what can be called “respect” for human beings among our world’s
+youth or adults. Still, to talk of a “new world order” does not mean that the
+world has become one place.
+Childhood, Adolescence, and Violence in Guatemala’s Dumpy Modernity
+Informed by Philippe Ariès’s much criticized yet indelibly influential book
+Centuries of Childhood, the framework often used for studies of the history of
+childhood and youth in Europe and the United States would by implication
+allot the lives of many Guatemalan children and youth to the categories premodern or traditional or, most arrogantly, “underdeveloped.”33 Instead of
+cataloging Guatemala as a “not-­yet” or a developing country, we need to
+recognize it as a modern country, and its modernity is just what it is. The
+juxtaposition of old and new, the so-­called traditional with the latest now
+“modern,” the computers in homes without running water, the huipil-­clad
+Maya girl who sells used clothes from the United States (that might have
+been originally hecho en Guatemala) in front of a shelter for street children
+sponsored by a Catholic center located in New York City; the sickly shoe-­
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+11
+
+shine boy with his fashionable sunglasses; the rip-­off fashion jeans; and the
+Che T-­shirts that fill the street markets to the fascination of foreigners and
+nationals alike—all speak not only of poverty and creativity but also of a historically specific modern condition.
+What might appear oppositional has been allied or unified into its own
+field of the modern. By the year 2010, this capitalist modernity could not
+provide Guatemala City with a safe walk or a regular—clean or dirty—water
+supply in its mundanely named Zones 1–8, 11, 12, 17–21, and others not in
+the confined wealthy areas, much less develop national wealth and distribute it to an increasingly poor population. More frustrating is the reality that
+gains fought for and won at some point in the twentieth century—such as
+the right to unionize, social security, land reform, a legal system, a living
+wage, the extension of public education and medical care, paved roads, and
+adequate bus service—have either been destroyed (unions, a living wage,
+land reform), stand in permanent disrepair (roads, bus service, railroads,
+public education), are continually falling apart (medical care, social security), or exist in name only (the legal system). As presented in James Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
+Copperbelt, the resourceful and modern Zambian former copper miner named
+George Kabamba, who is holding on to life despite being “destitute, sick,
+living in rags in a leaky tent in a malaria-­ridden swamp,” would find kindred
+lives in Guatemala.34
+The Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel wrote that in Latin America,
+modernity was born with the Conquest for both the conquered and the conquerors, as well as those imported from Africa as slaves. As many have argued, the brutalities of colonialism, slavery and forced labor, racism, spiritual suppression, and the robbery of common resources in the hundreds of
+years since 1492 have been historically inherent to, and not an aberration or
+disfiguration of, modern capitalist times. Exploitation and the superexploitation of the socially constituted “darker races”—whether through the postcolonial forced labor systems, child labor, sweat shops, or maquiladoras—
+are not some gray transition toward the modern or the developed any more
+than these are on the periphery of capitalism.35 Being situated on this violent
+“underside” that is at once an ignored center has been the complex condition of Latin American and Caribbean modernity and capitalism, not a sign
+that these are not there.
+The construction of La Juventud played an especially important part in
+this trajectory of modernity in Guatemala, where capitalist modernization
+has meant keeping part of the population excluded from liberal rights. In
+the 1860s, Enrique Palacios, a member of La Sociedad Económica de Amigos
+12
+
+Introduction
+
+del País (Economic Society of the Friends of the Nation) who worked to
+develop Guatemalan export agriculture and trade relations with England,
+wrote clearly about the relationship between modern times and a Maya
+population that he did not want to disappear in the blaring light of the new:
+“The majority of the population will not be an active element of progress,
+but rather an instrument [of it].”36 This instrumental majority was the Maya
+labor force of children, youth, and adults on coffee plantations, one guaranteed through forced labor laws and other legal and extralegal mechanisms
+of control. The sophisticated delegates to the Guatemala City 1893 Conferencia Pedagógica, who planned to implement innovative pedagogy nationally, equivocated when it came to the Maya, who composed most of the
+population within the national territory. They concluded that the children
+of los indios were to be given kindergarten education within plantations, one
+adapted to their special condition as agricultural workers. For this reason,
+it was decreed that “school hours be reduced to the minimum . . . without
+exceeding three hours a day, finding in each area the time most adequate
+with regards to the climate, the seasons, cultivation and other specific circumstances.”37 “Progress” depended on these “qualifications” within liberalism. Throughout the first part of the twentieth century and until 1944,
+Liberal Party dictators obstructed the development of an all-encompassing
+national citizenry; it was a privilege conferred on very few.
+The social construction of La Juventud as non-Maya, urban middle- and
+upper-class students became vital to the new nation. In the course of the
+nineteenth century, La Juventud was projected repeatedly not only as a vanguard of modernity, but also as a solution to the so-­called Indian Problem,
+the dilemma of how to build a “civilized nation” in a territory where the
+majority were uncivilized “indios.” Initially drawn to John Locke’s notion of
+a child’s mind as a blank slate, intellectuals concerned with the question of
+building a modern nation and a citizenship saw public education as salvation. If children’s minds were blank, an ideal and monocultural education
+could rescue children from the complexities of their family origins. At first
+rejecting or ignoring social Darwinist ideas as these appeared in Guatemala,
+they focused their attention on new pedagogies coming from Europe, and
+thus their attraction for the German Friedrich Froebel’s kindergartens, especially (theoretically speaking) for Maya toddlers.38 But Guatemala could not
+get away from keeping “indios” as noncitizens, who composed an exceptionally cheap labor force for its modernization through export agriculture.
+That plans for a territorial-wide public education ran afoul again and again
+did not stop the ideological uses of La Juventud, which grew to be an inflated
+and racialized symbol. Children of los “indios” and of all rural people, fell
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+13
+
+out of the category of La Juventud soon enough, leaving it non-­Maya and
+urban.
+In the late nineteenth century, Guatemalan elites and intellectuals marked
+off infancy, childhood, and youth as stages in “the perfection of civilization”
+and mankind.39 A veritable cult of La Juventud developed around annual
+Festivales de Minerva of the Liberal Party dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera,
+in which costumed schoolchildren and youth paraded around cardboard
+floats representing “La Ciencia” in celebration of “El Progreso.”40 By the
+1920s, adolescence had become a keyword in national discourse. At midcentury, President Dr. Juan José Arévalo, one of Guatemala’s premier statesmen, an educator, and author of La adolescencia como evasión y retorno, saw the
+cultivation of adolescents as the nation’s most urgent task to prevent what
+he described as the psychological disease of fascist and feminine submissiveness that threatened human history. He urged creating strong masculine leaders through his innovative Escuelas Tipo Federación (Federation
+Schools) school system.41 After the 1954 coup, it was above all the political
+Left that kept alive a mythology around La Juventud to the effect that it had a
+revolutionary essence and a responsibility toward the nation, now redefined
+in terms of “el pueblo.”
+Although infancy, childhood, and adolescence have been constructs used
+by Guatemalan professionals to describe so-­called universal truths, these
+“stages” have not been widespread experiences. For the well-­to-­do minority,
+childhood and adolescence have long pointed to times and spaces of private schooling; art and sports lessons; university education; foreign travel;
+long engagements; clubs and parties; and, for fifteen-­year-­old girls, elaborate quinceañeras, which are not, as they are among the urban poor, followed
+by a life of paid or unpaid labor. For decades, having or not having this adolescence has been inside the consciousness of all city youth, whether they
+are poor or wealthy. It has become a “norm” in which the majority of youth
+do not participate. The notion of teenager, with its connotations of volatility,
+rebellion and fun, was not employed until the second half of the twentieth
+century, when it became an aspiration of many.42
+In contrast to representations of urban youth as either a heroic vanguard
+of modernity or a decadent plague, at no point has there been a homogeneous “Youth.” Embedded in distinct kin life and history—and growing
+up within particular class, gender, cultural, and community constructions,
+experiences, and relationships—children and young people are heterogeneous, and they have varied relationships to power. Looking at specific
+young lives yields the complexity of the general issue of being “young” and
+the limitations of framing childhood and adolescence as “modern” or “tra14
+
+Introduction
+
+ditional” or of defining a society or culture as “child centered” or “adult
+centered.” This is a city where, at the beginning of the twenty-­first century,
+child labor is significant within the family wage economy, and so is the all-­
+important modern education that families see as a solution to their economic woes. Walter, a friend of mine who is adored by his parents, attends a
+public secondary school and works at night in his father’s tailor shop stitching imitation Levi’s jeans to sell in the informal economy to style-­conscious
+youth at colegios (private schools) in order to buy food in the open market for
+his extended family.
+Whether rural or urban, Maya or Ladino, prepuberty or postpuberty, most
+youth in Guatemala have had little time or space for themselves, and the borders between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have long been blurry
+in the eyes of the beholders. A nine-­year-­old who looks after his relatives,
+works, or both might be considered and treated as a young man, not a niño; a
+fifteen-­year-­old soldier is a man; and a fifteen-­year-­old mother from las clases
+populares is a woman. A pregnant fifteen-­year-­old from the upper classes who
+can have an abortion in Miami is just a “niñita tontita” (silly young girl).
+Street children are called children, no matter their age; gang members are
+youth criminals, not children, no matter their age; and the elite have applied
+the term niños to Mayas of all ages since the 1500s.
+The institutions of public education and the law make distinctions between age groups, even if the wider community and the work world do not,
+and the state violates its own codes. Legal minors end up, illegally, in adult
+prisons. Children can legally work at age fourteen, yet children under fourteen have been and continue to be agricultural, construction, transport,
+domestic, and sex workers; vendors of goods and services; and laborers in
+high-­risk jobs in the production of limestone, coffee, and fireworks, as well
+as in high-­risk situations along the border with Mexico.43 In the new times
+of the 2000s, the large Legumex factory, part of the “modern” as opposed
+to “traditional” sector of the economy, employs children under fourteen
+from 7 am until 7 pm to cut hundreds of pounds of vegetables and fruits
+daily for export. They stand in cold water, receive one half the Guatemalan
+minimum wage, and get no benefits.44 These children are having their childhoods; they are not short adults in an old-­fashioned society. Disappointing
+adults, exploitation, abuse, and violent everyday upheavals have made small
+delights too scarce and dependency on adults too fragile. For decades there
+have been children and youth who have figured that they might be better off
+on their own.
+In Minor Omissions, one of the few volumes concerning the history of Latin
+American children, Tobias Hecht suggests that the study of children is indisThe Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+15
+
+pensable to the understanding of the larger society and ought not be subsumed within the history of women and families.45 I add that it is especially the marginal minorities among the young—such as war orphans, gang
+members, and youth who make homes in the streets—who reflect and address central problems and not subcultural or subsidiary ones. Sitting at the
+intersection of the personal, subjective, social, and familial on the one hand,
+and larger categories such as modernity and capitalism on the other, young
+people are uniquely located, and through them our historical lens widens.
+We can see the mareros of today that way: a warning about all the points of
+that complex crossroads.
+“The Law of the Conservation of Violence”
+The state terror that went on before the war escalated in the 1980s was horrific enough, but opposition to it and an explanatory discourse about it
+prevented it from being absolute. Children who grew up in the late 1970s
+formed the Maras from within a broad social imaginary of class solidarity
+that still persisted in the early 1980s. But state violence escalated rapidly, intensifying in ways that were clearly traumatic.46 In response to a first draft
+of this manuscript in which I described several massacres, an anonymous
+reader for Duke University Press who was astutely cautioning against substituting shocking description for analysis wrote: “[A] concern I have . . .
+[is] the explicit representations of army violence. . . . I understand why it is
+important, [but] I found the chapter deeply traumatizing—arbitrary details
+haunted me for several days after reading it. I wonder whether it is necessary to traumatize the reader.” The violence in Guatemala cannot be communicated adequately, as is suggested by the many discussions concerning
+the crisis of representing the reality of the unimaginable. That is part of the
+power of an “excess of reality,” of something that cannot be real and is real.
+Yet depictions and approximations must be made in order to avoid furthering the silence surrounding it, leaving it as if incomprehensible and isolating those who experience it.47 Trying to place the reader closer to these
+experiences is an attempt to communicate reality. The manuscript reviewer
+was right on the mark to find the material traumatizing. Trauma is exactly
+what readers need to know.
+In his book How Societies Remember, the sociologist Paul Connerton argues
+that the body “re-­enacts the past” of social history by “conveying and sustaining memories” through inscription and incorporation.48 I am not suggesting that killing people is a “cultural posture” in Guatemala, although a
+few cynics might. The insight that bodies reenact society’s past at least sug16
+
+Introduction
+
+gests the possibility that the extreme violence of the mareros in the postwar period is a mimetic way of having or storing the war, especially because
+it is neither completely remembered nor completely forgotten. Someone is
+“acting out,” to use Dominick La Capra’s formulation, what went on without a clear idea of it.49 Pierre Bourdieu puts a similar thought in motion in
+other terms when he writes about the assault on the welfare state in Europe:
+“You cannot cheat with the law of the conservation of violence: all violence is paid
+for. . . . The structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form
+of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of
+minor and major everyday acts of violence.”50 In Guatemala, this “law of the
+conservation of violence” is complicated by war, trauma, and the silences
+about both, which is not to say that Guatemalans are all suicidal and criminal, but the “whole host” is everywhere evident.
+Despite the lack of immediate and satisfying answers, the question of the
+relationship between history, violence, and trauma must be kept in mind.
+There is too much extreme violence and trauma in the world to risk leaving
+aside the historical weight of these realities on the grounds that we do not
+fully understand them. Cathy Caruth has suggested that being traumatized
+by what breaches “the mind’s experience of time, self and the world” is necessary for surviving the unimaginable. To be traumatized is constructive in
+the face of destruction.51 This paradox, in which the displacing of what cannot be “placed” due to the inability to absorb the unimaginable—this distancing from experience even as it happens, as well as afterward, as protection—has a terrible catch to it. The experience, in one way or another,
+returns “uncontrolled and repetitive” to have a strong continued life “because violence inhabits, incomprehensibly, the very survival of those who
+have lived beyond it that it may be witnessed best in the future generations
+to whom this survival is passed on.”52
+This study does not prove a relationship between trauma, the “law of the
+conservation of violence,” and escalating postwar violence of the Maras in
+Guatemala City. However, it is a plea to pay heed to the historical agency of
+horror and trauma, an entreaty that adds fuel to the argument that should
+need none concerning the urgency of breaking public silences and ending
+impunity. If the law of the return is valid, and if Guatemala does not end impunity, “claim” its experience, and know its history, then it might drown in
+another sea of blood in the name of nothing. Ordinary Guatemalans need
+be the protagonists of their history and bring the entire miserable crew that
+has engineered this apparatus of political violence to justice, and then some.
+Healing is an elusive concept, and if healing means the restoration of mind,
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+17
+
+heart, body, and soul, it may never happen. Truth telling and trials cannot
+change what Martín-­Baró calls the “underlying problem of the traumatogenic social relations that are part of an oppressive system that led to war.”53
+Over and above telling the truth and bringing the guilty to justice, the whole
+social, political, and economic structure needs transformations based on
+human solidarity and our revolutionized imaginations.
+Part of the problem concerning the evolution of these gangs is that the
+revolutionary groups did not think much about the gangs at all. In the
+1980s, representatives of revolutionary groups called mareros lumpen or—
+worse—spies, and turned their backs on them. This helped leave youth open
+to recruitment by professionals, including those in army intelligence, for
+whom violence is the means of business. Why turn our backs on gangs?
+There is nothing at all wrong with a gang as a type of social organization.
+Youth form groups as spaces in which to speak emotional truths, refashion
+identities, and cultivate their own opinions and voice. The strong points of
+the powerful relationships among young people who have been marginalized can be intense trust, loyalty, friendship, and love, as Aragon’s beautiful
+cover photograph of two boys living out on the streets suggests. Perhaps
+the life expressed in their faces and in the gentle gesture of one boy’s hand
+on his companion’s arm can avert the death foretold in the fumes the other
+sniffs from the glue bottle he clutches.
+The Structure and Genesis of This Book
+Adiós Niño is a history of the present dedicated to not saying good-­bye to
+children. This introductory chapter has placed my basic argument within
+discussions about the gangs, and in the framework of the larger history of a
+modernity that has its constructions of young people and its uses for them.
+Chapter 1, “Death and Politics,” describes in broad terms the two historical periods—the 1950s to the 1980s, and the 1980s to the early 2000s—that
+formed the universe in which Maras evolved. It gives the background, and
+sometimes the foreground, for the material presented in chapters 2 and 3,
+in which many of the events, people, and places first presented in chapter 1
+reappear as the camera focuses in, so to speak, on the Maras and specific
+aspects of city and national life. Chapter 2, “1980s: The Gangs to Live For,”
+takes the reader back to the times in which the Maras first appeared, and
+chapter 3, “1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For,” follows them forward
+into the 2000s. Titled “Democracy and Lock-­Up,” chapter 4 continues by
+discussing the discourse around delincuencia and citizenship, and the rise of
+a prison system that revives violence to presumably ensure democracy and
+18
+
+Introduction
+
+citizen security. The concluding chapter, “Open Ending,” concerns the alternatives that young men and women who leave the gangs face.
+I am an oral historian, which in this particular case involved doing fieldwork and writing down my observations as well as conducting interviews.
+The research for this book took place over more than a decade in different
+parts of the city, including some in which I lived, and in different settings,
+ranging from homes to shelters for the homeless. I spoke and spent time
+with youth in and out of the Maras, social workers, psychologists, neighbors, parents, and others, some of whom I came to know personally. Those
+whom I quote are cited, and dozens more are not, even though in one way
+or another they are all present. Conversations varied: some went on intermediately for long periods of time, and others were short; some were structured or semi-­structured interviews and others were informal. In addition
+to fieldwork and interviews, I have also drawn on newspaper articles by investigative journalists, essays and reports by professionals, and other published material, including surveys and data on gangs gathered by a variety of
+organizations that each have had their own researchers and perspectives.54
+No one book can do everything. With luck, this study about what Saskia
+Sassen calls “concrete localities” can serve others in the community of
+people studying gangs in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America to
+deepen knowledge through comparison and contrast.55 I hope this book will
+also help the English-­language reader to comprehend Guatemala and empathize with its people, who constantly revitalize their lives.
+In the final months of my writing and cutting and more writing and
+more cutting of this manuscript, the still-­life paintings of the Italian painter
+Giorgio Morandi repeatedly came to mind. Over and over again, he painted
+similar objects, which entranced him and whose integrity he wished to respect. This book feels “over and over again.” It has been a long time in the
+making. I first studied the gangs before my first child, Ana, was born in 1987
+in Guatemala City. After my second child, Jasmin, was born in 1990 in New
+York City, I returned to Guatemala to look at the general question of urban
+youth. After taking up residence in New York City and then in Boston, I kept
+coming back to Guatemala City to see my friends, do research, and finish
+Hacer la juventud: Jóvenes de tres generaciones de una familia trabajadora en la Ciudad de
+Guatemala, which was published in 2005. Mareros kept coming my way, especially while, accompanied by my daughters, I kept meeting street children.
+The last time I talked with a young person in a Mara was in 2008; I was
+alone, an older woman from the United States. Have I been the adequate
+or appropriate person to write about youth gangs? Can we “fit” in some
+psychological, sociological, or historical sense with what we study? It has
+The Rise and Fall of Tomorrow
+
+19
+
+become customary for scholars to make arguments about why they are
+suited to their particular topics and themes. I cannot make any claims that I
+am a good match: I did not grow up in Guatemala City, much less in a gang
+there or anywhere; I have never spent more than a night in jail, and not in
+Guatemala, and so forth. It is simply that one thing led to another.
+Because I wanted to understand how ordinary people make exceptional
+history, in the early 1980s I researched and wrote Trade Unionists against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985, a book about urban labor activists who fought
+for life against all odds and who ultimately turned state murder around into
+an inspirational tool and thus kept their dead compañeros present, and life
+meaningful. Still living in Guatemala City in the mid-­1980s and working
+with a new research institute, I and others researched mareros for a political reason: we needed to understand these new gangs because the publicity about them that was creating new fears in a wartime city was based on
+absolutely no information. Subsequently it became hard for me to let go of
+this thread, especially after it was clear that the opposite of what had protected the sanity of the labor movement was under way: murder was and is
+being utilized to indeed kill life. I spoke with street children who were joining ms-­13 and m-­18 in the late 1990s, and most of those youth are dead.
+One young man, Estuardo, an m-­18 member murdered in 1998 by ms-­13,
+was dedicated heart and soul to historical memory, and his most important
+memories were of his mother’s memories. Because I knew Estuardo and
+other youth, it fell to me to write this book.
+Morandi kept painting those bowls, bottles, and other containers over
+and over, a bit differently each time. Writing this book, I kept drawing and
+redrawing the same terrain over and over, reframing the material from the
+same interviews again and again. Looking at his paintings and my manuscript, I worry that the gang members are too shoved against one another,
+that they do not have space to breathe, and don’t quite emerge, that the table
+or surface upon which they rest is not wide enough. Hopefully this book
+gives enough so that readers can pick them up and look at them again with
+the consideration and compassion they all deserve.
+
+20
+
+Introduction
+
+DEATH AND POLITICS, 1950s–2000s
+
+I feel terrible when I talk about all this. I don’t want to upset [anyone].
+—Excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Rodrigo Sic Ixpancoc, ex-­soldier
+of the Guatemalan Army, El Periódico, November 4, 2010
+
+“To Remember Is to Feel a Knife Tear into You”
+
+S
+
+itting on a chair in small apartment in Guatemala City’s Zone 3, Victor
+recounted that in 1985, when he was fifteen, he and his friends founded
+Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol with companionship and competing in an upcoming break dance competition in mind. But a few months later, he explained, Army Intelligence (g-­2) stopped him and a few others who were
+hanging out in a semi-occupied shopping center on the main strip of the
+shabby downtown Sexta Avenida in Zone 1, shoved them in a van, and took
+them to a military base, where they received a few days of training. Then,
+in his words, “They took us up to the mountain in a truck with some nicas
+[Nicaraguans] to some village . . . and we had on rubber boots and pretended to be egyptos [members of the guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero
+de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor, egp)], the nicas called a meeting
+and people [the villagers] came and the soldiers came down all of a sudden
+and killed everyone . . . [it was] a massacre.” He went on to say that he was
+soon dumped back on to Sexta Avenida, and within days he had taken off
+to Mexico in fear of g-­2 because, he said, “the others [the mareros with him]
+were killed.” In Mexico, he worked with the Mexican drug ring La Eme for
+many years. At age twenty-­eight, a full thirteen years later, he said, he returned in 1998 to a changed Guatemala City and joined Mara Salvatrucha
+(ms-­13), which had arrived in the 1990s.
+The abrupt and murderous military intervention that changed Victor’s life
+almost beyond recognition in 1985 is a small version of the experiences of
+
+1
+
+millions from 1980 to 1996, when over 100,000 primarily unarmed people
+died violently in massacres that came at dawn like thunderbolts, and millions fled without destination. Marked by this history, Victor mentioned only
+fragments of it to me. We spoke in 2002, six years after the Peace Accords
+officially ended the war. Victor told me that he has no idea what the war was
+about. He said, “It just was.”1
+The 1996 Peace Accords that formally stopped the thirty-­six-­year war between the Guatemalan military and revolutionary groups over Guatemala’s
+destiny brought tremendous relief because, at last, the war had ended.
+Among other important agreements, the Accords mandated constitutional
+amendments to redefine Guatemala as a multicultural nation, limit the
+army’s mission, resettle displaced peoples, allow civil society groups, and
+reform the judicial system. However, virtually none of its provisions were
+or have been implemented because, basically, the war concluded with a victory for the Guatemalan military, the state, and the economic status quo,
+and with the demise of a long revolutionary era.2 To begin to understand
+how deeply this defeat cut into and transformed Guatemala City in the last
+decades of the twentieth century, when the Maras evolved, it is necessary
+to appreciate that since the 1954 coup that overthrew a democratic government, the very existence of strong resistance to oppression and repression
+was as important as the oppression and repression. In the decades following the 1954 coup, many Guatemalans understood and portrayed the power
+of the state and of wealthy elites as temporal and historical, not absolute.
+Even with its ups and downs, the popular movement made exploitation and
+state violence in some way or another provisional because these could be assaulted by demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and citywide uprisings, as
+well as by a social imaginary that made challenging domination possible.
+The movement generated the knowledge that violence is the political tool of
+the state and of elites. From that perspective, Victor’s 2002 understanding
+of the war indicates a loss of ideological mooring; the war was not something that “just was.”
+In other words, what ended with the Peace Accords was more than the
+civil war. A way of knowing the world and acting within it had been shattered. The dynamism of an urban subculture of class solidarity wherein
+jokes get made, songs created and heard, leaflets written, small newspapers
+mimeographed, banners painted and seen, and political conversations held,
+was no longer there. To put this into the subjective and emotional framework in which life is lived: the ability to give voice, the “euphoria of ethical
+activism,” the existence of a sense of historical purpose on a grand scale,
+and the vivacity and hope that animated the popular movement had pre22
+
+Chapter 1
+
+vented people from succumbing to fear for generations; then, abruptly, all
+that life was lost and death emerged exultant.3 After decades of struggle
+against what was widely perceived as an immoral political economy, the
+chance for an immediate alternative was vanquished. Grinding into dust the
+project of progressive social change cut down collective understandings of
+life as humanly malleable for humanistic aims. By the twenty-­first century
+these visions seem to have become charred remains of plans for a future
+that required a revolutionary human praxis. What could have been memories
+of deaths that served to secure revolutionary victory now elicit despair and
+anger because so many died in vain. In 2010 an artist from the generation
+of the 1970s said with infinite sadness: “To remember is to feel a knife tear
+into you.”4
+Political violence in the second half of twentieth-­century Guatemala
+was spectacular. It exceeded that of other countries in the Americas: Guatemala had the highest per capita number of “disappeared,” it was one of two
+countries where acts of genocide took place, and it was there that the worst
+military massacres on the continent happened.5 Guatemala was also distinguished in this period by the force of its popular and revolutionary movements. The depth of the state violence that did not stop them is one measure
+of their profundity, and so are the even greater horrors that it took to finally
+destroy them.
+Violence takes many forms, has varied consequences, and conjures up
+different images.6 The extreme forms of political violence that overtook
+Guatemalan history and came to have a cultural weight and political role
+in it, held together and overlapped with structural, symbolic, and everyday
+forms of violence.7 Yet these are not all equivalent. Given that violence is
+varied and embedded in daily life, we need to distinguish a limited sense of
+this term and concept to capture the violence that “consciously or purposely
+breaks into the inner existential shell of a person i.e. into that room in which
+there is no other hiding place. A room from which there is no escape, the
+body of the human being.”8 To make explicit the varied worlds of power,
+hope, pain, and conflict in which the youth who joined gangs grew up, this
+chapter continues by contrasting two periods, 1954–80 and 1980–2000s, decades during which the kind of violence that converted life into a “space of
+death” emerged as a historical protagonist, as if on its own.9
+Normal Guatemalan State Violence: 1954–1980
+Guatemala was politically globalized on a grand scale in June 1954, when, in
+full anticommunist armor, the United States allied with Guatemalan elites
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+23
+
+to violently end the country’s singular attempt at a democratic reformist government, one based on electoral politics, civil liberties, and national capitalism. In the years that followed the famous 1954 coup, a symbol of Cold War
+politics everywhere, the United States and the Guatemalan military and political and economic elite developed a system of rule consisting of electoral
+politics supported by a liberal constitution that guaranteed civil liberties and
+of constant state terrorism. These forms of sovereignty went hand in hand.
+The United States showcased Guatemala as a model of its foreign policy of
+promoting democracy, poured in investments that furthered manufacturing
+and large-­scale capitalist agriculture, and collaborated with the Guatemalan state to build an extensive system of terror based on thousands of informants and on death squads that brought so-­called subversives into secret
+centers and slowly tortured them to death in the tens of thousands.10 During
+the apogee of electoral democracy, modernization, and economic growth
+under the reformist government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro (1966–
+70), death squads disappeared an average of forty-­three persons every five
+days.11 This durable arrangement lasting decades distinguishes the Guatemalan experience from those of countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and
+Chile, where the suspension of constitutional rule signaled comparatively
+shorter periods of outright military rule and terror.
+This mix of terror and constitutional rule started in the wake of the 1954
+coup. In the months following it, many 1944–54 government officials and
+supporters were charged and often shot or imprisoned for “subversion”
+under anticommunist legislation. But soon thereafter and especially after
+armed opposition emerged in 1960, activists and their friends and families rarely went to jail. For the most part, punishment meant death, and it
+happened without accusations, trials, bullets, electric chairs, firing squads,
+or gallows and trap doors. Death arrived slowly via ropes, bites, sticks,
+matches, knives, machetes, fingernails, rocks, and blowtorches, by means
+that were, to quote Michel Foucault on the ancien régime, “inexplicable phenomena that the extension of man’s imagination creates out of the barbarous and the cruel.”12
+Foucault’s discussion of the creation and reproduction of the body politic
+through mechanisms of discipline and punishment offers insight into modern Guatemala, although with a twist. The types of violence and physical torture of bodies that Foucault argued were foundational to an archetypal ancien régime underwrote capitalist modernization and constitutional rule in
+Guatemala. In the case of Guatemala, in Foucault’s formulation of the biopolitics that manufacture the life of members of modern nations as “a power
+bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather
+24
+
+Chapter 1
+
+than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit or destroying
+them,” the words “in addition to” need to replace “rather than.”13 Foucault
+recognized the rule over life through death.14 He conceptualized sovereignty
+as the ultimate power over life and death, but he wrote that a shift occurred
+in the modern age: “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let
+live was replaced by a power to foster life. . . . Now [in the modern period] it
+is over life, through its unfolding, that power establishes its domain; death
+is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret
+aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”15 In post-­1954 Guatemala, death
+was not “power’s limit.” The death-­squad tortures produced death that was
+not “simply the withdrawal of the right to live.” These tortures rested on the
+“whole quantitative art of pain,” calculated to “carry pain almost to infinity.”
+The death squads’ vocation was that “art of maintaining life in pain” in ways
+not unlike those that Foucault describes in great detail as “the spectacular
+of torture.”16
+One difference is that these slow tortures were not part of the sort of
+public spectacular to which Foucault refers. Instead, a phenomenon perhaps more insidious and even more terrifying replaced this or added a new
+dimension to it. Within the death-­squad system, grotesque torture to create
+the most painful death occurred in secret, but the catch is that almost everyone in the city knew about it. It was on view within the imagination because
+the bodies turned up, and their gashes and mutilations told stories. Foucault wrote that in ceremonies of public execution, “the main character was
+the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.” He thought that if execution took place in secret, it “would scarcely
+have any meaning.”17
+But what if “real and immediate presence” is in the imagination, a sort
+of modern individual private theater that everyone had? The scarred bodies
+provided the public performances in which the mind’s eye had to do a horrible double work of staging the scene and being its impotent spectator at
+the same time. Where does the mind go when the newspapers report in detail about a man who turns up dead in a ravine, burned with a blowtorch
+on the stomach and elsewhere, his tongue cut out and his face beaten in so
+severely that his lips were swollen and his teeth broken, or about a woman
+and her baby found tortured and murdered? Her breasts had bite marks and
+her underclothing was bloody. Her two-­year-­old son had had his fingernails
+pulled out. What the bodies told of their deaths became the public spectacle. That bodies appeared with their proverbial “signs of torture” “reactivated” state power because the agony of an excruciating death was on full
+display, a spectacle of what happens and can happen to anyone, one that
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+25
+
+takes place first somewhere unknown, and a second time in the imagination.18 This death-­in-­life state barbarism was already part of politics before
+the massacres of the 1980s, the period many call “the war.”19
+What the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben delineates as the “camp,”
+in reference to concentration camps established at various points in modern
+history and most notoriously by the Nazi Party, in which “the most absolute
+condition inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized,” belonged to Guatemalan death-­squad victims over and over for decades in concealed locations and to the imagination of those who were not there, except that they
+arrived in their mind’s eye, without presence or power, again and again.20
+Tortures seemingly beyond the power of conceptualization, much less execution, went on, conceived and executed. This was national political rule,
+not a concentration camp, not a strategy to exterminate a group from the
+body politic, but a strategy to control the entire body politic. Those who were
+not tortured—the witnesses who had no access to the event that they had
+to actualize in their heads—were not called upon to coproduce this system
+of terror, as Germans were in their acquisition of and complicity with anti-­
+Semitism in what the historian Claudia Koonz calls a “Nazi conscience.”21
+Racism against Mayas saturated and saturates national life, but the Guatemalan state organized fear and sadism, not Ladinos (the common term for
+non-­Maya), against an urban popular political movement that included both
+city Ladinos and Mayas.
+In the late 1970s, Gabriel Aguilera Peralta, Jorge Romero Imery, Enrique
+Torres-­Lezama, and Ricardo Galindo Gallardo did quantitative research on
+Guatemalan state violence in the post-­1954 period. Their findings were published in Costa Rica in 1981 under the title Dialéctica del terror en Guatemala.
+Many have repeated and none have improved on the book’s principal argument for the years 1963–79. Dialéctica del terror details how the counterrevolutionary state renewed its power through waves of terror.22 When popular
+discontent and mass struggle advanced, so did state brutality, which in turn
+caused social conflict to decrease, and with that so did state violence. Made
+even more determined by the repression, the popular organizations then
+took advantage of the diminished repression to emerge with even greater
+force and so forth until, so the authors optimistically believed, the movement would inevitably triumph. Tragically, even before the book’s publication, Romero Imery and Galindo Gallardo were kidnapped. Imery’s mangled
+body turned up months afterward, and Galindo Gallardo was never seen
+again. By then the state had started to turn its “normal” terrorism into a
+massive terrorist onslaught that upended predictions about an ultimate
+backfiring of violence.
+26
+
+Chapter 1
+
+Years later, to clarify the base level of “normal” state violence before
+1980, the archdiocese report on human rights violations, the Recuperación de
+la Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory, remhi), memorably
+noted: “For decades—and not including the war—the appearance of tortured corpses was part of waking up every morning, whether reading the
+newspaper or traveling footpaths and roadways.”23 Footpaths and newspapers: this violence was rural and urban; it has always been and remains
+today much worse against the Maya population in the countryside. At the
+same time, in this period state terror had a specific visibility in the city. The
+several daily newspapers covered demonstrations and assassinations and
+carried photos of the disappeared and of severely disfigured bodies. And
+because Guatemala City was at once the country’s political, administrative,
+financial, and industrial capital, it was central to protest and repression. It
+concentrated spaces of power that ranged from the national public university, with its radical schools of law, engineering, journalism, and medicine;
+to the land government agency to which peasants brought their disputes; to
+the offices of the labor union headquarters and the rooms where clandestine revolutionary cadre met; and to the “Telecommunications Center” that
+housed state intelligence and loomed tall behind the National Palace for all
+to see. Terror and state violence permeated everything from jokes to literature. There was hardly a poet, essayist, or novelist of the period who did not
+write about it; a journalist who did not report almost daily on it; a visual artist who did not represent it; or a city resident who did not know of someone
+“disappeared.”
+The Power of Life
+The Lazarus-­like urban popular movements that these 1954–80 levels of
+state sadism failed to destroy had strong wellsprings. One was the indelible
+legacy of the 1944–54 years, which was sustained by the quick underground
+regrouping of Guatemalan communists after the coup and by the overwhelming popularity of that brief era.24 Although the ten years of reform
+government were not utopian ones, they represented a new Guatemala. For
+government to have even contemplated, much less realized, a land reform,
+improved working conditions, housing, day care, and medical attention,
+constituted a historical miracle in a country with a centuries-­long history
+of the vast majority’s subjugation. A new Guatemala was not a dream: it had
+happened once, it was taken away; and it could happen again.
+The 1944–54 nationalist discourse rooted in the concept of self-­
+determination of nations became markedly anti-­imperialist after the coup.
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+27
+
+This radical nationalism was reinforced by the 1959 Cuban Revolution, an
+event with specific resonance in Guatemala because it validated armed revolution in contrast to the decision made by President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to
+not take up arms against U.S. military intervention. Radical nationalism resulted in a serious challenge to the Guatemalan state, when anti-­imperialist
+military officers in Guatemala City tried to stage a coup in 1960 and, in the
+wake of their failure, started the country’s first armed guerrilla movement,
+one that was soon informed by Marxism and strengthened by students who
+entered its ranks following a citywide insurrection in 1962.
+Anti-­imperialism, versions of Marxism, and radical nationalism were
+powerful ideologies among many, including professors, workers, lawyers,
+and schoolteachers—the latter being a group vital to the 1944–54 leadership and one whose influential union stayed on the Left. Intertwined with
+these views was the unfolding of remarkable changes in the church that reverberated throughout Guatemala. Clergy and lay religious workers who
+were revolutionized from being supporters of the status quo to instigators
+against it, made the Gospel an argument for class militancy, and configured
+Jesus as a militant who blessed the struggle of the poor against the rich.25
+The effects of this potent combination of perspectives included the growth
+of the labor movement and the disruption of many disciplinary institutions,
+including the urban public school system.
+The Normal Schools, the teacher-­training institutes that presumably
+“normalized” youth to “normalize” other youth, are one instance of a breakdown and an inversion of the machinery of sovereignty. Opened in the 1880s
+to regulate youth by ingraining the small and large features of discourses
+and bodily social behavior that would perpetuate the national status quo
+as it shifted in the late nineteenth century, the Normal Schools were basically militarized until the 1944 Revolution. In accord with its social aims,
+the generation of 1944 revolutionaries intentionally reshaped the Normal
+Schools into progressive and internally democratic institutions that defined
+nationalism in terms of specific programs for the popular social good, for
+instance, land reform and labor laws, and that trained free-­thinking leaders
+destined for national prominence.26 After 1954 and for decades thereafter,
+the students, teachers, and even administrators of Normal Schools held on
+to those ideals, and graduates were more likely to join radical groups or turn
+into leftist professionals than become stolid and conformist cogs within the
+disciplinary machinery (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). Hardly a school term passed
+without a major protest in Guatemala City’s Instituto Normal Central para
+Varones or the Instituto para Señoritas Belén, to name the two most prestigious public teacher-­training schools for boys and girls, respectively.
+28
+
+Chapter 1
+
+FIGURE 1.1 Student review parade at the Instituto de Varones, a ­Normal
+School, Guatemala City, 1914. The Liberal Party dictator Manuel
+­Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) mandated that military studies be added
+to the positivist curriculum. These students were emblematic of the
+­educated youth who, if obedient, symbolized “Progress and Order.”
+­Photographed by José García Sánchez. Credit: José García Sánchez. Desfile del
+Instituto de Varones. Ciudad de Guatemala, 1914. Colección de José García Sánchez.
+Fototeca Guatemala, CIRMA.
+
+FIGURE 1.2 Student demonstration against the militarization of government, Guatemala City, 1960. Soon after the 1954 coup against the reformist government of Jacobo Árbenz (1951–54), girls, boys, and young
+women and men organized FUEGO in schools such as the Normal
+Schools and boldly took to the streets to demand rights. Many of these
+students joined the armed struggle in the countryside that started in
+1961. The prominent sign to the left reads “FIRE, NOT ASHES.” Anonymous photographer. Credit: Anónimo. Pancartas y carteles de la manifestación en
+contra del Gobierno de Ydígoras Fuentes. Ciudad de Guatemala, Julio de 1960. Archivo de
+fotografías de El Imparcial. Fototeca Guatemala, CIRMA.
+
+The shallow discourse of anticommunism and developmentalism could
+not fend off the associative enthusiasm that resounded in the city. The
+regime’s political economy brought little or no hope to Guatemala City’s
+emerging working classes during a period in which manufacturing, transport, and the service sectors grew.27 Developmentalism permitted urban social programs to flounder and brought new industries that hired mean managers, paid miserable wages for long hours of hard work, neglected safety,
+and had no respect for employees or labor laws that permitted unions and
+guaranteed conditions. The post-­1954 coup Constitution’s guarantee of liberties such as the right to organize and to form electoral parties encouraged
+labor unions and other urban groups to try to use it in their favor, with few
+successes. Again and again state brutality threw off track trade union and
+grassroots legal struggles as well as campaigns for structural change by reformist politicians.28 With the failures of progressive electoral parties and
+the chronic inability of the Ministry of Labor to address labor disputes in the
+background, by the second half of the 1970s many people had grown weary
+of legal means and were attuned to ideas about armed revolutionary change.
+This was especially the case after the state responded inadequately to a 1976
+earthquake, as well as following an October 1978 uprising in Guatemala City
+that united workers of the state and private sectors, students, and neighborhood youth and other pobladores, who went on strike, barricaded streets, took
+over barrios, and fought security forces to bring the city to a complete halt.
+They successfully prevented a ten-centavo bus fare increase and raised the
+minimum wage. It took this urban rebellion to make these hardly revolutionary changes, and victory was short lived, because a flood of kidnappings
+by state agents and the refusal of authorities to actually grant a new wage
+minimum quickly followed. It is impossible to think that the youth who
+grew up in Guatemala City and joined Maras in the early 1980s missed this
+weeks-­long episode of the urban population in open revolt.
+Between the 1954 coup and the 1980s war, urban children and youth and
+the adults surrounding them lived in many milieus, and not just one of terror, that both directly contested terrorism or “simply” kept sensibilities of
+humanism and solidarity vibrant. The public face of what could be called a
+plebeian culture of people united by social class and a tumultuous history
+that had an unfinished air because the 1954 coup had derailed a new Guatemala was constantly visible. It was evident in so small a detail as the pleasure taken by most residents in the annual Huelga de Dolores (Strike of Sorrows), in which masked students disrupted the city with their satiric floats
+and placards making fun of the country’s dominant institutions. It was
+even more apparent in the May 1 marches, which did not primarily honor a
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+31
+
+distant past of repression and worker unrest. Every year Guatemala City’s
+International Workers’ Day march and rally revitalized itself by directing
+attention to that year’s ups and downs, and by the flow of old and young eloquent speakers who called for immediate changes and kept alive notions of
+alternate possibilities. All this had the effect of restraining despair and unfocused angers. During all these years and right into the 1980s, there were
+no especially violent youth gangs in the city. Going at least back to the 1940s,
+boys and young men sometimes joined minor street gangs called pandillas
+that engaged in petty crime and brawled against one another without dominating or tormenting neighborhood life or killing one another.29
+For decades the social life of many boys and girls and young men and
+women in the popular urban areas had more or less centered, for better or
+worse, on romance, tedious low or unpaid work, family, school, sports, and
+even church activities. Within the context of everyday life the discussion
+groups and the social improvement agenda of the Young Catholic Worker
+movement attracted youth in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, when more
+radical priests and other religious figures drawn to liberation theology had
+influence and support in the barrios.30 Although young people knew about
+state terrorism, its tactics belonged to an “other side” that had not yet overtaken the city, and not to their side of the proverbial tracks. In the 1970s
+young people were often students in the politicized public school system
+and/or workers who sometimes joined labor unions (or at the very least
+knew about them), neighborhood betterment associations, street protests,
+or, hand in hand with their families, the land invasions that followed the
+1976 earthquake. They lived near older militants and others in neighborhoods that were milieus of active class solidarity. A trade unionist characterized his neighborhood in La Parroquia, Zone 6, in the late 1970s with the
+words “when it came to demonstrations everyone went.”31 At least they did
+up to a point.
+The War in the 1980–1990s
+The military made a qualitative leap in its methods in the 1980s that had
+continuities and ruptures with the state violence that preceded it. Of course
+it continued to be extremely cruel. Among other changes, an official suspension of the Constitution legalized state barbarism; it became massive
+and aboveground; uniformed soldiers and members of official Civil Patrols
+rather than death squads committed it; and it came very fast to quickly reach
+unparalleled levels of sadism, even for Guatemala. This upsurge in terror
+affected the city drastically, and it had far worse results in rural Maya com32
+
+Chapter 1
+
+munities, where the military committed acts of genocide premised on its
+racism and its historic fear of Maya rebellion. In the Maya highlands, the
+military had a strategy that was, to quote one army official’s unknowingly
+perfect formulation of necropolitics, “planned down to the last detail to destroy every sign of life.”32 This intensified war’s aim was, for once and for all,
+absolute annihilation of, rather than containment of, popular movements in
+both city and countryside.
+Writing about the countryside, the historian Greg Grandin places the
+start of this escalation in March 1978 in the town of Panzós, Alta Verapaz,
+when army soldiers fired an unarmed crowd and killed over thirty Q’eqchi’
+Maya women and men who had gathered to discuss threats to their lands.
+In the city, where tens of thousands of urbanites protested what they immediately named “The Panzós Massacre,” there was in 1978–79 a sharp increase in kidnappings in Guatemala City. It could be argued that the police
+firebombing that killed over thirty people who had peacefully occupied the
+Spanish embassy in January 1980 to protest and publicize the war in rural
+areas made the war “official” in the city. What followed left no doubt that
+the state had declared all-­out war there. Uniformed police kidnapped students from the funeral march for those killed at the Spanish embassy a few
+days after the assault on it. Thirty-­one secondary and university students
+and factory workers were kidnapped in one day during the May 1 protest
+that year. On June 21, the narcotics squad division of the National Police
+“disappeared” twenty-­seven trade unionists in broad daylight out of a labor
+central’s office a few blocks from the National Palace. On July 14, uniformed
+police shot and killed nine students and injured forty more on the University of San Carlos campus. On August 24, seventeen trade unionists were
+kidnapped from a presumably secret meeting. By September 1980, the open
+popular movement had shut down, and the revolutionary groups endeavored to stage hit-­and-­run propaganda actions in the city.
+In the first few months of 1981, the Guatemalan Army formally stepped
+in. Soldiers, tanks, and helicopters launched a full-­fledged urban counterinsurgency, destroyed the safehouses of the revolutionary groups, and killed or
+captured dozens of cadre, while others fled to the mountains.33 Even though
+the city seemed a graveyard, some thought the coordinated revolutionary
+fronts would respond to this urban counterinsurgency with an urban offensive, as had recently happened in Nicaragua. These supporters felt part of
+a national guerrilla military campaign because at the time the Guatemalan
+Army started its scorched-­earth campaigns in 1981, the population of entire
+parts of the largely Maya departments of El Quiché, Huehuetenango, the
+Verapaces, and Chimaltenango were supporting and joining revolutionary
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+33
+
+fronts.34 Residents—especially those in the poorer areas of the city, where
+the distinction between city and countryside is blurred by the steady movement of people between them—heard bits and pieces about both advances
+of the guerrillas and the army’s massacres in rural areas during the early
+1980s, but it took time for city people to realize how weak the revolutionary
+fronts were. Left-­wing discourse still remained relevant in Guatemala City
+despite the army’s advances. When the Maras first formed in the early 1980s,
+the military’s use of violent death was already proving to be a definitive way
+to control life in rural areas, but the gangs did not utilize death in that way,
+or at all.
+One Becomes, and Is Not Born, a Killer
+According to the United Nations Report of the Commission for Historical
+Clarification (ceh), in the first years of the 1980s, the army and other state
+forces committed 91 percent of the human rights crimes carried out between 1962 and the 1996 Peace Accords.35 These crimes consisted of 626
+massacres that left more than 100,000 people dead, more than 55,000 children orphaned, and well over 1.5 million internal and external refugees.36
+Of the 626 massacres between 1960 and 1996, 554 took place between 1981
+and 1982. By the close of those two years, the number of dead later counted
+as victims of acts of genocide was complete. The Guatemalan Army was unconstrained, the guerrillas could mount no large military offensive, and the
+international community remained silent. Massacres that the Guatemalan
+anthropologist Ricardo Falla has described as “collective torture,” rather
+than battles, constituted these campaigns, according to the thousands of
+testimonies collected by the un ceh and the Guatemalan Archdiocese.37
+When the military escalated the war, it obliged a large percentage of the
+Guatemalan male population to participate in turning the death-squad system of sadism into public spectacles in hundreds of “red” and “pink” zones
+in the countryside.38 The army involved hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Maya, in causing “pain almost to infinity” to hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, who were in their majority Maya, in a short period
+of time. As a case in point, in a twenty-­four-­day period the Maya municipality of Rabinal in Alta Verapaz alone experienced twenty-­eight massacres
+in which around five thousand people were killed, representing almost 20
+percent of the population in that area.39
+Part of the manufacture of death was the production of those who killed,
+as in any war, but in this case that did not include relying on or constructing
+patriotism and an image of an ideal nation for which war must be waged,
+34
+
+Chapter 1
+
+except in the most superficial sense. Manolo Vela Castañeda’s research on
+the military shows that the regime did not build an army in order to pursue
+“war in the name of life,” to use Foucault’s description of twentieth-­century
+war and genocide.40 Bereft of the support of the urban majority in the early
+1980s, frightened to wade into the waters of openly recruiting from among a
+concentrated population that had as recently as May 1, 1980, marched under
+banners of “democracy and socialism” in numbers of over fifty thousand,
+the military made little attempt at propaganda designed to win the city over
+to, much less explain, the war. For a few months in the early 1980s, General
+Efraín Ríos Montt, Pentecostal and chief of staff, gave Sunday “sermons”
+on television to explain the “crisis” as a moral one that could be answered
+only by “cleaning house.”41 In kind with other urban war propaganda, his
+talks aimed to frighten and not to convince. In this period, the army television channel showed the Guatemalan Army’s pride, its elite force of killers
+called the kaibiles, “cleaning house.” They grabbed hens, pulled the feathers
+out, and ate them live with the animal blood splattering all over their contorted faces.42 On other channels, these scenes of kaibiles interrupted soap
+operas.
+The principal mechanism for constituting a fighting force to massacre in
+the countryside took place in the countryside, where military commanders
+forced Maya males into the army. For the most part they were rounded up
+in village markets, then hauled away on trucks to military bases, where they
+were barbarized through three months of abuses to turn them into cruel
+soldiers who lacked any trace of idealism.43 In his unpublished manuscript,
+Rodrigo Sic Ixpancoc, from Rabinal Baja Verapaz, describes what happened
+to him: A local military commissioner arrived at his home to inform him
+he had to “ir a comer arroz [literally, to go eat rice]” and serve in the army.
+During his three-­month training, he was beaten repeatedly, stripped naked,
+not allowed to eat or sleep for long periods, screamed at—“Chicken,” “Indio
+shit,” “Guerrillero”—tortured, taught to torture, and told that “if his mother
+was a guerrillera, an india shit, he had to kill her.” His manuscript describes
+details that repeatedly emerge in the un ceh’s Memoria del Silencio report of
+training that included the promotion of Maya self-­hatred, beatings, rape,
+and even debt peonage among its forced recruits. This was a war devoid of
+love between officers and soldiers or among soldiers or of nation.
+Recruits spent twenty-­seven weeks receiving instruction in absolute obedience and “contempt for life and the savoring of violence.”44 The recruits
+repeatedly recounted the presentation of pointless murder as if it were an
+exhilarating event. As one reported, a training instructor “yelled to me,
+‘Hurry, you are missing something good.’ And when I got there they only
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+35
+
+had one of the boys [referring to three either recruits or civilians brought
+into the base] left, and they were cutting off his head. That is what I was
+missing.”45 Recruits were exhorted to take the so-­called step of death: killing someone as a proof of competence. Instructors encouraged recruits to
+compete with one another in designing ways to torture the communist guerrillas. One recounted: “The instructors gave lessons and awoke the creativity
+and the imagination so that each one would think of a torture even more refined than the last. One said he would take off the guerrillas’ shoes, make
+a wound and put salt and lime in it. The next invented something else. He
+would poke out eyes with needles and on it went.”46 At the end of 1981, military commissioners organized the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (Civil Self-­
+Defense Patrols, pacs). The pacs incorporated all male villagers between
+fifteen and sixty, armed them with sticks and machetes, and ordered them to
+rape, steal, murder, and massacre in their neighboring and sometimes their
+own communities, or be killed (see figure 1.3).47 At the height of the war,
+the pacs included almost one million Guatemalans in a country of eight
+million; over 40 percent of the entire male population was forced or socialized into fratricide. A former pac member stated that these groups were not
+created to protect villagers, as the military had claimed; instead it was, he
+said, to “kill our own brothers. . . . We are all are sick with what they made us
+do.”48 The pacs carried out almost one-­half of the massacres in some areas
+under the orders of military commanders.49
+The murder of children is perhaps the strongest example of the design to
+inflict “infinite pain.” In massacre after massacre, soldiers drew and quartered or decapitated children with dull machetes, raped them, and ripped
+the unborn out of pregnant women in front of relatives and other community members.50 In one massacre, an entire village had to listen to the gang
+rape of one small girl for hours before she and the others were killed. In a
+variation of this, soldiers raped mothers in front of their children.51 People
+remember the massacre at Cuarto Pueblo in 1982, and they told how soldiers put “wires, red, red hot from the fire into them [the villagers], stuck
+them into their mouths, and all the way down to their stomachs . . . not
+caring if the person was a little child.”52 In the case of the community of Río
+Negro, on March 13, 1982, soldiers and Civil Patrollers entered the village,
+pulled people out of their homes, ate breakfast, played marimba music,
+made women and girls dance with them, and raped the youngest ones. A
+survivor testified that the soldiers then killed 70 women and 107 children; in
+the words of one witness, “they hung some from the trees, they killed others
+with machetes and they fired at others. They took the little children and
+threw them against the stones.”53 In another massacre, soldiers went into a
+36
+
+Chapter 1
+
+FIGURE 1.3 The uses of youth: this photograph of Civil Patrollers in the
+countryside, July 1985, suggests the ages at which almost one million males, for the most part Mayas, were obliged to join the Civil SelfDefense Patrols. Behind them, children watch. Credit: Anónimo. “Patrulla de
+Autodefensa Civil” organizada durante el conflicto armado interno. Guatemala, 28 de Julio de
+1985. Archivo de fotografías de El Gráfico. Fototeca Guatemala, CIRMA.
+
+hamlet and seized twelve men and boys and twelve women and girls. After
+directing the women and girls to get twelve hens and pots, they ordered the
+sons to kill their fathers. A witness stated, “If the son was the one not complying, then the father had to stain his hands by killing his son.” After that
+the clay pots with the twelve hens inside were put on fire, and the women
+began to cook. A survivor testified: “The army screamed at them to make
+sure the food was well-­prepared. . . . While the food cooked, the men died
+and the soldiers burnt them. . . . When they were all burned up, they [the
+soldiers] applauded and started eating.”54
+The above descriptions come from survivors in answer to set questions
+asked by human rights researchers in the late 1990s. Despite the problems
+involved in taking testimonies, witnesses of massacres detailed how in community after community, large numbers of soldiers arrived before dawn and
+quickly set up what can only be called death spaces in which they “destroyed
+every sign of life.” The military did not miss much in its calculations. Soldiers burned the houses and fields, ate the animals, arrived on religious
+days, made sure the children and the unborn died first and in the most horrible ways, poisoned wells with dead bodies, and killed the esteemed elderly
+with old work tools.55
+Perhaps the words beyond words of a survivor of the massacre of 350 of
+his fellow villagers at the Finca San Francisco in 1982, words that he used to
+describe his state of mind when he arrived in a Mexican town after fleeing
+across the border, break though the numbing literal descriptive style of the
+accounts given to human rights workers, and open onto the sheer incomprehensibility of existence and knowledge in the aftermath of an episode that
+obliterates the known world: “Is it 11 in the morning? I arrive in Santa Maria.
+Like a drunk I cannot see if it is daylight. I come without sadness. I think
+nothing. Without food, without food, without a jacket. Without clothes. I
+am nobody. Without a hat. Completely nobody.”56 Another villager who had
+fled that massacre testified that a soldier had taken out a child’s heart and
+put it to his mouth.57
+After the 1980–83 massacres, the army expanded its control over territory and local structures and placed survivors in resettlement camps that
+provided food, work, and Pentecostal services, and thus it could be said
+that it started cranking up the machinery of life, such as it was. By the early
+1990s, the majority within the military high command felt secure enough to
+start a years-­long period of negotiating to reach a final accord. As victor, the
+military could began to advertise the new discursive reality of “peace” and
+“democracy.” The guerrilla fronts still existed, and they engaged the army in
+
+38
+
+Chapter 1
+
+skirmishes, but the fronts had lost popular support definitively by the late
+1980s, and the 1996 Peace Accords ended an armed struggle that was already
+over.58
+How could this war, terrible in the city and much worse in the countryside, not have an effect on the evolution of urban gangs? However formulated or expressed—whether in ways very fragmented, hardly unrecognizable, or more colored in—all this history and all those who lived through it,
+got around. Millions of people suddenly left one place and went to another,
+and sometimes on to others. Thousands fled into the mountains, where
+some joined hidden settlements called Comunidades de Pueblos en Resistencia (Communities of People in Resistance) to live off the land, and thousands crossed the border into Mexico, where many went into refugee camps.
+Others became undocumented immigrants who either stayed in Mexico or
+traveled to the United States, where they disappeared in large cities, especially in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s and 1990s. It is estimated that
+between 50,000 and 200,000 left the country, yet 1.3 million fled the four
+hardest-­
+hit highland departments.59 Uncounted numbers of displaced
+moved about within Guatemala.
+At least fifty-­five thousand war refugees came into Guatemala City and
+quietly moved into the poorest areas of the city, where, if they were Maya,
+they often shed their clothes and languages for fear of being pursued. The
+mother of Estuardo, an ms-­1 3 member killed by Mara-­18 (m-­1 8) in 1998,
+escaped into an area of Guatemala City called Tierra Nueva I after a massacre killed the other members of her family in the early 1980s. In 1984, at
+fourteen, Edgar Guarchaj came from the Department of El Quiché to live
+in the streets of Guatemala City to make money to send back home so that
+his father could pay another man to serve his shift in the pac in order to
+have the time he needed to work his land to keep the family alive.60 Edgar
+remained tied to his family and stayed with relatives in the city, but thousands of orphaned children turned up on Guatemala City streets. Soldiers
+even brought orphans to a group home for children. In the words of a social
+worker there: “The same army [that massacred] would bring these children
+and say that so and so ‘was the only survivor of a battle’; to us this meant of
+a destroyed hamlet. This was very hard. . . . These children did not talk, at
+first we social workers thought that they were deaf mute, but little by little
+we discovered it was from the trauma of being present at the assassination
+of their parents and of their community. . . . We did not dare keep records
+for fear of reprisals, and we became human archives.”61
+
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+39
+
+Human Archives in Los Angeles
+Escaping war and seeking opportunities, tens of thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans went to California in the 1980s and 1990s, where they
+were pulled toward the long-­standing Spanish-­speaking neighborhoods of
+Los Angeles. Norma Stoltz Chinchilla and Nora Hamilton discuss how large
+numbers of these immigrants settled in Pico-­Union, a part of Westlake,
+located within the Ramparts division of the Los Angeles Police Department
+in the southern central part of Los Angeles, an area relatively cut off from
+others by freeways and other obstacles. They brought a new presence to this
+small dense world, one of the poorest areas of the city and 80 percent Hispanic by the 1980s. Life there was as difficult as in the worst of urban areas in
+the United States: the average income was $15,000; it had an 85 percent high
+school dropout rate; and it was plagued by crowded schools, overcrowded
+housing, inadequate services, and a dearth of recreational facilities, conditions that would deteriorate with the recession of the early 1990s.62 This
+was a period of urban deindustrialization and the deregulation of government programs such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers and English
+as a Second Language classes. As in other cities in the United States facing
+similar problems in these especially hard times, gangs and drugs dealers increased in Pico-Union and neighboring areas.63
+Los Angeles, including Pico-Union, has a long history of gangs, written
+about by James Diego Vigil and others.64 Gangs and youth clubs probably
+date from the White Fence in 1929, which was started to protect Mexicans
+and Mexican Americans from racism. The story of gangs in Los Angeles history includes the heyday of zoot suit cultures of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans in the 1940s, and the more recent Crips and
+Bloods. According to Vigil, none of this was characterized by excessive brutality toward others or themselves. What Vigil calls “escalating violence”
+in the 1950s and 1960s was “self-­contained” and involved “set battles.” He
+writes, “The modern notion of the ultraviolent street gang or predator did
+not prevail.” Major transformations came with crack and guns in the 1970s
+and 1980s, and sharpened in the 1990s, with the incorporation of gang members into the Mexican drug ring La Eme, and the arrival of Central American
+youth marked by war.65
+Numerous writers have emphasized that ms-­1 3 and m-­18 in Guatemala
+City are Los Angeles gangs because they started there; nonetheless, they
+also started as specifically Guatemalan and Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles.66 Boys and young men who came from Guatemala and from El Salvador, where twelve years of civil war ended in 1992, brought memories of
+40
+
+Chapter 1
+
+war-­related experiences that had to be recontextualized in the midst of new
+difficulties of racism, rejection, and unemployment in an unfamiliar city.67
+Especially given the push within academia to go beyond the boundaries of
+nation, it has been tempting to treat these gangs as a “global” phenomenon
+because of this Los Angeles nexus, as well as the Mexican one. Then again,
+even though these youth move across borders and experience the transcultured worlds of Los Angeles and of Mexican towns and cities, and they
+pick up meaningful slogans, names, institutional frameworks, and tactics—
+for example, the Southern United Raza (the nonaggression pact between
+gangs)—they are still what cultural historian Peter Fritzsche calls “bounded
+subjects” whose subjectivities had been shaped by the “national experience”
+and whose bodies are sometimes literally scarred by the nation-­state.68 In
+their studies, James Diego Vigil and Tom Hayden both connect the violence
+of the Central Americans gangs in Pico-­Union to state barbarism in Central
+America.69
+From my perspective ms-­13 and m-­18 could well be placed inside an as
+yet unwritten history of ex-­soldiers from Central America that someone
+should research. An ex-­soldier from either the Salvador Army or the rebel
+army nicknamed Flaco Stoner founded Wonder-­13 in the 1980s to defend
+his compatriots from Mexican Americans gangs. It soon became known as
+Mara Salvatrucha, to honor its Salvadoran members, although it welcomed
+Guatemalans and Hondurans excluded from other Latino gangs.70 In addition, with the numbers of Central Americans coming into the area, youth
+from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras took over an older, once Mexican American, 1950s gang known as 18th Street and later called m-­18, Mara­18, or Barrio-­18.71 The impact of both military training and the more general
+war experience was evident to them and to others. The Los Angeles Police
+Department heard that ms-­13 gang members were “outstanding” in their
+cruelty because they had been trained by no less a talent than that of the
+U.S. Special Forces in El Salvador.72 Neighbor youth noted that these gangs
+of Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Honduran youth brought a new level of
+violence to the area, which soon provoked escalations of violence in other
+gangs. One young man in Pico-­Union described the change in m-­18 after Salvadorans took over: “[Before] they [m-­18 members] were junior high school
+guys . . . like punks in the way they dressed, T-­shirts with skulls and long
+hair. . . . The truth is later [m-­18] became so large and so different from the
+cholo gangs, this stuff of just looking for violence and no more than that . . .
+they [the Salvadorans] just kill [because] some bato [dude] gives them an
+ugly look. . . . They always shot to kill.”73
+Ernesto Miranda, another founding ms-­13 member and ex–Salvadoran
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+41
+
+military solider explained the intensity of ms-­13 brutality: “[In Salvador]
+we were taught to kill our own people, no matter if they were from your
+own blood. If your father was the enemy, you had to kill him, so the training during the war in our country served to make us one of the most violent
+gangs of the United States.”74 In the following description, a perceptive and
+astute young man in ms-­13 captures this connection between the heightened cruelty of Salvadoran and Guatemalan gang members in Los Angeles,
+and the state terror in their home countries:
+The difference between the Mexicans and Salvadorans or Central Americans in general is this: Mexicans usually come from states like Michoacán. They live in a small town and are mainly agricultural. They do have
+violence from feuds, drug war, or now LA barrio violence. Generally
+speaking, they are not initially violent when they come to the US. El Salvador and Guatemala are another story. It was common to walk out of a
+tienda and see a street splattered with brain particles and blood. People
+in Guatemala were getting kidnapped and tortured to the point of insanity. In the main university in Guatemala City, students were forced
+to give classes due to the fact that all the professors had gotten smoked,
+one by one. . . . If you reach the age of 15 in Guatemala without having to
+identify [the body of ] a relative you were blessed. These people [Guatemalans] saw carnage that even the Faces of Death [snuff videos] chose
+not to use.75
+In his view, the pornography of snuff films, with their raw footage of—
+among much else—real life in real-­time rapes, massacres, train crashes,
+murders, and bodies flying out of exploded buildings, cannot hold a candle
+to the experience of violence inside the social wreckage of a collapsed moral
+universe in which you leave your everyday corner store to find brain particles
+all over the street outside.
+With the many sweeps that the Los Angeles police made in the Ramparts
+District, members of m-­18 and ms-­13, including Flaco Stoner, ended up in
+the California prison system, where (accounts claim) they made tight connections with La Eme. When and why a deadly rivalry between ms-­13 and
+m-­18 started is not clear, but it predates the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins) massive deportation of Central Americans back to
+their countries of origin. What started as a trickle of ins deportations in
+the early 1990s turned into a flood that included incarcerated gang members by 1996. Taken from prisons and flown home in shackles, these deportees brought with them ms-­13 and m-­18, as well as whatever slogans, clothing styles, hand signals, and vocabulary had not already traveled to Central
+42
+
+Chapter 1
+
+America through the media and immigration. ms-­13 and m-­18 absorbed
+and reorganized local Maras in Guatemala City into clikas with names such
+as “Los Locos,” which then formed the base of the ms-­13 or m-­18 pyramids.
+Each clika was under the supervision of a veterano; veteranos designated palabras (words) who communicated between the clikas. Members of m-­18 and
+ms-­13 with whom I spoke in Guatemala City in the late 1990s told me that
+the youth of each clika had their identities affirmed by going through initiation rituals—for instance, receiving the ms-­13 baptism of thirteen blows
+to the body and the cult knowledge of the changing meanings of the gang
+symbols that came from Los Angeles.
+“Shadows of War” in Guatemala City
+The war and its aftermath combined with changing demographics and an
+economic crisis to alter Guatemala City. Neoliberal restructuring programs
+affected Guatemala City, as they did Los Angeles and other cities around
+the world. Perhaps no more social services, for instance public clinics, got
+eliminated in Guatemala City than in Pico-­Union, but residents had even
+fewer resources at the outset. The substantial industrial development that
+took place in the 1950s and 1960s under the Central American Common
+Market had already started to unravel by the late 1970s as a consequence
+of the 1973 oil crisis. The cutbacks in production in workplaces such as the
+large unionized cavisa glass and acricasa thread companies turned into
+shutdowns in the last two decades of the twentieth century, making worse
+already drastic problems of gainful employment in a city that was booming
+demographically. Low-­wage maquiladoras, the sole growth industry in the
+1980s and 1990s, did not offer enough jobs to compensate for those lost in
+the 1980s, much less create new ones in a city with one of the world’s highest growth rates. The population had gone from less than a million in 1975
+to almost three million by 1996, with those under twenty-­five constituting
+over one-­half the urban population.76 The áreas marginales, exceptionally poor
+areas (see figures 1.4 and 1.5), grew as they never had before: of 161 identified in 1998, a full 111 formed after 1991. A 1996 survey of áreas marginales
+found that 34 percent of the households earned less than a “survival” income.77 Most analysts argue that war refugees, whom the sociologists Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus evocatively name “shadows of war” in a
+study of urban settlements, account for their rapid growth.
+Even though the displaced in the city rarely spoke directly about the massacres in fear of the consequences, which included reprisals, new designations and much else signaled the war.78 Where once rural-­to-­urban migrants
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+43
+
+FIGURE 1.4 Two boys standing around on a stretch of the Avenida Bolívar
+in Zone 8, Guatemala City, a city with little to offer youth, 2000. Credit:
+Andrea Aragón.
+
+FIGURE 1.5 A mother, Guatemala City, 2002. The city streets hold out
+even less for young people with children. From the series Inhalando
+muerte. Credit: Andrea Aragón.
+
+had identities that reflected their work and place of origin—the tailor from
+Todos Santos or the saleswoman from Totonicapán—now there were refugees, victims, ex-­soldiers, ex-­p acs, survivors, widows, and orphans. Like
+those who went across borders, war refugees in the city carried terrible
+memories into a situation where they were often alone, with few to console
+or understand them. Despite their silence about the war, in one way or another they communicated their feelings as well as some version of their experiences to their children and others. Because human rights workers generally did not gather testimonies in the áreas marginales, the memories of
+these refugees in the city were not reconstituted and affirmed as part of a
+“collective war memory,” however complex that notion, its production, and
+its uses may be.79 Without some community in which to develop a collective understanding of how mistrust, uncertainties, anger, hopelessness, and
+fear are grounded in specific events and people, all these sensations became
+unspecific and even more overwhelming because they seem to have no roots
+outside of a blur called “the situation” that was out of their control.80
+The growing number of poor areas and the presence of a war-­related migrant population constituted one shift in urban life. Another was that the
+more established city neighborhoods changed radically in the late 1980s and
+1990s because they all but lost their politics to the state terror.81 Neighborhood involvement became tied to the infrastructure of global nongovernmental organizations (ngos) by the early 1990s. In many areas, vertically
+structured civic life replaced the horizontal political life of the earlier period.
+The number of ngos increased dramatically, and institutions representing
+city and state departments, such as the medical clinics and pharmacies run
+by the municipality with funds from the Ministry of Health, diminished. In
+contrast to the 1970s, grassroots groups became few in number and only
+local in perspective. This meant that grassroots agency and everything that
+went with that—from starting from scratch in someone’s front room and
+getting up the nerve to go door to door, to developing analysis, strategy,
+and tactics in relation to the Guatemalan state and its agencies—had all
+but died off. By the 1990s, community improvement committees generally
+sought financing and advice from hierarchical agencies with international
+ties. Outspoken residents became entangled in trying to win changes “from
+above” rather than in mobilizing “from below.” With many ngos working
+in barrios, competition about funding from these agencies often divided
+community leaders. Communities tended to become further depoliticized
+because the ngos encouraged residents to resolve their problems through
+the medium of the ngos, instead of bringing them to the attention of the
+broader public and the state, as had grassroots organizations in the 1970s,
+46
+
+Chapter 1
+
+when neighborhood residents boldly inserted themselves into national politics (see figure 1.6).82 To confound this new absence of horizontal solidarities, the barrios had lost to state violence the left-­wing religious workers
+who had envisioned creating “God’s kingdom on Earth.” Tierra Nueva, later
+called Tierra Nueva I, started by a liberation theology priest in 1976 and
+where the Mara Las Cobras was born in the early 1980s, is an example of a
+community built with a new world in mind.
+The history of its offspring, Tierra Nueva II, illustrates the deep political
+change in barrios. In 1985, the teenage son of a religious left-­wing organizer
+of the original Tierra Nueva I launched Tierra Nueva II with his friends. A
+Mara called Mara Nene were born with the invasion; it was part of its “heat,”
+as one described the marero support for the new community.83 But within
+a few years, the combination of well-­funded ngos and selective state violence undermined the power of the original organizers and of their visions
+for a community-­run Tierra Nueva II. Death threats forced one organizer
+into exile and others out of activism. What was once a rivalry about break
+dance contests between the Maras Nene in Tierra Nueva II and Las Cobras
+in Tierra Nueva I became a violent one over territorio that included neighborhood streets, stores, and women’s bodies. Las Cobras destroyed Mara Nene
+at the end of the decade and went on to become violent within the gang and
+neighborhood.
+Much had changed in these milieus. By the late 1980s and increasingly as
+time passed, dozens of Pentecostal sects dominated Tierra Nueva I and II
+and other areas. Trucks mounted with sound systems blasted taped messages of sin and salvation incessantly to summon residents to services that
+went on during the day and evening for hours. Unlike liberation theology
+adherents, most pastors believed, in the words of one, that “the poor will
+always be with us. The poor choose to be poor.”84 Pentecostal pastors emphasized that nothing could be done about the fact that life was hell, and
+this portrayal of earthly impotence and hopelessness resonated in the wake
+of the defeat of projects for social change.85 The Pentecostal message emphasized the constancy of crisis and the absence of human control outside of individual willpower about the individual self. Nothing could have
+seemed truer. These churches grew like wildfire. For young people, this city
+life in the 1990s bore few traces of the experiences and ideas of the popular and revolutionary movements of the 1970s. The majority in Guatemala
+City was under eighteen, and what were startling transformations for older
+generations made up normal life for young people. This was a city that was
+losing its cultural texture, one in which people continually experienced the
+instability of the nation’s relationship to its past.
+Death and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+47
+
+FIGURE 1.6 The neighborhood of Esperanza in Mezquital, Guatemala
+City, 2005. Fifteen hundred families led a land invasion in 1984 to
+establish the urban settlement of Mezquital in Zone 12. War refugees
+were among the tens of thousands who came to live here. Over the
+years, Mezquital has been the scene of the twists and turns of grassroots organizations, nongovernmental organizations, state repression,
+Pentecostal churches, Maras, community initiatives against Maras, and
+“social cleansing” campaigns. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+The growth of violence following the war is notorious, and it happened
+in this urban crucible stripped of its political and ethical past. Today, Guatemala City is one of the most dangerous places in the world, with an average
+of a murder by gunfire “for every hour of the day,” as one newspaper journalist phrased it.86 The Guatemalan human rights ombudsman Sergio Morales stated that in 2008 there was more violence each day than there had
+been daily during the war.87 Most deaths are by gunfire. Most of those who
+die are youth. By one count, 80 percent of gun-­related deaths are of youth
+between fifteen and seventeen.88 This violence is generally not related to
+the political views of those killed, but that too continues. Women and men
+who have opposed mining companies and hydroelectric projects, occupied
+unused lands to prevent starvation, and sought to protect the environment
+have been killed, and so have workers trying to unionize.
+There is complete impunity. In the wake of the war, the state has shown
+itself either unwilling or incapable of preventing crime. The new National
+Civil Police, the presumably reformed police mandated by the Peace Accords,
+simply does not pursue criminal investigations. A 2002 study revealed that
+for every hundred cases reported to the judicial system, only ten received
+any response at all, and in 2005, only 1 percent of those accused of “crimes
+against life” were ever brought to a hearing.89 Mental health professionals—
+who seem the chroniclers of the period—report that this impunity causes
+despair, fear, paranoia, physical illness, and rage ignited over and over by
+helplessness. Impunity has led to the formation of barrio vigilante groups
+that beat up and even kill real or supposed young criminals. Impunity means
+that there exists absolutely no buffer between the community and crime except community action, which can take many forms. Impunity functions as
+a model whereby transgression of the law is seen as the normal way and the
+only way.90
+Violence has taken a long journey. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, notions
+of violence were qualified and analytical. Violence was not perceived, understood, discussed, measured, or judged outside of a particular context. Although in countries such as Colombia, the term “La violencia” was a familiar one, it was uncommon in Guatemala. Whether in social science and
+humanities publications, banners, or the bulletins of campesino leagues,
+Maya cultural organizations, urban trade unions, and university and secondary student groups, violence was represented as state terrorism, structural
+and everyday oppression, and armed self-­defense. Not only the revolutionary movement but also the popular movement and many religious figures
+defended armed violence as necessary and just. It was not until the 1990s
+that the defense of revolutionary violence and people’s war became increasDeath and Politics, 1950s–2000s
+
+49
+
+ingly subdued in the face of military successes. The military has never muted
+its defense of its actions, which it defines as “restoring order,” the opposite of the chaos of violence. It justified its own behavior, which it never
+called violent, in terms of “social cleansing,” or it used the language of the
+Cold War National Security Doctrine to argue that the cancer of subversion
+needed to be cut out, a medical rather than a military phrasing.
+Now ubiquitous, the unqualified term “La violencia” started to be used
+after the decisive massacres of the early 1980s, and it has held different
+meanings depending on who uses it, where, and when. It became a code
+for state violence for survivors who lived under military rule. For some, “La
+violencia” was and has remained a euphemism for state violence, a way for
+survivors to speak about the past in seemingly apolitical, and thus protected,
+language. It also became a way for the army, Pentecostals, and others to describe “El conflicto.” For many, especially younger generations, “La violencia” (and not the history of popular movements, guerrillas, state power and
+military strategy, struggles for land and higher wages, ideas, and ideals)
+tells the story of Guatemala’s past. Within this vision, a faceless “La violencia” consumed the past, and the present must be protected from it. The
+historically focused Memoria del silencio report, which analyzes causes and assigns blame, has been poorly circulated in Guatemala. For those who attend
+school, most curricula deal superficially with “El conflicto” and “La violencia” as the past from which Guatemala has evolved into a “post-­conflict”
+democratic society.91 This new public sphere rhetoric of “conflict” and
+“post-­conflict” suggests that conflict—surely a necessary condition of a
+healthy society—is negative. Whether the issue is land invasions or protests
+against mining, anything that questions the status quo is viewed as negative
+because it reintroduces conflict and drags to the foreground the muck of “La
+violencia.” Progressive groups have had a hard time reclaiming a language of
+resistance. Everyone must be nonviolent; otherwise they are part of “it.”92
+In everyday talk now in Guatemala City, “La violencia comes,” “La violencia
+arrives,” “La violencia prevents us,” “La violencia surrounds us,” “La violencia forces us,” “La violencia frightens us,” and so on. And “it” does all these
+things.
+Of 170 children under the age of eleven, questioned in 2010 in what the
+National Civil Police call a “red” (high-­crime) neighborhood in Guatemala
+City, 135 said that they had witnessed murders, and they could often describe in detail where the bullets went and the way the blood squirted out to
+quickly turn clothing red. Given an average of eighteen violent deaths daily
+in the first months of 2010, no doubt most of these children actually did see
+murders, and not on television (see figure 1.7).
+50
+
+Chapter 1
+
+FIGURE 1.7 Neighborhood residents watch the scene of a murder in
+Zone 5, Guatemala City, 2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+Marco Garavito, head of La Liga de Higiene Mental, a mental health collective, describes how the police typically put up a yellow cordon around
+the crime scene, but they place it right next to the body. “Why not at thirty
+meters?” he asks with the enormous frustration because so simple a change
+would help keep these deaths at least at a spatial distance. Children slip
+under the ropes to look closely at the bodies, which are often of youth from
+the neighborhood. If not literally known, the dead are familiar types, the
+people the children might be a few years later. A reporter asks Garavito,
+“What will happen to these children? What psychological damage will they
+suffer, what will happen to them in the future?” Garavito replies, “It takes
+no investigation to see that violence affects them . . . to the degree they become accustomed[,] they reproduce it. They see it as normal, natural.”93
+To challenge this, La Liga runs a program that takes as its point of departure and arrival the notion that violence is a “decision, not an obligation.” If
+young people have internalized violence as the natural means of living, they
+assume life demands it, or in the words of the Liga, “obliges” it. To invert
+this and say, “violence is a decision” denaturalizes it, makes it someone’s
+responsibility, and brings youth back inside the “old” social imaginary of
+cause and effect and human agency and away from the passivity of Victor’s
+“it just was” discourse.
+To return to Victor, introduced at the start of this chapter: In what massacre did Victor take part? Was he trying to impress or frighten with a tall
+story? He gave slight information, but what he said could certainly be true.
+The “high-­intensity” massacres were over by the time the army picked him
+up, but “low-­intensity” ones continued. If he did make it up, he did not invent the material. Clearly he knew things about these massacres, and this
+knowledge was part of his archive. His description was flat, without remorse
+or horror. If the military did not seize and train him, and then take him to
+the highlands to play a part in a massacre, perhaps he told this personal
+narrative in order to belong somewhere in the larger Guatemalan story of
+war, about which he had no shame or pride because he was part of what
+“just was.”
+
+52
+
+Chapter 1
+
+1980s: THE GANGS TO LIVE FOR
+
+I joined because there was emptiness inside me, a little loneliness, a bit of sadness. Maybe we are all alike in this. I joined through a bunch of girlfriends with
+whom I was very heavy. We’ve shared sorrows and joys. I think the Mara is a group
+of people who need affection. Some of us want to escape the mess in our homes.
+Sometimes we think we can create a new world.
+—Researchers’ interview with Maritza, Mara de la 4, March 1987
+
+W
+
+hen he was nine years old, Aníbal López told his parents that he had had
+a vision of an earthquake. A few days later, in the early morning of February 1976, a 7.5-­magnitude earthquake with an epicenter close to Guatemala City struck. More than twenty-­three thousand persons, most of whom
+lived in conditions of poverty, died as a result of this tremor and a strong
+aftershock, and tens of thousands more were injured and left homeless. The
+López family’s rented apartment in Barrio La Florida, Zone 19, was badly
+damaged, as were most of the over ninety thousand casas precarias (precarious homes) in the city.1 In late March, the López family was one of many who
+joined a well-­organized land invasion led by a revolutionary Catholic priest
+onto a defunct coffee plantation on the outskirts of Zone 7, not far from La
+Florida. This response to disaster was the result of theological reflections
+into the meaning of the earthquake between the priest and a small group of
+residents in the old barrio El Gallito in Zone 3, a neighborhood so poor that
+families lived in one room that served as all rooms. The group decided, in the
+words of one member, “the earthquake had been a warning from el Señor to
+leave El Gallito shantytowns” and develop “a communitarian identity.” They
+christened their settlement Tierra Nueva.2
+For a few years, a neighborhood committee that was inspired by liberation theology’s emphasis on building a here-­and-­now Reign of God on Earth
+ran Tierra Nueva with “the notion of a little socialism in terms of solidarity”
+
+2
+
+and “without bars or houses of prostitution.”3 The settlement grew, and over
+time residents mobilized to obtain water, electricity, paved streets, garbage
+collection, and a sewage system. They provided themselves with a medical clinic and started discussion groups as well as a daycare center in part
+financed by workers from the radical Coca-­Cola Workers’ Union. Years later
+state violence, corruption, and the imperatives and finances of the state and
+ngos undermined Tierra Nueva’s politics, but for a period of time, this attempt at an alternate everyday modernity emerged in both the imagination
+and practice.4 Problems such as alcoholism or unemployment were framed
+in social terms and widely discussed in community circles. This was a loose
+form of a “creative imaginary,” wherein individuals and collectives attempt
+to define themselves, in contrast to the ontology of “being determined.”5
+The radical politics of Tierra Nueva belonged to the milieu of solidarity
+and social justice that prevailed in neighborhoods, factories, and schools.
+With fewer than one million residents in the 1970s, Guatemala City was the
+country’s commercial and political center, and it had recently become the
+site of Guatemala’s singular industrial development. Stretched out over a
+high plateau cut through with deep ravines and edged by mountains, the city
+was divided into twenty-­one zones. The zones were packed with people and
+housing, but green areas still dotted neighborhoods, many of which were
+the consequence of unplanned urban spread. Except in the wealthy sections
+of the city, social life took place in empty lots, green areas, and designated
+soccer fields; at church and home and in streets, bars, houses of prostitution, the city’s central plaza, and its downtown in Zone 1. At midcentury, the
+urban population consisted of skilled artisans; a small middle class; an elite
+class; and a lower-­class majority that labored in service, transport, construction and other sectors, was poor and primarily Ladino or mestizo, with a far
+smaller number of Mayas. In the 1970s, these social classes remained; the
+city, however, was also becoming a proletarian one and rural migrants were
+adding to its numbers and ethnic texture. Factories gave many zones a new
+profile, and some of these factories even seemed a centerpiece for their size
+and bustle. The hard work, general mistreatment, low wages, and managerial violence against women and men in these new factories were challenged
+by workers.6 Unions were big news: factory sit-­ins and strikes were on the
+radio and in the press, with workers taking their grievances to the public.
+A major event in the city, International Workers’ Day on May 1, drew tens
+of thousands to the city’s central plaza with prounion and antigovernment
+banners. As was discussed in the last chapter, city residents mobilized again
+and again. Aníbal’s generation was perhaps too young to enter the ranks of
+revolutionary organizations or the other groups that students and young
+54
+
+Chapter 2
+
+workers joined, but it came of age within the ethos or the habitus, in Pierre
+Bourdieu’s sense, of the decades-­long fight between the state and the popular movement.7
+Because Aníbal had predicted one of the worst earthquakes in Central American history, as he grew up in Tierra Nueva, his extended family
+brought their worries to him, placed a lit candle in front of him, and asked
+him questions such as “where is so and so?” or “is so and so hurt?” His successes—for example, correctly envisioning an uncle delayed on the highway
+but not injured, dead, or missing—won him a reputation as a seer, and he
+was treated with special respect. Encouraged by his older brother, in the
+early 1980s he joined a new Tierra Nueva gang called Brek Las Cobras—brek
+as in break dancing—and later named Mara Las Cobras, which consisted
+of neighborhood boys and girls in their teens. His art career began in those
+years.8
+For Aníbal, being in Las Cobras enhanced his sense of himself among
+peers who appreciated his talents.9 He designed the graphics on Las Cobras’
+signature black T-­shirts. He loved the group favorites, Jethro Tull and Led
+Zeppelin, enjoyed dancing, and was proud to win the title “Rey del Brek” in
+an annual dance contest in which gang members competed in 1985. That
+same year, another new gang, Mara Nene, took part in a land invasion led
+by the seventeen-­year-­old left-­wing son of a founder of Tierra Nueva and
+established the settlement of Tierra Nueva II right above what then became
+renamed as Tierra Nueva I, discussed in chapter 1.
+The mid-­1980s was the period when, without ending the war, the Guatemalan military returned the country to constitutional rule after evaluating the success of its counterinsurgency scorched-­earth campaigns in rural
+areas. Even if what became known as a “transition to democracy” was a tactic designed by the military to garner respectability while it continued the
+war, it provided at least enough space in the city for small mobilizations that
+remained informed by progressive ideals. In 1984, over four hundred Coca-­
+Cola workers occupied the Coca-­Cola facilities for an entire year to protect
+their union. An attempt was made to start a radical labor confederation to
+replace the one destroyed in 1980, and a new organization, Grupo de Apoyo
+Mutuo (Group of Mutual Support, gam), which united relatives of the disappeared to demand their loved ones safe and sound, held its first public
+march in 1984.10 Urban land invasions, such as the one that created Tierra
+Nueva II, grew, and in September 1985, just before president-elect Vinicio
+Cerezo of the centrist Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democratic
+Party, pdc) took office with his promise of a “government for and by the
+people,” secondary students from the Rafael Aqueche Institute in downtown
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+55
+
+Guatemala City took to the streets to stop an increase in bus fares, with the
+support of the bus drivers and the participation of youth from the neighborhood breks. In retrospect, these urban demonstrations in the mid-­1980s
+were the last in the twentieth-­century city with those kinds of 1970s left-­
+wing politics. The point here is that gang members were part of this brief
+reappearance of protest.
+The mid-­1980s also saw the first massive advertising campaigns aimed
+at the urban youth market. Brightly colored ads portraying happy youth
+wearing Levi’s jeans, Reebok or Nike footwear, and expensive accessories
+appeared on television, which was becoming ubiquitous in barrios for the
+first time, and on billboards. This relentless multinational crusade to get
+youth from all social classes and ethnic backgrounds to desire goods that
+formed part of a fantasy “world youth culture” had effects. It was impossible to live in the city and miss this loud second coming of capitalism, in
+which messages about the benefits of consuming what were virtually lavish
+goods replaced the discredited promises of the post-­1954 economic development. This consumerism intensified life for working-­class youth, who already faced many demands and dilemmas. Desires to have a youth style that
+required its own expensive international accoutrements had the potential
+to push to calamity already-­untenable emotional, cultural, and economic
+situations wherein youth from poor homes were expected to work, to study,
+and to be a stable part of the time-­honored family wage economy. It is in
+this context of a fading Left presence, a return to civilian government, and a
+marked growth of advertising that the Maras emerged.
+Real Maras Become Imaginary Ones
+By 1987, boys and girls from age six to late teens had created over sixty
+gangs, which were sometimes dubbed breks but more often Maras. They
+gave them names that suggested mischief, rebellion, fun, trouble, a place,
+gringo-­isms, masculinity, or some combination of these traits. Maras named
+Los Guerreros, Las Pirañas, El Ruso, Los Pulpos, Los Garañones, Tigresa,
+Ángeles Infernales, Las Brujas, Los Angelitos, Nais, Relax, Vacas, Botudos,
+Sexta Calle, Los Motines Paraíso, adi, Los Títeres, Guevudos, Zope, Callejeros, Mara 33, Apache, Miau Miau, 3 de Julio, Las Llantas, Motley Crew, El
+Ceviche, La Isla, and Mara five came to include as many as one thousand
+children and teenagers who joined together to socialize; listen to the music
+of Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead, Queen, and other groups
+from the United States and Great Britain; and live with group and individual
+style, attitude, and personality. They earned reputations for their own strik56
+
+Chapter 2
+
+ing character. Their lower-class “strutting” drew fire from better-­off students at private colegios, who even started gangs called Bourgeois and AntiBrek, which declared “war” on the Maras for being “vulgar” and “uppity.”
+Decrying the appropriation of break dancing, a member of Bourgeois and
+Anti-Brek explained: “I fight with the breks because they are servants, vulgar
+types, because they rob, because of the way they dress. When brek dancing
+was in style, the bourgeois started to dance brek until it went out of style,
+but the poor kept dancing.”11 Victor, a founder of Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol,
+and Carlos Rafael Soto, head of Public Relations of the National Police, told
+me the same story about the origin of the widespread use of the term Mara
+for these gangs. They both separately said that the National Police spread the
+use of the term Mara in September 1985 during the protest against the bus
+fare. Soto remembered, “The September protesters used no organizational
+form or name so we called them ‘Maras’ from that Brazilian movie.” Victor
+recalled, “The guys from the press and the cops said ‘here comes the Marabunta!’ and that’s how it came to us and we started to be the Mara Plaza
+Vivar Capitol.”12
+A year later, these Maras were front-­page news. Under the headline “Grenade Exploded in Discothèque,” the daily El Gráfico reported that a youth in a
+“yellow bus with a black strip” threw a hand grenade at a crowd of teenagers
+in front of a discothèque named La Montaña Púrpura. One of the wounded, a
+ten-­year-­old on his way to Zone 1 to get a pair of sneakers, recounted to the
+journalist from El Gráfico that Mara youths in a school bus descended upon
+him and his friends, snatched gold chains, and fled.13 Within a day, the National Police spokesperson Soto explained to the media that the grenade had
+exploded in front of this discothèque at which loitered drugged youth who
+belonged to Mara 33, a criminal band from Zone 6 that had its origins in
+television programs from the United States and in misguided parenting. In
+his words, “This evil affecting our youth is the fault of irresponsible parents
+who have permitted their children to live in complete freedom.”14 Common
+images of delinquent life—such as the abuse of school property, weapons,
+gold chains, free-wheeling minors, Zone 1, and discos—­materialized in the
+story, and Soto used many of the loaded words—drugs, foreign, bad parents, drugs, freedom—of the ensuing anti-­Mara narrative.
+Without evidence, the National Police, press, and politicians quickly
+linked these Maras to urban problems such as street crime, prostitution, and
+the sale and use of drugs. The magistrate for minors, who directed the frail
+juvenile court system, pointed to the “disintegration of the family.”15 Social
+workers, even female ones with children, cited “women working outside the
+home” as the “fundamental cause” of juvenile delinquency.16 Catchphrases
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+57
+
+about “imitating foreigners,” “foreign movies,” “lack of nationalism,” and
+“imitating Negros” occurred again and again. The head of the juvenile delinquency bureau of the National Police told me: “Rock music incites youth to
+fight. We copy a lot . . . we don’t appreciate our own culture. Guatemalan
+citizens who work abroad bring records, this infiltrates our culture, there is
+also the effect of the Negroes in the U.S., the Maras are like Negro gangs, or
+like Stallone’s Cobras.” Speaking without irony, in the midst of civil war, he
+added, “Or look at that movie Warriors, now that had ­impact!”17
+Members of the Pentecostal movement were emerging in the mid-­1980s
+as the city’s new professionals in the wake of the military’s destruction of
+the intellectual community in fields such as psychology and sociology, and
+they incorporated this mix of nationalist, racist, and pro-­family rhetoric into
+a religious discourse of Satanism that surpassed that of criminalization.
+Pentecostal fanaticism had echoes of what the historian Virginia Garrard-­
+Burnett suggests was Guatemala’s religious language of war, one best exemplified by nationally televised speeches of the early 1980s that proselytized about the urgency of the covenant between God and man to cleanse
+society of evil, and were given by Pentecostal general Efraín Ríos Montt, who
+directed acts of genocide.18
+With unchallenged authority, Pentecostals became in the 1980s the most
+organized and outspoken experts on gangs in the city, and they drew on
+the international fame of born-­again Christianity successes with gangs
+such as New York City’s famous Mau Maus. Pentecostal members, as chapter 4 elaborates, became important officials in government agencies who
+did not hesitate to be outspoken about their conservative religious vision of
+the roots of social problems. A Pentecostal counselor working in the Welfare Secretariat insisted to me that “the term Mara is Hindu for ‘death to
+the soul.’ . . . They are Satanic, they use the anti-­Christ number 767 and
+their music encourages incest and necrophilia.”19 A widely circulated Pentecostal pamphlet titled La música roc y sus peligros warns that the Maras played
+rock music incessantly to promote “Satanic themes, pornography, materialism and chaos. . . . The popular singer Michael Jackson casts spells of terror in his music and video ‘Thriller.’ ac-­d c has songs like ‘Injected Poison’
+and the Evil Way on their album ‘Highway to Hell.’ The group ‘Queen’ has
+been popular. . . . Many think that ‘Queen’ means “queen’ but aside from
+that, ‘queen’ is an expression used in the street for homosexual transvestite.
+Theirs is a Satanic philosophy of homosexuality and the number one danger
+to which we must be alert.”20 A respected Pentecostal psychologist, Roberto
+Morales del Pinar, who directed a home for runaway girls and young women
+and wrote a regular newspaper column, described in horror to me how, in
+58
+
+Chapter 2
+
+one U.S. rock video, teenagers throw their father out the window. According
+to him, “In the Mara Satan appears to them [mareros], blood flows, wounds
+open, hate grows. . . . Satan conducts their death cults.” Morales del Pinar
+thought it took fire to fight such fire, as it had, he pointed out to me, against
+the communists.21
+The newly elected ruling pdc did not use this particular language.
+It made the “crisis of youth” a central issue and set up an underfinanced
+agency called National Plan for Youth to provide alternatives to gang life. It
+sponsored conferences, and even gave a few Mara youth office space in the
+National Youth Institute, an older establishment that trained future leaders.
+The pdc directed the new Ministries of Culture, Education, Labor, and
+Health—not the National Police or religious group—to confront the challenge of the Maras. However, the pdc did not confront the Pentecostal view,
+though party officials knew that the gangs represented no danger because
+the pdc had commissioned a study that showed the Maras to be composed
+of fairly average urban youth who at the worst broke minor laws. That these
+findings were not publicized and circulated facilitated confusion and fear,
+allowing the pdc to maintain favorable ties with the burgeoning and well-­
+financed Pentecostal movement.
+Research about Mareros
+Young social scientists within the National Plan for Youth, who were genuinely concerned that their work would contribute to making party policy,
+directed the pdc’s study. They conducted two straightforward surveys that
+consisted of asking young women and men in the gangs multiple-­choice
+questions. Forty filled out a questionnaire in 1987, and a year later, five Mara
+leaders who worked with the National Plan asked 290 gang members the
+same questions. The two surveys coincided on all but matters of age and gender. In the smaller study, 20 percent were female, and in the second, larger
+study in 1988, 44 percent were female. In the first survey, 80 percent of the
+youth were ages fifteen to nineteen, and in the second, 73 percent were ages
+twelve to fifteen. The sheer percentages of females and children who belonged to the Maras undercut the images that the media, the police, and the
+Pentecostal descriptions evoked, as did all the results.
+According to both surveys, of the religious majority in the Maras, 24 percent belonged to Pentecostal churches and the rest were Catholic; 27 percent checked “no religion.” Eighty percent lived at the birth family’s home.
+Ninety percent were born and bred in cities; 86 percent were single. Most
+spent their free time “hanging out” with Mara friends with whom they had
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+59
+
+“very tight” relationships, and few regularly watched television. All were literate, 61 percent attended elementary or secondary school, and the rest had
+dropped out of school. Eighty-­three percent did not work either because
+they studied or because they could find no work; 21 percent occasionally
+stole items. Most who worked in the formal economy earned little. When
+the questionnaire asked about aspirations for the future, 55 percent stated
+they wanted to study, 19 percent wanted to work, 2 percent wanted to form
+a family, 1 percent wanted to immigrate to the United States, 19 percent had
+“no aspirations,” and the rest had no reply.
+Queried about what might improve their future prospects, 64 percent replied “nothing,” 24 percent “study,” 9 percent “work,” and 3 percent “rob.”
+Over half had taken illegal drugs, usually marijuana. Over 80 percent felt
+“happy” in their Maras, and 85 percent were “in agreement with the rules
+guiding the Maras because they were not imposed norms, but arrived at
+through consensus.” Almost 100 percent had a positive view of their Mara
+as “angry, but with internal solidarity and respect” and declared that they
+had entered because of the “necessity of youth to unite.” Only 8 of the 290
+youths in the second survey said that they wished to leave the Maras in order
+to become “good citizens.”
+Whatever their shortcomings, the surveys at least revealed that Maras
+were composed of young people who seemed to be more or less “normal,”
+except that they were better educated than most city youth, they stole goods,
+and they moved within milieus of their own creation. Probably a citywide
+survey of adults would have found comparable replies about religion and
+wages but not about literacy, immigration, stealing, drugs, and, most important, belonging to a space perceived as one of solidarity, respect, happiness, and democracy. The pdc researchers, themselves products of the
+1960–70s, realized that the Maras had a relationship with that immediate
+political legacy. They concluded their report by defining the Maras as “a phenomenon of organized protest,” which was not a negative description in
+their eyes.22
+That same year, wishing to analyze the abrupt, shrill emphasis on juvenile
+crime in a nation racked by extraordinary state violence and shaken by the
+loss of dynamic popular politics, the social worker Nora Marina Figueroa,
+the psychologist Marta Yolanda Maldonado Castillo, and I did a qualitative
+study of the Maras under the auspices of the independent research institution the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences in Guatemala,
+avancso). I wrote up the results in a monograph titled Por sí mismos: Un estudio preliminar de las “Maras” en la Ciudad de Guatemala, published by avancso
+60
+
+Chapter 2
+
+in 1988.23 We had decided to study these gangs of children and youth because publicity about them had become alarmingly predominant at a time of
+complete silence surrounding the murders of the tens of thousands of children and youth in the highlands. The dangers these gangs posed might well
+be fantasy, we thought, and meant to distract attention from military massacres, yet the anxieties being created were real. Giving answers to simple
+questions concerning who these youth were, what they were doing, and
+what they thought they were doing aimed to clarify the public discussion.
+We interviewed dozens of members about family, work, school, violence,
+their gangs, their social lives, and their general views of life. And, after we
+spent several months passing time and talking with mareros from ten different Maras, we made the general observation that most of them were calm,
+well spoken, and thoughtful, not mindlessly imitative, obsessive, or hostile.
+Concerned about love and acceptance, they did not want to be misunderstood by us or the media, and they were usually eager to talk (see figure 2.1).
+The young people and children with whom we spoke came from poor,
+working-­class, and lower middle-­class families. Their parents labored in
+the informal and formal economies, most commonly as vendors, artisans,
+construction workers, day laborers, and domestic servants. They often described home life to be tense because of financial and emotional strains.
+Silvio, an eighteen-­year-­old member of Mara five, depicted his family: “My
+whole life has been a Calvary because my father is an alcoholic. There is no
+way to stop him! But my mother is the best in the world, everyone says so.
+I have a sister and the two of us suffer. . . . He doesn’t have any money, not
+even so we can eat. Today he came home drunk at 5 pm. But I have a grandmother who lives in the USA . . . she loves us, she helps us, thanks to her I
+study.”24 As this predicament of alcoholism in Silvio’s “whole” family illustrates, troubles were not confined to the single-­parent households. Speaking of her emotional ties to her hard-­working nuclear family, Lupe explained
+in a disheartened tone and without cynicism, “I have almost no relationship
+with them. . . . I don’t know what to talk to them about.”25
+The gang members’ views about the family, which they clearly perceived
+as the basic social unit of life, revealed deep feelings about what constituted
+a problem and what a solution. In all but ten of the descriptions of family
+life that we heard, fathers and other men such as stepfathers and boyfriends
+were irresponsible, alcoholic, and violent. Yolanda, age fourteen and a member of Mara Belén, explained that her mother, whom Yolanda adored, was a
+prostitute in a nightclub in Zone 1. Yolanda was furious at her mother: “I’m
+mad at her because she wants to marry some guy and I don’t want him to
+live in the house. I haven’t talked to her for two months. My little brother
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+61
+
+FIGURE 2.1 Snapshot of Miguel, a member of Mara five, taken in
+­ uatemala City in 1987 by the author. Despite the publicity about the
+G
+Maras’ Satanic criminality, in the 1980s no professional photographers
+were taking pictures of Mara members, who were hardly menacing in
+appearance. Credit: Deborah T. Levenson.
+
+doesn’t like him either. This guy is rotten. He beats my mother.”26 Rafael,
+a seventeen-­year-­old from Mara 33, said of his family, “The truth is that I
+don’t even know my father. I live with my stepfather, but he fights with me
+and I have to confront him all the time. My mother sells food, she makes
+stuffed chilies, tostados, atoles. . . . One day I’ll invite you. My stepfather is a
+drunk who likes to fight, he’s always loaded and my old lady and my brothers
+and sisters and I have to put up with this because there is no other way.”27 A
+sixteen-­year-­old Mara 33 member, Hernán, lived with his mother and father,
+but his relationship with his father was “terrible, a mess, because he is hotheaded.”28 Sixteen-­year-­old Marvin from Mara Garañones did not know
+what happened to his father: “I lived with my grandmother until I was fifteen, when she died, and so I had to go live with my mother and stepfather.
+I don’t get along with him. Every so often he beats me and kicks me out.”29
+Even worse than this general violence that many recounted to us were accounts of sexual abuse. Girls and young women told us of fathers, uncles,
+or stepfathers who had raped them in their households, in familial beds or
+patios, on floors or tables. Angeles, a fourteen-­year-­old former member of
+a Mara, recounted that she and other young girls wrote a play that represented the girls’ tribulations for a project named Chicas de Hoy (The Girls of
+Today), run by a private organization. The plot was one of adult male against
+young female, and it told the tragic “every young woman’s” story of a girl
+first deserted by her father and then raped repeatedly by her stepfather.
+These descriptions were about men, and not all family members. Out of
+all the mareros with whom we spoke, just one thought that his household
+was an unconditionally good place and a “real home.” Berlin, an eighteen-­
+year-­old from Mara 33, an orphan who lived alone with his grandmother,
+commented that he and his grandmother got along “super bien, we have
+good vibrations.”30 Even through the praise Berlin gave his family of two
+was unique, grandmothers always, and mothers sometimes, emerged in
+the family stories as good people and as saviors, in contrast to adult males.
+Silvio’s brief portrait of his family was common: his father wasted family
+income on alcohol, and, as he put it, his mother was the “best,” and “everyone says so.” The working maternal grandmother in the United States who
+paid for the children’s expenses out of her wages was a common figure
+in these families. Lucia, a thirteen-­year-­old from Mara de la 4, lived with
+younger siblings, a father who drank and, in her words, “yells at everyone in
+the house,” and a disabled mother who depended on her mother’s monthly
+Western Union money wires from New York City. Lucia pointedly credited
+her grandmother for paying her mother’s medical expenses, which included
+an expensive wheelchair.31
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+63
+
+Social workers used the vague concept of the “disintegrated family” in
+order to explain youth delinquency and as a synonym for “familial crisis,”
+yet conversations with these professionals made it clear that they knew that
+male alcoholism and domestic violence created crises in many two-­parent
+households, and that they saw wife beating and machismo as widespread
+problems that “everyone knows about.”32 That awareness of “what everyone
+knows” did not become operable knowledge. The aim of the social work with
+youth was to unite children with their families and reinforce child–­parent
+relationships, and not to honor and support youth, especially females, who
+had the sense to detest the men in their households. In addition and no doubt
+related to the wish to repair “broken” families, social workers looked at us
+in despair when we suggested that legal steps be taken against these men.
+In contrast to the social workers, these youths did not seem to want to
+mend their birth families, nor to hold as dear a vague ideal of the nuclear
+family. Their knowledge of what the general concept of “familial crisis”
+meant came from their emotional experiences, and they had their own solution: a redefined family, the Mara. They consistently used the term family to
+refer to their Maras. Without deserting their birth kin, the young women
+and men with whom we spoke wanted better families, not the status quo
+“traditional” ones. These young people slept at their birth family’s home
+most of the time, and at the same time they created new families inside their
+Maras. They often ate together, a traditional family activity, in fast-­food restaurants, and they kept track of one another’s whereabouts. Yolanda, who
+lived with her mother, said, “Like the others say, for me the Mara is my
+family, the best one in the world. There you have someone who loves you
+and tells you so.” Sitting next to Yolanda in a Wendy’s restaurant, where our
+conversation took place, sixteen-­year-­old Tono added that their Mara was
+“like family, but nicer, because no one bawls you out. Instead each person
+is like who they are, and that’s all there is to it.”33 Here was the new family,
+simply enough, warm and accepting. Hernán evaluated family in relation
+to his views on freedom and acceptance: “I think that family puts a lot of
+pressure on you, and because of that you seek your own group, a new family,
+so you can be free to be what you want to be and not how others want you
+to be.” For Calixto, at twenty-­four the oldest Mara member we met and the
+only one who had immigrated to Mexico and the United States to work, Mara
+adi was his Guatemalan anchor. He said, “The Mara is all I have . . . it’s
+my only family. There are friends, girls, and a lot of things that I cannot explain. When I am far away, there’s someone here for me, someone to write
+to, someone you want to see.”34 Silvio said that he “joined the Mara through
+friends. You talk, and go along getting to know each other, until it’s like a
+64
+
+Chapter 2
+
+really good family.” Maritza, whose Mara de la 4 was at one point an all-­girl
+gang, explained: “I joined because there was emptiness inside me, a little
+loneliness, a bit of sadness. Maybe we are all alike in this. I joined through a
+bunch of girlfriends with whom I was very heavy. We’ve shared sorrows and
+joys. I think the Mara is a group of people who need affection. Some of us
+want to escape the mess in our homes. Sometimes we think we can create
+a new world.”35 Being encircled by affectionate and empathetic peers made
+up Maritza’s new world, and that interrupted, and thankfully so, a life spent
+being constantly at pains with a “mess.”
+Articulate in the conversations that we initiated, the youths had never
+sought out a priest or a nun, a friendly schoolteacher, or any other adult for
+guidance or solace. Their space belonged to them, and in their space they did
+what they enjoyed, at a distance from adults. Sexuality was central to this
+distance because the new family of the Mara did not disapprove of sex for
+young people. It did not necessarily introduce sex, but the gang members
+admitted to it. Inside the Maras, sex flourished as exploration and as an item
+of conversation. What was a silent truth elsewhere—that many girls willfully had sex with boys before marriage—was not hidden, which is not to
+say that there existed sexual equality or that abuse did not go on during this
+early phrase of the Maras, as it would constantly in the 1990s. Notwithstanding serious problems, in the mid-­1980s arguably the only space where youth
+heterosexuality and homosexuality were undisguised and unashamed realities was within some of the Maras. Hernán cheerfully described his Mara in
+the working-­class neighborhood where he had lived all his life, as consisting
+of “twenty eight guys and two dykes.” His own lover was male. He explained,
+“The heavy thing is that in the Mara you learn to be freer in every sense. So, if
+a guy has sexual relations with a guy, no big deal. Same thing with the girls.”
+Maritza, who had had an amorous relationship with another girl, said that
+her greatest wish was to “find a girl or boy who in all honesty loves me and
+loves that I love her or him.”
+However, in drawing a closed circle around their Maras, the gang members did not leave their birth kin emotionally. They were loyal and proud
+members of the family wage economy as well; they never complained about
+this fact or rebelled against it. Everyone in their households worked, and—
+this was the only departure from the cdp report in our findings—so did
+the mareros. Lupe, the fifteen-­year-­old member of Mara Pirañas, hawked
+clothes in the large El Guarda market, her mother sold fruits juices in a
+smaller one, and her father worked in construction. Another fifteen-­year-­
+old, Joel, from Mara Belén, had a part-­time job in a shoe factory. He explained to us, “My father leaves at six in the morning and comes home at
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+65
+
+eight at night. . . . My mother works in a store. My brothers and sister each
+work on their own, and I’m almost never at home.”36 Rocío, a twelve-­year-­
+old girl, who had just joined Mara 33, worked alongside her mother sewing
+fashionable clothes that her older sister then sold to shops in Zone 1.37 Maritza picked coffee alongside her mother when she was small, then washed
+clothes, and more recently worked in sales earning Q150 a month. Earning
+Q160 a month, América worked sixty hours weekly in an upscale bakery in
+Zone 1, and gave part of her earnings to her mother.38 Isabel, a seventeen-­
+year-­old in the Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol, made thirty quetzals a week babysitting to help pay her younger brother’s school expenses, such as a uniform,
+a notebook, and a pencil.39 Rafael explained, “I have worked in everything,
+like the rest of us [in the family]! Can you believe that when I was a little
+kid, I collected plastic bags in the garbage dump? After that I gathered old
+newspapers and sold them in the market. After that I worked as a mechanic,
+which is very tiring work, and after that in a supermarket. There are eight
+of us plus my mother—it is a lot [to support].” Hernán worked in the informal economy, selling nail clippers, scissors, sunglasses, key chains, and
+change purses out of his school knapsack; he averaged Q150 a month. He
+said, “With that I can help my mother and buy my own things, because my
+father does not even have money to buy his own cigarettes.” Marvin earned
+one hundred quetzals a month as a carpenter’s helper and gave most of it to
+his mother. He hated her husband, who hit him and sometimes threw him
+out, but by giving her money, Marvin remained an indispensable son inside
+the circle of kin. Having money was obviously a form of power. The mareros’
+ability to get money, and not necessarily their ability to hold down a job, gave
+them a positive sense of themselves and allowed them to help kin.
+Within the context of the Mara as a means to empowerment and self-­
+esteem, robbery noticeably widened the horizons of many mareros. As
+workers, these youths were poorly paid for what was generally unskilled
+labor. As thieves, they made more money, a point many learned while working, and they also had the opportunity to develop interesting skills. When
+the Pepsi-­Cola Company employed Alejandro, a sixteen-­year-­old Mara five
+member, at fifteen quetzals a week as an auxiliary on a delivery truck, he discovered he and others could make fifteen quetzals a day stealing and selling crates. In 1987, as a full-­time thief who stole from tourists traveling to
+the colonial town of Antigua, Alejandro was king: he earned eight hundred
+quetzals during Holy Week that year. He was proud of his abilities, and he
+explained at length his exploits riding back and forth on a bus between Antigua and Guatemala City, happy to allow gringas to “practice their Spanish on
+me,” while he cut their backpacks and slipped out whatever his fingers could
+66
+
+Chapter 2
+
+manage to mine. That was his specialty. He said that mareros usually had
+one, whether it was opening car locks, stripping cars, cutting glass, slitting
+pocketbooks and pockets, or fencing goods. Like others, Alejandro stressed
+that this sort of activity meant “nothing really serious” to those robbed, and
+that he took “nothing of importance,” such as a passport.
+By working or more productively by stealing, the mareros could award
+their new selves new necessities, provide old necessities for their families,
+and maintain their accustomed selves. Hernán explained, “I have money for
+my father’s cigarettes, and I get what I want to,” as he waved a handsome
+gold wristband around. Lupe pickpocketed to provide cash for “my mother
+and sunglasses for me.” Robbery could yield the new material culture of
+youth without hurting one’s family. Berlin, for example, looking great in
+a brand-­name wool sweater, fashion jeans, and new clean white Nikes, explained to us how he had acquired his stylish apparel: “I stole the sneakers
+from a burgués [a bourgeois], these pants from another, and that’s how I get
+along, getting what I need to live.”
+As Berlin said, he and other youth in the Maras stole from burgueses,
+snobs, and those who had money, or had the nerve to appear as if they did.
+They positioned their victims as the class enemy, and their crimes class justified. Calixto, who helped support his mother and siblings, explained, “I’ve
+robbed everything from a piece of bread to a car, and with that I am saying
+everything! I am a professional thief, which is a bit more elegant then ‘delinquent,’ but I’ve always robbed from people who have money, robbing from
+the poor is evil.” Silvio said, “Look, the only people I steal from are people
+with money, because robbing from an equal would not be right. I grabbed
+chains from the chicks at Monte María, Belga, and other private schools.”
+Rafael, the seventeen-­year-­old from Mara 33, said, “I’ve taken what I need,
+and I have robbed from the rich. Taking from the burgueses is like taking a
+strand of hair from a cat, and you have to survive one way or another.” Lupe
+explained, “I slit the pocket books of two burgueses. . . . I took stuff from
+some others as well. . . . Last year I bought my mother a pair of shoes for
+Christmas so she doesn’t have to use sandals anymore. You want to know
+what else? I bought a Christmas tree. It was the first time we had a Christmas tree. We in the Mara, we have to steal from the burgueses because they
+have things we don’t have, and it doesn’t affect them.” Even if they sometimes stole from the lower middle class, even if they categorized potential
+victims as bourgeois in a purely visual and unreliable way, mareros were self-­
+conscious about presenting their actions as belonging to the class world of
+the deserving poor. If robbing helped their own, it was morally correct. Their
+language and recognition of their social location reflected a class and moral
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+67
+
+awareness that came from the recent urban movements. They never robbed
+within their own neighborhoods, and this represented a significant and a,
+sadly, short-­lived consciousness, a choosing of sides that came from a critical awareness, a framing of their situation, and not from a “primitive” or
+subconscious “speaking” that the oppressed “have” by virtue of oppression.
+A few of them had been at the margins of activism. Maritza was involved
+in a movement to fire a reactionary school principal. Silvio had been in a
+secretive political association in public school. His social commentary on
+his school days was meant to educate us, the researchers. He explained that
+he was expelled because of his membership in the student group, but he was
+more interested in pointing out the following: “I want a different education,
+something that is really helpful and not a lot of crap that what the hell do
+you want to waste your time with it anyway? It would be great if the teachers
+taught in an interesting way and not just by dictation after dictation. You get
+tired and then you lose interest in your studies because you are treated as an
+object that should not talk, move or think, basically [someone] who should
+not really exist.” Silvio called Mara five a weapon of social justice. He said
+he initially joined it “because I have a strong desire to fight for my rights,
+which society has denied me.”
+In addition, their cultural taste exemplified their proximity to the popular
+movement and their alertness to the dilemmas of youth, war, and unhappy
+families. La historia oficial (The Official Story), an intensely emotional Argentine film that condemns dictatorship and advocates in no uncertain terms
+for victims of the Dirty War, was one favorite. The other was Pink Floyd’s The
+Wall, a music-­driven movie depicting the construction and the possible demotion of a young man’s separation (the wall) of self from self and from the
+world; this young man came from a family damaged by war. It would be hard
+to think of two movies from that era that spoke, and spoke in generationally
+distinct artistic styles, so deeply to the Guatemalan realities of parents and
+youth struggling inconclusively to get loose from webs made tight by violence.
+Their other opinions reflected their political and social sensibilities.
+They unanimously described Ronald Reagan and President Vinicio Cerezo,
+a member of the pdc, in negative terms—Cerezo as “a greedy asshole”—
+and they painted Archbishop Próspero Penados del Barrio, a campaigner for
+social justice, in positive terms. They dismissed Madonna as empty headed
+and Michael Jackson as a “sell-­out” because they thought he rejected his
+own roots. They overwhelmingly selected Rigoberta Menchú, whose autobiographical narrative was published in Spanish in 1983, and Che Guevara
+as the “people I most admire.” One young man had an artistically arranged
+68
+
+Chapter 2
+
+scrapbook, which he regularly updated, of clippings about the Nicaraguan
+Sandinistas that went back to 1979. In reply to the question “What would
+you do if you were president?” came answers such as “Fight so that all can
+live equally,” and “I’d bring down the rich and give it all to the poor.” Most
+identified the worst problem in the city as the cost of living.
+In 1987, a handful of trade unionists in the city, including some from the
+Coca-­Cola union, decided to hold a May 1 demonstration, the first public
+one since 1980. With the media image of the mareros in mind, and in order
+to forestall any problems, the labor activists approached Mara Plaza Vivar
+Capitol about the march because this Mara was close to its route and final
+rallying point. Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol told them that “we mareros are from
+the working class and we would never harm the working class.”40 And after a
+right-­wing attempted coup against the civilian government on May 11, 1988,
+Mara five (Silvio’s Mara) ran a classified ad in the newspaper Prensa Libre
+that read, “This business of wanting to put an end to government is no good.
+Youth wants peace, not violence. When will we be heard? Mara five.”
+These young people defended themselves against class wounds, including
+the modern urban one of being excluded from style. In the 1980s, when advertising introduced Reebok, Adidas, and Nike, the power footwear priced
+at the equivalent of a worker’s monthly wage and that only upper-­class youth
+could afford, it turned into a class problem. Berlin’s narrative of the origins of Mara 33—with over one hundred members, it was one of the largest
+gangs in the city at that time—illustrates how close the gangs stood to class
+organizing, and how, instead, they took the road of class stealing. For decades and through the 1970s, boys played sports in nationally produced
+­i ncatecu sneakers. He said,
+It all started when we played soccer on the Barrio San Antonio team [in
+1985]. We qualified for the juvenile championship, and we were supposed
+to play in the final, but some burgueses had up to a couple of pair [of
+Nikes] each. We watched them, and then we jumped them, and we took
+their shoes and some other stuff. . . . You begin to realize that even soccer is only for the burgueses. We started going to parties. We got to know
+other guys, and we started to get together to talk about the problems
+each one had. Then we realized the desire to stick together. When one of
+the guys was really down, we helped out, but all of a sudden, we realized
+that we could have everything that was in style by ripping it off, or as they
+say, “borrowing.”
+Berlin brought together many elements of lower-­class life in the city in
+the 1980s. It was virtually impossible to carry out the daily activities of life
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+69
+
+(e.g., the simple leisure activity of soccer) without struggle. With no movements for higher wages, stealing became one of the few avenues through
+which working-­class youth could obtain material improvement. In the case
+of soccer, they thought that if they had Nike footwear they might win the
+game, and all the esteem that accompanied victory. In any case, why should
+Berlin and his friends not have those same high-­quality goods? At points
+in his description, Berlin could have been talking about the formation of
+a trade union or grassroots neighborhood group. After all, his Mara was a
+local organization devoted to getting the needs of working-­class met, except
+that some of these needs were defined by a global generational code; they
+were outside of the accustomed social essentials, and the means to their satisfaction was robbery.
+One of the most pensive teenagers with whom we spoke, Maritza, explained her crime in terms of power relations and injustice, and expressed
+ambivalence about the consumerism that flooded the city:
+Yes, I have robbed. You, what do you know? Maybe it never hurt you not
+to have what others had. I don’t know the explanation, the why of social
+classes, why some have and others don’t. Lady, this pain I carry inside
+me drowns me, and I don’t know how to stop it. The first time I stole
+was from a teacher who asked me to help her carry some oranges to her
+house. I waited. It was very hot. I thought she would give me one. But
+she didn’t. I took one and also an ornament. I was scared. I thought she
+would find out but she didn’t. . . .
+You want to hear something? I love perfume. But it would be a sin to
+ask my mother for it, because she has nothing. So once I was on a bus and
+I took some [a perfume flask] from a snobby-­t ype girl. I was frightened
+and I felt guilty but there was no other way. . . . Here in school they ask
+you to buy materials—they told us to buy special paper once and I didn’t
+have a penny, so I stole some from a companion. I wish someone, maybe
+you, would explain to me why one has to have objects and things one cannot buy. A while back, I stole a Parker pen from a girl. The saddest part
+was that when I had it, I didn’t feel what I thought I would feel.
+Maritza wove a world of class injury and class defense into her account of
+robbery. Hurt by elitism and abuse of a child’s obedience to a teacher, she
+expressed anger and humiliation. Wanting to have the perfume yet sensitive to her mother’s poverty, she protected her mother and her own desire
+by robbing someone she imagined would not be adversely affected. Needing items required by her school (an important arena for Maritza), she stole
+
+70
+
+Chapter 2
+
+from companions. But she recognized that she was talking about robbing
+peers, not the wealthy. She stopped her narrative at precisely that moment to
+interrogate her petty thievery. Maritza was a thoughtful young woman, and
+she questioned her pursuit. What was so good about these commodities if
+obtaining them in this way risked friendship and brought nothing but anxiety? It was impossible not to be on her side.
+Several youth in the Maras, including Maritza, cautioned us about the
+Maras. She told us that in some Maras, boys gang-­raped girls. Rafael made
+the haunting comment that his Mara was “very tight—it follows you everywhere because it is inside of you. Sometimes you feel good with the group
+but sometimes there’s a prison inside you that you can’t escape.” As much as
+these young people were not mindless imitators of television, dulled by bad
+habits, or cowed by the dominant ideas in Guatemalan society, and as much
+as the Maras could provide a better family and at least some space to act and
+think creatively, the danger of authoritarianism existed. Rafael went on to
+say, “The only thing I don’t like inside the Mara is that one is apparently free,
+but inside one’s head one is afraid to do things for fear of being rejected.”
+Maritza commented: “You can say the Mara doesn’t influence you, but the
+moment comes when you realize that to have their support, you have to be
+and do what others want. And that’s where you get confused. I try to be myself, but I have trouble, so the result is that sometimes I end up being what
+others want me to be. . . . Well, here’s another angle which is a consolation:
+it [the Mara] is not so great, but it would be worse without it.”
+As appealing as the young people we spoke with were, we concluded our
+study without too much optimism. Despite the powerful critiques and commentaries of society that these young women and men made, they were not
+trying to alter the already rapidly changing world of Guatemala City. They
+spent time together smoking marijuana and hanging out, not organizing.
+The moral affirmation of stealing from the “burgueses” and giving to themselves and other poor people was an important part of the mareros’ identity, but we knew that they knew they were not always stealing from the rich
+to give to the poor and when they talked about having stolen particular car
+parts from a particular model car, they had no idea whom they defrauded.
+Some of the robbery went beyond gold chains, sneakers, and perfumes.
+The market dictated much of their robbery, and the more money they
+wanted, the more the market controlled them. Consequently, they ended
+up “expropriating” from the not-­so-­well-­off. In 1987, the high demand on
+car parts for Toyota sedans and pickups made these makes prime targets.
+These were two models often used by lower middle-­class and working-­class
+
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+71
+
+people who had saved long and hard to purchase vehicles in order to start a
+small business, such as one hauling sand to construction sites. Moreover,
+the more a particular Mara became involved in theft as a primary activity,
+the more hierarchical and secretive the gang became. In one Mara gang,
+all the goods went “up” to a leader who fenced them, and then some money
+came “down, to be divided equally.” According to two irritated members of
+that Mara, the price the goods brought remained a mystery. In that particular gang, a gendered division of labor meant that pickpocketing belonged
+to females because of their small quick fingers—the same reason used for
+employing women in textiles—while boys stole and sold “heavy goods.” As
+a consequence, girls earned less.
+An original and daring sexual frankness and openness to love characterized some Maras. However, the gendered life within them was sometimes
+no worse or better than that in Guatemalan society in general, and there also
+existed an exaggerated masculinity, a hypermasculinity. Mara youth, male
+and female, tended to appear to be very tough, a trait commonly gendered as
+male. A macho style among homosexuals and heterosexuals was apparent in
+the Maras, even though it did not dominate all the members. There seemed
+to be little prejudice against male homosexuality and “masculine” lesbians,
+the “dykes” that Hernán mentioned, but “feminine” girls did not stand out,
+and few wanted to converse with us. Timid, they would become the target of
+abuse, as the next chapter discusses.
+We concluded our 1987 study thinking that the Maras and their members
+were diverse and complex, and that these youth and their gangs were challenged and framed by the deep and fast-­paced changes going around them
+in the city. Life in the gangs offered friendship, love, music, dance, sex,
+money, and excitement. Above all, Maras gave a sense of a life-­affirming
+identity and community in the face of social decomposition and the transformation of old communities, yet without disconnecting them from their
+families and their old communities and without destroying their identities as sons and daughters, friends, and neighbors. These gangs etched a
+new geography: they had constructed a place called mibarrio in which a new
+family of generational peers could flourish, and at the same time this space
+for discovery did not replace or irrevocably divide them from el barrio. Some
+violence went on, but it was neither an imperative nor as dangerous and
+hateful as the violence in their households, their city, or their nation. Mareros spoke about what they construed as critical matters, such as love, sexuality, money, family, identity, and leisure, without violent tropes and metaphors. Juan Carlos Núñez, a Jesuit anthropologist doing fieldwork in Barrio
+
+72
+
+Chapter 2
+
+San Antonio in Zone 6 in the 1980s, described the local Mara as being vital
+and having solidarity: “To live in the Mara is to live in a network. It is about
+creating a soccer or basketball team, it’s about creating community organization.”41
+These Maras came out of the generative environment of the revolutionary
+and popular urban movement, a milieu that included an anticapitalist discourse that emphasized the morality of class solidarity and social equality,
+precisely when those political groups were being destroyed. Because the
+Maras were gangs of young thieves disarticulated from radical political
+organizing, they combined two legacies, one of pandillas and the other of
+left-­wing student and worker movements, into something new: affectionate
+groups that had a measure of critical consciousness about relationships and
+a sense of solidarity with the poor that did not become involved in politics.
+Based on friendships that often preceded their existence, the Maras of
+the 1980s seemed to have faded, at least from public view, by the end of
+the 1980s. By their late teens or twenties, most Mara members we had met
+had left the gangs to enter the ordinary, everyday life of the urban poor in
+the 1990s, which often entailed work at low pay in the formal sector, and
+sometimes immigration. Although an unusual story in many respects, the
+trajectory of Aníbal López, the artist who was once a Las Cobras member,
+is suggestive of the creativity of the mareros and of the power of the subjective world in which they grew up. Like many other youth in and out of
+gangs, he emigrated in the late 1980s. He went through Mexico without
+documents. He made his way by drawing pictures of Christ in exchange for
+food and lodging in small towns along the route to the U.S. border, which
+he crossed to continue on to visit his brother, a Mormon in Utah, before
+making the return trip, again without papers. Back in Guatemala, he became a well-­known artist. His art is marked by the sharp awareness of social
+realities that we found in our interviews with mareros in the 1980s. In one
+early piece, he printed typical surnames of Maya, working-class mestizo,
+and wealthy and well-­known families on separate cardboard boxes that the
+viewer could then move around, to reorder the ethnic and class structure of
+Guatemala, with perhaps the Maya on top (see figure 2.2). He made images
+that addressed historical puzzles of national identity: in pen and ink he drew
+a Guatemalan male without skin and labeled him “Ladino” (the term used
+for mestizo that has the implication of non-­Maya), under which he placed
+“50% + 50% = 100%” plus a stamp that read “sale” (in English). To further capture the ethnic ambiguity and working-­class quality of Ladinos, he
+penned common-­use and imaginative definitions of Ladino on the reverse
+
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+73
+
+FIGURE 2.2 Untitled, by Aníbal López (A-­1 53167), Guatemala City, 1998.
+These cardboard boxes represent a partial reorganization of Guatemalan hierarchy with Maya surnames spread around, including near
+the top, slightly lower than “1492,” a date that marks the birth of the
+“Ladino.” On the bottom sits Bauer, a family name connected to the
+ownership of the Palo Gordo sugar plantation, one known for its repressive labor practices. The viewer can rearrange the boxes. Credit:
+Deborah T. Levenson.
+
+side of the picture. Engaging the historical construction of a Guatemalan,
+he dates his work using the Conquest of the Americas as the baseline, and
+he initials his pieces with his resident card number.
+As are others who joined these gangs in the mid-­1980s, Aníbal is part of
+a generation almost suspended in historical time between what now seems
+the shutter-­shot moment of an urban popular movement’s peak and its
+quick bloody demise. Because the mareros carried within them memories
+of a breathtaking historical period in city life, and at the same time because
+their gangs originated on this cusp of a sharp change that would demolish the world in which they grew up, their Maras—five, de la 4, 33, and
+Las Cobras, to name a few—were rich in life, ambiguities, creativities, and
+contradictions and they had the possibility of developing in different directions, for better or worse.
+
+1980s: The Gangs to Live For
+
+75
+
+1990s AND BEYOND: THE GANGS TO DIE FOR
+
+If you talk, you are dead.
+—Author interview with Short, a member of ms-­13, Guatemala City, 2005
+
+[The worst effect of war is] the undermining of our social relations because our
+social relations are the scaffolding we rely on to construct ourselves historically,
+both as individuals and as a human community. Whether or not it manifests itself
+in individual disorders, the deterioration of social interaction is itself a serious
+social disturbance. . . . A society that becomes accustomed to using violence to
+solve its problems big and small is a society in which the roots of human relations
+are diseased.
+—Ignacio Martín-­Baró, sj, Writings for a Liberation Psychology, 115
+
+The mareros’ thinking is military thinking that is always reproducing war, they
+live in war with the logic of war, thinking of the enemy’s attack. [They live within]
+a militarized culture of obedience, discipline and the fulfillment of orders and
+­missions.
+—Interview with Rodolfo Kepfer, psychiatrist, El Centro Correccional de
+Menores Etapa 2, San José Pinula, Guatemala
+
+A
+
+founding member of Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol back in 1985, Victor returned to Guatemala in 1998. He was twenty-­eight years old, and the war
+had only recently ended. He sought out his old gang because, he explained,
+the only family he wanted now in the city was his Mara. It was “all over” with
+his mother: “She does not like me.” After thirteen years of living in Mexico
+and working with gangs there, he found that the mareros in Guatemala
+City had become “more sophisticated,” “Mara five is with 18 [Mara-­18, or
+m-­1 8], and mibarrio Plaza Vivar Capitol is with ms [Mara Salvatrucha, or
+
+3
+
+ms-­13].” Identifying himself as a veterano, a name he said referred to someone who had killed, he joined ms-­13 to assume a “leadership role” and dedicate himself to gang rivalry. Speaking in military terms, he told me that
+“everyone sees themselves as soldiers serving mibarrio [my gang / my place]
+in a war without any Geneva Code.” His response to my query about his reference to the Geneva Code was “war without rules.” When I asked him to
+explain what that gang war was about, he gave the same explanation as he
+did for the civil war: “Who knows, it’s the way it is.”1
+Guatemala City had changed dramatically since Victor’s teen years. Consumption of hard drugs, especially crack, had become pandemic. Video
+shops now dotted neighborhood blocks. Small weapons were everywhere,
+and private security was one of the few growing urban enterprises. Military
+and ex-­military men had created an expanding industry of over two hundred
+companies that employed thirty-­five thousand people by 2002, more than
+twice the nation’s fifteen thousand policemen. Private security companies
+hired out men and women to protect individuals, hotels, restaurants, malls,
+small stores, private homes, and gated communities, the last of which were
+increasing in number in response to the rising common violence against
+people and property.2 It was difficult to not spot guns bulging out of shirts,
+pants, and jackets on any routine walk through the center of the city.
+It was no longer possible, as it had been in 1987, to walk down Sexta
+Avenida in Zona 1, change dollars on the black market in the empty lot behind Plaza Vivar Capitol, and strike up a friendly conversation with young
+people who called themselves breks and mareros and who sported brand-­
+name clothes. By 2000, youth in and around Maras had become secretive.
+At the same time, photographs of them as muscular tattooed young men
+stripped to the waist or behind prison fences had become ubiquitous in the
+media. Tall tales proliferated. By the early 2000s, mythological numbers had
+appeared: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) claimed that 200,000
+mareros, an army, “operated” in Guatemala. The National Civil Police, reorganized from the ill-­reputed National Police, gave wildly divergent numbers without explanation: a 2002 figure of 50,000 was reduced to 10,833 in
+2003.3 Another source, the Association for the Prevention of Crime, stated
+in 2006 that 165,000 youth belonged to Maras nationally.4 These fluctuating
+numbers, tattoos that were said to be Satanic symbols, and the constant
+evocation of the Maras’ “international links,” one that for some had echoes
+of the old “international communist plots,” spread panic. Without proof or
+hesitation, the influential U.S. Army War College scholar Max G. Manwaring cited the Maras as the major reason for the dramatically increasing crime
+rates in Guatemala and elsewhere in the region.5 In the brilliant noir police
+78
+
+Chapter 3
+
+novel of the late Mexican novelist Rafael Ramírez Heredia, La Mara, set in
+the diseased and rotting no-­exit southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, the
+Mara represent barbarism in all its diabolical colors.6
+Studies by many ngos and the United States Agency for International
+Development (usaid) have not dispelled or confirmed the criminal image,
+which in effect adds to the sense of mystery. Their findings offer little or
+nothing in relation to literal transgressions and offenses. These reports concur on major points: gangs are hierarchical, and most members have little
+status or power. The youth in Maras are primarily male, 75 percent by one
+count. With some exceptions, they come from poor and lower middle-­class
+backgrounds. Most have basic schooling. The age span is broad, ranging
+from six to the late twenties. A report done by the Demoscopía research
+group under the auspices of a Swedish International Development Agency
+(Asdi) found that a number of youth in Maras are parents, and that the majority of mareros work at odd jobs in the formal, informal, and illicit economies.7 With its focus on combating criminal rings, usaid investigated the
+Maras’ organizational structure. Its report presents the Maras’ tight organization pyramid with “organized crime” on top, followed by, and in descending order, “transnational gang leadership,” “gang cell [clika] members,”
+“neighborhood gang members,” and finally “children at risk.” Having said
+this, the usaid report concludes with the statement “no one Mara fits all,”
+one that leaves much up in the air.8
+Researching in the postwar city, I found that some youth made comments such as “I am a marero,” because they smoked marijuana or crack
+with members of one or another clika of ms-­13 or m-­18, were involved in
+fights, attended the burials, or some combination of these activities. Alberto
+presents an example of how different the various senses of belonging can
+be. He said he was “with ms-­13.” Since childhood, he had known an ms-­13
+leader nicknamed Maté who had been a barrio character infamous for habitual bullying. Maté was the offspring of a middle-­class family well known
+because it ran the local pharmacy, and his murder caused consternation in
+the area, even though most people there did not like him. Mourning death,
+including that of Maté, was a neighborhood question. “We showed up [at
+the burial]. We are with ms-­13,” Alberto told me. He also said that he had
+never been “baptized” (inducted). I asked if his mother had gone as well to
+the burial, and he said yes, “of course the whole family, we all went . . . they
+[Maté’s family] are neighbors.” It is hard to put Alberto in the same category
+with youth who are violently baptized into groups, obey codes, and take actions that divorce themselves from neighborhood loyalties and the “we” of
+family.9
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+79
+
+Perspectives and Perceptions of City Residents
+Urban residents have sometimes referred to a whole range of youth when
+they have spoken of mareros. However, their larger, more general discussions about “Las Maras” refer to those feared by residents. Poll after poll
+in this postwar period has established that Guatemalans see the Maras as
+one of the nation’s greatest threats. This belief persists even though sections of the city without Maras are plagued by crime, and no proof actually
+demonstrates that major crimes such as femicide are linked to them. That
+being stated, there can be absolutely no question about the gangs’ extremely
+negative impact on the city’s neighborhoods.10 In contrast to El Salvador and
+Nicaragua, polls have showed that city communities never feel protected
+by the presence of Maras, who form their own rivaling “pockets” of territorio that break the larger community.11 According to residents in barrios and
+colonias, social workers, and street educators, gang violence shot up in the
+1990s, and it has become increasingly ugly and constant as the years pass.12
+In a 1998 study on a colonia in Zone 6, residents described acute changes in
+daily life that made mistrust, fear, and the acquisition of weapons realistic
+reactions to the gangs. There, gangs broke up community events such as
+dances or meetings, their presence divided people along the lines of their
+offspring’s affiliation in rival Maras, and their constant warring with one another made walking around nerve racking and sleeping difficult. One woman
+said, “Ten years ago you could come in [to the area] at nine at night.” By 1997
+that was impossible, and in addition, between 8 pm and 4 am, “gunfire and
+screaming [went] on.”13 In 2003, residents in that same area reported that
+gang members beat children to force them to join and sometimes killed
+them if they refused.14
+Within many neighborhoods, mareros have used public spaces without
+reserve, whether school grounds, plazas, soccer fields, or even churches,
+and these have become dangerous spaces that parents caution children to
+avoid (see figures 3.1 and 3.2).15 Afraid of what can happen once children
+leave the home, parents sometimes stop sending them to school, and even
+more dramatically, afraid that their children will be forced to join the Maras
+to gain “protection” from the consequences of not joining, they sometimes
+send them out of the country. In U.S. immigration courts, undocumented
+Guatemalans increasingly cite threats from mareros, as well as accounts of
+persecution, including rape and murder by mareros, to argue against their
+deportations.16 Fears of persecution by mareros show up in explanations
+about immigration among Guatemala City residents living on Mexico’s
+southern border.17
+80
+
+Chapter 3
+
+FIGURE 3.1 Life in Ciudad de Sol, a populous working-­class neighborhood in the metropolitan area, 2005. Mara Salvatrucha (MS-­13) dominates Ciudad de Sol. The dramatic wall mural on the left shows a cemetery with a gravestone marked RIP, the English-language initials of
+rest in peace. Graffiti art has become an important part of the Maras’
+aesthetic, élan, and territorial mapping. No renter, property owner, or
+storekeeper requests these murals, which represent danger to residents.
+Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+FIGURE 3.2 A girl walks by a towering MS-­13 graffiti in Ciudad de Sol,
+2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+The effect of the Maras over parts of Guatemala City has been made worse
+by the fact that no dust seems to settle between the rival gangs. Residents
+say that the spaces mareros occupy are always contested ones, and the fights
+between gangs are constant. Gun fights between clikas of ms-­13 and m-­18
+have led to fires, especially in the poorer settlements that firemen refuse to
+enter because police do not have substations in them. This seemingly uncontrollable violence and the subsequent rapid decline of property values
+have forced many residents to flee middle-­class, working-­class, and completely poverty-­stricken areas.18 The rivalry has been apparently even worse
+in several towns that border the city, such as Villa Nueva and Mixco, as well
+as Palín and Amatitlán to the south, where ms-­13 and m-­18 have had a competing presence for years.
+This combination of (1) Mara violence, as well as adult crime unrelated to
+Maras, and (2) the lack of any meaningful official crime prevention or arrests
+has left barrio residents in an impossible situation. The National Civil Police
+has at times come into neighborhoods to “clean out” gangs, but this has led
+to more confusion and insecurity. Police pick up youth who are never seen
+again (see figures 3.3 and 3.4). In addition, street workers and others have
+implicated police in extortion rackets and murder. A bus driver who refused
+to pay “war” taxes fled the country with his family after his daughter was
+shot and killed by a bullet fired from an apartment belonging to a policeman.19 One gang minister told me that the police threaten to kill the mareros unless they bring in a certain amount of money and that the police raise
+the sum at will, which keeps the gang members in a state of panic.20 In this
+ongoing madness, nothing buffers community residents from criminal violence; even the street lights do not function. Violent civilian action in the
+countryside against presumed mareros has been widely reported. However,
+there have also been cases in the city, as the anthropologist Manuela Camus
+points out, of shopkeepers and barrio residents beating up or killing suspected criminals.21 It is the logic of violence. A woman in the Colonia Primero de Julio told Camus that she would not “have someone locked up [in
+prison]. What for? So that in three days when that person is free they come
+looking for payback?”22
+Two examples illustrate how impunity and changes in the Maras have
+shifted life and subjectivities on the broad citywide scale. The first involves
+workers at the Coca-­Cola Bottling Plant in Guatemala City. This workers’
+union is historically famous for its heroic persistence in the face of multiple
+assassinations of its leaders and members by state agents, for its radical
+political stances, and for withstanding an attempted plant shutdown when
+four hundred workers occupied the premises for one year (1984–85). Two
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+83
+
+FIGURE 3.3 A member of MS-­1 3 watches out of a door as police patrol
+Ciudad de Sol, 2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+FIGURE 3.4 In an abandoned church in Mezquital, Guatemala City, a
+father speaks about his missing son to the photographer Victor J.
+Blue. On July 18, 2005, policemen picked up his son off a street in
+broad daylight. His family has looked everywhere without finding any
+trace of him. The ruined church was his son’s M-­1 8 hangout. The wall
+graffiti reads “Only for Locos.” Locos is the name of his son’s clika.
+Whether or not mareros choose to discuss their birth families in their
+self-­presentations, their worried families are part of their lives. Credit:
+Victor J. Blue.
+
+years later the union, one of the few that survived heightened repression,
+sponsored the first public May 1 demonstration since 1980. As the last chapter describes, Coca-­Cola union leaders were among those who approached
+Mara Plaza Vivar Capitol, Victor’s old Mara, whose members hung out along
+the march’s planned route, and were relieved—given the negative press the
+Maras got—to receive the gang’s enthusiastic support. At that time, Coca-­
+Cola workers carried weapons to defend against themselves against political
+assassination.
+In contrast, by the early 2000s the union had pragmatically backed away
+from radical politics. Coca-­Cola deliverymen had taken to paying war taxes
+to those mareros who controlled the territorios through which the Coke
+trucks passed to supply retailers, and the union had petitioned the company
+for compensation for war taxes and for armed protection.23 In 2008, a Coca-­
+Cola deliveryman recounted his experiences. His route covered a neighborhood in Zone 7, where he regularly paid taxes to the clika of a Mara. Over
+time, he sensed growing tensions and to offset more troubles, he befriended
+a gang leader he then hired to further protect the truck for the hours that he
+spent in the area; thus he paid a “tax” and a “wage.” Even with all that “protection,” his regular assistant who hauled the crates was almost “gunned
+down without any motive by a kid in a gang.” Reflecting on the militant history of the union, he commented, “It is one thing to die for something,” and
+another to be killed for nothing by “some sick crazy kid.”24
+A far worse situation has developed for transportation workers. Bus
+drivers unionized under radical leadership in the 1944–54 period, and their
+union was one of the first to regroup following the 1954 coup. By the 1970s,
+the bus workers’ union had succeeded in organizing drivers across the
+dozens of small and large companies that ran Guatemala City’s poorly organized transportation system. In October 1978, the union allied with urban
+residents, students, and workers in what turned into an urban insurrection
+sparked by an increase in bus fares. The union struck in support of city residents, and it maintained a high profile in subsequent political demonstrations against state terror and for popular revolution. Unlike the Coca-­Cola
+workers’ union, the bus drivers’ union did not survive the early 1980s waves
+of state assassinations. But even without a union, the drivers went out on
+strike in September 1985 in solidarity with young people, including gang
+members, who took to the streets to protest an increase in fares.
+After the 1996 Peace Accords, a new and apolitical union started up, one
+that lacked historic ties with the old bus drivers’ unions. Few drivers joined
+it until robberies of riders and drivers became dramatic, and the union developed its profile by petitioning for police protection, a request that was
+86
+
+Chapter 3
+
+not granted. Robbing bus passengers and drivers became routine, but after
+the Maras initiated impuestos de circulación (circulation taxes), and demanded
+a Christmas holiday bonus, the drivers went on strike demanding police protection in 2002, and again in 2003, when the circulation tax increased from
+twenty to forty dollars a week.25 Following these unsuccessful strikes, the
+murders of drivers and their helpers started and spiraled upward. Between
+2006 and 2008, 512 city bus drivers and sixty of their assistants were assassinated. In 2008, almost two hundred were killed. They were usually shot
+while they drove, and presumably by the gangs who collected these taxes,
+although no one has been ever been brought to trial for these killings or for
+subsequent ones. In the month of February 2008 a dozen drivers were shot
+dead in two days. During one day in March 2009, two drivers were murdered
+in three hours; in 2009, 146 drivers and their assistants were murdered, and
+so it has continued.26 One driver, companion of several drivers who had
+been shot dead on the job, explained to a journalist that he took home $150
+a week after paying out $90 in circulation taxes, and he added that he could
+not afford to quit. He said, “It [the money] is not enough to live, and I might
+die, but I can’t find another job.”27 With support from the municipal government, the bus companies have established a fund for widows and orphans of
+drivers who, like widows of the war, have organized.
+A new crime-­induced “dividing practice” seems to ally the majority of
+city residents, who are poor people, on the same side of the barricades with
+the state and the right-­wing politicians against whom residents have historically fought. Yet however much anger at, and fear of, youth gangs exists,
+Coca-­Cola workers, bus drivers, and many city people are not so naive as to
+think that these robberies and murders start and stop with young people or
+that old enemies are suddenly friends. Mareros from ms-­13 and m-­18 extort
+from delivery truck drivers and stores, and from bus drivers and neighborhood merchants, but everyone wonders what adult syndicate collects the
+money. Speaking generally of both the plausibility and purposes of skilled
+and professional manipulation of the mareros, Rodolfo Kepfer, a Guatemala
+City psychiatrist who worked for many years at a youth detention center, said
+in an interview: “The Mara is not autonomous. There are powers behind it.
+There is a system here, a logic, and a well-­established hierarchy. There are
+periods when only members of a certain gang and not another get sent to
+jail, or periods when they are only involved in one specific sort of crime and
+not another. . . . All of which makes one think there are master plans that are
+not elaborated by these children who form the Maras. Who gives them arms?
+Who teaches them military tactics?”28 Given the impunity and the obvious
+political and economic clout of the drug trade kings, it has been impossible
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+87
+
+to delve into this far-­reaching question of the uses of mareros as cheap labor
+for well-­structured maneuvers that land youth in jail, instead of those who
+pull the strings.
+What can seem to be contradictory views in the neighborhoods reflect
+other types of awareness of the Maras’ complexities as victims. Those residents who tell of terrible assaults by gang members, call for mano dura, and
+do not necessarily oppose lynching suspected delinquents on the spot do not
+necessarily see the Maras as monolithic or evil. Their efforts to protect their
+own lives do not mean they have lost sight of the larger picture. They will
+often bracket their horror stories with remarks such as “they are not all like
+that” or “that bunch just gets high and listens to music. They don’t do anything.”29 They point out that mareros belong to a shared and difficult world
+of the barrios and that they sometimes suffer domestic abuse. It was with
+grief, despair, and worry for both victim and victimizer that a schoolteacher
+told a reporter how she saw a young gang member shoot his girlfriend in
+the face at close range.30 In a lunchtime discussion among a group of professionals in a youth shelter in 1997 regarding the deterioration of city life
+and the problem of gangs, a social worker offered what sounded like a line
+from a Bertolt Brecht play: “If only we got mad at the system again.”31
+Mental health experts and religious figures situate the mareros at that
+same threshold between life and death at which the gang members place
+themselves and their victims. The most well-­known figure in the world of
+gang ministry is the Jesuit priest Padre Manolo Maquieira, who died in 2006
+at age sixty of a heart attack. In 1996, Padre Manolo started pastoral work
+with gang members in three poor Zone 6 colonias in which ms-­13 was
+powerful. By 2001, he had created a youth club that provided children and
+teenagers with art classes, sports groups, and discussion circles, only to later
+realize that the rival gang m-­18 was using the club as a recruiting ground to
+develop its capacity to wage war against ms-­13 for control of the area. Disillusioned, eight years after he arrived in Zone 6, he judged the gang members to be beyond repair and shifted his attention, as did others, to “children
+at risk,” a term for those who were in danger of joining the gangs or being
+killed by them, as several he knew had been.32 He thought the gang members were self-­hating and in no way rebels against society. He wrote that they
+were “rebels against life and against themselves,” their violence was a “form
+of suicide, of self-­punishment.”33 Working with former gang members in a
+reform center just outside the city, the social worker Herbert Sánchez told
+me that, like alcoholics who every day must choose not to drink, the youth
+with whom he works must “choose life over death every day.”34 Interviewed
+after self-­described mareros cut out the heart of a forty-­five-­year-­old school88
+
+Chapter 3
+
+teacher, Jorge Emilio Winter Vidaurre, with the proclamation “he lived long
+enough,” the psychologist and youth worker Marco Garavito stated that “a
+sense of life no longer exists among mareros.”35
+The Mareros’ Sense: “Why Should I Talk?”
+When I resumed research in the late 1990s, the first time I met mareros was
+when two members of ms-­13 entered a leaky makeshift black plastic encampment full of street children in Zone 6, where I sat with a street educator who was doing medical checkups. Straight out of a photograph, with
+dark-­colored tattoos on their arms and dressed in black, the two looked
+muscular and healthy, even jaunty, and they contrasted with the malnourished, drugged, and sick street children who huddled on filthy mattresses
+and looked up attentively at these two larger-­than-­life figures. After directing the street educator to look over a wound one had, the mareros retreated.
+The street educator said that they would return to shake down the children
+after we had departed.
+To my surprise, a week later I saw one of the two ms-­13 youth I had seen
+in Zone 6 sitting by himself in a common space inside an ngo crisis shelter
+for street children. We recognized one another and introduced ourselves. He
+said that his name was Luis Arturo, he was seventeen years old, and he was
+leaving ms-­13. Because the penalty for that would be, he explained, death
+without trial, he had entered the shelter, where he bided time to “consider
+the options.” He described himself as a “professional” drug salesman because he did not take drugs and insisted on immediate cash payment and not
+goods. The Mara seemed a business association, and not his friendship cohort. A muscular body builder who regularly worked out in a gym in Zone 1
+in Guatemala City, Luis Arturo spoke about “mibarrio” as a sales region, one
+he had to fight over with other clikas. He normally lived alone in a “so-­so”
+pension, but he now stayed in the shelter. The “involvement of the National
+Police in the trade” had become a “permanent threat” to his life in ms-­13, so
+it was best to leave it all. Having listened to him, I asked him if we could take
+the time to talk more about his life, and he replied, “Why should I talk about
+my life?”36 He shrugged, and we both drifted off. It was impossible for me
+to conceptualize how to “interview” anyone who did not want to talk.37 Possibly I was the problem, for many reasons. Nonetheless, as I proceeded with
+my work of finding and talking to youth, the difficulties of having conversations started to become its own topic. When I later asked Short, a young man
+in the Maras I did befriend, about this, he shot off the statement “To talk is
+to die.” To make the point, he refused to respond to my further queries about
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+89
+
+what that meant.38 Perhaps if I were male, and better yet if I had lived for an
+extended period of time in a particular barrio full of gang members, things
+might have been different. Nonetheless, a sharp contrast existed between
+the youth in gangs I had met in the 1980s and those I was encountering in
+the late 1990s and 2000s.
+The young women and men in gangs in the mid-­1980s enjoyed conversing and turning over ideas. No one asked us, “Why should I talk about my
+life?” Eager to talk about almost anything in open-­ended discussions, they
+often took the conversational initiative and hoped to present themselves as
+“good” within the framework of a class struggle between rich and poor.
+To have the myths surrounding them exploded seemed just, and to be just
+was part of their narrative of themselves. Why not talk? The assumption of
+communication was in place. But with the striking exception of those who
+left the Mara and a very few others, the youth with whom I spoke in the late
+1990s and 2000s did not look to talk, much less interpret. It would be an
+understatement to say that the language of class had disappeared among
+the postwar mareros. Talk of “the poor” and “the rich,” much less the poor
+against the rich, had diminished.
+As time went on, I discovered that I was not alone with this predicament
+of finding it difficult to have lengthy conversations with mareros. Foreign
+journalists and sociologists have sometimes paid mareros in cash, goods,
+or favors for interviews. In the early 2000s, the Guatemalan sociologist
+Anneliza Tobar Estrada, who did none of that, developed a project in a high-­
+security prison that concerned the mareros’ “perception and criticism of
+Guatemalan society and their proposals about what should be done,” research that would involve the mareros and that explicitly honored them.
+After conferring with their clika higher-­ups via cell phone from the jail, the
+mareros refused to participate. “Why should we?” they said, and she shifted
+her research toward a few ex-­mareros and the professionals who worked
+with gangs.39
+Not talking, as in “to talk is to die,” could be read as a pact that creates
+a potent sense of belonging. It is no doubt related to ms-­13’s and m-­18’s
+multifarious relationships with adult criminal rings that manipulate youth
+inside a dangerous world in which fortunes are made and talk is dangerous.
+But it also reflects a larger political and social landscape that does not encourage young people from the popular barrios to speak, much less to analyze. Little was brought forth by my mention of subjects that mareros “ran
+with” on their own in the 1980s, such as work, family matters, school life,
+presidents, and movies. But the deeper issue concerns what they did choose
+to focus on in conversations.
+90
+
+Chapter 3
+
+What mareros most wanted to pencil in was their inclusion in a tightly
+knitted group that aimed to fight to the death. Many youth said that friendship was what initially attracted them to the clikas of ms-­13 and m-­18, but in
+what did friendship consist? The internal life of the Maras had shifted away
+from dancing or the possession of expensive consumer goods to a focus on
+drugs, painful rites of loyalty, and annihilating the other gang. A seventeen-­
+year-­old ms-­13 member named Carrito explained, “We dedicate ourselves to
+killing gang members who aren’t from mibarrio and that’s it—day after day,
+someone dies every day—every day our life is the same except it’s a different
+person who dies . . . one day one of theirs, one day one of ours.”40 Thirteen-­
+year-­old m-­1 8 member CC described to me how one day he would die in a
+gang fight because his life consisted of “matando a ellos, matado por ellos”
+(killing them and being killed by them). A boy named Gato told me, “We
+die one day to the next.” Phrases appeared and reappeared in conversations
+such as “we only think about killing,” “nothing matters to us.”41 Fifteen-­
+year-­old Junior said, “In the group we learn to be bad. We like to kill. We
+only think about killing, about revenge, about violence. Other people’s lives
+don’t matter to us.” Using the beautiful name Orquídia, one youth, who was
+covered with what he counted to be fifty-­five tattoos, insisted that to enter
+his clika of ms-­13, one had to kill members of rival clikas. He said, “Definitely the more people you smoke, the more respect, the faster you move up
+in the gang,” and added, “We only kill other gang members . . . my turn [to
+be killed by the enemy gang] will come.”42
+An amiable fifteen-­year-­old named Abel, a member of ms-­13, explained
+to me that after he had been kicked out of his home, he went directly to the
+National Airport because he thought he could sneak on an airplane. Instead
+he met a kindly cleaning woman who paid him to help her and took him
+home. She tried but could not maintain him, so she brought him to a crisis
+shelter that, because Abel was stable and did not take drugs, placed him in
+a group home for teenage boys. It was there that he discovered drugs and
+ms-­13. He explained: “They [ms-­13] offered me a barrio. I wanted one, and
+they had asked me, so I joined. To join I had a baptism. They took turns hitting me, hard, thirteen times, thirteen seconds each blow. . . . You need the
+Mara to defend you . . . you need friends for fights. As they say, ‘If someone
+touches you, they are touching everyone.’ There isn’t a night without a fight.
+The firemen don’t come. Nobody comes. I fight. I am prepared. I don’t have
+any obligations. If I die, so what?”43 Later killed in a gang fight, a street child
+recounted his experiences in ms-­13: “A bunch of us little kids entered the
+ms-­13 together. One of us was five years old. The majority of us are dead now.
+They [m-­18 leaders] killed them. . . . Five people died at my hands. The last
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+91
+
+time I killed was last year. I gave a tiro de gracias [coup de grâce] in the forehead, right here.”44
+Tattoos gave great poignancy to this constant rehearsal of killing, killed,
+shooting, shot, dying, dead. Although many of the youth I met did not have
+the facial tattoos that have attracted photographers, and many had desisted
+from using tattoos because these made them a target, the corporal aesthetic
+of tattooing had replaced the designer clothes of the 1980s. Large and small
+tattoos announced and named like no fashion sunglasses or brand-­name
+jeans could. At first glance, the specifics of any one person seemed to vanish into a meta-­identity signaled by tattoos of Satan, the sad and the happy
+clown, Christ, “forgive me mama for this crazy life,” unicorns, tigers, the
+Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, numbers, gang names in block letters, crowns
+of thorns, and wrist tattoos of thorns and chains. But what was being announced was personal identity. Tattoos were autobiographies. Carrito said
+that tattoos “cuenta la historia” (tell the story). Lounging on an old car seat
+outside of his mother’s small place, two rooms of a long row of rooms in El
+Gallito, Zone 3, Short read out his tattoos to me: “2” represented the number of his children, “3” referred to his zone, “rest in Peace, Julio” was a reference to a friend who died, “March 3” was the day of Julio’s death, “Shirley”
+referred to an ex-­lover, “Chiki” was the name of his girlfriend, and “Los
+Locos” was his clika. Sitting next to Short and with Short’s encouragement,
+Jonny read his tattoos aloud to me: “16” was the number of the months he
+spent in the Centro Preventivo in Zone 18, one tear drop represented the
+number of people he had killed, a heart represented “what I left behind, “la
+Chaka” was an ex-­lover, and a sad clown face was a “picture of me.”45
+Short and Jonny lived in the same poor neighborhood where they had
+grown up, as did most of the youth I met. None of the youth with whom I
+spoke had been to Los Angeles, and a few had never been to areas of Guatemala City that might count as urban highlights, such as the fancy Avenida
+de la Reforma or the city zoo. All these youth read and wrote, but did so
+only minimally, except for one young man who claimed that he kept all the
+account books for ms-­13 in Zone 18. None found school interesting. Several had common Maya surnames and were stereotypically indigenous in appearance, but no one replied to any query about ethnicity or to specific questions about the world outside of the hyperpresent gang life. They each had a
+nickname, and they called themselves mareros, and not indigenas, Mayas,
+Ladinos, mestizos, or chumos (a term for poor Ladinos or mestizos).46 They
+knew that they amounted to being big, bad kids with tattoos (even if they
+do not have tattoos), the type who kill (even if they did not). They knew that
+they would all burn in hell, and they all loved their mothers, but they were
+92
+
+Chapter 3
+
+loyal to their gang above all else, and for that they killed and were killed.
+They presented a repetitive script. They may have been making stories up
+or exaggerating, but violence and death were at the tips of their tongues.
+Sometimes tattooed and other times clean of tattoos, they spoke about the
+“rules,” about being beaten and beating others. Killing and being killed construct life and destiny, which consists of their death. This story of and belief
+in the “fight to the death” for mibarrio seems to answer the puzzle of life for
+these youth in a world that is, to borrow a phrase, “ontologically insecure
+and existentially uncertain” (see figure 3.5).47
+The question I repeatedly asked about why m-­18 and ms-­13 clikas fight
+to the death got similar responses: “Así es” (It just is like that) or “saber”
+(who knows). “Being malo [bad] is the only way to live, because life is bad,”
+said one youth. The one specific explanation for the intergang killings concerned revenge. After Short’s close friend Julio was killed, he told me, “After
+my tears dried, I did what I had to.” He and other gang members caught
+someone in the rival gang and got even. He concluded: “It was ‘an eye for
+an eye.’” Carrito, who describes himself as a “professional car thief,” said
+that “life demands malo . . . it’s part of life” and that is “how it is,” “la violencia” is life. “It” (death/violence) happens, and the mareros have found
+a way around it because they are inside of “it,” and not waiting for “it” to
+arrive. This suicidal fatalism is described by the Guatemalan psychologist
+Mariano Gonzáles as the mental condition of “accepting hopelessness”
+in which there is no “human project.”48 In a horrid reverse of modernity’s
+theme of making one’s way in life, these youth control their destiny of death
+by “making” their own deaths in the fight against an “enemy” who is themselves in the mirror of the rival gang.
+
+That young men and boys from similar backgrounds and with similar
+troubles compose one another’s enemies is paralleled by negative feelings
+about self. Writing about mareros he had known for years, Padre Manolo
+noted, “They have low self-­esteem, continually they repeat . . . ‘we are
+bad.’”49 I heard the same over and over: “Soy malo” (I am bad/evil); “Somos
+malos” (We are bad/evil). When these youth say “malo,” they refer to evil,
+bad, and badly behaved, and not “bad” as in a positive reversal. One youth
+told me that he wished he could change, and his family wished he could
+as well, but “that’s life—it’s evil, so it’s necessary to be evil.”50 Simultaneously, mareros defend themselves against society’s relentless negativity
+toward them. One said, “Society hates us. They hate us, and they look at us,
+they see a tattoo, and they judge us. We aren’t perfect, you know. But all they
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+93
+
+FIGURE 3.5 Members of MS-­13, 2005. Not all mareros have tattoos,
+a­ lthough in images of them they almost invariably do. This photograph
+is an exception. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+think is that we are bad people. They are just assholes.”51 Former marero
+William told the researcher Anneliza Tobar, “Society isn’t ours, it belongs
+to others,” and “when we join the gang, we look with indifference at the rest
+of the world.”52 Society is an enemy, the rival gang is an enemy, and each
+gang is entrenched in its mibarrio, a remarkable movable space given materiality by the presence of mareros who can show up in places from prisons
+and buses to el barrio.
+Tragically, the el barrio of neighborhoods, streets, and markets where
+these youth have grown up and usually live appears to be configured in their
+geographical imagining as prey. Padre Manolo observed this to be true especially if they lived in their old neighborhoods: “Their aspiration is not to be a
+youth from Barrio X. It is to be a youth from outside Barrio X who owns Barrio X.”53 The “outside” from which they descend might be the Los Angeles of
+their desires where they may have never been, and they return to beat up on
+the actual location of their own history of families, schools, and the dramas
+of their own lives. The youth I spoke with had relatives who most likely worried night and day about them, but what the mareros wanted to highlight
+was that they had broken with their families, even if they still slept at home.
+Victor articulated this in stark terms: when I asked him where he was born,
+he replied, “I was born with the Mara, without it I am nothing.”54 The common tattoo “forgive me mother for my crazy life” both retains the sanctity of
+mother love and distances oneself from it. The tattooed youth is not leaving
+his vida loca; he is requesting forgiveness for not leaving it. When I asked
+Short about his kin, he replied that his mother thought that he was “malo,”
+and he added that she was not part of “mi vida.” Yet, we were sitting outside
+of her house, where he lived. These youth may well support families, but that
+was not part of their self-­presentation, as it was in the 1980s. Surrounded
+by a seemingly endless parade of lives of poverty and failure, in their minds
+the mareros have severed themselves from “esa vida”—“that life.” They break
+with it, and even literally break it.
+Rosa ended up murdering an elderly woman. Here is her account to a
+social worker:
+We all lived in the same house. It’s a really big house, and everyone went
+there every day. There was a kind of temple. I was supposed to cut my
+veins and let drops of my blood fall into a big well. Everyone in the Mara
+had put their blood into that well. . . . During some rituals, some people
+fall down, others see eyes in the flames, some see someone being killed,
+or the things they do to you if you leave the gang. After joining the Mara,
+I killed an old woman because they told me I had to kill somebody, and
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+95
+
+to sacrifice their blood. . . . I pushed her, and when I touched her afterward, she wasn’t breathing any more. She was an [old] woman who lived
+with her grandchildren. They were from a rival gang. I had killed their
+grandma. I felt so bad, like I had killed my own grandma. . . . I don’t remember exactly what happened. The Mara has also tried to kill me—once
+with a gun, once with a knife, and another time with a car.55
+It is hard to imagine a more radical rupture from “esa vida,” or a more forced
+hell-­fire bonding than these theatrics of death and Rosa’s real-­life execution
+of an elderly woman. Rosa said that though she thought of killing herself,
+she fled instead, as the final chapter discusses, and went into hiding for
+months.
+For males, admissions of shame or fear would ruin their mystique of male
+power through physical talent and the ability to endure to the end without
+emotions. Violence was gendered as male. Padre Manolo pointed out, and
+I observed, that some young women in the Maras identify themselves with
+masculinity. Eighteen-­year-­old Carmen told me said that she joined a clika
+because she wanted to be “like a man, to be ready, to fight, to jump someone . . . to go to blows.” In Carolina’s opinion, “women can’t get things
+done and machos can and that’s what I need to be.” I asked Carolina to what
+things she referred when she said “get things done,” and I added that in her
+barrio in Zone 6, women held households together emotionally and economically. She knew that, “but you know,” she replied, “when it’s necessary
+to . . . handle a bad situation . . . all the things the clika needs to take care
+of, to protect, to be protected.” Her reply to the question “From what?” was
+“la violencia.”56 According to her, females are ranked. Those who are tough
+enough to endure beatings as an initiation ritual rather than rape—the “acceptance” of rape signals weakness—have a higher status in the Mara and a
+chance at being a clika leader.
+Folding violence, masculinity, and Mara into one another has left girls
+and young women who identify as feminine without a Mara identity, and,
+in conversations, they positioned themselves on the sidelines. Many said
+that they had joined the Maras because their boyfriends were mareros.
+Sixteen-­year-­old Chata’s comments were similar to those of the other girls.
+Chata declared her membership in ms-­13, but she spoke of “doing things
+for them,” or “with them.” She had no identity as one of “them.” “They”
+were “los muchachos,” the boys with whom one gets, in her words, “used to
+having sex. . . . At first you don’t want to and feel terrible.” Feminine females
+provide sexual “favors” and run gang errands—especially in the back and
+forth between prisons—clean, cook, and look after children and often asso96
+
+Chapter 3
+
+ciate themselves with their boyfriends’ otherwise neglected birth families.
+Their status reflects that of females in the larger society, yet worse.
+Foot Soldiers
+The marero has turned into a gendered killer/killed persona, a male warrior, the winner of the contest to decide Guatemalan history who is also a
+loser, the dead warrior. Gang members routinely call themselves “soldiers”
+who “fight and die for mibarrio.” The many meanings that masculinity has
+had have narrowed to one, and all others have atrophied. Masculinity has
+come to hinge on the capacity to give violence and take it, without limits, including the cap of mortality. This warriors’ work is what the really powerful
+men, whether generals or members of the economic elite, have had in their
+back pockets for generations, and they can pull it out and put it back in as
+need be. In the marero’s life there is only this violent masculinity, without
+the degrees, titles, money, prestige, social networks, mobility, and other
+resources that the Guatemalan elites and military men have had in plentitude and that allow for many masculine identities, whether of padre, patrón,
+or patria.
+For mareros necroliving has presumably kept their lives under their control by giving them space, identity, unconditional friendship, and a way to
+earn a living. They can use it to wreak havoc with a world that has failed them
+by messing up public transportation, redesigning neighborhood life, driving
+down real estate values, causing decreases in school attendance, and even
+provoking flight across borders. Finally, it can protect them, through death,
+from their own futures. Boys turn into young men and then into adults in
+their twenties without leaving the gangs until they die from life in the gang.
+Padre Manolo thought the presence of adults in their early twenties in the
+Maras indicated a fear of entering an adulthood that would be similar to
+that of their fathers, uncles, and other men in their neighborhoods, many of
+whom have not succeeded in life. He placed both extended memberships in
+the Mara and the early deaths of mareros in that context: they had lived and
+died as “youths and thus did not fail as men.”57 Over one-­half of the mareros
+that Padre Manolo had known over a ten-­year period died in fights. They beat
+adulthood to the punch and did not become, as the song “Hombres Fracasados” (Failed men) puts it, “failed men who could not be what they could
+have been.”
+Often surprisingly humble, sometimes domestically abused, and increasingly disconnected and alienated, urban young men and women and boys
+and girls for whom Ladinismo, Maya ethnicity, and Guatemalan citizenship
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+97
+
+continually depreciate into a cultural nothingness are drawn or forced into
+the imaginary of necroliving. In the gangs’ understanding of the world, the
+once clearly drawn lines between victim and victimizer, between ruler and
+ruled, have been blurred. It appears that only violent death can sort out who
+is which in a contest that is never settled for long and in which positions
+constantly flip as today’s victor is tomorrow’s victim. The lifeblood of the
+mareros’ efficacy flows from their promise to kill and to be killed. In the late
+1990s, one simple tattoo signaled Mara membership in Guatemala City. It
+consisted of three small dots between the thumb and the index finger that
+stood for hospital, prison, and morgue.
+The feisty 1980s mareros are one unusual reminder of an era of social
+struggle. Those of the postwar period are part of the heritage of war, and
+they portend the permanency of the war in everyday life. Neither rebels nor
+conformists, they are orphans of the world, not only of Guatemala. They have
+been criminalized by adults and even criminalized by the U.S. Department of
+Homeland Security for all manner of evils. These young people bring to mind
+those Hannah Arendt once called in another context “the most symptomatic group,” those “forced to live outside the common world,”58 in this case,
+mareros who reproduce the traumas that cast them outside that “common
+world,” to end these traumas in death.
+The Maras’ Smallest Veins
+Mareros are part of the fraught and narrow universe of destitute children
+and teenagers living in the city’s streets (see figures 3.6–3.7).59 Generally
+ignored or brutalized and despised by adults, these youth are often addicted
+to glue and without the means of making a living. Their ages vary (although
+they are called street children), their numbers grew in the last decades of
+the twentieth century as a direct or indirect result of the war, and by the
+early 2000s their offspring formed a second generation. In a complex relationship involving protection and exploitation, these street children inhabit the margins of the gangs, and they sometimes drift into them to run
+errands or become more full-­fledged participants. The Maras are the only
+social grouping that they can actually join and still be street children. Unlike
+humanitarian workers, the Maras do not try to tug these children away from
+the street living to which they are habituated, with which they identify and
+where their close friends are found.60 The gangs can even hold out a pathway. Guillermo, a twelve-­year-­old Honduran who ended up in the streets in
+Zone 1 by hitching rides to Guatemala City after Hurricane Mitch destroyed
+his home in 1998, told me that his friends in ms-­13 would help him go to
+98
+
+Chapter 3
+
+FIGURE 3.6 Young people living out on the street, Séptima Avenida,
+Zone 1, Guatemala City, 2002. Credit: Andrea Aragón.
+
+FIGURE 3.7 Neighborhood kids in their hangout, Guatemala City, 1999.
+Credit: Jonny Raxón/Fotokids, 1999.
+
+Houston, where he had relatives who worked in car wash. Here were real
+possibilities: connections with risk takers, undocumented immigration, a
+job in a car wash in the United States.61
+For some, the mareros are heroes who have mastered what it takes. I met
+children in a shelter in the late 1990s who proudly showed off their magic
+marker tattoos “ms” or “18.” One boy, Carlos, looked forward to being in a
+Mara clika when he was “stronger.” The clika seemed to be that inevitable
+violent defense against a painful world. A teenager named Rubén filled out
+the following questionnaire during one of his brief stays in a shelter:
+What is your family like?
+My family is my parents and my brothers and sisters. My older sister is
+named Ana. She is studying to be a schoolteacher. My little sister, Claudia,
+doesn’t go to school yet. My brother is named Oscar and everyone calls
+him “coco.” He has a bicycle and my family is lucky. We live very happily.
+My mother is very scared, and my father likes to fight.
+What are you like?
+I am cheerful. My character is rebellious and people provoke me a lot. I
+am respectful and responsible.
+Write what you would like your family to be like:
+I wish that they were very cheerful and that all my brothers and sisters
+were tough like me. I wish Rony and the others would study a lot and enjoy life. I wish my older brother were head of Mara-­18 so that my mother
+would be happier, less sad.62
+Anxious about a family that he conjured up as happy, Rubén imagined that
+the power of the Maras—if only his brother were “head”—might make his
+family truly happy. A social worker told me that Rubén joined a Mara, or at
+least hung out with one and “got into trouble.” His file shows that he died in
+1998 for “reasons unknown.”
+Estuardo Edwin Mendoza is another youth from the streets who joined
+a Mara. I met him in a shelter in 1997 when he was fourteen years old, tall
+for his age, pale, and sad. The first time we talked, we sat together watching
+the rain pour into the patio. He said that he had been sick for a “lifetime”
+because he had caught susto during the war, and it “just never went away.”63
+He told me about the massacre in his family’s hamlet and the dead bodies
+he had seen, “many many dead, some hung, some burnt.” “The army killed
+people because the people hid the guerrillas, the army killed babies. The
+people did not say where the guerrillas had gone. I touched dead bodies after
+the soldiers had cut them up with machetes. I went running into the night.
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+101
+
+The soldiers were painted with charcoal and they had knives. . . . The army
+killed four of my brothers even before I was born. I saw the soldiers throw
+fuel over the houses and burn them.” His mother, he went on to say, escaped
+from the hamlet after a massacre, which probably took place between 1981
+and 1982, and found her way down the mountains and into Guatemala City.
+Estuardo thought this was the second time war had destroyed her family and
+left her displaced. She told him she had left El Salvador “after her parents
+were killed by soldiers” and she had “walked on a highway with bombs falling all around her.” He remembered that she always said, “Why did I leave
+one war for another?”
+According to a social worker report, Estuardo had never been outside of
+the capital. He was born in a public hospital in Guatemala City in 1983 and
+lived with his mother for years in the settlement of Tierra Nueva II, one that
+absorbed war refugees in the 1980s and 1990s.64 According to Estuardo, he
+left home at age ten because “my mother said she could not support me. My
+mother doesn’t like me. . . . This is sad, I love my mother so much. When
+my mother hit me, she said it was because the blood of Salvadorans made
+her cruel.” After making a home visit, the social worker added to her report
+that Estuardo had three siblings, and his mother earned Q350 monthly and
+paid Q350 to rent a “small, dark room without much furniture.” The equation of rent and salary could have been an error. However, it is not surprising
+that she earned only enough to pay the rent. Even if she earned a bit more,
+how much could have been left for food or clothes, much less school fees or
+bus fares? Not atypically, the social worker faulted the mother for not being
+the mother she could not possibly have been. She wrote in her report, “The
+mother has been irresponsible with her children. There is no communication between them, she is dedicated only to her work [outside the house].”65
+Estuardo stayed in Guatemala City’s streets for the rest of his life, and
+sometimes he stopped by his mother’s place. Beaten by policemen in two
+incidents, he survived for a while. Out of exhaustion, he occasionally entered
+this shelter near the busy downtown area in Zone 1. Here he and other boys
+could sleep, eat, get medical attention, and attend classes on topics such as
+“what must be done to improve oneself,” “how to take advantage of life’s
+opportunities,” “aids and its consequences,” and “the family and the child’s
+role in the family,” provided that they did not use drugs. He would stay in
+this large converted mansion with its showers and friendly staff, food, and
+bunk beds until he was kicked out for breaking that cardinal rule, just to
+return a few months later and repeat this pattern. His thin file dates back
+to his first arrival there 1995. It gives his vital statistics, notes that he came
+from a family of “refugees from the countryside,” and describes his behavior
+102
+
+Chapter 3
+
+during his stays—“difficult,” “incommunicative,” and “complains of stomach pains.” A volunteer music teacher had penciled into the margins, “Estuardo loves to play guitar and drums . . . although at first he didn’t like the
+guitar, he has the possibility to express himself musically. He is helpful and
+cooperative, and sometimes he has his difficult moments.”66 Small wonder,
+in every sense.
+Not yet born at the time of the massacre in his family’s hamlet, he nevertheless described it as if he had been there, even actively: “I touched dead
+bodies. . . . I went running into the woods.” Recovering a sense of himself
+and his mother from these images, his experiences of other people’s memories at least kept him allied with a part of his family he had never directly
+known yet so affected him, and these memories gave him a history that explained the situation of his difficult existence, including his mother’s anger
+at him.67 Feeling ill could represent a “cultural document” that kept him
+close to his own truths and to the larger emotional and historic “we” within
+his trajectory.68
+He explained to me that he joined m-­1 8 because he wanted to “estar en
+algo” (be in something); here was the jagged edge of some “we.” Yet, at the
+bottom rung of the intense m-­18 hierarchy, he referred to the gang members as “them” and admired “them because they are loyal, they know how to
+handle stuff, they are malo, and that is what you need because life is malo.”
+In the gang, he felt “protected.”69 This indicates the extremity of his situation; a year later he was dead because of his membership. In revenge for a
+presumably m-­18 killing of an ms-­13 member, someone in ms-­13 shot him
+with an m16 assault rifle in early 1998. His murder was impersonal. He could
+have been anyone in the gang.
+The war and its aftermath run through all of this. Violent death marked
+both ends of his life, which spanned the Guatemalan state’s production of
+violent death as a means of political power, to Estuardo’s demise within a
+world of youth who can produce death as a means of getting by for a while.
+The war formed what Pierre Bourdieu called a system of dispositions, “a past
+which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself into the future by
+making itself present in practices structured according to its principles.”70
+The war put his life in place, organized it, and made violent death his most
+familiar terrain and his destiny.
+Estuardo’s insistent preservation of the memory of the massacre rang
+heroic and moral in light of the silence surrounding the war in 1997. He
+talked. Even though many children were in the streets because of the war,
+social workers rarely alluded to it in reports and conversations in order to
+protect their work and the children, and there existed no public discussion of
+1990s and Beyond: The Gangs to Die For
+
+103
+
+it. The transparency of Estuardo’s absorption in and memory of a massacre
+that he knew through others was uncommon among the street children I
+met in the late 1990s, even though many were war orphans.71 Recalling conversations with Estuardo, I am struck by his recollection of the massacre,
+especially because his memories defied the “amnesia of genesis” that overtook Guatemala in reference to military violence. It is difficult to reconcile
+the chronology he presents—he was not born until after his mother left the
+massacred village—except to say that the way he put it all together underscores his subjective sense of war’s presence and power.
+What chances did Estuardo have, living within the effective power of violent death because it was the greatest historical force within his life, a life
+spent growing up in the streets and in a “small dark” space with a hardworking and underpaid woman in an urban neighborhood pockmarked at a distance by the war? Outside of the Mara—and the crisis shelter, which never
+worked out for him, because he could not meet the difficult requirement of
+kicking his addiction—there were no open doors in his life and no way to
+understand more deeply his most foundational and entrenched memories.
+To quote Cathy Caruth in her discussion of the relationship between history
+and trauma, his history is precisely the way in which he was “implicated
+in other peoples’ traumas.”72 And we (myself and other adults who passed
+through his life) are implicated in the tragedy of not having been able to
+protect this child from becoming a victim of a system of dispositions that
+reproduced war without the war, and a target of the many in which he took
+part, and from which he died.73
+
+104
+
+Chapter 3
+
+DEMOCRACY AND LOCK-­U P
+
+I too have known Satan, I can bring them [mareros] to Christ.
+—Panamá, Pentecostal street worker, interviewed by the author, Guatemala City,
+March 1987
+
+The devil is my jefe.
+—Words said to have been mumbled by m-­18 member Áxel Danilo Ramírez
+Espinoza (alias Smiley), “public enemy number one,” El Periódico, April 17, 2009
+
+Who are we? We are the majority, worker, business executive, housewife, athlete,
+chewing gum vendor, we are those who drive in the latest model Mercedes Benz
+and those who take the bus or walk in the street. We are the people who do something constructive and positive for our country and our families and who every day
+confront the chaos and violence caused by “mareros,” those juvenile gangs. We are
+humble people, normal people who work to reach what is difficult but not impossible to achieve: peace.
+—National Civil Police of Guatemala, teléfono 110, “Unidos Contra Las Maras,”
+public relations advertisement
+
+T
+
+he National Civil Police’s “United against the Maras” poster advertises an
+alignment of Guatemalans who run the gamut, absurdly and obscenely,
+from a chewing gum vendor to the owner of a new Mercedes-Benz. No matter who they are, the argument goes, all share a normality that is threatened by the noncitizen others: the “mareros.” Nothing could more invert
+the 1954–80 progressive social imaginary, or more confuse our understandings than the portrayal by the National Civil Police. Policemen sometimes
+dip into and even control the earnings from the “war taxes” mareros collect;
+it is likely that the gum vendor has been harassed by a policeman at some
+point in her or his life; the owner of that new Mercedes-Benz might well
+
+4
+
+have bought it with drug money; and the business executive is not part of a
+“humble” majority that includes workers and housewives.
+However preposterous, the poster is hardly surprising. From the moment
+the Maras appeared on the streets of Guatemala City in 1985, mareros have
+been represented as threats to democracy, peace, toil, and the everyday life.
+Over decades of ever-­increasing clamor about youth delinquency, neither
+political parties nor state agencies—be these mano dura or reformist—have
+seriously studied the gangs in a sustained manner, or developed noteworthy
+programs to face up to the problems that gangs pose or that youth encounter. Attention has focused on the imaginary marero, and the real ones
+face a world of police, media people, and others who insist on that diabolical
+image and push the marero to fit what sometimes starts to stick.
+This chapter deals with the complexities and the consequences of varied
+responses to the mareros. It first discusses how expert demonologists in the
+Pentecostal movement staked out the terrain of handling the Maras during
+the war. It then recounts what has happened to the whole configuration of
+Mara power and powerlessness, discussed in the previous chapter, after the
+postwar state laid claim to a role as engineer of a new Guatemala based on
+law, and moved gang members into the institutional setting of the penitentiary system. Finally, it addresses the reality that going to jail has become a
+new—by now routine—stage in the lives of mareros, and that controlling
+jails in the name of National Citizen Security has enhanced the power of
+military and ex-military men. Prisons today reproduce the Maras, and they
+fuel the success of conservative political movements led by men who present
+themselves as necessary specialists in the management of violence.
+Neoliberalism and Pentecostals in the 1980s
+Structural adjustment programs imposed in the 1980s resulted in substantial cutbacks in funds to the state’s Welfare Secretariat, which since 1961
+has had jurisdiction over needy and troubled youth. By its own account it
+could only look after 4.69 percent of its potential clientele by 1987.1 By that
+year, the Tratamiento y Orientación de Menores (Treatment and Orientation for Minors, tom), the branch of the secretariat charged with rehabilitating or protecting juveniles, housed and serviced a mere 250 children and
+teenagers in its five centers, and even these group homes were barely supplied.2 In addition, the leadership of tom had no vision of its work. Social
+workers—who had to scurry about after working hours to solicit money for
+notebooks and pencils as well as supplies such as bandages, soap, toilet
+
+106
+
+Chapter 4
+
+paper, soft drinks, and plastic utensils from companies such as Johnson &
+Johnson and Coca-­Cola—drew up a long list of criticisms of tom that included “programs that do not represent the needs of the majority, inappropriate solutions, lack of rational and scientific planning, lack of evaluation
+and supervision.”3 Psychologists at tom appraised it in these words: “The
+achievements have been minimal, especially regarding reeducation, the raison d’être of the institution.”4 One professional evaluator summed up his
+1987 report by saying that the leadership of tom was “in another world.”5
+As a consequence of incompetence, financial crisis, and the ruling Christian Democratic Party’s inability to rise to the occasion, the care of needy
+and troubled youth was turned over to Pentecostals. Given their widespread
+influence, Pentecostals confronted no opposition when they assumed a role
+as social engineer, and their religiosity blurred the designation of privatization. As chapter 2 discussed, the Pentecostals in Guatemala had been involved in governance since the war escalated in 1980. For a period they ran a
+leadership training program for state functionaries and figures such as the
+born-­again Christian General Efraín Ríos Montt, an architect of massacres
+who justified his actions in the language of fire and brimstone.6 In this conjunction of a presumably reformist civilian government without funds, and
+the growing ubiquity of well-­funded Pentecostalism, there seemed nothing
+unusual about tom inviting Pentecostals into its centers. Members from
+the largest of these churches in Guatemala City, the Iglesia de Cristo Elim
+(Church of Christ, elim), regularly went to tom centers to sing, talk, and
+give counsel. With the approval of tom officials, they brought with them
+easy-­to-­read pamphlets on important topics such as drugs and alcohol.
+With the aim of orienting youth to better guide other youth away from the
+world of Maras, Pentecostals opened a ministry named Juventud para Cristo
+(Youth for Christ), which regularly sent volunteers into public schools such
+as the important teacher training school Instituto Normal de Señoritas
+Belén, and the large vocational high schools. Such was the situation of Pentecostal ascendancy that in 1987 the Judicial Magistrate for Youth joined
+with the unicef program to create an alliance, the Comisión Nacional
+Acción por los Niños (National Commission of Action for Children, conani), in which Pentecostals had an important part.7 Its vice-­president was
+a Pentecostal street worker, and the Pentecostal ex-­director of the Treasury
+Police, who was later dismissed because of his relationship to death squads,
+ran the conani-­supported groups such as one named Hombrecito. With
+conani’s support, numerous Pentecostal reform centers came into being.
+In the 1980s the most vocal and authoritative Pentecostals advocated
+
+Democracy and Lock-­Up
+
+107
+
+mental discipline and physical punishments for wayward youth. The Pentecostal psychologist Roberto Morales del Pinar, who directed a home for
+female ex–gang members and homeless girls in Zone 11, spoke in a professional capacity when he said he believed in corporal punishment and in the
+importance of his close authoritarian relationships with the girls, who had
+to call him “Papi.” His associate, a Nicaraguan nicknamed Panamá, went
+into the streets “where Satan works,” to save young people. Panamá had
+been in the Contra forces in Nicaragua, where he developed a drug habit,
+but he had a revelation in which Christ walked toward him, and he gave up
+his addiction. He was a strong and politically shrewd young adult and a self-­
+confessed killer. After he and I had conversed and toured Pentecostal centers together over a period of months, it occurred to me that Panamá could
+easily have had ties with the Guatemalan military, and with pride.
+One place Panamá took me to was a group home in Zone 1 named Casa Mi
+Hogar, a one-­story 1930s building. Inside Casa Mi Hogar was a small, dirty,
+foul-­smelling patio, off of which were four dormitories, an office, and a
+kitchen. It housed more youngsters than the state-­run reform center Gaviotas did at that time. The patio was the central space, and every time I visited,
+the more than 138 young men and boys and some 20 girls who resided there
+were standing up in this cramped, sun-­filled or rain-­soaked space, and they
+invariably looked distressed. According to the Casa Mi Hogar’s director, the
+youth stood for hours “to achieve discipline and formation.” What sort of
+“home” was this? It was one to which the National Police directly brought
+kids, straight from the street, and to which judges sent young people for rehabilitation. The state remunerated Casa Mi Hogar for services. In his early
+sixties, the director described himself to me as a former drug addict who had
+once been part of Centuriones, a 1960s shock brigade of a right-­wing political party, and later met Jesus Christ and converted to Pentecostalism inside
+the elim church. He explained to me that he was a sinner who had been
+saved in order to save others. Without any prompting on my part, he further
+explicated that his work inside the strategic hamlets into which the military
+had herded villagers after massacres illustrated his dedication to the salvation of souls. Punishment such as war cleansed sinners, and once cleansed
+they could “love themselves and develop themselves.”8
+Pentecostalism as a neoliberal solution to youth reform became institutionalized in 1992 when the born-­again Christian conservative president
+Jorge Serrano Elías took office, while the civil war continued. He brought
+the Pentecostal organization Rehabilitación de los Marginados (Rehabilitation of the Marginalized, remar) from Spain, and his government paid it
+to officially manage Gaviotas. In charge of the daily schedule and discipline,
+108
+
+Chapter 4
+
+remar staff regularly beat the interned boys with baseball bats, brooms,
+and firewood in special isolation rooms; held mandatory Bible classes; and
+ripped crosses off the boys’ necks. remar expanded its services to other
+state institutions and established its own private centers, where adults hurt
+and humiliated young people, and to which courts dispatched them.9 Despite international attention to these abuses, remar continued to work in
+the prisons after Pentecostals temporarily left important administrative and
+advisory positions at the time of the 1996 Peace Accords. The born-­again
+Ríos Montt entered the political arena after 1996, but his religious language
+met a provisional riposte in politicians such as Ramiro de León Carpio and
+Álvaro Arzú who, however religious, claimed modern expertise based on
+education and political experience, and not on a relationship with God.
+The Postwar Crossover
+Whether of a new generation or survivors of older generations struggling for
+identity and place, urban middle-­class professionals and others came to believe that any hope for creating a democratic and constitutional Guatemala
+rested on laws and their implementation, and not on revolution. In this
+context, there appeared a veritable renaissance of interest in legal means
+of social reform and control, and criminal justice was central to this.10 The
+Supreme Court judge and prison reform advocate José Francisco de Mata
+Vela hailed a new 1990s Penal Code that included the replacement of the inquisitorial model with the accusatory system, “the most important moment
+in Guatemalan legal history.” He located this event within a new dawn of
+“political and economical facts that have changed the sequence of human
+history, as have disappearance of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War,
+the democratization of all countries . . . [and in Guatemala] the construction
+of a democratic country, in the constitutional state of law.”11 Now liberal
+democracy could flourish unencumbered by the exigencies of the Cold War
+and the communist threats that had so twisted it out of shape.
+With optimism about the promise of an era during which nonmilitary
+laws and civilian structures would secure democracy, prestigious institutions in the country such as the Office of the Human Rights of the Archbishop of Guatemala, the University of Rafael Landívar, and the new Institute
+of Comparative Penal Science Studies of Guatemala sponsored a landmark
+2000 conference titled “Prisiones: El Desafío del Nuevo Milenio” (Prisons:
+Challenge of the new millennium). This meeting brought specialists from
+Latin American and European countries to Guatemala, and it placed Guatemalan professionals inside the ongoing global discussion about the worldDemocracy and Lock-­Up
+
+109
+
+wide prison crisis, one that has given new life to ideals of reform and rehabilitation programs and the protection of prisoners’ rights. In this postwar
+period, papers, conferences, university theses, and organizations concerned
+with prison reform have proliferated in Guatemala, and they all urge sweeping legislation on prisons and their administration.12 Even if all this has resulted in little change, the penitentiary system entered into the play of national history for the first time in Guatemala after the Peace Accords.
+Some context is necessary. It would be hard to argue that the claim made
+for many Latin American countries concerning the centrality of the penitentiary system to “strategies of control and discipline and the construction of
+hegemonic visions of society,” or to “the construction of a national state,”
+has been the case in Guatemalan history.13 According to the first large-­scale
+study of the system, done in 2000, “there has never existed the minimum
+criteria for prison administration” in Guatemalan history.14 The novel ideas
+about the penal system that developed in Europe in the 1800s circulated in
+Guatemala, made a small mark, and never went further than the construction of architectural performance pieces that simulated modernity.15 The
+Liberal Party built the first national prisons at the end of the nineteenth century. Established in 1877 and based on the European model of reeducation
+through moral uplift and workshops for “the women’s arts,” the women’s
+prison Santa Teresa rapidly deteriorated into no more than a filthy lock-­up.
+The larger Central Penitentiary for Men was carefully laid out according to
+the “plans of the best European penitentiaries.” Furnished with a library, a
+school with twelve classrooms, and a small soccer field, it opened in 1881
+to house 500 prisoners, and soon thereafter held 1,500 men in chaotic conditions of “vice, misery, horror and death.”16 This was the central national
+prison for men until the end of the 1960s.17 The Central’s population remained at a steady 1,500 until the 1954 coup, when it jumped to 2,500 due
+to the jailing of political prisoners under anticommunist laws, then dropped
+back to 1,500, probably because death squads took over punishment.18
+In the early 1960s, the physical structure of the Central Penitentiary collapsed. To replace it, three new national farm prisons were built, the most
+important one being El Pavón, located in Fraijanes, a town near the capital.
+Again, modern ideas dominated planning, and the prison grounds were landscaped to include agricultural and manufacturing centers to rehabilitate and
+train the incarcerated through useful labor and reeducation, but, as in the
+past, few programs got implemented. Soon after El Pavón opened, prisoners
+massively revolted in direct response to the terrible conditions that prevailed
+from the outset and to the fatal beating of two inmates by guards in 1968,
+during a national state of siege directed at the urban popular movement in
+110
+
+Chapter 4
+
+Guatemala City and the guerrilla movement in the east of the country. As
+prisoners started to tear El Pavón apart, the army sent tanks and soldiers into
+the sprawling complex, and gunmen sprayed machine gun rounds of bullets on the prisoners from a hovering helicopter. An unknown number were
+killed, and order was restored.19 As this chapter suggests, nothing of this
+nature has since taken place, though conditions have, if anything, worsened
+within Guatemala’s growing number of adult jails and juvenile reformatories.
+The adult penitentiary system now includes thirty-­five prisons administered by either the Dirección General del Sistema Penitenciario (General
+Administration of the Penitentiary System, dgsp) or regional authorities.
+Among these are El Pavón, El Pavoncito, and Fraijanes 2 in Fraijanes in the
+department of Guatemala; El Centro Preventivo in Zone 18 at the edge of
+Guatemala City; El Boquerón in Cuilapa, Santa Rosa; and El Hoyón in Escuintla. The Welfare Secretariat currently manages several reformatories for
+minors that are in and around Guatemala City and house 430 boys and a
+smaller number of girls. These include Gaviotas for boys and Gorriones for
+girls, both of which are located in Guatemala City, and El Centro Preventivo
+Etapa 2 for boys, which is located in San José Pinula, a small town forty-­five
+minutes by car from the capital.
+Whether for minors or adults, these centers and jails have been incoherently organized and managed for decades. In juvenile reformatories, youths
+are not separated by “crime,” an imprecise term in this context. According
+to a study done in the 1990s, over 80 percent of the girls in Gorriones were
+there because they were at “social risk.”20 In all these detention centers those
+judged to have committed deeds of “little social impact” are mixed with
+youth accused of homicide and kidnapping.21 Moreover, those convicted of
+these acts and sentenced for longer periods are often not transferred to adult
+prisons when they reach eighteen. All these youth, and especially those in
+centers that still have staff from remar , face beatings, have no recourse
+or legal counsel, and are often there “until rehabilitated,” a status that remains undefined. Few teachers, social workers, psychologists, or medical
+professionals are available to these young people. One study describes the
+youth detention center Etapa 2 as “in chaos” and the Welfare Secretariat “incapable of providing security of inmates, as recent mutinies have shown, in
+which adolescents have been killed and wounded.”22
+For many years, the adult prisons throughout Guatemala have housed a
+steady population of approximately 8,500 inmates. Of these, over 90 percent
+are male, the majority are from lower-­class backgrounds, 40 percent are between eighteen and twenty-­two years of age, and well over three-­quarters
+are awaiting trial. Those who are convicted are incarcerated together no matDemocracy and Lock-­Up
+
+111
+
+ter whether they have been found guilty of petty theft or multiple homicides.
+Prison conditions are notoriously terrible for most inmates. They live in overcrowded cells without light, air, mattresses, or sanitary facilities. Worse,
+water is scarce. As one example, a single faucet from which water trickles
+for at most three hours a day serves 330 inmates in El Hoyón, located in the
+hottest part of the country. Because prisoners need cash to survive and few
+prisons have work programs, inmates sell drugs and their bodies, and they
+wash clothes or clean for the wealthy inmate minority that lives in special
+quarters.23 To add to this, corruption and violent humiliation of prisoners
+have been the operational principles of guards. An observer noted that in
+one center, guards “force inmates to clean toilets with their hands, floors on
+their bare knees, sleep standing up and other degradations.”24 Guards have
+accepted money for everything from renting out mattresses to facilitating
+escapes and opening doors to allow in extralegal executioners.25
+It was at the end of the twentieth century that this corrupt and decrepit
+prison system slowly started to replace barrios and factories to become the
+new publicized site of urban struggles—or rather of disputes about the management of power—that would become increasingly central in the popular
+imagination. The stage for this was set by groups of inmates who took over
+the internal functioning of some prisons in the 1990s in response to the
+disastrous state of affairs inside them. They organized Comités de Orden y
+Disciplina (Committees of Order and Discipline, cods) that made prisons
+safer for visitors and inmates, implemented strict disciplinary codes, and demanded fees from prisoners to provide for cleaning equipment, prison security against internal theft, and the salaries of cod staff. The most famous
+cod was at El Pavón, one that inmates started to stop the constant robbery
+and rape of visitors. Over the years, it created what journalists described
+as “a country within a country,” or “a small town run by inmates.”26 The
+cod operated all the criminal rackets inside El Pavón smoothly, and it controlled internal strife in favor of the cod’s board members. The cod supplied goods, liquor, drugs, and prostitutes; collected fees from the inmates
+who ran the prison’s lively commercial center, which included a pizzeria, a
+pool hall, a call center, a butcher shop, a tortillería, various repair stalls, and
+a hardware store; charged rent for structures, land, and land use; and helped
+arrange the sale of homes built by departing inmates. The cod brought a
+sort of peace to El Pavón, which boasted of having the best housing for the
+wealthy minority in the nation’s prison system. Although the majority of inmates were poor and lived inside old cells with or without mattresses, the
+rich had well-­built homes with gardens (and gardeners), refrigerators, and
+gym equipment.27 For years, reformers, human rights advocates, and mano
+112
+
+Chapter 4
+
+dura politicians all argued emphatically that the central problem in the penitentiary system was, in the words of one, that “the state has given control to
+the prisoners.”28 In reality, this “prisoner power” consolidated the control
+of a small minority of inmates that threw crumbs to lower-­class ones, had
+ties with external elites, and tried to use the growing inmate population of
+mareros as foils within their behind-­the-­walls maneuvers.
+A Place in This World
+A group of researchers who minister to incarcerated gang members has
+suggested that by 2002, by which time the gang presence had become concentrated within the system, prison life represented a new stage of Mara
+history.29 The significance of jails is one result of the policy adopted by authorities of grouping gang members together in the same prisons, and even
+in the same cell-­blocks. With some fifteen hundred inmates, the largest
+penal complex in the country, El Pavón holds some three dozen mareros.
+This contrasts sharply with the smaller El Hoyón, which has approximately
+300 mareros out of almost the same total of inmates; the Centro Preventivo
+in Zone 18, which has had over 250 members of Mara-18 (m-­18) jammed into
+one small section known as the “11”; and the high-­security jail El Boquerón,
+where some 100 mareros represent over half of those incarcerated there.30
+The same pattern of keeping large numbers of gang members together has
+existed in the juvenile reformatories (see figure 4.1).
+Increased incarcerations and the tight grouping of mareros have had
+many consequences. One of these is simply that the penitentiary system has
+become the single most important place for mareros in Guatemalan society.
+It is their center of sociability par excellence, one where they continue to reference and elaborate on gang identity, maintain contact with gang members
+and leaders through their cell phones, and meet each other’s wives and children and other relatives on visiting days, and one where one marero’s visiting sister might become another marero’s lover. Locked in together, they
+are locked into each other: already intense gang loyalties become even more
+high pitched; in prisons, mareros are only that, and in those closed shared
+spaces they can recuperate their fantasies. They use gang language and signals, get new tattoos and shave their hair off over and over; their main sights
+are each other’s bodies, and they are together day and night, eating, sleeping, cleaning, and sitting around. Vital to their need to be physically strong,
+they do strenuous exercise routines as a group. According to one report,
+“There exists no specified area for exercise [in the jail], they [gang members]
+play soccer in the patios, they do exercises endlessly—sit-­ups, push-­ups—
+Democracy and Lock-­Up
+
+113
+
+FIGURE 4.1 Members of M-­18 sitting together in El Hoyón Prison,
+­Escuintla, 2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+wherever they can to stay in shape.”31 The many photographs of mareros behind prison fences attest to the fact that these youth maintain their bodies
+and their style. Categorized as mareros, they also call upon themselves to act
+as mareros, and they continue the war between Mara Salvatrucha (ms-­1 3)
+and m-­1 8 behind bars.32 The mareros have marked out territories, and they
+fight for them.
+When the mareros have opposed prison authorities, it has been to retain and expand their space within the penal system, rather than oppose
+their incarceration in it. The several uprisings of gang members in prisons
+and youth centers have involved taking guards hostage as leverage to win
+demands that will improve prison life for them as mareros. They have consistently sought increased visitation privileges and the right to carry cell
+phones at all times. However, the sharpest disputes have concerned transfers, which are matters of mibarrio solidarity, protection, and survival. The
+policy of putting mareros together in jails does not mean that mareros from
+the same gangs are necessarily together in the same centers. Mareros have
+rioted repeatedly to stop the reassignment of members of their mibarrio to
+jails that are rival strongholds, and to bring members of the same gang into
+the same prison. Examples of this are the taking of hostages around those
+paired demands at El Boquerón and the Centro Preventivo in Zone 18 in
+2005; the Centro Preventivo and El Pavoncito in 2006; El Hoyón, Etapa 2 in
+San José de Pinula and El Pavoncito in 2007; and Etapa 2 in 2009. These disputes have usually left prisoners and hostages wounded or dead.
+Taking Fire
+Despite their concentrated numbers and gang adherence, mareros’ power
+in prisons is limited. Outside of El Hoyón in Escuintla and juvenile centers such as Etapa 2, mareros have not become the authoritative group of
+inmates within the system because they have faced stiff competition from
+incarcerated state agents and members of the Colombian and Guatemalan mafias, as well as from important outside groups. Vulnerable as lower-­
+class youth without lawyers or wealthy relatives, mareros have been targets
+for powerful prisoners and, above all, for politicians and military men who
+entrap gang members and use them, as well as the all-­important uproar
+around them, in dangerous dramas that go beyond jails.
+The first publicized case of this nature took place in the Centro Preventivo, Zone 18, where the ex-­colonel Bryan Lima Oliva and a former member of the presidential guard, José Obdulia Villanueva (both incarcerated
+for the murder of the human rights advocate Bishop Juan Gerardi), joined
+Democracy and Lock-­Up
+
+115
+
+together with other ex-­military men who awaited trial there. Under Lima
+Oliva’s leadership, this cohort of inmates took control of the prison through
+the cod and, according to testimony later taken from prisoners by human
+rights organizations, “demanded monthly payments from inmates in return for security, cable television, food, water, light, cigarettes and maintenance.”33 At the lower end of the prison hierarchy, mareros complained of
+physical abuse at the hands of Lima Oliva and his friends, and this exploded
+on February 12, 2003, into a fight that left over fifteen mareros dead. It also
+left Obdulia Villanueva beheaded. In a show of power, Lima Oliva announced
+from prison over national radio that his bodyguards had immediately killed
+Villanueva’s killers in their cells. Lima Oliva explained that mareros had decapitated Villanueva because “they respond to their instincts and are hostile
+to military men” and that he and his “thousands [milles] of fellow inmates
+would begin daily executions of gang members if these were not removed.”
+Prison administrators complied and transferred two hundred inmates, including mareros.34 Years later, the discovery of Lima Oliva’s prison account
+books revealed thousands of dollars in loans that were paid back in gems,
+cars, and furniture; the cell phone numbers of Mexican Zeta leaders and ex-­
+kaibiles; and notes on what homes to rent for purposes of drug distribution
+and how to stock them—“washer, drier, television, 5 laptops, 200 hand grenades”—as well as on rental fees for chairs and tables within the prison for
+inmates’ visitors.35 The mareros had lost out to a trans-­regional military-­run
+capitalist company that operated on every profitable level possible, had its
+headquarters in the maximum-­security section of a large prison, and might
+have had its own reasons for getting rid of Villanueva.
+The vulnerability of the mareros and the imperative of unity were apparent to at least some gang members. At the time of the 2003 transfers, leaders
+in ms-­1 3 and m-­1 8 signed a nonaggression pact that went into effect in
+prisons and reform centers throughout the country. Based on a Los Angles
+model and known as Southern United Raza, or Sur, in Guatemala it stipulated that ms-­13 and m-­18 would continue to fight outside, but not inside,
+the penitentiary system (see figure 4.2). During the two years Sur lasted,
+the intense fighting between ms-­13 and m-­18 inmates ceased. However, the
+pact suddenly and brutally broke down. It is unclear how hand grenades
+and others arms got inside El Hoyón in Escuintla, the most overcrowded
+and run-­down prison, or by what means the news of the collapse of Sur so
+quickly spread throughout the country. According to reports, at 8:30 am on
+August 16, 2005, young men in ms-­13 threw grenades into a cell of members of m-­18 and continued their assault with firearms.36 Over the next three
+
+116
+
+Chapter 4
+
+FIGURE 4.2 Gang members from M-­18 in El Hoyón Prison, Escuintla,
+walk by a wall inscribed with the words “Southern United Raza,” in
+reference to the nonaggression pact between MS-­13 and M-­18 that prohibited rival clikas from fighting within penitentiary walls. It remained
+in effect from 2003 to 2005. Escuintla, 2005. Credit: Victor Blue.
+
+hours, ms-­13 attacked m-­18 members with weapons that included knives,
+9 mm pistols, revolvers, and Uzis at prisons at some distance from Escuintla,
+such as El Pavón; a prison in Quetzaltenango in the western highlands; one
+in Mazaltenango on the piedmont; and the male juvenile detention center
+Gaviotas in Guatemala City. Thirty youth between ages eighteen and twenty
+died, most of these inside El Hoyón, where sixty more were hospitalized
+with cuts and gunshot wounds.37 Every news outlet covered the aftermath
+of this bloody national battle in detail. Images of the shirtless, tattooed
+wounded young men and the tattooed dead lying on floors patently slippery
+with blood, of bereft families, and of panicked neighbors in areas near the
+prisons circulated for weeks (see figures 4.3–4.5). President Óscar Berger,
+of the center-­right Gran Alianza Nacional (Grand National Alliance, gana),
+stated that he was relieved no one had escaped and called for a rapid completion of forty-­nine cells that would expand Fraijanes 2, the high-­security
+prison next to El Pavón.38 His minister of the Interior, Carlos Vielmann, declared that this was not a “mutiny but a breakdown in the internal order of
+the penitentiary system.”39 There was no investigation of any aspect of this
+tragedy.40
+Whoever propelled it, this war continued. On September 4, the National
+Police reported that ms-­13 members managed to “force” their way into a detention center, open fire, blow off the heads of two members of m-­18, and
+go on to kill ten more. Two weeks later this scenario repeated itself almost
+down to the last detail. On September 19, according to National Police, three
+ms-­13 mareros between the ages of fourteen and seventeen walked into the
+juvenile reform center Etapa 2 in San José Pinula with an ak-­47 and several
+pistols. They killed several members of m-­18, two of whom they beheaded.
+The severed heads were placed in the outdoor space. Policemen and soldiers
+subsequently arrived, and the three were taken to Gaviotas. Later, however,
+one of the boys reported he had been picked up by the police and taken to
+the site of the crime; the second stated he had just been visiting; and the
+third, after declaring he knew his rights, remained silent. They were never
+charged. In a scenario that is hauntingly reminiscent of the war, and one in
+which the military was praised for its actions, all that clearly emerged about
+the events of the day was a televised video that showed two severed heads
+and the arrival of the armed forces, whose commander announced that the
+army had been called there in response to an “assault by a commando.”41 In
+this case, the criminals who were the “other” necessary to the definition of
+the good citizen that Michel Foucault describes in his classic work Discipline
+and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, might well have been invented, and the way
+
+118
+
+Chapter 4
+
+FIGURE 4.3 A mother waits for news of her incarcerated son in the aftermath of the August 2005 riots in El Hoyón Prison, Escuintla, that broke
+the nonaggression pact. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+FIGURE 4.4 Family members arrive at the morgue in Escuintla to look for
+their loved ones, 2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+FIGURE 4.5 Neighborhood boys search through the mess of discarded
+and ripped remains of the fighting, Escuintla, 2005. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+in which the prison system has become central to the national history is by
+facilitating the postwar reemergence of the Guatemalan military as a social
+force for the good of the good citizenry against, in this case, a few teenagers.
+Yet more is going on than the creation of the “other.” A year later, the
+state assaulted El Pavón. On September 25, 2006, Interior Minister Carlos
+Vielmann, National Police head Erwin Sperisen, and Alejandro Giammattei, the director of the national penitentiary system, personally led an attack force on the prison that consisted of three thousand members of the
+army and the National Civil Police, four tanks, and three helicopters, which
+flew over the heads of the fifteen hundred inmates. According to the official version, the troops marched forward against gunfire coming from the
+prison for thirty minutes, after which they entered, secured the prison in
+fifty minutes, and in the process killed seven “armed and combative prisoners.” Vielmann, Giammattei, and Sperisen accompanied President Berger
+on an immediate tour of the captured grounds. The Berger government
+quickly produced a video titled take control of a Territory Controlled by Criminals and subtitled take control of a Paradise for Juvenile Delinquents. The film
+follows the soldiers as they occupied the prison premises, walked through
+the wreckage of shops and buildings, and peeked into elite inmate homes
+replete with Jacuzzis, refrigerators, and televisions. The assault was a public spectacle, had a name—Operación Pavo Real (Operation Peacock)—and
+made it into both national and international news.
+What did not make the news was that a criminal ring controlled El Pavón.
+At the time of the assault the head of the cod was a drug lord named Luis
+Alfonso Zepeda, who had been sentenced in the early 1990s to twenty-­six
+years for having committed multiple assassinations. Zepeda and his business partners administered an El Pavón prison town complex that included
+a school called Escuela de Arte Senderos de Libertad (The Paths of Liberty School of Arts); a cocaine-­processing laboratory run by a well-­known
+Colombian mafia inmate, Jorge “El Loco” Batres Pinto; and an auto repair
+shop where numbers were erased off the chassis of robbed cars before these
+vehicles were sent back to the street for sale.42 Operación Pavo Real succeeded in destroying the cod. No gunfire was exchanged between prisoners
+and soldiers. A group of hooded men who entered with the soldiers and
+policemen went down a lineup of the fifteen hundred men with photos in
+their hands and pulled out Zepeda and five prisoners who were associates
+of El Loco. El Loco escaped the lineup and took refuge in his luxurious El
+Pavón residence, where he was soon discovered in his garden. The bodies of
+all seven turned up with signs of torture.43 Four years later, Vielmann, Giammattei, and Sperisen would flee Guatemala when the un Comisión Inter122
+
+Chapter 4
+
+nacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (International Commission
+against Impunity in Guatemala, cicig) revealed that this offensive against
+El Pavón settled a struggle about who controlled a large sector of the drug
+and stolen goods market.
+In the twenty-­first century the Guatemalan penitentiary system has become “a country within a country.” It is one of no doubt several control centers of the growing illegal economy. The description here of the configuration of prison conflicts from 2003 to 2005 illustrates that these fights are
+between important business and political figures who operate across walls
+and use both the mareros and invisibility of what goes on inside prisons to
+their advantage. Though the conflict at El Pavón did not involve mareros,
+officials who were culprits in this drama had presented the pre-­assault state
+of affairs in the prison as a “paradise for juvenile delinquents,”
+despite this being a prison for adults, not minors. Even in their absence, the
+mareros have been dodging bullets.
+In a subsequent fight between powerful adult criminals that again
+brought world attention to Guatemala’s prison system, mareros tried to
+avoid the trap that they saw coming. This time, they demanded that legal authorities protect them. On February 19, 2007, three Salvadoran congressmen
+widely known to be connected to the drug trade were ambushed and murdered on their way to Guatemala City, along with their driver. Four members
+of the criminal investigation unit of the Guatemalan National Civil Police
+subsequently confessed to these murders, and they were confined in the
+maximum-­security prison in El Boquerón, an ms-­13 stronghold. A few days
+later, the four policemen were shot to death in their cells at close range. A
+riot immediately broke out in the prison. Aware that they might be blamed,
+members of ms-­13 took a guard hostage and threatened to kill him unless authorities declared them innocent. They held their hostage at the very
+moment that the same officials involved at El Pavón—Vielmann, Sperisen,
+and Giammattei—were accusing the mareros of having slit the throats of
+the policemen—apparently they had not heard that the latter were gunned
+down—because, in their words, “mareros hate police.” Alert to the utility
+of human rights discourse, the mareros insisted that the human rights ombudsman and television crews be brought inside the prisons to, as they put
+it, “protect their human rights.” The ombudsman came, and the mareros released their hostage. Nonetheless, thirteen mareros were charged with the
+murder of the four policemen. Months later, the charges were dropped for
+lack of evidence, and the thirteen stayed in El Boquerón to complete their
+original sentences. The following month, “Small,” one of the thirteen, was
+decapitated and his body burned in his cell.44
+Democracy and Lock-­Up
+
+123
+
+Making Youth Crazy
+Who orchestrates this madness? Because a video from a closed-­circuit
+camera fell into the hands of the human rights ombudsman in 2006, it is
+possible to see the degree to which authorities brutally manipulate youth.
+In June 2006, m-­18 youth attacked ms-­13 members in the juvenile center
+Etapa 2 in San José Pinula, murdered them, and mutilated their bodies.
+What the video picked up is that at 5 pm that day, the prison wardens threw
+blankets over the entrance to the section where m-­18 youth were detained,
+and thus blocked the view of the camera and of a guard in a turret overlooking the wing. Over the next forty minutes, wardens went into the area
+under the blanket with objects not identifiable on the film. Ten minutes before the trouble started, the guard in the turret went on a dinner break, without being replaced. At 6:30 pm, three members of m-­18 emerged from behind the blanket and entered the area where ms-­13 youth lived, one that was
+presumably shut off by a locked door. During the next forty minutes, gang
+members attacked with sharp instruments, severed body limbs, and crushed
+skulls. A few minutes after the fight had started, someone had called the
+National Civil Police, which entered and left after two minutes. The policemen returned thirty-­eight minutes later, the three boys from m-­18 were back
+behind their blanket, and the policemen found three boys dead, with their
+limbs scattered, and six badly wounded boys, from whom no statements
+were taken. The human rights ombudsman presented the video to the un
+special rapporteur, who brought accusations against Giammattei that have
+yet to be resolved.45
+A contrast to the resulting chorus of “out of control” is at once obvious
+and startling: this was a tightly controlled sequence of events, right down
+to a stage manager who stopped the policemen from bungling the timing
+of their entrance and to the erasure of media publicity concerning the video.
+The venue for this manipulation was not an adult jail such as El Boquerón,
+where mareros have demonstrated some ability to hold their own, but a reform center for minors in an isolated setting in the countryside. This was the
+second terrifying and eerie news-­making disaster at Etapa 2. It occurred a
+year following the incident, cited earlier, in which three boys were arrested
+for beheadings in which they probably had no involvement. It has been difficult to investigate what was at issue in these two episodes that resulted in
+the deaths of young mareros; however, the leadership given by police and
+prison personnel in the 2006 murders is evident.
+It was in the same Etapa 2 in San José Pinula that youth murdered a
+schoolteacher three years later. On March 3, 2009, a few days following a
+124
+
+Chapter 4
+
+search by authorities in which cell phones were seized from the resident
+youth and visitation rights taken away as a punishment, several boys took
+hostage two custodians, a cook, and two teachers, including forty-­five-­year-­
+old Jorge Emilio Winter Vidaurre, who worked in one of the few programs at
+Etapa 2. The boys demanded that the cell phones be returned, that visiting
+privileges be restored, and that two youths recently transferred to another
+juvenile center be brought back. With the words “we aren’t kidding,” they
+shut the hostages in a room and waited to start negotiations; taking hostages had become the leverage common throughout the penal system. The
+Etapa 2 administrator did not negotiate. She called the National Civil Police,
+whose elite special forces encircled the prison. The boys responded by crushing Winter Vidaurre’s skull and cutting out his heart. In view of the police
+and residents of San José de Pinula who by then surrounded Etapa 2, the
+boys came out into the central patio, danced, and yelled that Winter Vidaurre
+“had lived long enough.” The police seized the youths, who held their fingers
+high in a gang sign, and took them out of the building to await trial in the
+adult Centro Preventivo, Zone 18, where they keep company with hundreds
+of mareros who were crammed into Section 11 of that prison.46 The psychiatrist Rodolfo Kepfer, who worked at Etapa 2 at the time, said that when
+“the boys are upset, they get violent, obsessed, single-­minded like addicts,
+almost glazed over. After something happens, you stay away until they are
+calmed down.” Following the initial riot over the cell phones, Kepfer had unsuccessfully warned Winter Vidaurre and others to absent themselves for a
+few days after the youth rioted over their cell phones.
+Winter Vidaurre’s grotesque murder and the boys’ disdainful boasting
+caused widespread horror and panic. State authorities had to act forcefully
+to project a vision of tenacious pursuit of mareros. Close on the heels of
+Winter Vidaurre’s death, President Álvaro Colom, of the social democratic
+party Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (National Unity of Hope, une), announced that “careful police intelligence and the cooperation of citizens
+over time” had led to the discovery of the identity of no less a persona than
+the shadowy figure behind the bus extortion rackets that have left hundreds
+of bus drivers and assistants dead in recent years and months. Colom’s attorney general, Salvador Gándara, proclaimed Áxel Danilo Rodríguez, alias
+Smiley, a twenty-­two-­year-­old leader of m-­18, mastermind of these crimes
+and, in addition, the culprit in the recent murder of a well-­to-­do Korean
+couple.47 Only weeks later, police captured this “public enemy number one”
+following a gun fight in Zone 10 of Mixco.
+Smiley was already an urban legend, an example of what Foucault cited as
+the historic failure of the modern penal system to rehabilitate the criminal
+Democracy and Lock-­Up
+
+125
+
+and its success “in producing delinquency, a specific type.” A child of that
+system, Smiley was born in Colonia Primero de Julio in Zone 9, joined m-­18
+when he was ten, and soon thereafter was arrested for extortion and sent to
+the juvenile center Gaviotas, where he killed two young members of ms-­13
+during the large-­scale multiprison battle between ms-­13 and m-­18 in August
+2005. For that, the judge sentenced him to five additional years and moved
+him into the adult prison, even though he was a minor, from which he was
+released for “good behavior” shortly thereafter. He returned to the streets to
+become “public enemy number one.”
+His 2009 capture received wide publicity and high praise from and for
+President Colom. Upon his arrest, Smiley denied the charges. He stated that
+he was responsible for killing ms-­13 rivals in August 2005 but not the bus
+drivers or the Korean couple. He called Gándara a “thief just like me, except
+he doesn’t have tattoos.” At an unusual press conference held in the police
+precinct following his arrest, Smiley spoke and looked like the marero who
+had been fantasized about for decades. Covered with tattoos, low voiced,
+and short on words, in answer to reporters’ provocative and aggressive questions, he said that killing people satisfied him and that he was a thief. He
+was heard to have muttered, “The devil is my jefe.” A few months later, the
+judge dropped the charges concerning the bus drivers and the Korean couple
+for lack of evidence and instead charged Smiley with “bearing weapons” to
+keep him in preventive custody in Zone 18’s Centro Pre­ventivo.48
+Keeping up his momentum, Smiley held up his end as the perfect delinquent. One year later, he was part of an m-­18 uprising coordinated by cell
+phone calls from the newly reinforced high-­security cells at jail Fraijanes
+2 and from the Centro Preventivo, Zone 18, at precisely noon on April 23,
+2010. The mareros in both prisons took hostages and demanded the transfer of dozens of m-­18 members from Fraijanes 2 to the Centro Preventivo in
+Zone 18. After days of a standoff, the human rights ombudsman negotiated
+a settlement to “protect the lives of the hostages.” The hostages were released, and the m-­18 members taken in heavily guarded trucks in middle of
+the night to the Centro Preventivo, Zone 18, where their presence increased
+the number of m-­18 members from (according to the press) 272 to 366.49
+On and on it goes. The “transition to democracy” cannot succeed without citizen security, which, because of these tattooed young gangsters, cannot happen without ironclad prisons. Yet the deep social changes that might
+root out the causes of misery and crime cannot happen because of well-­
+dressed criminals in power who, as Smiley observed, do not have tattoos.
+These youth seem shackled into this sequence. Foucault frames the mas-
+
+126
+
+Chapter 4
+
+FIGURE 4.6 A member of MS-­1 3 cries out as Guatemalan soldiers in
+downtown Guatemala City haul him and a woman away, to where
+is not known, 2005. The fate of both youth remains unclear. Credit:
+Victor J. Blue.
+
+sive prison uprisings of the 1970s that inspired his thinking as “revolts, at
+the level of the body, against the very body of the prison.” He writes that “at
+issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic,
+too primitive or too efficient but its very materiality as an instrument and
+vector of power.”50 In sharp contrast to the revolts referred to by Foucault,
+such as the uprising in the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York
+in 1971, the conflicts in Guatemala’s prisons and juvenile centers in the early
+2000s have been the consequence of mareros and others fighting to buttress
+their places within the prison system. The prisons have sustained the delinquents and created the disorders that, however disruptive, also do not challenge the “vector of power” (see figure 4.6).
+Clean and Dirty Bodies
+Fighting crime has been central to political campaigns for decades.51 Elected
+to the presidency in 2011, the ex-­general and kaibil Otto Pérez Molina, member of the Partido Patriota (Patriotic Party, pp), has long fashioned himself as the tough guy, a man who once directed battles and now can stop
+“narcotraficantes, Maras and others.”52 His unsuccessful 2007 bid as well as
+the successful 2011 campaign focused on youth in televised advertisements
+in which every type of youth, and dozens of them—Maya, Ladino, male,
+female, clean shaven, neatly bearded, arty, middle class, worker, and student—cheerfully advocate and repeat over and over “mano dura,” including in Maya languages. No matter whether hip or church-­bound in their
+look, they contrast with those looming figures: the nonnational (LA), menacing, almost faceless because of tattoos, hypervisible, blue with ink mareros whose bodies call so much attention to themselves. The public cannot
+read the stories that the marking on the mareros’ bodies tell. All the public
+seems to see is what is said about symbols of Satan. The clean bodies of the
+Guatemalan youth in the television videos represent a new Guatemala, one
+disassociated from the tattooed body’s presumed representational schema
+of violence and chaos. Perhaps the images of the mareros’ bodies are meant
+to replace or confuse memories of the kaibiles’ blood-­smeared faces.
+
+128
+
+Chapter 4
+
+OPEN ENDING
+
+If something does not go well, you have to cover up the holes, like on the stage
+set. When an actor makes a mistake he goes on, like nothing happened. The public
+doesn’t know the script. You don’t have to go into all the mistakes.
+—Fu (Juan Manuel Orozco Ambrosio), ex-­marero, educator, and theater
+performer and producer, killed April 5, 2009; El Periódico, November 30, 2008
+
+I want to say that I knew Fu and Chuky [a second assassinated actor and ex–gang
+member], and they were great people and their death hurts me and because of this
+same violence I had to leave and live outside in a foreign country, but I will never
+forget my brave friends. I send my condolences to the family of Fu and Chuky from
+North Carolina.
+—Flakita de la Frutal, El Periódico, May 3, 2009
+
+T
+
+he political violence of the Guatemalan ruling elite is the result of calculated decisions about wealth and power, but mareros have no political
+power or wealth. Their violence is part of the unspoken story of subjectivities that have been created by the absence of positive means of power over
+life and by fear, terror, and the difficult material conditions that have been
+part of Guatemalan history. A tragic legacy of Guatemala’s late twentieth-­
+century history, the mareros of the twenty-­first century are not rebels: sadly,
+they adhere to the standards set by Guatemala’s ruling elites, drug lords,
+military leaders, and too many other influential people.
+The backbone of this book has been the backstory of the current gangs.
+In the course of the decades since the 1980s, they have been vilified and victimized, and some of their members have responded in kind. Today clikas
+of the Maras with names such as Rokers, Los Locos, and Los Metalles, and
+young people who hang out and call themselves mareros are in the city and
+
+5
+
+in most of the country’s twenty-­two departments. They have become central figures in the minds of many, and a political windfall for authoritarian
+political parties. As I have stressed, some of these youth may not be violent, but their preoccupation with violence and with death and their crimes
+against ordinary people alert us to a world in deep trouble. Young people
+who were once imagined as leading humanity into the great mythical future
+of the metanarrative of modernity, where “things are getting better, better
+all the time,” are now shoved into corners by the past. This book has argued
+that capitalist modernity’s promises have not borne fruit for youth, and it
+has traced the discourses and identities available to youth and the deeply violent and changing Guatemala in which these have arisen. “Youth” was once
+a temporal fix on capitalist development’s failure to deliver in present time;
+it was the quintessential symbol of a bright national future on an always-­
+distant and luminous horizon. “Youth” now seems to signal a marketing
+niche, the biggest in the world, and a horrific social problem.
+Fortunately, girls and boys and young women and men are more than
+metaphors, symbols, objects, or images. They are subjects who transcend
+the frozen singular categories of identity such as delinquent and street child
+that obscure our vision (see figure 5.1). Young killers and thieves might also
+be overworked day laborers, artists on the side, and anxious parents; they
+are not simply wind-­up toy soldiers without emotions. Many experience repulsion, yet feel immobilized inside of a persona named marero who must
+follow the lethal orders of others.
+That youth abandon gangs gives hope, and so does the harrowing reality
+that they do so despite incalculable difficulties. The Maras ms-­13 and m-­18
+“green-­light” (give the death warrant to) youth who leave except, it has been
+claimed, in cases of conversion to Pentecostalism or of special permissions
+for “good behavior,” which means that those who are requesting a “leave”
+have complied with orders and accomplished tasks that include homicide. It
+has been argued that youth who quit do so only in obedience to these Mara
+guidelines, and therefore only within the gang’s regime of law.1 But youth
+in fact do quit otherwise. Ex-­mareros turn up in all kinds of places through
+the help of adults who have made no pacts with Mara leaders, or even without any adult support. Ex–gang members can be found working in jobs in
+the informal and formal economies; they can show up as artists such as
+Carlos Pérez (see figure 5.2), and as street educators and youth advocates.
+That they desert the Maras even at the risk of green-­lighting brings to mind
+political activists of the early period who chose lives that they deemed meaningful despite knowing that they might die as a consequence.2 Drawn into
+macabre gangs to which they can become faithful unto death, these children
+130
+
+Chapter 5
+
+FIGURE 5.1 A young man in the bustle of Guatemala City’s Central Park,
+Zone 1, 1999. Youth are more complex than identifications such as
+“­marero,” “student,” and “worker,” or “Ladino,” “mestizo,” and “Maya”
+suggest. Credit: Andrea Aragón.
+
+FIGURE 5.2 Artist Carlos Pérez, ex-­marero, Guatemala, 2010. Credit:
+­Copyright © Donna DeCesare, 2010.
+
+and young women and men also can “decide for life”—certainly a kind of
+politics—though they might die for that.
+Exiting through Pentecostalism
+The Pentecostal ministry has had successes, and this is a topic on its own
+that is beyond the scope of this book. Based on interviews with ex–gang
+members, Robert Brenneman’s Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central
+America offers a fine study of conversion. My own experiences in the early
+2000s made clear to me that the Pentecostals’ methods and rhetoric have
+changed over time, and these now vary from approaches centered on the
+hell-­and-­brimstone punishments such as those meted out in the reform
+centers by the brutal staff of remar, to the patience and kindliness given
+by individual pastors and particular ministries. In the best of the Pentecostal
+centers, youth join gentle communities, take the enormous step of entering
+detoxification programs, and do not necessarily have a relationship to the
+political affiliations of some of the megachurches, such as the ultraconservative El Shaddai Ministries.3 Pentecostals have ministered to ex-­mareros
+over the years through clubs such as Rescate Maras Para Cristo and encouraged them to open small cooperative businesses such as bakeries. Often
+with the assistance of the Guatemalan government, international groups
+and Guatemalan companies, these non-­Catholic Christian groups have been
+involved in attempts to reform mareros since the 1980s, as chapter 4 notes.
+Moreover, because of the stated agreement between Pentecostals and some
+Mara leaders affirming that members who leave to convert will not be killed,
+in the minds of many young people the Pentecostals offer what seems to
+amount to a lifeboat. Youth sometimes join Pentecostal groups out of fear of
+the consequences of not joining (see figure 5.3). Ghastly public executions
+of mareros have added urgency to a safe passage out of the gangs. In 2005,
+a Pentecostal pastor recruited an entire clika of over thirty boys in the town
+of Palín, near the capital, after several men burned three mareros alive in a
+public “social cleansing.”4
+Conversion stories are profound and speak to the real agency of those
+who, in their words, “encounter Christ.” Once saved, young people give
+emotional accounts of parental and other adult mistreatment, public testimonies that help them become more sympathetic to themselves and others.
+Many become activists for the ministries that guide them. Yet the notion that
+youth abandon the Maras only through Pentecostal conversion suggests that
+youth will not leave without the assurance that they will not be killed, and
+without strong religious persuasion and adult control over their every step.
+Open Ending
+
+133
+
+FIGURE 5.3 Ex-­members of MS-­1 3 attending a Pentecostal service in
+Palín, a town not far from Guatemala City, 2005. They renounced the
+gang and joined the church after being frightened by the lynching of
+three of their members. Credit: Victor J. Blue.
+
+This account of “departure only through Pentecostal groups” is deceptive
+because gangs have sometimes green-­lighted ex-­members who converted.
+It is also misleading because it suggests that fear always paralyzes youth, or
+that they lack the internal and moral conviction necessary to make a radical
+break on their own without a group that gives them narratives, standards,
+and regulations to which they need to conform, and which are conformist.5
+These assumptions are belied by the fact that some youth just take a chance
+and desert, sometimes following the birth of their children, or in simple
+­disgust.6
+Just Quitting
+The Guatemalan therapist Herbert Sánchez spent years working with young
+men who had abandoned the Maras. In his conversations with me in the late
+1990s, he emphasized that youth he counseled had lived in conditions where
+“death and hatred” determine everyday life. In line with this, he sought out
+the writings of the Viennese psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl, a survivor of
+the Nazi concentration camps, because Sánchez believed that these youth
+had to “survive the death camps.” He drew on Frankl’s argument that one
+can endure in situations that are constantly life threatening and soul deadening, as long as one gives life meaning, and that otherwise one cannot
+live.7 He labored hard to create a therapeutic community where youth had
+to live at a “high level of consciousness” as he phrased it, and struggle to
+give meaning to their shattered lives through physical exertion, discussion,
+love, and positive deeds toward others. The meaning of meaning, he said in
+response to my asking, is catching a passion about and for life (see figure
+5.4).8 In his view this represents a conversion to one’s own life.
+Using a different vocabulary, ex-­mareros expressed this resolution to
+make lives that made sense to them in defiance of death’s apparent omnipotence. Alfredo got out after police killed his two brothers in a “social
+cleansing” operation in La Limonada. Still in La Limonada, Alfredo now
+works with an agency that involves neighborhood youth in sports and
+other recreational activities. Sitting inside a storefront drinking a beer, his
+eighteen-­year-­old friend and coworker José told me he left because he “got
+fed up. . . . The leaders thought they were tough but they got too tough, they
+would just say ‘liquidate Fulano’ [so-­and-­so]” and he simply did not want
+to murder people. In a different ambience, Luis, a young man in a Catholic
+group home, said with a smile that he quit because he “fell in love.” Another,
+Rolando, explains his quitting as “I just decided to”; “I became a parent,”
+he said, and did not “want my kid to have my life.” When I asked Rolando
+Open Ending
+
+135
+
+FIGURE 5.4 Street educators found these children living in the central
+bus terminal in Guatemala City and brought them to live in this group
+home, 1998. A number of former street children have developed organizations to alleviate the problems of homeless youth. Credit: Deborah T.
+Levenson.
+
+whether he feared being killed by his old gang, he made the important observation that the probability of being killed while in the gang was higher:
+he said he would be “dead already anyway, in the clika, because of someone
+who would have jumped me.”9
+Rosa (see chapter 3) was suicidal because she took the life of an elderly
+woman—“I was ready to, I don’t know, ready to kill myself. My heart ached,
+I went to live with an aunt.” Rosa stayed out of sight for a while and then
+found a job. She put her reason for leaving as “I killed. . . . I really needed to
+get out of the Maras. . . . I didn’t have friends. I hardly ever saw my sister,
+because she found out I’ve been in a Mara. She beat me. I didn’t think much
+when I was younger, but now I know what is right and what is wrong. . . .
+When I grow up, I want to be a doctor. I want to have children, and I am
+going to give them lots of advice and all the love that I wasn’t given.” Rosa
+left without the protection of the Pentecostals to pursue her goals of being
+a loving parent and becoming a doctor who could help people who had been
+in her situation.
+Not all youth who leave make it. Notwithstanding that some who abandon the Maras without playing by gang rules escape green-­lighting, many
+others do not. Evidence indicates that getting away from gang life by leaving
+the country is particularly offensive to gang leaders, perhaps because in
+doing so youth remove themselves from the total control of “territory.”
+One tragic example concerns Edgar Chocoy, who joined ms-­13 at twelve in
+Guatemala City and left it two years later because, in his words, he “was not
+cut out for it” and he did not like the violence.
+Years afterward, Edgar recounted to the U.S. immigration lawyer Kimberly Baker Medina that when he dropped out of ms-­13 in 2002 at fourteen,
+the gang demanded that he pay three thousand quetzals a week to not be
+killed—a particularly horrific example of necroliving. He would have had
+to engage in continual big-­time robbery to come up with such a large sum.
+Instead he hid in Guatemala City for a short period of time before he decided to leave the country and reunite with his mother, who had emigrated
+to Los Angeles almost a decade before, while he was still a toddler. Upon
+receiving news of his situation and his planned journey, she sent money to
+pay a coyote (the person paid to guide those without papers across borders).
+In kind with the hundreds of children who go north from Central America
+to search for or otherwise reunite with their mothers, he went through an
+uncertain and terrifying journey that involved crossing rivers; concealing
+himself; pretending to be Mexican; getting on buses in foreign lands; and
+defending himself from thieves, hunger, sickness, officials, and despair.10
+After he arrived in Los Angeles, life was hard. He had troubles with schoolOpen Ending
+
+137
+
+mates because of gang rivalries there and his presumed inclusion in one of
+them. First his school kicked him out, and after a spell, so did his mother,
+who hardly knew him and did not want “problems” because she had other
+children (siblings Edgar barely knew) in her house. Afraid to stay homeless
+in the street, alone without real friends, Edgar went to the apartment of an
+older Spanish-­speaking schoolmate, a gang member who proceeded to use
+Edgar as an armed drug runner. While he was there, and even while working
+for the gang—his resource for food and shelter—he found out about Homeboy Industries, a program founded by Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, which opens
+its arms to gang members. He went there for help, and there he decided to
+start the painful process of getting rid of his tattoos, tattoos that he saw as
+a major source of trouble because they identified him with gangs.
+Then in 2003, the Los Angeles police arrested him for possession of
+cocaine base. The charge was adjudicated because of Edgar’s age. However,
+because he had no papers, he was sent to an internment camp in Colorado
+to await deportation. In the camp he entered the loose weave of solidarity
+among detainees, and he learned about the possibility of applying for asylum, which he did through contacts he pursued while in detention. He met
+Kimberly Baker Medina, and together they built his case against deportation
+around the argument that he would be green-­lighted by ms-­13 if he returned
+to Guatemala, one the judge rejected despite letters and testimony from experts in Guatemala and in the United States who supported his claim, and
+in spite of an offer from an aunt in Virginia to care for him. In early 2004,
+two-­and-­one-­half weeks following his deportation back to Guatemala City,
+he was shot the first time he dared leave what was essentially a hiding place
+in a relative’s house in Villa Nueva, on the city’s edge. He had stepped out
+into the doorway to watch a religious procession pass, and a few moments
+later, he was dead. He was sixteen (see figure 5.5).11
+Edgar left Guatemala to save his life from the Mara, but U.S. laws and Los
+Angeles life made that impossible, and then a U.S. judge returned him to
+Guatemala marked to die because the judge ruled that Edgar did not “belong
+to a social group” that suffers persecution.12 It is a tragedy that illustrates
+that the gangs do carry out their own laws when they want to. It also shows
+that U.S. judges are capable of ignoring facts put right in front of their eyes:
+ex-­mareros are a persecuted group. But all that killed Edgar did not define
+him. He defined his own life by trying to find a way into a better one. His life
+is marked by his triumphs. Here is a youth of startling valor, one we must
+assume had a sense of self-­worth. He abandoned ms-­13 on his own and on
+his own tried to figure out a life for himself, a task that included crossing
+two borders, the entire length of Mexico and the Sonora Desert, and jour138
+
+Chapter 5
+
+FIGURE 5.5 Edgar Chocoy, an ex-­member of MS-­13 who fled to the United
+States to escape gang life, Colorado, 2003. Edgar was deported by a U.S.
+judge who rejected Edgar’s plea that he would be killed if returned to
+Guatemala. He was shot to death by MS-­13 shortly after arriving back in
+Guatemala. Credit: Kimberly Baker Medina.
+
+neying into a huge strange city, without papers, to a mother he hardly knew.
+In a new country, without speaking English, and through people he barely
+knew, he found resources in his Herculean effort to establish traction in his
+constantly falling-­apart world. What more can we ask of a young person,
+stigmatized at every turn, alone, and without the named identities, signposts, and spaces given by citizenship, work, school, or family?
+Disidentifying: “The Public Doesn’t Know the Script”
+Eight years before he died, Juan Manuel Orozco Ambrosio, known as Fu,
+got out of m-­18 when he joined a theater group that had arrived in the barrio where he lived. “At first,” Fu told a friend, “I led a double life. During the
+day I would be at rehearsals and at night in the rollo [the gang activities].”
+Subsequently, at nineteen, he left m-­18 for good because he had found a real
+passion, what Herbert Sánchez would call a meaning. Fu explained, “With
+theater I could leave who I was for a while and put myself in someone else’s
+life. It was therapy. In these journeys I found myself.” He pursued a career in
+performing arts through the organization Caja Lúdica, an artistic collective
+devoted to, in its own words, “promoting a culture of peace among people
+and demanding an end to violence and impunity.”13 Another ex-­marero in
+Caja Lúdica described its work in an interview with a journalist in 2009. “We
+want to touch the human fiber in each person, to awaken that side that has
+been lost in the system. We have to look at ourselves, to recognize ourselves
+and see the power we have.”14
+Started in 2000 by theater people who had done similar work in Colombia, Caja Lúdica encourages youth to think about the history that generates
+the violent crucible of their “coming of age” so that they can emerge from
+subjugation (see figure 5.6). There exist other drama troupes in Guatemala
+City that also seek out gang members and other barrio youth to fashion true
+stories on a stage, whether that be a field or a street. These groups have
+helped generate skits based on the most gruesome truths about the war. In
+these, children reenact what happened to their parents and grandparents,
+and to that degree these young performers reclaim the “unclaimed experience” at the heart of trauma.15
+A young woman in her teens in the Zone 12 settlement of Mezquital,
+which started in 1985, the same year the Maras came out in public, Estela
+is a street performer. She reminds one of Maritza (a member of the Maras
+in the 1980s; see chapter 3). She can tell it like it is: “We have the ability to
+change this country, and stop all this aggression that we’re living through.
+The future is in our hands.” “Mezquital” she explains to visitors,
+140
+
+Chapter 5
+
+was created by people invading the land when they came here as refugees
+during the war. People fled here and raised their children here. The violence stems from that. . . . After the war there were a lot of traumatized
+young people with lots of violence in their heads and they kill each other.
+So it is dangerous.
+It’s important for everyone [to have the chance to express themselves],
+but we live in a culture that says we can’t do anything. Through [theater]
+you find out that everyone has the same value. When you see others on
+stilts or juggling, you feel better straightaway because you see that it’s
+possible.16
+For Fu and other ex-­mareros, the world of playing has offered a sensibility
+and mechanisms to develop themselves through the re-­creation of life
+itself—settings, characters, scripts, plots, surprise endings, varied clothing, and new faces through makeup, dance, music, and—on stilts—a new
+height, literally. Fu flourished in it. He even traveled to Germany as part of
+a performing arts troupe, and m-­18 had accepted this new life and ceased
+to brand him a traitor. But the old endless rivalry between m-­18 with ms-­13
+gave him problems. In 2008, Fu was left paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair after an ms-­13 member, who had participated in a workshop Fu ran,
+shot him. His response was to continue his theater work—“no reason to remain seated,” he joked from his wheelchair—as a script writer and director
+of educational comedies, and he opened a business that ran parties for children to support himself and his family (see figure 5.7).17
+Fu was shot to death as he sat in his wheelchair playing cards with a
+group of children outside his house on April 5, 2009, and a few weeks later,
+on May 23, two other members of Caja Lúdica were killed. These were ex-­
+mareros Saulo Fernando Gómez Estrada, known as both “el Chuky” and
+Solo Estilos, who break danced and designed a line of clothes that he was
+about to trademark; and Nexus Pineda, an ex-­marero nicknamed El Gordo
+who had established a community youth center in the Mario Alioto, a neighborhood in Guatemala City named after a student leader and political activist
+in the 1980s who was bludgeoned to death by police. Ten days later, shortly
+after a memorial for Fu, El Gordo, and Chuky, Caja Lúdica break dancers,
+actors, stilt walkers, and musicians Osmar Fernando Leiva Mejía, René Alexander Pérez Cruz, José Omar Pérez Cruz, Nelson Leonel Aguirre Tobar, and
+Juan María López were gunned down.18
+Why? Although it is possible that mareros killed them because they had
+left their Maras, all these youth had been out of the gangs for years. What coincided with their deaths was the growing success of theatrical groups such
+Open Ending
+
+141
+
+FIGURE 5.6 A parade performance presented by one of the several youth
+theater groups in downtown Guatemala City, 2007. Credit: Copyright ©
+Donna DeCesare, 2007.
+
+FIGURE 5.7 Ex-marero Juan Manuel Orozco Ambrosio, known as “Fu,”
+photographed playing his part in an evening street performance by the
+theatre group Caja Lúdica. Courageous and determined, Fu helped create
+critical spaces and autonomous voices for youth. Credit: Copyright © Donna
+DeCesare, 2007.
+
+as Caja Lúdica in barrios. Some see these killings in the light of that. Following a third memorial service, one young person in the theater group said that
+the dead youth “represented a threat to those who had economic interests in
+their neighborhoods, who exploit youth. Their murders were also a way to
+frighten others who might want to make change in these zones.”19
+According to the local official in the area, “various men who traveled in a
+vehicle and jumped out and opened fire” carried out the murders in May and
+April.20 Youth who write their own scripts—young women such as Estela
+and young men turning into adults such as Fu—who leave the Mara and
+know that they can rewrite the play, and that they are authors behind the
+scenes, are politically dangerous. By animating life so, they pose a threat to
+the micropower of death used to run neighborhoods.
+This short final chapter concludes the book but not the history. Movements against domination and injustice always appear at one point or another, and so will the counterparts of Edgar, Fu, Estela, and other young
+people who have their own thoughts and their own moments in time.
+These youths, and not the celebrated and the fictional obedient La Juventud of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national fantasies, need to be our
+heroes. However inconspicuous they are in the grand scale of things, they
+push against the grain of despondency and they delineate the possibility,
+once again, of a different Guatemala, with new lines.
+
+144
+
+Chapter 5
+
+AUTH O R'S N OT E
+
+A s a student o f history, having completed a master's degree and PhD
+in the discipline, I am grateful for all I learned from my professors
+and from the thousands of texts I studied. But I did not gain the
+perspective presented in this book from those professors or studies.
+This came from outside the academy.
+My mother was part Indian, most likely Cherokee, born in Jop­
+lin, Missouri. Unenrolled and orphaned, having lost her mother to
+tuberculosis at age four and with an Irish father who was itinerant
+and alcoholic, she grew up neglected and often homeless along with
+a younger brother. Picked up by authorities on the streets of Harrah,
+Oklahoma, the town to which their father had relocated the family,
+she was placed in foster homes where she was abused, expected to be
+a servant, and would run away. When she was sixteen, she met and
+married my father, of Scots-Irish settler heritage, eighteen, and a
+high school dropout who worked as a cowboy on a sprawling cattle
+ranch in the Osage Nation. I was the last of their four children. As
+a sharecropper family in Canadian County, Oklahoma, we moved
+from one cabin to another. I grew up in the midst of rural Native
+communities in the former treaty territory of the Southern Cheyenne
+and Arapaho Nations that had been allotted and opened to settlers
+in the late nineteenth century. Nearby was the federal Indian board­
+ing school at Concho. Strict segregation ruled a mong the Black,
+white, and Indian towns, churches, and schools in Oklahoma, and I
+had little interchange with Native people. My mother was ashamed
+of being part Indian. She died of alcoholism.
+In California during the r9 6os, I was active in the civil rights,
+anti-apartheid, anti-Vietnam War, and women's liberation move­
+ments, and ultimately, the pan-Indian movement that some labeled
+
+xi
+
+xii
+
+Author's Note
+
+Red Power. I was recruited to work on Native issues in 1970 by the
+remarkable Tuscarora traditionalist organizer Mad Bear Anderson,
+who insisted that I must embrace my Native heritage, however frag­
+ile it might be. Although hesitant at first, following the Wounded
+Knee siege of 1973 I began to work-locally, around the country,
+and internationally-with the American Indian Movement and the
+International Indian Treaty Council. I also began serving as an ex­
+pert witness in court cases, including that of the Wounded Knee de­
+fendants, bringing me into discussions with Lakota Sioux elders and
+activists. Based in San Francisco during that volatile and historic
+period, I completed my doctorate in history in 1974 and then took
+a position teaching in a new Native American studies program. My
+dissertation was on the history of land tenure in New Mexico, and
+during 1978-198 1 I was visiting director of Native American stud­
+ies at the University of New Mexico. There I worked collaboratively
+with the All Indian Pueblo Council, Mescalero Apache Nation, Na­
+vajo Nation, and the Dinebe'iina Nahiilna be Agha'diit'ahii (DNA)
+People's Legal Services, as well as with Native students, faculty, and
+communities, in developing a research institute and a seminar train­
+ing program in economic development.
+I have lived with this book for six years, starting over a dozen
+times before I settled on a narrative thread. Invited to write this
+ReVisioning American History series title, I was given parameters:
+it was to be intellectually rigorous but relatively brief and written
+accessibly so it would engage multiple audiences. I had grave misgiv­
+ings after having agreed to this ambitious project. Although it was
+to be a history of the United States as experienced by the Indigenous
+inhabitants, how could I possibly do justice to that varied experience
+over a span of two centuries? How could I make it comprehensible
+to the general reader who would likely have little knowledge of Na­
+tive American history on the one hand, but might consciously or
+unconsciously have a set narrative of US history on the other? Since
+I was convinced of the inherent importance of the project, I per­
+sisted, reading or rereading books and articles by North American
+Indigenous scholars, novelists, and poets, as well as unpublished dis­
+sertations, speeches, and testimonies, truly an extraordinary body
+of work.
+
+Author's Note
+
+I 've come to realize that a new periodization of US history is
+needed that traces the Indigenous experience as opposed to the fol­
+lowing standard division: Colonial, Revolutionary, Jacksonian, Civil
+War and Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age,
+Overseas Imperialism, Progressivism, World War I , Depression,
+New Deal, World War II, Cold War, and Vietnam War, followed by
+contemporary decades. I altered this periodization to better reflect
+Indigenous experience but not as radically as needs to be done. This
+is an issue much discussed in current Native American scholarship.
+I also wanted to set aside the rhetoric of race, not because race
+and racism are unimportant but to emphasize that Native peoples
+were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples­
+hundreds of nations-not as a racial or ethnic group. "Coloniza­
+tion," "dispossession," "settler colonialism," "genocide"-these are
+the terms that drill to the core of US history, to the very source of the
+country's existence.
+The charge of genocide, once unacceptable by establishment aca­
+demic and political classes when applied to the United States, has
+gained currency as evidence of it has mounted, but it is too often ac­
+companied by an assumption of disappearance. So I realized it was
+crucial to make the reality and significance of Indigenous peoples'
+survival clear throughout the book. Indigenous survival as peoples
+is due to centuries of resistance and storytelling passed through the
+generations, and I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dy­
+namic, not passive. Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is re­
+sistance: non-Indians must know this in order to more accurately
+understand the history of the United States.
+My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about
+history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples' experience, and
+the meaning and future of the United States itself.
+A note on terminology: I use " Indigenous," " Indian," and "Native"
+interchangeably in the text. Indigenous individuals and peoples in
+North America on the whole do not consider "Indian" a slur. Of
+course, all citizens of Native nations much prefer that their nations'
+names in their own language be used, such as Dine ( Navajo), Haude­
+nosaunee ( Iroquois), Tsalagi (Cherokee), and Anishinaabe (Ojibway,
+
+xiii
+
+xiv
+
+Author's Note
+
+Chippewa). I have used some of the correct names combined with
+more familiar usages, such as " Sioux" and " Navajo." Except in ma­
+terial that is quoted, I don't use the term "tribe." " Community,"
+"people," and " nation" are used instead and interchangeably. I also
+refrain from using "America" and "American" when referring only
+to the United States and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic
+terms annoy people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are,
+after all, also Americans. I use "United States" as a noun and "US"
+as an adjective to refer to the country and "US Americans" for its
+citizens.
+
+I NT R ODU CTI O N
+
+TH I S L A N D
+
+We are here to educate, not forgive.
+We are here to enlighten, not accuse.
+-Willie Johns, Brighton Seminole Reservation, Florida
+
+Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of
+America-"from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters"-are
+interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American
+Indians. 1 They cry out for their stories to be heard through their de­
+scendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded
+and how it came to be as it is today.
+It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the
+Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere,
+were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity inter­
+rupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction. 2 Choices were
+made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself-the
+moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over­
+heated. To learn and know this history is both a necessity and a
+responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.
+What historian D avid Chang has written about the land that
+became Oklahoma applies to the whole United States: "Nation, race,
+and class converged in land."3 Everything in US history is about the
+land-who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained
+its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commod­
+ity ( "real estate" ) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the
+market.
+US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though
+
+·
+
+2
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+often termed "racist" or "discriminatory," are rarely depicted as
+what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of
+colonialism-settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe
+writes, "The question of genocide is never far from discussions of set­
+tler colonialism. Land is life-or, at least, land is necessary for life."4
+The history of the United States is a history of settler colonial­
+ism-the founding of a state based on the ideology of white su­
+premacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy
+of genocide and land theft. Those who seek history with an upbeat
+ending, a history of redemption and reconciliation, may look around
+and observe that such a conclusion is not visible, not even in utopian
+dreams of a better society.
+Writing US history from an Indigenous peoples' perspective re­
+quires rethinking the consensual national narrative. That narrative
+is wrong or deficient, not in its facts, dates, or details but rather in
+its essence. Inherent in the myth we've been taught is an embrace of
+settler colonialism and genocide. The myth persists, not for a lack
+of free speech or poverty of information but rather for an absence
+of motivation to ask questions that challenge the core of the scripted
+narrative of the origin story. How might acknowledging the reality
+of US history work to transform society? That is the central question
+this book pursues.
+Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a sim­
+ple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the
+United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. In­
+variably most draw the approximate present shape of the United
+States from the Atlantic to the Pacific-the continental territory not
+fully appropriated until a century after independence. What became
+independent in 1 78 3 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the
+Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed be­
+cause they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call
+this a Rorschach test of unconscious "manifest destiny," embedded
+in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the
+world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and
+power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previ­
+ously been terra nullius, a land without people.
+Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" celebrates that the
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+land belongs to everyone, reflecting the unconscious manifest des­
+tiny we live with. But the extension of the United States from sea to
+shining sea was the intention and design of the country's founders.
+" Free" land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. Many
+were slave owners who desired limitless land for lucrative cash crops.
+After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US
+Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest
+Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing
+the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for
+gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory ( " Ohio Coun­
+try" ) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain
+had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1 76 3.
+In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler-state's
+intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating:
+" However our present interests may restrain us within our own lim­
+its, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our
+rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover
+the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people
+speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar
+laws." This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in
+the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or domi­
+nating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pa­
+cific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.
+Origin narratives form the vital core of a people's unifying iden­
+tity and of the values that guide them. In the United States, the
+founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state in­
+volves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with
+God to take the land. That part of the origin story is supported and
+reinforced by the Columbus myth and the " Doctrine of Discovery."
+According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European
+nations acquired title to the lands they "discovered" and the Indig­
+enous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europe­
+ans arrived and claimed it. 5 As law professor Robert A. Williams
+observes about the Doctrine of Discovery:
+Responding to the requirements of a paradoxical age of Re­
+naissance and Inquisition, the West's first modern discourses
+
+3
+
+4
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+of conquest articulated a vision of all humankind united
+under a rule of law discoverable solely by human reason. Un­
+fortunately for the American Indian, the West's first tentative
+steps towards this noble vision of a Law of Nations contained
+a mandate for Europe's subjugation of all peoples whose radi­
+cal divergence from European-derived norms of right conduct
+signified their need for conquest and remediation. 6
+The Columbus myth suggests that from US independence on­
+ward, colonial settlers saw themselves as part of a world system of
+colonization. " Columbia," the poetic, Latinate name used in refer­
+ence to the United States from its founding throughout the nine­
+teenth century, was based on the name of Christopher Columbus.
+The " Land of Columbus" was-and still is-represented by the im­
+age of a woman in sculptures and paintings, by institutions such as
+Columbia University, and by countless place names, including that
+of the national capital, the District of Columbia. 7 The 1798 hymn
+" Hail, Columbia" was the early national anthem and is now used
+whenever the vice president of the United States makes a public ap­
+pearance, and Columbus Day is still a federal holiday despite Co­
+lumbus never having set foot on the continent claimed by the United
+States.
+Traditionally, historians of the United States hoping to have suc­
+cessful careers in academia and to author lucrative school textbooks
+became protectors of this origin myth. With the cultural upheavals
+in the academic world during the 19 60s, engendered by the civil
+rights movement and student activism, historians came to call for
+objectivity and fairness in revising interpretations of US history.
+They warned against moralizing, urging instead a dispassionate
+and culturally relative approach. Historian Bernard Sheehan, in an
+influential essay, called for a "cultural conflict" understanding of
+Native-Euro-American relations in the early United States, writing
+that this approach "diffuses the locus of guilt."8 In striving for " bal­
+ance," however, historians spouted platitudes: "There were good
+and bad people on both sides." "American culture is an amalgama­
+tion of all its ethnic groups." "A frontier is a zone of interaction be­
+tween cultures, not merely advancing European settlements."
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+L ater, trendy postmodernist studies insisted on Indigenous
+"agency" under the guise of individual and collective empowerment,
+making the casualties of colonialism responsible for their own de­
+mise. Perhaps worst of all, some claimed (and still claim) that the
+colonizer and colonized experienced an "encounter" and engaged
+in "dialogue," thereby masking reality with justifications and ratio­
+nalizations-in short, apologies for one-sided robbery and murder.
+In focusing on "cultural change" and "conflict between cultures,"
+these studies avoid fundamental questions about the formation of
+the United States and its implications for the present and future.
+This approach to history allows one to safely put aside present re­
+sponsibility for continued harm done by that past and the questions
+of reparations, restitution, and reordering society. 9
+Multiculturalism became the cutting edge of post-civil-rights­
+movement US history revisionism. For this scheme to work-and
+affirm US historical progress-Indigenous nations and communities
+had to be left out of the picture. As territorially and treaty-based
+peoples in North America, they did not fit the grid of multicultur­
+alism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate
+oppressed racial group, while colonized Mexican Americans and
+Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously
+called "Hispanic" or " Latino." The multicultural approach empha­
+sized the "contributions" of individuals from oppressed groups to
+the country's assumed greatness. Indigenous peoples were thus cred­
+ited with corn, beans, buckskin, log cabins, parkas, maple syrup,
+canoes, hundreds of place names, Thanksgiving, and even the con­
+cepts of democracy and federalism. But this idea of the gift-giving
+Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United
+States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the
+very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire
+continent and its resources. The fundamental unresolved issues of
+Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the
+premises of multiculturalism.
+With multiculturalism, manifest destiny won the day. As an
+example, in 1994 , Prentice Hall (part of Pearson Education) pub­
+lished a new college-level US history textbook, authored by four
+members of a new generation of revisionist historians. These radical
+
+5
+
+6
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+social historians are all brilliant scholars with posts in prestigious
+universities. The book's title reflects the intent of its authors and
+publisher: Out of Many: A History of the American People. The ori­
+gin story of a supposedly unitary nation, albeit now multicultural,
+remained intact. The original cover design featured a multicolored
+woven fabric-this image meant to stand in place of the discredited
+"melting pot." Inside, facing the title page, was a photograph of a
+Navajo woman, dressed formally in velvet and adorned with heavy
+sterling silver and turquoise j ewelry. With a traditional Navaj o
+dwelling, a hogan, in the background, the woman was shown kneel­
+ing in front of a traditional loom, weaving a nearly finished rug.
+The design? The Stars and Stripes! The authors, upon hearing my
+objection and explanation that Navajo weavers make their livings
+off commissioned work that includes the desired design, responded:
+" But it's a real photograph." To the authors' credit, in the second
+edition they replaced the cover photograph and removed the Navajo
+picture inside, although the narrative text remains unchanged.
+Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writ­
+ing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position
+and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest des­
+tiny. The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North
+America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the ex­
+pansion of European corporations, backed by government armies,
+into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and re­
+sources. Settler colonialism is a genocidal policy. Native nations and
+communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and
+collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism
+using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the mod­
+ern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and
+what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought for
+survival as peoples. The objective of US colonialist authorities was
+to terminate their existence as peoples-not as random individuals.
+This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with
+premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal
+of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political
+entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process.
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed
+by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried
+their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that
+they have survived as peoples .
+To say that the United States i s a colonialist settler-state is not
+to make an accusation but rather to face historical reality, without
+which consideration not much in US history makes sense, unless
+Indigenous peoples are erased. But Indigenous nations, through re­
+sistance, have survived and bear witness to this history. In the era
+of worldwide decolonization in the second half of the twentieth cen­
+tury, the former colonial powers and their intellectual apologists
+mounted a counterforce, often called neocolonialism, from which
+multiculturalism and postmodernism emerged. Although much
+revisionist US history reflects neocolonialist strategy-an attempt
+to accommodate new realities in order to retain the dominance­
+neocolonialist methods signal victory for the colonized. Such ap­
+proaches pry off a lid long kept tightly fastened . One result has been
+the presence of significant numbers of Indigenous scholars in US
+universities who are changing the terms of analysis. The main chal­
+lenge for scholars in revising US history in the context of colonialism
+is not lack of information, nor is it one of methodology. Certainly
+difficulties with documentation are no more problematic than they
+are in any other area of research. Rather, the source of the problems
+has been the refusal or inability of US historians to comprehend the
+nature of their own history, US history. The fundamental problem is
+the absence of the colonial framework.
+Through economic penetration of Indigenous societies, the Eu­
+ropean and Euro-American colonial powers created economic de­
+pendency and imbalance of trade, then incorporated the Indigenous
+nations into spheres of influence and controlled them indirectly or
+as protectorates, with indispensable use of Christian missionaries
+and alcohol. In the case of US settler colonialism, land was the pri­
+mary commodity. With such obvious indicators of colonialism at
+work, why should so many interpretations of US political-economic
+development be convoluted and obscure, avoiding the obvious? To
+some extent, the twentieth-century emergence of the field of "US
+
+7
+
+8
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+West" or " Borderlands" history has been forced into an incomplete
+and flawed settler-colonialist framework. The father of that field of
+history, Frederick Jackson Turner, confessed as much in 1 9 0 1 : " Our
+colonial system did not start with the Spanish War [1 8 9 8 ] ; the U. S .
+had had a colonial history and policy from the beginning o f the
+Republic; but they have been hidden under the phraseology of 'inter­
+state migration' and 'territorial organization."' 1 0
+Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence
+or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over
+their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that
+fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to ac­
+complish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes
+violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable
+product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that vio­
+lence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer,
+blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonial­
+ism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its
+beginnings a genocidal tendency.
+The term "genocide" was coined following the Shoah, or Ho­
+locaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations
+convention adopted in 194 8 : the UN Convention on the Prevention
+and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not
+retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 19 8 8 ,
+when the U S Senate ratified it. The terms of the genocide convention
+are also useful tools for historical analysis of the effects of colonial­
+ism in any era. In the convention, any one of five acts is considered
+genocide if "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
+national, ethnical, racial or religious group":
+killing members of the group;
+causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
+deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
+calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
+or in part;
+imposing measures intended to prevent births within the
+group;
+forcibly transferring children of the group to another group . 1 1
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+9
+
+In the 1990s, the term "ethnic cleansing" became a useful descrip­
+tive term for genocide.
+US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be
+understood without dealing with the genocide that the United
+States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial pe­
+riod through the founding of the United States and continuing in
+the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual
+abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of In­
+digenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of
+Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence
+of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebra­
+tion of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the con­
+sciousness of US Americans.
+Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the geno­
+cide convention. In the case of the British North American colo­
+nies and the United States, not only extermination and removal
+were practiced but also the disappearing of the prior existence of
+Indigenous peoples-and this continues to be perpetuated in local
+histories. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O'Brien names this
+practice of writing Indians out of existence "firsting and lasting."
+All over the continent, local histories, monuments, and signage nar­
+rate the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first
+dwelling, first everything, as if there had never been occupants who
+thrived in those places before Euro-Americans. On the other hand,
+the national narrative tells of "last" Indians or last tribes, such as
+"the last of the Mohicans," " Ishi, the last Indian," and End of the
+Trail, as a famous sculpture by James Earle Fraser is titled.12
+Documented policies of genocide on the part of US administra­
+tions can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jackso­
+nian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern
+California; the post-Civil War era of the so-called Indian wars in
+the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period, all of which are
+discussed in the following chapters . Cases of genocide carried out
+as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the
+oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1 8 7 3
+is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, " We must
+act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their
+
+10
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault,
+the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female,
+or even discriminate as to age." 13 As Patrick Wolfe has noted, the
+peculiarity of settler colonialism is that the goal is elimination of
+Indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers.
+That project is not limited to government policy, but rather involves
+all kinds of agencies, voluntary militias, and the settlers themselves
+acting on their own . 14
+In the wake of the US 1950s termination and relocation poli­
+cies, a pan-Indigenous movement arose in tandem with the power­
+ful African American civil rights movement and the broad-based
+social justice and antiwar movements of the 19 60s. The Indigenous
+rights movement succeeded in reversing the US termination pol­
+icy. However, repression, armed attacks, and legislative attempts
+to undo treaty rights began again in the late 1970s, giving rise to
+the international Indigenous movement, which greatly broadened
+the support for Indigenous sovereignty and territorial rights in the
+United States.
+The early twenty-first century has seen increased exploitation
+of energy resources begetting new pressures on Indigenous lands.
+Exploitation by the largest corporations, often in collusion with
+politicians at local, state, and federal levels, and even within some
+Indigenous governments, could spell a final demise for Indigenous
+land bases and resources. Strengthening Indigenous sovereignty and
+self-determination to prevent that result will take general public
+outrage and demand, which in turn will require that the general
+population, those descended from settlers and immigrants, know
+their history and assume responsibility. Resistance to these power­
+ful corporate forces continues to have profound implications for US
+socioeconomic and political development and the future.
+There are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous
+communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people
+in the United States. These are the descendants of the fifteen mil­
+lion original inhabitants of the land, the majority of whom were
+farmers who lived in towns. The US establishment of a system of
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+Indian reservations stemmed from a long British colonial practice
+in the Americas. In the era of US treaty-making from independence
+to 1 8 7 1 , the concept of the reservation was one of the Indigenous
+nation reserving a narrowed land base from a much larger one in ex­
+change for US government protection from settlers and the provision
+of social services. In the late nineteenth century, as Indigenous resis­
+tance was weakened, the concept of the reservation changed to one
+of land being carved out of the public domain of the United States
+as a benevolent gesture, a "gift" to the Indigenous peoples. Rheto­
+ric changed so that reservations were said to have been "given" or
+"created" for Indians. With this shift, Indian reservations came to
+be seen as enclaves within state' boundaries. Despite the political
+and economic reality, the impression to many was that Indigenous
+people were taking a free ride on public domain.
+Beyond the land bases within the limits of the 3 10 federally rec­
+ognized reservations-among 554 Indigenous groups-Indigenous
+land, water, and resource rights extend to all federally acknowl­
+edged Indigenous communities within the borders of the United
+States. This is the case whether "within the original or subsequently
+acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits
+of a state," and includes all allotments as well as rights-of-way run­
+ning to and from them. 1 5 Not all the federally recognized Indigenous
+nations have land bases beyond government buildings, and the lands
+of some Native nations, including those of the Sioux in the Dakotas
+and Minnesota and the Ojibwes in Minnesota, have been parceled
+into multiple reservations, while some fifty Indigenous nations that
+had been removed to Oklahoma were entirely allotted-divided by
+the federal government into individual Native-owned parcels. Attor­
+ney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:
+In 1 8 8 1 , Indian landholdings in the United States had plum­
+meted to 156 million acres. By 1 9 3 4 , only about 50 million
+acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington)
+as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1 8 87. During
+World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for
+military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias
+
+11
+
+12
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during
+the termination era of the 1950s. By 1 9 5 5 , the indigenous land
+base had shrunk to just 2. 3 percent of its original size. 16
+As a result of federal land sales, seizures, and allotments, most
+reservations are severely fragmented. Each parcel of tribal, trust,
+and privately held land is a separate enclave under multiple laws
+and jurisdictions. The Dine (Navajo) Nation has the largest con­
+temporary contiguous land base among Native nations: nearly six­
+teen million acres, or nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, the
+size of West Virginia. Each of twelve other reservations is larger
+than Rhode Island, which comprises nearly eight hundred thou­
+sand acres, or twelve hundred square miles, and each of nine other
+reservations is larger than Delaware, which covers nearly a million
+and a half acres, or two thousand square miles. Other reservations
+have land bases of fewer than thirty-two thousand acres, or fifty
+square miles. 17 A number of independent nation-states with seats in
+the United Nations have less territory and smaller populations than
+some Indigenous nations of North America.
+Following World War II, the United States was at war with much of
+the world, just as it was at war with the Indigenous peoples of North
+America in the nineteenth century. This was total war, demand­
+ing that the enemy surrender unconditionally or face annihilation.
+Perhaps it was inevitable that the earlier wars against Indigenous
+peoples, if not acknowledged and repudiated, ultimately would in­
+clude the world. According to the origin narrative, the United States
+was born of rebellion against oppression-against empire-and
+thus is the product of the first anticolonial revolution for national
+liberation. The narrative flows from that fallacy: the broadening
+and deepening of democracy; the Civil War and the ensuing "second
+revolution," which ended slavery; the twentieth-century mission to
+save Europe from itself-twice; and the ultimately triumphant fight
+against the scourge of communism, with the United States inheriting
+the difficult and burdensome task of keeping order in the world. It's
+a narrative of progress. The 19 60s social revolutions, ignited by the
+African American liberation movement, complicated the origin nar-
+
+Introduction: This Land
+
+13
+
+rative, but its structure and periodization have been left intact. After
+the 19 60s, historians incorporated women, African Americans, and
+immigrants as contributors to the commonweal. Indeed, the revised
+narrative produced the "nation of immigrants" framework, which
+obscures the US practice of colonization, merging settler colonial­
+ism with immigration to metropolitan centers during and after the
+industrial revolution. Native peoples, to the extent that they were in­
+cluded at all, were renamed " First Americans" and thus themselves
+cast as distant immigrants.
+The provincialism and national chauvinism of US history produc­
+tion make it difficult for effective revisions to gain authority. Schol­
+ars, both Indigenous and a few non-Indigenous, who attempt to
+rectify the distortions, are labeled advocates, and their findings are
+rejected for publication on that basis. Indigenous scholars look to
+research and thinking that has emerged in the rest of the European­
+colonized world. To understand the historical and current experi­
+ences of Indigenous peoples in the United States, these thinkers and
+writers draw upon and creatively apply the historical materialism of
+Marxism, the liberation theology of Latin America, Frantz Fanon's
+psychosocial analyses of the effects of colonialism on the colonizer
+and the colonized, and other approaches, including development
+theory and postmodern theory. While not abandoning insights
+gained from those sources, due to the "exceptional" nature of US
+colonialism among nineteenth-century colonial powers, Indigenous
+scholars and activists are engaged in exploring new approaches.
+This book claims to be a history of the United States f� om an
+Indigenous peoples' perspective but there is no such thing as a col­
+lective Indigenous peoples' perspective, j ust as there is no mono­
+lithic Asian or European or African peoples' perspective. This is
+not a history of the vast civilizations and communities that thrived
+and survived between the Gulf of Mexico and Canada and between
+the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. Such histories have been writ­
+ten, and are being written by historians of Dine, Lakota, Mohawk,
+Tlingit, Muskogee, Anishinaabe, Lumbee, Inuit, Kiowa, Cherokee,
+Hopi, and other Indigenous communities and nations that have
+survived colonial genocide. This book attempts to tell the story of
+
+14
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+the United States as a colonialist settler-state, one that, like colonial­
+ist European states, crushed and subjugated the original civilizations
+in the territories it now rules. Indigenous peoples, now in a colonial
+relationship with the United States, inhabited and thrived for mil­
+lennia before they were displaced to fragmented reservations and
+economically decimated.
+This is a history of the United States.
+
+ON E
+
+F O L L O W THE C O R N
+
+Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans
+were living in balance with Naturebut they had their thumbs on the scale.
+-Charles C. Mann, I49I
+
+Humanoids existed on Earth for around four million years as hunt­
+ers and gatherers living in small communal groups that through
+their movements found and populated every continent. Some two
+hundred thousand years ago, human societies, having originated in
+Sub-Saharan Africa, began migrating in all directions, and their de­
+scendants eventually populated the globe. Around twelve thousand
+years ago, some of these people began staying put and developed ag­
+riculture-mainly women who domesticated wild plants and began
+cultivating others.
+As a birthplace of agriculture and the towns and cities that fol­
+lowed, America is ancient, not a "new world ." Domestication of
+plants took place around the globe in seven locales during approxi­
+mately the same period, around 8500 BC. Three of the seven were in
+the Americas, all based on corn: the Valley of Mexico and Central
+America (Mesoamerica); the South- Central Andes in South Amer­
+ica; and eastern North America. The other early agricultural cen­
+ters were the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River systems, Sub-Saharan
+Africa, the Yellow River of northern China, and the Yangtze River
+of southern China. During this time, many of the same human so­
+cieties began domesticating animals. Only in the American conti­
+nents was the parallel domestication of animals eschewed in favor
+of game management, a kind of animal husbandry different from
+
+15
+
+16
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+that developed in Africa and Asia. In these seven areas, agriculture­
+based "civilized" societies developed in symbiosis with hunting,
+fishing, and gathering peoples on their peripheries, gradually envel­
+oping many of the latter into the realms of their civilizations, except
+for those in regions inhospitable to agriculture.
+
+T H E SAC R E D CO R N F O O D
+
+Indigenous American agriculture was based o n corn. Traces o f cul­
+tivated corn have been identified in central Mexico dating back ten
+thousand years . Twelve to fourteen centuries later, corn production
+had spread throughout the temperate and tropical Americas from
+the southern tip of South America to the subarctic of North Amer­
+ica, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean on both continents.
+The wild grain from which corn was cultivated has never been iden­
+tified with certainty, but the Indigenous peoples for whom corn was
+and is their sustenance believe it was a sacred gift from their gods.
+Since there is no evidence of corn on any other continent prior to
+its post- Columbus dispersal, its development is a unique invention
+of the original American agriculturalists. Unlike most grains, corn
+cannot grow wild and cannot exist without attentive human care.
+Along with multiple varieties and colors of corn, Mesoamericans
+cultivated squash and beans, which were extended throughout the
+hemisphere, as were the many varieties and colors of potato cul­
+tivated by Andean farmers beginning more than seven thousand
+years ago. Corn, being a summer crop, can tolerate no more than
+twenty to thirty days without water and even less time in high tem­
+peratures. Many of the areas where corn was the staple were arid or
+semiarid, so its cultivation required the design and construction of
+complex irrigation systems-in place at least two thousand years be­
+fore Europeans knew the Americas existed. The proliferation of ag­
+riculture and cultigens could not have occurred without centuries of
+cultural and commercial interchange among the peoples of North,
+Central, and South America, whose traders carried seeds as well as
+other goods and cultural practices.
+The vast reach and capacity of Indigenous grain production im-
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+pressed colonialist Europeans . A traveler in French-occupied North
+America related in 1 669 that six square miles of cornfields sur­
+rounded each Iroquois village. The governor of New France, follow­
+ing a military raid in the r 6 8 os, reported that he had destroyed more
+than a million bushels (forty-two thousand tons) of corn belonging
+to four Iroquois villages.1 Thanks to the nutritious triad of corn,
+beans, and squash-which provide a complete protein-the Ameri­
+cas were densely populated when the European monarchies began
+sponsoring colonization projects there.
+The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred
+million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fifths in
+North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported
+some thirty million people . At the same time, the population of Eu­
+rope as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million.
+Experts have observed that such population densities in precolo­
+nial America were supportable because the peoples had created a
+relatively disease-free paradise. 2 There certainly were diseases and
+health problems, but the practice of herbal medicine and even sur­
+gery and dentistry, and most importantly both hygienic and ritual
+bathing, kept diseases at bay. Settler observers in all parts of the
+Americas marveled at the frequent bathing even in winter in cold
+climates. One commented that the Native people "go to the river
+and plunge in and wash themselves before they dress daily." Another
+wrote: "Men, women, and children, from early infancy, are in the
+habit of bathing." Ritual sweat baths were common to all Native
+North Americans, having originated in Mexico.3 Above all, the ma­
+jority of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had healthy, mostly
+vegetarian diets based on the staple of corn and supplemented by
+wild fish, fowl, and four-legged animals. People lived long and well
+with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.
+
+U P F R O M M E X I CO
+
+As on the two other major continental landmasses-Eurasia and
+Africa-civilization in the Americas emerged from certain popu­
+lation centers, with periods of vigorous growth and integration
+
+17
+
+18
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+interspersed with periods of decline and disintegration. At least a
+dozen such centers were functioning in the Americas when Euro­
+peans intervened. Although this is a history of the part of North
+America that is today the United States, it is important to follow
+the corn to its origins and briefly consider the peoples' history of the
+Valley of Mexico and Central America, often called Mesoamerica.
+Influences from the south powerfully shaped the Indigenous peoples
+to the north (in what is now the United States) and Mexicans con­
+tinue to migrate as they have for millennia but now across the arbi­
+trary border that was established in the US war against Mexico in
+1 846-4 8 .
+The first great cultivators of corn were the Mayans, initially cen­
+tered in present-day northern Guatemala and the Mexican state of
+Tabasco. Extending to the Yucatan peninsula, the Mayans of the
+tenth century built city-states- Chichen-Itza, Mayapan, Uxmal,
+and many others-as far south as Belize and Honduras. Mayan
+villages, farms, and cities extended from tropical forests to alpine
+areas to coastal and interior plains. During the five-century apex
+of Mayan civilization, a combined priesthood and nobility gov­
+erned. There was also a distinct commercial class, and the cities
+were densely populated, not simply bureaucratic or religious centers.
+Ordinary Mayan villages in the far-flung region retained fundamen­
+tal features of clan structures and communal social relations. They
+worked the nobles' fields, paid rent for use of land, and contributed
+labor and taxes to the building of roads, temples, nobles' houses,
+and other structures. It is not clear whether these relations were
+exploitative or cooperatively developed. However, the nobility drew
+servants from groups such as war prisoners, accused criminals, debt­
+ors, and even orphans. Although servile status was not hereditary,
+this was forced labor. Increasingly burdensome exploitation of labor
+and higher taxes and tribute produced dissension and uprisings, re­
+sulting in the collapse of the Mayan state, from which decentralized
+polities emerged.
+Mayan culture astonishes all who study it, and it is often com­
+pared to Greek (Athenian) culture. At its core was the cultivation
+of corn; religion was constructed around this vital food. The Ma­
+yan people developed art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, em-
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+ploying a variety o f materials, including gold and silver, which they
+mined and used for jewelry and sculpture, not for use as currency.
+Surrounded by rubber trees, they invented the rubber ball and court
+ball games similar to modern soccer. Their achievements in math­
+ematics and astronomy are the most impressive. By 3 6 BC they had
+developed the concept of zero. They worked with numbers in the
+hundreds of millions and used extensive dating systems, making pos­
+sible both their observations of the cosmos and their unique calendar
+that marked the passage of time into the future. Modern astrono­
+mers have marveled at the accuracy of Mayan charts of the move­
+ments of the moon and planets, which were used to predict eclipses
+and other events. Mayan culture and science, as well as governmen­
+tal and economic practices, were influential throughout the region.
+During the same period of Mayan devel opment, the Olmec civi­
+lization reigned in the Valley of Mexico and built the grand me­
+tropolis of Teotihuacan. Beginning in AD 7 5 0 , Toltec civilization
+dominated the region for four centuries, absorbing the Olmecs. Co­
+lossal buildings, sculptures, and markets made up the Toltec cit­
+ies, which housed extensive libraries and universities. They created
+multiple cities, the largest being Tula. The Toltecs' written language
+was based on the Mayan form, as was the calendar they used in
+scientific research, particularly in astronomy and medicine. Another
+nation in the Valley of Mexico, the Culhua, built the city-state of
+Culhuacan on the southern shore of Lake Texcoco, as well as the
+city-state of Texcoco on the eastern shore of the lake. In the late
+fourteenth century, the Tepanec people rose in an expansionist drive
+and subjugated Culhuacan, Texcoco, and all their subject peoples
+in the Valley of Mexico. They proceeded to conquer Tenochtitlan,
+which was located on an island in the middle of the immense Lake
+Texcoco and had been built around 1 3 25 by the Nahuatl-speaking
+Aztecs who had migrated from northern Mexico (today's Utah). The
+Aztecs had entered the valley in the twelfth century and been in­
+volved in toppling the Toltecs.4
+In 1 4 26, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan formed an alliance with the
+Texcoco and Tlacopan peoples and overthrew Tepanec rule. The
+allies proceeded to wage war against neighboring peoples and even­
+tually succeeded in gaining control over the Valley of Mexico. The
+
+19
+
+20
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Aztecs emerged as dominant in the Triple Alliance and moved to
+bring all the peoples of Mexico under their tributary authority.
+These events paralleled ones in Europe and Asia during the same
+period, when Rome and other city-states were demolished and occu­
+pied by invading Germanic peoples, while the Mongols of the Eur­
+asian steppe overran much of Russia and China. As in Europe and
+Asia, the invading peoples assimilated and reproduced civilization.
+The economic basis for the powerful Aztec state was hydraulic
+agriculture, with corn as the central crop. Beans, pumpkins, toma­
+toes, cocoa, and many other food crops flourished and supported a
+dense population, much of it concentrated in large urban centers.
+The Aztecs also grew tobacco and cotton, the latter providing the
+fiber for all cloth and clothing. Weaving and metalwork flourished,
+providing useful commodities as well as works of art. Building tech­
+niques enabled construction of enormous stone dams and canals,
+as well as fortress-like castles made of brick or stone. There were
+elaborate markets in each city and a far-flung trade network that
+used routes established by the Toltecs.
+Aztec merchants acquired turquoise from Pueblos who mined
+it in what is now the US Southwest to sell in central Mexico where
+it had become the most valued of all material possessions and
+was used as a means of exchange or a form of money. 5 Sixty-five
+thousand turquoise artifacts in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, are
+evidence of the importance of turquoise as a major precolonial com­
+modity. Other items were also valuable marketable commodities in
+the area, salt being close to turquoise in value. Ceramic trade goods
+involved interconnected markets from Mexico City to Mesa Verde,
+Colorado. Shells from the Gulf of California, tropical bird feath­
+ers from the Gulf Coast area of Mexico, obsidian from Durango,
+Mexico, and flint from Texas were all found in the ruins of Casa
+Grande (Arizona), the commercial center of the northern frontier.
+Turquoise functioning as money was traded to acquire macaw and
+parrot feathers from tropical areas for religious rituals, seashells
+from coastal peoples, and hides and meat from the northern plains.
+The stone has been found in precolonial sites in Texas, Kansas, and
+Nebraska, where the Wichitas served as intermediaries, carrying
+turquoise and other goods farther east and north. Crees in the Lake
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+Superior region and communities in what is today Ontario, Canada,
+and in today's Wisconsin acquired turquoise through trade. 6
+Traders from Mexico were also transmitters of culture and fea­
+tures such as the Sun Dance religion in the Great Plains, and the cul­
+tivation of corn by the Algonquin, Cherokee, and Muskogee (Creek)
+peoples of the eastern half of North America were transmitted from
+Central America. The oral and written histories of the Aztecs, Cher­
+okees, and Choctaws record these relations. Cherokee oral history
+tells of their ancestors' migrations from the south and through Mex­
+ico, as does Muskogee history.7
+Although Aztecs were apparently flourishing culturally and eco­
+nomically, as well as being militarily and politically strong, their
+dominance was declining on the eve of Spanish intrusion. Being
+pressed for tribute through violent attacks, peasants rebelled and
+there were uprisings all over Mexico. Montezuma II, who came to
+power in 1 5 0 3 , might have succeeded in his attempt to reform the
+regime, but the Spanish overthrew him before he had the opportu­
+nity. The Mexican state was crushed and its cities leveled in Cortes's
+three-year genocidal war. Cortes's recruitment of resistant commu­
+nities all over Mexico as allies aided in toppling the central regime.
+Cortes and his two hundred European mercenaries could never have
+overthrown the Mexican state without the Indigenous insurgency he
+co-opted. The resistant peoples who allied with Cortes to overthrow
+the oppressive Aztec regime could not yet have known the goals of
+the gold-obsessed Spanish colonizers or the European institutions
+that backed them.
+
+T H E N O RTH
+
+What i s n ow the US Southwest once formed, with today's Mexican
+states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua, the northern periphery of
+the Aztec regime in the Valley of Mexico. Mostly an alpine, arid, and
+semiarid region cut with rivers, it is a fragile land base with rainfall
+a scarce commodity and drought endemic. Yet, in the Sonora Desert
+of present-day southern Arizona, communities were practicing agri­
+culture by 2100 BC and began digging irrigation canals as early as
+
+21
+
+22
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+1 25 0 BC. The earliest evidence of corn in the area dates from 2000
+
+BC, introduced by trade and migration between north and south.
+Farther north, people began cultivating corn, beans, squash, and
+cotton around 1 5 0 0 BC. Their descendants, the Akimel O'odham
+people (Pimas), call their ancestors the Huhugam (meaning "those
+who have gone " ) , which English speakers have rendered as "Ho­
+hokam." The Hohokam people left behind ball courts similar to
+those of the Mayans, multistory buildings, and agricultural fields.
+Their most striking imprint on the land is one of the most extensive
+networks of irrigation canals in the world at that time. From AD
+9 0 0 to 1 4 5 0 , the Hohokams built a canal system of more than eight
+
+hundred miles of trunk lines and hundreds more miles of branches
+serving local sites. The longest known canal extended twenty miles.
+The largest were seventy-five to eighty-five feet across and twenty
+feet deep, and many were leak-proof, lined with clay. One canal
+system carried enough water to irrigate an estimated ten thousand
+acres. 8 Hohokam farmers grew surplus crops for export and their
+community became a crossroads in a trade network reaching from
+Mexico to Utah and from the Pacific Coast to New Mexico and
+irito the Great Plains. By the fourteenth c entury, Hohokams had
+dispersed, living in smaller communities.
+The famed Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon on the Colorado
+Plateau-in the present-day Four Corners region of Arizona, New
+Mexico, Colorado, and Utah-thrived from AD 850 to 1 25 0 . An­
+cestors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Anasazi constructed
+more than four hundred miles of roads radiating out from Chaco.
+Averaging thirty feet wide, these roads followed straight courses,
+even through difficult terrain such as hills and rock formations.
+The highways connected some seventy-five communities. Around
+the thirteenth century, the Anasazi people abandoned the Chaco
+area and migrated, building nearly a hundred smaller agricultural
+city-states along the northern Rio Grande valley and its tributaries.
+Northernmost Taos Pueblo was an important trade center, handling
+buffalo products from the plains, tropical bird products, copper
+and shells from Mexico, and turquoise from New Mexican mines.
+Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as
+the Great Plains, and as far south as Central America.
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+Other major peoples in the region, the Navaj os ( Dine) and
+Apaches, are of Athabascan heritage, having migrated to the region
+from the subarctic several centuries before Columbus. The majority
+of the Dine people did not migrate and remain in the original home­
+land in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Originally a hunting and
+trading people, they interacted and intermarried with the Pueblos
+and became involved in conflicts between villages engendered by
+disputes over water usage, with Dine and Apache groups allied with
+one or another of the riverine city-states.9
+The island peoples of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Ba­
+sin were an integral part of the cultural, religious, and economic
+exchanges with the peoples from today's Guyana, Venezuela, Co­
+lombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala,
+Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Wa­
+ter, far from presenting a barrier to trade and cultural relations,
+served as a means of connecting the region's peoples. Precolonial
+Caribbean cultures and cultural connections have been very little
+studied, since many of these peoples, the first victims of Columbus's
+colonizing missions, were annihilated, enslaved and deported, or
+later assimilated enslaved African populations with the advent of
+the Atlantic slave trade. The best known are the Caribs, Arawaks,
+Tainos, and the Chibchan-speaking peoples. Throughout the Ca­
+ribbean islands and rim are also descendants of Maroons-mixed
+Indigenous and African communities-who successfully liberated
+themselves from slavery, such as the Garifuna people ( " Black Car­
+ibs " ) along the coast of the western Caribbean.1 0
+From the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and south to
+the Gulf of Mexico lay one of the most fertile agricultural belts in
+the world, crisscrossed with great rivers. Naturally watered, teem­
+ing with plant and animal life, temperate in climate, the region was
+home to multiple agricultural nations. In the twelfth century, the
+Mississippi Valley region was marked by one enormous city-state,
+Cahokia, and several large ones built of earthen, stepped pyramids,
+much like those in Mexico. Cahokia supported a population of tens
+of thousands, larger than that of London during the same period.
+Other architectural monuments were sculpted in the shape of gi­
+gantic birds, lizards, bears, alligators, and even a r , 3 3 0 -foot-long
+
+23
+
+24
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+serpent. These feats of monumental construction testify to the levels
+of civic and social organization. Called "mound builders" by Euro­
+pean settlers, the people of this civilization had dispersed before the
+European invasion, but their influence had spread throughout the
+eastern half of the North American continent through cultural influ­
+ence and trade. 1 1 What European colonizers found in the southeast­
+ern region of the continent were nations of villages with economies
+based on agriculture and corn the mainstay. This was the territory
+of the nations of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw and the
+Muskogee Creek and Seminole, along with the Natchez Nation in
+the western part, the Mississippi Valley region.
+To the north, a remarkable federal state structure, the Haude­
+nosaunee confederacy-often referred to as the Six Nations of the
+Iroquois Confederacy-was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, On­
+ondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk Nations and, from early in the nine­
+teenth century, the Tuscaroras. This system incorporated six widely
+dispersed and unique nations of thousands of agricultural villages
+and hunting grounds from the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence
+River to the Atlantic, and as far south as the Carolinas and inland
+to Pennsylvania. The Haudenosaunee peoples avoided centralized
+power by means of a clan-village system of democracy based on
+collective stewardship of the land. Corn, the staple crop, was stored
+in granaries and distributed equitably in this matrilineal society by
+the clan mothers, the oldest women from every extended family.
+Many other nations flourished in the Great Lakes region where now
+the US- Canada border cuts through their realms. Among them, the
+Anishinaabe Nation (called by others Ojibwe and Chippewa) was
+the largest.
+The peoples of the prairies of central North America spanned an
+expanse of space from West Texas to the subarctic between the Mis­
+sissippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Several centers of develop­
+ment in that vast region of farming and bison-dependent peoples
+may be identified: in the prairies of Canada, the Crees; in the Da­
+kotas, the Lakota and Dakota Sioux; and to their west and south,
+the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples. Farther south were the Ponca,
+Pawnee, Osage, Kiowa, and many other nations, with buffalo num­
+bering sixty million. Territorial disputes inevitably occurred, and
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+25
+
+diplomatic skills as well as trade were highly developed for conflict
+resolution.
+In the Pacific Northwest, from present-day Alaska to San Fran­
+cisco, and along the vast inland waterways to the mountain barriers,
+great seafaring and fishing peoples flourished, linked by culture,
+common ceremonies, and extensive trade. These were wealthy peo­
+ples living in a comparative paradise of natural resources, including
+the sacred salmon. They invented the potlatch, the ceremonial dis­
+tribution or destruction of accumulated goods, creating a culture of
+reciprocity. They crafted gigantic wooden totems, masks, and lodges
+carved from giant sequoias and redwoods. Among these communi­
+ties speaking many languages were the Tlingit people in Alaska and
+the salmon-fishing Salish, Makah, Hoopa, Pomo, Karok, and Yurok
+people.
+The territory between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains
+in the West, now called the Great Basin, was a harsh environment
+that supported small populations before European colonization, as
+it does today. Yet the Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and Ute peoples
+there managed the environment and built permanent villages.
+
+G OV E R N A N C E
+
+Each Indigenous nation or city-state or town comprised a n indepen­
+dent, self-governing people that held supreme authority over internal
+affairs and dealt with other peoples on equal footing. Among the
+factors that integrated each nation, in addition to language, were
+shared belief systems and rituals and clans of extended families that
+spanned more than one town. The system of decision making was
+based on consensus, not majority rule. This form of decision making
+later baffled colonial agents who could not find Indigenous officials
+to bribe or manipulate. In terms of international diplomacy, each of
+the Indigenous peoples of western North America was a sovereign
+nation. First the Spanish, French, and British colonizers, and then
+the US colonizers, made treaties with these Indigenous governments.
+Indigenous governance varied widely in form. 12 East of the Mis­
+sissippi River, towns and federations of towns were governed by
+
+26
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+family lineages. The male elder of the most powerful clan was the
+executive. His accession to that position and all his decisions were
+subject to the approval of a council of elders of the clans that were
+represented in the town. In this manner, the town had sovereign
+authority over its internal affairs. In each sovereign town burned a
+sacred fire symbolizing its relationship with the spirit beings. A town
+could join other towns under the leadership of a single leader. Eng­
+lish colonists termed such groupings of towns "confederacies" or
+"federations." The Haudenosaunee people today retain a fully func­
+tioning government of this type. It was the Haudenosaunee constitu­
+tion, called the Great Law of Peace, that inspired essential elements
+of the US Constitution. 13 Oren Lyons, who holds the title of Faith­
+keeper of the Turtle Clan and is a member of the Onondaga Council
+of Chiefs, explains the essence of that constitution: "The first princi­
+ple is peace. The second principle, equity, justice for the people . And
+third, the power of the good minds, of the collective powers to be of
+one mind: unity. And health. All of these were involved in the basic
+principles. And the process of discussion, putting aside warfare as a
+method of reaching decisions, and now using intellect." 14
+The Muskogees ( Creeks), Seminoles, and other peoples in the
+Southeast had three branches of government: a civil administra­
+tion, a military, and a branch that dealt with the sacred. The lead­
+ers of each branch were drawn from the elite, and other officials
+were drawn from prominent clans. Over the centuries preceding
+European colonialism, ancient traditions of diplomacy had devel­
+oped among the Indigenous nations. Societies in the eastern part of
+the continent had an elaborate ceremonial structure for diplomatic
+meetings among representatives of disparate governments . In the
+federations of sovereign towns, the leading town's fire represented
+the entire group, and each member town sent a representative or two
+to the federation's council. Thus everyone in the federation was rep­
+resented in the government's decision making. Agreements reached
+in such meetings were considered sacred pledges that the representa­
+tives made not only to one another but also to the powerful spirit
+looking on. The nations tended to hold firm to such treaties out of
+respect for the sacred power that was party to the agreements. Rela­
+tions with the spirit world were thus a major factor in government. 15
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+The roles of women varied among the societies of eastern North
+America. Among the Muskogees and other southern nations, women
+hardly participated in governmental affairs. Haudenosaunee and
+Cherokee women, on the other hand, held more political authority.
+Among the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and
+Tuscaroras, certain female lineages controlled the choice of male
+representatives for their clans in their governing councils. Men were
+the representatives, but the women who chose them had the right to
+speak in the council, and when the chosen representative was too
+young or inexperienced to be effective , one of the women might
+participate in council on his behalf. Haudenosaunee clan mothers
+held the power to recall unsatisfactory representatives. Charles C .
+Mann, author o f I49 I : New Revelations of the Americas before
+Columbus, calls it "a feminist dream." 1 6
+According to the value system that drove consensus building and
+decision making in these societies, the community's interest over­
+rode individual interests. After every member of a council had had
+his or her say, any member who still considered a decision incorrect
+might nevertheless agree to abide by it for the sake of the commu­
+nity's cohesion. In the rare cases in which consensus could not be
+reached, the segment of the community represented by dissenters
+might withdraw from the community and move away to found a
+new community. This was similar to the practice of the nearly one
+hundred autonomous towns of northern New Mexico.
+
+S T E WA R D S O F T H E L A N D
+
+By the time of European invasions, Indigenous peoples had occupied
+and shaped every part of the Americas, established extensive trade
+networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapt­
+ing to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to
+suit human ends. Mann relates how Indigenous peoples used fire to
+shape and tame the precolonial North American landscape. In the
+Northeast, Indigenous farmers always carried flints . One English
+observer in 1 63 7 noted that they used the flints "to set fire of the
+country in all places where they come."17 They also used torches for
+
+27
+
+28
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+night hunting and rings of flame to encircle animals to kill. Rather
+than domesticating animals for hides and meat, Indigenous com­
+munities created havens to attract elk, deer, bear, and other game.
+They burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses
+and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would
+entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on
+them, which would sustain the people who ate them both. Mann
+describes these forests in r49 r : " Rather than the thick, unbroken,
+monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern
+forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry
+rambles , pine barrens , and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and
+oak." Inland a few miles from the shore of present-day Rhode Is­
+land, an early European explorer marveled at the trees that were
+spaced so that the forest "could be penetrated even by a large army."
+English mercenary John Smith wrote that he had ridden a galloping
+horse through the Virginia forest. In Ohio, the first English squat­
+ters on Indigenous lands in the mid-eighteenth century encountered
+forested areas that resembled English parks, as they could drive car­
+riages through the trees.
+Bison herds roamed the East from New York to Georgia (it's no
+accident that a settler city in western New York was named Buffalo).
+The American bison was indigenous to the northern and southern
+plains of North America, not the East, yet Native peoples imported
+them east along a path of fire, as they transformed forest into fal­
+lows for the bison to survive upon far from their original habitat.
+Historian William Cronon has written that when the Haudeno­
+saunee hunted buffalo, they were "harvesting a foodstuff which they
+had consciously been instrumental in creating." As for the " Great
+American Desert," as Anglo -Americans called the Great Plains, the
+occupants transformed that too into game farms . Using fire, they
+extended the giant grasslands and maintained them. When Lewis
+and Clark began their trek up the Missouri River in 1 8 04 , ethnolo­
+gist Dale Lott has observed, they beheld "not a wilderness but a
+vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans." Native Ameri­
+cans created the world's largest gardens and grazing lands-and
+thrived.18
+Native peoples left an indelible imprint on the land with systems
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+of roads that tied nations and communities together across the entire
+landmass of the Americas. Scholar David Wade Chambers writes:
+The first thing to note about early Native American trails and
+roads is that they were not just paths in the woods following
+along animal tracks used mainly for hunting. Neither can they
+be characterized simply as the routes that nomadic peoples
+followed during seasonal migrations. Rather they constituted
+an extensive system of roadways that spanned the Americas,
+making possible short, medium and long distance travel . That
+is to say, the Pre - C olumbian Americas were laced together
+with a complex system of roads and paths which became the
+roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ulti­
+mately transformed into major highways . 1 9
+Roads were developed along rivers, a n d many Indigenous roads
+in North America tracked the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Colum­
+bia, and Colorado Rivers, the Rio Grande, and other major streams.
+Roads also followed seacoasts. A major road ran along the Pacific
+coast from northern Alaska (where travelers could continue by boat
+to Siberia) south to an urban area in western Mexico. A branch of
+that road ran through the Sonora Desert and up onto the Colorado
+Plateau, serving ancient towns and later communities such as those
+of the Hopis and Pueblos on the northern Rio Grande.
+From the Pueblo communities, roads eastward carried travelers
+onto the semiarid plains along tributaries of the Pecos River and up
+to the communities in what is now eastern New Mexico, the Texas
+Panhandle, and West Texas. There were also roads from the north­
+ern Rio Grande to the southern plains of western Oklahoma by
+way of the Canadian and Cimarron Rivers. The roads along those
+rivers and their tributaries led to a system of roads that followed riv­
+ers from the Southeast. They also connected with ones that turned
+southwestward toward the Valley of Mexico.
+The eastern roads connected Muskogee (Creek) towns in present­
+day Georgia and Alabama. From the' Muskogee towns, a major
+route led north through Cherokee lands, the Cumberland Gap, and
+the Shenandoah Valley region to the confluence of the Ohio and
+
+29
+
+30
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Scioto Rivers . From that northeastern part of the continent, a trav­
+eler could reach the West Coast by following roads along the Ohio
+River to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Mis­
+souri, and along the Missouri westward to its headwaters . From
+there, a road crossed the Rocky Mountains through South Pass in
+present- day Wyoming and led to the Columbia River. The Columbia
+River road led to the large population center at the river's mouth on
+the Pacific Ocean and connected with the Pacific Coast road .
+
+CO R N
+
+North America i n 1 49 2 was not a virgin wilderness but a network
+of Indigenous nations, peoples of the corn. The link between peoples
+of the North and the South can be seen in the diffusion of corn
+from Mesoamerica. Both Muskogees and Cherokees, whose original
+homelands in North America are located in the Southeast, trace
+their lineage to migration from or through Mexico. Cherokee histo ­
+rian Emmet Starr wrote:
+The Cherokees most probably preceded by several hundred
+years the Muskogees in their exodus from Mexico and swung
+in a wider circle, crossing the Mississippi River many miles
+north of the mouth of the Missouri River as indicated by the
+mounds . . . . The Muskogees were probably driven out of
+Mexico by the Aztecs, Toltecs or some other of the northwest­
+ern tribal invasions of the ninth or preceding centuries. This is
+evidenced by the customs and devices that were long retained
+by the Creeks. 2 0
+Another Cherokee writer, Robert Conley, tells about the oral
+tradition that claims Cherokee origins in South America and sub­
+sequent migration through Mexico. Later, with US military inva­
+sions and relocations of the Muskogee and Cherokee peoples, many
+groups split off and sought refuge in Mexico, as did others under
+pressure, such as the Kickapoos. 2 1
+Although practiced traditionally throughout the Indigenous ag-
+
+Follow the Corn
+
+31
+
+ricultural areas of North America, the Green Corn Dance remains
+strongest among the Muskogee people. The elements of the ritual
+dance are similar to those of the Valley of Mexico. Although the
+dance takes various forms among different communities, the core of
+it is the same, a commemoration of the gift of corn by an ancestral
+corn woman. The peoples of the corn retain great affinities under
+the crust of colonialism.
+This brief overview of precolonial North America suggests the
+magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the
+settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter. These were
+civilizations based on advanced agriculture and featuring polities .
+I t is essential t o understand the migrations a n d Indigenous peoples'
+relationships prior to invasion, North and South, and how colonial­
+ism cut them off, but, as we will see, the relationships are being
+reestablished.
+
+TWO
+
+C U LT U RE O F C O N Q U E S T
+
+The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
+enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
+population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
+of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
+for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the
+rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic
+proceedings are the chief moments of prior accumulation.
+-Karl Marx, from "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Capital
+
+H O W I T BEGAN
+
+The late anthropologist Edward H . Spicer wrote that the initial Eu­
+ropeans who participated in colonization of the Americas were heirs
+to rich and ancient cultures, social relations, and customs in their
+lands of origin, whether Spain, France, Holland, or England. In the
+passage to the Americas and encountering the Indigenous inhabi­
+tants, they largely abandoned the webs of European social relations.
+What each actually participated in was a culture of conquest-vio­
+lence, expropriation, destruction, and dehumanization. 1
+Spicer's observation is true, but the culture of conquest didn't
+start with Europeans crossing the Atlantic. European institutions
+and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several
+centuries before that. From the eleventh through the thirteenth cen­
+turies, Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa
+and the Middle East, leading to unprecedented wealth in the hands
+of a few. This profit-based religion was the deadly element that Eu­
+ropean merchants and settlers brought to the Americas. In addi-
+
+32
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+tion to seeking personal wealth, colonizers expressed a Christian
+zeal that j ustified colonialism. Along with that came the militaristic
+tradition that had also developed in western Europe during the Cru­
+sades (literally, "carrying of the cross " ) . Although the popes, begin­
+ning with Urban II, called for most of the ventures, the crusading
+armies were mercenary outfits that promised the soldiers the right to
+sack and loot Muslim towns and cities, feats that would gain them
+wealth and prestige back home. Toward the end of the thirteenth
+century, · the papacy began directing such mercenaries to crush do­
+mestic "enemies" in their midst, as well-pagans and commoners
+in general, especially women (as ostensible witches) and heretics . In
+this way, knights and noblemen could seize land and force the com­
+moners living on it into servitude . Historian Peter Linebaugh notes
+that whereas the anti-Muslim Crusades were attempts to control
+the lucrative Muslim trade routes to the Far East, the domestic cru­
+sades against heretics and commoners were carried out to terrorize
+poor people and at the same time to enlist them in the lucrative and
+adventurous yet holy venture: " Crusading was thus a murderous
+device to resolve a contradiction by bringing baron and commoner
+together in the cauldron of religious war." 2
+The first population forcibly organized under the profit motive­
+whose labor was exploited well before overseas exploitation was
+possible-was the European peasantry. Once forced off their land,
+they had nothing to eat and nothing to sell but their labor. In addi­
+tion, entire nations, such as Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Bohemia, the
+Basque Country, and Catalonia, were colonized and forced under
+the rule of various monarchies. The Moorish Nation and the Sep­
+hardic Jewish minority were conquered and physically deported by
+the Castilian/Aragon monarchy from the Iberian Peninsula-a long­
+term project culminating in group expulsions beginning in 1492, the
+year Columbus sailed to America.
+The institutions of colonialism and methods for relocation, de­
+portation, and expropriation of land had already been practiced,
+if not perfected, by the end of the fifteenth century. 3 The rise of the
+modern state in western Europe was based on the accumulation of
+wealth by means of exploiting human labor and displacing millions
+of subsistence producers from their lands. The armies that did this
+
+33
+
+34
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+work benefited from technological innovations that allowed the de­
+velopment of more effective weapons of death and destruction. When
+these states expanded overseas to obtain even more resources, land,
+and labor, they were not starting anew. The peoples of the Caribbean,
+Central America, Mexico, and the Andes were the first overseas vic­
+tims . West and South Africa, North America, and the rest of South
+America followed. Then came all of Africa, the Pacific, and Asia .
+The sea voyages of European explorers and merchants in the late
+fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first of their kind.
+These voyagers borrowed the techniques for long- distance sea travel
+from the Arab world. Before the Arabs ventured into the Indian
+Ocean, Inuits ( Eskimos) plied the Arctic Circle in their kayaks for
+centuries and made contacts with many peoples, as did Norse, South
+Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, and Melanesian and Polynesian
+fishing peoples of the Pacific . Egyptian and Greek knowledge of the
+seas most likely extended beyond the Mediterranean, into the At­
+lantic and Indian Oceans. Western European seagoing merchants
+and the monarchies that backed them would differ only in that they
+had developed the bases for colonial domination and exploitation
+of labor in those colonies that led to the capture and enslavement of
+millions of Africans to transport to their American colonies .
+
+L A N D A S P R I VAT E P R O P E R T Y
+
+Along with the cargo o f European ships, especially o f the later Brit­
+ish colonizing ventures, came the emerging concept of land as pri­
+vate property. Esther Kingston-Mann, a specialist in Russian land
+tenure history, has reconstructed the elevation of land as private
+property to "sacred status" in sixteenth-century England. 4 The En­
+glish used the term "enclosure " to denote the privatization of the
+commons. During this time, peasants, who constituted a large ma­
+jority of the population, were evicted from their ancient common
+lands. For centuries the commons had been their pasture for milk
+cows and for running sheep and their source for water, wood for
+fuel and construction, and edible and medicinal wild plants . With­
+out these resources they could not have survived as farmers , and
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+35
+
+they did not survive as farmers after they lost access to the com­
+mons. Not only were the commons privatized during the sixteenth
+and seventeenth centuries, they were also transformed into grazing
+lands for commercial sheep production, wool being the main do­
+mestic and export commodity, creating wealth for a few and im­
+poverishment for the many. Denied access to the former commons,
+rural subsistence farmers and even their children had no choice but
+to work in the new woolen textile factories under miserable condi­
+tions-that is, when they could find such work for unemployment
+was high. Employed or not, this displaced population was available
+to serve as settlers in the North American British colonies, many of
+them as indentured servants, with the promise of land. After serving
+their terms of indenture, they were free to squat on Indigenous land
+and become farmers again. In this way, surplus labor created not
+only low labor costs and great profits for the woolens manufacturers
+but also a supply of settlers for the colonies, which was an "escape
+valve " in the home country, where impoverishment could lead to
+uprisings of the exploited. The sacred status of property in the forms
+of land taken from Indigenous farmers and of Africans as chattel
+was seeded into the drive for Anglo-American independence from
+Britain and the founding of the United States.
+Privatization of land was accompanied by an ideological drive
+to paint the commoners who resisted as violent, stupid, and lazy.
+The English Parliament, under the guise of fighting backwardness,
+criminalized former rights to the commons. Accompanying and fa­
+cilitating the privatization of the commons was the suppression of
+women, as feminist theorist Silvia Federici has argued, by conj uring
+witchcraft. Those accused of witchcraft were poor peasant women,
+often widows, while the accusers tended to be wealthier, either their
+landlords or employers, individuals who controlled local institutions
+or had ties to the national government. Neighbors were encouraged
+to accuse one another. 5 Witchcraft was considered mainly a female
+crime, especially at the peak of the witch hunts between 1 5 5 0 and
+
+1 650, when more than 80 percent of those who were charged with
+witchcraft, tried, convicted, and executed were women. In England,
+those accused of witchcraft were mostly elderly women, often beg­
+gars, sometimes the wives of living laborers but usually widows .
+
+36
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included
+nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the "evil­
+eye," local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths
+of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to
+midwifery and any kind of contraception . The service that women
+provided among the poor as healers was one of a number of vestiges
+from pre- Christian, matrilineal institutions that once predominated
+in Europe. It is no surprise that those who had held on to and per­
+petuated these communal practices were those most resistant to the
+enclosure of the commons, the economic base of the peasantry, as
+well as women's autonomy. 6
+The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their de­
+scendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast
+ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry.
+English settlers brought witch hunting with them to Jamestown,
+Virginia, and to Salem, Massachusetts. In language reminiscent of
+that used to condemn witches, they quickly identified the Indigenous
+populations as inherently children of Satan and " servants of the
+devil " who deserved to be killed. 7 Later the Salem authorities would
+justify witch trials by claiming that the English settlers were inhabit­
+ing land controlled by the devil.
+
+W H I T E S U P R E M ACY A N D C L A S S
+
+Also part o f the Christian colonizers' outlook was a belief i n white
+supremacy. As an 1 8 7 8 US Protestant evangelical hymn suggests­
+"Are your garments spotless? I Are they white as snow? I Are they
+washed in the blood of the lamb? "-whiteness as an ideology in­
+volves much more than skin color, although skin color has been
+and continues to be a key component of racism in the United States.
+White supremacy can be traced to the colonizing ventures of the
+Christian Crusades in Muslim-controlled territories and to the Prot­
+estant colonization of Ireland. As dress rehearsals for the coloniza­
+tion of the Americas, these proj ects form the two strands that merge
+in the geopolitical and sociocultural makeup of US society.
+The Crusades in the Iberian Peninsula ( Spain and Portugal today)
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+and expulsion of Jews and Muslims were part of a process that cre­
+ated the core ideology for modern colonialism-white supremacy­
+and its justification for genocide . The Crusades gave birth to the
+papal law of limpieza de sangre -cleanliness of blood-for which
+the Inquisition was established by the Church to investigate and
+determine. Before this time the concept of biological race based on
+" blood" is not known to have existed as law or taboo in Christian
+Europe or anywhere else in the world. 8 As scapegoating and sus­
+picion of Conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity) and
+Moriscos (Muslims who had converted to Christianity) intensified
+over several centuries in Christian-controlled Spain, the doctrine
+of limpieza de sangre was popularized. It had the effect of granting
+psychological and increasingly legal privileges to " Old Christians,"
+both rich and poor, thus obscuring the class differences between the
+landed aristocracy and land-poor peasants and shepherds . Whatever
+their economic station, the " Old Christian" Spanish were enabled
+to identify with the nobility. As one Spanish historian puts it, "The
+common people looked upwards, wishing and hoping to climb, and
+let themselves be seduced by chivalric ideals: honour, dignity, glory,
+and the noble life."9 Lope de Vega, a sixteenth-century contempo­
+rary of Cervantes, wrote : " Soy un hombre , I aunque de villana casta,
+
+I limpio de sangre y jamas I de hebrea o mora manchada" ( I am a
+man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mix­
+ture of Jewish or Moorish blood).
+This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of
+descendants of the old settlers of British colonization in North
+America. This then is the first instance of class leveling based on
+imagined racial sameness-the origin of white supremacy, the es­
+sential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. As
+Elie Wiesel famously observed, the road to Auschwitz was paved
+in the earliest days of Christendom . Historian David Stannard, in
+
+American Holocaust, adds the caveat that the same road led straight
+through the heart of America . 1 0 The ideology of white supremacy
+was paramount in neutralizing the class antagonisms of the landless
+against the landed and distributing confiscated lands and properties
+of Moors and Jews in Iberia, of the Irish in Ulster, and of Native
+American and African peoples.
+
+37
+
+38
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Great Britain, emerging as an overseas colonial power a century
+after Spain did, absorbed aspects of the Spanish racial caste system
+into its colonialist rationalizations, particularly regarding African
+slavery, but it did so within the context of Protestantism, which
+imagined a chosen people founding and raising a New Jerusalem.
+The English did not j ust adapt the habits and experiences of Spanish
+colonization; they had their own prior experience, which actually
+constituted overseas imperialism. During the early seventeenth cen­
+tury the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres
+of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early
+settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England
+had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never be­
+fore attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and
+plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social
+system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music
+forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutal­
+ized. A "wild Irish" reservation was even attempted. The "planta­
+tion" of Ulster was as much a culmination of, as it was a departure
+from, centuries of intermittent warfare in Ireland. In the sixteenth
+century, the official in charge of the Irish province of Munster, Sir
+Humphrey Gilbert, ordered that
+the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which
+were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies
+and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night,
+and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the
+waie ledying into his owne tente so that none could come into
+his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through
+a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem . . . . [It brought]
+greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their
+dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends . 1 1
+The English government paid bounties for the Irish heads. Later
+only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North Amer­
+ica, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same
+manner. Although the Irish were as " white" as the English, trans-
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+forming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what
+came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples
+of North America and to Africans.
+At that conj uncture, both in the Christian Crusades against
+Muslims and England's invasion of Ireland, the transition from re­
+ligious wars to the genocidal mode of colonialism is apparent. The
+Irish under British colonial rule, well into the twentieth century,
+continued to be regarded as biologically inferior. During the mid­
+nineteenth century, influenced by social Darwinism, some English
+scientists peddled the theory that the Irish (and all people of color)
+had descended from apes, while the English were descendants of
+"man," who had been created by God "in his own image ." Thus the
+English were "angels" and the Irish (and other colonized peoples)
+were a lower species, which today US " Christian Identity " white
+supremacists call "mud people," inferior products of the process of
+evolution . 1 2 The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge
+of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settle ­
+ment in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1 5 8 3 .
+In the lead-up to the formation of the United States, Protestantism
+uniquely refined white supremacy as part of a politico-religious
+ideology.
+
+T E R M I N A L N A R R AT I V E S
+
+According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale
+transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that oc­
+curred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to European invasion,
+warfare, and material acquisitiveness than to the bacteria that the
+invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway
+is among the proponents of this theory, and he writes that "epidemic
+diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas
+whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Na­
+tive American traders."13 Such an absolutist assertion renders any
+other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. Professor Callo­
+way is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North
+
+39
+
+40
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The
+thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in
+that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infec­
+tious disease during medieval pandemics. The principal reason the
+consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of
+settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish " Reconquest"
+and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the
+time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas,
+their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into depen­
+dency and servitude were ingrai �ed, streamlined, and effective. If
+disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the European
+colonizers in America found it necessary to carry out unrelenting
+wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of
+land they took from them-nearly three hundred years of colonial
+warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent re­
+publics of the hemisphere.
+Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial
+Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic de­
+cline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing
+from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization
+began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced
+by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing
+the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from one hun­
+dred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most ex­
+treme demographic disaster-framed as natural-in human history,
+it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements
+in the mid-twentieth century forged questions .
+US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians "accept
+uncritically a fatalistic 'epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity' ex­
+planation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient
+attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the
+natives to succumb to even slight infections . " 14 Other scholars agree .
+Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence
+of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare,
+which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military
+engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations,
+but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous na-
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+tion against another or factions within nations, with European allies
+aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the
+peoples of Ireland, Africa , and Asia . Other killers cited by Denevan
+are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and
+starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade net­
+works, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to
+live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide) , and
+deportation and enslavement. 1 5 Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has
+pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples' trade networks .
+When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensu­
+ing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations
+and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European
+manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. D obyns has esti­
+mated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages
+one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and pro­
+motion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the break­
+down of social order and responsibility. 16 These realities render the
+myth of "lack of immunity," including to alcohol, pernicious.
+Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena
+of European colonization, which also brought depopulation in the
+Pacific Islands, Australia, western Central America, and West Af­
+rica . 17 Sherburne Cook-a ssociated with Borah in the revisionist
+Berkeley School, as it was called-studied the attempted destruc­
+tion of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2 , 245 deaths among
+peoples in Northern California-the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo,
+Wappo, and Yokuts Nations-in late- eighteenth-century armed
+conflicts with the Spanish, while some 5 ,ooo died from disease and
+another 4 ,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people
+in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed
+
+4 ,000, and disease killed another 6,ooo. Between 1 8 5 2 and 1 8 67,
+US citizens kidnapped 4 ,000 Indian children from these groups in
+California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these
+conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women
+into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges
+of family life remained in these matriarchal societies . 1 8
+Proponents o f the default position emphasize attrition b y disease
+despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they
+
+41
+
+42
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by
+plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to
+disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more
+Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarcer­
+ation than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining
+the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.
+A nthropologist Michael V. Wilcox asks, " What if archaeologists
+were asked to explain the continued presence of descendant com­
+munities five hundred years after Columbus instead of their disap ­
+pearance or marginality ? " Cox calls for the active dismantling of
+what he terms "terminal narratives"-"accounts of Indian histories
+which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of In­
+digenous people s . " 1 9
+
+GOLD FEVER
+
+Searching f� r gold, Columbus reached many o f the islands of the Ca­
+ribbean and mapped them. Soon, a dozen other soldier-merchants
+mapped the Atlantic coast from the northern Maritimes to the tip of
+South America. From the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mer­
+cenaries, criminals, and peasants. They seized the land and prop­
+erty of Indigenous populations and declared the territories to be
+extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were
+confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority
+of the Roman Catholic Church. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1 494
+divided the " New World " between Spain and Portugal with a line
+drawn from Greenland south through what is now Brazil. Called the
+D octrine of Discovery, it claimed that possession of the entire world
+west of that line would be open to Spanish conquest and all east of it
+to Portuguese conquest.
+The story is well known. In 1492, Columbus sailed with three
+ships on his first voyage at the behest of Ferdinand, King of Ara­
+gon, and Isabella, Queen of Castille. The marriage of Ferdinand and
+Isabella in 1 4 69 had led to the merger of their kingdoms into what
+would become the core of the Spanish state . Columbus planted a
+colony of forty of his men on "Espanola" (now the Dominican Re-
+
+Culture of Conquest
+
+public and Haiti) and returned to Spain with Indigenous slaves and
+gold . In 1 493 , Columbus returned to the Caribbean with seventeen
+ships, more than a thousand men, and supplies. He found that the
+men he had left on the first trip had subsequently been killed by
+the Indigenous inhabitants . After planting another settlement, Co­
+lumbus returned to Spain with four hundred Arawak slaves. With
+seven ships, Columbus returned to the Caribbean in 1 4 9 8 , reaching
+what is now Venezuela, and he made a fourth and final voyage in
+
+1 5 0 2 , this time touching the Caribbean coast of Central America.
+In 1 5 1 3 , Vasco Nuiiez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama
+and charted the Pacific coast of the Americas. Juan Ponce de Leon
+claimed the Florida peninsula for Spain in l s r 3 . In l 5 21, following
+a three-year bloodbath and overthrow of the Aztec state, Hernando
+Cortes proclaimed Mexico as New Spain. Parallel with the cr_u shing
+of Mexican resistance were Ferdinand Magellan's explorations and
+charting of the Atlantic coast of the South American continent, fol­
+lowed by Spanish wars against the Inca Nation of the Andes. In both
+Mexico and Peru, the conquistadors confiscated elaborate artwork
+and statuary made of gold and silver to be melted down for use as
+money. During the same period, the Portuguese laid waste to what is
+today Brazil and began a thriving slave trade that would funnel mil­
+lions of enslaved Africans to South America, beginning the lucrative
+Atlantic slave trade.
+The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the
+catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England.
+The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded
+into city slums . For the first time in human history, the maj ority of
+Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minor­
+ity, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread
+worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its cur­
+rency, was gold . Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized
+at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit
+of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants
+establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much
+gold as possible . Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inher­
+ent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors,
+monarchies , and parliamentarians devised methods to control the
+
+43
+
+44
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with
+it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the
+Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subj ugating entire societies and civili­
+zations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village
+by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear
+inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational,
+but its ideological basis was madness.
+
+THREE
+
+C U LT O F THE C O VE N A N T
+
+For all the land which thou seest,
+to thee will I give it and to thy seed forever.
+-
+
+Genes i s 1 3 : 1 5
+
+And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and
+thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting
+covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.
+-Genesis 1 7 : 7
+
+M Y T H OF T H E P R I S T I N E W I L D E R N E S S
+
+With the onset o f colonialism i n North America, control of the land
+was wrenched away from the Indigenous peoples, and the forests grew
+dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the former cul­
+tivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape. Abandoned
+fields of corn turned to weeds and bushes. Settlers chopped down
+trees in New England until the landscape was nearly bare.1 One ge­
+ographer notes, "Paradoxical as it may seem, there was undoubtedly
+much more 'forest primeval' in 1 8 5 0 than in 1650."2 Anglo-Ameri­
+cans who did observe Native habitat management in action misun­
+derstood what they saw. Captain John Palliser, traveling through
+the prairies in the 1 8 50s, complained about the Indians' "disastrous
+habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than
+useless reasons." In 1937, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup claimed
+that the "open, park-like woods" written about in earlier times had
+been, "from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North
+America" and could not have been the result of human management. 3
+
+45
+
+46
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired
+a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who
+were hardly using it-an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work
+ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colo­
+nists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose
+governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technolo­
+gies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately de­
+veloped, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one
+another and with the environments that supported them. By the
+early seventeenth century, when British colonists from Europe be­
+gan to settle in North America, a large Indigenous population had
+long before created "a humanized landscape almost everywhere,"
+as William Denevan puts it. 4 Native peoples had created town sites,
+farms, monumental earthworks, and networks of roads, and they
+had devised a wide variety of governments, some as complex as
+any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosophies of
+government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international
+relations. They conducted trade along roads that crisscrossed the
+landmasses and waterways of the American continents. Before the
+arrival of Europeans, North America was indeed a "continent of
+villages," but also a continent of nations and federations of nations. 5
+Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness,
+undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so,
+for the European colonists could not have survived. They appro­
+priated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations.
+They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, to­
+bacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of
+the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous
+communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move
+armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to iden­
+tify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs. His­
+torian Francis Jennings was emphatic in addressing what he called
+the myth that "America was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by
+nonpeople called savages":
+European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited
+land. Had it been pristine wilderness then, it would possibly
+
+Cult of the Covenant
+
+be so still today, for neither the technology nor the social orga­
+nization of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
+had the capacity to maintain, of its own resources, outpost
+colonies thousands of miles from home. Incapable of conquer­
+ing true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in
+the skill of conquering other people,' and that is what they did.
+They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced
+a resident population.
+This is so simple a fact that it seems self-evident. 6
+
+T H E C A LV I N I S T O R I G I N S T O R Y
+
+All modern nation-states claim a kind of rationalized origin story
+upon which they fashion patriotism or loyalty to the state. When
+citizens of modern states and their anthropologists and historians
+look at what they consider "primitive" societies, they identify their
+"origin myths," quaint and endearing stories, but fantastic ones,
+not grounded in "reality." Yet many US scholars seem unable (or
+unwilling) to subject their own nation-state's founding story to the
+same objective examination. The United States is not unique among
+nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it
+to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ide­
+ology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and
+then domination of the rest of the world. It is one of the few states
+founded on the covenant of the Hebrew Torah, or the Christian bor­
+rowing of it in the Old Testament of the Bible. Other covenant states
+are Israel and the now-defunct apartheid state of South Africa, both
+of which were founded in 194 8 .7 Although the origin stories of these
+three covenant states were based on Judea- Christian scripture, they
+were not founded as theocracies. According to the myths, the faith­
+ful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each
+other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their
+god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.
+The influence of the scriptures was pervasive among many of the
+Western social and political thinkers whose ideas the founders of
+the first British colonies in North America drew upon. Historian
+
+47
+
+48
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Donald Harman Akenson points to the way that "certain societies,
+in certain eras of their development," have } ooked to the scriptures
+for guidance, and likens it to the way "the human genetic code oper­
+ates physiologically. That is, this great code has, in some degree, di­
+rectly determined what people would believe and when they would
+think and what they would do."8 Dan Jacobson, a citizen of Boer­
+ruled South Africa, whose parents were immigrants, observes that,
+like the Israelites, and their fellow Calvinists in New England,
+[the Boers] believed that they had been called by their God to
+wander through the wilderness, to meet and defeat the hea­
+then, and to occupy a promised land on his behalf . . . . A sense
+of their having been summoned by divine decree to perform
+an ineluctable historical duty has never left the Boers, and has
+contributed to both their strength and their weakness.9
+Founders of the first North American colonies and later of the
+United States had a similar sense of a providential opportunity to
+make history. Indeed, as Akenson reminds us, "it is from [the] scrip­
+tures that western society learned how to think historically." The
+key moment in history according to covenant ideology "involves the
+winning of 'the Land' from alien, and indeed evil, forces."1 0
+The principal conduit of the Hebrew scriptures and covenant ide­
+ology to European Christians was John Calvin, the French religious
+reformer whose teachings coincided with the advent of the European
+invasion and colonization of the Americas. The Puritans drew upon
+Calvinist ideology in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as did
+the Dutch Calvinist settlers of the Cape of Good Hope in founding
+their South African colony during the same period. Calvinism was
+a Protestant Christian movement with a strong separatist political
+component. In accord with the doctrine of predestination, Calvin
+taught that human free will did not exist. Certain individuals are
+"called" by God and are among the "elect." Salvation therefore has
+nothing to do with one's actions; one is born as part of the elect or
+not, according to God's will. Although individuals could not know
+for certain if they were among the elect, outward good fortune, es­
+pecially material wealth, was taken to be a manifestation of elec­
+tion; conversely, bad fortune and poverty, not to speak of dark skin,
+
+Cult of the Covenant
+
+49
+
+were taken as evidence of damnation. "The attractiveness of such
+a doctrine to a group of invading colonists . . . is obvious," Aken­
+son observes, "for one could easily define the natives as immuta­
+bly profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue." 1 1
+Since another sign o f justification was a person's ability to abide
+by the laws of a well-ordered society, Calvin preached the obliga­
+tion of citizens to obey lawful authority. In fact, they should do so
+even when that authority was lodged in poor leaders (one of the
+seeds for "my country right or wrong"). Calvin led his Huguenot
+followers across the border into Geneva, took political control of
+the city-state, and established it as a republic in l 54 I . The Calvin­
+ist state enacted detailed statutes governing every aspect of life and
+appointed functionaries to enforce them. The laws reflected Calvin's
+interpretation of the Old Testament; dissenters were forced to leave
+the republic, and some were even tortured and executed.
+Although the US Constitution represents for many US citizens a
+covenant with God, the US origin story goes back to the Mayflower
+Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony,
+named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what
+is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1 620. Forty-one of
+the "Pilgrims," all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking
+God's name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the
+signatories announced that they had journeyed to northern "Vir­
+ginia," as the eastern seaboard of North America was called by the
+English, "to plant the First Colony " and did therefore "Covenant
+and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic" to be gov­
+erned by "just and equal Laws" enacted "for the general good of the
+Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."
+The original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1 630,
+adopted an official seal designed in England before their journey.
+The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless,
+flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, " Come
+over and help us." 12 Nearly three hundred years later, the official
+seal of the US military veterans of the "Spanish-American War" (the
+invasio!1 and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines)
+showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier and a
+sailor, with a US battleship in the background. One may trace this
+
+50
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when
+the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.
+In other modern constitutional states, constitutions come and
+go, and they are never considered sacred in the manner patriotic
+US citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written constitu­
+tion. The Magna Carta arguably comes close, but it does not reflect
+a covenant. US citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to
+their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the found­
+ers of the United States and continuing to the present, the cultural
+persistence of the covenant idea, and thus the bedrock of US patrio­
+tism, represents a deviation from the main course in the develop­
+ment of national identities . Arguably, both the 1948 birth of the
+state of Israel and advent of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa
+were emulations of the US founding; certainly many US Americans
+closely identify with the state of Israel, as they did with Afrikaner­
+ruled South Africa. Patriotic US politicians and citizens take pride
+in "exceptionalism." Historians and legal theorists characterize US
+statecraft and empire as those of a "nation of laws," rather than one
+dominated by a particular class or group of interests, suggesting a
+kind of holiness.
+The US Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration
+of Independence, the writings of the " Founding Fathers," Lincoln's
+Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even Martin
+Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech are ·all bundled into
+the covenant as sacred documents that express the US state reli­
+gion. An aspect of this most visible in the early twenty-first century
+is the burgeoning "gun lobby," based on the sanctity of the Sec­
+ond Amendment to the C onstitution. In the forefront of these
+Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old settlers
+who say that they represent "the people " and have the right to bear
+arms in order to overthrow any government that does not in their
+view adhere to the God-given covenant.
+Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politi­
+cians, journali�ts, teachers, and even professional historians chant
+like a mantra that the United States is a "nation of immigrants.''
+From its beginning, the United States has welcomed-indeed, often
+solicited, even bribed-immigrants to repopulate conquered terri-
+
+Cult of the Covenant
+
+tories "cleansed" of their Indigenous inhabitants . From the mid­
+nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze
+forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops,
+p
+
+factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century,
+technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for
+their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant
+through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag,
+and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential
+enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often
+after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were
+often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no mat­
+ter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as
+hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers,
+and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The
+old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only
+those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Brit­
+ain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and
+shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to ac­
+quire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots,
+Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French-Calvinists all-who took the
+land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the
+creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers
+who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio
+Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their
+country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the
+covenant and what it stands for.
+
+S E T T L E R C O LO N I A L I S M A N D T H E U L S T E R - S C O T S
+
+The core group o f frontier settlers were the Ulster-Scots-the Scots­
+Irish, or "Scotch-Irish," as they called themselves.13 Usually the de­
+scendants of these Scots-Irish say their ancestors came to the British
+colonies from Ireland, but their journey was more circuitous than
+that. The Scots-Irish were Protestants from Scotland who were re­
+cruited by the British as settlers in the six counties of the province of
+Ulster in northern Ireland. The British had seized these half-million
+
+51
+
+52
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+acres from Ireland in the early seventeenth century, driven the in­
+digenous Irish farmers from it, and opened it to settlement under
+English protection. This coincided with the English plantation of
+two colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America and the begin­
+ning of settler colonialism there. These early settlers came mostly
+from the Scottish lowlands. Scotland itself, along with Wales, had
+preceded Ireland as colonial notches in the belt of English expan­
+sion. Britain's colonization of Indigenous lands in North America
+was foreshadowed by its colonization of northern Ireland. By 1 6 3 0
+the new settlers i n Ulster-21,000 Britons, including some Welsh,
+and 1 5 0 ,000 Lowland Scots-were more numerous than British set­
+tlers in all of North America at the time. In 1 64 1 , the indigenous
+Irish rebelled and killed ten thousand of the settlers, yet Protestant
+Scots settlers continued to pour in. In some formerly Irish areas,
+they formed a majority of the population. They brought with them
+the covenant ideology of Calvinism that had been the work of the
+Scotsman John Knox. Later John Locke, also a Scot, would secular­
+ize the covenant idea into a "contract," the social contract, whereby
+individuals sacrifice their liberty only through consent. An insid­
+iously effective example, the US economic system, was based on
+Locke's theories. 14
+So it was that the Ulster-Scots were already seasoned settler co­
+lonialists before they began to fill the ranks of settlers streaming
+toward the North American British colonies in the early eighteenth
+century, many of them as indentured servants. Before ever meeting
+Indigenous Americans, the Ulster settlers had perfected scalping for
+bounty, using the indigenous Irish as their victims. As this chapter
+and the following one show, the Scots-Irish were the foot soldiers of
+British empire building, and they and their descendants formed the
+shock troops of the "westward movement" in North America, the
+expansion of the US continental empire and the colonization of its
+inhabitants. As Calvinists (mostly Presbyterian), they added to and
+transformed the Calvinism of the earlier Puritan settlers into the
+unique ideology of the US settler class. 1 5
+In one o f history's great migrations, nearly a quarter-million
+Scots-Irish left Ulster for British North America between 1 7 1 7 and
+1 7 75 . Although a number left for religious reasons, the maj ority
+
+Cult of the Covenant
+
+were losers in the struggle over Britain's Irish policies, which brought
+economic ruin to Ireland's wool and linen industries. Hard times
+were magnified by prolonged drought, and so the settlers pulled up
+stakes and moved across the Atlantic. This is a story that would re­
+peat itself time and time again in settler treks across North America,
+the majority of migrants ending up landless losers in the Monopoly
+game of European settler colonialism.
+The majority of Ulster-Scot settlers were cash-poor and had to
+indenture themselves to pay for their passage to North America.
+Once settled, they came to predominate as soldier-settlers. Most
+initially landed in Pennsylvania, but large numbers soon migrated to
+the southern colonies and to the backcountry, the British colonies'
+western borders, where they squatted on unceded Indigenous lands.
+Among frontier settlers, Scots-Irish predominated among settlers
+of English and German descent. Although the majority remained
+landless and poor, some became merchants and owners of planta­
+tions worked by slaves, as well as politically powerful. Seventeen
+presidents of the United States have been of Ulster-Scots lineage,
+from Andrew Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, to Ronald
+Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama on his moth­
+er's side. Theodore Roosevelt characterized his Scots-Irish ancestors
+as "a stern, virile, bold and hardy people who formed the kernel
+of that American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the
+march westwards."1 6 Perhaps as influential as their being presidents,
+educators, and businessmen, the Scots-Irish engendered a strong set
+of individualist values that included the sanctity of glory in war­
+fare. They made up the officer corps and were soldiers of the regu­
+lar army, as well as the frontier-ranging militias that cleared areas
+for settlement by exterminating Indigenous farmers and destroying
+their towns.
+The Seven Years' War between the British and the French ( 1 75463) was fought both in Europe and in North America, where the
+British colonists called it the French and Indian War because it was
+mainly a British war against the Indigenous peoples, some of whom
+formed alliances with the French. The British colonial militias con­
+sisted largely of frontier Scots-Irish settlers who wanted access to
+Indigenous farmland in the Ohio Valley region. By the time of OS
+
+53
+
+54
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+independence, Ulster-Scots made up 1 5 percent of the population
+of the thirteen colonies, and most were clustered in majority num­
+bers in the backcountry. During the war for settler independence
+from Britain, most settlers who had emigrated directly from Scot­
+land remained loyal to the British Crown and fought on that side. In
+contrast, the Scots-Irish were in the forefront of the struggle for inde­
+pendence and formed the backbone of Washington's fighting forces.
+Most of the names of soldiers at Valley Forge were Scots-Irish. They
+saw themselves, and their descendants see themselves, as the true
+and authentic patriots, the ones who spilled rivers of blood to secure
+independence and to acquire Indigenous lands-gaining blood rights
+to the latter as they left bloody footprints across the continent.17
+During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, first- and
+second-generation Scots-Irish continued to pour westward into the
+Ohio Valley region, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. They
+were the largest ethnic group in the westward migration, and they
+maintained many of their Scots-Irish ways. They tended to move
+three or four times, acquiring and losing land before settling at least
+somewhat permanently. Scots-Irish settlers were overwhelmingly
+farmers rather than explorers or fur traders. They cleared forests,
+built log cabins, and killed Indians, forming a human wall of colo­
+nization for the new United States and, in wartime, employing their
+fighting skills effectively. Historian Carl Degler writes that "these
+hardy, God-fearing Calvinists made themselves into a veritable hu­
+man shield of colonial civilization." 18 The next chapter explores the
+kind of counterinsurgent warfare they perfected, which formed the
+basis of US militarism into the twenty-first century.
+The Calvinist religion of the Scots-Irish, Presbyterianism, was
+in numbers of faithful soon second only to those of New England's
+Congregationalist Church. But on the frontier, Scots-Irish devotion
+to the formal Presbyterian Church waned. New evangelical off­
+shoots refashioned Calvinist doctrines to decentralize and do away
+with the Presbyterian hierarchy. Although they continued to regard
+themselves as chosen people of the covenant, commanded by God
+to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel, the Scots-Irish also
+saw themselves, as their descendants see themselves, as the true and
+authentic patriots, entitled to the land through their blood sacrifice.
+
+Cult of the Covenant
+
+S A C R E D L A N D B E C O M E S R E A L E S TAT E
+
+The land won through North American bloodshed was not necessar­
+ily conceived in terms of particular parcels for a farm that would be
+passed down through generations. Most of the settlers who fought
+for it kept moving on nearly every generation. In the South many lost
+their holdings to land companies that then sold it to planters seeking
+to increase the size of their slave-worked plantations. Without the
+unpaid forced labor of enslaved Africans, a farmer growing cash
+crops could not compete on the market. Once in the hands of set­
+tlers, the land itself was no longer sacred, as it had been for the Indig­
+enous. Rather, it was private property, a commodity to be acquired
+and sold-every man a possible king, or at least wealthy. Later,
+when Anglo-Americans had occupied the continent and urbanized
+much of it, this quest for land and the sanctity of private property
+were reduced to a lot with a house on it, and "the land" came to
+mean the country, the flag, the military, as in "the land of the free"
+of the national anthem, or Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your
+Land." Those who died fighting in foreign wars were said to have
+sacrificed their lives to protect "this land" that the old settlers had
+spilled blood to acquire. The blood spilled was largely Indigenous.
+These then were the settlers upon which the national myths are
+based, the ultimately dispensable cannon fodder for the taking of
+the land and the continent, the foot soldiers of empire, the "yeoman
+farmers" romanticized by Thomas Jefferson. They were not of the
+ruling class, although a few slipped through and later were drawn in
+by the ruling class as elected officials and military officers, thereby
+maintaining the facade of a classless society and a democratic em­
+pire. The founders were English patricians, slave owners, large land
+barons, or otherwise successful businessmen dependent on the slave
+trade and exports produced by enslaved Africans and on property
+sales. When descendants of the settler class, overwhelmingly Pres­
+byterian or otherwise Calvinist Protestant, were accepted into the
+ruling class, they usually became Episcopalians, members of an elite
+church linked to the state Church of England. As we look at the
+bloody deeds of the settlers in acquiring and maintaining land, the
+social class context is an essential element.
+
+55
+
+FOU R
+
+B L O O DY F O O TP R I N TS
+
+For the "first 2 0 0 years of our military heritage, then, Americans
+depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers
+supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and
+"fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for
+captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants;
+and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between
+1 6 0 7 and 1 8 1 4 , Americans forged two elements- unlimited
+war and irregular war- into their "first way of war.
+-John Grenier, The First Way of War
+
+Within days of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, on May 2 ,
+201 1 , i t was revealed that the Navy SEAL team executing the mis­
+sion had used the code name Geronimo for its target. 1 A May 4
+report in the New York Daily News commented, "Along with the
+unseen pictures of Osama Bin Laden's corpse and questions about
+what Pakistan knew, intelligence officials' reasons for dubbing the
+Al Qaeda boss 'Geronimo' remain one of the biggest mysteries of
+the Black Ops mission." The choice of that code name was not a
+mystery to the military, which also uses the term "Indian Coun­
+try" to designate enemy territory and identifies its killing machines
+and operations with such names as UH-1 B/C Iroquois, OH- 5 8 0
+Kiowa, OV-1 Mohawk, OH- 6 Cayuse, AH-64 Apache, S - 5 8/H- 3 4
+Choctaw, UH-60 Black Hawk, Thunderbird, and Rolling Thunder.
+The last of these is the military name given to the relentless carpet­
+bombing of Vietnam peasants in the mid- 19 6os. There are many
+other current and recent examples of the persistence of the colonial­
+ist and imperialist sensibilities at the core of a military grounded
+
+56
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+in wars against the Indigenous nations and communities of North
+America.
+On February 19, 199 1 , Brigadier General Richard Neal, brief­
+ing reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, stated that the US military
+wanted to be certain of speedy victory once it committed land forces
+to "Indian Country." The following day, in a little-publicized state­
+ment of protest, the National Congress of American Indians pointed
+out that fifteen thousand Native Americans were serving as combat
+troops in the Persian Gulf. Neither Neal nor any other military au­
+thority apologized for the statement. The term "Indian Country" in
+cases such as this is not merely an insensitive racial slur, tastelessly
+but offhandedly employed to refer to the enemy. It is, rather, a tech­
+nical military term, like "collateral damage" or "ordnance," that
+appears in military training manuals and is regularly used to mean
+" behind enemy lines." It is often shortened to "In Country." This us­
+age recalls the origins and development of the US military, as well as
+the nature of US political and social history as a colonialist project.
+Furthermore, "Indian Country " is a legal term that identifies Native
+jurisdiction under US colonial laws but is also an important tool
+for Native nations to use in maintaining and expanding their land
+bases in the process of decolonization. "Indian Country," the legal
+term, includes not only federally recognized reservation territories,
+but also informal reservations, dependent Native communities and
+allotments, and specially designated lands. 2
+
+R O OT S O F G E N O C I D E
+
+I n The First Way of War: American War Making o n the Frontier,
+1 6 0 7-1814 , military historian John Grenier offers an indispensable
+
+analysis of the colonialist warfare against the Indigenous peoples of
+the North American territories claimed by Great Britain. The way of
+war largely devised and enacted by settlers formed the basis for the
+founding ideology and colonialist military strategy of the indepen­
+dent United States, and this approach to war is still in force in the
+twenty-first century. 3 Grenier writes that he began his study with
+the goal of tracing the historical roots of the use of unlimited war
+
+57
+
+58
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+by the United States, war whose purpose is to destroy the will of
+the enemy people or their capacity to resist, employing any means
+necessary but mainly by attacking civilians and their support sys­
+tems, such as food supply. Today called " special operations" or
+"low-intensity conflict," that kind of warfare was first used against
+Indigenous communities by colonial militias in Virginia and Mas­
+sachusetts. These irregular forces, made up of settlers, sought to
+disrupt every aspect of resistance as well as to obtain intelligence
+through scouting and taking prisoners. They did so by destroying
+Indigenous villages and fields and intimidating and slaughtering en­
+emy noncombatant populations. 4
+Grenier analyzes the development of the US way of war from
+1 607-1 8 1 4 , during which the US military was forged, leading to
+its reproduction and development into the present. US historian
+Bernard Bailyn calls the period " barbarous" and a "conflict of
+civilizations," but Bailyn represents the Indigenous civilization as
+"marauders" that the European settlers needed to get rid of. 5 From
+this formative period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic charac­
+teristics of the US way of war and thereby the characteristics of its
+civilization, which few historians have come to terms with.
+In the beginning, Anglo settlers organized irregular units to bru­
+tally attack and destroy unarmed Indigenous women, children, and
+old people using unlimited violence in unrelenting attacks. During
+nearly two centuries of British colonization, generations of settlers,
+mostly farmers, gained experience as "Indian fighters" outside any
+organized military institution. Anglo-French conflict may appear to
+have been the dominant factor of European colonization in North
+America during the eighteenth century, but while large regular
+armies fought over geopolitical goals in Europe, Anglo settlers in
+North America waged deadly irregular warfare against the Indig­
+enous communities . Much of the fighting during the fifteen-year
+settlers' war for independence, especially in the Ohio Valley region
+and western New York, was directed against Indigenous resisters
+who realized it was not in their interest to have a close enemy of
+settlers with an independent government, as opposed to a remote
+one in Great Britain. Nor did the fledgling US military in the 1 790s
+carry out operations typical of the state-centered wars occurring in
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+Europe at the time. Even following the founding of the professional
+US Army in the r 8 ros, irregular warfare was the method of the US
+conquest of the Ohio Valley and Mississippi Valley regions. Since
+that time, Grenier notes, irregular methods have been used in tan­
+dem with operations of regular armed forces.
+The chief characteristic of irregular warfare is that of the extreme
+violence against civilians, in this case the tendency to seek the utter
+annihilation of the Indigenous population. "In cases where a rough
+balance of power existed," Grenier observes, "and the Indians even
+appeared dominant-as was the situation in virtually every frontier
+war until the first decade of the 19th century- [settler] Americans
+were quick to turn to extravagant violence."6
+Many historians who acknowledge the exceptional one-sided co­
+lonial violence attribute it to racism. Grenier argues that rather than
+racism leading to violence, the reverse occurred: the out-of-control
+momentum of extreme violence of unlimited warfare fueled race
+hatred. " Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and ci­
+vilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a de­
+fining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a
+shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early­
+eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to be­
+ing a white American could later generations of 'Indian haters,' men
+like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars." By then,
+the Indigenous peoples' villages, farmlands, towns, and entire na­
+tions formed the only barrier to the settlers' total freedom to acquire
+land and wealth. Settler colonialists again chose their own means of
+conquest. Such fighters are often viewed as courageous heroes, but
+killing the unarmed women, children, and old people and burning
+homes and fields involved neither courage nor sacrifice.
+So it was from the planting of the first British colonies in North
+America. Among the initial leaders of those ventures were military
+men-mercenaries-who brought with them their previous war ex­
+periences in Britain's imperialist, anti-Muslim Crusades. Those who
+put together and led the first colonial armies, such as John Smith in
+Virginia, Myles Standish at Plymouth, John Mason in Connecticut,
+and John Underhill in Massachusetts, had fought in the bitter, bru­
+tal, and bloody religious wars ongoing in Europe at the time of the
+
+59
+
+60
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+first settlements . They had long practiced burning towns and fields
+and killing the unarmed and vulnerable. "Tragically for the Indian
+peoples of the Eastern Seaboard," Grenier observes, "the merce­
+naries unleashed a similar way of war in early Virginia and New
+England."7
+
+S E T T L E R - PA R A S I T E S C R E AT E T H E V I R G I N I A C O L O N Y
+
+The first Jamestown settlers lacked a supply line and proved unable
+or unwilling to grow crops or hunt for their own sustenance. They
+decided that they would force the farmers of the Powhatan Confed­
+eracy-some thirty polities-to provide them with food. Jamestown
+military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and
+children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the set­
+tlers as well as provide them with land and labor. The leader of the
+confederacy, Wahunsonacock, entreated the invaders:
+Why should you take by force that from us which you can
+have by love ? Why should you destroy us, who have provided
+you with food? What can you get by war? . . . What is the
+cause of your jealousy? You see us unarmed, and willing to
+supply your wants, if you will come in a friendly manner, and
+not with swords and guns, as to invade an enemy. 8
+Smith's threat was carried out: war against the Powhatans started
+in August 1 609 and the destruction of the Powhatans became the
+order of the day. The war dragged on for a year until the English
+governor, Thomas Gage, ordered forces mobilized by George Percy,
+a mercenary who had fought in the Netherlands, "to take revenge "
+and destroy the Indigenous population. In his report following the
+assault, Percy gloated over the gruesome details of killing all the
+children. Despite the terrorizing tactics of the settlers, the Powhat­
+ans were able to protect their grain storage buildings and force the
+Jamestown settlers to shelter within their colonial fortress.9 Mean­
+while the Powhatans organized a stronger confederacy. In 1 62 2 ,
+they attacked a l l the English settlements along the James River, kill-
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+ing 3 5 0-a third of the settler population. Unable to eliminate the
+Indigenous population by force of arms, the colonists resorted to a
+" feedfight," as Grenier identifies it-systematic destruction of all
+the Indigenous agricultural resources.1 0 A dozen years later an even
+greater conflict broke out, the Tidewater War ( 1 644-46). Hardly a
+war, it consisted rather of settlers continuously raiding Indigenous
+villages and fields with the goal of starving the people out of the
+area. There followed three decades of peace, from which the set­
+tlers inferred that total war and expulsion of the Indigenous people
+worked. The few Indigenous families that remained in eastern Vir­
+ginia were under the absolute dominance of the English. It was clear,
+Grenier points out, that "the English would tolerate Indians within
+and near their settlements provided they essentially neither saw nor
+heard them."11 In the absence of Indigenous sources of food and
+labor, the colonists brought in enslaved Africans and indentured
+European servants to do the work.
+By 1 676, the settler population of Virginia had mushroomed
+and English tobacco farmers were encroaching on the lands of the
+Susquehannock people. When the Susquehannocks resisted, a war
+broke out that went badly for the English. In 1676, the Virginia
+House of Burgesses formed a mounted force of 1 25 men to range
+through a particular cluster of Indigenous villages and thereby over­
+come Susquehannock resistance. 1 2 This was the immediate back­
+ground of Bacon's Rebellion, so beloved by populist US historians
+and those who search for the onset of racialized servitude in the
+British colonies. The rebellion occurred when Anglo settler-farmers
+along with landless indentured servants-both Anglo and African
+-took into their own hands the slaughter of Indigenous farmers
+with the aim of taking their land. The plantation owners who ruled
+the colony were troubled, to be sure, by the interracial aspect of
+the uprising. Soon after, Virginia law made greater distinction be­
+tween indentured servants and slaves and codified the permanent
+status of slavery for Africans.13 The point is an important one, but
+there is a larger issue. Bacon's Rebellion affected the development
+of genocidal policies aimed at the Indigenous peoples-namely, the
+creation of wealth in the colonies based on landholding and the use
+of landless or land-poor settler-farmers as foot soldiers for moving
+
+61
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+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+the settlement frontier deeper into Indigenous territories. 14 That the
+rebellion's leader, Nathaniel Bacon, was a wealthy planter reveals
+the relationship between the wealthy landed settlers and the poorer,
+often landless, settlers . Historian Eric Foner rightly concludes that
+the rebellion was a power play by Bacon against the Virginia gov­
+ernor William Berkeley and his planter allies, as Bacon's financial
+backers included other wealthy planters opposed to Berkeley. 15
+
+I N T H E N A M E OF G O D
+
+What transpired up the coast i n the founding and growth of the
+New England colony was different, at least at first. Just before the
+1 620 landing of the Mayflower, smallpox had spread from English
+trading ships off the coast to the Pequot fishing and farming com­
+munities on land, greatly reducing the population of the area the
+Plymouth Colony would occupy. King James attributed the epidemic
+to God's "great goodness and bounty toward us." 1 6 Consequently,
+those who survived in the Indigenous communities had little means
+to immediately resist the settlers' expropriation of their lands and
+resources. Sixteen years later, however, the Indigenous villages had
+recovered and were considered a barrier to the settlers moving into
+Pequot territory in Connecticut. A single violent incident triggered
+a devastating Puritan war against the Pequots in what the colony's
+annals and subsequent history texts call the Pequot War.
+The Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a
+hideous war of annihilation, entering Indigenous villages and kill­
+ing women and children or taking them hostage . The Pequots re­
+sponded by attacking English settlements, including Fort Saybrook
+in Connecticut. Connecticut authorities commissioned mercenary
+John Mason to lead a force of soldiers from that colony and Mas­
+sachusetts to one of the two Pequot strongholds on the Mystic River.
+Pequot fighters occupied one of the forts, while the other one con­
+tained only women, children, and old men. The latter was the one
+John Mason targeted. Slaughter ensued. After killing most of the
+Pequot defenders, the soldiers set fire to the structures and burned
+the remaining inhabitants alive . 17
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples.18 Accord­
+ing to their ways of war, when relations between groups broke down
+and conflict came, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests for
+individual glory, resulting in few deaths . Colonial wars inevitably
+drew other Indigenous communities in on one side or the other. Dur­
+ing the Pequot War, neighboring Narragansett villages allied with
+the Puritans in hopes of reaping a large harvest of captives, booty,
+and glory. But after the carnage was done, the Narragansetts left the
+Puritan side in disgust, saying that the English were "too furious"
+and "slay[ed] too many men." After having made the Pequots the en­
+emy, the settlers set out to complete the destruction. Fewer than two
+hundred half-starved Pequots remained of the two thousand at the
+beginning of the war. Although they had ceased fighting and were
+without any means of defense, the settlers started a new attack on
+the Pequots. The colony commissioned the mercenary Mason and
+his murderous crew of forty men to burn the few remaining homes
+and fields. 1 9 Puritan William Bradford wrote at the time in his His­
+
+tory of Plymouth Plantation:
+Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some
+hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as
+they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was
+conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a
+fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams
+of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and
+sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and
+they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so
+wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their
+hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and
+insulting an enimie. 20
+The other Indigenous nations of the region assessed what was in
+store for them and accepted tributary status under the colonial au­
+thority.
+During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New En­
+gland began the routine practice of scalp hunting and what Gre­
+nier identifies as "ranging"-the use of settler-ranger forces . By
+
+63
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+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+that time, the non-Indigenous population of the English colony in
+North America had increased sixfold, to more than 1 5 0,000, which
+meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous home­
+lands. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called
+King Philip's War. 21 Wampanoag people and their Indigenous al­
+lies attacked the settlers' isolated farms, using a method of guerrilla
+warfare that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating.
+The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as "skulking," and re­
+sponded by destroying Indigenous villages-again extirpation. But
+Indigenous guerrilla attacks continued, and so the commander of
+the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Indigenous tactics
+in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption. He peti­
+tioned the colony's governor for permission to choose sixty to sev­
+enty settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed
+"wilderness warfare." In July 1 676, the first settler-organized ranger
+force was the result. The rangers-60 settlers and 140 colonized In­
+digenous men-were to "discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or
+subdue" the enemy, in Church's words. The inclusion of Indigenous
+fighters on the colonists' side has marked settler colonialism and for­
+eign occupations ever since. 22 The settler-rangers could learn from
+their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades,
+Church perfected his evolving method of annihilation.
+
+"REDSKINS"
+
+Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and
+killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters,
+colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that
+became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare
+against Indigenous nations. 23 During the Pequot War, Connecticut
+and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially
+for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their
+scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunt­
+ing became routine only in the mid- 1 67os, following an incident
+on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice
+began in earnest in 1 69 7 when settler Hannah Dustin, having mur-
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+dered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented
+their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was re­
+warded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children. 24
+D ustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers.
+Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler
+authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on
+their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the
+reward money. "In the process," John Grenier points out, "they
+established the large-scale privatization of war within American
+frontier communities."25 Although the colonial government in time
+raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult fe­
+males, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the
+age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their
+scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could
+take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices
+erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants
+and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves.
+Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war.
+Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, cur­
+rency, and this development may even have created a black market.
+Scalp huntin g was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but
+also a means to eradicate or subj ugate the Indigenous population of
+the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. 26 The settlers gave a name
+to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp­
+hunts: redskins.
+This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization­
+destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging,
+and scalp hunting-became the basis for the wars against the Indig­
+enous across the continent into the late nineteenth century. 27
+
+C O L O N I A L E X PA N S I O N
+
+Having cleared the Indigenous populations from much of the coastal
+region from New England to the Carolinas, another wave of settlers
+employed the same kind of warfare in establishing the colony of
+Georgia beginning in 1 73 2 . Technically, it was the part of Spanish-
+
+65
+
+66
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+occupied Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squat­
+ted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of
+ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Briga­
+dier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia
+colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rang­
+ers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars
+into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony,
+Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander.
+The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters-in
+other words, brutal killers. h was unusual at the time to put a local
+militia officer in command of army regulars.28
+The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the
+Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to
+persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war
+broke out between Britain and Spain over British encroachment into
+Spanish Guale. Traders from Carolina had already brought small­
+pox and rum to the Cherokees, which had killed many in their vil­
+lages and made them suspicious of all English people. Oglethorpe
+himself visited Cherokee towns but was rebuffed. Meanwhile Span­
+ish agents were also trying to win over the Cherokees to fight on
+their side against the British. In the fall of 1 7 3 9 , on the verge of
+war, Oglethorpe won commitment from some Cherokee villages in
+exchange for corn, but he was aware that, like other Indigenous na­
+tions, the Cherokees would likely play one colonial power against
+the other for their own interests and could change sides at any mo­
+ment. In December, English invasion farther into Spanish territory
+began. Anglo and Scots rangers and their Indigenous allies destroyed
+Spanish plantations and intimidated the Maroon communities in
+northern Florida composed of local Indigenous families and escaped
+African slaves from the British colonies. The rangers sacked and
+looted, burned and pillaged, while hunting scalps of Spanish-allied
+Indigenous people and runaway slaves. Lasting nearly a month, the
+operations ravaged Florida, in part because the Spanish put up little
+fight. During the 1 740s, the British War Office and Parliament com­
+missioned two companies of colonial rangers and authorized more
+than a hundred men for full-time duty in the Highland Rangers in
+Georgia. 29 Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+WA R T H AT T U R N S T H E T I D E
+
+The decade leading up to the outbreak of the French and Indian
+War ( 1 754-63), known in Europe as the Seven Years" War, saw con­
+flict on the British-French frontiers in New England, New York,
+and Nova Scotia, all of which were well populated with Indigenous
+villages of various nations as well as French settlers called Acadi­
+ans. 30 A clash of interests among British settlers, Indigenous com­
+munities, and Acadians in the region of the present-day Canadian
+Maritime Provinces led to a four-year conflict that the British called
+King George's War. Although Britain had gained nominal posses­
+sion of Nova Scotia, it could not control the population of Acadians
+and the mixed communities of intermarried Acadians and Mi'kmaq
+and Malisset people. The Acadian-Indigenous villages insisted
+on neutrality in the British and French disputes, and the power­
+ful Haudenosaunee confederacy supported them in that stance. But
+British imperialists wanted the land, and they permitted Anglo­
+American settlers to play a prominent role in the fighting, which
+included ranging and scalp hunting. By the end of the war, settler­
+rangers dominated the British military presence in Nova Scotia ,
+setting off sustained Acadian-Indigenous resistance against British
+rule. 31
+At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, while the Brit­
+ish regular army and navy focused on French imperial positions in
+the Maritimes, the settler militia forces continued ranging against
+the Acadian-Indigenous villages, which led to an expulsion of the
+Acadians, sometimes known today as the Great Upheaval. In a pe­
+riod of weeks, British army forces and colonial militias forced four
+thousand noncombatants out of Nova Scotia, and at least half that
+number died in the Acadian diaspora . Some eight thousand escaped
+deportation by fleeing into the woods. The Acadians thus became
+the largest population of European settlers in North American
+history to be forcibly dispersed. This feat was accomplished with
+slaughter, intimidation, and plunder. By this time, there was no hesi­
+tation on the part of Anglo settlers to consider unarmed civilians of
+all ages as appropriate targets of violence.
+Major General Jeffery Amherst-after whom Amherst, Mas-
+
+67
+
+68
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+sachusetts is named-commanded the British army in the North
+American theater of the Seven Years' War. In 1 75 9 , Amherst ap­
+pointed Major Robert Rogers, the seasoned leader of New England's
+Rogers's Rangers and perhaps the most famous and admired ranger
+in frontier lore, to lead a force of settler-rangers, British volunteers,
+and allied Stockbridge Indigenous scouts-all to be handpicked by
+Rogers. Amherst ordered them to attack a resistant Abenaki village
+in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Although Amherst ordered Rogers
+not to allow torture or killing of women or children, the commander
+would have known about these rangers' reputation of sparing no
+one in their blood-drenched raids on Indigenous villages. In com­
+missioning Rogers, Amherst effectively sanctioned settler-ranger
+counterinsurgent warfare. In general, the British military not only
+tolerated but made use of the settlers' dirty war, in the Cherokee
+war, the subsequent French and Indian War, and in the effort to
+crush Pontiac's Rebellion of 1 763 , in which Amherst is best known
+for his support of using germ warfare against Indigenous people. 32
+" Could it not be contrived," Amherst wrote to a subordinate officer,
+"to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians ?
+We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to
+Reduce them." The colonel promised to do his best. 33 Amherst then
+gave orders "to bring them [Pontiac's forces and allies] to a proper
+Subjection" until "there was not an Indian Settlement within a thou­
+sand Miles of our Country."34
+In the southern part of the French and Indian War, the British in
+1 760 found their war-making capacity overwhelmed by the Chero­
+kee Nation. So here too they turned to rangers. In the spring, when
+the Cherokee Nation challenged British authority, Amherst rushed
+regular regiments to Charleston under the command of Colonel Ar­
+chibald Montgomery with orders to punish the Cherokees as quickly
+as possible so the soldiers could return north and j oin in the im­
+minent attack on Montreal. In previous wars against Indigenous
+nations, British commanders had assigned ranger groups specific
+missions, but in the Cherokee war, the British military forces, in­
+cluding regulars, would target noncombatants. A few months ear­
+lier, the North Carolina governor had conjured the strategy that
+would be used:
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+69
+
+In Case a War must be proclaimed, the three Southern Prov­
+inces of Virginia and the Carolinas should exert their whole
+force, enter into and destroy all the [Cherokee] Towns of those
+at War with us, and make as many of them as we should take
+their Wives and Children Slaves, by sending them to the Islands
+[West Indies] if above I O years old . . . and to allow IO lbs ster­
+ling for every prisoner taken and delivered in each Province. 35
+This was the plan adopted. Commander Montgomery was well
+aware that even with irregular warfare the military could not defeat
+the Cherokees in their own country and that he would need set­
+tlers and Indigenous allies serving as scouts and guides. He added to
+his troop strength three hundred settler-rangers, forty local militia
+members, and fifty Catawba allies. The Cherokee Nation had not
+succeeded in forming a confederation with the Muskogees or Chick­
+asaws, so their villages were vulnerable. The first target was the au­
+tonomous Cherokee town of Estatoe, comprising some two hundred
+homes and two thousand people. Montgomery's forces set all the
+homes and buildings afire, picking off individuals who tried to flee,
+while others who hid inside were burned alive. One after another,
+towns were set ablaze until the Cherokees organized a resistance
+strong enough to drive out the attackers. The British claimed to have
+crushed Cherokee resistance, but they had not, and the Cherokees
+laid siege to British forts . A year later, British forces struck again, this
+time even harder, and overwhelmed the Cherokees in their capital of
+Etchoe and destroyed it. The British then moved on to the other Cher­
+okee towns, burning them too. D uring the month-long, one-sided
+battle of annihilation, the British razed fifteen towns and burned
+fourteen hundred acres of corn. Five thousand Cherokees were made
+homeless refugees, and the number of deaths remained uncounted. 36
+Another weapon of war was alcohol, accelerating in the eigh­
+teenth century. In 1754, a Catawba leader known as King Hagler by
+English colonists petitioned the North Carolina authorities:
+Brothers, here is one thing you yourselves are to blame very
+much in; that is you rot your grain in tubs, out of which you
+take and make strong spirits.
+
+70
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+You sell it to our young men and give it [to] them, many
+times; they get very drunk with it [and] this is the very cause
+that they oftentimes commit those crimes that is offensive to
+you and us and all through the effect of that drink. It is also
+very bad for our people, for it rots their guts and causes our
+men to get very sick and many of our people has lately died by
+the effects of that strong drink, and I heartily wish you would
+do something to prevent your people from daring to sell or
+give them any of that strong drink, upon any consideration
+whatever, for that will be a great means of our being free from
+being accused of those crimes that is committed by our young
+men and will prevent many of the abuses that is done by them
+through the effect of that strong drink. 37
+King Hagler continued to petition for years for an embargo on liquor
+without succeeding.
+Britain's victory at the end of the French and Indian War in 1 763
+led to English domination of world trade, sea power, and colonial
+holdings for a century and a half.38 In the Treaty of Paris ( 1 763)
+France ceded Canada and all claims east of the Mississippi to Brit­
+ain. In the course of the war, Anglo settlers had gained strength in
+numbers and security in relation to Indigenous peoples just outside
+the British-occupied colonies. Even there, significant numbers of set­
+tlers had squatted on Indigenous lands beyond the colonies' putative
+boundaries, reaching into the Ohio Valley region. To the settlers'
+dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King George III
+issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of the
+Allegheny-Appalachian mountain ? arrier, ordering those who had
+settled there to relinquish their claims and move back east of the
+line. However, British authorities did not commit enough troops to
+the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands
+more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indig­
+enous lands.
+By the early 1 770s, terror against Indigenous people on the part
+of Anglo settlers increased in all the colonies, and speculation in
+western lands was rampant. In the southern colonies especially,
+farmers who had lost their land in competition with larger, more
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These
+settler-farmers thus set, as Grenier writes, "a prefigurative pattern
+of U. S . annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across
+the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer­
+settlers led by seasoned 'Indian fighters,' calling on authorities/
+militias of the British colonies, first, and the U.S. government/army
+later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of U. S .
+'democracy."'39
+The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger
+for independence of the settler population, in which the distinctly
+"American" nation was born. This mythology was expressed in the
+1 8 2 6 novel The Last of the Mahicans: A Narrative of 1 75 7, in which
+the author-land speculator James Fenimore Cooper-created a us­
+able settler-colonial history. Blockbuster Hollywood adaptations of
+the book in 193 2 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940
+film, based on the best-selling novel Northwest Passage, which is
+considered a classic and remains popular due to repeated television
+showings, goes even further in portraying the bloodthirsty merce­
+naries, Rogers's Rangers, as heroes for their annihilation of a village
+of Abenakis. 40
+
+T H E O H I O CO U N T RY
+
+The settlers' war for independence from Britain paralleled a decade
+of " Indian wars" ( 1 774-83), all with settler-rangers using extreme
+violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goals of total
+subjugation or expulsion. The British governor of Virginia, John
+Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, sided with British settlers who
+wanted land in the Ohio Country (in part because he was himself a
+land speculator) . In his view, no royal policy could prevent settlers'
+seizure of Indigenous land. In early 1 774 , the Shawnee Nation in the
+Ohio Valley region responded to settler encroachment on its farm­
+lands and hunting grounds by raiding illicit settlements and chasing
+out land surveyors. The settlers seem to have been waiting for just
+such an excuse to retaliate viciously. Dunmore commissioned 1 5 0
+Virginia settler-rangers t o destroy Shawnee towns, and h e mobilized
+
+71
+
+72
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+the Virginia militia to invade the Ohio Valley and to "proceed di­
+rectly to their Towns, and if possible destroy their Towns and maga­
+zines and distress them in every other way that is possible."41
+During "Lord Dunmore's War," Shawnees and other Indigenous
+peoples in what the Anglo separatists would soon call the Northwest
+Territory realized that they were in a life-or-death struggle with these
+murdering bands of settlers who were led by a wealthy land specula­
+tor, intent on destroying their nation and wiping them from the face
+of the earth. This realization led to another recurrent factor in the
+onslaught of European colonial ventures: the appearance of an ac­
+commodationist faction within the Shawnee Nation that accepted a
+humiliating peace agreement. Dunmore demanded all the Shawnee
+hunting grounds in what would later become, following US indepen­
+dence, the state of Kentucky.42 Although Virginia did not get all the
+land Dunmore demanded, Dunmore's War was only the beginning
+of a three-decade war against the Shawnee Nation and its allies.
+That alliance was led militarily in its resistance by the great Tecum­
+seh, born in 1 76 8 , who had grown up in the midst of unrelenting
+warfare against his people, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa,
+also known as the Prophet and the movement's spiritual leader.43
+Dunmore's War pushed the Shawnees into an alliance with the
+British against the separatists in 1777· Indigenous warriors struck
+scattered squatter settlements throughout the Upper Ohio Valley
+region, driving hundreds of settlers from Shawnee territory. But the
+tide of war between the British and the separatists turned, allow­
+ing the Continental Congress to focus on the Ohio Country and
+organize an offensive to annihilate the Shawnee Nation. Five hun­
+dred separatist fighters, composed of both militiamen and regu­
+lars, waged a genocidal war. Rampaging against combatants and
+noncombatants alike, the ranger force fell on the staunchly neu­
+tral towns of the Delaware Nation, torturing and killing women
+and children. In one particularly twisted incident, the settler troops
+slaughtered a Delaware boy who had been bird hunting alone. A
+near-riot ensued among the troops over who had the right to claim
+the "honor" of the kill. The Continental Congress sent a thousand
+more fighters with orders to "proceed, without delay, to destroy such
+towns of hostile tribes of Indians as he [Brigadier General Lachlan
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+Mcintosh] in his discretion shall think will most effectually chastise
+and terrify the savages, and check their ravages on the frontiers ."
+The Shawnees moved out of the way of the raiders to avoid the at­
+tacks, but the killing went on unabated. 44
+The settlers' escalation of extreme violence in the Ohio Country
+led to perhaps the most outrageous war crime, which showed that
+Indigenous conversion to Christianity and pacifism was no protec­
+tion from genocide. Moravian missionizing among the ravaged Del­
+aware communities in Pennsylvania had produced three Moravian
+Indian villages in the decades before the war for independence had
+begun. Residents of one of the settlements, named Gnadenhutten, in
+eastern Ohio, were displaced by British troops during fighting in the
+area, but were able to return to harvest their corn. Soon afterward,
+in March 1 7 8 2 , a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the com­
+mand of David Williamson appeared and rounded up the Delawares,
+telling them they had to evacuate for their own safety. There were
+forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children in the group
+of Delawares. The militiamen searched their belongings to confis­
+cate anything that could be used as a weapon, then announced that
+they were all to be killed, accusing them of having given refuge to
+Delawares who had killed white people. They were also accused of
+stealing the household items and tools they possessed, because such
+items should only belong to white people. Condemned to death, the
+Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morn­
+ing, Williamson's men marched over ninety people in pairs into two
+houses and methodically slaughtered them. One killer bragged that
+he personally had bludgeoned fourteen victims with a cooper's mal­
+let, which he had then handed to an accomplice. "My arm fails me,"
+he was said to have announced. " Go on with the work."45 This ac­
+tion set a new bar for violence, and atrocities that followed routinely
+surpassed even that atrocity.4 6
+A year earlier, the Delaware leader Buckongeahelas had addressed
+a group of Christianized Delawares, saying that he had known some
+good white men, but that the good ones were a small number:
+They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of
+their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who
+
+73
+
+74
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as
+they cannot do it, they kill us. There is no faith to be placed
+in their words. They are not like the Indians, who are only en­
+emies while at war, and are friends in peace. They will say to
+an Indian: "My friend, my brother." They will take him by the
+hand, and at the same moment destroy him. And so you will
+also be treated by them before long. Remember that this day
+I have warned you to beware of such friends as these. I know
+the long knives; they are not to be trusted.47
+
+H OW T H E S E TT L E R S W O N I N D E P E N D E N C E
+
+Both the British and their settler separatist opponents realized that
+the key to victory on the southern frontier of the thirteen colonies
+was an alliance with the Cherokee Nation. Despite constant attacks
+on its villages and crops, and with refugees and disease, the enor­
+mous Cherokee Nation remained intact with a well-functioning
+government. To win the Cherokees to their side, British authorities
+provided weaponry and money to Cherokee towns while separat­
+ist representatives tried to persuade the towns to remain neutral by
+threatening their complete destruction. Neutrality was the most the
+settlers could hope for. The settlers' viciousness toward Indigenous
+people caused them to be despised and spurred some Cherokees to
+take sides against them. A few Cherokee towns that had been hit
+hardest by settler-rangers responded by attacking squatter settle­
+ments, destroying several in the Carolinas in 1776. Following such
+attacks, separatists quickly announced their determination to de­
+stroy the Cherokee Nation. The North Carolina delegation to the
+Continental Congress declared, "The gross infernal breach of faith
+which they [the Cherokees] have been guilty of shuts them out from
+every pretension to mercy, and it is surely the policy of the Southern
+Colonies to carry fire and Sword into the very bowels of their coun­
+try and sink them so low that they may never be able again to rise
+and disturb the peace of their Neighbors."48
+In the summer and fall of 1776, more than five thousand set­
+tler-rangers from Virginia, Georgia, and North and South Carolina
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+stormed through Cherokee territory.49 William Henry Drayton, a
+leader of the Anglo separatists from Charleston, had met with the
+Cherokees in 1 775 . After the Cherokee attack that prompted the
+separatists' 1776 scorched-earth campaign, he recommended that
+"the nation be extirpated, and the lands become the property of the
+public. For my part, I shall never give my voice for a peace with the
+Cherokee Nation upon any other terms than their removal beyond
+the mountains."5 0 As Cherokees fled, abandoning their towns and
+fields, the soldiers seized, killed, and scalped women and children,
+taking no prisoners. 51
+In mid-1780, eighty Virginia separatist settler-rangers attacked
+the Shawnees in southern Ohio and spent a month destroying and
+looting their towns and fields. At the same time, the Cherokee Nation
+regained momentum in its resistance, raiding squatters' settlements
+within its territory. In retaliation, North Carolina sent five hundred
+mounted rangers to burn Cherokee towns, with orders to "chas­
+tise that nation and reduce them to obedience." During the win­
+ter of 1 7 8 0 - 8 1 , the separatist seven-hundred-man Virginia militia
+wreaked destruction again in the Cherokee Nation. On Christmas
+Day, the militia commander wrote to Thomas Jefferson, then a Vir­
+ginia delegate to the Continental Congress, that a detachment had
+"surprised a party of Indians, [and taken] one scalp, and Seventeen
+Horses loaded with clothing and skins and House furnishings"-a
+clear sign that these were noncombatant refugees trying to flee. The
+commander also reported that his forces had thus far destroyed the
+principal Cherokee towns of Chote, Scittigo, Chilhowee Togue, Mi­
+cliqua, Kai-a-tee, Sattoogo, Telico, Hiwassee, and Chistowee, along
+with several smaller villages.
+All told, more than a thousand homes had been laid waste, and
+some fifty thousand bushels of corn and other provisions either
+burned or looted.52 At this point, the Virginia and North Carolina
+separatist authorities pooled their manpower and materiel and orga­
+nized a force that effected a broad sweep of annihilation through the
+Cherokee towns, driving residents out into present-day middle Ten­
+nessee and northern Alabama, where they exterminated Indigenous
+families and burned down the towns in that area too.
+Throughout the war between separatist settlers and the forces of
+
+75
+
+76
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+the monarchy, armed settlers waged total war against Indigenous
+people, largely realizing their objectives. The Cherokees were forced
+to accept tributary status, yet the attacks continued. It would take
+nearly a half century after US independence was won to forcibly
+remove the Cherokee Nation from the South, but the effort was un­
+relenting. For the settlers squatting on Indigenous lands across the
+1 763 Proclamation Line of King George III, the wars waged by set­
+tlers during the war of independence were a continuation of those
+their ancestors and other predecessors had waged since the early
+seventeenth century. Some historians portray the British as the or­
+ganizers of Indigenous resistance during this period. The separatist
+colonial oligarchy that drew up the Declaration of Independence
+in 1 776 certainly took that view. Yet, as Grenier points out, the
+Indigenous people were well aware that negotiating with a faraway
+empire would yield much better outcomes than would dealing with
+the government of extermination-minded settlers. 53
+
+T H E H AU D E N OSAU N E E
+
+O n the western edge of the colony of New York, a s i n the southern
+colonies, settlers were invading and squatting on the territory of the
+Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois) by the mid- 1 77os. As with
+the Cherokee Nation, the British and the separatists knew that the
+Haudenosaunee would be an important factor in their war, and, as
+with the Cherokee Nation, both parties sent representatives to the
+Haudenosaunee councils to appeal for their support. Each member
+nation of the confederacy had its own specific interests because each
+had had different experiences in the previous century and a half of
+British and French intrusion. Much of the French and Indian War
+had been fought in their territories, with Indigenous people doing
+most of the actual fighting on both sides. In 1 775 , the Mohawk Na­
+tion allied with the British against the separatist settlers . The Sen­
+eca Nation had early on considered the British to be an intractable
+enemy but with the separatist war looming was more afraid of the
+settlers, and so the Senecas followed the Mohawks' lead into a Brit­
+ish alliance. The Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga Nations did not
+
+Bloody Footprints
+
+choose sides. Only the Christianized Oneidas conceded support for
+the separatist settlers.
+In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations, Gen­
+eral George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John
+Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee, "to
+lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be
+merely overrun but destroyed . . . . [Y]ou will not by any means, lis­
+ten to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements
+is effected . . . . Our future security will be in their inability to injure
+us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement
+they receive will inspire them." Sullivan replied, "The Indians shall
+see t h at there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything
+that contributes to their support."54
+By 1 779 , the Continental Congress had decided to start with the
+Senecas. Three armies were mustered to scorch the earth across New
+York and converge at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what
+is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the
+Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their sepa­
+ratist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the
+food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees. The
+separatist governments of the New York and Pennsylvania colonies
+offered rangers for the project, and, as an incentive for enlistment,
+the Pennsylvania assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps,
+without regard to sex or age. This combination of Continental Army
+regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged
+most of Seneca territory.
+With the Iroquois Confederacy disunited regarding the war, the
+Continental Army forces were practically unimpeded in their tri­
+umphal and deadly march. In another scenario typically resulting
+from European and Anglo-American colonialism and neocolonial­
+ism, civil war erupted within the Iroquois Confederacy itself, with
+Mohawks destroying Oneida villages. The Oneidas could no longer
+give their separatist allies intelligence. "By 1 7 8 1 ," Grenier observes,
+"after three seasons of the Indian war, New York's frontier had be­
+come a no-man's-land."55
+
+77
+
+FIVE
+
+THE B I R TH O F A N AT I O N
+
+Our nation was born in genocide . . . . We are perhaps
+the only nation which tried as a matter of national
+policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover,
+we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.
+Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves
+to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.
+-Martin Luther King Jr.
+
+The British withdrew from the fight to maintain their thirteen
+colonies in 1 7 8 3 , in order to redirect their resources to the conquest
+of South Asia. The British East India Company had been operat­
+ing in the subcontinent since 1600 in a project parallel to Britain's
+colonization of the North American Atlantic Coast. Britain's trans­
+fer to the United States of its claim to the Ohio Country spelled
+a nightmarish disaster for all Indigenous peoples east of the Mis­
+sissippi. Britain's withdrawal in 1 7 8 3 did not end military actions
+against Indigenous peoples but rather was a prelude to unrestrained
+violent colonization of the continent. In negotiations to end the
+war, Britain did not insist on consideration for the Indigenous na­
+tions that resisted the settlers' war of secession. In the resulting 1 7 8 3
+Treaty o f Paris, the Crown transferred t o the United States owner­
+ship of all its territory south of the Great Lakes, from the Mississippi
+to the Atlantic, and north of Spanish-occupied Florida. Muskogee
+Creek leader Alexander McGillivray expressed the general Indig­
+enous view: "To find ourselves and country betrayed to our enemies
+and divided between the Spaniards and Americans is cruel and un­
+generous."1
+
+78
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+T H E N EW O R D E R
+
+Wars continued for another century, unrelentingly and without
+pause, and the march across the continent used the same strategy
+and tactics of scorched earth and annihilation with increasingly
+deadly firepower. Somehow, even "genocide" seems an inadequate
+description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with hor­
+ror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country's manifest
+destiny.
+With the consolidation of the new state, the United States of
+America, by 1 790, the opportunity for Indigenous nations to negoti­
+ate alliances with competing European empires against the despised
+settlers who intended to destroy them was greatly narrowed. Nev­
+ertheless, Indigenous nations had defied the founding of the inde­
+pendent United States in a manner that allowed for their survival
+and created a legacy-a culture of resistance-that has persisted. By
+the time of the birth of the US republic, Indigenous peoples in what
+is now the continental United States had been resisting European
+colonization for two centuries. They had no choice given the aspira­
+tions of the colonizers: total elimination of Native nations or sur­
+vival. Precolonial Indigenous societies were dynamic social systems
+with adaptation built into them. Fighting for survival did not require
+cultural abandonment. On the contrary, the cultures used already
+existing strengths, such as diplomacy and mobility, to develop new
+mechanisms required to live in nearly constant crisis. There is always
+a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance
+also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, includ­
+ing absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices,
+using the colonizer's language, and intermarrying with settlers and,
+more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped Af­
+rican slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous
+peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through
+individual assimilation.
+A new element was added in the independent Anglo-American le­
+gal regime: treaty making. The US Constitution specifically refers to
+Indigenous nations only once, but significantly, in Article r, Section
+
+79
+
+80
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+8 : " [Congress shall have Power] to regulate Commerce with foreign
+Nations and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
+In the federal system in which all powers not specifically reserved for
+the federal government go to the states, relations with Indigenous
+nations are unequivocally a federal matter.
+Although not mentioned as such, Native peoples are implied in
+the Second Amendment. Male settlers had been required in the
+colonies to serve in militias during their lifetimes for the purpose
+of raiding and razing Indigenous communities, the southern colo­
+nies included, and later states' militias were used as "slave patrols."
+The Second Amendment, ratified in 1 79 1 , enshrined these irregular
+forces into law: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the se­
+curity of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
+shall not be infringed." The continuing significance of that "free­
+dom" specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist
+cultural roots of the United States that appear even in the present as
+a sacred right. 2
+US genocidal wars against Indigenous nations continued un­
+abated in the 1 790s and were woven into the very fabric of the new
+nation-state. The fears, aspirations, and greed of Anglo-American
+settlers on the borders of Indigenous territories perpetuated this
+warfare and influenced the formation of the US Army, much as the
+demands and actions of backcountry settlers had shaped the co­
+lonial militias in North America. Owners of large, slave-worked
+plantations sought to expand their landholdings while small farm
+owners who were unable to compete with the planters and were
+pushea off their land now desperately sought cheap land to support
+their families. The interests of both settler groups were in tension
+with those of state and military authorities who sought to build a
+new professional military based on Washington's army. Just as the
+US government and its army were taking form, a number of settle­
+ments on the peripheries of Indigenous nations threatened to secede,
+prompting the army to make rapid expansion into Indigenous terri­
+tories a top priority. Brutal counterinsurgency warfare would be the
+key to the army's destruction of the Indigenous peoples' civilization
+in the Ohio Country and the rest of what was then called the North­
+west over the first quarter-century of US independence. 3
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+T O TA L WA R I N O H I O S E T S T H E S TA G E
+
+The first Washington administration was consumed by the crisis
+engendered by its inability to quickly conquer and colonize the Ohio
+Country over which it claimed sovereignty.4 D uring the Confedera­
+tion period, before the US Constitution was written and ratified, the
+Indigenous nations in that region had access to a constant supply
+of British arms and had formed effective political and military al­
+liances, the first of them forged by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant
+during the 1 7 8 0s . Washington's administration determined that
+only war, not diplomacy, would break up the Indigenous alliances .
+Secretary of War Henry Knox told the army commander of Fort
+Washington (where Cincinnati is today) that "to extend a defensive
+and efficient protection to so extensive a frontier, against solitary,
+or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impos­
+sible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible,
+the said Banditti."5 These orders could not be implemented with a
+conventional army engaged in regular warfare. Although federal of­
+ficers commanded the army, the fighters were nearly all drawn from
+militias made up primarily of squatter settlers from Kentucky. They
+were unaccustomed to army discipline but fearless and willing to
+kill to get a piece of land to grab or some scalps for bounty.
+The army found the Miami vil lages they planned to attack
+already deserted, so they set up a base in one of the villages and
+waited for a Miami assault. But the assault was not forthcoming.
+When the commander sent out small units to find the Miamis,
+these search-and- destroy missions were ambushed and sent flee­
+ing by allied Miamis and Shawnees under the leadership of Little
+Turtle (Meshekinnoqquah) and Blue Jacket (Weyapiersenwah). The
+deserted towns had been bait to lure the invaders into ambushes.
+The commander reported to the War Department that his forces
+had burned three hundred buildings and destroyed twenty thousand
+bushels of corn . Those were likely facts, but his claim to have bro ­
+ken up the Indigenous political and military organization was not
+accurate. Knox apparently knew that more than food and property
+destruction would be needed to quell resistance. He ordered the
+commanders to recruit five hundred weathered Kentucky mounted
+
+81
+
+82
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+rangers to burn and loot Miami towns and fields along the Wabash
+River. They were to capture women and children as hostages to use
+as terms of surrender.
+In carrying out these orders, the marauding rangers demonstrated
+what they could accomplish with unmitigated violence and a total
+lack of scruples and respect for noncombatants. They destroyed the
+Miamis' two largest towns and took forty-one women and children
+captive, then sent warnings to the other towns that the same would
+be their lot unless they surrendered unconditionally: " Your war­
+riors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and de­
+stroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may
+be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall
+find no resting place on this side of the great lakes." Yet the Indians
+of the Ohio Country continued to fight, well aware of the likely
+consequences. The Seneca leader Cornplanter called the colonizers
+the "town destroyers." He described how, during the destruction
+and suffering that troops wreaked on the western Iroquois, Seneca
+"women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling
+close to the necks of their mothers."6
+Despite the primary use of settler militias, President Washington
+insisted that the new government had to develop a professional army
+that would enhance US prestige in the eyes of European countries .
+He also thought that the cost of using mercenaries, at four times
+that of regular troops, was too high. But whenever regular troops
+were sent into the Ohio Country, the Indigenous resisters drove
+them out. Reluctantly, Washington resigned himself to the neces­
+sity of using what were essentially vicious killers to terrorize the
+region, thereby annexing land that could be sold to settlers . The
+sale of confiscated land was the primary revenue source for the new
+government.
+In late 1 79 1 , the War Department notified Ohio squatters to call
+out their rangers for an offensive. Major General "Mad" Anthony
+Wayne was charged with restructuring the units of the army under
+his command to function as irregular forces. Washington and other
+officials were aware that Wayne was unreliable and an alcoholic, but
+it appeared that such characteristics might be useful for the dirty
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+war ahead. Between 1 79 2 and 1 794 , Wayne put together a com­
+bined force of regulars with a large contingent of experienced rang­
+ers. He enthusiastically embraced such counterinsurgent tactics as
+destroying food supplies and murdering civilians.
+Among the fifteen hundred mounted rangers in the first mission
+was the talented William Wells with his group of rangers. When he
+was thirteen, Wells had been captured by the Miamis and then had
+lived with them for nine years, marrying Little Turtle's daughter.
+Under his father-in-law's command, Wells had fought the invading
+settlers and the US Army. In 1 792, Wells was chosen to represent the
+Miami Nation in a negotiation with the United States, but on arrival
+for talks he encountered a brother from the family he had been sepa­
+rated from for a decade. He was persuaded to return to Kentucky
+and served as a ranger for the US Army. 7
+Wayne's troops and rangers managed to enter the Ohio Coun­
+try and establish a base they called Fort Defiance (in northwestern
+Ohio), in what had been the heart of the Indigenous alliance led by
+Little Turtle. 8 Wayne then made an ultimatum to the Shawnees: "In
+pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the
+further effusion of your blood." The Shawnee leader Blue Jacket
+refused submission, and the US forces began destroying Shawnee
+villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men.
+On August 20, 1 794 , at Fallen Timbers, the main Shawnee fighting
+force was overpowered. Even after this US victory, the rangers con­
+tinued for three days laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields.
+After creating a fifty-mile swath of devastation, the invading forces
+returned to Fort Defiance. The defeat at Fallen Timbers was a severe
+blow to the Indigenous nations of the Ohio Country, but they would
+reorganize their resistance during the following decade.
+The US conquest of southern Ohio was formalized in the 1795
+Treaty of Greenville, a victory based on vicious irregular warfare.
+The nations of the region no longer had the British and the French
+and the settlers to play against one another, but rather were now
+faced with the determined imperialist thrust of an independent re­
+public that had to coddle settlers if they were to recruit any into their
+service.9
+
+83
+
+84
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+TECUMSEH
+
+Over the following decade, more settlers poured over the Appala­
+chians, squatting on Indigenous lands, and even building towns,
+anticipating that the US military, land speculators, and civilian insti­
+tutions would follow.
+In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Ten­
+skwatawa began building a concerted Indigenous resistance in the
+early nineteenth century. From their organizing center, Prophet's
+Town, founded in 1 8 07, Tenskwatawa and his fellow organizers
+traveled throughout Shawnee towns calling for a return to their cul­
+tural roots, which had been eroded by the assimilation of Anglo­
+American practices and trade goods, especially alcohol. 1 0 Abuse of
+alcohol (and drugs) is epidemic like diseases in communities sub­
+jected to colonization or other forms of domination, particularly
+in crowded and miserable refugee situations. This is the case in all
+parts of the world, not only among Native peoples of North Amer­
+ica. Alcohol was an item in the tool kit of colonialists who made
+it readily and cheaply available. Christian missionaries often took
+advantage of these dysfunctional conditions to convert, offering not
+only food and housing but also discipline to avoid alcohol. But this
+was itself a form of colonial submission.
+Significantly, Tecumseh did not limit his vision to the Ohio
+Country but also envisaged organizing all the peoples west to the
+Mississippi, north into the Great Lakes region, and south to the Gulf
+of Mexico. He visited other Indigenous nations, calling for unity in
+defiance of the squatters' presence on their lands. He presented a
+program that would end all sales of Indigenous land to settlers . Only
+then would settlers' migrations in search of cheap land cease and the
+establishment of the United States in the West be prevented. An alli­
+ance of all Indigenous nations could then manage Indigenous lands
+as a federation. His program, strategy, and philosophy mark the
+beginning of pan-Indigenous movements in Anglo-colonized North
+America that established a model for future resistance. Joseph Brant
+and Pontiac had originated the strategy in the 1 7 8 0s, but Tecumseh
+and Tenskwatawa forged a pan-Indigenous framework made all the
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+85
+
+more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while
+respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation. 1 1
+The evolving Indigenous alliance posed a serious barrier t o con­
+tinued Anglo-American squatting and land speculation and acquisi­
+tions in the trans-Appalachian region. With previous Indigenous
+resistance movements, such as those led by Little Turtle and Blue
+Jacket, during peace negotiations in the wake of ruinous US wars of
+annihilation, leaders of factions had become "agency chiefs" who
+agreed to land sales without the consent of those they purported
+to represent. The colonized communities had fallen into economic
+dependency on trade goods and federal annuities, incurring debts
+that led to the forfeiture of what land remained in their hands. The
+emerging younger generation was contemptuous of such chiefs,
+whom they perceived as selling out their people. Anglo-American
+settlers and speculators exerted increased pressure and issued new
+threats of annihilation, provoking anger and calls for retaliation but
+also a renewed spirit of resistance.
+By l 8 ro, new Indigenous alliances challenged squatter settlers
+in the Indiana and Illinois Territories at a time when war between
+the United States and Great Britain was looming. Fearing that the
+British would unite with the Indigenous alliances to prevent the US
+imperialist goal to dominate the continent, these settlers drafted
+a petition to President James Madison, demanding that the gov­
+ernment act preemptively: "The safety of the persons and property
+of this frontier can never be effectually secured, but by the break­
+ing up of the combination formed by the Shawnee Prophet on the
+Wabash." 12
+In 1 8 09 , Indiana's territorial governor, William Henry Harri­
+son, badgered and bribed a few destitute Delaware, Miami, and
+Potawatomi individuals to sign the Treaty of Fort Wayne, accord­
+ing to which these nations would hand over their land in what is
+now southern Indiana for an annual annuity. Tecumseh promptly
+condemned the treaty and those who signed it without the approval
+of the peoples they represented . Harrison met with Tecumseh at
+Vincennes in 1 8 10, along with other delegates of the allied Shawnee,
+Kickapoo, Wyandot, Peoria, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Winnebago
+
+86
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Nations. The Shawnee leader informed Harrison that he was leaving
+for the South to bring the Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws
+into the alliance.
+Harrison, now convinced that Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa,
+the Prophet, was the source of the renewed Indigenous militancy,
+reasoned that destroying Prophet's Town would crush the resistance.
+It would present a clear choice to the many Indigenous people who
+supported the militant leaders: cede more land to the United States
+and take the money and trade goods, or suffer further annihilation.
+He decided to strike in Tecumseh's absence. Having served as Gen­
+eral Wayne's aide-de-camp in the Fallen Timbers attacks, Harrison
+knew how to keep his regular army forces from being ambushed. He
+assembled Indiana and Kentucky rangers-seasoned Indian killers
+-and some US Army regulars. At the site of what is today Terre
+Haute, Indiana, the soldiers constructed Fort Harrison on Shaw­
+nee land-a symbol of their intention to remain permanently. The
+people in Prophet's Town were aware of the military advance, but
+Tecumseh had warned them not to be drawn into a fight, because
+the alliance was not yet ready for war. Tenskwatawa sent scouts to
+observe the enemy's movements. The US forces arrived on the edge
+of Prophet's Town at dawn on November 6, r 8 u . Seeing no alter­
+native to overriding his brother's instructions, Tenskwatawa led an
+assault before dawn the following morning. Only after some two
+hundred of the Indigenous residents had fallen did the troops over­
+power them, burning the town, destroying the granary, and looting,
+even digging up graves and mutilating the corpses. This was the fa­
+mous " battle" of Tippecanoe that made Harrison a frontier hero to
+the settlers and later helped elect him president.13
+The US Army's destruction of the capital of the alliance outraged
+Indigenous peoples all over the Old Northwest, prompting fight­
+ers of the Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Potawatamis, and even Creeks
+from the South to converge on a British garrison at Fort Malden in
+Canada to obtain supplies with which to fight. Contrary to the false
+US assumption that Tecumseh was a mere tool of the British, he had
+been unwilling to enter into a British alliance because Europeans
+had proved so unreliable in the past. But now he spoke for unified
+and coordinated Indigenous-led war on the United States that the
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+British could support if they wished but not control. President Madi­
+son, speaking to Congress in seeking a declaration of war against
+Great Britain, argued: "In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain
+toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the
+warfare j ust renewed by the savages on one of our extensive fron­
+tiers-a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and
+to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity."14
+During the summer of 1 8 1 2 , the Indigenous alliance struck US
+installations and squatter settlements with little help from the Brit­
+ish. The US forts at present-day Detroit and D earborn fell. Among
+the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn, Kentucky ranger William Wells
+was killed and his body mutilated as that of a despised turncoat. In
+the fall, Indigenous forces attacked Anglo-American squatter settle­
+ments all over Illinois and Indiana Territories. The US rangers at­
+tempting to track and kill the Indigenous fighters found destroyed
+and abandoned Anglo-American settlements, with thousands of set­
+tlers driven from their homes. In response, Harrison turned the mi­
+litias loose on Indigenous fields and villages with no restrictions on
+their behavior. The head of the Kentucky militia mustered two thou­
+sand armed and mounted volunteers to destroy Indigenous towns
+near today's Peoria, Illinois, but without success. A reversal came
+in the fall of 1 8 1 3 , when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the
+Thames and the Indigenous army was destroyed. Throughout the
+eighteen-month war, militias and rangers attacked Indigenous civil­
+ians and agricultural resources, leaving behind starving refugees.15
+
+A S S A U LT O N T H E C H E R O K E E N AT I O N
+
+In the unconquered Indigenous region of the Old Southwest, parallel
+resistance took place during the two decades following US inde­
+pendence, with similar tragic results, thanks to extirpative settler
+warfare. Tennessee (formerly claimed, but not settled, by the British
+colony of North Carolina) was carved out of the larger Cherokee
+Nation and became a state in 1796. Its eastern part, particularly the
+area around today's Knoxville, was a war zone. The mostly Scots­
+Irish squatters, attempting to secure and expand their settlements,
+
+87
+
+88
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+were at war with the resistant Cherokees called " Chickamaugas."
+The settlers hated both the Indigenous people whom they were at­
+tempting to displace as well as the newly formed federal government.
+In 1 7 8 4 , a group of North Carolina settlers, led by settler-ranger
+John Sevier, had seceded from western Carolina and established the
+independent country of Franklin with Sevier as president. Neither
+North Carolina nor the federal government had exerted any con­
+trol over the settlements in the eastern Tennessee Valley region. In
+the summer of 1 7 8 8 , Sevier ordered an unprovoked, preemptive at­
+tack on the Chickamauga towns, killing thirty villagers and forcing
+the survivors to flee south. Sevier's actions formed a template for
+settler-federal relations, with the settlers implementing the federal
+government's final solution, while the federal government feigned an
+appearance of limiting settler invasions of Indigenous lands. 16
+Facing the fierce resistance of Indigenous nations in the Ohio
+Country and the fighting between the Muskogee Nati on and the
+state of Georgia, Washington's administration sought to contain
+Indigenous resistance in the South. Yet now the settlers were pro­
+voking the Cherokees in what would soon be the state of Tennes­
+see. Secretary of War Knox claimed to believe that the thickness of
+settlers' development, converting Indigenous hunting grounds into
+farms, would slowly overwhelm the Indigenous nations and drive
+them out. He advised the squatters' leaders to continue building,
+which would attract more illegal settlers. This disingenuous view
+ignored the fact that the Indigenous farmers were well aware of the
+intentions of the settlers to destroy them and seize their territories.
+In the 1 7 8 5 Treaty of Hopewell between the federal government
+and the Cherokee Nation, the United States had agreed to restrict
+settlement to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The several
+thousand squatter families who claimed nearly a million acres of
+land in precisely that zone were not about to abide by the treaty.
+Knox saw the situation as a showdown with the settlers and a test
+of federal authority west of the mountain chains, from Canada to
+Spanish Florida. The settlers did not believe that the federal gov­
+ernment meant to protect their interests, which encouraged them
+to go it alone. In the face of constant attacks, the Cherokees were
+desperate to halt the destruction of their towns and fields. Many
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+were starving, more without shelter, on the move as refugees, with
+only the Chickamauga fighters as a protective force fighting off the
+seasoned ranger-settler Indian killers. In July 1 79 1 , the Cherokees
+reluctantly signed the Treaty of Holston, agreeing to abandon any
+claims to land on which the Franklin settlements sat in return for an
+annual annuity of $100,000 from the federal government.17
+The United States did nothing to halt the flow of squatters into
+Cherokee territory as the boundary was drawn in the treaty. A year
+after the treaty was signed, war broke out, and the Chickamau­
+gas, under the leadership of Dragging Canoe, attacked squatters,
+even laying siege to Nashville.18 The war continued for two years,
+with five hundred Chickamauga fighters joined by Muskogees and
+a contingent of Shawnees from Ohio, led by Cheeseekau, one of Te­
+cumseh's brothers, who was later killed in the fighting. The settlers
+organized an offensive against the Chickamaugas. The federal In­
+dian agent attempted to persuade the Chickamaugas to stop fighting,
+warning that the frontier settlers were "always dreadful, not only to
+the warriors, but to the innocent and helpless women and children,
+and old men." The agent also warned the settlers against attacking
+Indigenous towns, but he had to order the militia to disperse a mob
+of three hundred settlers, who, as he wrote, out of "a mistaken zeal
+to serve their country" had gathered to destroy "as many as they
+could of the Cherokee towns."19 Sevier and his rangers invaded the
+Chickamaugas' towns in September 1 79 3 , with a stated mission of
+total destruction. Although forbidden by the federal agent to attack
+the villages, Sevier gave orders for a scorched-earth offensive.
+By choosing to attack at harvesttime, Sevier intended to starve
+out the residents . The strategy worked. Soon after, the federal agent
+reported to the secretary of war that the region was pacified, with
+no Indigenous actions since "the visit General Sevier paid the [Cher­
+okee] nation." A year later, Sevier demanded absolute submission
+from the Chickamauga villages lest they be wiped out completely.
+Receiving no response, a month later 1 ,750 Franklin rangers at­
+tacked two villages, burning all the buildings and fields-again near
+the harvest-and shooting those who tried to flee. Sevier then re­
+peated his demand for submission, requiring the Chickamaugas to
+abandon their towns for the woods, taking only what they could
+
+89
+
+90
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+transport. He wrote: "War will cost the United States much money,
+and some lives, but it will destroy the existence of your people, as a
+nation, forever." The remaining Chickamauga villages agreed to al­
+low the settlers to remain in Cherokee country.
+In squatter settlements, ruthless leaders like Sevier were not the
+exception but the rule. Once they had full control and got what they
+wanted, they made their peace with the federal government, which
+in turn depended on their actions to expand the republic's territory.
+Sevier went on to serve as a US representative from North Carolina
+and as governor of Tennessee. To this day, such men are idolized
+as great heroes, embodying the essence of the "American spirit." A
+bronze statue of John Sevier in his ranger uniform stands today in
+the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol. 2 0
+
+M U S KO G E E R E S I S TA N C E
+
+The Muskogee Nation officially had remained neutral i n the war be­
+tween the Anglo-American settlers and the British monarchy. None­
+theless, many individual Muskogees had taken the opportunity to
+raid and harass squatters within their national territories in Georgia,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina. When the United States was formed,
+the Muskogee Nation turned to Spanish Florida for an alliance in
+trying to stop the flow of squatters into their territory. Spain had an
+interest in the alliance as a buffer to its holdings, which at the time in­
+cluded the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans. The squat­
+ters believed that the Muskogees and the Spanish officials, as well as
+the British, were in cahoots to keep them out of western Georgia and
+present-day Alabama and considered the Muskogee Nation to be the
+main barrier to their permanent settlement in the region, particu­
+larly Georgia. The Muskogees called the squatters ecunnaunuxulgee
+-"people greedily grasping after the lands of the red people ."
+The federal government negotiated with the Muskogee Nation
+for a new boundary and for more settlements and trade, in ex­
+change for $60,000 a year in goods. The squatters did everything
+they could to provoke the Muskogees to war, while ignoring the
+treaty's provisions. They slaughtered hundreds of deer in the Mus-
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+kogee deer parks, with the intention of wiping out the livelihood of
+Muskogee hunters, who also made up the resistance forces. But the
+War Department was complicit, using money due to the Muskogees
+under the treaty to divide them by bribing leaders (miccos) and thus
+isolating the insurgents from their communities. Eighty Muskogee
+fighters j oined the Chickamaugas when they were still fighting, and
+together they attacked the Cumberland district of Tennessee in early
+
+1792, while others struck Georgia squatters in Muskogee territory.
+It was then that Shawnee delegates, sent by Tecumseh, visited from
+the Ohio Country to encourage the Muskogees to drive the squatters
+from their lands, as the Shawnees h � d done successfully up to that
+time. Secretary of War Knox wrote to the federal agent in Georgia
+that he knew the Muskogee militants were "a Banditti, and do not
+implicate the whole nor any considerable part of that Nation. The
+hostilities of the Individuals arise from their own disposition, and
+are not probably dictated, either by the Chiefs, or by any Towns or
+other respectable classes of the Indians."21
+By this time, in the process of the preceding British coloniza­
+tion and continuing with US colonization of the Muskogee Nation
+and other southeastern Indigenous nations, an Indigenous client
+class-called "compradors" by Africans, "caciques" in Spanish­
+colonized America-essential to colonialist projects, was firmly in
+place. This privileged class was dependent on their colonial masters
+for their personal wealth. This class division wracked the traditional
+relatively egalitarian and democratic Indigenous societies inter­
+nally. This small elite in the Southeast embraced the enslavement
+of Africans, and a few even became affluent planters in the style
+of southern planters, mainly through intermarriage with Anglos.
+The trading posts established by US merchants further divided Mus­
+kogee society, pulling many deeply into the US economy through
+dependency and debt, and away from the Spanish and British trad­
+ing firms, which had previously left their lands undisturbed. This
+method of colonization by co-optation and debt proved effective
+wherever employed by colonial powers in the world, but only when
+it was accompanied by extreme violence at any sign of indigenous
+insurgency. The United States moved across North America in this
+manner. While most Muskogees continued to follow their traditional
+
+91
+
+92
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+democratic ways in their villages, the elite Muskogees were making
+decisions and compromises on their behalf that would bear tragic
+consequences for them all.
+Federal authorities in 1 79 3 identified five hundred Muskogee
+towns where they believed the majority of insurgents resided. Secre­
+tary of War Knox called on the Georgia militia for federal service.
+The federal Indian agent notified the War Department that the set­
+tlers were set on assaulting the Muskogees and asked that a thou­
+sand. federal troops be deployed to occupy the insurgent Muskogee
+towns. Although the War Department rejected that idea and war
+was postponed, the restless Georgian militiamen deserted after hav­
+ing rushed to the Muskogee territory to loot, burn, and kill, only to
+be forced to wait. Persistent squatter attacks on Muskogee farmers,
+traders, and towns continued.
+During the winter of 1 793-94, Georgia border squatters formed
+an armed group of landless settlers. The leader, Elijah Clarke, was
+a veteran Indian killer and had been a major general in the Georgia
+militia during the war of independence, in which he commanded
+rangers to destroy Indigenous towns and fields. As a US patriot hero,
+Clarke was certain that his former troops would never take up arms
+against him. Clarke and his rangers declared the independence of
+their own republic, but Georgia state authorities captured him and
+destroyed the rebel stronghold. Still, Clarke's action sent a strong
+message to state and federal authorities that landless squatters were
+determined to take Indigenous lands. They would get the leader they
+needed for that purpose a decade later. Meanwhile, the elite of the
+Muskogee towns were successful in marginalizing the insurgents,
+while the federal government increased grants, and the wealthy class
+of Muskogees established trading posts, making whiskey cheaply
+available to impoverished Muskogees. 22
+
+T H E D I E I S CAST
+
+The successful settler intrusion into western Georgia made Ala­
+bama and Mississippi the next objectives for the rapidly expand­
+ing slave-worked plantation economy, which, along with land sales
+
+The Birth of a Nation
+
+of occupied Indigenous lands by private speculators, was essential
+to the US economy as a whole. The plantation economy required
+vast swaths of land for cash crops, even before cotton was king,
+leaving in its wake destroyed Indigenous national territories and
+Anglo settlers who would fight and die driving out the Indigenous
+communities yet remain landless themselves, moving on to the next
+frontier to try again. US colonization produced the subsequent
+hideous slavery-based rule of the Old Southwest, which would flour­
+ish for seven more decades. Unlike in the Ohio Country, the Wash­
+ington administration avoided force and in doing so alienated settlers
+in the region. By preventing them from wiping out the Muskogees,
+the federal government was seen as the enemy, just as the British au­
+thority had been for an earlier generation of determined settlers. But
+that would soon change with the Muskogee War of 1 8 1 3 - 1 4 , nar­
+rated in the following chapter, in which, as Robert V. Remini puts it
+in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, "Tennessee frontiersman
+Andrew Jackson, commanding both regular Army troops and fron­
+tiersmen, personally guaranteed that the Creeks would feel the full
+brunt of total war."23
+During 1 8 rn-1 5 , then, two parallel wars were ongoing, one in
+the Ohio Country-the Old Northwest-which ended with the de­
+feat of the Tecumseh-led alliance, and the other the war against
+the Muskogee Nation in 1 8 1 3 -1 4 . Unlike the 1 8 1 2-15 war between
+Britain and the United States, with which these wars overlapped,
+the situation did not return to things being as they had been before,
+but rather culminated in the elimination of Indigenous power east
+of the Mississippi. US conquest was not determined by the defeat of
+the British in battle in 1 8 1 5 , but rather by genocidal war and forced
+removal.24
+US leaders brought counterinsurgency out of the pre-indepen­
+dence period into the new republic, imprinting on the fledgling
+federal army a way of war with formidable consequences for the
+continent and the world. Counterinsurgent warfare and ethnic
+cleansing targeting Indigenous civilians continued to define US war
+making throughout the nineteenth century, with markers such as
+the three US counterinsurgent wars against the Seminoles through
+the Sand Creek Massacre of 1 8 64 to Wounded Knee in 1 8 9 0 . Early
+
+93
+
+94
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+on, regular armies had incorporated these strategies and tactics as a
+way of war to which it often turned, although frequently the regular
+army simply stood by while local militias and settlers acting on their
+own used terror against Indigenous noncombatants.
+Irregular warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it
+had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Mus­
+kogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods
+played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces,
+Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sher­
+man for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians.
+The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas,
+from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam,
+Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply
+the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US
+American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the "val­
+iant" settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images
+of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the
+genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual
+men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David
+Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Coo­
+per and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H . Lawrence's
+"myth of the essential white American" -that the "essential Ameri­
+can soul" is a killer. 25
+
+SIX
+
+TH E L A S T O F THE M O H I C A N S
+A N D A N D R E W J AC K S O N ' S
+WH I TE R E P U B L I C
+
+The settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty
+impossible for the native. The native's work is to imagine
+all possible methods for destroying the settler.
+-Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
+
+In 1 8 03 , the Jefferson administration, without consulting any af­
+fected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from
+Napoleon Bonaparte. Louisiana comprised 8 2 8 ,000 square miles,
+and its addition doubled the size of the United States. The territory
+encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including
+the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Pawnee, Osage, and Coman­
+che, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that
+would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of
+relocation of Indigenous peoples from west of the Mississippi. Fif­
+teen future states would emerge from the taking: all of present-day
+Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Min­
+nesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota;
+northeastern New Mexico and North Texas; the portions of Mon­
+tana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and
+Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Or­
+leans. The territory pressed against lands occupied by Spain, includ­
+ing Texas and all the territory west of the Continental Divide to the
+Pacific Ocean. These would soon be next on the US annexation list. 1
+At the time, many US Americans saw the purchase as a strate­
+gic means of averting war with France while securing commerce
+
+95
+
+96
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+on the Mississippi. But it was not long before some began eyeing it
+for settlement and others proposing an "exchange" of Indigenous
+lands in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest for lands west of
+the Mississippi. 2 Before turning to conquest and . colonization west
+of the Mississippi, the slavery-based rule of the Southeast would be
+ethnically cleansed of Indigenous peoples. The man for the job was
+Andrew Jackson.
+
+CA R E E R B U I L D I N G T H R O U G H G E N O C I D E
+
+Neither superior technology nor a n overwhelming number of set­
+tlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the
+spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was
+the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civiliza­
+tions of people in order to possess their land. This trend of exter­
+mination became common in the twentieth century as the United
+States seized military and economic control of the world, capping
+five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism. 3 The
+canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor
+( 1 8 7 1-90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, "The
+colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the
+modern world. "4 Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was
+the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east
+of the Mississippi.
+Andrew Jackson was an influential Tennessee land speculator,
+politician, and wealthy owner of a slave-worked plantation, the
+Hermitage. He was also a veteran Indian killer. Jackson's family
+personified the Protestant Scots-Irish migration to the borderlands
+of empires. Jackson's Scots-Irish parents and two older brothers ar­
+rived in Pennsylvania from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in
+1 7 6 5 . The Jacksons soon moved to a Scots-Irish community on the
+North Carolina border with South Carolina. Jackson's father died
+after a logging accident a few weeks before Andrew's birth in 1 767.
+Life was hard for a single mother and three children on the frontier.
+At age thirteen, with little education, Jackson became a courier for
+the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of in-
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+dependence from Britain. Jackson's mother and his brothers died
+during the war, leaving him an orphan. He worked at various j obs,
+then studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western Dis­
+trict of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Ten­
+nessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed
+land claims, he acquired a plantation near Nashville worked by 150
+slaves. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1 79 6, then was
+elected as its US senator, an office he quit after a year to become a
+judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court for six years.
+As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee,
+Jackson enriched himself by acquiring a portion of the Chickasaw
+Nation's land. It was in 1 8 0 1 that Jackson first took command of the
+Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his Indian-killing military
+career. After his brutal war of annihilation against the Muskogee
+Nation, Jackson continued building his national military and po­
+litical career by tackling the resistant Seminoles in what are known
+as the Seminole Wars. In 1 8 3 6, during the second of these wars,
+US Army general Thomas S . Jesup captured the popular Anglo at­
+titude toward the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only
+by exterminating them." By then Jackson was finishing his second
+term as the most popular president in US history to that date, and
+the policy of genocide was embedded in the highest office of the US
+government. 5
+In the Southeast, the Choctaws and Chickasaws turned exclu­
+sively to US traders once the new US republic effectively cut off ac­
+cess to the Spanish in Florida. Soon they were trapped in the US
+trading world, in which they would run up debts and then have
+no way to pay other than by ceding land to creditors who were of­
+ten acting as agents of the federal government. This was no acci­
+dental outcome but was foreseen and encouraged by Jefferson. In
+1 8 0 5 , the Choctaws ceded most of their lands to the United States
+for $50,000, and the Chickasaws relinquished all their lands north
+of the Tennessee River for $20,000. Many Choctaws and Chicka­
+saws thus became landless participants in the expanding plantation
+economy, burdened by debts and poverty. 6
+The division of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the rise of
+Andrew Jackson as a result led to his eventual elevation to the
+
+97
+
+98
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+presidency and carrying out of the final solution-elimination of all
+the Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi through forced
+removal. After the Choctaws and Chickasaws lost most of their ter­
+ritories, only the Muskogees continued to resist the United States.
+The Muskogee Nation was a federation of autonomous towns
+located in the valleys of the many rivers that crisscross what are now
+the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and Florida.
+The Lower Creeks inhabited and farmed in the eastern part of this
+region watered by the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Riv­
+ers, while the Upper Creeks lived west of them, in the valleys of
+the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama Rivers. Following US indepen­
+dence, the Muskogees were divided by settler colonialism. Lower
+Creek villages became economically dependent on settlers and emu­
+lated settlers' values, including ownership of African slaves. This
+was largely due to two decades of diligent work on the part of US
+Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. He was in charge of the US gov­
+ernment's "civilization" project, lending the settler moniker " Five
+Civilized Tribes" to describe the great agricultural nations of the
+Southeast. Hawkins's mission was to instill Euro-American values
+and practices in Indigenous peoples-including the profit motive,
+privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealth by a few,
+and slavery-allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the
+Muskogees. At the time of independence, hundreds of settlers were
+squatting illegally on lands of Muskogees of the Lower Creek towns,
+and that is where Hawkins concentrated, leaving the Muskogees up­
+river alone. However, traditionalists among the Upper Creeks, who
+had allied with Tecumseh and the Shawnee confederation, under­
+stood that they would be next, as they saw the twenty-year Hawkins
+project transforming some citizens of the Lower Creek towns into
+wealthy plantation and slave owners, while the majority became
+landless and poor.
+Traditionalist fighters, called Red Sticks due to the color of
+their wooden spears, began an offensive against collaborating Up­
+per Creeks and settlers that ended in civil war during 1 8 1 3 . The
+Red Sticks created chaos that affected Hawkins's scheme, as they
+attacked anyone associated with his program. Their effectiveness,
+however, provoked a genocidal counteroffensive not officially autho-
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+rized by the federal government, led by Andrew Jackson who was
+then head of the Tennessee militias. Jackson threatened to form his
+own mercenary army to drive the Muskogees " into the ocean" if the
+government failed to eradicate the insurgents.7 Although Jackson
+and his fellow Tennesseans made it clear that their goal was extermi­
+nation of the Muskogee Nation, their rhetoric claimed self-defense.
+In a serie s of search-and-destroy missions over three months prior to
+.
+the final assault on the Red Sticks, Jackson's mercenaries killed hun­
+dreds of Muskogee civilians, pursuing without mercy even homeless
+and starved refugees seeking shelter and safety. By this point, the
+Red Sticks had killed most of the Muskogee Nation livestock both
+to deprive US soldiers of food and to rid Muskogee culture of the
+colonizers' influence. 8
+Both Shawnee fighters and Africans who had freed themselves
+from slavery allied with the Red Sticks. With all their families they
+set up a fortified encampment at Tohopeka at the Horseshoe Bend
+on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama. Jackson proceeded
+to mobilize Lower Creek fighters and some Cherokee allies against
+the Red Sticks. In March 1 8 1 4 , with seven hundred mounted mili­
+tiamen and six hundred Cherokee and Lower Creek fighters, Jack­
+son's armies attacked the Red Stick stronghold. The mercenaries
+captured three hundred Red Stick wives and children and held them
+as hostages to induce Muskogee surrender. Of a thousand Red Stick
+and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. Jackson lost forty­
+nme men.
+In the aftermath of "the Battle of Horseshoe Bend," as it is
+known in US military annals, Jackson's troops fashioned reins for
+their horses' bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee bodies,
+and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given "to the
+ladies of Tennessee."9 Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his
+troops' actions: "The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder
+our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders . . . .
+They have disappeared from the face of the Earth . . . . How lamen­
+table it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over
+the carcasses of the slain! But it is in the dispensation of that provi­
+dence, which inflicts partial evil to produce general good." 10
+Horseshoe Bend marked the end of the Muskogees' resistance in
+
+99
+
+100
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+their original homeland. As historian Alan Brinkley has observed,
+Jackson's political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians­
+that is, their eradication. 1 1
+The surrender document the Muskogee Nation was forced t o sign
+in 1 8 1 4 , the Treaty of Fort Jackson, asserted that they had lost under
+"principles of national justice and honorable war." Andrew Jackson,
+the only US negotiator of the treaty, insisted on nothing less than
+the total destruction of the Muskogee Nation, which the Muskogees
+had no power to refuse or negotiate. These terms of total surrender
+shocked the small group of Muskogee plantation and slave own­
+ers, who thought that they had been thoroughly accepted by the US
+Americans. They had fought alongside the Anglo militias against
+the majority Red Sticks in the war just concluded, yet all Muskogees
+were now to be punished equally. To no avail did the "friendlies"
+prostrate themselves before Jackson at the treaty meeting, begging
+that they and their holdings be spared. Jackson told them that the
+extreme punishment exacted upon them should teach all those who
+would try to oppose US domination. "We bleed our enemies in such
+cases," he explained, "to give them their senses."12 Military histo­
+rian Grenier observes that "Jackson's 'bleeding' of the Muskogees
+marks a culminating point in American military history as the end
+of the Transappalachian East's Indian wars . . . . The conquest of
+the West was not guaranteed by defeating the British Army in battle
+in 1 8 1 5 , but by defeating and driving the Indians from their home­
+lands." 13
+The treaty obliged surviving Muskogees to move onto western
+remnants of their homelands, and Jackson, far from being repri­
+manded for his genocidal methods, won a commission from Presi­
+dent James Madison as major general in the US Army. The territory
+that would become Alabama and Mississippi now lay open to An­
+glo-American settlement, an ominous green light to the expansion
+of plantation slavery. The Muskogee War thus inscribed a US policy
+of ethnic cleansing onto an entire Indigenous population. The policy
+originated by Andrew Jackson in that war would be reconfirmed
+politically when he became president in 1 8 2 8 . 14
+The Upper Creek Muskogees who remained in Alabama surren-
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+dered to Jackson and ceded twenty-three million acres of their ances­
+tral lands to the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Red
+Sticks, however, j oined the resistant Seminole Nation in the Florida
+Everglades and three more decades of Muskogee resistance ensued.
+During this period, Anglo-American slave owners, and Andrew
+Jackson in particular, were determined to destroy the safe havens
+that Seminole towns offered to Africans who escaped from slav­
+ery. 1 5 The Seminole Nation had not existed under that name prior
+to European colonization. The ancestral towns of the Indigenous
+people who became known as Seminoles were located along rivers
+in a large area of what is today Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina,
+and the Florida Panhandle. In the mid-eighteenth century, Waka­
+puchasee (Cowkeeper) and his people separated from the Coweta
+Muskogees and moved south into what was then Spanish-occupied
+Florida. As Spain, Britain, and later the United States decimated
+Indigenous towns throughout the Southeast, survivors, including
+self-emancipated Africans, established a refuge in Seminole territory
+in Spanish Florida in the Everglades. European incursions came in
+the form of military attacks, disease, and disruption of trade routes,
+causing collapse and realignments within and between the towns. 1 6
+The Seminole Nation was born of resistance and included the
+vestiges of dozens of Indigenous communities as well as escaped
+Africans, as the Seminole towns served as refuge. In the Caribbean
+and Brazil, people in such escapee communities were called Ma­
+roons, but in the United States the liberated Africans were absorbed
+into Seminole Nation culture. Then, as now, Seminoles spoke the
+Muskogee language, and much later (in 1957) the US government
+designated them an "Indian tribe." The Seminoles were one of the
+" Five Civilized Tribes" ordered from their national homelands in
+the 1 8 3 0s to Indian Territory (later made part of the state of Okla­
+homa).
+The United States waged three wars against the Seminole Na­
+tion between 1 8 1 7 and 1 8 5 8 . The prolonged and fierce Second
+Seminole War ( 1 8 3 5-4 2) was the longest foreign war waged by the
+United States up to the Vietnam War. The US military further de­
+veloped its army, naval, and marine capabilities in again adopting a
+
+101
+
+102
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+counterinsurgency strategy, in this case against the Seminole towns
+in the Everglades. Once again US forces targeted civilians, destroyed
+food supplies, and sought to destroy every last insurgent. What US
+military annals call the First Seminole War ( 1 8 1 7-19) began when
+US authorities entered Spanish Florida illegally in an attempt to re­
+cover US plantation owners' "property": former African slaves. The
+Seminoles repelled the invasion. In 1 8 1 8 , President James Monroe
+ordered Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the US Army, to
+lead three thousand soldiers into Florida to crush the Seminoles and
+retrieve the Africans among them. The expedition destroyed a num­
+ber of Seminole settlements and then captured the Spanish fort at
+Pensacola, bringing down the Spanish government, but it failed in
+destroying Seminole guerrilla resistance and the Seminoles did not
+agree to hand over any former slaves. "Armed occupation was the
+true way of settling a conquered country," Senator Thomas Hart
+Benton of Missouri said at the time, reflecting a popular blend of
+militarism and white-supremacist Christian identity. "The children
+of Israel entered the promised land, with implements of husbandry
+in one hand, and the weapons of war in the other."17 The United
+States annexed Florida as a territory in 1 8 19 , opening it to Anglo­
+American settlement. In l 8 2 I Jackson was appointed military com­
+mander of Florida Territory. The Seminoles never sued for peace,
+were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United
+States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1 8 3 2 to
+Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation
+has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.
+
+T H E M Y T H I C A L F O U N D AT I O N O F S E T T L E R PAT R I OT I S M
+
+Between 1 8 1 4 and 1 8 2 4 , three-fourths of present-day Alabama and
+Florida, a third of Tennessee, a fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and
+parts of Kentucky and North Carolina became the private property
+of white settlers-all of the land seized from Indigenous farmers. In
+1 8 2 4 , the first permanent US colonial institution was established.
+First named the Office of Indian Affairs and placed tellingly within
+the Department of War, the agency was transferred to the Depart-
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+103
+
+ment of Interior twenty-five years later following the annexation
+of half of Mexico. In making this transfer, the federal government
+showed overconfidence in assuming that armed Indigenous resis­
+tance to US aggression and colonization had ended. Such resistance
+would continue for another half century.
+Whereas white supremacy had been the working rationalization
+for British theft of Indigenous lands and for European enslavement
+of Africans, the bid for independence by what became the United
+States of America was more problematic. Democracy, equality, and
+equal rights do not fit well with dominance of one race by another,
+much less with genocide, settler colonialism, and empire. It was
+during the l 8 2os-the beginning of the era of Jacksonian settler
+democracy-that the unique US origin myth evolved reconciling
+rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among
+its initial scribes.
+Cooper's reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel
+
+The Last of the Mahicans has become the official US origin story.
+Herman Melville called Cooper "our national novelist."18 Cooper
+was the wealthy son of a US congressman, a land speculator who
+built Cooperstown, named after himself, in upstate New York
+where he grew up. His hometown was christened all-American with
+the establishment of the National Baseball Hall of Fame there in
+19 3 6, during the Depression. Expelled from Yale, Cooper joined the
+navy, then married and began writing. In 1 8 2 3 , he published The
+
+Pioneers, the first book in his Leatherstocking Tales series, the other
+four being The Last of the Mahicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder,
+and The Deers/ayer (the last published in 1 8 4 1 ) . Each featured the
+character Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his
+age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, or Deerslayer. Bumppo is a Brit­
+ish settler on land appropriated from the Delaware Nation and is
+buddies with its fictional Delaware leader Chingachgook (the "last
+Mohican" in the myth). Together the Leatherstocking Tales narrate
+the mythical forging of the new country from the 1 75 4-63 French
+and Indian War in The Last of the Mahicans to the settlement of the
+plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Tennessee. At
+the end of the saga Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the
+Rocky Mountains, as he gazes east. 1 9
+
+104
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+The Last of the Mahicans, published in 1 8 26, was a best seller
+throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continu­
+ously since, with two Hollywood movies based on the story, the
+most recent made in 199 2 , the Columbus Quincentennial.2° Cooper
+devised a fictional counterpoint of celebration to the dark under­
+belly of the new American nation-the birth of something new and
+wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of
+the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European,
+not biological merger but something more ephemeral, involving
+the dissolving of the Indian. In the novel, Cooper has the last of the
+"noble" and "pure" Natives die off as nature would have it, with
+the " last Mohican" handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the
+nativized settler, his adopted son. This convenient fantasy could be
+seen as quaint at best if it were not for its deadly staying power.
+Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which
+generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what
+historian Francis Jennings has described as "exclusion from the pro­
+cess of formation of American society and culture":
+In the first place they [US historians] exclude Amerindians (as
+also Afro-Americans) from participation, except as foils for
+Europeans, and thus assume that American civilization was
+formed by Europeans in a struggle against the savagery or
+barbarism of the nonwhite races. This first conception implies
+the second-that the civilization so formed is unique. In the
+second conception uniqueness is thought to have been created
+through the forms and processes of civilization's struggle on a
+specifically American frontier. Alternatively, civilization was
+able to triumph because the people who bore it were unique
+from the beginning-a Chosen People or a super race. Either
+way American culture is seen as not only unique but better
+than all other cultures, precisely because of its differences
+from them.21
+
+US exceptionalism weaves through much of the literature produced
+in the United States, not only the writing of historians. Although
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+Wallace Stegner decried the devastation wrought by imperialism
+on Indigenous peoples and the land, he reinforced the idea of US
+uniqueness by reducing colonization to a twist of fate that produced
+some charming characteristics:
+Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumber­
+land Gap, Americans have been wanderers . . . . With a conti­
+nent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could
+not have avoided being footloose. The initial act of emigration
+from Europe, an act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was
+the beginning of a national habit.
+It should not be denied, either, that being footloose has al­
+ways exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape
+from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations,
+with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our
+folk heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately re­
+flect that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the
+narrator of Moby Dick, all are orphans and wanderers; any of
+them could say, "Call me Ishmael." The Lone Ranger has no
+dwelling place except the saddle. 22
+The British novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence, who lived in
+northern New Mexico for two years, conceptualized the US origin
+myth, invoking Cooper's frontiersman character Deerslayer: "You
+have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other
+stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of
+by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a
+killer. It has never yet melted."23
+Historian Wai-chee Dimock points out that nonfiction sources of
+the time reflected the same view:
+The United States Magazine and Democratic Review summed
+it up by arguing that whereas European powers "conquer only
+to enslave," America, being "a free nation," "conquers only
+to bestow freedom." . . . Far from being antagonistic, "em­
+pire" and "liberty" are instrumentally conjoined. If the for­
+mer stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves
+to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two,
+
+105
+
+106
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+of freedom and dominion, gives America its sovereign place
+in history-its Manifest Destiny, as its advocates so aptly
+called it. 24
+Reconciling empire and liberty-based on the violent taking of
+Indigenous lands-into a usable myth allowed for the emergence
+of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic
+cleansing could be sold to "the people"-indeed could be fought for
+by the young men of those very people-by promising to expand
+economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.
+The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the
+Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that pe­
+riod and throughout the nineteenth century-generations of young
+white men-the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the
+basis for the coalescence of US American nationalism. Behind the
+legend was a looming real-life figure, the archetype that inspired
+the stories, namely, Daniel Boone, an icon of US settler colonialism.
+Boone's life spanned from 1 7 3 4 to 1 8 20, precisely the period cov­
+ered in the Leatherstocking series. Boone was born in Berks County,
+Pennsylvania, on the edge of British settlement. He is an avatar of
+the moving colonial-Indigenous frontier. To the west lay "Indian
+Country," claimed through the Doctrine of Discovery by both Brit­
+ain and France but free of European settlers save for a few traders,
+trappers, and soldiers manning colonial outposts.
+Daniel Boone died in 1 8 2 0 in Missouri, a part of the vast ter­
+ritory acquired in the 1 8 03 Louisiana Purchase. When Missouri
+opened for settlement, the Boone family led the initial settlers there.
+His body was taken for burial in Frankfort, Kentucky, the covenant
+heart of the Ohio Country, Indian Country, for which the revolution
+had been fought and in which he had been the trekker superhero,
+almost a deity. Daniel Boone became a celebrity at age fifty in 1784,
+a year after the end of the war of independence. Real estate entre­
+preneur John Filson, seeking settlers to buy property in the Ohio
+Country, wrote and self-published The Discovery, Settlement and
+
+Present State of Kentucke, along with a map to guide illegal squat­
+ters . The book contained an appendix about Daniel Boone, purport­
+edly written by Boone himself. That part of the book on Boone's
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+107
+
+"adventures" subsequently was published as "The Adventures of
+Col. Daniel Boone" in the American Magazine in 1 7 8 7, then as a
+book. Thereby a superstar was born-the mythical hero, the hunter,
+the "Man Who Knows Indians,'' as Richard Slotkin has described
+this US American archetype:
+The myth of the hunter that had grown up about the figure
+of Filson's Daniel Boone provided a framework within which
+Americans attempted to define their cultural identity, social
+and political values, historical experience, and literary aspira­
+tions . . . . Daniel Boone, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson
+were heroes to the whole nation because their experiences had
+reference to many or all of these common experiences. "The
+Hunters of Kentucky,'' a popular song that swept the nation
+in 1 8 22-2 8 , helped elect Andrew Jackson as President by as­
+sociating him with Boone, the hero of the West. 25
+Yet the Leatherstocking's positive twist on genocidal colonialism
+was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colo­
+nizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created
+that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the
+experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories
+that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide
+and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and
+historians.
+
+COM M A N D E R AND C H I E F
+
+Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most US history texts in a chapter
+titled "The Age of Jackson," "The Age of Democracy," "The Birth
+of Democracy," or some variation thereon. 26 The Democratic Party
+claims Jackson and Jefferson as its founders. Every year, state and
+national Democratic organizations hold fund-raising events they call
+Jefferson-Jackson Dinners. They understand that Thomas Jefferson
+was the thinker and Jackson the doer in forging populist democracy
+for full participation in the fruits of colonialism based on the oppor­
+tunity available to Anglo settlers.
+
+108
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Jackson carried out the original plan envisioned by the found­
+ers-particularly Jefferson-initially as a Georgia militia leader,
+then as an army general who led four wars of aggression against the
+Muskogees in Georgia and Florida, and finally as a president who
+engineered the expulsion of all Native peoples east of the Mississippi
+to the designated "Indian Territory." As the late Cherokee principal
+chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography:
+The fledgling United States government's method of dealing
+with native people-a process which then included systematic
+genocide, property theft, and total subjugation-reached its
+nadir in 1 8 3 0 under the federal policy of President Andrew
+Jackson. More than any other president, he used forcible re­
+moval to expel the eastern tribes from their land. From the
+very birth of the nation, the United States government truly
+had carried out a vigorous operation of extermination and
+removal. Decades before Jackson took office, during the ad­
+ministration of Thomas Jefferson, it was already cruelly ap­
+parent to many Native American leaders that any hope for
+tribal autonomy was cursed. So were any thoughts of peaceful
+coexistence with white citizens .27
+It's not that Jackson had a "dark side," as his apologists rational­
+ize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was
+the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonial­
+ist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to
+constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents­
+Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman,
+Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama-have each advanced populist
+imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups
+beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythol­
+ogy. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Con­
+sciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how
+to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom
+for the people.
+Jackson was a national military hero, but he was rooted in the
+Scots-Irish frontier communities, most of whose people, unlike
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+him, remained impoverished. Their small farms were hard-pressed
+to compete with large plantations with thousands of acres of cot­
+ton planted and each tended by hundreds of enslaved Africans.
+Land-poor white rural people saw Jackson as the man who would
+save them, making land available to them by ridding it of Indians,
+thereby setting the pattern of the dance between poor and rich US
+Americans ever since under the guise of equality of opportunity.
+When Jackson was inaugurated in 1 8 29 , he opened the White House
+to the public, the majority in attendance being humble poor whites.
+Jackson was easily reelected in 1 8 3 2 , although landless settlers had
+acquired very little land, and what little they seized was soon lost
+to speculators, transformed into ever larger plantations worked by
+slave labor.
+The late Jackson biographer Michael Paul Ragin observed:
+Indian removal was Andrew Jackson's major policy aim in
+the quarter-century before he became President. His Indian
+wars and treaties were principally responsible for dispossess­
+ing the southern Indians during those years. His presidential
+Indian removal finished the job . . . . During the years of Jack­
+sonian Democracy, 1 8 24-5 2 , five of the ten major candidates
+for President had either won reputations as generals in Indian
+wars or served as Secretary of War, whose major responsibil­
+ity in this period was relations with the Indians. Historians,
+however, have failed to place Indians at the center of Jackson's
+life. They have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every per­
+spective but Indian destruction, the one from which it actually
+
+developed historically. 28
+
+Once elected president, Jackson lost no time in initiating the
+removal of all the Indigenous farmers and the destruction of all
+their towns in the South. In his first annual message to Congress,
+he wrote: "The emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as
+cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of
+their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be
+distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States
+they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as
+individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment
+
+109
+
+110
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+of those possessions which they have improved by their industry."29
+This political code language barely veils the intention to forcibly
+remove the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Semi­
+nole Nations, followed by all other Indigenous communities from
+east of the Mississippi River, except for the many who could not be
+rounded up and remained, without land, without acknowledgment,
+until the successful struggles of some of them for recognition in the
+late twentieth century.
+The state of Georgia saw Jackson's election as a green light and
+claimed most of the Cherokee Nation's territory as public land.
+The Georgia legislature resolved that the Cherokee constitution
+and laws were null and void and that Cherokees were subject to
+Georgia law. The Cherokee Nation took a case against Georgia
+to the US Supreme Court. With Chief Justice John Marshall writ­
+ing for the maj ority, the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees.
+Jackson ignored the Supreme Court, however, in effect saying that
+John Marshall had made his decision and Marshall would have to
+enforce it if he could, although he, Jackson, had an army while
+Marshall did not.
+While the case was working its way through the courts , gold
+was discovered in Georgia in 1 8 29 , which quickly brought some
+forty thousand eager gold seekers to run roughshod over Cherokee
+lands, squatting, looting, killing, and destroying fields and game
+parks. Under authority granted by the Indian Removal Act, passed
+by Congress in 1 8 3 0 , the United States drew up a treaty that would
+cede all Cherokee lands to the government in exchange for land in
+" Indian Territory." The US government held Cherokee leaders in
+jail and closed their printing press during negotiations with a few
+handpicked Cherokees, who provided the bogus signatures Jackson
+needed as a cover for forced removal. 30
+
+TRA I LS O F TEARS
+
+Not only the great southern nations were driven into exile, but also
+nearly all the Native nations east of the Mississippi were forced off
+their lands and relocated to Indian Territory, seventy thousand peo-
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+111
+
+pie in all. During the Jacksonian period, the United States made
+eighty-six treaties with twenty-six Indigenous nations between New
+York and the Mississippi, all of them forcing land sessions, includ­
+ing removals. Some communities fled to Canada and Mexico rather
+than going to Indian Territory. 31 When Sauk leader Black Hawk
+led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland
+in Illinois in 1 8 3 2 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed
+they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal
+troops. The " Black Hawk War" that is narrated in history texts was
+no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend
+themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under
+a white flag. Still the soldiers fired, resulting in a bloodbath. In his
+surrender speech, Black Hawk spoke bitterly of the enemy:
+You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all
+white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not
+deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look
+at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do
+not steal. An Indian who is as bad as the white men could
+not live in our nation; he would be put to death and eaten up
+by the wolves . . . . We told them to leave us alone, and keep
+away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they
+coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us
+by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. 32
+The Sauks were rounded up and driven onto a reservation called Sac
+and Fox.
+Most Cherokees had held out in remaining in their homeland
+despite pressure from federal administrations from Jefferson on to
+migrate voluntarily to the Arkansas- Oklahoma-Missouri area of
+the Louisiana Purchase territory. The Cherokee Nation addressed
+removal:
+We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our
+advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We think other­
+wise. Our people universally think otherwise . . . . We wish to
+remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and origi­
+nal right to remain without interruption or molestation. The
+
+112
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursu­
+ance of treaties, guarantee our residence and our privileges,
+and secure us against intruders. Our only request is, that these
+treaties may be fulfilled, and these laws executed. 33
+A few contingents of Cherokees settled in Arkansas and what
+became Indian Territory as early as 1 8 1 7. There was a larger migra­
+tion in 1 8 3 2 , which came after the Indian Removal Act. The 1 8 3 8
+forced march o f the Cherokee Nation, now known a s the Trail of
+Tears, was an arduous journey from remaining Cherokee homelands
+in Georgia and Alabama to what would later become northeast­
+ern Oklahoma. After the Civil War, journalist James Mooney inter­
+viewed people who had been involved in the forced removal. Based
+on these firsthand accounts, he described the scene in 1 8 3 8 , when
+the US Army removed the last of the Cherokees by force:
+Under [General Winfield] Scott's orders the troops were dis­
+posed at various points throughout the Cherokee country,
+where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and hold­
+ing the Indians preparatory to removal. From these, squads
+of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every
+small cabin hidden away in the coves or by sides of mountain
+streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants,
+however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner
+were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway
+and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary
+miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their
+fields or going along the road, women were taken from their
+wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turn­
+ing for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their
+homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on
+the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage . So keen were these
+outlaws on the scene that in some instances they were driv­
+ing off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before
+the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direc­
+tion. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian
+graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a
+colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the
+civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by
+thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I
+ever knew."34
+Half of the sixteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and chil­
+dren who were rounded up and force-marched in the dead of winter
+out of their country perished on the journey.
+The Muskogees and Seminoles suffered similar death rates in
+their forced transfer, while the Chickasaws and Choctaws lost
+around 15 percent of their people en route. An eyewitness account
+by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of the day, captures
+one of thousands of similar scenes in the forced deportation of the
+Indigenous peoples from the Southeast:
+I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which
+I have been describing; and I was the witness of sufferings
+which I have not the power to portray.
+At the end of the year 1 8 3 1 , whilst I was on the left bank
+of the Mississippi at a place named by Europeans Memphis,
+there arrived a numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as
+they are called by the French in Louisiana). These savages had
+left their country, and were endeavoring to gain the right bank
+of the Mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum which
+had been promised them by the American government. It was
+then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe;
+the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was
+drifting huge masses of ice. The Indians had their families
+with them; and they brought in their train the wounded and
+sick, with children newly born, and old men upon the verge
+of death. They possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only
+their arms and some provisions. I saw them embark to pass
+the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade
+from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard amongst
+the assembled crowd; all were silent. Their calamities were
+of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The
+
+113
+
+114
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them
+across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as
+these animals perceived that their masters were finally leav­
+ing the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and, plunging all
+together into the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after
+the boat.35
+In his biography of Jackson, Rogin points out that this was no
+endgame: "The dispossession of the Indians . . . did not happen once
+and for all in the beginning. America was continually beginning
+again on the frontier, and as it expanded across the continent, it
+killed, removed, and drove into extinction one tribe after another."3 6
+Against all odds, some Indigenous peoples refused to be removed
+and stayed in their traditional homelands east of the Mississippi.
+In the South, the communities that did not leave lost their tradi­
+tional land titles and status as Indians in the eyes of the government,
+but many survived as peoples, some fighting successfully in the late
+twentieth century for federal acknowledgment and official Indig­
+enous status. In the north, especially in New England, some states
+had illegally taken land and created guardian systems and small
+reservations, such as those of the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies
+in Maine, both of which won lawsuits against the states and at­
+tained federal acknowledgment during the militant movements of
+the 19 70s. Many other Native nations have been able to increase
+their land bases.
+
+T H E P E R S I STENCE O F D E N IAL
+
+Andrew Jackson was born to squatters under British rule on Indig­
+enous land. His life followed the trajectory of continental imperial­
+ism as he made his career of taking Indigenous land, from the time
+of Jefferson's presidency to the elimination of Indigenous nations
+east of the Mississippi. This process was the central fact of US poli­
+tics and the basis for the US economy. Two-thirds of the US popula­
+tion of nearly four million at the time of independence lived within
+fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. During the following half century,
+more than four million settlers crossed the Appalachians, one of the
+
+The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson's White Republic
+
+largest and most rapid migrations in world history. Jackson was an
+actor who made possible the implementation of the imperialist proj ­
+ect of the independent United States, but he was also an exponent
+of the Euro-American popular will that favored imperialism and the
+virtually free land it provided them.
+D uring the period of Jackson's military and executive power, a
+mythology emerged that defined the contours and substance of the
+US origin narrative, which has weathered nearly two centuries and
+remains intact in the early twenty-first century as patriotic cant, a
+civic religion invoked in Barack Obama's presidential inaugural ad­
+dress in January 2009 :
+In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that
+greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has
+never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.
+It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who
+prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches
+and fame.
+Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of
+things-some celebrated, but more often men and women ob­
+scure in their labor-who have carried us up the long, rugged
+path towards prosperity and freedom.
+For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and
+traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they
+toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of
+the whip and plowed the hard earth.
+For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and
+Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
+Time and again these men and women struggled and sac­
+rificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might
+live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of
+our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of
+birth or wealth or faction.
+This is the journey we continue today. 37
+Spoken like a true descendant of old settlers. President Obama raised
+another key element of the national myth in an interview a few days
+
+115
+
+116
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+later with Al Arabiya television in Dubai. Affirming that the United
+States could be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
+he said: "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.
+But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born
+as a colonial power."
+The affirmation of democracy requires the denial of colonialism,
+but denying it does not make it go away.
+
+SEVEN
+
+SE A TO S H I N I N G S E A
+
+These Spaniards [Mexicans] are the meanest looking
+race of people I ever saw, don't appear more civilized
+than our Indians generally. Dirty, "filthy looking creatures.
+-
+
+Capta i n Lemuel Ford, 1835
+
+That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us, is quite as
+certain as that that is the destiny of our own Indians.
+-Waddy Thompson Jr., 183 6
+
+Captain Lemuel Ford of the First Dragoons, United States Army,
+made the above observation in his diary, referring to Comanche­
+ros, Mexican traders in northern Mexico who traded and intermar­
+ried primarily with Comanches on the plains. Waddy Thompson Jr.
+served as a US diplomat to Mexico from 1842 to 1 84 4 . 1 Army offi­
+cers like Ford and diplomats like Thompson were not exceptional in
+their racist views. Indian hating and white supremacy were part and
+parcel of "democracy" and "freedom."
+The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang
+the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had
+been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US
+war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of
+sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime
+change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed
+by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for
+manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capi­
+tal of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly
+grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the lnjun,
+will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history. . . . A superior
+
+117
+
+118
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The
+whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our
+country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient
+Mexico . . . to do with the great mission of peopling the New World
+with a noble race ? "3 In September 1 846, when General Zachary
+Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as " ''another
+clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon char­
+acter."4 Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin
+myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as
+historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would
+later be called social Darwinism.
+
+US O V E R S E A S I M P E R I A L I S M
+
+Traversing the continent "from sea to shining sea" was hardly a natu­
+ral westward procession of covered wagons as portrayed in Western
+movies . The US invasion of Mexico was carried out by US marines,
+by sea, through Veracruz, and the early colonization of California
+initially progressed from the Pacific coast, reached from the Atlantic
+coast by way of Tierra del Fuego. Between the Mississippi River
+and the Rockies lay a vast region controlled by Indigenous nations
+that were neither conquered nor colonized by any European power,
+and although the United States managed to annex northern Mexico,
+large numbers of settlers could not reach the Northern California
+goldfields or the fertile Willamette Valley region of the Pacific North­
+west without army regiments accompanying them. Why then does
+the popular US historical narrative of a "natural" westward move­
+ment persist? The answer is that those who still hold to the narrative
+remain captives of the ideology of "manifest destiny," according
+to which the United States expanded across the continent to assume
+its preordained size and shape. This ideology normalizes the succes­
+sive invasions and occupations of Indigenous nations and Mexico
+as not being colonialist or imperialist, rather simply ordained prog­
+ress. In this view, Mexico was j ust another Indian nation to be
+crushed.
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+The US invasion of Mexico has also been characterized as the
+first US "foreign" war, but it was not. By 1 846, the United States
+had invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed dozens of foreign
+nations east of the Mississippi. Then there were the Barbary Wars.
+The opening lyric of the official hymn of the US Marine Corps,
+composed and adopted soon after the invasion of Mexico, " From
+the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli," refers in part to
+1 8 01-5 , when the marines were dispatched by President Thomas
+Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation of North Africa. This was the
+"First Barbary War," the ostensible goal of which was to persuade
+Tripoli to release US sailors it held hostage and to end "pirate " attacks
+on US merchant ships.5 The " Second Barbary War," in 1 8 15-16,
+ended when pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to
+exact fees from US ships entering their territorial waters.
+By this time, throughout Spain's American colonies, wars of in­
+dependence flamed, the leaders of these revolutions inspired by the
+French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. A successful inde­
+pendence movement arose in France's Caribbean plantation slave
+colony of Haiti in 1 8 0 1 , when the majority enslaved African popu­
+lation overthrew the French planters and declared an independent
+nation-state. This was the first permanently successful national lib­
+eration movement against European colonialism in the world. The
+prevailing myth claims that the colonized peoples fighting for inde­
+pendence from Spain were inspired by successful US secession from
+Britain but this is a dubious claim.
+Simon Bolivar was a major leader of the independence move­
+ments in South America. He visited liberated Haiti in 1 8 1 5 , a trip
+that sharpened his hatred for slavery and led to its abolishment in
+the independent nations that formed in South America. Bolivar and
+liberator Jose de San Martin were founders of the unitary republic
+they named Gran Colombia, which survived from 1 8 19 to 1 8 3 0 with
+Bolivar as president. Subsequently, Gran Colombia splintered into
+the nation-states of Venezuela, Colombia (which then included Pan­
+ama), Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. A similar unitary nation formed
+in Central America called the United Provinces of Central America,
+with its capital in Guatemala City, which existed from l 8 2 I to 1 8 4 1 ,
+
+119
+
+120
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+thereafter splitting into the present separate small states. In both
+cases the larger and stronger unitary federations were subject to eco­
+nomic intervention and domination by the British and US empires.
+Father Miguel Hidalgo, a priest who was instrumental in the
+Mexican independence movement, was deeply assimilated into In­
+digenous society in Mexico, and the maj ority of the movement's
+insurgent fighters were drawn from Indigenous nations. Most of the
+actual fighters in the independence movements led by San Martin
+and Bolf var in South America were also Indigenous, representing
+their communities and nations, fighting for their own liberation as
+peoples. In striking contrast, the US war of independence targeted
+the Indigenous nations as enemies. The Indigenous communities in
+the new South American republics were soon dominated economi­
+cally and politically by national landed elites that consolidated their
+power following the wars of independence. However, Indigenous
+peoples whose ancestors fought for liberation from Spanish colo ­
+nialism have never forgotten their important role in those revolu­
+tionary movements and realize that the liberation process continues.
+The Indigenous peoples of Latin America feel they own those revo­
+lutions, whereas the US secession from Great Britain was the inten­
+tional founding of a white republic that planned elimination of the
+Indigenous peoples as territorial-based, collective societies.
+The period of US intervention to annex and dominate former
+Spanish territories in the Americas began not in 1 8 9 8 with the
+Spanish-American War, as most history texts claim, but rather nearly
+a century before, during Jefferson's presidency, with the Zebulon M.
+Pike expedition of 1 8 0 6-7. Those historians who track "continental
+expansion" separately from clear actions of US imperialism rarely
+note the juxtaposition in time and presidential administration of the
+interventions in North Africa and Mexico on the eve of its liberation
+from Spain. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition, completed the
+same year that Pike set off, the Pike expedition was a military proj ­
+ect ordered by President Jefferson. Lewis and Clark had headed into
+the far reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory to gather
+intelligence on the Mandan, Hidatsa, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and
+many other nations in the huge swath of territory between the Rock-
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+ies and the Pacific, bordered by Spanish-occupied territory on the
+west and south and British Canada on the north. 6 Pike and his small
+force of soldiers and Osage hostages had orders to illegally enter
+Spanish territory to gather information that would later be used for
+military invasion. Under the guise of having gone astray, Pike and
+his contingent found themselves inside Spanish-occupied northern
+New Mexico (today's southern Colorado), where they "discovered"
+Pikes Peak and built a fort. Ultimately, as they had undoubtedly
+planned, they were taken into custody by Spanish authorities who
+transported them to Chihuahua, Mexico, allowing Pike and his men
+to observe and make notes about northern Mexico on the way. More
+important, they collected information on Spanish military resources
+and behavior and the location of and relations among civilian popu­
+lations . Pike was released, and in l 8 r o published his findings. Later
+titled The Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the book was
+a best seller.7
+
+U S C O L O N I Z AT I O N O F N O R T H E R N M E X I C O
+
+The instability of the impoverished new republic of Mexico, as it
+emerged in 1 8 2 1 from more than three centuries of Spanish colonial­
+ism and an exhausting war of national liberation, put it in a weak
+position to defend its territory against US aggression . With Spain
+out of the way, the United States could pursue its own policy of im­
+perialism without risking a difficult war with European imperialist
+powers-what George Washington had referred to in his farewell
+address when he warned against "foreign entanglements ." Once
+Mexico was independent, its newly formed government immediately
+opened its borders to trade, something Spanish authorities had never
+allowed. US trader William Becknell arrived at Taos in the Mexican
+province of Nuevo Mexico from St. Louis in 1 8 2 1 , and a US trading
+party led by Sylvester Pattie arrived in 1 8 2 4 . 8 Traders based in St.
+Louis, at the time the effective western frontier outpost of the United
+States, began extending their business to New Mexico. Until the
+publication of Pike's book in l 8 ro, US merchants had shown little
+
+121
+
+122
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+interest in trading in Mexico. Pike's account of the potential profits
+to be made inspired them to set out to capture that trade. 9
+US traders would help pave the way t o US political control of
+northern Mexico through what came to be known as the "Ameri­
+can party of Taos." Christopher Houston " Kit" Carson would play
+a major role in the success of the US invasion of northern Mex­
+ico as he continued work as a colonial mercenary. Born in 1 8 09 in
+Kentucky, Carson was a fur trapper and entrepreneur, as well as a
+noted Indian hater and killer, who had left his family's homestead
+in Missouri for New Mexico at age sixteen. Most of the US citizens
+who made up the American party, including Carson, married into
+wealthy Spanish-identified families in New Mexico who had not
+favored independence from Spain, creating a strong Anglo affinity
+within the local ruling class. The goal of this clique was to attract,
+and thus monopolize, the trade in furs with Indigenous and other
+trappers, with the ultimate goal of US annexation. As a magnet, the
+traders would offer low-priced manufactured goods, from clothing
+to kitchenware, tools, and furniture. St. Louis was connected to
+transatlantic trading houses in cities on the East Coast, so it had the
+advantage of better variety and quality of goods than those of Chi­
+huahua traders, who relied on the declining port of Veracruz. Bent's
+Fort (near present-day La Junta, Colorado) became the economic
+center for the fur trade in northern New Mexico, rivaling only John
+Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in North America. Missouri
+merchants circumvented the Mexican prohibition against exports
+of silver and gold (lifted briefly for silver between 1 8 2 8 and 1 8 3 5 )
+through smuggling and bribery. 1 0
+St. Louis soon replaced Chihuahua as the entrepot for the north­
+ern Mexico trade, and the elite of Mexico's northern provinces be­
+came parties to the US objective of incorporating the territory into
+the United States. As early as 1 8 24 , Missouri senator Thomas Hart
+Benton introduced a bill in the US Senate on behalf of citizens of
+Missouri for a US government survey of the Santa Fe Trail to the
+Mexican border. In 1 8 3 2 , President Andrew Jackson began using
+US troops to protect caravans of merchandise on the Santa Fe Trail
+going to northern Mexico from possible interference by Indigenous
+peoples whose territories they crossed without permission.
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+123
+
+In addition to New Mexico, US citizen residents laid groundwork
+for the annexation of Mexico in Texas and California as well. The
+Spanish Cortes (parliament) had enacted a law in 1'8 13 that autho­
+rized provincial authorities to make private property land grants,
+and this practice of granting land to individuals, including foreign­
+ers, was continued under the independent Mexican government
+until 1 8 2 8 . In 1 8 23 , Mexico's despotic ruler Agustin de Iturbide
+enacted a colonization law authorizing the national government to
+enter into a contract granting land to an empresario, or promoter,
+who was required to recruit a minimum of two hundred families to
+settle the grant. Only applied in the province of Texas, many such
+grants were sought by and granted to slave-owning Anglo-American
+entrepreneurs, despite slavery being illegal in Mexico, making pos­
+sible their dominance in the province and leading to Mexico's loss of
+Texas in 1 8 3 6 . 1 1
+Senator Benton, h i s son-in-law Captain John C . Fremont, and
+Kit Carson also helped pave the way for the invasion of Northern
+California. In the early 1 840s, Benton and his daughter, Jessie-Fre­
+mont's wife-built a booster press to entice settlers to the Oregon
+Territory as well as to settle in the Mexican province of California.
+At the same time, Fremont and his guide Carson mounted five ex­
+peditions to gather information, laying the groundwork for military
+conquest. The third expedition illegally entered the Sacramento Val­
+ley region from the north in early 1 846, just before the United States
+declared war against Mexico. Fremont encouraged Anglo settlers in
+the Central Valley to side with the United States, promising military
+protection if war broke out. Once a US warship was positioned for
+war, Fremont was appointed lieutenant colonel of the California
+Battalion, as if it had all been planned in advance. 12
+Exploration and intelligence gathered by Pike, followed by infil­
+tration and settlement of northern Mexican provinces preceded by
+US entrepreneurs, finally culminated in military invasion and war. US
+forces fought their way from Mexico's main commercial port of
+Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico to the capital, Mexico City, nearly
+three hundred miles away. The US Army occupied the capital until
+the Mexican government agreed to cede,its northern territories, cod­
+ified in the 1 848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Texas had become a
+
+124
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+US state at the end of 1 845 . California quickly acquired statehood
+in 1 8 50, followed by Nevada in 1 8 64 , Colorado in 1 876, Wyoming
+in 1 89 0 , Utah in 1 8 9 6, but the more densely populated Arizona and
+New Mexico not until 19 1 2 .
+The Land Ordinance o f I ] 8 5 had established a national system
+for surveying and distributing land, and as one historian has noted,
+" Under the May 1785 ordinance, Indian land would be auctioned off
+to the highest bidder."13 The Northwest Ordinance of 1 7 8 7, albeit
+guaranteeing Indigenous occupancy and title, set forth an evolution­
+ary colonization procedure for annexation via military occupation,
+territorial status, and finally statehood. Conditions for statehood
+would be achieved when the settlers outnumbered the Indigenous
+population, which in the cases of both the Mexican cession area and
+the Louisiana Purchase territory required decimation or forced re­
+moval of Indigenous populations. In this US system, unique among
+colonial powers, land became the most important exchange com­
+modity for the accumulation of capital and building of the national
+treasury. To understand the genocidal policy of the US government,
+the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US
+wealth and power must be seen. Apologists for US expansionism see
+the 1 7 8 7 ordinance not as a reflection of colonialism, but rather as
+a means of "reconciling the problem of liberty with the problem of
+empire," in historian Howard Lamar's words. 14
+Following the Mexican War, the United States faced problems
+more pressing than that of reconciling conflicting ideologies . For
+one thing, the vast majority in the annexed territory were Indigenous
+peoples or Mexican farmers and ranchers, landed communities. As
+for the Navajos, Apaches, and Utes who had resisted for centuries all
+colonization efforts by the Spanish and then the Mexican authori­
+ties, they continued to resist the new colonial regime. To understand
+how the peoples of these regions responded to the US invasion and
+conquest, and to understand their particular relationship with the
+United States today, it is essential to understand their history under
+Spanish colonization.
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF
+OCCU P I E D N O RT H E R N M E X I CO
+
+Although the Spanish Crown had dispatched explorers such as
+Coronado, Cabeza de Baca, and others, and had established trading
+and military posts and towns along the North American Atlantic
+Coast and in Florida and along the Gulf Coast as far as the Missis­
+sippi, Spanish settler-colonialist rule did not begin north of the Rio
+Grande until 159 8 . The soldier-settler colonizing mission launched
+a brutal military assault on the Pueblo towns in New Mexico and
+imposed state and church institutions. The colonizers found a thriv­
+ing irrigation-based agriculture supporting a population living in
+ninety-eight interrelated city-states (pueblos, the Spanish called
+them), and within two decades they reduced the towns to twenty­
+one. 15 Perhaps most provocative, given the Pueblos' extensive rituals
+and numerous religious feast days, the Franciscan missionaries for­
+bade Pueblo religious practices and forced Christianity upon them.
+As Spanish repression and labor exploitation intensified, the Pueblos
+organized a revolution that also was supported by the unconquered
+Navaj os, Apaches, and Utes, and the Hopi towns to the west in
+what is now Arizona . They were joined by the servant and laboring
+class of captive Indigenous and Mestizos in the Spanish capital at
+Santa Fe. In 1680, they drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, leav­
+ing the Pueblos free for twelve years before a new and permanent
+colonizing mission arrived. 1 6 During another l 3 o years of Spanish
+rule before Mexico's independence, the Pueblos were strictly con­
+trolled and forced to provide foot soldiers for Spanish forays against
+the Navaj os, Apaches, and Utes who were never colonized by the
+Spanish. Mexico ousted the Franciscans and left the Pueblos to their
+own lives, although much of their territory had been lost to perma nent settlers.
+The two largest Mexican provinces annexed by the United States,
+Coahuila y Tejas (Texas) and California, were more sparsely popu­
+lated and not as tightly centralized and organized as New Mex­
+ico. After 1692, as the Spanish Crown sent an army to invade and
+reoccupy the Rio Grande Pueblos, it also sought effective control
+and settlement of California and Texas, in part to create a large
+
+125
+
+126
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+buffer with competing French, British, and Russian imperialism.
+After two centuries of dominance in the Americas, the Spanish state
+was crumbling politically and economically. Having experienced a
+depression in silver production in their American colonies and grow­
+ing competition from other European powers, the Spanish settled
+on maintaining and expanding its northern holdings to hold back
+French and British encroachment into the mining areas of the inte­
+rior of New Spain (Mexico).
+In what is now the state of Texas, Spain built forts and expropri­
+ated land from the local Indigenous people, granting it to Spanish
+settlers to farm and ranch. The first Spanish town in Texas, San An­
+tonio, was established in 1 7 1 8 , and Franciscan missionaries founded
+the Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) . Spanish forts, mis­
+sions, and settlements dotted the territory, especially along the Rio
+Grande from Matamoras to Laredo. The Indigenous peoples of
+Texas included the Lupin Apaches, Jumanos, Coahuiltecans, Tonka­
+was, Karankawas, and Caddos, all of whom were more vulnerable
+to colonization than the more mobile Comanches and Wichitas in
+West Texas. By the time of Mexican independence, the Indigenous
+population of the province was around fifty thousand, while Span­
+ish settlers numbered around thirty thousand.
+During the first decade of Mexican independence, some ten thou­
+sand Cherokees, Seminoles, Shawnees, and many other Indigenous
+communities east of the Mississippi avoided forced removal to In­
+dian Territory and escaped the iron heel of the United States, tak­
+ing refuge in Mexico. One such community was the people of the
+Coahuila Kikapu (Kickapoo) Nation, forced out of its homeland
+when Wisconsin was opened for settlement. The Tohono O'odam
+Nation did not move anywhere, but the redrawn 1 8 4 8 border split
+their homeland. The independent Republic of Mexico provided land
+grants for their various communities. With Texas's independence
+from Mexico, then US annexation, many moved south of the im­
+posed new border. 17
+The Republic of Mexico opened a door to US domination by
+granting land to Anglo immigrants. During the first decade of Mexi­
+can independence, some thirty thousand Anglo-American farmers
+and plantation owners, along with their slaves, poured into Texas,
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+127
+
+receiving development land grants. By the time Texas became a US
+state in 1 845 , Anglo settlers numbered 1 60 , 0 0 0 . 1 8 Mexico abol­
+ished slavery in 1 8 29 , which affected the Anglo-American settlers'
+quest for wealth in building plantations worked by enslaved Afri­
+cans. They lobbied the Mexican government for a reversal of the ban
+and gained only a one-year extension to settle their affairs and free
+their bonded workers-the government refused to legalize slavery.
+The settlers decided to secede from Mexico, initiating the famous
+and mythologized 1 8 3 6 Battle of the Alamo, where the mercenaries
+James Bowie and Davy Crockett and slave owner William Travis
+were killed. Although technically an Anglo-American loss, the siege
+of the Alamo served to stir Anglo patriotic passions, and within a
+month at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, Mexico handed over the
+province. This was a great victory for the Andrew Jackson admin­
+istration, for Jackson's brother, Mason, who was one of the Texas
+planters, and especially for the alcoholic settler-warrior hero Sam
+Houston: The former governor of Tennessee, Houston was made
+commander in chief of the Texas army and president of the new
+"Texas republic," which he helped guide to US statehood in 1 8 4 5 .
+O n e o f the first acts o f the pro-slavery independent government was
+to establish a counterinsurgency force that-as its name, the Texas
+Rangers, suggests-followed the "American way of war" in destroy­
+ing Indigenous towns, eliminating Native nations in Texas, pursu­
+ing ethnic cleansing, and suppressing protest from Tejanos, former
+Mexican citizens. 19
+Mission San Francisco de Asis, also called Mission Dolores, was
+a Spanish Franciscan mission established on the Pacific Coast at the
+same time as the Presidio (military base) at San Francisco-1 776,
+the year that Anglo-Americans declared independence from Brit­
+ain. The purpose of the garrison was twofold: to protect the mis­
+sion from Indigenous inhabitants whose territory the Spanish were
+usurping and to round up those same people and force them to live
+and work for the Franciscan friars at the mission. Mission Dolores
+was the sixth of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established be­
+tween 1 769 and 1 8 2 3 , when Mexico disbanded the missions. The
+establishment of the missions and presidios from San Diego and
+Los Angeles and Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and So-
+
+128
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+noma, traces the colonization of California's Indigenous nations.
+The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called
+El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.
+The Spanish military in California was divided into four districts,
+each with Franciscan missions and strategically located presidios.
+The 1 769 establishment of the first presidia in San Diego coincided
+with establishment of the first Franciscan mission in California. The
+second presidia was based in Monterey in 1 770, to defend the six
+missions in the area as well as the mercury mines in the Santa Cruz
+Mountains. Monterey became the capital and the only port of entry
+for shipments to and from Spanish California, and it remained so
+until 1 846, when the United States seized California.
+These California Franciscan missions and their founder, Junipero
+Serra, are extravagantly romanticized by modern California resi­
+dents and remain popular tourist sites. Very few visitors notice,
+however, that in the middle of the plaza of each mission is a whip ­
+ping post. The history symbolized by that artifact is not dead and
+buried with the generations of Indigenous bodies buried under the
+California crust. The scars and trauma have been passed on from
+generation to generation. Putting salt in the wound, as it were, Pope
+John Paul II in 19 8 8 beatified Junipero Serra, the first step toward
+sainthood. California Indigenous peoples were insulted by this act
+and organized to prevent the sanctification of a person they consider
+to have been an exponent of rape, torture, death, starvation, and
+humiliation of their ancestors and the attempted destruction of their
+cultures. Serra would take soldiers with him, randomly kidnapping
+Indigenous individuals and families, recording these captures in his
+diaries, as in this instance: " [When] one fled from between their [the
+soldiers'] hands, they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all
+necessary, for, even bound, he defended himself that they should not
+bring him, and flung himself on the ground with such violence that
+he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought
+him . . . . He was most frightened and very disturbed." 20 In 1 8 7 8 , a
+old Kamia man named Janitin told an interviewer of his experience
+as a child: "When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a
+room for a week . . . . Every day they lashed me unjustly because I
+did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they
+caught me like a fox." He was fastened to the stage and beaten to
+unconsciousness.
+California Indigenous peoples resisted this totalitarian order.
+These insurgent actions are also recorded in official records and
+diaries, but they seem to have interested few historians until the
+civil rights era of the 1950s and 19 60s, when California Indigenous
+peoples began to do their own research. They found that no mission
+escaped uprising from within or attacks from outside by communi­
+ties of the imprisoned along with escapees. Guerrilla forces of up to
+two thousand formed. Without this resistance, there would be no
+descendants of the California Native peoples of the area colonized
+by the Spanish. 21
+Under the protection of the US Army, beginning in 1 8 4 8 , gold
+seekers from all over the world brought death, torture, rape, star­
+vation, and disease to the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral ter­
+ritories included the sought-after goldfields north and east of San
+Francisco . As Alejandro Murguia describes it, unlike the Native
+peoples for whom gold was irrelevant, the forty-niners "hungered
+for gold with a sickness":
+They would do anything for it. They left families, homes, ev­
+erything behind; they sailed for eight months aboard leaky,
+smelly ships to reach California; others, captains and sailors,
+jumped ship at San Francisco, leaving a fleet of abandoned
+brigs, barks, and schooners to rot by the piers. They slaugh­
+tered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers
+and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn't
+survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native
+Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer. The
+miners cheated and killed each other in the gold fields. 22
+In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement extermi­
+nated more than one hundred thousand California Native people
+in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by
+1 8 70-quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all
+time. 23 Here too, against impossible odds, the Indigenous resisted
+
+129
+
+130
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+and survived to tell the story. Had they not done so, there would be
+no Indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California, because
+the objective was to eradicate them. From the onset of the California
+gold rush, crazed "gold bugs" invade� Indigenous territories, terror­
+izing and brutally killing those who were in their path. These settlers
+seemed to require no military assistance in running roughshod over
+unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful
+paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains. The role left for the US
+Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport
+them to established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.
+
+THE WH ITE MAN'S BURDEN
+
+The two-year invasion and occupation of Mexico was a joyful ex­
+perience for most US citizens , as evidenced by Walt Whitman's
+populist poetry. Its popularity was possible because of buoyant na­
+tionalism, and the war itself accelerated the spirit of nationalism
+and confirmed the manifest destiny of the United States. Besides
+new weapons of war and productive capacity brought about by the
+emerging industrial revolution, there was also an advance in print­
+ing and publishing techniques, which increased the book publishing
+market from $2.5 million in 1 8 3 0 to $ 1 2 .5 million in 1 8 5 0 . Most
+of the books published during the five-year period leading up to,
+during, and after the invasion were war-mongering tracts . Euro­
+American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period
+of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fen­
+imore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf
+Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Haw­
+thorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains
+read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national
+and nationalist writers, not as colonialists.
+Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid
+little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely sup­
+ported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored
+of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whit-
+
+Sea to Shining Sea
+
+man saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a
+"true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our vic­
+torious armies." Emerson opposed the war as he did all wars. His
+opposition to the Mexican War was based, however, not just on his
+pacifism but also on his belief that the Mexican "race" would poison
+Anglo-Americans through contact, the " heart of darkness" fear.
+Emerson supported territorial expansion at any cost but would have
+preferred it take place without war.
+Most of the writers of the era were obsessed with heroism. Oppo­
+sition to the Mexican War came from writers who were active abo­
+litionists such as Thoreau, Whittier, and Lowell. They believed the
+war was a plot of southern slave owners to extend slavery, punishing
+Mexico for having outlawed slavery when it became independent
+from Spain. However, even the abolitionists believed in the "mani­
+fest destiny of the English race," as Lowell put it in 1 8 59, "to occupy
+this whole continent and to display there that practical understand­
+ing in matters of government and colonization which no other race
+has given such proof of possessing since the Romans." 24
+President James K. Polk, who presided over the war, saw its sig­
+nificance as an example of how a democracy could carry on and win
+a foreign war with as much "vigor" as authoritarian governments
+were able to do. He believed that an elected civilian government with
+its volunteer people's army was even more effective than European
+monarchies in the quest for empire. The victory over Mexico proved
+to the European powers, he felt, that the United States was their
+equal. Standing tall through military victory over a weak country:
+it was not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush who thought up that
+idea. The tradition is as old as the United States itself.
+The US war against Mexico did more than annex half of Mexico.
+A debate that turned deadly ensued over whether the acquired terri­
+tory would allow slavery and it brought on a civil war that produced
+a million casualties. The US Civil War allowed for the reorganiza­
+tion and modernization of the military and streamlined counterin­
+surgency operations-that is, ones targeting civilians. A rehearsal
+for this streamlining is found in the aftermath of the Mexican War
+in the US Army counterinsurgency against the fierce resistance of
+the Apaches in the portions of the territory annexed from Mexico
+
+131
+
+132
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+in 1 8 4 8 that later became the states of New Mexico and Arizona, as
+well as across the new border into what remained Mexico. The First
+and Second US Army Dragoons (cavalry troops) were employed for
+this purpose, elite mounted troops well equipped and trained for
+the desert terrain. During the period between the Mexican War and
+the Civil War, Indigenous resistance was led by Gila Apache leader
+Mangas Coloradas to maintain the Apaches' traditional lands and
+way of life. The dragoons employed the "first way of war," total
+war, encouraging field units to attack Apache villages and destroy
+crops and kill livestock, slaughtering women and children and old
+men left in the villages while the young men were engaged elsewhere
+fighting the dragoons. 25 This kind of warfare against Indigenous
+peoples continued throughout the Civil War and ratcheted up in the
+northern plains and Southwest afterward, producing the term that
+the US military use to this day all over the world when referring to
+enemy territory: "Indian Country."
+
+E I G HT
+
+" I N D I A N CO U N TRY"
+
+Buffalo were dark rich clouds moving upon the rolling hills
+and plains of America. And then the 'flashing steel came
+upon bone and -flesh.
+-Simon J. Ortiz, from Sand Creek
+
+The US Army on the eve of the Civil War was divided into seven
+departments-a structure designed by John C. Calhoun during the
+Monroe administration . By 1 8 60 , six of the seven departments,
+comprising 1 8 3 companies, were stationed west of the Mississippi,
+a colonial army fighting the Indigenous occupants of the land. In
+much of the western lands, the army was the primary US govern­
+ment institution; the military roots to institutional development
+run deep.
+President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1 8 61, two
+months after the South had seceded from the union. In April, the
+Confederate States of America (CSA) seized the army base at Fort
+Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina. Of more than a thousand
+US Army officers, 2 8 6 left to serve the CSA, half of them being West
+Point graduates, most of them Indian fighters, including Robert E .
+Lee. Three o f the seven army department commanders took leader­
+ship of the Confederate Army. Based on demographics alone, the
+South had little chance of winning, so it is all the more remarkable
+that it persisted against the Union for more than four years. The
+1 8 60 population of the United States was nearly thirty-two mil­
+lion, with twenty-three million in the twenty-two northern states,
+and about nine million in the eleven southern states. More than a
+third of the nine million Southerners were enslaved people of Af­
+rican heritage. Within the CSA, 76 percent of settlers owned no
+
+133
+
+134
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+slaves. Roughly 60-70 percent of those without slaves owned fewer
+than a hundred acres of land. Less than 1 percent owned more than
+a hundred slaves. Seventeen percent of settlers in the South owned
+one to nine slaves, and only 6.5 percent owned more than ten. Ten
+percent of the settlers who owned no slaves were also landless, while
+that many more managed to barely survive on small dirt farms. The
+Confederate Army reflected the same kind of percentages.1 Those
+who, even today, claim that "states' rights" caused Southern seces­
+sion and the Civil War use these statistics to argue that slavery was
+not the cause of the Civil War, but that is false. Every settler in the
+Southern states aspired to own land and slaves or to own more land
+and more slaves, as both social status and wealth depended on the
+extent of property owned. Even small and landless farmers relied
+on slavery-based rule: the local slave plantation was the market for
+what small farmers produced, and planters hired landless settlers as
+overseers and sharecroppers. Most non-slave-owning settlers sup­
+ported and fought for the Confederacy.
+
+L I N CO L N ' S " F R E E S O I L" F O R S E T T L E R S
+
+Abraham Lincoln's campaign for the presidency appealed to the vote
+of land-poor settlers who demanded that the government "open"
+Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi. They were called "free­
+soilers," in reference to cheap land free of slavery. New gold rushes
+and other incentives brought new waves of settlers to squat on In­
+digenous land. For this reason, some Indigenous people preferred
+a Confederate victory, which might divide and weaken the United
+States, which had grown ever more powerful. Indigenous nations in
+Indian Territory were more directly affected by the Civil War than
+anywhere else. As discussed in chapter 6, the southeastern nations­
+the Cherokees, Muskogees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws
+( " Five Civilized Tribes")-were forcibly removed from their home­
+lands during the Jackson administration, but in the Indian Terri­
+tory they rebuilt their townships, farms, ranches, and institutions,
+including newspapers, schools, and orphanages. Although a tiny
+elite of each nation was wealthy and owned enslaved Africans and
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+135
+
+private estates, the majority of the people continued their collective
+agrarian practices. All five nations signed treaties with the Confed­
+eracy, each for similar reasons. Within each nation, however, there
+was a clear division based on class, often misleadingly expressed as
+a conflict between "mixed-bloods" and "full-bloods." That is, the
+wealthy, assimilated, slave-owning minority that dominated politics
+favored the Confederacy, and the non-slave-owning poor and tradi­
+tional majority wanted to stay out of the Anglo-American civil war.
+Historian David Chang found that Muskogee nationalism and well­
+founded distrust of federal power played a major role in bringing
+about that nation's strategic alliance with the Confederacy. Chang
+writes: "Was the Creek council's alliance with the South a racist de­
+fense of slavery and its class privileges, or was it a nationalist defense
+of Creek lands and sovereignty? The answer has to be 'both."'2
+John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, at first called
+for neutrality, but changed his mind for reasons similar to the Mus­
+kogees and asked the Cherokee council for authority to negotiate
+a treaty with the CSA. Nearly seven thousand men of the five na­
+tions went into battle for the Confederacy. Stand Watie, a Chero­
+kee, held the post of brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
+His First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi ,was
+
+among the last units in the field to surrender to the Union Army on
+June 23 , 1 8 6 5 , more than two months after Lee's surrender of the
+Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse in April
+1 8 6 5 . During the war, however, many Indigenous soldiers became
+disillusioned and went over to the Union forces, along with enslaved
+African Americans who fled to freedom. 3
+Another story is equally important, though less often told. A
+few months after the war broke out, some ten thousand men in
+Indian Territory, made up of Ind igenous volunteers, along with
+African Americans who had freed themselves and even some Anglo­
+Americans, engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Confederate
+Army. They fought from Oklahoma into Kansas, where many of
+them joined unofficial Union units that had been organized by abo­
+litionists who had trained with John Brown years earlier. This was
+not likely the kind of war the Lincoln administration had desired-a
+multiethnic volunteer Union contingent fighting pro-slavery forces
+
+136
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History o f the United States
+
+in Missouri, where enslaved Africans escaped to j oin the Union
+side.4 The self-liberation by African Americans, occurring all over
+the South, led to Lincoln's 1 8 63 Emancipation Proclamation, which
+allowed freed Africans to serve in combat.
+In Minnesota, which had become a non-slavery state in 1 8 5 9 , the
+Dakota Sioux were on the verge of starvation by 1 8 62. When they
+mounted an uprising to drive out the mostly German and Scandi­
+navian settlers, Union Army troops crushed the revolt, slaughtering
+Dakota civilians and rounding up several hundred men. Three hun­
+dred prisoners were sentenced to death, but upon Lincoln's orders
+to reduce the numbers, thirty-eight were selected at random to die
+in the largest mass hanging in US history. The revered leader Little
+Crow was not among those hanged, but was assassinated the follow­
+ing summer while out picking raspberries with his son; the assassin,
+a settler-farmer, collected a $ 500 bounty. 5
+One of the young Dakota survivors asked his uncle about the
+mysterious white people who would commit such crimes. The uncle
+replied:
+Certainly they are a heartless nation. They have made some
+of their people servants-yes, slaves . . . . The greatest object of
+their lives seems to be to acquire possessions-to be rich. They
+desire to possess the whole world. For thirty years they were
+trying to entice us to sell them our land. Finally the outbreak
+gave them all, and we have been driven away from our beauti­
+ful country. 6
+
+T H E G E N O C I DA L A R M Y O F T H E W E ST
+
+To free the professional soldiers posted in the West to fight against
+the Confederate Army in the East, Lincoln called for volunteers
+in the West, and settlers responded, coming from Texas, Kansas,
+California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and
+Nevada. Having few Confederates to fight, they attacked people
+closer to hand, Indigenous people. Land speculators in the trans­
+Mississippi West sought statehood for the occupied former Mexican
+territories in order to attract settlers and investors . Their eagerness to
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+137
+
+undertake the ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous residents to achieve
+the necessary population balance to attain statehood generated
+strong anti-Indian hysteria and violent actions. Preoccupied with
+the Civil War in the East, the Lincoln administration did little to
+prevent vicious and even genocidal actions on the part of territorial
+authorities consisting of volunteer Indian haters such as Kit Carson.
+The mode of maintaining settler "law and order" set the pattern
+for postwar genocide. In the most infamous incident involving mi­
+litias, the First and Third Colorado Volunteers carried out the Sand
+Creek Massacre. Although assigned to guard the road to Santa Fe,
+the units mainly engaged in raiding and looting Indigenous com­
+munities. John Chivington, an ambitious politician known as the
+" Fighting Parson," led the Third Colorado.7
+By 1 8 61, displaced and captive Cheyennes and Arapahos, under
+the leadership of the great peace seeker Black Kettle, were incar­
+cerated in a US military reservation called Sand Creek, near Fort
+Lyon in southeastern Colorado. They camped under a white flag
+of truce and had federal permission to hunt buffalo to feed them­
+selves. In early 1 8 64 , the Colorado territorial governor informed
+them that they could no longer leave the reservation to hunt. Despite
+their compliance with the order, on November 29 , 1 8 64 , Chiving­
+ton took seven hundred Colorado Volunteers to the reservation .
+Without provocation or warning, they attacked, leaving dead 105
+women and children and 2 8 men. Even the federal commissioner
+of Indian affairs denounced the action, saying that the people had
+been "butchered in cold blood by troops in the service of the United
+States." In its 1 8 65 investigation, the Congress Joint Committee on
+the Conduct of the War recorded testimonies and published a report
+that documented the aftermath of the killings, when Chivington
+and his volunteers burned tepees and stole horses. Worse, after the
+smoke had cleared, they had returned and finished off the few sur­
+vivors while scalping and mutilating the corpses-women and men,
+young and old, children, babies. Then they decorated their weapons
+and caps with body parts-fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas­
+and, in the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, " Stuck them I on
+their hats to dry I Their fingers greasy I and slick."8 Once back in
+Denver, they displayed the trophies to the adoring public in Denver's
+
+138
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Apollo Theater and in saloons. Yet, despite the detailed report of the
+deeds, neither Chivington nor any of his men were reprimanded or
+prosecuted, signaling a free field for killing. 9
+US Army colonel James Carleton formed the Volunteer Army of
+the Pacific in 1 8 6 1 , based in California. In Nevada and Utah, a Cali­
+fornia businessman, Colonel Patrick Connor, commanded a militia
+of a thousand California volunteers that spent the war years mas­
+sacring hundreds of unarmed Shoshone, Bannock, and Ute people
+in their encampments. Carleton led another contingent of militias
+to Arizona to suppress the Apaches, who were resisting colonization
+under the great leader Cochise. At the time, Cochise observed:
+When I was young I walked all over this country, east and
+west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many
+summers I walked again and found another race of people had
+come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to
+die-that they carry their lives on their finger nails? . . . The
+Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few. . . .
+Many have been killed in battle. 10
+Following a scorched-earth campaign against the Apaches,
+Carleton was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and placed
+in command of the Department of New Mexico. He brought in the
+now-seasoned killing machine of Colorado Volunteers to attack
+the Navajos, on whom he declared total war. He enlisted as his
+principal commander in the field the ubiquitous Indian killer Kit
+Carson . 1 1 With unlimited authority and answering to no one, Car­
+leton spent the entire Civil War in the Southwest engaged in a series
+of search-and-destroy missions against the Navajos. The campaign
+culminated in March 1 8 64 in a three-hundred-mile forced march of
+eight thousand Navajo civilians to a military concentration camp
+at Bosque Redondo in the southeastern New Mexico desert, at the
+army base at Fort Sumner, an ordeal recalled in Navajo oral history
+as the " Long Walk." One Navajo named Herrero said,
+Some of the soldiers do not treat us well. When at work, if we
+stop a little they kick us or do something else . . . . We do not
+mind if an officer punishes us, but do not like to be treated
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+139
+
+badly by the soldiers. Our women sometimes come to the tents
+outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay
+with them for a night, and give them five dollars or something
+else. But in the morning they take away what they gave them
+and kick them off. This happens most every day. 12
+At least a fourth of the incarcerated died of starvation. Not until
+1 8 68 were the Navajos released and allowed to return to their home­
+land in what is today the Four Corners area. This permission to re­
+turn was not based on the deadly conditions of the camp, rather that
+Congress determined that the incarceration was too expensive to
+maintain.13 For these noble deeds, Carleton was appointed a major
+general in the US Army in 1 8 6 5 . Now he led the Fourth Cavalry in
+scorched-earth forays against Plains Indians.
+These military campaigns against Indigenous nations constituted
+foreign wars fought during the US Civil War, but the end of the
+Civil War did not end them. They carried on unabated to the end of
+the century, with added killing technology and more seasoned kill­
+ers, including African American cavalry units. Demobilized officers
+and soldiers often could not find jobs, and along with a new gen­
+eration of young settlers-otherwise unemployed and often seeking
+violent adventure-they joined the army of the West, some of the of­
+ficers accepting lower ranks in order to get career army assignments.
+Given that war was centered in the West and that military achieve­
+ment had come to foster prestige, wealth, and political power, every
+West Point graduate sought to further his career by volunteering
+in the army. Some of their diaries echo those of combat troops in
+Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, who later were troubled by the
+atrocities they witnessed or committed. But most soldiers persevered
+in their ambition to succeed.
+Prominent Civil War generals led the army of the West, among
+them Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan (to
+whom is ascribed the statement "The only good Indian is a dead
+Indian" ), George Armstrong Custer, and Nelson A. Miles. The army
+would make effective use after 1 8 65 of innovations made during the
+Civil War. The rapid-fire Gatling gun, first used in battle in 1 8 62 ,
+would be employed during the rest o f the century against Indigenous
+
+140
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+civilians. Non-technological innovations were perhaps even more
+important, the Civil War having fostered an extreme patriotic ideol­
+ogy in the Union Army that carried over into the Indian wars. Now
+more centralized under presidential command, US forces relied less
+on state contributions and were thus less subject to their control.
+The prestige of the Department of War rose within the federal gov­
+ernment, so that it had far more leeway to send troops to steamroll
+over Indigenous peoples who challenged US dominion.
+The Union Army victory over the Confederate Army transformed
+the South into a quasi-captive nation, a region that remains the
+poorest of the United States well over a century later. The situa­
+tion was similar to that in South Africa two decades later when the
+British defeated the Boers (descendants of the original seventeenth­
+century Dutch settlers) . As the British would later do with the Boers,
+the US government eventually allowed the defeated southern elite
+to return to their locally powerful positions, and both US southern­
+ers and Boers soon gained national political power. The powerful
+white supremacist southern ruling class helped further militarize
+the United States, the army practically becoming a southern institu­
+tion. Following the effective Reconstruction experiment to empower
+former slaves, the US occupying army was withdrawn, and African
+Americans were returned to quasi-bondage and disenfranchisement
+through Jim Crow laws, forming a colonized population in the South.
+
+C O LO N I A L P O L I CY P R E C E D E S
+M I L I TA R Y I M P L E M E N TAT I O N
+
+I n the midst of war, Lincoln did not forget his free-soiler settler
+constituency that had raised him to the presidency. During the Civil
+War, with the southern states unrepresented, Congress at Lincoln's
+behest passed the Homestead Act in 1 8 62 , as well as the Morrill Act,
+the latter transferring large tracts of Indigenous land to the states
+to establish land grant universities. The Pacific Railroad Act pro­
+vided private companies with nearly two hundred million acres of
+Indigenous land. 14 With these land grabs, the US government broke
+multiple treaties with Indigenous nations. Most of the western ter-
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+141
+
+ritories, including Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana,
+Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona,
+were delayed in achieving statehood, because Indigenous nations re­
+sisted appropriation of their lands and outnumbered settlers. So the
+colonization plan for the West established during the Civil War was
+carried out over the following three decades of war and land grabs.
+Under the Homestead Act, i .5 million homesteads were granted to
+settlers west of the Mississippi, comprising ne·arly three hundred
+million acres (a half-million square miles) taken from the Indigenous
+collective estates and privatized for the market. 1 5 This dispersal of
+landless settler populations from east of the Mississippi served as
+an "escape valve," lessening the likelihood of class conflict as the
+industrial revolution accelerated the use of cheap immigrant labor.
+Little of the land appropriated under the Homestead Acts was
+distributed to actual single-family homesteaders. It was passed in­
+stead to large operators or land speculators. The land laws appeared
+to have been created for that result. An individual could acquire
+1 , 1 20 or even more acres of land, even though homestead and pre­
+emption (legalized squatting) claims were limited to 1 60 acres.1 6 A
+claimant could obtain a homestead and secure title after five years
+or pay cash within six months. Then he could acquire another 160
+acres under preemption by living on another piece of land for six
+months and paying $ i . 2 5 per acre. While acquiring these titles, he
+could also be fulfilling requirements for a timber culture claim of
+1 60 acres and a desert land claim of 640 acres, neither of which re­
+quired occupancy for title. Other men within a family or other part­
+ners in an enterprise could take out additional desert land claims to
+increase their holdings even more. As industrialization quickened,
+land as a commodity, "real estate," remained the basis of the US
+economy and capital accumulation.17 The federal land grants to the
+railroad barons, carved out of Indigenous territories, were not lim­
+ited to the width of the railroad tracks, but rather formed a check­
+erboard of square-mile sections stretching for dozens of miles on
+both sides of the right of way. This was land the railroads were free
+to sell in parcels for their own profit. The 1 8 63-64 federal banking
+acts mandated a national currency, chartered banks, and permitted
+the government to guarantee bonds. As war profiteers, financiers,
+
+142
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+and industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie,
+and J. P. Morgan used these laws to amass wealth in the East, Le­
+land Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles
+Crocker in the West grew rich from building railroads with eastern
+capital on land granted by the US government.18
+Indigenous nations, as well as Hispanos, resisted the arrival of
+railroads crisscrossing their farms, hunting grounds, and homelands,
+bringing settlers, cattle, barbed wire fencing, and mercenary buffalo
+hunters in their wake. In what proved a prelude to the genocidal
+decades to follow, the Andrew Johnson administration in 1 8 67-68
+sent army and diplomatic representatives to negotiate peace treaties
+with dozens of Indigenous nations. The 3 7 1 treaties between Indig­
+enous nations and the United States were all promulgated during the
+first century of US existence. 1 9 Congress halted formal treaty mak­
+ing in 1 8 7 1 , attaching a rider to the Indian Appropriation Act of that
+year stipulating "that hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the
+territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized
+as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United
+States may contract by treaty. Provided, further, that nothing herein
+contained shall be construed to invalidate or impair the obligation
+of any treaty heretofore lawfully made and ratified with any such
+Indian nation or tribe."2 0 This measure meant that Congress and
+the president could now make laws affecting an Indigenous nation
+with or without negotiations or consent. Nevertheless, the provision
+reaffirmed the sovereign legal status of those Indigenous nations
+that had treaties. During the period of US-Indigenous treaty mak­
+ing, approximately two million square miles of land passed from
+Indigenous nations to the United States, some of it through treaty
+agreements and some through breach of standing treaties.
+In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and com­
+pliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy
+the basic economic base of the Plains Nations-the buffalo. The
+buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a
+few decades and only a few hundred left by the 'r 8 8 os. Commercial
+hunters wanted only the skins, so left the rest of the animal to rot.
+Bones would be gathered and shipped to the East for various uses.
+Mainly it was the army that helped realize slaughter of the herds. 21
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+Old Lady Horse of the Kiowa Nation could have been speaking for
+all the buffalo nations in her lament of the loss:
+Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo . . . . Most
+of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion. A white buf­
+falo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used
+parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed
+people or when they sang to the powers above.
+So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when
+they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected
+the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens.
+They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their
+people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
+There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The
+white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly­
+headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could,
+but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post
+cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them
+back.
+Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the
+buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting
+sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them
+came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and
+bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their
+loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be
+shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile
+of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad
+track.
+The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could pro­
+
+tect their people no longer. 22
+
+Another aspect of US economic development that affected the
+Indigenous nations of the West was merchant domination. All over
+the world, in European colonies distant from their ruling centers,
+mercantile capitalists flourished alongside industrial capitalists and
+militaries, and together they determined the mode of colonization.
+Mercantile houses, usually family-owned, were organized to carry
+
+143
+
+144
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+goods over long stretches of water or sparsely populated lands to
+their destinations. The merchants' sources of commodities in re­
+mote regions were the nearby small farmers, loggers, trappers, and
+specialists such as woodworkers and metalsmiths. The commodities
+were then sent to industrial centers for credit against which money
+could be drawn. Thus, in the absence of a system of indirect credit,
+merchants could acquire scarce currency for the purchase of for­
+eign goods. The merchant, thereby, became the dominant source of
+credit for the small operator as well as for the local capitalist. Mer­
+cantile capitalism thrived in colonial areas, with many of the first
+merchant houses originating in the Levant among Syrians ( Leba­
+nese) and Jews. Even as mercantile capitalism waned in the twenti­
+eth century, it left its mark on Native reservations where the people
+relied on trading posts for credit, a market for their products, and
+commodities of all kinds-an opportunity for super-exploitation.
+Merchants and traders, often by intermarrying Indigenous women,
+also came to dominate Native governance on some reservations.23
+As noted above, at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly
+missed a beat before the war "to win the West" began in full force.
+As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops,
+the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself,
+destroying the natural tall grasses of the plains and planting short
+grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of the topsoil four
+decades later. William Tecumseh Sherman came out of the Civil War
+a major general and soon commanded the US Army, replacing war
+hero Ulysses S. Grant when Grant became president in 1 8 69 . As
+commanding general through 1 8 8 3 , Sherman was responsible for the
+genocidal wars against the resistant Indigenous nations of the West.
+Sherman's family was among the first generation of settlers who
+rushed to the Ohio Valley region after the total war that drove the
+people of the Shawnee Nation out of their homes, towns, and farms.
+Sherman's father gave his son the trophy name Tecumseh after the
+Shawnee leader who was killed by the US Army. The general had
+been a successful lawyer and banker in San Francisco and New York
+before he turned to a military career. During the Civil War, most fa­
+mously in the siege of Atlanta, he made his mark as a proponent and
+practitioner of total war, scorched-earth campaigns against civil-
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+145
+
+ians, particularly targeting their food supplies . This had long been
+the colonial and US American way of war against the Indigenous
+peoples east of the Mississippi. Sherman sent an army commission
+to England to study English colonial campaigns worldwide, looking
+to employ successful English tactics for the US wars against Indig­
+enous peoples. In Washington, Sherman had to contend with the
+upper echelons of the military that were under the sway of Carl von
+Clausewitz's book On War, which dealt with conflict between Euro­
+pean nation-states with standing armies. This dichotomy of training
+the US military for standard European warfare but also training it
+in colonial counterinsurgency methods continues in the twenty-first
+century. Although a man of war, Sherman, like most in the US rul­
+ing class, was an entrepreneur at heart, and his mandate as head of
+the army and his passion were to protect the Anglo conquest of the
+West. Sherman regarded railroads a top priority. In a letter to Grant
+in 1 8 67 he wrote, "We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged
+Indians stop the progress of [the railroads] ."24
+An alliance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations was
+blocking the "Bozeman Trail," over which thousands of crazed gold
+seekers crashed through Indigenous territories in the Dakotas and
+Wyoming in. 1 8 66 to reach newly discovered goldfields in Montana.
+The army arrived to protect them, and in preparation for construct­
+ing Fort Phil Kearny, Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman led
+eighty soldiers out to clear the trail in December 1 8 66 . The Indig­
+enous alliance defeated them in battle. Strangely, this being war,
+the defeat of the US Army in the battle has come down in historical
+annals as "the Fetterman Massacre." Following this event, General
+Sherman wrote to Grant, who was still army commander: "We must
+act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their exter­
+mination, men, women, and children." Sherman made it clear that
+"during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between
+male and female, or even discriminate as to age."25
+In adopting total war in the West, Sherman brought in its most
+notorious avatar, George Armstrong Custer, who proved his met­
+tle right away by leading an attack on unarmed civilians on No­
+vember 27, 1 8 68 , at the Southern Cheyenne reservation at Washita
+Creek in Indian Territory. Earlier, at the Colorado Volunteers' 1 8 64
+
+146
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Sand Creek Massacre, the Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had es­
+caped death. He and other Cheyenne survivors were then forced to
+leave Colorado Territory for a reservation in Indian Territory. Some
+young Cheyenne men, determined to resist reservation confinement
+and hunger, decided to hunt and to fight back with guerrilla tac­
+tics. Since the army was rarely able to capture them, Custer resorted
+to total war, murdering the incarcerated mothers, wives, children,
+and elders. When Black Kettle received word from Indigenous spies
+within the army ranks that the mounted troops of the Seventh Cav­
+alry were leaving their fort and headed for the Washita reservation,
+he and his wife rode out at dawn in a snowstorm, unarmed, to at­
+tempt to talk with Custer and assure him that no resisters were pres­
+ent on the reservation. Upon Black Kettle's approaching the troops
+with a hoisted white flag, Custer ordered the soldiers to fire, and a
+moment later Black Kettle and his wife lay dead. All told, the Sev­
+enth Cavalry murdered over a hundred Cheyenne women and chil­
+dren that day, taking ghoulish trophies afterward. 26
+
+C O LO N I A L S O L D I E R S
+
+Many of the intensive genocidal campaigns against Indigenous ci­
+vilians took place during the administration of President Grant,
+1 8 69 -77. In 1 8 66, two years before Grant's election, Congress had
+created two all-African American cavalry regiments that came to
+be called the buffalo soldiers . Some four million formerly enslaved
+A fricans were free citizens in 1 8 6 5 , thanks to the Emancipation
+Proclamation, which took effect in January 1 8 63 . The legislation
+was intended to have a demoralizing effect on the CSA, but it gave
+belated official recognition to what was already fact: many African
+Americans, especially young men, had freed themselves by fleeing
+servitude and joining Union forces .27 Up to 1 8 6 2 , Africans had been
+barred from serving in their own capacity in the army. Now the
+Union Army incorporated them but at lower pay and in segregated
+units under white officers. The War Department created the federal
+Bureau of Colored Troops, and one hundred thousand armed Afri­
+cans served in the unit. Their courage and commitment made them
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+the best and most effective fighters, although they had the highest
+mortality rate. At the end of the Civil War, 1 8 6,ooo Black soldiers
+had fought and 3 8 ,000 had died (in combat and from disease), a
+higher death toll than that of any individual state. The state with
+the highest casualty count was New York, with troops comprising
+mostly poor white immigrant soldiers, largely Irish. After the war
+many Black soldiers, like their poor white counterparts, remained
+in the army and were assigned to segregated regiments sent west to
+crush Indigenous resistance.
+This reality strikes many as tragic, as if oppressed former slaves
+and Indigenous peoples being subjected to genocidal warfare should
+magically be unified against their common enemy, "the white man."
+In fact, this is precisely how colonialism in general and colonial war­
+fare in particular work. It is not unique to the United States, but
+rather a part of the tradition of European colonialism since the Ro ­
+man legions . The British organized whole armies of ethnic troops
+in South and Southwestern Asia, the most famous being the Gur­
+khas from Nepal, who fought as recently as Margaret Thatcher's
+war against Argentina in 1983 .28 The buffalo soldiers were such a
+specially organized colonial military unit. As Stanford L . Davis,
+a descendant of a buffalo soldier, writes:
+Slaves and the black soldiers, who couldn't read or write, had
+no idea of the historical deprivations and the frequent geno­
+cidal intent of the U . S . government toward Native Americans.
+Free blacks, whether they could read and write, generally had
+no access to first-hand or second-hand unbiased informa­
+tion on the relationship. Most whites who had access often
+didn't really care about the situation. It was business as usual
+in the name of "Manifest Destiny." Most Americans viewed
+the Indians as incorrigible and non-reformable savages. Those
+closest to the warring factions or who were threatened by it,
+naturally wanted government protection at any cost. 29
+Many Black men opted for army service for survival reasons, as it
+gave them food and shelter, pay and a pension, and even some glory.
+The United States had its own motives for assigning Black troops to
+
+147
+
+148
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+the West. Southerners and the eastern population did not want thou­
+sands of armed Black soldiers in their communities. There was also
+fear that if they demobilized, the labor market would be flooded.
+For US authorities, it was a good way of getting rid of the Black sol­
+diers and the Indians.
+The Civil War also set the template for the rapid "Americaniza­
+tion" of immigrants. Jewish immigrants fought on both sides in the
+war, and as individuals they earned a level of freedom from US big­
+otry they had never experienced before.
+Indian scouts and soldiers were essential to the army as well,
+both as individuals and as nations making war on other Indigenous
+nations. Many decades later, Native Americans have continued to
+volunteer in US wars in percentages far beyond their populations.
+Wichita Nation citizen Stan Holder appeared in a 1974 documentary
+film on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds, in which he explained
+his volunteering for service. While growing up he had heard the
+older people's stories about Wichita warriors, and, looking around,
+the only warriors he could identify were marines, so he enlisted in
+what he considered a warrior society. It is no accident that the US
+Marine Corps evokes that image in angry young men. As with Black
+men who volunteered in the Indian wars and enlisted and served in
+other wars, Native men seized the security and potential glory of the
+colonialist army.
+The explicit purpose of the buffalo soldiers and the army of the
+West as a whole was to invade Indigenous lands and ethnically
+cleanse them for Anglo settlement and commerce. As Native his­
+torian Jace Weaver has written: "The Indian Wars were not fought
+by the blindingly white American cavalry of John Ford westerns but
+by African Americans and Irish and German immigrants."30 The
+haunting Bob Marley song " Buffalo Soldier" captures the colonial
+experience in the United States: " Said he was a buffalo soldier I Win
+the war for America."31
+The army of the West was a colonial army with all the problems
+of colonial armies and foreign occupation, principally being hated
+by the people living under occupation. It's no surprise that the US
+military uses the term "Indian Country" to refer to what it considers
+enemy territory. Much as in the Vietnam War, the 1 9 8 0s covert wars
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+in Central America, and the wars of the early twenty-first century
+in Muslim countries, counterinsurgent army volunteers in the late­
+nineteenth-century US West had to rely heavily on intelligence from
+those native to the land, informers and scouts. Many of these were
+double agents, reporting back to their own people, having j oined
+the US Army for that purpose. Failing to find guerrilla fighters, the
+army resorted to scorched-earth campaigns, starvation, attacks on
+and removals of civilian populations-the weapons of counterinsur­
+gency warfare. During the Soviet counterinsurgency in Afghanistan
+in the 19 8 0s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called the
+effect "migratory genocide"-an apt term to apply retrospectively
+to the nineteenth-century US counterinsurgency against Indigenous
+peoples.32
+
+A N N I H I L AT I O N U N TO TOTA L S U R R E N D E R
+
+The US Army's search-and-destroy missions and forced relocations
+(ethnic cleansing) in the West are well documented but perhaps not
+normally considered in the light of counterinsurgency.
+Mari Sandoz recorded one such story in her 1 9 5 3 best-selling
+work of nonfiction Cheyenne Autumn, on which John Ford based
+a 1 9 64 film.33 In 1 8 7 8 , the great Cheyenne resistance leaders Little
+Wolf and Dull Knife led more than three hundred Cheyenne civil­
+ians from a military reservation in Indian Territory, where they had
+been forcibly confined, to their original homeland in what is today
+Wyoming and Montana. They were eventually intercepted by the
+military, but only following a dramatic chase covered by newspa­
+per reporters. So much sympathy was aroused in eastern cities that
+the Cheyennes were provided a reservation in a part of their origi­
+nal homeland. A similar feat was that of the Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce)
+under Chief Joseph, who tried to lead his people out of military
+incarceration in Idaho to exile in Canada. In 1 877, pursued by two
+thousand soldiers of the US cavalry led by Nelson Miles, Nimi'ipuu
+led eight hundred civilians toward the Canadian border. They held
+out for nearly four months, evading the soldiers as well as fighting
+hit-and-run battles, while covering seventeen hundred miles. Some
+
+149
+
+150
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+were rounded up and placed in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, but they
+soon left on their own and returned to their Idaho homeland, even­
+tually securing a small reservation there.
+The longest military counterinsurgency in US history was the war
+on the Apache Nation, 1 8 5 0 - 8 6 . Goyathlay, known as Geronimo,
+famously led the final decade of Apache resistance. The Apaches
+and their Dine relatives, the Navajos, did not miss a beat in continu­
+ing resistance to colonial domination when the United States an­
+nexed their territory as a part of the half of Mexico taken in 1 8 4 8 .
+The Treaty o f Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and
+Mexico, which sealed the transfer of territory, even stipulated that
+both parties were required to fight the "savage" Apaches. By 1 877
+the army had forced most Apaches into inhospitable desert reserva­
+tions. Led by Geronimo, Chiricahua Apaches resisted incarceration
+in the San Carlos reservation designated for them in Arizona. When
+Geronimo finally surrendered-he was never captured-the group
+numbered only thirty-eight, most of those women and children,
+with five thousand soldiers in pursuit, which meant that the insur­
+gents had wide support both north and south of the recently drawn
+US-Mexico border. Guerrilla warfare persists only if it has deep
+roots in the people being represented, the reason it is sometimes
+called "people's war." Obviously, the Apache resistance was not a
+military threat to the United States but rather a symbol of resistance
+and freedom. Herein lies the essence of counterinsurgent colonialist
+warfare: no resistance can be tolerated. Historian William Apple­
+man Williams aptly described the US imperative as "annihilation
+unto total surrender."34
+Geronimo and three hundred other Chiricahuas who were not
+even part of the fighting force were rounded up and transported by
+train under military guard to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida,
+to j oin hundreds of other Plains Indian fighters already incarcer­
+ated there. Remarkably, Geronimo negotiated an agreement with
+the United States so that he and his band would surrender as prison­
+ers of war, rather than as common criminals as the Texas Rangers
+desired, which would have meant executions by civil authorities.
+The POW status validated Apache sovereignty and made the cap­
+tives eligible for treatment according to the international laws of
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+151
+
+war. Geronimo and his people were transferred again, to the army
+base at Fort Sill in Indian Territory, and lived out their lives there .
+The US government had not yet created the term "unlawful combat­
+ant," which it would do in the early twenty-first century, depriving
+legitimate prisoners of war fair treatment under international law.
+During the Grant administration, the United States began ex­
+perimenting with new colonial institutions, the most pernicious of
+which were the boarding schools, modeled on Fort Marion prison.
+In 1 8 75 , Captain Richard Henry Pratt was in charge of transporting
+seventy-two captive Cheyenne and other Plains Indian warriors from
+the West to Fort Marion, an old Spanish fortress, dark and dank.
+After the captives were left shackled for a period in a dungeon, Pratt
+took their clothes away, had their hair cut, dressed them in army
+uniforms, and drilled them like soldiers. " Kill the Indian and save
+the man" was Pratt's motto. This "successful" experiment led Pratt
+to establish the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania
+in 1 8 79 , the prototype for the many militaristic federal boarding
+schools set up across the continent soon after, augmented by dozens
+of Christian missionary boarding schools. The decision to establish
+Carlisle and other off-reservation boarding schools was made by
+the US Office of Indian Affairs, later renamed the Bureau of Indian
+Affairs ( BIA). The stated goal of the project was assimilation. Indig­
+enous children were prohibited from speaking their mother tongues
+or practicing their religions, while being indoctrinated in Christian­
+ity. As in the Spanish missions in California, in the US boarding
+schools the children were beaten for speaking their own languages,
+among other infractions that expressed their humanity. Although
+stripped of the languages and skills of their communities, what they
+learned in boarding school was useless for the purposes of effective
+assimilation, creating multiple lost generations of traumatized indi­
+viduals.35
+Just before the centennial of US independence, in late June 1 8 76,
+then-Lieutenant Colonel Custer, commanding 225 soldiers of the
+Seventh Cavalry, prepared to launch a military assault on the civil­
+ians living in a cluster of Sioux and Cheyenne villages that lay along
+the Little Bighorn River. Led by Crazy Horse and Sitti �g Bull, the
+Sioux and Cheyenne warriors were ready for the assault and wiped
+
+152
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+out the assailants, including Custer, who after death was promoted
+to general. The proud author of multiple massacres of Indigenous
+civilians, starting during the Civil War with his assault on unarmed
+and reservation-incarcerated Cheyennes on the Washita in Indian
+Territory, Custer "died for your [colonialist] sins," in the words of
+Vine Deloria Jr. 3 6 A year later, Crazy Horse was captured and im­
+prisoned, then killed trying to escape. He was thirty-five years old.
+Crazy Horse was a new kind of leader to emerge after the Civil
+War, at the beginning of the army's wars of annihilation in the
+northern plains and the Southwest. Born in 1 8 4 2 in the shadow of
+the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) , he was considered special, a quiet
+and brooding child. Already the effects of colonialism were present
+among his people, particularly alcoholism and missionary influence.
+Crazy Horse became a part of the Akicita, a traditional Sioux so­
+ciety that kept order in villages and during migrations. It also had
+authority to make certain that the hereditary chiefs were doing their
+duty and dealt harshly with those who did not. Increasingly dur­
+ing Crazy Horse's youth, the primary concern was the immigrant
+defilement of the Sioux territory. A steady stream of Euro-American
+migrants clotted the trail to Oregon Territory. Young militant Sioux
+wished to drive them away, but the Sioux were now dependent on
+the trail for supplies. In 1 849, the army arrived and planted a base,
+Fort Laramie, in Sioux territory. Sporadic fighting broke out, leading
+to treaty meetings and agreements, most of which were bogus army
+documents signed by unauthorized individuals. Crazy Horse was a
+natural in guerrilla warfare, becoming legendary among his people.
+Although Crazy Horse and other militants did not approve of the
+1 8 68 US treaty with the Sioux, some stability held until Custer's
+soldiers found gold in the Black Hills. Then a gold rush was on, with
+hordes of prospectors from all over converging and running ram­
+pant over the Sioux. The treaty had ostensibly been a guarantee that
+such would not occur. Soon after, the Battle of the Little Bighorn put
+an end to Custer but not to the invasion.
+Indigenous peoples in the West continued to resist, and the sol­
+diers kept hunting them down, incarcerating them, massacring ci­
+vilians, removing them, and stealing their children to haul off to
+faraway boarding schools. The Apache, Kiowa, Sioux, Ute, Kick-
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+apoo, Comanche, Cheyenne, and other nations were attacked, leav­
+ing community after community decimated. By the 1 890s, although
+some military assaults on Indigenous communities and valiant In­
+digenous armed resistance continued, most of the surviving Indig­
+enous refugees were confined to federal reservations, their children
+transported to distant boarding schools to unlearn their Indigenous­
+ness.
+
+G H O S T DA N C I N G
+
+Disarmed, held in concentration camps, their children taken away,
+half starved, the Indigenous peoples of the West found a form of
+resistance that spread like wildfire in all directions from its source,
+thanks to a Paiute holy man, Wovoka, in Nevada. Pilgrims journeyed
+to hear his message and to receive directions on how to perform the
+Ghost Dance, which promised to restore the Indigenous world as it
+was before colonialism, making the invaders disappear and the buf­
+falo return. It was a simple dance performed by everyone, requiring
+only a specific kind of shirt that was to protect the dancers from
+gunfire. In the twentieth century Sioux anthropologist Ella Deloria
+interviewed a sixty-year-old Sioux man who remembered the Ghost
+Dance he had witnessed fifty years before as a boy:
+Some fifty of us, little boys about eight to ten, started out
+across country over hills and valleys, running all night. I know
+now that we ran almost thirty miles. There on the Porcupine
+Creek thousands of Dakota people were in camp; all hurrying
+about very purposefully. In a long sweat lodge with openings
+at both ends, people were being purified in great companies
+for the holy dance, men by themselves and women by them­
+selves, of course . . . .
+The people, wearing the sacred shirts and feathers, now
+formed a ring. We were in it. All joined hands. Everyone was
+respectful and quiet, expecting something wonderful to hap­
+pen. It was not a glad time, though. All wailed cautiously and
+in awe, feeling their dead were close at hand.
+
+153
+
+154
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+The leaders beat time and sang as the people danced, going
+round to the left in a sidewise step. They danced without rest,
+on and on, and they got out of breath but still they kept go­
+ing as long as possible. Occasionally someone thoroughly
+exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay
+there "dead." Quickly those on each side of him closed the gap
+and went right on. After a while, many lay about in that con­
+dition. They were now "dead" and seeing their dear ones. As
+each one came to, she, or he, slowing sat up and looked about,
+bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably. . . .
+Waking to the drab and wretched present after such a
+glowing vision, it was little wonder that they wailed as if their
+poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at
+least they had seen! The people went on and on and could not
+stop, day or night, hoping perhaps to get a vision of their own
+dead, or at least to hear the visions of others . They preferred
+that to rest or food or sleep. And so I suppose the authorities
+did think they were crazy-but they weren't. They were only
+terribly unhappy. 37
+When the dancing began among the Sioux in 1 89 0 , reservation
+officials reported it as disturbing and unstoppable. They believed
+that it had been instigated by Hunkpapa Teton Sioux leader Tatanka
+Yotanka (Sitting Bull), who had returned with his people in 1 8 8 1
+from exile i n Canada. H e was put under arrest and imprisoned in
+his home, closely guarded by Indian police. Sitting Bull was killed by
+one of his captors on December 1 5 , 1 8 9 0 .
+A l l Indigenous individuals and groups living outside designated
+federal reservations were considered "fomenters of disturbance," as
+the War Department put it. Following Sitting Bull's death, military
+warrants of arrest were issued for leaders such as Big Foot, who
+was responsible for several hundred civilian refugees who had not
+yet turned themselves in to the designated Pine Ridge Reservation.
+When Big Foot heard of Sitting Bull's death and that the army was
+looking for him and his people-350 Lakotas, 230 of them women
+and children-he decided to lead them through the subzero weather
+to Pine Ridge to surrender. En route on foot, they encountered US
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+troops. The commander ordered that they be taken to the a rmy
+camp at Wounded Knee Creek, where armed soldiers surrounded
+them. Two Hotchkiss machine guns were mounted on the hillside,
+enough firepower to wipe out the whole group. During the night,
+Colonel James Forsyth and the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old regi­
+ment, arrived and took charge. These soldiers had not forgotten
+that Lakota relatives of these starving, unarmed refugees had killed
+Custer and decimated his troops at the Little Bighorn fourteen years
+earlier. With orders to transport the refugees to a military stockade
+in Omaha, Forsyth added two more Hotchkiss guns trained on the
+camp, then issued whiskey to his officers . The following morning,
+December 29 , 1 8 9 0 , the soldiers brought the captive men out from
+their campsites and called for all weapons to be turned in. Search­
+ing tents, soldiers confiscated tools, such as axes and knives. Still
+not satisfied, the officers ordered skin searches. A Winchester rifle
+turned up. Its young owner did not want to part with his beloved ri­
+fle, and, when the soldiers grabbed him, the rifle fired a shot into the
+air. The killing began immediately. The Hotchkiss guns began fir­
+ing a shell a second, mowing down everyone except a few who were
+able to run fast enough . Three hundred Sioux lay dead. Twenty­
+five soldiers were killed in "friendly fire."38 Bleeding survivors were
+dragged into a nearby church. Being Christmastime, the sanctuary
+was candlelit and decked with greenery. In the front, a banner read:
+PEACE ON EARTH AND GOOD WILL TO MEN.
+
+The Seventh Cavalry attack on a group of unarmed and starving
+Lakota refugees attempting to reach Pine Ridge to accept reserva­
+tion incarceration in the frozen days of December 1 8 9 0 symbol­
+izes the end of Indigenous armed resistance in the United States.
+The slaughter is ca lled a battle in US military annals. Congres­
+sional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers
+involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor
+the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to
+honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at
+the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L.
+Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The
+
+Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at
+the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on
+
+155
+
+156
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+January 3 , 1 89 1 , he wrote, "The Pioneer [sic] has before declared
+that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the
+Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order
+to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe
+these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. " 39
+Three weeks before the massacre, General Sherman had made
+clear that he regretted nothing of his three decades of carrying out
+genocide. In a press conference he held in New York City, he said,
+"Injins must either work or starve. They never have worked; they
+won't work now, and they will never work." A reporter asked, " But
+should not the government supply them with enough to keep them
+from starvation? " " Why," Sherman asked in reply, "should the gov­
+ernment support 260,000 able-bodied campers ? No government
+that the world has ever seen has done such a thing."4 0
+The reaction of one young man to Wounded Knee is represen­
+tative but also extraordinary. Plenty Horses attended the Carlisle
+school from 1 8 8 3 to 1 8 8 8 , returning home stripped of his language,
+facing the dire reality of the genocide of his people, with no tradi­
+tional or modern means to make a living. He said, "There was no
+chance to get employment, nothing for me to do whereby I could
+earn my board and clothes, no opportunity to learn more and re­
+main with the whites. It disheartened me and I went back to live as
+I had before going to school."41 Historian Philip Deloria notes: "The
+greatest threat to the reservation program . . . was the disciplined In­
+dian who refused the gift of civilization and went 'back to the blan­
+ket,' as Plenty Horses tried."42 But it wasn't simple for Plenty Horses
+to find his place. As Deloria points out, he had missed the essential
+period of Lakota education, which takes place between the ages of
+fourteen and nineteen. Due to his absence a nd Euro-American influ­
+ence, he was suspect among his own people, and even that world
+was disrupted by colonialist chaos and violence. Still, Plenty Horses
+returned to traditional dress, grew his hair long, and participated
+in the Ghost Dance. He also j oined a band of armed resisters, and
+they were present at Pine Ridge on December 29, 1 8 9 0 , when the
+bloody bodies were brought in from the Wounded Knee Massacre.
+A week later, he went out with forty other mounted warriors who
+accompanied Sioux leaders to meet Lieutenant Edward Casey for
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+possible negotiations. The young warriors were angry, none more
+than Plenty Horses, who pulled out from the group and got behind
+Casey and shot him in the back of his head.
+Army officials had to think twice about charging Plenty Horses
+with murder. They were faced with the corollary of the recent army
+massacre at Wounded Knee, in which the soldiers received Congres­
+sional Medals of Honor for their deeds. At trial, Plenty Horses was
+acquitted due to the state of war that existed. Acknowledging a state
+of war was essential in order to give legal cover to the massacre.
+As a late manifestation of military action against Indigenous
+peoples, Wounded Knee stands out. Deloria notes that in the preced­
+ing years, the Indian warrior imagery so prevalent in US American
+society was being replaced with "docile, pacified Indians started out
+on the road to civilization."
+Luther Standing Bear, for example, recounts numerous occa­
+sions on which the Carlisle Indian Industrial School students
+were displayed as docile and educable Indians. The Carlisle
+band played at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1 8 8 3
+and then toured several churches. Students were carted around
+East Coast cities. Standing Bear himself was placed on display
+in Wanamaker's Philadelphia department store, locked in a
+glass cell in the center of the store and set to sorting and pric­
+ing jewelry.43
+
+GREED IS GOOD
+
+During the final phase of military conquest of the continent, surviv­
+ing Indigenous refugees were deposited in Indian Territory, piled on
+top of each other in smaller and smaller reservations. In 1 8 8 3 , the
+first of several conferences were held in Mohonk, New York, of a
+group of influential and wealthy advocates of the "manifest destiny"
+policy. These self-styled "friends of the Indians" developed a policy
+of assimilation soon formulated into an act of Congress written by
+one of their members, Senator Henry Dawes: the General Allotment
+Act of 1 8 87. Arguing for allotment of collectively held Indigenous
+
+157
+
+158
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+lands, Dawes said: "The defect of the [reservation] system was ap­
+parent. It is [socialist] Henry George's system and under that there is
+no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neigh­
+bors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.
+Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide among
+their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates they will
+not make much more progress." Although allotment did not cre­
+ate the desired selfishness, it did reduce the overall Indigenous land
+base by half and furthered both Indigenous impoverishment and US
+control. In 1 8 8 9 , a part of Indian Territory the federal government
+called the Unassigned Lands, left over after allotment, was opened
+to settler homesteading, triggering the " Oklahoma Run."
+Oil had been discovered in Indian Territory, but the Dawes Allot­
+ment Act could not be applied to the five Indigenous nations removed
+from the South, because their territories were not technically reser­
+vations, rather sovereign nations. In contradiction to the terms of
+the removal treaties, Congress passed the Curtis Act in r 8 9 8 , which
+unilaterally deposed the sovereignty of those nations and mandated
+allotment of their lands. Indigenous territories were larger than the
+sum of r 6o -acre allotments, so the remaining land after distribution
+was declared surplus and opened to homesteading.
+Allotment did not proceed in Indian Territory without fierce re­
+sistance. Cherokee traditionalist Redbird Smith rallied his brethren
+to revive the Keetoowah secret society. Besides direct action, they
+also sent lawyers to argue before Congress. When they were over­
+ridden, they formed a community in the Cookson Hills, refusing to
+participate in privatization. Similarly, the Muskogee Creeks resisted,
+led by Chitto Harjo, who was lovingly nicknamed Crazy Snake.
+He led in the founding of an alternate government, with its capital
+a settlement they called Hickory Ground. More than five thousand
+Muskogees were involved. Captured and j ailed, when freed Harjo
+led his people into the woods and carried on the fight for another
+decade. He was shot by federal troops in r9 r 2 , but the legacy of the
+Crazy Snake resistance remains a strong force in eastern Oklahoma.
+Muskogee historian Donald Fixico describes a contemporary en­
+clave: "There is a small Creek town in Oklahoma which lies within
+the Creek Nation. The name of this town is Thlopthlocco. Thlopth-
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+159
+
+locco is a small independent community which operates almost
+independently. They are not very much dependent on the federal
+government, nor are they dependent on the Creek Nation. So they're
+kind of a renegade group."44
+In 19 07, Indian Territory was dissolved and the state of Okla­
+homa entered the Union. Under the Dawes and Curtis Acts, priva­
+tization of Indigenous territories was imposed on half of all federal
+reservations, with a loss of three-fourths of the Indigenous land base
+that still existed after decades of army attacks and wanton land
+grabs. Allotment continued until 19 3 4 , when it was halted by the In­
+dian Reorganization Act, but the land taken was never restored and
+its former owners were never compensated for their losses, leaving
+all the Indigenous people of Oklahoma (except the Osage Nation)
+without effective collective territories and many families with no
+land at all.45
+The Hopi Nation resisted allotment with partial success. In 1 8 9 4 ,
+they petitioned the federal government with a letter signed b y every
+leader and chief of the Hopi villages:
+To the Washington Chiefs:
+During the last two years strangers have looked over our
+land with spy-glasses and made marks upon it, a:nd we know
+but little of what it means. As we believe that you have no
+wish to disturb our Possessions we want to tell you some­
+thing about this Hopi land.
+None of us were asked that it should be measured into
+separate lots, and given to individuals for they would cause
+confusion.
+The family, the dwelling house and the field are insepa­
+rable, because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest
+with her. Among us the family traces its kin from the mother,
+hence all its possessions are hers . The man builds the house
+but the woman is the owner, because she repairs and pre­
+serves it; the man cultivates the field, but he renders its har­
+vest into the woman's keeping, because upon her it rests to
+prepare the food, and the surplus of stores for barter depends
+upon her thrift.
+
+160
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+A man plants the fields of his wife, and the fields assigned
+to the children she bears, and informally he calls them his,
+although in fact they are not. Even of the field which he
+inherits from his mother, its harvests he may dispose of at
+will, but the field itself he may not. 4 6
+The petition continues, explaining the matriarchal communal
+society and why dividing it up for private ownership would be un­
+thinkable. Washington authorities never replied and the government
+continued to carve up the lands, finally giving up because of Hopi
+resistance. In the heart of New Mexico, the nineteen Indigenous
+city-states of the Pueblo Indians organized resistance under US oc­
+cupation using the legal system as a means of survival, as they had
+under Spanish colonialism and in their relationship with the republic
+of Mexico. In the decades after they had lost their autonomous po­
+litical status under Mexico and were counted as former Mexican cit­
+izens under US law, both Hispanos and Anglo squatters encroached
+upon the Pueblos' ancestral lands. The only avenue for the Pueblos
+was to use the US court of private land claims . The following report
+reflects their status in the eyes of the Anglo-American j udiciary:
+Occasionally the court room at Santa Fe would be enlivened
+by a squad of Indians who· had j ourneyed thither from their
+distant Pueblos as witnesses for their grant. These delegations
+were usually headed by the governor of their tribe, who ex­
+hibited great pride in striding up to the witness stand and be­
+ing sworn on the holy cross; wearing a badge on his breast, a
+broad red sash round his waist, and clad in a white shirt, the
+full tail of which hung about his Antarctic zone like the skirt
+of a ballet dancer, and underneath which depended his baggy
+white muslin trousers, a la Chinese washee-washee. The grave
+and imperturbable bow which the governor gave to the judges
+on the bench, in recognition of their equa lity with himself
+as official dignitaries, arrayed in that grotesque fashion, was
+enough to evoke a hilarious bray from a dead burro.47
+
+"Indian Country "
+
+161
+
+Without redress for their collective land rights under the claims
+court, the Pueblos had no choice but to seek federal Indian trust
+status. After they lost in their first attempt, finally in r9r3 the US Su­
+preme Court reversed the earlier decision and declared the Pueblos
+wards of the federal government with protected trust status, stating:
+"They are essentially a simple, uninformed, inferior people."48
+At the beginning of the twentieth century, sculptor James Earle
+Fraser unveiled the monumental and iconic sculpture The End of
+
+the Trail, which he had created exclusively for the triumphal r9r5
+Panama-Pacific International Exposition in S a n Francisco, Califor­
+nia. The image of the near naked, exhausted, dying Indian mounted
+on his equally exhausted horse proclaimed the final solution, the
+elimination of the Indigenous peoples of the continent. The follow­
+ing year, Ishi, the California Yani who had been held captive for five
+years by anthropologists who studied him, died and was proclaimed
+"the last Indian." Dozens of other popular images of "the vanishing
+Indian" were displayed during this period. The film industry soon
+kicked in, and Indians were killed over and over on screens viewed
+by millions of children, including Indian girls and boys.
+With utter military triumph on the continent, the United States
+then set out to dominate the world, but the Indigenous peoples re­
+mained and persisted as the "American Century" proceeded.
+
+NINE
+
+U S T R I U M PHA L I S M
+A N D PE ACE TI M E C O L O N I A L I S M
+
+There is one feature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or
+European, blood during the past four centuries which should never
+be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion
+on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught
+with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the
+lands over which the expansion took place.
+-Theodore Roosevelt, " T he Expansion of the White Races," 1909
+
+I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back
+now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered
+women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the
+crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young.
+And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud,
+and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was
+a beautiful dream . . . the nation's hoop is broken and scattered.
+There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
+-Black Elk, 1 9 3 0 , on the massacre at Wounded Knee
+
+Although US imperialism abroad might seem at first to fall outside
+the scope of this book, it's important to recognize that the same
+methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peo­
+ples on the continent were mirrored abroad. While the Indigenous
+Americans were being brutally colonized, eliminated, relocated, and
+killed, the United States from its beginning was also pursuing over­
+seas dominance. Between 1798 and 1 8 27, the United States inter­
+vened militarily twenty-three times from Cuba to Tripoli ( Libya)
+to Greece. There were seventy-one overseas interventions between
+
+162
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+l 8 3 J and 1 896, on all continents, and the United States dominated
+most of Latin America economically, some countries militarily. The
+forty interventions and occupations between 1 8 9 8 and 1919 were
+conducted with even more military heft but using the same methods
+and sometimes the same personnel.
+
+CO N N E CT I O N S
+
+U S colonies established during 189 8-1919 include Hawai'i (formerly
+called the Sandwich Islands), Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Is­
+lands, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Northern
+Mariana. Most of these, and dozens more islands depopulated in the
+Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean for military bases and
+bomb testing, remain colonies (called "territories" and "common­
+wealths" ) in the twenty-first century. 1
+One of the first outspoken proponents of transoceanic imperial­
+ism was former abolitionist William H . Seward who was Lincoln's
+secretary of state and who considered it the destiny of the United
+States to dominate the Pacific Ocean. Seward did everything possi­
+ble to fulfill that perceived destiny, including arranging the purchase
+of Alaska in 1 8 67. In early 1 874 , the United States began military
+control of Hawai'i, and in 1 8 9 8 it annexed the islands after over­
+throwing the Hawai'ian queen, Liliuokalani. Following post-World
+War II ascendancy to statehood, Indigenous Hawai'ians and Alas­
+kan Natives were brought under similar US colonial rule as Native
+Americans.2
+Overseas ventures gained increasingly exuberant public support
+in the late nineteenth century. In the best-selling book Our Country
+
+( 1 8 8 5) the Reverend Josiah Strong of the American Home Mission­
+ary Society argued that the United States had inherited the mantle of
+Anglo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibility
+to control the world. By 1914 there were six thousand US Protestant
+missionaries in China and thousands of others in every other part
+of the non-European world, and they remained, as from the early
+seventeenth century, ensconced in Native American communities.
+The United States built the naval " Great White Fleet" and ex-
+
+163
+
+164
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+panded the army from twenty-five thousand to nearly three hundred
+thousand men by the time it invaded and occupied Cuba, undermin­
+ing the ongoing independence movement against Spain there. While
+US troops were headed to Havana Harbor in 1 8 9 8 , Admiral George
+Dewey led the US Navy to intervene in the Philippines-purport­
+edly to assist a force of thirty thousand indigenous Filipino rebels
+who had won and declared their independence from Spain. Dewey
+referred to the Filipinos as "the Indians" and vowed to "enter the
+city [Manila] and keep the Indians out."3 It took the United States
+three more years to crush the Filipino " lhdian" resistance to US oc­
+cupation, the army using counterinsurgency techniques practiced
+against the Indigenous nations of the North American continent,
+including new forms of torture such as water-boarding, and under
+many of the same army commanders. Twenty-six of the thirty US
+generals in the Philippines had been officers in the " Indian wars."4
+Major General Nelson A. Miles, who had commanded the army in
+campaigns against Indigenous peoples, was put in general command
+of the army in the Philippines war.
+The continuity between invading and occupying sovereign In­
+digenous nations in order to achieve continental control in North
+America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global
+control is key to understanding the future of the United States in
+the world. The military provided that continuity. As a colonel in
+the 1 8 70s, Nelson Miles had been in charge of pursuing every last
+Sioux and herding them onto reservations guarded by troops or re­
+cently trained Indian police. The reservations were not safe havens
+for the incarcerated . Struck By the Ree told of multiple horrors of
+daily life on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, which was not out
+of the ordinary:
+Another time when General Sully came up he passed through
+the middle of our field, turned all his cattle and stock into our
+corn and destroyed the whole of it . . . . The soldiers set fire to
+the prairie and burnt up four of our lodges and all there was
+in them . . . . The soldiers are very drunken and come to our
+place-they have arms and guns; they run after our women
+and fire into our houses and lodges; one soldier came along
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+165
+
+and wanted one of our young men to drink, but he would
+not, and turned to go away, and the soldier shot at him. Be­
+fore the soldiers came along we had good health; but once the
+soldiers come along they go to my squaws and want to sleep
+with them, and the squaws being hungry will sleep with them
+in order to get something to eat, and will get a bad disease,
+and then the squaws turn to their husbands and give them the
+bad disease. 5
+As related in chapter 8 , Miles had also led the army's pursuit of
+Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce as they sought to escape to Canada,
+and in 1 8 8 6 Miles took charge of the War Department's efforts to
+capture Geronimo, commanding five thousand soldiers, a third of the
+army's combat force, along with five hundred Apache scouts forced
+into service and thousands of volunteer settler militiamen. In 1 8 9 8 ,
+now general i n chief o f the army, Miles personally commanded the
+army forces that seized Puerto Rico. Miles's second in command,
+General Wesley E. Merritt, was assigned to head the military inva­
+sion of the Philippines. He had served under Custer, fighting Sioux
+and Cheyenne resistance. Commanding the army occupation of the
+Philippines was General Henry W. Lawton, to whom Geronimo had
+turned himself in, making Lawton an instant hero for "capturing"
+Geronimo. Lawton had led troops in Cuba before going to the Phil­
+ippines. Ironically, Filipino insurgents under the leadership of a man
+named Geronimo killed Lawton in an attack. What these US officers
+had learned in counterinsurgency warfare in North America they
+applied against the Filipinos. Younger officers would apply lessons
+learned in the Philippines to future imperial ventures, or in at least
+one case, pass them to a son. General Arthur MacArthur, father of
+World War II general Douglas MacArthur, chased Filipino guerrilla
+leader Emilio Aguinaldo, finally capturing him. 6
+By this time, Theodore Roosevelt was president. His corporate­
+friendly militarism, particularly his rapid development of the navy
+and his carefully staged performance as leader of the Rough Riders
+militia in Cuba, brought him to the presidency. He was popular with
+both settlers and big business. Roosevelt referred to Aguinaldo as
+a "renegade Pawnee" and observed that Filipinos did not have the
+
+166
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+right to govern their country just because they happened to occupy
+it. Two hundred thousand US soldiers fought in the Philippines, suf­
+fering seven thousand casualties ( 3 .5 percent). Twenty percent of the
+Philippine population died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Ar­
+my's scorched-earth strategy (food deprivation, targeting civilians
+for killing, and so on) and displacement.7 In 1904 Roosevelt pro­
+nounced what has come to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the
+Monroe Doctrine. It mandated that any nation engaged in "chronic
+wrong-doing" -that is, did anything to threaten perceived US eco­
+nomic or political interests-would be disciplined militarily by the
+United States, which was to serve as an "international police power."8
+As the US economy rapidly industrialized, the army also inter­
+vened frequently on the side of big business in domestic conflicts be­
+tween corporations and workers. Troops were used for this purpose
+in the Great Railroad Strike of 1 8 77-the first nationwide work
+stoppage-begun by railroad workers protesting wage cuts. Begun
+in West Virginia, the strike soon spread along rail lines from ocean
+to ocean and from north to south. General Philip Sheridan and his
+troops were called in from the Great Plains, where they had been
+campaigning against the Sioux, to halt the strike in Chicago.
+Industrialization affected farming as machinery replaced farm­
+ers' hands and cash crops came to prevail. Large operators moved in
+and banks foreclosed on small farmers, leaving them landless. Farm­
+ers' movements, most of them socialist-leaning and anti-imperialist,
+opposed military conscription and US entry into World War I-the
+"rich man's war," as they called it. Tens of thousands protested and
+carried out acts of civil disobedience. In August 1 9 1 7, white, Black,
+and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern
+and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscrip­
+tion, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government
+to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded
+grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union
+(WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous
+Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan
+was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working
+people to arm themselves and to j oin them along the way. After a
+day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Okla-
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+167
+
+homa, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they
+ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed
+posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which
+became known as the Green Corn Rebellion. Those who didn't get
+away were arrested and received prison sentences. The rebellion is
+today considered as the waning voice of the people pushed off the
+land, but it also reflects the crisis induced by the forced allotment
+of Indigenous territories and the reality of a multiethnic resistance
+movement, a rare occurrence in US colonialist history. 9
+At the same time, landless Indigenous farmers were launching a
+revolution in Mexico. Before President Wilson put General John J.
+Pershing at the head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Eu­
+rope in 1917, the president had sent him to lead troops, mainly buf­
+falo soldiers, inside Mexico for nearly a year to stop the revolution
+in the north led by Francisco "Pancho" Villa. The military interven­
+tion did not go well . Even the Mexican federal troops fighting Villa
+resented the presence of US soldiers. About the only notable success
+for the US military expedition was the killing of Villa's second-in­
+command by a young lieutenant named George Patton. 10
+
+M A R KETS K I L L
+
+The extension of US military power into the Pacific and Caribbean
+was not militarism for its own sake. Rather, it was all about secur­
+ing markets and natural resources, developing imperialist power
+to protect and extend corporate wealth. Indigenous peoples in the
+United States were severely affected by US industrialization and the
+development of corporations. In a study of corporations in Indian
+Territory, historian H . Craig Miner defines the corporation as "an
+organization legally authorized by charter to act as a single indi­
+vidual, characterized by the issuance of stock and the limitation of
+liability of its stockholders to the amount of their respective invest­
+ment . . . an artificial person that could not be held accountable in a
+manner familiar to the American Indian way of thinking. Individual
+responsibility could be masked in corporate personality . . . a legal
+abstraction."11
+
+168
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+The burgeoning of the corporation brought about a new era of
+attacks on Indigenous governments, lands, and resources. After the
+military power and resistance of Indigenous nations and communi­
+ties were stifled by the growing US military machine following the
+Civil War, compliance on the part of Indigenous leaders became
+necessary for survival. Miner argues that "industrial civilization"
+diminishes the relevance of persons or communities in its way and
+also notes that industrial civilization is not exactly the same as "in­
+dustrialization," that it is something quite different and more per­
+vasive. Industrial civilization justified exploitation and destruction
+of whole societies and expansion without regard for the sovereignty
+of peoples; it promoted individualism, competition, and selfishness
+as righteous character traits. 12 The means by which the US govern­
+ment assured corporate freedom to intrude in Indigenous territories
+was federal trusteeship, the very instrument that was mandated to
+protect them.
+Beginning at the end of the Civil War, government funds from
+Indigenous land sales or royalties were not distributed to reservation
+citizens or held by their governments; rather they were held in trust
+and managed in Washington. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without
+Indigenous peoples' consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad
+companies and various municipal and state bonds. For instance,
+the Cherokee national fund and the Muskogee Creek Orphan Fund
+were so invested. Indigenous leaders were well aware of these prac­
+tices but were powerless to stop them. They certainly did protest, as
+evidenced by a petition filed by the Chickasaw Nation: "The Indians
+did not lend this money; the United States lent it, to increase the
+value of its multiple states . . . . But now the attempt is made to force
+the Indian to contribute his pittance to the growth of all this pros­
+perity and power; and this, too, when the United States, triumphant
+over the perils that once surrounded it, is more than ever able to be
+liberal, although nothing more is asked of it than to be just." 13
+Cherokee official Lewis D owning, writing in 1 8 69 that rules
+would have to be agreed on and adhered to, noted the differences
+between Indigenous values and those of American businessmen, "in
+that industry, habit, and energy of character which is the result of the
+development of the idea of accumulation." Free development with-
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+169
+
+out restraint of consensual policy would not do, Downing declared:
+"To us, it appears that once cut loose from our treaty moorings,
+we will roll and tumble upon the tempestuous ocean of American
+politics and congressional legislation, and shipwreck [will] be our
+inevitable destination."14
+Entering the 1920s, Indigenous peoples were at their lowest
+point-both in population and possibility for survival after decades
+of violent military operations during and following the Civil War,
+along with federal theft of Indigenous treaty-guaranteed funds and
+then two decades of allotment of Indigenous lands. Then the US
+government imposed unsolicited citizenship on American Indians
+with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, gesturing toward assimila­
+tion and dissolving the nations. It was a boom time for the national
+economy, but life threatening for Native Americans everywhere .
+Robert Spott of the Yurok Nation in Northern California, also an
+army veteran of World War I, described his community's situation,
+which could have been applied to every Native community. Speak­
+ing before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 1926, he
+said:
+There are many Indian women that are almost blind, and they
+only have one meal a day, because there is no one to look after
+them. Most of these people used to live on fish, which they
+cannot get, and on acorns, and they are starving. They hardly
+have any clothing to cover them. Many children up along the
+Klamath River have passed away with disease. Most of them
+from tuberculosis. There is no road into there where the In­
+dians are. The only road they have got is the Klamath River.
+To reach doctors they have to take their children down the
+Klamath River to the mouth of the Klamath. It is 24 miles
+to Crescent City, where we have to go for doctors. It costs us
+$25 . o o . Where are the poor Indians to get this money from to
+get a doctor for their children ? They go from place to place
+to borrow money. If they cannot get it, the poor child dies
+without aid. Inside of four or five years more there will be
+hardly any Indians left upon the Klamath River.
+I came here to notify you that something has to be done.
+
+1 70
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+We must have a doctor, and we must have a school to educate
+our children, and we must have a road upon the Klamath
+River besides the bank of the river . . . .
+My father was an Indian chief, and we used to own every­
+thing there. When the land was allotted they allotted him only
+ten acres, a little farm of land which is mostly gravel and rock,
+with little scrubby trees and redwood . . . .
+Often we see a car go past. It is the Indian Service. Do you
+suppose the man driving that car would stop ? Always he has
+no time for the Indians, and the car with some one from the
+U . S . A . Indian Service goes past just like a tourist.15
+Natives j oined African Americans, Mexican Americans, and
+Chinese immigrants as targets of individual racial discrimination
+between the end of Reconstruction in the South in the l 8 8os to the
+mid-twentieth century. Jim Crow segregation reigned in the South,
+where more than five thousand African Americans were lynched. 1 6
+As Black people fled terror and impoverishment in the South, their
+populations grew in northern and midwestern cities where they still
+faced discrimination and violence. Chicago, Tulsa, and dozens of
+other cities were marred by deadly "race riots" against African Amer­
+icans.17 The virulent and organized racism of the 1920s spilled over
+to other peoples of darker hue. The pseudoscience of eugenics and
+racial purity was more robust in the United States than in Europe,
+further solidifying the ideology of white supremacy. For Indigenous
+peoples, this was manifest in development of US government policy
+measuring "blood quantum" in order to qualify for Indigenousness,
+replacing culture (especially language) and self-identification. While
+African Americans were classified as such by the measure of "one
+drop of blood," Indigenous people were increasingly called to prove
+their degree of ancestry as a significant fraction.
+
+N E W D E A L T O T E R M I N AT I O N
+
+Some relief for Indigenous nations came with the 1930s New Deal.
+The Roosevelt administration's programs to combat economic col­
+lapse included an acknowledgment of Indigenous self-determina-
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+171
+
+tion. Roosevelt appointed anthropologist and self-identified socialist
+John Collier as US commissioner of Indian affairs in 193 3 . 18 As a
+young activist scholar in 1922, Collier had been hired by the Gen­
+eral Federation of Women's Clubs to assist the Pueblo Indians of
+New Mexico in their land-claims struggle, a proj ect that culmi­
+nated in success when Congress passed the 1924 Pueblo Lands Act.
+Having lived at Taos Pueblo, whose residents practiced traditional
+lifeways, Collier had developed respect for the communal social re­
+lations he observed in Indigenous communities and had confidence
+that these peoples could govern themselves successfully and even in­
+fluence a move toward socialism in the United States. He understood
+and agreed with Indigenous opposition to assimilation as individu­
+als into the general society-what the ongoing allotment in severalty
+of Native collective estates and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
+sought to institutionalize.
+As commissioner for Indian affairs, in consultation with Native
+communities, Collier drafted and successfully lobbied for passage
+of the Wheeler-Howard bill, which became the Indian Reorganiza­
+tion Act (IRA) of 1 9 3 4 · One of its provisions was to end further
+allotment of Indigenous territories, which was immediately imple­
+mented, although already allotted land was not restored. Another
+provision committed the federal government to purchase available
+land contiguous to reservations in order to restore lands to relevant
+Native nations. The IRA's main provision was more controversial
+with Indigenous peoples, calling for the formation of "tribal gov­
+ernments." In a gesture toward self-determination, the IRA did not
+require any Indigenous nation to accept the law's terms, and several,
+including the Navajo Nation, declined. The IRA was limited in that
+it did not apply to the relocated Native nations in Oklahoma; sepa­
+rate legislation was later drawn up for their unique circumstances. 1 9
+The Navajo Nation, with the largest land base and population
+among Indigenous peoples in the United States, soundly rejected
+signing off on the IRA. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, in
+the words of postwar Navajo chairman Sam Ankeah, "the most
+devastating experience in [Navajo] history since the imprisonment
+at Fort Sumner from 1 8 64-1 8 6 8 ."20 When Collier became commis­
+sioner in 1933 , he pushed for reduction of Navajo sheep and goats
+
+1 72
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+as part of a larger New Deal conservation scheme to stem stock
+overgrazing. He badgered the twelve Navajo Council members into
+accepting the reduction, promising unlikely new jobs under the Ci­
+vilian Conservation Corps to replace lost income. Collier suggested,
+without basis, that soil erosion in the Navajo Reservation was re­
+sponsible for the silting up of the Boulder Dam site. His action likely
+was influenced by agribusinesses that wanted to get rid of all small
+producers in order to create an advantage to Anglo settler ranchers
+in New Mexico and Arizona. 2 1 The process is still bitterly remem­
+bered by Navajos. With traumatized Navajos watching, government
+agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them
+after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats
+were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty
+thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews
+tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those
+who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their
+livestock. As Navajo Council member Howard Gorman said:
+All of these incidents broke a lot of hearts of the Navajo people
+and left them mourning for years. They didn't like it that the
+sheep were killed; it was a total waste. That is what the people
+said. To many of them livestock was a necessity and meant
+survival . Some people consider livestock as sacred because
+it is life's necessity. They think of livestock as their mother.
+The cruel way our stock was handled is something that should
+never have happened. 22
+In addition to the trauma experienced by the Navajos, the effect of
+the reductions was to impoverish the owners of small herds.
+For those Native nations, the majority, that did accept the In­
+dian Reorganization Act, a negative consequence was that English­
+speaking Native elites, often aligned with Christian denominations,
+signed on to the law and formed authoritarian governments that
+enriched a few families and undermined communal traditions and
+traditional forms of governance, a problem that persists. However,
+the IRA did end allotment and set a precedent for acknowledg­
+ing Indigenous self-determination and recognizing collective and
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+1 73
+
+cultural rights, a legal reality that made it difficult for those who
+sought to undo the incipient empowerment of Indigenous peoples
+in the 19 50s.
+The Truman administration pushed out John Collier, among
+many other progressive Roosevelt appointees. Following the end of
+World War II, attitudes among the ruling class and Congress regard­
+ing Indigenous nations turned from supporting autonomy to their
+elimination as peoples with a new regimen of individual assimila­
+tion. In 1946 Congress established the Indian Claims Commission
+and the Indian Claims Court to legitimize the prior illegal federal
+taking of Indigenous treaty lands. Between 1946 and 1 9 5 2-the
+cutoff date for filing claims-370 petitions representing 8 5 0 claims
+were filed on behalf of Indigenous nations. Although the govern­
+ment's stated purpose was to clear title for lands illegally taken,
+the claims mechanism barred restitution of lands taken illegally or
+acquiring new ones to replace the loss. Settlement was limited to
+monetary compensation based on the property's value at the time
+of the taking, and without interest. Adding insult to injury, any ex­
+penditure made by the federal government on behalf of the Indige­
+nous nations making claims was subtracted from the overall award,
+thereby penalizing the Indigenous people for services they had not
+requested. The average interval between filing a claim and receiving
+an award was fifteen years.
+In creating the Indian Claims Commission, Congress was ac­
+knowledging the fact that the federal government had illegally seized
+Indigenous lands guaranteed by treaties. That validation became
+useful in Indigenous strategies for strengthening sovereignty and
+pursuing restitution of the land rather than monetary compensa­
+tion. On the other hand, the process became a stepping-stone to
+ending federal acknowledgment of Indigenous nations altogether.
+The Eisenhower administration lost no time in collaborating with
+Congress to weaken federal trust responsibility, transferring Indian
+education to the states and moving Indian health care from the Bu­
+reau of Indian Affairs to the Department of Health.
+This policy trend toward assimilation culminated in the Ter­
+mination Act (House Concurrent Resolution r o 8 ) in 195 3 , which
+provided-in Orwellian language-that Congress should, "as
+
+1 74
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+quickly as possible, move to free those tribes listed from Federal
+supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations spe­
+cially applicable to Indians." Under termination, the federal trust
+protection and transfer payments guaranteed by treaties and agree­
+ments would end. Dillon S. Myer, who had headed the War Re­
+location Authority that administered the concentration camps for
+US citizens of Japanese descent, was, significantly, the Eisenhower
+administration's commissioner of Indian affairs to implement ter­
+mination. 23 Commissioner Myer noted that Indigenous consent was
+immaterial, saying, " We must proceed even though Indian coopera­
+tion may be lacking in certain cases."24 In the same year, Congress
+imposed Public Law 2 8 0 that transferred police power on reserva­
+tions from the federal government to the states.
+Despite the piecemeal eating away of Indigenous landholdings
+and sovereignty and federal trust responsibility based on treaties,
+the US government had no constitutional or other legal authority
+to deprive federally recognized Native nations of their inherent
+sovereignty or territorial boundaries. It could only make it nearly
+impossible for them to exercise that sovereignty, or, alternatively,
+eliminate Indigenous identity entirely through assimilation, a form
+of genocide. The latter was the goal of the 1 9 5 6 Indian Relocation
+Act ( Public Law 949 ) . With BIA funding, any Indigenous individual
+or family could relocate to designated urban industrial areas-the
+San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Denver,
+Cleveland-where BIA offices were established to make housing and
+job training and placement available. This project gave rise to large
+Native urban populations scattered among already poor and strug­
+gling minority working-class communities, holding low-skilled jobs
+or dealing with long-term unemployment. Yet many of these mostly
+young migrants were influenced by the civil rights movement emerg­
+ing in cities in the 1950s and 19 60s and began their own distinct
+intertribal movements organized around the urban American Indian
+centers they established. In one of the largest of the relocation des­
+tinations, the San Francisco Bay Area, this would culminate in the
+eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz in the late 19 60s.
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+1 75
+
+C I V I L R I G HTS ERA B EG I N S
+
+The founding of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)
+in 1944 had marked a surge of Indigenous resistance. An extraordi­
+nary group of Native leaders emerged in the 1950s, including D'Arcy
+McNickle (Flathead), Edward Dozier (Santa Clara Pueblo), Helen
+Peterson (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota), and dozens of others from
+diverse nations . Without their efforts, the termination period would
+have been more damaging than it was, possibly ending Indigenous
+status altogether. As a result of their organizing, the government
+ceased enforcing termination in 1 9 6 1 , though the legislation (e­
+mained on the books until its repeal in 19 8 8 . 25 However, by 1960,
+more than a hundred Indigenous nations had been terminated . A
+few were later able to regain federal trusteeship through protracted
+court battles and demonstrations, which took decades and financial
+hardship. Indigenous leaders such as Ada Deer and James White of
+the terminated Menominee Nation played key roles in the struggle
+to have Indigenous cases heard by Congress and by the Supreme
+Court in suits and appeals. The restitution movement attracted pub­
+licity through community organizing and direct action. 26 Postwar
+Indigenous resistance operated in relation to a United States far
+wealthier and more powerful than before, but also within the era
+of decolonization and human rights inaugurated with establishment
+of the United Nations and adoption of its Universal Declaration of
+Human Rights as well as the Convention on the Prevention and
+Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 194 8 . Native leaders paid
+attention and were inspired.
+Native organizing, like the organization of the African American
+desegregation and voting rights movement, developed within the
+context of a nationalistic anticommunist ideology that intensified
+with the Cold War and nuclear arms race in the 19 50s. This second
+great Red Scare (the first had been in the wake of World War I) tar­
+geted the labor movement under the guise of combating the "com­
+munist threat" from the Soviet Union. 27 It also attacked the civil
+rights and self-determination movements of the period, and racism
+broadened and flourished. The wars against Japan and then Korea,
+
+176
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+along with the successful Chinese communist revolution, revived
+the early-twentieth-century racist fear of a " yellow peril." Mexi­
+can migrant workers largely replaced the Asian agricultural work­
+ers displaced by the Japanese American internment, but in 1 9 5 3
+" Operation Wetback," as the federal program was called, forced the
+deportation of more than a million Mexican workers, in the pro­
+cess subjecting millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage to illegal
+search and arrest. Native Americans continued to experience brutal­
+ity, including rape and detention in the border towns on the edges
+of reservation lands, at the hands of citizens as well as law enforce­
+ment officials. The situation of African Americans was one of con­
+tinued legalized segregation in the South, and extralegal but open
+discrimination elsewhere. Then, thanks to the long and hard work
+of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
+(NAACP) in 1954, the US Supreme Court ordered desegregation of
+public schools. Years of persistent and little-publicized civil rights
+organizing, particularly in the South, burst into public view with
+the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the following year. The
+white response was murderous: a well-funded campaign by White
+Citizens' Councils that formed all over the country, accusing civil
+rights activists of communist influence and infiltration. When white
+vigilantes bombed and burned Black churches, it was said that "the
+communists" were doing it to gain sympathy for integration.
+As national liberation movements surged in European colonies
+in Africa and Asia, the United States responded with counterin­
+surgency. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in
+
+1947 and expanded in size and global reach during the Eisenhower
+administration under director Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower's
+secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. The CIA instrumentalized the
+overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Iran in 1953
+
+a n d Guatemala in 1954. 28 Guatemala had been the leading light i n
+developing the Inter-American Indian Institute, a 1940 treaty-based
+initiative that Dave Warren and D'Arcy McNickle were involved
+with. Following the coup, the institute headquarters relocated from
+Guatemala City to Mexico City, but there it no longer had the same
+clout. Covert action came to be the primary means of counterinsur­
+gency, while military invasion remained an option as in Vietnam fol-
+
+US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism
+
+lowing a decade of covert counterinsurgency there. In the buildup to
+the US war in Vietnam, the CIA set the stage with its "secret war" in
+Laos, organizing the indigenous Hmong as a CIA-sponsored army.
+After Iran and Guatemala, the CIA engineered coups in Indonesia,
+the Congo, Greece, and Chile, while attempting assassinations or
+coups that failed in Cuba, Iraq, Laos, and other countries.
+Two years before John F. Kennedy took office as president of the
+United States, the Cuban people, after decades of struggle and years
+of urban and rural organizing and guerrilla war, deposed the cor­
+rupt and despised dictator Batista, who had been financed and sup­
+ported by the United States to the bitter end. The CIA spent the next
+several years trying to assassinate revolutionary leader Fidel Castro
+and made many attempts to invade, the most infamous of which
+was the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. Many Cubans who left Cuba for
+the United States after the revolution were recruited as CIA opera­
+tives. The revolution in Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast,
+would be a touchstone for increasingly radicalized young people
+in the United States, but even more so for the Indigenous peoples
+of Latin America, which resonated with Native American activists
+seeking self-determination to their north.
+
+177
+
+TEN
+
+G HO S T DA N CE P R O P HE C Y
+A N AT I O N I S C O M I N G
+
+The whole world is coming,
+A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
+The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
+-from the Lakota Ghost Dance song, "Maka' Sito'maniyafi"
+
+Little Wounded Knee is turned into a giant world.
+-Wallace Black Elk, 1973
+
+T H E N EW FRONTI E R
+
+Seventy years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the con­
+quest of the continent was said to have been complete, and with
+Hawai'i and Alaska made into states, rounding out the fifty stars
+on today's flag, the myth of an exceptional US American people
+destined to bring order out of chaos, to stimulate economic growth,
+and to replace savagery with civilization-not just in North America
+but throughout the world-proved to have enormous staying power.
+A key to John F. Kennedy's political success was that he revived
+the " frontier" as a trope of populist imperialism openly based on the
+drama and popular myth of "settling" the continent, of "taming"
+a different sort of " wilderness." In Kennedy's acceptance speech at
+the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, historian
+Richard Slotkin writes, the presidential nominee "asked his audi­
+ence to see him as a new kind of frontiersman confronting a differ­
+ent sort of wilderness: 'I stand tonight facing west on what was once
+
+178
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+1 79
+
+the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3 0 0 0 miles behind me,
+the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes
+their lives to build a new world here in the West . . . . We stand today
+on the edge of a new frontier . . . a frontier of unknown opportuni­
+ties and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.'" 1
+Kennedy's use of " new frontier" to encapsulate his campaign
+echoed debates about US history that had begun more than six de­
+cades earlier. In 1894, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had pre­
+sented his history-making " frontier thesis," claiming that the crisis
+of that era was the result of the closing of the frontier and that a new
+frontier was nee.ded to fill the ideological and spiritual vacuum cre­
+ated by the completion of settler colonialism. The "Turner Thesis"
+served as a dominant school of the history of the US West through
+most of the twentieth century. The frontier metaphor described Ken­
+nedy's plan for employing political power to make the world the new
+frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War,
+what Slotkin calls "a heroic engagement in the 'long twilight strug­
+gle"' against communism, to which the nation was summoned, as
+Kennedy characterized it in his inaugural address. Soon after he took
+office, that struggle took the form of a counterinsurgency program
+in Vietnam. "Seven years after Kennedy's nomination," Slotkin re­
+minds us, "American troops would be describing Vietnam as 'Indian
+Country' and search-and-destroy missions as a game of 'Cowboys
+and Indians'; and Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify a
+massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the 'In­
+dians' away from the 'fort' so that the 'settlers' could plant 'corn.'"2
+The movement of Indigenous peoples to undo what generations
+of "frontier" expansionists had wrought continued during the Viet­
+nam War era and won some major victories but more importantly
+a shift in consensus, will, and vision toward self-determination and
+land restitution, which prevails today. Activists' efforts to end ter­
+mination and secure restoration of land, particularly sacred sites,
+included Taos Pueblo's sixty-four-year struggle with the US gov­
+ernment to reclaim their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo
+Mountains of New Mexico. In the first land restitution to any Indig­
+enous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effect Public
+
+180
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Law 9 1 - 5 5 0 on December 1 5 , 1970, which had been approved with
+bipartisan majorities in Congress. President Nixon stated, "This is a
+bill that represents j ustice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in
+which land involved in this bill-4 8 ,000 acres-was taken from the
+Taos Pueblo Indians. The Congress of the United States now returns
+that land to whom it belongs."3
+In hearings held in the preceding years by the Senate Subcom­
+mittee on Indian Affairs, members expressed fear of establishing a
+precedent in awarding land-based on ancient use, treaties, or ab­
+original ownership-rather than monetary payment. As one witness
+testifying in opposition to the return of Taos lands said, "The his­
+tory of the land squabbles in New Mexico among various groups of
+people, including Indian-Americans and Spanish Americans, is well
+known. Substantially every acre of our public domain, be it national
+forest, state parks, or wilderness areas is threatened by claims from
+various groups who say they have some ancestral right to the land to
+the exclusion of all other persons . . . which can only be fostered and
+encouraged by the present legislation if passed."4
+Although the Senate subcommittee members finally agreed to
+the Taos claim by satisfying themselves that it was unique, it did
+in fact set a precedent. 5 The return of Blue Lake as a sacred site
+begs the question of whether other Indigenous sacred sites remain­
+ing as national or state parks or as US Forest Service or Bureau of
+Land Management lands and waterways should also be returned.
+Administration of the Grand Canyon National Park has been par­
+tially restored to its ancestral caretakers, the Havasupai Nation,
+but other federal lands have not. A few sites, such as the volcanic El
+Malpais, a sacred site for the Pueblo Indians, have been designated
+as national monuments by executive order rather than restored as
+Indigenous territory. The most prominent struggle has been the La­
+kota Sioux's attempt to restore the Paha Sapa, or Black Hills, where
+the odious Mount Rushmore carvings have scarred the sacred site .
+Called the " Shrine of Democracy" by the federal government, it is
+anything but that; rather it is a shrine of in-your-face illegal occupa­
+tion and colonialism.
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+181
+
+RESURGENCE
+
+The return of Taos Blue Lake was not a gift from above. I n addition
+to the six-decade struggle of Taos Pueblo, the restitution took place
+in the midst of a renewed powerful and growing Native American
+struggle for self-determination. The movement's energy was evident
+when twenty-six young Native activists and students founded the
+National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961, based in Albuquer­
+que, New Mexico. From twenty-one different Native nations, some
+from reservations or small towns and others from relocated families
+far from home, the founders included Gloria Emerson and Herb
+Blatchford ( both Navajo), Clyde Warrior ( Ponca from Oklahoma),
+Mel Thom (Paiute from Nevada), and Shirley Hill Witt (Mohawk).
+Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas mentored the militant
+young activists. Although primarily committed to local struggles,
+their vision was international. As Shirley Hill Witt put it: "At a time
+when new nations all over the globe are emerging from colonial con­
+trol, their right to choose their own course places a vast burden of
+responsibility upon the most powerful nations to honor and protect
+those rights . . . . The Indians of the United States may well present
+the test case of American liberalism."6
+In 1964, the NIYC organized support for the ongoing Indigenous
+struggle to protect treaty-guaranteed fishing rights in Washington
+State. Actor Marlon Brando took an interest and provided finan­
+cial support and publicity. The "fish-in" movement soon put the
+tiny community at Frank's Landing in the headlines. Sid Mills was
+arrested there on October 1 3 , 19 68 . Eloquently, he explained his
+actions:
+I am a Yakima and Cherokee Indian, and a man. For two years
+and four months, I've been a soldier in the United States Army.
+I served in combat in Vietnam-until critically wounded . . . .
+I hereby renounce further obligation in service or duty to the
+United States Army.
+My first obligation now lies with the Indian People fight­
+ing for the lawful Treaty to fish in usual and accustomed wa­
+ter of the Nisqually, Columbia and other rivers of the Pacific
+
+182
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Northwest, and in serving them in this fight in any way pos­
+sible . . . .
+Just three years ago today, on October 1 3 , 1 9 6 5 , 19 women
+and children were brutalized by more than 45 armed agents of
+the State of Washington at Frank's Landing on the Nisqually
+river in a vicious, unwarranted attack . . . .
+Interestingly, the oldest human skeletal remains ever found
+in the Western Hemisphere were recently uncovered on the
+banks of the Columbia River-the remains of Indian fisher­
+men. What kind of government or society would spend mil­
+lions of dollars to pick upon our bones, restore our ancestral
+life patterns, and protect our ancient remains from damage­
+while at the same time eating upon the flesh of our living Peo­
+ple?
+We will fight for our rights.7
+Hank Adams with other local leaders founded the Survival of
+American Indians Association, which was composed of the Swin­
+omish, Nisqually, Yakama, Puyallup, Stilaguamish, and other Indig­
+enous peoples of the Pacific Northwest to carry on the fishing-rights
+struggle. 8 The backlash from Anglo sport fishers was swift and vio­
+lent, but in 1973 fourteen of the fishing nations sued Washington
+State, and, in a reflection of changed times, the following year US
+District Court Judge George Boldt found in their favor. He validated
+their right to 50 percent of fish taken "in the usual and accustomed
+places" that were designated in the 1 8 50s treaties, even where those
+places were not under tribal control. This was a landmark decision
+for historical Indigenous sovereignty over territories outside desig­
+nated reservation boundaries.
+The NIYC saw itself as an engine for igniting local organizing,
+a
+m rshaling community organizing proj ects with access to funds
+from the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty," the mandate
+of which was to implement the principles of economic and social
+equality intended by authors of the Civil Rights Act of 19 64 . In­
+terethnic alliances, including a significant representation of Native
+peoples, developed during the mid-19 6os. These culminated in the
+19 68 Poor People's Campaign spearheaded by the Reverend Mar-
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+183
+
+tin Luther King Jr. , which consisted of community organizing and
+leading marches across the country. In the final month of campaign
+planning, Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 19 6 8 . Thousands of
+marchers arrived in Washington, DC, in the next month and gath­
+ered in a tent city, then remained there for six weeks.9
+While local actions multiplied in Native communities and na­
+tions, the spectacular November 19 69 seizure and eighteen-month
+occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay grabbed wide
+media attention. An alliance known as Indians of All Tribes was ini­
+tiated by Native American students and community members living
+in the Bay Area. They built a thriving village on the island that drew
+Native pilgrimages from all over the continent, radicalizing thou­
+sands, especially Native youth. Indigenous women leaders were par­
+ticularly impressive, among them Madonna Thunderhawk, LaNada
+Means War Jack, Rayna Ramirez, and many others who continued
+organizing into the twenty-first century. The Proclamation of the In­
+dians of All Tribes expressed the level of Indigenous solidarity that
+was attained and the j oyful good humor that ruled:
+We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alca­
+traz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of
+discovery.
+We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the
+Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the fol­
+lowing treaty:
+We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dol­
+lars (24) in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the
+white man's purchase of a similar island about 3 0 0 years ago.
+We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the
+land for their own to be held in trust by the American Indians
+Government and by the bureau of Caucasian Affairs to hold in
+perpetuity-for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go
+down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the
+proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our edu­
+cation, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of
+civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up
+from their savage and unhappy state . . . .
+
+184
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from
+all over the world, entering the Golden Gate, would first see
+Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this
+nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands
+once ruled by free and noble Indians. 10
+Despite the satirical riff on the history of US colonialism, the
+group made serious demands for five institutions to be established
+on Alcatraz: a Center for Native American Studies; an American
+Indian Spiritual Center; an Indian Center of Ecology that would do
+scientific research on reversing pollution of water and air; a Great
+Indian Training School that would run a restaurant, provide job
+training, market Indigenous arts, and teach "the noble and tragic
+events of Indian history, including the Trail of Tears, and the Mas­
+sacre of Wounded Knee"; and a memorial, a reminder that the island
+had been established as a prison initially to incarcerate and execute
+California Indian resisters to US assault on their nations. 1 1
+Under orders from the Nixon White House, the Indigenous resi­
+dents remaining on Alcatraz were forced to evacuate in June r97 r .
+Indigenous professors Jack Forbes and David Risling, who were
+in the process of establishing a Native American studies program
+at the University of California, Davis, negotiated a grant from the
+federal government of unused land near Davis, where the institu­
+tions demanded by Alcatraz occupants could be established. A two­
+year Native-American- Chicano college and movement center, D - Q
+(Deganawidah- Quetzalcoatl) University, was founded, while U C
+Davis became the first US university t o offer a doctorate in Native
+American studies.
+During this period of intense protest and activism, alliances
+among Indigenous governments-including the National Congress
+of American Indians (NCAI) led by young Sioux attorney Vine De­
+loria Jr.-turned militant demands into legislation. A year before
+the seizure of Alcatraz, Ojibwe activists Dennis Banks and Clyde
+Bellecourt founded the American Indian Movement (AIM), which
+initially patrolled the streets around Indigenous housing projects in
+Minneapolis . 12 Going national, AIM became involved at Alcatraz.
+With the rather bitter end of the island occupation, as Paul Smith and
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+185
+
+Robert Warrior write: "The future of Indian activism would belong
+to people far angrier than the student brigades of Alcatraz. Urban
+Indians who managed a life beyond the bottles of cheap wine cruelly
+named Thunderbird would continue down the protest road." 13
+With the Vietnam War still raging and the reelection of Richard
+Nixon in November 1972 imminent, a coalition of eight Indigenous
+organizations-AIM, the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada
+(later renamed Assembly of First Nations), the Native American
+Rights Fund, the National Indian Youth Council, the National
+American Indian Council, the National Council on Indian Work,
+National Indian Leadership Training, and the American Indian
+Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse-organized "The Trail of
+Broken Treaties." Armed with a "20 -Point Position Paper" that fo­
+cused on the federal government's responsibility to implement Indig­
+enous treaties and sovereignty, caravans set out in the fall of 1972.
+The vehicles and numbers of participants multiplied at each stop,
+converging in Washington, D C , one week before the presidential
+election. Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian
+Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the " Native American Em­
+bassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous
+nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time
+largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the
+doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occu­
+pying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time
+for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross
+mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed
+up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified In­
+digenous alliances, and the "20 -Point Position Paper," 14 the work
+mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hun­
+dreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the docu­
+ment would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis
+for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
+Three months after the BIA building takeover, Oglala Lakota
+traditional people at the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Da­
+kota invited the American Indian Movement to assist them in halt­
+ing collusion between their tribal government, formed under the
+terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, and the federal government
+
+186
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+that had crushed the people and further impoverished them. The
+people opposed the increasingly authoritarian reign of the elected
+tribal chairman, Richard Wilson. They invited AIM to send a del­
+egation to support them. On February 27, 1973 , long deliberations
+took place in the Pine Ridge Calico Hall between the local people
+and AIM leaders, led by Russell Means, a citizen of Pine Ridge. The
+AIM activists were well known following the Trail of Broken Trea­
+ties Caravan, and upon AIM's arrival, the FBI, tribal police, and the
+chairman's armed special unit, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation
+(they called themselves "the GOON squad"), mobilized. The meet­
+ing ended with a consensus decision to go to Wounded Knee in a
+caravan to protest the chairman's misdeeds and the violence of his
+GOONs. The law enforcement contingent followed and circled the
+protesters. Over the following days, hundreds of more armed men
+surrounded Wounded Knee, and so began a two-and-a-half-month
+siege of protesters at the 1 8 9 0 massacre site. The late-twentieth­
+century hamlet of Wounded Knee was made up of little more than a
+trading post, a Catholic church, and the mass grave of the hundreds
+of Lakotas slaughtered in 1 8 9 0 . Now armed personnel carriers,
+Huey helicopters, and military snipers surrounded the site, while
+supply teams of mostly Lakota women made their way through the
+military lines and back out again through dark of night.
+
+WO U N D E D K N E E 1 8 9 0 A N D 1 973
+
+The period between the "closing of the frontier," marked by the
+
+1 8 9 0 Wounded Knee Massacre, and the 1973 siege of Wounded
+Knee, which marks the beginning of Indigenous decolonization in
+North America, is illuminated by following the historical experience
+of the Sioux. The first international relationship between the Sioux
+Nation and the US government was established in 1 8 0 5 with a treaty
+of peace and friendship two years after the United States acquired
+the Louisiana Territory, which included the Sioux Nation among
+many other Indigenous nations. Other such treaties followed in 1 8 1 5
+and 1 8 2 5 . These peace treaties had n o immediate effect o n Sioux po­
+litical autonomy or territory. By 1 8 3 4 , competition in the fur trade,
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+with the market dominated by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company,
+led the Oglala Sioux to move away from the Upper Missouri to the
+Upper Platte near Fort Laramie. By 1 846, seven thousand Sioux had
+moved south. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent in 1 846, rec­
+ommended that the United States purchase land to establish a fort,
+which became Fort Laramie. "My opinion," Fitzpatrick wrote, "is
+that a post at, or in the vicinity of Laramie is much wanted, it would
+be nearly in the center of the buffalo range, where all the formidable
+Indian tribes are fast approaching, and near where there will eventu­
+ally be a struggle for the ascendancy [in the fur trade] ."15 Fitzpatrick
+believed that a garrison of at least three hundred soldiers would be
+necessary to keep the Indians under control.
+Although the Sioux and the United States redefined their rela­
+tionship in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1 8 5 1 , this was followed by
+a decade of war between the two parties, ending with the Peace
+Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1 8 6 8 . Both of these treaties, though not
+reducing Sioux political sovereignty, ceded large parts of Sioux terri­
+tory by establishing mutually recognized boundaries, and the Sioux
+granted concessions to the United States that gave legal color to the
+Sioux's increasing economic dependency on the United States and
+its economy. During the half century before the 1 8 5 1 treaty, the
+Sioux had been gradually enveloped in the fur trade and had become
+dependent on horses and European-manufactured guns, ammuni­
+tion, iron cookware, tools, textiles, and other items of trade that
+replaced their traditional crafts. On the plains the Sioux gradually
+abandoned farming and turned entirely to bison hunting for their
+subsistence and for trade. This increased dependency on the buf­
+falo in turn brought deeper dependency on guns and ammunition
+that had to be purchased with more hides, creating the vicious circle
+that characterized modern colonialism. With the balance of power
+tipped by mid-century, US traders and the military exerted pressure
+on the Sioux for land cessions and rights of way as the buffalo popu­
+lation decreased. The hardships for the Sioux caused by constant
+attacks on their villages, forced movement, and resultant disease
+and starvation took a toll on their strength to resist domination.
+They entered into the 1 8 68 treaty with the United States on strong
+terms from a military standpoint-the Sioux remained an effective
+
+187
+
+188
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+guerrilla fighting force through the 1 8 8 0s, never defeated by the US
+army-but their dependency on buffalo and on trade allowed for
+escalated federal control when buffalo were purposely exterminated
+by the army between 1 870 and 1 876. After that the Sioux were fight­
+ing for survival.
+Economic dependency on buffalo and trade was replaced with
+survival dependency on the US government for rations and com­
+modities guaranteed in the 1 8 68 treaty. The agreement stipulated
+that "no treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reser­
+vation herein described which may be held in common shall be of
+any validation or force against the said Indians, unless executed
+and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians."
+Nevertheless, in 1 876, with no such validation, and with the discov­
+ery of gold by Custer's Seventh Cavalry, the US government seized
+the Black Hills-Paha Sapa-a large, resource-rich portion of the
+treaty-guaranteed Sioux territory, the center of the great Sioux Na­
+tion, a religious shrine and sanctuary. When the Sioux surrendered
+after the wars of 1 8 7 6-77, they lost not only the Black Hills but
+also the Powder River country. The next US move was to change the
+western boundary of the Sioux Nation, whose territory, though at­
+rophied from its original, was a contiguous block. By 1 8 7 7, after the
+army drove the Sioux out of Nebraska, all that was left was a block
+between the rn3rd meridian and the Missouri, thirty-five thousand
+square miles of land the United States had designated as Dakota
+Territory (the next step toward statehood, in this case the states
+of North and South Dakota). The first of several waves of north­
+ern European immigrants now poured into eastern Dakota Terri­
+tory, pressing against the Missouri River boundary of the Sioux. At
+the Anglo-American settlement of Bismarck on the Missouri, the
+westward-pushing Northern Pacific Railroad was blocked by the
+reservation. Settlers bound for Montana and the Pacific Northwest
+called for trails to be blazed and defended across the reservation.
+Promoters who wanted cheap land to sell at high prices to immi­
+grants schemed to break up the reservation. Except for the Sioux
+units that continued to fight, the majority of the Sioux people were
+unarmed, had no horses, and were unable even to feed and clothe
+themselves, dependent upon government rations.
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+189
+
+Next came allotment. Before the Dawes Act was even imple­
+mented, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from
+Washington, DC, in 1 8 8 8 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Na­
+tion to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million
+acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found
+it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of
+the nation as required under the 1 8 68 treaty, and so returned to
+Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the
+treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to
+accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the
+government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress com­
+missioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again,
+this time with an offer of $ r . 5 0 per acre. In a series of manipula­
+tions and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the
+commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation
+was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by Euro­
+pean immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard
+with settlers on allotments or leased land. 1 6 Creating these isolated
+reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and
+communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Euro ­
+peans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to ex­
+ercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau's boarding school
+system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought
+Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along
+with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people's weak
+position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they
+managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to
+replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903 , the US Su­
+preme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3 ,
+1 8 7 1 , appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had
+"plenary" power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian
+Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless
+of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that
+opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale
+of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came
+to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.
+By the time of the New Deal-Collier era and nullification of
+
+190
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non­
+Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one.
+However, the drought of the mid- to late-19 3 o s drove many settler
+ranchers off Sioux land, and the Sioux purchased some of that land,
+which had been theirs. However, "tribal governments" imposed
+in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly
+harmful and divisive for the Sioux.17 Concerning this measure, the
+late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux
+(Pine Ridge), observed: "The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the
+constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reor­
+ganization Act of 1 9 3 4 · This was the introduction of home rule . . . .
+The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a
+sovereign nation. We have our own government." 18 " Home rule," or
+neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early
+1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with leg­
+islation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even
+the tribal governments. 1 9 At the time of termination and relocation,
+per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $ 3 5 5 ,
+while that i n nearby South Dakota towns was $ 2 , 5 0 0 . Despite these
+circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of In­
+dian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its
+program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high
+percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search
+of j obs. 2 0
+Mathew King has described the United States throughout its his­
+tory as alternating between a "peace" policy and a "war" policy
+in its relations with Indigenous nations and communities, saying
+that these pendulum swings coincided with the strength and weak­
+ness of Native resistance. Between the alternatives of extermina­
+tion and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace policy),
+King argued, were interim periods characterized by benign neglect
+and assimilation. With organized Indigenous resistance to war pro­
+grams and policies, concessions are granted. When pressure light­
+ens, new schemes are developed to separate Indians from their land,
+resources, and cultures. Scholars, politicians, policymakers, and the
+media rarely term US policy toward Indigenous peoples as colonial-
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+ism. King, however, believed that his people's country had been a
+colony of the United States since 1 8 9 0 .
+The logical progression o f modern colonialism begins with eco­
+nomic penetration and graduates to a sphere of influence, then to
+protectorate status or indirect control, military occupation, and fi­
+nally annexation. This corresponds to the process experienced by
+the Sioux people in relation to the United States. The economic pen­
+etration of fur traders brought the Sioux within the US sphere of in­
+fluence. The transformation of Fort Laramie from a trading post, the
+center of Sioux trade, to a US Army outpost in the mid-nineteenth
+century indicates the integral relationship between trade and colonial
+control. Growing protectorate status established through treaties
+culminated in the 1 8 6 8 Sioux treaty, followed by military occupa­
+tion achieved by extreme exemplary violence, such as at Wounded
+Knee in 1 8 9 0 , and finally dependency. Annexation by the United
+States is marked symbolically by the imposition of US citizenship on
+the Sioux (and most other Indians) in 1924 . Mathew King and other
+traditional Sioux saw the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 as a turn­
+ing point, although the violent backlash that followed was harsh.
+Two decades of collective Indigenous resistance culminating at
+Wounded Knee in 1973 defeated the 1950s federal termination pol­
+icy. Yet proponents of the disappearance of Indigenous nations seem
+never to tire of trying. Another move toward termination developed
+in 1977 with dozens of congressional bills to abrogate all Indian
+treaties and terminate all Indian governments and trust territories.
+Indigenous resistance defeated those initiatives as well, with another
+caravan across the country. Like colonized peoples elsewhere in
+the world, the Sioux have been involved in decolonization efforts
+since the mid-twentieth century. Wounded Knee in 1973 was part
+of this struggle, as was their involvement in UN committees and
+international forums. 2 1 However, in the early twenty-first century,
+free-market fundamentalist economists and politicians identified the
+communally owned Indigenous reservation lands as an asset to be
+exploited and, under the guise of helping to end Indigenous poverty
+on those reservations, call for doing away with them-a new exter­
+mination and termination initiative.
+
+191
+
+192
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+" I N D I A N WA R S " AS A T E M P L AT E F O R
+T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S I N T H E W O R L D
+
+The integral link between Wounded Knee i n 1 8 9 0 and Wounded
+Knee in 1973 suggests a long-overdue reinterpretation of Indigenous­
+US relations as a template for US imperialism and counterinsurgency
+wars. As Vietnam veteran and author Michael Herr observed, we
+"might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was
+headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and
+come back to form a containing perimeter."22 Seminole Nation Viet­
+nam War veteran Evan Haney made the comparison in testifying at
+the Winter Soldier Investigations: "The same massacres happened to
+the Indians . . . . I got to know the Vietnamese people and I learned
+they were just like us . . . . I have grown up with racism all my life.
+When I was a child, watching cowboys and Indians on TV, I would
+root for the cavalry, not the Indians. It was that bad. I was that far
+toward my own destruction."23
+As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in
+Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee.
+It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1 8 9 0 Wounded
+Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news
+and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place
+in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation
+and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then
+serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious of­
+ficers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he
+remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters
+weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US
+military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter,
+then governor of Georgia. In 1974 , President Richard Nixon would
+pardon Calley. One of the documented acts, among many, that
+Calley committed and ordered others to carry out at My Lai took
+place when he saw a baby crawling from a ditch filled with mu­
+tilated, bloody bodies. He picked the baby up by a leg, threw the
+infant back into the pit, and then shot the baby point-blank. My
+Lai was one of thousands of such slaughters led by officers just like
+Calley, who a few weeks before My Lai had been observed throwing
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+193
+
+a stooped old man down a well and firing his automatic rifle down
+the shaft.
+The ongoing siege at Wounded Knee in 1973 elicited some rare
+journalistic probing into the 1 8 9 0 army massacre. In 1970, univer­
+sity librarian Dee Brown had written the book Bury My Heart at
+
+Wounded Knee, which documented a n d told the 1 8 9 0 Wounded
+Knee story, among many other such nineteenth-century anti-Indian
+crimes and tragedies . The book was a surprise best seller, so the
+name Wounded Knee resonated with a broad public by 1973 . On the
+front page of one newspaper, editors placed two photographs side by
+side, each of a pile of bloody, mutilated bodies in a ditch. One was
+from My Lai in 1968, the other from the Wounded Knee army mas­
+sacre of the Lakota in 1 89 0 . Had they not been captioned, it would
+have been impossible to tell the difference in time and place.
+During the first US military invasion of Iraq, a gesture intended
+to obliterate the "Vietnam Syndrome," on February 19, 199 1 , Briga­
+dier General Richard Neal, briefing reporters in Riyadh, Saudi Ara­
+bia, stated that the US military wanted to ensure a speedy victory
+once it committed land forces to "Indian Country." The following
+day, in a little-publicized statement of protest, the National Con­
+gress of American Indians pointed out that fifteen thousand Native
+Americans were serving as combat troops in the Persian Gulf. As we
+have seen, the term " Indian Country" is not merely an insensitive
+racial slur to indicate the enemy, tastelessly employed by accident.
+Neither Neal nor any other military authority apologized for the
+statement, and it continues to be used by the military and the media,
+usually in its shortened form, "In Country," which originated in the
+Vietnam War. "Indian Country" and "In Country" are military
+terms of trade, like other euphemisms such as "collateral damage"
+(killing civilians) and "ordnance" (bombs) that appear in military
+training manuals and are used regularly. "Indian Country" and "In
+Country" mean "behind enemy lines." Its current use should serve
+to remind us of the origins and development of the US military, as
+well as the nature of our political and social history: annihilation
+unto unconditional surrender.
+When the redundant "ground war," more appropriately tagged
+a "turkey shoot," was launched, at the front of the miles of killing
+
+194
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+machines were armored scouting vehicles of the Second Armored
+Calvary Regiment (ACR), a self-contained elite unit that won fame
+during World War II when it headed General Patton's Third Army
+crossing Europe. In the Gulf War, the Second ACR played the role
+of chief scouts for the US Seventh Corps. A retired ACR commander
+proudly told a television interviewer that the Second ACR had been
+formed in the 1 8 3 0s to fight the Seminoles, and that it had its first
+great victory when it finally defeated those Indians in the Florida
+Everglades in 1 8 3 6 . The Second ACR in the vanguard of the ground
+assault on Iraq thus symbolized the continuity of US war victories
+and the source of the nation's militarism: the Iraq War was just
+another Indian war in the US military tradition. After weeks of
+high-tech bombing in Iraq followed by a caravan of armored tanks
+shooting everything that moved, the US Special Forces entered Iraqi
+officers' quarters in Kuwait City. There they found carrier pigeons
+in cages and notes in Arabic strewn over a desk, which they inter­
+preted to mean that the Iraqi commanders were communicating
+with their troops, and even with Baghdad, using the carrier pigeons.
+High-tech soldiers had been fighting an army that communicated
+by carrier pigeon-as Shawnees and Muskogees had done two cen­
+turies earlier.
+Twelve years after the Gulf War, a US military force of three
+hundred thousand invaded Iraq again. A little-read report from As­
+sociated Press correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer illustrates the sym­
+bolic power of Indian wars as a source of US military memory and
+practice. Once again we find the armored scouting vehicles and their
+troops retracing historical bloody footprints as they perform their
+" Seminole Indian war dance":
+Capt. Phillip Walford's men leaped into the air and waved
+empty rifles in an impromptu desert war dance . . . .
+With thousands of M 1 A 1 Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting
+vehicles, Humvees and trucks, the mechanized infantry unit
+known as the " Iron Fist" would be the only U . S . armored
+division in the fight, and would likely meet any Iraqi defenses
+head on.
+" We will be entering Iraq as an army of liberation, not
+
+Ghost Dance Prophecy
+
+195
+
+domination," said Wolford, of Marysville, Ohio, directing the
+men of his 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment to take down
+the U.S. flags fluttering from their sand-colored tanks.
+After a brief prayer, Wolford leaped into an impromptu
+desert war dance. Camouflaged soldiers j oined him, j ump ­
+ing up and down in the sand, chanting and brandishing rifles
+carefully emptied of their rounds. 24
+
+H I S T O RY N OT PA S T
+
+In April 2007, a l l the news seemed t o be coming from Virginia and
+was about murder-the murder of Indigenous farmers that com­
+menced four hundred years before with the founding of Jamestown
+and the rampage at nearby Virginia Tech University on April 1 6 ,
+
+2007. Yet n o one commented i n the media o n the juxtaposition of
+these bookends of colonialism. Jamestown was famously the first
+permanent settlement that gave birth to the Commonwealth of Vir­
+ginia, the colonial epicenter of what became the United States of
+America nearly two centuries later, the colony out of which was
+carved the US capital, Washington, on the river whose mouth lay up
+the coast. A few years after Jamestown was established, the more
+familiar and revered colony of Plymouth was planted by English
+religious dissidents, under the auspices of private investors with
+royal approval, as with Jamestown, and the same mercenary activi­
+ties personified by Captain John Smith. This was the beginning of
+British overseas colonialism, after the conquest and colonization of
+Scotland, Wales, and Ireland turned England into Great Britain. The
+Virginia Tech killings were described in 2007 as the worst "mass
+killing," the "worst massacre," in US history. Descendants of massa­
+cred Indigenous ancestors took exception to that designation . It was
+curious with the media circus surrounding the Jamestown celebra­
+tion, and with Queen Elizabeth and President Bush presiding, that
+journalists failed to compare the colonial massacres of Powhatans
+four centuries earlier and the single, disturbed individual's shootings
+of his classmates. The shooter himself was a child of colonial war,
+the US war in Korea.
+
+196
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Meditating on the five major US wars since World War II-in
+Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (1991), Afghanistan, and Iraq (2003 )-with
+flashes of historical memory of Jamestown, the Ohio Valley, and
+Wounded Knee, brings us to the essence of US history. A red thread
+of blood connects the first white settlement in North America with
+today and the future. As military historian John Grenier puts it:
+U. S . people are taught that their military culture does not
+approve of or encourage targeting and killing civilians and
+know little or nothing about the nearly three centuries of war­
+fare-before and after the founding of the U. S .-that reduced
+the Indigenous peoples of the continent to a few reservations
+by burning their towns and fields and killing civilians, driv­
+ing the refugees out-step by step-across the continent . . . .
+[V] iolence directed systematically against noncombatants
+through irregular means, from the start, has been a central
+part of Americans' way of war. 25
+
+ELEVEN
+
+THE D O C T R I N E O F D I S C OVE RY
+
+The whip covers the fault.
+-D'Arcy McNickle, The Surrounded
+
+Native liberty, natural reason, and survivance
+are concepts that originate in narratives,
+not in the mandates of monarchies, papacies,
+severe traditions, or federal policies.
+-Gerald Vizenor, The White Earth Nation
+
+In 1 9 8 2 , the government of Spain and the Holy See (the Vatican,
+which is a nonvoting state member of the United Nations) proposed
+to the UN General Assembly that the year 1992 be celebrated in the
+United Nations as an "encounter" between Europe and the peoples
+of the Americas, with Europeans bearing the gifts of civilization
+and Christianity to the Indigenous peoples. To the shock of the
+North Atlantic states that supported Spain's resolution (including
+the United States and Canada), the entire African delegation walked
+out of the meeting and returned with an impassioned statement con­
+demning a proposal to celebrate colonialism in the United Nations,
+which was established for the purpose of ending colonialism. 1
+The " Doctrine o f Discovery " had reared its head i n the wrong
+place. The resolution was dead, but it was not the end of efforts by
+Spain, the Vatican, and others in the West to make the Quincenten­
+nial a cause for celebration.
+Only five years before the debacle in the UN General Assembly,
+the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas conference at the UN's Ge­
+neva headquarters had proposed that 1992 be made the UN "year
+
+197
+
+198
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+of mourning" for the onset of colonialism, African slavery, and
+genocide against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and that
+October l 2 be designated as the UN International Day of the World's
+Indigenous Peoples. As the time drew near to the Quincentennial,
+Spain took the lead in fighting the Indigenous proposals. Spain and
+the Vatican also spent years and huge sums of money preparing for
+their own celebration of Columbus, enlisting the help of all of the
+countries of Latin America except Cuba, which refused (and paid
+for this in withdrawn Spanish financial investments). In the United
+States, the George H. W. Bush administration cooperated with the
+project and produced its own series of events. In the end, compro­
+mise won at the United Nations: Indigenous peoples garnered a De­
+cade for the World's Indigenous Peoples, which officially began in
+
+1994 but was inaugurated at UN headquarters in New York in De­
+cember 1992. August 9, not October 1 2 , was designated as the an­
+nual UN International Day for the World's Indigenous Peoples, and
+the Nobel Peace Prize went to Guatemalan Mayan leader Rigoberta
+Menchu, announced in Oslo on October 1 2 , 199 2 , a decision that
+infuriated the Spanish government and the Vatican. The organized
+celebrations of Columbus flopped, thanks to multiple, highly visible
+protests by Indigenous peoples and their allies. Particularly, support
+grew for the work of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations to
+develop new international law standards.
+According to the centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery, European
+nations acquired title to the lands they "discovered," and Indigenous
+inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans had
+arrived and claimed it.2 Under this legal cover for theft, Euro-Amer­
+ican wars of conquest and settler colonialism devastated Indigenous
+nations and communities, ripping their territories away from them
+and transforming the land into private property, real estate. Most of
+that land ended up in the hands of land speculators and agribusiness
+operators, many of which, up to the mid-nineteenth century, were
+plantations worked by another form of private property, enslaved
+Africans. Arcane as it may seem, the doctrine remains the basis for
+federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous peoples' lives and
+destinies, even their histories by distorting them.
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+199
+
+T H E W H I P O F C O LO N I A L I S M
+
+From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most
+of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of
+Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian
+European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, map­
+ping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It
+originated in a papal bull issued in 1 4 5 5 that permitted the Portu­
+guese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus's infa­
+mous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen
+of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar
+permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish
+monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas ( 1 494),
+which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian
+empires, clarified that only non- Christian lands fell under the dis­
+covery doctrine. 3 This doctrine on which all European states relied
+thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of
+the Iberian monarchies' exclusive rights under Christian canon law
+to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other
+European monarchical colonizing proj ects . The French Republic
+used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth­
+century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent
+United States when it continued the colonization of North America
+begun by the British.
+In 1 79 2 , not long after the US founding, Secretary of State
+Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed
+by European states was international law applicable to the new US
+government as well. In 1 8 23 the US Supreme Court issued its deci­
+sion in Johnson v. Mcintosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice
+John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an es­
+tablished principle of European law and of English law in effect
+in Britain's North American colonies and was also the law of the
+United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that
+a European country acquired by dint of discovery: "Discovery gave
+title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority,
+it was made, against all other European governments, which title
+
+200
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+might be consummated by possession." Therefore, European and
+Euro-American "discoverers" had gained real-property rights in the
+lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous
+rights were, in the Court's words, "in no instance, entirely disre­
+garded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired."
+The Court further held that Indigenous "rights to complete sover­
+eignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished." Indig­
+enous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with
+the discovering power, the United States. A later decision concluded
+that Native nations were "domestic, dependent nations ."
+The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely
+mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The
+UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually
+for two weeks, devoted its entire 201 2 session to the doctrine.4 Three
+decades earlier, as Indigenous peoples of the Americas began assert­
+ing their presence in the UN human rights system, they had pro­
+posed such a conference and study. The World Council of Churches,
+the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Episcopal Church, and other
+Protestant religious institutions, responding to demands from Indig­
+enous peoples, have made statements disassociating themselves from
+the Doctrine of Discovery. The New York Society of Friends (Quak­
+ers), in denying the legitimacy of the doctrine, asserted in 201 2 that
+it clearly "still has the force of law today" and is not simply a medi­
+eval relic. The Quakers pointed out that the United States rational­
+izes its claims to sovereignty over Native nations, for instance in the
+2005 US Supreme Court case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of
+
+Indians. The statement asserts: " We cannot accept that the Doctrine
+of Discovery was ever a true authority for the forced takings of lands
+and the enslavement or extermination of peoples."5 The Unitarian
+Universalist Association (UUA) resolution regarding this is particu­
+larly powerful and an excellent model. The UUA "repudiate(s) the
+D octrine of Discovery as a relic of colonialism, feudalism, and reli­
+gious, cultural, and racial biases having no place in the modern day
+treatment of indigenous peoples." The Unitarians resolved to "ex­
+pose the historical reality and impact of the Doctrine of Discovery
+and eliminate its presence in the contemporary policies, programs,
+theologies, and structures of Unitarian Universalism; and . . . in-
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+vite indigenous partners to a process of Honor and Healing (often
+called Truth and Reconciliation)." They additionally encouraged
+"other religious bodies to reject the use of the Doctrine of Discovery
+to dominate indigenous peoples" and resolved to collaborate with
+groups "to propose a specific Congressional Resolution to repudiate
+this doctrine . . . and call upon the United States to fully implement
+the standards of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
+Peoples in the U. S . law and policy without qualifications."6
+
+TA N G L E D C O N T R A D I C T I O N S
+
+US officials get tangled in the contradictions inherent in the attempt
+to legitimize empire building through the Doctrine of Discovery and
+the origin story of making a clear break from the British empire. The
+rhetoric is often baffling, particularly when it references US Ameri­
+can cultural memory of the wars against Native nations, as it did
+following the declaration of the "War on Terror" after the terrorist
+attacks of September n, 2oo r .
+In early 2 o n , a Yemeni citizen, Ali Hamza a l Bahlul, was serving
+a life sentence at Guantanamo as an "enemy combatant," a military
+tribunal having convicted him of crimes associated with his service
+to al- Qaeda as Osama bin Laden's media secretary. The Center for
+Constitutional Rights (CCR) issued a statement prior to the hearing
+in the appeal of Bahlul's conviction. In arguing that Bahlul's convic­
+tion be upheld, a Pentagon lawyer, navy captain Edward S. White,
+relied on a precedent from an 1 8 1 8 tribunal. In his thirty-seven-page
+military commissions brief, Captain White wrote: "Not only was
+the Seminole belligerency unlawful, but, much like modern-day al
+Qaeda, the very way in which the Seminoles waged war against U. S.
+targets itself violate the customs and usages of war." The CCR ob­
+jected to this passage in the government's brief. "The court should
+. . . reject the government's notable reliance on the 'Seminole Wars'
+of the l 8 oos, a genocide that led to the Trail of Tears," the CCR
+declared. "The government's characterization of Native American
+resistance to the United States as 'much like modern-day al Qaeda'
+is not only factually wrong but overtly racist, and cannot present
+
+201
+
+202
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+any legitimate legal basis to uphold Mr. Bahlul's conviction."7 In
+response, the Pentagon's general counsel issued a letter stating that
+the US government stood by its precedent.
+
+" W E W I S H T O C O N T I N U E T O E X I S T"
+
+The question of self-determination of peoples is a recent historical
+phenomenon integral both to the formation of modern European
+nation-states and to the gradual formation of an imperialist world
+system eventually led by the United States. National integration and
+state formation occurred first in western Europe as its states estab­
+lished colonies and colonial regimes in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the
+Americas, and the Caribbean, and as the United States established
+itself as an independent state. These conquests afforded European
+states and the United States access to vast resources and labor that
+in turn allowed them to industrialize and to create efficient bu­
+reaucratic structures and political republicanism. At the end of this
+process, with decolonization of European holdings in the twenti­
+eth century, self-determination became a major global issue eventu­
+ally incorporating all human beings as citizens of nation-states. The
+creation of nation-states and the redrawing of national boundaries
+that this often entailed inevitably raised the questions of which na­
+tional, ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities were included
+and whether their consent or participation would be required. There
+are peoples and nations without their own states, locked under a
+state authority that may or may not be willing to respond to their de­
+mands for autonomy within the existing state. If the state is not will­
+ing, the peoples or nations may choose to insist on independence.
+That is the work of self-determination.
+In the United States, Indigenous nations that seek political auton­
+omy or even independence engage in nation building-that is, devel­
+oping Indigenous governance and an economic base. For decades,
+Native activists and organizers in North America have worked tire­
+lessly to establish the validity of treaties and to foster and protect
+the self-determination and sovereignty of Indigenous nations. The
+nations seek control of their social and political institutions without
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+compromising what they consider unique and essential cultural val­
+ues. The central concern for Indigenous peoples in the United States
+is prevailing upon the federal government to honor hundreds of trea­
+ties and other agreements concluded between the United States and
+Indigenous nations as between two sovereign states. Demands to
+have treaties and agreements upheld have never abated, and they
+have accelerated since the end of the termination era. However, the
+Indigenous concept of nation and sovereignty is quite distinct from
+the Western model of the state as the final arbiter of decision mak­
+ing, based on police enforcement. Rather, as Indigenous lawyer and
+activist Sharon Venne has put it, "We know the laws given to us by
+the Creator. It is an obligation. It is a duty. It is the future of our
+[children's] children. We cannot like the non-indigenous people who
+make rules and regulations and change them when they don't like
+the rule or regulation. We were given the laws by the Creator. We
+have to live the laws. This is sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples."8
+Following the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, the American
+Indian Movement brought together more than five thousand Indig­
+enous representatives, including ones from Latin America and the
+Pacific, in a ten-day gathering that founded the International In­
+dian Treaty Council (HTC), which then applied for and received UN
+nongovernmental consultative status in 1975 . The HTC proceeded
+to organize the first conference to be held at the United Nations
+on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas in 1977· At this conference,
+Northern Cheyenne tribal judge Marie Sanchez opened the proceed­
+mgs:
+Members of this conference, delegates, and my brothers and
+sisters who are present here today.
+We are the target for the total final extermination of us as
+people.
+The question I would like to bring forth to this conference,
+to the delegates from other countries here present, is why have
+you not recognized us as sovereign people before ? Why did
+we have to travel this distance to come to you? Had you not
+thought that the United States Government in its deliberate
+and systematic attempt to suppress us, had you not thought
+
+203
+
+204
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+that that was the reason they did not want to recognize us as
+sovereign people ? The only positive thing that I feel should
+come out of this conference, if you are going to include us as
+part of the international family is for you to recognize us, for
+you to give us this recognition. Only with that can we con­
+tinue to live as completely sovereign people.
+And you also, because you are part of the family of this
+world, you should also be very concerned, because the com­
+mon enemy is your enemy too, and that enemy dictates policy
+to your governments also. I warn you not to be so dependent
+on the country that we are under, on the government that we
+are under. We have demonstrated to you how many hundreds
+of years we have survived.
+We wish to continue to exist.9
+This international work at the United Nations grew slowly at first,
+but by the mid-198os it was attracting grassroots Indigenous rep­
+resentatives from around the world and constructing important
+initiatives.
+The global Indigenous cause reached a major milestone in 2007
+when the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the
+Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four members of the assembly
+voted in opposition, all of them Anglo settler-states-the United
+States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. All four, with some
+embarrassment, later changed their votes to approval.1 0 Leo Kills­
+back reflects the perceptions of most Native people that the declara­
+tion might " bring western cultures out of their old world of savagery
+and closer to humanity," noting the example of the end of World
+War II:
+After the fall of Nazi Germany, its leaders were publicly os­
+tracized, tried, convicted, and executed for war crimes at the
+Nuremburg trials. This led to the Genocide Convention and
+the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Nazi society
+members affirmed that the Holocaust occurred and some were
+forced to visit concentration camps only feet from their place
+of residence. Under truth and reconciliation German society
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+205
+
+began to rebuild itself, and with the end of their savage world,
+they and numerous other countries adopted Holocaust-denial
+laws. This is exactly how a society moved from one reality to
+another. 1 1
+For Indigenous peoples in North America an important action
+within the UN human rights framework was the 1 9 8 7 mandate
+given to a UN special rapporteur, Miguel Alfonso Martinez, to in­
+vestigate the status of treaties and agreements between Indigenous
+nations and the original colonial powers and the national govern­
+ments that now claim authority over Indigenous nations by virtue
+of those treaties. The UN Study on Treaties, completed in 1999,
+is a useful tool for Indigenous peoples in the United States in their
+continuing struggles for land restoration and sovereignty. The in­
+vestigation concluded that Indigenous treaty rights in the United
+States have contemporary effective status. The special rapporteur
+based this finding largely on the US Constitution, which in Article
+VI provides that "all treaties made, or which shall be made, under
+the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the
+Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any
+Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary not­
+withstanding." Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution explicitly
+includes relations with Indigenous nations as among the powers of
+Congress: "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among
+the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."12
+
+LAN D C LA I M S
+
+With a large part of Indigenous nations' territories and resources in
+what is now the United States taken through aggressive war, outright
+theft, and legislative appropriations, Native peoples have vast claims
+to reparations and restitution. Indigenous nations negotiated numer­
+ous treaties with the United States that included land transfers and
+monetary compensation, but the remaining Indigenous territories
+have steadily shrunk due to direct federal appropriation by various
+means as well as through government failure to meet its obligation to
+
+206
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+protect Indigenous landholdings as required under treaties. The US
+government has acknowledged some of these claims and has offered
+monetary compensation. However, since the upsurge of Indian rights
+movements in the 19 60s, Indigenous nations have demanded restora­
+tion of treaty-guaranteed land rather than monetary compensation.
+Native Americans, including those who are legal scholars, ordi­
+narily do not use the term "reparations" in reference to their land
+c �aims and treaty rights. Rather, they demand restoration, restitu­
+tion, or repatriation of lands acquired by the United States outside
+valid treaties . These demands for return of lands and water and
+other resource rights illegally taken certainly could be termed "rep­
+arations," but they have no parallel in the monetary reparations
+owed, for example, to Japanese Americans for forced incarceration
+or to descendants of enslaved Africa.n Americans. No monetary
+amount can compensate for lands illegally seized, particularly those
+sacred lands necessary for Indigenous peoples to regain social coher­
+ence. One form of Native claim does seek monetary compensation
+and might provide a template for other classes. Of the hundreds of
+lawsuits for federal trust mismanagement that Indigenous groups
+have filed, most since the 19 60s, the largest and best known is the
+
+Cobell v. Salazar class-action suit, initially filed in 1 9 9 6 and settled
+in 201 i . The individual Indigenous litigants, from many Native na­
+tions, claimed that the US Department of the Interior, as trustee
+of Indigenous assets, had lost, squandered, stolen, and otherwise
+wasted hundreds of millions of dollars dating back to the forced
+land allotment beginning in the late l 8 8os. By the end of 2009, it
+was clear that the case was headed for a decision favoring the Indig­
+enous groups when the lead plaintiffs, representing nearly a half­
+million Indigenous individuals, accepted a $3 . 4-billion settlement
+proposed by the Obama administration. The amount of the settle­
+ment was greater than the half-billion dollars that the court would
+likely have awarded. However, what was sacrificed in the settlement
+was a detailed accounting of the federal government's misfeasance.
+As one reporter lamented: "The result will see some involved with
+the case, especially lawyers, become quite rich, while many Indi­
+ans-the majority, in all likelihood-will receive about a third of
+what it takes to feed a family of four for just one year."13
+
+The Doctrifle of Discovery
+
+207
+
+Another important form of reparations is the repatriation of re­
+mains of dead ancestors and burial items. After considerable struggle
+on the part of Indigenous religious practitioners, Congress enacted
+the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of
+
+1990 (NAGPRA), which requires that museums return human re­
+mains and burial items to the appropriate Indigenous communities.
+It is fitting that Congress used the term "repatriation" in the act.
+Before NAGPRA, the federal government had used "repatriation"
+to describe the return of remains of prisoners of war to foreign na­
+tions. Native American nations are sovereign as well, and Congress
+correctly characterized the returns as repatriations. 14
+Although compensation for federal trust mismanagement and
+repatriation of ancestral remains represent important victories, land
+claims and treaty rights are most central to Indigenous peoples' fight
+for reparations in the United States. The case of the great Sioux
+Nation exemplifies the persistence among Indigenous nations and
+communities to protect their sovereignty and cultures. The Sioux
+have never accepted the validity of the US confiscation of Paha Sapa,
+the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore is controversial among Native
+Americans because it is located in the Black Hills. Members of the
+American Indian Movement led occupations of the monument be­
+ginning in 197 ! . Return of the Black Hills was the major Sioux
+demand in the 19 73 occupation of Wounded Knee. 1 5 Due to a de­
+
+_
+
+cade of intense protests and occupations by the Sioux, on July 23 ,
+
+1980, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the US Supreme
+Court ruled that the Black Hills had been taken illegally and that
+remuneration equal to the initial offering price plus interest-nearly
+
+$106 million-be paid. The Sioux refused the award and continued
+to demand return of the Black Hills. The money remained in an
+interest-bearing account, which by 2010, amounted to more than
+
+$757 million. The Sioux believe that accepting the money would
+validate the US theft of their most sacred land. The Sioux Nation's
+determination to repatriate the Black Hills attracted renewed me­
+dia attention in 201 r . A segment of the PBS NewsHour titled " For
+Great Sioux Nation, Black Hills Can't Be Bought for $ r . 3 Billion"
+aired on August 24 . The reporter described a Sioux reservation as
+one of the most difficult places in which to live in the United States:
+
+208
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Few people in the Western Hemisphere have shorter life ex­
+pectancies. Males, on average, live to j ust 48 years old, fe­
+males to 5 2 . Almost half of all people above the age of 40 have
+diabetes.
+And the economic realities are even worse. Unemployment
+rates are consistently above 80 percent. In Shannon County,
+inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, half the children live in
+poverty, and the average income is $ 8 ,ooo a year.
+But there are funds available, a federal pot now worth more
+than a billion dollars. That sits here in the U . S . Treasury De­
+partment waiting to be collected by nine Sioux tribes. The
+money stems from a 1 9 8 0 Supreme Court ruling that set aside
+
+$105 million to compensate the Sioux for the taking of the
+Black Hills in 1 877, an isolated mountain range rich in miner­
+als that stretched from South Dakota to Wyoming. The only
+problem: The Sioux never wanted the money because the land
+was never for sale.1 6
+That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas
+would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and signifi­
+cance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as
+a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the
+resilience . of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
+
+E C O N O M I C S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N
+
+The relationship of economic development and Indigenous peoples
+in the United States is not a twentieth-century phenomenon. The
+collusion of business and government in the theft and exploitation
+of Indigenous lands and resources is the core element of coloniza­
+tion and forms the basis of US wealth and power. By the end of the
+nineteenth century, Indigenous communities had little control over
+their resources or their economic situations, receiving only royalties
+for mining and leasing, funds held in trust in Washington. Dur­
+ing the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, most reservation
+economic development was spurred by funding and grants from the
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+209
+
+Economic Development Administration, the Office of Economic
+Opportunity, and other government agencies. The Bureau of Indian
+Affairs began a program to woo industrial plants to reservations,
+promising cheap labor and infrastructure investment. The largest
+such experiment was that of the giant electronics company Fair­
+child's assembly plant in the Navajo Nation.
+Established at the town of Shiprock (in the northeastern part of
+the reservation, in New Mexico) in 1969, the plant became the sin­
+gle largest industrial employer in New Mexico by 1975 · Twelve hun­
+dred Navajos made up the initial workforce. By 1974 , the numbers
+had lessened to a thousand, but still Navajos were 95 percent of the
+workforce. Then, during 1974-75, the Navajo workforce shrunk to
+six hundred. Fairchild's Mountain View, California, headquarters
+claimed that Navajos were quitting, something very common in the
+electronics assembly industry. Non-Indians were being hired to re­
+place Navajos. What actually had been happening were layoffs, not
+resignations. The federal government subsidized the wages for the
+six-month training period on the job, for which little training is re­
+quired, and Fairchild was laying off those workers whom they would
+have to pay and hiring new trainees at no cost. Local Navaj o activ­
+ists and former Fairchild employees, along with help from American
+Indian Movement leaders, organized a protest at the plant, which
+led to the workers occupying it. Fairchild decommissioned the plant
+and moved it overseas. Documents recovered by protesters revealed
+that Fairchild was seeking a pretext to break its lease. The Navajo
+Nation had built the plant to Fairchild's specifications at a cost of
+three and a half million dollars . 17
+The Indian Self-D etermination Act of 1975 validated Indig­
+enous control over their own social and economic development
+with continuation of federal financial obligations under treaties
+and agreements . Acting upon the new mandate, a number of In­
+digenous nations with mineral resources formed the Council of
+Energy Resource Tribes (CERT). Patterned after the federation of
+oil-producing states, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Export­
+ing Countries), CERT sought to renegotiate mineral leases that the
+BIA had practically given away to energy companies. Native lands
+west of the Mississippi held considerable resources: 30 percent of the
+
+210
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+low-sulfur coal in the United States, 5 percent of the oil, 10 percent
+of the natural gas, and 80 percent of the uranium. CERT was able
+to establish a center of information and action in Denver to serve its
+members with technical and legal assistance. The Jicarilla Apache
+Nation slapped a severance tax on the oil and gas taken from their
+lands . A corporate legal challenge to this wound up in the Supreme
+Court, which found that Native nations had the right to tax corpo­
+rations that operated in their boundaries.
+Navaj o chairman Peter MacDonald was the force behind the
+founding of CERT and was its first director. But he quickly found
+his scheme of mining as the basis for economic development chal­
+lenged by young Navajos who perceived the downside of ecological
+destruction. Strip-mining of coal and uranium in the Navajo Na­
+tion was bad enough, but then a coal-gasification plant was estab­
+lished to feed into the Navajo electricity-generating plant that sent
+power to Phoenix and Los Angeles but provided Navajos with little
+or none. Navajo activist John Redhouse, who became director of
+the National Indian Youth Council, led decades of struggle against
+unrestricted mining, with new generations continuing the fight. 18
+Like many de-industrializing US cities and states in the 1 9 8 0s,
+some Native nations turned to gaming for revenue. In 1986, they
+formed the National Indian Gaming Association for the purpose of
+lobbying state and federal governments and to represent the interests
+of its members. But in 19 8 8 Congress passed the Indian Gaming
+Regulatory Act, which gave the states some control over gaming, a
+dangerous surrender of sovereignty for those Native nations operat­
+ing casinos. Indigenous gaming operations now constitute a $26 bil­
+lion industry annually that employs three hundred thousand people,
+with about half the 5 64 federally recogn ized nations operating ca­
+sinos of various sizes. Profits have been used in myriad ways, some
+for per capita payments, others earmarked for educational and lin­
+guistic development, housing, hospitals, and even investing in larger
+projects such as the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of
+the American Indian. A good portion of profits go to lobbying politi­
+cians of state and federal governments. The Indian gaming lobby in
+California, for instance, is second only to the prison guards union
+in the state.19
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+211
+
+T H E N A R R AT I V E O F DYS F U N C T I O N
+
+The mainstream media and books regularly expose and denounce
+the poverty and social dysfunction found in Indigenous communi­
+ties. Rates of alcoholism and suicide are far higher than national av­
+erages, and higher even than in other communities living in poverty.
+In a book of case studies of poverty and neglected sites of deteriora­
+tion in the United States, j ournalist Chris Hedges offered an impas­
+sioned account of the Pine Ridge Reservation. 20
+As well-meaning and accurate as such portrayals are, however,
+they miss the specific circumstances that reproduce Indigenous pov­
+erty and social scarring-namely, the colonial condition. As Vine
+Deloria Jr. and other Native American activists and scholars have
+emphasized, there is a direct link between the suppression of Indige­
+nous sovereignty and the powerlessness manifest in depressed social
+conditions. Deloria Jr. explained that for the Sioux, everyone has
+responsibility and rituals to perform that involve a particular ge­
+ography. In their case, this means sites in the Black Hills: " Some of
+the holy men up there will say that a lot of the social problems with
+the Sioux are the result of losing the Black Hills, so you couldn't
+perform your duties and become a contributor to the ongoing cre­
+ation. And consequently, people began to fall away and they started
+to suffer and they started to fight among themselves."21 In continu­
+ing to disregard treaty rights and deny restitution of sacred lands
+such as the Black Hills, the federal government prevents Indigenous
+communities from performing their most elemental responsibilities
+as inscribed in their cultural and religious teachings. In other words,
+sovereignty equates to survival-nationhood instead of genocide.
+Ethnographer Nancy O estreich Lurie provocatively described
+Indian drinking as "the world's oldest on-going protest demon­
+stration."22 The effects of continued colonization form similar pat­
+terns among Indigenous communities throughout the Americas,
+as well as among the Maori of New Zealand and the Australian
+Aborigines. 23
+The experience of generations of Native Americans in on- and
+off-reservation boarding schools, run by the federal government or
+Christian missions, contributed significantly to the family and so-
+
+212
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+cial dysfunction still found in Native communities. Generations of
+child abuse, including sexual abuse-from the founding of the first
+schools by missionaries in the 1 8 3 0s and the federal government in
+1 8 75 until most were closed and the remaining ones reformed in
+the l97os-traumatized survivors and their progeny.24 In 2002, a
+coalition of Indigenous groups started the Boarding School Healing
+Project, which documented through research and oral history the
+extensive abuses that go beyond individual casualties to disruption
+of Indigenous life at every level. Sun Elk was the first child from the
+very traditional Taos Pueblo to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial
+School, spending seven years there beginning in 1 8 8 3 . After a harsh
+reentry into Taos society, he told his story:
+They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must
+get civilized. I remember that word too. It means " be like
+the white man." I am willing to be like the white man, but I
+did not believe Indians' ways were wrong. But they kept teach­
+ing us for seven years. And the books told how bad the In­
+dians had been to the white men-burning their towns
+and killing their women and children. But I had seen white
+men do that to Indians. We all wore white man's clothes
+and ate white man's food and went to white man's churches
+and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also be­
+gan to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people
+and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and
+dances. 25
+Corporal punishment was unknown in Indigenous families but
+was routine in the boarding schools. Often punishment was inflicted
+for being "too Indian" -the darker the child, the more often and
+severe the beatings. The children were made to feel that it was crimi­
+nal to be Indian. 2 6 A woman whose mother experienced boarding
+school related the results:
+Probably my mother and . . . her brothers and sisters were the
+first in our family to go to boarding school. . . . And the sto­
+ries she told . . . were horrendous. There were beatings . There
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+[was] a very young classmate-I don't know how old they
+were, probably preschool or grade school-who lost a hand
+in having to clean this machine that baked bread or cut dough
+or something, and having to kneel for hours on cold basement
+floors as punishment . . . . My mother lived with a rage all her
+life, and I think the fact that they were taken away so young
+was part of this rage and how it-the fallout-was on us as a
+family.27
+Ponca historian Roger Buffalohead verifies that testimony:
+The idea of corporal punishment, so foreign to traditional In­
+dian cultures, became a way of life for those students return­
+ing from their educational experience.
+Yet you find by the thirties and forties in most Native
+communities, where large numbers of young people had, in
+the previous years, attended boarding schools, an increasing
+number of parents who utilized corporal punishment in the
+raising of their children, so that although you can't prove a
+direct connection, I think you can certainly see that boarding
+school experiences, where corporal punishment was the name
+of the game, had [their] impact on the next generations of na­
+tive people. 28
+Sexual abuse of both girls and boys was also rampant. One
+woman remembers: "We had many different teachers during those
+years; some got the girls pregnant and had to leave . . . . [One teacher]
+would put his arms around and fondle this girl, sometimes taking
+her on his lap . . . . When I got there, Mr. M put his arm around me
+and rubbed my arm all the way down. He rubbed his face against
+mine." At one mission school, a priest was known for his sexual ad­
+vances. "Anyway, I ended up beside him [the priest] . . . and all of a
+sudden he started to feel my legs . . . . I was getting really uncomfort­
+able and he started trying to put his hands in my pants ."29 Nuns also
+participated in sexual abuse: "A nun was sponge bathing me and
+proceeded to go a little too far with her sponge bathing. So I pushed
+her hand away. She held my legs apart while she strapped the insides
+of my thighs. I never stopped her again."3 0
+
+213
+
+214
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Much documentation and testimony attest to the never-ending
+resistance by children in boarding schools. Running away was the
+most common way to resist, but there were also acts of nonparticipa­
+tion and sabotage, secretly speaking their languages and practicing
+ceremonies. This surely accounts for their survival, but the damage
+is nearly incomprehensible. Mohawk historian Taiaiake Alfred asks,
+" What is the legacy of colonialism ? Dispossession, disempower­
+ment, and disease inflicted by the white man, to be sure . . . . Yet the
+enemy is in plain view: residential schools, racism, expropriation,
+extinguishment, warship, welfare."31
+Indigenous women, in particular, have continued to bear the
+brunt of sexual violence, both within families and by settler preda­
+tors. Incidence of rape on reservations has long been astronomical.
+The colonialist restrictions on Indigenous policing authority on
+reservations-yet another legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery and
+the impairment of Indigenous sovereignty-opened the door to
+perpetrators of sexual violence who knew there would be no con­
+sequences for their actions. 32 Under the US colonial system, jurisdic­
+tion for crimes committed on Native lands falls to federal and state
+authorities because Native justice can be applied only to reserva­
+tion residents, and then only for misdemeanors. One in three Native
+American women has been raped or experienced attempted rape,
+and the rate of sexual assault on Native American women is more
+than twice the national average. For five years after publication of
+a scathing 2007 report by Amnesty International, Native American
+and women's organizations, including the National Organization
+for Women (NOW), lobbied Congress to add a new section to the
+
+1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) addressing the special
+situation of Native American women living on reservations. 33 The
+added provision would allow Native nations' courts jurisdiction to
+arrest and prosecute non-Native men who enter reservations and
+commit rape. At the end of 201 2 , the Republican-dominated US
+Congress denied reauthorization of the VAWA, because it included
+the provision. In March 2013 , however, that opposition was over­
+come, and President Barack Obama signed the amended act back
+into law-a small step forward for Native sovereignty.
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+215
+
+I N D I G E N O U S G OV E R N A N C E
+
+For generations, Native nations, occasionally with the help of fed­
+eral or state government, treated the symptoms of colonialism. But
+with the powerful Indigenous self-determination movements of the
+second half of the twentieth century, those nations participated in
+drafting and instituting new international law that supports their
+aspirations, and they began working on shoring up their sovereignty
+through governance . Through this work, US Indigenous peoples
+have reconceptualized their current forms of government based on
+new constitutions that reflect their specific cultures. Navajo think­
+ing on a future constitution expresses that desire. Like some other
+Native nations, the Navajo, the most populous and the one holding
+the largest land base in the United States, has never had a constitu­
+tion. But others do have constitutions similar to that of the United
+States. Nearly sixty Native nations adopted constitutions before
+
+193 4 · Following the Indian Reorganization Act of that year, another
+1 3 0 nations wrote constitutions according to federal guidelines but
+without significant participation of their citizenry. 34 The movement
+to create, revise, or rewrite constitutions has seen notable success
+in two instances during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
+From 2004 to 2006 the Osage Nation, located in northeastern
+Oklahoma, engaged in a contentious process of reform that pro­
+duced a new constitution. The preamble reflects the extraordinary
+context and content of the new law:
+We the Wah-zha-zhe, known as the Osage People, having
+formed as Clans in the far distant past, have been a People and
+as a People have walked this earth and enjoyed the blessing of
+Wah-kon-tah for more centuries than we truly know.
+Having resolved to live in harmony, we now come together
+so that we may once more unite as a Nation and as a Peo­
+ple, calling upon the fundamental values that we hold sacred:
+Justice, Fairness, Compassion, Respect for and Protection of
+Child, Elder, All Fellow Beings, and Self.
+Paying homage to generations of Osage leaders of the past
+
+216
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+and present, we give thanks for their wisdom and courage.
+Acknowledging our ancient tribal order as the foundation of
+our present government, first reformed in the r 8 8 r Constitu­
+tion of the Osage Nation, we continue our legacy by again
+reorganizing our government.
+This Constitution, created by the Osage People, hereby
+grants to every Osage citizen a vote that is equal to all others
+and form a government that is accountable to the citizens pf
+the Osage Nation.
+We, the Osage People, based on centuries of being a People,
+now strengthen our government in order to preserve and per­
+petuate a full and abundant Osage way of life that benefits all
+Osages, living and as yet unborn. 35
+Similarly, in 2009 , the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabeg
+(Ojibwe people) adopted a new constitution. White Earth is located
+in central Minnesota and is one of a number of Anishinaabe reserva­
+tions in Minnesota, with others in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and
+Canada. The preamble to the White Earth constitution is revealing:
+The Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation are the ances­
+tors of a great tradition of continental liberty, a native con­
+stitution of families, totemic associations. The Anishinaabeg
+create stories of natural reason, of courage, loyalty, humor,
+spiritual inspiration, survivance, reciprocal altruism, and na­
+tive cultural sovereignty.
+We the Anishinaabeg of the White Earth Nation in order
+to secure an inherent and essential sovereignty, to promote
+traditions of liberty, justice, and peace, and reserve common
+resources, and to ensure the inalienable rights of native gov­
+ernance for our posterity, do constitute, ordain, and establish
+this Constitution of the White Earth Nation. 36
+Gerald Vizenor, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, best-sell­
+ing author, and leading intellectual, participated in the writing of
+this constitution. Explaining the concept of "survivance," a term he
+coined, he stresses that it originates in Indigenous narratives: "The
+
+The Doctrine of Discovery
+
+conventions of survivance create a sense of Native presence over
+nihility and victory. Survivance is an active presence: it is not ab­
+sence, deracination, or ethnographic oblivion, and survivance is the
+continuance of narratives, not a mere reaction, however pertinent.
+Survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, the unbearable
+sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry."37
+The Doctrine of Discovery is dissolving in light of these profound
+acts of sovereignty. But neither arcane colonial laws nor the his­
+torical trauma of genocide simply disappear with time, certainly
+not when conditions of life and consciousness perpetuate them. The
+Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty movement is not only
+transforming the continent's Indigenous communities and nations
+but also, inevitably, the United States. The ways it is doing that are
+explored in the concluding chapter.
+
+21 7
+
+C O N C LU S I O N
+
+THE F U T U RE O F THE U N I TE D S TATE S
+
+That the continued colonization of American Indian nations,
+peoples, and lands provides the United States the economic
+and material resources needed to cast its imperialist gaze
+globally is a fact that is simultaneously obvious within and yet continually obscured by- what is essentially a settler
+colony's national construction of itself as an ever more perfect
+multicultural, multiracial democracy. . . . [T]he status of
+American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by the
+United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre.
+-Jodi Byrd
+
+The conventional narrative of US history routinely segregates the
+" Indian wars" as a subspecialization within the dubious category
+"the West." Then there are the westerns, those cheap novels, movies,
+and television shows that nearly every US American imbibed with
+mother's milk and that by the mid-twentieth century were popular
+in every corner of the world. 1 The architecture of US world domi­
+nance was designed and tested by this period of continental US mili­
+tarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its
+own innovations in total war. The opening of the twenty-first cen­
+tury saw a new, even more brazen form of US militarism and impe­
+rialism explode on the world scene when the election of George W.
+Bush turned over control of US foreign policy to a long-gestating
+neoconservative and warmongering faction of the Pentagon and its
+civilian hawks. Their subsequent eight years of political control in­
+cluded two major military invasions and hundreds of small wars em­
+ploying US Special Forces around the globe, establishing a template
+that continued after their political power waned.
+
+218
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+" I N J U N CO U N T RY"
+
+One highly regarded military analyst stepped forward to make the
+connections between the " Indian wars " and what he considered
+the country's bright imperialist past and future. Robert D. Kaplan,
+in his 2005 book Imperial Grunts, presented several case studies
+that he considered highly successful operations: Yemen, Colom­
+bia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, in addition to ongoing complex
+projects in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan , and Iraq.2 While
+US citizens and many of their elected representatives called for end­
+ing the US military interventions they knew about-including Iraq
+and Afghanistan-Kaplan hailed protracted counterinsurgencies in
+Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific. He
+presented a guide for the US controlling those areas of the world
+based on its having achieved continental dominance in North Amer­
+ica by means of counterinsurgency and employing total and unlim­
+ited war.
+Kaplan, a meticulous researcher and influential writer born in
+1 9 5 2 in New York City, wrote for major newspapers and magazines
+
+before serving as "chief geopolitical strategist" for the private se­
+curity think tank Stratfor. Among other prestigious posts, he has
+been a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security
+in Washington, D C , and a member of the Defense Policy Board, a
+federal advisory committee to the US Department of Defense. In
+2 o r r , Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's
+
+"top r o o global thinkers." Author of numerous best-selling books,
+including Balkan Ghosts and Surrender or Starve, Kaplan became
+one of the principal intellectual boosters for US power in the world
+through the tried-and-true "American way of war." This is the way
+of war dating to the British-colonial period that military historian
+John Grenier called a combination of "unlimited war and irregular
+war," a military tradition "that accepted, legitimized, and encour­
+aged attacks upon and the destruction of noncombatants, villages
+and agricultural resources . . . in shockingly violent campaigns to
+achieve their goals of conquest."3
+Kaplan sums up his thesis in the prologue to Imperial Grunts,
+which he subtitles "Injun Country":
+
+219
+
+220
+
+An Indigenous Peoples ' History of the United States
+
+By the turn of the twenty-first century the United States mili­
+tary had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready
+to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's
+notice.
+The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commands­
+similar to the way that the Indian Country of the American
+West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century by the
+U. S . Army. . . . [A]ccording to the soldiers and marines I met
+on the ground in far-flung corners of the earth, the compari­
+son with the nineteenth century was . . . apt. "Welcome to
+lnjun Country" was the refrain I heard from troops from Co­
+lombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To
+be sure, the problem for the American military was less [Is­
+lamic] fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism
+was really about taming the frontier. 4
+Kaplan goes on to ridicule "elites in New York and Washington"
+who debate imperialism in "grand, historical terms," while indi­
+viduals from all the armed services interpret policy according to the
+particular circumstances they face and are indifferent to or unaware
+of the fact that they are part of an imperialist project. This book
+shows how colonialism and imperialism work.
+Kaplan challenges the concept of manifest destiny, arguing that
+" it was not inevitable that the United States should have an empire
+in the western part of the continent." Rather, he argues, western
+empire was brought about by "small groups of frontiersmen, sepa­
+rated from each other by great distances ." Here Kaplan refers to
+what Grenier calls settler "rangers," destroying Indigenous towns
+and fields and food supplies. Although Kaplan downplays the role of
+the US Army compared to the settler vigilantes, which he equates to
+the modern Special Forces, he acknowledges that the regular army
+provided lethal backup for settler counterinsurgency in slaughtering
+the buffalo, the food supply of Plains peoples, as well as making
+continuous raids on settlements to kill or confine the families of the
+Indigenous fighters.5 Kaplan summarizes the genealogy of US mili­
+tarism today:
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+Whereas the average American at the dawn of the new mil­
+lennium found patriotic inspiration in the legacies of the Civil
+War and World War II, when the evils of slavery and fascism
+were confronted and vanquished, for many commissioned and
+noncommissioned officers the U. S . Army's defining moment
+was fighting the " Indians."
+The legacy of the Indian wars was palpable in the numer­
+ous military bases spread across the South, the Middle West,
+and particularly the Great Plains: that vast desert and steppe
+comprising the Army's historical "heartland," punctuated by
+such storied outposts as Forts Hays, Kearney, Leavenworth,
+Riley, and Sill. Leavenworth, where the Oregon and Santa Fe
+trails separated, was now the home of the Army's Command
+and General Staff College; Riley, the base of George Arm­
+strong Custer's 7th Cavalry, now that of the l St Infantry Divi­
+sion; and Sill, where Geronimo lived out the last years of his
+life, the headquarters of the U.S. Artillery. . . .
+While microscopic in size, it was the fast and irregular
+military actions against the Indians, memorialized in bronze
+and oil by Remington, that shaped the nature of American
+nationalism. 6
+Although Kaplan relies principally on the late-nineteenth-century
+source of US counterinsurgency, in a footnote he reports what he
+learned at the Airborne Special Operations Museum in Fayetteville,
+North Carolina: " It is a small but interesting fact that members
+of the 101st Airborne Division, in preparation for their parachute
+drop on D -Day, shaved themselves in Mohawk style and applied war
+paint on their faces."7 This takes us back to the pre-independence
+colonial wars and then through US independence and the myth pop­
+ularized by The Last of the' Mahicans.
+Kaplan debunks the argument that the attacks on the World
+Trade Center and the Pentagon on September n, 2001, brought the
+United States into a new era of warfare and prompted it to estab­
+lish military bases around the world. Prior to 2001, Kaplan rightly
+observes, the US Army's Special Operations Command had been
+
+221
+
+222
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+carrying out maneuvers since the 1980s in " 1 70 countries per year,
+with an average of nine 'quiet professionals' on each mission. Amer­
+ica's reach was long; its involvement in the obscurest states protean.
+Rather than the conscript army of citizen soldiers that fought World
+War II, there was now a professional military that, true to other
+imperial forces throughout history, enjoyed the soldiering life for its
+own sake."8
+On October 13, 20I I , testifying before the Armed Services Com­
+mittee of the US House of Representatives, General Martin Dempsey
+stated: "I didn't become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee
+the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end
+state that would have this nation and its military not be a global
+power. . . . That is not who we are as a nation."
+
+T H E R E T U R N OF L E G A L I Z E D TO R T U R E
+
+Bodies-tortured bodies, sexually violated bodies, imprisoned bod­
+ies, dead bodies-arose as a primary topic in the first years of the
+George W. Bush administration following the September 2001 at­
+tacks with a war of revenge against Afghanistan and the overthrow
+of the government of Iraq. Afghans resisting US forces and others
+who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were
+taken into custody, and most of them were sent to a hastily con­
+structed prison facility on the US military base at Guantanamo Bay,
+Cuba, on land the United States appropriated in its 1 8 9 8 war against
+Cuba. Rather than bestowing the status of prisoner of war on the
+detainees, which would have given them certain rights under the Ge­
+neva Conventions, they were designated as "unlawful combatants,"
+a status previdusly unknown in the annals of Western warfare. As
+such, the detainees were subjected to torture by US interrogators
+and shamelessly monitored by civilian psychologists and medical
+personnel.
+In response to questions and condemnations from around the
+globe, a University of California international law professor, John
+C. Yoo, on leave to serve as assistant US attorney general in the Jus-
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+tice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, penned in March 2003
+what became the infamous "Torture Memo." Not much was made
+at the time of one of the precedents Yoo used to defend the designa­
+tion "unlawful combatant," the US Supreme Court's 1873 opinion
+in Modoc Indian Prisoners.
+In 1872, a group of Modoc men led by Kintpuash, also known as
+Captain Jack, attempted to return to their own country in Northern
+California after the US Army had rounded them up and forced them
+to share a reservation in Oregon. The insurgent group of fifty-three
+was surrounded by US troops and Oregon militiamen and forced
+to take refuge in the barren and rugged lava beds around Lassen
+Peak, a dormant volcano, a part of their ancestral homeland that
+they knew every inch of. More than a thousand troops commanded
+by General Edward R. S. Canby, a former Civil War general, at­
+tempted to capture the resisters, but had no success as the Modocs
+engaged in effective guerrilla warfare. Before the Civil War, Canby
+had built his military career fighting in the Second Seminole War
+and later in the invasion of Mexico. Posted to Utah on the eve of
+the Civil War, he had led attacks against the Navaj os, and then be­
+gan his Civil War service in New Mexico. Therefore, Canby was a
+seasoned Indian killer. In a negotiating meeting between the general
+and Kintpuash, the Modoc leader killed the general and the other
+commissioners when they would allow only for surrender. In re­
+sponse, the United States sent another former Civil War general in
+with more than a thousand additional soldiers as reinforcements,
+and in April 1 8 73 these troops attacked the Modoc stronghold,
+this time forcing the Indigenous fighters to flee. After four months
+of fighting that cost the United States almost $soo,ooo-equal to
+nearly $ 1 0 million currently-and the lives of more than four hun­
+dred of its soldiers and a general, the nationwide backlash against
+the Modocs was vengeful.9 Kintpuash and several other captured
+Modocs were imprisoned and then hanged at Alcatraz, and the Mo ­
+doc families were scattered and incarcerated on reservations. Kint­
+puash's corpse was embalmed and exhibited at circuses around the
+country. The commander of the army's Pacific Military Division at
+the time, Lieutenant General John M. Schofield, wrote of the Modoc
+
+223
+
+224
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+War in his memoir, Forty-Six Years in the Army: "If the innocent
+could be separated from the guilty, plague, pestilence, and famine
+would not be an unjust punishment for the crimes committed in this
+country against the original occupants of the soil." 1 0
+Drawing a legal analogy between the Modoc prisoners and the
+Guantanamo detainees, Assistant US Attorney General Yoo em­
+ployed the legal category of homo sacer: in Roman law, a person
+banned from society, excluded from its legal protections but still
+subject to the sovereign's power. 1 1 Anyone may kill a homo sacer
+without it being considered murder. As Jodi Byrd notes, " One begins
+to understand why John C. Yoo's infamous March 1 4 , 2003 , torture
+memos cited the 1 8 6 5 Military Commissions and the 1 873 The Mo­
+
+doc Indian Prisoners legal opinions in order to articulate executive
+power in declaring the state of exception, particularly when The
+Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion explicitly marks the Indian com­
+batant as homo sacer to the United States."12 To buttress his claim,
+Yoo quoted from the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion:
+It cannot be pretended that a United States soldier is guilty
+of murder if he kills a public enemy in battle, which would be
+the case if the municipal law were in force and applicable to
+an act committed under such circumstances . All the laws
+and customs of civilized warfare may not be applicable to an
+armed conflict with the Indian tribes upon our western fron­
+tier; but the circumstances attending the assassination of
+Canby [Army general] and Thomas [U. S . peace commissioner]
+are such as to make their murder as much a violation of the
+laws of savage as of civilized warfare, and the Indians con­
+cerned in it fully understood the baseness and treachery of
+their act.13
+Byrd points out that, according to this line of thinking, any­
+one who could be defined as " Indian" could thus be killed legally,
+and they also could be held responsible for crimes they committed
+,
+against any US soldier. "As a result, citizens of American Indian
+nations become in this moment the origin of the stateless terrorist
+combatant within U . S . enunciations of sovereignty." 14
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+225
+
+R A M P E D - U P M I L I TA R I Z AT I O N
+
+The Chagos Archipelago comprises more than sixty small coral
+islands isolated in the Indian Ocean halfway between Africa and
+Indonesia, a thousand miles south of the nearest continent, India.
+Between 1968 and 1973 , the United States and Britain, the latter
+the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhab ­
+itants of the islands , the Chagossians . Most of the two thousand
+deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius
+and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and
+forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US
+military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. As if
+being rounded up and removed from their homelands in the name
+of global security were not cruel enough, before being deported the
+Chagossians had to watch as British agents and US troops herded
+their pet dogs into sealed sheds where they were gassed and burned.
+As David Vine writes in his chronicle of this tragedy:
+The base on Diego Garcia has become one of the most se­
+cretive and powerful US military facilities in the world, help ­
+ing to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (twice),
+threatening Iran, China, Russia, and nations from southern
+Africa to southeast Asia, host to a secret CIA detention cen­
+ter for high-profile terrorist suspects, and home to thousands
+of U. S . military personnel and billions of dollars in deadly
+weaponry. 15
+The Chagossians are not the only indigenous people around the
+world that the US military has displaced . The military established
+a pattern during and after the Vietnam War of forcibly removing
+indigenous peoples from sites deemed strategic for the placement of
+military bases. The peoples of the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific
+and Puerto Rico's Vieques Island are perhaps the best-known ex­
+amples, but there were also the lnughuit of Thule, Greenland, and
+the thousands of Okinawans and Indigenous peoples of Microne­
+sia. During the harsh deportation of the Micronesians in the 1970s,
+the press took some notice. In response to one reporter's question,
+
+226
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of the Micronesians: "There
+are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn ? " 16
+This is a statement of permissive genocide .
+By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States
+operated more than 900 military bases around the world, including
+
+287 in Germany, 1 3 0 in Japan, 106 in South Korea, 89 in Italy, 5 7
+i n the British Isles, 21 i n Portugal, and 1 9 i n Turkey. The number
+also comprised additional bases or installations located in Aruba,
+Australia, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan ,
+Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Crete, Sicily, Ice­
+land, Romania, Bulgaria, Honduras, Colombia, and Cuba (Guan­
+tanamo Bay), among many other. locations in some 150 countries,
+along with those recently added in Iraq and Afghanistan. 17
+In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe
+activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing nega­
+tive effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the
+consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people,
+especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous ter­
+ritories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and
+Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of
+aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo
+Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of
+uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly
+health effects. "I am awed by the impact of the military on the world
+and on Native America," LaDuke writes. " It is pervasive. " 18
+Political scientist Cynthia Enloe, who specializes in US foreign
+policy and the military, observes that US culture has become even
+more militarized since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
+Pentagon. Her analysis of this trend draws on a feminist perspective:
+Militarization . . . [is] happening at the individual level, when
+a woman who has a son is persuaded that the best way she can
+be a good mother is to allow the military recruiter to recruit
+her son so her son will get off the couch. When she is persuaded
+to let him go, even if reluctantly, she's being militarized. She's
+not as militarized as somebody who is a Special Forces soldier,
+but she's being militarized all the same. Somebody who gets
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+excited because a jet bomber flies over the football stadium to
+open the football season and is glad that he or she is in the sta­
+dium to see it, is being militarized. So militarization is not just
+about the question "do you think the military is the most im­
+portant part of the state ? " (although obviously that matters).
+It's not just "do you think that the use of collective violence is
+the most effective way to solve social problems ? "-which is
+also a part of militarization. But it's also about ordinary, daily
+culture, certainly in the United States . 1 9
+As John Grenier notes, however, the cultural aspects o f militari­
+zation are not new; they have deep historical roots, reaching into the
+nation's British-colonial past and continuing through unrelenting
+wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries.
+Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use
+for the first way of war in the construction of an "American
+identity." . . . [T]he enduring appeal of the romanticized myth
+of the "settlement" (not the conquest) of the frontier, either
+by "actual" men such as Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or
+fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore
+Cooper's creation, poiQts to what D. H. Lawrence called the
+"myth of the essential white American."2 0
+The astronomical number of firearms owned by US civilians,
+with the Second Amendment as a sacred mandate, is also intricately
+related to militaristic culture. Everyday life and the culture in gen­
+eral are damaged by ramped-up militarization, and this includes
+academia, particularly the social sciences, with psychologists and
+anthropologists being recruited as advisors to the military. Anthro ­
+pologist David H. Price, in his indispensable book Weaponizing An­
+thropology, remarks that "anthropology has always fed between
+the lines of war." Anthropology was born of European and US co­
+lonial wars. Price, like Enloe, sees an accelerated pace of militariza­
+tion in the early twenty-first century: "Today's weaponization of
+anthropology and other social sciences has been a long time coming,
+and post-9/r r America's climate of fear coupled with reductions in
+
+227
+
+228
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+traditional academic funding provided the conditions of a sort of
+perfect storm for the militarization of the discipline and the acad­
+emy as a whole."21
+In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven­
+hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United
+
+States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask:
+" Why does our country have military bases in every region of the
+globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts ? Why does
+the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest
+of the world combined ? Why does it still possess thousands of nu­
+clear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation
+poses an imminent threat? "22 These are key questions. Stone and
+Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions.
+The authors see the post-World War II development of the United
+States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from
+the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the
+mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by
+President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British co­
+lonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in
+search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fail to mention
+that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, coloniz­
+ing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had
+since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century.
+In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an impe­
+rialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical
+outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.
+
+N O RT H A M E R I CA I S A C R I M E S C E N E
+
+Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story
+of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the
+origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention
+to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of
+genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what
+has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples-and what still hap­
+pens. 23 It's not just past colonialist actio n s but also "the continued
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+229
+
+colonization of American Indian nations, peoples, and lands" that
+allows the United States "to cast its imperialist gaze globally" with
+"what is essentially a settler colony's national construction of itself
+as an ever more perfect multicultural, multiracial democracy," while
+"the status of American Indians as sovereign nations colonized by
+the United States continues to haunt and inflect its raison d'etre."
+Here Byrd quotes Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who spells
+out the connection between the " Indian wars" and the Iraq War:
+The current mission of the United States to become the center
+of political enlightenment to be taught to the rest of the world
+began with the Indian wars and has become the dangerous
+provocation of this nation's historical intent. The historical con­
+nection between the Little Big Horn event and the " uprising" in
+Baghdad must become part of the political dialogue of Amer­
+ica if the fiction of decolonization is to happen and the hoped­
+for deconstruction of the colonial story is to come about. 24
+A "race to innocence" is what occurs when individuals assume
+that they are innocent of complicity in structures of domination and
+oppression.25 This concept captures the understandable assump­
+tion made by new immigrants or children of recent immigrants to
+any country. They cannot be responsible, they assume, for what
+occurred in their adopted country's past. Neither are those who are
+already citizens guilty, even if they are descendants of slave owners,
+Indian killers, or Andrew Jackson himself. Yet, in a settler society
+that has not come to terms with its past, whatever historical trauma
+was entailed in settling the land affects the assumptions and behav­
+ior of living generations at any given time, including immigrants and
+the children of recent immigrants.
+In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen
+in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent
+on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social
+services and quality public education; the gross profits of corpora­
+tions, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than
+half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide
+few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation
+
+230
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the
+poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individual­
+ism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame
+for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog
+competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and
+high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against
+women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun
+violence.
+These are symptoms, and there are many more, of a deeply trou­
+bled society, and they are not new. The large and influential civil
+rights, student, labor, and women's movements of the 1950s through
+the 1970s exposed the structural inequalities in the economy and
+the historical effects of more than two centuries of slavery and bru­
+tal genocidal wars waged against Indigenous peoples. For a time, US
+society verged on a process of truth seeking regarding past atroci­
+ties, making demands to end aggressive wars and to end poverty,
+witnessed by the huge peace movement of the 1970s and the War on
+Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, prison reform, women's
+equity and reproductive rights, promotion of the arts and humani­
+ties, public media, the Indian Self-Determination Act, and many
+other initiatives. 26
+A more sophisticated version of the race to innocence that helps
+perpetuate settler colonialism began to develop in social movement
+theory in the 1990s, popularized in the work of Michael Hardt and
+Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, the third volume in a trilogy, is
+one of a number of books in an academic fad of the early twenty­
+first century seeking to revive the Medieval European concept of the
+commons as an aspiration for contemporary social movements. 27
+Most writings about the commons barely mention the fate of Indig­
+enous peoples in relation to the call for all land to be shared. Two
+Canadian scholar-activists, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright,
+for example, do not mince words in rejecting Native land claims
+and sovereignty, characterizing them as xenophobic elitism. They
+see Indigenous claims as "regressive neo-racism in light of the global
+diasporas arising from oppression around the world."28
+Cree scholar Lorraine Le Camp calls this kind of erasure of Indig­
+enous peoples in North America "terranullism," harking back to the
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+231
+
+characterization, under the Doctrine of Discovery, of purportedly
+vacant lands as terra nullis.19 This is a kind of no-fault history. From
+the theory of a liberated future of no borders and nations, of a vague
+commons for all, the theorists obliterate the present and presence
+of Indigenous nations struggling for their liberation from states of
+colonialism. Thereby, Indigenous rhetoric and programs for decolo­
+nization, nationhood, and sovereignty are, according to this project,
+rendered invalid and futile. 3° From the Indigenous perspective, as
+Jodi Byrd writes, "any notion of the commons that speaks for and
+as indigenous as it advocates transforming indigenous governance or
+incorporating indigenous peoples into a multitude that might then
+reside on those lands forcibly taken from indigenous peoples does
+nothing to disrupt the genocidal and colonialist intent of the initial
+and now repeated historical process."31
+
+B O DY PA R T S
+
+Another aspect o f the demand for US public dominion appears
+under the guise of science. Despite the passage in 1990 of the Na­
+tive American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),
+some researchers under the cloak of science have fought toot� and
+nail not to release the remains and burial offerings of some two mil­
+lion Indigenous people held in storage, much of it uncataloged, in
+the Smithsonian Institution and other museums and by universities,
+state historical societies, National Park Service offices, warehouses,
+and curio shops. Until the r99os, archaeologists and physical an­
+thropologists claimed to need the remains-which they labeled "re­
+sources" or "data," but rarely as "human remains"-for "scientific"
+experimentation, but most were randomly stored in boxes. 32
+In doing so, they also challenge the definition of "Native Ameri­
+can" and the claimants' right to sovereignty. They even accuse Na­
+tive Americans of being anti-science for seeking to repatriate the
+remains of their relatives. 33 However, since anthropologist Franz
+Boas in r9 r r discredited the theories of racial superiority and in­
+feriority upon which such research was premised, little actual ex­
+amination of the Indigenous body parts has taken place. When
+
+232
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+Ishi-identified by Anglos in 19n as the last of the Yahi people
+of Northern California-died in 1916, the University of California
+at Berkeley anthropologist who had studied him and his culture,
+Arthur Kroeber, insisted on an Indigenous traditional burial and
+no autopsy, according to Ishi's wishes. When asked about the cause
+of science, Kroeber said: "If there is any talk about the interest of
+science, say for me that science can go to hell. . . . Besides I cannot
+believe that any scientific value is materially involved. We have hun­
+dreds of Indian skeletons that nobody ever comes to study."34
+Despite Kroeber's stance, Ishi's brain was removed and preserved
+and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. As anthro­
+pologist Erik Davis observes, the bodies have never had scientific
+value. Rather, they have become a fetish, "a marker of value, the
+power of which derives specifically from the obscuring of the refer­
+ent to which it originally referred. It is my claim that Indian identity,
+and its material form, the dead Native body, has functioned for a
+very long time, and with increasing power, as a fetish marking the
+possession of land by those who have conquered it already."35
+The " Kennewick Man" phenomenon of the 1990s revealed much
+about the pathology Davis references. In 1996, a nearly complete
+skeleton and skull were found on a riverbank on traditional land
+of the Umatilla Nation near Kennewick, Washington. The county
+coroner determined that the bones were ancient-at least nine thou­
+sand years old-and therefore Native American. Under NAGRA
+they should be handed over to the Umatilla authorities. But a local
+archaeologist, James C. Chatters, asked to examine the remains.
+Several weeks later Chatters called a press conference at which he
+proclaimed the remains to be "Caucasoid" and with a story to tell.
+Up to that moment, little attention had been paid to the find, but
+with Chatters's claims it became a public sensation fueled by head­
+lines such as "Europeans Invade America: 20,000 BC" (Discover),
+" Was So meone Here before the Native Americans ? " (New Yorker),
+"America before the Indians" ( US News and World Report), and
+" Hunt for the First Americans" (National Geographic). The archae­
+ologist had made a series of logical conclusions from a bogus prem­
+ise: the remains were ancient; the skeleton and skull were said not
+to resemble those of living Natives, and might be more akin to those
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+233
+
+of modern Europeans, therefore, Europeans were the "first Ameri­
+cans." The Archaeological Institute of America dismissed such
+claims, denouncing the already discredited "science" of determining
+racial characteristics projected back in time. Yet the claims stuck in
+the public mind and media bias.
+Clearly the controversy was not about science, but rather about
+Native claims of antiquity, sovereignty, and rights, and settler re­
+sentment. Chatters made this clear when he was interviewed on the
+CBS program 6 0 Minutes: "The tribe's fight against further testing
+of Kennewick Man is based largely on fear, fear that if someone
+was here before they were, their status as sovereign nations, and all
+that goes with it-treaty rights, and lucrative casinos . . . could be
+at risk." The white supremacist group Asutru Folk Assembly made a
+similar assessment: " Kennewick Man is our kin . . . . Native Ameri­
+can groups have strongly contested this idea, perceiving that they
+have much to lose if their status as the 'First Americans' is over­
+turned. We will not let our heritage be hidden by those who seek to
+obscure it."3 6
+Chatters claimed that Kennewick Man "has so many stories to
+tell. . . . When you work with these individuals you develop an em­
+pathy, it's like you know another individual intimately."37 Erik Da­
+vis, calling this identification with the remains a scientist studies
+"pathological ventriloquism," points out that even the judge who
+sided with Chatters in the dispute with the Umatilla Nation got into
+the act, saying that the remains were "a book that they can read,
+a history written in bone instead of on paper, j ust as the history
+of a region may be 'read' by observing layers of rock or ice, or the
+rings of a tree."38 Forty-five years ago, archaeologist Robert Silver­
+berg wrote about the appeal of "lost tribes" to Anglo-Americans:
+"The dream of a lost prehistoric race in the American heartland was
+profoundly satisfying, and if the vanished ones had been giants, or
+white men, or Israelites, or Danes, or Toltecs, or great white Jewish
+Toltec Vikings, so much the better."39 Anything but Indians, for that
+would provide evidence reminding Anglo settlers' descendants that
+the continent was stolen, genocide committed, and the land repopu­
+lated by settlers who seek authenticity but never find it because of
+the lie they live with, suspecting the truth and fearing it.
+
+234
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+G H O S T S A N D D E M O N S TO H I D E F R O M
+
+A living symbol of the genocidal history of the United States, as
+well as a kind of general subconscious knowledge of it, is the "Win­
+chester Mystery House," a tourist site in the Santa Clara (Silicon)
+Valley of Northern California. Fifty miles south of San Francisco, it
+is billed as a ghost house on billboards that start appearing in Or­
+egon to the north and San Diego to the south. Sarah L. Winchester,
+the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, built the Victorian
+mansion to avoid and elude ghosts, although there is no record of
+any ghosts ever having found their way into her home. It could be
+said, perhaps, that Mrs. Winchester's project from 1 8 84 to her death
+in 1922 was a success. She likely was well aware of the widely pub­
+licized Ghost Dance in 1890, which led to the killing of Sitting Bull
+and the Wounded Knee massacre . The dancers believed that the
+dance would bring back their dead warriors.
+It makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself
+from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle,
+which her late husband's father had invented and produced in 1 8 66,
+with later models being even more lethal. Mrs. Winchester inherited
+the fortune accumulated by her husband's family through sales of
+the rifle. There was one major purchaser: the US Department of
+War. The chief reason for the War Department's purchases of the
+rifle in great quantities: to kill Indians. The rifle was a technological
+innovation designed especially for the US Army's campaigns against
+the Plail).s Indians following the Civil War.
+The Winchester house amazes all who tour it. There are five
+floors, more or less, since they are staggered. Each room in itself
+appears normal, decorated in the late-nineteenth-century Victorian
+mode. But there is more than meets the eye in getting from parlors
+to bedrooms to kitchen to closets and from floor to floor. Numerous
+stairways dead-end, and secret trapdoors hide the actual stairways .
+Closet doors open to walls, and pieces of furniture are really doors
+to closets. Huge bookcases serve as entrances to adjoining rooms.
+Part of the house was unfinished when the widow died, as she had
+construction workers building every day from dawn to dusk, adding
+rooms and traps until her death. Visitors trekking through the wid-
+
+Conclusion: The Future of the United States
+
+235
+
+ow's home are astounded, and perhaps saddened, by the evidence
+all around them of the fears and anguish of an obviously mentally
+disturbed person. Yet there is another possibility: a sense of the scaf­
+folding that supports US society, a kind of hologram in the minds of
+each and every person on the continent.
+Mrs. Winchester might have been more aware of the truth than
+most people and therefore fearful of its consequences. Regardless, in
+continuing to find or invent enemies across the globe, expand what
+is already the largest military force in the world, and add to an elab­
+orate global network of military bases, all in the name of national
+or global "security," does not the United States today resemble Mrs.
+Winchester constantly trying to foil her ghosts ? The guilt harbored
+by most is buried and expressed in other ways, on a larger scale, as
+"regeneration through violence," in Richard Slotkin's phrasing.
+
+THE FUTU RE
+
+How then can US society come to terms with its past? How can it ac­
+knowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes al­
+ways stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what
+their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in,
+which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility pro­
+vides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in
+the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance
+and intervention, often violently through direct military means or
+through proxies. It is an urgent concern. Historian and teacher Juan
+Gomez- Quinones writes, "American Indian ancestries and heritages
+ought to be integral to K-1 2 curriculums and university explora­
+tions and graduate expositions . . . [with] full integration of Na­
+tive American histories and cultures into academic curriculums. "
+Gomez- Quinones coins a measure o f intelligence in the United
+States the "Indigenous Quotient."4 0
+Indigenous peoples offer possibilities for life after empire, pos­
+sibilities that neither erase the crimes of colonialism nor require the
+disappearance of the original peoples colonized under the guise of
+including them as individuals. That process rightfully starts by hon-
+
+236
+
+An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
+
+oring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous nations,
+by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills and includ­
+ing most federally held parks and land and all stolen sacred items
+and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the
+reconstruction and expansion of Native nations. In the process, the
+continent will be radically reconfigured, physically and psychologi­
+cally. For the future to be realized, it will require extensive educa­
+tional programs and the full support and active participation of the
+descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans,
+as well as immigrant populations.
+In the words of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz:
+
+The future will not be mad with loss and waste though the
+memory will
+Be there: eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of
+this nation
+Will mend after the revolution. 41
+
+Preface
+I was not anxious to write this book. Writing an autobiography at my age
+seemed presumptuous. Moreover, I felt that to write about my life, what I
+did, what I thought and what happened to me would require a posture of
+difference, an assumption that I was unlike other women — other Black
+women — and therefore needed to explain myself. I felt that such a book
+might end up obscuring the most essential fact: the forces that have made
+my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped
+the lives of millions of my people. Furthermore I am convinced that my
+response to these forces has been unexceptional as well, that my political
+involvement, ultimately as a member of the Communist Party, has been a
+natural, logical way to defend our embattled humanity.
+The one extraordinary event of my life had nothing to do with me as an
+individual — with a little twist of history, another sister or brother could
+have easily become the political prisoner whom millions of people from
+throughout the world rescued from persecution and death. I was reluctant to
+write this book because concentration on my personal history might detract
+from the movement which brought my case to the people in the first place. I
+was also unwilling to render my life as a personal "adventure" — as though
+there were a "real" person separate and apart from the political person. My
+life would not lend itself to this anyway, but even if it did, such a book
+would be counterfeit, for it could not convey my overwhelming sense of
+belonging to a community of humans — a community of struggle against
+poverty and racism.
+When I decided to write the book after all, it was because I had come to
+envision it as a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the
+events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my present
+commitment. Such a book might serve a very important and practical
+purpose. There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would
+understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives —
+our bodies, our knowledge, our will — to the cause of our oppressed
+
+people. In this period when the covers camouflaging the corruption and
+racism of the highest political offices are rapidly falling away, when the
+bankruptcy of the global system of capitalism is becoming apparent, there
+was the possibility that more people — Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and
+white — might be inspired to join our growing community of struggle.
+Only if this happens will I consider this project to have been worthwhile.
+
+PART ONE: Nets
+The net will be torn by the horn of a leaping calf. . .
+
+I
+
+AUGUST 9, 1970
+
+believe I thanked her but I am not sure. Perhaps I simply watched her dig
+into the shopping bag and accepted in silence the wig she held out to me.
+It lay like a small frightened animal in my hand. I was alone with Helen
+hiding from the police and grieving over the death of someone I loved. Two
+days earlier, in her house perched on a hill in Los Angeles' Echo Park, I
+learned of the Marin County Courthouse revolt and the death of my friend
+Jonathan Jackson. Two days earlier I had never heard of Ruchell Magee,
+James McClain or William Christmas — the three San Quentin prisoners
+who, along with Jonathan, had been involved in the revolt which left him,
+McClain and William Christmas dead. But on that evening, it seemed as
+though I had known them for a very long time.
+I walked toward the bathroom and stood before the mirror trying to fit the
+ends of my hair under the tight elastic. Like broken wings my hands
+floundered about my head, my thoughts completely dissociated from their
+movement. When finally I glanced into the mirror to see whether there were
+still bits of my own hair unconcealed by the wig, I saw a face so filled with
+anguish, tension and uncertainty I did not recognize it as my own. With the
+false black curls falling over a wrinkled forehead into red swollen eyes, I
+looked absurd, grotesque. I snatched the wig off my head, threw it on the
+floor and hit the sink with my fist. It remained cold, white and
+impenetrable. I forced the wig back on my head. I had to look normal; I
+could not arouse the suspicion of the attendant in the station where we
+would have to gas up the car. I didn't want to attract the attention of
+someone who might drive up alongside us and look in our direction while
+we waited at an intersection for the light to turn green. I had to look as
+commonplace as a piece of everyday Los Angeles scenery.
+
+I told Helen that we would leave as soon as it got dark. But night would not
+shake off the day that kept clinging to its edges. We waited. Silently.
+Hidden behind drawn curtains, we listened to the street noises coming
+through the slightly opened balcony window. Each time a car slowed down
+or stopped, each time footsteps tapped the pavement outside, I held my
+breath — wondering whether we might have waited too long.
+Helen didn't talk very much. It was better that way. I was glad that she had
+been with me during these last days. She was calm and did not try to bury
+the gravity of the situation under a mound of aimless chatter.
+I don't know how long we had been sitting in the dimly lit room when
+Helen broke the silence to say that it was probably not going to get any
+darker outside. It was time to leave. For the first time since we discovered
+that the police were after me, I stepped outside. It was much darker than I
+thought, but not dark enough to keep me from feeling vulnerable,
+defenseless.
+Outside in the open, entangled in my grief and anger was also fear. A plain
+and simple fear so overwhelming, and so elemental that the only thing I
+could compare it to was that sense of engulfment I used to feel as a child
+when I was left alone in the dark. That indescribable, monstrous thing
+would be at my back, never quite touching me, but always there ready to
+attack. When my mother and father asked me what it was that made me so
+afraid, the words I used to describe this thing sounded ridiculous and stupid.
+Now with each step, I could feel a presence which I could describe easily.
+Images of attack kept flashing into my mind, but they were not abstract —
+they were clear pictures of machine guns breaking out of the darkness,
+surrounding Helen and me, unleashing fire . . .
+
+Jonathan's body had lain on the hot asphalt of the parking lot outside the
+Marin County Civic Center. I saw them on the television screen dragging
+him from a van, a rope tied around his waist . . .
+In Jon's seventeen years he had seen more brutality than most people can
+expect to see in a lifetime. From the time he was seven, he had been
+
+separated from his older brother George by prison bars and hostile guards.
+And I had once stupidly asked him why he smiled so seldom.
+
+The route from Echo Park down to the Black neighborhood around West
+Adams was very familiar to me. I had driven it many times. But tonight the
+way seemed strange, full of the unknown perils of being a fugitive. And
+there was no getting around it — my life was now that of a fugitive, and
+fugitives are caressed every hour by paranoia. Every strange person I saw
+might be an agent in disguise, with bloodhounds waiting in the shrubbery
+for their master's command. Living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria,
+distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the
+real signs that the enemy is near. I had to learn how to elude him, outsmart
+him. It would be difficult, but not impossible.
+Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had done, for nightfall to cover
+their steps, had leaned on one true friend to help them, had felt, as I did, the
+very teeth of the dogs at their heels.
+It was simple. I had to be worthy of them.
+The circumstances that created my hunted state were perhaps a bit more
+complicated, but not all that different. Two years before, SNCC had held a
+fund-raising cocktail party. After the party, the police had raided the
+Bronson Street apartment of Franklin and Kendra Alexander — who were
+members of the Communist Party, and two of my closest friends — where a
+few of the group had gathered. Money and guns were confiscated and
+everyone there was arrested on charges of armed robbery. As soon as they
+discovered that one of the weapons — a .380 automatic — was registered in
+my name, they called me in for questioning. The charges did not stand up in
+court and, after a few nights in jail, the sisters and brothers were released
+and the guns returned to their owners.
+The same .380 which the Los Angeles Police had reluctantly returned to me
+then was now in the hands of the Marin County authorities, having been
+used during the courthouse revolt. The judge presiding over James
+McClain's trial had been killed and the district attorney prosecuting the case
+
+had been wounded. Even before Franklin told me about the police lurking
+around my house, I knew they would be after me. Over the last months I
+had been spending practically all my time helping to build a mass
+movement to free the Soledad Brothers — Jonathan's brother, George, John
+Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo — who were facing a fraudulent murder
+charge inside Soledad Prison. I had just been fired from my teaching
+position at the University of California by Governor Ronald Reagan and the
+Regents because I was a member of the Communist Party. No one needed
+to tell me that they would exploit the fact that my guns had been used in
+Marin in order to strike out at me once more.
+By August 9, agents (Los Angeles police? FBI?) were swarming like angry
+wasps around Kendra, Franklin and my roommate, Tamu. Other members
+of the Che-Lumumba Club — our Party collective — and the Soledad
+Brothers Defense Committee had told Franklin they were also under
+surveillance. Coming up to Helen and Tim's apartment in Echo Park that
+day, it had taken Franklin several hours to shake off the police tail —
+several hours of dodging and hiding, of changing cars in vacant alleys and
+of going in front doors and leaving by the back. He was afraid to risk
+another trip to get in touch with me. It might not be as successful.
+If a full-fledged search were initiated, Helen and Tim's place would not be
+safe. I had known them for a number of years, and although they were not
+members of any movement organization, they had a history of radical
+political activity. Sooner or later, their names would appear in some
+policeman's notebook. We had to make a quick, camouflaged move.
+The address given to Helen and me was located on a quiet, well-kept street
+in the West Adams area. The house was an older duplex encircled by nicely
+shaped hedges and flowers in bloom. After saying an awkward good-bye to
+Helen, I left the car and timidly rang the doorbell. What if we had
+misunderstood the house number and this was the wrong place? Anxiously
+waiting for the door to open, I wondered what the people were like, how
+they looked, how they would react to me. All I knew was that the woman,
+Hattie, and her husband, John, were Black people sympathetic to the
+movement. They had no questions when I arrived, and they ignored the
+usual formalities. They simply took me in, accepted me — totally and with
+
+the affection and devotion ordinarily reserved for family. They allowed
+their lives to be disrupted by my presence. For my protection, they
+reorganized their routines in order that one of them would be in the house
+all the time.
+Excuses were made to their regular visiting friends so no one would know
+that I was there.
+After a few days, I began to feel as settled and comfortable as I could in
+such circumstances. It seemed as though I might be able to learn how to
+close my eyes for a few hours at night without falling into some terrifying
+nightmare about what had happened in Marin. I was even beginning to get
+used to the old iron bed which folded down out of the dining room wall. I
+was almost able to concentrate on the anecdotes Hattie told me about her
+career as an entertainer and how she had plowed her way through all the
+discrimination to assert herself as the dancer she wanted to be.
+I was ready to hole up there indefinitely; that is, until the times were more
+auspicious. But the search for me had intensified (conservative newscaster
+George Putnam had announced on his TV program in L.A. that it extended
+even to Canada). Clearly it was best to get out of the state for a while.
+I hated what I was doing: the nighttime moves, the veiling of eyes, the
+whole atmosphere of stealth and secretness. Although it was true that, for a
+long time, I had been convinced that the day would come when many of us
+would have to go underground, the realization of my fears didn't stop me
+from hating this furtive, clandestine existence.
+
+A friend, David Poindexter, was in Chicago. I had not seen him for a long
+while, but I was certain that he would drop everything to help. I was
+prepared to make the trip alone and did not expect Hattie to insist on
+staying with me until I found David. I wondered at the source of her
+strength. It was as if she had to do this thing, regardless of the jeopardy to
+her own life.
+
+After the preparations were made, we drove all night to Las Vegas. My
+friends had asked an older Black man — whom I met for the first time that
+night — to accompany us on that leg of the journey.
+All dressed up, Hattie looked very much like the dancer she had been in her
+younger years. With the grace and dignity of a Josephine Baker, she turned
+heads wherever she went. In the Vegas airport, for the first time since I had
+gone underground, I was walking among people, and each time a white man
+stared at us harder than I thought he should, my pounding heart identified
+him as an agent.
+Everyone knew that O'Hare Airport in Chicago was a center of intrigue and
+heavy CIA-FBI surveillance. We slipped through the throngs of people,
+frantically searching for David, who had not been there to meet us at the
+gate. I was cursing him under my breath, although I knew he was probably
+not to blame. It turned out that the message sent to him had been too cryptic
+and he had thought I would come straight to his place. We ended up taking
+a taxi there.
+Hattie left after seeing me safely into David's apartment overlooking the
+calm waters of Lake Michigan. Although I was glad to see him, I had
+grown so close to Hattie that it hurt to see her leave. When we embraced, I
+couldn't say thank you — those words were far too small for someone who
+had risked her life to help save mine.
+David was in the middle of a remodeling job on his apartment, and
+practically everything was in disarray. Wallpaper half-pasted on the walls,
+furniture piled up in the middle of the living room, paintings, little
+sculptures and other objects spread randomly across the couch.
+I had forgotten how much David liked to talk. Whether he was discussing a
+problem of politics or telling you about a spot you had on your blouse, he
+was always glib. In the first five minutes he hit me with so many things that
+I had to ask him to slow down and backtrack a bit.
+After I put down my things and splashed some cold water on my face, we
+went into his study and sat down on the thick blue carpet amid the
+deshelved books strewn across the room. There we talked about the
+
+situation. He couldn't cancel his trip out West, which was scheduled for the
+next day, he said, but he would shorten it in order to be back in a few days.
+The prospect of spending the next days alone was appealing. I could use the
+time to orient myself, to reflect on the coming weeks, to pull myself
+together. The solitude would be good.
+Later, David introduced me to Robert Lohman, who lived in the same
+building. Robert Lohman was, at the moment of the introduction, David's
+"very close friend." Someone who could be trusted, who, over the next
+days, would be available any time I needed him to look in on me, see to it
+that food was in the refrigerator and, if I felt like company, be happy to
+come up.
+It was afternoon when I met Robert. By evening, he and David had been
+drawn into a ferocious argument about their jointly owned automobile.
+(Suppose David were captured driving me in a car that was registered to
+Robert . . .) When the hurling of words had subsided, their friendship was in
+ruins and Robert was in our eyes a potential informer. This forced us to
+rethink all of our plans.
+David and I drove another car through the heavy night rain to the house
+where he and his wife had lived before her death. He refused to listen when
+I tried to apologize for driving this wedge into his life, for wrecking his
+friendships, forcing him, ultimately, to cancel his important trip to the West.
+All these things were trivial, he said.
+Before David fell asleep (I sat up all night) we decided that it would be best
+to leave the city the next day.
+My disguise had been all right for the first leg of the trip. But it was not
+good enough for a situation that would grow increasingly more dangerous.
+The curly wig, too close to the shape of my natural, did not really change
+the appearance of my face. Before we left Chicago, a young Black woman,
+to whom I identified myself as David's cousin in trouble, gave me another
+wig that was straight and stiff, with long bangs and elaborate spitcurls. She
+pulled out half of my eyebrows, glued false eyelashes to my lids, covered
+my face with all sorts of creams and powders and put a little black dot just
+
+above the corner of my lip. I felt awkward and over-painted, but I doubted
+my own mother could have recognized me.
+We had decided to head for Miami. Since airports were more closely
+watched than anyplace else, we plotted a ground route — by car to New
+York and by train to Miami. After the car was rented and David had packed
+his things, we set out on this wild odyssey, the details of which we had to
+improvise as we went along.
+In a turnpike motel on the outskirts of Detroit, I turned on the television to
+watch the news. "Today, Angela Davis, wanted on charges of murder,
+kidnapping and conspiracy in connection with the Marin County
+Courthouse shootout, was seen leaving the home of her parents in
+Birmingham, Alabama. She is known to have attended a meeting of the
+local branch of the Black Panther Party. When Birmingham authorities
+finally caught up with her, she managed to outrun them, driving her 1959
+blue Rambler . . ."
+Was it my sister they were talking about? But she was supposed to be in
+Cuba. And the last time I had seen my car, it was parked outside Kendra
+and Franklin's on 50th Street in L.A.
+I was afraid for my parents. The FBI and the local police force must have
+been hovering around the house like buzzards. Knowing that the lines were
+tapped, I had not risked a phone call. All I could do was hope that Franklin
+had found some way to tell them that I was safe.
+In the city of Detroit, we lost ourselves in the crowds as we searched for an
+optometrist who could quickly make me up a pair of glasses. I hadn't been
+home since the news of the rebellion, and had no luggage. I had to buy
+some clothes so I could get out of the things I had been wearing for the last
+few days.
+From Detroit, we drove on to New York, where we boarded a train that took
+almost two days to arrive in Miami. There, under the blinding late summer
+sun, I barricaded myself inside an unfurnished apartment David rented,
+waiting for the times to change. I felt almost as much a prisoner as if I had
+been locked up in a jail and often felt jealous because David could go out
+
+when he wished — he even traveled back to Chicago. I stayed in, read and
+watched television news: draconic repression of the Palestinian movement
+by King Hussein of Jordan; the first of the major prison rebellions at the
+Tombs in New York.
+There was never any news of George. Of George, John, Fleeta, Ruchell,
+San Quentin . . .
+
+***
+
+Toward the end of September, signs pointed to a hot and deadly pursuit.
+David's mother, who lived near Miami, told him that two men had come to
+her house inquiring as to his whereabouts. The old fears erupted again, and
+I began to seriously doubt that it would be possible to elude the police
+without leaving the country altogether. But each time I considered going
+abroad, the thought of being indefinitely exiled in some other country was
+even more horrible than the idea of being locked up in jail. At least in jail I
+would be closer to my people, closer to the movement.
+No. I would not leave the country, but I thought that I could lead the FBI to
+believe that I had managed to get out. The last thing I did in that bare
+Miami apartment was to draw up a statement to be delivered to someone
+who could release it to the press. I wrote about Jonathan's youthful, even
+romantic, determination to challenge the injustices of the prison system and
+about the tremendous loss we had experienced when he was killed on
+August 7 in Marin County. I affirmed my innocence and, implying that I
+was already out of the country, promised that when the political climate in
+California became less hysterical, I would return to clear myself through the
+courts. Meanwhile, I wrote, the struggle would go on.
+
+OCTOBER 13, 1970
+
+We were back in New York. I had been underground about two months.
+With the familiar tightness in my stomach, the now habitual knot in my
+throat, I woke up, got dressed, and struggled with my disguise. Another
+tedious twenty minutes trying to get the eye make-up to look presentable.
+More impatient pulls at the wig, trying to lessen the discomfort of the tightfitting elastic. I tried to forget that today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps any of
+a long string of days to come, might be the day of my capture.
+When David Poindexter and I left the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge late
+that morning in October, the situation had become desperate. We were
+rapidly running out of money and everyone we knew was under
+surveillance. Wandering through the surrounding Manhattan neighborhood,
+we thought about our next move. Strolling down Eighth Avenue, lost in
+crowds of New Yorkers oblivious to everything going on around them, I felt
+better than I had in the motel. Hoping to calm our nerves, we decided to
+spend the afternoon at the movies. To this day I do not remember what
+movie we saw. I was hopelessly preoccupied with problems of eluding the
+police, wondering how much longer I could tolerate isolation, knowing that
+to contact anyone would be suicide.
+The movie was over shortly before six. David and I talked very little as we
+headed in the direction of the motel. We passed the broken-down shops on
+Eighth Avenue and were crossing over to the motel side of the street when
+suddenly I seemed to see police agents all around me. Surely this was just
+another one of my recurring fits of paranoia. Yet as we walked through the
+glass doors of the motel, I had a sudden impulse to turn around and race
+back into the anonymous crowds I had just left. But if my instincts were
+correct, if all these nondescript white men were in fact policemen
+surrounding us, then the slightest abrupt move on my part would give them
+the excuse they needed to shoot us down on the spot. I remembered how
+they had murdered li'l Bobby Hutton, how they shot him in the back after
+telling him to run. If, on the other hand, my instincts were groundless, my
+running would only arouse suspicion. I had no choice but to keep on
+walking. Inside the lobby, my fears seemed to be confirmed in every
+straight-looking white man standing around. I was positive that all these
+men were agents standing in a formation previously agreed upon, preparing
+themselves for attack. But nothing happened. As nothing had happened in
+
+the motel in Detroit, when I had also been certain that we were about to be
+captured. As nothing had happened on the countless other occasions when
+my unnaturally high level of tension had transformed perfectly ordinary
+events into scenes of impending capture.
+I wondered what David was thinking. It seemed like a long time since we
+had said anything to each other. He could conceal his nervousness in tight
+situations and, besides, we rarely talked about those moments when we
+must both have suspected that the police were about to pounce upon us.
+When we made it past the front desk, I breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing
+had broken. This was probably just another normal day in the life of this
+typical New York motel.
+I was just beginning to recuperate when a plump, redfaced white man,
+wearing what could have been the short, regulation haircut of a policeman,
+got into the elevator with us. My fears were rekindled. I again held my
+ritual soliloquy: He was probably an executive; after all, if you're being
+pursued, all white men with short hair and plain suits look like police
+agents. Besides, if they had really caught up with us, wouldn't it have been
+more logical for them to make the arrest downstairs?
+During the interminable elevator ride to the seventh floor, I convinced
+myself that my overactive imagination had created this aura of danger, and
+that we would probably make it safely through that day. One more day.
+Out of the habit of living in clandestinity, I lingered behind several yards
+while David went ahead to check out the room. While he was turning the
+key in the lock, which appeared to present more difficulties than usual,
+someone opened a door on the other side of the corridor. A frail figure
+peered through and, although he didn't look like a policeman, his sudden
+appearance sent me tumbling back into my terrifying fantasies. Of course,
+this pale little man could have simply been a motel guest on his way to
+dinner. But something told me that the scenario of the arrest had begun and
+that this man was number one in the cast. I thought I felt someone behind
+me. The man in the elevator. Now there was not the slightest trace of
+uncertainty in my mind. This was the real thing.
+
+Precisely at the moment when all panic should have broken loose inside me,
+I felt calmer and more composed than I had in a long time. I lifted my head
+higher and began to stride confidently toward my room. As I passed the
+open door facing my room, the frail man reached out and grabbed my arm.
+He said nothing. More agents were pouring out behind him and others were
+streaming out of a room across the hall. "Angela Davis?" "Are you Angela
+Davis?" The questions were coming from all directions. I glared at them.
+During the ten or twelve seconds between the elevator and the point of
+confrontation, all kinds of thoughts tore through my mind. I remembered
+the television program I had watched in the Miami apartment: The FBI — a
+typical, inane TV melodrama of agents pursuing fugitives, complete with
+the final violent encounter which left the pursued with bullets in their skulls
+and the FBI agents shown as heroes. Just as I moved to turn off the set, a
+photograph of me flashed on the screen as if it were a part of the
+fictionalized FBI pursuit. "Angela Davis," a deep voice said, "is one of the
+FBI's ten most wanted criminals. She is wanted for the crimes of murder,
+kidnapping and conspiracy. She is very likely armed, so if you see her, do
+not try to do anything. Contact your local FBI immediately." In other words,
+let your "very likely armed" FBI have the honor of shooting her down.
+David and I were unarmed. If they pulled out their weapons we wouldn't
+have a chance. As the frail man reached for me, I saw the guns coming out.
+I imagined the deafening noise of gunshots and our bodies lying in pools of
+blood in the corridor of the Howard Johnson motel.
+They forced David into a room on the right side of the corridor and shoved
+me into one on the left. There they ripped the wig off my head, cuffed my
+hands behind me and fingerprinted me on the spot. All the while pelting me
+with the same question: "Are you Angela Davis?" "Angela Davis?" "Angela
+Davis?" I said nothing. Obviously they had gone through similar scenes
+many times before. They had rehearsed this moment with the false arrests
+of scores, perhaps hundreds of tall, light-skinned Black women with large
+naturals. Only the fingerprints would tell them whether they had caught the
+real one this time. The prints were compared. The panic on the chief's face
+was replaced by relief. His underlings were ransacking my purse like
+bandits. As I stood there, determined to preserve my dignity, elaborate
+
+preparations were being made to get me out. I could hear them alerting
+other agents who must have been stationed at various points in and outside
+of the motel. All these "precautions," all these dozens of agents fit in
+perfectly with the image they had constructed of me as one of the country's
+ten most wanted criminals: the big bad Black Communist enemy.
+About ten agents shoved me through the crowd that had already gathered in
+the downstairs lobby and on the sidewalk. A long caravan of unmarked cars
+was waiting. Speeding through the streets, I caught a glimpse of another
+caravan taking David to some unknown destination.
+My hands were so tightly cuffed behind me that if I had not balanced my
+body on the very edge of the back seat, the circulation in my arms would
+have stopped. The agent in the front seat turned around and, smiling, said,
+"Miss Davis, would you like a cigarette?"
+I spoke for the first time since the capture. "Not from you."
+Inside the FBI headquarters, where the caravan came to a halt, I was met by
+a woman with bleached-out hair who looked more like a truck-stop waitress
+than the police matron she was. She searched me in a little room that looked
+like a gynecologist's office, although my short knit skirt and thin cotton
+blouse couldn't have concealed a weapon of any description.
+Later, in a room with fluorescent lights flooding bright red vinyl couches,
+some agents strode in with stacks of papers in their hands. They took seats
+directly opposite me and spread out their papers, confident that they were
+about to get into a long, involved interrogation. Before they formulated
+their first question, I told them I had nothing to say to the FBI.
+I knew that they could not legally hold me for any period of time without
+allowing me to contact a lawyer. Nevertheless, each time I demanded access
+to a telephone, they ignored me.
+Finally, they said that an attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, was on the telephone
+and that I could speak to him. I had never met Lefcourt before, but his name
+was familiar to me in connection with his work for the twenty-one members
+of the Black Panther Party on trial in New York.
+
+In a gigantic room, a telephone with its receiver off the hook sat on one of
+the scores of desks. But Lefcourt was not on the other end, only silence.
+Looking around the room, I noticed my belongings spread out on some of
+the desks a few yards away from where I was sitting. David's possessions
+were scattered on another series of desks. Agents were hovering over our
+things, going through them meticulously.
+The bearers of the handcuffs, who had removed them for the search and the
+mug shots and fingerprints, reappeared to fasten them on my wrists once
+more. I wondered why they cuffed my hands in front this time.
+Going down in the elevator, my thoughts were far away. I was trying to
+figure out how to reach a comrade or a friend. When the doors slid open,
+furious flashes of light jolted me out of my reflections. That's why they had
+cuffed my hands in front. As far as I could see, reporters and photographers
+were crowded into the lobby.
+Trying hard not to look surprised, I lifted my head, straightened my back
+and, between the two agents, made the long walk through the light flashes
+and staccato questions toward the caravan waiting outside.
+When the wailing of the sirens tapered off and the caravan began to slow
+down, I realized that I was somewhere in Greenwich Village. As the car
+turned into a dark driveway, a corrugated aluminum door began to rise and
+once again, crowds of photographers with flashing lights jumped out of the
+shadows. The red brick wall surrounding this tall archaic structure looked
+very familiar, but it took me a few moments to locate it in my memory. Of
+course; it was the mysterious place I had seen so often during the years I
+attended Elisabeth Irwin High School, not too far from there. It was the
+New York Women's House of Detention, which stood there at the main
+intersection in the Village, at Greenwich and Sixth avenues.
+While the car was rolling into the prisoners' entrance, a flock of memories
+fought for my attention. Walking to the subway station after school, I used
+to look up at this building almost every day, trying not to listen to the
+terrible noises spilling from the windows. They were coming from the
+women locked behind bars, looking down on the people passing in the
+streets, and screaming incomprehensible words.
+
+At age fifteen I accepted some of the myths surrounding prisoners. I did not
+see them as quite the criminals society said they were, but they did seem
+aliens in the world I inhabited. I never knew what to do when I saw the
+outlines of women's heads through the almost opaque windows of the jail. I
+could never understand what they were saying — whether they were crying
+out for help, whether they were calling for someone in particular, or
+whether they simply wanted to talk to anyone who was "free." My mind
+was now filled with the specters of those faceless women whom I had not
+answered. Would I scream out at the people passing in the streets, only to
+have them pretend not to hear me as I once pretended not to hear those
+women?
+The inside of this jail stood in stark contrast to the building I had just left.
+The FBI headquarters was modern, antiseptically clean, its plastic texture
+illuminated by fluorescent lights. The Women's House of Detention was
+old, musty, dreary and dim. The floor of the receiving room was unpainted
+cement, dirt from the shoes of thousands of prisoners, policemen and
+matrons etched into its surface. There was a single desk where all the
+paperwork seemed to be done, and rows of long benches which looked as
+though they had once been pews in a storefront church.
+I was told to sit on the front bench in the right-hand row. A few other
+women were scattered unsystematically throughout the benches. Some, I
+learned, had just been booked; others had come in from a day in court. Food
+was brought in to us, but I had no appetite for the wrinkled hot dogs and
+cold potatoes.
+Suddenly there was a loud rumble outside the gate. Scores of women were
+walking up to the entrance, waiting for the iron gate to be opened. I
+wondered what could have led to such a massive bust, but one of the sisters
+inside told me that these were the women returning from court on the last
+bus.
+All the women I could see were either Black or Puerto Rican. There were
+no white prisoners in the group. One of the Puerto Rican sisters called out,
+"Are you Spanish?" At first I didn't think she could mean me, but then I
+remembered how I must have looked with my hair straight and flat after the
+agents had snatched the wig away. I said "no" with as warm a tone as I
+
+could manage, trying to convey that it did not really matter: the same jailers
+would be holding the same hammer over our heads. While the women who
+had returned from court were still standing outside the iron gates, I was led
+out of the room. I thought that I was on my way to the cells, but instead I
+found myself in a large windowless room, a dim light bulb barely
+illuminating the center of the ceiling. There were the same filthy cement
+floors, drab yellow tile walls and two very old office desks.
+A robust white matron was in charge. When I discovered, amid the papers
+taped to the wall, my picture and description on an FBI Wanted poster, she
+snatched it down. My eyes shifted to the next poster. To my surprise it bore
+the photograph and description of a woman whom I had known in high
+school. Kathy Boudin had been in my eleventh and twelfth grade classes at
+Elisabeth Irwin High School. Now she was on the FBI's Wanted list.
+When the work shift changed, I was still waiting in that dingy room. A new
+officer was sent to guard me. She was black, she was young — younger
+than I — she wore a natural, and as she approached, she showed none of the
+belligerence and arrogance I had learned to associate with jail matrons.
+It was a disarming experience. Yet it was not the fact that she was Black
+that threw me. I had encountered Black matrons before — in jails in San
+Diego and Los Angeles — but it was her manner: unaggressive and
+apparently sympathetic.
+At first she was taciturn. But after a few minutes, in a quiet voice, she told
+me, "A lot of officers here — the Black officers — have been pulling for
+you. We've been hoping all along that you would get to someplace that was
+safe."
+I wanted to talk to her, but I felt it was best to be wary of any involved
+conversation. For all I knew, she might have been instructed to assume this
+sympathetic posture. If I appeared to be deluded by her sympathy, if I
+appeared to become familiar with her, it would lend credibility should she
+decide to lie about the content of our conversations. I would be safer if I
+maintained the distance, the formality.
+
+Thinking that I might be able to pry some information out of her about my
+predicament, I asked her why the delay was so long. She didn't know all the
+details, she said, but she thought that they were trying to decide how they
+could keep me away from the main jail population. The problem was the
+lack of facilities for isolation. It was her feeling that they would put me in
+4b, the area of the jail reserved for women with psychological problems.
+I looked at her in disbelief. If they locked me up in a tank for mental
+patients, their next step might be to declare me insane. Perhaps they would
+try to say that communism is a psychological illness — something akin to
+masochism, exhibitionism or sadism.
+Surprised at my reaction, she tried to console me by saying that I'd probably
+be happier there — sometimes the women would ask to be moved to the
+"mental" cellblock because they couldn't tolerate the noise in the main
+population. But to me, jail was jail — there were no degrees of better or
+worse. And nothing could detract from the thought that they wanted to
+isolate me because they feared the impact the mere presence of a political
+prisoner would have on the other women.
+I reminded the officer that I had not yet made the two telephone calls due
+me. I needed a lawyer, and I knew I had the right to contact one.
+"A lawyer by the name of John Abt has been trying to get in to see you,"
+she said. "But visiting hours for attorneys are over at five o'clock. I'm sorry
+I can't do anything."
+"If I can't see him, at least I ought to be able to call him."
+"These people," she said, "haven't decided how to deal with you. They say
+you're a federal prisoner, under the jurisdiction of the federal marshals. We
+have federal prisoners all the time. The marshals are the ones who should
+have let you make the two phone calls. At least, that's what the captain
+said."
+"For five hours," I insisted, "I have been trying to make a phone call, and
+everybody I ask gives me the run-around."
+
+"You know, no prisoners here are actually allowed to use the phone. You
+have to write out your number and your message on a form and a special
+officer does the calling."
+I started to protest, but soon realized that nothing I said would make them
+give me access to a telephone that evening. The only thing they
+relinquished was a card John Abt had left at the front gate.
+The crowd of women just back from court had apparently been "processed,"
+and I could now return to the receiving room to await my turn for this
+mysterious "process." As I entered the room, I saw a figure lying on a
+hospital cart, almost completely covered with a sheet. I didn't know whether
+it was living or dead. It was simply there, unattended, in the least
+conspicuous corner of the receiving room. When I tried to inspect it as
+carefully as I could from a distance, I noticed an elevation in the middle that
+seemed to be moving. It was a pregnant prisoner about to deliver — and
+soon. Wasn't anybody going to do anything? Were they going to let her have
+the baby right here in this dump? Even if they did take her to a halfway
+decent hospital, what would happen to the infant once it was born? Would it
+be placed in an orphanage while she did her time? I felt angry but helpless
+as I watched the sister go further and further into labor. Soon the iron gates
+opened, and the attendants of a police ambulance came to take her away. I
+watched them carry the stretcher into the night.
+At last it was my turn. The print of my forefinger was stamped on an orange
+card, which, they informed me, was the jail identification that every
+prisoner had to keep with her at all times. Then came another body search. I
+vigorously protested this second search — the FBI had already done it once.
+The officer assigned to search me was ambivalent about the procedure.
+While I undressed in the shower room, she discreetly pretended to be
+looking for something. She gave me a hospital dressing gown and directed
+me to sit on a bench outside a closed door. From the women already waiting
+there, I learned that we were about to be searched internally. Each time
+prisoners left the jail for a court appearance, and upon their return, they had
+to submit to a vaginal and rectal examination.
+It was one A.M. before they actually booked me into the jail. There were
+only three women left in the receiving room. One of them stared at me for a
+
+long time and finally asked whether I was Angela Davis. When I smiled
+and nodded, she said that coming in from court she had seen crowds outside
+demonstrating for me. All kinds of people — young, old, Black, white.
+"What? Where?" I was tremendously excited by the possibility that people
+in the movement were near.
+The sister told us to be quiet for a moment. If we listened especially hard,
+we might be able to hear some of the chants. Sure enough, muffled rhythms
+were penetrating these massive walls. Just outside the building, the sister
+said, they were chanting, "Free Angela Davis." The sister describing the
+scene was in jail for possession of heroin. (The first thing she was going to
+do when she got out, she said, was to look up her connection.) With an
+expression of triumph on her face, she assured me that I was going to win.
+She said this knowing that according to jail standards, I was facing very
+heavy charges.
+The entire jail was shrouded in darkness when I finally reached the cell in
+4b. It was no more than four and a half feet wide. The only furnishings were
+an iron cot bolted to the floor and a seatless toilet at the foot of the bed.
+Some minutes after they had locked me in, the officer in charge of that unit
+— another young Black woman — came to the iron door. She whispered
+through the grating that she was shoving a piece of candy under the door.
+She sounded sincere enough, but I couldn't take any chances. I didn't want
+to be paranoid, but it was better to be too distrustful than not cautious
+enough. I was familiar with jailhouse "suicides" in California. For all I
+knew, there might be poison in the candy.
+The first night in jail, I had no desire to sleep. I thought about George and
+his brothers in San Quentin. I thought about Jonathan. I thought about my
+mother and father and hoped that they would make it through this ordeal.
+And then I thought about the demonstration outside, about all the people
+who had dropped everything to fight for my freedom.
+I had just been captured; a trial awaited me in California on the charges of
+murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. A conviction on any one of these
+charges could mean death in the gas chamber. One would have thought that
+this was an enormous defeat. Yet, at that moment, I was feeling better than I
+
+had felt in a long time. The struggle would be difficult, but there was
+already a hint of victory. In the heavy silence of the jail, I discovered that if
+I concentrated hard enough, I could hear echoes of slogans being chanted
+on the other side of the walls. "Free Angela Davis." "Free All Political
+Prisoners."
+
+The key rattling in the cell-gate lock startled me. A guard was opening the
+gate for a plump young Black woman wearing a faded blue prisoner's
+uniform and holding a big tray in her hands.
+Smiling, she said in a very soft voice, "Here's your breakfast. Do you want
+some coffee?"
+Her gentle manner was comforting and made me feel like I was among
+human beings again. I sat up on the cot, thanked her and told her that I
+would very much like a cup of coffee.
+Looking around, I realized that there was no place to put the food — the
+bed and the toilet were the only furnishings in the tiny cell. But the sister,
+obviously having gone through this many times before, had already stooped
+down to a squatting position and was placing the food on the floor: a small
+box of cornflakes, a paper cup filled with watery milk, two pieces of plain
+white bread and a paper cup into which she began to pour the coffee.
+"Is there any black coffee?" I asked her, partly because I didn't drink coffee
+with milk and partly because I wanted an excuse to exchange a few more
+words with her.
+"When they give it to us, it's already like this," she answered, "but I'll see
+what I can do about getting you some black coffee tomorrow."
+The guard told me I had to get ready for my court appearance. Then she
+slammed the gate on the young woman's exit. While she was unlocking the
+next cell, the sister whispered through the bars, "Don't worry about a thing.
+We're all on your side." And she disappeared down the corridor.
+
+I looked down at my breakfast, and saw that a roach had already discovered
+it. I left it all spread out on the bare floor untouched.
+After I had gone through the elaborate steps involved in getting dressed for
+court, a matron led me downstairs. A crowd of white men was milling
+around the receiving room. Seeing me, they swept toward me like vultures
+and clamped handcuffs around my wrists, which still ached from the
+previous day. Outside, shiny tan cars crowded into the cobblestone
+courtyard. It was still dark when the caravan reached the federal courthouse.
+A glimpse of the morning paper's boldlettered headlines, peeping out from
+under some man's arm, stunned me: ANGELA DAVIS CAPTURED IN
+NEW YORK. It suddenly struck me that the huge crowd of press people
+summoned by the FBI the evening before had probably written similar
+headline stories throughout the country. Knowing that my name was now
+familiar to millions of people, I felt overwhelmed. Yet I knew that all this
+publicity was not really aimed at me as an individual. Using me as an
+example, they wanted to discredit the Black Liberation Movement, the Left
+in general and obviously also the Communist Party. I was only the occasion
+for their manipulations.
+The holding cell where I spent the next several hours was cleaner than the
+jail cell I had just left and looked like a giant, unfinished bathroom. It had
+sparkling white tile walls and a light-colored linoleum floor. A seatless
+toilet stood in one of the corners. Long metal benches lined the three walls.
+One of the federal bureaucrats came into the cell.
+"I have nothing to say," I told him, "until I see my lawyer."
+"Your father's lawyer is waiting outside," he said.
+My father's lawyer? Perhaps it was a friend posing as my "father's lawyer"
+in order to get permission to see me.
+In a large hall filled with rows of desks, John Abt was waiting to see me.
+Although I had never met him before I knew about the trials in which he
+had successfully defended members of our Party. With a great feeling of
+relief, I sat down to talk with him.
+
+"I waited for hours last night at the jail, but they refused to let me in," John
+said. "I had to get your father to call them before they would let me see you
+this morning."
+He went on to explain that I was about to be arraigned on the federal
+charges — interstate flight to avoid prosecution. Before he had gotten very
+far in his discussion of the legal proceedings before us, a group of people
+pressed through a door at the other end of the room. Without my glasses,
+which the FBI had not bothered to return, the people's faces were blurred.
+Noticing a young Black woman involved in a heated exchange with the
+marshals, I squinted in order to see her more clearly.
+"That's Margaret!" I shouted.
+Margaret Burnham was a very old friend of mine. During my youngest
+years, her family and mine had lived in the same housing project in
+Birmingham. When the Burnhams moved to New York, we visited them
+every summer for four years, then we alternated the visits — sometimes
+they would come to Birmingham and we would go to New York. Our
+families had been so close that I had always considered Margaret, her
+sisters Claudia and Linda, and her brother Charles more family than friends.
+I had not seen her for several years.
+She had been in Mississippi, gotten married and given birth to a child. I
+knew that she had recently graduated from law school and I assumed she
+was now practicing in New York.
+"Margaret," I called, as loudly as I could, "come on over." Apparently this
+was enough to settle the argument she was having with the marshal, for he
+did nothing to prevent her from walking over to the desk where John and I
+were. It felt so good to embrace her.
+"Margaret," I said to her, "I'm so glad you came. You don't know how glad I
+am to see you." As we started talking about personal things, I almost forgot
+that there was business to be taken care of.
+"Can you work on the case?" I asked her finally, disperately hoping she
+would say yes.
+
+"You know I will, Angela," she answered, "If that's what you think I should
+do."
+It was as if half the battle had already been won.
+John Abt went on to explain the legal situation.
+Back in August, Marin County had charged me with murder, kidnapping
+and conspiracy to commit murder and rescue prisoners. On the basis of an
+FBI agent's affidavit declaring that I had been seen by "reliable sources" in
+Birmingham, a federal judge had issued a warrant charging me with
+"interstate flight to avoid prosecution."
+It was possible, John said, that I might be "removed" to California, which
+meant that without further litigation I would simply be transferred from the
+New York Federal District to the California Federal District. But more than
+likely, he surmised, I would be "turned over" to the State of New York for
+extradition to California, and we would be able to challenge California in
+the New York courts.
+As we were winding up this conference, David walked into the room,
+encircled by guards. I hadn't seen him since our arrest. He looked as if he
+hadn't slept either.
+In a cool, crisp tone, he called out to me, "Remember now, no matter what,
+we're going to beat this thing."
+"No talking between the prisoners," a voice announced. It could have come
+from any one of the marshals standing around.
+"O.K., David," I said, ignoring the command. "You be sure to keep strong
+yourself."
+I had never seen a courtroom so small. With its marred walls of blond
+wood, it had the worn-out elegance of an old mansion. There was just
+enough room for the bench and a single row of chairs lining the back wall.
+The smallness of the courtroom exaggerated the height of the judge's bench.
+The judge himself was little, like his courtroom. He was wearing old-
+
+fashioned plastic-rimmed glasses, and his white hair was spread sparsely
+over his head. I thought about Soledad guard O. G. Miller perched in his
+gun tower, aiming his carbine at the three brothers he killed in the yard in
+January.
+There were no spectators. The only non-official people were reporters —
+and there were not very many of them. As I entered, a sister sitting in the
+seat closest to the door held up a copy of the hardcover edition of George's
+Soledad Brother. This was the first time I had seen the book, which I had
+read in manuscript.
+The arraignment on the federal charges was short and to the point. All the
+prosecutor was required to do was to prove, for the record, that I was the
+Angela Davis named in the warrant. The bail figure was a farce. Who could
+even contemplate raising $250,000 to get me out of jail?
+It was still early — late morning or early afternoon — when I returned to
+the holding cell. The last time I had been in the cell, my thoughts had been
+monopolized by the problem of finding a lawyer. Now that I had two fine
+lawyers whom I trusted and loved, I could no longer ward off thoughts of
+my imprisonment. I was alone with the shiny tile walls and the gray steel
+bars. Walls and bars, nothing more. I wished I had a book or, if not
+something to read, at least a pencil and a sheet of paper.
+I fought the tendency to individualize my predicament. Pacing from one
+end of this cell to the other, from a bench along one wall to a bench along
+the other, I kept telling myself that I didn't have the right to get upset about
+a few hours of being alone in a holding cell. What about the brother —
+Charles Jordon was his name — who had spent, not hours, but days and
+weeks in a pitch-dark strip cell in Soledad Prison, hardly large enough for
+him to stretch out on the cold cement, reeking of urine and human
+excrement because the only available toilet was a hole in the floor which
+could hardly be seen in the dark.
+I thought about the scene George had described in the manuscript of his
+book — the brother who had painted a night sky on the ceiling of his cell,
+because it had been years since he had seen the moon and stars. (When it
+was discovered, the guards painted over it in gray.) And there was Ericka
+
+Huggins at Niantic State Farm for Women in Connecticut. Ericka, Bobby,
+the Soledad Brothers, the Soledad 7, the Tombs Rebels and all the countless
+others whose identities were hidden behind so much concrete and steel, so
+many locks and chains. How could I indulge even the faintest inclination
+toward selfpity? Yet I paced faster across the holding cell. I walked with the
+determination of someone who has someplace very important to go. At the
+same time, I was trying not to let the jailers see my agitation.
+When someone finally opened the gate, it was late in the evening. Margaret
+and John were waiting to accompany me to a court appearance in the same
+courtroom we had appeared in that morning. Aside from us, there were not
+"civilians" in the courtroom, not even the reporters from the morning
+session. I wondered what kind of secret appearance this was going to be.
+The elderly judge announced that he was rescinding the bail and releasing
+me on my own recognizance. I was sure I had misheard his words. But
+already, the Feds were approaching me to unlock the handcuffs. The judge
+said something else, which I hardly heard, and then suddenly several New
+York policemen moved in to replace the federal handcuffs with their own
+manacles.
+With the New York handcuffs binding my wrists, there was a trip to a musty
+police precinct office, where I was officially booked as a prisoner of the
+State of New York. Forms, fingerprints, mug shots — the same routine. The
+New York police seemed to be as confused as their surroundings. Amid all
+the papers haphazardly strewn on desks and counters, they were running
+around like novices. Their incompetence calmed me. It must have been
+around ten in the evening when one of them announced that there would be
+yet another court appearance. (Did Margaret and John know about this third
+court session?)
+The courtroom in the New York County Courthouse was larger than any I
+had ever seen. Its high ceilings and interminable rows of benches made it
+look like a church from another era. Most courtrooms are windowless, but
+this one seemed especially isolated from the outside world. It was so dimly
+lit, with hardly anyone but policemen sitting randomly on the benches, that
+I had the impression that what was about to happen was supposed to be
+hidden from the people outside.
+
+Neither Margaret nor John was there. When they told me that I had to be
+arraigned before a New York judge, I said that I wasn't budging from my
+seat until they contacted my lawyers. I was prepared to wait the whole
+night.
+When John finally arrived, he said that the police had directed him to the
+wrong courtroom. He had been running all over New York trying to find
+me. After hours of waiting, the court appearance lasted all of two minutes.
+Back at the jail, I was so physically and emotionally exhausted that I only
+wanted to sleep. Even the hard cell cot in the "mental" ward felt
+comfortable. But as soon as I closed my eyes, I was jolted out of my
+exhaustion by piercing screams in a language which sounded Slavic. They
+came from a cell at the other end of the corridor. Footsteps approached the
+cell in the darkness. Voices tried to calm the woman in English but could
+not assuage her terror. I listened to her all night — until they took her away
+in the morning.
+
+The same unpalatable breakfast — cornflakes, powdered milk and stale
+white bread — was placed on the unswept floor of my cell the next
+morning. As she had promised, Shirley, who had brought my breakfast the
+morning before, had found me a cup of black coffee. Accompanying her
+this time was a tall, slim Puerto Rican woman wearing a very short natural.
+She introduced herself as "just Tex" and went on to say that when the sisters
+in her corridor learned that I was in 4b, they wanted me to know that they
+were convinced we would win.
+After Shirley and Tex had gone, I called through the bars, telling the officer
+to bring me my cigarettes — they had kept them when I came from court
+the night before.
+"You can't have a cigarette now," she called from the day room. "You'll
+have to wait till cigarette time, like the rest of the inmates." She spoke as if
+it were against the regulations not to understand that smoking took place
+only at "cigarette time." When she came around a half-hour later, she gave
+
+me a single cigarette and insisted on lighting it herself through the grating
+of the cell door. "Sorry, these are the rules. We have to follow the rules."
+The corridor was quiet that morning. When I had finished my cigarette, I
+called to the guard once more.
+"I'm ready to take my shower and get dressed."
+She came back to my cell. "I can't let you out right now."
+"I want to brush my teeth, take a shower and put on something other than
+this gown."
+"I can't let you out. Hasn't anyone explained the rules of 4b? The ‘girls' can
+only come out of their cells when two officers are on duty." (All prisoners
+— whether they were sixteen or sixty-were referred to as "girls.")
+Nothing, I later discovered, absolutely nothing was allowed inside the cells
+— not only were cigarettes and matches banned, but also books, writing
+materials, toothbrushes, soap, washcloths, clothes and shoes. Before being
+locked into her cell, each prisoner was always checked to make sure she
+had removed her underwear and was wearing nothing except the flimsy,
+light-green nightgown she was given. A book or a magazine? How could
+they be used to inflict injury on oneself? And toilet paper? We could not
+even keep a roll of toilet paper in the cell. Like dependent infants, each time
+we wanted to use the toilet, we had to call the officer to bring us paper.
+Shortly before lunch, the second officer arrived and the cell doors were
+unlocked. A strange melange of women emerged from the cells: one very
+young Black woman, short and heavyset, with her natural thinning out on
+one side. Something seemed to be churning her up inside. Another Black
+woman with straight hair, and an incredibly serene expression. She was far
+away from this jail in her thoughts. A white woman with dyed red hair,
+looking young one moment and very old the next, who began to pace
+frantically around the day room, mumbling incomprehensibly under her
+breath. And a young white woman, small, frail, with short blond hair, who
+seemed on the verge of panic, but didn't know how to express it.
+
+The women did not even notice that a new prisoner had been thrown in with
+them. Except for the woman who continued to pace, they each found places
+at the table in the day room and sat separate from one another, as if there
+were a mutual agreement that they would all refrain from invading the
+others' turf. After they took their seats, they became completely absorbed in
+themselves, blank stares telling me that no matter how much I wanted to
+talk, it would be futile to approach any of them.
+Later I learned that these women received Thorazine with their meals each
+day and, even if they were completely sane, the tranquilizers would always
+make them uncommunicative and detached from their surroundings. After a
+few hours of watching them gaze silently into space, I felt as though I had
+been thrown into a nightmare.
+Even there in the day room where the eyes of the officers were constantly
+following our most subtle gestures, we were not allowed to hold a pack of
+cigarettes or matches. If you wanted a cigarette, you approached the officer
+sitting at the desk, and she handed you one from your pack and lit it for
+you. If you were a chain smoker, as I was at the time, and especially if you
+had kept your sanity and your sobriety, this little ceremony was itself
+maddening.
+I had loudly protested being kept in 4b from the very first day. I didn't
+belong there — or had I been judged a mental case? The officer said I had
+been placed in 4b not because I was psychologically unsound, but for my
+own safety and to keep me from disrupting the life of the jail. I was not
+persuaded.
+I began to make as many requests as I could think of. I knew that there must
+be some kind of library in the building, so I asked to visit it, certain that
+if I read only the piles of Reader's Digests lying around, I too would be a
+candidate for Thorazine. The message which came back was that I could
+order books from the library, and they would be brought up to me. The
+same rule applied to the commissary — I could order whatever I needed,
+and it would be delivered to me. I had never seen the library or the
+commissary, but when virtually nothing came back in response to my lists, I
+realized that I had terribly overestimated both of these jail institutions. Even
+
+items like a ball-point pen or a natural comb were not sold in commissary
+and were therefore considered "contraband."
+The day was dragging, and I was beginning to wonder whether they were
+planning to deny me contact with my attorneys. Either Margaret or John
+should have certainly come to see me by now. When I made inquiries about
+my attorneys' visits, the officer said that they had received instructions that
+although I was allowed to have counsel visits, I was to go nowhere without
+an "escort." (The jail euphemism for a guard.) Normally all a prisoner
+needed was a pass. At last the call came announcing the arrival of the
+lawyers. Going to meet them was my first opportunity to walk through any
+part of the jail at a normal hour — when the prisoners were not locked in or
+sleeping.
+Women awaiting trial were always allowed to wear their own clothes. The
+women in 4b, however, the "mental cases," wore the uniforms of sentenced
+women, so I had to go down to the ground floor for my first visit in a dungcolored, unhemmed cotton dress, at least two sizes too large and about five
+inches above my ankles. I had washed my hair that morning and had my
+natural back for the first time in almost two months — but since we weren't
+allowed to use natural combs, my hair was in hopeless disarray. Yet
+excitement about my trip to the main floor totally annihilated any worry
+about my appearance.
+When the iron door was opened, sounds peculiar to jails and prisons poured
+into my ears — the screams, the metallic clanging, officers' keys clinking.
+Some of the woman noticed me and smiled warmly or threw up their fists in
+gestures of solidarity. The elevator stopped on the third floor, where the
+commissary was located. The women who were waiting for the elevator
+recognized me and told me in a cordial, sisterly way, their words sometimes
+reinforced with their fists, that they were on my side. These were the
+"dangerous women" who might attack me because they didn't like
+"Communists," had I not been hidden away in 4b. This and subsequent trips
+to the main floor were further evidence of what I already knew: that the
+administration's allegations that the prison population might harm me were
+nonsense.
+
+On the first floor I was directed to a booth which became a regular hangout
+over the next weeks. The first problem I discussed with Margaret and John
+was what we could do to get me out of 4b and into the main population. As
+we talked we noticed that the guard stationed at the table outside the booths
+was trying her best to listen to our conversation.
+In the days that followed, familiarity with the routine in 4b did not diminish
+the horror of living behind bars. I not only pressed harder for my own
+release, but I was becoming increasingly persuaded that something had to
+be done about this maximum security arrangement camouflaged as a
+therapeutic cellblock. Regardless of why the women in 4b had been placed
+there, they were all being horribly damaged. Whatever problems they had
+had initially were not solved, but rather systematically aggravated. I could
+see the erosion of their will taking place even during the short time I spent
+there.
+In the cell next to me lived a white woman somewhere between thirty and
+forty-five years old who had lost all contact with reality. Each night before
+she fell asleep the cellblock shook with her screams. Sometimes her
+rantings and ravings filled the air long after midnight. Her vile language,
+her weird imagery bespeckled with the most vulgar kind of racial epithets
+made me so angry that it was all I could do to prevent myself from trying to
+break through the steel and concrete that separated her cell from mine. I
+was convinced that she had been placed there intentionally as a part of the
+jailers' efforts to break me.
+When I saw this pitiful figure the next morning, it was clear that her
+sickness was so far advanced — some stage of schizophrenia — that she
+was beyond the reach of argument. Her illness had become a convenient
+vehicle for the expression of the racism which had grown like maggots in
+her unconscious. Each night, and every morning before breakfast came, she
+went through a prolonged ritual which took the form of a violent argument
+with some invisible figure in her cell. More often than not, this figure would
+be a Black man, and he would be attacking her with a kind of sexual
+perversity which would have been inconceivable had not her own verbal
+imagery been so vivid. She would purge this figure from her cell with a
+
+series of incantations. When her imagined attacker assumed some other
+position, it brought about a corresponding change in her incantations.
+One morning in the day room, Barbara, the young Black woman from the
+cell directly across from mine, broke her habitual silence to tell me she had
+refused her daily dose of Thorazine. It was very simple: she was tired of
+feeling like a vegetable all the time. She was going to resist the Thorazine
+and was going to get out of 4b. She knew about my own attempts to get out,
+and if we were both transferred she said she would like very much to be my
+"cellie" in the main population.
+In the cell next to Barbara's was a very young white woman who appeared
+to receive larger doses of Thorazine than any of the others. One day when
+she was not so spaced out, she wanted to know if I could help her with her
+case. (She was back from court and evidently had not been drugged so she
+would look more or less normal for the judge.) When I asked her about her
+charges, tears streamed down her face as she said repeatedly, "I could never
+do anything like that. I couldn't kill my own baby."
+She didn't understand where she was and had no comprehension whatever
+of the judicial system. Who were her friends, she wanted me to tell her, and
+who were the ones who wanted to put her away? She had been afraid to talk
+to her lawyer, for fear he would tell the judge. Now she was thoroughly
+crushed because a doctor who had sworn himself to secrecy had just taken
+the stand and divulged everything she had told him. All she wanted now
+was just a little Thorazine. She wanted to get away, forget, get high.
+Perhaps the most tragic of them all was Sandra — the teenager charged
+with arson. She was one of the women who had been in the receiving room
+the night I was arrested. I had noticed then that her hair was coming out in
+patches and had assumed that she had ringworm. My first day in 4b, she
+came out of the cell for meals. The second day, she ignored the key
+unlocking her cell gate at mealtimes. She silently and systematically pulled
+her hair out by the roots. From that day on, whenever I saw her, she was
+sitting quietly on her bed, yanking out hair by the handful. By the time I
+left, she was as thin as a wishbone, and all that was left of her natural was a
+few clumps of hair on one side of her pitiful hairless head.
+
+Of all the officers who were sent to do duty in 4b — and there were
+different ones almost every day — no one cared about this young woman,
+no one except a sweet, motherly Black woman officer, who seemed quite
+out of character in her guard's uniform. The few times she was on duty, she
+would tenderly coax the poor girl out of her depression, draw words from
+her tortured soul, bring her out of her cell into the day room and persuade
+her to eat a little. But this officer was rarely there, and she was only one
+person poised against an entire system in which there was nothing to
+encourage concern for a prisoner who was being slowly, hopelessly
+engulfed by her desperation.
+The week I spent in 4b was far worse than my worst fantasies of solitary
+confinement. It was torture to be surrounded by these women who urgently
+needed professional help. It was all the more torturous because each time I
+tried to help one of them out of her misery, I would discover that a wall —
+far more impervious than the walls of our cells — stood between us. I could
+not keep from becoming depressed myself when their "doctor" came to
+examine them — he simply prescribed larger doses of Thorazine, chloral
+hydrate, or other tranquilizers.
+Even if prisoners with severe psychological problems were given more
+attention, I wonder whether the approach would be fundamentally different
+from what I witnessed in 4b. Psychology as it is generally practiced is not
+geared to cure. Often it does not reach the root of the problem because it
+does not recognize the social origin of many forms of mental illness.
+How could the woman next door to me even begin to be cured if the
+psychologist treating her was not aware of the way in which racism, like an
+ancient plague, infects every joint, muscle and tissue of social life in this
+country? This woman was rotting in a snake pit of racism, flagellating
+herself daily with her obscene and graphic imagination. In order to
+understand her illness, it would be necessary to start with the illness of the
+society — for it was from the society that she had so perfectly learned how
+to hate Black people.
+Trapped in this wasteland inhabited by the sick, the drugged, and their
+indifferent keepers, my life revolved around Margaret's daily visits. They
+were oases, refreshing reentries into humanity. Our conversations — about
+
+the little world of our childhood, our families, and the larger world of global
+politics, the movement, the case — sustained me more than anything else
+during this period. She brought messages from my parents, and continually
+assured my mother that my health was good and my spirits were high.
+Margaret was my only link to my comrades, my friends, and she kept me
+from being totally swallowed up by the madness of that dungeon.
+She had grown very strong. Coupled with the responsibilities of her fulltime job at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and her total devotion to her
+six-year-old son, she was doing a full-time job on the case. And knowing
+how much I looked forward to her visits, she rarely missed a day.
+She came into the case fighting and kept it up for the entire twenty months.
+That first morning in the Federal Building she had reached me only after
+fighting her way through an assemblage of marshals. When she came to
+visit me in jail, the jailers said she didn't look like a lawyer: she seemed too
+young to have passed the bar in New York. And besides, she was Black and,
+to complete the unpopular combination, she was a woman. When she had
+established her right to visit me as my lawyer, she launched into an
+interminable battle with the jail administration over my rights.
+The first skirmish was fought in order to get me out of 4b. Margaret
+submitted request upon request to the administration, demanding that I be
+placed in some more normal section of the jail. She went from one officer
+to another, up the hierarchy from lieutenant to captain to deputy
+superintendent to the superintendent herself. Margaret insisted that she
+could not carry on a sensible conversation with this warden. (My own
+encounters with the woman confirmed everything I had heard about her
+from lawyers and prisoners alike. Unfortunately, she was Black. She was
+probably chosen for that reason — she had proved to be a convenient tool
+for the higher-ups in the New York Department of Corrections.)
+Nowhere along the hierarchy could any reason for my incarceration in 4b
+be given, aside from the ridiculous notion that the other women might
+attack me if I were not kept in a safely guarded place. By now we had
+accumulated enough evidence through my trips from the cellblock to the
+main floor for lawyers' visits to demonstrate the affection which the vast
+majority of the women felt for me.
+
+A little more than a week had passed when the warden informed Margaret
+that I was to be moved to the main population. I was extremely excited, but
+did not want to make it appear to the officers that this move was anything
+more than what I was due and had expected all along. Shortly before dinner,
+a young, emaciated-looking Puerto Rican officer came to fetch me from 4b.
+I gathered up my belongings — jail-issued dresses and underwear and the
+magazines I had managed to have brought in, said my good-byes to the
+women (even though most were irretrievably spaced out on drugs), and
+followed the officer through the iron door. I called to the women who were
+in the dining room across from the elevator and asked them to say good-bye
+to Shirley and Tex, who had brought our meals in 4b. When they heard I
+was leaving they both came running out, asking me to try to get back down
+that way to see them if I could.
+The bed assigned me in the tenth-floor dormitory, where at least a hundred
+women were sleeping, was in the very front of the hall, only a few yards
+away from the officer's desk. After a tasteless dinner in the diningrecreation room next door, I struck up conversations with a number of
+women. Many of the women were recuperating and were assigned to the
+dormitory because they needed to be near the hospital across the hall in case
+some problem arose. Some had just had babies.
+Others were elderly women who might not have survived the regular jail
+routine.
+One woman looked familiar. I soon realized that she was the pregnant
+woman I had seen the night I was arrested. When I asked her how her baby
+was, she was surprised that I knew about it. After I explained, she said that
+she had been in so much pain then that she had no memory of what had
+happened. We had a lively conversation about the jail, her case, her
+personal problems. Finally she got up enough nerve to ask me to explain
+what communism was. Some of the other women began to listen. We were
+in the back of the hall; there were no officers around, yet I knew they would
+find out that we were holding political talks. Most of the women seemed
+honestly interested and I snatched the opportunity to tell them that most of
+what they had heard about communism was a carefully woven network of
+lies.
+
+While I was arranging my personal effects in the small cabinet at the side of
+my bed, a young white woman came up to me and in an almost inaudible
+voice whispered, "I am a political prisoner also." She explained that a friend
+of her husband's had been arrested for possession of explosives in Oakland.
+They had apparently been tied into this affair by the police and were later
+arrested in New York. Their case was still in the extradition stages. She had
+given birth to a baby and was waiting here in almost total ignorance of
+developments in the lawsuit against them. (Later I learned that the officers
+had given her the name "Weatherman" although she didn't seem to have
+anything to do with that organization.)
+That evening I received my introduction to a wellknown institution in any
+prison — the grapevine. Several of the women told me that they had just
+heard "through the grapevine" that I had been transferred from 4b to the
+tenth floor for security reasons. The administration was afraid, so they said,
+that with the help of outside friends, I might attempt to escape from the
+fourth floor. Apparently it had been done before. There were even rumors
+that they had already uncovered some plot to rescue me. I don't know
+whether these were fantasies of the prisoners or of the jailers; in any event, I
+didn't completely dismiss the possibility that the administration was
+impelled by fear to transfer me to the tenth floor. It was amusing but also
+frightening, for if they had already acted on such irrational grounds, there
+was no telling what else they might try.
+Sure enough, the very next day I was told that I was about to be transferred
+to another part of the jail. I protested being bounced back and forth like a
+Ping-Pong ball, but actually I didn't mind the move, thinking that I was
+going into the regular population. I hated the lack of privacy in the
+dormitory. If I decided to do some reading or writing, it was impossible to
+retreat, except perhaps into a bathroom stall. At least in the cellblocks, the
+cell would provide a hint of privacy. I had no idea that my longing for some
+degree of seclusion was about to be overfulfilled. The main population I
+thought I was about to enter turned out to be a hurriedly improvised special
+isolation room separated from all of the corridors on the sixth floor.
+Outraged, I demanded to know what was going on, but of course there was
+no explanation from the officer who had silently led me away. After all, she
+
+said, she was only following the instructions of her supervisor. It was not
+hard to see the probable connection between the harmless discussion with
+the sisters upstairs about communism and this abrupt and unexplained move
+into solitary confinement.
+I looked around the cell in angry disbelief. It seemed especially illogical
+that after they had transferred me from the psychiatric cellblock to the
+dormitory, they would now isolate me altogether. Even as these thoughts
+sifted through my head, I realized that it was futile to try to understand the
+perverted logic of jailers.
+I learned later that this room was ordinarily used by the doctor, ostensibly
+for medical examinations. The isolation units which had existed in the past
+had been dismantled years ago, in an effort to remove from view the most
+blatant instances of inhumanity. Needless to say, they had not succeeded;
+inhumanity seethed from all the cracks and crevices of that place.
+As the work shifts changed — first at midnight, then early the next
+morning, there was a noticeable changing of the guard in front of the door. I
+began to realize that they had assigned someone to watch me twenty-four
+hours a day. Not only had they isolated me, they had placed me under
+maximum security.
+Later that night I looked out the window at the "free" people passing down
+Greenwich Avenue. I listened to the night sounds of the Village and paced
+back and forth in the room. When I finally got into bed, I kept my eyes
+open: I didn't want to be caught off guard in the middle of the night.
+The next morning it struck me that there was no shower in this cell. I began
+to wonder quite seriously whether they would construct a "special facility"
+for me. When I announced to the officer outside the door that I was ready
+for my daily shower, she said I would have to wait. It took over an hour to
+arrange for my shower because all the women had to be cleared from the
+corridor and locked into their cells before I was let out of mine. The officer
+unlocked the door and directed me through an iron gate into a long corridor
+of cells.
+
+This was the first time I had a chance to get a closer look at a corridor in the
+main jail population. When they weren't locked in their cells, I later
+discovered, the prisoners spent most of their time in corridors like these,
+sitting on cold, filthy cement floors. Apparently none of the cells had waste
+baskets, because paper and dirt were strewn along the entire length of the
+corridor — as if it had been casually thrown through the bars.
+The shower was no more sanitary — a dead mouse huddled under the bench
+as if to be a little less obtrusive. When I emerged, I did not feel any cleaner
+than before, but I had gained a little satisfaction from the fact that my
+demand for this shower had forced the jailers to submit in a small way.
+When Margaret and John came in, I gave them a detailed account of the
+most recent offensive launched by the jail administration. We began to map
+out plans for our counteroffensive. Our response had to be both political
+and legal. There would be a federal lawsuit filed on the grounds that I was
+the victim of undue discrimination. The political campaign would have to
+reveal the precedent the jail administration and government were trying to
+set in the treatment of political prisoners.
+At that time, the Department of Corrections must have felt it was extremely
+important to establish methods of quarantining resistance and radicalism in
+order to prevent their large-scale diffusion. In September, a month before,
+the Tombs had erupted in massive collective protests. Obviously, every
+prison in New York was searching for new ways of preventing these
+explosions. If we did not publicly contest the efforts to segregate me from
+the rest of the women, this apparatus would be ready and waiting for
+anyone deemed a political threat.
+I decided to dramatize the situation by declaring myself on a hunger strike
+for as long as I was kept in isolation — I would hold my own on this side of
+the walls while things got rolling on the other side. It was not difficult to go
+on a hunger strike. If the food had looked palatable, it would have been
+hard; but the unsavory dishes they placed before me actually facilitated the
+strike. After taking a look at the food, I felt more like vomiting than eating.
+Of the many officers assigned to guard me during those weeks, there were a
+few who were unmistakably sympathetic. I learned from them that the
+warden had instructed them to prevent any exchange of words between me
+
+and the other women — not even a greeting was allowed. The friendly
+officers ignored this order, in spite of the fact that if their superiors had
+become aware of the understanding they had reached with me, they could
+have been brought up on charges of insubordination.
+I also learned from one of these officers that when they came on duty, they
+took charge of a log entitled "Angela Davis' Daily Activities." Every hour
+on the hour, they were supposed to make an entry describing my activities
+of the previous hour — whether I had been reading (if so, what), writing,
+exercising — that exhausted the extent of the activities I could pursue in
+such confined quarters.
+Some of them also told me that they had been instructed to conduct a
+thorough search of my quarters each time there was a changing of the
+guard. The friendlier ones didn't bother with the search. But those who took
+this duty seriously announced their presence at the post by entering the cell,
+intently looking around at the barren walls as if they might conceal a
+weapon, and finally by going through the drawers of the bed table. One eye
+always following my movements.
+Unfortunately, I cannot describe the sympathetic officers or refer to them by
+name. My words might mean the loss of their jobs. They were an interesting
+conglomeration of Black women, both young and old, whose political
+sentiments ranged from "liberal" to straight-out sympathy with the most
+militant wings of the Black Liberation Movement.
+They all explained that they had been driven by necessity to apply for this
+kind of job. Apparently it was one of the highest-paying jobs in New York
+that did not require a college education. In a way, these officers were
+prisoners themselves, and some of them were keenly aware that they were
+treading ambiguous waters. Like their predecessors, the Black overseers,
+they were guarding their sisters in exchange for a few bits of bread. And
+like the overseers, they too would discover that part of the payment for their
+work was their own oppression. For example, overtime was compulsory.
+And because of the military discipline to which they were forced to submit,
+failure to work overtime was punishable as insubordination. Sixteen-hour
+workdays, a few times a week, were never out of the ordinary for the young
+
+officers who held no seniority, and for the older ones who weren't wellliked in the top echelons of the jail hierarchy.
+Still, even though their own grievances were reason enough to become
+involved in protest, whatever positive role they could play inside the jail
+was limited — they certainly could not revolutionize the penal system. But
+within these limitations there were a number of important things they did
+do. For instance, they communicated messages from prisoners to the
+outside, when it was not possible to send them through normal channels.
+They brought in "contraband" articles, such as natural combs. They got
+literature to the prisoners — particularly political literature that was banned
+from the library. If serious study groups were formed by women who
+wanted to learn more about the Black or Puerto Rican Liberation
+movements, sometimes these officers served as a shield between them and
+the administration.
+All these things imply risks. These officers repeatedly pointed out that when
+two of their colleagues had been discovered to have ties with the Black
+Panther Party, they were swiftly discharged. While they were willing to risk
+losing their jobs, they thought it was more beneficial to the prisoners to do
+whatever they could manage within the jail system itself, than to become
+martyrs without reason. Yet a few of them said that if things reached a
+crisis, they would shed the uniform and join the army of the prisoners.
+Of course, it was difficult to judge the seriousness and depth of their
+commitment, but it cheered me to see one of them coming to assume the
+guard post. Then I could talk with some of the sisters from the floor. One
+afternoon, the sisters from the two corridors nearest my cell marched
+single-file past my door chanting, "Free Angela. Free our sister."
+Through the grapevine I learned that there were women all over the jail who
+were carrying out a hunger strike in sympathy with mine. I was especially
+moved when I heard that Shirley was organizing a hunger strike on the
+fourth floor. Since she worked in the kitchen, it must have required an
+unusually big effort on her part. As for myself, I had a glass of juice three
+times a day at meal times, lots of water and exercise. That, along with the
+New York Times, which now came daily, the one or two books I had, and the
+visits from Margaret and John, were enough to keep me going.
+
+While I was in solitary, I finally began to receive regular evening visits
+from several friends. An officer would stand just close enough to hear my
+side of the conversation. (I assumed that they summarized it in the log
+book.) I was not a stranger to visiting arrangements in jails, for I had visited
+friends and comrades in prison on many occasions. But this visiting room
+was by far the worst I had seen. It is not unusual to have to speak to a
+visitor through a glass pane, but the panes in the House of Detention were
+less than a square foot in size, and the rust-colored dirt that covered them
+made it impossible to get a clear look at the person who had come to see
+you. The prisoners had to stand up during these twenty-minute visits and
+shout into telephones which inevitably seemed to stop functioning just
+when the most important part of the conversation had gotten under way.
+One evening while I was still in solitary, I received a visit from Kendra
+Alexander, who had been subpoenaed to New York along with her husband
+Franklin to testify before the Grand Jury in the case against David
+Poindexter. She informed me that the demonstration protesting my solitary
+confinement was about to begin. They knew more or less where my room
+was located — I had carefully detailed the areas of Greenwich Avenue I
+could see from my window. The demonstrators were to gather on the corner
+of Greenwich and West Tenth.
+I ran back upstairs. The officer guarding me was one of the friendlier ones,
+and turned her head and closed her ears while I spread the news. On five or
+six floors, the women who lived in the corridors with windows looking out
+on Greenwich Avenue would be able to see and hear the demonstration.
+It was an enthusiastic crowd. Their shouts "Free Angela! Free all our
+sisters!" rang through the night. Looking down from my cell window, I
+became altogether engrossed in the speeches, sometimes losing the
+sensation of captivity, feeling myself down there on the street with them.
+My mind flashed back to past demonstrations — "Free the Soledad
+Brothers," "Free Bobby and Ericka," "Free Huey," "End the war in
+Vietnam," "Stop police killings in our community now . . ."
+
+Jose Stevens, a Communist leader from Harlem, had wound up his speech.
+Franklin was addressing his words, full of passion, to all the prisoners
+locked up in the Women's House of Detention. Then my sister, Fania, took
+the megaphone. The sound of her voice shocked me back into the reality of
+my situation, for I momentarily had forgotten that this demonstration was
+centered around me. I had been so absorbed in the rally that I had actually
+felt as if I were down there in the streets with them. Reflecting upon the
+impenetrability of this fortress, on all the things that kept me separated from
+my comrades barely a few hundred yards away, and reflecting on my
+solitary confinement — this prison within a prison that kept me separated
+from my sisters in captivity — I felt the weight of imprisonment perhaps
+more at that moment than at any time before.
+My frustration was immense. But before my thoughts led me further in the
+direction of self-pity, I brought them to a halt, reminding myself that this
+was precisely what solitary confinement was supposed to evoke. In such a
+state the keepers could control their victim. I would not let them conquer
+me. I transformed my frustration into raging energy for the fight.
+Against the background of the chants ringing up from the demonstration
+below, I took myself to task for having indulged in self-pity. What about
+George, John and Fleeta, and my codefendant, Ruchell Magee, who had
+endured far worse than I could ever expect to grapple with? What about
+Charles Jordan and his bout with that medieval strip-cell in Soledad Prison?
+What about those who had given their lives — Jonathan, McClain and
+Christmas?
+The experience of the demonstration had worked up so much tension in me
+that I felt none of the debilitating effects of the fast. I did an extra heavy set
+of exercises to sufficiently lower my energy level so I could lie in bed in
+relative calm. There was no question of getting a full night's sleep. On this
+evening, I had to be especially vigilant. All was quiet in the jail, but I was
+convinced that the demonstration had aroused the jailers, and I had to hold
+myself in readiness in case they decided to strike sometime during the
+night.
+On the tenth day of the hunger strike, at a time when I had persuaded
+myself that I could continue indefinitely without eating, the Federal Court
+
+handed down a ruling enjoining the jail administration from holding me any
+longer in isolation and under maximum security conditions. They had
+decided — under pressure, of course — that this unwarranted punishment
+was meted out to me because of my political beliefs and affiliation. The
+court was all but saying that Commissioner of Corrections George McGrath
+and Jessie Behagan, the superintendent of the Women's House of D., were
+so fearful of letting the women in the jail discover what communism was
+that they preferred to violate my most basic constitutional rights.
+This ruling came as a surprise. I hadn't expected it to be so swift and to the
+point. It was an important victory, for we had firmly established that those
+in the Department of Corrections in New York would not have a clear
+course before them when they attempted to persecute the next political
+prisoner delivered into their hands. At the same time, however, I did not put
+it past the jail administration to concoct another situation which might not
+be solitary confinement, but which would give me an equally bad time. This
+thought subdued my delight at the news of the injunction.
+Next destination: seventh floor, C corridor. When I arrived, there was a big
+shake-up going on. Women were being moved out, others were coming in.
+For a moment the thought struck me that they were preparing a special
+corridor for informers, jailer's confidantes — and me. But as it turned out,
+the lawsuit had forced the administration to get on its toes — so-called
+"first offenders" were supposed to be jailed separately from those who had
+already spent time in the House of Detention. Apparently the necessary
+shifts were being made.
+There was little time to learn my way about before all the cell gates were
+locked, but some of my neighbors gave me a guided tour of my 8' x 5' cell.
+Because mine was the corner cell — the one which could be easily spied on
+from the officer's desk in the main hallway — it was also the smallest one
+on the corridor; the double bunk made it appear even smaller. The fixtures
+— the bed, the tiny sink, the toilet — were all arranged in a straight line,
+leaving no more than a width of two feet of floor at any point in the cell.
+The sisters helped me improvise a curtain in front of the toilet and sink so
+they could not be seen from the corridor. They showed me how to use
+newspaper wrapped in scrap cloth to make a seat cover so the toilet could
+
+be turned into a chair to be used at the iron table that folded down from the
+wall in front of it. I laughed out loud at the thought of doing all my writing
+while sitting on the toilet stool.
+Lock-in time was approaching; a sister remembered that she had forgotten
+to warn me about one of the dangers of night life in the House of D.
+"'Mickey' will be trying to get into your cell tonight," she said, and I would
+have to take precautionary steps to "keep him out."
+"Mickey?" Was there some maniac the jailers let loose at night to pester the
+women?
+The sister laughingly told me she was referring to the mice which
+scampered about in the darkness of the corridors looking for cell doors not
+securely stuffed with newspapers.
+It became a nightly ritual: placing meticulously folded newspapers in the
+little space between the gate and the floor and halfway up the gate along the
+wall.
+Despite the preventive measures we took, Mickey could always chew
+through the barricade in at least one cell, and we were often awakened by
+the shouts of a woman calling the officer to get the mouse out. One night
+Mickey joined me in the top bunk. When I felt him crawling around my
+neck, I brushed him away thinking that it was roaches. When I finally
+realized what it was, I called for the broom — our only weapon against
+him. Apparently mousetraps were too expensive, and they were not going to
+exterminate.
+There was one good thing about Mickey. His presence reassured us that
+there were no rats in the vicinity. The two never share the same turf.
+In a sense our daily struggles with Mickey — with all the various makeshift
+means devised to get the better of him — were symbolic of a larger struggle
+with the system. Indulging in a flight of fancy, I would sometimes imagine
+that all the preparations that were made at night to ward off those creatures
+were the barricades being erected against that larger enemy. That hundreds
+of women, all over the jail, politically conscious, politically committed,
+
+were acting in revolutionary unison. That first evening, shortly after the
+sister had helped me stuff the gate with newspapers, an officer called out,
+"Lock-in time, girls. Into your cells." As the women slid their heavy iron
+gates closed, loud metallic crashing noises thundered from all four corridors
+of the seventh floor. I could hear the same sounds at a distance echoing
+from throughout the jail. (In 4b, I had never been able to figure out what all
+this commotion was about. The first time I heard it, I thought a rebellion
+had been unleashed.)
+The officer came around to count each prisoner, and at 9 P.M. all lights in
+the corridor and cells were turned off by a master switch. In the darkness, a
+good night ritual was acted out. One sister shouted good night to another,
+calling her by name. The latter, catching the identity of the voice, would
+shout good night, also calling the first sister by name. Early on, someone
+from my corridor called out warmly, "Good night, Angela!" But having
+learned hardly anyone's name, much less to recognize their voices, I was an
+outsider to this ritual and could only respond with a lonesome, unsupported,
+though no less vigorous, "good night." My call sparked off good night
+shouts to me, which came not only from my own corridor but from the
+others as well. I am sure that there had never been such a prolonged "saying
+of good nights." The officers did not interrupt, though silence should have
+prevailed long before.
+
+Life in jail was arranged and controlled from above in accordance with
+pragmatic principles of the worst order. Just enough activities were
+provided to distract the prisoners from any prolonged reflection upon their
+wretched condition. The point was to fill up the day with meaningless
+activities, empty diversions.
+As a result, a whole network of institutions was there to absorb the energies
+of the prisoners. Commissary, needless to say, was an important aspect of
+survival in captivity. Three days out of the week women awaiting trial
+visited this small store to purchase the little things that made life slightly
+less intolerable. Mondays and Wednesdays, there was a three-dollar limit on
+what we could buy; on Fridays we could spend one dollar more. The
+coveted articles on sale were such things as cigarettes, cosmetics, primitive
+
+writing materials — pencils (but no pens) and lined pads, and stamps;
+knitting and crocheting paraphernalia; and foodstuffs such as cookies,
+candies, sugar, instant coffee and hot chocolate. Unless you were pregnant,
+the only available source of real milk was the commissary.
+The centrality of commissary emerges from the deprivation which is such
+an important element of official control and authority. In jail, you learn that
+nothing can be taken for granted; the normal need-fulfillment process is
+shattered. You cannot assume that even your most basic needs will be
+satisfied. There are always strings attached. If you conduct yourself in such
+a way as to provoke an officer to place you in lockup, you lose your
+commissary privileges. If you happen not to have cigarettes, you must
+simply do without. The threat of withdrawing commissary privileges is a
+powerful negative stimulus.
+Another method used to fill time was the church services each Sunday
+morning. Out of curiosity, I went down to the chapel on the first Sunday I
+spent in the main population. I was surprised at the number of prisoners in
+attendance. But soon I realized that many of the women had ulterior
+motives unrelated to any serious religious feelings. It was one of the two
+consistent meeting places where women from one part of the jail could see
+and converse with their friends from other floors.
+The other weekly meeting place was the movies — that is, if the projector
+was not broken. Not even the curiosity that attracted me to the church
+services could make me attend one of these insipid Hollywood movies.
+Needless to say, it was a favorite trysting place of homosexual couples.
+For those who enjoyed reading, the library would have been a saving grace
+had it not been for the fact that the vast majority of the books were
+mysteries, romances and just plain bad literature whose sole function was to
+create emotional paths of escape. During my days of solitary confinement,
+after Margaret had persuaded the warden that I should have access to
+reading material, I spent a few sessions alone in the library. Within a short
+time I had combed the entire place, turning up only a few books which held
+the slightest interest: A book on the Chinese Revolution by Edgar Snow, the
+autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois and a book on communism written by an
+astonishingly objective little-known author.
+
+After my discovery of these books, my thoughts kept wandering back to
+their enigmatic presence. And suddenly it hit me: they had probably been
+read by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones or one of the other
+Communist leaders who had been persecuted under the Smith Act during
+the McCarthy era. I myself had been told that if I received any books during
+my time there, I would have to donate them to the library — which was a
+pleasure, considering the state of that so-called place of learning. As I
+turned the pages of those books, I felt honored to be following in the
+tradition of some of this country's most outstanding heroines: Communist
+women leaders, especially the Black Communist Claudia Jones.
+If you wanted books which were not in the library, they had to be mailed
+directly from the publisher. I decided to have as many books sent to me as
+possible, so as to provide, for succeeding prisoners, literature that was more
+interesting, more relevant, more serious than the trash on the shelves of the
+library. Apparently, the jailers saw through my scheme, especially when ten
+copies of George Jackson's Soledad Brother came in, for they harshly
+informed me that none of my books were to leave my hands. They would
+follow me to whichever jail I went.
+The few remaining jail institutions were even more limited. There were
+short exercise periods on the roof of the building. This, I admit, was my
+favorite activity, and as long as the weather permitted, I looked forward
+with great pleasure to our volleyball games atop the jail. On the roof, in
+enclosed rooms, there were also arts and crafts, dancing, and games such as
+cards and Scrabble. With this, the range of activities behind the walls was
+practically complete. It was amazing, however, how much time could be
+consumed in these things, most of which contributed not in the least to the
+educational, cultural or social development of the prisoners. The main
+purpose of these pastimes was to encourage, in a subtle way, obedience and
+submissiveness.
+Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the
+population into specimens in a zoo — obedient to our keepers, but
+dangerous to each other. In response, imprisoned men and women will
+invent and continually invoke various and sundry defenses. Consequently,
+two layers of existence can be encountered within almost every jail or
+
+prison. The first layer consists of the routines and behavior prescribed by
+the governing penal hierarchy. The second layer is the prisoner culture
+itself: the rules and standards of behavior that come from and are defined by
+the captives in order to shield themselves from the open or covert terror
+designed to break their spirits.
+In an elemental way, this culture is one of resistance, but a resistance of
+desperation. It is, therefore, incapable of striking a significant blow against
+the system. All its elements are based on an assumption that the prison
+system will continue to survive. Precisely for this reason, the system does
+not move to crush it. (In fact, it sometimes happens that there is an underthe-table encouragement of the prisoners' subculture.) I was continually
+astonished by the infinite details of the social regions which the women in
+the House of Detention considered their exclusive domain. This culture was
+contemptuously closed to the keepers. I sometimes wandered innocently
+through the doors and found myself thoroughly disoriented. A telling
+example happened on my second day in population. A sister asked me,
+"What did you think of my grandfather? He said he saw you this morning."
+I was sure I had misheard her question, but when she repeated it, I told her
+she must be mistaken, because I had no idea who her grandfather was.
+Besides, I hadn't had any visitors that day. But the joke was on me. I was in
+a foreign country and hadn't learned the language. I discovered from her
+that a woman prisoner who had come by my cell earlier in the day was the
+"grandfather" to whom she was referring. Because she didn't seem eager to
+answer any questions, I contained my curiosity until I found someone who
+could explain to me what the hell was going on.
+A woman a few cells down gave me a fascinating description of a whole
+system through which the women could adopt their jail friends as relatives.
+I was bewildered and awed by the way in which the vast majority of the jail
+population had neatly organized itself into generations of families: mothers/
+wives, fathers/husbands, sons and daughters, even aunts, uncles,
+grandmothers and grandfathers. The family system served as a defense
+against the fact of being no more than a number. It humanized the
+environment and allowed an identification with others within a familiar
+framework.
+
+In spite of its strong element of escapism and fantasy, the family system
+could solve certain immediate problems. Family duties and responsibilities
+were a way in which sharing was institutionalized. Parents were expected to
+provide for their children, particularly the young ones, if they could not
+afford "luxury items" from commissary.
+Like filial relationships outside, some sons and daughters had, or
+developed, ulterior motives. Quite a few of them joined certain families
+because the material benefits were greater there.
+What struck me most about this family system was the homosexuality at its
+core. But while there was certainly an overabundance of homosexual
+relationships within this improvised kinship structure, it was nevertheless
+not closed to "straight" women. There were straight daughters and
+husbandless, i.e., straight, mothers.
+I recall with fondness a young woman of sixteen, with a very intense
+beauty, who told me plainly and simply one day that she was going to
+consider me her mother. Although I shared my commissary with her (and
+others as well) when she didn't have enough money in her account, she
+never once asked me for anything. She was quiet, serious and very curious
+about the Black Liberation movement. My obligations to her seemed to
+consist primarily of carrying on discussions with her about the movement.
+Housed with the "adolescents" in another corridor on my floor, she always
+managed with a calm firmness to persuade the officers to let her into my
+corridor.
+Since the majority of the prisoners seemed to be at least casually involved
+in the family structure, there had to be a great number of lesbians
+throughout the jail. Homosexuality is bound to occur on a relatively large
+scale in any place of sexually segregated confinement. I knew this before I
+was arrested. I was not prepared, however, for the shock of seeing it so
+thoroughly entrenched in jail life. There were the masculine and feminine
+role-playing women; the former, the butches, were called "he." During the
+entire six weeks I spent on the seventh floor, I could not bring myself to
+refer to any woman with a masculine pronoun, although some of them, if
+they hadn't been wearing the mandatory dresses, would never have been
+taken for women.
+
+Many of them — both the butches and the femmes — had obviously
+decided to take up homosexuality during their jail terms in order to make
+that time a little more exciting, in order to forget the squalor and
+degradation around them. When they returned to the streets they would
+rejoin their men and quickly forget their jail husbands and wives.
+An important part of the family system was the marriages. Some of them
+were extremely elaborate — with invitations, a formal ceremony, and some
+third person acting as the "minister." The "bride" would prepare for the
+occasion as if for a real wedding.
+With all the marriages, the seeking of trysting places, the scheming which
+went on by one woman to catch another, the conflicts and jealousies — with
+all this — homosexuality emerged as one of the centers around which life in
+the House of Detention revolved. Certainly, it was a way to counteract some
+of the pain of jail life; but objectively, it served to perpetuate all the bad
+things about the House of Detention. "The Gay Life" was all-consuming; it
+prevented many of the women from developing their personal
+dissatisfaction with the conditions around them into a political
+dissatisfaction, because the homosexual fantasy life provided an easy and
+attractive channel for escape.
+One of the corridors on the fourth floor, where the psychiatric bloc was
+located, was reserved for women with heavy heroin habits. When I caught
+glimpses of them during my trips to the elevator, I was struck by their
+physical deterioration. Their bodies were marred with leprous-like sores.
+These were the abscesses caused by dirty needles. Others had needle tracks
+all over their legs and arms and, because these veins had collapsed, they had
+begun to inject the drug into the veins in their necks.
+The most tragic sight of all was the very young addicts, many of whom
+could have been no more than fourteen, despite the age they had given the
+police. Most of them had absolutely no intention of staying off the drug
+once they returned to the streets. To me, it was beyond comprehension that
+they could witness the most sordid effects of heroin while they were in jail
+and not be provoked to reconsider their own flirtations with the drug —
+flirtations that frequently became full-scale addiction.
+
+Sometimes women with very heavy habits were brought in and left to kick
+alone in their cells. They would scream in agony all night long and not a
+single officer would help them. One evening an emaciated young woman
+was placed in the cell across from mine. By the time we were supposed to
+lock in for the night, she was doubled over, her whole face distorted in
+anguish. She needed medical help fast, but no doctor was forthcoming.
+Sisters in my corridor began to tell stories of women who had been in
+similar conditions and, left alone in their cells to kick, had died during the
+night. We decided that we would refuse to lock in unless she received
+medical attention immediately. Only after we took this stand did a doctor
+come to examine her and take her to the hospital.
+There were many other occasions when we were forced to intervene in
+order to ensure medical help for one of our ill sisters. The most horrifying
+case of all was that of a woman on our corridor who began to complain one
+weekend about severe pains in her chest. On Monday morning at sick call,
+she saw one of the elderly white doctors, who told her that her problem was
+psychosomatic — the result of sitting around all day doing nothing. The
+doctor's advice to her was to "get a job." (If you were awaiting trial, as this
+sister was, you didn't even get the five or ten cents an hour that the
+sentenced prisoners received.)
+The sister's pains grew worse over the next days, and finally we decided
+that we would have to issue a collective threat in order to force the jailers to
+get her the medical attention she needed. We refused to lock in until a
+competent doctor examined her. That day she didn't return to the cell; we
+later discovered that they had found tumors in her breasts and had rushed
+her to a hospital for tests and a possible mastectomy, if the tumors were
+found to be malignant.
+The negligence toward the prisoners' health was also reflected in the daily
+routine of the jail. If pregnant women could not afford to buy a carton of
+milk on the three days we went to commissary, the only way they could
+supplement the three skimpy glasses of milk they received at mealtimes
+would be through our scheming. After I began to have problems with my
+eyes (a court injunction had allowed an outside doctor to examine me), a
+
+special diet, including milk, was prescribed for me. On numerous
+occasions, I smuggled my milk to a pregnant sister.
+The first two weeks went by torturously slowly. I had the feeling that I had
+been in jail for a very long time. However, as soon as the jail routine began
+to inexorably impose itself, the days flowed imperceptibly into one another,
+and there seemed to be little difference between three days and three weeks.
+At six o'clock each morning, the dim lights went on and the gates were
+unlocked for breakfast. Eight o'clock was the first lock-in of the day, and it
+lasted as long as it took to count prisoners and silverware to make sure a
+person or a spoon was not missing. Cleaning, doctor's rounds, mail time and
+commissary on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then lunch and silver
+count, followed by the 3 P.M. lock-in and count. Depending on the day of
+the week, afternoons were for roof exercises, the library or, once in a while,
+a movie. Dinner, silver count, visits, 8 P.M. lock-in and count and all lights
+out at nine.
+I was fortunate to have Margaret's almost daily visits. John came as often as
+he could, and I received frequent visits from the lawyers working with
+Margaret on the suits around the jail conditions. They were Haywood
+Burns, the Director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and two
+members of the organization, Harold Washington and Napoleon Williams.
+We discussed the progress of the jail suit and the legal fight to prevent my
+extradition. John and Margaret were prepared to appeal the New York
+decision to return me to California all the way up through the appellate
+courts to the U.S. Supreme Court.
+Those who had family or friends eagerly awaited the moment, after dinner,
+when the officer distributed the visit slips to the small crowd gathered
+behind the bars at the end of each corridor. Evening visits never lasted
+longer than twenty minutes; nevertheless they broke up the monotony of the
+days.
+Once my lawyers had pressured the jail bureaucracy to let me have the
+regular evening visits — shortly after I was released from solitary — I had
+visitors practically every night. Whenever my sister Fania, Franklin and
+Kendra Alexander, Bettina Aptheker and other friends and comrades were
+
+in town, they came in to see me. Exactly twenty minutes after the beginning
+of a visit, I could expect to hear the loud announcement that time was up; it
+usually took just about that long to get into a serious conversation.
+I always looked forward to Charlene Mitchell's visits. She was a close
+friend and member of the Political Committee (the leadership body) of the
+Communist Party. In the 1968 Presidential elections, she was our Party's
+candidate for President. Charlene had had a lot to do with my decision to
+join the Party, and over the last years my friendship with her had taught me
+a great deal about what it means to be a Communist. When the FBI pursuit
+began, without a hint of hesitation, she had placed herself in jeopardy in
+order to save my life. It was always frustrating to talk to her through the
+faulty telephones, and I was always painfully aware of the glass and wall
+which separated us. It would have meant so much to have simply been able
+to embrace her — or even to squeeze her hand. One evening, I had an
+exciting visit with Henry Winston, the chairman of the Communist Party.
+Winnie, as our comrades affectionately called him, was born in Mississippi
+and, being both Black and a Communist, he had been an important target of
+the raging anti-communism of the forties and fifties. Close to ten years of
+prison, during which a brain tumor remained untreated, had left him almost
+totally blind. I had never seen him in person before his visit to the House of
+D. From the other side of the clouded pane, he greeted me with a very
+gentle voice, and I felt he could see me with far greater perceptiveness than
+someone with perfect eyesight. He wanted to know about my health, the jail
+food, and how I was being treated by the officers. He assured me that the
+Party was totally committed to the fight for my freedom and that he,
+personally, would do whatever was necessary to ensure victory.
+I thought about my family all the time. Not a day passed when I did not
+worry about how my mother, who was still in Birmingham, was standing up
+to the whole ordeal. Despite my desire to see her, I told Margaret not to
+encourage her to make the trip to New York. She is such a sensitive person
+that I was afraid that she might not be able to bear the strain of seeing her
+daughter behind bars in a filthy, mouse-ridden jail. I was very reluctant to
+subject her to the frustration of a twenty-minute visit through telephones,
+concrete and the tiny, dirty window.
+
+Mother was determined to see me, regardless of the conditions. When she
+told us she was coming to New York, Margaret worked for days to arrange
+for a "special visit" — in the social worker's office. Finally, when Margaret
+told the jailers that my mother had broken her foot and would find it
+difficult to stand during the visit, they agreed to the special visit.
+Experience had taught me to be skeptical about everything. I didn't really
+believe that Mother would be allowed in the interior of the jail until the
+moment she actually arrived. She came walking in on crutches that
+morning, her foot still in a cast. When she put her arms around me, I could
+feel the tension throughout her body. For her benefit, I tried to appear
+especially cheerful. In an effort to conceal my thinness, I had worn the
+largest of the four jail-issued dresses. Even under normal circumstances, she
+gets upset when I lose a couple of pounds; during my fast I had lost fifteen
+pounds. Though she tried to appear in high spirits, I could tell from the deep
+furrows in her forehead that she was deeply disturbed. We talked about the
+family — Daddy, who was still at home; Benny, whose wife, Sylvia, and
+child I had not yet seen, and Fania, who was now a few months pregnant.
+Although she did not say it, I felt that my father was taking the whole thing
+rather hard, and I told her to tell him there was nothing to worry about — it
+was just a matter of time. Whenever I said something as optimistic as this, I
+am sure she must have been thinking about the gas chamber in California.
+So I kept telling her that there wasn't a doubt in my mind that I would soon
+be free — out there with her.
+It was good that the New York Committee to Free Angela Davis had
+organized several events in which they invited Mother to participate. I knew
+it would hearten her to see that there were many people concerned about my
+fate. Several of the sympathetic officers attended a reception in her honor.
+This was particularly important, for she could see that even among those
+who were supposed to be my jailers there were women who wanted to join
+the mass movement against repression.
+In addition to these officially sanctioned visits, I received numerous "street
+visits." Though illegal, this was a well established custom among the
+prisoners. Friends would simply shout up to the jail windows from the street
+below. One evening after lock-in, several women from the Harlem Black
+
+Women to Free Angela Davis gathered on Greenwich Avenue to inform me
+about the activities they had planned on my behalf. I saw a policeman walk
+over to one of them and obviously issue a warning; when she continued to
+call up to me, he grabbed her and dragged her away.
+
+Once I felt settled in the main population, my thoughts naturally turned
+toward the possibility of collective political activity in jail. Many people are
+unaware of the fact that jail and prison are two entirely different
+institutions. People in prison have already been convicted. Jails are
+primarily for pertrial confinement, holding places until prisoners are either
+convicted or found innocent. More than half of the jail population have
+never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because
+the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off,
+jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee.
+The O.R. program — which allows one to be released without posting
+bond, on one's own recognizance — is heavily tainted with racism. At least
+ninety-five percent of the women in the House of D. were either Black or
+Puerto Rican.
+The biggest problem jail prisoners face is how to get out on bail. The
+political issue, therefore, is how accused men and women can benefit
+equally from the so-called presumption of innocence by being free until
+proven guilty. I assumed that this was the issue around which we could
+most effectively organize sisters in the House of D. — and, in fact, this is
+what we later did.
+Originally the jailers had insisted that I had been placed in solitary
+confinement for my own protection — the women on the corridor would be
+hostile toward me, they said, because of my Communist politics. It was all a
+lie. The women were hospitable from the first moment, and they were
+loving and protective. Nothing illustrated this more clearly than the
+demonstration staged by the sixth-floor women in front of my solitary cell
+and the hunger strike which began to spread throughout the jail in solidarity
+with my action. Throughout my stay I received numerous written messages
+of support from the sisters. (Any written communication between prisoners
+
+is illegal; these notes are called "kites" because of the shape they are folded
+in for easy concealment.)
+On the seventh floor, only a few days had gone by when the sisters wanted
+to talk about the movement — and this was on their own initiative, without
+the least prodding from me. We talked about racism and how it is not just
+the attitude that Black people are inferior. Racism, in the first place, is a
+weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in — by
+paying Black workers less for their work. We talked about the way racism
+confuses white workers, who often forget that they are being exploited by a
+boss and instead vent their frustrations on people of color. On the corridor
+and in the recreation room, we had numerous discussions on the meaning of
+communism; the sisters were especially interested in hearing about my
+experiences in Cuba in 1969 — a trip which had proved to me what
+socialism can do to eradicate racism.
+One evening, after lock-up, a loud question broke the silence. It came from
+a sister who was reading a book I had lent her.
+"Angela, what does 'imperialism' mean?"
+I called out, "The ruling class of one country conquers the people of another
+in order to rob them of their land, their resources, and to exploit their labor."
+Another voice shouted, "You mean treating people in other countries the
+way Black people are treated here?"
+This prompted an intense discussion that bounced through the cells, from
+my corridor to the one across the hall and back again.
+Although I had ten copies of Soledad Brother, George's letters from prison,
+in my box in the library, not a single one was allowed on the
+corridor. Some of the friendly officers, however, smuggled a number of
+copies in from the outside. These became the most valuable pieces of
+contraband in the jail. They were always in demand and were widely read.
+When I wrote George of the enthusiastic reception of his book among the
+sisters there, it gave him pleasure to know that they were learning to relate
+to the movement through studying his individual political evolution. But
+
+there was one question that disturbed him: how were the sisters responding
+to the attitude toward Black women manifested in some of his early letters?
+In the past he had seen Black women as often acting as a deterrent to the
+involvement of Black men in the struggle. He had since discovered that this
+generalization was wrong, and was deeply concerned that the other women
+in the jail be informed of this.
+Needless to say, there were reprisals for our activities. One sister was
+especially hard hit. Harriet had been in the House of D. many times before
+and knew her way through the crevices of this jail far better than many of
+the officers. I had first met her during my stint in solitary. Her job in the
+laundry room allowed her to travel throughout the jail, and she was the only
+prisoner permitted to enter my cell. When she came, she always brought
+something with her — when I told her my pencil would not stay sharp, she
+brought me a contraband ballpoint pen.
+Harriet had known Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur of the New York Panther 21
+while they were in the House of D. She was intensely interested in
+becoming a part of the movement for the liberation of her people. Later,
+when I was moved to the seventh floor, she came each day on her laundry
+missions and brought "kites" and news from the other floors.
+As the weeks passed, the jailers began to grow wary of the solidarity
+welding us all together, and security became visibly tighter. Harriet was
+ordered to keep away from my cell and from the other women in that
+corridor. They assigned another woman to bring the laundry to the floor.
+Until this moment, Harriet had had relatively decent relationships with the
+officers, even with the higher-ups. She had one of the most enviable jobs,
+for it meant she could go anywhere in the eleven-floor jail without explicit
+permission. After she was prohibited from being on our floor, she proudly
+threw this "privilege" right back into the jailers' faces. She quit her job and
+refused to talk, except with hostility, to the officers who were responsible
+for the order. Many did not understand why Harriet took such a drastic way
+out — and, considering the structures of imprisonment, this was
+unequivocally drastic. She got the word to me that this incident involved
+fundamental and principled issues, on which she would never accept a
+compromise.
+
+A real togetherness was developing. I was anxious to strengthen this sense
+of community, and I knew it needed more than books and discussions to
+thrive. In order to keep it alive, I invited the sisters to join me in exercising
+in the corridors. Exercising was an indispensable requirement for my own
+survival in jail. Often I could not fall asleep unless I exercised to the point
+of exhaustion.
+After a few days of doing calisthenics together, we added some simple
+karate movements. One of the women who also knew a little karate helped
+out with the instruction. It was not long before rumors were flying through
+official jail circles that I was teaching karate to the women in preparation
+for a confrontation with the jailers. They ordered it stopped, but we found a
+way to do it anyhow. Once the calisthenic phase of the exercises was over, a
+woman kept watch at the gate while we punched and kicked our way down
+the length of the corridor.
+As my stay in the House of Detention was drawing to a close, a number of
+women's groups in New York began to organize a bail fund for the women
+inside the House of Detention. There were women who spent months in jail
+simply because they didn't have fifty dollars to make their bail. As this
+work was being accomplished outside, there was organizing going on
+within. The problem was to prevent the bail fund from becoming just
+another service organization to provide bail for women inside, much the
+same way as lawyers are provided by Legal Aid. We came up with an ideal
+solution: the women who would receive funds from the organization outside
+were to be elected collectively by the women in each corridor. When a
+woman was elected to be a beneficiary, she would not only have her bail
+paid, but would have responsibilities to the bail fund as well. Once out on
+the streets, she would have to work with the fund, helping to raise money;
+making whatever political contributions she could to the development of the
+organization.
+
+DECEMBER 21, 1970
+On a cold Sunday afternoon a massive demonstration took place down on
+Greenwich Avenue. It was spearheaded by the bail fund coalition and the
+
+New York Committee to Free Angela Davis. So enthusiastic was the crowd
+that we felt compelled to organize some kind of reciprocal display of
+strength. We got together in our corridor, deciding on the slogans we would
+shout and how to make them come out in unison — even though we were
+going to be spread down the corridor in different cells, screaming from
+different windows. I had never dreamed that such powerful feelings of pride
+and confidence could develop among the sisters in this jail.
+Chants thundered on the outside: "One, two, three, four, the House of D. has
+got to go!" "Free our Sisters, Free Ourselves," and other political chants that
+were popular at the time. After a while, we decided to try out our chants. It
+was far easier for us to be heard through the windows by the people outside
+than it was for us to be heard by ourselves, separated as we were by the
+thick concrete walls dividing the cells. Although our slogans may not have
+been transmitted in the most harmonious style, we managed to get our
+message across: "Free the Soledad Brothers," "Free Erika," "Free Bobby,"
+"Long Live Jonathan Jackson."
+While the chants of "Free Angela" filled me with excitement, I was
+concerned that an overabundance of such chants might set me apart from
+the rest of my sisters. I shouted one by one the names of all the sisters on
+the floor participating in the demonstration. "Free Vernell! Free Helen! Free
+Amy! Free Joann! Free Laura! Free Minnie!" I was hoarse for the next
+week.
+As the demonstration moved into full swing, an officer unlocked the gate to
+our corridor and shouted to us to stop all the noise. We refused. They sent a
+captain to try to halt the demonstration. She approached me in my cell to
+say there would be sanctions for all of us if we did not calm down. Our
+exchange was heated. Within a matter of minutes, a confrontation had
+brewed. Shouts began to come from across the hall — the sisters in the next
+corridor had decided to join. There was nothing this captain could do to
+make us acquiesce; every word she uttered kindled our combativeness. The
+more militant we became, the less confident she became, and finally she left
+the corridor in defeat.
+As long as there were demonstrators outside, we continued our chants. Even
+after they left, the floor was throbbing with excitement. We were proud of
+
+the staunch position we had taken vis-a-vis the bureaucracy. In this
+atmosphere of triumph, it was a cruel letdown for us to discover that the
+Supreme Court in Washington had just denied our appeal, and that I would
+soon be extradited to California. It was a Sunday; I assumed I would be
+taken back to the West Coast on Monday or Tuesday.
+That night, still hot with the ardor of the demonstration, locked up in the
+darkness of their cells, the women staged a spontaneous demonstration of
+support. "One, two, three, four. We won't let Angela go!" "Five, six, seven,
+eight. We won't let them through the gate!" Shoes were banging on the cell
+bars; chants grew louder. An officer tried meekly to calm them down but
+had no success. A very vocal sister who was in one of the adolescent
+corridors was told to keep it quiet, but when she refused and all the sisters
+came vociferously to her aid, the officers hit her, knowing that all we could
+do was scream. They dragged her away to 4a — the punitive isolation unit.
+Frustrated by our inability to help her, we called out threats and beat even
+more loudly on the bars of our cells.
+Someone noticed a sympathetic-looking white couple on Greenwich
+Avenue staring up in wonderment at the building, which was shaking with
+the clamor of protests from our floor. We called down to them that a sister
+had just been beaten and was probably being put through the third degree
+down in the hole. We were bold that evening. We shouted out loud and clear
+the names and ranks of the officers who had pulled her from her cell. We
+asked the couple to call the underground press and as many Left
+organizations as they could to let them know that we were expecting an
+even more severe crackdown. (I later discovered that they had spent the
+evening contacting everyone they felt could help us.)
+A few hours passed and nothing unusual happened. The pace of our activity
+gradually eased off until the floor was silent. As I was dozing off to sleep, I
+was jolted into wakefulness by a bright light shining in my face. One of the
+"friendly" officers was aiming a flashlight at me. My lawyer was
+downstairs, she said. They were going to permit me to have a special visit
+with him so that he could inform me about my rights with respect to the
+forthcoming extradition. It was indeed strange to have an attorney's visit at
+three in the morning, but on the other hand, John had been in Washington
+
+all day for the Supreme Court extradition hearing. He had probably returned
+late and now expected me to be extradited before the night was over.
+As soon as the elevator came to a stop on the main floor, I realized that they
+had just successfully played a confidence game on me. There were white
+police-types in civilian clothes casually standing around in the area outside
+the receiving room. The white assistant warden, dressed in her Sunday best,
+was conferring with some of them. A deputy warden, who at times had tried
+to wear a human mask, had been waiting for the elevator doors to open. She
+appeared to be in charge of the operation.
+She bluntly informed me that I should prepare for a strip search. I angrily
+refused. Sarcastically, reminding them that they had told me that my lawyer
+was waiting for me, I walked over to the bench where prisoners waited to
+be called for visits and took a seat.
+All around me was an acceleration of activity, which I pretended not to
+notice. The deputy warden approached me once more, this time
+accompanied by the woman second in command only to the warden. Again
+she told me to prepare for the strip search. Again I refused. Whether I
+agreed or not, she said, the search would take place, implying that if
+necessary they would use force. The two then left the area, apparently to
+confer about the situation with the police-types. They returned several
+times, sometimes bringing an officer who had hitherto been relatively nice
+to me. While they played the role of the stick, they wanted her to be the
+carrot.
+As this confrontation was growing more heated, two familiar officers
+dressed in civilian clothes quietly crept into the room. When I saw them I
+was puzzled. Of all the officers in the House of Detention, they had been
+among the few for whom I had had a certain amount of respect. One was
+the librarian; the other worked at the front desk, checking in the attorneys
+when they came for visits.
+For the moment, they were totally passive, bystanders as it were. Just as I
+was about to ask them what they were doing in the jail at that time of night,
+out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of two men in guard's
+uniforms approaching me from behind. This was the first time I had seen
+
+male guards in the House of D. My mind flashed back to what the sisters
+had said about these "last resort" guards — the jail's riot squad — who were
+always on call for situations where force was deemed necessary. Realizing
+why they were there, I jumped up, took a battle stance and prepared to
+defend myself. One of them grabbed my arm. I kicked him. When the other
+man came to his aid, they both knocked me to the floor. By the time I could
+get up, the deputy warden and some of her female helpers were in on the
+action — as if two male prison guards weren't capable of subduing me.
+At this moment, the two officers standing on the sidelines could no longer
+bear their position of neutrality. They both threw themselves into the fight.
+Their entrance into the battle was a shock — were they too willing to go to
+bat for the enemy? But it was even more of a shock to discover that they
+were not trying to subdue me but rather were beating the men who, by now,
+were really roughing me up.
+The fight turned into a free-for-all. No one really knew who was on who's
+side. In all the confusion, both men managed to grab me, each one seizing
+an arm. They bent each arm upward behind my back in a hold that was
+impossible to break.
+Bruised and breathless, there was nothing I could do to prevent them from
+locking the handcuffs. I knew that my rights had been violated; they were
+abducting me before I had even had the opportunity to learn the results of
+the Supreme Court decision from my lawyer. But for the time being, there
+was little I could do, except wait until I reestablished contact with my
+comrades outside.
+My hands bound behind me, I was shoved, protesting, into a side room.
+Seeing that I was wearing the sleeveless cotton jail dress and canvas
+sneakers without socks, the librarian warned me it was very cold outside. I
+told her that my "court clothes" were at the booking desk.
+The receptionist got my two civilian outfits: the navy-blue skirt and the
+blouse I had been wearing the day of my arrest, and a pair of wool pants
+and lightweight suede jacket. But I could not put them on because my hands
+were locked behind my back. The two women helped me slide my legs into
+
+the pants, which I wore under the dress, and wrapped the jacket around my
+shoulders.
+I tried to concentrate on the concrete. Was I heading for the airport or would
+the extradition be carried out by train — or by car, as had been the case with
+Bobby Seale some months ago? The uncertainty was nerve-rending.
+With the receptionist on one side and the librarian on the other, I walked
+slowly through the prisoners' gate onto the cold cobblestones of the
+courtyard. My anger gave way to pangs of regret at having to leave behind
+all my friends locked up in that filth. Vernell . . . Would they drop that
+phony murder charge? Helen . . . Would she go home? Amy . . . so old, so
+warm . . . What would happen to her? Pat . . . Would she write her book
+exposing the House of D.? And the organizing for the bail fund . . . Would it
+continue? Harriet . . . So committed to the struggle — would they continue
+to try to break her will?
+The police van was waiting in the courtyard, the same van they had used to
+take me to court. Through the heavy grill on the windows, I could see
+nothing in the darkness. But suddenly, as the van rolled through the
+courtyard gates, I heard a thunderous burst of shouts of support. I could not
+figure out how so many people had learned I was being taken away that
+night. Later I found out they had come in response to the calls made by the
+white couple on Greenwich Avenue.
+
+Not a single light illuminated the gigantic courtyard of the Tombs. All I
+could see was the outline of a collection of cars parked in the center, and the
+shadows of human figures moving back and forth between the vehicles. The
+atmosphere was reminiscent of postwar spy movies. A dozen white men
+swarming around their unmarked police cars, nervously awaiting the end of
+this transaction, this histrionic ceremony of repression unfolding under the
+dim glow of flashlights.
+New York removed its handcuffs. California produced theirs and locked
+them around my wrists.
+
+New York turned over documents. California aimed its flashlights on the
+papers before accepting them with approval.
+New York handed over my clothes and a gray denim bag of shoes.
+California received them, as if by accepting my possessions, it was
+asserting control over my life.
+The librarian and the receptionist, who had accompanied me this far, stood
+silently by. It was as if their individual identities were fading away. They
+appeared disturbed by their powerlessness. "I hope things turn out all right,"
+one of them said. In spite of herself, she sounded like someone who must
+say something cheerful to a terminally ill patient.
+The scene had a choreographed air about it. In the same silent rhythm, New
+York moved toward the van and California trudged toward the extradition
+vehicle. Something about the undisturbed perfection of this operation was
+far more terrifying than the extradition itself. I had to do something,
+anything, to disrupt their performance. Impulsively, I stopped short. Hands
+automatically tightened around weapons in answer to my little gesture of
+refusal.
+"These handcuffs are too tight — and there's no reason why my hands need
+to be locked behind my back. If you're thinking about getting me into this
+car, you can think about changing these handcuffs."
+At least I had smashed their rhythm of inevitability. At least I had taken
+them by surprise, and with no one to give them cues, they were
+momentarily at a loss.
+Still startled, and as if he were following the orders of a superior, the cop in
+charge instructed one of the others to unlock the cuffs and redo them with
+my hands in front.
+This caravan without beginning and without end was the epitome of the
+insane violence of the state. It would speed through the city, then abruptly
+stop. Anonymous policemen would jump out of cars, whisper to one
+another, then some of the cars would head in one direction and others would
+
+go in the opposite direction. When we reached a tunnel, the cars came to a
+halt while the roadblock they were setting up for us was secured.
+I had not realized how cold it was until I felt my body shivering and heard
+my teeth chattering. The man to my right was holding my wool skirt and
+blouse. Perhaps if I wrapped the skirt around my feet and used the blouse to
+cover my hands, I might be warmer.
+At first he didn't object to my request for the skirt, but while I was
+awkwardly trying to wrap it around my feet with my manacled hands, he
+lunged toward me as if he expected me to aim a gun at him. For a moment I
+thought he had gone berserk. Only a madman could think that I might have
+concealed a weapon in those flimsy clothes, which moreover had already
+been searched by the FBI and the jailers at the House of D. Then it occurred
+to me that anyone in his place would have done the same thing — it was the
+madness of the institution he served that was driving him to hysterically
+search the hem of my skirt and the seams of my blouse.
+We had been driving so long I was beginning to wonder whether they were
+planning to go the whole stretch across country this way. But when I
+ventured a question about our destination, the man to my right, after a bit of
+hesitation, said that it was McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. So in
+addition to armed agents, police, the attorney general's offices of two states,
+even the military had been brought in.
+We drove onto the base and then shot diagonally across an airfield
+submerged in the darkness of the early winter morning. The plane was not
+yet visible, only the light shining through its windows. Did they expect an
+airborne battle? Is that why they called on the Air Force? It would hardly
+have surprised me if someone told me fighter planes were going to escort
+me to California.
+As we got closer to the aircraft, I saw little clusters of people lined up in a
+U-formation around the stairway descending from the tail of the old freight
+plane. Agents with weapons in their hands. Shot guns. Rifles. Machine
+guns.
+
+What if I tripped while I was walking toward the plane? Their attack
+reflexes would be set off. And my body would be riddled with bullets.
+Since this operation was being conducted in secrecy, away from the eyes of
+the press, there would be no one to contradict them if they said I was trying
+to escape.
+With slow determination, despite my locked wrists, I managed a smooth
+descent from the automobile. Moving toward the plane, each step was full
+of effort. The gun barrels were tracing my path.
+Flanked by plainclothes and uniformed men, two women were stationed at
+the top of the movable stairs. One was short and thin, with drab brown hair.
+Her keen-featured pale face betrayed the uncertainty of the novice. The
+older woman was tall and heavy-featured. Her hair had the look of a recent
+trip to the beauty parlor. I could tell immediately that she was strongly
+committed to her job; a policewoman par excellence. She seemed to enjoy
+being in charge of me, surrounded by those armed men who, in the event of
+an incident, would have to take instructions from her.
+Throughout the trip, she was the one who most conspicuously imposed
+herself on me. Each time I shifted position, even slightly, she got up from
+her seat to inspect the small area surrounding me. And when I had to use
+the toilet, she insisted on stuffing herself inside the tiny booth. As she
+intently watched me urinate, I couldn't resist asking, "Do you think I'm
+going to flush myself down the toilet?"
+She seemed a fitting representative of the government of California. That
+state held the dubious distinction of being one of the most advanced in the
+country when it came to quelling resistance. California could already claim
+more than its share of victims. I could trace the history of my political
+involvement there by the number of funerals I had attended.
+During this interminable flight I wondered whether I too would become one
+of its victims. My confidence in the movement was invaded by the terrible
+specter of San Quentin, that fortress of horrors hanging over the San
+Francisco Bay as though it were clinging to the fringes of civilization. I
+thought about Aaron Henry, the last victim to be strangled by gas in San
+Quentin's death chamber. On the date of his execution, his mother begged
+
+for an audience with the governor. Ronald Reagan felt no compassion for
+her. He never even bothered to acknowledge her presence. Sitting on that
+plane, I thought of her and every Black mother like her. It took twelve hours
+to fly from one end of the country to the other. Twelve hours for my
+thoughts to roam from one end of my life to the other. I thought of my
+family. What would happen to my mother, my father, Reggie, Benny,
+Fania? It had been so long since the days when we were all together — at
+home, secure, sheltered.
+But had there ever really been such a time? Hadn't the people on that
+airplane always been there, holding us with hatred in their eyes, preying
+upon our lives?
+
+PART TWO: Rocks
+I have a home in that rock, don't you see? . . .
+
+T
+
+he big white house on top of the hill was not far from our old
+neighborhood, but the distance could not be measured in blocks. The
+government housing project on Eighth Avenue where we lived before was a
+crowded street of little red brick structures — no one of which was different
+from the other. Only rarely did the cement surrounding these brick huts
+break open and show patches of green. Without space or earth, nothing
+could be planted to bear fruit or blossoms. But friends were there — and
+friendliness.
+In 1948 we moved out of the projects in Birmingham, Alabama, to the large
+wooden house on Center Street. My parents still live there. Because of its
+steeples and gables and peeling paint, the house was said to be haunted.
+There were wild woods in back with fig trees, blackberry patches and great
+wild cherry trees.
+On one side of the house was a huge Cigar tree. There was space here and
+no cement. The street itself was a strip of orange-red Alabama clay. It was
+the most conspicuous house in the neighborhood — not only because of its
+curious architecture but because, for blocks around, it was the only house
+not teeming inside with white hostility. We were the first black family to
+move into that area, and the white people believed that we were in the
+vanguard of a mass invasion.
+At the age of four I was aware that the people across the street were
+different — without yet being able to trace their alien nature to the color of
+their skin. What made them different from our neighbors in the projects was
+the frown on their faces, the way they stood a hundred feet away and glared
+at us, their refusal to speak when we said "Good afternoon." An elderly
+couple across the street, the Montees, sat on their porch all the time, their
+eyes heavy with belligerence. Almost immediately after we moved there the
+
+white people got together and decided on a border line between them and
+us. Center Street became the line of demarcation. Provided that we stayed
+on "our" side of the line (the east side) they let it be known we would be left
+in peace. If we ever crossed over to their side, war would be declared. Guns
+were hidden in our house and vigilance was constant.
+Fifty or so yards from this hatred, we went about our daily lives. My
+mother, on leave from her teaching job, took care of my younger brother
+Benny, while waiting to give birth to another child, my sister Fania. My
+father drove his old orange van to the service station each morning after
+dropping me off at nursery school. It was next door to the Children's Home
+Hospital — an old wooden building where I was born and where, at two, I
+had my tonsils removed. I was fascinated by the people dressed in white
+and tried to spend more time at the hospital than at the nursery. I had made
+up my mind that I was going to be a doctor — a children's doctor.
+Shortly after we moved to the hill, white people began moving out of the
+neighborhood and Black families were moving in, buying old houses and
+building new ones. A Black minister and his wife, the Deyaberts, crossed
+into white territory, buying the house right next to the Montees, the people
+with the hateful eyes.
+It was evening in the spring of 1949. I was in the bathroom washing my
+white shoelaces for Sunday School the next morning when an explosion a
+hundred times louder than the loudest, most frightening thunderclap I had
+ever heard shook our house. Medicine bottles fell off the shelves, shattering
+all around me. The floor seemed to slip away from my feet as I raced into
+the kitchen and my frightened mother's arms.
+Crowds of angry Black people came up the hill and stood on "our" side,
+staring at the bombed-out ruins of the Deyaberts' house. Far into the night
+they spoke of death, of white hatred, death, white people, and more death.
+But of their own fear they said nothing. Apparently it did not exist, for
+Black families continued to move in. The bombings were such a constant
+response that soon our neighborhood became known as Dynamite Hill.
+The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more
+determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the
+
+battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things. On
+the contrary, my mother always said, love had been ordained by God. White
+people's hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal. She knew that
+whenever I answered the telephone and called to her, "Mommy, a white
+lady wants to talk to you," I was doing more than describing the curious
+drawl. Every time I said "white lady" or "white man" anger clung to my
+words. My mother tried to erase the anger with reasonableness. Her
+experiences had included contacts with white people seriously committed to
+improving race relations. Though she had grown up in rural Alabama, she
+had become involved, as a college student, in anti-racist movements. She
+had worked to free the Scottsboro Boys and there had been whites — some
+of them Communists — in that struggle. Through her own political work,
+she had learned that it was possible for white people to walk out of their
+skin and respond with the integrity of human beings. She tried hard to make
+her little girl — so full of hatred and confusion — see white people not so
+much as what they were as in terms of their potential. She did not want me
+to think of the guns hidden in drawers or the weeping black woman who
+had come screaming to our door for help, but of a future world of harmony
+and equality. I didn't know what she was talking about.
+When Black families had moved up on the hill in sufficient numbers for me
+to have a group of friends, we developed our own means of defending our
+egos. Our weapon was the word. We would gather on my front lawn, wait
+for a car of white people to pass by and shout the worst epithets for white
+people we knew: Cracker. Redneck. Then we would laugh hysterically at
+the startled expressions on their faces. I hid this pastime from my parents.
+They could not know how important it was for me, and for all of us who
+had just discovered racism, to find ways of maintaining our dignity.
+
+From the time we were young, we children would go to the old family farm
+in Marengo County. Our paternal grandmother and my Uncle Henry's
+family lived on the same land and in an ancient, unpainted weatherbeaten
+cabin similar to the one in which my father and all his sisters and brothers
+had been born. A visit to the country was like a journey backward into
+history; it was a return to our origins.
+
+If there had been a mansion nearby, their cabin could have easily been the
+slave quarters of a century ago. The little house had two small bedrooms, a
+kitchen in the back and a common room where we children slept on pallets
+spread out on the floor. Instead of electricity, there were kerosene lanterns
+for the few hours of darkness before we went to bed. Instead of plumbing,
+there was a well outside where we drew water to drink and to heat over an
+open fire in the yard for our weekly baths in huge metal tubs. The outhouse
+frightened me when I was very young, so I urinated in a white enamel pot
+and would go into the brush to have a bowel movement rather than enter the
+putrid-smelling little house with the hole in the wooden plank where you
+could look down and see all the excrement floating around.
+The family ate well; I did not realize then that this was probably one of the
+few pleasures that was available in a life which was work from sunup to
+sundown, when you were so exhausted that you could only think about
+recuperating for the next day's work. As a child on the farm, I did not
+distinguish work from play because the work there was novel to me and
+because I was not forced to do it all the time. When I fed the chickens, I
+would laugh at the way they all raced for the feed and gulped it down.
+When I gathered the eggs and fed the slop to the hogs, milked the cows and
+led the workhorses to the watering trough, I was enjoying myself.
+Going to the country, to the green open spaces of the cotton and tobacco
+fields, was going to my own vision of paradise. I loved to chase the
+chickens barefoot, ride the work horses bareback, help take the few cows to
+pasture in the early hours of the morning. The only amusement available
+that was totally unrelated to the work of the farm was the refreshing swims
+in the nearby creek — "the crick," we called it — and the exciting trips into
+the swamps to explore this wonderful world inhabited by bizarre, crawling,
+slimy creatures.
+Every Sunday after returning from the little wooden church a few miles
+down the road, there would be fried chicken and biscuits baked in the wood
+stove and spread with home-churned butter, greens and sweet potatoes from
+the fields, and fresh sweet milk from the cows in the barn.
+Around the time I was twelve years old, my grandmother died. She had
+stayed with us in Birmingham for a while but had since moved to California
+
+to take turns living with my father's sisters and brothers who had trekked
+out to the West Coast in search of the mythical opportunities open to Black
+people there. Her body was brought back to Marengo County, Alabama, to
+be consecrated and buried in her little hometown of Linden. It was a
+tremendous blow to me, for she had always been a symbol of strength, of
+age, wisdom and suffering.
+We had learned from her what slavery had been like. She was born only a
+few years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and her parents had been
+slaves themselves. She did not want us to forget that. When we were taught
+about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in school, it was my
+grandmother's image that always came to mind.
+Not yet having accepted the finality of death, I still had a nebulous notion of
+an afterlife. Therefore amid all the desperate crying and shouting at the
+funeral, there were visions in my head of my grandmother going to join
+Harriet Tubman, where she would look down peacefully upon the
+happenings in this world. Wasn't she being lowered into the same soil where
+our ancestors had fought so passionately for freedom?
+After her burial the old country lands took on for me an ineffable, aweinspiring dimension: they became the stage on which the history of my
+people had been acted out. And my grandmother, in death, became more
+heroic. I felt a strange kind of unbreakable bond, vaguely religious, with her
+in that new world she had entered.
+
+The summer before I went to school, I spent several months with Margaret
+Burnham's family in New York. Compared to Birmingham, New York was
+Camelot. I spent a rapt summer visiting zoos, parks, beaches, playing with
+Margaret, her older sister Claudia, and their friends, who were Black,
+Puerto Rican and white. With my Aunt Elizabeth, I rode buses and sat in the
+seat right behind the driver.
+That summer in New York made me more more keenly sensitive to the
+segregation I had to face at home. Back home in Birmingham, on my first
+bus ride with my teen-aged cousin Snookie, I broke away from her and
+
+raced for my favorite place, directly behind the driver. At first, she tried to
+coax me out of the seat by cheerfully urging me to come with her to a seat
+in the back. But I knew where I wanted to sit. When she insisted I had to get
+up, I wanted to know why. She didn't know how to explain it. I imagine the
+whites were amused at her dilemma, and the Black people were perhaps just
+a little embarrassed about their own acquiescence. My cousin was
+distraught; she was the center of attention and had no notion of what to do.
+In desperation she whispered in my ear that there was a toilet in the back
+and if we didn't hurry she might have an accident. When we reached the
+back and I saw there was no toilet, I was angry not only because I had been
+tricked and lost my seat, but because I didn't know who or what to blame.
+Near my father's service station downtown was a movie house called The
+Alabama. It reminded me of the ones in New York. Day and night the front
+of the building glittered with bright neon lights. A luxurious red carpet
+extended all the way to the sidewalk. On Saturdays and Sundays, the
+marquee always bore the titles of the latest children's movies. When we
+passed, blond-haired children with their mean-looking mothers were always
+crowded around the ticket booth. We weren't allowed in The Alabama —
+our theaters were the Carver and the Eighth Avenue, and the best we could
+expect in their roach-infested auditoriums was reruns of Tarzan. "If only we
+lived in New York . . ." I constantly thought. When we drove by the
+amusement park at the Birmingham Fairgrounds, where only white children
+were allowed, I thought about the fun we had at Coney Island in New York.
+Downtown at home, if we were hungry, we had to wait until we retreated
+back into a Black neighborhood, because the restaurants and food stands
+were reserved for whites only. In New York, we could buy a hot dog
+anywhere. In Birmingham, if we needed to go to the toilet or wanted a drink
+of water, we had to seek out a sign bearing the inscription "Colored." Most
+Southern Black children of my generation learned how to read the words
+"Colored" and "White" long before they learned "Look, Dick, look."
+I had come to look upon New York as a fusion of the two universes, a place
+where Black people were relatively free of the restraints of Southern
+racism. Yet during subsequent visits, several incidents sullied this image of
+racial harmony. Between the ages of six and ten, I spent a part of most
+summers in the city. My mother was working toward her master's degree in
+
+education, attending New York University during the summers. She always
+took her children along. In my mother's circle of friends, there was a couple
+whose futile efforts to find a place to live had brought them and their
+friends to despair. After listening to vague conversations on the subject, I
+managed to pry out of the adults the reason for their difficulty: she was
+Black and he was white.
+Another situation in New York was in even sharper contradiction to the
+myth of Northern social harmony and justice. When I was around eight, the
+McCarthy period had reached a peak. Among the Communists forced
+underground was James Jackson, whom my parents knew from the time he
+and his family had lived in Birmingham. I did not really understand what
+was going on at the time; I only knew that the police were looking for my
+friend Harriet's father. Whenever I was with the Jackson children, they
+would point out the men following them who were always no more than
+half a block away. They were stern-looking white men dressed in suits, no
+matter how hot the weather got. They even started following our family,
+afterward questioning whomever we had visited during the day.
+Why were they looking for my friend's father? He had done nothing wrong;
+he had committed no crime — but he was Black, and he was a Communist.
+Because I was too young to know what a Communist was, the meaning of
+the McCarthy witch hunts escaped me. As a result, I understood only what
+my eyes saw: evil white men out to get an innocent Black man. And this
+was happening not in the South, but in New York, the paragon of racial
+concord.
+Like New York, California was thought to be far more advanced than the
+South. During my childhood, I heard numerous stories about the golden
+opportunities available to Black people on the West Coast. Great westward
+pilgrimages were still being made by the poor and the jobless. One of my
+father's brothers and two of his sisters had joined the Black emigration to
+the West. We occasionally visited them in Los Angeles.
+Some of the relatives had created comfortable circumstances for themselves
+— one of my aunts who had gone into real estate was even buying property
+in the hills of Hollywood. But another side of the family was in such
+difficult straits they were living off welfare. It depressed me to visit my
+
+cousins and discover that they did not have enough food in the house for a
+single decent meal — and that six or seven of them were living in a onebedroom apartment. I recall their asking my father repeatedly if he would
+not give them some money so they could at least put some food in the
+refrigerator.
+
+My childhood friends and I were bound to develop ambivalent attitudes
+toward the white world. On the one hand there was our instinctive aversion
+toward those who prevented us from realizing our grandest as well as our
+most trivial wishes. On the other, there was the equally instinctive jealousy
+which came from knowing that they had access to all the pleasurable things
+we wanted. Growing up, I could not help feeling a certain envy. And yet I
+have a very vivid recollection of deciding, very early, that I would never —
+and I was categorical about this — never harbor or express the desire to be
+white. This promise that I made to myself did nothing, however, to drive
+away the wishdreams that filled my head whenever my desires collided
+with a taboo. So, in order that my daydreams not contradict my principles, I
+constructed a fantasy in which I would slip on a white face and go
+unceremoniously into the theater or amusement park or wherever I wanted
+to go. After thoroughly enjoying the activity, I would make a dramatic,
+grandstand appearance before the white racists and with a sweeping gesture,
+rip off the white face, laugh wildly and call them all fools.
+Years later, when I was in my teens, I recalled this childish daydream and
+decided, in a way, to act it out. My sister Fania and I were walking
+downtown in Birmingham when I spontaneously proposed a plan to her: We
+would pretend to be foreigners and, speaking French to each other, we
+would walk into the shoe store on 19th Street and ask, with a thick accent,
+to see a pair of shoes. At the sight of two young Black women speaking a
+foreign language, the clerks in the store raced to help us. Their delight with
+the exotic was enough to completely, if temporarily, dispel their normal
+disdain for Black people.
+Therefore, Fania and I were not led to the back of the store where the one
+Black clerk would normally have waited on us out of the field of vision of
+the "respectable" white customers. We were invited to take seats in the very
+
+front of this Jim Crow shop. I pretended to know no English at all and
+Fania's broken English was extremely difficult to make out. The clerks
+strained to understand which shoes we wanted to try on.
+Enthralled by the idea of talking to foreigners — even if they did happen to
+be Black — but frustrated about the communication failure, the clerks sent
+for the manager. The manager's posture was identical. With a giant smile he
+came in from his behind-the-scenes office saying, "Now, what can I do for
+you pretty young ladies?" But before he let my sister describe the shoes we
+were looking for, he asked us about our background — where were we
+from, what were we doing in the States and what on earth had brought us to
+a place like Birmingham, Alabama? "It's very seldom that we get to meet
+people like you, you know." With my sister's less than elementary
+knowledge of English, it required a great effort for her to relate our
+improvised story. After repeated attempts, however, the manager finally
+understood that we came from Martinique and were in Birmingham as part
+of a tour of the United States.
+Each time this man finally understood something, his eyes lit up, his mouth
+opened in a broad "Oh!" He was utterly fascinated when she turned to me
+and translated his words. The white people in the store were at first
+confused when they saw two Black people sitting in the "whites only"
+section, but when they heard our accents and conversations in French, they
+too seemed to be pleased and excited by seeing Black people from so far
+away they could not possibly be a threat.
+Eventually I signaled to Fania that it was time to wind up the game. We
+looked at him: his foolish face and obsequious grin one eye-blink away
+from the scorn he would have registered as automatically as a trained
+hamster had he known we were local residents. We burst out laughing. He
+started to laugh with us, hesitantly, the way people laugh when they suspect
+themselves to be the butt of the joke.
+"Is something funny?" he whispered.
+Suddenly I knew English, and told him that he was what was so funny. "All
+Black people have to do is pretend they come from another country, and
+
+you treat us like dignitaries." My sister and I got up, still laughing, and left
+the store.
+I had followed almost to the t the scenario of my childhood daydream.
+
+In September 1949, Fania had just turned one, and my brother Benny was
+about to turn four. Having spent three years playing the same games in
+nursery school and visiting the hospital next door, I was ready for
+something different and had pleaded to go early to elementary school. On
+the Monday after Labor Day, wearing my stiff new red plaid dress, I
+jumped into my father's truck, eager to begin my first day at "big" school.
+The road to school took us down Eleventh Court across the overpass above
+the railroad tracks, through the street dividing the Jewish Cemetery in half
+and three blocks up the last hill. Carrie A. Tuggle School was a cluster of
+old wooden frame houses, so dilapidated that they would have been
+instantly condemned had they not been located in a Black neighborhood.
+One would have thought that this was merely a shoddy collection of houses
+built on the side of a grassless hill if it had not been for the children milling
+around or the fenced-in grave out front, bearing a sign indicating that Carrie
+A. Tuggle, founder of the school, was buried there.
+Some of the houses were a motley whitewashed color. Others were covered
+with ugly brownish-black asphalt siding. That they were spread throughout
+an area of about three square blocks seemed to be proof of the way the
+white bureaucracy had gone about establishing a "school" for Black
+children. Evidently, they had selected a group of rundown houses and, after
+evicting the inhabitants, had declared them to be the school. These houses
+stood all along a steep incline; at the bottom of the hill, there was a large
+bowl-shaped formation in the earth, covered with the red clay that is
+peculiar to Alabama. This empty bowl had been designated the playground. Houses similar to the school buildings were located around the
+other sides of the bowl, houses whose outsides and insides were falling to
+pieces.
+
+My mother, a primary school teacher herself, had already taught me how to
+read, write and do simple arithmetic. The things I learned in the first grade
+were far more fundamental than school learning. I learned that just because
+one is hungry, one does not have the right to a good meal; or when one is
+cold, to warm clothing, or when one is sick, to medical care. Many of the
+children could not even afford to buy a bag of potato chips for lunch. It was
+agonizing for me to see some of my closest friends waiting outside the
+lunchroom silently watching the other children eating.
+For a long time, I thought about those who ate and those who watched.
+Finally I decided to do something about it. Knowing that my father returned
+from his service station each evening with a bag of coins, which he left
+overnight in a kitchen cabinet, one night I stayed awake until the whole
+house was sleeping.
+Then, trying to overcome my deep fear of the dark, I slipped into the
+kitchen and stole some of the coins. The next day I gave the money to my
+hungry friends. Their hunger pangs were more compelling than my pangs
+of conscience. I would just have to suffer the knowledge that I had stolen
+my father's money. My feelings of guilt were further appeased by reminding
+myself that my mother was always taking things to children in her class.
+She took our clothes and shoes — sometimes even before we had outgrown
+them — and gave them to those who needed them. Like my mother, what I
+did, I did quietly, without any fanfare. It seemed to me that if there were
+hungry children, something was wrong and if I did nothing about it, I would
+be wrong too.
+This was my first introduction to class differences among my own people.
+We were the not-so-poor. Until my experiences at school, I believed that
+everyone else lived the way we did. We always had three good meals a day.
+I had summer clothes and winter clothes, everyday dresses and a few
+"Sunday" dresses. When holes began to wear through the soles of my shoes,
+although I may have worn them with pasteboard for a short time, we
+eventually went downtown to select a new pair.
+The family income was earned by both my mother and father. Before I was
+born, my father had taken advantage of his hard-earned college degree,
+from St. Augustine's in Raleigh, North Carolina, to secure a position
+
+teaching history at Parker High School. But life was especially difficult
+during those years; his salary was as close to nothing as money could be. So
+with his meager savings he began to buy a service station in the Black
+section of downtown Birmingham.
+My mother who, like my father, came from a very humble background, also
+worked her way through college and got a job teaching in the Birmingham
+elementary school system. The combined salaries were nothing to boast
+about, yet enough to survive on, and much more than was earned by the
+typical Southern Black family. They had managed to save enough to buy
+the old house on the hill, but they had to rent out the upstairs for years to
+make the mortgage payments. Until I went to school I did not know that this
+was a stunning accomplishment.
+The prevailing myth then as now is that poverty is a punishment for
+idleness and indolence. If you had nothing to show for yourself, it meant
+that you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew that my mother and father had
+worked hard — my father told us stories of walking ten miles to school
+each day, and my mother had her collection of anecdotes about the difficult
+life she had led as a child in the little town of Sylacauga. But I also knew
+that they had had breaks.
+My preoccupation with the poverty and wretchedness I saw around me
+would not have been so deep if I had not been able to contrast it with the
+relative affluence of the white world. Tuggle was all the shabbier when we
+compared it to the white school nearby. From the top of the hill we could
+see an elementary school for white children. Solidly built of red brick, the
+building was surrounded by a deep-green lawn. In our school, we depended
+on potbellied coal stoves in winter, and when it rained outside, it rained
+inside. By the time a new building was constructed to replace the brokendown old one, I was too old to spend more than a year or so in its
+classrooms, which were reserved for the lower grades.
+There were never enough textbooks to go around, and the ones that were
+available were old and torn, often with the most important pages missing.
+There was no gym for sports periods — only the "bowl." On rainy days
+when the bowl's red clay was a muddy mess, we were cooped up
+somewhere in one of the shacks. Tuggle was administered and controlled as
+
+a section of the "Birmingham Negro Schools" by an all-white Board of
+Education. Only on special occasions did we see their representatives face
+to face — during inspections or when they were showing off their "Negro
+schools" to some visitor from out of town. Insofar as the day-to-day
+activities were concerned, it was Black people who ran the school.
+Perhaps it was precisely these conditions that gave us a strong positive
+identification with our people and our history. We learned from some of our
+teachers all the traditional ingredients of "Negro History." From the first
+grade on, we all sang the "Negro National Anthem" by James Weldon
+Johnson when assemblies were convened — either along with or sometimes
+instead of "The Star Spangled Banner" or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." I
+recall being very impressed with the difference between the official
+anthems, which insisted that freedom was a fact for everybody in the
+country, and the "Negro National Anthem," whose words were of
+resistance. And although my singing voice was nothing I wanted to call
+attention to, I always sang the last phrases full blast: "Facing the rising sun,
+till a new day is born, let us march on till victory is won!"
+As we learned about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham
+Lincoln, we also became acquainted with Black historical figures. Granted,
+the Board of Education would not permit the teachers to reveal to us the
+exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey. But we were introduced to
+Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
+One of the most important events each year at Tuggle was Negro History
+Week. Special events were planned for assembly, and in all grades each
+child would be responsible for a project about a Black historical or
+contemporary figure. Throughout those years, I learned something about
+every Black person "respectable" enough to be allotted a place in the history
+books — or, as far as contemporary people were concerned, who made their
+way into "Who's Who in Negro America" or Ebony magazine. The
+weekend before Negro History Week each year, I was always hard at work
+— creating my poster, calling on the assistance of my parents, clipping
+pictures, writing captions and descriptions.
+Without a doubt, the children who attended the de jure segregated schools
+of the South had an advantage over those who attended the de facto
+
+segregated schools of the North. During my summer trips to New York, I
+found that many of the Black children there had never heard of Frederick
+Douglass or Harriet Tubman. At Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School,
+Black identity was thrust upon us by the circumstances of oppression. We
+had been pushed into a totally Black universe; we were compelled to look
+to ourselves for spiritual nourishment. Yet while there were those clearly
+supportive aspects of the Black Southern school, it should not be idealized.
+As I look back, I recall the pervasive ambivalence at school, an
+ambivalence which I confronted in virtually every classroom, and every
+school-related event. On the one hand, there was a strong tendency
+affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school
+activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the
+official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an
+individualistic, competitive way out of this torment. We were told that the
+ultimate purpose of our education was to provide us with the skills and
+knowledge to lift ourselves singly and separately out of the muck and slime
+of poverty by "our own bootstraps." This child would become a doctor, this
+one a lawyer; there would be the teachers, the engineers, the contractors, the
+accountants, the businessmen — and if you struggled extraordinarily hard,
+you might be able to approach the achievements of A. G. Gaston, our local
+Black millionaire.
+This Booker T. Washington syndrome permeated every aspect of the
+education I received in Birmingham. Work hard and you will be rewarded.
+A corollary of this principle was that the road would be harder and rockier
+for Black people than for their white counterparts. Our teachers warned us
+that we would have to steel ourselves for hard labor and more hard labor,
+sacrifices and more sacrifices. Only this would prove that we were serious
+about overcoming all the obstacles before us. It often struck me they were
+speaking of these obstacles as if they would always be there, part of the
+natural order of things, rather than the product of a system of racism, which
+we could eventually overturn.
+I continued to have my doubts about this "work and ye shall be rewarded"
+notion. But, I admit, my reaction was not exactly straightforward. On the
+one hand, I did not entirely believe it. It didn't make sense to me that all
+those who had not "made it" were suffering for their lack of desire and the
+
+defectiveness of their will to achieve a better life for themselves. If this
+were true, then, great numbers of our people — perhaps the majority — had
+really been lazy and shiftless, as white people were always saying.
+But on the other hand, it seemed that I was modeling my own aspirations
+after precisely that "work and be rewarded" principle. I had made up my
+mind that I was going to prove to the world that I was just as good, just as
+intelligent, just as capable of achieving as any white person. At that time —
+and until my high school years in New York — I wanted to become a
+pediatrician. Never once did I doubt that I would be able to execute my
+plans — after elementary school, high school, then college and medical
+school. But I had a definite advantage: my parents would see to it that I
+attended college, and would help me survive until I could make it on my
+own. This was not something that could be said for the vast majority of my
+schoolmates.
+The work-and-be-rewarded syndrome was not the only thing which seemed
+to fly in the face of the positive sense of ourselves. We knew, for example,
+that whenever the white folks visited the school we were expected to "be on
+our P's and Q's," as our teachers put it. I could not understand why we had
+to behave better for them than we behaved for ourselves, unless we really
+did think they were superior. The visitors from the Board of Education
+always came in groups — groups of three or four white men who acted like
+they owned the place. Overseers. Sometimes if the leader of the group
+wanted to flaunt his authority he looked us over like a herd of cattle and
+said to the teacher, "Susie, this is a nice class you have here." We all knew
+that when a white person called a Black adult by his or her first name it was
+a euphemism for "Nigger, stay in your place." When this white assault was
+staged, I tried to decipher the emotions on the teacher's face: acquiesence,
+obsequiousness, defiance, or the pain of realizing that if she did fight back,
+she would surely lose her job.
+Once a Black teacher did fight back. When the white men called him
+"Jesse" in front of his class, he replied in a deep but cold voice, "In case you
+have forgotten, my name is Mr. Champion." He knew, as the words left his
+lips, that he had just given up his job. Jesse Champion was a personal friend
+of my parents, and I was appalled by the silence that reigned among the
+
+Black community following his act. It probably stemmed from a collective
+sense of guilt that his defiance was the exception and not the norm.
+Nothing in the world made me angrier than inaction, than silence. The
+refusal or inability to do something, say something when a thing needed
+doing or saying, was unbearable. The watchers, the head shakers, the back
+turners made my skin prickle. I remember once when I was seven or eight, I
+went along with my friend Annie Laurie and her family on a trip to the
+country. At the house we visited, a dog was running around in the yard.
+Soon another dog appeared. Without any warning the two animals were
+tearing at each other's throats. Saliva was flying and blood gushed from the
+wounds. Everyone was just standing, looking, doing nothing. It seemed we
+would stand there all day watching the hot Alabama sun beat down on the
+stupid, pointless fight of two dogs gnawing out each other's guts and eyes. I
+couldn't stand it any longer; I rushed in and tried to pull the dogs apart. It
+wasn't until after the screaming adults had dragged me away that I thought
+about the danger. But then it didn't matter; the fight had been stopped.
+The impulse I felt then was with me at other fights. Fights not between
+animals but between people, but equally futile and meaningless. All through
+school there were absurd battles — some brief, but many sustained and
+deadly. I frequently could not keep from stepping in.
+The children fought over nothing — over being bumped, over having toes
+stepped on, over being called a name, over being the target of real or
+imagined gossip. They fought over everything — split shoes, and cement
+yards, thin coats and mealless days. They fought the meanness of
+Birmingham while they sliced the air with knives and punched Black faces
+because they could not reach white ones.
+It hurt me. The fight in which my girl friend Olivia got stabbed with a knife.
+It hurt to see another friend, Chaney — furious when a teacher criticized
+her in front of the class — stand up, grab the nearest chair and fly into the
+teacher with it. The whole class turned into one great melee, some assisting
+Chaney, others trying to rescue the teacher, and the rest of us trying to break
+up the skirmish.
+
+It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts
+because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our
+misery.
+
+Time did not cool the anger of the white people who still lived on the hill.
+They refused to adapt their lives to our presence. Every so often a
+courageous Black family moved or built on the white side of Center Street,
+and the simmering resentment erupted in explosions and fires. On a few
+such occasions, Police Chief Bull Conner would announce on the radio that
+a "nigger family" had moved in on the white side of the street. His
+prediction "There will be bloodshed tonight" would be followed by a
+bombing. So common were the bombings on Dynamite Hill that the horror
+of them diminished.
+On our side, old houses abandoned by their white inhabitants were
+gradually bought up, and the woods where we picked blackberries were
+giving way to new brick houses. By the time I was eight or nine, we had a
+whole neighborhood of Black people. When the weather was warm, all the
+children came out after dark to play hide and go seek. There were many
+hiding places within our boundaries, which were not less than one or two
+square blocks. The night made the game more exciting, and we could
+pretend we were outsmarting the white folks.
+Sometimes we actually dared to penetrate their turf. "I dare you to go up on
+the Montees' porch," one of us would say. Whoever took him up would
+leave us on our side of the street as he hesitantly crossed over into enemy
+territory, tiptoed up the Montees' cement steps, touched the wooden porch
+with one shoe as if he were testing a hot stove, then raced back to us. When
+it was my turn, I could virtually hear the bombs going off as I ran up the
+steps and touched the Montee porch for the first time in my life. When this
+game began to lose its aura of danger, we made it more challenging. Instead
+of just touching the porch, we had to run to the door, ring the bell and hide
+in the bushes around their house, while the old woman or old man came
+out, trying to figure out what was going on. When they finally caught on to
+our game, even though they could seldom find us, they stood on the porch
+screaming, "You little niggers better leave us alone!"
+
+In the meantime my playmates and school friends were learning how to call
+each other "nigger," or what, unfortunately, was just as bad in those days,
+"black" or "African," both of which were considered synonymous with
+"savage." My mother never allowed anyone to say the word "nigger" in the
+house. (For that matter, no "bad words" — "shit," "damn," not even "hell"
+could be uttered in her presence.) If we wanted to describe an argument we
+had had with someone, we had to say, "Bill called me that bad word that
+starts with an n." Eventually, my mouth simply refused to pronounce those
+words for me, regardless of how hard I might want to say them.
+If, in the course of an argument with one of my friends, I was called
+"nigger" or "black," it didn't bother me nearly so much as when somebody
+said, "Just because you're bright and got good hair, you think you can act
+like you're white." It was a typical charge laid against light-skinned
+children.
+Sometimes I used to secretly resent my parents for giving me light skin
+instead of dark, and wavy instead of kinky hair. I pleaded with my mother
+to let me get it straightened, like my friends. But she continued to brush it
+with water and rub vaseline in it to make it lie down so she could fix the
+two big wavy plaits which always hung down my back. On special
+occasions, she rolled it up in curlers made out of brown paper to make my
+Shirley Temple Curls.
+One summer when our Brownie troop was at Camp Blossom Hill, it started
+to rain as we were walking from the mess hall to our cabins, and the girls'
+hands immediately went for their heads. The water was no threat to my
+unstraightened hair, so I paid no attention to the rain. One of the girls
+switched out and said, "Angela's got good hair. She can stroll in the rain
+from now to doomsday." I know she wasn't intentionally trying to hurt me,
+but I felt crushed. I ran back to my cabin, threw myself on the bunk
+sobbing.
+My cousins Snookie, Betty Jean and their mother, Doll, lived in Ketona,
+Alabama. I always loved to spend the weekend with them, because I knew
+they would put the hot comb over the wood fire and run it through my hair
+until it was straight as a pin. If I begged my mother long enough, she would
+let me wear it to school for a few days before she made me wash it out.
+
+Downtown near the post office was the Birmingham Public Library. It was
+open only to white people, but in a hidden room in the building, accessible
+only through a secret back entrance, a Black librarian had her headquarters.
+Black people could pass lists of books to her, which she would try to secure
+from the library.
+As a result of my mother's encouragement and prodding, books became a
+gratifying diversion for me. Mother taught me how to read when I had
+hardly reached my fourth year and eventually, when I was a little older, we
+both established a quota system for the number of books I should be reading
+per week. My mother or father picked up my books downtown, or else the
+Black librarian, Miss Bell, would bring them by the house.
+Later a new Black library was built down the hill, on the corner of Center
+Street and Eighth Avenue. The new red brick library, with its shiny
+linoleum floors and varnished tables, became one of my favorite hangouts.
+For hours at a time, I read avidly there — everything from Heidi to Victor
+Hugo's Les Miserables, from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery to
+Frank Yerby's lurid novels.
+Reading was far more satisfying than my weekly piano lessons and
+Saturday morning dance classes. For my fifth Christmas, my mother and
+father had gotten enough money together to buy me a full-sized piano. Once
+a week I trudged over to Mrs. Chambliss' house, dutifully played my scales
+and compositions, suffering the humiliation of being screamed at if I made
+a mistake. When the lesson was over, I paid her seventy-five cents and, if it
+was dark, waited for Mother or Daddy to pick me up so I wouldn't have to
+walk by the cemetery alone. On the other six days, I had to practice before I
+went out in the neighborhood with my friends. Around the end of May each
+year, Mrs. Chambliss' recital took place either at St. Paul's Methodist
+Church or the 16th Street Baptist Church two blocks away from my father's
+service station. With my hair in curls, wearing a ruffled organdy dress, rigid
+with nervousness, I tapped out the piece I had been practicing for months.
+The reward for the ordeal was three whole months without the pressure of
+piano lessons.
+Saturday mornings I joined scores of leotard-clad girls at the Smithfield
+Community Center in the projects where we used to live. There Mrs. Woods
+
+and her helpers made sure we did our plies and arabesques. Ballet during
+the first part of the class, then tap, soft shoe. My natural clumsiness defied
+the delicate ballet steps, so I always tried to find a place to hide in one of
+the back rows. For a while, my little brother, Benny, was coming along, so I
+had the added responsibility of taking care of him. One morning as we were
+walking down Center Street, he ran out in front of me — straight across
+Ninth Avenue. A bus came screeching to a stop, practically knocking him
+down. Trembling violently, I ran to rescue him. He was totally oblivious to
+the fact that he had almost been killed. During the warm-up exercises, I was
+still shaking. Suddenly I felt something warm streaming down my legs. I
+dropped to the floor, into the puddle of my urine, so humiliated I couldn't
+bear to look up at the staring faces of the other pupils. A girl named Emma
+came over and put her arms around my shoulder. Saying, "Angela, don't
+worry. Let's go outside," she led me away. She never knew how much her
+gesture meant to me. Still, having to face this same crowd every Saturday
+filled me with shame.
+
+Some years back, Black visitors to Birmingham had all of three post cards
+from which to choose if they wanted a souvenir of the Black section of the
+city. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Parker High School. A. G. Gaston's
+Funeral Home. Perhaps the white people who made the photographs and
+retouched them in bright reds and yellows had decided that our lives could
+be summarized by church, school and funerals. Once we were born, we got
+religion and a sprinkling of learning; then there was nothing left to do but
+die.
+They tried to make this sprinkling of learning appear to come from the most
+impressive institution of education around. On the picture post card, Parker
+looked brand new, whiter than if it had been whitewashed the day before,
+and had bright-green grass painted in front, where the dry dust refused to
+yield even a weed. Above the picture, stamped in bold black print, were the
+words: "A. H. Parker High School, Largest in the World for Colored Pupils"
+— as if there should have been tourists from every region of the globe
+coming to get a glimpse of this wonder.
+
+Perhaps, on its face, the statement was true — I don't think anyone ever did
+the research to confirm or contradict it. But whatever truth it contained
+rested squarely on the miserable conditions of Black people. If Parker was
+the "largest high school for colored pupils," it was for the same reason that
+there was not a single public high school in Harlem and the same reason
+that the education of Black youth in South Africa doesn't merit a grain of
+consideration. When my mother was high school age, the "world's largest"
+had been called Industrial High School, and it was the only Black high
+school for hundreds of miles around. She lived in the small town of
+Sylacauga, at least seventy-five miles from the city. The only way she could
+hope to get an education beyond the eighth grade was to leave her family
+and move to Birmingham.
+My friends and I were not overly eager to enter high school. When we
+graduated from Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School, we had to enter
+Parker Annex, several blocks away from the main building. This was a
+cluster of beaten-up wooden huts not much different from what we had just
+left.
+When we arrived on the first day we discovered that the inside of these
+structures was even more dilapidated than the outside. Unpainted wooden
+floors, ancient walls covered with graffiti no one ever bothered to remove.
+We realized that when the season began to turn, we would have to depend
+on the archaic potbellied stove in the corner of each house — we called
+them Shack I, Shack II, etc.
+Very few of my classes were stimulating — biology, chemistry,
+mathematics were the subjects that interested me most. My history classes
+were a farce.
+Farcical not so much because of the teachers' deficiency as the deficiency of
+the textbooks assigned by the Board of Education. In our American History
+book I discovered that the Civil War was the "War for Southern
+Independence" and that Black people much preferred to be slaves than to be
+free. After all, the books pointed out, the evidence of our ancestors' cheerful
+acceptance of their plight was the weekly Saturday night singing and
+dancing sessions. In elementary school, we had already been taught that
+many of the songs by slaves had a meaning understood only by them.
+
+"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" for instance also referred to the journey
+toward freedom in this life. But there was nothing about this in our high
+school textbooks. The teachers either had too much on their hands keeping
+the classes orderly or else they were not as concerned as our elementaryschool teachers were about presenting us with an accurate picture of Black
+history.
+The inner-directed violence which was so much a part of our school lives at
+Tuggle accelerated at Parker to the point where it verged on fratricide.
+Hardly a day would pass without a fight — in class or outside. And on one
+warm and windswept day — right there in the schoolyard — one of my
+schoolmates actually succeeded in knifing all life from another.
+We seemed to be caught in a whirlpool of violence and blood from which
+none of us could swim away.
+About the time I entered high school, the civil rights movement was
+beginning to awaken some Black Alabamians from their deep but fretful
+sleep. But judging from the general inactivity at Parker High School, you
+never would have known that Rosa Parks had refused to move to the back
+of the bus in Montgomery on December 4, 1955, or that Martin Luther King
+was leading a full-scale bus boycott there, just a hundred miles away, or
+that, in fact, there was supposed to be a budding bus movement in
+Birmingham.
+Some of us were affected by the boycott, however. On a few occasions, a
+small group of my schoolmates and I spontaneously decided to sit in the
+front of the bus to show our support of our sisters and brothers. Inevitably, a
+shouting match ensued between us and the bus driver. The Black people on
+the bus were forced to take sides. Because there was no extensive organized
+movement at that time in Birmingham, some of them were afraid of our
+audacity and implored us to do what the white man said.
+Around this time, the NAACP was declared illegal in Alabama, and its
+members were threatened with imprisonment. My parents were both
+members and determined not to allow Bull Conner and company to scare
+them into submission. Like others who related to the movement, my parents
+received bomb threats, but they continued to pay their dues until the
+
+NAACP was officially dissolved and replaced by the Alabama Christian
+Movement for Human Rights, headed by Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
+On the day after Christmas in 1956, the bus protest in Birmingham was
+scheduled to be launched by the ACMHR. Having decided to crush it
+before it had a chance to gather momentum, the racists, encouraged by Bull
+Conner, pulled out of the closet their old trusty weapons: the sticks of
+dynamite we had come to know so well. Christmas night, a roaring
+explosion ripped through the home of Reverend Shuttlesworth. They had
+planted the bomb beneath the house, directly under the bed where the
+minister was sleeping. People said that it was a miracle of God that
+everything around him was blown to pieces, yet the minister escaped
+without a scratch. We learned the next day that he had taken a neighbor who
+had been hurt during the explosion to the hospital and had returned home by
+bus, riding in the front. Later that day quite a number of people followed
+Reverend Shuttlesworth's example and were subsequently arrested.
+I was very agitated during those days. Something was happening which
+could change our lives. But I was too young, so I was told (I was twelve),
+and a girl at that, to be exposed to the billy clubs and violence of the police.
+As the years passed, however, and the needs of the movement increased, it
+became necessary to incorporate every man, woman and child who was
+willing into all levels of protest activity. In fact, shortly thereafter, the
+Shuttlesworth children began to play leading roles in ACMHR's work.
+While these upheavals were exploding in the streets of Birmingham, little
+of it penetrated Parker's campus. Over the next three years, the movement
+reached high points and then lulled. The daily schedule of classes,
+complemented by football and basketball games went on. The off-campus
+social life of the Black middle class continued undisturbed — except for the
+usual, routine racist incidents.
+For instance, one Sunday some friends and I were driving home from the
+movies. Among those in the car was Peggy, a girl who lived down the
+street. She was very light-skinned, with blond hair and green eyes. Her
+presence usually provoked puzzled and hostile stares because white people
+were always misidentifying her as white. This time it was a policeman who
+mistook her for a white person surrounded by Black people. And just as my
+
+friends were about to drop me off in front of the house, he forced us over to
+the side, demanding to know what we niggers were doing with a white girl.
+He ordered us out of the car and searched all of us, except Peggy, whom he
+separated from the group. In Alabama at that time, there was a state statute
+which prohibited all except economic intercourse between Blacks and
+whites. The cop threatened to throw all of us in jail, including Peggy, whom
+he called a "nigger lover."
+When Peggy angrily explained that she was Black like all the rest of us, the
+cop was obviously embarrassed. He worked off his embarrassment by
+harassing us with foul language, hitting some of the boys and searching
+every inch of the car for some excuse to take us to jail. This was a routine
+incident, perhaps even milder than most, but no less enraging because it
+was typical.
+At fourteen, in my junior year, I felt restless and exceedingly limited. The
+provincialism of Birmingham bothered me, and I had not yet been swept up
+into the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that it could forge for me a
+solid raison d'etre. I could not define or articulate the dissatisfaction I felt. I
+simply had the sensation of things closing in on me — and I wanted to get
+out. The time was fast approaching when, in order not to be outcasts, girls
+my age in middle-class circles had to play an active role in the established
+social life of the Black community. I hated the big formal dances and felt
+very awkward and out of place at the one or two such events I attended. I
+had to get away. One way or another, I was going to leave Birmingham.
+I discovered two avenues of escape: the early entrance program at Fisk
+University in Nashville and an experimental program developed by the
+American Friends Service Committee, through which Black students from
+the South could attend integrated high schools in the North. I applied for
+both and, after some months, learned that I had been accepted by both.
+With medical school in mind, at first I had a strong inclination toward the
+Fisk alternative. Fisk would not only be an escape from the provincialism I
+detested, it would also mean that I could more easily pursue my plans to
+become a pediatrician; Meharry Medical School was right on its campus.
+And Fisk was among the most academically prestigious Black universities
+in the country. It was the Fisk of W. E. B. DuBois. But it was also the
+
+University of the Black Bourgeoisie par excellence, and I could predict that
+my disinclination to become involved in purely social affairs would create
+enormous personal problems. Probably if I did not pledge a sorority, I
+would remain an outsider.
+As far as the American Friends' program was concerned, I had been able to
+gather only the most rudimentary information. I knew that the school I
+would attend, Elisabeth Irwin High School, was in New York and that I
+would live with a white family in Brooklyn. Though I knew nothing about
+the school, New York still fascinated me. I thought of all the things I had
+not been able to do for the first fifteen years of my life. I could do them in
+New York. I had a very undeveloped appreciation of music or the theater; I
+could look forward to exploring a whole new cultural universe.
+Ready and willing to accept the challenge of the unknown, I was only a
+little frightened. My mother thought more about the dangers I might
+confront, and though she wanted me to receive a fuller education, she was
+distressed about my having to leave home. I was only fifteen and she feared
+that a year on a university campus, surrounded by men and women much
+older than I, would rob me of the rest of my childhood and make me mature
+before my time. I don't think she quite realized that any Black child
+growing up in the South is forced to mature "before her time" anyway. But
+when she considered New York, all she could see was a gigantic house of
+horrors. Elisabeth Irwin was located in Greenwich Village, which, to her,
+was the haven of weird beatniks.
+My own preference was Elisabeth Irwin High School, New York City,
+where I would live in the home of W. H. Melish. But because of Mother's
+misgivings, I was willing to content myself with Fisk. We telephoned the
+Melishes in New York and informed them with regret of our decision. I
+tried to think about the positive side of Fisk: In four years, I would be
+nineteen and could attend Meharry Medical School; a few years later I
+would be curing children.
+With my suitcases packed and my mind snapped shut, I was ready to go
+(even if I had not bought all the suggested clothes on the list, such as
+formals for various occasions). One or two days before I was to leave, my
+father, my dear father, broke out of his normal reticence and asked me to
+
+tell him frankly what I wished to do. But before I could answer, he said he
+wanted to tell me about some of his own experiences during his brief stay at
+Fisk. (He had graduated from St. Augustine College in Raleigh, North
+Carolina, but had done some graduate work at Fisk.) It was a very good
+school, he said. But to accomplish anything there you had to enter the place
+with an unwavering conception of what you were going to do. I had to see
+both sides of Fisk, he said, its historical significance to Black people — and
+its problems as well.
+By the time we wound up the conversation, I knew that I would not be
+attending Fisk University, at least not that year. I would just have to
+persuade my mother that I was capable of defending myself against
+whatever dangers might be lurking in the streets of New York.
+
+For better or for worse, I boarded the train for New York. The trip itself was
+symbolic. Getting on in the Black section of the train, I was surrounded by
+friends and acquaintances from Birmingham who were on their way to
+schools located along the route to New York. As the Jim Crow train moved
+through Alabama, Georgia, and up through Washington, my friends left the
+train in small groups. Some were going to Morehouse, Spellman, or Clark,
+in Atlanta, and the final group got off in Washington to attend Howard
+University. At each major train stop, the familiarity of the surroundings
+eroded a little more. By the time the train slid out of Washington, I had been
+abandoned to the company of strangers and to the strangeness of white
+people entering the car and taking seats which had been "For Colored"
+throughout the Southern states.
+The prospects both excited and worried me. I had already assumed an
+obligation to live and study with white people over the next two years, but
+could I accustom myself to being around them all the time? In spite of the
+fact that, theoretically at least, the white people I was going to relate to at
+home and at school were committed, on some level, to fight for the equality
+of my people, the impact of racism upon me had been so tremendous that I
+knew I would have to exercise great effort to fit into a predominantly white
+world. I would have to be open and guarded at the same time. I would be
+watchful — prepared for any early sign of slight or hostility. (I did not yet
+
+know that what I would also encounter was white liberals' tendency to be
+oversolicitous of their few Black acquaintances.) But I would try hard to be
+at ease, to be accessible to whatever humaneness and kindness they might
+show me. I felt an almost unbearable tension — it was as if I were two
+persons, two faces of a Janus head. One profile stared disconsolately into
+the past — the fretful, violent, confining past broken only by occasional
+splotches of meaning, and by the love I had for my family. The other gazed
+with longing and apprehension into the future — a future glowing with
+challenge, but also harboring the possibility of defeat.
+Reverend and Mrs. Melish were waiting for me in Pennsylvania Station
+when the train arrived. From the first moment I had heard about them, and
+the sacrifices they had made for the progressive movement, I had a great
+respect for both of them. At the height of the McCarthy period, Reverend
+Melish (who, together with his father, was the pastor of the largest
+Episcopal church in Brooklyn) had used his pulpit to defend the victims of
+McCarthy's witch-hunting insanity. He had preached about the need for true
+Christians to fight all forms of injustice and repression. Moreover, he was at
+that time a member of the Soviet-American Friendship Organization, and in
+those days, McCarthy and company didn't distinguish between defending
+the right of a people to be Communist and being a Communist oneself.
+The Melishes had gone through a period of fierce and turbulent struggle
+with the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church; there had been the calumny of
+the public media, the ecclesiastical trial and finally the loss of the church.
+But their suffering had simply made them stronger and more determined.
+There were three sons in the Melish family: two older and one younger than
+me. One was in the twelfth grade and another in the seventh grade at
+Elisabeth Irwin. I felt a little more comfortable knowing that someone
+would be helping me orient myself in this school which was, from all
+accounts, unlike any I had ever heard of.
+I got settled at the house, and tried to explore the neighborhood. It was a
+relief to learn that the house was located in the heart of the Black
+community — in Bedford Stuyvesant on the corner of Kingston and St.
+Marks. It took me a while to realize that Black people too were affected by
+the character of New York. You did not go out on the street — especially if
+
+you were a woman — and strike up a conversation with a passing brother.
+In Birmingham, it would be considered the height of arrogance to pass one
+of your people on the street without a greeting like "Good evening." But
+here, they looked at you as though you were deranged if you spoke to a
+stranger on the street.
+Before the official opening of the semester, I went with Mrs. Melish to visit
+the school and meet some of the teachers. Elisabeth Irwin High School, on
+the edge of Greenwich Village, was such a small brick building in the
+middle of a block of two-story apartment buildings, that you would have
+never noticed that it was a school unless you happened to pass by in the
+morning when school was about to begin or in the evening when it was
+letting out.
+The history of the school impressed me. It had been conceived some
+decades before as an experiment within the public education system in
+progressive education. When the New York Board of Education decided to
+drop the experiment, the teachers themselves resolved to take over the
+school and guarantee its continued existence. They transformed it into a
+private school, asking tuition fees of those who attended, and made
+themselves collective owners of the institution.
+Aside from the high school there was an elementary school and
+kindergarten as well, located in a red brick building on Bleecker Street,
+appropriately called The Little Red School House. In each grade, from four
+years old through the twelfth grade, there was a single class, consisting of
+from twenty-five to thirty students. The preview trip to the school
+completely shattered my ideas of what schools were supposed to be like.
+All the teachers I had ever known had been conservative in appearance: the
+men had worn suits and ties, the women simple but dressy clothes. One of
+the first teachers I was introduced to was wearing a pair of beat-up jeans, a
+wild-colored short-sleeved shirt, and tennis shoes, and much of his face was
+hidden by a beard. I was further stunned by the fact that I was introduced to
+them by their first names. Even the director of the school, a sympathetic,
+white-haired, dignified New England gentleman — even he was presented
+by his first name.
+
+Because it was a small school and because a sizeable number of students
+had entered it at age four and stayed until they graduated from high school,
+there was an inevitable tendency toward clannishness. I sensed this familylike atmosphere immediately and was not completely sure whether I was
+going to be capable of integrating myself into it.
+In trying to get a more complete picture of this school, talking to the
+Melishes and others who knew something about it, I learned that many of
+the present teachers had been placed on the blacklist (whitelist?) by the
+Board of Education and were therefore not permitted to teach in any public
+school. Their politics ranged from liberal to radical, including leanings
+toward communism, or so I thought.
+Trying to put all this together, I felt as if I were swimming alone in
+unexplored waters. I did not know the undercurrents, I could never tell
+whether I was in deep or shallow waters or maybe a swamp or quicksand.
+And I had no guide who understood my strengths, my weaknesses — the
+strengths and handicaps of a young Black woman from the racist South.
+As I leaped over the hurdles presented by my new environment, I began to
+feel more comfortable at home and at school. When I learned about
+socialism in my history classes, a whole new world opened up before my
+eyes. For the first time, I became acquainted with the notion that there could
+be an ideal socioeconomic arrangement; that every person could give to the
+society according to his ability and his talents, and that in turn he could
+receive material and spiritual aid in accordance with his needs.
+I did not yet understand scientific socialism, but I tried to comprehend the
+utopian socialist experiments we discussed in our history classes. I was
+fascinated by these groups of people who resolved to isolate themselves
+entirely in order to build a new miniature socialist, human society. I did not
+stop with the material we read about in our history books. I went to the
+library and read whatever I could find about Robert Owens and the other
+leaders of that movement.
+Perhaps it was the romantic strain in me which attracted me to the Utopian
+socialists. Because when I began to consider the real possibility of solving
+the problems of my people, and the problems of exploited white people as
+
+well, I could not find the transition from the real world of oppression and
+racism and injustice and the ideal world of communism. Perhaps a few
+people here and there might save their souls from the corruption of
+capitalism, but small collective, communist agricultural societies were
+definitely no way to liberate millions and millions of people.
+The Communist Manifesto hit me like a bolt of lightning. I read it avidly,
+finding in it answers to many of the seemingly unanswerable dilemmas
+which had plagued me. I read it over and over again, not completely
+understanding every passage or every idea, but enthralled nevertheless by
+the possibility of a communist revolution here. I began to see the problems
+of Black people within the context of a large working-class movement. My
+ideas about Black liberation were imprecise, and I could not find the right
+concepts to articulate them; still, I was acquiring some understanding about
+how capitalism could be abolished.
+I was particularly impressed by a passage in the Manifesto which portrayed
+the proletariat as the savior of all oppressed people: "All previous historical
+movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities.
+The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of
+the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The
+proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot
+raise itself up, without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society
+being sprung into the air."
+What struck me so emphatically was the idea that once the emancipation of
+the proletariat became a reality, the foundation was laid for the
+emancipation of all oppressed groups in the society. Images surged up in
+my mind of Black workers in Birmingham trekking every morning to the
+steel mills or descending into the mines. Like an expert surgeon, this
+document cut away cataracts from my eyes. The eyes heavy with hatred on
+Dynamite Hill; the roar of explosives, the fear, the hidden guns, the
+weeping Black woman at our door, the children without lunches, the
+schoolyard bloodshed, the social games of the Black middle class, Shack
+I/Shack II, the back of the bus, police searches — it all fell into place. What
+had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern
+whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks
+
+to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequence of a ruthless system which
+kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition and the
+oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word: the cold and
+constant motive for the behavior, the contempt and the despair I had seen.
+Now I sensed a need to change some of my ideas about liberation. I realized
+then that despite my superficial aversion for some of the social activities of
+the Black middle class, I had been depending on it to guide the workers, the
+jobless and the poor among us to freedom.
+Of course, the most powerful impact the Manifesto had on me — what
+moved me most — was the vision of a new society, without exploiters and
+exploited, a society without classes, a society where no one would be
+permitted to own so much that he could use his possessions to exploit other
+human beings. After the communist revolution "we shall have an
+association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the
+free development of all."
+The final words of the Manifesto moved me to an overwhelming desire to
+throw myself into the communist movement:
+The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly
+declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow
+of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a
+Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
+chains. They have a world to win.
+WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
+Quite coincidentally, around the same time that I read the Communist
+Manifesto, I was invited by a friend to attend meetings of a youth
+organization called Advance. She was a daughter of a member of the
+Communist Party, and Advance was a Marxist-Leninist youth organization
+with fraternal ties with the Party. Many of the meetings were held in the
+house of Herbert Aptheker — the much-respected Communist historian —
+with his daughter Bettina Aptheker playing a major leadership role in the
+organization.
+
+Eugene Dennis, the son of the Communist leader of the same name, was
+also a part of the group, as was Mary Lou Patterson, the daughter of the
+formidable Black Communist lawyer William Patterson. It was Patterson
+who carried the petition protesting the genocide of Black people to the
+United Nations in 1954. James Jackson's daughter Harriet, Mary Lou, and
+Margaret and Claudia Burnham, were already close friends of mine; now
+through our activities in Advance we became truly "comrades in arms."
+Herbert Aptheker was teaching a course on the fundamentals of Marxism at
+the American Institute for Marxist Studies. Along with other members of
+Advance, I attended his lectures, which helped me to penetrate the
+mysteries in the Manifesto.
+Advance participated in all the peace demonstrations that were being
+organized at the time by SANE (the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy)
+and the civil rights demonstrations in solidarity with the movement in the
+South. The first sit-ins had been launched on February 1, 1960, in
+Greensboro, North Carolina, and had spread throughout the South. After the
+demand for employment of Black clerks in F. W. Woolworth variety store
+was introduced, every Saturday morning we lugged our picket signs and
+literature down to the Woolworth's on Forty-Second Street, set up the line
+and tried to persuade New Yorkers not to patronize the store until it agreed
+to hire black clerks in the South.
+Although I was involved in the movement in that way I felt cheated:
+precisely at the moment I had decided to leave the South a movement was
+mushrooming at home. In 1961, when the bus carrying the freedom riders
+arrived at the Greyhound Depot in Birmingham, I called my parents to tell
+them that I wanted to come home — and to please send me the money for
+the trip. When they told me it was best that I stay in New York and finish
+out my last year of studies there, I was too distressed and frustrated to keep
+my mind on my schoolwork. Each time I saw photographs or television
+coverage of the police aiming high-power hoses at demonstrators, sicking
+dogs on little children, I closed the door to my room so the Melishes would
+not see me cry.
+They were exciting years — and I have never regretted my decision to
+spend them in New York. But they were years of tension. The Janus head
+
+was still fixed — one eye full of longing to be in the fray in Birmingham,
+the other contemplating my own future. It would be a long time before the
+two profiles came together and I would know the direction to both the past
+and the future.
+
+PART THREE: Waters
+I go into genesis' landscape
+of rumblings, collisions, and waters . . .
+FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
+
+P
+
+SEPTEMBER 1961
+
+erched on an enormous boulder protruding from a grassy knoll on the
+outskirts of Waltham, Massachusetts, is a brass sculpture of Justice
+Louis Brandeis, his arms outstretched, winglike, as if he were about to take
+flight — as if there were nowhere else to go.
+
+I had come to assume that in order to safeguard its unorthodoxy, Elisabeth
+Irwin had spun a cocoon around itself. During those two years in New York
+I never quite overcame the sense of being out of place, of being an outsider
+who had penetrated that cocoon by accident. Nevertheless, I confronted it
+head on. And when the atmosphere became too close, too oppressive, I
+could always tear away a piece of the wall and slip out to other worlds —
+my childhood friends, Margaret and Claudia, Mary Lou Patterson, Phyllis
+Strong; political work in Advance; my Black and Puerto Rican friends at
+the Youth Center run by Mrs. Melish in Brooklyn.
+Brandeis University was different. There were no roads leading outside.
+Its physical and spiritual isolation were mutually reinforcing. There was
+nothing in Waltham but a clock factory, and Cambridge and Boston were
+unreachable for those of us who couldn't afford a car.
+I searched the crowds of freshmen for others who were Black. Just knowing
+they were there would have made me feel a little more comfortable. But the
+full scholarship Brandeis had bestowed upon me was apparently a guilt-
+
+motivated attempt to increase their Black freshman population of two. We
+three were all female. I was glad that one of them, Alice, lived on the same
+floor as I.
+Although Alice and I struck up a friendship immediately, it did not
+essentially alter my attitude toward the college. I felt alienated, angry, alone
+and would have left the campus if I had had the courage and had known
+where to go. Since I was there — to stay, it seemed — I lived with this
+alienation and began to cultivate it in a romantic sort of way. If I felt alone,
+I refused to feel sorry for myself and refused to fight it by actively seeking
+friends; I would be alone, aloof, and would appear to enjoy it. It didn't help
+the situation that I had gotten very much involved in the writings of the socalled Existentialists. Camus. Sartre. I retreated into myself and rejected
+practically everything outside.
+Only in the artificial surroundings of an isolated, virtually all-white college
+campus could I have allowed myself to cultivate this nihilistic attitude. It
+was as if in order to fight off the unreal quality of my environment, I leaped
+desperately into another equally unreal mode of living.
+During that first semester, I didn't study very much. I told myself that the
+courses I was compelled to take were irrelevant anyway. I stayed out of the
+social life of the school, or would wander into a formal dance in the blue
+jeans I wore all the time — just for the sake of making a point. I called
+myself a communist, but refused to be drawn into the small campus
+movement because I felt that the politicos had approached me in an
+obviously patronizing manner. It seemed as if they were determined to help
+the "poor, wretched Negroes" become equal to them, and I simply didn't
+think they were worth becoming equal to.
+The one thing that did excite me during that freshman year was the news
+that James Baldwin was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures on
+literature. Since I had first discovered Go Tell It on the Mountain, I read all
+of Baldwin's writings I could find. When he came to Brandeis, I made sure I
+captured a front seat. But he had hardly gotten into his lecturing when the
+news broke that the world was teetering on the edge of the abyss of World
+War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis had erupted.
+
+James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without
+contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political
+responsibilities. In the meantime, a campus-wide rally was being pulled
+together, while students roamed the campus, either in a silent daze or else
+screaming out their fear that the world was about to be consumed in a
+nuclear holocaust.
+Some of them got into cars and took off in a panic, saying they were on
+their way to Canada. What was so striking about the students' response to
+the crisis was its strongly selfish quality. They were not interested in the
+fact that the people of Cuba were in terrible jeopardy — or even that
+millions of innocent people elsewhere might be destroyed if a nuclear
+conflict broke out. They were interested in themselves, in saving their own
+lives. Girlfriends and boyfriends went off together to get in their last little
+bit of love.
+By the time the rally took place, large numbers of students had gone off by
+themselves and they were not able to hear the powerful speeches given by
+James Baldwin, Herbert Marcuse (this was the first time I heard him) and
+several other professors and graduate students. The point of their speeches
+was not to be frightened, not to despair, but to put pressure on the
+government to withdraw its threat.
+It was good to feel part of a movement and once again be participating in
+rallies, teach-ins, demonstrations. But when the crisis was over, things
+settled back into their old grooves. During the brief period of protest, I was
+drawn toward the people with whom I felt I had most in common — the
+foreign students. I became friends with an Indian man, who was very gentle
+and had a keen sense of what was happening around us. It was my
+friendship with Lalit more than anything else, I suppose, that helped me
+understand concretely the interconnectedness of the freedom struggles of
+peoples throughout the world. I was profoundly moved when he talked
+about the incredible misery of his people in India. As he spoke I found
+myself constantly thinking about my people in Birmingham, my people in
+Harlem.
+I also became friends with Melanie, a young woman from the Philippines,
+and Mac, a South Vietnamese woman about to be deported because she was
+
+opposed to Diem. Around the same time, I entered into a close friendship
+with Lani, probably because we both felt so outside things at Brandeis.
+Flo Mason, one of my friends from Elisabeth Irwin, and I corresponded
+regularly. I don't remember who initially conceived the idea, but we both
+decided to attend the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students in
+Helsinki, Finland, the following summer. I was eager to meet revolutionary
+youth from other parts of the world, but my decision to make this trip was
+also motivated by a simple desire to leave the country in order to get a
+better perspective on things. It seemed that the farther I became removed
+from my home, my roots, the more restricted I felt and the farther I wanted
+to go.
+The rest of the year I worked to earn money for the trip. I refiled books in
+the library stacks, filed cards in the Biology Department, and worked in
+Chomondeleys, the campus coffee shop. And I found a job in a two-bit soda
+parlor in Waltham. Having gotten back into the habit of studying, between
+my jobs and my books I didn't have very much time to do anything else.
+Even my social life — I was seeing a German student, Manfred Clemenz,
+around this time — consisted mostly of coffee in the cafeteria after an
+evening of studying.
+Then it was June. My festival scholarship called for doing some volunteer
+work at the Festival Committee Headquarters in New York: typing,
+mimeographing, mailings. The Brandeis charter plane took us to London,
+where I wandered alone about the city for a day or two before my train left
+for Paris. My friend Harriet Jackson was going to meet me at the Gare du
+Nord, but a strike threw all the schedules awry, and there I was in Paris
+alone, knowing no one and without the slightest idea of how to find Harriet.
+After a few days in a dirty hotel in the Latin Quarter exploring the city, and
+reading with horror the racist slogans scratched on walls throughout the city
+threatening death to the Algerians, I finally made contact with my friend.
+She had left a note at American Express in hopes that I would think of
+going there. By the time Flo arrived, we had moved into a tiny room on the
+top floor of an apartment building in the Sixteenth Arrondissement so close
+to the Eiffel Tower that from the one-foot-square window pane, you could
+see the elevator rising and falling. The chambre de bonne had been rented
+
+by one of Harriet's friends who was studying in Paris and had agreed to let
+us use it while she was away.
+One of ten such rooms, it could only be reached by climbing six flights of a
+rusty fire-escape type stairway. Like all the others, it had no plumbing, only
+a filthy toilet bowl and a cold-water hydrant at the end of the corridor.
+There was just enough space for a bed, a small closet, a table, and floor
+room for an air mattress and a pallet. Flo, Harriet and I took turns sleeping
+on the bed, the air mattress and the floor. We thought it was crowded in our
+room until we became acquainted with the people across the hall — a frail
+woman from Martinique trying to live in the same amount of space with her
+four robust daughters, ranging in age from about fourteen to twenty. Having
+just arrived from the Caribbean, they all left each day in search of work.
+Each evening they returned with nothing to show for their day but tired
+bodies, a little less money and, frequently, horror stories of being mistaken
+for Algerian women.
+The three of us rushed around Paris being tourists, doing the things that cost
+the least and gave discounts to students: the Louvre, the Rodin Museum,
+Moliere at La Comedie Française (which cost one franc for students).
+Hanging around the crowded cafes along the Boulevard St. Michel, we met
+people with interesting and exciting stories to tell — especially when it
+came to their distaste for the French. They were Africans, Haitians, other
+Antillais and Algerians. We were introduced to working-class Algerian
+eating places, hidden in the network of back streets in the Latin Quarter.
+To be an Algerian living in Paris in 1962 was to be a hunted human being.
+While the Algerians were fighting the French army in their mountains and
+in the Europeanized cities of Algiers and Oran, paramilitary terrorist groups
+were falling indiscriminately upon men and women in the colonialist capital
+because they were, or looked like, Algerians.
+In Paris, bombs were exploding in cafes frequented by North Africans,
+bloody bodies were discovered in dark side streets and anti-Algerian graffiti
+marred the sides of buildings and the walls of metro stations. One afternoon
+I attended a demonstration for the Algerian people in the square in front of
+the Sorbonne. When the flics broke it up with their high-power water hoses,
+
+they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the
+Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses.
+The new places, the new experiences I had expected to discover through
+travel turned out to be the same old places, the same old experiences with a
+common message of struggle.
+After Harriet left for the Soviet Union, Flo and I decided spontaneously to
+board a train for Geneva, but ended up trying to hitch-hike with a Swiss
+student just back from the University of Wisconsin. It was typical of our
+luck that it happened to be July 14 — anniversary of the storming of the
+Bastille — and thus virtually impossible to catch a ride. We got as far as
+Orly Airport, just on the outskirts of the city, pitched the Swiss student's
+tent in a field, ate dinner at the airport and bedded down for the night, with
+him outside guarding the tent. Not doing very much better the next
+morning, we caught buses and trains till we reached Lausanne, where the
+student's mother put us up for a few days.
+With its quaint little houses built on ascending levels on the slopes of hills,
+Lausanne was the cleanest, most beautiful city I had seen. Now I
+understood why the wealthy sent their children to Switzerland.
+From Lausanne, it was Geneva, back to Paris and on to Finland for the
+festival. The drab, monotonous postwar architecture of Helsinki concealed
+the tremendous vibrancy of the youth who were gathering there from all
+over the world.
+In the brief two weeks of the festival, there were spectacular cultural
+programs, mass political rallies and countless seminars on the struggle in
+Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East. The most exciting dimension
+of the festival, in my own opinion, came from the bilateral delegation
+meetings, because they were occasions for more intimate contact with the
+youth of other lands.
+The cultural presentation given by the Cuban delegation was the most
+impressive event of the festival. Not that they performed in the most
+polished, sophisticated manner, but because their performance conveyed a
+fiercely compelling spirit of revolution. They were the youth of a revolution
+
+that was not yet three years old. With the U.S. delegation as audience, the
+Cubans satirized the way wealthy American capitalists had invaded their
+country and robbed them of all traces of sovereignty. They presented their
+attack on the invaders in plays, songs and dances. During those days, long
+before women's liberation had been placed on the agenda, we watched the
+Cuban militia women zealously defending their people's victory.
+It is not easy to describe the strength and enthusiasm of the Cubans. One
+event however illustrates their infectious dynamism and the impact they had
+on us all. At the end of their show, the Cubans did not simply let the curtain
+fall. Their "performance," after all, had been much more than a mere show.
+It had been life and reality. Had they drawn the curtain and bowed to
+applause, it would have been as if their commitment was simply "art." The
+Cubans continued their dancing, doing a spirited conga right off the stage
+and into the audience. Those of us openly enthralled by the Cubans, their
+revolution and the triumphant beat of the drums rose spontaneously to join
+their conga line. And the rest — the timid ones, perhaps even the agents —
+were pulled bodily by the Cubans into the dance. Before we knew it we
+were doing this dance — a dance brought into Cuban culture by slaves
+dancing in a line of chains — all through the building and on into the
+streets. Puzzled Finns looked on in disbelief at hundreds of young people of
+all colors, oblivious to traffic, flowing down the streets of Helsinki.
+Though it was the dominant theme, camaraderie was not the whole story of
+the festival. In keeping with the dictates of the Cold War, the CIA had
+planted its agents and informers in all the strategic areas of the festival,
+including the delegation from the United States. (A fact later admitted by
+the Agency). Provocations were frequent and assumed varied forms.
+Members of the delegation from the German Democratic Republic were
+kidnapped, for example, tear-gas bombs were set off in crowds during mass
+events and Hell's-Angels types picked fistfights with delegates in the streets
+of downtown Helsinki.
+After saying good-bye to my new friends, and spending some time visiting
+my German friend, Manfred, I returned to the States to find an FBI
+investigator awaiting me.
+
+"What were you doing at that Communist Youth Festival this summer?" the
+agent wanted to know. "Don't you know how we feel about Communists?
+Don't you know what we do to Communists?"
+
+***
+
+The experiences of the summer still very much alive, I felt older and more
+confident as I entered my second year at Brandeis. Meeting people from all
+over the world had taught me how important it was to be able to tear down
+the superficial barriers which separated us. Language was one of those
+barriers which could be removed easily. I decided to major in French. That
+year I immersed myself totally in my work: Flaubert, Balzac, Baudelaire,
+Rimbaud and the thousands of pages of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps
+Perdu. My interest in Sartre was still quite keen — every spare moment I
+could find, I worked my way through his writings: La Nausee, Les Mains
+Sales, Les Sequestres d'Altona, and the rest of the earlier and later plays,
+and the novels comprising the sequence Les Chemins de la Liberté. I read
+some of his philosophical and political essays and even tried my hand at
+L'Etre et le Néant. Since I had to contend with the isolation of the campus
+in one way or another, I decided to make constructive use of it by spending
+most of my waking hours in the library or in some hidden place with my
+books.
+At first I roomed with Lani, but since we both preferred to live alone, she
+moved into a single when one became available. Tina, a Swedish friend,
+who wanted to live off-campus with a friend, pretended to move into my
+room, thus leaving me with the privacy I desired.
+Gwen and Woody, graduate students at the university, were in charge of the
+Ridgewood men's dormitories. The fact that we were Black and had
+common friends in Birmingham made us feel close even before we got to
+know each other. If they wanted to go out on evenings and weekends, they
+could always count on me to stay with their baby boy while I studied. And
+whenever I felt like talking, they were ready to listen and give advice.
+
+It was a quiet, subdued year on the campus — until the smug sense of
+comfort which reigned over this white liberal college was abruptly shattered
+by the appearance of Malcolm X. In the largest auditorium on campus,
+Gwen, Woody and I sat one-third of the way back, engulfed, it seemed, by
+the white crowd waiting breathlessly to hear this man who was the
+spokesman for the prophet Elijah Mohammed. Elijah Mohammed called
+himself the messenger of the Islamic God, Allah, chosen to reveal Allah's
+message to Black people in the United States.
+Years before, at Parker High School, one of our classmates had been
+arrested for selling a "Black Muslim' newspaper. He was a gentle-looking,
+soft-spoken boy who kept to himself. Several times I had tried
+unsuccessfully to talk to him. On the day following his arrest, I learned for
+the first time that there was a nationwide organization of "Black Muslims"
+and, not questioning the prevailing propaganda, I thought they were a
+strange sect of people ranting and raving about Allah's future destruction of
+all white people — a group essentially unable to help solve the problem of
+racism. For a long time it bothered me that this classmate of mine was a
+member of the Muslims. I could not reconcile my own stereotyped notion
+of the Muslims with his sensitivity. I waited for him to get out of jail and
+return to school so I could ask him who the Muslims really were. But I
+never saw him again.
+Finally Malcolm strode in, immaculately dressed, encircled by
+conservatively dressed, clean-shaven men, and women in long flowing
+robes. From their manner of carrying themselves I could feel the pride
+emanating from them. Quietly they took their seats in the first three rows.
+Malcolm, accompanied by several of the men, walked onstage.
+Malcolm X began his speech with a subdued eloquence, telling about the
+religion of Islam and its relevance to Black people in the United States. I
+was fascinated by his description of the way Black people had internalized
+the racial inferiority thrust upon us by a white supremacist society.
+Mesmerized by his words, I was shocked to hear him say, speaking directly
+to his audience, "I'm talking about you! You!! You and your ancestors, for
+centuries, have raped and murdered my people!" He was addressing himself
+to an all-white crowd and I wondered whether Gwen, Woody and the four
+
+or five other Black people in the audience felt, from that moment on, as
+outrageously misplaced as I did. Malcolm was addressing himself to white
+people, chastising them, informing them of their sins, warning them of the
+Armageddon to come, in which they would all be destroyed. Although I
+experienced a kind of morbid satisfaction listening to Malcolm reduce
+white people to virtually nothing, not being a Muslim, it was impossible for
+me to identify with his religious perspective. I kept thinking that it must be
+a tremendous experience to hear him speaking to a Black audience. For the
+white people, listening to Malcolm had been disorienting and disturbing. It
+was interesting that most of them were so bent on defending themselves and
+on distinguishing themselves from the slave master and the Southern
+segregationist it never struck them that they themselves could begin to do
+something concrete to fight racism.
+Earlier in the year I had applied for a place in the Hamilton College Junior
+Year in France Program. After receiving the news of my acceptance, I
+fought hard with the Brandeis scholarship office, until they finally agreed to
+do the unprecedented by extending my regular scholarship to cover my
+third-year studies in France.
+
+By the time the two busloads of us arrived from Paris, the resort of Biarritz,
+on the Bay of Biscay, near the border of Spain, had already been abandoned
+by the wealthy tourists. This was where we were to have our preparatory
+language courses. Deserted, the gaudy beach-side casinos seemed even
+more decadent than if they had been teeming with voracious vacationing
+gamblers. The countless trinket shops lining the arcade-covered streets had
+a ravaged appearance that was exaggerated by the absence of customers.
+The shopkeepers looked desperate, as if they were wondering how to
+survive the next months without the tourists' money, and at the same time
+relieved that they had managed to survive the summer onslaught.
+Walking through the streets of Biarritz, I felt like someone wandering into a
+place where a long drunken party had just broken up. The last staggering
+guests had already gone home, but no one had gotten around to cleaning up
+the mess. The traces of the summer orgy were embarrassing — like dirty
+underwear inadvertently left behind — and at the same time infuriating. I
+
+could see them squandering enormous wealth without the vaguest feeling of
+compassion for those whose slavery had created that wealth.
+Not long after our arrival, a curious thing happened in the abandoned city:
+there was a sudden, massive flea invasion, the likes of which the working
+people of Biarritz had never seen before. For days, it was impossible to find
+a single patch of land or air uninfested by fleas. In our classrooms, the
+teacher could hardly be heard over the constant scratching. People scratched
+in cafes, movie theaters, bookstores, and they scratched just walking down
+the street. People with sensitive skin were beginning to look like lepers,
+their arms and legs covered with infected bites. Like everyone else's, my
+sheet was covered with little spots of blood.
+If Ingmar Bergman had done a movie on the oppressive, parasitical tourists
+who come to Biarritz, and had included the flea invasion in his script, critics
+would have written that his symbolism was too blatant. In this city in its
+odd position of trying to recuperate from tourists and fleas — in this group
+of typically American students which without my presence would have
+been lily-white — my old familiar feelings of disorientation were rekindled.
+
+SEPTEMBER 16, 1963
+After class I asked the three or four students with whom I was walking to
+wait a moment while I bought a Herald Tribune. My attention divided
+between walking and listening to the conversation, just skimming the paper,
+I saw a headline about four girls and a church bombing. At first I was only
+vaguely aware of the words. Then it hit me! It came crashing down all
+around me. Birmingham. 16th Street Baptist Church. The names. I closed
+my eyes, squeezing my lids into wrinkles as if I could squeeze what I had
+just read out of my head. When I opened my eyes again, the words were
+still there, the names traced out in stark black print.
+"Carole," I said, "Cynthia. They killed them."
+My companions were looking at me with puzzled expressions. Unable to
+say anything more, I pointed to the article and gave the newspaper to an
+
+outstretched hand.
+"I know them. They're my friends . . ." I was spluttering.
+As if she were repeating lines she had rehearsed, one of them said, "I'm
+sorry. It's too bad that it had to happen."
+Before she spoke I was on the verge of pouring out all the feelings that had
+been unleashed in me by the news of the bomb which had ripped through
+four young Black girls in my hometown. But the faces around me were
+closed. They knew nothing of racism and the only way they knew how to
+relate to me at that moment was to console me as if friends had just been
+killed in a plane crash.
+"What a terrible thing," one of them said. I left them abruptly, unwilling to
+let them have anything to do with my grief.
+I kept staring at the names. Carole Robertson. Cynthia Wesley. Addie Mae
+Collins. Denise McNair. Carole — her family and my family had been close
+as long as I could remember. Carole, plump, with long wavy braids and a
+sweet face, was one of my sister's best friends. She and Fania were about
+the same age. They had played together, gone to dancing lessons together,
+attended little parties together. Carole's older sister and I had constantly had
+to deal with our younger sisters' wanting to tag along when we went places
+with our friends. Mother told me later that when Mrs. Robertson heard that
+the church had been bombed, she called to ask Mother to drive her
+downtown to pick up Carole. She didn't find out, Mother said, until they
+saw pieces of her body scattered about.
+The Wesleys had been among the Black people to move to the west side of
+Center Street. Our house was on Eleventh Court; theirs was on Eleventh
+Avenue. From our back door to their back door was just a few hundred feet
+across a gravel driveway that cut the block in two. The Wesleys were
+childless, and from the way they played with us it was obvious that they
+loved children. I remembered when Cynthia, just a few years old, first came
+to stay with the Wesleys. Cynthia's own family was large and suffered from
+the worst poverty. Cynthia would stay with the Wesleys for a while, then
+return to her family — this went on until the stretches of time she spent
+
+with the Wesleys grew longer and her stays at home grew shorter. Finally,
+with the approval of her family, the Wesleys officially adopted her. She was
+always immaculate, her face had a freshly scrubbed look about it, her
+dresses were always starched and her little pocketbook always matched her
+newly shined shoes. When my sister Fania came into the house looking
+grubby and bedraggled, my mother would often ask her why she couldn't
+keep herself clean like Cynthia. She was a thin, very sensitive child and
+even though I was five years older, I thought she had an understanding of
+things that was far more mature than mine. When she came to the house,
+she seemed to enjoy talking to my mother more than playing with Fania.
+Denise McNair. Addie Mae Collins. My mother had taught Denise when
+she was in first grade and Addie Mae, although we didn't know her
+personally, could have been any Black child in my neighborhood.
+When the lives of these four girls were so ruthlessly wiped out, my pain
+was deeply personal. But when the initial hurt and rage had subsided
+enough for me to think a little more clearly, I was struck by the objective
+significance of these murders.
+This act was not an aberration. It was not something sparked by a few
+extremists gone mad. On the contrary, it was logical, inevitable. The people
+who planted the bomb in the girls' restroom in the basement of 16th Street
+Baptist Church were not pathological, but rather the normal products of
+their surroundings. And it was this spectacular, violent event, the savage
+dismembering of four little girls, which had burst out of the daily,
+sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression.
+No matter how much I talked, the people around me were simply incapable
+of grasping it. They could not understand why the whole society was guilty
+of this murder — why their beloved Kennedy was also to blame, why the
+whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also
+guilty of this murder. Those bomb-wielding racists, of course, did not plan
+specifically the deaths of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise. They
+may not have even consciously taken into account the possibility of
+someone's death. They wanted to terrorize Birmingham's Black population,
+which had been stirred out of its slumber into active involvement in the
+struggle for Black liberation. They wanted to destroy this movement before
+
+it became too deeply rooted in our minds and our lives. This is what they
+wanted to do and they didn't care if someone happened to get killed. It
+didn't matter to them one way or the other. The broken bodies of Cynthia,
+Carole, Addie Mae and Denise were incidental to the main thing — which
+was precisely why the murders were even more abominable than if they had
+been deliberately planned.
+
+In November our group moved to Paris. I was assigned to the Lamotte
+family at 13 bis rue Duret, a little ways from the Arc de Triomphe. Two
+other women from the Hamilton program lived there too. Jane was on the
+third floor with M. and Mme. Lamotte and their three children. Christie and
+I shared one of the two bedrooms in the smaller second-floor apartment of
+M. Lamotte's mother. Each morning she brought us a big wooden tray with
+two large bowls of cafe au lait, pieces of a freshly baked baguette, and two
+hunks of butter. In the evening we had dinner with the family upstairs. We
+walked through the old cobblestone courtyard to the metro station around
+the corner, and traveled underground on the old red trains to the Latin
+Quarter to attend our classes. Most of mine were at the section of the
+Sorbonne called the Institut de Preparation et de Perfectionnement de
+Professeurs de Français a L'Etranger.
+In the Sorbonne, I always felt as if I were in church — it was centuries old,
+with tremendous pillars holding up uncommonly high ceilings which
+displayed faded old paintings. The sacredness exuded by the place forced
+thousands of students inside to observe the silence. My business there
+seemed incongruous with the surroundings. My studies were devoted
+almost entirely to contemporary literature — one course on contemporary
+French novels, another on plays, one on poetry and one on Ideas. The only
+other course I took was organized by the Hamilton program itself and
+required attending the theater each week and discussing and writing about
+the plays we had seen. By the time the year was up, I had the feeling I had
+seen most of what was interesting on the stage in Paris — including the
+Peking Opera and the Ballet Africaine from Guinea.
+When the news broke in Paris that Kennedy had been shot, everyone rushed
+down to the U.S. Embassy. Kennedy's assassination was certainly no source
+
+of joy to me. Though his hands were far from clean (I kept remembering the
+Bay of Pigs), killing him was not going to solve any problems. Besides, the
+Vice President from Texas and his cronies in the oil monopolies would
+probably only make things worse for my people. Nevertheless, I felt out of
+place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of "Americans in Paris" and it
+was difficult to identify with their weeping. I wondered how many of them
+had shed tears — or had truly felt saddened — when they read the Herald
+Tribune story about the murders of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise.
+Later on in the year, I accompanied a friend who had been invited to attend
+the Vietnamese Tet celebration. That night, two New Year's programs were
+taking place — one organized and attended by the South Vietnamese who
+remained loyal to Diem and the other organized and attended by the North
+Vietnamese, together with the socialist and other opposition forces in the
+South. We attended the North Vietnamese celebration. Held in a gigantic
+stadium in a working-class district of Paris, it was a grand seven-hour
+spectacle consisting of songs, comedy acts, acrobatic numbers and skits, all
+full of the vigor of their struggle and conveying a message that did not
+require an understanding of Vietnamese. Like the thousands of Vietnamese
+sitting around the stadium, I was enchanted. But I was shocked back to the
+brutal realities of their experiences by the recurring satires directed against
+the U.S. government and its military. The longest and most vehement
+applause and laughter were always at the appearance of an actor dressed up
+like a U.S. GI, who was the butt of jokes or, in more serious episodes, fell
+in defeat.
+
+Although I was on the verge of receiving a degree in French Literature,
+what I really wanted to study was philosophy. I was interested in Marx, his
+predecessors and his successors. Over the last years, whenever I could find
+the time, I read philosophy on the side. I didn't really know what I was
+doing, except that it gave me a feeling of security and comfort to read what
+people had to say about such formidable things as the universe, history,
+human beings, knowledge.
+During my second year at Brandeis, I had picked up Eros and Civilization
+by Herbert Marcuse and had struggled with it from beginning to end. That
+
+year he was teaching at the Sorbonne. When I arrived in Paris the following
+year, he was already back at Brandeis, but people were still raving about his
+fantastic courses. When I returned to Brandeis, the first semester of my
+senior year was so crowded with required French courses that I could not
+officially enroll in Marcuse's lecture series on European political thought
+since the French Revolution. Nevertheless, I attended each session, rushing
+in to capture a seat in the front of the hall. Arranged around the room on
+progressively higher levels, the desks were in the style of the UN General
+Assembly room. When Marcuse walked onto the platform, situated at the
+lowest level of the hall, his presence dominated everything. There was
+something imposing about him which evoked total silence and attention
+when he appeared, without his having to pronounce a single word. The
+students had a rare respect for him. Their concentration was not only total
+during the entire hour as he paced back and forth while he lectured, but if at
+the sound of the bell Marcuse had not finished, the rattling of papers would
+not begin until he had formally closed the lecture.
+One day, shortly after the semester began, I mustered up enough courage to
+put in a request for an interview with Marcuse. I had decided to ask him to
+help me draw up a bibliography on basic works in philosophy. Having
+assumed I would have to wait for weeks to see him, I was surprised when I
+was told he would be free that very afternoon.
+From afar, Marcuse seemed unapproachable. I imagine the combination of
+his stature, his white hair, the heavy accent, his extraordinary air of
+confidence, and his wealth of knowledge made him seem ageless and the
+epitome of a philosopher. Up close, he was a man with inquisitive sparkling
+eyes and a fresh, very down-to-earth smile.
+Trying to explain my reasons for the appointment, I told him that I intended
+to study philosophy in graduate school, perhaps at the university in
+Frankfurt, but that my independent reading in philosophy had been
+unsystematic — without regard for any national or historical relations.
+What I wanted from him — if it was not too much of an imposition — was
+a list of works in the sequence in which I ought to read them. And if he
+gave me permission, I wanted to enroll in his graduate seminar on Kant's
+Critique of Pure Reason.
+
+"Do you really want to study philosophy?" Professor Marcuse asked, slowly
+and placing emphasis on each word. He made it sound so serious and so
+profound — like an initiation into some secret society which, once you join,
+you can never leave. I was afraid that a mere "yes" would ring hollow and
+inane.
+"At least, I want to see if I am able," was about the only thing I could think
+of to answer.
+"Then you should begin with the Pre-Socratics, then Plato and Aristotle.
+Come back again next week and we will discuss the Pre-Socratics."
+I had no idea that my little request would develop into stimulating weekly
+discussions on the philosophers he suggested, discussions which gave me a
+far more exciting and vivid picture of the history of philosophy than would
+have emerged from a dry introduction-to-philosophy course.
+Shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Marcuse had emigrated
+to the United States, along with a group of intellectuals who had established
+the Institut fur Sozialforschung. Among them were Theodor Adorno and
+Max Horkheimer. They had continued their work for a number of years in
+this country, but after the defeat of the fascists, they reestablished the
+Institute as a part of the regular university in Frankfurt. I had first become
+acquainted with the work of the Institute through Manfred Clemenz, the
+German student I had met my first year at Brandeis. During the summer
+after my studies in France, I had spent several weeks in Frankfurt attending
+a few of Adorno's lectures, and getting to know some of the students there.
+At that time, my knowledge of German was minimal, but the people around
+me translated the essential points of the lectures into English or French.
+Later I read all of Adorno's and Horkheimets works that had been translated
+into English or French, in addition to Marcuse's writings. In this way I had
+acquainted myself with their thought, which was collectively known as
+Critical Theory.
+During that last year at Brandeis, I made up my mind to apply for a
+scholarship to study philosophy at the university in Frankfurt. Marcuse
+confirmed my conviction that this was the best place to study, given my
+interest in Kant, Hegel and Marx. The remaining months of the school year
+
+were consumed by intensive preparation in philosophy, German language
+and the final requirements for my B.A. degree, including a year-long honors
+project on the Phenomenological Attitude, which I thought I had discovered
+in the works of the contemporary French novelist Robbe-Grillet. The most
+challenging and fulfilling course was the graduate seminar that Marcuse
+conducted on the Critique of Pure Reason. Poring over a seemingly
+incomprehensible passage for hours, then suddenly grasping its meaning
+gave me a sense of satisfaction I had never experienced before.
+My parents were not overjoyed at the idea of my leaving the country again,
+particularly since I had not yet decided how long I wanted to remain in
+Germany. Nevertheless, they were extremely proud to attend the graduation
+ceremony, where they heard my name called among the Phi Beta Kappas
+and magna cum laudes. I gave my mother the diplomas, certificates and
+medals and we packed up the things I had accumulated over the last four
+years, dropped off my friend Celeste in Providence and headed down the
+highway for Birmingham.
+Along the way, we stopped at a liquor store where my father bought several
+bottles of bourbon to take home with him — in Alabama's state-controlled
+liquor stores, the only brands available were the ones approved by the
+government. (We always thought that one of Wallace's relatives must be the
+owner of the factory producing all the off-the-wall brands of alcohol, which
+you never saw anyplace except in Alabama.) We crossed over into
+Tennessee very late that night, and because we knew that we'd never find a
+motel run by Black people where we could spend the night, we decided to
+drive straight through to Birmingham.
+In one of those towns along the highway in Tennessee, around two in the
+morning, we heard a siren screaming behind us. The fat, tobacco-chewing
+cop, letting his white Tennessee drawl tumble out of a grotesque smile, said
+to my father, "Y'all know y'alls driving too fast. Git out of the car." All the
+time he was fingering the holster strapped to his waist. I thought about the
+stories I had heard about Black people or Northern whites disappearing for
+weeks, sometimes forever, in these small-town jails. The cop searched the
+front of the car and told my father to open the trunk. When he saw all the
+suitcases, he seemed startled and immediately asked where we were coming
+
+from. After my father said that he had just attended his daughter's college
+graduation, the cop assumed a less slovenly posture and became more
+official. But when he saw the bourbon, his eyes lit up.
+"This is a dry county, y'all know. No liquor allowed nowhere in the
+jurisdiction."
+"The bottles are unopened and we're only passing through," my father
+insisted.
+"Don't make no difference. The county is dry and ain't no liquor allowed no
+kind of way. Y'all can do thirty days in jail for this. And the judge ain't even
+in town — won't be back till next week. Look like y'all gone have to stay in
+jail till he get back."
+When my father talked about getting in touch with his lawyer, the cop said,
+"I tell you what. I'm gon do you a favor. Treat ya like I treat my boys
+around here. Git back in the car and follow me into town." He took the
+whiskey to the patrol car.
+Thinking we were headed for the police station, and knowing that it would
+be fatal to try to get away, we followed the police car through the dark
+streets. When it came to a halt, there was nothing around which bore the
+faintest resemblance to a police station. We were in an unpaved alley and
+the cop was opening a garage door. Although this wasn't the first time we
+had been trapped into a situation like this, we were all silently nervous.
+"Davis," my mother said, "I don't think you should go in there. There's no
+telling what he might try to do." But there wasn't the slightest trace of fear
+in my father — in fact, I have never seen him afraid of anything. He went
+on in while we waited on tenterhooks in the car. After what seemed like
+hours he came out with a wry smile on his face. Starting up the car, he told
+us, chuckling, "All the man wanted was the liquor and twenty dollars." It
+was a small-time racket which he probably pulled whenever he caught up
+with Black people driving through the town. The alternative to giving him
+the twenty dollars would probably have been much more terrible than the
+thirty days in jail.
+
+When I boarded the boat sailing for Germany, Watts was burning. I felt
+again the tension of the Janus head — leaving the country at that time was
+hard for me. But in a little more than a week, I was on the other side of the
+ocean.
+My stipend consisted of the boat fare and a hundred dollars a month — for
+rent, food, tram fare to and from the university, books, and whatever else I
+needed.
+As I searched the city for a room, the agencies kept telling me, "Es tut uns
+leid, aber wir haben keine Zimmer fur Auslander." "Sorry but we don't have
+rooms for foreigners," their attitude clearly implying, "Our rooms are only
+for good Aryans."
+In historical time, twenty years is not very long — half the people I saw on
+the streets, and practically all the adults, had gone through the experience of
+Hitler. And in West Germany, unlike the German Democratic Republic,
+there had been no determined campaign to attack the fascist and racist
+attitudes which had become so deeply embedded.
+Eventually, after days of reading the fine print of the Frankfurter
+Allgemeiner, I found a little room near the zoo, on the top floor of a postwar
+apartment building — like the chambre de bonne I had lived in in Paris.
+The family to whose apartment the room was attached seemed to be
+exceptional, as far as the masses of West Germans were concerned. They
+were curious and concerned about the condition of Black people in the
+United States and they never failed to draw the appropriate parallels
+between the Nazi oppression of the Jews in their country and the repression
+of my people in the United States. They repeatedly invited me to their
+apartment for dinner and discussions. In the beginning when my German
+was not very polished, these discussions helped me orient myself to the
+language.
+During the first few weeks, I didn't understand a word of what Adorno was
+saying. Not only were the concepts difficult to grasp, but he spoke his own
+special aphoristic variety of German. It was a consolation to discover that
+
+most German students attending his lectures for the first time were having
+almost as much trouble understanding Adorno as I.
+I saw old friends from previous trips to Europe, and entered into new
+friendships as well. It was a great relief to find that not too far from me
+lived a young Black man from Indiana who had been stationed in Frankfurt
+as a GI and had decided to stay on to pursue his studies in literature at the
+university. We were good friends throughout my stay in Germany. I was
+friendly with a group of Haitian students, a Black South African and two
+couples who, like myself, had come from the United States to study with
+Adorno.
+I was paying eighty marks a month for my room — practically a quarter of
+the hundred dollars I had to live on. Almost inevitably, when the end of the
+month approached, I was eating nothing but Quark (something between
+yogurt and cottage cheese), and writing my parents for a few dollars to tide
+me over until the next check came in. I was very relieved to find a room on
+Adalbertstrasse, near the university, which cost only a few marks a month.
+It was in a massive old building of crumbling red brick, an abandoned
+factory which the owner rented out I imagine in order to avoid paying a
+watchman.
+The three floors of one side were occupied by a sculptor who fashioned
+huge abstract metal forms which he kept in the courtyard. The side I moved
+into had been taken over by a group of students, all as poor as I. The entire
+place cost us seventy-five marks (less than twenty dollars) a month, and it
+could comfortably accommodate up to five people in the little nooks that
+had served as offices when the factory was in operation.
+It was a dilapidated old abandoned building with dirty cement floors, no
+showers — not even hot water — and no central heating, only potbellied
+coal stoves. But paying only about five dollars a month for rent and a few
+more dollars for coal during the winter months, I could afford to eat a little
+better — even buying meat a couple of days a week — and was able to buy
+more books and a new blouse once in a while. As throughout Europe,
+cultural events could always be attended by students at a great discount, so
+for about fifty cents, I could see a movie or go to the theater, the opera, the
+ballet or a museum.
+
+During the spring of my first year there, all the students who had received
+scholarships from the exchange program were given a trip to Berlin from
+whatever section of Germany they happened to be living in. Anxious to see
+Socialist Germany, I spent most of the time in Berlin, the capital of the
+German Democratic Republic. Each day, I walked across at Checkpoint
+Charlie — the border point for people with passports from capitalist
+countries. Crowds of white tourists from the United States would be
+standing in line, probably waiting to cross the border in order to tell people
+they had seen the other side of the "wall" — so they could say, in Kennedy's
+war-filled words, "Ich bin ein Berliner," that is, I am ready to fight
+communism. The tourists were always complaining about the wait. But I
+never had any trouble — each time I went across, I would receive the signal
+to go on only a few moments after I had shown my passport. This was their
+way of showing their solidarity with Black people.
+Claudia and Margaret Burnham's stepbrother Bob had recently come
+through Frankfurt, stayed a while at the "factory" and then gone on to study
+at the Brecht Theater in Berlin. Through him, I was introduced to several
+people in the GDR who showed me around the city. Living in Bob's
+apartment building was a group of Cubans — the national director of the
+ballet and several of his assistants. I was amazed at their youth — the
+director was in his early twenties and the rest around the same age. They
+talked about their efforts to more fully integrate the African element of
+Cuban culture into their classical dances and described the way in which
+they were developing the old Yoruba dances which, before the revolution,
+had been restricted to the remote areas of the country where Black people
+still retained African customs.
+Esther and James Jackson, old friends of my parents from Birmingham,
+were in Berlin at the time. Jim, the International Affairs Director of the
+Communist Party, U.S.A., was representing the party at the May Day
+celebration. I spent an evening with them. We talked about the old days
+when Jim had been underground, and how puzzled I had been as a child,
+seeing those sinister white men following us all over New York looking for
+him; Jim was one of the lucky ones whom the FBI never succeeded in
+tracking down. We discussed the socialist transformation of the GDR and
+its active campaign against the remnants of fascism in the mentality of the
+
+people. The next day I watched the parade, participated in the May Day
+Festivities and then went on back through Checkpoint Charlie to catch my
+plane for Frankfurt.
+When the West German police said they were going to detain me at the
+airport, I was certain they were going to accuse me of being too friendly
+with the people in the GDR — and, of course, they would have been
+correct. But, according to them, the reason they wouldn't let me board the
+plane had to do with my failure to check out with the Frankfurt police when
+I had moved, some months before, out of the room near the zoo, and had
+not registered with the police station near the factory. I could never get used
+to the incredible bureaucracy in which one must become embroiled merely
+as a prerequisite for living an ordinary life. Everyone, citizen or foreigner,
+not registered at the nearest police station — and there was no lack of them
+— was technically liable to arrest, including those visiting with friends for
+only a few days. Although I had registered when I moved into the first place
+(the process is called Anmeldung — announcing one's arrival), it had not
+crossed my mind to tell them I was leaving (called Ausmeldung) and to go
+through the Anmeldung at the Adalbertstrasse police station. The West
+Berlin police were serious: they were talking about deporting me. It took
+several hours before I could persuade them that my failure to register had
+been an innocent omission. After it was all over and they had left the threat
+of deportation hanging over me unless I cleared myself the next day with
+the Frankfurt police, I was still positive that the harassment was a little
+retaliatory action for my trip to the GDR.
+
+Frankfurt was a very intensive learning experience. Stimulating lectures and
+seminars conducted by Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermass, Professor
+Haag, Alfred Schmidt, Oscar Negt. Tackling formidable works, such as all
+three of Kant's Critiques and the works of Hegel and Marx as well (in one
+seminar, we spent an entire semester analyzing about twenty pages of
+Hegel's Logic).
+Most of the students living in the factory studied either philosophy or
+sociology. Many were members of S.D.S. — Sozialistischer Deutscher
+Studentenbund, the German Socialist Student League. And they were very
+
+seriously striving to arrive at some form of practical resistance capable of
+ultimately overturning the enemy system. Aside from the concern with the
+social contradictions inside their own country, they consistently tried to
+force an internationist awareness among their members. I participated in
+rallies and demonstrations directed against U.S. aggression in Vietnam.
+Those of us who were not citizens had to be especially careful because an
+arrest would mean a sure deportation. One demonstration, which took place
+outside the U.S. Embassy, was particularly dangerous. Chanting "U.S. raus,
+U.S. raus, U.S. raus aus Vietnam!" and "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" the crowds
+of demonstrators were attacked almost immediately by mounted police.
+One young woman was trampled under the hooves of the horses. Since it
+had been decided beforehand that we would resist this expected attack, the
+agreed upon hit-and-run, disruptive tactics were put into operation. The idea
+was to move along the main street leading to the center of the city,
+disrupting the functioning of the tramway. As the crowds of demonstrators
+marched down the main street on the sidewalks on both sides of the street,
+some would periodically separate from the group and sit down on the
+tramway tracks. Watching the approach of the police, they waited until the
+very last moment to run into the refuge of the crowd. Not all of us made it.
+When it was my turn to do the sitting and running, I had to make sure I was
+fast enough to reach the safety of the crowd, not wanting to have a case
+foisted upon me by the West German courts. After several hours of sitting
+and running, and a sizeable number of arrests, we made it to the
+Hauptwache, the center of the city, and listened to an arousing speech by
+Rudi Dutsche, the Chairman of S.D.S., who was later shot in the head by a
+would-be assassin who said he was inspired by the assassination of Martin
+Luther King.
+Toward the end of my second year, a mass student demonstration, organized
+by S.D.S. in Berlin protesting the visit by the Shah of Iran, was attacked by
+the Shah's security, aided by the West Berlin police, with such terrible force
+that it ended in the death of a student — Ben Ohnesorge, who was attending
+his first political protest. The response throughout West Germany was swift
+and intense. In Frankfurt, there were mass gatherings, demonstrations and
+teach-ins.
+
+I was most impressed by the consciousness of the student movement when I
+heard about the Berlin campaign led by S.D.S. against the movie Africa
+Adio, directed by two Roman playboy-types, dealing with the ousting of the
+colonialists from Africa. Not only was this movie thoroughly racist in that it
+depicted the African Liberation Fighters as aggressors against the pure,
+educated, civilized whites, but the directors went so far as to stage actual
+killings in order to do on-the-spot documentary coverage of Africa. S.D.S.
+members in Berlin tore up a theater which refused to boycott the film.
+Students and workers were being drawn en masse into the arena of political
+protest in Germany. At the same time, great upheavals were taking place in
+the States.
+My decision to study in Frankfurt had been made in 1964, against the
+backdrop of relative political tranquility. But by the time I left in the
+summer of 1965, thousands of sisters and brothers were screaming in the
+streets of Los Angeles that they had observed the rules of the game long
+enough, too long.
+Watts was exploding; furiously burning. And out of the ashes of Watts,
+Phoenix-like, a new Black militancy was being born.
+While I was hidden away in West Germany the Black Liberation Movement
+was undergoing decisive metamorphoses. The slogan "Black Power" sprang
+out of a march in Mississippi. Organizations were being transfigured — The
+Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, a leading civil rights
+organization, was becoming the foremost advocate of "Black Power." The
+Congress on Racial Equality was undergoing similar transformations. In
+Newark, a national Black Power Conference had been organized. In
+political groups, labor unions, churches and other organizations, Black
+caucuses were being formed to defend the special interests of Black people.
+Everywhere there were upheavals.
+While I was reading philosophy in Frankfurt, and participating in the
+rearguard of S.D.S., there were young Black men in Oakland, California,
+who had decided that they had to wield arms in order to protect the
+residents of Oakland's Black community from the indiscriminate police
+brutality ravaging the area. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, li'l Bobby Hutton
+
+— those were some of the names that reached me. One day in Frankfurt I
+read about their entrance into the California Legislature in Sacramento with
+their weapons in order to safeguard their right (a right given to all whites) to
+carry them as instruments of self-defense. The name of this organization
+was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
+The more the struggles at home accelerated, the more frustrated I felt at
+being forced to experience it all vicariously. I was advancing my studies,
+deepening my understanding of philosophy, but I felt more and more
+isolated. I was so far away from the terrain of the fight that I could not even
+analyze the episodes of the struggle. I did not even have the knowledge or
+understanding to judge which currents of the movement were progressive
+and genuine and which were not. It was a difficult balance I was trying to
+maintain, and it was increasingly hard to feel a part of the collective coming
+to consciousness of my people.
+I am certain that what I was feeling was a variation and reflection of the
+same feelings that were overwhelming larger and larger numbers of Black
+people abroad. Many others of us must have felt pained, when reading
+about some new crisis in the struggle at home, to be hearing about it
+secondhand.
+I had thought mine was the perfect dilemma: the struggle at home versus
+the need to remain in Frankfurt until the completion of my doctorate, for I
+was certain that Frankfurt was far more conducive to philosophical studies
+than any other place. But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my
+ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to
+contribute something concrete to the struggle.
+Adorno had readily agreed to direct my work on a doctoral dissertation. But
+now I felt it would be impossible for me to stay in Germany any longer.
+Two years was enough. I arranged for an appointment with Adorno at the
+Institute and explained to him that I had to go home. In my correspondence
+with Marcuse, he had already agreed to work with me at the University of
+California in San Diego, where he had accepted a position after having been
+practically pushed out of Brandeis for political reasons. I wanted to
+continue my academic work, but I knew I could not do it unless I was
+
+politically involved. The struggle was a life-nerve; our only hope for
+survival. I made up my mind. The journey was on.
+
+PART FOUR: Flames
+fire eaters from the sun
+we shall lay the high white dome to siege
+cover screams with holy wings, in those days
+we shall be terrible
+HENRY DUMAS
+
+I
+
+t was the summer of 1967. On the way home I stopped off in London to
+attend a conference where Herbert Marcuse and Stokely Carmichael
+were among the main speakers. It was good to talk to Herbert and his wife
+Inge, whom I had not seen for quite some time, and I was looking forward
+to hearing Stokely's presentation. Convened around the theme "The
+Dialectics of Liberation," the conference was headquartered in a huge
+railroad turntable called the Roundhouse. The gathering was an unlikely
+conglomeration of Marxist theoreticians, philosophers, sociologists and
+psychologists, radical political activists, hippies and Black Power
+advocates. In the enormous barn-like structure, its floor covered with
+sawdust, the air reeked heavily of marijuana, and there were rumors that
+one speaker, a psychologist, was high on acid. Stokely Carmichael and
+Michael X, the militant West Indian leader of community struggles in
+London, were the two central figures of the small Black contingent in
+attendance.
+My natural hair style, in those days still a rarity, identified me as a
+sympathizer with the Black Power Movement. Immediately I was
+approached by the group around Michael and Stokely.
+Between conference sessions I spent my time with Stokely and Michael X's
+group, accompanied them to meetings in London ghettos, helping on
+occasion to pull the gatherings together. I was struck by the degree to which
+West Indian communities in London were mirror images of Black
+communities at home. These warm, receptive, fiery, enthusiastic people
+
+were also searching for some way to avenge themselves. As in the United
+States, there was a natural inclination to identify the enemy as the white
+man. Natural because the great majority of white people, both in the United
+States and England, have been carriers of the racism which, in reality,
+benefits only a small number of them — the capitalists. Because the masses
+of white people harbor racist attitudes, our people tended to see them as the
+villains and not the institutionalized forms of racism, which, though
+definitely reinforced by prejudiced attitudes, serve, fundamentally, only the
+interests of the rulers. When white people are indiscriminantly viewed as
+the enemy, it is virtually impossible to develop a political solution. Such
+were my thoughts as I moved through the conference. I learned more about
+the new movement there in London than from all the reading I had done. I
+was learning that as long as the Black response to racism remained purely
+emotional, we would go nowhere. Like the playground fights at Parker
+High, like the sporadic headless anger of those who fell under police clubs
+in Alabama — it would solve nothing in the long run.
+As I listened to Stokely's words, cutting like a switchblade, accusing the
+enemy as I had never heard him accused before, I admit I felt the cathartic
+power of his speech. But I also wanted to know where to go from there. I
+was distressed to discover that among some of the Black leaders there was
+the tendency to completely dismiss Marxism as "the white man's thing." It
+had been clear to me for a long time that in order to achieve its ultimate
+goals, the Black Liberation struggle would have to become a part of a
+revolutionary movement, embracing all working people. It was also clear to
+me that this movement must push in the direction of socialism. And I knew
+that Black people — Black workers — had an important leadership role to
+play in the overall fight. Therefore I found it disappointing that the
+nationalist posture of the Black leaders in London involved a strong
+resistance to socialism. I was encouraged, however, to learn that Stokely
+was about to make a trip to Cuba. Once he saw Black, Brown, and white
+people constructing together their socialist society, he would be compelled,
+so I thought, to reexamine his own position. When I asked Stokely about
+movement contacts in Southern California, he told me about Tommy J., a
+community leader in Los Angeles. The address he gave me was in Watts.
+
+When I arrived in Southern California a few weeks later, one of the first
+things I did was look up the address Stokely had given me. There was no
+such number. After desperately knocking on door after door, it was clear
+that no one in the neighborhood had ever heard of Tommy J. Because I was
+straining toward a permanent involvement, not being able to find this
+brother depressed me enormously. Reluctantly, I left for San Diego without
+any contacts in or concrete information about the movement in Southern
+California.
+In San Diego, the only people I knew were graduate students in the
+philosophy department, primarily students who were there because of
+Marcuse. Ricky Sherover and Bill Leiss, for example, had been graduate
+students at Brandeis during my senior year and had accompanied Marcuse
+to UCSD. Nevertheless, I did manage to get the telephone numbers of two
+Black community leaders: the director of a youth organization in San
+Diego, and a man who I later discovered was a member of the Communist
+Party.
+I telephoned the first brother.
+"Hello, this is Angela Davis. I've just arrived in San Diego to study
+philosophy at the university. I've been abroad for the last two years, and I
+want to try to contribute whatever I can to the Black movement here.
+Someone gave me your name and number . . ."
+At the end of my little speech there was only silence. I did not realize then
+how I must have sounded — like an effervescent adolescent, or like an
+agent trying to worm her way to the inside. The silence continued for a
+while, then he finally promised to call me soon and tell me about a meeting
+I could attend. I didn't detect very much enthusiasm in his voice and I didn't
+really expect to hear from him after I hung up. I was right.
+The days clumped by, the chances of a speedy acceptance into the San
+Diego community becoming more and more remote. Sometimes I would get
+into my car and, out of sheer frustration, drive into San Diego and head
+toward Logan Heights, where the largest concentration of Black people
+lived, and drive around aimlessly, daydreaming, trying to devise some way
+of escaping this terrible isolation.
+
+There was little more to do than wait for classes at the university to begin.
+And so I studied, socialized with the philosophy students and professors,
+and waited, waited. At last the dormitories came alive with students
+returning to campus. As the resident student body grew, so did my
+disappointment. Not everyone had arrived, but I was hard at work searching
+every corner and crevice for sisters and brothers. Each day brought on a
+more profound dejection, for there were still no Black people on campus.
+I was like an explorer who returns to his homeland after many years, with
+precious bounty and no one to give it to. I believed my energy, my
+commitment, my convictions were the treasure I had accumulated, and I
+looked high and low for a way to spend it. I roamed the campus, examined
+the bulletin boards, read the newspapers, talked to everyone who might
+know: Where are my people? It was as if I would be churned up and
+destroyed inside by these irrepressible desires to become a part of a
+liberation movement if I did not soon discover an outlet for them.
+Therefore, I turned to the radical students' organization on campus, and
+participated in the planning of an action against the war in Vietnam.
+In 1967 masses of people had not yet arrived at the conclusion that the war
+ought to come to an immediate halt. Consequently many of our efforts to
+talk to the people in the streets of San Diego were immediately and abruptly
+rebuffed. Many refused to even take our literature. But since this was my
+first demonstration in the United States, for a number of years, I was
+enthusiastic and excited. The hostile attitudes of the people in the streets
+gave me all the more reason to talk harder, longer and more persuasively.
+As zealous as I felt, as clearly as I understood the political necessity for this
+demonstration, I still experienced a sense of alienation among these
+students. Emotionally I was a stranger — in a way that I had never been a
+stranger among white people before. It was not the feeling of my childhood
+in the South. It was not the alienation I experienced in New York upon
+realizing that many of the whites around me were going out of their way to
+make me feel that they were not racist. It was a new strangeness that I felt.
+But one I would have to deal with later.
+Meanwhile, the contingent of police overseeing our demonstration grew
+larger. A police car was stationed on every corner now. Uniformed and
+
+plainclothes agents were all around. San Diego was not used to such
+demonstrations. That its defenses would be extreme could have been
+predicted beforehand.
+When the atmosphere seemed to be reaching a boiling point, the decision
+was made to return to the campus and pick up reinforcements. Since my '58
+Buick was one of the largest cars we had, I accepted the assignment of
+making the fifteen mile trip back to La Jolla. But by the time we reached
+the university, a call had come in telling us that arrests had already been
+made.
+The next step was to retrieve the prisoners. We mustered up enough for the
+bond. Three of us, a man, another woman and I, went down to the jail,
+posted the money and awaited the release of our companions. The charges
+that had been lodged against them were still an enigma to us. We inquired
+about the precise circumstances surrounding the arrest. Previously we had
+been told that the charge was "obstructing pedestrian traffic."
+Since no one in the front office could satisfy us, we were directed to the
+chambers of the patrol captain. We entered into a dark room musty with the
+odor of San Diego justice. Again, we posed the question. Why the arrests?
+Again the answer was mechanically spouted out to us: "obstructing
+pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk." We were persistent. What does that
+mean? We ourselves were passing out literature as well; we knew we did
+not prevent anyone from passing. "Well," said the patrol captain, "as long as
+you are standing on the sidewalk, you may be considered to be obstructing
+pedestrian traffic."
+"Then how many times have you arrested Jehovah's Witnesses distributing
+their religious literature?"
+Silence.
+"Sir, could you be a little more explicit and a little clearer in your
+explanation of the reasons for the arrests of our friends?"
+The captain began to say something, but became so completely tongue-tied
+he was not able to get the words out. Finally, out of sheer frustration and
+
+evidently disturbed by our logic, he blurted out — "It is not the police's job
+to understand the law; that is the job of the district attorney. If you want to
+understand the meaning of this law, go to the D.A.!"
+Although we realized that we were in the chambers of our enemy, this
+remark was so stupid and so funny that all three of us roared with laughter.
+"Get out of this place! Get out!" the captain, now out of control, screamed.
+We were trying to regain our composure when we noticed him dialing a
+number on his telephone. In less than a minute, his office was full of
+policemen who came for a single purpose: to throw us into jail.
+Our male companion was carted off; Anna and I were handcuffed and
+pushed into the back seat of a patrol car parked in the steaming hot
+courtyard of the city jail complex. The windows were closed, and we saw
+that police cars have no door handles on the inside. The police officer
+slammed the doors and walked away. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty.
+The heat had become absolutely intolerable. Sweat was pouring down our
+faces and our clothes were drenched. We banged on the windows and
+screamed. No one came.
+Just as our fear began to approach panic, the officer walked toward the car,
+got in and started up the motor.
+"What do you girls do for a living?" he asked.
+"We don't have jobs," we answered.
+"If you don't have a job, then we can pin vagrancy on you."
+"We have money in our purses; that proves we aren't vagrants."
+"That's even better," he said. "If you have money, but no job, we can charge
+you with robbery — or better than that, armed robbery."
+On the way to the jail, we looked at San Diego through the windows of the
+police car. The screeching of the siren attracted stares from the crowds of
+people in the downtown area. What were they thinking? Were we
+
+prostitutes, drug users, robbers, or had we gotten caught in a confidence
+game? I doubt if the idea crossed any of their minds that we might be
+revolutionaries.
+In the woman's section of the county jail, we were directed to a room and
+instructed to remove all of our clothes in the presence of a matron. Anna
+and I protested this degradation long and hard before we were forced to
+acquiesce. The next stage was a hot shower in a room where a heavy iron
+door was locked behind us. After being left for an hour in the shower room,
+we were placed in separate silvery-colored, padded cells, where we had to
+suffer through another waiting period. Thinking I could use some of this
+time constructively, I scratched political slogans on the walls with a burnt
+match for the benefit of the sisters who would occupy this cell next.
+Many hours passed before the mug shots and fingerprints were finally
+taken, our booking sheet written up. We made the telephone calls due us
+and, dressed in prisoner's uniforms, were taken to the jail population
+upstairs.
+They put us in a large tank separated from the outside corridor by a double
+gate of electrically operated bars. The first gate slid open at the push of a
+button. Anna and I stepped inside between the two gates. It slid closed.
+Only when it was securely locked did the second gate leading into the tank
+open.
+The tank itself was as depressingly sterile as jail tanks are meant to be. It
+was divided into two sections — one with the bunks for sleeping and the
+other for eating and game-playing. We explained to each sister who
+inquired what we had done to be arrested. Our explanation singled us out, in
+1967, as curiosities. Many of the sisters, in jail on such charges as
+possession of drugs and prostitution, tried to comfort us. They felt that the
+charges against us were silly and would be dropped.
+They were right. At long last we were released.
+In the meantime other demonstrators had informed the news media that
+three people in San Diego had been arrested when they tried to inquire
+about the nature of a law. A rock station based in Los Angeles was running
+
+a spot every hour: "Have you heard about the people down south who got
+arrested because they wanted to know about the law?"
+The university agreed to lodge an official protest, and within two days, the
+district attorney of San Diego dropped the charges and made a formal
+apology.
+A few days later, during a meeting of the group that had organized the
+demonstration, I was excited to see a young Black couple sitting on the
+other side of the room. They were the first Black students I had seen on the
+campus — and their presence at the meeting meant they were interested in
+the movement. After the meeting, we introduced ourselves, and within a
+short time Liz and Ed and I decided to try to organize a Black Student
+Union. We began by systematically investigating the dormitories, asking
+whether there were any Black students on the floor. After we combed all the
+halls, we attacked the graduate departments, going into the main office of
+each one with pen and paper, requesting the names of all Black students and
+employees. We also involved Black workers; if we hadn't we would have
+been too small to get the attention we needed to function.
+We made contact with some fifteen to twenty Black students and workers.
+About ten of them showed up at our meeting, leaving us quite proud of our
+first efforts at independent political organizing. One Black professor
+attended the meeting and agreed to act as the group's sponsor. Soon another
+professor, from Jamaica, became heavily involved in the work of the
+organization.
+We realized that to be successful we would have to establish ties with
+similar groups. Otherwise, when making demands, it would be hard to
+convince the university administration of our strength. We decided therefore
+to affiliate, in a loose way, with the Black Students' Council at San Diego
+State College, and to seek community ties as well.
+It struck me, about this time, that I was being looked upon as somewhat of a
+leader of the Black movement at the university. It was not that I had sought
+out this position; it simply emerged that, despite my two-year absence, I
+was one of the most experienced organizers on campus.
+
+We discovered that the San Diego Black Conference — a coalition of
+community organizations spearheaded by Ron Karenga's US-Organization
+— was trying to build support for a Black seaman, Ed Lynn, who was
+challenging racial discrimination at Balboa Naval Base. Liz, Ed and I
+decided to attend the Thursday night meeting of the conference. The facts
+surrounding Ed Lynn's case were classic. It had created a huge stir at the
+base when Ed circulated a petition protesting race prejudice, asking both
+Black and white seamen to sign. In the course of this petition drive, Ed had
+charged that President Johnson condoned racism in the military. Within a
+short time he was told that he faced court-martial for having made
+"offensive" statements about the President of the United States.
+The small meeting was being held at a community center in Logan Heights.
+The participants stared at the three strangers who said they were
+representing Black students at the University of San Diego — no one had
+ever heard of our group. Some probably thought we were agents. We
+worked hard to persuade them that we were genuinely interested in the case
+of Ed Lynn. Ed himself was quite willing to let us help him in his defense.
+He readily accepted our invitation to speak about his case at the university
+and enthusiastically greeted our idea of setting up a permanent table on the
+campus plaza with literature on him and the battle at Balboa Naval Base. In
+this way, the Black Student Council entered into a close working
+relationship with Ed Lynn. In the course of these activities, Ed and I became
+good friends.
+
+The Second Baptist Church in Watts glowed with colorful African patterns
+and fabrics — the women wore "traditional" long dresses of red, purple,
+orange and yellow; the men wore bubas that rivaled in every way the fiery
+beauty of the women's clothes. The walls of the registration room were
+alive with poster art that hailed Blackness as an ancient and peerless beauty.
+It was November of 1967, and my exhilaration was as bright and intense as
+the colors that dappled the room. I was a stranger to this kind of gathering
+and found literally staggering the energy and resolve of the people attending
+the Black Youth Conference. London and San Diego had been sad
+
+miniatures compared to this massive display of strength. I walked around
+calling everyone sister and brother; smiling, elated, high on love.
+I came down. Slowly, at first, but then with a jolt.
+A gun battle broke out during the first hours between two organizations —
+The United Front and Ron Karenga's US-Organization. Beneath the façade
+of unity, under the wonderful colors of the bubas, lay strong ideological
+differences and explosive political conflicts, and perhaps even agents
+provocateurs. I knew it was as important to understand this side of the
+movement as the nicer side — but my idealism had received a strong, and
+probably necessary, kick in the teeth. I was expecting too much, needing too
+much, and my eagerness to learn and submerge myself in this movement
+made me giddy with excitement.
+In the midst of the chaos which followed the shooting, I read the literature,
+sat in on some of the workshops, and discovered that about the only thing
+we really had in common was skin color. No wonder unity was fragile.
+There were the cultural nationalist organizations, talking about a new
+culture, a new value system, a new life-style among Black people. There
+were the severely anti-white factions who felt that only the most drastic
+measure — elimination of all white people — would give Black people the
+opportunity to live unhampered by racism. Others simply wanted to
+separate and build a distinct Black nation within the United States. And
+some wanted to return to Africa, the land of our ancestors.
+There were those who felt the most urgent task of the movement was to
+refine the spirit of confrontation among Black people. They wanted to spark
+mass uprisings, such as the Watts and Detroit rebellions. Related to them
+were those who called upon us all to "pick up the gun" as the major weapon
+of liberation and transformation — although they seldom seemed to know
+exactly what it was they wanted to usher in with the gun.
+There were the pseudo-militant groups that insisted that the racist
+establishment should be challenged — but only in order to pressure the big
+foundations to finance service programs which they themselves would
+develop and, probably, profit from. Indicative of the confusion was the fact
+
+that one workshop went so far as to propose before the plenary session the
+use of drums as a new means of communication among Black people in the
+cities.
+It seemed to me that two steady rays of lucidity shone through the
+confusion — James Forman of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating
+Committee) and Franklin Alexander of the Communist Party. Forman spoke
+to the plenum of the conference and emphatically defended the proposition
+that we could not afford to make a skin analysis alone; we also needed a
+class analysis. I watched Franklin as he co-chaired a workshop on the
+subject of Black Politics and Economics. His presentation was clear and
+incisive: power relationships which placed Black people at the bottom
+stemmed from the use of racism as a tool of the economically ascendant
+class — the capitalists. Racism meant more profits and, insofar as white
+workers are concerned, division and confusion.
+After the conference adjourned, I was invited, quite by happenstance, to
+attend a small house meeting where James Forman and Ralph Featherstone
+talked about their recent trip to Africa. They gave a fascinating, detailed
+account of what they had seen in Tanzania, and discussed plans to establish
+within SNCC a "skill bank" through which Black people here with special
+scientific and technical skills could commit themselves to spending certain
+periods of time in Africa. Besides Franklin and Kendra Alexander, at this
+meeting there were representatives of an organization called the Black
+Panther Party. It was a small cadre group which felt its role was to develop
+theoretical analyses of the Black movement, as well as to build structures
+within the existing movement. It bore no relationship to Huey Newton and
+Bobby Seale's Black Panther Party for Self Defense, except that both had
+taken their names from the Lowndes County Black Panther Party in
+Alabama. In fact, to distinguish it from Huey and Bobby's party, it was
+called the Black Panther Political Party.
+This meeting was the beginning of my long and deep relationship with
+many of the members of the BPPP. Their understanding of the Black
+Liberation Movement was far more sophisticated and more satisfying than
+what I had discovered in San Diego. Though I continued my commitment to
+
+both the university and the community in San Diego, I found real strength
+and vision in L.A.
+One of my missions during this trip to Los Angeles was to contact speakers
+for a San Diego rally we were planning in support of Ed Lynn. Leaders of
+several groups agreed to come: John Floyd, the chairman of the Black
+Panther Political Party; Brother Crook, a leader of the Community Alert
+Patrol; Ron Karenga, whose US-Organization was popular in San Diego;
+and Walter Bremond, the chairman of the Black Congress, a working
+coalition of Black organizations in the area of Los Angeles.
+In organizing for this rally back in San Diego, I ran headlong into a
+situation which was to become a constant problem in my political life. I was
+criticized very heavily, especially by male members of Karenga's
+organization, for doing "a man's job." Women should not play leadership
+roles, they insisted. A woman was supposed to "inspire" her man and
+educate his children. The irony of their complaint was that much of what I
+was doing had fallen to me by default. The arrangements for the publicity
+of the rally, for instance, had been in a man's hands, but because his work
+left much to be desired, I began to do it simply to make sure that it got
+done. It was also ironical that precisely those who criticized me most did
+the least to ensure the success of the rally.
+I became acquainted very early with the widespread presence of an
+unfortunate syndrome among some Black male activists — namely to
+confuse their political activity with an assertion of their maleness. They saw
+— and some continue to see — Black manhood as something separate from
+Black womanhood. These men view Black women as a threat to their
+attainment of manhood — especially those Black women who take
+initiative and work to become leaders in their own right. The constant
+harangue by the US men was that I needed to redirect my energies and use
+them to give my man strength and inspiration so that he might more
+effectively contribute his talents to the struggle for Black liberation.
+
+***
+
+For me revolution was never an interim "thing-to-do" before settling down;
+it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social
+life — made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by
+costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a
+revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be
+for a lifetime.
+As 1968 got under way I realized how much I needed to find a collective.
+Floating from activity to activity was no revolutionary anything. Individual
+activity — sporadic and disconnected — is not revolutionary work. Serious
+revolutionary work consists of persistent and methodical efforts through a
+collective of other revolutionaries to organize the masses for action. Since I
+had long considered myself a Marxist, the alternatives open to me were
+very limited.
+I had already begun to consider the possibility of joining the Communist
+Party, and had been involved in numerous discussions about this with
+Kendra and Franklin Alexander. In January I was among those invited to
+attend an open meeting of the Che-Lumumba Club at Charlene Mitchell's
+house; she was the founding chairwoman of this Black collective of the
+Party. Charlene made a presentation on the relationship between reform and
+revolution. Her paper was brilliant. It was the most lucid analysis I had
+encountered of the way to organize people around their own daily problems
+and, through this, propel them in the direction of the revolutionary
+overthrow of the capitalist system.
+But because there were too many unanswered questions in my own mind, I
+did not join the Party at that time. Since my high school days in New York,
+and since the summer of 1962 when I had attended the Eighth World Youth
+Festival in Helsinki, I had been more or less out of touch with members of
+the Communist Party. Instead, I had been relating to Marxist groups and
+theoreticians and activists who were often strongly critical of members of
+the traditional Communist parties. Later, looking back upon my European
+days, I realized how deeply I had been influenced by the anti-communism
+which permeated the European Left movement. I saw the Communist
+parties as being too conservative and behind the times in their uncritical
+
+attitude toward the working class. In this respect, I thought that there was
+no hope for white workers in the United States — they had been irreparably
+corrupted by racism on the one hand and concessions by the ruling class on
+the other.
+Yet, even if these particular problems had not bothered me, I was illprepared to join the Party right then. Still, to become a Communist is to
+make a lifetime commitment that requires a great deal of serious thinking
+about whether one has the knowledge, the strength, the stamina and the
+discipline that a Communist must have. During the first months of 1968 I
+let joining the Party remain an open question.
+The Black Panther Party, however, appeared flexible enough to accept
+Marxist ideas. It was a small collective of young Black people, the majority
+of whom came from the Black intelligentsia — students, teachers, and a
+professor or two.
+I had become acquainted with some of the members of the BPPP after the
+Youth Conference in November, and had started to develop some
+friendships with a few of them. When they decided, early in January, to
+broaden their membership by three, they issued one invitation to a brother
+at California State who had a reputation as a very good writer. The second
+was extended to Franklin Alexander, and the third to myself. I accepted the
+invitation. Inviting Franklin was, I thought, a sign of their willingness to
+open up to Marxist ideas. I saw them as an interim political base from
+which I could think over and decide upon the ultimate political direction I
+was going to take. They, in turn, saw me as their representative down south
+in San Diego. The BPPP was a member organization of the Los Angeles
+Black Congress — a broad coalition of community groups in the area.
+Around this time the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, whose highest
+leader, Minister of Defense Huey Newton, was in prison, decided to build a
+chapter in Los Angeles.
+Unfortunately some of their new recruits moved into that territory with
+belligerent claims of the exclusivity of the name "Black Panther Party." One
+afternoon, when I was in the Black Congress Building, I caught the eye of a
+brother drinking a bottle of wine — something prohibited, as I recall, in the
+
+Congress building. I turned my eyes from him and began to walk down the
+corridor toward an office. As I passed him, he pulled a gun out of his pocket
+and, with lightning speed, grabbed me by the shoulder, pointed the piece
+toward my temple and pulled me into the nearest office.
+He wanted to talk, he said. His words were slurred and his breath clotted
+with wine. He wanted to talk about the Black Panther Party and his Black
+Panther Party for Self Defense. The wine bottle, the slurred words, the fact
+that he had a gun and I had nothing told me that if I didn't want my head
+blown off, I had better remain as tight-lipped as possible. So I listened.
+"The Black Panther Party for Self Defense," he screamed, "demands that
+your motherfuckin' party get rid of the name the Black Panther Party. In
+fact, you better change it to the motherfuckin' Pink Pussycat Party. And if
+you haven't changed your name by next Friday, we are going to off you all."
+To make sure I knew that he was dead serious, he told me that he had found
+out that I lived in San Diego; that he had my address and that I could expect
+someone to knock on my door if we didn't do what they were demanding.
+(In all fairness to Huey's Black Panther Party, it is important to say that this
+screaming drunk with a gun was later expelled from the Panthers for being
+an agent provocateur.)
+A crisis situation had erupted. Other members of our group were similarly
+threatened. Guns were the common persuaders; death was the consequence
+of disobedience. I could do one of two things — obey him or get my own
+protection. I chose the latter and, for a while, was fully armed at all times. I
+knew that if I were ever stopped by the police and searched, I could end up
+in jail, yet if I did not take that risk, I could very easily end up dumped in an
+alley somewhere with a bullet in my brain.
+We held emergency meeting after emergency meeting, but during that brief
+period, were unable to resolve this crisis. Some members wanted an open
+confrontation with the Panthers for Self Defense, even if it meant coming to
+blows. Others simply wanted to ignore the threats, insisting that the
+Panthers were bluffing. And there were one or two who were willing to
+quit, bend under the Panthers' threats and disband the organization.
+
+The final solution came about as a result of a fortuitous trip of James
+Forman to Los Angeles. He came to town to speak at a rally organized by
+the New Politics Convention. We seized the occasion to acquaint him with
+the strife between the two organizations and to get his ideas on how to
+prevent this conflict from erupting into open warfare. After giving our
+predicament some thought, he said he had a proposal.
+He prefaced his proposal by telling us of recent efforts to strengthen
+relations between SNCC and the Panthers for Self Defense. They had both
+agreed to move toward a merger between the two organizations. Stokely
+Carmichael had already been appointed Prime Minister of the BPP, Rap
+Brown became Minister of Justice, and Forman himself became Minister of
+International Affairs.
+One of the obstacles to the consolidation of the merger was the
+geographical separation of the headquarters of the organizations: SNCC
+was in New York; the BPP was in the San Francisco Bay area. Forman felt
+it was essential to build a strong SNCC chapter on the West Coast. If we
+would consider transforming ourselves into Los Angeles SNCC, Forman
+said, our problems as well as SNCC's might be solved. First of all, our
+name would no longer be an issue. We would also acquire new national
+dimensions for our own collective and overcome, thereby, some of the
+provincialism that plagued us. From Forman's standpoint we would be
+assisting SNCC — which then was considered by many to be the leading
+force in the Black Liberation Movement — to build a base on the West
+Coast. Finally we would be able to cement the relationship between the
+BPP and SNCC. If a lasting coalition were to develop, it would be a
+tremendous advance.
+At first there was opposition. Some called Forman's recommendation too
+superficial to provide a lasting solution to our problems. They said we
+would have to deal with the brothers like the one who put the gun to my
+head whether we remained in our old clothes or whether we put on the new
+clothes of SNCC.
+I was in favor of joining SNCC — not because I thought that the merger
+was going to dispel the discord between us and the new L.A. Panthers, but
+rather because I respected the historical contributions SNCC had made to
+
+the movement. The peace talk, however, in no way encouraged me to relax
+my own vigilance. The trusty weapon was still within reach at all times.
+Most of the sisters and brothers on our side were equally wary and did not
+immediately disarm themselves.
+With everyone still on pins and needles, a peace-making meeting was
+called. It was an impressive gathering. With the exception of two or three of
+our members who had dropped out, all of us were present. On the Panthers'
+side, the line-up was all the major leaders (except Huey, of course, who had
+been arrested in October). Eldridge Cleaver was present. Until that meeting,
+most of us knew very little about him except that he was the "Minister of
+Information" who was "underground," according to the designation that
+followed the title each week in their newspaper. Bobby Seale was there,
+Emory Douglas and li'l Bobby Hutton, as well as seven or eight others.
+I was most impressed by li'l Bobby. He was human, natural, and so clearly
+unconcerned about fitting the image of a cold, calculating revolutionary. Li'l
+Bobby initiated a friendly conversation with me by asking some everyday,
+down-home questions: where I was from, what I did. He had a beautiful
+smile and an uncorrupted, youthful enthusiasm. After talking to him for a
+few mintues, I knew that he was serious about the struggle and that there
+was little, if any, egoism in his motives.
+The light conversation with li'l Bobby was the only relief for me in a
+meeting that was otherwise shrouded in tension.
+When, a few months later, I heard that li'l Bobby had been shot, I felt as if it
+were a brother of mine who had been murdered by the Oakland police.
+For better or worse, it was decided by both groups that our first common
+effort would be the issuing of a call to the entire Black Liberation
+Movement on the West Coast for two mass meetings — one in Northern
+California, and the other in Southern California — to demand Huey
+Newton's freedom on the occasion of his birthday.
+The most widely known political prisoner, Huey Newton was an important
+symbol of Black militancy. At a time when it was perfectly legal to carry
+unconcealed weapons in California, he and his comrades had armed
+
+themselves in order to protect the Black community in Oakland from the
+arbitrary brutality of the Oakland Police Department. Because he had posed
+a serious threat to their authority, they had cornered him in a situation
+which left him with a bullet in his stomach and one policeman dead. Huey
+was awaiting trial for murder. We turned our energies full force to
+organizing this rally and to making it a major event.
+We enlisted the support of the Black Congress and, after a series of hassles,
+we secured the Sports Arena for the meeting. It was the largest indoor
+meeting place in Los Angeles at the time. We printed thousands of leaflets,
+bought advertisements or asked for free time on radio and television
+stations.
+It was an exciting evening. Although the turnout was not what we had
+expected, practically the entire main floor of the arena was full. The list of
+speakers was impressive: Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Bobby Seale,
+James Forman, Reis Tijerina, Ron Karenga.
+The importance of the rally was obvious. I was, therefore, especially
+disturbed by the content of some of the speeches. Stokely, for example,
+spoke of socialism as "the white man's thing." Marx, he said, was a white
+man and therefore irrelevant to Black Liberation. "As Black people,"
+Stokely shouted, "we have to forget about socialism, which is a European
+creation, and have to start thinking about African communalism."
+His speech was all the more disturbing because I knew that he had been in
+Cuba the preceding summer and had been warmly received wherever he
+went. He had officially congratulated the Cuban people — Black, Brown
+and white — for their superb achievements in building socialism.
+Moreover, I knew for a fact that he had publicly stated that his trip to Cuba
+had unequivocally demonstrated to him that socialism alone could liberate
+Black people. In a socialist country, to people whose sisters and brothers,
+and mothers and fathers had given their lives in the defense of their socialist
+revolution, Stokely had said that he was convinced that socialism was the
+answer for his people as well. Now that he was back in the United States,
+where the official propaganda made socialism less popular, he was
+opportunistically reversing his position. Because he knew how to turn a
+phrase, he had the audience applauding, not so much what he said as his
+
+way of saying it. I was glad he was no longer the chairman of SNCC,
+because after hearing such a speech, I would have left the organization on
+the spot.
+The speech of Rap Brown, who had replaced Stokely in the chairmanship of
+SNCC, was one of the best of the evening.
+A serious problem permeated the entire rally. We were supposed to be
+calling for mass support for Huey Newton. However, no strategy followed,
+graced or even decorated this demand. There were no specific, concrete
+proposals placed before the people in attendance. In response to the appeal,
+the applause was ample enough, but where were we to go from there? The
+only answer to this question was the slogan "The sky is the limit." That is to
+say, if Huey Newton was convicted and sentenced to death, the ruling class
+could expect a hundred police stations to be attacked, fifty power plants to
+be bombed, etc., etc., etc. It wasn't even clear whether the speakers were
+saying that they themselves would carry out these demolitions, or whether
+they were appealing to the people in attendance to go out and respond in
+this way if Huey was convicted. The gaping void was a clear-cut line of
+action spelling out the way to organize masses of people in struggle in order
+to guarantee that Huey Newton would be set free.
+At this time, Rap Brown faced several very serious charges — clearly
+fraudulent — stemming from his speeches and political activity. He had
+been released on bail with the proviso that he remain within the boundaries
+of Manhattan, New York, except for trips to confer with his attorney. He
+was on just such a trip then to meet with William Kuntsler — a convenient
+trip for us because he had been able to speak at the rallies celebrating
+Huey's birthday.
+We did not know — Rap did not know — that he would not get very far
+when he left California. He was to be seized by the FBI, reimprisoned, this
+time with a bail of $100,000, plus an extra $25,000 for allegedly insulting
+the arresting officer.
+Our first grass-roots organizing effort was, therefore, a bail campaign for
+the national chairman of our organization. We decided to circulate a petition
+demanding that the exorbitant sum be lowered. At the same time, we began
+
+to organize a door-to-door drive to raise money for Rap's bond. Sisters and
+brothers were recruited to go out on weekends, into the community — in
+houses, churches, community centers, shopping centers, we asked people to
+put their donations into our coin cans and sign the petition.
+The modesty of this approach was surpassed only by its success. As a result
+of the all-day expeditions with the cans labeled "Let Rap rap," we attracted
+a sizeable number of sisters and brothers to our organization. Increasing
+SNCC's membership on the Coast was an important gain, over and above
+the money that was collected and the message that reached large numbers of
+Black people in Los Angeles.
+Shortly after our campaign to support Rap had gotten off the ground, we
+opened up a headquarters on Jefferson Avenue near Arlington. When my
+university responsibilities for the week were fulfilled, I would jump into my
+beat-up 1958 Buick and race up the highway from La Jolla to Los Angeles,
+heading straight to SNCC headquarters to join the others in getting down to
+the real business of struggle.
+We felt we had the energy of stallions and the confidence of eagles as we
+rushed into the neighborhoods of L.A. — on the streets, in houses,
+campuses, offices — driving, walking, meeting, greeting. We experienced
+the heights of brotherhood and sisterhood doing something openly, freely
+and above ground about our own people. This was no sly manipulation of
+the establishment, marked by compromise and gradualism. Nor was it the
+individual heroism of some one person whose outrage had reached the point
+of no return. Our stance was public and our commitment was to our people
+— and for some of us, to the class. The time was indeed ours to seize. In
+spite of the absence of a homogeneous ideology, in spite of the disparate
+ways in which problems were approached, we knew we could not retire to
+reflect, could not halt the tide until every detail was worked out to
+everyone's satisfaction. Like new alchemists we lit the fire and trusted the
+heat to refine our recipe for victory.
+Those were exciting times. The potential we had for building a mass
+movement among Black people in L.A. was staggering, and we went to
+work straightaway, pounding out a more comprehensive program for our
+organizers to follow. We were on our own. Because of the origins of our
+
+membership, we were not under the direct authority of the national
+organization of SNCC. Moreover, the merger with the Panthers had all but
+dissolved. After a minor run-in with Eldridge and company over the money
+raised during the February 18 rally, whatever superficial agreement had
+initially prevailed withered away for want of a mutual desire to sustain it.
+Fortunately, overt hostilities had also withered.
+Although we tried to learn from the organizing experiences of SNCC —
+particularly during the year of its greatest influence in the South — we did
+not feel committed to follow rigidly the same line or program which had
+been developed by SNCC. For all intents and purposes, we were an
+autonomous organization.
+With all the gusto of the novice, I accepted the responsibility for drawing up
+plans for a "Liberation School" and for being its director once it was
+established.
+It was during this period of work on the bail campaign for Rap that we
+learned about a brutal police murder committed on the very day of the
+February 18 rally. One evening while we were in the office — and, if I
+recall correctly, Franklin, Bobbie Hodges, John Floyd, myself and others
+were deeply embroiled in a fiery discussion about the significance of
+Marxism for the Black Liberation struggle — two brothers came in (one of
+whom was the author Earl Ofari). They gave us the gory details of the
+police slaying of eighteen-year-old Gregory Clark not too far from our
+office. The brothers appealed to us to immediately organize a movement of
+resistance.
+The next day some of us went out to investigate the facts of the killing and
+to explore the sentiment of the community. According to Gregory's family
+and friends and witnesses to the act, these were the facts: On a warm
+afternoon in February, Gregory Clark and a friend were cruising down
+Washington Boulevard in a late-model Mustang. They were drinking soda
+pop, the cans covered by brown paper bags. When they reached Vineyard,
+they were motioned over to the curb by an LAPD cop who, according to the
+brother who survived, told them that they didn't look like they "fit" the car
+they were driving. Then, seeing the brown bags and without a shred of
+proof, he accused them of drinking beer while driving.
+
+The two brothers protested, the witnesses said. They had the registration to
+prove that they hadn't stolen the car and the cans themselves were proof of
+what they had been drinking. But the cop, Warren B. Carleson, refused to
+hear their explanation. All he heard was niggers talking back to a white man
+in uniform. Ordering them out of their car, he prepared to handcuff them.
+Perhaps Gregory began to raise his voice in protest. Perhaps he snatched his
+hands away to prevent the cop from clamping on the handcuffs. Perhaps he
+did nothing. In any case, there was a brief scuffle before Carleson locked
+the manacles around his wrists. The victim was caught, but Carleson did not
+stop there. According to those watching the encounter, he knocked Gregory
+Clark to the sidewalk, and while he lay face down, his hands cuffed behind
+him, Carleson shot Gregory in the back of the head with a .38 revolver.
+As I stood there on the corner of Washington and Vineyard, staring at the
+two-week-old bloodstains on the sidewalk, this scene unfolded before me in
+all its original horror. But the hurt and the rage meant nothing by
+themselves. What was needed was an organized struggle.
+Over a hundred people showed up at the community meeting we called.
+They listened avidly as witnesses to the murder told what they had seen.
+The community people eagerly accepted our suggestion that we should
+mobilize people to attend the coroner's inquest which would determine, for
+the benefit of officialdom, whether charges should be pressed against the
+cop or whether the act was a legitimate expression of his duty as a "peace
+officer."
+We did not feel that we were strong enough at that point to influence the
+outcome of the inquest simply by our presence. More than likely they
+would declare that the killing of Gregory Clark was a "justifiable
+homicide." But large numbers of people there would certainly alert the
+ruling cliques that we were preparing ourselves for battle.
+The scenario unfolded as we knew it would: the panel accepted Carleson's
+version of the story: He had been frightened; thinking that Gregory Clark
+might be armed (prostrate with his hands cuffed behind him?), he shot him
+in self defense. The verdict: justifiable homicide.
+
+Still, there was partial victory: the leaflets we had sent out into the
+community; the vigilance at the inquest. Our promises to expose the
+Gregory Clark case put the LAPD on the spot. We had sent people to track
+Carleson down on his beat and photograph him for our literature, but the
+LAPD had secreted him somewhere. That evening Carleson was
+interviewed by a major television station and forced to justify his act before
+the eyes of thousands of people, and our photographer snapped a
+photograph of him which we used to announce a People's Tribunal.
+Carleson was going to be tried by the people he had offended. The sisters
+and brothers who had been attracted to SNCC by the protests we were
+spearheading constituted themselves into a People's Tribunal Committee. A
+date was set for the trial to be held in South Park. While some were
+selecting the "lawyers," "judges," those who would play significant roles in
+the trial, other SNCC and People's Tribunal Committee members composed
+and printed the literature. I was in the propaganda department. Of all the
+material we produced, I was most proud of the poster which carried the
+photograph of Carleson which had been shot from the television set. If we
+had been consciously seeking a picture of a typical "racist pig," we couldn't
+have made a better choice. Carleson's soul was fully revealed in his face.
+Printed across the poster in large, broad letters was the word "Wanted."
+Under the photograph was the description: "LAPD Cop for the Murder of
+Brother Gregory Clark."
+These posters were put up all over the Black community — the area where
+the brother was killed was saturated with them. Fact sheets about the case
+and leaflets announcing the trial were distributed door-to-door, after work at
+factories, in churches, and wherever Black people were.
+The fruits of our labors were a tremendous awareness in the community of
+the case of Gregory Clark and a very large turnout at the people's trial.
+The prosecuting attorney was Ben Wyatt, a Black lawyer and community
+activist. No one wanted to accept the position of defense attorney, but
+finally Deacon Alexander — Franklin's brother — accepted this unenviable
+role. The panel of judges consisted of a variety of persons active in the
+Black community, all representative of organizations which counted
+themselves among the advocates of Black Liberation.
+
+If someone accused us of being one-sided, we made no claims to
+impartiality. We were not trying to duplicate the bourgeois judicial system
+which tries to conceal its class and race bias behind meaningless procedures
+and empty platitudes about democracy. We were demanding justice —
+about which Black people needed to be defiant and passionate. After
+hundreds of years of suffering the most persistently one-sided bestiality and
+violence, how could we seriously assume a posture of unbiased observers?
+The witnesses were called; they gave their testimony of events leading up to
+and following Gregory's death. Other witnesses were called to give "expert
+testimony" on the unchecked racism in the LAPD. Past police murders in
+the Black community were documented, stitch by stitch, and a tapestry of
+racist horrors was woven. At the center of this tapestry was Gregory Clark,
+whose killer was arrogantly screaming "self-defense." We tried and
+convicted Carleson — not for being the originator and sole perpetrator of
+the crime, but because he had been an all-too-willing accomplice in the
+routine business of a racist system. Warren B. Carleson had not acted alone;
+he had helped the system to add one more victim to its rolls. And it was for
+this that he deserved the maximum penalty.
+"You have heard the evidence against the defendant and you have also
+heard his defense. Are the people ready to pronounce their verdict?"
+"Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" roared the audience, and their unanimous
+thunderous verdict tore through the park air like bullets.
+It would have been anticlimactic for the process to end with the mere
+rendering of the verdict. Yet we could not carry out a penalty unless it
+involved the continuation of our collective struggle. Our proposal to the
+Tribunal was therefore that we pressure the city councilmen, particularly
+the Black representatives, to call for Carleson to be tried for murder. As a
+dramatization of the seriousness of our proposal, we wanted to bring
+hundreds of people, thousands if possible, to City Hall; people who would
+demand that the popular verdict of guilty be given its due consideration.
+It was too little. Following all the excitement, the sensations of strength, the
+will to resist that had been aroused during the course of the trial itself, the
+proposal seemed too conservative.
+
+"Death! Death!" screamed a group of people. Others voiced their
+agreement. "Death to the pig," brothers continued to shout. Appoint a
+commission to execute the sentence, they said. They were volunteering.
+Rage had transported these brothers into a desperate fantasy world. I
+understood how they felt. When I saw Gregory Clark's blood on the
+sidewalk, rage had pulled my instincts in the very same direction. But
+understanding the real value of mass action, I therefore had something else
+to lean on, something which could absorb my anger and set it on the right
+track.
+Chaos reigned in the crowd. The reactions were partly the product of pentup frustrations which were seeking the easiest way out. They were partly
+the result of conscious encouragement of the "pick up the gun" movement,
+perhaps aided by agents provocateurs sent into our midst to disrupt.
+It was Franklin who pulled things back together. He had done an
+irreproachable job of presiding over the tribunal and the confusion
+presented a supreme test of his ability to lead masses of people. It was
+awesome to see him almost effortlessly gather up all the pieces of the
+meeting and mold them back into something whole. He moved with the
+people, identified with their desire to see the swift execution of the justice
+they demanded. He explained the fact that though we were growing
+stronger, the balance of power was still overwhelmingly on the side of the
+enemy. It would not begin to shift until we could bring increasingly greater
+numbers of people into our movement. That was what would have the
+greatest impact upon those who pretended to rule us. Our strategy therefore
+had to be that of reaching out to more and more of our people, bringing
+them over to our side.
+By the time Franklin was ready to close the Tribunal, people were eagerly
+agreeing with and applauding the proposal that we make a journey to City
+Hall to lodge our demands. His phenomenal capacity to reach out to people
+made a deep impression on me, not only as an individual, but also — even
+more so — as a Communist. The respect he had commanded, the clarity of
+his explanation and the forcefulness of his method of presenting it were
+rooted in years of experience he had accumulated as a member of the
+Communist Party.
+
+APRIL 4, 1968
+I spent the morning at the SNCC office. In the afternoon, I went down to
+the Los Angeles Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights to see about some
+material I wanted to have printed.
+The normal course of that Thursday was shattered by a scream "Martin
+Luther King has been shot!" A stonelike incredulity locked my face. The
+wound was in the head, put there by a white assassin, and there was little
+hope that he would survive.
+My disbelief gave way to a sadness which made me feel, for the time being,
+very helpless, like I was sinking. An amorphous sense of guilt fell upon me.
+We had severely criticized Martin Luther King for his rigid stance on
+nonviolence. Some of us, unfortunately, had assumed that his religion, his
+philosophical nonviolence and his concentration on "civil rights," as
+opposed to the larger liberation struggle, had rendered him an essentially
+harmless leader. Never would any of us have predicted that he would be
+struck down by an assassin's bullet. Never would any of us have predicted
+that he would have needed our protection. I don't think we had realized that
+his new notion of struggle — involving poor people of all colors, involving
+oppressed people throughout the world — could potentially present a great
+threat to our enemy. It was not coincidental, I thought, that on that day he
+had been marching in the streets with sanitation workers on strike.
+Back at the SNCC office, my anger and sorrow over the death of Dr. King
+could find its proper expression — its collective expression. Together with
+my SNCC comrades, I discussed the way we were going to fight back.
+Many people in the community would be looking to us, L.A. SNCC, for
+leadership. We were going to need all the mind and muscle we could find.
+The crisis of King's assassination had erupted at the precise moment when
+we were having some serious problems among our own cadre, some of
+whom preferred to be TV revolutionaries and to excite crowds with militant
+rhetoric — but they didn't like the unromantic day-to-day work of building
+an enduring organization. Since the People's Tribunal, Franklin had
+
+emerged as the most capable leader of all our cadres. His competence and
+magnetism provoked envy among the Hollywood revolutionaries and
+stimulated undercurrents of anti-communism which had further complicated
+our internal situation. Yet, if we did not act immediately, we would be
+abdicating our responsibility to the Black community. Franklin was not in
+town. He had taken advantage of the relative quiet around L.A. to visit
+Kendra, who was attending an Ideological School for Communist Party
+cadres in New York. At the time of the assassination, he was driving across
+country — he called us from Chicago to ask what we thought he should do.
+We wanted him to turn around and head back to L.A.
+That night in New York, the streets of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were
+teeming with angry Black youth attacking white businesses with stones and
+bottles — and the police sent to repress them. Raleigh, North Carolina, was
+in rebellion and Jackson, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee, were on the
+verge of exploding.
+Ghettos all over Los Angeles could easily reach the boiling point and
+reenact August 1965 once more. We knew that some elements would
+encourage spontaneous outbursts of a collective frustration and desperation,
+playing right into the hands of the police, for we were certain that the
+LAPD would be only too happy to have the opportunity to test all their new
+"riot-equipment." Every Black person who appeared to be disturbed about
+the assassination of Martin Luther King would be a potential target of
+attack. Many of its members having been recruited from the Deep South,
+the LAPD was perhaps the most vicious in the country — and more
+important than its viciousness, it was also the best equipped.
+A physical confrontation had to be avoided, for in it the Black community
+would be doomed. Nevertheless, the eagerness to fight back could not be
+permitted to wither away — it had to be channeled into a political direction.
+We needed a mass political event to put forth a call for a renewed, intensive
+struggle against racism: Racism was Martin Luther King's assassin, and it
+was racism that had to be attacked.
+The Black Congress ratified that position. All the member organizations
+agreed to work toward a mass rally call for an escalation of the battle
+against racism. Meanwhile, we had to develop a crescendo of mass
+
+activities which would climax with the rally. The community had to be kept
+in movement without being pushed to the point of explosion. The day after
+the assassination, we asked high school students to participate in a
+campaign to explain the assassination to the community and to distribute
+literature asking our people to attend a meeting at the Second Baptist
+Church. Our three mimeograph machines were rolling twenty-four hours a
+day, printing the leaflets to be distributed by hundreds of high school
+students who waited in and outside the office at every moment of the day.
+Some people accused us of trying to "calm down" the community and of
+assuming a conservative stance before the fact of the assassination. These
+accusations came from those who advocated immediate rebellion. Our
+strategy, however, was proven correct, for the day after the murder, the
+police were themselves ready to provoke a rebellion. The scouts we sent out
+to investigate the mood of the community returned with reports of police
+provocations all over the city. Machine guns had been mounted atop the
+major police stations in the ghetto; the operators were at their posts at all
+times. That evening, a younger brother, with blood streaming down his face,
+walked into the office and told us that he had been beaten up by the police
+on the other side of town and was dropped off in front of our office. We
+took care of his wounds and saw to it that he got home.
+Tension was mounting; we felt as if we were on top of a simmering volcano
+which could explode at any moment. On April 5, the day following the
+assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson had issued orders to the Secretary of
+Defense to utilize all the force that was necessary to safeguard "law and
+order." By April 6, there were twenty people dead throughout the country:
+nine in Chicago, five in Washington, two in Detroit and one each in New
+York, Tallahassee, Minneapolis and Memphis, the place of the
+assassination. A thousand had been wounded and two thousand had been
+arrested. Twenty-three cities were in rebellion.
+The night of the meeting at the Second Baptist Church, we left three
+brothers from our security force to keep watch over the office. The situation
+was very tense; anything might happen. The brothers stayed there as a
+safeguard against police frenzy.
+
+The first sign of trouble was that no one answered our knocks when we
+returned to the office after the church meeting. Bobbie and I were about to
+get angry at the brothers for leaving their posts at such a critical moment.
+But we knew they were extremely trustworthy — it didn't seem likely that
+they would have left the office unguarded.
+The front door was unlocked — something was wrong. Inside, chairs were
+turned over, literature had been snatched from the shelves and scattered all
+over the floor and our Rap Brown poster had been ripped to pieces. In the
+mimeograph room, the drums of our machines had been slashed with
+broken glass. Mimeo ink had been randomly squirted on the floor and the
+walls.
+Within a few minutes the two women who ran the restaurant next door
+came rushing into the office. They told us that approximately ten to fifteen
+black-and-white police cars had pulled up in front of the office. Some
+police had gone around to the back door. We saw that it had been chopped
+down with an ax. According to the two sisters, about ten minutes later, the
+police had led our three security brothers out the front door, their wrists
+cuffed together. They had shoved them into a patrol car and sped away.
+It was not coincidental that they had attacked our printing machines. The
+work of our organization was, in the first place, educational. We had just
+produced hundreds of thousands of leaflets protesting Dr. King's murder,
+explaining the racist forces behind his assassination and suggesting how we
+should manifest our resistance. Although they did not often admit it, the
+ruling circles feared this educational approach far more than they feared the
+rhetorical threats to "off the pigs." They knew that our strategy was to
+organize the masses and that increasing numbers of people were looking to
+us for knowledge and leadership.
+We recuperated from the initial shock and set aside our rage long enough to
+inspect the mess more closely and to start the wheels moving to post bail
+for the brothers. Someone suggested we eat, and turned the fire on under the
+big pot of spaghetti which had been cooked earlier in the day. Bowls were
+passed out, and we were starting to eat, when someone shouted, "Hey,
+there's a nail in this spaghetti." It was true. Tacks were in his food and in the
+
+other bowls as well — they had been stirred into the pot by the police who
+had broken into our office.
+We decided to leave the office as it was, including the pot of spaghetti on
+the stove and to call a press conference for the following morning. So that
+the press could see with their own eyes the malicious work of the "brave"
+police.
+
+By the end of April 1968, L.A. SNCC was barely two months old. But it
+had developed into one of the most important organizations in the L.A.
+Black community. Our People's Tribunal Committee, still active around
+Gregory Clark's case, dealt with police brutality and repression. We had
+built a youth organization — SNCC Youth Corps — which had attracted
+over fifty active members, and the Liberation School, which was under my
+charge, drew scores of people each time it convened.
+Our telephone rang constantly; people were continually reporting acts of
+discrimination and repression to us, asking for our leadership on how to
+counter them. The office was hardly ever empty: it was a place where
+people came to find out about the struggle, how they could participate in it.
+As the organization grew stronger, the truly committed cadres were being
+separated from the staff members who wanted the credit but not the
+responsibility for building SNCC. On the original central staff there had
+been six men and three women. The three women on the staff — Bobbie,
+Rene and myself — always had a disproportionate share of the duties of
+keeping the office and the organization running. Now only two of the men
+were doing anything significant in the organization — Franklin, of course,
+and a brother by the name of Frank, who headed the security and SNCC
+Youth Corps. Bobbie, Rene and I worked full time. Some of the brothers
+came around only for staff meetings (sometimes), and whenever we women
+were involved in something important, they began to talk about "women
+taking over the organization" — calling it a matriarchal coup d'etat. All the
+myths about Black women surfaced. Bobbie, Rene and I were too
+domineering; we were trying to control everything, including the men —
+which meant by extension that we wanted to rob them of their manhood. By
+
+playing such a leading role in the organization, some of them insisted, we
+were aiding and abetting the enemy, who wanted to see Black men weak
+and unable to hold their own. This condemnation was especially bitter
+because we were one of the few organizations on the Black Liberation Front
+in Los Angeles, and probably in the country, where women did play a
+leading role. It was a period in which one of the unfortunate hallmarks of
+some nationalist groups was their determination to push women into the
+background. The brothers opposing us leaned heavily on the male
+supremacist trends which were winding their way through the movement,
+although I am sure that some of them were politically mature enough to
+understand the reactionary nature of these trends. After all, it had been a
+voice of the Johnson administration, Daniel Moynihan, who in 1966 had
+rekindled the theory of the slavery-induced Black matriarchate, maintaining
+that the dominant role of Black women within the family and, by extension,
+within the community was one of the central causes of the depressed state
+of the Black community.
+The brothers knew this; they also knew that Bobbie, Rene and I, together
+with Franklin and Frank, had moved into leadership of SNCC because of
+their own defective commitments. Still, they were determined to have a
+fight. I knew things were bad; that we were on the verge of something
+serious, perhaps devastating. But I did not know that this skirmish was
+going to mushroom into open warfare.
+Franklin and Frank, naturally, fought on our side. When the work of the
+organization slowed down, adversely affected by this internal struggle, we
+decided to call New York SNCC headquarters for help. Forman was out of
+the country; some other national staff person said he would come out. But
+when he arrived, he was not so much interested in the specific difficulties
+we had called him about as in the general quality of the work we were
+doing in L.A. He summarily dismissed our problem of male-female
+political relationships, saying that it was not important enough to merit a
+special discussion. They would be solved, he said, in the course of dealing
+with other problems. What this brother wanted to discuss was the great
+dissimilarity between our organization and the other SNCC chapters across
+the country, especially the national operation in New York. He was right, of
+course. We had formulated our own strategy and program without regard to
+
+the policies of New York SNCC. In fact, we received hardly any input from
+national SNCC, except permission to use the name and the initial advice we
+got from Forman.
+The brother from New York complained that the office was not
+"businesslike"; there were too many people "hanging around" who "were
+not sitting behind desks." We weren't fulfilling what should have been one
+of our major duties, i.e., fund-raising for the national organization. He
+admonished us for not arranging enough cocktail parties up in the hills
+where the more affluent of our people could be persuaded to share their
+prosperity with SNCC.
+I was personally criticized for the courses I had included in the curriculum
+for the Liberation School. Whereas I saw the school as being a
+consciousness-raising vehicle, as imparting political education to the
+community, the brother from New York thought it should be geared
+fundamentally toward teaching skills to the community — skills such as
+radio and TV repair and computer programming. The school, he said,
+should become an instrument of survival; it should teach people the
+knowledge they required in order to get a job. While the need for jobs and
+job skills was at a crisis level in Black communities, it was not the role of
+the SNCC Liberation School to be a job-training center. My overall vision
+of the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was
+forged and sharpened, where consciousness became explicit and was urged
+in a revolutionary direction. This is why I taught and found others to teach
+courses on such topics as Current Developments in the Black Movement,
+Liberation Movements in the Third World, and Community Organizing
+Skills.
+The national representative also criticized my inclusion of courses
+involving Marxist ideas. After all, Black people were afraid of communism,
+he said; they would be alienated from the organization if they thought
+communists were around. This was the first signal that an all-out attack on
+Franklin was brewing.
+After a fund-raising event during the brother's stay in L.A. (we did have
+fund-raising events in order to cover our own local expenses), Franklin
+invited some of the brothers on security to his apartment. They had the
+
+money which had been collected as well as the weapons to protect it. Using
+the pretext that there was noise coming from the apartment, the police broke
+in, arrested all the brothers, confiscated the money and the weapons (all of
+which were legally owned) and charged them with armed robbery.
+It was not difficult to discern the motive of this seemingly arbitrary attack.
+A rally was scheduled for the next morning in front of City Hall to climax
+the series of confrontations with the City Council on the Gregory Clark
+case. Franklin was the central figure of the rally. A large mobilization was
+expected, and the police hoped to cut the sting out of the rally by
+imprisoning Franklin. The arraignment was set at the same time as the rally,
+and there was no chance of getting him released on bail before the court
+appearance that Monday morning.
+The police doubtless expected us to cancel the mobilization — or even if
+we didn't, they probably thought it would be a defeat for the People's
+Tribunal Committee to try to pull it off in the absence of their leader. That
+morning in front of City Hall, the people attending the mobilization
+decided, almost spontaneously, to take the demonstration to the courthouse
+across the street and demand Franklin's immediate release. The eager crowd
+streamed into the halls of the courthouse and filled to capacity the
+courtroom where the arraignment was taking place. Without an explanation,
+the judge suddenly announced that he was dropping all charges against
+Franklin and the other brothers.
+Franklin was unwashed and unshaven, and it was easy to see that he had not
+slept that night in jail. Nevertheless, he led the rally with his usual vigor,
+and it seemed that the people were even more militant than if the police had
+not tried to intervene. Having witnessed the evidence of their collective
+power — the release of Franklin in response to their demands — they were
+raring to fight for more such victories.
+The next day, the L.A. Times published an extensive article on the rally and
+the way Franklin's release was achieved. In the article, Franklin was called
+a "Maoist Communist." As a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A.,
+Franklin was not, of course, a Maoist. Yet the brother from the New York
+office was mesmerized by this phrase, even though he knew it to be false. I
+imagine he didn't care what kind of communist Franklin was. It was the fact
+
+that he was a communist at all and that the news media had seized upon this
+that worried him so much.
+The Times article prompted him to call a meeting of the staff and other
+SNCC workers. I discovered later that certain select staff members had been
+informed that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the advisability of
+having a Communist play a leading role in the organization. I had not been
+informed, for they knew where my politics and my loyalties were.
+The SNCC representative's presentation before the gathering was as simple
+as it was opportunistic. SNCC simply could not afford to be associated with
+Communists. It had been incorrect to permit Franklin to play such a
+"visible" role in the organization, particularly without consulting the New
+York office first. He was expelling Franklin, so he insisted, in line with the
+policy of the national organization, and was further decreeing that the office
+and the operation should be purged of all traces of communism and
+Marxism. Silence. Was this going to be a reenactment of the McCarthy
+purges? Franklin's brother Deacon and I were the only ones who resisted
+this move at all. And we were a tiny fraction of those present. Obviously,
+we had left a fatal defect in the organization we had built if a man from the
+New York office could come in and expel the leading figure from our midst
+without even a feeble effort at resistance. Or was it that the fear of
+communism was so powerful that it could engender compromises of
+principle and concessions of all the things we had fought so hard to attain?
+It was a depressing time. I felt alienated from sisters and brothers whom I
+had not only considered my comrades in arms, but whom I had come to
+regard as close friends as well. Franklin had been unilaterally kicked out of
+the organization without having been given the opportunity to defend
+himself before the people who had looked upon him as their comrade and
+their leader. Franklin, Deacon and I caucused about our next moves. My
+first instinct was to resign. But after the discussion, we decided that Deacon
+and I should stick it out a while longer; perhaps we could help the others
+back to political sanity.
+But it was too late. The first concession, the first endorsement of an
+irrational, anti-Communist policy, the first act of tolerance toward an
+autocratic, apolitical businessman-type who called himself a revolutionary
+
+was the beginning of the end of our organization. The national
+representative appointed a chairman who assumed the same dictatorial
+stance. And one by one, this chairman effectively isolated all the good
+people in SNCC. I was relieved of my position as director of the Liberation
+School, at which point I submitted my resignation and from the sidelines
+watched the rest first pushed around and then pushed out of the
+organization. Within a matter of weeks, only the shell of what we had
+created was left. Whereas we had had over two hundred workers whom we
+could count on and hundreds more who could be mobilized, by the
+beginning of the summer there were no more than ten people left.
+L.A. SNCC was dead. The office closed down and people wondered what
+had happened to all of us. This was a victory for reactionary forces. The
+downfall of SNCC could not have been better planned if it had been the
+work of an agent of the government.
+Hours, days were consumed by exhausting discussions about the
+destruction of L.A. SNCC. Could the final downfall have been avoided?
+What had we done wrong? Could we have brought the majority of the staff
+over to our side? Could we have convinced them to withdraw from the
+national organization? After all, we had built everything without assistance
+from New York.
+Kendra, who had been attending a Party School during the crucial period,
+criticized Franklin, as well as Deacon and myself, for not having waged a
+more determined battle from the outset against the little signs of anticommunism. There had been signs — passive acquiescence in anticommunism as well as active encouragement of it — but these signs had
+been either subtle or sporadic and disconnected. I had not realized that they
+could be the germs of a collective attitude which could erupt so abruptly
+into a witch hunt.
+I felt that I was not entirely without blame, for on occasion I had agreed to
+certain anti-Communist notions prevalent on the Left. I had not done this in
+any official capacity or in circumstances involving formal meetings. Yet, in
+casual conversations around the office, I had sometimes joined the others in
+putting Franklin on the spot. We had accused the Communist Party of not
+paying sufficient attention to the national and racial dimensions of the
+
+oppression of Black people, and therefore submerging the special
+characteristics of our oppression under the general exploitation of the
+working class. I had gone along with others in criticizing, from an ultra-left
+standpoint, the general "conservatism" of the Party.
+It was not that I shouldn't have criticized the Communist Party at all. The
+point was that I had made these charges without having carefully
+investigated the Party's positions. Given the circumstances, my statements
+— especially coming, as they did, from someone who called herself a
+Marxist — may have encouraged in some way the widespread no-struggle
+attitude toward the anti-communism.
+From this point forward I tried to acquire the information I needed in order
+to decide whether I wanted to become a member of the Communist Party.
+At this stage in my life and my political evolution — even more than during
+the San Diego days — I needed to become a part of a serious revolutionary
+party. I wanted an anchor, a base, a mooring. I needed comrades with whom
+I could share a common ideology. I was tired of ephemeral ad-hoc groups
+that fell apart when faced with the slightest difficulty; tired of men who
+measured their sexual height by women's intellectual genuflection. It wasn't
+that I was fearless, but I knew that to win, we had to fight and the fight that
+would win was the one collectively waged by the masses of our people and
+working people in general. I knew that this fight had to be led by a group, a
+party with more permanence in its membership and structure and more
+substance in its ideology. Confrontations were opportunities to be met;
+problems were entanglements to be sorted out with the right approach, the
+correct ideas. And I needed to know and respect what I was doing. Until
+now all our actions seemed to end, finally, in an ellipsis — three dots of
+irresolution, inconsistency and ineffectiveness.
+During that depressing time, I reread Lenin's What Is To Be Done, and it
+helped me to clarify my own predicament. I read Du Bois again,
+particularly his statements around the time he decided to join the
+Communist Party.
+Since Frankfurt, since London, since San Diego, I had been wanting to join
+a revolutionary party. Of all the parties that called themselves revolutionary
+or Marxist-Leninist, the Communist Party, in my opinion, alone did not
+
+overstate itself. Despite my criticisms of some aspects of the Party's
+policies, I had already reached the conclusion that it would be the
+Communist Party or, for the time being, nothing at all.
+But before I could make my decision I had to examine it, study it. The CheLumumba Club, the Black cell of the Party in Los Angeles, was the section
+of the Party which interested me. I wanted to know what its role and
+responsibilities were within the Party and how it maintained its identity and
+consistency as its cadres involved themselves in the Black Liberation
+Movement. As with all the other Communist parties, the basic unit of the
+CPUSA was and remains the "club" (or cell, as it is called in other
+countries). In general, the club is composed of from five to twenty
+members. There are sections, districts, states, regions, and finally the
+national leadership, which carries out policy which is made by periodic
+national conventions. Insofar as the democratic centralist structure of the
+Party was concerned, the Che-Lumumba Club was just like any other club.
+Yet it did have a special role, originating from the fact that Black
+Communists in Los Angeles had fought within the Party for a club that
+would be all Black and whose primary responsibility would be to carry
+Marxist-Leninist ideas to the Black Liberation struggle in L.A. and to
+provide leadership for the larger Party as far as the Black movement was
+concerned.
+The club had been established in 1967 — at a time when the Black
+movement was approaching its zenith. The Communist Party was bound to
+be affected by the stirrings in the ghettos from Harlem to Watts. Because
+L.A. was the scene of one of the first recent, full-scale Black uprisings, it
+seemed inevitable that the Che-Lumumba Club would come into existence
+in that city.
+The knowledge I gained about the Che-Lumumba Club did not satisfy me
+completely, because I had little firsthand knowledge of the larger Party.
+Kendra and Franklin, therefore, introduced me to some of the white
+comrades. I began to pay visits to Dorothy Healey, who was then the
+District Organizer of Southern California. We had long, involved
+discussions — sometimes arguments — about the Party, its role within the
+movement, its potential as the vanguard party of the working class; its
+
+potential as the party that would lead the United States from its present,
+backward, historically exploitative stage to a new epoch of socialism. I
+immensely enjoyed these discussions with Dorothy and felt that I was
+learning a great deal from them, regardless of whether I ultimately decided
+to become a Communist myself.
+
+In July 1968, I turned over my fifty-cents — the initial membership dues —
+to the chairman of the Che-Lumumba Club, and became a full-fledged
+member of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Shortly thereafter I had to retreat
+to La Jolla in order to do the last intensive preparations for my Ph.D.
+qualifier examinations. For weeks and weeks I only studied. Days, I studied
+in my office at the university. Evenings, I worked — often well into the
+night — in the isolated house in Del Mar which friends lent me for the last
+part of the summer. My thoughts became so thoroughly wedded to
+philosophical things that I even found myself dreaming sometimes about
+the ideas of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel. I had wanted to pass the exams at this
+time and not wait until after my second year of classes, as was the normal
+procedure. This meant that I had to study on my own works that I would
+have ordinarily read in connection with courses. I had to work, work and
+work — until the point of absolute saturation.
+As exam week approached, the simmering desperation among graduate
+students preparing to take the test exploded into open panic. In the middle
+of a discussion, for example, someone might break into tears for no
+apparent reason. The fear of not passing was omnipresent. And there was
+something that was feared even more than flunking the exams: passing
+them with a terminal master's degree and thus being shut out of the Ph.D.
+program entirely. If one simply flunked the exams, one could always take
+them again in the spring. But a terminal master's was the end.
+It was a great relief to learn that I had done quite well on the examinations.
+Having passed them, I began to work on the prospectus for my dissertation,
+and became a teaching assistant in the Philosophy Department, a further
+requirement for the Ph.D. About half of each week I spent researching and
+teaching in La Jolla and the other half I devoted to my political work in Los
+Angeles.
+
+I was glad to be in a position to resume attending the weekly CheLumumba meetings. It was an extremely important period for us. In June,
+Charlene Mitchell, our founding chairperson, had been selected by the
+national convention to be our Party's candidate for President, thus becoming
+the first Black woman ever to run for that office. We were immensely proud
+that the first Black woman presidential candidate was also a Communist.
+Because it had been twenty-eight years since the Communist Party had
+participated in the presidential elections, her candidacy marked the
+beginning of a new era for the Party. The vestiges of McCarthyism were
+being repudiated, and more and more people were realizing that they had to
+be defeated once and for all.
+During September and October, Charlene was constantly on the road,
+speaking in some twenty-one states and Puerto Rico as well. (No other
+candidate even bothered to go to Puerto Rico.) In Southern California, we
+campaigned for Charlene outside factory gates, at union meetings, in
+churches, on campuses, in the streets and everywhere else our message
+might fall on a receptive ear. Naturally we harbored no illusions about the
+outcome of the elections. Therefore we weren't so much interested in the
+number of votes she would pull, as in her ability to reach people who
+otherwise would never have been inspired to consider political alternatives
+outside the Republican and Democratic parties, and economic alternatives
+outside monopoly capitalism. Charlene's candidacy gave us the opportunity
+to speak about socialism as a real solution to the problems confronting the
+working class, and especially Black and Brown people.
+Around this time Charlene's brother, Deacon, and I entered into discussions
+with leaders of the L. A. Black Panther Party, who had approached us about
+working with their Party. They were considering opening an office on the
+West Side of the city and wanted Deacon to lead that section. I was asked to
+participate in the political education program. In view of the fact that all the
+other members of the club were already deeply involved in mass
+movements of one kind or another, we both gave serious thought to this
+idea. Some of our comrades were active in the antiwar movement, pushing
+for an approach among antiwar activists which recognized the relation
+between aggression in Vietnam and racism and repression at home. Others,
+including Kendra and Franklin, were working with students, primarily at
+
+Southwest Junior College. I felt that it would be important for some of us to
+assist in the work of the Black Panther Party which, at that time, was like a
+magnet drawing large numbers of young Black people, all over the country,
+into its ranks.
+After a series of meetings with the Panthers to air problems and explain and
+set aside past hostilities, and following discussion of the proposal in the
+Che-Lumumba Club, Deacon and I both agreed to go into the Panther Party.
+We found a building for the West Side office on Seventh Avenue and
+Venice Boulevard, and within a few days young sisters and brothers from
+the surrounding community began to stream in. No sooner were programs
+organized than they were bulging with eager young people. From threethirty in the afternoon, when the junior high school students came in, until
+ten at night, the office was the scene of meetings, classes and discussions on
+such topics as the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States, the
+Movement in the Los Angeles Area, Strategy and Tactics in Community
+Organizing, and Marxist-Leninist Theory of Revolution.
+If I still retained any of the elitism which almost inevitably insinuates itself
+into the minds of college students, I lost it all in the course of the Panther
+political education sessions. When we read Lenin's State and Revolution,
+there were sisters and brothers in the class whose public school education
+had not even allowed them to learn how to read. Some of them told me how
+they had stayed with the book for many painful hours, often using the
+dictionary to discover the meaning of scores of words on one page, until
+finally they could grasp the significance of what Lenin was saying. When
+they explained, for the benefit of the other members of the class, what they
+had gotten out of their reading, it was clear that they knew it all — they had
+understood Lenin on a far more elemental level than any professor of social
+science.
+Not long after the office opened, we learned about a brutal killing which
+had occurred in the neighborhood. This was the account given us: One
+evening when a young brother had tried to buy some beer in a liquor store
+nearby, the owner refused to accept his money in the absence of
+identification proving him to be of age. Angry about not being able to get
+his beer, he said a few strong words to the owner and stormed out of the
+
+store. Apparently for no other reason than sheer frustration, the brother
+kicked over a garbage can standing on the corner. The owner grabbed his
+weapon, hidden under the counter, and fired through the glass door,
+instantly killing this brother who had done nothing more than vent his anger
+on a garbage can outside. When later questioned about the incident, the
+owner claimed he had a right to protect his property. The irony of this
+tragedy was that we had just been reading about the function of the state as
+providing protection for the propertied classes. It was clear that if people
+did not make their protests heard, this shell of an excuse would be accepted
+without question by the courts. That is to say, they would accept the owner's
+claim that the life of this young Black man was worth less than a five-dollar
+garbage can.
+We assumed responsibility for organizing the community to see to it that
+this man was brought to justice. This meant marches through the streets of
+the surrounding neighborhood, door-to-door leafletting, street rallies,
+particularly on the parking lot of the store, and a constant picket line urging
+people to withdraw their patronage from this man we considered a
+murderer. As a result, the store's business dwindled down to a mere fraction
+of what it had been, and criminal charges of manslaughter were filed
+against the owner. As usual, however, he did not even spend a night in jail,
+since his bail was so low that it was tantamount to no bail at all. Still, we
+were determined that he be prosecuted for — and convicted of — murder.
+This movement gathered momentum. Classes and meetings at the office had
+reached a total attendance of over two hundred. We were having to deal
+with much more concentrated police harassment. Suddenly, in the midst of
+all this, crisis struck at the Black Panther Party. Nationally, numbers of
+police agents had been discovered to be infiltrators inside the Party. A purge
+began. Once it was initiated, it began to engulf many sisters and brothers
+who were as innocent as any of those advocating the purge. It was my
+opinion that some of the enemy sympathizers who themselves should have
+been purged had made their way into the decision-making process, where it
+was determined who would be expelled and who would remain in the Party.
+The West Side office was practically decimated. Deacon was called up on
+the question of his membership in the Communist Party — in very much
+the same way he might have been called before the Subversive Activities
+
+Control Board. Obviously, there was something more behind this than
+simply the fact that he was a Communist — this had certainly been known
+by all at the time he was approached to join the intermediate leadership of
+the Black Panther Party. Moreover, they did not even confront me with the
+ultimatum given Deacon — namely, to choose one of the two parties —
+Black Panther or Communist. (This had been discussed before we entered
+the Panther Party, and it had been agreed on both sides that the two parties
+were not in competition with each other and that thus there existed no
+problem of conflict of loyalties.)
+Needless to say, this was the perfect moment for the enemy to move in and
+take advantage of the disarray and confusion. Sure enough, around this
+time, a leading member of the BPP — one who had helped a great deal with
+the building of the West Side section — was found one morning in an alley
+with a bullet through his brain. Shortly thereafter, around the middle of
+January, before we had had a chance to recuperate from the shock of
+Franco's death, Deacon and I heard a flash on the radio: two leaders of the
+BPP, Bunchy Carter and Jon Huggins, had been shot to death during a
+meeting of the Black Student Union on the campus of UCLA. That very
+day I had planned to visit Jon and his wife Ericka to continue the dialogue
+about the problems within the Party. With a few sisters and brothers from
+the West Side office, we rushed over to the apartment to make sure nothing
+had happened to Ericka and her newborn child. By the time we arrived, the
+police were just completing their raid. Justifying their arrests of the sisters
+and brothers in the apartment, including Ericka and the baby, they said they
+had word that the Panthers might try to retaliate for the killings of their
+people. This was absurd, because at that point, no one was fully aware of
+the circumstances surrounding the murders. It was only later that we
+learned that two members of Ron Karenga's US-Organization were the ones
+who actually pulled the trigger.
+Many times before, movement leaders and activists had been felled by the
+bullets of police, conscious agents or crazy, confused brothers who let
+themselves be used. We had cried before, we had attended funerals before,
+and we had felt and expressed rage at seeing the life of a brother, a
+comrade, so cruelly blown out of him. We knew that for the moment our
+commitment meant that we were chained to a vicious circle of violence —
+
+in this way our enemies were trying to force us to retreat in fear. In a sense,
+therefore, we always expected the violence, we knew it was coming, though
+we could never predict the next target. Yet each time it struck, it was
+equally devastating to us. No matter how many times it was repeated, there
+was no getting used to it.
+For me personally, the death of Jon Huggins was especially painful — of all
+the Panther leaders, he and Ericka were among the ones to whom I felt
+closest. Despite all the problems which had recently arisen, I had an
+enormous respect and admiration for him and felt he was in good faith in
+his determination to find a solution to the crisis within the Party. I was
+convinced then, as I remain today, the police were involved in some way in
+his murder because they feared his strength and his will to always do what
+was best for his people.
+Ericka and the other sisters and brothers were released late that night. When
+she walked through the gates of Sybil Brand Institute for Women into the
+hard rain cutting through the night outside, she seemed as strong as ever.
+Seeing our sadness, our empathy with the pain she was surely suffering, she
+said, "What's wrong with you all? We can't stop now. We've got to keep on
+struggling." That was a moment I shall never forget. The sisters who had
+been with her inside the jail said that she was the one who had kept
+everyone's spirits high. She was the one who had most resolutely continued
+to carry the banner of struggle.
+Amid all the speculation about the motives behind the killing and the verbal
+attacks on US-Organization, we attended Bunchy's funeral, and Ericka left
+for Connecticut to bury her husband and to find a safe place for her young
+daughter Maya. We learned that she had immediately begun to organize a
+chapter of the Black Panther Party in New Haven where, a few months
+later, police arrested her on a charge of conspiracy to murder.
+Meanwhile, things quieted down around the BPP in Los Angeles, and
+because the problems surrounding Deacon's membership in the CP were
+never resolved, I felt it would be unprincipled of me to continue to work
+with the Panthers. I decided to spend the rest of the school year on the
+campus in La Jolla, where I worked again on a day-to-day basis with the
+Black Student Council. At the beginning of the second quarter, the sisters
+
+and brothers in the leadership of the organization all agreed that something
+was needed to set our membership in motion once more. We needed an
+issue around which to struggle. But what was the right issue? What was the
+most magnetic and most dramatic issue? Each of us thought seriously and
+intensely; our individual proposals were argued out in meetings that seemed
+never to end.
+Finally, we reached unanimous agreement. Since the San Diego Campus of
+the university was to consist, ultimately, of a series of separate colleges, we
+decided that it would be just and appropriate to demand that the next
+college — the third college — be expressly devoted to the needs of students
+from oppressed social groups. Specifically, it should serve the needs of
+Black students, Chicano students and white students of working-class
+origin. While tightening our already close relationship with the Chicano
+students in the Mexican-American Youth Association, we drew up plans for
+our college. In order to project the radical character of our demands, we
+decided to call it Lumumba-Zapata College — after the assassinated
+Congolese revolutionary leader, Patrice Lumumba, and the Mexican
+revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata. We wanted our goals to be transparent:
+Lumumba-Zapata College, in our theoretical formulation, was to be a place
+where our peoples could acquire the knowledge and skills we needed in
+order to more effectively wage our liberation struggles.
+After a brief period of strategy planning sessions, we decided that the time
+was right to confront the university administration. One afternoon the
+members of our two organizations streamed into the chancellor's office,
+insisting that he listen to our demands. I had been designated by the sisters
+and brothers to read the statement collectively drawn up by the BSC and
+MAYA. Along with our demands for Lumumba-Zapata College, we issued
+a very serious warning: in the event that the chancellor refused to negotiate,
+we would not guarantee that the university would continue to function
+undisturbed.
+As could have been predicted, the chancellor did indeed refuse. His refusal
+was our signal for an all-out offensive: more rallies, demonstrations and
+confrontations. We knew that in order to be effective we needed the support
+of a significant number of students and faculty. Our actions, therefore, were
+
+designed to attract as many of the white students and professors as possible.
+Some white students were involved from the outset, since one very
+important aspect of our demands was the integration into the college of
+white students from working-class backgrounds. But we needed many
+more; we aimed to draw hundreds into the movement for Lumumba-Zapata
+and hoped to eventually bring the majority of the students over to our side.
+Only in this way could we isolate the administration, and thus force it to
+accept our demands.
+Our actions were climaxed first by an appearance of our organizations in an
+Academic Senate meeting. With the aid of sympathetic professors —
+including Herbert Marcuse and others in the Philosophy Department — we
+began to win over a sizeable number of faculty members to our position.
+The next dramatic demonstration of our demands was a takeover of the
+registrar's office. As a result of our occupation of one of the central nerves
+of the university, the administration and those professors who were not
+already convinced were made to understand the seriousness of our position.
+We had put up a fierce struggle. Large numbers of UCSD students had
+experienced the radicalization that was occurring on campuses throughout
+the country. The university hierarchy decided, apparently, that it was best to
+make the concessions we were demanding, rather than risk a prolonged
+disruption of campus activities. To tell the truth, we had not really expected
+them to agree so readily to our notion of the third college. And when they
+did, those of us leading the movement knew that despite our victory — of
+which all of us were proud — Lumumba-Zapata College would never
+become the revolutionary institution we had originally projected.
+Concessions were going to be inevitable, however the creation of the
+college would bring large numbers of Black, Brown and working-class
+white students into the university. And it would be a real breakthrough to
+have a college in which students would exercise more control over the
+education they received.
+At the end of the school year, as I prepared to leave for a conference in
+Oakland, and go from there to Cuba, students selected by our organizations
+were settling down to a summer of drawing up concrete curriculum, faculty
+and administrative proposals for the college. The fight was not over. On the
+
+contrary, it had just begun. The most important responsibility resting with
+us was to ensure that whoever became involved in the college — students
+and faculty alike, carried on the legacy of struggle out of which the idea of
+Lumumba-Zapata was born.
+
+The era of massive national conferences was still in full force. In July 1969,
+movement activists, Black, Brown and white, from throughout the country,
+converged in Oakland, California, to attend a conference called by the
+Black Panther Party to found a United Front Against Fascism.
+The organizational theory behind the conference was excellent: people with
+various ideologies — the broadest possible representation of people —
+joined together to forge a United Front to combat the increasingly ferocious
+repression. But there were problems with the conference, and I was perhaps
+overly sensitive, since I had just recently been forced to break my relatively
+close ties with the Panthers. The basic difficulty, I thought, was that we
+were being asked to believe that the monster of fascism had already broken
+loose and that we were living in a country not essentially different from
+Nazi Germany. Certainly, we had to fight the mounting threat of fascism,
+but it was incorrect and misleading to inform people that we were already
+living under fascism. Moreover, the resistance dictated by such an analysis
+would surely lead us in the wrong direction. First, in seeking to include
+absolutely everyone who had an interest in overthrowing that fascism, we
+might be pushed into the arms of the liberals. Our revolutionary thrust
+would thus be blunted. And if we were not led in that direction, we would
+be pressed toward the opposite end of the political spectrum. For, if we
+believed we were living under genuine fascism, it would mean that virtually
+all democratic channels of struggle were closed and we should immediately
+and desperately rush into the armed struggle.
+In many of the speeches, the word "fascism" was used interchangeably with
+the word "racism." Certainly, there was a definite relationship between
+racism and fascism. If a full-blown fascism ever erupted in the United
+States, it would certainly ride on the back of racism in much the same way
+that anti-Semitism provided the handle for German fascism in the thirties.
+But to think that racism was fascism and fascism was racism was to cloud
+
+the vision of those who were attracted to the struggle. It was to hamper their
+own political development and to impede the organized mass fight against
+racism, against political repression — and especially in defense of the
+embattled Panthers.
+In the midst of the confusion, Herbert Aptheker, the Communist historian,
+made an excellent presentation, laying out the relationship between racism
+today and the potential of fascism tomorrow. For me, it confirmed the
+correctness of my decision to join the Communist Party almost a year ago
+to that date.
+With all its obvious flaws, the conference was nevertheless one of the most
+important political events of the season. It established the basis for breaking
+out of the narrow nationalism so prevalent in the Black Liberation
+Movement and pointed the way for alliances between people of color and
+white people around issues which involved us all.
+As soon as the conference had adjourned, Kendra and I boarded a plane for
+Mexico City, where we joined the remaining members of a delegation of
+Communists invited by the Cubans to spend a month in the "first free
+territory of America." I was nervous and depressed during the flight to
+Mexico: my purse had been stolen while I slept in a Haight-Ashbury park,
+and I had no money and no passport. Kendra had lent me enough for the
+ticket to Mexico City, but I was less than certain of being able to secure a
+passport before the others took off for Cuba. My only hope was that the
+Cubans would let me enter the country without my traveling papers.
+Not only did the passport present problems insofar as the trip was
+concerned, we all had to worry about concealing our intentions from the
+Mexicans, who, on several occasions, have deported activists from the
+United States trying to get to Cuba. During the student demonstrations of
+1968, when the police had massacred crowds of people, a group of activists,
+among whom were Bobbie Hodges and Babu (with whom I had worked in
+SNCC) were in Mexico City attempting to get a plane for Cuba. They had
+all been detained by the police, interrogated about the purpose of their trip
+(were they going to receive guerrilla training?) and asked about their
+participation in the student rebellion in Mexico City. The outcome of the
+whole affair was deportation for them all. They had been randomly and
+
+separately placed on planes leaving Mexico — Bobbie, for instance, had
+ended up in Paris.
+We devised a plan to elude the Mexican police. As soon as we landed, we
+would look up the address of the Cuban Embassy, where our visas were
+supposed to be waiting, and check into a hotel somewhere in the vicinity.
+After we had deposited our luggage, we would go out on foot to locate the
+Embassy. The next morning, we would make a dash for it. We knew that if
+the police discovered us before we got inside the Embassy, we might be
+detained before we could even obtain our visas. After receiving the visas,
+we would remain in the Embassy and at the last moment we would rush for
+the airport, stopping off for our luggage on the way.
+That night we walked for hours, but in vain, for we could not find the
+Cuban Embassy anywhere in the neighborhood. Only after much wandering
+the next day did we discover on the other side of town another street with
+exactly the same name. The Cuban Embassy was located there. Reaching
+the Embassy finally without incident (although we noticed men outside who
+appeared to be U.S. agents), we were told that our visas had not yet arrived
+and that unfortunately it would not be possible for us to leave for Havana
+that evening. It was Monday and if everything could be arranged in time,
+we could take the Friday plane to Cuba.
+And then came the coup de grace. Explaining that my passport had been
+stolen two days before, I asked whether I could board the plane without it.
+Trying to console me, the Cuban comrade told me that they were not the
+ones who required the passports; it was the Mexican immigration
+department. No one could leave Mexico for Cuba without first presenting
+their papers to the Mexican authorities. The comrade suggested that I go to
+the U.S. Embassy there in Mexico City and attempt to get a new passport as
+quickly as possible.
+I was not at all optimistic about being able to get my passport replaced. The
+State Department still kept lists of Communists and often refused to deliver
+passports to our comrades until a lawyer challenged them in the courts.
+Kendra, for instance, thinking she had lost her passport, had put in an
+application some six weeks before the trip. Normally a passport is ready
+within a week after one applies, but each time Kendra inquired, they told
+
+her that there was no information concerning the date her passport would be
+ready. Luckily she found her misplaced passport before we left the country,
+because the new one had still not arrived. Another member of our
+delegation had also waited for weeks for his passport and at that moment in
+Mexico City was awaiting word from his lawyer, who was dealing with the
+State Department. I was still willing to try any scheme we could concoct in
+order to acquire a passport by Friday. I returned to the hotel, picked out the
+nicest clothes I had — the ones which would identify me as an innocuous
+tourist whose passport and money had just been stolen. At the U.S.
+Embassy, I tearfully explained that I had been planning this trip through
+Mexico, Central America and South America for over a year, and my
+vacation plans had been ruined by some thief. A friend was waiting for me
+in Nicaragua and I had no way of reaching her. Wasn't it possible to get a
+passport on some kind of emergency basis? The Embassy official took pity
+on me and by the next afternoon, there was a new passport waiting for me.
+The ploy had been pulled off; I had obviously aroused no suspicions, so
+they had issued the passport without first checking with the State
+Department in Washington.
+We had almost given up when the visas finally came through. With the
+exception of Jim — whose passport was still in the hands of some
+bureaucrat in the State Department — we all prepared to take the Friday
+flight to Havana. Whoever was about to board the Cuban plane had to agree
+to be photographed by the Mexican immigration officials. No one, not even
+the nun on her way to Cuba, doubted that these photos would soon end up
+in the files of the CIA. We were not completely cured of our paranoia until
+we had actually lifted off the ground.
+As we were flying over the lush Havana Green Belt, studded with tall,
+graceful palm trees, the pilot announced over the loudspeaker, "You are
+about to land on the first free territory of America." Several minutes later,
+when the plane touched the runway, everyone on the plane spontaneously
+burst into applause.
+It was the day before Cuba's most important national holiday — the 26th of
+July. On this date in 1953, Fidel led an assault on the Moncada Garrison, a
+central base for the dictator Batista's army and a well-known symbol of his
+
+power. Though Fidel and his comrades were all either killed or arrested,
+people viewed their courageous act as the first great challenge to Batista's
+dictatorship. After the ultimate triumph of the revolution, July 26th, the Day
+of the National Rebellion, continued to be celebrated as the anniversary of
+the first armed attack of the revolution.
+Ordinarily there would have been a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolucion
+at which Fidel and other leaders would have spoken to the hundreds of
+thousands in attendance. This year July 26 would mark the beginning of an
+agricultural campaign to process more sugar cane than ever before in the
+history of their economy. To be exact, they wanted to produce ten million
+tons of sugar. Instead of going to the Plaza on July 26, everyone was going
+to the fields to work. While it would be an honor to participate in the
+Campaign of the Ten Millions, I must confess that I was disappointed that
+there would be no rally at the Plaza. This was the first time since the
+triumph of the revolution that the traditional celebration would not take
+place.
+Colorful billboard posters lined the road from the airport to the hotel:
+posters about the Campana de los Diez Milliones; posters of El Che; posters
+praising the people of Vietnam. Many of these billboards had been used in
+the past to advertise U.S. products, bearing slogans such as "Drink CocaCola," and "The Pause that Refreshes." I felt a great satisfaction knowing
+that the Cubans had ripped down these trademarks of global exploitation
+and had replaced them with warm and stirring symbols that had real
+meaning for the people. The sense of human dignity was palpable.
+Our bus carried us across the grounds of the Havana University, reserved
+for two hundred years for the sons and daughters of the wealthy. Now the
+students were the children of workers and peasants — Black and Brown as
+well as white.
+The bus stopped in front of the Havana Libre, formerly the Havana Hilton,
+now freed from the veined fingers of decadent old capitalists. This was the
+first time I had stayed in such a fancy hotel. Its elaborateness, however, was
+quieted by the guests: workers on vacation, young couples on their
+honeymoons and by the compañeros who staffed the hotel — men and
+women with none of the servility usually associated with bellboys,
+
+chambermaids and waiters, people who would never accept the tip that
+natives of capitalist countries are accustomed to giving.
+In the early morning hours of July 26, we drove to the fields. Buses, vans,
+trucks and automobiles were packed with young and old, proudly dressed in
+work clothes, singing as they made their way to the country. It seemed as if
+every able-bodied resident of Havana was rushing to the fields as though to
+a joyous carnival. On these faces reigned the serenity of meaningful work
+— the passion of commitment. They were finished with the politics of class
+and race, done with the acid bile of outdoing one's neighbor for the sake of
+materially rising above him.
+The sugar cane campaign was closely connected with work in other realms
+of agriculture. The higher the rate of productivity in preparing and
+harvesting tobacco, citrus fruit, coffee, etc., the more the workers would be
+able to devote their energies to cane-cutting. Our first trip to the countryside
+was to the coffee fields in the Havana Green Belt. On July 26 we spent the
+day hoeing away the weeds and breaking up the soil around the coffee
+plants to permit them to grow unhindered.
+It was a hard day. In the white-hot sunlight sweat drenched my clothes
+before I had hardly gotten started. I was in fairly good condition but the
+hoeing was difficult work for me. The Cubans, on the other hand, did it
+with ease. I was determined to ignore the sun and to keep the same pace as
+the hundreds of compañeros around me. Even when a spell of vertigo
+threatened to overcome me, I said nothing and refused to stop.
+Being North Americans, we all felt we had to constantly demonstrate our
+worth. At the precise moment when I was certain I was going to faint,
+Kendra chopped her foot with the hoe and I had to accompany her to the
+first aid station. It was a convenient "out," but I returned to the fields still
+determined to survive the day. Besides, I had to build up my endurance for
+the coming week, which we were going to spend cutting cane in the
+province of Oriente on the eastern end of the island.
+After a shower, a change of clothes and a few moments' rest in the airconditioned comfort of the Havana Libre, I left the hotel with one of the
+comrades from our delegation to explore the streets of Havana. The old
+
+Spanish architecture in some parts of the center made me think back to the
+War of Independence, the Black General Antonio Maceo, wounded some
+eighty times before he finally fell. Down on the Malecon, we saw the statue
+erected by the United States. The eagle at its tip was missing. The
+revolutionaries tore it down after their march on Havana.
+We saw a young militia woman wielding a machine gun on guard duty in
+front of her work center. Wearing the light blue shirt with epaulets, olivegreen pants, military boots, she defended her assigned territory. With the
+archenemy so near — Florida was a mere ninety miles away — one of the
+most noticeable aspects of everyday life in Cuba was bound to be defense.
+People were still talking about the Bay of Pigs invasion as if it had
+happened only yesterday. Eight years had passed since the burial ceremony
+for the seven who were killed when airplanes from the United States and its
+bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua had bombed the airports in three Cuban
+cities. On April 16, 1961, Fidel had proclaimed the socialist character of the
+Cuban Revolution and called upon his people to mobilize themselves lest
+the "puppets of imperialism expand their acts of aggression." Sure enough,
+the very next day, Cuban exiles — trained by the CIA with participation by
+the Kennedy administration — landed with U.S. ships and planes on Playa
+Giron.
+Eight years was indeed a short span of time, considering that the Cubans
+were trying to build a new world and would fight to the death for their right
+to build it. U.S. aggression had expressed itself in other ways as well. Using
+the presence of Soviet missiles on Cuban soil as an excuse, the Kennedy
+administration openly declared its intention to annihilate the Cuban
+Revolution even if it meant a thermonuclear catastrophe. And during the
+days of the October crisis, the world tottered above the abyss. Moreover,
+there was the U.S.-imposed economic blockade; there were U.S. troops on
+Guantanamo Base in Oriente, and news had leaked out that Kennedy had
+actually discussed the issue of whether to assassinate the Prime Minister,
+Fidel Castro.
+One of the mass organizations very much in evidence from one end of the
+island to the other was the Committee to Defend the Revolution. During our
+first walk through the streets of Havana, we had noticed that on at least one
+
+house door in every block there was a poster in red, white and blue, with the
+words "Comite de Defensa de la Revolucion."
+The origin of this organization had been spontaneous. On September 28,
+1960, during a rally at which Fidel was reporting on his trip to the United
+Nations, two bombs were set off by someone in the crowd. Fidel's response
+was swift:
+We are going to establish a system of collective vigilance and then
+we're going to see if the lackeys of Imperialism will be able to operate,
+because we live all over the city; there is not a single apartment
+building in this city, nor is there any block, any square block, that is
+not widely represented here. . . . We are going to establish a
+Committee of Revolutionary Vigilance in every square block, so that
+the people stand vigilance, so that the people see everything, so that
+the enemy understands that when the masses of people are organized,
+there is no imperialist nor lackey of the imperialists, nor sell-out to the
+imperialists, nor instruments of the imperialists that will be able to
+operate again.1
+By 1969, there were CDR's in literally every block on the island. It was
+amusing to recall some of the propaganda which was floating around in the
+United States about the Cuban Revolution — particularly the lies about the
+Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. According to the government
+propagandists, this was a spy organization, something like the FBI, that
+snooped around gathering intelligence on the people and communicating it
+to the government. This was obviously absurd, since the majority of the
+Cuban population belonged to the CDR's; they had joined because they
+wanted to help root out the saboteurs and enemy agents who were trying to
+subvert the Cuban Revolution. Another widely accepted falsehood about
+Cuba had to do with the role of Fidel Castro. According to the propaganda,
+he was not only a "tyrannical dictator," imposing an iron will upon his
+people; he was projected as an infallible charismatic figure, whom the
+people were expected to worship. After seeing all the spectacular posters of
+Che Guevara and other leaders of the revolution, I looked hard for pictures
+and posters of Fidel. The only ones I could find were historical in character
+— in which he was shown with guerrillas in a typical scene of battle. But
+
+there were no portraits of the Prime Minister anywhere to be seen. When I
+asked some of the compañeros why there were many portraits of Che to be
+seen but absolutely none of Fidel, they told me that he himself had
+prohibited people from mounting pictures of him in their offices or work
+centers. This upset people sometimes, I learned, for they thought he was
+more self-effacing than was necessary.
+Talking to almost any Cuban about Fidel, it soon became clear that they did
+not see him as being anything more than extraordinarily intelligent,
+exceptionally committed, and an extremely warm human being endowed
+with great leadership talents. He made mistakes, human errors, and people
+loved him in large part because of his honesty with them. Fidel was their
+leader, but most important he was also their brother, in the largest sense of
+the word.
+We spent a week in the small village of Santa Maria II, located in the sugar
+center, Antonio Guiterras, living in log cabins with cement floors in an
+encampment which normally served as a Party retreat camp for political
+education. Our eating place was an open area with a roof to shade it from
+the sometimes unbearably hot Oriente sun. The toilet was a regular
+outhouse, until plumbing was installed toward the end of our stay. The
+shower was a cement stall into which we took large buckets of cold water
+fetched from the one faucet on the grounds.
+We were roughing it, even by Cuban standards. We followed the regular
+routine: up at five, breakfast and out to the fields with our machetes. Back
+in the camp by eleven; lunch and rest during the noon hours when the
+sweltering tropical heat would be dangerous even for those accustomed to
+it. Back in the fields by three, and by six it was time to lay down the
+machetes for the day.
+Cane-cutting was far more difficult and fatiguing than the work in the
+coffee fields. But again, I was determined to do at least my share, and I
+meticulously followed the system: A powerful stroke at the root of the
+plant; careful strokes down the side of the stalk to shave off the leaves; then
+the last motion of slicing the stalks into pieces the right size for processing.
+It was hard, and the heat was even more intolerable because our clothes
+were blue jeans, heavy long-sleeved work shirts, high-top boots, and
+
+gloves. All this was for protection from the liquid that seeped out of the
+cane leaves and could cause a severe skin rash. It didn't take me long to
+accept the fact that during the working hours of each day I was going to be
+soaking wet with sweat. In two days I was able to get into the swing of it; I
+had recovered my energy, it seemed, and could work alongside a Cuban
+compañero — though I did suspect that he was slowing his pace to remain
+with me.
+One day I remarked to a Cuban how I admired his skill in cutting cane — it
+was almost like an art, the way he did it. He thanked me for the
+compliment, but quickly added that his skill was a skill that needed to
+become obsolete. Cane-cutting was inhuman toil, he said. Before the
+revolution thousands had had to depend for their survival on working like
+animals during the cane season. Many of them would end up having to cut
+off a finger with the machete for a little insurance money to make ends meet
+a little while longer.
+The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the
+revolution. No one was a cane-cutter by trade any longer; during the cane
+season everyone pitched in. Also profits for others were not being squeezed
+from their sweat and toil. They knew that the returns from sugar sales
+abroad would be used to raise the living standards of the Cuban people as a
+whole — new schools would be built, more hospitals constructed; child
+care centers would multiply, better housing would be available to those who
+had the greatest need.
+Even so, this Cuban said, the business of cutting cane was work not fit for
+human beings; it made you old before your time. He continued to do it
+because he knew that he was working for the day when his sons and their
+children would not have to toil under the sweltering sun. Mechanization of
+the entire industry was on the agenda, but the rapidity with which it could
+be put into operation depended on the sacrifices they were all willing to
+make.
+In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something
+which was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I
+began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be
+
+utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and
+misleading.
+As the time went by, Kendra and I and the rest of us began to feel as if we
+had taken root in this small village in Oriente. We had met almost every
+resident; we knew the Communist Party headquarters well and we knew all
+the children in the barrio. Despite the language barrier, the children
+accepted us as members of the family. They helped me with my Spanish
+lessons each day. I was extremely embarrassed that I had not learned a little
+Spanish before the trip, for it is an affront to a people to visit them before
+having attempted to learn their language. Because I spoke Spanish so
+poorly, never having studied it, I felt less inhibited with the children. They
+were patient, corrected me and helped me find words when no dictionary
+was available.
+It was a sad day indeed when we had to pack up our things and board the
+bus, ready to move on to the next stage of our journey. All of us cried —
+men and women alike, in our delegation as well as on the Cuban side. The
+hardest part for me was saying good-bye to the children. A young boy of
+about nine or ten, who had always been the toughest one of his group,
+seemed reluctant to come up and say good-bye. I thought that it was his
+natural shyness. Just before I got into the bus, I went over to him and gave
+him a kiss on the cheek. He tore away from me and ran as fast as he could.
+But once in the bus, I saw him standing behind a tree, trying to conceal
+himself as his body shook with sobs. The tears that had been flooding my
+own eyes slid down my face.
+We had an unusually rugged schedule over the next weeks: schools,
+hospitals, child care centers, historical spots, a workers' resort center, the
+University of Santiago, a dam, a rice-producing center.
+Wherever we went, we were immensely impressed by the results of the
+fierce struggle that had been waged against racism after the triumph of the
+revolution. The first executive decrees of the new government had been to
+abolish segregation in the cities, brought to Cuba by corrupt capitalists from
+the United States. Now it was simply a crime to discriminate against Black
+people in any way, including the use of racist language. What was more
+important, of course, was the destruction of the material base of racism —
+
+weeding it out of the economy. During our trip, we saw Black people in
+leadership in factories, schools, hospitals and wherever else we went. It was
+clear to us — and Kendra, Carlos and I, the three Black members,
+incessantly discussed it — that only under socialism could this fight against
+racism have been so successfully executed.
+Around the end of August, our delegation, together with a larger Puerto
+Rican delegation, boarded a Cuban freighter which would take us on the
+first leg of our trip back home as it transported cement to the French
+Antilles. The freighter steered out of the Santiago Bay that evening. By the
+time we had cleared the island, the moonless night made it impossible to
+see land or sea. We were settling down, finding our way around the ship,
+and along with the large Puerto Rican delegation returning via this route,
+we were trying to get acquainted with the crew. The captain was a twentysix-year-old ex-philosophy student, with whom I was eager to discuss
+philosophy. This was his first voyage manning this ship and, like us, he was
+having to familiarize himself with the ship and the crew as well.
+As we sailed farther into the darkness, a plane suddenly flew low over the
+ship at lightning speed. Before I could collect my thoughts, it crossed above
+us once more. As Kendra and I rushed toward the captain's bridge to find
+out what was going on, one of the crew members told us calmly that this
+was an exhibition of aggression by a U.S. aircraft carrier enforcing the
+economic blockade.
+By means of lights, the U.S. carrier began signaling to our ship to identify
+itself and its mission. Of course, they could see the Cuban flag; this whole
+episode was the routine harassment which Cuban ships confronted
+whenever they sailed out of their own waters. We signaled back that before
+we identified ourselves, we wanted the name and mission of the party
+desiring the information.
+Amusement mingled with tension during these moments of our encounter
+with the U.S. aircraft carrier. Suddenly in the near distance, a bizarre,
+soundless explosion-effect lit up the darkness. At first, it looked like a
+miniature mushroom cloud. A second later, it seemed to be heading directly
+toward us. I was too frightened to ask what was going on; if this was lethal
+gas, there was no way for us to escape. Finally, it engulfed the ship with its
+
+bright light, illuminating the whole area as if it were high noon. A crew
+member then remarked that it must be a new flare, and that the United
+States was using the blockade to test it.
+We finally shook off the North American military men and enjoyed for a
+few days the legendary beauty of the Caribbean. We passed the politically
+not so beautiful countries of Haiti and Santo Domingo, and at last received
+instructions that the ship was to dock in Guadeloupe.
+I did not like the idea of being responsible for communications with the
+Guadeloupeans, but I was the only one on board who knew French, so I had
+no other choice.
+Our delegation had very little luggage. But the Puerto Rican delegation had
+boxes of books which the Cubans had given them for their bookstore in San
+Juan. I was careful to ask the customs people whether or not they wanted to
+inspect all the packages. We wished to avoid any kind of incident on the
+island, and the Puerto Ricans wanted to make sure they would be able to
+mail the packages to San Juan from Basse-Terre, the port where we had
+docked. The Frenchman told me not to worry about a thing; all they wanted
+to see was our passports. After they were stamped, we would be completely
+clear.
+The Cuban captain had the name of a women who would allow us to eat at
+her restaurant-hotel and would let us leave our belongings there while we
+made arrangements for a flight to Puerto Rico. After depositing our things, I
+went to an agency to buy plane tickets for the twenty-five of us. Some of
+the Puerto Rican brothers began to cart their packages to the post office.
+I was negotiating with the travel agent when one of the Puerto Rican
+comrades broke into the office, frantically explaining that all the packages
+had been confiscated. The police had confiscated the passports of several
+members of their delegation, and it seemed that they had been charged with
+a crime. Because of the language barrier, they did not fully understand what
+was happening. They needed me as an interpreter.
+As I walked through the streets of Basse-Terre, I was certain that this was a
+minor misunderstanding which could be instantly cleared up. The passports
+
+would be returned and we would be on our way to Puerto Rico later that
+night. The comrades led me down a broken-down street, through a dark
+driveway into a dingy garage which was being used as a storage area,
+apparently by the French Customs Department. In the dim light of this
+cellar, about ten members of the Puerto Rican Delegation were standing in a
+circle around an old French colonialist who was waving their passports in
+the air while he ranted about communism infiltrating the "free French
+world" of Guadeloupe. The faces of the Puerto Rican brothers were
+distorted in incomprehension.
+Calmly, but quite firmly, I asked him what it was that disturbed him so
+much. My cool-headed posture did not sober him, as I had hoped, but rather
+set him off on a tirade that was even more vitriolic than the first. He was
+accusing us all of being agents of Cuban communism, bringing communist
+propaganda to foment revolution on this tranquil island where the "natives"
+loved their French governors and had peacefully coexisted with them for so
+many decades. I thought to myself that it would have indeed been a good
+thing if in such a short time we could have fomented an insurrection there.
+Unfortunately, our presence on the island had nothing to do with
+revolutionary activity.
+When he quieted down, I began to tell him the simple truth: Some of us
+were Communists — I, for example — and some of us were not. We were
+returning from a trip to Cuba and hoped to leave Guadeloupe on the next
+plane to Puerto Rico. As for the books and literature, we had no intention of
+leaving a single one of them in Guadeloupe. Their destination was a
+bookstore in Puerto Rico. Besides, they were written in Spanish and as far
+as I knew, French, not Spanish, was the language spoken in Guadeloupe.
+Moreover, the majority of the books were not political in character, but
+rather were classical and contemporary Spanish-language literature of all
+sorts.
+When I tried to catch my breath to move on to the next part of my speech in
+French, the man made a wild sweeping gesture, moved from one side of the
+room to the other and pointed an accusing finger at me: "Mademoiselle,
+vous êtes communiste!" he screamed, a horrified look crumpling his face.
+
+My casual reference to myself as a Communist had apparently confirmed
+his worst suspicions.
+I knew that I was carrying on a dialogue with a raving lunatic. But despite
+the bizarre circumstances, in this dingy cellar on the terrain of French
+Imperialism, I felt called upon to defend my Party, Cuba, the Socialist
+Countries, the World Communist Movement and the cause of oppressed
+people across the globe. "Oui, Monsieur, je suis communiste et je le
+considere un des plus grands honneurs humains, parce que nous luttons
+pour la liberation totale de la race humaine." Yes, I am a Communist and I
+consider it one of the greatest honors, because we are struggling for the
+total liberation of the human race.
+In the heat of this quarrel, I had not bothered to ask the comrades standing
+around what kind of approach they wanted to take to the situation. With my
+speech I had gotten them even more deeply involved. The Frenchman's face
+had turned bright-red, and he furiously threatened to lock us all up for five
+years and throw the books into the sea. Obviously it was time to bring this
+dialogue to a different level. After all, they were in power on this island and
+if we didn't watch out, we could really find ourselves locked away in a
+dungeon with no one knowing our whereabouts.
+I repeated my original statement: we had not come to Guadeloupe on any
+political mission. We simply found this to be the most convenient way of
+returning to our own countries. But the man wouldn't be appeased. He
+began to tear open some of the boxes which were piled up on the floor.
+When he discovered a box of Tri-Continentals, a revolutionary periodical
+published in Cuba, he asked me where all that classical Spanish literature
+was supposed to be. He ripped open another box, discovering this time
+something that sent him soaring to new heights of rage: posters depicting
+Jesus Christ, with haloed head, wielding a carbine on his shoulder. For him,
+this was the straw that broke the camel's back. He completely lost control,
+and literally fell on the floor waving his arms and legs, bellowing
+inarticulate sounds. I stared incredulously at this desperate creature and
+decided to wait quietly until his fit had subsided.
+Uniformed men entered the room, as though they were going to arrest us.
+As it turned out, they wanted all the passports that they had not yet
+
+confiscated. I told them that they had no right to seize our passports — we
+weren't even formally charged with a crime. One of the colonialists
+announced that we were to appear before a judge the following morning for
+the reading of the charges and the trial. If we did not want to give up our
+passports, then detention in jail was the alternative. Imagining what the
+dungeons must have been like, and realizing that we would be without any
+kind of movement to back us, hidden away on this island in the Caribbean,
+we all decided that we would turn over our passports and take advantage of
+our freedom to make some plans for escape.
+Using some of the captain's connections with sympathetic Cubans living on
+the island, we made contact with a Black woman, a respected lawyer and a
+leading member of the Communist Party of Guadeloupe.
+Mattre Archimede was a big woman with very dark skin, penetrating eyes,
+and unassailable confidence. I will never forget the first meeting we had
+with her. I felt as if I were in the presence of a very great woman. As for our
+predicament, there was never any doubt in my mind that she would rescue
+us. But I was so impressed by her personality, by the respect that she clearly
+commanded as a Communist, even from the colonialists, that for a while
+our problem became a secondary concern for me. If I had surrendered to my
+desires, I would have remained on the island to learn from this woman.
+Over the next days, she worked tenaciously at negotiating with the customs
+officials, the police, the judges. We learned that there was indeed a law
+which could be legitimately invoked — insofar as colonial laws could be
+legitimate — to put us behind bars for a substantial period of time. The only
+way out was a compromise: the colonialists would let us leave the island
+only under the condition that the Puerto Ricans leave the literature behind.
+We fought this, of course, but at least we had won the first stage of our
+battle. Our final decision was to take our passports, leave Guadeloupe and
+leave the question of the books in the hands of Mattre Archimede, who
+promised to do everything possible to retrieve them.
+In an informal ceremony, we thanked Mattre Archimede for her invaluable
+assistance. With affection, we took leave of her, the woman who had
+allowed us to stay at her hotel, the Cuban captain and the ship crew. Then
+we headed for the other side of the island, Point-à-Pitre, where we caught a
+
+plane the next morning for Puerto Rico. From there, we North Americans
+took off for New York.
+
+The Cuban trip had been a great climax in my life. Politically I felt
+infinitely more mature, and it seemed that the Cubans' limitless
+revolutionary enthusiasm had left a permanent mark on my existence. I had
+expected to spend a few days in New York, then go directly to my place in
+Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where I could quietly reflect on my Cuban experiences
+before I began the year teaching at UCLA.
+I did not discover until I returned to the coast that an FBI agent had
+published an article in the campus newspaper about a Communist who had
+recently been hired by the Philosophy Department. William Divale revealed
+in his article that he had been instructed by the FBI to infiltrate the
+Communist Party. Undoubtedly he had also been instructed to publish the
+article about my membership in the Party.
+Another article had appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, under the byline of Ed Montgomery, one of the most reactionary reporters in the state.
+According to him, I was not only a member of the Communist Party,
+U.S.A., but (despite the contradiction) I was a Maoist as well. The article
+alleged that I also belonged to the Students for a Democratic Society and
+the Black Panther Party. Moreover, he said he had information that I was a
+gun runner for the Black Panther Party, and that he knew for a fact that I
+had been under surveillance for some time by the San Diego Police
+Department.
+When I read this nonsense, I laughed. But at the same time, I sensed that I
+was in the midst of a serious situation. My suspicions were confirmed when
+I learned that the governing body of the university — under the leadership
+of Governor Ronald Reagan — had instructed the chancellor of the Los
+Angeles campus to formally ask me whether I was a member of the
+Communist Party.
+I was somewhat shocked, I admit, by this march of events. Not that I had
+expected the issue of my membership in the Communist Party to be totally
+
+ignored. What shocked me was the ceremonious character of the
+confrontation and what seemed the beginning of an inquisition a la
+McCarthy.
+When I accepted the job at UCLA, I was unaware of the regulation in the
+Regents' handbook — dating back to 1949 — prohibiting the hiring of
+Communists. This clearly unconstitutional statute was pulled out of the
+closet, and invoked by Ronald Reagan and company in order to prevent me
+from teaching at UCLA.
+As this whole affair was brewing, I realized that the personal goals I had set
+for myself were about to collide head-on with the political requirements of
+my life. Originally I had not intended to begin working that year. I had not
+yet completed my Ph.D. dissertation and wanted to get that out of the way
+before I went out job-seeking. Later I had decided to accept the position at
+UCLA because its light teaching load would leave me the time and
+flexibility I needed to finish writing the thesis. I wanted desperately to get
+that part of my academic life behind me. But now, I had been challenged.
+To accept the challenge meant that I would have to abandon the idea of
+receiving my degree before the end of that school year.
+My comrades in the Che-Lumumba Club immediately committed
+themselves to building a campaign within the Black community in Los
+Angeles around my right to teach at UCLA. White comrades were active as
+well. On the campus, the Black Student Union and the Black Professors'
+organization took up the banner. Large numbers of students and professors
+began to understand the need to fight the Regents' political encroachments
+on the autonomy of the university.
+The unanimous position of the Philosophy Department was to condemn the
+Regents for interrogating me about my political beliefs and affiliations.
+None of them had been asked, as a condition of their employment, whether
+they were members of the Democratic, Republican, or any other party. The
+chairman of the Philosophy Department, Donald Kalish, had assumed a
+principled, unyielding position from the outset. It was largely because of his
+work, and the efforts of the few Black professors, that the movement to
+support my right to teach expanded throughout the faculty.
+
+The stage was set for the battle. The first step was to answer the chancellor's
+letter asking me whether I was a member of the Communist Party. Only my
+lawyer — John McTernan — and a few close friends and comrades were
+aware of the way I was going to reply to the question. Most people assumed
+that I would invoke the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, declining to
+answer on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. During the
+McCarthy era, this had been the strategy of most Communists, for at that
+time, if it could be established that a person was a Communist, he or she
+could be sentenced, under the Smith Act, to many years in prison. Gus Hall
+and Henry Winston, the General Secretary and the Chairman of our Party,
+had spent almost ten years of their lives behind walls. Since there was going
+to be a fight in any event, I preferred to pick the combat area, and to
+determine myself the terms of the struggle. The Regents had moved in with
+an attack on me. Now I would assume the offensive and would move in
+with an attack on them.
+I answered the chancellor's letter with an unequivocal affirmation of my
+membership in the Communist Party. I strongly protested the posing of the
+question in the first place, but made it clear to them that I was prepared to
+fight openly, as a communist.
+My reply caught the Regents unawares, and some of them considered my
+announcement of my membership in the Communist Party a personal
+affront. I am sure that they had taken for granted that I would call upon the
+Fifth Amendment. Their strategy, in turn, would have been to publicly
+ransack my immediate past in order to prove that I was in fact a
+Communist.
+They countered my move with an impetuous, angry response: they
+announced their intention to fire me.
+The racists and anti-Communists throughout the state responded with furor.
+Threatening calls and letters poured into the Philosophy Department and
+into the offices of the Communist Party. A man broke into the Philosophy
+Department offices and physically attacked Don Kalish. A special telephone
+line had to be installed in my office, so that all my calls could be screened
+before they reached me. The campus police had to be placed on alert at all
+
+times. Several times they had to check out my car because of bomb threats I
+had received.
+For security purposes, a brother was assigned by my comrades in CheLumumba to stay with me at all times, and I had to change many of my
+personal habits and remold them for the requirements of security. Things
+which I had taken for granted for so long were now completely out of the
+question. If, for instance, I got bogged down on some work I was doing, I
+could no longer go out alone for a walk or a drive at two o'clock in the
+morning. If I needed cigarettes at an hour when most people were sleeping,
+I would have to wake Josef and ask him to go with me.
+It was difficult for me to accept the necessity of someone's being with me
+practically all the time, and I was constantly criticized by members of the
+Che-Lumumba Club for taking security so lightly. Kendra and Franklin
+Alexander kept reminding me that if anything ever happened to me they
+would be the ones to be blamed. Whenever I made light of the need for
+security, they reminded me of all the incidents that had already occurred.
+There had been the time when I was pursued by the police while driving
+home alone at night. They had followed me for some distance and as I
+slowed down to turn into my driveway, the cops aimed their spotlight into
+the car and kept it trained on me until I reached the door. I had assumed that
+this was just one more of their attempts to harass me, so I ignored them. But
+afterward, a comrade remarked I underestimated them — they could have
+been setting me up for an assassination.
+It wasn't just a question of police either. The comrades would often remind
+me that out of the thousands of threats that had been made on my life, there
+might be one person crazy enough to actually try to kill me. Just one
+person, one crazy person.
+After our first victory in court — an injunction prohibiting the Regents
+from firing me for political reasons ��� the hate letters and threats multiplied
+in number and ferocity. Bomb threats were so frequent that after a while the
+campus police stopped checking under the hood of my car for explosives.
+Of necessity, I had to learn the procedure myself. One afternoon, a Black
+plainclothesman interrupted my class to tell me that serious threats had been
+received and that the campus police had instructed him to guard me until I
+
+was ready to go home. That day several calls had been received at various
+points on the campus warning that I would not get off the grounds alive.
+Apparently the same person had made calls all over Los Angeles, to friends
+and acquaintances of mine and people involved in the movement. When I
+walked out of the classroom, Franklin, Gregory and several other comrades
+from Che-Lumumba were waiting to take me home, their long coats not
+quite concealing the shotguns and rifles they had brought along. We all
+remembered that barely a year ago John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, two
+members of the Black Panther Party, had been shot to death on that campus
+— not far from where I was holding my class.
+If the need for constant security made life unwieldy for me, it was only one
+facet of the larger problem of getting used to the fact that I had been
+transformed into a public figure overnight. I hated being the center of such
+excessive attention. The snooping, often parasitic news reporters jarred my
+nerves. And I loathed being stared at like a curiosity object. I had never
+aspired to be a "public revolutionary"; my concept of my revolutionary
+vocation had been vastly different. Still, I had accepted the challenge which
+the state initiated and if that meant I had to become a public personality,
+then I would have to be that personality — despite my own discomfort.
+But there were the enormously moving moments which more than
+compensated for the unpleasant aspects of my public life. Once I was
+grocery shopping in the supermarket near my house. I could tell that the
+middle-aged Black woman behind a nearby cart thought she recognized me.
+When our eyes met, hers lit up. She rushed over and asked, "Are you
+Angela Davis?" When I smiled and said yes, tears came into her eyes. I
+wanted to hug her, but she was faster than I. With a firm, warm embrace,
+she told me in a motherly way, "Don't worry, child. We're behind you. We're
+not going to let them take your job. Just keep on fighting."
+If this one moment had been the only fruit of the many seasons I had
+devoted to the movement, it would have made all the sacrifices worthwhile.
+There was never a doubt in my mind that my mother and father, in their
+own gentle way, would stand with me. I knew they would not bend under
+the terrible pressures to denounce their "Communist daughter." At the same
+
+time I realized that the more strongly they defended me, the more their own
+safety would be placed in jeopardy; I worried a great deal about them.
+As I thought of their being exposed to the most virulent Southern racism
+and anti-communism, my apprehension mingled with fears I had
+experienced during my childhood in Birmingham. I remembered how
+terrified I had felt when I heard the bombs explode, ripping to pieces the
+houses across the street. I remembered how my father's weapons had
+always been waiting in his top drawer in anticipation of an attack. I thought
+about the time when the slightest sound was enough to send my father or
+my brothers searching for a hidden explosive device outside. One night
+after the publicity broke, I spoke to my youngest brother, Reginald, who
+was attending college in Ohio. He, too, was very much afraid that our
+parents might come under attack and he wanted to go back to Birmingham
+to protect them.
+Whenever I talked to our mother and father, they assured me that things
+were going well. Perhaps there had been no physical assault, but I could
+detect in their voices that they were being hurt in other ways. Maybe
+someone who was supposed to be a friend had been frightened away
+because he did not want to be associated with the parents of a Communist.
+The psychological impact of anti-communism on ordinary people in this
+country runs very deep. There is something about the word "communism"
+that, for the unenlightened, evokes not only the enemy, but also something
+immoral, something dirty.
+Among the many reasons for my decision to publicly talk about my
+membership in the Communist Party, was my belief that I could help
+explode some of the myths on which anti-communism thrives. If only
+oppressed people could see that Communists are profoundly concerned
+about them, they would be forced to reevaluate their irrational fear of "the
+Communist Conspiracy."
+I soon discovered that in the ghetto, among poor and working-class Black
+people, anti-Communist reactions were often not deeply ingrained. To relate
+only one example: A brother who lived across the street from me came over
+one day and asked me what communism was. "There must be something
+
+good about it," he said, "because the man is always trying to convince us
+that it's bad."
+But in Birmingham, the image most people had of me was doubtlessly
+abstract and irrational. Many people who had known me as a child, people
+who still wanted to love me, probably assumed very simply that I had been
+captured, led astray and brainwashed by the Communists. I could imagine
+them using every euphemism they could think of in order to avoid calling
+me such a dirty name as Communist.
+While I was home during the Christmas break, my mother admitted that
+people who had counted themselves among her friends had broken down
+under the pressure. Some, she said, had abruptly stopped calling or coming
+around to visit. Some of my father's customers at the service station had
+suddenly disappeared.
+Yet at the same time, she insisted, many of her friends had taken forthright
+positions in my defense. If someone even implied that I had been innocently
+lured into the Communist Party, they would firmly declare that I had made
+up my own mind about my political affiliations.
+My mother and father had always encouraged my sister, my brothers and
+me to be independent. From the time we were very small, they repeatedly
+counseled us to forget about what other people said and to do what we felt
+was right. I was proud that both my parents were determined to defend my
+right to seek an independent, revolutionary answer to the oppression of our
+people.
+I kept in close touch with my brother Ben, who is a football player with the
+Cleveland Browns. If there were any repercussions on his job because I was
+a Communist, I wanted to be prepared to defend him immediately.
+Although nothing overt happened at that time — the problems were still to
+come — he was very much conscious of the conspicuous silence which
+surrounded him. No one had even asked him whether he was with me or
+against me.
+My sister, Fania, was living only a hundred miles away in the San Diego
+area at the time. She and her husband, Sam, were attending the University
+
+of California in San Diego. There was a greater than average concern about
+the UCLA affair there because I had attended the university for two years
+and was officially still a philosophy graduate student, studying for my
+doctorate under Professor Herbert Marcuse.
+I had kept my little apartment near the university in Cardiff-by-the-Sea,
+thinking that it would be a perfect refuge when I wanted to get away from
+the hectic pace of Los Angeles. Since the rent was forty dollars a month and
+my place in Los Angeles was only eighty dollars, I had decided I could
+afford to keep the two places. Fania and Sam had stayed there before they
+moved into a place of their own. Afterward, they continued to use it
+whenever they felt like it.
+After the Regents fired me, and my membership in the Communist Party
+was thoroughly publicized and attacked in the press throughout the state, I
+could not help worrying about Fania and Sam. The San Diego area was
+home territory for the Minutemen, Southern California's version of the Ku
+Klux Klan. The police were not much better. With recent memories of being
+followed by the police for being in the leadership of the Black Student
+Council at UCSD, I warned them to be on their guard.
+My fears were not unfounded. One morning in the fall the telephone beside
+my bed rang so early that I knew something was wrong. My heart was
+beating fast when I said hello.
+"Angela," whispered a voice which I immediately recognized as my sister's,
+"Sam's been shot." She sounded like she was talking in her sleep. Her words
+were so unreal.
+"What do you mean?" I asked unbelievingly.
+"The pigs shot Sam," was all she said.
+She didn't say whether he was still alive, and fearing the worst, I didn't want
+to ask. Instead, trying to sound calm, I asked her to tell me exactly what had
+happened.
+
+Two sheriff's deputies had broken into their house and fired on Sam, hitting
+him in the shoulder. He had grabbed the shotgun they kept in the house,
+fired back and run them out of the house. When she said that he was in the
+hospital, I felt tremendous relief; now I could ask her how he was doing.
+The bullet had lodged a mere quarter of an inch from his spine. But it had
+already been removed, and she thought he was going to be all right. The
+biggest problem at that moment was that they had placed him under arrest.
+As soon as he was released from the hospital, they were going to put him in
+jail.
+She said she was calling from Evelyn and Barry's — the upstairs section of
+the house in Cardiff where my apartment was. I told her to hold on, and that
+I'd drive down as soon as I could.
+After I woke Josef and told him, I called Kendra and Franklin to have them
+alert the other comrades. Kendra said she was going with me. Franklin
+volunteered to go to Riverside, where I was scheduled to speak at the
+university that day. After apologizing for my absence and delivering a
+speech himself, he said he would head for San Diego.
+When we arrived in Cardiff, we found Evelyn and Barry in a state of panic.
+Shortly after Fania called me, several sheriff's cars had pulled up in front of
+the house. With their weapons drawn, they had rushed in announcing that
+they had a warrant for the arrest of Fania Davis Jordon. They had
+handcuffed her and led her away to a patrol car. Some police had ransacked
+both my apartment and Evelyn and Barry's place upstairs. Evelyn was in a
+state of rage because one of the cops had aimed his rifle at her baby.
+Hearing the infant squirming in his bed behind a closed door, the cop had
+broken into the room, pointing his weapon at the bed.
+Both Fania and Sam were subsequently charged with "attempted murder of
+a peace officer." It took two days to raise the money for their bail — and it
+would have taken much longer were it not for the fact that Herbert and Inge
+Marcuse contributed a substantial sum.
+The story of their arrest was splashed across newspapers up and down the
+state. ANGELA DAVIS KIN ARRESTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER
+
+was a typical headline. In all the papers I saw, with the exception of the
+People's World and a few underground weeklies, the fact most emphasized
+was that Fania and Sam Jordon were the sister and brother-in-law of the
+"selfavowed Communist," Angela Davis.
+Later Fania told us that the cops and matrons had continually called her
+"Angela" and had tried to rile her with their vulgar, anti-Communist
+remarks.
+I publicly accused the San Diego Sheriff's Department of collaborating, in
+the basest way, with the most reactionary forces of the state. In particular, I
+charged them with carrying Ronald Reagan's racist, anti-Communist
+policies to the extremes of premeditated murder. In the scuffle in their
+house, Sam would certainly have been killed if Fania had not been as bold
+as she was. After the cop had fired on Sam and hit him once, she grabbed
+his gun arm, deflecting the rest of the bullets into a nearby wall.
+Fania and Sam were indicted twice by the Grand Jury. Both times, the judge
+assigned to the case realized how futile it was to try to prosecute them and
+dropped the charges. But their case dragged on for well over a year.
+At the turn of the year, with one academic quarter behind me, my job was
+temporarily secure. The courts had declared unconstitutional the rule
+prohibiting the hiring of Communists. Everyone knew that although the
+Regents had been immobilized for the time being, they were seeking other
+ways of eliminating me before the beginning of the next school year. They
+had devised a system of provocation and espionage carried out by people
+posing as students in my classes; I was struggling with them daily.
+As time went by, it became clear that the assault on my job was only a tiny
+part of a systematic plan to disarm and destroy the Black Liberation
+struggle and the entire radical movement. The fight for my job had to be
+interwoven with a larger fight for the survival of the movement.
+Repression was on the rise throughout the country. The worst victims of
+judicial frame-ups and police violence were members of the Black Panther
+Party. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins had been indicted in New Haven.
+Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered by Chicago policemen as
+
+they slept in their beds. And in Los Angeles, the Black Panther Party
+headquarters was raided by the Los Angeles Police Department and their
+special tactical squad, with the National Guard and the Army on alert.
+I witnessed this raid firsthand and, along with my comrades, helped to
+organize resistance within the Black community. Our success in pulling
+together a grass-roots challenge to this repression put the city and state
+government on the defensive for a short time. It also doubtlessly increased
+their desire to eliminate all of us.
+Early one morning — toward five A.M. — I received a telephone call about
+an emergency situation at the Panther headquarters on Central Avenue. The
+police had tried to break into the office, but the sisters and brothers inside
+had held them off and were still fighting back, guns in hand. I woke Josef
+and told him to get dressed as quickly as he could — I would explain the
+rest in the car.
+The area surrounding the office had been cordoned off; each station of the
+blockade was at least three blocks away from the shooting. Circling the
+area, we caught sight of a figure spread out against a wall, being frisked by
+a policeman. When I looked more closely I saw it was Franklin. Kendra and
+a few other comrades were standing some twenty-five yards down the
+street. We jumped out of the car to ask them what was going on.
+They said they had been trying to get as close as possible to the scene of the
+battle when a policeman had come up and aimed his shotgun at Franklin,
+ordering him up against the wall. Kendra, Taboo and the others had been
+told that if they didn't get out of the way their heads would be blown off. It
+was Franklin who interested them. When they found a piece of Party
+literature on him, they said something like "You dirty Communist" and led
+him away to a patrol car.
+All the while gunshots could be heard in the background. As we walked
+down Central Avenue toward the police cordon, dawn was just beginning to
+break. In the new day's light, armed figures, dressed in black jumpsuits,
+were creeping snakelike along the ground or hiding behind telephone poles
+and cars parked along the avenue. From time to time, they discharged their
+weapons.
+
+More black-clad figures were stationed on roofs along the entire block
+where the office was located. A helicopter hovered overhead. A bomb had
+just been dropped on the roof of the Panther office. Regular Los Angeles
+patrolmen were swarming throughout the entire area.
+None of these cops were talking to one another. Their concentration on the
+attack had a hypnotic, even insane quality about it. They were like robots.
+The assault was too efficient to have been spontaneous. It appeared to have
+been planned well in advance, perhaps even down to the position of each
+cop.
+The silence was almost total, broken only by the sound of gunshots. If shots
+were still being fired from the office, this was the only evidence that at least
+some of the Panthers were still alive.
+A few people were standing around in the area. One woman looked
+extremely pained each time she heard a burst of shots. Her daughter, I
+learned, was inside. From our observation point — through the binoculars
+we had secured — the situation looked dismal. Between the guns and the
+dynamite, the office had been practically destroyed. The woman said
+nothing. No words could have expressed the terrible anguish that stood so
+clearly in her eyes.
+I walked over to her and, as gently as possible, told her not to worry. I told
+her about the chains of telephone calls that had been started, carrying the
+message to people throughout the city to rush down to the Panther office
+immediately. There would soon be hundreds of people out in the streets.
+Their presence alone would force the police to retreat. Her daughter
+Tommie was going to be all right.
+By seven A.M. people from the neighborhood and from throughout the city
+had crowded into the area. But the cordon had been extended. Only those of
+us who had come down early were close enough to see what was
+happening. We found ourselves inside the cordon.
+Kendra and I and the other members of our club were extremely worried
+about Franklin. We were torn between the need to stand vigilance over the
+battle and our desire to find out what the police had done with him. I
+
+volunteered to try to get out of the cordon, survey the situation outside,
+determine whether Franklin was around and try to return. Josef was going
+with me.
+We discovered an alley which we thought would take us safely through the
+cordon, but just as we thought we were on the other side, we caught sight of
+some policemen and had to turn around. Looking for another alley, we
+noticed a group of children from the neighborhood. Realizing that they
+probably knew the area better than anyone, we asked them whether they
+could get us through the blockade. They eagerly agreed and proceeded to
+lead us through labyrinthine walkways, backyards and alleys which could
+not be seen from the streets. If someone sighted the police, a sign was
+given, and we quickly retreated and tried another route.
+Finally we made it to the other side. There were crowds of people with
+anger written all over their faces. As we searched the area for Franklin, we
+met scores of movement sisters and brothers we knew. We reached the
+block where Jefferson High School is located. The police motorcycle corps
+was parading in front of the school, trying to pull off a grand show of force.
+Over a hundred cops, all trying to look tough, and managing only to look
+racist, were speeding through the streets. They gunned the motors of their
+cycles, thinking the roar was the sound of their own power. At that moment,
+I saw in this scene historical traces of Hitler's troops trying to terrorize the
+Jews into submission.
+One young sister, moved by righteous indignation, picked up a bottle and
+threw it into the procession. The motorcycle parade came to a halt. There
+was an extraordinary moment of tension. Many of us were certain that a
+full-scale confrontation was about to explode. But this peacock parade of
+force was only for show. The cops had not been ordered to go into combat.
+The procession started up again and the pigs continued to flaunt their
+presence through the ghetto. Rumors were sprouting in the crowd and
+spreading at full speed. Peaches was dead, someone said. Bunchy and
+Yvonne Carter's baby was in the office, according to someone else, and had
+been killed by the pigs. The crowd's anger was mounting. Its size was
+greater than the visible police force. The students from Jefferson High
+School were angry. People who lived in the community were angry.
+
+One woman who had just gotten off work was telling a small group that she
+couldn't even get to her own house because the police had blocked off that
+area. "These pigs think they can come into our community and take over."
+Some wanted to fight. Others counseled caution for the moment, because
+those inside the Panther office were still in danger.
+Josef and I continued to search for Franklin. Finally, we saw him walking in
+our direction on the other side of the street. We were about to run over to
+him when we noticed him subtly motioning us away. He returned shortly,
+telling us that he had thought he was being followed and didn't want to
+jeopardize us.
+He had been working with the students at Jefferson High School, helping
+them to prepare the conditions for a community rally inside the school.
+Totally absorbed by the immediate problems of the rally, he had almost
+forgotten the incident of earlier that morning. The police had locked him in
+the patrol car and had parked it close to the Panther headquarters. He had
+literally been able to see the bullets flying. After an hour or so, they had
+driven him off and had pushed him out of the car some ten blocks away in a
+typical act of police harassment.
+The location of the LAPD Command Post had been discovered, so Franklin
+told us. Someone returned to Central Avenue to get Kendra and the other
+comrades while we headed for the house which the chief of police had
+taken over as his headquarters. It was surrounded by cops, and reporters
+were swarming all over the place. Some of them recognized me and
+immediately wanted to know whether I had come to act as an
+"intermediary" between the police and the Panthers. I told them in so many
+words that I had nothing but contempt for the LAPD. My loyalties were
+with the sisters and brothers under attack.
+The woman who lived across from the house which had been
+commandeered by the LAPD was indignant about the police invasion of the
+community. She offered us — sisters and brothers from the Panthers, the
+Black Student Alliance and Che-Lumumba — the use of her house as
+headquarters for the resistance. A call went through to the Panther office.
+The sisters and brothers inside were all still alive, although most of them
+had been shot up and hurt in the explosion.
+
+They said they were prepared to leave the building, but only if community
+people and the press could observe them coming out. They realized that if
+they had not defended themselves from the beginning, they might have all
+been shot down in cold blood. They had tried to hold out until we could
+gather enough people to witness the aggression, as well as to stand watch as
+they lay down their weapons and left the building.
+A piece of white fabric was thrown out of the window. Everyone was silent.
+When the sisters and brothers walked out, eleven of them altogether, they
+were all standing strong. They were bleeding, their clothes were torn, and
+they were dirty from the debris of the explosion. But they were still
+standing strong. I found out later that Peaches had been shot in both legs.
+Yet she had marched proudly out of the building.
+When the last of the eleven had come out, a huge roar of applause and
+cheers surged up from the crowd. Slogans were triumphantly shouted:
+"Power to the People." "No more pigs in our community." This was indeed
+a victory. The police had crept into the community in the early hours of the
+morning and launched a murderous attack on the Panthers. Without a doubt,
+they had planned to kill as many as they could and capture the rest, thus
+destroying the Panther chapter in Los Angeles. But with the support of the
+people outside, the Panthers had emerged victorious.
+With the sisters and brothers out of the building, the crowd grew bolder.
+One sister actually jumped out and hit one of the cops from behind. Before
+he realized what had hit him, she was back under the cover of the crowd.
+The students Franklin had talked to earlier had made preparations for a
+rally. They had informed their administration that they were going to use
+the gym for a community meeting to protest the unwarranted police raid on
+the Panther headquarters. The word was passed in the crowd to move over
+to Jefferson for the rally.
+Emotions were high. The speeches were passionate. All carried the theme
+of the need to protect and defend the Panthers and the need to protect and
+defend the community. Some of the students gave speeches, as did a brother
+from the Black Student Alliance, Franklin and myself. By the time the rally
+was over, the students had called for a walkout so that they could spread the
+
+news of the attack throughout the Los Angeles Black community. They
+committed themselves to help mobilize the community for the coming fight,
+and we all walked out of the hall singing, "I want to be a Mau Mau. Just
+like Malcolm X. I want to be a Mau Mau. Just like Martin Luther King."
+In order to organize the resistance, a coalition was established between the
+Black Panther Party, the Black Student Alliance and our Che-Lumumba
+Club. On the basis of this coalition of the Black Left, we felt we could call
+for a broad united resistance emanating from all sectors of the Black
+community.
+That night we sponsored a meeting, attended by delegates from Black
+organizations throughout the city. This body approved a call for a general
+strike two days later in the Black community. On that day, we would hold a
+massive protest rally on the steps of City Hall. We had about thirty-six
+hours to put the rally together. It was no time at all, but the quicker the
+community reacted in an organized way, the more effective our protest
+would be.
+That very night, thousands of leaflets were printed. The next morning,
+teams saturated the community with literature about the attack and the need
+to resist. The local Black radio station and an underground FM station gave
+us free time to issue the strike call and to publicize the rally. Others
+announced the rally as a part of the news.
+I personally recorded spot announcements and held press conferences, since
+my name was known in the community. Yet I also felt the need to involve
+myself on a grass-roots level. I needed to acquire a sense of the mood of the
+community — and that could not be done from behind a microphone.
+A team was on its way to Jordon Down Projects in Watts to distribute
+leaflets. I decided to go along. In all my experience of door-to-door
+community work, never had I seen such unanimous acceptance of our
+appeal. Literally no one was abrupt, no one tried to shut us out, and all
+agreed that we had to resist the attack on the Panthers. Many of the people
+recognized me, and I was surprised that they also volunteered their support
+for me in the fight for my job. Virtually every person with whom I spoke
+
+made a firm promise to observe the general strike and to attend the rally the
+next morning.
+There were problems back at the Panther office. The woman who lived in
+the house behind the office had reported that early in the morning the police
+had returned and shot tear-gas cartridges into the office. The fumes were
+stronger now than shortly after the attack had halted. It was impossible to
+remain inside for any length of time without becoming sick.
+It was decided, as a result, to hold a vigil in front of the office at all times.
+Participants in the vigil would form themselves into shifts in order to clean
+out all the debris. When the sun went down, there were still more than a
+hundred people taking part in the vigil. The tear-gas fumes had not abated
+and most of the group was clustered at the end of the block so no one would
+be overcome by the gas. The plans were to keep the vigil going throughout
+the night. Franklin led the group in freedom songs.
+While the singers were warming up, I noticed some strange movements in
+the area: police cars creeping by — unmarked, but unmistakably police cars
+with agents peering out at us. I assumed that this was the normal
+surveillance. It seemed unlikely that they would try anything on a group
+which included not only the usual young movement people, but ministers,
+professors, politicians as well.
+The singing broke into full blast. Perhaps the police felt affronted by the
+words of "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle" and "I Woke Up This Morning
+with My Mind Staid On Freedom" because they abruptly interrupted with a
+voice projected through a loudspeaker. "The Los Angeles Police
+Department has declared this an illegal assembly. If you do not move out,
+you will be subject to arrest. You have exactly three minutes to disperse."
+Even if we had tried, we could not have dispersed in three minutes. We
+decided immediately not to disperse, but rather to form ourselves into a
+moving picket line. As long as we kept moving, we would not be an
+"assembly" and would theoretically have the right to remain. Senator
+Mervyn Dymally, a Black state senator, decided that he was going to speak
+to the policeman in charge, thinking he could calm them down.
+
+The line stretched from the corner where the group had been singing, well
+past the office, which was near the next corner.
+I moved toward the end nearest the Panther office. It was dark and difficult
+to determine exactly what was happening at the other corner. Suddenly
+there was a dash of the crowd. Thinking that this had been precipitated by
+nothing more serious than a show of force at the other end, I turned to calm
+everybody and tell them not to run. But at that moment, I saw a swarm of
+the black-suited cops who had executed the attack on the office the day
+before. They were already beating people further down, and some of them
+were about to converge on us.
+I had been facing the crowd. I turned quickly, but before I could break into
+a run, I was knocked to the ground. I hit my head on the pavement and was
+momentarily stunned. During those seconds of semi-consciousness, I felt
+feet trampling on my head and body and it flashed through my mind that
+this was a terrible way to die.
+A brother screamed, "Hey, that's Angela down there." Immediately, hands
+were pulling me up. I could see the billy clubs smashing into these brothers'
+heads. Someone told me later that as soon as the police realized who I was,
+they had come after me with their sticks.
+Once on my feet, I ran as fast as I could.
+This was insane. Clearly, the police had no intention of arresting us. They
+only wanted to beat us. Even Senator Dymally hadn't been immune. After
+his futile conversation with the chief of police, I learned later, he had been
+the first to be hit.
+We raced through the neighborhood, across lawns, through alleys, wherever
+it seemed we could find temporary refuge. As I ran across a front yard with
+some sisters and brothers I didn't even know, I heard a voice coming from
+the dark porch, telling us to come in. We ran into the house, lay down on
+the floor and tried to catch our breath. It was a middle-aged Black woman
+who had opened her doors to us. When I tried to thank her, she said that
+after what had happened the day before, this was the very least she could
+do.
+
+We were on a side street, off Central Avenue. I looked through the draperies
+in the front room and could see nothing except a police car cruising by.
+Then I noticed some of our people on a porch across the street and decided I
+would try to get over to that house.
+In all the excitement, I hadn't noticed how badly I had been bruised by the
+fall. Blood was streaming down my leg and my knee was throbbing with
+pain. But there was no time to think about that now. I thanked the woman,
+said good-bye and ran toward the house across the street as fast as I could.
+The family who lived there had allowed a comrade from our Party to
+organize a first-aid station in the house. People with blood all over their
+faces were already waiting to be tended, and a squad had gone out
+searching for others who were wounded. Apparently, people throughout the
+neighborhood had opened their doors. Their spontaneous show of solidarity
+had saved us from a real massacre.
+I was worried about Kendra, Franklin, Tamu, Taboo and the rest of my CheLumumba comrades whom I had not yet seen. The Panther leaders not
+under arrest as a result of the original assault were also missing, as were key
+members of the Black Student Alliance. A brother from the BSA said he
+would accompany me around the neighborhood in order to determine what
+had happened to our friends. People were crowded in the storefronts along
+Central Avenue. By hiding in the shadows along the way, we were able to
+reach one of the storefronts without incident. The people we were worried
+about were among the crowds in the storefronts. One person had been
+arrested.
+On Central Avenue, a squadron of cops in black jumpsuits was marching in
+formation. When they saw one of our people in the street, several of them
+would jump out of line, swing at the person with their billy clubs and then
+calmly fall back into the march. It appeared they were determined to hold
+us prisoner indefinitely in these houses and storefronts.
+Later, we learned that the police in the black jumpsuits were members of
+the Los Angeles Police Department's counter-insurgency force — the
+Special Weapons and Tactical Squad. Subsequent research determined that
+the SWAT Squad was composed primarily of Vietnam veterans. For over a
+
+year, they had been in training, learning how to wage counter-urban
+guerrilla warfare, learning how to "quell" riots, and obviously also how to
+provoke them. They had made their public debut with the attack on the
+Panther office. Their offensive against our vigil was their second official
+appearance.
+The attack on us had begun around six o'clock in the evening. It wasn't until
+ten-thirty or eleven that it appeared we might be able to leave the houses
+and storefronts. Around that time, one of Senator Dymally's aides got word
+to us that the police were prepared to retreat if we all left the area
+immediately. Whether or not this guarantee was good was a matter for
+speculation.
+Even in this moment of crisis, our most important concern was making the
+rally a success. Most of the organizers and speakers for the meeting were
+down on Central Avenue. There was only one logical explanation for this
+ruthless siege: the police were trying to sabotage our rally. We had to take
+the chance of trying to get people out of the area so that we could go on
+with preparations for the mass meeting.
+The exit took place without incident. After almost everyone had left,
+Kendra and I, together with other comrades, headed for a house to hold an
+emergency Che-Lumumba meeting. Everyone was cautioned to shake off
+all police tails before arriving.
+There we discussed a proposal we were going to present to other members
+of the coalition the next morning: a march, at the conclusion of the rally, to
+the county jail where the Panthers were being held. The march would
+culminate in a demonstration raising the demand for their immediate
+freedom.
+In the middle of our discussions, the brother on security out front rushed
+into the room to tell us that the police were cruising by in unusual numbers.
+They had discovered our meeting place, and we had no idea what they
+would try to do. Our uncertainty, our firm belief based on previous
+experience that the Los Angeles Police would stop at nothing to crush their
+adversaries meant that we would have to prepare for the worst.
+
+Weapons were checked out, loaded and distributed. In the formidable
+silence, in the tension-laden room, we waited in readiness. Fortunately, the
+attack did not materialize. Despite the excitement and the threat of an
+assault looming over us, we managed to get through our meeting early
+enough to catch a few hours' sleep before the rally. Everyone else was going
+home. But it was too dangerous to go to my house on Raymond Street. I
+had to resign myself to sleeping on Kendra and Franklin's floor.
+I woke up the next morning with a terrible feeling of apprehension that only
+a few hundred people might show up. If the rally were poorly attended, then
+L.A. ruling circles, particularly the LAPD, might take it as a sign that the
+Black community was accepting the repression without resisting it. The
+police could therefore claim a mandate to escalate their aggression. They
+would attempt to totally obliterate the Black Panther Party and would move
+on to other militant Black organizations. The arbitrary police violence in the
+ghetto would mount.
+With these fears digging at my stomach, I drove down to City Hall with
+Kendra, Franklin and other members of the club. It was about an hour and a
+half before the meeting was scheduled to begin. We arrived early to see that
+equipment was set up and raise the question of the march with the others.
+What we saw when we arrived made us all feel euphoric. At least a
+thousand people were already on the steps — and four-fifths of them were
+Black. People were still steadily streaming into the area.
+By the time the first speaker took the microphone, the crowd had swelled to
+eight or ten thousand strong. It was a magnificent multitude, studded with
+signs and banners demanding an end to police repression, demanding a halt
+to the offensive against the Panthers, demanding immediate release of the
+captured Panthers. The speeches were powerful. As we had previously
+agreed, the theme of the rally — the theme of all the speeches — was
+genocide. The aggression against the Panthers embodied the racist policy of
+the U.S. government toward Black People. Carried to its logical conclusion,
+this policy was a policy of genocide.
+The Panthers had been charged with conspiracy to assault police officers. In
+my speech, I turned the idea of conspiracy around and charged Ed Davis,
+
+the Chief of Police, and Sam Yorty, the mayor of L.A., with conspiring with
+U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover to decimate and
+destroy the Black Panther Party.
+Months later, the existence of just such a plan was revealed to the public.
+The government had decided to wipe out the BPP throughout the entire
+country. J. Edgar Hoover had called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the
+internal security of the country," and police forces in most of the major
+cities had moved on local Panther chapters.
+As I emphasized in my speech, our defense of the Panthers had to be a
+defense of ourselves as well. If the government could carry out its racist
+aggression against them without fearing resistance, then it would soon be
+directed against other organizations and would finally engulf the entire
+community.
+We needed more than a one-day stand. Papers circulated in the crowd to be
+signed by those who wanted to play an active role in organizing the mass
+movement we needed. By the time the speeches were over, the people were
+in a fighting mood. Franklin took the microphone and called for the march
+and demonstration. It was instantly approved with unanimous and roaring
+applause. We set out for the jail.
+When we reached the County Courthouse where the jail was located, the
+collective anger was so great that the people could not be contained. Defiant
+throngs pressed forward through the doors of the building. So great was
+their rage that they began to destroy everything in sight. As they attacked
+the coin machines in the lobby, they were probably fantasizing about
+ripping down the iron bars of the jail upstairs.
+There were only two ways out of the lobby — one exit on each side. If the
+police decided to attack, it would be a bloodbath, without a doubt. They
+only had to lock off the exits and we would be bottled in the building, with
+no place to run, no room for maneuvering.
+But the crowd was ungovernable. I tried to get their attention. But my voice
+does not carry well without the aid of a microphone and it was drowned out
+in the clamor. It was Franklin who eventually assumed the role he always
+
+seems to excel in: he stood at the top of the lobby steps and with his voice
+blasting forth like a trumpet, he elicited complete silence from the raging
+demonstrators. He explained our immediate tactical disadvantages. The
+police had already sealed off one of the entrances. They were stationed
+throughout the area and could fall upon us in just a matter of minutes.
+It was not enough to explain the dangers of the moment. What had to be
+emphasized was that the Panther prisoners would be freed by the actions of
+a mass movement. The militant protests of a movement of masses, the
+determined thrust of thousands of people, could force our enemy to release
+the sisters and brothers upstairs. Rather than waste our energies giving vent
+to our frustrations, we should be trying to organize ourselves into a
+permanent movement to defend our fighters and to defend ourselves.
+The people left the courthouse and the demonstration continued outside in
+full force and with unabated enthusiasm. Thousands marched around the
+jailhouse chanting slogans of resistance.
+Later, the street in front of the Panther office was overflowing with people
+who came down to assist in the ongoing work of this movement. In all
+respects, this had been an extraordinarily triumphant day. The rally had
+more than served its purpose. But in order to realize the potential of what
+we had just witnessed, much day-to-day organizing was needed. Sisters and
+brothers would have to commit themselves to work that might not be as
+visible or dramatic as what we had just done, but which, in the final
+analysis, would be infinitely more effective.
+In the aftermath of the rally, its immediate effects could already be seen.
+For a while, at least, there was a noticeable let-up of police violence in the
+community.
+If you were stopped, you could see that the L.A. police were not as selfconfident and certainly not as arrogant as they had been before. By the
+same token, the collective confidence, pride and courage of the community
+was definitely on the rise. I felt deeply gratified each time someone in the
+community expressed his satisfaction to me that something was finally
+being done about the brutality and insanity of the police.
+
+Around the time of the attack on the Panther office, a strange series of
+events drove me out of my apartment on Raymond Street. The day the
+police besieged the Panthers, Che-Lumumba comrades and members of the
+BSA had come over to the apartment to discuss strategy. The meeting had
+hardly gotten started when the manager of the apartment house burst into
+my living room frantically raving about my harboring Panthers. If we didn't
+leave the premises immediately, he said, he would call the police.
+Apparently, he was afraid that the cops were going to shoot up the house
+just as they had shot up the office and homes of the Panthers.
+At first, I argued with the man, telling him that he had allowed the police to
+do exactly what they wanted to do to the Black community — namely to
+inflict terror on everyone. But he could not be calmed down. So we finally
+decided that since we already had enough trouble on our hands and didn't
+want to land in jail because of the stupidity of a house manager, we would
+leave for another comrade's house.
+It was only the beginning. His conduct became increasingly eccentric.
+Frequently, when he heard me descending the stairs (my apartment was just
+over his), he would come out on the porch and, as I locked my door
+downstairs, he silently stared at me with the most peculiar kind of hostility.
+He would stand there, following me with his eyes until I had driven off in
+my car. (This, incidentally, happened to be at a time when there was no
+security person living at the house. Josef had to move out and we hadn't
+found anyone to replace him. I was happy though at the thought of being
+liberated from the stringent security precautions.)
+I didn't let the man's odd behavior bother me — I figured that as long as I
+paid the eighty dollars rent each month, he could hold nothing against me. I
+did think that one of two things was wrong with him: either he was a little
+psychotic or took drugs from time to time. The latter possibility was quite
+realistic, because my neighborhood was saturated with drugs.
+One day, I found the man again waiting for me on the front porch. As soon
+as I appeared, he started to babble incoherently about my holding him
+prisoner in his own house. He was saying something about hearing my
+
+voice coming from upstairs, hypnotizing him and forcing him to stay in the
+house the whole weekend. He kept asking me what I was doing to him. And
+he mumbled something about communism — about Communists being able
+to brainwash people.
+I was in a hurry that day and could not be bothered with his madness, so I
+told him that he was crazy or had been drinking too much or taking too
+much dope and went on about my business. The next morning, on my way
+to UCLA, I was stopped by the police, who told me they had received a
+complaint about me from a man in the neighborhood. According to their
+story, the man had told them that I was out to kill him and through hypnosis
+had already forced him to put a gun to his head. The cop was arrogant as he
+told me that unfortunately they couldn't take me in because the man had
+refused to sign a complaint. I told the cop that he knew as well as I did that
+the man was crazy and that there was no basis whatever for their leveling
+any charges against me. Trying to conclude this little encounter on a note of
+victory, the cop added that the man had officially informed the police that if
+anything happened to him, they should come for me. His tone implied that
+he almost hoped that something would happen to this man so that they
+could arrest me for the crime.
+By now, I was used to the police stopping me on the slightest pretext — or
+for no reason at all — so this incident was quickly shoved to the back of my
+mind. But later on that week, this whole insane sequence of events came to
+a climax. It was on the day I finally got around to buying a decent
+secondhand dining room table. One of the comrades from Che-Lumumba
+helped me transport it from the store to the house. When we arrived, the
+man came out on the porch and, as he had done many times before, stared at
+us with antagonism written all over his face as we struggled to get the table
+up the stairs. The job accomplished, we came downstairs and noticed with
+some astonishment that the man was lying on the back seat of his car, which
+was parked out in front of the house. As we got into my car, he raised
+himself up to watch us driving off. I casually remarked to Gregory that my
+manager had been behaving very strangely over the last weeks.
+After I dropped Gregory off and ran some errands, I returned to the house
+alone to do some work. It was dusk and when I drove up, I noticed a figure
+
+rising up on the back seat of the man's car. I couldn't believe that he was
+still there. He must have been sinking deeper and deeper into his psychosis,
+I thought. Yet I didn't feel that his sickness was any great menace to me.
+Pushing him out of my mind, I went on upstairs to get into my work.
+When some time had passed and I noticed that it had gotten completely
+dark, I got up from my desk to close the curtains in my front room. As I
+closed the curtains and was looking at nothing in particular outside, my
+eyes fell upon the house manager's car, which was now in the middle of the
+street. He was at the steering wheel and was intently staring up at my
+apartment. Noticing that I had discovered him, he drove off. For the first
+time, I began to think that this man just might be crazy enough to try
+something. The car drove up in front of the house again. Closing the curtain
+and peering through a small opening so he would not see me, I stood there
+for some fifteen minutes until I could determine that he was systematically
+circling the block, stopping each time, apparently to make sure I was still
+upstairs.
+If it had been the cops or the FBI, I would not have been so worried — for
+they did this all the time. Obviously my house manager was mad and it was
+impossible to predict his next moves. Having decided that the most
+reasonable thing was to go for help, I left the house, just as the man had
+pulled off to circle the block once again. Or at least I thought he was going
+to circle the block. I drove the half-block down Raymond to Jefferson and
+as I turned, I realized that he had been waiting for me at the corner.
+He fell right in behind me, tailing me with his front fender less than a foot
+from my back fender. I accelerated, trying to shake him off and found
+myself driving fifty miles an hour down Jefferson Boulevard. But his '69
+model car was in far better shape than my '59 Rambler, so he had no trouble
+staying right on my back fender.
+On the corner of Jefferson and Western there was a newly opened
+supermarket where I had just recently begun to shop. The manager of the
+store, a Black man in his early forties, was always especially friendly to me
+whenever I came in — surely he would help me shake off this madman.
+
+I made a sharp right turn into the driveway of the market's parking lot —
+and the man turned in right behind me. I pulled into the first parking space I
+saw, rushed out of the car and was about to run into the store when I noticed
+that the man had waited for me in the driveway. To get to the store, I had to
+cross in front of his car. Taking a deep breath, I decided to run for it. But the
+man was quick — almost quick enough to run me over. Fortunately I
+jumped back in time to escape, and was only brushed by the car's fender. I
+ran into the store.
+What I hadn't wanted to admit to myself since I first sensed I was in a
+potentially dangerous situation, I had to admit now: He was actually trying
+to kill me. Although I hadn't the faintest idea what his motive might be,
+there was no doubt in my mind about his intentions — he had tried to run
+me down.
+My friend the store manager was more than willing to help; he sent his
+security personnel out to look for the man while I called Franklin and
+Kendra to tell them what had happened. That evening after I had made it to
+their house, the first thing on the agenda was criticism and self-criticism. It
+had been foolish for me to move around without some kind of security.
+After all, I might well become a target because this man had evidently been
+severely influenced by all the propaganda about communism. Thinking that
+Communists could "brainwash" people, and confusing brainwashing with
+hypnosis, he had convinced himself that I was able to hypnotize him into
+doing things against his own will.
+The collective decision was that I should not stay at my Raymond Street
+apartment alone again and that I should move as soon as possible. I hated to
+give up my eighty-dollar-a-month six-room apartment. It had really grown
+on me over the last seven months, and I was sure I wouldn't be able to find
+such a good deal again. Nonetheless, I had to agree — the house manager
+was a dangerous man and we knew for a fact that he had a weapon
+downstairs.
+The pieces of this fantastic story did not completely fall together until I was
+in the process of moving out. In one of his moments of lucidity, the man
+came upstairs and wanted to talk. After making sure that he didn't have a
+weapon and confirming that my gun was within reach, my sister and I
+
+decided to let him in. He began by apologizing profusely about what had
+happened, explaining that he had heard voices that night instructing him to
+kill me before I killed him. Fania began to put him through the third degree:
+Did he realize what he was saying? Why had the voices told him to kill me?
+All he knew was what had happened that weekend when I kept him locked
+up in the house and made him do all kinds of things, including holding a
+gun up to his own head before a mirror. Fania asked how he knew it was I
+who was behind all that. The voice was coming from my apartment, he
+replied — and besides, he could recognize my voice. The night he tried to
+kill me, other voices had possessed him, convincing him that it was my life
+or his. When he failed to run me down, he had gone to the house of an
+acquaintance and had all but destroyed their garage — he had simply gone
+wild.
+The strangest thing about his whole confession was an account he gave of
+what he had done that weekend when I was supposedly holding him
+prisoner. He had written poems about himself and me. By this time, Fania
+was thoroughly fascinated with his story, and persuaded, for the moment at
+least, that he was harmless, she asked him to go and get the poems. He
+returned with a huge sheaf of papers that looked like the manuscript for a
+book. With great curiosity, Fania and I leafed through these papers with
+dialogues carefully printed in pencil in a childlike writing. We both knew
+that the man was semiliterate and could imagine the incredible effort that
+must have gone into the creation of those poems. A constant theme broke
+through the poems: the man felt some kind of attraction toward me. But it
+was couched in the ambivalence that stemmed from his socially inflicted
+fear of communism. I was a Communist, a monster, yet at the same time
+educated and, in his eyes at least, somewhat physically attractive. The
+poems brought into play a constant conflict between those two poles.
+It was clear that this man's writings were the work of someone stumbling
+into madness. I suggested very strongly that he see a doctor and explained
+to him that I was preparing to move, since it was impossible to predict when
+he might go into one of his trances again. He halfway agreed, but at the
+same time was manifestly disturbed by the fact that I would no longer be
+living above him.
+
+I was angered by the fact that I had to move, but at the same time, felt sorry
+for this man and wondered just how much of his illness was the product of
+his being Black in a racist, anti-Communist world.
+With these thoughts, I left the neighborhood, the man and his sickness, and
+moved into an apartment on 45th Street with Tamu Ushindi and her baby.
+Tamu had been a member of the club for some years; her husband, also a
+comrade, was about to go to jail for a number of months in connection with
+a high school demonstration in 1968. We had found a place large enough to
+hold the three of us; it was conveniently located some five blocks from
+Franklin and Kendra's, and we knew that the neighbors were friendly and
+would shield us in the event of a police attack.
+
+One afternoon as I sat working in my office at UCLA, I heard a knock at
+the door. Without looking up, I said, "Come in." A moment later, a white
+man in uniform, with guns swinging from his hips and a sheaf of papers in
+his hand, was standing in front of my desk. The brother on security
+immediately stood up beside him. Startled and expecting the worst, I asked
+him who he was and what he wanted.
+"County marshal," he said. "You have been subpoenaed to appear in court."
+He dropped the papers on my desk.
+I picked them up and asked what it was about. His job, he said, was only to
+deliver the subpoena; he had no idea what was in it. The marshal turned and
+walked out.
+The papers did not reveal anything more than the date for the court
+appearance, a courtroom number and a name which was entirely unfamiliar
+to me. Someone who called himself Hekima had subpoenaed me to appear
+as a witness on his behalf.
+Confused and full of apprehension, I telephoned my attorney. John's advice
+was to wait until the court date and try to determine at that time what the
+story was. He said that a lawyer in his firm would accompany me.
+
+On the date designated in the subpoena, Wendell Holmes — a young Black
+attorney in the firm — went with me down to the County Courthouse.
+Inside the courtroom, a trial was under way. A white man and a Black man
+were arguing. The white man was the district attorney. The Black man,
+articulately conducting the defense, seemed to be the defendant as well.
+So this is the mysterious Hekima, I thought. When he saw me, he nodded
+and smiled warmly. His face was just as unfamiliar as his name and I still
+could not imagine why I had been called to testify on his behalf.
+Wendell approached the dock and, explaining to the bailiff that I was a
+witness in the case, asked him to arrange a conference with the defendant
+during the next recess. At the break, I walked up to Hekima and extended
+my hand. We went through the four movements of the solidarity handshake.
+As I took a seat at the defense table, he told me that he was very happy that
+I had responded. "You want me to testify in your defense?" I asked him. He
+nodded his head and went on to explain why he had subpoenaed me.
+Some years ago, Hekima had been convicted of murder. The charges
+stemmed from an incident during which a white man had been robbed by
+several Black men. In the course of the scuffle, the white man fell, hit his
+head on the cement sidewalk and died shortly thereafter. Though it was an
+open question whether Hekima had personally struck the man, it was clear
+that he had been with the group. His conviction of first-degree murder had
+been recently overturned by an appellate court. This time, he said, he was
+conducting his own defense. This time he was going to present a "political
+defense." He was going to try to demonstrate before the jury how racism
+and poverty could drive Black men and women to desperate solutions.
+He did not want to justify the killing of the white man — even though it had
+been clearly accidental. Nor did he wish to say that it was all right to rob
+people. What he wanted to do was to point the finger at the real criminal: a
+society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions
+of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under.
+Having read about my fight for my job at UCLA, he felt that I could assist
+him in constructing his defense. He wanted to call me to the stand as an
+expert on the socioeconomic function of racism. I would testify about such
+
+things as the incidence of unemployment in our communities; that most of
+the time at least 30 percent of the young people in black ghettos across the
+country are unable to find work. He wanted me to talk about the things that
+white people generally try to ignore — about the starvation and severe
+malnutrition which Black people still suffer.
+"What is a Black man to do," he asked, "when he has applied for jobs day in
+and day out, when his unemployment insurance is running out, when he
+can't pay his exorbitant rent for his rundown apartment, when his wife is
+desperate, when his children are hungry? What is he to do?" He spoke in a
+voice haunted by personal tragedies.
+The more Hekima talked, the more compelled I felt to do whatever I could
+to help him.
+I would not be called to the stand that day, he said. The prosecutor had not
+yet rested his case. Moreover, it was going to require a struggle to convince
+the judge to allow him to present a defense of that kind.
+As the trial unfolded over the coming days, the judge openly displayed his
+favoritism for the prosecutor and his disdain for Hekima. He had no
+intention of allowing me to testify.
+Eventually Hekima was denied the right to present the defense he had so
+carefully worked out. The judge did not want the Black Liberation
+Movement to be brought into his courtroom.
+Since I was on Hekima's witness list, I could meet with him in the attorney's
+visiting room at the county jail. There we would not be separated by a glass
+wall and could talk directly to each other, rather than over the telephone as
+in the regular visiting room.
+During our visits, Hekima always spoke very softly — perhaps as a result
+of his many years in confinement — but knowing that he had much more to
+say than could be said during the short time we spent together, he also
+spoke rapidly. He was incisive and intense. He never looked down while he
+spoke. His eyes were always fixed on mine.
+
+I was fascinated by the hours I spent with him, and began to learn, for the
+first time, about the transformation prisoners were undergoing. A new
+consciousness had taken root. It was not simply the consciousness of those
+who were in prison for political reasons. This was a mass phenomenon.
+Prisoners — particularly Black prisoners — were beginning to think about
+how they got there — what forced them into prison. They were beginning
+to understand the nature of racism and class bias. They were beginning to
+recognize that regardless of the specific details of their individual cases,
+most of them were in prison because they were Black, Brown and poor.
+The jailers placed a limit on my visits: after two three-hour meetings in the
+attorney's room, I had to see Hekima in the visiting room during regular
+visiting hours. When he was convicted the second time, he did not allow
+himself the luxury of depression. He immediately began to work feverishly
+on his appeal. I agreed to become his legal runner, which meant that I
+would deliver legal papers to and from the jail and run errands relating to
+his case on the outside. With that relationship we could resume our
+meetings in the attorney's room, which continued throughout the next
+months — throughout the period of my involvement with the Soledad
+Brothers Defense Committee. There, under the hostile glares of jail guards,
+I became convinced that there were impending explosions behind the walls,
+and that if we did not begin to build a support movement for our sisters and
+brothers in prison, we were no revolutionaries at all.
+
+Around the middle of February, I picked up the Los Angeles Times and
+noticed on the front page a large photograph of three very striking Black
+men. Their faces were serene and strong, but their waists were draped in
+chains. Chains bound their arms to their sides and chains shackled their
+legs. "They are still trying to impress upon us that we have not yet escaped
+from bondage," I thought. Angry and frustrated, I began to read the story. It
+was about Soledad Prison.
+Soledad Prison was a household word in the Black community. During my
+last two years in Los Angeles, I must have heard it a million times. There
+was San Quentin, there was Folsom — and there was Soledad.
+
+Soledad is the Spanish word for solitude. Solitude Prison — this name
+seemed to expose what the prison was trying to hide. When Josef was living
+in my apartment, he told me how they had kept him in solitary confinement
+during most of his imprisonment. He still bore the stamp of Soledad. He
+still preferred solitude. For hours and often days he would stay on the
+sunporch which was his bedroom, reading, thinking, alone. And when he
+talked, it was always in a soft whisper of a voice — as if not to disturb the
+massive silence that had so long surrounded him.
+The L.A. Times article reported the indictment of George Jackson, John
+Clutchette and Fleeta Drumgo for the murder of a guard at Soledad Prison.
+An entire month had elapsed since the killing took place. Why had it taken
+so long to return the indictments? I wondered why the author had not
+commented on this time lag. The article reeked of deception and
+evasiveness. It seemed that the Times was trying to turn public opinion
+against the accused men even before the trial got started. If one accepted the
+article on its face, one would have come away with the assumption that the
+three men were guilty.
+During the next days, I kept thinking of the faces of those brothers. Three
+beautiful virile faces pulled out of the horrible anonymity of prison life.
+A few weeks later, the Che-Lumumba Club was contacted about a meeting
+on the Soledad situation. It was being arranged by the Los Angeles
+"Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights," which wanted to discuss the
+mounting of a mass campaign to free the three from Soledad.
+I was drowning in work, but I simply couldn't stop thinking about those
+three haunting faces in the newspaper. I had to attend the meeting; even if I
+only became involved in a minimal way, at least I would be doing
+something.
+The night of the meeting, Tamu, Patrice Neal — another club member —
+and I went down to the run-down old Victoria Hall. (It had been famous
+once for its swinging Saturday night dances. Now, in this hall, people were
+no longer having fun. They were talking about a very serious thing, about
+liberation.)
+
+About a hundred people answered the call. Though they were
+predominantly Black, a sizeable number of white people had turned up as
+well. There were young people, older people and people who were
+obviously attending their first political meeting. There were those who had
+come because they had sons, husbands and brothers in Soledad Prison.
+Seated behind the long tables stretched across the front of the hall were Fay
+Stender, lawyer for George Jackson, George's mother and sisters —
+Georgia, Penny and Frances Jackson — Inez Williams, Fleeta's mother, and
+Doris Maxwell, the mother of John Clutchette.
+Speaking of Soledad, Fay Stender explained that from the warden down to
+the guards, the prison hierarchy had a long history of promoting racial
+enmity in the prison population. As long as the Black, Chicano and white
+prisoners were at each other's necks, the prison administration knew they
+would not have to worry about serious challenges to their authority.
+As in an old Southern town, segregation in Soledad Prison was almost total.
+All activities were arranged so that racial mingling would not occur — or so
+that when it did occur, the prisoners would be in a posture of battle. With
+the collaboration of some of the white prisoners, Soledad had developed its
+own counterpart to the Ku Klux Klan — a group called the "Aryan
+Brotherhood." Tension in the prison was so thick that even the most
+innocuous meeting between the races was bound to set off an explosion.
+Before January 13, 1970, exercise periods, like everything else, were
+segregated. On that day, with no explanation, the guards sent Black,
+Chicano and white prisoners to exercise together in the newly constructed
+yard. Not a single guard was assigned to accompany them. The explosion
+was inevitable. A fight erupted between a Black prisoner and a white
+prisoner, and within a few minutes, there was havoc.
+O. G. Miller had the reputation of being a hard-line racist, and was known
+to be an expert marksman. He was stationed in the gun tower that day. He
+carefully aimed his carbine and fired several times. Three men fell: W. L.
+Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, Alvin Miller. They were all Black. A few days
+later the Monterey County Grand Jury was convened to hear the case of O.
+G. Miller. As could have been predicted, he was absolved of all
+
+responsibility for the deaths of the three brothers. The Grand Jury ruled that
+he had done nothing more serious than commit "justifiable homicide."
+There was a brutal familiarity about this story. As I listened to Fay Stender's
+narration, the specter of Leonard Deadwilder invaded my thoughts. As he
+was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital in Los Angeles, a white
+handkerchief attached to the antenna to indicate an emergency, the cops
+stopped him for speeding and without even seeking an explanation, they
+shot him to death. It was called justifiable homicide by the courts. I
+remembered Gregory Clark, the eighteen-year-old Black child who was
+stopped by the police because "he didn't look like he fit the Mustang he was
+driving." Though Gregory Clark was himself unarmed, the cop said he
+moved in self-defense. As the brother lay defenseless, face down on a hot
+ghetto sidewalk, his hands cuffed behind him, he was shot in the back of the
+head. Later the courts ruled that the cop had committed "justifiable
+homicide."
+"Justifiable Homicide" — these innocuously official words conjured up the
+untold numbers of unavenged murders of my people.
+Fay Stender's story recaptured my attention. She was talking about the
+Soledad prisoners' proud attempts to challenge this judicial endorsement of
+a clearly racist assassination. Spontaneously and with the intense
+desperation of men in chains, the Black prisoners had shouted unexecutable
+threats meant for the assassin O. G. Miller, and banged angrily at the bars of
+their cells. Soledad Prison pulsated with resistance. A guard inadvertently
+stumbled into the brothers' fierce but chaotic rebellion and was engulfed by
+their collective desire for revenge. No one knew who pushed the guard over
+the railing.
+This was the beginning of the story of George Jackson, John Clutchette and
+Fleeta Drumgo. There was no evidence that they had killed the guard. But
+there was evidence that George, John and Fleeta were "militants"; they had
+been talking with their fellow captives about the theory and practice of
+liberation. The prison bureaucracy was going to hold them symbolically
+responsible for the spontaneous rebellion enacted by the prisoners. They
+were charged with the murder of the guard. The prison hierarchy wanted to
+throw them into San Quentin's death chamber and triumphantly parade their
+
+gassed bodies before thousands of California prisoners, as examples of what
+the prison and the State did to those who refused to observe the silence of
+acceptance.
+Fay Stender's legal analysis left us to suffer in the privacy of our individual
+emotions. But when Georgia Jackson began to speak, her voice brought a
+new dimension to our meeting, her words expressed her unashamed
+maternal pain. Georgia Jackson, Black, woman, mother; her infinite
+strength undergirded her plaintive words about her son. When she began to
+talk about George, a throbbing silence came over the hall. "They took
+George away from us when he was only eighteen. That was ten years ago."
+In a voice trembling with emotion, she went on to describe the incident
+which had robbed him of the little freedom he possessed as a young boy
+struggling to become a man. He was in a car when its owner — a casual
+acquaintance of his — had taken seventy dollars from a service station.
+Mrs. Jackson insisted that he had been totally oblivious of his friend's
+designs. Nevertheless, thanks to an inept, insensitive public defender,
+thanks to a system which had long ago stacked the cards against young
+Black defendants like George, he was pronounced guilty of robbery. The
+matter of his sentencing was routinely handed over to the Youth Authority.
+With angry astonishment I listened to Mrs. Jackson describe the sentence
+her son had received: one year to life in prison. One to life. And George had
+already done ten times the minimum. I was paralyzed by the thought of the
+absolute irreversibility of his last decade. And I was afraid to let my
+imagination trace out the formidable reality of those ten years in prison. A
+determination began to swell in me to do everything within the limits of the
+possible to save George from the gas chamber.
+Fleeta Drumgo was his mother's only son. She spoke about her pain quietly
+but intensely, and appealed to us to rescue her son from his enemies. The
+mother of John Clutchette told us how she had received a note bearing the
+single word "Help." This was the first sign that the three brothers were
+being set up by the prison bureaucracy. Alone she could do nothing to help
+John, Fleeta or George. Only we, the people, could hope to stop the legal
+lynching which was planned for them.
+
+By the time these women had finished, the prosecution appeared to have the
+logic and coherence of a conspiracy against the brothers — against them,
+their politics, their principles, their commitment. There was only one
+question: What were we prepared to do to prevent the consummation of the
+conspiracy? We addressed ourselves to the details of building a mass
+movement to fight for our brothers' freedom. The chairperson asked for
+volunteers to participate in the various subcommittees which needed to be
+set up — fund-raising, publicity, research, etc.
+Although I already felt totally committed to George, John and Fleeta, I
+knew that I had too many responsibilities to assume a major role in the
+defense committee. The fight for my job raged on and was sending me up
+and down the California coast, exposing and challenging Ronald Reagan,
+and seeking support for our side.
+I was active in the Che-Lumumba Club, working in the area of political
+education. And, of course, I had to prepare for the two sets of lectures I was
+giving at UCLA. I was already killing myself trying to fulfill all these
+responsibilities. How could I possibly find time to be active on a day-to-day
+basis in the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee?
+Even though these were my thoughts as the subcommittees were being
+constituted, my arm shot up when they asked for volunteers for the
+subcommittee on campus involvement. Something more elemental than
+timetables and prior commitments had seized me and made me agree to
+coordinate the committee's efforts in the local colleges and universities.
+The decision had been made. How to find time was a secondary question. I
+thought about my initial reluctance to take on a substantial role. How
+presumptuous it had been to weigh the outcome of the fight for my job
+against the outcome of the fight for the lives of these men. At UCLA I was
+fighting for my right as a Black woman, as a Communist, as a
+revolutionary, to hold on to my job. In Soledad Prison, George Jackson,
+John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo were fighting for their rights as Black men,
+as revolutionaries, to hold on to their lives. Same struggle. Same enemies.
+The majority of the students and professors — except on the very
+reactionary campuses — agreed at least in principle with my academic
+
+freedom to teach, regardless of the fact that I was a Communist. I could
+utilize the widespread interest in the struggle around my job and the natural
+curiosity of people who wanted to see "a real, live, self-avowed
+Communist" to get onto the campuses and to call for support of the Soledad
+Brothers.
+At the end of the meeting at Victoria Hall, the members of the campus
+subcommittee got together and decided to hold the first meeting the
+following week. I volunteered Kendra and Franklin's place on 50th Street.
+In the meantime we would try to recruit sympathetic students and
+professors from schools in the area to attend the meeting. We would try to
+devise proposals for the organizing efforts we were going to carry out in the
+Los Angeles academic community.
+I left the meeting with a new sense of direction. I thought about George,
+John and Fleeta. We had to find some way to let them know that they were
+no longer alone. That soon there would be thousands of combative voices
+shouting "Free the Soledad Brothers" and thousands willing to fight for
+them.
+I was still busy working out an agenda for the meeting when Kendra ran
+into the bedroom, excitedly describing what was going on in the living
+room. "You won't believe how many people are out there. It's not even eight
+o'clock, and the place is already so crowded that they're sitting on the floor."
+Kendra and Franklin's eighty-dollar-a-month duplex was located in an area
+on the East Side which had seen a lot of action during the 1965 Watts
+Rebellion.
+Their place on 50th Street wasn't too far from the apartment on 45th which
+Tamu and I had recently moved to. From their front porch you could see
+South Park, which had a long history of militant mass rallies. Since the
+Che-Lumumba Club hadn't yet acquired a headquarters, Kendra and
+Franklin's one-bedroom place had become something of a center. We held
+our meetings in their living room, and whenever a club member who
+couldn't afford to rent an apartment needed a place to stay, the living room
+floor was always available.
+
+If we had wanted to hold a mass meeting, it would have been a simple
+matter to do a door-to-door leafleting in the surrounding community. But
+we had not distributed any literature about this meeting because it was only
+to be a gathering of the subcommittee on campus activities. Consequently it
+was with tremendous astonishment that I greeted the fifty-odd sisters and
+brothers who had assembled in the living room. The word had gotten
+around that a meeting about George, John and Fleeta was going to take
+place. So they came — unaware that it was originally planned as a special
+meeting to talk about building support on the campuses. In fact the majority
+of the people who came were not even students or professors, but rather
+workers or ex-prisoners or people who had experienced some personal
+clash with the California prison system. Some of the brothers there had
+even done time with George, John or Fleeta; others had known them when
+they were on the streets in Los Angeles. Mrs. Jackson was there with her
+daughter Frances. Inez Williams and Doris Maxwell were also present.
+Those of us who had organized the meeting were extremely moved to see
+how deeply these sisters and brothers had been affected when they heard the
+news of the frame-up. We could feel the enthusiasm which agitated the
+meeting. All these people — Black, some young, some old, workers,
+students, ex-prisoners — all of them were ready to defend and liberate the
+three brothers at Soledad.
+With so many people at the meeting, we couldn't confine the discussion to
+campus activities alone. We simply could not tell the people that they were
+at the wrong meeting; this enormous excitement had to be seized at that
+moment and channeled into active protest. People eagerly volunteered to
+write and mimeograph literature about the case, and others volunteered to
+organize community leafleting teams. We talked about a mass rally to be
+held in a few weeks. The picnic which had been discussed in the Victoria
+Hall meeting was brought up again and volunteers agreed to immediately
+begin work on it.
+Things were in motion. People were caught up in the immense and
+passionate desire to get their teeth into something — something that would
+shake the judges from their benches; that would tear down the indifference
+of greedy public defenders and peel the cruelty from the eyes of prison
+
+guards. They wanted for once to fight the machine that had ground them —
+their fathers, their brothers, their sons — into the dirt. Many of them knew
+George, John or Fleeta — but their anger, like mine, was for every Black
+mother's son whose life had been frozen or destroyed in the Soledads of this
+country. They didn't need to be educated or informed — they knew. The
+gray walls, the sound of chains had touched not only their lives, but the
+lives of all Black people in the country. Somewhere, at some time, they
+knew or knew of someone who wore those chains. They had moved from
+ancient and individual despair, resignation, and savage fury to a Hydraheaded unit that said with one voice: "No more. It stops here." It was
+natural and right that this group become the nucleus toward which the
+permanent Soledad Committee gravitated. And the position I had initially
+accepted — coordinator of campus activities — was soon transformed into
+the leadership position of the entire Los Angeles committee. Though I knew
+that I would have to push myself to the very limits of my capabilities, it did
+not even enter my mind to step down. The exhilaration I felt in
+experiencing all this energy and enthusiasm could have persuaded me to
+drop everything else.
+Within a few short weeks, the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers was
+being talked about all over the Black community, the college campuses and
+Left political circles throughout the city. Our "Free the Soledad Brothers"
+buttons were being worn by many people. A brother in the BSU at UCLA
+had donated some silk-screen posters of the brothers, and a printing
+operation had produced masses of them at no cost to the committee.
+Wherever movement activities were going on — meetings, rallies,
+conferences — and at concerts and other events in the Black community,
+there were always committee activists, armed with literature, posters and
+buttons, inviting people to attend our weekly meetings at the 50th Street
+house.
+At the rally downtown, Penny Jackson and I spoke on behalf of the brothers
+and were joined by other Black community leaders: Masai, then Minister of
+Education of the Black Panther Party, spoke about the frame-up of the
+Soledad Brothers as part of the same trend of repression manifested in the
+police attacks on his party.
+
+At UCLA, we moved to build a Soledad Brothers — Bobby Seale-Ericka
+Huggins Defense Committee, and organized a rally which attracted
+thousands of students. The members of the committee who worked at the
+L.A. County Hospital invited me to speak about the case at a meeting of
+hospital workers. Frances Jackson and I accepted an invitation to speak at
+San Diego State College. It was a good rally, but we had to make a quick
+exit to make sure that the prominently and abundantly posted Minutemen
+did not carry out the threats of violence they had made against us. After that
+rally, I went over to the university in La Jolla to give another speech on the
+Brothers, after which I helped to pull a committee together down there.
+Even though Fania and Sam were still very much entangled in their own
+case, they were eager to build the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee in
+La Jolla.
+Our work was gaining momentum, and its impact on the community was
+growing stronger. The committee's numbers were increasing each week,
+reflecting the growth in strength of the broader defense campaign. I stepped
+up my own personal involvement. No requests for speaking engagements
+were turned down — but I made it clear that any speech I gave would be on
+the Soledad Brothers case, and whatever honorarium I received would be
+donated to the Soledad Brothers Defense Fund. Loyola College in L.A.
+Pasadena City College. University of San Francisco. University of the
+Pacific. Monterey Junior College. University of California at Santa Cruz.
+Palisades High School. There were also the churches and the social groups,
+including sororities and fraternities that were being stimulated by the
+growing political involvement of the sisters and brothers around them.
+I had become so totally immersed in traveling and speaking engagements
+that when a pretrial hearing took place in Monterey County on May 8, I
+could not join the delegation from our committee. I had never seen the
+Soledad Brothers and had been looking forward to attending the hearing, if
+only to catch a glimpse of them. A few days earlier, I had received a
+message from George, saying that they were all eager to see us.
+Kendra, Tamu and a few committee members made the seven-hour drive to
+Salinas, along with the families of the brothers. Having discovered that
+John Clutchette was the same John she had known in high school, Kendra
+
+was especially excited about seeing him after so many years. Reluctantly, I
+stayed home and worked on my course lectures.
+Everyone who had attended the hearing came back to L.A. recharged by
+their contact with the Brothers and angered by what they had seen and
+heard in the courtroom.
+At the conclusion of the hearing, Frances, Penny and Mrs. Jackson had been
+able to visit with George. He wanted me to know, they said, how grateful he
+and the other Brothers were — but that they had all been disappointed that I
+had not come.
+The next hearing was a week off. I planned my schedule in order to take the
+day off for the trip to Salinas. In addition to the families, three of us were
+going up this time. Cheryl Dearmon, from UCLA, and Carl X, from the
+Che-Lumumba Club, were going to ride with me. Dearmon, as her friends
+called her, was active in the BSU at the university and had been one of the
+first to join the campaign around my job. Because she was tall, lightskinned and wore a full natural, she was constantly being mistaken for me
+— even, sometimes, by the police who were assigned to keep me under
+surveillance.
+I had planned to take my trusty old 1959 Rambler, but no one else shared
+my confidence that the car would make it along the steep winding route
+leading to Salinas. Overruled, I agreed to drive Kendra and Franklin's
+station wagon.
+When we left the highway on the Salinas turnoff, we still had a few minutes
+to spare. As I drove through the streets of this city, my eyes instinctively
+searched for Black faces in the cars and among the little groups of sidewalk
+strollers. There was not one Black person in sight. There was a laziness
+about Salinas and a small-town atmosphere which reminded me of the
+South. The white people looked Southern. Their faces seemed to convey
+that familiar combination of inanity and a desperate striving to feel superior
+to something. I wondered whether the many Chicanos whom I saw walking
+the streets had heard about the Soledad Brothers case. This was where
+Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Union had been conducting an
+
+organizing campaign. Perhaps, I thought, we could solicit support from
+them, should the trial take place in Monterey County.
+We had no trouble finding the courthouse. As in most small Southern
+towns, it dominated the downtown area. White and massive, its architecture
+in neoclassical design, the courthouse was surrounded by little parking lots
+filled with sheriff's patrol cars and a whole array of official vehicles with
+Monterey County stamped on their sides. This was the famous Monterey
+County — scenic, luxurious — where thousands of people converged each
+year to relax to the sound of their favorite jazz musicians. The Monterey
+Jazz Festival, Big Sur, Carmel Valley — it all sounded so soothing and
+idyllic. It was such a perfect cover for the Soledad persecution of prisoners,
+the repression of Chicano farm workers, the Aryan Brotherhood, and Judge
+Campbell, who had made no secret of his intention to deliver George, John
+and Fleeta into the hands of their executioner. Being in Salinas was like
+having ventured into enemy territory.
+Trying to be inconspicuous as we looked for a parking space, we ran into
+the Jackson family as they were arriving.
+After following them to the lot behind the courthouse, we all walked into
+the building. Like most courthouses I had seen, this one had a plastic, shiny
+veneer. Its sparkling marble walls and antiseptically clean floor almost
+seemed designed to hide the dirty racist business being conducted there. It
+was as if the sheer weight of the marble, the inhuman tidiness of the halls
+alone spelled justice. Could there be bribery behind pinkveined Vienna
+marble? Could the sound of footsteps on those glistening floors be that of
+any other than the most righteous? How could those massive doors open
+onto any but the most fair and compassionate litigation?
+Here as elsewhere Justice was an image — heavy, slick and wholly
+deceptive.
+The Bay Area Soledad Committee had done an excellent job of mobilizing
+people to attend the hearing. The line outside Judge Campbell's courtroom
+stretched down the other end of the corridor. While it was good to see so
+many people already involved in the campaign, I was distressed by the fact
+that so few Black people were there. (Later, I discovered that the problem
+
+was the composition of the committee — it was active and had attracted
+numbers of enthusiastic members, but the Black people on the committee
+could be counted on one hand.)
+When Georgia saw all the people, she told me that it didn't make sense for
+us to stand in this long line; the courtroom couldn't even seat all those
+already waiting. I had never felt so crushed. After all the shifting of
+schedules to make time for the hearing; after all the feverish running around
+to make sure we arrived on time; after all this, I wasn't going to get in. Full
+of rage, I saw myself standing outside the doors while the hearing took
+place, waiting breathlessly for some news of the proceedings.
+Georgia tried to cheer me up by saying that there was still a chance that
+something could be arranged. Dearmon and I took the hint, and when the
+bailiffs opened the doors for the families, we both slipped inconspicuously
+into the chambers.
+Inside the crowded courtroom, the silence palpitated with the frustration of
+people powerfully stimulated by the tangible presence of the enemy. The
+red-faced bailiffs stationed along the walls stared at us with the hostility
+they had learned for their role. We waited. I hoped that something would
+soon happen to break this incredible tension before it exploded of its own
+accord.
+Despite, or because of, this intense waiting, the sudden appearance of a fat,
+hard-looking uniformed white man startled us all. As he waddled through
+the door behind the bench, he epitomized the fascist atmosphere of this
+hearing. We knew already that Judge Campbell would try to tighten the
+knots of the conspiracy.
+He would try to lock the Brothers more securely into a fate leading
+unwaveringly to the death chamber. The presence of this Soledad guard was
+supposed to instill awe and fear in us. We were supposed to feel impotent
+before the apparatus he represented. We were supposed to already smell the
+odor of cyanide.
+But we did not feel afraid, we did not feel impotent. And we vigorously
+applauded the heroes of our struggle as they strode proudly, courageously,
+
+powerfully into the courtroom. The chains draping their bodies did not
+threaten us; they were there to be broken, destroyed, smashed. The sight of
+those shackles designed to alarm us, to make the prisoners appear
+"dangerous," "mad," only made us itch to tear the metal from their wrists,
+their ankles. I knew that my own anger was shared by all. The bile rose in
+my throat. But more powerful than the taste of outrage was the dominating
+presence of the Brothers, for the Brothers were beautiful. Chained and
+shackled, they were standing tall and they were beautiful.
+George looked even more vibrant than I had imagined. I had thought that
+the scars of the last decade would be immediately apparent. But there was
+not a trace of resignation, not the least stamp of the bondage in which he
+spent all the years of his adult life. He walked tall, with more confidence
+than I had ever seen before. His shoulders were broad and muscular, his
+tremendous arms sculptures of an ancient strength, and his face revealed the
+depth of his understanding of our collective condition and his own refusal
+to be overwhelmed by this oppression. I could hardly believe the refreshing
+beauty of his smile.
+John was the tallest of the three. Dark, with handsome, well-wrought
+features, there was an appealing earthiness about the way he walked into the
+courtroom. And Fleeta, so visibly full of hope. He greeted us with his
+beautiful, unrestrained smile.
+It was so wrong that they should be the ones to wear these clanging chains.
+Whatever the time it took, whatever the energy, these chains would be
+broken.
+The hearing itself was a series of formal denials of every motion the
+defense lawyers tried to argue. Predictably, it was punctuated with the little
+racist quips for which Judge Campbell was already notorious — such as
+telling the spectators to remember that they were not sitting at a barbeque
+table. Amid all the screaming back and forth between prosecution lawyers,
+defense lawyers and the bench, the Brothers were calm and self-contained.
+During the proceedings, George read through a huge sheaf of papers.
+Wearing his black-rimmed glasses and reading with intense concentration,
+he looked very studious, like the teacher he had become for so many
+brothers in prisons up and down the state.
+
+At the end of the morning session, I approached the defense table, hoping to
+exchange a few words with them. The guards said nothing when George
+walked over to the rail to speak to me. There was no time for formal
+introductions, and there was none of the stiffness that usually characterizes
+first meetings. George spoke as if our friendship already had a long, full
+history behind it.
+"Angela, did you get my letter?" he asked.
+"The note you sent to the house last week?" I referred to a short letter on
+prison stationery mailed through official channels, in which he asked me to
+apply for regular correspondence with him.
+"No, I'm talking about a long letter on yellow legal paper. You didn't get it
+yet?"
+"No, I haven't seen it."
+"Damn it. I wanted you to read it before you came in today."
+Obviously, there was something quite important about the letter. I wondered
+what it was.
+"H. probably has the letter. Do you know her?" He spoke rapidly, now that
+our time was running out.
+I shook my head.
+"She's around here somewhere. She shouldn't be too hard to find. But make
+sure you get the letter before you leave."
+"Don't worry, George," I assured him, "if it's around, I'll find it."
+There was so much more I wanted to say. But from the beginning of the
+conversation, the bailiffs had been screaming for the courtroom to be
+cleared. The Soledad guards were growing restless and seemed to be
+looking for a superior to order them to move in on the little crowd around
+the Brothers. Reluctantly, we said our good-byes.
+
+I didn't find the letter that day, but I did manage to find out who H. was. She
+did have the letter, but not with her. We made arrangements for it to reach
+me over the next days.
+
+The first time I saw Jonathan Jackson, he reminded me of my youngest
+brother, Reginald. Like Reggie, he was tall, light-skinned, with a full head
+of sandy- colored hair. I had been invited to speak at the annual conference
+of the L.A. Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. The organizers of the
+conference had selected the prison struggle as its major theme and had
+asked the families of the three Soledad Brothers to attend. Mrs. Jackson,
+Penny and Jonathan, together with Inez Williams and some of John
+Clutchette's relatives, participated in the workshop on prisons and political
+prisoners.
+Sometime after the May 16 hearing, Georgia and Penny Jackson asked me
+to attend a meeting of the Democratic Club in Pasadena, which was headed
+by Don Wheeldin, a Black man who had a long history of involvement in
+progressive causes. He wanted to raise the issue of the Soledad Brothers
+case before this meeting in order to appeal to the membership for financial
+and political support. A sister named Fannie, who was a student at UCLA
+and one of the leading activists in the Soledad Committee, had driven us
+there. Since we had to drop Georgia and Penny off when the meeting was
+over, they invited us to stop by the house for coffee.
+It was late when we arrived, and everyone in the Jackson home had already
+gone to bed. The four of us were sitting around the dining-room table
+discussing the meeting we had just left and waiting for the coffee to brew,
+when Jonathan appeared in the doorway, in his bathrobe and rubbing the
+sleep from his eyes. With a faint smile, he mumbled, "What's all the noise
+about? Can't anyone get some sleep around here?" And he walked on in,
+took a seat at the table and joined in the conversation.
+This was the first time I had exchanged more than a few words of greeting
+with Jonathan. George had mentioned him in the letter, praising him for his
+intelligence and especially for his unshakable commitment to him. He had
+said that Jon was somewhat withdrawn and had asked me to try to get him
+
+interested in attending the Soledad meetings at Kendra and Franklin's. I
+decided to talk to him about the committee right then.
+Jonathan only wanted to talk about George. All of his interests, all of his
+activities were bound up in some way with his brother in Soledad. At
+sixteen, Jonathan was carrying a burden which most adults would refuse.
+The last time he had seen George on the "free" side of the walls, he was a
+seven-year-old. From that time to this, there had been the visits overseen by
+armed guards in Chino, Folsom, San Quentin, Soledad. And the letters. The
+letters in which they had developed the relationship which should have
+unfolded at home, in the streets, in the gym, on the baseball field. But
+because it had been cramped into prison visitors' cubicles, into two-page,
+censored letters, the whole relationship revolved around a single aim —
+how to get George out here, on this side of the walls.
+Jonathan was extremely proud of the relationship he had with his brother,
+proud of its maturity and of the trust George had in him. In the course of
+our conversation, he brought out a thick sheaf of letters he had received
+from the various prisons his brother had inhabited over the last ten years.
+He wanted us to read George's descriptions of the brutal treatment he and
+the other brothers had received at the hands of the prison guards.
+Without ever having been involved in mass movements, he instinctively
+understood the need to get large numbers of people pushing for the freedom
+of his brother. As he talked about his experiences at Pasadena High School,
+where he was finishing his third year, he bitterly complained about the
+apathy of most of his classmates. They didn't know what struggle was all
+about, he said — particularly the white students, who were in the majority
+at the school. He showed Fannie and me an article which he had written in
+the school newspaper, running down the facts of the Soledad Brothers case
+and criticizing the students for not being involved in issues such as this.
+The article was brilliantly written. Like George, he expressed himself in
+powerful and compelling language. Recalling that George had said in his
+letter that we should try to attract Jonathan to the work of the defense
+committee, I told him that we were sorely in need of good writers to get the
+literature of the committee together. As Fannie and I were leaving, I said we
+were expecting to see him at the next meeting.
+
+Jon was present at the next meeting on 50th Street and after that he rarely
+missed a session. He never said much during the meetings, but when it
+came to producing material and distributing it, he was a dedicated worker.
+As the Soledad Committee gained in influence, and as its work became
+more complicated and demanding, I began to spend a great deal of time
+with the Jackson family. Frances, Penny or Georgia and I frequently had
+joint speaking engagements in order to publicize the activities of the
+committee. More often than not, Jonathan accompanied us. We grew closer,
+and I came to look upon him not only as a brother in struggle, but as
+something like a blood brother as well.
+My communications with George became more regular. We too grew closer.
+As we agreed and disagreed with each other on political questions, a
+personal intimacy also began to develop between us. In his letters, which
+dealt for the most part with subjects such as the need to popularize
+communist ideas among the Black masses, the need to develop the prison
+movement, the role of women in the movement, etc., George also talked
+about himself, his past life, his own personal desires and aspirations, his
+fantasies about women, his feelings about me. "I've been thinking about
+women a lot lately," he once wrote. "Is there anything sentimental or
+otherwise wrong with that? That couldn't be. It's never bothered me too
+much before, the sex thing. I would do my exercise and the hundreds of
+katas, stay busy with something . . ."
+I came to know George not only through the letters we exchanged, but also
+through the people who were close to him — through Jon and the rest of the
+Jackson family, through John Thorne, who, as his lawyer, saw him
+regularly. The closer I felt to George, the more I found myself revealing to
+those who knew George a side of me I usually kept hidden except from the
+most intimate of friends. In the letters I managed to get to him I responded
+not only to the political questions he posed; I also told him that my feelings
+for him had grown deeper than a political commitment to struggle for his
+freedom; I felt a personal commitment as well. George knew about the tons
+of hate mail which poured into my office at UCLA demanding that I be
+expelled from the university. He knew about the many threats which had
+been made on my life and was concerned for my safety. George was aware
+
+that whenever I appeared in a public situation, sisters and brothers from the
+Che-Lumumba Club did security duty. Yet, he didn't think this was enough.
+From his own experience — behind walls — he was convinced one could
+never be too vigilant. Besides, the sisters and brothers from Che-Lumumba
+were necessarily abstract for him. He had never seen them and knew them
+only through my letters. He knew and trusted Jonathan much more than
+anyone else on this side of the walls. He wrote me that he wanted Jon to
+stay with me as much as possible. Jon also received a message from his
+brother asking him to make sure that I was secure from the racists and
+reactionaries who might try to make me a martyr.
+When George's book Soledad Brother was being prepared for publication,
+he asked me to read over the manuscript and make suggestions for
+improvements. The evening I received it, I thought I would skim through a
+few of the letters, saving the bulk of the book for another time. But once I
+got started, it was impossible to put the manuscript down until I had seen
+every word — from the first letter to the last. I was astounded. The
+formidable magnetism of the letters came not only from their content, not
+only from the way they traced George's personal and political evolution
+over the last five years — but even more from the way they articulated so
+clearly, so vividly, the condition of our people inside prison walls and
+outside. And in several passages George stated so precisely, so naturally, the
+reasons our liberation could only be achieved through socialism.
+
+On June 15, one of the most important of all the pretrial motions in the
+Soledad case was scheduled to be heard in Salinas. The lawyers were going
+to move for a change of venue. I drove up with Mrs. Jackson, Frances and
+Jonathan. Two other carloads of our committee members had also been
+mobilized to attend the hearing. Fannie Haughton, my sister Fania, Mitsuo
+Takahashi, Jamala and several others were there to represent the L.A.
+movement.
+We had expected a fierce courtroom battle, but we had not expected the
+judge to be so audacious as to ban the Brothers themselves from the scene
+of the hearing. Apparently the Salinas officials had been frightened by the
+sight of large numbers of people from all parts of the state who had come to
+
+attend the hearing. The judge had issued an order prohibiting the Soledad
+guards from bringing the Brothers to the courthouse.
+When the lawyers and the spectators learned about this ploy, pandemonium
+broke loose. The lawyers were screaming at the judge and the audience
+joined in. In the midst of all this, Fay Stender shouted that we were all there
+only to assure that the trial was moved to a place where the Brothers would
+stand a better chance of being fairly judged. By now, the judge was in a
+state of total confusion. He simply did not know how to cope with the
+supporters in the courtroom. Answering Fay, he screamed something like
+"All right, you can have your change of venue. Where do you want the trial
+to take place?"
+"San Francisco," she immediately responded, thinking, as she later told us,
+that there was not the slightest possibility that he would accept her
+suggestion.
+"All right," the judge said now, almost in a state of panic, "I am ordering
+that the trial be moved to San Francisco." With this, and without even
+formally adjourning court, he left the bench and headed for his chambers.
+We rejoiced over our victory. We had won the change of venue, which we
+expected would be denied, as all the other motions had been. The victory
+was important: a trial in San Francisco would be far more public, it would
+require far less effort to fill the courtroom, and it would be far easier to
+mobilize demonstrators to stand vigilance each day.
+For the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, the months of June and July
+were filled with spirited activity. All of us worked assiduously to publicize
+and expand the movement for the freedom of George, John and Fleeta.
+On June 19, our L.A. group sponsored a demonstration and rally outside the
+State Building, which houses the Department of Corrections and the Parole
+Board. Quite coincidentally, this happened to be the day when the Regents
+were meeting to deliberate on the question of my position at UCLA. This
+was both a boon and a disadvantage.
+
+On the one hand, it meant that we would receive far more publicity than we
+had hoped for, since all the reporters seeking my response to the Regents'
+decision would find their way to the demonstration. But on the other hand,
+it could prove fatal to the goal of our demonstration if it overshadowed the
+cause of the Soledad Brothers.
+Before we went down to the State Building that morning, I decided that
+whatever the decision of the Regents, and regardless of the number of
+reporters around, I would forestall all comment on that situation until we
+had completed our actions around the Soledad Brothers.
+At the rally, Masai Hewitt, Minister of Education of the Black Panther
+Party, spoke on behalf of his imprisoned comrades, Bobby and Ericka,
+Huey and the scores of others so that the Soledad case would be seen as one
+of the crests of a mounting wave of repression. Since Josef had done time in
+Soledad, we asked him to describe his experiences behind the walls in order
+to give people an understanding of the forces which had led to the frame-up
+of the Soledad Brothers. Jane Fonda, who had eagerly agreed to participate
+in the rally, was on hand to make the appeal for funds. I spoke of the work
+of our committee in organizing for the freedom of the Brothers. I told how
+we had come to the conclusion that it was not enough to fight around
+individual cases. We had to do that and much more. A movement was
+burgeoning behind the walls, and sisters and brothers needed our support
+and solidarity. The demands we were going to present to the Adult
+Authority reflected our resolve to expand our movement; they were
+demands on behalf of all prisoners.
+With my speech, the rally was over. We fell into formation and marched
+across the street to the building housing the California Adult Authority —
+the Prison Parole Board. There were hundreds in our ranks as we poured
+into the building, into the elevators, and streamed several flights up the
+stairs until we reached the offices of the Adult Authority. For the occasion
+we had printed posters demanding the freedom of the Soledad Brothers,
+Bobby and Ericka, and all political prisoners and listing our demands to the
+Department of Corrections and the Adult Authority. All along our route, we
+had pasted the posters on the walls.
+
+The crowd was beautiful in its varied composition: Black, Chicano, Asian
+and white. There were young people, many over thirty and some much
+older. Workers, students, and professionals were in our ranks. A fairly good
+representation from UCLA included the chairman of the Philosophy
+Department, Donald Kalish, who could always be called upon to lend his
+support to progressive causes. I was extremely happy to see that the two
+young Black women who were clerical workers in the department —
+Connie and Betty — had come out to participate. Some passers-by had also
+joined in the demonstration.
+A small-scale confrontation took place between us and the Adult Authority
+people when we demanded a meeting with the members of the board.
+Surrounded by hundreds of chanting demonstrators, they were searching for
+some way out. They insisted that the board members were not in Los
+Angeles, but rather were meeting in some other part of the state. When they
+had learned of our intentions to stage this demonstration on the date of their
+monthly meeting in L.A., they had probably moved the meeting elsewhere.
+We were not so much interested in pushing the confrontation further. We
+had served notice on them of our intentions.
+Not long after the demonstration had come alive, several reporters informed
+me that the Regents were done with their meeting and had already released
+their decision: I was not going to be rehired for the coming year. Now that
+our demonstration had been successfully concluded, we prepared to hold a
+press conference on the sidewalk outside the State Building. It seemed that
+the news media had been following a conscious policy of minimal or no
+coverage of the Soledad Brothers movement. I was determined that they not
+get away with it this time. Thus I made a point of phrasing all my responses
+in such a way that each sentence said something about the relationship
+between my firing and the repression of the Soledad Brothers and other
+political prisoners. The Regents could no longer invoke the statute
+prohibiting the employment of Communists at the university; the court
+injunction against the Regents on this issue was still in effect. Moreover,
+they had been unable to produce any evidence that I had been delinquent in
+the performance of my academic duties. Not even the secret ad hoc
+committee of professors appointed by the Regents to investigate my
+
+classroom activity had come up with anything the Regents considered
+useful.
+Thus the Board of Regents was left only with the notion that my political
+speeches outside the classroom were "unbefitting a university professor."
+Interestingly, this decision was announced on the very day of one of these
+speeches in which I had "unbefittingly" charged high government officials,
+including Ronald Reagan himself, with participating in and condoning a
+conspiracy to suppress all radical political activists, particularly those in
+prison.
+Members of our Defense Committee were all pleased to learn that the
+photograph accompanying the story about my firing had been snapped
+while we were walking the picket line. It carried the message of our fight
+through the international wire services to people all over the world: I was
+carrying a sign reading save the soledad brothers from legal lynching and
+Jonathan, walking close behind me, carried a sign reading end political
+repression in prisons.
+A few days after our June 19 demonstration, a statewide meeting of the
+Soledad Defense Committee took place in San Jose at the home of Joan and
+Betsy Hammer. On the agenda was the question of strategy for the
+upcoming San Francisco trial. The committee in San Francisco was not
+nearly as strong as it should have been, especially in the Black community.
+It was obvious that there had to be more grass-roots work in San Francisco
+and Oakland in order to lay the groundwork for the large-scale participation
+in the events around the trial. I was asked whether I would consider
+spending some time in San Francisco during the summer to help with these
+tasks. I said I had to think it over very carefully.
+Back in Los Angeles, our committee held cocktail parties to raise funds. We
+sponsored a showing of a film on Vietnam, The Year of the Pig; there was
+quite a successful mass rally at the Unitarian Church on Eighth Street. One
+of the Soledad Committee's most outstanding fund-raisers was the art
+auction we pulled together. A number of artists, Black and white,
+professional and amateur, agreed to donate their works. Two brothers who
+operated an art gallery in the Crenshaw area of L.A. (and who, incidentally,
+had attended nursery school with me in Birmingham) readily agreed to let
+
+us use their place for the showing. We planned many more such events for
+the remainder of the summer and the fall.
+As all these activities unfolded, the academic part of my life was also
+demanding attention. Knowing that under ordinary circumstances — that is,
+if the UCLA affair had not exploded into an all-consuming aspect of my life
+— the dissertation would have already been done, I now wanted to get it
+behind me as quickly as possible. By the end of the summer, it absolutely
+had to be finished. This was the goal I set for myself. My work was going
+to be facilitated by the research grant I had received from the university for
+the months of July, August and September.
+While there was no question of my ceasing to be active in the Soledad
+Committee, I did want to pare down my political involvements to a
+minimum. I began to make certain practical changes. In the apartment, I
+tried to reestablish my study, which had been taken over by the work of the
+committee. I moved the mimeograph machine and the other materials being
+used by the committee from my study into our adjacent dining room. I had
+thought that I would then be able to develop a work routine involving at
+least eight hours of study a day. But by the summer our apartment on 45th
+had become a real center, an office and a "crash pad." People constantly
+dropped by to inform themselves about the work of the committee — and
+this was good, because it meant that we had created a movement which was
+attracting many people in the community. Tamu's husband, Malcolm, had
+been released from prison and was now living at the house, and a friend of
+theirs from Canada was sleeping on the couch. Baby Kendra had reached
+the age where she required a great deal of attention. Whenever she was
+around, I simply could not resist the temptation to play with her. All this
+added up to the fact that the only time I could accomplish serious work on
+my dissertation was after everyone in the house was asleep. Sometimes I
+worked from one or two A.M. until six or seven. But since I never slept
+during the day, it became impossible for me to keep up this pace.
+Feeling very frustrated about my work, I decided to look for a small,
+inexpensive apartment where I could hide away during the hours I wanted
+to work. The place I finally found was located on 35th Street, just ten
+blocks away from the other apartment. The rent was only seventy-five
+
+dollars, which meant I could still pay half the rent at the other place and
+continue to stay there when I needed to. Remembering the experience of the
+phone on 45th ringing at all hours of the day and night, I decided to keep
+this apartment free of its incursions, receiving all my calls on 45th.
+Since I couldn't move in until the first of July, Georgia Jackson invited me
+to spend the intervening time out at their house in Pasadena so I'd have a
+quiet place to work. On the first, I moved my books and papers, my desk
+and typewriter and a bed into the new place. Over the next month, I allowed
+nothing to interrupt my studying, with the one exception of the Soledad
+Committee.
+Around the middle of July, I made a short trip to the Bay Area to speak
+about the Soledad Brothers at a meeting of activists from various
+organizations in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. Since the venue of
+the trial had been changed, the Brothers had been transferred from Soledad
+to San Quentin. Jonathan and his father were driving up to see George
+around the time of the meeting, so we all went up together.
+The meeting was being held at the office of the National Lawyers Guild.
+Together with Fay Stender and other members of the Bay Area Soledad
+Committee, I spoke of the importance of broadening the movement around
+the Brothers, especially in the months and weeks preceding the trial. The
+Left throughout the Bay Area had to be mobilized, and there had to be a
+concentrated organizing effort focused on the Black community. A brother
+from the Black Panther Party assured us that they would assume a large part
+of the responsibility of getting masses of Black people involved in the
+attempt to save the Brothers' lives.
+Present at the meeting were representatives of the Defense Committee,
+which was doing a highly successful job developing support for a group of
+Chicano activists on trial at that time — Los Siete de la Raza. We agreed
+upon a loose coalition between our groups and decided that we would
+launch the new era of our work to free political prisoners with a mass rally
+in San Francisco on August 12. Charles Garry, attorney for Los Siete,
+eagerly agreed to speak at the rally, and I said I would speak as well.
+
+George's lawyer, John Thorne, had filed a motion with a San Francisco
+judge requesting that I be recognized as George's legal investigator —
+which was essentially the same thing I had done for Hekima. Since I was
+there, we both went to the courthouse in order to argue the motion that day.
+On the same floor where John was arguing the motion, the trial of Los Siete
+was in session. I sat in for a while, made the sign of solidarity to the
+brothers and talked for a few minutes with Charles Garry about the
+coordination of the work of the committees around the two groups of
+political prisoners.
+While I was in the Bay Area, the Soledad Committee activists once again
+raised the question of my spending a little time up there to help with the
+organizing of the committee. Having just found the apartment where I could
+devote most of my days to my dissertation, I was hesitant to seriously
+entertain the possibility of dismantling everything again. But the Bay Area
+Committee was not in the best of shape and could no doubt benefit from the
+experiences we had accumulated in Los Angeles. I told them that I would
+think about it, but in the event that I could not come, I would try to
+persuade one of the more experienced Black members of our group to come
+up instead.
+I was thinking about my roommate Tamu.
+Around the beginning of August, I had decided that it might be possible for
+me to spend a few weeks in the Bay Area, particularly since the library on
+the Berkeley campus was far more complete in works relating to the topic
+of my thesis than the UCLA library, and I was going to have to do the last
+part of my research there anyway. I thought it might be possible to spend
+some time in the Bay Area, dividing my days between the University and
+the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. Around the beginning of August
+I went up to see about a place and check out the library.
+
+AUGUST 7, 1970
+Courtroom number one, presided over by Judge Harold Haley, was in
+session. On trial was James McClain, a prisoner from San Quentin who had
+
+been charged with assault in connection with a recent incident at the prison.
+Acting as his own attorney, he had already begun to present his defense.
+When Jonathan entered the courtroom and took a seat in the spectator
+section, Ruchell Magee, another San Quentin prisoner and a witness for the
+defense, was being examined by McClain. Jonathan sat there for a while.
+Then he stood up, a carbine in his hand, and directed everyone in the
+courtroom to freeze. McClain and Ruchell joined Jonathan, as did William
+Christmas, who was waiting to testify in a nearby holding cell.
+Some of the sheriff's people later testified that the brothers shouted out,
+"Free the Soledad Brothers!" Others claimed they heard "Free Our brothers
+at Folsom!" and yet others, "Free All Political Prisoners!" The prosecutor
+maintained that the purpose of the revolt was to have the Soledad Brothers
+released from prison.
+The judge, a shotgun taped to his neck, the district attorney prosecuting the
+case and several jurors were led by the brothers into a van parked in the lot
+outside. A San Quentin guard fired on the van. Then a barrage of shots tore
+into the van and when the smoke had cleared, all except one inside had
+either been killed or wounded. Judge Haley was dead. D.A. Garry Thomas
+was wounded. A woman juror was wounded. McClain and Christmas were
+dead. Ruchell was wounded.
+And Jon . . .
+When I learned about the revolt later that evening, when I saw the Marin
+County scene on television, I kept repeating out loud, "There must be some
+mistake. That can't be Jonathan, not our Jon. It can't be. He was so alive, so
+strong."
+Jonathan had just turned seventeen. A few months earlier, George had
+written me:
+Jon is a young brother and he is just a little withdrawn, but he is
+intelligent and loyal. . . . He is at that dangerous age where confusion
+sets in and sends brothers either to the undertaker or to prison. He is a
+little better off than I was and than most brothers his age. He learns
+fast and can distinguish the real from the apparent, provided someone
+
+takes the time to present it. Tell the brothers never to mention his green
+eyes and his skin tone. He is very sensitive about it and he will either
+fight or withdraw. Do you understand? You know that some of us don't
+bother to be righteous with each other. He has had a great deal of
+trouble these last few years behind that issue. It isn't right. He is a loyal
+and beautiful black man-child. I love him.
+And Jon's feelings for George had overshadowed everything else in his life.
+Jon was still so young, yet I don't think he had ever really been a child. He
+had been robbed of his childhood by a society that had kept his brother
+behind bars for almost as long as he could remember.
+Seven is the age when most boys play with bright-red plastic water guns.
+But at seven, Jon knew that guns were big and gray and that when they
+were drawn from a prison guard's holster and the trigger was pulled they did
+not eject a fresh stream of water. They shot bullets that brought streams of
+blood and death. Death. From the age of seven on, Jonathan saw George
+only during prison visits. He saw his brother living with the reality of death,
+every day, every hour, every moment.
+During the few months of our friendship, I don't think I realized how
+wracked he must have been by that decade of accumulated frustrations, by
+that terrible sense of impotence before the walls, the bars, the guns, and
+those tidy courtrooms presided over by fastidious white judges.
+Now the enemy had closed in on Jon, who had tried to make some dent in
+the formidable prison system which was turning his brother — all his
+brothers and sisters — around and around, faster and faster in a vicious
+orbit of misery and brutality, frame-ups and assassinations.
+In those days following the revolt in the courthouse, I tried to dispel my
+blind rage over Jonathan's death in order for my anger to become
+constructive. I knew that there was only one way to avenge Jon's death —
+through struggle, political struggle, through people in motion, fighting for
+all those behind the walls.
+Not to fight in this way was to leave Jonathan forever lying on the asphalt
+— lying there in his own blood as though that was where he belonged. Not
+
+to fight would be to forever deny him — all the young and unborn
+Jonathans — the beauty of lush green mountains instead of cold gray bars,
+the freshness of a trip to the seaside, instead of a dismal journey into a
+Soledad Prison visiting room. A childhood full of smiles and nice toys and
+older brothers who are beautiful, strong and free . . .
+
+PART FIVE: Walls
+The hand between the candle and the wall
+Grows large on the wall. . . .
+It must be that the hand
+Has a will to grow larger on the wall,
+To grow larger and heavier than
+the wall. . .
+WALLACE STEVENS
+
+W
+
+DECEMBER 22, 1970
+
+hen the plane landed in California after the twelve-hour extradition
+trip across country, there were as many armed men waiting outside
+as there had been on the East Coast airfield to oversee my departure. The
+sheriff's deputies and policemen seemed to be lost among the hundreds of
+men wearing the uniforms of the United States Air Force. They were
+stationed throughout the area and lined both sides of the route taken by the
+caravan as it sped through the base.
+The trip lasted ten or fifteen minutes. Then the caravan turned into the
+Marin County Civic Center, which I recognized from newspaper
+photographs taken since the August 7 revolt. The car in which I was riding
+drove into a garage, and a steel gate immediately banged down. On the
+other side of the gate, a crowd had gathered, and when I got out of the car,
+they let out a clamorous "Free Angela Davis and all political prisoners!"
+Still handcuffed, I made the sign of solidarity with a double fist.
+Although I hadn't recognized any of the people, their presence rejuvenated
+me, like the roars of support in New York on the day of my arrest. A few
+seconds after I had raised my fists, I was pushed into an elevator that
+opened into the booking area of the jail upstairs. And for the third time
+
+since I was arrested, I went through the same ritual: the forms, mug shots
+and fingerprints.
+The difference between the Marin County Jail and the Women's House of
+Detention in New York was stark. Seeing the House of D. for the first time,
+I had been repelled by its consummate filth. The Marin County Jail, on the
+other hand, was strikingly, antiseptically clean. There were no mice
+scurrying about the shiny floors. There were no graffiti on the newly
+painted walls. Whereas the House of D. had been dingy, dim and dungeonlike, this jail was painfully bright. I was used to the sixty-watt bulb in my
+New York cell; my eyes burned from the bright fluorescent lights here.
+During the booking I noticed a set system of small television screens behind
+the desk. The entire jail was obviously subject to the surveillance of closedcircuit TV. I wondered whether I would find a camera in my cell.
+Once the booking process was over, and I had made sure they gave me
+receipts for everything I had brought from New York, the matron signaled
+for the door at the end of the corridor to be opened. A button was pressed;
+the metal door slid heavily into the wall. This mechanical perfection was
+much more frightening than the archaic fixtures of the House of D.
+With an entourage of female guards, I walked down a corridor lined with
+iron doors, windowless except for small square peepholes. At the end of the
+corridor we turned right and faced two single cells separated by a tiny
+shower cubicle which opened directly onto the corridor. A TV camera,
+mounted on the ceiling, pointed in the direction of the cells.
+The head matron unlocked the last of the two cells. As I walked in, my
+feelings were ambivalent: anger at being subjected to the will of racist
+jailers again; slight relief at finally being alone with time to think.
+Once the gates were locked behind me and the matrons had left me alone
+(although they were probably watching me on TV), I examined my
+surroundings. Larger than my cell in the House of D., this one was about
+seven feet square. Extending from one wall was a metal slab with a threeinch mattress on top. On the opposite wall was a pale-gray combined toiletand-sink fixture — the water from the basin drained down into the toilet
+
+bowl. To brush your teeth or wash your face, it was necessary to stand over
+the open toilet bowl. The only other furnishings in the cell were a twelveinch shelf with two clothes hooks underneath and a small metal table
+attached to a round wooden stool.
+I stretched out on the little mattress and tried to imagine what was
+happening on the other side of the walls. I hadn't had a chance to speak to
+either Margaret or John after the Supreme Court ruled that I was to be
+returned to California. I was certain that they would both come out
+immediately, but as yet there was no word. No word from them or from
+anyone else.
+I was still lying there, staring at the ceiling, trying to sort out my thoughts,
+when a matron came to say that a lawyer was waiting to see me. Expecting
+to see Margaret or John, I followed the matron into the lawyers' visiting
+booth. On the other side of the metal screen was Terrence Kayo Hallinan, a
+Bay Area lawyer who had been involved in the defense committee, and
+Carolyn Craven, whom I had known from Los Angeles, who was at that
+time a reporter for the local educational television network. Carolyn had
+been able to get in as Kayo's legal assistant. When the jailers learned
+afterward that she was also a news reporter, they announced that only
+"attorneys of record" would be allowed in the jail. That meant that until
+Margaret or John arrived from New York, I would literally be held
+incommunicado.
+With nothing to keep me occupied but the thoughts racing through my head,
+I wondered about my brothers in San Quentin. I knew that not far from this
+jail was that medieval fortress, surrounded by water, where they were
+holding George captive. Did he know that I was now in California? Perhaps
+I would soon receive a message from him and the brothers with him in the
+Adjustment Center, the very worst section of the prison. Thinking about
+them, reflecting upon our common predicament, I was able to rise above the
+depressing and threatening solitude
+I did not sleep that night — and I did not even try to shut out the
+speculations about my future, about George's, John's, Fleeta's, Ruchell's. I
+knew the gas chamber was waiting for us all. Then, like an omen from hell
+sent to verify my wildest fears, a woman's screams shattered the silence. I
+
+could feel my heart beating like a frightened caged bird. In between her
+bloodcurdling screams she seemed to be pleading: "Let me out of here! Let
+me out of here!" Her shrieks were made more terrifying and disorienting
+because I was unfamiliar with my surroundings. Except for my cell, the one
+next door, and the visitor's booth down the hall, I had no idea of where
+things were. The screaming continued. The cries were so close and I felt so
+powerless. Darkness lay on me like a coffin lid, closing my first day at
+Marin County Jail.
+Early the next morning Margaret and John came in to see me. Shortly
+afterward I was led down the maze of underground corridors through which
+prisoners were taken from their cells to their court appearances. My
+arraignment on the charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy was
+scheduled for that morning. Margaret and John requested a continuance for
+the arraignment, explaining that the legal team was just in the process of
+being formed. After the presiding judge of Marin County granted our
+request, he officially announced that he, as well as all the other judges in the
+county, had disqualified himself because his relationship to Judge Haley
+would probably prevent him from presiding fairly over the case. He then
+handed down a gag order designed to prohibit me, the lawyers, and anyone
+directly or tangentially connected with the case from making public
+statements about evidence which might come up during the course of the
+suit.
+Everything was modern and spotless in this courtroom.
+The lights, shining much brighter than daylight, accentuated the newness. In
+this neat, pretty room, I thought, men and women are sent to dirty cells,
+some to the death chamber just across the way at San Quentin. As I had
+learned from press accounts, the courtrooms — and the entire Marin
+County Civic Center — had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. For the
+courtrooms, he had used a motif of circles. In the one where my first court
+appearance took place, the ceiling had a large round panel with lights
+encircling it. The fixtures of the room were arranged to correspond with the
+circle above — the judge's bench, the jury box, and the tables for the
+prosecution and defense — all were strategically placed to form a circle.
+
+Later I discovered that in designing the courtrooms, Wright had had
+something very definite in mind. He wanted to depict the nature of justice
+in the United States. The participants in a trial, he believed, should not be
+seen as struggling against one another. On the contrary, judge, jury,
+prosecutor and defendant are holding hands around a circle in the common
+pursuit of justice.
+When I learned about Wright's hand-holding message, I thought about the
+game we used to play as children — "Ring around the rosie, Pocket full of
+posies . . . Ashes, Ashes . . ." — and the way the game itself picked certain
+children to be "out." There was absolutely nothing I had in common with
+the men sitting around the courtroom circle. My comrades, my friends and I
+— we all saw these men as the manipulators of a judicial game that was
+rigged against me. We therefore had to continually strengthen the people's
+movement that was our only hope of beating the odds. Two days later, in
+fact, the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (NUCFAD), led
+by my sister Fania and my comrade Franklin, held a Christmas day vigil
+outside the Civic Center. The walls of my windowless cell were far too
+thick for their chants to penetrate. But I could feel them and I felt happy and
+strong because of them.
+
+***
+
+Now that I was in Marin County, I had to prepare to face my accusers on
+their ground. A legal team had to be formed. John was planning to go back
+to the East Coast once the question of the lawyers was squared away, but
+Margaret was going to stay. I would have to have complete and total
+confidence in my lawyers; in a very literal sense, I was entrusting my life to
+them. Margaret and I already had established that deep trust, for we loved
+each other as sisters.
+There were many criteria which I hoped the other members of the legal
+team would satisfy. Naturally I wanted lawyers who would be compatible
+with me and with each other. We would be spending many months working
+
+together. However, there was one criterion that outweighed all the others. I
+had to have lawyers who agreed that the case was a political one. They had
+to be sensitive to the fact that the trial would be political in every respect.
+Moreover, the courtroom battle would be interwoven with a battle
+conducted by a mass movement. The lawyers would have to understand
+from the outset that what happened in the courtroom would of necessity be
+related to and coordinated with the campaign in the streets.
+Hayward Burns, the president of the National Conference of Black
+Lawyers, had put me in touch with Howard Moore. On the day I was
+extradited from New York, I had talked with Howard, who had flown in
+from Atlanta at my request. It was clear during our first conversation in the
+New York jail that in trying civil rights cases in the South, he saw his
+lawyer role as part of a larger effort to defend oppressed people who were
+fighting for their freedom. When Howard talked about the struggle, there
+was an intensity about him that convinced me that the most important thing
+in his life was the liberation of Black people. He understood immediately
+why I thought it was important for me to participate directly in the defense.
+The evidence being mounted against me was political evidence: my
+speeches at rallies, my leadership in the mass movement to free the Soledad
+Brothers, my membership in the Communist Party. My politics were at
+stake and it was up to me to defend them. Howard had agreed that one of
+the first motions we filed should call for my participation in the legal team.
+Aside from Howard's strong political commitment and his expertise as a
+lawyer, he was also a warm human being. I liked him. The decision was
+made. Margaret called his office to ask whether he would be willing to take
+on the major responsibility of the case. He agreed at once and Franklin left
+for Atlanta to finalize the agreement. The first hurdle had been surmounted.
+I felt tremendously relieved.
+Although Howard had agreed to shoulder the main burden of the trial,
+previous commitments in his Atlanta law practice prevented his coming to
+California permanently before the beginning of April. During the three
+intervening months, we needed lawyers to work on the pretrial motions.
+And for the team that would eventually try the case, we needed one or two
+
+lawyers who had been admitted to practice, on a regular basis, before the
+California Bar.
+We asked three lawyers to join the team for purposes of filing and arguing
+the pretrial motions: Al Brotsky, who was a partner in Charles Garry's firm
+and whose office he put at the disposal of the other lawyers; Michael Ugar,
+whom I had known while he taught in the law school at UCLA; and Dennis
+Roberts, a friend and colleague of Michael's. Later, Sheldon Otis, a wellknown trial lawyer from Detroit, also joined the team.
+The physical arrangement of the jail seemed to be designed to utilize the
+minimum amount of space for everything. The little lawyers' booth in the
+women's section could accommodate one lawyer uncomfortably; two could
+squeeze in if they weren't too large, one sitting and the other standing
+behind the chair. My side of the metal screen was equally small —
+whenever I was forced to sit in the booth for any length of time, it took me
+some time to conquer the claustrophobia I had developed in jail.
+At first I was thoroughly confused by the legal jargon with which the
+lawyers discussed the case. When I was sealed in the tiny booth, these
+mysterious terms would whirl around in my head. "One of our first motions
+has to be the ‘Nine ninety-five,'" someone said. What did a "Nine ninetyfive" have to do with my life and the attempt to rescue it from the death
+chamber? I hadn't the slightest idea what it meant.
+The lack of space for lawyers' meetings was the cause of the first major
+skirmish with the jailers. The issue was as clear as the legitimacy of our
+complaint. If they did not furnish us with some opportunity to meet as a
+group, they would be denying me a basic, constitutional right — the right to
+counsel of my own choice. But the overseers of the jail made it clear that
+they did not feel compelled to respect my rights, and they were not going to
+yield an inch without a fierce struggle. Jails are thoughtless places.
+Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by their administrations;
+no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different
+from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules
+and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet
+digested). Before we could even approach the major battle for my life — to
+create weapons to slay the monster, as it were, we had to spend endless
+
+energy fighting minnows. Because of the rules by which prisons survive,
+the only wellspring of passion left to their administrators is the proximity of
+pain and death. Those quickest to kill were always those most outraged by
+the infraction of a rule.
+After they agreed to provide us with a place for a lawyers' conference, they
+made arrangements for a heavily "secured" meeting in what turned out to be
+the sheriff's staff room. It was the captain who came to fetch me,
+surrounded by uniformed and armed guards. Grim-faced guards were
+stationed along the way. It seemed to me that they had mobilized half their
+police force. Who could believe that they seriously regarded me as such an
+enormous threat? It was much more likely that they were trying to make me
+appear to be so dangerous that scores of guards were needed to hold me
+down. It was part of the conspiracy to find me guilty before I even had a
+chance to be tried. The closer we got to the staff room, where there were
+windows and doors to the outside world, the greater the number of guards
+and the smaller the space between them. Just before entering the meeting
+room, I had to walk down a narrow aisle created by two shoulder-toshoulder rows of deputies. Did they think I was going to run for it? It was
+McGuire Air Force Base all over again. But then it struck me that these men
+were probably even more dangerous than the ones at the base in New
+Jersey: they were the same men who had been disarmed and held at bay by
+Jonathan — by a seventeen-year-old man-child. No doubt they were
+thinking about the August 7 revolt. No doubt their behavior was motivated
+by a combination of shame and embarrassment and an obsessive yearning
+for vengeance.
+
+JANUARY 5, 1971
+At the push of a button, the iron door closing off the women's section slid
+open. I was on my way to the courtroom where I would be formally charged
+by the state of California with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. After the
+long walk through the underground prisoners' corridors, I was directed into
+a holding cell just outside the courtroom. A few minutes later, Captain
+Teague, the chief of the detail, pulled out his keys from his gun belt, opened
+
+the door with a commanding gesture and said, "Miss Davis, you may enter
+now."
+When I walked into the courtroom, there was thunderous applause and my
+eyes were momentarily blinded by flash bulbs and bright lights. Looking
+straight into the spectator section, straining to see familiar faces, I raised my
+fist to acknowledge their reception.
+Some days later, looking at a photograph of that moment, I was struck by
+the glaring incongruity of the scene. There I was, my face adorned with a
+glowing smile; my unencumbered arm raised high. At the table a few feet to
+my right, there sat Ruchell Magee, whom I had not yet seen. He was
+tangled up in a mess of chains, a trace of a grimace on his face, as if he
+were trying to find a more comfortable way of coping with the chains.
+Had I seen Ruchell sooner, my first gesture would have been to reach out to
+him, to affirm the bond between us. Then I would have turned to show my
+gratitude to the supporters. Ruchell and I should have been able to
+acknowledge, together, their presence. Only when I sat down in the seat
+which faced the door I had just entered, did I see the chained Black man
+who was my co-defendant. When I did see him, I smiled as warmly as I
+could, trying to tell him that I loved him and that we were together. Ruchell
+smiled back.
+The arrangement seemed all wrong. We were so far away from each other.
+The judge's bench was closer to me than Ruchell's chair. So was the
+prosecutor's. Ruchell was all the way on the other side of the courtroom.
+This "justice in the round" seemed intent on breaking up the natural alliance
+between my brother and me. I was furious and upset. It even looked as if I
+were there on my side of the circle with five good movement lawyers, while
+Ruchell sat with his court-appointed attorney, Leonard Bjorkland.
+When I read the San Francisco Chronicle the following day, I could detect
+the beginnings of a campaign to publicly pit me against Ruchell. The article
+on the arraignment began: "Angela Davis, accused of murder and
+kidnapping, strode confidently into a Marin County courtroom, raised a
+clenched fist, and later told the judge, 'I am innocent of all charges.'" About
+fifteen paragraphs into the article was the sentence: "There was a gasp from
+
+courtroom spectators when Ruchell Magee, a San Quentin convict charged
+as a co-conspirator with Miss Davis, was brought into the circular room
+from an adjoining holding cell."
+That was on January 6. On January 18, the same reporter wrote an article
+which began: "They call Ruchell Magee ‘the other defendant' in the Angela
+Davis case . . . overshadowed by the newly acclaimed heroine of black
+revolutionaries." And then: "If Magee is a revolutionary it is the prison
+environment — not a course of intellectual endeavor — that has made him
+one."
+That was the way the press tried to push Ruchell and me as far from each
+other as possible in the eyes of the public. Even in the autobiographical
+sketch of Ruchell, I was made the point of comparison: "Magee's prison life
+began when he was 16, at about the same age Miss Davis, the daughter of a
+middle class family, earned a scholarship to Brandeis University. . . . In the
+years that Miss Davis followed a college career that took her through
+Europe and finally to the University of California at San Diego to study for
+her Ph.D. under Herbert Marcuse, Magee studied law books in his cell."
+It seemed that the intent of the article was to burn away all semblance of
+solidarity between us — to turn those who supported me against Ruchell
+and to turn those who supported Ruchell against me. They wanted disunity
+and division; for divided, we would both be most vulnerable. Unity was the
+only sure way to carry us both to victory.
+When the superficies of our two lives were set aside, what they had in
+common could easily be seen. It all boiled down to the fact that we were
+Black and in our own ways had tried to fight the forces that were strangling
+our people.
+I had always thought it was fortuitous that I was among those who had
+escaped the worst. One small twist of fate and I might have drowned in the
+muck of poverty and disease and illiteracy. That is why I never felt I had the
+right to look upon myself as being any different from my sisters and
+brothers who did all the suffering, for all of us. When I later learned how
+Ruchell had spent his thirty-two years, it became so clear that he was
+among them.
+
+Born in Louisiana, he had been convicted as a boy of thirteen of the
+"attempted rape" of a white girl and had been locked up in Angola State
+Penitentiary. He grew to adulthood behind those walls, where just to live
+out another day was a constant fight. Eight years later, the authorities told
+him he could leave the prison — that is, if his mother agreed to take him to
+another state. They left for California. Ruchell was on the streets for just a
+little more than a year when the Los Angeles police picked him up for being
+involved in a trivial fight with another brother. With such a heavy record
+behind him, they did not bother to give him even the appearance of a fair
+trial. The system was poised against him, even to the extent that his courtappointed lawyer entered, over Ruchell's objection, a plea of "not guilty for
+reasons of insanity." When the trial was over, Ruchell had been sentenced to
+life in prison, having been convicted of kidnapping. (The allegation had
+simply been that he drove the brother in question a few blocks in a car.)
+Ruchell was all of us, not only in the way he was made a scapegoat of
+racism, but also in his resiliency, in his refusal to concede defeat. The
+schools in Louisiana had not taught him to read and write. Behind walls in
+California, by using the Constitution of the United States as his reader he
+conquered his illiteracy. He read law books and became sufficiently
+conversant with the law to write briefs on his own case, which he filed with
+the appropriate courts. With nothing to fall back on but his own sheer
+determination, he became such an efficient lawyer that an appellate court
+reversed his conviction on the basis of an argument he had made.
+But the second time around, his trial also led to a conviction, for they
+refused to recognize his right to defend himself. Again, he was sold out by a
+court- appointed lawyer. But even in face of this second conviction, Ruchell
+did not give up. He continued to file briefs with the courts — and not only
+for himself, but for other brothers as well. At the same time, he wrote to
+everyone on the outside whom he felt could assist him in exposing the
+injustice done to him.
+Ironically, I did not realize that I, too, had received one of those letters from
+Ruchell until it was presented in court, having been taken from my
+apartment by the FBI. It was one of the hundreds of letters I received each
+week during the affair at UCLA. Because I had no one to help me with my
+
+mail, it had remained buried under all the other unanswered letters. If I had
+only known then.
+
+The Women's Section of the Marin County Jail was obviously designed
+under the assumption that few female arrests would be made in this county,
+which ranks among the wealthiest in the country. The very small percentage
+of Black, Chicano and poor people bore a direct relationship to what the
+authorities felt their female jail needs would be. Counting the sick bay, the
+isolation cells and the juvenile tank, there were a mere seventeen beds on
+the women's side.
+One would have thought that this small-scale jail would produce matrons
+with less impersonal, less brutal responses. And, in fact, my first impression
+of the female jailers was that they were amateurs groping around for the
+role they felt matrons should play. But precisely because they were
+straining to be good jailers, they frequently chose to assume the most
+extreme posture they could manage.
+Shortly after I arrived, I had a run-in with one of the matrons, the first of an
+unending series of such conflicts. It happened on a Sunday in January. I had
+spent part of the morning reading the least boring sections of the San
+Francisco Examiner. During the late morning, I was called out for a visit,
+but I had hardly gotten past the formalities of the introduction when a
+raving matron broke into the visiting cubicle.
+"Where's the razor blade? Just give it up! If you don't hand over the razor
+blade, you'll see what we can do . . ."
+I didn't know what she was talking about. The last time I had even seen a
+razor blade was before my arrest. I didn't respond.
+She continued her cryptic demands. "Unless you produce the razor blade
+immediately, you won't be able to finish this visit."
+I stared her straight in the eye for a few seconds and finally asked her what
+she was talking about.
+
+"What happened to the razor blade in your newspaper?" she asked
+frantically.
+"What razor blade? What newspaper?" I asked.
+I finally gathered from her sometimes incoherent remarks that the Sunday
+paper had carried an advertisement for some brand of razor blades and that
+a sample had been included.
+"I don't read the advertisements," I said. "If there was a razor blade in the
+paper, it must still be there."
+I told her that if she'd stop being so hysterical, she could have the ridiculous
+razor blade. And I walked down the corridor to my cell. The bulky paper
+was stacked up on the bed. Not about to help her with her searching
+business, I told her to get the razor blade herself. Still frantic, she tore
+through the paper until she found the advertisement. When she pulled it out
+and, with a vicious scowl on her face, showed me that the razor blade was
+missing, I was certain that I was being set up by someone.
+"Obviously," I said, "someone has removed the razor blade. But that's your
+problem, not mine. I haven't the slightest idea what happened to it . . ."
+As I expected, she spat loud, bold threats at me. "You won't have another
+visit until you give up the razor blade. We're going to cut out your
+commissary privileges. And if you think that you're going to call or see
+your lawyers before you produce the razor blade, you're wrong. You're
+wrong."
+I tried to keep myself from blowing up. I had to show them that they
+weren't going to provoke me with such pettiness. "I have said all I'm going
+to say," I answered. "It's clear that I couldn't have a rational discussion with
+you, even if I wanted to. One thing, though. I do know something about my
+rights. I know full well that you cannot prevent me from seeing my
+attorney. Just try — and you'll have a real fight on your hands."
+I turned around abruptly and sat on my bed. "You may leave now," I said.
+Still flustered, she whirled around and rushed out, almost forgetting to lock
+
+the gate behind her.
+Alone in my cell, I thought about the dilemma. If they dared, they could
+hold me incommunicado indefinitely. But I kept reassuring myself that if
+they really tried to prevent my lawyers from seeing me, the lawyers would
+find some way to get in.
+Late that afternoon, shortly before the matron's shift was up, she came back
+to my cell looking embarrassed. "I guess I have to apologize to you, Miss
+Davis," she said hesitatingly. "A deputy at the booking desk took the razor
+blades out of all the papers before they were sent in."
+"They aren't going to get off so easily," I thought to myself.
+The next day I went into the matron's office to put through the daily
+telephone call which all prisoners were allowed to make. In a loud and
+disdainful voice, I related to Brotsky every detail of the razor-blade
+incident. I wanted the matrons to know that whenever they challenged me, I
+was ready for a fight.
+The lawyers' protests, addressed to various levels of the jail hierarchy, put
+them on the defensive. The National United Committee to Free Angela
+Davis joined in. I could see that they were beginning to fear the rapidly
+developing mass movement. They knew that any unjustified attack on me
+could be exposed.
+Very early in my stay at the Marin County Jail, I was introduced to the
+jailers' racist bias. The same matron involved in the razor-blade incident
+unlocked my cell one day and brusquely told me to come with her. Dressed
+in full uniform and carrying a shoulder bag, she was apparently about to
+leave the jail.
+"I'm not going anywhere until I find out what's going on," I said.
+"Just come on," she said.
+When I refused, she conceded that there was an emergency in the building.
+Still not satisfied, I demanded that she explain further and finally got her to
+
+admit that a bomb threat had been called in, and the entire complex was
+being evacuated. The women prisoners would be taken to a bomb shelter
+downstairs.
+I was accustomed to being handcuffed with my arms behind me — it had
+become a part of the routine. When the three other women prisoners were
+brought out into the corridor (and this was for months the only direct
+contact I had with other prisoners), the manner in which we were
+handcuffed revealed the blatant racism of the matrons. There was a Black
+woman and a Chicana woman. They were cuffed to each other, the right
+arm of one locked to the left arm of the other. The one remaining prisoner
+was a white woman. The matrons had done nothing to restrain her
+movements. So there we were, me with both arms manacled behind me, the
+Black woman chained to the Chicana woman, and the white woman with
+both hands free.
+
+The Marin County jailers were determined to hold me in solitary
+confinement, so we began to press for relief from the court. The pretense
+was the same as in New York. That is to say, it wasn't that I was so
+dangerous. On the contrary, it was my life they were trying to safeguard.
+They were afraid, they said, that some fanatic anti-Communist or someone
+who was excessively affected by the death of Judge Haley might try to do
+me some harm. And how easy it was to get arrested in Marin County, they
+said. Someone might actually commit a petty crime to get into the jail —
+and get me. The jailers had to consider these things, they said.
+The judge refused therefore to issue an order permitting me to go into the
+main population — he wanted a detailed, documented motion from us,
+specifying precisely the conditions of my incarceration and setting forth in
+legal terms the reasons we felt I should not be kept in solitary. This was a
+typical way of reversing the process of justice. Whenever my rights were
+violated — it was up to us to show why they should not be violated.
+Doubtlessly the judge knew what he was doing because he ultimately went
+along with a compromise solution. He did not allow me to "mingle" with
+the other women; instead he ordered the jailers to provide permanent
+
+facilities for meetings with the team of lawyers, a request we had made in
+the same motion.
+These permanent meeting facilities were established "within the security
+area," i.e., behind a series of electrically operated, heavy iron doors, and
+within the range of the closed circuit TV monitor system. Inside one of
+those rooms, behind the iron door with the little peephole window, was
+what they called the juvenile cell. It was adjacent to the matron's office. All
+they had to do was pull down a metal flap on their side and they could spy
+on me through a porthole-type window. This cell was slightly larger than
+mine. The walls were painted the same drab gray, the concrete floors the
+same institutional rust-color. It contained bunk beds — i.e., metal slabs
+extending from the wall, with a thin mattress like the one I slept on every
+night. There were a few other superficial differences between it and my cell
+— the toilet bowl was not attached to the sink, and there was a shower
+inside. But the only difference that mattered to me was the skylight above.
+By this time I was so starved for a bit of natural light that I rejoiced when I
+discovered that on occasion I would be able to tell whether it was light or
+dark outside. The skylight was translucent, rather than transparent, so I
+could not really see the sky, but I could hear airplanes passing above and on
+rainy days the monotony of my surroundings would be broken by the sound
+of raindrops. In my nighttime dream fantasies, I climbed through this
+skylight to freedom.
+At first, when the attorneys came, I was escorted to and from my cell to the
+meeting room. Later, though, we managed to convince the judge that if he
+did not intend to relax the solitary conditions any time soon, I should have
+access to this conference room even when the lawyers were not present.
+Emphasizing for his benefit the fact that I had already announced my
+intention to file a motion to act as one of the counsels in my case, we made
+the point that it was the responsibility of the jail to furnish adequate access
+to legal materials as well as facilities where they could be studied. He
+agreed, then, that I could use the conference room — the juvenile cell — as
+a work area between the hours of eight in the morning and ten in the
+evening.
+
+We had won a minor skirmish, which was the signal for the jailers to
+retaliate. Since they knew that they couldn't violate the judge's order to
+allow me access to the working quarters, they contrived as many annoying
+trivial rules as their little minds could discover. First, they declared that it
+was against the rules for me to take my meals in the work cell. The twosecond trip around the corner and a few yards down the corridor could only
+take place after they had brought breakfast to my sleeping quarters. Come
+lunchtime, they opened the door of the work cell and directed me back to
+my sleeping cell. After lunch — the trip back; dinner, the same. The only
+time this routine could be broken was if one of the lawyers happened to be
+visiting me in the work area — then I could take my meals there.
+The fact that this cell was to be the area where I worked on my case, they
+pushed to absurdity: because I was supposed to be working there, I could
+not also eat there; I could not do my daily exercises there. But they could do
+nothing to prevent me from doing calisthenics, katas, or headstands when I
+felt like it in the work cell. Often I exercised precisely at the moment when
+I knew they were peeping in on me.
+The work I managed to do in jail required far more than normal powers of
+concentration. In that state of almost continuous solitude, getting totally
+involved in my work was a fundamental condition of survival and sanity.
+The jailers knew this and were willing to resort to the paltriest acts, hoping
+to obstruct me in some small way. The head matron was especially good at
+this.
+I can't say I was able to dismiss everything they did. There were things
+which I found merely exasperating, and there were other things which
+really angered and frustrated me. Often lunch or dinner time would find me
+deeply immersed in work — reading or writing a statement, letter or
+something I simply wanted to write for my own benefit. A matron would
+open the door for me to return to the sleeping/eating cell to take my meal.
+During my unsavory, solitary meal — it hardly ever took me more than ten
+minutes either to consume it or to decide that I wasn't going to eat it — I
+continued to think about the work I had been doing. Naturally, as soon as I
+was done with the food, I was eager to return to my work. A half-hour
+would pass without my cell gate having been opened. Forty-five minutes,
+
+an hour. At these times I simply could not contain my frustration and would
+scream as loud as I could for them to come and unlock the gate. Inevitably
+the more I screamed, the longer they would wait before they came with the
+key. Sometimes they tried to justify the delay by saying, for example, that a
+prisoner was being booked and fingerprinted in the corridor — no prisoner,
+at that point, was allowed to lay eyes on me. Other times, they snidely said
+that they were sorry that they could not eat as fast as I — and they weren't
+going to let me disturb their leisurely meal. This situation became so
+unbearable that rather than put up with it I decided to skip meals when my
+work might be disrupted.
+For months, this work cell was the center of a constantly raging battle
+between the head matron and me. She noticed, for instance, through her spy
+window that I would sometimes lie down on the bottom bunk in the work
+cell and read in that position. Within a short time, the mattresses were
+removed from the cell. Afterward, to show her that she had not disturbed
+my routine, I would lie down on the metal slab — the thin mattresses hadn't
+made the bed much more comfortable anyway. This matron and the others
+were particularly incensed when we got the news that David Poindexter had
+been acquitted on the federal charges of harboring a fugitive. (They could
+not prove that David knew that the FBI, as well as the California Police,
+was looking for me.)
+I wondered, at times, just how much I was allowing myself to be diverted
+by these inane episodes. Realizing how easy it is to lose perspective when
+you are imprisoned — particularly if you cannot communicate with others
+who share your condition — I wondered whether I was reacting to trivial
+incidents as if they were a matter of survival. I feared becoming obsessively
+wound up in these small things, because if I did, this in itself could be a
+way for the jailers to control my mind. There was a pill-taking ritual, for
+example, which seemed to hold a special importance for one particular
+matron. Her obnoxious personality was surpassed only by her stupidity. She
+actually believed that if she gave me an aspirin for a headache or for cramps
+that I was going to follow her instructions and lift my tongue up so she
+could see whether I had swallowed it or whether I was hiding it until she
+left the cell. It was this same matron, in fact, who once tried to prohibit
+Margaret from bringing books in to me. One Saturday morning Margaret
+
+had brought me some hardcover books and one paperback anthology on
+fascism. This matron believed all paperback books were novels. She
+allowed Margaret to bring in the hardbacks, but not the "storybook," as she
+called the book on fascism. According to this dull-witted woman, I was not
+allowed to have "storybooks," that is, fiction, in my work cell — and The
+Nature of Fascism was such a book.
+The Marin County Jail doctor misdiagnosed a rash I had contracted, and
+while he was treating me with antihistamines for what he said was an
+allergy, the rash spread over my entire body. This gave us the leverage we
+needed to demand that a doctor from the outside be able to visit me. Bert
+Small, a young Black movement doctor who ran the Panthers' Free Health
+Center, immediately recognized my rash as a jail fungus that had progressed
+so far it was going to be difficult to cure. Bert began to come in at least
+once a week to examine me. During his visits a matron always stood
+outside the cell, peering at us through the bars. Once we discovered that a
+second matron was hiding with a note pad in the shower adjacent to the cell
+and was obviously taking down everything we said.
+After a few weeks, Bert was told not to hug me (he always greeted me with
+a big hug). Soon afterward, they told him that all non-medical conversation
+was forbidden. Since the matrons were not very smart, we developed
+without too much trouble a code language in which we could discuss just
+about anything without their understanding.
+Of all the matrons, there was only one who went out of her way to be kind.
+Timid and soft-spoken, she was young and obviously inexperienced in
+police work. I imagine she was one of the women they hired when they
+used my presence in the jail as an excuse to increase the number of female
+deputies. One night when this deputy was on duty alone, a sister in the main
+tank screamed out, just before lights went out, "Good night, Angela." As
+loudly as I could, I screamed back, "Good night." (The main tank was two
+hundred feet down the corridor, around the corner and at the end of the next
+corridor.)
+For several months this deputy continued to be silent while I carried on
+conversations and developed friendships with women prisoners whom I had
+never seen and whom I could never hope to see. On the day Ericka Huggins
+
+and Bobby Seale were acquitted of murder charges in New Haven, we held
+a regular celebration. Once this matron handed me two bars of candy which
+the sisters in the main tank had sent as presents. When I opened them, I
+discovered long letters — kites — concealed under the wrappers.
+
+Thursdays and Sundays were women's visiting days in Marin County Jail.
+During the first six months, I received my visits only after all the other
+women had finished, since no contact between us was allowed. As long as
+the person had identification, anyone could come in to see me. NUCFAD
+arranged visits, more often than not, with people I had not yet met. Often
+the visits were strained, introductions rendered difficult by the glass and
+telephones separating me from the visitor. And usually by the time we got
+settled into a conversation, it was time for the visit to end.
+After voluminous, well-documented motions were filed, the judge finally
+issued an order that legal investigators of our designation be admitted into
+the jail during certain hours of the day. I could visit them in the regular
+lawyers' booth when they came alone; when an attorney of record was
+present, they were let into the work cell. Legal investigators, at various
+times during the year, were Franklin and Kendra, Fania, Charlene,
+Cassandra Davis, and Bettina Aptheker.
+I had first met Bettina in New York when we were both high school age.
+She was among the friends introduced to me by Claudia and Margaret
+Burnham. At that time, Bettina was in the leadership of Advance, the youth
+organization I joined, which had fraternal ties with the Communist Party.
+What subsequently remained most vividly in my mind about Bettina was
+the way she had described a trip she made to the Soviet Union. I had been
+enormously impressed by the egalitarianism she said she witnessed. She
+had visited the apartment of a worker and the apartment of a doctor; the
+doctor's she said, was no more luxurious than the worker's. Bettina's father,
+Herbert Aptheker, was the director of the Institute for Marxist Studies, and I
+felt excited and enlightened by the lectures I heard him deliver.
+In 1964, some years later, Bettina emerged as one of the key leaders of the
+Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which prepared the way for the campus
+
+rebellion of the sixties. When she visited me in Los Angeles at the time of
+the struggle around my job, it had been about ten years since I had seen her.
+Writing for the World Magazine (the magazine section of our Party's daily
+newspaper), she interviewed me about the fight to keep my position at
+UCLA. When we saw each other after that, it was always only for a short
+time and in the midst of some political urgency. I had felt frustrated that we
+weren't able to find the time to sit down and talk in relaxed surroundings.
+At the time I was extradited to California, she was living in San Jose with
+her husband, Jack Kurzweil, who was a professor at California State
+University in San Jose. Their child Joshua was around four years old.
+Bettina was just finishing the manuscript of her book The Academic
+Rebellion: A Marxist Critique. She had decided to devote a large part of her
+time to working on the National United Committee. I was happy to learn
+that she could also spare the time to act as one of the legal investigators on
+the case, for this meant that she could visit me for longer periods and
+outside the regular visiting hours.
+During one of her earliest visits, Bettina mentioned that the Defense
+Committee in England wanted to publish a book of writings by and about
+me and the movement for my freedom. They asked us to put together a
+packet of materials out of which they could select the literature for the
+book.
+After some discussion, Bettina and I decided that a more accurate and
+complete representation of the movement could be included in the book if it
+were compiled by the Committee here. Moreover, if it were done here, it
+could also be used as an organizing tool for the campaign in this country.
+Immediately after this discussion, Bettina and I began to work on the
+project ourselves.
+From the inception of the idea, we saw the book as an instrument through
+which people could deepen their knowledge of repression, through which
+people could become acquainted with cases of political prisoners, and could
+learn what was really happening behind the walls in general. I insisted that
+the content of the book should not only revolve around my case, but had to
+relate to other political prisoners as well — George, John, Fleeta, Ruchell
+and the many incarcerated sisters and brothers throughout the country. One
+
+of the central theses of the book would be the need to reevaluate the
+traditional definition of "political prisoner," as a result of the intensification
+of racism. Aside from the scores of men and women in prison because of
+their political beliefs and activities, there were many thousands more who
+had been framed or had received disproportionately long sentences for the
+sole reason that they were Black or Brown. The book had to provide a voice
+not only for the political prisoners in the strict sense of the term, but also for
+those who were victimized in one way or another by the racism of the
+police-court-prison apparatus.
+Bettina and I both wrote articles concerning prisons and political prisoners.
+During long meetings in jail, rendered difficult by the glass and telephones
+or the mesh of metal between us, we made our decisions about the other
+materials to be included. The jailers would not allow the investigators to
+bring anything into the jail except a pad of blank paper and a pencil.
+Therefore all the materials had to be given to me by one of the attorneys.
+And the things Bettina wanted to discuss, she had to try to memorize before
+she came.
+Finally, after several months of intensive work, the book was practically
+done. George, Jon, Fleeta and Ruchell, as well as Bobby and Ericka had
+contributed writings. Howard and Margaret had written about essential legal
+aspects of the case, and Fania, Franklin and Kendra had written about the
+mass movement. Out of the innumerable appeals which had been made on
+my behalf, we selected a representative number both from the United States
+and abroad. To begin the book, we used James Baldwin's moving letter to
+me. "Some of us, white and black," he wrote, "know how great a price has
+already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new
+people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse
+than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for
+your life as though it were our own — which it is — and render impassable
+with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the
+morning, they will be coming for us that night." It struck us that the title of
+the anthology should be If They Come in the Morning.
+Originally, it had been our intention to have the book published by a
+movement company. After all, we did not see it as destined for mass
+
+commercial distribution — it was to be an organizing weapon. But it had to
+come out immediately, if it was to have any impact on the campaign for my
+freedom and the freedom of other political prisoners. At that time, no
+movement publishing operation had the resources to bring it out so quickly.
+As a result, we gave the book to a Black company, The Third Press.
+Unfortunately we did not realize that the over-riding interest of this
+company was to push the book commercially — even at the expense of
+misrepresenting it as a book authored (rather than edited) by me.
+But despite the problems, the publication of the book was an important
+event for all of us behind walls. One of the most moving things Ruchell said
+to me was that If They Come in the Morning, which contained a large
+section on his life and his case, had done more to expose the state's
+persecution of him than anything else.
+At the same time arrangements had been made for legal investigators to
+visit me, the judge had ordered the jailers to allow potential defense
+witnesses to come back to the work cell in the presence of an attorney of
+record. My parents and Benny and Reggie were able to see me in this way.
+When my mother and father came out on March 16 for the opening of the
+pretrial motions and the big rally outside the Civic Center, we had spoken to
+each other in the booth, through glass, on telephones. It was good, finally,
+to be able to embrace them. Herbert Marcuse and his wife Inge came up
+several times. And our Party leaders, Henry Winston, Jim Jackson and
+William Paterson, came in together from New York.
+I anxiously awaited the visits of George's lawyer John Thorne because it
+was one of the ways I kept up with what was happening with George and
+the other brothers in San Quentin. Margaret, Howard and Sheldon visited
+George, John, Fleeta and Ruchell as often as they could manage.
+In the month of June, Howard argued the bail motion before the new judge
+in the case, Richard Arnason, who had been brought in from Sonoma
+County. Everyone's hopes were high — everyone's except mine, that is —
+that Arnason would rule in our favor. The issue was simple; persons
+accused of capital crimes were not to be released on bail when the "proof of
+guilt is evident and the presumption thereof great." The corollary was that
+
+the lack of sufficient evidence meant that the accused person should be let
+out pending trial. Howard and Kendra were as certain that I would be
+released as they were of their own lives and were both trying to cheer me up
+with promises of freedom tomorrow. During the bail hearing, Albert Harris
+felt so confident that Arnason would deny our motion that he said into the
+record: "When she checks out of the Marin County Jail, if she is released on
+bail, she might as well be given an air travel credit card along with her
+belongings, because we will never see her again."
+When Arnason said no, I felt the vise closing once more, but I did not feel
+terribly shocked, having expected him to take the easiest way out anyway.
+Kendra cried and Howard was more depressed than I had ever known him
+to be.
+It appeared that the motions the judge did grant were an attempt to
+compensate for the terrible blow he had delivered in denying bail. Arnason
+said yes to our contention that I should be allowed to act as co-counsel in
+the case. And because bail had been denied, he agreed to order that more
+favorable conditions (especially for the preparation of the case) be
+established at once within my jail cell.
+He ordered that I be given access to a typewriter and that, like the other
+women, I be allowed to have a radio. He even ordered the matron to allow
+me to spend brief periods of time with the women in the main section. I
+discovered that things in the main tank in the corridor around the corner
+were not very different from what I had seen in the House of Detention in
+New York. I rediscovered how vitally important it was to resist every
+destructive current of prison life . . .
+For jails and prisons are deadly places. There was the mesmerizing inanity
+of television; a few boring high school texts, some mysteries and a lot of
+unbelievably bad fiction. The women could write if they wished, but the
+small note-paper, which was seldom available, discouraged serious writing
+in favor of casual notes which would be censored anyway before they were
+mailed. Even getting hold of a pencil could be an extensive and complex
+undertaking. There were the well-worn cards and games, indispensable
+props for every jail — things to coat the fact of imprisonment with sugary
+innocuousness, fostering an imperceptible regression back to childhood. As
+
+I had noticed from the parlance at the House of D., in the jailers' eyes,
+whether we are sixteen or seventy, we are "girls." They loved to watch over
+their child-prisoners happily engrossed in harmless games. Any pastime
+that was intellectually demanding seemed suspect. The jailers in Marin
+County were extremely hostile to allowing a chess game in, and agreed to it
+only if it fit silly specifications. The one finally admitted to the day room
+was toy-like, a child's version of chess.
+One other jail "outlet" was overwhelmingly sexist. It was the stubborn
+presence of the washing machine, clothes dryer and ironing paraphernalia
+which, discounting the metal tables and backless stools, were the sole
+furnishings of the day room. The "reasoning" behind this was presumably
+that women, because they are women, lack an essential part of their
+existence if they are separated from their domestic chores. The men's linens
+and jail clothes were sent elsewhere for laundering; the women were
+expected to tend to their own. If they did not volunteer to do the washing
+and ironing, a work schedule was imposed. This work system also proved
+to be racist. When, out of boredom, many women volunteered to do the
+washing, black women were consistently rejected. But when no one
+volunteered, black women were ordered to do it.
+In the midst of all this, sleep emerges as a kind of luxury. Just because it
+involves unconsciousness, the complete negation of an already empty
+existence, it becomes the least monotonous way to pass the time. The
+matrons encouraged us to think of sleep as a privilege by making the
+availability of a bed during the day a reward for "good conduct." If, for
+instance, a woman was not up, fully dressed, with her blankets tidily tucked
+under the mattress, when breakfast arrived at 6:30 A.M., then all the women
+in that cell would lose their "bed privileges" for that day. They were all
+locked in the adjacent day room, where the only resting places were stools.
+They are serious people, jailers, thoroughly caught up in the glitter of their
+badges. When challenged, this seriousness shows its true face. A young
+Black woman prisoner was told that since she was occasionally let out of
+the jail on a work-furlough program, she could not join the other prisoners
+in the television day room. TV was not very important to her, but this
+reprisal made her furious. She told the matron that her badge didn't give her
+
+the right to punish her so. In response, the matron called upon a power
+greater than her badge — her racism. She told the Black woman that she
+had "overstepped her color." This incident stirred a terrific battle among the
+women, and interestingly enough the battle lines defied racial demarcation:
+though all of the Black women supported the sister, some white women did
+too.
+This badge-seriousness extends into areas that are truly deadly. Many times
+when I rode in the elevator with armed guards on my way to a court
+appearance, the men would unsnap their gun holsters — all a show for my
+eyes alone.
+
+JULY 8, 1971
+Howard, John Thorne and I followed the jailers through the brightly lit
+prisoners' corridors into a holding cell in the courtroom area. A seatless
+toilet stood in the corner and two wooden benches lined opposite walls of
+the narrow cell. The upper half of one of the walls was made of transparent
+plexiglass. It was just a little smaller than the one where Ruchell and I
+waited for our court appearances.
+Although I should have known what to expect, the heavy metallic rattling
+which precipitously dissipated our silence startled me. The chains, locks,
+shackles, handcuffs, whose rumblings I had first heard in the courtroom in
+Salinas, now sounded very familiar. On the other side of the glass wall,
+George was descending the stairs for an all-day meeting between him and
+his lawyers and me and my lawyers.
+Since I was now officially recognized as co-counsel for myself, the judge
+had agreed to issue an order for a meeting between me and each of the
+Soledad Brothers and my codefendant, Ruchell. A few days later, I wrote
+George about my impressions of that first moment.
+"A scene frozen in my mind: I am standing in the little glass cubicle
+downstairs, standing waiting, loving, desiring and then hot cold rage when
+the chains begin to rattle as you slowly descend the stairs . . . I'm supposed
+
+to rip off the chains. I'm supposed to fight your enemies with my body, but I
+am helpless, powerless. I contain the rage inside, I do nothing. I stand there
+watching, forced to assume the posture of a disinterested spectator, the
+whole scene perceived through glass, laboratory-like, mad at them for
+thrusting this upon me, mad at myself for doing nothing. Mad at myself too
+because I could not fail to see how much counter force you were exerting
+upon yourself, each step, long, hard, unwilling to be restrained by chains
+and pigs, your entire body with each foot movement in a hard sway . . ."
+As soon as he came into the cell and saw that we were there, the disdain on
+his face immediately dissolved into the smile I remembered so well from
+Salinas. Instinctively, his first gesture was to try to reach out. An embrace.
+He had forgotten that his wrists were chained to his waist and that he could
+only move them a few inches. With my free hands — they had not cuffed
+me this time — I tried to make up for his chains.
+Eight hours was not long enough. We talked about everything, but there was
+not enough time. We discussed our strategy for the defense and talked about
+the possibility of George's testifying during the trial. He was certain that we
+would beat the case. I told him that our victory would have to be a victory
+together. All of us.
+
+Subsequently there was an all-day meeting with Ruchell. It came at a
+critical time. Though we were both solidly united on our political approach
+to the case, we did not entirely agree on the way it should be attacked from
+a legal standpoint. Ruchell wanted the trial transferred from the jurisdiction
+of the State of California to the federal court system. Based on his years of
+experience with the California courts, he was convinced that they wanted
+his life. He felt that the chances of minimizing the repressive and racist
+treatment both of us were receiving would be greater if we could agree
+upon this strategy of removal. I had studied this strategy, I had reflected
+upon it, and had held long discussions with Margaret and Howard about the
+viability of Ruchell's position. Finally, I had decided that it would be best
+for us to fight it out on the state court level.
+
+Among the many reasons for my decision, one pertained in a very practical
+way to our ability to get the best possible jury. In federal court, it was the
+judge who questioned potential jurors and made all decisions concerning
+the presence or lack of biases in them. In state court, on the other hand, we,
+the defense, could demand the right to conduct an extensive voir dire of
+potential jurors, probing into areas such as racism and anti-communism.
+Huey Newton's case had already established the precedent as the result of
+Charles Garry's work in picking the jury. It would not be possible to
+conduct this kind of courtroom investigation into the jurors' backgrounds if
+we litigated the case in federal court.
+During the many months of the pretrial period, Ruchell and I held brief
+discussions about this in the holding cell where we waited in the mornings
+for court to be convened and during recesses. We corresponded with each
+other about our differences. Margaret, Sheldon and Howard visited Ruchell
+in San Quentin, arguing out all the pros and cons of removal. It was
+important to me that we reach agreement on this, because my position from
+the very beginning had been that he and I should go to trial together. There
+had been much pressure, from many quarters, including from the judge
+himself, to sever the cases. But the position of our defense team had always
+been that all such efforts to separate us had to be resisted.
+So long as the situation regarding removal was in abeyance, we had not
+been able to proceed with many of our pretrial motions. Proceedings at the
+state court level might possibly jeopardize Ruchell's fight for removal. It
+was a difficult predicament.
+When the time came to throw aside all indecisiveness in order to begin
+serious litigation of the case, Ruchell and I were still at odds on our
+respective legal positions.
+This is where we were, at the beginning of the eight-hour jail meeting.
+Lawyers — mine and Ruchell's — were present, as were members of our
+committees. At times, the arguments became rather heated. But even with
+all this, there was no breach of the solidarity which bound us together.
+Ruchell made a point of letting it be understood that this was a technical
+disagreement on legal strategy and not a fundamental rupture between us.
+
+When it appeared that this gap between our legal positions was not going to
+close before the end of the meeting, I felt compelled, for the sake of unity,
+to make a concession: I proposed that in conjunction with Ruchell's efforts,
+I file a motion for removal, but only under the condition that if the motion
+were denied in federal court, Ruchell would agree to jointly fight the case in
+state court. He gave his approval to my proposal.
+Later, I could see that our agreement was defective from the outset, more a
+result of our desperation than a real attempt to solve our differences. For
+Ruchell was certain beyond a doubt that the judge would grant the removal
+motion, and didn't earnestly consider the possibility of a denial. I was
+equally certain — beyond a doubt — that the motion would in fact be
+denied, so I never earnestly considered the possibility of fighting the case in
+federal court.
+The motion was denied. Rather than begin litigation in state court, Ruchell
+decided he wanted to pursue the removal strategy further. I knew how
+passionately he was committed to his position, so I could not really blame
+him for what he did. But, now, the impasse we had hoped we would elude
+subbornly imposed itself. If we wanted to get on with our respective
+defenses, there was only one way to confront the impasse — and both of us
+understood this. Severance now was the only way out. Severance was a
+word I hadn't wanted to hear, but since we were both wedded with equal
+conviction to our own particular strategies, we had to move for the
+separation. Immediately afterward, our Committee issued a statement to the
+press:
+On Monday, July 19, Judge Richard Arnason granted a motion to sever
+the case brought against Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee by the State
+of California. . . . From the inception of the frame-up the general mass
+media, joined in by dubious "left friends" have attempted to drive a
+wedge between Angela and Ruchell. The devices have ranged from
+phoney and racist comparisons between Angela and Ruchell all the
+way to the establishment of a hierarchy of political prisoners. Angela
+and Ruchell have devoted many hours to the co-ordination of legal
+strategies. During the first seven months of pretrial hearings they made
+continuous attempts at developing complementary legal strategies.
+
+However, unable to coordinate their strategies, the final result was a
+severance motion agreed upon by both defendants.
+. . . It should be clear that the decision to sever was not reflective of
+political divergencies. Nor did it bear upon substantive issues of the
+legal defense, Rather differences were procedural in nature . . .
+Ruchell will attempt to take [the] battle to Federal court, and Angela
+will attempt to fight the same battle in a state court. But both believe
+that without a massive, Black-led movement which uses the courtroom
+as only one forum of struggle, this battle will not be won. And we will
+win.
+For those of us around the country who are actually struggling to build
+a mass movement capable of freeing all political prisoners, our
+responsibilities are doubled. The cases of Ruchell Magee and Angela
+Davis must be taken before the people with the idea of providing
+masses of people with a close insight into the oppression of the penal
+system . . .
+The first anniversary of the insurrection which was seized upon to
+frame Angela and Ruchell is soon approaching. Committees in
+California and throughout the country are commemorating August 7
+through various activities, ranging from rallies and teach-ins to
+memorial services. In Pasadena, California, a park is being dedicated
+to the memory of Jonathan Jackson. It is through these kinds of
+activities that people will come to understand the conditions against
+which Ruchell and our slain brothers were fighting on August 7, 1970.
+
+AUGUST 21, 1971
+In the little lawyers' booth in the visiting area, Bettina and I were trying
+hard to finish the manuscript of If They Come in the Morning. When
+Howard arrived, bringing Barbara Ratliff, who was doing the research for
+one of our legal motions, all three of them were able to come back to the
+work cell. We had hardly gotten settled when the big key turned in the lock,
+
+the door swung open and, addressing Howard, the woman deputy
+announced, "Mr. Moore, you'll have to leave.
+There's an emergency in the building."
+It had been months since the last bomb scare. Nevertheless, the procedure
+was not unfamiliar to us.
+"We'll be back when it's over," Howard said. And the three of them left the
+cell. I assumed that the woman deputy would return shortly to direct me and
+the other prisoners to the bomb shelter downstairs, as had been done the last
+time, but a half-hour, then an hour, passed, and no one had appeared at the
+door. She finally came back to the cell and told me she had instructions to
+take me to the sleeping cell. When I asked what was going on, she refused
+to say anything more than that she was simply following the orders she had
+received.
+I don't know how many hours I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling, letting
+my imagination run wild. I waited. I waited for some word from one of
+them, from Howard, Margaret, someone. It was very late when the deputy
+came back to my cell and told me, "Mr. Moore is waiting for you." She
+unlocked the gate and I walked a few steps behind her. Turning the corridor
+corner, I saw Margaret and Howard standing in front of the work-cell door.
+Margaret's eyes were red and swollen, and the only time I had seen that
+expression of utter desperation on her face before was the morning about
+ten years ago when her mother came into the bedroom where we were
+sleeping to tell her and the other children that their father had died of a heart
+attack that night. Howard was sweating heavily, his forehead was all
+wrinkled, his eyes were squinted, and he was breathing hard as if from
+exhaustion.
+I looked at them, feeling something giving way inside me. We were alone,
+in the cell, the door closed behind us, and no one had yet broken the silence.
+During the last interminable hours of waiting I had fought back broken
+pictures of an explosion at San Quentin that kept trying to insinuate
+themselves into my thoughts. How many times had George said that the war
+declared on him by his jailers could break out into open combat at the
+
+slightest provocation? I was screaming inside. "Don't let it be that
+something has happened to George." But the louder I screamed, the more
+their faces told me that something had happened — that the worst had
+happened.
+"George?" I asked, leaving his name hanging there. I didn't want to make
+my question more concrete.
+Howard nodded.
+"He's not . . .?"
+Howard bowed his head, and I was aching with hope that I had not really
+heard that little, almost inaudible "yes."
+I reached out to Margaret, who broke into huge sobs, and we stood there,
+holding on to each other. I felt frozen, unable to move, unable to bring
+words out of my mouth, unable to bring tears to my eyes. As if someone
+had encased me in ice.
+"The pigs killed him, Angela." Howard's voice penetrated my
+consciousness from the distance. "They murdered him. Shot him in the
+back."
+Already the key was turning and the deputy was telling them they had to
+leave.
+Back in the cell, I woke up from the frozen nightmare to face the reality of
+George's death. It was then, alone in the darkness, that I began to cry.
+I thought about Georgia, Robert, Penny, Frances, Delora, and George's
+nephews and nieces. It was in this way they had to observe the first
+anniversary of Jonathan's death.
+George was a symbol of the will of all of us behind bars, and of that
+strength which oppressed people always seem to be able to pull together.
+Even when we think the enemy has stripped us of everything, left us bereft
+even of our souls. The strength that comes out of an almost biological need
+
+to feel that we have something to say about the direction of our lives. That
+need had gnawed at George, behind bars all of his adult life — and, what
+was most important, he had known how to give the clearest, most universal
+expression to that need, and his writings had aroused people all over the
+world.
+The sisters in the House of Detention in New York had learned something
+important about themselves when they read Soledad Brother. When my
+message reached George in San Quentin that the women were exhilarated
+by the book, but disturbed by his earlier uncomplimentary remarks about
+Black women, he apologized and wanted them all to understand his
+misjudgment.
+Tonight men and women in every prison in the country were probably
+awake, like me, mourning and trying to channel their anger constructively.
+People all over the world must be talking about vengeance — constructive
+organized mass retaliation.
+The next day it seemed as if the whole world were inside my cell. Every
+seat around the work table was occupied. At first, it was difficult to get the
+words moving in conversation — no one knew quite where to begin. When
+I looked at Charlene, Kendra, Franklin, Margaret, Howard . . . I couldn't
+keep back the tears. Then Franklin broke into sobs.
+It was Charlene or Kendra who said that the Committee had begun to
+organize a vigil outside San Quentin — the lives of the other brothers had to
+be safeguarded, and the conditions of George's murder had to be
+investigated immediately. They said that reports were seeping out of the
+prison about brutal beatings and horrifying torture sessions. Already our
+Committee had contacted Rep. Ron Dellums, Assemblyman Willie Brown,
+Dr. Carleton Goodlett and many other concerned public people, asking
+them to demand that they be allowed to tour San Quentin, interview the
+prisoners about the events that had led to George's death, and examine the
+wounds inflicted upon the brothers by guards.
+After they had left, to rush back to the work of organizing the counterattack,
+I tried to compose a statement to be released to the press.
+
+"George knew," I wrote, "that the price of his intense revolutionary
+commitment was having to live each day fighting off potential death blows.
+"George's example of courage in the face of the spectre of summary
+execution; his insights honed in the torment of seven years of solitary
+confinement; his perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds will
+continue to be a source of inspiration to all our sisters and brothers inside
+prison walls and outside."
+I wrote about the Jackson family: "Their grief is deep. In little more than a
+year, two of their sons, George and Jonathan, were felled by fascist bullets.
+I express my love to Georgia and Robert Jackson, Penny, Frances and
+Delora.
+"For me, George's death has meant the loss of a comrade and revolutionary
+leader, but also the loss of an irretrievable love . . . I can only say that in
+continuing to love him, I will try to express that love in the way he would
+have wanted — by reaffirming my determination to fight for the cause
+George died defending. With his example before me, my tears and grief are
+rage at the system responsible for his murder. He wrote his epitaph when he
+said:
+‘Hurl me into the next existence, the descent into hell won't turn me. I'll
+crawl back to dog his trail forever. They won't defeat my revenge, never,
+never. I'm part of a righteous people who anger slowly but rage undamned.
+We'll gather at his door in such a number that the rumbling of our feet will
+make the earth tremble.'"
+Then I was left with the radio.
+All day long one station broadcast readings from George's book, and the allnews station began to develop the preposterous story that George had
+smuggled a bulky pistol, hidden under a wig, from the visiting area to the
+Adjustment Center, the most heavily guarded section of San Quentin. I
+listened to the radio talk shows. The majority of the people who called in to
+the shows suspected that something was very wrong inside San Quentin;
+that whatever was askew was not the fault of the prisoners, but of the prison
+hierarchy. The most consistent aspect of these responses was the belief that
+
+the prison administration had taken them for fools. Over and over again,
+people commented on the contempt the administration had shown by not
+even constructing a sensible story. Who on earth would believe that the tale
+about the wig justified all the violence unleashed on the prisoners?
+George was dead, and the deeply personal pain I felt would have strangled
+me had I not turned it into a proper and properly placed rage. I could not
+dwell on my own loss. Any individual gnashing of teeth would bring me to
+my knees. Personal sadness in that still gray cell under the hateful eyes of
+my jailers might break the cords of will that held me together. George's
+death would be like a lodestone, a disc of steel deep inside me, magnetically
+drawing toward it the elements I needed to stay strong and fight all the
+harder. It would refine my hatred of jailers, position my contempt for the
+penal system, and cement my bonds with other prisoners. It would give me
+the courage and energy I needed for a sustained war against the malevolent
+racism that had killed him. He was gone, but I was here. His dreams were
+mine now.
+
+AUGUST 3, 1971
+Judge Keating takes the stand. He looks pitifully thin, and the deep wrinkles
+in his face make him look older than his years. Something about him
+reminds me of the racists who peopled my childhood. I feel confident and
+eager as I rise to question him about his judgment in selecting the Marin
+County Grand Jury. This time I am launching the attack.
+Our position was that the indictment against me had been returned by a
+Grand Jury (that needed only eight minutes and no extended discussion to
+indict me) that was racist and non-representative. A hearing was granted us
+to determine whether the judges' selection of the Grand Jury was based on
+their own race and class prejudices. We believed that the judges were
+unacquainted with the black community, the working class community, and
+the youth community, and therefore could not have picked representative
+jurors.
+
+We were well into the examination when I produced a photograph which
+Margaret had given me. Approaching the witness stand, I handed him the
+picture and asked him whether it was a true representation of his house (and
+by implication of his wealth). Surprised and annoyed by the fact that we
+had photographed his home, he mumbled, under his breath, but loud enough
+for the court reporter to hear, "Judges don't have any civil rights or privacy,
+huh? The people that enforce the civil rights don't have any. Yes, that's my
+house. I might say it might be dangerous to do that again. . . . We don't take
+kindly to burglars up there."
+When I asked Keating whether he would consider recommending a member
+of the Black Panther Party to serve on the Grand Jury, he said: "They are
+the blatant racists outside Adolph Hitler." And he went on to insist that
+"they are advocates of hatred, violence and murder. . . . They spew hatred
+and violence and murder all over." He added that this also held true for the
+Communist Party.
+I was speechless, shocked not so much that these were his sentiments as by
+the fact that a Superior Court judge had shouted these statements into a
+permanent court record.
+A survey we conducted confirmed the deep-seated racist and antiCommunist prejudices of the average resident of the county. Judge Keating
+was a typical Marin County resident. How could my trial take place in the
+Civic Center, next door to Judge Haley's courtroom? We prepared to argue
+our motion for a change in the venue of the trial. For, a trial here would be a
+ceremonial slaughter, a sure prelude to San Quentin's gas chamber. All the
+Superior Court judges in the county had confessed that they could not fairly
+preside over my trial. That grand gesture disengaging themselves was to me
+another way of saying that they were hopelessly convinced of my guilt.
+Our survey demonstrated that the majority of the people in Marin County,
+who were both white and wealthy, believed me guilty of kidnapping,
+murder and conspiracy. But even more telling, they believed that I was
+guilty of something worse — of being a Communist, of being a Black
+woman. Many of them felt outraged that I had been allowed to teach the
+children of decent white Californians. If they could vote on the matter, they
+would banish me forever from the universities in California.
+
+Since that survey had been conducted George had been murdered by San
+Quentin guards. The hysteria whipped up around these events — designed
+to turn the victims into the criminals — was pervasive. Public opinion in
+this wealthy white county considered anyone who spoke out on behalf of
+San Quentin prisoners as guilty as they presumed the prisoners to be.
+Our motion for a change of venue was thorough and well-documented.
+Judge Arnason, the presiding judge called in from another county, had no
+choice but to grant it. But we didn't want just any change of location for the
+trial. Any Black person knows that there are only a few places in the state
+of California where even the semblance of a fair trial could take place. If
+there was to be a trial, we wanted it to take place in San Francisco, where
+we could hope to pull some Black people from the jury panel. But those
+who determined the locality of the trial didn't want to go to San Francisco,
+sprawled on the other side of the bridge, with its multicolored people of
+many social opinions and political persuasions. San Francisco was too
+unpredictable; the potential of a large local movement rising up to be
+vigilant over the trial was much too strong.
+They wanted a more tranquil place, a place where controversies were
+smothered by soft-spoken civilities. A place where Black people did not
+live in large numbers, but where there were enough leading Black figures in
+the community to veil the existence of racism. They wanted a place with
+substantial geographical stature, but without political color, and especially
+without a tradition of progressive political struggles.
+That place, we discovered, was to be San Jose. Marin County jailers and
+sheriffs accepted this change of venue as a personal defeat. Their faces
+wore expressions of deep regret — regret that they could not preside over
+the slaughter themselves. With undisguised pleasure, they refused to give us
+the smallest hint about the date or hour of the move. Howard and Margaret
+warned me that I should be prepared to leave at a moment's notice, and had
+brought me cardboard boxes to pack my things: books, papers, letters that I
+had accumulated over the last year in that jail.
+Their warnings served me well. One morning around three or four A.M. the
+chief matron woke me, screeching that I had better be ready in a few
+
+minutes. I was prepared. There was nothing to do but wash and brush my
+teeth.
+
+DECEMBER 2, 1971
+The trip to San Jose was much longer than I had expected. Even though I
+didn't know much about the geography of Northern California, I could tell
+that they were taking a roundabout route for what they called "security
+reasons." I had been hoping to see San Francisco or Berkeley, or some place
+with normal (but for me extraordinary) scenes of human activity. But when
+I arrived at the jail in Palo Alto, I had no pleasant memories to bring in with
+me. The trip had been freeway all the way, the caravan traveling far above
+the speed limit. And until we began the approach to Palo Alto, it had been
+pitch-dark.
+A slight, pale man was riding in the car with me. At the time I didn't know
+that he was the under-sheriff of Santa Clara County. He did not have the
+usual manner of a law enforcement officer. He seemed unsure of himself.
+He tried to console me, to assure me that the stint I was going to do in the
+jail there would be much more tolerable than the year of horrors I had just
+left in Marin County. But jail was jail. Unless you had resigned yourself to
+the fact of being locked up, there were no degrees of better or worse.
+As with the FBI, as with the New York House of D., as with the Marin
+County Jail, now with the Santa Clara Jail, the ritual: Name . . . Address . . .
+Age . . . Birthplace . . . Previous arrests . . . etc., etc., etc. Mug shots . . .
+fingerprints . . . Would there ever come a time when I would finally be
+booked out?
+I had learned that each time a prisoner is booked she has a right to two
+phone calls. I called my lawyers first so they would know I had arrived, and
+then my parents. I hardly ever had the chance to talk to them on the phone
+except when I was being booked into a new jail. They were overjoyed to
+hear my voice, yet at the same time frustrated and tense about what this new
+situation might bring. Mother said she was coming out before Christmas.
+My younger brother, Reggie, on work leave from his college, was also
+
+going to come to the West Coast. My mother was trying to concentrate on
+things that would let her escape the reality of my predicament. Although
+she remained strong until the end, I think the whole ordeal was harder on
+her than on anyone. I asked whether she had started eating regularly again,
+and whether she had managed to gain back some of the weight she had lost.
+Each time we saw each other or talked, we ended up admonishing each
+other for the same reasons. She reminded me this time to eat more and try
+to gain my own weight back. I asked her not to worry so much and
+reluctantly said good-bye.
+As soon as I hung up the receiver, a shaded door to the left of the booking
+area was unlocked. We walked into a short and narrow hall and as I glanced
+to my right, I saw the most frightening jail cell I had yet seen. The area was
+walled off in glass. On the other side of the glass was a twelve-by-two-foot
+corridor, off of which were two cells. Each cell was about six feet by eight
+feet. One contained the metal slab bed, a thin mattress, toilet and sink; the
+other was a padded cell completely lined with a heavy tufted fabric painted
+a silvery gray. The padding was broken by a single hole in the floor which
+served as a toilet.
+"You have to take off your clothes," the matron said.
+She handed me a dress, some pajamas, a sweater, and a pair of underpants,
+a bra, some socks and rubber thonged slippers. I told her I would put on the
+clothes but not the underwear. She insisted that I had to give up my own
+underwear and put on the county's. I was serious about not wearing jail
+underwear. In New York, wearing unsterilized underwear, I had contracted
+a terrible fungus which had spread all over my body and had taken months
+to finally cure. I told the matron she could have my underwear but nothing
+she said or did was going to make me put on those jail panties.
+Female jailers must have something of the voyeuse in them — even those
+who are not homosexual inevitably stand and watch you with deep interest
+while you strip down to the nude. This matron must have been unconscious
+of the intensity with which she was looking at me, because when I asked
+her what she found so interesting, she looked terribly embarrassed, and left
+abruptly.
+
+The faded, smock-like dress was too tight and too short. The drab gray
+sweater would not reach my waist, and its sleeves came halfway up my
+arms. I could not pull the white children's socks over my heels nor fit into
+the rubber slippers. I threw the slippers and socks through the open door
+into the corridor.
+Then I realized how cold it was in that cell. Not only was it cold, the toilet
+was leaking and water was running all over the floor. I stepped out into the
+cell corridor to shout a complaint, but no one was in sight, and the door to
+the larger corridor was locked. I told myself that Margaret and Howard
+would be there soon, and we could begin to fight these sub-human
+conditions. In the tight childish smock, without underwear, and barefoot, I
+was freezing, so I put the pajama bottoms on under the dress, the tiny
+sweater over it, and the pajama top over the sweater. I imagine I looked
+absurd.
+Since there was no place to sit, I climbed up on the bunk, pulled the army
+blanket over my shoulders and tried to concentrate on the book I had
+brought along. I had hardly gotten through one page when a matron with
+long, flaming-red hair came through the door into the corridor outside. She
+unlocked the door and, sounding somewhat kindly, I thought, asked whether
+I cared for breakfast. I said yes. Five minutes later she came back, saying
+that I wasn't "eligible" for breakfast. She had checked with the Marin
+County people and they had told her that I had had tea — tea! — before my
+trip down. Since that was the case, I didn't have anything coming until
+lunchtime.
+"You people just don't know what it means to behave like humans, do you?"
+I blurted out.
+Quickly but silently she darted out of the cell. I scolded myself for having
+said yes in the first place to her nice offer and tried to get back into my
+book.
+Later, when Margaret came, and saw me all huddled up in the blanket,
+freezing above a water-logged floor, her mouth fell open. "They must be
+kidding!" she said. "I've been inside a lot of jails, but this beats them all."
+
+Her outrage made me feel a little better. For a while, I had been wondering
+whether I was overreacting. And then I thought of the descriptions George
+had given of the many dungeons they had thrown him into over the last
+decade. This place couldn't be as bad as O Wing in Soledad or the
+Adjustment Center in San Quentin or solitary in Folsom or any of the other
+cells where they had tried to squeeze the will and determination out of
+George.
+"This place isn't even a jail," I told Margaret. "It's what they call a ‘holding
+facility' — a place to keep prisoners for a few hours or maybe overnight.
+But they want to keep me here for months. I can't believe it," I went on,
+"there isn't enough room in here to do exercises, even the ones where you
+stand in place."
+We decided to draw a scale sketch of the cell, with an accompanying
+description. We wanted the Committee to use it in their press release and
+propaganda about the conditions of my confinement.
+Margaret left to give the drawing to the Committee. "Hold on," she said,
+"there will be some big changes around here very soon!"
+I smiled at her. "Margaret, you know I'll be O.K."
+A little later the matron led a young, very desolate-looking white woman
+past my cell. I heard a gate being unlocked next door. She must be in on a
+drug bust, I figured. Not feeling like talking to someone I couldn't see, I
+said nothing to her but went back to the inner cell, got back on the top bunk
+and continued to read The Female Eunuch until Margaret and Howard
+came.
+They brought news that the Committee was already putting wheels into
+motion. All over the country and even in other countries people were
+receiving communications about the conditions under which I was being
+held. In a matter of hours telegrams and telephone calls began to pour into
+the sheriff's office. Sheriff James Geary, who regarded himself as a man of
+liberal persuasions, responded to this massive protest and ordered some
+changes. In an interview that appeared in the San Jose Mercury, he
+lamented the fact that people all over the country thought he had shoved me
+
+into the most wretched of dungeons. One woman, he said, had protested my
+being kept in a "heatless hole, barefoot, wading in water up to her ankles."
+Not only were there physical changes such as heat, clothing, and shoes, but
+the manner of the jailers changed. Some of them had become almost kind:
+"Miss Davis, is there anything you need?" "Are you sure everything is all
+right?" "How was your dinner?" "Do you have any complaints?" "Would
+you like anything in particular tomorrow?"
+Before the downpour of protests, meals were tasteless TV dinners, justified
+by the jailers by the fact that prisoners were rarely there longer than a day
+or so. After the protests, a cook was brought in and the jailers suggested to
+the lawyers that I could have a television in my cell, and could keep the
+radio and electric typewriter I had acquired in Marin.
+With these innovations the cell became cluttered. Magnanimously the
+jailers opened the door to the padded cell for my use. Thus I came to have
+what, in the prosecutor's propaganda, became a "two-room suite." A tworoom suite consisting of a six-by-eight cell and an even smaller padded cell,
+the toilet hole of which backed up one day and covered my books and the
+floor with liquid excrement.
+Just as the "two-room suite" was a farce, so was "my own private
+television" of which the prosecutor constantly spoke. My television was
+"private" only because they insisted on keeping me in solitary confinement.
+The prosecutor never mentioned that in the regular women's jail a color
+television was available for the prisoners. Nor that when I got mine I
+insisted on one for the prisoner next door and that when the jailers refused,
+the Committee purchased a TV for her as well. During those days, as the
+conditions of my imprisonment improved, I felt a profound sadness welling
+up within me. What had been done for me had, so far, been done only for
+me. But I was haunted by the specters of all those sisters and brothers
+whose lives were eroding in other jails. Ruchell, Fleeta, John, Luis, Johnnie
+Spain, David Johnson, Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Earl Gibson, Larry Justice,
+Lee Otis Johnson, Martin Sostre, Marie Hill, the Attica Brothers . . . The
+names kept tolling in my ears. My head was bursting with jumbled images
+of their dungeons, their keepers — terror-ridden images that made the
+improvement of my own physical circumstances extremely painful for me.
+
+The tremendous energy of the movement which had so swiftly transformed
+my jail situation was energy my sisters and brothers had a more than equal
+right to. I tried to assuage some of my pain by establishing contact with
+sisters and brothers in prisons all over the country.
+Compulsively almost, for hours at a time, I answered letter after letter from
+prisoners — letters which had piled up over the months in Marin when the
+jailers refused to give me all of my mail. More than ever before I felt a need
+to cement my links to every other prisoner. My very existence, it seemed,
+was dependent on my ability to reach out to them. I decided then and there
+that if I was ever free, I would use my life to uphold the cause of my sisters
+and brothers behind walls.
+
+Shortly before the change of venue, Sheldon had had to leave the case for
+personal reasons. And with the pretrial motions at an end, the original legal
+team had been disbanded. Around this time, we asked Doris Walker, a
+lawyer with a long history of involvement in progressive causes, to join the
+team. We welcomed her participation not only because of her qualifications
+as an attorney and her unquestionable commitment to the struggle, but also
+because we felt it was politically important for women to assume visible
+roles in the defense.
+Once the transfer to Santa Clara County took place, we had to move quickly
+to make the last addition to the legal team. There were Howard, Margaret
+and Dobby. We wanted one additional lawyer. During the original
+discussion about lawyers in the House of D. in New York, the name of Leo
+Branton came up along with Howard's as one of the first lawyers we wanted
+to speak to about taking the case. I was particularly interested in Leo
+Branton because he had been one of the few lawyers courageous enough to
+defend Communists during the Smith Act Trials. Recently, he had come out
+of retirement to take the case of the L.A. Panthers which stemmed from the
+January 1970 police attack on their office.
+When we first approached him about the defense team, he was all tied up in
+the Panther case and could not therefore assume another major
+responsibility. As a result of a misunderstanding — our impression was that
+
+he had left the country after his involvement in the Panther case terminated
+— we had not contacted him since the fall of 1970. When Dobby told me
+that he had appeared extremely receptive about the idea of joining the team
+now, I was absolutely delighted. Shortly afterward, he made a trip from
+L.A. to San Jose to discuss his entrance into the case.
+I had seen Leo once before — very briefly during one of the pretrial
+hearings of the L.A. Panthers. At that time he wore a mustache. Because
+everyone was talking about this tremendous Black lawyer who felt so
+strongly about the Panthers that he had come out of retirement to defend
+them, I retained an impression that he was well up in the years. On the day
+his visit was scheduled, I saw a young-looking man with a well-developed
+physique, dressed very sharply. It did not enter my mind that this could be
+the Leo Branton who had come out of retirement to take the Panther case —
+but who was he?
+I was so shocked that after Howard introduced him, one of the first things I
+asked him was how old he was. As it turned out, he had retired at the age of
+forty-five and had gone with his wife Geri to live in Mexico for a while.
+Leo's background was fascinating. He had tried the Smith Act cases, had
+gone to the South in the early sixties to defend Civil Rights workers and
+eventually had become one of the few Black lawyers to represent people in
+the entertainment field. He had been, for example, the attorney for Nat King
+Cole, and at the time we asked him to come into the case, he was handling
+the Jimi Hendrix's estate in England, on behalf of his family.
+The outcome of our discussion was that Leo would become an attorney of
+record as soon as he completed the litigation in England. His decision was a
+source of pleasure and pride for us all. With Margaret, Howard, Dobby and
+Leo, our legal team was now the best we could hope for. This was an
+indisputable step in the direction of victory!
+Soon after the move, I began to attend court regularly on pretrial matters.
+The jailers insisted on making the ten-minute trip to downtown San Jose
+some three hours before court was scheduled to begin. The caravan of
+armed men would leave between five-thirty and five forty-five in the
+morning. Some cars drove ahead of the unmarked car I rode in; some were
+behind, and there was always a car moving alongside. If their intention was
+
+to make the trip inconspicuously, they were hardly successful. Each
+morning a whole series of machinations and manipulations was necessary
+to keep this formation in shape as it sped at over seventy miles an hour to
+San Jose. Early one morning, as I was dressing for one of these predawn
+trips, I turned on the radio as I always did upon waking. There was a news
+flash: "Yesterday evening the Supreme Court of the State of California
+voted to abolish the death penalty on the grounds that it is cruel and unusual
+and thus unconstitutional." I was convinced at first that I had misheard the
+announcement. I had talked many times with Anthony Amsterdam, the
+attorney who prepared the papers and argued the death penalty case before
+the high court. He had visited me in jail while preparing our appeal of the
+bail denial before the federal court. At no time did he seem optimistic about
+the outcome of his case. But there it was. The death penalty annulled.
+My thoughts at that moment flew to the brothers in San Quentin with
+pending cases carrying the death penalty. No longer could Ruchell be
+condemned to die in the gas chamber so near his cell. John Cluchette could
+not now be killed by the state. Fleeta, my brother, as much like a blood
+brother as Benny or Reggie; my dear Fleeta would not lose his life to the
+cyanide tablets dropped in the acid beneath the death chair. Johnnie Spain,
+Luis Talamante, Hugo Pinell, David Johnson, Willie Tate — the state could
+not take any more of their lives than prison had done already. Earl Gibson
+and Larry Justice would escape the official death that is often the lot of
+those who refuse to be obsequious before their keepers.
+I laughed out loud. If I had been anywhere else I would have shouted, but
+there in the solitude of that jail I held my joy.
+Margaret came in. I could tell that she had already heard the news: she was
+almost dancing with excitement. We hugged each other. I told her that this
+was one day I wouldn't mind being in San Quentin's Adjustment Center on
+Death Row. "There must be a carnival going on now over there," I said.
+Margaret was animatedly saying something about Howard preparing for a
+bail hearing that morning.
+"Bail hearing?" I asked. "What kind of bail hearing?"
+
+Margaret looked at me as if I were a little crazy.
+"Angela," she said, "the death penalty has been abolished. Don't you realize
+that this undercuts the whole legal basis for Judge Arnason's denial of bail?
+He has nowhere to turn now. He has to let you out!"
+Of course! In his original decision denying me bail, Arnason had
+emphatically stated that if not for the fact that I was accused of a capital
+crime, he would be more than willing to set me free on bail. Now there
+were no capital crimes. Arnason's words were on the record. The argument
+he had invoked when he rejected our bail motion no longer held water.
+According to the judge's own argument, I was now "legally" eligible for
+bail.
+In my joy that Fleeta, the other brothers, and I could not be condemned to
+death, I had forgotten all about bail. We howled then. It was the first time I
+had laughed freely and deeply in sixteen months.
+"We called Judge Arnason early this morning," Margaret said, "and he's
+already agreed to hold a bail hearing today. Howard and Dobby are trying to
+get copies of the Supreme Court decision now. They should be here in a few
+minutes. And Franklin, Kendra and the rest of the Committee are frantically
+trying to raise the bail money."
+I had been close to euphoria when Margaret said that I would certainly be
+out on bail soon. But the more concrete she became, the more she began to
+talk about the facts and specifics, the more my euphoria dwindled away into
+an overwhelming pessimism.
+"This judge isn't going to let me out on bail," I said, "not after all these
+months, not now, right on the eve of the trial. Just wait. He'll find a loophole
+somehow."
+I didn't want to dampen Margaret's enthusiasm, but I remembered only too
+vividly our experience when the bail motion had been argued the last time.
+Virtually everyone in the Committee had been positive that we would win. I
+think that I was the only one — the lawyers included — who had profound
+reservations about the possibility of being released. So when Arnason
+
+announced that he could not "legally" release me, it was such a terrible
+letdown for everyone, creating such an all-pervasive climate of gloom that
+it was hard to pick up the pieces and start the movement rolling again. I felt
+that another enormous defeat would be disastrous for the movement. There
+was also the psychological damage such a defeat would have on me; I had
+to husband my strength in order to survive. I could not allow myself to
+build up my hopes for release, which would only be shattered by the
+arbitrary words of a white man in the black robes of the judiciary. Certainly,
+there was a remote possibility that I might be released on bail, but in the
+opinion I was forming now, it was precisely that, a remote possibility.
+Moreover I was certain that Arnason would not make the decision alone.
+The real decision, I thought, would be made on levels of government much
+higher than that of a Superior Court judge.
+We entered chambers for the preliminary bail hearing. I had already plotted
+out the scenario in my mind. Arnason, in his efforts to be the fairest judge
+possible, would agree to reconsider his ruling and, in fact, would hold a
+new bail hearing. But between now and the time he held the substantive
+hearing, he would have pried into each one of his law books, read the
+Supreme Court decision a thousand times for a loophole, and would
+announce on the day of the hearing that he was terribly distressed, but the
+law prohibited him from releasing me on bail.
+When the three lawyers and I moved into the judicial chambers, we came
+face to face with a despondent-looking prosecutor, Albert Harris. Howard
+presented our extremely simple argument for bail: 1) The previous denial of
+bail was based entirely on the capital nature of the charges against me; 2)
+Only hours ago, the Supreme Court had abolished the death penalty —
+there was no such thing as a capital crime; 3) Ergo, I should be granted bail
+immediately.
+So convinced were Howard and Dobby of the infallibility of their argument
+that they had a bondsman waiting at the back door of the court. But my
+pessimistic appraisal was correct. The judge set a date for yet another
+hearing. He said he needed time to review the Supreme Court decision, and
+that the prosecutor needed time to prepare his answer to our argument.
+
+FEBRUARY 23
+The bail hearing was set for Wednesday — in chambers. The judge
+responded to Howard's vigorous resistance to a closed hearing by saying
+that if we wanted to have the proceedings in open court, he would be only
+too happy to accommodate us — but he would have to postpone the date of
+the hearing for quite a while. We well understood the significance of this. In
+my state of mind I regarded it as a very broad hint that the motion would
+once more be denied. If not, why would he shy away from holding the
+hearing before the public?
+Kendra, Franklin and Margaret kept trying to persuade me that this time the
+judge had no way out. In Margaret's "professional opinion," she kept
+reminding me, the law could not supply him with a loophole. Not this time.
+All of us, however, understood Howard's reticence on the subject. The last
+time he had been so sure — and had suffered so much for me when the
+denial came down. Almost everyone else was telling me to pack everything,
+to be on the alert so that when the decision was rendered, I could walk
+through the gates without a second's delay.
+But I refused to pack, to make any gesture that might lead someone —
+particularly the jailers — to believe that I really thought I was going to get
+out. I recalled only too vividly, and with a great deal of depression, the
+arrogant deportment of the Marin County matrons and sheriff's deputies
+after the judge had said "denied" to our bail motion in June the year before.
+Finally, quivering with nervousness, I had to submit to the handcuffs and be
+led through the steel doors for the court appearance. I was hyper-conscious
+of every gesture I had to make: how to hold my manacled hands outward,
+turn my back to the car, sit down on the edge of the seat and slide myself to
+the middle. I never accepted the help of a jailer, no matter how difficult it
+was to get into the car. So many times before, I had strained to absorb every
+little detail along the route from the jail to the courthouse. On some of these
+trips I had enjoyed the sight of children playing in the street; on others I
+examined with sadness the faces of Black maids on their way to work for
+the Palo Alto rich. But always there was the stark and obscene Moffett
+Airfield, the coven from which planes were sent to kill Laotians,
+Vietnamese and Cambodians.
+
+Now I might be seeing these scenes through the window of a police car for
+the last time — yet I could not persuade myself that there was even a
+remote possibility that it might be true. I felt as though I were walking a
+tightrope. If I continued to reject the possibility of receiving bail, my
+pessimism could send me plummeting into an abyss of depression. But if,
+on the other hand, I succeeded in convincing myself that today would be the
+day, I ran the risk of the fall from euphoria into an even deeper abyss.
+During the next few minutes, I tried desperately to maintain my balance. I
+kept looking for that medium between total pessimism and unrestrained
+optimism. Just to walk the rope a little longer.
+There we were, arranging ourselves in the judge's chambers for the
+pronouncement of the verdict: Margaret, Howard, Dobby and myself on one
+side of the room; Albert Harris and Clifford Thompson on the other, and the
+judge in his great throne-like chair in the center.
+Arnason's nonchalance must have been deliberate. Because of the casual
+way he announced his decision, we had no opportunity to let loose our
+screams of triumph. Sixteen months of imprisonment were coming to a
+close. Just like that.
+The lawyers discussed conditions of bail with the judge. Without yet feeling
+the impact of my impending freedom, I wondered why he had finally
+decided to set me free. It was certainly not because he personally wanted to
+release me before trial. If that had been the case, he could have let me out
+months ago. He would not have had to wait for the abolition of the death
+penalty. Neither was it only because of the new court decision that Arnason
+had granted our motion. He could have very easily accepted the prosecutor's
+proposition that the Supreme Court decision would not be final for ninety
+days yet; therefore, he should wait out those three months and release me
+then — assuming no revisions were made in the decision. (Later I
+discovered that every judge in the state of California who had heard a bail
+motion on the basis of the abolition of the death penalty had followed the
+prosecutor's suggestion and waited out the ninety days.)
+It was not the judge.
+It was not the law.
+
+Only one other explanation remained. That very morning, the judge himself
+had given me a glimpse into what had motivated him to grant bail.
+He spoke about ". . . the mail I've received in the last two days and the
+telephone calls, none of which I have personally taken, but which my staff
+has taken, from . . . a tremendous number of states and telegrams from
+foreign countries. It is a case of amazing interest."
+The real reason he felt compelled to hand down a decision in our favor had
+to do with the mushrooming defense campaign. Arnason did not mean to
+imply that he was "yielding to public pressure." Yet it was clear that the
+tremendous agitation of millions of people had affected him.
+This realization brought to mind the many heated arguments we had had
+around the bail movement — arguments which usually found me alone on
+one side and Fania, Kendra, Franklin and the other Committee leaders on
+the other. It had been about a year since the bail campaign was launched. I
+had profound reservations about devoting so much of the energy of the
+campaign to the single question of bail. In the first place, I had been certain
+that there would not be the flimsiest chance of victory. In the second place I
+thought the political content of the bail issue too weak. It did not permit
+people to express their resistance to the system of repression, which was not
+only behind my own imprisonment but was why so many others were
+languishing in prison.
+Only after many months had passed did I begin to understand my own
+misjudgment. True, the demand for bail was not a revolutionary demand.
+True, it did not of itself expose the rotten core of the capitalist system. But
+precisely because a bail demand was something which could appeal to
+anyone who wanted to side with justice, it allowed the campaign to reach
+out to many thousands of people who at that time could not have been
+stimulated to call for my complete freedom. They would not go on record
+demanding my freedom, but they would go on record demanding that I be
+released pending the determination of my innocence — or guilt — by a
+court of law.
+The participation of so many people had been in itself phenomenal, but
+what impressed me most and what convinced me of the correctness of the
+
+bail fight was the way in which the people who waged the fight began to
+evolve politically. Many of them began to involve themselves in other areas
+of the campaign. Once they had been exposed to the realities of the prison
+and judicial systems, they were forced to give serious consideration to the
+political repression we spoke about. In learning about my case they learned
+about the Soledad Brothers, about the subhuman conditions of the jails,
+about the indeterminate-sentence law, under which George had been given a
+term of from one year to life for something which, had he been white and
+well-off, would have resulted in probation at worst. They learned about
+racism and how it pervaded every corner of the prison system. And they
+learned about the dynamic which makes racism an essential ingredient of
+the political persecution of revolutionaries and progressives. Many who
+began, reluctantly, demanding bail, ended up as strong and effective leaders
+of the campaign.
+Arnason told us that the defense and the prosecution had to agree on the
+conditions of bail before he could formally set the bond, which he said
+would be $102,500 — of which $2,500 had to be paid directly to the court
+in cash. The prosecution, of course, tried to see that, once on the outside, I
+would be imprisoned within so many restrictions that I might as well be in
+jail.
+The battle raged on. Harris used the opportunity to lash out against the
+Committee (whose presence always seemed to offend him personally). He
+insisted I was not to attend or participate in anything that was organized by
+or had anything whatever to do with the National United Committee to Free
+Angela Davis. If he had had his way, I would not have been able to
+associate with my own sister, because she was one of the national
+coordinators of the defense campaign. Harris seemed to see as his main
+enemy not me, but rather this multitudinous movement which had risen up
+to jam his apparatus of persecution.
+It seemed as if many hours had gone by when we had finally reached the
+point of agreement — or rather of truce. Outside, a large assembly of sisters
+and brothers had gathered to wait out the hearing and receive news of the
+decision firsthand. What we knew from the opening moments of the
+hearing, they knew not at all. When Howard and Dobby had to get legal
+
+papers from the office, the judge instructed them to keep silent about his
+decision, to speak to no newsperson, to go directly to the office and come
+directly back. Margaret and I went into the jury deliberation room to wait.
+We hoped that Howard would ignore — just a little — the judge's
+instructions.
+Suddenly a huge roar was heard in the courthouse. Cheers, screams,
+laughter. The message had gotten to the people. And it was their own
+victory they were claiming. It was at that moment that the emotions I had
+had to contain during that long hearing were suddenly unleashed. It was
+right that it should be so; that my own happiness should emerge and merge
+with the emotions of those who had created it.
+Howard and Dobby returned shortly. I told Howard that I knew he would
+not be able to keep the bail a secret when he went out.
+"But I didn't say anything," Howard insisted. "I walked out with as straight
+a face as possible. I could see how tense and upset Franklin and Kendra and
+the others were. Still, I kept walking. Then Franklin ran up to me, and all I
+did was smile. I was smiling all over — I couldn't help it. Franklin didn't
+need anything else. He hugged me, Kendra, and then all pandemonium
+broke loose."
+Now we had to get down to the concrete. Where was the money and
+property for the bond coming from? There were problems with the
+bondsman, Howard said. The one they had expected to use (a so-called
+"movement" bondsman) had apparently gotten cold feet at the last moment
+and begun talking about the way Eldridge Cleaver had split the country.
+This bondsman had proved himself such a racist, Howard said, that even if
+he changed his mind, we couldn't use him on principle.
+In situations where bad news had to be broken, Howard had a way of
+assuming a fatherly air. There in the jury room, he told me very tenderly
+that I should expect to have to hole up for a few days while the bond was
+raised and a bondsman was found.
+There had been Aretha Franklin's public promise some months before to put
+up the money for the bond. Now she was out of the country, but when my
+
+mother reached her, she said she was still willing to go bail for me. The
+problem was that she had to remain abroad for a while longer, and the
+money could not be released without her personal signature.
+The Committee kept on looking. They quickly raised $2,500 to be handed
+over to the court and $10,000 to be kept on hand for the 10 percent bail
+bondsman's fee when the $100,000 in property was found. This time, when
+I rode back to jail, my hands cuffed, in the caravan of armed men, I felt
+strong. What had just unfolded was incontrovertible proof of the power of
+the people.
+Back in my cell, I lay down feeling a profound sadness. Why me and not
+the others? I could not get rid of a sense of guilt. But I knew that my
+freedom would be significant only if I used it to push on for the freedom of
+those whose condition I had shared.
+All of a sudden people were coming back to my cell. Franklin said that I
+would be getting out right away. What did he mean? Stephanie came in
+with this same cryptic news. Then Howard explained that they had found
+someone who was willing to put up his property as bond. Someone who had
+simply appeared, attracted to us by the magnetism of the movement. A
+white farmer from Fresno County, who had inherited a large stretch of land
+from his father, and who was a sympathizer with our movement. Soon there
+was news of another possibility. The bondsman whose office was
+downstairs from our legal offices in San Jose had decided to take over the
+operation. Negotiations were being conducted right outside the jail. Finally
+Howard came in with the joltingly exciting news: the bond had definitely
+been raised; all that remained was the paper work! I wanted to scream with
+joy. But the sluggish jail bureaucracy hindered the natural flow of my
+emotions. Every second of waiting now was like the months and seasons I
+had spent waiting behind bars. I could not shed the ugly jail clothes fast
+enough and pull on the purple pants Kendra had brought — pants too small
+for her and certainly too tight for me. My hands were trembling so I could
+hardly dress. Yet, seconds later, I was out front at the booking desk waiting
+for the jailers (who were silently burning with rage) to push the buttons
+which would fling open the gates.
+
+The first gate was sliding open at its own maddeningly slow pace. One step
+and that threshold was crossed. My heart pounded as I waited for the gate
+behind me to slam shut with the hateful banging sound that had seared my
+nerves so many times before. This was the last time. I stepped through the
+next gate that was opening before me and was greeted by a tumultuous roar.
+I threw my arms around the first person I saw outside, Refu, a brother I had
+known in L.A. I wanted to embrace every sister and brother in the crowd.
+Jail, imprisonment, sheriffs, chains — all that was far behind. For security
+reasons we had to leave the jail grounds quickly. Refu gently reminded me
+that I would have time to see all the people in safer surroundings. Margaret
+and I got into Victoria Mercado's yellow Mustang and plowed through the
+supporters and reporters who had converged on the car. Speeding down the
+freeway, we screamed, laughed and kissed each other. I was out there; no
+guards, no police car, no handcuffs. "Everyone's meeting over at Bettina
+and Jack's," someone said.
+When we walked into the house, my face was hurting from smiling and
+laughing so much. Margaret's six-year-old son, Hollis, and Bettina and
+Jack's four-year-old, Joshua, were both there. With the special tenderness
+that young children can show, Joshua asked me, "Angela, are you really
+free?" And Hollis was so ecstatic he flung his arms around my neck.
+There were the members of the national staff, the leaders and activists from
+the San Jose Committee, and committees from throughout the Bay Area, all
+gathered under one roof. I thought back on all the difficulties we had
+confronted trying to organize the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. My
+admiration for the leaders of my committee was limitless. I was meeting
+many of them for the first time, all these beautiful sisters and brothers who
+had snatched my life from the pale hands of racist persecution.
+I met in a back room with the leaders of the Chicano Defense Organization.
+El Comite Para la Defensa de los Presos Politicos had given special
+attention to my case. Their support was critical in Santa Clara County,
+where the Chicano population outnumbered the Blacks. Victoria Mercado, a
+Chicana sister who had joined the national staff of the Committee very
+early, had spent many months working in San Jose with El Comite.
+
+Throughout the evening an unbroken stream of people came in. In the midst
+of all that, I picked up the telephone and dialed Birmingham. Mother and
+Daddy. Knowing the deep personal pain they had suffered, and their
+complete devotion to the fight, I felt happier for their sake than I did for my
+own. Our emotions were so high that the telephone seemed more a barrier
+than a medium of communication. Then I had to call my brother Benny and
+his wife Sylvia. Their commitment was both personal and political, and we
+had come to love each other even more. Then the New York calls. I had to
+reach Charlene, who had tackled the formidable job of handling the national
+campaign. Afterward I called Winnie. Henry Winston, chairman of our
+Party, and Gus Hall, our General Secretary, had together carried the
+message of the campaign to the world.
+Then a problem insinuated itself. Franklin ran it down. Hundreds had
+assembled at Solidarity Center — the office of the San Jose Committee —
+to celebrate.
+They were waiting impatiently for me to drop by. Since the bail order
+included a prohibition on my speaking to or being present at any large
+gathering organized by the Committee, the suggestion was that I not go.
+What should I do? The first violation of my bail condition could be seized
+upon as a reason for putting me back in jail. Should I play it safe and follow
+the judge's order to the t? For some selfish concern for this little bit of
+freedom, should I ignore the sisters and brothers who had given so much?
+Court order or no court order, I was accountable only to those who had
+fought with and for me. If in fulfilling my obligations to them, I was risking
+my freedom, then so be it. If I stayed with the people, I would never be
+alone.
+As we entered the Solidarity Center the crowd broke into a long, thunderous
+ovation — an ovation that almost made up for my last eighteen months in
+clandestinity and prison.
+
+***
+
+We had already decided that I would move in with Margaret. Bob and
+Barbara Lindsay, friends of ours in San Jose, had lent her a house for the
+duration of the case. For sixteen months Margaret had visited me in jails —
+New York, Marin County, Santa Clara; now it was strange to know that we
+could go to sleep and wake up under the same roof. Like many years ago,
+when she spent the summer in our house in Birmingham, or when I stayed
+with her family in New York.
+It was futile to even try to fall asleep, so I spent these first hours of silence
+and darkness in thought. It was frightening to think about the profound
+impact jail had had on me. My responses were still geared to the sparseness
+of jail surroundings, to the thick hostility pervading the whole environment.
+Being accustomed to sleeping on a slab only slightly wider than my body, it
+felt peculiar to be able to roll over in Margaret's big bed.
+There was something else about this house that saddened me and broke the
+spell of celebration. The house had belonged to Barbara Lindsay's mother, a
+beautiful woman named Emma Stern. I had come to know her as the whitehaired old lady, lines deeply etched in her face, who had written the first
+pamphlet on the Soledad Brothers. Over seventy years old, she had been
+one of the most active leaders of the Soledad Defense Committee. In the
+summer of 1971 she fell ill. For a while she was in and out of the hospital
+and seemed to be recovering. When George was killed, the forces keeping
+her alive must have been consumed by sorrow. Shortly after George's
+funeral, Emma Stern died.
+
+FEBRUARY 24
+There was not enough time to savor the first morning of sun shining on the
+lush backyard. I wanted to abandon myself to primitive sensations:
+stretching out on the grass, soaking up the solar warmth and energy I had
+missed so much in my succession of cells. But I had to restrain this
+compulsion to touch trees, watch clouds and listen to the sound of children's
+voices. In a little while I had to face the press and confront the media and
+the millions they reach.
+
+Just then the bell announced Fania's arrival. She had worked so hard on the
+campaign, traveling throughout the world, that she was not even there when
+I was released. She had had a speaking engagement that night in Idaho. We
+embraced each other, full to bursting with the deferred joy of the last
+eighteen months. Sisters, we had become comrades.
+After the press conference, we made our way to Bettina and Jack's, where
+Gus Hall was waiting to see me. Gus understood better than anyone what I
+was feeling. He had spent some eight years in Leavenworth Federal
+Penitentiary. He described the moment when they first learned that the
+judge had granted him bail. The news arrived in the midst of a session of
+the Party Congress. They were torn, he said, between the impulse to make
+the announcement immediately and the knowledge that the news would
+hopelessly disrupt the remainder of the meeting. They risked disruption,
+and the rest of the day's business gave way. Accompanying Gus on this trip
+was Luis Figueroa, a leader of the Communist Party and Senator from
+Chile. Short, with a huge mustache falling over his lips, he was like a
+benevolent uncle. In his warm, down-to-earth manner, Gus asked me
+whether I'd like to have dinner with a few comrades from the area. I
+accepted, and someone reminded me that we must hurry to meet my
+mother's plane.
+I had suffered through such painful prison visits with my mother. She was
+such a sensitive person, especially about her children, I could only begin to
+sense the anguish my imprisonment caused her. If there was a single
+overriding personal reason why I wanted to be free, it was for my mother's
+sake.
+As she stepped off the jet that afternoon, there was a radiance about her
+which I had never seen before. Eisa, my young niece, was in her arms. In an
+instant, we were entangled in hugs. No jailers to sully the privacy of this
+meeting.
+After dinner, when I had finished one glass of champagne — all I dared to
+drink — I toasted practically everyone who was present. Spontaneously we
+began to sing "The Internationale": "Arise ye prisoners of starvation . . ."
+and immediately afterward "The Negro National Anthem." My mother's
+
+voice sang loud and clear: "Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven
+ring . . ." Even the Black waiters joined in.
+
+FEBRUARY 25
+The burly white policeman in charge was evidently jarred by my
+appearance. His voice quivered with rage as he told me to step behind the
+white line over there. How many mug shots did this make?
+Like the other cops lining the walls, he was wearing a dark-blue jumpsuit
+with a matching baseball cap. One could have easily mistaken him for a
+parking-lot attendant, a television repairman or an auto mechanic. But there
+was that heavy pistol swinging from his waist, and the two-foot truncheon
+his right hand was so tightly gripping.
+When the photographer was done, the same fury-laden voice directed me to
+another white line — this one reserved for the women. My steps heavy with
+hesitation, I moved from the line to the other side of the screen. I held my
+breath while they frisked my body, dug their fingers in my hair, and asked
+me to lower my underpants.
+Kendra, Victoria, Franklin and Rodney were already acquainted with the
+special routine in the San Francisco County Courthouse for those attending
+the Soledad Brothers' trial. But Mother, Sylvia and Benny were incredulous,
+outraged and horrified by this degrading prelude to the court session.
+It was frightening to realize the regular trial-goers had to submit themselves
+to these humiliating searches day after day. Undoubtedly, the repetition
+conferred a dangerous aura of normality on this manifestly fascist routine.
+Undoubtedly, it had already created a dangerous precedent for political
+trials in the future.
+Names were recorded, special seats assigned, photos taken for the San
+Francisco Police and the FBI. And inside, we in the spectator section were
+separated from the scene of the trial by a bulletproof shield extending the
+entire width of the courtroom.
+
+Behind the plexiglass, things took on a staged appearance. Ritualistically, it
+seemed, the figures marched in to assume their habitual places: defense,
+prosecution, the twelve jurors and four alternates; finally, John and Fleeta,
+whose strength and beauty seemed to split the bulletproof glass. We reached
+out for one another.
+It was difficult to concentrate on the facts at hand, so thoroughly was I
+haunted by the thought that I was free and they were still in chains. The
+circle had closed. As a free woman before, I had vowed to fight relentlessly
+for their freedom. John, Fleeta and George . . . This new freedom must be
+no different.
+This is what I had planned to tell John during the meeting the lawyers had
+arranged for the lunch break. But I should have realized that things were
+moving along too smoothly. Upstairs in the holding area, the Chicano guard
+gave us the news. Unfortunately, he said, Judge Vauvaris had changed his
+mind. No meeting with John Clutchette.
+My immense disappointment subsided slightly when I realized that John's
+cell was visible from the counter where I stood. The guard did not object
+when I called out to him, telling him to hold tight and keep strong; it was
+only a matter of time.
+Downstairs a huge throng of people had gathered, and the press had been
+alerted to my presence. Conceivably, because of this the judge could
+construe my attendance at the Soledad Brothers' trial as a violation of the
+bail order. But at this point, that didn't matter very much. What mattered
+was that I reaffirm my commitment to the fight to free all political prisoners
+— first and foremost, the Soledad Brothers. It was important not only
+because it put me where I wanted to be — back in the struggle — but also
+because of the meaning it would have for all the sisters and brothers who
+had fought for my freedom. If I could not be satisfied with my freedom
+alone, they could not be satisfied either.
+
+PART SIX: Bridges
+Walls turned sideways are bridges
+
+E
+
+arly one Saturday morning during my first year at Brandeis, my friend
+Lani and I decided to hitchhike up north to see the fishing boats in
+Gloucester, Massachusetts. We had plans to stay the night. But since we
+knew no "adults" in Gloucester, we had to engage in a small transgression
+of the ridiculously puritanical rules governing the conduct of female
+students. Signing out of our dormitory, we indicated that we had permission
+from our parents to visit a family in New York, whose name and address we
+gave. (They were people who would know how to act if any checking was
+done.)
+Gloucester was magnificent, with its multicolored autumnal trees, the
+massive beauty of its seaside boulders, its throng of ships and fishermen.
+For hours we walked along the coast, then we toured the little streets dating
+from the eighteenth century. Though we were practically moneyless, a nice
+man in a little restaurant gave us as much food as we could eat and wouldn't
+hear of letting us work off our meal.
+When the sun's warmth began to fade away, we had to reconsider our
+original intention to sleep out on the beach. With no money, we could
+hardly think about checking into a motel, so we said good-bye to the friends
+we had made in the town and headed back down the highway with our
+thumbs as our only means of transportation.
+It was late by the time we reached the campus in Waltham, later than the
+curfew hour for first-year female students. If we risked crossing the campus
+to Hamilton quadrangle, where our dorm was situated, we would probably
+be picked up by the security men and charged with curfew violation. Even
+if we weren't picked up during the run for it, it was very probable that we'd
+be caught as we tried to get into the dorm unnoticed.
+
+Ridgewood — the men's dorms — were on the edge of the campus, right
+off the highway where our ride had dropped us. There wouldn't be much
+security around those dorms, so we decided to ask a friend to give up his
+room for the night. When we woke him, he was quite willing to find
+another bed and give us the two beds in his room for the night. The next
+morning we got up early and made it back to our rooms without incident.
+Somehow — we never found out exactly how — word got back to the Dean
+of Women that we had "spent the night in the men's dorms." She called us
+in to say that we were going to have to stand trial before the women's
+tribunal. Lani and I were incredulous. This whole thing was absurd — stand
+trial before a group of upper-class women brainwashed into believing that
+because we were young women, what we had done was immoral. We had to
+appear before this tribunal or be expelled from the university — because we
+had simply wanted to enjoy the beauty of an autumn day, and had not
+allowed the rules to inhibit us.
+In the bare, windowless room, Lani and I sat on one side of the long table.
+The members of the tribunal sat on the other side.
+"Don't you know that you have marred the reputation of this university by
+accepting rides from strangers?"
+We both looked with disgust at the student who pronounced these words.
+"Brandeis' reputation must really be marred," I retorted, "with all the
+hitchhiking that's done around here."
+"Decent students do their hitchhiking on the campus, and not on strange
+roads."
+A long contest followed, with the tribunal women hurling their invective at
+us, and Lani and me treating their words with the derision they merited.
+As we knew when we walked into the room, the verdict was guilty, and the
+sentence was the maximum. For thirty days we were "dormed," meaning
+that we had to be in our rooms every day after dinner and remain there or
+give proof that we were studying in the library for the evening.
+
+I never forgot the self-righteous condemnation of that tribunal. They were
+convinced they had a right to play God, master and mother. Since we
+refused to accept their way of life, we were "moral criminals" and they
+wanted to see us punished.
+
+FEBRUARY 28
+As the first potential jurors were brought into the courtroom, I thought back
+on that little mock trial which had unfolded more than a decade ago. I felt
+the same sense of unreality, the feeling that the same sort of game was
+being played, the contestants with the dangerously obsolete ideas having an
+unfair advantage.
+But this was another game — more deadly. And the risks were far higher
+than thirty days in my bedroom.
+On the desk directly in front of our table, a brown wooden raffle box is spun
+around. When it comes to a stop, the clerk reaches inside and pulls out a
+slip of paper. He reads the name carefully, pronouncing each syllable
+distinctly. People upstairs are watching and listening on a television
+monitor. Downstairs in the courtroom we are keenly conscious of the
+cameras and microphones transmitting our actions to that roomful of
+strange people corresponding to the names and numbers on our jury list.
+Shortly after her name was called, Mrs. Marjorie Morgan appeared and took
+her seat in the witness box. Mrs. Marjorie Morgan, who described herself as
+the wife of a retired tractor shop owner. Mrs. Marjorie Morgan . . .
+provincial and biased . . . Mrs. Marjorie Morgan, who didn't hesitate to tell
+Leo, who was examining her, that she thought I was "probably guilty" of
+murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, and that I never should have been
+allowed to teach at UCLA. It was illegal and improper, she insisted, for
+Communists to teach at a university. The only decent trait she exhibited was
+her honesty about her inability to judge me fairly. The judge was thus
+forced to eliminate her from the panel.
+
+The questioning of potential jurors — the voir dire — was divided into two
+parts. First the potential juror was asked about his or her exposure to
+publicity about me and the case. If the judge was satisfied that pretrial
+publicity had not created irreversible prejudice against me, then that person
+was temporarily seated in one of the twelve jury seats. When the jury box
+was full, the second stage of the voir dire began, during which we
+intensively questioned the potential jurors on a whole range of subjects. We
+attempted to draw out any hidden racist, pro-police or other biases which
+might surface as a result of evidence produced during the trial.
+The next day an even bolder anti-Communist was examined. William
+Waugh, when asked about his attitude toward Communists, said that "if
+anyone wants to be a Communist, it seems they could go back where they
+come from." That, he admitted, included me as well — if I wanted to be a
+Communist, I should go back to where Communists are in power. But
+because he would not agree that this position would affect his ability to give
+me a fair trial if I were tried for something unrelated to communism, he was
+not unseated. For the time being, he remained on the panel.
+But this was also the day when Mrs. Janie Hemphill was called in. Mrs.
+Hemphill was the only Black woman in the entire pool of potential jurors.
+A robust woman in her early forties, she pleasantly insisted that she could
+give me a fair trial. But before she even uttered a word, we were certain that
+Albert Harris, the prosecutor, would strike her from the panel at the earliest
+possible moment.
+A few days later, when she was voir dired in depth, she poignantly
+described her background. I was so moved by what she said that I almost
+forgot that this was a part of the process of selecting a jury that might send
+me back to the other side of the walls. When Howard asked her about the
+jobs she had held, she took us back to Arizona, where she had picked cotton
+and cut onions at the age of twelve. "Later," she said, "I was a short-order
+cook. I went to Los Angeles and I worked as a short-order cook . . . And I
+also worked in a sandwich factory for those trucks that pass by . . . When I
+first came to San Jose, I did domestic work and I worked at Spivey's as a
+dish-washer."
+
+As she spoke, she reminded me of my mother — her fight to get out of
+Good Water, Alabama, to get herself through high school and college doing
+all the odd jobs she could find. All this in order to finally get a job teaching
+in a little school.
+Mrs. Hemphill's story was the universal story of the Black woman in a
+world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome. My
+mother had overcome. But many others had not. The system was poised
+against us. That was what had come through so powerfully in Mrs.
+Hemphill's words. My own present predicament was, on a different level,
+evidence of that same politically, economically, socially hostile world
+which almost every Black woman must contend with every day of her life.
+On March 13, fifteen days after the jury selection had opened, Mrs.
+Hemphill was eliminated by one of the prosecution's peremptory
+challenges. She was the only Black person to have been questioned in the
+witness box. Court was adjourned.
+The next day, March 14, we accepted the jury as constituted. It was not
+because we were satisfied with the people who sat in the box. By no means
+— after all, the only Black person had been eliminated by Harris. Yet, from
+our cursory investigation of the remainder of the jury venire, we were
+convinced that the combination of jurors we had on March 14 was probably
+better than anything else we could hope for. If we had continued to
+challenge those whom we felt were most prejudiced, then it was certain that
+Harris would challenge those whom we felt had the greatest inclinations
+toward fairness. They would be picked off one by one, as he had already
+picked off Janie Hemphill and the few others who did not seem totally
+prosecution-prone.
+We were hoping that our instincts were correct about Mrs. Mary Timothy,
+whose son had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war. During
+the voir dire, she had come across as a fiercely independent person who, we
+thought, would know how to hold her own. If only she, and the few others
+we had been vaguely pleased with, would look at the evidence objectively
+and with intelligence, and would refuse to be swayed by the demagogic
+tricks of the prosecution, we could hope for a hung jury at least.
+
+When the jury was sworn in on March 14, it included a woman whose
+presence on the panel had worried us from the very beginning. When
+Howard had examined her on the question of communism, she had said that
+Communists seek to obtain their goals "kind of by force."
+"And when you say ‘force,'" Howard asked, "what are you referring to?
+What do you mean?"
+"Subversive," the woman answered, ". . . this type of thing. I really don't
+know . . ."
+"Now, you say a ‘subversive' type of thing. Could you tell us what a
+subversive type of thing is, in your opinion?"
+"I can reduce it," she said, "to terms of my eleven-year-old, and that would
+be 'sneaky.'"
+When Howard asked her how she would define "sneaky," she tried to
+explain her use of that word by saying, "I kind of reduced it to an
+oversimplification. I am just not that well educated. You read and hear
+about their activities, that they try to promote riots. I don't know this to be a
+fact. This is what we read in the paper."
+Howard was convinced that she was putting on a show every time she tried
+to appear naively unaware of things and thus capable of being a fair juror.
+After all, she was the daughter of a retired sheriff's captain — a man who
+had spent over twenty-five years of his life in what Mrs. Titcomb termed
+"police work."
+During the voir dire, Howard had asked her whether she had Black friends.
+She answered, "Oh, we had some very dear Black friends many years ago
+that moved away from this area. There is a family behind us that we are
+friends with."
+Asked when she last had Blacks in her home as social guests, she
+responded, "Blacks in my home as social guests . . . My children have them
+in almost daily." On March 14, she was sworn in, along with eleven other
+jurors. But, a few days after the swearing of the jury, she was relieved of her
+
+responsibilities. The spectators and the press were told that she was leaving
+because of "personal reasons." Few people ever heard the real story.
+Perhaps if the transcript had not been kept sealed, the media would not have
+been so quick to praise the U.S. court system for its guaranteed fairness to
+everyone.
+It all started when the sketch and description of the jury appeared in the
+papers on the day following our acceptance of it. Judge Arnason's clerk said
+that a call came into his office that day from a person who identified herself
+as the juror's daughter. The clerk described her voice as hysterical — all she
+could say was "If my mother remains on the jury, God help Angela Davis."
+The defense team and the prosecution had been urgently called into the
+judge's chambers to hear the account of this incident. What did we suggest
+be done? We insisted that the daughter be brought into chambers so that she
+could elaborate on her fears that her mother was out to get me.
+She was pale, of slight build and appeared to be much younger than her
+eighteen years. It was apparent that she was not accustomed to such official
+surroundings. She seemed timid and a bit frightened. I wanted to ask her
+what it was that impelled her to take this great risk. Had she been reached in
+some way by the movement for my freedom? It could only have been this
+movement that had compelled her to become aware of her own individual
+political responsibility, even if it entailed an attack on her mother.
+I could not help feeling sorry for her as she stared apprehensively at all the
+strange people sitting around the walls of the judge's chambers. Even the
+judge felt moved, and in a fatherly gesture, he walked over to her, placed
+his arm around her shoulder and told her gently that there was nothing to be
+frightened about. When some of the terrible tension subsided, we were able
+to get down to the business of the session. Yes, she was certain that her
+mother would vote for a conviction, regardless of the evidence that was
+presented. Her mother had never liked Black people, and had told her
+daughter not to make friends with Black children. The one Black girl friend
+the daughter had had as a child could not visit her at her house — not only
+because her mother would not allow it, but also because the girl's parents
+would not let her be subjected to a woman who was known in the
+
+community for her anti-Black feelings. The daughter had cried on one of
+her birthdays because her friend could not attend.
+After we had waded our way through the facts of this episode, the daughter
+began to relate, with not a small amount of confusion, a story about a Black
+boyfriend of hers, on whom her mother had spewed her vitriolic racism.
+The second stage of this encounter involved a meeting with the juror where
+we confronted her with the accusations her daughter had made. Of course,
+she insisted that everything her daughter had said was a lie. She said that
+she and the daughter had never been able to get along — of all her children,
+this was the one she liked least.
+What about the little Black girl friend her daughter had not been allowed to
+bring home as a child? The story was a fabrication, she insisted. Then, what
+about the Black boyfriend? Her daughter had told her she had been raped,
+according to the woman.
+No, she had not lied during the voir dire. No, she would not voluntarily step
+down. She felt she had a right to serve on this jury, and she was determined
+to carry out her civic responsibilities.
+This woman seemed ready to risk almost anything to stay on that jury and
+convict me. We threatened to bring her daughter back in to confront her
+face to face with the charges of racism. But she was more than willing to
+face up to her daughter. We had to go further. Was she prepared to listen to
+her daughter and all the other witnesses we could uncover make these
+accusations on the witness stand, before the court, the spectators, the press
+and the world? She reflected for a moment, and then decided that she would
+back out altogether. The world was a little more than she was willing to take
+on.
+
+MARCH 27
+When court recessed for lunch, Kendra and I were the last to leave.
+Suddenly Leo came rushing back into the courtroom shouting, "The
+
+Soledad Brothers were acquitted." We screamed, we hugged each other, we
+jumped up and down. "The Soledad Brothers are free." Our loud,
+unrestrained, joyous cries pealed through the empty courtroom.
+I was laughing and crying with joy, but thinking also, Why not George? If
+only they had let him live a little while longer.
+Relaxing in his chambers, Judge Arnason had heard our wild yells and had
+come rushing to the door. Looking somewhat frightened and probably
+fearing the worst, he asked in a soft voice whether something had
+happened. The three of us could only repeat what we had been screaming:
+"The Soledad Brothers were acquitted."
+This was the opening day of the trial. Two autumns, two winters, two
+springs had already been consumed by the preliminary skirmishes. Now, at
+last, we had moved into the final, decisive contest. And the exoneration of
+John and Fleeta was like an omen portending our future victory.
+This victory would confirm one of the fundamental elements of my defense:
+the political character of my involvement in the movement to defend the
+Soledad Brothers and the strategy of developing mass protests and mass
+resistance to the persecution of the Brothers.
+Harris had attempted to work up the jury with an absurd theory of my
+having been impelled to commit murder, kidnapping and conspiracy by my
+"boundless and all-consuming passion" for George. By purging his case of
+the original political accusations, the prosecutor thought he was being
+shrewd. In the indictment, the first "overt act" of the "conspiracy" had been
+my participation in a rally on June 19, 1970, for the immediate freedom of
+the Soledad Brothers. Policemen had testified before the Grand Jury that I
+had advocated the release of the Soledad Brothers, at this rally, as well as in
+other meetings and assemblies. Now, because so many people accepted the
+idea that I was a political prisoner, the prosecution was on the defensive.
+Harris was undoubtedly afraid to use the key evidence he had initially relied
+upon. This was the impact of the mass campaign, the central theme of
+which was the repressive, political character of the prosecution.
+
+"There will be no evidence offered by the prosecution over the next few
+weeks," he insisted before the jury, "of the exercise by the defendant of her
+right of free speech and assembly under the First Amendment, except for
+certain letters that she wrote. You will be satisfied that the case of the
+prosecution does not rest in any degree whatever upon the nature of the
+political views of the defendant, whatever they may be.
+"The evidence will show that the claim of political persecution, the claim
+that the defendant is a political prisoner, the claim that the defendant is the
+subject of prosecution because of her political beliefs — all of these claims
+are false and without foundation."
+But if he weeded out the "political evidence," the prosecutor had to build
+another framework for the case. This new framework was based on the
+motive of passion. I simply wanted to liberate, he said, a man whom I
+loved.
+Throughout his opening statement, although he was diligently trying to
+make political considerations seem totally irrelevant to the case, politics
+kept creeping back in. "This morning," he said, "you heard of evidence
+through her books that this teacher of philosophy is a student of violence.
+[He was referring to two books, The Politics of Violence and Violence and
+Social Change.] Other evidence that we will present will show the
+defendant does not live only in the world of books and ideas, but that she is
+committed to action, that she is committed to violence."
+But then, he tried to backtrack: "Her own words will reveal that beneath the
+cool academic veneer is a woman fully capable of being moved to violence
+by passion. The evidence will show that her basic motive was not to free
+political prisoners, but to free the one prisoner that she loved. The basic
+motive for the crime was the same motive underlying hundreds of criminal
+cases across the United States every day. That motive was not abstract. It
+was not founded basically on any need, real or imagined, for prison reform.
+It was not founded on a desire for social justice. It was founded simply on
+the passion that she felt for George Jackson. . . ."
+On the second day of the trial we had our chance to attack the prosecution's
+case. Since we had decided a few days before that I would deliver the
+
+opening statement to the jury, I had spent every moment of the last days
+discussing it with the lawyers and preparing my notes. Now I felt certain
+that we could tear the prosecution's case to pieces.
+Our weapons were together. Our legal team was in good shape — Howard,
+Margaret, Leo, Dobby and myself. The mass movement had unprecedented
+global strength. Fania, Franklin, Charlene, Kendra, Rob, Victoria, Phyllis,
+Stephanie, Bettina and the others on the staff were accomplished organizers.
+They were preparing to steer the movement across the finish line.
+Besides, this new twist, this new theory of passion that Harris had
+propounded, left the state's case even shoddier, if that were possible, than it
+had been in the beginning. This was a last-ditch approach to the trial,
+developed and elaborated when it became clear that the political case would
+simply not be accepted.
+On this second day of the trial, as Victoria and Rodney Barnett, who were
+in charge of my personal security, drove with me through the unfamiliar
+San Jose streets, my thoughts were totally absorbed by the task I thought I
+would soon be carrying out.
+As we neared the Santa Clara Civic Center, we noticed an unusually large
+crowd milling around the building. Armed sheriff's deputies were running
+around the yard. Others were posted atop the roofs of the Civic Center
+buildings.
+Ignorant of what the commotion was all about, I thought that whatever it
+was that was going down, it must be a part of the larger conspiracy to send
+me to prison for life. Every day, people entering the courtroom —
+spectators, press people, we ourselves, and even the jurors — had to submit
+to metal detectors, humiliating frisks, and for the audience and the press,
+cameras which took mug shots of them. Now the whole area was occupied
+by deputies toting shotguns, rifles and machine guns.
+Looking around the yard, I saw some of the jurors sitting on the municipal
+court steps, and others on the benches on the opposite side of the yard.
+Someone said there was an escape attempt in progress, involving prisoners
+
+in the men's county jail located in the same complex of buildings as the
+courthouse.
+The sheriff's deputy guarding the back entrance, where the lawyers entered
+the courtroom, refused to let me through.
+The building was under emergency security measures, he said, and no one
+could leave or enter. We discovered later that the press people had been
+locked in the pressroom, the spectators had been locked in the corridor
+outside the courtroom, and a few jurors who had already entered the
+building were locked up in the jury room.
+When the judge rescinded the security measures for the participants in the
+trial, and we all gathered in the courtroom, he announced that the trial
+would be adjourned until the next morning and immediately dismissed the
+jurors for the day.
+Apparently three men being held in the county jail while they waited to be
+transferred to various prison facilities had decided to make a run for
+freedom. They had taken hostages and had attempted to negotiate their
+release. But, as if they were following the example of the San Quentin
+guards, the sheriff's deputies moved at the first clear moment to shoot their
+way out of the negotiations. The person who had been considered the leader
+of the effort was killed, and the other two were captured.
+The evening papers carried headlines like JAIL ESCAPE TRY AT
+ANGELA TRIAL SITE. And a number of articles contained lengthy
+comparisons between this incident and the August 7 revolt. Whether it was
+planned this way or not, the suggestion planted in the minds of many who
+read the accounts was that we had something to do with the escape attempt.
+This episode, which came before we had even had a chance to present our
+case to the jury, raised some very difficult questions for us. On the one
+hand, the only way to ensure that I would not be judged by a jury with
+prejudices grown sharper from their experience of the escape attempt would
+be to move at once for a mistrial. But on the other hand, if we did move for
+and were granted a mistrial, then the jury selection process would start from
+
+scratch again. Since we felt we had already picked the very best jury Santa
+Clara could offer, a new jury could only be worse.
+The defense team and the campaign organizers met throughout the evening
+before we finally agreed upon a definitive position: a brief voir dire of the
+jurors to determine whether they had become more biased against me as a
+result of the escape attempt they had witnessed.
+The next day, at the conclusion of the individual examinations of the jurors,
+we decided that the damage was not irreparable. We would move on with
+the trial.
+
+The podium was behind the prosecutor's table and slightly to the left.
+Arranging my notes, preparing to begin our statement, I could see Harris
+squirming in his seat.
+"The prosecutor," I said to them, "has introduced you to a very long and
+complicated path down which he hopes his evidence will lead you in the
+course of this trial. He says that this path will point squarely in the direction
+of my guilt. He says that his evidence is so conclusive that it will eliminate
+every doubt in your minds with respect to my guilt, and that you will have
+no choice but to convict me of these very serious crimes of murder,
+kidnapping and conspiracy.
+"But we say to you, members of the jury, that the prosecutor's evidence
+itself will demonstrate to you that this case is no case at all. The evidence
+will show that I am totally innocent of all the charges against me. It will
+reveal that the prosecutor's case is entirely without substance. It will reveal
+that his case is based on conjecture, guesswork, speculation . . .
+"The prosecutor began on Monday by telling you that this case against me,
+basically, is a case involving the crime of passion. He said that my passion
+for George Jackson was so great that it knew no bounds, that it had no
+respect for human life.
+
+"He went on to say later in the statement that I was not concerned with the
+struggle to free political prisoners, that I was not concerned with the
+movement to improve the character of prison life in this country. He told
+you that he intends to prove that I was exclusively interested in the freedom
+of one man, of George Jackson, and that that interest was motivated by pure
+passion.
+"Members of the jury . . . the evidence will show that when I was indicted,
+the Grand Jury of Marin County considered evidence of my participation in
+the movement to free the Soledad Brothers, not only George Jackson, but
+also Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette.
+"The evidence will show that the first overt act of the conspiracy count
+consists of a description of a rally in which I participated, around the
+freedom of the Soledad Brothers. On June 19, 1970, I was exercising
+constitutionally guaranteed rights — rights guaranteed to me by the First
+Amendment — when I participated in this rally which dealt with the
+persecution of the Soledad Brothers, with other political prisoners, and
+prison conditions in general. Yet, this was supposed to be the first overt act
+of a conspiracy to free the Soledad Brothers, through the events of August
+seventh.
+"The evidence will show, members of the jury, that this indictment
+provoked widespread concern, concern throughout the world, that I was a
+victim of political repression. I ask you whether or not it would not be
+reasonable to infer that the prosecutor is aware that no fair-minded juror
+would convict me on the basis of such evidence. Therefore, he has said to
+you that he will present no evidence of my participation in the struggle to
+free the Soledad Brothers. What he has done is that he has transformed the
+character of this case.
+"Now he will have you believe that I am a person who would commit the
+crimes of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, having been motivated by
+pure passion. He would have you believe that lurking behind my external
+appearance are sinister and selfish emotions and passions which, in his
+words, know no bounds. "Members of the jury, this is utterly fantastic. It is
+utterly absurd. Yet it is understandable that Mr. Harris would like to take
+advantage of the fact that I am a woman, for in this society women are
+
+supposed to act only in accordance with the dictates of their emotions and
+passions. I might say that this is clearly a symptom of the male chauvinism
+which prevails in our society."
+I had not realized that these remarks would strike such a responsive chord
+in a number of the women jurors. I tried throughout my statement to watch
+the jury closely for its responses. As I spoke about the male supremacist
+character of Harris' case, heads nodded and receptive expressions broke out
+on some of the female faces. They too had known the experience of being
+accused because they were women of acting irrationally and according to
+emotions rather than logic. "The evidence will show," I continued, "that my
+involvement in the movement to free the Soledad Brothers began long
+before I had any personal contact with George Jackson. You will learn that
+shortly after Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette and George Jackson were
+indicted by a Monterey County Grand Jury . . . I began to attend public
+meetings designed to lay the basis for a movement to publicly defend them
+from the unfounded charges that they had killed a guard behind the walls of
+Soledad Prison . . .
+"The evidence will show that my own efforts to free George Jackson always
+expressed themselves within the context of a movement to free all the
+Soledad Brothers and to free all men and women who are unjustly
+imprisoned."
+Describing the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, I told the jury that ". .
+. our meetings were open to anyone who wanted to participate in them . . .
+We organized demonstrations, rallies, leafleting campaigns and various
+other informational and educational activities. . . .
+"Members of the jury, you will see when testimony is adduced to this effect,
+that we sought out those kinds of activities which permitted us to involve
+ever greater numbers of people in the public defense of the Soledad
+Brothers."
+And emphasizing what we felt would be the critical element of our defense,
+I told them that "testimony will make it clear that we felt that the influence
+of large numbers of people would help win them an acquittal and that they
+would be freed in that way from an unjust prosecution.
+
+"Members of the jury, we were correct in our understanding of the Soledad
+Brothers' case, for Monday morning as you sat here listening to the
+prosecution's opening statement, and as you heard that I was not interested
+in furthering the movement to free the Soledad Brothers, the ultimate fruits
+of our labor were attained. The twelve men and women who, for a period of
+many, many months had listened to all the evidence that the prosecution
+could muster against the Soledad Brothers, ended up, in the courtroom in
+San Francisco, by pronouncing the two surviving Soledad Brothers not
+guilty. And if George Jackson had not been struck down by a San Quentin
+Prison guard in August of last year, he too would have been freed in that
+way from that unjust prosecution."
+I continued the statement by describing in detail the activities of the
+Soledad Defense Committee, and placing them in the framework of my
+experiences in the struggle for Black Liberation and for the rights of all
+working people — Chicano, Puerto Rican, Indian, Asian and white. I spoke
+about my experiences in the Black Student Council at the university in San
+Diego, the Black Student Alliance, the Black Congress, SNCC, the
+California Teachers Federation, the Black Panther Party, the Che-Lumumba
+Club and the antiwar movement.
+I tried to show the jury how my activities around the defense of the Soledad
+Brothers were part of a history of involvement in the movement to defend
+and free political prisoners such as Huey Newton, the New York Panther
+21, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, the Los Angeles Panther 18 and the
+seven other brothers from Soledad Prison also charged with killing a guard.
+"The evidence will show," I told them, "that I corresponded with the
+Soledad 7, and that I expressed to them my love and my compassion and
+my solidarity with their struggle. . . .
+"The prosecutor has said that this trial has nothing to do with a political
+frame-up, but, members of the jury, during the entire time I was involved in
+the movement to free the Soledad Brothers, I was the object of an extensive
+spy campaign. The prosecutor himself is in possession of numerous reports
+made to various police agencies throughout the state of California about my
+activities on behalf of the Soledad Brothers. He has police reports on rallies
+
+where I spoke. He has films of demonstrations where I and others
+proclaimed our support for the Soledad Brothers.
+"The prosecutor contends that I was not interested in bringing about prison
+reform, but he has in his possession police reports made specifically for the
+administration at Soledad Prison concerning my activities.
+"The prosecutor contends that, during the period prior to August 7, I was a
+mere creature of passion, that I was not genuinely striving toward the
+elimination of repression in the prisons, but he has evidence that will refute
+his own contentions, evidence gathered by an entire network of police spies
+and spies from the Department of Corrections on the content of my political
+efforts to free George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette.
+"But, members of the jury, he has told you that you will not see this
+evidence. He will present no evidence of that sort. He will present no such
+evidence because, if he did, it would show you the process whereby an
+innocent person can be set up and accused of outrageous crimes. No, he will
+not bring this evidence to you. He will continue to tell you that I am not the
+person you see standing before you, but rather an evil, sinister creature
+pushed to the brink of disaster by ungovernable emotions and passions."
+When the time came to deal with my relationship with Jonathan, I placed it
+within the context of the relationships I had developed with the families of
+all three Brothers. Referring to the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, I
+told the jury that "Jonathan Jackson was a unique part of our group, for he
+brought with him the angry frustrations and concerns of a young man who
+had no memories of his older brother except those which had been obscured
+by prison bars. Jonathan was a child of seven when his brother was first
+taken to prison, and for ten long years he accompanied various members of
+his family to various prisons throughout the state of California to visit with
+his brother.
+"These visits must have left an indelible impression on him about what a
+prisoner's life was like, and I know, though he was only seventeen years
+old, he must have been extremely and intimately sensitive to the plight, the
+frustrations, the feelings of depression and futility that men like James
+McClain, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas must have felt. And I
+
+might say that now, in retrospect, I understand the frustration, the very deep
+frustration and the very deep desperation that Jonathan must have been
+experiencing."
+Next I moved on to the question of the guns and the other physical evidence
+which Harris was using to try to prove that I was guilty. I touched upon the
+facts which we did not contest:
+"This is a sick kind of game which the prosecutor has been playing. He has
+invented a scheme, a diagram, a conspiracy, and then he fits his conspirator,
+his criminal into that picture. There is a crime scene, a plan. And he seeks
+ways of pulling me into it so that it still appears plausible. But since I
+committed no crimes and since all my activities were open and above
+board, the prosecutor is left with only one alternative. He must shape his
+circumstantial case out of the ordinary circumstances of everyday life. And
+he leaves it to you, members of the jury, to supply the missing link which
+converts ordinary activity into criminal conduct." After two hours of
+explaining the outlines of our defense to the jury, I felt confident enough to
+tell them:
+". . . We have reached the conclusion of our opening statement, and we ask
+you to think toward the conclusion of this trial, when you will have sat
+patiently, almost to the point of exhaustion, and will have heard all sides of
+the heated contest which is to unfold in this courtroom, when you will have
+sat in calm reflection and deliberation. We have the utmost confidence that
+your verdict will be a just verdict. We have the utmost confidence that your
+verdict will be the only verdict that the evidence and justice demand in this
+case. We are confident that the case will terminate with your
+pronouncement of two words —'Not Guilty'."
+Of course, we were not nearly so certain as I had made it appear, for we
+knew that some of the jurors were probably more prosecution-prone than
+objective judges of fact. The legal team had observed them meticulously
+during both the state's presentation and our own. A couple of them seemed
+far more engrossed in the story the prosecution had concocted than in the
+defense I had presented. Yet at the same time, we thought that a number of
+them, such as Ralph Delange, the maintenance electrician, and Mary
+Timothy, had listened very carefully to the analysis I had proposed.
+
+At the end of my statement, I was exhausted and kept wondering whether I
+had said the right things in the right way. The outline I had given them was
+going to have to serve as the background against which they would judge
+months of prosecution testimony. (Harris said, at first, that his case would
+last six months.) Had I put it forcefully enough for them to retain our
+analysis of the facts — or would they remember only the neat little scheme
+the prosecutor had provided? There would be no more argument until the
+very end of the trial and the conclusion was so far away.
+Coolly and calmly, Judge Arnason assumed control over the courtroom.
+"Thank you, Miss Davis. Before we proceed with the calling of the first
+witness, we will take a recess at this time, and this will hopefully be the
+regular recess of the afternoon, so we will give you a little break time.
+Thank you."
+
+Testimony began. The prosecution called to the stand several women who,
+on August 7, 1970, had been listening to Ruchell Magee testify on behalf of
+James McClain when Jonathan came into the courtroom. Harris was visibly
+stunned when one of the women described McClain's manner as "almost
+gentle."
+Harris presented to the jury horrifying, bloody photographs, in poster-sized
+enlargements. It was only because of Judge Arnason's sense of propriety
+that the prosecutor did not succeed in entering into evidence the pictures of
+Judge Haley with half his head blown off by a shotgun blast.
+I had to close my eyes and keep my anguish and rage to myself when he
+brought out the photographs of Jonathan lying dead inside the van, and on
+the cement where he had been dragged with a rope.
+During the first phase of the testimony, the prosecutor had strategically
+decided to avoid all mention of my name. He simply wanted to establish
+what had happened at each instant as the rebellion had unfolded.
+We used our cross-examination to defend Jonathan, Ruchell, McClain and
+Christmas, to refute Harris' allegations that they were brutal terrorists.
+
+Already this early in the trial, his theories began to erode, both because of
+their internal defectiveness and as a result of our attacks during crossexamination.
+He could not prove, for example, definitively — "beyond a reasonable
+doubt," in judicial parlance — that there had been a demand advanced to
+"free the Soledad Brothers." We pursued this because Ruchell had written in
+a publicized letter to me that the plan had been totally different — it had not
+been to hold hostages until the Soledad Brothers, or any other prisoners,
+were freed. It had not even been to guarantee their own escape. They
+wanted simply to reach a radio station, Ruchell said, where they could
+expose to the world the railroads so many of them had received instead of
+trials, the incredibly wretched conditions of their existence behind walls
+and, in particular, the recent murder by San Quentin guards of a prisoner
+named Fred Billingslea.
+Many of the witnesses who had been on the scene in the courtroom had not
+heard "Free the Soledad Brothers." Others heard no demand at all. Some
+had heard "Free the brothers at Folsom." Captain Teague — the same
+Captain Teague who had overseen all the operations around me when I was
+in the Marin jail — was certain he had heard "Free all political prioners,"
+but he admitted that this was a slogan widely used at rallies and
+demonstrations of the Left, and could have very well been an exclamation
+as opposed to a ransom demand. Sheriff Montanas of Marin County,
+according to the theory of the prosecution, had received a telephone call
+from McClain from the courtroom. It was during this phone conversation
+that McClain is supposed to have demanded the freedom of the Soledad
+Brothers in exchange for the hostages. Naturally, everyone was expecting
+the sheriff to relate this conversation to the jury from the witness stand. Yet
+Montanas never testified for the prosecution.
+This is not to say that plenty of his coworkers did not take the stand — and
+not only sheriff's deputies from Marin County (many of whom had been
+assigned to guard me in the Marin jail), but also cops from all the cities in
+the area — San Rafael, Novota — not to mention the San Quentin guards.
+Harris tried to recreate with mathematical precision every single instant of
+the incident. He became so involved in minutiae — who was standing at
+
+what point when, and for how many seconds — that he did not even realize
+that his interminable procession of witnesses grew tedious and began
+visibly to bore some of the jurors.
+When Sergeant Murphy from San Quentin testified, Leo cross-examined
+him on the policy of the prison regarding escapes.
+"And to be certain I understand the significance of that policy, sir, does that
+policy mean that if people are attempting to escape, and if they have
+hostages, and if the guards are able to prevent that escape, that they are to
+prevent that escape even if it means that every hostage is killed?"
+Sergeant Murphy's emotionless answer: "That is correct."
+"And that means, whether they are holding one judge or five judges, or one
+woman or twenty women or one child or twenty children, that the policy of
+the San Quentin guards is that, at all costs, they must prevent the escape. Is
+that right?"
+"That also includes the officers that work in the institution, sir."
+"All right. Even if they are holding other officers who work at the
+institution, that should not deter the San Quentin correctional officers from
+preventing an escape at all costs. Is that right?"
+"That is correct."
+"In other words, it is more important to prevent the escape than to save
+human life. Is that correct?"
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The courtroom was on tenterhooks. Jurors, press and spectators waited
+anxiously, intensely, for the prosecutor to reach the critical passage in my
+letter to George. But he went on and on, his monotonic words falling flatly
+on the otherwise unbroken silence of the hall.
+
+"‘To choose between various paths of survival means the objective
+availability of alternatives. I hope you don't take this as an apologetic
+stance. I'm only trying to understand the forces that have led us, Black
+women, to where we are now. Why did your mother offer you reprimands
+instead of the flaming sword? Which is equivalent to posing the same
+question about every other Black woman — and not only with respect to the
+sons, but the daughters, too (this is really crucial). In Cuba last summer I
+saw some very beautiful Vietnamese warriors — all female. And we know
+that the Algerian war for national liberation would have been doomed to
+defeat from the very beginning without the active participation of Algerian
+women. In Cuba, I saw women patrolling the streets with rifles on their
+backs — defending the revolution. But also young compañeras educating
+their husbands and lovers — demythologizing machismo. After all, if
+women can fight, manage factories, then men ought to be able to help with
+the house, children . . .
+"But returning to the question: We have learned from our revolutionary
+ancestors that no individual act or response can seize the scepter of the
+enemy. The slave lashes out against his immediate master, subdues him,
+escapes, but he has done nothing more than take the first step in the long
+spiral upwards towards liberation.
+I could see the beads of perspiration rolling down Albert Harris' face as he
+struggled to read my letter to George before the jury. Often, his reading
+reminded me of that of a child who knows how to pronounce the syllables,
+but is unaware of the sense of what he is reading.
+"And often that individual escape is an evasion of the real problem."
+Harris read the last sentence as if he were noticing it for the first time. As if
+he were realizing that my words offered no proof whatever of my
+participation in the August 7 rebellion; that, on the contrary, they tended to
+exonerate me from the crimes he had charged me with. Although it
+appeared as if he wanted to be done with it and throw the whole bunch of
+letters away, he could not stop. He continued, monotonously, falteringly.
+"‘It is only when all the slaves are aroused from their slumber, articulate
+their goals, choose their leaders, make an unwavering commitment to
+
+destroy every single obstacle which might prevent them from transcribing
+their visions of a new world onto the soil of the earth, into the flesh and
+blood of men . . .
+'A mother cannot help but cry out for the survival of her own flesh and
+blood.'"
+Harris read this as if he were a foreign student of English repeating a
+sentence uttered by the teacher. I looked into the jury box. A few of the
+women, particularly Mrs. Timothy, seemed to be straining to understand his
+motive in reading these passages.
+"We have been forbidden to reach out for the truth about survival — that it
+is a collective enterprise and must be offensive, rather than defensive — for
+us, the principle of survival dictates the annihilation of all that compels us
+to order our lives around that principle."
+He pronounced "annihilation" with extra emphasis, as was the case with
+every word which he thought had something to do with violence.
+"Anxieties, frustrations engendered by the specter of a child dead of
+starvation focus our minds and bodies on the most immediate necessities of
+life. The "job" harangue, the "make yourself something" harangue.
+Exhortations grounded in fear, a fear brought into being and sustained by a
+system which could not subsist without the poor, the reserve army of
+unemployed, the scapegoat.
+"Survival instincts perverted and misdirected by a structure which coerces
+me to kick my jobless man out of the house so the social worker doesn't
+stop those welfare checks which I need to feed my hungry child."
+He rushed through this sentence in order to make it as unobtrusive as
+possible.
+"A labyrinthine network of murderous institutions in order to allow my man
+no flexibility, no room, lets me receive the checks, lets me in the back door
+to scrub floors (so the reserve labor force remains alive) and has the
+audacity to consider that a favor in return for which I must submit to the
+
+white rapist and/or subjugate my Black man. The principle of (un) Just
+Exchange is omnipotent."
+Harris pulled out his wrinkled white handkerchief and wiped the sweat from
+his face. This pause was obviously deliberate. He was about to read the
+section he felt was most incriminating of all. It was as if by setting this
+passage off with a pause, he could make the jury forget all the other ideas
+expressed in the letter and focus their attention and their memories
+exclusively on these things.
+"Frustrations, aggressions cannot be repressed indefinitely. Eventual
+explosion must be expected. But if the revolutionary path is buried beneath
+an avalanche of containment mechanisms, we, Black women, aim our
+bullets in the wrong direction and moreover, we don't even understand the
+weapon.
+'For the Black female, the solution is not to become less aggressive, not to
+lay down the gun, but to learn how to set the sights correctly, aim
+accurately, squeeze rather than jerk and not be overcome by the damage.
+We have to learn how to rejoice when pigs' blood is spilled.'"
+Harris had spoken slowly, with all the determination and drama he could
+muster.
+I hoped that the jury was not as unintelligent as he counted on their being.
+Some of them must have heard of metaphor.
+Harris reverted to his previous monotone.
+"But all this presupposes that the Black male will have purged himself of
+the myth that his mother, his woman, must be subdued before he can wage
+war on the enemy. Liberation is a dialectical movement — the Black man
+cannot free himself as a Black man unless the Black woman can liberate
+herself from all this muck — and it works the other way around. And this is
+only the beginning.
+'Is it coincidental that Leroi Jones and Ron Karenga and the whole lot of
+cowardly cultural nationalists demand the total submission of the Black
+
+female as rectification for the "century-long wrongs she has done the Black
+Male." Like you said, George, there are certain obvious criteria for
+measuring the extent to which counter-revolution is being nourished by
+those who call themselves our companions in struggle. Their attitude
+toward whites is one criterion. Their attitude toward women, another.'"
+I thought that Harris wanted to steer the jury's attention away from my
+criticism of the indiscriminately anti-white nationalists in the movement.
+He was depending on them to instinctively associate me with the anti-white
+wing of the Black Liberation Movement, and thus to be reinforced in their
+already existing political biases.
+"Women's liberation in the revolution is inseparable from the liberation of
+the male."
+He read this last sentence as if it had no apparent meaning."
+"I have rambled. I hope I have not been talking in tautologies."
+Here, he had recourse to the same intentional pause as before. The last part
+of the letter was what he wanted to read most dramatically, most
+emphatically. This is what he wanted them to retain.
+"Jon and I have made a truce. As long as I try to combat my tendencies to
+remind him of his youth, he will try to combat his male chauvinism. Don't
+come down on me before you understand — I never said Jon was too young
+for anything, I just mentioned how incredible it is that in spite of Catholic
+school, etc., he refused to allow society to entrap him in adolescence. But
+still, he doesn't dig any mention of age."
+The words had rung out strangely when Harris had tried to project his
+voice: "I never said Jon was too young for anything . . ." This phrase, which
+I had casually scratched down on paper, this phrase, with which I meant to
+tell George that I knew how much he loved and respected his brother, this
+phrase, Harris wanted to utilize as a virtual confirmation of his conspiracy
+theory. But he had just started; there was still more:
+
+"The night after I saw you in court, for the first time in months, I dreamt (or
+at least the dream was significant enough to work its way into my
+consciousness) we were together, fighting pigs, winning. We were learning
+to know each other."
+It was as if Harris wanted the jury to think that I was so wrapped up in this
+so-called conspiracy that I conspired even in my dreams.
+"I love you. Revolutionary Greetings from Che-Lumumba and the Soledad
+Brothers Defense Committee. Angela."
+When Harris reached the end of the letter, he inhaled deeply and allowed a
+tremendous sigh to escape. He did not display the confidence which one
+would have expected from a prosecutor who has just presented critical
+portions of his evidence. On the contrary, his demeanor seemed to bespeak
+a profound sense of defeat. And his sigh was a sigh of relief — as if he
+never thought he would reach the end of this letter he had been forced to
+recite like a schoolboy.
+The ambivalence I felt was disarming. On the one hand, seeing the letter as
+evidence, I had the impulse to proclaim once more the utter bankruptcy of
+the state's case — it was with this kind of evidence that they had kept me in
+jail for those sixteen months. But on the other hand, I felt depressed at
+having to see my most intimate feelings hurled out into the public like that
+through the calculating and cold presentation of the prosecutor. And the
+unmitigated grief was revived, the grief at Jon's death, the grief at George's
+death, and the burning anger at their murderers. I couldn't cry, I couldn't
+scream. I had to sit there at the counsel table, waiting for the next piece of
+evidence which the prosecutor was going to use to try to convince the jury
+of my guilt.
+One of the next witnesses to take the stand was Mrs. Otelia Young. A Black
+woman, about sixty years of age, she was rather short, and her back was
+bent as if from decades of hard labor. But she approached the stand with
+firm, determined steps. Her face, although not quite in a frown, revealed an
+almost angry seriousness. I wondered whether people were interpreting this
+determination, this seriousness, as being directed against me; the jurors
+looked puzzled.
+
+Mrs. Young had lived in the flat downstairs from me in the house on 35th
+Place. We had exchanged greetings numerous times, and I had used the
+telephone in her apartment on several occasions. I had liked her a lot —
+there was a vitality about her that was obviously the secret of her survival.
+The sparkle in her eyes and her pleasantly caustic sense of humor had made
+me want to pursue a more than casual friendship with her. But there had
+been no time.
+She had seen Jonathan at the house a few times, and they had hit it off quite
+well, both of them enjoying the subdued game of dozens they played. With
+unmistakable affection, Jon would say, "How are you doing, you old hag?"
+And before he had a chance to catch his breath, she would retaliate with
+"What have you been up to, you crazy yellow-haired brat?" And they would
+go on.
+Now she was being asked by the state to testify against me.
+Harris was trying to set the stage for his conspiracy theory. By his usual
+method of trying to convert everything I had done in the period prior to the
+Marin rebellion into conspiratorial activity, he was going to attempt to
+prove — so he said in his opening remarks — that I had obtained the 35th
+Place flat expressly for the purpose of conspiring with Jonathan, who, he
+said, had also moved into the place. He was calling Mrs. Otelia Young to
+prove his hypothesis.
+Yes, she said, she had seen Jonathan Jackson at the house on 35th Place.
+Had he been there often? No, not often, just a few times. Had she seen me
+moving into the flat, bringing my things in a white station wagon? Yes, she
+said, she had seen the station wagon. Was Jonathan with me when I moved
+in — had he moved the things upstairs? No, the station wagon was full of
+books, and I carried them all up alone.
+Bewildered expressions were all over the courtroom. We could tell that the
+jurors were wondering why Harris had bothered to call Mrs. Young to the
+stand at all. We had already figured that he would call all the Black people
+he could muster — almost regardless of what they would say. A racist ploy
+— based on the idea that jurors would think twice about my innocence if
+
+Black people were acting as state's witnesses. But obviously Mrs. Young's
+testimony had backfired.
+One thing that stood out particularly was her answer to Harris' question
+regarding her employment status.
+"Do you spend a good deal of time at work?"
+"Yes, I work — I work from seven o'clock in the morning to eight o'clock,
+eight-thirty at night." She spoke angrily and from deep down in her throat,
+sending her words thundering across the courtroom. Everyone understood
+immediately that she was a domestic worker in some white family's
+household, doing its drudgery every day from breakfast time to dinner time.
+I wondered whether some of the jurors thought back to what I had written
+George about Black women. Did they realize that I had been writing about
+Otelia Young and all her sisters in the struggle for survival?
+It was apparent that Harris had interrupted the examination without having
+brought it to a conclusion. He had been the aggressor in this duel, but he
+could not summon up the courage to fight it out to the end.
+There was no need for us to cross-examine, so Mrs. Young stepped down
+from the stand as proudly as she had walked up to it. Her eyes were aimed
+directly in front of her — toward the door in the back of the courtroom. It
+was therefore startling to us all when she reached the railing and abruptly
+turned in my direction to give me an immense, almost extravagant, smile.
+With the old sparkle back in her eyes, she greeted me with an affectionate,
+prolonged "Hi," and waved her hand the way one waves at little children.
+March had been rapidly consumed by our efforts to pick a jury that would
+penetrate the smoke screen of the scores of witnesses the state was calling.
+(Their original list had included over four hundred.) Now there was nothing
+left of April.
+I had long since forgotten how to relax; though I could never become really
+settled in the mode of existence imposed upon us, there was something very
+frightening about the way the trial developed a life of its own — a life that
+was devouring our lives. Monday through Thursday, Margaret and I would
+
+rush out of the house for our nine-fifteen appointment with the judge, jury
+and prosecutor, as if we were running off to a job or trying to make it to
+classes. On Fridays, I had to report to the Santa Clara County Probation
+Department so that they could be sure that I had not jumped bail.
+Saturdays and Sundays were our meeting days — days on which we
+evaluated our legal positions, days of criticism, self-criticism, arguments,
+and finally collective agreement on what was to be our courtroom posture
+for the coming week. Then there were meetings with the staff of the
+Defense Committee, where ideas for mass dissemination of trial literature
+were aired and formulated, where demonstrations and rallies were planned,
+where the global defense effort was coordinated with the events unfolding
+inside the courtroom.
+But it was not only my life that had been appropriated by this case.
+Margaret, Howard, Leo, Dobby — they worked incessantly. Charlene,
+Kendra, Franklin, Fania, Bettina, Stephanie, Rob, Victoria, Rodney, and all
+the other leaders of the mass campaign had ordered their lives entirely
+around building the movement. Even on the day Fania's baby was born, she
+had spent a few hours at the jail discussing the campaign with me. Several
+months later, she asked Mother to keep Eisa with her in Birmingham so that
+all her time could be devoted to organizing. When Mother traveled around
+the country and through Canada, appealing to people to support me and all
+political prisoners, she carried Eisa around with her in her arms.
+On May 4, one of the prosecution's star witnesses told the story the
+prosecution hoped would convince the jury, definitively, of my guilt. Alden
+Flemming, a plump, pink-complexioned man whose clothes sort of hung off
+him, was the owner of a service station situated at the foot of one of the
+entrances to the Marin County Civic Center. He testified that he had seen
+me with Jonathan at his service station on August 6, the day before the
+revolt. Cross-examination revealed that he had originally identified me
+from a group of photographs so carefully selected as to leave him no other
+choice. The group included several mug shots of straight-haired Black
+women with their names written across the photos. There was a picture each
+of Fania, Penny Jackson, Georgia Jackson, and about six or seven shots of
+me, all taken during the highly publicized June 19 Soledad rally, which was
+
+also the day I was fired from my UCLA position. In some of the photos I
+am speaking into a microphone, and one of them even showed Jonathan
+walking at my side. No one could have failed to miss the point —
+Flemming was being asked to identify Angela Davis.
+In court, he not only identified all of my pictures in the group, he pointed to
+my sister Fania as well and said he wasn't quite sure, but he thought that the
+picture of Penny Jackson might also be me. When Leo asked him about his
+experiences in relating to Black people, he hastily informed us that 20
+percent of his customers were Black — which seemed incredible in a
+county whose population was barely 3 percent Black.
+"Do you have any experience in having seen Black women with Afro hair
+styles?" Leo asked.
+"Yes."
+"Have you seen them many times in your life?"
+"Since it has been popular."
+"All right, and how long would you say that the Afro hair style has been a
+popular hair style for Black women?"
+"Oh, maybe seven years."
+"And I take it that during that period of time you have seen many Black
+women wearing Afro hair styles? Would that be a fair statement?"
+"Twenty percent of the people that come into my station."
+"You mean all of the people that come into your station wear Afro hair
+styles?"
+"I would say fifteen of the twenty percent."
+"So you have seen an awful lot of Black women with Afro hair styles?"
+"Right."
+
+Then Leo pursued another line.
+"How many light-complexioned Black people have you had the experience
+of seeing in your lifetime?"
+"As fair as this lady is, I would say not more than ten."
+(Any Black person or anyone who has spent any time around Black people
+would know that if 20 percent of his customers were really Black, he would
+have seen a great number of people with skin as light as mine, and many
+with much lighter skin.)
+"Is that one of the things that helped you identify her?"
+"Yes."
+"Anything else?"
+"Her features."
+And when Leo asked him to be more specific in describing what it was that
+was outstanding about my features, he said:
+"Well, she has, I would say, large eyes. The cheek bones are higher. I
+wouldn't say she has as strong a face, as heavy a face as what colored
+people have."
+Then Leo asked the inevitable question, mockingly, pronouncing "colored
+people" with Flemming's own accent.
+"Is there a certain kind of face that 'colored people,' in your opinion, usually
+have?"
+After stammering a bit, Flemming finally said, "Well, I would say the ones I
+have dealt with, their faces are flatter,
+"Faces are flatter?"
+"Yes."
+
+"And Miss Davis' face was not flat, and that made her unusual. Is that
+right?"
+"Well, I — I don't think she has a flat face."
+Leo looked Flemming in the eye, allowed a noticeable pause to intervene,
+then said, "Mr. Flemming, don't you think that all colored people look
+alike?"
+And, as if he were definitively proving his veracity before the jury, he
+answered without hesitation, "Not in Miss Davis' case."
+It was clear that this man's attitudes were so permeated with racism that he
+would be unable to make an honest identification of a Black person even if
+his life depended on it. The results of our cross-examination were never
+published in the established press — what received all the publicity was the
+direct examination by Harris, the scenario of which, we believed, had been
+perfected and rehearsed beforehand.
+The jury appeared to be impressed by a bit of Perry Mason dramatics that
+Howard came up with. Unbeknownst to me, he had asked Kendra a week
+before to drive him out to Marin, where they stopped in the Flemming
+Service Station. As he was permitted to do with any of the prosecutor's
+witnesses, he questioned Flemming about the content of the statement he
+had given the attorney general. Before they left, however, Kendra got out of
+the car, asked Flemming to check the oil, and, making herself as obvious as
+she could, she engaged him in a bit of casual conversation.
+It came as a surprise to me when Leo asked Flemming whether he had ever
+seen the Black woman sitting next to me behind the counsel table. I
+assumed he was merely trying to confuse the witness. Flemming answered
+that although he had never seen her in person, he thought he remembered
+seeing a news story in which her picture appeared. As it turned out,
+although he had insisted that he had seen no more than ten Black women as
+light-skinned as I, he had absolutely no recollection of having talked to
+Kendra in his service station.
+
+While the lawyers were hammering away at the most important evidence of
+the prosecution, the sisters and brothers on the Committee stoked the fires
+in the streets, among the people. The more the movement for my freedom
+increased in numbers, strength and confidence, the more imperative it
+became for everyone to see it not as something exceptional but as a small
+part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of
+resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police
+brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and
+white working people are kept chained to misery and despair. And it was
+not only within the United States of America, but in countries like Vietnam,
+with the bombs falling like rain from U.S. B52's, burning and
+dismembering innocent children.
+We wanted the culminating mass demonstration of the campaign to bring all
+these struggles together in a single, unified dramatization of our power. All
+our separate movements — political prisoners, welfare rights, national
+liberation, labor, women, antiwar — might generate storms here and there.
+But only a mighty union of them all could beget the great hurricane to
+topple the whole edifice of injustice.
+Many other organizations joined our Committee in issuing a call for a Rally
+against Racism, Repression and the War, to be held at the site of my trial —
+San Jose, California — on the twenty-sixth of May. The bail conditions
+prohibited me from being present at the rally. However, I was fortunate that
+the people who lived across the street from the park, directly behind the
+podium, put their house fully at our disposal. I watched and listened to the
+rally from a room in their attic.
+The crowd was not only impressive in its numbers — thousands came from
+throughout the state — but, more important, because of its composition,
+which was evenly divided between Black, Chicano and white. And it wasn't
+the usual crowd of demonstration-going politicos, particularly since so
+many of them came from San Jose, which knew no long tradition of radical
+political protest. One could sense the pulsating freshness and enthusiasm of
+those who felt impelled, for the first time in their lives, to add their voices
+to this united demand for justice.
+
+The speakers included Richard Hatcher, the Black mayor of Gary, Indiana;
+Sister Mary McAllister, one of the defendants in the Harrisburg 8 Trial;
+Phillip de la Cruz from the United Farmworkers; Raul Ruiz representing La
+Raza Unida Party; Pat Sumi, who spoke on the relation between the
+women's movement and repression, and Franklin Alexander, speaking on
+behalf of our Committee.
+When the speeches were over and the multicolored crowd was hoarse from
+screaming its approval, no one could deny that at least a spiritual victory
+had been won. All that was necessary now was to carefully plot our next
+moves and skillfully execute them, both inside the courtroom and out in the
+streets.
+
+Over the last months, the lawyers — particularly Dobby and Margaret —
+had put together an impressive assembly of defense witnesses. We had
+known from the outset that we had to worry not so much about contesting
+the facts of the case — since there was no clear-cut factual case against me
+— as about the politics implied in the prosecutor's presentation. Since the
+prosecutor, in a last-ditch effort, had resorted to his passion theory, we were
+going to have to present the true picture of my involvement with the
+Soledad case, especially with George, and provide, for the jury, a panoramic
+view of my previous political involvement, particularly as it concerned
+political prisoners. We were in a dilemma because, while we wanted to
+present our witnesses, the emptiness of the prosecutor's case was so obvious
+that a defense was not really necessary to crack it. Harris had not proved me
+guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus we were under no obligation
+whatever to prove that I was innocent.
+We had several long, rather heated meetings on what the nature of the
+defense should be. Among the legal team and campaign leaders close to the
+legal situation, some felt that the prosecution was so flimsy that to present a
+defense would be to confer upon it a legitimacy and credibility that it could
+not claim on its own. I felt, at first, that we should go on with the full-blown
+defense we had planned, not so much because a defense was legally
+necessary to my particular case as because I saw it as a tremendously
+effective way to expose the government's repressive methods of silencing
+
+all its opponents. Perhaps the firmness with which I defended this position
+also had something to do with my subjective unwillingness to throw months
+of preparation out the window. Margaret, Dobby and I had been working
+together for ages, it seemed, on my testimony and the political evidence
+which would be presented through other witnesses.
+The advocates of the "no defense" posture reminded us that throughout the
+trial we had been exposing these methods of repression — and there was
+yet the final argument in which it would all be summed up. And redirecting
+our attention to the trial itself, they pointed out that we had told the jury
+throughout that the burden of proof lay with the prosecutor — not with the
+defense. If the prosecutor could not prove his case "beyond a reasonable
+doubt," then we were not required to utter a word of defense. If we
+presented a defense which spanned weeks and months, the jurors might
+think we were afraid of something they themselves had missed during the
+presentation of the state's case. But on the other hand, if there were no
+defense at all, the jury might think we were silent because we had nothing
+to say in response.
+After the arguments were over and the tempers had subsided, in the end we
+all agreed upon a third approach to the defense — a short line of witnesses
+with testimony that was succinct both in the factual and the political points.
+The end was near. After Leo had argued the motion for a directed verdict,
+which Arnason predictably denied, we put on our two-and-a-half-day
+defense. Several comrades, a friend and a lawyer whom I had seen in San
+Francisco during the days prior to the Revolt, testified about my reasons for
+being in the Bay Area at that time. We examined the friend whose house I
+was visiting when I learned about the Revolt and the death of Jonathan. My
+roommate Tamu took the stand to give evidence about the weapons. She
+explained that the guns and ammunition were used by members of the CheLumumba Club for target practice and that the place where they were kept
+— in the house on 45th — was easily accessible to a whole number of
+sisters and brothers. Our final witness was Dr. Robert Buckout, an expert on
+eyewitness testimony. He described experiments and showed slides which
+demonstrated that people have a natural tendency to fill in details
+themselves about individuals and events they cannot fully remember. One
+
+experiment which seemed to impress the jury involved a white college
+student who walked around on a campus with a black bag on his head. As it
+turned out, large numbers of those who were later questioned about him
+were certain they had seen a Black man.
+We closed our defense, Harris put several rebuttal witnesses on the stand
+and then made his closing argument before the jury. His confidence had
+eroded considerably since the opening day of the trial, and I had the feeling
+he just wanted to get the whole thing over with.
+Leo presented the closing argument for the defense. There were moments
+when I became so involved in his presentation — which was eloquent and
+moving — that I found myself forgetting that it was my life at stake. He
+closed the argument by referring to the defense lawyers:
+"We have carried on our shoulders a great responsibility. We've tried to
+carry that responsibility with truth and with dignity. With these last few
+words of mine, we are now going to transfer that responsibility from our
+shoulders to yours. We hope that in so doing that when you twelve people,
+tried and true, write the final chapter in the case of the People vs. Angela
+Davis, you will be able to say that you were chosen, you served, you
+considered and you brought back the only verdict that could comport with
+justice in this case. And that is a verdict of not guilty. I'm sure you will."
+That Friday morning shortly before noon, the jury retired to the hidden
+room upstairs. Courtroom spectators, movement activists, press people,
+gathered on the grass in front of the courthouse to participate in or observe
+the vigil organized by the Committee. The lawn outside the courthouse was
+crowded with signs, children, food, dogs and games.
+Horst, a journalist from the GDR who had been with the trial from the
+beginning, had been asking us out to lunch for weeks. Always we had to
+decline because we were meeting about something during lunch breaks.
+With the jury out, there was nothing left to meet about, so I went along to
+lunch with Horst, Margaret, Stephanie, Kendra, Franklin, Victoria, Rodney,
+Benny and Sylvia. We were still in the bar waiting to be seated when one of
+the waiters called me to the phone which the bartender pulled out from
+behind the counter.
+
+No one said a word as I picked up the receiver. It was Fania.
+"Angela. Wait a minute. The judge wants to talk to you."
+"What's going on?" I asked. "What does the judge want with me?"
+"I don't know any more than you. He only asked me if I knew where you
+were. I have to tell him you're on the line."
+"It's the judge," I said in a loud whisper to the others, with my hand over the
+mouthpiece. We all thought the inevitable:
+"A verdict already!" The intervening silence was long and made me wonder
+whether he was coming at all.
+But he finally picked up the receiver and asked, "Miss Davis? Where are
+you?"
+Fania knew where we were. I had a funny feeling that there might have
+been some reason for keeping this from Judge Arnason. But why would she
+have called in the first place if she didn't want him to know where we were?
+"We're at the Plateau Seven," I answered. "Why?"
+Ignoring my question, and with a great urgency in his voice, he said, "Don't
+leave. Stay there until I contact you again." He switched off the
+conversation as abruptly as he had begun.
+Before we had time to find words for our many speculations — a verdict?
+jury tampering? threats? — men in plain clothes, obviously policemen,
+slipped into the bar and planted themselves at various points in the room.
+Someone tried to reduce the tension by suggesting that we order our meals.
+The waiter led us through a corridor, where we noticed more
+plainclothesmen apparently trying to be inconspicuous, into a private dining
+area. The room was much too large for our small group and the table
+appeared to have been set for a banquet — certainly not for us. Franklin,
+Victoria, Rodney and Benny were quite worried about our security. What if
+there had been a threat — and it was about to be carried out? Franklin was
+
+going to check out the restaurant floor in order to see whether anything
+unusual was going on, but he was stopped by a policeman who had posted
+himself on the other side of the door to our room.
+"I thought there was some reason for this room," Franklin said when he
+returned to the table. "They've actually locked us up in here, and policemen
+are guarding the doors."
+A few minutes later Howard came in with Lieutenant Tamm, the public
+relations man for the sheriff's department. Howard was out of breath.
+"There's been a hijacking and they think the hijackers want you to come
+with them."
+We were all stunned. It didn't make any sense at all.
+"The judge wants a meeting. Dobby and Leo are already there. You and
+Margaret should come with me."
+Lieutenant Tamm said nothing.
+Outside the Plateau Seven, two police cars were waiting. The meeting in
+court was brief and shed no further light on the situation. "I'm not taking
+you into custody, Miss Davis," Arnason said in the presence of all the
+attorneys, "but for your own safety, I'm asking you to stay here in the
+courtroom until we get this problem solved."
+It had not occurred to me before that moment that they might think that I
+was involved in staging the hijacking. After all, if I had really wanted to
+leave, there were less risky ways to do it and I needn't have waited until the
+deliberations began.
+Leo and Dobby had ascertained a few more details. According to the FBI
+agent, who had stationed himself there in the courthouse, a plane had been
+commandeered by four Black men after taking off in Seattle. Demands had
+been transmitted over the plane's radio. The agent said that when they
+landed at the San Francisco Airport, they wanted me to be at the end of the
+runway with $500,000 and five parachutes. (There were supposed to be four
+men.) I was to wear a white dress.
+
+Fortunately, I was dressed in red. If I had happened to put on a white dress
+that morning, some people undoubtedly would have been convinced that I
+had a part in the hijacking.
+Since there was no telling how long we were going to be closed up in the
+courtroom, Howard arranged for the family to join us.
+Lieutenant Tamm came in and announced that the hijackers had plastic
+explosives on board and that they were threatening, if their demands were
+not met, to blow up the plane with its nearly one hundred passengers.
+While we sat around in the courtroom, Leo and Dobby were listening, in the
+judge's chambers, for more developments in the hijacking. Leo came out
+and informed us that under no conditions would Arnason allow me to be
+taken to the airport. Later Dobby came over, shaking her head and smiling
+wryly. "You won't believe what just happened. Apparently the plane just
+landed at Oakland Airport. The FBI agent was on the phone, in a panic,
+telling someone to get the plane back into the air — all their agents are in
+San Francisco dressed up as airplane attendants; there's only one agent in
+Oakland."
+It was about seven o'clock when the real story of the hijacking finally came
+to light. And it had absolutely nothing to do with me, white dresses or
+parachutes. My name, in fact, had never once been mentioned by the
+hijackers. There weren't even four hijackers. All these embellishments were
+tacked onto the story while it moved from the radio control tower through
+the FBI to us. We couldn't help speculating that the FBI had tried to draw
+me into the hijacking in order to disrupt the jury deliberations.
+The San Jose News was on street corners all over the city, carrying the
+headline story HIJACKERS DEMAND ANGELA, based on the earlier
+erroneous FBI reports. Although the judge had ordered all televisions
+removed from the jurors' motel rooms, there was still no guarantee that one
+of them might not catch a glimpse of a headline somewhere between the
+courthouse and their motel rooms. If one of the jurors did see the newspaper
+and was influenced by it, a mistrial could be declared. We could only hope
+that they knew nothing.
+
+Out of all the chaos of the first day of deliberations, there was one
+undisputed cause for celebration. Ms. Mary Timothy was elected
+forewoman of the jury. From the very beginning we had considered her as
+among the most honest and most objective of the jurors. During the voir
+dire we had been heartened to learn that her son had refused to be inducted
+into the U.S. Army. During the period when the bombing of Vietnam was
+particularly fierce, she had come to court wearing a button bearing the
+three-pronged peace symbol. Throughout the trial we had directed the jury's
+attention to the prosecutor's efforts to exploit the prevailing stereotypes
+about women, persistently attacking his case for its attempt to portray me as
+an irrational, emotion-driven female. That Ms. Timothy had been chosen to
+preside over the discussions indicated that members of the jury were
+thinking about the question of social discrimination against women. Their
+first active gesture as a jury was a rejection of the notion that only men are
+qualified to lead.
+Howard had a theory about the deliberations, which we heard him expound
+repeatedly during the last days of the trial. If they decided to acquit, it
+would be a verdict which was unanimous from the start, they would stay
+out not more than a few hours. If they stayed out longer than a day, they
+would probably be out for a very long time and, in the end, would be unable
+to reach a decision. Friday we were so concerned about that plane en route
+from Seattle to San Francisco that we hardly had time to worry about the
+verdict. Saturday morning, Howard was saying that they would be in before
+lunch. So when the clerk called Moorpark Apartments to say that the judge
+wanted to see one of the lawyers, we thought they might be nearing a
+verdict. Anxious and silent, we all went down to the courthouse. But there
+was no verdict at hand, only a request from the jury to have some of the
+evidence delivered to them. However, our spirits were lifted somewhat
+when we noticed that the note to the judge was signed "Mary Timothy,
+foreMs." We took this little bit of humor as a sign that there was no outand-out battle in progress.
+Outside on the grass, the vigil was in full force. After shooing away the
+reporters, Victoria, Rodney and I walked through the crowd, eating
+sandwiches from the big basket of food, playing with the babies and
+thanking people for their encouragement.
+
+Among the vigilants was Andy Montgomery, one of the San Jose Black
+community's leading spokesmen and an active member of the San Jose
+Defense Committee. It was he who had found an office and lodgings for the
+members of the legal staff. He had spoken on my behalf at meetings of the
+Black Caucus and had gotten members of the caucus involved in the
+campaign. He had successfully appealed to the members of his church to
+join the campaign and was generally responsible for much of the local
+activity around the case. Friday we had promised that, in the event the jury
+was still deliberating, we would have dinner at his house. As it turned out,
+everyone who had any connection with the case at all was either inside
+Andy's house or outside in the street — my family, the lawyers and their
+families, Bettina, Kendra and Franklin, Rodney, Victoria, and members of
+the San Jose Committee.
+The dinner at Andy's was supposed to be a respite from our purgatory of
+waiting. But tensions were too agonizing for quiet relaxation. When I
+arrived at Andy's, a double rope was turning in the middle of the street, and
+Margaret was jumping to screams of "Faster! Faster!" I joined her. After
+getting entangled in the ropes a few times, I got it and didn't want to stop. It
+was the way we jumped rope when as a child I spent the summer in New
+York. Bettina jumped, Howard, Leo, Charlene — and we even managed to
+persuade my father to join in. When he got started, he didn't want to stop
+either. A little way down the street, Benny had gotten a football game
+together and we shouted at the players for disrupting our rope-jumping with
+misthrown passes.
+When the chicken and ribs, potato salad, greens and cornbread were ready,
+we ate as though we were celebrating the end of a long famine. No one
+talked very much about the trial, but the word had begun to circulate in the
+neighborhood that we were over at Andy's, and for the rest of the evening
+there was an interminable stream of visitors.
+In the end, we discovered that we had played a little too hard — Kendra
+was the casualty of our premature celebration. During the football game she
+had twisted her ankle, and Franklin had to take her to the hospital for xrays, an Ace bandage and crutches. Perhaps we had overdone it, but the
+
+tightness in my chest had almost disappeared, and worrying about Kendra's
+sprained ankle made us slightly less anxious about the jury's decision.
+
+***
+
+JUNE 4
+It was Sunday morning. We assumed we were at the beginning of an all-day
+wait, and hadn't yet bothered to check in with one another. I had spent the
+night at Leo and Geri's Moorpark apartment. Leo and I had gotten absorbed
+in our chronic debate about the weight of the mass movement in influencing
+the direction of the case.
+All of a sudden, Howard broke into the apartment, out of breath — he had
+run all the way from his apartment on the other side of the complex. He
+simply told us that it was time to go. For an instant, I didn't even understand
+what "time to go" meant. The idea that the jury would reach a verdict on
+Sunday morning was so unlikely that I had not even bothered to get
+dressed. Without telling him, I had more or less accepted Howard's theory
+of the deliberations.
+The last moments were the most agonizing of all. We had been waiting for
+two days while the jury deliberated, for three months while the trial
+unfolded, for twenty-two months since the Marin County revolt, and now
+we were told that we had to wait until the press assembled before we could
+hear the pronouncement of the verdict. In that back room where we had
+waited so many times for court to convene, my lawyers kept reassuring me
+and themselves that there was no way the verdict could be anything but Not
+Guilty. Besides, with the shabbiness of the case and the mass movement
+pushing on, there was never any question of a guilty verdict. And, in fact,
+we had never considered that as an alternative — it was either acquittal or
+hung jury. Now a hung jury could be ruled out: they had already announced
+that they had reached a verdict. There was, however, one possibility we
+were all reluctant to discuss — a compromise verdict, which, though
+
+theoretically illegal, happened all the time in jury trials where multiple
+charges had been lodged against defendants. But no one had said, at least
+not in my presence, "The only thing we really have to worry about is an
+acquittal on the murder and kidnapping counts and a conviction on the
+conspiracy."
+Leo tried to cut away some of the tension by pointing out that we would
+know the moment the jury entered the courtroom: the expressions on their
+faces — especially Ms. Timothy's and Mr. Delange's — would betray the
+decision they had reached. Of course, none of this helped very much. The
+suspense, the anxiety — all this was beyond remedy. I couldn't sit down for
+more than a minute without jumping up to pace off some of the strain. And
+when I began to pace, I had to sit down again, for the room was far too
+small to contain my energy. I could only clench my teeth and dig my
+fingernails deep into my palms. Margaret kept telling me that all we had to
+do was to keep cool for a few minutes more; everything would soon be
+behind us. Kendra was fighting hard to keep herself together.
+When we went into the courtroom area, people were crowded into the
+corridor, but apparently members of the press still hadn't arrived; and we
+had to wait some more. Out in the corridor Mother insisted that she wanted
+to wait outside while the verdict was announced. As I tried to calm her and
+reassure her that I would soon be free, my own strength and my own
+confidence began to return.
+Somewhere in the corridor crowd, a voice began to hum softly — a Negro
+spiritual. Someone else picked up the tune, adding the words "Woke up this
+morning with my mind staid on freedom." Before long everyone, including
+my mother, had joined in. Captain Johnson, who had been the terror of both
+the press and the people attending the trial, walked out, looked around, and
+for the first time that anyone could remember, said nothing to object.
+At last we took our places in the courtroom. Howard, Dobby and Leo sat at
+the table, and I sat against the barrier with Margaret on one side and Kendra
+on the other. The bailiff announced the entrance of the judge. Within
+minutes the jury began to walk through the door. At the sight of the first
+juror, Margaret, who had been the calmest of us all, let out a muffled "Oh
+
+no," and slid down into her chair. I leaned over and gave her the same
+words of comfort she had given me. She sobbed softly.
+I looked at the jurors filing in, searching for reassuring signs in their faces.
+But they were all expressionless, as if they had purged themselves of every
+trace of emotion. I broke out in a sweat and felt my whole body go weak.
+There was not a hint of the usual warmth in Ms. Timothy's face, which was
+cold and marble-like, and the sparkle in Delange's eyes had turned into a
+dull stare directed at no one in particular. Like a fragment from a broken
+record, Leo's words roared through my brain. "We'll know immediately
+what the verdict is, from the expressions on their faces."
+During the judicial ritual preceding the reading of the verdict, I was
+searching for some explanation of this sudden transformation of the jury's
+posture. Their faces said "Conviction." "Guilty." But this was impossible,
+illogical, absurd. Unless the whole thing had been a grand hoax. Unless
+they had consciously tried to delude us these last months, and these glacial
+stares were the reality behind the masks they had finally shedded. I wanted
+to rush over and rescue my mother from the consequences. Born of
+desperation and incomprehension, these disjointed thoughts shook me so
+furiously that I had to strain to hear the clerk as he read the papers Ms.
+Timothy had turned over to the court.
+The first count was murder. There was a loud, clear "Not Guilty." Heavy
+sobs fell into the moment of silence that followed. It was Franklin. It felt
+like everyone was breathing deep and hard and with the rhythm of a single
+being. The second count was kidnapping. "Not Guilty" rang out again.
+Franklin was crying louder. I did not think I could hold on much longer. But
+I had to hear the last verdict, the conspiracy count. My right hand tightened
+around Kendra's, the other around Margaret's.
+When the clerk read off "Not Guilty" for the third time, we screamed,
+laughed, cried and embraced — completely oblivious to the banging of the
+judge's gavel. He wanted to close the trial with the same decorum with
+which he had presided. He read a rather long quote from Twelve Men by G.
+K. Chesterton, congratulated defense, prosecution and jury, dismissed the
+last from their duties and declared case number 52613, People of California
+vs. Angela Y. Davis, closed.
+
+In her joy, my mother looked so beautiful she reminded me of the
+photographs of her when she was very young. I felt happier for her than for
+anyone else, including myself.
+The last thing I felt like was a press conference — I didn't feel like
+structuring my thoughts and emotions in order to articulate them before
+cameras and microphones — yet it was the only way I could speak to and
+thank all the people. As we entered the pressroom, the members of the jury
+were just concluding their conference. Never having exchanged a word with
+any of them, I was not sure how to relate to them. I stood at the door. The
+juror to leave the platform first was the one whom we had all thought was
+most sympathetic to the prosecution. I wondered what her reaction would
+be. When she approached, I extended one hand, but she reached out with
+both her arms, hugged me and said, "I am so happy for you." All the other
+jurors followed her example.
+A crowd had assembled in front of the courthouse. As soon as they heard
+the verdict, people had rushed down to the Civic Center. With the gag rule
+and the bail restrictions behind us, I could speak before a crowd for the first
+time in the twenty-two months since the revolt. I thanked them for coming,
+for all their support, and said that it was time to deploy our forces for the
+freedom of Ruchell, the San Quentin 6 and all other political prisoners.
+From the courthouse we went over to Gloria and David's house, where my
+parents had been staying. Family, lawyers, friends, comrades, Committee
+workers, and most of the jurors — we all sat in the sun on the grass in the
+backyard. I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it.
+For I knew it would be short-lived. Work. Struggle. Confrontation lay
+before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it . . .
+But first the grass, the sun . . . and the people.
+
+Epilogue
+At the victory party the evening of the verdict, our joy knew no bounds and
+our celebration no restraints. Yet in the echoes of our laughter and the
+frenzy of our dancing there was also caution. If we saw this moment of
+triumph as a conclusion and not as a point of departure, we would be
+ignoring all the others who remained draped in chains. We knew that to
+save their lives, we had to preserve and build upon the movement.
+This was the concern of the NUCFAD staff meeting called by Charlene on
+Monday evening, the very day after the acquittal. Fearing that some local
+committees might consider their mission accomplished, we decided to send
+out immediately a communique requesting that they all keep their
+operations alive. To ensure that this message filtered down to the masses,
+we decided that I would go on a speaking tour. While expressing our
+gratitude to the people who had joined the movement which achieved my
+freedom, I would appeal to them to stay with us as long as racism or
+political repression kept Ruchell, Fleeta, the Attica brothers or any other
+human being behind bars.
+My freedom was not yet a week old when I left with Kendra, Franklin and
+Rodney for Los Angeles. From there we went to Chicago and on to Detroit,
+where close to 10,000 people attended the rally. In New York I spoke at the
+fund-raising concert at Madison Square Garden, which had been organized
+months earlier by our Legal Defense Fund.
+An enormous political responsibility had been thrust upon me — and I was
+more frightened than I had ever been in my life because I knew that human
+lives were at stake. Our ability to keep the movement alive offered the only
+hope to our sisters and brothers behind walls. In the mass meetings,
+attended by predominantly Black people, I explained that my presence
+before them signified nothing more and nothing less than the tremendous
+power of united, organized people to transform their will into reality. Many
+others also deserved to be the beneficiaries of their power.
+
+I went on to Dallas and Atlanta and, after spending some time with my
+family in Birmingham, prepared to make a month-long tour abroad. The
+international campaign had not only exerted serious pressure on the
+government, it had also stimulated the further growth of the mass
+movement at home. At the center of the international movement was the
+socialist community of nations. It was for this reason that we decided to
+visit the USSR, including Central Asia, the German Democratic Republic,
+Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Cuba. The last stop was to be Chile.
+We saw the trip as a natural continuation of the tour through the United
+States, its foremost purpose being to thank the people who had contributed
+to the fight for my freedom and to turn their attention to other political
+prisoners. In those countries rallies were attended by more people than I had
+ever before seen assembled in one place — hundreds of thousands, for
+example in the GDR, and close to three-quarters of a million in Cuba. In
+Havana I mentioned the case of Billy Dean Smith in my speech, a Black
+G.I. antiwar activist charged with the murder of two white U. S. officers in
+Vietnam. When the Prime Minister, Fidel Castro, delivered his speech, he
+vowed on behalf of the Cuban people that as they had fought for my
+liberation, they would raise their voices now for the freedom of Billy Dean
+Smith. By the next morning, as if by magic, the walls of Havana were
+covered with posters demanding that Billy Dean Smith be set free. As we
+traveled up and down the island, children who had painted pictures and
+composed songs about Billy Dean wanted to be sure we were going to save
+their hermano.
+Here at home, work was already under way to strengthen the united front
+which could save Billy Dean and eventually all political prisoners.
+Immediately, I began another tour of campuses and communities to
+publicize, raise funds for and gather information about political prisoners
+for the organization we were building Today, a year and a half later, we
+have consolidated the National Alliance Against Racist and Political
+Repression, which has chapters in twenty-one states. Our membership
+consists of Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Asian, Indian and white people.
+We are proud that we have been able to forge unity among Communists,
+Socialists, radical Democrats, and nationalists; between ministers and nonchurchgoers; between workers and students. All of us understand that unity
+
+is the most potent weapon against racism and political persecution. As I
+write this epilogue, we are preparing to take thousands of people to North
+Carolina on July 4 for a national demonstration. For we must ensure that the
+Black leader Reverend Ben Chavis is not sentenced to the 262 years in
+prison on the charges which that state has leveled against him. We must
+liberate Donald Smith, sentenced at age sixteen to forty years behind bars
+because he participated in the movement at his high school. And we must
+rescue our innocent sister Marie Hill, whose death sentence, pronounced
+when she was sixteen, is now a sentence of living death — life without
+possibility of parole.
+Across this country, there are hundreds and thousands more like Reverend
+Chavis, Donald Smith and Marie Hill. We — you and I — are their only
+hope for life and freedom.
+June 21, 1974
+
+1
+Introduction—Prison Reform or Prison
+Abolition?
+In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted
+of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In some countries—including the
+United States—where capital punishment has not yet been abolished, a
+small but significant number of people are sentenced to death for what are
+considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar with the
+campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has already been abolished
+in most countries. Even the staunchest advocates of capital punishment
+acknowledge the fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few
+people find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.
+On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent
+feature of our social lives. Most people are quite surprised to hear that the
+prison abolition movement also has a long history—one that dates back to
+the historical appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. In
+fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison activists—even those
+who consciously refer to themselves as “antiprison activists”—are simply
+trying to ameliorate prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in
+more fundamental ways. In most circles prison abolition is simply
+unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians
+and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at
+worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to
+envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering
+people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities
+and families. The prison is considered so “natural” that it is extremely hard
+to imagine life without it.
+
+It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to question their own
+assumptions about the prison. Many people have already reached the
+conclusion that the death penalty is an outmoded form of punishment that
+violates basic principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to encourage
+similar conversations about the prison. During my own career as an
+antiprison activist I have seen the population of U.S. prisons increase with
+such rapidity that many people in black, Latino, and Native American
+communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of
+getting a decent education. When many young people decide to join the
+military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in prison, it
+should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better
+alternatives.
+The question of whether the prison has become an obsolete institution
+has become especially urgent in light of the fact that more than two million
+people (out of a world total of nine million) now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails,
+youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to relegate
+ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an
+isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and
+technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability? According
+to a recent study, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental
+illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals
+in the United States combined.1
+When I first became involved in antiprison activism during the late
+1960s, I was astounded to learn that there were then close to two hundred
+thousand people in prison. Had anyone told me that in three decades ten
+times as many people would be locked away in cages, I would have been
+absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded something
+like this: “As racist and undemocratic as this country may be [remember,
+during that period, the demands of the Civil Rights movement had not yet
+been consolidated], I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to
+lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No,
+this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism.” That
+might have been my reaction thirty years ago. The reality is that we were
+called upon to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact that
+two million people—a group larger than the population of many countries
+
+—are living their lives in places like Sing Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin,
+and Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these
+numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the U.S.
+population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas
+more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be
+claimed by the United States. In Elliott Currie’s words, “[t]he prison has
+become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our
+history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass
+incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social
+program of our time.”2
+In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison, we should ask
+how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates
+regarding the efficacy of incarceration. When the drive to produce more
+prisons and incarcerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s
+during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued that “tough on
+crime” stances—including certain imprisonment and longer sentences—
+would keep communities free of crime. However, the practice of mass
+incarceration during that period had little or no effect on official crime rates.
+In fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison populations led not
+to safer communities, but, rather, to even larger prison populations. Each
+new prison spawned yet another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system
+expanded, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods
+and services, and use of prison labor. Because of the extent to which prison
+building and operation began to attract vast amounts of capital—from the
+construction industry to food and health care provision—in a way that
+recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer
+to a “prison industrial complex.”3
+Consider the case of California, whose landscape has been thoroughly
+prisonized over the last twenty years. The first state prison in California was
+San Quentin, which opened in 1852.4 Folsom, another well-known
+institution, opened in 1880. Between 1880 and 1933, when a facility for
+women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a single new prison
+constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for Women opened and
+Tehachapi became a new prison for men. In all, between 1852 and 1955,
+
+nine prisons were constructed in California. Between 1962 and 1965, two
+camps were established, along with the California Rehabilitation Center.
+Not a single prison opened during the second half of the sixties, nor during
+the entire decade of the 1970s.
+However, a massive project of prison construction was initiated during
+the 1980s—that is, during the years of the Reagan presidency. Nine prisons,
+including the Northern California Facility for Women, were opened
+between 1984 and 1989. Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years
+to build the first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the
+number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s, twelve new
+prisons were opened, including two more for women. In 1995 the Valley
+State Prison for Women was opened. According to its mission statement, it
+“provides 1,980 women’s beds for California’s overcrowded prison
+system.” However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners5 and the other two
+women’s prisons were equally overcrowded.
+There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, sixteen
+community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother facilities in
+California. In 2002 there were 157,979 people incarcerated in these
+institutions, including approximately twenty thousand people whom the
+state holds for immigration violations. The racial composition of this prison
+population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority, account for
+35.2 percent; African-Americans 30 percent; and white prisoners 29.2
+percent.6 There are now more women in prison in the state of California
+than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s. In fact, California
+can claim the largest women’s prison in the world, Valley State Prison for
+Women, with its more than thirty-five hundred inhabitants. Located in the
+same town as Valley State and literally across the street is the second-largest
+women’s prison in the world—Central California Women’s Facility—whose
+population in 2002 also hovered around thirty-five hundred.7
+If you look at a map of California depicting the location of the thirtythree state prisons, you will see that the only area that is not heavily
+populated by prisons is the area north of Sacramento. Still, there are two
+prisons in the town of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state’s
+notorious super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border.
+
+California artist Sandow Birk was inspired by the colonizing of the
+landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three landscape paintings
+of these institutions and their surroundings. They are collected in his book
+Incarcerated: Visions of California in the Twenty-first Century.8
+I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the California
+landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how easy it was to produce a
+massive system of incarceration with the implicit consent of the public.
+Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly
+large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the
+free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in
+more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their
+own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did
+not exist? What other reasons might there have been for the rapidity with
+which prisons began to colonize the California landscape?
+Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in
+California as “a geographical solution to socio-economic problems.”9 Her
+analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these
+developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state
+capacity.
+California’s new prisons are sited on devalued rural land, most, in
+fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres . . . The State bought
+land sold by big landowners. And the State assured the small,
+depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the new, recessionproof,
+non-polluting
+industry
+would
+jump-start
+local
+10
+redevelopment.
+But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more general
+economic revitalization promised by prisons has occurred. At the same
+time, this promise of progress helps us to understand why the legislature
+and California’s voters decided to approve the construction of all these new
+prisons. People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce crime,
+they would also provide jobs and stimulate economic development in outof-the-way places.
+
+At bottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we take prison for
+granted? While a relatively small proportion of the population has ever
+directly experienced life inside prison, this is not true in poor black and
+Latino communities. Neither is it true for Native Americans or for certain
+Asian-American communities. But even among those people who must
+regrettably accept prison sentences—especially young people—as an
+ordinary dimension of community life, it is hardly acceptable to engage in
+serious public discussions about prison life or radical alternatives to prison.
+It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death.
+On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to
+imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the
+realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside
+them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is
+absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous presence and
+absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping
+the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for
+granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce. After all, no
+one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing to cope with
+the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner,
+we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is
+even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already
+experienced imprisonment.
+We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate
+reserved for the “evildoers,” to use a term recently popularized by George
+W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, “criminals” and
+“evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color.
+The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which
+undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking
+about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are
+drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that
+the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously
+engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by
+racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
+
+What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about prison expansion
+without addressing larger economic developments? We live in an era of
+migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in this country—
+and thus higher wages, benefits, and so on—corporations roam the world in
+search of nations providing cheap labor pools. This corporate migration
+thus leaves entire communities in shambles. Huge numbers of people lose
+jobs and prospects for future jobs. Because the economic base of these
+communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are
+profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women, and children who
+live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison.
+In the meantime, corporations associated with the punishment industry
+reap profits from the system that manages prisoners and acquire a clear
+stake in the continued growth of prison populations. Put simply, this is the
+era of the prison industrial complex. The prison has become a black hole
+into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass
+imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends
+to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus
+real and often quite complicated connections between the
+deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during
+the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral
+during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was
+represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed
+because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that
+by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics
+were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws were being enacted,
+and “three-strikes” provisions were on the agendas of many states.
+In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the rise of the
+prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to think further about the
+reasons we so easily take prisons for granted. In California, as we have
+seen, almost two-thirds of existing prisons were opened during the eighties
+and nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there such an
+obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many new prisons? A partial
+answer to this question has to do with the way we consume media images of
+the prison, even as the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost all
+who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural critic Gina Dent
+
+has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the prison comes in part
+from representations of prisons in film and other visual media.
+The history of visuality linked to the prison is also a main
+reinforcement of the institution of the prison as a naturalized part of
+our social landscape. The history of film has always been wedded to
+the representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison’s first films
+(dating back to the 1901 reenactment presented as newsreel,
+Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison) included
+footage of the darkest recesses of the prison. Thus, the prison is
+wedded to our experience of visuality, creating also a sense of its
+permanence as an institution. We also have a constant flow of
+Hollywood prison films, in fact a genre.11
+Some of the most well known prison films are: I Want to Live, Papillon,
+Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz. It also bears mentioning that
+television programming has become increasingly saturated with images of
+prisons. Some recent documentaries include the A&E series The Big House,
+which consists of programs on San Quentin, Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and
+Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women. The long-running HBO program
+Oz has managed to persuade many viewers that they know exactly what
+goes on in male maximum-security prisons.
+But even those who do not consciously decide to watch a documentary or
+dramatic program on the topic of prisons inevitably consume prison images,
+whether they choose to or not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV.
+It is virtually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In 1997, I
+was myself quite astonished to find, when I interviewed women in three
+Cuban prisons, that most of them narrated their prior awareness of prisons
+—that is, before they were actually incarcerated—as coming from the many
+Hollywood films they had seen. The prison is one of the most important
+features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence
+of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our
+common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it
+should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a
+great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.
+
+This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have occurred in the way
+public conversations about the prison are conducted. Ten years ago, even as
+the drive to expand the prison system reached its zenith, there were very
+few critiques of this process available to the public. In fact, most people had
+no idea about the immensity of this expansion. This was the period during
+which internal changes—in part through the application of new
+technologies—led the U.S. prison system in a much more repressive
+direction. Whereas previous classifications had been confined to low,
+medium, and maximum security, a new category was invented—that of the
+super-maximum security prison, or the supermax. The turn toward
+increased repression in a prison system, distinguished from the beginning of
+its history by its repressive regimes, caused some journalists, public
+intellectuals, and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on
+prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbated by mass
+incarceration.
+In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project published a study of
+U.S. populations in prison and jail, and on parole and probation, which
+concluded that one in four black men between the ages of twenty and
+twenty-nine were among these numbers.12 Five years later, a second study
+revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in three (32.2
+percent). Moreover, more than one in ten Latino men in this same age range
+were in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. The second study also
+revealed that the group experiencing the greatest increase was black
+women, whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight percent.13
+According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African-Americans as a whole
+now represent the majority of state and federal prisoners, with a total of
+803,400 black inmates—118,600 more than the total number of white
+inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prison expansion
+appeared in Newsweek, Harper’s, Emerge, and Atlantic Monthly. Even
+Colin Powell raised the question of the rising number of black men in
+prison when he spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention, which
+declared George W. Bush its presidential candidate.
+Over the last few years the previous absence of critical positions on
+prison expansion in the political arena has given way to proposals for prison
+
+reform. While public discourse has become more flexible, the emphasis is
+almost inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a better
+prison system. In other words, the increased flexibility that has allowed for
+critical discussion of the problems associated with the expansion of prisons
+also restricts this discussion to the question of prison reform.
+As important as some reforms may be—the elimination of sexual abuse
+and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example—frameworks that rely
+exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies
+beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which should
+be the focal point of our conversations on the prison crisis, tend to be
+marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most immediate
+question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations
+and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into
+what prisoners call “the free world.” How can we move to decriminalize
+drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously
+strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective
+alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing
+“crime” and of the social and economic conditions that track so many
+children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into
+the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent
+challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where
+the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.
+
+2
+Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist
+Perspectives Toward Prison
+“Advocates of incarceration . . . hoped that the
+penitentiary would rehabilitate its inmates.
+Whereas philosophers perceived a ceaseless state
+of war between chattel slaves and their masters,
+criminologists hoped to negotiate a peace treaty of
+sorts within the prison walls. Yet herein lurked a
+paradox: if the penitentiary’s internal regime
+resembled that of the plantation so closely that the
+two were often loosely equated, how could the
+prison possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?”
+—Adam Jay Hirsch15
+
+The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex challenges to
+the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence
+that they could not conceive of society without it. Within the history of the
+United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind. Although
+as early as the American Revolution antislavery advocates promoted the
+elimination of African bondage, it took almost a century to achieve the
+abolition of the “peculiar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists such
+as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the
+dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics. When Frederick
+Douglass embarked on his career as an antislavery orator, white people—
+even those who were passionate abolitionists—refused to believe that a
+
+black slave could display such intelligence. The belief in the permanence of
+slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists found it difficult to
+imagine black people as equals.
+It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally disestablish the
+“peculiar institution.” Even though the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.
+Constitution outlawed involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to
+be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply inscribed in
+new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions was lynching, which
+was widely accepted for many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of
+figures such as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually
+legitimized during the first half of the twentieth century. The NAACP, an
+organization that continues to conduct legal challenges against
+discrimination, evolved from these efforts to abolish lynching.
+Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a century after the
+abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not
+envision a legal system defined by racial equality. When the governor of
+Alabama personally attempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in
+the University of Alabama, his stance represented the inability to imagine
+black and white people ever peaceably living and studying together.
+“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” are the
+most well known words of this politician, who was forced to repudiate them
+some years later when segregation had proved far more vulnerable than he
+could have imagined.
+Although government, corporations, and the dominant media try to
+represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of the past that has been
+relegated to the graveyard of U.S. history, it continues to profoundly
+influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors. Nevertheless,
+anyone who would dare to call for the reintroduction of slavery, the
+organization of lynch mobs, or the reestablishment of legal segregation
+would be summarily dismissed. But it should be remembered that the
+ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined
+life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation. The
+2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
+Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances held in Durban, South Africa,
+
+divulged the immensity of the global task of eliminating racism. There may
+be many disagreements regarding what counts as racism and what are the
+most effective strategies to eliminate it. However, especially with the
+downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, there is a global
+consensus that racism should not define the future of the planet.
+I have referred to these historical examples of efforts to dismantle racist
+institutions because they have considerable relevance to our discussion of
+prisons and prison abolition. It is true that slavery, lynching, and
+segregation acquired such a stalwart ideological quality that many, if not
+most, could not foresee their decline and collapse. Slavery, lynching, and
+segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that,
+like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. Yet, in
+the case of all three examples, we can point to movements that assumed the
+radical stance of announcing the obsolescence of these institutions. It may
+help us gain perspective on the prison if we try to imagine how strange and
+discomforting the debates about the obsolescence of slavery must have been
+to those who took the “peculiar institution” for granted—and especially to
+those who reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist
+exploitation. And even though there was widespread resistance among
+black slaves, there were even some among them who assumed that they and
+their progeny would be always subjected to the tyranny of slavery.
+I have introduced three abolition campaigns that were eventually more or
+less successful to make the point that social circumstances transform and
+popular attitudes shift, in part in response to organized social movements.
+But I have also evoked these historical campaigns because they all targeted
+some expression of racism. U.S. chattel slavery was a system of forced
+labor that relied on racist ideas and beliefs to justify the relegation of people
+of African descent to the legal status of property. Lynching was an
+extralegal institution that surrendered thousands of African-American lives
+to the violence of ruthless racist mobs. Under segregation, black people
+were legally declared second-class citizens, for whom voting, job,
+education, and housing rights were drastically curtailed, if they were
+available at all.
+
+What is the relationship between these historical expressions of racism
+and the role of the prison system today? Exploring such connections may
+offer us a different perspective on the current state of the punishment
+industry. If we are already persuaded that racism should not be allowed to
+define the planet’s future and if we can successfully argue that prisons are
+racist institutions, this may lead us to take seriously the prospect of
+declaring prisons obsolete.
+For the moment I am concentrating on the history of antiblack racism in
+order to make the point that the prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack
+racism that operate in clandestine ways. In other words, they are rarely
+recognized as racist. But there are other racialized histories that have
+affected the development of the U.S. punishment system as well—the
+histories of Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans. These
+racisms also congeal and combine in the prison. Because we are so
+accustomed to talking about race in terms of black and white, we often fail
+to recognize and contest expressions of racism that target people of color
+who are not black. Consider the mass arrests and detention of people of
+Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Muslim heritage in the aftermath of the
+September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
+This leads us to two important questions: Are prisons racist institutions?
+Is racism so deeply entrenched in the institution of the prison that it is not
+possible to eliminate one without eliminating the other? These are questions
+that we should keep in mind as we examine the historical links between
+U.S. slavery and the early penitentiary system. The penitentiary as an
+institution that simultaneously punished and rehabilitated its inhabitants was
+a new system of punishment that first made its appearance in the United
+States around the time of the American Revolution. This new system was
+based on the replacement of capital and corporal punishment by
+incarceration.
+Imprisonment itself was new neither to the United States nor to the
+world, but until the creation of this new institution called the penitentiary, it
+served as a prelude to punishment. People who were to be subjected to
+some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison until the
+execution of the punishment. With the penitentiary, incarceration became
+
+the punishment itself. As is indicated in the designation “penitentiary,”
+imprisonment was regarded as rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was
+devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their
+crimes and, through penitence, for reshaping their habits and even their
+souls. Although some antislavery advocates spoke out against this new
+system of punishment during the revolutionary period, the penitentiary was
+generally viewed as a progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for
+the rights of citizens.
+In many ways, the penitentiary was a vast improvement over the many
+forms of capital and corporal punishment inherited from the English.
+However, the contention that prisoners would refashion themselves if only
+given the opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude and silence disregarded
+the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and work. Indeed, there were
+significant similarities between slavery and the penitentiary prison.
+Historian Adam Jay Hirsch has pointed out:
+One may perceive in the penitentiary many reflections of chattel slavery as
+it was practiced in the South. Both institutions subordinated their subjects to
+the will of others. Like Southern slaves, prison inmates followed a daily
+routine specified by their superiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects
+to dependence on others for the supply of basic human services such as
+food and shelter. Both isolated their subjects from the general population by
+confining them to a fixed habitat. And both frequently coerced their
+subjects to work, often for longer hours and for less compensation than free
+laborers.16
+As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed similar forms of
+punishment, and prison regulations were, in fact, very similar to the Slave
+Codes—the laws that deprived enslaved human beings of virtually all
+rights. Moreover, both prisoners and slaves were considered to have
+pronounced proclivities to crime. People sentenced to the penitentiary in the
+North, white and black alike, were popularly represented as having a strong
+kinship to enslaved black people.17
+The ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were
+profoundly linked during the earliest period of U.S. history. While free
+people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a
+
+sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already
+experienced by slaves. Thus, as Hirsch further reveals, Thomas Jefferson,
+who supported the sentencing of convicted people to hard labor on road and
+water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort
+of punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sentencing them
+to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson
+suggested banishment to other countries instead.18
+Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role in
+constructing presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of slavery,
+former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave Codes in order
+to regulate the behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that had
+existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed a range of actions
+—such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts, the
+possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts—that were
+criminalized only when the person charged was black. With the passage of
+the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and involuntary
+servitude were putatively abolished. However, there was a significant
+exception. In the wording of the amendment, slavery and involuntary
+servitude were abolished “except as a punishment for crime, whereof the
+party shall have been duly convicted.” According to the Black Codes, there
+were crimes defined by state law for which only black people could be
+“duly convicted.” Thus, former slaves, who had recently been extricated
+from a condition of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal
+servitude.
+In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to
+develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities
+of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime
+targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by many as a
+reincarnation of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example,
+declared vagrant “anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run away [from a
+job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had
+neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all other idle and
+disorderly persons.”19 Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one
+punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very
+plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.
+
+Mary Ellen Curtin’s study of Alabama prisoners during the decades
+following emancipation discloses that before the four hundred thousand
+black slaves in that state were set free, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in
+Alabama’s penitentiaries were white. As a consequence of the shifts
+provoked by the institution of the Black Codes, within a short period of
+time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama’s convicts were black.20 She
+further observes:
+Although the vast majority of Alabama’s antebellum prisoners were white,
+the popular perception was that the South’s true criminals were its black
+slaves. During the 1870s the growing number of black prisoners in the
+South further buttressed the belief that African Americans were inherently
+criminal and, in particular, prone to larceny.21
+In 1883, Frederick Douglass had already written about the South’s
+tendency to “impute crime to color.”22 When a particularly egregious crime
+was committed, he noted, not only was guilt frequently assigned to a black
+person regardless of the perpetrator’s race, but white men sometimes sought
+to escape punishment by disguising themselves as black. Douglass would
+later recount one such incident that took place in Granger County,
+Tennessee, in which a man who appeared to be black was shot while
+committing a robbery. The wounded man, however, was discovered to be a
+respectable white citizen who had colored his face black.
+The above example from Douglass demonstrates how whiteness, in the
+words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, operates as property.23 According to
+Harris, the fact that white identity was possessed as property meant that
+rights, liberties, and self-identity were affirmed for white people, while
+being denied to black people. The latter’s only access to whiteness was
+through “passing.” Douglass’s comments indicate how this property interest
+in whiteness was easily reversed in schemes to deny black people their
+rights to due process. Interestingly, cases similar to the one Douglass
+discusses above emerged in the United States during the 1990s: in Boston,
+Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife and attempted to blame an
+anonymous black man, and in Union, South Carolina, Susan Smith killed
+her children and claimed they had been abducted by a black carjacker. The
+racialization of crime—the tendency to “impute crime to color,” to use
+
+Frederick Douglass’s words—did not wither away as the country became
+increasingly removed from slavery. Proof that crime continues to be
+imputed to color resides in the many evocations of “racial profiling” in our
+time. That it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than
+the color of one’s skin is not mere speculation. Police departments in major
+urban areas have admitted the existence of formal procedures designed to
+maximize the numbers of African-Americans and Latinos arrested—even in
+the absence of probable cause. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks,
+vast numbers of people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage were
+arrested and detained by the police agency known as Immigration and
+Naturalization Services (INS). The INS is the federal agency that claims the
+largest number of armed agents, even more than the FBI.24
+During the post-slavery era, as black people were integrated into southern
+penal systems—and as the penal system became a system of penal servitude
+—the punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into
+the penal system. “Whipping,” as Matthew Mancini has observed, “was the
+preeminent form of punishment under slavery; and the lash, along with the
+chain, became the very emblem of servitude for slaves and prisoners.ʺ25 As
+indicated above, black people were imprisoned under the laws assembled in
+the various Black Codes of the southern states, which, because they were
+rearticulations of the Slave Codes, tended to racialize penality and link it
+closely with previous regimes of slavery. The expansion of the convict lease
+system and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum criminal
+justice system, which focused far more intensely on black people than on
+whites, defined southern criminal justice largely as a means of controlling
+black labor. According to Mancini:
+Among the multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction
+that blacks could only labor in a certain way—the way experience had
+shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant
+supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the
+requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, Southern whites almost
+universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such
+intense surveillance and discipline.26
+
+Scholars who have studied the convict lease system point out that in
+many important respects, convict leasing was far worse than slavery, an
+insight that can be gleaned from titles such as One Dies, Get Another (by
+Mancini), Worse Than Slavery (David Oshinsky’s work on Parchman
+Prison),27 and Twice the Work of Free Labor (Alex Lichtenstein’s
+examination of the political economy of convict leasing).28 Slave owners
+may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after
+all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were
+leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally
+to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.
+According to descriptions by contemporaries, the conditions under which
+leased convicts and county chain gangs lived were far worse than those
+under which black people had lived as slaves. The records of Mississippi
+plantations in the Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that
+the prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or mattresses,
+and often without clothes. They were punished for “slow hoeing” (ten
+lashes), “sorry planting” (five lashes), and “being light with cotton” (five
+lashes). Some who attempted to escape were whipped “till the blood ran
+down their legs”; others had a metal spur riveted to their feet. Convicts
+dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption,
+sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and “shackle poisoning” (the
+constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh).29
+The appalling treatment to which convicts were subjected under the lease
+system recapitulated and further extended the regimes of slavery. If, as
+Adam Jay Hirsch contends, the early incarnations of the U.S. penitentiary in
+the North tended to mirror the institution of slavery in many important
+respects, the post-Civil War evolution of the punishment system was in very
+literal ways the continuation of a slave system, which was no longer legal in
+the “free” world. The population of convicts, whose racial composition was
+dramatically transformed by the abolition of slavery, could be subjected to
+such intense exploitation and to such horrendous modes of punishment
+precisely because they continued to be perceived as slaves.
+Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many scholars who have
+acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of the post-Civil War structures
+
+of punishment in the South have failed to identify the extent to which
+racism colored common-sense understandings of the circumstances
+surrounding the wholesale criminalization of black communities. Even
+antiracist historians, she contends, do not go far enough in examining the
+ways in which black people were made into criminals. They point out—and
+this, she says, is indeed partially true—that in the aftermath of
+emancipation, large numbers of black people were forced by their new
+social situation to steal in order to survive. It was the transformation of
+petty thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of black
+people to the “involuntary servitude” legalized by the Thirteenth
+Amendment. What Curtin suggests is that these charges of theft were
+frequently fabricated outright. They “also served as subterfuge for political
+revenge. After emancipation the courtroom became an ideal place to exact
+racial retribution.” 30 In this sense, the work of the criminal justice system
+was intimately related to the extralegal work of lynching.
+Alex Lichtenstein, whose study focuses on the role of the convict lease
+system in forging a new labor force for the South, identifies the lease
+system, along with the new Jim Crow laws, as the central institution in the
+development of a racial state.
+New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewhere were able to use the
+state to recruit and discipline a convict labor force, and thus were
+able to develop their states’ resources without creating a wage labor
+force, and without undermining planters’ control of black labor. In
+fact, quite the opposite: the penal system could be used as a
+powerful sanction against rural blacks who challenged the racial
+order upon which agricultural labor control relied.31
+Lichtenstein discloses, for example, the extent to which the building of
+Georgia railroads during the nineteenth century relied on black convict
+labor. He further reminds us that as we drive down the most famous street
+in Atlanta—Peachtree Street—we ride on the backs of convicts: “[T]he
+renowned Peachtree Street and the rest of Atlanta’s well-paved roads and
+modern transportation infrastructure, which helped cement its place as the
+commercial hub of the modern South, were originally laid by convicts.”32
+
+Lichtenstein’s major argument is that the convict lease was not an
+irrational regression; it was not primarily a throwback to precapitalist
+modes of production. Rather, it was a most efficient and most rational
+deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the
+South. In this sense, he argues, “convict labor was in many ways in the
+vanguard of the region’s first tentative, ambivalent, steps toward
+modernity.ʺ33
+Those of us who have had the opportunity to visit nineteenth-century
+mansions that were originally constructed on slave plantations are rarely
+content with an aesthetic appraisal of these structures, no matter how
+beautiful they may be. Sufficient visual imagery of toiling black slaves
+circulate enough in our environment for us to imagine the brutality that
+hides just beneath the surface of these wondrous mansions. We have learned
+how to recognize the role of slave labor, as well as the racism it embodied.
+But black convict labor remains a hidden dimension of our history. It is
+extremely unsettling to think of modern, industrialized urban areas as
+having been originally produced under the racist labor conditions of penal
+servitude that are often described by historians as even worse than slavery.
+I grew up in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Because of its mines—
+coal and iron ore—and its steel mills that remained active until the
+deindustrialization process of the 1980s, it was widely known as “the
+Pittsburgh of the South.” The fathers of many of my friends worked in these
+mines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that the black miners
+and steelworkers I knew during my childhood inherited their place in
+Birmingham’s industrial development from black convicts forced to do this
+work under the lease system. As Curtin observes,
+Many ex-prisoners became miners because Alabama used prison labor
+extensively in its coalmines. By 1888 all of Alabama’s able male prisoners
+were leased to two major mining companies: the Tennessee Coal and Iron
+Company (TCI) and Sloss Iron and Steel Company. For a charge of up to
+$18.50 per month per man, these corporations “leased,” or rented prison
+laborers and worked them in coalmines.34
+Learning about this little-acknowledged dimension of black and labor
+history has caused me to reevaluate my own childhood experiences.
+
+One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual erasure of historical
+contributions by people of color. Here we have a penal system that was
+racist in many respects—discriminatory arrests and sentences, conditions of
+work, modes of punishment—together with the racist erasure of the
+significant contributions made by black convicts as a result of racist
+coercion. Just as it is difficult to imagine how much is owed to convicts
+relegated to penal servitude during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
+we find it difficult today to feel a connection with the prisoners who
+produce a rising number of commodities that we take for granted in our
+daily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and universities are
+provided with furniture produced by prisoners, the vast majority of whom
+are Latino and black.
+There are aspects of our history that we need to interrogate and rethink,
+the recognition of which may help us to adopt more complicated, critical
+postures toward the present and the future. I have focused on the work of a
+few scholars whose work urges us to raise questions about the past, present,
+and future. Curtin, for example, is not simply content with offering us the
+possibility of reexamining the place of mining and steelwork in the lives of
+black people in Alabama. She also uses her research to urge us to think
+about the uncanny parallels between the convict lease system in the
+nineteenth century and prison privatization in the twenty-first.
+In the late nineteenth century, coal companies wished to keep their
+skilled prison laborers for as long as they could, leading to denials
+of “short time.” Today, a slightly different economic incentive can
+lead to similar consequences. CCA [Corrections Corporation of
+America] is paid per prisoner. If the supply dries up, or too many are
+released too early, their profits are affected . . . Longer prison terms
+mean greater profits, but the larger point is that the profit motive
+promotes the expansion of imprisonment.35
+The persistence of the prison as the main form of punishment, with its
+racist and sexist dimensions, has created this historical continuity between
+the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century convict lease system and the
+privatized prison business today. While the convict lease system was legally
+abolished, its structures of exploitation have reemerged in the patterns of
+
+privatization, and, more generally, in the wide-ranging corporatization of
+punishment that has produced a prison industrial complex. If the prison
+continues to dominate the landscape of punishment throughout this century
+and into the next, what might await coming generations of impoverished
+African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans?
+Given the parallels between the prison and slavery, a productive exercise
+might consist in speculating about what the present might look like if
+slavery or its successor, the convict lease system, had not been abolished.
+To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slavery and the lease
+system has produced an era of equality and justice. On the contrary, racism
+surreptitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are
+difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging. In some states, for
+example, more than one-third of black men have been labeled felons. In
+Alabama and Florida, once a felon, always a felon, which entails the loss of
+status as a rights-bearing citizen. One of the grave consequences of the
+powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as
+president. If only the black men and women denied the right to vote because
+of an actual or presumed felony record had been allowed to cast their
+ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today. And perhaps we
+would not be dealing with the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared
+during the first year of his administration. If not for his election, the people
+of Iraq might not have suffered death, destruction, and environmental
+poisoning by U.S. military forces.
+As appalling as the current political situation may be, imagine what our
+lives might have become if we were still grappling with the institution of
+slavery—or the convict lease system or racial segregation. But we do not
+have to speculate about living with the consequences of the prison. There is
+more than enough evidence in the lives of men and women who have been
+claimed by ever more repressive institutions and who are denied access to
+their families, their communities, to educational opportunities, to productive
+and creative work, to physical and mental recreation. And there is even
+more compelling evidence about the damage wrought by the expansion of
+the prison system in the schools located in poor communities of color that
+replicate the structures and regimes of the prison. When children attend
+schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on
+
+knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for
+prison. If this is the predicament we face today, what might the future hold
+if the prison system acquires an even greater presence in our society? In the
+nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery
+continued, the future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first
+century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the
+revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison
+system.
+
+3
+Imprisonment and Reform
+“One should recall that the movement for
+reforming the prisons, for controlling their
+functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does
+not even seem to have originated in a recognition
+of failure. Prison ‘reform’ is virtually
+contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes,
+as it were, its programme.”
+—Michel Foucault36
+
+It is ironic that the prison itself was a product of concerted efforts by
+reformers to create a better system of punishment. If the words “prison
+reform” so easily slip from our lips, it is because “prison” and “reform”
+have been inextricably linked since the beginning of the use of
+imprisonment as the main means of punishing those who violate social
+norms. As I have already indicated, the origins of the prison are associated
+with the American Revolution and therefore with the resistance to the
+colonial power of England. Today this seems ironic, but incarceration
+within a penitentiary was assumed to be humane—at least far more humane
+than the capital and corporal punishment inherited from England and other
+European countries. Foucault opens his study, Discipline and Punish: The
+Birth of the Prison, with a graphic description of a 1757 execution in Paris.
+The man who was put to death was first forced to undergo a series of
+formidable tortures ordered by the court. Red-hot pincers were used to burn
+away the flesh from his limbs, and molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin,
+and other substances were melted together and poured onto the wounds.
+
+Finally, he was drawn and quartered, his body burned, and the ashes tossed
+into the wind.37 Under English common law, a conviction for sodomy led to
+the punishment of being buried alive, and convicted heretics also were
+burned alive. “The crime of treason by a female was punished initially
+under the common law by burning alive the defendant. However, in the year
+1790 this method was halted and the punishment became strangulation and
+burning of the corpse.ʺ38
+European and American reformers set out to end macabre penalties such
+as this, as well as other forms of corporal punishment such as the stocks and
+pillories, whippings, brandings, and amputations. Prior to the appearance of
+punitive incarceration, such punishment was designed to have its most
+profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of
+spectators. Punishment was, in essence, public spectacle. Reformers such as
+John Howard in England and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that
+punishment—if carried out in isolation, behind the walls of the prison—
+would cease to be revenge and would actually reform those who had broken
+the law.
+It should also be pointed out that punishment has not been without its
+gendered dimensions. Women were often punished within the domestic
+domain, and instruments of torture were sometimes imported by authorities
+into the household. In seventeenth-century Britain, women whose husbands
+identified them as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male dominance were
+punished by means of a gossip’s bridle, or “branks,” a headpiece with a
+chain attached and an iron bit that was introduced into the woman’s
+mouth.39 Although the branking of women was often linked to a public
+parade, this contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house,
+where the punished woman remained until her husband decided to release
+her. I mention these forms of punishment inflicted on women because, like
+the punishment inflicted on slaves, they were rarely taken up by prison
+reformers.
+Other modes of punishment that predated the rise of the prison include
+banishment, forced labor in galleys, transportation, and appropriation of the
+accused’s property. The punitive transportation of large numbers of people
+from England, for example, facilitated the initial colonization of Australia.
+
+Transported English convicts also settled the North American colony of
+Georgia. During the early 1700s, one in eight transported convicts were
+women, and the work they were forced to perform often consisted of
+prostitution.40
+Imprisonment was not employed as a principal mode of punishment until
+the eighteenth century in Europe and the nineteenth century in the United
+States. And European prison systems were instituted in Asia and Africa as
+an important component of colonial rule. In India, for example, the English
+prison system was introduced during the second half of the eighteenth
+century, when jails were established in the regions of Calcutta and Madras.
+In Europe, the penitentiary movement against capital and other corporal
+punishments reflected new intellectual tendencies associated with the
+Enlightenment, activist interventions by Protestant reformers, and structural
+transformations associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. In Milan in
+1764, Cesare Beccaria published his Essay on Crimes and Punishments,41
+which was strongly influenced by notions of equality advanced by the
+philosophes—especially Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Beccaria
+argued that punishment should never be a private matter, nor should it be
+arbitrarily violent; rather, it should be public, swift, and as lenient as
+possible. He revealed the contradiction of what was then a distinctive
+feature of imprisonment—the fact that it was generally imposed prior to the
+defendant’s guilt or innocence being decided.
+However, incarceration itself eventually became the penalty, bringing
+about a distinction between imprisonment as punishment and pretrial
+detention or detention until the infliction of punishment. The process
+through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of stateinflicted punishment was very much related to the rise of capitalism and to
+the appearance of a new set of ideological conditions. These new conditions
+reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and
+aspirations furthered new scientific, philosophical, cultural, and popular
+ideas. It is thus important to grasp the fact that the prison as we know it
+today did not make its appearance on the historical stage as the superior
+form of punishment for all times. It was simply—though we should not
+underestimate the complexity of this process—what made most sense at a
+particular moment in history. We should therefore question whether a
+
+system that was intimately related to a particular set of historical
+circumstances that prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
+can lay absolute claim on the twenty-first century.
+It may be important at this point in our examination to acknowledge the
+radical shift in the social perception of the individual that appeared in the
+ideas of that era. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the individual came to be
+regarded as a bearer of formal rights and liberties. The notion of the
+individual’s inalienable rights and liberties was eventually memorialized in
+the French and American Revolution. “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” from
+the French Revolution and “We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men
+are created equal . . .” from the American Revolution were new and radical
+ideas, even though they were not extended to women, workers, Africans,
+and Indians. Before the acceptance of the sanctity of individual rights,
+imprisonment could not have been understood as punishment. If the
+individual was not perceived as possessing inalienable rights and liberties,
+then the alienation of those rights and liberties by removal from society to a
+space tyrannically governed by the state would not have made sense.
+Banishment beyond the geographical limits of the town may have made
+sense, but not the alteration of the individual’s legal status through
+imposition of a prison sentence.
+Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computed in terms of
+time, is related to abstract quantification, evoking the rise of science and
+what is often referred to as the Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that
+this was precisely the historical period when the value of labor began to be
+calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated in another
+quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state punishment in terms
+of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the
+basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of
+punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the
+commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences
+emerged as the primary form of punishment.42
+Today, the growing social movement contesting the supremacy of global
+capital is a movement that directly challenges the rule of the planet—its
+human, animal, and plant populations, as well as its natural resources—by
+
+corporations that are primarily interested in the increased production and
+circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a challenge to the
+supremacy of the commodity form, a rising resistance to the contemporary
+tendency to commodify every aspect of planetary existence. The question
+we might consider is whether this new resistance to capitalist globalization
+should also incorporate resistance to the prison.
+Thus far I have largely used gender-neutral language to describe the
+historical development of the prison and its reformers. But convicts
+punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily
+male. This reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political,
+and economic rights. Since women were largely denied public status as
+rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the
+deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. 43 This was especially true
+of married women, who had no standing before the law. According to
+English common law, marriage resulted in a state of “civil death,” as
+symbolized by the wife’s assumption of the husband’s name. Consequently,
+she tended to be punished for revolting against her domestic duties rather
+than for failure in her meager public responsibilities. The relegation of
+white women to domestic economies prevented them from playing a
+significant role in the emergent commodity realm. This was especially true
+since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialized as white. It
+is not fortuitous that domestic corporal punishment for women survived
+long after these modes of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men.
+The persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical
+modes of gendered punishment.
+Some scholars have argued that the word “penitentiary” may have been
+used first in connection with plans outlined in England in 1758 to house
+“penitent prostitutes.” In 1777, John Howard, the leading Protestant
+proponent of penal reform in England, published The State of the Prisons,44
+in which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for religious selfreflection and self-reform. Between 1787 and 1791, the utilitarian
+philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his letters on a prison model he
+called the panopticon.45 Bentham claimed that criminals could only
+internalize productive labor habits if they were under constant surveillance.
+
+According to his panopticon model, prisoners were to be housed in single
+cells on circular tiers, all facing a multilevel guard tower. By means of
+blinds and a complicated play of light and darkness, the prisoners—who
+would not see each other at all—would be unable to see the warden. From
+his vantage point, on the other hand, the warden would be able to see all of
+the prisoners. However—and this was the most significant aspect of
+Bentham’s mammoth panopticon—because each individual prisoner would
+never be able to determine where the warden’s gaze was focused, each
+prisoner would be compelled to act, that is, work, as if he were being
+watched at all times.
+If we combine Howard’s emphasis on disciplined self-reflection with
+Bentham’s ideas regarding the technology of internalization designed to
+make surveillance and discipline the purview of the individual prisoner, we
+can begin to see how such a conception of the prison had far-reaching
+implications. The conditions of possibility for this new form of punishment
+were strongly anchored in a historical era during which the working class
+needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable
+of performing the requisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist
+system.
+John Howard’s ideas were incorporated in the Penitentiary Act of 1799,
+which opened the way for the modern prison. While Jeremy Bentham’s
+ideas influenced the development of the first national English penitentiary,
+located in Millbank and opened in 1816, the first full-fledged effort to
+create a panopticon prison was in the United States. The Western State
+Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, based on a revised architectural model of the
+panopticon, opened in 1826. But the penitentiary had already made its
+appearance in the United States. Pennsylvania’s Walnut Street Jail housed
+the first state penitentiary in the United States, when a portion of the jail
+was converted in 1790 from a detention facility to an institution housing
+convicts whose prison sentences simultaneously became punishment and
+occasions for penitence and reform.
+Walnut Street’s austere regime—total isolation in single cells where
+prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible (if, indeed, they were literate),
+and supposedly reflected and repented—came to be known as the
+
+Pennsylvania system. This regime would constitute one of that era’s two
+major models of imprisonment. Although the other model, developed in
+Auburn, New York, was viewed as a rival to the Pennsylvania system, the
+philosophical basis of the two models did not differ substantively. The
+Pennsylvania model, which eventually crystallized in the Eastern State
+Penitentiary in Cherry Hill—the plans for which were approved in 1821—
+emphasized total isolation, silence, and solitude, whereas the Auburn model
+called for solitary cells but labor in common. This mode of prison labor,
+which was called congregate, was supposed to unfold in total silence.
+Prisoners were allowed to be with each other as they worked, but only
+under condition of silence. Because of its more efficient labor practices,
+Auburn eventually became the dominant model, both for the United States
+and Europe.
+Why would eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers become so
+invested in creating conditions of punishment based on solitary
+confinement? Today, aside from death, solitary confinement—next to
+torture, or as a form of torture—is considered the worst form of punishment
+imaginable. Then, however, it was assumed to have an emancipatory effect.
+The body was placed in conditions of segregation and solitude in order to
+allow the soul to flourish. It is not accidental that most of the reformers of
+that era were deeply religious and therefore saw the architecture and
+regimes of the penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimes of
+monastic life. Still, observers of the new penitentiary saw, early on, the real
+potential for insanity in solitary confinement. In an often-quoted passage of
+his American Notes, Charles Dickens prefaced a description of his 1842
+visit to Eastern Penitentiary with the observation that “the system here is
+rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to
+be cruel and wrong.”
+In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and
+meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised
+this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen
+who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are
+doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the
+immense amount of torture and agony that this dreadful punishment,
+prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers . . . I am only the
+
+more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it
+which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no
+man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow
+and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be
+immeasurably worse than any torture of the body . . . because its
+wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human
+ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret
+punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.46
+Unlike other Europeans such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de
+Beaumont, who believed that such punishment would result in moral
+renewal and thus mold convicts into better citizens,47 Dickens was of the
+opinion that “[t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into
+society again morally unhealthy and diseased.”48 This early critique of the
+penitentiary and its regime of solitary confinement troubles the notion that
+imprisonment is the most suitable form of punishment for a democratic
+society.
+The current construction and expansion of state and federal supermaximum security prisons, whose putative purpose is to address
+disciplinary problems within the penal system, draws upon the historical
+conception of the penitentiary, then considered the most progressive form of
+punishment. Today African-Americans and Latinos are vastly
+overrepresented in these supermax prisons and control units, the first of
+which emerged when federal correctional authorities began to send
+prisoners housed throughout the system whom they deemed to be
+“dangerous” to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. In 1983, the entire
+prison was “locked down,” which meant that prisoners were confined to
+their cells twenty-three hours a day. This lockdown became permanent, thus
+furnishing the general model for the control unit and supermax prison.49
+Today, there are approximately sixty super-maximum security federal and
+state prisons located in thirty-six states and many more supermax units in
+virtually every state in the country.
+A description of supermaxes in a 1997 Human Rights Watch report
+sounds chillingly like Dickens’s description of Eastern State Penitentiary.
+
+What is different, however, is that all references to individual rehabilitation
+have disappeared.
+Inmates in super-maximum security facilities are usually held in
+single cell lock-down, commonly referred to as solitary confinement
+. . . [C]ongregate activities with other prisoners are usually
+prohibited; other prisoners cannot even be seen from an inmate’s
+cell; communication with other prisoners is prohibited or difficult
+(consisting, for example, of shouting from cell to cell); visiting and
+telephone privileges are limited.50
+The new generation of super-maximum security facilities also rely on
+state-of-the-art technology for monitoring and controlling prisoner conduct
+and movement, utilizing, for example, video monitors and remotecontrolled electronic doors.51 “These prisons represent the application of
+sophisticated, modern technology dedicated entirely to the task of social
+control, and they isolate, regulate and surveil more effectively than anything
+that has preceded them.”52
+I have highlighted the similarities between the early U.S. penitentiary—
+with its aspirations toward individual rehabilitation—and the repressive
+supermaxes of our era as a reminder of the mutability of history. What was
+once regarded as progressive and even revolutionary represents today the
+marriage of technological superiority and political backwardness. No one—
+not even the most ardent defenders of the supermax—would try to argue
+today that absolute segregation, including sensory deprivation, is restorative
+and healing. The prevailing justification for the supermax is that the horrors
+it creates are the perfect complement for the horrifying personalities
+deemed the worst of the worst by the prison system. In other words, there is
+no pretense that rights are respected, there is no concern for the individual,
+there is no sense that men and women incarcerated in supermaxes deserve
+anything approaching respect and comfort. According to a 1999 report
+issued by the National Institute of Corrections,
+Generally, the overall constitutionality of these [supermax] programs
+remains unclear. As larger numbers of inmates with a greater diversity of
+characteristics, backgrounds, and behaviors are incarcerated in these
+facilities, the likelihood of legal challenge is increased.53
+
+During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absolute solitude and
+strict regimentation of the prisoner’s every action were viewed as strategies
+for transforming habits and ethics. That is to say, the idea that imprisonment
+should be the main form of punishment reflected a belief in the potential of
+white mankind for progress, not only in science and industry, but at the
+level of the individual member of society as well. Prison reformers mirrored
+Enlightenment assumptions of progress in every aspect of human—or to be
+more precise, white Western—society. In his 1987 study Imagining the
+Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century
+England, John Bender proposes the very intriguing argument that the
+emergent literary genre of the novel furthered a discourse of progress and
+individual transformation that encouraged attitudes toward punishment to
+change.54 These attitudes, he suggests, heralded the conception and
+construction of penitentiary prisons during the latter part of the eighteenth
+century as a reform suited to the capacities of those who were deemed
+human.
+Reformers who called for the imposition of penitentiary architecture and
+regimes on the then existing structure of the prison aimed their critiques at
+the prisons that were primarily used for purposes of pretrial detention or as
+an alternative punishment for those who were unable to pay fines exacted
+by the courts. John Howard, the most well known of these reformers, was
+what you might today call a prison activist. Beginning in 1773, at the age of
+forty-seven, he initiated a series of visits that took him “to every institution
+for the poor in Europe . . . [a campaign] which cost him his fortune and
+finally his life in a typhus war of the Russian army at
+Cherson in 1791.”55 At the conclusion of his first trip abroad, he
+successfully ran for the office of sheriff in Bedfordshire. As sheriff he
+investigated the prisons under his own jurisdiction and later “set out to visit
+every prison in England and Wales to document the evils he had first
+observed at Bedford.”56
+Bender argues that the novel helped facilitate these campaigns to
+transform the old prisons—which were filthy and in disarray, and which
+thrived on the bribery of the wardens—into well-ordered rehabilitative
+penitentiaries. He shows that novels such as Moll Flanders and Robinson
+
+Crusoe emphasized “the power of confinement to reshape personalityʺ57
+and popularized some of the ideas that moved reformers to action. As
+Bender points out, the eighteenth-century reformers criticized the old
+prisons for their chaos, their lack of organization and classification, for the
+easy circulation of alcohol and prostitution they permitted, and for the
+prevalence of contagion and disease.
+The reformers, primarily Protestant, among whom Quakers were
+especially dominant, couched their ideas in large part in religious
+frameworks. Though John Howard was not himself a Quaker—he was an
+independent Protestant—nevertheless
+[h]e was drawn to Quaker asceticism and adopted the dress “of a plain
+Friend.” His own brand of piety was strongly reminiscent of the Quaker
+traditions of silent prayer, “suffering” introspection, and faith in the
+illumining power of God’s light. Quakers, for their part, were bound to be
+drawn to the idea of imprisonment as a purgatory, as a forced withdrawal
+from the distractions of the senses into silent and solitary confrontation with
+the self. Howard conceived of a convict’s process of reformation in terms
+similar to the spiritual awakening of a believer at a Quaker meeting.58
+However, according to Michael Ignatieff, Howard’s contributions did not
+so much reside in the religiosity of his reform efforts.
+The originality of Howard’s indictment lies in its “scientific,” not in
+its moral character. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756
+and author of several scientific papers on climatic variations in
+Bedfordshire, Howard was one of the first philanthropists to attempt
+a systematic statistical description of a social problem.59
+Likewise, Bender’s analysis of the relationship between the novel and the
+penitentiary emphasizes the extent to which the philosophical
+underpinnings of the prison reformer’s campaigns echoed the materialism
+and utilitarianism of the English Enlightenment. The campaign to reform
+the prisons was a project to impose order, classification, cleanliness, good
+work habits, and self-consciousness. He argues that people detained within
+the old prisons were not severely restricted—they sometimes even enjoyed
+the freedom to move in and out of the prison. They were not compelled to
+
+work and, depending on their own resources, could eat and drink as they
+wished. Even sex was sometimes available, as prostitutes were sometimes
+allowed temporary entrance into the prisons. Howard and other reformers
+called for the imposition of rigid rules that would “enforce solitude and
+penitence, cleanliness and work.”60
+“The new penitentiaries,” according to Bender, “supplanting both the old
+prisons and houses of correction, explicitly reached toward . . . three goals:
+maintenance of order within a largely urban labor force, salvation of the
+soul, and rationalization of personality.”61 He argues that this is precisely
+what was narratively accomplished by the novel. It ordered and classified
+social life, it represented individuals as conscious of their surroundings and
+as self-aware and self-fashioning. Bender thus sees a kinship between two
+major developments of the eighteenth century—the rise of the novel in the
+cultural sphere and the rise of the penitentiary in the socio-legal sphere. If
+the novel as a cultural form helped to produce the penitentiary, then prison
+reformers must have been influenced by the ideas generated by and through
+the eighteenth-century novel.
+Literature has continued to play a role in campaigns around the prison.
+During the twentieth century, prison writing, in particular, has periodically
+experienced waves of popularity. The public recognition of prison writing
+in the United States has historically coincided with the influence of social
+movements calling for prison reform and/or abolition. Robert Burns’s I Am
+a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang,62 and the 1932 Hollywood film
+upon which it was based, played a central role in the campaign to abolish
+the chain gang. During the 1970s, which were marked by intense organizing
+within, outside, and across prison walls, numerous works authored by
+prisoners followed the 1970 publication of George Jackson’s Soledad
+Brother63 and the anthology I coedited with Bettina Aptheker, If They Come
+in the Morning.64 While many prison writers during that era had discovered
+the emancipatory potential of writing on their own, relying either on the
+education they had received prior to their imprisonment or on their
+tenacious efforts at self-education, others pursued their writing as a direct
+result of the expansion of prison educational programs during that era.
+
+Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has challenged the contemporary dismantling of
+prison education programs, asks in Live from Death Row,
+What societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What
+social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while
+imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits (other than the
+prison establishment itself) from stupid prisoners?65
+A practicing journalist before his arrest in 1982 on charges of killing
+Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, Abu-Jamal has regularly produced
+articles on capital punishment, focusing especially on its racial and class
+disproportions. His ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty
+with the more general challenges to the expanding U.S. prison system and
+are particularly helpful to activists who seek to associate death penalty
+abolitionism with prison abolitionism. His prison writings have been
+published in both popular and scholarly journals (such as The Nation and
+Yale Law Journal) as well as in three collections, Live from Death Row,
+Death Blossoms,66 and All Things Censored.67
+Abu-Jamal and many other prison writers have strongly criticized the
+prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which was enacted in the 1994
+crime bill,68 as indicative of the contemporary pattern of dismantling
+educational programs behind bars. As creative writing courses for prisoners
+were defunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prisoners’ writing
+eventually collapsed. Of the scores of magazines and newspapers produced
+behind walls, only the Angolite at Louisiana’s Angola Prison and Prison
+Legal News at Washington State Prison remain. What this means is that
+precisely at a time of consolidating a significant writing culture behind bars,
+repressive strategies are being deployed to dissuade prisoners from
+educating themselves.
+If the publication of Malcolm X’s autobiography marks a pivotal moment
+in the development of prison literature and a moment of vast promise for
+prisoners who try to make education a major dimension of their time behind
+bars,69 contemporary prison practices are systematically dashing those
+hopes. In the 1950s, Malcolm’s prison education was a dramatic example of
+prisoners’ ability to turn their incarceration into a transformative
+experience. With no available means of organizing his quest for knowledge,
+
+he proceeded to read a dictionary, copying each word in his own hand. By
+the time he could immerse himself in reading, he noted, “months passed
+without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I
+never had been so truly free in my life.ʺ70 Then, according to Malcolm,
+prisoners who demonstrated an unusual interest in reading were assumed to
+have embarked upon a journey of self-rehabilitation and were frequently
+allowed special privileges—such as checking out more than the maximum
+number of books. Even so, in order to pursue this self-education, Malcolm
+had to work against the prison regime—he often read on his cell floor, long
+after lights-out, by the glow of the corridor light, taking care to return to bed
+each hour for the two minutes during which the guard marched past his cell.
+The contemporary disestablishment of writing and other prison
+educational programs is indicative of the official disregard today for
+rehabilitative strategies, particularly those that encourage individual
+prisoners to acquire autonomy of the mind. The documentary film The Last
+Graduation describes the role prisoners played in establishing a four-year
+college program at New York’s Greenhaven Prison and, twenty-two years
+later, the official decision to dismantle it. According to Eddie Ellis, who
+spent twenty-five years in prison and is currently a well-known leader of the
+antiprison movement, “As a result of Attica, college programs came into the
+prisons.ʺ71
+In the aftermath of the 1971 prisoner rebellion at Attica and the
+government-sponsored massacre, public opinion began to favor prison
+reform. Forty-three Attica prisoners and eleven guards and civilians were
+killed by the National Guard, who had been ordered to retake the prison by
+Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the prison rebellion had been
+very specific about their demands. In their “practical demands” they
+expressed concerns about diet, improvement in the quality of guards, more
+realistic rehabilitation programs, and better education programs. They also
+wanted religious freedom, freedom to engage in political activity, and an
+end to censorship—all of which they saw as indispensable to their
+educational needs. As Eddie Ellis observes in The Last Graduation,
+Prisoners very early recognized the fact that they needed to be better
+educated, that the more education they had, the better they would be able to
+
+deal with themselves and their problems, the problems of the prisons and
+the problems of the communities from which most of them came.
+Lateef Islam, another former prisoner featured in this documentary, said,
+“We held classes before the college came. We taught each other, and
+sometimes under penalty of a beat-up.”
+After the Attica Rebellion, more than five hundred prisoners were
+transferred to Greenhaven, including some of the leaders who continued to
+press for educational programs. As a direct result of their demands, Marist
+College, a New York state college near Greenhaven, began to offer collegelevel courses in 1973 and eventually established the infrastructure for an
+on-site four-year college program. The program thrived for twenty-two
+years. Some of the many prisoners who earned their degrees at Greenhaven
+pursued postgraduate studies after their release. As the documentary
+powerfully demonstrates, the program produced dedicated men who left
+prison and offered their newly acquired knowledge and skills to their
+communities on the outside.
+In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating more prisons and
+more repression within all prisons, Congress took up the question of
+withdrawing college funding for inmates. The congressional debate
+concluded with a decision to add an amendment to the 1994 crime bill that
+eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, thus effectively defunding all higher
+educational programs. After twenty-two years, Marist College was
+compelled to terminate its program at Greenhaven Prison. Thus, the
+documentary revolves around the very last graduation ceremony on July 15,
+1995, and the poignant process of removing the books that, in many ways,
+symbolized the possibilities of freedom. Or, as one of the Marist professors
+said, “They see books as full of gold.” The prisoner who for many years had
+served as a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being
+moved, that there was nothing left to do in prison—except perhaps
+bodybuilding. “But,” he asked, “what’s the use of building your body if you
+can’t build your mind?” Ironically, not long after educational programs
+were disestablished, weights and bodybuilding equipment were also
+removed from most U.S. prisons.
+
+4
+How Gender Structures the Prison System
+“I have been told that I will never leave prison if I
+continue to fight the system. My answer is that one must
+be
+alive in order to leave prison, and our current
+standard of
+medical care is tantamount to a death sentence.
+Therefore, I have no choice but to continue . . .
+Conditions
+within the institution continually reinvoke
+memories of
+violence and oppression, often with devastating
+results.
+Unlike other incarcerated women who have come
+forward
+to reveal their impressions of prison, I do not feel
+‘safer’
+here because ‘the abuse has stopped.’ It has not
+stopped. It
+has shifted shape and paced itself differently, but it
+is as
+insidious and pervasive in prison as ever it was in
+the
+world I know outside these walls. What has ceased
+is my
+ignorance of the facts concerning abuse—and my
+
+willingness to tolerate it in silence.”
+—Marcia Bunny72
+
+Over the last five years, the prison system has received far more attention
+by the media than at any time since the period following the 1971 Attica
+Rebellion. However, with a few important exceptions, women have been
+left out of the public discussions about the expansion of the U.S. prison
+system. I am not suggesting that simply bringing women into the existing
+conversations on jails and prisons will deepen our analysis of state
+punishment and further the project of prison abolition. Addressing issues
+that are specific to women’s prisons is of vital importance, but it is equally
+important to shift the way we think about the prison system as a whole.
+Certainly women’s prison practices are gendered, but so, too, are men’s
+prison practices. To assume that men’s institutions constitute the norm and
+women’s institutions are marginal is, in a sense, to participate in the very
+normalization of prisons that an abolitionist approach seeks to contest.
+Thus, the title of this chapter is not “Women and the Prison System,” but
+rather “How Gender Structures the Prison System.” Moreover, scholars and
+activists who are involved in feminist projects should not consider the
+structure of state punishment as marginal to their work. Forward-looking
+research and organizing strategies should recognize that the deeply
+gendered character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the
+gendered structure of the larger society.
+Women prisoners have produced a small but impressive body of literature
+that has illuminated significant aspects of the organization of punishment
+that would have otherwise remained unacknowledged. Assata Shakur’s
+memoirs,73 for example, reveal the dangerous intersections of racism, male
+domination, and state strategies of political repression. In 1977 she was
+convicted on charges of murder and assault in connection with a 1973
+incident that left one New Jersey state trooper dead and another wounded.
+She and her companion, Zayd Shakur, who was killed during the shootout,
+were the targets of what we now name racial profiling and were stopped by
+
+state troopers under the pretext of a broken taillight. At the time Assata
+Shakur, known then as Joanne Chesimard, was underground and had been
+anointed by the police and the media as the “Soul of the Black Liberation
+Army.” By her 1977 conviction, she either had been acquitted or had
+charges dismissed in six other cases—upon the basis of which she had been
+declared a fugitive in the first place. Her attorney, Lennox Hinds, has
+pointed out that since it was proven that Assata Shakur did not handle the
+gun with which the state troopers were shot, her mere presence in the
+automobile, against the backdrop of the media demonization to which she
+was subjected, constituted the basis of her conviction. In the foreword to
+Shakur’s autobiography Hinds writes:
+In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has
+ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men’s prison,
+under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without
+intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and
+without the company of other women for all the years she was in their
+custody.74
+There is no doubt that Assata Shakur’s status as a black political prisoner
+accused of killing a state trooper caused her to be singled out by the
+authorities for unusually cruel treatment. However, her own account
+emphasizes the extent to which her individual experiences reflected those of
+other imprisoned women, especially black and Puerto Rican women. Her
+description of the strip search, which focuses on the internal examination of
+body cavities, is especially revealing:
+Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur [members of the Black Panther Party] had told
+me about it after they had been bailed out in the Panther 21 trial. When they
+had told me, I was horrified.
+“You mean they really put their hands inside you, to search you?” I had
+asked.
+“Uh-huh,” they answered. Every woman who has ever been on the rock,
+or in the old house of detention, can tell you about it. The women call it
+“getting the finger” or, more vulgarly, “getting finger-fucked.”
+“What happens if you refuse?” I had asked Afeni.
+
+“They lock you in the hole and they don’t let you out until you consent to
+be searched internally.”
+I thought about refusing, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be in the hole. I
+had had enough of solitary. The “internal search” was as humiliating and
+disgusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this table and the nurse
+holds your legs open and sticks a finger in your vagina and moves it around.
+She has a plastic glove on. Some of them try to put one finger in your
+vagina and another one up your rectum at the same time.75
+I have quoted this passage so extensively because it exposes an everyday
+routine in women’s prisons that verges on sexual assault as much as it is
+taken for granted. Having been imprisoned in the Women’s House of
+Detention to which Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur refer, I can personally
+affirm the veracity of their claims. Over thirty years after Bird and Afeni
+Shakur were released and after I myself spent several months in the
+Women’s House of Detention, this issue of the strip search is still very
+much on the front burner of women’s prison activism. In 2001 Sisters
+Inside, an Australian support organization for women prisoners, launched a
+national campaign against the strip search, the slogan of which was “Stop
+State Sexual Assault.” Assata Shakur’s autobiography provides an
+abundance of insights about the gendering of state punishment and reveals
+the extent to which women’s prisons have held on to oppressive patriarchal
+practices that are considered obsolete in the “free world.” She spent six
+years in several jails and prisons before escaping in 1979 and receiving
+political asylum by the Republic of Cuba in 1984, where she lives today.
+Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote an earlier account of life in a women’s
+prison, The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner.76 At the height
+of the McCarthy era, Flynn, a labor activist and Communist leader, was
+convicted under the Smith Act and served two years in Alderson Federal
+Reformatory for Women from 1955 to 1957. Following the dominant model
+for women’s prisons during that period, Alderson’s regimes were based on
+the assumption that “criminal” women could be rehabilitated by
+assimilating correct womanly behaviors—that is, by becoming experts in
+domesticity—especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Of course, training
+designed to produce better wives and mothers among middle-class white
+
+women effectively produced skilled domestic servants among black and
+poor women. Flynn’s book provides vivid descriptions of these everyday
+regimes. Her autobiography is located in a tradition of prison writing by
+political prisoners that also includes women of this era. Contemporary
+writings by women political prisoners today include poems and short stories
+by Ericka Huggins and Susan Rosenberg, analyses of the prison industrial
+complex by Linda Evans, and curricula for HIV/AIDS education in
+women’s prisons by Kathy Boudin and the members of the Bedford Hills
+ACE collective.77
+Despite the availability of perceptive portrayals of life in women’s
+prisons, it has been extremely difficult to persuade the public—and even, on
+occasion, to persuade prison activists who are primarily concerned with the
+plight of male prisoners—of the centrality of gender to an understanding of
+state punishment. Although men constitute the vast majority of prisoners in
+the world, important aspects of the operation of state punishment are missed
+if it is assumed that women are marginal and thus undeserving of attention.
+The most frequent justification for the inattention to women prisoners and
+to the particular issues surrounding women’s imprisonment is the relatively
+small proportion of women among incarcerated populations throughout the
+world. In most countries, the percentage of women among prison
+populations hovers around five percent.78 However, the economic and
+political shifts of the 1980s—the globalization of economic markets, the
+deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the dismantling of such social
+service programs as Aid to Families of Dependent Children, and, of course,
+the prison construction boom—produced a significant acceleration in the
+rate of women’s imprisonment both inside and outside the United States. In
+fact, women remain today the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison
+population. This recent rise in the rate of women’s imprisonment points
+directly to the economic context that produced the prison industrial complex
+and that has had a devastating impact on men and women alike.
+It is from this perspective of the contemporary expansion of prisons, both
+in the United States and throughout the world, that we should examine
+some of the historical and ideological aspects of state punishment imposed
+on women. Since the end of the eighteenth century, when, as we have seen,
+imprisonment began to emerge as the dominant form of punishment,
+
+convicted women have been represented as essentially different from their
+male counterparts. It is true that men who commit the kinds of
+transgressions that are regarded as punishable by the state are labeled as
+social deviants. Nevertheless, masculine criminality has always been
+deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality. There has always been a
+tendency to regard those women who have been publicly punished by the
+state for their misbehaviors as significantly more aberrant and far more
+threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts.
+In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of
+prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved
+as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely
+subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such.
+For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in
+greater proportions than in prisons.79 Studies indicating that women have
+been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that
+while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of
+men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is,
+deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have
+been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to
+inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far
+more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts. A
+Native American woman incarcerated in the Women’s Correctional Center
+in Montana related her experience with psychotropic drugs to sociologist
+Luana Ross:
+Haldol is a drug they give people who can’t cope with lockup. It makes you
+feel dead, paralyzed. And then I started getting side effects from Haldol. I
+wanted to fight anybody, any of the officers. I was screaming at them and
+telling them to get out of my face, so the doctor said, “We can’t have that.”
+And, they put me on Tranxene. I don’t take pills; I never had trouble
+sleeping until I got here. Now I’m supposed to see [the counselor] again
+because of my dreams. If you got a problem, they’re not going to take care
+of it. They’re going to put you on drugs so they can control you.80
+Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of the notion of
+punishment as “doing time,” the use of confinement to control beggars,
+
+thieves, and the insane did not necessarily distinguish among these
+categories of deviancy. At this phase in the history of punishment—prior to
+the American and French Revolutions—the classification process through
+which criminality is differentiated from poverty and mental illness had not
+yet developed. As the discourse on criminality and the corresponding
+institutions to control it distinguished the “criminal” from the “insane,” the
+gendered distinction took hold and continued to structure penal policies.
+Gendered as female, this category of insanity was highly sexualized. When
+we consider the impact of class and race here, we can say that for white and
+affluent women, this equalization tends to serve as evidence for emotional
+and mental disorders, but for black and poor women, it has pointed to
+criminality.
+It should also be kept in mind that until the abolition of slavery, the vast
+majority of black women were subject to regimes of punishment that
+differed significantly from those experienced by white women. As slaves,
+they were directly and often brutally disciplined for conduct considered
+perfectly normal in a context of freedom. Slave punishment was visibly
+gendered—special penalties, were, for example, reserved for pregnant
+women unable to reach the quotas that determined how long and how fast
+they should work. In the slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially
+brutal form of whipping is described in which the woman was required to
+lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole, whose purpose was
+to safeguard the fetus (conceived as future slave labor). If we expand our
+definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual
+relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women,
+if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the
+deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he
+victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into
+hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female “deviance”
+always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this
+intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized. Thus,
+white women labeled as “criminals” are more closely associated with
+blackness than their “normal” counterparts.
+Prior to the emergence of the prison as the major form of public
+punishment, it was taken for granted that violators of the law would be
+
+subjected to corporal and frequently capital penalties. What is not generally
+recognized is the connection between state-inflicted corporal punishment
+and the physical assaults on women in domestic spaces. This form of bodily
+discipline has continued to be routinely meted out to women in the context
+of intimate relationships, but it is rarely understood to be related to state
+punishment.
+Quaker reformers in the United States—especially the Philadelphia
+Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, founded in 1787—
+played a pivotal role in campaigns to substitute imprisonment for corporal
+punishment. Following in the tradition established by Elizabeth Fry in
+England, Quakers were also responsible for extended crusades to institute
+separate prisons for women. Given the practice of incarcerating
+criminalized women in men’s prisons, the demand for separate women’s
+prisons was viewed as quite radical during this period. Fry formulated
+principles governing prison reform for women in her 1827 work,
+Observations in Visiting, Superintendence and Government of Female
+Prisoners, which were taken up in the United States by women such as
+Josephine Shaw Lowell and Abby Hopper Gibbons. In the 1870s, Lowell
+and Gibbons helped to lead the campaign in New York for separate prisons
+for women.
+Prevailing attitudes toward women convicts differed from those toward
+men convicts, who were assumed to have forfeited rights and liberties that
+women generally could not claim even in the “free world.” Although some
+women were housed in penitentiaries, the institution itself was gendered as
+male, for by and large no particular arrangements were made to
+accommodate sentenced women.
+The women who served in penal institutions between 1820 and 1870
+were not subject to the prison reform experienced by male inmates.
+Officials employed isolation, silence, and hard labor to rehabilitate
+male prisoners. The lack of accommodations for female inmates
+made isolation and silence impossible for them and productive labor
+was not considered an important part of their routine. The neglect of
+female prisoners, however, was rarely benevolent. Rather, a pattern
+
+of overcrowding, harsh treatment, and sexual abuse recurred
+throughout prison histories.81
+Male punishment was linked ideologically to penitence and reform. The
+very forfeiture of rights and liberties implied that with self-reflection,
+religious study, and work, male convicts could achieve redemption and
+could recover these rights and liberties. However, since women were not
+acknowledged as securely in possession of these rights, they were not
+eligible to participate in this process of redemption.
+According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen
+women, with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered
+to be public individuals who had simply violated the social contract, female
+criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of
+womanhood. The reformers, who, following Elizabeth Fry, argued that
+women were capable of redemption, did not really contest these ideological
+assumptions about women’s place. In other words, they did not question the
+very notion of “fallen women.” Rather, they simply opposed the idea that
+“fallen women” could not be saved. They could be saved, the reformers
+contended, and toward that end they advocated separate penal facilities and
+a specifically female approach to punishment. Their approach called for
+architectural models that replaced cells with cottages and “rooms” in a way
+that was supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. This model
+facilitated a regime devised to reintegrate criminalized women into the
+domestic life of wife and mother. They did not, however, acknowledge the
+class and race underpinnings of this regime. Training that was, on the
+surface, designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor
+women (and especially black women) into “free world” jobs in domestic
+service. Instead of stay-at-home skilled wives and mothers, many women
+prisoners, upon release, would become maids, cooks, and washerwomen for
+more affluent women. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued,
+would minimize the sexual temptations, which they believed were often at
+the root of female criminality.
+When the reform movement calling for separate prisons for women
+emerged in England and the United States during the nineteenth century,
+Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Shaw, and other advocates argued against the
+
+established idea that criminal women were beyond the reach of moral
+rehabilitation. Like male convicts, who presumably could be “corrected” by
+rigorous prison regimes, female convicts, they suggested, could also be
+molded into moral beings by differently gendered imprisonment regimes.
+Architectural changes, domestic regimes, and an all-female custodial staff
+were implemented in the reformatory program proposed by reformers,82
+and eventually women’s prisons became as strongly anchored to the social
+landscape as men’s prisons, but even more invisible. Their greater
+invisibility was as much a reflection of the way women’s domestic duties
+under patriarchy were assumed to be normal, natural, and consequently
+invisible as it was of the relatively small numbers of women incarcerated in
+these new institutions.
+Twenty-one years after the first English reformatory for women was
+established in London in 1853, the first U.S. reformatory for women was
+opened in Indiana. The aim was to
+train the prisoners in the “important” female role of domesticity. Thus an
+important role of the reform movement in women’s prisons was to
+encourage and ingrain “appropriate” gender roles, such as vocational
+training in cooking, sewing and cleaning. To accommodate these goals, the
+reformatory cottages were usually designed with kitchens, living rooms,
+and even some nurseries for prisoners with infants.83
+However, this feminized public punishment did not affect all women in
+the same way. When black and Native American women were imprisoned
+in reformatories, they often were segregated from white women. Moreover,
+they tended to be disproportionately sentenced to men’s prisons. In the
+southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War, black women endured the
+cruelties of the convict lease system unmitigated by the feminization of
+punishment; neither their sentences nor the labor they were compelled to do
+were lessened by virtue of their gender. As the U.S. prison system evolved
+during the twentieth century, feminized modes of punishment—the cottage
+system, domestic training, and so on—were designed ideologically to
+reform white women, relegating women of color in large part to realms of
+public punishment that made no pretense of offering them femininity.
+
+Moreover, as Lucia Zedner has pointed out, sentencing practices for
+women within the reformatory system often required women of all racial
+backgrounds to do more time than men for similar offenses. “This
+differential was justified on the basis that women were sent to reformatories
+not to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of their offense but to be
+reformed and retrained, a process that, it was argued, required time.”84 At
+the same time, Zedner points out, this tendency to send women to prison for
+longer terms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement, “which
+sought to have ‘genetically inferior’ women removed from social
+circulation for as many of their child-bearing years as possible.ʺ85
+At the beginning of the twenty-first century, women’s prisons have begun
+to look more like their male counterparts, particularly facilities constructed
+in the contemporary era of the prison industrial complex. As corporate
+involvement in punishment expands in ways that would have been
+unimaginable just two decades ago, the prison’s presumed goal of
+rehabilitation has been thoroughly displaced by incapacitation as the major
+objective of imprisonment. As I have already pointed out, now that the
+population of U.S. prisons and jails has surpassed two million people, the
+rate of increase in the numbers of women prisoners has exceeded that of
+men. As criminologist Elliot Currie has pointed out,
+For most of the period after World War II, the female incarceration rate
+hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977.
+Today it is 51 per 100,000 . . . At the current rates of increase, there will be
+more women in American prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates
+of both sexes in 1970. When we combine the effects of race and gender, the
+nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison
+incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as
+recently as 1980.86
+Luana Ross’s study of Native American women incarcerated in the
+Women’s Correctional Center in Montana argues that “prisons, as employed
+by the Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a
+colonial situation.”87 She points out that Native people are vastly
+overrepresented in the country’s federal and state prisons. In Montana,
+where she did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the general
+
+population, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned population. Native women
+are even more disproportionately present in Montana’s prison system. They
+constitute 25 percent of all women imprisoned by the state.88
+Thirty years ago, around the time of the Attica uprising and the murder of
+George Jackson at San Quentin, radical opposition to the prison system
+identified it as a principal site of state violence and repression. In part as a
+reaction to the invisibility of women prisoners in this movement and in part
+as a consequence of the rising women’s liberation movement, specific
+campaigns developed in defense of the rights of women prisoners. Many of
+these campaigns put forth—and continue to advance—radical critiques of
+state repression and violence. Within the correctional community, however,
+feminism has been influenced largely by liberal constructions of gender
+equality.
+In contrast to the nineteenth-century reform movement, which was
+grounded in an ideology of gender difference, late-twentieth-century
+“reforms” have relied on a “separate but equal” model. This “separate but
+equal” approach often has been applied uncritically, ironically resulting in
+demands for more repressive conditions in order to render women’s
+facilities “equal” to men’s. A clear example of this can be discovered in a
+memoir, The Warden Wore Pink, written by a former warden of Huron
+Valley Women’s Prison in Michigan. During the 1980s, the author, Tekla
+Miller, advocated a change in policies within the Michigan correctional
+system that would result in women prisoners being treated the same as men
+prisoners. With no trace of irony, she characterizes as “feminist” her own
+fight for “gender equality” between male and female prisoners and for
+equality between male and female institutions of incarceration. One of these
+campaigns focuses on the unequal allocation of weapons, which she sought
+to remedy:
+Arsenals in men’s prisons are large rooms with shelves of shotguns, rifles,
+hand guns, ammunition, gas canisters, and riot equipment . . . Huron Valley
+Women’s arsenal was a small, five feet by two feet closet that held two
+rifles, eight shotguns, two bullhorns, five handguns, four gas canisters, and
+twenty sets of restraints.89
+
+It does not occur to her that a more productive version of feminism
+would also question the organization of state punishment for men as well
+and, in my opinion, would seriously consider the proposition that the
+institution as a whole—gendered as it is—calls for the kind of critique that
+might lead us to consider its abolition.
+Miller also describes the case of an attempted escape by a woman
+prisoner. The prisoner climbed over the razor ribbon but was captured after
+she jumped to the ground on the other side. This escape attempt occasioned
+a debate about the disparate treatment of men and women escapees. Miller’s
+position was that guards should be instructed to shoot at women just as they
+were instructed to shoot at men. She argued that parity for women and men
+prisoners should consist in their equal right to be fired upon by guards. The
+outcome of the debate, Miller observed, was that
+escaping women prisoners in medium or higher [security] prisons are
+treated the same way as men. A warning shot is fired. If the prisoner fails to
+halt and is over the fence, an officer is allowed to shoot to injure. If the
+officer’s life is in danger, the officer can shoot to kill.90
+Paradoxically, demands for parity with men’s prisons, instead of creating
+greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women
+prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women. This is
+not only a consequence of deploying liberal—that is, formalistic— notions
+of equality, but of, more dangerous, allowing male prisons to function as the
+punishment norm. Miller points out that she attempted to prevent a female
+prisoner, whom she characterizes as a “murderer” serving a long term, from
+participating in graduation ceremonies at the University of Michigan
+because male murderers were not given such privileges. (Of course, she
+does not indicate the nature of the woman’s murder charges—whether, for
+instance, she was convicted of killing an abusive partner, as is the case for a
+substantial number of women convicted of murder.) Although Miller did
+not succeed in preventing the inmate from participating in the
+commencement, in addition to her cap and gown, the prisoner was made to
+wear leg chains and handcuffs during the ceremony.91 This is indeed a
+bizarre example of feminist demands for equality within the prison system.
+
+A widely publicized example of the use of repressive paraphernalia
+historically associated with the treatment of male prisoners to create
+“equality” for female prisoners was the 1996 decision by Alabama’s prison
+commissioner to establish women’s chain gangs. After Alabama became the
+first state to reinstitute chain gangs in 1995, then State Corrections
+Commissioner Ron Jones announced the following year that women would
+be shackled while they cut grass, picked up trash, or worked a vegetable
+garden at Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women. This attempt to institute
+chain gangs for women was in part a response to lawsuits by male
+prisoners, who charged that male chain gains discriminated against men by
+virtue of their gender.92 However, immediately after Jones’s announcement,
+Governor Fob James, who obviously was pressured to prevent Alabama
+from acquiring the dubious distinction of being the only U.S. state to have
+equal- opportunity chain gangs, fired him.
+Shortly after Alabama’s embarrassing flirtation with the possibility of
+chain gangs for women, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopo County, Arizona—
+represented in the media as “the toughest sheriff in America”—held a press
+conference to announce that because he was “an equal opportunity
+incarcerator,” he was establishing the country’s first female chain gang.93
+When the plan was implemented, newspapers throughout the country
+carried a photograph of chained women cleaning Phoenix’s streets. Even
+though this may have been a publicity stunt designed to bolster the fame of
+Sheriff Arpaio, the fact that this women’s chain gang emerged against the
+backdrop of a generalized increase in the repression inflicted on women
+prisoners is certainly cause for alarm. Women’s prisons throughout the
+country increasingly include sections known as security housing units. The
+regimes of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation in the security
+housing unit (SHU) in these sections within women’s prisons are smaller
+versions of the rapidly proliferating super-maximum security prisons. Since
+the population of women in prison now consists of a majority of women of
+color, the historical resonances of slavery, colonization, and genocide
+should not be missed in these images of women in chains and shackles.
+As the level of repression in women’s prisons increases, and,
+paradoxically, as the influence of domestic prison regimes recedes, sexual
+abuse—which, like domestic violence, is yet another dimension of the
+
+privatized punishment of women—has become an institutionalized
+component of punishment behind prison walls. Although guard-on-prisoner
+sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which
+offending officers are treated suggests that for women, prison is a space in
+which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is
+effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment
+behind prison walls.
+According to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report on the sexual abuse of
+women in U.S. prisons:
+Our findings indicate that being a woman prisoner in U.S. state prisons can
+be a terrifying experience. If you are sexually abused, you cannot escape
+from your abuser. Grievance or investigatory procedures, where they exist,
+are often ineffectual, and correctional employees continue to engage in
+abuse because they believe they will rarely be held accountable,
+administratively or criminally. Few people outside the prison walls know
+what is going on or care if they do know. Fewer still do anything to address
+the problem.94
+The following excerpt from the summary of this report, entitled All Too
+Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons, reveals the extent
+to which women’s prison environments are violently sexualized, thus
+recapitulating the familiar violence that characterizes many women’s
+private lives:
+We found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and
+orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. We
+found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male officers
+have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but have also used
+their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female
+prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for
+having done so. In other cases, male officers have violated their most basic
+professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners
+absent the use of threat of force or any material exchange. In addition to
+engaging in sexual relations with prisoners, male officers have used
+mandatory pat-frisks or room searches to grope women’s breasts, buttocks,
+and vaginal areas and to view them inappropriately while in a state of
+
+undress in the housing or bathroom areas. Male correctional officers and
+staff have also engaged in regular verbal degradation and harassment of
+female prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial environment in the state
+prisons for women that is often highly sexualized and excessively hostile.95
+The violent sexualization of prison life within women’s institutions raises
+a number of issues that may help us develop further our critique of the
+prison system. Ideologies of sexuality—and particularly the intersection of
+race and sexuality—have had a profound effect on the representations of
+and treatment received by women of color both within and outside prison.
+Of course, black and Latino men experience a perilous continuity in the
+way they are treated in school, where they are disciplined as potential
+criminals; in the streets, where they are subjected to racial profiling by the
+police; and in prison, where they are warehoused and deprived of virtually
+all of their rights. For women, the continuity of treatment from the free
+world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, since they
+also confront forms of violence in prison that they have confronted in their
+homes and intimate relationships.
+The criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting
+images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them
+both in and outside of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a
+Nightline television series filmed in November 1999 on location at
+California’s Valley State Prison for Women. Many of the women
+interviewed by Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and
+unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visited the doctor
+with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these
+examinations, the chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had
+rare opportunities for “male contact,” and that they therefore welcomed
+these superfluous gynecological exams. Although this officer was
+eventually removed from his position as a result of these comments, his
+reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned
+women to sexual abuse.
+Studies on female prisons throughout the world indicate that sexual abuse
+is an abiding, though unacknowledged, form of punishment to which
+women, who have the misfortune of being sent to prison, are subjected.
+
+This is one aspect of life in prison that women can expect to encounter,
+either directly or indirectly, regardless of the written policies that govern the
+institution. In June 1998, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations
+Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, visited federal and state
+prisons as well as Immigration and Naturalization detention facilities in
+New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Minnesota, Georgia, and California.
+She was refused permission to visit women’s prisons in Michigan, where
+serious allegations of sexual abuse were pending. In the aftermath of her
+visits, Coomaraswamy announced that “sexual misconduct by prison staff is
+widespread in American women’s prisons.”96
+This clandestine institutionalization of sexual abuse violates one of the
+guiding principles of the United Nations’ Standard Minimum Rules for the
+Treatment of Prisoners, a UN instrument first adopted in 1955 and used as a
+guideline by many governments to achieve what is known as “good prison
+practice.” However, the U.S. government has done little to publicize these
+rules and it is probably the case that most correctional personnel have never
+heard of these UN standards. According to the Standard Minimum Rules,
+Imprisonment and other measures which result in cutting off an offender
+from the outside world are afflictive by the very fact of taking from the
+person the right of self-determination by depriving him of his liberty.
+Therefore the prison system shall not, except as incidental to justifiable
+segregation or the maintenance of discipline, aggravate the suffering
+inherent in such a situation.97
+Sexual abuse is surreptitiously incorporated into one of the most habitual
+aspects of women’s imprisonment, the strip search. As activists and
+prisoners themselves have pointed out, the state itself is directly implicated
+in this routinization of sexual abuse, both in permitting such conditions that
+render women vulnerable to explicit sexual coercion carried out by guards
+and other prison staff and by incorporating into routine policy such
+practices as the strip search and body cavity search.
+Australian lawyer/activist Amanda George has pointed out that
+[t]he acknowledgement that sexual assault does occur in institutions for
+people with intellectual disabilities, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, youth
+
+training centres and police stations, usually centres around the criminal acts
+of rape and sexual assault by individuals employed in those institutions.
+These offences, though they are rarely reported, are clearly understood as
+being ”crimes” for which the individual and not the state is responsible. At
+the same time as the state deplores “unlawful” sexual assaults by its
+employees, it actually uses sexual assault as a means of control.
+In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested with the power and
+responsibility to do acts which, if done outside of work hours, would be
+crimes of sexual assault. If a person does not “consent” to being stripped
+naked by these officers, force can lawfully be used to do it . . . These legal
+strip searches are, in the author’s view, sexual assaults within the definition
+of indecent assault in the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) as amended in section 39.98
+At a November 2001 conference on women in prison held by the
+Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, Amanda George described an
+action performed before a national gathering of correctional personnel
+working in women’s prisons. Several women seized control of the stage
+and, some playing guards, others playing the roles of prisoners, dramatized
+a strip search. According to George, the gathering was so repulsed by this
+enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women’s prisons
+everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate
+themselves from such practices, insisting that this was not what they did.
+Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watching
+representations of their own actions outside the prison context. What they
+must have realized is that “without the uniform, without the power of the
+state, [the strip search] would be sexual assault.”99
+But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in
+women’s prisons an important element of a radical analysis of the prison
+system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the
+direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the
+dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the
+institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully
+approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their
+ghastly vitality behind prison walls. The destructive combination of racism
+and misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social movements,
+
+scholarship, and art over the last three decades, retains all its awful
+consequences within women’s prisons. The relatively uncontested presence
+of sexual abuse in women’s prisons is one of many such examples. The
+increasing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global
+resonances leads us to think about the extent to which the many
+corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the prison
+system are, like the state, directly implicated in an institution that
+perpetuates violence against women.
+
+5
+The Prison Industrial Complex
+“For private business prison labor is like a pot of
+gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health
+benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’
+compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in
+foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being
+built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside
+the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron,
+make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs,
+shovel manure, and make circuit boards,
+limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s
+Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor.’”
+—Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg100
+
+The exploitation of prison labor by private corporations is one aspect
+among an array of relationships linking corporations, government,
+correctional communities, and media. These relationships constitute what
+we now call a prison industrial complex. The term “prison industrial
+complex” was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing
+beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison
+populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant
+drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by
+ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. Social historian Mike Davis
+first used the term in relation to California’s penal system, which, he
+observed, already had begun in the 1990s to rival agribusiness and land
+development as a major economic and political force.101
+
+To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context
+of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be
+conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How
+often do we encounter the phrase “crime and punishment”? To what extent
+has the perpetual repetition of the phrase “crime and punishment” in
+literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and
+in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about
+punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the
+prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, necessary, and permanent
+effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison
+today?
+The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the
+punishment process that take into account economic and political structures
+and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal
+conduct and efforts to “curb crime.” The fact, for example, that many
+corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important
+source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons
+began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that
+the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also
+insists that the racialization of prison populations—and this is not only true
+of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well—
+is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex
+undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to
+critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social
+justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of
+imprisonment. At the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against
+Racism held in Durban, South Africa, a few individuals active in
+abolitionist campaigns in various countries attempted to bring this
+connection to the attention of the international community. They pointed
+out that the expanding system of prisons throughout the world both relies on
+and further promotes structures of racism even though its proponents may
+adamantly maintain that it is race-neutral.
+Some critics of the prison system have employed the term “correctional
+industrial complex” and others “penal industrial complex.” These and the
+term I have chosen to underscore, “prison industrial complex,” all clearly
+
+resonate with the historical concept of a “military industrial complex,”
+whose usage dates back to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. It may
+seem ironic that a Republican president was the first to underscore a
+growing and dangerous alliance between the military and corporate worlds,
+but it clearly seemed right to antiwar activists and scholars during the era of
+the Vietnam War. Today, some activists mistakenly argue that the prison
+industrial complex is moving into the space vacated by the military
+industrial complex. However, the so-called War on Terrorism initiated by
+the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 2002 attacks on the World
+Trade Center has made it very clear that the links between the military,
+corporations, and government are growing stronger, not weaker.
+A more cogent way to define the relationship between the military
+industrial complex and the prison industrial complex would be to call it
+symbiotic. These two complexes mutually support and promote each other
+and, in fact, often share technologies. During the early nineties, when
+defense production was temporarily on the decline, this connection between
+the military industry and the criminal justice /punishment industry was
+acknowledged in a 1994 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Making Crime
+Pay: The Cold War of the ’90s”:
+Parts of the defense establishment are cashing in, too, sensing a logical new
+line of business to help them offset military cutbacks. Westinghouse
+Electric Corp., Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co, GDE Systems (a
+division of the old General Dynamics) and Alliant Techsystems Inc., for
+instance, are pushing crime fighting equipment and have created special
+divisions to retool their defense technology for America’s streets.102
+The article describes a conference sponsored by the National Institute of
+Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, entitled “Law
+Enforcement Technology in the 21st Century.” The secretary of defense was
+a major presenter at this conference, which explored topics such as, “The
+role of the defense industry, particularly for dual use and conversion.”
+Hot topics: defense-industry technology that could lower the level of
+violence involved in crime fighting. Sandia National Laboratories,
+for instance, is experimenting with a dense foam that can be sprayed
+at suspects, temporarily blinding and deafening them under
+
+breathable bubbles. Stinger Corporation is working on “smart guns,”
+which will fire only for the owner, and retractable spiked barrier
+strips to unfurl in front of fleeing vehicles. Westinghouse is
+promoting the “smart car,” in which minicomputers could be linked
+up with big mainframes at the police department, allowing for
+speedy booking of prisoners, as well as quick exchanges of
+information...103
+But an analysis of the relationship between the military and prison
+industrial complex is not only concerned with the transference of
+technologies from the military to the law enforcement industry. What may
+be even more important to our discussion is the extent to which both share
+important structural features. Both systems generate huge profits from
+processes of social destruction. Precisely that which is advantageous to
+those corporations, elected officials, and government agents who have
+obvious stakes in the expansion of these systems begets grief and
+devastation for poor and racially dominated communities in the United
+States and throughout the world. The transformation of imprisoned bodies
+—and they are in their majority bodies of color—into sources of profit who
+consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities, devours public
+funds, which might otherwise be available for social programs such as
+education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs.
+Punishment no longer constitutes a marginal area of the larger economy.
+Corporations producing all kinds of goods—from buildings to electronic
+devices and hygiene products—and providing all kinds of services—from
+meals to therapy and healthcare—are now directly involved in the
+punishment business. That is to say, companies that one would assume are
+far removed from the work of state punishment have developed major
+stakes in the perpetuation of a prison system whose historical obsolescence
+is therefore that much more difficult to recognize. It was during the decade
+of the 1980s that corporate ties to the punishment system became more
+extensive and entrenched than ever before. But throughout the history of the
+U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of
+profit. For example, they have served as valuable subjects in medical
+research, thus positioning the prison as a major link between universities
+and corporations.
+
+During the post-World War II period, for example, medical
+experimentation on captive populations helped to hasten the development of
+the pharmaceutical industry. According to Allen Hornblum,
+[T]he number of American medical research programs that relied on
+prisoners as subjects rapidly expanded as zealous doctors and researchers,
+grant-making universities, and a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry raced
+for greater market share. Society’s marginal people were, as they had
+always been, the grist for the medical-pharmaceutical mill, and prison
+inmates in particular would become the raw materials for postwar profitmaking and academic advancement.104
+Hornblum’s book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg
+Prison, highlights the career of research dermatologist Albert Kligman, who
+was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Kligman, the “Father of
+RetinA,” 105 conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in
+Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained many researchers to use
+what were later recognized as unethical research methods.
+When Dr. Kligman entered the aging prison he was awed by the
+potential it held for his research. In 1966, he recalled in a newspaper
+interview: “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a
+farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” The hundreds of
+inmates walking aimlessly before him represented a unique
+opportunity for unlimited and undisturbed medical research. He
+described it in this interview as “an anthropoid colony, mainly
+healthy” under perfect control conditions.106
+By the time the experimentation program was shut down in 1974 and
+new federal regulations prohibited the use of prisoners as subjects for
+academic and corporate research, numerous cosmetics and skin creams had
+already been tested. Some of them had caused great harm to these subjects
+and could not be marketed in their original form. Johnson and Johnson,
+Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are only a few of the
+corporations that reaped great material benefits from these experiments.
+The potential impact of corporate involvement in punishment could have
+been glimpsed in the Kligman experiments at Holmesburg Prison as early as
+
+the 1950s and 1960s. However, it was not until the 1980s and the increasing
+globalization of capitalism that the massive surge of capital into the
+punishment economy began. The deindustrialization processes that resulted
+in plant shutdowns throughout the country created a huge pool of
+vulnerable human beings, a pool of people for whom no further jobs were
+available. This also brought more people into contact with social services,
+such as AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and other
+welfare agencies. It is not accidental that “welfare, as we have known it”—
+to use former President Clinton’s words—came under severe attack and was
+eventually disestablished. This was known as “welfare reform.” At the same
+time, we experienced the privatization and corporatization of services that
+were previously run by government. The most obvious example of this
+privatization process was the transformation of government-run hospitals
+and health services into a gigantic complex of what are euphemistically
+called health maintenance organizations. In this sense we might also speak
+of a “medical industrial complex.ʺ107 In fact, there is a connection between
+one of the first private hospital companies, Hospital Corporation of
+America—known today as HCA—and Corrections Corporation of America
+(CCA). Board members of HCA, which today has two hundred hospitals
+and seventy outpatient surgery centers in twenty-four states, England, and
+Switzerland helped to start Correctional Corporations of America in 1983.
+In the context of an economy that was driven by an unprecedented
+pursuit of profit, no matter what the human cost, and the concomitant
+dismantling of the welfare state, poor people’s abilities to survive became
+increasingly constrained by the looming presence of the prison. The
+massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means
+of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly
+declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the
+dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending
+more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and
+more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our
+communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.
+The media, especially television . . . have a vested interest in
+perpetuating the notion that crime is out of control. With new
+competition from cable networks and 24-hour news channels, TV
+
+news and programs about crime . . . have proliferated madly.
+According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, crime
+coverage was the number-one topic on the nightly news over the
+past decade. From 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half
+nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose
+almost fourfold.108
+During the same period when crime rates were declining, prison
+populations soared. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of
+Justice, at the end of the year 2001, there were 2,100,146 people
+incarcerated in the United States.109 The terms and numbers as they appear
+in this government report require some preliminary discussion. I hesitate to
+make unmediated use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage
+the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the
+prison industrial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that
+plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experience the
+misfortune of imprisonment. There are many different kinds of men and
+women in the prisons, jails, and INS and military detention centers, whose
+lives are erased by the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures. The numbers
+recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug
+conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who
+might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.
+With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is as follows:
+There were 1,324,465 people in “federal and state prisons,” 15,852 in
+“territorial prisons,” 631,240 in “local jails,” 8,761 in “Immigration and
+Naturalization Service detention facilities,” 2,436 in “military facilities,”
+1,912 in “jails in Indian country,” and 108,965 in “juvenile facilities.” In the
+ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of confinement were
+opened by states and more than 528,000 beds were added, amounting to
+1,320 state facilities, representing an eighty-one percent increase. Moreover,
+there are currently 84 federal facilities and 264 private facilities.110
+The government reports, from which these figures are taken, emphasize
+the extent to which incarceration rates are slowing down. The Bureau of
+Justice Statistics report entitled “Prisoners in 2001” introduces the study by
+indicating that “the Nation’s prison population grew 1.1%, which was less
+
+than the average annual growth of 3.8% since yearend 1995. During 2001
+the prison population rose at the lowest rate since 1972 and had the smallest
+absolute increase since 1979.”111 However small the increase, these
+numbers themselves would defy the imagination were they not so neatly
+classified and rationally organized. To place these figures in historical
+perspective, try to imagine how people in the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries—and indeed for most of the twentieth century—who welcomed
+the new, and then quite extraordinary, system of punishment called the
+prison might have responded had they known that such a colossal number
+of lives would be eventually claimed permanently by this institution. I have
+already shared my own memories of a time three decades ago when the
+prison population was comprised of a tenth of the present numbers.
+The prison industrial complex is fueled by privatization patterns that, it
+will be recalled, have also drastically transformed health care, education,
+and other areas of our lives. Moreover, the prison privatization trends—both
+the increasing presence of corporations in the prison economy and the
+establishment of private prisons—are reminiscent of the historical efforts to
+create a profitable punishment industry based on the new supply of “free”
+black male laborers in the aftermath of the Civil War. Steven Donziger,
+drawing from the work of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, argues:
+[C]ompanies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient
+quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth . . . In the
+criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do
+what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners
+to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of
+incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the
+incarceration is necessary.112
+In the post-Civil War era, emancipated black men and women comprised
+an enormous reservoir of labor at a time when planters—and industrialists
+—could no longer rely on slavery, as they had done in the past. This labor
+became increasingly available for use by private agents precisely through
+the convict lease system, discussed earlier, and related systems such as debt
+peonage. Recall that in the aftermath of slavery, the penal population
+drastically shifted, so that in the South it rapidly became disproportionately
+
+black. This transition set the historical stage for the easy acceptance of
+disproportionately black prison populations today. According to 2002
+Bureau of Justice Statistics, African-Americans as a whole now represent
+the majority of county, state, and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400
+black inmates—118, 600 more than the total number of white inmates. If
+we include Latinos, we must add another 283,000 bodies of color.113
+As the rate of increase in the incarceration of black prisoners continues to
+rise, the racial composition of the incarcerated population is approaching
+the proportion of black prisoners to white during the era of the southern
+convict lease and county chain gang systems. Whether this human raw
+material is used for purposes of labor or for the consumption of
+commodities provided by a rising number of corporations directly
+implicated in the prison industrial complex, it is clear that black bodies are
+considered dispensable within the “free world” but as a major source of
+profit in the prison world.
+The privatization characteristic of convict leasing has its contemporary
+parallels, as companies such as CCA and Wackenhut literally run prisons
+for profit. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the numerous private
+prison companies operating in the United States own and operate facilities
+that hold 91,828 federal and state prisoners.114 Texas and Oklahoma can
+claim the largest number of people in private prisons. But New Mexico
+imprisons forty-four percent of its prison population in private facilities,
+and states such as Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming turned over more than
+twenty-five percent of their prison population to private companies.115 In
+arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system, federal, state, and
+county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which
+means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as
+possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.
+In the state of Texas, there are thirty-four government-owned, privately
+run jails in which approximately 5,500 out-of-state prisoners are
+incarcerated. These facilities generate about eighty million dollars annually
+for Texas.116 One dramatic example involves Capital Corrections
+Resources, Inc., which operates the Brazoria Detention Center, a
+government-owned facility located forty miles outside of Houston, Texas.
+
+Brazoria came to public attention in August 1997 when a videotape
+broadcast on national television showed prisoners there being bitten by
+police dogs and viciously kicked in the groin and stepped on by guards. The
+inmates, forced to crawl on the floor, also were being shocked with stun
+guns, while guards—who referred to one black prisoner as “boy”—shouted,
+“Crawl faster!ʺ117 In the aftermath of the release of this tape, the state of
+Missouri withdrew the 415 prisoners it housed in the Brazoria Detention
+Center. Although few references were made in the accompanying news
+reports to the indisputably racialized character of the guards’ outrageous
+behavior, in the section of the Brazoria videotape that was shown on
+national television, black male prisoners were seen to be the primary targets
+of the guards’ attacks.
+The thirty-two-minute Brazoria tape, represented by the jail authorities as
+a training tape—allegedly showing corrections officers “what not to do”—
+was made in September 1996, after a guard allegedly smelled marijuana in
+the jail. Important evidence of the abuse that takes place behind the walls
+and gates of private prisons, it came to light in connection with a law-suit
+filed by one of the prisoners who was bitten by a dog; he was suing
+Brazoria County for a hundred thousand dollars in damage. The Brazoria
+jailors’ actions—which, according to prisoners there, were far worse than
+depicted on the tape—are indicative not only of the ways in which many
+prisoners throughout the country are treated, but of generalized attitudes
+toward people locked up in jails and prisons.
+According to an Associated Press news story, the Missouri inmates, once
+they had been transferred back to their home state from Brazoria, told the
+Kansas City Star:
+[G]uards at the Brazoria County Detention Center used cattle prods
+and other forms of intimidation to win respect and force prisoners to
+say, “I love Texas.” “What you saw on tape wasn’t a fraction of
+what happened that day,” said inmate Louis Watkins, referring to the
+videotaped cellblock raid of September 18, 1996. “I’ve never seen
+anything like that in the movies.”118
+In 2000 there were twenty-six for-profit prison corporations in the United
+States that operated approximately 150 facilities in twenty-eight states.119
+
+The largest of these companies, CCA and Wackenhut, control 76.4 percent
+of the private prison market globally. CCA is headquartered in Nashville,
+Tennessee, and until 2001, its largest shareholder was the multinational
+headquartered in Paris, Sodexho Alliance, which, through its U.S.
+subsidiary, Sodexho Marriott, provides catering services at nine hundred
+U.S. colleges and universities. The Prison Moratorium Project, an
+organization promoting youth activism, led a protest campaign against
+Sodexho Marriott on campuses throughout the country. Among the
+campuses that dropped Sodexho were SUNY Albany, Goucher College, and
+James Madison University. Students had staged sit-ins and organized rallies
+on more than fifty campuses before Sodexho divested its holdings in CCA
+in fall 2001.120
+Though private prisons represent a fairly small proportion of prisons in
+the United States, the privatization model is quickly becoming the primary
+mode of organizing punishment in many other countries.121 These
+companies have tried to take advantage of the expanding population of
+women prisoners, both in the United States and globally. In 1996, the first
+private women’s prison was established by CCA in Melbourne, Australia.
+The government of Victoria “adopted the U.S. model of privatization in
+which financing, design, construction, and ownership of the prison are
+awarded to one contractor and the government pays them back for
+construction over twenty years. This means that it is virtually impossible to
+remove the contractor because that contractor owns the prison.ʺ122
+As a direct consequence of the campaign organized by prison activist
+groups in Melbourne, Victoria withdrew the contract from CCA in 2001.
+However, a significant portion of Australia’s prison system remains
+privatized. In the fall of 2002, the government of Queensland renewed
+Wackenhut’s contract to run a 710-bed prison in Brisbane. The value of the
+five-year contract is $66.5 million. In addition to the facility in Brisbane,
+Wackenhut manages eleven other prisons in Australia and New Zealand and
+furnishes health care services in eleven public prisons in the state of
+Victoria.123 In the press release announcing this contract renewal,
+Wackenhut describes its global business activities as follows:
+
+WCC, a world leader in the privatized corrections industry, has
+contracts/awards to manage 60 correctional /detention facilities in North
+America, Europe, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand with a total of
+approximately 43,000 beds. WCC also provides prisoner transportation
+services, electronic monitoring for home detainees, correctional health care
+and mental health services. WCC offers government agencies a turnkey
+approach to the development of new correctional and mental health
+institutions that includes design, construction, financing, and operations.124
+But to understand the reach of the prison industrial complex, it is not
+enough to evoke the looming power of the private prison business. By
+definition, those companies court the state within and outside the United
+States for the purpose of obtaining prison contracts, bringing punishment
+and profit together in a menacing embrace. Still, this is only the most
+visible dimension of the prison industrial complex, and it should not lead us
+to ignore the more comprehensive corporatization that is a feature of
+contemporary punishment. As compared to earlier historical eras, the prison
+economy is no longer a small, identifiable, and containable set of markets.
+Many corporations, whose names are highly recognizable by “free world”
+consumers, have discovered new possibilities for expansion by selling their
+products to correctional facilities.
+In the 1990s, the variety of corporations making money from
+prisons is truly dizzying, ranging from Dial Soap to Famous Amos
+cookies, from AT&T to health-care providers . . . In 1995 Dial Soap
+sold $100,000 worth of its product to the New York City jail system
+alone . . . When VitaPro Foods of Montreal, Canada, contracted to
+supply inmates in the state of Texas with its soy-based meat
+substitute, the contract was worth $34 million a year.125
+Among the many businesses that advertise in the yellow pages on the
+corrections.com Web site are Archer Daniel Midlands, Nestle Food Service,
+Ace Hardware, Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the
+communications companies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech. One
+conclusion to be drawn here is that even if private prison companies were
+prohibited—an unlikely prospect, indeed—the prison industrial complex
+and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact. Private
+
+prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but
+public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profitproducing products and services of private corporations that the distinction
+is not as meaningful as one might suspect. Campaigns against privatization
+that represent public prisons as an adequate alternative to private prisons
+can be misleading. It is true that a major reason for the profitability of
+private prisons consists in the nonunion labor they employ, and this
+important distinction should be highlighted. Nevertheless, public prisons are
+now equally tied to the corporate economy and constitute an ever-growing
+source of capitalist profit.
+Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the
+stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be
+willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than
+the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always
+undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this
+new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence
+of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the
+economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This
+means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose
+hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the
+spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.
+The global prison economy is indisputably dominated by the United
+States. This economy not only consists of the products, services, and ideas
+that are directly marketed to other governments, but it also exercises an
+enormous influence over the development of the style of state punishment
+throughout the world. One dramatic example can be seen in the opposition
+to Turkey’s attempts to transform its prisons. In October 2000, prisoners in
+Turkey, many of whom are associated with left political movements, began
+a “death fast” as a way of dramatizing their opposition to the Turkish
+government’s decision to introduce “F-Type,” or U.S.-style, prisons.
+Compared to the traditional dormitory-style facilities, these new prisons
+consist of one- to three-person cells, which are opposed by the prisoners
+because of the regimes of isolation they facilitate and because mistreatment
+and torture are far more likely in isolation. In December 2000, thirty
+prisoners were killed in clashes with security forces in twenty prisons.126
+
+As of September 2002, more than fifty prisoners have died of hunger,
+including two women, Gulnihal Yilmaz and Birsen Hosver, who were
+among the most recent prisoners to succumb to the death fast.
+“F-Type” prisons in Turkey were inspired by the recent emergence of the
+super-maximum security—or supermax—prison in the United States, which
+presumes to control otherwise unmanageable prisoners by holding them in
+permanent solitary confinement and by subjecting them to varying degrees
+of sensory deprivation. In its 2002 World Report, Human Rights Watch paid
+particular attention to the concerns raised by
+the spread of ultra-modern “super-maximum” security prisons. Originally
+prevalent in the United States . . . the supermax model was increasingly
+followed in other countries. Prisoners confined in such facilities spent an
+average of twenty-three hours a day in their cells, enduring extreme social
+isolation, enforced idleness, and extraordinarily limited recreational and
+educational opportunities. While prison authorities defended the use of
+super-maximum security facilities by asserting that they held only the most
+dangerous, disruptive, or escape-prone inmates, few safeguards existed to
+prevent other prisoners from being arbitrarily or discriminatorily transferred
+to such facilities. In Australia, the inspector of custodial services found that
+some prisoners were being held indefinitely in special high security units
+without knowing why or when their isolation would end.127
+Among the many countries that have recently constructed supermaximum security prisons is South Africa. Construction was completed on
+the supermax prison in Kokstad, KwaZulu-Natal in August 2000, but it was
+not officially opened until May 2002. Ironically, the reason given for the
+delay was the competition for water between the prison and a new low-cost
+housing development.128 I am highlighting South Africa’s embrace of the
+supermax because of the apparent ease with which this most repressive
+version of the U.S. prison has established itself in a country that has just
+recently initiated the project of building a democratic, non-racist, and
+nonsexist society. South Africa was the first country in the world to create
+constitutional assurances for gay rights, and it immediately abolished the
+death penalty after the dismantling of apartheid. Nevertheless, following the
+example of the United States, the South African prison system is expanding
+
+and becoming more oppressive. The U.S. private prison company
+Wackenhut has secured several contracts with the South African
+government and by constructing private prisons further legitimizes the trend
+toward privatization (which affects the availability of basic services from
+utilities to education) in the economy as a whole.
+South Africa’s participation in the prison industrial complex constitutes a
+major impediment to the creation of a democratic society. In the United
+States, we have already felt the insidious and socially damaging effects of
+prison expansion. The dominant social expectation is that young black,
+Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men—and increasingly
+women as well—will move naturally from the free world into prison,
+where, it is assumed, they belong. Despite the important gains of antiracist
+social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within
+institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.
+The racist arrests of vast numbers of immigrants from Middle Eastern
+countries in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the
+subsequent withholding of information about the names of numbers of
+people held in INS detention centers, some of which are owned and
+operated by private corporations, do not augur a democratic future. The
+uncontested detention of increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants
+from the global South has been aided considerably by the structures and
+ideologies associated with the prison industrial complex. We can hardly
+move in the direction of justice and equality in the twenty-first century if
+we are unwilling to recognize the enormous role played by this system in
+extending the power of racism and xenophobia.
+Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the
+antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the
+quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist,
+anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the
+prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes
+the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and
+children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do
+the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people
+in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How,
+
+then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the
+needs of prisoners—calling for less violent conditions, an end to state
+sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to
+drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of
+prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or
+alternative sentencing—and at the same time call for alternatives to
+sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist
+strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?
+
+6
+Abolitionist Alternatives
+“Forget about reform; it’s time to talk about
+abolishing jails and prisons in American society . .
+. Still—abolition? Where do you put the prisoners?
+The ‘criminals’? What’s the alternative? First,
+having no alternative at all would create less crime
+than the present criminal training centers do.
+Second, the only full alternative is building the
+kind of society that does not need prisons: A
+decent redistribution of power and income so as to
+put out the hidden fire of burning envy that now
+flames up in crimes of property—both burglary by
+the poor and embezzlement by the affluent. And a
+decent sense of community that can support,
+reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who
+suddenly become filled with fury or despair, and
+that can face them not as objects—‘criminals’—
+but as people who have committed illegal acts, as
+have almost all of us.”
+—Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies129
+
+If jails and prisons are to be abolished, then what will replace them? This is
+the puzzling question that often interrupts further consideration of the
+prospects for abolition. Why should it be so difficult to imagine alternatives
+to our current system of incarceration? There are a number of reasons why
+we tend to balk at the idea that it may be possible to eventually create an
+
+entirely different—and perhaps more egalitarian—system of justice. First of
+all, we think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on
+imprisonment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great difficulty
+envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two million people
+who are currently being held in the country’s jails, prisons, youth facilities,
+and immigration detention centers. Ironically, even the anti-death penalty
+campaign tends to rely on the assumption that life imprisonment is the most
+rational alternative to capital punishment. As important as it may be to
+abolish the death penalty, we should be conscious of the way the
+contemporary campaign against capital punishment has a propensity to
+recapitulate the very historical patterns that led to the emergence of the
+prison as the dominant form of punishment. The death penalty has coexisted
+with the prison, though imprisonment was supposed to serve as an
+alternative to corporal and capital punishment. This is a major dichotomy. A
+critical engagement with this dichotomy would involve taking seriously the
+possibility of linking the goal of death penalty abolitionism with strategies
+for prison abolition.
+It is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system—and perhaps
+this is the problem that leads to the assumption that imprisonment is the
+only alternative to death—it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar
+system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If,
+however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated
+institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial
+complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more
+complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt
+to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then,
+would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of
+punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.
+Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in
+the economic, political and ideological life of the United States and the
+transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the
+prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and
+prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among
+correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates,
+guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas. If it is true that the
+
+contemporary meaning of punishment is fashioned through these
+relationships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will contest
+these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What,
+then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not
+allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a
+society in which race and class are not primary determinants of
+punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central
+concern in the making of justice?
+An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these
+would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and
+institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social
+and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be
+looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest
+safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing
+decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a
+continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools,
+revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free
+physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and
+reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.
+The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied
+by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would
+inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape.
+Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and
+prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from
+schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of
+armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that
+encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits
+to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for
+decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize
+the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer
+severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with
+mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental
+institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people
+should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental
+institutions, which were—and in many cases still are—as repressive as the
+
+prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care
+available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus
+creating another vehicle for decarceration.
+To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the
+existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives
+that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.
+Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class
+bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead
+to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.
+It is within this context that it makes sense to consider the
+decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy
+to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice
+system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration. Thus, with
+respect to the project of challenging the role played by the so-called War on
+Drugs in bringing huge numbers of people of color into the prison system,
+proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of
+a constellation of free, community-based programs accessible to all people
+who wish to tackle their drug problems. This is not to suggest that all
+people who use drugs—or that only people who use illicit drugs—need
+such help. However, anyone, regardless of economic status, who wishes to
+conquer drug addiction should be able to enter treatment programs.
+Such institutions are, indeed, available to affluent communities. The most
+well known program is the Betty Ford Center, which, according to its Web
+site, “accepts patients dependent on alcohol and other mood altering
+chemicals. Treatment services are open to all men and women eighteen
+years of age and older regardless of race, creed, sex, national origin,
+religion or sources of payment for care.ʺ130 However, the cost for the first
+six days is $1,175 per day, and after that $525 per day.131 If a person
+requires thirty days of treatment, the cost would amount to $19,000, almost
+twice the annual salary of a person working a minimum-wage job.
+Poor people deserve to have access to effective, voluntary drug treatment
+programs. Like the Betty Ford program, their operation should not be under
+the auspices of the criminal justice system. As at the Ford Center, family
+members also should be permitted to participate. But unlike the Betty Ford
+
+program, they should be free of charge. For such programs to count as
+“abolitionist alternatives,” they would not be linked—unlike existing
+programs, to which individuals are “sentenced”—to imprisonment as a last
+resort.
+The campaign to decriminalize drug use—from marijuana to heroin—is
+international in scope and has led countries such as the Netherlands to
+revise their laws, legalizing personal use of such drugs as marijuana and
+hashish. The Netherlands also has a history of legalized sex work, another
+area in which there has been extensive campaigning for decriminalization.
+In the cases of drugs and sex work, decriminalization would simply require
+repeal of all those laws that penalize individuals who use drugs and who
+work in the sex industry. The decriminalization of alcohol use serves as a
+historical example. In both these cases, decriminalization would advance
+the abolitionist strategy of decarceration—that is, the consistent reduction in
+the numbers of people who are sent to prison—with the ultimate aim of
+dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode of punishment. A
+further challenge for abolitionists is to identify other behaviors that might
+be appropriately decriminalized as preliminary steps toward abolition.
+One obvious and very urgent aspect of the work of decriminalization is
+associated with the defense of immigrants’ rights. The growing numbers of
+immigrants—especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001—who are
+incarcerated in immigrant detention centers, as well as in jails and prisons,
+can be halted by dismantling the processes that punish people for their
+failure to enter this country without documents. Current campaigns that call
+for the decriminalization of undocumented immigrants are making
+important contributions to the overall struggle against the prison industrial
+complex and are challenging the expansive reach of racism and male
+dominance. When women from countries in the southern region are
+imprisoned because they have entered this country to escape sexual
+violence, instead of being granted refugee status, this reinforces the
+generalized tendency to punish people who are persecuted in their intimate
+lives as a direct consequence of pandemics of violence that continue to be
+legitimized by ideological and legal structures.
+
+Within the United States, the “battered women’s syndrome” legal defense
+reflects an attempt to argue that a woman who kills an abusive spouse
+should not be convicted of murder. This defense has been abundantly
+criticized, both by detractors and proponents of feminism; the former do not
+want to recognize the pervasiveness and dangers of intimate violence
+against women and the latter challenge the idea that the legitimacy of this
+defense resides in the assertion that those who kill their batterers are not
+responsible for their actions. The point feminist movements attempt to
+make—regardless of their specific positions on battered women’s syndrome
+—is that violence against women is a pervasive and complicated social
+problem that cannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight back
+against their abusers. Thus, a vast range of alternative strategies of
+minimizing violence against women—within intimate relationships and
+within relationships to the state—should be the focus of our concern.
+The alternatives toward which I have gestured thus far—and this is only a
+small selection of examples, which can also include job and living wage
+programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, communitybased recreation, and many more—are associated both directly and
+indirectly with the existing system of criminal justice. But, however
+mediated their relation might be to the current system of jails and prisons,
+these alternatives are attempting to reverse the impact of the prison
+industrial complex on our world. As they contest racism and other networks
+of social domination, their implementation will certainly advance the
+abolitionist agenda of decarceration.
+Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the net of
+alternatives helps us to do the ideological work of pulling apart the
+conceptual link between crime and punishment. This more nuanced
+understanding of the social role of the punishment system requires us to
+give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable
+consequence of crime. We would recognize that “punishment” does not
+follow from “crime” in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses
+that insist on the justice of imprisonment, but rather punishment—primarily
+through imprisonment (and sometimes death)—is linked to the agendas of
+politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of
+crime. Imprisonment is associated with the racialization of those most likely
+
+to be punished. It is associated with their class and, as we have seen, gender
+structures the punishment system as well. If we insist that abolitionist
+alternatives trouble these relationships, that they strive to disarticulate crime
+and punishment, race and punishment, class and punishment, and gender
+and punishment, then our focus must not rest only on the prison system as
+an isolated institution but must also be directed at all the social relations
+that support the permanence of the prison.
+An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives
+to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why
+“criminals” have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human
+beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others.
+Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category
+“lawbreakers” is far greater than the category of individuals who are
+deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the
+law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had
+smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale.
+However, acknowledged disparities in the intensity of police surveillance—
+as indicated by the present-day currency of the term “racial profiling”
+which ought to cover far more territory than “driving while black or
+brown”—account in part for racial and class-based disparities in arrest and
+imprisonment rates. Thus, if we are willing to take seriously the
+consequences of a racist and class-biased justice system, we will reach the
+conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because
+they are, for example, black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or
+poor, regardless of their ethnic background. They are sent to prison, not so
+much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely
+because their communities have been criminalized. Thus, programs for
+decriminalization will not only have to address specific activities that have
+been criminalized—such as drug use and sex work—but also criminalized
+populations and communities.
+It is against the backdrop of these more broadly conceived abolitionist
+alternatives that it makes sense to take up the question of radical
+transformations within the existing justice system. Thus, aside from
+minimizing, through various strategies, the kinds of behaviors that will
+bring people into contact with the police and justice systems, there is the
+
+question of how to treat those who assault the rights and bodies of others.
+Many organizations and individuals both in the United States and other
+countries offer alternative modes of making justice. In limited instances,
+some governments have attempted to implement alternatives that range
+from conflict resolution to restorative or reparative justice. Such scholars as
+Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to be defined in terms of
+tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law. In his words,
+“[The lawbreaker] is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but
+simply a debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility
+for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair.”132
+There is a growing body of literature on reshaping systems of justice
+around strategies of reparation, rather than retribution, as well as a growing
+body of experiential evidence of the advantages of these approaches to
+justice and of the democratic possibilities they promise. Instead of
+rehearsing the numerous debates that have emerged over the last decades—
+including the most persistent question, “What will happen to the murderers
+and rapists?”—I will conclude with a story of one of the most dramatic
+successes of these experiments in reconciliation. I refer to the case of Amy
+Biehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, California, who
+was killed by young South African men in Guguletu, a black township in
+Capetown, South Africa.
+In 1993, when South Africa was on the cusp of its transition, Amy Biehl
+was devoting a significant amount of her time as a foreign student to the
+work of rebuilding South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been freed in 1990,
+but had not yet been elected president. On August 25, Biehl was driving
+several black friends to their home in Guguletu when a crowd shouting
+antiwhite slogans confronted her, and some of them stoned and stabbed her
+to death. Four of the men participating in the attack were convicted of her
+murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. In 1997, Linda and Peter
+Biehl—Amy’s mother and father—decided to support the amnesty petition
+the men presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The four
+apologized to the Biehls and were released in July 1998. Two of them—
+Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni—later met with the Biehls, who, despite
+much pressure to the contrary, agreed to see them.133 According to
+Nofemela, he wanted to say more about his own sorrow for killing their
+
+daughter than what had been possible during Truth and Reconciliation
+hearings. “I know you lost a person you love,” he says he told them during
+that meeting. “I want you to forgive me and take me as your child.”134
+The Biehls, who had established the Amy Biehl Foundation in the
+aftermath of their daughter’s death, asked Nofemela and Peni to work at the
+Guguletu branch of the foundation. Nofemela became an instructor in an
+after-school sports program and Peni an administrator. In June 2002, they
+accompanied Linda Biehl to New York, where they all spoke before the
+American Family Therapy Academy on reconciliation and restorative
+justice. In a Boston Globe interview, Linda Biehl, when asked how she now
+feels about the men who killed her daughter, said, “I have a lot of love for
+them.” After Peter Biehl died in 2002, she bought two plots of land for them
+in memory of her husband so that Nofemela and Peni can build their own
+homes.135 A few days after the September 11 attacks, the Biehls had been
+asked to speak at a synagogue in their community. According to Peter
+Biehl, “We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to
+what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen?
+’ instead of simply reacting.”136
+
+AFFIRMATION
+I believe in liv ing.
+I believe in the spectrum
+of Beta days and Gamma people.
+I believe in sunshine.
+In windmills and waterfalls,
+tricycles and rocking chairs.
+And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
+And sprouts grow into trees.
+I believe in the magic of the hands.
+And in the wisdom of the eyes.
+I believe in rain and tears.
+And in the blood of infinity.
+I believe in life .
+And i have seen the death parade
+march through the torso of the earth,
+sculpting mud bodies in its path.
+I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
+and seen bloodthirsty maggots
+prayed to and saluted.
+I have seen the kind become the blind
+and the blind become the bind
+in one easy lesson.
+I have walked on cut glass.
+I have eaten crow and blunder bread
+and breathed the stench of indi fference.
+I have been locked by the lawless;
+Handcuffed by the haters.
+Gagged by the greedy.
+And, if i know any thing at all,
+it's that a wall is just a wall
+and nothing more at all.
+It can be broken down.
+I beli�e in liv ing.
+I believe in birth.
+I believe in the sweat of love
+and in the fire of truth.
+And i believe that a lost ship,
+steered by tired, seasick sailors,
+can still be guided home
+to port.
+
+I
+
+Chapter 1
+
+here were lights and sirens. Zayd was dead.
+My mind knew that Zayd was dead. The air was like
+cold glass. Huge bubbles rose and burst. Each one felt
+like an explosion in my chest. My mouth tasted like
+blood and dirt. The car spun around me and then
+something like sleep overtook me. In the background i
+could hear what sounded like gunfire. But i was fading
+and dreaming.
+Suddenly, the door flew open and i felt mysel f
+being dragged out onto the pavement. Pushed and
+punched, a foot upside my head, a kick in the stom­
+ach. Police were everywhere. One had a gun to my
+head.
+"Which way did they go?" he was shouting.
+"Bitch, you'd better open your goddamn mouth or I'll
+blow your goddamn head off!"
+I nodded my head across the highway. I was sure
+that nobody had gone that way. A few of the cops were
+off and running.
+One pig said, "We oughta finish her off." But the
+others were all busy around the car, searching it. They
+were pulling and prodding.
+"Ya find the gun?" they kept asking each other.
+Later, one of them asked another, "Should we put'er in
+the car?"
+"Naw. Let'er lay in the gutter where she belongs.
+Just get'er out of the way."
+I felt mysel f being dragged by the feet across the
+pavement. My chest was on fire. My blouse was purple
+with blood. I was convinced that my arm had been
+shot off and was hanging inside my shirt by a few
+strips of flesh. I could not feel it.
+Finally the ambulance came and they moved me
+into it. Being moved was agony, but the blankets were
+
+3
+
+ASSATA
+4
+
+worth it. I was so cold. The medics examined me. I tried to talk,
+but only bubbles came out. I was foaming at the mouth.
+"Where's she hit?" they asked each other as if i wasn't there.
+They concluded their examination. I was relieved.
+"Let's move it," one of them said.
+"O.K., but wait a minute," said the driver and he got out. "Hit
+twice," i heard him say. "We gotta wait." The driver slammed the
+door.
+He said something else but i didn't understand it. Time
+passed. I was floating off again. It felt so weird, like a dream, a
+nightmare. More time passed. It seemed like forever. I was in and
+out, in and out.
+A rough voice asked, "Is she dead yet?" I floated off again. I
+heard another voice. "Is she dead yet ?" I wondered how long the
+ambulance had been sitting there. The attendants looked nervous.
+The bubbles in my chest felt like they were growing bigger. When
+they burst, my whole chest shattered. I faded again and it was down
+South in the summertime. I thought about my grandmother. At last
+the ambulance was moving. "If i live," i remember thinking, "i'll
+only have one arm."
+The hospital is glaring white. Everybody i see is white. Everyone
+seems to be waiting. All at once they are in motion. Blood pressure,
+pulse, needles, etc. Two detectives come in. I know they're detec­
+tives because they look like detectives. One of them has a face like a
+bulldog, with jowls hanging down the sides. They supervise the
+nurse as she cuts off my clothes. After a while, one of them dabs my
+fingertips with what look like Q-tips. Later i find out that this is the
+
+neutron activation test to determine whether or not i have fired a
+weapon. Another one then tries to fingerprint me, but he has
+trouble because my hand is dead.
+"Gimme the dead man's kit." He puts my fingers into spoon­
+looking things used to fingerprint dead people. They begin to ask
+me questions, but a bunch of doctors come in. One of them, who
+appears to be the head doctor, examines me. He pokes and prods,
+throwing me around like a rag doll. then, like he is going to kill me,
+he jerks me around so that i'm on my stomach. The pain is like an
+electric shock. I moan.
+"Don't cry now, girlie," he says. "Why'd you shoot the
+trooper? Why'd you shoot the trooper ?"
+I want to kick him in his face. I know he would kill me if he
+had the chance. I can see the scalpel slipping. One of the other
+doctors says something about calling the operating room. "Hell
+no!" is all i can think of. "Hell no !"
+
+After a while, they all leave. Then a Black nurse comes into the
+am glad as I could be to see her. She bends over me.
+"What is your name?" she asks. "What is your name?"
+I think about it and decide to say nothing. If i tell them my
+name they will know who i am and they will kill me for sure.
+"What is your name?" she keeps asking, enunciating each
+syllable in the way that people talk to someone who has trouble
+hearing or understanding. "What is your name? What is your
+address ? Where do you live?" Her voice is getting louder. "We need
+JOur signature, miss," she says, waving a piece of paper in front of
+me. "We need your permission for treatment, in case we have to
+operate." She repeats the same thing, over and over. "Who shall we
+contact in case of emergency?" (I think that's kind of funny.) "What
+is your name? Where do you live?" I close my eyes, wishing she
+would go away. She keeps right on talking.
+I drift off, thinking about my arm. It is still there.
+"Nerve damage. Paralyzed," i heard them say. It has never
+occurred to me. It isn't that bad, i remember thinking. I can live
+with that if i have to.
+More voices, other voices, grating my ears and my con­
+SCIousness.
+"She can talk," one is saying. "The doctor says she can talk.
+Where were you going? What is your name? Where were you
+coming from? Who was in the car with you ? How many of you were
+there? I know she can hear me."
+I keep my eyes closed. One of them leans down real close to
+me. I feel his breath on my cheek. And smell it.
+"I kno� you can hear me and I know you can talk, and if you
+don't hurry up and start talking, I'm gonna bash your face in for
+you."
+My eyes fly open in spite of myself. Immediately they are all in
+my face, throwing question after question at me. I say nothing.
+After a while, i close my eyes again.
+"Oh, she doesn't feel good," one of them says in a sweet,
+mocking voice. "Where does it hurt? Here? Here ? HERE?"
+With each here comes a crash. I look around wildly, but no
+one is there. More thumps and punches, but none of them hurts as
+bad as my chest is hurting. I try to scream but i know immediately
+that that's a mistake. My chest erupts and i think i am gonna die.
+They go on and on. Questions and bangs. I think they will never
+stop.
+A woman's voice. "Telephone."
+"Thank you," one of them says, giving me an ugly grin. They
+are gone.
+room. I
+
+ASSATA
+
+5
+
+ASSATA
+6
+
+Another pig comes in. A Black pig. In uniform. He comes
+closer and i see that he is not a cop but a hospital security guard.
+He stands not too far from where i am lying and i can see he is not
+at all hostile. His face breaks into a kind of reserved smile and, very
+discreetly, he clenches his fist and gives me the power sign. That
+man will never know how much better he made me feel at that
+moment.
+The detectives come back with a nurse. They begin to move the
+stretcher. My mind races. Where are they taking me ? The only
+place i can think of is the operating room. When we arrive at the x­
+ray room, i'm thankful. Because i have to move around, the X-rays
+are painful, but the technician is cool. X-rays are over and i am
+rolled down the hallway, determined to keep my eyes closed. All of
+a sudden, flashes of light. My eyes pop open. This time they are
+taking my picture.
+The police photographer asks, "Don't you wanna give us a
+smile? Come on. Give us a smile."
+I close my eyes again. We are moving. The stretcher stops. One
+of the pigs tells the nurse he has a headache. She volunteers to get
+him something.
+The stretcher is moving again. Where the hell are they taking
+me? Again the light is changing and, although my eyes are closed, i
+can feel the difference. It feels like i'm in the dark. I can't take it
+any longer and i look. The room is dark, but there is some light.
+My eyes slowly adjust. There's something lying next to me. I can
+see an outline. Something in plastic. Something-my mind slowly
+realizes that it is a man in a plastic bag. And that the man is Zayd.
+My body stiffens. My mind spins.
+One of the troopers says, "That's what's gonna happen to you
+before the night is over if you don't tell us what we want to know."
+I say nothing, but inside i'm raging. "Dogs ! Swine! Filthy pigs !
+Dirty slimy scum ! Bastards ! Sons of bitches !" I rage on and on. "I
+wouldn't tell you the right time of day," i remember thinking. "I
+wouldn't tell you that shit stinks !"
+The night crawls along. Nurses, doctors, and troopers. I am
+still scared, but i am just as angry and evil as i am scared. The
+detectives are in and out and, when nobody is there except them,
+they get in their digs and bangs. But after a while i don't think
+about them too much. I am thinking about living, about surviving,
+thinking about what is going to happen next. They are gonna do
+what they are gonna do and there isn't much i can do about it. I
+just have to be myself, stay as strong as i can, and do my best. That's
+all. There is nowhere to run and i am in no shape to try. I realize
+
+how isolated and vulnerable i am. What if i really do need an
+operation ? I need help from the outside world. I have to try to get
+word out to someone. The Black nurse has been back and forth,
+asking me the same questions. Each time i have closed my eyes until
+she goes away. I decide to ask her to get in touch with my people
+the next time she comes by. Maybe she will be cool. She is my best
+shot; the guard is long gone.
+I doze off for a little while. When i wake up, a nurse and a
+priest are standing over me. The priest is mumbling and seems to
+be rubbing something on my forehead. At first i don't understand
+what he is doing. Then it dawns on me. Last rites. Last rites are for
+the dying.
+"Go away," i say out loud. I don't have the strength to say
+anything else. But i know i don't want anybody's last rites. I am not
+going to die, and even if i do die, i'm not going to die nobody's
+hypocrite.
+The Black nurse comes back and starts her questions again.
+Before she can get started good, i beckon her to come closer. There
+is no one else around. I ask her to get in contact with my lawyer
+(who is also my aunt). I give her my name and ask her to make the
+call herself. She has a hard time understanding me and keeps
+asking me to repeat my name. I can barely talk, and each time she
+asks me to repeat myself, i feel like screaming. Then it occurs to me
+that Assata is foreign to her ears. She has probably never heard the
+name before. So i give her my slave name. Then i give her the
+number and she is off and running.
+Two minutes later the detectives are on me like white on rice.
+They threaten and plead, reason and offer me the world. They hurl
+question after question at me, acting crazier than before. One plays
+the nice cop who is trying to save me from the bad cop, if only i will
+cooperate. I am tired and their act is even tireder. I can see exhaus­
+tion in their faces. The whole night is coming down on me. Their
+voices begin to sound far away. I can't take it anymore. They can go
+to hell. I am going to sleep. This time i am going out for real.
+When i wake up the stretcher is moving. After a little while we
+arrive at the intensive care part of the hospital. The place is packed
+with nurses. I am elated. All i want to do is sleep. Soon i'm drifting
+off again.
+I wake up and it's the next day. The doctors are making their
+rounds. One of them, an intern i think, is very kind to me. They
+examine me and spend the rest of the morning doing blood tests,
+X-rays, EKGs, etc., etc.
+Soon i learn that they're going to move me again. I also find
+
+ASSATA
+7
+
+ASSATA
+
+8
+
+out that i'm in middlesex county hospital. I hear the nurses talking.
+They are glad i am being moved because the police are driving them
+crazy.
+When they come to move me it looks like a police parade. The
+rooms i am moved to are called the Johnson Suite. I can't believe it.
+I have never imagined that hospitals have rooms like this. There is a
+sitting room, a huge hospital-equipped room (where i am kept), a
+den, a kitchen, a full bathroom and another little room whose
+purpose i will never learn. They transfer me to the bed and hand­
+cuff one of my legs to the side rail.
+I keep looking around. It is elegant and clearly for rich people.
+I am probably the first Black person who has ever been in this
+room. And the only reason i am there is for security. They have
+sealed off the doors and no one can enter except through the sitting
+room next door where three state troopers are stationed. Two
+regulars and one sergeant.
+The police radio in the room cackles all day long. "A carload
+of suspicious-looking coloreds in a white Ford coupe." "A sus­
+picious-looking Negro walking near the hospital in a blue jacket
+and sneakers." No suspicious-looking white people are reported.
+From listening to the police talk next door, and to the radio, i learn
+that the hospital is saturated with state troopers. They seem to be
+under the impression that somebody is going to try and break me
+out. I feel better. The Demerol has me flying a little and makes it
+easier for me to lie in the contorted position i am forced into
+because of the cuff on my leg.
+Later that afternoon, it begins again. Detectives and more
+detectives. Questions and more questions. This time the questions
+are different. Now they want to know about the Black Liberation
+Army: how big is it; what cities is it in; who is in it, etc., etc. But
+the main focus of their questions centers around "the guy that got
+away." I am delighted ! I figure that Sundiata is somewhere safe by
+now, cooling out.
+They are more careful where and how they hit me now. I guess
+they don't want to leave any marks. One sticks his fingers in my
+eyes. I don't know what he has on his fingertips, but whatever it is
+burns like hell. I think I am gonna be blind forever. He says he will
+keep doing it until i am completely blind. I close my eyes and hold
+them as tight as i can. He strikes me a few more times. Some of the
+stuff gets into my eyes anyway. Burning tears pour down my face
+and my whole head is throbbing. I think he is going to keep on, but
+he begins to curse me, calling me all kind of nigger bitches. Finally,
+he and the others leave.
+
+On one of those first days, a white doctor comes to examine
+me. He acts very nice, sweet as pie. He examines me slowly, the
+whole time making friendly conversation. I wonder what kind of
+specialist he is since i haven't seen him before and i know he isn't
+one of the regulars. He says he knows how terrible i must feel and
+makes a big deal of protesting that i am chained to the bed. He
+keeps on talking and, after a while, pulls a chair close to the bed.
+Then he starts to ask friendly little questions. The conversation
+goes something like this:
+"Those guys on the turnpike are rough. They'll give you a
+ticket for anything. I take the turnpike every day. You live in jersey?
+I live in Newark. You ever been there? You must really be lonely up
+here. I'll bet you really need someone to talk to. I went to medical
+school in New York. You're from there, aren't you ?"
+I get suspicious and say nothing to him. I tell him i want to go
+to sleep and he leaves. I never saw him again, but to this day i'm
+convinced he was some kind of police or FBI agent.
+On the third or fourth day, most of my troubles came to an end.
+Well, not really, but the punch, bang, poke, and prod part of my
+troubles ended. A nurse with a German accent came to my aid. She
+was one of the morning nurses, very professional and exacting, to
+the point that she could be a pain in the neck. But she was a
+lifesaver. It was she who had first protested the tightness of the
+handcuff on my leg. My leg had begun to swell and she had
+insisted they loosen it and that the cuff be covered with gauze. Of
+course, as soon as she was gone they tightened it again, but the
+gauze helped somewhat. I could tell by the little things she said and
+did that she knew what was going on. One morning she came in as
+usual and, after she had finished her normal routine, she reached
+behind the bed, pulled at something, and then handed me an
+electric call button on a cord.
+"Anytime you need me or need anything from the nurses, just
+press this button," she said. "Don't be afraid to use it," she added,
+giving me a knowing look.
+I could have kissed her. Later, when she returned to the room,
+after the troopers realized i had the call button, one came in behind
+her.
+"Is there any way to disconnect that thing?" he asked. "She
+might hurt someone with it or hurt herself."
+"No," she said, "there is no way to remove it. If you pull it out,
+it will just keep ringing in the nurses' station. She is having diffi­
+culty breathing and she needs it."
+
+ASSATA
+9
+
+ASSATA
+IO
+
+"Right on !" i thought. "Das ist richtig."
+After that, whenever the police came within two feet of my
+bed, i would push the button. Finally, they gave up the idea of
+beating on me and contented themselves with threats and other
+kinds of harassment. A favorite was to stand in the door and point
+their guns at me. Each day was my last day on earth. Each night was
+my last night. After a while, i became accustomed. Immune. Some­
+times they would cock a gun i didn't know was empty, give a long,
+impassioned speech, and then pull the trigger. Other times i was
+invited to a game of Russian roulette. they all expressed a bitter
+hatred for me. They were state troopers and i was accused of killing
+one of them.
+Every day there were three shifts of police. When they changed
+shifts, the two troopers would salute the sergeant. Some saluted an
+army salute, but others saluted like the nazis did in Germany. They
+held their hands in front of them and clicked their heels. I couldn't
+believe it. One day one of them came in and gave me a speech about
+how he fought in World War II on the wrong side. He went on and
+on and there was no question that he believed everything he said.
+He talked about how messed up the world is. How decent people
+couldn't walk the streets. He said that if Hitler had won, the world
+wouldn't be in the mess it is in today, that niggers like me, no-good
+niggers, wouldn't be going around shooting new jersey state troopers.
+He went on to say that the white race had invented everything
+because they were smart and worked hard, that other races wanted
+to riot and use terrorism to take everything the white race had
+worked so hard to get. I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut.
+He talked about empires, the Roman, the Greek, the Spanish, the
+British. He told me white people created empires because they were
+more civilized than the rest of the world. White people created
+ballet and opera and symphonies. "Did you ever hear of a nigger
+writing a symphony?" he asked. Every day he gave me a speech
+about nazism. Sometimes other nazis would join in. I asked him if
+there were a lot of nazis in the state troopers, but he just laughed
+and kept on talking.
+When i was in the Black Panther Party, we used to call the
+police "fascist pigs," but i had called them fascists not because i
+believed they were nazis but because of the way they acted in our
+communities. As many times as i had referred to police as fascists,
+these shocked me by the truth of my own rhetoric. I later learned
+that the state troopers in new jersey was started by a German, that
+their uniforms were patterned after some type of German uniform
+
+(very similar to the uniforms South African police wear), that they
+are notorious for stopping Black, Hispanic, and long-haired people
+on the turnpike and beating, harassing, and arresting them.
+The nazis headed the harassment campaign against me. They
+spit in my food and turned down the thermostat in the room until
+it was freezing. For a while their campaign centered on keeping me
+from sleeping. They stamped their feet on the floor, sang songs all
+night, played with their guns, shouted, etc. I told the nurses about
+it, but it was no use.
+I could deal with whatever they were putting out, but how long
+would this go on? I had heard nothing from the outside world, and
+i didn't even know if anybody knew where i was or whether i was
+dead or alive. My chest was feeling better, but i still could hardly
+breathe: I thought i was past the point of needing an operation, but
+i wasn't sure if it was because of the painkillers they had given me or
+because i was really getting better.
+Every day i asked them to contact my lawyer, and every day
+they said they had tried but there was no answer. I knew that was a
+lie because Evelyn had an answering service. Every day i asked them
+to contact my family. The response to this was usually obscene.
+"Oh, you got a family, do you ? Is your mother a nigger whore
+like you ? We don't allow no pickaninnies at this hospital."
+They went on and on about my family until they found some­
+thing else to go on and on about. Whoever said that no news is
+good news had to be out of his mind.
+Well, there was news, but it wasn't good news. They told me
+they had arrested Sundiata. At first i didn't believe them, but they
+were too glib and arrogant. I knew something had happened.
+"We got your friend," they said, "and he's singing like a bird.
+Yeah, he's singing like a bird, and he's giving you all the weight. It's
+a good thing for you he didn't know what color undies you had on
+or he would have told us that. We know where you were coming
+from. We know where you were going. We know that you stopped
+at a Howard Johnson. He even told us what you ordered and that
+you just love potato chips."
+"What?" i thought. "How did they know that?" Then i re­
+membered that we had bought potato chips at a Howard Johnson
+on the turnpike. Maybe someone had seen me and remembered.
+"Yes, Clark Squire tells us that you took the trooper's gun and
+shot him in the head. Now, you wouldn't do a thing like that,
+would you ? Well, JoAnne, you're in a hell of a fix. If I were you, I
+wouldn't let him get away with it. It's a low-down thing to do,
+giving all the weight to a woman. I'll make a deal with you. You tell
+
+ASSATA
+II
+
+ASSATA
+I2
+
+us everything that happened and I promise we'll go light on you. I
+just don't like to see you get a bad break, that's all. You know,
+you're facing a lot of time in prison, the way things stand, if he
+testifies against you. You could get life in prison or even the chair,
+but all you have to do is tell us what happened and we'll see to it
+that you do just a couple of years and go home. You're young. You
+don't want to rot away your whole life in prison, do you ? Maybe
+you think you owe something to the cause. You think he's thinking
+about the cause now ? No, he's singing his head off, trying to give
+you all the weight. They're all the same. They talk all this shit about
+Black people, equal rights, civil rights, but when it comes down to
+the wire, all they care about is their hide. He's thinking about his
+hide and you better think about yours. You think the cause gives a
+damn about you? Your own people don't give a damn about you.
+To them you're just a common criminal. Now I'm giving you this
+one chance to save yourself and come clean. If you don't take it,
+you're a fool."
+They really did think Black people were stupid. Their line had
+to be the oldest in the book. He was sitting there like he just knew
+his corny little speech had done the trick. I said nothing. If you
+don't say anything to them, they have nothing to turn around and
+use against you. "Divide and conquer" has always been their
+motto.
+When they realized i wasn't going to talk, they began to leave.
+Then one came back. "Oh," he said, "I almost forgot to read you
+your rights." He pulled out this little card and read from it. " 'You
+have the right to remain silent. . . . You have the right to . . . etc. ' I
+wouldn't want you to say that we didn't read you your rights."
+Thursday afternoon. They're letting me make a phone call. I don't
+believe it. I call my aunt. She's not in. The answering service
+answers. I don't know who else to call. The only lawyers whose
+names i know worked on the Panther 21 trial. I call them at
+random. No one is in, but secretaries promise to give them mes­
+sages. I'm disappointed but i feel a lot better. Things are looking
+up.
+It is Friday. From the activity in the room next door, i can tell
+something is up. Voices and whispers. They are back and forth, in
+and out, arranging this, moving that. The police radio is jumping.
+What is happening? Whatever it is, it can't be too bad, i think. They
+are leaving me alone. In a little while a policewoman comes in. She
+is in a brown uniform and her insignia says "Sheriff's Depanment."
+
+She's Black or Hispanic. I can't tell exactly, except that she isn't
+white. Then some more police come in, dressed in uniforms similar
+to hers. Then more police. They are state troopers. One of them
+moves to the door and stands at attention. Then some men in suits
+come in. Then a man comes in with a stenographic machine.
+"The Honorable Joseph F. Bradshaw, State of New Jersey,
+County of Middlesex. All rise."
+Then this judge walks in with a black robe on. One of the men
+in a suit reads the charges against me:
+We are here today to serve complaints upon you for the matters
+arising out of the shooting of May 2 of 1973. I will read you the
+complaints, leave copies with you of the charges that will be pending
+against you. The Judge will then advise you on the arraignment of
+such rights you may have . . . .
+. . . you are charged under Complaint Number 119977, by
+Detective Taranto, New Jersey State Police, who says on the 2nd of
+May, 1973, within the confines of the Township of East Brunswick,
+County of Middlesex, that you unlawfully and illegally resisted a
+lawful arrest being made by New Jersey State Trooper James Harper
+by discharging a dangerous pistol and wounding the said James
+Harper and fleeing the scene of the incident, all in violation of N.J.S.
+2A:85-1. . . .
+You are also charged, . . . under complaint Number S 119979,
+by Detective Sergeant Taranto of the New Jersey State Police, who
+says that on the 2nd of May, 1973, within the Township of East
+Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did commit an Atrocious
+Assault and Battery upon New Jersey State Trooper James Harper by
+shooting, wounding and maiming the said James Harper with a
+hand gun then and there discharged by the defendant, all in viola­
+tion of N.J.S. 2A:90-1.
+In the Second Count you are charged by the said officer who
+says that defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard did on the afore­
+mentioned date and place unlawfully and illegally assault the said
+James Harper with intent to kill, murder and slay him by use of a
+hand gun then and there held by the defendant, all in violation of
+N.J.S. 2A:9 0- 2.
+It further charges in the Third Count that the aforementioned
+defendant did at the above mentioned time and place commit an
+unlawful and illegal assault and battery on a law enforcement officer,
+to wit, one James Harper, a duly sworn Trooper of the New Jersey
+State Police, by discharging a firearm and wounding the said James
+Harper, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:90-4 . . . .
+In S 119980 you are charged with illegally and unlawfully
+committing the crime of murder by willfully and with malice
+
+ASSATA
+
+I3
+
+ASSATA
+
+aforethought shooting, killing and slaying New Jersey State Trooper
+Werner Foerster, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:11 3-1 and N.J.S.
+2A:85-14....
+You are further being charged under S 119981 with one count,
+wherein Detective Sergeant Taranto charges you on the 2nd day of
+May, 197 3, within the Township of East Brunswick, County of
+Middlesex, that you did unlawfully, illegally and with malice
+aforethought cause or affect the murder of James Coston a/kla Zayd
+Shakur, while resisting or avoiding a lawful arrest then and there
+being affected by New Jersey State Trooper James Harper, all in
+violation of N.J.S. 2A:11 3- 2....
+You are charged with S 119982 by State Police Sergeant Louis
+Taranto, that on the 2nd day of May, 197 3, in the Township of East
+Brunswick, County of Middlesex, you unlawfully and illegally pos­
+sessed on your person, under your custody and control, an illegal
+weapon, to wit, one Browning 9 milimeter automatic pistol, one
+Browning automatic .380 caliber, one .38 caliber Llama automatic
+pistol, serial number 248 31, all without having obtained any neces­
+sary permit for the carrying of same, in violation of N.J.S.
+2A:151-41 (a)....
+You are further charged in Complaint S 119983, wherein De­
+tective Sergeant Taranto says on the 2nd day of May, 197 3, in the
+Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex, that you did
+unlawfully and illegally and forcibly take from the person of New
+Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster a .38 caliber revolver by vio­
+lence,to wit, by shooting, slaying and killing the same Werner
+Foerster, all in violation of N.J.S. 2A:141-1.
+The Second Count of that Complaint charges you with com­
+mitting that act while being armed, in violation of N.J.S.
+2A:151-5.. ..
+...you are being charged by State Trooper Detective Sergeant
+Taranto, Complaint S 119984, who says on the 2nd day of May,
+197 3, in the Township of East Brunswick, County of Middlesex,
+that you did illegally, unlawfully conspire with James Coston, a/k/a
+Zayd Shakur and one John Doe to commit the crime of murder of
+the said Trooper Werner Foerster, and in the affectuation of said
+conspiracy did execute the following overt acts:
+1.That the said defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard did have
+in her possession a pistol with which to affectuate the ends of the
+conspiracy on the above-mentioned time and ... at the above­
+mentioned place.
+2. The above named defendant Joanne Deborah Chesimard in
+concert with and by common scheme and plan did assault Trooper
+James Harper and otherwise distharge her weapon at the said
+Trooper James Harper with the intent to affect the ends of the
+
+conspiracy by otherwise wounding, maiming or killing him, all in
+violation of N.J.S. 2A:98-1 and N.J.S. 2A:113-1.
+1 think he will never stop. Half of the charges i don't even
+understand. 1 interrupt the proceedings. "I don't have a lawyer
+here," i protest. "I would like to have a lawyer present." They ignore
+me and keep on reading.
+"How do you plead?" they ask me.
+"I would like to have a lawyer present. Don't i have a right to a
+lawyer?"
+"That will not be necessary," the judge says coldly. "Enter a
+plea of not guilty for the defendant."
+And just as quickly as they entered, the procession departs.
+Later the same policewoman comes back. She stands rigidly
+against the wall. Her face is a mask. "Oh, no !" i think. "Court
+again ? What are they gonna do, railroad me here and now?" 1
+imagine myself being tried right there in the bed with no lawyer.
+The door opens. It is Evelyn-my lawyer and aunt. She is the
+most beautiful sight in the world. She embraces me and sits down
+next to me. As usual, she is business first.
+"I only have five minutes," she tells me. "They told me that 1
+couldn't see you. 1 had to go to court and get a court order to see
+you. The judge would give us only five minutes apiece. Your mother
+and sister are outside. So talk fast."
+We look up. The police are practically standing in our mouths.
+"I would like to talk with my client in private," Evelyn says.
+"Would you please move back. This is an outrage. This is an
+attorney-client visit and we have a constitutional right to privacy."
+The police move back one inch. 1 tell Evelyn about the kan­
+garoo court in the morning. My mouth moves so fast it's like one of
+those old-style movies, but a talkie. 1 can see from the expression
+on her face that i must look horrible.
+"How are they treating you?" she asks.
+1 don't have time to tell her the whole story, but i have to let
+her know what is going on. 1 don't know what they will do next. 1
+have to try to get someone to put pressure on them to stop. 1 tell her
+some of it, but i just can't tell her the worst things. Her face looks
+so pitiful and every time i tell her something else, her hands shake.
+"Try to do what you can," i say.
+"Time's up. Time's up, miss !"
+Evelyn makes her futile protests. "I need to talk with my
+client. This is just not enough time."
+
+ASSATA
+I5
+
+ASSATA
+I6
+
+"Sorry, miss. Time's up !" They move toward her like they
+are
+.
+going to beat her up.
+Then she is gone. 1 brace myself for my mother and my sister.
+It has been such a long time since i have seen them. 1 don't know
+what to expect.
+My mother comes in. She looks worried but strong. She kisses
+me.
+"I'm proud of you," she says.
+The words spin around me, weaving a warm blanket of love. 1
+am so happy. 1 can hardly contain myself. My mother is proud of
+me. She loves me and she is proud of me.
+Too soon the time with my mother is up. My sister comes in.
+She has her hair wrapped in a turban and she looks so pale. As
+soon as she sees me, she breaks out crying. Tears stream down her
+already puffy face. 1 can tell she has been crying a lot.
+"I love you," she says simply.
+We don't do a lot of talking, but i feel so very close to her
+during those few minutes.
+"Time's up." Again. And then she is gone.
+1 lie there full of emotion. All of this is so hard on my family.
+They look vulnerable and shaken. This is maybe harder on them
+than it is on me. 1 wish there was something i can do to make them
+happy.
+Two Black nurses were very kind to me. When they were on duty,
+they would go out of their way to make sure i was all right. They
+made frequent trips to my room, for which i was especially grateful
+during those first days.
+"If you need anything, just ring," they said knowingly.
+One night one of the nurses came in and gave me three books.
+I hadn't even thought about reading. The books were a godsend.
+They had been carefully selected. One was a book of Black poetry,
+one was a book called Black Women in White Amerika, and the
+third was a novel, Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. Whenever i tired
+of the verbal abuse of my captors, i would drown them out by
+reading the poetry out loud. "Invictus" and "If We Must Die" were
+the poems i usually read. 1 read them over and over, until i was sure
+the guards had heard every word. The poems were my message to
+them.
+When i read the book about Black women, i felt the spirits of
+those sisters feeding me, making me stronger. Black women have
+been struggling and helping each other to survive the blows of life
+since the beginning of time. And when i read Siddhartha, a peace
+
+came over me. I felt a unity with all things living. The world, in
+spite of oppression, is a beautiful place. I would say "Om" softly to
+myself, letting my lips vibrate. I felt the birds, the sun, and the trees.
+I was in communion with all the forces on the earth that truly love
+people, in communion with all the revolutionary forces on the
+earth.
+I was definitely getting better. They were even unchaining me
+so that i could hobble to the bathroom every now and then, with
+the help of the nurse. I was still weak and, when i returned from the
+bathroom, i would flop on the bed as if i had just accomplished a
+great physical feat. But at least now i knew what was wrong with
+me. During those first days i could barely ask, and when i did, they
+acted as if my condition were some top secret information i was not
+privy to. I had three bullet holes. There was a bullet in my chest (it's
+still there); an injured lung with fluid in it, a broken clavicle, and a
+paralyzed arm with undetermined damage to the nerves. I kept
+asking if i would be able to use my hand again. One or two doctors
+said, flatly, no. The others said, "Maybe yes, maybe no."
+Anyway, i was gonna live.
+STORY
+
+You died.
+I cried.
+And kept on getting up.
+A little slower.
+And a lot more deadly.
+
+ASSATA
+I7
+
+Chapter 2
+
+IS
+
+he FBI cannot find any evidence that i was
+born. On my FBI Wanted poster, they list my birth
+date as July 1 6, 1 947, and, in parentheses, "not sub­
+stantiated by birth records."
+Anyway, i was born. I am the older of two chil­
+dren. My sister, Beverly, was born five years later. The
+name my momma gave me was JoAnne Deborah By­
+ron. I am told that i was a fat, happy baby and that i
+was talking in complete sentences when i was about
+nine months old. They say that i was lazy, though, that
+i talked way before i learned to walk. Everybody says
+that i had my days mixed up with my nights and kept
+everybody up all night. (I'm still pretty much a night
+owl.) The only other tale i remember hearing about
+my babyhood was that i would scream at the top of
+my lungs whenever anybody wearing furs or feathers
+came near me. (I'm still not too fond of furs and
+feathers.)
+My mother and father were divorced shortly after
+i was born. I lived with my mother, my aunt (now
+Evelyn Williams), my grandmother (Lulu Hill), and
+my grandfather (Frank Hill) in a house in the Brick­
+town section of Jamaica, New York. The only thing i
+remember about that house is the backyard, which i
+loved, and the huge dog next door. I remember the
+dog well because he terrified me. To my young eyes he
+looked like a giant, a canine version of King Kong or
+Mighty Joe Young. (I'm still not too wild about dogs.)
+When i was three years old, my grandparents sold the
+house and moved down South. I moved with them.
+We moved into a big wooden house on Seventh
+Street in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was the
+house my grandfather had grown up in. It had a
+wraparound porch with a big green swing and, of
+
+course, rosebushes in the front yard and a pecan tree in the back.
+My grandfather originally thought that the house had belonged to
+my great-grandfather, Pappa Linc (short for Lincoln), but they
+found out he had only been given the use of the house for his
+lifetime. Pappa Linc had worked as a chauffeur for one of the most
+prominent white families in Wilmington and, the story goes, had
+been a prominent member of the Black community. He and my
+great-grandmother, Momma Jessie, had worked hard all their lives,
+had raised eleven children in that house, and had died under the
+impression that the house was theirs. Fine print and white lawyers
+have a way of robbing Black people of what is theirs. My grand­
+parents were forced to buy the house again.
+"Who's better than you?"
+"Nobody."
+"Who?"
+"Nobody. "
+"Get that head up."
+"Yes."
+"Yes, who?"
+"Yes, Grandmommy."
+"I want that head held up high, and i don't want you taking
+no mess from anybody, you understand?"
+"Yes, Grandmommy."
+"Don't you let me hear about anybody walking over my
+grandbaby. "
+"No, Grandmommy."
+"I don't want nobody taking advantage of you, you hear
+me.2"
+"Yes, i hear you."
+"Yes, who?"
+"Yes, Grandmommy."
+
+All of my family tried to instill in me a sense of personal dignity, but
+my grandmother and my grandfather were really fanatic about it.
+Over and over they would tell me, "You're as good as anyone else.
+Don't let anybody tell you that they're better than you." My
+grandparents strictly forbade me to say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir"
+or to look down at my shoes or to make subservient gestures when
+talking to white people. "You look them in the eye when you talk
+to them," i was told. "And speak up like you've got some sense." I
+was told to speak in a loud, clear voice and to hold my head up
+high, or risk having my grandparents knock it off my shoulders.
+
+ASSATA
+
+I9
+
+ASSATA
+20
+
+My grandparents were big on respect. I was to be polite and
+respectful to adults, to say "good morning" or "good evening" as i
+passed the neighbors' houses. Any kind of back talk or sass was
+simply out of the question. My grandparents didn't even permit me
+to answer questions with a simple "yes" or "no." Instead I had to
+say "yes, Grandmother" or "no, Grandfather." But when it came to
+dealing with white people in the segregated South, my grand­
+mother would tell me, menacingly, "Don't you respect nobody that
+don't respect you, you hear me?" "Yes, Grandmother," i would
+answer, my voice almost a whisper. "Speak up !" she would tell me
+repeatedly, something she seemed hell-bent on making me do. She
+would send me to the store with clear instructions on what to bring
+back. I was, under no circumstances, to come home with inferior
+goods, something which happened all too often to Black people in
+the South. " You tell them that you don't want any garbage, and
+you'd better not come back with any," she would warn me. If the
+store owner sold me something that my grandmother didn't like, i
+would have to return to the store and get the thing changed or get
+my money back. "You speak up loud and clear. Don't let me have
+to go down to that store." Scared to death of the fuss my grand­
+mother would make if she had to go to the store herself, i would
+hurry back to the store, prepared to raise almighty hell.
+Whenever my grandmother heard about somebody being mis­
+treated, especially if it was a man mistreating a woman, she would
+glare at me and say, "Don't you let anybody mistreat you, you hear?
+We're not raising you up to be mistreated, you hear? I don't want
+you taking no mess off of nobody, you understand ?" "Yes, Grand­
+mother," i would answer, for what seemed like the millionth time,
+wondering why my grandmother liked to repeat herself so often.
+The tactics that my grandparents used were crude, and i hated it
+when they would repeat everything so often. But the lessons that
+they taught me, more than anything else i learned in life, helped me
+to deal with the things i would face growing up in amerika.
+But a lot of times, for my grandparents, pride and dignity were
+hooked up to things like position and money. For them, being "just
+as good" as white people meant having what white people had.
+They would tell me to go to school and study so that i could have a
+nice house and nice clothes and a nice car. "White people don't
+want to see us with nothing," they would tell me. "That's why
+you've got to get your education so that you can be somebody and
+have something in life." Becoming "somebody" in life just didn't
+mean too much to me. I wanted to feel happy, to feel good. My
+awareness of class differences in the Black community came at an
+
+early age. Although my grandmother taught me more about being ASSATA
+proud and strong than anyone i know, she had a lot of Booker T.
+ZI
+Washington, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, "talented tenth"
+ideas. She had worked hard and had made a decent living as a
+pieceworker in a factory, but she had other ideas for me. She was
+determined that i would become part of Wilmington's talented
+tenth-the privileged class-part of the so-called Black bour­
+geOISIe.
+One of her first steps was to sternly forbid me to play with
+"alley rats." It was impossible for me to obey her orders since i had
+absolutely no idea what an alley rat was. I often became the
+unwitting object of my grandmother's fury, charged with the crime
+of alley rat playing. My grandmother, writhing with annoyance,
+would threaten me with untold punishments if i continued my evil
+ways. I received strict orders to abandon my penchant for alley rats
+and play with "decent children." But we could never agree on who
+"decent children" were. Decent children, to my grandmother, were
+a whole 'nother story.
+"Decent children" came from "decent families". How did you
+know what a decent family was ? A decent family lived in a decent
+house. How did you know what a decent house was? A decent
+house was fixed up nice and had a sidewalk in front of it. Decent
+families didn't let their kids play in the street with no shoes on and
+didn't let their kids say "ain't." Little did my grandmother know
+that ain't was my favorite word once i got two feet out of her
+hearing range. My grandmother had a little alley rat right under
+her roof and she didn't even know it. Alley rats supposedly lived in
+alleys, in run-down shacks, but my grandmother would often call
+one of my friends an alley rat even if the kid didn't live in an alley.
+Dutifully, to put some sense in my head, she would take me to
+visit "decent children." These decent little souls were invariably the
+offspring of Wilmington's Black doctors, lawyers, preachers, and
+undertakers. Schoolteachers, barbershop owners, and the editor of
+the "colored" newspaper were also decent. In most of these "de­
+cent" little play sessions, the other kids and I would stand around
+looking at each other awkwardly. Sometimes we would get it on
+and have some fun. But more often than not, it would be glare-at­
+each-other time or show-and-tell time (the kids showing me their
+toys and such while the grownups oohed and aahed). The worst
+times were eating at the preacher'S house, where they would take an
+hour saying grace, or playing ball with the undertaker's daughter.
+She always wanted to play ball and i was scared to death that the
+ball was going to roll into the part where they kept the dead people
+
+ASSATA and end up in the mouth of some corpse. My grandmother would
+have caught a shitfit if she had known that one of her favorite little
+22
+decent kids' favorite game was playing show and tell with his ding­
+a-ling and threatening to pee on everybody.
+After these visits, my grandmother would chirp for a week
+about how nice my little decent friends were and about how nicely
+we had played together, while i would groan silently and keep the
+expression on my face one shade away from insolence. My grand­
+mother and i waged a standoff battle damn near until i was grown.
+It wasn't that i wanted to defy her, it was that i just liked who i
+liked. I didn't care what kind of house my friends had or whether
+or not they lived in alleys. All that mattered was whether i liked
+them. I was convinced then, and i'm still convinced, that in some
+things kids have a lot more sense than adults.
+But, to my young mind, life in Wilmington was exciting. There
+were always new places to go and new cousins, aunts, and uncles to
+meet. One of my favorite relatives was Aunt Lou. She was Momma
+Jessie's sister and she lived across town. She was my grandfather's
+only remaining relative in Wilmington, the rest having moved up
+North or out West. Aunt Lou had a magic house, full of all kinds of
+flavors, textures, smells, and things. There were whole worlds in her
+house to explore. She would always feed me something good to eat
+and then let me run wild.
+I didn't know until i was grown that Aunt Lou had a son. His
+name was Uncle Willie and he died before i was born. Uncle Willie
+was something of a legend around Wilmington during the twenties,
+thirties, and forties. Whenever he came to town, they say, Aunt Lou
+would plead and moan and worry until he was in safer territory up
+North. They say that he would tear down the "colored" and "white
+only" signs and break the Jim Crow laws at whim. He would go
+around demanding his rights and denouncing the oppression of
+Black people, and it is logical that no one who loved him felt the
+least bit comfortable until he was long gone. They called him "Wild
+Willie" or "that crazy Indian" (he was supposedly Black and Cher­
+okee), but people called him that because of his nature. They say he
+had a lot of friends and that he died of natural causes.
+The rest of the relatives i met came from my grandmother'S
+side. My grandmother'S family lived in Seabreeze, outside of
+Wilmington, close to Carolina Beach. Their last name was Free­
+man, and they were famous for being high-strung, quick-tempered,
+and emotional. They seldom worked for anybody, choosing instead
+to live on the land their father had left them. They worked as
+farmers and fishermen, and they owned small stores. I have also
+
+heard that they were in the bootleg business. My grandmother's
+father was a Cherokee Indian. He died when my grandmother was
+very young. Nobody knows too much about him, except that,
+somehow, he acquired a great deal of land and left it to his children.
+The land was very valuable because much of it bordered either on
+the river or on the ocean. Everybody had a different theory about
+what my great-grandfather had done to acquire it. But it was
+because of this land that my grandparents had moved down South.
+In 1 950, the year we moved to Wilmington, the South was
+completely segregated. Black people were forbidden to go many
+places, and that included the beach. Sometimes they would travel
+all the way to South Carolina just to see the ocean. My grand­
+parents decided to open a business on their land. It consisted of a
+restaurant, lockers where people could change their clothes, and an
+area for dancing and hanging out.
+The popular name for the beach was Bop City, although my
+grandparents insisted on calling it Freeman's Beach. Throughout
+my childhood, the name Freeman had no particular significance. It
+was a name just like any other name. It wasn't until i was grown
+and began to read Black history that i discovered the significance of
+the name. After slavery, many Black people refused to use the last
+names of their masters. They called themselves "Freeman" instead.
+The name was also used by Africans who were freed before slavery
+was "officially" abolished, but it was mainly after the abolition of
+chattel slavery that many Black people changed their names to
+Freeman. After learning this, i saw my ancestors in a new light.
+For me, the beach was a wonderful place, and to this day there
+is no place on this earth that i love more. I have never seen a beach
+more beautiful than it was then, before they decided to build a
+canal right through the property of my grandparents. It is now just
+a pale shadow of what it used to be, most of it destroyed by erosion.
+But back then there were majestic sand dunes covered with tall sea
+grass where my cousins and i would build forts, houses, and,
+sometimes, cities. When time permitted, we spent hours hiding and
+making sneak attacks on one another. The sand was fine and clean
+and, in the beginning of summer, we could find j ust about every
+imaginable kind of sea shell. When the sun got too hot, we would
+sit in the old blue jeep my grandfather drove and play with frilly
+things like paper dolls and teacups. After i learned to read, i would
+sit in the sun, under the huge hats my grandmother always made
+me wear, and read one book after another.
+Every other week my grandfather went to the "colored" library
+on Red Cross Street and the librarian would send ten or so books
+
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+for me to read. As soon as i finished reading them, my grandfather
+would go and get another batch. My imagination was vivid. With
+fragments of pirates and the Bobbsey Twins floating around, i
+would sit looking out at the ocean and think about everything. I
+imagined all the places i had read about on the other side of the
+ocean and wondered if i would ever see them. And, of course, i
+daydreamed about all kinds of stuff, most of it silly.
+But my days were not spent simply daydreaming. My grand­
+parents were firm believers in work. They had worked all of their
+lives and there was no way they were gonna tolerate any "lazy­
+good-for-nothin's" around them. Every day there were chores to do
+and there was no playing until they were completed. I did things
+like putting the potato chips on the racks, putting sodas in the
+cooler, wiping the tables clean, etc. When customers were there, i
+would sell small stuff like potato chips, Nabs, pickles, and pickled
+pigs' feet. I would also set the tables and bring customers things
+they needed. But my main job was collecting fifty cents for parking.
+Because there was no road to our beach (the paved road ended with
+the white section), my grandparents had to pay for a dirt road and
+parking lot to be laid over the sand. Truckloads of dirt were
+brought and a steamroller mashed it down so that it was hard
+enough to drive on. This was an expensive process, so my grand­
+parents decided to charge fifty cents for parking. I could count and
+make change at a very early age, so it was my job to collect the fifty
+cents. During the week it wasn't too time-consuming, but on the
+weekends, if the weather was nice, it was an all-day job.
+Cars and buses of people came from all over North Carolina,
+South Carolina, and Virginia. There were church groups, school
+groups, social clubs, women's clubs, boy scouts, and girl scouts. All
+kinds of people would come to the beach, some with a little money
+and some that you could tell were real poor. In all the years i spent
+on that beach, only one or two people hassled me. Most of them
+treated me very kindly, just like i was their kid.
+The people who came to the beach fascinated me. I loved to see
+them come and go. After a while, i would recognize the regulars
+and it didn't take me too long to learn their names. Some of them
+gave me tips, which i usually spent on the picolo (jukebox). There
+were lots of lovers and i spent some of my time spying on them in
+the parking lot, but they weren't too interesting. All they did was
+squirm a lot. Checking license plates (i could recognize almost all
+of the states' license plates on sight) and collecting bugs (i had a
+huge collection) were much more interesting. But watching families
+was better, on their picnics with their fried chicken, potato salads,
+
+and watermelons. Some of them looked so happy you could tell
+they didn't get a chance to go to many picnics. And i was always on
+the watch for kids to play with when 1 wasn't busy.
+Then there were the goodtimers. Their cars smelled like whis­
+key. They would dance a lot, eat a lot, spend a lot on the picolo, and
+many times i would wonder if they had made it home all right.
+A lot of poor people came to the beach. Sometimes the floors
+of their raggedy old cars or trucks were half rotted out. Usually a
+lot of little children were with them and they wouldn't have bathing
+suits. They went swimming in whatever clothes they had worn to
+the beach, and half the time the little kids wore nothing. Then there
+were those who came to put on airs, usually in the evening, all
+dressed up, to eat dinner.
+Many would say, "I can't stand the sun," "I'm too Black
+already, 1 ain't goin' out in no sun." It was amazing the number of
+people who said they were too Black already. We looked at them
+like they were crazy because we loved the sun. But the umbrellas for
+rent went like hotcakes. Some people draped clothes and blankets
+around the umbrellas so that no light penetrated whatsoever. One
+lady always put a paper bag on her head and poked holes in it for
+her eyes. Some of the women refused to go near the water because
+they were afraid their hair would "go bad."
+One of the moving things for me was when someone saw the
+ocean for the first time. It was amazing to watch. They would stand
+there, in awe, overpowered and overwhelmed, as if they had come
+face to face with God or with the vastness of the universe. 1
+remember one time a preacher brought an old lady to the beach.
+She was the oldest-looking person i had ever seen. She said that she
+just wanted to see the ocean before she died. She stood there in one
+spot for so long she looked like she was in a trance. Then, with the
+help of the preacher, she hobbled around, picked up the mundane
+shells, and put them into her handkerchief as if they were the most
+precious things in the world.
+1 loved to eat (still do) and the beach was right up my alley.
+Right now, when i think of the fried chicken and fish dinners, my
+mouth starts to water. But what really sends me off is remembering
+those seafood platters with fish, shrimps, oysters, deviled crab,
+clam fritters, and french fries with lettuce and tomatoes on the side.
+If my memory is any good, i think they sold for $ 1 .50.
+Next to food, music was my love. Fats Domino, Nat King
+Cole, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Platters, Brook Benton,
+Bobby "Blue" Bland, James Brown, Dinah Washington, Maxine
+Brown, Big Maybelle were some of the people 1 listened to during
+
+ASSATA
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+those beach years. I loved to dance. They would play that music and
+i would dance my natural heart out. That was another way i
+collected tips. People would egg me on, "Go on, gal, go. Boy, looket
+that little girl dance." But i loved to see people dance, too. Many a
+time my grandmother or grandfather had to call me out of the
+trance i was in watching somebody dance instead of doing my
+chores.
+At night, my cousins, who sometimes came over to work on
+the beach, told ghost stories. They loved to tell them to me because
+i would get scared out of my wits. They would tell me about people
+who came back from the dead, about snakes that could crawl a
+hundred miles an hour and beat you to death with their tails, and
+about red phantoms and haints and all kinds of other horrible
+things. My imagination was vivid, and before the night was over the
+sea grass turned to monsters and the wind made ghost howls.
+Sometimes even my grandmother and grandfather would get
+into the ghost story sessions. My grandfather's favorite one goes
+like this: He was driving home in a terrible storm one night. It was
+lightning and thundering like crazy. He saw lightning hit a tree
+ahead of him and saw the tree fall across the road. He tried to stop,
+but it was too late. He braced himself to hit the tree, but nothing
+happened. The car went smoothly through it as if it weren't there.
+He turned around and, sure enough, the tree was still lying across
+the road. He swears that the story is true and i'm convinced that he
+thoroughly believes it is.
+We were, however, visited by real, live ghosts. They were the
+phantoms of the parking lot. It seems that the white citizens of
+Wilmington and Carolina Beach were not at all happy that my
+grandparents had dared to build on the land and to start a "col­
+ored" business. We were too close for their comfort. So they would
+visit us from time to time to express their disapproval. I don't know
+for a fact that they were card-carrying members of the Klan, but,
+judging from their behavior, i think they were. But then, of course,
+they weren't wearing their sheets. They could've just been red­
+blooded amerikan boys out for some good clean fun. The parking
+lot was made of dirt, and cars spinning around on it at breakneck
+speed would ruin it in no time. Two or three of them would ride
+around the parking lot, spinning and skidding, while they shouted
+curses and racist insults. One time they fired guns in the air. I
+remember seeing them and hearing them out there and wondering
+what they were gonna do next. More than once i saw my grand­
+father go to where he kept his gun and carry it quietly to where he
+
+had been sitting. Somehow this made me more afraid, because i
+knew that he, too, thought they were scary.
+Finally my grandfather put a big fat chain, almost as big as the
+kind used to anchor ships, across the road at the entrance to the
+parking lot. This soon eliminated our nightly visitors.
+One night, as my grandmother and i were fastening the chain
+in place and locking it, a white man drove up to the lot and, in an
+arrogant tone of voice, ordered my grandmother to open the gate so
+that he could turn his car around. My grandmother, looking very
+dignified, said, "No, I can't let you do that." Then, in a nicer voice,
+he asked my grandmother again to open the gate. "No," she said
+again. "Come on now, auntie, I got a mammy in my house. Now
+open the gate and lemme turn around." "Wha'd you say?" asked
+my grandmother. "I said I got a mammy in my house, now come
+on, open up. " My grandmother leaned over in the man's face.
+"I don't care how many mammies you got in your house. I
+don't care if you've got a hundred mammies in your house, you're
+gonna back out of here tonight. And I want you off of my property
+now! Right now!"
+That man turned as red as a redneck can turn and started to
+back his car up. The road was very narrow, barely wide enough for
+one car, and there was no way he could turn around without
+getting stuck in the sand. He backed up for more than a quarter of
+a mile. As we looked at him backing up, my grandmother and i
+laughed so hard the tears fell from our eyes.
+Every day when we drove from the house on Seventh Street to
+the beach, we passed a beautiful park with a zoo. And every day i
+would beg, plead, whine, and nag my grandmother to take me to
+the zoo. It was almost an obsession. She would always say that
+"one day" she would take me, but "one day" never came. I would
+sit in the car pouting, thinking how mean she was. I thought that
+she had to be the meanest woman on the face of the earth. Finally,
+with the strangest look on her face, she told me that we were not
+allowed in the zoo. Because we were Black.
+When we were on the beach we shopped at Carolina Beach. It
+had an amusement park, but of course Black people were not
+permitted to go in. Every time we passed it i looked at the merry-go­
+round and the Ferris wheel and the little cars and airplanes and my
+heart would just long to ride them. But my favorite forbidden ride
+had little boats in a pool of water, and every time i passed them i felt
+frustrated and deprived. Of course, peristent creature that i am, i
+always asked to be taken on the rides, knowing full well what the
+
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+answer would be. One summer my mother and sister and i were
+walking down the boardwalk. My mother was spending part of her
+summer helping my grandparents in the business. As soon as we
+neared the rides, i went into my usual act. I continued, ad nauseam,
+until my mother, grinning, said. "All right now, I'm gonna try to get
+us in. "When we get over there, I don't want to hear one word out of
+either of you. Just let me do the talking. And if they ask you
+anything, don't answer. Okay? Okay!"
+My mother went over to the ticket booth and began talking. I
+didn't understand a word she was saying. The lady at the ticket
+window kept telling my mother that she couldn't sell her any
+tickets. My mother kept talking, very fast, and waving her hands.
+The manager came over and told my mother she couldn't buy any
+tickets and that we couldn't go into the park. My mother kept
+talking and waving her hands and soon she was screaming this
+foreign language. I didn't know if she was speaking a play language
+or a real one. Several other men came over. They talked to my
+mother. She continued. After the men went to one side and had a
+conference, they returned and told the ticket seller to give my
+mother the tickets.
+I couldn't believe it. All at once we were laughing and giggling
+and riding the rides. All the white people were staring at us, but we
+didn't care. We were busy having a ball. "When i got into one of
+those little boats, my mother practically had to drag me out. I was
+in my glory. When we finished the rides we went to the Dairy
+Queen for ice cream. We sang and laughed all the way home.
+When we got home my mother explained that she had been
+speaking Spanish and had told the managers that she was from a
+Spanish country and that if he didn't let us in she would call the
+embassy and the United Nations and i don't know who all else. We
+laughed and talked about it for days. But it was a lesson i never
+forgot. Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the
+boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.
+My first school experience was Mrs. Perkins's school in
+Wilmington. It was a little two-room school on Red Cross Street
+where i learned the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arith­
+metic. I was four years old. Mrs. Perkins's school was the closest
+thing to nursery school that Black people in Wilmington had, but
+she didn't play that baby play stuff. We were there to learn. I was
+prone to colds, however, and i guess the potbellied stove in the
+school didn't give off enough heat. I was out sick more than i was in
+
+school. But i learned enough so that when i went to first grade,
+aoerything was easy. I could already read.
+I spent most of first grade in New York with my mother, the
+rest of the first and all of the second down South with my grand­
+parents. I went to Gregory Elementary School in Wilmington. My
+reachers knew my grandparents well and gave them daily reports of
+my progress. The teachers were strict and believed solemnJy in the
+paddle, but we learned.
+Of course, our school was segregated, but the teachers took
+more of an interest in our lives because they lived in our world, in
+the same neighborhoods. They knew what we were up against and
+what we would be facing as adults, and they tried to protect us as
+much as they could. More than once we were punished because
+some children had made fun of a student who was poor and badly
+dressed. I'm not saying that segregation was a good system. Our
+schools were inferior. The books were used and torn, handed down
+from white schools. We received only a fraction of the state money
+allotted to white schools, and the conditions under which many
+Black children received an education can only be described as
+horrible. But Black children encountered suppport and understand­
+ing and encouragement instead of the hostile indifference they often
+met in the "integrated" schools.
+There was a big dirt yard next to the school where we would
+play and fight. We grew up fighting; it was really hard to get
+through school without a few fights, just to survive. But i always
+wondered what made people fight. Especially after we learned
+about wars. I used to look out on the remains of the sunken ship
+that tilted up in front of our beach and wonder how people had
+died in it. It was covered with green moss and i imagined skeletons
+floating around inside. The ship had been sunk during the Civil
+War and i always wondered if it carried Northerners or South­
+erners. Back in those days i used to think the Northerners were the
+good guys.
+But I never could make much sense out of war. I remember
+being taught that World War I was the war to end all wars. Well, we
+know that was a lie because there was World War II. I remember a
+teacher telling us that World War I was started because Prince
+Ferdinand, somewhere in Austria, got killed. (When we learned
+history, we were never taught the real reasons for things. We were
+just taught useless trivia, simplistic facts, key phrases, and mis­
+cellaneous, meaningless dates.) I couldn't understand it. What were
+people all the way in amerika doing in a war because some prince
+
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+30
+
+got killed in Austria ? I could just imagine going home and telling
+my grandmother that i got in a fight because some dude in Europe
+got killed.
+They made war sound so glorious in school, so heroic. But the
+wars we had on the way home from school and in the playground
+were anything but glorious. Besides the cuts and scratches we
+received on our battleground, we were likely to get spanked for
+fighting or for getting our clothes dirty. I was pretty lucky in that
+respect. When my grandmother would discover that i was all in one
+piece she wouldn't make too much of a fuss. I guess i looked pretty
+much the same after a fight as i did any other day when i came
+home from school. I was a natural tomboy and a natural slob. My
+blouse was always hanging out of my skin, one of my socks always
+fell down in my shoe, and my hair always flew wild around my
+head. I always managed to get something torn and dirty and,
+because i was awkward and clumsy, i always looked like a victim of
+about fifty wars.
+Most of our fights started over petty disputes like stepped-on
+shoes, flying spitballs, and the contested ownership of pens and
+pencils. But behind our fights, self-hatred was clearly visible.
+"Nappy head, nappy head, I catch your ass, you goin' be
+dead. "
+"You think you Black and ugly now; I'm gonna beat you till
+you purple."
+"You just another nigga to me. Ima show you what I do with
+niggas like you."
+"You better shut your big blubber lips."
+We would call each other "jungle bunnies" and "bush
+boogies." We would talk about each other's ugly, big lips and flat
+noses. We would call each other pickaninnies and nappy-haired so­
+and-so's.
+"Act your age, not your color," we would tell each other.
+"You gon thank me when I'm through with you, Ima beat you
+so bad, I'm gon beat the black offa you."
+Black made any insult worse. When you called somebody a
+"bastard," that was bad. But when you called somebody a "Black
+bastard," now that was terrible. In fact, when i was growing up,
+being called "Black," period, was grounds for fighting.
+"Who you callin' Black ?" we would say. We had never heard
+the words "Black is beautiful" and the idea had never occurred to
+most of us.
+I hated for my grandmother to comb my hair. And she hated
+to comb it. My hair has always been thick and long and nappy and
+
+it would give my grandmother hell. She has straight hair, so she was
+impatient with mine. When she combed my hair she always remem­
+bered something i had done wrong the day before or earlier that
+day and popped me in the head with the comb. She would always
+tell me during these sessions, "Now, when you grow up, I want you
+to marry some man with 'good hair' so your children will have
+good hair. You hear me ?" "Yes, Grandmother." I used to wonder
+why she hadn't followed her own advice since my grandfather's
+hair is far from straight, but i never dared ask. My grandmother
+just said what everybody knew was a common fact: good hair was
+better than bad hair, meaning that straight hair was better than
+nappy hair.
+When my sister Beverly was little, i remember teasing her
+about her lips. She has big, beautiful lips, but back then we looked
+at them as something of a liability. I never thought of them as
+ugly-my sister has always seemed very pretty to me-but her lips
+were something good to tease her about. I once told her, "With
+those big lips, the only thing you've got going for you is your long
+hair; you better never cut it off." I will never know how much
+damage all my "teasing" did to my sister. But i was only saying
+what everybody knew: little, thin lips were better than big, thick
+lips. Everybody knew that.
+There was one girl in our school whose mother made her wear
+a clothespin on her nose to make it thin. There were quite a few
+girls who tried to bleach their skin white with bleaching cream and
+who got pimples instead. And, of course, we went to the beauty
+parlor and got our hair straightened. I couldn't wait to go to the
+beauty parlor and get my hair all fried up. I wanted Shirley Temple
+curls just like Shirley Temple. I hated the smell of fried hair and
+having my ears burned, but we were taught that women had to
+make great sacrifices to be beautiful. And everybody knew you had
+to be crazy to walk the streets with nappy hair sticking out. And of
+course long hair was better than short hair. We all knew that.
+We had been completely brainwashed and we didn't even
+know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of
+beauty and, at times, we accepted the white man's view of ourselves.
+We had never been exposed to any other point of view or any other
+standard of beauty. From when i was a tot, i can remember Black
+people saying, "Niggas ain't shit." "You know how lazy niggas
+are." "Give a nigga an inch and he'll take a mile." Everybody knew
+what "niggas" like to do after they eat: sleep. Everybody knew that
+"niggas" couldn't be on time; that's why there was c.p.t. (colored
+people's time). "Niggas don't take care of nothin'." "Niggas don't
+
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+
+stick together." The list could go on and on. To varying degrees we
+accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each
+made them true within ourselves because we believed them.
+I entered third grade in P.S. 154 in Queens. The school was almost
+all white, and i was the only Black kid in my class. Everybody in my
+family was glad i was going to school in New York. "The schools
+are better," they said. "You'll get a better education up North than
+in that segregated school down South."
+School up North was much different for me than school down
+South. For one thing, the teachers (they were all white-i don't
+remember having any Black teachers until i was in high school)
+were always grinning at me. And the older i got, the less i liked
+those grins. I didn't have a name for them then, but now i call them
+the "little nigga grins."
+My third grade teacher was young, blond, very prissy, and
+middle class. Whenever i came into the room she would show me
+all thirty-two of her teeth, but there was nothing sincere about her
+smile. It never made me feel good. There was always something
+unnatural and exaggerated about her behavior with me. On my
+first or second day in class she was teaching us penmanship. "Does
+anyone know how to make a capital L in script?" she asked.
+Nobody raised a hand. Timidly, i did. "You know how to do it?"
+she asked incredulously. "Yes," i told her, "we had that last year
+down South." "Well, come and write it on the blackboard, then,"
+she told me. I wrote my pitiful little second grade L on the black­
+board. After looking at me and nodding, she made a big, fancy L
+next to mine.
+"Is this what you're trying to make, JoAnne ?" Her expression
+was smug. The whole class broke out laughing. I wanted to go
+somewhere and hide. After that, it seemed that every time i men­
+tioned something i learned down South she got mad. She never saw
+my raised hand. When she couldn't ignore it, like when no one else
+raised theirs, she would say something like "Oh, do you know the
+answer, JoAnne ?"
+Every holiday a class was assigned to put on a play. There were
+plays for Columbus Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas.
+Our class had George Washington's birthday, and our play was
+about his cutting down this cherry tree when he was a little boy. I
+was selected to be in the play. I was tickled pink and so proud. I was
+cast as one of the cherry trees. The teacher put some green crepe
+paper over my head and told me to stand at the back of the stage
+where i was to stay until the end of the play. Then the cherry trees
+were supposed to sway from side to side and sing: "George Wash-
+
+ington never told a lie, never told a lie, he never told a lie. George
+Washington never told a lie, and the truth goes marching on."
+I didn't know what a fool they had made out of me until i grew
+up and started to read real history. Not only was George Wash­
+ington probably a big liar, but he had once sold a slave for a keg of
+rum. Here they had this old craka slavemaster, who didn't give a
+damn about Black people, and they had me, an unwitting little
+Black child, doing a play in his honor. When George Washington
+was fighting for freedom in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting
+for the freedom of "whites only." Rich whites, at that. After the so­
+called Revolution, you couldn't vote unless you were a white man
+and you owned a plot of land. The Revolutionary War was led by
+some rich white boys who got tired of paying heavy taxes to the
+king. It didn't have anything at all to do with freedom, justice, and
+equality for all.
+Again, in the fourth grade, i was the only Black kid in my
+class. My teacher, Mr. Trobawitz, was cool, though, and a very
+good teacher. He had modern ideas about teaching, and instead of
+making us read those old boring readers, he had us read real books
+and write reports about them. His class was always interesting. He
+told us all kinds of jokes and stories and he seemed to be sincerely
+concerned about us. That year we were learning about the Civil
+War and about Lincoln's freeing the slaves. Like all the other
+teachers, Mr. Trobawitz taught us "fairy-tale history," but at least
+he made it interesting. That year i was crazy about Lincoln. I
+memorized the entire "0 Captain ! My Captain!" by Walt Whit­
+man and recited it to the class.
+Little did i know that Lincoln was an archracist who had
+openly expressed his disdain for Black people. He was of the
+opinion that Black people should be forcibly deported to Africa or
+anywhere else. We had been taught that the Civil War was fought to
+free the slaves, and it was not until i was in college that i learned
+that the Civil War was fought for economic reasons. The fact that
+"official" slavery was abolished was only incidental. Northern in­
+dustrialists were fighting to control the economy. Before the Civil
+War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on
+southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to
+northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided
+to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern
+capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their
+capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn't
+happen, the North went to war.
+When i was still in the fourth grade, i fell off a swing and broke
+my leg. Mr. Trobawitz came to my house and gave me lessons and
+
+ASSATA
+
+33
+
+ASSATA
+
+34
+
+assignments. When i returned to school, Mr. Trobawitz had left to
+teach in college. Everybody in the class was sad. A bird-beaked,
+stick-to-the-book, teach-by-rote teacher replaced him. She made us
+go back to reading in the readers and changed the desks around so
+that once again we were sitting in rows. I didn't like her and she
+bored me to death.
+One time our class had a dance. It was a big event for me since
+i loved to dance. The white kids couldn't dance for nothing. They
+looked like a bunch of drunken kangaroos, hopping all over the
+place, out of time with the music. I sat there with my hand over my
+mouth trying to suppress my laughter. I ached to get out there and
+show them how to do it. But nobody asked me to dance. I don't
+think it ever occurred to them, and, if it did, they knew better.
+Dancing with a "nigger" was surely good for a week or so of
+teasing. But these whites were not at all out in the open with their
+racism. It was undercover, like their parents' racism. Anyhow, i just
+sat there, looking at them flop around until this one kid (i'll never
+forget his name: Richard Kennedy; he was a poor Irish kid with red
+hair) came over to where i was sitting and said, "If you give me a
+dime, i'll dance with you." The sad part of the story is that i almost
+gave him the dime.
+In the fifth grade, i was put into the class of the school's most
+notorious battle-ax, Mrs. Hoffler. I knew from the first day it was
+going to be a long, hot year. The only good thing was that there was
+anoth er Black kid in the class. The teacher put us in the back, next
+to each other. His name was David' something, but i called him
+David Peacan. The teacher was one of those military types and her
+classes resembled boot camp. We were told where to sit, how to sit,
+and what kind of notebooks, pens, pencils, etc., to use. She permit­
+ted no talking and gave tons of homework. Her punishment for
+everything was extra homework. Whenever somebody got caught
+talking or doing anything she disapproved of, she gave extra home­
+work. When you didn't have your homework, she gave extra home­
+work. And every time she gave you extra homework she wrote your
+name on the blackboard and refused to remove it until you had
+turned in the "punishment." By the time i left her class my name
+covered practically the entire blackboard.
+David and i were her favorite targets. The whole class would be
+in an uproar, but we were the only ones she saw with our mouths
+open. The more she rode our backs, the more rebellious i became. I
+would sit in the back of the class and make jokes about her.
+One day when we were talking and giggling, she came up and
+pulled David out of his seat by the ear, twisting it until the whole
+
+side of his face was red and contorted with pain. I made up my
+mind right then and there that she wasn't going to do it to me. A
+few days later, she came after me. When she put her hands on me, i
+kicked her or hit her. I don't remember which. Anyway, the next
+thing i knew i was in the principal's office being sent home with a
+note. I was scared to death my mother would find out, so i signed
+the note myself and brought it to school the next day. My signature
+didn't fool anybody. To make a long story short, when my mother
+found out i confessed everything and i told her about Mrs. Hoffler.
+I think she had some idea about what was going on because she
+had seen a change in me. I had always been very quiet and obedient
+in school. My mother went to the school, talked to the teacher and
+the principal, and demanded i be moved to another class. It's a
+good thing she wasn't one of those parents who believe the teacher
+is always right because i don't know what would have happened. I
+guess the fact that she's a teacher and is acutely aware of the racism
+and hostility that Black children are exposed to from the time they
+enter school had something to do with it.
+I don't remember the name of my other fifth grade teacher
+except that it was a mile long and began with a Z, but she was very
+nice and a very good teacher. She introduced us to art, literature,
+and philosophy. I remember studying the French Revolution in her
+class. She made names like Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday,
+and Robespierre come alive. She talked about philosophers like
+Rousseau who influenced the thinking of the period and about how
+the French Revolution was influenced by the amerikan Revolution.
+She even showed us pictures of the art and architecture of the
+period. She was the first teacher (one of a very few) who taught
+subjects as if they related to each other.
+Before i was in her class, i would never have imagined that
+history was connected to art, that philosophy was connected to
+science, and so on. The usual way that people are taught to think in
+amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no
+relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive frag­
+ments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no log­
+ical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that
+produces people who don't have the ability to think for themselves
+and who are easily manipulated.
+As we grew older, the differences between the Black and white,
+the poor and rich students grew bigger and bigger. Once a new
+teacher told us to make mobiles as homework. Most of us brought
+in cardboard, wood, or paper mobiles. One kid brought in a
+mobile made out of metals-not just one kind of metal, but metals
+
+ASSA1:A
+
+35
+
+ASSATA
+
+of different colors. I was in awe of this kid who had the resources to
+cut all those different, perfectly formed geometric shapes. Calder
+would have taken notice.
+The school was in a largely Jewish, middle-class neigh­
+borhood. There was a little island of Black people in the middle,
+and that was where i lived. It was almost completely segregated
+from the white section. The school was right in the middle. In most
+of the Black families the mother and father both worked, and many
+worked two or three jobs and weren't able to spend a lot of time in
+the school. But some of the white parents were there for every little
+thing from trips to cookie selling. And talk about pushy parents !
+To this day, i believe that some of them did most of their kids'
+homework. Black kids wrote a composition or a book report on
+plain lined paper and handed it in. Some of the white kids pre­
+sented their reports bound in expensive binders, some were typed,
+and each page was covered with plastic. I could just imagine asking
+my mother to type my homework for me or to give me money to
+buy binders and plastic sheets. She would surely have thought i had
+gone crazy. The white kids came to school with all kinds of junk:
+expensive pen and pencil sets, compasses, and one kid even had a
+slide rule, which i doubt he had the faintest idea how to use.
+The older they grew, the more snobbish the white kids became.
+They were always talking about what they had and what their
+parents had bought them. One girl, Marsha, horribly ugly to me,
+was always dressed like some kid in the movies or on TV. She was
+one of the super-snobs in the class. One day she came to school
+with weird-looking mittens on. She said they were made of
+chinchilla and that it was the most expensive fur in the world. I
+raced home to ask my mother. I just knew she had to be lying
+because i had never even heard of chinchilla and everybody i knew
+thought that mink was the most expensive fur on the market. I was
+really shocked when my mother told me she was telling the truth.
+Every year when we came back to school, we would inevitably
+be told to write a composition entitled "My Summer Vacation."
+Usually we stood in front of the room and read our compositions
+aloud. I was always fascinated by some of the places these kids had
+been to during the summer: places like Spain, England, Brazil, and
+Bermuda. Some of them even brought slides and movies of their
+trips. After they finished talking, i wouldn't even want to read my
+compositon about being down South with my grandparents.
+One of the things that had been drilled into my head since
+birth was that we were just as good as white people. "You show
+those white people that you are just as good as they are," i was told.
+
+This meant that i was to get good marks in school, that i was to
+always be neat and clean when i went to school, that i was to speak
+as "properly" as they did, and that i would show them whenever i
+could that Black people (we called ourselves Negroes then) could
+do whatever white people could do and that we could appreciate
+what white people appreciated.
+I was supposed to be a child version of a goodwill ambassador,
+out to prove that Black people were not stupid or dirty or smelly or
+uncultured. I carried out this mission as best i could to show that i
+was as good as they were. I never questioned the things they
+thought were good. White people said classical music was the
+highest form of music; white people said that ballet was the highest
+form of dance; and i accepted those things as true. After all, wasn't i
+as cultured as they were ? And everything that they wanted, i wanted.
+If they wanted poodle jackets, i wanted a poodle jacket. If they
+wanted a Star of David necklace, i wanted a Star of David necklace.
+If they wanted a Revlon doll, i wanted a Revlon doll. If they could
+act snobby, then i could act snobby. I saved my culture, my music,
+my dancing, the richness of Black speech for the times when i was
+with my own people. I remember how those kids would talk about
+gefilte fish and matzos. It would never have occurred to me to talk
+about black-eyed peas and rice or collard greens and ham hocks. I
+would never have given them an opportunity to ridicule me. Any­
+way, half the white people thought that all we ate was grits and
+watermelon. In many ways i was living a double existence.
+I became interested in television in the fifth or sixth grade. Or,
+rather, i should say that that was about the time television started to
+corrode my brain. You name any stupid show that existed back in
+those days and it was probably one of my favorites. "Ozzie and
+Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver," "Donna Reed," "Father Knows
+Best," "Bachelor Father," "Lassie," etc. After a while i wanted to be
+just like those people on television. After all, they were what
+families were supposed to be like.
+Why didn't my mother have freshly baked cookies ready when
+i came home from school? Why didn't we live in a house with a
+backyard and a front yard instead of an ole apartment? I remember
+looking at my mother as she cleaned the house in her old raggedy
+housecoat with her hair in curlers. "How disgusting," i would
+think. Why didn't she clean the house in high heels and shirtwaist
+dresses like they did on television? I began to resent my chores. The
+kids on television never had any work to do. All they did was their
+homework and then they went out to play. They never went to the
+laundromat or did the shopping. They never had to do the dishes or
+
+ASSATA
+
+37
+
+ASSATA
+
+scrub the floor or empty the garbage. They didn't even have to
+make their own beds. And the kids on television got everything they
+wanted. Their parents never said, "I don't have the money, I can't
+afford it." I had very little sympathy for my mother. It never
+occurred to me that she worked all day, went to school at night,
+cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed, raised two children, and, in
+her "spare" time, graded tests and papers and wrote her thesis. I
+was furious with her because she wasn't like Donna Reed.
+And, of course, the commericals took another toll. I wanted
+everything i saw. My mother always bought Brand X. I would be so
+exasperated when we went shopping. I wanted her to buy Hostess
+Twinkies and Silvercup white bread. Instead, she bought whole
+wheat bread and apples. She would never get good cereals like
+Sugar Crunchies and Coco Puffs. She always bought some stuff
+that was supposed to be good for us. I thought she was crazy. If
+Hostess Twinkies were good enough for the kids on TV, then why
+weren't they good enough for me ? But my mother remained un­
+moved. And i remained disgusted. I was a puppet and i didn't even
+know who was pulling the strings.
+One year everybody was wearing buttons on their coats. Some
+had writing on them and others had pictures of movie stars. I went
+somewhere with my mother and my aunt, and they asked me if i
+wanted a button. I picked out one with Elvis Presley on it. All the
+kids at school thought Elvis Presley was cool. I wore that button
+religiously, all winter, and that summer, when i went down South, i
+went to see one of Elvis Presley's movies.
+In Wilmington, at that time, there was only one movie theater
+where Black people were allowed to go. It was called the Bailey
+Theater. Once you bought your ticket, you went up a long staircase
+on the side of the theater to the second balcony, the "colored"
+section. Shame on you if you were nearsighted. The movie was like
+all the rest of Elvis's movies-fQrgettable ! When it was over, i went
+downstairs. All the white kids were leaving with pictures of Elvis
+Presley that they had bought. I started to walk to my grandparents'
+restaurant on Red Cross Street, but then i turned around and
+walked back. If the white kids could have a picture of Elvis, then so
+could i. At least i was gonna try. I knew it would be absolutely no
+use to go to the ticket booth and ask the woman anything. She
+would most assuredly say no. So i walked right on past her, straight
+into the white section of the theater. What a surprise it was ! It was
+j ust like the movies in New York. They had soda machines, a butter
+popcorn machine, and all kinds of candy and potato chips and
+things. Upstairs in the "colored" section, they had some old, stale
+plain popcorn and a few candy bars and that was it.
+
+The moment i walked in, all the action stopped. Everybody's
+eyes were on me. 1 walked over to the counter where they were
+selling the pictures. Before i could open my mouth, the salesgirl
+told me, "You're in the wrong section; just go outside and go up
+the stairs on the side."
+"I want to buy a picture of Elvis Presley," i said.
+"What'd you say, again ?" she drawled.
+"I want to buy a picture of Elvis Presley," i repeated. "They
+don't have any upstairs."
+"Well, 1 don't know," she said. "I'll have to get the manager."
+She said something to the other woman behind the counter and
+then left. By this time a crowd had gathered around me.
+"What's she doing in here?" they kept asking each other.
+"Now, she knows better," somebody was saying. "Look, Ma, a
+colored girl." "Ya get lost, honey?" "What's she want?" "Don't
+they have no pictures in the colored section ? " "What's she need
+with a picture anyway?"
+The crowd was all around me, gawking. It seemed like the
+manager would never come.
+"Can't she read ? Don't she know that we don't allow no
+colored in here?" "I don't know what it's about. Something about a
+picture." "Came walking right in here bold as day."
+Finally the salesgirl came back. A man was with her. All eyes
+were fixed on the manager. He took one look at me and another at
+the crowd forming around me.
+"Give her the picture and get'er out of here," he told the
+salesgirl. Hurriedly, she sold me the picture.
+"All right, folks, it's all over now. Go on about your business."
+1 took my picture and went prancing out into the daylight. 1
+was feeling good. It seemed funny when i thought about it. The
+looks on those crakas' faces, all puffed up like balloons. 1 had a
+good time, laughing all the way to my grandparents' restaurant.
+And of course the minute i got there, i told everybody what hap­
+pened. 1 was just so proud. 1 took my picture and put it on the back
+counter right next to the funeral parlor calendar. The picture
+stayed there a few days until Johnnie from the cab stand across the
+street came and told me that Elvis had said the only thing a Black
+person could do for him was to buy his records and shine his shoes.
+Quietly, i slid the picture into obscurity, then oblivion. (Later i read
+that Elvis had given Spiro Agnew a gold-plated .357 Magnum and
+had volunteered to work for the FBI.)
+Evelyn, my aunt, was the heroine of my childhood. She was
+always taking me places and "exposing me to things," as she called
+it. She took me to museums-i think we visited just about every
+
+ASSATA
+
+39
+
+ASSATA
+
+museum in the city of New York. She turned me into a real art
+lover. Before i was ten, i could recognize a Van Gogh on sight, and i
+knew what cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism were.
+Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Modigliani were my favorite
+artists. I didn't know the name of one Black artist in those days.
+Very few, if any, museums exhibited the work of Black artists, so i
+just assumed that Black people weren't too good at painting. But i
+learned about African art from my mother. From the time i can
+remember, my mother always had African sculpture in the house. It
+was the only kind she had. I always loved those pieces and it really
+annoyed me when i took art history in school and the teacher
+referred to African art as primitive. In fact, if the art was by anyone
+else but a white person, it was called primitive art.
+In addition to museums, Evelyn would take me to see plays
+and movies, and we would experiment with all kinds of restaurants.
+We would go to parks, go bicycle riding, and it was Evelyn who
+gave me my first rowboat lesson. She was very sophisticated and
+knew all kinds of things. She was right up my alley because i was
+forever asking all kinds of questions. I wanted to know everything.
+She would give me a book and say, "Read this," and i would eat up
+that book like it was ice cream.
+It was Evelyn who took me to see my first show at the Apollo.
+We saw Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. I was walking on
+clouds. After that, as soon as i learned to ride the subway by myself,
+i went to the daytime shows. If my mother and my aunt had
+known, they would have had a fit. I guess people wondered what
+this little girl was doing in the Apollo all by herself, but nobody
+ever bothered me. I was always pretty lucky that way.
+Barbara was a little girl who lived next door to us in Queens.
+She was my main friend and foe for quite a while. One day i saw her
+leaving her house wearing a white dress and a little white veil like a
+bride wears. Everything she had on was white, all the way down to
+her shoes. She even had a little white Bible in her hands. I thought
+she was gonna be in a Tom Thumb wedding like they have down
+South. So i went up to her and asked her who she was marrying.
+She said she was making her first communion, that she was Catho­
+lic.
+Well, i became an instant convert. I wanted to wear a white
+dress and dress up like a bride, too. And Catholics even got out
+early from school on Wednesdays. I raced home to tell my mother.
+My mother was very permissive where religion was concerned. She
+gave us carte blanche to be Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, or
+whatever. So i started going to mass and to catechism classes on
+Wednesday.
+
+The Catholic Church was like no other church i had ever been
+to. Down South i always went to church. But those services were
+rich with music and emotion. I would sit caught up in the music
+and watch those people who had "got happy" or "got the spirit"
+jumping around all over the place. I was never holy-holy, but i had
+liked going to church. In the Black churches that i had been in, the
+air was charged. The music rocked and the preacher preached and
+sang at the same time. People felt free to do what they needed to do.
+H they felt like dancing, they danced; if they felt like praying, they
+prayed; if they felt like screaming, they screamed; and if they felt
+like crying, they cried. The church was there to give them strength
+and to get them through the long week ahead of them. Where we
+lived in Queens, there was no Black church.
+The Catholic Church was different. It was silent and cold. The
+music was terrible and you couldn't understand nine-tenths of the
+service. But what fascinated me was the spookiness of it. They had
+so much weird stuff attached to their religion. When you walked in
+the door, you had to cross yourself with holy water; then, before
+you could sit down, you had to genuflect. And throughout the
+mass, you were forever up and down, sitting, standing, and kneel­
+ing. And there was so much stuff to learn. The stations of the cross,
+rosary beads, lighting candles, going to confession. It was all so
+spooky i just knew that this had to be the real god. The nuns really
+tripped me out. They walked around with rings on their fingers
+saying they were married to God. That was really weird. And they
+could never have children or "do it," and people said they had bald
+heads under their habits. I was simply overwhelmed.
+The catechism class was nothing like Sunday school. They
+never told good stories about Jesus and we never sang "Yes, Jesus
+Loves Me. " In catechism class, we learned all about the saints-it
+seemed like they had a million of them. And then there was the
+Virgin Mary. They made a big deal out of her. They even had us
+praying to her. I would do it, but that story was always kind of hard
+for me to swallow. Nothing about the Catholics was simple; they
+even had different kinds of hell. They had a special one for babies
+and then they had one in between and then they had the sho nuff,
+sho nuff hell.
+They even had two kinds of sin. I can still hear that nun, as if it
+were yesterday. Now, a venial sin is a sin that's not so bad; it's a
+white sin. But a mortal sin is terrible; it is a black sin.
+The night before i was to make my first communion, i had to
+run to the church with my baptismal certificate. They needed it to
+prove i had been baptized. My mother had had a hell of a time
+finding it. I was tickled to be going because they told me to bring it
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+to the convent where the nuns lived. 1 had been dying to see what it
+looked like inside. It was just as cold and lifeless as the church.
+When i gave the nun my baptismal certificate, she looked at it and
+almost jumped out of her chair. "Oh, no, this won't do," she said.
+"This is not a Catholic baptismal certificate. You weren't really
+baptized."
+"What?" i said. "I was too baptized. "
+"No, you weren't," she said. "It's not a Catholic baptism, s o it
+doesn't count. You'll have to be baptized tonight or you can't make
+your first communion tomorrow."
+1 was not ready for that one. 1 caught an instant attitude. She
+was talking about my godparents like they were dirt under her feet.
+They called my mother and told her she had to come to the church.
+Then they got these total strangers from somewhere and told me
+they were supposed to be my godparents and they baptized me. 1
+never saw those people again, and if you ask me their names i
+couldn't tell you. 1 had had a godmother all my life and here they
+were telling me she wasn't my godmother because she wasn't
+Catholic. They really made me mad that day, but i didn't say too
+much about it. 1 really wanted to make my first communion. 1 did
+and, later, my confirmation, but i never looked at them the same.
+The sixth grade passed along rather uneventfully. There was
+another Black in my class, Gail. We became friendly, but my
+relationships with the white kids deteriorated even more. They
+made it pretty evident that they didn't care too much for me, and i
+made it clear right back that i didn't care for them. The thing i
+disliked most about them was their assumptions about me. For one
+thing, they automatically assumed that i was stupid, and they
+would really act surprised when i showed i had some brains. One of
+the biggest fights i had was when this kid in my class couldn't find
+some pen that his father had given him and accused me of stealing
+it. 1 waited for him outside the classroom and as soon as he came
+out the door, i jumped on him like a crazy person. Some teachers
+broke us up. "I'm surprised at you," they kept saying. "I never
+thought you'd act that way." I was usually very quiet and well
+behaved. They acted like i had jumped on that boy for nothing, and
+they couldn't understand why i was so angry. As a matter of fact,
+even i didn't understand. Then.
+Outside of school was a whole 'nother matter. When i wasn't
+doing homework or chores, i would go "exploring." My bicycle
+was one of the great loves of my life. I would jump on it and ride all
+over Queens. Sometimes on Saturdays or Sundays i would ride all
+day long, leaving early in the morning and returning as late as i was
+
+allowed to. And if i wasn't on my bicycle, i was somewhere playing
+with my friends. We played everything from house to handball. I
+played with the boys more than with the girls because the boys had
+better games. I loved punch ball and handball, anything that in­
+volved running. The playground was right across the street from my
+house and i took full advantage of everything that was there. I
+played hopscotch, marbles, and cowboys and Indians. I always
+wanted to be an Indian and would hide over or under something
+and leap out shrieking at the top of my lungs. I guess i was unusual
+in that respect, because most of the kids wanted to be cowboys.
+I was always rough and clumsy and i played everything as if my
+life depended on it. Some of the girls didn't like to play with me
+because they said i was too rough. And i was always excluded from
+the rope-jumping sessions. I was too clumsy to jump double-Dutch
+and they didn't even like me to turn because they said i was
+"uneven-handed."
+But i always had one best friend and she was always a girl. I
+had other friends to play with and hang out with, but i always had
+one special friend that i could really talk to. We would go to the
+candy store and the movies and places like that and we would sit
+and talk for hours about j ust anything. By the time i reached the
+sixth grade, i began to idolize and imitate the big kids who went to
+junior high school. I couldn't wait to grow up. The grownup world
+was so exciting, and when you were grown up you could do
+anything you wanted to. Besides, i was beginning to feel different. I
+was beginning to be interested in boys.
+
+ASSATA
+43
+
+ASSATA
+
+44
+
+CRACKERJACKS
+
+I coulda told you,
+in the old days,
+in the park,
+or skating down some hill
+what it was all about.
+I coulda sat next to you
+on some stairway
+and gave you half my bubblegum,
+and, in between the bubbles
+and the giggles,
+I coulda told you.
+But we are grown up now.
+And it is all so complicated
+when you dig somebody.
+Now, when i open up my crackerjacks,
+I find no heart-shaped ring.
+Only a puzzle
+that i don't wanna solve.
+
+Chapter 3
+
+t seemed like the middle of the night. Some­
+one was calling me. Waking me up. What did they
+want? Suddenly i was aware of all kinds of activity.
+Police, the crackling of walkie-talkies. The place was
+buzzing.
+"Here, put this on," one of them said, handing
+me a bathrobe.
+"What's going on ?" i asked.
+"You're being moved."
+"Where am i being moved to ?"
+"You'll find out when you get there."
+A wheelchair was waiting. I figured they were
+taking me to jail. There was a caravan of police cars
+outside the hospital. It looked like i was gonna be in a
+parade again.
+The ride was pleasant. Just looking at houses and
+trees and people passing by in cars was good. We
+arrived at the prison at sunrise, in the middle of no­
+where. It was an ugly, two-story brick building. They
+pushed me up the stairs to the second floor.
+I was put in a cell with two doors. A door of bars
+was on the inside, and directly outside of that was a
+heavy metal door with a tiny peephole that i could
+barely see through. The cell contained a cot with a
+rough green blanket on it and a dirty white wooden
+bench with a hundred names scratched on it. Adjacent
+to the cell was the bathroom, with a sink, a toilet, and
+a shower. Hanging above the sink was the bottom of a
+pot or pan. It was supposed to serve as a mirror, but i
+could barely see myself in it. There was one window
+covered by three thick metal screens facing a parking
+lot, a field, and, in the distance, a wooded area.
+I walked around the cell, to the bath, to the
+
+45
+
+ASSATA
+
+window, to the door. Back and forth until i had tired myself out. I
+was still pretty weak. Then i lay down on the cot and wondered
+what this place was going to be like. Here i was, my first day in
+pnson.
+In about an hour, a guard unlocked the outside door and
+asked me if i wanted breakfast. I said, "Yes," and in a few minutes
+she came back with eggs and bread in a plastic bowl and a metal
+cup containing something that was supposed to be coffee.
+The eggs didn't taste too bad. "Maybe prison food isn't as bad
+as they say it is," i remember thinking.
+I heard voices and it was clear they weren't police voices. Then
+the radio came on. Black music. It sounded so good. I looked
+through the peephole and saw faces, weird and distorted because of
+the concave glass, but Black faces to match the Black voices i had
+heard.
+"How y'all doin' ?" i asked.
+No response. Then i realized how thick the metal door was, so
+i shouted this time: "How y'all doin' ?" A chorus of muffled "Fine" s
+came back. I was feeling good. Real people were just on the other
+side of the wall.
+The guard opened the metal door and handed me some uni­
+forms, maid's uniforms-royal blue, white buttons, collars, and
+cuffs.
+I kept trying them on until two of them fit. Then she gave me a
+huge cotton slip that looked like a tent dress and a nightgown that
+looked exactly like the slip.
+"You are entitled to a clean uniform once a week."
+"Once a week?" i nearly screeched. They had to be crazy.
+Behind the guard, through the open door, i could see some of the
+women standing around. They were all, it seemed, Black. They
+smiled and waved at me. It was so good to see them, it was like a
+piece of home.
+"When are you going to unlock me and let me go out there ?" i
+asked, motioning to the other women. The guard looked surprised.
+"I don't know. You'll have to ask the warden."
+"Well, when can i see the warden ?" i pushed.
+"I don't know."
+"Well, why am i being locked in here? Why can't i go out there
+with the other women ?"
+"I don't know."
+"Then why can't you let me out?"
+"We were told you were to remain in your room."
+"Well, how long am i supposed to stay in here locked up like
+this?"
+"
+
+"I don't know."
+1 saw it was useless. "Would you please tell the warden or the
+sheriff that i would like to see him ?" i requested.
+The guard locked the door and was gone.
+The metal door was unlocked again. An ugly, shriveled white
+woman stood in front of the bars. "My name is Mrs. Butterworth
+and 1 am the warden of the women's section of the workhouse."
+She reminded me of a dilapidated horse. "Well, JoAnne, is there
+something 1 can do for you?"
+1 didn't like her looks or her tone of voice, but i decided to
+ignore that for the moment and get to the business at hand.
+"When can i be unlocked from this cell and go outside in the
+big room with the other women ?"
+"Well, 1 don't know, JoAnne. Why do you want to go out
+there?"
+"Well, i don't want to stay in here all day, locked up by
+myself."
+"Why, JoAnne, don't you like your room? It's a very nice room.
+We had it painted just for you."
+"That's not the point," i said. "I would like to know when i
+will be able to be with the other women."
+"Well, JoAnne, 1 don't know when you'll be able to come out.
+You see, we have to keep you in here for your own safety because
+there are threats on your life. You know, JoAnne," she said, lower­
+ing her voice like she was speaking confidentially, "cop killers are
+not very popular in correctional institutions."
+"Have any of the women here made threats against me?"
+"Well, 1 don't know, but I'm sure they have."
+"I'll bet," i said to myself. "Nobody has threatened my life.
+They just don't want to let me outta here."
+"Well, JoAnne, the important thing is for you to behave and to
+cooperate with us so that we'll be able to send a good report to the
+judge. It's important for our girls to behave like ladies."
+This woman was making me sick. Did she think i was fool
+enough to believe that either she or the judge was gonna help me in
+any way ? But it was the superior-sounding tinge to her voice that
+really ticked me off.
+"Butterworth, is it?" i asked. "What's your first name ?"
+"Why, 1 never tell my girls my first name."
+"I'm not one of your girls. I'm a grown woman. Why don't you
+tell people your first name ? Are you ashamed of it?"
+"No, JoAnne, I'm not ashamed of my name. It's a matter of
+respect. 1 am the warden here. My girls call me Mrs. Butterworth
+and 1 call them by their first names."
+
+ASSATA
+
+47
+
+ASSATA
+
+"Well, you haven't done anything for me to respect you for. I
+give people respect only when they earn it. Since you won't tell me
+your first name, then i want you to call me by my last name. You
+can either call me Ms. Shakur or Ms. Chesimard. "
+"I'm not going to call you by your last name. I'm going to
+continue calling you JoAnne."
+"Well, that's okay by me, if you can stand me calling you Miss
+Bitch whenever i see you. I don't give anybody respect when they
+don't respect me."
+"Lock the door," she told the guard and walked away.
+Days passed. Evelyn called the sheriff, the warden (there were
+two wardens in that jail: Butterworth and a man named Cahill.
+Cahill had all the power, though. Butterworth was only a fig­
+urehead) and everybody else. Nothing more could be done outside
+of going to kourt.
+I had little or no feeling in my right arm. I knew i needed
+physical therapy if i was ever to use it again. I had learned to write
+with my left hand, but that was no substitute. I needed a more
+specific diagnosis of exactly what had been damaged before i would
+know whether or not i would ever use it again, even with physical
+therapy.
+Isolation was driving me up the walls. I needed materials to
+write and to draw, paint, or sketch. All my requests went unheeded.
+I was permitted nothing, including peanut oil and a small ball to
+aid movement in my arm.
+When the jail doctor examined me i asked him about my arm.
+"Why, we doctors aren't gods, you know. There's nothing
+anyone can do when someone is paralyzed."
+"But they said i might get better," I protested. "Oh, yes, and
+the physical therapist at Roosevelt Hospital said that some peanut
+oil might help."
+"Peanut oil ?" he asked, laughing. "That's a good one. I can't
+write a prescription for that now, can I ? My advice to you is to
+forget about all of that stuff. You don't need any of it. Sometimes in
+life we just have to accept things that are unpleasant. You still have
+one good arm."
+I kept talking but i could see i was wasting my time. He had no
+intention of even trying to help me. "Well, would you at least
+prescribe some vitamin B?"
+"All right, but you really don't need it."
+Every time they called me to see the doctor after that, i went
+reluctantly. He would take my arm out of the sling and move it
+back and forth about two inches. "Oh, yes, you're getting better,"
+he would say. I always asked about physical therapy and he always
+said there was nothing he could do.
+
+Finally, Evelyn went to court. Some of the items we petitioned
+for were ridiculous. In addition to physical therapy and nerve tests,
+we asked for peanut oil, a rubber ball, a rubber grip, books, and
+stuff to draw or paint with. The kourt finally granted a physical
+therapist if we would find one and pay the bill, but i never got one.
+It seems that no physical therapist in Middlesex County was will­
+ing to come to the prison to treat me, and only a physical therapist
+from Middlesex County was permitted.
+But i did get the peanut oil and the grip. And in a short time i
+had a whole physical therapy program worked out.
+I was receiving a lot of mail from all over the country. Most of
+it came from people i didn't know, mostly militant Black people,
+either in the streets or in prison. I got some hate mail, though, and
+some letters from religious people who were trying to save my soul.
+I wasn't able to answer all of those letters because the prison
+permitted us to write only two letters a week, subject to inspection
+and censorship by the prison authorities. It was hard for me to
+write anyway. I was also very paranoid about letters. I could not
+bear the thought of the police, FBI, guards, whoever, reading my
+letters and getting daily insight on how i was feeling and thinking.
+But i would like to offer my sincerest apology to those who were
+kind enough to write to me over the years and who received no
+answer.
+I spent my first month at the middlesex county workhouse
+writing. Evelyn had brought some newspaper clippings and it was
+obvious the press was trying to railroad me, to make me seem like a
+monster. According to them i was a common criminal, just going
+around shooting down cops for the hell of it. I had to make a
+statement. I had to talk to my people and let them know what i was
+about, where i was really coming from. The statement seemed to
+take forever to write. I wanted to make a tape of it and enlisted
+Evelyn's help. As my lawyer, she was dead set against it and advised
+me not to make the tape. But as a Black woman living in amerika,
+Evelyn understood why it was important and necessary. When the
+prosecutor found out about the tape he tried to get her thrown off
+the case. She was ordered by the court never to bring a tape
+recorder again when she visited me.
+I made the tape of "To My People" on July 4, 1 973, and it was
+broadcast on many radio stations. Here is what I said:
+
+Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you
+and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My
+name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a
+revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have
+
+ASSATA
+49
+
+ASSATA
+50
+
+declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our
+men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.
+I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the
+politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless,
+heartless robots who protect them and their property.
+I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the
+wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other
+Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.
+I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have
+been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a
+woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in
+which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of
+planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post
+offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and
+newspapers . They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards
+for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and
+shoot to kill.
+I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a
+part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their news­
+papers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious,
+brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun
+molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and
+ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can
+think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the
+criminals.
+It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are.
+Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third
+World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique,
+Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law
+enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals.
+The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of
+the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the
+Watergate crimes.
+They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hun­
+dred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound
+thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The
+rulers of this country have always considered their property more
+important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not
+responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages
+murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder
+and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State-or
+Southern State, either.
+They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther
+King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson,
+Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder,
+by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old
+Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us mur-
+
+derers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and
+oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World peo­
+ple. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen per­
+cent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of
+murder victims are Black.For every pig that is killed in the so-called
+line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the
+police.
+Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do
+their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in
+fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin
+and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of
+Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is
+murder.But they have got the gall to call us murderers.
+They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squire (who is
+accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was
+kidnapped on April 2, 1969, from our Black community and held
+on one million dollars' ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspir­
+acy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the
+others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two
+hours to deliberate. Brother Squire was innocent. Yet he was kid­
+napped from his community and family. Over two years of his life
+was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the
+thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika's con­
+centration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this
+country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither
+bail nor lawyers.
+They call us thieves and bandits.They say we steal. But it was
+not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of
+Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture,
+of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives.They call us
+thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year
+through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer
+fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet
+every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being
+robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are
+being held up.And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a
+gun into our ribs.
+They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of
+Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers.
+They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia,
+and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the
+people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this
+country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal,
+vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the mur­
+derers. And they should be treated as such.These maniacs are not fit
+to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika.
+Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.
+
+ASSATA
+JI
+
+ASSATP
+
+52
+
+Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions,
+although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us
+and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how
+to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.
+I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for
+being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The
+turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched,
+harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much
+of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is
+sleeping will stumble many times.
+Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured,
+the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the
+movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution.
+The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are
+responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika.
+That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop
+from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our
+oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto
+streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth,
+and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless
+Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers
+and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively,
+make up the BLA.
+There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and
+child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the
+Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to
+struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must
+defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our
+liberation by any means necessary.
+It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
+It is our duty to win.
+We must love each other and support each other.
+We have nothing to lose but our chains:
+In the spirit of:
+Ronald Carter
+William Christmas
+Mark Clark
+Mark Essex
+Frank "Heavy" Fields
+Woodie Changa Olugbala Green
+Fred Hampton
+Lil' Bobby Hutton
+George Jackson
+Jonathan Jackson
+
+James McClain
+Harold Russell
+Zayd Malik Shakur
+Anthony Kumu Olugbala White
+We must fight on.
+
+The workhouse had a whole heap of rules, most of them
+stupid. No newspapers or magazines were permitted. When i asked
+why we couldn't read newspapers, they told me that newspapers
+were "inflammatory." Obviously, if a person read in the paper that
+his or her sister had been raped, he would wait until the rapist
+came to jail and then do him bodily harm.
+"But," i protested, "the other inmates watch television and
+listen to the radio (i wasn't allowed either). They could receive the
+same information that way or from a visit from home."
+"In that case," the warden told me, "we don't let you read
+newspapers because they are a fire hazard."
+One of the saddest rules prohibited children from visiting their
+mothers in jail. I could see the children waiting outside, looking up
+at that ugly old building with sad, frustrated faces. Their mothers
+would run to the only window that faced the parking lot just to get
+a glimpse of their children. Yelling out of the window was a no-no,
+but once in a while somebody would get carried away. Sometimes
+their frantic screams went unheard.
+Gradually, i began to know the women. They were all very
+kind to me and treated me like a sister. They laughed like hell when
+i told them that i was supposedly being protected from them. Those
+first days, before i had really learned to maneuver with one hand,
+they did whatever they could to make things easier for me. They
+volunteered to iron my uniforms and sneak them into the laundry
+to be washed more than once a week. When they told me their
+charges and the time they were doing, i couldn't believe it. Quite a
+few of them were doing time for the numbers, either six months or
+a year. In New York, doing time for number running was prac­
+tically unheard of, and it certainly didn't get six months or a year.
+Everybody in the world knows that the numbers business keeps the
+cops fat. These women hadn't hurt anybody or stolen anything, yet
+they were sitting in jail, probably busted by the same cops that they
+paid off. Their only crime was competing with the state lottery.
+Most of them had already been sentenced. If the sentence was less
+than a year, time was served in the county jail rather than in the
+state penitentiary.
+If i had expected to find so-called hardened criminals or big-
+
+ASSATA
+
+53
+
+ASSATA
+54
+
+time female gangsters or gun molls in the workhouse, i would have
+been sadly disappointed. The rest of the women who weren't doing
+time for the numbers were in for some form of petty theft, like
+shoplifting or passing bad checks. Most of those sisters were on
+welfare and all of them had been barely able to make ends meet.
+The courts had shown them no mercy. They brought in this sister
+shortly after i arrived who was eight months pregnant and had been
+sentenced to a month for shoplifting something that cost less than
+twenty dollars.
+Later a middle-aged sister began coming to the workhouse on
+weekends. She worked during the week and served her six-month
+sentence for drunken driving on weekends. Knowing that white
+women with the same charges would never have received such a
+sentence, i thought it was harsh. But i didn't realize how harsh until
+she told me that she had been arrested for drunken driving in the
+driveway of her own house. She hadn't even been on a public road.
+She also told me that the cops had arrested her because they didn't
+like the way she talked to them.
+In that jail it was nothing to see a woman brought in all beat
+up. In some cases, the only charge was "resisting arrest." A Puerto
+Rican sister was brought in one night. She had been so badly beaten
+by the police that the matron on duty didn't want to admit her. "I
+don't want her dying on my shift," she kept saying. It was days
+before this sister was able to get out of bed.
+In spite of it all, those sisters kept the place jumping. They told
+all kinds of funny stories about their lives, things they had seen and
+experienced. Some had a natural knack for comedy. What amazed
+me was the way they told the saddest stories in the world and made
+everybody laugh about them.
+Girl, that nigga was always in my pocketbook stealing my
+money. And all he did with it was blow it at the racetracks. Girl,
+that man spent so much money on the racetracks, he made me
+wish i was a horse. One day i fixed his ass, though. I was sick and
+tired of his mess. Betcha he won't go in nobody's pocketbook no
+time soon. I put a mousetrap in that sucker. Girl, you should have
+heard that nigga howl.
+My husband and me, we used to fight like cats and dogs. And
+he was jealous as the day is long. Chile, we went to the bar this
+night and the nigga got all high, and started thinkin ' i was messing
+around with some dude at the bar. As soon as we got outside, boy,
+
+he jumped on me like a gorilla jumps on a banana. Don't you ASSATA
+know that man hit me so hard he knocked my teeth straight out of
+55
+my mouth. "Now, hold on a minute!" i told that fool. "We can
+fight later. I ain't got no 'nother four hundred dollars to spend on
+no false teeth. " Chile, we was drunk as skunks, down on our knees
+for 'bout an hour looking for those teeth. And when that fool
+found them, he said the teeth jumped up and tried to bite him.
+Lord, chile, that man is a fool.
+1 could listen to these stories only when the outside door was
+open. During the day they had a female "sheriff's officer" posted
+outside my cell. When she was there, the door usually stayed open.
+The whole time i was at that jail i saw very few white women.
+The few who did come were there only a few hours or a day or so
+before they were bailed out. There was one white woman who was
+busted on the turnpike with fifty pounds of reefer. Everyone waited
+to see what her bail would be. Then we found out she had been
+released on her own recognizance (that is, without bond). To be
+released on recognizance in the state of new jersey, one of the
+requirements is jersey residence. The woman lived in Vermont. But
+nobody was really shocked. She was white.
+1 was going crazy in that little cell. The only time they let me
+out was for visits and to see the so-called doctor. 1 have always been
+an active and restless person, and being locked up in that little cage
+all day drove me wild. 1 needed to stretch my legs. 1 started to run
+around the cell. 1 would run in this tiny circle until i was exhausted.
+Two or three days after i started, the warden, Miss Bitch, accom­
+panied by some male guards, visited me.
+"We hear that you are running around your cell," she said.
+"You will have to stop this activity at once."
+"What? Why ?"
+"Because you are disturbing the people downstairs."
+"What people ?"
+"There is an office underneath you and you are disturbing the
+workers."
+"Are you crazy ? They'll just have to be disturbed. 1 don't run
+for that long anyhow. If you let me go out into the yard to exercise
+with the other women, i'll stop running around my cell."
+"I order you to stop running around your room."
+"I don't remember joining your army," i said. "When i join
+your army, then you can order me around."
+She left in a huff and i kept on running. That was the end of
+
+ASSATA
+
+that. I have to thank her, though. If she hadn't come and harassed
+me, i would have probably given up running around that tiny space
+in a few days.
+The food in the workhouse was horrible. Actually, it was
+disgusting. The food there is worse than the food in any jail that i
+have been in since, and that is quite an accomplishment. I would sit
+and wait for lunch or dinner, hungry as hell, and they would bring
+me some greenish-brown iridescent chunks floating around in a
+watery liquid (liver stew, they called it) or some lamb fat floating
+around in some water which was supposed to be lamb stew. And
+that nasty-looking, foul-smelling stuff tasted much worse than it
+looked. The place was infested with flies and so was the food. The
+only thing edible was eggs, when they had them, and mashed
+potatoes. I lived off the nuts and candy i bought from the commiss­
+ary and the fruit my family brought on visits.
+Every single day for one whole week they brought us this nasty
+stuff that was supposed to be ravioli. Well, that was the last straw.
+We all decided to go on a food strike. I wrote a petition which
+everybody signed and we sent it down to the warden's office. Later,
+the warden agreed to discuss making the food more edible, but he
+refused to talk to me. He said the fact that i had referred to the food
+as "slop" showed i was unreasonable. The food was better for a few
+days, and then it reverted to the same old nasty slop.
+The woman sheriff's officer who guarded me had to be the
+oldest "dumb" blonde alive. She played the part to a bust. She was
+nosy and was the world's biggest gossip. Every time she saw me she
+smiled and pretended to be oh so friendly. One day some workmen
+were drilling a big hole in the wall to install new electrical circuits.
+Of course, as soon as she came in, the nosy sheriff's officer began
+her questions.
+"What are they building?"
+I said, "Haven't you heard? Well, you know, they passed a
+special law and they're going to execute me. They're building the
+gas chamber now."
+"Well !" she said indignantly. "Well ! Nobody told me about
+it." And she rushed off to find out why no one had informed her.
+The lights were turned off every night at ten. I was lucky
+because there was a night switch that i controlled in the bathroom
+adjacent to my cell. I would move the cot so that i was in as much
+light as possible and i would read way into the night. When i tired
+of reading, i'd turn off the light and look out the window. Outside,
+police patrolled the area. A lot of times there were two police on
+foot who seemed to be standing around near the parking lot. They
+
+carried rifles and shotguns. One night, in my usual condition of
+boredom, while standing at the window and feeling mischievous, i
+cried out a birdlike sound in the shrillest voice i could muster:
+"Eeeeenk, eeeenk, eeeeenk, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenk." The pigs
+started looking around like crazy. They jerked this way and that
+way as if they thought someone was behind them. Again i cried,
+"Eeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeewa, eeeeeeeeeeeewa." This time
+they really jumped around. You would have thought it was World
+War II and the Japanese were two feet away. I waited awhile. When
+they calmed down, in a voice even shriller than before, i cried,
+"Naaaaaaeeeeee, naaaaeeeeeee, naaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeee. " They
+pointed their guns and actually walked backward, prepared to fire
+at anything moving. Then, quite by accident, my metal cup fell to
+the floor. Well, in a second they were down on the ground, crawl­
+ing, holding their rifles. When i saw these fools crawling around on
+the ground like that, i just couldn't take it anymore. I laughed until
+i was sick. Great, big, bad police, crawling around scared of their
+own shadows. Every once in a while i tried it again with different
+police and usually the results were similar, but it was never as good
+as that first night.
+Because i had a broken clavicle, i had to wear a figure-eight
+brace around my shoulders. It was made of foam and cotton with a
+tiny belt buckle fastener in the back, about a half-inch wide. One
+morning, as i was eating, the guard came in my cell and took it.
+"You can't have this."
+"Why ?"
+"Because it contains metal," she replied. "You can't have
+anything with metal on it. " Now, there i was, sitting on a metal cot,
+drinking out of a <metal cup, eating out of a metal bowl, and this
+policewoman was standing in my face telling me i couldn't have my
+brace because of this tiny metal buckle. I raised all the hell i could,
+but i saw that she was, like she said, like they all say, "only
+following orders."
+"If the prison doctor says you need it, you can have it back."
+As soon as Dr. Miller came into the workhouse, i asked to see
+him. Without the brace, my shoulder felt weak and fragile. I could
+barely hold myself up straight.
+"Don't worry about that old brace," Herr doctor told me.
+"You don't need that thing anyway."
+It was all i could do not to kick him in his groin. Luckily, later
+that week, the bone specialist came out from the hospital to see me.
+He was a very good doctor and a very kind man. He told the
+warden in no uncertain terms that i needed my brace and without it
+
+ASSATA
+
+57
+
+ASSATA
+
+i could be disfigured. He gave me a lot of encouragement for my
+hand so that i could regain full use of it. Finally, they returned the
+brace.
+It was about that time that the miracles started. I was sure now
+that my hand was coming back to life. I was beginning to be able to
+tell it to do things and it would actually respond. Each little bit of
+progress was a miracle. Being able to touch my pinky with my
+thumb, to pick up a cup, to hold a pencil, to pinch myself were feats
+that took days of practice and exercise to accomplish. And then the
+day came when i knew i was almost there. After months of trying, i
+could finally snap my fingers. Whenever anyone came to see me, i
+would show them my new talents. I felt like a little kid saying,
+"Look, Mommy, see what i can do."
+Finally a joint conference was arranged between Sundiata and
+me with Evelyn present. It took place at the workhouse. Sundiata
+was brought from the new brunswick jail. I've never been happier
+to see anyone in my life. It was difficult to talk because the guards
+were practically sitting in our laps. I can't whisper for nothing and
+Evelyn kept telling me to lower my voice. We talked about the case
+and decided that it was politically correct to be tried together. Just
+seeing Sundiata cooled me right out. I was feeling bad and i was
+real self-conscious about how i looked. I had broken out in a
+horrible rash from the prison soap and i looked like a lopsided
+scarecrow with bumps. There is something about Sundiata that
+exudes calm. From every part of his being you can sense the
+presence of revolutionary spirit and fervor. And his love for Black
+people is so intense that you can almost touch it and hold it in your
+hand. There's nothing put on about him. He is a real folksy kind of
+person. Every time i see him he looks like he belongs on a porch
+somewhere down South, breathing in the summer air and bouncing
+babies off his knee. The truth of the matter is that Sundiata is
+country. He would deny it to the bitter end, but he is sho nuff
+country. And when he laughs that giggle laugh of his, it's like a trip
+to Texas in the backwoods. When the conference ended, i was a
+different person. I felt much stronger and i didn't feel alone.
+I don't know when, but somewhere along the way i started to
+collect the metal cups we were given to drink from. At first i think it
+was just my slow way of drinking that caused the cups to accumu­
+late. I was none too popular with the guards, especially the men.
+Most of them hadn't said boo to me and vice versa, but they hated
+my guts. To them, i was a cop killer and they were cops. Something
+told me to be real careful. They had given me a little table to eat
+and write on, and at night, before i went to sleep, i pushed the table
+
+up next to the bars and stacked the cups precariously on top of it.
+The bars opened into the cell, and the slightest movement would
+send the whole stack of cups clanging to the floor. I would push the
+wooden bench behind the table. In that way, anyone who tried to
+come in would have to apply some real pressure. I went through
+this routine every night, feeling slightly foolish but compelled.
+One night, in the middle of the night, the cups came crashing
+down. I immediately awoke to find four or five male guards stand­
+ing in the doorway of my cell.
+I screamed, "What do you want? What are you doing in my
+cell ?" loud enough for someone to hear me. The guards stood in
+the doorway like they didn't know what to do. Finally one of them
+locked the door and said, "We heard a noise and we came to
+investigate. We were just checking it out." They weren't even sup­
+posed to be in the women's section. The female guard on duty that
+night, the slimiest one in the prison, was nowhere in sight. After
+that, no matter what jail i was in, i always found some way to
+barricade my cell. In prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a
+prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell . . No matter how
+suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled "sui­
+cides." They are usually Black inmates, considered to be a "threat
+to the orderly running of the prison." They are usually among the
+most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison.
+When Eva came to the workhouse it was something of an
+event. Usually she occupied the cell i was in. (The rest of the women
+were housed in two open dormitories.) The guards didn't know
+what to do with her. She had been in that jail many times before
+and she was known as a hell raiser. Everybody said she was crazy.
+My first encounter with Eva was when she came over to the
+bars and sat down outside my cell and told me she could astro­
+travel. She called it something like astro-space projection.
+"I can go anywhere I want to, whenever I want to," she told
+me. "I've just come from Jupiter."
+"How was it?" i asked her.
+"Oh, it was fine. They had these cute little people. They were
+purple with crocodile skin and blue hair. You can go anywhere you
+want to," she told me. "You just have to project yourself."
+"Can you show me how to project myself the hell out of here?"
+"Oh, that's easy," she said, "I do that all the time. As a matter
+of fact, I'm not here now."
+"No," i said, "that's not good enough. I want to project my
+mind and my body out of here."
+"You'll be in j ail wherever you go," Eva said.
+
+ASSATA
+
+59
+
+ASSATA
+
+60
+
+"You have a point there," i told her, 'but i'd rather be in a
+minimum security prison or on the streets than in the maximum
+security prison in here. The only difference between here and the
+streets is that one is maximum security and the other is minimum
+security. The police patrol our communities just like the guards
+patrol here. I don't have the faintest idea how it feels to be free."
+Eva told me that she knew how i felt. She had to know. Any
+Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have
+got to come to the conclusion that they don't know what it feels
+like to be free. We aren't free politically, economically, or socially.
+We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a
+Black person in amerika isn't even free to walk down the street.
+Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night,
+and you know what happens.
+Eva and i got on famously. A lot of times i didn't understand
+what in the world she was talking about. But at times she made so
+much sense i wondered if it was really the world that was crazy. She
+taught me a lot about prison, and she was forever telling some
+funny story about her life.
+Eva was a huge sister; she weighed about 300 pounds. She had
+very dark skin and her hair was cut short next to her scalp. People
+who have accepted white, European standards of beauty would find
+her unattractive. But to me there was something beautiful about her
+and i loved to look at her. She is one of the few people that i have
+met in life who have the courage to be almost totally honest.
+Altogether, Eva had spent about ten years in the clinton cor­
+rectional facility for women in new jersey. She had been there in the
+old days when the women worked out on the farm. She told me
+how the women were treated, that state troopers would be called in
+for the slightest disturbance. She was there during a riot at clinton
+and had seen state troopers beat the women mercilessly; once they
+had beaten a pregnant woman so badly she lost her baby.
+Around this time i started taking my little walks. Staying
+cooped up in that cage all day was driving me up the wall. So when
+the guards brought my food, i would walk past them into what was
+called the day room, where the women ate and watched TV. I would
+walk first to one dorm, then to the other, and then return to my
+cell. There was no place i could run to since there were two or three
+locked doors between me and the outside. Most of the guards
+would nag me to come back into my cell and, after a short time, i
+would. But none of them got too crazy about it until one day a
+guard yelled at me, "Get back here ! Did you hear me? Get back
+here !"
+
+If there's one thing i can't stand it's being ordered around, and
+if there's another thing that makes me go wild it's for a white
+person to talk to me in that tone of voice. "You make me come
+here," i told her. "You so big and bad, i want to see you make me
+come back in there." She made a move like she was going to grab
+me. "You put your hands on me and it's gonna be you and me. You
+lay a hand on me and i'm gonna splatter your brains all over these
+walls." It's a good thing she didn't try me, though, because she
+outweighed me by at least fifty pounds and i was still pretty much
+the one-armed bandit. But i would have given her a hell of a fight. I
+was mad and frustrated and i had already stored up about two or
+three months of anger. Anyway, i finally went back into the cell,
+when i was ready. But her attitude made me defiant. Whenever she
+opened my cell for anything, i would push past her and walk
+around for a minute. She would stand in the doorway like she was a
+door or something and i would rear back and butt her out of the
+way. She was as big as a house, but she didn't have one bit of
+strength. Finally, she called the male guards. I was in one of the
+dorms talking to the women, wondering why she wasn't bothering
+me, when about ten male guards came into the room.
+"Who is JoAnne Chesimard?" the head guard asked. Nobody
+said anything. "Which one of you is JoAnne Chesimard?" They
+looked like they were ready to leap on somebody. Again no one
+responded. "All right, I'm gonna ask you again, which one of you is
+JoAnne Chesimard?"
+"I'm JoAnne Chesimard," Eva said. Well, when the guards
+took one look at Eva and saw how big she was, their tone changed
+immediately.
+"Miss Chesimard, would you please return to your cell ?"
+One of the guards came from the back and tapped the sergeant
+on the shoulder.
+"I know her," he said. "She's not Chesimard."
+"I am who you are looking for, " i said. I didn't want Eva to
+get too involved in my madness. "I'll see you sisters later. I've had
+enough excitement for the moment." I walked past them and went
+to my cell and opened a book.
+The next day this same guard managed to tick me off again.
+"I don't want anymore trouble out of you," she said. "I don't
+want to have to call the men again."
+"You can call the national guard, the militia, the FBI, and
+anybody else for all i care. You can call your mother if you want
+to," i told her. As soon as she opened the door for lunch, i pushed
+right past her. I took my tray, sat down with the other women and
+
+ASSATA
+
+6I
+
+ASSATA
+
+62
+
+started eating my lunch. 1 didn't know what was going to happen
+but i wanted to see what they were gonna do. 1 had about three
+mouthfuls of food left on my plate when the goon squad came in.
+"All right, get up and get in your cell."
+"As soon as i finish what i have on my plate."
+"Now !" they ordered.
+"I only have two spoonfuls left."
+"Now!" They beckoned to the female guard. "Remove the
+prisoner to her cell." She came near me with her hands stretched
+out.
+"Don't you put your hands on me," i told her. "I'll walk to my
+cell."
+"Remove the prisoner to her cell," they ordered. She went to
+grab my arm and all at once the room was in motion. Chairs,
+tables, cups, trays were flying in the air. Everybody was either
+running to get out of the way or fighting. The female guard made a
+wild dash for the door. The male guards jumped on me. 1 was
+hitting, kicking, scratching, punching, biting, and i don't know
+what all else. They finally managed to get me in my cell and the
+other women locked in their dormitories. None of the women was
+seriously injured. 1 had a few nicks and scratches, but otherwise i
+was fine. And i felt fine. Some of that anger pent up inside me had
+been released. One of the guards was wounded. Somehow his face
+had got cut. He was the same little runt who had sat across from me
+in the hospital, pointing a shotgun at me and switching the safety
+on and off, talking about how he liked to kill animals. Nobody
+knows how he was cut or who cut him. But everybody knows that
+the hunter got hunted.
+Later that day they brought a photographer to photograph the
+evidence. The local newspaper later reported a "riot" at the work­
+house. Some police and the sheriff came around and searched the
+jail. They said they were looking for the weapon that had cut the
+guard. They didn't find anything. That night they came and got
+Eva. They took her to the Vroom Building, the new jersey "hospi­
+tal" for the criminally insane. She spent about three weeks there
+before she came back. The night she left i felt sad and guilty. Here i
+had got her caught up in my madness. 1 was sitting and thinking
+about her. So i sat down and wrote this poem:
+
+Rhinocerous woman
+Who nobody wants
+and everybody used.
+
+They say you're crazy
+cause you not crazy enough
+to kneel when told to kneel.
+Hey, big womanwith scars on the head
+and scars on the heart
+that never seem to healI saw your light
+And it was shining.
+You gave them love.
+They gave you shit.
+You gave them you.
+They gave you hollywood.
+They purr at you
+cause you know how to roar
+and back it up with realness.
+Rhinocerous woman.
+Big momma in a little world.
+You closed your eyes
+and neon spun inside your head
+cause it was dark outside.
+You read your bible
+but god never came.
+Your daddy woulda loved you
+but what would the neighbors say.
+They hate you momma
+cause you expose their madness.
+And their cruelty.
+They can see in your eyes
+a thousand nightmares
+that they have made come true.
+Black woman. Baad woman.
+Wear your bigness on your chest like a badge
+cause you done earned it.
+Strong woman. Amazon.
+Wear your scars like jewelry
+cause they were bought with blood.
+They call you mad.
+And almost had you
+believing that shit.
+They called you ugly.
+And you hid yourself
+
+ASSATA
+
+63
+
+ASSATA
+
+behind yourself
+and wallowed in their shame.
+Rhinocerous WomanThis world is blind
+and slight of mind
+and cannot see
+How beautiful you are.
+I saw your light.
+And it was shining.
+
+Most of the women benefited from the "riot," though. Over
+the next few days almost everybody was released or sent to some
+kind of program. The jail was practically empty. It's strange how
+things work. When it suits the government's interest, they put
+people in jail for rioting. And when it suits their interests, they let
+them out of jail for the same thing. Afterward, the outer door to my
+cage remained shut at all times. This was no great deprivation since
+it had remained closed most of the time before anyway.
+One day they brought me a big bushel of stringbeans. (They
+grew a lot of their food at the workhouse. The men worked in the
+field.) "Here, we want you to snap these stringbeans."
+"How much are you gonna pay me?" i asked.
+"We don't pay no inmate nothin', but if you snap these beans
+we'll let your door stay open while you snap them."
+"I don't work for nothing. 1 ain't gonna be no slave for
+nobody. Don't you know that slavery was outlawed?"
+"No," the guard said, "you're wrong. Slavery was outlawed
+with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons."
+1 looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth
+Amendment to the Constitution says:
+Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punish­
+ment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
+shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
+j urisdiction.
+
+Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails
+and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black
+and Third World people, why so many Black people can't find a
+job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know
+how. Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you
+don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If
+
+every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to
+do, the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone
+would amount to millions. When Jimmy Carter was governor of
+Georgia, he brought a Black woman from prison to clean the state
+house and babysit for Amy. Prisons are a profitable business. They
+are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and
+more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing
+board. Who are they for? They certainly aren't planning to put
+white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's gen­
+ocidal war against Black and Third World people.
+On July 1 9, 1 973 , i was taken to New York to be arraigned on
+a Queens bank robbery indictment in Brooklyn federal court. The
+trip was like a surrealistic cartoon. There must have been at least
+twelve cars in the procession, and a new jersey state trooper's car
+was stationed at every exit on the turnpike. All the cars had lights
+on and sirens going. A helicopter trailed us. And the pigs in the car
+i was in were comical. At every point they said something like ''At
+least we got to the turnpike." "At least we got to the bridge." "At
+least we got to New York." "At least we made it to the court."
+Whenever they passed a police car they waved and sometimes
+raised their fists. When the jersey police were replaced by New York
+police at the bridge to Staten Island, they shook hands and gave
+each other the power sign. They even called each other "brother."
+"This is my brother officer, so and so." They acted like they were on
+some dangerous mission inside Russia. They were actually afraid.
+White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to
+amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would
+do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so
+much dirt to Black people-their guilty conscience tells them to be
+afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to
+fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will
+drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
+In September, i was moved from the workhouse and entombed
+in the basement of the middlesex county jail, allegedly because of
+the jail's proximity to the middlesex county courthouse where the
+new jersey trial was scheduled to begin on October 1 . I was the
+first, and last, woman ever imprisoned there. It has always been a
+men's jail.
+When i arrived i was given a dirty, scratchy horse blanket and
+one sheet. Thinking they had made a mistake, i asked for another
+sheet. "That's all you get," they told me.
+"I can't sleep with that filthy thing over me. I need another
+sheet."
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+66
+
+"Sorry."
+"Why am i allowed only one sheet?"
+"That's all the men get. We only give one because they might
+hang themselves."
+"They can hang themselves as easily with one sheet as they can
+with two," i reasoned.
+"Sorry."
+For me to sleep on that filthy thing with one sheet was out of
+the question. I hooped, hollered, demanded they call my lawyer,
+and told the guard that the next time she came into my cage i was
+going to wrap the sheet around her neck. Finally, she gave me
+another sheet.
+If i wrote a hundred pages describing the basement of the
+middlesex county jail, it would be impossible for you to visualize it.
+It was a big, grayish, pukey-greenish cell. The ceiling was covered
+with all kinds of pipes, some small, some huge, some dry, some
+leaky. There was no natural light, and the jailers refused to open
+the small windows located near the ceiling. The average tem­
+perature was 95 degrees. It was infested with ants and centipedes. I
+had never seen a centipede before and they scared me to death.
+They were huge, albino monsters and they crawled all over me.
+Female guards were stationed at the door of my cell twenty­
+four hours a day. Their job was to sit there and look in the cell at
+me. They could see every move i made. The first day i moved the bed
+>I-
+
+' On December 1 1 , 1 9 78, attorney Lennox Hinds, on behalf of the National Conference
+of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racism, and the Commission for Racial
+Justice of the United Church of Christ, sent a petition to the United Nations Commission on
+Human Rights alleging a "consistent pattern of gross . . . violations of human rights and
+fundamental freedoms of certain classes of prisoners in the United States because of their
+race, economic status, and political beliefs." In response to the petition, seven international
+jurists visited a number of prisoners on August 3-20, 1 9 79, and reported their findings.
+They listed four categories of prisoners, the first of which were political prisoners, defined as
+"a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of
+illegal governmental conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for
+provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal pros­
+ecutions. This class is exemplified by at least: The Wilmington Ten, the Charlotte Three,
+Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Imari Obadele and other Republic of New Africa defendants,
+David Rice, Ed Poindexter, Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, Richard Marshall, Russell Means, Ted
+Means and other American Indian Movement defendants."
+They considered my case in the section of their report dealing with solitary con­
+finement: "One of the worst cases is that of ASSATA SHAKUR, who spent over rwenty
+months in solitary confinement in rwo separate men's prisons subject to conditions totally
+unbefitting any prisoner. Many more months were spent in solitary confinement in mixed or
+all-women's prisons. Presently, after protracted litigation, she is confined at Clinton Correc­
+tional Facility for Women in maximum security. She has never on any occasion been
+punished for any infraction of prison rules which might in any way justify such cruel or
+unusual treatment."
+
+against the wall, away from the guard's surveillance so that i could
+have a little privacy while i was sleeping. The guards ordered me to
+move the bed into the middle of the floor. 1 refused. The next day
+workmen nailed the bed to the floor in the center of the cell. They
+even peeked through the window in the bathroom when i was on
+the toilet or taking a shower. When i covered the peephole with a
+towel or a uniform, they ordered me to remove it and threatened to
+take away all towels and uniforms if i continued covering the
+window. 1 didn't refuse, i simply ignored them. After a while they
+gave up. A month later one of the sergeants told me that i was
+permitted to cover the window when i used the bathroom. But only
+for three minutes.
+There were twelve four-foot-Iong fluorescent light bulbs in the
+cage that were blinding. When i got ready to go to sleep the first
+night, i asked the guard to turn off the lights. She refused. "I can't
+see you if the light isn't on."
+"How in the world can you miss me? You can see everything in
+the cell."
+"Sorry."
+They kept me under those blinding lights for days. 1 felt like i
+was going blind. 1 was seeing everything in doubles and triples.
+When Evelyn, my lawyer, came to see me, i complained. Finally,
+after Evelyn accused them of torture, they turned the lights off at
+eleven. But every ten or fifteen minutes they would shine a huge
+floodlight into the cell.
+Then the trial started. First, motions were argued. Practically
+all of our motions were denied. All the prosecution's were granted.
+Then jury selection began before Judge John E. Bachman.
+When they brought in the first jury panel i thought i was gonna
+have a heart attack. There were only a few Blacks speckled here and
+there, and the panel looked more like a lynch mob than a j ury.
+Most of the jurors openly glared at us, as if they would kill us if
+they could. Half said they thought we were guilty. The other half,
+although they didn't say it right out, answered questions like they
+believed more or less that we probably were guilty. 1 was convinced
+some of them deliberately lied just to get on the jury and convict us.
+Most of the few Black people excused themselves on the grounds of
+hardship. They had children, families, jobs and simply could not
+afford to be on a lengthy jury trial. If ever there was a case of the
+blues, i had it.
+"Do something," i kept telling the lawyers. "Do something!"
+"What can we do?" the lawyers would answer. "We're doing
+the best we can."
+
+ASSATA
+
+67
+
+AS SATA
+
+68
+
+It was true, but i just could not accept it. This was my life they
+were talking about. I must have bugged the lawyers to death.
+"Object to this, object to that," i would tell them.
+"Our objection is already on the record."
+"Well, object again anyway." I was outraged, trapped and
+helpless. Whenever a juror said something that revealed out-and­
+out prejudice, the judge would try to clean it up. Poor Ray Brown,
+one of the defense lawyers, caught most of my fire.
+"I want you to object. "
+"On what basis ?" he would ask.
+"Don't you see it? The judge is asking leading questions."
+"But the judge is legally allowed to ask leading questions
+during j ury selection."
+"Well, object anyway." I knew nothing about law then. I had
+never even seen a trial. I just couldn't understand how the j udge
+could be so blatantly prejudiced in favor of the prosecution and
+there was nothing we could do about it.
+"Why can't y'all be like Perry Mason?" i asked the lawyers
+jokingly.
+"Did you ever see Perry Mason defend a Black defendant?"
+Ray Brown answered.
+Sundiata was a lifesaver. He would try to calm me down and
+would explain what to expect. Logically, i accepted what he said,
+but i was still frantic.
+"We just can't let ourselves be railroaded," i'd say, coming up
+with one wild idea after another. Sundiata would patiently explain
+why none of my fantastic ideas would work. After a while of
+participating in my own legal lynching, i became convinced that
+Sundiata and i should fire the lawyers and defend ourselves. In that
+way we wouldn't be tied to those stupid rules and we could say
+anything we wanted to.
+"That's not true," Sundiata told me. "Even if you defend
+yourself, you're still bound by their rules."
+"How am i supposed to know those rules ? I'm not a lawyer.
+And i still have a constitutional right to defend myself. "
+"True, but you still have to play according to their rules or they
+can bind and gag you. Look at what they did to Bobby Seale."
+Every time i looked up at the jury box, i'd argue the point
+again. But i also knew that i didn't know one thing about the law,
+and it was hard to picture myself actually defending myself. Evelyn
+was always repeating the old cliche that a person who defends
+himself has a fool for a lawyer.
+As we came closer and closer to completing the selection of
+
+the jury, i became more and more upset. Then, one day, a kid who
+couldn't have been more than twenty was being examined as a
+potential juror. He spilled the beans. The judge asked him if he had
+an opinion of the case and he said, "They say she's guilty." The
+judge questioned him further and he blurted it all out. The pro­
+spective jurors in the jury room were talking about the case, al­
+though they had been ordered not to discuss it. The judge asked
+what they were saying.
+"They say she's guilty."
+"Only Mrs. Chesimard?" the judge asked.
+"They're saying they're Black, they're guilty."
+At that moment the lawyers were all on their feet, talking a
+mile a minute. They demanded a complete investigation of what
+was going on in the jury room. They wanted the juror asked more
+questions. They wanted the jurors to whom he talked questioned.
+The judge immediately realized the boy had opened a can of
+worms. He did everything he could to avoid opening the can any
+further, but it had gotten out of his control. He finally agreed to
+conduct an impartial investigation. This time, when he questioned
+the jurors, he was very careful to downplay the gravity of what was
+going on in the jury room. But the other jurors substantiated what
+the boy had said. Our lawyers filed a motion asking that the jury be
+selected from another county because we couldn't get a fair trial in
+Middlesex. The assignment judge, not Judge Bachman, was to
+decide the motion. Meanwhile, the trial was stopped.
+Evelyn told me the decision. The assignment judge had deter­
+mined that it was in fact true that we couldn't get a fair trial in
+Middlesex County. The jury was to be picked from Morris County.
+"Where's that?" i asked Evelyn. She said she hadn't the faintest
+idea. Then Ray Brown came in.
+"Where in the world is Morris County?" i asked him.
+"Well," he said, "I'll tell you." Morris County was almost
+completely white with very few Black people and even fewer His­
+panics and Asians.
+"What does that mean ? Are there ten percent Black people?
+Five percent? Or what?"
+"A whole lot fewer."
+"A jury of your peers," Evelyn said bitterly.
+"What can we- do?" i asked.
+"We'll just have to wait and see."
+"Can't we get the trial moved somewhere else where there are
+more Black people?"
+"We can try, but don't get your hopes up too high."
+
+ASSATA
+
+69
+
+ASSATA
+70
+
+I was coming back to earth, and fast.
+The trial had been postponed for about a month, until Janu­
+ary, because they needed time to secure the jail in Morristown, in
+Morris County.
+"Maybe," i thought, "the lawyers will come up with some­
+thing by then." I really didn't expect too much, but it seemed like
+such an obvious trick, such an obvious ploy, to ensure that we
+didn't receive a fair trial by a j ury of our peers that i thought maybe
+something could be done about it. I was naive in those days. I knew
+it in theory, but i had not seen enough to accept the fact that there
+was absolutely no j ustice whatsoever for Black people in amerika. I
+still had some hope left. But they had taken something that was
+supposed to help us and turned it against us. They had used the law
+to abuse the law.
+"Now, all we have to do," i reasoned, "is get the facts and
+figures and prove that they are trying to deny us a fair trial." How
+little did i know!
+
+Chapter 4
+
+unior high school had its advantages and
+its disadvantages. It was more impersonal and much
+more confusing than elementary school, but it gave
+me the chance to move around and change classes,
+which i liked. Generally my subjects bored me, with
+the exception of English, history, and a newfound love
+of ceramics. Parsons Junior High School in Queens
+was mostly white. A lot of the Black kids had been put
+into remedial or what we called "dumb" classes. It
+never ceased to amaze me that the kids who were so
+smart in the street were always in the dumb classes.
+In junior high everybody was going with some­
+one. When girls got together to talk, the subject was
+always boys: who was cute, who was going with
+whom, who was fresh, etc., etc. A cute boy was tall,
+slim but well built, and usually had light skin. A boy
+was considered super-fine if, in addition to light skin,
+he had funny-colored eyes. Hazel and green eyes were
+the best. If a boy was popular or good at sports he
+usually got a play, but in general the boys we talked
+about were tall, not too dark, and handsome.
+One of my earliest admirers was this boy named
+Joe. He was new in our neighborhood, from down
+South or somewhere, because everyone said he was
+country. He was real dark and had a long body with
+short little legs. He liked me, and, in the beginning, i
+think i kinda liked him too. Then everyone started
+teasing me, saying he was my boyfriend and saying he
+looked like a black frog because his legs were so short.
+At that age, i was worried to death about what every­
+one thought of me. I wanted desperately to be one of
+the pack and i didn't want anybody to make fun of
+me. So whenever anybody said i liked Joe, i would
+
+ASSATA
+72
+
+deny it to the bitter end and talk about him worse than everybody
+else. But Joe was very sweet to me. Every time he saw me he would
+smile and say something nice. On Valentine's Day he gave me a
+beautiful big valentine and some candy. One day, in the spring, i
+heard somebody calling my name outside my bedroom window. It
+was Joe. Quickly, he put a flower on the sill and ran away. Every day
+after that he did the same thing. When i would see him on the
+street, i would smile. I was really touched by the flowers. Then one
+day my mother saw him at the window putting a flower on the sill.
+"You tell that boy to stay away from that window," she said.
+"Now he's putting flowers in the window, the next thing you know
+he'll be trying to climb in." But she still thought it was kinda cute.
+The next thing i knew she was telling all her friends about it. While
+i was embarrassed, it also made me think i was cute. No boy had
+every paid me that much attention before and i loved it.
+One day i was coming from the store and i saw Joe. He started
+walking beside me. He was kinda shy and he had never said
+anything to me except "You look nice" or "You look pretty." This
+day we tried to make conversation as we went along. Then, all of a
+sudden, he said, "Will you go with me ? I want you to be my girl."
+Somehow i was shocked. Did he really think i would go with him
+and ruin my reputation forever?
+"No," i answered.
+"No," he repeated. "Why not?"
+I didn't know what to say. My tongue became heavy and
+twisted, I started to stutter. Nothing came out of my mouth. "Why
+not?" he asked again. I stammered and stuttered and then, with icy
+bluntness, i said, "Because you're too black and ugly." I will never
+forget the look on his face. He looked at me with such cold hatred
+that i was stunned. I was instantly sorry for what i had said, but
+there was no taking it back. He looked at me as if he despised me
+more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I felt so ugly and
+dirty and depraved. I was shaken to the bone. For weeks, maybe
+months, afterward, i was haunted by what happened that day, by
+the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth. The sneering hatred
+on his face every time i saw him after that made me know there was
+nothing i could do to make it up to him. There was nothing i could
+do but change myself. Not for him, but for me. And i did change.
+After that i never said "Black" and "ugly" in the same sentence and
+never thought it. Of course, i couldn't undo all the years of self­
+hatred and brainwashing in that short time, but it was a beginning.
+And although i still cared too much about what people thought
+about me, i always tried hard after that to stand on my own two
+
+feet, to stand by what i felt and thought and not just be a robot. I
+didn't always succeed, but i always tried like hell.
+Mostly, when i was young, the news didn't seem real. In fact,
+my vision of the world was like a comic strip: In China they ate
+fortune cookies and the men wore braids; in Africa they lived in
+huts, wore bones in their noses, and were cannibals; in South
+Amerika they wore big hats, slept in the middle of the day, drank a
+lot of rum, and danced the cha-cha. The only place, besides the
+United States, that i could talk about with anything resembling
+realism was Europe. And my perception of Europe was almost as
+unreal. The first president i remember was Eisenhower and even he
+didn't seem real. My mother said that all he did was play golf.
+When he gave a speech on TV, we turned the channel, and, if he
+was on all the stations, we turned the TV off.
+Only the news concerning Black people made any impact at all
+on me. And it seemed that each year the news got worse. The first of
+the really bad news that i remember was Montgomery, Alabama.
+That was when i first heard of Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks had
+been arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman. The
+Black people boycotted the buses. It was a nasty struggle. Black
+people were harassed and attacked and, if i remember correctly,
+Martin Luther King's house was bombed. Then came Little Rock. I
+can still remember those ugly, terrifying white mobs attacking those
+little children who were close to my own age. When the news about
+Little Rock came on, you could hear a pin drop at my house. We
+would all sit there horrified. Sometimes, afterward, somebody
+would say something, but usually we would just sit there lost in our
+own thoughts. I guess there was nothing to say. And each year i
+would sit in front of that box, watching my people being attacked
+by white mobs, being bitten by dogs, beaten and water-hosed by
+police, arrested and murdered. Then the news seemed too real.
+The older i got, the more i seemed to grow into myself. My
+mother and stepfather were having all kinds of problems. They were
+fussing and fighting like cats and dogs. They were like a whole lot
+of other Black people in that respect. They were catching hell every
+day on their jobs, in society, and they took their frustrations out on
+each other. To make matters worse, she was a teacher and he
+worked in the post office: she had been to college and he hadn't. As
+far as i'm concerned, if a Black man and woman make a marriage
+work in amerika, they've accomplished a miracle. Because every­
+thing is against them. Just being poor is one of their biggest
+obstacles. Most of the arguments are about money. It's hard as hell
+to be loving and caring when you can't pay the bills and you don't
+
+ASSATA
+73
+
+ASSATA
+74
+
+know where the next dollar is coming from. And the way that we're
+brought up to think adds insult to injury. It's changing a little bit
+now, but when i was growing up, every white man on television was
+able to support his family with no particular strain. There was no
+need for his wife to work. Her job was to stay home and take care
+of the kids. Black people accepted those role models for themselves
+even though they had very little to do with the reality of their own
+existence and survival.
+While my parents were going through their changes, i was
+going through mine. I was at the age where i questioned everything.
+The world was beginning to have more and more impact on me. I
+was curious about, and wanted to experience, everything. On week­
+ends, whenever i could, i would take off. I went to the movies or to
+the library, but my favorite activity was riding subways and buses. I
+would hop on any subway or bus, ride until i got tired, then get off
+at any stop and walk around. Sometimes i talked to people or
+played handball with kids my age. Other times i just walked and
+looked. I went into all kinds of neighborhoods-white, Black,
+Puerto Rican, Chinatown too. But Harlem was my favorite place. I
+was fascinated by the street life. I was always trying to figure out
+what was going on. Everything was so colorful and busy. Men
+standing on the corner drinking, boys playing basketball, hustlers
+buzzing up and down the streets huddling and making deals. It was
+the land of dream books, kitchenettes, and Johnnie Walker Red. I
+loved the stores. From the market on Park Avenue to the greasy fish
+joints, to the candy stores that sold penny candy and penny ciga­
+rettes and god knows what else. I would walk and look and think.
+The world for me then was a big question mark, and the biggest
+question of all was where i fit in.
+I was always late getting home and in trouble. It was like i had
+some kind of disease. I could never make it home on time. I would
+leave with the best intentions, but as soon as i got out in the street,
+it was as if i was in a trance. I would forget all about the time until
+it was too late. And half the time when i realized that it was getting
+dark, i didn't even know where i was, much less how to get home.
+My mother would talk to me, slap me, shake me, punish me, but
+nothing worked. I was a lost cause. I was running away from home
+and i didn't even know it. And one thing always led to another. I
+was turning into a fantastic liar. As soon as i got near home i began
+making up lies. When i look back at it now, i know my mother must
+have wanted to choke me when she heard those farfetched crea­
+tions, but at the time i thought they were brilliant. As the problems
+
+in my family intensified, i ran away consciously instead of uncon­
+sciously.
+The first time i ran away, i went to Evelyn's house. She wasn't
+home so i fell asleep on the stairway. When she came home, she
+thought i was some kind of drunken bum, so she walked by me and
+went to her apartment. I came back the next day and she talked to
+me, played shrink and family counselor, and sent me home. It
+worked for a while, but things were a mess. My mother and i
+couldn't see eye to eye about anything, and i was just as stubborn
+and self-willed as she was. And even when i tried to do right, it just
+seemed like i couldn't do anything that made her happy. And when
+my mother and stepfather were at each other's throats, it drove me
+wild. I would simply get my coat and walk out. Some days i just
+didn't come back.
+At times, running away was fun and exciting. At other times it
+was miserable, cold, and lonely. The part i dug about it, though,
+was surviving. Being out there, face to face with the raunchiest side
+of life was like living on a roller-coaster, everything hurling itself at
+you at breakneck speed. It was one hell of an education, and, when
+i think about it, i was one lucky chile. So many things could have
+happened to me, and almost did.
+The first time i ran away i had just the clothes on my back and
+very little money. I rode the subway and slept in hallways until i just
+couldn't take it anymore. Then i started talking to people. One of
+the first people i met was this boy named David. I told him that my
+mother was in the hospital and that i didn't have any other family in
+New York and i was scared to stay home alone. He took me home
+to his mother's house and we told his mother the same story. She
+said it would be okay for me to spend the night. They lived in the
+Farragut Projects in Brooklyn. David took me out and introduced
+me to all his friends. We got along fine until nighttime. Then it was
+war-an all-night wrestling match. When he wasn't attacking me,
+he was begging and pleading and thinking up a thousand argu­
+ments why i should give him some. I told him i was afraid of getting
+pregnant. He went and got this big jar of Vaseline and told me that,
+if you used Vaseline, you couldn't get pregnant. I was dumb, but
+not that dumb. I told him to go to hell, and the wrestling match
+continued. After a day or two at David's, i was ready to move on.
+Besides, his mother was getting suspicious.
+My next new friend was a girl. I couldn't take any more
+Davids. Tina lived in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn with her
+mother and her brother in a brownstone house. It was a rickety old
+
+ASSATA
+
+75
+
+ASSATA
+
+house and half of it looked like it was condemned. There was
+nothing whatsoever in that house that was orderly. There were
+rooms with all kinds of j unk in them, stacked almost to the ceiling:
+tables, chairs, record players, old radios. I told the same old story
+to Tina's mother and she was sweet as pie. I could stay there just as
+long as i wanted, she said. In fact, she said, she "just loved to have
+young people around her." And she wasn't lying either. All day
+long there was a procession of people in and out of that house, and
+most of them were young. When Tina's mother saw that i didn't
+have any clothes, she said, "We'll j ust have to take you shopping." I
+remember thinking how nice she was, to be willing to spend money
+on me, a stranger. The next morning we went down to Fulton
+Street.
+"All right," she told me, "now I want you to go with Tina into
+A&S and pick out what you want; I'll be here at the soda place.
+Just remember where everything is."
+Off we went, Tina and I. I was happy as a jaybird; my clothes
+were kind of on the funky side. When we got inside the store, i
+started to pick up things and got ready to try them on.
+"Be cool," said Tina. "Don't you know what size you wear?"
+"Yeah," i said. "Why?"
+"Let's j ust get the stuff and get out of here. If you like some­
+thing, just say so. Don't go picking it up and putting it on and
+carrying on."
+"O.K.," i said, thinking that she was strange. I liked a plaid
+kilt with a big safety pin and a blouse and sweater to match.
+"This will go with it, too," Tina said, pointing to a white
+blouse. "Now you just do what i tell you. Step in this."
+"Step in what?" i said, looking down.
+"Be cool, fool!" Tina whispered. "Just keep looking ahead and
+help me pull this thing up." She had already got half the skirt up
+around my thighs. Finally we got the skirt up and fastened under
+my own skirt. "O.K., let's get out of here," Tina said. "Wait a
+minute. Roll that skirt up, it's hanging down, and don't look
+down !" I was scared out of my wits, but i started to roll.
+"Not your skirt, fool," Tina whispered, "the one underneath."
+Well, i was walking and rolling and trying to look cool and, if
+anyone had seen me, i know i musta looked like a slapstick
+comedy. But somehow we made it out of there. I expected the police
+to come swooping down on us at any moment. Tina's mother was
+still sitting in the same place, sipping on a soda.
+"How'd it go ?" she asked Tina.
+"She's O.K.," Tina said. "She don't know nothin', but she was
+
+cool." I felt like fainting. Everybody else's mother i knew would
+knock you down if they even thought you were stealing. This was
+surely something new. I just kept staring at Tina's mother. She
+must've seen me staring at her, too, because she told me, "That's
+right, i steal and my kids steal, too. They tryin' to take my house
+from me. Tryin' to take everythin' i got. I got to survive by the best
+way i know how. But it ain't really stealing; it's just a discount. You
+need a discount, high as these stores is. We call it the 'five-finger
+discount.' " She started laughing.
+When we got to the house, she said, "All right, let's see all the
+pretty clothes you got." Tina took the blouses and sweater from
+somewhere and i took the skirt from under my skirt. "That's all you
+got?"
+"Yeah," said Tina. "She don't know how to do nothin', an' we
+was takin' too long."
+"Y'all didn't get no underwear?" Tina's mother asked.
+"No."
+"Well, here," she said, giving us some money. "Go to the five
+and dime and buy some. And I don't want y'all taking nothin', ya
+hear? I didn't raise no nickel-and-dime-store kids, understan' ?"
+"Yes." And we were gone.
+"We're gon teach you how to deal," Tina said on the way from
+the store. I just looked at her. My mind was spinning. Then i
+started to feel glad about it. We had gotten over. We had gotten over
+tough. The idea of five-finger discounts was beginning to appeal to
+me. And it was easy as hell.
+That night i dressed up in my new clothes and went with Tina
+and her brother to hang out. He was on the quiet side, and evil­
+looking, but he turned out to be nice. We were going to a party at
+the Fort Greene Projects. We stopped and bought some french fries
+and Thunderbird. At the party, Tina introduced me to Tyrone. It
+was love at first sight. I thought he was the cutest boy i'd ever seen.
+Tyrone was the warlord of the Fort Greene Chaplins, and i thought
+it was just so romantic, like West Side Story. We sat in the hallway,
+drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. I had smoked before, but i
+had never drunk any wine. The music was playing and the lights
+were down low and i was feeling goooooooddd. They were playing
+those old slow sides like "Wind," "Gloria," "In the Still of the
+Night," "Sunday Kind of Love." We went inside and started to
+dance. I was in love and dancing on clouds, whirling around the
+dance floor. I was whirling and spinning, and all of a sudden i was
+outside, holding onto some bench for dear life, drunk as a skunk
+and sick as a dog. When i was finally able to stand, Tyrone walked
+
+ASSATA
+
+77
+
+ASSATA
+
+me to Tina's house. We held hands all the way and he made a big
+deal out of kissing me good night, although i'll never understand
+how he could stand my vomit-tasting mouth.
+1 woke up the next morning feeling like elephants had been
+doing the Watusi on my forehead and like i was walking on my
+eyelids. Tina's mother wanted me to go someplace with her. 1 got
+up, washed, and got dressed. "What kind of jewelry do you like?"
+she asked me.
+"I don't know," i said. "I guess i like rubies because they are
+my birthstone."
+"Oh, no ! You look like a girl that's made strictly for dia­
+monds."
+"Really ?" i asked, flattered.
+"Oh yeah, diamonds are a girl's best friend. And I'm gonna
+show you how to get some." She spent the morning and most of the
+afternoon showing me how to do just that. "You have nothin' to
+worry about," she kept telling me. "Even if they catch you, they
+can't do nothin' to you, you're a kid. " 1 was supposed to go in a
+store and talk very proper. 1 was to ask the price of everything and
+tell the clerk that my father gave me $80 to spend, but that i had
+some money of my own. Tina and her brother would come in and
+create a diversion and, while everyone was looking at them, i was to
+put the biggest earrings i could get in my mouth under my tongue.
+1 was to say something to the salesman and walk calmly out of the
+store. There were a few more parts to the plan, but i don't re­
+member them. She had me practice talking with things under my
+tongue.
+When we got to the store, i thought i was going to die of fright.
+1 acted like i didn't know Tina and her brother and went in as
+planned. The store was pretty crowded and i went into my act. 1 was
+so scared, i felt like i was having hot flashes. At first the salesman
+acted like he didn't want to show me anything, but when i told him
+about the $80 and my extra money, he hurried up and pulled out
+trays. 1 held them up, saying, "Do you think she'll like these ? Do
+you think she'll like these better?" Then, all of a sudden, Tina and
+her brother came running into the store. They were laughing real
+loud and chasing and grabbing each other. 1 almost forgot what i
+was supposed to be doing because 1 was so busy watching them.
+Then i remembered and, when i saw that no one was watching, i
+picked up the biggest earrings i saw and put them into my mouth.
+"I don't see anything Mommy would really like," i said. "Maybe
+i'll come back later." 1 started walking to the door. 1 just knew that
+that man was going to call me back.
+
+"Miss," someone called. I felt like dropping through the floor.
+I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw that it was another
+salesman calling someone else. I walked out of the store, turned a
+corner, and ran. I was halfway to Tina's house before they caught
+up with me. The earrings were still in my mouth.
+"Did you get over?" Tina asked me. I looked at her almost as if
+i didn't know her. "Did you cop or not?" she asked again, impa­
+tiently. Finally, i spit the earrings out into my hand.
+"Shit," said Tina's mother, "them's pretty numbers there, I like
+them myself." As it turned out, the earrings were for pierced ears
+and my ears weren't pierced. "Sell them to me," Tina's mother said.
+"I'll give you $20 for them."
+"It's a deal," i told her. I was glad as hell to get $20. I didn't
+care about no diamond earrings and i needed some money to get
+away and try to find a job. I was convinced that i wasn't cut out to
+be no thief.
+That night we went out to celebrate. Tina's mother had given
+me $20 plus $2 extra for good work and she had also given me a
+pretty, gold-colored dress and nice black shoes. I was dressed up
+clean as the board of health and we all had some money in our
+pockets and were ready to "do it." We looked for Tyrone but he
+wasn't home. We walked all around the projects until we found
+him. He was at the house of these twins Jessie and James, or
+something like that. They all went downstairs for some kinda
+meeting. Everybody said they were gonna fight. They were at war
+with another gang, the Bishops, and one of their members had got
+messed up by the Bishops. Finally, the meeting was over and Tyrone
+came and hung out with us. But it wasn't the same. He spent the
+whole night talking about what he was gonna do to the Bishops.
+And if he wasn't talking about that, he was talking about the fights
+he'd had before, gang fights, school fights, fight fights, etc. It
+seemed like his whole life was fighting.
+"Why?" i kept thinking. "Why was he so into fighting?" The
+question was on the tip of my tongue, but i just couldn't bring
+myself to ask it. I tried to imagine the future, Mrs. Tyrone
+whateverhisnamewas, and the children. Me, packing his lunch as he
+went off to fight the Bishops. Somehow, the picture didn't work. I
+was tired of this adventure. I was ready to go home. Whatever the
+consequences !
+
+ASSATA
+79
+
+Chapter 5
+
+80
+
+II right, Chesimard, pack
+your things. You're being moved."
+"Moved ? Where ?"
+"You'll find out when you get there."
+"Then i'd like to call my lawyer."
+"You can call your lawyer when you get where
+you're going."
+1 kept trying to find out where they were taking
+me. The continuation of the jersey trial, after the
+change of venue to Morristown, was still a month
+away. Maybe they were just moving me ahead of time.
+Maybe they were taking me back to the workhouse. 1
+wasn't too worried, though. Anywhere was better
+than that basement in the middlesex county jail. The
+sheriff came down with a piece of paper in his hand.
+"Where am i going?" i asked him.
+"I have a federal order to produce you," he said,
+waving the paper around. "You are being turned over
+to the custody of the federal goverment."
+"What for ?"
+"I don't know. You'll have to ask the feds."
+My abrupt transfer from one jail to another,
+without either notice to my lawyers or explanation to
+me, was a scenario that would be repeated over and
+over again during the next few years.
+After our motion for a change of venue from
+Middlesex County was granted in October 1 973, i was
+returned to the basement of the middlesex county jail,
+where i believed i would remain until the trial resumed
+in Morris County on January 4, 1 974. Evelyn imme­
+diately swung into action, contacting the national Jury
+Project to explore the level of racism in Morris County
+and preparing a number of motions she anticipated
+
+would have to be made before the morris county kourt. In addition,
+she was working on the continuous motion to remove me from
+solitary confinement in the middlesex county jail that was then
+before the new jersey federal district kourt. The underlying argument of the motion-that this kind of confinement destroyed my
+ability to adequately participate in preparation for my trial-had to
+be supported by psychological data and the opinions of experts.
+Evelyn was trying to find psychologists and sociologists willing to
+provide their professional assessments in support of the motion. She
+was also trying to locate a forensic pathologist, a ballistics expert, a
+forensic chemist, and other specialists we needed for the trial, and
+trying to raise money to pay them.
+I was aware that there were two indictments outstanding
+against me for alleged bank robberies. Evelyn had been told that
+trials for these charges would follow the trial in jersey. One of the
+indictments was for a Bronx bank robbery that occurred in Septem­
+ber 1 972. I had been indicted for this crime along with Kamau,
+Avon White, and others in the federal kourt, southern district of
+New York, located in Foley Square in lower Manhattan.
+I knew that Evelyn had made a motion before the southern
+district j udge, gagliardi, to have that trial postponed until after the
+termination of the jersey trial. Having learned that the motion had
+been granted, i didn't connect the move to New York with the bank
+robbery trial. I was wrong.
+The trip was the usual high-security endless procession of cars.
+And, as usual, i enjoyed the ride. Just the walk from the door of the
+jail to the car did me good-it had been so long since i had seen
+daylight or breathed fresh air. I looked at the trees and the grass and
+the sky as if i had never seen them before. It was a gloriously
+beautiful day.
+When the feds told me they were taking me to New York to go
+to trial, i didn't know what in the world was going on, but i was
+sure Evelyn would straighten things out. There was no way in hell i
+could go to trial in federal kourt. Not unless they gave us time to
+prepare for it and canceled the jersey trial. There was no way that
+Evelyn could deal with both trials at the same time. She was
+working so hard i couldn't keep track of all that she was doing.
+I knew we had arrived somewhere in Queens, but i didn't
+know where. There was no courthouse in the direction we had
+gone. The car came to a bridge where pigs were stationed, pointing
+rifles and shotguns. On the other side of the bridge were more
+police.
+"Where are we ? Where is this place?"
+
+ASSATA
+
+8I
+
+ASSATA
+82
+
+"You are now on Rikers Island. This will be your new home
+for a while," the marshal told me.
+"It'll never be my home."
+I looked around while they waited for clearance to pass
+through the gate. There were huge, ugly buildings in front of us, not
+old or dilapidated as i had imagined when i pictured Rikers Island,
+but institutional-looking nevertheless.
+"Are all these buildings jails ?" i asked.
+"Yep," said the marshal. "They're all jails. There are a lot of
+criminals in the world."
+"Everybody in jail isn't a criminal," i told him. "And they've
+got a lot of criminals locking people up. They've got a gang of
+criminals in the White House. "
+The marshal just grunted. The car turned into a modern brick
+building. There were no old-fashioned bars, just jalousied window­
+bar combinations. I was brought into a large receiving room and
+locked into one of the small rooms that lined the sides, empty
+except for some benches and a dirty bathroom. After a long wait, i
+was taken out to be printed and photographed. I was returned to
+the room, then called out again to fill out forms. I immediately got
+into a hassle about the forms: i had left the line for "address"
+blank.
+"Where do you live?"
+"I don't live anywhere. I'm in jail. And i've been in jail for six
+months."
+"Well, where did you live before that?"
+"I don't remember." And it wasn't a lie. I remembered the
+place, but i couldn't even begin to tell anyone the address. While i
+was underground i made it a habit never to remember addresses. I
+used landmarks to remember a place, and i never had trouble
+locating any place i had been to once, but even if i visited it a
+hundred times, i never looked at the address.
+"Well, where does your mother live?"
+"Why ?"
+"We need an address."
+"I haven't lived with my mother in years."
+"Well, give me the address anyway."
+"I don't know if my mother would want you to have her
+address. I'll have to ask her."
+The guard insisted, but that line was left blank. The guard was
+a Black woman with an Afro. And there was another one, next to
+her, with a lopsided wig on. She was Black, too. In fact, most of the
+guards i had seen so far were Black. I was quickly to find out that
+
+the overwhelming majority of guards in the female jail at Rikers are
+Black. But when they opened their mouths and expressed their
+opinions, you wondered. But that's another story.
+After i had been waiting for what seemed like hours, they
+brought in a whole bunch of women. It was wonderful. They were
+real, live people, talking and laughing. It had been so long since i
+had even heard a conversation. I just sat there staring at them. I
+know i must have looked like i was crazy, staring like i was, but i
+just couldn't help it. I was overwhelmed. I could barely talk,
+though. When someone asked my name i stammered and stuttered.
+My voice was so low everyone constantly asked me to repeat myself.
+That was one of the things that always happened to me after long
+periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk.
+The next phase was the strip and search. There were two
+groups of women: those who were returning from kourt and those
+who, like me, were new admissions. We were directed to stand in
+little booths and take off all our clothes. Then we were told to turn
+around, squat, run our fingers through our hair, lift up our feet and
+open our mouths. This was for everybody. The next step was only
+for the new admissions. They put us in shower stalls without
+curtains, we were told to take a shower, and then were given this
+stuff which they told us to put it in our hair and on our pubic hairs
+and wash with it.
+"What is this for ?" i asked.
+"It's for lice and crabs," the guard said. It was humiliating.
+The last stage was the "search." Every woman who came into the
+building had to go through this process, even if she had been
+nowhere but to kourt. Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur had told me
+about it after they had been bailed out in the Panther 21 trial.
+When they had told me, i was horrified.
+"You mean they really put their hands inside you, to search
+you ?" i had asked.
+"Vh-huh," they had answered. Every woman who has ever
+been on the rock, or in the old house of detention, can tell you
+about it. The women call it "getting the finger" or, more vulgarly,
+"getting finger-fucked."
+"What happens if you refuse?" i had asked Afeni.
+"They lock you in the hole and they don't let you out until you
+consent to be searched internally."
+I thought about refusing, but i sure as hell didn't want to be in
+the hole. I had had enough of solitary. The "internal search" was as
+humiliating and disgusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this
+table and the nurse holds your legs open and sticks a finger in your
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+vagina and moves it around. She has a plastic glove on. Some of
+them try to put one finger in your vagina and another one up your
+rectum at the same time. Anyway, i had an instant, mile-long
+attitude. I wanted to punch that nurse clear to oblivion. Afterward,
+the guards had the nerve to tell me that a mistake had been made
+and a doctor would have to make a complete examination. I was
+just too disgusted. He was a filthy-looking man who looked more
+like a Bowery bum than a doctor. He coughed all over me without
+even covering his mouth, and his fingernails looked like he had
+spent the last five years in a coal mine. The only good thing about
+him was that he was quick. He rattled diseases off like he was an
+auctioneer and asked me if i had had them. Then he gave me a one­
+minute examination, took my blood, and that was it.
+I was kept in the receiving room until long after everyone had
+left. Then a pleasant enough guard, with a scar on her nose and
+mouth, took me to my cell. We went down a corridor that seemed
+to be a mile long to a hallway where a guard sat inside a glass cage.
+Buttons and knobs and lights decorated the cage. It looked like the
+inside of some kind of spaceship.
+"Open up five," the guard who had brought me said.
+There was a thumping sound and then a humming sound and
+then nothing.
+"You can go to your room now."
+"Go where ?" i asked.
+"Just walk down the hall and the door will be open. You'll see
+it. "
+The hallway was long. When i got to the cell, the light came
+on. When i went in, the door slid shut behind me. It was something
+out of a science-fiction movie. The long halls, the sliding door, the
+control panel. "Space jail," i said to myself. Inside, there was a cot,
+a dirty sink, a seatless toilet, and a roll of toilet paper. I was tired
+and wanted to go to sleep.
+"I'm turning the light out now," a voice said over the microphone.
+The light went out, but a yellow light stayed on.
+"Turn the little light of� please," i called to the guard.
+Again, a voice came on over a microphone. "The light must
+stay on. It is there for your own protection."
+The light stayed on and i went to sleep.
+Morning! The doors slid open.
+"Breakfast, ladies !" came over the microphone. It was early,
+but i was anxious to get dressed and look around. The first thing
+that hit me was the smell. I don't care what jail i've been in, they all
+
+stink. They have a smell unlike any smell on earth. Like blood and
+sweat and feet and open sores and, if misery has a smell, like misery.
+The walls of the cell were covered with obscenities and love declarations. "Apache loves Carmen;" "Linda and Lil bit;" "India and
+Rosa-true love, always." From the window i could see a small
+paved yard with grass growing between the cracks in the pavement
+and then another long building.
+A few women were in the dayroom, but most stayed in their
+cells, which were barren except for the toothpaste writing that
+covered the walls. In prison, toothpaste serves many functions, one
+of which is glue to hang up pictures. A few of the cells were "fixed
+up" with pictures from magazines hung on the walls and a knitted
+or crocheted afghan on the bed. Clothes, in cardboard boxes, were
+on the floor. The women looked evil and ashen. They glanced at me
+with only vague interest and went about their business. They were
+all Black or Hispanic.
+I took a shower and spent the rest of the morning walking
+back and forth. Some of the women were bloated, with swollen
+hands and feet. A few had a real strange look about them. One sat
+in a chair, her eyes crusted with sleep, giggling quietly to herself. A
+group of women sat at a table playing spades. They asked me if i
+wanted to play, and since i had never heard of the game, volun­
+teered to teach me. It turned out to be like whist, only spades are
+always trumps. Then it was lock-in time again, the second one for
+the day. The first had come after breakfast.
+There were two women on either side of me who had been
+locked in their cells all day. "Don't you want to come out?" i asked,
+stupidly. They broke up laughing.
+"No," one said, "I like it here." When she stopped laughing,
+she told me she was "locked." That meant she was locked into her
+cell until she was seen by the Board.
+"What's the Board ?" i asked.
+"It's the Disciplinary Board. When you get an infraction, they
+lock you up until you see the Board."
+"Then they let you out?"
+"Sometimes, but we're going to PSA."
+"What's that?"
+"It's the hole, the bing. This is 2 Main, where you go before
+they take you to the Board; then, after that, if they think you
+haven't done enough time down here, they send you to PSA." (PSA
+stands for punitive segregation area: solitary.)
+"You mean you don't stay in this part all the time?"
+"No. We're on the sentence side. We only had to come here
+
+ASSATA
+
+85
+
+ASSATA
+86
+
+because we stole the medication. We stole almost everything on the
+medication truck and drank it. Coke almost OD'd. That's why
+we're down here. This part is for people who have infractions or for
+crazy people."
+"Crazy people?"
+"Yeah !" the one named Coke answered. "They've got some
+real bugs down here. How come you here?"
+"I don't know. 1 got here yesterday and this is where they put
+me."
+"You got a homicide? "
+"A homicide?"
+"Yeah, a homicide. You here for murder?"
+"I have a homicide case in new jersey, but i'm here for a bank
+robbery trial."
+"That's probably why they got you down here," they specu­
+lated. "They probably gonna move you soon." They asked a million
+questions.
+"Who did you kill ?"
+"I didn't kill anybody."
+"Well, who did they say you killed?"
+"A cop, a new jersey state trooper."
+"Oh, shit. You gon have a hard way to go. You didn't really do
+it?"
+"No."
+"You got a bank robbery, too. Did you rob the bank ? How
+much money did you get ?"
+"I didn't get any money because i didn't rob the bank."
+"Yeah ? Then your boyfriend did it and put the blame on you?"
+"No, i don't have a boyfriend."
+"Oh, so you like girls funny ?" They laughed. "You're kinda
+cute. Ya wanna go with me ?" one of them joked. "You ever do time
+before?"
+"No, never."
+"You got any other cases?"
+"Yeah, i have another bank robbery."
+"Did you do that one?"
+"No !"
+"Well, damn, they got you all hooked up !" the one called
+Delores said. "How come they tryin' to frame you up like that?"
+"Because i'm a revolutionary. They say that i'm in the Black
+Liberation Army."
+"Oh, oh, 1 know you. You that girl 1 read about in the papers.
+Yeah, what's your name ?"
+
+"Assata, Assata Shakur, but my slave name is JoAnne
+Chesimard. "
+"Yeah, you the one. I never thought I'd meet you. How you
+doin' ?"
+"Yeah," Coke said, "I saw your picture on TV, but you look
+different now."
+"How?" i asked.
+"When I saw your picture I thought you was much bigger. And
+much blacker, too."
+"Really ?" I laughed. It was a statement i heard over and over.
+Everybody told me they thought i was bigger, blacker, and uglier.
+When i asked people what they thought i looked like, they would
+describe someone about six feet tall, two hundred pounds, and very
+dark and wild-looking.
+"Bad as them papers said you was, I j ust knew you had to look
+bad. And here you are, just a little ole thing."
+I asked them what they were in prison for. In the course of
+those next few days i was to learn a whole new vocabulary. Jostling
+was pickpocketing; boosting was shoplifting; juggling paper was
+writing bad checks and dragging or playing drag was conning.
+Later that evening a woman who had j ust come from kourt
+told me that Phyllis wanted me to come to the gym at 8 :30. I was
+overjoyed. I had heard that Simba was on the rock, but i thought
+they might move her to make sure we had no chance to be together.
+The gym was large. Women were playing handball and basketball,
+dancing, sitting on the bleachers, and talking. Finally, behind a
+clump of women, i saw Simba. We embraced and both just sat
+there, trying to get out all the words that were in our hearts. So
+much had happened since we had seen each other. We had been
+close when we were both members of the Black Panther Party. For a
+while we had lived together. She was always a real earthy sister with
+a heart of gold. She told me about her case, about the other
+comrades she was in touch with, and, then, that she was pregnant.
+Homey was her nickname for her lover, the baby's father, Kakuyan
+Olugbala. He was a beautiful revolutionary brother, and he was
+murdered by the New York police. Kakuyan and i had gotten to
+know each other pretty well while we were both at the Harlem
+branch of the Black Panther Party. He was one of the brothers who,
+in the days of the Panther Party's lumpen ideology, would be called
+lumpen. He was raised in Harlem around 1 1 6th Street and 8th
+Avenue, a relaxed, easy kind of person, but a fighter to the heart.
+He loved weapons and was a genius with them.
+I was glad about her pregnancy and sad at the same time: she
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+88
+
+was facing twenty-five years. Although i tried to be cheerful, i guess
+she could see the concerned expression on my face.
+"Don't worry," she told me. "These people can lock us up, but
+they can't stop life, just like they can't stop freedom. This baby was
+meant to be born, to carry on. They murdered Homey, and so this
+baby, like all our children, is going to be our hope for the future." I
+would think about her words many times later.
+It's early in the morning. It feels like a quarter to zero and i want to
+sleep. I hear my name vaguely over the microphone. Something
+about kourt. They are calling me for kourt. Hurriedly i roll out of
+bed, shower, dress, comb my hair, and i'm ready to go. They bring
+breakfast on the food truck. I can't even stand the look of food,
+much less eat anything.
+"All right, court ladies, time to go to the receiving room," the
+microphone wails. It's too early in the morning for that thing. I
+want to tear it out of the ceiling. I stumble down to the receiving
+room, still not fully awake. It's 7:20 A.M. I sit in the receiving room
+for three hours. Finally, the marshals come. Now they want me to
+hurry. One of them chains me up. First he shackles my feet; then he
+puts a chain around my waist, fastens the handcuffs to the chain,
+and handcuffs on my hands. I can barely walk. Or shuffle.
+Kourt, dull, gray, dull green. They are putting me into the bull
+pen. I don't know why they call it a bull pen, though i have often
+speculated.
+"Attorney visit," one of the marshals calls as he opens the bars
+to let me out.
+We go to the end of the hall. Evelyn is puffing and huffing. She
+always puffs and huffs when she's angry. In a few minutes, i know
+that she will begin pacing and tapping her feet.
+"They're trying to force us to go to trial right away," she tells
+me. "You know I've been busy, drawing up motions for federal
+court."
+"What do you mean, federal kourt? Aren't we in federal
+kourt?"
+"Yes, but if the judge denies our motion for postponement, I
+want to be ready to go straight into the circuit court."
+"What's the circuit kourt?" It was all Greek to me.
+"That's where we appeal if the judge issues an unfavorable
+opinion."
+We go on talking. Evelyn is trying to explain to me and i am
+trying to explain to her that we can't possibly go to trial. "There's
+no way in the world you can be ready to go to trial right now." I am
+ranting.
+
+"I know, 1 know," Evelyn replies.
+1 rant and rave indignantly while Evelyn tries to explain the
+law to me. They call us to court. The judge is gagliardi. He looks
+just like what he is: a racist dog craka. Kamau comes into the
+courtroom. 1 am delighted to see him. He has aged. He's grinning,
+but under the grin his face is hungry. 1 wonder what he's thinking.
+Bob Bloom, Kamau's lawyer, is up on his feet talking. He is asking
+for a postponement. Everything he says is logical and makes sense.
+Evelyn gets up and starts to rap. She is talking pure unmitigated
+truth and logic. The judge looks at the ceiling. 1 predict the outcome of the hearing and keep turning around to look at the
+audience. Friendly, familiar faces smiling at me. 1 don't want them
+to ever stop. The judge denies our motion for a postponement. The
+judge denies all our motions. 1 want to scream, "Dirty dog, slimy
+pig, you're not a judge. You're just another prosecutor."
+1 look at the prosecutor. He's smug. His face is unreal-like a
+poster. He looks like a 1 940 war poster. John Q. Public. 1 keep
+staring at him. Nobody could look that corny. He's like a ghost
+from the past. I'm convinced he doesn't know it's 1973 . The
+lawyers ask for a joint meeting and the judge says yes, but make it
+short. The lawyers outline the strategy of the appeals.
+"What are our chances on this appeal ?" i ask.
+"There's a chance," Evelyn says. "Slim, maybe, but a chance. If
+the courts are interested in justice, well, of course, they'll support
+our position." We all know how big an "if" it is.
+The next time we went to kourt five days later it had snowed. The
+trees were bare and covered with ice and, though i don't like winter,
+it was a beautiful sight. As soon as i arrived in the kourthouse,
+Evelyn was there to tell me that the circuit court had denied all of
+our appeals, and gagliardi was talking about going to trial that day.
+"I just want you to understand that there is no way that 1 can
+adequately defend you on this short notice. 1 haven't had time to
+prepare pretrial motions, 1 have received no discovery material, and
+1 haven't even had time to think about an appropriate defense
+because 1 haven't been able to find out the basic facts of the case. 1
+just want you to know that."
+"I know," i told her, "and i know you're doing the best that
+you can."
+"At any rate," Evelyn said, "if worse comes to worst, you'll
+have a solid issue for appeal."
+It was a depressing picture. We clearly were being railroaded.
+We went before the judge. Again, he was arrogant and belligerent,
+determined to force us to go to trial right away. Again, she asked
+
+ASSATA
+
+89
+
+ASSATA
+
+the judge for a postponement, but her arguments fell on deaf ears.
+He ruled that we could have a joint conference later, but the trial
+would begin immediately.
+As we left the courtroom, Akilah was standing in the hallway
+with Ksissay, Kamau's two-year-old daughter. As he walked near
+her, she held out her arms to him. Kamau took about two steps
+toward her and the marshals jumped him and began beating him. I
+jumped on the marshals and tried to pull them off. In an instant
+there was one hell of a fight in the hallway. Finally, the marshals
+drew their guns and forced us to lie down on the floor with our
+arms spread apart. We lay there while they stomped our backs and
+kicked us as they handcuffed our hands behind our backs. Akilah
+ran to tell everybody what was going on as Ksissay screamed
+hysterically. I will never forget the haunting scream of that child as
+she watched her father being brutally beaten.
+After the fight, the marshals were vicious and vindictive. They
+did everything they could to provoke and harass us. Newspapers
+reported that we had attacked the marshals.
+Kamau and i decided that we weren't just going to let ourselves
+be railroaded quietly. This so-called trial was such a blatant miscar­
+riage of justice that we weren't even going to participate in it. And
+we didn't want Evelyn and Bob Bloom to participate in it either.
+"Just sit there and don't say anything," we told them. "We'll
+do the talking." And do the talking we did.
+At the next kourt session, gagliardi asked the lawyers if they
+were prepared to begin picking the jury. Both of them made state­
+ments to the effect that since it was impossible for them to represent
+us adequately, we had requested that they remain "mute."
+"All right, then, we'll proceed with you or without you," the
+judge roared. "Bring in the panel."
+As soon as the jury panel entered the kourtroom, Kamau and i
+began to tell them what was going on. We told the jury that he had
+been appointed by Nixon and that he was persecuting us because of
+our political beliefs, that he was the same judge who had just given
+Mitchell and Stans, the Watergate defendants, who did not have
+one fraction of the valid reasons for an adjournment that we had,
+an extended postponement. After a while, the judge ordered us
+removed from the courtroom. Jury selection continued with only
+the judge and the prosecutor participating. Every so often the judge
+would send the marshals back to ask us if we were going to
+"behave."
+"Of course," we would tell the marshals.
+Once returned to the courtroom, we "behaved." Again we told
+
+the jury what was happening and that the judge was trying to
+railroad us. As soon as we began to talk, the judge ordered us from
+the kourt. "Whenever we were about to be thrown out, the marshals
+vied for positions closest to us and for the opportunity to grab us,
+twist our hands behind our backs, and get their licks in. To avoid
+being manhandled, as soon as the judge said, "Remove the defend­
+ant from the courtroom," i would say, "The defendant will remove
+herself. " Most of the time it worked, but one day the marshals were
+so gung ho they jumped on me and started brutalizing me in open
+kourt. Evelyn jumped up like she was ready to fight and stood
+between me and them, holding them away with an outstretched
+arm.
+She complained to the judge. My arm and hand had not yet
+fully recovered and i was still partially paralyzed. Evelyn's remarks
+made the marshals more vicious. They became so brutal that all of
+the spectators began to cry out. As the marshals carried me out of
+the kourtroom, the spectators chanted, "Railroad, railroad." The
+judge ordered them removed. As i was being taken downstairs, i
+could hear the commotion. People were chanting and yelling and
+screaming. The marshals, i later found out, had beaten some of
+them. I sat in the bull pen, lost in my thoughts, when they brought
+a white woman and man down the hallway and put the woman in
+the cell with me. I looked at her without much interest.
+"Assata," she said, "I'm go glad to have finally met you. But I
+never thought it would be this way."
+I looked at her blankly.
+"My name is Natalie Rosenstein. I was upstairs. I was one of
+the spectators in the courtroom when they started pushing and
+shoving and beating people."
+"What?" i said. "You're kidding!"
+"No. We didn't move fast enough, so they arrested us," she
+said, referring to herself and the white man.
+""What did they charge you with ?"
+"Obstructing justice. "
+After that, Kamau and i were banned from the kourtroom. We
+were put into a freezing room next to the kourtroom where a
+loudspeaker had been installed so we could listen to the trial. In the
+beginning, they slammed the door shut. At first, we wanted the
+door open because it was so cold and the warmth from the rest of
+the building helped. Then we began to enjoy the privacy. It was
+good to be able to talk to each other without someone looking
+down our throats. Because we knew that sooner or later they would
+open the door and stare at us, we would open it.
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+"Let some heat in. It's freezing in here."
+"The door stays closed." After a while, they locked it.
+One of the first things that Kamau and i had discussed was
+Islam. He had been a Muslim for some time and was deep into it.
+He was seriously trying to convince me to convert and become a
+practicing, active Muslim. I had always said that if i had any
+religion, it was Islam, but i had never practiced it. Because of Elijah
+Muhammad and Malcolm X, the Muslim influence over our strug­
+gle has been very strong, but it had always been difficult for me to
+accept the idea of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing god.
+And, i reasoned, how could i be expected to love and worship a god
+whose "master plan" included the enslavement, torture, and
+murder of Black people ?
+Kamau argued that Islam was a just religion, opposed to
+oppression. "Oppression is worse than slaughter," he quoted from
+the Holy Koran. "A true Muslim is a true revolutionary. There is no
+contradiction between being a Muslim and being a revolutionary."
+I didn't know much about it, but i agreed to seriously check it out.
+Muslim services were held regularly on Rikers Island, and Simba
+and i began to attend.
+Talking to Kamau was so good for me. Solitary had affected
+me really badly. I had closed up inside myself and had forgotten
+how to relate in an open way with people. We spent whole days
+laughing and talking and listening to the kourtroom madness in
+between. Each day we grew closer until, one day, it was clear to both
+of us that our relationship was changing. It was growing physical.
+We began to touch and to hold each other and each of us was like
+an oasis to the other. For a few days the question of sex was there.
+Then, one day, we talked about it. Surely, it was possible. But, i
+thought, the consequences ! Pregnancy was certainly a possibility. I
+was facing life in prison. Kamau would also be in prison for a long
+time. The child would have no mother and no father.
+Kamau said, "If you become pregnant and you have a child,
+the child will be taken care of. Our people will not let the child
+grow up like a weed." I thought about it. That was true, but the
+child would suffer. "All our children suffer," Kamau said. "We
+can't guarantee our children a future in a world like this. Struggling
+is the only guarantee our children will ever have for a future. You
+may never have another chance to have a child."
+"I have to think," i told him. My mind was screaming. Who
+would take care of my baby ? I thought about what Simba had said
+about our children being our hope for the future. I had never
+wanted a child. Since i was a teenager i had always said that the
+
+world was too horrible to bring another human being into. And a
+Black child. We see our children frustrated at best. Noses pressed
+against windows, looking in. And, at worst, we see them die from
+drugs or oppression, shot down by police, or wasted away in jail.
+My head was swimming. What had my mother and grandmother
+and great-grandmother thought when they brought their babies
+into this world? What had my ancestors thought when they
+brought their babies into this world, only to see them flogged and
+raped, bought and sold. 1 thought and thought. How many Black
+children are separated from their parents? How many grow up with
+their grandmothers and grandfathers? Didn't i stay with my grand­
+parents until my mother had finished school and was on her feet? 1
+remembered all the discussions i had had. "I'm a revolutionary," i
+had said. "I don't have time to sit at home and make no babies."
+"Do you think that you're a machine?" a brother had asked
+me. "Do you think you were put on this earth to fight and nothing
+else?"
+1 thought about what Zayd had always told me. "While you're
+alive, girl, you betta live."
+"I am about life," i said to myself. "I'm gonna live as hard as i
+can and as full as i can until i die. And i'm not letting these
+parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill
+my children in my mind, before they are even born. I'm going to live
+and i'm going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that
+union, i'm going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures
+and i believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our
+struggle." 1 was ready for whatever happened. 1 relaxed and let
+nature take its course.
+When something important was happening in the kourtroom,
+we listened. But, usually, whatever was happening droned on in
+boring chatter that amounted to nothing. Lawyers have the habit of
+turning ten words into a hundred and saying nothing more in the
+process. The trial was like something out of some playwright's
+imagination. We called it the "vaudeville show." Evelyn and Bob,
+after registering their daily protests, sat mute. The judge raved and
+ranted. The pigs barked like vicious dogs. The "witnesses" lied like
+crazy. The jurors (who had been picked solely by the prosecution)
+looked and listened expressionlessly. There were a couple of Black
+jurors, and although we held little hope we would be acquitted, we
+placed the microscopic hope we did have in the Black jurors. Even
+though we had presented no defense, had not participated in the
+trial, we thought that there was a slim chance they might not go
+along with the program. Black people are generally not as brain-
+
+ASSATA
+93
+
+ASSATA
+94
+
+washed as white people when it comes to the so-called system of
+justice.
+The whole kourt process began to take its toll on me. Half the
+time i wasn't eating because they usually served pork for lunch and,
+sometimes, they had pork for dinner. Breakfast was out of the
+question. 1 could never figure out what they gave us. 1 called it
+"monster stew." 1 was always freezing and i didn't have a coat. My
+mother had brought me one, but i had given it to Simba. She was
+pregnant and needed it more than i did. One night, when i returned
+from kourt, i began to feel awful, like a knife was stabbing me in
+my side. 1 could hardly breathe. 1 went to the prison doctor and the
+diagnosis was plueurisy. When the judge learned i was sick and
+unable to come to kourt, he had a fit. He acted like i had gotten
+sick just to delay the trial. The next time i saw the prison doctor, he
+was nervous and shook up.
+"They keep calling me about you," he said. "They want you
+back in court right away. They want to know how fast 1 can have
+you back in the courtroom."
+"Who keeps calling you?" i asked.
+"Everybody. People. I've got to get you back in court as soon as
+possible. "
+And that's exactly what he did.
+Every day they brought us into the kourtroom. And, every
+day, as soon as the j ury came in, we began to tell them what was
+happening, that we were being forced to trial without being given
+time to prepare a defense. And every day, the judge ordered us
+removed from the kourtroom and cited us for contempt. It was
+comical.
+"What are you going to do ?" i would ask him, after i had been
+cited for contempt for the hundredth time. "Put me in jail? Lock me
+up ?"
+One day, when the j udge had been particularly crazy and the
+marshals had been particularly brutal, Evelyn just couldn't take it
+anymore.
+"I'm not going to sit here and watch this spectacle," she said.
+"If you won't permit me to defend my client, there is no purpose in
+my being here." And with that, she got up and started to leave.
+"Get back in here," the judge yelled. "I order you to get back
+here and sit down."
+Evelyn kept walking.
+"If you don't come back and sit down, I'm citing you for
+contempt."
+Evelyn walked out of the kourtroom. The judge cited her for
+
+contempt. (In 1 975, after all appeals, including the supreme kourt
+of the united states, were denied, she served the ten-day sentence in
+maximum security at the westchester county jail for women.)
+The trial soon ended and we waited patiently for the verdict.
+Evelyn and Bob gave us lectures. "Expect nothing but the worst.
+There's a chance, but it's slim." Kamau and i waited for the convic­
+tion. One day of jury deliberation passed. Two days passed. The
+jury seemed to be taking forever. We wondered what was taking
+them so long. It was an open-and-shut case. We had cross-exam­
+ined no witnesses, presented no defense. Kamau and i spent the
+time tenderly, savoring our last few moments together.
+The next morning Evelyn and Bob came in, grinning. "It's a
+hung jury," they giggled. "gagliardi is fit to be tied. They're going to
+call us into court in a few minutes. We just thought we'd come in
+and give you the good news." Ten minutes later we were in the
+kourtroom. The judge was grimly thanking and dismissing the jury.
+The marshals looked like they wanted to fight. The prosecutor
+looked like he wanted to cry. We found out later that a lone Black
+juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us. The look on
+gagliardi's face gave me great pleasure. I looked at him and gave
+him my most meaningful smile. His face turned red and he looked
+away.
+Afterward, we met with the lawyers. We were still giddy and in
+a state of shock. "What does this mean? Are they going to try us
+again?"
+"They're going to try you again, and right away," Evelyn told
+us. "The new trial will begin on Monday."
+Kamau and i looked at each other. We were sick of this case
+but were ecstatic that we were going to have more time together.
+"Are we going to have the same judge?"
+"No," Bob said. "They've got to assign a new judge."
+Evelyn was caught up in our gleeful mood, but, as usual, she
+was business first. "We've got to come up with a trial strategy."
+Sitting in that courtroom day after day and watching that fiasco
+enabled us to do one thing. We were able to see and analyze their
+case. "I feel that now we are ready to go to trial."
+"They don't have a case," Bob said. "I don't even know how
+they got an indictment."
+"We know," Kamau and i said.
+"Their case is utterly absurd," Evelyn said.
+"We know," Kamau and i droned again.
+"Their witnesses are as phony as three-dollar bills," Evelyn
+said.
+
+ASSATA
+95
+
+ASSATA
+
+"We know."
+"They don't have one piece of physical evidence," Evelyn
+ranted. "No photographs, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no
+nothing."
+"We know," Kamau and i chanted in unison.
+"They couldn't possibly have any evidence," i said. "We
+weren't there."
+"Well, 1 know that," Evelyn said indignantly. "That's not the
+point."
+Bob and Kamau looked perplexed. Evelyn and i just looked at
+each other and smiled knowingly. We had found out in new jersey
+how "evidence" could appear out of nowhere and other evidence
+disappear.
+Evelyn and i have a very close relationship. We love each other
+intensely and we get along wonderfully. Usually ! But when we
+argue or disagree, it's awful. We are both outraged that the other
+one doesn't agree or see our point and we feel betrayed and furious.
+And neither of us has the mildest temper in the world. Add to that
+the tremendous pressure we were both under, and you have the
+recipe for fireworks.
+During one of our strategy meetings, Evelyn and i locked
+horns. Try as we might, we couldn't reach any kind of agreement.
+After a while, we weren't even communicating. It became a matter
+of who had the last word and the final decision.
+"I'm the lawyer," she yelled. "I know what I'm doing! If you
+aren't going to listen to me, then what's the point of having me
+defend you ?"
+"I'm the client," i yelled back. "I'm the one who's gonna do
+the twenty-five years in prison if you're wrong."
+"What you're saying is that you don't trust me or my judg­
+ment." Evelyn said. Our argument went from bad to worse. After a
+while we were saying all kinds of things we didn't mean to each
+other.
+"I don't need this shit," Evelyn stormed. "What the hell do 1
+need to defend you for? You haven't got an ounce of sense."
+"You don't have to defend me if your don't want to," i re­
+sponded. "Don't do me any favors."
+"You need all the favors you can get," Evelyn countered.
+"Well, i don't need them from you. 1 can defend my damn self
+as well as you can."
+"I'd like to see you try it. 1 don't need this mess."
+"I will. I don't need you either."
+
+"Well, go ahead and defend your stupid self then." Evelyn
+screamed.
+"I will."
+After the argument i was tired and blank. All the tension had
+been drained out of my body. I was still mad, but i was sorry, too.
+Evelyn was probably right, and i was probably crazy. It's so hard
+working with someone who is so close to you. It's like having your
+mother or your wife or husband as your lawyer. It's real hard to be
+objective. Personal stuff sometimes gets in the way. I didn't know
+whether i was being a sane adult or a rebellious child.
+The next time we came to kourt, i could see right away that
+Evelyn was still angry with me. I fully intended to try and make up,
+but her cold manner made me draw back and get mad all over
+agam.
+"Is your decision still the same?" she asked coldly.
+"Yes," i responded icily.
+"Judge," she told the new judge, "I wish to be relieved from
+the case. Ms. Shakur wishes to retain another lawyer."
+"Is this true?" the judge asked me.
+"Yes. I want to defend myself." A little while later she was off
+the case.
+As i sat in the bull pen feeling stupid and stubborn, the guard
+brought in a public defender. Gagliardi had assigned him because
+he didn't like the way Evelyn was behaving. I told him i didn't want
+him to represent me, that i was representing myself, the judge had
+assigned him to my case.
+"What did you do before you were a public defender?"
+He told me that "once upon a time" he had been a prosecutor.
+That was the end of the conversation. I would rather have had an
+alligator for a lawyer. I don't even remember his name, but he sat
+through both trials as my supposed lawyer, even though i refused to
+even speak to him.
+Since i was now defending myself, i was entitled to a lawyer as
+an adviser. Everyone suggested lawyers, but most of them were
+white leftists. I wanted, if at all possible, a Black woman. Not just
+any Black woman lawyer, but someone who was in tune with the
+politics of the Black Liberation struggle.
+One of the names given me was Flo (Florence) Kennedy. She
+was a Black lawyer who was very active in the women's movement,
+well known on the speaking circuit from coast to coast and more
+renowned as a feminist and political activist than as a lawyer. She fit
+the bill perfectly. She was just what i wanted.
+
+ASSATA
+97
+
+ASSATA
+
+Some argued against her.
+"But, Assata," they said, "she's not a trial lawyer. Flo is not a
+criminal lawyer. You need both, someone who can give you sound
+advice." 1 was unmoved by their arguments. "She's wild; she's
+flamboyant and eccentric; she might scare the jury."
+"She can't be any wilder than this case is," i countered.
+"Besides, i don't need a crimnal lawyer because this isn't a criminal
+case. 1 need a political lawyer. "
+1 was in a wild mood and i was determined to handle the case
+the way i saw fit. 1 wasn't expecting any such thing as justice! This
+case was like something out of The Twilight Zone and i was
+convinced that it couldn't be treated like a normal, run-of-the-mill
+criminal trial. 1 was determined to use this case to expose the deceit
+and crookedness of the government. A meeting between Flo and me
+was arranged. Flo warned me over and over about her lack of trial
+experience.
+"You know, darling, that 1 haven't been inside a courtroom to
+try a case in years."
+"I don't care," i said. "You've been out in the world; you know
+what reality is and that's enough."
+Flo agreed to be my legal adviser. And i was ready to go to
+trial.
+
+Chapter 6
+
+y mother and stepfather
+broke up and my mother, my sister, and i moved to a
+new apartment in a housing complex in South Ja­
+maica near New York Boulevard and Foch. One side
+was the projects and the other side was the co-op
+where we lived, but they looked about the same to me.
+Compared to Jamaica, Parsons Gardens, where we
+had lived, was a little black dot. South Jamaica, Ja­
+maica, Hollis, Bricktown, St. Albans, Springfield Gar­
+dens, South Ozone, etc., were all joined together to
+make up a Black city. You could live your whole life in
+Jamaica and the only time you'd see a white face was
+when you shopped on Jamaica Avenue or when the
+insurance man came around. At one time, Jamaica
+was all white. Black people had moved out to the
+Island to escape the ghettos of Harlem and Brooklyn.
+They bought old houses at exorbitant prices, only to
+find that, within a few years, their "nice" neigh­
+borhoods had turned into the crime-ridden, drug­
+ridden, poverty-stricken places they had run from.
+I loved Jamaica, and i was just starting to get into
+the beat of it and to know my way around when my
+mother and i had one of our terrible arguments. I
+don't even remember what the argument was about,
+but i was hardheaded, stubborn, and under the im­
+pression that a grave injustice had been done to me.
+The next day i got up, packed my clothes, and headed
+straight for the Village. Greenwich Village was where
+artists and musicians and all kinds of weird people
+were supposed to live. I was fascinated by the idea of
+beatniks and bohemians, even though i had never met
+any. I figured that if i belonged anyplace, it must be
+the Village.
+
+99
+
+ASSATA
+IOO
+
+1 walked around with my suitcase until i was exhausted. 1
+
+remember thinking that people here didn't look that different from
+anybody else. 1 found a place to check my suitcase and spent the
+rest of the day going around door to door asking people if they had
+any jobs available. Most didn't even look up at me, they just gave a
+flat no. At the end of the day, i was tired, disgusted, and hungry. 1
+had nowhere to live and not the slightest idea what i was going to
+do next. 1 went back for my suitcase, but the place was closed. After
+that, i just walked aimlessly until i reached a little park. 1 sat down
+on a bench, tired as hell and unable to take another step. After a
+while, a little white guy with bumps on his face sat down next to
+me and started talking. 1 didn't understand half the things he said,
+but he seemed nice enough. When he asked me if i wanted to go to
+a restaurant across the street with him, i gladly accepted. 1 was
+starving. It was an Italian restaurant and the scent in the air was
+heavenly. 1 ordered enough to feed a mule. The guy talked about all
+these people i didn't know and about his job. He kept saying
+people on his job were conspiring to get him fired.
+"I worked there for eight years and they didn't even give me
+any notice." He told me over and over that the company he had
+worked for had stolen two of his inventions and patented them and
+that when he tried to get paid for them and to get credit for his
+ideas, the company tried to get rid of him.
+"What did they do?" i asked.
+"They did everything. They stole my files and my papers and
+then spread rumors about me." He said he was some kind of
+engineer. "I should never have trusted them," he kept saying. "You
+can't trust anybody."
+When the food came i ate like i had spent a lifetime starving.
+"Doesn't this food taste funny to you?" the guy asked. 1 tasted
+some more and it was good.
+"There's nothing wrong with mine," i told him.
+"There's something wrong with this food," he said loudly.
+"What did they do to my food?"
+The waiter came and tried to calm the guy down. "I don't
+understand," the waiter said, "but if you'd like, I'll bring you
+another plate." Although the guy said it was better, he still thought
+it tasted a little funny. To change the subject, i told him a sad story
+about my mother being in the hospital and that i had nowhere to
+stay.
+"Oh, you can stay at my place," he said. Then, seeing how i
+was looking at him, he added, "I have an extra bed."
+"No funny business ?"
+
+"No funny business," he promised. He paid the check and we
+left.
+His apartment was a tiny one-bedroom unit with a dirty
+kitchen and a green moldy-looking rug. The living room was neat
+and sterile. There was a plain brown couch that turned into a bed. 1
+asked him for something to sleep in and plopped down into the
+bed. He kept talking, but i closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.
+After a while he went into his bedroom and shut off the light. 1
+woke up during the night to go to the bathroom, stumbling around
+disoriented until i finally found it. When i came out of the
+bathroom, i went into the kitchen for some water. While i was there
+the guy came in. His face was all puffed up and red.
+"What are you looking for?"
+"Some water."
+"Oh, no, you're not," he screeched. "You've been creeping
+around this house looking for something."
+"What?" i asked. "You're crazy."
+"Oh, no, my dear, that's what they want me to think. I'm not
+crazy in the least. What were you looking for? Who sent you ? You
+didn't find anything, did you ? Well, you can tell them, 1 haven't
+invented anything else for them to steal."
+"I don't know what you're talking about. Nobody sent me no
+place and i wasn't looking for anything. "
+"Oh, no ! You were just going for a little moonlight stroll. Do
+you think I'm some kind of fool? 1 took you in off the street, out of
+kindness, and here you try and deceive me. They really fooled me
+this time. 1 never thought they'd send a nigger. A nigger spy."
+"Your momma is a nigger," i told him, "and you're a crazy son
+of a bitch." 1 threw on my clothes as i cursed him out.
+"Spy. Spy," he kept saying.
+"Your mother is a spy, and you can drop dead as far as i'm
+concerned. "
+1 slammed the door and walked out into the early morning.
+The sun was beginning to come up. 1 walked until i found a
+drugstore open and ordered tea and an English muffin. 1 bought a
+toothbrush, toothpaste, and some makeup so that i would look
+older. 1 was going to get a job if it killed me. 1 got my suitcase,
+found a bathroom to wash up in, changed clothes, and checked the
+suitcase again. 1 bought a couple of newspapers. This time i was
+going to be systematic about it.
+1 saw an ad for a waitress and counter girl. That was something
+i knew i could do. The place was in downtown Brooklyn. 1 hopped
+on the first train in that direction and got there about 8 : 30 in the
+
+ASSATA
+IOI
+
+ASSATA
+I02
+
+morning. The cafeteria was in a factory building and was solely for
+the factory workers. The manager had black and white hair and
+was big, fat, and sloppy. He wasn't so anxious to hire me at first, so
+i told him a sob story about coming from down South to help my
+mother who was in the hospital and that i needed a job as soon as
+possible. Finally, after looking me up and down, he hired me and
+said i could start right then and there. 1 was grinning from ear to
+ear.
+1 was supposed to spend the morning making salads and
+sandwiches and other things for lunchtime. But around ten o'clock,
+all these men started coming for coffee break. The manager had me
+running around like crazy, toasting bread, buttering buns, and
+getting the men their orders.
+"Move faster, move faster," he kept telling me. Every time he
+told me to move faster i tried until it seemed that it wasn't humanly
+possible for anyone to have moved faster. Then i noticed he was
+always brushing against me. His hands were always "accidentally"
+touching my behind. I'd move his hand away but that only seemed
+to make him bolder. Every time i bent over to get something out of
+the freezer or off the food shelves, he would try to slide his hands
+up my dress. After a while, i began slapping his hands away. This,
+too, seemed to make him bolder. Finally i told him, in a nice, quiet
+voice, "Would you please keep your hands off me ? Would you keep
+them to yourself?"
+"Whattaya talkin' about?" he said, acting surprised. "I ain't
+done nothin' to ya."
+As the day wore on, he accelerated his shouting at me. "Can't
+you move any faster ?" he would yell. "Get that lead outa your ass."
+He stopped putting his hands on me for a while, but in about an
+hour he was right back to his old tricks. He acted like it was some
+kind of joke or something. I didn't think it was funny worth a
+damn. Lunchtime was super-busy and i was moving super-fast.
+After lunch, we started getting ready for afternoon coffee break and
+after that we started getting ready for dinner. Dinner was from 4:30
+to 6:30, and 7:00 was quitting time. When dinnertime came, i was
+tired and miserable. I needed the job desperately, but the manager
+was driving me wild putting his hands all over me. When i told him
+to stop, he would grin, throw his hands in the air, and say, "What
+am 1 doing? What am I doing?" Then he started a new trick. He'd
+pull the elastic of my panties through the uniform and let it pop
+like a rubber band.
+"Stop it !" i yelled. "Just stop it!"
+"Stop what? What am 1 doin'?"
+
+By the time dinner was over i knew i couldn't take it anymore.
+Bad as i needed the job, i couldn't take that big fat pig's hands all
+over me. Just before i was ready to go home, i told him.
+"Look, if you can't keep your hands to yourself, i'll quit. 1
+can't take it anymore."
+"Whattaya mean, you'll quit? You're fired. You got lead in your
+ass and you don't know how to treat your boss. Now get the hell
+outta here."
+"Just give me my money and i will. "
+"I ain't gonna give you shit," he said, " 'cause you ain't did
+shit."
+"Look, mister, you gonna pay me my money. 1 worked hard
+and i want my money."
+"Come back at the end of the week."
+"No, i want my money now. 1 need it now."
+"You ain't gettin' nothin' now, 1 told ya. Come back at the end
+of the week."
+"No, you're giving me my money now; i want my money !"
+"Well, you ain't gettin' it."
+"I'll call the cops on you," i bluffed.
+"I'll call the cops on you," he said, "if you don't get your ass
+outta here."
+"You better give me my money," i repeated, looking wild and
+about ready to jump out a real bag.
+Some people from the factory came in and stood at the back of
+the cafeteria looking.
+"Keep your voice down," he said, acting like he was going to
+be cooperative and pay me. "I'll tell you what. You come in the
+back with me now and I'll pay you for an extra day. I'll even let you
+keep your job, and, if you're good, I'll even give you a little extra
+change."
+"I'm not going any damn where with you. Just give me my
+money !"
+"Now, why do you want to be like that?" he asked, putting his
+hands on my shoulder. 1 was hot and fit to be tied.
+"Get your hands off me," i yelled. "You don't want nobody to
+know what kind of a dog you are. Well, i'm gonna tell everybody. If
+you don't give me my money, i'm gonna make you wish you had.
+I'm gonna tell everybody what you are." 1 started to walk to where
+people were working in the factory part.
+"All right, all right," he said. "Here's your goddamn money.
+Just get the hell outta here."
+The people who had been standing in the back moved up
+
+ASSATA
+I03
+
+ASSATA
+I04
+
+closer to see what was going on. The man went to the register and
+counted out my money. 1 was dead tired and felt like a fool, but at
+the same time i felt kinda good inside. 1 was still in the same boat,
+but i was thirteen dollars richer and i had enough self-respect not to
+let any old lecherous white man feel up and down my body.
+1 had enough money altogether to rent a cheap hotel room. 1
+got my suitcase and checked into a hotel. 1 think it was the Hotel
+Albert. After i had hung up my clothes and taken a shower, i
+decided to get something to eat. Downstairs in the lobby, there was
+this big, tall Black woman, dressed to kill. She had black hair with
+silver streaks running through it, long false eyelashes and a lot of
+makeup.
+"Well, look at the baby !" she said, looking straight at me. "Pa­
+lease tell me how you wound up in this joint? Are you straight from
+Alabama, dar-ling? Where are you going, honey?"
+1 j ust looked at her.
+"Do you speak, dar-ling? Can you talk? Where are you going,
+honey?"
+"I'm going out to eat," i said, a little wary.
+"Where are you going to eat, love?"
+"I don't know."
+"Well, come with me, honey. We can eat together. I'm having a
+starvation attack."
+1 j ust stood there looking at her.
+"Well, come on, love. You don't want me to die of malnutri­
+tion, now, do you ? Do you like Chinese food?"
+"Yes," i told her, wondering why she was taking all of this
+interest in me and wondering how she knew i was new at the hotel.
+We walked around until we came to a Chinese restaurant. The
+whole time she talked nonstop. Suddenly i remembered how little
+money i had. 1 had intended to eat a hot dog or something.
+"Look," i told her, "i don't have enough money to go in there.
+This place looks expensive and i'm kinda on the broke side. Maybe
+another time i'll come eat with you."
+"Listen, love," she said, "I didn't drag you all this way to eat
+alone. 1 hate to eat alone so you're just stuck with my company. It
+looks like I'm gonna have to treat your broke ass to dinner."
+1 was extremely grateful. Miss Shirley (that's what she called
+herself) was one helluva talker. She sounded sophisticated and
+country at the same time. She was from Georgia, but she had been
+in New York for a long time. She had lived in the Village for a long
+time, too, although she said she was a gypsy. 1 ordered something
+like chop suey, the cheapest thing on the menu.
+
+"What is you tryin' to do, honey?" she said. "Make me sick ?
+Look, you sit there with your ears open and let me do the order­
+ing." She ordered all this stuff and, when it came, we feasted. There
+was so much we could barely finish it.
+"That's better, honey. Now Mother can join the living."
+The waiter came and asked if we wanted anything else.
+"If I can't have you," Miss Shirley said with a wink, "I'd like
+the check."
+The waiter, a tall, thin Chinese man, blushed and hurried
+away. This is one bold chick, i remember thinking.
+"How long is your place rented for?" Miss Shirley asked.
+"Until tomorrow."
+"What are you going to do after that?"
+"I'll find another job," i told her. Then i told her about my job
+at the cafeteria. She laughed her head off.
+"Well, honey," she asked me, "what in the hell are you running
+from or what in the hell are you running to?"
+I told her the sad tale about my mother in the hospital.
+"Do you actually expect me to believe that mess ?"
+I swore up and down that it was true.
+"I ain't no fool, honey, and I been out in these streets long
+enough to know that you running from something, and if you don't
+want to tell me, that's your business. But I like you and I'll try to
+help you if I can." I was grateful and i didn't know what to say so i
+didn't say anything.
+"Look, I've got this friend that works on Bleecker Street. He
+wants to take some time off to hang out with his friend, but he
+doesn't want to lose his job. You could work in his place until he
+comes back."
+"Fine," i said. I was down for anything-well, almost. We went
+to the care and a skinny white dude came up to us.
+"Sit down and rest yourselves. I'll be back in a minute."
+We sat down at a little round table.
+"You want some espresso ?" the guy asked.
+"Sure," Miss Shirley said. He brought two little cups of black
+stuff. I took one sip and thought i was gonna choke. Miss Shirley
+cracked up. "Well, I can see that you're not initiated. I'm gonna
+have to do something about your education."
+I arranged to take the guy's job for four days and he showed
+me what i had to do. "If you forget anything, or have any ques­
+tions, ask the sailor," he said, pointing to a man with tattoos up
+and down his arms. I was to begin work the next afternoon at four.
+I still didn't know how i was going to pay my rent at the hotel for
+
+ASSATA
+I05
+
+ASSATA
+Io6
+
+the next few days because i wouldn't be paid for my work at the
+cafe until the guy came back from his vacation. I told Miss Shirley
+what i was thinking.
+"I'll talk to Freddie," she said, "and see if he'll let my good
+friend have a little credit. If not, you can come up to my place and
+sleep on the floor. We went back to the hotel and found Freddie. He
+didn't want to give me any credit. Miss Shirley kept haggling.
+"How much money do you have ?" she asked me.
+"Fifteen dollars."
+"Well, give me ten and I'll lend you the rest so you can rent a
+room for a week."
+I gave her the money and Freddie told me i had to move to
+another room, which was fine with me. The room was tiny, but at
+least it had a bathroom and i had somewhere to stay for the rest of
+the week. I was grateful as hell for Miss Shirley.
+"Well," she told me, "you get a good night's sleep. Mother has
+to go to work."
+"Where do you work ?"
+"Anywhere I have to," she said. "Anywhere I can."
+I was dog-tired and the bed was like an oasis. I woke up the
+next afternoon. It was almost one o'clock. I took a shower, got
+dressed, and went to find something to eat. Then i went back to the
+hotel and knocked on Miss Shirley's door. She opened the door
+with a razor in her hand. I almost fainted. She was shaving her face.
+Miss Shirley was a man. When she saw my reaction, she fell out
+laughing.
+"You got a lot to learn, sugar. Ya got a lot to learn." We both
+sat there laughing up a storm. Somehow, it was funny as hell.
+I went to work early that afternoon. The job wasn't bad and i
+could eat all i wanted, which meant i didn't have to buy dinner. The
+tips weren't that much, but i'd be able to live on them until the guy
+came back.
+Any Black woman, practically anywhere in amerika, can tell
+you about being approached, propositioned, and harassed by white
+men. Many consider all Black women potential prostitutes. In the
+Village, this phenomenon was ten times worse than elsewhere. It
+was almost impossible to go from one corner to the next without
+some white man hissing at you, following you, or jingling the
+money in his pockets. One morning in the park, i met a couple,
+about my age, from Harlem, who had run away from home and
+were now living in a room in the Village. I told them that i had run
+away, too, and we became instant comrades. We got into a discus­
+sion about how white men are always approaching Black women.
+
+"Yeah," they giggled, "but we got something for they ass."
+"Yeah?" i asked.
+"Yeah. We fix them right up."
+"How?" i asked. Then they told me. The Murphy game was
+their game. They told me how it worked and i fell out laughing. 1
+thought it was a brilliant scheme.
+"You want to try it? 1 know them ofays'll dig you."
+1 was anxious to try this new scheme because it was "big"
+money and i would be able to pay Miss Shirley back and get a real
+place of my own. The first night, after my job was over, i met Pat
+and Ronnie in the park. Pat and i were the bait and Ronnie was the
+protection. We were all to walk separately on different sides of the
+street so that we could see each other. 1 had dressed up and put on
+makeup to look older. About five minutes after we started walking,
+a white man came up to me. He said he liked the way i walked and
+wanted to take me someplace.
+"I'm on my way to a party," i told him. "It's going to be a real
+hot party."
+"Yeah ? What kind of party is it going to be ?"
+"What kind of party would you like it to be ?"
+"A party for two," he said.
+"I know a place where they've got some very nice private rooms
+and they're not too expensive. It's a private club. You've gotta join
+first."
+"How much does it cost?"
+"Fifteen for the room, fifteen to join the club, and fifteen for
+the babysitter."
+"You don't look old enough to have a kid."
+"The babysitter's for my little sister."
+We argued about the price. He thought it was too high. I kept
+telling him how he was getting a deal and that, once he joined, he
+would be a member for a year and could go there anytime he
+wanted and get some action. Finally he agreed to pay. When we got
+to the building, i told him to give me the money so i could go
+upstairs and pay the people.
+"By the way," i said, "would you tell me what kind of work you
+do ? These people are very particular about who joins their club."
+"I work for a bank." 1 could see from his face he was lying.
+"I'll be right back. Don't you go nowhere."
+1 ran up the stairs and opened the door to the roof. Carefully, i
+closed it behind me. Then i went over about ten roofs until i came
+to the one i was supposed to come down from. 1 tried the door. It
+wouldn't budge. Somebody had locked it. 1 went to the next roof.
+
+ASSATA
+I07
+
+ASSATA
+Io8
+
+Luckily, the door opened. I ran down the stairs and came out
+around the corner from where the man was standing. Hurriedly, i
+walked to where i was supposed to meet Pat and Ronnie.
+"How'd it go ?" they asked.
+"Easy as pie," i answered.
+"Okay, let's do another one." I was scared to try another one
+because i was scared i would run into the man again.
+"We can go up around 14th Street. We've got another building
+staked out around there."
+"Okay," i told them, "but let's check it out first." I explained
+about the door that wouldn't open. We got to the new place,
+checked it out, then went to 14th Street. In a matter of twenty
+minutes Pat and i had each caught a fish. I was worried to death we
+would bump into each other. I rushed my man to the building, got
+the money, and hurried to the meeting place. I waited and waited. It
+seemed like an eternity until they came. Pat had seen me with my
+man and had the good sense to go to a different building than the
+one I took my man to. We were all in high spirits.
+"See how easy it is ?" Pat asked me.
+"Yeah. It's a breeze."
+We split up the money. We had each made $45. I rushed back
+to the hotel. Miss Shirley was there and we went up to her room for
+a drink. I felt like a millionaire. I had the money i had made
+working in the cafe plus the $45 . I whipped out my bankroll and
+paid Miss Shirley back.
+"Now, girl, I know you ain't got no rich uncle. How'd you get
+all that money?"
+I told her everything. I thought i was so slick.
+"Girl, is you crazy ? Do you know what one of these men will
+do to you if they find you in the street? Girl, these people out in this
+street don't give a damn about you. This street will eat your ass
+alive. Honey, I know what I'm talking 'bout. You done run away,
+ain't you?"
+"Yeah," i told her. "I ran away."
+"I knew it all the time. Well, honey, I can't make you go home.
+If I tried, you'd only run away again, but you're wasting your time
+and your life out here. These people don't care nothin' 'bout you.
+All they want to do is suck your blood. You a smart girl. What you
+need to do is go home and finish school."
+"I'm never going home."
+"Well, if you insist on staying out here in these streets, you
+better start acting like you got some sense. Don't you never let
+nobody use you and make a fool outta you. What if one of those
+
+men had been a crazy man and followed you upstairs ? What if the ASSATA
+other door had been locked and you hadn't been able to get out?
+I09
+Where was your so-called protection? You mean to tell me that you
+gon risk your life for fifteen dollars ? Girl, this Village ain't nothin'
+to play around with. They got some crazy mens around here that is
+killing up young girls like you and one of 'em cuts their titties off.
+Girl, as far as 1 can see, that young boy Ronnie don' wanna be
+nothin' but a pimp. He ain't done one thing to earn that money.
+You better start to use your head."
+1 could see Miss Shirley knew what she was talkin' about. "But
+what am i gonna do, Miss Shirley? You know how hard it is to find
+a job."
+"Don't worry, honey, I'll come up with something."
+The next day when i went down to the lobby, Freddie was
+behind the desk. "I hear you're lookin' for a job," he said.
+"Uh-huh. "
+"You know anything about bein' a barmaid?"
+"No," i told him.
+"Well, ya go over to this place, Tony'S, on 3rd Street and ask
+for a guy named Chuck. Tell him i sent you."
+"Thanks. Thanks a lot." 1 went over to Tony's and talked to
+Chuck. "Do you have any openings?" i asked him.
+"Sure, we always have openings for foxes like you." He
+laughed. "Do you know the setup ?"
+"No."
+"Fifteen dollars a night and you get a quarter for each drink
+and a dollar for each bottle of champagne."
+1 looked at him blankly.
+"Your job is to sit and look pretty and keep the customers
+happy and buying. You work from eight in the evening to four in
+the morning when the place closes. What you do after that is your
+business. Just don't make any deals on the premises."
+"Yes," i answered warily.
+"Well, then, see you tonight."
+When i got back to the hotel, i told Miss Shirley about my new
+job. "All right, honey, but you be real careful. There are a whole lot
+of crazy peoples 'round here. And you keep looking for a real job so
+you can go to school at night. Now, come on upstairs and let me
+show you how to put your face on. You look like a two-bit hoe."
+At ten to eight i was at Tony's. Chuck was there and introduced
+me to the barmaid. Her name was Joyce. "Come here for a minute,
+honey," she told me and went to the end of the bar. 1 followed her.
+"You like whiskey sours? "
+
+ASSATA
+I IO
+
+"I guess so. I never had one. "
+"Whatever you do, don't get drunk. I'm going to make your
+drinks without the whiskey. If a customer come in and I know he's
+the suspicious type, I'll make you a real one. If you want a drink
+with the whiskey in it, just order with your hands folded. There's
+not too much I can do about the champagne. I'll try to keep
+pouring it into the man's glass. But it's not too bad and the bottles
+are small. "
+"Okay. Thanks."
+I went to the bar and sat down. In a few minutes a couple of
+white guys came in. They sat two seats down from me and kept
+looking in my direction.
+"Would you like a drink?" one said.
+"Okay," i answered.
+"What are you drinking?"
+"A whiskey sour." And so began what seemed like a never­
+ending parade of whiskey-less whiskey sours. It got so that even the
+smell of the stuff made me sick. Once in a while i would ask the
+barmaid to put some whiskey in one, but i have never been much of
+a drinker.
+Most of the customers were white men who were looking for
+some action. I found most of them to be crude, boring, and creepy. I
+would sit there, making up different stories to tell them just to keep
+myself amused. Another object of these stories was to get them to
+spend as much money as possible. If i thought that the man would
+go for a sob story and hand over some money, i would tell him a
+real tearjerker. Other times i pretended to be a college girl going to
+NYU. This made them less likely to be bold. When i played a
+college girl, i usually said i was a math major because people never
+know the first thing about math. One night, though, after i told this
+guy my math major story, he asked me some questions about
+integrals and imaginary numbers. I didn't have the faintest idea
+what the guy was talking about. It turned out he taught math at
+NYU.
+"I know you're lying," he told me.
+"Of course, i am. Who in the hell is going to be interested in
+the life of a waitress?"
+The guy broke out laughing. "That deserves a drink," he said.
+"Bring the lady another drink. " After that, the guy (i called him
+Mr. Math) came by every so often to hang out. He would buy
+drinks and we would sit there cracking jokes.
+"How's your thesis going?" he would ask.
+
+"Fine," i'd answer. "I'm doing a chronological study about the
+social significance of two and two equaling four."
+I had a few other regulars. Most of them came in to tell me
+their troubles. They either had wife trouble or job trouble. Some
+were drunks who just wanted somebody to drink with, and others
+just liked the challenge of trying to seduce a young girl.
+A lot of the other girls were prostitutes. The few who weren't
+were either just out to make some extra money or they were
+alcoholics. Most of the women were very nice and protective of me.
+The prostitutes liked me because i was always sending them busi­
+ness and was always discreet about it. Soon i made friends with the
+guys in the jazz quartet that worked there regularly. I've always
+loved jazz and i would clap and shout and let them know i enjoyed
+the music. The piano player and i became especially tight. I called
+him my big brother and he was very protective of me. When the
+place closed, he and maybe one or two of the group would walk me
+home. If it was raining, he would send me home in a cab. Closing
+time was the roughest time of all. Some of the men thought that
+buying drinks entitled them to more than conversation. But Chuck
+was a good bouncer and could spot a problem before it became
+serious. If a guy was getting out of hand, Chuck would approach
+him, tell him that i was the sister of one of the guys in the band and
+that if he didn't treat me with respect, he would let him have it.
+At times some real freaks and weirdos hung out there. There
+was one guy who had bought the panties of almost every woman
+who worked at Tony's, paying them each $15. I asked him what he
+did with them. He laughed and told me he hung them on the walls
+of his apartment. When i told one of the other girls, she laughed.
+"Girl, you believe that? That guy takes them home and holds
+them over his nose. He's a sniff freak."
+But any woman at Tony's had to be careful. Some of the men
+who came around were real dangerous. On nights when things
+were slow and there were no customers in the place, the women
+would tell horror stories about all the crazy men they had run into.
+I was big for my age and well built and, with all the makeup i
+wore, i could usually pass for eighteen. I told everybody i was
+nineteen. The white people never questioned my age, but the Black
+people would, sooner or later, realize i was younger than i let on.
+Some of them even guessed i had run away and would take me to
+the side and encourage me to go home. After a while, all the
+women who worked at the place teased me about not having a
+boyfriend.
+
+ASSATA
+III
+
+ASSATA
+I I2
+
+"This girl don't like men and she don't like women. Here's a
+girl that let's her fingers do the walking!"
+When they teased me i wanted to crawl into a crack somewhere
+and hide. The more embarrassed i became, the more they laughed.
+A new bass player came to work for the band and i developed an
+instant crush on him. I was convinced i was in love. In a short time,
+everybody knew about my crush. But the bass player paid me no
+mind at all. I did everything i could think of to attract his attention,
+but he just ignored me. Near closing time, his white girlfriend
+would come and they would leave together. I hated her. She looked
+so smug. One weekday night, it was pouring rain outside and the
+place was empty. The bass player said to me, "I'm writing a song for
+you. You want to hear it? " I could have fainted. I was grinning from
+ear to ear.
+"Yes, i'd like to hear it."
+Da da da ta ta da da de de.
+Da da da ta ta da da de de de Jailbait!
+Da da da ta ta da da de de,
+Da da da ta ta da da de de de Jailbait!"
+
+The rest of the group chimed in, "Jailbait, jailbait," and the whole
+place cracked up. I could have died right then and there. That was
+the end of my crush. When i thought about it later, though, it was
+funny.
+A lot of the Black men that i met in the Village were hung up
+on white women. Some of them would come right out and tell you,
+"Man, i can't dig no spade chick. Gimme an ofay every day." When
+i asked them why, they said white women are sweeter, Black women
+are evil; white women are more understanding, Black women are
+more demanding. One of the things that really infuriated me was
+when they called Black women sapphire. "You know how you
+nigga women are, sapphire, evil." A lot of these guys would have
+trampled over my face just to get to a white woman.
+At times, i really got sick of being around so many grown
+people. I'd either sneak back into my oId neighborhood or hang
+out with Pat and Ronnie. One night they were going to a party
+uptown. I was dying to be with kids my own age, so i told Chuck i
+was taking the night off. When we got to the party, it was dull and
+tired, so Pat and Ronnie went off to find some reefer. They loved the
+stuff, but i was scared of it. I waited and waited for them to get
+back. I started to talk to a boy, who seemed really nice, about how
+dull the party was. He said he knew of a boss party that was going
+
+to be happening later. I waited for Pat and Ronnie to come back,
+but they never did.
+"Why don't you come to the party with me ?" the boy asked.
+"It's at my house and I'm sure you'll have a good time."
+Finally i said i would go. He seemed so nice. He lived in some
+projects near Spanish Harlem. When we got to his house, no one
+was there. I started to leave, but he said his friends were all at a ball
+game and they would be there afterward. In a little while, the
+doorbell rang and, sure enough, all these people came in. After a
+minute i noticed they were all boys.
+"Excuse me," the boy said. Then they all went into another
+room for a minute. When they returned they were whispering and
+talking .under their breaths and i could tell that they were up to
+something.
+"Where are the girls ?" i asked. "Oh, they're coming." One
+came and sat next to me. He put his hand on my leg. I moved it
+away.
+"Come on, baby, why you wanna act like that?"
+"Come here, man," one of them said. I could sense that
+something was wrong. I didn't know what they were up to, but i
+knew they were up to something. I picked up my pocketbook and
+my sweater.
+"I'll have to be going."
+"No, baby, you ain't goin' nowhere."
+"I've got to go." I started walking toward the door. One of
+them grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the door.
+"Sit your ass down, bitch. We've got plans for you."
+I knew it now. They were going to rape me. I had heard people
+talking about "trains," but i had never thought it would happen to
+me. I sat still for a minute. Then i made a wild break for the door.
+They tried to grab me and i fought like hell. The fight didn't last
+too long, though, because in a minute they had me held down on
+the floor. They were pulling up my skirt and taking my blouse off. I
+cried and screamed.
+"Shut up, bitch," one of them said, slapping my face. I begged
+them for mercy. I told them i was a virgin.
+"There's always a first time, baby," someone sneered. I begged
+and pleaded. I cried and cried. I couldn't believe they could be so
+heartless. But they were. The boy who brought me there was
+arguing with another boy about who would be first. I couldn't
+believe it. It was a nightmare. They were arguing and carrying on as
+if i wasn't even human, as if i was some kind of thing. I felt so scared
+
+ASSATA
+I I3
+
+ASSATA
+I I4
+
+and betrayed. I had trusted this boy. The argument between them
+was heated. I hoped they would fight and kill each other. I kept
+begging for mercy, pleading with them. They paid me no attention.
+One of them came over to me as if he felt sorry for me.
+"Don't worry, baby, it won't hurt. You'll see. You'll like it."
+"Okay," i heard the boy who had brought me there say, "you
+can go first, man," and the other boy started toward me. I jumped
+up and tried to run, but i was cornered. One tried to grab me and,
+in the process, he knocked over an ashtray.
+"Be careful, man," said the boy whose house it was. "My
+mother will kill me if the house gets messed up."
+That was my cue. I picked up a vase and threw it at the wall. I
+picked up a lamp and something else, crying and screaming at the
+same time.
+"You might get me, but i'm gonna mess up your mother's
+house before you do."
+The boy who was supposed to go first made a leap for me and
+missed. I kicked over the table and knocked over a plant that was
+on the stand.
+"Get back ! Get back !" i screamed.
+The boy whose house it was grabbed the boy who was sup­
+posed to go first.
+"Come on, man, my mother will kill me."
+"Get back! Get back!" i screamed. "I'm gonna throw this lamp
+straight into that mirror." There was a big mirror hanging behind
+the couch. "Get them out of here. Get them out of here or i'll fuck
+this house up." I was shaking and crying, but i was serious as hell. I
+was gonna mess that boy's house up so bad no one would recognize
+it. "Get them out of here," i said, kicking the table over.
+"Come on," the boy said. "Y'all got to get out of here. My
+mother's gonna have a fit."
+"You crazy bitch," one of them said to me. "Come on, let's
+jump on her, man, she can't do that much damage."
+"It's the man's house," one of the others said. "Come on, let's
+go."
+"Get 'em out of here," i screeched at the top of my lungs.
+"That's okay," one of them said. "We'll wait for you outside,
+baby."
+Slowly, in what seemed forever, they left. Only the boy who
+had brought me remained. I could see that he was trying to figure
+out some way to j ump me.
+"Don't come near me. You better stay back." I didn't know
+
+what i was gonna do next. They were all waiting for me outside. 1
+couldn't call the police because the police were looking for me.
+"Get back," i told the boy who looked like he was trying to
+ease up close to me. "All right, get away from the door." 1 still had
+the lamp and something else in my hands. "Get back there," i told
+him, indicating the back of the apartment, "or i'll smash your
+house up." When he moved back i looked through the peephole.
+There was nobody in the hallway. "They must be waiting down­
+stairs," i thought. "All right," i yelled, "get over by the door." He
+moved to the door. "Now get out in the hallway and knock on one
+of your neighbor's doors and bring a grownup back here."
+"What?"
+"You heard me, sucker. Now move."
+"It wasn't my idea. 1 didn't want to do it. 1 had to."
+"I don't want to hear that shit. Just get your ass out in that hall
+or i'll mess up your house so bad your mother won't even think it's
+her house."
+"Please," the boy said.
+"Please, my ass," i screamed. "If you don't get out there and
+knock on one of those doors, you can forget about your mother's
+house."
+He went outside into the hallway. 1 slammed the door after
+him and watched through the peephole as he knocked on a door. A
+lady answered, and i opened the door and started begging her to
+help me.
+"Please, miss, help me. They're trying to get me," i screamed,
+crying all over again. 1 still had the lamp in my hand. "Please walk
+me downstairs to the subway or to a cab."
+"What happened, honey?" she asked.
+"They tried to do it to me," i cried.
+The woman looked at me and then at the boy. "You wait there
+for a minute, honey," she said. Then she and her husband came
+out. "Don't worry, nothin's going to happen to you now." They
+brought me downstairs and put me into a cab.
+1 thought a lot about those boys after that night. 1 hated them,
+but what i couldn't understand is why they hated me so much.
+Everybody was always saying what a dog-eat-dog world it was.
+There were all kinds of people in the world and most of them
+seemed unhappy. Everybody seemed to be in their own bag and few
+seemed to care about anybody else. 1 had read this play by Sartre.
+The play ended with the conclusion that hell is other people, and,
+for a while, i agreed.
+
+ASSATA
+
+I IS
+
+ASSATA
+
+II6
+
+Back then, when i was growing up, boys gang-banging or
+gang-raping a girl was a pretty common thing. They called it
+pulling a train. It didn't happen to any particular kind of girl. It
+happened to girls who were at the wrong place at the wrong time.
+The boys talked about it like it was a joke or a game, like they were
+"only" out to have some "fun." If a girl was caught on the wrong
+side of a park or in the wrong territory or on the wrong street, she
+was a target. It was a common thing back then for boys to down­
+grade girls and cuss at them in the street. It was common for them
+to go to bed with girls and talk about them like dogs the next day.
+It was common for boys to deny they were the fathers of their
+babies. And it was common for boys to beat girls up and knock
+them around. And then the girls would get hard too.
+"If the nigga ain't got no money, 1 don't want to be bothered."
+"If the nigga ain't got no car, then later for him."
+The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i
+read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became
+that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation,
+when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on
+each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we
+were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed
+it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares. A
+Black woman was fair game for anyone at any time: the master or a
+visiting guest or any redneck who desired her. The slavemaster
+would order her to have six with this stud, seven with that stud, for
+the purpose of increasing his stock. She was considered less than a
+woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhorse. Black
+men internalized the white man's opinion of Black women. And, if
+you ask me, a lot of us still act like we're back on the plantation
+with massa pulling the strings.
+After my close call uptown, i became more skeptical of every­
+body. 1 was much more careful about the situations that i let myself
+fall into. 1 would talk to the men at Tony's but, more and more, i
+became "strickly business." The more i saw of street life, the uglier
+it was.
+One day, as i was walking down 8th Street, i saw one of my
+aunt's friends. Her name was Abbie or Addie or something like that
+and she was as big as a truck. 1 turned my head hoping she
+wouldn't recognize me.
+"Joey, Joey !" i heard her cry out. 1 kept walking. She kept
+calling. 1 kept walking. Then i felt her grab my arm.
+"I know you," she said. "You're Joey. Your aunt and your
+mother are worried to death about you."
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about," i said. "My name is
+Joyce and i don't know you or anyone else that you're talking
+about."
+"Come off it, Joey," she said. "You're not fooling me. Come
+with me while I call your aunt." She had my arm in an iron grip. I
+thought of making a run for it, but she was too big to play with.
+She took me to some bar and told me to sit at the counter while she
+made the call. As soon as she started dialing i made a beeline for
+the door. She was right on top of me, grabbing me with that iron
+grip. "You're not going anywhere until your aunt gets down here."
+In half an hour, Evelyn was on the scene throwing questions at me
+left and right.
+"Where have you been ? What have you been doing? Where
+have you been staying? What have you been doing for money? How
+have you been eating?" she asked-and a million questions more.
+When Evelyn questioned me, she sounded like a lawyer cross­
+examining a witness. In about an hour i had broken down and told
+her everything. She demanded that i take her to the hotel where i
+was staying. After i had packed my things, she told the guy behind
+the desk, "Do you know that you've had a thirteen-year-old girl
+staying here? I could have you prosecuted for contributing to the
+delinquency of a minor." The guy looked at me like he j ust
+couldn't believe it. I could have crawled under the floor. Then she
+called up Tony's and told him the same thing. I was dying of
+embarrassment, but in a way i was glad it was over. I was getting
+tired of the streets. I was tired of being grown and i wanted to be a
+kid again.
+
+ASSATA
+II7
+
+Chapter 7
+
+II8
+
+amau and i were acquitted in the
+bank robbery trial in the Southern District of New
+York on January 28, 1 973, and on the following day i
+was returned to new jersey. When i arrived at the
+morristown jail, there was a clump of reporters and
+photographers standing around. Morristown looked
+just like smalltown, usa. The jail was an ugly building
+attached to the kourthouse. There were a few other
+women in the jail and i was kept away from them. The
+only time i saw them was when i was being taken to or
+from my cell. They all appeared to be white, although
+i found out later that one was Black. The guards were
+all women, as old as the hills, and they had been
+working at the jail for an eternity.
+There was a television and a radio in the cell, and
+it had been so long since i had been able to watch the
+news on television or listen to a static-free radio sta­
+tion that i went crazy. And i had turned into a crochet
+fiend. My poor mother was the unfortunate recipient
+of my early "creations." Brave, devoted person that she
+was, she thought they were pure genius.
+We learned there were few, if any, Black jurors on
+the panel for the new trial. The news was depressing.
+The panel was selected from the voting rolls, and, since
+candidates running for office seldom represent the in­
+terests of Black and poor people, Blacks and the poor
+don't vote. But failing to vote means they don't sit on
+juries. Any chance that we would receive something
+even remotely resembling a fair trial was slim. We
+decided to try to have the trial removed to federal
+court. The chance of the feds taking over was slim, but
+it was worth the try. If the trial was held in the federal
+
+kourt in Newark, at least we'd be assured of a few more Black jurors
+on the jury panel.
+There were countless joint legal meetings, countless strategy
+sessions, and countless kourt appearances. My first look at the
+Morris County jury panel flung me into a terrible depression. There
+were only two or three Black jurors on each panel and they looked
+like extras in a soap opera. As a matter of fact, the whole jury panel
+looked like escapees from a soap opera. They dressed differently
+and had a whole different air about them than New York people.
+Morristown was supposed to be one of the ten richest counties in
+the country, and, looking at these people, i believed it. 1 could just
+see trying to explain to them what poor Black people in big cities
+go through. How could they understand someone becoming a
+Black revolutionary? They had so little to revolt against. They had
+bought the amerikan dream lock, stock, and barrel and seemed
+unaware that, for the majority of Black and Third World people,
+the amerikan dream is the amerikan nightmare.
+Evelyn and i had resolved our differences and she was back on
+the case. She, Ray Brown, and Charles McKinney, Sundiata's law­
+yer, worked hard on the motion to remove the trial to federal kourt.
+But after a hearing, the federal judge remanded the case back to the
+state kourt. He hadn't even listened to our arguments. So we were
+right back where we had started: picking a jury in Morris County.
+Jury selection droned on tediously. Sundiata and i kept our­
+selves from falling asleep or from having nervous breakdowns by
+laughing and talking. Just seeing Sundiata every day was such a
+comfort to me. We made up all kinds of little games and jokes,
+especially guessing the answers j urors would give to the trial
+judge's questions. We got to be pretty good at it. We could look at a
+person and pretty much know what he was going to say. Some
+glared at us hatefully while they waited to be called, as if they
+couldn't wait to give their opinion that we were guilty. They were so
+sure of exactly what happened. They recited detail after detail from
+newspapers and TV.
+"Where were you hiding that night on the turnpike ?" i wanted
+to scream at them. "I didn't see you!"
+Others gave us crooked smiles in the hope that we would think
+they sympathized with us and would leave them on the jury. But
+there was not one bigot in the kourtroom. None of them said they
+had any prejudice against Black people.
+"Do you have any Black friends ?" the judge asked.
+"Of course." But when asked if they had ever invited a Black
+person to their homes or been to the home of a Black person, the
+
+ASSATA
+
+I I9
+
+ASSATA
+I20
+
+answer was, invariably, no. On one panel, the judge asked every­
+body if they had ever called a Black person a nigger. They all said
+no, except for one woman, who said, "Well, when I was a child, we
+used to say 'Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, catch a nigger by the toe.' "
+After that, a whole bunch of them said the same thing. Sometimes
+their answers were so phony they were a joke. Except the joke was
+on us.
+One day, a man being questioned told the judge what he had
+read about the case in newspapers and what he had heard on radio
+and TV. He tried to make it seem that he had just incidentally
+come across the news stories and that he had not really followed the
+case or paid much attention to it. Further, he denied having been
+affected by any of it.
+"Have you ever read a book called Target Blue?"
+Only a day or two before, the defense team had asked that that
+question be included in the voir dire. Robert Daley, who at one time
+was the public relations and publicity director for the New York
+City Police Department, had written the book Target Blue. An
+excerpt from the book was "coincidentally" printed in New York
+magazine on almost the exact day our trial was to begin. One or
+two chapters were about the Black Liberation Army. The book was
+a collection of sensationalism, groundless accusations, and outright
+lies. The few facts that were in those two chapters were distorted
+beyond recognition. I was referred to by name. Daley implied that i
+had been responsible for the deaths of numerous policemen. He
+called me the "soul" of the Black Liberation Army, the "mother
+hen" that "kept them fighting and kept them moving." According
+to the book, i had also robbed numerous banks and blown up a
+police car with a hand grenade during a police chase.
+"Have you ever read Target Blue?" the judge asked.
+"Er, er, yes."
+Immediately the defense team submitted requests to the judge
+that additional questions be asked.
+"When did you read this book?"
+"As a matter of fact, I'm reading it now." Not only had he been
+reading the book, but he had it upstairs in the jury room. Although
+the defense team asked for an investigation, the judge refused. It
+was obvious the man had brought the book to court to show to the
+other jurors and that they had discussed it. After a lot of arguments
+made by our lawyers, the judge agreed to dismiss that juror and
+others in the panel with whom he had been close.
+One day i was informed that the nazi party was demonstrating
+outside the court, marching up and down, complete with
+
+swastikas, b rown uniforms, and helmets. They carried "White
+power," "Save our police," and "Death penalty" placards. Other
+signs were printed with racist statements. Rumor spread that a
+cross had been burned in front of the home of one of our support­
+ers. At the end of the day the nazis almost got into a fight with
+some of the few Black residents in Morristown.
+A lot of people don't know it, but they've got more nazis and
+Ku Klux Klan in jersey than a little bit. Some of my friends call it
+"up South." Lou Myers, who was later one of my lawyers on this
+case, is from Mississippi. One day, in all earnestness, he told me he
+would rather try a case in Mississippi any day than try one in jersey.
+I couldn't understand it. I was growing weaker and weaker. My
+energy seemed to have gone down the drain. All i wanted to do was
+sleep. I chided myself for trying to escape from reality instead of
+facing it. I had seen women in j ail sleep their whole time away. I was
+afraid that was happening to me. I was so easily upset and reacted
+to everything in an exaggerated manner. My nerves were terrible.
+Every little thing affected me. All i did, all day, when there was no
+kourt, was sleep, eat, watch television, and listen to the radio. I was
+eating like food was going out of style. This also convinced me my
+nerves were going bad. I have seen people in prison gain twenty,
+thirty, forty, fifty pounds eating out of nerves and boredom. It gets
+to the point when all you have to look forward to is the meals. And
+that in itself is pitiful, because anyone who has ever been in prison
+knows how terrible the food is. Yet i was gulping that stuff down
+just like it was Mom's home cooking.
+It wasn't until i sat down one day to do my exercises that i
+really suspected what could be wrong. I could barely get through
+ten sit-ups. Everything added up. I didn't dare hope, but, at the
+same time, down deep inside, i knew. As sure as i knew my own
+name, i knew that i was pregnant. But what was i to do next? I
+knew i had to see the doctor, but what in the world was i going to
+say? I had been in prison for eight months and it would really be
+weird to say, " Hey, i think i'm pregnant." I wanted to know for sure
+whether i was or not, but if i wasn't i didn't want the doctor to
+know my business. Because if i was, it would be only a matter of
+time before the whole world would know.
+First thing the next morning, i saw the prison doctor. I told
+him all my symptoms, dropping hint after hint. He told me there
+was nothing to worry about, that i was j ust constipated.
+As time wore on, it became harder and harder to wake up in
+the morning. When the guards came to wake me for kourt, i would
+
+ASSATA
+I2I
+
+ASSATA
+
+I22
+
+simply roll over and continue sleeping. They did everything to get
+me out of bed. They called. They threatened. They banged on the
+bars and anything else they could think of.
+"Just don't come in this cell," i would tell them, feeling evil as
+the day is long. "You come in here and you put your hands on me
+and i'ma take your head right offa your shoulders." They must have
+known i meant it because they kept their distance until i was awake.
+I didn't care what they thought or said as long as they didn't put
+their hands on me. I wanted them to leave me alone. All i wanted to
+do was sleep.
+I walked into kourt whenever i got up, no matter what time it
+was. The judge would go on and on about my lateness and admon­
+ish my lawyers for not having me in kourt on time, but it was
+hopeless. I didn't care what the judge said, what the guards said, or
+what anybody said. All i wanted to do was sleep.
+I told Sundiata and one or two of the lawyers that i thought i
+was pregnant. They looked at me blankly, puzzled, as if i had an
+overactive imagination. Each day i felt more and more weird. I felt
+fragile and sick. I went back to the prison doctor, dropping more
+and more hints. I repeated my symptoms. Queasy stomach, stom­
+ach getting bigger, sick in the mornings, sleep all the time, etc. But
+he still didn't get the message and kept telling me this stuff about
+an intestinal disorder. I didn't know what to do next.
+One day i woke up and could hardly move. I was sick as a dog
+and dizzy to boot. I got up for a minute, then sank back down on
+the cot, holding onto it for dear life. They called the prison doctor.
+I repeated the symptoms again, and this time he ordered some tests.
+He asked for a urine specimen. I was sure he had sent for a
+pregnancy test. I waited a few days and heard nothing. Then the
+nurse came and asked me for more urine. I was certain this meant
+the pregnancy test was positive and they were retesting just to be
+sure. I gave her the urine sample and waited.
+When the doctor called me to his office, i knew he was going
+to tell me i was pregnant. Instead, he was smug and acted really on
+the stupid side. He kept making snide little remarks and i could tell
+he was trying to make fun of me. I asked him what was wrong with
+me and he repeated the same old stuff about a bowel disorder.
+Then he asked me some questions about my sex life.
+"Ask your momma about her sex life," i said and went out of
+his office, slamming the door. Later that day, Ray Brown and Evelyn
+came to see me. Ray was in a jovial mood, laughing his head off.
+"Well, you've really done it this time. I don't know what we're
+
+going to do with you. His honor is going to give you a strong
+reprimand for getting pregnant during his trial. "
+"You mean i'm really pregnant?"
+"It was in the doctor's report to the judge. Didn't you know ?"
+"No," i told him. "I was j ust in that slimy bastard's office this
+morning and he told me that i had something wrong with my
+intestines.
+"He's pulling your leg," Ray said. "They did two or three
+pregnancy tests on you and they all came back positive. You're
+pregnant, all right. I can't believe it."
+Evelyn was in a state of shock. "It's something," she said. Then
+she looked into space for a long time. "It's something. "
+"Judge Bachman's having a fit," Ray said. "I hear the FBI is
+going to conduct an investigation to determine how you got preg­
+nant. "
+"Well, they better not try to come 'round me asking no ques­
+tions," i told them. "I'll tell them that this baby was sent by the
+Black creator to liberate Black people. I'll tell 'em that this baby is
+the new Black messiah, conceived in a holy way, come to lead our
+people to freedom and justice and to create a new Black nation."
+Sundiata and McKinney had joined us. Sundiata was elated.
+He couldn't get over it. He sat there grinning and slapping his knee.
+"I think it's beautiful," he kept saying. "I think it's absolutely
+beautiful." Everyone was in a j ubilant mood. I was glad. I hadn't
+known how they would react.
+"It's amazing," Evelyn said. "Out of all this misery a new life is
+conceived."
+I was caught up in the mood, but i couldn't wait to get off
+alone in my cell to think about this. What had seemed like a remote
+dream was coming true. A baby. My mind was jumping and
+dancing.
+I spent the next few days in a virtual daze. A joyous daze. A
+person was inside of me. Someone who was going to grow up to
+walk and talk, to love and laugh. To me it was the miracle of all
+miracles. And deeply spiritual. The odds against this baby being
+conceived were so great it boggled my mind. And yet it was happen­
+ing. It seemed so right, so beautiful, in surroundings that were so
+ugly. I was filled with emotion. Already, i was deeply in love with
+this child. Already, i talked to it and worried about it and wondered
+how it was feeling and what it was thinking. I would lie in my cell
+wondering about his or her life, wondering what kind of life it
+would have. What kind of people it would love, what kind of values
+
+ASSATA
+
+I23
+
+ASSATA
+I24
+
+it would have, and what it would think of all the madness that
+would surround it. Sometimes i felt so helplessly protective, won­
+dering when my baby would be called nigger for the first time,
+wondering when the full horror and degradation of being Black in
+amerika would descend on my baby. How many wolves hid behind
+the bushes to eat my child ?
+But there were s o many happy things that i thought about,
+too. I wondered when would be the first time my child would sit
+down and seriously appreciate the glory of a sunset and marvel at
+the wonders of nature. Or when he or she would smack lips and
+lick fingers over a sweet potato pie, or kiss strawberries and drink
+lemonade. It has always intrigued me how the world can be so
+beautiful and so ugly at the same time. I wanted, with all my being,
+for my baby to experience the many types and sides of love and
+friendship and to know and understand selflessness and generosity,
+struggle and sacrifice, honesty, courage, and so many of the senti­
+ments that have given me strength and have made my life worth
+living. In these days, i was in such a state of sensitivity and thought
+that i barely noticed what was going on around me.
+The next time my mother came to see me, my sister was with
+her. I was so happy to see them both. When i say "see," it is
+something of an overstatement, because in morristown j ail there are
+little windows that you and your visitors peek through, and there
+are little holes through which you are supposed to talk, but to
+make yourself heard you are obliged to shout.
+"Honey, you look pale," my mother shouted.
+"Mommy, i 'm pregnant."
+"What is it, honey?"
+"I'm pregnant, Mommy."
+My mother smiled blandly. I repeated myself and she began to
+laugh. "How many months are you?"
+"No, seriously, Mommy, i'm pregnant."
+"Well, so am I," my mother said, this time laughing heartily. "I
+think it was my hysterectomy that caused it."
+"No, Mommy," i pleaded. "You don't understand. I'm preg­
+nant. I'm not j oking."
+"Who's joking, honey? Pregnancy is a serious matter," she
+said, trying to keep a straight face, "especially when the baby is
+born under immaculate conception and god is the father." She and
+my sister were having a giggling fit. "What are you going to name
+the baby?" my sister added. "Jesus?"
+They just carried on. The more i insisted i was pregnant, the
+
+more they laughed and cracked jokes. But, finally, my mother
+stopped laughing.
+"Are you really pregnant?"
+I told her that it happened in the kourt and that Kamau was
+the father.
+"How do you feel ? "
+"Actually, kind of funny," i told her. " I can barely move and
+i'm just so tired. "
+I n the visiting room on the prisoners' side, there were no
+chairs, so you had to stand up and talk. I was so tired, i just
+couldn't stand any longer. I sat down on the floor, leaning on the
+wall behind me so that they could see me. I couldn't see them, but
+we shouted to each other until the visit was over. I went up to my
+cell after the visit ended and immediately fell out. My mother went
+to the warden to complain about their refusal to provide chairs.
+The next day Evelyn came to see me. "Your mother called me
+last night all the way from Morristown, as soon as she left you. She
+was worried to death that, with all you've been through, you'd
+finally been driven crazy. I told her not to worry, that you are, in
+fact, pregnant. I think she's in a state of shock. So's your sister. It's
+all over the papers. I brought them for you."
+I couldn't believe it. Sure enough, there were the articles. The
+one in the New York Daily News, i remember, was especially
+sordid. All of the papers speculated about who the father was and
+how i had managed to become pregnant in jail. One of them hinted
+that a prison guard was the father.
+"I'm sick, Auntie, i feel awful."
+"Well, that's what happens when you 're pregnant. You get
+morning sickness and all sorts of other strange ailments. It's only
+normal."
+"Maybe you're right, but i'm having these pains down here," i
+told her, pointing to where the pains were. "And i can barely stand
+up."
+She told me to go see the doctor and i told her how the doctor
+had acted.
+"Well, go see him anyway, and have him examine you thor­
+oughly. Meanwhile, I'll try to have you seen by a private gynecolo­
+gist as soon as possible. I'll probably have to go to court. "
+She promised that she would do all that she could to get an
+outside doctor, and i went upstairs to see the jail doctor.
+"Why did you lie to me and tell me all that junk about a bowel
+disorder?" was the first thing i asked him.
+
+ASSATA
+
+I2 5
+
+ASSATA
+I26
+
+"Well, you lied. I just figured I'd get back at you. Anyway, you
+found out, like I knew you would."
+I told him about my pains and he examined me.
+"What's wrong?" i asked, anxiously.
+"There's a chance you're threatening to abort."
+"What? " i practically screamed.
+"There's a chance that you're going to abort."
+"I don't want no abortion," i cried out.
+"It's probably the best course you could take now, and I'd
+recommend it. But that's not what I was talking about. I said that
+there was a chance you could spontaneously abort, have a miscar­
+riage."
+"Oh no ! " i moaned. "What are you going to do ?"
+"Relax. It's probably nothing serious. It's nothing much to
+worry about. "
+"What do you mean, nothing much to worry about. I want this
+baby. "
+"Well, I can't force you to d o anything, but m y advice i s to
+have an abortion. It will be better for you and for everyone else."
+"I don't want nobody's abortion. But what are you going to do
+about this miscarriage thing? Isn't there something you can give me
+to keep me from having a miscarriage ? Isn't there something that i
+can take to make sure i don't lose this baby?"
+"No. There's nothing I can do now. We have to wait and see
+what happens."
+"What do you mean, wait and see what happens ? If i have a
+miscarriage, then it will be too late. Can't you call a gynecologist ?"
+"No. There's nothing I can do right now. "
+"You mean there's nothing you will do right now, don't you ?"
+"Take i t any way you want to."
+"Won't you at least call a gynecologist in to see me? You're not
+a specialist in this area."
+"I don't need you to tell me what my specialties are," he said
+angrily. "It would be best for everybody concerned if you have an
+abortion, no matter which way you have it."
+"Just who is everybody concerned ?"
+"Don't you worry about it. My advice to you is that you
+should go to your cell and lie down. Just lie down and rest your
+mind. Just lie down and stay off your feet. And if you go to the
+bathroom and see a lump in the toilet, don't flush it. It's your
+baby. "
+I raced out of his office and, when i got t o m y cell, i lay o n the
+cot crying. I was worried to death. As far as i could see, they were
+
+out to kill my baby. I couldn't lose this baby now, not now. It was
+meant to be; this baby was our hope. Our hope for the future. I
+tried to calm myself. I didn't want the baby to feel my anguish.
+Finally, i fell asleep.
+The next morning, i waited anxiously for Evelyn and Ray
+Brown. Ray came first. I told him what had happened.
+"Please," i begged, "get a doctor we can trust to see me today."
+"I'll try to get one as soon as I can," Ray assured me. "I'll have
+to make some phone calls and then I've got to talk to the j udge.
+He's having a fit, you know. He wants to resume the trial today.
+Don't worry, everything is going to be all right."
+Ray and Evelyn came back in about an hour. "Don't worry,"
+they told me, "the trial has been postponed until there is a report
+from our doctor. The j udge has permitted you to be examined by
+your own gynecologist, and he's coming this afternoon, so cheer
+up." They did their best to take my mind off everything and to
+make me feel better. That day i felt worse than ever before.
+"Is the doctor Black ?"
+"No, he's a Ku Klux Klan doctor," Ray Brown joked. I felt like
+my insides were going to drop out on the floor at any minute. Ray
+went outside to meet the doctor and came back followed by a tall,
+brown-skinned man. The man sure as hell didn't look like no
+doctor. He looked like Mr. Superfly himself. He had on a long fur
+coat, a j umpsuit, and platform shoes. But when i looked into his
+face, i was reassured. He was kind and very self-assured. He was
+gentle when he examined me and i was truly grateful. He asked a
+whole lot of questions in a careful, painstaking manner. I was really
+impressed.
+"Would you tell me your name again?" i asked him, ashamed
+that i had forgotten it.
+"Sure. That's an easy order. Ernest Wyman Garrett." He prac­
+ticed in Newark and there was an air of Newark about him. I liked
+him instantly. He was one of those rare breed of Black professionals
+who haven't lost contact with the masses of Black people. He didn't
+have one trace of the affected bourgie speech and mannerisms that
+are so popular among the Black middle class.
+I waited nervously for the verdict. "There's no doubt about it.
+You're pregnant. But I found blood in the vaginal canal, which can
+be a sign that something is wrong. There's a possibility that you are
+threatening to abort. This doesn't mean that you are going to have a
+miscarriage. The chances are good that you won't. The odds and
+medical statistics are in your favor.
+He explained the different possibilities and the treatment he
+
+ASSATA
+
+I2 7
+
+ASSATA
+I28
+
+was prescribing. I asked a million questions and, when he left, felt a
+whole lot better, just knowing there was someone i could trust
+taking care of me and the baby.
+The days that followed are blurry in my mind. Most of the time
+i slept. The warden and the sheriff and the powers that were didn't
+like the idea of my having my own doctor, though. In their minds,
+the butcher, jailhouse-quackhouse doctor was good enough for me.
+And the fact that Dr. Garrett was Black infuriated them. They
+refused to let him examine me unless a white doctor, hired by the
+state, was present, and for the report to the judge, the white doctor
+had to examine me. Fortunately, he agreed with my doctor's find­
+ings. There was a lot of activity going on around me that I didn't
+understand. I was too out of it to try. I could see, though, that
+Evelyn and Ray were worried. I wanted to help them, to get to the
+bottom of what was happening, but i just didn't have the energy.
+About two days after his first visit, Dr. Garrett came to visit
+me. When he finished examining me, he said, "Assata, I don't want
+to worry you, but I think you should be hospitalized. It's nothing
+serious, strictly a precautionary measure. You're in no condition to
+proceed with a trial. You need a few weeks of complete bedrest.
+There is a possibility the judge will try to push you into that trial
+right away, without regard for your medical condition. Assata, there
+is no way we are going to let that happen. I am prepared to fight all
+the way for your right as a human being to receive decent medical
+care and for your baby to be born healthy. I'm doing the same for
+you as I would for any other patient. You should be hospitalized.
+There isn't a responsible doctor in the world who wouldn't agree
+with that opinion. And I'm prepared to testify in any court that to
+deny you proper medical care would be tantamount to committing
+murder. I will be going, in a very short time, to give a medical
+report about your condition to the judge. I will do my best to
+convince him of the seriousness of this matter. I think he'll listen to
+reason. I'm sure the judge will go along with the findings of two
+board-certified gynecologists. But if worse comes to worst, and the
+judge denies our motion, I will see to it personally that this j ail and
+the courtroom are surrounded by the right-to-life people by tomor­
+row morning."
+I was too shot out to say much more than thank you. I was
+scared to death for my baby, but i knew that everything that could
+be done was being done and that was a load off my mind. I got
+dressed and waited for them to come and take me to kourt. I
+wanted to hear what was going on. When they didn't come for me, i
+became worried. What was going on ? Why weren't they bringing
+
+me to kourt? Why were they taking so long? What were they going
+to do ? Were they going to try to make me go to trial like this ? What
+were they planning to do?
+Evelyn and Ray came in strutting and beaming. I knew every­
+thing was going to be all right. "What happened? Why didn't they
+bring me to kourt?"
+"You're too sick to go to court." Evelyn laughed. "Haven't you
+heard that they don't let pregnant women into court? They figure
+it's a disease and are afraid everybody will catch it. We felt it was
+much better for you not to be moved. It went fine. They'll be taking
+you to a hospital as soon as they can make the arrangements. Dr.
+Garrett did a great job. After that speech, there was no way the
+judge was gonna force you to go to trial in your condition. The trial
+has been severed and Sundiata will go on with the trial alone."
+"What?" i exclaimed. "But we had agreed that we would be
+tried together. Why can't they wait until i'm better?"
+"Now, Assata, you know they're not gonna wait for you to
+have your baby to try Sundiata. They claim that being here in
+Morristown is costing them a fortune."
+"It will be cheaper to try us together," i said. "Well, can't i at
+least see Sundiata and say good-bye to him?"
+"We'll try," they said, "but we doubt if there will be time or if
+the sheriff will consent to it."
+"I'm going to miss Sundiata."
+"Yes. We know. "
+Later they put me on a stretcher and wheeled me into an
+ambulance. "Don't worry," i told the baby, "you're gonna be all
+right. "
+
+ASSATA
+
+I29
+
+ASSATA
+
+I3 0
+
+LOVE
+
+Love is contraband in Hell,
+cause love is an acid
+that eats away bars.
+But you, me, and tomorrow
+hold hands and make vows
+that struggle will multiply.
+The hacksaw has two blades.
+The shotgun has two barrels.
+We are pregnant with freedom.
+We are a conspiracy.
+
+Chapter 8
+
+fter the Village, i lived with
+Evelyn on 80th Street between Amsterdam and Co­
+lumbus in Manhattan. She had a garden apartment in
+a brownstone. Nothing grew in the garden but weeds,
+and it was where our neighbors threw their garbage.
+The apartment was one big room that we used for
+sleeping, eating, and living; it had a kitchen and a
+bathroom with an old-fashioned toilet up on a plat­
+form and an overhead tank so that you had to pull on
+a little chain to flush it. Evelyn always referred to it as
+the dump. She had it fixed up nicely, but it was just too
+small for two people, especially if one of them was me.
+I was a slob, and Evelyn went to great pains to train
+me in neatness. In a small place like that, when just a
+few things are out of place it looks like a hurricane
+passed through. And many times after a long day's
+work, poor Evelyn would be greeted with a hurricane,
+a tornado, and an earthquake at the same time. Grad­
+ually, i learned to keep things in something vaguely
+resembling order.
+The neighborhood, for me, was exciting, full of
+character and different flavors. Central Park and
+Riverside Park were nearby, and i immediately fell in
+love with both of them. Then, also, there were plenty
+of museums nearby; i spent hour upon hour in the
+Museum of Natural History chld the Metropolitan
+Museum of Art. They were free then, and full of fas­
+cinating things. There were all kinds of stores for me
+to explore and examine, even though most of the time
+i didn't have any money. I was delighted with it all.
+And it was my first clear glimpse of the hierarchy of
+amerikan society.
+Eightieth Street, like many of the nearby streets,
+
+I3 I
+
+ASSATA
+
+I) 2
+
+was changing. Most of the changing, however, had taken place
+before i got there. Most of the Germans had moved out and Blacks
+and Puerto Ricans were moving in. Evelyn told me that when she
+moved there it was so safe she had slept, in the summer, with the
+back door open and just the screen door latched. On 80th Street
+there might be three, four, five, or more people huddled into a one­
+room apartment. Sometimes the apartments were rented furnished
+with nothing but an old saggy bed, a chest of drawers, and a beat­
+up refrigerator and stove. You could usually tell them from the
+outside by the paper-thin plastic curtains shimmying in the wind.
+Most of the people on 8 0th Street were poor, although here and
+there were a few renovated apartments that catered to a clientele
+that was a little richer, usually "night people."
+Seventy-ninth Street was directly behind us, but there was a
+world of difference between the two . It was an upper-middle-class
+street. Doctors and lawyers and a lot of performers lived there.
+Every day after school, i would hear an opera singer practicing.
+Maybe that's why i developed a profound dislike for opera. The
+people on 79th Street wouldn't dream of socializing with the
+people on 80th Street. They recognized our existence with a mix­
+ture of amusement, fear, and dislike. Eighty-first Street between
+Central Park West and Columbus Avenue was even richer. The
+lobbies were elegant and the doormen were splendidly attired. They
+were, for the most part, all white and not even slightly aware of the
+people who lived only a block away.
+Farther over, toward the river, near West End Avenue or River­
+side Drive, there was a middle-class neighborhood. The buildings
+were usually old, grandiose, and well kept. The people who lived
+there were mostly white, of course, with a few Blacks and mixed
+couples thrown in. The Upper West Side, as the neighborhood was
+called, was supposed to be a "liberal" stronghold. I have never
+really understood exactly what a "liberal" is, though, since i have
+heard "liberals" express every conceivable opinion on every conceiv­
+able subject. As far as i can tell, you have the extreme right, who are
+fascist, racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right
+out and let you know where they're coming from. And on the
+opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed
+to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between
+those two points is the liberal. As far as i'm concerned, "liberal" is
+the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown
+me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on
+the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private
+schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then
+
+'"
+
+they are "liberals." But when times get hard and money gets tight,
+they pull off that liberal mask and you think you're talking to Adolf
+Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long
+as they can maintain their own privileges.
+Sometimes i walked over to the East Side, on the other side of
+Central Park. If Riverside Drive was like another city, then the East
+Side was like another world. English nannies pushed fancy baby
+carriages (they called them trams) through the eastern side of
+Central Park. The only Black people you saw were servants or, like
+me, those just passing through. Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, chauf­
+feur-driven cars, diamonds, and furs. The Upper East Side was for
+the sho nuff rich. When i'd walk through those streets, some
+looked at me as if i was an object from a museum or something.
+Once or twice, a doorman actually stopped me and asked where i
+was going. But i kept walking and looking. Sometimes, i'd have
+some fun and walk into one of the stores. I couldn't believe there
+were people who paid that kind of money for things. As soon as i'd
+step in, the salespeople were right on me. Sometimes i said i was
+just looking. Other times i would ask for outrageous things, like
+pickled feet. Usually, they would say, "What? What? What?" and i
+would burst out laughing. One time, i went into a grocery store and
+was asked who my mistress was.
+I was always crazy about art and made it a point to visit any
+art gallery i discovered. Sometimes they acted snooty or disgusted.
+At first, i felt uneasy and out of place. But after a while, whenever
+they acted disgusted, i made a point of asking the price of each
+piece. They would turn so red and swell up so much that it was
+comical. I remember hating some of those people, but at the same
+time i wanted to be rich like them. Back then, i thought being rich
+was the solution to everything.
+Four blocks from where we lived, there was still another world:
+84th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. Before it was torn
+down, it was voted the worst block in the city. When i was a kid, i
+never would have imagined that people could live so bad. Living in
+some of those apartments was like living in a coffin. I swear, there
+was one building that, when you walked past it in the summer, it
+stunk so bad it made you want to drop to your knees. Usually, i'd
+just sit on some stoop and watch the street. There was always
+something going on. Men standing around with do-rags on their
+"
+heads, covering greasy process hairdos, making deals, laughing and
+talking and looking at the women passing by. Drunks and fights
+and drunken fights. The street was always alive and swarming with
+people. Survival and life were hanging out in the open like laundry
+
+ASSATA
+I3 3
+
+ASSATA
+
+I3 4
+
+for everyone to see. Arguments, dirty deals, misery, and malice ran
+out into the streets like pus from open sores. There was something
+horrible and foreboding about the street, yet exciting at the same
+time.
+Lil-Bit, who went to my school, lived on 84th Street. Her
+nickname was Lil-Bit, but i called her Fruit-fly because she was
+crazy about fruit. I liked to hang out with her because she was a
+good walker; we could walk for hours without getting tired. One
+day she asked me to come with her to get something from her
+house. When we got there i couldn't believe it. I thought i had seen
+some messed-up cribs before, but hers took the cake. She lived in a
+tiny little pea-green closet of a room, covered with wall-to-wall
+roaches. I just kept staring at Lil-Bit. She walked around in that
+horror house like it was normal. She didn't even try to kill the
+roaches. She just brushed them aside if they got in her way. When i
+left, i itched and scratched for hours.
+When i met Lil-Bit's mother and started getting to know her
+and some of her neighbors, i got my first lesson in hopelessness.
+Lil-Bit's mother used to work in factories and laundries as a presser.
+But she burned her hand real bad and was on some kind of
+disability. She lived from day to day and from check to check. She
+was always sick, and sometimes her cough was so bad i thought she
+was going to die any minute. She acted like she was too tired or too
+weak to do much of anything. They had a hot plate, but most of the
+time they didn't even cook. They just ate sandwiches, usually lunch
+meat on white bread. Lil-Bit's mother never went anywhere except
+to the clinic or to the welfare office or to the bar on Amsterdam.
+Sometimes she would get drunk and start crying about some man
+she used to go with. She didn't know anything about what was
+going on in the world and she didn't seem to care. Eighty-fourth
+Street was her world and other worlds didn't really exist. When i
+was with Lil-bit and her mother i felt all kinds of things. Sometimes
+disgust and anger because they accepted anything and lived any old
+kind of way. Other times i felt sorry for them, and, still other times,
+i relaxed and enjoyed them because they were so easy and down to
+earth. But whenever i hung out with them it was down on the
+stoop. I would never go up into that house.
+Evelyn kept my excursions at a bare minimum, though. She
+was strict and didn't play around. Every day, after school, i had to
+be in the house by four o'clock, and she would call home just to see
+that i had arrived safely. Evelyn didn't want me in the street too
+much because she said the neighborhood was bad and she didn't
+want me to get in any trouble. And she also wanted me to stay at
+
+home and do my homework. After homework, i read. I have never
+been too fond of television and, besides, Evelyn had an excellent
+library. Those books were like food to me. Fiction and poetry were
+my favorites, although i liked history and psychology, too. I also
+liked to read about other countries and about all the different
+religions in the world. The only books i never touched were
+Evelyn's law books. They were dry and boring and Greek to me.
+Evelyn was a store of knowledge and she knew about a whole
+range of subjects. We were always discussing or debating some­
+thing. Hanging out with Evelyn, i started to think that i was cool
+and sophisticated and grown up and that i knew it all. You couldn't
+tell me nothing. I was just too cool. Evelyn and i went to museums
+and art galleries and the theater. On Broadway, off Broadway, she
+was turning me on to so many things. I started to view movies as an
+art form instead of just entertainment. I was learning what and how
+to order at restaurants. And my vocabulary and control of the
+English language were expanding greatly.
+But life with Evelyn definitely had its ups and downs. Some­
+times we got along famously and other times it was terrible. Evelyn
+was super-honest and she just could not tolerate my lying. I would
+try to tell the truth and try to be honest, but sometimes, especially
+if i was in a tight situation, i would lie. I had been in the habit of
+lying and it was easy for me to fall back into the old pattern. But it
+was futile to lie to Evelyn because she was a lawyer and would
+cross-examine me until i would inevitably trip myself up. Little by
+little, i got out of the habit, but it was a long and constant battle
+between us.
+Our financial situation also had its ups and downs. One week
+we were "rich" and the next week we were "poor." Evelyn was
+determined to be a trial lawyer and to be in private practice. Most
+of her clients were Black and poor and most of the time they didn't
+have money to pay her. But Evelyn would defend them anyway. She
+was always up in arms about some injustice or other. I used to call
+her the "last angry woman." But whenever somebody did pay her,
+we were "rich." We would go out and celebrate. For a week or so
+we ate steaks and lamb chops, went to restaurants, took taxis; the
+next week we would be right back to riding subways and eating
+hamburgers. Evelyn was generous and extravagant, and she had
+absolutely no head for business. I usually did the shopping for us
+since i was more tight-fisted and practical. Once in a whil;, i'd be
+tempted to give myself a "five-finger discount," but Evelyn was so
+honest that it rubbed off on me. I was becoming so goody-goody i
+couldn't stand myself. I really underwent a great change.
+
+ASSATA
+I3 5
+
+ASSATA
+
+I3 6
+
+Evelyn had great plans for my future. I was going to Junior
+High School 44, but Evelyn wasn't satisfied with the education i
+was receiving. J. H. S. 44 wasn't a bad school, but we were learning
+at a much slower pace than at my school in Queens. I don't
+remember too much about the school except for the music classes.
+Most of the class was Black or Puerto Rican and we all loved music.
+But we hated music class with a passion. The teacher talked to us as
+though we were inferior savages, incapable of appreciating the finer
+things in life. She lectured about symphonies and concertos and
+sonatas and the like in a snooty voice. A boy would mimic the
+gestures and expressions of the teacher and the rest of us would
+giggle and snicker as she played music. The teacher became more
+and more exasperated, saying, "Listen ! Can't you listen ? Don't you
+have ears? Can't you appreciate anything? I'm trying to get you to
+appreciate music and you all act as though you're deaf. I want you
+to stop talking! I want you to stop talking and listen ! Do you hear
+me ? " We got louder and louder and the teacher became more and
+more disgusted. She would scream at us and call us names like
+hooligans and ignoramuses. And we returned her insults.
+We hated her because she thought the music she liked was so
+superior. She didn't recognize that we had our own music and that
+we loved music. For her, there was no other music except Bach and
+Beethoven and Mozart. To her, we were uncultured and uncouth.
+For her, Latin music, jazz, rhythm and blues were trashy and we
+were trash. She was a racist who would have denied it to the bitter
+end. A lot of people don't know how many ways racism can
+manifest itself and in how many ways people fight against it. When
+i think of how racist, how Eurocentric our so-called education in
+amerika is, it staggers my mind. And when i think back to some of
+those kids who were labeled "troublemakers" and "problem stu­
+dents," i realize that many of them were unsung heroes who fought
+to maintain some sense of dignity and self-worth.
+Evelyn strongly "suggested" that i enter Cathedral High
+School in the ninth grade. I was not at all happy about the idea
+since i hated wearing a uniform and Catholic schools had a reputa­
+tion for being so strict. But Evelyn kept on strongly suggesting and
+i got the message. I didn't mind the Catholic religious part of it,
+though, since i was going to mass regularly and i was kind of holy,
+holy that year. I took the test for Cathedral and passed, and it was
+firm that i was going to enter Cathedral the next September. I even
+started to feel happy about it. It was a change and i have always
+been a person who likes a change of scenery.
+I usually spent my weekends with one of my girlfriends or
+
+with my mother as much as possible. Toni was cool to hang out
+with and she knew where all the parties were. But we never had
+deep conversations so we never got really close. Bonnie and i met
+through Toni and began what was to be a best-friend relationship
+with an argument about Abraham Lincoln. We argued for hours
+until Bonnie's aunt told us to shut up and go to bed, since neither
+of us knew what we were talking about. Bonnie lived in the same
+building my mother lived in, and after that night we became close
+friends and talked about every subject on earth. Bonnie knew more
+than i did about what was happening in the world and we spent
+hours talking about Medgar Evers, sit-ins, freedom riders, etc. We
+began to write poetry about love and Black people, and sometimes
+we wrote morbid poetry about hate and death. As soon as we
+finished a poem we'd call each other and read it. After a while, we
+read poetry together. Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay
+were our idols. We read everything they wrote and even memorized
+their poems. After that, we read all different kinds of poets. We
+were "deep" and were forever in the library or a bookstore trying to
+find another poet who was "deep," too. The more we read, the
+more we wrote. And it came in handy in the street. If we didn't like
+somebody, or if we had some dispute with someone, we wrote a
+poem about them. We made up all kinds of "dozens" poems and
+laughed our heads off. We were young and old, happy and sad at
+the same time.
+Usually, every summer, i went down South to visit my grand­
+parents. When they had the business on the beach, i loved it. But
+they had lost two different buildings on the beach, both destroyed
+by hurricanes. After the last one was leveled, they operated a
+restaurant on Red Cross Street. I liked working in the restaurant
+sometimes, but it wasn't as much fun as working on the beach.
+One of the last summers that i spent down South, the NAACP
+rented a building a few doors from my grandparents' restaurant,
+which was a great source of interest to me. I was forever walking by,
+standing in the doorway, or sliding discreetly into the building to
+see what was going on. I could hear them talk about integrating the
+South by sitting in, praying in, singing in, and about nonviolence. I
+was glad because i surely wanted segregation to end. I had grown
+up exposed to the degrading, dehumanizing side of segregation. I
+remember that when we traveled from North to South and vice
+versa we really felt the sting of segregation more acutely than at
+other times. We'd drive hours without being able to stop adywhere.
+Sometimes we would pull into a filthy old gas station, buy gas, and
+then be told that we were not permitted to use their filthy old
+
+ASSATA
+
+I3 7
+
+ASSATA
+
+bathroom because we were Black. 1 can remember clearly squatting
+in the bushes with mosquitoes biting my bare buttocks, and my
+grandmother handing me toilet paper, because we could not find a
+place with a "colored" bathroom. Sometimes we were hungry, but
+there was no place to eat. Other times we were sleepy and there was
+no hotel or motel that would admit us. If i sit and add up all the
+"colored" toilets and drinking fountains in my life and all of the
+back-of-the-buses or the Jim Crow railway cars or the places i
+couldn't go, it adds up to one great ball of anger.
+And so, when i saw these NAACP people, i was ready to do
+whatever it was that they were going to do. But they were very
+confusing. One day i was hanging around in the office and two men
+were talking about nonviolence and self-control. Then he walked
+around the room asking everybody questions.
+"What would you do if they pushed you ?"
+"Nothing. I'd j ust keep on doing what i came to do."
+"What would you d o if they kicked you?"
+"I'd pray to the Lord to forgive them for their sins."
+"What would you do if they spit on you?"
+"I'd just go on singing."
+Well , that was just too much for me. I could take someone
+pushing me, hitting me, kicking me, but to sit there and let some
+craka dog spit on me, well, just the idea of it made me want to
+fight. To me, if someone spit on you, it was worse than hitting you,
+especially if they spit in your face. I tried to tell myself that i would
+just sit there and take it, but every muscle in my body, every instinct
+i had, rebelled against it. The man continued around the room
+asking everybody the same questions. When he came to me, 1
+answered the same, too, except for the spitting question.
+"I don't know," i told him.
+"What do you mean, you don't know?"
+"I just don't know."
+"Well, little sister, we can see that you're just not ready. If you
+want your freedom, there's no sacrifice that's too big to make."
+Everybody looked at me as if i was some kind of stupid idiot. 1
+felt bad, but i still couldn't get used to the idea of letting somebody
+spit on me. The man said i wasn't ready, and i had to agree with
+him.
+When i think back to those days, i feel such admiration and
+respect for the spirit of struggle and sacrifice that my people ex­
+hibited. They went up against white mobs, water hoses, vicious
+dogs, the Ku Klux Klan, trigger-happy nightstick-wielding police,
+armed only with their belief in j ustice and their desire for freedom.
+
+I remember how i felt in those days. I wanted to be an amer­
+ikan j ust like any other amerikan. I wanted a piece of amerika's
+apple pie. I believed we could get our freedom just by appealing to
+the consciences of white people. I believed that the North was really
+interested in integration and civil rights and equal rights. I used to
+go around saying "our country," "our president," "our govern­
+ment." When the national anthem was played or the pledge of
+allegiance spoken, i stood at attention and felt proud. I don't know
+what in the hell i was feeling proud about, but i felt the juice of
+patriotism running through my blood.
+I believed that if the South could only be like the North, then
+everything would be all right. I believed that we Black people were
+really making progress and that the government, the president, the
+supreme kourt, and the congress were behind us, so we couldn't go
+wrong. I believed that integration was really the solution to our
+problems. I believed that if white people could go to school with us,
+live next to us, work next to us, they would see that we were really
+good people and would stop being prejudiced against us. I believed
+that amerika was really a good country, like my teachers said in
+school, "the greatest country on the face of the earth." I grew up
+believing that stuff. Really believing it. And, now, twenty-odd years
+later, it seems like a bad joke.
+Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their
+freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were
+oppressing them. Once you study and really get a good under­
+standing of the way the system in the United States works, then you
+see, without a doubt, that the civil rights movement never had a
+chance of succeeding. White people, whether they are from the
+North or from the South, whether it was in 1960 or 1980, benefit
+from the oppression of Black people. Those who believe that the
+president or the vice-president and the congress and the supreme
+kourt run this country are sadly mistaken. The almighty dollar is
+king; those who have the most money control the country and,
+through campaign contributions, buy and sell presidents, con­
+gressmen, and judges, the ones who pass the laws and enforce the
+laws that benefit their benefactors.
+The rich have always used racism to maintain power. To hate
+someone, to discriminate against them, and to attack them because
+of their racial characteristics is one of the most primitive, reaction­
+ary, ignorant ways of thinking that exists.
+A war between the races would help nobody and free nobody
+and should be avoided at all costs. But a one-sided race wa. with
+Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is
+
+ASSATA
+
+I 39
+
+ASSATA
+
+worse. We will be criminally negligent, however, if we do not deal
+with racism and racist violence, and if we do not prepare to defend
+ourselves against it.
+
+STRANGER
+
+Everything you love
+is from a different world.
+Hungry,
+you turn your nose up
+at my peas and rice.
+
+Chapter 9
+
+was taken to Roosevelt Hospital in
+Metuchen, new jersey, and shackled to the bed by my
+foot. Dr. Garrett had established that i was one month
+pregnant. When he visited me he demanded that the
+shackles be removed at once (based on the elementary
+principle that proper treatment, both mental and
+physical, of a woman threatening miscarriage would
+not seem to include being chained to a bedpost). My
+mental stability was also threatened by the round-the­
+clock guards who sat outside my hospital room with
+shotguns trained at my head.
+After ten days, i was discharged from the hospital
+over the objections of my doctor, brought to the mid­
+dlesex county j ail for men, and kept in solitary con­
+finement from February 1 974 until May 1 974.
+At first, they wouldn't even give me milk. Since
+pork was served as a staple meat almost daily, i began
+to slowly starve. (In county jails it goes like this: one
+sheet, one horse blanket, a metal cup ; your cell is
+raided if you have luxuries, like salt.) They did every­
+thing they could to thwart the care Dr. Garrett was
+trying to give me. They hired their own doctor and
+insisted that whenever my doctor saw me, their man
+had to be present. This meant a severe limitation on
+the number of visits Dr. Garrett could arrange because
+their doctor happened often "not to make it" out to
+the prison on the days examinations had been agreed
+to and scheduled.
+My lawyers had initiated a lawsuit against the
+state of new jersey in federal court charging medical
+maltreatment and dietary abuse. Before the date the
+hearing was scheduled, i was extradited to the State of
+New York, which made the federal court action moot.
+
+I4 I
+
+ASSATA
+
+When i arrived at Rikers Island again, i was anemic and mal­
+nourished, according to my entrance physical. New jersey had
+been giving me iron pills, but i was anemic up to the last blood test
+before giving birth.
+The pregnancy, or "special," diet at Rikers, in addition to the
+regular food, was powdered milk, juice, and a hard-boiled egg
+daily. This was my diet until i gave birth, and things seemed to go
+normally.
+Meanwhile, the lawyers obtained another court order from the
+New York court permitting Dr. Garrett to continue treating me.
+When he first came to Rikers, i was in the infirmary. They told him
+the court order was "no good" and that he couldn't see me. I was
+left in a room for three days with a woman who turned out later to
+have active tuberculosis. It was May and they had turned the heat
+off. It got cold again and women who were having seizures, meth­
+adone withdrawal, and one sister who they said had pneumonia all
+piled blankets on their beds. The sister got worse and worse.
+Finally, they brought her to Elmhurst Hospital where they dis­
+covered she did have tuberculosis. I found this out later, when she
+was returned to Rikers, kept in isolation, and the doctors wore
+masks and gloves when they visited her.
+I also had monilia, a vaginal discharge, which worsened be­
+cause the Montefiore Hospital doctors assigned to Rikers could not
+agree about how it should be treated. They refused to treat the
+condition at all until my culture was returned from Elmhurst Hos­
+pital. By the time they managed to get the culture back, the whole
+inside of my thigh was chapped raw from the discharge, and i could
+barely walk.
+Montefiore Hospital and the Health and Hospital Corpora­
+tion went to court to prevent Dr. Garrett from delivering my baby.
+Their position was that since i was a prisoner it was not necessary
+for me to have the doctor of my choice. They also said he was
+"disruptive" because, when he did manage to see me, he "often
+wrote in my chart," which they found very disturbing. The kourt
+upheld them. I was only a prisoner!
+I went into labor the morning of September 1 0, 1974, at 4
+A.M. on 2 Main at Rikers, where i had been kept in the psycho
+ward. I got out of bed, took a shower, braided my hair, and packed.
+My labor was mild, a pinch every half hour, which rapidly became
+a pinch every fifteen minutes. At 1 1 A.M. i was sure i was on my way,
+but i had no doctor to confirm it, and i refused to go to the
+infirmary. Around noon i asked to call Dr. Garrett and they some­
+how got hold of him. (He was at Elmhurst Hospital trying to
+
+persuade them to let him deliver my baby. ) At about 3 P.M., he
+arrived at Rikers and i went up to the infirmary to meet him. He
+told me that i was "effaced" and definitely in labor. I would not
+allow the other doctors there to examine me.
+I was taken to Elmhurst Hospital in a motorcade. It looked to
+me like a million police cars buzzing around the vehicle in which i,
+a woman in labor, was riding. And they all followed. Into Elmhurst
+Hospital and up to the delivery room. They surrounded the hospi­
+tal.
+There was a demonstration outside of Elmhurst Hospital in
+support of my right to choose the doctor who would deliver my
+baby, and Evelyn and Dr. Garrett held a press conference at the
+hospital to explain the situation. There were actually two po­
+licewomen inside the labor room and several outside. I was having
+contractions every five minutes. Finally, i let one of their doctors, a
+resident, examine me to see how the labor was progressing-which
+turned out to be a terrible mistake. When he finished, i was
+bleeding. After that, there was no way I would let any of them touch
+me again. I ordered them to bring me a stethoscope (to see if the
+baby's heart was beating normally) and a few other instruments i
+would need because, i said, "I am delivering the baby myself."
+It was a standoff for a couple of hours. Then a nurse told me to
+walk around to ease the pain and encourage labor. I got up, then
+pretended to fall out (knowing how afraid they were of lawsuits),
+and the doctors rushed over to pick me off the floor. I knew they
+were worried. I stated again, "I am delivering the baby myself." I
+checked the baby's heart with the stethoscope. It was beating
+normally.
+That, or the press conference, or the demonstration outside of
+the building seemed to do it. They told me that if i signed a release
+statement absolving them of all responsibility, they would let Dr.
+Garrett deliver my baby. I signed, making certain that they had no
+control over Dr. Garrett or over anything having to do with my
+labor. And that was that.
+He took over. He examined me, listened to the baby's heart,
+and, at some point, broke my water. He explained carefully every­
+thing that would happen and answered all my questions. He gave
+me a local anesthetic in the cervix. I didn't want Demerol or a
+saddle block, but the paracervical block seemed O.K. At this point
+i was very tired.
+After that i was still in labor but felt little pain. I went to sleep
+for a while. I woke up about 3 :30 A.M. and i could feel the baby
+lowering and thought i could feel the baby's head. I called the
+
+ASSATA
+
+I4 3
+
+ASSATA
+I44
+
+nurse. She said, without looking, that i wasn't "ready" yet. When i
+insisted, she looked and went running for Dr. Garrett. They
+wheeled me into delivery, he gave me a local anesthetic, and did the
+episiotomy. I pushed three times and she was here. At 4:00 A.M.,
+Kakuya Amala Olugbala Shakur was born. I said, "Check that
+baby out" (just to ensure her subsequent safety). The birth itself
+was peaceful and beautiful-out of sight. It's very important for a
+woman to go through the birth experience with people she trusts.
+Later that day, September 1 1 , they still hadn't brought me the
+baby. Dr. Garrett had gone home to sleep and, when he returned, at
+6 P.M. that day, i still hadn't seen the baby. He reminded them that i
+was supposed to breastfeed her. They told him he hadn't "written a
+prescription" for breastfeeding. Finally, they brought me the baby
+and i breastfed her every four hours-another incredibly beautiful
+experience. The nurses from the nursery were very friendly and
+kind and kept me informed about the baby's condition. But the
+staff in D-l l , the psycho ward where i was kept in a tiny, guarded
+room, were something else again.
+They allowed me only one shower a day. No toothbrush or
+toothpaste, only mouthwash. They don't furnish it, a friend can't
+bring it, and the prison won't allow it. I had to beg them for a bra
+while i was nursing. The prison refused to let me bring one. Many
+strange doctors tried to examine me to hasten my discharge and
+get rid of me. I came close to physically brawling with a couple of
+them because i refused their examinations. Finally, they discharged
+me anyway, without the consent of my doctor. The Commissioner
+of Corrections, Benjamin Malcolm, had signed a paper taking all
+responsibility for my discharge.
+They put me in an ambulance, chained me to a stretcher, and
+brought me back to the Women's House of Detention at Rikers
+Island. They took me straight to the infirmary and said, "You will
+have to stay here and be examined." I was really depressed, having
+been separated so abruptly from my baby. I said, "I don't want to
+be here. I won't be examined here. Send me to PSA [punitive
+segregation area: solitary confinement], anywhere. I don't care. I
+just have to be somewhere by myself. Just leave me alone."
+That's not quite what they did. When i refused examination, i
+walked out of the infirmary and they called the goon squad (several
+large female officers). They all jumped on me and started beating
+me. They had me on the floor--eventually my arms and legs were
+chained. They dragged me by the chains to PSA and stopped only
+when a nurse asked them to please stop. So they put me on a
+mattress and dragged the mattress. They took me to the observa-
+
+tion room and left me, hands and feet cuffed. I had no sanitary
+napkins, no means to wash myself. The cuffs cut into my skin (the
+scars are still visible), and my wrists were bleeding. Later i found
+out that i had received an infraction for slapping an officer in the
+face while they were beating me.
+I still refused their medical examination. They finally brought
+me napkins. I was left on a mattress, on the floor, no bed and no
+shower. I was there for two weeks. I continued to refuse all their
+medical attention, insisting that Dr. Garrett examine me. I refused
+to eat, so eventually my breasts, which were full of milk, stopped
+hurting. They offered doctors of all kinds and drugs (mainly tran­
+quilizers). They sent the psychiatrist, who had the nerve to ask me
+if i was depressed. The Disciplinary Board met in front of my cell
+and gave me an additional sentence of fourteen days in PSA. All
+other inmates were cleared out of PSA. During this time i was still
+refusing most food. I was so weak i fainted a couple of times. At
+that time it was also Ramadan, when it is forbidden to eat until
+sundown for the whole two weeks. I j ust ate once a day, when the
+food was edible, and for the first few days I ate nothing at all.
+After two weeks, they said, "If you agree to be vaginally
+searched, you can go to your floor." I did and went to my floor. The
+next day the captain came down to my cell and informed me that
+they had decided to lock me up again for refusing a complete
+physical from the medical staff assigned to Rikers from Montefiore
+Hospital. What had happened was that when i was returned to my
+floor they told me that Dr. Garrett had been permitted to examine
+me and that he was at Rikers Island, that my lawyer had gone to
+court and the court had ruled that i could be examined by Dr.
+Garrett. So i waited. A white doctor came in and said in order for
+me to see my doctor, i must see him and be examined by him first. I
+refused. Then they brought in a Black doctor, who greeted me with,
+"Hey, soul sister. " He was really sneaky. I refused him, too. So Dr.
+Garrett was forced to leave and I was put back in PSA. They
+threatened me with administrative segregation, so i sat on the floor
+and refused to move when my sentence in PSA was up. They gave
+me an infraction and a verbal reprimand and said the vaginal
+search would be sufficient. Then the next day they locked me up
+agam.
+This time, i was locked in my cell for a month. I continued to
+refuse most food. They let me out to shower whenever they felt like
+it. I began a hunger strike at one point, and after a few days in the
+tiny cell i was sick. I wondered how long i would have to hold out.
+Evelyn had filed a writ of habeas corpus before the brooklyn
+
+ASSATA
+
+I45
+
+ASSATA
+
+federal kourt against Commissioner Malcolm and Essie Murph,
+superintendent of the Women's House of Detention on Rikers, to
+force them to release me from punitive segregation. I was to appear
+in kourt for the hearing, but I didn't know the date. Then a deputy
+told me, "Your court date's been postponed. And your lawyer sends
+her advice: see a doctor." It was a lie. But I believed it. I was
+examined by the prison doctors under what I thought was Evelyn's
+advice.
+So i was no longer locked. Just in j ail. And separated from my
+child.
+
+LEFTOVERS-WHAT I S LEFT
+
+After the bars and the gates
+and the degradation,
+What is left?
+After the lock ins and the lock outs
+and the lock ups,
+What is left?
+I mean, after the chains that get entangled
+
+in the grey of one's matter,
+After the bars that get stuck
+in the hearts of men and women,
+What is left?
+After the tears and disappointments,
+After the lonely isolation,
+After the cut wrist and the heavy noose,
+What is left?
+I mean, like, after the commissary kisses
+
+and the get-your-shit-off blues,
+After the hustler has been hustled,
+What is left?
+After the murderburgers and the goon squads
+and the tear gas,
+After the bulls and the bull pens
+and the bull shit,
+What is left?
+Like, after you know that god
+can't be trusted,
+After you know that the shrink
+is a pusher,
+
+that the word is a whip
+and the badge is a bullet,
+What is left?
+After you know that the dead
+are still walking,
+After you realize that silence
+is talking,
+that outside and inside
+are just an illusion,
+What is left?
+I mean, like, where is the sun?
+Where are her arms and
+where are her kisses ?
+There are lip-prints on my pillow­
+i am searching.
+What is left?
+I mean, like, nothing is standstill
+and nothing is abstract.
+The wing of a butterfly
+can't take flight.
+The foot on my neck is part
+of a body.
+The song that i sing is part
+of an echo.
+What is left?
+I mean, like, love is specific.
+Is my mind a machine gun?
+Is my heart a hacksaw?
+Can i make freedom real ? Yeah !
+What is left?
+I am at the top and bottom
+of a lower-archy.
+I am an earth lover
+from way back.
+I am in love with
+losers and laughter.
+I am in love with
+freedom and children.
+Love is my sword
+and truth is my compass.
+What is left?
+
+ASSATA
+
+I4 7
+
+Chapter 1 0
+
+I4 8
+
+he next several years of high school passed
+uneventfully. Because i was spending weekends with
+my mother, we became closer. During my seventeenth
+year, however, i decided to quit school, get a job, and
+live on my own.
+My entrance into the working world was a rude
+awakening. I didn't even know what most of the want
+ads meant. Auditor, copywriter, accounts receivable,
+key punch operator were all foreign words to me.
+Every day i hit the pavement with my best "office­
+looking" clothes on and a pair of high-heel torture
+shoes. Every day i came home more frustrated than the
+day before. I didn't know how to do anything, had no
+experience, and was Black to boot. Finally, i paid some
+employment agency one or two weeks' salary for the
+privilege of getting me one of those dingy, boring,
+$95 -dollar-a-week jobs. I was one of those slaves
+where you pay a fifth of your salary for taxes, some
+more for social security, another $5 a month for union
+dues, and the rest was not even enough to die on.
+It seemed that the whole world was made up of
+things i couldn't afford. After i paid the rent on my
+furnished room, spent carfare, and bought food, i had
+just enough money to buy an air sandwich. The only
+saving grace was that i didn't have too much time to
+hang out. I was going to night school, so i would leave
+my boring job and go to boring night school to di­
+agram sentences, memorize garbage, and prepare for a
+high school diploma that meant nothing in the job
+market. My life was being spent pushing around
+meaningless papers that had nothing to do with liv­
+ing. I wasn't doing anything positive. I wasn't making
+anything, creating anything, or contributing to anything. After a while, i wanted to tell them to take their
+
+papers and their job and shove it.
+But at first i wasn't like that. After weeks of looking for a job, i
+was grateful just to have one. I didn't think about low pay, indecent
+working conditions, no medical benefits, only one week vacation. I
+was just happy to be working. I identified with the job and talked
+about "our" company and told people what "we" manufactured. I
+wasn't making two cents over lunch money and talked like i owned
+the place. I remember once i was working at some joint where they
+made trailers. I had a job pushing papers. I told one of my aunt's
+friends that she should buy one of those trailers if she ever wanted
+one. She looked at me like i was crazy. "Why ?" she asked. "Are they
+going to give me a discount?" I felt so stupid. It hit me. They
+wouldn't even give me a discount and i was working there.
+The longer i worked at those places, the shorter my patience
+got. Half the time i didn't even want to hear that rinky-dink stuff
+they talked about at the office. I got sick of listening to gossip about
+the bosses and this and that and who was messing with who. After
+a while, i stayed pretty much to myself, and when i wasn't busy i
+would stick a book between some pages and read. That was back in
+the mid-sixties and papers were filled with stories about riots.
+At the time, i really didn't know what to think about the riots.
+The only thing i can remember thinking was that i wanted to see
+the rioters win. In the office there was a group of secretaries who
+worked for the president or the vice-presidents. They looked down
+on those of us who worked in the general office and treated us like
+we were nothing. One day, i was in the bathroom and one secretary
+came in. She was spraying hair spray on a puffed-up French roll that
+was so hard it looked like it had been baked on. She began talking
+about this and that. I was surprised because she never talked to me.
+Then she started about the riots, "what a shame it was" that "those
+people" were so stupid and dumb for rioting because they were just
+tearing up their own neighborhoods and burning down their own
+houses. I didn't say anything. She prodded: "I said, isn't it a
+shame? Isn't it?" I didn't know what to say. It was true that Black
+people were burning down Black neighborhoods, but i didn't know
+how to deal with the question. She kept insisting. Finally, i said,
+"Yes," and walked out.
+I was disgusted with myself. I hadn't wanted to agree with her,
+but i didn't know what else to say. I spent half the night thinking
+until i felt i had the answer. A few days later, the subject came up
+again. This time the whole bunch of front-office secretaries, who
+were friendly with the office manager, came into the general office.
+Before they had a chance to get any words out after "riot," i was on
+
+ASSATA
+I 49
+
+ASSATA
+
+IS O
+
+their case. "What do you mean, they're burning down their houses?
+They don't own those houses. They don't own those stores. I'm
+glad they burned down those stores because those stores were
+robbing them in the first place !" They stood with their mouths
+open.
+After that, the office manager went out of her way to hassle
+me. Miscellaneous whites began to ask my opinion about the riots,
+and i made sure they weren't disappointed. I knew it wouldn't be
+long before they fired me. The only reason i didn't quit was that i
+had nowhere to go and nothing else lined up. When i was finally
+fired, i was relieved.
+Because my girlfriend Bonnie and i read a lot of fiction and poetry,
+we thought we were intellectuals. Neither of us had finished high
+school, but we used to go to this place on Broadway called the West
+End, dressed in what we believed to be our scholastic finery. It was
+one of those real college-type places, with pastrami sandwiches and
+pitchers of dark beer. We sat around trying to look "deep" until
+someone sat down and talked to us. After a while, we made friends
+with some African students who were studying at Columbia.
+I loved to listen to the Africans. They were intense, serious, and
+had so much dignity. I was introduced to African customs, and they
+spent hours explaining the various aspects of their cultures. Bonnie
+asked about their marriage ceremonies because she was dying to
+get married. I asked about the food because i loved it: curried
+chicken, groundnut stew (chicken in peanut sauce), and corn bread
+that you cook over the stove. You would break off a little piece, roll
+it into a ball, dip your thumb in the middle and make a spoon that
+you would fill with gravy and eat. It really made me think about
+how bad they've done us. We know everything about spaghetti and
+egg rolls and crepes suzette, but we don't know the first thing about
+our own food. When i was a little kid, if you had asked me what
+Africans ate, i would have answered, "People !"
+One day, Vietnam came up. It was around 1 964 and the
+movement against the war had not yet blown up in full force.
+Someone asked me what i thought. I didn't have the faintest idea.
+Back then, the only thing i read in the papers was the headlines,
+crime stories, comics, or the horoscope. I said, "It's �ll right, i
+guess." All of a sudden there was complete silence. "Would you
+mind explaining, sister, what you mean by 'it's all right, i guess' ?"
+The brother's voice was mocking. I said something like "You know,
+the war we're fighting over there, you know, for democracy. " It was
+clear, from the expressions around me, that i had said the wrong
+
+thing. The brother i had come with looked like he wanted to crawl
+under the floor. "Who's fighting for democracy?" somebody asked.
+"We are. The United States." And then, as an afterthought, i added,
+"You know, they're over there fighting communism. Fighting for
+democracy." The brother held his head in his hands as if he had a
+headache. I knew i had said something wrong, but i couldn't figure
+out what. Thinking i had failed to state my case strongly enough, i
+continued repeating everything i had heard on television. Babbling.
+Which only made matters worse.
+When i finished, the brother asked me if i knew anything
+about the history of Vietnam. I didn't. He told me. He explained
+French colonialization, exploitation, brutalization, the starvation
+and illiteracy; the long fight waged and won in the North and the
+u.s. involvement in propping up a phony government after the
+French got their butts kicked.
+The brother was talking about names, places, and events just
+like he was from Vietnam or something. I sat there with my mouth
+hanging open. He knew all this stuff and he wasn't even studying
+history. I couldn't believe that this African, who didn't even live in
+the u.s. or in Asia, could know more than me who had friends and
+neighbors who were fighting over there.
+Then he defined the u.s. government's role, that it was fighting
+for money, to defend the interests of u.s. corporations and to
+establish military bases. I didn't know whether to believe him or
+not. I had never heard of such a thing. "What about democracy?" i
+asked him. "Don't you believe in democracy ?" Yes, he said, but the
+government the u.s. was supporting was not a democracy but a
+bloodthirsty dictatorship. He started running all kinds of names
+and dates on me and there was no way i could respond. There he
+was, talking about the u.s. government just like somebody would
+talk about a criminal. I just couldn't relate to it. But my mind was
+blown.
+Despite that, i continued saying the first thing that came into
+my head: that the u.s. was fighting communists because they
+wanted to take over everything. When someone asked me what
+communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i
+didn't have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from
+a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat
+pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we
+were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they
+weren't free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one
+owned anything. The Africans rolled with laughter.
+I felt like a bona fide clown. One of them explained that
+
+ASSATA
+I5 I
+
+ASSATA
+I5 2
+
+communism was a political-economic system, but i wasn't listen­
+ing. I was just digging on myself. I had been hooping and hollering
+about something that i didn't even understand. I knew i didn't
+know what the hell communism was, and yet i'd been dead set
+against it. Just like when you're a little kid and they get you to
+believe in the bogeyman. You don't know what the hell the
+bogeyman is, but you hate him and you're scared of him.
+I never forgot that day. We're taught at such an early age to be
+against the communists, yet most of us don't have the faintest idea
+what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who
+his enemy is. I started remembering all the stupid stuff people told
+me when i was little. "Don't trust West Indians because they'll stab
+you in the back." "Don't trust Africans because they think they are
+better than we are." "Don't hang out with Puerto Ricans because
+they all stick together and will gang up on you."
+I had learned, through experience, that they were all lies told
+by stupid people, but i never thought i could be so easily tricked
+into being against something i didn't understand. It's got to be one
+of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your
+enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your
+enemies for you.
+After that, i began to read about what was happening in
+Vietnam. What the Africans had said was true. There were also
+articles about the u.s. army in Vietnam, their involvement in tor­
+ture and forcing Vietnamese women to sell their bodies j ust to
+survive.
+I was so confused. It just didn't make any sense to me. "Our
+government couldn't do anything that bad," i told Bonnie. There
+had to be some other information. I couldn't even understand what
+"we" were doing there in the first place. Some kind of treaty, they
+said, but it didn't make any sense. I got so disgusted at one point
+that i said i wasn't going to read the news anymore.
+"Ignorance is bliss," Bonnie said.
+"The hell it is," i answered. I damn sure didn't want to be as
+ignorant as i had been. When you don't know what's going on in
+the world you're at a definite disadvantage. I decided i 'd keep trying
+to follow what was happening, but i still couldn't believe the u.s.
+was doing all the foul things i was reading in the newspapers.
+"What do you mean, you don't believe it?" Bonnie asked. "Just
+take a look at what they're doing to you."
+The difference between the Africans and the other friends i
+hung out with that summer was startling. I remember one day at
+the beach. Everybody is hee-hee happy. It's party time. A multi-
+
+colored umbrella stands defiantly against the breeze. Blankets and
+silly-looking beach towels color the beach, along with soda cans
+and bottles of Bacardi and Johnnie Walker Black. Healthy-looking
+Black men, wearing turned-down sailor hats and college sweat­
+shirts with cutoff sleeves, lug ice chests and other stuff back and
+forth. An improvised outdoor sound system has been hooked up
+and Martha and the Vandellas are wailing in the background.
+I am insisting on reading James Baldwin even though the wind
+keeps flapping the pages. Anguished voices scream and moan from
+the pages. Compressed ghettos threaten to explode. Poverty and fire
+and brimstone boil over into a deadly stew, but the "beautiful"
+people refuse to let me read in peace. My girlfriend has insisted on
+"fixing me up" with "Mr. Wonderful," who turns out to be an
+egomaniac decked out in monogrammed swimming trunks, a
+matching terrycloth robe, and a monogrammed towel to boot. Mr.
+Wonderful consents to grace me with his presence. His looks and
+manner tell me that i should be grateful because he is definitely
+what's happening. His ride is a red MG convertible, his crib is in
+Esplanade Gardens, and his gig is an assistant manager for some
+bank downtown. He is kool from his reel-to-reel tapedeck to his
+color TV, right down to his shaggy "bachelor rug," which he
+leeringly tells me about.
+He drinks Remy Martin cognac and Harvey's Bristol Cream,
+uses a cologne i can't pronounce, and i wait, expectantly, for him to
+tell me his brand of toothpaste. He goes on and on about his
+trinkets and status symbols. "Look at this monogrammed mother­
+fucker," i think to myself. He is smug and insinuating. A Black
+version of "Bachelor Knows Best," or some such thing. I want to go
+back to James Baldwin, but i am surrounded by a group of people
+that talk too loud, looking and thinking somewhat like Mr. Won­
+derful. They are talking about Karmann Ghias, Porsches, Cor­
+vettes, and other cars that are deemed "in."
+The conversation drifts on to co-ops and high-rise apartment
+complexes. A young man, who has mentioned more than once that
+he is an accountant, tells us the benefits of buying "property" on
+the Island. An insurance salesman says that he sells insurance out
+on the Island and pulls some business cards out of a little silver­
+colored case which he "just happens to have handy" in his beach
+bag. A redheaded schoolteacher who has eyes for the accountant
+says that she has always wanted a house on the Island with a big
+kitchen. After talk about the Island has exhausted itself, the con­
+versation turns to places to go. French and Mexican restaurants are
+definitely "in," with a restaurant that sells fifty different kinds of
+
+ASSATA
+
+IS3
+
+ASSATA
+I 54
+
+crepes winning hands down. One of the men, who is a poverty
+pimp, says that he has moved his offices to the Red Rooster bar and
+restaurant. Somebody laughingly asks if he isn't afraid to go into
+Harlem "with all them niggas." Everybody has some favorite res­
+taurant on top of some building downtown. They don't talk about
+the food, just the scenery. Mr. Wonderful says he has a Playboy key
+and often eats at the Playboy Club.
+I smile uneasily, feeling out of place. All this talk is giving me a
+headache. Some fraternity brothers invite me to dance. One tells me
+that i look like a Delta girl. "How does a Delta girl look ?" i ask.
+"Just like you in a swimsuit." Mr. Wonderful glares at them. I am
+picking up snatches of conversation from all around me. Talks of
+grants, poverty programs, and democratic politics. Talk of the
+NFL, and the football season. Talk of Bergdorf Goodman, Bloom­
+ingdale'S, and Saks Fifth Avenue. About speedboats and cruisers
+which nobody owns but everybody wants to.
+Whiskey flows like water, and the speedboats turn into yachts.
+Everybody is just crazy about the islands: Jamaica, Bermuda,
+Nassau. Everybody is so chic. I'm so tired of hearing about it that I
+want to send them somewhere by way of foot-mine ! It's a disgrace.
+Social workers talking about their clients like dogs, teachers who
+don't like to teach. A probation officer complaining about how
+dangerous his job is. A bunch of money-worshipers putting on a
+front for each other. Somebody asks me if i have my thing together.
+"Which thing?" i want to know. I take a walk up to the house to get
+away from it all. Some women are in the bathroom smoking reefer
+and blowing their hair dry. I go fishing in my bag for some aspirin.
+"Where'd you buy your suit?" one asks me. I don't want to say
+Klein's, but i say it anyway. "They have some nice things, some­
+times," she says without conviction, dismissing me as a bargain
+basement case. They go back to talking about people and hair
+going back. They are putting on makeup to look like Black Barbie
+dolls on the beach.
+I go back outside feeling like i'm from another planet. I feel
+lonely and serious. Something has been happening to me, a change
+that has been a long time coming. I want to be real. Am i the only
+bad-doing, hand-to-mouth, barely-making-it Black woman there?
+The struggle i 've been going through and the struggle i 've been
+seeing is too hard to lie about and i don't even want to try. I want to
+help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people
+behind. I don't want to style and profile in front of nobody. I want
+somebody i can relate to and talk about serious shit with.
+This party is a lost cause. I get my beach towel and my book
+
+and ease on down the beach a little piece. Looking out at the ocean,
+i wonder how many of our people lie buried there, slaves of another
+era. I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what
+it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder. I get back off into
+James Baldwin. I don't give a damn if Sag Harbor sags into
+oblivion. Me and James Baldwin are communicating. His fiction is
+more real than this reality.
+My patience was zero. I didn't want to wait for something to
+happen. I was into living and living for now. I was hungry, starving
+for life, but at the same time i was growing more and more cynical
+every day. I wanted to go everywhere, do everything, and be every­
+thing, all at the same time. I wanted to experience everything, know
+how everything felt. I had many zigzag conflicting ideas rolling
+around in my head at the same time. One day i was happy just to be
+alive and young and moving. The next day i felt like the world was
+coming to an end. Everything in my life was jagged, sharp, un­
+finished edges. Nothing happened calmly. Nothing was like i had
+thought it would be when i was little.
+My friends were dying from OD and going into the army. My
+girlfriends had babies and were looking and sounding old. Nice old
+men sitting in the park weren't nice old men at all but were busy
+masturbating under their newspapers. I got so i didn't believe in
+anything. It seemed that everybody was in some kind of bag, the
+dope bag, the whiskey brown paper bag, the j esus bag, the love
+bag, the sex bag, the make-it bag, and none of those bags were
+doing anybody any good. I was looking for my own bag, but the
+pickings were slim. I kept on looking nevertheless, running and
+moving and hanging out until i was running myself ragged. One
+day i'd be downtown hanging out with my hippy, blippy (Black
+hippy) friends. The next night i'd be uptown hanging out with the
+hustlers. But nothing seemed like it was for real, you know ? The
+same dudes who would be talking slick and sniffing coke out of
+$50 bills one day would be scrounging and begging for a loan the
+next. Even the most successful hustlers seemed to be nothing but
+flunkies and potential fall guys for the mafia. My friends from
+downtown weren't much better. At best, most of them were profes­
+sional escape artists, into escaping the problems of the Black com­
+munity or those of the white community. Some of them tried to
+escape through drugs, tripping over worlds that didn't exist on
+some kind of inner-space odyssey. But in their case, the drugs were
+usually not entirely self-destructive, although i know at least one
+who zoomed dead out of this world and didn't come back.
+
+ASSATA
+I 55
+
+ASSATA
+
+Through my hippy/blippy friends, i got turned on to a lot of things,
+though. I got into poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Fer­
+linghetti, all kinds of novelists, music, food, etc. I didn't relate to
+everything i checked out, but my horizons got a whole lot broader.
+My growing impatience with petty bourgeois upward-bound
+"Negroes" came to a head when i went to work with a Black
+employment agency. Evelyn had gotten me a job there as a typist.
+The agency was located in Rockafella Center in the same building
+with Johnson Publications, the publishers of Ebony and Jet maga­
+zines. I was happy as hell to get the job since i was tired of working
+for white people. The people in the office were nice and the at­
+mosphere was completely lacking in tension. The boss was decent
+enough, and i had a pretty good relationship with him and his
+secretary, under whom i worked. At first i was excited, glad to be
+around so many Black people who seemed to be doing so good.
+Everybody was into making it, moving up the ladder. Black men
+and women with long lists of degrees, and briefcases, were in and
+out of the place. They were sharp, dressed to a tee, and talking
+about junior executive training programs, poverty programs, etc.
+Some of them talked about those companies as if they were going
+to be the president of the board of directors in five years.
+Once in a while i went to lunch with a young man who
+worked at Johnson Publications. But we always got into arguments.
+Especially about Ebony magazine. Half the time, in the fashion
+section they would have these elaborate evening gowns that cost
+thousands of dollars. When i asked him what Black people could
+afford to buy them and whether they were gonna wear them to the
+corner bar, he got insulted. He was one of those Black people who
+think that you are free if you can go in a store and buy expensive
+things. I told him that the only Black woman who could afford
+those dresses was johnson's wife, and he got even more insulted. He
+told me that everything was changing, everything was so much
+better. I said that if things were so much better, how come every
+time a Black person got a good job or was a manager or something,
+it was news and was printed in Ebony. Our relationship ended
+abruptly when he accused me of always trying to bring Black
+people down and make it seem like we don't have nothing. I ended
+the matter by cursing him out and that was that.
+These Black people went around acting as if there was no such
+thing as prejudice and that all you had to do was study and you
+could be president of the world. At the agency, we were working
+hard for an equal opportunity conference. The idea was to have
+Black college graduates from all over the country participate in
+
+interviews with representatives from the major corporations in
+amerika. Almost all of the big corporations were involved, and the
+graduates paid a substantial fee, plus transportation and hotel fees,
+to participate in the conference. It worked like this: students made
+out resumes and the corporate personnel officers decided which
+applicants they wanted to see. It was a big, plush affair in a major
+New York hotel, with the penthouse suite and quite a few lower
+floors rented out to the conferencp• 1 just knew that hundreds of
+these young, "qualified" Black people were going to get jobs. 1 was
+proud to have helped bring the conference about. It lasted a few
+days, and by the time it was over, i was ready to go somewhere and
+have a good cry.
+Some of those Black graduates had spent hundreds of dollars
+to come to the conference and didn't have one interview. The only
+graduates the corporations even wanted to see were math, science,
+engineering, and business majors. Some corporations only wanted
+to interview graduates in very specialized categories, like petroleum
+engineering or geological engineering. Since most had majored in
+subjects like English, history, sociology, etc., they were out of the
+running from the j ump.
+1 was shocked and upset. After the conference, i went out with
+one of the Black "executives" i had met in the agency. "I don't
+understand it," i kept telling him. "Why would those companies
+pay all that money to participate in the conference if they aren't
+really interested in hiring anybody? It doesn't make any sense."
+"It makes a lot of sense, if you think about it."
+"Huh ? 1 don't understand."
+"Listen," he went on, "the government says that in order for
+those companies to keep their contracts, they have to at least make
+an effort to look for 'qualified Black personnel.' The law doesn't
+say they have to hire anybody. The law says they've only got to
+look."
+1 was furious. They had used poor dumb me just like they use
+a drug dealer to conspire against his own people. 1 was part of the
+plot and i didn't even know it. There were some Blacks who got
+jobs, but mainly the thing was a sham, to make things look good
+on paper. My friend and i got stupidly drunk, singing oldies by the
+Sherrills on Lexington Avenue, he telling me about what bastards
+the bosses were and about the trials and treacheries of the demo­
+cratic party machine and telling me how i was gonna get another
+job as a go-go dancer in the ladies' room.
+About a week later, i made up a resume, described myself as a
+college graduate, and was hired as a marketing assistant. 1 didn't
+
+ASSATA
+
+I5 7
+
+ASSATA
+IS 8
+
+believe in anything, and i wasn't gonna follow anyone's rules but
+my own. I got fired from that job a couple of weeks later, got
+another college job, and got fired from that too. I didn't care. I was
+going to deal with them just like they dealt with us. One time i got
+a job as a bookkeeper. I didn't know the first thing about it, but
+after i got the job i bought a couple of "bookkeeping made easy"
+books and when i didn't understand something I told them that we
+used a different system at the last place i worked.
+The job involved a lot of cash and i had to be bonded. When
+you get bonded, they do a background check on you. The job
+wasn't too bad, and the boss was cool. It was an excellent way to
+learn bookkeeping and the insurance business. I knew they would
+fire me as soon as the report came in, but i didn't care. One day, my
+boss threw a detective's report on my desk. It had my name on it. I
+swallowed hard, knowing it was my last day. The more i read it, the
+more surprised i became. The report verified everything i had said:
+"Subject attended such and such high school," subject . . . gradu­
+ated from such and such college," "subject worked at such and
+such places." They even reported that i lived on a quiet tree-lined
+street and that they had talked to my neighbors and learned that i
+was a nice person. I cracked up all the way home. Everything is a lie
+in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people
+believe the lie.
+But my patience was getting shorter and my temper was terri­
+ble. I was quick to tell people what i thought of them, and even i
+was surprised by my bluntness. Bonnie kept telling me, "Slow
+down, you're speeding, somebody's gonna give you a ticket." She
+was almost as restless and crazy as i was. We would check out
+things happening and make a joke of them. The world seemed to
+be so big and fixed and we couldn't think of anything to change it.
+Bonnie encouraged me to stop lying about going to college and go
+for real. "If you're smart enough to fool them, then you're smart
+enough to play their game." I knew that what she said made sense,
+but i had hated my last days in high school and had no desire to
+study anything else.
+The only other person who stayed on my case and prodded me
+to go back to school was my friend from Kenya. We had grown to
+be serious friends. And we dug each other much more as friends
+than as lovers. He was studying economics out on Long Island, and
+we didn't get a chance to see each other much. Sometimes on the
+weekend we would hang out together. He was one of the few people
+i knew who was serious about almost everything he did in life and
+whose conversation was not just about his small world but about
+
+the whole world. One weekend we had arranged to hang out. I
+think we were supposed to go and hear somebody play at Count
+Basie's club. My apartment looked like some kind of hurricane had
+hit it, and i was trying to ease out the door without letting him in.
+Somehow he managed to get a glimpse inside. "No, we aren't going
+anywhere," he said. "How can you live like this? If your house
+looks like this i can just imagine what your head looks like."
+I was embarrassed, but i had to admit he was right. I had
+everything thrown every which way, clothes flung all over the place.
+It was a wreck. He suggested that instead of going out he would
+help me clean up and get organized. "You'll be all right if you just
+get yourself organized. You can do almost anything you want as
+long as you organize yourself to do it. " I decided he was right. It
+was time to get my life in some kind of order. It was time to take
+control. Life was like a bus: you could either be a passenger and go
+along for the ride, or you could be the driver. I didn't have the
+foggiest idea where i wanted to go, but i knew that i wanted to
+drive. I decided the first thing i would do was go back to school. I
+returned home to live with my mother in her new apartment in
+Flushing, Queens.
+
+C U LTURE
+
+i must confess that waltzes
+do not move me.
+i have no sympathy
+for symphonies.
+i guess i hummed the Blues
+too early,
+and spent too many midnights
+out wailing to the rain.
+
+ASSATA
+I 59
+
+Chapter 1 1
+
+n July 19, 1 973, while i was still
+at the middlesex county workhouse, i was brought to
+the u.s. district kourt for the eastern district of New
+York in Brooklyn, which has jurisdiction over all
+federal crimes committed in the counties of Brooklyn
+and Queens. I was taken there by federal writ to be
+arraigned on an indictment in which Andrew Jackson
+and i were accused of having robbed a bank in the
+county of Queens on August 23, 1971 . While there
+were a lot of indictments against me all over New York
+State i didn't even know about that summer, this is one
+i surely could not have missed, because the bank sur­
+veillance photo taken of the woman holding up the
+bank with a gun was put on wanted posters that were
+pasted up in every subway station, posted in every
+bank and post office, and blown up in full-page news­
+paper advertisements. They hit the streets on August
+24, 1971, and remained even after my arrest on May
+
+2, 1 973.
+
+I 60
+
+Under the photo was the name Joanne Deborah
+Chesimard. Above the photo were the words
+" WANTED FOR BANK ROBBERY : $ 1 0,000 re­
+ward."
+After the feds took a mug shot of me and fin­
+gerprinted me, i was arraigned, pled not guilty, and
+was returned to the workhouse on the same day. I
+heard nothing further about this indictment until Jan­
+uary 1 , 1 975, when the feds brought me back to the
+eastern district kourt. Only this time it was to have me
+photographed.
+The prosecutor has made a motion to have me
+photographed in the same angle, wearing the same
+kind of glasses, wig, and dress as the woman who had
+
+been photographed by the bank cameras during the robbery. The ASSATA
+judge, a notorious, racist pig, is sure to grant the motion. I have
+I 6I
+decided to refuse. As far as i am concerned, the reasons are obvious. You put anybody in a monkey suit and they're gonna end up
+looking like a monkey. Besides, someone had told me about some
+trick the FBI uses. They take a photo of you in the same angle as the
+bank photo and superimpose a transparency of the bank photo
+over it. If you are unfortunate enough to have two eyes, a nose, and
+lips, in more or less the same place, you end up looking like the
+bank robber, no matter what you really look like. When i was
+arraigned i had permitted them to take all the photographs of me
+they wanted, and that, as far as i was concerned, was enough.
+We enter the kourtroom. The judge is on the bench. The (.
+kourtroom has been rearranged. FBI agents, with cameras, are
+standing on top of tables. A group of federal marshals are buzzing
+around nervously like flies that smell rot. They are waiting for
+action. Evelyn gets up and says her piece. The judge ignores what
+she is saying and orders me to be photographed. I refuse, stating
+my objections as strongly as i can. In a hot second, the marshals
+and the FBI agents are crawling all over me. They seem to be trying
+to jerk my head off my shoulders. The judge has ordered that i am
+to be photographed, today, now, and that all the force necessary to
+take the pictures in the way the FBI wants to take them is to be
+used.
+The FBI, the marshals, and i end up on the kourtroom floor,
+with me on the bottom. I hear Evelyn in the background. "Let the
+record reflect that the marshals are twisting my client's arms behind
+her back." "Let the record reflect that the marshals are choking my
+client." "Let the record reflect that there are five marshals manhan­
+dling my client." Evelyn goes on and on while the marshals twist
+me, jerk me, strangle me, kick me, and literally try to beat me into
+submission. The assault goes on and on with Evelyn putting it,
+blow by blow, into the record. Finally, it is over. The marshals lead
+me back into the holding pen. I lie on the bench like a rag doll with
+the stuffing hanging out, feeling like i have just been stampeded by
+a herd of buffalo.
+Evelyn comes back for a lawyer's visit. She looks j ust as tired as
+i feel.
+"That was unbelievable," she exclaims. "How's your arm ? Are
+you okay?"
+More or less, i tell her. My body is aching and my bad arm's
+numb. I sit back marveling at how cool Evelyn has been. It dawns
+on me how hard it must have been for her to watch what was
+
+ASSATA
+
+happening and then, calmly, put it into the record. I am amazed at
+her control. She insists that a nurse be called to check me out.
+"Did you hear that shit?" she asks me.
+"Yeah, i heard it."
+"I can't wait for the record to be transcribed. If they don't
+erase it, i think we've got that dumb asshole right on the record. If
+they don't erase it, then we can get the stupid moron off the case."
+Evelyn is looking triumphant and defiant, like she has just put her
+foot up somebody's butt.
+"What the hell are you talking about?" i want to know.
+"Didn't you hear him ? He said, right on the record, that he
+thought you were guilty. He admitted he was prejudiced right on
+the record. Didn't you hear him ?"
+"I'm afraid i was otherwise occupied. What does it mean ?"
+"It means we'll be able to get rid of his stupid ass. Anybody
+else is bound to be better. This judge is out to hang you, and he'll
+go to any limits to try and convict you. If we're forced to go to trial
+in front of him, i'm afraid the only shot we'll have is in an appeals
+court."
+"I sure hope they don't erase the record."
+Evelyn and i sit there speculating on the chances of the record
+being changed. Evelyn thinks the judge is too dumb to even realize
+what he said. I am afraid that the judge will review the transcript
+and then have it changed. Evelyn thinks the judge is too racist and
+too arrogant to be worried about the record. It turns out that she is
+right. She files a motion, based on the transcript, to have the judge
+relieved from the case. After what seems like forever, the judge is
+removed and a new judge is assigned.
+But before i went to trial on this case, the powers-that-be
+decided that i must first be tried on a state kidnapping case in
+brooklyn supreme kourt. I had been accused of kidnapping a drug
+dealer for ransom on December 28, 1 972. Evelyn was my lawyer
+and there were two codefendants. One was Rema Olugbala
+(Melvin Kearney), a member of the Black Liberation Army and well
+known to me. The other codefendant was a young brother by the
+name of Ronald Myers. The pretrial motions were permeated by an
+aura of paranoia. Mine. No one i knew had ever heard of Ronald
+Myers, and no one understood why he had been targeted for this
+particular frame-up. In fact, i wondered if he was some kind of
+plant. It all seemed so strange.
+Finally, we had a joint conference, which was arranged by a
+court order. I asked Rema about Ronald Myers. Rema told me that
+as far as he was concerned, Ron was just a brother who happened
+to have the misfortune of being framed along with us: an un-
+
+suspecting victim. But everything in this case was so strange that i
+couldn't figure it out. A joint legal conference was arranged be­
+tween Ronald Myers, his lawyer, a young Black lawyer by the name
+of James Carroll, Evelyn, and me. Immediately upon seeing this
+brother most of my suspicions disappeared.
+He was nineteen but looked like he was about sixteen. He had
+a quiet, soft, honest manner that i didn't think any police agent
+could feign. He seemed to be just as perplexed and out of it as we
+were. As i listened to him talk, i felt a kind of motherly protec­
+tiveness toward him. We were revolutionaries, supposedly prepared
+for such things. For years we had been preaching about and de­
+nouncing pig conspiracies to kill and imprison Black political
+activists. But looking at this soft-eyed young Black man, the thing
+seemed that much more horrible. Those were very cynical days, and
+we had developed very cynical attitudes to deal with it all. We had
+become masters at telling bitter, angry jokes about justice and
+equality and "democratic freedom." But s �ng this brother
+awakened such a sense of righteous indignation in us so-called
+veterans that we were all bitten by a sudden burst of energy. I pored
+over the discovery material and the police records tirelessly. Rema
+was tense, mysterious, and determined in his manner. We knew that
+the state was out to get us and we were more determined than ever
+not to let them.
+The guards came and tore my cell apart. It was clear they were
+looking for something, standing on chairs, kneeling on all fours;
+they reminded me of bloodhound bitches. They seemed desperate. I
+tried to speculate on what they were looking for. One of the Black
+guards, who was halfway decent, was looking funny at me. Another
+guard, who had always been hostile, looked smug. Shortly after
+they left my cell, i tried to hook up with the wire to see what was
+going on. Finally i got the news. Rema Olugbala was dead. He had
+plunged to his death while trying to escape from the brooklyn
+house of detention. The makeshift rope that he was using to lower
+himself had broken. I felt too numb to do anything. Or say any­
+thing. Some of the sisters helped me piece my cage together. There
+was nothing to say. Another Black man had died trying to be free.
+Everything was boiling up inside me. I had to do something, and
+most of my options seemed absurd.
+It wasn't what i would like to have done. It didn't say half of
+what i wanted to say. But i guess it was the best thing i could have
+done at the moment. I wrote a poem.
+For Rema Olugbala-Youngblood
+They think they killed you.
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+But i saw you yesterday,
+standing with your hands in your pockets
+waiting for the real deal to go down.
+I saw you smiling your "fuck it" smile, blood in your eyes,
+your heart pumping freedom
+Youngblood !
+They think they killed you.
+But i saw you yesterday
+in the playground.
+Black skin, sweaty, shiny,
+hurling your ball bomb into the hoop
+right on target.
+Won't be no game next time
+cause you ain't hardly playing.
+They think they killed you.
+But i saw you yesterday
+with your back against the wall,
+muscles bulging against the chains,
+eyes absorbing truth.
+Lips speaking it.
+Heart learning how to love.
+Head learning who to hate.
+Blood ready to flow
+towards freedom.
+Youngblood !
+Youngbloods ain't got no blood to waste
+in no syringes, on no barroom floors,
+in no strange lands
+delaying other youngbloods' freedom.
+We don't need no tired blood.
+No anemic blood. No blood clots
+in our new body.
+They think they killed you.
+But i saw you yesterday.
+All them youngbloods
+musta gave you a transfusion.
+All that strong blood.
+All that rich blood.
+All that angry blood
+flowing through your veins
+toward tomorrow.
+
+The next time we went to kourt, i winced when i saw the
+empty chairs. Slouching listlessly, i thought about Rema, com-
+
+pletely unaware of what was being said. There was talk about this
+hearing and that hearing and this motion and another and none of
+them made the slightest sense to me. But Evelyn was on the case,
+letting nothing slide by, citing all of her objections "for the record."
+I was bored to death, completely out of it, until the jury selection
+process began.
+There were two prosecutors: one exceedingly ugly lynch mob­
+looking fat guy and another thin, bearded wolfman-looking dude,
+rather on the young side. I don't even remember their names. The
+judge's name was William Thompson, and he was a Black man,
+which surprised me. I guess they assigned the case to him because
+they were so sure we would be convicted and they figured a Black
+judge would, at least, give the illusion of justice. Thompson was
+somewhat of a character, who rarely sat up on the bench but
+constantly walked around the kourtroom. While he clearly could
+not, by any stretch of the imagination, be accused of ruling in our
+favor, and his political career would certainly not have been helped
+by our being acquitted, nevertheless the kourtroom did not have
+that out-and-out lynch-mob atmosphere we usually encountered.
+The jury selection process really stood out in my mind. If
+anyone can write a book about how a Black lawyer can pick a j ury
+and eliminate hostile, racist, prejudiced j urors from the panel, then
+Evelyn is surely the one to write the book. I was fascinated as i
+watched her. She was all honey and pie as she started to voir dire
+the j urors. At first, almost all of the white jurors began by saying
+they had no prejudices. By the time Evelyn finished asking them
+questions, we learned they had no Black friends or neighbors,
+would object to their children marrying a Black person, or had
+referred to Black people as niggers or some other derogatory name.
+After a while, many of the whites asked to be excused before Evelyn
+even asked them any questions. Most of them preferred to be
+excused rather than have their feelings toward Black people, Black
+militants, and Black Panthers questioned and explored. When you
+think about the fact that the average Black defendant on trial gets
+to ask prospective j urors only a few perfunctory questions, you can
+see why so many Black people end up in jail. Even with Evelyn
+putting everything she had into picking the j ury, it was a long uphill
+struggle. But at the end, we managed to get four or five Black
+people on the j ury, a remarkable accomplishment anywhere in
+amerika, except for D.C. The prosecutor even had the nerve to ask
+for extra peremptory challenges so he could bump some of the
+jurors off the panel.
+The hardest thing in the world for me was to keep my mouth
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+I 66
+
+shut in the kourtroom, to sit quietly and suffer silently. Evelyn, well
+aware of that fact, happily consented to my acting as co-counsel.
+Although she remained skeptical about my ability to cross-examine
+major witnesses, she agreed that it would be an excellent idea for
+me to make the opening statement. Finally, after days of writing
+under the dim nightlight in the cell, i delivered it. I was nervous as
+hell, since i have never liked speaking in public, but i tried my best
+to express to the jury some of what i was feeling:
+Judge Thompson, Brothers and Sisters, men and women of the
+jury.
+I have decided to act as co-counsel, and to make this opening
+statement, not because i have any illusions about my legal abilities,
+but, rather, because there are things that i must say to you. I have
+spent many days and nights behind bars thinking about this trial,
+this outrage. And in my own mind, only someone who has been so
+intimately a victim of this madness as i have can do justice to what i
+have to say. And if you think that i am nervous, your senses do not
+deceive you. It is only because i know that this moment can never
+be lived again and that so much depends on it. I have to read»ns
+opening statement to you because i am afraid that if i don't, i will
+forget half of what i have to say. Please try to bear with me.
+This will not be a conventional opening statement. First of all,
+because i am not a lawyer, and what has happened to me, and what
+has happened to Ronald Myers, does not exist in a vacuum. There
+are a long series of events and attitudes that led up to us being here.
+When we were sitting in this courtroom, during the jury selec­
+tion process, i listened to Judge Thompson tell you about the
+amerikan system of justice. He talked about the presumption of
+innocence; he talked about equality and justice. His words were
+like a beautiful dream in a beautiful world. But i have been await­
+ing trial for two and one half years. And justice, in my eyesight, has
+not been the amerikan dream. It has been the amerikan nightmare.
+There was a time when i wanted to believe that there was justice in
+this country. But reality crashed through and shattered all my
+daydreams. While awaiting trial i have earned a Ph.D. in justice or,
+rather, the lack of it.
+I sat next to a pregnant woman who was doing ninety days for
+taking a box of Pampers and watched on TV the pardoning of a
+president who had stolen millions of dollars and who had been
+responsible for the deaths of thousands of human beings. For what?
+For peace with honor? Nixon was pardoned without ever standing
+trial or being found guilty of a crime or spending one day in jail.
+Who else could commit some of the most horrendous, destructive
+crimes in history and get paid 200,000 tax dollars a year? Ford
+stated that he pardoned Nixon because Nixon's family had suffered
+
+enough. Well, what about thousands of families whose sons gave
+their lives in Vietnam? And what about the millions of people who
+have been sentenced at birth to poverty, to live like animals and
+work like dogs. What about the families who have sons and daugh­
+ters in prison, who cannot afford bail or even lawyers for their
+children ? Where is justice for them?
+What kind of justice is this?
+Where the poor go to prison and the rich go free.
+Where witnesses are rented, bought, or bribed.
+Where evidence is made or manufactured.
+Where people are tried not because of any criminal actions but
+because of their political beliefs.
+Where was the justice for men at Attica?
+Where was the justice for Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton,
+Clifford Glover?
+Where was the justice for the Rosenbergs?
+And where is the justice for the Native Amerkftns who we so
+presumptuously call Indians ?
+I am not on trial here because i am a criminal or because i have
+committed a crime. I have never been convicted of a crime in my
+life. Ronald Myers is not on trial because he has committed a crime.
+He was nineteen years old when he turned himself in, after seeing
+his picture in the newspapers. He thought that the police would
+immediately see their mistake. I met Ronald Myers for the first time
+about eight months ago in the lawyers' conference room. It was a
+strange meeting, something i hope i'll never have to go through
+again. I was shocked to see how young he was. And no matter what
+the outcome of this trial, i will always feel a bitterness about what
+has happened to Ronald Myers and what has happened to me.
+I do not think that it's just an accident that we are on trial here.
+This case is just another example of what has been going on in this
+country. Throughout amerika 's history, people have been im­
+prisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal
+acts in order to justify that imprisonment.
+Those who dared to speak out against the injustices in this
+country, both Black and white, have paid dearly for their courage,
+sometimes with their lives. Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael,
+Angela Davis, the Rosenbergs, and Lolita Lebron were all charged
+with crimes because of their political beliefs. Martin Luther King
+went to jail countless times for leading nonviolent demonstrations.
+Why, you are probably asking yourself, would this government
+want to put me or Ronald Myers in jail? In my mind, the answer to
+that is very simple: for the same reason that this government has
+put everyone else in jail who spoke up for freedom, who said give
+me liberty or give me death.
+During the voir dire process, we asked you about the word
+"militant. " There was a reason for that. In the late sixties and the
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+I 68
+
+early seventies, this country was in an upheaval. There was a strong
+people's movement against the war, against racism, in the colleges,
+on the streets, and in the Black and Puerto Rican communities. This
+government, local police agencies, the FBI, and the CIA launched
+an all-out war against people they considered militants. We are only
+finding out now, because of investigations into the FBI and the
+CIA, how extensive and how criminal their methods were and still
+are. In the same way that witches were burned in Salem, this
+government went on a witch-hunt for people they considered "mili­
+tant. "
+Countless numbers of people were either killed or imprisoned.
+The Berrigans, the Chicago 7, the Panther 2 1 , Bobby Seale, and
+thousands of antiwar demonstrators were all victims of this witch­
+hunt justice. Maybe some of you are saying to yourselves, no
+government would do that. Well, all you have to do is check out for
+yourselves the history of this country and to look around and see
+what is going on today. All you have to do is ask yourselves, who
+controls the government? And who are the victims of that control?
+Since you have been in this courtroom you have heard the
+name Black Liberation Army mentioned over and over. Those of
+you in the jury have been questioned as to what you havf read or
+seen on television and what your opinions were about the BLA.
+Most of you have stated that you thought the Black Liberation
+Army was a militant organization. You have said that what you
+have read or heard has come from the establishmentarian media.
+The major TV and radio networks, the Times, the Post,and the
+Daily News. I have read the same articles that you have read. I have
+seen the same news programs that you have seen. When it comes to
+the media, i have learned to believe none of what i hear and half of
+what i see. But i can tell you, if i were just Jane Doe citizen and if i
+did not know better, i would've read those articles and come to the
+same conclusion: that JoAnne Chesimard, Ronald Myers, and all
+other people called militants were a bunch of white-hating, cop­
+hating, gun-toting, crazed, fanatical maniacs-fighting for some
+abstract, misguided cause.
+But one percent of the people in this country control seventy
+percent of the wealth. And it is that one percent, the heads of large
+corporations, who control the policies of the news media and
+determine what you and i hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see
+on television. It is more important for us to think abol:tt where the
+media gets its information. From the police department qr from the
+prosecutor. No major newspaper or television station has ever
+asked my lawyers or myself one question concerning anything.
+People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television
+before they ever see a courtroom. A person who is accused of
+stealing a car becomes an international car theft ring. A man is
+
+accused of participating in a drunken brawl and the headlines read
+"Crazed Maniac Goes Berserk. "
+During the seventies, the media created a front-page headline,
+guaranteed to sell newspapers: the Black Liberation Army. Accord­
+ing to them, the BLA was everywhere. Almost every other thing
+that happened was attributed to the Black Liberation Army. Head­
+lines that are sensational sell newspapers. The media shape public
+opinion and the results are often tragic.
+Before you were sworn as jurors, you were asked about your
+knowledge of what the Black Liberation Army is or what it stands
+for. However, most of you did say you believed that the Black
+Liberation A rmy was a "militant" organization. I would like to
+talk about that for a moment. The Black Liberation Army is not an
+organization: it goes beyond that. It is a concept, a people's move­
+ment, an idea. Many different people have said and done many
+different things in the name of the Black Liberation Army.
+The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions
+in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing,
+massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education.
+The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in
+this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this
+country's prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old
+children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated
+our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of
+our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political,
+social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country.
+And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is
+part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army
+stands for freedom and justice for all people.
+While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for
+the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free
+trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps
+for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of
+people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy,
+and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this
+trial. I do not understand a govern"fent so willing to spend millions
+of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter,
+and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.
+I have read the Declaration of Independence, and i have great
+admiration for this statement:
+"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
+created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
+unalienable R ights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
+pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are
+instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
+of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+destructive of these ends, it is the R ight of the People to alter or
+abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
+on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
+them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "
+These words are especially meaningful in the year of this
+country's bicentennial. I would like to help make this a better world
+for my daughter and for all the children of this world; for all the
+men and women of this world.
+But you understand that the BLA is not on trial here. I am on
+trial here. Ronald Myers is on trial here. And the charge is kidnap­
+ping and armed robbery, where the so-called victim is a drug
+pusher, a seller of heroin, a man called James Freeman.
+We live in New York, and it is impossible not to see the horror,
+the degradation, and the pain associated with heroin addiction.
+Most of you have seen the staggering numbers of young lives
+sucked into oblivion, into walking deaths by the use of drugs. Many
+of you have seen helpless mothers watch their children turn into
+nodding skeletons, whom they can no longer trust. And seen the
+dreams, the potential of a whole generation of youngsters drain
+away, down into the bottomless pit of a needle. And these victims
+also have their victims: the countless number of people who have
+been mugged, burglarized, and robbed by drug-made vampires,
+who care about nothing else but their poison.
+We will show you that James Freeman is a liar. We will show
+you that the other prosecution witnesses are all friends, relatives,
+lovers, or employees ofJames Freeman and that they are liars. You
+will see for yourself that they have conspired and that they have
+been coached.
+Men and women of the jury, human lives are serious matters. I
+have already told you that i have no faith in this system of justice,
+and, believe me, i don't. I have seen too much. If there was such a
+thing as justice, i wouldn 't be here talking to you now. You have
+been chosen to be the representatives ofjustice. You and you alone.
+You have said that you could try this case on the basis of evidence.
+What i am saying now is not evidence. What the prosecutor says is
+not evidence. You may or may not agree with my political beliefs.
+They are not on trial here. I have only brought them up to help you
+understand the political and emotional context in which this case
+comes before you.
+Although this court considers us peers, many of you have had
+different backgrounds and different learning and life experiences. It
+is important that you understand some of those differences. I only
+ask that you listen carefully. I only ask that you listen, not only to
+what these witnesses say, but to how they say it.
+Our lives are no more precious or no less precious than yours.
+We ask only that you be as open and as fair as you would want us
+to be, were we sitting in the jury box determining your guilt or
+
+innocence. Our lives and the lives that surround us depend on your
+fairness. Thank you.
+
+As the prosecution began its case, one witness after the other
+took the stand. I don't remember how many there were, but they
+were a never-ending parade. The trial was a circus. The carefully
+planned, carefully rehearsed case of the FBI and local New York
+police began to fall apart from the moment the witnesses were
+cross-examined. The prosecution was so desperate to get a convic­
+tion in this case that they resorted to stupid, theatrical devices that
+backfired. One witness, also a drug dealer, hobbled up to the
+witness stand with the "aid" of a cane, looking like he was two
+steps from the grave. When asked about the source of his "injuries,"
+he stated that he had received them several years ago at the time of
+the "kidnapping." Both he and the prosecutor must have forgotten
+that just a few days ago he had bebopped into the kourtroom to
+pick me out in an identification hearing, looking perfectly healthy.
+Under cross-examination, he was forced to admit that he had
+entered the kourtroom just a few days before without any visible
+limp and without the "aid" of his cane. He was the only witness
+who claimed he could positively identify me, because i "had spent
+weekends at his house." But he didn't know the color of my eyes.
+The so-called major witness, James Freeman, the supposed
+"victim," told a real tearjerker about his kidnapping and the forced
+ingestion of drugs during it. The prosecution had lightly glossed
+over the fact that Freeman was a convicted drug dealer. We knew he
+was connected with the FBI in some way, but it was not until he was
+cross-examined by James Carroll, Ronald Myers' lawyer, that the
+real picture of collusion between him and the FBI came out. Free­
+man testified that he was a paid informant for the FBI. When asked
+if he had been paid by the FBI to frame me, he said he "couldn't
+talk about it."
+At the end of the people's case, our motions for a verdict of
+dismissal of the indictment were denied, and we put on our defense.
+Evelyn and Martha Pitts, a good friend of mine, were working
+around the clock. Since we could not afford to pay investigators,
+they did all the leg work. Martha, a registered nurse, investigated
+Freeman's claim of being drugged. Evelyn was running around like
+crazy after kourt was over looking for witnesses to testify. Most of it
+seemed futile to me, since i could not conceive of how one finds
+defense witnesses in a frame-up. By the time we called our first
+witness, Evelyn was looking smug and rubbing her hands together.
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+"We've got their ass this time," she grinned. "They didn't use
+enough dirt to cover their tracks. "
+And they didn't. Records subpoenaed from the state Liquor
+Authority proved that the bar was owned by someone else, not by
+the witness who had testified to be the owner. The real owner
+testified that he had closed the bar before the alleged kidnapping,
+that he had visited it every day during the period of time it has
+hosted the "kidnapping," and had locked the door as he left and
+had given no one permission to use it. The bar had been closed for
+one year before the alleged crime. The irrefutable and obvious
+conclusion was that, in fact, there was no bar, no "scene" of the
+alleged crime, and, therefore, no crime. Subpoenaed medical rec­
+ords and expert medical testimony showed that Freeman's stomach
+contained only a couple of aspirin, hardly supporting his testimony
+that he had been drugged with some drugs he could not identify,
+which he had been forced to swallow and which had left him
+knocked out for several hours.
+Sure enough, on December 8, 1 975 , after four months of trial,
+the jury acquitted Ronald Myers and me.
+
+Chapter 1 2
+
+hen i entered Manhattan
+Community College i fully intended to major in busi­
+ness administration and then graduate into a job in
+marketing or advertising. Instead, i took only one
+business course. History, psychology, and sociology
+interested me more than learning how to sell some­
+body something.
+I had truly lucked up. I had gone back to school
+at a time when struggle and activity were growing,
+when Black consciousness and nationalism were on
+the upswing. I had also lucked up on the school.
+Manhattan Community College had a very high
+percentage of Black and Third World students, more
+than fifty percent. The level of activity was high, both
+on campus and off. The Golden Drums, the Black
+organization on campus, whose president was a prin­
+cipled, disciplined brother named Henry Jackson,
+was pushing for more Black studies courses, Black
+teachers, programs more responsive to the needs of
+Black students, and cultural awareness. They gave all
+kinds of programs on African dancing, drawing, and
+more. By word of mouth or by the bulletin board, we
+were turned on to concerts, plays, poetry readings, etc.
+The Last Poets, a group of young Black poets, knocked
+me out. I had always thought of poetry in a European
+sense, but The Last Poets spoke in African rhythms,
+chanted to the beat of African drums, and talked
+about revolution. When we'd leave their place on
+125th Street-i think it was called the Blue Guerrilla-we'd be so excited and fired up we didn't even
+notice the long subway ride home.
+If i was running myself ragged before i went back
+to school, now i was flying. I was learning and chang-
+
+/
+
+I 73
+
+ASSATA
+I 74
+
+ing every day. Even my image of myself was changing, as well as my
+concept of beauty. One day a friend asked me why i didn't wear my
+hair in an Afro, natural. The thought had honestly never occurred
+to me. In those days, there weren't too many Afros on the set. But
+the more i thought about it, the better it sounded. I had always
+hated frying my hair-burnt ears, a smokey straightening, and the
+stink of your own hair burning. How many nights had i spent
+trying to sleep on curlers, bound with scarves that cut into my head
+like a tourniquet. Afraid to go to the beach, afraid to walk in the
+rain, afraid to make passionate love on hot summer nights if i had
+to get up and go to work in the morning. Afraid my hair would "go
+back." Back to where? Back to the devil or Africa. The permanent
+was even worse: trying to sit calmly while lye was eating its way into
+my brain. Clumps of hair falling out. The hair on your head feeling
+like someone else's.
+And then i became aware of a whole new generation of Black
+women hiding under wigs. Ashamed of their hair-if they had any
+left. It was sad and disgusting. At the time, my hair was conked,
+but the hairdresser said it was "relaxed." To make it natural, i
+literally had to cut the conk off. I cut it myself and then stood
+under the shower for hours melting the conk out. At last, my hair
+was free. On the subway the next day, people stared at me, but my
+friends at school were supportive and encouraging. People are right
+when they say it's not what you have on your head but what you
+have in it. You can be a revolutionary-thinking person and have
+your hair fried up. And you can have an Afro and be a traitor to
+Black people. But for me, how you dress and how you look have
+always reflected what you have to say about yourself. When you
+wear your hair a certain way or when you wear a certain type of
+clothes, you are making a statement about yourself. When you go
+through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will
+look like the hair of another race of people, then you are making a
+statement and the statement is clear. I don't care if it's the curly
+conk, latex locks, or whatever, you're making a statement.
+It was a matter of simple statement for me. This is who i am
+and this is how i like to look. This is what i think is beautiful. You
+can spend a lifetime discovering African-style hairdresses, there are
+so many of them, and so many creative, natural styles yet to be
+invented. For me, it was important not just because of how good it
+made me feel but because of the world in which i lived. In a country
+that is trying to completely negate the image of Black people, that
+constantly tells us we are nothing, our culture is nothing, i felt and
+still feel that we have got to constantly make positive statements
+
+about ourselves. Our desire to be free has got to manitest itseit m
+everything we are and do. We have accepted too much of a negative
+lifestyle and a negative culture and have to consciously act to rid
+ourselves of that negative influence. Maybe in another time, when
+everybody is equal and free, it won't matter how anybody wears
+their hair or dresses or looks. Then there won't be any oppressors
+to mimic or avoid mimicking. But right now i think it's important
+for us to look and feel like strong, proud Black men and women
+who are looking toward Africa for guidance.
+I wasn't in school but a hot minute when a brother in my math
+class told me about the Golden Drums. After a couple of meetings i
+was hooked. They addressed me as sister, were glad to see me at
+meetings, worried about how I was making out in school, and were
+really concerned about me as a person.
+The subject of one of the many lectures scheduled by the
+Drums was about a slave who had plotted and planned and fought
+for his freedom. Right here in amerika. Until then my only knowl­
+edge of the history of Africans in amerika was about George
+Washington Carver making experiments with peanuts and about
+the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman had always been my
+heroine, and she had symbolized everything that was Black resist­
+ance for me. But it had never occurred to me that hundreds of Black
+people had got together to fight for their freedom. The day i found
+out about Nat Turner I was affected so strongly it was physical. I
+was so souped up on adrenalin i could barely contain myself. I
+tore through every book my mother had. Nowhere could i find the
+name Nat Turner.
+I had grown up believing the slaves hadn't fought back. I
+remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in
+school. The teachers made it seem that Black people had nothing to
+do with the official "emancipation" from slavery. White people had
+freed us.
+You couldn't catch me without a book in my hand after that. I
+read everything from J. A. Rogers to Julius Lester. From Sonia
+Sanchez to Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee). I saw plays by Black
+playwrights like Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. It was amazing. A
+whole new world opened up to me. I was also meeting a lot of
+sisters and brothers whose level of consciousness was much higher
+than mine-Black people who had gained knowledge not only by
+reading but by participating in the struggle, who talked about
+Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Cinque, as well as Nat Turner,
+because they had gone out of their way to learn about our history
+and our struggle.
+
+ASSATA
+I 75
+
+ASSATA
+
+Many of us have misconceptions about Black history in amerika.
+What we are taught in the public school system is usually inaccu­
+rate, distorted, and packed full of outright lies. Among the most
+common lies are that Lincoln freed the slaves, that the Civil War
+was fought to free the slaves, and that the history of Black people in
+amerika has consisted of slow but steady progress, that things have
+gotten better, bit by bit. Belief in these myths can cause us to make
+serious mistakes in analyzing our current situation and in planning
+future action.
+Abraham Lincoln was in no way whatsoever a friend of Black
+people. He had little concern for our plight. In his famous reply to
+editor Horace Greeley in August, 1862, he openly stated:
+My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is
+not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without
+freeing any slave, I would do it and if i could save it by freeing some
+and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
+
+Lincoln was elected president in 1 860. Immediately afterward,
+South Carolina had a convention and unanimously voted to with­
+draw from the Union. Before he had even been inaugurated, Flor­
+ida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas followed
+suit. In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1 86 1 , Lincoln said that
+slavery was legal under the constitution and that he had no right
+and no intention to abolish slavery. He further promised to enforce
+the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted Southern slave owners to
+"reclaim" their escaped slaves in Northern states. What the law
+actually did was give any white man with a "certificate of
+ownership" the right to kidnap any "free" Black man, woman, or
+child in the North and force them into slavery. Because of this
+position, Lincoln received a great deal of criticism from Black
+abolitionists. Ford Douglas, a runaway slave who accompanied
+Frederick Douglass on his anti-slavery tours in the West, blasted
+Lincoln's position, saying,
+In regard to the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, Abraham Lincoln
+occupies the same position that the old Whig Party occupied in
+185 2 . . . . Here, then, is Abraham Lincoln in favor of carrying out
+that infamous Fugitive Slave Law, that not only strikes down the
+liberty of every black man in the United States, but virtually the
+liberty of every white man as well, for, under that law, there is not a
+man in this presence who might not be arrested today upon the
+simple testimony of one man, and, after an ex-parte trial, hurried off
+to slavery and to chains.
+
+On April 12, 1 86 1 , Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter,
+South Carolina, thus starting the Civil War. The response of the
+Northerners was electrifying. Millions who had been indifferent or
+lukewarm to the secession of the South jumped on the bandwagon
+to defend the Union. But the enthusiasm was short-lived. They
+already viewed Black workers in the North as competitors for their
+jobs, and the white Northerners, for fear of losing even more jobs
+to the Blacks, refused to enlist in sufficient numbers for the North
+to win the war. When the draft law was enacted, tens of thousands
+of white workers in New York City took to the streets and brutally
+beat and murdered every Black person they could find. It has been
+estimated that between four hundred and a thousand Blacks were
+killed as a result of the so-called New York draft law riots. Draft
+riots and the murder of Blacks also took place in other Northern
+cities.
+Lincoln had originally opposed Blacks fighting in the Civil
+War, stating:
+I admit that slavery is at the root of the rebellion, and at least its sine
+qua non. . . . I will also concede that emancipation would help us in
+Europe. . . . I grant, further, that it would help somewhat at the
+North, though not so much, I fear, as you and those you represent
+imagine . . . . And then, unquestionably, it would weaken the Rebels
+by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance; but I am
+not so sure we could do much with the Blacks. If we were to arm
+them, I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hand of the
+Rebels . (History of the Negro Race in America, Vol. II, p. 265.)
+
+Northern whites were more than happy at the prospect of
+Black people fighting in the war. A popular verse published in the
+newspapers of the day reflected the sentiment of many North­
+erners:
+Some say it is a bumin' shame
+To make the naygurs fight
+An' that the trade 0 ' bein' kilt
+Belongs but to the white;
+But as for me upon me sowl,
+So liberal are we here,
+!'lI let Sambo be murthered in place 0 ' meself
+On every day in the year.
+
+It was not until 1 8 63 that Lincoln in fact issued the Emancipa­
+tion Proclamation. But the document had very little immediate
+
+ASSATA
+
+I 77
+
+ASSATA
+
+effect. It freed slaves only in the Confederate states; the slaves in
+states loyal to the Union remained slaves. Lincoln clearly did not
+believe Black people could live in the u.s. as equal citizens. In the
+Lincoln-Douglas debates, he stated:
+If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do
+as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all
+the slaves and send them to Liberia-to their own native land. But a
+moment's reflection would convince me that, whatever of high hope
+. . . there may be in this, in the long run its sudden execution is
+impossible . . . . What then ? Free them all and keep them among us
+as underlings? It is quite certain that this betters their condition? I
+think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not
+clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free
+them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own
+feelings will not admit of this, and, if mine would, we well know that
+those of the great mass of whites will not.
+
+Lincoln was a firm believer in the massive exportation of Black
+people anywhere. In 1 8 65, at the end of the war, he asked General
+Butler to explore the possibility of using the navy to remove Black
+people to Haiti or to other areas in the Caribbean and South
+America.
+It's also important to understand that the Civil War was not
+fought to free the slaves. It was a war between two economic
+systems, a war for power and control of the u.s. by two separate
+factions of the ruling class: rich, white Southern slave owners and
+rich, white Northern industrialists. The battle was between a plan­
+tation slave economy and an industrial manufacturing economy.
+An industrial revolution was taking place in the years before
+the Civil War. Inventions such as the cotton gin, the telegraph,
+steamships, and steam trains completely changed methods of man­
+ufacturing, transportation, mining, communications, agriculture,
+and trade. The amount of goods produced was no longer deter­
+mined by the number of people working in the process but by the
+capacity of the machines. Amerika was no longer a country that
+produced raw materials for the manufacturing nations in Europe.
+By 1 8 60, the census reports that 1,385,000 people were employed
+in manufacturing and that one-sixth of the whole population was
+directly supported by manufacturing. The number was much
+higher when clerks, transportation workers, and merchants were
+added.
+As manufacturing centers began to grow, European immi­
+grants were imported as a source of cheap labor. More than five
+
+million entered the u.s. between 1 820 and 1 860. Although the
+South had many cotton mills functioning, the factories were small
+and their numbers grew slowly. In 1 850, the value of manufactured
+goods produced in the Northern "free" states was four times the
+output of the Southern "slave" states. And with the rise of industry
+came the rise of economic crisis and the threat of industrial col­
+lapse.
+Even though there had been economic crises in the past,
+people had generally lived on farms and the economic depressions
+didn't create such a great hardship for the masses. But with many
+people living in cities, economic crises meant unemployment and
+no way to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. The first big crash
+came in 1 825, followed by further depressions in 1 829, 1 837,
+1 847, and a severe depression in 1 856. The recession in 1 857
+almost completely destroyed the early labor movement. The poverty
+in Northern and Southern cities was staggering. Rags, filth, squa­
+lor, hunger, and misery were words used to describe the ghettos of
+the 1 800s.
+To solve the problems in industrial cities, many called for
+reforms such as the abolition of debtors' prison, an end to the laws
+that kept white men who did not own property from voting, free
+education, the right to strike, an end to child labor, establishment
+of a ten-hour workday, and granting of land in the West to poor
+people in the cities. Big business proposed the expansion of cap­
+italism and industry to other parts of the country. And this was
+where Northern capitalists clashed with Southern slave owners.
+Northern capitalists wanted new states to enter the Union as
+"free" states. Slave owners wanted new states to enter as "slave"
+states. To maintain a balance of power, the North and the South
+had entered into several compromises. The main one was the
+Missouri Compromise. Northern capitalists were afraid slave
+owners would open factories and produce goods more cheaply
+because they didn't have to pay for labor. White workers were afraid
+of losing their jobs because of slavery. Southern plantation owners,
+of course, wanted the system of slavery to expand across the coun­
+try.
+All the differences between the North and the South were
+economic, not moral. For capitalists to control the economy and
+the political system, the slave system had to be defeated.
+In 1 85 6, the newborn republican party ran Abraham Lincoln,
+a former whig, as their first presidential candidate. He lost. In
+1 8 60, he ran again with a strong, three-point platform:
+
+ASSATA
+
+I 79
+
+/
+
+ASSATA
+
+ISO
+
+1 . To shut slavery out of the territories.
+2. To establish large protective tariffs.
+3. To enact a homestead law giving a medium-size farm free to
+anyone willing to till the land.
+
+The platform was designed to appeal to rich Northern capitalists,
+poor white laborers, farmers, and abolitionists. For only a tiny
+portion of the population was the abolition of slavery a moral issue,
+and the overwhelming majority of the white people who supported
+the abolition of slavery or who fought in the Union's army did so
+because they believed it was in their interests, not for love or
+concern for Black people.
+I was gradually becoming more active. I began to control my life.
+Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellec­
+tual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing
+what the hell was going on in the streets. Theory without practice is
+just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go
+together. I was determined to do both.
+The major way i got hip to things was by listening to people.
+The Black students going to Manhattan Community College be­
+longed to every type of organization. There were Black Muslims,
+Garveyites, Malcolm X's Organization of Afro-American Unity
+(OAAU), members of various community and cultural organiza­
+tions, and a few who were young turks of the NAACP. We got
+together and talked about everything under the sun. I did a whole
+lot more listening than talking, but i asked questions about any­
+thing i didn't understand. Sometimes the discussions and debates
+got so heated that they lasted until eleven o'clock, when night
+school ended and the building was being closed up.
+One of the first organizations i checked out was a Garveyite
+group that had a big hall on 125th Street. I had just read a book on
+Marcus Garvey. In fact, i had only recently learned he existed. It
+was a shame. Here he had headed up one of the strongest move­
+ments of Black people in amerika and i hadn't heard about him
+until i was grown. One of the brothers who was studying there
+invited me to a meeting.
+The meeting was upstairs. There seemed to be hundreds of
+chairs in the room. I arrived a little early and hardly anyone was
+there. I spotted the brother who had invited me, and he introduced
+me to the ten or fifteen people already there. We sat around in a
+little group talking and waiting for the others to arrive. They never
+came. It was obvious that everyone knew each other and had been
+
+coming to these meetings for a long time. After a while, a speaker
+climbed the podium. He welcomed me to the meeting, then gave an
+impassioned speech. One after another got up and gave speeches as
+if they were talking to a roomful of people. The others applauded
+loudly. I felt sad. They were such nice people, and so sincere, but
+their circle had grown so small they were reduced to giving
+speeches to each other.
+No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and
+changing with the times. If it isn't growing, it's stagnant, and
+without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can
+exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is. That's
+why political work and organizing are so important. Unless you are
+addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing
+positive direction, they'll never support you. The first thing the
+enemy tries to do is isolate revolutionaries from the masses of
+people, making us horrible and hideous monsters so that our
+people will hate us.
+All we usually hear about are the so-called responsible leaders,
+the ones who are "responsible" to our oppressors. In the same way
+that we don't hear about a fraction of the Black men and women
+who have struggled hard and tirelessly throughout our history, we
+don't hear about our heroes of today.
+The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created
+them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to
+overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history,
+teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will
+help set you free. Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing
+people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and
+training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist
+system requires. As long as we expect amerika's schools to educate
+us, we will remain ignorant.
+The parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of
+Brooklyn, like Black parents all around New York at that time,
+were pushing for control of the schools in their communities. They
+wanted a say in what their children were taught, in how their
+schools were run, and in who was teaching their children. They
+wanted the local school boards to have hiring-and-firing power over
+teachers in their districts, but the city's board of education and the
+American Federation of Teachers was against them.
+A whole bunch of us from Manhattan Community College
+loaded on the subway and took the train out to a demonstration
+called by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents. As soon as we got off
+
+ASSATA
+
+/
+
+ASSATA
+I82
+
+the train we ran into some students from CCNY. It seemed like the
+whole train had been heading for the demonstration, and it was
+just the kind of demonstration i like.
+An energetic sea of Black faces. Proud, alive, angry, disciplined,
+upbeat, and, most of all, with that sisterly, brotherly kinship i loved.
+Several of the parents spoke to the crowd, along with the Black
+principal the parents had insisted on hiring. A Black teacher, head
+wrapped in a galee, talked about the importance of Black people
+controlling our schools. She made sweeping gestures with her
+bangled arms as she spoke. Everybody dug what she said. We were
+all high on the atmosphere. It seemed like a kinetic dance was
+boogying in the air.
+When it was over, i hated to go home. There aren't too many
+experiences that give you that good, satisfied feeling, that make you
+feel so clean and refreshed, as when you are fighting for your
+freedom.
+Most of us felt that taking control of our neighborhoods was
+the first step toward liberation. We sat in the subway station trip­
+ping. When a train did come, we just let it pass. First we would take
+control of the schools; then we would take control of the hospitals;
+then we would take control of the colleges, the housing, etc., etc.
+We would have community-controlled employment, welfare cen­
+ters, and city, state, and federal agencies.
+"Hold on for a minute," somebody said. "Where are ya'll
+gonna get the money to run all that stuff?"
+"We'll take community control of the banks," someone else
+answered.
+"You'd better take control of the army, too, because those
+banks aren't gonna just let you take their money lying down."
+"We'll take control of the political institutions in our com­
+munity. Then we'll take control of the congressional seats, the
+senate seats, the city council seats, the mayor's office, and every
+other office that we can take control of. We'll take control of the
+political offices so we can allocate money to the people who need
+it. "
+"Y'all just wishing and hoping," someone said. "You can
+control the social institutions and the political institutions, but
+unless you control the economic and military institutions, you can
+only go but so far."
+Everybody just sort of got quiet, thinking.
+"Well, what are we supposed to do, then ? Just sit back and do
+nothing?"
+
+"Fighting for community control is just the first step. It can
+only go so far. What you need is a revolution. "
+Everybody started talking about what the brother had said.
+We were all confused, but we were all enthused. That was the one
+thing i dug about those days. We were alive and we were excited
+and we believed that we were going to be free someday. For us, it
+wasn't a matter of whether or not. It was a question of how.
+We always started out talking about reform and ended up
+talking about revolution. If you were talking about anything except
+a few little jive crumbs here and there, reform was just not going to
+get it. I was long past the day when i thought that reform could
+possibly work, but revolution was a big question mark. I believed,
+with all my heart, that it was possible. But the question was how.
+I had heard a lot about the Republic of New Afrika and had
+promised myself to check it out. The Provisional Government of the
+Republic of New Afrika advocated the establishment of a separate
+Black nation within the u.s., to be made up of what is now South
+Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. At the
+time, i thought the group was kind of wild and far out, but i got 0/
+good feeling being around them and the idea of a Black nation
+appealed to me.
+The first time i attended a Republic of New Afrika event, i
+drank in the atmosphere and enjoyed the easy audacity of it all. The
+surroundings were gay and carnival-like. A group of brothers were
+pounding out Watusi, Zulu, and Yoruba messages on the drums.
+Groups of sisters and brothers danced to motherland rhythms until
+their skins were glazed with sweat. Speeches were woven between
+songs and poems. Vibrant sisters and brothers with big Afros and
+flowing African garments strolled proudly up and down the aisles.
+Bald-headed brothers, wearing combat boots and military uniforms
+with leopard-skin epaulets, stood around with their arms folded,
+looking dangerous. Little girls running and laughing, their heads
+wrapped with galees, tiny little boys wearing tiny little dashikis.
+People calling each other names like Jamal, Malik, Kisha, or
+Aiesha. Sandlewood and coconut incense floated through the air.
+Red, black, and green flags hung from the rafters alongside posters
+of Malcolm and Marcus Garvey. Serious-looking young men, wear­
+ing jeans and green army field jackets, passed out leaflets. Exotic­
+looking sisters and brothers, decked out in red, black, and green,
+sat behind felt-covered tables and sold incense, bead earrings, and
+an assortment of other items.
+
+ASSATA
+I 83
+
+ASSATA
+
+"Peace, sister/' a voice said. "Do you wanna be a citizen?"
+"What?" i asked, without the slightest notion of what she was
+talking about.
+"A citizen," she repeated. "Do you want to be a citizen of the
+Republic of New Afrika ?"
+"How do i become a citizen?"
+"Easy. Just sign your name in the citizens' book."
+"That's all?"
+"Yeah. You want a name?"
+"A name?"
+"Yeah, sista, a name. If you want an African name, just ask
+that brother over there to give you one."
+The brother she pointed out was wearing a long bubba with
+matching pants and a matching fez-type hat. He was wearing
+various necklaces made of beads, bones, shells, and pieces of wood.
+His left ear was pierced and his face was strained in concentration,
+the veins in his forehead throbbing.
+Without giving it a second thought, i went over to have my
+name changed. The brother looked at me, asked me a couple of
+questions which i don't remember, and then began shaking a
+container furiously. He hurled out the contents, which turned out
+to be shells, onto a soft cloth. After a long, concentrated stare at the
+shells and after glancing back and forth at me, the brother decided
+that my name was Ybumi Oladele. He spelled the name out to me
+as i wrote it down, then i hurried over to the sister's table and
+became a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika. Ybumi Oladele. I
+liked the way it sounded. Soft and musical, kinda happy-sounding.
+I filed my new name away in my pocketbook and continued suck­
+ing in the atmosphere, tripping out on the idea of a Black nation in
+Babylon, a nation of Black people smack dab in the middle of the
+belly of the beast. Imagining Black youth flourishing and being
+nourished in Black schools, taught by teachers who loved them and
+who taught them to love themselves. Controlling their lives, their
+institutions, working together to build a humane society, ending
+the long legacy of suffering Black people have endured at the hands
+of amerika. My mind spaced out on the idea and in a minute i was
+imagining red, black, and green buses, apartment buildings with
+African motifs, Black television shows, and movies that reflected the
+real quality of Black life rather than the real quality of white racism.
+I imagined everything from cities called Malcolmville and New
+Lumumba to a reception for revolutionary leaders around the
+world at the Black House. Sure enough, i liked the idea of a Black
+nation, but i didn't give it any serious consideration as a possible
+
+solution. Back then, the idea just seemed too farfetched. I guess, at
+the time, having an African name seemed a little farfetched, too. I
+told my friends about the name, talked about it for a few days, and
+then promptly forgot about it.
+It wasn't until years later-after college and more revolutionary
+activism and marriage-that i began to seriously think about
+changing my name. The name JoAnne began to irk my nerves. I
+had changed a lot and moved to a different beat, felt like a different
+person. It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It
+really had nothing to do with me. I didn't feel like no JoAnne, or no
+Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman. From the time
+i picked my hair out in the morning to the time i slipped off to
+sleep with Mingus in the background, i felt like an African woman
+and rejoiced in it. My big, abstract black and white inkblot-looking
+painting was replaced by paintings of Black people and revolution­
+ary posters. My life became an African life, my surroundings took
+on an African flavor, my spirit took on an African glow. From the
+paintings on my walls to the big, fat pillows on my floor, from the
+incense burning in the air to the music dancing through the rooms,
+my whole life was moving to African rhythms. My mind, heart,
+and soul had gone back to Africa, but my name was still stranded
+in Europe somewhere. JoAnne was bad enough, but at least my
+mother had given it to me. As for Chesimard, well, i could only
+come to one conclusion. Somebody named Chesimard had been
+the slavemaster of my ex-husband's ancestors. Chesimard, like
+most other last names Black people use today, was derived from
+massa. Black folks went from being Mr. johnson's Mary and Mr.
+Jackson's Paul to being Mary Johnson and Paul Jackson. Some­
+times, before dozing off to sleep, i would lie in bed and think about
+it, wondering how many slaves Chesimard had owned in Martini­
+que and how often he beat them. I would stare up at the ceiling
+wondering how many Black women Chesimard had raped, how
+many Black babies he had fathered, and how many Black people he
+had been responsible for killing.
+So the name finally had to go. I thought about Ybumi
+Oladele, but there was one problem. I didn't know what the name
+meant. My new name had to mean something really special to me.
+At the time, there were little pamphlets being put out listing names
+and their meanings, but i had a hard time finding one i liked. A lot
+of the names had to do with flowers or songs or birds or other
+things like that. Others meant born on Thursday, faithful, loyal, or
+even things like tears, or little fool, or one who giggles. The
+
+ASSATA
+I 85
+
+ASSATA
+
+I 86
+
+women's names were nothing like the men's names, which meant
+things like strong, warrior, man of iron, brave, etc. I wanted a name
+that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the
+liberation of our people. I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur.
+Assata means "She who struggles," Olugbala means "Love for the
+people," and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and
+Zayd's family. Shakur means "the thankful."
+At first, the Golden Drums society concentrated its efforts on Black
+culture and history. But after a while we started to examine our role
+as students. We didn't want to be tape recorders, recording what­
+ever information, facts, lies they gave us and then playing them all
+back during examinations. We began to talk about an education
+that was relevant to us as Black people, that we could take back to
+our communities. We didn't want to learn Latin or classical Greek.
+We wanted to learn things that we could use to help free our
+people.
+One of our first struggles centered on student government.
+Most of us were from working-class or poor families and we
+wanted a student government that was responsive to what we
+needed. We didn't need a student government that was brownnos­
+ing the administration in return for favors and good grades. We
+wanted a student government that supported a Black studies pro­
+gram, more Black faculty members, and other Black causes. As a
+result, the Golden Drum Society and the Students for Democratic
+Society (SDS) ran a joint ticket and won by a landslide.
+It soon became evident that having control of the student
+government wasn't enough. It had no real power. We would pass
+resolutions and come up with proposals, which the administration
+would promptly deny. The only power we had was over the student
+government budget. Instead of inviting reactionary "scholars" or
+politicians to speak, we invited the Young Lords or the Black
+Panther Party or some other group who was saying something
+relevant.
+One of our proposals was for students to work during the
+summer in remedial programs to improve the level of kids who had
+trouble with reading and math. Our idea was to have a few kids
+assigned to each student-teacher. In that way, each one would
+receive the individual attention he or she needed. The academic
+curriculum was to be supplemented with courses that would en­
+hance the students' sense of self-worth and give them more of a
+sense of their history. Student-teachers would work with parents,
+visit the kids' homes, and create a kind of day camp by offering
+
+sports, trips, crafts, etc. Several of the Black faculty members helped
+us with the proposal. As soon as it was submitted it was rejected.
+The administration claimed there was no money. A small
+investigation into finances, aided by some concerned Black and
+white faculty members, revealed that the president of the college
+was living in a house rent-free, that taxpayers were also providing
+him with chauffeur and maid services, and that student fees, which
+had not been spent in previous years, were being invested on the
+stock market. A rather strange financial picture was emerging.
+After we made some of our investigation results known to the
+administration, we were informed that the money for the project
+had been found.
+As a student-teacher i taught reading and math in the morning
+and arts and crafts in the afternoon. The morning classes were tiny,
+while the afternoon classes were larger, combining various morning
+groups. The curriculum included Black history, dancing and drum­
+ming, physical education, arts and crafts, in addition to reading
+and math. There was an excursion every Friday afternoon.
+My mother thought my teaching reading and writing was a
+joke. My spelling is terrible, and my skills in mathematics are
+limited to two and two equaling four. To prepare myself for the
+day's lesson, i had to study just as hard as the kids. My students
+shocked the hell out of me. Through conversation, it was obvious
+just how bright they were, yet they scored way below their grade
+levels in reading and math. There was such a big contradiction
+between the intelligence they exhibited in class and their test scores
+that i didn't know where to begin. The books we had to work with
+were Reader's Digest-like textbooks that i couldn't even imagine
+using. I didn't even want to read those things and i knew sure as
+hell that my students wouldn't want to use them. So every day, i
+took the vocabulary out of those books and wrote a little story,
+something i thought the students would find interesting, typed it on
+a stencil, and ran it off. I brought all kinds of books to school for
+them to read, and as long as they found the books interesting, those
+students would read until the cows came home. I was learning just
+as much as the kids. I found it oppressive playing teacher all the
+time, so every day i rotated the thing around. Everybody got to be
+teacher for a while. It was also great for discipline, since if some­
+body acted up in your class, you were free to act up in theirs.
+Nobody wanted people to act up in their class so everyone was
+more or less cool.
+In order to teach, each one of us had to prepare our lesson and
+know what we were talking about. One of the boys in the class
+
+ASSATA
+
+I87
+
+ASSATA
+
+I88
+
+worked so hard on his lessons that he would just lay me out. I don't
+know where he is now or what he's doing, but if he isn't a teacher,
+it's a damn shame, because he would have been a great one. He
+would cut out pictures and even make up math games for us to play.
+My class in the afternoon was usually exhausting. Clay, paint,
+papier-mache over everything and everyone, especially me. The first
+days of that class i wanted to do nothing but go somewhere and
+have a good cry. On the first day of the arts and crafts class i had
+nothing really prepared, so i asked everyone to draw themselves.
+When i looked at the drawings i felt faint. All of the students were
+Black, yet the drawings depicted a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed
+little white children. I was horrified. I went home and ransacked
+every magazine i could find with pictures of Black people. I came in
+early the next day and plastered the walls with pictures of Black
+people. We talked about what was beautiful. We talked about all
+the different kinds of beauty in the world and about all the different
+kinds of flowers in the world. And then we talked about the
+different kinds of beauty that people have and about the beauty of
+Black people. We talked about our lips and our noses. We made
+African masks out of clay and papier-mache, made African sculp­
+tures, painted pictures of Black people, of Black neighborhoods.
+Over the summer i felt the classroom changing. The kids were
+changing and so was i. We were feeling good about ourselves and
+feeling good about being with each other.
+I was so involved in working at the school that i had time for
+little else. If one of the students didn't come to school, i was at his
+or her house that very day wanting to know why. I would go home
+and spend hours rewriting some story or preparing for the next day.
+Half the time my mother would find me asleep with a book in my
+hands and all the lights on. I loved working with the kids, and i
+loved teaching. My mother helped me quite a lot and we grew closer
+than we had ever been before. I thought about becoming a teacher
+but decided against it.
+For the first time, i became aware of what my mother had been
+going through all those years trying to teach in New York schools.
+Most of these principals are caught up in bureaucracy and they
+force the teachers to be caught up in it too. They care more about
+what the teachers have written in their plan books than what they
+are actually teaching in the class. My mother was working in an
+environment where white teachers often showed a hostile, conde­
+scending attitude toward Black children and where some teachers
+thought of themselves as zookeepers rather than teachers.
+As much as i loved working with kids, i knew that i could never
+
+participate in the board-of-education kind of teaching. I wasn't
+teaching no Black children to say the pledge of allegiance or to
+think George Washington was great or any other such bullshit.
+That fall, the level of activity on campus surpassed anything
+that we had dreamed of. Large numbers of students became in­
+volved in the antiwar movement. It seemed that there was no time
+to catch up with all of the things that were happening. I would be at
+the construction workers' demonstration one day and then march­
+ing with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with every­
+thing-rent strikes, sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office
+building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give
+active support in some way. The more active i became the more i
+liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole. I
+was home. For the first time, my life felt like it had some real
+meaning. Everywhere I turned, Black people were struggling,
+Puerto Ricans were struggling. It was beautiful. I love Black people,
+i don't care what they are doing, but when Black people are
+struggling, that's when they are most beautiful to me.
+As usual, i was speeding. My energy just couldn't stop danc­
+ing. I was caught up in the music of struggle, and i wanted to
+dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and
+sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me. I would
+mention their names, but the way things are today, i'd only be
+sending the FBI or the CIA to their doors.
+There were a lot of communist groups on campus. I had no
+idea at the time that there were so many different kinds of commu­
+nists and socialists. I had been so brainwashed i had thought that
+all communists were the same, that there were Marxists, Leninists,
+Maoists, Trotskyites, etc. Most of the so-called communists i met
+weren't in any party at all, but just related to the philosophy of
+communism. Most followed very different political lines and poli­
+cies, and it was difficult for them to sit down and agree on the time
+of day, much less hatch up some "communist plot."
+I was surprised to learn that there were all different types of
+capitalist countries and different types of communist countries. I
+had heard "communist bloc" and "behind the iron curtain" so
+much in the media, that i had naturally formed the impression that
+these countries were all the same. Although they are all socialist,
+East Germany, Bulgaria, Cuba, and North Korea are as different as
+night and day. All of them have different histories, different
+cultures, and different ways of applying the socialist theory, al­
+though they have the same economic and similar political systems.
+It has never ceased to amaze me how so many people can be tricked
+
+ASSATA
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+I89
+
+ASSATA
+
+into hating people who have never done them any harm. You
+simply mention the word "communist" and a lot of these red,
+white, and blue fools are ready to kill.
+I wasn't against communism, but i can't say i was for it either.
+At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man's
+concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and stud­
+ied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa
+understood that the question of African liberation was not just a
+question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white
+colonialists, if they didn't rid themselves of the capitalistic eco­
+nomic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by
+Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement
+in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a
+single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for
+capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation:
+anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, pro­
+duced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn't work­
+ing people collectively own that wealth ? Why shouldn't working
+people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant
+that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant
+that the people who made the wealth owned it.
+I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who
+claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a question of
+race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white
+ones. That's why you've got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan
+or other conservatives. Black folks with money have always tended
+to support candidates who they believed would protect their finan­
+cial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn't take too much
+brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class
+as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. It
+would burn me up every time somebody talked about Black people
+climbing the ladder of success. Anytime you're talking about a
+ladder, you're talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and
+a lower class, a rich class and a poor class. As long as you've got a
+system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to
+wind up at the bottom, because we're the easiest to discriminate
+against. That's why i couldn't see fighting within the system. Both
+the democratic party and the republican party are controlled by
+millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power, while
+i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting
+fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i wanted
+to see them overthrown. They were interested in supporting racist,
+fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them
+overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i
+
+was interested in seeing them win their liberation. A poster of the
+massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped
+together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my
+wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world.
+Manhattan Community College had not one course on Puerto
+Rican history. The Puerto Rican sisters and brothers who knew
+what was happening became our teachers. I had hung out all my
+life with Puerto Ricans, and i didn't even know Puerto Rico was a
+colony. They told us of the long and valiant struggle against the
+first Spanish colonizers and then, later, against the u.s. government
+and about their revolutionary heroes, the Puerto Rican Five-Lolita
+Lebron, Rafael Miranda, Andres Cordero, Irving Flores, and Oscar
+Coll.azo, each of whom had spent more than a quarter of a century
+behind bars fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico. Once you
+understand something about the history of a people, their heroes,
+their hardships and their sacrifices, it's easier to struggle with them,
+to support their struggle. For a lot of people in this country, people
+who live in other places have no faces. And this is the way the u.s.
+government wants it to be. They figure that as long as the people
+have no faces and the country has no form, amerikans will not
+protest when they send in the marines to wipe them out.
+I had begun to think of myself as a socialist, but i could not in
+any way see myself joining any of the socialist groups i came in
+contact with. I loved to listen to them, learn from them, and argue
+with them, but there was no way in the world i could see myself
+becoming a member. For one thing, i could not stand the conde­
+scending, paternalistic attitudes of some of the white people in
+those groups. Some of the older members thought that because
+they had been in the struggle for socialism for a long time, they
+knew all the answers to the problems of Black people and all the
+aspects of the Black Liberation struggle. I couldn't relate to the idea
+of the great white father on earth any more than i could relate to the
+great white father up in the sky. I was willing and ready to learn
+everything i could from them, but i damn sure was not ready to
+accept them as leaders of the Black Liberation struggle. A few
+thought that they had a monopoly on Marx and acted like the only
+experts in the world on socialism came from Europe. In many
+instances they downgraded the theoretical and practical contribu­
+tions of Third World revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi
+Minh, Augustino Neto, and other leaders of liberation movements
+in the Third World.
+Another thing that went against my grain was the arrogance
+and dogmatism i encountered in some of these groups.
+A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+about the liberation of Black people i should quit school and get a
+job in a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have
+to work at a factory and organize the workers. When i asked him
+why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he
+told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the
+students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and
+that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize them­
+selves without any college students doing it for them. Some of these
+groups would come up with abstract, intellectual theories, totally
+devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to
+the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for par­
+ticipating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the
+Viet Cong were selling out to the u.s. I think they got insulted when
+i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight
+their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell
+the Vietnamese people how to run their show.
+Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so
+factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting together against a com­
+mon enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about
+who had the right line.
+Although i respected the work and political positions of many
+groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come
+together to organize our own structures and our own revolutionary
+political party. Friendship is based on respect. As long as much of
+the white left saw their role as organizing, educating, recruiting,
+and directing Black revolutionaries, i could not see how any real
+friendship could occur. I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for
+Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our
+present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle. Black
+self-determination is a basic right, and if we do not have the right to
+determine our destinies, then who does ? I believe that to gain our
+liberation, we must come from the position of power and unity and
+that a Black revolutionary party, led by Black revolutionary leaders,
+is essential. I believe in uniting with white revolutionaries to fight
+against a common enemy, but i was convinced that it had to be on
+the basis of power and unity rather than from weakness and unity at
+any cost.
+
+TO MY M O MMA
+
+To my momma,
+who has swallowed the amerikan dream
+and choked on it.
+To my momma,
+whose dreams have fought each other­
+and died.
+Who sees,
+but cannot bear to see.
+A volcano eating its own lava.
+To my momma, who couldn't turn
+hell into paradise
+and blamed herself.
+Who has always seen
+reflected in her mirror
+an ugly duckling.
+To my momma,
+who makes no demands of anyone
+cause she don't think she can afford to.
+Who thinks her money talks
+louder than her womanhood.
+To my butchfem momma,
+who has al ways
+taken care of business.
+Who has never drifted
+hazily to sleep
+thinking, "he will take care of it."
+Who has schemed so much
+she sometimes schemes against herself.
+To my s weet, shy momma.
+Who is uneasy with people
+cause she don't know how
+to be phony,
+and is afraid to be real.
+Who has longed for sculptured gardens.
+Whose potted plant
+dies slowly on the window sill.
+
+ASSATA
+
+I93
+
+ASSATA
+
+I94
+
+We have all been infected
+with a sickness
+that can be traced back
+to the auction block.
+You must not feel guilty
+for what has been done to us.
+Only the strong go crazy.
+The weak just go along.
+And what i thought was cruelty,
+I understand was fear
+that hands, stronger than yours,
+and whiter than yours,
+would strangle my young life
+into oblivion.
+Momma, i am proud of you.
+I look at you
+and see the strength of our people.
+I have seen you struggle
+in the dark;
+the world beating on your back,
+dragging your catch
+back to our den.
+Pulling your pots and pans out
+to cook it.
+A mop in one hand.
+A pencil in the other,
+marking up my homework
+with your love.
+The injured have no blame.
+Let it fall on those who injure.
+Leave the past behind
+where it belongsand come with me
+toward tomorrow.
+I love you mommy
+cause you are beautiful,
+and i am life that springs from you:
+part tree, part weed, part flower.
+My roots run deep.
+I have been nourished well.
+
+Chapter 1 3
+
+am at school when i hear about it. Electric
+shocks are zooming down my back the way they do
+when i am about to go temporarily insane. On the
+train, headed uptown, i am ready to riot. I am having
+daymares on the subway, imagining myself with a
+long knife slashing slits in white sheets. Ku Klux Klan
+blood is spilling. You wanna look like a ghost, you
+wanna look like a ghost, my mind keeps chanting,
+you wanna look like a ghost, well, i'll make you one.
+Sitting on the subway, bloody fantasies. I look out of
+my daymare. Nobody is moving. Everybody screams.
+Everybody has a frozen face. The train is slowing
+down. Everybody is tensely looking at the door.
+125th Street. I am going to a riot. I want to kill
+someone.
+Martin Luther King has been murdered.
+The street wakes me up. There is no blood yet.
+Everybody is getting into position. The wind is blow­
+ing rumors. The people are waiting. The streets are
+rumbling. The tanks are coming. The natives are rest­
+less. The tanks will quiet the natives. The tanks are
+coming. I feel absurd and impotent.
+Who am i going to attack ? Where is a George
+Lincoln Rockwell? I am ready to kill him. He will get
+a chance to utter exactly two syllables before i cut
+him off. He isn't there. Only the rumors and the
+rumble of the tanks and the waiting. The store win­
+dows are filled with shit. You can't exchange Martin
+Luther King for shit in the store window. Smashing
+windows will do me no good. I am beyond that. I
+want blood. The tanks are waiting to crush the resist­
+ance, squelch the disturbance. It crosses my mind: i
+want to win. I don't want to rebel, i want to win. The
+
+I95
+
+ASSATA
+
+revolution will not be televised on the six o'clock news. I have to
+get myself ready. Revolution. The word has me going.
+I am back on the subway. Nobody is looking at anybody. I
+think i have my period. Sweat is rolling down my legs. I go home.
+My mother is glad to see me. She knows that i am half crazy. The
+television is wet with crocodile tears. REBELLION, REBELLIO US
+CHILDREN, TEMPER TANTR UMS, REBELLION, REVOL UTION. I like
+the word.
+The grim reapers are abuzz. Reports about the natives. They
+are excited. This is the stuff that news is made of. We are looking
+at each other. Impassioned speeches sizzle on their tongues, caus­
+ing sour ashes to fall from our mouths. We are just sitting there. I
+am thinking about revolution. The tonic. Abstract. Revolution. I
+am tired of watching us lose. They kill our leaders, then they kill us
+for protesting. Protest. Protest. Revolution. If it exists, i want to
+find it. Bulletins. More bulletins. I'm tired of bulletins. I want
+bullets.
+
+While i was going to CCNY, after i graduated from Manhattan
+Community College, i decided to get married. My husband was
+politically conscious, intelligent, and decent, and our affair was
+frantic, high-pitched, and charged with emotion. Somehow, i be­
+lieved that our shared commitment to the Black Liberation struggle
+would result in a "marriage made in heaven." I spent most of my
+time at school, meetings, or demonstrations and whenever i was at
+home my head was usually stuck in some book. It was unthinkable
+to allow more than five minutes on mundane things like keeping
+house or washing dishes. To complicate matters, my husband's
+ideas about marriage stemmed mostly from his parents' life, where
+his mother was the homemaker and his father was the breadwinner.
+Spaghetti was about the only thing i could cook, and he was
+profoundly shocked to learn i had none of his mother's domestic
+skills. After a while, it became clear to me that i was about as ready
+to be married as i was to grow wings and fly. So after a confused
+and unhappy year, we decided we made much better friends than
+marriage partners and called it quits.
+I decided to go to California. It was becoming increasingly
+clear to me that, although it was important for students to partici­
+pate in the struggle, no revolution had ever been won by students
+alone. Struggling around school issues had narrowed my perspec­
+tive and i was getting bogged down. I wanted to expand that
+struggle to the Black community. At that time California, especially
+the Bay area, was where everything was happening. Some of my
+
+favorite professors were going out West for the summer and they
+offered to hook me up with a place to stay. As usual, i was flat
+broke, but a good friend gave me the money to make the trip, with
+a little spending change thrown in.
+My friends found a place for me in Berkeley, the most radical,
+progressive place i had ever been in. Revolutionary posters were
+plastered all over the walls, along with "people's murals." The
+fronts of banks and other official buildings were bricked up as a
+result of the demonstrations and street fighting that followed the
+People's Park struggles. Red stars and Mao's Red Book were sold
+on street corners, and food cooperatives sold health food at cheap
+prices. People's collectives were dedicated to surviving, struggling,
+and teaching. I was impressed with the kinds of informal solutions
+they had cooked up to deal with the problems they faced, and i
+enrolled in the practical skills classes they gave (printing and layout,
+first aid, etc.).
+There were books and pamphlets in the San Francisco and
+Berkeley bookstores i had never seen in New York, and for the first
+time i read the theory of urban guerrilla warfare as outlined by Che
+Guevara, Carlos Mariguella, and the Tupamaros. I had been more
+aware of imperialism in Vietnam or Cambodia, and the extent of
+u.s. imperialism in South and Central America surprised me. The
+u.s. government had invaded more than fifteen countries there, not
+once or twice but in some cases more than ten times, and the
+guerrilla movements were waging armed struggle in most of them.
+Reading about guerrilla warfare in South America and Vietnam
+was one thing, but thinking in terms of guerrilla war inside the u.s.
+was another.
+Back then, people used the word "revolution" just because it
+sounded hep. Half the time what they were really talking about was
+change or some kind of vague progress. Some meant a separate
+Black nation, and others dealt with Black revolution as part of an
+overall revolution waged by whites, Hispanics, Orientals, Native
+Americans, and Blacks. Malcolm said it meant bloodshed and
+land. To me, the revolutionary struggle of Black people had to be
+against racism, capitalism, imperialism, and sexism and for real
+freedom under a socialist government. But the reality of achieving it
+seemed a long way off.
+In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem too
+far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and
+Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hardhats
+and the rednecks and the bible belt and the so-called middle
+amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine the "new
+
+ASSATA
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+I9 7
+
+ASSATA
+
+left" talking to those people, much less orgamzmg them and
+changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with
+some answers was to keep on studying and struggling. I didn't
+know how half of what i was studying would fit in, but i figured it
+would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare
+and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one
+day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about
+it, because reading all that stuff probably has saved my life a million
+times.
+As part of my first aid skills class, i worked as an assistant to a
+doctor who volunteered once a week at Alcatraz. At the time,
+Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were
+protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal poli­
+cies, and racist exploitation. Alcatraz symbolized the strength and
+dignity of Indian people as well as their resolve to fight to preserve
+their cultural traditions. I enjoyed everything about going there
+except the trip. The doctor was a motorcycle fanatic who insisted
+on zooming across the Golden Gate Bridge on that thing, with me
+hanging on for dear life. Once on the other side we would jump
+into a rickety little boat with water in the bottom and limp across
+the bay to the island. By the time we got there i felt as if i had done
+a day's work.
+The first thing that hit me was the spirit of the people. I felt the
+tremendous pride, tremendous determination, and tremendous
+calm from the time i landed on the island until the time i left. They
+were Native Americans from all over North America, including
+Canada, from different tribes and backgrounds. They were young
+and old. Little babies wiggled in their mother's arms, and one old
+man who had spent many years in Alcatraz prison said that when
+he arrived on the island he had taken a sledgehammer and reduced
+the cell he had once been locked in to rubble. The prison, one of
+the most infamous and sadistic ever to exist, loomed in the back­
+ground.
+There were many different Indian nations, each with its own
+rich culture, religious traditions, history, and folklore. Everybody
+was into learning and teaching each other their own history and
+culture. It was a surprise to find out how many Native Americans
+had been raised in cities and knew nothing about who they were. In
+that respect, they were very similar to Black people. Most of them
+were from the West Coast, and so i told them about the Indian
+Museum and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Sud­
+denly, i stopped short. I wondered how i would feel going into some
+museum and seeing the houses and stolen artifacts of my people
+
+stuck away in some exhibition hall. As i spoke i realized that most
+of the "history" i had been taught about the Indians was probably
+lies invented by the white man.
+It wasn't until later, for instance, that i learned that scalping
+was an old European custom. In the 1 700s, the state of Mas­
+sachusetts was paying the equivalent of $60 for a scalp and Pennsyl­
+vania paid $ 1 34. It wasn't until more than a hundred years later, in
+response to the massive genocide at the hands of whites, that the
+Indians themselves started scalping. None of the little museum
+exhibits featuring tepees and feather headdresses had ever men­
+tioned how men, women, and children were mowed down at
+Wounded Knee or how the u.s. army had purposely given the
+Indians smallpox-infected blankets. As i listened to those sisters
+and brothers at Alcatraz i realized that the true history of any
+oppressed people is impossible to find in history books.
+I will always be grateful for having had the opportunity to visit
+Alcatraz. I will never forget the quiet confidence of the Indians as
+they went about their lives calmly, even though they were under the
+constant threat of invasion by the FBI and the u.s. military. They
+didn't fit into any of my preconceived notions or the stereotyped
+images shown on TV and in the movies. They were really open with
+me and, after a while, we talked about the struggle in general. They
+had many of the same problems we had: education, organizing the
+people to struggle, and raising consciousness. They damn sure had
+the same enemy, and they were doing as bad as we were, if not
+worse. They told me to check out Akwasasne when i returned to
+New York. It was a territory they had liberated on the border
+between New York and Canada. I told them if they ever came to
+New York they should visit me and check out Harlem. "Sure.
+When are you going to liberate it?" they asked.
+There were a million groups in the Bay area i wanted to check out.
+There was so much activity i would have had to spend twenty-eight
+hours a day just to keep up with it all. Someone i was studying with
+arranged for me to hook up with the Brown Berets, a Chicano
+group that had been started recently in California and Texas. It was
+a brief meeting since the brother with whom i had the appointment
+had to be on the move. He ran down to me some of the conditions
+they were dealing with and some of the work they were doing. I had
+always thought of the Chicano movement as a rural rather than an
+urban one. Most of the information we had received was about the
+Chicano farmworkers' struggle and people like Cesar Chavez fight­
+ing to organize them and abolish the unbearable living conditions
+
+ASSATA
+I99
+
+ASSATA
+200
+
+and slave wages they were forced to work for. I was not aware that
+Chicanos in the city were fighting against unemployment, police
+brutality, and inferior schools, just like Black people. In the same
+way that the Black Panther Party was trying to organize and pol­
+iticize street gangs in Chicago, the Brown Berets wanted to pol­
+iticize Chicano street gangs in Los Angeles. The brother also told
+me that they had been doing a lot of work around Los Siete de las
+Razas, seven Chicano brothers who had been accused of killing a
+San Francisco policeman. (They were later acquitted.) I wanted to
+rap some more about this case because i was seeing the same
+pattern everywhere-sisters and brothers being locked up all over
+the country, accused of killing pigs or of conspiring to. The brother
+had to run, though. We promised that we would hook up again,
+but it never happened.
+Next i wanted to check out the Red Guard, a group of young
+revolutionary brothers and sisters who were struggling in
+Chinatown, San Francisco. I was especially anxious to meet up
+with them because it was so hard to get information about them
+back East. The West Coast has the largest Asian population in the
+country and i really wanted to get a good idea about what was
+going on in the Asian communities. A lot of people think Asians do
+not experience racism, that they are professionals and business
+owners, unaware that many are poor and oppressed.
+Finding the Red Guard was not at all easy. Half the people i
+ran into had never heard of them, and the other half only had a
+minimal knowledge of who they were and what they were all about.
+Someone gave me an address and since i didn't have the faintest
+idea where it was, i got a brother to drive me over to Chinatown to
+look for their headquarters. We ended getting lost and never did
+find the address. Instead, we ended up eating at a Chinese restau­
+rant and getting into a big debate. He couldn't understand why a
+Black woman wanted to hook up with Chinese revolutionaries in
+the first place: "ain't nobody gonna free Black folks but Black
+folks"; "those Chinese don't give a damn about you and me. All
+they care about is their own people and what's going on in China."
+I told him that i thought there were a whole lot of us in the same
+predicament and that the only way we were going to get out of it
+was to come together and break the chains. The brother looked at
+me as if i was spouting empty rhetoric. Some of the laws of
+revolution are so simple they seem impossible. People think that in
+order for something to work, it has to be complicated, but a lot of
+times the opposite is true. We usually reach success by putting the
+
+simple truths that we know into practice. The basis of any struggle
+is people coming together to fight against a common enemy.
+When i finally did get around to meeting some brothers from
+the Red Guard, it was quite by accident and somewhat embarrass­
+ing. I was hanging out in the park with a sister and some brothers
+from the Black Students Union. We were exchanging experiences,
+talking politics, and smoking reefer. The day was blue and beau­
+tiful and we just sat there lazing in the sun without a care in the
+world, listening to some rock music that was playing in the back­
+ground. I had brought a whole pile of leaflets and newspapers from
+New York to give to them. Everybody was feeling laid-back and
+mellow when all of a sudden a bunch of pigs descended on a group
+of hippies and proceeded to beat them mercilessly, kicking them
+and hitting them with clubs. We were all so high, we just sat there
+watching, like it was a movie or something. By the time we got our
+voices together to cry out in protest, the pigs were carrying the
+hippies off.
+Two Asian brothers came up to us and pointed to the news­
+papers.
+"You'd better get rid of those before the pigs see them," one
+said. "More are on the way. If you've got any grass on you, you'd
+better get out of here fast. "
+We were a picture of confusion, stuffing sheets of paper under
+shirts and into pocketbooks. The Asian brother led our half-dazed
+procession out of the park.
+"You need a lift?"
+"Yeah, that's cool."
+"To where?"
+"Oh, anywhere. Anywhere from here," one of us answered. We
+were too high to make any decisions. We piled into a rickety­
+looking jeep. They told us they would drive us over to Shattuck
+Street and drop us off. As we were driving, everybody started to talk
+about the pigs beating up on the hippies. The image was burning in
+everyone's mind.
+"That was a trip," drawled one of the BSU brothers. "Did you
+see those pigs? I thought they were gonna kill those dudes."
+I was still high, feeling too stunned and eerie to talk.
+"That's why we need a revolution," the sister was saying.
+"They just think they can do anything they want to."
+"What started the shit?" somebody asked the Asian brothers.
+"It was some hassle about some ID or something. They just
+wanted to hassle somebody. You're lucky they didn't see you first."
+
+ASSATA
+20I
+
+ASSATA
+202
+
+We were all silent for a minute, imagining ourselves being
+beaten and carted off to jail.
+"It's a good thing they didn't see those leaflets," the other
+Asian brother said. "They would have hassled you for sure."
+The sister, who was obviously angry, got off into a political
+rap. Everybody kind of jumped into the conversation, talking about
+the situation in the Black community, the Black students' struggle,
+and the overall piggishness of amerika. Everybody was into the rap,
+all of us presenting ourselves as political activists and revolution­
+anes.
+"Are you guys in the movement?" one of the Asian brothers
+asked us. Everybody jumped at the opportunity to say yes, giving
+credentials and naming organizations.
+"Right on," they said.
+They told us they were Red Guard cadre and that they were
+having some kind of forum on the revolution in China. In my
+tongue-tied, confused state of marijuana intoxication, i tried to
+communicate to them that i had been trying to get in touch with
+their organization to check it out. The brother who had been doing
+most of the talking reached down under the seat and handed me a
+leaflet which had the date and time of the forum.
+"Make sure you come and check us out," he said. "Put this
+somewhere where you won't lose it," making direct reference to my
+confused, disjointed state of consciousness. "You guys should
+really be careful with that grass, especially when you've got leaflets
+or newspapers on you. A lot of good comrades have been busted
+like that."
+"Yeah," said the other one. "You've got to be alert to deal with
+this situation. You've got to be disciplined and ready to deal with
+the enemy at all times."
+The Red Guard brothers dropped us off and we thanked them
+and said good-byes amid a hail of "Right ons" and "Power to the
+people. " Carefully avoiding each other's eyes, we wandered
+aimlessly, looking for someplace where we could plop down and
+get our heads together. I was feeling guilty and stupid, silly and
+politically backward. I was embarrassed to be bumbling down the
+street in the middle of the day not in full control of my faculties, too
+high to deal with reality, much less change it. I wondered what the
+brothers from the Red Guard had thought of us, sitting there in a
+stupor, having to be virtually led out of the park. It was obvious my
+stuff was raggedy and that i needed to get my act together. If i
+wanted to call myself a revolutionary i was going to have to earn the
+title. I had heard somebody say that revolutionaries get high on
+
+revolution and that it was the best high in the world. "I'm gonna
+check out that high," i said aloud. "Huh ? What did you say?"
+"Nothing," i answered. "I was just talking out loud." "Oh," some­
+body said, "I can dig it."
+We stopped off at a coffee shop and had some tea. Everybody
+looked sheepish and lost in their own thoughts. Finally, we waved
+our good-byes and made our separate ways. 1 walked back to where
+i was staying, wondering what i was going to have to do to become
+who i needed to become. Revolution is about change, and the first
+place the change begins is in yourself.
+The most important organization on my list to check out was the
+Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland. 1 had a whole lot of
+respect for the Party and had been heavily influenced by it, as had
+almost everyone around my age that i knew. Every time we heard
+about Huey Newton and Bobby Seale standing up to the power
+structure, we slapped five and said, "Yeah !" As far as i was con­
+cerned, the Panthers were "baaaaaad." The Party was more than
+bad, it was bodacious. The sheer audacity of walking onto the
+California senate floor with rifles, demanding that Black people
+have the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense, made me
+sit back and take a long look at them. And the more political i
+became, the more i appreciated them. Panthers didn't try to sound
+all intellectual, talking about the national bourgeoisie, the military­
+industrial complex, the reactionary ruling class. They simply called
+a pig a pig. They didn't refer to the repressive domestic army or the
+state repressive apparatus. They called the racist police pigs and
+racist dogs.
+One of the most important things the Party did was to make it
+really clear who the enemy was: not the white people, but the
+capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black libera­
+tion struggle out of a national context and put it in an international
+context. The Party supported revolutionary struggles and govern­
+ments all over the world and insisted the u.s. get out of Africa, out
+of Asia, out of Latin America, and out of the ghetto too. 1 had
+gotten to know some of the Panthers in New York when they spoke
+at the lectures we invited them to at Manhattan Community Col­
+lege. 1 made it my business to drop by some of the New York Black
+Panther Party offices and offered to help them with this or that,
+whatever needed to be done. 1 was happy to do it. 1 barely opened
+my mouth. 1 just looked, listened, and worked. Some of the com­
+rades would ask why i didn't join. "I probably will, someday," i'd
+always answer.
+
+ASSATA
+203
+
+ASSATA
+204
+
+When i heard on the radio that the New York Panthers had
+been busted, i was furious. The so-called conspiracy charges were
+so stupid that even a fool could see through them. The police
+actually had the audacity to charge them with plotting to blow up
+the flowers in the Botanical Garden. And the 2 1 were some of the
+baddest, most politically educated sisters and brothers in the Party.
+It was an insult. I thought about joining the Party right then, but i
+had some other things i wanted to do and i needed a low profile in
+order to do them.
+As much as i dug the Party, i also had some real differences
+with its style of work. As i opened the front gate of the Oakland
+headquarters, i felt j ust as nervous about going inside as i did about
+the Doberman pinschers running around the yard. A brother
+opened the door and i nervously blurted out that i was from New
+York and had come to check out the Party. He acted like he was
+glad to see me and brought me into a room to meet some of the
+other Panthers. A group of sisters and brothers were sitting around
+the room, laughing and talking. They greeted me casually, passing
+over a chair for me to sit in. Artie Seale was there and i had to
+control myself to keep from gawking at her. I wondered how she
+felt with her husband in jail, being railroaded and bound and
+gagged in kourt. I recognized the names of others. It was strange to
+be there in a room with those people. It was like sitting down on
+the pages of a history book.
+They asked me about New York, and i told them what was
+happening with the Black students at Manhattan Community Col­
+lege, CCNY, and the Black student movement in general, the
+antiwar movement, Black construction workers, and whatever
+other work i was involved in at the time. I told them i had done
+some work for the New York Panthers and ran off a list of the ones
+i knew. Somebody asked my why i had never joined the Party.
+Half stammering, i told them i had thought about it but had
+decided not to. "Why ?" everybody wanted to know. It was hard for
+me to say it because i felt so much love and respect for the sisters
+and brothers seated there, but i knew i'd hate myself if i didn't say
+what was on my mind: that i had been turned off by the way
+spokesmen for the Party talked to people, that their attitude had
+often been arrogant, flippant, and disrespectful. I told them i pre­
+ferred the polite and respectful manner in which civil rights work­
+ers and Black Muslims talked to the people rather than the
+arrogant, fuck-you style that used to be popular in New York. I
+said they cursed too much and turned off a lot of Black people who
+would otherwise be responsive to what the Party was saying.
+
+When i had finished, i waited nervously, fully expecting them
+to jump all over what i had said. To my profound surprise, nobody
+did. Everybody agreed that if that was, in fact, how Party members
+were relating to the people, they should change at once. One of the
+sisters pointed out that there was a leadership crisis in the New
+York chapter caused by the arrest and imprisonment of the Panther
+2 1 . It was well known by everybody in the movement that the New
+York police had kidnapped the most experienced, able, and intel­
+ligent leaders of the New York branch and demanded $ 1 00,000
+ransom for each one. One of the brothers explained that the Pan­
+thers were facing the same problem all over the country because of
+persecution by the pigs. We spent the rest of the afternoon rapping
+about the Black struggle in New York and in the u.s. in general. I
+was deep in a discussion about strategy and tactics when Emory
+Douglas came in. I was as happy as a bee in a pollen factory to meet
+him. I dug his artwork a lot and had even taped a piece he had
+written on revolutionary art to my closet door. We hit it off at once
+and, when everybody finished rapping, he took me up to see how
+the Black Panther newspaper was put together.
+I was truly impressed by the Panthers in Oakland. After my
+first visit, i dropped in at their offices regularly. I visited some of the
+other branches in the area, talking to the people and asking my
+usual ton of questions. I spent a couple of nights working at the
+distribution center for the Party paper, which was located in the
+Fulton district in San Francisco. It was a trip! The papers wouldn't
+get picked up from the printer until late in the evening, and people
+would work until the wee hours sorting them out and preparing
+them for distribution to the Panther offices all around the country.
+Panthers worked there, but the majority seemed to be sisters and
+brothers from the neighborhood who had just dropped in to give
+the Panthers a hand. A lot of young people were there and some
+elderly sisters and brothers. As we wrapped the papers in bundles,
+printed addresses, and counted out papers, we sang Panther songs
+and marching chants. Every now and then, a few stepped outside to
+sip a little bitter dog. This was supposedly a Panther invention
+made of red port and lemon juice. It wasn't too bad, once i got used
+to it, and by the time 1 A.M. came around, i loved it. Working on
+the paper distribution didn't even seem like work-it was more like
+a party. Somebody always gave me a lift home and i would fall into
+a happy sleep feeling refreshed and renewed.
+It was splashed across the papers, blaring on the radio, and yet i
+still couldn't believe it. The face of the serious young man with the
+
+ASSATA
+205
+
+ASSATA
+206
+
+gun refused to leave my thoughts. I must have picked up the same
+newspaper and put it down a hundred times. This shit was serious !
+Seventeen years old with a rifle under his raincoat. Seventeen years
+old and taking freedom into his own hands. Seventeen years old
+and defying the whole pig power structure in amerika. Seventeen
+years old and dead. Tears i didn't even know i had poured out. I got
+on the phone to find somebody who could explain it all. Who was
+Jonathan Jackson? Who was the young man who came to free a
+revolutionary Black prisoner, holding a district attorney and a pig
+judge hostage, shouting, "We are the revolutionaries ! Free the
+Soledad Brothers by 12:30"? Who was he?"
+I had only vaguely heard of the Soledad Brothers. A brother
+who knew all about the case broke it down to me. Three unarmed
+Black prisoners were shot down in the yard by a white guard. A
+grand jury ruled it "justifiable homicide." After the verdict, a white
+guard was found dead. Three politically conscious Black prisoners
+were charged with the murder and thrown into solitary. They all
+faced the death penalty. John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo and
+George Jackson were the brothers charged with the murder. George
+Jackson, a brilliant revolutionary theorist and writer, was Jonathan
+Jackson's brother.
+I couldn't get the whole thing out of my head. Why were
+grown men and women living while Jonathan Jackson lay dead ?
+What kind of rage, what kind of oppression, and what kind of
+country shaped that young man ? I felt guilt for being alive and well.
+Where was my gun? And where was my courage?
+I was dry-eyed when i attended the funeral. There were hun­
+dreds of people. We could barely get into the church. They set up a
+loudspeaker outside so that people could hear the sermon. Black
+Panthers, solemn and determined, marched in military formation. I
+was so, so glad they were there. Black people need someone to
+stand up for us or we will always be victims. I held my arms real
+close to me, feeling a bit unraveled. Life for us gets so ugly. If i stay
+a victim it will kill me, I thought. It was time for me to get my shit
+together. I wanted to be one of the people who stood up. These
+were serious times.
+Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her
+up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and
+murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set.
+They charged her with murder because they claimed that some of
+the guns used belonged to her. She was one of the most beautiful
+women i had ever seen. Not physically, but spiritually. I knew who
+she was, because i had been keeping clippings of her in my file. She
+
+was the sister who got fired from her job teaching at a California
+college because she told everybody she was a communist and if they
+didn't like it, they could go to hell.
+But i wasn't surprised. They will charge Black people with
+anything, using any flimsy excuse. We were very glad they hadn't
+caught her. I hoped they never would. The air was charged, every­
+thing was happening so fast, and i wasn't blind anymore. I was
+seeing things straight, seeing them more clearly than ever before. I
+had so many things to do. If you are deaf, dumb, and blind to
+what's happening in the world, you're under no obligation to do
+anything. But if you know what's happening and you don't do
+anything but sit on your ass, then you're nothing but a punk.
+I tried to explain how i felt to some of the people i knew. I
+wanted to struggle on a full-time basis. They urged me to join the
+Panther Party. I went over in my mind all the criticisms i had of the
+party. They had said, "You'll be good for the Party, and the Party
+will be good for you. The Party is only as strong as its people." It
+made a lot of sense to me. For the first time in months i felt calm
+and sure of what i was going to do. I told them that the first thing i
+was going to do when i returned to New York was join the Party.
+I thought about it all the way home. Of all the things i had
+wanted to be when i was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly
+wasn't one of them. And now it was the only thing i wanted to do.
+Everything else was secondary. It occurred to me that even though i
+wanted to become a revolutionary more than anything else in the
+world, i still didn't have the slightest idea what i would have to do
+to become one.
+
+ASSATA
+207
+
+Chapter 1 4
+
+208
+
+ou're the property of the feds now," one of
+the marshals told me like he really believed it. "We're
+taking you to MCC [the federal prison, manhattan
+correctional center] where you'll stay while you stand
+trial for bank robbery." It was January 5, 1976, fifteen
+days after i had been acquitted on the kidnapping
+charge in Brooklyn supreme kourt; i was still on
+Rikers Island. He busied himself tying me up with
+what seemed an endless amount of chains and
+shackles. Another stupid-looking marshal told me
+how sorry he was to see me again. He said i'd given
+him hell the last time. I didn't even recognize him. He
+said he had worked on the last, other bank robbery
+trial and had gotten "chewed out" because i got preg­
+nant. "You were framed," i told him . He looked at me
+all dumb, scratching his head. "Yeah, yeah. That's
+right." I started to laugh. Even the other marhsals
+started to crack up. "It's not so funny," he said. "I lost
+my commendation that went down in my record." I
+laughed even harder.
+The only way i can describe MCC is modern gray,
+with dabs of colored paint here and there. It's one of
+those ugly inner-city fortress buildings, antinature,
+antihuman, and cold to all the senses. There was no
+fresh air because the entire building was air-con­
+ditioned, and the only natural light came in from
+narrow glass slits cut into the side of the building and
+wired with alarms. The guards looked like space age
+robotons, with blue blazers, gray pants, walkie-talk­
+ies, and beepers. After i had been issued the standard
+uniform for women (a yellow jumpsuit and tennis
+shoes), i was led up to the women's section. To my
+absolute surprise i was placed in "general popula-
+
+tion," given a key to my cage, and told that there was no "lock-in"
+time. We were supposed to stand by the cell doors at various times
+of the day to be counted. The women's section was a relatively small
+area, comprising a central area for eating and recreation, a TV
+room, and three split-level tiers. There were a few offices, one or
+two rooms that served as classrooms, and that was it. The only
+other place the women could go, once in a while, was to recreation
+on the roof, which was covered with huge metal antihelicopter bars.
+After spending more than a month in that confining little
+place, the women were climbing the walls, and i'm sure the men felt
+the same way. A few of the federal prisoners were big time, with
+money and connections; they'd been arrested for more "sophisti­
+cated" crimes than the average state prisoner. But th� majority were
+poor, Black, or Third World, just like in the state jails. But just like
+in the street, money talks. A lot of the men on the honor floor,
+which was on the same floor as the women, had money, and rumor
+had it that they would send their favorite guards out to buy them
+Chinese or Italian food or send them to the Jewish delicatessen,
+depending on their mood. One drug dealer made frequent visits to
+the women's section in the wee small hours for conjugal visits with
+his wife. Since the men on the honor floor had contact with the
+women, many tried to buy them by sending them huge quantities
+of commissary items. Others tried to impress the women with tall
+tales about how much they had ripped off or how big they were on
+the street. 1 was sitting on the bench with this white guy, waiting for
+them to take me to kourt one morning, and he was steady talking
+one and two million dollar deals he had pulled off. He was some
+kind of con artist, busted for stock fraud. "You shouldn't be here,"
+i told him. "You should be in the White House with all the other
+big-time con artists." "I was trying," he said, "I was trying like
+hell.�'
+There were two sisters who i knew from Rikers. 1 was really
+happy to see them both. Skeets was a strong, stand-up sister who
+kept her mouth shut, minded her business, and didn't take any shit
+from anybody. She was a real warmhearted person, generous and
+open, and maintained a whole lot of humanity, even though she was
+facing a hunk of time on a bank robbery case. 1 was shocked when i
+ran into Charlie, who i had known on Rikers as Charlene. She had
+changed completely. She was no longer the thin, round-faced young
+sister i had known on the rock. It was as if she had aged overnight.
+She had written some dynamite poetry and had been part of our
+drama group. But this time she had been arrested for parole viola­
+tion on a technicality and just didn't give a damn about anything
+
+ASSATA
+
+209
+
+ASSATA
+2IO
+
+anymore. She was bitter and tired and her whole attitude can be
+summed up in the two words that she frequently used: "Shove it."
+She told me that her freedom depended on whether or not she
+passed a high school equivalency test. Everybody encouraged her
+to study, but she just didn't seem to care anymore. She said she was
+tired of jumping through hoops and didn't give a damn what
+happened. I understood how she felt, but i hated to see her so bitter
+and so hurt and nowhere to go with it, nothing positive to apply it
+to. I wanted to help her, but i didn't know how, and i was only
+going to be there for a hot minute. The only thing that perked her
+up was the struggle the women got into to improve medical care at
+the jail.
+At the time, the health situation was horrible. Women came in
+off the street and were given no physical exam, no tests, no nothing.
+They had trouble seeing gynecologists and having their most basic
+needs met, medical or otherwise. Since we were a tiny minority of
+the prison population, our needs were ignored. The women got
+together and wrote complaints to the warden. Charlie was one of
+the women who worked the hardest to get better medical condi­
+tions. It's kind of ironic when i think about it now. A little more
+than a year later, i heard over the prison grapevine that Charlene
+had died from undiagnosed cancer of the uterus.
+The Queens bank robbery trial, which I was here for, was one
+of the wildest trials i ever went through. We had just finished with
+the Brooklyn kidnapping case and i was not at all looking forward
+to going to trial again so soon.
+For almost three years, now, Evelyn had worked on my cases
+continuously. She had quit her job as a professor at New York
+University Law School on the day I was arrested on the turnpike to
+become my lawyer. One of the few cases she had accepted since my
+arrest-mostly to earn some money-was ready for trial, and she
+couldn't postpone it any longer. So i had to get someone else for
+my trial. Some of the brothers and sisters recommended Stanley
+Cohen to me. They said he was a good lawyer and would do a good
+job on this kind of case. I was hesitant because i had always had
+Black lawyers representing me. I felt that they would probably be
+more understanding and more sensitive to the situation i was
+dealing with. I'm not talking about any old Black lawyer, because
+some of them make a whole lot of money and think like Richard
+Nixon. I'm talking about those who are concerned with the plight
+of Black people.
+I was especially sensitive to the issue after months of listening
+to some of the sisters at Rikers. They were so brainwashed they
+
+thought a white lawyer, any white lawyer, was better than a Black
+lawyer. They also felt the same way about white doctors, white
+dentists, white teachers, etc. "I ain't going to court with no Black
+lawyer," they'd say. "I want me a white lawyer who is friendly with
+the judge and ain't gonna make him mad." 1 tried to tell them that
+it didn't matter what color their lawyer was, if the lawyer went
+against the judge and really put up a fight for the client, the judge
+was gonna get mad. Few, if any, Black defendants have ever been
+freed because the judge liked their lawyer. If you had a dime for
+every time a judge and a defense lawyer sat down to lunch and
+discussed some Black client rotting away in jail, you'd be able to
+stop working and live on the interest.
+1 decided to talk with Cohen and see whether i thought he
+would be good for the case. Stanley was a middle-aged, Jewish,
+fiesty-Iooking man who somehow reminded me of W. C. Fields. He
+had a dramatic streak in him and could change the tone and mood
+of his voice from indignant to pleading in a matter of seconds. He
+had a long list of acquittals in his record and told funny stories
+about the strategies he used in this or that trial. He had once been a
+member of the Communist party and continued to have progressive
+politics. "Why do you like being a criminal lawyer?" i asked him.
+"How can you stapd to fight in the kourt system, knowing how
+much racism and injustice is involved ?" It was a loaded question,
+put out there to see how he would answer it. 1 expected him to say
+something like somebody had to do it, somebody had to make the
+sacrifice. "I like to win," he said. "I do it because 1 like to win." 1
+liked him and decided i wanted him to defend me on the bank
+robbery case.
+Evelyn gave Stanley the transcripts from the time i was beaten
+up in kourt by the u.s. marshals trying to photograph me, together
+with all of the other documents in her file, and worked with him on
+the trial strategy. Andrew Jackson had pled guilty, so i was on trial
+alone. Everything was rush, rush, rush. The railroad train was
+whistling and it could hardly wait to take me up the river. The new
+judge assigned to the case wanted the case over with and he wanted
+it over with fast. We wanted to question the prospective j urors
+about their opinions, what they had seen and heard in the media,
+etc. The judge was determined not to have a long voir dire, and so
+we compromised. A questionnaire was made up asking some of the
+questions we submitted and others that the prosecutor submitted.
+After we went through the answers we were to pick or eliminate
+jurors, asking additional questions as needed. Some of the answers
+were so contradictory and such a study on the level of racism in
+
+ASSATA
+2II
+
+ASSATA
+2I2
+
+amerika that it would take a book just to report on them. In one
+hundred percent of the cases we were able to tell whether the
+prospective juror was Black, white, or "other," just by reading the
+answers.
+The trial had a lighthearted feel to it. Everyone had kind of
+decided that we would enjoy the fight and fight as hard as we could,
+without worrying about whether we were gonna win or lose. I
+don't think that there was a single one of us, with the possible
+exception of Afeni Shakur, who really thought we were going to
+win. Afeni, who was working as a legal assistant, kept telling me,
+"We're going to win this one, Assata." But i sure as hell didn't
+believe it. They had taken a bank picture of a woman robbing a
+bank, printed my name under it as being positively identified, and
+then placed that picture in newspapers, subway stations, and, i
+think, even on the sides of buses. They had this picture posted in
+every bank in New York. There was not a person in New York who
+went to the bank, rode the subway, or walked the streets who had
+not seen that photograph with my name printed under it a thou­
+sand times. There was no way of even counting how many times
+that picture had been flashed on television, with the announcer
+calling out my name. The public had been so saturated with that
+image that i felt it was crazy to take this trial seriously. After
+Stanley was familiar with some of the facts, i had asked him what
+he thought my chances were. "I'd be lying if I told you that they
+looked good. In reality, they look pretty lousy. But, I believe you,
+and I'm going to fight for you. And, believe me, I like to fight." We
+agreed that i would act as co-counsel on the case. "You're a lousy
+lawyer," he would tell me every time we got into an argument over
+some strategy, "but you're better than a lotta lawyers I know who
+passed the bar."
+The atmosphere was electric. The kourtroom was packed every
+day with sisters and brothers who had come to watch the circus. I
+couldn't stop staring. I have always said that the best thing about
+being on trial is getting to see and smile at the spectators. Seeing so
+many beautiful people in the kourtroom gave us the push . we
+needed to get down and take care of business. I felt that way during
+all of my trials, but this trial had an atmosphere that made it even
+more special. People from all over the Black community dropped
+by. The Muslim sisters and brothers brought their prayer rugs and
+broke out into prayer in the hallway of the kourthouse. People
+brought their children, explaining what was happening. One little
+girl broke up the whole kourtroom when she asked out loud, "Is
+that the fascist pig, Mommy?" pointing up at the judge. It was as if
+
+Black folks had just taken over the kourtroom, letting everybody
+know that they were watching what was going down.
+The first thing we did was ask for a lineup. The way i had been
+"identified" was from a photo. The FBI had selected my pho­
+tograph from the "militant casebook." This book contained the
+photographs of all the "militants" the FBI wanted to send to prison.
+After they had gotten my photograph out of the "militant case­
+book," they put it in with a few other photographs of women. Of
+course, mine, a mug shot, was the only one with numbers across
+the front of it. The rest were normal. The FBI then showed this
+group of pictures to the robbery witnesses and asked them to
+identify someone who "somewhat resembled" or "bore a likeness"
+to the woman who robbed the bank. Two of the people who were
+in the bank signed affidavits saying that the photograph with the
+numbers across it, my mug shot, looked somewhat like the woman.
+The rest who had been in the bank at the time of the robbery made
+no such identification. We told the judge we wanted a lineup
+because we thought the initial identification of me as the bank
+robber was suggestive and tainted. But before the judge had ar­
+ranged for the lineup, the prosecutor called one of the so-called
+witnesses to testify. Since i was the only Black woman sitting in the
+defendant's chair, of course he identified me. We protested the
+procedure, but the judge admitted his testimony anyway. We finally
+did arrange for a lineup, and, of course, the other so-called wit­
+nesses picked out another woman.
+Since the photo identification part of the case was based on
+nothing more than "all niggers look alike," the FBI tried to use
+"scientific" evidence to gain a conviction. Their plan to superim­
+pose the bank surveillance photo over my photograph failed be­
+cause they had only one photo of me that was taken at the same
+angle as the bank robbery picture. It was one of the photographs
+taken when they assaulted me in the kourtroom before the trial
+began when I refused to let them take my picture. The FBI had
+blocked out the faces and hands of the marshals and FBI agents
+choking and assaulting me. They had cropped the picture so that
+the only thing the jury could see was my face. But my facial
+expression in the photograph was one of such agony that it was
+hard for them to convince the jury of anything else.
+So the FBI came up with a brilliant idea. They brought in
+some dude from the FBI who said he was an expert on identifying
+photographs by examining them under a microscope. He was a real
+pro, slick as grease. He had charts and diagrams and whatnot, and i
+was worried to death that the jury would go for that crap. He
+
+ASSATA
+2 I3
+
+ASSATA
+2 I4
+
+sounded real good, until it came time for cross-examination. It
+turned out that he was a specialist in paleontology and had spent a
+lot of time studying rocks. He tried to claim that his expertise at
+examining rocks made him able to identify people. Under cross­
+examination, all his carefully constructed "expertise" turned into a
+pile of rocks, and this new technical breakthrough in crime fighting
+proved to be nothing but a fraud. Because the prosecution had been
+allowed to introduce this new, "scientific" evidence, the judge said
+we had the right to find a photographic expert to rebut the testi­
+mony. Since i didn't have a dime, the kourt agreed to pay for it. The
+day our photograph expert testified i slumped down in the seat. He
+was a real straight-looking white guy who looked like he sub­
+scribed to Reader's Digest. But the guy had credentials in pho­
+tography a mile long, and you could tell from the way he talked
+that he loved photography and that he was incensed over what the
+FBI was trying to do. He explained to the jury the chemical process
+of photography and that what the FBI agent said was absolutely
+impossible. He said that if you look at a photograph under a
+microsocpe all you will see is little dots. His testimony was so
+correct and his facts so together that the prosecutor barely bothered
+to cross-examine him.
+The capper came when the manager of the bank came forward
+to testify in my behalf. He said that i was definitely not the woman
+who robbed the bank and that the robber was a different height
+and weight from mine. We could see the prosecutor quietly creep
+under his table. His last hope was the summation.
+In his closing statement, he tried to make up for everything he
+had not proved with the evidence. He painted me as an evil,
+conniving monster. He told the jury that i was hiding the fact that i
+had big fat arms like the woman who was shown robbing the bank,
+that i was concealing my arms because i had not worn a sleeveless
+dress in kourt (the trial was held in the middle of January). As he
+was talking, i politely rolled up my sleeves right there in the
+kourtroom, exposing my very thin arms. When he got to the final
+part of his closing, he grew strangely confident. "Ladies and gen­
+tlemen of the jury, this woman is very clever, very conniving. She
+has tried to deceive this jury in every way. But she made one
+mistake, ladies and gentlemen, she made one fatal error." He then
+held up a picture of the woman robbing the bank and, in the other
+hand, he held up my mug shot picture. "She made one mistake," he
+kept repeating. "She forgot to change her earrings. She has the
+same earrings on."
+The prosecutor was so dramatic. The scene was straight out of
+
+the movies. You could tell he had been watching the late show. Both
+the woman in the bank and i had on hoop earrings. When Stanley
+summed up, he just said, "Will all the women in the courtroom
+who have on hoop earrings, please stand up?" Half the women rose
+to their feet.
+While the jury was out deliberating i paced back and forth in
+the holding pen. "They're gonna convict me anyway," i told Afeni.
+"They probably weren't even listening. "That jury isn't going to
+convict you, Assata," Afeni replied. "Didn't you see the faces of
+those jurors, especially the Black ones ?" It was true, i had seen
+them look at me differently after the truth started coming out. And
+i knew that the Black jurors in the deliberating room would make
+all the difference in the world. If nothing else, they remind some of
+the more racist whites that Black people are human beings. It's a
+shame that too many Black people try to avoid jury duty, instead of
+trying to slow down the railroad. A lot of times it's a matter of
+simple economics. Black people often feel they can't afford to sit on
+a jury, that the money they would lose would mean a sacrifice for
+their family. And they are probably right. But their sitting on a jury
+might mean that their neighbor's son or daughter doesn't end up
+frying in the electric chair or rotting away behind bars.
+A verdict had been reached. I could tell what it was before we
+even entered the kourtroom. The pigs were upset, to put it mildly.
+The female guard who escorted me to kourt every day seemed glad.
+The jury read the verdict. Acquittal. The kourtroom broke into a
+loud cheer. The judge just gave up calling for order. He had to wait
+for the shouting to die down. It was a long time coming. All the
+spectators were jumping around hugging each other. The marshals
+led me out of the courtroom and handcuffed me. They brought me
+back to Rikers Island where i was put into solitary confinement.
+
+ASSATA
+2 I5
+
+Chapter 1 5
+
+2I6
+
+bundle of energy walked
+into the Black Panther Party office on Seventh Avenue.
+If a light had been plugged into me, i'm sure i would
+have lit up half of Harlem. I was fired up and raring to
+go. When i joined the BPP, i was determined to give it
+everything i had.
+The officer of the day gave me a form to fill out.
+He couldn't find the second sheet so i went back with
+him to look for it. He was searching through a file
+cabinet which was in a state of anti-order. It was a
+complete mess. I offered to arrange it for him and the
+brother consented. In a minute i was knee-deep in
+paper, indexing and putting everything in alphabetical
+order. After everybody's "security files" were filed, i cut
+index markers out of a manila folder, thinking about
+how lax security was. I had just walked in off the street
+and they let me go through all the files. I explained the
+new system to the brother, happy at least that the
+experience gained from all those boring office jobs was
+put to some revolutionary use.
+That same evening i was on the bus to Phila­
+delphia. The Party had called for a constitutional
+convention to write a new constitution that would
+guarantee the rights of the poor and oppressed and
+would be antiracist and antifascist. We were attending
+the plenary session for the convention to be held later
+in D.C. This session was a definite up. Everybody's
+spirits were soaring. It took my breath away to see all
+those revolutionaries get up and tell it like it was. I was
+happy as a dog in boneville. My "hotel room" was a
+pool table in the basement of a church. I slept better
+than a princess on twenty mattresses.
+When i got back to New York, i was assigned to
+
+the medical cadre. Joan Bird was my immediate supervisor. She had
+been a nursing student and was one of the defendants in the New
+York Panther 21 case. She was out on $100,000 bail and busy
+working on the trial. She had been beaten, tortured, and hung
+upside down out of a police station window. She had big, soft eyes,
+nervous lips, and the face of someone who had been forced to grow
+up too soon. She reminded me of someone who had led a very
+sheltered life and then, all of a sudden, found herself in the cold,
+cruel world. She was sort of shy, and i felt sorry for her because she
+seemed to be under so much pressure. She took everything to heart;
+nothing seemed to slide off her back. She worried about everything
+and everyone. She was facing thirty years in prison, so i had to do
+most of the medical cadre work, and she worried herself sick about
+that.
+The medical cadre was responsible for the health care of the
+Panthers. We made medical and dental appointments for them and
+taught them basic first aid so that they could help the people in
+emergencies. Periodically, we set up a table on the street corner and
+gave free TB tests or gave out information on sickle-cell anemia. It
+was also my job to work with the Black medical students and
+doctors who we were counting on to help us set up a free clinic in
+Harlem. The Panther Party had bought a brownstone on 12 7th
+Street, and as soon as it was renovated we planned to open a free
+clinic there.
+Every week all the medical cadre members from the Bronx,
+Brooklyn, Harlem, Jamaica, and Corona branches met at the
+Bronx Ministry of Information. On my first trip to the Ministry, i
+carried a big stack of Panther newspapers. I was a lousy paper
+seller, and most of the time i got some of my doing-good friends to
+chip in and buy them. Then we'd give them away to the people.
+The head of the medical cadre was Alaywa, and from the first
+moment she gained my respect and admiration. She was serious
+about everything that concerned Black people, but when it came to
+their health she was a fanatic. She demanded that we take our jobs
+seriously, and woe be to the medical cadre who showed up at the
+weekly meeting with nothing on their progress reports. Alaywa had
+a young daughter, but she nevertheless did the work of two people.
+I got expelled from the Party, though, that first night after the
+medical cadre meeting. When i came out of the meeting, my stack
+of Panther papers was gone. I asked around, but no one had seen
+them. Finally, Robert Bey, the head of the whole East Coast branch
+of the Party, said that he had seen them.
+"Where are they?" i asked.
+"I threw them away."
+
+ASSATA
+2 I7
+
+ASSATA
+2IB
+
+"What do you mean, you threw them away?" i asked, thinking
+it was some kind of joke.
+"I threw them away," he insisted. "Ya'll know that you're not
+supposed to leave the papers out here on the desk. This will teach
+you to put the papers up on the rack where they belong."
+I explained that it was my first time coming up to the Ministry
+and that i had no way of knowing the procedure.
+"You should have asked," he replied arrogantly. "I threw them
+away and that's that."
+I was losing my patience. "Look, man, why don't you just give
+me my papers so that i can get out of here. I don't have time to
+stand here all night."
+"I told you i threw the papers away, and that's that."
+"Then you're either a liar or a fool," i shot back. He had made
+me mad, gone and stepped on my last nerve. Then he tried to get all
+bad, getting all up in my face, trying to defend his stupid arrogance.
+I was in no mood for fooling around. I cursed him out royally and
+walked out of the office.
+The next day, when i walked into the Harlem office, Bashir, the
+officer of the day, told me i would have to leave. "What do you
+mean, leave ?" i asked. He said that he was sorry, but Robert Bey
+had called and told him that i was no longer in the Party. I was
+burnt. I got the Bronx Ministry and told them to put Bey on the
+phone and proceeded to call him the unprincipled, arrogant idiot
+he was. In addition to being cowardly, he hadn't even told me to my
+face that i was expelled. I was so warm i wasn't even surprised when
+he apologized and told me i was reinstated. I hate arrogance
+whether it's white or purple or Black. Some people let power go to
+their heads. They think that just because they have some kind of
+title in front of their name you're supposed to bend over and kiss
+them on the ass. The only great people i have met have been modest
+and humble. You can't claim that you love people when you don't
+respect them, and you can't call for political unity unless you
+practice it in your relationships. And that doesn't happen out of
+nowhere. That's something that has got to be put into practice every
+day.
+The first day i was assigned to the breakfast program i over­
+slept. To get there on time i had to get up at 4:30 in the morning. I
+was the picture of shame and remorse as i came plodding into the
+office. "Fancy meeting you here," the sister who i was supposed to
+be helping said. "So nice of you to come." Later on that evening i
+criticized myself for being late. "That's all right, sister," the brother
+
+who was leading the meeting said. "you can do penance by work­
+ing on the breakfast program for life."
+"For life?" i repeated.
+"Yep, you can show your sincerity to the hungry children of
+Harlem by working on the breakfast for as long as you're in the
+Party."
+1 have always hated to get up in the morning, and the sheer
+idea of getting up every day at 4:30 made me groan. But i thought
+about the children i'd let down. Getting up early should be an easy
+thing for a revolutionary. 1 thought about those who had given their
+lives for our struggle and decided it wasn't so hard after all. Later,
+one of the sisters told me, "Don't worry. They'll just assign you to
+the breakfast program every day until you're used to it and they can
+count on you to be disciplined. The same thing happened to me."
+1 was glad it had happened to others because i felt like such a
+dumbbell. Got to try harder, i told myself.
+Working on the breakfast program turned out to be an abso­
+lute delight. The work was so fulfilling. The Harlem branch had
+breakfast programs in three different churches, and i rotated among
+all three. From the first day i saw those kids, my heart went out to
+them. They were such bright, open little people, each with his or
+her own personality. 1 spent the first two weeks or so just getting
+my cooking act together. One little girl came over to me and tapped
+me on the back.
+"There's something wrong with your pancakes."
+"What's wrong with them ?"
+"They don't taste good."
+Making breakfast for a whole bunch of hungry kids in the
+morning is no easy task, especially when you don't know how
+many are coming or how much they're going to eat. There was one
+little boy who i was convinced had a tapeworm. He put away so
+much food it was unbelievable. One day i saw him stuff some food
+into his pockets.
+"Would you like some paper to wrap that in?" i asked him,
+tearing off a piece of foil.
+"I wasn't stealing." Tears welled up in his eyes.
+"Of course you weren't. Everything is free here and you can
+take as much as you want. But don't you want to wrap it up so your
+pockets don't get all greasy ?"
+"It's for my mother. We don't have no food and the stove is
+broke."
+"You can tell your mother that she can come down if she wants
+
+ASSATA
+2Ig
+
+ASSATA
+220
+
+to, and you can take as much food home as you want to." A few of
+the other kids were looking at us. "That goes for everyone. If you
+want to take a sandwich or something with you, just let me know
+and i'll give you some wrapping paper for it." After that i would try
+to remember to ask if anybody wanted anything to go. Most of the
+kids were interested. "Give me an egg sandwich to go." "I want two
+sausages to go." We rarely met the parents. When a new kid joined
+the program, the parents might drop by to check it out, but in
+general they would only come to leave the kids or pick them up.
+The breakfast program in East Harlem was the poorest. In the
+middle of winter some of the kids were without hats, gloves,
+scarves, and boots and wore just some skimpy coats or jackets.
+When it was possible, we tried to hook them up with something
+from the free clothing drive. Only once in a while, when everything
+went smoothly and we were through early, did we get a chance to
+spend some time with the children. Usually we were in a rush
+making sure they got out to school on time. Some of the Panthers
+wanted them to learn the ten-point program and platform and
+others wanted to teach them Panther songs. 1 preferred talking to
+them, sitting down with them and exchanging ideas. So we just sort
+of combined these approaches. We were all dead set against cram­
+ming things in their heads or teaching them meaningless rote
+phrases. The children were so naturally curious we had to take care
+not to let the food burn while we answered their questions.
+My closest friends in the Party were Dhoruba, Cetewayo, and
+Jamal. They were all out on bail from the Panther 21 case. They
+came over to my house and we sat for hours talking politics, the
+Party, North Korea, and what was happening on 1 1 6th Street. 1
+learned more in one night than i learned in City College in a
+month. They had a hard time dealing with me, though. 1 can be
+stubborn as six mules and will argue anyone down until i'm
+convinced one way or the other. Although i no longer hated white
+people and no longer saw all of them as the enemy, i was still not
+too fond of them. As far as i was concerned, it was the duty of Black
+people to work in the Black community and it was the job of white
+people to go into the white community and organize white people.
+The brothers were in one hundred percent agreement with that. We
+also agreed that it was necessary for Black, white, Hispanic, Native
+American, and Oriental people to come together to fight. We
+disagreed on who and what i should study.
+Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that,
+often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. 1 preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim II
+Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and
+
+Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey
+Newton was putting out. It wasn't easy reading, but i was glad i did
+it. It opened up my horizons a hell of a lot. I didn't relate to them as
+the great white fathers or like some kind of gods, like some of the
+white revolutionaries did. As far as i was concerned, they were two
+dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too
+great to be ignored.
+The more i studied, the more critical i became of the political
+education (PE) program in the Party. There were three different
+political education classes: community classes, classes for BPP ca­
+dre, and PE classes for Panther leadership. In the community
+classes, Panthers explained the ten-point program and the general
+objectives and philosophy of the BPP as well as various articles that
+appeared in the Black Panther newspaper. As far as i was con­
+cerned, these were the best PE classes the party ever gave. If the
+teachers were good, the classes were interesting and fun.
+With a few exceptions, PE classes for Party members turned
+out to be j ust the opposite. We reviewed articles in the BPP paper,
+read passages from Mao's R ed Book, and discussed certain
+speeches and articles by various Party members. Most of the time
+whoever was giving the class discussed whatever we were studying
+and explained it, but without giving the underlying issues or
+putting it into any historical context. The basic problem was not
+whether the teacher was good or bad. The basic problem stemmed
+from the fact that the BPP had no systematic approach to political
+education. They were reading the Red Book but didn't know who
+Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner were. They
+talked about intercommunalism but still really believed that the
+Civil War was fought to free the slaves. A whole lot of them barely
+understood any kind of history, Black, African or otherwise. Huey
+Newton had written that politics was war without bloodshed and
+that war was politics with bloodshed. To a lot of Panthers, however,
+struggle consisted of only two aspects: picking up the gun and
+serving the people.
+That was the main reason many Party members, in my opin­
+ion, underestimated the need to unite with other Black organiza­
+tions and to struggle around various community issues. A lot of the
+sisters and brothers had joined because they were sick and tired of
+the oppression they had been suffering. Most of them had never
+been in the struggle before. Quite a few joined thinking the Party
+was going to issue them a gun and direct them to go out and shoot
+pigs. Most of these brothers and sisters had attended inferior
+schools which either taught them lies or nothing at all. Education
+
+ASSATA
+22I
+
+ASSATA
+222
+
+of every kind was sorely needed. Without an adequate education
+program, many Panthers fell into a roboton bag. They repeated
+slogans and phrases without understanding their complete mean­
+ing, often resulting in dogmatic and shortsighted practices. For
+example, one day an African brother who was working with one of
+the African liberation movements came into the office and gave us a
+beautiful calendar put out by one of the African liberation groups.
+It was baaad. It had beautiful pictures of African freedom fighters
+and said something like "International support for African libera­
+tion." The first thing i did was hang it up. When i came to the office
+the next day the calendar was gone. When i asked what had
+happened to it, they said, "The calendar said 'international' and
+we're not internationalists, we're intercommunalists."
+I am convinced that a systematic program for political educa­
+tion, ranging from the simplest to the highest level, is imperative for
+any successful organization or movement for Black liberation in
+this country. The Party had some of the most politically conscious
+sisters and brothers as members, but in some ways it failed to
+spread that consciousness to the cadre in general. I also thought it
+was a real shame the BPP didn't teach Panthers organizing and
+mobilizing techniques. Some members were natural geniuses at
+organizing people, but they were usually the busiest comrades with
+the most responsibility. Part of the problem was that the Party had
+grown so fast that there wasn't a lot of time to come up with step­
+by-step approaches to things. The other part of the problem was
+that almost from its inception, the BPP was under attack from the
+u.s. government.
+At first i didn't feel the repression too deeply. I knew the Party
+was under attack, but it felt like it wasn't so near, like it was
+lingering in the background. What made me maddest was the
+media treatment of the BPP, which gave the impression that the
+Party was racist and violent. And it worked. The pigs would burst
+into a Panther office, shoot first, and ask questions later. The press
+always reported that the police had "uncovered" a large arsenal of
+weapons. Later, when the "arsenal" turned out to be a few legally
+registered rifles and shotguns, the press never printed a word. The
+same thing goes on today. Nobody gets upset about white people
+having guns, but let a Black person have a gun and something
+criminal is going on. The only time white amerika is in favor of
+Black people having guns is when we are using them to do amer­
+ika's dirty work. They've got a lot of Black people so scared they are
+scared even to think about owning a gun. But the way the tide of
+racism is rising in this country, Black people better be more scared
+
+to not have a gun than to have one. With the Ku Klux Klan and all
+these other racists running around, Black people have got to be
+suicidal if they don't own and know how to operate a gun. If you
+don't own a gun now, you'd better rush out and buy one because in
+a few years, the way this country is moving, it might be against the
+law for Blacks to buy guns.
+One of the best things about struggling is the people you meet.
+Before i became involved, i never dreamed such beautiful people
+existed. Of course, there were some creeps, but i can say without
+the slightest hesitation that i have been blessed with meeting some
+of the kindest, most courageous, most principled, most informed
+and intelligent people on the face of the earth. l owe a great deal to
+those who have helped me, loved me, taught me, and pulled my
+coat when i was moving in the wrong direction. If there is such a
+thing as luck, i've had an abundance of it, and the ones who have
+brought it to me are my friends and comrades. My wild, big­
+hearted friends, with their pretty ways and pretty thoughts, have
+given me more happiness that i will ever deserve. There was never a
+time, no matter what horrible thing i was undergoing, when i felt
+completely alone. Maybe it's ironic, i don't know, but the one thing
+i do know is that the Black liberation movement has done more for
+me than i will ever be able to do for it.
+Becoming Zayd's friend was something really important. After i
+joined the party he would drop by my house every so often. We
+would listen to music and talk politics. I was forever teasing him
+about being part of the leadership (he was Minister of Information)
+since he was the only leader up at the Bronx Ministry, with the
+exception of Afeni Shakur, i had any respect for. He would laugh at
+my Robert Bey jokes, but he never once said a disparaging word
+about any of the other comrades. I also respected him because he
+refused to become part of the macho cult that was an official body
+in the BPP. He never voted on issues or took a position just to be
+one of the boys. When brothers made an unprincipled attack on
+sisters, Zayd refused to participate. Whenever we hooked up for a
+meeting at somebody's house, he was the first to volunteer to cook
+dinner or, if dinner was already cooked, the first to roll up his
+sleeves and wash the dishes. I knew this had to be especially hard
+for him because he was small and his masculinity was always being
+challenged in some way by the more backward, muscle-headed
+men in the party.
+Zayd always treated me and all the other sisters with respect. I
+enjoyed his friendship because he was one of those rare men com-
+
+ASSATA
+223
+
+ASSATA
+224
+
+pletely capable of being friends with a woman without having
+designs on her. We communicated on such an intense, honest level
+that afterward i wondered if it had been real. And he was cultured.
+When you say "cultured," most people think you're talking about
+the opera and Amy Vanderbilt's etiquette book, but that's not what
+i'm talking about. He was well versed and well educated about
+every aspect of Black life. He could not only recite Langston Hughes
+by heart and give a biographical rundown of Coltrane, Bessie
+Smith, or James Cleveland, but he could also sit down and have an
+intelligent conversation about dreambooks or Argo starch eaters.
+After a while Zayd asked me to work with him on Party
+projects. It was mostly dealing with white support groups who
+were involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members still in jail.
+1 hated it. At the time, i felt that anything below 1 10th Street was
+another country. All my activities were centered in Harlem and i
+almost never left it. Doing defense committee work was definitely
+not up my alley. 1 think that one of the reasons Zayd insisted on
+bringing me to some of these events is that he knew how much i
+hated them. 1 was the perfect angry Panther. 1 hated standing
+around while all these white people asked me to explain myself, my
+existence. 1 became a master of the one-line answer.
+"What made you become a Panther?"
+"Oppression. "
+"What do you think about Huey Newton ?"
+"He's a right-on Black revolutionary leader."
+"What do you think white people should be doing?"
+"Organizing other white people in their communities, supporting Black and Third World liberation struggles, and helping to
+free the Panther 2 1 ."
+Once a guy asked if i was really going to off the pigs.
+"Not tonight."
+1 couldn't get over how personal some of those people tried to
+get even though i'd never seen them before. One came over to me
+and asked if Zayd was my Panther husband. When i looked at her
+as if she was crazy for asking me a question like that, she said,
+giggling all over herself, "I mean, 1 mean, is he your cat?" Another
+woman came over and stuck her hands all in my hair. "Oh, 1 just
+had to touch your hair. It's so . . . kinky."
+Zayd would be steady trying to convince the defense groups to
+raise more money. He explained how important it was to have the
+Panther 21 out on the street, organizing and educating people
+about what was going on in amerika. Zayd was polite and under­
+standing and patient. After he gave his little speech, he would turn
+
+to me and ask, "What do you think about that, sister?" Rapping in
+my best Panther cadence, i would say something like "Black people
+have been oppressed for four hundred years. We are still being
+oppressed. The Panther 21 don't need any moral support. They
+need concrete support. They don't want to hear that you sym­
+pathize with them, they want to hear that you are willing and ready
+to help liberate them." When we were finished, a second donation
+would be given.
+Zayd was usually cool and poised at these functions, except
+once. We were at a meeting with the Computer People for Peace, a
+group that was helping to raise the money to bail out Sundiata
+Acoli. Zayd said Sundiata should be the next Panther to be bailed
+out because his leadership qualities were sorely needed in the Party.
+One guy kept interrupting him, implying that Zayd was pushing for
+Sundiata's release because they were friends, that he was being
+subjective and dealing from an emotional rather than a scientific,
+objective analysis. Zayd's face underwent a complete change. I
+could see that he was trying to control himself to keep from going
+off on this dude. "What do you mean, I'm being subjective? Don't
+you ever open your mouth to me to tell me I'm subjective as long as
+you live. My brother Lumumba, my own flesh and blood, has also
+been locked up for more than a year, and I haven't asked you for a
+dime to bail him out." Lumumba Shakur was one of the Panther
+2 1 . A complete hush came over the room. The computer people
+said they would do everything they could to raise money for Sun­
+diata's bail, and that's' what they did. The only thing was that, once
+the $ 1 00,000 cash bail was raised, pig judge Murtagh refused to
+release him or any of the others. We were furious and helpless.
+After a while, everything seemed strange to me. I was catching
+all these weird vibrations and sensations. I couldn't quite put my
+finger on it, but i could sense a whole lot of stuff going on. I felt like
+i was standing on top of a river with currents swirling down
+underneath the surface. All these strange things were starting to
+happen. I would go to the laundromat and find a Black policeman
+there who said he wanted to join the Party. Every once in a while i'd
+turn around and see strange men following me. Even though i had
+no money to pay my telephone bill and had long stopped paying it,
+the telephone kept working and, after a while, i stopped receiving
+any bills.
+Politically, i was not at all happy with the direction of the Party.
+Huey went on a nationwide tour advocating his new theory of
+intercommunality. The essence of the theory was that imperialism
+had reached such a degree that sovereign borders were no longer
+
+ASSATA
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+
+ASSATA
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+
+recognized and that oppressed nations no longer existed, only
+oppressed communities, within and outside the u.s. The problem
+was that somebody had forgotten to tell these oppressed commu­
+nities that they were no longer nations. Even worse, almost no one
+understood Huey's long speeches explaining intercommunalism.
+Huey Newton was not what you would call a good speaker. In fact,
+he had a kind of high-pitched monotonous voice and his rambling
+for three hours about the negation of the negation was sheer
+disaster. People walked out in droves. Instead of criticizing what
+was happening, most of the Party members defended it. When i said
+that Huey needed speaking lessons they jumped down my throat.
+When Huey changed his title from defense minister to the
+ridiculous-sounding "Supreme Commander" and then to the even
+more ridiculous "Supreme Servant," damn near nobody said a
+word. That was one of the big problems in the Party. Criticism and
+self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given
+often was not taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-crit­
+icism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization.
+Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn
+from them.
+Because i was still a college student, i was often called on by
+the BPP to do student work. I didn't mind working with students
+to coordinate this or that, but i was deathly afraid of speaking in
+public. But they insisted i had to learn in order to be effective on
+campus. I had an old rickety tape recorder that was on its last legs. I
+decided to use it to practice public speaking. On and on i went, bla,
+bla, bla, into the microphone. The telephone rang. I put the mike
+down, turned off the recorder, and rushed to the phone. "Hello,
+JoAnne? Stop making tapes," the voice said. The phone clicked. I
+stood there with the receiver in my hand. I had to get out of there. I
+ran to get my coat. I needed some privacy to think.
+Every day at the office, things were getting stranger and stran­
+ger. Rumors that the pigs were going to attack the office were
+rampant. Convinced of the invasion, the leadership decided to
+"secure" the office. The big storefront window was removed and
+replaced by a wooden partition. Windows without glass were cut
+into the wood, covered by little wooden doors. "What are all those
+little holes for?" i asked. "To shoot out of," they told me. Piles of
+sandbags were brought into the office. I didn't believe that shit!
+Everybody was talking about defending the office. "Why do we
+have to defend the office ?" i asked. They told me something about
+executive mandate number three. It said Panthers were supposed to
+defend the office against pig attacks. I was all in favor of self-
+
+defense, but i couldn't see giving my life up just to defend the office.
+"It's the principle of the thing," they told me.
+I didn't understand what principle they were talking about.
+One of the basic laws of people's struggle was to retreat when the
+enemy is strong and to attack when the enemy is weak. As far as i
+was concerned, defending the office was suicidal. The pigs had
+manpower, initiative, surprise, and gunpowder. We would just be
+sitting ducks. I felt that the Party was dealing from an emotional
+rather than a rational basis. Just because you believe in self-defense
+doesn't mean you let yourself be sucked into defending yourself on
+the enemy's terms. One of the Party's major weaknesses, i thought,
+was the failure to clearly differentiate between aboveground politi­
+cal struggle and underground, clandestine military struggle.
+An aboveground political organization can't wage guerrilla
+war anymore than an underground army can do aboveground
+political work. Although the two must work together, they must
+have completely separate structures, and any links between the two
+must remain secret. Educating the people about the necessity for
+self-defense and for armed struggle was one thing. But maintaining
+a policy of defending Party offices against insurmountable odds was
+another. Of course, if the police just came in and started shooting,
+defending yourself made sense. But the point is to try and prevent
+that from happening. One day, in the not too distant future, any
+Black organization that is not based on bootlicking and tomming
+will be forced underground. And as fast as this country is moving to
+the fascist far right, Black revolutionary organizations should start
+preparing for the inevitability. Fascist governments do not permit
+revolutionary or progressive opposition groups to exist, no matter
+how peaceful or nonviolent they are. It doesn't matter whether the
+fascist government simply outlaws the groups like in Nazi Germany
+or mounts a counterintelligence campaign to destroy opposition
+groups, like in the u.s.
+It was growing more and more impossible to get work done.
+Everything seemed to be in a continuous state of chaos. The Party
+decided at one point to open a Saturday Liberation School for
+children, and i was assigned to the project. I was really ecstatic
+about it because i love working with children and i was really tired
+of adults at the time. Being my usual reserved self, i threw every bit
+of energy i had into the project. I collected books, materials, paints,
+photographs, children's Black history stories, children's records,
+etc. Two other comrades were assigned to the project. Everybody
+pitched in and after a few weeks we had a whole pile of children
+attending. Just as we got the program on its feet, i was called aside
+
+ASSATA
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+
+ASSATA
+228
+
+and taken into confidence. The Party had information that the pigs
+were going to raid the office in about two weeks. "If the pigs were
+going to attack the office, why would they bother to tell us?" I
+asked. "We have our sources, sister," i was told. "Just like the pigs
+have their sources, we have ours." I was skeptical, but i figured they
+knew more about it than i did. In preparation for the coming attack
+i was asked to prepare a child care place, a safe house for Panther
+children. It sounded kind of wild, but i agreed to do it. In the back
+of my mind i half thought they were testing me to see how i would
+respond in a crisis.
+I put the child care thing together. Two weeks came and went,
+but there was no invasion.
+In addition, a lot of things were going on that i was not too
+happy about. Plans, priorities, and procedures changed daily, and
+most of the time the changes were ill-conceived. Everything had an
+arbitrary air to it, and i certainly did not have the feeling that we
+were waging a step-by-step analytical struggle. There was little
+internal conflict in either the Harlem branch or the New York
+Chapter. For the most part Panthers were a friendly, open group of
+people who really went out of their way to be kind and helpful and,
+in spite of all the pressure and hardships they had to deal with,
+managed to be principled and to fight as hard as they ktiew how for
+our people. We had a bit of a leadership problem with Robert Bey
+and Jolly, who were both from the West Coast. Bey's problem was
+that he was none too bright and that he had an aggressive, even
+belligerent, way of talking and dealing with people. jolly's problem
+was that he was Robert Bey's shadow. Bey later became Huey
+Newton's bodyguard, a job for which he was much more suited.
+Cotton had come to Harlem from California. Everybody loved
+him. He was everybody's main man. He had known Bunchy Carter,
+Lil Bobby Hutton, the chief (David Hilliard), and, of course, the
+rage (Eldridge Cleaver). Cotton had been sent to New York and put
+in charge of fixing up the brownstone the Party had bought on
+127th Street. According to the grapevine, Huey wanted to move
+BPP headquarters to New York and Cotton was to prepare the
+security for the house. He used to mosey over to the Harlem office
+with a bottle of cheap pluck in his back pocket and tell war stories.
+He would sip his wine and talk about what had gone down on the
+coast.
+The first time i went over to inspect the 127th Street house,
+Cotton gave me a guided tour. He explained the whole futuristic
+security plan. He was going to hook up the security system so that
+if so much as a foot was put on the front steps of the building an
+
+alarm would alert the security officer inside. If it was the pigs, huge
+floodlights would be turned on, blinding them. Thick metal doors
+would glide into place and a lot of other fantastic things would
+happen that i don't remember. I kept my mouth shut because i
+knew absolutely nothing about security, but i silently wondered
+why he didn't put in stuff that was more conventional, like a
+closed-circuit TV. I had a special interest in the building since the
+ground floor and the basement were designated to be the free health
+clinic. At the time, the basement was a disaster, with no plumbing,
+no heat, no electricity, and a mountain load of bricks, powder, and
+debris. Cotton assured me that the basement would be fixed up
+within six months.
+Next he showed me Huey's room. It was the only room in the
+house somewhat fixed up. He had put up wooden paneling. There
+was a small table and a single bed which, he carefully explained to
+me, was made up in military style, ready at all times for the
+minister. I looked at him like he was crazy. Of all the things i could
+imagine Huey doing, sleeping in that freezing house on that Spar­
+tan bed was not one of them. Cotton talked about Huey with this
+eerie reverence that made me sick. And it sounded sure enough
+weird, how Cotton talked about the minister's bed.
+I visited the house on 127th Street many times over the next
+few months. Hard as i tried, i could not find one shred of progress. I
+came to the conclusion that Cotton was a big mouth and a drunk.
+But everybody kept telling me how hard he was working, so i
+figured he was working on something secret they had obviously
+decided not to tell me about.
+During one of my trips to the house, Cotton's assistant told me
+he didn't feel well. I made an appointment with the doctor and
+called to tell him the time. A few days later, when i came into the
+office, everyone looked at me like i had committed some crime
+against the people.
+"What's wrong?" i asked.
+"Cotton says that the brother who works for him is sick and
+that you refused to do anything for him."
+"What?" I was completely surprised. "That's not true."
+"Cotton says that's what happened."
+Fired up mad, i tried to get Cotton on the phone, but it was
+out of order. It took me several days to get the thing straight, but
+finally the assistant confirmed that i had made the doctor's ap­
+pointment for him but that he had neglected to keep it and had
+gone home instead. I tried to figure out why Cotton had made such
+a fuss. The only conclusion i could come to is that he was annoyed
+
+ASSATA
+2 29
+
+ASSATA
+23 0
+
+with me because i kept pushing him to get the clinic in order.
+Several years later, after the Freedom of Information Act was passed,
+it was revealed that Cotton had been working undercover for the
+police.
+Things seemed to be going from bad to worse. Although there
+wasn't much dissension in the New York branch, there was beau­
+coup dissension and disunity on the national level. Every other
+weekend somebody was going out to the West Coast to deal with
+"contradictions." Everybody was uptight and miserable. And then
+everything started to happen at once. First there was an article
+stating that Huey was living in a $650-a-month apartment in
+Oakland. The Harlem branch was shocked because, in those days,
+that was a whole lot of rent and it contrasted sharply with the living
+conditions of the Panthers in New York. Panthers who owned little
+more than the clothes on their backs were out in the street in the
+freezing cold weather selling papers, with big pieces of cardboard
+in their shoes and with flimsy jackets that did nothing to hold back
+the hawk. The party issued a statement that Huey was living in the
+apartment for "security purposes," but a lot of Panthers were not at
+all convinced. I wanted to believe the security story, but it didn't fit
+my sense of logic. Then came the long series of expulsions, which
+proved to be the last straw.
+Many long-standing, loyal Panthers were being expelled by
+Huey. One of the first to go in Huey's private purge was Geronimo
+Elmer Pratt. Geronimo was widely respected, somewhat of a Pan­
+ther folk hero. When i heard about it, the first thing i did was go to
+someone who would know and try to find out the real deal.
+Although paranoid and upset, the person broke down the story to
+me, just enough to let me know the expulsion was probably unjust.
+I couldn't imagine Geronimo being an enemy of the people, any­
+more than i could imagine myself being one. Then came the
+expulsions of the Panther 2 1 , supposedly for writing an open letter
+to the Weathermen that was somewhat critical of BPP policies. I
+had read the letter and could find nothing in it to merit such
+extreme action, especially since it might prove prejudicial to their
+ongoing trial. I was becoming more and more critical of what was
+going on in the Party, but i loved it nevertheless and wanted to see it
+functioning on the right track.
+For the first time i questioned whether i could continue within
+the Party. Almost every project i was working on was frustrated and
+barely able to get off the ground. The Saturday liberation school,
+the free health clinic, and a lot of the student work were all on hold.
+I felt frustrated and a bit demoralized. This Party was a lot different
+
+from the Blank Panther Party i had fallen in love with. Gone were
+the black berets and leather jackets (because of police harassment,
+Panthers had been ordered not to wear the uniform, except for
+special occasions). Gone were the Panther marches, the Panther
+songs. Gone were the "Free Huey," "Free Bobby" songs sung to the
+tune of "Wade in the Water." Gone were the big Panther buttons
+and big Panther flags flapping in the wind. Everything felt different.
+The easy, friendly openness had been replaced by fear and para­
+noia. The beautiful revolutionary creativity i had loved so much was
+gone. And replaced by dogmatic stagnation.
+It was around this time that Zayd and i had our big falling out.
+I had made a list of the criticisms of the Party, along with a list of
+things i thought were positive and a lot of suggestions i thought
+might correct some of the problems the Party was facing. I called
+Zayd and told him i needed to talk to him. When he arrived, i
+bared my heart and soul to him. I must have talked for a good two
+or three hours, raising all of the political and tactical concerns i
+had. Zayd listened to everything i said without taking any position
+one way or the other. Then he told me he had to leave and would
+talk to me another time. I was furious. I felt he was acting in his role
+as "leadership" and using our friendship to gain information about
+how i thought, to gauge the level of dissension within the ranks.
+Throughout my days in the Party i've always been outspoken and
+blunt. Zayd and i had always been frank with each other, and i
+interpreted his silence as a declaration that he supported and de­
+fended policies i considered unprincipled and politically incorrect.
+After that, we didn't see or speak to each other for a long time. I
+had no way of knowing the thin tightrope he was walking or the
+pressure he was under.
+Zayd was acting as peacemaker between Huey and the Panther
+2 1 , furiously trying to get Huey to rescind his expulsion order.
+Zayd felt that to take any position in reference to problems within
+the Party might jeopardize his role and result in dire consequences
+for the Panther 2 1 . Cetewayo and Dhoruba, who had not been
+expelled because they were out on bail and had not signed the
+letter, were also attempting to get the Panther 21 reinstated. They
+were under a lot of pressure from both sides. Huey wanted them to
+support the expulsion and the expelled Panthers wanted them to
+criticize Huey's actions. Like Zayd, Cet and Dhoruba honestly
+believed they could straighten out the madness. And were it not for
+the FBI, they probably could have. Nobody back then had ever
+heard of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) set up
+by the FBI. Nobody could possibly have known that the FBI had
+
+ASSATA
+23 I
+
+ASSATA
+23 2
+
+sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, "signed" by the
+Panther 2 1 , criticizing Huey Newton's leadership. No one could
+have known that the FBI had sent a letter to Huey's brother saying
+the New York Panthers were plotting to kill him. No one could
+have known that the FBI's COINTELPRO was attempting to de­
+stroy the Black Panther Party in particular and the Black Liberation
+Movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics. The FBI's
+COINTEL program consisted of turning members of organizations
+against each other, pitting one Black organization against another.
+Huey ended up suspending Cet and Dhoruba from the Party,
+branded them as "enemies of the people," and caused them to go
+into hiding, in fear for their very lives. No one had the slightest idea
+that this whole scenario was carefully manipulated and orches­
+trated by the FBI.
+When they brought the Black Panther newspaper to the office,
+the one that branded Dhoruba, Cet, and Cet's wife, Connie Matt­
+thews Tabor, as enemies of the people, i refused to sell it and
+attacked it as an outright lie. I had been so outspoken about my
+criticisms that i knew it was just a matter of time before i, too,
+would be expelled. Sick and disgusted, i decided it was time for me
+to leave the Party.
+Most of the Panthers understood why i left, and i stayed on
+good terms with them. They would call me and ask if they could
+drop by or sleep over at my crib. Almost daily i got a blow-by-blow
+description of what was going on in the Party. The tension had
+increased even more, the differences between the New York cadre
+and the West Coast leadership growing even wider. I tried to stress
+to the comrades what i saw to be the importance of everybody
+sitting down and resolving their differences. No such thing oc­
+curred. In fact, a group came to my house jumping for joy. They
+had split from the West Coast leadership. It really saddened me that
+they had not been able to sit down together and mend their
+differences.
+After i left the Party, my life became more and more impossi­
+ble. Everywhere i went it seemed like i would turn around to find
+two detectives following behind me. I would look out my window
+and there, in the middle of Harlem, in front of my house, would be
+two white men sitting and reading the newspaper. I was scared to
+death to talk in my own house. When i wanted to say something
+that was not public information i turned the record player up real
+loud so that the buggers would have a hard time hearing. It was so
+weird. I still hadn't received a telephone bill and months had gone
+by since i'd paid the last one, yet the telephone was always working.
+
+Strange people visited my neighbors, asking questions. I hated to
+move from my apartment because the rent was so cheap. I was
+paying something like $65 a month and, if you could get used to
+the fifth-floor walkup, it wasn't at all bad. It was one of those rent­
+controlled buildings right across the street from City College, where
+i was enrolled. I had no choice but to leave. It was impossible to live
+amid all those bugging devices. I decided to donate the apartment
+to the Panthers and look for somewhere else to live, and to spend
+time with some friends, passing a few days here and a few days
+there, until i found another place.
+One day, as i was zipping up the avenue, on my way home, a
+friend called me over.
+"What's up ?" i asked.
+"Don't go home."
+"What do you mean, don't go home ?"
+"Your place is crawling with pigs. They're waiting for you."
+I walked around for a while, trying to get my head together.
+What could they do to me if i went home ? I hadn't done anything. I
+thought about the Panther 2 1 . They hadn't done anything either.
+Anyway, they can do anything they want. I thought about my crib.
+Maybe they had been taping my voice and hooking up pieces of
+conversation to make it seem like there was a conspiracy to do
+something. Maybe they would charge me with harboring a fugitive
+or with conspiracy to harbor a fugitive. Everybody said they were
+tailing me so tough because they thought i would lead them to Cet,
+Dhoruba, or some other comrade that had been forced into hiding.
+Maybe they would try to interrogate me, beat and torture me until i
+signed some phony confession or something. I decided one thing
+right then and there. I definitely wasn't going home, and i definitely
+wasn't answering anybody's questions about anything. I thought of
+going to Evelyn's but i figured that as soon as i showed, the pigs
+would be there waiting for me. I decided the best thing i could do
+was lay low until i found out what was going on and could come to
+some decision.
+
+ASSATA
+233
+
+Chapter 1 6
+
+23 4
+
+y initial image of the under­
+ground was pure fantasy. When Zayd talked about the
+underground i actually pictured people in some base­
+ment, passing through some hidden bookcase door
+and disappearing into thin air. I had pictured all kinds
+of elaborate "I Spy" kinds of hookups, outrageous
+disguises, false panels, stuff right out of "Mission:
+Impossible." I was shocked when i ran into a brother i
+knew in a supermarket. I knew the pigs were looking
+for him. He had shaved all the hair off his face, but he
+looked almost the same. I had to catch myself to keep
+from calling out to him. I just kept walking, feeling
+that, somehow, seeing me would make him nervous.
+Even though i had always thought that someday i'd
+probably be involved in clandestine struggle, i had
+never given any serious thoughts to going under­
+ground. I had, more or less, thought of a clandestine
+struggle in terms of leading a double life. I thought the
+ideal way to struggle was to have a regular job or
+whatever as a front and then go out at night or when­
+ever and do what needed to be done, careful to leave
+no trails. I still think that is the best way, but you have
+to anticipate being discovered and be prepared for
+whatever might happen.
+At the end of the sixties or the beginning of the
+seventies, it seemed like people were going under­
+ground left and right. Every other week i was hearing
+about somebody disappearing. Police repression had
+come down so hard on the Black movement that it
+seemed as if the entire Black community was on the
+FBI's Most Wanted list. The repression had come
+down so fast that many people had no chance whatsoever to get organized. I was kind of in limbo, slipping
+
+back and forth between above and below. As far as i could tell, i was
+only wanted for questioning. I hadn't done anything and i didn't
+feel that the situation was too grave. I had to be discreet and change
+some of my habits, but i felt relatively free to move around
+aboveground and underground without too much problem. I had
+no intentions of answering anybody's questions, and so i figured i'd
+j ust lay low until the heat was over.
+There were so many things that needed to be done. Basically, i
+was working with the railroad (support network) stations, trying to
+find the basic necessities for people and trying to help them get to
+where they wanted to go. It was a job that required real caution and
+a lot of concentration on detail. Over a short period of time, i found
+that my powers of observation had increased many times over. I had
+to keep my eyes on everything that was going on, looking ahead
+and, at the same time, glancing over my shoulder. The work was
+interesting and well suited to my restless, active temperament. But i
+found it kind of hard to change my way of relating to people. I had
+always been open and trusting and i was finding it really hard to
+change. It took my almost getting killed for me to develop a more
+suspicious nature.
+I was running into quite a few people, some of whom i knew
+and others whom i didn't: different collectives, members of dif­
+ferent organizations, from different parts of the country. I was
+surprised at how disorganized many people were, and i was all for
+seeing them organize themselves in a much more disciplined man­
+ner. I was straining to understand some of the things i saw, but
+people were moving so fast it was hard to keep track of what they
+were dong. The whole situation was new to me and i guess all of us
+were trying to make heads or tails out of it, trying to get a good
+grip on what was happening and where we fit into it.
+I had heard it on the radio, had seen some of the reports on lV. My
+reaction was WOW! The tables were turning. As many Black people
+as the New York Police Department murdered every year, someone
+was finally paying them back. The media were filled with countless
+adjectives: senseless, brutal, vicious, deadly, bloody, etc. On May
+19, Malcolm X's birthday, two police had been machine-gunned on
+Riverside Drive. I felt sorry for their families, sorry for their chil­
+dren, but i was relieved to see that somebody else besides Black
+folks and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos was being shot at. I was sick
+and tired of us being the only victims, and i didn't care who knew
+it. As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities
+were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and
+
+ASSATA
+23 5
+
+ASSATA
+
+murdering people at whim and without restraint. 1 despise vio­
+lence, but i despise it even more when it's one-sided and used to
+oppress and repress poor people. But i was still in a state of shock,
+the shit was so real. 1 mean, it was happening. Somebody was doing
+what the rest of us merely had fantasies about.
+1 had an early morning meeting. My friend went to the corner
+to pick up the papers and something to munch on. He came back,
+all excited.
+"Look at this, sister. 1 think you should look at this."
+"I don't want to look at anything right now. 1 want something
+to eat. What did you buy to eat?"
+""This is serious, sister. Will you come over and look at this ?"
+"Man, i don't wanna read no paper, i'm starving," i said.
+Nevertheless, i went over and picked up the papers. "Oh shit. Oh
+shit!" was the only thing that would come out of my mouth.
+Hungrily, i read every word of the article. 1 stared down at my
+picture on the front page of the Daily News. The paper said i was
+wanted for questioning in relation to the machine-gunning. "Shit!"
+1 walked aimlessly around in circles. 1 couldn't believe it, but i was
+looking at it.
+"You've got to get out of here, sister," my friend said.
+"Where am i supposed to go ?"
+"I don't know, but we've got to get you out of here. Maybe you
+can go and hook up with the people."
+1 knew that i had to hook up with some people in the under­
+ground, but this was no time to go around hunting for people.
+Strangely enough, i felt calm and i wanted to stay that way. 1 asked
+my friend to go and get me a wig and some other things to enable
+me to move around a little bit. While he went to get the things i
+needed, i went though my address book and made mental notes of
+the people who the pigs could easily trace me to. 1 had to stifle the
+desire to call my mother and tell her that, at least for the moment, i
+was relatively safe and that i loved her.
+Once i got out into the street, i could feel the tension in my
+body. 1 walked down the street searching for signs on people's faces.
+1 walked a few blocks before i realized that not a soul in the world
+was paying me any mind. 1 heard some feet running behind me and
+swung around, only to find it was a bunch of children. 1 had
+planned to go to my girlfriend's house and decided i'd still head
+that way. She lived alone, in a quiet neighborhood, and i knew that
+it would be damn near impossible for anyone to trace me to her.
+Her life consisted almost completely of working and going to
+school at night.
+
+1 was a little nervous when i got to her door. Maybe i was
+
+doing the wrong thing, getting her hooked into all of this. Maybe
+she would be angry at me for coming at all. 1 decided that i
+wouldn't stay. 1 would just stop by to explain to her why i was late
+and to tell her good-bye. She answered the door with a towel
+wrapped around her head.
+"What the hell took you so long?"
+How did i begin ? A funny thing happened to me on the way to
+your house? "There's something i've got to tell you," i began. "I just
+stopped by to say good-bye. The police are looking for me. My
+picture is plastered all over the Daily News. 1 don't believe this is
+happening, but it is."
+"I know. 1 know," she told me. "What 1 want to know is, what
+took you so long to get here?"
+1 stared at her, completely surprised. 1 didn't understand. If
+she knew what happened, why was she expecting me? "I just
+dropped by for a minute to let you know what happened and to let
+you know that i'm okay. "
+"Are you okay?"
+1 told her that i was.
+"Where are you going?"
+1 told her that i was going to try to hook up with some people i
+knew.
+"Where do you have to go ? Do you have any money? Do you
+know how to contact these people? Do you need any help ?"
+1 told her that i had j ust found out what was happening and
+that i was just going to have to play it by ear, slipping and sliding
+for a while until i could make contact.
+"Girl, are you crazy ? You militants ain't got no sense ! Would
+you take that shit off your head and sit down so 1 can talk to you !"
+She always referred to me and my comrades as "you militants." She
+was a militant too, but at the moment she was not active, not out on
+Front Street, as she called it.
+"Do you have this address written down anywhere or this
+phone number?"
+"No, nobody even knows who you are or that we even know
+each other." Luckily, i had never made a habit of writing too much
+down, and since things had gotten so hot, i had put most of the
+numbers that i had for contacts in code. 1 knew all of my friend's
+numbers by heart, so that was no problem. 1 had never even called
+her from the 1 3 8th Street phone at my last place. 1 told her that as
+far as i knew there was no way i could be traced to her.
+"Then relax, fool. It don't make no sense for you to be out
+
+ASSATA
+23 7
+
+ASSATA
+
+23 8
+
+there in the street moving around right now. You've got to relax and
+get your head together."
+"Look," i told her. "I don't want to impose on you. This is my
+thing, not yours, and i don't want to involve you in my stuff."
+"Woman, will you please shut up ? This ain't your thing, this is
+our thing. You done involved me in it already, and if I didn't want
+to be bothered, I wouldn't have opened my door. I'm your friend
+and I trust you and love you. I'll hide you out any old time. Where
+did you think you were gonna hide out, anyway? On the moon?"
+I stared at her in amazement. I had never really known her. A
+real sister. Tough, critical, a bit too cynical, but a real stand-up
+woman.
+"Here," she said, handing me a knife and some onions and
+potatoes, "make yourself useful. Even y'all militants got to eat."
+I just sat there grinning. Grinning and peeling potatoes. Talk­
+ing and feeling really at home.
+It's early in the morning. I have to move. The move has got to be
+made with care since my picture has j ust been plastered all over the
+newspapers. Wanted posters of me are everywhere, and somebody
+had told me that the police have a photograph of me in the space
+over the glove compartments of their cars. Carefully, i arrange my
+disguise. It has been designed not to stand out, something that will
+help me blend in with the other people who will be on the subway
+early in the morning. I stare at myself in the mirror, debating
+whether to look like a secretary or a maid. It's too early in the
+morning for secretaries. I decide to look like a poor Black woman.
+Thick, ugly stockings, run-over black oxfords, beat-up plastic
+pocketbook, hand-me-down-Iooking plaid jacket, and, of course,
+lord-have-mercy-Iooking wig. My puffy morning face, smudged
+with a dab of awkward-looking eyebrow pencil and lipstick, are
+perfect for the look.
+I walk down to the subway, stopping to buy the paper. I
+stand on the platform waiting for the train. I thumb the news­
+papers, making sure that no familiar photographs appear. I skim
+the headlines to find the usual assortment of right-wing half-lies,
+distortions, and scandal stories. The headlines, as usual, are offen­
+sive: "Commies Land in Outer Space." "Cops Nab Lightbulb
+Bandit." "Hubby Ties Knot with Country Gal." Finally, the train
+comes. I scan the cars as they pass, looking for the transit cop.
+Seeing none, i move toward the front of the train. I plop down in a
+vacant seat and immediately stick my head into the newspaper.
+Carefully, i look around to see who is riding in the car with me. In
+
+an instant i'm reproaching myself for leaving too early in the
+morning. I have an eerie feeling that something is wrong, but i can't
+put my finger on it. The subway car has a twilight zone air to it.
+With the exception of a few white men who look like they are going
+to factory jobs, the rest are Black women. One has on a nurse's
+uniform, another looks like she is going to church, hat and all, and
+the rest of them look more or less like me. I keep staring at. them.
+And it registers. Without one exception, every one of these sisters is
+wearing a wig. It feels so spooky. I am hiding my beautiful, nappy
+hair under this wig and hating it, hiding my stuff to save my life. I,
+who have had to give up my headwraps and my big, beaded
+earrings, my dungaree jackets, my red, black, and green poncho,
+and my long African dresses in order to struggle on another level,
+look out from under my wig at my sisters. Maybe we are all
+running and hiding. Maybe we are all running from something, all
+living a clandestine existence. Surely we are all being oppressed and
+persecuted. I imagine the headlines: "Nigger Woman Nabbed for
+Nappy Hair." "Afro Gal Has Tangled Hair." "Militant Mom Bares
+All." It is really too much to comprehend. Such horrible things
+have been done to us. A whole generation of Black women hiding
+out under dead white people's hair. I have the urge to cry, but i
+don't. It would draw attention. I keep from getting up until my stop
+comes. I pray and struggle for the day when we can all come out
+from under these wigs.
+
+ASSATA
+
+239
+
+ASSATA
+
+C U RRENT EVENTS
+
+i understand that i am
+slightly out of fashion.
+The in-crowd wants no part of me.
+Someone said that i am too sixties
+Black.
+Someone else told me i had failed to mellow.
+It is true i have not
+straightened back my hair.
+Nor rediscovered maybelline.
+And it is also true
+that i still like African things,
+like statues and dresses
+and PEOPLE.
+And it is also true
+that struggle is foremost in my mind.
+And i still rap about disciplinemy anger has not run away.
+And i still can't stand ole
+el dorado.
+And i still can't dig no
+one and one.
+And i still don't dig no
+roka fellas.
+And i call a pig a pig.
+And a party, to my thinking,
+happens only once in a while.
+Anyway, i'm really kind of happy
+being slightly out of style.
+
+Chapter 1 7
+
+ver the next few years, home
+became a lot of places. I traveled quite a bit and met up
+with some really beautiful people, people so beautiful
+they restored my faith in humanity each time i passed
+through their station. Like most of us back in those
+days, i was new at this, learning about clandestine
+struggle as i lived it. I didn't have many fixed ideas at
+first about what i thought armed struggle within the
+confines of amerika should be like. I had done a lot of
+reading about it in other places, but i had no concrete
+idea how to apply the lessons from those struggles to
+the struggle of Black people within the United States.
+It was clear that the Black Liberation Army
+was not a centralized, organized group with a com­
+mon leadership and chain of command. Instead,
+there were various organizations and collectives work­
+ing out of different cities, and in some of the larger
+cities there were often several groups working indepen­
+dently of each other. Many members of the various
+groups had been forced into hiding as a result of the
+extreme police repression that took place during the
+late sixties and early seventies. Some had serious cases,
+some had minor ones, and others, like me, were just
+wanted for "questioning."
+Sisters and brothers joined these groups because
+they were committed to revolutionary struggle in gen­
+eral and armed struggle in particular and wanted to
+help build the armed movement in amerika. It was the
+strangest feeling. People i used to run into at rallies
+were now in hiding, sending messages that they
+wanted to hook up. Sisters and brothers from just
+about every revolutionary or militant group in the
+country were either rotting away in prison or had been
+
+24 I
+
+ASSATA
+
+forced underground. Everyone i talked to was interested in taking
+the struggle to a higher level. But the question was how. How to
+bring together all those people scattered around the country into
+an organized body that would be effective in struggling for Black
+liberation.
+It became evident, almost from the beginning, that consolida­
+tion was not a good idea. There were too many security problems,
+and different groups had different ideologies, different levels of
+political consciousness and different ideas about how armed strug­
+gle in amerika should be waged. On the whole, we were weak,
+inexperienced, disorganized, and seriously lacking in training. But
+the biggest problem was one of political development. There were
+sisters and brothers who had been so victimized by amerika that
+they were willing to fight to the death against their oppressors.
+They were intelligent, courageous and dedicated, willing to make
+any sacrifice. But we were to find out quickly that courage and
+dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, you
+have to have the way as well as the will, an overall ideology and
+strategy that stem from a scientific analysis of history and present
+conditions.
+Some of the groups thought they could just pick up arms and
+struggle and that, somehow, people would see what they were
+doing and begin to struggle themselves. They wanted to engage in a
+do-or-die battle with the power structure in amerika, even
+though they were weak and ill prepared for such a fight. But the
+most important factor is that armed struggle, by itself, can never
+bring about a revolution. Revolutionary war is a people's war. And
+no people's war can be won without the support of the masses of
+people. Armed struggle can never be successful by itself; it must be
+part of an overall strategy for winning, and the strategy must be
+political as well as military.
+Since we did not own the TV stations or newspapers, it was
+easy for the news media to portray us as monsters and terrorists.
+The police could terrorize the Black community daily, yet if one
+Black person successfully defended himself or herself against a
+police attack, they were called terrorists. It soon became clear to me
+that our most important battle was to help politically mobilize,
+educate, and organize the masses of Black people and to win their
+minds and hearts. It was inconceivable that we could survive, much
+less win anything, without their support.
+Every group fighting for freedom is bound to make mistakes,
+but unless you study the common, fundamental laws of armed
+revolutionary struggle you are bound to make unnecessary mis-
+
+takes. Revolutionary war is protracted warfare. It is impossible for
+us to win quickly. To win we have got to wear down our oppressors,
+little by little, and, at the same time, strengthen our forces, slowly
+but surely. I understood some of my more impatient sisters and
+brothers. I knew that it was tempting to substitute military for
+political struggle, especially since all of our aboveground organiza­
+tions were under vicious attack by the FBI, the CIA, and the local
+police agencies. All of us who saw our leaders murdered, our
+people shot down in cold blood, felt a need, a desire to fight back.
+One of the hardest lessons we had to learn is that revolutionary
+struggle is scientific rather than emotional. I'm not saying that we
+shouldn't feel anything, but decisions can't be based on love or on
+anger. They have to be based on the objective conditions and on
+what is the rational, unemotional thing to do.
+In 1857 the u.s. supreme kourt ruled that Blacks were only
+three-fifths of a man and had no rights that whites were bound to
+respect. Today, more than a hundred and twenty-five years later, we
+still earn less than three-fifths of what white people earn. It was
+plain to me that we couldn't look to the kourts for freedom and
+justice anymore than we could expect to gain our liberation by
+participating in the u.s. political system, and it was pure fantasy to
+think we could gain them by begging. The only alternative left was
+to fight for them, and we are going to have to fight like any other
+people who have fought for liberation.
+I wasn't one who believed that we should wait until our
+political struggle had reached a high point before we began to
+organize the underground. I felt that it was important to start
+building underground structures as soon as possible. And although
+i felt that the major task of the underground should be organizing
+and building, i didn't feel that armed acts of resistance should be
+ruled out. As long as they didn't impede our long-range plans,
+guerrilla units should be able to carry out a few well-planned, well­
+timed armed actions that were well coordinated with aboveground
+political objectives. Not any old kind of actions, but actions that
+Black people would clearly understand and support and actions
+that were well publicized in the Black community.
+
+ASSATA
+
+24 3
+
+Chapter 1 8
+
+244
+
+fter my acquittal in the
+Queens bank robbery case in Brooklyn Federal Court
+on January 16, 1 976, i was brought back to new jersey,
+placed in the basement of the middlesex county jail for
+men, in solitary confinement, and held there for more
+than a year until the jersey trial was over. Lennox
+Hinds, then the head of the National Conference of
+Black Lawyers, together with the other members of
+the defense team, filed a civil suit against the state,
+charging that my conditions were cruel and inhuman.
+After a long, drawn-out court battle, both sides agreed
+that a hearing officer should review my jail conditions
+and make a ruling. The hearing officer was a man
+named Ploshnik, who was appointed by the state. We
+had no say whatsoever in who was appointed and,
+therefore, expected the decision to be favorable to the
+state. But he surprised everybody and ruled that my
+conditions of imprisonment were indeed inhuman and
+recommended that they be changed at once. But
+through a series of appeals and legal maneuvers, the
+state succeeded in keeping me confined in that base­
+ment. When the government finds it convenient to
+follow its own laws and administrative procedures, it
+does. And when it finds that these same laws are
+inconvenient for their own purposes, it simply ignores
+them.
+I decided that i wanted Stanley Cohen and Evelyn
+to work together on the case. This turned out to be a
+mistake, since they were not exactly in love with each
+other. Neither Stanley nor Evelyn was a new jersey
+lawyer and we had to get a new jersey lawyer to be on
+the case. Ray Brown was busy with other commit­
+ments and couldn't possibly do it. Stanley asked a
+
+young white new jersey lawyer named Stuart Ball, and, after some
+reservations, he agreed to be the admitting lawyer. Stanley also
+wanted a young lawyer, Lawrence Stern, to act as his assistant. Even
+though Evelyn was involved in the defense and Lennox was handling the civil suit around my prison conditions, the Conference of
+Black Lawyers assigned a young Black lawyer from Mississippi
+named Lewis Myers to work on the case. I was delighted. Everyone
+knew that the new jersey trial was the big one and that my chances
+of receiving a fair trial were about slim to none. So the strategy was
+to try to surround the defense team with as much resources and
+expertise as possible.
+It sounded like a good idea, but if there was ever a case of too
+many cooks in the kitchen, this case was it. Almost from the
+beginning the defense team was beset by personality conflicts. The
+problems were magnified greatly by the fact that nobody was being
+paid. The lawyers were having problems covering even their bare
+expenses. It seemed like every other month one or another of the
+lawyers was asking the j udge to be relieved from the case.
+We were in dire need of experts. We needed to find a ballistics
+expert and a forensic chemist, among others, to refute the state's
+charges. We were also in desperate need of an investigator to locate
+some of the doctors who had treated me while i was hospitalized
+and other potential witnesses. We fought and harped on this point
+until finally the judge, Theodore Appleby, issued an order that the
+state pay for the experts. But once we got the order, we found that
+we were in the same position that we started from. Without excep­
+tion, everybody that we went to for help turned us down. The types
+of experts we needed almost always are police or are working for
+police agencies. Because my case involved the murder of a police
+officer, none of them would touch the case. The most crucial part of
+the prosecutor's case was the "scientific testimony" alleging that i
+had huge amounts of the dead state trooper's blood on me. We
+wanted someone who knew what they were doing to go over every
+inch of those clothes, to check out what was on them and also to
+check out what had been done to them. But we could not find one
+forensic chemist to work for us, let alone testify for us. If they had,
+they would never again have been able to work in peace for any
+police agency. People never hear about this side of a trial. But there
+is no place a defendant in a criminal trial can go to find "experts" in
+sciences commonly known as "police sciences." The police can
+virtually write up a report saying anything they want, and there is
+no way of refuting it. And there have been cases where "experts"
+have been double agents: working for a defendant while secretly
+working with the prosecutor.
+
+ASSATA
+
+245
+
+ASSATA
+
+One of the amazing things was the number of student support­
+ers who gave their time and energy to help us. They volunteered to
+index and organize past transcripts and, together with political
+activists, did a survey of prospective jurors in Middlesex County.
+Members of the defense committee published a bulletin to keep
+people informed about what was happening in the case and also
+did speaking engagements and fundraising. People circulated peti­
+tions and demonstrated in front of the kourtroom. They volun­
+teered to do typing, haddle the telephones, etc. Entertainers like
+Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee performed at
+fundraising benefits. Poets like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and
+Sonia Sanchez, among others, gave poetry readings. Political activ­
+ists like Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka worked hard to educate
+the people about what was happening in new jersey. When Angela
+Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my
+behalf, the new jersey prosecutor's office ambushed her and her
+party, harassing them until the moment they left the state. She tried
+to visit me at the jail, and not only did the j udge forbid her to visit
+me but he stopped all of my other visits as well.
+One of the most moving statements i have ever heard was a
+speech Judge Bruce Wright made at a fundraising rally for me.
+Judge Bruce Wright is a Black judge who was removed from the
+criminal court bench in New York because he was too fair and
+honest, and he did something that was unforgivable-he set poor
+people's bail at amounts they could afford to pay. The kourts will
+never be anything but a tool of repression until there are judges like
+Bruce Wright presiding over Black people's trials.
+There were many, many people who i never got to meet, even
+though they worked so hard on my behalf. And even though i never
+got a chance to thank all the Black people, white people, Third
+World people, all the students, feminists, revolutionaries, activists,
+etc., who worked on the case, i thank you now.
+A lot of the pretrial conferences had to do with nothing more
+than the defense making motions and the judge denying them.
+Every time we went to kourt the judge made a point of reading into
+the record that i had refused to stand up for him. He was one of
+those racist white dogs who really believed he was massa. He really
+took that "your honor" stuff seriously. If he could have made
+people bow to him and kiss his hand he would have done it. He
+claimed that he was a "stickler for the decorum of his courtroom."
+Plenty of decorum but not a bit of justice. Stand for him ? It was out
+of the question. He was a real died-in-the-wool craka. The kind
+they could send to wipe out the "natives" in Africa, make Central
+
+America safe for United Fruit Company, or run a sterilization center
+in Puerto Rico.
+Stanley Cohen came to see me. He was excited and upbeat. His
+good news was that he had found an investigator, an old friend of
+his who owed him a favor. His friend had contacts with the new
+jersey state police and thought they might be able to come up with
+some information on Harper, the police officer who was the main
+witness. He was also making progress in finding a forensic chemist.
+We both felt that at least some of the scientific reports had been
+fudged by the new jersey state troopers. We talked about this and a
+million things before the visit ended. He was so positive. He said he
+had a plan, something he wanted to check out, but he didn't want
+to discuss it and raise my hopes prematurely. That was the last time
+i saw Stanley Cohen.
+A few days later i received a phone call. Stanley was dead. His
+body had been found in his home with evidence of trauma. No­
+body, with the exception of the police and Stanley'S family, knows
+to this day the cause of death. The newspapers stated Stanley died
+of natural causes. But a friend of Stanley'S, a doctor, told me he had
+talked to the coroner's office and had been given conflicting stories.
+No one knows for sure how Stanley died and we probably never
+will. The one thing we do know is that after his death, all the legal
+papers on my case came up missing. Evelyn talked to Phyllis,
+Stanley'S widow, and she gave her every legal paper she could find
+that had something to do with my case, but the bulk of the material
+was still missing. Finally, Evelyn found out that the New York City
+police had my legal papers. "How did they get them?" i asked her.
+"I don't even want to think about it," she answered.
+1 could hardly believe all this was happening. It felt so strange.
+The New York police claimed they had taken my legal papers from
+Stanley'S house as evidence. "Evidence of what?" i asked Evelyn.
+Apparently, my legal papers were the only property the New York
+Police Department had removed from his house. It took more than
+a month to get some of them back. Some were never recovered.
+None of the notes about the investigator or the forensic chemist
+were found. All the notes on trial strategy we had mapped out were
+missing. It was weird. 1 thought of Stanley'S family and what they
+must have been going through. The circumstances of his death were
+so strange. 1 walked around with an empty feeling in my stomach
+for a long time.
+After Stanley'S death, William Kunstler joined the defense
+team. The first thing the judge did after admitting Kunstler to the
+
+ASSATA
+
+247
+
+ASSATA
+
+case was to rescind the order for state-paid experts, claiming the
+lawyers had failed to move fast enough to get them. I became more
+suspicious than before. I couldn't understand why Appleby, all of a
+sudden, was so anxious we not have expert witnesses. It was ob­
+vious that without some financial help i would never be able to
+afford expert witnesses. I didn't have a thin dime to my name.
+Appleby's strategy was to completely intimidate the lawyers, to
+harass them, threaten them until they became fearful of mounting
+any significant opposition to the legal lynching that was supposed
+to be my trial. Since there were no funds to pay for anything, the
+defense committees and the lawyers were forced to launch a
+fundraising campaign. The first time Bill Kunstler spoke in new
+jersey, Appleby attempted to have him thrown off the case, charging
+him with "improper conduct" and "conduct that was prejudicial to
+the administration of justice." The improper conduct was giving a
+lecture at Rutgers University during which he said that we needed
+money for expert witnesses, that the conditions of my confinement
+were detrimental to my aiding in my defense, and that under the
+law i was presumed innocent until proven guilty.
+Appleby's Order to Show Cause why Bill should not be
+thrown off the case accomplished what it intended. Instead of
+preparing for trial, the lawyers were forced to spend time and
+energy preparing for the two-day hearing that would determine
+whether or not Bill stayed on the case. Appleby finally decided Bill
+would remain, but only after we had spent a month dealing with
+that madness. The implication of the hearing was clear. Any at­
+tempt the lawyers made to defend me would be met with the
+judge's hostility. Appleby threatened every single one of the lawyers
+with contempt, not once or twice but regularly. Lew Myers at­
+tended a fundraising cocktail party at which Angela Davis spoke.
+Someone sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury in Washington and,
+approximately ten days later, he was under investigation by the
+Internal Revenue Service. Evelyn was repeatedly harassed by Ap­
+pleby. Not one day went by when the so-called impartial judge
+failed to show his hostility to the defense team.
+The lawyers uncovered evidence that the offices across from the
+courthouse that they and the defense team were using were bugged.
+Motions for an investigation were denied. During a press con­
+ference, Lennox Hinds had the courage to call the trial exactly
+what it was, "a legal lynching and a kangaroo kourt." Appleby
+cited him for contempt and an effort was made to disbar him. Only
+after he took his appeal to the highest kourt in new jersey was he
+
+permitted to continue practicing as a lawyer in the state of new
+Jersey.
+The trial began on January 1 7, 1 977, the same day Gary
+Gilmore was shot in Utah. Gary Gilmore was the first person legally
+executed since the death penalty was struck down by the u.s.
+supreme kourt in the early 1 970s. His execution set the climate for
+the trial. The judge had denied almost every one of our motions,
+including my right to defend myself and act as co-counsel, a
+change of venue, a motion to review Harper's police record, a
+motion to introduce evidence that i had been victimized by the
+government's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), etc.
+Even though the National Jury Project had done a study of Mid­
+dlesex County and had found that eighty-three percent of the
+people had heard about my case in the media and seventy percent
+had already formulated an opinion about my guilt, the kourt
+maintained that i could receive a fair trial. The judge said he would
+question the jurors and make sure they were "fair and impartial."
+Appleby took great pains to avoid asking potential jurors
+whether they thought i was guilty, electing to ask them instead
+whether they could "put their opinions aside." He carefully
+avoided asking their opinions about me, the Black Liberation
+Army, the Black Panther Party, Black militants, or anything else that
+had been negatively and biasedly reported in newspapers. The trial
+lawyers had no right to question jurors. Appleby's voir dire was
+designed to make sure the most hypocritical, opinionated jurors
+stayed on the jury. Here are two examples taken directly from the
+transcript:
+Q. And have you heard about this case ?
+A. Yes, I have.
+Q. From what source may you have heard about the case?
+A. Newspapers.
+.
+Q. And have you discussed it with other people ?
+A. Occasionally.
+Q. And based upon whatever you may have heard from any
+source whatsoever, do you feel that you have already in your own
+mind formed an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of this defend­
+ant?
+A. Well, to be perfectly honest, I think I would be a little biased.
+Q. Let me ask you another question. In the event that you were
+to be chosen to serve, do you feel that you could sit and listen to all
+the evidence in the case and then judge it fairly and impartially and
+apply the law that the judge gives to you and put aside completely
+
+ASSATA
+
+2 49
+
+ASSATA
+250
+
+any previous opinions or conceptions or ideas about anything in the
+case and then do you believe that you could render a fair verdict as to
+the guilt or innocence of this defendant?
+A. I think I could.
+Q. Do you believe that you could?
+A. I think so.
+
+Example number two:
+Q. Do you feel that based upon whatever information you may
+have accumulated about the case from any source whatsoever that
+you have already formed an opinion in your mind as to the guilt or
+innocence of this defendant?
+A. I would think-yeah, I would think that she was guilty, yeah.
+Q. You feel that she's guilty?
+A. Yes.
+Q. And let me ask you another question. In the event that you
+might be selected to serve as a juror in this case, do you feel that you
+could sit and listen to the evidence and judge it impartially, apply
+the law the judge gives you, set aside this opinion that you have
+already formed?
+A. Yes, I probably could.
+Q. And then still judge impartially whether she's guilty or
+innocent?
+A. Yeah. Depending on the evidence and all that.
+
+These were typical of the answers given. The judge refused to
+remove the above two jurors for cause (on the basis of bias that
+would prevent them from being fair and impartial jurors) and our
+peremptory challenges were quickly exhausted. Remaining on the
+final jury were two friends, one girlfriend, and two nephews of new
+jersey state troopers. The so-called jury selection process was the
+biggest farce in legal history.
+About halfway through the so-called jury selection process i
+was ready to call it a day. As bad as this jury sounded, it looked
+even worse. I didn't want to participate. But almost everyone on the
+defense team thought not participating was a mistake. "If you
+don't, we'll never get anything on the record. You'll never even be
+able to convince an appeal court of anything. You've got to get up
+there and tell your side of the story. We can prove by the medical
+testimony that you were shot in the back with your hand raised in
+the air. We can prove that Harper shot first. We can prove �hat after
+you were shot, your hand was paralyzed and, from the location of
+his gunshot wound, it would have been impossible for you to have
+
+shot him with yOUT left hand. We can prove that Harper shot first.
+We can prove this if you take the stand. We can prove . . . . "
+I was tired of this case. I damn sure didn't believe that any
+appeals kourt was going to free me or that any racist white,
+prejudiced jury was either. It was obvious i didn't have one chance
+in a million of receiving any kind of justice. The financial problems,
+expert witness problems, personality problems among the lawyers,
+in addition to rotting away in solitary confinement, had taken their
+toll on me. Every day when i entered the kourtroom i felt like i was
+entering the theater of the absurd. I wanted no part of it. The
+lawyers said that i could create a political climate which, they
+thought, would force the appeal court to give in if i participated in
+the trial and put on the record the fact that i was innocent. They
+were convinced that at the last minute the forensic chemist they
+were trying to locate in Canada was going to come in and save the
+day. I didn't put any stock in that, but i knew that keeping the
+momentum going around what was happening was important. I
+decided to remain and participate, even though it was killing me.
+The trial went absurdly on. An all-white jury was selected,
+based on the advice of Kunstler and the Jury Project, who decided
+that even though the jurors seated in the panel were horrible, the
+others were worse. Not only did the judge deny my motion to act as
+co-counsel, he refused to permit the lawyers to read my opening
+statement to the jury. The defense team's headquarters, located in
+New Brunswick, was broken into, papers rummaged through and
+stolen, and the judge refused to investigate, calling the motion
+"frivolous. " The state's witnesses, almost all of whom were pigs,
+got up and said whatever they were told to say. We had no expert
+witnesses to refute or even evaluate their testimony. The main
+witness, Harper, the state trooper i was supposed to have shot,
+testified he had told an "untruth" on direct examination but denied
+it was a lie.
+I spent most of the trial looking up at the ceiling and hating
+myself for sitting there in the first place. When the time came for
+me to testify, i was shocked. I had thought i would be able to go
+into everything-being a fugitive, how i became a fugitive, the
+entire political scenario that led to being in the kourtroom. But
+then they told me something about "opening the door." Opening
+the door, it was explained, was like opening Pandora's box. If i gave
+the political reasons for my being a fugitive, the prosecutor could
+then introduce all kinds of prejudicial "evidence" that had nothing
+to do with what happened on the turnpike in order to show my
+
+ASSATA
+25I
+
+ASSATA
+252
+
+"criminal intent." If i "opened the door," the prosecutor would be
+able to introduce manuals of guerrilla warfare and a whole stack of
+other material they found in the car that had nothing to do with
+this trial. In the absence of political witnesses (whose subpoenas
+for their appearance the judge had refused to issue) who would
+have testified about COINTELPRO's systematic attack on the Black
+Liberation movement, and on Blacks in general, my testimony
+would have been distorted. I wanted to back out completely, de­
+nounce the trial, but it was too late. The only way out was to testify,
+get my side of what happened on the record, and avoid "opening
+the door." The year of solitary confinement had made me almost
+mute. As i testified, i held on to a small picture of my child.
+When i sit back today and examine why i participated in that trial, i
+think i must have been crazy. I guess i had been through too many
+trials and gotten too many acquittals and let that stuff go to my
+head. (Three other indictments had been dismissed. One in Queens
+state supreme court, charging me with killing policemen, was dis­
+missed because the judge, after examining the grand jury minutes,
+determined there was not even enough evidence for me to have been
+indicted. The other two, one in Brooklyn supreme kourt and the
+other in supreme kourt in New York County, were dismissed for
+failure of the state to bring me to trial for six years after the
+indictments had been returned.)
+Participating in the new jersey trial was unprincipled and
+incorrect. By participating, i participated in my own oppression. I
+should have known better and not lent dignity or credence to that
+sham. In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only
+ones who can free us are ourselves.
+
+Chapter 1 9
+
+was transferred on April 8, 1 978 to the
+maximum security prison for women in alderson, west
+virginia, the federal facility designed to hold "the most
+dangerous women in the country." 1 had been con­
+victed of no federal crime, but under the interstate
+compact agreement any prisoner can be shipped, like
+cargo, to any jail in u.s. territory, including the virgin
+islands, miles away from family, friends, and lawyers.
+Through the device of this agreement, Sundiata had
+been transferred to marion prison in illinois, the
+federal prison that was the most brutal concentration
+camp in the country.
+Alderson was in the middle of the west virginia
+mountains, and it seemed as if the mountains formed
+an impenetrable barrier between the prison and the
+rest of the world. It had no airport, and to reach it,
+days of travel were necessary. The trip to alderson was
+so expensive and difficult that most of the women
+received family visits only once or twice a year.
+1 was housed in the maximum security unit (msu)
+called davis hall. It was surrounded by an electronic
+fence topped by barbed wire, which in turn was cov­
+ered by concertina wire (a razor-sharp type of wire
+that had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention). It
+was a prison within a prison. This place had a stillness
+to it like some kind of bizarre death row. Everything
+was sterile and dead.
+There were three major groups in msu: the nazis,
+the "niggah lovers," and me. I was the only Black
+woman in the unit, with the exception of one other
+who left almost immediately after i arrived. The nazis
+
+253
+
+ASSATA
+
+2 54
+
+had been sent to alderson from a prison in California, where they
+had been accused of setting inmates on fire. They were members of
+the aryan sisterhood, the female wing of the aryan brotherhood-a
+white racist group that operates in California prisons and is well­
+known for its attacks on Black prisoners.
+Hooked up with the nazis were the manson family women,
+sandra good and linda "squeaky" froame. Sandra had been sen­
+tenced to fifteen years for threatening the lives of business ex­
+ecutives and government officials, and froame was serving a life
+sentence for attempting to kill president gerald ford. They were like
+the Bobbsey twins and clear out of their minds.
+They called themselves "red" and "blue." Everyday "red" wore
+red from head to toe and "blue" wore blue. They were so fanatic in
+their devotion to charles manson that they wrote to him everyday,
+informing him about everything that happened at msu. They waited
+for his "orders," and you can be sure that if he told them to kill
+someone they would die trying to do it. Also hooked up with the
+nazis were the hillbilly prisoners: an obese sow who never bathed
+and walked around barefoot and a tobacco-chewing butch who
+acted like she was in the confederate army. There was one "indepen­
+dent" nazi who had fallen out with the others. She sported a huge
+swastika embroidered on her jeans.
+Luckily, Rita Brown, a white revolutionary from the George
+Jackson Brigade, a group based on the West Coast, was among the
+four or five "niggah lovers." She was a feminist and a lesbian, and
+helped me to better understand many issues in the white women's
+liberation movement. Unlike Jane Alpert, whom i had met in the
+federal prison in New York, and whom i couldn't stand either
+personally or politically, Rita did not separate the oppression of
+women from the racism and classism of u.s. society. We agreed that
+sexism, like racism, was generated by capitalist, imperialist govern­
+ments, and that women would never be liberated as long as the
+institutions that controlled our lives existed. I respected Rita be­
+cause she really practiced sisterhood, and wasn't just one of those
+big mouths who go on and on about men.
+I'm sure that a lot of prison officials thought i'd never leave the
+place alive. It was the perfect setup for a setup, and i dealt with the
+situation seriously. I didn't look for trouble, but i let the nazis know
+that i was ready to defend myself at any time, and that if they
+wanted ass (like they say in prison) they would have to bring ass. I
+made it clear to them that i hated them as much as they hated me,
+and that if anybody's mother had to cry it would be theirs, not Ms.
+Johnson. After a few run-ins, the nazis stayed out of my way.
+
+After i had been at alderson for a while, we learned that the
+msu would be closed down because it had been declared uncon­
+stitutional. A phase-out stratification program was implemented
+that enabled those in msu to leave it during the day and to partici­
+pate in the same activities permitted those in the general popula­
+tion. I got a job working on the general mechanic's crew, was
+allowed recreation, attended classes, and was able to eat and visit
+with the other women in general population.
+Many of the sisters were Black and poor and from D.C., where
+every crime is a violation of a federal statute. They were beautiful
+sisters, serving outrageous sentences for minor offenses. Similar to
+the situation that existed at the federal prison in New York, some
+women could not afford to buy cigarettes without forgoing neces­
+sities, while others had money, contacts, wore fur coats, and lived
+as if they were in a different prison. That small group of women had
+been convicted of drug trafficking. Rumor had it that they per­
+formed the same services in prison as they had on the street, only
+now they worked for the guards.
+One day, as i was returning to davis hall, a middle-aged
+woman with "salt-and-pepper" hair caught my eye. She had a
+dignified, schoolteacher look. Something drew me towards her. As i
+searched her face, i could see that she was also searching mine. Our
+eyes locked in a questioning gaze. "Lolita ?" i ventured. "Assata?"
+she responded. And there, in the middle of those alderson prison
+grounds, we hugged and kissed each other.
+For me, this was one of the greatest honors of my life. Lolita
+Lebron was one of the most respected political prisoners in the
+world. Ever since i had first learned about her courageous struggle
+for the independence of Puerto Rico, i had read everything i could
+find that had been written about her. She had spent a quarter of a
+century behind bars and had refused parole unless her comrades
+were also freed. After all those years she had remained strong,
+unbent and unbroken, still dedicated to the independence of Puerto
+Rico and the liberation of her people. She deserved more respect
+than anyone could possibly give her, and i could not do enough to
+demonstrate my respect.
+In our subsequent meetings i must have been quite a pain in
+her neck, falling all over myself to carry her tray, to get a chair for
+her, or to do whatever i could for her. Lolita had been through hell
+in prison, yet she was amazingly calm and extremely kind. She had
+suffered years of isolation in davis hall in addition to years of
+political and personal isolation. Until the upsurge of the movement
+for Puerto Rican independence in the late 60s, she had received very
+
+ASSATA
+2 55
+
+ASSATA
+
+little support. Years had gone by without a visit. For years she had
+been cut off from her country, her culture, her family, and had not
+been able to speak her own language. Her only daughter had died
+while she was in prison.
+I supported Lolita a hundred percent, but there was one thing
+about which we did not agree. At the time we met, Lolita was
+somewhat anticommunist and antisocialist. She was extremely re­
+ligous and, i think, believed that religion and socialism were two
+opposing forces, that socialists and communists were completely
+opposed to religion and religious freedom.
+After the resurgence of the Puerto Rican independence move­
+ment, Lolita was visited by all kinds of people. Some were pseudo­
+revolutionary robots who attacked her for her religious beliefs,
+telling her that to be a revolutionary she had to give up her belief in
+God. It apparently had never occurred to those fools that Lolita was
+more revolutionary than they could ever be, and that her religion
+had helped her to remain strong and committed all those years. I
+was infuriated by their crass, misguided arrogance.
+I had become close friends with a Catholic nun, Mary Alice,
+while at alderson, who introduced me to liberation theology. I had
+read some articles by Camillo Torres, the revolutionary priest, and i
+knew that there were a lot of revolutionary priests and nuns in Latin
+America. But i didn't know too much about liberation theology. I
+did know that Jesus had driven the money changers out of the
+temples and said that the meek would inherit the earth, and a lot of
+other things that were directly opposed to capitalism. He had told
+the rich to give away their wealth and said that "It is easier for a
+camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
+into the Kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24). I knew a little bit, but
+i had too much respect for Lolita to open my mouth carelessly. I
+decided to study liberation theology so that i could have an intel­
+ligent conversation with her.
+I never got around to it, though. The maximum security unit
+closed, and i was shipped back to new jersey. Lolita is free now, and
+she is no longer isolated from what is going on in her part of the
+world or in her church. I know that wherever she is, she is praying
+and struggling for her people.
+
+Chapter 2 0
+
+y mother brings my daugh­
+ter to see me at the clinton correctional facility for
+women in new jersey, where i had been sent from
+alderson. I am delirious. She looks so tall. I run up to
+kiss her. She barely responds. She is distant and stand­
+offish. Pangs of guilt and sorrow fill my chest. I can see
+that my child is suffering. It is stupid to ask what is
+wrong. She is four years old, and except for these
+pitiful little visits-although my mother has brought
+her to see me every week, wherever i am, with the
+exception of the time i was in alderson-she has never
+been with her mother. I can feel something welling up
+in my baby. I look at my mother, my face a question
+mark. My mother is suffering too. I try to play. I make
+my arms into an elephant's trunk stalking around the
+visiting room jungle. It does not work. My daughter
+refuses to play baby elephant, or tiger, or anything.
+She looks at me like i am the buffoon i must look like.
+I try the choo-choo train routine and the la, la, la
+song, but she is not amused. I try talking to her, but
+she is puffed up and sullen.
+I go over and try to hug her. In a hot second she is
+all over me. All i can feel are these little four-year-old
+fists banging away at me. Every bit of her force is in
+those punches, they really hurt. I let her hit me until
+she is tired. "It's all right," i tell her. "Let it all out."
+She is standing in front of me, her face contorted with
+anger, looking spent. She backs away and leans
+against the wall. "It's okay," i tell her. "Mommy un­
+derstands." "You're not my mother," she screams, the
+tears rolling down her face. "You're not my mother
+and I hate you." I feel like crying too. I know she is
+
+2 57
+
+ASSATA
+
+confused about who i am. She calls me Mommy Assata and she
+calls my mother Mommy.
+1 try to pick her up. She knocks my hand away. "You can get
+out of here, if you want to," she screams. "You just don't want to."
+"No, i can't," i say, weakly. "Yes you can." she accuses. "You just
+don't want to."
+1 look helplessly at my mother. Her face is choked with pain.
+"Tell her to try to open the bars," she says in a whisper.
+"I can't open the door," i tell my daughter. "I can't get through
+the bars. You try and open the bars."
+My daughter goes over to the barred door that leads to the
+visiting room. She pulls and she pushes. She yanks and she hits and
+she kicks the bars until she falls on the floor, a heap of exhaustion. 1
+go over and pick her up. 1 hold and rock and kiss her. There is a
+look of resignation on her face that i can't stand. We spend the rest
+of the visit talking and playing quietly on the floor. When the guard
+says the visit is over, i cling to her for dear life. She holds her head
+high, and her back straight as she walks out of the prison. She
+waves good-bye to me, her face clouded and worried, looking like a
+little adult. 1 go back to my cage and cry until i vomit. 1 decide that
+it is time to leave.
+
+TO MY DAUGHTER KAKUYA
+
+i have shabby dreams for you
+of some vague freedom
+i have never known.
+Baby,
+i don't want you hungry or thirsty
+or out in the cold.
+And i don't want the frost
+to kill your fruit
+before it ripens .
+i can see a sunny place­
+Life exploding green.
+i can see your bright, bronze skin
+at ease with all the flowers
+and the centipedes.
+i can hear laughter,
+not grown from ridicule.
+And words, not prompted
+by ego or greed or jealousy.
+i see a world where hatred
+has been replaced by love .
+and ME replaced by WE.
+And i can see a world
+where you,
+building and exploring,
+strong and fulfilled,
+will understand.
+And go beyond
+my little shabby dreams.
+
+ASSATA
+
+259
+
+Chapter 2 1
+
+2 60
+
+y grandmother came all the
+way from North Carolina. She came to tell me about
+her dream. My grandmother had been dreaming all of
+her life, and the dreams have come true. My grand­
+mother dreams of people passing and babies being
+born and people being free, but it is never specific.
+Redbirds sitting on fences, rainbows at sunset, con­
+versations with people long gone. My grandmother's
+dreams have always come when they were needed and
+have always meant what we needed them to mean. She
+dreamed my mother would be a schoolteacher, my
+aunt would go to law school, and, during the hard
+times, she dreamed the good times were coming. She
+told us what we needed to be told and made us believe
+it like nobody else could have. She did her part. The
+rest was up to us. We had to make it real. Dreams and
+reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.
+I was extremely pleased that she had come. Her
+air was confident and victorious. The rest of the family
+prompted her to tell me her dream.
+"You're coming home soon," my grandmother
+told me, catching my eyes and staring down into
+them. "I don't know when it will be, but you're com­
+ing home. You're getting out of here. It won't be too
+long, though. It will be much less time than you've
+already been here."
+Excited, i asked her to tell me about her dream.
+We were all talking, i noticed in a conspiratorial tone.
+"I dreamed we were in our old house in Jamaica. I
+don't know if you remember that house or not."
+I assured her that i did.
+"I dreamed tha! i was dressing you," she said,
+"putting your clothes on."
+
+"Dressing me?" i repeated.
+"Yes. Dressing you."
+Fear ran up and down my back. "Was i little or grown?"
+"You were grown up in my dream."
+1 felt slightly sick. Maybe my grandmother dreamt about my
+death. Maybe she dreamt that i was killed while trying to escape.
+Why else would she be dressing me, if i wasn't dead? My grand­
+mother caught my drift of thought.
+"No, you're all right. You're alive. It's just as plain as the nose
+on your face. You're coming home. 1 know what I'm talking about.
+Don't ask me to explain it anymore, because 1 can't. 1 just know
+you're going to come home and that you're going to be all right."
+1 drilled her for more details. Some she gave and some she
+didn't. Finally, after i had asked a thousand questions, my grand­
+mother let all the authority show in her voice. "I know it will
+happen, because 1 dreamt it. You're getting out of this place, and 1
+know it. That's all there is to it."
+My grandmother sat looking at me. There was a kind of smile
+on her face i can't describe. 1 knew she was serious. My grand­
+mother's dreams were notorious: her dreams came true. All her life
+her uncanny senses have been like radar, picking up and identifying
+all kinds of things that we don't even see. My family and i just sat
+there vibing on each other. Talking and laughing, bringing up old
+memories and telling funny stories. Calmness rolled down my
+body like thick honey.
+When i got back to my cell i thought about it all. No amount
+of scientific, rational thinking could diminish the high that i felt. A
+tingly, giddy excitement had caught hold of me. 1 had gotten drunk
+on my family's arrogant, carefree optimism. 1 literally danced in my
+cell, singing, "Feet, don't fail me now." 1 sang the "feet" part real
+low, so i guess the guards must have thought i was bugging out,
+stomping around my cage singing "feet," "feet."
+"You can't win a race just by running," my mother told me
+when i was little. "You have to talk to yourself."
+"Huh ?" i had asked.
+"You have to talk to yourself when you are running and tell
+yourself you can win."
+It had become a habit of sorts. Anytime i am faced with
+something difficult or almost impossible, i chant. Over the years i
+have developed different kinds of chants, but i always fall back on
+the old one "i can, i can, yes, i can."
+1 called my grandparents a day or two before i escaped. 1
+wanted to hear their voices one last time before i went. 1 was feeling
+
+ASSATA
+Z6I
+
+ASSATA
+
+kind of mush and, so as not to sound suspicious, i told them i
+wanted to hear some more about the family's history, tracing the
+ties back to slavery. All too soon it was time to hang up. "Your
+grandmother wants to say something else to you," my grandfather
+told me.
+"I love you," my grandmother said. "We don't want you to get
+used to that place, do you hear? Don't you let yourself get used to
+it. "
+"No, grandmommy, I won't."
+Every day out in the street now, i remind myself that Black
+people in amerika are oppressed. It's necessary that I do that.
+People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppres­
+sion, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people
+just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become
+free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
+
+THE TRADITION
+
+Carry it on now.
+Carry it on.
+Carry it on now.
+Carry it on.
+Carry on the tradition.
+There were Black People since the childhood of time
+who carried it on.
+In Ghana and Mali and Timbuktu
+we carried it on.
+Carried on the tradition.
+We hid in the bush
+when the slavemasters came
+holding spears.
+And when the moment was ripe,
+leaped out and lanced the lifeblood
+of would-be masters.
+We carried it on.
+On slave ships,
+hurling ourselves into oceans.
+Slitting the throats of our captors.
+We took their whips.
+And their ships.
+Blood flowed in the Atlantic­
+and it wasn't all ours.
+We carried it on.
+Fed Missy arsenic apple pies.
+Stole the axes from the shed.
+Went and chopped off master's head.
+We ran. We fought.
+We organized a railroad.
+An underground.
+We carried it on.
+In newspapers. In meetings.
+In arguments and streetfights.
+We carried it on.
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+In tales told to children.
+In chants and cantatas.
+In poems and blues songs
+and saxophone screams,
+We carried it on.
+In classrooms. In churches.
+In courtrooms. In prisons.
+We carried it on.
+On soapboxes and picket lines.
+Welfare lines, unemployment lines.
+Our lives on the line,
+We carried it on.
+In sit-ins and pray-ins
+And march-ins and die-ins,
+We carried it on.
+On cold Missouri midnights
+Pitting shotguns against lynch mobs.
+On burning Brooklyn streets.
+Pitting rocks against rifles,
+We carried it on.
+Against water hoses and bulldogs.
+Against nightsticks and bullets.
+Against tanks and tear gas.
+Needles and nooses.
+Bombs and birth control.
+We carried it on.
+In Selma and San Juan.
+Mozambique. Mississippi.
+In Brazil and in Boston,
+We carried it on.
+Through the lies and the sell-outs.
+The mistakes and the madness.
+Through pain and hunger and frustration,
+We carried it on.
+Carried on the tradition.
+Carried a strong tradition.
+Carried a proud tradition.
+
+Carried a Black tradition.
+Carry it on.
+Pass it down to the children.
+Pass it down.
+Carry it on.
+Carry it on now.
+Carry it on
+TO FREEDOM !
+
+ASSATA
+
+Postscript
+
+2.66
+
+reedom. I couldn't believe that it had really
+happened, that the nightmare was over, that finally the
+dream had come true. I was elated. Ecstatic. But i was
+completely disoriented. Everything was the same, yet
+everything was different. All of my reactions were
+super-intense. I submerged myself in patterns and tex­
+tures, sucking in smells and sounds as if each day was
+my last. I felt like a voyeur. I forced myself not to stare
+at the people whose conversations i strained to over­
+hear.
+Suddenly, i was flooded with the horrors of prison
+and every disgusting experience that somehow i had
+been able to minimize while inside. I had developed
+the ability to be patient, calculating, and completely
+self-controlled. For the most part, i had been incapa­
+ble of crying. I felt rigid, as though chunks of steel and
+concrete had worked themselves into my body. I was
+cold. I strained to touch my softness. I was afraid that
+prison had made me ugly.
+My comrades helped a lot. They were so beau­
+tiful, natural, and healthy. I loved them for their kind­
+ness to me. It had been years since i had
+communicated with anyone intensely, and i talked to
+them almost compulsively. They were like medicine,
+helping me to ease back into myself again.
+But i had changed, and in so many ways. I was no
+longer the wide-eyed, romantic young revolutionary
+who believed the revolution was just around the cor­
+ner. I still appreciated energetic idealism, but i had
+long ago become convinced that revolution was a
+science. Generalities were no longer enough for me.
+Like my comrades, I believed that a higher level of
+political sophistication was necessary and that unity in
+the Black community had to become a priority. We
+could never afford to forget the lessons we had learned
+
+from COINTELPRO. As far as i was concerned, building a sense of
+national consciousness was one of the most important tasks that lay
+ahead of us. I couldn't see how we could seriously struggle without
+having a strong sense of collectivity, without being responsible for
+each other and to each other.
+It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist
+component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolu­
+tionary about nationalism by itself-Hitler and Mussolini were
+nationalists. Any community seriously concerned with its own
+freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well.
+The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory
+for Black people. Each time one of imperialism's tentacles is cut off
+we are closer to liberation. The struggle in South Africa is the most
+important battle of the century for Black people. The defeat of
+apartheid in South Africa will bring Africans all over the planet
+closer to liberation. Imperialism is an international system of ex­
+ploitation, and, we, as revolutionaries, need to be internationalists
+to defeat it.
+
+Havana. Lazy sun against blue-green ocean. A beautiful city of
+narrow, spider-web streets on one side of town and broad, tree-lined
+avenues on the other. Houses with peeling paint and vintage u.s.
+cars from the 40s and 50s.
+It's a busy place, full of buses, people hurrying, kids in wine­
+or gold-colored uniforms walking leisurely down the streets swing­
+ing book bags. The first thing that hit me were the open doors.
+Everywhere you go doors are open wide. You see people inside
+their homes talking, working, or watching television. I was amazed
+to find that you could actually walk down the streets at night alone.
+Old people strolling slowly, carrying shopping bags, stop to
+ask, "Que hay ? Que hay en la mercada?" "What are they selling in
+the market?" Without a moment's hesitation they yell at kids to get
+out of the street. They stand with their hands on their hips, acting
+like they own the place. I guess they do. They're not afraid.
+"Es mentira." my neighbors exclaim. "It's a lie." Que men­
+tirosa tu eres." "What a liar you are." My neighbors ask me what
+the u.s. is like, and they accuse me of lying when i tell them about
+the hunger and cold and people sleeping in the streets. They refuse
+to believe me. How can that be in such a rich country ? I tell them
+about drug addicts and child prostitutes, about crime in the streets.
+They accuse me of exaggerating: "We know capitalism is not a
+good system, but you don't have to exaggerate. Are there really
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+2 68
+
+twelve-year-old drug addicts ?"
+Even though they know about racism and the ku klux klan,
+about unemployment, such things are unreal to them. Cuba is a
+country of hope. Their reality is so different. I'm amazed at how
+much Cubans have accomplished in so short a time since the
+Revolution. There are new buildings everywhere-schools, apart­
+ment houses, clinics, hospitals, and day care centers. They are not
+like the skyscrapers going up in midtown Manhattan. There are no
+exclusive condominiums or luxury office buildings. The new build­
+ings are for the people.
+Medical care, dental care, and hospital visits are free. Schools
+at all educational levels are free. Rent is no more than about ten
+percent of salaries. There are no taxes-no income, city, federal, or
+state taxes. It is so strange to pay the price actually listed on
+products without any tax added. Movies, plays, concerts, and
+sports events all cost one or two pesos at the most. Museums are
+free.
+On Saturdays and Sundays the streets are packed with people
+dressed up and ready to hang out. I was amazed to discover that
+such a small island has such a rich cultural life and is so lively,
+particularly when the u.s. press gives just the opposite picture.
+I'm being introduced at a party. The hostess tells me that the
+man is from El Salvador. I hold out my hand to shake his. A few
+seconds too late, i realize he is missing an arm. He asks me what
+country i come from. I'm so upset and ashamed i'm almost shak­
+ing. "Yo soy de los estados unidos, pero no soy yankee," i tell him.
+A friend of mine had taught me that phrase. Every time someone
+asked me where i was from i cringed. I hated to tell people i was
+from the u.s. I would have preferred to say i was New Afrikan,
+except that hardly anyone would have understood what that meant.
+When i read about death squads in El Salvador or the bombing of
+hospitals in Nicaragua, i felt like screaming.
+Too many people in the u.s. support death and destruction
+without being aware of it. They indirectly support the killing of
+people without ever having to look at the corpses. But in Cuba i
+could see the results of u.s. foreign policy: torture victims on
+crutches who came from other countries to Cuba for treatment,
+including Namibian children who had survived massacres, and
+evidence of the vicious aggression the u.s. government had com­
+mitted against Cuba, including sabotage, and numerous assassina­
+tion attempts against Fidel. I wondered how all those people in the
+states who tried to sound tough, saying that the u.s. should go in
+here, bomb there, take over this, attack that, would feel if they knew
+
+that they were indirectly responsible for babies being burned to
+death. I wondered how they would feel if they were forced to take
+moral responsibility for that. It sometimes seems that people in the
+states are so accustomed to watching death on "Eyewitness News,"
+watching people starve to death in Africa, being tortured to death
+in Latin America or shot down on Asian streets, that, somehow, for
+them, people across the ocean-people "up there" or "down there"
+or "over there"-are not real.
+One of the first questions on the minds of Blacks from the
+states when they come to Cuba is whether or not racism exists. I
+was certainly no exception. I had read a little about the history of
+Black people in Cuba and knew that it was very different from the
+history of Black people in the states. Cuban racism had not been as
+violent or as institutionalized as u.s. racism, and the tradition of
+the two races, Blacks and whites, fighting together for liberation­
+first from colonization and later from dictatorship-was much
+stronger in Cuba. Cuba's first war for independence began in 1 868
+when Carlos Manuel De-Cespedes freed his slaves and encouraged
+them to join the army in the fight against Spain. One of the most
+important figures in that war was Antonio Maceo, a Black man,
+who was the chief military strategist. Blacks played a crucial role in
+Cuba's labor movement in the 1 950s. Jesus Menendez and Lazaro
+Peiia led two key unions. And i knew that Blacks like Juan Almeda,
+now Commandante of the Revolution, had played a significant role
+in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow Batista. But i was most
+interested in learning what had happened to Blacks after the tri­
+umph of the Revolution.
+I spent my first weeks in Havana walking and watching. No­
+where did I find a segregated neighborhood, but several people told
+me that where i was living had been all white before the Revolution.
+Just from casual observation it was obvious that race relations in
+Cuba were different from what they were in the u.s. Blacks and
+whites could be seen together everywhere-in cars, walking down
+streets. Kids of all races played together. It was definitely different.
+Whenever i met someone who spoke English i asked their opinion
+about the race situation.
+"Racism is illegal in Cuba," i was told. Many shook their
+heads and said, "Aqui no hay racismo." "There is no racism here."
+Although i heard the same response from everyone i remained
+skeptical and suspicious. I couldn't believe it was possible to elimi­
+nate hundreds of years of racism just like that, in twenty-five years
+or so. To me, revolutions were not magical, and no magic wand
+could be waved to create changes overnight. I'd come to see revolu-
+
+ASSATA
+
+ASSATA
+
+tion as a process. 1 eventually became convinced that the Cuban
+government was completely committed to eliminating all forms of
+racism. There were no racist institutions, structures, or organiza­
+tions, and i understood how the Cuban economic system under­
+mined rather than fed racism.
+1 had assumed that Blacks would be working within the Revo­
+lution to implement the changes and to insure the continuation of
+the nonracist policies that Fidel and the revolutionary leaders had
+instituted in every aspect of Cuban life. A Black Cuban friend
+helped me have a better understanding. He told me that Cubans
+took their African heritage for granted. That for hundreds of years
+Cubans had danced to African rhythms, performed traditional
+rituals, and worshipped Gods like Shango and Ogun. He told me
+that Fidel, in a speech, had told the people, "We are all Afro­
+Cubans, from the very lightest to the very darkest."
+1 told him that i thought it was the duty of Africans everywhere
+on this planet to struggle to reverse the historical patterns created
+by slavery and imperialism. Although he agreed with me, he
+quickly informed me that he didn't think of himself as an African.
+"Yo soy Cubano." "I am Cuban." And it was obvious he was very
+proud of being Cuban. He told me a story about a white Cuban
+who had volunteered twice to fight in Angola. He had received
+awards for heroism. "His case is not at all common in Cuba, but
+there are some who have problems adjusting to change."
+"What was his problem ?" 1 asked. "When the guy came home
+he caused a big scandal with his family. His daughter wanted to
+marry a Black man and he opposed the marriage. He said he
+wanted his grandchildren to look like him. It was a big argument,
+and his whole family got into it. This guy was so mixed up he went
+crazy when his daughter called him a racist. He wanted to fight
+everybody. He was out in the street, crying and kicking lamp posts.
+He didn't know what to do. All the time he was in Angola fighting
+against racism, he never thought about his own racism."
+1 agreed with him that whites fighting against racism had to
+fight on two levels, against institutionalized racism and against
+their own racist ideas. "What happened to the man ?" i asked.
+"Well, his daughter got married anyway, and his family con­
+vinced him to go to the wedding. Now, he baby-sits for his grand­
+children, and he says he's crazy about them, but the guy is still not
+right in the head. Every time 1 see him, he's apologetic. 1 told him 1
+don't want his apologies. Let him apologize to his daughter and
+her husband. As long as he supports the Revolution, 1 don't care
+what he thinks. 1 care more about what he does. If he really
+
+supports the Revolution, then he's gonna change. And, even if he
+never· changes, his kids are going to change� And his grandchildren
+will change even more. That's what I care about."
+The whole race question in Cuba was even more confusing to
+me because all the categories of race were different. In the first
+place, most white Cubans wouldn't even be considered white in the
+u.s. They'd be considered Latinos. I was shocked to learn that a lot
+of Cubans who looked Black to me didn't consider themselves
+Black. They called themselves mulattoes, colorados, jabaos, and a
+whole bunch of other names. It seemed to me that anyone who
+wasn't jet black was considered a mulatto. The first time someone
+called me a "mulatta," i was so insulted that if i had been able to
+express myself in Spanish, we would have had a heated argument
+right there on the spot.
+"Yo no soy una mulatta. Yo soy una mujer negra, y orgullosa
+soy una mujer negra," i would tell people as soon as I learned a
+little Spanish. "I'm not a mulatto, but a Black woman, and I'm
+proud to be Black." Some people understood where i was coming
+from, but others thought i was too hung up on the race question.
+To them, "mulatto" was just a color, like red, green, or blue. But, to
+me, it represented a historical relationship. All of my associations
+with the word "mulatto" were negative. it represented slavery, slave
+owners raping Black women. It represented a privileged caste,
+educated in European values and culture. In some Caribbean coun­
+tries, it represented the middle level of a hierarchical, three-caste
+system-the caste that acted as a buffer class between the white
+rulers and the Black masses.
+I found it impossible to separate the word from its history. It
+reminded me of a saying i had heard repeatedly since childhood: "If
+you're white, you'r right. If you're brown, stick around. And, if
+you're black, get back." I realized that in order to really understand
+the situation i had to study Cuban history thoroughly. But, some­
+how, i felt that the mulatto thing hindered Cubans from dealing
+with some of the negative ideas left over from slavery.
+The Black pride movement had been very important in helping
+Black people in the u.s. and in other English-speaking countries to
+view their African heritage in a positive light. I had never heard of
+any equivalent movement around mulatto pride and i couldn't
+imagine what the basis for it would be. To me, it was extremely
+important for all the descendants of Africans everywhere on this
+planet to struggle to reverse the political, economic, psychological,
+and social patterns created by slavery and imperialism.
+The problem of racism takes on so many forms and displays so
+
+ASSATA
+2 7I
+
+ASSATA
+
+many subtleties. It is a complicated problem that will require much
+analysis and much struggle to resolve. Although, in some ways,
+Cubans and I approached the problem from different angles, i felt
+we shared the same goal: the abolition of racism all over the world.
+I respected the Cuban government, not only for adopting nonracist
+principles, but for struggling to put those principles into practice.
+
+I held my breath as i waited for my aunt to pick up the phone.
+It had been five years since i had last spoken to her. Five years since
+i had been able to contact my family. Hopefully, she hadn't
+changed her number. A click. And then, at last, i heard her voice. I
+was so happy.
+"Anty," i almost
+.' shouted. "It's me. Assata."
+"Who?"
+"Assata. "
+"Who ?"
+"It's me. Assata. I'm in Cuba. I'm in Cuba. Oh, i love you. It's
+so good to hear your voice. How are you?"
+The voice on the other end was my aunt's, but it was so cold i
+could hardly believe it. "Oh. Really. Assata. Hm. Right. Well, I'm
+fine."
+"What's the matter, Anty? It's me. Assata. Are you all right?"
+"I'm fine."
+"Anty. Oh, i missed you so much. It's all right. Everything's
+o.K. I'm fine. I'm fine. How's everybody? How's everybody there?"
+Again the icy voice. "Everything is just fine. What do you
+want?"
+"What do i want? What do you mean, what do i want? I want
+to talk to you. I love you. You sound so cold."
+"Well . . . it . . . it . . . I . . . " There was a pause. And then,
+"Say something so I'll know it's really you. Something only you and
+I know."
+Finally understanding, i said the first thing that popped into
+my head. "Anty, panty, jack o'stanty." It was a stupid childhood
+rhyme and nobody else could possibly know about it. I used to
+taunt her with it when I was a kid.
+"It is you. Oh, my God, it really is you," she screamed. "Wait.
+Give me a second to catch my breath. How are you?"
+"Fine," i said. "How's Mommy and Kakuya ?"
+"Your mother's fine. Oh, she's gonna be so happy when I tell
+her I've talked to you. Kakuya's fine, too. Your daughter is so big
+
+you won't recognize her. She's almost as tall as you are."
+I told her i wanted to call my mother and Kakuya as soon as i
+finished talking to her.
+"No. You call her tomorrow. Let me call her first, so she really
+knows its you. Where did you say you are?"
+"Cuba. I'm calling from Cuba. I'm a political refugee here."
+"Cuba ?" my aunt repeated. "Cuba ? Are you O.K. there ? I
+mean, are you safe?"
+"I think so," i told her. "I feel fine. It seems that way."
+Talking to Kakuya and my mother the next day was like a
+dream. "Hi," this little voice said into the phone. It was the most
+beautiful voice i'd ever heard. I was nervous and happy. Sweating
+buckets.
+"How are you?" i asked my daughter.
+"Fine. "
+I felt like a pot boiling over. All the feelings i'd kept inside for
+so long came gushing out. I had a million things i wanted to ask
+her. A million things i wanted to say.
+My mother and i made plans. She and my aunt and Kakuya
+would come down as soon as possible. It seemed too good to be
+true. And it was.
+Month after month passed by. In order for Kakuya to get her
+passport, she needed a birth certificate. My mother told me that for
+ten years Elmhurst Hospital had refused to issue Kakuya a birth
+certificate. Finally, after months of hassling, Evelyn had to go to
+kourt to get a document proving that my daughter had been born.
+Over the months that followed, i began to understand the kind
+of hell that the police and the FBI had put my family through. After
+i had escaped, the police had so persistently and brutally badgered
+my mother that she had had a heart attack. What they had done to
+Evelyn was beyond belief. I understood why Evelyn had reacted to
+my call the way she did. At one time, Evelyn's office telephone had
+ten intercepts on it. She and my mother had received phony notes in
+my handwriting. They had received telephone calls with my voice
+telling them to "come to the spot and bring some money." They
+had found electric eyes and all kinds of other devices in and around
+their houses. They had experienced strange break-ins where
+nothing of value was taken. But they had survived. And grown
+stronger in the process.
+As the plane swooped down over Havana, it seemed that my
+heart was beating on my ribs to get out. My stomach hurt. My
+mouth was dry like cotton. It seemed like a million people poured
+
+ASSATA
+
+2 73
+
+ASSATA
+
+2 74
+
+off the plane before the tall little girl with the great big eyes started
+down the ramp. I could see my mother, looking frail, yet so deter­
+mined. With my aunt behind her, looking triumphant.
+How much we had all gone through. Our fight had started on
+a slave ship years before we were born. Venceremos, my favorite
+word in Spanish, crossed my mind. Ten million people had stood
+up to the monster. Ten million people only ninety miles away. We
+were here together in their land, my small little family, holding each
+other after so long. There was no doubt about it, our people would
+one day be free. The cowboys and bandits didn't own the world.
+
+Preface
+As I began to give interviews and talks about my book “They Take
+Our Jobs!” And 20 Other Myths about Immigration, published in 2007,
+I became more and more convinced that a key, central issue that’s
+hampering those of us who support immigrant rights is the absence
+of a basic, fundamental ability to say “immigrant rights are human
+rights.” Immigration simply should not be illegal. No politician or
+talk-show commentator is going to risk saying this, but we have to.
+I stand by my arguments about the myths I deconstruct in the
+book (Immigrants DON’T take American jobs! Immigrants DO pay
+taxes! Immigrants ARE learning English!), but I also, deep down,
+think these arguments miss the point. Immigrants are human beings
+who have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status
+from the rest of the United States’ inhabitants. The only thing that
+makes immigrants different from anybody else is the fact that they
+are denied the basic rights that the rest of us have. There is simply
+no humanly acceptable reason to define a group of people as
+different and deny them rights.
+How can we claim to oppose discrimination based on national
+origin when our entire body of citizenship and immigration law is
+founded on discrimination based on national origin? When people
+ask me, “Why don’t they just apply for citizenship?” or “Why don’t
+they just come here legally?” they are betraying a fundamental
+ignorance of our immigration and citizenship laws. People don’t
+apply for citizenship or don’t obtain proper documents to come
+here, because the law forbids it. That’s right: the law forbids them to
+come to the United States or to apply for citizenship. US
+immigration law is based on a system of quotas and preferences. If
+you don’t happen to be one of the lucky few who falls into a quota
+or preference category, there is basically no way to obtain legal
+permission to immigrate. If you are already in the United States
+without proper documentation, you will never, ever be allowed to
+apply for citizenship.
+
+Given the choice, nobody would risk his or her life walking
+through the desert to enter the country illegally, and nobody would
+risk the constant fear, discrimination, and threat of deportation that
+comes from being undocumented. Of course, everybody who comes
+to the United States would rather enter the country legally, and
+everybody who is undocumented would rather be documented. If
+only the law allowed them to do it!
+The purpose of this book is to denaturalize illegality. I want to
+show it as the social construction that it is. I want to show when,
+why, and how it came to be, and how it came to be socially
+accepted as a fact. I want to show how it works and what purpose it
+serves. Or maybe whose purposes it serves. My goal is to unveil the
+complex, inconsistent, and sometimes perverse nature of US
+immigration law that makes some people illegal.
+
+Introduction
+When people say, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?”
+they imply that they, in fact, understand everything about it. They
+take illegality to be self-evident: there’s a law, you break the law,
+that’s illegal. Obvious, right?
+Actually, illegality is a lot more complicated than that. Laws are
+made and enforced by humans, in historical contexts, and for
+reasons. They change over time, and they are often created and
+modified to serve the interests of some groups—generally the
+powerful and privileged—over others.
+Most of the citizens who brag that their ancestors came here “the
+right way” are making assumptions based on ignorance. They
+assume that their ancestors “went through the process” and
+obtained visas, as people are required to do today. In fact, most of
+them came before any legal process existed—before the concept of
+“illegality” existed.
+THE INVENTION OF ILLEGALITY
+Illegality as we know it today came into existence after 1965. In the
+decades before 1965, the media rarely depicted immigration in
+negative terms. Nor did the public or Congress consider it a problem
+in need of legislation. By the 1970s, though, the demonization of
+immigrants—in particular, Mexican and other Latino immigrants—
+and the issue of “illegal immigration” were turning into hot-button
+issues.1
+There are some particular historical reasons for these changes.
+Some are economic. The global and the domestic economies
+underwent some fundamental structural changes in the late
+twentieth century, changes we sometimes refer to as “globalization.”
+Some analysts argued that globalization was making the world
+“flat,” and that with the spread of connection, technology, and
+communication, old inequalities would melt away.2 Others believed
+
+that new inequalities were becoming entrenched—that a “global
+apartheid” being imposed, separating the Global North from the
+Global South, the rich from the poor, the winners in the new global
+economy from the losers.3 I’ll go more into depth about these
+changes and show how they contributed to a need for illegality to
+sustain the new world order.
+The second set of changes is ideological and cultural. Like the big
+economic shifts, ideological and cultural changes are a process; they
+can’t necessarily be pinpointed to a particular date or year. I use
+1965 as a convenience, because that’s when some major changes
+were enacted in US immigration law that contributed to creating
+illegality. But those changes responded to, and contributed to, the
+more long-term economic and ideological shifts that were occurring.
+In the cultural realm, overt racism was going out of fashion. Civil
+rights movements at home and anti-colonial movements abroad
+undercut the legitimacy of racial exclusion and discrimination.
+While apartheid continued in South Africa through the 1980s, even
+that lost its international legitimacy. In the United States, the Jim
+Crow regime was dismantled and new laws and programs were
+aimed at creating racial equality, at least on paper. By the new
+century, people were beginning to talk about the United States as a
+“postracial” society. At the same time, though, new laws hardened
+immigration regimes and discrimination against immigrants in the
+United States and elsewhere.
+TRUE REFUGEES OF THE BORDER WARS
+Before deeply delving into the dizzying and sometimes irrational
+nature of immigration law, it’s helpful to consider what’s actually
+happening on the ground. I had the opportunity to see firsthand the
+human tragedy that’s resulted from the new immigration regime in
+March 2010, when I participated in a weeklong humanitarian
+delegation with the organization No More Deaths, one of several
+that take direct action on the US-Mexico border.
+Volunteers from these organizations attempt to provide
+humanitarian aid to migrants by leaving water at stations along
+
+migrant trails and offering basic first-aid at camps in the desert,
+among other things. My group, though, was taking testimonies on
+the Mexican side of the border from migrants who had been caught
+and deported.
+During that week, I met several hundred deportees. They were
+arrested for a crime no US citizen can commit: entering the United
+States without official permission. Only people who are not US
+citizens need official permission to enter US territory.
+Nogales, Sonora, on the US-Mexico border, has the feel of a war
+zone. Every few hours, a bus from the Wackenhut private security
+service arrives on the US side of the border filled with would-be
+migrants, mostly from Mexico’s poor southern regions. Most of them
+were captured by the Border Patrol somewhere in the Arizona
+desert. “They used to try to capture us near the border,” one
+migrant told me wearily. “Now, they patrol two or three days’ walk
+north of the border. They want to find us when we’re dehydrated,
+exhausted, blistered, so we can’t run away.”
+First, the drivers unload their belongings from underneath the
+bus—a few backpacks, but mostly clear plastic Homeland Security
+bags supplied by the Border Patrol. After about half an hour, the
+migrants descend from the bus in small groups. Under armed guard,
+the lucky ones retrieve their packages and shuffle back across the
+border to be processed by Mexican authorities. Many have lost
+everything on their trek through the desert, when they were
+attacked by robbers, became separated from their group, got lost, or
+fled from the Border Patrol.
+Processing takes about fifteen minutes. The migrants receive a
+slip of paper attesting to the fact that they are deportees. The paper
+confirms their eligibility for the fragmentary social services that the
+Mexican government and several Catholic church organizations
+offer to migrants in Nogales: one phone call, a half-fare bus ride
+home, three nights in a shelter, and, most generously, fifteen days of
+free meals twice a day at the comedor, or soup kitchen, run by the
+Proyecto Kino, supported by both the Mexican and several US
+archdioceses of the Catholic church.
+
+After processing, the migrants emerge on the Mexican side of the
+border. Taxi drivers and food vendors accost them as they stumble
+out, dazed and bewildered. “Everybody wants to pretend to be a
+migrant, to get services,” one provider told me. “You have to look at
+their shoes. If they have shoelaces, they’re not migrants. Homeland
+Security takes their shoelaces so they won’t. . .” He gestured slitting
+his throat and laughed conspiratorially. So the migrants stumble
+because their feet are raw and torn from walking through the desert,
+and because they have no shoelaces in their tattered shoes.
+If they’re lucky, one of the first people they’ll encounter is Sal,
+with the Transportes Fronterizos (Border Transport) company,
+contracted by the Mexican government to provide transportation
+services for deportees. Sal is a deportee himself. In his twenties, he
+speaks English with a perfect Chicano lilt. That’s not surprising: he
+came to the United States with his parents when he was three and
+grew up and graduated from high school in Arizona. “How did you
+get deported?” I asked him, quickly realizing that we should
+communicate in his preferred English, rather than Spanish. “You
+don’t want to know,” he grimaced. “Jaywalking.” Was it racial
+profiling? The police stopped him for crossing a street where there
+was no crosswalk, asked him for his documents, and arrested him.
+In Arizona, local police are empowered to enforce immigration laws.
+Sal can tell migrants where to find free food and shelter, and how
+to access the transportation services offered by Grupo Beta, the
+Mexican government agency charged with removing migrants from
+the border to prevent them from attempting to recross. He keeps his
+booth open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., when the last bus leaves for
+the shelter. Migrants who get deported after that have to sleep on
+the streets.
+Most migrants leave their homes in Mexico with identification
+papers, money, and family members or other traveling companions.
+Most are deported alone and can spend days or weeks trying to
+determine the whereabouts of husbands, wives, children, or cousins.
+Many have also lost their documents and their cash. The buses
+arrive every few hours, all day and night. The migrants who are
+
+dumped and wander the streets of Nogales are the true refugees of
+the border wars.
+At the door of the Proyecto Kino soup kitchen, the long line for
+breakfast starts forming around 8:30 a.m. Some migrants arrive by
+bus from the shelters, others by foot after spending the night on the
+street or in the cemetery. The hundred or so men line up on the
+right, and the ten to twenty women and children, who get served
+first, on the left. To get in when the comedor opens at 9 a.m. for the
+first breakfast shift, all of them have to show their deportation
+document. The paper that proves that they were hunted, captured,
+and deported for not having the proper documents to enter the
+United States now becomes their ticket to a free meal.
+The services available to migrants are paltry compared to their
+needs. “My wife, my grown daughters, and our two adopted
+grandchildren are in California,” one man in his fifties told me
+despairingly. He showed me the adoption papers. His daughter’s
+children, aged two and three and both US citizens, were taken by
+Child Protective Services when the daughter became a drug user. He
+and his wife became their foster parents and then adopted them. “I
+had to promise that I’d support them and care for them. How can I
+do that if I can’t get back to them?” He asked to use my cell phone
+to call his wife and then thrust the phone into my hand. “Talk to
+her,” he urged me. “Tell her I’m here. Tell her I’m trying to get
+back.”
+A young man spent three days waiting outside the exit port. He
+and his wife were separated during the deportation process. “Her
+name is Brenda. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a green Tshirt,” he told everyone who would listen. As each bus arrived, he
+stood waiting with a desperate hopelessness, watching the deportees
+slowly trickle out, searching for her familiar face.
+As part of No More Deaths, I could offer these people only a few
+tokens of aid: a phone to call their relatives, donated clothes and
+socks, a granola bar or rehydration drink. I could beg them to share
+their stories with us, so that we could tell them back in the United
+States and try to change our immigration policies. At the end of the
+
+day, we’d walk back to Nogales, Arizona, stepping lightly across the
+border that had destroyed and divided their lives.
+THE COURTS PLAY THEIR ROLE
+In Tucson, Arizona, the Federal Court processes seventy migrants a
+day through the Operation Streamline program. About 4 percent of
+migrants who are captured are sent to Streamline, which began
+functioning in Tucson in 2008 after beginning in Texas as a pilot
+program in 2005. Between Tucson and Yuma, the other Arizona
+district using the program, some thirty thousand migrants are
+“Streamlined” every year.
+Unlike most deportees, Streamlined migrants are charged with a
+criminal offense and imprisoned. The daily hearings fall somewhere
+between a kangaroo court and a slave auction. The migrants are
+shackled hand, foot, and waist, and sit in rows taking up about half
+of the courtroom. The judge calls them up in groups of ten or so,
+and their harassed lawyers, who represent four or five defendants a
+day, scramble to accompany them.4 Almost all of these migrants
+were captured in the desert, and are blistered, exhausted,
+disoriented, and dehydrated when they are placed in cells. They
+describe being stripped of their belongings and their jackets and left
+to shiver in T-shirts under the air conditioning, being placed seventy
+or eighty people deep in cells designed for four or five. There is no
+room even to sit, much less lie down; they receive only a small juice
+box and a packet of cheese crackers in two days.
+Ten migrants stand before the judge in their shackles, while
+dozens of others look on. The lawyers hover beside their clients. The
+judge asks: “Mr. ___, do you understand the charge against you and
+the maximum penalty? Do you understand your right to a trial? Are
+you willing to give up that right and plead guilty? Of what country
+are you a citizen? On or about March 18 of this year, did you enter
+into Southern Arizona from Mexico? Did you come to a port of
+entry?”
+Most answer that they are citizens of Mexico, though on the day I
+attended the hearing, there were several Hondurans and
+
+Ecuadorians. A court interpreter repeats the questions in Spanish
+simultaneously, and the defendants listen through headphones that
+they can’t touch because their hands are shackled to their waists.
+Their lawyers prompt them if they falter in their responses. Mostly,
+they answer sí to everything, which the interpreter dutifully
+translates as yes, except to the port-of-entry question, to which they
+are supposed to answer no. Some answer dully, staring at the
+ground; some respond in strong voices, looking up at the judge. A
+few are dismissed because they don’t speak Spanish, and the court
+has no interpreters for the indigenous languages of Mexico. A few
+scorn the headphones and answer in English.
+Occasionally, a defendant breaks the pattern. One answered yes
+when asked if he came to a port of entry. The judge was visibly
+unnerved. “You came to a port of entry?” she asked. “Let me ask the
+question again. Did you come to a port of entry?” Again, the
+defendant answered yes. She asked several more times before the
+lawyer convinced his client to answer no. Another defendant
+became agitated when the judge began to question him. “I’m guilty!
+I’m guilty!” he exclaimed. “I know you’re guilty,” responded the
+judge impatiently. “But I still have to ask you these questions, and
+you have to answer them.”
+“How do you plead to illegal entry, guilty or not guilty?” was the
+judge’s last question. Every prisoner answered dutifully, culpable—
+guilty. Most were sentenced to time served and prepared to be
+deported to Nogales, Mexico. They will leave the country that they
+sacrificed so much to get to with a criminal record and the threat of
+up to twenty years in jail if they enter again. They will be among
+those arriving in Nogales, penniless, lost, and bewildered.
+What we saw was only part of the picture. The trip to the border
+can be as dangerous as the crossing and passage through the US
+side. Every year, many thousands of migrants are kidnapped as they
+travel through Mexico. Gangs and drug smugglers see migrants as
+easy targets and count on the fact that the friends or relatives in the
+United States who raised the thousands of dollars to fund their trip
+will be able to generate more to pay for their ransom. As violence in
+the border region increased, migrants made up many of the victims.
+
+If a ransom was not paid, or if migrants refused to work for the
+gang, they might be killed, sometimes in massacres that claimed the
+lives of dozens.
+SOME BACKGROUND
+The many competing interests at stake in the development of law,
+policy, and ideology surrounding undocumentedness have led to a
+perplexing and constantly shifting landscape. To understand the
+changes of the late twentieth century, we need to understand how
+the system worked before that. From the eighteenth and, especially,
+the nineteenth centuries on, the United States benefited from its
+place in the global industrial economy, and white people in the
+United States benefited from their place in the racial order. A dual
+labor market developed in which some workers began to become
+upwardly mobile and enjoy the benefits of industrial society, while
+others were legally and structurally stuck at the bottom.
+This dual system was reproduced both domestically and
+internationally, and race played a big role in it. Legal systems were
+created to justify and sustain it. Globally, the system was expressed
+through colonialism. Europeans colonized people of color around
+the world and benefited from their forced labor and their resources.
+In the United States, slavery played a big role in sustaining a dual
+labor system, where whites could move up, but blacks could not.
+The United States took some colonies, too, at the end of the
+nineteenth century, like the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. But
+US companies and citizens also benefited from the dual labor system
+when American companies like United Fruit established plantations
+in Central America and produced bananas using cheap labor there.
+They benefited when Brazilian slaveholders or German coffee
+planters in Guatemala used forced labor in those countries to supply
+cheap coffee for US markets.
+Mexico played a big role in the dual labor market in the United
+States, both domestically and internationally. US mining companies
+operated in both countries from the late 1800s, and in both, they
+employed an explicit dual wage system. Mexicans received a lower,
+
+“Mexican” wage, while white US citizens received a so-called gold
+or US wage.5
+Inside the United States, Mexicans were welcomed as migrant
+workers as American investment in the southwest grew after the
+territory was taken from Mexico in 1848 and 1853. A reliance on
+Mexican workers who contribute their labor to US economic
+enterprises—but are denied access to the benefits that US law
+affords its citizens—has underpinned the economy for over a
+century. Over the course of time, different legal and structural
+mechanisms have been used to maintain this system. Early on, it
+was done by legally distinguishing immigrants from workers.
+Immigrants were the Europeans who came to Ellis Island; workers
+were the Mexicans and Chinese who built the railroads and planted
+the food that sustained white settlement in the newly conquered
+west of the country. They were not expected to settle, stay, or
+become citizens. Citizenship, after all, was reserved for people
+defined as white until after the Civil War.
+US immigration law thus treated Mexicans not as potential
+immigrants but as sojourners, temporary migrants who entered the
+country to work, rather than as immigrants who intended to stay.
+Anti-immigrant sentiment was directed against newly arrived
+Europeans, not against Mexicans. Anti-Mexican racism was also
+common, but it was directed against the supposed racial category of
+Mexicans rather than their status or citizenship.
+Until 1924, the new border between the United States and
+Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly.
+Mexicans were exempted from the immigration restrictions passed
+into law before 1965. Because they were not considered immigrants,
+Mexicans were also permanently deportable and were, in fact,
+singled out for mass deportations in the 1930s and 1950s. The
+nonimmigrant status of Mexican workers over time underlies the
+apparent paradox between the United States as a so-called country
+of immigrants and its xenophobia and restrictive immigration
+policies.
+
+The creation of citizenship by birth through the Fourteenth
+Amendment was aimed at remedying the historic exclusion of
+African Americans. But it also created the apparent paradox that
+other nonwhites—like the Chinese—could become citizens through
+birth. Congress quickly moved to remedy this by restricting the
+entry of Chinese women in 1873 and all Chinese with the Chinese
+Exclusion Act in 1882. California’s farms then became even more
+dependent on Mexicans who, unlike the Chinese, could still be
+counted on to leave after the harvest rather than remain in the
+country and eventually become citizens.
+In 1928, the Saturday Evening Post reported that there were some
+136,000 farmers in California, 100,000 with farms of under 100
+acres, and 83,000 farming fewer than 40 acres. These small farmers
+did not use hired labor during most of the year, but during the
+harvest, required some 10 to 50 additional workers. “Fluid, casual
+labor is for them a factor determining profits or ruin,” the Post
+explained.
+“Mexican labor fits the requirements of the California farm as no
+other labor has done in the past. The Mexican can withstand the
+high temperatures of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys. He is
+adapted to field conditions. He moves from one locality to another
+as the rotation of the seasonal crops progresses. He does heavy field
+work—particularly in the so-called ‘stoop crops’ and ‘knee crops’ of
+vegetable and cantaloupe production—which white labor refuses to
+do and is constitutionally unsuited to perform.” Mexican labor, the
+author estimated, comprised from 70 to 80 percent of “casual” or
+seasonal farm labor.6
+This informal system of rotating labor prevailed until the 1940s,
+when it was supplemented by a government-run system that
+continued until the mid-1960s, the Bracero Program. The Bracero
+Program, which brought in over 4 million workers between 1942
+and 1964, was terminated in the context of civil rights organizing
+that highlighted the discriminatory treatment of these guest
+workers. But the economic structures that relied on these workers
+
+didn’t disappear, and neither did the workers; they just returned to
+the old, informal system.
+But, suddenly, the old system became illegal. The 1965
+immigration law, which coincided with the termination of the
+Bracero Program, responded to the domestic and international
+movements for racial equality by getting rid of the racial and
+national quota system that had prevailed until then. It gave every
+country an equal quota. And it included the countries of the Western
+Hemisphere for the first time, considering Mexicans as potential
+immigrants rather than just exploitable workers.
+Given the structural realities of Mexican migrant labor, treating
+Mexicans equally under the new law was actually a way to keep
+exploiting them, but now, by calling them “illegal.” From 1965 on,
+new laws made them more and more illegal and took more and
+more rights away from them.
+Although it may seem contradictory, restrictive immigration laws
+actually contributed to a rise in both legal and “illegal”
+immigration. Two immigration scholars point to a synergy between
+the way the 1965 law privileged family members of US citizens and
+legal residents—in many cases, exempting them from the new
+quotas—and the barrage of laws after 1965 that progressively
+restricted the rights of noncitizens. It wasn’t the new quota that led
+to increased Mexican legal immigration after 1965, since the quota
+drastically reduced the number of Mexicans allowed to immigrate.
+Instead, it was the punitive aspects of that and subsequent laws that
+increased the numbers of those who decided to become immigrants,
+rather than sojourners.7 In other words, workers decided to stay,
+bring their families, and become immigrants because the earlier,
+seasonal pattern was becoming increasingly criminalized.
+Some of the very organizations that were pushing to expand legal
+and social rights in the United States in the 1960s continued to draw
+a line at the border. The United Farm Workers union campaigned
+against “illegal” workers in the 1970s.8 California Rural Legal
+Assistance and the UFW supported the nation’s first employer
+sanctions law—making it illegal for employers to hire
+
+undocumented workers—in 1971.9 The first attempt to implement
+such sanctions at the national level was in 1973, at the initiative of
+the AFL-CIO and the NAACP.10 (By the 1990s, all of these
+organizations had changed their positions and opposed the
+employer sanctions that were created by the 1986 Immigration
+Reform and Control Act.) But employer sanctions turned out to be
+just one more way to maintain a large, exploitable pool of workers
+to fill agriculture’s most backbreaking jobs. The sanctions could be
+suspended, as they were after Hurricane Katrina, when federal
+contractors desperately needed migrant laborers to clean up and
+rebuild the city of New Orleans.
+Agriculture continues to employ large numbers of undocumented
+workers in the twenty-first century, as farmers and their
+organizations throughout the United States have publicly
+acknowledged. Larry Wooten, the president of the North Carolina
+Farm Bureau, explained at an agricultural summit in Atlanta in
+2012 that “agricultural employers who advertise jobs—as is
+required for those who are part of the federal guest worker program
+—for nearly two months get little to no response. ‘We have no
+choice,’ Wooten said. ‘We must use immigrants.’”11
+Since the 1980s, economic restructuring in the United States has
+created some huge new demands for extra-legal workers who will
+contribute to the economy for low wages and few benefits. Many
+undocumented people today work at jobs that have been in-sourced.
+While most of us are familiar with outsourcing—when jobs, from
+manufacturing to call centers, are shifted overseas—in-sourcing is
+less well known. The phrase can refer to a company’s decision to
+carry out internally those tasks that were previously contracted out,
+or it can mean that a company brings back a job that had been
+outsourced abroad. Here, though, I’m referring to a particular kind
+of in-sourcing: when a company closes down an operation in order
+to move it somewhere else inside the United States where it will
+have access to cheaper (often immigrant) workers, lower taxes,
+fewer environmental or health and safety regulations, or other
+financial incentives.
+
+Almost everybody in the United States benefits from that labor in
+one way or another, because it underlies almost all of the goods and
+services we use. Whether they work in agriculture or in-sourced
+industries like meatpacking, or whether they work in landscaping,
+newspaper delivery, or cleanup after environmental disasters, the
+invisible labor of undocumented workers sustains the economy.
+Moreover, the presence of these migrants also serves to create more
+jobs. By living in the United States, by spending money and
+consuming goods and services themselves, they sustain the jobs of
+other workers.
+The work that undocumented migrants do is essential to the
+functioning of the economy and to the comfort of citizens. The
+system is also, however, fundamentally unjust. By creating a
+necessarily subordinate workforce without legal status, we maintain
+a system of legalized inequality. It’s a domestic reproduction of a
+global system. The border is used to rationalize the system globally;
+it makes it seem right and natural that exploited workers in one
+place should produce cheap goods and services for consumers in
+another place. Illegality replicates the rationale domestically: it
+makes it seem right and natural that a legally marginalized group of
+workers should produce cheap goods and services for another group
+defined as legally superior.
+STATUS, RACE, AND THE NEW JIM CROWS
+At the same time that these big economic shifts were occurring,
+other political, social, and cultural changes were happening
+globally. After World War II, overt racism and white supremacy
+began to lose ground. Europe slowly and painfully let go of most of
+its colonies, and the number of independent countries proliferated.
+Almost all of the new independent countries were run by people of
+color. In the United States, civil rights movements fought to
+dismantle legalized discrimination. South Africa became an
+international pariah and finally ended apartheid.
+In an important book published in 2010, though, Michelle
+Alexander argues that the racial caste system that United States has
+
+maintained since the days of slavery did not end with the passage of
+civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. Rather, a new system
+of legalized discrimination developed to replace the old Jim Crow
+system. The new system, she writes, is mass incarceration. Black
+people—and, as I argue here, Mexicans and other Latin Americans
+as well—were systematically criminalized. Although, on the surface,
+the system is color-blind, in fact, it targets people of color. But it
+works better in this supposedly postracial age, because it never uses
+race directly to discriminate. Instead, it criminalizes people of color
+and then discriminates on the basis of their criminal status.
+Most citizens who rail against the undocumented insist that their
+opposition is based solely on technical, legal grounds: they oppose
+people who broke the law. But becoming undocumented is a highly
+racialized crime. Nationality itself has its origins in racial thinking
+and still bases itself on birth and origin in ways that echo racialism.
+The categories “Mexican” and “Latino” have been racialized in the
+United States, and the category of illegality is heavily associated
+with the category “Mexican,” whether this is understood as a
+nationality, an ethnicity, or a race. In 2011, 93 percent of federal
+immigration crimes were committed by noncitizens, and 89.3
+percent of them were committed by Hispanics.12
+Another way to look at the racialized nature of
+undocumentedness is to compare the criminalization of immigrants
+(especially Latino immigrants) in the post–civil rights era with the
+criminalization of blacks. Alexander argues that laws passed and
+implemented in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and
+legislation that accompanied it effectively countered the gains made
+in the 1950s and ’60s. “We have not ended racial caste in America,”
+she writes, “we have merely redesigned it.”13 The new system, mass
+incarceration, consists of “not only . . . the criminal justice system
+but also . . . the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that
+control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison.” Once
+caught in the web, former prisoners are in it forever. They “enter a
+hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social
+exclusion. . . . The current system of control permanently locks a
+
+huge percentage of the African American community out of the
+mainstream society and economy.”14
+Alexander focuses not only on incarceration itself, but on what
+happens after release. “Once [prisoners] are released, they are often
+denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to a
+racially segregated and subordinated existence. . . . They are legally
+denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public
+benefits.”15 Possession of a felony conviction, then, replicates the
+very legal restrictions that used to be enforced by Jim Crow.
+In the ideology and culture of exclusion, as well as in the laws
+and mechanics of its implementation, the arguments Alexander
+makes about African Americans have a parallel in the situation of
+immigrants. Like the African Americans that Alexander studies,
+large portions of the Latin American immigrant population have
+also been permanently criminalized and legally excluded. As with
+African Americans, undocumented immigrants are criminalized by a
+system that is superficially race-blind and defended on that basis.
+Just as African Americans have become stigmatized in the post–
+civil rights era through criminalization, so have immigrants. Before,
+legal discrimination could be based explicitly on race. When racebased discrimination was outlawed, a new system emerged: turn
+people of color into criminals. Then you can discriminate against
+them because of their criminality, rather than because of their race.
+A new legitimacy for discrimination was thus born.16
+Alexander meticulously details the ways in which criminal status
+follows black people into every area of life. With minor drug
+charges turned into felonies and defendants urged to plea bargain,
+huge numbers of black men become permanent “felons”:
+When a defendant pleads guilty to a minor drug offense,
+nobody will likely tell him that he may be permanently
+forfeiting his right to vote as well as his right to serve on a
+jury. . . . He will also be told little or nothing about the
+parallel universe he is about to enter, one that promises a
+form of punishment that is often more difficult to bear than
+prison time: a lifetime of shame, contempt, scorn, and
+
+exclusion. In this hidden world, discrimination is perfectly
+legal. . . . Commentators liken the prison label to “the mark of
+Cain” and characterize the perpetual nature of the sanction as
+“internal exile.” Myriad laws, rules, and regulations operate to
+discriminate against ex-offenders and effectively prevent their
+reintegration into the mainstream society and economy. These
+restrictions amount to a form of “civic death” and send the
+unequivocal message that “they” are no longer part of “us.”17
+Like
+convicted
+felons—mostly
+African
+Americans—the
+undocumented live in a strange world of internal exile or civic
+death. While physically present, they are legally excluded by an
+official status that has been ascribed to them. They can’t vote, serve
+on a jury, work, live in public housing, or receive public benefits.
+These exclusions apply equally to those, mostly blacks, with a
+criminal record and those, mostly Mexican, who are undocumented.
+Stigmatization and exclusion create a vicious circle of further
+stigmatization and exclusion.
+“In the era of colorblindness,” Alexander writes, “it is no longer
+permissible to hate blacks, but we can hate criminals.”18 The same
+argument could be made for Mexicans and criminalized immigrants.
+Anti-immigrant blogs, commentaries, and general opinion frequently
+emphasize the legalistic nature of their anti-immigrant sentiment:
+“They broke the law!” But it’s a law that, in design and in fact, is
+aimed at one, racially defined, sector of society.
+Another aspect that links the criminalization of blacks and of
+Hispanics is the enormous rise in detention and what some have
+termed the “prison-industrial complex.”19 The Supreme Court
+commented in 2010 on the dramatic changes in federal immigration
+law over the previous ninety years. “While once there was only a
+narrow class of deportable offenses and judges wielded broad
+discretionary authority to prevent deportation, immigration reforms
+over time have expanded the class of deportable offenses and
+limited the authority of judges to alleviate the harsh consequences
+of deportation.” As criminal convictions of people of color for minor
+offenses have risen, so have the consequences of these convictions.
+
+Now, even legal permanent residents can be deported for minor
+convictions, well after the fact.20
+PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
+This new criminalization of African Americans and Latinos relates to
+their different places in a changing labor market. Alexander points
+out that earlier racial caste systems (slavery and Jim Crow) served
+to keep African Americans as an exploitable labor force. Now, the
+criminalization of African Americans has coincided with their
+removal from the labor force. With the collapse of the urban
+manufacturing sector, their labor was no longer necessary. They
+have become a surplus population, to be warehoused in the prison
+system.
+The criminalization of Mexican immigrants, however, underlies
+their increasingly important role in the economy. The language and
+ideology are similar: fear, marginalization, and exclusion are based
+upon the supposed criminality of the objects of hatred and justified
+with repeated invocations of the color-blind nature of modern US
+society. But in the case of immigrants, the criminalization justifies
+their location in the lowest ranks of the labor force.
+Like Alexander, Nicholas De Genova argues that changes in the
+law deliberately criminalized a group that could no longer be legally
+defined by race. Illegality, he writes, is not “a mere fact of life, the
+presumably transparent consequence of unauthorized border
+crossing or some other violation of immigration law.” Instead, he
+argues, laws themselves were written with the express purpose of
+creating this new status of illegality, because it served the purpose
+of keeping workers exploitable.21
+At an even deeper level, anti-undocumented sentiment plays into
+deeply held beliefs and fears about the state, the nation, and
+sovereignty. The world’s wealthy nations have created islands of
+prosperity and privilege, and those who live in these islands have an
+interest in preserving them—and in justifying their own access to
+them. Illegality is the flip side of inequality. It serves to preserve the
+privileged spaces for those deemed citizens and justify their
+
+privilege by creating a legal apparatus to sustain it. Heightened
+panic about “illegality” coincides with growing global inequality
+and the dependence of the privileged on the labor of the excluded.
+The idea that countries are such discrete entities is inherently
+flawed. As every Mexican is aware, the contemporary US-Mexico
+border is an arbitrary product of the US invasion of Mexico from
+1846 to 1848, and the subsequent demand that a huge segment of
+Mexico’s territory be ceded to the United States. As the descendants
+of the Mexican population living in what is now the southwestern
+United States like to remind us, “We didn’t cross the border; the
+border crossed us.”
+Even since the creation of this new border, in the case of the
+United States, Mexico, and Central America, the histories,
+economies, politics, and militaries of these countries are so deeply
+intermeshed that each would be totally different without its
+relationship with the others. Without Mexican and Central American
+labor, and the consumer goods and profits that come from that
+labor, US prosperity would look entirely different. And without US
+military, political, and economic intervention, Mexico and Central
+America would be quite different as well. A person might be a
+citizen of, and live inside the borders of, a single country. But the
+social and economic systems that structure our lives go well beyond
+the borders of any country.
+Also worth considering, for a moment, is what it means to
+criminalize movement or presence. While we are accustomed to a
+global order in which nation-states define their sovereignty in part
+by their ability to control movement in and out of their territories,
+we should also be capable of critiquing this equation and imagining
+different definitions of sovereignty. Is it necessary to rely on a legal
+order that forces people to remain inside the political unit into
+which they were born and makes unlawful their presence outside of
+that political unit? With a bit of critical distance, the notion appears
+more and more absurd.
+OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
+
+The first chapter of this book, “Where Did Illegality Come From?”
+seeks to unveil the beliefs and assumptions that have led us to
+accept discrimination on the basis of a human invention that we call
+“citizenship.” It places illegality in a long historical trajectory of
+different ways that people—and, since 1492, especially Europeans—
+have created an unequal world of privilege and marginalization.
+The second chapter, “Choosing to Be Undocumented,” looks at
+the origins of undocumented people and the different paths to
+undocumented status. It looks on the ground at sending
+communities in Mexico and Guatemala, and the historical and social
+forces that lead people to migrate and lead them into
+undocumentedness.
+Chapter 3, “Becoming Illegal,” looks at the different ways that
+people enter the United States without authorization or lose
+authorization after entering legally. Some enter the country with
+legal permission but fall out of that status, while others pay
+thousands of dollars to coyotes (smugglers) to make a dangerous
+and sometimes fatal trip across the desert. This chapter also
+discusses how Operation Gatekeeper and other US border policy
+choices have affected people’s lives and choices.
+Chapter 4, “What Part of ‘Illegal’ Do You Understand?” explores
+what exactly is considered illegal about people without documents.
+It looks at what is actually prosecuted and how this has changed
+over time, and at who is deported and why. It also examines the
+contradictory and shifting legal landscape that structures migrants’
+lives.
+Chapters 5 and 6 look at the world of work. What kinds of work
+are undocumented people doing in the United States? How does
+their work support the United States and the global economy? Who
+benefits, and who is harmed, by the existence of undocumented
+status? These chapters look into the jobs and the working conditions
+of the undocumented, and how their status affects their rights in the
+workplace and the functioning of the US economy as a whole.
+Chapter 7 focuses on children and families. As the undocumented
+population grew, its profile also changed. In earlier years, the
+
+undocumented were primarily single, working-age men. By the late
+twentieth century, large numbers of children were undocumented or
+had undocumented parents. How does status affect the lives of
+children and families? What kinds of organizations have these youth
+formed, and what are the prospects for their future?
+The last chapter looks at solutions. If we do not want to live in a
+society divided by status, with large numbers of “illegal” people,
+what can we do to change the situation? I outline some of the socalled solutions that have been attempted, ranging from deportation
+to border patrols to legalizations. I argue that current immigration
+reform proposals do not address the problem of being
+undocumented in a realistic way, and that only by challenging the
+contradictions inherent in the category itself—that is, by declaring
+that no human being is illegal—can the law adequately address
+human rights and human needs.
+When people ask me what I think we should do about
+immigration reform, I tell them that I think the immigrant rights
+movement had it right back in the 1980s when we insisted that “no
+human being is illegal.” If discrimination on the basis of national
+origin is illegal, then we need to acknowledge that our immigration
+laws are illegal. Human rights—including the right to be recognized
+as a person equal to other people—apply to everyone: no
+exceptions. Let’s admit that our discriminatory laws are
+unjustifiable. Let’s abolish the category “illegal” and give everyone
+the right to exist. We would solve the problem of illegal
+immigration with the stroke of a pen.
+But I also understand that a lot of political and cultural change is
+going to have to occur before such a policy change could enter the
+realm of possibility. Thus, while we insist on unveiling and
+challenging the roots of injustice and inequality, we need to also,
+pragmatically and simultaneously, work to relieve its excesses
+where we can, even if our larger goals seem distant. It’s important,
+though, to keep sight of the larger goals as well and not adopt shortterm campaigns that work at cross-purposes to what we really
+believe and seek to change.
+
+If we accept the argument that changes in the law deliberately
+created illegality, and did so for the purpose of keeping Mexican
+workers available, cheap, and deportable, then it should not be
+unimaginable to propose drastically changing the law. Likewise, if
+we understand that, with respect to Mexico, restrictive immigration
+legislation has had virtually no effect on migration patterns, we
+must be able to question the value of such legislation even in
+achieving its avowed purpose. I hope that this book will contribute
+to opening a new debate that goes well beyond so-called
+comprehensive immigration reform to challenge the very concept of
+undocumentedness or illegality in our society.
+
+CHAPTER 1
+
+Where Did Illegality Come From?
+Most of us think that we know what the word illegal means and
+why some people fall into this category. It seems right and natural
+to us that people should be divided by citizenship, and by
+documents, into different categories with differential rights.
+We assume that the world is naturally divided into countries and
+that every human being somehow belongs in one country or
+another. People are supposed to stay in the country that they were
+born in, unless they can get special permission to enter another.
+Each country expresses its sovereignty by deciding who is allowed
+to enter into its territory and who is allowed access to citizenship.
+So we rarely question the idea that countries should be able to
+decide who can cross their borders and treat people differently
+under the law depending on statuses that these same countries
+assign them.
+But there is nothing natural about this state of affairs. Countries,
+sovereignty, citizenship, and laws are all social constructions:
+abstractions invented by humans. What’s more, they are all fairly
+recent inventions. Today, we use them to justify differences in legal
+status. In this chapter, I will call into question the contemporary
+concept of illegality by looking at how we came to accept this
+particular kind of status difference as legitimate, even as we have
+rejected other historical rationales for laws that inscribe inequality.
+We assume that these social constructions have some kind of
+independent reality or existence, but in fact they don’t: people
+invented them to serve their own interests. There were historical
+reasons that people created them, and it’s important to understand
+those reasons in order to think critically about them.
+Our current system of organizing the world into sovereign
+countries made up of citizens (and, in almost all cases, noncitizens)
+has roots in past ideas and categories, which have evolved over
+
+hundreds of years. The laws that make some immigration—and
+thus, some people—��illegal” are recent creations, though they grow
+out of older ideas. Once we carefully examine the history of these
+concepts, they start to look more and more untenable. Rather than
+the question we often hear, “What part of illegal don’t you
+understand?” perhaps we need to ask, “What part of illegal do you
+understand?”
+There are several concepts that can help us to trace the roots of
+illegality. First, we’ll look at ideologies of European domination that
+spurred the continent’s expansion after 1492. Ideas about mobility,
+and who has the right to move where, played an important role in
+the ideologies of European superiority that justified conquests and
+colonization.
+Connected to ideas about mobility are ideas about the law. In
+1894, French novelist Anatole France noted with irony “the majestic
+equality of the laws, which forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under
+the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”1 Even if a
+law looks like it treats everybody equally, laws only exist in social
+contexts. If the social context is unequal or unfair, even a law that
+purports to be equal might serve to cover up, or even reinforce,
+existing inequalities. Recently, the discipline of critical legal studies
+has developed this perspective, arguing that despite its pretensions,
+the law is never neutral, but rather reflects power relationships in
+society. As we talk about mobility, we’ll look at how Europeans used
+laws to assert their superiority and their right to move, and to deny
+others the right to freedom of movement, all the while asserting that
+the rule of law must be held sacred.
+We’ll also look at how, over the past one thousand years,
+Europeans have used religion, race, and nationality—that is,
+countries and citizenship—as organizing principles to divide people
+into categories or castes. Each has been used hierarchically to justify
+social inequalities and differential legal treatment of different
+groups. Once status is inscribed in the law, this becomes an
+automatic justification for inequality: “it’s the law!”
+
+Status has been used historically to justify forcing people defined
+as inferior or outsiders to work for those defined as superior or
+insiders. Low-status people are forced to work in society’s dirtiest,
+hardest, and most dangerous jobs.
+In today’s world, the connection of status to work is different.
+Until recently, one of the main purposes of status was to create a
+subject labor force through enslavement and other systems of forced
+labor. In the twenty-first century, laws are still used keep certain
+people working in low-wage, undesirable jobs. But the way status is
+used to enforce labor has changed. Force became more subtle, and
+work itself became redefined as a privilege. As twentieth-century
+economic changes in the United States and abroad made it more and
+more difficult for people to produce their own subsistence, overt
+force became less and less necessary as a way of making people
+work. Now, people work out of need.
+Along with these structural changes came ideological changes. In
+today’s ideology, work is a privilege reserved for those of superior
+status, rather than a burden imposed on those of inferior status. Of
+course, those of inferior status still work, and they still do the worst
+jobs. But the system is upheld by laws that claim to prevent people
+of inferior status from working. But the laws are only actually
+enforced in more desirable sectors of the labor market; thus, people
+labeled inferior are once again relegated to the worst jobs. Still, it’s
+notable that the late twentieth century was the first time that laws
+have claimed to try to reserve jobs for the privileged, rather than
+force them upon the unprivileged.
+These issues are interrelated in many ways. While we’ll address
+them one by one, the discussion will also build an argument about
+the arbitrary and historically specific nature of illegality and the
+role it serves in the modern world.
+DOMINATION AND MOBILITY
+Some of the unspoken foundations that support the idea of illegality
+today come to us thanks to Christopher Columbus and the European
+expansion that followed in his wake. It might surprise readers to
+
+hear that many of the structures that have led to the current ways
+that people are moving around the planet—or prevented from this
+movement—date back to that same colonial expansion.
+The “age of exploration” sent Europeans around the globe with
+the aim of settling and ruling distant lands and peoples. They
+developed an ideology to justify this exploration: an ideology that
+granted full humanity, free will, intellect, and strength to white
+Christians. To those who did not fall into that category, the
+Europeans (who did not at that time think of themselves as
+Europeans or even as white but rather primarily as Christians)
+attributed irrationality, brutality, stupidity, and barbarity.2
+Along with these ideologies went ideas about movement: who
+belonged where. Europeans, apparently, belonged everywhere.
+Christians needed to spread their religion to heathens, European
+governments needed to expand their realms and bestow the benefits
+of their government to others, and settlers needed to fulfill their
+pioneering spirit and manifest destiny by applying their will and
+their capital to new lands and peoples. And they created countries,
+governments, and laws to authorize themselves to do these things.
+In the mind frame undergirding European exploration, nonEuropeans were not capable, nor had they the right, to make their
+own decisions about residence or movement. It was up to Europeans
+to forcibly relocate them to where they could best serve European
+needs. Native Americans and Africans were both subject to
+transportation—Native Americans to mines and haciendas (in
+Spanish America) or simply off of lands that Europeans desired (in
+British America), and Africans to those same lands, to work for
+Europeans.
+In the New Imperialism of the nineteenth century, Europeans
+(who by now identified explicitly with that term) once more
+demonstrated their will to move, to rule, and to displace. In the
+Scramble for Africa, Britain, France, and Germany laid their claims
+to the continent. The new United States followed its Manifest
+Destiny and displaced Native Americans westward and onto
+reservations, and then went on to appropriate colonies like Puerto
+
+Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines from the declining Spanish empire.
+After abolishing slavery, the United States established legal systems
+of segregation to prohibit African Americans from whites-only
+spaces. Meanwhile, the new imperial powers transported indentured
+Africans, East Indians, and Chinese to the Caribbean and the
+American continent to work on their plantations, railroads, and
+other enterprises.
+In the intellectual spirit of the time, King Leopold of Belgium
+offered a pseudoscientific justification for this European control of
+migrations, explaining that “the races inhabiting [the southern
+continents] are captives in the bonds of all powerful nature; they
+will never break down the fences that sunder them from us. It is for
+us, the favored races, to go to them.”3 Go to them, and then confine
+them. As one white settler in Arizona proposed, the United States
+should “[p]lace the Indians on reservations . . . establish military
+posts along their limits, and shoot every Indian found off the
+reservations.”4
+From apartheid South Africa to the Jim Crow South, white
+Europeans during the twentieth century made it clear that the right
+to decide who could move where was inherent to domination. In
+1917, the United States created the Asiatic Barred Zone prohibiting
+immigration by “Asiatics,” who were defined as “aliens ineligible to
+citizenship” because of their race. Meanwhile, US forces were
+demanding the opening of China and Japan to US migration, trade,
+and business enterprise and, indeed, demanding the right of
+extraterritoriality for its citizens there. As Woodrow Wilson declared
+in 1907 (before he became president), “The doors of the nations
+which are closed . . . must be battered down. Concessions obtained
+by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the
+sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.
+Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner
+of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”5 Although China
+was not a colony, with the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844, the United
+States insisted on American access to Chinese ports and, moreover,
+that US citizens in China would be subject to US rather than Chinese
+
+law. In the words of Teemu Ruskola, not only were Americans
+guaranteed the right to enter China, but “when Americans entered
+China, American law traveled with them, effectively attaching to
+their very bodies.”6
+Americans and Europeans currently assume that freedom to
+travel is their birthright. “Over much of the world today citizens of
+many countries can travel freely,” Jared Diamond asserts
+confidently. “To cross the border into another country, either we
+arrive unannounced and just show our passport, or else we have to
+obtain a visa in advance but can then travel without restrictions.”7
+What he really means is that citizens of the former colonial powers
+(and also, generally, postcolonial elites) can travel freely. These
+same countries routinely deny entry to people, especially poor
+people, from their former colonies. Freedom to travel, then, is still a
+privilege reserved for those in control.
+Americans and Europeans also rarely question their right to send
+troops and establish governments in their former colonies. Iraq and
+Afghanistan, they implicitly believe (like Puerto Rico, Cuba,
+Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and so on),
+simply can’t govern themselves without a US and European
+presence. People from all of those former colonies, however, also
+need to have their mobility severely restricted. Countries like the
+United States established themselves by driving out nonwhites or
+non-Europeans or non-Christians, and establishing rule over
+nonwhites, non-Europeans, and non-Christians in the Global South.
+Now, they argue, they need to erect militarized borders to prevent
+the descendants of those nonwhites from infiltrating, at the same
+time that they continue to send their citizens to those countries as
+occupying armies, aid workers, investors, tourists, or students.
+FROM RELIGION TO RACE
+Columbus and those who traveled with and after him were heirs to
+a medieval Spanish tradition that used religion as the main principle
+for organizing and categorizing people. Muslim Spain, from 711 to
+1492, like many other medieval and earlier (and some later)
+
+empires, was based on the idea of convivencia, or religious tolerance,
+among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. Not so Christian
+Spain. The reconquista, or reconquest, of the Iberian peninsula by
+Christians drew on the spirit of the Crusades: to drive out and
+destroy the infidels.
+Spanish Christian ideas about religion were much more
+essentialist than the way most people think about religion today.
+Religion was thought to be defined by blood. The Spanish developed
+elaborate theories of lineage based on what was called Christians’
+purity of blood. Jews’ and Muslims’ blood was considered to be
+stained. Even if they converted to Christianity, they would continue
+to bear the stain of their non-Christian ancestry. So-called New
+Christians were viewed with suspicion and periodically repressed or
+expelled.
+Ideas about mobility—who belonged where—were based on
+religion. The Spanish conquest in the Americas began the same year
+—1492—that the last Muslims and Jews were driven out of the
+Iberian Peninsula, and the Spaniards took their ideologies with
+them. Spanish Christians were already transporting and enslaving
+Africans with the rationale that they were not Christian. They
+debated the humanity of the native peoples of the Americas, in the
+end deciding that they were, in theory, capable of being converted
+to Christianity and, therefore, not to be enslaved.
+Capable of being converted or not, though, the indigenous
+inhabitants clearly did not have pure blood. In the Americas,
+Christian Spaniards’ struggle to assert, define, and justify their socalled purity of blood began to take on a more racial cast. The term
+purity came to mean the absence of African or indigenous ancestry.
+In the elaborate legal hierarchy of Spanish America, racialized
+castes proliferated by the eighteenth century. Spaniards born in
+Spain were the purest, because there was no chance that their
+ancestry could have been compromised with indigenous or African
+admixture. People of (supposedly) 100 percent Spanish ancestry
+born in the New World occupied a space on a rung lower, and from
+
+there, the ranks descended all the way down to enslaved Africans
+and tributary Indians, with multiple mixtures in between.
+Emerging ideas about race were also part of an elaborate system
+of legal status and access—or lack of access—to rights in society.
+People defined as belonging to the lower races were prohibited from
+spaces reserved for the privileged and subject to special taxes and
+forced labor. Purity of blood could also be purchased. Suspicious or
+inferior ancestry could be erased for a fee, thus strengthening the
+relationship between race and social status.8
+British colonizers in North America were heirs to some of the
+same broad European cultural mores as the Spanish, but their
+colonial enterprise was also infused with a form of Protestant,
+northern European ethno-nationalism exemplified in the “Black
+Legend.” Promoted by British and Dutch thinkers and artists like
+Theodore de Bry, the Black Legend depicted the cruelties of Spanish
+conquest and attributed them to Spanish Catholicism and the
+Spanish racialized character. British and Dutch colonialism, in
+contrast, was conceived as a benign project.9
+Religion was a key factor for the British in defining who they
+were as a people and justifying their right to conquer, dominate,
+and exclude. Legal scholar Aziz Rana argues that, for the British, the
+original “savages” were the Catholic Irish. The conquest of Ireland
+served as a “test case” or “rehearsal” for subsequent British conquest
+in the Americas. In Ireland, the British refined their rationale for
+land expropriation. If the natives didn’t cultivate the land according
+to British standards or did not accept British religious dictates, they
+lost their rights to the land itself.10
+In the American colonies, British ideas about race grew from and
+eventually came to supersede those about religion. In King Philip’s
+War (1675), colonists slaughtered Native Americans, Christianized
+or not.11 By the 1700s, white indentured servants were moving off
+the plantations and being replaced by African slaves. As whites took
+advantage of the economic rewards of freedom, they also began to
+impose laws that protected their privileges and their access to slave
+labor—the first racial laws that targeted free blacks solely on the
+
+basis of race. Thus, by the 1700s, free blacks had become “a
+segregated and separate caste” in American society.12
+Just as religion became a palimpsest for race in the first centuries
+of European colonialism, the race/religion complex likewise became
+a palimpsest for what came to be called the nation. New ideas
+evolved from, and were shaped by, what came before. When the
+United States declared itself an independent nation, race was the
+key factor in determining who belonged to the polity. Emerging
+European nation-states, too, based their legitimacy on what
+Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities” of peoples
+connected primordially, ethnically—essentially, racially or by
+blood.13
+FROM RACE TO NATION
+Racially based ideas held considerable sway well into the twentieth
+century, even as policies and ideologies came to replace race with
+nation as the prime rationale for legal domination, discrimination,
+and restrictions on mobility. The abolition of racially based slavery,
+most analysts now agree, led to an upsurge in racially exclusive and
+repressive policies and attitudes throughout the Americas. Not until
+the late twentieth century, with Europe’s rejection of Nazism and
+the dismantling of the racial regime in the United States, did overtly
+racialist thought lose its legitimacy. Precisely in this recent period,
+the use of nationality as an excuse for discrimination and
+persecution rose to new prominence. It was not a new concept or
+justification, but it emerged, perhaps, in full ideological flower, after
+generations of germination.
+What we think of as countries today—also known as nation-states
+—first emerged in Europe several centuries ago. The idea of the
+nation-state was that the country was the manifestation of a
+historical unity or essence of the people that lived there—the
+nation. Older, multicultural empires like the Russian, AustroHungarian, and Ottoman gave way by the twentieth century to a
+proliferation of countries or states, each claiming to represent a
+people or nation.
+
+In the United States, rights and access that used to be assigned on
+the basis of religion or race were gradually transferred to citizenship
+status. Racial restrictions on immigration and citizenship were
+replaced by national restrictions. Historian John Torpey wrote that
+gaining a monopoly over “legitimate means of movement” was
+precisely how emerging nation-states established their claims to
+sovereignty.14
+To examine the different components of this second shift—from
+race to nation—let us look for a moment at the evolution of controls
+on mobility in the United States. In the nineteenth-century United
+States, private individuals and subnational localities held the right
+to control freedom of movement, especially that of enslaved and
+even free blacks. National membership was overtly based on race:
+until 1868, citizenship was restricted to whites. The Dred Scott
+decision in 1857 reiterated the primacy of race as a justification for
+deprivation of rights, but also of individual rights to control
+mobility. Until the civil rights acts of the 1960s, racial controls on
+physical access and individual, local, or institutional controls on
+access prevailed. School and bus segregation may be the best-known
+examples, but sundown towns, in which blacks were allowed to
+work but not remain after sunset, also hung on until 1968.15
+Explicitly national manifestations of control of movement
+emerged in the late nineteenth century, imbued with racial ideas.
+The first restrictive immigration laws in the United States conflated
+race and nation. Chinese exclusion in 1882 was based on race: as
+“racially ineligible to citizenship,” the Chinese should be excluded
+from entering the country as well. The quota system that restricted
+southern and eastern European immigration—and virtually
+proscribed non-European immigration—starting in 1921, likewise
+relied on racialized notions of nationality: Italian was as much a
+race as an official citizenship status.
+Even as national citizenship became more important in the early
+twentieth century, race continued to play an important role in
+determining status and access to rights. Hiroshi Motomura uses the
+term “intending citizenship” to explain the privileges granted to
+
+white immigrants in the nineteenth century. Although not formally
+citizens, by virtue of their race they were accorded privileges of
+access to the benefits of society, including the right to vote and
+virtually automatic naturalization. Aziz Rana elaborates by
+distinguishing formal citizenship from “free citizenship”—the latter
+available only to whites. Mexicans, after 1848, and blacks, after
+1868, were accorded formal citizenship, but still denied the right to
+vote, to own land, and to move freely.16 New immigrants from
+Europe—Motomura’s “intended” citizens—were accorded all of
+those rights, even when they were not yet formally citizens. Thus,
+race frequently trumped nationality in determining access to rights.
+As the twentieth century progressed, national citizenship more
+and more joined race as a primordial legal identification and
+determinant of status. For example, voting laws were changed to
+prohibit noncitizens from voting. Instead of being considered
+automatically part of the country on the basis of their whiteness,
+European immigrants came to be considered foreign because of their
+immigrant status.17 For the first time, white Europeans were treated
+as legally other and subordinate, the way conquered and racially
+differentiated peoples—African and Indian—had been since the first
+days of British settlement. Noncitizens were also told that, like
+Africans and Indians, they were no longer in charge of their own
+mobility. State authorities now had the right to exclude or deport
+them.18
+The 1924 immigration legislation illustrates some of the ways
+that national citizenship was coming to stand in for race. Asians
+were excluded as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” based on the same
+legal ideas that had previously excluded African Americans. The
+new legal category of national origins was invented for Europeans.19
+They were defined as implicitly belonging to the white race, but
+having so-called nationalities or ethnicities that did not preclude
+assimilation into the United States. Mexican and Chinese
+nationalities, though, became legally defined as nonwhite. So while
+race and nationality were separated for European Americans (i.e., a
+person could be both white and Italian), they became one for Asians
+
+and Mexicans; their nationalities were essentially legislated to be
+nonwhite races.20
+These legal changes complicated racial categories by overlaying
+them with nation. If Chinese and Mexican became races, the very
+meaning of race was changing fundamentally, its power giving way
+to nation. If Congress and the courts had to resort more and more to
+nationality as a pretext for the denial of rights, it was precisely
+because racial justifications were being chipped away, at least in the
+legal sphere.
+During most of the twentieth century, legal subjection by race
+and by immigration or citizenship status coexisted. By the end of the
+twentieth century, though, differential legal treatment on the basis
+of race had fallen from international favor. Formal abolition of
+racial discrimination may not have created actual racial equality,
+but it did dismantle and delegitimize legal structures of
+discrimination, including racialized restrictions on freedom of
+movement. Facilities formerly justified as separate-but-equal were
+abolished, along with sundown towns. Federal antidiscrimination
+law prohibited long-standing practices that denied access to jobs,
+spaces, and benefits on the basis of race.
+But just as the first round of antiracialist legislation after the Civil
+War led to a surge in anti-immigrant legislation—aimed at racially
+defined unwanteds—so did the second round after World War II. If
+citizenship were to be granted to all by birth, as per the Fourteenth
+Amendment, then race could no longer be explicitly used to deny
+citizenship. So nationality stood in for it, and citizens of countries
+like China lost their right to immigrate. If formal citizenship was to
+be made real—if citizens could no longer be excluded from jobs,
+landownership, voting, and other rights on the basis of race—
+nationality could once again be mobilized as a method of exclusion.
+In 1965, numerical immigration restrictions were applied for the
+first time to the Western Hemisphere. Mexicans could no longer be
+discriminated against for belonging to the Mexican race; now they
+would be discriminated against for their nationality, their Mexican
+citizenship, their lack of US citizenship, or their illegality.
+
+The status of illegality and its concomitant legal exclusion
+affected more individuals by the early 2000s than did the Jim Crow
+system in the US South at its height.21 Just as Jim Crow had
+imposed discrimination on the basis of race, new legislation in the
+late twentieth century increased discrimination against noncitizens
+and especially those who challenged their exclusion from the
+country by nonviolent direct action—that is, entering “illegally” or
+overstaying a visa. A study of Hispanic immigrants in rural North
+Carolina found that they felt that their lack of citizenship status,
+rather than their ambiguous place in the black-white racial
+hierarchy, was the main factor causing the discrimination they
+experienced.22
+Recently, political scientist Jacqueline Stevens has suggested that
+discrimination on the basis of citizenship is incompatible with the
+notion of a liberal, egalitarian society, as much so as earlier laws
+and institutions that discriminated on the basis of religion or race.
+“The history of the United States, as for all countries, is one of a
+struggle between the voices on behalf of rationality and equality, on
+the one hand, and those urging the imposition of rigid distinctions
+based on ancestry and religion,” she writes.23 The idea of birthright
+citizenship—that people belong and should have rights only in the
+place they happen to be born—is the epitome of a “rigid distinction
+based on ancestry.” An immigration system that attempts to force
+people to reside inside the national territory in which they were
+born is in fact one of “global apartheid,” she insists.24
+Restricting freedom of movement, as in apartheid, is a way of
+enforcing domination and maintaining inequality. This is true
+whether the restriction is based on something defined as religion,
+race, or the arbitrary fact of birthplace. On a global level, patrolled
+borders prevent the poor of the world from escaping the poverty
+they were born into and gaining access to the jobs, education, and
+health and welfare that are reserved for those fortunate enough to
+be born in the wealthy countries that border them. Global apartheid
+is enforced with walls, stadium lights, and guns. And global
+apartheid never talks about race, only nationality.
+
+THE USES OF ILLEGALITY
+Throughout most of human history, both states and economic
+enterprises have struggled to incorporate people into their
+projects.25 A strikingly different characteristic of the contemporary
+era is the extent to which access to states and to the right to work
+has come to be seen as a privilege. In some ways, this change
+reflects very real shifts in the functioning of states and economies,
+but in other ways, the differences are more apparent than real.
+People have always needed to work for their subsistence. Until
+well into the twentieth century—and in some regions, into the
+twenty-first—this has meant, primarily, that they have needed
+access to land. Most people worked for themselves. Labor for others
+generally happened as a result of force: when one group conquered
+another, took control of land, or took prisoners of war, those
+conquered could be forced to work for their conquerors, often as
+slaves. “The use of socially marginalized communities for menial
+tasks helped maintain a higher standard of living and greater
+property ownership for settlers,” Rana wrote of the early United
+States.26 While creating privilege for settlers was characteristic of
+settler colonial societies, the creation and use of the socially
+marginalized for labor was pretty much a universal of civilization.
+Would-be employers initially had to rely on state power to force
+people into working for them. Gradually, though, direct force was
+no longer required. In the nineteenth century, industrialization and
+colonialism separated more and more people worldwide from their
+lands and left them no option except wage labor. As access to land
+diminished, people started voluntarily moving to cities and seeking
+to work for others. Some sectors of the labor force gained access to
+the privileges and benefits of consumer society. Other sectors
+remained marginalized, creating what sociologists have termed a
+segmented or dual labor market. Even in the marginalized sectors,
+though, a lack of alternatives rather than force became the prime
+motivation for workers. Work, in fact, had become a privilege.
+In her study of mass incarceration, Michelle Alexander notes that
+coerced labor has given way to mass unemployment among black
+
+men. First slavery and then Jim Crow were designed to make blacks
+work for the white-dominated economy. The dismantling of Jim
+Crow, she argues, coincided with the collapse of the American
+manufacturing sector and loss of the jobs that sustained African
+American communities. She cites sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who
+“emphasizes that the one thing that makes the current penal
+apparatus strikingly different from previous racial caste systems is
+that ‘it does not carry out the positive economic mission of
+recruitment and disciplining of the workforce.’ Instead it serves only
+to warehouse poor black and brown people for increasingly lengthy
+periods of time, often until old age. The new system does not seek
+primarily to benefit unfairly from black labor, as earlier caste
+systems have, but instead views African Americans as largely
+irrelevant and unnecessary to the newly structured economy.”27
+The newly structured economy may not need to benefit unfairly
+from black labor, but it still needs to benefit unfairly from the labor
+of some socially marginalized community. In the late twentieth
+century, African Americans became less “cheap” because they
+gained legal rights, gained access to social services, and organized
+unions. Simultaneously, the sectors like manufacturing and
+government that had employed them collapsed, contributing to high
+unemployment among African Americans. But other sectors
+—“downgraded manufacturing and expanded service sectors,” in
+Nicolas De Genova’s study of Chicago—began to massively employ
+immigrant and, especially, undocumented immigrant workers.28
+(Chapters 5 and 6, on the topic of working, go into more detail
+about the kinds of work undocumented people do.)
+Here, however, I’d like to emphasize how useful illegality has
+been in the late twentieth-century reconfiguration of work from an
+obligation to a privilege. Illegality is a way to enforce a dual labor
+market and keep some labor cheap, in a supposedly postracial era.
+Illegality uses lack of citizenship—that is, being born in the wrong
+place—to make workers more exploitable. Once naturalized, the
+status neatly hides the human agency that forces workers into this
+marginalized status. It is not just coincidence that illegality has
+
+burgeoned in the postindustrial societies of the Global North at the
+end of the twentieth century. It serves a crucial role in their
+economies and ideologies.
+
+CHAPTER 2
+
+Choosing to Be Undocumented
+US citizens often wonder why immigrants in the United States don’t
+“do it the right way” and obtain proper documents to authorize
+their entry and presence in the country.1 They believe—usually
+erroneously—that their own ancestors obtained proper visas prior to
+coming to the United States and also know that if they intended to
+travel or move to another country, they would assemble their
+documents before attempting to travel.
+When you get your US passport in the mail, it comes with a flyer
+that says “With Your US Passport, the World Is Yours!” Holders of
+the US passport are accustomed to simply arriving at the border of
+another country, showing their passport, and easily crossing. Rarely,
+they have to apply for a visa in advance. If they pay the fee and fill
+out the application correctly, the visa is routinely granted. Holders
+of US passports tend to believe that freedom to travel is their
+birthright, a view reinforced by the literature that comes with their
+passports. For the cost of a plane ticket, and occasionally a small
+visa fee, they can leave the country they were born in any time they
+want.
+For most of the world’s population, though, freedom to travel is a
+distant dream. They can’t leave the country of their birth because,
+instead of that magical ownership of the world that comes with a US
+passport, they are citizens of countries in Africa, Latin America, or
+most of Asia. Many of them are also poor and people of color. They
+can’t leave their countries because no other country will let them in.
+Least of all, the United States. In today’s global apartheid, whole
+countries—almost all of them in the First World—shut themselves
+off to travelers, while assuming that their own citizens have the
+right to travel anywhere they choose. Meanwhile, the citizens of
+other countries—mostly in the Third World—are imprisoned in the
+
+country they are born in, because of the restrictions established by
+those richer and more powerful.
+From the comfort of their First World homes, many citizens of the
+United States assume that anyone can get a visa to travel legally to
+any country. If someone comes to and/or lives in the United States
+without proper documentation, they assume it must be because they
+simply failed to follow the correct procedure. If only there were
+such a procedure to follow.
+I’ve even heard a Massachusetts state legislator express this
+assumption in a hearing on the question of allowing undocumented
+students to be considered state residents for the purpose of paying
+in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. He
+interrogated a panel of students, members of the Student Immigrant
+Movement who had come to testify in favor of the bill. All were
+undocumented, and each one explained how and why he or she had
+ended up with that status.
+“What’s your status now?” the legislator asked them. “I’m
+undocumented,” one Brazilian student answered, bewildered. “Why
+don’t you start the process to become a citizen?” he continued. “I
+can’t,” she explained. “Why not?” he asked, revealing his profound
+ignorance of immigration law. Just as the law forbids most residents
+of the Third World to travel here—by requiring visas, but refusing
+to grant them—it also forbids virtually all people who are
+undocumented to regularize their status.
+SOME HISTORY
+Structural factors, mostly related to the economy and labor needs,
+have shaped migrations for centuries. Some of the largest sources of
+out-migration to the United States today were recipients of inmigration only a few generations ago. The Caribbean islands in
+particular fall into this category. Other places that now send large
+numbers of migrants to the United States have long histories of
+temporary, seasonal, and permanent out-migration. Mexico stands
+out in this regard.
+
+Since the nineteenth century, nation-states have increasingly
+attempted to regulate migration and control freedom of movement
+across often newly established borders. US immigration policies
+have changed frequently, creating a mesh of regulations and
+statuses that even immigration lawyers and scholars find confusing.
+Until 1890, there was no national immigration system or agency
+in the United States. Individual states enforced existing immigration
+laws until the establishment of the federally operated immigration
+inspection station at Ellis Island in 1892. Certain categories of
+people became excludable starting in 1875, and in 1891 the law
+provided for deportation of an immigrant who became a public
+charge within a year of arrival or was found to belong to a
+prohibited or excluded group—like Chinese contract workers,
+prostitutes, convicted criminals. After a year, though, those who had
+entered “illegally”—that is, in violation of the laws that excluded
+them—could no longer be deported. The 1903 Immigration Act
+extended these periods of potential deportability to two years for
+becoming a public charge, and three years for belonging to an
+excludible class. In 1917, this was extended to five years.2
+It’s important to note that so-called illegal entry, up until this
+time, referred to entry by persons belonging to a class of people who
+were unilaterally denied entry: it had nothing to do with the way a
+person entered. It was the 1907 Immigration Act that first made
+entering without inspection itself a violation of the law. The 1907
+act formalized the inspection procedure, requiring every would-be
+immigrant coming in by sea to pass through inspection, and made it a
+misdemeanor for a ship owner to bring in anybody belonging to an
+excluded class.3 The act did not apply to Mexicans. Inspection was
+for immigrants, and immigrants were defined as people who arrived
+by sea, not Mexicans, who crossed the southern border to work.
+Likewise, Mexicans were exempted from the literacy requirement
+and head tax imposed on immigrants in 1917, as long as they were
+coming to work in agriculture. Mexicans weren’t even required to
+enter through an official port or inspection point until 1919.
+
+For Europeans, a passport was first required for entry in 1918,
+but even then, it was only for identification. Would-be immigrants
+did not need to obtain prior permission in their home countries
+before traveling to the United States, and they couldn’t be deported
+for entering without inspection until 1924.4 In 1929, entry without
+inspection became a misdemeanor, punishable with fines and jail
+time.5 But there were still exceptions for Europeans.
+A new process called registry for noncitizens who had entered
+without inspection prior to this time allowed them—if they were
+otherwise (i.e., racially) eligible to citizenship—to regularize their
+status if they could demonstrate “that they had resided in the
+country continuously since 1921, were not otherwise subject to
+deportation, and were of ‘good moral character.’”6 In practice, the
+registry helped Europeans who had evaded the 1919 inspection
+requirement. The registry system set a precedent—that a period of
+residence outweighed the technicalities of inspection, or lack of
+inspection, upon entry. Later laws like the 1986 Immigration
+Reform and Control Act and the twenty-first-century proposals for a
+path to citizenship would revive that idea.
+The 1924 Immigration Act created what was called the “quota
+system,” putting numerical limits on immigration (still conceived as
+European immigration) for the first time. Immigrants from Europe
+now had to comply with quotas established based on the proportion
+of immigrants from that country already present in the United
+States. Non-Europeans didn’t get quotas. The Bureau of Labor
+Statistics explained the intent of the law: “Immigrants of New World
+countries or their descendants, aliens ineligible to citizenship or
+their descendants, the descendants of slave immigrants, and the
+descendants of American aborigines were specifically excluded from
+the national-origins plan. In a broad sense, therefore, the problem
+was to find the extent to which the various countries of Europe, as
+now constituted, had contributed to the white population of the
+country.”7 For the first time, Europeans could be excluded, not on
+the basis of their individual characteristics, but because of the
+country they came from. Somewhat paradoxically from today’s
+
+perspective, Mexican labor migration was unaffected by the
+restrictive law.
+Most Europeans who arrived in the United States prior to 1924
+did pretty much what immigrants from Mexico and Central America
+did a few decades later: they gathered their families and their
+belongings, put together the money they needed for the trip, and
+embarked on their journey. They didn’t “do it the right way,” wait
+in line, or follow a legal process, because there was no line or
+process.
+The records of Ellis Island are filled with the stories of individuals
+like Irving Berlin, who went on to become an iconic American
+songwriter, author of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” and
+“God Bless America.” The family of Israel Baline, age five, fled their
+home in Russia after their village was attacked in a pogrom and
+their house burned to the ground. They traveled “illegally” because,
+in 1893, Russia (unlike most countries at the time) required a
+passport for travel and exit; they “smuggled themselves from town
+to town and country to country” until reaching Antwerp, Belgium,
+where they boarded a ship bound for New York. On the ship’s
+manifest, their last name was changed from Baline to Beilin, so they
+entered the United States under a false name. (The name “Irving
+Berlin” was introduced by a printer’s error when Israel produced his
+first album at age nineteen.)8 Since the United States had only
+minimal entry requirements for Europeans at the time, family
+members were given a medical inspection by the US Public Health
+Service to determine whether they had any infectious disease and a
+legal inspection to determine whether they were likely to become
+public charges. Only about 2 percent of would-be immigrants were
+rejected as a result of these inspections.
+Mae Ngai argues that with so few restrictions on immigration in
+the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “there was no such
+thing as ‘illegal immigration.’ The government excluded a mere 1%
+of the 25 million immigrants who landed at Ellis Island before
+World War I, mostly for health reasons. (Chinese were the
+exception, excluded on grounds of ‘racial unassimilability.’) The
+
+statutes of limitations of one to five years meant that even those
+here unlawfully did not live forever with the specter of
+deportation.”9
+The 1924 law, in addition to establishing the quota system,
+created the concept of illegality by making entry without inspection
+illegal, and making deportability permanent by eliminating the
+statute of limitations. Before 1924, what made a person deportable
+was his or her membership in an excluded class; furthermore, after
+the person had been in the country for a period of time, his or her
+presence became legal despite prior excludability. Now, a person
+who entered without inspection could be, technically, “illegal.”10
+Still, there were many ways for Europeans who didn’t “follow the
+rules” to become legal. The 1929 registry law helped those who
+entered before 1921. Between 1935 and the late 1950s, European
+immigrants without documentation were allowed to adjust their
+status by reentering through Canada to obtain legal permanent
+residency. After 1940, immigrants who could show that their
+families would suffer “serious economic detriment” could have their
+deportation suspended. All of these provisions applied only to
+European immigrants, since they were the only ones allowed to
+immigrate under the 1924 exclusions. (Mexicans were still crossing
+the border easily, but they were not considered immigrants.) Some
+two hundred thousand Europeans without documents were able to
+legalize their status using these means.11
+In 1965, the United States abandoned the differential quota
+system, replacing it with a new one that imposed equal quotas on all
+countries. This meant that, for the first time, Western Hemisphere
+migrants—primarily Mexicans—were classified as immigrants. This
+change essentially created illegal immigration from Mexico and
+Central America, but without all of the loopholes and exceptions
+that had allowed Europeans to adjust their status.12
+Donna Gabaccia’s research shows that media references to socalled illegal immigration closely followed restrictive legislation.
+
+The earliest references are to “illegal immigration,” which
+referred to the movement of workers from China; they
+appeared immediately after passage of the 1882 Chinese
+exclusion. With the exclusion of all Asians and the restriction
+of southern and eastern European migrations in the 1920s,
+“illegal immigrant” became an intermittent fixture in the
+pages of New York Times, where it usually meant stowaways,
+persons who “jumped ship,” or the “immigrant bootleggers”
+who supposedly smuggled in workers and “immoral” women.
+Only after World War II (and a brief period when most stories
+about “illegal immigrants” focused on European Jews entering
+the British mandate in Palestine) did the term—understood by
+then to mean “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande—become
+attached firmly to workers from Mexico. And only after 1965
+did the term become common in a wide array of writings by
+journalists, scholars, and Congressional representatives.13
+Today, of course, the term “illegal immigrant” has become
+common currency. The rest of this chapter will look at two of the
+largest sources of undocumented immigrants in the United States
+today, Mexico and Guatemala. It will ask how people from those
+countries came to migrate to the United States, and how and why
+their migrations have become illegalized.
+AN OVERVIEW OF UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION
+The undocumented population in the United States increased
+rapidly between 1965, when the first restrictive measures were
+passed against Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, and
+the beginning of the twenty-first century. By 1980, there were from
+2 to 4 million undocumented immigrants in the country, rising to
+8.5 million in 2000 and reaching a peak of almost 12 million in
+2007.14
+Notably, over half of those undocumented in 2011 had arrived
+between 1995 and 2004, with only 14 percent arriving between
+2005 and 2011.15 Thus, most undocumented people have been in
+
+the country for quite a while. The rise in the undocumented
+coincided with an even greater rise in the overall Hispanic
+population in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1970, the
+9.6 million Hispanics in the United States made up 4.7 percent of
+the population. Four decades later, the Hispanic population had
+jumped to 50.5 million or 16 percent of the population.16
+Most of these have consistently been Mexicans. Estimates for the
+undocumented Mexican population rose from 1.13 million in 1980
+to 2.04 million in 1990 and 4.68 million in 2000, rising to a high of
+7.03 million in 2008 before stabilizing and declining to 6.8 million
+in 2011. The Central American undocumented population also rose
+after 1980, reaching 570,000 Salvadorans, 430,000 Guatemalans,
+and 300,000 Hondurans in 2008. For Central Americans, the
+numbers continued to increase after 2008: in 2011, there were
+660,000 from El Salvador, 520,000 from Guatemala, and 380,000
+from Honduras. Together, Central Americans and Mexicans made up
+three-quarters of the growth in the undocumented population
+between 1980 and 2008.17
+Moreover, a significant proportion—over half—of Mexicans and
+Central Americans who are here are undocumented. Fifty-eight
+percent of Mexicans, 57 percent of Salvadorans, 71 percent of
+Guatemalans, and 77 percent of Hondurans are undocumented.
+“Never before have so many people been outside the law and never
+before have the undocumented been so concentrated within such a
+small number of national origins,” wrote Douglas Massey and Karen
+Pren.18 Mexico and Central America are thus key pieces in the
+puzzle of undocumentedness in the United States.
+With this big picture in mind, we must start to untangle the
+history of undocumented migration from Mexico and Central
+America.
+MEXICANS
+The largest group of undocumented people in the United States
+today comes from Mexico. Many are from the central-western
+Mexican states that have been sending migrants northward for over
+
+a century, although increasingly migrants hail from heavily
+indigenous regions in the south of the country that had seen little
+out-migration before the 1990s. Almost 60 percent of the
+undocumented, over 6 million people in 2010, were Mexican. Other
+Latin Americans make up another 23 percent.19 Mexicans also make
+up the largest foreign-born population in the United States, with
+about 29 percent of the foreign-born or 12 million people.20 As
+noted above, over half of Mexicans in the United States are
+undocumented.
+Surveys taken of Mexican migrants in Mexico (i.e., having
+returned from the United States) show another side of the story: that
+lots of undocumented people return home after being in the United
+States. The Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University and
+the University of Guadalajara surveyed eighty thousand return
+migrants from twenty-one Mexican states, as well as migrants from
+those communities who have settled in the United States. In Mexico,
+the interviews show that 83 percent had entered the United States
+illegally on their first trip, and 73 percent on their most recent trip.
+In the United States, 77 percent responded that they had entered
+illegally on their first trip, and 56 percent that they entered illegally
+on their most recent trip. (The last response may be skewed by
+individuals reluctant to reveal current illegal status.)21
+To understand why and how so many Mexicans have come to be
+undocumented, it’s crucial to examine the history.
+The border that divides the United States from Mexico, and that
+large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans cross each year
+without authorization, was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe
+Hidalgo in 1848 and adjusted by the Gadsden or La Mesilla
+Purchase of 1853. Much of the US Southwest used to be Mexico. The
+first Mexicans in the United States did not cross any border; rather,
+the border crossed them.
+Until 1924, the new border between the United States and
+Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly.
+Mexicans worked in the mines and railroads of the Southwest and
+migrated to the factories and urban centers in the Midwest. In 1908,
+
+US Bureau of Labor Statistics researcher Victor Clark reported that,
+while “complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not
+kept,” an estimated sixty thousand to one hundred thousand
+Mexicans crossed each year to work in the United States. “Except in
+Texas and California, few Mexicans become permanent residents,
+and even in those two states, a majority are transient laborers who
+seldom remain more than six months at a time in this country.”22
+The many laws that were passed to try to control immigration
+from the Civil War on did not apply to Mexicans, because Congress
+did not consider them immigrants or potential immigrants at all. In
+agriculture, Clark explained, “the main value of the Mexican . . . is
+as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short. . . .
+Mexicans are not likely to be employed the year round by small
+farmers, because they are not entertained in the family like
+American, German, Scandinavian, or Irish laborers of the North. Yet
+they do not occupy a position analogous to that of the Negro in the
+South. They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish
+themselves in little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and
+outside of American civilization.”23
+RAILROADS AND MIGRATION
+Railroads played a crucial role both in moving Mexicans to the
+border and into the United States and in creating a demand for
+Mexican labor. Mexico’s nineteenth-century rail system was
+“designed, planned and constructed by Americans” and extended US
+lines into Mexico to facilitate the transport of US manufactured
+goods into Mexico. Thus, decisions about Mexico’s economy and
+infrastructure were made in the United States, for the benefit of US
+capitalists. The railroads also helped bring Mexicans to, and across,
+the border.24
+As US capital moved south, it drew southerners northward.
+Railroad concessions displaced over three hundred thousand
+peasants in Mexico’s central plateau, creating one pool of potential
+migrants. Many of them were recruited to work in new American
+enterprises in the north of the country. Some went to work on the
+
+railroad itself; others in new American-owned mining and oil
+operations. Mexico’s demographic patterns were fundamentally, and
+irrevocably, altered with this shift of population to the North.25 In
+Arizona, as the copper mines boomed in the last decades of the
+nineteenth century, they sent labor contractors to scour Mexico for
+workers being displaced from their lands. The first Mexican
+mineworkers in Arizona were Sonorans who crossed the border, but
+they were soon joined by central Mexicans who traveled north along
+the new rail lines.26
+Victor Clark described how the railroads contributed to the
+creation of a migrant labor force and the long-term social and
+cultural changes that the railroads and the migrations brought:
+In Mexico railways have given both the opportunity and the
+inducement to emigration. Needing unskilled labor for their
+construction and maintenance, they drew among the
+agricultural population along their lines, at first for a few days
+or weeks of temporary service between crops and later for
+more extended periods. At first the true peon was averse to
+leaving his home, and would not work where he could not
+sleep under his own roof, but gradually he became bolder and
+more worldly-wise and could be prevailed upon to work for a
+month or so a hundred miles or more up and down the line.
+He became accustomed to having silver in his pocket
+occasionally and found it would exchange for things he had
+not heretofore thought of having for his personal use. He
+became attached to cash wages in about the same degree that
+he became detached from his home surroundings. Employers
+in the more primitive parts of Mexico say that at present the
+people will not work for money so long as they have food in
+their cabins. When they first leave home they will work only
+long enough to provide themselves with food and shelter for a
+few days in advance. But the railways, bringing a greater
+variety of wares at lower prices, have made possible the
+attractive shop of the railway town, and this market for
+money has made the latter a more desirable commodity in the
+
+eyes of the peon. . . . The railways have thus attracted labor
+and have held it more and more permanently from a
+constantly widening area along their lines. A general officer of
+the National Railroad of Mexico stated that his company had
+brought north about 1,500 laborers to work on the upper
+section of the road within a year, and that practically all of
+them had ultimately crossed over into Texas.27
+Newcomers were met at the entry point and offered “fair wages.”28
+US aid and investment, then, directly uprooted Mexican peasants,
+recruited them into a migrant labor stream, and initiated the social
+and cultural changes that led them to leave their homes and work
+for cash in distant lands. It was US influence deep inside Mexico
+that set into motion the process of out-migration.
+A TYPICAL SENDING COMMUNITY: ARANDAS, JALISCO
+By 1933, economist Paul S. Taylor found that a tradition of
+migration had become well established in the Mexican sending
+community of Arandas in Jalisco. The ongoing migration, he wrote,
+was “but a modern and expanded phase” of a process that had
+begun decades before.29
+First, the railroad arrived. The Mexico City–El Paso rail line,
+which passed through Jalisco, recruited workers from the adjacent
+countryside. Then US railroad and mining companies began to send
+employment agents into Mexico’s interior to contract potential
+migrants and deployed station agents on the border to recruit
+arriving workers.
+The earliest migrants from Arandas had heard rumors about the
+availability of work in the United States from former prisoners, local
+men who had been arrested and sent to fight in ongoing military
+campaigns against the Yaqui Indians in Sonora. They traveled by
+rail to El Paso, where an employment agency contracted them for
+railroad work in Independence, Kansas. On their next venture,
+agents in El Paso sent them to Fresno, California, again to work on
+the railroad.30
+
+Mexican employment agents also visited Arandas to recruit
+laborers. One former migrant told Taylor that a railroad
+construction recruiter offered him free passage to the border.31 “In
+1913, an agent [Mexican] from the Santa Fé railroad came to
+Arandas and took three or four of us by auto to the railroad, and
+north. I did not pay anything to go to the frontier; they paid all,”
+one source from the village told Taylor, adding that “American
+contratistas, representing railroads and mines, had been all through
+the region twenty-odd years ago.”32
+Taylor emphasizes that the migration was spurred by US actions.
+When Congress passed the Literacy Act for immigrants in 1917,
+railroad, agricultural, and mining corporations raised a howl of
+protest and insisted that an open border was essential in order to
+obtain the labor they needed.33 In response, Congress quickly
+exempted Mexicans from the literacy requirement. Migration ebbed
+and flowed directly in response to employment demands in the
+United States.34 When they needed workers, employers turned to
+Mexico. When they didn’t—as in 1929, when Depression-era
+unemployment began to rise—the State Department instructed
+consular officers to increase their enforcement of the “likely to
+become a public charge” restriction on would-be immigrants and
+refuse to grant entry visas to Mexicans unlikely to find work.35
+Emigrants from the small community of Arandas worked in
+twenty-four states in the United States by the 1930s, and in a wide
+variety of industries ranging from automobile factories to
+agriculture to coal mining, though the railroad was by far the
+largest employer.36 Most came to the border without papers and
+were automatically granted entry. After 1928, the American
+consular service began to encourage prospective migrants to obtain
+permits from a consulate before arriving at the border, though this
+was still not required.37
+Some also crossed without inspection, either paying a small sum
+to a professional or simply wading across the river at a spot distant
+from any border post. By 1931, though, the word had spread that
+
+the consular service was not granting papers, that deportations were
+rising and employment contracting.38
+BORDER PATROL AND SEGREGATION
+Although the 1924 law did not include any restrictions on
+immigration from the Western Hemisphere, it did create a new
+border police force, the Border Patrol. In the early years, according
+to historian Aristide Zolberg, “its mission was to prevent the entry
+of alcohol rather than people, so that in effect, the border remained
+an informal affair.”39 The force also sought to deter prohibited
+Chinese attempting to enter through Mexico.
+Was it a paradox that the Border Patrol was created in the 1920s,
+just when agribusiness, with its need for migrant labor, was rapidly
+expanding in the Southwest? Several scholars argue that in fact the
+system worked well for farmers who needed migrant workers.
+Mexican workers could still cross the border easily, but because they
+became more deportable, the new laws also made them more
+exploitable. “Agribusinessmen kicked, winked, screamed, lobbied,
+and cajoled for border patrol practices that allowed unrestricted
+access to Mexican workers while promoting effective discipline over
+the region’s Mexicano workforce.”40 Deportability was part of that
+discipline. Local officials served farmers’ interests by carrying out
+deportation raids in cases of union organizing or, sometimes, just
+before payday.41
+The need to patrol the border was mitigated in some ways by the
+fact that the (mostly) men who crossed into the United States
+carried the border with them, even before the Border Patrol was
+created. Many had worked under segregated conditions for US
+enterprises inside Mexico. In Mexico, workers did “Mexican work”
+and received a “Mexican wage”; they lived in segregated housing.42
+These segregated conditions were replicated in the United States.
+“Recruited laborers whether destined for northern Mexico or for the
+United States, travel in parties, under a boss, or ‘cabo’ who holds the
+tickets,” wrote Victor Clark in 1908. Then, after “crossing a virtual
+
+open border, Mexican workers were again housed in company
+towns, confined to ‘Mexican work,’ treated to dual wages, and
+segregated socially . . . the workers’ experiences in Mexico
+continued in the United States.”43
+Thus, the most important border was the internal or racial one
+that kept Mexicans and Americans socially separated from each
+other, even as they labored in a single, integrated economy on both
+sides of the political boundary that separated the countries. Gilbert
+González concludes that “rather than interpreting segregation as a
+means of keeping people out of the ‘mainstream’ or of
+‘marginalizing’ them to the social and economic periphery,
+segregation was the method of integrating Mexican immigrants and
+their families into the heart of the American economy. . . .
+Segregated settlements brought a variation of the border to the
+employers’ doorsteps.”44
+Mexican workers’ theoretical deportability became real in 1929,
+as the country entered the Great Depression. On the pretext that
+they were likely to “become a public charge” as employment
+opportunities evaporated, both Mexicans and Mexican Americans
+were rounded up for deportation. A “frenzy of anti-Mexican
+hysteria” justified roundups of entire Mexican neighborhoods and
+hundreds of thousands were deported with little attention to legal
+niceties.45
+THE BRACERO PROGRAM
+With the ending of the Depression and the coming of World War II,
+agricultural interests confronted a new labor shortage. The US
+government responded with the Bracero Program, administered
+jointly by the US and Mexican governments from 1942 to 1964,
+which recruited millions of Mexicans to migrate north for a season
+or more.46 Over the period, 4.5 million contracts were signed,
+representing some 2 million workers (many went more than once).
+The program cemented US agribusiness’s reliance on migratory
+Mexican workers to the present day.
+
+The four central-western states of Jalisco, Guanajuato,
+Michoacán, and Zacatecas comprised 45 percent of the participants.
+“Here,” argues historian Michael Snodgrass, “is where a culture of
+Mexican migration first took root in the early twentieth century.”
+Because of demand from both would-be migrants and local officials,
+the Mexican government established its processing centers in
+Guanajuato and Jalisco. Workers from “depressed mining villages
+and drought-stricken farm towns” flocked to the program.47
+Alongside Bracero migrants, others from the same region
+migrated on their own, undocumented, but not unwelcome. “It was
+easy then,” Snodgrass explains. “When he headed north for the first
+time in 1955, the first English expression that Gerardo López
+learned was ‘go ahead,’ the words a Border Patrol agent spoke while
+encouraging his entry.”48 Aristide Zolberg, who was stationed in El
+Paso for military service in the mid-1950s, commented that
+“informality” prevailed regarding border crossings. “You were more
+likely to be stopped crossing the Juarez Bridge if you looked like an
+American in military service than like a Mexican seeking work.”49
+Former migrants from the highlands of Jalisco recalled that the
+program resurrected networks that had been established in the
+1920s, only to be temporarily interrupted in the 1930s. Other parts
+of Jalisco, like the sugar region, had no prior history of migration.
+Now, though, union leaders began to demand Bracero contracts for
+their members during the tiempo muerto from May to December,
+which conveniently coincided with California’s harvest season.
+Thus, new areas were drawn into the “culture of migration.”50
+Remittances became Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign
+exchange by the 1950s. While renewing old flows and creating new
+ones, the Bracero Program also redefined the destinations of
+Mexican migrants: now almost all of them were recruited directly
+into farm labor.51
+The program also deepened the structures and culture of
+migration, including extralegal migration, in western Mexico.52 A
+whole industry of smugglers or “coyotes” emerged, who worked
+with US-based labor contractors to supply undocumented workers to
+
+farmers.53 Some famers preferred to avoid the bureaucracy and
+protections involved with the official system. Others lived in states
+like Texas that the Mexican government blacklisted from the
+program because of labor violations. By the time the program ended
+in 1964, it had outlived its demand because the extralegal system
+that had grown alongside it had grown large and strong enough to
+fulfill the country’s farm labor demand.54
+Legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom argues that the program
+legitimized “a particularly instrumentalist view of Mexican
+immigrant workers.” Employers, the law, and the population in
+general had long seen Mexicans as different from other immigrants
+—as essentially temporary and disposable. The Bracero Program
+institutionalized this position for the post–World War II period.
+Mexicans in the United States were automatically assumed to be
+temporary and perhaps without papers. In other words, Mexicans’
+status was inherently “legally tenuous.”55
+The Bracero Program was also accompanied by a “massive
+bilateral deportation policy” that increased deportations to some
+seven hundred thousand by the early 1950s. “The wetback is a
+person of legal disability who is under jeopardy of immediate
+deportation if caught. He is told that if he leaves the farm, he will
+be reported to the [Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS),
+which] will surely find him if he ventures into town or out onto the
+roads,” reported the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in
+1951.56
+Still, both farmers and government tacitly admitted that the line
+between legality and illegality was a fine one, and that “wetbacks”
+were an essential component of the system.57 In one incident in
+early 1954, as workers massed on the border seeking to cross in
+Mexicali, the INS urged them to the edge of town, where they
+crossed “illegally.” “Instead of sending them back to Mexico,
+however, US Border Patrol officials trotted them to the US side of
+the official crossing and directed them to touch a toe onto the
+Mexican side. . . . When this was done, US Labor Department
+
+officials gave the migrants contracts to sign, which completed their
+transformation from illegal immigrants to guestworkers.”58
+Just a few months later, the Eisenhower administration initiated
+Operation Wetback, a massive, military-style sweep of Mexican and
+Mexican American neighborhoods aimed at deporting en masse
+those deemed to be in the country “illegally.” Over a million were
+deported. Like the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback
+snared many individuals, including US citizens, simply for being
+ethnically Mexican.
+Attorney General Herbert Brownell distinguished between “the
+illegal Mexican migrants known as ‘wetbacks,’ and the legal
+Mexican nationals known as ‘braceros.’ . . . The illegals, who cross
+the border furtively in violation of the laws and regulations of both
+the United States and Mexico cause serious social and economic
+problems for the United States.”59 Yet the operation illustrated the
+symbiotic relationship between the Bracero Program and
+undocumented workers. Even as it was being carried out, Bracero
+recruitment continued unabated, and the INS offered numerous
+methods for farmers to legalize the workers they needed, a process
+termed “drying out the wetbacks.”60 As Kanstroom points out, “The
+remarkably symmetrical relationship between labor recruitment and
+the deportation system is illustrated by the fact that, up to 1964, the
+number of braceros, nearly 5 million, was almost exactly the same
+as the number of deportees.”61
+After Operation Wetback, deportations dropped again as the
+number of Bracero-contracted workers grew alongside the number
+of work-permitted or green-card entrants. The green card had its
+origins in the Alien Registration Act of 1940 in the context of World
+War II, requiring all noncitizens to register at a local post office,
+which would then mail them the card. The Security Act of 1950
+created the green card as we know it today. Still, for Mexicans, since
+there were no numerical restrictions, “obtaining residency [i.e., the
+green card] required little more than a letter verifying employment
+and a trip to a US consulate.”62 During the 1960s and early 1970s,
+
+some forty thousand Mexicans living south of the border held green
+cards that enabled them to commute to work in the United States.
+THE 1965 IMMIGRATION LAW AND THE INVENTION OF
+ILLEGALITY
+During the two major waves of deportation/repatriation of Mexicans
+before 1965—during the Depression of the 1930s and in the mid1950s—undocumentedness as we know it today was not the
+rationale used to justify deportation. As entry to the country was
+restricted on the grounds of indigence or the probability of
+becoming a public charge, the vague “likely to become a public
+charge” accusation was harnessed to justify the deportations of
+Mexicans during the Depression.63 During the 1950s, many people
+mounted arguments against both illegal immigrants—then accorded
+the insulting moniker wetback—and the Bracero Program,
+regardless of the fact that one was technically legal and the other
+illegal. Even as Operation Wetback targeted the supposedly illegal,
+the INS offered multiple methods for legalization. Mexican
+American organizations like LULAC and the American GI Forum
+campaigned equally against both the Bracero Program and the
+“wetback tide,” both of which they believed to be harmful to the
+efforts of Mexican Americans to assimilate into white US society.64
+The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 for the first time
+ever placed numerical limits on Mexican migration, just as the
+Bracero Program was being shut down. Suddenly, legal migration
+for Mexicans, after so many years of being encouraged, was closed
+off. But the demand for Mexican labor, and Mexican workers’ need
+for jobs, continued. A smaller guest-worker program, the H-2
+program, remained and was expanded over the following decades,
+but came nowhere near to filling the demand.
+The abolition of the Bracero Program was supposed to create
+better, more equal treatment for Mexicans in the United States, in
+keeping with the civil rights movements of the era, including a
+growing farm-worker movement. It failed miserably. Unlike the
+European countries, which legalized their guest workers when they
+
+ended similar programs around the same time, the United States
+simply illegalized its Mexican workers. “In essence, in 1965 the
+United States shifted from a de jure guestworker program based on
+the circulation of bracero migrants to a de facto program based on
+the circulation of undocumented migrants.”65
+The visa cap for Mexicans was far below the number who had
+been migrating as braceros in previous years. Thus, the law
+“intensified the institutional framework that further enabled the
+codification of Mexicans as ‘illegals.’” And the newly created
+problem of illegality became the rationale for a huge increase in
+apprehensions and deportations.66 The number of Mexican migrants
+who lacked the green card and were therefore deportable rose from
+88,823 in 1961 to over a million a year by the mid-1970s.67
+Still, writes Oscar Martínez, “because of leniency on the part of
+US authorities at the time, undocumented commuters found it rather
+easy to cross the border.”68 As the Mexican government pointed out,
+many of the undocumented were part of a “seasonal, temporary,
+and circular” migration.69 With the “relatively open” border
+between 1965 and 1985, “85 percent of undocumented entries were
+offset by departures, yielding a relatively modest net increment to
+the US population.”70 Still, Douglas Massey wrote that “never before
+have so many immigrants been placed in such a vulnerable position
+and subject to such high levels of official exclusion and
+discrimination.”71
+The US government acknowledged the contradictions of this new
+situation in 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act
+(IRCA) allowed Mexicans in the country illegally to regularize their
+status. The concept was not new; earlier European immigrants
+became exempt from deportation and were allowed to become
+citizens after they had established roots in the country. Some 2.3
+million Mexican immigrants (and 700,000 non-Mexicans) were able
+to become legal under the IRCA’s provisions.72 To do so, though,
+they needed documents: documents proving their continuous
+presence in the country since 1982, or documents demonstrating
+that they had been involved in seasonal agricultural work. A small
+
+industry grew manufacturing false documents. The ever-fuzzy line
+between legal and illegal remained, as many were able to legalize
+illegally with fraudulent documents.
+When the IRCA was passed, the Department of Agriculture
+estimated that some 350,000 undocumented migrants were working
+in agriculture and would be eligible for Seasonal Agricultural
+Worker (SAW) status. However, some 1.3 million applied—almost
+as many as applied for status under the four-years-of-continuousresidence provisions. In California, with an estimated two hundred
+thousand undocumented agricultural workers, some seven hundred
+thousand applied. By early 1992, the INS had approved 88 percent
+of these applications, or over a million nationwide.73 But
+independent studies carried out in Mexico, among migrants who had
+applied for the SAW provision, showed that only 60–70 percent of
+those who applied were actually eligible.74
+Thus, the IRCA contributed to what could perhaps be called
+illegal legalizations—people using false documents attesting to their
+status as agricultural workers to apply for, and obtain, legal status
+in the United States—and what Philip Martin called “documented
+illegal aliens.” In an article in the New York Times, Robert Suro
+claimed there had been “fraud on a huge scale.”75 Yet fraud or no
+fraud, people became officially legal. Moreover, the whole process
+may have actually spurred further undocumented immigration by
+“spreading work authorization documents and knowledge about
+them to very poor and unsophisticated rural Mexicans and Central
+Americans, encouraging first-time entrants from these areas.”76
+The 1986 law also for the first time made it illegal to employ a
+worker without proper documents. Employer sanctions created an
+enormous and costly illegal infrastructure that migrants had to
+navigate to obtain false documents in order to work, but did little to
+reduce the numbers of undocumented workers. Moreover, the law
+left employers virtually immune to prosecution, and with even
+greater ability to exploit their now more legally vulnerable
+workers.77
+
+The 1986 IRCA was ostensibly aimed at ending illegality by
+legalizing many resident Mexicans and discouraging new arrivals
+through increased border controls and employer sanctions that
+criminalized work. However, it had exactly the opposite effect.
+Mexicans who obtained legal status under the amnesty were able to
+leave the more marginalized sectors of the labor market. But these
+traditional sectors, like agriculture, plus newly emerging sectors
+(discussed in Chapters 5 and 6) only increased their demand for
+workers. Some developed new strategies of subcontracting to evade
+the law. Meanwhile undocumented migrants, once in the country,
+began to extend their stays and send for their families, since the
+long-standing circular migration patterns were disrupted by the
+border militarization.78
+Until the 1990s, what migration scholars call the “traditional” or
+central-west region of Mexico, including Jalisco, had been the
+source of the majority of migrants.79 Since the 1990s, the proportion
+from that region has shrunk considerably and that from the southsoutheast region has increased. Migrants from the traditional
+sending regions were primarily Spanish-speaking mestizos.80 Since
+the 1980s, though, a series of blows, including the 1982 peso crisis,
+the debt crisis that followed it, and neoliberal restructuring in the
+1990s and components of the North American Free Trade
+Agreement in 1994, have severely affected indigenous communities
+in southern Mexico. Over a million families lost their land as a result
+of these changes. The result was that new areas started their own
+massive out-migration to the North, greatly diversifying the Mexican
+population in the United States.81
+CASE STUDY: THE HERNáNDEZ CRUZ FAMILY
+One family’s story can illustrate the various and contradictory ways
+that people become illegal in the contemporary United States.
+Consider the case of the Hernández Cruz family of Irapuato, Mexico.
+The father, Juan Miguel Hernández Pérez, began the family’s
+migration tradition in the middle of the century, when he was
+recruited to work in the Bracero Program. But if the program
+
+created a legal means to initiate a migrant stream from 1942 to
+1964, the termination of the program did not end either the demand
+for migrants’ labor nor their desire to work in the United States.
+When Juan Miguel’s son Juan Hernández Cruz left Irapuato to work
+in the fields of California in 1981, “he was following his father’s
+footsteps but, unlike his father, who had been a registered worker
+under the Bracero Program, Juan would be crossing as an
+unauthorized migrant.”82
+Juan Hernández Cruz’s younger sister, Samantha, followed her
+brother in 1988, bringing their seriously ill mother with her. First
+they tried to enter without inspection, crossing “through the back
+hills of San Ysidro many times without success.” Finally, “the coyote
+suggested they get false papers instead. . . . By using someone else’s
+papers, altered to include their photos, they found it easy to cross
+via the San Ysidro US Port of Entry.”
+Meanwhile, Juan was working to regularize his and his sister’s
+status using the Seasonal Agricultural Worker provision of the 1986
+IRCA. “Through friends, they were connected with a farmer in the
+United States who signed all the documents they required for $800
+each. They both received a letter that they had worked on a farm for
+the required number of years and were both granted permanent
+residency.”83 Legally, but on the basis of false documents.
+The ins and outs of this family’s immigration history are more
+typical than unusual for Mexican migrants. Their story, and the long
+history behind it, helps to explain why Mexicans supposedly choose
+to come to the United States “illegally.” From the railroads, to the
+various maneuvers in US immigration policy over the past century,
+to the current neoliberal regime in Mexico, structural factors have
+created what is today called Mexican illegality.84
+GUATEMALAN MAYANS: A HISTORY OF MIGRATION
+Central Americans, coming primarily from Honduras, El Salvador,
+and Guatemala, comprise the second-largest group of undocumented
+people in the United States. My focus here is on one group of
+Central Americans, indigenous rural Mayans from Guatemala’s
+
+highlands. The history of today’s Mayan migration to the United
+States began over five hundred years ago.
+While we have little evidence about Mayan migration patterns
+prior to the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, patterns of coerced and
+voluntary migration clearly characterized the colonial period. The
+Spanish concentrated the indigenous in new communities to better
+implement political, religious, and economic control. They imposed
+various systems of coerced labor that forced people out of their
+communities for weeks or months at a time to work in colonial
+mines, plantations, and factories. Mayans also fled from their
+communities to avoid forced labor demands.85
+The coffee plantation system that grew in Guatemala after
+independence led to new forced labor demands and displacements.
+Historians have documented the fearful violence involved with
+dispossessing large numbers of indigenous peoples from their lands
+and forcing them into labor on the new plantations. They estimate
+that one in five of the highland Indian population migrated
+seasonally to work in the coffee fields in the 1880s.86 The numbers
+increased after the overthrow of the brief revolutionary experiment
+in the 1950s: Christopher Lutz and George Lovell calculate some
+two hundred thousand Mayan labor migrants a year in the 1950s,
+three hundred thousand in the 1960s, and five hundred thousand in
+the 1970s.87
+Guatemalan Indian activist Rigoberta Menchu described her
+initiation into migration to coffee and cotton plantations as a child.
+Migration to work was simply a fact of life, not to be questioned.
+From when I was very tiny, my mother used to take me down
+to the finca, wrapped in a shawl on her back. She told me that
+when I was about two I had to be carried screaming into the
+lorry because I didn’t want to go. . . . It sometimes took two
+nights and a day from my village to the coast. . . . By the time
+we got to the finca we were totally stupefied; we were like
+chickens coming out of a pot. We were in such a state, we
+could hardly walk to the finca. I made many trips from the
+
+altiplano to the coast, but I never saw the countryside we
+passed through. . . . I saw the wonderful scenery and places
+for the first time when we were thrown out of the finca and
+had to pay our own way back on the bus . . . .
+I remember that from when I was about eight to when I
+was about ten, we worked in the coffee crop. And after that
+we worked on the cotton plantations further down the coast,
+where it was very, very hot. . . . That was our world. I felt
+that it would always be the same, always the same. It hadn’t
+ever changed . . . .
+The lorries belonged to the fincas, but they were driven by
+the recruiting agents, the caporales. These caporales are in
+charge of about forty people, or more or less what the lorry
+holds. When they get to the finca, the caporal becomes the
+overseer of this group. . . . The overseers stay on the fincas. . .
+. They are in charge. When you’re working, for example, and
+take a little rest, he comes and insults you. . . . They also
+punish the slow workers . . . .88
+Every finca in Guatemala has a cantina, owned by the
+landowner, where the workers get drunk on alcohol and all
+kinds of guaro, and pile up debts. They often spend most of
+their wages. They drink to get happy and to forget the
+bitterness they feel at having to leave their villages in the
+Altiplano and come and work so brutally hard on the fincas for
+so little.89
+Menchu’s testimony suggests that, like the Mexican peasants
+described earlier, Guatemalan highlanders were not seeking to leave
+their homes to work for pay. It took generations of forced
+recruitment to create this migration tradition.
+Interestingly, human rights advocate Daniel Wilkinson found that
+the Mayan descendants who live on the plantations today know
+little of the violence that went into the making of this history.
+“People knew where their families had come from, but they didn’t
+know—or didn’t care to recall—much more about what had brought
+
+them to the plantations.”90 Wilkinson, like others who study
+Guatemala, emphasizes the silences that surround people’s
+understanding of their realities. Decades—or centuries—of genocide
+and terror have shaped the culture of Guatemala’s highland
+indigenous communities. People may have few tools to understand
+the forces behind their oppression, and they have learned over and
+over that trying to protest or change their situation only invites
+further repression.
+The civil war—or more accurately, dirty war—against highland
+Maya communities during the 1970s and ’80s was one result of
+people in the highlands trying to challenge their poverty and
+dispossession. It led to the destruction of hundreds of villages, and
+perhaps a million internally displaced and one hundred thousand to
+two hundred thousand refugees who fled the country, many across
+the border to Mexico. Others were forced from their homes into
+model villages under army control.
+Thus, historians of the Maya have argued that migration has been
+a “ubiquitous feature of Maya life” that became central to Mayan
+history and identity. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish
+conquerors, and in accelerated ways since the 1800s, political, legal,
+military, and economic structures have directly enforced migration
+or simply made it impossible to survive without it.91
+“An absent community or family member may be in one of
+several places: on the coast picking coffee (returning home within a
+month, with wages); in the capital working as a domestic, merchant,
+or worker (sending money home to the family, returning
+periodically or permanently, such as after a stint or a marriage
+proposal from home); in another municipio selling firewood,
+animals, or agricultural products (returning once or twice a month
+for business and domestic activities); and, increasingly, allá lejos (in
+the United States), sending US dollars home on a regular basis.”92
+Both in its structural aspects and in its cultural aspects, today’s
+migration is just a new phase in a process that is rooted in hundreds
+of years of history.93
+
+CASE STUDY: GUATEMALANS IN PROVIDENCE
+Among the undocumented Mayans of Providence, Rhode Island,
+Patricia Foxen found a very different conception than what most
+citizens understand about illegality. Rather than imagining
+themselves as autonomous individuals making a decision to break
+the law, they, like Rigoberta Menchu, understand their migration as
+a requirement imposed upon them by outsiders, which they have no
+right or opportunity to question.
+The coyotes that offer to take them across the border may be
+considered smugglers under US law, but to the Mayans Foxen
+studied, they were no different from the labor contractors who had
+been forcibly recruiting them—legally—for generations. Instead of
+going to the Pacific coast to work on plantations, now they were
+being sent to la costa del Norte to work in jewelry factories. One
+woman told Foxen that “the coyote is the same as the contratista
+(labor contractor) on the coast: he should know when there is work
+over there, and should not be sending people if there is no work.”
+Others told her that they went to Providence “because that is where
+the coyotes sent them.”94 In many cases, contratistas themselves
+became coyotes, relying on their existing networks and standing and
+just expanding their geographic scope.95 “As did their forefathers
+centuries ago,” Lutz and Lovell write, “Guatemalan Mayas continue
+to migrate in order to survive.”96
+Once in the United States, understandings and worldviews
+shaped by their history in Guatemala continue to inform
+immigrants’ understanding of their current realities. One Mayan in
+Providence explained to Foxen that “the migra here, it is like, as
+they said, the guerrillas over there. . . . If la migra is looking for one
+of us, we all run, run escaping, it is like the guerrilla.” Likewise in
+Guatemala, one campesino (peasant farmer) told her that “he had
+heard that the INS had not yet arrived in Providence, though they
+were said to be close (thus likening them to the army or
+guerrillas).”97
+
+Foxen also notes a “total confusion surrounding understandings
+about the legality and illegality of different types of documentation”
+that stems from the population’s long history of the law being used
+against them.98 Some of her informants had paid hundreds of
+dollars to a notario for a temporary work permit. These notarios
+often had no legal credentials, but played on a semantic confusion,
+since in Latin America the term often refers to a lawyer. The notarios
+would file a fraudulent asylum application, which would
+nonetheless entitle the migrant to a temporary, legal work permit,
+until their asylum hearing, which would generally result in
+deportation. Foxen encountered frequent references to people
+obtaining “papeles legalmente falsificados”—legally falsified
+documents—a further example of the impenetrable character of the
+law from the perspective of the immigrants.99
+Describing his experience as a court interpreter for Guatemalan
+migrants after an immigration raid at a meatpacking plant in
+Postville, Iowa, Erik Camayd-Freixas explained that workers there
+had simply followed recruiters’ and employers’ instructions, and had
+not knowingly chosen to break any law.
+“Do you know what this number is?” asked the lawyer,
+pointing to the social security number on his I-9 employment
+form. “I don’t know,” said the man. “Who put it there?” “At
+the plant, they helped me fill out the papers ’cause I can’t
+read or write Spanish, much less English.” “Do you know
+what a social security number is?” the lawyer insisted. “No,”
+said the man. “Do you know what a social security card is?”
+“No.” “Do you know what it’s used for?” “I don’t know any of
+that. I’m new in this country,” said the man, visibly
+embarrassed.100
+Like their ancestors and their contemporaries, these migrants had
+simply gone where the recruiters had taken them to work.
+A New York Times reporter interviewed Guatemalan and other
+Central American migrants on Mexico’s southern border in early
+2013. “Few had even heard about the debate to overhaul
+
+immigration laws and possibly open a pathway to citizenship for
+immigrants living illegally in the United States,” he commented.
+“Instead, the prevailing force seems to be deteriorating conditions at
+home.”101
+For at least five hundred years, Guatemala’s highland Mayan
+populations have been buffeted, or coerced, by the winds of the
+global economy. They have been slaughtered, displaced, massacred,
+and enslaved. They have had to leave their homes and their families
+to do the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest work for the benefit of others.
+They have been discriminated against socially and legally. For
+centuries, they have been forced to migrate and suffered poor
+working conditions and legalized discrimination. Their migration to
+the United States is only the latest phase of this long history. Their
+technical illegality in the United States is but a small part of a
+system that has worked to control their movement and their labor
+for hundreds of years.
+
+CHAPTER 3
+
+Becoming Illegal
+There are two main ways to become undocumented in the United
+States. About half of the undocumented population enters without
+inspection. They may have attempted to obtain a visa and been
+denied. More likely, they either knew that such an attempt was
+hopeless or did not even know that such a process existed and didn’t
+try at all. So they crossed somehow, usually by land but sometimes
+by sea, through a border that may have been unmarked, invisible, or
+at least unpatrolled. Thus, they were not inspected by any official
+from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when they
+entered. This means that while they may have many kinds of
+identification documents, they have none that specifically authorizes
+their entry into the United States.
+The other portion of the undocumented population entered with
+inspection, usually with a visa of some sort or with a Border
+Crossing Card. One US government estimate calculates that between
+30 percent and 60 percent of the undocumented became so through
+visa overstays, meaning that though they were initially authorized
+entry, they neglected to leave in the designated time frame.1
+Millions of Mexicans obtain tourist visas every year, and the
+number has been rising steadily, from about 4 million a year at the
+beginning of the 2000s to almost 13 million in 2010.2 However, the
+vast majority of Mexicans who obtain tourist visas do not overstay
+their visas and become “illegal.” Most Mexicans who are
+undocumented became so by crossing the border without inspection,
+and most people who become undocumented through visa overstays
+are not Mexican.
+Under today’s immigration laws, citizens of most countries must
+request a visa in their home country before traveling to the United
+States. Europeans, as always, are privileged: the Visa Waiver
+Program allows most of them to enter as tourists (but not to work)
+
+without a visa. Some Mexicans are eligible for Border Crossing
+Cards that allow them to travel for a specified period of time in the
+border region. Border Crossing Cards are like tourist or visitors’
+visas: they authorize entry into the United States, but they don’t
+authorize the holder to work. People who enter with these kinds of
+permission can become undocumented if they either overstay their
+visa or violate its terms in some other way, including, for Border
+Card holders, leaving the twenty-five-mile border zone. Because
+nonimmigrant visas are temporary permits with specific conditions
+attached to them, ordinary activities that are not in themselves
+illegal can still constitute visa violations. In some cases, there are
+lies or questionable and illegal activities involved in obtaining the
+visa itself.
+In 2011, 159 million nonimmigrant visitors entered the United
+States with some kind of legal permission. Thirty-three percent or
+53.1 million of them were I-94 card holders, meaning that they
+either had obtained a nonimmigrant (temporary) visa or were
+admitted under the Visa Waiver Program. The largest source of I-94
+admissions was Mexico, with 33 percent of the total. (The next
+largest source was United Kingdom, with only 8.6 percent.) Eightyseven percent of these visa holders had visitors’ or tourist visas that
+allowed them to travel for business or pleasure. The others held
+student, temporary worker, or other kinds of visas.3 Some one
+hundred thousand were H-2 guest workers, some 80 percent of them
+Mexican. Most of the other two-thirds of inspected entries were
+Mexicans and Canadians with Border Crossing Cards.4
+For all categories of nonimmigrant travel, then—as visitors or
+temporary workers with a visa, with a Border Crossing Card, or as
+undocumented entries—Mexicans constitute the largest numbers. Of
+the 11.5 million or so undocumented immigrants in 2006, some 4–
+5.5 million had entered with visitor or tourist visas, and another
+250,000–500,000 entered with Border Crossing Cards. The other 6–
+7 million entered without inspection.5
+ILLEGAL VISAS
+
+Although evading ICE inspection points and the Border Patrol is a
+common method of illegal entry, it’s not the only one. The head of
+Customs and Border Protection (CBP) explained to researcher
+Lynnaire Sheridan that before resorting to a dangerous crossing
+through the desert, migrants could attempt to borrow, purchase, or
+steal an authentic US passport or permanent resident card. Absent
+that possibility, they might obtain a false document or alter a
+document themselves by inserting their own photograph. If they
+could not access any documents, they might hide in a vehicle and
+cross at night.6 The professional cross-border smugglers Sheridan
+interviewed offered a rather similar assessment. They told her that
+the safest way to cross was to obtain a tourist visa or, if that was not
+possible, to use a valid visa belonging to a family member. A bit
+riskier was the use of false or altered documents. The most
+dangerous method was to attempt to cross without being seen,
+generally in isolated areas with little Border Patrol presence.7
+Sheridan interviewed many families that had crossed illegally
+multiple times. They corroborated this assessment. They listed their
+preferred options as, first, crossing with a tourist visa and
+overstaying it; second, using someone else’s documents; third, using
+false documents; and last, attempting to cross without being
+discovered. If the latter was the only option, they emphasized that
+the more isolated the area, the more dangerous the crossing.
+Cost was also a factor. The safest options were the most
+expensive. Sometimes families would pay more to have their young
+children, for example, cross with false papers (perhaps
+accompanying adults with valid documents), while the adults would
+opt for a dangerous clandestine crossing.8
+Another method of crossing the border is with a temporary work
+visa, generally through the H-2A (agricultural) or H-2B
+(nonagricultural) programs. (There are other categories of
+temporary work visas, but most require specific types and levels of
+skills and don’t apply in most situations.) But with the H-2 program,
+as with the Bracero Program before it, paperwork and requirements
+are so bureaucratic and onerous that many employers and potential
+
+workers find the program not worth the effort.9 There is also a lot of
+room for illegal and unfair maneuvering within the H-2 system.
+US employers begin by requesting authorization to recruit H-2
+workers from the Department of Labor. Once an employer receives
+authorization, they generally turn to a US contracting agency, which
+in turn contracts with a Mexican recruiting agency to find available
+workers. Opportunities for abuse within the system abound.
+The complexity of the H-2 program and the gap between the
+overwhelming demand on both sides and the small number of visas
+actually available make the program ripe for fraud and exploitation.
+“Illegality” enters the system in numerous ways, as uncovered by a
+2010 United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
+In six cases that the GAO reviewed, “employers charged their H-2B
+workers fees that were for the benefit of the employer or charged
+excessive fees that brought employees’ wages below the hourly
+federal minimum wage. These charges included visa processing fees
+far above actual costs, rent in overcrowded apartments that
+drastically exceeded market value, and transportation charges
+subject to arbitrary ‘late fees.’ Workers left the United States in
+greater debt than when they arrived. In one case, these fees reduced
+employees’ paychecks to as little as $48 for a 2-week period.” In
+eight cases, “employers were alleged to have submitted fraudulent
+documentation to Labor, USCIS, and State to either exploit their H2B employees or hire more employees than needed. Employers and
+recruiters misclassified employee duties on Labor certification
+applications to pay lower prevailing wages; used shell companies to
+file fraudulent labor certification applications for unneeded
+employees, then leased the additional employees to businesses not
+on the visa petitions; and preferentially hired H-2B employees over
+American workers in violation of federal law.”10
+Eighty percent of H-2A and H-2B visa requests in Mexico are
+processed at the US consulate in Monterrey. The director of the
+Mexican Oficina de Atención al Migrante in that city has filed
+complaints about “hundreds of cases of fraud” in which
+unscrupulous agents charge would-be migrants illicit fees in
+
+exchange for promises of access to the coveted visa.11 “In practice,
+nobody can hope to obtain one of these visas if they don’t use the
+intermediaries. Otherwise how will they find out about the
+opportunities that exist?”12 From the perspective of the Mexican
+worker, working through the H-2 program might be almost
+indistinguishable from crossing without inspection to work. Both
+involve relying on shady networks for information, paying
+exorbitant fees, and working under poor conditions and at wage
+rates that are frequently “illegal” as well as exploitative.
+In 2004, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee or FLOC, a farmworkers’ union in the United States, negotiated an agreement with
+North Carolina growers that allowed the workers to bypass the
+contractors. The organization opened an office in Monterrey to
+monitor the recruitment process there. On September 9, 2007, the
+director of the FLOC office, Santiago Rafael Cruz, was found tied up,
+tortured, and murdered. The union suspected that local labor
+contractors were behind the murder. As FLOC president Baldemar
+Velázquez explained, “FLOC’s agreement eliminated the extortion of
+illegal fees from workers by criminal elements. They have been
+unhappy with the union taking away their goldmine. We disrupted
+not only the recruiters working for growers in North Carolina, but
+all the recruiters who recruit workers for all the other states: from
+Florida and Georgia, through South Carolina and Virginia, all the
+way up to Pennsylvania and New York.” Labor journalist Dan
+LaBotz added that “FLOC’s presence in Mexico meant that the
+racketeers were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in
+exorbitant fees and bribes.”13
+The chains reach deep into Guatemala. Some twelve hundred
+workers recruited by Mexican agency Job Consultoría paid from
+$1,000 to $3,000 for supposed access to a visa. In Amatitlán,
+Guatemala, 370 men and their families attacked local resident Pablo
+Roberto Valencia in late 2011 when they learned that the money
+they had given him to pay for their visas had disappeared.14
+According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, workers generally
+
+arrive in the United States with debts between $500 and $10,000
+owed—illegally—to recruiters.15
+While these workers do enter with visas that authorize their
+presence and permit them to work in the United States, the process
+that connects them with these visas violates US, Mexican, and
+sometimes other countries’ laws. It frequently involves threats,
+violence, extortion, and debt peonage. These violations are
+generally met with impunity, however. In fact, the violations are
+built into the system itself; they are integral to its functioning and to
+the arrival of officially legal H-2 workers to the United States.
+GETTING TO THE BORDER
+Although the majority of uninspected border crossers are Mexican,
+others are Central and South Americans. Today, Central Americans
+often travel a perilous land journey from their homes across one or
+more countries and through Mexico. A century ago, excluded people
+like the Chinese entered through Mexico, because of the openness of
+that border.
+While the number of Mexicans crossing illegally has declined in
+recent years, the number of Central Americans has been steadily
+increasing. The economic crisis in the United States meant that some
+sectors, like construction, that had traditionally attracted Mexican
+migrants, were not hiring. Some experts have also suggested that
+increased deportation rates, violence along the border, and a
+declining birthrate in Mexico have contributed to a slowing of
+Mexican crossings.16
+In Central America, though, economic stagnation and horrific
+levels of violence, especially in Guatemala, El Salvador, and
+Honduras, have meant that the numbers crossing into the United
+States continue to increase. Somewhere between 150,000 (according
+to the Mexican government) and 400,000 (according to advocacy
+organizations) undocumented migrants were entering Mexico each
+year as of 2010, mostly from Central America.17 In 2011, 46,997
+non-Mexicans, mostly Central Americans, were detained at the
+border; in 2012, the figure more than doubled, to 94,532.18 While
+
+still much fewer than the 188,467 Mexicans detained during the
+2011–2012 fiscal year, the trend was clear: the number of Mexicans
+was decreasing, while that of Central Americans was increasing.19
+Although in even smaller numbers, South Americans also cross
+the border by land, first traveling by plane to Mexico. In
+Montevideo, one travel agency offered a choice of a tourist visa and
+a ticket to New York or a ticket to Mexico and a connection to a
+coyote who would arrange an illegal land crossing, depending on
+how much the traveler was willing to pay.20 Similarly in Brazil,
+travel agents sell package deals that include airfare to Mexico City,
+a guide to Tijuana, and a coyote for crossing the border. In New
+York, Maxine Margolis found that only 3 percent of Brazilians in her
+sample had crossed the Mexican border, but in Framingham,
+Massachusetts, another study found that 43 percent had. Wealthier
+Brazilians were more likely to be able to obtain the tourist visa,
+while those who were poorer and less educated were more likely to
+have to resort to the Mexican route.21
+When US consulates in the Dominican Republic began to reduce
+the number of tourist visas they granted, informal visa brokers
+began to offer their clients other, more expensive routes. Migrants
+were sent to Puerto Rico by boat or to Mexico to cross the land
+border. A market sprang up in forged or false papers. Samuel
+Martinez noted that while Dominicans saw some modes of entry as
+preferable to others, the relative illegality was not their prime
+concern. It was just how the system worked: rich people got
+preferred access to visas; poor people had to pay huge sums for the
+same privilege. “‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ modes of entry are viewed by
+Caribbean people more as bureaucratic obstacles to circumvent than
+as immutable law,” he concluded.22
+Eugenia Georges’ research on emigration from the Dominican
+Republic noted the same pattern of poorer immigrants having to
+take more costly and dangerous routes. In the town she studied,
+richer residents—those who owned land or businesses—could
+usually get tourist visas and fly directly to the United States, since,
+as property owners, they could convince US consular officials that
+
+they would return home after their tourist excursions. Poorer,
+landless Dominicans had to resort to the more expensive, riskier,
+indirect route via Mexico.23
+In the case of Central Americans, almost all of those trying to
+migrate are poor, and their journey through Mexico is a perilous
+one. In 2001, Mexico—under pressure from the Bush administration
+—began to implement what it called “Plan Sur” to secure its
+southern border, while Guatemala countered with “Venceremos
+2001” to control exit traffic from its own country. The militarization
+of this border mirrored what had begun a decade earlier on the USMexico border, and the results were also similar. Official statistics
+showed migration numbers slowing. But migrants and human rights
+organizations pointed out that these statistics were deceptive. Many
+migrants shifted away from the newly enforced and militarized
+checkpoints into more remote areas. As crossing became more
+difficult and more dangerous, it also became more criminalized, as
+gangs, drug traffickers, and professional smugglers became
+involved.24 Deportations also rose, but much more slowly than the
+migrant stream. Between January and November 2010, the Mexican
+National Institute of Migration (INAMI) deported 49,143 Central
+Americans: 19,876 Hondurans, 8,263 Salvadorans, 20,354
+Guatemalans, and 646 Nicaraguans.25 Another 40,971 Central
+Americans were detained in Mexico in 2012.26
+Many Central Americans attempt to cross Mexico by stowing
+away on the freight trains that run from Chiapas on the MexicoGuatemala border up to Mexico City and then on to the US border.
+The journey can take days or weeks, as migrants slip from train to
+train. Up to fifteen hundred Central Americans attempt to board La
+Bestia or the Beast—also known as “The Train of Death”—every day.
+Thousands have been killed or maimed in the process.27
+Because migrants carry money for their trip and because most of
+them have relatives working in the United States who are helping to
+pay for them and can be extorted for ransom money, the kidnapping
+of migrants has become a regular occurrence on their trip through
+Mexico. In just six months between September 2008 and February
+
+2009, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission uncovered
+cases of almost 10,000 migrants kidnapped.28 From April to
+September 2010, the commission found 11,333 kidnapping cases.
+“This figure reflects the fact that there have not been sufficient
+government efforts to lower the rates of kidnapping affecting the
+migrant population,” the commission declared. Most of the cases
+discovered by the commission were Hondurans (44.3 percent),
+followed by Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and small
+numbers of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, and Ecuadorians.29
+Although various social actors—including Mexican police and
+other government officials—participate in kidnapping and extortion
+networks, their modus operandi is similar: migrants are captured
+and tortured to force them to reveal contacts in their home country
+or in the United States. The kidnappers then call these relatives or
+friends and demand payment, threatening to kill the migrant if they
+don’t comply.30 The majority of kidnappings take place along the
+train route or on the trains themselves.
+Kidnapping is only part of the story. A Mexican church-based
+human rights coalition decried a broad spectrum of “human rights
+violations committed by public servants and federal, state, and
+municipal police. This criminalization of undocumented migration
+sets the stage for physical, psychological, and sexual aggression, and
+human trafficking.”31
+The emergence of the Zetas cartel in 2002 greatly worsened the
+situation just as the numbers of Central American migrants passing
+through Mexico was increasing. According to Mexico’s Assistant
+Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized
+Crime, “its main activities include extortion and sale of protection
+services, carrying out assassinations, holding and selling drugs,
+piracy, gasoline sales, and the capture and ransom of hostages.”
+According to victims, the Zetas are the main perpetrators of migrant
+kidnappings.32
+The Zetas use a strategy of displacing and taking control of
+small communities. They terrorize and extort the local
+
+population and co-opt individuals who belong to gangs or
+small local bands, training them to carry out actions like
+surveillance of trains, apprehension of migrants, transferring
+and overseeing migrants in safe houses, making telephone
+calls for the purpose of extortion, and receiving the ransom.
+These delinquent groups, made up mostly of young people,
+are popularly known as the “Zetitas.” In every kidnapping
+case they also commit serious crimes like assassination, sexual
+exploitation, and human trafficking. In its first two years, the
+Zetas cartel succeeded in establishing itself all along the
+routes traveled by migrants.33
+As the flow of Central American migrants increased, so did cases
+of kidnapping, especially after 2007.34 In one notorious case, in
+August 2010, seventy-two migrants from El Salvador, Honduras,
+Guatemala, Ecuador, and Brazil were victims of a massacre as they
+passed through Tamaulipas on their way to the border. Their
+captors—members of a drug gang, possibly the Zetas—demanded
+that they pay ransom or agree to work as couriers. When the
+migrants refused, they were slaughtered. A lone survivor managed
+to reach a nearby military base and tell the story of what had
+transpired. A year later, a young member of the Zetas confessed to
+the crime.35 In another massacre, in May 2012, forty-nine mutilated
+bodies of supposed migrants were found dumped along a highway
+near Monterrey. ���Because of the number of people, it appears that
+they could be passengers from a bus full of illegals; it could be a
+case in which organized delinquents [i.e., drug cartels] were
+extorting the coyote, since they have now taken over this illegal
+business,” a Mexican government representative explained.36
+According to the Human Rights Coalition report, “Migrants are
+typically captured on the trains themselves, or while waiting along
+the tracks. Groups of heavily armed persons approach the migrants,
+force them onto pickup trucks, and take them to safe houses. The
+kidnappings are carried out with unremitting brutality. In the ‘safe
+houses’ where they are held they suffer all kinds of tortures, cruel
+
+and inhuman treatment, and physical and psychological
+punishments, until their family in the United States (or in Central
+America) collects the money for their ransom.”37
+Mexican government officials have also been heavily implicated
+in these abuses. The Mexican INAMI and state security forces carry
+out “migration verification operations” on the trains, sometimes
+using electric shock instruments. They detain some migrants,
+leaving others in the hands of the gangs or armed groups.38
+While it might be tempting to simply blame this violence against
+migrants on Mexican actors, the situation really can’t be separated
+from its larger context: the criminalization of migrants by the
+United States, and its pressure on Mexico to enforce similar policies.
+While Mexico has publicly denounced US anti-immigrant policies,
+its government has also collaborated in many ways. US policies
+create a political context—illegality—that legitimizes abuses against
+migrants. The Bishop of Saltillo in northern Mexico articulated what
+many Mexicans and Central Americans believe: “My conclusion is
+that the Mexican government’s migration policies are aimed at
+preventing migrants from crossing into the United States. It is
+abundantly clear that the impunity enjoyed by organized crime, like
+that previously enjoyed by gangs, is a policy of terror.”39 A policy of
+terror that thrives in and serves the climate of criminalization of
+immigrants in their destination.
+ON THE BORDER
+Crossing the US-Mexico border used to be a rather mundane affair,
+as described in earlier chapters. With politicians pandering to (and
+fanning the flames of) the rising anti-immigrant climate inside the
+United States in the early 1990s, the border changed dramatically.
+Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in 1993 and Operation
+Gatekeeper in California in 1994 began today’s still-ongoing
+obsession with the border.40 In September 1993, the Border Patrol
+chief of the El Paso Sector, Silvestre Reyes, launched his new policy,
+a “highly visible show of force along a 20-mile section of the
+boundary dividing El Paso from Ciudad Juárez. Inspections at
+
+official ports of entry also intensified. The strategy represented a
+radical departure from the prior Border Patrol strategy of pursuing
+and apprehending unauthorized immigrants after they had crossed
+the boundary into the El Paso area.” Apprehensions quickly fell in
+this sector, not because overall border crossings declined, but
+because migrants simply shifted to new crossing points.41
+Likewise, Operation Gatekeeper in California succeeded in
+deflecting migrant traffic away from the sixty-six-mile stretch
+known as the San Diego Sector of the border. Operation Gatekeeper
+included construction of a wall, massive deployment of Border
+Patrol agents along the border, stadium lighting, vehicles, sensors,
+and other equipment. Beginning at the Imperial Beach Station in the
+west and moving east, the Border Patrol hoped to bring the entire
+San Diego Sector “under full control” within five years.42 As in
+Texas, “control” did not mean that migrants stopped coming; they
+simply moved to other, much more treacherous entry points.
+In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union and Mexico’s
+National Human Rights Commission on accused the US government
+of causing thousands of deaths at the border. “This report is the
+sounding of an alarm for a humanitarian crisis that has led to the
+death of more than 5,000 human beings,” they declared. The crisis
+was a direct result, they said, of US decisions: “The deaths of
+unauthorized migrants have been a predictable and inhumane
+outcome of border security policies on the US-Mexico border over
+the last fifteen years.” The new policies implemented by Gatekeeper,
+militarizing the more populated San Diego Sector, “intentionally
+forc[ed] undocumented immigrants to extreme environments and
+natural barriers that the government anticipated would increase the
+likelihood of injury and death.”43 To reach safety, migrants had to
+hike for miles over treacherous desert terrain, enduring the extreme
+heat of the days and cold of the nights. Few were able to carry
+enough water. As the death rate rose precipitously, “the chief cause
+of death shifted . . . from traffic fatalities to deaths from
+hypothermia, dehydration, and drowning.”44
+
+The Arizona-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos has tallied
+the dead in the Arizona sector since 2000. Basing its figures on
+recovered remains, the organization noted that at least 100 to 300
+have died each year, with the highest number, 282, being reached
+in 2006. Since many remains are not recovered, the actual death
+rates are considerably higher. The organization attributes the slight
+decline after that (down to 179 in 2011–2012) to lower numbers of
+total crossings.45 A GAO investigation in 2006 found that bordercrossing deaths had doubled in the past decade, to a high of 472 in
+2006. Three-quarters of the increase was due to rising death rates in
+the Tucson sector, and most were due to heat-related exposure.46
+The Pima County, Arizona, medical examiner’s office took custody
+of the remains of 1,915 migrants who died in the desert between
+2001 and 2010.47 The Border Patrol’s own figures corroborated the
+high (492) in fiscal year 2005 and show that despite a slight drop
+after that, numbers rose again, to 483 in fiscal year 2012.48
+Even as the total number of people crossing may have declined
+after 2006, the process became increasingly dangerous. The Arizona
+Daily Star noted that the ratio of known deaths per apprehensions
+rose from three per one hundred thousand in 1998 to thirty-nine in
+2004 and eighty-eight in 2009. “That means the risk of dying is
+more than twice as high today compared with five years ago and
+nearly 30 times greater than in 1998,” the newspaper reported at
+the end of 2009. “Border-county law enforcement, Mexican
+Consulate officials, Tohono O’odham tribal officials and
+humanitarian groups say the increase in fencing, technology and
+agents has caused illegal border crossers to walk longer distances in
+more treacherous terrain, increasing the likelihood that people will
+get hurt or fatigued and left behind to die.”49
+In response to the growing death rate and the outcry it provoked,
+the Border Patrol initiated the Border Safety Initiative in 1998 and
+formed BORSTAR to train agents in search, trauma, and rescue. The
+goal was to address the humanitarian crisis created by the United
+States’ own new border policies. Border Patrol agents did provide
+life-saving aid to hundreds of migrants in the years since the
+
+program was initiated. But “while the Tucson Sector BORSTAR unit
+routinely provided search, rescue, and medical intervention to
+undocumented immigrants under harsh conditions, the number of
+times it responded was insignificant in comparison to the volume of
+Border Patrol law enforcement activities.”50 Soon, other,
+independent church-based and grassroots organizations began to
+form to try to respond to the issue.
+CONCLUSION
+The laws that allow or disallow entry into the United States are and
+have always been arbitrary and discriminatory. One set of laws,
+primarily for Europeans and for the wealthy, allows freedom of
+travel. Another set, for Latin Americans and the poor, creates a
+labyrinth of enticements and obstacles.
+The Las Americas Premium Outlets complex on the US side the
+Tijuana–San Ysidro crossing just south of San Diego symbolizes the
+contradiction. Looming over the border, the 125 outlet stores
+beckon to tourists from the Mexican side, offering them a consumer
+mecca if they cross to shop. “The big fence surrounding the outlets
+and the Mexican flag [just beyond the complex, on the other side of
+the border] was a bit distracting,” wrote one US reviewer on the
+popular website Yelp.com.51 Between the mall and the flag are the
+imposing border wall and the security apparatus that sustains it,
+reminding Mexicans that their welcome is decidedly conditional.
+Myriad historical and economic factors draw and sometimes force
+migrants from their homes into the US economy. Many of these
+factors are the result of deliberate decisions implemented by US
+employers, investors, and government. At the same time,
+increasingly convoluted webs of laws, restrictions, and
+discrimination ensure that migrants remain in a subject position,
+exploitable and exploited. Today, the system works by drawing or
+forcing them into a status deemed illegality.
+The borders that divide immigrants from the United States are
+not just physical. Once inside the country—whether by means of a
+traumatic border crossing or a simple visa overstay—people without
+
+documents live behind another kind of border, a baffling and
+sometimes terrifying border that separates them from those around
+them and the country and society in which they live. These internal
+borders are the subject of the next chapter.
+
+CHAPTER 4
+
+What Part of “Illegal” Do You Understand?
+Arbitrary and precarious. If life for poor people in Mexico and
+Central America seems to be filled with precarious status and
+arbitrary events to which they must simply adapt in order to
+survive, life in the United States continues the pattern. Why do some
+government agencies welcome the undocumented, while others
+ignore them, and still others threaten, imprison, and deport them?
+What really determines their status, and why does it seem to change
+so frequently and unpredictably? How can they plan for the future
+or prepare, when everything seems so capricious?
+THE BLURRINESS OF CATEGORIES
+In the minds of most citizens, the terms “legal” and “illegal” are
+clearly defined and clearly distinguished categories. In real life,
+though, there is a large gray area between the two ostensibly
+opposite poles. Most people who are undocumented live ordinary
+lives and are not immediately distinguishable from immigrants with
+documents or from citizens. Yet in some ways, hidden to the
+outside, documented world, their lives are very different. As Jose
+Antonio Vargas puts it, “Everyday life for an undocumented
+American means a constant search for loopholes and back doors.”1
+Most of the approximately 11 million undocumented people in
+the United States have been here for quite a while. As noted earlier,
+only 14 percent arrived in the country after January 1, 2005,
+meaning that 86 percent have been in the country for over seven
+years.2 While the law may consider them alien, most of them are
+people who have deep roots in the United States.
+Mexicans are overrepresented among those deported: Mexicans
+make up 58 percent of the undocumented population, but 70
+percent of those deported are Mexican.3 Apparently, being Mexican
+makes you somehow more undocumented, in the eyes of society and
+of law enforcement, than others. Since undocumentedness is a
+
+socially imposed status, then how you are seen by those in authority
+is in fact what brings it into being.
+Many individuals have experienced being both documented and
+undocumented. Laws have changed, as in 1986 when many
+undocumented people were offered the chance to legalize.
+Individuals who entered the country legally may fall out of status if
+they violate the terms of their visa in some way, while, more rarely,
+those who are undocumented may find a way to regularize their
+status.
+The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the country’s
+most recent attempt at some sort of supposedly comprehensive
+immigration reform, exemplified the arbitrary nature of immigration
+law. In order to qualify for legalization, migrants must have resided
+in the country continuously since January 1, 1982. This cutoff date
+meant that the large numbers of Central American immigrants who
+arrived later were excluded. Of the 500,000 to 850,000 Salvadorans
+in the country in 1986, only 146,000 qualified.4 The American
+Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh (or ABC) Settlement Agreement in
+1990 reopened thousands of political asylum cases, offering a new
+chance for legal residence for undocumented Salvadorans and
+Guatemalans. But the process was agonizingly slow, and tens of
+thousands of Central Americans remained in limbo through the
+1990s, renewing their work permits every eighteen months as their
+cases languished.
+The Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT)—among many other
+provisions—created the new category of Temporary Protected Status
+(TPS), offering temporary protection and work authorization to
+immigrants from countries affected by war or natural disaster.
+Salvadorans were granted TPS, based on the state of civil war in the
+country that made it impossible for them to return. Guatemalans,
+despite the war in their country, were not included. TPS for
+Salvadorans was extended several times, but ended in 1995 after a
+peace agreement ended the war. At that time, some 1 million
+Salvadorans lived in the United States. Half of them were legal
+immigrants, and between 90,000 and 190,000 had been protected
+
+by TPS.5 (Some 200,000 applied originally, but many failed to
+complete the repeated renewal process.)6 When TPS ended, many
+Salvadorans returned to the stalled asylum process.
+The 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central America Relief Act
+(NACARA) was an attempt to address the backlog in asylum cases
+by offering permanent residency to certain asylum seekers. But
+NACARA too left many Guatemalans and Salvadorans in limbo, as it
+favored Cuban and Nicaraguan petitioners and continued to be
+plagued with backlogs. In 2001, the INS estimated that it could take
+“up to 20 years” to process the pending, almost three hundred
+thousand Central American applications.7 Between 1999 and 2003,
+the approval rate for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum applicants
+hovered between 7 percent and 11 percent, not much higher than
+the low rate in the 1980s that had led to the ABC lawsuit. For
+applicants from other countries, the rate was 33 percent to 44
+percent.8 Salvadorans and Guatemalans, in the words of Cecilia
+Menjívar and Leisy Abrego, “have faced being granted only
+temporary permits, seemingly interminable applications, reapplications, long waiting times for their applications to be
+processed, and the threat of imminent deportation.” Neither fully
+legal nor illegal, they exist in a state of “permanent temporariness”
+or “liminal legality.”9
+Menjívar describes the experiences of many undocumented
+Central American immigrants:
+Occasionally they are granted temporary relief from
+deportation with multiple and confusing deadlines for
+applications and renewals of permits and convoluted
+application procedures (e.g., fees, forms, photos, fingerprints,
+proofs of residence, and innumerable caveats and conditions).
+Indeed, so much work is involved in preparing these
+applications and information is so difficult to obtain that a
+veritable industry has developed among document preparers,
+notaries, and other entrepreneurs (some of whom are not
+particularly well qualified) to fulfill the needs of Central
+
+Americans applying for the different dispensations. This
+situation creates enormous anxiety, as each deadline
+accentuates these immigrants’ precarious situation, which for
+many has gone on for over two decades.10
+Immigration law revisions have continued the pattern of creating
+new ways of punishing illegality, while concomitantly creating
+sometimes unexpected and apparently arbitrary new avenues for
+legalization. A new Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans
+(2001) and Haitians (2011) offered undocumented people from
+those countries a temporary respite, but with the knowledge that it
+could just as easily be rescinded in the future. President Obama’s
+June 2012 announcement of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
+(DACA) granted some youth a similar two-year reprieve during
+which they could receive temporary documents, including
+permission to work, but with no prediction about what their status
+would be at the end of those two years.
+Many migrants hope that someday a legal avenue will be opened
+for them to regularize their status, as occurred in 1986, and do
+everything possible to improve their chances for obtaining legal
+status if and when the opportunity arises. Thus, once in the United
+States, they are constantly torn between laws they feel they have no
+choice but to violate (for instance, laws that prohibit them from
+working) and a desire to prove themselves as law abiding and
+deserving of legal status.
+For this reason, many thousands of undocumented immigrants
+apply for and receive Individual Taxpayer ID Numbers (ITINs) that
+allow them to file income tax returns each year. They readily appear
+in court when cited for traffic violations or the more serious charge
+of driving without a license. Yet they continue to work and drive
+without official authorization to do so.
+SOCIAL SERVICES
+The social service network is often a maze of complexity even for
+citizens and contributes to the arbitrariness that undocumented
+
+status entails. Undocumented immigrants are eligible for some types
+of benefits, while both the undocumented and temporary
+immigrants with legal documents are restricted from others. Since
+1996, even legal permanent residents are excluded from many
+services. Disentangling what an immigrant is legally eligible for is a
+complex task. Furthermore, as people often live in mixed-status
+families, different services may be available to different members.
+Regulations for welfare, Medicaid, and other types of social services
+have struggled to parse the categories and decide exactly what
+“lawfully present” means when determining eligibility. Several
+pages of the 2011 edition of the United States Code are needed to
+explain the various legal statuses and determine which qualify a
+person for different types of benefits.11
+The complexity reveals both the legal and moral difficulty of
+identifying individuals by status and the confusing questions that
+undocumented immigrants face. Why does one government agency
+want to help them, while another wants to harm them? Can they be
+punished for accepting services that are offered to them?
+To further confuse the issue, most social service providers are
+trained and eager to make sure that people obtain access to the
+services for which they are eligible. Undocumented immigrants may
+be overwhelmed with phone calls and urgings to accept certain
+benefits, while finding it impossible to access others that are even
+more urgently needed. (Of course, this is true for citizens as well.)
+The patchwork reflects competing interests in the passage of laws
+and the interests of agencies, but, like status itself, presents a
+bewildering panorama to those in need.
+Immigrants may learn that pregnant women are eligible for the
+federal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food supplementation
+program, but not for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
+(SNAP). One (US-born) child might be eligible for SNAP, while
+another (foreign-born) child in the same family is not.
+Undocumented children can go to Head Start and to public schools,
+but their eligibility for public higher education varies by state. The
+Affordable Care Act explicitly excludes the undocumented from
+
+eligibility, but hospital emergency rooms are still required to
+provide care for them. They are not eligible for publicly funded
+housing, but can live in such housing if it’s shared with a qualified
+family member who is not undocumented.
+Because they are ineligible for most publicly funded social
+services, and because they are generally reluctant to claim even
+those services for which they may be eligible, the undocumented
+tend to place fewer costs on the public coffers than would be
+expected, given their low incomes. In a careful study of the fiscal
+impact of undocumented immigration, the Center for Immigration
+Studies concluded that “the primary reason they create a fiscal
+deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and
+tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social
+services.”12
+FRAUDULENT DOCUMENTS
+Almost all people who are undocumented in fact possess a spectrum
+of valid and fraudulent papers. They may hold a birth certificate,
+driver’s license, or passport from their home country, but lack a visa
+authorizing their presence in the United States or perhaps hold an
+expired visa.
+There are many degrees of fraudulence and many methods for
+trying to gain access to the documents people need for everyday life.
+One of the first documents an undocumented immigrant needs upon
+arrival in the United States is a Social Security card. A thriving
+underground business in false (and often poorly made) Social
+Security cards preys on the newly arrived. For a few hundred
+dollars, the forgers simply place the immigrant’s name—or a false
+name—along with a random number on a card designed to
+approximate an actual card.
+Since the E-Verify program has become more common in the past
+decade, more undocumented people are finding that they need a
+Social Security number with a correctly matched name. Sometimes,
+an immigrant can borrow a name and number from a friend or
+
+relative. Or, for a much higher fee, a forger will sell an immigrant
+an actual person’s name and Social Security number.
+Puerto Rico has been an especially lucrative source for valid birth
+certificates and Social Security numbers with Spanish names. A
+person might sell his own documents, those of a child or elder who
+is not working, or even those of a person who has died. Or the
+documents could be stolen. The buyer—often an undocumented
+immigrant in the continental United States—most often just wants a
+valid Social Security number that matches the name on the card so
+that he or she can work. In some cases, though, the fraud moves
+into more aggressive theft, where a person will use the documents
+to apply for social services that are available only to citizens or to
+obtain tax refunds, loans, or credit in the other person’s name.13
+In 2010, the Puerto Rican government responded to the situation
+by invalidating all Puerto Rican birth certificates and requiring
+everyone born in Puerto Rico to obtain a new, more secure
+document. Many were skeptical that this would end the problem.
+One Puerto Rican citizen explained drily, “Money buys everything. .
+. . Anyone will do anything for money.”14
+There’s a big difference between using a false number and
+identity theft. In a case of identity theft, an individual attempts to
+access someone’s bank account, credit card, or other property to
+benefit from it. Using a false Social Security number—even if it
+happens to belong to someone else—does not give you access to
+anything that actually belongs to that person. Rather, when an
+employer pays payroll taxes using the false number, the IRS flags
+the discrepancy and simply transfers the Social Security payments
+into its Earnings Suspense File.15 The person to whom the number
+actually belongs is not affected in any way. In recognition of the
+ubiquity—and the harmlessness—of the use of false Social Security
+numbers, the Obama administration clarified that using a false
+Social Security number would not count against a young person
+applying for DACA.
+Marrying for documents is another strategy that ranges from
+legal to illegal, with myriad shades of gray in between. Some
+
+marriages may be arranged as financial transactions between
+strangers solely in hopes of obtaining documents. This practice is
+illegal, and ICE prosecutes people who obtain legal residency
+through this kind of arranged marriage. But not all marriages of
+convenience are fraudulent. No laws govern the amount of love a
+person must feel in order to marry; most people who marry do so
+for a spectrum of reasons ranging from the emotional to the
+extremely practical. There is nothing illegal about marrying for
+security, money, prestige, or power.
+DRIVING
+During the 1980s and ’90s, most states had no rules preventing the
+undocumented from obtaining a driver’s license and driving legally.
+This changed after 9/11, when suddenly driver’s licenses were
+turned into a matter of national security. Millions of people who
+had been driving legally, with legitimate licenses, found that driving
+had become illegal.
+The REAL ID Act of 2005, passed as part of the recommendations
+made by the 9/11 Commission, attempted to set a national standard
+for driver’s license issuance. Among other things, the act required a
+birth certificate or passport with a visa that demonstrated that the
+person was in the country legally. The license would then serve as
+an electronically readable, federally approved identification card.
+The Department of Homeland Security would set the standard and
+approve the cards, essentially turning the state-issued driver’s
+license into a national identity card.
+The act was slated to go into full effect in 2008, but full
+implementation was postponed several times. By the end of 2012,
+most states were in compliance. Once fully implemented, a driver’s
+license from a state not in compliance would not be considered valid
+identification for travel, opening a bank account, applying for
+benefits or Social Security, or entry into federal buildings.
+Driving is such a basic necessity for adult life in most of the
+United States that numerous methods have emerged for
+undocumented immigrants to obtain a license. Like a Social Security
+
+card, a false driver’s license can be purchased. A new industry
+mushroomed, making false driver’s licenses. Some people used
+licenses from their own countries—legal or falsified. Others traveled
+to New Mexico or Washington State—two states that still allowed
+the undocumented to obtain a license—and claimed residence there.
+In Utah, the legislature created a “driver privilege card” in 2005
+for those unable to obtain a driver’s license because they had no
+Social Security card. The privilege card cannot serve as official
+identification, but it does certify that the holder has passed a driving
+test and entitles him or her to drive. Other states, concerned with
+the safety problems posed by the proliferation of unlicensed drivers,
+experimented with other kinds of driving permits that would evade
+the REAL ID Act. Some allowed noncitizens to use a license from
+their own country for a limited period of time while in the United
+States.
+Even immigrants legally authorized to work are not always able
+to obtain the license they need. Part of the problem is legislators’
+simple ignorance of the amazing complexity of immigration law and
+status. The state of Texas, for example, passed legislation in 2007
+requiring that, in order to obtain a commercial driver’s license, an
+applicant must be a citizen, a legal permanent resident, an asylee, or
+a refugee, or else provide an I-94 form proving that they crossed the
+border legally. But there are many immigrants who are legally
+present and have work authorization but don’t fit into those
+categories.
+A large number of Central Americans in Texas have Temporary
+Protected Status, which authorizes their continued presence and
+allows them to work even if they were formerly undocumented.
+Other undocumented immigrants may have received authorization
+to work while they pursue an asylum case. These statuses do not,
+however, grant them a permanent status like resident, asylee, or
+refugee. Nor do they retroactively create an I-94 form making their
+initial entry legal. They give recipients other legal documentation.
+When the legislature passed the Transportation Code, however, it
+failed to take these other categories into account and thus made it
+
+impossible for these state residents to obtain or keep their
+licenses.16
+In the case of the driver’s license, a fraudulent document is not
+generally of much use. Police are trained and motivated to
+recognize a fake license, unlike employers, who are usually content
+to do the minimal inspection required by law. Many undocumented
+immigrants simply drive without one. The consequences, like so
+much about immigration law and enforcement, are arbitrary.
+Depending on the state, or even the community within a state, an
+undocumented, unlicensed driver who is stopped by police might
+receive warning or a small fine, or might lose his or her car or be
+imprisoned and deported. If a jurisdiction is participating in a
+federal program like ICE 287(g) or Secure Communities, which
+requires officials to share data on those arrested with ICE, a routine
+court appearance might end in incarceration and deportation. In
+2010, the New York Times estimated that 4.5 million undocumented
+people were driving, mostly without licenses. That year, some thirty
+thousand of those stopped for common traffic violations—or even
+being involved in an accident in which they were not at fault—were
+deported.17
+Some law enforcement agents support the hard-line position.
+Republican state senator Chip Rogers of Georgia took a get-tough
+attitude in promoting the draconian driving laws in that state.
+“There are certain things you can’t do in the state of Georgia if you
+are an illegal immigrant,” he said proudly. “One of them is, you
+can’t drive.”18 In Los Angeles, however, the police chief joined
+Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the police commission in
+overturning a rule impounding the car of anyone found driving
+without a license. The police union protested vociferously, but the
+conservative city attorney backed the change.19
+Law enforcement agencies have frequently had very mixed
+reactions to federal efforts to toughen immigration policies. In
+Framingham, Massachusetts, the police pulled out of the 287(g)
+Program two years after adopting it. The police chief, Steven Carl,
+“said he signed up two years ago exclusively to tap into federal
+
+databases to investigate crime, and balked when federal officials
+wanted him to detain immigrants, transport them and even testify in
+immigration court. Carl said that could hurt the police’s relationship
+in the community, where 26 percent are immigrants. ‘It doesn’t
+benefit the police department to engage in deportation and
+immigration enforcement,’” he explained.20
+In contrast, when Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick
+announced his intention to withdraw Massachusetts from the federal
+Secure Communities program, the chief of police of Milford, a town
+not far from Framingham and, like the latter, home to large
+numbers of immigrants, had the opposite reaction. “It takes an
+important tool away from police officers, who are trying to perform
+a difficult job,” the police chief said. “We need to make it clear to
+(people) who are here improperly, and those who are engaged in
+employing them, that we need to take this issue seriously.”21
+WHAT EXACTLY IS ILLEGAL?
+It’s illegal to cross the border without inspection and/or without
+approval from US immigration authorities. As we’ve seen above,
+about half of the undocumented population entered the country
+illegally (as opposed to entering with inspection and permission, but
+overstaying or violating the terms of their visas). Entering the
+country illegally is a crime, and a person who does so can be subject
+to up to six months in prison. Entering the country again after being
+deported is a more serious crime—a felony—punishable by up to
+two years in prison. Simply being in the country without
+authorization, though, is not in itself a crime but rather a civil
+violation, remedied by removal (either voluntary departure or
+deportation) rather than a criminal penalty. Unlawful presence
+becomes a criminal offense only “when an alien is found in the
+United States after having been formally removed or after departing
+the US while a removal order was outstanding.”22
+Even when a would-be immigrant is apprehended at the time of
+unlawful entry, neither criminal nor civil immigration charges have
+generally been pressed. Because the standards for criminal
+
+prosecution are much higher than for immigration proceedings, the
+government has every incentive to keep immigration violations out
+of the criminal court system. The immigration court system has a
+backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases, which means that an
+immigrant sent into that system will likely be subject to a lengthy—
+and expensive—detention.
+Many immigrants who are apprehended are offered voluntary
+departure or voluntary return, meaning that the person leaves the
+country without being officially deported. There is no order of
+removal, but the person tacitly admits to removability, that is, to
+being present without authorization. Under voluntary departure, the
+person is given a time limit and permitted to arrange his or her own
+departure. Mexicans apprehended at the border are usually granted
+voluntary removal, which means that they are bused back to the
+border and deposited on the Mexican side.23 For many immigrants,
+especially those who have little likelihood of winning an
+immigration case, voluntary departure is the preferred route,
+although many who depart voluntarily soon attempt to reenter.
+Immigrants apprehended in the interior or those apprehended at
+the border who do not accept voluntary departure, who are accused
+of other crimes or infractions, or who are flagged for other reasons
+may instead be subject to formal (involuntary) removal or
+deportation. In this case, they must appear before a judge who
+orders their deportation.24 Those who are removed are not deemed
+guilty of any crime, and removal is not considered a punishment.
+Once a person is formally removed, however, attempted reentry
+becomes a felony, and unlawful presence too becomes criminalized.
+For most of the twentieth century, voluntary departures—mostly
+by people apprehended by the Border Patrol and returned (usually
+to Mexico) without an official deportation order—were far more
+numerous than removals. Since 2006, the number of voluntary
+departures has plummeted, from over a million a year down to only
+323,000 in 2011, while the number of removals (mostly people
+apprehended in the interior) has risen steadily, surpassing 50,000 a
+
+year for the first time in 1995 and then rising quickly to almost
+400,000 a year since President Obama was elected in 2008.25
+Some attribute the decline in border apprehensions to increased
+enforcement. The Border Patrol, they point out, grew from nine
+thousand agents in 2001 to twenty thousand by the end of 2009,
+and twenty-one thousand by 2012, while the Customs and Border
+Protection budget rose from about $6 billion in 2004 to about $11
+billion in 2009. (The Border Patrol accounted for about $1.4 billion
+of that.) The border wall grew and employed increasingly
+sophisticated technology. The purpose of all this so-called
+“enforcement” was to discourage potential border crossers from
+even trying. Maybe it was working, some argued. Others, though,
+attribute the decline to the economic downturn in the United States,
+arguing that fewer people are trying to cross the border, as demand
+for their labor has declined.26
+Meanwhile, the number apprehended by ICE Enforcement and
+Removal Operations inside the country skyrocketed, principally as
+the result of the Obama administration’s emphasis on programs for
+interior enforcement.27 This meant that many more people with
+jobs, lives, and community ties in the United States were being
+uprooted and deported. Through 2005, only about 5 percent of
+Mexicans deported had been in the United States for over a year. In
+2010, two years into President Obama’s first term, over a quarter of
+those deported had been in the United States for over a year; in
+2011, it was almost half.28 Meanwhile, in 2010, ICE requested $5.5
+billion in discretionary funds for the following year, the majority of
+which was designated for detention and deportation.29 Enforcing
+illegality was an expensive operation.
+WHO BENEFITS FROM ILLEGALITY?
+Although illegality resides inherently in the realm of law, it has
+significant economic implications, as discussed in the next two
+chapters. Employers of low-wage labor benefit from the illegal
+status of some workers, as do consumers of low-cost goods and
+services. State and local budgets face costs that result from the
+
+economic marginalization of the undocumented, while federal
+programs like Social Security benefit handsomely from payments
+into the system by undocumented workers who will never be
+eligible for benefits.
+Illegality also has significant benefits for the prison system, in
+particular, the new and mushrooming private prison system.
+Immigration enforcement creates jobs in the prison industry, which
+in 2011 employed eight hundred thousand people and cost some
+$74 billion a year.30
+But beyond the economic costs and benefits to different sectors of
+society, there are other, intangible benefits. Politicians and talkshow hosts have zeroed in on the issue to whip up audiences and
+support.
+Anti-immigrant
+sentiment
+and,
+especially,
+the
+demonization of the undocumented can bring votes and attention.
+What Leo Chavez calls the “Latino threat narrative” overlaps with
+anti-undocumented sentiment, as “Mexican immigration, the
+Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in
+general [came] to be perceived as a national security threat” in the
+1990s.31 The threat narrative, Chavez explains, has been expressed
+so repeatedly that its components have become culturally accepted.
+Mexican immigrants are “illegal aliens” or criminals, the narrative
+suggests. They want to create a “Quebec” (i.e., a culturally and
+linguistically distinct region), invade the country, or reconquer the
+Southwest. They refuse to learn English or assimilate, procreate too
+rapidly, and threaten national security.32
+In addition to attracting votes or increasing ratings, the Latino
+threat narrative serves the more subtle purpose of channeling
+national anxieties about social inequality; environmental crisis;
+economic downturn; lack of access to jobs, housing, health care, and
+education; deteriorating social services; and other real issues facing
+the US population away from their real causes. Those who benefit
+from the status quo would rather have people blame immigrants
+than fight for real social and economic change.
+DETENTION
+
+According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the detention of
+immigrants has reached “crisis proportions.” “Over the last 15 years,
+the detention system more than quintupled in size, growing from
+less than 6,300 beds in 1996 to the current capacity of 33,400 beds.
+In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held 363,000
+immigrants in detention in over 250 facilities across the country.”33
+Meanwhile, ICE’s detention operations budget jumped from $864
+million in 2005 to over $2 billion in 2012.34 According to Amnesty
+International, the use of detention for immigration violations
+contradicts international rights law against arbitrary detention.
+“Everyone has the right to liberty, freedom of movement, and the
+right not to be arbitrarily detained,” Amnesty explained.35
+Immigrant detention sends people into a Kafkaesque netherworld.
+Immigration court is a separate entity from the criminal justice
+system; it is an administrative court. This means that the whole
+body of law designed to protect those accused of crimes and
+guarantee them a fair trial does not apply. (An immigrant accused of
+a crime does receive those rights in criminal court, however.) In the
+immigration detention system, prisoners have few rights and often
+lack the means to find out what rights they do have or make use of
+these rights. For example, immigrants have the right to be
+represented by an attorney, but not at public expense. Many
+detainees don’t know that they have the right to representation,
+don’t know how to obtain representation, and/or can’t afford it. For
+those who do go through deportation hearings, 84 percent lack
+representation.36
+Some detained migrants will choose voluntary departure because
+it leaves their names clear for a legal entry sometime in the future.
+Many are unaware of legal provisions that might authorize them to
+remain in the country and have no way to find out about them,
+since they have no way to obtain legal counsel. Some choose
+voluntary departure to escape lengthy detention, even if they are
+convinced that their case to stay could be won if they were to finally
+obtain a hearing. Unlike those detained on criminal charges,
+immigrants have generally been ineligible to be released on bail.37
+
+If they do not choose (or are not offered) voluntary departure,
+detainees have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to
+determine whether they can obtain legal permission to remain in
+the country. Some detainees may be eligible for political asylum;
+others, for parole or prosecutorial discretion based on the lack of a
+criminal record, family relationships to citizens or permanent
+residents, hardship that would be caused to citizens or permanent
+residents (e.g., to their children who are citizens) by their removal,
+or other reasons. But without a lawyer to argue their case,
+immigrant detainees may have no idea what kinds of arguments
+could work in their favor.
+Moreover, the deportation procedures for those who reject
+voluntary departure are often quite lengthy. While the proceedings
+crawl along, the petitioner remains in detention. A study by
+Amnesty International found that “immigrants and asylum seekers
+may be detained for months or even years as they go through
+deportation procedures that will determine whether or not they are
+eligible to remain in the United States.” The average was ten
+months, but some individuals remained in detention for up to four
+years before a decision was reached.38 If the judge who hears the
+case rules against them, they will be deported and barred from legal
+reentry, usually for ten years.
+A new twist in this system emerged at the border in 2005 with
+Operation Streamline, described in the introduction, which takes
+migrants caught at the border out of the civil immigration system
+and lodges criminal border-crossing charges against them. After a
+criminal conviction, they are generally sentenced to time served and
+returned to ICE for civil removal procedures. The program has been
+expanded along the border, so that by 2012 every border sector
+participated, with some referring all of those apprehended for
+criminal prosecution. Tens of thousands of migrants who would
+have been returned to Mexico are now instead detained, tried, and
+incarcerated at government expense. While Streamline aims to rush
+dozens of cases through each court every day, the size of the
+program—some fifty-five thousand prosecutions a year—still means
+
+that the government requires a large amount of short-term space for
+incarceration.39
+Since 2005, the federal government has spent $5.5 billion on
+private prison contracts for criminal immigration cases, over $1.4
+billion in 2011 alone.40 At the end of 2011 there were sixty-three
+thousand Streamline cases in pretrial detention and twenty-five
+thousand convicted and incarcerated.41 District Court Judge Sam
+Sparks of the Western District of Texas protested that “[t]he
+expenses of prosecuting illegal entry and reentry cases (rather than
+deportation) on aliens without any significant criminal record is
+simply mind boggling. The US Attorney’s policy of prosecuting all
+aliens presents a cost to the American taxpayer that is neither
+meritorious nor reasonable.”42
+Streamline and the overall increase of federal prosecution of
+immigration violations turned immigration cases into the top federal
+crime by 2011.43 Immigration is a highly racialized crime: as
+immigration charges began to take up more and more of the federal
+criminal caseload, it meant the courts were prosecuting and
+convicting more and more Latinos. Hispanics made up more than
+half of those arrested on federal charges in 2011.44
+Streamline and other criminal prosecutions account for only a
+fraction of immigration arrests. Most of the 391,953 immigrants
+removed were apprehended in the interior through ICE enforcement
+and apprehension operations, and their removal was ordered by
+immigration judges without any involvement of the criminal justice
+system. Some of those arrested by ICE enforcement operations inside
+the country, though, come into ICE custody with current or prior
+criminal charges.
+The intersection of criminal law with civil immigration law
+creates a web of complexity in which many immigrants and their
+attorneys become entangled. Increasingly, criminal charges are
+resolved through plea bargains rather than contested in court. In a
+plea bargain, the accused agrees to plead guilty to a lesser but still
+criminal charge in exchange for receiving a lighter sentence,
+frequently a suspended sentence or probation rather than jail time.
+
+Strikingly, more than 96 percent of those arrested on federal charges
+pled guilty in 2011.45
+For an immigrant, though, a criminal conviction on even a minor
+charge can render him or her deportable. Legal permanent residents
+(green card holders) may also find themselves in immigration
+detention if they are convicted of a crime. Or if they are discovered
+by immigration authorities to have previously been convicted of a
+crime that is a deportable offense. Or even if they are discovered to
+have been convicted of a crime that was not a deportable offense at
+the time, but later became one. Even decades-old minor drugpossession convictions have become grounds for deportation.
+The public defenders that most poor immigrants rely on in
+criminal cases generally have little knowledge of immigration law or
+the possible implications of a guilty plea. One attorney told the
+American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA): “On the one
+hand . . . the immigration matter should not affect the criminal case,
+and, from an intellectual purity standpoint, that makes a lot of
+sense. But [for the client], that makes no sense at all. It’s part of
+their circumstances. . . . I have to be aware of that, and I need to
+give advice based upon what their circumstances are.” Public
+defenders, AILA explained, rarely have the time or resources to
+research the immigration implications of their advice to their
+clients. Most are juggling twice as many cases as are allowed by the
+American Bar Association. Less than a third worked with
+immigration attorneys in their cases involving immigrants, even
+though their decisions could directly affect their clients’
+immigration status.46
+RAMPING UP THE NUMBERS
+In early 2010, James Chaparro, director of ICE Detention and
+Removal Operations (DRO), wrote an internal memo—later
+obtained by the Washington Post—noting that while the number of
+removals of criminals so far that year had been satisfactory, the
+agency’s numbers in removing “non-criminal aliens” were too low.
+“As of February 15, 2010, DRO removed or returned 60,397 non-
+
+criminal aliens which is an average of 437 removals/returns per
+day. The current non-criminal removal rate projections will result in
+159,740 removals at the close of the fiscal year. Coupling this with
+the projections in criminal removals only gives us a total of just over
+310,000 overall removals—well under the Agency’s goal of
+400,000.” For the first time, the agency had explicitly acknowledged
+having an established target.47
+Chaparro insisted that field agents increase the average daily
+population in ICE detention facilities to 32,600 and “[i]ncrease the
+number of Tier One Non-Criminal Fugitive alien arrests along with
+Tier Two arrests (Re-Entry/Reinstatement) in every field office.” He
+recommended that each office process thirty to sixty noncriminal
+cases per day in a “surge” aimed at meeting deportation quotas.48
+Basically, the memo instructed ICE officers to increase the detention
+and deportation of noncriminals and of “criminals” whose only
+offense was reentry into the country, in the interest of meeting the
+annual deportation goal.49
+Another program that helped ICE increase its numbers in the
+Obama years was Secure Communities. Introduced by the Bush
+administration and piloted in a number of cities around the country
+in late 2008, Secure Communities requires law enforcement
+agencies in participating jurisdictions to automatically share with
+ICE the fingerprints of anybody arrested. If ICE flags the individual
+as potentially deportable, the agency issues a detainer. When the
+person is released, he or she is turned over to ICE. The Obama
+administration initially stated that participation was voluntary, but
+later announced that the program would be required nationwide by
+2013. Eighty-three percent of those who come into ICE custody
+through Secure Communities are sent to ICE detention centers.
+Ninety-three percent are Latino.
+Promoters touted the program as a way to “remove dangerous
+criminals from your community.”50 However, only about half of
+those deported through Secure Communities fit the profile of a
+criminal—that is, had been convicted of a crime other than a traffic
+or immigration violation. The only violation for 45 percent of those
+
+deported was being “present without admission”—that is, being
+undocumented. Only half of those deported received a hearing
+before an immigration judge to determine their deportability. The
+other half were simply deported under ICE administrative
+procedures or pressured into taking voluntary departure. By late
+2011, 226,694 immigrants had come into ICE custody through
+Secure Communities.51
+DETENTION, INC.
+In addition to ICE itself, there are powerful interests supporting the
+detention industry, ranging from private prison companies to
+elected officials who see prisons as a boost to local economies. The
+Immigration and Naturalization Service (precursor to today’s ICE)
+started to contract out its detainees to private prisons in the early
+1980s when the detention system started to exceed its capacity of
+beds. By 1989, the agency was holding about two thousand people a
+day, with five hundred in private facilities.52 Over the past three
+decades, immigration violations served as a reliably increasing
+source of revenue for private prisons.53 As ICE detention rates
+doubled to the current rate of four hundred thousand a year in the
+first decade of the twenty-first century, the proportion of
+immigration detainees held in privately run detention facilities also
+rose, from one-quarter to one-half.54 Private prisons specialize
+disproportionately in detaining immigrants, who tend to be young,
+healthy, and nonviolent, and therefore among the cheapest and the
+most profitable inmates to house.55
+The first private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of
+America (CCA, founded in 1983), was poised to benefit from and
+promote the increases in criminal sentencing and immigrant
+detention in the 1990s. According to Travis Pratt, professor of
+criminology at Arizona State University, who studied the private
+prison industry’s lobbying campaigns, “The private prisons industry
+has a very, very heavy lobby in most states and the federal
+government to increase sanctions for a number of offenses. They’ve
+
+been doing this for a very long time. It’s a multi-million-dollar
+lobbying effort. . . . And they’ve been exceptionally successful—
+longer sentences for more types of offenses means more inmates,
+more inmates means they have to be housed somewhere, which
+translates to greater profits for that industry. They have a very clear
+agenda there, and they’ve been unapologetic about it. They haven’t
+hidden that at all.”56 Between 2002 and 2012, private prison
+companies had spent over $45 million in campaign contributions
+and lobbying.57
+The GEO Group (founded in 1984) currently runs 109 facilities in
+the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa,
+with 75,000 beds in the United States; CCA has 60 in the United
+States that can hold 90,000 inmates, and Management and Training
+Corporation (MTC), founded in 1987, runs 22 prisons in the United
+States with 29,500 beds.58 CCA is the fifth-largest corrections
+system in the country, following the federal government and three
+states.59 In 2010, GEO and CCA together earned revenues of over
+$2.9 billion.60 They have spent millions of dollars lobbying over the
+past decade.61
+The private prison industry has a vested interest in increasing
+both the criminalization of immigrants and the drug wars that
+criminalize African Americans. “Our growth is generally dependent
+upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage
+new correctional and detention facilities,” CCA explained to its
+shareholders. “The demand for our facilities and services could be
+adversely affected by . . . the decriminalization of certain activities
+that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” In particular,
+CCA warned, “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled
+substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons
+arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing
+demand for correctional facilities to house them.”62 Company
+officials were optimistic, though, that ICE would continue to supply
+“a significant portion of our revenues.” 63
+The Justice Policy Institute concluded in 2011 that “[w]hile
+private prison companies may try to present themselves as just
+
+meeting existing ‘demand’ for prison beds and responding to current
+‘market’ conditions, in fact they have worked hard over the past
+decade to create markets for their product. As revenues of private
+prison companies have grown over the past decade, the companies
+have had more resources with which to build political power, and
+they have used this power to promote policies that lead to higher
+rates of incarceration.”64
+One avenue they have used is the American Legislative Exchange
+Council (ALEC), a “conservative, free-market orientated, limitedgovernment group,” in the words of staff director Michael Hough.65
+Legislators pay $50 a year to join, while companies pay tens of
+thousands of dollars for a seat at the table, giving ALEC a total
+budget of over $6 million a year. ALEC’s main focus is on drafting
+model legislation. Because it does not officially lobby, it doesn’t
+have to disclose its activities. Because it’s a nonprofit, corporations
+can deduct their donations to the organization.66
+“Is it lobbying when private corporations pay money to sit in a
+room with state lawmakers to draft legislation that they then
+introduce back home? [ALEC senior director of policy Michael]
+Bowman, a former lobbyist, says, ‘No, because we’re not advocating
+any positions. We don’t tell members to take these bills. We just
+expose best practices. All we’re really doing is developing policies
+that are in model bill form.’”67
+At an ALEC meeting in late 2009, Arizona senator Russell Pearce
+first presented his proposal for what became the state’s radical antiimmigrant Senate Bill 1070, and a draft for the model legislation
+was outlined. S.B. 1070 required immigrants to carry proof of their
+documentation at all times and required local law enforcement
+officials to detain immigrants unable to produce such documents.
+After it became law in April 2010, S.B. 1070 became the prototype
+for anti-immigrant legislation passed in Georgia, Alabama, Indiana,
+South Carolina, and Utah in the following years.
+Two representatives of CCA, which clearly stood to benefit from
+the bill, sat at the table where the text was agreed upon. “Asked if
+the private companies usually get to write model bills for the
+
+legislators, Hough said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way it’s set up. It’s a publicprivate partnership. We believe both sides, businesses and
+lawmakers should be at the same table, together.’” 68
+ALEC and CCA influence was evident not only in the shaping of
+the legislation, but in the response among legislators: “As soon as
+Pearce’s bill hit the Arizona statehouse floor in January . . . thirtysix co-sponsors jumped on, a number almost unheard of in the
+capitol. . . . Two-thirds of them either went to that December
+meeting or are ALEC members.” Furthermore, a report continued,
+“thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six
+months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies—Corrections
+Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and
+The Geo Group.” Two of Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s top advisers
+were former lobbyists for private prison companies.69 Referring to
+the passage of S.B. 1070, the president of GEO Group stated, “I can
+only believe the opportunities at the federal level are going to
+continue apace as a result of what’s happening. Those people
+coming across the border and getting caught are going to have to be
+detained and that for me, at least I think, there’s going to be
+enhanced opportunities for what we do.”70 Indeed, CCA and GEO
+Group doubled their revenues from the immigration detention
+business between 2005 and 2012.71
+Depressed communities can see private prisons as engines of
+economic opportunity. One such area is Pinal County, Arizona. CCA
+is the largest employer in the county, where five facilities hold up to
+three thousand detainees a day.72 “The expanding prison
+populations have allowed small towns to carry budget surpluses in a
+state that has otherwise been pummeled by the recession,” explains
+journalist Chris Kirkham. “Prison communities have largely avoided
+the dire economic straits suffered by Arizona communities in every
+direction, where the housing bust and subsequent foreclosure crisis
+have ravaged local government coffers.”
+The Pinal County town of Florence, with a population of 7,800,
+also houses 17,000 detainees. Flush with state revenues from the
+prison industry—$5.2 million in 2011—the town has been able to
+
+offer services and build infrastructure like skate parks, dog parks,
+and sports fields. Deputy town manager Jess Knudson bragged that
+Florence was “one of the few towns in Arizona that has been able to
+stay in the black with this recession.” For Florence, as well as
+neighboring Eloy and other Arizona communities, “boosting the
+prison population has emerged as a primary economic development
+strategy.” The county too has a financial incentive—$2 per day per
+prisoner, which adds up to over a million dollars a year—and
+County Sheriff Paul Babeu has been a champion for ramped-up
+immigrant detentions.73
+In rural Irwin County in Georgia, the privately run Irwin
+Detention Center was the county’s top employer. As the prison
+population dwindled in 2009, the county teamed up with the
+company that ran the prison to seek a contract with ICE.
+Paradoxically, said a report in the Nation, “even as Georgia and
+Alabama passed harsh new immigration laws last year designed to
+keep out undocumented immigrants . . . politicians from both states
+were lobbying hard to bring immigrant detainees in. ICE succumbed
+to the pressure, sending hundreds of detainees to the financially
+unstable facility in Georgia that promised to detain immigrants
+cheaply.”74
+CONCLUSION
+Undocumented people face a veneer of ordinary life undergirded by
+permanent uncertainty. In the film El Norte, Nacha, a more seasoned
+undocumented Mexican woman, tries to convince Rosa, a newly
+arrived Guatemalan, to sign up for English classes, free and offered
+by the government. Rosa worries that the school will turn her in to
+immigration, and Nacha reassures her that it won’t. “Don’t try to
+understand the gringos,” she laughs. “It will drive you crazy.” Since
+the situation and the policies are essentially incomprehensible, the
+best an undocumented person can do is try to survive day by day
+and hope for the best.
+
+CHAPTER 5
+
+Working (Part 1)
+You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane
+All they will call you will be “deportees”. . .
+Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
+Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
+—“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee),” 1948
+Words by Woody Guthrie; music by Martin Hoffman1
+As we have seen, work has been central to the Mexican experience
+in the United States since the nineteenth century, and Mexican
+workers have been critical to the growth of the US economy. Prior
+to 1965, racism and the law—including government-run guestworker programs like the Bracero Program—enabled and justified
+unequal treatment for Mexican workers.
+After 1965, when the Bracero Program ended and numerical
+restrictions were placed on Mexican immigration, new systems and
+rationales were needed to maintain the supply of cheap Mexican
+labor. Undocumentedness took on a new importance in the labor
+market, replacing earlier methods of legally compartmentalizing
+Mexican labor. The undocumented were channeled into the same
+types of jobs that Mexicans had long occupied. Reflecting the new
+significance of undocumentedness, the 1986 Immigration Reform
+and Control Act (IRCA) was both the first legislative attempt in the
+country’s history to address this issue and the first immigration
+legislation to specifically address the issue of work, making it illegal
+for employers to hire workers who lacked documents.
+At first glance, this may seem paradoxical. If undocumented
+Mexican labor was so necessary, why make it illegal? But IRCA
+made it illegal with a large wink. Employers were required to obtain
+proof of eligibility to work from new hires, but they were not
+required to evaluate the documents they were shown. They could be
+punished for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, but usually
+only received a small fine. IRCA, it turned out, was more for show
+
+than for changing the country’s labor structure. It was a bumbling
+intervention that succeeded in making migrant workers more
+vulnerable, while actually contributing to increasing the numbers of
+the undocumented.
+Though they comprise a small proportion of the overall
+workforce (about 5 percent), workers without documents continue
+to occupy crucial niches in the economy.2 This chapter and the next
+will look at how undocumentedness became an important factor in
+the labor market and what kinds of jobs undocumented people fill.
+MAKING WORK ILLEGAL
+Although the 1965 immigration law made it illegal for many
+Mexicans to enter or remain in the United States, it did not
+specifically prohibit undocumented people from working, nor did it
+forbid employers to hire them. The 1952 immigration law known as
+the McCarran-Walter Act had made it illegal to “conceal” or
+“harbor” a person who was undocumented, but not to employ them.
+The law included the so-called “Texas Proviso”—to satisfy Texas
+business interests that depended on undocumented Mexican workers
+—stipulating that employment “shall not be deemed to constitute
+harboring.” Thus, in the words of the Immigration and
+Naturalization Service general counsel, “there was no prohibition at
+all on employment of illegal aliens.”3
+The idea of criminalizing employment gained ground toward the
+end of the century. Senator Peter Rodino introduced the first
+national employer sanctions bill in 1973, but it failed to pass in the
+Senate. In 1986, though, employer sanctions were a key element of
+the new IRCA. Many progressive organizations including the AFLCIO, the NAACP, and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, a
+national coalition of 185 civil rights organizations and the country’s
+“premier coordinating mechanism for civil rights advocacy before
+Congress and the executive branch,” all supported the idea,
+although the Leadership Council was “sharply divided.”4 A century
+earlier, the AFL had openly excluded nonwhites from membership.
+
+Now it joined civil rights organizations in advocating for
+discrimination based on citizenship.
+In 1990, the NAACP reversed its position after an acrimonious
+debate. The AFL-CIO did the same in 2000. Those favoring the
+sanctions argued that citizenship should determine rights. The
+presence and the hiring of undocumented people, they claimed,
+lowered the floor and made it harder for blacks or for American
+workers to obtain decent employment. If it became more difficult
+for the undocumented to work, they reasoned, employers would
+have to improve conditions and employ citizen workers. “If you
+withdraw those sanctions, then you open the door and you flood
+this state with a multitude of undocumented aliens who will take
+the jobs of blacks and other minorities,” one NAACP branch
+president explained.5
+For Latino organizations, though, employer sanctions are a civil
+rights issue, and discrimination based on status is both harmful to
+workers in general and conducive to racial discrimination. (It is
+notable that to be heard in the public sphere, immigrant rights
+advocates must often frame their arguments in terms of racial
+discrimination—showing, for example, that anti-immigrant policies
+contribute to racial profiling—since the idea that humans deserve
+equal rights regardless of citizenship status is practically untenable
+in today’s climate.) Armed with a March 1990 GAO report that
+found a “widespread pattern of discrimination,” especially against
+Latinos and Asians who were thought to look “foreign,” Latino
+organizations launched a campaign to press the Leadership Council
+and the NAACP to withdraw their support for the sanctions. Both
+organizations eventually did so.6
+Opponents reversed the argument about the sanctions protecting
+citizen workers from a feared flood of the undocumented. Instead,
+they insisted that the sanctions themselves lowered the floor for
+everyone. By making a large group of workers more vulnerable to
+exploitation—because they have little recourse under the law—
+sanctions enable employers to lower wages and working conditions,
+with little fear that workers will protest or organize. Thus, the
+
+sanctions paradoxically make undocumented immigrants a more
+desirable workforce, because the sanctions make them more
+desperate and more willing to accept substandard working
+conditions.
+Nicholas De Genova argues that, while billed as “employer”
+sanctions, the system actually targeted the workers, not the
+employers. Potential workers had to purchase false documents, and
+a new industry emerged to produce them. Employers still hired
+them, but now they were triply vulnerable: to the document
+industry, to the employer, and to the possibility of arrest and
+deportation. Rather than punishing employers—who were routinely
+given warnings prior to inspections of their hiring records or subject
+to token fines, at most—the law instead placed new burdens and
+new penalties on the workers.7
+During the Bush administration, workplace raids became the
+major public face of immigration enforcement. These were highprofile operations that let government authorities bask in the public
+impression they created that they were getting tough on
+immigration. The Michael Bianco, Inc., factory in New Bedford,
+Massachusetts, in March 2007; the Agriprocessors plant in Postville,
+Iowa, in May 2008; Swift (at multiple sites) and Smithfield (North
+Carolina) meatpacking plants in December 2006 and January 2007;
+and Howard Industries electronics plant in Laurel, Mississippi
+(August 2008), were the sites of just a few of the many raids.
+Immigration authorities would descend upon the workplace and
+round up workers, arresting hundreds. The largest were the Swift
+raids, where over twelve hundred workers were arrested in a sweep
+of six plants.
+Barack Obama publicly criticized the raids when he was a
+candidate for president, proclaiming during his convention speech
+that “I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated
+from her infant child.” But he also defended enforcement of
+sanctions, continuing to decry the effects when “an employer
+undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.”8 As a senator,
+he pressed for E-Verify, a federal program designed to electronically
+
+detect fraudulent documents and prevent the hiring of the
+undocumented.
+As president, Obama pursued a policy during his first term that
+some have termed “silent raids.” Instead of descending on the
+workplace and making arrests, the new policy used audits. ICE
+would require a business to turn over employment eligibility forms
+for all of its workers. “Since January 2009,” the Wall Street Journal
+reported in May 2012, “the Obama administration has audited at
+least 7,533 employers suspected of hiring illegal labor and imposed
+about $100 million in administrative and criminal fines—more
+audits and penalties than were imposed during the entire George W.
+Bush administration.”9 With the audits, workers are not deported.
+But they do lose their jobs.
+UNDOCUMENTED JOBS
+Most undocumented people work in three specific types of jobs, all
+of which tend to be low wage and low status, offer few if any
+benefits, have difficult or unstable schedules, and offer little job
+security. They may be seasonal or involve night shifts. The work is
+generally heavy, unpleasant, dirty, and even dangerous.
+Agricultural jobs, especially in plantation and other large-scale
+enterprises, have always occupied a special low status and employed
+many legally excluded workers. As large-scale agriculture spread
+through the Southwest in the twentieth century, migrant Mexican
+workers became the primary labor force. Today, 42 percent of
+agricultural workers work as migrants—that is, they follow the
+crops. Seventy-five percent of farm workers were born in Mexico,
+with 2 percent born in Central America and 23 percent in the United
+States.10 Only about 4 percent of undocumented immigrants work in
+agriculture, but they make up somewhere between 25 percent and
+90 percent of all agricultural workers.11 The National Agricultural
+Worker Survey conducted by the US Department of Labor has
+consistently found approximately 50 percent of agricultural workers
+as undocumented over the past twenty years.12 Some analysts, such
+as Rob Williams of the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, believe
+
+that the percentage is even higher, up to 90 percent or more, since
+many people when interviewed will not admit to being
+undocumented.13 The seasonal and back-breaking nature of farm
+work, along with dangerous, often unregulated conditions and low
+pay, make these jobs unattractive to potential workers who have the
+advantage of citizenship. Most farm workers only find work for
+about thirty weeks of the year and earn $12,500 to $15,000
+annually.14
+Second, undocumented people work at jobs that have been insourced or relocated within the United States, as companies attempt
+to resurrect the kinds of conditions they enjoyed before unionization
+and government regulation began to cut into their profits. A major
+example is the meatpacking industry, which closed down unionized
+plants in major urban areas to relocate in the rural Midwest. As
+these jobs became more unattractive—because they were relocated
+to areas where workers did not want to move and because they
+downgraded working conditions and pay—the plants too began to
+recruit heavily among undocumented immigrants.
+Many of these in-sourced jobs differ from agricultural work
+because they are year-round instead of seasonal. Their rise coincides
+with a growing long-term, not seasonal migration of undocumented
+workers and a growing shift from the historic seasonal migration
+areas of California and the Southwest into the Midwest and
+especially the South. Despite poor wages and working conditions,
+many immigrants consider these jobs a step up from agriculture.15
+Another type of in-sourcing has occurred in the construction
+industry, which employs almost one in five undocumented
+immigrants—about a million in the first decade of the twenty-first
+century.16 During the long construction boom between 1970 and
+2006, total employment more than doubled to 7.7 million before
+declining sharply in the housing-led recession.17 The thriving
+construction industry in urban centers like Nevada and post-Katrina
+New Orleans attracted large numbers of undocumented immigrants.
+Third, new job categories in the service sector have emerged in
+recent decades. Fast-food service, newspaper delivery, and
+
+landscaping are three areas with exploding demand for low-paid,
+contingent workers. Changing lifestyles including increased pressure
+on the middle class, rising expectations for consumption, and the
+entry of women into the workforce have created whole new sectors
+of the economy that have relied heavily on undocumented workers.
+Steve Striffler notes, “Latinos are becoming virtually synonymous
+with food preparation and cleanup in our nation’s restaurants. To
+find a meal that has not at some point passed through the hands of
+Mexican immigrants is a difficult task.”18 Chicken, for example,
+boomed in popularity in the 1980s and ’90s, as it was transformed
+from a low-profit farm product that was generally sold whole or in
+parts to a highly processed—and highly profitable—manufactured
+commodity in forms like nuggets and fingers. And who does the
+processing in the new plants that have created our contemporary
+incarnation of chicken? In large numbers, and across the country, it
+is Mexican and Central American workers, many of them
+undocumented.
+AGRICULTURE
+As fruit and vegetable agriculture spread in California at the end of
+the nineteenth century, farmers sought a labor force that would be
+as tractable and exploitable as African slaves had been in the South,
+or even better, one that would be there only when needed for the
+labor-intensive seasons. “A California farm spokesman in 1872
+observed that hiring seasonal Chinese workers who housed
+themselves and then ‘melted away’ when they were not needed
+made them ‘more efficient . . . than negro labor in the South
+[because] it [Chinese labor] is only employed when actually needed,
+and is, therefore, less expensive’ than slavery.”19
+When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 eliminated that option a
+decade later, agriculturalists turned to Mexicans. Seasonal farm
+labor increased rapidly over the course of the century as farming
+centralized. Worker mobility, writes Don Mitchell, was built into the
+system. He quotes Harry Drobish of the California Relief
+Administration, who wrote in 1935 that “the nature of crop
+
+plantings . . . compels labor mobility.”20 However, as Mitchell
+argues, Drobish attributed to “nature” what was actually a result of
+economic structure. Human decisions and policies, not nature,
+underlay the development of California’s agricultural system.21
+A report to Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951
+noted the shift away from small farms relying on family labor and
+the rapid growth of large farms making heavy use of migrant labor.
+Earlier, most farms used no hired workers or one or two permanent
+employees. By 1951, more and more were using large numbers of
+seasonal workers.22
+American workers didn’t want these jobs. As the commission
+reported, “The American farm worker is still legally and morally
+responsible to feed his family every day.” With seasonal work, “it is
+almost impossible for him to meet American standards of life.”23 But
+employers had little use for permanent workers: “When the work is
+done, neither the farmer nor the community wants the wetback
+around.”24 Furthermore, agricultural employers preferred a kind of
+“feudal” relationship that they could only enjoy with migrants. They
+“do not care for workers who may voice complaints in regard to
+working conditions, housing, or sanitary facilities. They want only
+those people who will go quietly about their work and make no
+comments or objections. They want the Mexican worker who has
+just come across the border and is strange to our language and ways
+of life. They find that the Mexican who has been in this country for
+some time and become acquainted with our free customs is no
+longer suited to the economic and social status of a stoop laborer.”25
+The Bracero Program, starting in 1942, was a building block in
+the establishment of the California agricultural system based on a
+highly exploitative labor process.26 Migratory labor was “the
+essential labor force” at the basis of this system.27 And not only
+migratory labor: frequently and cyclically, these migratory workers
+were undocumented. As geographer Don Mitchell shows, the
+existence of a large pool of “officially invisible” undocumented
+workers was crucial to the functioning of the Bracero Program and
+tacitly acknowledged by those administering and benefiting from it.
+
+Farmers could request Bracero contract workers even as they
+enjoyed a surplus of available (but officially invisible)
+undocumented migrants. This permanently renewed oversupply of
+labor “was not a privilege big California growers wanted to
+relinquish lightly.”28
+As Mitchell illustrates, there was never a labor shortage in
+California agriculture. California agribusiness depended on workers
+who were cheap, temporary, and exploitable, and on government
+policies that ensured their continued access to these workers both as
+braceros and as undocumented migrants.29
+“For growers, a productive, living landscape required that
+workers become more and more mere vessels of labor power . . .
+[and] less and less living, breathing people.”30 The Bracero system
+contributed simultaneously to “the destabilization of working
+people” and “the stabilization of the profitable landscape: it saved
+the crops—precisely because it destroyed lives.”31 As geographer
+Richard Walker points out, the enormous prosperity of California’s
+agriculture should—or at least could—have improved the lives of
+workers as well. It didn’t. “Low-wage labor has been systematically
+built into labor relations and the reproduction of capital. . . . The
+low wages of farm labor are an important factor in the continuing
+profitability of California agribusiness.”32
+With the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, undocumented
+workers came to the fore as the migrant agricultural labor force. The
+program was phased out gradually between 1965 and 1967, so that
+it ended completely just as the limit of 120,000 immigrants per year
+from the Western Hemisphere—the first numerical limit ever—went
+into effect.33 As described in chapter 2, by 1965 the program was no
+longer necessary because the flow of undocumented workers was
+large enough to fulfill the needs of agribusiness.34 Seasonal
+migration continued unabated, except that now even former
+braceros migrated without documents.35 Some scholars termed the
+post-1965 system of undocumented migration a “de facto guestworker program.”36
+
+The special provisions for farm workers in the Immigration
+Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 highlighted the special need
+for undocumented—“illegal”—workers in agriculture. To apply for
+legal status, most migrants (mostly Mexicans) had to prove that they
+had been in the United States continuously since 1982. This
+provision rested on the same rationale that previous legalizations (of
+Europeans) had relied upon: that length of residence could outweigh
+technical irregularities in means of arrival and justify legalization.
+However, the provisions for agricultural workers were different:
+instead of requiring the four years of continuous residence, the act
+offered legal status to migrant farm workers who had simply been
+employed in agriculture for at least ninety days during the 1985–
+1986 season. (Or, as shown earlier, who could provide false
+documents stating that this was the case.) The law made this
+exception precisely because it acknowledged agriculture’s reliance
+on these migrant workers.
+The employer sanctions provision of IRCA contributed to a shift
+away from direct employment and to the use of Farm Labor
+Contractors. The use of FLCs increased from about one-third of
+farms hiring migrant labor in the mid-1980s to over half in the early
+1990s.37 This system allowed employers to evade legal
+responsibility for the workers they relied on. As Philip Martin
+concludes, “FLCs are practically a proxy for the employment of
+undocumented workers and egregious or subtle violations of labor
+laws.”38 He noted that while the US manufacturing sector shrank in
+the 1980s, the agricultural sector expanded, as farmers continued to
+be confident of their ability to rely on low-wage labor. Immigrant
+workers earning below poverty-level wages subsidized the
+expansion of an agribusiness model that increased poverty at the
+same time that it increased profits.39
+The IRCA contributed to the growth of the FLC system in three
+ways. Employer sanctions encouraged farmers to seek third parties
+to take the risks of employing laborers. Many former migrant
+workers, now legalized under the SAW Program, took advantage of
+their new status to become FLCs. Finally, the rise of the FLC system
+
+coincided with the shift from Mexico’s traditional sending regions to
+new, indigenous areas in southern Mexico and Guatemala, in which
+the FLCs served as important recruiters and intermediaries.40
+A temporary labor force that will simply move on when the work
+dwindles at the end of the season may seem ideal from an
+employer’s perspective. For the workers, though, such a life is
+characterized by poverty, uncertainty, and long periods of
+unemployment. The Economist in 2010 noted the parallels between
+today’s Mexican migrants and the desperate “Okies” who migrated
+during the Depression in their struggle to find work, comparing a
+contemporary Mexican migrant family, the Vegas, to the Joads in
+John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath:
+Often they take the same roads on which the “Okies” travelled
+en masse in the 1930s as they fled the depressed dust bowl of
+Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas to seek a living in California.
+These Okies are forever etched into America’s psyche. . . .
+Joads then and Vegas now are pushed by the same need,
+pulled by the same promise. Now as then, there is no clearing
+house for jobs in the fields, so the migrants follow tips and
+rumours. Often, like the Joads, they end up in the right places
+at the wrong times. Felix Vega and three of his group,
+including his wife, were dropped off in Oxnard, famous for its
+strawberries. But they arrived out of season, so they slept on
+the streets, then in a doghouse, then in somebody’s car. For
+two months they did not bathe and barely ate. Finally, they
+found jobs picking strawberries and made their first money in
+America.41
+In the summer of 2010, the United Farm Workers decided to
+confront the myth that “they [immigrants] take our jobs” directly.
+The union organized a campaign called “Take Our Jobs,” inviting
+citizens and green-card holders to apply for agricultural work. The
+campaign got an extra publicity boost when comedian Stephen
+Colbert took up the challenge and then testified to Congress about
+the experience. Three months into the campaign, the union
+
+announced that its website, takeourjobs.org, had been visited by 3
+million people; 8,600 had expressed an interest in a job in
+agriculture, but only 7 had actually followed through. “These
+numbers demonstrate that there are more politicians and fingerpointers interested in blaming undocumented farm workers for
+America’s unemployment crisis than there are unemployed
+Americans who are willing to harvest and cultivate America’s food,”
+the Farm Workers concluded.42
+In 2010 the US Department of Agriculture published an analysis
+of the probable impact of increased immigration enforcement on the
+US agricultural sector. The report cited the common figure that over
+half of the agricultural labor force consisted of undocumented
+Mexican workers.43 A reduction in undocumented migrant labor
+would lead to rising labor costs, the report concluded, and different
+scenarios, depending on the characteristics of the crop. Where the
+potential
+existed,
+mechanization
+would
+spread.
+Where
+mechanization was not an option, farmers would face market loss
+due to higher costs. Finally, new research in mechanization and
+rising consumer prices would likely result. It is notable that in no
+case did the report foresee improved working conditions or rising
+employment of domestic workers in agriculture.44
+“The US fruit and vegetable industry competes in a global
+economy with producers from other countries who often have much
+lower wages. With increasing trade, competitive pressures are
+greater than ever. In summer 2009, the Federal minimum wage was
+$7.25 per hour and the minimum wage in California was $8.00 per
+hour, while the minimum wage in Mexico ranged from $3.49 to
+$4.16 per day, depending on the region,” the report explained.45 It’s
+no surprise that so many of the fruits and vegetables we find in the
+supermarket are labeled “Product of Mexico.”
+Labor’s share made up 42 percent of the variable production
+costs for fruit and vegetable farms, and labor is the “single largest
+input cost” for many crops. Moreover, said the USDA report, “most
+[farm workers] will move on to nonagricultural employment within
+a decade of beginning to work in the fields.”46 Thus, agribusiness
+
+interests see a continuing supply of (undocumented) migrant
+workers as essential to their continued production and have lobbied
+heavily for a century to ensure that this supply continues to be
+available to them. As another USDA report put it bluntly: “The
+supply of farmworkers for the US produce industry depends on a
+constant influx of new, foreign-born labor attracted by wages above
+those in the workers’ countries of origin, primarily Mexico.
+Immigration policy helps to determine whether the produce
+industry’s labor force will be authorized or unauthorized.”47
+The State of Kansas sought in 2012 to develop a system of its
+own to legalize undocumented farm workers.48 Georgia’s farmers
+panicked in the summer of 2011, when a new law made it a felony
+for an undocumented person to apply for work. The Georgia
+Department of Agriculture wrote that “[n]on-resident immigrant
+laborers, those of legal and illegal status, harvest crops, milk cows,
+gin cotton and maintain landscapes. Georgia farmers and
+agribusiness employers widely attribute the need for these workers
+due to the fact that local citizens do not generally possess or care to
+develop the specialized skills associated with agriculture and,
+further do not regularly demonstrate the work ethic necessary to
+meet the productivity requirements of the farm business.”49 A
+majority of Georgia farm employers hired laborers for a limited
+period of one to three months, another reason that citizen workers
+are reluctant to take these jobs.50
+One season after the passage of Georgia’s new law, 26 percent of
+farmers answered that they had lost income because of the lack of
+available labor for their farms. For some specialty crops like laborintensive fruits and vegetables (blueberries, cabbage, cantaloupe,
+cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, squash, tobacco, and watermelon),
+over 50 percent were in that situation.51 Fifty-six percent said they
+had trouble finding qualified workers.52 “A major response theme
+for this question was that the work is too physically demanding and
+difficult for US citizens (non-immigrants). Respondents believe that
+only immigrant workers are willing to do the tasks needed in their
+operations.”53
+
+Productivity was also an issue. “Producers expressed great
+concern with the quality of work from domestic workers.”
+According to data provided by one onion producer, “A migrant
+worker was twice as productive as a non-migrant worker in planting
+Vidalia onions.”54 As one Georgia farmer remarked, “American
+workers are not interested in getting dirty, bloody, sweaty, working
+weekends & holidays, getting to work at 4 a.m. 2 mornings a week
+& at 6 a.m. 5 mornings a week.”55
+Experiments with criminal offenders who are out on probation—
+and required to work as a condition of their probation—backed up
+the farmer’s opinion. One crew leader “put the probationers to the
+test . . . assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a
+second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers
+compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers. ‘It’s
+not going to work,’ [the crew leader] said. ‘No way. If I’m going to
+depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops
+up.’”56
+As Philip Martin explains, most workers won’t spend more than
+ten years working in agriculture. “As it is currently structured, fruit
+and vegetable agriculture requires a constant inflow of workers from
+abroad who are willing to accept seasonal farm jobs.”57 Farm labor
+is so marginal, strenuous, and low paid, that if workers achieve legal
+status, they quickly move into other sectors. Thus “farmers and their
+political allies . . . oppose simply legalizing unauthorized workers,
+which would enable them to get nonfarm jobs. Instead, farmers
+agree to legalization only in exchange for large guest-worker
+programs that give employers considerable control of foreign
+workers.”58
+Sixty years ago the folk singer–songwriter Woody Guthrie asked
+somewhat rhetorically, “Is this the best way we can grow our big
+orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?” In the
+ensuing half-century, the United States has only deepened its
+“modern agricultural dilemma.” It has devised a vast and
+multifaceted agricultural system that depends upon desperate
+workers for its survival. True, for many Mexicans—from the Bracero
+
+days to the present—low-wage, temporary, migrant labor in the
+United States offers a viable or even hopeful alternative to poverty
+at home. But this merely means that the US agricultural system
+depends upon the existence of a lot of extremely poor people in
+Mexico.59
+While modern large-scale agricultural systems produce vast
+amounts of food, they have also created large-scale problems: “high
+capital costs; environmental deterioration of farmland through
+erosion, salinization, compaction, and chemical overload; pesticide
+and chemical fertilizer pollution of lakes, streams, and groundwater;
+unhealthy working conditions for farm workers, farmers, and farm
+families; dependence on an extremely narrow and destabilizing
+genetic base in major crops; dependence on nonrenewable mineral
+and energy resources; the destruction of rural communities; and the
+increasingly concentrated control of the nation’s food supply.”60
+Other critiques examine the consumption side: the increasing
+reliance on overprocessed, high-sugar, and fatty foods, fast food and
+junk food, and the lifestyle diseases like heart disease and diabetes
+that have resulted.61
+As we in the United States confront the problems in our
+agricultural and food production system, the problem of labor
+scarcity and continued reliance on impoverished, undocumented
+workers has to be central to the discussion. Given the way the
+agricultural system currently works, farm labor is so precarious and
+so harsh that only displaced migrants, the majority of them
+rendered illegal by US laws, are willing and able to carry it out.
+Paradoxically, most of these migrants were in fact displaced from
+centuries-old systems of subsistence agriculture in Mexico by
+precisely the same agricultural modernization that now demands
+their labor elsewhere. A truly comprehensive approach to
+immigration reform would look at these interlocking economic and
+structural systems, not merely make more narrow changes in
+immigration law.
+We must recognize the basic irrationality, immorality, and
+unsustainability of the food production system. Farmers
+
+overwhelmingly oppose the harsh state-level immigration laws that
+make it more difficult for them to find the seasonal workers they
+need. In the short term, simply making it legal for immigrants to
+work in agriculture would address the needs of both farmers and
+immigrant farm workers who are undocumented. The larger
+problems await a longer-term and more profound reform of the
+global agricultural system. We can begin by acknowledging that our
+access to relatively cheap and abundant food in the United States
+exists because of the hard labor of poor Mexicans, in their country
+and in our own.
+
+CHAPTER 6
+
+Working (Part 2)
+If the US agricultural system has relied on Mexican labor as it
+developed over many decades, meat processing and construction are
+two industries that shifted to heavy use of Mexican and Central
+American—and, in particular, undocumented—immigrants at the
+end of the twentieth century. This shift coincided with the trend of
+outsourcing, when manufacturing plants began to shift their laborintensive production abroad. Manufacturing employment declined
+from a high of 20 million in 1979 to 11 million in 2012.1
+Meatpacking and construction couldn’t exactly be moved abroad.
+But meatpacking could be moved out of heavily unionized urban
+centers like Chicago into the rural Midwest. Construction boomed in
+new regions, with employment doubling between 1970 and 2006 to
+a high of 7.7 million.2 Both industries increasingly employed
+immigrant, and undocumented, workers.
+CONSTRUCTION
+While the manufacturing sector was shrinking in the last decades of
+the twentieth century, construction was expanding. But this industry
+was also changing profoundly. Unionization plummeted, from 40
+percent in the 1970s to only 14 percent in 2011. Unions lost ground
+especially in the high-growth area of residential construction, which
+was being buoyed by low interest rates and subprime loans through
+the first decade of the new century. But as employment rose,
+working conditions and wages deteriorated. Immigrants and
+especially undocumented workers increased their presence in the
+workforce.3 The low wages of undocumented workers helped
+contribute to the housing bubble by making building costs
+artificially cheap.4
+In Las Vegas, the population doubled to almost 2 million between
+1990 and 2007, and the share of immigrants in the city’s population
+also doubled during the same time span from 9 percent to 19
+percent. Many of the newcomers worked in hotel construction and
+
+tourism-related services in the booming city: half of the state’s
+construction workers were Latino immigrants. By 2008, Nevada had
+the largest percentage of undocumented workers of any state, 12
+percent.5
+Houston’s 1970s oil boom likewise spurred a jump in
+construction. “The record-breaking construction of office buildings,
+shopping centers, storage facilities, apartment projects, and
+suburban homes in the 1970s and early 1980s created an insatiable
+demand for Mexican immigrant labor. Undocumented workers from
+rural and urban Mexico became a preferred labor force, especially
+among construction employers who paid low wages and offered
+poor working conditions.”6 The Greater Houston Partnership
+estimated that 14 percent of Houston’s construction workforce was
+undocumented in 2008, more than any other job category.7
+In Texas as a whole, one in thirteen workers—about a million
+total—labored in the construction industry as of 2013. Half of them
+are undocumented. A study by the Workers Defense Project in
+Austin showed that 41 percent of Texas construction workers are
+subject to payroll fraud, including being illegally classified as
+independent contractors instead of employees. Employers use this
+method to evade their legal responsibilities for payroll taxes,
+minimum wages, working conditions, and benefits. Working
+conditions are so dangerous that one in five construction workers in
+the state will require hospitalization for job-related injuries. “More
+construction workers die in Texas than in any other state,” the study
+discovered.8
+In New Orleans, only days after Hurricane Katrina hit, the federal
+government waived employer sanctions provisions, allowing
+employers to hire workers without documents. Soon after, it waived
+prevailing federal wage standard requirements for contractors
+working on federally funded reconstruction projects. These
+exemptions set the stage for an influx of low-paid, undocumented
+workers.9 US census figures showed that some one hundred
+thousand Hispanics moved into the Gulf Coast after Katrina.
+Hispanics made up half of the labor force working in reconstruction,
+
+and half were undocumented. Undocumented workers formed “the
+backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction,” reported USA
+Today.10 Curiously, while the workers remained undocumented, it
+was ostensibly not illegal for them to work, at least during the first
+month and a half, because of the employer sanctions waiver.
+Overall, undocumented workers made up a quarter of the
+workforce in New Orleans in the months following the hurricane.11
+Almost 90 percent were already in the United States and moved to
+New Orleans from other areas, primarily Texas (41 percent) and, to
+a lesser extent, Florida (10 percent).12 Unsurprisingly,
+undocumented workers faced lower wages and poorer working and
+living conditions than those with documents.
+When Hurricane Ike hit southeastern Texas in 2008,
+undocumented immigrants performed a significant portion of the
+cleanup work. “All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris
+must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild. Hurricane Ike’s
+destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state
+has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny
+facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be
+done by illegal immigrants,” reported the Houston Chronicle.13
+When the housing boom went bust after 2008, strangely,
+statistics showed that construction wages began to rise. What was
+actually happening was that the lower-paid newcomers were the
+first to lose their jobs, so that the rise in wages was more apparent
+than real. Individual workers weren’t receiving better wages; there
+were just fewer construction workers employed overall.14
+MEATPACKING
+Like construction, meatpacking is an industry that is very difficult to
+outsource. In some ways, the work process in meatpacking more
+resembles that of other large manufacturing plants than it does
+construction, in which most workers are employed by small
+companies and contractors. But while industries like textiles or
+electronics can transport the raw materials and the finished
+products over long distances to save on the costs of production, this
+
+strategy is not practical for dealing with a perishable, bulky, and
+sometimes cantankerous product. So like construction, meatpacking
+has relied on bringing immigrant workers to the point of
+production, rather than sending production to countries where it is
+cheaper.
+Lance Compa summarizes how in-sourcing happened in
+Nebraska, in a process repeated throughout the Midwest:
+From its founding as a territory in 1854 until the late
+twentieth century, Nebraska was mostly populated by white
+Americans of European origin, joined by a minority of
+African-Americans. Omaha was always an important
+meatpacking center because of its proximity to livestock and
+feedlots. Immigrant workers from southern and eastern
+Europe made up most of the meatpacking labor force in the
+early twentieth century. In the 1940s and ’50s, the children of
+these immigrants, along with African-American coworkers in
+key roles, formed strong local unions of the United
+Packinghouse Workers. As happened in the industry generally,
+in the 1980s and 1990s, many meatpacking businesses closed
+plants that provided good wages and benefits. Following
+closures, company owners often relocated plants to rural
+areas. In Omaha, some companies later reopened closed
+factories employing low wage, new immigrant workforces
+without trade union representation.15
+Wages in meatpacking fell 45 percent between 1980 and 2007.
+The downgrading of meatpacking jobs proved “devastating to the
+standard of living for workers in an industry that once sustained a
+blue-collar middle class.”16 As both wages and working conditions
+deteriorated, immigrant workers became the mainstay of the labor
+force. By the late 1990s, fully a quarter of meatpacking workers
+were estimated to be undocumented. 17
+In the climate of heightened calls for immigration enforcement,
+the meatpacking industry attracted attention. In 1999, the INS
+launched Operation Vanguard in Nebraska, subpoenaing the
+
+employment records of every meatpacker in the state. After
+reviewing all 24,000 employee records received, the agency
+identified 4,700 cases in which the employee’s legal status was in
+doubt. It presented employers with the list and required all of the
+“suspects” to appear for interviews with the agency. It seemed clear
+to the meatpackers that “INS’s intention was not to apprehend
+potentially unauthorized employees, but to ‘chase off’ those workers
+who were present in illegal status.”18
+In chasing them off, the operation succeeded. Only one thousand
+of the workers dared to appear for their interviews. The others
+simply left their jobs. Overnight, the state’s meatpacking industry
+lost 13 percent of its workforce. Meanwhile, of the one thousand
+interviewed, thirty-four were determined to be unauthorized to
+work and were arrested and deported. “Meatpacking company
+officials . . . believe that a substantial number of these employees
+[who disappeared] were authorized to work but chose not to appear
+because of the intimidation inherent in any such interview (for
+example, from questions such as ‘are you or any members of your
+family not authorized to be present in the United States?’).” The
+Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association estimated that its members lost $5
+million and the state economy as a whole lost $20 million as the
+result of the operation.19
+Operation Vanguard ended in 2000, but in 2006 a new
+enforcement effort began, focused on workplace raids. On December
+12, 2006, ICE agents descended on six Swift meatpacking plants in
+Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah, arresting
+thirteen hundred of the company’s seven thousand day-shift
+workers. Swift was also part of the industry pattern of shifting from
+urban to rural, and employing large numbers of new Latin American
+immigrants, many of them undocumented. In several Swift plants,
+researchers drew a direct connection to the Bracero Program. Two
+small communities in the Mexican states of Michoacán, Villachuato
+and La Huacana, which had begun to send recruits northward as
+braceros, had now become major sources of migrants to Swift
+plants. These workers were later joined by Central Americans. In
+
+Swift’s Cactus, Texas, plant, most of the workers were Maya Quiche
+Guatemalans, many of them undocumented.20
+In an eerie replay of previous roundups and deportations of
+Mexicans like Operation Wetback, ICE agents relied on appearance
+to determine who to detain. One American citizen of Mexican origin
+at Swift’s Nebraska plant recounted that “when they said all the US
+citizens come over to this place, I went up there and I stood right by
+my boss. My boss showed his driver’s license and then he was free
+to go. I showed my driver’s license and my voting registration card
+and that was not enough. He [the ICE agent] said, no, you need
+either your passport or citizenship certificate.”21 Most of those
+arrested in the raids were charged not with the civil violation of
+unauthorized presence in the country, but with criminal charges of
+fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and/or identity theft.
+The raids affected more than just those arrested, as family
+members and others were afraid to show up to work in the
+aftermath. The Center for Immigration Studies looked at what
+happened in the devastated plants over the following months. All
+managed to replace the hundreds of workers who were arrested, but
+none improved working conditions or wages, and none shifted back
+to employing US citizens. The companies scoured the United States
+for workers willing to accept the jobs, and most of the lost workers
+were eventually replaced by immigrants from Burma and different
+parts of Africa who held refugee status and thus had legal
+authorization to work.22
+THE POSTVILLE RAID
+Another devastating raid took place at the Agriprocessors plant in
+Postville, Iowa, in May 2008. Agriprocessors represented a cross
+between in-sourcing and a new industry. Although meatpacking in
+general was an old industry that was moving into new rural areas,
+kosher processing had been a local, small-scale industry before the
+late twentieth century. “In the 1980s, before the Postville plant had
+opened, almost all fresh kosher meat had been sold through local
+butchers. It came in raw quarters from slaughterhouses that were
+
+rented out by rabbis, and it rarely made it beyond major cities on
+the coasts.” 23
+The Rubashkin family changed all that. Locating their new plant
+in the small town of Postville, Iowa, they proposed to turn kosher
+meat into a nationally available, mass-produced product. “The
+Rubashkins created a world in which it was possible to buy fresh
+kosher beef and poultry in ordinary supermarkets across the
+country, even in places that had few Jews. . . . The changes brought
+about by the Rubashkins did something more than expand the reach
+of kosher meat. They brought an entirely new customer base to
+kosher food: the secular Jews and even non-Jews who never would
+have stopped at a butcher shop. The expansion also allowed
+Orthodox communities in places that had never had them.”24
+Agriprocessors also differed from other meatpackers in choosing
+the tiny town of Postville as its location. Most meatpackers moved
+to medium-sized towns of thirty thousand to sixty thousand when
+they left the urban centers. Postville, with a population of fourteen
+hundred, was “a town with no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants
+and a weekly newspaper that for years featured the ‘Yard of the
+Week.’”25 Most of the workers were recruited from two small
+villages in Guatemala. Over 75 percent of the workers were
+undocumented, and some were minors.26 Working conditions at the
+plant were abysmal.
+“One of those workers—a woman who agreed to be identified by
+the pseudonym Juana—came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago
+from Guatemala,” said one newspaper account. Since then, she has
+worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting
+hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health insurance to
+have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and
+stopping at $7, that several industry experts described as the lowest
+of any slaughterhouse in the nation.”27
+In May 2008, ICE agents descended on the plant and arrested 389
+of its 900 workers, most of them Guatemalan. As their lengthy saga
+of incarceration and deportation began, the rest of the town’s
+immigrant population panicked. “Within weeks, roughly 1,000
+
+Mexican and Guatemalan residents—about a third of the town—
+vanished. It was as if a natural disaster had swept through, leaving
+no physical evidence of destruction, just silence behind it.”28
+The Agriprocessors raid in May 2008 was “the largest single-site
+operation of its kind in American history.”29 Because one of the
+court interpreters, Erik Camayd-Freixas, wrote a detailed protest
+about the irregularity of the procedures, which circulated widely on
+the Internet and was later submitted to Congress, the public
+obtained access to an unusually complete picture of the process.
+According to Camayd-Freixas’s account, “The arrest, prosecution,
+and conviction of 297 undocumented workers from Postville was a
+process marred by irregularities at every step of the way.” The
+government charged the workers en masse, and without any
+evidence whatsoever, of the criminal charge of “aggravated identity
+theft.” Prosecutors then coerced them into a plea bargain for a lesser
+but still criminal charge of misuse of a Social Security number.30
+The Guatemalan workers knew that they were in the country
+without legal permission. But that’s a civil violation, not a crime.
+The only punishment should have been removal. Through their own
+networks, most of the undocumented immigrants know that they
+have few rights in the immigration court system. Most of them had
+no idea what the criminal charges meant, and when pressured to
+accept a plea bargain, most of them did so. Many acquiesced out of
+desperation, since as the sole support for their families, they could
+not afford to remain in detention awaiting trial. They believed they
+would quickly be deported. Instead, they had signed up for a fivemonth prison sentence.
+Camayd-Freixas described the heart-wrenching scenes as courtappointed lawyers tried to explain the criminal charges and advise
+those arrested. One conversation illustrates the utter disconnect
+between the world of the workers and the legal system they were
+caught in.
+The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent
+most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the
+crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from
+
+Guatemala? “I walked.” What? “I walked for a month and ten
+days until I crossed the river. . . . I just wanted to work a year
+or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to
+be. . . . The Good Lord knows I was just working and not
+doing anyone any harm.” This man, like many others, was in
+fact not guilty. “Knowingly” and “intent” are necessary
+elements of the [criminal] charges, but most of the clients we
+interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number
+was or what purpose it served. This worker simply had the
+papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read
+or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to
+advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He
+was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he
+said. “So you can do whatever you want with me.” To him we
+were part of the system keeping him from being deported
+back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and
+sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not
+know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5
+months. None of the “options” really mattered to him. Caught
+between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed
+his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but
+he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he
+superstitiously declined, saying it could be “poisoned.” His
+Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer
+think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending
+to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for
+guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he
+said: “God knows you are just doing your job to support your
+families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine.”31
+Like Swift, Agriprocessors looked to other sources of
+marginalized, immigrant workers in the wake of the raid. “In one of
+its most desperate moves, Agri recruited 170 people from the
+Micronesian island of Palau—whose status as a former US
+protectorate means its citizens can work legally in the United States.
+In September 2008, the Palauans traveled 72 hours and 8,000 miles
+
+on planes and buses before arriving in Postville with little more than
+flip-flops and brightly colored shorts and tops.”32
+Six months later, the plant closed. It was later sold and reopened,
+and like other plants in the industry, implemented the E-Verify
+system. However, as a journalist found in 2011,
+few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small
+community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs
+for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses
+and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many
+homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about
+40 percent lower than they were in 2008.
+In order to staff its still low-paying jobs with legal
+immigrants, the new owner of the plant has recruited a
+hodgepodge of refugees and other immigrants, who often
+leave the town as soon as they find better opportunities,
+creating a constant churn among the population. The switch
+to a legal workforce has made the community feel less stable,
+some locals say, and it’s unclear if Postville will again become
+a place where immigrants will put down roots, raise children,
+and live in relative harmony with their very different
+neighbors.33
+Years later, a researcher in Guatemala met with families that had
+been deported, including sixteen US-born, US citizen children. The
+children, Aryah Somers reported, were “growing up in extreme
+poverty, with little schooling and scant medical care. . . . The kids
+are undernourished and barely literate in either Spanish or English.”
+Their parents planned to send them back to the United States once
+they are ten or twelve years old and able to travel alone.34
+While the Obama administration scaled down the Bush-era policy
+of workplace raids, the E-Verify system expanded rapidly. E-Verify
+was created in 1997 under the auspices of the 1996 Illegal
+Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and
+requires participating employers to check each new hire against a
+set of federal databases to ensure that the individual is either a
+
+citizen or an immigrant specifically authorized to work in the
+United States. The system was initially voluntary, but in 2007, the
+Office of Management and Budget required all federal government
+agencies to screen all new hires through the system and, in 2009,
+required certain federal contractors and subcontractors to use it for
+existing employees as well as new hires. Several states, beginning
+with Arizona in 2007, have mandated that all employers in the state
+utilize E-Verify.35 Other states have tried to restrict its use.36 S. 744,
+the comprehensive immigration reform bill supported by President
+Obama and passed by the Senate in June 2013, would make the
+system mandatory for all employers nationwide. (As this book goes
+to press, the bill seems to have little chance of passing in the House
+or becoming law.)
+But the experience of the meatpacking industry shows that
+eliminating undocumented workers, either through workplace raids
+or through the use of E-Verify, has not increased employment
+opportunities for citizens. Instead, it has destabilized businesses and
+communities, created temporary flows of refugees, and brought
+harm to innumerable immigrants, citizens, and businesses with
+benefit to none. Many argue against the use of E-Verify because the
+GAO found it to be plagued with errors and false alarms, as amply
+illustrated by several GAO investigations between 2005 and 2011.37
+While it’s quite true that the program has mistakenly ensnared large
+numbers of work-authorized immigrants and naturalized citizens,
+that is not the only or even the main reason to oppose it. Even if the
+program worked perfectly, its impact on individuals, businesses,
+communities, and the economy would only be to cause harm.38
+NEW JOBS: LANDSCAPING
+Other sectors that employ significant numbers of undocumented
+workers are the mostly unregulated, small-scale niches in the service
+sector like landscaping, nanny services, and newspaper delivery.
+The first two are sectors where employment has grown in recent
+decades, while in the latter it has shrunk. But all three have been
+refuges for undocumented workers, in part because they involve low
+
+pay; insecurity and lack of benefits; difficult hours; and isolated,
+heavy, and sometimes dangerous working conditions. These poor
+working conditions parallel the working conditions in industries
+that have been outsourced (manufacturing) and in-sourced
+(meatpacking, construction). The cheap products provided by
+outsourcing and in-sourcing, along with the cheap services provided
+by these new service industries, have contributed to rising
+consumption and illusions of affluence in the United States.
+The landscaping industry has grown steadily since the 1970s,
+hand in hand with the construction industry. Newly built homes,
+businesses, and public buildings created a fresh demand for
+landscaping services. Landscaping companies responded to the
+increased demand by creating new products and services, which
+soon came to be considered essential.39
+Two additional, interrelated changes in the past decades have
+contributed to the increase in demand for landscaping services.
+First, the ranks of the super-rich who hire landscaping companies to
+maintain their palatial grounds have increased. Second, middle- and
+upper-middle-class suburban families that once might have
+maintained their own yards are now too busy and are contracting
+out services that they or their children used to provide. As the
+industry grew, the new jobs were filled by immigrants, especially
+undocumented immigrants.
+One of many companies to expand and transform in the new era
+belonged to Nikita Floyd. The Washington Post described its
+trajectory:
+In the early 1990s, Floyd had fewer than a dozen employees,
+all of them black. Today, 73 percent of the Washington area’s
+landscaping workers are immigrants, along with 51 percent of
+office cleaners and 43 percent of construction workers. . . .
+Floyd’s 20 wintertime workers are all men from El Salvador,
+except for two black women who manage the office. In the
+summer, he employs twice as many men, all immigrants.
+Floyd’s experience illustrates immigrants’ impact. Once just a
+guy with a lawnmower, he runs a business with annual sales
+
+of more than $2.5 million. He credits immigrant employees
+for his business’s growth and pays about $10 an hour, with no
+work and no pay in inclement weather. It’s grueling labor in
+the winter; a man can spend the day stabbing a spade into
+frozen dirt or be asked to shimmy up a tree with a chainsaw
+in one hand and no netting below.40
+Like the farm and meatpacking associations discussed earlier, the
+California Landscape Contractors Association is strongly opposed to
+the criminalization of immigrant work and implicitly acknowledges
+its industry’s reliance on the undocumented. Calling for legalization,
+the association notes that “[t]he status quo is untenable, as it puts
+employers in a strange ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation where they
+can never be sure of their workforce.” The industry operates under a
+continuous labor shortage, the association explains:
+The landscaping industry relies heavily on an immigrant labor
+force. Landscaping is physically demanding work. It is
+performed in hot, cold, and sometimes rainy weather. Some
+landscaping jobs are seasonal. American-born workers
+increasingly are not attracted to such jobs. Because
+landscaping work involves outdoor manual labor, it is to some
+extent young person’s work. Yet America has an aging
+workforce. At the same time, the landscape industry is
+growing and therefore has a need for more workers, partly
+because this same aging population tends to enlarge the
+market for landscaping services. Immigrants, who tend to be
+young, address this unmet need for younger workers in the
+landscape industry.41
+NEW JOBS: NANNIES
+Landscaping is not the only personal-service job that has
+proliferated with the use of undocumented immigrants in recent
+decades. A number of high-profile public figures have been
+embarrassed when reporters uncovered their use of undocumented
+domestic workers. Lawyer Zoe Baird, who had worked for the Carter
+
+administration and the Department of Justice, was withdrawn as
+President Bill Clinton’s nominee for attorney general when it was
+revealed that she had employed undocumented workers as
+chauffeur and nanny. Then Clinton’s second choice, Kimba Wood,
+was withdrawn for the same reason.42 When Mitt Romney was
+running in the Republican primary in 2007, in large part on an antiimmigrant platform, the Boston Globe published an investigation
+showing that undocumented workers maintained the 2.5-acre lot
+around his home in Belmont, Massachusetts.43 California Republican
+gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman fired
+her nanny of nine years during the campaign when she allegedly
+first learned that she was undocumented.44 And Bernard Kerik
+stepped down from his nomination as chief of the Department of
+Homeland Security in 2004 when it was learned that he too had
+hired a nanny who lacked documents.45
+But not only the super-rich hire nannies, landscapers, and house
+cleaners. In 2001, sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo described
+the proliferation of services in the previous twenty years that had
+transformed middle-class life in heavily immigrant Los Angeles. At
+the time she was writing, Los Angeles was still in the vanguard; a
+decade later, what she described had become commonplace
+throughout the United States.
+She writes:
+When you arrive at many a Southern California hotel or
+restaurant, you are likely to be first greeted by a Latino car
+valet. The janitors, cooks, busboys, painters, carpet cleaners,
+and landscape workers who keep the office buildings,
+restaurants, and malls running are also likely to be Mexican or
+Central American immigrants, as are many of those who work
+behind the scenes in dry cleaners, convalescent homes,
+hospitals, resorts, and apartment complexes. . . . Only twenty
+years ago, these relatively inexpensive consumer services and
+products were not nearly as widely available as they are
+today. The Los Angeles economy, landscape, and lifestyle
+
+have been transformed in ways that rely on low-wage, Latino
+immigrant labor.46
+The number of gardeners and domestic workers in Los Angeles
+doubled between 1980 and 1990.47
+The inexpensive nature of these services—in part because of the
+often undocumented immigrant labor that provided them—helped
+to sustain an illusion of upward mobility for people in the working
+and middle classes.48 This illusion overlays other changes in the US
+economy over the past fifty years, as the rapid expansion of the
+middle class that began in the post–World War II era slowed and
+then reversed in the 1970s, to be replaced by growing economic
+inequality. Paradoxically, Hondagneu-Sotelo found that increasing
+social inequality led to greater numbers of people employing
+domestic help. The middle class works harder to maintain its
+standard of living and must increasingly rely on low-cost services
+provided by the more impoverished.49 Formerly, domestic workers
+were found mostly in the employ of upper-middle-class
+suburbanites. By the 1980s, employers came to include “apartment
+dwellers with modest incomes, single mothers, college students, and
+elderly people living on fixed incomes. They live in tiny bungalows
+and condominiums, not just sprawling houses.” Even Latina
+domestic workers found themselves employing other immigrant
+women to clean, cook, and care for their children, while they
+provided those same services to their wealthier clients.50
+Tellingly, Los Angeles was the vanguard. In the 1990s, “when
+Angelenos, accustomed to employing a full-time nanny/housekeeper
+for about $150 or $200 a week, move[d] to Seattle or Durham, they
+[were] startled to discover how ‘the cost of living that way’ quickly
+escalate[d]. Only then [did] they realize the extent to which their
+affluent lifestyle and smoothly running household depended on one
+Latina immigrant woman.”51 As the Latino immigrant population
+spread from the Southwest to other parts of the country, access to
+the services it provided also became more widespread.52
+
+Business Review reported, “[N]annies [are] a growth industry in
+slow economy.” With more parents working, and child care
+expensive or unavailable, the nanny industry fills the gap.53 The
+Arizona Republic reported, “[U]nconventional work schedules,
+increased awareness and flexible care options have ignited growth
+in the nanny industry. At the same time, parents have a desire for
+more personalized care.”54
+The New York Times commented on the widespread nature of the
+so-called nanny problem with regard to the Zoe Baird case: “As
+everyone learned before a conveniently childless candidate ended
+the search for an Attorney General, the hiring of illegal caregivers is
+an endemic labor practice, among paralegals and secretaries as well
+as $250,000-a-year executives, in cities like New York, Los Angeles
+or Miami—points of entry to the United States as well as centers of
+immigrant population. Cities with a baby sitter or nanny labor force
+tend to lack even the fragile, faint day-care networks that exist in
+other parts of the country.”55
+NEWSPAPER DELIVERY
+Newspaper delivery, of course, has been around for a long time. But
+today’s newspaper delivery system is something entirely new. No
+longer does a neighborhood kid walk or bike through the streets
+tossing papers into his neighbors’ yards. Today, 81 percent of paper
+deliverers are adults, and a large proportion of them are
+undocumented immigrants. A look at the structure of the industry
+will help explain why.56
+In many areas of the country, newspapers are delivered through a
+system of independent contractors—the same system construction
+companies use to evade their legal responsibilities as employers. The
+newspaper publisher works with a contracting company, which in
+turn hires workers who must sign a contract confirming that they
+are not employees but independent contractors. In Connecticut, all
+fourteen respondents to a survey of newspaper publishers in the
+state confirmed that they used this system. 57 Likewise in the Boston
+
+area, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Boston Globe are
+all distributed by a single company, which hires contractors to
+deliver all three in a given area.
+As independent contractors, workers may not receive the
+minimum wages and may not be eligible for workers’ compensation
+or unemployment benefits. (States and courts have varied as to how
+they treat these cases, but newspaper publishers overwhelmingly
+insist that their deliverers are contractors, not employees.) In a case
+where independent contractors sued and appealed for class status in
+a class action suit, the US District Court–Southern District of
+California described the job in the following terms:
+Plaintiffs deliver the North County Times to the homes of
+subscribers. Each morning, the newspaper carriers arrive at
+one of several distribution centers in San Diego County. The
+carriers arrive at different times. Although they generally
+arrive between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., some arrive earlier or
+later. The arrival time varies depending on the day of the
+week.
+The carriers are contractually obligated to deliver the
+assembled newspapers by 6:00 a.m. each weekday and 7:00
+a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
+Upon arrival, the carriers are responsible for assembling
+the newspapers. Some assemble the papers at the distribution
+center—those that use the distribution center pay a rental fee
+—and others assemble the papers elsewhere. Assembling the
+newspapers may involve folding or inserting the following:
+newspaper inserts, sections, pre-prints, samples, supplements
+and other products at NCT’s direction. The carriers pay for
+their own rubber bands and plastic bags used to assemble the
+papers. Some carriers buy the rubber bands and bags from
+Defendant, and others purchase them elsewhere. The carriers
+also pay for their own gas and automobile expenses they incur
+delivering the newspapers.58
+
+Contractors sign up to deliver papers 365 days a year, starting no
+later than 4 a.m. every day. They cannot miss a day unless they can
+arrange for their own replacement, must own a car, and have a
+valid driver’s license. They have to maintain and buy gas for the car,
+driving hundreds of miles a week. All for less than minimum wage.
+During winter weather emergencies, when public transportation is
+shut down and the governor of Massachusetts calls a state of
+emergency, closing public offices and begging residents to stay at
+home and businesses to remain closed until the plows can clear the
+streets, independent contractors receive a curt message with their
+newspapers. “SNOW IS EXPECTED . . . WE WILL BE WORKING. IC’S
+ARE EXPECTED TO DELIVER THEIR ROUTES. PLAN
+ACCORDINGLY: BE EARLY; DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CAR TO BE
+BLOCKED IN; EXPECT TO HAVE TO SHOVEL OUT.”59
+It’s a job, in other words, made for an undocumented immigrant.
+CONCLUSION
+Overall, the rise in undocumented workers over the past several
+decades has gone along with a rise in the invisible, exploited labor
+that they perform. The generally unacknowledged work that they do
+is a crucial underpinning to the standard of living and consumption
+enjoyed by virtually everyone in the United States. But, clearly, an
+economic system that keeps a lot of people unemployed and another
+group trapped in a legal status that restricts them to the worst kinds
+of jobs does not really benefit everyone.
+Some have argued that the influx of undocumented workers
+depresses the labor market, lowers wages for less educated workers,
+and creates more competition for jobs at the lower end of the pay
+scale. Labor economist George Borjas has made this argument most
+persuasively, and many commentators who argue that we should
+restrict immigration base their arguments on his work.60
+Other economists, however, have found that the low-wage labor
+of undocumented immigrants actually increases the wages and
+employment of even low-paid citizen workers. By increasing
+productivity, low-paid undocumented workers can increase capital
+
+available for investment, hiring, and wages. Because undocumented
+workers add to the population, their consumption stimulates the
+economy.61 One recent study tried to document the expected
+economic impact of deportation versus legalization of the
+undocumented population of Arizona. The study found that
+legalization would be far more beneficial and deportation far more
+costly for American citizens.
+Undocumented immigrants don’t simply “fill” jobs; they
+create jobs. Through the work they perform, the money they
+spend, and the taxes they pay, undocumented immigrants
+sustain the jobs of many other workers in the US economy,
+immigrants and native-born alike. Were undocumented
+immigrants to suddenly vanish, the jobs of many Americans
+would vanish as well. In contrast, were undocumented
+immigrants to acquire legal status, their wages and
+productivity would increase, they would spend more in our
+economy and pay more in taxes, and new jobs would be
+created.62
+Two recent films, one a feature film and one a documentary,
+demonstrate this effect. A Day without a Mexican imagines that
+California awakens one morning to a strange fog, which has caused
+everyone of Mexican origin to vanish. Non-Mexicans stumble
+through their lives trying to fill in the gaps and realizing along the
+way how utterly dependent their economy and daily lives are on
+Mexican immigrants. In a moving scene at the end, after the fog lifts
+and the Mexicans reappear, the Border Patrol comes across a group
+in the wilderness at night. Flashing their lights, a patrolman asks,
+“Are you guys Mexican?” When the migrants confirm, the patrollers
+break into welcoming applause.
+The film 9500 Liberty looks at a case in which the fantasy of A
+Day without a Mexican became a reality. In Prince William County,
+Virginia, a local ordinance in 2007 required police to stop and
+question anyone they suspected of being undocumented. Although
+the ordinance was eventually repealed, the acrimonious anti-
+
+immigrant mobilization surrounding it as well as fear of its
+implementation caused many immigrants to leave. As businesses
+closed, schools and neighborhoods emptied, and the housing market
+collapsed, the white citizen majority in the county became more
+dubious about the supposed benefits of expelling the undocumented.
+Although the current system benefits many people in the United
+States, we must also recognize its fundamental injustice and think
+seriously about how it works and what steps could make it more
+just. If immigrants are being exploited by the current system, and if
+undocumentedness is one of the concepts that sustains inequality
+and unjust treatment, then we need to question undocumentedness
+itself.
+The system benefits most Americans materially, given that
+Americans—even poor Americans—consume an extraordinary
+proportion of the planet’s resources. Only 4 percent of the world’s
+children are American, but they consume 40 percent of the world’s
+toys.63 Despite the fact that many Americans are unemployed, in
+debt, and struggle to pay for health care and put food on their
+plates, they still consume more than their share. They do so because of
+the economic chain that links them to workers who are legally
+marginalized, either because they work in other countries or
+because they work illegally inside the United States.
+Undocumentedness has everything to do with work and the
+economy. It is a key component of the late-twentieth-century global
+system. Every so-called industrialized country—or more accurately,
+deindustrializing country—relies on the labor of workers who are
+legally excluded to maintain its high levels of consumption. Like the
+United States, these countries rely on the legal conveniences of
+borders, countries, and citizenship to impose different rules for
+different people and maintain a legally excluded working class.
+This system also creates fantastic profits for the few. But a fairer
+economic system would distribute the planet’s resources more
+equally. If we can understand undocumentedness as a mechanism
+for creating and perpetuating economic inequality, it will be easier
+for us to reject it outright.
+
+CHAPTER 7
+
+Children and Families
+Although the need to work—and the availability of work—has
+played a central role in the rise of both immigration and
+undocumentedness in the past half-century, every worker is also a
+human being. Like everyone else, undocumented workers have
+children and families. The undocumented population and those
+personally affected through family relations by undocumentedness
+include much more than the single, working-age male. As border
+enforcement has increased over the past two decades and the
+circular, seasonal migration of workers has shifted to long-term
+family settlement, more and more children have been affected by
+issues of status.
+Some children are undocumented themselves, while others live in
+mixed-status families, with one or both parents, siblings, or other
+relatives who are undocumented. Still others have temporary and
+unstable statuses. Some children, whether citizens or undocumented
+themselves, lose parents or other family members to deportation,
+while others cross the border illegally to reunite with parents they
+had lost to migration. Virtually all parents who come to the United
+States do so because they want better lives for their children; the US
+law claims to protect the best interests of children. But immigration
+law makes these children’s lives tenuous and unpredictable.
+About 17 percent of all Hispanics and 22 percent of all Hispanic
+youth ages sixteen to twenty-five are unauthorized immigrants,
+according to Pew Hispanic Center estimates in 2009. These
+percentages refer to all Hispanics, whether native-born or
+immigrant. Among immigrants, the numbers are, of course, much
+higher. Some 41 percent of all foreign-born Hispanics and 58
+percent of foreign-born Hispanic youths are estimated to be
+unauthorized immigrants.1
+
+Other youth fall into in-between categories, like asylum
+applicants or those who have received Temporary Protected Status,
+wherein their presence is currently legal, but in an unstable status
+that could easily be revoked—what Cecilia Menjívar termed “liminal
+legality.”2 President Obama’s DACA program of 2012 created
+another temporary status, allowing certain undocumented youth a
+two-year respite from illegality, but with no guarantee of what
+would occur at the end of the two years. While immensely popular
+among Latinos (Romney called it a “big gift” to Hispanic voters),
+DACA did little to address the underlying problem of
+undocumentedness.3
+The immigration system in general is designed to deprive
+undocumented adults of most rights, but, in some cases, laws
+designed to protect children transcend status and are applied
+equally to all children. Laws and policies thus struggle between two
+contradictory aims: to punish violations of immigration status or to
+protect the rights of children and their need to be with their parents.
+In the case of US citizen children of undocumented parents, the goal
+of keeping children together with their parents can contradict the
+goal of removing the parent, and the goal of promoting the best
+interests of the children conflicts with the laws that punish their
+parents for their status. In some cases, judges have ruled that a
+child’s best interest requires that he or she remain in the United
+States and have terminated parental rights of parents who are
+deported. In other cases, immigration laws prevent children from
+entering the United States to reunite with their parents.
+Undocumented youth can also be deported and face legal
+discrimination that prevents them from working, going to college,
+and receiving public benefits.
+From being virtually invisible in the public sphere only a decade
+ago, undocumented youth, especially those who have grown up in
+the United States, have stepped to the forefront in organizing for
+immigrant rights. Their activism openly challenges the antiimmigrant propaganda and may be changing the way the citizen
+public views the undocumented.
+
+YOUNG AND ALONE
+The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic surge of young
+people fleeing their homes in Mexico and Central America and
+attempting the treacherous border crossing alone. They may be
+seeking to escape violence, gangs, or abuse at home, or they may be
+making a desperate attempt to reunite with parents who left them to
+journey to the United States. They face all of the hazards that adults
+face, and more.
+Undocumented youth, especially Central Americans fleeing civil
+wars, began crossing the border alone in the 1980s. At the time, the
+immigrant detention system had no provisions or capacity to deal
+specifically with detained youth: they were simply imprisoned with
+and treated as adults. During 1990, the INS reported that eighty-five
+hundred minors had been apprehended crossing the border without
+documents, 70 percent of them unaccompanied. Most were Mexican
+and were quickly returned to Mexico under an agreement with that
+government. Non-Mexicans, though, were detained in immigration
+facilities, some for lengthy periods, awaiting immigration hearings.4
+A series of lawsuits and court decisions starting in 1985 led
+finally, in 1997, the then-INS to develop special policies for detained
+minors. Under the Flores v. Meese settlement of that year, the INS
+developed separate standards for children that took their age and
+needs into account. Children would be released, if possible, to a
+sponsor; they would be placed in the least restrictive setting
+possible, and the agency would implement appropriate standards for
+their treatment.
+A US government study in 2001 explained that most juveniles the
+INS encountered were still of Mexican origin and generally held for
+only a few hours before being returned voluntarily to Mexico. The
+study emphasized that the Border Patrol worked to ensure that
+juveniles were returned to family members or to Mexican
+government officials rather than being “simply dropped off across
+the border.”5 Most of the children who ended up in US custody,
+therefore, were Central American. The numbers taken into custody
+(rather than returned) increased rapidly over the first decade of the
+
+new century, from the low thousands to up to ten thousand a year.6
+The system scrambled to keep up with the influx.
+After 2002, when the INS was replaced by ICE under the new
+Department of Homeland Security, responsibility for detained
+children was transferred to the Department of Health and Human
+Services and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.7 And in 2003, the
+ORR created the Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services
+(DUCS) to handle the placement of undocumented minors.8
+The treatment of children in detention improved with the
+involvement of the social service agencies. Rather than being
+housed indefinitely with adult criminals, children were sent to
+special facilities where they had access to educational and social
+services, and most were released within weeks to family members in
+the United States (many of them undocumented themselves).
+Facilities must provide “classroom education, health care,
+socializing/recreation activities, vocational training, mental health
+services, case management, and, when possible, assist with family
+reunion.”9 According to the New York Times, “It is not unusual for
+youths to recall the detention shelters . . . as some of the best times
+in their battered lives.”10
+Still, in 2006, a study found that detained minors “fall into the
+bewildering inner workings of the immigration and asylum system.”
+Despite the changes in detention provisions, immigration law did
+not distinguish between children and adults, and until 2004, the
+courts simply treated any child, no matter how young, as an adult.11
+In 2012, yet another study found that children who are detained for
+immigration violations “enter a disjointed, labyrinthine system in
+which they may interact with numerous agencies within several
+federal government departments, as well as with a host of
+government contractors.”12
+The automatic repatriation of Mexican children was challenged in
+2008 when Congress passed the William Wilberforce Trafficking
+Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act. The act responded to
+concerns that US deportation policies were contributing to the
+exploitation and abuse of children. It stated that a child could not be
+
+repatriated if he or she was victim of human trafficking or had a
+viable asylum claim and did not voluntarily agree to be repatriated.
+This meant that rather than immediately returning Mexican
+children, ICE was supposed to evaluate each case individually.13
+Still, in 2009, 70 percent of children in ORR custody came from
+Central America, primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,
+as most Mexican children were still simply deported.14
+The number of Mexican children crossing the border alone has
+remained steady or fallen over the past few years, along with
+crossings by Mexican adults. The number of young unaccompanied
+minors from Central America, in contrast, has risen dramatically,
+doubling from 2011 to 2012. “The rush of young illegal border
+crossers began last fall but picked up speed this year” reported the
+New York Times in August 2012.15 During 2012, more than fourteen
+thousand youth, most of them Central American, had been taken
+into ORR custody. In just the first three months of 2013, seven
+thousand more crossed, suggesting that the record increases were
+continuing.16
+Central America’s political and economic crises—exacerbated by
+US military involvement and trade policies—virtually guarantee that
+children will continue to try to escape. “Almost all of the children’s
+migration arose out of longstanding, complex problems in their
+home countries—problems that have no easy or short-term
+solutions.”17 According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, which
+interviewed 150 young unaccompanied border-crossers, most are
+fleeing gangs, drug traffickers, and violence at home. “They are
+willing to risk the uncertain dangers of the trip north to escape
+certain dangers they face at home.”18
+“The conditions in Central America have deteriorated to such a
+point that, when the Women’s Refugee Commission asked the
+children if they would risk the dangerous journey north through
+Mexico all over again now that they had direct knowledge of its
+risks, most replied that they would. They said that staying in their
+country would guarantee death, and that making the dangerous
+journey would at least give them a chance to survive. Many of them
+
+expressed a longing for their homelands, stating that they would not
+have left but for fear for their lives.”19
+The government was unprepared for the influx and was initially
+unable to abide by the 1997 standards. “Children were held for up
+to two weeks in CBP short-term hold facilities. These facilities are
+not designed for long-term detention or to hold children. The lights
+stay on 24 hours a day, and there are no showers or recreation
+spaces. During the influx, they were sometimes so overcrowded that
+children had to take turns just to lie down on the concrete floor.”
+The ORR began to open “emergency surge centers” where it could
+hold detained youth.20
+The numbers arriving at the US border reveal only part of the
+magnitude of the problem, since the Mexican government also
+reported a doubling in the numbers of detentions of Central
+American children traveling through that country in 2012.21
+Perhaps only half of the children who leave Central America even
+make it to the US border. Along the way, they face the same hazards
+that older migrants face: injury or death on the train, kidnapping,
+rape, torture, coercion.
+It is clear that conditions for children detained crossing the
+border have greatly improved in the past decade. It’s also clear,
+though, that a situation in which tens of thousands of children flee
+their homelands in Mexico and Central America each year is a
+desperate one. It’s not enough to suggest that those countries need
+to solve their own problems. The United States has a long history of
+military, political, and economic involvement in the region,
+including overthrowing and establishing governments. It continues
+to provide economic and military support for policies and programs
+that is has designed and approved. These policies and programs
+provide enormous profits and cheap products for US citizens and
+corporations, while exacerbating the very social crises that underlie
+the out-migration. Those of us in the United States need to seek
+deeper solutions that go beyond offering humane treatment and
+social services to these children after they cross the border.
+
+LOSING THEIR PARENTS
+Even children who are American citizens are at risk of losing
+undocumented parents to deportation. Although the Obama
+administration announced early on that immigration detention and
+deportation would focus on individuals who had committed crimes
+or were a threat to national security, deportations increased
+dramatically under his watch, to four hundred thousand a year.
+Almost all of those deported were, like most undocumented
+immigrants, members of communities with jobs, homes, and
+families. Their lives intersected every day with those of US citizens.
+In many cases, they were the parents of US citizens.
+As with the number of children crossing the border, the number
+of children losing their parents to deportation has also been rising.
+From 1998 to 2007, some 8 percent of those removed from the
+country were parents of US citizens; in 2011, it was 22 percent of a
+much larger number of removals. During the first half of 2011, over
+forty-six thousand parents of US-citizen children were deported. The
+Applied Research Center estimated that as of 2011, there were over
+five thousand US citizen children living in foster care because their
+parents were either in immigration detention or had been deported.
+Some were put up for adoption as incarcerated or deported parents
+lacked the resources to enforce their parental rights.22
+The term “anchor baby” is frequently thrown around in these
+discussions, with the implication that giving birth to a child in the
+United States gives the parent some special rights or privileges. It
+doesn’t. The child, as a US citizen, has the right to all of the benefits
+that citizenship offers, including a US passport, freedom to remain
+in or leave the country, and access to work and social services. The
+undocumented status of the parent, however, is not ameliorated in
+any way by the existence of the so-called anchor baby. Parents of
+citizens can be, and are, deported on a regular basis.
+The Obama administration’s 2010 and 2011 Morton Memos on
+prosecutorial discretion, issued by ICE director John Morton to
+revise agency policy, acknowledged the hardships caused for
+children when their parents were detained or deported. The first
+
+memo suggested that ICE “should not expend detention resources on
+aliens who are known to be suffering from serious physical or
+mental illness, or who are disabled, elderly, pregnant, or nursing, or
+demonstrate that they are primary caretakers of children or an infirm
+person.” Unfortunately, the new guidelines did not significantly
+reduce the numbers of parents separated from their children by
+ICE.23 The 2011 memo went somewhat further, specifically
+mentioning that one factor that ICE should take into consideration
+when deciding whether to prosecute a case was the immigrant’s
+relationship to US citizens. Still, this was one on a list of suggestions
+rather than a specific mandate.24
+Behind the statistics are the stories: a crying baby taken from
+her mother’s arms and handed to social workers as the mother
+is handcuffed and taken away, her parental rights terminated
+by a U.S. judge; teenage children watching as parents are
+dragged from the family home; immigrant parents
+disappearing into a maze-like detention system where they
+are routinely locked up hundreds of miles from their homes,
+separated from their families for months and denied contact
+with the welfare agencies deciding their children’s fate.25
+Consider the case of Sandra Molina, an undocumented immigrant
+from Guatemala. She married an immigrant with legal status, who
+became a citizen in 2009. They had two children, both US citizens.
+When her husband became a citizen, they decided that Sandra
+should return to Guatemala so that he could sponsor her to come
+legally to the United States. Even in the case of the spouse of a US
+citizen, however, there is no guarantee that legal permission will be
+granted. In Sandra’s case, it was denied, even though she had no
+criminal record or other apparent obstacle to legal entry.
+She then attempted to cross the border illegally to reunite with
+her family, but was caught and returned to Guatemala. Now, legal
+entry became even more complicated. Reentry after deportation is a
+felony, punishable with jail time, and one of the Obama
+administration’s priorities for deportation is those who reentered
+
+after being deported. In Mexico, Sandra “says she feels so hopeless
+about her life that she has thought about ending it. ‘I just want to be
+forgiven,’ she said, sobbing on the phone. ‘I feel I am about to go
+crazy, I miss my children so much. They are all I have. I cannot go
+on without them.’ Back home in Stamford, her children are suffering
+too. The youngest cried constantly, the eldest became angry and
+withdrawn. Though their plight is documented in thick files that
+include testimony from psychologists and counselors about their
+need for their mother, appeals for humanitarian relief were
+denied.”26
+The case of an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant who was
+detained with her fifteen-year-old son illustrates the contradictions
+as different government agencies pursue conflicting goals. The
+mother had lived in the United States for four years and had a oneyear-old daughter born here. She sent for her fifteen-year-old son,
+who was detained crossing the border and placed in DUCS custody.
+Following DUCS policy, she was called and her son was released to
+her. “I received a call to come pick him up,” she explained from her
+prison cell, “so I left my daughter with my friend who lived next
+door, and took a bus to Arizona to get him. I picked up my son and
+we went straight to the bus. At the bus station, I was approached by
+some officers and they detained both of us. I have been here for nine
+months without seeing my baby girl. She was only one year old
+when I left her with my friend. I don’t know what is happening with
+her.”27
+When parents disappear into the immigration system like this,
+they run the risk of losing custody of their children.28 Courts may
+terminate parental rights after parents are deported or detained. In
+the criminal justice system, prisoners have guaranteed certain rights
+and access to services. Immigrant detainees, though, fall into a sort
+of constitutional and legal netherworld. The circumstances of their
+detention often make it impossible for them to comply with
+requirements for retaining custody of their children. Relatives who
+could care for a child in the parent’s absence may be afraid to
+identify themselves because they too are undocumented. From the
+
+perspective of child welfare services, the system of detention and
+deportation can create insuperable obstacles to the goal of enabling
+parents to care for their children.29 “In the child welfare system,
+immigrant parents are at risk of losing their children without the
+same constitutional due process protections in place that other
+parents receive.”30 An unknown number of those children are being
+put up for adoption against the wishes of their parents, who, once
+deported, are often helpless to fight when a US judge decides that
+their children are better off here.
+In a 2007 case, an undocumented Guatemalan woman was
+arrested during a raid at the chicken plant where she worked in
+Missouri. While she was in detention, her six-month-old son was
+taken from her custody and put up for adoption. The judge ruled
+that “smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing
+crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide any stability
+for a child.” Her parental rights were terminated and the infant was
+adopted. Although the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the
+judge’s decision in 2011, that ruling was in turn overturned by a
+judge who ruled that she had “effectively abandoned her son.” The
+mother was deported, leaving the child with his adoptive parents in
+Missouri.31
+LEARNING TO BE UNDOCUMENTED
+Other undocumented children, some of the most politically active
+today, were brought or sent here by their parents at a young age.
+The United States is now raising a generation of children without
+documents, and the legal proposals to address their status, ranging
+from in-state tuition to the DREAM (Development, Relief, and
+Education for Alien Minors) Act, reveal the discomfort that their
+existence poses. “They are Americans in their heart, in their minds,
+in every single way but one: on paper,” President Obama declared.32
+As one undocumented student put it, “I breathe, eat, and live in
+America and have done so since I can remember.”33 The president’s
+remarks remind us that a person’s birthplace is an almost entirely
+
+arbitrary fact. Should it really be used to determine his or her
+subsequent life chances?
+Children, of course, don’t usually know much about status and
+immigration law unless their parents choose to explain the status
+issue to them. Generally their main interaction with state authority
+is through school, and since 1982, schools have been required to
+treat all children equally, regardless of status. In that year, the US
+Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision struck down a Texas law that
+allowed local school districts to deny entry to children who lacked
+legal documentation and withheld state funds for their education if
+local districts did choose to enroll them. The court ruled that to
+deny children access to education not only violated the Equal
+Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but would impose
+an unwarranted, lifetime hardship on them and bring no benefit to
+the state.34 Thus, children may never confront the issue of
+documentation in their daily lives.
+Most citizens become aware of the importance of identification
+documents when they are teenagers and apply for a driver’s license
+or for their first formal job. For the first time, they may be required
+to dig up a birth certificate or a Social Security card to prove their
+citizenship status. Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented
+immigrant from the Philippines, described the shock that many
+undocumented youth experience when they first become aware that
+there is something about their legal status that divides them from
+their peers. Vargas joined and propelled a growing movement
+among undocumented youth to break the silence, come out of the
+shadows, and openly challenge the system that excludes them.
+In the summer of 2011, Vargas published a daring exposé of his
+own life story in the New York Times Magazine. He began by
+recounting how his mother sent him, at age twelve, to live with his
+grandparents in Mountain View, California, and how he struggled to
+learn English and excel at school.
+One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V.
+office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already
+had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed
+
+the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped
+it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t
+come back here again.”
+Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted [my
+grandfather] Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage,
+cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him,
+showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog.
+(“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American
+citizens—he worked as a security guard, she as a food server
+—and they had begun supporting my mother and me
+financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and
+inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’
+separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his
+face as he told me he purchased the card, along with other
+fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he
+warned.35
+The Philippines offers a particularly convoluted case of the
+meaning of immigration, citizenship, and documents, since it was a
+US colony for the first half of the twentieth century and Filipinos
+were unilaterally deemed to be US nationals who could travel freely
+to the mainland until 1934. (The category “national” was created
+early in the twentieth century to apply to people who lived in newly
+acquired US territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. They were
+essentially stateless people, with no country and no citizenship.)
+Tens of thousands of Filipinos were recruited legally to the United
+States through nursing and military exchange programs after that,
+while the United States maintained an enormous military presence
+there. Vargas’s migration was a product of this history, as well as
+the twists and turns of US immigration law.
+In the Philippines, Vargas’s great aunt married a Filipino
+American who was serving in the US military, starting a family
+chain of migration. Using the family preferences built into the law,
+she petitioned for her brother and his wife (Vargas’s grandparents),
+who entered the country on immigrant visas in 1984 and later
+became naturalized citizens. The grandfather then petitioned for his
+
+two children. Citizens, however, can only sponsor children who are
+unmarried. Vargas’s mother was single; she and her husband had
+separated almost a decade earlier. But fearing that immigration
+would consider the petition fraudulent based on her previous
+marriage, the grandfather decided to withdraw it.
+Then the family entered the netherworld of false documents,
+obtaining a doctored passport and green card (resident alien visa)
+and sending twelve-year-old Jose with a coyote—who, he was told,
+was his uncle—to live with his grandparents in 1993. The boy never
+knew of the extra-legal nature of these arrangements or that there
+was anything unauthorized about his presence in the United States.
+Vargas’s experience coming of age, symbolized by his rebuff at
+the DMV, falls within what sociologist Roberto Gonzalez describes
+as the “transition to adulthood” for many undocumented youth. As
+Gonzalez explains, becoming an adult also involves a “transition to
+illegality” as “public schooling and US immigration laws collide to
+produce a shift in the experiences and meanings of illegal status for
+undocumented youth at the onset of their transition to
+adulthood.”36 These youth, while treated equally under the law
+during their childhood, are excluded from the rites of passage that
+lead most American youth to the adult world. They are left in a
+“developmental limbo.�� The extremely low economic status of most
+undocumented families pushes young people to assume more
+financial responsibility than their documented peers, —but they are
+not, officially, allowed to work. At the same time, they are cut off
+from other stages in the transition to majority like learning to drive,
+registering to vote, undertaking postsecondary education, or
+opening a bank account.37 It comes as a shock that the society that
+nurtured them suddenly closes its doors. One student wrote, “I did
+not think to question the pledge of allegiance or the history that was
+being taught to us. . . . Looking back, I should have questioned the
+allegiance I pledged every morning to a country that rejected me.”38
+YOUTH ACTIVISM
+
+This generation of undocumented youth coming of age in today’s
+United States is historically unprecedented. Most undocumented
+adults are individuals who were raised in another country and came
+here as adults. They knew life in their country of birth, and they
+came here of their own volition (but, of course, under historical
+circumstances that they did not choose). Their experience of life in
+the United States is that of being undocumented.
+Their children, who may be undocumented as well, have a
+completely different life experience. They were raised and attended
+schools in this country, where they were repeatedly told that this is
+a nation of immigrants, a country that treats everybody equally.
+They were taught that if they worked hard, they could attend
+college and get a good job. They were taught that they had rights,
+because that’s what the schools teach children in this country. They
+learned about Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and about Martin
+Luther King Jr. and struggles for racial justice and equality. At
+home, they were taught that their parents brought them here so that
+they could have a better life.
+When Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Irina
+Todorova studied several generations of immigrant youth and their
+experiences in US schools, they found that the immigrants of the
+first generation are the highest achievers. They are acutely aware of
+the sacrifices their parents made to provide more opportunities for
+them, and “these parental sacrifices propel many immigrant
+students to launch themselves wholeheartedly into their educational
+journey.”39
+Learning that they are undocumented and what that means is an
+unexpected and unacceptable shock to many of these children. They
+never felt or knew that they were any different from their
+classmates. Consider these testimonies from students: “It’s almost
+like I am tied down to the ground with a ball and chain because I
+don’t have citizenship”; “It’s like someone giving you a car, but not
+putting any gas in it”; “They say you can accomplish whatever you
+want or set your mind to, but they don’t say that it’s just for
+some.”40
+
+Just as this new generation of undocumented youth was finishing
+high school, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and IIRIRA made it
+almost impossible for them to go to college. By prohibiting them
+from receiving public financial aid and depriving them of state
+residency, the acts effectively shut the door to higher education.41
+These youth have been at the forefront of organizing for
+immigrants’ rights over the past decade. Access to higher education
+has been one focal organizing point for high-achieving students. At
+the state level, they fought for the right to be considered state
+residents and to attend public colleges and universities. At the
+national level, they fought for the DREAM Act, which would give
+them educational rights and also put them on a path to citizenship.
+In Texas, Republican governor Rick Perry signed the first in-state
+tuition law in 2001, allowing undocumented students to be
+considered state residents for tuition purposes. California passed a
+similar law later the same year, and other states followed. As of
+mid-2013, fourteen states offered in-state tuition to qualified
+students who were undocumented.42
+Some arguments about in-state tuition were strictly economic.
+Proponents explained that it would increase state revenues by
+allowing more individuals to enroll in state colleges and
+universities, while opponents feared that letting in the
+undocumented would reduce the seats available to citizen students.
+The number of students able to take advantage of these provisions
+has been small: as of 2005, there were 1,620 in the University of
+California and California State University systems and 5,100 in
+Texas, including the community college system, which accounted
+for about 80 percent of undocumented students.43 The
+Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation estimated that such a law
+would allow some 350 students a year to enroll in that state, again
+with the majority going to community colleges.44
+In-state tuition has been a state-level struggle. Only the federal
+government could address the larger issue of status. The DREAM
+Act, proposed and defeated or abandoned numerous times at the
+federal level, would create a path to citizenship for certain
+
+undocumented youth. The different versions of the act vary slightly
+on specifics, but in general they address a population that has come
+to be known as the “DREAMers”: young people between the ages of
+sixteen and thirty who were brought to the United States by their
+parents before they reached the age of sixteen—that is, as children
+—who may have crossed the border (or remained in the country)
+“illegally,” but not through their own will or decision. The act
+would extend provisional legal status to such youth for six years. If
+they attend college or serve in the military for two years, their
+provisional status could be converted into a path to citizenship.45
+(Other individuals and organizations object to the military service
+provision, arguing that it is trying to create a de facto military draft
+for young Latinos, since most would not be able to afford college
+tuition even at in-state rates.)46
+The Migration Policy Institute estimated in 2010 (based on 2006–
+2008 figures) that there were 2.1 million undocumented youth who
+were potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act. Almost a million of
+these were under the age of eighteen.47
+The DREAM Act was reintroduced repeatedly in both the US
+Senate and the House starting in 2001, and included in S. 2611, the
+Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act approved by the Senate in
+2006 (later defeated in the House of Representatives), and S. 744,
+the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration
+Modernization Act passed by the Senate in 2013.
+Many advocates saw the rights of DREAMers as a front line in a
+larger struggle over the meaning of undocumentedness. By placing a
+sympathetic face—a high-achieving high school student—together
+with the term and the status of undocumented, they sought to
+challenge the better-known image associating the status with
+criminality.
+Still, there was significant debate in the movement over this
+tactic. By emphasizing the innocence of students who were brought
+to the United States as young children with no choice in the matter,
+did the campaign tacitly accept the guilt of these students’ parents,
+who had made the decision? Were the students being held up as
+
+exceptional, deserving, undocumented individuals, thus implying
+that other undocumented people were not deserving?
+While some were wary of the way the DREAM Act seemed to
+skim off and privilege the most publicly acceptable portion of the
+undocumented population, most organizations believed that it was
+an opening to challenge the very concept of undocumentedness.
+Undocumented youth who grew up in the United States do not fit
+the profile that many citizens hold of the “illegal immigrant.” Many
+of these youth feel motivated to take advantage of their relative
+privilege as English-speaking, assimilated, and educated members of
+US society to fight publicly against anti-immigrant and antiundocumented sentiment.
+The DREAM Act both responded to and created an outlet for a
+huge upsurge in organizing by undocumented youth. Claudia
+Anguiano, who studied the history of undocumented student
+activism in depth, outlined three phases. From 2001 to 2007, “selfidentification strategies were used to create a collective group
+identity that countered the negative dehumanizing typecast of
+‘illegal aliens’ by identifying DREAMers as exceptional students.”
+During the following two years, “self-representation strategies
+worked to unite undocumented youth through the creation of
+national coalitional organizations and through self-identification as
+undocumented and unafraid.” Finally, during 2010, “activists utilized
+strategies of self-reliance and self-identified as unapologetic
+DREAMers. The strategies of intervention included the use of civil
+disobedience tactics to petition for the legislation.”48
+In 2009, DREAMers founded the organization United We Dream
+to coordinate nationally and use the tactic of coming out or telling
+their own stories as a political weapon. “Leaders realized that
+encouraging young people to recount the stories of their lives in
+hiding and of their thwarted aspirations could be liberating for
+them, and also compelling for skeptical Americans.”49 Taking
+inspiration from the gay rights movement, many have themselves
+and encouraged others to come out and hold public coming-out
+ceremonies. Jose Antonio Vargas suggested, in his defiantly titled
+
+essay “Not Legal, Not Leaving,” that “we are living in the golden age
+of coming out.”50 Coming out can be a personal liberation, but it is
+also part of a larger project to insist on social and legal acceptance,
+which means fundamentally changing the legal structures of
+belonging in the country and challenging the beliefs that underlie
+and justify anti-immigrant sentiment.
+DREAM activist Gaby Pacheco accompanied much of this process.
+Pacheco, like Jose Antonio Vargas and so many others, learned that
+she was undocumented when she went to apply for her learner’s
+permit. She had come from Ecuador to Miami with her parents
+when she was about to start third grade. She began to organize for
+the rights of undocumented students in 2004, founding Students for
+Immigrant Rights in Florida and working with the Florida
+Immigrant Coalition and Presente.org. “From four of us that used to
+meet to try to pass the DREAM Act, we now have 16 chapters
+throughout Florida. Students Working for Equal Rights is part of the
+United We Dream network, which is led by students and represents
+26 states,” she explained.51
+In January 2010, Pacheco joined three other immigrant Florida
+students for a fifteen-hundred-mile march to Washington, DC, part
+of the ongoing and increasingly public campaign to press for the
+rights of the undocumented. “They said they had concluded that the
+exposure to immigration agents on the walk was not much greater
+than what they faced in their daily lives. ‘We are aware of the risk,’
+[one participant] said . . . ‘We are risking our future because our
+present is unbearable.’” ICE declined to comment on the issue.52
+“Coming out didn’t endanger me; it had protected me,” wrote
+Vargas. “A Philippine-born, college-educated, outspoken mainstream
+journalist is not the face the government wants to put on its
+deportation program.” He also wanted to use his case to publicize
+the arbitrary nature of immigration enforcement. “Who flies under
+the radar, and who becomes one of those unfortunate 396,906 [who
+are deported]? Who stays, who goes, and who decides?”53
+A year after coming out, he recounted his attempt to find out
+what ICE planned to do about him.
+
+After months of waiting for something to happen, I decided
+that I would confront immigration officials myself. Since I live
+in New York City, I called the local ICE office. The phone
+operators I first reached were taken aback when I explained
+the reason for my call. Finally I was connected to an ICE
+officer.
+“Are you planning on deporting me?” I asked.
+I quickly found out that even though I publicly came out
+about my undocumented status, I still do not exist in the eyes
+of ICE. Like most undocumented immigrants, I’ve never been
+arrested. Therefore, I’ve never been in contact with ICE.
+“After checking the appropriate ICE databases, the agency
+has no records of ever encountering Mr. Vargas,” Luis
+Martinez, a spokesman for the ICE office in New York, wrote
+me in an e-mail.
+I then contacted the ICE headquarters in Washington. I
+hoped to get some insight into my status and that of all the
+others who are coming out. How does ICE view these cases?
+Can publicly revealing undocumented status trigger
+deportation proceedings, and if so, how is that decided? Is ICE
+planning to seek my deportation?
+“We do not comment on specific cases,” is all I was told.54
+Amid increasingly visible activism and sympathetic media
+coverage, Congress took up the DREAM Act again at the end of
+2010. Although it passed the House of Representatives, advocates
+could not muster enough votes to overcome a Senate filibuster.
+Most Republicans opposed the DREAM Act in the 2010 vote, even
+some who had supported previous attempts. The House was about
+to be turned over to a Republican majority. For some DREAMers, it
+was time to shift away from a legislative strategy. “In a meeting
+after the vote with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority
+leader, Ms. [Gaby] Pacheco said she grabbed him and whispered in
+his ear. ‘You know the president has the power to stop deporting
+us,’ she said. ‘You know you could tell him to do this.’ Startled, Mr.
+Reid gave her a hug and walked away.” In early 2011, United We
+
+Dream decided to change its focus to the president. At the National
+Council of La Raza meeting in Washington in July, when Obama
+tried to explain that he could not bypass Congress to push for
+immigrants’ rights, DREAMers “erupted in shouts: ‘Yes you can! Yes
+you can!’”55
+Meanwhile, Obama’s June 2011 Morton Memo specifically
+included DREAMers as a category meriting “prosecutorial
+discretion,” essentially advising that ICE refrain from prosecuting
+them for immigration violations. (See chapter 8 for a more detailed
+discussion of prosecutorial discretion.) DREAMers saw this as a
+concession and an opening for further action.
+In March 2012, Florida Republican—and potential vice
+presidential candidate—Marco Rubio announced that he was
+preparing to propose his own version of the DREAM Act. While
+reluctant to address specifics, Rubio emphasized that unlike
+previous versions of the act, his would not open a path to
+citizenship for undocumented youth. “I think that one of the debates
+that we need to begin to have is a difference between citizenship
+and legalization . . . You can legalize someone’s status in this
+country with a significant amount of certainty about their future
+without placing them on a path toward citizenship, and I think that
+is something that we can find consensus on,” Rubio explained.
+DREAM Act supporter and Democratic senator Harry Reid declared
+scornfully that this was a “watered-down version” that he would do
+“everything in his power” to oppose.56
+Still, Democrats worried about ceding momentum—and possibly
+Latino votes—to the Republicans during an election year.
+DREAMers praised Rubio’s step, and they continued to challenge
+Obama to take presidential action. In May, they presented the
+administration with a letter signed by over ninety law professors
+outlining legal precedents and steps that the president could take to
+halt deportations of undocumented youth.57
+“[Rubio’s] plan puts Obama in a box,” the Washington Post
+reported. “Democrats are reluctant to see Rubio’s efforts as anything
+other than a political gambit to repair his party’s tarnished image
+
+with Hispanics and boost his own profile as a potential vicepresidential pick or future White House contender. But if Obama
+does not at least try to work with Rubio, he could risk losing a
+centerpiece of his appeal to Hispanic voters—that he is their fiercest
+ally in Washington and that the GOP is to blame for lack of action
+on fixing the country’s immigration ills.”58
+In June, Obama regained the initiative for the Democrats when
+he announced his DACA program.
+DACA
+Much smaller than a comprehensive immigration reform, smaller
+even than the DREAM Act, DACA offered a two-year respite to
+young people who, Obama said, were American “in every single
+way but one: on paper.” “We’re a better nation than one that expels
+innocent young kids,” he explained.59 While his announcement was
+celebrated by many young undocumented immigrants and
+organizations that advocate for immigrant rights, it did not make
+those young people “American,” and like the DREAM Act, it
+implicitly raised questions about the very nature of status and
+illegality that were uncomfortable for both DREAMers and their
+opponents.
+DACA followed the DREAM Act in addressing people thirty and
+under who had arrived in the United States before age sixteen and
+had lived here continuously since 2007 and were in school, high
+school graduates, or veterans. (Vargas, who had just turned thirtyone, was thus excluded.) Unlike the DREAM Act, however, DACA
+did not open up a path to citizenship. It was limited to relief from
+deportation for two years and, during those two years, permission to
+work.
+The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that up to 1.4 million youth
+would be eligible for DACA, half of them under eighteen and half
+eighteen to thirty and either enrolled in school or high school
+graduates. Seventy percent of these were from Mexico. Together,
+DACA candidates represented just over 10 percent of undocumented
+immigrants in the United States.60
+
+During the first month (August 16 to September 15), US Citizen
+and Immigration Services (USCIS) received 82,361 applications.61 A
+month later, the agency announced that 179,794 DACA applications
+had been received, and 4,591 approved.62 By April 2013, the USCIS
+reported a total 488,782 received, and 472,004 approved. The vast
+majority of applicants were from Mexico (354,002), followed by El
+Salvador (18,949), Honduras (12,603), and Guatemala (11,817).63
+Grace Meng from Human Rights Watch pointed out that DACA
+was aimed at only a certain sector of immigrant youth. “The
+program’s idea of ‘American’ is unlikely to include the children who
+picked the oranges for your juice or the tomatoes on your
+hamburgers,” she explained. The children of migrant farm workers,
+she points out, are more likely to be out of school—they drop out at
+four times the national average—and less likely to have the
+documentation of continuous presence required to qualify for DACA.
+It is clear, Meng writes, that
+the program of deferred action was not designed for child
+farmworkers who, like many immigrants throughout U.S.
+history, live very different lives than middle-class, suburban
+kids. . . . It’s not surprising that the Obama administration
+designed a program for the best and the brightest immigrant
+children. But the fact that deferred action will probably
+exclude many farmworker children underscores how much
+immigration law is out of sync with the reality of an economy
+that depends on unauthorized immigrants.64
+By proposing an immigration reform—whether one as farreaching as the DREAM Act or one as limited as DACA—for this
+restricted group of people, policymakers and advocates suggested
+that this group—and, implicitly but inevitably, not other groups—
+deserved access to some sort of legal status. By recognizing these
+young people as American, the implication was that other
+undocumented people were not American, but rather irredeemably
+foreign. If these young people were defined as innocent—because
+they were brought to the United States by their parents before they
+
+were old enough to make an independent decision—then their
+parents, who made the decision and brought them, were by
+implication guilty.
+When Senators Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), Dick Durbin
+(D-Illinois), and Harry Reid (D-Nevada) introduced a recent version
+of the DREAM Act in May 2011, they presented it in precisely those
+terms. The act, Reid claimed, was for “children brought to this
+nation by their parents through no fault of their own.” “We should
+not punish children for their parents’ past decisions,” Menendez
+added. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) agreed that “we should not
+hold innocent children responsible for the sins of their parents.”65
+Many children found it difficult to accept the logic that
+counterpoised their own innocence with their parents’ guilt. As one
+DREAMer protested, “I was brought to this country by a very
+courageous woman. She’s my hero. She’s my mother. She left
+everyone and everything she knew behind in order for her to give
+me a better life. . . . I’m not going to blame her. . . . I thank her for
+bringing me here.”66
+Referring to the internal border that separates the undocumented
+from the rest of US society, another DREAMer wrote,
+Is it possible that DACA is also perpetuating this internal
+border? DACA passed largely due to the pressure that was
+being put on politicians and President Obama by DREAMers.
+But, I began to question, what else could have influenced the
+passing of DACA? The strong movement of DREAMers started
+getting exposure to the general public of the country and the
+movement made many people question why these students . .
+. were being punished. DREAMers began to make this internal
+border visible to the country. . . . In order for the United
+States to keep perpetuating undocumentedness as an
+unwanted and illegal “thing,” they chose to help us in a way
+that keeps us in the same state of second-class citizenship with
+a nicer title and stops the general public from continuing to
+ponder this question. . . . Undocumentedness allows the
+country to keep its cheap labor and discriminate against non-
+
+whites. And, with undocumented students out of the
+immediate picture of undocumentedness, the continual
+perpetuation of undocumented people as outsiders can
+continue to thrive.67
+Many argued that DACA was a first step rather than a solution.
+“‘By having this relief and having access to greater resources we can
+begin to push harder for relief for the entire community,’ said
+Lorella Praeli, advocacy director of the group United We Dream.
+‘This fight for DREAMers in our community has never been about
+ourselves. . . . It’s been about our families.’”68 Just a month after the
+2012 election, United We Dream agreed upon a new platform
+demanding “an inclusive pathway to citizenship.” A New York Times
+reporter described the meeting:
+Their decision to push for legal status for their families was
+intensely emotional. When they were asked at a plenary
+session how many had been separated by deportation from a
+parent or other close family member, hundreds of hands went
+up. They were critical of Mr. Obama for deporting more than
+1.4 million people during his first term.
+“When Obama is deporting all these people, separating all
+of our families, I’m sick and tired of that,” said Regem Corpuz,
+a 19-year-old student at the University of California, Los
+Angeles, who was born in the Philippines.
+“Our families’ dreams were to get a better future,” said
+Ulises Vasquez of Sonoma County, Calif., “but our future is
+with our families together.”
+At the meeting, several parents followed their children’s lead and
+held a coming-out ceremony to tell their stories publicly for the first
+time.69
+Other contradictions plagued DACA as well. Presidential
+candidate Mitt Romney announced that, if elected, he would
+immediately halt the program upon taking office, though he said he
+would not revoke the status of those who had already been
+
+approved. With Obama’s election, the program seemed secure at
+least for the two years initially announced. But many of those who it
+was designed to help found themselves caught in the multiple
+contradictions of the immigration system, which DACA could not
+transcend.
+For many young immigrants, the very documents they needed to
+supply to prove that they fulfilled the program’s requirements were
+precisely those that they lacked. As the New York Times asked, “How
+do you document an undocumented life?” Particularly difficult were
+work records. For those who worked off the books and were paid in
+cash, no records documented the transactions. For those who used
+false Social Security numbers, submitting the evidence incriminated
+them in another crime. Moreover, employers were reluctant to
+unearth or provide records that could implicate them, too, in legal
+problems.70
+Furthermore, DACA did not affect the actions of ICE, which was
+pursuing deportation cases against a significant number of potential
+recipients. Instead, it placed two branches of the Department of
+Homeland Security against each other: while USCIS administered
+DACA, ICE attorneys were still charged with pursuing deportation
+cases. With 325,000 cases pending in its backlogged system, ICE
+found itself prosecuting—and even deporting—young people, even
+as USCIS was reviewing or approving their applications for deferred
+action.71
+Obama also disappointed many DREAMers when he announced
+that DACA recipients would be excluded from federal health-care
+programs under the Affordable Care Act (including Medicaid and
+federal subsidies for purchasing private insurance), even though
+immigrants deemed “lawfully present” were eligible. The New York
+Times noted ironically that “immigrants granted such relief [i.e.,
+Deferred Action] would ordinarily meet the definition of ‘lawfully
+present’ residents. . . . But the administration issued a rule in late
+August that specifically excluded the young immigrants from the
+definition of ‘lawfully present.’”72
+
+The Department of Homeland Security left it up to individual
+states to decide whether people with DACA status could obtain a
+driver’s license or receive state-level benefits like in-state tuition at
+state colleges and universities. Arizona’s governor declared that
+DACA youth were not eligible for driver’s licenses, while
+Massachusetts became the first state to make them eligible for instate tuition. In Michigan, the Secretary of State’s office announced
+that DACA youth would not be able to obtain a driver’s license. “We
+rely on the federal government to tell us who is here legally; we
+don’t determine that,” the office explained. “So far, the federal
+government has not provided information to the states indicating
+that DACA grants that legal status.” As one Michigan DACA
+recipient put it wryly, “I’m caught in this situation where I can go to
+work, I can go to school, I’m legal here, but I can’t go to work and
+can’t go to school.”73
+As President Obama celebrated his victory in the 2012 election,
+he highlighted immigrant youth. “We believe in a generous
+America, in a compassionate America, in a tolerant America open to
+the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools
+and pledges to our flag, to the young boy on the south side of
+Chicago who sees a life beyond the nearest street corner, to the
+furniture worker’s child in North Carolina who wants to become a
+doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or
+even a president,” the president proclaimed stirringly.
+“Obama was very clearly referencing the immigrant youth who
+he’s supported with his backing of the DREAM Act and deferred
+action,” said Julianne Hing, Colorlines immigration reporter. “But it
+should be noted that his support came largely because immigrant
+youth have put his feet to the fire and relentlessly demanded more
+humane treatment of undocumented youth and their families.”74
+The Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill (S. 744) passed
+in June 2013 included the most generous version yet of the DREAM
+Act, but as the bill subsequently stalled in the House, the future for
+immigrant youth remained as uncertain as ever.
+
+CHAPTER 8
+
+Solutions
+In order to talk about solutions, we have to understand the real
+roots and nature of the problem. Many politicians and others who
+see immigration control as an issue of security and sovereignty
+imagine that hordes of poor people of color are seeking to
+appropriate the resources of this land that we now call the United
+States. This formulation of the problem is a precise reversal of the
+actual European settlement of the country, from the perspective of
+the Native Americans.
+It is also a mirror image of the United States’ relationship with
+the countries—primarily Mexico, Central America, and other Latin
+American countries—from which the undocumented come. In every
+case, the products and profits accumulated in the sending countries
+are a major source of the abundance and affluence in the United
+States. A quick review of any supermarket or clothing or electronics
+store reveals the Third World and often Latin American origins of
+many of the products we consume. More invisible are the mines, oil
+wells, multinationals, and profits behind the products. But the flow
+of resources is undeniable.
+The history that is drummed into the heads of US schoolchildren
+insists that the “country of immigrants” was founded and built by
+Europeans. The invisible underside of this narrative is the imperial
+narrative of conquest and dispossession that continued until the end
+of the nineteenth century and upon which the new “country of
+[white] immigrants” was built.
+The country-of-immigrants narrative is very much a narrative of
+race. Immigrants were conceived as white Europeans (the only
+people allowed to naturalize), and their presence and comfort
+depended upon the labor of people who were legally excluded from
+the polity. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth
+centuries, Mexicans, like African Americans prior to 1868, were
+
+accepted as a necessary evil for their labor and considered
+unthreatening to the white nature of the country that viewed them
+as exploitable workers rather than as potential citizens. The history
+of reliance on Mexican labor coupled with the refusal to grant rights
+to Mexican workers is a long one indeed.
+The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase (La
+Mesilla Purchase of 1853) offered US citizenship to Mexican citizens
+resident in the territories newly taken. By specifying “Mexican
+citizens,” the laws excluded the Native American population
+resident in the area. And by offering citizenship to Mexicans at a
+time when citizenship was restricted to whites, the laws implied that
+Mexicans would be considered white. In the midcentury, then, “it
+was possible . . . to be both white and Mexican in the United
+States.”1 However, as Katherine Benton-Cohn explains in her
+detailed study of four Arizona border towns, Mexican nationality
+became racialized as nonwhite during the nineteenth century
+through work. Where Mexicans were workers, rather than
+landholders, they came to be legally defined as racially Mexican and
+disqualified from citizenship.
+“Where Mexicans owned ranches and farms, racial categories
+were blurry and unimportant. But in the industrial copper-mining
+town of Bisbee, Mexican workers were segregated economically by
+their lower pay (‘Mexican wage’) and geographically by new townplanning experiments. To most non-Mexican residents of Bisbee,
+Mexicans were peon workers or potential public charges, not
+neighbors or business partners, not co-workers or co-worshipers,
+and certainly not potential marriage partners.” In these areas, where
+Mexicans became defined as racially Mexican through their laboring
+status, “‘American’ increasingly equaled ‘white,’ and so ‘Mexican’
+came to mean the opposite of both.”2
+Nicolas De Genova notes the “longstanding equation of Mexican
+migration with a presumably temporary, disposable (finally,
+deportable) labor migration predominated by men (who were
+predominantly single or left wives and children behind).”3 The 1911
+Dillingham US Immigration Commission argued that “while
+
+[Mexicans] are not easily assimilated, this is of no very great
+importance as long as most of them return to their native land. In
+the case of the Mexican, he is less desirable as a citizen than as a
+laborer.”4 “One way or the other, then,” De Genova concludes, “US
+policy would ensure that ‘most of them’ proved to be sojourners.”5
+The laws that restricted citizenship to whites did not restrict the
+right to work to whites. On the contrary, Congress has repeatedly
+created new categories of nonwhite people who were specifically
+cast as workers. (Slave laborers comprised the original worker-butnot-potential-citizen category.) Deportability became a crucial factor
+in cementing the association between Mexican-ness as a race and
+legal status as a temporary worker. The threat of deportation
+worked to institutionalize the fragile character of Mexicans’ claims
+to rights in the land where they came, invited, to work. It could be
+used to accommodate the changing needs of employers, and it could
+also be used to discourage union organizing or other forms of social
+protest.6 Until the 1960s, racial justifications seemed sufficient for
+legal discrimination against Mexicans.
+MAKING IMMIGRATION ILLEGAL
+After the 1960s, when race was finally rejected as a rationale for
+excluding people from access to public spaces, citizenship, or entry
+into the United States, new forms of legal and legalized exclusion
+took its place. The last two major immigration reforms, in 1965 and
+1986, turned Mexican migrant workers into “illegal” workers and
+used that legal status to justify discrimination. They also,
+paradoxically, helped to greatly increase both the immigrant and
+the undocumented population.
+The 1965 law is generally seen as a civil rights triumph. One
+typical account explains that it “ended discrimination” and
+“represented a significant watershed in US immigration history and
+particularly in its explicit reversal of decades of systematically
+exclusive and restrictive immigration policies.” Immigration
+scholars agree that the climate of the civil rights movement of the
+1960s set the context for the 1965 immigration reform.7
+
+Despite this generous interpretation, the 1965 law was actually
+“distinctly and unequivocally restrictive” when it came to Mexican
+migrants.8 Through the 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of
+thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border as braceros or
+alongside the braceros each year. Then the Bracero Program was
+ended and Mexican immigration was suddenly capped. By 1976, a
+cap of twenty thousand immigrant visas a year was enforced. The
+seasonal, circular migration of Mexicans over many decades that
+had attracted little national attention suddenly became “a yearly
+and highly visible violation of American sovereignty by hostile
+aliens who were increasingly framed as invaders and criminals.”9
+If the new restrictions were intended to lower migration from
+Latin America, they failed miserably. Instead, all types of
+immigration from Latin America rose after 1965: temporary and
+permanent, legal and illegal. Legal immigration from Latin America
+grew from about 450,000 between 1950 and 1960 to over 4 million
+between 1990 and 2000, while the number of undocumented Latin
+Americans living long term in the United States grew from almost
+none in 1965 to close to 10 million in the first decade of the new
+century.10
+Further “unintended consequences” flowed from the greatly
+increased border enforcement of the 1990s and 2000s. As border
+crossing became more difficult, more dangerous, and more
+expensive, seasonal migrants began to change their patterns and
+stay on in the United States, sometimes bringing their families as
+well. The undocumented population grew rapidly in those decades,
+not because more immigrants were arriving, but because fewer were
+leaving. “It was thus a sharp decline in the outflow of
+undocumented migrants, not an increase in the inflow of
+undocumented migrants, that was responsible for the acceleration of
+undocumented population growth during the 1990s and early
+2000s, and this decline in return migration was to a great extent a
+product of US enforcement efforts.”11
+Starting in 1990, a series of laws made life even more difficult for
+noncitizens, including green-card holders (legal permanent
+
+residents). Family reunification privileges favored citizens over legal
+permanent residents. In 1996, legal permanent residents were
+barred from receiving most social services, while the Antiterrorism
+and Effective Death Penalty Act made noncitizens deportable for a
+wide range of crimes, even if they had been committed in a distant
+past. Then, in 2001, the USA-PATRIOT Act made deportation and
+arrest possible for virtually any noncitizen, based only upon the US
+Attorney General’s decision.12
+In response to the increasingly punitive climate for noncitizens,
+more immigrants chose to naturalize. As new citizens, they were
+now able to take advantage of the family preferences created by the
+1965 law and petition for their family members, thus contributing
+to an increase in overall immigration.13
+STRUCTURAL CAUSES OF INCREASED MIGRATION
+While US legislative changes played a large role in increasing both
+documented and undocumented immigration, the enormous
+political and economic convulsions that wracked Latin America in
+the post-1965 era and the shifts in the global economy were also
+important. Political movements for social change were crushed as a
+wave of extraordinarily repressive right-wing dictatorships spread
+through the continent. Supply-side economics and structural
+adjustment programs tore apart social safety networks and spurred
+export-oriented extraction and production. The new policies
+disrupted traditional economies while creating expectations and
+hopes that couldn’t be fulfilled at home. Meanwhile, both
+consumption and inequality shot up in the United States, creating
+massive demand for cheap immigrant workers. Globalizing
+technologies and migration chains transformed the possibility of
+migration from remote to realistic. The forces behind the rise in
+Latin American, especially Mexican and Central American,
+migration were multiple indeed.
+Even as US politicians railed about illegal immigration and
+border control, they pursued policies that served to increase migrant
+flows. Policies imposed on Latin America that destroy subsistence
+
+farming and degrade agricultural work, and limit employment
+opportunities and social services, set the stage for out-migration.
+Policies at home that create demand for low-wage, immigrant
+workers and establish recruitment networks structure the
+destinations of migrant flows. These are precisely the policies that
+the United States has implemented.
+Over the past century, the United States has consistently
+promoted export-oriented economies in Latin America based on
+foreign investment. It has opposed and overthrown Latin American
+governments that have tried to take control of or redistribute their
+countries’ resources. During recent decades, US policies promoting
+neoliberal austerity measures and market fundamentalism have had
+noxious effects on Latin American society. They undermine
+subsistence agriculture, employment, and the social safety network,
+while increasing structural and individual violence in Latin America.
+The United States has used international institutions, military
+interventions, trade agreements, and corporate privilege to arrive at
+a situation in which it, with 4 percent of the world’s population,
+consumes between 25 percent and 50 percent of the planet’s major
+resources, while simultaneously creating an enormous demand for
+low-wage, informal, and seasonal labor. Thus, the United States
+continues to set the stage for large migrations from Latin America.14
+Perhaps the advocates of border control believe that while the
+open border worked in the past, these structural changes have made
+it untenable in today’s world. A focus on securing—or more
+accurately, militarizing—the border, though, only serves to
+reinforce the structural conditions behind migration. As Jacqueline
+Stevens argues, “Illegitimate regimes benefit from the restrictive
+immigration policies of their neighbors. In most countries run by
+tyrants, emigration is not curtailed by the regimes themselves,
+which often lack the resources to police wide swaths of their
+borders. Rather, neighboring countries fearing the incursion of
+political and economic refugees take care of this.”15
+In the case of the United States and Latin America, Stevens’s
+argument must be refined. It is not pure coincidence that poor and
+
+violent countries in Latin America coexist alongside the
+overconsuming United States. Deliberate US policies, from invasions
+and occupations to military aid to loans and investments, have
+created the Latin American polities and economies and the
+disparities that are now the roots of today’s migrations. Attempts to
+seal the border only reinforce the very inequalities that contribute
+to migration.
+CHALLENGING DISCRIMINATION
+The campaigns to strengthen immigration law and make it harsher
+are fairly well known and have been related to the successive
+punitive measures against undocumented immigrants since the
+1980s. But organizations that defended the rights of immigrants
+and, in particular, the undocumented also grew in the last decades
+of the twentieth century.16
+While nativism has been part of US society and culture since the
+country was founded, specifically anti-undocumented sentiment and
+movements date to the post-1965 and especially the post-1986
+period. The Republican Party first mentioned immigration
+enforcement in its 1980 national platform and in 1984 first
+“affirmed the right of the United States to control its boundaries and
+voiced concern about illegal immigration.” The Democratic Party
+first mentioned illegal immigration in its 1996 platform.17 Popular
+movements for the defense of the rights of the undocumented also
+grew this period.
+Mexican American rights organizations like LULAC have taken
+mixed stances on the undocumented and even on immigrants in
+general over the course of the twentieth century. Mexican
+Americans sought to claim their rights by demonstrating their
+patriotism and distancing themselves from new arrivals, even as
+their communities, friends, and families included both documented
+and undocumented new immigrants.18 Even the United Farm
+Workers union, made up primarily of immigrants, was hesitant to
+defend the rights of the undocumented.
+
+However, Mexican American rights, immigrant rights, and the
+rights of the undocumented have also been intertwined. The
+Chicano movement of the 1960s and ’70s rejected the emphasis on
+patriotism and assimilation of earlier generations, and insisted on a
+cultural nationalism that united people of Mexican origin, regardless
+of status. (The movement adopted the name Chicano to emphasize
+the indigenous roots of Mexicans and the difference in their
+historical experience from that of European immigrants.) “Chicano
+families became the new underground railroad,” explained Alma
+Martínez evocatively, referring to the ties that bound US-born
+Chicanos to new, including undocumented, immigrants.19 Even as
+politicians and the media raised their voices against the
+undocumented, networks and organizations grew to defend their
+rights.
+In the 1980s, growing numbers of Central American refugees
+joined the ranks of what had previously been primarily a Mexican
+phenomenon. The sanctuary movement, growing primarily out of
+Central American refugee organizations and Anglo religious
+congregations, sought to aid Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in
+the United States without legal status. Some organizations were
+made up of refugees themselves, like the Central American Refugee
+Center (CARECEN, later changed to Central American Resource
+Center), founded in 1983. These and other organizations concerned
+with the rights of Salvadoran (and to a lesser extent, Guatemalan)
+refugees were the first to bring the question of the rights of the
+undocumented into the public sphere. They also emphasized how
+US intervention was behind much of the violence that was causing
+people to flee Central America.
+A series of lawsuits focused specifically on the right to asylum,
+reflecting these organizations’ concern with the situation of Central
+American refugees. Orantes-Hernandez v. Meese and Perez-Funes v.
+District Director both required the INS to strengthen Central
+Americans’ right to seek and obtain asylum in the mid-1980s.
+Finally, in 1990, American Baptist Church v. Thornburgh required the
+INS to reopen asylum cases that had been unfairly denied. The
+
+organizations pushing the lawsuits also worked to end US military
+aid to El Salvador. Their focus was on the Central American crisis
+and its victims, more than on the issue of undocumentedness per se.
+THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE REFORM
+The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was
+comprehensive in the same way that twenty-first-century proposals
+for comprehensive reform were. It combined enforcement—in the
+form of employer sanctions and increased border security—with
+legalization or amnesty. The rationale was that by legalizing some
+of the undocumented population, encouraging others to leave
+(through employer sanctions that would make it more difficult for
+them to work), and making it more difficult for further
+undocumented people to enter the country, the numbers of the
+undocumented should be significantly reduced.
+IRCA had complicated implications for the undocumented. For
+those who could document presence since 1982 or eligibility for
+Special Agricultural Worker Status, the chance to obtain legal status
+was priceless. (As discussed earlier, the law also created a black
+market of falsified papers trying to document eligibility.) The
+employer sanctions provisions of the law, however, created a new
+system for marginalizing and discriminating against the
+undocumented. By offering legal status to some, but not all of the
+undocumented, IRCA (like the DREAM Act and DACA) invited even
+more pernicious racism against those it left out.
+The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights was
+established in 1986, growing out of a coalition that coalesced in
+1985 to organize a National Day of Justice for Immigrants and
+Refugees in opposition to legislative proposals for employer
+sanctions for the hiring of undocumented workers, which was
+incorporated in the 1986 IRCA. Following the passage of the law,
+new organizations like the New York Immigrant Coalition and the
+Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition formed
+both to help undocumented immigrants gain legal status and to
+
+challenge discriminatory aspects of the enforcement of employer
+sanctions (and sometimes the notion of employer sanctions itself).
+Despite its supposed comprehensiveness, IRCA did not live up to
+its claims. Around 1.7 million immigrants became legalized through
+IRCA provisions, which succeeded in reducing the total
+undocumented population by that number. However, the gradual
+net inflow of undocumented people did not seem to change much.
+As Karen Woodrow and Jeffrey Passel explain, “The entire decrease
+in the undocumented population from 3.1 million in 1986 to 1.9
+million in 1988 is attributable to . . . formerly undocumented
+immigrants changing their status to legal residents under the
+provisions of the IRCA.”20 In other words, the law led to neither an
+increased outflow nor a reduced inflow of undocumented
+immigrants. In fact, “after this group [those who legalized] is taken
+into account, our research suggests that the remaining
+undocumented population may actually have increased between
+June 1986 and June 1988. . . . Thus IRCA has not cut off the flow of
+new undocumented immigrants to the United States.”21
+The AFL-CIO supported employer sanctions in 1986. But as Jeff
+Stansbury wrote a few years later, “The IRCA is not a border-control
+law,” rather, it is “a worker-control law.” In the words of Asian Law
+Caucus staff attorney Bill Tamayo, “The new law has codified the
+existence of a cheap and highly exploitable class of labor, largely
+non-white and non-English-speaking, with little rights, if any.” And
+employers lost no time in using the law as a weapon against workers
+who tried to organize unions.22 In 2000, the AFL-CIO reversed its
+stance and called for a repeal of employer sanctions.23 AFL-CIO
+executive vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson explained,
+“Employers often knowingly hire workers who are undocumented,
+and then when workers seek to improve working conditions
+employers use the law to fire or intimidate workers.”24
+Proponents of employer sanctions argued that by making it more
+difficult for undocumented immigrants to find work, the law would
+discourage them from migrating to begin with. For Mexicans
+contemplating migration, though, employer sanctions did not
+
+appear to loom very large. In one important study of Mexican
+sending communities in 1990, “Interviewees made it clear that
+having a job in the United States is far more important to them than
+any law the US Congress might pass: If they have a solid job
+prospect, they will migrate, with or without papers. Our field
+studies suggest that the robust growth in employment opportunities
+in the United States in the second half of the 1980s has been at least
+as important in fueling the current wave of emigration as the effects
+of Mexico’s lingering economic crisis.”25
+THE ANTI-IMMIGRANT 1990S
+In the 1990s, explicitly anti-undocumented or anti-illegal
+mobilization took off, especially in California, where Proposition 13
+in 1978 had decimated state finances. Under Governor Pete Wilson,
+“illegal” immigrants became a convenient scapegoat.26 Proposition
+187 in 1994 was the first of many state- and nationwide efforts to
+impose austerity on the backs of the most vulnerable. Nicknamed
+“Save Our State,” it sought primarily to bar the undocumented from
+receiving public services. The text of the proposed law began by
+stating: “The People of California find and declare as follows: That
+they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by
+the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered
+and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal
+conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the
+protection of their government from any person or persons entering
+this country unlawfully.”27 Wilson “made undocumented
+immigration the cornerstone of his 1994 re-election campaign.”28
+Proposition 187’s language and rationale became widespread in the
+anti-undocumented movement in subsequent years.
+Many of Proposition 187’s provisions were never enacted, being
+tied up or rejected in the courts. However, as California goes, so
+goes the nation. After the Democrat Bill Clinton became president in
+1993, Wilson connected anti-immigrant with anti-Washington
+bombast, claiming that the federal government had failed to protect
+the country’s borders. Wilson’s attacks helped to push Clinton to the
+
+right on border enforcement, as Clinton sought to woo California’s
+apparently increasingly anti-immigrant electorate.29
+Anti-“illegal” rhetoric mirrored and intertwined with a growing
+anti-black, anti–civil rights backlash in multiple ways. It replaced
+explicitly racialized language with a two-pronged attack against
+people of color. First, starting with the 1980 election, conservatives
+“repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a context
+between hardworking blue-collar whites and poor blacks who
+refused to work.”30 Second was rhetoric about law and order.31
+“The shift to a general attitude of ‘toughness’ toward problems
+associated with communities of color began in the 1960s. . . . By the
+late 1980s, however, not only conservatives played leading roles in
+the get-tough movement, spouting the rhetoric once associated only
+with segregationists. Democratic politicians and policy makers were
+now attempting to wrest control of the crime and drug issues from
+Republicans by advocating stricter anti-crime and anti-drug laws—
+all in an effort to win back the so-called ‘swing voters’ who were
+defecting to the Republican Party.”32
+By the end of 1993, “politicians began tripping over one another
+to take a tough stance on boundary enforcement and unauthorized
+migration.”33 In 1994, President Clinton implemented Operation
+Gatekeeper to bring the border “under control” and undercut Pete
+Wilson’s protagonism by taking the lead on border enforcement as
+the elections approached.34 In 1996, Clinton pressed for punitive
+Welfare Reform and Immigration Reform laws that enacted federally
+much of what California had tried to do at the state level. With
+these laws, Clinton made both welfare reform and law and order
+centerpieces of the Democratic Party program, and linked the antiblack and the anti-immigrant aspects of these policies. In the panic
+following the 9/11 attacks, the USA-PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the
+subsequent creation of the Department of Homeland Security in
+2003 strengthened both institutional controls against potential and
+current immigrants, as well as the ideological climate of antiimmigrant sentiment.
+
+Joseph Nevins argues that the government’s increasing attention
+to border enforcement in the 1990s actually served to create the
+supposed immigration crisis. Through its sensationalist rhetoric and
+justifications, as well as its ostentatious enforcement policies, the
+state helped to convince the population that such a crisis indeed
+existed.35
+Republicans were torn between their traditional allies in the
+business community—who had little incentive to join the
+anti-“illegal” hysteria—and the new right-wing populism. Texas
+went the opposite direction from California in the 1990s. “In Texas,
+the economy was booming; the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Austin,
+and San Antonio were exploding; and thousands of illegal
+immigrants sat astride two-by-fours, nail guns in hand, building
+those neighborhoods. So, then-governor Bush and his man Karl Rove
+crafted a different strategy from their California colleagues:
+Hispanic-friendly. The result? In 1998, George W. Bush crushed his
+Democratic opponent, getting nearly half the Hispanic vote—a
+triumph that placed him on the path to the presidency one year
+later.”36 In 2001, Texas Republican governor Rick Perry’s decision
+to sign the nation’s first in-state tuition law in 2001 represented the
+crest of the pro-immigrant wave.
+A decade later Texas Republicans had gone the way of their
+California colleagues. Texas Republicans promoted a redistricting
+plan and voter identification law that federal courts struck down as
+discriminatory. As late as 2010, Perry declared that a law like
+Arizona’s S.B. 1070 “would not be the right direction for Texas.”37
+By 2012, however, he was defending Arizona. “No state should be
+held hostage to a federal government that refuses to enforce the
+laws of the land. . . . The people of Arizona took action consistent
+with federal law and in direct response to the failure of this
+administration to secure our nation’s borders. The absence of federal
+action on immigration enforcement directly spoils the integrity of
+our nation’s laws.”38 Moreover, Perry was pushing for a Texas
+version of this legislation, banning sanctuary cities that would
+
+prevent local law enforcement agencies from enforcing federal
+immigration law.39
+“COMPREHENSIVE” VERSUS “ENFORCEMENT ONLY”
+IN THE NEW CENTURY
+In January 2004, president and candidate George W. Bush had
+lauded the country’s immigrant history in a speech whose audience
+included representatives of LULAC and other Hispanic
+organizations. Bush acknowledged the country’s need for migrant
+workers and expressed great sympathy for the undocumented:
+Reform must begin by confronting a basic fact of life and
+economics: Some of the jobs being generated in America’s
+growing economy are jobs American citizens are not filling.
+Yet these jobs represent a tremendous opportunity for workers
+from abroad who want to work and to fulfill their duties as a
+husband or a wife, a son or a daughter. Their search for a
+better life is one of the most basic desires of human beings.
+Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile,
+through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. Some
+have risked their lives in dangerous desert border crossings or
+entrusted their lives to the brutal rings of heartless human
+smugglers. Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in
+the shadows of American life, fearful, often abused and
+exploited. When they’re victimized by crimes they’re afraid to
+call the police or seek recourse in the legal system. They are
+cut off from their families far away, fearing if they leave our
+country to visit relatives back home they might never be able
+to return to their jobs.
+Thus, Bush proposed offering temporary legal status to all
+undocumented workers in the country. Although he emphasized
+that the status would be temporary—initially for three years, but
+renewable—he also emphasized that those who wanted to apply for
+citizenship should also be allowed to do so.40
+
+Several congressional proposals for so-called comprehensive
+immigration reform were launched in the first decade of the new
+century: John McCain and Ted Kennedy’s Secure America and
+Orderly Immigration Act (S. 1033) in 2005; John Cornyn and Jon
+Kyl’s Comprehensive Enforcement and Immigration Reform Act (S.
+1438), also in 2005; Arlen Specter’s Comprehensive Immigration
+Reform Act (S. 2611), which passed the Senate in 2006; and finally
+the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act or Secure Borders,
+Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.
+1348), which drew on the earlier three and was promoted by
+Senators McCain, Kennedy, and Kyl, as well as then-president Bush.
+The right-wing reaction against the concept they termed amnesty
+gained political traction and contributed to the failure of these
+measures, even though all of them incorporated strong antiimmigrant
+measures
+euphemistically
+called
+enforcement
+components. Rarely was it pointed out that the combination of
+legalization and enforcement pioneered in 1986 had been followed
+by a huge increase in the size of the undocumented population. The
+proposals were generally critiqued from the right rather than from
+the left. Comprehensive reform, willy-nilly, had become the rallying
+cry of political liberals and supporters of immigrant rights.
+While these comprehensive approaches stalled, the House passed
+an extraordinarily punitive piece of legislation that epitomized what
+came to be called the enforcement-only approach, H.R. 4437, the
+Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control
+Act of 2005. This vote became a catalyst for a new level of
+immigrant rights mobilization, the huge demonstrations in the
+spring and especially on May 1, 2006.
+NEW PROTESTS IN THE NEW CENTURY
+The major academic study of the 2006 demonstrations points out
+that they dwarfed even the largest protest movements in the
+country’s history, which only occasionally reached a half-million
+protesters. “In a short span of twelve weeks between mid-February
+and early May 2006, an estimated 3.7 million to 5 million people
+
+took to the streets in over 160 cities across the United States to rally
+for immigrant rights.”41 The protests were also unique in being
+carried out within the political system but primarily by people
+legally excluded from the polity—the undocumented.
+Local activist organizations, hometown associations, and unions
+as well as Spanish media and the Catholic Church played important
+roles in disseminating publicity and motivating participants. “Radio
+show hosts and DJs on popular Spanish-language radio stations
+across the country endorsed the marches and encouraged listeners
+to attend. In addition, the two main Spanish-language networks,
+Univisión and Telemundo, promoted it through public service
+announcements broadcast during popular evening newscasts,
+regular reporting on the preparations for the marches and
+interviews with march organizers during newscasts, and frequent
+informal banter during talk-show and variety show formats, even
+incorporating the subject into the plotlines of their telenovelas, or
+soap operas.”42 National-level organizations took a backseat as
+different coalitions mobilized in different cities.43 The culmination
+of these many protests was on May 1, when a coordinated daywithout-an-immigrant protest brought walkouts and business
+closings throughout the country to illustrate the importance of
+immigrants to the economy and their role in citizens’ daily lives.
+Another thing the immigrant and undocumented communities
+had in their favor were the reformers in the labor movement who
+pushed for more pro-immigrant, and pro-undocumented positions.
+In the fall of 2003, the AFL-CIO, UNITE-HERE, and the SEIU
+sponsored the first Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.
+Undocumented immigrant workers took off from 101 cities around
+the United States, headed for Washington, DC, where they lobbied
+and demanded legislative change, and to New York, where they
+held public rallies.44 One study suggests that the Immigrant Workers
+Freedom Ride three years earlier helped bring groups together and
+lay the groundwork for the 2006 mobilizations.45
+To the extent that the protests aimed to prevent H.R. 4437 from
+becoming law, they succeeded: the Senate declined to consider the
+
+proposal and, in fact, passed its own, comprehensive reform bill
+later in May 2006 (which was then rejected by the House).
+Some analysts believe that it was Bush’s immigration agenda and
+the battles over comprehensive immigration reform that led to the
+Republican losses in Congress in 2006. After Obama’s victory in
+2008, backlash came in the form of the Tea Party movement,
+outflanking the Republicans to the libertarian and anti-immigrant
+right. The Republicans are currently torn between appealing to the
+fast-growing population of Hispanic voters—who have traditionally
+voted Democratic—and playing to the far right anti-immigrant
+sentiment fanned by talk radio and the Tea Party. Thirty-five
+percent of Hispanics voted for Bush in 2000, and over 40 percent
+did so in 2004, when Hispanic Republican support peaked.46 In
+2008, with Barack Obama running against John McCain and Sarah
+Palin, the Hispanic Republican vote sank to 31 percent. In 2012, as
+candidate Mitt Romney took an outspokenly anti-immigrant
+position, this went still lower to 27 percent. Meanwhile, the
+Hispanic vote rose to 10 percent of the total, up from 9 percent in
+2008 and 8 percent in 2004.47
+CONSULTING FIRMS AND THE CULTURAL BATTLE
+Rinku Sen argues that despite the successes of 2006, a cultural
+battle for the rights of the undocumented was lost in the rise of
+xenophobia after 9/11. Fox News, talk radio, reality TV, and other
+media and entertainment sources offer the public epic battles
+between “criminal aliens” and beleaguered law enforcement in what
+Sen calls a “racialized cultural fight over the nation’s identity.”48
+Sen especially critiques the immigrants’ rights organizations that
+have sought and followed the advice of consultants and
+“mainstreamed” their messages so as to tacitly accept, rather than
+challenge, common anti-immigrant sentiments. Many large
+organizations have relied on consulting firms like Westen Strategies
+that use surveys and focus groups to determine what messages will
+resonate with different sectors of the American public.
+
+The firm’s founder, psychologist Drew Westen, urged advocates
+to concede to the public’s antipathy for immigrants considered
+illegal, rather than to challenge that stance. Advocates should aim
+for the center, he argued, by avoiding talk of immigrants’ rights and
+instead relying on some key phrases that would resonate with those
+less sympathetic. His surveys found that the phrases “comprehensive
+immigration reform” and “fixing a broken immigration system”
+went over especially well with these centrist voters. An effective
+message, Westen discovered, begins with “taking tough measures to
+secure our borders,” continues with “cracking down on illegal
+employers,” and finally ends with “requiring those who came here
+without our permission to get in line, work hard, obey our laws, and
+learn our language.”49 His firm works with and has been
+commissioned by major immigrants’ rights organizations like the
+Migration Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and
+Reform Immigration for America. Indeed, Westen’s key phrases
+began to enter every politician’s immigration proposals.
+The Democratic Party also constructed its twenty-first-century
+agenda based on survey and focus group research about what
+messages would resonate with the American public. A study the
+party commissioned by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan
+Rosner Research as the 2008 election approached argued that
+immigration is “especially important in Congressional battleground
+districts and states where views on illegal immigration are more
+negative. Failing to show real determination to get this problem
+under control costs incumbent Democrats votes.”
+Like Westen, the authors recommended “acknowledgment of the
+problem, pragmatic and tough ideas to stem the flow of illegal
+immigration with a path to citizenship laden with the kinds of
+requirements that anyone should meet if they are to attain the
+honor of being an American citizen.” Their bullet points included
+the following:
+Attack [then-president] Bush for losing control of the
+problem; enforcement at both the border and with employers
+
+[sic]; opposition to non-essential benefits; and responsibility
+and a path to citizenship.
+A large majority of voters support a path to citizenship if
+we are serious about having to qualify for citizenship:
+expelling anyone who has committed a crime, others pay a
+fine and taxes, learn English, and get in the back of the queue.
+But if voters hear only the part about a path to citizenship
+without the responsibilities, they do not support this—and
+punish incumbent Democrats. But if Democrats “get it” and
+are very serious about getting the problem under control,
+including benefits, their leaders can get support for solving
+this problem.50
+As a candidate, Obama echoed this position when he outlined
+what he believed comprehensive immigration reform should look
+like and vowed to press for its passage. “I can guarantee . . . that we
+will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support
+and that I’m promoting. And I want to move that forward as quickly
+as possible,” he stated in May 2008.51 “We need immigration reform
+that will secure our borders, and punish employers who exploit
+immigrant labor; reform that finally brings the 12 million people
+who are here illegally out of the shadows by requiring them to take
+steps to become legal citizens,” he told the National Association of
+Latino Elected Officials in June.52 A large coalition of immigrant
+rights organizations favored this idea of a comprehensive reform,
+despite its punitive aspects, and supported the Obama candidacy
+and presidency.
+Obama continued to reiterate this refrain once in office. “The
+way to fix our broken immigration system is through commonsense, comprehensive immigration reform,” he declared at a Cinco
+de Mayo celebration in 2010, seeming to take his cue directly from
+Westen. “That means responsibility from government to secure our
+borders, something we have done and will continue to do. It means
+responsibility from businesses that break the law by undermining
+American workers and exploiting undocumented workers—they’ve
+
+got to be held accountable. It means responsibility from people who
+are living here illegally. They’ve got to admit that they broke the
+law and pay taxes and pay a penalty, and learn English, and get
+right before the law—and then get in line and earn their
+citizenship.’”53
+He continued to sound the same themes after winning the 2012
+election:
+When I say comprehensive immigration reform . . . I think it
+should include a continuation of the strong border security
+measures that we’ve taken, because we have to secure our
+borders. I think it should contain serious penalties for
+companies that are purposely hiring undocumented workers
+and taking advantage of them. And I do think that there
+should be a pathway for legal status for those who are living
+in this country, are not engaged in criminal activity, are here
+simply to work. It’s important for them to pay back taxes, it’s
+important for them to learn English, it’s important for them to
+potentially pay a fine, but to give them the avenue whereby
+they can resolve their legal status here in this country, I think
+is very important.”54
+A core of mainstream immigrant rights organizations linked to
+the Democratic Party continues to push for this kind of a
+comprehensive reform. Organizations like the New Democrat
+Network, the National Council of La Raza, National Association of
+Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, We Are America Alliance,
+Mi Familia Vota Educational Fund, and Democracia USA are
+sometimes identified as the inside-the-beltway organizations. They
+emphasize the potential of the growing Latino vote, the need to
+incorporate new voters into the Democratic Party, and the need of
+the party to reach out to its new constituency through the project of
+comprehensive reform.
+A few advocates and organizations opposed the focus-group
+approach. Oscar Chacón, executive director of the National Alliance
+of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, or NALAAC,
+
+rejected the “comprehensive” consensus arguing that “this is
+oppressive language—punitive and restrictive.” The 2008
+Democracy Corps report was “nothing but an effort by D.C. groups
+to justify their views with a public opinion survey.” The Democrats
+were “accept[ing] more and more of the premises of the antiimmigrant lobby.” “We should be trying to change the way people
+think about the situation . . . instead of finding a way to make antiimmigrant sentiments tolerable,” Chacón urged.55
+Once Obama took office, the idea of a comprehensive reform died
+a quiet death. The Obama administration moved instead on the
+enforcement side, promoting and imposing the Secure Communities
+and E-Verify programs. Secure Communities, a Bush-era program
+that empowered local police forces to share data on arrests with
+ICE, grew from a small, voluntary pilot program to one Obama
+insisted would be imposed nationwide by 2013. E-Verify likewise
+grew from a small-scale, voluntary program to one required for
+companies holding government contracts—about 170,000 of them,
+employing some 4 million workers—and encouraged for all.56
+The immigrant rights organizations that had worked for Obama
+were disappointed when the first years of his presidency seemed to
+pander to the anti-immigrant right rather than pay them back for
+their support of his candidacy. Finally, in 2010, a crumb was
+thrown to immigrant rights supporters: prosecutorial discretion.
+Memoranda by Immigration Commissioner John Morton, in 2010
+and 2011 (described in chapter 7), instructed agents of ICE to
+exercise “prosecutorial discretion” with regard to immigration
+violations. The term refers to law enforcement agencies’ right to
+choose which cases to pursue and when to allow violators relief
+from prosecution. Acknowledging that ICE could not possibly deport
+all of the millions of people in the United States without
+authorization, Morton instructed ICE to prioritize national security,
+border security, and public safety in selecting its targets. Immigrants
+who had committed no crimes beyond immigration violations, had
+US citizens who were dependent upon them, and posed no risk to
+
+national security or public should, in general, be eligible for such
+discretion.57
+One complicating factor in this new set of priorities was that
+while entry without inspection is a civil immigration violation, “reentry after removal” is defined as a felony. The new rules defined
+entry without inspection as a low-priority violation, but a second
+attempt to enter without inspection made a person a felon and thus
+a high priority for removal. In fact, of 391,953 aliens removed by
+ICE in 2011, over half (203,571) had no criminal violations. Of the
+188,382 who did have a criminal conviction, about 60 percent were
+guilty of either minor drug offenses, driving offenses, or
+immigration offenses.58 For fiscal year 2012, ICE proudly
+announced that it had hit a new record with 409,849 removals.
+Slightly over half of those removed (225,000) had been convicted of
+felonies or misdemeanors, though the vast majority of these, as
+usual, were for immigration or traffic offenses. Only about 7,000
+were guilty of violent crimes.59
+Toward the end of 2011, ICE began a case-by-case review of over
+three hundred thousand pending removal cases in order to
+determine which ones merited dismissal under the new guidelines.
+As 2012 progressed, however, immigrant advocates became
+concerned at the small and diminishing numbers of cases that were
+determined to be eligible for dismissal. By the middle of 2012, only
+a few thousand of the tens of thousands of cases reviewed had been
+approved for dismissal.60 Prosecutorial discretion seemed to be
+delivering much less than it had promised.
+With the 2012 campaign in full swing, Obama finally offered his
+signature DACA program. DACA opened some important doors, as
+discussed in chapter 7, and may have contributed to the return of
+comprehensive immigration reform to the 2013 Congressional
+agenda. The reforms being debated in 2013, though, continued to
+follow the consulting firms’ emphasis on enforcement followed by a
+punitive path to citizenship or perhaps even something less than
+citizenship.
+
+CAN WE ABANDON “ENFORCEMENT”?
+The more that US authorities have tried to control or stop Mexican
+border crossing over the course of the twentieth century, the more
+people have come. Absolute numbers have increased despite the
+illegalizing of many border crossings. Despite increasingly harsh
+measures aimed at reducing or eliminating illegal crossings, these
+too have increased and sometimes decreased, as with those by
+Mexicans in recent years, due to factors unrelated to measures
+aimed explicitly at border control.
+The past few decades have demonstrated that the more the
+United States tries to militarily control the border, the more out of
+control it gets. The huge growth in organized crime, drug
+smuggling, drug and smuggling cartels, kidnappings, and violent
+and unnecessary death at the border is the result of misguided
+policies attempting to impose control.
+Supporters of the idea of border control often argue that without
+draconian measures to deter migrants, floods of Mexicans and other
+Latin Americans would overwhelm the border and the country. They
+forget, perhaps, that during the many decades in which the border
+was relatively open, there were no floods. The number of
+undocumented immigrants in the United States began its precipitous
+rise after the country began to try to seal the border, in large part
+because instead of leaving after a season of work, migrants felt
+compelled to stay, since they realized that returning would be
+difficult.
+Recent trends demonstrate the extent to which structural factors
+still govern migrant flows. The slowing and even reversal of
+migration from Mexico and the concomitant rise in numbers
+migrating from Central America, particularly from Honduras,
+suggest that factors other than border policies are the ones that
+really affect migrant streams. Border policies can shape where
+people try to cross, how much it will cost, and how many will die in
+the process, but they seem to have little effect on the numbers of
+people crossing.
+
+DEEPER QUESTIONS
+If the United States can’t close the border, and if comprehensive
+immigration reform is such a flawed approach, what can we do?
+By now, we have become accustomed to the notion that
+controlling the border is a basic prerequisite for security, safety, and
+sovereignty. So accustomed, that we rarely question this idea.
+The drive for so-called enforcement—through militarizing the
+border, criminalizing the undocumented, detention, deportation,
+and a punitive path to citizenship based on paying society back for
+some supposed wrong inflicted—grows from some of the beliefs
+outlined in the first chapter of this book. The entire immigration
+apparatus is based on the presumption that we know where people
+belong and we need to legislate their mobility.
+It’s also based on some unquestioned assumptions about countries.
+It is not OK for a public park, a town, a county, or a state to
+discriminate regarding who is allowed to enter its space. But it’s OK
+for a country to do that. It’s not OK to treat people differently based
+on their religion, race, gender, or many other characteristics. But it’s
+OK to treat people differently based on where they were born or
+their nationality (which is generally determined by where a person
+is born). US immigration laws do just that: discriminate, on the basis
+of nationality, regarding who is allowed to be where.
+If we really want to address the problem of undocumentedness,
+or so-called “illegal” immigration, we need to look more in depth at
+why the United States made some immigration illegal to begin with.
+I hope that I have shown that the drive to illegalize immigration
+was wrongheaded from the start. It’s just the latest stage in a
+centuries-long process of legislated inequality, a process both global
+and domestic.
+Rather than what currently passes for comprehensive reform,
+some organizations are pushing for what they call a “cultural
+strategy” that challenges the nationalist—and racist—underpinnings
+of popular views of immigrants. The new generation of
+undocumented youth—the DREAMers discussed in chapter 7—has
+taken this approach. Rinku Sen emphasizes that their goal goes
+
+beyond gaining their own access to citizenship: the bigger aim is to
+challenge the anti-immigrant culture. “Young, savvy with social
+media, and artistically inclined, DREAMers have compensated for
+their lack of political power by telling their stories in many forms
+and venues.” With their stories, they sought to reframe the entire
+debate.61
+The Applied Research Center launched its Drop-the-I-Word (i.e.,
+illegal) campaign in 2010 in another attempt to challenge the terms
+of the mainstream debate about immigration that directly
+contradicted Westen’s advice. Arguing that the very term “illegal”
+(or “illegal immigrant”) “opens the door to racial profiling and
+violence and prevents truthful, respectful debate on immigration,”
+and that “no human being is illegal,” supporters challenged
+politicians, the media, and others to stop using it.62 By 2013,
+numerous mainstream news outlets had shifted their usage. “Illegal
+immigrant isn’t always accurate because it implies that somebody
+illegally immigrated when it fact a lot of people who are here
+illegally are here because their documentation expired after they
+came,” the Associated Press explained when its new style guide
+recommended against using the term.63 The New York Times and Los
+Angeles Times soon followed suit.64
+In December 2012, Mexican American columnist Ruben
+Navarrette penned a controversial column in which he chastised
+DREAMers—and implicitly, others who are explicitly challenging
+the official terms of the debate—for acting “like spoiled brats.”
+“They don’t ask, they demand,” Navarrette complained. “These kids
+want it all . . . what some seem to really want is the golden ticket:
+US citizenship.” They are “drunk on entitlement,” he wrote, and will
+“alienate supporters.”65
+At my own university, Salem State, in Massachusetts, a group
+supporting undocumented students engaged in a similar debate a
+few years ago. Should the university openly admit and support
+students who were undocumented? Or should it quietly open some
+back doors? One local high school guidance counselor cautioned us
+that the anti-immigrant climate at her school was so virulent that
+
+she preferred to counsel students individually and would not
+recommend that we hold a public event at her school. A faculty
+member worried that if we raised the issue publicly, it would
+imperil our undocumented students. Another retorted: “Do you
+know of any historical example where social change has come about
+by people keeping quiet?”
+That question has stayed with me over the years and seems to
+surface again and again, as in Navarrette’s column. There are those
+who truly believe that the best way to help the undocumented is
+through backroom deals that may bring some benefits for some
+people without addressing the larger structural issues of unequal
+international relations, an economy based on the use of labor kept
+cheap through legal marginalization, restrictive immigration
+policies, discrimination, and inequality before the law. History
+shows, though, that whether we are trying to change foreign policy,
+domestic and global economic structures, or laws that discriminate,
+Frederick Douglass was closer to the truth when he argued that
+change “must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
+demand. It never did and it never will.”66
+Although the cultural strategy is a very important way to raise
+awareness and open a real debate about immigration policy, we also
+need to address the root global and economic factors that have
+contributed to today’s problems. In the most immediate terms, we as
+a society created illegal immigration by making immigration illegal.
+In larger terms, we created illegal immigration by fostering a global
+system that bases the prosperity for the few on the exploitation of
+the many and enforcing it, in the modern era, through borders and
+exclusive citizenship. It’s up to us to change it.
+
+THE PROBLEM WITH SASS
+
+This is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women.
+This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who
+take grown women seriously. This is a book for women who know shit is
+fucked up. These women want to change things but don’t know where to
+begin.
+To be clear, I’m not really into self-help books, so I don’t have one of
+those catchy three-step plans for changing the world. What I have is anger.
+Rage, actually. And that’s the place where more women should begin—with
+the things that make us angry.
+When it comes to Black women, sometimes Americans don’t recognize
+that sass is simply a more palatable form of rage. Americans adore sassy
+Black women. You know, those caricatures of finger-waving, eye-rolling
+Black women at whom everyone loves to laugh—women like Tyler Perry’s
+Madea, Mammy in Gone with the Wind, or Nell from that old eighties sitcom
+Gimme a Break! These kinds of Black women put white folks at ease.
+In my first terrible job after college, my boss, an older white woman, told
+me that the students at the predominantly Black school at which we worked
+had deemed her an honorary Black woman. When I looked at her with
+question marks in my eyes, she said, “You know, they mean the way I talk to
+them and roll my neck,” and demonstrated it for me. I went on back to my
+desk.
+Years after that, I was doing a summer abroad in South Korea. My
+Malaysian roommate, who had seen many episodes of the old nineties sitcom
+Family Matters, told me that she loved Black women because we were
+
+sassy like Harriette and Laura Winslow, the main Black female characters on
+that show. To her, these stereotypical portrayals made Black folks seem
+understandable, even though to me, her descriptions felt like we were exotic
+others. She loved it, she said, when Black women put their hands on their
+hips and swiveled their necks in protest. Not wanting to offend this woman
+who I otherwise really liked, I simply said, “We’re not all like that.” She
+looked disappointed.
+I am fat, Black, and Southern. But this is not a sassy Black girl’s tale.
+Black women turn to sass when rage is too risky—because we have jobs to
+keep, families to feed, and bills to pay. Black women who hold their
+communities together also hold our broader American community together.
+But it’s unclear whether we are really being taken seriously.
+Owning anger is a dangerous thing if you’re a fat Black girl like me.
+Angry Black Women get dismissed all the time. We are told we are
+irrational, crazy, out of touch, entitled, disruptive, and not team players. The
+story goes that Angry Black Women scare babies, old people, and grown
+men. This is absurd. And it is a lie. If you have the nerve to be fat and angry,
+then you are treated as a bully even if you are doing nothing aggressive at all.
+The truth is that Angry Black Women are looked upon as entities to be
+contained, as inconvenient citizens who keep on talking about their rights
+while refusing to do their duty and smile at everyone. Don’t you just hate
+when folks yell at you to “Smile!”? I told the last man who said that shit to
+me, “You smile!”
+Some years ago, I ran into a former student on the college campus where I
+was teaching. Erica was a brilliant Black girl who wrote great papers and
+asked really smart questions. As we were standing around with a group of
+others, chatting, she said, “I loved having you as my professor. Your lectures
+were filled with rage. But it was, like, the most eloquent rage ever.” I
+immediately felt defensive. What did she mean by rage? “I’m not angry,” I
+told her. “I’m passionate.” By then, I was wary of the Angry Black Woman
+stereotype. Even though I was only in my mid-twenties at the time, I had
+already experienced many years of white people doing that thing they do to
+articulate Black women—always asking us “Why are you so angry?” I hated
+the accusation from others, usually white people, because it was unfair, a
+
+way to discredit the legitimacy of the things Black women say by calling
+them emotional and irrational. But Erica was a Black girl. She fixed me with
+a telltale look that only another Black woman can give you, a look that said,
+Girl, be for real. And then she said, “Brittney, you know you’re angry.” I felt
+exposed. I couldn’t even say anything. She had seen through the veneer, seen
+the lie I was telling. It was devastating. And life-changing.
+I was angry. As hell. And I was fooling no one.
+Black women have the right to be mad as hell. We have been dreaming of
+freedom and carving out spaces for liberation since we arrived on these
+shores. There is no other group, save Indigenous women, that knows and
+understands more fully the soul of the American body politic than Black
+women, whose reproductive and social labor have made the world what it is.
+This is not mere propaganda. Black women know what it means to love
+ourselves in a world that hates us. We know what it means to do a whole lot
+with very little, to “make a dollar out of fifteen cents,” as it were. We know
+what it means to snatch dignity from the jaws of power and come out
+standing. We know what it means to face horrific violence and trauma from
+both our communities and our nation-state and carry on anyway. But we also
+scream, and cry, and hurt, and mourn, and struggle. We get heartbroken, our
+feelings get stepped on, our dreams get crushed. We get angry, and we
+express that anger. We know what it means to feel invisible.
+* * *
+I know what it means to feel invisible. To be picked on, bullied,
+misunderstood, and dismissed. But when Erica called me out on my anger, it
+was clear that she saw me in a way that I wasn’t particularly interested in
+being seen. She helped me to realize that my anger could be a powerful force
+for good. She had called my rage eloquent. Clear. Expressive. To the point.
+In her estimation, it had made me a good teacher, and it had inspired her and
+other students.
+Over and over again, Black girls have called me out and demanded that I
+get my shit together, around my rage, around my work in the world, and
+around my feminism. Those Black girl callouts, or “homegirl interventions,”
+
+as I call them in this book, have come from my grandmama, my mama, and
+my girls. And they have saved my life.
+America needs a homegirl intervention in the worst way. So in this book, I
+am doing what Black women do best. I’m calling America out on her bullshit
+about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and a bunch of other stuff.
+And I’m using feminism to stage this homegirl intervention. I’m here for
+picket signs, pussy hats (as long as there are plenty of brown ones in the
+mix), and patchouli. My picket signs are as likely to say FUCK THE POLICE as
+they are to say FUCK THE PATRIARCHY. Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and
+we need all the rage. Feminism can give us a common language for thinking
+about how sexism, and racism, and classism work together to fuck shit up for
+everybody.
+Like many other feminists, I used to carry around Audre Lorde’s book
+Sister Outsider like it was the feminist bible. Her essay “The Uses of Anger:
+Women Responding to Racism” taught me that rage is a legitimate political
+emotion. She writes, “Focused with precision, it can become a powerful
+source of energy serving progress and change.”
+Here’s the thing: My anger and rage haven’t always been “focused with
+precision.” The process, of both becoming a feminist and becoming okay
+with rage as a potential feminist superpower, has been messy as hell. We
+need to embrace our messiness more. We need to embrace the ways we are
+in process more. Very often Black girls don’t get the opportunity to be in
+process. So just know that you don’t have to have everything figured out to
+read and enjoy this book.
+For more than a decade, since Erica named for me my superpower—
+eloquent rage—I’ve been trying to figure out how to focus it with precision.
+When I watch the Williams sisters—Venus and Serena—use their power
+on a tennis court, I feel like they are a case study in how to use rage with
+precision. Born six months after Venus and nine months before Serena, I feel
+like I grew up with the Williams sisters. When they first began to win major
+tournaments in the late 1990s, sportscasters derisively referred to the “power
+tennis” they played. These strong, athletic Black girls had serves with speeds
+of more than 120 miles per hour and they scared the shit out of white girls.
+
+Until they learned how to use their power, it often became a liability, causing
+them to make lots of mistakes on and off the court.
+But in the nearly twenty years since they have come to dominate tennis,
+both sisters have figured out how to corral all that power into precise serves
+and shots that are nearly unmatched. They have created this kind of alchemy
+that uses their physical strength and strategic prowess on the court, together
+with all the racial slurs and insults they have endured over the years—being
+called the N-word, being called ugly, being told their bodies were too manly
+—to create something that looks magical to the rest of us. Watching Venus
+play, particularly on grass courts, is like watching a Black girl perform in a
+ballet. She is an elegant player. Watching Serena play, particularly when
+she’s beating white women, is like watching eloquent rage personified. Her
+shots are clear and expressive. Her wins are exultant. Her victories belong to
+all of us, even though she’s the one who does all the work.
+That’s kind of how it feels to be a Black woman. Like our victories
+belong to everyone, even though we do all the work. But here’s the thing—if
+I can master any force in my life and slay it like Serena slays tennis balls on
+the court, then I’m happy to share the wealth.
+
+CAPITAL B, CAPITAL F
+
+It took nothing short of a homegirl intervention to turn me into a feminist. It
+was my senior year at Howard University, and I’d managed to go through
+much of college without having even one boyfriend on campus. As much as
+Howard offered an explicit education in the workings of racism and white
+supremacy, its lessons about sexism were far more subtle. I felt like
+something was wrong with me. The boys wanted me to run their student
+government campaigns, or they wanted to verbally joust with me, but they
+didn’t want to date me. On high self-esteem days, I simply thought it was
+because they were dumb. On bad self-esteem days, I thought it was because I
+was fat. (Fat is of course relative, because if I could be my college size
+again…) I hadn’t considered that sexism had anything to do with it, that
+young men had been socialized to desexualize outspoken women. I reveled in
+being unconquerable, because that’s an important trait for Black girls
+surviving abusive father figures to have. I didn’t realize that living life in a
+patriarchy, even in a beautiful Black one, meant that I had to at least appear
+conquerable if I wanted to get chose.
+One day, on campus, I proclaimed with the confidence of a twenty-yearold who knows just enough to be dangerous, that “feminism is white
+women’s shit. At most, I’m a womanist.” I had heard someone else invoking
+Alice Walker’s definition of womanism, and it sounded good enough to me.
+The thing is: my defection from feminism wasn’t a principled defection. I
+hadn’t read Walker’s definition at all. But I had spent a lifetime having
+slightly awkward friendships with the white girls with whom I grew up, and I
+had escaped after high school to the Blackness of Howard to recover from
+
+all of it. I’ll talk more about my complicated relationship with white women
+in the next chapter, but suffice it to say that I was ready to lay the entirety of
+my feminist inheritance—the work of women like Sojourner Truth, Anna
+Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and the women of the Combahee River
+Collective—on the altar next to all the blond hair that I had mentally burned
+in effigy after high school. This is what I like to call doing the most, but
+achieving the least. And, luckily, one of my homegirls saw through my
+bullshit and staged a friendly but serious intervention.
+My friend Tracey heard me making such ignorant pronouncements about
+feminism and hemmed me up in the dorms later. “Here,” she said, handing me
+a book. “Read this, because you were talking kinda crazy earlier about
+feminism.” This wasn’t our first discussion about the f-word. She had also
+asked me a few months earlier if I wanted to “come to Blackburn [the student
+center] to hear bell hooks?” “Who is bell hooks?” I had asked, vaguely
+remembering that I had encountered her name in a book on gender and
+equality that I had bought during my days on my high school’s debate team.
+“Oh, she writes all this feminist stuff, but she talks real crazy, so it should be
+interesting,” Tracey had said, chuckling.
+“Talking crazy” in our college parlance could be either an indictment or a
+compliment. It was a way to denote those moments of flirtation with ideas
+that skirted the line between being profound and being absolutely
+nonsensical. For instance, there was the day that the Honors Office Crew (the
+Blerds of my day) entertained the idea of whether women might evolve into
+being able to impregnate themselves, if it happened to be true that clitorises
+were really just small penises. My good Christian self was both scandalized
+by the mention of clitorises and penises (and evolution!) but also deeply
+curious and seduced by the questions themselves. I vacillated between
+wondering whether my friends were going to hell, and tiptoeing into the deep
+with them because I secretly loved the irreverence of it all. It felt like any
+day in the Howard Honors office could lead to a personal evolution of bigbang proportions.
+* * *
+
+Listening to years of “talking crazy” among the crew had made me fall in
+love with ideas in a substantive way. For instance, the Crew put me on to TaNehisi Coates back in the early 2000s when he wrote for the Washington
+City Paper. His pieces were must-reads, and when we saw him hanging out
+on campus, we whispered to each other, stanning ever so slightly. Once, I
+remember Coates popping his head into a room of Howard student leaders in
+the Blackburn Center and scowling at us, unimpressed. We were probably
+having a heated debate about the fate of Black America, and apparently, we
+weren’t saying anything earth shattering. I’m pretty sure I scowled back.
+Still, it was cool as hell to run into thinkers on campus whose work I’d
+read on the regular. I became a Ph.D. because I wanted that kind of life, one
+where “talking crazy”—playing with ideas that skirted the line between the
+radical and the absurd, the sacred and the profane—was the order of the day.
+So I knew that in Tracey’s indictment of hooks’s propensity to “talk crazy”
+there was also an endorsement, a belief that she was worth hearing. Curious
+about just exactly what kind of crazy talk hooks might engage in, I followed
+Tracey to the panel.
+I don’t remember much about hooks’s talk. Perhaps we had arrived late. I
+do remember that she seemed unimpressed and perhaps agitated, most likely
+with the conservative gender politics that shaped Howard during my time
+there. But hooks’s feminist “crazy talk” was my first experience with the
+kinds of provocations that can be life-changing. And it was quite different
+from the dismissive “crazy talk” that had me in the hot seat with my homegirl.
+I think Tracey had just assumed, naturally, that I would be a feminist,
+given my fierce sense of selfhood and my willingness to drag anyone who
+stepped to me with what I deemed a bad argument. She therefore looked at
+me both curiously and incredulously when I dared to insist otherwise. I took
+the book, a collection of academic essays on feminist theory. She instructed,
+“I think you’ll really like this essay on multiple jeopardies by Deborah
+King.” Sufficiently chastised, I agreed to read the piece she had chosen.
+While I was not especially interested in being a feminist, I was even less
+interested in having a raggedy analysis, of being critically uninformed, and
+of getting caught out there, assed out and looking ignorant. So I sat down that
+same night, turned to the essay Tracey had suggested, and tried to get clearer
+
+on what exactly feminism was and how it might apply to me. King wanted us
+to see the effects of oppressions on Black women’s lives as what she called
+“multiplicative.” Our class position, sexual identity, and many other vectors
+of power shaped our identity in the world, and more specifically, these things
+determined how many boots there were on our collective necks.
+That essay didn’t turn me into a feminist, because it felt a bit too academic
+for me to read without the benefit of a classroom context to work out the
+ideas. But I did begin to care deeply about Black women’s legacy of activism
+and ask more questions about what historical Black women had said about
+issues of racism and sexism. Over the next few years, I would have the
+opportunity, via some dope-ass Black feminist professors and because of the
+work of Hip Hop feminist Joan Morgan, to name and own a feminism for
+myself. But what mattered to me most, what lingers for me now, was the
+thoughtfulness and care of another Black girl’s friendship.
+Friendships with Black girls have always saved my life. I give the side
+eye to any Black woman who doesn’t have other Black women friends, to
+any woman who is prone to talk about how she relates better to men than to
+women, to anyone who goes on and on about how she “doesn’t trust
+females.” If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women,
+then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you, seducing you
+with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do.
+It isn’t true.
+I came up in an era when Black girls loudly proclaimed that they didn’t
+have friends. They had associates. It has always rung false to me, maybe
+because the introverted parts of me had absolutely no interest in spending
+sustained time fake-grinning at people with whom I couldn’t be my whole
+self. I wanted friends to snicker, giggle, and pass notes with, to share secrets
+with. I wanted people who would have my back. I worry about a world in
+which Black girls on their way to becoming women are taught to distrust
+women. I worry about a world in which Black women who are raising boys
+cultivate distrust for girls by looking upon every girl who shows interest in
+their sons with distrust. We wonder why young men hate women and,
+sometimes, the sad truth is that their mamas and aunts and sisters act as an
+
+arm of the patriarchy by parroting the refrain that “girls simply can’t be
+trusted.”
+It’s hard for Black girls to be friends with each other. But there is wonderworking power in the homegirl hem-up, the particular way that Black women
+friends gather you and save your life by telling you lovingly to get your shit
+together. It took me a really long time to find my tribe, though. I always knew
+I needed Black girls to make it, and I longed for their friendship in
+substantial ways throughout childhood. But, more often than not, I was
+rebuffed. We live in a world that tells women to distrust other women. And
+those of us who do dare to love other women hard are taught to distrust our
+impulses, to see that love as queer and wrong.
+I have had more than a few crushes on my homegirls, mostly intellectual
+and always deeply emotional, and sometimes perhaps a bit sexual. In middle
+school, when I finally found my first real-deal, pass-notes-in-class, rushhome-after-school-to-talk-on-the-phone-for-several-more-hours Black-girl
+bestie, I was elated. And a bit surprised. Neisha had sidled up to me one day
+at the end of seventh grade, as we were walking out the doors toward the
+buses after school, and said, “We’re gonna have to stick together next year.”
+Up until that point, I didn’t totally know how I felt about her. She was both
+smart and cool; I had smart on lock, but couldn’t find my own cool even if
+someone had handed it to me in a paper bag.
+Neisha and I had come to know each other better a few weeks earlier on
+our seventh-grade honors trip to South Louisiana, a place that seemed a
+world away from our more rural, North Louisiana experience. On the trip,
+we bonded over an episode of Martin, featuring his next-door neighbor
+Sheneneh and her homegirls Bonquisha and Keylolo. Together with Reina, a
+Black girl whom I had known since I was eight, when we ended up in Girl
+Scouts together, the three of us—the only Black girls on the trip—stuck
+together. For some reason, perhaps because of the insecurities that plague all
+girls at age twelve, occasionally Neisha and Reina would devolve into
+mean-girl behaviors with me as the target. Just happy to have Black girls for
+friends, I pretended not to hear the commentary they made behind my back,
+about how corny I was, or how naïve I was. One day, in eighth grade, after
+Neisha and I became actual besties, I heard her walking behind me in the
+
+hall, whispering to someone about why I had worn hot-pink scrunch socks
+instead of white tights with the cute skirt I rocked to school that day. My
+feelings were hurt; I pretended like I simply didn’t hear her. A confrontation
+would surely have ended our friendship.
+One of the final outings of the Louisiana Heritage Tour in 1993 was a trip
+to New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo, the biggest zoo in our state. Our teachers had
+given strict instructions that we were to use the buddy system. Neisha, Reina,
+and I, together with James (the only Black boy on the trip), decided we
+would navigate the zoo together. None of us had been especially tight before
+we had boarded the buses that Monday, but by that Thursday afternoon, the
+trip to the plantation, one in which tour guides acted shy about admitting that
+enslaved people had lived and worked there, had brought us together.
+Apparently my endless chatter, or my inability to be as appropriately cool
+and detached as twelve-year-old me should have been, got on the nerves of
+Reina and Neisha for the last time. At some point, I turned around and they
+had ditched me, abandoning the buddy system and leaving me to find my way
+back to the bus. Looking around frantically, I spotted them several yards up
+ahead, snickering and giggling to themselves as they assumed they had gotten
+away with their mean joke. Not wanting to be lost, I followed slowly behind,
+keeping them in sight so that I wouldn’t be late to the bus. But since they
+wanted to be away from me, I didn’t catch up to them either. I walked along,
+humiliated that I needed them to find my way back and afraid to call out their
+behavior for fear that the friends I had finally found would no longer be my
+friends. I wondered what it was that I had done to make them hate me. I
+arrived back at the bus a few moments after they did, but we never spoke
+about how they had left me in the middle of a “jungle” without backup. I
+knew I wasn’t ready to ditch them and go it alone again, so there was no
+point in making a scene.
+A few weeks later, apparently Neisha had reassessed her view of me,
+deciding that we would in fact “need each other” next year. Post–thirty-yearold me wishes I had had the nerve to tell her to shove it, but I really did need
+her, and she really did need me. We were overachieving Black girls in
+predominantly white classrooms, and what that trip to learn about our
+heritage had taught us was that our story bound us together and didn’t allow
+
+us the privilege of building friendships based on shared affinity and
+personality alone. Black girls had to stick together.
+* * *
+So stick we did. We exchanged phone numbers and then spent the summers
+between seventh and eighth and eighth and ninth grades giggling on the phone
+endlessly, talking about boys and having phone romances with boys that we
+connected to through an endless string of three-way calls. Two summers
+before, it was my white bestie, Mandy, whom I’d called to tell when my
+period showed up a few days before the start of sixth grade. But sharing the
+secrets of growing into my Black womanhood with my white bestie, when
+our social lives were increasingly racially segregated, made for an
+unsustainable friendship by the end of middle school, causing Mandy and I to
+grow apart. By the summer of ’93, it was my Black bestie Neisha I’d called
+to talk about the harrowing events of the night before, when my mother’s
+live-in boyfriend, angry over their impending breakup, beat her, forcing me to
+choose between grabbing a knife and calling the police. I was thankful that I
+had a Black girl to call, and I realized that if circumstances had been
+different, I wouldn’t have told Mandy at all. Neisha’s family was different
+from mine. She had a married mama and daddy and two big brothers who
+lived in the house with her. Still, I felt like she would understand more. And
+she did. She listened and offered support. Perhaps that is why my mother,
+slightly embarrassed and incensed with me for telling her business, let it
+ride. Black girls of every age need other Black girls who can hold their
+truths.
+I was deep in the throes, that summer, of my girlhood crush on Ronnie
+Groves, a nerdy Black boy who was two years older and who had beaten me
+in Bible Quiz at Vacation Bible School two summers prior. My head and
+diary were filled with hopes and wishes that he would be my first kiss. I was
+surprised and unprepared for the moment when I found myself fantasizing
+about kissing Neisha, having picked up from the ether, rather than from any
+particular conversation, that girls didn’t kiss girls.
+* * *
+
+Up until college, I had only ever encountered one lesbian, a woman named
+Wendy, whom all the adults in my life seemed to like and respect and smile at
+when she was around, but as soon as she was out of earshot, they would
+whisper about how she “went the other way.” Wendy rocked a Jheri Curl,
+drove a long green car, and always had on shades, which she wore, looking
+back on it, like armor. I simply thought she looked a little mysterious. She
+had a pretty smile and a friendly demeanor, but it was clear to me that she
+existed on the outskirts of our small, tightly knit community because she was
+“different.”
+Liking girls didn’t seem like a viable possibility for me. Fantasies of
+kissing Neisha weren’t frequent, but the closer I felt to her, the more I
+imagined what physically expressing that closeness might look like.
+Thankfully (or perhaps not), my mother paid for monthly subscriptions to all
+the great teen magazines of the nineties: Sassy, Teen, Seventeen, and YM. YM
+was my fave and Sassy, the most feminist of them all, was my least fave.
+Wokeness has been a process for me. So I turned to the monthly advice
+columns every month and read questions that readers would write into the
+mag about sex.
+My boyfriend and I were messing around one day and he was inside
+me a little bit. Am I still a virgin?
+While I found that question quite scandalous, I was relieved when I read
+this question:
+Sometimes I think about what it would be like to kiss another girl.
+Does this mean I’m gay?
+“No,” the columnist replied.
+Your body is changing and you are having lots of feelings. It’s
+perfectly normal in the sexual development process to fantasize
+about members of the same sex. But don’t worry about it. You’re
+probably not gay, and you’ll figure it out in time.
+
+The magazines worked to assure girls that they were most probably
+straight, subtly making it clear that queerness was not desirable. But back
+then, conversations about queerness and gender fluidity hadn’t trickled down
+to my Louisiana middle school. You were one or the other, in or out, gay or
+straight. Relieved and assured of my straightness, I placed Neisha, my one
+real close Black friend, in the friend-only category and went back to crushing
+on cute-ass Ronnie Groves. The thing I know today, after many cycles of
+homegirls, many more years of girl crushes, and a life of straight sexual
+activity, is that one can’t truly be a feminist if you don’t really love women.
+And loving women deeply and unapologetically is queer as fuck. It is erotic
+in the way that Audre Lorde talks about eroticism. It’s an opening up, a
+healing, a seeing and being seen. Good sex is all these things, too. My
+friendships with women have never been overtly sexual, but a good many of
+them have been what bell hooks in her book Communion: The Female
+Search for Love called romantic, in the soul-inspiring way that someone
+being thoughtful about loving you and showing up for you is romantic. Often
+those connections have what hooks called “an erotic dimension … that acts
+as an energetic force, enhancing and deepening ties.” There is no room in my
+life for shallow or basic connections.
+Feminism helped me to be okay with what it means to love women in the
+womanish and womanist ways that Alice Walker famously talked about
+—“sexually and non-sexually.” These days, on what one of my homegirls has
+deemed #ThottieThursdays, it has become customary for my girls and I to
+sext one another slyly seductive pics of our asses, or thighs, or cleavages,
+sometimes bare, or sometimes clothed in the perfect way that all our curves
+are accentuated. And the tacit agreement is that we share to be affirmed, in
+our sexiness, in our beauty, and in our glory. When this particular group of
+homegirls first started with their shameless flirting and body commentary, I
+used to blush furiously, not knowing where this kind of engagement fit for me,
+a straight girl. But for this same me, who has been single, alone, and often
+lonely for most of my grown womanhood, ofttimes the flirtations and sexy
+comments from the homies are the only compliments I get.
+One of the biggest battles that second-wave feminists of the seventies had
+with third-wave feminists of the nineties was over the place of sex and
+
+beauty in feminism. Second wavers critiqued high heels and lipstick as
+oppressive expectations of the patriarchy. Third-wave white girls brought
+heels and fly red lips back into the mix. Black feminists gave the side eye to
+white girls and their feminist waves, because looking fierce and fly has
+always been a part of the Black-girl credo. (And also because Black
+feminism didn’t fit neatly within the historical trajectory of waves.) Our
+embrace of femininity was its own armor in a world where white women
+said that Black women should never be called ladies. If I have to pick a side,
+I’d say I’m second wave enough to put middle fingers up to the patriarchy
+and I’m third wave enough to affirm that beauty and the desire to be wanted
+still matter. When you go for months or years without a dude (or any love
+interest) ever noticing you, you can begin to feel invisible. And feminist
+principles about how the patriarchy has made us beholden to beauty culture
+do nothing to assuage the desire we all have to be seen and affirmed.
+The old adage is that all feminists are lesbians. So what if that’s true?
+Here’s the thing, and there’s really no straight way to say this. Black
+feminism is and has always been a fundamentally queer project. Straight
+chicks gotta make their peace with that, and hopefully without too much
+struggle.
+I would venture to say that most tried-and-true feminist chicks are open to
+the possibility of their own queerness, because desire is fluid and because
+the boundaries and labels matter so much less when you get down to the real
+work of what it means to love Black women in a world that hates us all. One
+time, when I revealed to one of my girls that I was post-thirty but still hadn’t
+figured out how to have an orgasm that I didn’t give myself, she looked at me
+with a look of incredulity and thinly veiled disgust at the dudes I had slept
+with and said, “Shit. I’ll fuck you.” She was only half-joking. I didn’t take
+her up on her offer, but I did realize that I needed to seriously invest in my
+own pleasure, or else I was in for a homegirl intervention of a very different
+sort. Deep and abiding love can be sisterly and it can be erotic, and
+sometimes it can be and needs to be all these things at the same damn time.
+On more than one occasion, I’ve had a male lover say to me, upon finding
+out I’m a feminist, “Are you a lesbian? Are you sure?” Rather than being
+reactionary and defensive, perhaps straight women need to become less
+
+invested in the project of straightness altogether. Let me be clear. I’m not
+telling you who to sleep with. I’m also not telling you that all feminists want
+to or should want to sleep with women. I am saying that far too many women
+leave behind the freedom feminism offers because they want to stay on
+patriarchy’s dick, which is to say they want to secure their straightness and
+their options for getting chosen.
+I love a penis attached to a man who knows how to use it, but I’m
+uninterested in femme-style battle royales over dick. That’s just so basic.
+Who has time? Feminism wouldn’t be feminism if it didn’t encode a healthy
+skepticism about the politics of getting dick. And feminism wouldn’t be
+feminism if it didn’t celebrate the power of pussy. It might be trite but it’s
+true. To be clear, and not transphobic, feminism is also not about the
+elevation of particular body parts. My trans-women comrades have taught me
+that you don’t have to have a vagina to have a pussy. And my lesbian
+homegirls have extolled to me the virtues of the “D” their own lesbian
+partners are throwing down. The larger point is that however dope fellatio
+may be, fellating the patriarchy is no way to win.
+If Black women don’t figure out how to love other Black women (cis and
+trans, queer and straight, and everything in between), it will be the death of
+us. This toxic behavior of not fully knowing how to love other Black women
+shaped my earliest Black-girl friendship with Neisha, and shaped many of
+my other friendships for years to come. I put up with Neisha’s mean-girl
+behavior almost until the end of high school. But one summer night, after a
+minor spat but after many years of holding in my wounded feelings, I snapped
+and tried to fight her, only to have Reina hold me back. It’s the first and last
+time I’ve ever come that close to letting a Black woman catch these hands.
+Sometimes the sisterhood hurts.
+This toxicity that dogs Black women in friendships almost ruined my
+college friendship with Tracey, too. Inexplicably, a few months after pulling
+my card about feminism, she stopped talking to me. Months later, she said I
+had become “too intense,” which I read to mean too close, too attuned, too
+involved, too much. The subtext, though neither of us ever spoke it out loud,
+was that I was doing “gay shit” and it made her uncomfortable. Perhaps I
+was. I never imagined kissing Tracey, never wanted to sleep with her. But I
+
+loved her, deeply, because it’s the only way I know how to love Black
+women. I loved her because she loved me enough to check me when my
+feminist analysis was raggedy. But Neisha had taught me not to stay in
+friendships out of fear of being alone, so I endured the homegirl breakup with
+my chin up as much as I could, which is to say, not very much. One day my
+roommate Alicia came home and caught me crying big hot tears over this
+latest friendship failure. Yet again, I had done too much and managed to run
+off the closest Black friend that I had. “Sometimes, Miss Bertney, (Alicia’s
+nickname for me), it’s not that people don’t love you, it’s that they don’t have
+the same capacity to love as you do. Most people are doing the best they
+can.” Alicia’s words felt wise and true, and they helped me to pick my face
+up and move on. Months later, Tracey apologized, saying to me, “You simply
+loved me, and I didn’t know how to take it. I hope we can repair our
+friendship.” Intimacy between Black women matters on its own terms, and it
+isn’t a threat to the other kinds of relationships we want to have in our lives.
+So many Black women of my generation want access to the suburban
+fantasy marriage more than almost anything else. All I had imagined for my
+personal life at age twenty was that I would get married, have three kids, and
+enjoy taking care of a family. It’s laughable now since I don’t particularly
+like children, unless they belong to people I love. I had nuclear-family
+dreams because I had bought into the notion that the way I grew up—in a
+single-parent home, with a mismatched family of aunties and uncles and
+cousins and grandparents bringing up the rear—was not optimal. So part of
+my success story involved having it all—the house, the car, the career, the
+pretty man, and the kids. It’s fine to want all those things. But it’s dangerous
+to get them in a context where you have no analysis of how and why those are
+your desires. Feminism helped me to think more robustly about where I had
+gotten the idea that my upbringing was wrong or lacking. (Moynihan was one
+place. The church was another. And I’ll say more about both of these later.)
+And feminism helped me to recognize that there were other versions of a life
+to want.
+When my patriarchal nuclear fantasy didn’t happen and the privileges of
+straightness eluded me and a whole generation of overachieving Black
+women, it is my girls who have celebrated my successes, showered me with
+
+compliments, taken me out on dates, traveled the world with me, supported
+me through big life decisions, and showed up when disasters struck. One of
+feminism’s biggest failures is its failure to insist that feminism is, first and
+foremost, about truly, deeply, and unapologetically loving women.
+* * *
+Beyoncé gets this lesson about feminism better than most. And she has been
+one of the biggest victims of this failure to love women among Black
+feminists. Until the release of her magnum opus, Lemonade, an album so selfconsciously about the interior lives, struggles, and emotions of Black women
+that even most of Bey’s haters had to bow down, I have never seen so much
+vitriol, particularly among Black feminist women, as I have seen in their
+reactions to Beyoncé. Never.
+They simply didn’t believe that the pretty, light-skinned, affluent, superstar
+Black girl could really love other Black girls. For most of us, her
+#prettyprivilege conjured up the mean girls we encountered at twelve and
+thirteen—that age when we all felt deeply misunderstood, and were prone to
+be mean to others while being the target of other mean girls ourselves. Of
+course we are no longer adolescents, but something about seeing Beyoncé
+shine makes that particular truth go right out the window. We could call it the
+defenestration of feminist common sense. It’s as if the girls who were bullied
+finally have the chance to be the mean girls, and, where Beyoncé is
+concerned, they have embraced that role with gusto and absolutely no sense
+of irony.
+Beyoncé is my feminist muse.
+She didn’t start out that way. Back in 1997, she was just one of the
+members in a girl group that I loved, singing the soundtrack to my senior year
+of high school. Three years later, when two of the original group members
+left, I swore that Beyoncé was the cause and refused to buy any more
+Destiny’s Child albums. But I’ve always been terrible at holding a grudge,
+and by the time Bey dropped her first solo album during the fall of my first
+year of graduate school, I was back on board. Over the next decade she
+became Beyoncé the multi-talented mega-superstar that we know today,
+largely by keeping Black girls supplied with anthems for every possible life
+
+event. She was girl power personified, so I didn’t necessarily need or expect
+her to have a critique of the patriarchy or a formal membership to the
+feminists club. (BTW, for all you card-pullers, no such club exists.)
+By then, she was inspiring all of my best feminist theorizing. When I heard
+the 2006 club track “Get Me Bodied,” I definitely did an “old-school dance”
+or two, as the song entreated, but I also thought about feminist body politics,
+and what it might mean for a Black girl to really get in her body, love it, and
+stay there. When I heard her “Upgrade U,” I cringed when she sang, “I can do
+for you what Martin did for the people, ran by the men” (both because of the
+bad grammar and the even worse politics), but perked up when she said, “but
+the women keep the tempo.” I have thought long and hard about what it means
+for women’s bodies to keep the tempo of social movements. Some of my best
+academic theorization around feminism has come from pondering what kind
+of space Bey might be making for the particular ways in which Black women
+can be and can lead.
+At some point, a journalist named Jane Gordon asked her directly whether
+she was a feminist. Many Black women musicians had been asked this
+question before Bey. Erykah Badu and Queen Latifah readily come to mind.
+Both denied identification with the term, citing an affinity for “humanism” in
+Erykah’s case, and a love for Black men in Latifah’s.
+Beyoncé replied:
+I think I am a feminist, in a way. It’s not something I consciously
+decided I was going to be; perhaps it’s because I grew up in a
+singing group with other women, and that was so helpful to me. It
+kept me out of so much trouble and out of bad relationships. My
+friendships with my girls are just so much a part of me that there are
+things I am never going to do that would upset that bond. I never
+want to betray that friendship because I love being a woman and I
+love being a friend to other women.
+When I heard Beyoncé articulate friendships with Black women as the core
+of what feminism was for her, it felt to me like she got the core essence of
+what this is all about. I love being a woman and being a friend to other
+
+women should be feminism’s tagline. If this isn’t true for you, you aren’t a
+feminist. I’m not much on pulling people’s feminist cards, but some shit we
+should just be able to say.
+Eventually Beyoncé went on to adopt Chimamanda Adichie’s position on
+feminism in a song called “Flawless” on her 2013 self-titled album, in which
+she quoted from a YouTube clip of Adichie’s TED Talk: “Feminism refers to
+the social, political, and economic equality of women.” Adichie’s own
+failure in early 2017 to understand that transwomen are deserving of this
+social, political, and economic equality perhaps makes her a problematic
+feminist icon for many of us. When asked about transwomen, Adichie
+struggled, in an interview, to acknowledge that they are women. Instead, she
+said, “there are women, and then there are transwomen.” And while it is
+okay to acknowledge that all kinds of women, whether white, Black,
+Indigenous, Latina, Asian, cis, gender nonconforming, trans, queer, bi, or
+straight might have different experiences, it’s not cool to act as though
+transwomen are in some entirely separate category from the more general
+category of woman. That is something that feminism needs to be clear on—
+that it isn’t feminism if all women’s concerns, particularly the most
+marginalized women’s concerns, aren’t taken seriously.
+When I think about why Beyoncé matters so much to me as a feminist, it is
+the first definition that always resonates, the one that she seemed hesitant to
+articulate, the label she seemed ambivalent about adopting. Her feminism of
+deeply connected relationships is one that escapes notice in our rush to make
+sure our feminism names every ism and every intersectional category in its
+articulation. It doesn’t matter if we get the rhetoric right, though, if we still
+keep treating other women wrong.
+Some would argue that Beyoncé hasn’t helped with that. On that very
+same feminist track “Flawless,” the chorus insists “bow down bitches” over
+an infectious Houston Hip Hop beat. Immediately, I watched Black feminist
+chicks losing their minds, citing their outrage over having someone as
+powerful as Beyoncé telling them to bow down.
+This outrage felt rooted
+in willful ignorance and emotional dishonesty. I’m glad that Hip Hop has
+always been a part of my feminist journey, because I take Joan Morgan’s call
+for “a feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays” as bible. You can be
+
+deeply invested in loving other Black women, but still need to proclaim
+sometimes that bitches need to bow down. One, I don’t take bitches to be
+gender-specific. Call that a feminist disruption of the sexism inherent in the
+English language. And two, if I had had Beyoncé’s anthems as a twelve- or
+thirteen-year-old, on more than a few occasions, I might have wanted to tell
+Reina and Neisha to bow down.
+Loving Black girls is complicated, but loving oneself in a world where
+there is always someone ready to do you harm is even harder. I’m not trying
+to resolve the contradiction of proclaiming you love Black women one day
+and potentially telling them to bow down the next. I’m asking us to sit with
+the pain and offense that make that space necessary. I’m asking us to sit with
+the mean-girl tendencies we all have, with the ways that we hurt each other
+and don’t show up for each other. I’m asking us to sit with the Beyoncé
+conundrum that exists for all of us. At least she had the courage to own the
+messiness of it.
+And that’s why feminism needed Beyoncé. Because she has been more
+truthful about how hard it is for Black women to get on the same page than
+any of us professional feminists have ever been. After Beyoncé, feminism
+was no longer something reserved for Black girls with college degrees and
+Ph.D.’s. Suddenly feminism wasn’t just the province of Black girls who’d
+read bell hooks. Armed with feminist narratives in the digital age, this Black
+girl who’d built a singing career instead of going to college could be a
+feminist, too. And she would use her considerable cultural power to spread
+the gospel of feminism to the masses.
+I wasn’t prepared for the ways many of my Black feminist comrades
+resented her for it. bell hooks, the scholar and thinker who made it possible
+for Black girls like me to write books like this, called Bey a “terrorist.” She
+was responding to Bey’s image on the cover of Time magazine, a very blond,
+damn-near white rendition of Bey, in which her image approximated white
+womanhood in ways that felt a little too close for comfort. I think hooks read
+Bey as flirting with whiteness and passing for white in ways that were
+fundamentally anti-Black and not affirming for women of color. I wish that
+she had said that, rather than throwing around the very loaded language of
+“terrorist” all willy-nilly. Another group of Black feminists got together and
+
+proclaimed Bey’s feminism “bottom-bitch feminism,” the kind of faux
+feminism that they felt accompanied the politics of sex work.
+The rage was eloquent, to say the least. It spilled out in think piece after
+think piece after think piece, attempting to beat back the march of Beyoncé’s
+feminism, like it was the bubonic plague come to wipe out centuries of effort
+from Black women activists. The rage was eloquent, but it wasn’t righteous.
+And mostly it read as just plain wrong to me. Black women with unchecked
+rage and emotional work left undone can do real harm.
+Our feminist origin stories matter. When I watched Black women deem
+this girl a brand instead of a human being, a stealthy rhetorical move that
+enabled them to distance themselves from her and then drag her for filth
+without compunction, it read to me like grown Black women using the power
+of feminism to punch down (or up) at the mean girls who they resented in
+childhood. I’m no therapist, but I’m a Black girl’s Black girl, and I know
+Black-girl pain when I see it. Many of us who couldn’t access pretty
+privilege, those of us who weren’t popular or cool, those of us nerdy girls
+who stayed to ourselves, wrote stories and dreamed of lives as writers, grew
+up and found a home in feminism, a place where we were seen, a place
+where others were as mad about injustice as we were.
+But for many of us, the first real injustices that mattered to us, that ripped
+our hearts out, weren’t the failings of our parents’ relationships, or the boys
+we crushed on who didn’t love us, but the Black girls who we wanted to see
+us and befriend us instead either ignored or bullied us. I believe Bey
+conjures up all that shit, and that feminist analysis gives us the language to
+bludgeon her with our pain while feeling as if we are doing so in the cause of
+justice.
+There is never just cause to beat a Black woman like she stole something
+when she is very clearly taking the pieces of her life and trying to build
+something magnificent. Misdirected rage is a dangerous thing … a deadly
+thing. But the power of Black feminism, of any good analytic frame, really, is
+in its ability to clarify what the stakes are.
+What would it mean to ask the question, Why is Beyoncé drawn to
+feminism? If this feminist world we proclaim is so dope, why wouldn’t a
+Black girl like her want to be part of this work, too? And if her husband Jay
+
+Z’s recently released confessional album 4:44 is any indicator, perhaps
+feminism helped Bey find her power when she was confronted with an
+unfaithful partner. Feminism has certainly been a soothing reminder of my
+badassery every time I’ve been forced to mend my own broken heart.
+Something about the thoughtfulness and intentionality with which she has
+publicly grappled with her feminist journey makes it feel authentic to me.
+Yes, my willingness to believe the best about Beyoncé comes from my
+insistence on believing the best I can about Black women. It is not a small
+thing to have the world’s biggest pop star on our squad. There are still far too
+many young women who are hesitant to claim their feminism for us to be
+snobs about who gets to be included.
+Recently, I had to stage a homegirl intervention of my own for a young
+sister struggling with the meaning of feminism. The young woman, a student
+at Howard, had emailed to ask if I would come to her research presentation
+on my campus. Of course, I obliged her. During her presentation about her
+research on Black girls, I sat brimming with pride at her professionalism but
+also curiosity about the conspicuous absence of Black feminist theorists from
+her presentation. Afterward I asked her about that choice. “Well, Dr. Cooper,
+I’m not sure about feminism.” “Why?” I asked, even though I suspected some
+of what her answer might be. “It just seems like Black women are trying to
+force white women to accept and include them. I’m still not over how those
+suffragists treated Ida B. Wells at that march in 1913.” She was right. A
+group of white suffragists had tried to force Wells to march in back during a
+1913 suffrage march. Wells patently refused, though, and found a way to
+march with her state delegation.
+As I sat and talked with the student who had far more sophisticated
+reasons for rejecting feminism than I had when I was a student, I wondered
+yet again about why it is so easy for Black women to ignore how important
+feminism is to our lives. I began by reminding her of the obvious: despite
+white women’s racism, Ida B. Wells felt she had a right to be at the suffrage
+march. Black women care about feminism because sexism and patriarchy
+affect our lives, too.
+Then I shared with her some things I’ve learned on my journey to
+feminism. First, I’m not merely a feminist who happens to be Black. I’m a
+
+Black Feminist, capital B, capital F. That means I learned my feminism from
+Black women, and my feminist theory and praxis is situated in the particular
+ways Black women have understood, thought about, and written about the
+problems of racism and sexism across space and time. My feminism begins
+not with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showing out at Seneca
+Falls, but with Maria Stewart, a Black lady abolitionist, who was schooling
+audiences of men and women, Black and white, in Boston in the 1830s. When
+Sister Stewart asked her audience, “How long shall the fair daughters of
+Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron
+pots and kettles?” I see in her question an insistence on prioritizing the wellbeing of Black women and girls. When she then steps to Black women and
+says, “We have been possessed of by far too mean and cowardly a
+disposition, though I highly disapprove of an insolent and impertinent one,” I
+see her grappling with the ways that rage has been our constant companion. I
+see her challenging Black women to make that rage count. And while I think
+Black women have every right to an attitude problem, I get Stewart’s point.
+She concludes by telling Black women, “Do you ask the disposition I would
+have you possess?… Sue for your rights and privileges. Know the reason you
+cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You can but die if
+you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not.” This is my
+Black feminism—the kind that is gonna channel all this rage to either get free
+or die trying.
+Second, I have too much feminist shit to do to spend my time hating white
+women. Any time a white woman says something wrong in the public sphere
+these days, there is an army of Black feminist writers at the ready with think
+pieces that can snatch her wig and have her picking her face up off the floor
+months later. Going after white women online will get you lots of clicks and
+likes. But you’ll feel exhausted at the end and, often, white women’s attitudes
+won’t have changed one iota. I’m not saying white women don’t do
+treacherous shit. Far too often they are straight-up enemies to the work of
+ending patriarchy and racism. But we still can’t let white women become the
+center of a conversation that isn’t about them. I have had other Black
+feminists drag me (or try to) when I have said this. They have said I’m caping
+for white girls. Have you met me? Black feminism is not a reactionary
+
+project. It is not about the damage that white girls do. Not solely or
+primarily. Black feminism is about the world Black women and girls can
+build, if all the haters would raise up and let us get to work. When I talk
+about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear
+caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage. Black feminism
+taught me that. My job as a Black feminist is to love Black women and girls.
+Period.
+The third thing Black feminism taught me is that I was once willing to let a
+Black nationalist–centered politic, largely narrated to me by Black men, have
+me put my own political needs and concerns on the back burner to center
+their needs and concerns. It’s odd in this political moment that Black
+feminists resent white women more than Black men because when I think of
+the harms I’ve dealt with and who has caused the most pain, done the most
+emotional and physical violence, it is always always always Black men.
+They have done the shooting, the cheating, the beating, and the devaluing. Yet
+when a young Black man gets killed by police, my ass is in the street
+proclaiming that “Black lives matter.” When Black women get killed, Black
+men never manage to plan such marches in solidarity with us. Though our
+bros ain’t loyal, we insist on showing up for them. In a world where capital
+“B” Blackness matters as much as it does, I’m not sure that this obviously
+contradictory approach to our feminist politics will change. Where brothers
+are concerned, shit is and will always be complicated.
+After laying all this out, I realized that I sounded like a feminist evangelist
+and that perhaps I had hemmed the girl up a little too hard. So I backed up,
+and simply urged the young Howardite not to leave her intellectual and
+political heritage at the door because of the ways white women often act. She
+listened to me, but she still looked skeptical as hell. I guess I deserved it for
+all the talking crazy I did way back when.
+This is why I worry about a Black feminist politic that spends all its time
+tearing down Black girls who aren’t deemed radical enough on the one hand
+and white girls and their relationship to racism on the other. Stewart didn’t
+say we shouldn’t give white folks the business. She said the opposite. But
+she also reminds us that Black women and girls should be at the center. My
+Black feminism keeps my eyes on the prize, the prize being Black women and
+
+girls. My Black feminism insists that we center them, that we talk about them,
+that we build a world for and with them, that we fight alongside them. Black
+feminist rage can change this world, but it can also destroy us if we are not
+careful. It’s just that powerful. It’s powerful because the power of a good
+political analysis is that it can be a masterful cloak for the emotional work
+we haven’t done.
+Look, I know the world is not Black and white. But for Black women, our
+relationships to white women and Black men are still the primary definers of
+our feminism. Being in solidarity with the Latina chick or the Asian
+American chick in the struggle feels not uncomplicated but sensible. It’s
+dealing with all the feelings around white girls and black boys that get us all
+caught up. And in the midst of that predicament Black girls are always the
+compass, pointing us to the North. That is the most important lesson that
+Black feminism taught me. That a Black girl—my homegirl—saved my life.
+She did it by lovingly calling me out (or rather calling me in, as the kids say)
+on my bullshit. We need each other to survive.
+
+STRONG FEMALE LEADS
+
+I have a complicated relationship with white women. As clear as I am about
+needing Black women as a matter of survival, I feel far less sure about the
+need to be in solidarity with white women. And no other relationship causes
+me to reckon with that fact more than the political rise and fall of Hillary
+Rodham Clinton. I have been a spectator to her political career since 1992,
+when her husband became the first Democratic president in my lifetime. I
+was twelve years old when he took office, and my conflicted, complicated
+feelings about Hillary Clinton are deeply rooted in the very relationships
+with white girls that shaped my early adolescence, which happened
+simultaneously with her entrance on the national stage. But first, let me tell
+you why things with me and white girls are the way they are.
+On the one hand, if my television viewing preferences are any indicator, I
+love white women, especially those who run shit. My Netflix queue is
+populated with shows that feature “Strong Female Leads”: Gilmore Girls,
+The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girlboss, and Grace and Frankie. I can
+be found on any given day watching reruns of Madame Secretary, Rizzoli &
+Isles, or Veep on regular television. And Rachael Ray gets as much credit for
+my cooking style as anything my mother and my grandmother ever taught me. I
+know I just committed country Southern Black-girl blasphemy, but I long ago
+swapped out those delicious cans of flavor-infused, heart-clogging used
+grease for a bottle of EVOO (extra virgin olive oil).
+On the other hand, I haven’t had a white girl for a friend since 1998, the
+year I graduated high school. The last white girl to visit a place where I lived
+was my friend Michelle, who famously stepped into my room one day and
+
+put my Luster’s Pink Oil Moisturizer in her blond hair and claimed it gave
+her texture and body. We both giggled about it, her in delight at using Black
+haircare products and me at the absurdity of this white girl, my friend, putting
+my pink oil in her white-girl hair. Real friends can share cross-cultural
+intimacies like that.
+But until the Netflix-user algorithm clued me in, I had no idea that I had a
+predilection for watching white girls run the world. How can an avowed
+Black feminist be in love with imagined worlds in which white girls are at
+the center of everything?
+It all started with The Baby-Sitters Club. Well, really, it all started with
+Tami Brown, a poor, mousy-brown haired white girl who could have fit the
+description of Ramona Quimby in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, which I
+loved. Tami screamed the words “dirty nigger!” to me on the playground at
+recess. When I was eight years old, I only registered “nigger,” a word I had
+heard my father use before among his friends, as an insult because it spewed
+forth from the beet-red, angry, scrunched-up face of this white girl. She
+delivered it with such force that my body recoiled from the shock of it, even
+though I wasn’t fully aware what she meant. That night, I came home and
+asked, “Mama, what does the word ‘nigger’ mean?” Before my mother
+answered, her face winced in pain. I had never seen that look before, but I
+registered that she hated hearing and knowing that her daughter had been
+called such a thing. Mama stopped stirring the pot on the stove, looked at me
+intently, and replied, “An ignorant person! A nigger is an ignorant person.”
+Tami Brown may have been ignorant, but she had just initiated me into a
+world of racial knowing of the worst sort.
+White girls were still kind of new to me. I had only recently started
+spending any significant time with them socially, after my first-grade teacher
+discovered that I was an advanced reader. That meant I could no longer stay
+in my disproportionately Black, middle-ability-track elementary school
+classroom. I was moved to the predominantly white upper-ability classroom.
+Mandy, whom I met in second grade, was my best friend. She was nice to me
+and we ended up playing together at recess every day. Mandy invited me to
+skating parties and church cookouts. But then there was Tami, who looked at
+me as though my skin was shit-stained brown.
+
+My newfound congress with white girls brought me great joy. One day
+Mandy mentioned that she was part of a cool club called the Brownies, so I
+came home and told my mama I wanted to be one. After having worked all
+day, she honored the whim of her seven-year-old, hustled back out the door,
+packed me into the backseat of her Chevy Chevette, and drove me over to the
+school cafeteria for the Brownie meeting. The school was completely dark,
+because her seven-year-old had the wrong location. We drove back home,
+dug the flyer out of the trash can, found the proper location, and then drove
+across town to get me all signed up for Girl Scouts. As a hardworking single
+mom, my mother’s commitment to getting me to that meeting taught me that
+she was invested in my doing positive activities that would enable me to
+become a self-possessed and confident Black girl. She was also probably
+just a bit worried about whether I would make real friends given this new
+social world in the higher-track classes. Girl Scouts became my proper
+introduction to the social lives of Southern white girls, the deliciousness of
+s’mores, and the wonders of going to sleepaway camp.
+These new friendships also alienated me from any Black friends I might
+have had; I quickly became the object of ridicule among my black
+classmates, who accused me of “acting white.” I was not yet fully clear on
+what all the shifts in my friend demographic meant, but Tami made it plain.
+There was a word, an angry, hateful, stigmatizing word that named the
+difference between me and my new white friends.
+I tried to make sense of this whole new world through the very vehicle
+that had brought me into contact with so much whiteness in the first place—a
+love of books. By the end of third grade, I had plowed through Judy Blume’s
+Fudge series, all of the Ramona Quimby books, and every hardcover chapter
+book that arrived at my house from the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club.
+I escaped happily into fictional worlds populated by nice, adventurous,
+friendly white girls. I don’t know that I chose these books because the girls
+were white. There were so few books about Black girls to choose from. The
+few books about Black people that I had, my aunt Colleen had boxed up and
+shipped to me from the Black-owned bookstore in Dallas, Texas, where she
+lived. A country girl in a small town, I associated access to books about my
+own experience with life in the big city. In the books to which I had regular
+
+access, the worlds of white girls were middle-class, nuclear, and
+uncomplicated, which is, fairly or unfairly, how I imagined their lives.
+That spring, when the circular arrived for the book fair, I noticed one of
+the Baby-Sitters Club titles listed on the flyer and felt immediately drawn to
+it. I marked it down and asked my mom for money to buy it, along with some
+sticker books and other goodies at the fair. She obliged. When it came to
+books, my mother always obliged.
+When I made it to the book fair, I beelined for book #8, Boy-Crazy
+Stacey, the first book I read in the series. Book #8 began a five-year love
+affair with the five thirteen-year-old Connecticut girls that comprised the
+BSC. Like thousands of other girls, I became a card-carrying member of the
+Scholastic, Inc. Baby-Sitters Club and received a real-life printed
+membership card and welcome packet in the mail with a letter penned by
+Ann M. Martin, the series author. In the fifth grade I tried to start my own
+baby-sitters club before I realized that I really didn’t have any babies to sit
+and before I realized, quite frankly, that my single working mama would not
+take too kindly to this “venture” of mine, since it would probably amount to
+extra work for her. Regretfully, I reached into the makeshift loose-leaf paper
+“envelope” I had stapled together and refunded each girl her fifty cents in
+club dues.
+Each month when my allowance arrived, just in time for my mother’s and
+my monthly sojourn to the closest mall thirty miles away, I would set aside
+my four dollars and change to purchase the newest book in the series. I loved
+that it was a series, because I didn’t have to let go of the characters at the end
+of each book.
+As an only child, I considered the core members of the BSC—Kristy,
+Mary Anne, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn—my friends in my head. Eventually,
+they took on two junior members, eleven-year-olds Mallory and Jessi.
+Interestingly, Jessi was African American, but I was never too pressed to
+read about her. I already knew what it felt like to be the only one in a friend
+group of white girls, and Ann Martin never quite captured that experience.
+But what I loved about these girls was the authenticity of their friendship.
+They were young, smart, and enterprising. They didn’t all think alike, but they
+did things together. They weren’t the mean girls or the cool kids, but they had
+
+their sacred friendship unit and they honored it. In the safety of that friendship
+unit, every girl was her full, best, awesome self. They fought sometimes, but
+always made up. And in the end, no matter what, they rode for each other.
+I longed for that kind of close female comradeship. I craved it. As thankful
+as I was for sleepovers and friends to play with at school, none of my
+friendships ever felt like the Baby-Sitters Club. White girls for me existed in
+real life somewhere on a continuum from Mandy, the best of them, to Tami,
+the worst of them. When, in 2010, my homegirl and I created a blogging crew
+called the Crunk Feminist Collective it occurred to me, after we were up and
+running and functioning well, that my first act in adulthood, after getting my
+first real job, was to basically create a Black-girl adult version of the BabySitters Club! The project we undertook together wasn’t baby-sitting, but the
+essential concept was the same—a group of young women who came
+together around a shared thing that we all did, to change our little corner of
+the world for the better. Black feminism taught me my feminism, and Hip Hop
+taught me my crunk, but the Baby-Sitters were the first to help me imagine
+what the contours of loving female friendships could look like.
+These days, any show, past or present, that demonstrates authentic loving
+friendships between strong women (including mothers and daughters) is
+always at the top of my list—Gilmore Girls, Grace and Frankie, The
+Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Sex and the City, Living Single.
+I realize now that I was mostly interested in understanding the very
+different lives of these older, Northern, sophisticated white girls who,
+because they were fictional, were different enough from the Southern white
+girls I knew and safe enough for me to admire and love without hurt or
+shame. At least that’s the explanation that makes sense to thirtysomethingyear-old me. What I remember is loving these fictional white girl characters,
+even as I learned the perils and possibilities of what it meant to live closely
+with white girls in real life. My Baby-Sitters Club years were populated
+with racial slights from the white girls I called friends. Never overt, these
+incidents communicated that I was mostly liked, often tolerated, but
+invariably different.
+In the fourth grade, I sat at my desk one morning as my friend Candy, a
+member of the core group of girls I played with at recess, came around
+
+handing out invitations to her birthday party. When she came to my desk, she
+said, “I’m sorry I can’t invite you to my party, Brittney, but my daddy doesn’t
+like Black people.” I remember how her light brown hair swung from side to
+side as she said it.
+Later that year, when I starred in and coproduced our Black History
+Month play, The Rosa Parks Story (an idea I got from one of those Black
+history books Aunt Colleen had sent), Candy raised her hand first when the
+teacher asked for volunteers to play Martin Luther King. Her mother brought
+her to school with a bottle of brown makeup, which Candy smeared all over
+her own face. She then gave an enthusiastic rendition of King’s “I Have a
+Dream” speech. Her mom was in the audience; her dad was not.
+In fifth grade, I watched my friends and their families tie yellow ribbons
+on trees around town to commemorate Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf
+War. A few months later, when we were all treated to the video of Rodney
+King being brutally beaten by four LAPD officers, no one at school
+mentioned it. I was left to discuss it in the blackness of my own home. In one
+of our deep playground conversations, which at tween ages revolved around
+everything from how it was to get your period to debating whether white and
+Black people could date, Mandy told me that her daddy said “everybody
+should stick with their own kind.”
+Still, she was my friend. Particularly in the sixth grade when she saved me
+in gym. We were sitting there talking about Judy Blume books, and I had just
+finished reading Deenie, a book that I had gotten for a few cents on an
+afternoon excursion to Fran’s Book Nook with my aunt Punkin, who went
+there regularly to restock her endless supply of romance novels. Sometimes,
+on her way, she would swoop by after school in her old brown 1977 Toyota
+Celica, pick me up, and let me ride with her. At Christmas time, when Aunt
+Colleen came home from the city, she and Aunt Punkin would trade romance
+novels.
+I had also devoured and loved Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,
+probably because as a Black girl raised in the Baptist Church, I spent a lot of
+time thinking about God, whether He was really as scary as the preacher said
+He was every Sunday, wondering whether the world really would end before
+
+I got up enough courage to get “saved,” and wondering just who God was
+and how God thought.
+Mandy was having no parts of Deenie. “Ew,” she said when I mentioned
+it. “That book talks about touching yourself and stuff.” “Yes, it’s called
+masturbation,” I said loudly to her and our friends on the top row of the
+bleachers. Mandy’s face turned red and she ducked, telling me to keep it
+down. I had no idea that I had committed a cardinal teenage sin, that it was a
+thing to be embarrassed about, not to be discussed in mixed company. That is
+probably because even though I read the descriptions, I still wouldn’t figure
+out masturbation properly until I was in college. And I didn’t live in a house
+with older siblings who might have discussed these things. Mandy looked out
+for a sister that day, because getting caught talking about masturbation is only
+second in disaster potential to getting caught doing it.
+On her birthday that year, we had a sleepover at her house and went to the
+dollar movies to see Fried Green Tomatoes. Late that evening, upon our
+return, all the girls were styling each other’s hair, but no one was allowed to
+touch mine. A cardinal rule of Black girls is that when your mama has sat up
+all night styling your hair, you don’t let anybody else touch it. So I played in
+theirs, learning about the difference in textures and that you didn’t need to
+pull a comb through a white girl’s hair with nearly as much force as it took to
+pull a comb through a Black girl’s kinks and curls.
+White girls were exceedingly tender-headed, and it took me a few tries
+before Mandy stopped saying “Ouch, not so hard.” That ability, to have a
+world that is centered on the prerogatives of white femininity, to command
+someone to stop pulling and tugging so hard upon request, is so far from the
+truth of so many Black girls’ lives. A delicate, fine-toothed comb is no match
+for the average Black girl’s hair. We require wide-toothed combs that are
+sturdy and strong and can hold our thick tresses firmly and gently at the same
+time, without breaking them or hurting us. For many of us are tender-headed,
+too. By the way, we require the same things from our lovers, our mothers,
+and the country in which we reside. This is not a one-comb-fits-all nation.
+Before the natural hair revolution reemerged in the early 2000s and
+chided us for relaxing and combing the hell out of our springy, gravitydefying Black-girl hair, most of us sat between our mamas’ knees and took it.
+
+We endured the endless hours of washing, detangling, drying, oiling, parting,
+twisting, and plaiting our hair into respectable styles so that we could look
+like we belonged to somebody. And it was precisely because this process
+took hours that we were not ever allowed to let anybody touch our hair. But
+the process of our mothers and aunties and big sisters and grandmothers
+lovingly tugging our hair into place is often the first lesson Black girls learn
+about the inherently tough conditions we face, about how much effort it will
+take to prepare us to face a waiting world, about where our safe havens are
+and always will be—in community with women. Who you let put their
+fingers in your head is sacred.
+The politics of Black women’s hair matters. It matters in a world where,
+as I learned at Mandy’s party, the comb never slips through our hair quite so
+easily as it slips through theirs.
+Later that spring, when my classmate Layla had her pool party, the great
+hair divide was on full display. We were in the pool in her backyard, playing
+Marco Polo and water tag and all manner of other games. I was under
+express orders not to get my hair wet, because chlorine and permed hair
+don’t mix. As I clung to the edges of the pool, both because I couldn’t swim
+and because I was trying to limit the amount of water that seeped inside my
+swim cap, my friends’ mothers whispered to each other by the side of the
+pool, “I don’t understand why it’s that serious. It’s just hair. Kids should just
+get to be kids.” Of course, my mama wasn’t there to defend herself because
+she had to work.
+Still, my efforts proved futile and my hair got wet anyway. When Mama
+walked in under the judging eyes of the white moms hanging by the pool, I
+said, “I’m sorry for getting my hair wet, Mama. I tried not to.” To which she
+replied, “We’ll just have to wash it.” She didn’t make a big deal about it, and
+I was grateful, but washing and styling my hair was a several hours’ long
+ordeal, and surely not the way my mother had intended to spend her Friday
+night at the end of a long week.
+A few years later, another white girl friend, one with whom I exchanged
+notes and enjoyed a friendly classroom competition for grades, came up to
+me and asked, “Can I touch your hair?” Today, I would give her every side
+eye I have and a firm “no,” but back then, I let her touch it. Her reply: “It’s so
+
+soft. I thought it would feel more like a Brillo pad.” Her daddy, she once
+whispered to me, didn’t much care for Black people either.
+These, though, were my friends. And this was the deep stew of Southern
+1990s adolescence that shaped my own conception of girlhood. Effectively
+shunned by most of the other Black girls who didn’t yet have the tools to
+understand their Black-girl magic or to make space for mine, I would have
+had no friends but for these white girls who invited me to sleepovers, pool
+parties, and the movies.
+But so much of what it meant to be a Black girl among white girls, was to
+be a spectator and coconspirator in their construction of me as the other, as
+not quite like them. By escaping into the world of my beloved baby-sitter
+friends and later into the world of Elizabeth and Jessica, the Sweet Valley
+Twins, I could be a spectator and an imagined participant without risk. In this
+fictive world, I imagined race was only incidental and I got to revel in the
+shared tween and teen shenanigans of other girls, unencumbered by social
+difference.
+To be clear, I did not fully consent to my own othering. I read every Black
+book my aunt sent, played with the paper dolls of Josephine Baker that
+arrived in one of the books, and diligently hunted for every book in Mildred
+Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry trilogy. On Saturday mornings, we
+cleaned the house while Video Soul and Soul Train played on the TV and, on
+lazy Saturday evenings, Luther Vandross, Johnny Gill, and Alexander O’Neal
+blasted from my mother’s stereo system.
+In sixth grade, my mama thought it would be fun to take me to my first
+concert. It featured MC Lyte (for me), Miki Howard (for her), David
+Peaston, and Surface. The Hip Hop of the nineties, which I loved, had its fair
+share of strong female leads, dope sistas who were kicking butt and taking
+names. These women were unbowed by the male-centered nature of Hip Hop
+culture. Hip Hop is all about loud, rowdy, and raunchy testosterone-driven
+narratives. These women thrived both because of and in spite of the culture.
+If you ask me the most memorable figures in the soundtrack to my girlhood
+and adolescence, my personal Hip Hop mixtape would be primarily female.
+My first favorite Hip Hop group was J.J. Fad, a bubblegum-pop girl group,
+whose 1988 hit “Supersonic” had an infectious beat that I still remember
+
+hearing for the first time as a seven-year-old in the passenger seat of my big
+cousin’s blue Pontiac Sunbird on a country summer excursion to the corner
+store. J.J. Fad was gimmicky, but when I heard them for the first time, I paid
+attention to girls who rhymed.
+For the concert my mother, who always took more interest in my
+appearance (thankfully) than I did, had hustled me over to Cato Fashions for
+an outfit. Once I reached tween age, every school year my mother would go
+to Cato and put a few outfits on layaway for me, so I could look fresh at the
+start of school. But this was a special treat. I remember that I had a cute top
+and these awesome baggy purple pants that felt cool and cute, and kind of
+like Hip Hop. I was ready when MC Lyte came out and lit up the stage.
+A pioneering MC in Hip Hop, Lyte is the exemplar of a “strong female
+lead.” She is, to this day, a confident lyricist who tells it like it is while
+coming off as supremely unbothered by any haters who would dare to step to
+her. Between Lyte, Queen Latifah, Da Brat, and, later, Lauryn Hill, Missy
+Elliot, Lil’ Kim, and Foxy Brown, I was blessed to come of age in the era of
+the female emcee. Despite my lack of Black girl friends, listening to Black
+music, Hip Hop and R&B, made me know that I was a real Black girl even if
+none of the other Black girls around me saw it. Like Ashley Banks, the little
+sister on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I had a massive crush on Tevin Campbell
+and squealed when my mama surprised me with a cassette tape of his debut
+album T.E.V.I.N. Black girls frequently teased me for “talking white” and
+“acting white” but I still remember the exhilaration of seeing MC Lyte
+command a stage for the first time, watching Queen Latifah check sexist
+dudes in the “U.N.I.T.Y.” video, and learning all the words to Da Brat’s
+“Funkdafied.”
+Most of my love of Black girl pop icons and Black music lived out of
+sight of anyone but my mother. That tucking away of my Black-girlness, even
+as I simultaneously tucked away my awareness of my friends’ whiteness, was
+a survival skill that I honed, in part, by reading and immersing myself in the
+stories of white girls’ lives. Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all
+people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters
+and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives. The stories we
+watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very
+
+“universal” human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and
+others. The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated
+as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen
+as limited and particular.
+By escaping regularly into the saccharine world of fictional white
+girlhood, I could find respite from grappling with the enormously
+complicated and devastating meanings of Rodney King, Anita Hill, Clarence
+Thomas, and the L.A. Riots, even as all of these formative narratives about
+the precarity of Blackness and Black womanhood were happening around
+me.
+And this brings me back to the moment that I, along with the rest of
+America, got our first taste of Bill and Hillary Clinton. When the Arkansas
+governor burst onto the political stage in 1992, it seemed pretty clear that
+there was something unique about him. His charm was then, as now,
+legendary.
+When I wasn’t in the fictive world of Stonybrook, Connecticut, or the
+raucous world of early nineties Hip Hop, I was devouring teen magazines.
+Those magazines had begun to cover a political couple from Arkansas that
+they referred to as “Billary.” Before there were corny celebrity portmanteaus
+like Bennifer and Brangelina, there was Billary. But Billary was not in the
+least celebratory. It was a derisive dig at Hillary Clinton’s political
+ambitions and her attempt to move away from the traditional first-lady role of
+being a decorous appendage to the president. I wasn’t that interested in
+politics, but I found the wordplay clever. I watched as Hillary Clinton built a
+name for herself, mostly by ignoring her charismatic husband’s notoriously
+womanizing ways. As the news of Bill Clinton’s affair with Gennifer
+Flowers made headlines, I learned that men don’t lose presidencies over
+cheating on their wives. Moreover, Hillary Clinton was an ambitious wife
+who made a failed bid for an office in the West Wing during her husband’s
+first term. Americans admired her loyalty to her husband, almost as much as
+they despised her political ambitions. I also learned that if wives have the
+nerve to have ambitions beyond wifehood, the public chastening and
+disciplining is even more severe.
+
+So much of Hillary Clinton’s career in the public eye reads like a modern
+version of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Oddly enough, two of my
+favorite movies, both of which emerged just as Hillary Clinton ran for and
+won her Senate seat in New York, are remakes of Shrew. And I love both the
+white version, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), and the Black version,
+Deliver Us From Eva (2003). I love them because I always identified with
+the strong female leads at the center of these stories. Hillary Clinton’s
+personal and professional life has been shaped by the consequences she has
+faced for being an ambitious and untamed woman. Though I believe she and
+Bill enjoy a great friendship and a political partnership, his multiple
+infidelities and his flaunting of them in public have certainly had the effect, if
+not the intent, of disciplining his wife into the role of supportive, loyal
+spouse. And for playing that role with aplomb, Hillary Clinton garnered the
+respect of many women across race and class lines. My mother told me after
+the Monica Lewinsky scandal: “I like Hillary. She’s handling this in such a
+classy way.”
+By that November, as the Clintons were on their way to the White House
+and a historic number of women on their way to Congress, the press had
+declared 1992 the Year of the Woman. Still, when Hillary made her failed
+bid for the West Wing office so she could push the agenda of universal
+health-care coverage, she was roundly lambasted, publicly hated, and again
+culturally disciplined into silence. But she put the world on notice that, as
+Beyoncé might say, “I’m not just his little wife.” I have always lingered over
+stories of women who lead, women who know what they want out of this
+world, and women who demand that others respect them and recognize their
+magic.
+When Hillary decided to run for president in 2008, I had initially planned
+to vote for her. Before my admiration for Michelle and Barack Obama and,
+frankly, my racial loyalty caused me to ascend the Hope train, I could think of
+no more qualified person to be our first female president. When again she
+chose to run in 2016, my fervor for her was renewed. This was despite the
+fact that she had called thirteen-year-old Black children “superpredators” in
+support of her husband’s 1994 crime bill. I was thirteen when she said it, just
+like her daughter. And despite the fact that in 2008 she seemed to entertain
+
+the notion that someone shooting Barack Obama would put her in line for the
+nomination. And despite the fact that her husband made a bunch of entitled
+and thinly veiled racist statements to the people of South Carolina when they
+backed Barack Obama in ’08.
+My relationship with white girls is and remains complicated. And in the
+public parts of my life, for good or ill, white women’s racism has never kept
+me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them. This has been
+true for multiple generations of Black women, especially in the South. I
+understand Hillary Clinton at the nexus of these competing narratives of my
+own womanhood and girlhood—my complicated relationship with white
+women, my innate admiration for strong women, and my hard-won
+understanding of the similarities between how Black and white communities
+constrict and resent women who seek power.
+The latter lesson I learned during my junior year at Howard University,
+when I decided to run for student-body president. Coincidentally, that was
+the same year that Hillary Clinton took office as a U.S. senator. I felt that, as
+an overachiever my whole life and an enthusiastic joiner ever since Mandy
+told me about Girl Scouts in the second grade, running the student body was a
+natural progression of my many years leading and serving in student
+organizations in high school and college. Debate team, Young Lawyers
+Association, and Future Business Leaders.
+I took this joiner sensibility right into college, where I eagerly embraced
+all kinds of student associations, honors clubs, and various positions in the
+expansive student government network that comprises Howard University. In
+my junior year, I decided that I was ready for the big time—president of the
+Howard University Student Association (HUSA). Together with my running
+mate, Mark, I threw my hat in the ring. At Howard, the only historically
+Black college located in the nation’s capital, student government campaigns
+are simulations of real life. Candidates spend in the thousands of dollars for
+fancy campaign logos and posters and splashy events to attract attention.
+Naïve and idealistic, I had yet to learn at age twenty that elections are as
+much about popularity as about policy. In the cheerleader-jock-nerd nexus of
+my high school, I understood and steered clear of this. I was the girl who
+worked out much of what I experienced in the real world by escaping into the
+
+world of books and ideas. At Howard, no one knew the student handbook,
+the intercollege student government structure, or the minutiae of policies and
+procedures better than I did. Knowing all of these policies and procedures
+would equip me, I thought, to lead people.
+On the day that my running mate and I went to meet with the university
+president, I laid out my ambitious agenda. President Swygert looked at me,
+as if amused, and said, “You have to get elected first.” I was taken aback. I
+didn’t fully understand the comment. It felt dismissive, condescending, and
+insulting. Didn’t he know who I was? I had never at that point failed at any
+major endeavor in my life, and I didn’t plan to fail at this one. Still, although
+it was before the age of Facebook, he had scribbled the proverbial writing
+on my wall.
+As the election season progressed, my polling teams (yes, polling teams)
+would go out across the campus and canvass dorms on my behalf. They
+always began with two questions: Who do you think has the best command of
+the issues? and Who do you plan to vote for? Invariably, the response to
+Question One would be “Brittney and Mark.” The response to Question Two
+would be “Stefanie and Alex,” our erstwhile opponents, who would
+eventually emerge victorious.
+Completely nonplussed by this information, I was even more taken aback
+by the other kinds of feedback my teams brought back with them. Students
+said I needed to be more feminine. I should wear stud earrings rather than my
+signature hoops. To this day, I only occasionally deviate from hoops. I
+needed to style my permed hair more effectively and wear suits and heels. I
+was awkward, overweight, and far more interested in books and politics than
+in makeup and hairstyles. I didn’t even really know where to begin. Wholly
+naïve to the world of political campaigns, I could not understand people who
+thought I knew the issues better than anyone, but planned to vote for someone
+else. But that is what they did. Stefanie and Alex won in a landslide against
+us and another ticket. I should have known how it would go on election day
+when a known campus busybody sent a passive-aggressive message to me
+through one of my friends that my jeans, campaign T-shirt, and sneakers
+didn’t “look presidential.”
+
+My spirit crushed and my eyes open to the intimate cruelty of politics, I
+was not a gracious loser. I did not call to congratulate the winners. I skipped
+class the next day, ashamed to show my failure of a face on campus, opting
+instead to sulk in the darkness of the movies. And I spent much of my senior
+year disillusioned with a campus that I felt had betrayed me despite several
+years of committed service.
+But many of the failures were mine. Mind you, it never even occurred to
+me to canvass dorms with my team. The thought of soliciting strangers for
+votes still gives me anxiety! (Clearly I shouldn’t have been running.) It was
+dramatic and devastating in the way that first failures for overachievers tend
+to be. It was a painful opportunity to see myself through the mirror of others
+and find my reflection wanting. Over the course of my twenties, it became a
+lesson in figuring out what things about myself I would retain and what things
+I wanted to change. I learned first and foremost, though, that if people can’t
+trust you, you can’t lead them. Second, I learned that electoral politics
+weren’t the thing for me. Perhaps that’s petty, but living a life being evaluated
+by other people’s impressions of me felt like too much. The third thing I
+learned is that it wasn’t just about qualifications, or competence, or
+commitment, but about helping people feel connected. As a bit of an introvert
+and not much of a people person, I had failed to make the connection.
+Stefanie, my opponent, did. Students could relate to her. They found her to be
+genuine, rather than haughty or uptight. I was used to being one of the
+smartest people in the room and I acted like it, primarily as a defense
+mechanism.
+I didn’t see Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election coming. Like most
+Americans, and most of the polling numbers, I assumed that we had arrived
+at a place where America was ready for a female president, especially one
+as hypercompetent as Clinton. In the late hours of November 8, 2016, when it
+became clear that she would lose, I was nothing short of heartbroken.
+Perhaps I should have been less optimistic.
+The writing was on the wall. For more than twenty years, journalists have
+written essays about the reasons people hate Hillary Clinton. Every time I
+heard or read one of those pieces, I winced, remembering acutely how it felt
+to be deemed overqualified but simultaneously disliked and distrusted.
+
+The things that made others distrust Hillary Clinton were the things that
+made me like her. Something about her social awkwardness, her detailoriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of
+racking up qualifications through intentional résumé building feels familiar,
+because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I
+know. Often Black women are cast as cold and unfeeling for having these
+qualities. But the hustling spirit that I saw in Hillary Clinton resonated with
+the oft-repeated Black proverb: You have to work twice as hard to get half as
+far. Black women and girls are forced to navigate the unreasonably high
+expectations that go along with proverbs like this throughout their lives. I’ll
+come back to that later. But I believe that there is no other group of women
+who can understand just how devastating Hillary Clinton’s loss was than
+Black women. What might feel like a singular and stunning defeat for her is
+one that Black women learn to live with every day—the sense that you are a
+woman before your time, that your brilliance and talents are limited by the
+historical moment and the retrograde politics within that moment in which
+you find yourself living. Black women, from slavery to freedom, know that
+struggle so much more than any white person ever will.
+Hillary appealed to the parts of me that care far less about impressing
+people than about figuring out the nuts and bolts of the kind of thinking that
+will actually help people. She appealed to the parts of me that despise the
+insincerity and superficiality of small talk. She appealed to the parts of me
+that come alive in intimate settings when I have the chance to connect with
+real people. My ability to empathize with a woman whose life and political
+commitments diverge significantly from my own is rooted in the ways I
+learned in early childhood to understand and negotiate the complex humanity
+of white women even before I learned to negotiate my own. I learned to like
+and value certain white women, despite their racism, long before I learned
+how to prioritize and value my own Black-girl magic.
+So, yes, I think patriarchy had something to do with Hillary, whom Barack
+Obama called the most qualified person ever to run for the job, losing the
+election to a man who probably struggles to spell the word “competent.” The
+fact that 53 percent of white women voted against her bears all the marks of
+the internecine ways that patriarchy pits women in an endless competition
+
+with one another. Throughout the election season, I witnessed so many white
+women, on both the right and the left, rolling their eyes and saying “ewwww”
+and “ugghh” every time Hillary Clinton came up in conversation. Somewhere
+in the midst of the time I spent being friends with white girls, I missed their
+penchant for doing mean-girl shit to each other. Everything about the ways
+that white women endlessly analyzed and picked Hillary apart felt like it
+came from the mean-girl playbook that we all learn in middle school.
+Perhaps it’s sexist of me to reduce legitimate political analyses down to
+mean-girl infighting, but the political distrust and disdain for Hillary Clinton
+is as outsized as the vitriol that some Black feminists reserve for Beyoncé.
+Look. It’s not just Black and white women who I think keep replaying
+middle-school angst. Working-class white men’s overidentification with
+Donald Trump, a man who clearly despises them, is the stuff of middleschool fantasy, too. Perhaps it is difficult to hear that electoral contests still
+are what they’ve always been: popularity contests. And popularity is dictated
+by all of the worst forms of social privilege—we are conditioned to like the
+people who are pretty, charming, handsome, rich, and well-connected.
+Donald Trump sure ain’t pretty, but he is rich and well-connected, and that
+means that lots of white men who will never be either of these things secretly
+identify with him. That’s all I’m saying—that so many of the emotional
+impulses that shape our engagements with powerful public figures have to do
+with the shit we went through in middle school. I really wish people would
+just go to therapy.
+The young and woke ones on the Black left also refused to give too much
+credence to patriarchy’s influence on the election. Many of these Black folks,
+some of them new and first-time voters and some of them old-school
+contrarians, saw Hillary Clinton as a shill for the neoliberal, establishment
+Democrats, a racist doing her husband’s bidding, a woman unworthy of being
+a poster child for feminist anything. It seemed reasonable to them to protest
+every imperial fault of the American Republic on Hillary Clinton’s back.
+Meanwhile, these same folks lined up behind Bernie Sanders, a socialist
+who had radical things to say about money, but not much else. I never
+believed the Bernie hype. Perhaps it’s problematic identity politics, but I left
+white-savior narratives alone a long time ago. Bernie’s Johnny-come-lately
+
+race analysis, which he hastily put together after young Black women bumrushed him onstage at a rally, felt as opportunistic to me as Hillary’s belated
+engagement with the politics of race. It didn’t matter to me that Bernie had
+participated in the civil rights movement and, frankly, his close proximity to
+that degree of racial animus made his absence of racial analysis more than
+fifty years later even more egregious. Moreover, I found it especially terrible
+that when it came to racial politics, many young progressives, across racial
+lines, were far more willing to train their hatred on Hillary Clinton, a white
+woman, than on Bernie Sanders, a white man. White women have absolutely
+been accomplices to the American project of white supremacy, but their
+husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons have always been the masterminds. Let
+us never forget that.
+Having grown up in a world where white women were frequently a mixed
+bag, I couldn’t technically disagree with assessments of Clinton as a racist
+and a neoliberal big-money politician. My problem was that every politician
+on the left since Bill Clinton has been exactly this kind of politician. I didn’t
+understand how people, knowing how patriarchy works, expected the first
+woman president in a deeply masculinist and patriarchal democracy to break
+the mold. People demanded nothing short of political purity from a woman
+fighting for a position in a system that has been stained bright red with the
+blood of countless marginalized groups from the beginning. Women are to be
+pure and unsullied, maternal, nurturing, and the conscience of the Republic.
+Clinton was maternal to her one child only, and not much interested in any of
+those other qualities. And many Americans, including the young of all races
+who have grown up with patriarchal expectations as barely detectable
+background noise, hated Clinton for all the ways in which she did not
+conform to these dictates. At the same time, a curious thing was happening
+among young Black feminists and progressives, who hated Hillary Clinton
+because she was entirely too white. These folks focused on her race and
+class politics exhaustively, and treated her gender and her long life as a
+woman in politics as though it were incidental rather than central to the
+narrative.
+Even before I embraced feminism, the Howard campus election taught me
+that patriarchy is always on its job. Other things like race, class, and sexual
+
+orientation, might be central. But gender always matters. The angst I felt over
+being deemed simultaneously too good and not good enough set me on the
+path to feminism. For the first time, on a campus that was committed to all
+Black everything, I ran headlong into the politics of gender. Yes, my
+opponent, a woman, won. But in addition to her clear talent for politics and
+her doing an admittedly really great job as student body president, she also
+met respectable standards of femininity that I hadn’t even truly been aware
+existed. On the day of the campus election, she wore a dark-colored suit and
+heels. I had no knowledge of the social mores of “looking presidential.”
+Never before had my clothing and appearance been policed in this way, other
+than by my mother. My insistence on a uniform of jeans and tennis shoes was,
+I’m sure, a subconscious rebellion against this very same mother who, to this
+day, owns neither a pair of jeans nor a pair of sneakers. Never before had I
+encountered a world where the merit of my ideas didn’t rule the day. Even in
+high school, though top grades and impressive college admissions didn’t
+protect me from racism, the racists did not win. Never before had I been
+made to care so much about how my existence and manner of moving through
+the world made other people feel.
+I wrote my first ever op-ed about my experience for the campus
+newspaper. Before Rebecca Solnit gifted us the term “mansplaining,” several
+brothers approached me on campus, having read my article, wanting to know
+how the demand that I wear lipstick and smaller earrings was any different
+from the unspoken edict that they shave their cornrows or locs. True enough,
+Howard, like many other Black colleges, had (and has) a culture of
+respectability when it comes to what constitutes professional attire. The
+politics of respectability is predicated on extremely conservative ideas about
+what a proper race man and a proper race woman are and should look like. I
+watched, over the course of four years, as many young men in the School of
+Business cut their dreadlocks just in time for senior year and the waiting job
+market. Still, I offered every brother that stepped to me a withering glare and
+asked, “Do you really think this is the same thing?” The stakes weren’t the
+same. Respectability politics rooted in sexist ideas suggested that I wasn’t
+qualified to be president because I wasn’t feminine enough and was not
+enough of a lady. Because my male colleagues were straight men, their
+
+masculinity was not called into question. No one had said that they weren’t
+masculine enough to be president. I didn’t have the language for that then.
+My lack of answers to these questions left me with a sinking feeling in my
+gut that even though I was more than halfway through college, I didn’t have
+even half of the answers I needed about my life as a Black woman. I wasn’t a
+feminist yet, but my unquestioned commitment to a race-only politic was like
+sand slowly slipping through the fingers of my tightly clenched Black-power
+fist.
+I also never questioned my femininity because, even though I’ve never
+been hyperfeminine, I am most at home in the company of other women. Ever
+since the days of Girl Scouts and the Baby-Sitters Club, I have been a girl’s
+girl. My understanding of my girlhood and my womanhood has always been
+forged in relationship to other women and girls, black and white. At Howard,
+I ran squarely up against the intersection of race and gender, racism and
+sexism, in ways that I could not foresee. The kind of Black womanhood that
+Howard valued in its leaders during my time there in the early 2000s was a
+womanhood different from my own. Opinionated, outspoken, and far too
+serious, I didn’t temper my mouth with cute hairstyles or clothes. I didn’t
+know I needed to.
+White women taught me about racism; Black institutions, like Howard and
+the Black Church, gave me a primer on sexism. My relationship to both are,
+consequently, complicated. Of course white women weren’t my only
+examples of strong female leads. My life had been intimately shaped by
+strong women leading. In the intimate world that shaped me, Black women—
+my grandmother, my mother, and my three aunts—ran everything. They
+cooked the meals, worked the jobs, paid the bills, managed the kids,
+extinguished fires, told off racist teachers, and put out bad lovers; parted,
+greased, and plaited hair every night and every morning; sewed, washed, and
+ironed clothes; taught us to pray, picked a mean switch for a good whuppin;
+and drew the boundaries of every Black child’s world with a simple look.
+But the world of girls and women outside my home was white. In graduate
+school I read the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminist
+activists from the 1970s who gave me a new understanding of “identity
+politics,” a term they invented. I had learned early how to disidentify with
+
+whiteness but never fully how to inhabit, embrace, and identify with my
+particular Black-girl magic. They argued in their famous “Black Feminist
+Statement,” written in 1977, that “our politics evolve from a healthy love for
+ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our
+struggle and work.” So they adopted what they called “identity politics,” a
+belief that “the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly
+out of our own identity.” These politics of identity were radically different
+from the dis-identity politics that had shaped my youth. These were Black
+women speaking a language of liberation, of self-possession, that I didn’t
+even know I needed.
+I like strong female leads, Black and white alike. I want to be strong.
+Badass women have to be strong. But I don’t ever want to be strong in ways
+that are inauthentic, dishonest, and dangerous to my health and well-being.
+Black feminism taught me that in the battle with white women over racism
+and with Black men over sexism, I can never go wrong in picking myself. But
+I’m grown and I know the choices are never so black and white. I love,
+embrace, and keep company with Black men who have yet to fully or even
+remotely reckon with their sexism, because those Black men are my father
+figures, brothers, cousins, friends, and lovers. Similarly, I can, in limited
+instances, admire and offer support to white women who have not yet fully
+reckoned with their racism. I can also admit that the struggle to take down the
+patriarchy will be a very limited endeavor if white women aren’t a part of it.
+I do wish white feminists would embrace the notion, however, that in this
+new feminist movement we are all trying to build, they aren’t automatically
+our choice for “strong female lead.”
+
+THE SMARTEST MAN I NEVER
+KNEW
+
+Every time I hear calls from young radical activists to “burn it all down and
+start again,” I feel more fear and distress than possibility. While there are a
+fair number of Black women across history who have believed in
+revolutionary violence, the posture of burning shit down feels decidedly
+masculinist to me. Our nation’s story is one of men using violence—against
+Native folks, against Black folks, and against women—to build and fund a
+grand “experiment in democracy.” Very often, when we think about the way
+the United States likes to wield its “big stick” abroad, through military might,
+we forget that this project is inherently phallic. Picking on countries full of
+people of color with less money and resources is also a racist and imperial
+project. Lots of young activists of color that I know point to this. They point
+to the way police occupy Black communities like our military forces occupy
+places abroad. But militarism isn’t just racist. It’s also patriarchal, sexist,
+and masculinist. Far too many Black men crib from this same playbook,
+believing setting fire to white men’s institutions while laying claim to land
+and women is what freedom looks like.
+My mother’s father was a military man, a World War II vet. For many
+black men, joining the military was their only viable option to make
+something of themselves in a world where they couldn’t finish school and
+couldn’t go on to college. The men in my family lived down South, the place
+from which other Black people fled during the Great Migration. There were
+no good factory jobs in these rural small towns near the Mississippi Delta to
+
+create economic opportunity for those who didn’t go North. The military
+provided a salary and a pension. It also provided an avenue for Black men to
+become the kind of normative, proud, self-supporting men that are valorized
+in a patriarchy. In my grandfather’s case, his time in the military also gave
+him bragging rights. According to the big white leather family Bible that sat
+on the coffee table next to my grandmother’s weekly subscription to Jet
+magazine, Grandfather Henry saw action at Normandy. He came back from
+the war with an injury that he lived with until his death twenty-five years
+later. At some point, after he returned from the war, he married my
+grandmother, a young woman sixteen years his junior. Depending on who
+tells the story, my grandfather’s personality had many faces. My mother’s
+older sisters remember him as a mischievous and fun-loving father who piled
+them all into the pickup truck and took them down to the jook joint, leaving
+them to play in the truck for hours while he went in and gambled with his
+friends. My grandmother told me stories of the fights they’d have, most likely
+after he came back drunk from the jook. “Yes, I fought him,” she’d say,
+reveling in her ability to stand toe-to-toe with her man. But she also spoke of
+the PTSD he carried. “Cooper (which is what she called him), could not
+sleep on white sheets. My God, he would carry on if I ever tried to make him
+sleep on white sheets.” One can only imagine the horrors those white sheets
+conjured for a WWII vet born in 1911. My mother, the baby of the family,
+remembered her father in his old age as a gentle giant with huge hands that
+she’d hold as they walked around the yard to “help him get his exercise.”
+It’s not too far a leap to think that her love for her own father, a volatile
+but loving family man, shaped the kinds of men my mother came to love when
+she was grown enough or thought she was. Bob was also a military man,
+several years older, tall, dark, handsome, charming, and gentle. Just the kind
+of man that makes mothers scared for their daughters. My grandmother
+warned my mother away, telling her that Bob was “no good” for her. As is
+the custom of daughters, my mother thought my grandmother didn’t know
+what she was talking about.
+So Mama let Bob shoot his shot. She obliged him, and things went along
+like a dream until, as she mentioned later, in that way that Black women can
+say everything while saying so little: “He didn’t treat me right.” As a younger
+
+woman, I wanted to know what that meant. As a grown woman who’s lived a
+little bit of life, the broad outlines feel clear. The details matter less. My
+mother, a pretty, charming, smart, and ambitious girl in her first year of
+college, left Bob and pursued her bliss. At eighteen her bliss was another
+older man, himself home from a stint in the military. Charming and smart,
+Mann swiftly took up the space Bob had left. Bob, a Vietnam vet who would
+later tell my mother that his “head was all screwed up from the War,” viewed
+it as a betrayal of the sort that deserved retribution.
+On a Saturday afternoon in March, Bob came upon my mother and Mann
+sitting in a car across the street from Big Mama’s (Mann’s mother’s) house.
+A young woman from the neighborhood would later tell my mother that she
+saw Bob coming and ran toward the car, waving her arms wildly in the
+rearview mirror, trying to get my mother’s attention. Mann somehow saw
+Bob coming and gestured for his nine-year-old nephew David to go into the
+house. David heard a pop, pop, pop as soon as he made it inside the door.
+Outside, Bob shot my mother three times and Mann once.
+My mother awoke in the hospital to her older sister Linda asking her if she
+knew where she was and whether she understood what had happened. Mama
+had blocked out the shooting, but she knew enough to tell her sister “Bob shot
+me.” In the manner of rural Southern boys, my mother’s big brother had
+ridden around all night with a shotgun and a willingness to kill. Bob called,
+wanting to know if my mother was alive. Lil’ Mama, my mother’s
+grandmother, simply said to my mother as she lay in the hospital bed fighting
+for her life, “Baby, you didn’t do nothing wrong.”
+It has been nearly thirty-eight years since a grown man, drunk on his own
+sense of entitlement, attempted to murder my mother. According to several
+years of reports by the Violence Policy Center, in this, the second decade of
+the twenty-first century, eight Black women per week, more than one per day,
+are murdered, usually with guns, and usually by a Black male they know.
+More than one thousand women of all races are murdered each year, in
+similar incidents, usually by men of their own race. It has been said before,
+but it is worth saying again: Toxic masculinity kills.
+At eighteen years old and in good health, my mother, thankfully,
+recovered. A few weeks later, she found out that she was pregnant, with
+
+Mann’s baby. With me. The first time she heard my heartbeat, big and strong,
+she felt like she was floating on air, renewed in her decision to bring her
+pregnancy to term. All three of us—my mother, my father, and me—had
+survived the shooting. Put another way, we had survived a Black man
+attempting to murder us.
+Because my mother now had a baby to support, she did not return to
+college for her sophomore year. She recovered from the shooting, gave birth
+to me in late 1980, and started her career at a local company at the beginning
+of 1981. My father struggled, using alcohol to medicate his pain and trauma,
+in the same way that his father—my grandfather Claudie, also known as Big
+Daddy—had done. On weekends, Mann got drunk and came home to fight my
+mother. Many years after his passing, his sister—my aunt Mattie—told me,
+“He loved your mother. That was the only way he knew to show it. That was
+all he’d ever seen.” Inadvertently, she had revealed something of the
+dynamics between Big Mama and Big Daddy, dynamics that I had been
+oblivious to as a child, because I knew Big Daddy only as the lovable town
+drunk. I saw him far more frequently posted up under a tree, in the projects,
+with a brown paper bag in his pocket, than I ever saw him at Big Mama’s
+house. I call it her house because I never remember seeing him there. And
+whenever I ran into him, Big Daddy always gave me the biggest smile, happy
+to see me. Many of my friends and I, with grandparents who grew up in the
+aftermath of World War II, repeat to each other the stories our parents handed
+down to us in hushed voices, of how their parents got drunk and caroused all
+weekend, and then came home and took their anxieties, fears, and frustrations
+out on each other. The women sometimes got brutally beaten or killed, but
+sometimes they gave as good as they got.
+This had been the script of both my grandfathers, Henry and Claudie. It
+was the script my mother had to work with when she chose whom to love. It
+was the script of both of the men she loved as a young woman. Of my father,
+my mother has said, “Your dad and I would work all week trying to build
+something. And then in one weekend, he could go out and destroy everything
+we had worked that week to build.” This is the father I remember, the
+weekend bringer of chaos and destruction, not the faithful, sober builder who
+showed up Monday through Friday, not the man who my mother made ride
+
+shotgun with her to drop me off each morning at daycare because I cried too
+much when she left me.
+Men aren’t born destroyers. Many men imbibe scripts of toxic masculinity
+almost from birth. And on their way to becoming men, they enact those toxic
+scripts in the lives of the women around them. It’s important to remember that
+this conclusion is not inevitable. But that’s the thing that will drive you mad
+when you lose someone tragically—wondering about the inevitability of the
+outcome.
+It was a Saturday morning on the fourteenth of April, at around 5:00 A.M.,
+when the phone rang in our house. It was exactly ten years and two weeks
+after Bob had shot my parents. I heard my mama on the phone saying, “How
+am I gonna tell this girl…?” I knew something bad had happened, but didn’t
+know what or to whom. Ever the straight shooter, my mama asked me to get
+up, and when we sat down in the living room, she said simply, “Somebody
+shot and killed your dad last night.” I was in the fourth grade, and by that time
+I was well acquainted with my daddy being shot. He had been shot when I
+was in the second grade, and again when I was in the third grade. Both of
+those times, and the time with Bob, he had survived. This time, he had not. I
+sat on the sofa, digging my toes into our bright blue carpet, shaking my head,
+trying to make sense of the senseless. “We should get over to Big Mama’s
+house. She’s not doing too well,” my mom said. We got dressed hurriedly,
+climbed in the car, and drove the couple of miles down the road to Big
+Mama’s house.
+Inside, Big Mama’s face was racked with grief, and she kind of rocked
+from side to side. Aunt Lil’, my daddy’s baby sister, was distraught. “Mann
+never liked Friday the thirteenth. He never did,” she was saying to no one in
+particular. But, apparently, my daddy had violated one of his own edicts by
+being out of the house on that Friday night. Over the weeks and years to
+come, a few more bits and pieces of the story would trickle in. My daddy had
+been at his girlfriend’s house. A man—perhaps the landlord, perhaps a
+former lover—came by angry about money, waving a gun around, threatening
+her and her children. My daddy intervened and ended up dead, shot in the
+head. For the second time, my daddy had become the victim of another man’s
+vendetta against the special woman in his life.
+
+Each and every time men try to deflect conversations about intimate
+partner violence in Black communities by talking about how “men are
+victims of abuse, too,” I want to hit them myself. Patriarchy and toxic
+masculinity (together with alcoholism and militarism) turned my father into a
+violent man. But patriarchy also killed him.
+In the nine shared years of our story together, years framed entirely by the
+gratuitous violence of men, I struggled to know this man, my father, this
+mischievous brother called “Mann” by his family, who was a bit
+superstitious, a bit of a romantic, a wild dancer, and a man willing to take a
+bullet more than once for a woman he loved. The father I knew harassed and
+terrorized my mother and me. He regularly upended and disrupted our lives,
+demanding much but giving little. The man I knew as my dad did not square
+in any way with the Mann who was beloved by his family.
+In the eighth grade, my substitute teacher, Mr. Roebuck, happened to be a
+good friend of my mother’s and a minor local celebrity who deejayed at the
+local radio station. Soul Roe was his DJ name. In that way that Southern
+Black people have with each other, I went up to him after class and said, “I
+think you know my mother.” And like Black Southerners are wont to do, Mr.
+Roebuck scaffolded me into a whole local genealogy, assessing, rather
+quickly, “who my people were.” “I knew your daddy, too,” he told me. I had
+no idea what he might say next, because I couldn’t imagine what good thing
+he might have to say about my daddy. “He was a really smart guy,” Mr.
+Roebuck told me, to my great surprise. “I saw him walking down the street
+one day and gave him a ride. He talked to me about starving children in
+Africa and all kinds of things, not the kind of things you would think a cat
+walking along the side of the road would be thinking about.” I had heard my
+father’s sisters’ stories, about how he was smart as a whip, about how he did
+Lil’s homework, about how he never had to study for tests. I’ve never met a
+test I didn’t have to study for. But other people outside the family thought my
+dad, the same man who had come late one night and slashed all the tires on
+my mother’s car, was smart. Like really smart, to the point that it was worth
+remarking on. Mr. Roebuck was subbing in my gifted and talented class, and
+for the first time, he introduced me to the idea that my daddy might have
+bequeathed to me more than grief, that my father, and not just my mother,
+
+might have had something to do with the precocity and intelligence that
+everyone in my family bragged on me for having.
+Several months after my conversation with Mr. Roebuck, I tumbled back
+into grief, unable, as had I been able to do at age nine, to tuck in the fear of
+violence and death that were the natural aftermath of losing a parent. I could
+not reconcile the thoughtful, empathetic man that Mr. Roebuck had picked up
+along the side of the road with the man who used to ring our old green rotary
+phone incessantly, making it impossible to spend an evening at home in
+peace. The man Soul Roe knew, who had empathy and concern for everybody
+else’s children—Africa’s children, his girlfriend’s children—didn’t seem to
+have any empathy or tangible concern for his own daughter.
+My father wanted me to know him. Well acquainted with his violence, I
+felt I knew him as much as I would ever need to know him. After an evening
+of drunken reveling, it was customary for him to call and demand that my
+mother “put Brittney on the phone.” “She doesn’t want to talk to you, Mann,”
+my mother would say while I shook my head. Listening from the other end,
+I’d hear “No, I haven’t turned her against you.” And after he refused to hang
+up, “Here,” Mama would say, handing me the phone, “talk to your daddy.”
+“Why don’t you want to talk to me?” he’d ask, hoping I would provide some
+evidence of my mother’s campaign to “turn me against him.” There had been
+no such campaigns. “Because you hurt Mama,” I’d say. “Do you love me?”
+Daddy asked me once. “No, because you hurt Mama.” I didn’t even think
+twice about telling my daddy I didn’t love him. How could I love him? I’d
+seen him inflict pain with my own two eyes. Small and powerless, I’d heard
+him slamming my mother into doors, even while I screamed and cried from
+the other room for him to stop. “Well, I love you,” he said, sounding quite
+sober. Then he demanded that my mother drop me off to spend the day with
+him so that I would know him. That day he gave me as much peanut butter
+and jelly mixed together in a green bowl as I wanted to eat. When my mother
+came to pick me up, he didn’t fight her. But other times, he did. Seeing me
+was frequently a pretext for seeing her. But people are never the sum total of
+the wrongs that they do. Men aren’t born monsters.
+The only time I ever thought I loved my dad was when I went to see him
+one of the times after he’d been shot. He was walking around with a cane,
+
+sober and genuinely happy to see me. He smiled and I smiled back, these
+smiles and faces mirror images of each other. On the ride back home, I told
+Mama, “Maybe I love my daddy.” She said nothing. Her position on my dad
+was always that everything regarding him was better left unsaid. She left me
+to form my own opinions. I don’t remember whether it was the second-grade
+shooting or the third-grade shooting (that’s how I mark the time) when he got
+shot, as my mother told me, “in the lower stomach.” Years later, my aunt
+Mattie clarified that one of his testicles had been shot off. But she told me my
+dad had attended the court date for the shooter. During his remarks to the
+judge, Daddy said, “Don’t lock him up. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst
+enemy.” There was that radical empathy again, that fairly sophisticated sense
+that locking up a man for a drunken street fight that had gotten out of control
+didn’t, in fact, constitute justice. Losing a testicle, my dad had suffered a
+violent and material blow to his own masculinity, but still he didn’t equate
+carceral solutions with justice.
+At thirteen, four years after the gun finally won and Mr. Roebuck
+disrupted my particular memories of my father as mostly a monster, these
+competing narratives bubbled over, haunting me each night. My mother made
+a way, despite limited income, to put me in therapy. Twice a week, the
+summer after eighth grade, I would go to sit on the sofa with Dr. Rick, a
+middle-aged white man with glasses, a beard, and a long chin. At some point,
+Dr. Rick assessed that the cause of my anger, the thing keeping me up nights
+and making me anxious, was that I needed to know my father better. The few
+good memories of my father that I have—the time he walked me to the store
+and bought me Bubble Yum, or the time he sat me on his shoulders and took
+me for a walk while he whistled a tune—had been overshadowed by all the
+negative memories. Dr. Rick sent me on a fact-finding mission to gather
+pictures of my dad (which I didn’t have), and to figure out some of my dad’s
+story. Talking to family friends, I started to put the pieces together, trying to
+connect the version of the story that I had to the version of the story that
+others told.
+Aunt Mattie, my dad’s oldest sister and the keeper of the family history,
+happily welcomed me for a visit, armed with old pictures, letters, and
+
+stories. In a letter dated “24 March ’75,” my dad wrote to her, from his post
+in Germany:
+This is a beautiful place over here. I seen towns sitting on top of
+mountains and towns sitting way down in the valley under the
+mountains.
+After checking in on everyone in the family and sending his hellos, my
+dad, at eighteen, mischievously concludes,
+Have you seen Margie yet. When you see her tell her to write and tell
+Patricia to write. I don’t care if she is engaged. (smile)
+And he signs it,
+Bye now from your BIG LITTLE BROTHER.
+At thirteen, the beautiful turn of phrase and the imagery of my dad sitting
+in Germany, perhaps on a mountainside somewhere as I imagined it back
+then, thinking about the bits of world he’d seen, stuck with me. Years later, he
+would affectionately refer to my mother as “Schatzi,” the German word for
+“treasure” or “sweetheart.”
+During my first year as a professor, I traveled to Heidelberg, Germany, for
+a conference called “Toward an International History of Lynching.” I was
+giving a paper about Ida B. Wells’s antilynching work, reflecting on Black
+women’s long history of standing up to the United States for the wars it has
+waged on Black people, and on Black men in particular. Sitting in the
+window seat as the plane descended into Germany, I marveled at the
+beautiful, idyllic towns sitting on top of verdant green mountains, and looked
+curiously off in the distance at other towns tucked in the valleys below. For a
+brief moment, I got to see the world through my daddy’s eyes.
+I remember all the gifts my daddy ever gave to me: two fancy yellow
+bows with ribbons for my hair, a green purse for my fourth birthday, two
+half-dollar coins that I still have. And a picture of my sister, his other
+
+daughter, whom I didn’t meet until adulthood. This momentary glimpse of his
+view of the world—when he was still young and excited about what was
+possible—felt like an inheritance, like a part of my story, whose provenance
+I could verify. My dad didn’t leave a will, but through this letter I inherited a
+slice of beauty, a slice of his joy, before being a Black boy in a world that
+hated Black boys hardened his heart and limited his capacity for kindness.
+* * *
+I am always struck by the ways other people’s stories about my father tend to
+highlight his empathy and kindness for others. I wonder about a world in
+which you can be kind to everyone but the people who belong to you. And, in
+that regard, my father’s capacity for empathy for the “starving children of
+Africa” reflects this conundrum of American empathy. On the one hand, my
+father had a deep thoughtfulness that I would not necessarily assume he
+would have as a Black man from semirural Louisiana. At the same time, he
+cared more for these Black children abroad than he cared for his own
+children, whom he never financially or emotionally supported.
+In the spring of 2014, the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram kidnapped
+more than two hundred school girls in Chibok and absconded with them to an
+obscure and impenetrable part of the country, where they would no doubt be
+coerced into being wives for the male rebels. On social media
+#BringBackOurGirls trended and then President Obama offered aid to the
+Nigerian government. Michelle Obama tweeted a picture of herself holding a
+sign that said “#BringBackOurGirls.” While Black women in the States
+organized solidarity actions like “Rock a Gele for Our Girls,” folks on the
+left began to bellyache about the perils of U.S. military intervention. Many
+Black men argued that intervening would be militarist and imperialist, and
+that the woke position of any of us committed to radical politics should of
+course be against U.S. military intervention. Many on the left had hoped that
+the Obama years would bring less rather than more U.S. military incursions
+abroad. U.S. imperialism is a uniquely troubling evil, even in these days of a
+waning empire. And as the argument went among some Black men on the left,
+even two hundred-plus kidnapped, raped, and forcefully impregnated Black
+teen girls did not warrant U.S. military intervention.
+
+In the months prior to the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, President Obama
+had launched his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which was aimed at
+creating mentorship programs and leadership opportunities solely for young
+boys of color. Enraged that he would leave Black girls out of his signature
+racial justice initiative, I joined other Black women in organizing an open
+letter to the president, calling him out on his exclusion of Black girls. If our
+president, a self-proclaimed feminist who lived in the White House with
+three generations of Black women, couldn’t bring himself to use his pulpit to
+fight for Black women, then all hope felt lost.
+Are Black girls ever worth fighting for? I wonder this sometimes as a
+feminist who still secretly hopes for a man who will fight for her honor. I
+wonder this, more specifically, as a fat feminist who has been in one too
+many rooms where brothers have gone on the attack, misreading my large
+body as unduly aggressive, often resorting to using their own bodies as
+physical intimidation, only to have other men in the room do and say nothing.
+It has never been fully clear to me whether I was left on my own out of
+resentment, passivity, or some twisted belief that it would be sexist to stand
+up for a feminist, especially a physically large one who seems infinitely
+capable of defending herself. I have learned to defend myself because I’ve
+never been able to rely on a man to do it for me. That doesn’t mean I’ve
+never wanted a man to do it for me. It strikes me that if my daddy had lived,
+he might have cared deeply about the Chibok girls. The fact of his empathy is
+no guarantee that he would have figured out how to care for and father his
+own daughters any better than he did when we were children.
+One of my all-time favorite quotes, one that has largely been attributed to
+civil rights preaching luminary Rev. Vernon Johns is, “If you see a good fight,
+get in it.” Is the fight for the lives, safety, and sense of well-being of Black
+girls a good fight? I think so. Does it have to be a violent fight? I hope not.
+But far too many brothers have walked away from the fight for Black
+women’s lives, citing lack of interest, lack of urgency, or dogma. The
+feelings of disinterest and the faulty belief that Black girls aren’t engaged in
+an urgent struggle for their lives infuriates but does not surprise me. Sexism,
+like every other “ism,” is a willful refusal to not see what is right in front of
+you.
+
+The dogmatic commitment to not fighting for Black women and girls
+confounds me. On principle, many in Black communities believe that there is
+never a compelling reason to stand up in unequivocal defense of Black girls.
+Though patriarchy is clearly a structural problem, often there is a refusal to
+confront it, because to do so makes it seem like Black women are “picking
+on” Black men. Naming the terrible things Black men have done to Black
+women gets too frequently read as man-bashing and hatred. But as I have said
+before, “We can neither heal nor fix that which we will not confront.” Dogma
+isn’t just dangerous. It’s deadly. Our politics and beliefs should serve us; we
+should not serve them. Now I know that this position is also dangerous. I’m
+not advocating for a self-serving, navel-gazing politic that bends and shifts
+for our convenience. I’m advocating for people-centered politics that hold
+the safety and protection of the least of these—among them Black women and
+girls—as a value worth fighting for. I’m asking what it will take to have a
+politics that puts Black women and girls (cis, trans, and everything in
+between) at the center and keeps them safe. What does that look like?
+Because I sure as hell know what it doesn’t look like.
+When the Chibok girls were kidnapped, I wanted our Black president to
+use the force and resources of the U.S. military to go in there and bring our
+girls back. I wanted this same president to use the bully pulpit granted to him
+by the American people to proclaim that Black Lives Matter and, more
+specifically, the lives of Black women and girls matter. He struggled to do
+any of this, only coming around to cite the myriad contributions of Black
+women in a speech given in the fall of 2015. Those leftist radical
+pontificators who reside in a utopian place I like to call “Wokeland” called
+my position—this desire and advocacy for intervention on the part of Black
+women—imperialist. Black womanhood is not a politically pure category by
+any stretch. Any evil act we can think of, we can of course find some Black
+woman who has committed it.
+But, structurally, it is absolutely untenable to suggest that Black women
+are imperialists and colonizers. In the context of the United States, our
+reproductive capacities were conscripted to build the capital base for the
+assertion of the U.S. empire. After slavery, our bodies and the children they
+produced were tethered to multiple generations of low-wage work and
+
+poverty, providing staffing for the perpetuation of the U.S. underclass. The
+desire for protection and safety is not an imperial desire. Asking the leaders
+of your country and the members of your race to fight for you (if you’re
+Black) is not a colonizing act. They are demands for recognition of
+citizenship and humanity.
+Black women know intimately what the process of U.S. militarism does to
+Black men … what military-style policing does to Black communities. We
+know what it means for the military to become the only viable option that so
+many of our people have had for access into the middle class. Every
+opportunity I get, I stridently discourage the young men in my family from
+treating the military as their pathway out. Far too often, in these days of
+endless war and in wars past, it sends or has sent back to us men with war
+raging in their hearts and ringing in their ears. Those men, who cannot cut
+through the madness of the violence they’ve seen and in which they’ve been
+forced to engage, see Black girls and women as targets—as objects for
+violent sexual release, as punching bags, as emotional chopping blocks.
+* * *
+When I was five, Bob came back. He had spent a few years in prison for his
+crimes against my parents. We were leaving Grandmother’s house when
+Rebo, my grandmother’s first cousin, flagged us down to say that “Bob is out,
+and he’s been looking for you.” A few minutes later, Bob drove past,
+recognized my mother, and pulled over, waving her to his car. Rebo, who
+was more like an aunt to my mother and her siblings, looked nervous and my
+mama looked shook. She said nothing, but then she didn’t have to. Five-yearolds understand brute emotions like fear. I didn’t know who Bob was or why
+it felt so cloudy and dark in the car when the sun was shining so brightly
+outside. I didn’t ask questions, though. By then, my own father had caused
+enough chaos for me to know what danger looked, smelled, and felt like.
+Frantically, my mother rushed back to town and drove directly to Cherry’s
+Gun Shop. Inside Cherry’s, a young white woman behind the counter showed
+my mother a small handgun. “It’s two-fifty,” she said. My mom just shook her
+head, piled me into the car, and took me home while she actively figured out
+plan B.
+
+By the time we made it the couple of miles to our place in the projects,
+she had arranged for me to go to my next-door neighbor’s, to stay with my
+bestie, Lawrence, and his parents. Before she left, she kneeled in the front
+yard so that we were eye to eye and told me, “Bob is a bad man. I’m going to
+the courthouse to see the judge so he can’t bother me.” I nodded. My mother
+has always had a policy of radical honesty with me, even when I was too
+young to understand all the ins and outs. I went inside to play with Lawrence,
+hoping that the judge could do something to keep the bad man away.
+What does it mean to build a world in which Black women and Black
+girls are safe? Jail clearly didn’t keep Bob away from my mother and me,
+and the restraining order didn’t keep him away forever, either. Moreover,
+despite my desire for Barack Obama to send our troops to rescue the Chibok
+girls, the U.S. military apparatus causes harm both at home and abroad.
+Black men often parrot this logic of the U.S. nation-state, engaging either in
+the politics of doing harm or the politics of doing nothing. And we—Black
+girls, Black women—are not saved.
+How, then, shall we live? What do Black men, who have in the aggregate
+been the purveyors of so much harm, owe to Black women? Black men took
+those Black girls in Chibok. Black on different terms than we understand
+Black manhood in the United States, but Black men nonetheless. That is why
+it felt so egregious to hear radical, progressive Black men in the United
+States talk about all the reasons why those little girls were not worthy of U.S.
+intervention. A Black man shot my mother. Four different Black men shot my
+father. One of those Black men killed him. Two different Black men put their
+hands on my mother. One of those men was my father.
+I’m a Black girl, a grown Black girl, who wants the men in my life, and
+men who are bystanders in critical moments, to fight for my honor. I want
+them to have the protective impulse that my mother’s big brother had the night
+she was almost killed. I want men to have the impulse my uncle Carl Lee, my
+daddy’s brother, had the afternoon that he chased Daddy around the living
+room to stop him from putting hands on my mother. My uncle Carl Lee
+reminds me of the character Carl Lee Hailey in the movie A Time to Kill:
+When two white racists in Mississippi kidnapped and raped Carl Lee’s
+beautiful little girl, that Black man took his shotgun and took them out. I’ve
+
+seen enough gun violence not to actually desire men to act this way, but I
+appreciated his moral clarity. They had harmed his daughter and thrown her
+in a ditch to die as though she were disposable. He had to take them out. I
+want Black men to feel that impulse of protection for Black girls everywhere,
+even when those Black girls aren’t their daughters, but especially when they
+are.
+I’m a Black woman who wants to live in a nation that believes it has a
+responsibility to Black women, as citizens and as people, to make the world
+safe for them. I’m a Black feminist who cannot reconcile my desire for men
+to fight for my honor with my general abhorrence for violence. I’m a feminist
+who cannot reconcile my desire for U.S. military intervention in Chibok with
+my utter hatred of guns. I’m a feminist who cannot reconcile my desire for my
+nation-state to intervene on my behalf with the woke analysis feminism has
+bequeathed me about the perils of getting in bed at any level with the logics
+of patriarchy and militarism. For these things might protect you one minute
+and kill you the next. I am my mother’s daughter, and I have been taught
+always, always to stand up and fight honorably for myself. I am also the
+daughter of my father, Mann, who brought more relief in his absence than
+with his presence, who taught me that there was more security in his leaving
+than in his staying, a man whose lack of respect for boundaries made me
+chronically afraid at levels that were no less nerve-racking than the acuteness
+of the fear Bob induced.
+Now I am a grown woman trying to build a life where I can get in bed
+every night with a man who knows that my desire for him to hold me down
+does not in any guise mean that I want him to put his foot on my neck. I am a
+grown woman who feels like these obvious things have to be said explicitly.
+I am too afraid to say these things that need to be said, because the
+consequence of my demands might be another man leaving me, and my father
+taught me that my needs weren’t compelling enough to make a man stay. I am,
+then, a grown woman who struggles mightily to trust what it might mean for a
+man to stay, to show up, to catch me when I fall, acquainted as I am with the
+relief that comes when they finally, simply, go. The leaving feels like the
+tanks are finally pulling out. But also like I am on my own. So when the good
+brothers come to stay, looking so much like the enemy, when they come in
+
+talking sweetly and meaning it, being loving and meaning it, occupying your
+thoughts and taking up space, it feels just like that—like an occupation.
+Now that I’m grown, my mother speaks more freely about what these men
+who shaped her youth meant to her. Of my father, she says, looking off into
+the distance, “He was a terrorist.” My father controlled our lives through
+constant surveillance and random acts of violence designed to reinforce his
+control, power, and ownership. But my mother felt like she owed my father
+loyalty because she felt guilty for “getting him shot.” And perhaps because
+she had learned how costly disloyalty could be. Of Bob she says, “He was a
+fatal attraction” to whom she was attracted, in her words, “because of low
+self-esteem.” Eventually my mother met and married a lovely man, my
+stepfather, to whom she has been married for more than two decades. Much
+like these other men, my stepdad, a preacher whom I affectionately call Rev,
+told me about his own reckoning with the ways his father had been physically
+abusive toward his mother. “I resolved that I would never put my hands on a
+woman,” Rev told me once. All of these men, my father, my stepfather, and
+Bob, had to contend with the models handed down to them. But only Rev
+seemed to come to the right conclusion. My mother, for her part, always felt
+like her ability to make better romantic choices came from learning to love
+herself. I’m sure that’s part of the story. But it’s certainly not all of it.
+Self-help gurus, pastors, and poets love to point to Black women’s “low
+self-esteem” as the cause for all Black-girl problems. Just learn to love
+yourself, we are told. But patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced
+hatred of women. If every woman and girl learned to love herself fiercely,
+the patriarchy would still be intact; it would demand that she be killed for
+having the audacity to think she was somebody. Individual blame isn’t enough
+to solve the problem.
+How are Black girls supposed to grow up to be Black women in love
+with themselves in a country built on the structural negation of Black
+women’s humanity and personhood? Too much of the conversation about
+patriarchy in Black communities pivots on Black women’s low self-esteem.
+Black women are often admonished to make better choices. But my mother
+left Bob when he didn’t treat her right. She almost lost her life for it. The
+deadliest time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she decides to
+
+leave. Still, despite almost being killed, when things got to be too terrible
+with my father, she left him, too. From where I sit, my mama made the right
+choice to leave every time it became clear that her man wasn’t going to treat
+her right. The abuse had nothing to do with her choices and everything to do
+with the ways we don’t demand that men stop being violent.
+Mama says she prayed about when to leave my daddy, asking for the Holy
+Spirit to show her, a twenty-three-year-old woman, the right time to end
+things. We should not have to rely on supernatural acts of God to keep
+women safe. And though my mother is clearly my hero, she deserved better
+options and more help. Young women encountering violent men today
+deserve those options, too. It’s not enough to teach women how not to attract
+violent men. We have to spend our time teaching young men how not to be
+violent men and partners.
+Surely Mann and Bob did not hold themselves in high esteem. On the day
+that my daddy finally, peaceably, retreated from our home, he didn’t even
+look me in the eye. He couldn’t. His abdication of responsibility was
+egregious, yes. But the humiliation of learning that you have taken so much
+that no one in your home wants anything you have to give is surely an
+unbearable feeling. The violence that men do demoralizes them, too.
+Having a structural analysis of the logics of patriarchy doesn’t let Mann
+and Bob off the hook. War narrows the frame of masculine possibility and
+tethers it irreparably to violence. In every part of their lives, young men need
+access to conversations about what it means to be a man in ways that are not
+rooted in power, dominance, and violence. We owe it to ourselves to imagine
+what a post-patriarchal Black masculinity might look like. And, frankly, until
+we have that conversation, men will continue to kill Black women (cis and
+trans). And they will continue to kill each other.
+Perhaps we could start with empathy, though. This is the thing about my
+father’s story that always strikes me—he was a deeply empathetic man,
+caring greatly about the injustices in the world around him. Social scientists
+have spoken of a phenomenon that they call the “racial empathy gap,” in
+which people, regardless of race, believe that Black people experience less
+physical pain than white people experience. This racial empathy gap
+
+influences everything from harsher sentences for crime to differential
+prescribing practices for pain medication based on race.
+It strikes me that among Black men and Black women, perhaps there is a
+gender empathy gap. There is certainly a broader gender empathy gap, in
+which women are perceived to experience less pain than men and are treated
+for pain less aggressively than men. Professors Diane Hoffman and Anita
+Tarzian have found that women frequently receive inadequate treatment for
+pain, and often that psychological and emotional pain receive less treatment
+than physical pain. The presence of both a racial empathy gap and a gender
+empathy gap doesn’t bode well for Black women, even though they haven’t
+been a direct focus of these pain-management studies. Because Black women
+are viewed as preternaturally strong, our pain often goes unnoticed both in
+the broader world and in our own communities. Black men frequently don’t
+acknowledge our vulnerability, don’t seem to think we need defending, and
+don’t feel a political responsibility to hold Black women (who aren’t their
+mothers or sisters or daughters) up and honor them. There seems to be no
+empathic register for understanding the sheer magnitude of the physical and
+emotional pain that systems of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy inflict on
+Black women every day. Black men grow up believing and moving through
+the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain
+matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything
+similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt. That it might, in
+many cases, be worse for us seems to many men a preposterous supposition.
+My father, for instance, showed far more empathy for the man who shot
+him than he ever showed for the woman whom he claimed to love the most.
+Patriarchy numbs men’s collective pain sensors, and it causes Black men to
+not see Black women as worthy of care and concern. To be clear, showing
+care and concern for the women you want to sleep with or the women who
+are related to you is not the same as having an overarching commitment to
+Black women’s political, social, and personal well-being as a justice
+project.
+Lest I be mistaken, though, Black men didn’t invent patriarchy. Patriarchy
+is America’s daddy issue. America rules the world through war, the same
+way patriarchs rule families with an iron fist and a Janus-faced promise of
+
+either violence or benevolence, depending on which day you catch them, and
+how well you bow down and do their bidding. Our government does not just
+wage war abroad. It wages war in Black communities at home, controlling
+Black folks through surveillance and violence, demanding their submission
+and compliance. When submission and compliance is not freely offered, the
+state murders Black men, women, and children, citing the rule of law. The
+War on Drugs is only the most obvious example of a war that the U.S.
+government declared and waged on Black communities. That particular war,
+and the ways it targeted Black men and destroyed Black families, often
+rendered Black women the spoils of war. And we have been treated as such,
+as trophies for men to tote around as evidence of their power and greatness.
+White men who waged war paraded narratives of Black women before the
+American public in the 1980s, calling them “welfare queens” and “crack
+addicts” and using hatred of Black women to curry favor with the American
+public. Black men, demoralized by wars both at home and abroad, took
+possession of the one thing that was left—the women, treating us as their own
+kind of trophies, pretty objects that bolstered their social capital while
+commanding or compelling no responsibility from them for, and to, us.
+In his famous 1967 sermon, “Beyond Vietnam,” Martin Luther King
+preached about the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and
+militarism.” He preached about the “brutal solidarity” that brought together
+white men and Black men who wouldn’t even “live on the same block” back
+home. King didn’t name patriarchy as a founding evil of the U.S. nation-state,
+but that brutal solidarity that men experienced across race as they went to
+war cannot be understood outside of a Western patriarchal fantasy that
+seduces so many brothers whose definition of freedom is a desegregated
+patriarchy. Black men didn’t just experience racial equality on the battlefield;
+they experienced gender equality, too. After Truman desegregated the armed
+forces in time for the Korean Conflict, Black men got to engage in American
+carnage as equal citizens—not as Black or white, but simply as men. (I’m
+sure that’s how a military brochure might put it.) But what King didn’t live
+long enough to think about was what it would look like for a whole
+generation of men, Black men in particular, to come back from that war. The
+Vietnam War was a Pyrrhic victory not only because of its dubious status as a
+
+victory abroad, but also because it dropped Black men back off in the same
+racist hoods they left, this time not only with PTSD, but also with the same
+limited access to patriarchy and the power of white men that they learned to
+crave.
+So many Black men escaped the racist wars of segregation and
+criminalization being waged in their own backyards by agreeing to fight
+America’s many racist wars of aggression abroad. That is a perverse model
+of both masculinity and freedom, and it is Black women and girls who have
+paid the highest price for it. But Black men have paid the price, too. My
+daddy was certainly a casualty of war, of the wars Black people wage on
+each other, when there are no proper outlets for the living out of our dreams
+or the expression of our rage. Those wars are wars of mundane but
+devastating violence enacted on those who live in closest proximity to us. It
+is our own country that uses war as a tool to compel violent submission from
+those people in other places that we claim to care about. But unchecked
+violence does not just topple empires. It also devastates men. Both Bob and
+Mann lost the girl they loved and left a lifetime of resentment, pain, and anger
+in their wake because they chose to live out the lie that surveillance, control,
+occupation, and terror are acceptable ways to treat the people they claimed
+to love, when the truth is that these acts are never acceptable for anyone at
+all.
+
+BAG LADY
+
+On the very day that Sandra Bland was pulled over in Waller County, Texas,
+just a stone’s throw away from the entrance to her alma mater, Prairie View
+A&M University, I was on an Amtrak train on a daylong round trip to
+Harvard University. Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Chicago resident, was
+completing a drive to Texas to begin her dream job at Prairie View.
+I had been called to come to the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for
+Astrophysics to speak to young scientists about the importance of employing
+intersectional perspectives in STEM research. Intersectionality, or the idea
+that we are all integrally formed and multiply impacted by the different ways
+that systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy affect our lives,
+was a mostly foreign notion to these young scientists. Intersectional education
+happens primarily in the kinds of college classrooms that cause conservative
+politicians to lose their shit on the regular. Intersectionality is considered
+fluffy, liberal, radical, and certainly not scientific. Intersectionality is not
+only not objective, it sneers at claims to objectivity, arguing that none of us is
+purely objective. We all come with a perspective and an agenda. We all have
+investments. We all have skin in the game.
+As I stood at the podium doing my thing in that Harvard classroom, no one
+could tell that my fervent desire was to find somewhere to curl up and weep.
+I had spent the better part of the four-hour train ride arguing via text message
+with a high-school sweetheart who had managed to swoop back in with a
+load of new-school promises that I had recently discovered he had no
+intention of keeping. On the brink of thirty-five at that point, my career was
+going exceedingly well, and I thought it the responsible thing to do to begin to
+
+turn my attention toward building a family. When I’m not railing at the
+patriarchy and reconsidering whether a traditional marriage is for me, I
+spend my time reading romance novels. My favorite romance story plot is
+always about young lovers who lose touch, reconnect, and then live happily
+ever after. On this particular summer morning, I was learning for the last time
+that this would not be my story. I was officially all out of childhood and
+teenage sweethearts (and there had been a few) with whom to try to make this
+fantasy work.
+About one hour before I arrived, I sent my last curse-filled text to my ex,
+an equally curse-filled text to my homegirl, who had been offering sympathy,
+outrage, and possible revenge plots throughout the entire scenario, and then
+tried to calm my spirit and plaster a smile on my face so I could go explain to
+this group of eager students the intersectional conundrums that shaped my
+regular Black-girl life. I couldn’t fall apart like I wanted to because, well,
+I’m a Black girl, and we don’t get the luxury of doing frivolous shit like that.
+This was an invitation to speak at Harvard, after all. Business always comes
+first, broken hearts later. Black women’s historian Darlene Clark Hine
+coined a term for the performance I was putting on. She called it the “culture
+of dissemblance,” this enigmatic way that Black women in the late-nineteenth
+and early-twentieth centuries moved through the world, often doing race
+work of the type I was doing that day, giving the appearance of being open
+while fully obscuring the operations of their inner lives from public view.
+While I was busy dissembling, Sandra Bland was in another part of the
+world completing what amounts to a return migration back to the South from
+Chicago, the very city that two generations earlier had seen so many Black
+people fleeing North to escape the pervasive, quotidian horror of Southern
+state-sanctioned racial violence. She was just a few hundred yards from
+completing her journey when she ran into a twenty-first century specter of a
+violence that we all hoped was long gone. When she made it to University
+Drive, the street that runs into the campus of Prairie View, a Waller County
+police officer began following her. She thought he wanted to pass, so she
+pulled over. He pulled over behind her, and was apparently planning to write
+her a citation for “failure to signal a lane change.” She could almost see the
+university from where she was sitting. She was that close to her dream job.
+
+Instead, officer Brian Encinia decided to harass, assault, and arrest Bland
+because she refused to be servile during the traffic stop. She did not berate
+the officer but she did let him know she wasn’t pleased that he had pulled her
+over on a bullshit charge. Incensed by her lack of deference and her seeming
+lack of fear, Encinia grabbed his Taser, opened the door, reached into the
+vehicle, and yanked Sandra Bland out of her car, while yelling at her, “I will
+light you up.” A local bystander stopped to tape the incident, and Bland, who
+was a great supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, thanked the
+bystander for taping. She narrated that the officer had just slammed her head
+into the ground and cuffed her wrists so tightly, she thought they might break.
+A Black woman officer can be heard off-camera telling a struggling Bland,
+“Well, you shoulda thought about that.”
+Bland spent the weekend trying to arrange for someone to bring the $500
+needed to bail her out of jail. Five hundred dollars is such a small amount,
+but the cost is prohibitively high in a world where Black women between the
+ages of eighteen and sixty-four have been estimated to have only about $100
+of net wealth. Not only do most Black women not have $500 to spare in case
+of emergencies, but many don’t have networks of family or friends with that
+kind of money to spare either.
+On Monday morning, July thirteenth, at around 9:00 A.M., Sandra Bland
+was found dead. The official narrative is that she hanged herself by placing a
+trash bag around her neck. I don’t know what happened to Bland in that jail
+cell. It’s easier to believe—and entirely plausible—that rogue police
+officers murdered her. In March 2016, Brian Encinia was fired and charged
+with misdemeanor perjury for giving a false account of what happened at the
+traffic stop. In June 2017, local prosecutors dropped all charges; Encinia
+surrendered his law enforcement license and agreed that he would never
+work in law enforcement again.
+Caring for Black women’s actual lives means sitting with the acuteness of
+our fragility. We break, too. Police at the White House killed Miriam Carey
+in 2013. She was a mother suffering from severe postpartum depression,
+who, it seems, took a wrong turn at the White House gates with her baby
+daughter strapped into the backseat. She was killed in a hail of bullets while
+her baby daughter sat helpless. Tanisha Anderson of Cleveland, Ohio,
+
+experienced a mental health crisis, which caused her children to contact
+police for help to assist their mother in taking her medicine. Instead an
+officer handcuffed her, and when she began to struggle, he restrained her by
+putting a knee in her back, effectively smothering her while her children
+watched. The county medical examiner ruled her death a homicide, and the
+police department settled with the family for over two million dollars. The
+system’s response to seeing us bend is to break us entirely.
+For Black girls, many of us teeter on that brink. If one more thing goes
+wrong, we feel like we just can’t make it. We go to church like Bland, a
+church girl herself. There, preachers tell us, “Your blessing is just around the
+bend. Keep pressing.” On March 1, 2015, Bland uploaded a video to her
+vlog Sandy Speaks. She admitted to struggling with depression and PTSD,
+and spoke out against the stigma and shame that many who struggle with
+depression feel. She apologized for not having vlogged regularly, and told
+her listeners, “I’m just a human.” And then she mentioned that though she had
+missed church that morning, she watched a bit of the service, and the
+morning’s message had been about faith.
+* * *
+Just four months later, that same faith caused Bland to press her way to Texas
+for her dream job. Through Sandy Speaks, Bland talked about everything
+from her recent struggles with depression after losing a pregnancy to her
+outrage over the police killings of unarmed Black people and her support for
+the Black Lives Matter Movement. Unlike the race women of old, Sandy
+Bland did not dissemble. She shared her private struggles right alongside her
+political views.
+On the morning of July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland and I were two Black
+women chasing our dreams, even in the aftermath of our heartbreak. I know
+exactly what it feels like to pack all of my belongings into the car and drive
+more than a thousand miles to the gates of a university that holds my career
+hopes and dreams. I’ve done it more than once. And I know how much I
+relied on my faith in God and myself to travel every mile.
+It’s classic for writers to spend time waxing eloquent about the
+possibilities and perils of life’s metaphoric journeys, and the roads we either
+
+do or don’t travel. But the dangers that attend Black people’s actual travels
+are not in any guise metaphoric. Reminiscent of earlier periods of racial
+terror for African Americans, traffic stops have again become the pretext for
+the reckless taking of Black life by police. In April 2015, South Carolina
+police officer Michael Slager killed Walter Scott after stopping him for a
+broken taillight. Slager was charged with murder and brought to trial. Though
+a local barber who was walking through the area shot clear video of Slager
+shooting an unarmed Scott as he was running away, a judge declared a
+mistrial in December 2016 after a local jury failed to return a verdict. In May
+2017, Slager pled guilty to federal charges that he violated Scott’s civil
+rights. He is now serving time in federal prison. In August 2016, after Korryn
+Gaines, a twenty-three-year-old mother from Baltimore, fail-ed to pay a
+traffic citation, members of the police force arrived at her house to serve her
+a warrant for failure to appear in court. The standoff ended when police
+kicked in Gaines’s door, shot and killed her, and shot her five-year-old son.
+And in July 2016, a Minnesota police officer shot and killed Philando
+Castile, after Castile requested permission to pull out his gun and concealedweapons permit for the officer’s inspection during a traffic stop for a broken
+taillight. The officer was acquitted of all charges, despite damning dash cam
+video suggesting that Castile did nothing wrong.
+Because traffic stops are frequently a life-or-death matter for Black
+people, stopping traffic has become one of the primary modes of protest for
+the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). The shutdown of major interstate
+highways began in August 2014, after a police officer shot eighteen-year-old
+Michael Brown and left his dead body lying in the street for four and a half
+hours. In the weeks that followed, across the country from St. Louis to
+Atlanta to Oakland, protestors began to form human barriers across major
+highways while holding signs and chanting, “Black Lives Matter,” and
+“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”
+Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, has
+said “When people disrupt highways and streets, it is about disrupting
+business as usual. It’s also about giving a visual that folks are willing to put
+their bodies on the line to create the kind of world we want to live in.”
+Feminist activist Naomi Wolf once said, “For a protest to be effective, you
+
+have to stop traffic.” Carruthers understands the stakes of Black people
+putting their bodies on the line to stop traffic as a kind of visual prophecy of
+the world we want to see, a world where we all can go to our destinations
+safely and soundly or no one can. When they put their bodies on the line, they
+dramatize the danger for all people who are stuck in traffic.
+Black women have long been aware of what it means to be stuck in traffic,
+confined to the intersections of social discourses that bypass us on their way
+to futures to which we don’t have access. In the late 1980s, legal scholar
+Kimberlé Crenshaw named this seemingly shared quality of Black women’s
+lives intersectionality. Intersectionality makes clear the ways that systems of
+power interact in Black women’s lives to restrict social mobility and to
+hinder us from moving unencumbered through the social sphere. Pulled over
+at a traffic stop, peering intently down University Drive to the destiny she
+had created for herself, Sandra Bland was yanked into a future that precisely
+mirrored the violent Black past that we are presently—and collectively—
+obsessed with escaping. She was right there. Right there. At the intersection
+of destiny, dreams, and death. Death won, assisted in its victory by those
+with real power.
+Five months before she was killed by police, Korryn Gaines was pulled
+over in Baltimore County for a traffic stop. She had replaced the front license
+plate on her car with a cardboard sign that read “free traveler.” The back
+plates had a similar cardboard sign that read, “Any government official who
+compromises this pursuit to happiness and right to travel will be held
+criminally responsible and fined, as this is a natural right and freedom.” I
+know to “regular,” “law-abiding” folks, Korryn sounds crazy. Hers is a kind
+of brazenness the world tries to beat out of Black girls before they reach
+adulthood. For many who are apologists for state violence, her declaration of
+her freedom and her rights sounded like an invitation to harassment. But let’s
+do this young Black woman, one who had undoubtedly heard of Sandra
+Bland’s story, the courtesy of suspending our disbelief. She chose to be
+eccentric, defiant, outrageous, and, dare I say, visionary in a world where
+Black women and girls don’t often get to do any of these things without lethal
+consequences.
+
+There is a thin line between clarity and craziness, and sometimes clarity
+can be crazy-making. For there is a profound argument in the particular terms
+through which Korryn Gaines chose to elaborate her freedom project. She
+argued, by way of a makeshift license plate, that the pursuit of happiness and
+the right to travel are natural rights, rights that are endemic to any declaration
+of freedom. The struggle by Black people to obtain the free and full exercise
+of their natural rights and continual forms of structural opposition to these
+rights have been a fundamental feature of what it means to be Black in
+America. To get bogged down or distracted by the policy and procedure
+elements of her approach is to miss the soundness of her conclusions. By
+declaring her rights to travel, to freedom, and to happiness to be natural
+rights, Korryn Gaines invoked a very particular political discourse about the
+origin of our natural rights. If freedom to travel and freedom to be happy are
+civil rights or legal rights, they exist entirely at the whim and fancy of the
+U.S. government. If however, these matters are natural rights, they are not
+bound by the exigencies of policy and procedure. The problem is not that
+Korryn Gaines believed these ideas about herself, but rather that she chose to
+make them explicit.
+How can this Black woman’s notions of freedom, her audacity in trying to
+live free, seem so preposterous and exasperating and so utterly reasonable
+and exhilarating at the same time? More than any of us, she seemed to have a
+clear vision of what freedom for Black women looked like—the ability to get
+in a vehicle of your choosing, strap your babies safely into the backseat, and
+make your way to the place where you were trying to go. This conception of
+freedom, the ability to travel unencumbered to the places where you need to
+go, is something Black women have been fighting for since they first
+encountered America. I think of twenty-one-year-old Ida B. Wells who, in
+1883, was violently removed from the ladies’ car of a train in Memphis,
+Tennessee, because “colored women” were not allowed to sit there. Because
+segregation laws were not yet cemented, Wells tried to flout the unspoken
+mandate to segregate, so that she could read her newspaper in the much nicer
+ladies’ car in peace. Instead, the conductor and two other passengers tried to
+drag her to her “place” in the colored car. She chose to get off the train
+instead.
+
+This long history of Black women enduring violent harassment while they
+are on their way somewhere—anywhere—makes Korryn Gaines’s demands
+to be recognized and respected as a “free traveler” far less preposterous. I’m
+also struck by the intimacy of these encounters, the moment when, as Bland
+and Wells experienced, suddenly a white man is putting his hands on you,
+yanking you violently away from your intended journey. I wonder about what
+Ida Wells might have been reading, about what Sandy Bland and Korryn
+Gaines might have been bumping on the radio, about what thoughts might
+have streamed through their consciousness as they were on their way
+somewhere, anywhere. At twenty-one, Wells had her fair share of young men
+jockeying for her affections. I wonder if her thoughts moved somewhere
+between her love life, her love of pretty dresses, and the injustices she was
+undoubtedly reading about in the paper.
+The tragic consequences of these traffic and train encounters make clear
+that intersectionality has intimate consequences. What does it look like for
+Black women to move freely through space when we are always confronting
+the precariousness of life at the intersections of race and gender, of class and
+mental health, of love and dreams? Erykah Badu once famously cautioned
+Black women about the costs of carrying around too much baggage: “Bag
+lady, you gone miss yo’ bus. You can’t hurry up cause you got too much
+stuff.” Badu then coolly advises, “Pack light.” But, of course, that is not
+entirely our choice.
+Black women did not agree to or apply for the job of baggage handlers for
+the nation. With histories as forced laborers and forced breeders, so much of
+our employment history in this country has simply not been up to us. Our
+lives are strewn about with structurally deposited baggage. If we assume the
+radical position that it isn’t ours to carry, we are called lazy. Degenerate.
+Angry. Irresponsible. The nation waves its fingers at us in accusation,
+demanding that we take the weight. And, often, we accede to these demands,
+taking the weight against our will, but taking it nonetheless. Black women
+take it upon ourselves to challenge stereotypes, to raise respectable children,
+to build homes, communities, and churches despite our chronic condition of
+underemployment. We are masters of wresting sustenance from insufficiency.
+
+We combat structurally imposed trauma much as Erykah Badu demanded of
+both herself and us—by taking responsibility for the weight we carry.
+I don’t even have to go all the way back to Ida B. Wells in the 1880s to be
+appalled by the amount of social and structural baggage foisted upon the
+backs of Black women. The 1980s was hell on the social image of Black
+women, who were vilified and demonized as money-grubbing welfare
+queens and drug-abusing crack fiends birthing crack babies that the system
+couldn’t handle. Oprah Winfrey as Miss Sofia in Steven Spielberg’s 1985
+screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple uttered one of the
+most memorable and damning lines about the terrible burdens that America
+(and Black men) had heaped upon Black women. “All my life, I had to fight,”
+she told Celie after her husband Harpo tried to beat her in an assertion of
+male dominance. There’s a reason why Black women my age can recite lines
+from The Color Purple at will. The film is iconic because it dared,
+following Alice Walker’s lead, to suggest to America that Black women
+were the heroes and not the villains of the American national story. It dared
+to suggest to a watching world that the baggage we carry is not of our own
+stitching. And while we Black girls always recite these lines to each other in
+a humorous context, it is mostly humorous because just underneath the
+surface, the truth of what we say in jest leaps at us with the clarity of an
+Alvin Ailey performance. If you hear one sister saying to another, “Don’t do
+it, Miss Celie,” you better move out the way, ’cause somebody is liable to
+get cut.
+Black women powerbrokers of the 1990s undertook a full-scale rescue
+mission to resuscitate the culturally devastated image of Black womanhood
+handed to us in the 1980s. In the 1990s, during my tween and adolescent
+years, I watched women my mother’s age explode the Black women’s chick
+lit and self-help industries. Books by Iyanla Vanzant and Susan L. Taylor
+were a staple in my household. Together with books by (and about) Oprah,
+Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, the telltale pink Women’s Devotional Bible
+(with which every Black girl of a certain age is familiar), and copies of
+Essence and Ebony magazines, I watched my mama fashion a clearly Blackwoman, girl-centered household for the two of us. These books and
+magazines acted as therapy for my working-class single mom who couldn’t
+
+afford to sit on someone’s sofa once a week to discuss her problems. She had
+a daughter to feed and bills to pay. This bookshelf and coffee-table therapy
+gave birth to two unspoken mantras that shaped our life together: “Take care
+of business” and “Daughter, heal thyself.”
+My mother used the explosion of a body of literature that spoke to Black
+women’s interior lives to get hers together. After the abuse she suffered
+during my childhood, my mother, tired of being used and abused, began the
+process of healing herself in my tween and teen years. Years later, she would
+tell me, “I wanted better for you, and if I wanted better for you, then I had to
+want better for myself.” I watched my mom read Iyanla’s Yesterday, I Cried
+and In the Meantime. And I watched as she intently listened, when a rare day
+off permitted her to, to Iyanla on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was a keen
+observer of my mother, and I knew she connected to this material even though
+I did not always understand why. I liked to read Essence and Ebony but
+didn’t much care for the rest of it. I saw my mother’s admiration for Susan
+Taylor’s monthly “In the Spirit” column. I read it and thought it sounded
+good, but too heavy and fluffy for my Black-girl tastes. My mother was a
+woman, as Alice Walker once said of her character Meridian, “in the process
+of changing her mind.” I watched my mother change her mind about her worth
+and value and then reflect that shift in her romantic choices. She freed herself
+from a cycle of abuse and, in so doing, saved her own life.
+I believe wholeheartedly in the internal spiritual work that Black women
+must do to save our own lives. But I also wonder whether our spiritual work
+is a match for the structural systems that would crush us alive. Audre Lorde
+famously said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into
+other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” But what do we do with this
+push for self-definition and self-recognition in a system that would crush us
+anyway? It crushed Sandra Bland. It crushed Korryn Gaines. It has crushed
+untold numbers of trans Black women, who have been killed simply for
+having the audacity to live their truth.
+My own mother modeled the importance of taking care of one’s spirit as a
+means of saving oneself. This was the model of Black womanhood that
+shaped my coming-of-age, and it still shapes how I move through the world
+as a grown woman. In the Oprah-Iyanla-Susan era, my mother would always
+
+say to me, when I came home crying about being bullied by mean girls at
+school, “The only behavior you can change is your own. What behavior can
+you change so you can avoid this kind of attention?” Even if in the end the
+“behavior” I changed was my own mind-set, such that the taunts didn’t bother
+me as much, the point was that my mother believed in my moving through the
+world with a spirit of self-possession. She raised me to be a Black girl who
+believes (sometimes stridently) in her own mind and her own counsel. Akin
+to that, I believe that each of us is responsible for doing our own emotional
+work. We can’t hope to have healthy relationships of any type if we are
+unwilling to own our shit.
+I am struck by the manner in which my mother’s ability to show up to and
+heal her own life was made possible in the particular world of the 1990s, a
+brief moment where Black women were allowed to see themselves and their
+full set of possibilities. The last decade of the twentieth century found the
+nation discovering for the first time what Black business owners and
+corporations had long known—that Black women were a target demographic
+for cosmetics, self-help literature, and chick lit. In 1991, Maybelline
+launched its “Shades of You” campaign, becoming the first mainstream
+cosmetics line to explicitly focus on women of color. Consumer culture
+scholar and professor Robert Weems has marked this as a “watershed” event,
+which led to a proliferation of more than a dozen Black women–focused
+cosmetic lines in a two-year period. Today, I have my pick of cosmetic
+products that can match and complement my dark brown skin tone, but in my
+adolescent years, such products were just coming into existence. Weems
+suggests that so much of Black people’s experience of citizenship has been
+tied to consumerism; so when Black women became a mainstream target
+demographic in the 1990s, they experienced new levels of cultural visibility
+that expanded to other arenas like books and movies.
+Terry McMillan reached blockbuster success with her 1992 novel
+Waiting to Exhale. My mother and I then hustled to the public library on a
+Saturday morning to pick up her earlier novels Mama and Disappearing
+Acts. Or rather, she picked up Terry McMillan novels, and I checked out
+Mildred Taylor books like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Let the Circle
+Be Unbroken. Oprah officially reigned as the queen of daytime television,
+
+providing a platform for Iyanla Vanzant to dig into the inner lives of
+struggling Black women and call forth a healing. And Susan Taylor’s
+oversight of Essence magazine with both her “In the Spirit” column and her
+mind/body/spirit approach to presenting Black women’s issues created a
+felicitous set of social conditions for Black women to come to voice in ways
+that were more personal than political.
+Suddenly, Black women professionals were talking about the personal
+stakes of being Black women in a world that didn’t love us. Oprah and
+Iyanla, for instance, talked little about racism, sexism, and poverty. But they
+spoke a lot about the terrible choices we make when we have low selfesteem and don’t love ourselves. I wonder if Sandra Bland watched episodes
+of Iyanla, Fix My Life as she struggled to overcome her depression. Now
+that I’m grown, I regularly pick up O, The Oprah Magazine, looking for tips
+to fix my own life. As a twentysomething, I ran across a column on
+narcissism in O magazine, and that column named for me the emotional abuse
+I endured for so many years from an old boyfriend. Reading those words
+helped me to stop hoping that he would ever change, because narcissists
+never do. Those words gave me the language to free myself from that
+relationship, to know that I deserved better.
+I struggle, then, with how to simultaneously hold the competing truths that
+shape Black women’s public and private lives. On the one hand, I have made
+many a bad decision, tolerating bad friends and even worse dudes, because I
+didn’t love myself as well as I should have. Therefore, I merely accepted
+what others offered, even when it was so much less than what I am worth.
+That is the truth. And my process of learning that truth was deeply personal
+and has been deeply transformative.
+On the other hand, individual transformation is neither a substitute for nor
+a harbinger of structural transformation. Holding oneself in perpetually low
+esteem is a structurally induced condition. Patriarchy propagates a whole
+series of narratives about Black women that are designed to make us hate
+ourselves. Melissa Harris-Perry argues that Black women carry a great
+amount of shame because of our inability to fully inhabit the American
+dream. In 1965, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that Black
+communities were caught in a tangle of pathology because our communities
+
+had a disproportionate number of female-led households, his conclusions had
+both affective and social dimensions. His 1965 report, “The Negro Family:
+The Case for National Action,” offered social and political recommendations
+focused on ways to help Black men become breadwinners again so they
+could assume their “rightful” place at the head of Black families. But the
+affective goal of his infamous Moynihan Report was to shame Black women
+for the very mundane magic involved in our making a way out of no way.
+That shame persists well into the twenty-first century, when more than 70
+percent of Black households are female-led. Black women have
+proportionally higher rates of abortion than any other group. There is no
+shame in having an abortion. I consider the right to choose the conditions
+under which one becomes a parent to be one of the most important social
+values. But I believe that decades of discourse about poor Black women and
+unwed Black mothers being “welfare queens” who unfairly take more from
+the system than they put in has shamed many Black women into not bearing
+children that they otherwise might consider having. The idea that only
+middle-class, straight, married women deserve to start families is both racist
+and patriarchal.
+The fact that our society honestly believes that poor women don’t have the
+right to start families because they may require public assistance obscures
+the variety of ways that middle-class families do receive public assistance.
+White families have been the primary beneficiaries of both public and
+corporate welfare in the form of redlining policies that drove down property
+values in Black neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods undesirable for
+businesses, families, and schools. They have been beneficiaries of favorable
+bank-loan terms to help them purchase safe, affordable, quality housing. They
+are the beneficiaries of marital and housing tax breaks and the
+disproportionate beneficiaries of the dwindling number of quality public
+schools that we have left.
+Public discourse on the right paints a picture of brazen Black and Brown
+teenagers and unmarried mothers having baby after baby that they can’t
+support to game the system. In fact, the discourse about Korryn Gaines after
+she was killed was that she was a bad Black mother who used her son as a
+human shield against the cops. But she told her five-year-old to document
+
+what was happening to her, teaching him how to train her smartphone’s video
+camera on her as she talked. Less outrage was reserved for the police who
+decided that shooting her son who, thankfully, survived was a reasonable
+price to pay for apprehending his mother, who had committed the crime of
+failing to pay a traffic ticket. When I talk to Black women in my community,
+many of them feel shame and guilt about not being respectable Black women
+in traditional two-parent homes.
+In middle school, there were only two Black girls in my school’s gifted
+and talented program, my friend Holly and me. We took to each other quickly
+because Black girls find each other as a means to survive. We were both
+working-class girls raised by single moms. I insisted on being a good girl,
+while Holly was definitely a rebel. By her junior and my senior year of high
+school, Holly was pregnant. Neither of us were strangers to teen pregnancy
+in our community. Black girls in my community had been getting pregnant
+since I was in the sixth grade.
+So when Holly got pregnant, I was concerned and a little sad, but not
+surprised. She fit the cautionary tale that I was steadfastly trying to avoid,
+because I am the daughter of a teen mom. After many years we lost contact
+and reconnected via Facebook. By then, she had had five children and was
+on her way to baby number six.
+One day, we inboxed just to catch up and she told me of the multiple
+degrees in nursing she had secured and how proud she was of her family. I
+was proud of her and also feeling just a bit lonely. Yes, Holly’s path to
+family was risky, but she had made it. And I had toed the line and followed
+the rules, a little too well, perhaps. Now I find myself in my thirties with few
+prospects of having children in a traditional two-parent family. In fact, my
+late thirties are beset with the heaviness of receding childbearing options.
+Still, Holly said to me in the inbox, “I’m trying. I don’t want to be another
+statistic.” The irony is that I traded being one kind of Black woman statistic
+for another. I’m now among the scores of professional Black women who are
+unmarried. This, too, is seen as a failure—as just more evidence of the
+pervasive social undesirability of Black women.
+With her six children by multiple fathers and her multiple nursing degrees
+to boot, Holly challenged every stereotype I might have been invested in
+
+believing. And when my doctor, at my behest, began to walk me through the
+process and the cost of retrieving and freezing my eggs, I began to wonder if
+maybe I had done something wrong. Many Black women like me are so
+obsessed with the idea of not having babies too early that frequently it ends
+up being too late. No statistic can adequately capture Holly’s story; she
+didn’t let respectability politics have the last word.
+Black women pay the highest costs for investing in respectability politics.
+First, it breeds distrust between middle-class striving women and poor
+women of color. We (middle-class women) are taught that those women, who
+were once “fast-tailed girls” make us all look bad. I never thought about poor
+women as making me look bad, because my community of women was
+working-class. And my mother often reminded me when I became a bit too
+frivolous with her money: “Child, we are poor.” Like many, many Americans
+and most Black folks I know, we lived paycheck to paycheck. And given the
+dubious origins of my birth, my family certainly wouldn’t have been invited
+to Jack and Jill. But I knew very early on that I didn’t want to be like the girls
+in my middle school, saddled with children I couldn’t support and doomed to
+a lifetime of low-wage work with little opportunity for advancement.
+These are the narratives that working-class “good” girls buy into in order
+to make our way out of the hood. The goal to “not be like them” animates our
+drive and our hustle. But now that I’m grown, I no longer believe that Black
+women should imbibe shame and blame for all the creative ways that we
+build families and lives, arrange fulfilling partnerships, and work to maintain
+safe homes and steady employment.
+I spent my twenties and most of my thirties waiting on a partner to show
+up before I would ever consider children, because I never wanted to be a
+single mother. I bought into the idea that making good choices around
+education and career would entitle me to a broader set of options in every
+part of my life. But the world doesn’t work that way for Black women. In my
+college, the female-to-male ratio was 3 to 2. Even assuming that everyone
+had hooked up in heterosexual pairings, one-third of Black girls were
+automatically going to be assed out. When I graduated from Howard without
+having even one boyfriend there, it didn’t dawn on me that I was one of the
+33 percent. The optimism of my twenties would not let me consider that these
+
+numbers would not improve over the course of my life. My friends and I
+didn’t realize the structural clusterfuck that shaped Black partnering options
+until we were already in the thick of things. I’ll say more about all that in the
+chapter titled “Love in a Hopeless Place.” But suffice it to say that we
+thought, as all young people do, that we had endless time, that our chosen
+boos would arrive, and that our advanced degrees would bring us into a
+world of men with advanced degrees and earning potential, too. It hasn’t
+worked out that way for a great many of us.
+In my thirties I became an unwilling member of the Sisterhood of Fibroid
+Havers. Black women disproportionately struggle with fibroid tumors, and
+the medical science continues to offer little explanation. After my fibroid
+surgery, a successful outpatient procedure that I thought would buy me a little
+more time, my doctor, a lovely Black woman gynecologist, told me, “More
+than likely, your fibroids will return. You have a uterus that makes fibroids.”
+Perhaps the saddest part of being reminded of the dreaded biological clock
+was having to tell my mother that, since I had no partner in sight, I might not
+be able to give her grandchildren. For the first time, I began to wonder
+whether I should have been less regimented and more reckless in my
+twenties, when I was younger and had eggs to spare. Black women deserve
+more options than these extremes—that the same choices we make to not ruin
+our lives as young people become the choices that make us miserable twenty
+years later.
+Part of what friendship has meant in my thirties is supporting my
+homegirls in their thirties and forties who have limited partnering options,
+and even fewer options for starting families. The intimate consequences of
+all these good-ass choices we have made are relentlessly brutal. Yes, folks
+are quick to say: Adopt. Freeze your eggs. Try in vitro. But with what
+money? Black women in prime child-rearing age have negligible net wealth.
+Many of these single women, as first-generation middle-class with loads of
+educational debt and without a two-income household, have no way to fund a
+creative family structure. The weight of the absence—of the partners who
+didn’t show up, of the children you didn’t get to have, of the uterus robbed by
+fibroids—is a burden none of us was properly prepared to bear.
+
+How much of this baggage can we reasonably be expected to carry? On
+that July morning that I found myself at Harvard, I walked off the train
+carrying more baggage than I walked onto it with. Life (and, more to the
+point, bullshit like heartbreaks and racism and sexism) bequeaths to us
+baggage. The end of that relationship was my last shot at a serious
+relationship before I reached advanced maternal age. He couldn’t appreciate
+the urgent consequences of what was clearly routine fuckery for him. At any
+point, he could turn things around and have a child. I could not. That’s how
+male privilege is set up.
+This is why songs like “Bag Lady,” which point out this baggage to us and
+act like we are holding all of it of our own accord, are summarily unhelpful.
+The unfair part is that folks are far more concerned with policing how Black
+women carry the baggage than with reducing the load hoisted upon us in the
+first place. When I read fluffy self-help literature or attend church services
+where usually male preachers tell usually female parishioners that our social
+conditions are largely a result of our personal failings and individual bad
+choices, I often want to throw the book or walk out of the service. But while
+I have, in fact, walked out of service, I have, thus far, refrained from
+throwing books. Those who preach this sermon, whether in print or from the
+pulpit, think they are “empowering” Black women to address the conditions
+we face.
+But “empowerment” is a tricky word. It’s also a decidedly neoliberal
+word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals.
+Neoliberalism is endlessly concerned with “personal responsibility” and
+individual self-regulation. It tells us that in a free market, devoid of any
+regulation or accountability at the top, what happens to those on the bottom is
+entirely our fault. Did we have enough drive? Enough vision? Enough hustle
+to change our condition? The politics of personal empowerment suggests to
+us that if we simply “free our minds, then our asses will follow.” I’m not
+convinced that this is true. Why? Have you ever noticed that people who
+have real “power”—wealth, job security, influence—don’t attend
+“empowerment” seminars? Power is not attained from books and seminars.
+Not alone, anyway. Power is conferred by social systems. Empowerment and
+
+power are not the same thing. We must quit mistaking the two. Better yet, we
+must quit settling for one when what we really need is the other.
+Those who feel “empowered” talk about their personal power to change
+their individual condition. Those with actual power make decisions that are
+of social and material consequence to themselves and others. Sandra Bland
+used her faith to empower her to cope with her depression and pursue her
+dreams; she met the limits of her narratives of faith and empowerment on the
+shoulder of University Drive, and subsequently in a Waller County jail cell.
+Empowerment looks like cultivating the wisdom to make the best choices we
+can out of what are customarily a piss-poor set of options. Power looks like
+the ability to create better options. The powerlessness and capriciousness of
+being repeatedly jammed up at the personal and political crossroads of one’s
+intersections while a watching world pretends not to see you there, needing
+help, is how it feels to be a Black woman on an ordinary day.
+Individual solutions to collective problems cannot work, no matter how
+personally empowering they may feel. I could have been Sandra Bland,
+because I have certainly “mouthed off” to an officer on more than one
+occasion. I could have been Holly, but for a few different choices and
+opportunities. And I am my mother’s child, a daughter who believes
+wholeheartedly that my first patient is always me. I refuse, however, to be
+America’s bag lady, resigned to hauling around a load of cultural refuse
+heaped on me by the nation. First our country tried to rob us of seats on the
+bus. One generation of our foremothers, women like Claudette Colvin, Rosa
+Parks, and Pauli Murray, fought for us to have a seat of our own choosing.
+Now our generation struggles even to catch the bus, weighed down as we are
+by the lies about our worth, our dignity, and our worthiness. Claudette Colvin
+was an unwed pregnant teen when she was arrested for refusing to give up
+her seat on a bus in 1955. Rosa Parks was a married, respectable officer of
+the NAACP when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Pauli
+Murray was a masculine-performing queer Black woman when she was
+arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Every kind of Black woman has a
+stake in the proverbial “bus.”
+Every kind of Black woman has fought for our right to be free to travel in
+pursuit of dreams and destiny. One way to start shedding the baggage is to
+
+start telling our truths, to start opening the bags and exposing the lies that
+weigh us down. The weight of the nation is not ours to carry.
+
+GROWN-WOMAN THEOLOGY
+
+The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural
+Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four
+steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on
+my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared,
+“It’s time for you to start having sex!”
+I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned upon me
+that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. There was an
+accusation in her words, as though this was something my twenty-two-yearold self should have been doing forever. For the record, I had in fact had a
+bit of sex by age twenty-two; for my twenty-second birthday my homegirl,
+horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and
+purchased a vibrator for me. There was a classic Black woman read in my
+grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she
+couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of
+sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. That,
+coupled with the asshole I had chosen for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t
+having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in
+sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place.
+I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian
+seventy-five-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and
+bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of
+sex to unmarried me. “Back in my day, we did it,” she said. I squirmed. Who
+ever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell
+you we didn’t. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the
+
+time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for ten years. She and my
+grandfather got married and then had their children. In the way that none of us
+is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even
+occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until
+marriage to have sex or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks
+in the 1940s.
+Comically, she explained to me that I should have sex, but only if my
+partner was willing to wear “one of those combos.” What the hell is a
+combo? I wondered. Condoms. Her colorful descriptions and gestures made
+it clear that she meant “condoms!” Grandmama had not been able to hear
+well since her teen years, when some kind of fever damaged her ears. So,
+when someone said “condom,” she heard “combos.” When I heard combos, I
+thought of the hilarious conversations I had had years earlier with my highschool boyfriend about exactly what combos of birth control we would use
+so I wouldn’t ruin all my overachieving Black-girl life goals, if I ever gave
+in and gave him some. For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly.
+She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the
+six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely
+available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But
+we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my
+grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black
+women, too, because in the twenty-first century, it meant her granddaughter
+could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children, until she chose to.
+My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both
+feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life, as a poor
+rural Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I
+was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist.
+My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological
+positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that
+Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “start
+having sex.” She meant real, good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs
+that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude
+sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl
+comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t.
+
+I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. The
+evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that
+our flesh—our bodies and their longings and impulses—were sinful,
+dangerous, and unhealthy. We were admonished each week to bring our
+unruly flesh in submission to our “spirit man.” Having heard this every
+Sunday of my life I did not understand how my grandmother, our beloved
+family matriarch, could dare advocate that I let my flesh win. Clearly, I
+wasn’t ready for the grown-woman theology that this holy woman offered to
+me that day. Frankly, I thought she had gotten ahold of some terrible theology,
+and I was determined to live my life as a good evangelical should. I had life
+goals and desires for success that my provincial grandmother, who once told
+me to go to the local college and then “get a good clerical job,” clearly did
+not understand. Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a
+baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life. This was my credo in
+triplicate.
+Dismissing grandmother’s words was easy. I felt that my theology,
+informed indirectly by the advent of the “True Love Waits” purity campaigns
+of the 1990s, and my ability to recite by rote all the Bible verses condemning
+sex before marriage made my spiritual perspective more sophisticated, more
+informed, more correct. I had imbibed a set of social ideas about Black
+girlhood and womanhood rooted in the fear of being a failure and the social
+shame of becoming a statistic. I nearly worshipped my mother, but I didn’t
+want to be a teen mother as she had been. I wanted to finish college,
+something my birth had prevented her from doing. By the time grandmother
+sat me down for the talk, I was twenty-two, had completed two college
+degrees, and was on my way to a Ph.D. program. By local standards, I had
+already made it.
+In 1993, the year that I turned thirteen, Lifeway Bookstores, the publishing
+arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, made their intervention in the “sex
+sells” culture wars with their True Love Waits sexual abstinence campaign.
+Christians wanted to talk about sex, too, even if only to suggest that no one
+should be having it. That is, unless they were of age, straight, married, and
+preferably Christian. For clarification, even though I was Southern and
+Baptist, my church and most Black churches in the South were not in fact part
+
+of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Those were the white Baptists—
+the ones who were pro-slavery and pro-segregation. In fact, the SBC did not
+issue a formal apology for slavery until 1995.
+The purity discourse that emerged from Southern white evangelicalism is
+not separable from the racialized discourse of sexuality and purity that these
+same Christians have shaped for the whole of American history. The
+regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always
+been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear
+family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual,
+middle class, and white. Because my social circles were mostly white, I had
+a front-row seat to the incursion of True Love Waits programs among my
+white classmates.
+Peppered among their discussions about youth mission trips to Mexico
+were conversations about promise rings, purity pledges, and True Love Waits
+classes. My church had a makeshift youth group that met irregularly and a
+teen Sunday School class, which I attended faithfully. There was no purity
+talk beyond bringing the flesh into submission. There were no mission trips
+or classes devoted to sex ed. What my community also had was a teen
+pregnancy problem—it was not uncommon for Black girls to get pregnant in
+my middle school or my high school. I can remember only one white teen
+mom in high school (although I am sure there were a few others), and
+absolutely none in middle school. For me, the equation was simple. In
+communities where they talked about sexual abstinence and “waiting,” they
+didn’t have a teen pregnancy problem. In my community, where no such
+conversations were had, teen pregnancy was rampant.
+These messages about success, whiteness, abstinence, and Christianity
+converged for me. Black kids accused me of acting white, but the white kids I
+knew loved Jesus (like I did), did well in school (like me), and got to have
+interesting discussions and experiences at church (which I didn’t). I have
+already mentioned the particular challenges of growing up a nerdy Black girl
+in a predominantly white school system. One way that I internalized white
+supremacy in my honors classes, which were 95 percent white and in which
+the kids were overwhelmingly Christian, was to associate the success I
+sought with the kind of whiteness and morality that shaped my classmates’
+
+lives. White privilege works by making the advantages white people have
+invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color
+hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people
+have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better
+choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black
+people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in
+most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as
+hard as they do. And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people
+believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile
+1960s.
+Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in
+the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to
+succeed as a result of their own terrible choices. But white children in my
+school district weren’t inherently smarter. They were reared in homes where
+their parents had been college educated and where they had access to
+enrichment programs and private tutors. I also associated discourses around
+sex and sexuality with this narrative of choice. At thirteen or fourteen, I
+didn’t recognize that even if the doctrine of abstinence is ineffective at
+curtailing early parenthood, youth who have opportunities to talk about sex,
+to travel to conferences and go on mission trips, at least know that there is a
+world beyond their front door, a world they can’t get to if they end up as
+parents before getting out of high school. These kinds of opportunities to
+travel and explore were scarce in my working-class community, where most
+Black folks had limited resources. But my close proximity to middle-class
+white youth put me in a position to culturally eavesdrop on my white friends,
+even though I didn’t have the experiences they had. I knew the possibilities of
+those experiences existed. What I learned from watching white kids who
+were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters
+of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took
+me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white
+supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.
+Black girls and Black women, particularly those who have had any
+sustained encounter with Christianity, are often immobilized by the
+hyperregulation of their sexuality from both the church and the state. These
+
+messages about excessive and unregulated Black flesh that converge from
+both the nation-state and the church form a double helix of sexual ideas that
+form the core of cultural ideas about Black sexuality. These messages
+constitute a critical strand in a sticky social web that immobilizes Black
+women caught at the intersections of race, class, gender, and lack of access to
+normative modes of sexual behavior. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill
+Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological
+term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black
+women’s agency and structural well-being. Far too often the result of trying
+to extract ourselves from these webs, which immobilize us until all of the life
+is drained from us, is that we leave critical pieces of ourselves behind.
+Black women are often robbed of our agency to build healthy intimate lives.
+These systems don’t crush every Black woman, but they do retain pieces of
+flesh, bone, and spirit.
+When you are free enough to run away, you run. It makes no earthly sense
+to go back and do battle with the system for the fragments of yourself that
+remain. We are taught to be grateful that we “made it,” no matter what we had
+to leave behind.
+This is why Black women’s self-help literature is obsessed with the
+question of “how to be whole again.”
+For my grandmother, my very successful regulation of my sexual desires
+read like a wholly unhealthy inhabitation of my own Black woman body. I
+was a fully grown woman, but my theology and thought process around sex
+was adolescent and retrograde. Grandmama pushed me to articulate a
+version of my selfhood that would force me to bring my whole self to the
+table and prioritize my pleasure.
+“Girl,” Grandmama said while gesturing mischievously toward her nether
+regions, “I had good stuff.” (I repeat: No one ever wants to know this about
+their grandmother.) She wanted me to own the fact that my “stuff” was “good
+stuff,” too. My grandmother’s indecent proposal constituted a critical and
+intimate dissent from the wholesale American demonization of Black
+women’s sexuality. To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women
+and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s
+sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and
+
+dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around
+owning our sexuality. Calling her sexuality and her sexual body parts good in
+the face of these unrelenting social messages suggests that my grandmother
+had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of
+Christianity and white supremacy. Or maybe she simply didn’t buy in all the
+way. She, of course, couldn’t resist a little inappropriate body commentary
+as Southern grandmothers are wont to do, telling me “You need to lose a little
+weight, so he won’t have to lift it [my tummy] up to get to it [my stuff].”
+The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source
+of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and
+my life goals all at the same time. This is no way to teach sex education to
+teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about
+sex. Most Christian theology infantilizes women in just this manner. It makes
+us think that because we are all children of God, God only ever sees us as
+children. And, as a result, we’ll be grown women afraid of embracing our
+sexuality, approaching it with the ingrained trepidation we learned in our
+teenage years. I rebuke this foolishness. I am God’s child, as I think every
+human being is. But God knows I’m grown.
+The politics of fear and endless rules that we use to (try to) control
+teenagers is unhealthy but understandable. Advocating that teens delay sex is
+ultimately about maximizing their life chances by helping them make choices
+that will benefit them and the future families they hope to build. We could, of
+course, do a better job of telling teens to do something other than wait. It
+turns out that my “simple equation” that abstinence would solve teen
+pregnancy was totally wrong. In places where abstinence is the only form of
+sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to
+contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen
+pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically. What the poor Black girls in
+my school needed was not the True Love Waits campaign, but rather good
+information about sex, emotional maturity, and birth control. What was true
+for my grandmother in the 1950s was true for my Black girl peers in the
+1990s: “They just couldn’t get the stuff.”
+Telling grown-ass women that all sex outside of marriage is an affront to
+God is absolutely ludicrous. Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of
+
+holy. But the indoctrination is real, especially if you are invested in being a
+“good girl,” especially if your goal in life is to not “repeat the cycle,” to not
+“become a statistic.” These are the kinds of social messages that Black
+women and girls get about their bodies and the potentially enormous public
+and personal costs of their sexuality. My mother once mentioned that when
+she found herself pregnant with me at age eighteen, at her grandmother’s
+insistence she had to go up in front of the church and ask for the
+congregation’s forgiveness for getting pregnant out of wedlock. She was
+ashamed and infuriated because, as she said, “other girls were doing it. They
+just hadn’t gotten caught.”
+The theology my grandmother offered to me (one very different from her
+mother’s), a theology for grown Black women, was one predicated on
+dissent from a set of biblical truths and social mores that shamed women,
+cast female sexuality as bad, dirty, and evil, and suggested that marriage was
+the only proper context through which women could express their sexual
+selves. Widowed at the age of forty-two, my grandmother chose to never
+remarry. She told me that same day, “I would never want to marry again,
+because I don’t ever want some man telling me what groceries I can and
+can’t buy.” That was all she said about marriage—that she understood it as
+men being able to dictate to women how to spend money and how to run a
+household. Living her own life and being able to raise at least some of her
+children independent of my grandfather’s influence had shown my
+grandmother that having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable.
+In her forthright rejection of conservative evangelicalism on the matter of
+sex, she modeled for me that Black women had the right to dissent from
+theologies that didn’t serve them well. Black women had the right to a say
+about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the
+kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was
+permission to choose for myself.
+I wish I could say that I stepped off my grandmother’s porch a new
+woman, ready to own and explore her sexuality. But all her fussing about
+what I needed to be doing proved no match for the years of shaming and
+moral panic about sex that I experienced both inside and outside of my
+community. Four years after that conversation, I came home from church after
+
+a particularly guilt-compelling sermon, bagged up all my romance novels,
+astrology books and manuals, and my vibrator, and threw them in the
+dumpster. The presence of these items in my apartment were tacit licenses for
+me to engage and indulge in sinful living, and surely God was not pleased
+with that. These days, I’m sure that between peals of laughter, God is sitting
+somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those
+books and that perfectly good vibrator.” Live. Learn.
+What does it mean when our spiritual and theological systems impede
+healthy living? This is a question that Black women should begin to ask
+forthrightly. They should insist fervently on answers among themselves and
+from their spiritual leaders. We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we
+shut down our sexuality. It’s not so much that I should have had more sex,
+although I wish I had in my twenties. It’s that there are things we come to
+know about our bodies, our impulses, our likes, our dislikes and desires,
+when we fully engage the sexual part of ourselves. We go around missing
+critical knowledge about who we are, or might be, when we act as though
+sex isn’t foundational to who we are.
+Also, what does it mean when our theological systems impede our access
+to a healthy and robust set of spiritual and political practices—practices that
+should give us life? Let me be a bit mischievous (like my grandmother) and
+offer you a brief feminist interpretation of one of my favorite Bible stories. In
+the Black Church, single Black women love to talk about how they are just
+waiting on God to send their Boaz. By Boaz, they are referring to the Old
+Testament story in the Book of Ruth. Ruth’s husband (Naomi’s son) had died,
+and Naomi decided to return to her hometown of Bethlehem. Ruth went with
+her. To support the two of them, Ruth went to work in the fields, and she was
+noticed by a well-respected, rich man in town named Boaz, a distant relative
+of Naomi. Naomi wanted to make sure Ruth could get married again so she
+would have a partner and a community to provide for her. So the two of them
+hatched a plot for Ruth to proposition Boaz. Naomi told Ruth to take a bath,
+get dressed up, and put on some perfume. After Boaz had gotten good and
+drunk at the barley harvest, Ruth was supposed to go into his tent and, as the
+Bible says, “lie at his feet” to let him know she was available for marriage.
+
+As the story goes, Boaz woke up and found Ruth there, and he decided to
+marry her right on the spot.
+Now, think about it. Does this story make any damn sense? A young
+woman finds a rich, fine-ass man she wants to marry. So she gets all dressed
+up, waits for him to get drunk, sneaks (stalkerishly) into his tent, and then lies
+at his feet?! I don’t believe it. Not when there is well-documented evidence
+that the word “feet” in the Old Testament was often a euphemism for genitals!
+Christian women want their Boaz, but they reject every single part of the
+process to get him. Ruth and Naomi plotted to trick Boaz into marrying her.
+Ruth kicked it to him first. She didn’t wait on Boaz to ask her out on a date.
+And I personally think that Ruth did all manner of sexual acts to drunken
+Boaz in the tent (the kind of shit that made him get up out of his sleep and say
+“I gotta marry this girl”). But even if you think Ruth simply “lay at his feet”
+all night, that’s a serious sexual proposition.
+With the blessing of her elders, Ruth mapped out what she wanted and
+went after it. She didn’t let cultural conventions about chastity, purity, and
+patriarchy keep her from asking for what she wanted. She also seemed to
+have a very forthright and embodied sense of her sexuality to help her along.
+In short form, I’m saying, “Girl, if you want your Boaz, put on your pretty
+dress and perfume and get your cranial maneuvers together. And then go into
+the tent and handle your business. But maybe get Boaz’s consent before you
+pop up like that, though.”
+On her porch that day, my grandmother taught me what it meant for grown
+women to have an intergenerational gathering and make meaning out of the
+texts and scripts we have about our lives together. My grandmother did for
+me what Naomi did for Ruth. She tried to empower me to fight for my
+happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She
+modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And
+sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to
+what others think is best for you, so you can find the courage to say yes to
+yourself.
+There are so many ways that Black women need to free themselves from
+the strictures of conservative Christian theology. Notice that I didn’t say to
+abandon Jesus and the church if it’s important to you. I haven’t. But I’m no
+
+longer checking my thinking cap at the door. For years, I let Christian
+preachers convince me that the story of Ruth and Boaz pivoted upon a weird
+cultural ritual in which men get drunk and then women lie down next to them
+all night, only to wake up with a marriage proposal the next morning. That
+shit is just absurd.
+We believe a lot of other absurd theologies, too. Many Black Christian
+girls are seduced by white evangelicalism, because, hell, it seems to be
+working out so well for white people. I mean, white Jesus helps white
+people to win a lot. But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a
+different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate,
+and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my
+investment in being a Christian Goody Two-Shoes. I don’t even believe God
+wants that. The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in
+all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders. But I digress. We also have an
+absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many
+churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we
+would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was
+used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or
+to liberate them. That’s our choice.
+Sometimes this means that we have to reject the kind of Christian teaching
+that sets up a false binary between flesh and spirit, mind and body, and
+sacred and secular. To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh
+is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our
+very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the
+desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep
+springs in our spirits. When we hear about how “the heart is deceitful above
+all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest
+longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who
+have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or
+sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.
+I am a professionally trained textual critic, but the Bible isn’t any old
+regular text. It is a text endued with thousands of years of political, social,
+and cultural power. That means that to wrest a theology for my grown Black
+woman life from it, I had to bring my fully embodied, unapologetic self to it.
+
+My grandmother didn’t teach me anything about how to understand the
+biblical text more critically. She taught me what it meant not to jump out of
+my own skin just because the Bible said I should be at war on the inside. She
+offered to me a fully embodied theology of grown Black womanhood that
+day, one with its compass set toward freedom. One in which I should
+embrace the fundamental goodness of all my stuff, both sexual and otherwise.
+I had to become a fully grown Black woman to receive it, though. In my holy
+hubris, I had dismissed her as provincial and out-of-pocket. How did she
+know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to
+pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self? She modeled for me
+one of the core things Black church girls would do well to remember about
+Jesus: He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much
+time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our
+faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit,
+of humanity and divinity, than we do.
+The second thing we need to remember is this: The primarily white male
+theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity
+were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own
+worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still
+vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the
+fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.
+Interpreting the biblical text conservatively has a political function. This
+political function differs depending on whether you’re white or Black.
+Conservative biblical interpretation became the hallmark of the rise of the
+religious right, a political force that rose in response to desegregation in the
+South, and Lyndon Johnson’s perceived betrayal of Southern Democrats.
+Conservative biblical interpretation in Black churches has conversely risen
+in response to the political evils engineered by the white religious right.
+White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation
+to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up the machinations of white
+supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted
+conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the
+massive devastation of these same social policies. Although the social
+desires (or political goals) of these religious communities are wholly
+
+oppositional, the biblical interpretation methods are the same. Obviously,
+that can’t work. If Black women are honest, it hasn’t been working for us for
+a long time.
+Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the
+Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me—a sacred text of
+country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me—a
+sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and
+Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill
+Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all
+sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in
+its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the
+academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life.
+What Black feminism and my grandmother have taught me is that Black
+women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama
+taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations
+weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable,
+then that was a failure, not a win.
+When I first wrote on the Crunk Feminist Collective blog about searching
+for a new, more liberatory theology of sexuality, the comments section was a
+nightmare. Many of our readers were not here for the kind of Black feminist
+theology I was offering. Related to but distinct from womanist theology, what
+I call Black feminist theology is something that can help sisters who are
+damn near ready to leave the church just so they can act like grown women
+with full sex lives in peace. My Black feminist theology is not just focused
+on what happens in the church, but rather is a call to those of us who are
+Black feminists to remember that lots of Black women are still quite
+religious. We need a way to reconcile our feminist politics and our spiritual
+lives, not only at church or mosque, but at the office, too. Still, a lot of folks
+at our blog weren’t trying to hear it. Some sisters called me “Beelzebub.”
+Seriously. They told me my words were poisonous. One said I had a
+“reprobate mind” and had been given over to Satan. These angry commenters
+all agreed that I was not allowing myself to be led by the Holy Spirit. All of
+those sisters, many of whom had been celibate for years and years, were
+scared as hell. What if I was right? This is not about right and wrong, though.
+
+This is about what freedom means. This is about not standing by idly or, even
+worse, participating as white evangelicals and their enthusiastic Black
+counterparts hand to us a theology that does the dirty work of racism,
+patriarchy, and homophobia. Even when Black people were enslaved and it
+was illegal for them to “read the word for themselves” (as Black Christians
+love to say), they knew that God was nothing if not freedom. I believe that
+because of all the oppressions that we’ve experienced, Black girls have
+unique visions of freedom. I believe those visions are God-given, however
+you understand God, even if you simply worship, to paraphrase Alice
+Walker, the “God you found in yourself.” Freedom is my theological
+compass, and it never steers me wrong.
+Recently, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman who worked at a
+university where I had flown in to deliver a talk gave me a ride to the airport.
+My talk was about what it would mean to move beyond respectability, the
+subject of my first book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought
+of Race Women, and how to embrace a feminist politic that was insistent,
+loud, demanding, ratchet, and unapologetic. On the hour-long drive into the
+airport, my Black girl chauffeur told me “I hate to make you work, but since I
+have you in the car, I’m wondering…” Anybody who flies to places and
+speaks for a living often dreads this encounter of being trapped in the car
+with a stranger and their questions. But I give Black girls a lot of rope, so I
+listened. “Well,” she began, “how have you found that Black men respond to
+this discussion about feminism?”
+There it was—the question that haunts so many Black girls. “Will
+feminism fuck up my love life?” She went on to offer some context for the
+behavior of Black men on her campus who were decidedly race-first in their
+analysis. But I got the subtext—“Will any brother ever love me if I go down
+this path? Cuz it’s not looking too promising.” She was a church girl with
+very religious parents. I took the opportunity to share with her some of my
+struggles to reconcile faith and feminism. She and I talked about approaching
+the Bible not as a rule book, but perhaps as a cultural library of texts that
+recount the journeys of a series of ancient human beings with God, an
+approach I learned from reading theologian and writer Brian McLaren. When
+
+I floated this “radical” idea, she immediately shot back, “But what about
+repentance, though?”
+By this she meant what about the demand that we must always atone for
+our sins, and always seek to “turn from our wicked ways.” Drawing on
+McLaren’s work, I explained to her, “Repentance to me means ‘re-think.’
+That’s literally what it means. To think again and to think in a different
+direction.”
+It was one of those encounters steeped in serendipity, one of those
+opportunities to talk to a younger version of myself and to share the things I
+wish someone had said to me when I was twenty-three, anxious as shit, and
+freaked the hell out. “But, what will my mother say?” she asked. We talked
+about how to navigate one’s own needs as a grown woman, even when they
+diverge in critical ways from the desire of so many Black girl overachievers
+to please the women who raised us. I told this Black girl that if I could tell
+my younger self anything, it would be to “chill out.” That is what my
+grandmother had been trying to tell me.
+And that’s what my grandmother cosmically sent a homegirl to tell me
+years later when I was finally ready to listen. Yet again, I required a
+homegirl hem-up. Robin and I had become friends at just about the moment
+when I was exhausted from trying not to show up to my own life. Even after
+the Great Porch Intervention, I went on with these bouts of sexual self-torture
+for years, declaring celibacy, falling off the wagon, and then declaring it once
+again. By the time I finished with my Ph.D. program and arrived at my first
+job, I was sexually frustrated in the worst way and desperate for a new way
+to think. During a conversation with Robin, I shared that it had been several
+years since I had had any sex at all. Appalled at the absurdity of my quest for
+“holiness,” she pinned me with a Black-girl look that said I was being
+foolish and told me, “God knows you want to get some.” God knows I did.
+So I did.
+I don’t know what changed. Maybe, with all of my schooling complete, I
+felt like I really had made it. Maybe my twenty-eight-year-old body would no
+longer be denied. Maybe I had been looking for permission and I was ready
+to listen. Robin’s resistance to the crazy-making sexual politics of the church
+helped, too. She was brave enough to see past all the ways that church and
+
+culture told Black women “no.” She was brave enough to go in search of her
+own “yeses.” Brave enough to trust that God does, in fact, have some yeses
+for grown-ass women. Brave enough, like my grandmother was, to recognize
+that all the stuff we’re made of God calls “good.” Because of her, I braved
+the roiling waters of my own heart and decided to, for once, stand on my own
+side. Spiritual attitude adjustment complete, I set out on a quest for the good
+stuff.
+
+ORCHESTRATED FURY
+
+Respectability politics died the day Michelle Obama showed up to her last
+official engagement as First Lady with a thrown-together ponytail-bun
+combination and a facial expression fit for a funeral. She looked flawless as
+always. She also looked fed up and ready to go. Respectability politics, the
+belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts
+of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment
+is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative. What I
+mean is that your fashion choices are subject to great scrutiny. Black people
+are taught to care how they look and how their children look. If you see a
+little Black girl out in public with her hair unkempt—her parts
+unintentionally jagged, her edges unsmoothed, her ponytails askew, or her
+hair ornaments not in their proper place—you can be assured that there is
+some Black woman somewhere asking, “Who does that baby belong to?”
+Black women’s hairstyles are their own cultural vocabulary, which
+change depending on mood, life circumstance, and who exactly will be
+seeing us on any given day. Mrs. Obama’s hairstyle was the kind you put
+together after you’d been up all night packing and it’s time to get your shit,
+leave the keys on the counter, and go. It’s not public hair. It is not hair given
+to inaugural pomp and circumstance. It is everyday Black-girl hair. We learn
+this complex hair vocabulary as we sit perched, often for hours, between the
+knees of mothers, aunties, and hairstylists, trained and untrained, from
+babyhood forward.
+Every night, my mother painstakingly parted my hair and greased my
+scalp, and then plaited or rolled my hair for ease of styling in the morning.
+
+The next morning, I would sit between her legs while she parted my hair into
+three or four neat sections, affixed rubber bands to the tops of each section,
+and then twisted my ponytails. She finished by tying ribbons at the tops and
+snapping barrettes on the ends. At the end of each day, she would fuss and
+scold when I came home with those same barrettes missing and ponytails
+askew and unraveled after “ripping and running and not being careful” at
+recess. At age twelve, when my mother finally decided it was time for me to
+get a perm, my hairdresser, Mrs. Earline, asked my mother “Are you sure?”
+And, later, when Mom came to pick me up with my newly permed, silky
+tresses, Mrs. Earline said, “I prayed over this baby’s head. When I didn’t see
+any hair on the comb as I worked it through, I knew the Lord was saying it
+was going to be alright.” Maintaining my head of long, thick hair was a
+community project.
+At age fifteen, when I accompanied my mother and her three sisters to see
+the movie premiere of Waiting to Exhale, I knew what it meant, then, when
+Bernadine, after being newly separated from her cheating husband, went to
+the hairdresser and asked her stylist to chop off nearly every inch of her
+beautiful, luxurious mane. Even though I didn’t have the emotional maturity to
+understand the devastation of losing a marriage, I knew how much effort it
+took to grow that length and thickness of hair and keep it beautiful. I knew
+how much Black women and girls envied having long, thick hair in a world
+where white women’s ability to grow and regrow hair like weeds was the
+standard of beauty. Chopping it all off meant she was going through
+something exceedingly terrible.
+My social media and text feeds lit up the moment we got a good look at
+Mrs. Obama’s last inauguration hairdo. Throughout her two terms as first
+lady, and particularly in the second term, Mrs. Obama’s public hair was
+always long and flowing, with unique kinds of cuts and styles. Black women
+were culturally obsessed with both her fashion choices and her hair. Was it
+permed or was it natural? Was she rocking bangs? Who was her stylist and
+what were they doing to give her hair all that bounce and body? How were
+Malia and Sasha wearing their hair? These questions are all forms of cultural
+assessment that Black women and girls do with other Black women and girls.
+Though sometimes it can morph into mean-girlness, in Mrs. Obama’s case,
+
+our running cultural commentary about her hair was one of seeing her and
+feeling seen. It meant that there were Black girls in the White House with
+hair—challenges, and woes, and triumphs—just like us. So when I saw her
+hair on her last day, it was clear that she had not spent hours in a stylist’s
+chair getting her ’do done just right. Presumably, she would have wanted to
+be a fashion stunner for her final formal public appearance. Instead, this bona
+fide fashion icon showed up to the inauguration of Donald Trump with a
+quick and convenient on-the-go ’do, and what looked like a good church
+dress she had pulled from the closet. Certainly, she may simply have been
+gracious in letting Melania have her moment. But there was also something
+about the refusal to perform the public standard—a standard that Mrs. Obama
+had herself set—that marked an unceremonious ending.
+Her hair was a signal to the world that what we were about to witness
+was some bullshit. She knew it. We knew it. “Do y’all see this shit?” that
+hair asked of all of us who were watching or deliberately not watching our
+complicated American homeland being placed in the hands of a mentally
+unwell fascist. Like the rest of us, she might have to accept it, but she didn’t
+have to like it. The “I-refuse-to-be-botheredness” of that ponytail evinced
+rage of both the eloquent and the elegant varieties. It wasn’t so much about
+the actual hairstyle. A bun or ponytail can be elegant and appropriate. It was
+the combination of this kind of informal updo with a dress that was pretty, but
+also unremarkable, that signaled a kind of pulling back, a disengagement,
+with the American public. Mrs. Obama didn’t throw her middle fingers up at
+the system that had just elected Donald Trump. However, the subtlety in her
+refusal of pomp and circumstance belied a deep disdain for the way in which
+the American people had rejected her work, and that of President Obama, by
+installing his nemesis—a man who had started a whole movement
+questioning his citizenship—in the White House.
+Respectability politics are at their core a rage-management project.
+Learning to manage one’s rage by daily tamping down that rage is a response
+to routine assaults on one’s dignity in a world where rage might get you
+killed or cause you to lose your job. Mrs. Obama had to learn this lesson
+quickly, and on the national stage, after being accused and publicly
+caricatured as an Angry Black Woman when Mr. Obama ran for his first term.
+
+She chose to channel her energy into slaying the American public in another
+way, by offering an impeccable standard of fashion to a watching world.
+Sometimes that is what Black women do when we can’t give in to the
+murderous levels of rage we feel at the indignities we experience. We can’t
+kill. But we can slay.
+Rage is a fundamentally more reasonable response to America’s cultural
+investment in the disrespect of Black women than being respectable. That’s
+why it’s damn near impossible for rage and respectability to reside in the
+same place. On her last day, Mrs. Obama didn’t sublimate the rage over
+Trump and his wife to the province of the slay. She simply refused. Rage is a
+kind of refusal. To be made a fool of, to be silenced, to be shamed, or to
+stand for anybody’s bullshit. It is a refusal of the lie that Black women’s
+anger in the face of routine, everyday injustice is not legitimate. Black
+women’s rage is a way of looking these mischaracterizations in the face and
+responding, “You got me all the way fucked up.”
+This is what I heard—what I felt—when I saw Mrs. Obama’s ponytail.
+Having had her anger hyperpoliced since 2007, when her husband announced
+his candidacy, on her very last day on the job Mrs. Obama became, as
+comedy writer Damon Young might say, “fuck-deficient.” Since the definition
+of respectability politics is that you absolutely give a fuck (because you have
+to) about what white folks and everybody else thinks, respectability politics
+and fuck-deficiency pretty much cannot coexist in the same body.
+Audre Lorde, the first writer to offer a Black feminist theory of anger,
+famously argued in “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” the
+essay that I always keep close at hand, that “Women of Color in america have
+grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at
+knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted
+our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its
+service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to
+learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.” Black
+women’s rage is a kind of orchestrated fury. Lorde went on to say, “We have
+had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and
+insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult
+lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen
+
+sisters.” Michelle Obama’s negotiation of Trump’s inauguration, the manner
+in which she both expressed her disdain but kept it respectful at the same
+time, was nothing short of symphonic.
+Black folks codified the ideology of respectability in the decades
+following Reconstruction after the federal government, helped along by
+indifferent white Northerners, left newly freed Black folks in the South to
+fend for themselves against the terroristic whims and fancies of angry white
+Southerners, who were still licking their wounds over their Civil War loss.
+Women and men like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du
+Bois, and Booker T. Washington reasoned that if Black folks learned to work
+hard, educate themselves, and stay out of trouble, white people would see
+that we were good, respectable people, human beings, worthy of both
+citizenship and protection. Initially, respectability politics was a survival
+strategy in the face of the massive potential for violence. It was a
+conservative strategy but an imminently reasonable one for nineteenth- and
+early twentieth-century Blacks faced with high rates of illiteracy, housing and
+job insecurity, and cyclical influxes to the North of Black folks looking to
+make a better life. Showing these Black people how to present a respectable
+image became a key strategy in securing their survival in hostile and violent
+conditions.
+The problem with all provisional strategies, particularly when they begin
+to work for the exceptional few, is that they rise to the level of ideology.
+Soon, Black folks began to blame other Black people for bringing the race
+down. The Respectables, as I like to call them, claimed that our refusal to
+practice chastity and piety and avoid crime led to our low esteem among
+white people. Taken to its extreme form, respectability politics will net you
+Black people who don’t love Black people. Ben Carson and Clarence
+Thomas are the chiefs among these anti-Black Judas types.
+But the Obamas themselves practiced and subscribed to a mild, everyday
+politics of respectability, too. During an infamous commencement address at
+historically Black Bowie State University in 2013, the First Lady critiqued
+the propensity among Black youth who had been taken in by the lure of
+celebrity. “Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re
+sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of
+
+dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re
+fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.” This is the language of
+respectability. It comes from the same place as Sunday sermons that wag
+fingers at young men to pull up their pants. It comes from the same place as
+Barack Obama’s unique penchant for telling Black men to be good fathers to
+their children, a message he never felt compelled to share with
+predominantly white audiences. The ways the Obamas engaged Black
+audiences during their time in the White House were filled with what we
+might call the everyday respectability politics of our parents and
+grandparents, who implored us: “Act like you got some sense,” and “Don’t
+make me have to come up to that school.”
+The Respectables’ credo is two-fold: You have to be twice as good to get
+half as far, and Never let ’em catch you slippin’. (But the Respectables
+ideally would say this in completely proper English, without my Hip Hop–
+era remix.) This sounds like good sense. It sounds like Black people taking
+on the very high levels of personal responsibility that those on the right love
+to talk about so much. But it doesn’t acknowledge that when you are twice as
+good, white folks will resent you for being better. And all human beings
+deserve at least a few slips. It’s inhuman to demand otherwise.
+When we saw the Obamas exit their caravan and walk down the streets of
+Washington, D.C., smiling and waving on January 20, 2009, these guiding
+principles reached great commandment status. We felt our ancestors smiling.
+We felt new possibilities taking shape for our children. For once, America
+had let us win. The project of respectability had triumphed. It had proven that
+if Black people would simply get educated, be upstanding and respectable,
+and work hard, they could be absolutely anything—even president.
+But the respectability project was particularly burdensome for Michelle
+Obama. She was policed and critiqued from head to toe by every community
+—white, Black, and in-between. When she turned inward to focus on her
+children, a safe stance that made her more palatable to broad American
+audiences, white feminists expressed disdain for her embrace of the “momin-chief” role, calling it antifeminist. They conveniently forgot that their
+ancestors had long claimed ladyhood uniquely for themselves, refusing, to the
+great chagrin of Black women, to acknowledge that sisters of a darker hue
+
+were ladies, too. However, Black women refused to cede the volatile turf of
+American ladyhood to white women, taking to public outlets to remind white
+women that it was a privilege for a Black woman to be able to just focus on
+raising her kids. This battle to define ladyhood for ourselves, and to access
+its protections, was longstanding. I think again of Ida B. Wells being ejected
+from the ladies’ car after she had refused to sit in the smoky, filthy,
+segregated colored car of the train. A few years later, Anna Julia Cooper
+wrote about needing to use the bathroom at a train station. When she
+approached the door, each was marked with a sign, one reading “for ladies,”
+and the other “for colored.” Which sign should she, a consummate colored
+lady, choose?
+To be a Black woman is to be always confronted with these kinds of
+profane distinctions, to be asked to choose between your race and your
+gender. Black social life in the nineteenth century was marked for Black
+women by a lack of access to the protections of ladyhood, and by a steadfast
+refusal among white people to even make gender distinctions among Black
+people. Those ideas shaped the way in which Michelle Obama was both
+perceived and policed. There was a minor public outcry when she took her
+official White House portrait in a sleeveless dress. And there was the time
+U.S. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner referred to her as having a big butt.
+One of the perks of being a lady is not being subject to people’s lewd, thinly
+veiled sexual commentaries. Michelle Obama enjoyed no such perks. It also
+bears noting that white people’s regulation of Black women’s bodies in the
+public sphere is one reason that Black people have been obsessed with
+outward appearance. Michelle Obama’s ascent to ladyhood, despite these
+persisting obstacles, conquered that offensive history, proving that Black
+women could be the arbiters of American femininity and style, too.
+Meanwhile, Melania Trump represented everything that Mrs. Obama did
+not. During the 2016 campaign, not only were Mrs. Trump’s educational
+credentials in question and her open brand of sexuality deemed antithetical to
+respectable American ladyhood, but in her Republican National Convention
+speech, she plagiarized Michelle Obama. Yet this is the couple that the
+American people chose to succeed the Obamas in the White House.
+Meanwhile, Melania Trump was allowed to float above criticism, even
+
+though she initially refused to live in the White House and to take on the
+social demands of First Ladyhood. Had Michelle Obama dared to be so
+resistant, we would never have heard the end of the insults and bellyaching
+of the American public. But Mrs. Trump is the beneficiary of America’s
+silence.
+Of course, on Inauguration Day, Michelle Obama was put out with this
+whole state of affairs. Being compelled by law and custom to hand the mantle
+over to someone who tried to obtain it by biting your beats is almost too
+much to bear. But it also is perhaps the most symbolic evidence of the failure
+of the project of African American respectability.
+A Black woman, descended from enslaved people, became the First Lady
+of a country that historically used Black women’s bodies merely to
+reproduce noncitizens. One of the most unique things about Black women’s
+experiences in this country is that we are the only group of people whose
+bodies have ever been legally mandated as the place that reproduced
+noncitizens. Indigenous women were never striving for their children to have
+American citizenship, but rather sovereignty on their own terms. And Latina
+immigrant women who are unfairly maligned for giving birth to children on
+American shores are hated precisely because they, too, can pass on the rights
+of citizenship to their children, even if they have been denied access to it
+themselves. It is Black American women whose bodily history is bound up
+with the burden of reproducing the condition of unfreedom for our children.
+It, therefore, meant something—possibly even everything—to have a Black
+woman, descended from these Black women, to ascend to the highest role our
+nation designates for women (since the presidency still eludes us.)
+But by January 20, 2017, as Melania Trump stepped to the podium in her
+baby-blue suit, that project had proved itself unsustainable. African
+American respectability might bring us to the highest office in the land, but it
+could not ensure any level of long-term respect for Black humanity, Black
+womanhood, Black manhood, or Black childhood. During the Obama
+administration unarmed Black men, Black women, and Black children had all
+been murdered by the police, while most of the offending officers never lost
+their jobs or freedom. So it made sense that Mrs. Obama showed up looking
+somber, as if she were attending a funeral.
+
+Maybe Michelle Obama hasn’t divested from respectability politics
+forever. Truth be told, they have served her well. But a well-timed diss can
+let you know the limitations of a way of thinking or mode of being in the
+world. If you weren’t looking for it carefully, Lady Obama’s class and social
+position might have allowed you to miss her microresistance. In myriad ways
+Black women daily resist messages that try to shame us into submission or
+otherwise steal and kill our joy. That dissent doesn’t just happen on national
+stages. Sometimes it goes down in the everyday spaces that Black women
+frequent, spaces that are rife with misogynoir (a term that specifically refers
+to hatred of Black women) and that are tasked with the work of disciplining
+Black women and girls into respectable ladyhood.
+My mother was the first to teach me this lesson. She had come to pick me
+up after I had spent six weeks attending the Upward Bound summer program
+at a local Black college. This federally funded summer experience for
+working-class youth was the closest most of us rural and semirural Southern
+Black children would ever get to going to summer sleepaway camp. For six
+weeks, we stayed on campus in the dorms, being exposed to what college life
+might look like, while we spent our days doing math and science enrichment,
+attending cultural experiences like plays and poetry readings, and taking
+long-distance field trips. Those programs mattered to single moms like my
+own, who had big dreams for their children but very few resources.
+Together, Mama and I sat at the final Upward Bound banquet, a
+celebration of our achievements that summer, listening to a local preacher
+giving the keynote address. He was in the middle of his sermon text, a classic
+passage from Proverbs, when my mother began shaking her head: “The Bible
+says ‘train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not
+depart from it.’ Some of your children are acting up, and the Word says that
+means y’all aren’t doing your jobs.” A chorus of “amens” rose up around the
+room, affirming this conventional “wisdom.” But my mother’s head continued
+to shake. Eventually, a clear but quiet “no,” formed on her lips. The head
+shaking drew eyes to our table, so much so that the preacher stopped, looked
+at her, and said, “You don’t agree?” “No.” She shook her head again. He said
+to her, surprised, “Well, that’s alright.” Murmurs went up around the room, as
+other mothers looked at my mother curiously, some with disapproval, some
+
+with surprise, and maybe, hopefully, at least a few, in relief. Satisfied that
+her disagreement had been registered, my mother nodded her head, letting
+him continue.
+Later, in the car on the way home, my mom explained, “That verse says,
+‘When they are old, they won’t depart from it.’ Y’all aren’t old yet.” Blaming
+Black mothers for having normal boundary-testing teenagers didn’t sit well
+with my mother, a single mom herself. Her act of solidarity with the other
+single mothers in the room mattered all the more because my mother was
+raising a veritable, rule-following, Bible-toting Goody Two-Shoes. But she
+refused the carrot of thinking herself better than other folks because her own
+child didn’t have the behavior problems or classroom demeanor of some of
+the other children. Mama knew she was an underdog in a room full of
+underdogs, and like she has told me on more than one occasion, “I always
+root for the underdog.”
+Too often, Black leaders think rooting for Black folks means shaming them
+into respectability. Southern Black male preachers are masters of
+propagating sexist common sense to achieve respectable outcomes. On more
+Sundays than a few, their rhetoric shames single Black mothers for failing to
+raise their children in traditional nuclear families. But my mother was the
+first to teach me that we don’t have to accept nonsense simply because it is
+common. I learned that day that sometimes you have to say no, even in a room
+where everyone else is offering sacrificial “yeses.” Those “yeses” were a
+sacrifice because assenting to one’s own public shaming is not an affirmation
+any Black woman can ever afford. Saying yes to a religious narrative about
+bad Black mothering that props up an even more pernicious state-based
+narrative that pathologizes Black mothers costs too much. A Black male
+preacher asking Black mothers to collude in their own denigration is unholy.
+Black church ladies love the Bible verse that says, “Let all things be done
+decently and in order.” My mother was out of order in every respectable
+sense. She had challenged a preacher—in public. She challenged his biblical
+interpretation in a culture that believes preachers have a direct, anointed line
+to God. She dissented from him openly, forthrightly, and unapologetically.
+This, too, was eloquent rage—against the theological and social machine of
+respectability. This, too, was orchestrated fury, in the form of a symphonic
+
+disruption—a refusal to let “the man of God” use rhetoric to beat up on
+vulnerable women trying to make a way in the world for themselves and their
+children. My mama didn’t turn over any tables in the temple like her Jesus
+might have done, but she did cause just enough of a disruption to make clear
+that an injustice was being done. Eloquent rage isn’t always loud, but it is
+always effective.
+Fourteen and a bit nonplussed by my mother’s decision to make a scene, I
+didn’t even know you could do something as bold as challenge a preacher. In
+Southern Black communities, the Great Chain of Being goes something like
+God, Black Male Preachers, and the Rest of Us. But sometimes the only thing
+that is in order is to act out of order. To turn up, show out, and disrupt. That
+preacher was touting a particular order of things, a hierarchy of shame that
+placed Black women on the bottom. Inherent within his remarks was an
+indictment of the kinds of Black families in the audience. These were
+working-class Black people raising children in one of the poorest states in
+the union. These Black families weren’t two-parent, middle-class Black
+families. There were a few fathers, but mostly there were mothers,
+grandmothers, aunties, and younger siblings in that room.
+Here was the Moynihan Report rearing its ugly head again. Black mothers,
+according to Moynihan, were the source of our deepest, most faulty
+conditions. The roots of Black social wrongness ran deep. They ran to the
+womb, to the mothers, to the maternal labor that birthed us and made space
+for us. Parroting the logic of Moynihan, and many Black sociologists who
+had come before, this preacher argued that the reason that Black children
+were out of line was that fathers were absent and mothers weren’t mothering
+well. My mother insisted on a different story. And she was willing to be
+disruptive in order to make that story heard.
+This is what anti-Blackness looks like. This is what misogynoir sounds
+like. The rub is that these mansplaining men think they are helping. Moynihan
+thought his report would help. The preacher thought his sermon would help.
+But this is the kind of help that will kill you. In the absence of actual
+structural resources to ameliorate social problems, sermonic shaming and
+policy blaming is the opposite of help. It constitutes harm. It sounds eerily
+similar to the kind of shame and blame that undergirds social-welfare policy
+
+in the United States. Dog-whistle policies about welfare moms and Hip Hop
+anthems about greedy baby mamas and sermons about mothers who don’t
+take care of their children all share a common through line—that Black
+women aren’t shit, that they need to be corralled, controlled, and contained.
+The logic of otherwise disparately placed men—in public policy, in Hip
+Hop, and in the church—converges on the truth that if Black women would
+just be better mothers, the state wouldn’t be so taxed, our communities would
+not be in such a shambles, and brothers wouldn’t be so short in the pockets.
+That’s a huge minefield of structurally induced hatred to navigate.
+What’s even more terrible is that we don’t just ask Black women to
+traverse this difficult terrain. Black girls encounter the daily violence of this
+hateful cultural landscape, too. Remember, there were girls like me, on the
+way to becoming women, listening on that day, too, to a narrative of what
+proper ladyhood looked like. I was too invested in being a “good girl” to
+ever have thought to disrupt the preacher’s message myself. But my mother
+had been a bad girl in many ways, a rebel and a teen mom who liked slightly
+older bad boys. That’s how I got here.
+Though good behavior has its place, it’s the disruptive girls, the loud,
+rowdy, attitudinal Black girls, and the defiant, quiet, insolent Black girls who
+expose every day exactly what this system is made of. In September 2015, a
+school resource officer in South Carolina confronted a high-school student
+named Shakara for failure to put away her cell phone as she sat at her desk
+during math class. To be clear, the term “school resource officer” is a just a
+fancy name for police officers in schools, doing the kinds of jobs that used to
+be reserved for principals and school counselors. Although she sat quietly at
+her desk, Shakara held the phone tightly in her hand, defying her teacher’s
+orders to put it away.
+At the behest of the Black male teacher, a white male police officer named
+Ben Fields arrived and began hassling Shakara. She neither ignored him nor
+responded to him. Instead, Shakara sat quietly, looking straight ahead,
+exercising her right to remain silent. An arrest would be forthcoming anyway.
+Very rarely are Black girls read in ways that recognize what their fear might
+look like. Fields saw only insubordination, and he responded with
+escalation, grabbing Shakara with such force that he tipped the desk over
+
+while she was still seated inside it. From that position, he yanked her body
+violently out of the desk, creating such momentum that, as he dislodged her
+body, she collided violently with the wall.
+Shakara’s classmates looked terrified, even as one lone distressed
+teenager, a girl named Niya Kenny, stood up and yelled, “What the fuck?!
+What the fuck?! This can’t happen.” Niya encouraged her classmates to tape
+the incident, and later, said, “I was screaming, ‘What the F___? What the
+F____?’ Is this really happening? I was praying out loud for the girl.”
+Cussing and praying. Mixing the profane and sacred together. No one can
+cuss you out more eloquently than a Black woman can. It might be a
+stereotype, but it’s also a truth. We cuss out of rage, and we pray that the
+cussing will be enough to get all the rage out. We curse those who trespass
+against us, and we pray usually that the rage won’t win. We curse systems,
+and we pray for divine help to overcome those very same systems. This is
+why it is so egregious for preachers to use biblical texts to shame Black
+women and girls into complying with a system that hates them. Most Black
+girls and women come to lean on that same holy language for divine help
+when the system shows up to smash them into a million pieces. Rage and
+respectability can’t exist in the same space. But cussing and praying
+absolutely can. These forms of expression, themselves tethered to those
+spaces between disrespect and respectability, hold Black women together
+when the violence we encounter would otherwise rip us apart.
+Shakara and Niya were both arrested for the dubious charge of “disturbing
+schools.” More than a year later, the charges were dropped, but not before
+students at the high school held protests in favor of the school resource
+officer getting his job back. Many of the children who protested were Black,
+because Black children learn early that the best way to survive in a broken
+system is to go along to get along. If Shakara hadn’t persisted in her small but
+mighty act of rebellion, we might never have seen just how violent the world
+is toward Black girls who don’t immediately comply. Shakara’s rage was
+quiet. But it was no less eloquent, no less clear.
+Many, many Black folks, the ones who daily tell their children, “Don’t
+make me come up to that school,” were incensed at Shakara. “Why didn’t she
+just put the phone away?” They asked similar questions when, months earlier,
+
+Sandra Bland was threatened with tasing and then arrested after challenging a
+dubious citation by a Texas police officer.
+Because respectability is a rage-management project, those invested in
+Black respectability are often deeply uncomfortable with Black rage.
+Respectability tells us that staying alive matters more than protecting one’s
+dignity. Black rage says that living without dignity is no life at all. This rage
+is dangerous because it can’t be reasoned with, can’t be forced to accept the
+daily indignities of racism, and more than likely will fight back, rather than
+fleeing or submitting. The consequence of all these antirespectable choices
+range from violence to death. Ask Sandra Bland.… My anger is always
+libation for my fallen sisters.
+To be clear, Black living and Black surviving matters. We can’t be
+dogmatic about the rightness or wrongness of embracing rage or choosing
+safety. It would be irresponsible for me to tell people to embrace rage and
+all its consequences when I daily put on a respectable outfit and drive in a
+solidly middle-class car to a solidly middle-class job. Perfecting the art of
+respectability in the right moments helped me to make it this far. But the more
+access I have to halls of power, to places where decisions get made, the
+more rage I feel. I know how to “count the costs” of my rage, but I wonder if
+we’ve learned how to count the costs of our respectability. It makes us
+emotionally dishonest. It makes us unable to see each other. It causes us to
+sympathize with the dignity vampires, come to take everything from us while
+claiming we brought it on ourselves.
+Grown Black people resented Shakara’s youthful rebellion. Underneath
+the resentment, clearly people were horrified at the violence. But the view
+was, “We already know how they will treat us. So we can never give them a
+reason.” Never let them catch you slippin’. Luckily, Niya’s mother had more
+vision than much of the shortsighted public discourse. After Niya was
+arrested for “disturbing schools,” her mother said, “Looking at the video,
+who was really disturbing the school? Was it my daughter? Or was it the
+officer who came into the classroom and did that to the young girl?”
+Shakara’s silence in the face of such violence, and Niya’s loud wailing of
+distress and disruption came to help us. These Black girls asked us to be
+emotionally honest about how fucked up this world is. They gave us an
+
+opportunity, if we would only get in touch with our rage, with the
+righteousness of it, to imagine a world in which two grown men could figure
+out a dignified and reasonable way to get a teenage girl to put away her
+phone. Suppressed rage will cause us to accept gratuitous violence as a
+necessary evil. Expressed rage offers us an opportunity to do better.
+Two grown men, one Black and one white, one a teacher and one an
+officer, colluded that day to terrorize two Black girls, and a room full of
+mostly Black students, into submission. And only the power of Black girls
+refusing to bow down to this unprincipled show of force alerted the nation to
+the problem of how Black girls get treated in schools. After she was
+arrested, Niya left school in pursuit of her GED. Because Shakara was in the
+foster-care system, her anonymity was protected and it’s not clear what
+happened to her. Niya became another of the disproportionate number of
+Black girls who are suspended every year compared to their white
+counterparts. Her contact with the legal system also means that her act of
+solidarity made her one more Black student forced into what Monique
+Morris has called the “school-to-confinement pathways” that dog Black girls
+for the entirety of their educational lives.
+Rage is costly. And its costs are directly proportional to the amount of
+power any given woman or girl has when she chooses to wield it.
+But Black women’s rage also builds movements. Black Lives Matter. This
+is the most eloquent statement of rage to come out of Black communities in a
+generation. Three Black women began proclaiming this simple truth on July
+13, 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin.
+The entire narrative of the Zimmerman trial had become a story about Black
+women and rage. Much of the trial decision seemed to rely on the testimony
+of Trayvon Martin’s good friend Rachel Jeantel. He had been on the phone
+with Rachel just as Zimmerman started to stalk him around the neighborhood.
+Rachel heard the initial moments of the confrontation before her phone went
+dead. And when she took the stand on Trayvon’s behalf, Rachel was all hood
+solidarity and unpolished Black-girl attitude. Her rage over the killing of her
+friend was apparent, but because she had a speech impediment, and little
+investment in taking the stand to relive the trauma of hearing her friend be
+murdered, the inelegance of her speech made her rage seem less eloquent.
+
+But it was abundantly, expressly clear that she was mad at losing her friend,
+and mad at the farce of a trial that eventually acquitted Zimmerman. All us
+Black girls who love bigheaded Black boys as friends and brothers and
+cousins were mad.
+That very same night, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi got
+together on social media and began proclaiming “#BlackLivesMatter.” Those
+words became even more salient on August 9, 2014, when Ferguson,
+Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson picked a fight with Michael Brown
+and his friend Dorian Johnson as they walked in the middle of the street
+within a small apartment complex on Canfield Drive. Wilson pulled his gun
+and shot Mike Brown multiple times, claiming afterward that Brown tried to
+grab his gun. After residents stood vigil for four and a half hours as Mike
+Brown’s body lay in the street, the next iteration of the movement was born.
+Individualized acts of eloquent rage have limited reach. But the
+collective, orchestrated fury of Black women can move the whole world.
+This is what the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us. There is
+something clarifying about Black women’s rage, something essential about
+the way it drills down to the core truth. The truth is that Black women’s anger
+is not the problem. “For it is not the anger of Black women,” Lorde tells us,
+“which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not [our]
+anger which launches rockets … missiles, and other agents of war and
+death.” “Anger,” she said, “is an appropriate response to racist attitudes.”
+#AudreLordeTaughtMe
+We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while
+simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it.
+American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is
+of legitimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for
+civility, equality, liberty, and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the
+ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and
+unjustly as a matter of course. Had Darren Wilson been just a bit more
+“civil,” Mike Brown might very well be alive.
+The lie we are told is that white rage and white fear are honest emotions
+that preserve the integrity of American democracy. More often than not, we
+keep learning that white rage and white fear are dishonest impulses that lead
+
+us toward fascism. White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions
+among white people that their power might be slipping away. Black rage and
+Black fear are fundamentally more honest, because they are reactions to the
+violence of white supremacy. When Black women are the collective arbiters
+and organizers of Black rage, it is inherently more inclusive. By proclaiming
+that Black Lives Matter, the leaders of the Movement for Black Lives
+(M4BL) have been insisting that the American democratic project become as
+inclusive as it claims to be. White supremacist gaslighting insists that what
+the statement really means is “only Black lives matter.” But that is willful
+ignorance on the part of folks who refuse to see that the conditions that
+prompted the proclamation in the first place were conditions that tried to
+assert that Black lives didn’t matter, that they were disposable, and that
+Black communities didn’t deserve justice. Black women, therefore, stood up
+and said, “We matter.” Too. Also. I simply refuse to believe that white
+people don’t know this.
+Whether we are at work, at church, at school, in court, in the halls of
+government, or in the streets, the rage of Black women and girls does the
+necessary work of pushing American democracy forward, of exposing its
+flaws, of dramatizing its injustices, of taking its violent beatings. Black
+women’s rage isn’t always healthy, particularly when we turn it on ourselves
+or on our children. But when we turn it outward and focus it on the powers
+that would crush us into submission and give back to us a mangled image of
+ourselves, Black women’s rage is a kind of power that America would do
+well to heed if it wants to finally live up to its stated democratic aims.
+
+WHITE-GIRL TEARS
+
+The problem with the 2016 presidential election is simple: White feminists
+did not come get their people. Who are the people of white feminists? Other
+white women. Until the election of Donald Trump, very few Americans,
+beyond political scientists and analysts, paid attention to the fact that white
+women have a long history of voting predominantly for Republican
+candidates in presidential elections. In fact, in 2016, 3 percent fewer white
+women voted for Trump than those who had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
+That’s a significant political shift in one election cycle. But when we woke
+up on November 9, 2016, to discover that white women were not interested
+in forming a president in their own image, suddenly we began to train our
+eyes more heavily on white women, trying to understand what the hell was
+going on.
+As I made clear earlier, I have always known of white women’s great
+capacity to be treacherous. But I did not know that they suffered a far more
+acute version of a problem that white feminists have for decades diagnosed
+Black women with having: For white women, their race comes before their
+gender. See, this tendency to put race before gender does not surprise me
+with Black women. We grow up in a world that only secondarily
+acknowledges our girlhood and our womanhood. We grow up being denied
+the protections of femininity that are always afforded to white women. And
+because anti-Blackness is so palpable, it’s easy if you aren’t paying attention
+to miss the very sexist ways that racism can present itself. Most racial
+stereotypes of Black women—that they are sexually insatiable, unrapeable,
+and prone to having a bunch of babies they can’t take care of, are gendered
+
+stereotypes. But most of us don’t learn to identify the problem as one rooted
+in racism and sexism. This is a problem that Black feminist organizers and
+intellectuals have been attuned to since the very beginning. But I simply
+didn’t know that white feminists had a version of this problem, too. Namely,
+white women’s voting practices tell us that they vote with the party that
+supports their racial issues, even though this means voting with a party that
+hates women as a matter of public policy.
+On the day after Trump’s inauguration, white women took over America,
+to the tune of more than three million protestors. It is the biggest feminist
+action ever recorded. But it was hard to see the outraged cries of all these
+white women, many of whom had failed to get their people, as anything other
+than a public profusion of white-lady tears. White girls usually cry whitelady tears after they have done something hella racist and then been called
+out by the offended party for doing so. To shift blame and claim victimhood,
+they start to cry. The world falls apart as people rush to their defense. All
+knowledge of the fact that they are the ones who caused the problem escapes
+the notice of everyone except the person or people they disrespected. It’s a
+phenomenon that Black folks know well.
+Recently, at a campus lecture I gave, a young Black man told me of an
+incident where a white female student who he thought was a friend called
+him a nigger. When he expressed deep offense at her racism, she started
+crying. He wanted to report her to campus authorities, but felt that given his
+race, size, and stature, he would not be believed. He felt he would be cast as
+the aggressor. So he walked away and let it go.
+I, too, have experienced white women become aggressively angry at
+public lectures when I give talks. Recently, I received an award from a
+national women’s organization for my work as a feminist activist. In my
+remarks, I spoke briefly about the ways the Clinton crime bill had harmed
+Black communities and men in my own family. As I walked off stage, an
+older white feminist, a judge, shook with anger as she disagreed with my
+analysis of the crime bill. I told her that perhaps my analysis could have been
+more precise, but that the gist of my point about Clinton and the explosion of
+the prison industrial complex was in fact, correct. She moved further into my
+personal space, as her face became red, and her voice shook. All of these are
+
+cues of physical aggression, and if you’re Black, they are signs that
+somebody is ready to fight. She didn’t cry, but I certainly wanted to make her
+cry. The comfort she felt in physically advancing on a stranger and expecting
+not to have any clapback for it is a comfort and a privilege that only white
+women have.
+What that white lady judge didn’t know is that I eat white-lady tears for
+breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So it made sense that on the day of the Women’s
+March I skipped it and went to my girl’s spot for a very Black brunch in
+Brooklyn. Watching white women take it to the streets to protest an election
+outcome that was a result of white women’s powerful voting bloc felt like an
+exercise in white-lady tears if I ever saw one, and I knew I couldn’t be
+trusted to act right amidst a sea of pink pussy hats and white women
+struggling to understand what intersectionality means.
+But I felt conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted to be in the streets helping
+women make feminist history. It feels really important in this moment to make
+clear that feminism is a multiracial project. Feminism doesn’t belong to
+white women. When cries arose in the weeks following the election for a
+Million Women’s March, I was skeptical and annoyed. Black women had
+already had such a march in 1997. Though the organizers of this march
+scrambled and recovered, rebranding the event the Women’s March and
+placing several women of color at the helm, I decided that I would sit this
+particular march out. My conflict arose, though, because even though I want
+white women to learn with a quickness about the many other modes of
+womanhood that exist outside of white womanhood, I also understand the
+power of a unified front.
+The election of Trump, a man who had admitted on tape to sexually
+assaulting women, women who were presumably white, suggests that 2016 is
+the moment white women ran squarely up against the limits of white-lady
+tears as a form of political capital. White-lady tears might seem not to be a
+big deal, but they are actually quite dangerous. When white women signal
+through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the
+whole world rises in their defense. The mythic nature of white female
+vulnerability compels protective impulses to arise in all men, regardless of
+race.
+
+I think here of the white-girl rapper travesty that is Iggy Azalea. This
+Australian white girl built her career by mimicking the accent and cadence of
+Black girls in Atlanta, Georgia. She was helped along in this regrettable
+experiment in cultural appropriation by Atlanta rapper T.I. In late 2014, Iggy
+Azalea dismissed Black female rapper Azealia Banks’s claims that America
+appropriates Black culture by engaging in what Banks called “cultural
+smudging.” In the midst of the racial uproars of 2014—the killing of Michael
+Brown and Tamir Rice and the refusal of the Ferguson, Missouri, prosecutor
+to indict Officer Darren Wilson—Banks had called out Iggy for profiting off
+of Black culture but not speaking out about Black pain. When, days later,
+Banks followed up in an interview about this longstanding problem of
+cultural appropriation—think jazz, rock ’n’ roll, blues, and blue-eyed soul—
+Iggy dismissed Banks as a bully who had little success because of her
+attitude. Rap legend Q-Tip, from A Tribe Called Quest, stepped in to give
+Iggy a history lesson on Twitter. It was not long before rapper T.I. defended
+his protégé Iggy by saying that many Black people had a “paranoid, ‘All
+White People Wanna Steal Our Shit’” mentality. Clearly T.I.’s arguments are
+reductive and ludicrous. Black people have every right to be upset about the
+long history of cultural appropriation in this country. The fact that Iggy’s
+career took off at a moment in Hip Hop when Black girls could barely find a
+record deal (Nicki Minaj being the exception) suggests that our fears and
+anger about white girls taking up space to which they are not entitled are
+well-founded.
+During these same years, we have endured everyone from Miley Cyrus to
+Taylor Swift to Katy Perry parroting the sounds and idioms of Hip Hop in
+their music, while disrespecting Black women in the process. There was the
+time that Katy Perry rocked corn rows with her front edges gelled down (a
+hair style that is undeniably specific to Black women) in the music video for
+her song “This Is How We Do” while pursing her lips, with her head cocked
+to the side, to impersonate what she thinks attitudinal, edgy Black girls look
+and sound like. Then there was the time Taylor Swift crawled between the
+legs of several Black girls twerking in her video “Shake It Off.” Let me also
+note that phrases like “this is how we do” and “shake it off” are themselves
+Black cultural sayings, indigenous to the Hip Hop generation.
+
+Miley Cyrus even infamously invited Black women with huge posteriors
+on stage to twerk with her when she was trying to emerge from the good-girl
+gloss of her old Disney character Hannah Montana. Using the logic of white
+supremacy to her advantage, she figured that the closer she put her skinny, noass-having self to Black women’s thick and voluptuous bodies, the easier it
+would be for people to accept her as a sexually active, slightly vulgar, grown
+woman. Black women’s bodies became critical to this performance of grown
+womanhood because Miley knew (at least implicitly) that Black women’s
+bodies are already coded as hypersexual and excessively vulgar, and this
+was everything she wanted to be.
+Of late, Cyrus says she has moved away from Hip Hop because, as she
+told John Norris at Billboard, “It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex,
+got a girl on my cock’—I am so not that.” Now that Hip Hop had rescued her
+from the stultifying demands to perform pure, chaste white Southern
+femininity, she was ready to throw it out like a used-up washrag. Of course,
+Hip Hop had been misogynist for more than three decades when Cyrus
+thought to use it to add an edge to her image. The ability to take on and peel
+off the parts of Black culture that you like at will is exactly what is meant by
+the term “white privilege.” And while culture sharing is fine, white people
+have proven that they have a problem sharing. White people don’t share.
+They take over. They colonize. They claim shit as their own and then accuse
+others of being territorial and retrograde for pointing out these aggressive
+borrowing practices that shape white culture. It’s wrong to use Black
+aesthetics, Black cultural vernaculars, and Black dance in your videos
+without any kind of citation or homage.
+Beyond the culture wars, there’s a whole political infrastructure designed
+to protect the sanctity of white women’s fears and tears. White women’s
+complicity and participation in state violence toward Black people has a
+long and sordid history. In 1892, after the local lynching of three Black men,
+Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells wrote an editorial calling out white men for
+the lynching. She wrote, “Nobody in this section of the community believes
+that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men
+are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging
+to the moral reputation of their women.” One of the lynched men, Thomas
+
+Moss, was Wells’s good friend; he was married with a family, and he was a
+respected businessman. He and his business partners had, in fact, been
+lynched for running a successful grocery store that competed with a local
+white grocer. Once Wells saw the economic logics at play, she stopped
+believing the myth propagated by white supremacists, that Black men were
+running amok raping white women.
+Wells also sought to call out the complicity of white women in this racial
+terror propagated against Black men. Not only weren’t they victims, but they
+were often engaging in consensual, though illicit, sexual relationships with
+Black men. Sometimes these women would cry rape when they were caught
+in the act. Sometimes the white men in their lives would cry rape for them.
+These white women’s tears proved deadly for Black men and Black
+communities. Meanwhile, the white men who were outraged over the rape of
+white women often raped Black women with impunity. Black men, too, were
+often victims. In a world where telling a white woman “no” could lead to as
+many consequences as telling her “yes,” surely the social conditions were not
+ripe for any Black body to freely consent to interracial liaisons.
+Conveniently enough, white men didn’t begin to propagate the myth of
+Black male rapists until after the Civil War. During the war, when they left
+their wives and daughters on plantations with these same Black men, there
+were few to no accusations of sexual assault. But after the war, suddenly (we
+are to believe), white men’s outsized outrage and paranoia over the safety of
+white women was about actual crimes Black men were committing rather
+than about white men’s deep and unbridled rage over losing power. By
+turning the nation’s attention to supposed misdeeds by Black men, white men
+misdirected attention from the copious amounts of rape they were committing
+against Black women. Disregard for the bodily autonomy of Black women
+grew in direct proportion to the social valuation of white femininity. Though
+this had also been true during slavery, after the Civil War white men used
+white femininity as an excuse to terrorize newly freed men and women
+through lynching and rape.
+White women’s tears are dangerous. Ida B. Wells was run out of Memphis
+for challenging white women’s (and men’s) lies about rape, and her
+newspaper’s office was burned to the ground. White men sent a threatening
+
+message that they would kill her if she returned to Memphis from her travels
+up North. Her story demonstrates the extent to which white men were willing
+to go to protect and promote the narrative of vulnerable white femininity. But
+it also makes clear just how bothered white men were by the prospect of
+white women potentially sleeping with Black men. Not only were white men
+willing to lynch Black men to keep them in line but, in the case of Wells, they
+were also willing to murder Black women in order to prop up their fantasy
+about racially pure sexual desire. The desire of white men to regulate white
+women’s intimate desires placed Black people in a clusterfuck of white
+terror.
+Since the nineteenth century, white feminists have critiqued the ways
+white men have attempted to sexually regulate their bodies. They have
+decried the demands for sexual chastity, purity, and monogamy that American
+culture has presumed to be white women’s civic duty. But often the critique
+stops there. White women never make the leap toward solidarity. That
+solidarity would be rooted in the fact that the terms and limits of Black
+women’s and white women’s sexual agency (while certainly not equal in the
+scope of terror and violence) are both bound up with the project of white
+supremacy. Far too frequently, white women’s notions of antiracist solidarity
+is defined solely by their willingness to date Black men. I’m coming back to
+that momentarily.
+It is in light of these histories that everyone should be able to understand
+the complex reactions that Black communities had to allegations against Bill
+Cosby. The allegations that he raped and sexually assaulted nearly fifty
+women, most of them white, between the 1960s and the 2000s, were an open
+secret that most of us deliberately chose to ignore until the cries of his
+victims got louder and louder. Cosby has denied these allegations. When I
+initially began hearing about these alleged assaults, my first thought was that
+Cosby was yet another Black man who secretly found white women more
+sexually desirable than his gorgeous Black wife, Camille. That was
+disappointing, but as race-man types go, also rather clichéd. As more and
+more stories emerged, however, I returned to my default position—I believe
+women when they say they are raped. No matter their race. That is a hard
+
+position to hold, given what Ida B. Wells taught us about the racial and
+sexual politics of the post-Reconstruction era.
+Postslavery, Black manhood was framed primarily in terms of being a
+sexual threat to the purity of white womanhood. To find out that there are
+very compelling reasons to believe that Bill Cosby raped dozens of white
+women, and began doing so during the racially volatile 1960s, has been hard
+for many African Americans to accept. If the allegations are true, that would
+make Cosby as much of a monster as many white people love to think all
+Black men are. When he was tried in June 2017 for sexually assaulting
+Andrea Constand, a judge declared a mistrial after a jury failed to reach a
+verdict. However, the mistrial in his case is no more an assurance of
+innocence than such mistrials are when the victims are Black men killed by
+white cops. Too often, the rampant racism of the criminal justice system is
+used as an excuse for the heinous misogyny and sexism of Black men.
+I’m no fair-weather feminist, though. Rape is rape. Sexism is sexism. No
+matter who commits it. I gave up The Cosby Show, a show I loved and had
+continued to watch, even after Cosby became a moralizing grandfatherly
+fuckboy who shamed single Black mothers, derided the Black poor, and
+mocked Black naming practices. In his infamous 2004 Pound Cake Speech,
+Cosby said, “Women having children by five, six different men. Under what
+excuse, I want somebody to love me, and as soon as you have it, you forget to
+parent. Grandmother, mother, and great grandmother in the same room,
+raising children, and the child knows nothing about love or respect of any
+one of the three of them.” His speech is filled with this shame-and-blame
+rhetoric, demonizing Black mothers. But I am so used to Black men who
+blame Black women for our communities’ social problems, and to Black
+elders who believe wholeheartedly in respectability politics, that it seemed a
+small price to pay to continue to watch The Cosby Show. As long as Black
+women were the targets of Cosby’s ire, I could ignore it and continue to
+enjoy reruns of my favorite sitcom after a long, stressful day. I’m used to
+brothers being not quite right and even all the way wrong in their dealings
+with us. I’m used to seeing their proverbial slips showing and loving them
+anyway. But after it came to light that he might be a vicious sexual predator,
+any racial solidarity between us fell away. To be clear, I would have made
+
+the same choice if the vast majority of his accusers had been Black. Some
+are. But the fact remains that even I sprang into action more readily when I
+read all of these white women’s accounts of his actions, in ways that I had
+not felt the urgency to do when the targets of his rage were Black. Black
+men’s disdain for Black women is so common that it didn’t even occur to me
+to stop watching his show. White women’s tears are powerful.
+I wish, however, that white feminists specifically weren’t so deliberately
+oblivious about their privileged status. Fickle feminism won’t get us
+anywhere. Even as Black feminists rallied to denounce Cosby’s (alleged)
+despicable conduct and crimes, there was little to no outrage among white
+feminists when Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer of Asian and
+white American descent, was accused of raping thirteen Black women, and
+was subsequently found guilty of eight of the rapes, in late 2015. While
+Cosby’s accusers commanded mainstream news coverage, Holtzclaw’s
+victims received embarrassingly little media coverage. If, by contrast, a
+Black police officer had been found guilty of raping multiple white women,
+this would have been a media circus. This was Ida Wells’s point. The
+alleged vulnerability of white women misdirected critical attention away
+from the ways in which white men were, in fact, brutalizing and raping Black
+women and girls. Today, most rapes are intraracial, but white women’s
+perceived vulnerability to crimes at the hands of Black men does untold
+amounts of harm to Black communities and, in particular, to Black women
+and children.
+When George Zimmerman stalked and killed Trayvon Martin, who was
+walking home from the corner store in a suburban Florida neighborhood,
+Zimmerman claimed to be suspicious because Trayvon, a seventeen-year-old
+Black kid wearing a hoodie, was looking at the houses as he walked home. A
+Black kid in a hoodie must surely be scoping out these houses, where some
+white families lived, in order to commit a crime. At Zimmerman’s trial, the
+jury consisted of five white women and one woman of color. As I watched
+the trial, I wondered which brand of white womanhood would prevail.
+Would these women act out of their socially constructed fear of Black men in
+hoodies or would they “transcend” race and identify with Sybrina Fulton,
+Trayvon’s mother, in the unjust loss of her child? After jurors failed to
+
+convict Zimmerman on the grounds that he had the right to “stand his ground,”
+it became clear that to the jurors, Trayvon Martin wasn’t Sybrina Fulton’s
+baby boy. He was a walking embodiment of white women’s worst nightmare.
+After the trial, Juror B-37, a white woman, gave an interview to Anderson
+Cooper. Cooper asked the juror why Zimmerman might have found Trayvon
+to be suspicious, and she responded:
+He said he was looking in houses as he was walking down the road.
+Kind of just not having a purpose to where he was going. He was
+stopping and starting. But I mean, that’s George’s rendition of it, but I
+think the situation where Trayvon got into him being late at night, dark
+at night, raining, and anybody would think anybody walking down the
+road stopping and turning and looking, if that’s exactly what happened,
+is suspicious. And George said that he didn’t recognize who he was.
+Note several things about the juror’s answer. She fully agreed with
+George Zimmerman, that it was reasonable to see Trayvon Martin, a kid
+walking home in the rain, talking on his phone, as suspicious. As she put it,
+“anybody would think” this way. By anybody, she means any white body.
+Even if that were true, the larger question is whether any of us would have
+stopped, followed him, and then shot him to death after doing so. That is the
+only question. The jurors put themselves fully in George Zimmerman’s shoes.
+They could not find any empathy for the teenage boy walking home with
+snacks. These women’s acquittal of Zimmerman suggested that their primary
+social priority is white safety, even if it means authorizing lethal force
+against Black folks who aren’t studying them or their white suburban lives in
+the least. After the Zimmerman trial, white feminists did not call out these
+jurors. During the trial they did not call on them to exercise integrity, check
+their white privilege, or act from a place of empathy. White feminism has
+worked hard to make the world safer for white women, but it has stridently
+refused to call out the ways that white women’s sexuality and femininity is
+used not just as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool for the maintenance of
+white supremacy.
+
+Less than two months before Donald Trump clinched the presidency, a
+white police officer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Betty Shelby shot and
+killed Terence Crutcher, a forty-year-old unarmed Black man, during a traffic
+stop. When Shelby shot Crutcher, who was outside of his vehicle at her
+request, his hands were in the air. As police helicopters covered the scene,
+they could be heard saying that he looked like “a bad dude.” While Shelby’s
+partner used his Taser to subdue Crutcher, who officers say wasn’t following
+commands, Shelby pulled out her gun and shot him, hitting him in the lung.
+Like many other white police officers who have killed unarmed Black
+people, her only defense was “I feared for my life.” Her fear became a lethal
+weapon against Terence Crutcher, who was carrying no weapons of his own.
+Yet again, white feminists did not write think pieces or organize panels
+asking their white sistren to interrogate the lethal and anti-Black
+consequences of this “fear.” At trial, Betty Shelby was found not guilty of
+manslaughter, and she went back to work for the Tulsa Police Department.
+When Black men show out, Black feminists call that shit out. In fact, we
+viciously dragged men and women in our own communities who tried to hold
+on to Bill Cosby and The Cosby Show. Black folks of a certain generation
+were hella resentful about being asked to give up watching such shows as an
+act of solidarity. For those of us born before 1990, the Huxtables were the
+first high-achieving, reasonably functional Black family that we got to see on
+TV. For most of the seasons during which it aired, it was a top-ranked
+sitcom. This meant that the Cosbys were a Black family that all Americans
+could relate to. I loved the Huxtables, particularly the youngest daughter,
+Rudy, who was near my age. But I gave them up, because after knowing of
+Bill Cosby’s alleged crimes it was hard to watch him without remembering
+that I was watching a violent monster. Black women have been some of Bill
+Cosby’s most vocal critics. We didn’t just leave white women to fend for
+themselves. We came and got our people.
+When evidence surfaced that actor Nate Parker and his writing partner
+and friend Jean Celestin were accused of running a train on a white woman
+without her consent when they were in college, Black feminists expressed
+outrage, boycotted Parker’s ironically titled film, The Birth of a Nation, and
+demanded that he atone in a thoughtful way for any harm he might have
+
+caused this young woman, who eventually committed suicide. Parker and
+Celestin were both tried for sexual assault. Parker was acquitted while
+Celestin was initially found guilty. Later that verdict was thrown out. Parker
+maintained his innocence, but Black women, who are disproportionately
+victims of sexual assault, continued to empathize with the young woman and
+to hold Parker’s and Celestin’s feet to the fire. Black feminists were roundly
+blamed for the film being a flop in theaters. Still the position of Black
+feminists remains clear: first, do no harm.
+No comparable outrage emerges from white feminists when Black women
+are under attack. Meanwhile, Black women pay a high price for our
+commitment to feminism in a culture that reveres our men, precisely because
+their extreme social vulnerability is on display. We are called divisive, manhating, combative, unfeminine. All the usual shit. Those of us who are
+straight are often chastised for our outspokenness by being denied
+partnership. White feminists often struggle to even conceptualize Black
+female vulnerability, let alone to call out white men for harming Black
+women. When the various forms of structural challenges that Black women
+experience come to light, the response from white feminists is, more often
+than not, anemic.
+White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from
+being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.
+Black people hesitate to call out Black men for male privilege because they
+have experienced such devastation at the hands of a white supremacist
+system. And white women frequently don’t recognize that though women are
+oppressed around the world, whiteness elevates the value of their femininity
+and allows them to get away with shit that women of color pay royally for.
+Many Black men struggle to acknowledge that they experience male
+privilege. Some years ago, an internet writer published a Black male
+privilege checklist, modeled after Peggy McIntosh’s white privilege
+checklist. Every time I have posted the Black male checklist, the level of
+bellyaching, backtracking, minimizing, and obscuring that Black men do is
+unmatched. Yes, it is true that Black men experience what famed Black
+feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins has called a “subjugated masculinity.”
+This means, like I discussed about Mann and Bob, that they are frustrated
+
+patriarchs. For instance, only male privilege could make Barack Obama do
+the shit he did around My Brother’s Keeper, a point I made previously. Only
+male privilege could eclipse the struggles of Black girls out of the view of a
+man who is a father to two daughters.
+Perhaps the frustrated patriarch explanation can shed some light on why
+the Bill Cosby case is so appalling. His copious alleged sexual assaults of
+women play out a troubling script of a Black man obsessed with dominating
+and subjugating white women. There is racialized sexism at play in Bill
+Cosby’s apparent choice of victims. The desire to violate predominantly
+white female victims at the height of the 1960s, when Cosby was one of the
+most powerful and visible Black male stars, suggests that, if these charges
+are true, his desire for power was tied uniquely to the ability to subjugate
+white women. There was a full one-hundred-year period between the end of
+slavery and the first allegations of Bill Cosby raping white women. That
+means there was a one-hundred-year period between the emergence of a
+narrative about dangerous Black male rapists and the instantiation of one
+who was serial in his brutality. For one hundred years, Black men had never
+gotten away with it. They were killed, mostly for rapes they didn’t commit.
+A history with those contours, a Black masculinity shaped in a toxic stew
+of white male rage and white-lady tears, might emerge with a perverted
+notion of freedom. Yes, it is true that the Cosby case is so extreme that it
+certainly does not reflect the everyday realities of most Black men. But most
+white people aren’t members of the KKK, either. The most extreme versions
+of a pathology often have much to teach us about the less extreme forms those
+pathologies can take. If this were an episode of Criminal Minds, we could
+perhaps admit that if it is true that Cosby assaulted all these women, then
+white women became the target of his seething but sublimated Black male
+rage. The desire to dominate and humiliate white women is a logical
+extension of a racialized toxic masculinity, predicated on the idea that
+freedom is synonymous with white patriarchy. And white patriarchy inheres
+in both the dominating and the possessing of white women. Look, if it is true
+that Cosby committed even a portion of these crimes, it’s not clear to me
+whether his hatred of white women was because he really wanted to be with
+one or because he simply despised what they had meant for the project of
+
+Black manhood. That kind of work is best left up to the psychoanalysts. What
+I know is that rape is about power, and if a Black man has been serially
+raping white women for nearly fifty years, this is a violent patriarchal form
+of hitting back at white supremacy.
+In 1968, Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver wrote an infamous
+book called Soul On Ice, where he delved—scarily—into the psychosexual
+politics of Black men’s relationships to white and Black women. He wrote,
+“The white man made the Black woman the symbol of slavery and the white
+woman the symbol of freedom. Every time I embrace a Black woman I’m
+embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m
+hugging freedom.… I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman
+in my bed and a white man minds his own business. Until that day comes, my
+entire existence is tainted, poisoned, and I will still be a slave—and so will
+the white woman.” Thus, Cleaver concludes a few pages later, “I became a
+rapist.” Infuriatingly, he recounts, “To refine my technique and modus
+operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … and when
+I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white
+prey.” “Rape,” Cleaver argues, “was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me
+that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system
+of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was
+the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact
+of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting
+revenge.” Does anyone else need a shower?
+Now that you’re back, let’s talk about it. First, I know that many of you
+reading this are wondering what the fifty-year-old sexist ramblings of a
+racial madman have to do with racial and sexual attitudes today. Does the
+phrase “Make America Great Again” mean anything to you? So much of the
+racial animus that is shaping this current moment in American politics is a
+relitigation of the 1950s and 1960s. Often, in the polling data that shaped the
+Trump campaign, white Americans cited the 1950s as America’s best
+decade. And perhaps the Leave It To Beaver years were really great—if you
+were white! The civil rights movement was not yet in full swing. The
+women’s liberation movement had not yet begun. White men ruled, and white
+ladies looked pretty on TV. So going back to this moment is necessary to
+
+understand the kinds of racialized masculinity that white and Black men are
+negotiating in this moment. Also, far too often, we think history doesn’t
+matter, but half the time that I spend with Black men talking about feminism
+makes me think I’m in some Black Power skit conjured up from 1973.
+After reading Eldridge Cleaver’s psychotic rambling, Bill Cosby’s
+alleged crimes make far more sense. Both men became the self-fulfilling
+prophecies of white supremacy’s worst lies about Black male sexuality.
+White folks needed monsters to justify their hatred, and white supremacy plus
+patriarchy created just the kind of primordial stew that could bring forth such
+creatures. We all have a political and ethical duty to reject the monsters
+white supremacy created, but we can’t forget that white patriarchy itself is
+the biggest bang of them all. There is also a more hurtful truth that Eldridge
+Cleaver points us to in his frightening candor. He spoke of a deep-seated and
+collective hatred among Black men for Black women. White women
+represented freedom, while Black women represented slavery. Black women
+were the literal site for the reproduction of slavery.
+Part of the reason no one delved fully into the racial politics of Cosby’s
+alleged sex crimes is because they point us back to a key source of enmity
+between Black men and Black women, and Black women and white women
+—they force us to ask questions about interracial relationships that we would
+all rather shy away from speaking honestly about. But Ida B. Wells’s critique
+of the sexual politics of racism shows us why interracial dating (between
+white and Black people) and interracial rape are conversations that
+intrinsically go together. Rape is tied to questions of power and consent, but
+interracial dating is tied to questions of power and freedom.
+I believe wholeheartedly in the right of all consenting adults to choose the
+kinds of partnerships that are best for them, but I’m tired of the lie that
+relationships and love are not political. The struggle of queer folks to build
+families in the ways they desire demonstrate that love is political. I’m tired
+of the lie that desire is a pure social category, unhampered by the politics of
+race and gender.
+Case in point: Jesse Williams, a biracial Black actor and one of the stars
+and heartthrobs of Grey’s Anatomy, has a huge following among Black
+women. At the 2016 BET Awards, Williams gave a speech that went viral
+
+after he won the Humanitarian Award. He affirmed the Black Lives Matter
+movement, the many victims of police brutality, and the movement’s largely
+female leadership. He also called out white cultural appropriation, saying,
+“We’re done watching and waiting while this invention called ‘whiteness’
+uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while
+extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold,
+ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our
+genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like
+rinds of strange fruit.” It was a perfect moment of a celebrity using his
+platform for good. I’m not even into light-skinned men, but in that moment,
+Jesse Williams was bae.
+A few months later, Williams and his wife, whom he had saluted during
+the speech, announced they were divorcing. Much like having a Black wife
+had done wonders for Obama’s credibility with Black America, Jesse
+Williams having a Black, regular-pretty, slightly thick and curvy wife also
+made Black women love him more. But when divorce reports surfaced, some
+tabloids suggested that Williams had been cheating with a white female
+costar. Though those news reports were never confirmed, the mere thought of
+it made Williams’s stock go down quickly among Black women. The divorce
+we could understand. Marriage is hard. But the potential white girl—that
+was damn-near unforgivable. For once, Williams represented a Black man
+who had made it, who had great politics, and who had chosen a Black
+woman for a life partner. To most Black women, that choice matters.
+Often when Black men show a vocal preference for white women, and
+Black women “feel some type of way about it,” as millennials like to say, we
+are told that we are tripping over what is simply a matter of preference! My
+good friend Dr. Yaba Blay often says, “There is a thin line between
+preference and pathology.” When Black men evince a preference for dating
+white women, solely or primarily, this crosses the line into the pathological.
+Conversely, there are Black men who have sophisticated structural analyses
+of white supremacy and of their oppressed conditions as Black men, but treat
+their intimate choices through a faulty color-blind lens in which Black
+women, in particular, are asked to view the whiteness of their choice of
+
+partner as merely incidental to a larger narrative of love that transcends
+racial boundaries. This is bullshit.
+I’m tired of Black men who are race men everywhere but in the bedroom.
+I’m tired of Black men who buy into the lie that their choice of white female
+partners shouldn’t concern anyone but them. That thinking is ahistorical.
+Courtesy of white supremacy, Black women have always had to care whom
+Black men were dating. Black and white people have never had the luxury of
+apolitical romance. Yet, when Black women give either the overt or internal
+eye roll to the polished (seemingly), got-it-together brother walking down the
+street with the white chick on his arm, we are cast as bitter and angry. Maybe
+we should just start admitting that we are angry at seeing some of our best
+and brightest brothers choose white women for partners. There. I said it.
+Because it is we, Black women, who labor under the historical narrative of
+having our bodies cast as the unique and singular site for unfreedom. That’s a
+heavy load to bear in a country that romanticizes freedom and justice for all.
+Of course, we are resentful of brothers whose freedom dreams are
+personified by the ability to date and fuck white women with ease.
+I’m tired of meeting white women with no race analysis who marry Black
+men and make these men feel like their race—their Blackness—is not a
+primary thing that defines them. For many Black men, the best-case scenario
+is that they can create a part of their lives where they are not solely defined
+by Black manhood. The worst-case scenario is that they think white
+womanhood is some kind of come-up from the abjection of Black
+womanhood.
+This is why I don’t have any problem with Black women who choose to
+partner with people who are not Black. The logic of reverse racism won’t
+work here, for any of you who were planning on trying it. In the chapter
+“Love in a Hopeless Place,” I lay out the challenges that Black girls face in
+trying to find partners. There is a real numbers problem that Black women
+confront, even though they are the least likely to marry someone who isn’t
+Black. This kind of racial loyalty often circumscribes Black women’s
+intimate options in ways that cause us to be alone forever. Moreover, if
+dating-site statistics are to be believed, Black women are the least likely of
+any demographic (Latina and Asian women, white, Black, Latino, and Asian
+
+men) to receive responses to their dating profiles. This cultural and intimate
+hatred of Black women is a feminist issue, one that all feminists, Black and
+non-Black alike, should care about.
+In Kate Weigand’s book Red Feminism, she tells a fascinating story about
+Black women who participated in the Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s. In
+1934, Black women organizers asked the Party leadership to outlaw
+interracial marriages among members. Many of the Black men had married or
+begun dating white women, but white men weren’t showing comparable
+interest in dating or marrying Black women. The Party’s leadership
+appointed Abner Berry, a Black party leader who was married to a white
+woman, to deal with the crisis. In typical Black-man fashion, he called Black
+women’s demands to outlaw interracial marriage “counterrevolutionary.” But
+he did institute organizing sessions on the triple oppressions of race, class,
+and gender that Black women faced. Apparently, the party members also
+tried to teach white male communists how to dance so they would be more
+comfortable approaching Black women at parties.
+These are not new problems. In many ways, prospects in heterosexual
+dating are far more dismal today than they were eighty years ago. But in the
+1930s, radical left organizers framed Black women’s limited intimate
+options as a structural problem. They didn’t fall into the neoliberal trap of
+framing everything as a simple matter of individual choice. They also seemed
+to understand that if they were going to use Black women’s labor to build
+movements for social change, they had a responsibility to care about the
+quality of Black women’s personal lives. We have far less clarity today
+about the ways that Black women’s intimate lives, whether they are in
+straight or queer partnerships, should be a part of our political frameworks.
+I absolutely know that love doesn’t adhere to racial lines. (Even I have a
+white-boys-who-could-get-it list.) But the choice of whom to love is
+political. And if white feminists were honest, they would recognize that their
+feminism actually does demand that they interrogate the political dimensions
+of their intimate engagements. Those white women married to white men
+overwhelmingly expressed their solidarity with Donald Trump, clearly
+placing racial solidarity and agreement with white supremacy over any kind
+of gender solidarity. Those white women who have partnered with Black
+
+men must reckon with what that choice means, in light of histories where
+white women are cast as the stuff of which racial freedom dreams are made.
+White women and, specifically, white feminists have to reckon with their
+complicity and often full participation in this set of social narratives about
+Black sexuality that has been exceedingly dangerous to the well-being of
+Black lives.
+A woke white feminism would recognize that even as they rebel against
+the sexual strictures of white patriarchy, through movements to reclaim the
+term “slut” and so forth, they have a duty to recognize that white men’s
+desires to regulate their sexual lives is predicated not just on controlling
+white women’s bodies, but also on criminalizing Black men and denigrating
+Black women. The movement to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization
+that provides critical health care to many poor women of color, has nothing
+to do with the desire of white men on the right for Black and Latina women to
+have more babies. Rather, these men seek to control reproduction itself
+because they want to control the life possibilities of all women. So much of
+right-leaning social policy in the 1980s and 1990s was predicated on white
+men controlling white women’s bodies by uplifting the purity and sanctity of
+white femininity and simultaneously maligning Black womanhood and Black
+femininity.
+I’ve already mentioned the way the term “welfare queens” has been used
+on the right to summarily vilify Black women. But the idea of the “welfare
+queen” is itself a myth, created for nefarious purposes. In 1976, Ronald
+Reagan began telling stories about a completely fabricated group of system
+abusers that he called “welfare queens.” He named a non-existent social
+phenomenon based on a singular incident of abuse of welfare benefits by one
+woman in Chicago in the 1970s. But white people who resented the racial
+and class progress of the 1960s found a convenient target in hating allegedly
+undeserving Black women, who all got subsumed under the category of
+welfare queens. From the first time he deployed the term in his 1976
+presidential campaign, until 1996, when Bill Clinton passed his infamous
+welfare reform bill, white male politicians on both the right and the semi-left
+used cultural enmity toward Black women to mobilize a conservative
+backlash against the 1960s.
+
+A decade later, two cases cemented the enduring power of the Black male
+rapist myth from one hundred years earlier. In 1986, William Horton, a
+prisoner who was serving a life sentence for robbery and murder in
+Massachusetts, was allowed to participate in a weekend prison furlough
+program. He failed to return, and ten months later raped and beat a white
+woman from suburban Maryland while her husband was bound and gagged
+and forced to listen. During the 1988 presidential race, the George H. W.
+Bush campaign ran incendiary television ads that conveniently renamed
+William Horton “Willie Horton” and cast him as a monster that liberal
+Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, had let out of jail.
+A year later, a white woman was brutally raped and beaten in Central
+Park, and five young Black and Latino men were arrested for the crime. After
+more than a decade in jail, all five young men were exonerated by DNA
+evidence. Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in 1989 in several New
+York newspapers, including The New York Times, calling for New York to
+bring back the death penalty so these young men could be executed. In 2014,
+he called the $41 million settlement the five men were awarded “the heist of
+the century.” One month before he was elected president, he doubled down in
+a CNN interview, saying that the young men had all “admitted they were
+guilty.” They were teenagers at the time, and their testimony had been
+coerced. Moreover, DNA evidence correctly identified the actual perpetrator
+of the crime back in 2002. In the interim years between their arrest and the
+overturning of their convictions, the presumed guilt of the Central Park Five
+contributed to a powerful narrative exploited by politicians on the right and
+the left, everyone from Reagan to Bush I to Bill Clinton about the need to “get
+tough on crime” and put away “Black male superpredators,” whom the
+Clintons (both Bill and Hillary) argued began terrorizing communities at as
+early as thirteen years of age.
+With his 1994 crime bill and his 1996 welfare reform package, Clinton,
+with the help of a Republican Congress, sounded a late-twentieth-century
+death knell for Black social progress, all rooted in an insidious narrative
+about the danger of Black sexuality—it turned Black men into rapists and
+Black women into baby machines. In this narrative, white women were
+everything Black women were not—socially responsible, well-behaved,
+
+marriageable. Therefore, they were the kind of women that Black men should
+desire but of which they should never ever understand themselves to be
+worthy.
+The obsession with curtailing reproductive freedom in this country is
+about forcing white women to be hyperproductive in service of reproducing
+a white Republic. As of 2014, most children born in the United States are not
+white. This important demographic shift has only heightened anxiety about
+declining birth rates among white families. God, the right would have us
+believe, wants America to remain white. The only way that can happen is for
+heterosexual white people to keep getting married and reproducing.
+When Ida B. Wells gave the written side eye to the white-girl tears of her
+day, she was hoping that maybe by doing so, those folks listening could attune
+their ear to the fervent cries of Black women being raped by white men all
+over the country. But Wells learned something that every Black girl learns at
+some point. When white girls cry, every other girl’s tears cease to matter.
+However, what the Trump era has come to teach white women is that
+uncritical solidarity with patriarchy is tantamount to sticking your head in a
+lion’s mouth. Too many white women thought they could vote for Trump
+while sticking everyone else with the consequences. In the battle over power,
+when white men run the world, white-lady tears have diminishing returns.
+This fact alone should inspire an army of white feminists to arm themselves
+with boxes of Kleenex, march into the world of white women, and start doing
+the painful work of trying to change their sisters’ minds.
+
+NEVER SCARED
+
+In the summer of 2008, The New Yorker featured a cover called “The Politics
+of Fear.” The cover depicted an Afro-wearing, gun-toting Michelle Obama
+and her husband, presidential candidate Barack Obama, clad in a turban, in
+the Oval Office, engaging in a conspiratorial fist bump under a picture of
+Osama Bin Laden. Created by Barry Blitt, the cover, according to the
+magazine, sought to “satirize the use of scare tactics and misinformation in
+the presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.” Americans on
+the right expressed angst about whether Michelle Obama was a militant
+Angry Black Woman and whether her husband, whose father had been
+Muslim, was himself a sympathizer with those who erroneously used Islam to
+justify terroristic acts. The cover was roundly condemned. Blitt had gambled
+that coming face-to-face with their ugliest and most entrenched ideas about
+the Obamas, about Black men and women, and about Muslims would force
+American conservatives to realize the absurdity of these belief systems. It
+did not. The cover seemed to reinscribe rather than to resist the stereotypes,
+since it trusted that white Americans would be able to acknowledge their
+own problematic assumptions about race.
+In 2015, at her Tuskegee University commencement speech, Mrs. Obama
+responded specifically to this cover, which she argued was rooted in the
+“fears and misperceptions of others.” Those fears and misperceptions
+brought up questions about her, such as “Was I too loud, or too angry or too
+emasculating?” She said that the cover “knocked [her] back a bit,” and made
+her wonder “just how are others seeing me?” The anti-Blackness at the heart
+of white fear is predicated on a misrecognition of the humanity of Black
+
+people. Whether that misrecognition is willful or unwitting matters less than
+its harmful outcomes. Impact matters more than intent.
+Donald Trump is the logical extension of white America’s most fantastical
+and distorted ideas about people of color and their power in the Americas.
+Despite Barack Obama’s eventual wins in 2008 and 2012, the fear that Blitt
+captured in his cover presaged a rise of populist resentment against the
+Obamas specifically, and Blacks and Muslims in general, that would come
+roaring back fiercely. In the 2016 elections, white fear ruled the day. Trump
+used fear to prime the pumps of white American racial resentment by fanning
+the flames of the birther myth against Barack Obama, claiming that Obama
+was not a native-born American citizen. For years Trump stoked the fires of
+the birther myth, continuing even after Canadian-born Ted Cruz became his
+primary opposition in the 2016 Republican primaries. Donald Trump deftly
+used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white
+male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed. All voters
+should have access to candidates that make them feel recognized, but there’s
+a problem when your notion of recognition is predicated on someone else’s
+exclusion. There’s a problem when visibility becomes a zero-sum game,
+where making one group’s demands visible renders every other group’s
+political concerns obscure. Only white supremacy demands such exacting
+and fatalistic math.
+Trying to make sense of the 2016 election outcome, Toni Morrison named
+the problem one of white fear. “The sad plight of grown white men,
+crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic
+stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children.
+Only the frightened would do that. Right?” she inquires of us. “So scary are
+the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have
+flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against
+the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified,
+with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.”
+I once read that the root of all anger is fear, particularly a fear of those
+things we cannot control. White rage is deeply connected to a fear of losing
+privilege and status in a browning American empire. When your entire
+worldview is predicated on being on top, sinking from the top even a little
+
+bit can feel like an annihilation. My fluffy friends, those who have had many
+more years of therapy than I have had, are quick to tell me that feelings and
+emotions are not to be judged and that there are no right and wrong feelings.
+Feelings just are. But I am as judgmental as I can possibly be of white fear. It
+is an illegitimate political emotion that has done no good that I can think of,
+and more harm than it is humanly possible to tally. To say it in terms that the
+“all lives matter” crowd might understand, all fears matter, but some fears
+are treated as though they matter more.
+To be Black is to grow up in a world where white feelings can become
+dangerous weapons. If you’re Black, white fear is frequently lethal. I’m
+willing to concede my skepticism toward feelings as a potential personality
+flaw, but my approach to life is to view feelings as employees that can’t be
+trusted—which is to say, my feelings are subject to intense
+micromanagement. I have to be clear about how I want my feelings to work
+for me. I set up strict parameters and rules about how they should be
+engaged, the lines they can’t cross, and I am quick to put my feelings in a time
+out when I feel they are getting out of hand. Frankly, I resent others who
+allow their feelings to roam around unmanaged, demanding everybody’s
+attention.
+My feelings, for their part, go on strike against me all the time, showing up
+with picket signs that scream truths I’d rather not hear, all while demanding
+that I renegotiate terms. But if you are Black and hope to live to adulthood,
+micromanaging your feelings is necessary for survival. Your feelings can’t go
+on strike in the workplace. You can’t karate chop every white retail service
+person who follows you around a store, is rude to you on the phone, or takes
+their good sweet time bringing your food to the table. You also can’t karate
+chop the well-meaning white friend who moves to reassure you that “it
+wasn’t racial. Clearly they’re just jerks.”
+I think I am a micromanager of feelings because my Black mama didn’t
+play that. Pouting, angry tears, and back talk were strictly not allowed in our
+house. The image of children stomping up the stairs and slamming doors after
+getting mad at their parents was some shit reserved for white families on TV.
+I was convinced as a child that if I ever tried such a thing in my mother’s
+house, she already had a burial site picked out for me. Always sensitive and
+
+quick to cry after being scolded, I tried mightily to hold back tears lest I hear
+my mother saying, “Suck up all that crying before I really give you something
+to cry about.” Unlike many Black children in my community, my mother
+wasn’t fond of giving whippings. Those were few and far between for me.
+But the specter of the switch or the belt was always there—for me and for
+every Black kid I knew. That was what my community understood good
+parenting to be. Unmanaged emotions were one swift way to arrange a
+summit for your rear end and the belt. No one had time for my intense Blackgirl emotions.
+Black children learn early that our fears are not, and cannot be, the first
+order of business in a family trying to survive. When I was seven, and
+starting the third grade, my mother asked me one day, “If I get you a key to the
+house, do you feel like you can come home on the bus after school every day
+and stay by yourself until I get home from work?” “No,” I told her, “I would
+just like to keep going to daycare.” The look on my mom’s face, a mix of
+disappointment, distress, and a bit of disdain, told me that “No” had not been
+the right answer. It wasn’t really a question.
+Skyrocketing childcare costs continue to disadvantage Black families,
+particularly in households like mine, headed by a single breadwinner mother.
+According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all
+Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the
+family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely on a married mother as
+the breadwinner. In every state in the United States, there are more single
+than married Black mothers. In every state in the United States, there are
+more married white mothers than single ones. In twenty-four states, the cost
+of childcare exceeds the cost of rent, and in many states the cost of childcare
+exceeds the 10 percent income-affordability threshold established by federal
+agencies. In my hometown, childcare currently costs 8 percent of a family’s
+budget, that is, if they make enough to meet cost-of-living standards. And if
+you live in a big city, forget about it. In the 1980s, my mother was an hourly
+employee for a local construction firm. Childcare costs surely exceeded the
+affordability threshold.
+At age seven, my latchkey status became official. I was just going to have
+to “be a big girl,” get over my fear of monsters in the closet and boogie men
+
+under the bed, and do my mama a solid. To manage both our fears, my mother
+insisted that I call her as soon as I walked into the house and closed and
+locked the door behind me. I was not allowed to go outside until she came
+home. And when darkness came earlier and earlier at the end of each fall, I
+would turn on all the lights, walk into all the rooms, and make sure no one
+who shouldn’t be there was there. I don’t know if latchkey adulthood is a
+thing, but since I have lived alone for the entirety of my adult life, I do often
+still turn on all the lights when I arrive home and walk into all the rooms to
+make sure there are no intruders. Part of what being a latchkey kid taught me
+is that overcoming fear is first and foremost about having the courage to look
+under the bed.
+Black girls learn that managing our fears is the key to our families’ ability
+to survive and thrive. At the beginning of third grade, I conquered my fear of
+being home alone for the greater good of my family. By the beginning of
+fourth grade, my mother had saved enough even on her limited income to
+purchase a modest ranch-style home for the two of us. She didn’t tell me then,
+but perhaps this was the plan all along. Either her money could go to
+childcare, or it could go toward an investment in our future. Nearly thirty
+years after my mother was making these kinds of choices, working moms of
+color too often still have to choose between housing security and child care.
+In order for my mother’s plan to work, I had to do my seven-year-old-Blackgirl part and refuse to let whatever boogie monsters were under my bed not
+have the final say. What might it mean to start from the perspective of a Black
+girl’s fears and build a world that is safe for her? In hindsight, I can see the
+material difference it made when I agreed with my mom that I was “big girl”
+enough to stay home. No matter who you are, the stakes of giving in to your
+fears are high.
+One of my Sunday school teachers told us that F.E.A.R.s are just
+“fantasies, expecting a reality.” Years later, a different teacher told us that
+fears are just “false expectations appearing real.” Black Christianity
+demands that we regularly confront our fears and identify the falsities that
+shape them. From childhood forward, you are told to memorize the words of
+2 Timothy 1:7: “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of
+love, and of a sound mind.” This verse was to be kept in the spiritual arsenal
+
+for moments when anxiety and fear began to encroach on your sense of peace.
+When you felt anxious, you were supposed to speak back to your fears,
+reminding them that fear does not come from a divine place. We were
+learning that our fears, like our feelings in general, were not facts. No matter
+the clever acronym, fear was rooted in falsity and fantasy. Fear was always a
+thing to be managed by increasing our faith.
+In fact, I do believe fear and faith can coexist. But what I appreciate is
+that the Black Church demands a continual reckoning with what is true and
+what is false. Often religious traditions, invested as they are in what many
+think of as the mythic and fantastical, are not given credit for being invested
+in anything real. But the Black Church is one of the historic structuring
+institutions for the social life of Black people, and it has always known that
+part of Black survival is about having the best tools to assess what is and is
+not a real threat. In other words, the Black Church doesn’t have the luxury of
+acting like white supremacy, sexism, and homophobia aren’t real. These
+structural forces take Black lives every day, sometimes through violent
+deaths, sometimes after a lifetime of privation. Because of the commitment of
+Black churches to running food pantries and tax workshops for the elderly
+and trying to meet the needs of impoverished folks in their local
+communities, they know well that some of the material realities Black people
+face are scary. As I said in the “Grown Woman Theology” chapter, churches
+have an exceedingly long way to go in combating matters of homophobia and
+sexism. And, frankly, modern-day Black churches also have to reckon with
+all the ways in which they have walked away from the clarity of King’s
+generation about the role the church should play in ending white supremacy.
+Still, it was at church that I learned how to have a healthy relationship with
+my fears, anxieties, and fantasies.
+White fear is not subject to any such cultural or religious scrutiny. In fact,
+white fears are routinely treated as fact rather than fantasy. When the police
+shot John Crawford in August 2014 in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, those
+who called 911 said he was walking around the store pointing the gun at
+people. Later the man who made that call retracted his statement, but his
+retraction came too late. Video footage confirms that John Crawford simply
+perched the air rifle, which he had picked up at the store, on his shoulder as
+
+he shopped. In this instance, white fear of the fantastical threat of Black men
+caused the police to take John Crawford’s life. Three months later, two
+police officers rolled up on and shot Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old kid
+playing with a toy gun in a park near his neighborhood. The cops who shot
+Tamir without even giving him a chance to put down the gun or identify it as
+a toy claimed to have feared for their lives. None of these officers was
+charged and convicted; their fears were treated as facts. In other words,
+white fears rest on the presumption that they are rooted in fact; everyone who
+is nonwhite is treated as though their fears are the stuff of fantasy.
+In April 2017, a Texas police officer shot and killed fifteen-year-old
+Jordan Edwards as he and his brothers were frantically driving away from a
+party where other young people had started shooting. That officer, Roy
+Oliver, was fired and charged with murder. He subsequently pled not guilty.
+But Jordan Edwards is still dead. Fear—over having your life or a loved
+one’s life snatched away by those sworn to protect and serve—is at least one
+of the emotions that animates the cry of “Black Lives Matter.” Most white
+people fixate on the anger and rage that feels palpable at Black Lives Matter
+protests. They view this rage with a studied indifference and a willful
+ignorance that is about not seeing or validating Black people’s fear and right
+to be afraid. In the era of Fox News and fake news, the Black Lives Matter
+movement has been branded a “hate group” on par with the Ku Klux Klan.
+One online interlocutor characterized the political program of BLM as a
+desire for “Black supremacy.” Black supremacy is not a thing, if you were
+wondering. But the same folks who believe in the possibility of Black
+supremacy also have a problem with Black Entertainment Television, Black
+History Month, and T-shirts that proclaim that Black Girls Rock. I refuse to
+spend my time trying to help these kinds of basic-ass white people.
+White fear is the cultural refuse of white supremacy. Strewn about and
+never properly disposed of, it becomes an environmental hazard for those of
+us who must live in the neighborhoods (metaphoric and otherwise) where
+white folks choose to dump all their shit. If I’m being generous (and I’m not
+required to be generous), I can understand why shifting power relations in a
+world where white folks have always been unequivocally dominant could
+have them all in their feelings. The problem is that, with the exception of
+
+former president Barack Obama and a few well-placed Black millionaires
+and billionaires, Black people don’t have any appreciable levels of
+institutional power. The U.S. Senate currently has three Black senators.
+That’s the most it’s ever had, and we are nearly two decades into the twentyfirst century. In 2013, the median net wealth for white families was over
+$141,000. For Black families, it was $11,000. According to a joint study by
+the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise
+Development, it would take Black people 228 years to catch up to the amount
+of net wealth that white people currently possess. White people fear a
+fantastical rise of racial power that they have made damn-near structurally
+impossible for Black people to achieve.
+Letting fear rule is dangerous if you’re a regular person. If you have levels
+of privilege and power unmatched in the modern world, being ruled by fear
+is catastrophic for those with less power than you. Fear of Black people is
+one of the grandest delusions of white supremacy. It’s the reason why even
+police officers of color—Black, Asian, and Latino—are often quick on the
+trigger when they are policing Black men. In Charlotte, North Carolina, on
+September 20, 2016, a Black officer shot Keith Lamont Scott as he was
+sitting in his car waiting on his grandchild to get off the school bus. The
+officer said Scott looked suspicious and that he feared for his life. Scott had
+no weapon. A Latino officer shot Philando Castile. White fear of Black
+people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white
+supremacy, a virus that infects us all. That Black lives are at the mercy of
+those emboldened and sanctioned by the state to enact the worst of their
+fantasies upon us is enough to make us lose faith in the whole damn system.
+Curiosity is often the first casualty of the politics of fear. Sometimes the
+things we fear most are our questions. More specifically, we fear the
+questions to which we don’t have answers. When we are afraid, we stop
+asking questions and start seeking short-term solutions. The work of my
+hands is the work of teaching students how to ask more and better questions.
+It is the work of rescuing curiosity from the clutches of fear. What kind of
+world can (white) fear really create? What is the end game of white
+supremacy? And what would it mean to start from the fears of the
+marginalized and build a world that is safe for them?
+
+Though I grew up in a religious household, my mother and stepfather
+encouraged my questions. But I was so obsessed with getting the right answer
+that often my natural skepticism took a back seat to my overachiever
+impulses. Having a carefully ordered world is important for working-class
+Black girls trying to make it out of the neighborhood and on to bigger and
+better. And sometimes the hood and the structures that beget it don’t make
+time for Black kids with questions. At some point, it became more important
+to me to pass the tests, get the right SAT scores, write perfect literary
+analyses of novels, and produce scholarship-winning essays for college than
+to nurture my endless curiosity.
+It was years of extended access to the classroom that helped me overcome
+my fear of asking questions. If we cannot or will not ask questions, then we
+are far, far from the path to freedom. Orderly knowledge systems appeal to
+that part of me that is always seeking a clear and linear path forward. But, of
+course, life is not given to linearity. I already told y’all that I’m a
+micromanager of emotions, and sometimes our questions show up in the form
+of feelings. Part of learning to manage our feelings is learning to confront our
+questions.
+One way that we’ve seen questions arrive in the form of feelings is in the
+generalized white anxiety and distrust of President Obama. Rather than
+digging deep to find the question at the core of the anxiety, too many white
+people let the feeling become an indicator of Obama’s fitness and right to
+lead. The question—“Can I, a white person, trust a Black man to lead this
+country?”—was left unasked by too many. There are also liberal white folks
+who went into the voting booth believing they could. But they stopped after
+asking the question one time. Voting once or even twice for a Black man is
+not enough to undo years of anti-Black social conditioning. Fear and feelings,
+especially about racism, have to be managed constantly. White supremacy
+does not fall through singular acts of white resistance and magnanimity.
+There are assuredly people who voted for Obama in 2008 and then voted for
+Trump in 2016. This is because their support for Obama was predicated on
+him emerging as some sort of Magical Black Jesus figure. When he couldn’t
+meet such ridiculous expectations, many white folks returned to their comfort
+zone.
+
+Every time I write about the emotional lives of white people, some white
+person sends me an email or a tweet and tells me, “How dare you act like
+you know what white folks are thinking?!” Haven’t white folks learned that
+Black folks know them far better than they know themselves? Our survival is
+predicated on our willingness to study you, your impulses, your hard
+expressions, your laughter (and whether it reaches your eyes), your gifts, and
+your lies. Black survival means being endlessly obsessed with figuring out
+the depths to which white folks will fall to maintain a position of dominance.
+Sometimes Black survival requires that we be the wet nurses and
+handmaidens for an endless project of white navel-gazing. In order to save
+our own lives, we have to be brutally honest about what the worst of white
+folks, as Kiese Laymon calls them, are capable of, even if no one else will.
+Politicians on the right know that the kind of work we do in college
+classrooms—the work of inquiry and deep questioning, the work of nurturing
+curiosity, the work of exposing the myths and fantasies that inform students’
+fears—can create an informed and powerful citizenry. The students who sit
+in college classrooms like mine today can become powerful leaders in the
+fight against racism, sexism, and homophobia two decades from now.
+Politicians seek to quash all possibility of this kind of work. Recently I found
+out that I had been placed on a “professor watchlist” for a national nonprofit
+organization whose mission is to remove “liberal bias” from the college
+classroom. What they mean by “liberal bias” is that they don’t want a Black
+woman standing in a classroom, teaching college students that racism is real,
+sexism is a problem, homophobia is repugnant, and capitalism and the elitism
+it begets are worthy of our deepest skepticism. This is not knowledge, they
+say. It’s my “racial agenda” governing how I run my classroom. By letting me
+know that they are watching me, they are hoping to scare me. But this is why
+I’m “never scared,” as we say in the crunk South. This doesn’t mean I’m
+never afraid. Being never scared has a cultural inflection to it that is about
+defiance, and about a refusal to be cowed into submission. To be black is to
+know you are being watched—at all times—anyway.
+This is, in fact, the conundrum of being a Black woman in the academy;
+that we are simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. Patricia Hill Collins
+once called the constant surveillance that attends to our movement in the
+
+ivory tower the politics of containment. Being under the presence of the
+white gaze is supposed to elicit different behavior from me—namely to
+curtail whatever illicit behaviors that I am automatically presumed to be
+engaging in. Moving through the world as though under the constant gaze of
+white folks is something Black people with middle-class aspirations are
+taught from a young age to perfect. To repeat part two of the Respectables’
+Credo: “Never let them catch you slippin’.” Be perfect. Never fuck up.
+And my response is, “Fuck all that.” Sometimes you have to have the
+clarity that Ida B. Wells had when she told white people the truth about
+themselves and their lynching lies. She knew she was poking the hornet’s
+nest, but it was a “Give me liberty or give me death” moment. Now, look.
+Any given day in my college classroom is never that dramatic. Mostly I don’t
+go in thinking my life is on the line. But with the uptick in open-carry permits
+on college campuses, and white men’s penchant for taking out their anger,
+frustration, entitlement, and anxiety on innocent bystanders, the stakes of
+telling the truth are becoming higher and higher. Right-wing organizations are
+not above using threats and intimidation to corral and suffocate modes of
+knowledge production that challenge the politics of fear. They insist that I be
+scared. But what they don’t know is that I’ve been slaying boogie men since
+age seven. White folks are not entitled to my fear.
+When I was in graduate school, it was customary that when Black students
+ran into each other on our predominantly white Southern campus, we would
+stop, embrace, and chat it up, so happy were we to see other friendly Black
+faces in what could sometimes be a hostile environment. But, frequently, if
+there were more than three of us together, white faculty or students might
+walk by and passive-aggressively say, “Oh what are y’all over here doing?
+Plotting the revolution?” Our running joke whenever more than three of us
+were gathered was to yell, “Disperse, disperse! You know they can’t handle
+it.” The joke was that we kept right on talking, out in the open, even though
+we knew we were conspicuous. It was our way of giving a middle finger to
+our very real fear of institutional surveillance and containment.
+There is something deeply profane about the politics of white fear and, for
+this reason, the sacred is not the only register in which Black folks should
+respond to it. Because fear is an emotion viscerally experienced in the body,
+
+Black expressive culture that engages the body is one of the places where we
+work out shit that we can’t make sense of any other way. Southern bootyshake music, the kind of stuff you can twerk to, is the place where I find the
+most productive synergy between the sacred and the profane, the place where
+I feel the most bodily freedom to let all my emotions—particularly the
+uncomfortable ones like anger and fear—hang out and find free expression.
+In both the Blues and Southern Hip Hop, Black folks have explicitly thrown
+off the vestiges of respectability politics to say the shit that needs to be said.
+But I’m a child of Hip Hop, not the Blues, and when I need to work out my
+feelings in a bodily fashion, it is to Hip Hop that I turn, to Crunk to be exact.
+Crunk music, that brand of Hip Hop indigenous to Atlanta, and to the
+South more generally, gives me the lyrical and bodily vocabulary to stand up
+to our collective cultural bullies with my middle fingers up. Whether it’s the
+Youngbloodz yelling, “If you don’t give a damn, we don’t give a FUCK!” or
+Bone Crusher reminding his foes that he “ain’t never scared,” crunkness has
+always been the soundtrack to my resistance. It has kept me supplied in the
+lyrical defiance necessary to look white supremacy in the face and emerge
+victorious.
+Rejecting the politics of fear is a primary sensibility if you were born into
+the Age of Hip Hop. This has been true ever since rap group N.W.A became
+famous and targeted for their song “Fuck Tha Police.” Defiant and unafraid,
+these young men rapped about being regular victims of police harassment and
+brutality and they rejected the politics of deference that many police feel is
+compulsory. Refusing to be nice to an officer, especially when he pulls you
+over on a ludicrous charge is not, in fact, against the law. Incivility is not
+illegal. The police know that, which is why they are jerks to Black citizens
+on the regular. I was only seven years old when N.W.A told the police
+exactly what they thought of them; thus, I was a little young to need or
+resonate with their defiant sensibility. Nearly thirty years after N.W.A
+became our generational prophets of Black rage, these same rage-inducing
+conditions persist.
+This is why grown-ass Black women need Beyoncé. With me, it always
+comes back to Beyoncé. While her pop anthems gave me all the feminist
+good feelings in my twenties, Grown Woman Beyoncé, the Beyoncé that has
+
+emerged since her 2013 eponymous album, is on something different. Like I
+mentioned before, Black feminists had all the feelings about Bey telling
+bitches to “bow down” on her song “Flawless.” But every time I think about
+this Trump presidency, about the magnitude of the destruction it is heaping on
+communities of color, I’m grateful for every angry anthem Bey ever made.
+This kind of give-no-fucks anthem has been put here for such a prophetic time
+as this—a time in which white supremacists feel bold enough to try it. And
+because my personal mantra has long been “Be unapologetic,” I can be found
+on any given day twerking (or trying my damnedest to twerk) to “I Ain’t
+Sorry,” one of my favorite tracks on her blockbuster visual album Lemonade.
+“Formation,” the debut track on Lemonade, is an invitation to a Black-girl
+conjuring session. In the song, the High Priestess of Hip Hop Culture tells us,
+“Okay ladies. Now, let’s get in formation.” She is calling us into very
+particular formations—the kinds of collective gatherings that can shift the
+culture, that can combat white supremacy, and sexism, and homophobia, the
+kinds of spaces that can use Black-girl magic to change the world. When
+Beyoncé tells all the fly chicks to get in formation, she is asking us to get our
+shit together so we can do the work that needs to be done. And the stakes are
+high as hell, because Black people are being killed. So, she reminds us,
+“Slay, trick. Or you get eliminated.” Now that might be a reference to some
+kind of dance competition. But it’s also a revision of “Never let them catch
+you slippin’.” Be the best. Be exceptional. Or get eliminated.
+The video for “Formation” pays homage to post-Katrina New Orleans and
+ends with Bey using the weight of her body to sink a New Orleans police
+cruiser into the flood’s waters. Putting middle fingers up to the state that
+incarcerates the most people per capita anywhere on the globe, and including
+an image of a Black boy dancing for his life while staring down a line of
+police in riot gear, is a bold fuck-you to the forces that seek to snuff out
+Black lives. I fucks with Grown Woman Beyoncé, even more than I fucked
+with her during my girlhood, because Lemonade gives us a portrait of a
+Black woman reckoning with her rage, in both its intimate and its structural
+dimensions.
+But I also love the political vision that emerges from the visual album that
+accompanies Lemonade. That political vision centers its hope in the
+
+collective magic, the indefatigable stamina, and the enduring power of Black
+women and girls. When Beyoncé used her own body to sink that police
+cruiser, she reminded us of all the ways Black women are willing to put their
+lives on the line to combat state violence. The sacrifices that Black women
+and girls make create more opportunities and possibilities for our
+communities. Getting into formation with other like-minded folks is one way
+we can help our fears not to win. In those formations, we can find joy,
+support, and strategies to help us overcome. When Black girls get in
+formation, the nation should follow.
+
+LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE
+
+My grandmother had this way of beginning conversations with me in the
+middle. Perhaps you figured that out from the impromptu sex talk. She’d start
+conversations with an accusation. On the regular, she told me, “You need to
+stop being so mean! Then you could get a boyfriend!” After saying this, she’d
+cut her roaming eyes at me, scolding, assessing, and reading me. It was as
+though she had been waiting on an opportunity to tell me about myself. Who
+says my goal in life is to get a boyfriend, Grandmama?! And if by “mean,”
+you mean “serious,” about my business, and inhospitable to bullshit, well,
+wonder where I got that from?! Fuming internally, I just shook my head,
+frustrated at this unsolicited intrusion and unwelcome advice. How could I
+tell Grandmama that my lack of a boyfriend wasn’t because of a lack of
+desire on my part? From what I could ascertain, absolutely nobody wanted
+me. She started these conversations with me during my vacations home from
+college, which was just about the same time I realized that education and
+smarts weren’t necessarily a pathway to finding a bae.
+My grandmama had never understood why I wanted to go thousands of
+miles away, “upstate” as Southerners call it, to college. “Stop studyin’
+yourself!” she’d admonish every time she caught seven- or eight-year-old me
+zoned out in a world of my own thoughts. “All those books gone run ya
+crazy,” she’d pronounce emphatically. Maybe she was right. My love for
+books had taken me miles and miles away. To the world of beautiful Black
+boys at Howard. I wasn’t the first in my family to attend college, but my goal
+was to be the first to graduate. That meant I had to keep my head in the books
+and my legs closed. Neither my mother nor my grandmother ever preached
+
+such a sermon to me. But they didn’t have to. Ambition was its own
+motivation. I couldn’t let knuckleheaded boys come along and ruin my life
+chances. At least, this is what I told myself. But staying in the books and then
+later focusing on my career wasn’t in the least bit hard when literally no one
+was trying to date me.
+How could I tell my grandmother that? That I didn’t have half the swag
+she’d apparently had at my age. That brothers didn’t want me. And that it
+wasn’t a figment of my imagination. On two separate occasions at Howard,
+first with King and then with Rob, classmates had looked me in my face and
+said, “You’re so unattractive.” I had dared on both occasions to beat each of
+them in an argument. When they were left without anything of substance to
+say, they both did what men learn to do when they can’t dominate a woman
+intellectually—they berate her physically. But I wasn’t a feminist yet. I didn’t
+know then that this is one way patriarchy shows up. I cried in front of Rob,
+despite myself, which only made him despise me more. By the time it
+happened with King, I was less taken aback. Still, I had been humiliated by
+two men who figured out the easiest way to rob me of my sense of victory.
+They made me feel unlovable.
+I hadn’t wanted either of them and had cared little about their romantic
+assessments of me. Still, I winced upon learning that being smart had made
+me ugly to them. They were willing to say it, but I wondered what other
+romantic suitors had come to similar conclusions. Just how undesirable was
+I? Maybe this is why college had been a romantic drought for me. Maybe I
+was what the Combahee River Collective called smart-ugly: “We discovered
+that all of us, because we were ‘smart’ had also been considered ‘ugly,’ i.e.,
+‘smart-ugly.’ ‘Smart-ugly’ crystallized the way in which most of us had been
+forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our ‘social’ lives. The
+sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers
+is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from
+the educated middle and upper classes.” The women of Combahee put a
+language to the way that patriarchy and the men who love it separate women
+into categories of smart and pretty. Or friendable and fuckable. The girls who
+manage to be the perfect combination of both have access to some juju that I
+still haven’t figured out.
+
+On another occasion, a guy friend asked me one night while we were
+working on a campus project, “Brittney, why don’t you have a boyfriend?”
+He had a girlfriend, so I knew this wasn’t some awkward roundabout attempt
+of his to kick it to me. I sat, searching for an answer but coming up with none.
+Really, I wanted to reply, “I don’t know. Can you tell me why?” It was an
+odd question, one that I didn’t have an answer for then, one that I don’t have
+an answer for now. That question haunted me, for the rest of college, for the
+entirety of my twenties, and for a good portion of my thirties.
+What is wrong with me?
+My grandmother said I was too mean, but surely some of my overly
+serious demeanor was a mask, an armor designed to keep men from seeing
+my innermost feelings. How could I take off the armor when there were no
+guarantees that men would recognize and, more to the point, want the real
+me? And what was wrong with being a woman who preferred the company
+of her own thoughts much of the time? On plenty of occasions, men, white
+and Black alike, have yelled at me to “Smile!” when they catch me going
+about my day zoned off in my own world. Grandmama had tried to warn me
+from childhood that “studyin’ myself” would cause trouble. But I didn’t
+listen, never making the connection that such practices made me seem like the
+stereotype—angry and unapproachable. It mattered less that white folks think
+unsmiling Black women are plotting the revolution. I revel in denying them
+smiles. But it felt costly to know that brothers were using similar assessments
+—that women who weren’t smiling were women who had no interest in
+romance. Simpletons. Or, as we might call such brothers today, basics.
+Grandmama began sounding the alarm about my singleness long before the
+rest of the family did. But when I hit age thirty with no appreciable
+prospects, the Cooper women staged an intervention. During Christmas, both
+my mother and my aunt Colleen pulled me to the side—separately—to say,
+“You’re so hard on men.” Apparently, they’d seen one too many a feminist
+rant on Facebook. Face hot with indignation, I looked at them both pointedly,
+and said, “This is the woman you raised me to be.” “I know,” they both told
+me, in conversations that echoed each other so much I wondered if they had
+planned it. Despite their fierce investments in being independent, none of
+these women who raised me had ever struggled with getting or keeping a
+
+man. Their critiques made it seem as if I had learned all the wrong things
+from them. There was an art to “letting a man be a man” and not making him
+feel intimidated, my mother told me, as she recounted strategies for how to
+date a man who made less money while not offending his ego. Who has time?
+Or, better yet, interest? At what point is it fair to ask men to act like grown
+human beings?
+But there is no one more insistent than a mother with a grandbaby agenda.
+Despite the fact that I have arranged my whole life so that I don’t “end up” a
+single mother like my mother was for most of my life, her current refrain has
+become, “You could have a baby. You don’t have to get married.” What is
+this blasphemy that my good Christian, pastor’s wife of a mother is speaking?
+With every rant she reads on my Facebook page about how brothers need to
+decolonize their minds, divest from the patriarchy, and cease and desist with
+the bullshit, my mother can feel her future grandmother status slipping from
+her grasp, all of it going the way of the few viable eggs that my post-thirtyfive body has left. My aunt, on the other hand, the one who has remained
+single by choice for her entire life, wants me to be lucky in love and to have
+a partner to go on adventures with. Her partner looks slightly like radio host
+Tom Joyner and drives a Mercedes convertible. These two perpetual
+teenagers use this fact to aid and abet their entrance to all the grown-andsexy post-fifty parties that they go to around town.
+If I could loosen up and stop being so mean and ornery, which is
+Southern-speak for one who takes herself way too seriously, then maybe men
+could warm up to my charms. All the Cooper ladies mean well, but, on
+feminist principle, I have to reject any advice that blames sisters for the lack
+of partnering options. So if it ain’t our fault, then whose fault is this shitty
+state of affairs?
+Real talk? I blame Bill Clinton.
+I mentioned earlier that some of the baggage Black women carry has to do
+with the devastating moment when we realize how much our choices around
+love and marriage are limited by a fucked-up set of social circumstances. I
+blame Bill Clinton for those social circumstances, and let me tell you why. It
+is his two terms in office that are most singularly responsible for the
+structural devastation of Black intimacy and the piss-poor state of Black
+
+love, generally, among all of us born after 1980. The presidential election of
+2016 became a referendum on Hillary Clinton’s support of the Violent Crime
+Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which her husband signed into
+law during his first term as president. At the time, Hillary championed her
+husband’s tough-on-crime legislation, parroting an upsurge in rhetoric about
+the rise of a class of teenage “superpredators.” Criminologist John DiIulio,
+who, at that time, taught at Princeton, began arguing that given skyrocketing
+rates of violent crimes committed by teens between the mid-1980s and the
+mid-1990s, the country had a problem on its hands. The number of young
+Blacks and Latinos would continue to grow, and with them a crime problem
+the likes of which the country had never seen. Lawmakers concluded that the
+solution was to lock them up.
+When Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill into law, effecting policy at
+the federal level, it created a ferment of tough-on-crime policies in forty-five
+states. The crime bill also funded massive increases in police officers across
+the country. Most striking were laws that allowed juveniles to be tried as
+adults for violent crimes, and laws that allowed juvenile offenders to receive
+automatic life sentences for certain crimes.
+Moreover, this rhetoric about violent Black male teenagers shaped the
+social context of my Black male counterparts during our adolescent years.
+Black boys were being expelled at higher rates than their white male
+counterparts. Today, Black school-age boys are expelled three times as often
+as white school-age boys. And black boys in the late nineties were part of the
+first major wave of the school-to-prison pipeline in which schools pursued
+zero-tolerance policies for fighting. This meant that Black youth were
+frequently suspended or expelled and sometimes arrested either for fighting
+or for truancy. Black male teenagers, boys who were not yet men, became
+bona fide enemies of the state, the primary targets in law enforcement’s war
+on drugs and crime. The war on Black boys and men was not new. But it
+reached a fever pitch just as my generation was coming of age.
+In the many years since, none of DiIulio’s predictions have come true. He
+and other white male criminologists stoked the most base fears of white
+America, and his erroneous conclusions devastated the social, economic, and
+intimate prospects of a whole generation of Black folks—my generation of
+
+Black folks. These crime policies took greatest effect just as people born in
+the late 1970s and early 1980s began reaching adolescence and young
+adulthood. Late Gen Xers, cusp Millennials or “Xennials” (like myself), and
+Millennials proper began to use the language of Black men as an
+“endangered species” to name the epidemic levels of casualty and outmigration of Black men into prisons that we witnessed. We believed the myth
+that there were more Black men in jail than in college. There never were, but
+the numbers were always far too close for comfort. And, of course, there
+were more Black women than Black men in college. Howard’s ratio in the
+early 2000s was 3:2, and that was pretty good among college populations.
+These days, DiIulio is notably repentant, having admitted to being wrong.
+Now he spends a great deal of time trying to help the very communities that
+were hurt by the whack social science that he used to swear by. Twenty years
+later, it amounts, for him, to a heavy, if sincere, shoulder shrug. For those of
+us young Black people who weathered the storm, the consequences have
+been far more severe, far more sinister. I have spent many a Christmas
+holiday traveling to even smaller rural areas of Louisiana than the one I grew
+up in to visit the many men in my family who have been victimized by the
+politics of mass incarceration. I have watched them attempt to father
+children, to maintain partnerships, and to hold on to hope from behind bars. I
+have seen the endless cotton fields that they spend their days gazing out upon,
+in the Podunk backwoods of Louisiana, much like the view that many of our
+ancestors must have gazed upon 150 or more years ago. And, for those of us
+making life go on while critical parts of our family units were locked away, I
+have watched children spiral and struggle, and partners keep vigil, and
+mothers labor on makeshift altars in prayer, waiting on men they love to
+come home.
+I have also been forced to play a numbers game in the name of love that
+has increasingly diminished returns for every year that you don’t win. And by
+winning, I mean finding someone to spend your life with. I wish I were
+mature enough, feminist enough, not to think of marriage or the securing of
+lifelong partnership as a win, or of the absence of these things as a loss, but I
+do. Despite myself. Sometimes I run the numbers in my head, but this, too, is
+a double-edged sword. When I see the abysmal state of Black love by the
+
+numbers, it’s hard to blame myself, but it’s hard to have any sense of hope
+either.
+Only 49 percent of Black women with college degrees marry men with
+some post-secondary education. Fifty-eight percent of married Black women
+college graduates marry men with an overall lower level of education than
+they have. Moreover, more than 60 percent of Black women college
+graduates between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, peak childbearing
+years, have never been married. Compare that number with a mere 38
+percent of white women for whom this is true.
+According to the Pew Research Center, 36 percent of all Black folks
+above the age of twenty-five had never been married in the year 2012. In
+1960, that number was 9 percent. For white people, those numbers were 16
+percent and 8 percent, respectively. So while the numbers doubled for our
+white counterparts, they quadrupled for African Americans. The rates of
+Black men and Black women who have never been married are roughly equal
+at 36 percent and 35 percent, respectively. But it is Black women who have
+experienced a far sharper decline in marriageability over the last fifty years.
+In 1960, 12 percent of Black men over age twenty-five had never been
+married. And 8 percent of Black women over age twenty-five had never been
+married. Today the number has tripled for Black men, but more than
+quadrupled for Black women. Black women who have never married
+outnumber Black men who have never married at a rate of 100 to 92.
+Most women across races list stable employment as a primary factor in
+whom they choose as a mate. It’s not even about a brother needing to be rich.
+But can he at least have a job and the ability to pay his own bills? When the
+Pew Research Center accounted for employment status using census data,
+they found that there are “51 employed Black men for every 100 young Black
+women.” Decades earlier, the numbers were far more equal: There were
+nearly 90 employed Black men for every 100 young Black women. Here’s
+the rub: “Among never-married white, Hispanic, and Asian American young
+adults, the ratio of employed men to women is roughly equal—100 men for
+every 100 women.” To add insult to this clear injury, Black folks attach far
+more importance to marriage than white folks do, and yet we get married far
+less. Fifty-eight percent of Black folks believe that couples should marry if
+
+they plan to spend their lives together. Only 44 percent of white people
+believe the same thing.
+And we haven’t even begun to talk about what singleness means for Black
+women economically. In 2010, the Insight Center for Community Economic
+Development found that single Black women in the prime working ages of
+thirty-six to forty-nine have a median net wealth of $5. Five whole dollars.
+Single white women in this same cohort had a net wealth of $42,600. But for
+every sister who has wished at rent time for a partner with whom to split
+costs, those numbers get met with our most ardent “Tell us something we
+don’t know.”
+Given the WTF nature of these statistics, it is absolutely high time that we
+stop blaming Black women for what is clearly a structural problem. This shit
+simply is not our fault. Social structures have intimate consequences, and
+rates of incarceration, employment, and education shape partnering options.
+Understanding the piss-poor state of Black relationships cannot be reduced to
+a conversation about individual moral failings. It’s not that white folks are
+less screwed up than we are. It’s that they have far more chances to get it
+right. White people have more access to marriage and partnership because
+they have more access to absolutely everything else: jobs, housing, safety,
+and wealth. In my small town, white girls started getting married right out of
+college. By the time I came home for the ten-year reunion, more of my white
+classmates were married than not. For my Black women classmates, the
+situation was exactly the opposite. In the ensuing years, many of these same
+white girls have gotten divorced. Most of them are seriously dating or have
+remarried. Most of the Black girls still haven’t married husband number one.
+Having fewer chances to succeed means that you have far fewer chances to
+fail. It also means that the stakes are ridiculously high every single time a
+potentially good brother walks through the door.
+Those stakes show up when you put up with a man who doesn’t treat you
+right for longer than you should because fear of being alone feels like too
+much to bear. For Black women, those stakes show up when we date brothers
+far outside our economic league because we fear being called “bougie,”
+“uppity,” and “elitist” if we don’t want to give a broke brother a chance.
+During my first year as a professor, I was out having dinner alone at the local
+
+Panera Bread. I frequently take myself out to dinner because, as a single
+person who doesn’t have a typical office job, it often happens that I can go
+days without seeing anyone of consequence. On this particular night, I was
+out in my small Southern college town having dinner alone to beat back the
+loneliness awaiting me at my house. One of the servers came over to sweep
+the area near me and dropped a note at my booth, calling me cute and asking
+me for my number on the back of a receipt. Though I had not imagined a
+brother working for close to minimum wage at Panera to be my best
+partnering option, my politics demanded that I put aside elitism. He was cute.
+I said yes.
+He took me on a nice date a few days later and seemed interesting and
+passionate. Because he drove a jalopy, I picked him up and dropped him off
+at his father’s house, where he lived. A few days after that, he asked to come
+over to my house for a movie night in. When he got there, he said, looking
+around, pointedly assessing my apartment, “You got a real nice place here.” I
+could see his plans for premature cohabitation starting to take shape. After
+movies and mediocre sex, the first sex I had had in nearly five years, I never
+talked to him again. I’m feminist enough to date a brother who makes less
+money than me. I’m not feminist enough to be any man’s plan for a come-up.
+When I told my mother about him later, she said, “Well, at least he will
+work.” Apparently, this had become the standard—a mere willingness to
+work. And Black men have clear and vocal resentment toward Black women
+who want brothers with a little money. Kanye made famous these lines: “I
+ain’t saying she a golddigger, but she ain’t messin’ with no broke niggas.”
+From the age of twenty to twenty-nine, I was celibate with the exception
+of a couple of singular and very brief encounters. That is nearly a decade
+without being touched, desired, complimented, or engaged at any significant
+intimate level. Dude from Panera got lucky because, at some level, I was not
+sure when I would again have the opportunity. Among my friends, my years
+of celibacy aren’t anywhere near record-setting. At some point, after you’ve
+gone years without a man so much as smiling your way or admiring your
+looks, you begin to feel invisible. You begin to doubt your own gaze.
+Recognition is a human need, and there is something fundamentally violent
+about a world that denies Black women recognition on a regular basis. Even
+
+though you look in the mirror and see someone attractive staring back at you,
+the fact that no one else ever seems to notice fucks with your head. The selfhelp books that you read before bed tell you that needing external validation
+is a weakness. You meditate on this while you sleep, but wake craving touch
+despite yourself. This thirst for compliments is probably why no one is
+giving them to you. They can see how desperate you are. Desperation is
+unattractive. You spiral. But what you never do is win. Statistics and
+analyses about how the patriarchy is beating down your door ain’t got
+nothing on the fervent, insistent desire to get chose.
+Black women are eternal optimists. The numbers about absolutely
+everything except getting diabetes and high blood pressure are never in our
+favor. We are, therefore, usually unbowed in the face of a dismal social
+prognosis. If you’re an overachieving Black girl who is used to winning
+more than losing, on a good day, you imagine that you can bend the odds to
+your will. On a bad day, you can know the numbers aren’t in your favor and
+still obsess (over wine and Oreos) about why you aren’t part of the 51
+percent who have a fighting chance. Undaunted by the numbers, the fixing
+commences. We read the relationship books, go to therapy, dating workshops,
+and the annual church singles conference trying to fix ourselves and each
+other to prepare for ever-elusive opportunities at love. I can ashamedly
+admit that I was one of the millions of Black women who made comedian
+Steve Harvey a best-selling author when I ran out and purchased his book Act
+Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. And up until about the year 2012 or so, I
+saw every single Tyler Perry movie.
+Don’t make me hand over my feminist card, please. A sister was
+desperate. It wasn’t that I had abandoned my analysis of patriarchy. By day, I
+stepped into classrooms all over campus challenging women and men alike
+to get on board with feminism. But every night I came home to a pile of
+lesson planning and an empty apartment. It had become exceedingly clear that
+my feminist analysis wasn’t gonna keep me warm at night or get me laid at
+all. I needed a regular old straight man, not one with a fancy analysis, to clue
+me in to how dudes think and what makes them tick. I didn’t grow up in the
+house with men, and I always felt at a disadvantage compared to my few
+friends who did grow up with father figures in their homes. I saw Tyler
+
+Perry’s movies and Harvey’s book as an opportunity to delve into the
+emotional lives of Black men. Call it research. I needed to know: What did
+brothers want? When Harvey said every man had a need to profess his love,
+provide for his mate, and protect her, I recognized this as patriarchal bullshit.
+For certain. Single for the entirety of my adult life, I had long been
+confronting things that went bump in the night and providing for myself. And I
+was proud of my self-sufficiency. My mama taught me to be. But a man
+professing his love—I needed to know what made them do that. This was
+valuable insight I needed if I was gonna play the game because, as things
+stood, I was playing the game quite badly.
+For instance, one thing that Harvey proclaimed that I think is true: If a
+brother hasn’t got his career together and has no clear path toward achieving
+his professional goals, it’s hard for that brother to focus on a relationship. It
+doesn’t matter what feminism has to teach us about the structural realities of
+unemployment and underemployment for Black men. We live in a society that
+says real men provide. And if you are a man who doesn’t feel good about his
+own prospects, then it’s hard to think about building with and providing for a
+partner. Even among those of us feminist chicks who have a more expansive
+view of these matters, we still want brothers who can share the weight and
+spend a little money on us sometime.
+Recently, I had a lovely first date with a guy named Mike, whom I had met
+on a dating site. When the check came, I pulled out my wallet to split the bill.
+One, I’m a feminist and I had kind of pressed Mike to move things offline and
+into the real world. But if he had actually made me pay, that probably would
+have been the end of things. Luckily, that night, patriarchy worked in my
+favor. Mike balked, pushed my hand away, and lightly scolded me, saying, “I
+don’t know what kinda niggas you been dating, but the man always pays.” At
+that exact moment, I decided that Mike could get it.
+Fast-forward eighteen months later: Mike, a lovely, sweet, thoughtful man
+comes by for our weekly evening of my home-cooked meals and
+conversation and cuddle time. We can’t see each other too much more than
+this because he works every available hour and most weekends in order to
+make a salary that will allow him to financially support himself and his two
+children. Single, childless, and elated to have the consistent company of a
+
+decent man for the first time in my adult life, I remind him that he needs to
+take me out on a date. It’s been months since I last dragged him to a showing
+of a new romcom. “I know,” he says. And I drop it. I’m still trying to find the
+balance between advocating for myself and not being a nag. At thirty-five,
+most men have children. If they are decent human beings, they take care of
+those children, and this means that children and their economic and relational
+needs are always the priority. Like me, Mike grew up without his dad. And,
+like so many Black men who grew up with the structural shame of the
+Moynihan Report and its denigration of absentee Black fathers, Mike is
+trying to be superdad. For my part, I feel a mix of admiration and jealousy.
+This is the first time I am witnessing up close a man making the sacrifices to
+be a present father. I only knew what it looked like watching my mother do it.
+I bring up this super-dad thing to Mike as we are leaving a showing of
+Southside With You, a movie that I loved because of the romance and that he
+loved because he’s a Barack stan. We are discussing the scene where
+Michelle implores Barack to forgive his father for abandoning him. I know
+Mike has all the sensitive spots about his father having left him as a child.
+But since movies are (I am hoping) a great way to broach relationship topics
+that are hard to discuss, I dive in. “It’s interesting that brothers our age who
+didn’t have fathers have tried to overcompensate for it with their own kids by
+becoming super dads,” I tell him. “It’s interesting because the lesson you
+learned from your fathers leaving is that you should be better, more dedicated
+fathers. But none of you thinks anything about learning to be better partners.”
+He looks at me questioningly: “What do you mean?” “Well, the reason your
+fathers left is often because they didn’t know or care to learn how to be good
+partners to your mothers. I just find it interesting that for a whole generation
+of you, y’all don’t ever think critically about what you should do differently
+about the partnership piece. So many brothers still resent the mothers of their
+children, but they insist on being fathers regardless.” He says, “Hmmm. I’ll
+have to think about it.” And I let the conversation drop, because giving a
+patriarchy 101 lecture on date night would be tantamount to cock-blocking
+myself. And this good feminist still needs dick. To put it how Maya Angelou
+once defined feminism, “It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”
+
+But it occurs to me, as I feign flexibility in the face of canceled dates
+because of the kids and a reduction in date nights because of economic
+pressures, that I have no idea how it feels to be a man’s number-one priority.
+After the love was gone, my daddy left, too. And now that I’m dating
+someone else’s daddy, insisting that my needs come first is selfish. But for
+the first time in my life, I’m at least on the list of priorities. My happiness
+and my needs are a consideration. This is what I tell my therapist. That what
+I want more than anything is to know what it feels like to be a consideration.
+Mike laps at my big-girl body and grabs my booty like he’s been waiting all
+his life to find it. That counts for something, too.
+Black men’s cultural anxiety about the place of money in relationships is
+real and palpable. Another brother I dated once asked me, “What do you
+want in a relationship?” “Well,” I told him with an S on my chest, “I don’t
+need a man to give me money or pay my rent or buy me things. I can do that
+myself.” “What do you want, then?” he asked rather testily. “I want a
+partner, someone who shows up for me, offers emotional support, and
+someone to share my life with.” “Oh,” he said, with no hint of irony, “you
+want me to be gay!” This is why we can’t have nice things.
+Black men’s refusal to own their feelings about how capitalism,
+patriarchy, and white supremacy leave them shit out of luck on the regular
+does more harm than good. Scapegoating gay brothers because the
+heteropatriarchy ain’t trying to help straight brothers come up is not the
+move. And when projecting vulnerability onto gay men doesn’t work, too
+many brothers heap their fear, anxiety, and resentment on Black women.
+Kanye made millions blaming Black women for desiring men to have some
+level of economic stability. This anxiety about unstable economic prospects
+is not new. Black women have been talking about the ways Black men show
+their asses about this since the 1940s. In 1947, Pauli Murray, a famous civil
+rights attorney, wrote an article in Negro Digest titled “Why Negro Girls
+Stay Single.” She lamented that education was “a social handicap if [the
+educated woman] wanted marriage.” But men didn’t date educated women,
+Murray asserted, “because it would be too great a threat to their security.”
+Patriarchy had made Black men feel like they should be “the lords of
+creation, the breadwinners and warriors of our time and all time.” But given
+
+economic realities that limited educational and economic opportunities, the
+men of Murray’s day were mostly stunting while trying to cover up the fact
+that they were “as frightened and insecure as modern women are.”
+Fear can distort your view of the facts. Despite the fact that Black women
+outpace Black men educationally, Black men still have far more net wealth
+than Black women do. The way patriarchy is set up, men always have more
+wealth and social status. And this means that marriage has long been the path
+to economic stability for women of all races. Yet it is Black women who get
+branded as welfare queens by the government and as gold-digging baby
+mamas by Black men. At some point, brothers gotta own their shit here. They
+have to own their fear. They have to own that they have always gauged their
+nearness to patriarchal dominance by measuring both how far beneath white
+men they fall and how far above Black women they rise. Sisters climbing the
+social ladder is scary for so many brothers, but it doesn’t have to be.
+About ten years ago, independent, self-supporting women were in vogue
+in Black popular culture. Everyone from rapper Webbie to R&B singers NeYo and Jamie Foxx released odes to the independent woman, whom they
+loved and celebrated because she didn’t need a man and had her own money.
+These brothers seemed to be rejecting Kanye West’s anxiety by celebrating
+the fact that a woman “who got her own” didn’t need so much from them. It
+was a useful intervention, albeit brief. Most brothers I encountered were
+deeply suspicious of independent women. One brother I dated sat on my
+couch one night denigrating “all you independent, don’t-need-a-man types.”
+When I pointed out the contradiction of hating women who were independent
+and hating women who were “gold diggers” (and therefore by definition, too
+dependent), all I got was a Kanye shrug.
+When I was a kid and an angsty teen nerd experiencing my first crushes
+and my first loves, I believed that Black men loved Black women. If the love
+songs my mama played on the stereo on Saturday evenings were any
+indicator, they saw us as gorgeous, magical, and worthy of their best ploys to
+win our affections. Whether I was listening to my mama’s old Luther
+Vandross tapes or playing Boyz II Men songs on repeat, I understood what it
+meant for men to profess their love for women in their music. They sang
+about sex, too, but they also sang about heartbreak, betrayal, unrequited love,
+
+and the joy of falling in love. In high school, I lived for the moments when my
+crushes asked me to slow dance at parties. By the time I reached my late
+twenties, slow dancing had gone the way of the rotary phone and love songs
+had turned into male bitch fests. There is a decided difference between Carl
+Thomas singing “I wish I never met her at all” and Chris Brown singing
+“These hoes ain’t loyal.” Sometimes I wish I could ask Black men “What did
+we do to make you hate us so much?”
+I know I sound old, begging for love songs and slow dances. Perhaps I’m
+asking too much to demand emotional vulnerability and maturity from Black
+men, and at least a smidgen of integrity from those brothers who have access
+to cultural and religious pulpits. But can we tell the truth about it? Is there a
+way to say, without sounding like somebody’s grandma, that three decades of
+turning the disrespect of Black women into a global art form via Hip Hop
+might have some intimate and emotional costs for Black folks? Is there a way
+to do that without letting white supremacy off the hook for creating the very
+social conditions that caused these problems in the first place? Where did all
+this resentment come from? What did Black women ever do to warrant this
+level of hatred? Where the fuck is the love?
+It’s seriously so much easier to just blame Bill Clinton.
+Late one night, I trekked to Harlem for a series of Emotional Justice
+conversations that my good friend Esther Armah hosted in an attempt to get
+Black women and men to be vulnerable with each other in pursuit of mutual
+healing. I listened to a bunch of ostensibly in-touch, together-brothers
+dialogue about their feelings, hurts, and traumas and the ways that the failure
+to think this through in relationships had caused them to do harm to various
+women. Like many sisters, I sat in the audience all in my feelings, grateful for
+once that maybe there were a few brothers out there willing to share the
+weight and do some of the emotional labor of building strong Black
+relationships. Still, the audience that night was 90 percent Black women.
+There is no justice in that. There can be no justice when brothers fail to show
+up to have the tough conversations.
+There are a few critical shifts that I think we can make that will move us
+closer together. First, we need to pursue intimate solidarity with one
+another. Solidarity and allyship matter as much in the bedroom as they matter
+
+in the revolution. Hip Hop generation brothers love to talk about how their
+ideal mates are “ride-or-die chicks” who are down for anything. If there is at
+all a healthy or just version of ride-or-die Black relationships, it is rooted in
+the concept of being allies and coconspirators. It is rooted in a notion of
+partnership and solidarity. The way we love each other, or fail to, is a lifeand-death situation. Black families and Black communities can’t thrive
+without love in abundance. We need intimate solidarity with one another.
+Method Man said it this way in the original ride-or-die anthem: “You’re all
+that I need, I’ll be there for you. If you keep it real with me, I’ll keep it real
+witchu.” This is what intimate solidarity and just Black Love look like—
+acknowledging that we need each other, committing to showing up for each
+other, and committing to radical honesty and realness with each other.
+Second, Black men have to stop heaping all of their anger and resentment
+over the way that patriarchy has failed them on the backs of Black women.
+Far too many brothers conceptualize freedom as the sharing of power with
+white men. And every time a bid for power fails, it is sisters who get shit
+upon and who are asked to pick up the broken pieces. This has to change.
+More to the point, if you feel like your manhood is rooted in failure, how can
+you possibly love yourself? So much of the discourse of the failure of Black
+intimacy is about the ways that Black women just need to love themselves.
+But when we look more closely, very often it is brothers who are oozing
+wounds of self-hatred and low self-esteem. Any man who treats women as
+ornamental clearly believes that outward decoration will hide inner
+deficiency. They have therapists for that.
+Third, straight Black men have to stop letting homophobia and misogyny
+impede healthy possibilities for love. Seeing the desire for partnership as
+gay is teenage-boy logic and it should have no place in the emotional lives of
+grown men. Homophobia and misogyny will be the death of Black love.
+Being vulnerable doesn’t make one gay or straight, and continuing to invest
+in a view of romantic relationships that is set up for Black folks to lose isn’t
+especially smart. When Black love succeeds in a system that hates us all,
+there is something profoundly queer about that. Queer Black folks have
+survived precisely because they have refused to let traditional ideas about
+
+what love and relationships should look like dictate what is possible for
+them.
+Partnership, and all of the practices that are necessary to achieve it,
+disrupt the social hierarchies that currently structure Black intimacy.
+Partnership demands that we meet each other on equal footing. Partnership
+stops placing the entire onus on Black men to profess, protect, and provide.
+That’s too much weight to carry. We all need someone to speak up for us, to
+look out for us, and to share resources to help us make it. We bring all our
+strengths and our weaknesses to the table. We agree that no matter what we
+ride for each other. We decide that we are coconspirators in a project of
+Black love. We agree to do the work we need to do to be together. We center
+a justice practice as a love language. We commit to being intimately and
+relationally just with one another.
+If my grandmother could see this lay of the land, I think she would say,
+“You young folks study yourselves way too much!” In other words, we
+overthink everything and take it all so deadly seriously. We have to figure out
+how to commit to the fierce pursuit of joy with one another. There was a boy
+whom I thought I loved, a Southern country boy intellectual, who seemed like
+the prototype of the kind of man I thought I should marry. Randy was the kind
+of dude who could quote Black feminist theorists like bell hooks and Patricia
+Hill Collins off the dome. We were intellectual kindred spirits. He had a
+reputation for being a ladies’ man, though, and once when we were honest
+enough to joke about it, he said to me, “I’m a feminist. I love women.” During
+one conversation, in the spring of 2008, when it looked like Barack Obama
+would have a real chance of clinching the Democratic nomination, I had
+lunch with Randy. He said, “I don’t understand why Michelle Obama hasn’t
+quit her job yet.” Looking curiously at him, I asked, “Well, why would she?
+He isn’t the nominee yet.” And in the parlance of a church boy, he said, “Yes,
+but surely it’s time for her to get fully on board with his vision.” In that
+moment I knew that, while Randy was a feminist intellectually, his first
+impulse emotionally was to expect a high-powered career woman like
+Michelle Obama to quit her job, to support her husband going after his
+dreams. That wasn’t feminist. Lots of men have feminist rhetoric down, but
+many of them haven’t done the emotional work of showing up for a woman
+
+with dreams and visions of her own. I learned in that moment that marrying a
+feminist dude wasn’t the goal. Instead, I learned to look for men who
+genuinely like and value women as people.
+Years later, though, I saw the girl Randy did marry. A lovely woman with
+a career of her own, who prioritized supporting his career. None of this
+surprised me. But the thing I also discovered was that she made him laugh
+uproariously on the regular. I realized that even though my assessments about
+the legitimacy of his feminist politics were right, and our intellectual kinship
+mattered, in the end he chose a partner with whom he could find
+unadulterated joy. And in this, too, is a lesson. Given the hard realities that
+Black folks face in finding their way to one another, Black love is nothing if
+it is not simultaneously a conduit to Black joy. The lessons seem to be: Find
+someone who makes you laugh. Find someone who doesn’t allow you to take
+yourself too seriously. Find someone who brings you joy. And please, please
+bring back slow dancing.
+
+FAVOR AIN’T FAIR
+
+Survivor’s guilt shows up in a really odd way among Black radical
+intellectuals. The ongoing narrative in Black social justice and academic
+spaces is that working-class Black neighborhoods—the hood, the ghetto, the
+projects—are revolutionary. One activist told me during a training for
+organizers that it was the job of Black professionals, those of us who had
+“made it,” to return to the live in the hood.
+I lived for four of my first five years in the projects. I remember it. And
+while the projects in the small-town South are not at all comparable to the
+horror stories I hear coming out of urban ghettos, I have no intention of
+returning. And I don’t have any guilt about it. The activist who insisted that I
+should want to return is himself first-generation middle class. His parents
+grew up in the hood, and he suffered from a serious case of FOMO. His
+solution was that we should all, therefore, return.
+I, on the other hand, witnessed exactly what the daily grind looked like for
+my mother, who had the nerve to have middle-class aspirations as she
+slowly, methodically worked her way from a place in the projects to a
+modest apartment to a house. When I was about four, my mom, dad, and I
+went to the A&P grocery store. My mom, still in her work clothes, looked
+bone tired. As the groceries sailed down the conveyor belt, my dad stood at
+the other end. When time came to pay, only my mother reached for her wallet.
+I looked at Daddy, expecting, thinking, waiting on him to contribute. He
+looked at me sheepishly, almost shrugging, as my mother paid for the
+groceries alone. Why hadn’t my daddy helped my mommy?
+
+In the months to come, Daddy bounced, strutting out the door one sunny
+morning, with a white towel slung over the shoulder of his bare torso, after
+my mother summoned the courage to tell him “It’s over.” He left without
+incident, refusing even to catch my eye as I sat on the sofa, witnessing his
+exit.
+I asked my mother what motivated her to want to get out of the projects,
+even though all of her friends still lived there. She said simply, “I saw
+people going to sleep all around me. I wanted better for you.” Concentrated
+poverty meant that seeing ambulances and hearing police sirens were a
+regular occurrence. One evening, one of mama’s friends showed up holding a
+bloody T-shirt in a bag. Her brother had been stabbed and, though he would
+be fine, she had gone to the hospital to collect his belongings. I knew her
+brother, and I was horrified to see the bloody contents of that bag dangling
+from her hands while she stood in our living room.
+There is often little peace and quiet and even less space to think when
+violence can show up in your living room at any given time. I told the young
+activist who began to belligerently insist on his revolutionary hood housing
+program that asking Black women to move back into violent, underresourced spaces didn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me. His
+revolution was rooted in a male-centered conception of men politicking in
+the ghetto. But Black women’s revolutions are always about safety, food, and
+education for women, children, and the elderly. No matter where the sisters
+are, we are always making meals, raising children, and keeping things
+together. When we do make it out, we make it out in the simple hopes that it
+will be a little easier to keep things together now. Guilting Black folks,
+particularly Black women, for pursuing safety, care, and possibility for their
+children is not a freedom project.
+When my mother announced casually while putting away laundry in our
+apartment, “We’re getting a house,” I jumped on her back, hugging her,
+shrieking for joy. This was a big deal, even though she was playing it cool.
+When we pulled up to the house, I vaguely remembered that I had seen
+Chip Brown, the little brother of Tami Brown (the girl who had called me
+“nigger”), peering out from the screen door of this very house, the year
+before when my school bus passed through the neighborhood. After they had
+
+moved out, my mother’s realtor had come and cried, she’d told my mother,
+over the mess they’d made of the place. On the Saturdays leading up to our
+move, I helped wash the walls at our new house while Mama climbed on the
+kitchen counters, unscrewed all the old cabinets, stripped the old varnish
+from them, and replaced it with a shiny new coat. During breaks, I rolled my
+eight-year-old body on the new blue carpet, thinking it felt so nice compared
+to the dingy brown carpet in the apartment we were leaving.
+Those were the triumphs. But the stress showed up, too, in the form of my
+mother’s perpetually upset stomach, her painful and chronic ingrown toenails
+that there was no money to fix, and the kind of strictness that occurs when you
+don’t have time for your child to do anything but toe the line. My mother
+believed in old-school parenting, which meant she didn’t believe it was her
+job to entertain me. “That is why you have a room full of books and toys,”
+she would pointedly remind me every time I complained too much about
+being bored. Getting Mama to play board games with me, or to let me play in
+her hair and call her by her first name were treats reserved for special days.
+I became an exceptional student, because it was the only job I had. My
+mother went to work to make a life for us, and I went to school and made A’s.
+A’s made my mother proud, and I was a classic overachieving only child,
+deeply adult-identified and invested in keeping my mother happy. Getting A’s
+was not rewarded. That was the expectation. When it became clear to my
+community—family members, teachers, church congregation—that I was an
+exceptionally smart child, the refrain of my interactions with these adults
+became “Get your lesson, girl! Keep your head in them books! If you put God
+first, you can go anywhere and be anything.” I loved all the positive attention,
+and brought home all the A’s I could to keep it going.
+Being singled out as exceptional by the adults at home and school created
+its own set of problems among my peers. I became a target of other Black
+children in the community, who accused me of “talking too proper” and
+“acting white.” From their vantage point, I was trying to be special and
+different, in ways that they either could not be or did not want to be. One
+Saturday, two girls from down the street came to visit. We weren’t friends
+entirely, but we were cool. It was almost as if Dominique and Trecie had
+been given a dare to come knock on my door and see what would happen. I
+
+let them in and took them to my very girly room, with the pink-and-blue doll
+wallpaper and peach bedspread, the Barbie dolls and Baby-Sitters Club
+books, the notebooks and papers where I played school with said dolls,
+strewn about. Out of sheer Southern politeness, we engaged in banal chatter,
+with it all feeling entirely odd to me. These girls were not my friends. Why
+were they at my house? Finally, after this performance had gone on for a few
+minutes, Dominique looked at me with pity and said, “You really do want to
+be white, don’t you?”
+“Well, no,” I stumbled, taken aback, offering a none-too-impressive
+response. Dominique humored me, nodding as I talked. She still thought I
+was weird, though. They had caught me at home on a weekend in a place
+where I wasn’t used to being attacked. At school, where my guard was
+always up, when I was taunted, I usually shouted back “Does being smart
+make you white?” Witty retorts were not my specialty. After a few more
+minutes of awkwardness, Dominique and Trecie left. Meanwhile, an
+opportunity to connect with some Black girls for friends had slipped away
+yet again. I sat in my room, wondering what was wrong with the kind of
+Black girl I chose to be, and also thinking they were supremely ignorant for
+believing that a love of books and standard English meant I wanted to be
+white.
+Year upon year of being called white only strengthened my resolve for an
+exit strategy. My mother hated that I was so bothered. She came home and
+talked to me about an article she had read that said we all have different
+ways of talking, depending on the audience. I eagerly sucked up this
+information, hoping that I didn’t secretly really want to be white. But
+somehow, other Black girls didn’t recognize the Tevin Campbell and Boyz II
+Men–loving Black girl in me. On particularly bad days, my mama would give
+me the Black mama pep talk. “Those kids ain’t ’bout nothing. You stay
+focused. And if you keep on living, one of these days, you’ll see how they
+turn out, versus how you turn out.”
+She was right, of course. Our paths were largely set by the time we were
+nine. My teacher, Mrs. Gaulden, one of only a very few Black teachers that I
+had, insisted that I be tested for the Gifted and Talented program. When the
+results came in and she was told that I had failed, she insisted they rescore
+
+my test. They had, in fact, made an error. I was indeed gifted and talented
+and, therefore, worthy of small, special classes and extracurricular
+experiences. Many of my classmates, especially those without benefit of Mrs.
+Gaulden, received no such special care, cultivation, or opportunities.
+Many of those children continued to labor under the assumption that white
+people, and we Blacks who supposedly wanted to be white, had a monopoly
+on smartness. Nothing about our deeply segregated school system ever
+challenged their ideas. And, of course, my weak retorts to the daily taunts did
+not ever rise to the level of a piercing systemic critique. I came to believe
+that I was special, unique, and exceptional. Of course, I wanted to be among
+smart Black overachieving kids. This is why I set out for Howard at the first
+opportunity. But making it out of Ruston, Louisiana, meant that I had to
+believe the lie of my own exceptionalism—that my classmates had fewer
+opportunities because they didn’t try hard enough and because they were
+trying to be too cool for school.
+At one point in high school, my godsister April joined in on taunting me.
+We had grown up together, my mother the best of friends with her mother and
+her aunts. April grew up in the “old projects” while I lived a few blocks
+away in the “new projects.” The only thing that really distinguished them was
+that the new projects had lighter bricks and metal screen doors, while the old
+projects had wooden ones. By high school, April had her crew, and I had
+mine. No one knew we had grown up as damn near kin, that we used to sleep
+in the same bed together while the adults went down to a club called The
+Limb to dance the night away. One aunt always stayed behind and threatened
+us late into the night, telling us, “Take your asses to bed before I come in
+there and whup somebody!”
+On this day, I watched as April giggled at me as other girls, her friends,
+tossed barbs my way, berating everything from the way I talked to my long,
+straight hair. “She need a perm,” one of them taunted as April giggled.
+During my daily debriefing with my mother, I mentioned that some girls at
+school said I needed a perm. “They’re just jealous,” my mother said. Back
+then, I had an enviable head of long, thick, Black-girl hair that was great for
+styling. But I was mostly oblivious to it, since I much preferred to have my
+head in a book than in a stylist’s chair. I mentioned the names of the girls
+
+taunting me, thinking nothing of including April. It had been years since we’d
+spent weekends having sleepovers while our parents were out on the town.
+My mother called her aunt and told it. And April, I heard, got the dressingdown of her life, as every single auntie let her know that “not only do you not
+need to be picking on Brittney, but you need to be trying to do what she
+doing.” Apparently, being fussed out was effective. The very next time this
+scenario went on in the hallway, I looked her in the eye, anticipating the
+barbs, but she was curiously, noticeably, silent. I was relieved. I hadn’t
+really planned to rat her out, but I appreciated the affirmation that the adults
+in her life gave me: “You need to be doing what Brittney is doing.”
+Being excluded and being exceptional are the frequent prerequisites for a
+bad case of self-righteousness. Because I was a classic good girl, I naturally
+thought myself more devout and more Godly than my classmates, and when
+that is combined with an evangelical orientation to the world, it’s a problem.
+I approached knowing God the same way I approached getting A’s. Follow
+the rules, and success will come to you. The more I excelled, the more I
+chalked it up to God’s blessing and “favor” on my life. Black church folks
+love to talk about how “blessed and highly favored they are.” It is the kind of
+explanation that comes to stand in, far too often, for structural inequality.
+Favor ain’t fair. Or so the saying goes. So I came to understand my success
+in that way, too. In my early twenties, a preacher at my local church went so
+far as to prophesy blessings of God’s favor over my life. I had been put here
+to make a special impact, he pronounced one evening during a Bible study
+class.
+Here’s the thing: I’m still a Christian. So I will never discount God’s
+favor and the way it has shown up in my life. This is a challenge for
+mainstream feminism, because much of it is still a deeply secular project. So
+many Black women I know, even those who don’t go to church very much,
+still have deep spiritual and religious lives. Most Black feminists I know
+have some version of a God-concept. For those of us who watched our
+mamas work themselves damn near to death to raise up powerful daughters
+like us, attributing it to sheer strength of will and hard work is an American
+fable that doesn’t suit us. Liberal white folks tell themselves these kinds of
+stories—that they made it because of their own ingenuity and will. But most
+
+Black girls have enough humility to see ourselves as walking miracles who,
+as Audre Lorde famously said, “were never meant to survive.” I want to be
+clear that God has a place in how I think about justice and feminism, but I
+hate God-explanations for structural problems. I learned the limits of these
+kinds of explanations clearly when I returned to reckon with my old
+classmates at the ten-year high school reunion.
+There was no way I was missing the reunion. This was my victory lap,
+and I was just petty enough to take it. I was a few months shy of completing
+my doctorate and had fulfilled the promise of my senior designation in the
+yearbook: “most likely to succeed.” My friend Reina, one of the two mean
+girls from middle school, accompanied me. We had grown up around the
+corner from each other, ours a friendship borne of necessity, since we were
+two of three Black girls routinely taking honors courses together. It wasn’t so
+much that we got along back then as we needed each other to get along. We
+had weathered the storm of our teenage years, and, with the angst and
+competition behind us, we had become real friends. We were a team on
+reunion night. Racial politics back home being what they are, there came a
+moment at the end of the homecoming football game (think Friday Night
+Lights) when the entire class decided to go out for a drink. Once we reach
+adulthood in the small town where I went to high school, Black and white
+folks don’t really socialize at the same watering holes together to any great
+degree. Reina and I stood in the bleachers, watching our classmates split by
+race. We looked at each other, wondering which group we should choose.
+The Black kids hadn’t been our friends, but the very Republican evangelical
+whiteness of our classmates wasn’t as palatable as it had been a decade
+before. We figured we might as well throw our lot in with the Blacks.
+So, we went to a local restaurant for drinks. I threw back a couple of
+shots of Tequila and started dancing to a Hip Hop song blaring over the
+speakers. A new dance was out, and as is the custom of folks who are getting
+grown, we were trying to figure out who could, in fact, “do tha stanky leg.”
+Lashay looked at me and said, “I want Brittney to do it!” It was a gentle,
+mocking challenge, one designed to literally have me prove my Blackness
+once and for all, by standing up and dancing for the group. This bullshit
+
+again. Seriously? “I’m not that drunk,” I told Lashay. Ten years had helped
+my comeback game moderately.
+But since she had, I reasoned, started it, I refused to let it go. As our food
+came, I said to the table, “It’s just so interesting that I’m here. Because the
+narrative was that I wanted to be white back in the day.” Lashay nodded.
+“That is true. People did say that.” Lavonne jumped in, hoping to keep the
+peace and not fuck up the vibe, saying, “Awww, you know we were just
+jealous.” Jealous? Jealous?! Jealous. There was that word again. And I was
+as incredulous about it then as I had been years before, when my mama
+offered it as an explanation for the actions of April and her friends.
+April didn’t make it to the ten-year reunion. She had died suddenly of
+natural causes, a few days after giving birth to her daughter, during the fall of
+my freshman year of college. Thankfully, we’d made our peace the summer
+before I left when I ran into her at Wendy’s, where she worked. She was a
+few months’ pregnant and I was heading off to college. Somehow, we both
+moved along the trajectories that my town seems to set up for Black girls.
+Either you become an exceptional achiever, or you settle into a life of lowwage work and children. Exceptionalism or struggle should not be the only
+pathways available to Black people. When my mother talked about watching
+“where those girls would end up,” I know she had not, in fact, been thinking
+of April. April saw me, smiled, and said, “Hey, Brittney.” I smiled back.
+Childhood beefs were squashed, and we were both moving into our
+respective paths of womanhood.
+Jealousy was the one emotion that I had never ever expected to hear. It
+had never occurred to me that the Black children in my school knew there
+was something wrong with a system that singled out a few exceptional
+children and gave them the keys to the kingdom. I took a moment. Then I
+replied, “Man, I’m not holding on to it. We were all victims of a fucked-up
+system. It chose particular kids and gave them everything. And it was set up
+to make us think that the white kids were so much smarter, while really it was
+simply that they got more attention, more resources, and more opportunities. I
+don’t blame y’all for that. These people in this town are racist.” Lavonne
+nodded her head. And we went back to drinking.
+
+Out in the car, Reina looked at me and said, “I don’t agree at all with how
+you handled that. You let them off the hook! And they made our childhoods
+miserable!” I had. And they had. Though Reina and I had grown up in the
+same neighborhood, with single mamas hustling to make a living for us, we
+resolved the trauma very differently. For a long time she took their
+internalized anti-Blackness as evidence that there was little room for her in
+Black communities. She gravitated toward white friends, multicultural
+Christianity, and conservative values. I went to Howard, found thousands of
+the overachieving, nerdy Black kids I’d been looking for, and healed because
+I began to experience a world in which smart Black folks just made sense. I
+was able to see my childhood, the bullying, and small-mindedness as a
+function of retrograde racial politics that became magnified in the context of
+a small town in the semirural deep South. More than that, I had learned the
+pitfalls of using a respectability framework to explain the achievement gap in
+our communities. Before going away to college, I thought other Black
+children were lazy, unmotivated, and ignorant, and I ultimately concluded that
+they had gotten what they deserved. But at the reunion, Lavonne offered me
+new insight. When she framed their childhood disdain toward me as jealousy,
+what I heard, more precisely, was an awareness of an injustice. Black
+children know when they are being left behind, devalued, and overlooked.
+Black communities have always been aware of the prickly politics of
+racial exceptionalism. W.E.B. Du Bois famously advocated for Black
+communities to train what he called the “Talented Tenth,” an exceptional
+core of leaders who would get access to education and resources and bring
+them back to everyone else. More progressive Black thinkers have long
+rejected the elitism of Talented Tenth–based leadership models. These
+models favor Black folks who are polished, articulate, and easily able to
+acclimate to white environments. There was the pressing danger of Talented
+Tenth types returning to their home communities and looking down upon
+everyone else as unsophisticated, unintelligent, and self-destructive. But
+while Du Bois thought of this as a pragmatic strategy in a world where white
+people were not invested in being broadly inclusive, many of the Blacks who
+came to have this kind of access felt entitled to it. Thus, part of the
+consciousness-raising process on the radical Black left has been to be deeply
+
+suspicious of anything that looks like class-based entitlement. Moreover,
+young radical brothers, like the one who tried to convince me to move back
+to the hood, located their radicalism in the completion of Du Bois’s strategy.
+It had failed because too many of us refused to go back. All would be well if
+the educated few would return and lend their talents to the struggling Black
+masses. But liberation is never so simple as getting it and bringing it back.
+Any educated sister who sends a considerable chunk of her paycheck home to
+the folks who haven’t yet made it out will tell you that we leave and return to
+the places that made us, many times over the course of a lifetime.
+Still, our guilt over leaving people behind nips at our heels, at every new
+station that we reach. For instance, whenever there is a convening at an
+academic conference, invariably some young radical person will get on the
+mic to ask, “Who isn’t in the room? Who are we excluding?” These questions
+matter, but they can also be deeply annoying because very often they are a
+performance of middle-class angst. These people know full well who won’t
+be at the conference before they ever sign up to come to it. How do we
+balance the impulse to think that having degrees equips us to speak for
+people in their absence with the fact that the degrees in most cases actually
+do mean we have something of value to contribute that we might not
+otherwise have had? My grandmother, who never finished high school,
+stayed on me to “get my lesson,” because she knew there was something of
+value in the books I so loved to read. She knew it, and those of us who have
+read those books know it, too. Why do we patronize people by acting like
+our access to more education didn’t actually teach us anything of value?
+That’s a patronizing lie we have to stop telling, for it serves no one and
+insults the very folks who made the sacrifices for us to get here.
+On one too many occasions I have had social justice–oriented folks chide
+me for being elitist while they were diligently grinding their way through
+graduate programs at institutions far more elite than the ones I have attended.
+Part of what I am saying is that the anxiety about being inclusive is itself a
+middle-class Black anxiety, a fear we have of getting too big for our britches,
+so to speak. Some of us handle our guilt by blaming it on God and His
+mysterious and divine favor and intentions. Others romanticize the very
+conditions they have spent their whole lives escaping. How do we deal with
+
+our guilt when we are the ones who achieved in a system that is intentionally
+set up for most Black folks to fail?
+I don’t know that I have the answer to that question. But I do know that we
+annoy the hell out of each other with assertions of our connections to various
+hoods, and blocks, and working-class communities. An accusation that one is
+elitist is like the sounding of the death knell to any activist or scholar
+committed to the struggle. It’s akin to somebody rolling up and dissing your
+mama. But there is a gender dynamic to it. When I have experienced these
+kinds of accusations from other Black feminist women, typically, it’s meangirl shit and jealousy masquerading as a radical critique. When Black men do
+it to Black women, it is a way to deny Black women the authority of being
+legitimate theorists or decision makers within Black communities. The
+absurdity of this is that most of us are only 1.5 generations, at most, into the
+Black middle class. The vast majority of educated Black folks aren’t that far
+removed from the mythic “Cousin Pookie” whom Obama was obsessed with
+forcing off the sofa and into the voting booth. But President Obama’s
+invocation of “Cousin Pookie,” a stereotype signaling disengaged and
+disaffected young Black men, was an intentional bid for street cred through
+an appeal to a cultural narrative accessible primarily to Black folks.
+President Obama wanted us to believe that he knew a Cousin Pookie or two
+himself. The ability to claim proximity to such folks is just one way that elite
+and middle-class Blacks index their continued insider status in working-class
+Black communities. It’s highly problematic, mostly because it’s performative,
+and not just on Obama’s part. In other words, this kind of fronting doesn’t
+help anybody. The sisters I know remain connected to their working-class
+roots because the extra money we do make is often used to help somebody
+back home make the rent or car note, pay for Ma’Dear’s light bill or
+medications, or just give whoever needs it a few extra dollars to tide them
+over till the next payday. Black women’s consistent philosophy is “If we eat,
+everybody eats.” If I’m not struggling, no one in my family struggles either. It
+is precisely this thinking that leads to Black women my age having a median
+net wealth of $5.
+Favor isn’t fair. So we should have what womanist theologians call a
+“hermeneutic of suspicion”—a healthy skepticism—of the institutions and
+
+opportunities that would make of us exceptions. Relying on the favor of God
+to open doors for us is not a plan for systemic change or justice at any broad
+level. And using the favor of God to justify the machinations of a system that
+routinely forecloses opportunities for Black women’s thriving ain’t
+revolutionary, either. In fact, if this framework of favor goes unchecked it
+lays the groundwork for an unholy trinity between the church, neoliberalism,
+and racial respectability politics. Black preachers point to the work of
+currying favor with God by obeying all the rules the Bible sets out because,
+to them, God’s favor is more powerful than any systemic obstacle. At their
+best, Christian invocations of favor are used as a resource in the fight against
+routine injustices that harm Black people and deny them access to
+opportunity. One problem, though, is that this approach to currying favor with
+God is individual. Second, it is wholly dependent upon the dictates of
+respectability politics to work.
+God apparently grants favor first and foremost to those who follow the
+rules—those who tithe 10 percent of their income, those who don’t have sex
+before marriage, those who attend church and Sunday school faithfully, those
+who don’t think sinful thoughts, those who don’t struggle with addictions of
+any sort, those who strive for perfection, and those who are always on their
+best behavior. It turns out that schools favor those who follow these rules,
+too. In shorter form, success comes to those who take personal
+responsibility for their lives. But following the rules shouldn’t be the
+guarantor of rights or dignity.
+Black children and Black people are told that if they simply follow the
+rules, they can make it into the middle class, where the hope is that they will
+experience some level of stability. When this respectability formula links up
+with Christian dogma about God’s favor, one comes to believe that their
+access to a stable social life, with the ability to pay their bills, have secure
+and affordable housing, healthy and affordable meals, good public schools,
+and a bit of discretionary income is a function of God’s blessing and favor.
+Those who rely on God’s favor to secure what the system cannot provide
+unwittingly admit that they know the system is a fraud. They know things are
+not set up for Black folks to win. But since God wants us to win as long as
+
+we do right, then theology becomes a substitute for demanding that the system
+be more just.
+In this way the church, as I mentioned in my discussion of grown-woman
+theology, has become complicit in the broader project of neoliberalism,
+which is marked by a social abdication of responsibility to create systems
+that help the vast majority of citizens achieve some notion of the good life.
+Instead, neoliberalism turns our attention to individual self-regulation, and
+notions of personal empowerment, as the pathway to having anything in life.
+And yet, again, what we teach and preach in churches allows “God”
+language to do the dirty work of the system, namely, pretending to empower
+us while ultimately blaming our lack of social options on some flaw in our
+character or misstep in our conduct.
+I very much had to resist the narrative that I made it because I acted right.
+Racist teachers humiliated me and tried to break my spirit, even when I acted
+right. Acting right, which far too often means “acting white,” didn’t protect
+me from what Carol Anderson calls the “white rage” of my classmates when
+they realized that I actually would graduate at the top of the class, and atop
+all of them. And plenty of Black children who acted right still didn’t have the
+levels of opportunity I had.
+Part of the work of justice for those of us who made it out of terribly
+fucked-up conditions is rejecting the myth of our own exceptionalism. That is
+the thing I tried to do at the table in the conversation with my classmates. I
+tried to find common cause with them, despite the traumas they enacted on
+me. Black people can do terrible harm to each other when we aren’t clear
+who the enemy is. But in finding common cause I also wanted to avoid doing
+harm to my community, to not participate in the narrative that stripped
+children who were just like me of having real educational opportunity,
+simply because they didn’t, for instance, show an early facility for reading. I
+wanted to forgive my childhood tormentors, and at the same time to put some
+of the fancy educational analysis that I’d had the benefit of receiving to good
+and just use.
+The idea that the pathway to freedom is found in better choices is bullshit.
+Take, for instance, the latest research on the racial wealth gap. Any time I’m
+in racial justice organizing spaces at least one brother demands the mic so
+
+that he can tell us that “What Black people need to do is support Black
+businesses. If we would just pool all our resources and stop spending money
+on Jordans and hair weaves, we could have real wealth to invest in our
+communities.” The research says differently. Black people at every level
+spend less money than white folks in similar economic circumstances. It turns
+out that the entire respectability formula for raising Black socioeconomic
+status is a fail. Going to college, raising children in a two-parent home,
+working full-time, and spending less do not make it possible for Black
+people to close the wealth gap that they have with white people. White
+people have more money because their ancestors made money from owning
+our ancestors. When white people die, other white people gain wealth. When
+black folks die, they often leave debt behind.
+When my grandmother died a decade ago, the bank let us know that she
+had a safe-deposit box. We went expecting that there would be an insurance
+policy, a will, and other information about her assets. Instead we found an
+unceremonious collection of thirty-year-old receipts from the phone
+company. Grandmama took pride in paying her bills, and in owing “nary a
+debt.” That was her legacy; that she died owing no one anything. So many
+Black folks aren’t that lucky, and death often means loved ones inherit the
+debt of those who’ve passed on. In every generation, the vast majority of
+Black people must start over trying to build wealth. Sometimes they can only
+do that after they’ve resolved the debts others have left for them to handle.
+In order for people to make healthier, more sustainable choices that will
+support their thriving, they have to have better options. But the Hail Mary
+politics of divine favor (i.e., using favor like a Hail Mary) ain’t about having
+more options, but rather about what happens when you have far too few of
+them. The hood is marked by a lack of access to reasonable options. It
+always annoys me to find out that the woke, radical, pro-Black, feminist
+position is uncritical valorization of the hood. Let me say this: If the people
+on the block had the answers, the revolution would have long since come.
+Disproportionate numbers of our people are locked in the structural
+hopelessness that attends concentrated poverty. Many of them dissent from
+that hopelessness every day by making a way anyway, by using their own
+ingenuity and will to create options for themselves where none exist.
+
+Being asked to do more with less is inhumane. Frequently, social
+scientists point to the resilience of children from difficult backgrounds. One
+time, in a meeting on my campus, in a discussion about the hardships children
+of color face, a white woman remarked dismissively, “Oh, but children are
+resilient!” Celebrating the resilience of poor folks is a perverse way of
+acknowledging the unreasonable demands placed upon people who already
+are struggling to make it. In fact, in this moment, when a broad-scale
+conservative backlash threatens to absolutely gut the social safety net,
+“resilience” is a dangerous word. The logic of relying on people’s resilience
+goes something like, “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you
+before you break.” That shit is evil. We can celebrate and recognize the
+awesome ways that Black humanity and possibility show up without drinking
+the Kool-Aid.
+My mother is my shero. I’m the biggest beneficiary of her ingenuity and
+tenacity. But I don’t mistake the model my mother carved for me for a
+liberation plan for all Black people. Nor is it reasonable to blame all the
+folks who didn’t do what she did for their own social condition. You can’t
+judge the effectiveness of a system by the success of its exceptional actors,
+from the president on down.
+So, what do we do when the woke position demands that we cosign ways
+of thinking that actually don’t make any sense? My entire life, my community
+encouraged me to leave and make something of myself. As soon as I achieved
+the highest possible credentials, suddenly lots of brothers, some with degrees
+and many more who didn’t finish school, started popping up, mansplaining
+that “Even though you might be more educated than me, that doesn’t mean you
+have more knowledge than me.” Some of the smartest folks I’ve ever known
+didn’t have college degrees. As I’ve said, my daddy was the smartest man I
+never knew. I can throw a rock and hit an educated fool. But this suspicion of
+education and its benefits is part of a broader culture of American antiintellectualism that we simply must reject. From age four to age twenty-eight,
+save one year, I was a student. Ten of those years were spent in pursuit of
+higher education. This counts for something. The one year that I wasn’t a
+student, I worked at a public school. If I had already learned everything I
+
+would need to know in my community of origin, then all of the Black folks in
+that community would not have encouraged me to reach for the skies.
+Thus, when I see other radicals with elite access valorizing their hoods, I
+recognize it as misapplied survivor’s guilt and a deep desire to retain one’s
+street cred and authenticity. Whenever we’re together, highly educated folks
+start doing this dance of talking about how we really need to appreciate what
+the hood taught us. I’ve done some of this dance myself, and much of it I
+believe in. Theorizing all the possibilities of resistance in crunk music and
+ratchet television is good, important cultural work, rooted in the workingclass sensibilities of the South. Appreciating the epistemological
+frameworks, the ways of knowing and making sense of the world that my
+grandmother and my mother bequeathed to me is radical work that upends the
+politics of the academy as the only place where anyone is saying anything of
+value. But. The ignobility of academe doesn’t make the hood noble.
+I gained the tools to do better analytic work and ask better questions in the
+university. I became a feminist in a Ph.D. program. Hell, I learned the word
+epistemology in a Ph.D. program. But, more than all of that, I learned to heal
+from the anti-Black trauma and bullying that was the entirety of my childhood
+at college. The first day I stepped into Professor Lawrence Jackson’s honors
+composition classroom was the first day of my life that I wasn’t presumed to
+be the smartest Black person in my classroom. Suddenly I was in the middle
+of 360 degrees of Black brilliance and, briefly, I was shook. Who was I, if
+“smart Black girl” fit fully 60 percent of the people on campus? Suddenly I
+was no longer the only one, a truth I gulped down while I looked around the
+room at all the other eager students listening to Dr. Jackson’s lecture about
+why the map of the world made Africa look so much smaller than
+everywhere else when, really, it was larger.
+The trap and the burden of being exceptional is that your entire identity is
+wrapped up in being the only one. The stories of infighting and
+competitiveness among Blacks that we tell when we get together have
+everything to do with building an identity based on being the exception. It
+took exactly one day at a Black college to break me of such thinking. It was
+both scary and exhilarating, but I came to understand the racial politics of
+U.S. public schools in my college and grad-school classrooms. Those
+
+frameworks gave me what I needed to go back and see that my classmates
+and I had been victims of a system that pitted us against each other as a
+justification for its own logic of white dominance and Black exceptionalism.
+American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack
+Obama can be found in every Black community. I have met brilliant Black
+boys at every step of my journey. Many of them were languishing in poor
+schools and even worse neighborhoods. Just like there are many, many white
+men who make viable candidates for the presidency, the same is true for
+Black communities. The only difference is structural levels of access, not
+levels of talent or intellect. I would not have known that if I had not left my
+community.
+And, despite what I know now, I still remember the loneliness of being a
+Black-girl nerd longing for community for most of my childhood. I forgive
+my bullies, but I don’t want to live in any sustained community with them.
+Over the years, most of the specific incidents of harm have faded. But
+whenever I run into one of my old tormentors around town, typically I know
+because my stomach twists and turns into knots, recoiling at slights that have
+long since passed. That’s a truth to sit with, too: The harm is no less harmful
+simply because we know what caused it. Structural violence is rooted in the
+need to maintain hierarchies, but far too often its most gut-wrenching acts are
+enacted horizontally, by our peers, not by those positioned above us. Real
+radicalism implores us to tell the whole ugly truth, even when it’s
+inconvenient. To own the hurt and the pain. To own our shit, too. To think
+about it systemically and collectively, but never to diminish the import of the
+trauma.
+Survivor’s guilt is about as useful as white guilt, which is to say, not
+useful at all. My mama worked too hard and my community prayed too much
+for me to feel guilty about making it. But I have copious amounts of rage at
+the systems that refused to nurture the talents of the kids who looked like me.
+And more than that, I have a great sense of responsibility. I’m not planning to
+go back home to live, because where I’m from is no place for a radical
+feminist Black girl who likes to challenge preachers in her spare time. But I
+am responsible in big and small ways for making that place and places like it
+better, more equitable and more just. I’m thankful for favor, such as it is, but I
+
+refuse to mistake favor for freedom. Knowing more than the folks with less
+education than you, doesn’t mean you know everything. In some cases, it
+doesn’t even mean you know the best things or the right things. But education
+is powerful. That is ancestral wisdom that our folks fought for us to have. We
+don’t serve them well by acting like we don’t know anything worth knowing.
+Going off to college and to grad school turned me into a picket-sign carrying,
+Jesus-loving radical feminist. I stand by the notion that the ideas I learned in
+those places, and that all the things Black feminism has taught me, can help
+our folks get free. And for all who would disagree I would say, simply,
+“Ain’t no future in our frontin’.”
+
+JOY
+
+The term “feminist killjoys” is well-earned. Sometimes, in the bid for
+rightness, feminists and hyperwoke folks can take the joy out of everything. I
+actually think it’s irresponsible to wreck shop in people’s world without
+giving them the tools to rebuild. It’s fine to quote Audre Lorde to people and
+tell them, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The
+harder work is helping people find better tools to work with. We have to
+smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy,
+and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life
+difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That’s why
+people are so afraid of it.
+But part of what I’ve been trying to say is that rage can help us build
+things, too. The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of
+world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of. I’m
+not interested in a feminist project that only works to tear down things. Black
+women know that justice is rarely found in the rubble. If your rage can do
+anything for you, I hope it can do for you what it has done for me—help us to
+build the world we want to see.
+And since, as you know by now, I’m a church girl, I want to end this book
+in the way that I’ve watched Black preachers end church services my entire
+life. I want to offer you a benediction. My stepdad, a Baptist preacher and the
+first pastor I ever had, told us that we should never leave church without the
+benediction. Those good words spoken at the end imbued us with power to
+go out and live out the things we had just learned about.
+So here goes …
+
+* * *
+May you have joy.
+Joy, as I have heard countless Black preachers say, is different from
+happiness, because happiness is predicated on “happenings,” on what’s
+occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy
+arises from an internal clarity about our purpose. My purpose is justice. And
+the fight for justice brings me joy.
+In your president’s favorite book of the Bible, Two Corinthians, these
+words appear: “We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed;
+perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down,
+but not destroyed.” In shorter form, the Black Church would say, “Joy—the
+world didn’t give it to me, and the world can’t take it away.” Maintaining the
+capacity for joy is critical to the struggle for justice. Things are still as
+fucked up at the end of this book as they were at the beginning. But we can’t
+let the messed-up state of the world steal our joy.
+It is critical in reinvigorating our capacity for new visions. When we lack
+joy, we have a diminished capacity for self-love and self-valuing and for
+empathy. If political struggle is exercise for the soul, joy is the endorphin
+rush such struggles bring.
+* * *
+May you have gut-busting belly laughter, every day.
+Laughing with my girls brings me joy. Traveling around the world,
+migrating down South to my mama’s sofa, watching Food Network for hours,
+reading trashy romance novels and watching sappy romcoms—all of these
+things bring me joy. (Yes, I know they reinforce the patriarchy. You win
+some, you lose some.)
+* * *
+May you ask more and better questions.
+Homegirl interventions leave me with more questions than answers. But
+usually they leave me with far better questions than I began with. May your
+curiosity be unceasing.
+
+* * *
+May your rage be a force for good.
+What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.
+When the struggle feels unwinnable, may you never forget this one thing:
+* * *
+You got this. We got this.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+HARRIET ]ACOBS'S LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave
+Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself (1861),
+the best-known nineteenth-century African-American woman's
+autobiography, makes a marked contribution to American history and letters by having been written, as ]acobs stressed, "by
+herself.": Many other narratives by women who had been enslaved (for example, Sojourner Truth) had been dictated to
+amanuenses whose roles diluted the authenticity of the texts.' ]acobs not only wrote her own book, but as an abolitionist and ardent reader, she knew the literary genres of her time. Describing
+an African-American family whose members cleave to one another against great odds, she skillfully plays on her story's adherence to and departure from the sentimental conventions of
+domestic fiction. In so doing, she used its difference to a
+woman's advantage. Her self-consciously gendered and thoroughly feminist narrative criticizes slavery for corrupting the
+morals and the families of all it touched, whether rich or poor,
+white or black. She lays the groundwork for the analysis of black
+womanhood.'
+Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl makes three important
+points convincingly: It shows, first, the myriad traumas owners
+and their agents inflicted upon slaves. Bloody whippings and
+rapes constituted ground zero of the enslaved condition, but in
+addition, slaves were subject to a whole series of soul-murdering
+psychological violations: destruction of families, abandonment
+of children, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, humiliation, contempt. Jacobs details the physical violence so common in her
+Southern world, but she especially stresses the assault on slaves'
+psyches. Second, she denounces the figure of the "happy darky."
+As a slave and later as an abolitionist, she was frequently conIX
+
+x
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+fronted with this favorite American myth, which she knew to be
+false. In answer to this proslavery argument, she enumerates the
+miseries of the enslaved; in chapter 13 she shows precisely how
+Northerners were gulled into believing black people liked being
+enslaved." Third, and most courageously, Jacobs insists that enslaved people-here, black women-cannot be judged by the
+same standards as the free. Jacobs expounds the conditions of enslavement that deprived people of autonomy, denying them influence over their own and their children's destinies. While her
+enslaved friends and family took advantage of every possible
+loophole" within the fabric of an evil system, working the system
+allowed them only a modicum of self-determination. Because
+they literally belonged to other people, slaves lacked the power
+to protect their morals, their bodily integrity, or their children.
+In sum, Jacobs delineates a system in which the enslaved and
+their enslavers (aided and abetted by Northern sympathizers)
+were totally at odds or, as she says, at war." As she sees it, there
+could be no identity of interest between the two parties to the
+peculiar institution, even though lives and bloodlines frequently
+intersected. The frequent occurrence of similar names-for example, Margaret Horniblow (Harriet's first owner) and Molly
+Horniblow (Harrier's grandmother)-may confuse the reader
+but attest to these very intersections.
+Harriet Ann Brent Jacobs was born in about 1813 in Edenton,
+North Carolina.' Her younger brother and best friend, John S.
+Jacobs, was born two years later. Their parents, Delilah and Elijah" Jacobs, were enslaved, but they lived together as a family
+with Delilah's mother, Molly Horniblow. Horniblow, the
+daughter of a South Carolina planter who emancipated her during the Revolutionary War and sent her to freedom outside the
+United States, had been captured, returned to American territory, and fraudulently reenslaved after her father's death. The
+head chef at the Horniblow Inn in Edenton, Molly Horniblow
+managed to earn and save money as a caterer even while enslaved. Her industry and clientele made her well known, well respected, and well connected in Edenton, and even before being
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XI
+
+freed again at the age of fifty, she had accrued as much standing
+as possible by one who was neither white nor free.
+As a slave, Horniblow could not marry, yet her daughter
+Delilah and her husband Elijah lived with Molly as a married
+couple: Delilah even wore a wedding ring, which she left to her
+daughter Harriet. Horniblow's effective marital status, on the
+other hand, remains a mystery, as does the never mentioned existence or identity of her own children's father. These silences-in
+the historical record, in Harriet Jacobs' s / ncidents in the Life ofa
+Slave Girl, and in John S. jacobs's "A True Tale of Slavery"speak volumes, given Horniblow's seemingly hypocritical attachment to the feminine ideal of chastity. Her insistence on
+premarital sexual purity, a condition which often eluded even
+free poor and working-class white women, would wreak havoc
+in her enslaved granddaughter's emotional life.
+Neither Harriet nor John recalled much about their mother,
+who died when Harriet was about six and John about four years
+old, although Harriet later praised Delilah as "noble and womanly" in nature." Their father, Elijah, the best house carpenter in
+the region, hired himself out from his base at home. Both Harriet
+and John recalled their father as a man of independent mind,
+whose slave status embittered and depressed him. John was convinced that his father died young-in 1826-precisely because he
+was enslaved: "My father, who had an intensely acute feeling of
+the wrongs of slavery, sank into a state of mental dejection,
+which, combined with bodily illness, occasioned his death when
+I was eleven years of age."IO
+By dint of their skills, values, connections, and ancestry, the
+entire Jacobs family had much in common with Edentori's elite.
+However, their African descent, legal status as slaves, and extreme vulnerability placed them firmly on the wrong side of a
+towering color bar. Molly Horniblow and her grandchildren experienced the ambiguities of their allegiances differently. The
+grandchildren admired, but could not share, her heartfelt Christian piety. The grandmother counted on the existence of conscience in the slaveowning class, another faith beyond her
+grandchildren's reach. She sought decent treatment through per-
+
+Xl!
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+sonal entreaty; they both followed the route of permanent escape. Horniblow's son ]oseph shared her grandchildren's hatred
+of slavery; he ran away twice, the second time intending to leave
+the United States for good. Punning on the common term for
+whipping, he told his brother that he meant to "get beyond the
+reach of the stars and stripes of America."!'
+The Jacobses lived on the left bank of the Chowan River
+where it empties into Albemarle Sound. Connected through internal waterways with Hampton Roads, Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
+Edenton served as an administrative center for its own Chowan
+and surrounding counties and as northeastern North Carolina's
+main port. In 1820, the population numbered 1261, of whom 634
+were white, 499 enslaved, and 67 free black.'! During Harriet's
+and John's youth, Edenton was still vibrant enough as a trading
+center that the town's leading families would station members in
+the New York area. The TredweIls and Blounts in Brooklyn,
+New York, who made the jacobses' later residence there unsafe,
+belonged to Edenton's merchant families. During the midnineteenth century, Edenton lost importance as the Albemarle
+Sound silted up and North Carolina's economy shifted away
+from the heavily slaveholding and agricultural East Coast toward
+the diversified farming and industry located in the Piedmont farther inland.
+In 1819 and 1820 Edenton rated two visits from President
+James Monroe; in 1820 the town offered him a banquet, prepared
+by none other than Molly Horniblow, the region's finest chef, at
+the Horniblow Inn, the local elite's gathering place.
+The inn sat on the main street, across an alley from the courthouse. Between the inn, the jail, and the courthouse stood the
+whipping post, where slaves were disciplined and blood flowed.
+John S. Jacobs recalled seeing "men and women stripped, and
+struck from fifteen to one hundred times and more. Some whose
+backs were cut to pieces were washed down with strong brine or
+brandy ..." He described one instrument of torture, the oak
+backing paddle, the blade of which was full of small holes that
+pulverized the body and left "the flesh like a steak." He him-
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Xlll
+
+self had dressed the back of a woman whose back he "solemnly
+declare[d] ... had not a piece of skin left on it as wide as my
+finger."!'
+The Edenton elite, small and inbred, was closely connected
+through ties of ownership and sentiment to the Jacobses and included the heads of the Sawyer, Tredwell, and Norcom families.
+Drs. Matthias Sawyer (d. 1835) and James Norcom (1778-1850)
+were longtime business and professional partners. An 1808 inventory of the value of their joint practice revealed a net worth
+of $8000, half of which consisted of outstanding debts." The
+financial precariousness of medicine, combined with doctors'
+ostentatious standard of living, kept them constantly on the
+lookout for financial advantage. Both Sawyer and Norcom operated plantations that (usually) contributed to their income and
+where Harriet and John had occasion to work. During this same
+period, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (1800-1863)15 and John Norcorn (1802-?), attended the Edenton academy together; the
+younger Norcom followed in his father's footsteps by graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree.
+Samuel Tredwell Sawyer attended but dropped out of William
+and Mary College. With his family connections, neither his limitations as a scholar nor his feckless dandyism impeded his flourishing as a lawyer;"
+After her mother's death in 1819, Harriet went to the home of
+her owner, Miss Margaret Horniblow. Harriet Jacobs recalled
+Margaret Horniblow as a kind mistress "almost like a mother to
+me."?" During her six years with Margaret Horniblow, Harriet
+learned to read, sew, and generally to carry herself as a lady, a
+bearing others remarked upon for the rest of her life.
+Reflecting the extreme vulnerability of enslaved people to the
+fates of those who owned them, Margaret Horniblow's death in
+1825 made Harriet the slave of Horniblow's sister's three-yearold daughter, also the daughter of James Norcom, who became
+her de facto owner. The following year, Harrier's father died,
+leaving the child with only her grandmother as protector. Molly
+Horniblow's stature and residence in the center of town did pose
+a counterweight to Norcorn's power over his young female
+
+XIV
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+slave. Harriet realized that both the town's gossip mill and her
+grandmother's standing offered her limited but tangible protection.
+When her own mistress died in 1828, fifty-year-old Molly
+Horniblow, too, fell to James Norcom and was put up for sale at
+auction. On account of her age and stature, the sight of
+Molly Horniblow on the auction block scandalized the good citizens of Edenton, but her sale, entirely legal, went through. According to Incidents, an older white woman bought Molly
+Horniblow, emancipated her, and made Molly the owner of her
+own older son, Mark Ramsey. John S. jacobs's <CA True Tale of
+Slavery" tells a different story. It says the grandmother entrusted
+her savings to a kindly white man, who carried out her wishes.l"
+In any case, Horniblow's younger son Joseph ran away, was recaptured, jailed in Edenton, and sold to New Orleans. Joseph escaped again and met his brother Mark Ramsey in New York
+City, prior to disappearing forever. Mark Ramsey hired his time
+as a steward on a passenger boat, a position that made it possible
+for him to aid many a fugitive slave running toward freedom.
+Molly Horniblow bought her own seven-room house in the very
+center of the town with excellent access to her catering market of
+Edenton's elite.
+At the same 1828 auction at which James Norcom sold Molly
+Horniblow, he bought Harriet's brother John, then about thirteen years old. John worked in Norcom's medical office, where
+he learned the then common practices of cupping, leeching, and
+bleeding, and the manufacture and use of various salves and
+dressings. As a youth, John doctored the enslaved and later attracted the attention of a medical student, who attempted to buy
+him. His then owner, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, refused to sell
+him even for the handsome price of $1500. 19
+By 1829 Harriet had fallen in love with a free black carpenter,
+who wanted to marry her. James Norcom forbade the marriage
+and intensified his pursuit of her by threatening to place her in a
+small house outside of town-the isolation of concubinage. As a
+very young, enslaved, orphaned African-American woman, Harriet was virtually powerless to resist the obscene advances of her
+leading-citizen, middle-aged, white male medical doctor owner.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+xv
+
+The close relationship between the elder Norcom and Sawyer
+and their sons grew thornily incestuous around the person of
+young Harriet. James Norcom, at fifty-two, was trying to seduce
+thirteen-year-old Harriet, who lived in his house as a dependent.
+He dared not exercise one right against her-exiling her to the
+plantation where his son John lived-for fear John would possess her sexually.
+Harriet found herself in a common quandary, for during the
+nineteenth century, young girls of all races and sexes were regarded as little more than prey: men saw even the most privileged mainly as rich potential wives. In Incidents, Jacobs attacks
+this dynamic, calling slavery "that cage of obscene birds." She
+chastises Northerners who married their daughters to Southern
+slaveholders, for the "poor girls" would soon find themselves
+victims of adultery, their homes scenes of "jealousy and hatred."20 Conservatives like the South Carolina novelist Sue Petigm King and Civil War diarist Mary Chestnut-both of whom
+accepted the justice of Negro slavery-deplored Southern husbands' habit of committing adultery with women who belonged
+to them; it mattered less to Chestnut and Petigru King that the
+women under the husbands' control were mere girls. But girls
+they often were, vulnerable in both their status and their youth."
+James Norcom had been following a Southern tradition of taking
+advantage of girls when he married a teenager situated to improve his financial situation. He had been a thirty-two-year-old
+divorce in 1810, when he married Mary Matilda Horniblow, the
+barely sixteen-year-old daughter of the woman whose business
+affairs he managed. This marriage had brought him control of
+Harriet jacobs's family.
+Norcorri's threats and Harrier's distress alerted Norcorn's
+partner's son, the unmarried young lawyer Samuel Tredwell
+Sawyer, to her sexual availability and made her quarry. He began
+courting her through letters and other expressions of sympathy.
+Finding herself trapped, Harriet "made a headlong plunge" into
+a sexual relationship with Sawyer. Jacobs admits she knew what
+she was doing when she slept with Sawyer instead of Norcom:
+Norcom was building a cottage in which to hide her from the
+town whose gaze had lent her some meager protection. Harriet
+
+XVI
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+had "exhausted [her] ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of the hated tyrant." In Incidents, she says, "I tried
+hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in
+the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the monster
+proved too strong for me.... I saw whither all this was tending."22 Caught between two older stalkers, Harriet gave in to the
+younger evil. As the peer of Norcom's son John, Samuel Sawyer
+belonged to a filial generation. In relation to fourteen-year-old
+Harriet, he belonged to a parental generation. When he impregnated her, he was nearly thirty years old.
+Harriet's difficulties increased when her pregnancy began to
+show. Already jealous of her husband's pursuit of Harriet, Mary
+Matilda Horniblow Norcom assumed the child Harriet was carrying was her husband's and threw her out of her house. Harriet
+went to her grandmother, touching off a scene that scarred the
+younger woman for life.
+At first reading, Molly Horniblow's reputation appears to
+have both protected Harriet against Norcom and aggravated her
+vulnerability. On the one hand, Horniblow's standing among
+the Edenton elite made outright rape of her granddaughter too
+costly for Norcom and his reputation as a gentleman. The dozen
+or so slave women he had raped, impregnated, and sold had all
+lived outside of town on the plantation and lacked highly visible
+family connections. On the other hand, Harriet held back from
+confessing Norcom's harassment to her grandmother, who, in a
+contradictory but time-honored pattern, would have blamed
+Harriet for prompting the advances both women deplored. Harriet's reticence forestalled her grandmother's confronting Norcorn head-on and, perhaps, forcing him to desist.
+A second look at Incidents, however, shows Molly Horniblow aware of her granddaughter's peril and taking all the steps
+open to her to warn N orcom off. Her approach-indirect,
+moral, and highly contingent-reflected the fundamental disparity of power between owner and grandmother. Although
+Horniblow could not afford a direct or angry confrontation with
+one of the town's first citizens, she had "high words" with him
+over Harriet.P In the last analysis, she lacked means of retaliating
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XVll
+
+against him materially; her puny weapons and the need to keep
+up appearances failed her on Edenton's sexual hunting ground.
+Horniblow's staunch belief in the ideal of female chastity put
+her nearly as much at odds with her granddaughter as with her
+harasser. Jacobs addresses her reader directly in Incidents: "You
+never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by
+law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a
+chattel, entirely subject to the will of another."24 But when she
+says that the prospects of the unfree are so "blighted by slavery"
+that chastity becomes an impossible goal, she speaks to her
+grandmother as well as the Northern reader she addresses
+as "yoU."25
+Molly Horniblow accused Harriet of disgracing her dead
+mother's memory after Harriet had been turned out of the Norcorns' house. "I had rather see you dead than to see you as you
+now are," Horniblow exclaimed as she wrenched Harriet's
+mother's wedding ring from her finger and sent her away. Molly
+Horniblow waited several days before answering Harriet's plea
+to take her back home. Even on relenting, Horniblow pitied
+Harriet but never forgave her. One critic wonders whether Harriet sinned chiefly by losing caste: Becoming pregnant without
+marrying, she was acting just like all the other ordinary slave
+girls. Horniblow, after all, took pride in her and Harriet's superiority over the common run of "degraded" Negro slaves."26
+In 1831, two years after Harriet gave birth to her son ]oseph,
+Nat Turner led an insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, some
+forty miles from Edenton. As in insurrection scares in 1807,
+1819, and 1822, the Nat Turner insurrection fomented a pogrom
+in and around Edenton." On the pretext of searching for insurrectionists, white men looted, beat, raped, murdered, and generally terrorized African Americans. For a moment, Southern
+legislators, particularly in Virginia, considered the possibility of
+saving their skins by abolishing slavery. They decided instead to
+tighten its controls, making manumission more difficult and the
+lives of free blacks yet more precarious.
+During the early and mid-1830s, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer
+launched his political career with service in the North Carolina
+
+XVlll
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+state house and senate. He spent increasing amounts of time in
+Raleigh but fathered a second child with Jacobs, Louisa
+Matilda, born in 1833. Meanwhile, James Norcom flourished in
+Edenton as chairman of the town commissioners.i'' To punish
+Harriet for rejecting his renewed advances, he sent her to one of
+his plantations. Upon learning in 1835 that he intended to send
+her children to the plantation to be "broken in," Jacobs panicked. She knew the breaking-in process entailed much physical
+and psychological abuse, which Harriet had already witnessed to
+her sorrow. Several times in Incidents she mentions slaves who
+had been so "brutalized" as to lose all human feeling. We still
+recognize the behavior she described, now labeling it trauma and
+the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome: depression, selfloathing, anger, violence against the self and/or others." The
+plantation to which Norcom proposed sending her children was
+a place of bloodletting torture.
+To divert Norcom from his plan and persuade him to let her
+children's father purchase them, Harriet ran away, commencing
+the long process of self-emancipation that would entail spending
+several days and nights in a swamp full of snakes and nearly
+seven years hidden in a crawl space in her grandmother's house.
+Norcom imprisoned jacobs's Aunt Betty, her brother John, and
+her children, but in the end he would allow Sawyer to purchase
+their two children and Harriet's brother John.
+Sawyer was elected to one term in the United States House of
+Representatives in 1837. He took his slave John S. Jacobs to
+Washington and then with him on a wedding trip to Chicago,
+Canada, and New York. To travel in the North, Sawyer bade jacobs pose as a free man working for wages, which Jacobs, who
+said he hated lies and hypocrisy, found repugnant. Toward the
+end of the journey he left Sawyer in New York City and emancipated himself.
+Now free, John S. Jacohs quickly made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, a haven for fugitive slaves where young
+Frederick and Anna Douglass had recently settled and where
+doubtless all three became acquainted as fellow workers and
+budding abolitionists.'?
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XIX
+
+The early 1840s also brought the emancipation of Harriet Jacobs and her children, one by one. Sawyer had brought little
+Louisa from Edenton to Washington, D.C., to tend her halfsister, his and his wife's new baby. Once Sawyer's term ended,
+he sent Louisa to work for his Tredwell cousins in Brooklyn.
+Harriet finally escaped from Edenton to New York in 1842. Her
+grandmother sent Harrier's son Joseph to her, and Harriet sent
+Joseph to her brother in New Bedford. She lived and worked in
+the Astor House, the favorite New York stopping place of
+wealthy white Southerners and the same hotel where John S. Jacobs had left Sawyer in 1839.
+Harriet served as the live-in baby nurse of Nathaniel Parker
+Willis, the popular poet, litterateur, and editor of the weekly
+Home Journal, and his English wife Mary Stace Willis. They
+lived well, thanks to her father's £300/year subvention.'! Willis
+was well known among New York's smart set and among its
+abolitionists; he had courted Lydia Maria Child, editor of the
+New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, who law became
+Harriet Jacobs's editor. Child described Willis in terms of his
+"aristocratic tastes, social snobbery, dandyism, and political conservatism. "32 Jacobs did not weigh in on the first three of these
+characteristics, but she knew Willis to be proslavery. In 1850 he
+wrote "Negro Happiness in Virginia,"33 dismissing whatever
+doubts Jacobs might have harbored about his politics and, undoubtedly, inspiring a scene she includes in chapter 13 of Incidents. Here, a slaveholder seduces a Northern visitor, producing
+slaves who-because, as Jacobs explains, they would suffer
+violent reprisals if they spoke the truth-attest to their perfect
+contentment. While Willis was hobnobbing with apologists
+for slavery, Jacobs attended abolitionist meetings on a regular
+basis.
+During her years in antebellum New York, Jacobs always felt
+hunted. As the North's busiest seaport and one of fugitive slaves'
+preferred destinations, New York harbored numerous slave
+catchers, whose numbers increased after the 1850 passage of the
+Fugitive Slave Act made the recapture of fugitives-or black
+people alleged to be fugitives-even more lucrative. Jacobs always felt somewhat safer in Massachusetts. In 1843 she fled to
+
+xx
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Boston. She returned to New York City, but another scare in
+1844 sent her back to Boston with her daughter Louisa.
+After the death of Mary Stace Willis in 1845, Nathaniel Parker
+Willis took his daughter Imogen and Jacobs to England to visit
+Imogen's grandparents. In London, Jacobs felt truly free-of
+slavery, of American white supremacy and racial oppressionfor the first time in her entire life. She was thirty-two years old.
+But needing to make a living for herself and her children, Jacobs
+returned to employment in New York City and several subsequent recapture scares. Finally, Cornelia Grinnell (the second
+Mrs. Willis) bought Jacobs for $300 in 1852 and freed her."
+During Harriet Jacobs's years with the Willises, John S. Jacobs
+extended his activism in the abolitionist movement, serving as
+the corresponding secretary of Boston's black New England
+Freedom Association. In 1848 and 1849 he toured as a paid lecturer of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, appearing with
+star speakers such as Frederick Douglass, who praised Jacobs's
+"calm but feeling manner."35 In 1849 John S. Jacobs purchased
+the Rochester Antislavery Office and Reading Room, a bookstore located above Douglass's North Star newspaper offices.
+Harriet sent Louisa to school in Clinton, N ew York, and joined
+her brother's antislavery enterprise. The reading room failed, as
+did John's succeeding endeavor, an oyster restaurant.
+During her nine months in Rochester, Harriet roomed with
+Amy and Isaac Post, a white feminist abolitionist couple unusual
+in their ability to deal with African Americans on a footing of
+equality. Through the Posts, Jacobs met another of their black
+house guests, the chatty young Bostonian, William C. N ell, who
+worked in the offices of William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. Jacobs had already left Rochester when the Posts hosted the itinerant antislavery preacher Sojourner Truth. During their time
+together, Harriet Jacobs shared her life story with Amy Post,
+who encouraged her to write and publish it. Jacobs eventually
+acted on the suggestion, but not in the 1840s.
+The Compromise of 1850 included a tough new Fugitive Slave
+Act. On the lecture circuit, John S. Jacobs exhorted his black
+brethren and sisters to arm themselves for self-defense, then left
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XXI
+
+the East for safer and potentially more lucrative fields. Always
+enterprising, he went to California to pan for gold. 36 Harriet returned to New York City; her son Joseph, now twenty-one
+years old, joined her brother in California. Unbeknownst to her,
+her Edenton tormentor, Dr. james Norcom, died late in 1850.
+During the 1850s, when she was in her late thirties, Harriet jacobs worked for the Willises, who were now settled in their
+Hudson River estate, and wrote her book in secret. LINDA: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself was issued in January 1861 under the
+pseudonym "Linda Brent." In it Jacobs indicted the institution
+of chattel slavery for its physical torture, its debasement of family attachments among white as well as black, its corruption of
+Southern white religion, and the prostitution of young women.
+Such a firsthand account had never before appeared. Despite its
+uniqueness, Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl failed to capture
+the attention of a public preoccupied with the breakup of the
+Union and the impending war. John S. Jacobs, now living in
+London, published serially" A True Tale of Slavery" in the London magazine Leisure Hour in February 1861.
+Harriet jacobs, like several other women abolitionists (including, later, Sojourner Truth and Maria Stewart), put her antislavery principles to work in 1862, moving to Washington, D.e., to
+volunteer in the freedmen's relief movement under the auspices
+of New York and Philadelphia Quakers. Her daughter Louisa,
+now about thirty, joined Harriet in 1863. They distributed food
+and clothing to "contraband"-black people who had escaped
+slavery in Maryland and warfare in northern Virginia. Freedmen's relief took Harriet back to Edenton in 1865 and 1867, as a
+free woman able to succor the poor who had in the past shared
+her oppression. This relief mission also took her to Savannah,
+Georgia; she then traveled to England and raised £100 to build an
+orphanage and old-age home. (Harriet Tubman, in Auburn,
+New York, acted on a similar vision.) But Ku Klux Klan terrorism made the Savannah undertaking dangerous, and Jacobs finally recommended the home not be built. With the end of
+Reconstruction in Georgia and North Carolina, the Jacobses returned North. By 1870 they were running a rooming house for
+
+xxii
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Harvard faculty and students in Cambridge, Massachusetts; by
+1885 they were living in Washington, D.e., where Louisa taught
+at Howard University. Harriet accompanied Louisa to meetings
+in 1895 at which the National Association of Colored Women
+was organized. Harriet Jacobs died in 1897; Louisa died in 1917.
+Although Harriet and Louisa stayed together until the end of
+Harrier's life, Joseph, the son and brother, disappeared in Australia in 1863; his mother had been able to send him money but
+not to save his life. Harrier's brother John S. Jacobs died in 1875
+and is buried beside his sister and niece in Mt. Auburn Cemetery
+in Cambridge.'?
+
+Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is first and foremost a piece
+of engaged writing, a means of advancing the struggle against the
+institution of slavery by politicizing respectable Northern white
+women-as women. Jacobs agreed with her friend and sister
+abolitionist Amy Post that her story should be told in order to
+reveal gendered evils of slavery that-due to their sexual nature-were usually passed over in silence. Whereas many other
+ex-slave narratives presented testimonials against a vicious institution and also served as a means for their authors' financial support, Jacobs wrote purely out of her antislavery ideology. Well
+and gainfully employed, her children grown up, she was not in
+great need of money.38
+Lacking formal education, Jacobs initially doubted her ability
+as a writer to strike the right balance between candor and prurient detail. She thought first to dictate her experiences to someone
+more comfortable with writing for publication, as Sojourner
+Truth had to Olive Gilbert in the 1840s.39 The best-selling author of Uncle Tom's Cabin struck Jacobs as a potential amanuensis, but Harriet Beecher Stowe saw in Jacobs only grist for her
+own mill. She asked to print the whole of Jacobs's experiences in
+her Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Jacobs allowed her only a
+brief sketch. Stowe not only sought to appropriate jacobs's material, she also sent Jacobs's letter, containing details about her
+sexual history, to jacobs's employer, without jacobs's permission. Jacobs, perhaps naively, had also proposed to Stowe that
+Louisa accompany Stowe on a trip to England. Stowe's patroniz-
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XXJU
+
+ing refusal offended Jacobs. Deeply chagrined, Jacobs decided to
+become an author in her own right. The death of her grandmother in 1853 removed the last obstacle to her writing her own
+story, "by herself."
+Between 1853 and 1858, Jacobs wrote in secret, certain her
+employer would oppose her mission. She also honed her skills
+by writing letters to the editors of New York newspapers.t?
+Once the book manuscript was complete, her daughter Louisa,
+who had the advantage of formal education, recopied the manuscript, standardizing the spelling and punctuation. Jacobs took
+the recopied manuscript to England to engage a publisher; she
+did not succeed. In Boston in 1859 she found Phillips and Samson, but the firm went bankrupt before the book could be
+printed. Meanwhile, like many other abolitionists, Harriet jacobs was deeply inspired by John Brown's 1859 raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. She added a final chapter
+to her book on Brown's visionary attack.
+A new publishing firm in Boston, Thayer and Eldridge,
+agreed in 1860 to publish Incidents, provided the experienced
+abolitionist author and editor Lydia Maria Child would add a
+preface. William C. Nell, whom jacobs knew as a fellow abolitionist and Post family friend, introduced jacobs to Child. Child
+agreed, further, to edit the manuscript in the late summer of
+1860.
+The two women's correspondence shows that Jacobs had completed her book before meeting Child and that Child made only
+two substantive changes, minor cuts, and one act of reorganization. Child suggested that Jacobs delete the chapter on John
+Brown and end with her purchase by CorneIia GrinnelI Willis
+and subsequent emancipation. Jacobs complied. Child also gathered together the stories of physical torture, placing them in one
+chapter, "Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders." In addition to
+Child's authenticating preface, Jacobs's friends Amy Post (a
+white woman) and John Lowther ("a highly respectable colared
+citizen of Boston," according to the National Anti-Slavery Standard 4 1) , appended endorsements.
+Thayer and Eldridge went bankrupt in December 1860, having stereotyped the plates but not printed the book. Jacobs
+
+XXIV
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+bought the plates and published the book herself using a Boston
+printer, a recourse Sojourner Truth had also used in 1850 with
+her Narrative. Lydia Maria Child continued to help with publishing and promotion. She had arranged for a subvention so that
+Thayer and Eldridge could print 2000 copies (it is unclear
+whether 1000 or 2000 were finally printed), and she wrote
+friends such as John Greenleaf Whittier, urging them to have
+their local booksellers stock copies of IncidentsS
+LINDA: Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery, Written by Herself appeared in Boston in January 1861. Although the name "Linda" appeared on the book's
+spine, its title page omitted it. As a result, the book is better
+known today without "Linda.f''" (W. Tweedie published the
+English edition, entitled The Deeper Wrong: or, Incidents in the
+Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, in September 1862.44
+Child used parts of Incidents [citing Jacobs as author] in The
+Freedmen's Book, an anthology she compiled for the freedpeople
+in 1865.)
+The earliest notices of the publication of Incidents in the Life of
+a Slave Girl amounted to far less than sustained book reviews.
+jacobs's old friend, William C. Nell, puffed the book in a letter
+to the editor in the Boston Liberator. Nell acknowledged that
+the Liberator overflowed with news of secession and impending
+civil war, but he wanted to alert readers to the existence of a
+newly published book, "LINDA: Incidents in the Life ofa Slave
+Girl, seven years concealed in Slavery," which he thought certain
+to "render a signal and most acceptable service" in a time of crisis. Nell praised the book as more useful than most ex-slave narratives because it was straight fact, with no fiction: "This record
+of complicated experience in the life of a young woman, a
+doomed victim to America's peculiar institution-her seven
+years' concealment in slavery-continued persecutions-hopes,
+often deferred, but which at length culminated in her freedomsurely need not the charms that any pen of fiction, however
+gifted and graceful, could lend. They shine by the lustre of their
+own truthfulness ..." Nell expressed the hope that all mothers
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+xxv
+
+and daughters would read it and "learn yet more of the barbarism of American slavery and the character of its victims. "45
+The New York National Anti-Slavery Standard published the
+book's "Preface by the Author," signed "Linda Brent," as well as
+Lydia Maria Child's introduction and the accompanying notes
+from Amy Post and George W. Lowther in its "New Publications" column on 23 February 1861. The editor, claiming to have
+read the book, added a paragraph assuring readers that it "will
+not disappoint the expectation which these testimonials are so
+well adapted to excite. It casts a strong light upon the system of
+slavery, revealing features too often obscured by a mistaken delicacy. If this narrative of the terrible experiences of a noble
+woman in slavery could be read at every fireside in the free
+States, it would kindle such a feeling of moral indignation against
+the system and its guilty abettors" that Northerners would no
+longer coddle Confederate secessionists.f Several months later,
+National Anti-Slavery Standard columnist Richard D. Webb
+briefly noted the publication of both Jacobses' narratives, calling
+hers "one of the most interesting and affecting in the whole compass of anti-slavery literature.f'V The New York Anglo-African
+ran an unsigned review praising Incidents for portraying "the
+true romance of American life and history" and showing a "more
+revolting phrase ... because it is of the spirit and not the flesh."
+The reviewer condemned the sexual dynamics of American slavery and said the book would strike a telling blow against this
+"cursed system." As though anticipating twentieth-century interpretations of the provenance of the text, the Anglo-African review stressed the circumscribed nature of Child's role as editor.t"
+Lydia Maria Child deplored the antislavery press's lack of interest in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as early as February
+1861, and unfortunately, that interest hardly picked Up.49 Jacobs's publication date, coinciding with the furor preceding the
+outbreak of the Civil War, practically consigned the book to obscurity; the demise of the institution Jacobs attacked diminished
+its interest for American readers for more than a century. Only
+in the aftermath of the civil rights, black power, and black studies movements did Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl begin to
+
+XXVI
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+find a larger readership. The growth of the fields of women's history and women's studies has further elevated it to the status of a
+classic American text. The narrative of a slave woman is being
+recognized as a story of a representative American woman.
+
+Thanks for research assistance to Malinda Alaine Lindquist and
+especially, as ever, to Elaine Wise.
+NELL IRVIN PAINTER
+
+East Charleston, Vermont, August 1999
+
+Notes
+1. Frances Smith Foster notes that the title page of the first edition of
+
+Jacobs's book bears only the subtitle, leading later reprinters and
+critics to call the book simply Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
+The spine of the first edition bore the name "Linda," and thus, in
+the nineteenth century the author was known by her pseudonym,
+"Linda Brent." See Francis Smith Foster, "Resisting Incidents," in
+Harriet ]acobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Deborah M. GarfieId and Rafia Zafar (New York: Cambridge University
+Press, 1996),69.
+2. For example, Louisa Picquet's autobiography, Louisa Picquet, the
+Octoraon; or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life, as told to
+the Reverend Hiram Mattison, also appeared in 1861. It reflected
+above all Mattison's prurient interest in Picquet's sexuality. See
+William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of
+Afra-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of
+Illinois Press, 1986),243-246.
+3. This last point is Hazel Carby's in Reconstructing Womanhood: The
+Emergence of the Afra-American Woman Novelist (New York:
+Oxford University Press, 1987),39,45-61.
+4. The "happy darky" genre outlived Harriet Jacobs, notably in continual restagings of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a proslavery play and
+movie well into the twentieth century.
+5. Jacobs calls the crawl space in which she hid for nearly seven years a
+"loophole of retreat."
+6. Wilma King and Nellie McKay both compare to wartime the conditions under which slave children developed. See Wilma King,
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XXVll
+
+Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America
+(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Nellie Y.
+McKay, "The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church
+Terrell, and Anne Moody," in Tradition and the Talents of Women,
+ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
+7. According to Jean Fagan Yellin, the definitive authority, [acobs was
+born in "around 1813." SeeJean Fagan Yellin, introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, by Harriet A.
+Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), xv.
+However, Robanna Sumrell Knott, in "Harriet Jacobs: The Edenton Biography" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
+North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994), uses Jacobs's Mt. Auburn
+Cemetery gravestone to calculate her dates. Edith Grinnell Willis,
+daughter of Cornelia Grinnell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, erected
+the stone in 1917, after the death of Harrier's daughter Louisa jacobs, presumably using Louisa's dates. By this reckoning, Harriet
+Jacobs would have been born in 1815, her brother John S. [acobs
+born in 1819, and her daughter Louisa in 1837. Harrier's son
+joseph, who died in Australia, presumably in 1863, is not buried in
+Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Yellin gives joseph's birthdate as 1829.
+(Knott, p. 33, fn. 1; p. 75, fn. 15). This essay uses Yellin's dates unless otherwise indicated.
+8. In her introduction to the 1987 edition of Incidents in the Life of a
+Slave Girl, Jean Fagan Yellin calls Harriet jacobs's father Daniel.
+She corrected the name in "Harriet Jacobs's Family History,"
+American Literature 66, no. 4 (December 1994): 765-767. Yellin
+also explains that after the death of Harriet's mother, Elijah married a free woman, with whom he had a second family, including a
+son born in about 1824, also named Elijah. The younger Elijah, surnamed Knox, eventually settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts,
+the widowed father of two children. He subsequently remarried
+and had a son, whom he also named Elijah. Louisa jacobs, Harrier's
+daughter, recognized Elijah Knox and his family in her will.
+9. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: Published for the Author [self-published], 1861),9. All page numbers
+refer to this edition.
+10. John S.Jacobs, "A True Tale of Slavery," 233. All page numbers refer to this edition.
+11. John S.Jacobs, "A True Tale of Slavery," 235.
+12. Robanna Sumrell Knott, "Harriet jacobs," 56, 78. All the enslaved
+
+XXV111
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+would have been considered to be Negroes, but their number
+would also include people of European and American Indian descent.
+13. John S. Jacobs, "A True Tale of Slavery," 256.
+14. Robanna Sumrell Knott, "Harriet jacobs," 128.
+15. According to Jean Fagan Yellin (Incidents, 268), Samuel Tredwell
+Sawyer died in 1865; in this instance, I have followed Robanna
+Sumrell Knott ("Harriet Jacobs," 114), who adds that Sawyer is
+buried on Long Island.
+16. Robanna Sumrell Knott, "Harriet Jacobs," 130-134.
+17. HarrietJacobs, Incidents, 9.
+18. P. Gabrielle Foreman speculates enticingly on the possible familial
+entanglements motivating Horniblow's sale and emancipation, her
+possession of her son, and her purchase of a grand house in the center of town for $1. See Foreman's "Manifest in Signs: The Politics
+of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,"
+in Harriet Jacobs, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 92.
+19. John S. jacobs, "A True Tale of Slavery,"243.
+20. The quotes are on pages 58 and 39 of Harrier jacobs, Incidents. See
+also pages 4 and 57.
+21. Hannah Decker points to the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of
+the sweet young thing (das siisse Madel) in Freud's Vienna. See
+Nell Irvin Painter, "Three Southern Women and Freud: A NonExceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave
+South," in Feminists Revision History, ed. Ann-Louise Shapiro
+(New Brunswick, N.].: Rutgers University Press, 1994),205-206.
+22. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents, 61-62. The Norcoms named their daughter Mary Matilda after her mother, Mary Matilda Horniblow Norcorn.
+23. Harriet [acobs, Incidents, 59.
+24. HarrietJacobs, Incidents, 61-62.
+25. HarrietJacobs, Incidents, 18,60-61.
+26. Deborah M. Garfield, "Earwitness: Female Abolitionist, Sexuality,
+and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," in Harriet Jacobs, ed.
+Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 121-122; and Harriet jacobs,
+Incidents, 86.
+27. Robanna Sumrell Knott, "Harrier jacobs," 83, 115.
+28. Robanna Sumrell Knott, "Harrier Jacobs," 227.
+29. Nell Irvin Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Full
+Loaded Cost Accounting," in U.S. History as Women's History:
+New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris,
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+XXIX
+
+and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 137-138.
+30. Frederick Douglass (1818-1885), the leading African-American
+antebellum feminist abolitionist and postwar statesman, wrote
+three autobiographies and edited several newspapers over the
+course of an illustrious public career.
+31. Willis's father-in-law supplied half their annual income. See
+P. Gabrielle Foreman, "Manifest in Signs," 91.
+32. The exact quote is Carolyn Karcher's, rather than Child's. See Carolyn L. Karcher, ed., A Lydia Maria Child Reader (Durham, N.C.:
+Duke University Press, 1997),330.
+33. Jean Fagan Yellin, "Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative," American Literature 53, no. 3 (November 1981): 481.
+34. Nathaniel Parker Willis's'sister, the popular novelist Fannie Fern,
+suspected he married Cornelia Grinnell for her money. Cornelia
+Willis's inheritance paid for their Hudson River mansion, Idlewild,
+where Harriet Jacobs was the senior housekeeper and surreptitiously wrote Incidents. See P. Gabrielle Foreman, "Manifest in
+Signs," 97.
+35. Jean Fagan Yellin, "Through Her Brother's Eyes: Incidents and 'A
+True Tale,' " in HarrietJacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave
+Girl, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 46, 45.
+36. Jean Fagan Yellin, "Through Her Brother's Eyes," 47.
+37. This material comes from Jean Fagan Yellin's "Chronology," ID
+Yellin, ed., Incidents, 224-225.
+38. P. Gabrielle Foreman, "Manifest in Signs," 80. Sojourner Truth's
+Narrative was meant to raise money to support her in her old age.
+She was in her mid-fifties when it appeared.
+39. See "Introduction," in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Nell Irvin
+Painter (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
+40. See Jean Fagan Yellin, "Harrier Ann ]acobs, c. 1813-1897," Legacy:
+A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 5, no.
+2 (Fall 1988): 56,60-61. This article includes the text of ]acobs's
+first letter to the editor, written in 1853.
+41. New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 February 1861.
+42. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child:
+Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
+Press, 1982), 357-359, 378-379. See also Carolyn L. Karcher, The
+First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria
+Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994),435-437.
+43. Frances Smith Foster, "Resisting Incidents," 69.
+
+xxx
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+44. Jean Fagan Yellin, "Through Her Brother's Eyes," 56.
+45. William C. Nell, Letter to the Editor, Liberator, 25 January 1861.
+46. New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 23 February 1861. By
+this time, Lydia Maria Child had been out of the editorship nearly
+twenty years.
+47. New York National Anti-Slavery Standard, 17 August 1861,
+quoted in [acqueline Goldsby, "I Disguised My Hand," in Harriet
+Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Deborah M.
+Garfield and Rafia Zafar, 23.
+48. New York Anglo-African, 13 April 1861.
+49. Child to Henrietta Sargent, 9 February 1861, in Milton Meltzer and
+Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters,
+374-375.
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
+
+Andrews, WiIliam L. "The Changing Moral Discourse of NineteenthCentury African American Women's Autobiography: Harriet jacobs
+and Elizabeth Keckley." In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics
+of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Edited by Sidonie Smith and
+Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
+Berlandt, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
+1997.
+Braxton, Joanne M., and Sharon Zuber. "Silences in Harriet 'Linda
+Brent' jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." In Listening to
+Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. Edited by Elaine Hedges
+and SheIley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press,
+1994.
+Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AjroAmerican Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
+Doriani, Beth Maclay. "Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century
+America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women's Autobiographies." American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1991).
+Fleischner, Jennifer. Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity
+in Women's Slave Narratives. New York: New York University
+Press, 1996.
+Foreman, P. Gabrielle. "The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the
+Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig," Callaloo 13, no. 2 (Spring 1990).
+Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of
+Afro-American Women." In Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship.
+Edited by Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
+
+j.
+
+1~~
+
+Garfield, Deborah M., and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet ]acohs and ncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays. New York:
+Cambridge University Press, 1996.
+Kaplan, Carla. "Recuperating Agents: Narrative Contracts, Emancipatory Readers, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." In Provoking
+
+XXXI
+
+XXXll
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
+
+Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice. Edited by judith
+Kegan Gardiner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
+Knott, Robanna Sumrel!. "Harriet Jacobs: The Edenton Biography."
+Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at
+Chapel Hill, 1994.
+Lovell, Thomas B. "By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs,
+Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor," Arizona
+Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1996).
+McKay, Nellie Y. "The Girls Who Became the Women: Childhood
+Memories in the Autobiographies of Harrier Jacobs, Mary Church
+Terrell, and Anne Moody." In Tradition and the Talents of Women.
+Edited by Florence Howe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
+1991.
+Mullen, Harryette, "Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle
+Tom's Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and
+Beloved." In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. Edited by Shirley
+Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
+Painter, Nell Irvin. "Three Southern Women and Freud: A NonExceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave
+South." In Feminists Revision History. Edited by Ann-Louise
+Shapiro. New Brunswick, N.].: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
+Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
+Sorisio, Carolyn, "'There Is Might in Each': Conceptions of Self in
+HarrietJacobs's Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl, Written by Herself," Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women
+Writers 13, no. 1 (1996).
+Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
+WaIter, Krista. "Surviving in the Garret: HarrietJacobs and the Critique
+of Sentiment," ATQ: 19th C. American Literature and Culture New
+Series 8, no. 3 (September 1994).
+Yellin, Jean Fagan, "Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative," American Literature 53, no. 3 (November 1981).
+- - - . "Harrier Ann Jacobs, c. 1813-1897," Legacy: A Journal ofNineteenth-Century American Women Writers 5, no. 2. (Fall 1988).
+- - - . "Harrier Ann [acobs, 1813-1897." In Black Women in America:
+An Historical Encyclopedia, Vo!. 1. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine.
+Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1993.
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR FUR THER READING
+
+xxxiu
+
+"Harrier jacobs's Family History," American Literature 66,
+no. 4 (December 1994).
+- - - . "Incidents in the Life of Harriet Jacobs." In The Seductions of
+Biography. Edited by Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff. New York:
+Routledge, 1996.
+Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by
+Herself, by Harriet A. [acobs. Edited by L. Maria Child. Cambridge,
+Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
+
+A NOTE ON THE TEXT
+
+The text reproduced here of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
+is based on the 1861 first Boston edition. That of « A True Tale of
+Slavery" comes from a bound copy of the Leisure Hour, a London periodical, in which it was published serially in February
+1861.
+None of the three original manuscripts of Incidents-Harriet
+jacobs's version, Louisa jacobs's copy, or Lydia Maria Child's
+edited version-survives. After the initial publications in Boston
+in 1861 and London in 1862, the book did not begin to circulate
+until it was reprinted in 1960 and 1961 in facsimile editions by
+Ayer Publishers and the Scholarly Press. In 1972 the travel
+writer Waiter Magnes Teller published excerpts in an anthology
+entitled Twelve Works of Naive Genius (New York: Harcourt
+Brace Jovanovich, 1972) and the first annotated edition in 1973.'
+Also in 1973, the AMS Press published a facsimile edition.
+In the late 1970s and early 1980s Jean Fagan Yellin, following
+in the footsteps of Dorothy Sterling, used the Jacobs letters in
+the recently deposited Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers in the
+University of Rochester Library to corroborate jacobs's claim,
+in her title, to have written her book "herself." Although Jacobs
+was known as her book's author in the nineteenth century,
+twentieth-century readers preferred to see it as the work of
+Child. Before Yellin' s research, historians and critics did not
+consider the book the authentic work of a former slave.
+Yellin began publishing her findings on Jacobs in 1981,
+demonstrating conclusively that Jacobs was the actual author of
+Incidents. Sterling included jacobs's letters in We Are Your Sisters, published in 1984. Yellin' s research on the Jacobs family
+continues, and she is currently preparing the papers of both Harriet and John S. Jacobs for publication.' Historians such as John
+xxxv
+
+XXXVi
+
+A NOTE ON THE TEXT
+
+W. Blassingame doubted both the book's truth value and its authenticity as the work of a former slave. In 1972 and 1979
+Blassingame exaggerated the role of Lydia Maria Child and
+called jacobs's story "not credible" and "too melodramatic.":'
+Even in the 1980s, critics and historians continued their disparagement of jacobs's claim.
+The 1987 publication of Yellin's carefully researched and annotated edition by Harvard University Press converted literary
+critics, and they have continued to give the book far more attention than historians, perhaps in part because Yellin herself works
+out of an English department and publishes in literary journals.
+The historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, writing in 1988, followed Blassingame's lead in disparaging Incidents's usefulness as
+autobiography. For Fox-Genovese, Incidents should be read
+skepticaIly, as an improbably «crafted representation" resting
+upon "a great factual lie," for Jacobs could not in fact have
+evaded Norcom's sexual grasp.4 Doubting historians are now the
+minority of Jacobs's readers; since the late 1980s, Incidents has
+gained wide acceptance as an important black feminist autobiography. In 1987 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., included it in the onevolume Classic Slave Narratives (New York: New American
+Library) and, in 1988, in the multivolume Schomburg Library of
+Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford
+University Press). The late 1990s witnessed the incorporation of
+Incidents into the college curriculum and the publication of editions for classroom use.
+
+Notes
+1. Harriet jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Waiter Teller
+(New York: Harcourt Brace ]ovanovich, 1973).
+2. Bibliographical information from the Jacobs family papers is not yet
+
+available.
+3. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
+
+Antebellum South (revised and enlarged edition) (New York: Oxford
+
+University Press, 1979), 373.
+4. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel
+Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1988),392-394.
+
+INCIDENTS!
+IN THE
+
+LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL.
+WRITTEN BY HERSELF .
+• t'lll.
+
+"Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is
+perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depthof degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY; if they had, they would never
+cease their efforts untilso horrible a system was overthrown."
+A WOMAN OF NORTH CAROLINA.'
+
+"Rise up, ye women that are at ease! Hear my voice, ye careless
+daughters! Give earunto my speech."
+ISAIAH XXXII.9.J
+
+EDITED BY L. MARIA CHILD.
+
+BOSTON:
+PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR.
+
+1861.
+
+Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
+L. MARIA CHILD.
+
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.
+
+Preface by the Author
+
+READER, BE ASSURED THIS narrative is no fiction. I am aware
+
+that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are,
+nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short
+of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to
+pursue this course.
+I wish I were more competent to the task I have undertaken.
+But I trust my readers will excuse deficiencies in consideration of
+circumstances. I was born and reared in Slavery; and I remained
+in a Slave State twenty-seven years. Since I have been at the
+North, it has been necessary for me to work diligently for my
+own support, and the education of my children. This has not left
+me much leisure to make up for the loss of early opportunities to
+improve myself; and it has compelled me to write these pages at
+irregular intervals, whenever I could snatch an hour from household duties.
+When I first arrived in Philadelphia, Bishop Paine" advised me
+to publish a sketch of my life, but I told him I was altogether incompetent to such an undertaking. Though I have improved my
+mind somewhat since that time, I still remain of the same opinion; but I trust my motives will excuse what might otherwise
+seem presumptuous. I have not written my experiences in order
+to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have
+been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North
+to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at
+the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of
+3
+
+4
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens
+to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is.
+Only by experience can anyone realize how deep, and dark, and
+foul is that pit of abominations. May the blessing of God rest on
+this imperfect effort in behalf of my persecuted people!
+LINDA BRENT
+
+Introduction by the Editor
+
+THE AUTHOR OF THE following autobiography is personally
+known to me, and her conversation and manners inspire me with
+confidence. During the last seventeen years, she has lived the
+greater part of the time with a distinguished family in New
+York," and has so deported herself as to be highly esteemed by
+them. This fact is sufficient, without further credentials of her
+character. I believe those who know her will not be disposed to
+doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more
+romantic than fiction.
+At her request, I have revised her manuscript; but such
+changes as I have made have been mainly for purposes of condensation and orderly arrangement. I have not added any thing
+to the incidents, or changed the import of her very pertinent remarks. With trifling exceptions, both the ideas and the language
+are her own. I pruned excrescences a little, but otherwise I had
+no reason for changing her lively and dramatic way of telling her
+own story. The names of both persons and places are known to
+me; but for good reasons I suppress them.
+It will naturally excite surprise that a woman reared in Slavery
+should be able to write so well. But circumstances will explain
+this. In the first place, nature endowed her with quick perceptions. Secondly, the mistress, with whom she lived till she was
+twelve years old, was a kind, considerate friend, who taught her
+to read and spell." Thirdly, she was placed in favorable circumstances after she came to the North; having frequent intercourse
+with intelligent persons, who felt a friendly interest in her
+welfare, and were disposed to give her opportunities for selfimprovement.
+I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for
+presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this
+5
+
+6
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLA VE GIRL
+
+intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which
+some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar
+phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public
+ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I
+willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil
+withdrawn. I do this for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who
+are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them. I do it with the hope of arousing conscientious and
+reflecting women at the North to a sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of Slavery, on all possible occasions. I do it with the hope that every man who reads
+this narrative will swear solemnly before God that, so far as
+he has power to prevent it, no fugitive from Slavery shall ever
+be sent back to suffer in that loathsome den of corruption and
+cruelty.
+L. MARIA CHILD
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL,
+SEVEN YEARS CONCEALED.
+
+I
+
+Childhood
+
+I WAS BORN A slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy
+childhood had passed away. My father! was a carpenter, and
+considered so intelligent and skilful in his trade, that, when
+buildings out of the common line were to be erected, he was sent
+for from long distances, to be head workman. On condition of
+paying his mistress two hundred dollars a year, and supporting
+himself, he was allowed to work at his trade, and manage his
+own affairs. His strongest wish was to purchase his children; but,
+though he several times offered his hard earnings for that purpose, he never succeeded. In complexion my parents were a light
+shade of brownish yellow, and were termed mulattoes. They
+lived together in a comfortable home; and, though we were all
+slaves, I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a
+piece of merchandise, trusted to them for safe keeping, and liable
+to be demanded of them at any moment. I had one brother,
+William,2 who was two years younger than myself-a bright, affectionate child. I had also a great treasure in my maternal grandmother,' who was a remarkable woman in many respects. She
+was the daughter of a planter in South Carolina, who, at his
+death, left her mother and his three children free, with money to
+go to St. Augustine, where they had relatives. It was during the
+Revolutionary War; and they were captured on their passage,
+carried back, and sold to different purchasers. Such was the story
+my grandmother used to tell me; but I do not remember all the
+particulars. She was a little girl when she was captured and sold
+to the keeper of a large hotel. I have often heard her tell how
+hard she fared during childhood. But as she grew older she
+7
+
+8
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+evinced so much intelligence, and was so faithful, that her master
+and mistress could not helping seeing it was for their interest to
+take care of such a valuable piece of property. She became an indispensable personage in the household, officiating in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress. She was much
+praised for her cooking; and her nice crackers became so famous
+in the neighborhood that many people were desirous of obtaining them. In consequence of numerous requests of this kind, she
+asked persmission of her mistress to bake crackers at night, after
+all the household work was done; and she obtained leave to do it,
+provided she would clothe herself and her children from the
+profits. Upon these terms, after working hard all day for her
+mistress, she began her midnight bakings, assisted by her two
+oldest children. The business proved profitable; and each year
+she laid by a little, which was saved for a fund to purchase her
+children. Her master died, and the property was divided among
+his heirs. The widow had her dower in the hotel, which she continued to keep open. My grandmother remained in her service as
+a slave; but her children were divided among her master's children. As she had five, Benjarnin," the youngest one, was sold, in
+order that each heir might have an equal portion of dollars and
+cents. There was so little difference in our ages that he seemed
+more like my brother than my uncle. He was a bright, handsome
+lad, nearly white; for he inherited the complexion my grandmother had derived from Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Though only
+ten years old, seven hundred and twenty dollars were paid for
+him. His sale was a terrible blow to my grandmother; but she
+was naturally hopeful, and she went to work with renewed energy, trusting in time to be able to purchase some of her children.
+She had laid up three hundred dollars, which her mistress one
+day begged as a loan, promising to pay her soon. The reader
+probably knows that no promise or writing given to a slave is
+legally binding; for, according to Southern laws, a slave, being
+property, can hold no property. When my grandmother lent her
+hard earnings to her mistress, she trusted solely to her honor.
+The honor of a slaveholder to a slave!
+To this good grandmother I was indebted for many comforts.
+My brother Willie and I often received portions of the crackers,
+
+CHILDHOOD
+
+9
+
+cakes, and preserves, she made to sell; and after we ceased to be
+children we were indebted to her for many more important services.
+
+Such were the unusually fortunate circumstances of my early
+childhood. When I was six years old, my mother" died; and then,
+for the first time, I learned, by the talk about me, that I was
+a slave. My mother's mistress was the daughter of my grandmother's mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother; they
+were both nourished at my grandmother's breast. In fact, my
+mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of
+the mistress might obtain sufficient food. They played together
+as children; and, when they became women, my mother was a
+most faithful servant to her whiter foster sister. On her deathbed her mistress promised that her children should never suffer
+for any thing; and during her lifetime she kept her word. They all
+spoke kindly of my dead mother, who had been a slave merely in
+name, but in nature was noble and womanly. I grieved for her,
+and my young mind was troubled with the thought who would
+now take care of me and my little brother. I was told that my
+home was now to be with her mistress; and I found it a happy
+one. No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed upon me.
+My mistress was so kind to me that I was always glad to do her
+bidding, and proud to labor for her as much as my young years
+would permit. I would sit by her side for hours, sewing diligently, with a heart as free from care as that of any free-born
+white child. When she thought I was tired, she would send me
+out to run and jump; and away I bounded, to gather berries or
+flowers to decorate her room. Those were happy days-too
+happy to last. The slave child had no thought for the morrow;
+but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.
+When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died. As I saw the cheek grow paler, and the eye more
+glassy, how earnestly I prayed in my heart that she might live! I
+loved her; for she had been almost like a mother to me. My
+prayers were not answered. She died, and they buried her in the
+little churchyard, where, day after day, my tears fell upon her
+grave.
+
+10
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+I was sent to spend a week with my grandmother. I was now
+old enough to begin to think of the future; and again and again I
+asked myself what they would do with me. I felt sure I should
+never find another mistress so kind as the one who was gone. She
+had promised my dying mother that her children should never
+suffer for any thing; and when I remembered that, and recalled
+her many proofs of attachment to me, I could not help having
+some hopes that she had left me free. My friends were almost
+certain it would be so. They thought she would be sure to do it,
+on account of my mother's love and faithful service. But, alas!
+we all know that the memory of a faithful slave does not avail
+much to save her children from the auction block.
+After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was
+read, and we learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister's
+daughter," a child of five years old. So vanished our hopes. My
+mistress had taught me the precepts of God's Word: "Thou shalt
+love thy neighbor as thyself." "Whatsoever ye would that men
+should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." But I was her
+slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor. I
+would give much to blot out from my memory that one great
+wrong. As a child, I loved my mistress; and, looking back on the
+happy days I spent with her, I try to think with less bitterness of
+this act of injustice. While I was with her, she taught me to read
+and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls to the lot of
+a slave, I bless her memory.
+She possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all
+distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother's children, and had shared the same milk that nourished
+her mother's children. Notwithstanding my grandmother's long
+and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no
+more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or
+the horses they tend.
+
+II
+
+The New Master and Mistress
+
+DR. FLINT, 1 A PHYSICIAN in the neighborhood, had married
+
+the sister of my mistress, and I was now the property of their little daughter. It was not without murmuring that I prepared for
+my new home; and what added to my unhappiness, was the fact
+that my brother William was purchased by the same family. My
+father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skilful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman
+than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy;
+and being brought up under such influences, he early detested
+the name of master and mistress. One day, when his father and
+his mistress both happened to call him at the same time, he hesitated between the two; being perplexed to know which had the
+strongest claim upon his obedience. He finally concluded to go
+to his mistress. When my father reproved him for it, he said,
+"You both called me, and I didn't know which I ought to go to
+first. "
+"You are my child," replied our father, "and when I call you,
+you should come immediately, if you have to pass through fire
+and water."
+Poor Willie! He was now to learn his first lesson of obedience
+to a master. Grandmother tried to cheer us with hopeful words,
+and they found an echo in the credulous hearts of youth.
+When we entered our new home we encountered cold looks,
+cold words, and cold treatment. We were glad when the night
+came. On my narrow bed I moaned and wept, I felt so desolate
+and alone.
+I had been there nearly a year, when a dear little friend of
+mine was buried. I heard her mother sob, as the clods fell on the
+coffin of her only child, and I turned away from the grave, feeling thankful that I still had something left to love. I met my
+11
+
+12
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+grandmother, who said, "Come with me, Linda;" and from her
+tone I knew that something sad had happened. She led me apart
+from the people, and then said, "My child, your father is dead."2
+Dead! How could I believe it? He had died so suddenly I had
+not even heard that he was sick. I went home with my grandmother. My heart rebelled against God, who had taken from me
+mother, father, mistress, and friend. The good grandmother tried
+to comfort me. "Who knows the ways of God?" said she. "Perhaps they have been kindly taken from the evil days to come."
+Years afterwards I often thought of this. She promised to be a
+mother to her grandchildren, so far as she might be permitted to
+do so; and strengthened by her love, I returned to my master's. I
+thought I should be allowed to go to my father's house the next
+morning; but I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's
+house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day
+gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the
+dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What
+cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property.
+Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching
+them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous
+doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.
+The next day I followed his remains to a humble grave beside
+that of my dear mother. There were those who knew my father's
+worth, and respected his memory.
+My home now seemed more dreary than ever. The laugh of
+the little slave-children sounded harsh and cruel. It was selfish to
+feel so about the joy of others. My brother moved about with a
+very grave face. I tried to comfort him, by saying, "Take courage, Willie; brighter days will come by and by."
+"You don't know any thing about it, Linda," he replied. "We
+shall have to stay here all our days; we shall never be free."
+I argued that we were growing older and stronger, and that
+perhaps we might, before long, be allowed to hire our own time,
+and then we could earn money to buy our freedom. William declared this was much easier to say than to do; moreover, he did
+not intend to buy his freedom. We held daily controversies upon
+this subject.
+
+THE NEW MASTER AND MISTRESS
+
+13
+
+Little attention was paid to the slaves' meals in Dr. Flint's
+house. If they could catch a bit of food while it was going, well
+and good. I gave myself no trouble on that score, for on my various errands I passed my grandmother's house, where there was
+always something to spare for me. I was frequently threatened
+with punishment if I stopped there; and my grandmother, to
+avoid detaining me, often stood at the gate with something
+for my breakfast or dinner. I was indebted to her for all
+my comforts, spiritual or temporal. It was her labor that supplied
+my scanty wardrobe. I have a vivid recollection of the linseywoolsey? dress given me every winter by Mrs. Flint. How I
+hated it! It was one of the badges of slavery.
+While my grandmother was thus helping to support me from
+her hard earnings, the three hundred dollars she had lent her mistress were never repaid. When her mistress died, her son-in-law,
+Dr. Flint, was appointed executor. When grandmother applied to
+him for payment, he said the estate was insolvent, and the law
+prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with
+that money. I presume they will be handed down in the family,
+from generation to generation.
+My grandmother's mistress had always promised her that, at
+her death, she should be free; and it was said that in her will she
+made good the promise. But when the estate was settled, Dr.
+Flint told the faithful old servant that, under existing circumstances, it was necessary she should be sold.
+On the appointed day, the customary advertisement was
+posted up, proclaiming that there would be a "public sale of negroes, horses, &c." Dr. Flint called to tell my grandmother that
+he was unwilling to wound her feelings by putting her up at auction, and that he would prefer to dispose of her at private sale.
+My grandmother saw through his hypocrisy; she understood
+very well that he was ashamed of the job. She was a very spirited
+woman, and if he was base enough to sell her, when her mistress
+intended she should be free, she was determined the public
+should know it. She had for a long time supplied many families
+with crackers and preserves; consequently, "Aunt Marrhy," as
+she was called, was generally known, and every body who knew
+
+14
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+her respected her intelligence and good character. Her long and
+faithful service in the family was also well known, and the intention of her mistress to leave her free. When the day of sale came,
+she took her place among the chattels, and at the first call she
+sprang upon the auction-block. Many voices called out, "Shame!
+Shame! Who is going to sell you, aunt Marrhy? Don't stand
+there! That is no place for you." Without saying a word, she quietly awaited her fate. No one bid for her. At last, a feeble voice
+said, "Fifty dollars." It came from a maiden lady, seventy years
+old, the sister of my grandmother's deceased mistress. She had
+lived forty years under the same roof with my grandmother; she
+knew how faithfully she had served her owners, and how cruelly
+she had been defrauded of her rights; and she resolved to protect
+her. The auctioneer waited for a higher bid; but her wishes were
+respected; no one bid above her. She could neither read nor
+write; and when the bill of sale was made out, she signed it with
+a cross. But what consequence was that, when she had a big heart
+overflowing with human kindness? She gave the old servant her
+freedom.
+At that time, my grandmother was just fifty years old. Laborious years had passed since then; and now my brother and I
+were slaves to the man who had defrauded her of her money, and
+tried to defraud her of her freedom. One of my mother's sisters,
+called Aunt Nancy," was also a slave in his family. She was a
+kind, good aunt to me; and supplied the place of both housekeeper and waiting maid to her mistress. She was, in fact, at the
+beginning and end of every thing.
+Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient
+in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy
+chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from
+every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church; but
+partaking of the Lord's supper did not seem to put her in a
+Christian frame of mind. If dinner was not served at the exact
+time on that particular Sunday, she would station herself in the
+kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles
+and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to prevent
+
+THE NEW MASTER AND MISTRESS
+
+15
+
+the cook and her children from eking out their meagre fare with
+the remains of the gravy and other scrapings. The slaves could
+get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions
+were weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day. I
+can assure you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from
+her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour
+would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.
+Dr. Flint was an epicure. The cook never sent a dinner to his
+table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a
+dish not to his liking, he would either order her to be whipped,
+or compel her to eat every mouthful of it in his presence. The
+poor, hungry creature might not have objected to eating it; but
+she did object to having her master cram it down her throat till
+she choked.
+They had a pet dog, that was a nuisance in the house. The
+cook was ordered to make some Indian mush for him. He refused to eat, and when his head was held over it, the froth flowed
+from his mouth into the basin. He died a few minutes after.
+When Dr. Flint came in, he said the mush had not been well
+cooked, and that was the reason the animal would not eat it. He
+sent for the cook, and compelled her to eat it. He thought that
+the woman's stomach was stronger than the dog's; but her
+sufferings afterwards proved that he was mistaken. This poor
+woman endured many cruelties from her master and mistress;
+sometimes she was locked up, away from her nursing baby, for a
+whole day and night.
+When I had been in the family a few weeks, one of the plantation slaves was brought to town, by order of his master. It was
+near night when he arrived, and Dr. Flint ordered him to be
+taken to the work house, and tied up to the joist, so that his feet
+would just escape the ground. In that situation he was to wait
+till the doctor had taken his tea. I shall never forget that night.
+N ever before, in my life, had I heard hundreds of blows fall, in
+succession, on a human being. His piteous groans, and his "0,
+pray don't, massa," rang in my ear for months afterwards. There
+were many conjectures as to the cause of this terrible punishment. Some said master accused him of stealing corn; others said
+
+16
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+the slave had quarrelled with his wife, in presence of the overseer, and had accused his master of being the father of her child.
+They were both black, and the child was very fair.
+I went into the work house next morning, and saw the
+cowhide still wet with blood, and the boards all covered with
+gore. The poor man lived, and continued to quarrel with his
+wife. A few months afterwards Dr. Flint handed them both over
+to a slave-trader. The guilty man put their value into his pocket,
+and had the satisfaction of knowing that they were out of sight
+and hearing. When the mother was delivered into the trader's
+hands, she said, "You promised to treat me well." To which he
+replied, "You have let your tongue run too far; damn you!" She
+had forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the
+father of her child.
+From others than the master persecution also comes in such
+cases. I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of
+a child nearly white. In her agony she cried out, "0 Lord, come
+and take me!" Her mistress stood by, and mocked at her like an
+incarnate fiend. "You suffer, do you?" she exclaimed. "I am glad
+of it. You deserve it all, and more too."
+The girl's mother said, "The baby is dead, thank God; and I
+hope my poor child will soon be in heaven, too."
+"Heaven!" retorted the mistress. "There is no such place for
+the like of her and her bastard."
+The poor mother turned away, sobbing. Her dying daughter
+called her, feebly, and as she bent over her, I heard her say,
+"Don't grieve so, mother; God knows all about it; and HE will
+have mercy upon me."
+Her sufferings, afterwards, became so intense, that her mistress felt unable to stay; but when she left the room, the scornful
+smile was still on her lips. Seven children called her mother. The
+poor black woman had but the one child, whose eyes she saw
+closing in death, while she thanked God for taking her away
+from the greater bitterness of life.
+
+III
+
+The Slaves' New rear's Day
+
+DR. FLINT OWNED A fine residence in town, several farms, and
+about fifty slaves, besides hiring a number by the year.
+Hiring-day at the south takes place on the 1st of January. On
+the 2d, the slaves are expected to go to their new masters. On a
+farm, they work until the corn and cotton are laid. They then
+have two holidays. Some masters give them a good dinner under
+the trees, This over, they work until Christmas eve. If no heavy
+charges are meantime brought against them, they are given four
+or five holidays, whichever the master or overseer may think
+proper. Then comes New Year's eve; and they gather together
+their little aIls, or more properly speaking, their little nothings,
+and wait anxiously for the dawning of day. At the appointed
+hour the grounds are thronged with men, women, and children,
+waiting, like criminals, to hear their doom pronounced. The
+slave is sure to know who is the most humane, or cruel master,
+within forty miles of him.
+It is easy to find out, on that day, who clothes and feeds his
+slaves well; for he is surrounded by a crowd, begging, "Please,
+massa, hire me this year. I will work very hard, massa."
+If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is
+whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and
+promises not to run away during the year. Should he chance to
+change his mind, thinking it justifiable to violate an extorted
+promise, woe unto him if he is caught! The whip is used till the
+blood flows at his feet; and his stiffened limbs are put in chains,
+to be dragged in the field for days and days!
+If he lives until the next year, perhaps the same man will hire
+him again, without even giving him an opportunity of going to
+the hiring-ground. After those for hire are disposed of, those for
+sale are called up.
+17
+
+18
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+0, you happy free women, contrast your New Year's day
+with that of the poor bond-woman! With you it is a pleasant season, and the light of the day is blessed. Friendly wishes meet you
+every where, and gifts are showered upon you. Even hearts that
+have been estranged from you soften at this season, and lips that
+have been silent echo back, "1 wish you a happy New Year."
+Children bring their little offerings, and raise their rosy lips for a
+caress. They are your own, and no hand but that of death can
+take them from you.
+But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the
+children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day
+dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system
+that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's
+instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.
+On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children
+to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be
+taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a
+slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own
+town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the
+trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused
+to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by
+one, wherever he could command the highest price? 1 met that
+mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day
+in my mind. She wrung her hands in anguish, and exclaimed,
+"Gone! All gone! Why don't God kill me?" 1 had no words
+wherewith to comfort her. Instances of this kind are of daily,
+yea, of hourly occurrence.
+Slaveholders have a method, peculiar to their institution, of
+getting rid of old slaves, whose lives have been worn out in their
+service. I knew an old woman, who for seventy years faithfully
+served her master. She had become almost helpless, from hard labor and disease. Her owners moved to Alabama, and the old
+black woman was left to be sold to any body who would give
+twenty dollars for her.
+
+IV
+
+The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man
+
+Two YEARS HAD PASSED since I entered Dr. Flint's family, and
+those years had brought much of the knowledge that comes from
+experience, though they had afforded little opportunity for any
+other kinds of knowledge.
+My grandmother had, as much as possible, been a mother to
+her orphan grandchildren. By perseverance and unwearied industry, she was now mistress of a snug little home,' surrounded
+with the necessaries of life. She would have been happy could her
+children have shared them with her. There remained but three
+children and two grandchildren, all slaves. Most earnestly did
+she strive to make us feel that it was the will of God: that He
+had seen fit to place us under such circumstances; and though it
+seemed hard, we ought to pray for contentment.
+It was a beautiful faith, coming from a mother who could not
+call her children her own. But I, and Benjamin, her youngest
+boy, condemned it. We reasoned that it was much more the will
+of God that we should be situated as she was. We longed for a
+home like hers. There we always found sweet balsam for our
+troubles. She was so loving, so sympathizing! She always met us
+with a smile, and listened with patience to all our sorrows. She
+spoke so hopefully, that unconsciously the clouds gave place to
+sunshine. There was a grand big oven there, too, that baked
+bread and nice things for the town, and we knew there was always a choice bit in store for us.
+But, alas! even the charms of the old oven failed to reconcile
+us to our hard lot. Benjamin was now a tall, handsome lad,
+strongly and gracefully made, and with a spirit too bold and daring for a slave. My brother William, now twelve years old, had
+the same aversion to the word master that he had when he was an
+urchin of seven years. I was his confidant. He came to me with
+19
+
+20
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+all his troubles. I remember one instance in particular. It was on
+a lovely spring morning, and when I marked the sunlight dancing here and there, its beauty seemed to mock my sadness. For
+my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about
+day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with
+stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like
+fire. 0, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be, if
+some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow
+him up, and disencumber the world of a plague.
+When he told me that I was made for his use, made to obey
+his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave,
+whose will must and should surrender to his, never before had
+my puny arm felt half so strong.
+So deeply was I absorbed in painful reflections afterwards, that
+I neither saw nor heard the entrance of anyone, till the voice of
+William sounded close beside me. "Linda," said he, "what makes
+you look so sad? I love you. 0, Linda, isn't this a bad world?
+Every body seems so cross and unhappy. I wish I had died when
+poor father did."
+I told him that every body was not cross, or unhappy; that
+those who had pleasant homes, and kind friends, and who were
+not afraid to love them, were happy. But we, who were slavechildren, without father or mother, could not expect to be happy.
+We must be good; perhaps that would bring us contentment.
+"Yes," he said, "I try to be good; but what's the use? They are
+all the time troubling me." Then he proceeded to relate his afternoon's difficulty with young master Nicholas.i It seemed that
+the brother of master Nicholas had pleased himself with making
+up stories about William. Master Nicholas said he should be
+flogged, and he would do it. Whereupon he went to work; but
+William fought bravely, and the young master, finding he was
+getting the better of him, undertook to tie his hands behind him.
+He failed in that likewise. By dint of kicking and fisting, William
+came out of the skirmish none the worse for a few scratches.
+He continued to discourse on his young master's meanness;
+how he whipped the little boys, but was a perfect coward when a
+tussle ensued between him and white boys of his own size. On
+such occasions he always took to his legs. William had other
+
+THE SLAVE WHO DARED TO FEEL LIKE A MAN
+
+21
+
+charges to make against him. One was his rubbing up pennies
+with quicksilver, and passing them off for quarters of a dollar on
+an old man who kept a fruit stall. William was often sent to buy
+fruit, and he earnestly inquired of me what he ought to do under
+such circumstances. I told him it was certainly wrong to deceive
+the old man, and that it was his duty to tell him of the impositions practised by his young master. I assured him the old man
+would not be slow to comprehend the whole, and there the matter would end. William thought it might with the old man, but
+not with him. He said he did not mind the smart of the whip, but
+he did not like the idea of being whipped.
+While I advised him to be good and forgiving I was not unconscious of the beam in my own eye. It was the very knowledge
+of my own shortcomings that urged me to retain, if possible,
+some sparks of my brother's God-given nature. I had not lived
+fourteen years in slavery for nothing. I had felt, seen, and heard
+enough, to read the characters, and question the motives, of
+those around me. The war of my life had begun; and though one
+of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered. Alas, for me!
+If there was one pure, sunny spot for me, I believed it to be in
+Benjamin's heart, and in another's, whom I loved with all the ardor of a girl's first love. My owner knew of it, and sought in
+every way to render me miserable. He did not resort to corporal
+punishment, but to all the petty, tyrannical ways that human ingenuity could devise.
+I remember the first time I was punished. It was in the month
+of February. My grandmother had taken myoid shoes, and replaced them with a new pair. I needed them; for several inches of
+snow had fallen, and it still continued to fall. When I walked
+through Mrs. Flint's room, their creaking grated harshly on her
+refined nerves. She called me to her, and asked what I had about
+me that made such a horrid noise. I told her it was my new shoes.
+"Take them off," said she; "and if you put them on again, I'll
+throw them into the fire."
+I took them off, and my stockings also. She then sent me a
+long distance, on an errand. As I went through the snow, my
+bare feet tingled. That night I was very hoarse; and I went to bed
+
+22
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+thinking the next day would find me sick, perhaps dead. What
+was my grief on waking to find myself quite well!
+1 had imagined if I died, or was laid up for some time, that my
+mistress would feel a twinge of remorse that she had so hated
+"the little imp," as she styled me. It was my ignorance of that
+mistress that gave rise to such extravagant imaginings.
+Dr. Flint occasionally had high prices offered for me; but he
+always said, "She don't belong to me. She is my daughter's property, and I have no right to sell her." Good, honest man! My
+young mistress was still a child, and 1 could look for no protection from her. I loved her, and she returned my affection. lance
+heard her father allude to her attachment to me; and his wife
+promptly replied that it proceeded from fear. This put unpleasant doubts into my mind. Did the child feign what she did not
+feel? or was her mother jealous of the mite of love she bestowed
+on me? I concluded it must be the latter. 1 said to myself,
+"Surely, little children are true."
+One afternoon 1 sat at my sewing, feeling unusual depression
+of spirits. My mistress had been accusing me of an offence, of
+which I assured her 1 was perfectly innocent; but I saw, by the
+contemptuous curl of her lip, that she believed I was telling a lie.
+1 wondered for what wise purpose God was leading me
+through such thorny paths, and whether still darker days were in
+store for me. As 1 sat musing thus, the door opened softly, and
+William came in. "Well, brother," said I, "what is the matter this
+time?"
+"0 Linda, Ben and his master have had a dreadful time!"
+said he.
+My first thought was that Benjamin was killed. "Don't be
+frightened, Linda," said William; "1 will tell you all about it."
+It appeared that Benjamin's master had sent for him, and he
+did not immediately obey the summons. When he did, his master
+was angry, and began to whip him. He resisted. Master and slave
+fought, and finally the master was thrown. Benjamin had cause
+to tremble; for he had thrown to the ground his master-one of
+the richest men in town. I anxiously awaited the result.
+That night I stole to my grandmother's house, and Benjamin
+
+THE SLAVE WHO DARED TO FEEL LIKE A MAN
+
+23
+
+also stole thither from his master's. My grandmother had gone to
+spend a day or two with an old friend living in the country.
+"I have come," said Benjarnin, "to tell you good bye. I am going away."
+I inquired where.
+"To the north," he replied.
+I looked at him to see whether he was in earnest. I saw it all in
+his firm, set mouth. I implored him not to go, but he paid no
+heed to my words. He said he was no longer a boy, and every
+day made his yoke more galling. He had raised his hand against
+his master, and was to be publicly whipped for the offence. I reminded him of the poverty and hardships he must encounter
+among strangers. I told him he might be caught and brought
+back; and that was terrible to think of.
+He grew vexed, and asked if poverty and hardships with freedom, were not preferable to our treatment in slavery. "Linda,"
+he continued, "we are dogs here; foot-balls, cattle, every thing
+that's mean. No, I will not stay. Let them bring me back. We
+don't die but once."
+He was right; but it was hard to give him up. "Go," said I,
+"and break your mother's heart."
+I repented of my words ere they were out.
+"Linda," said he, speaking as I had not heard him speak that
+evening, "how could you say that? Poor mother! be kind to her,
+Linda; and you, too, cousin Fanny.""
+Cousin Fanny was a friend who had lived some years with us.
+Farewells were exchanged, and the bright, kind boy, endeared
+to us by so many acts of love, vanished from our sight.
+It is not necessary to state how he made his escape. Suffice it
+to say, he was on his way to New York when a violent storm
+overtook the vessel. The captain said he must put into the nearest
+port. This alarmed Benjamin, who was aware that he would be
+advertised in every port near his own town. His embarrassment
+was noticed by the captain. To port they went. There the advertisement met the captain's eye. Benjamin so exactly answered its
+description, that the captain laid hold on him, and bound him in
+chains. The storm passed, and they proceeded to New York. Be-
+
+24
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+fore reaching that port Benjamin managed to get off his chains
+and throw them overboard. He escaped from the vessel, but was
+pursued, captured, and carried back to his master.
+When my grandmother returned home and found her youngest child had fled, great was her sorrow; but, with characteristic
+piety, she said, "God's will be done." Each morning, she inquired if any news had been heard from her boy. Yes, news was
+heard. The master was rejoicing over a letter, announcing the
+capture of his human chattel.
+That day seems but as yesterday, so well do I remember it. I
+saw him led through the streets in chains, to jail. His face was
+ghastly pale, yet full of determination. He had begged one of the
+sailors to go to his mother's house and ask her not to meet him.
+He said the sight of her distress would take from him all selfcontrol. She yearned to see him, and she went; but she screened
+herself in the crowd, that it might be as her child had said.
+We were not allowed to visit him; but we had known the jailer
+for years, and he was a kind-hearted man. At midnight he
+opened the jail door for my grandmother and myself to enter, in
+disguise. When we entered the cell not a sound broke the stillness. "Benjamin, Benjamin!" whispered my grandmother. No
+answer. "Benjamin!" she again faltered. There was a jingle of
+chains. The moon had just risen, and cast an uncertain light
+through the bars of the window. We knelt down and took Benjamin's cold hands in ours. We did not speak. Sobs were heard,
+and Benjamin's lips were unsealed; for his mother was weeping
+on his neck. How vividly does memory bring back that sad
+night! Mother and son talked together. He asked her pardon for
+the suffering he had caused her. She said she had nothing to forgive; she could not blame his desire for freedom. He told her that
+when he was captured, he broke away, and was about casting
+himself into the river, when thoughts of her came over him, and
+he desisted. She asked if he did not also think of God. I fancied I
+saw his face grow fierce in the moonlight. He answered, "No, I
+did not think of him. When a man is hunted like a wild beast he
+forgets there is a God, a heaven. He forgets every thing in his
+struggle to get beyond the reach of the bloodhounds."
+
+THE SLAVE WHO DARED TO FEEL LIKE A MAN
+
+25
+
+"Don't talk so, Benjamin," said she. "Put your trust in God.
+Be humble, my child, and your master will forgive you."
+"Forgive me for what, mother? For not letting him treat
+me like a dog? No! I will never humble myself to him. I have
+worked for him for nothing all my life, and I am repaid with
+stripes and imprisonment. Here I will stay till I die, or till he
+sells me."
+The poor mother shuddered at his words. I think he felt it; for
+when he next spoke, his voice was calmer. "Don't fret about me,
+mother. I ain't worth it," said he. "I wish 1 had some of your
+goodness. You bear every thing patiently, just as though you
+thought it was all right. I wish 1 could."
+She told him she had not always been so; once, she was like
+him; but when sore troubles came upon her, and she had no arm
+to lean upon, she learned to call on God, and he lightened her
+burdens. She besought him to do likewise.
+We overstaid our time, and were obliged to hurry from the jail.
+Benjamin had been imprisoned three weeks, when my grandmother went to intercede for him with his master. He was immovable. He said Benjamin should serve as an example to the
+rest of his slaves; he should be kept in jail till he was subdued, or
+be sold if he got but one dollar for him. However, he afterwards
+relented in some degree. The chains were taken off, and we were
+allowed to visit him.
+As his food was of the coarsest kind, we carried him as often
+as possible a warm supper, accompanied with some little luxury
+for the jailer.
+Three months elapsed, and there was no prospect of release or
+of a purchaser. One day he was heard to sing and laugh. This
+piece of indecorum was told to his master, and the overseer was
+ordered to re-chain him. He was now confined in an apartment
+with other prisoners, who were covered with filthy rags. Benjamin was chained near them, and was soon covered with vermin. He worked at his chains till he succeeded in getting out of
+them. He passed them through the bars of the window, with a
+request that they should be taken to his master, and he should be
+informed that he was covered with vermin.
+
+26
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+This audacity was punished with heavier chains, and prohibition of our visits.
+My grandmother continued to send him fresh changes of
+clothes. The old ones were burned up. The last night we saw him
+in jail his mother still begged him to send for his master, and beg
+his pardon. Neither persuasion nor argument could turn him
+from his purpose. He calmly answered, "I am waiting his time."
+Those chains were mournful to hear.
+Another three months passed, and Benjamin left his prison
+walls. We that loved him waited to bid him a long and last
+farewell. A slave-trader had bought him. You remember, 1 told
+you what price he brought when ten years of age. Now he was
+more than twenty years old, and sold for three hundred dollars.
+The master had been blind to his own interest. Long confinement had made his face too pale, his form too thin; moreover, the
+trader had heard something of his character, and it did not strike
+him as suitable for a slave. He said he would give any price if the
+handsome lad was a girl. We thanked God that he was not.
+Could you have seen that mother clinging to her child, when
+they fastened the irons upon his wrists; could you have heard
+her heart-rending groans, and seen her bloodshot eyes wander
+wildly from face to face, vainly pleading for mercy; could you
+have witnessed that scene as 1 saw it, you would exclaim, Slavery
+is damnable!
+Benjamin, her youngest, her pet, was forever gone! She could
+not realize it. She had had an interview with the trader for the
+purpose of ascertaining if Benjarnin could be purchased. She was
+told it was impossible, as he had given bonds not to sell him till
+he was out of the state. He promised that he would not sell him
+till he reached New Orleans.
+With a strong arm and unvaried trust, my grandmother began
+her work of love. Benjamin must be free. If she succeeded, she
+knew they would still be separated; but the sacrifice was not too
+great. Day and night she labored. The trader's price would treble
+that he gave; but she was not discouraged.
+She employed a lawyer to write to a gentleman, whom she
+knew, in New Orleans. She begged him to interest himself for
+
+THE SLAVE WHO DARED TO FEEL LIKE A MAN
+
+27
+
+Benjamin, and he willingly favored her request. When he saw
+Benjamin, and stated his business, he thanked him; but said he
+preferred to wait a while before making the trader an offer. He
+knew he had tried to obtain a high price for him, and had invariably failed. This encouraged him to make another effort for freedom. So one morning, long before day, Benjamin was missing.
+He was riding over the blue billows, bound for Baltimore.
+For once his white face did him a kindly service. They had no
+suspicion that it belonged to a slave; otherwise, the law would
+have been followed out to the letter, and the thing rendered back
+to slavery. The brightest skies are often overshadowed by the
+darkest clouds. Benjamin was taken sick, and compelled to remain in Baltimore three weeks. His strength was slow in returning; and his desire to continue his journey seemed to retard his
+recovery. How could he get strength without air and exercise?
+He resolved to venture on a short walk. A by-street was selected,
+where he thought himself secure of not being met by anyone
+that knew him; but a voice called out, "Halloo, Ben, my boy!
+what are you doing here?"
+His first impulse was to run; but his legs trembled so that he
+could not stir. He turned to confront his antagonist, and behold,
+there stood his old master's next door neighbor! He thought it
+was all over with him now; but it proved otherwise. That man
+was a miracle. He possessed a goodly number of slaves, and
+yet was not quite deaf to that mystic clock, whose ticking is
+rarely heard in the slaveholder's breast.
+"Ben, you are sick," said he. "Why, you look like a ghost. I
+guess 1 gave you something of a start. Never mind, Ben, 1 am not
+going to touch you. You had a pretty tough time of it, and you
+may go on your way rejoicing for all me. But 1 would advise you
+to get out of this place plaguy quick, for there are several gentlemen here from our town." He described the nearest and safest
+route to New York, and added, "1 shall be glad to tell your
+mother 1 have seen you. Good bye, Ben."
+Benjamin turned away, filled with gratitude, and surprised
+that the town he hated contained such a gem-a gem worthy of a
+purer setting.
+
+28
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+This gentleman was a Northerner by birth, and had married a
+southern lady. On his return, he told my grandmother that he
+had seen her son, and of the service he had rendered him.
+Benjamin reached New York safely, and concluded to stop
+there until he had gained strength enough to proceed further. It
+happened that my grandmother's only remaining son had sailed
+for the same city on business for his mistress. Through God's
+providence, the brothers met. You may be sure it was a happy
+meeting. "0 Phil.:" exclaimed Benjamin, "I am here at last."
+Then he told him how near he came to dying, almost in sight
+of free land, and how he prayed that he might live to get one
+breath of free air. He said life was worth something now, and it
+would be hard to die. In the old jail he had not valued it; once, he
+was tempted to destroy it; but something, he did not know what,
+had prevented him; perhaps it was fear. He had heard those who
+profess to be religious declare there was no heaven for selfmurderers; and as his life had been pretty hot here, he did not desire a continuation of the same in another world. "If I die now,"
+he exclaimed, "thank God, I shall die a freeman!"
+He begged my uncle Phillip not to return south; but stay and
+work with him, till they earned enough to buy those at home.
+His brother told him it would kill their mother if he deserted her
+in her trouble. She had pledged her house, and with difficulty
+had raised money to buy him. Would he be bought?
+"No, never!" he replied. "Do you suppose, Phil, when I have
+got so far out of their clutches, I will give them one red cent?
+No! And do you suppose I would turn mother out of her home
+in her old age? That I would let her pay all those hard-earned
+dollars for me, and never to see me? For you know she will stay
+south as long as her other children are slaves. What a good
+mother! Tell her to buy you, Phil. You have been a comfort to
+her, and I have been a trouble. And Linda, poor Linda; what'll
+become of her? Phil, you don't know what a life they lead her.
+She has told me something about it, and I wish old Flint was
+dead, or a better man. When I was in jail, he asked her if she
+didn't want him to ask my master to forgive me, and take me
+home again. She told him, No; that I didn't want to go back. He
+got mad, and said wc were all alike. I never despised my own
+
+THE SLAVE WHO DARED TO FEEL LIKE A MAN
+
+29
+
+master half as much as I do that man. There is many a worse
+slaveholder than my master; but for all that I would not be his
+slave."
+While Benjamin was sick, he had parted with nearly all his
+clothes to pay necessary expenses. But he did not part with a little pin I fastened in his bosom when we parted. It was the most
+valuable thing I owned, and I thought none more worthy to
+wear it. He had it still.
+His brother furnished him with clothes, and gave him what
+money he had.
+They parted with moistened eyes; and as Benjamin turned
+away, he said, "Phil, I part with all my kindred." And so it
+proved. We never heard from him again.
+Uncle Phillip came home; and the first words he uttered when
+he entered the house were, "Mother, Ben is free! I have seen him
+in N ew York." She stood looking at him with a bewildered air.
+"Mother, don't you believe it?" he said, laying his hand softly
+upon her shoulder. She raised her hands, and exclaimed, "God be
+praised! Let us thank him." She dropped on her knees, and
+poured forth her heart in prayer. Then Phillip must sit down and
+repeat to her every word Benjamin had said. He told her all; only
+he forbore to mention how sick and pale her darling looked.
+Why should he distress her when she could do him no good?
+The brave old woman still toiled on, hoping to rescue some of
+her other children. After a while she succeeded in buying
+Phillip." She paid eight hundred dollars, and came home with the
+precious document that secured his freedom. The happy mother
+and son sat together by the old hearthstone that night, telling
+how proud they were of each other, and how they would prove
+to the world that they could take care of themselves, as they had
+long taken care of others. We all concluded by saying, "He that
+is willing to be a slave, let him be a slave."
+
+v
+
+The Trials of Girlhood
+
+DURING THE FIRST YEARS of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I
+was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of
+my mistress. Though this seemed to me no more than right, I
+was grateful for it, and tried to merit the kindness by the faithful discharge of my duties. But I now entered on my fifteenth
+year-a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to
+whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt. The master's age, my extreme youth, and the
+fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother,
+made him bear this treatment for many months. He was a crafty
+man, and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes.
+Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims
+tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought
+must surely subdue. Of the two, I preferred his stormy moods,
+although they left me trembling. He tried his utmost to corrupt
+the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled
+my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster
+could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But
+he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof
+with him-where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was
+his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My
+soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn
+for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as
+ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow
+of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from
+death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.
+The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no
+other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage. The
+30
+
+THE TRIALS OF GIRLHOOD
+
+31
+
+degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are
+more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe. Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are
+told you concerning the helpless millions suffering in this cruel
+bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten the yoke.
+You surely would refuse to do for the master, on your own soil,
+the mean and cruel work which trained bloodhounds and the
+lowest class of whites do for him at the south.
+Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow;
+but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old,
+why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the
+slaves. Perhaps the child's own mother is among those hated
+ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble
+when she hears her master's footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty
+upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands
+admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of
+the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by
+slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves
+feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot
+tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor
+how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at
+every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing
+by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him.
+If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied
+toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother's grave, his
+dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature
+had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other
+slaves in my master's house noticed the change. Many of them
+pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to
+inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof;
+and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that
+never went unpunished.
+I longed for some one to confide in. I would have given the
+
+32
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+world to have laid my head on my grandmother's faithful bosom, and told her all my troubles. But Dr. Flint swore he would
+kill me, if I was not as silent as the grave. Then, although my
+grandmother was all in all to me, I feared her as well as loved her.
+I had been accustomed to look up to her with a respect bordering upon awe. I was very young, and felt shamefaced about
+telling her such impure things, especially as I knew her to be very
+strict on such subjects. Moreover, she was a woman of a high
+spirit. She was usually very quiet in her demeanor; but if her indignation was once roused, it was not very easily quelled. I had
+been told that she once chased a white gentleman with a loaded
+pistol, because he insulted one of her daughters. I dreaded the
+consequences of a violent outbreak; and both pride and fear kept
+me silent. But though I did not confide in my grandmother, and
+even evaded her vigilant watchfulness and inquiry, her presence
+in the neighborhood was some protection to me. Though she
+had been a slave, Dr. Flint was afraid of her. He dreaded her
+scorching rebukes. Moreover, she was known and patronized by
+many people; and he did not wish to have his villany made public. It was lucky for me that I did not live on a distant plantation,
+but in a town not so large that the inhabitants were ignorant of
+each other's affairs. Bad as are the laws and customs in a slaveholding community, the doctor, as a professional man, deemed it
+prudent to keep up some outward show of decency.
+0, what days and nights of fear and sorrow that man caused
+me! Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am
+telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle
+a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still
+in bondage, suffering as I once suffered.
+I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a
+fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When
+I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave's heart. I knew
+how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child
+grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched
+
+THE TRIALS OF GIRLHOOD
+
+33
+
+by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded
+when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning.
+How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the
+flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup
+of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are
+compelled to drink.
+In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and
+women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance
+of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so
+full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women
+who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to
+go on! God bless those, every where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!
+
+VI
+
+The Jealous Mistress
+
+I WOULD TEN THOUSAND times rather that my children should
+be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America. I would rather drudge out
+my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me
+rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. The felon's home in a penitentiary is preferable. He may
+repent, and turn from the error of his ways, and so find peace;
+but it is not so with a favorite slave. She is not allowed to have
+any pride of character. It is deemed a crime in her to wish to be
+virtuous.
+Mrs. Flint' possessed the key to her husband's character before I was born. She might have used this knowledge to counsel
+and to screen the young and the innocent among her slaves; but
+for them she had no sympathy. They were the objects of her
+constant suspicion and malevolence. She watched her husband
+with unceasing vigilance; but he was well practised in means to
+evade it. What he could not find opportunity to say in words he
+manifested in signs. He invented more than were ever thought of
+in a deaf and dumb asylum. I let them pass, as if I did not understand what he meant; and many were the curses and threats bestowed on me for my stupidity. One day he caught me teaching
+myself to write. He frowned, as if he was not well pleased; but I
+suppose he came to the conclusion that such an accomplishment
+might help to advance his favorite scheme. Before long, notes
+were often slipped into my hand. I would return them, saying, "I
+can't read them, sir." "Can't you?" he replied; "then I must read
+them to you." He always finished the reading by asking, "Do
+you understand?" Sometimes he would complain of the heat of
+the tea room, and order his supper to be placed on a small table
+in the piazza. He would seat himself there with a well-satisfied
+34
+
+THE JEALOUS MISTRESS
+
+35
+
+smile, and tell me to stand by and brush away the flies. He would
+eat very slowly, pausing between the mouthfuls. These intervals
+were employed in describing the happiness I was so foolishly
+throwing away, and in threatening me with the penalty that finally awaited my stubborn disobedience. He boasted much of
+the forbearance he had exercised towards me, and reminded me
+that there was a limit to his patience. When I succeeded in avoiding opportunities for him to talk to me at home, I was ordered to
+come to his office, to do some errand. When there, I was obliged
+to stand and listen to such language as he saw fit to address to
+me. Sometimes I so openly expressed my contempt for him that
+he would become violently enraged, and I wondered why he did
+not strike me. Circumstanced as he was, he probably thought it
+was a better policy to be forbearing. But the state of things grew
+worse and worse daily. In desperation I told him that I must and
+would apply to my grandmother for protection. He threatened
+me with death, and worse than death, if I made any complaint to
+her. Strange to say, I did not despair. I was naturally of a buoyant disposition, and always I had a hope of somehow getting out
+of his clutches. Like many a poor, simple slave before me, I
+trusted that some threads of joy would yet be woven into my
+dark destiny.
+I had entered my sixteenth year, and every day it became
+more apparent that my presence was intolerable to Mrs. Flint.
+Angry words frequently passed between her and her husband.
+He had never punished me himself, and he would not allow any
+body else to punish me. In that respect, she was never satisfied;
+but, in her angry moods, no terms were too vile for her to bestow upon me. Yet I, whom she detested so bitterly, had far
+more pity for her than he had, whose duty it was to make her life
+happy. I never wronged her, or wished to wrong her; and one
+word of kindness from her would have brought me to her feet.
+After repeated quarrels between the doctor and his wife, he
+announced his intention to take his youngest daughter.? then
+four years old, to sleep in his apartment. It was necessary that a
+servant should sleep in the same room, to be on hand if the child
+stirred. I was selected for that office, and informed for what purpose that arrangement had been made. By managing to keep
+
+36
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+within sight of people, as much as possible, during the day time,
+I had hitherto succeeded in eluding my master, though a razor
+
+was often held to my throat to force me to change this line of
+policy. At night I slept by the side of my great aunt;' where I felt
+safe. He was too prudent to come into her room. She was an old
+woman, and had been in the family many years. Moreover, as a
+married man, and a professional man, he deemed it necessary to
+save appearances in some degree. But he resolved to remove the
+obstacle in the way of his scheme; and he thought he had planned
+it so that he should evade suspicion. He was well aware how
+much I prized my refuge by the side of my old aunt, and he determined to dispossess me of it. The first night the doctor had the
+little child in his room alone. The next morning, I was ordered to
+take my station as nurse the following night. A kind Providence
+interposed in my favor. During the day Mrs. Flint heard of this
+new arrangement, and a storm followed. I rejoiced to hear it
+rage.
+After a while my mistress sent for me to come to her room.
+Her first question was, "Did you know you were to sleep in the
+doctor's room?"
+"Yes, ma'am."
+"Who told you?"
+"My master."
+"Will you answer truly all the questions I ask?"
+"Yes, ma' am."
+"Tell me, then, as you hope to be forgiven, are you innocent
+of what I have accused you?"
+"I am."
+She handed me a Bible, and said, "Lay your hand on your
+heart, kiss this holy book, and swear before God that you tell me
+the truth."
+I took the oath she required, and I did it with a clear conSCIence.
+"You have taken God's holy word to testify your innocence,"
+said she. "If you have deceived me, beware! Now take this stool,
+sit down, look me directly in the face, and tell me all that has
+passed between your master and you."
+
+THE JEALOUS MISTRESS
+
+37
+
+I did as she ordered. As I went on with my account her color
+changed frequently, she wept, and sometimes groaned. She spoke
+in tones so sad, that I was touched by her grief. The tears came to
+my eyes; but I was soon convinced that her emotions arose from
+anger and wounded pride. She felt that her marriage vows were
+desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for
+the poor victim of her husband's perfidy. She pitied herself as a
+martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of
+shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was
+placed.
+Yet perhaps she had some touch of feeling for me; for when
+the conference was ended, she spoke kindly, and promised to
+protect me. I should have been much comforted by this assurance if I could have had confidence in it; but my experiences in
+slavery had filled me with distrust. She was not a very refined
+woman, and had not much control over her passions. I was an
+object of her jealousy, and, consequently, of her hatred; and I
+knew I could not expect kindness or confidence from her under
+the circumstances in which I was placed. I could not blame her.
+Slaveholders' wives feel as other women would under similar circumstances. The fire of her temper kindled from small sparks,
+and now the flame became so intense that the doctor was obliged
+to give up his intended arrangement.
+I knew I had ignited the torch, and I expected to suffer for it
+afterwards; but I felt too thankful to my mistress for the timely
+aid she rendered me to care much about that. She now took me
+to sleep in a room adjoining her own. There I was an object of
+her especial care, though not of her especial comfort, for she
+spent many a sleepless night to watch over me. Sometimes I
+woke up, and found her bending over me. At other times she
+whispered in my ear, as though it was her husband who was
+speaking to me, and listened to hear what I would answer. If she
+startled me, on such occasions, she would glide stealthily away;
+and the next morning she would tell me I had been talking in my
+sleep, and ask who I was talking to. At last, I began to be fearful
+for my life. It had been often threatened; and you can imagine,
+better than I can describe, what an unpleasant sensation it must
+
+38
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+produce to wake up in the dead of night and find a jealous
+woman bending over you. Terrible as this experience was, I had
+fears that it would give place to one more terrible.
+My mistress grew weary of her vigils; they did not prove satisfactory. She changed her tactics. She now tried the trick of accusing my master of crime, in my presence, and gave my name
+as the author of the accusation. To my utter astonishment, he
+replied, "I don't believe it; but if she did acknowledge it, you tortured her into exposing me." Tortured into exposing him! Truly,
+Satan had no difficulty in distinguishing the calor of his soul! I
+understood his object in making this false representation. It was
+to show me that I gained nothing by seeking the protection of
+my mistress; that the power was still all in his own hands. I pitied
+Mrs. Flint. She was a second wife, many years the junior of her
+husband; and the hoary-headed miscreant was enough to try the
+patience of a wiser and better woman. She was completely foiled,
+and knew not how to proceed. She would gladly have had me
+flogged for my supposed false oath; but, as I have already stated,
+the doctor never allowed anyone to whip me. The old sinner
+was politic. The application of the lash might have led to remarks
+that would have exposed him in the eyes of his children and
+grandchildren. How often did I rejoice that I lived in a town
+where all the inhabitants knew each other! If I had been on a remote plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city,
+I should not be a living woman at this day.
+The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven
+slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of
+their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in
+whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well
+the terrible consequences.
+My grandmother could not avoid seeing things which excited
+her suspicions. She was uneasy about me, and tried various ways
+to buy me; but the never-changing answer was always repeated:
+"Linda does not belong to me. She is my daughter's property,
+and I have no legal right to sell her." The conscientious man! He
+was too scrupulous to sell me; but he had no scruples whatever
+about committing a much greater wrong against the helpless
+
+THE JEALOUS MISTRESS
+
+39
+
+young girl placed under his guardianship, as his daughter's property. Sometimes my persecutor would ask me whether I would
+like to be sold. I told him I would rather be sold to any body
+than to lead such a life as I did. On such occasions he would assume the air of a very injured individual, and reproach me for my
+ingratitude. "Did I not take you into the house, and make you
+the companion of my own children?" he would say. "Have I
+ever treated you like a negro? I have never allowed you to be
+punished, not even to please your mistress. And this is the recompense I get, you ungrateful girl!" I answered that he had reasons of his own for screening me from punishment, and that the
+course he pursued made my mistress hate me and persecute me.
+If I wept, he would say, "Poor child! Don't cry! don't cry! I will
+make peace for you with your mistress. Only let me arrange
+matters in my own way. Poor, foolish girl! you don't know what
+is for your own good. I would cherish you. I would make a lady
+of you. Now go, and think of all I have promised you."
+I did think of it.
+Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes. I am
+telling you the plain truth. Yet when victims make their escape
+from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to act the
+part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his
+den, "full of dead men's bones, and all uncleanness." Nay, more,
+they are not only willing, but proud, to give their daughters in
+marriage to slaveholders. The poor girls have romantic notions
+of a sunny clime, and of the flowering vines that all the year
+round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they
+destined! The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose
+hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her
+own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto
+him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery
+home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness.
+Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about
+it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the
+pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make
+them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader's hands
+
+40
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight. I am
+glad to say there are some honorable exceptions.
+I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their
+husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a
+"parental relation;" and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counselled them to do that which it
+was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered
+their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and
+confidence took the place of distrust.
+Though this bad institution deadens the moral sense, even in
+white women, to a fearful extent, it is not altogether extinct. I
+have heard southern ladies say of Mr. Such a one, "He not only
+thinks it no disgrace to be the father of those little niggers, but he
+is not ashamed to call himself their master. I declare, such things
+ought not to be tolerated in any decent society!"
+
+VII
+
+The Lover
+
+WHY DOES THE SLAVE ever love? Why allow the tendrils of the
+heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be
+wrenched away by the hand of violence? When separations come
+by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in resignation, and
+say, "Not my will, but thine be done, 0 Lord!" But when the
+ruthless hand of man strikes the blow, regardless of the misery
+he causes, it is hard to be submissive. I did not reason thus when
+I was a young girl. Youth will be youth. I loved, and I indulged
+the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright
+lining. I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are too
+dense for light to penetrate. A land
+"Where laughter is not mirth; nor thought the mind;
+Nor words a language; nor e'en men mankind.
+Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,
+And each is tortured in his separate hell."!
+
+There was in the neighborhood a young colored carpenter; a
+free born man. We had been well acquainted in childhood, and
+frequently met together afterwards. We became mutually attached, and he proposed to marry me. I loved him with all the ardor of a young girl's first love. But when I reflected that I was a
+slave, and that the laws gave no sanction to the marriage of such,
+my heart sank within me. My lover wanted to buy me; but I
+knew that Dr. Flint was too wilful and arbitrary a man to consent to that arrangement. From him, I was sure of experiencing
+all sorts of opposition, and I had nothing to hope from my mistress. She would have been delighted to have got rid of me, but
+not in that way. It would have relieved her mind of a burden if
+she could have seen me sold to some distant state, but if I was
+41
+
+42
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+married near home I should be just as much in her husband's
+power as I had previously been,-for the husband of a slave has
+no power to protect her. Moreover, my mistress, like many others, seemed to think that slaves had no right to any family ties of
+their own; that they were created merely to wait upon the family
+of the mistress. lance heard her abuse a young slave girl, who
+told her that a colored man wanted to make her his wife. "I will
+have you peeled and pickled, my lady," said she, "if I ever hear
+you mention that subject again. Do you suppose that I will have
+you tending my children with the children of that nigger?" The
+girl to whom she said this had a mulatto child, of course not acknowledged by its father. The poor black man who loved her
+would have been proud to acknowledge his helpless offspring.
+Many and anxious were the thoughts I revolved in my mind. I
+was at a loss what to do. Above all things, I was desirous to spare
+my lover the insults that had cut so deeply into my own soul. I
+talked with my grandmother about it, and partly told her my
+fears. I did not dare to tell her the worst. She had long suspected
+all was not right, and if I confirmed her suspicions I knew a
+storm would rise that would prove the overthrow of all my
+hopes.
+This love-dream had been my support through many trials; and
+I could not bear to run the risk of having it suddenly dissipated.
+There was a lady in the neighborhood, a particular friend of Dr.
+Flint's, who often visited the house. I had a great respect for her,
+and she had always manifested a friendly interest in me. Grandmother thought she would have great influence with the doctor. I
+went to this lady, and told her my story. I told her I was aware
+that my lover's being a free-born man would prove a great objection; but he wanted to buy me; and if Dr. Flint would consent to
+that arrangement, I felt sure he would be willing to pay any reasonable price. She knew that Mrs. Flint disliked me; therefore, I
+ventured to suggest that perhaps my mistress would approve of
+my being sold, as that would rid her of me. The lady listened with
+kindly sympathy, and promised to do her utmost to promote my
+wishes. She had an interview with the doctor, and I believe she
+pleaded my cause earnestly; but it was all to no purpose.
+How I dreaded my master now! Every minute I expected to
+
+THE LOVER
+
+43
+
+be summoned to his presence; but the day passed, and 1 heard
+nothing from him. The next morning, a message was brought to
+me: "Master wants you in his study." 1 found the door ajar, and
+1 stood a moment gazing at the hateful man who claimed a right
+to rule me, body and soul. 1 entered, and tried to appear calm. 1
+did not want him to know how my heart was bleeding. He
+looked fixedly at me, with an expression which seemed to say, "I
+have half a mind to kill you on the spot." At last he broke the silence, and that was a relief to both of us.
+"So you want to be married, do you?" said he, "and to a free
+nigger. "
+"Yes, sir."
+"Well, I'll soon convince you whether 1 am your master, or
+the nigger fellow you honor so highly. If you must have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves."
+What a situation 1 should be in, as the wife of one of his slaves,
+even if my heart had been interested!
+1 replied, "Don't you suppose, sir, that a slave can have some
+preference about marrying? Do you suppose that all men are
+alike to her?"
+"Do you love this nigger?" said he, abruptly.
+"Yes, sir."
+"How dare you tell me so!" he exclaimed, in great wrath. After a slight pause, he added, "I supposed you thought more of
+yourself; that you felt above the insults of such puppies."
+1 replied, "If he is a puppy 1 am a puppy, for we are both of
+the negro race. It is right and honorable for us to love each other.
+The man you call a puppy never insulted me, sir; and he would
+not love me if he did not believe me to be a virtuous woman."
+He sprang upon me like a tiger, and gave me a stunning blow.
+It was the first time he had ever struck me; and fear did not enable me to control my anger. When I had recovered a little from
+the effects, I exclaimed, "You have struck me for answering you
+honestly. How I despise you!"
+There was silence for some minutes. Perhaps he was deciding
+what should be my punishment; or, perhaps, he wanted to give
+me time to reflect on what I had said, and to whom I had said it.
+Finally, he asked, "Do you know what you have said?"
+
+44
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+"Yes, sir; but your treatment drove me to it."
+"Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you,that I can kill you, if I please?"
+"You have tried to kill me, and I wish you had; but you have
+no right to do as you like with me."
+"Silence!" he exclaimed, in a thundering voice. "By heavens,
+girl, you forget yourself too far! Are you mad? If you are, I will
+soon bring you to your senses. Do you think any other master
+would bear what I have borne from you this morning? Many
+masters would have killed you on the spot. How would you like
+to be sent to jail for your insolence?"
+"I know I have been disrespectful, sir," I replied; "but you
+drove me to it; I couldn't help it. As for the jail, there would be
+more peace for me there than there is here."
+"You deserve to go there," said he, "and to be under such
+treatment, that you would forget the meaning of the word peace.
+It would do you good. It would take some of your high notions
+out of you. But I am not ready to send you there yet, notwithstanding your ingratitude for all my kindness and forbearance.
+You have been the plague of my life. I have wanted to make you
+happy, and I have been repaid with the basest ingratitude; but
+though you have proved yourself incapable of appreciating my
+kindness, I will be lenient towards you, Linda. I will give you
+one more chance to redeem your character. If you behave yourself and do as I require, I will forgive you and treat you as I always have done; but if you disobey me, I will punish you as I
+would the meanest slave on my plantation. Never let me hear
+that fellow's name mentioned again. If I ever know of your
+speaking to him, I will cowhide you both; and if I catch him
+lurking about my premises, I will shoot him as soon as I would a
+dog. Do you hear what I say? I'll teach you a lesson about marriage and free niggers! Now go, and let this be the last time I
+have occasion to speak to you on this subject."
+Reader, did you ever hate? I hope not. I never did but once;
+and I trust I never shall again. Somebody has called it "the atmosphere of hell;" and I believe it is so.
+For a fortnight the doctor did not speak to me. He thought to
+mortify me; to make me feel that I had disgraced myself by re-
+
+THE LOVER
+
+45
+
+ceiving the honorable addresses of a respectable colored man, in
+preference to the base proposals of a white man. But though his
+lips disdained to address me, his eyes were very loquacious. No
+animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than he watched
+me. He knew that I could write, though he had failed to make me
+read his letters; and he was now troubled lest I should exchange
+letters with another man. After a while he became weary of silence; and I was sorry for it. One morning, as he passed through
+the hall, to leave the house, he contrived to thrust a note into my
+hand. I thought I had better read it, and spare myself the vexation of having him read it to me. It expressed regret for the blow
+he had given me, and reminded me that I myself was wholly to
+blame for it. He hoped I had become convinced of the injury I
+was doing myself by incurring his displeasure. He wrote that he
+had made up his mind to go to Louisiana; that he should take
+several slaves with him, and intended I should be one of the
+number. My mistress would remain where she was; therefore I
+should have nothing to fear from that quarter. If I merited kindness from him, he assured me that it would be lavishly bestowed.
+He begged me to think over the matter, and answer the following day.
+The next morning I was called to carry a pair of scissors to his
+room. I laid them on the table, with the letter beside them. He
+thought it was my answer, and did not call me back. I went as
+usual to attend my young mistress to and from school. He met
+me in the street, and ordered me to stop at his office on my way
+back. When I entered, he showed me his letter, and asked me
+why I had not answered it. I replied, "I am your daughter's
+property, and it is in your power to send me, or take me, wherever you please." He said he was very glad to find me so willing
+to go, and that we should start early in the autumn. He had a
+large practice in the town, and I rather thought he had made up
+the story merely to frighten me. However that might be, I was
+determined that I would never go to Louisiana with him.
+Summer passed away, and early in the autumn Dr. Flint's eldest sorr' was sent to Louisiana to examine the country, with a
+view to emigrating. That news did not disturb me. I knew very
+well that I should not be sent with him. That I had not been
+
+46
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+taken to the plantation before this time, was owing to the fact
+that his son was there. He was jealous of his son; and jealousy of
+the overseer had kept him from punishing me by sending me
+into the fields to work. Is it strange that I was not proud of these
+protectors? As for the overseer, he was a man for whom I had
+less respect than I had for a bloodhound.
+Young Mr. Flint did not bring back a favorable report of
+Louisiana, and I heard no more of that scheme. Soon after this,
+my lover met me at the corner of the street, and I stopped to
+speak to him. Looking up, I saw my master watching us from his
+window. I hurried home, trembling with fear. I was sent for, immediately, to go to his room. He met me with a blow. "When is
+mistress to be married?" said he, in a sneering tone. A shower of
+oaths and imprecations followed. How thankful I was that my
+lover was a free man! that my tyrant had no power to flog him
+for speaking to me in the street!
+Again and again I revolved in my mind how all this would
+end. There was no hope that the doctor would consent to sell me
+on any terms. He had an iron will, and was determined to keep
+me, and to conquer me. My lover was an intelligent and religious
+man. Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me
+while I was a slave, the marriage would give him no power to
+protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable
+to witness the insults I should have been subjected to. And then,
+if we had children, I knew they must "follow the condition of
+the mother." What a terrible blight that would be on the heart of
+a free, intelligent father! For his sake, I felt that I ought not to
+link his fate with my own unhappy destiny. He was going to Savannah to see about a little property left him by an uncle; and
+hard as it was to bring my feelings to it, I earnestly entreated him
+not to come back. I advised him to go to the Free States, where
+his tongue would not be tied, and where his intelligence would
+be of more avail to him. He left me, still hoping the day would
+come when I could be bought. With me the lamp of hope had
+gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over. I felt lonely and
+desolate.
+Still I was not stripped of all. I still had my good grandmother, and my affectionate brother. When he put his arms
+
+THE LOVER
+
+47
+
+round my neck, and looked into my eyes, as if to read there the
+troubles I dared not tell, I felt that I still had something to love.
+But even that pleasant emotion was chilled by the reflection that
+he might be torn from me at any moment, by some sudden freak
+of my master. If he had known how we loved each other, I think
+he would have exulted in separating us. We often planned together how we could get to the north. But, as William remarked,
+such things are easier said than done. My movements were very
+closely watched, and we had no means of getting any money to
+defray our expenses. As for grandmother, she was strongly opposed to her children's undertaking any such project. She had
+not forgotten poor Benjamin's sufferings, and she was afraid that
+if another child tried to escape, he would have a similar or a
+worse fate. To me, nothing seemed more dreadful than my present life. I said to myself, "William must be free. He shall go to
+the north, and I will follow him." Many a slave sister has formed
+the same plans.
+
+VIII
+
+What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North
+
+SLAVEHOLDERS PRIDE THEMSELVES UPON upon being honor-
+
+able men; but if you were to hear the enormous lies they tell
+their slaves, you would have small respect for their veracity. I
+have spoken plain English. Pardon me. I cannot use a milder
+term. When they visit the north, and return home, they tell their
+slaves of the runaways they have seen, and describe them to be in
+the most deplorable condition. A slaveholder once told me that
+he had seen a runaway friend of mine in N ew York, and that she
+besought him to take her back to her master, for she was literally
+dying of starvation; that many days she had only one cold potato
+to eat, and at other times could get nothing at all. He said he refused to take her, because he knew her master would not thank
+him for bringing such a miserable wretch to his house. He ended
+by saying to me, "This is the punishment she brought on herself
+for running away from a kind master."
+This whole story was false. I afterwards staid with that friend
+in New York, and found her in comfortable circumstances. She
+had never thought of such a thing as wishing to go back to slavery. Many of the slaves believe such stories, and think it is not
+worth while to exchange slavery for such a hard kind of freedom.
+It is difficult to persuade such that freedom could make them
+useful men, and enable them to protect their wives and children.
+If those heathen in our Christian land had as much teaching as
+some Hindoos, they would think otherwise. They would know
+that liberty is more valuable than life. They would begin to understand their own capabilities, and exert themselves to become
+men and women.
+But while the Free States sustain a law which hurls fugitives
+back into slavery,' how can the slaves resolve to become men?
+There are some who strive to protect wives and daughters from
+48
+
+WHAT SLAVES ARE TAUGHT OF THE NORTH
+
+49
+
+the insults of their masters; but those who have such sentiments
+have had advantages above the general mass of slaves. They have
+been partially civilized and Christianized by favorable circumstances. Some are bold enough to utter such sentiments to their
+masters. 0, that there were more of them!
+Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that
+they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to
+their wives and daughters. Do you think this proves the black
+man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you
+be, if you had been born and brought up a slave, with generations of slaves for ancestors? I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in
+which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that
+lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the
+South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the
+north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work.
+Southern gentlemen indulge in the most contemptuous expressions about the Yankees, while they, on their part, consent
+to do the vilest work for them, such as the ferocious bloodhounds and the despised negro-hunters are employed to do at
+home. When southerners go to the north, they are proud to do
+them honor; but the northern man is not welcome south of Mason and Dixori's line, unless he suppresses every thought and
+feeling at variance with their "peculiar institution." Nor is it
+enough to be silent. The masters are not pleased, unless they obtain a greater degree of subservience than that; and they are generally accommodated. Do they respect the northerner for this? I
+trow not. Even the slaves despise "a northern man with southern
+principles;" and that is the class they generally see. When northerners go to the south to reside, they prove very apt scholars.
+They soon imbibe the sentiments and disposition of their neighbors, and generally go beyond their teachers. Of the two, they
+are proverbially the hardest masters.
+They seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that
+God created the Africans to be slaves. What a libel upon the
+heavenly Father, who "made of one blood all nations of men!"
+And then who are Africans? Who can measure the amount of
+Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?
+
+50
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+I have spoken of the pains slaveholders take to give their
+slaves a bad opinion of the north; but, notwithstanding this, intelligent slaves are aware that they have many friends in the Free
+States. Even the most ignorant have some confused notions
+about it. They knew that I could read; and I was often asked if I
+had seen any thing in the newspapers about white folks over in
+the big north, who were trying to get their freedom for them.
+Some believe that the abolitionists have already made them free,
+and that it is established by law, but that their masters prevent
+the law from going into effect. One woman begged me to get a
+newspaper and read it over. She said her husband told her that
+the black people had sent word to the queen of 'Merica that they
+were all slaves; that she didn't believe it, and went to Washington
+city to see the president about it. They quarrelled; she drew her
+sword upon him, and swore that he should help her to make
+them all free.
+That poor, ignorant woman thought that America was governed by a Queen, to whom the President was subordinate. I
+wish the President was subordinate to Queen Justice.
+
+IX
+
+Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders
+
+THERE W AS A PLANTER in the country, not far from us, whom
+I will call Mr. Litch.' He was an ill-bred, uneducated man, but
+very wealthy. He had six hundred slaves, many of whom he did
+not know by sight. His extensive plantation was managed by
+well-paid overseers. There was a jail and a whipping post on his
+grounds; and whatever cruelties were perpetrated there, they
+passed without comment. He was so effectually screened by his
+great wealth that he was called to no account for his crimes, not
+even for murder.
+Various were the punishments resorted to. A favorite one was
+to tie a rope round a man's body, and suspend him from the
+ground. A fire was kindled over him, from which was suspended
+a piece of fat pork. As this cooked, the scalding drops of fat continually fell on the bare flesh. On his own plantation, he required
+very strict obedience to the eighth commandment. But depredations on the neighbors were allowable, provided the culprit managed to evade detection or suspicion. If a neighbor brought a
+charge of theft against any of his slaves, he was browbeaten by
+the master, who assured him that his slaves had enough of every
+thing at home, and had no inducement to steal. No sooner was
+the neighbor's back turned, than the accused was sought out, and
+whipped for his lack of discretion. If a slave stole from him even
+a pound of meat or a peck of corn, if detection followed, he was
+put in chains and imprisoned, and so kept till his form was attenuated by hunger and suffering.
+A freshet once bore his wine cellar and meat house miles away
+from the plantation. Some slaves followed, and secured bits of
+meat and bottles of wine. Two were detected; a ham and some
+liquor being found in their huts. They were summoned by their
+master. No words were used, but a club felled them to the
+51
+
+52
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ground. A rough box was their coffin, and their interment was a
+dog's burial. Nothing was said.
+Murder was so common on his plantation that he feared to be
+alone after nightfall. He might have believed in ghosts.
+His brother, if not equal in wealth, was at least equal in cruelty. His bloodhounds were well trained. Their pen was spacious, and a terror to the slaves. They were let loose on a
+runaway, and, if they tracked him, they literally tore the flesh
+from his bones. When this slaveholder died, his shrieks and
+groans were so frightful that they appalled his own friends. His
+last words were, "I am going to hell; bury my money with me."
+After death his eyes remained open. To press the lids down,
+silver dollars were laid on them. These were buried with him.
+From this circumstance, a rumor went abroad that his coffin was
+filled with money. Three times his grave was opened, and his
+coffin taken out. The last time, his body was found on the
+ground, and a flock of buzzards were pecking at it. He was again
+interred, and a sentinel set over his grave. The perpetrators were
+never discovered.
+Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities. Mr. Conant, a neighbar of Mr. Litch, returned from town one evening
+in a partial state of intoxication. His body servant gave him some
+offence. He was divested of his clothes, except his shirt,
+whipped, and tied to a large tree in front of the house. It was a
+stormy night in winter. The wind blew bitterly cold, and the
+boughs of the old tree crackled under falling sleet. A member of
+the family, fearing he would freeze to death, begged that he
+might be taken down; but the master would not relent. He remained there three hours; and, when he was cut down, he was
+more dead than alive. Another slave, who stole a pig from this
+master, to appease his hunger, was terribly flogged. In desperation, he tried to run away. But at the end of two miles, he was so
+faint with loss of blood, he thought he was dying. He had a wife,
+and he longed to see her once more. Too sick to walk, he crept
+back that long distance on his hands and knees. When he reached
+his master's, it was night. He had not strength to rise and open
+the gate. He moaned, and tried to call for help. I had a friend living in the same family. At last his cry reached her. She went out
+
+SKETCHES OF NEIGHBORING SLAVEHOLDERS
+
+53
+
+and found the prostrate man at the gate. She ran back to the
+house for assistance, and two men returned with her. They carried him in, and laid him on the floor. The back of his shirt was
+one clot of blood. By means of lard, my friend loosened it from
+the raw flesh. She bandaged him, gave him cool drink, and left
+him to rest. The master said he deserved a hundred more lashes.
+When his own labor was stolen from him, he had stolen food to
+appease his hunger. This was his crime.
+Another neighbor was a Mrs. Wade. At no hour of the day
+was there cessation of the lash on her premises. Her labors began
+with the dawn, and did not cease till long after nightfall. The
+barn was her particular place of torture. There she lashed the
+slaves with the might of a man. An old slave of hers once said to
+me, "It is hell in missis's house. 'Pears I can never get out. Day
+and night I prays to die."
+The mistress died before the old woman, and, when dying,
+entreated her husband not to permit anyone of her slaves to
+look on her after death. A slave who had nursed her children,
+and had still a child in her care, watched her chance, and stole
+with it in her arms to the room where lay her dead mistress. She
+gazed a while on her, then raised her hand and dealt two blows
+on her face, saying, as she did so, "The devil is got you now!"
+She forgot that the child was looking on. She had just begun to
+talk; and she said to her father, "I did see ma, and mammy did
+strike ma, so," striking her own face with her little hand. The
+master was startled. He could not imagine how the nurse could
+obtain access to the room where the corpse lay; for he kept the
+door locked. He questioned her. She confessed that what the
+child had said was true, and told her how she had procured
+the key. She was sold to Georgia.
+In my childhood I knew a valuable slave, named Charity, and
+loved her, as all children did. Her young mistress married, and
+took her to Louisiana. Her little boy, James, was sold to a good
+sort of master. He became involved in debt, and James was sold
+again to a wealthy slaveholder, noted for his cruelty. With this
+man he grew up to manhood, receiving the treatment of a dog.
+After a severe whipping, to save himself from further infliction
+of the lash, with which he was threatened, he took to the woods.
+
+54
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+He was in a most miserable condition-cut by the cowskin, half
+naked, half starved, and without the means of procuring a crust
+of bread.
+Some weeks after his escape, he was captured, tied, and carried
+back to his master's plantation. This man considered punishment
+in his jail, on bread and water, after receiving hundreds of lashes,
+too mild for the poor slave's offence. Therefore he decided, after
+the overseer should have whipped him to his satisfaction, to have
+him placed between the screws of the cotton gin, to stay as long
+as he had been in the woods. This wretched creature was cut
+with the whip from his head to his feet, then washed with strong
+brine, to prevent the flesh from mortifying, and make it heal
+sooner than it otherwise would. He was then put into the cotton gin, which was screwed down, only allowing him room to
+turn on his side when he could not lie on his back. Every morning a slave was sent with a piece of bread and bowl of water,
+which were placed within reach of the poor fellow. The slave was
+charged, under penalty of severe punishment, not to speak to
+him.
+Four days passed, and the slave continued to carry the bread
+and water. On the second morning, he found the bread gone, but
+the water untouched. When he had been in the press four days
+and five nights, the slave informed his master that the water had
+not been used for four mornings, and that a horrible stench came
+from the gin house. The overseer was sent to examine into it.
+When the press was unscrewed, the dead body was found partly
+eaten by rats and vermin. Perhaps the rats that devoured his
+bread had gnawed him before life was extinct. Poor Charity!
+Grandmother and I often asked each other how her affectionate
+heart would bear the news, if she should ever hear of the murder
+of her son. We had known her husband, and knew that lames
+was like him in manliness and intelligence. These were the qualities that made it so hard for him to be a plantation slave. They
+put him into a rough box, and buried him with less feeling than
+would have been manifested for an old house dog. Nobody
+asked any questions. He was a slave; and the feeling was that the
+master had a right to do what he pleased with his own property.
+And what did he care for the value of a slave? He had hundreds
+
+SKETCHES OF NEIGHBORING SLAVEHOLDERS
+
+55
+
+of them. When they had finished their daily toil, they must hurry
+to eat their little morsels, and be ready to extinguish their pine
+knots before nine o'clock, when the overseer went his patrol
+rounds. He entered every cabin, to see that men and their wives
+had gone to bed together, lest the men, from over-fatigue, should
+fall asleep in the chimney corner, and remain there till the morning horn called them to their daily task. Women are considered
+of no value, unless they continually increase their owner's stock.
+They are put on a par with animals. This same master shot a
+woman through the head, who had run away and been brought
+back to him. No one called him to account for it. If a slave resisted being whipped, the bloodhounds were unpacked, and set
+upon him, to tear his flesh from his bones. The master who did
+these things was highly educated, and styled a perfect gentleman.
+He also boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though
+Satan never had a truer follower.
+I could tell of more slaveholders as cruel as those I have described. They are not exceptions to the general rule. I do not say
+there are no humane slaveholders. Such characters do exist,
+notwithstanding the hardening influences around them. But they
+are "like angels' visits-few and far between."
+I knew a young lady who was one of these rare specimens.
+She was an orphan, and inherited as slaves a woman and her six
+children. Their father was a free man. They had a comfortable
+home of their own, parents and children living together. The
+mother and eldest daughter served their mistress during the day,
+and at night returned to their dwelling, which was on the
+premises. The young lady was very pious, and there was some
+reality in her religion. She taught her slaves to lead pure lives,
+and wished them to enjoy the fruit of their own industry. Her
+religion was not a garb put on for Sunday, and laid aside till Sunday returned again. The eldest daughter of the slave mother was
+promised in marriage to a free man; and the day before the wedding this good mistress emancipated her, in order that her marriage might have the sanction of law.
+Report said that this young lady cherished an unrequited affection for a man who had resolved to marry for wealth. In the
+course of time a rich uncle of hers died. He left six thousand dol-
+
+56
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+lars to his two sons by a colored woman, and the remainder of
+his property to this orphan niece. The metal soon attracted the
+magnet. The lady and her weighty purse became his. She offered
+to manumit her slaves-telling them that her marriage might
+make unexpected changes in their destiny, and she wished to insure their happiness. They refused to take their freedom, saying
+that she had always been their best friend, and they could not be
+so happy any where as with her. 1 was not surprised. 1 had often
+seen them in their comfortable home, and thought that the whole
+town did not contain a happier family. They had never felt slavery; and, when it was too late, they were convinced of its reality.
+When the new master claimed this family as his property, the
+father became furious, and went to his mistress for protection. "I
+can do nothing for you now, Harry," said she. "I no longer have
+the owner 1 had a week ago. 1 have succeeded in obtaining the
+freedom of your wife; but 1 cannot obtain it for your children."
+The unhappy father swore that nobody should take his children
+from him. He concealed them in the woods for some days; but
+they were discovered and taken. The father was put in jail, and
+the two oldest boys sold to Georgia. One little girl, two young
+to be of service to her master, was left with the wretched mother.
+The other three were carried to their master's plantation. The
+eldest soon became a mother; and, when the slaveholder's
+wife looked at the babe, she wept bitterly. She knew that her
+own husband had violated the purity she had so carefully inculcated. She had a second child by her master, and then he sold her
+and his offspring to his brother. She bore two children to the
+brother, and was sold again. The next sister went crazy. The life
+she was compelled to lead drove her mad. The third one became
+the mother of five daughters. Before the birth of the fourth the
+pious mistress died. To the last, she rendered every kindness to
+the slaves that her unfortunate circumstances permitted. She
+passed away peacefully, glad to close her eyes on a life which had
+been made so wretched by the man she loved.
+This man squandered the fortune he had received, and sought
+to retrieve his affairs by a second marriage; but, having retired after a night of drunken debauch, he was found dead in the morning. He was called a good master; for he fed and clothed his
+
+SKETCHES OF NEIGHBORING SLAVE HOLDERS
+
+57
+
+slaves better than most masters, and the lash was not heard on his
+plantation so frequently as on many others. Had it not been for
+slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier
+woman.
+No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading
+corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of
+her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or
+fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of
+them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish
+their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their
+will. She may have had religious principles inculcated by some
+pious mother or grandmother, or some good mistress; she may
+have a lover, whose good opinion and peace of mind are dear to
+her heart; or the profligate men who have power over her may be
+exceedingly odious to her. But resistance is hopeless.
+"The poor worm
+Shall prove her contest vain. Life's little day
+Shall pass, and she is gone!"
+
+The slaveholder's sons are, of course, vitiated, even while
+boys, by the unclean influences every where around them. Nor
+do the master's daughters always escape. Severe retributions
+sometimes come upon him for the wrongs he does to the daughters of the slaves. The white daughters early hear their parents
+quarrelling about some female slave. Their curiosity is excited,
+and they soon learn the cause. They are attended by the young
+slave girls whom their father has corrupted; and they hear such
+talk as should never meet youthful ears, or any other ears. They
+know that the women slaves are subject to their father's authority in all things; and in some cases they exercise the same authority over the men slaves. I have myself seen the master of such a
+household whose head was bowed down in shame; for it was
+known in the neighborhood that his daughter had selected one of
+the meanest slaves on his plantation to be the father of his first
+grandchild. She did not make her advances to her equals, nor
+even to her father's more intelligent servants. She selected the
+
+58
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+most brutalized, over whom her authority could be exercised
+with less fear of exposure. Her father, half frantic with rage,
+sought to revenge himself on the offending black man; but his
+daughter, foreseeing the storm that would arise, had given him
+free papers, and sent him out of the state.
+In such cases the infant is smothered, or sent where it is never
+seen by any who know its history. But if the white parent is the
+father, instead of the mother, the offspring are unblushingly
+reared for the market. If they are girls, I have indicated plainly
+enough what will be their inevitable destiny.
+You may believe what I say; for I write only that whereof I
+know. I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds. I can
+testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is
+a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white
+fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as
+for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe
+the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.
+Yet few slaveholders seem to be aware of the widespread
+moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system. Their talk is of
+blighted cotton crops-not of the blight on their children's
+souls.
+If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader.
+Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear
+things that will seem to you impossible among human beings
+with immortal souls.
+
+x
+A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life
+
+AFTER MY LOVER WENT away, Dr. Flint contrived a new plan.
+He seemed to have an idea that my fear of my mistress was his
+greatest obstacle. In the blandest tones, he told me that he was
+going to build a small house for me, in a secluded place, four
+miles away from the town. I shuddered; but I was constrained to
+listen, while he talked of his intention to give me a home of my
+own, and to make a lady of me. Hitherto, I had escaped my
+dreaded fate, by being in the midst of people. My grandmother
+had already had high words with my master about me. She had
+told him pretty plainly what she thought of his character, and
+there was considerable gossip in the neighborhood about our affairs, to which the open-mouthed jealousy of Mrs. Flint contributed not a little. When my master said he was going to build
+a house for me, and that he could do it with little trouble and expense, I was in hopes something would happen to frustrate his
+scheme; but I soon heard that the house was actually begun. I
+vowed before my Maker that I would never enter it. I had rather
+toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and
+die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living
+death. I was determined that the master, whom I so hated and
+loathed, who had blighted the prospects of my youth, and made
+my life a desert, should not, after my long struggle with him,
+succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do
+any thing, every thing, for the sake of defeating him. What could
+I do? I thought and thought, till I became desperate, and made a
+plunge into the abyss.
+And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life,
+which I would gladly forget if I could. The remembrance fills me
+with sorrow and shame. It pains me to tell you of it; but I have
+promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost
+59
+
+60
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+me what it may. I will not try to screen myself behind the plea of
+compulsion from a master; for it was not so. Neither can I plead
+ignorance or thoughtlessness. For years, my master had done his
+utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the
+pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good
+mistress of my childhood. The influences of slavery had had the
+same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had
+made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the
+world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation.
+But, 0, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered
+from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of
+your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge
+the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been
+abolished, I, also, could have married the man of my choice; I
+could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have
+been spared the painful task of confessing what I am now about
+to relate; but all my prospects had been blighted by slavery. I
+want to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the
+monster proved too strong for me. I felt as if I was forsaken by
+God and man; as if all my efforts must be frustrated; and I became reckless in my despair.
+I have told you that Dr. Flint's persecutions and his wife's
+jealousy had given rise to some gossip in the neighborhood.
+Among others, it chanced that a white unmarried gentleman 1 had
+obtained some knowledge of the circumstances in which I was
+placed. He knew my grandmother, and often spoke to me in the
+street. He became interested for me, and asked questions about
+my master, which I answered in part. He expressed a great deal
+of sympathy, and a wish to aid me. He constantly sought opportunities to see me, and wrote to me frequently. I was a poor slave
+girl, only fifteen years old.
+So much attention from a superior person was, of course, flattering; for human nature is the same in all. I also felt grateful for
+his sympathy, and encouraged by his kind words. It seemed to
+me a great thing to have such a friend. By degrees, a more tender
+feeling crept into my heart. He was an educated and eloquent
+
+A PERILOUS PASSAGE IN THE SLAVE GIRL'S LIFE
+
+61
+
+gentleman; too eloquent, alas, for the poor slave girl who trusted
+in him. Of course I saw whither all this was tending. I knew the
+impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a
+man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable
+to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has
+left her any pride or sentiment. It seems less degrading to give
+one's self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin
+to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except
+that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may
+treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak; moreover, the wrong does not seem so great with an unmarried man,
+as with one who has a wife to be made unhappy. There may be
+sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practise of them impossible.
+When I found that my master had actually begun to build the
+lonely cottage, other feelings mixed with those I have described.
+Revenge, and calculations of interest, were added to flattered
+vanity and sincere gratitude for kindness. I knew nothing would
+enrage Dr. Flint so much as to know that I favored another; and
+it was something to triumph over my tyrant even in that small
+way. I thought he would revenge himself by selling me, and I
+was sure my friend, Mr. Sands, would buy me. He was a man of
+more generosity and feeling than my master, and I thought my
+freedom could be easily obtained from him. The crisis of my fate
+now came so near that I was desperate. I shuddered to think of
+being the mother of children that should be owned by myoid
+tyrant. I knew that as soon as a new fancy took him, his victims
+were sold far off to get rid of them; especially if they had children. I had seen several women sold, with his babies at the
+breast. He never allowed his offspring by slaves to remain long
+in sight of himself and his wife. Of a man who was not my master I could ask to have my children well supported; and in this
+case, I felt confident I should obtain the boon. I also felt quite
+sure that they would be made free. With all these thoughts revolving in my mind, and seeing no other way of escaping the
+doom I so much dreaded, I made a headlong plunge. Pity me,
+and pardon me, 0 virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to
+
+62
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLA VE GIRL
+
+be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have
+the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject
+to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in
+avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you
+never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled
+within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel
+it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory
+will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on
+the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be
+judged by the same standard as others.
+The months passed on. I had many unhappy hours. I secretly
+mourned over the sorrow I was bringing on my grandmother,
+who had so tried to shield me from harm. I knew that I was the
+greatest comfort of her old age, and that it was a source of pride
+to her that I had not degraded myself, like most of the slaves. I
+wanted to confess to her that I was no longer worthy of her love;
+but I could not utter the dreaded words.
+As for Dr. Flint, I had a feeling of satisfaction and triumph in
+the thought of telling him. From time to time he told me of his
+intended arrangements, and I was silent. At last, he came and
+told me the cottage was completed, and ordered me to go to it. I
+told him I would never enter it. He said, "I have heard enough of
+such talk as that. You shall go, if you are carried by force; and
+you shall remain there."
+I replied, "I will never go there. In a few months I shall be a
+mother."
+He stood and looked at me in dumb amazement, and left the
+house without a word. I thought I should be happy in my triumph over him. But now that the truth was out, and my relatives
+would hear of it, I felt wretched. Humble as were their circumstances, they had pride in my good character. Now, how could I
+look them in the face? My self-respect was gone! I had resolved
+that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave. I had said, "Let
+the storm beat! I will brave it till I die." And now, how humiliated I felt!
+I went to my grandmother. My lips moved to make confession, but the words stuck in my throat. I sat down in the shade
+of a tree at her door and began to sew. I think she saw something
+
+APE R I L 0 U SPA SSAG E IN THE S L A V E G I R L 'S LI F E
+
+63
+
+unusual was the matter with me. The mother of slaves is very
+watchful. She knows there is no security for her children. After
+they have entered their teens she lives in daily expectation of
+trouble. This leads to many questions. If the girl is of a sensitive
+nature, timidity keeps her from answering truthfully, and this
+well-meant course has a tendency to drive her from maternal
+counsels. Presently, in came my mistress, like a mad woman, and
+accused me concerning her husband. My grandmother, whose
+suspicions had been previously awakened, believed what she
+said. She exclaimed, "0 Linda! has it come to this? I had rather
+see you dead than to see you as you now are. You are a disgrace
+to your dead mother." She tore from my fingers my mother's
+wedding ring and her silver thimble. "Go away!" she exclaimed,
+"and never come to my house, again." Her reproaches fell so hot
+and heavy, that they left me no chance to answer. Bitter tears,
+such as the eyes never shed but once, were my only answer. I
+rose from my seat, but fell back again, sobbing. She did not speak
+to me; but the tears were running down her furrowed cheeks,
+and they scorched me like fire. She had always been so kind to .
+me! So kind! How I longed to throw myself at her feet, and tell
+her all the truth! But she had ordered me to go, and never to
+come there again. After a few minutes, I mustered strength, and
+started to obey her. With what feelings did I now close that little
+gate, which I used to open with such an eager hand in my childhood! It closed upon me with a sound I never heard before.
+Where could I go? I was afraid to return to my master's. I
+walked on recklessly, not caring where I went, or what would
+become of me. When I had gone four or five miles, fatigue compelled me to stop. I sat down on the stump of an old tree. The
+stars were shining through the boughs above me. How they
+mocked me, with their bright, calm light! The hours passed by,
+and as I sat there alone a chilliness and deadly sickness came over
+me. I sank on the ground. My mind was full of horrid thoughts.
+I prayed to die; but the prayer was not answered. At last, with
+great effort I roused myself, and walked some distance further,
+to the house of a woman who had been a friend of my mother.
+When I told her why I was there, she spoke soothingly to me;
+but I could not be comforted. I thought I could bear my shame if
+
+64
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+I could only be reconciled to my grandmother. I longed to open
+my heart to her. I thought if she could know the real state of the
+case, and all 1 had been bearing for years, she would perhaps
+judge me less harshly. My friend advised me to send for her. 1
+did so; but days of agonizing suspense passed before she came.
+Had she utterly forsaken me? No. She came at last. 1 knelt before
+her, and told her the things that had poisoned my life; how long
+1 had been persecuted; that 1 saw no way of escape; and in an
+hour of extremity 1 had become desperate. She listened in silence.
+1 told her 1 would bear any thing and do any thing, if in time 1
+had hopes of obtaining her forgiveness. 1 begged of her to pity
+me, for my dead mother's sake. And she did pity me. She did not
+say, "I forgive you;" but she looked at me lovingly, with her eyes
+full of tears. She laid her old hand gently on my head, and murmured, "Poor child! Poor child!"
+
+XI
+
+The New Tie to Life
+
+I RETURNED TO MY good grandmother's house. She had an interview with Mr. Sands. When she asked him why he could not
+have left her one ewe lamb,-whether there were not plenty of
+slaves who did not care about character,-he made no answer;
+but he spoke kind and encouraging words. He promised to care
+for my child, and to buy me, be the conditions what they might.
+I had not seen Dr. Flint for five days. 1 had never seen him
+since I made the avowal to him. He talked of the disgrace 1 had
+brought on myself; how I had sinned against my master, and
+mortified myoid grandmother. He intimated that if I had accepted his proposals, he, as a physician, could have saved me
+from exposure.' He even condescended to pity me. Could he
+have offered wormwood more bitter? He, whose persecutions
+had been the cause of my sin!
+"Linda," said he, "though you have been criminal towards
+me, I feel for you, and 1 can pardon you if you obey my wishes.
+Tell me whether the fellow you wanted to marry is the father of
+your child. If you deceive me, you shall feel the fires of hell."
+I did not feel as proud as I had done. My strongest weapon
+with him was gone. I was lowered in my own estimation, and
+had resolved to bear his abuse in silence. But when he spoke contemptuously of the lover who had always treated me honorably;
+when I remembered that but for him I might have been a virtuous, free, and happy wife, 1 lost my patience. "1 have sinned
+against God and myself," 1 replied; "but not against you."
+He clinched his teeth, and muttered, "Curse you!" He came
+towards me, with ill-suppressed rage, and exclaimed, "You obstinate girl! I could grind your bones to powder! You have thrown
+yourself away on some worthless rascal. You are weak-minded,
+and have been easily persuaded by those who don't care a straw
+65
+
+66
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+for you. The future will settle accounts between us. You are
+blinded now; but hereafter you will be convinced that your master was your best friend. My lenity towards you is a proof of it. I
+might have punished you in many ways. 1 might have had you
+whipped till you fell dead under the lash. But I wanted you to
+live; I would have bettered your condition. Others cannot do it.
+You are my slave. Your mistress, disgusted by your conduct,
+forbids you to return to the house; therefore I leave you here for
+the present; but I shall see you often. I will call to-morrow."
+He came with frowning brows, that showed a dissatisfied
+state of mind. After asking about my health, he inquired whether
+my board was paid, and who visited me. He then went on to say
+that he had neglected his duty; that as a physician there were certain things that he ought to have explained to me. Then followed
+talk such as would have made the most shameless blush. He ordered me to stand up before him. I obeyed. "I command you,"
+said he, "to tell me whether the father of your child is white or
+black." 1 hesitated. "Answer me this instant!" he exclaimed. 1 did
+answer. He sprang upon me like a wolf, and grabbed my arm as
+if he would have broken it. "Do you love him?" said he, in a
+hissing tone.
+"1 am thankful that I do not despise him," 1 replied.
+He raised his hand to strike me; but it fell again. I don't know
+what arrested the blow. He sat down, with lips tightly compressed. At last he spoke. "I came here," said he, "to make you a
+friendly proposition; but your ingratitude chafes me beyond endurance. You turn aside all my good intentions towards you. I
+don't know what it is that keeps me from killing you." Again he
+rose, as if he had a mind to strike me.
+But he resumed. "On one condition I will forgive your insolence and crime. You must henceforth have no communication
+of any kind with the father of your child. You must not ask any
+thing from him, or receive any thing from him. I will take care of
+you and your child. You had better promise this at once, and not
+wait till you are deserted by him. This is the last act of mercy I
+shall show towards you."
+1 said something about being unwilling to have my child sup-
+
+THE NEW TIE TO LIFE
+
+67
+
+parted by a man who had cursed it and me also. He rejoined,
+that a woman who had sunk to my level had no right to expect
+any thing else. He asked, for the last time, would I accept his
+kindness? I answered that I would not.
+"Very well," said he; "then take the consequences of your
+wayward course. Never look to me for help. You are my slave,
+and shall always be my slave. I will never sell you, that you may
+depend upon."
+Hope died away in my heart as he closed the door after him. I
+had calculated that in his rage he would sell me to a slave-trader;
+and I knew the father of my child was on the watch to buy me.
+About this time my uncle Phillip was expected to return from
+a voyage. The day before his departure I had officiated as bridesmaid to a young friend. My heart was then ill at ease, but my
+smiling countenance did not betray it. Only a year had passed;
+but what fearful changes it had wrought! My heart had grown
+gray in misery. Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are
+born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances. None of us
+know what a year may bring forth.
+I felt no joy when they told me my uncle had come. He
+wanted to see me, though he knew what had happened. I shrank
+from him at first; but at last consented that he should come to
+my room. He received me as he always had done. 0, how my
+heart smote me when I felt his tears on my burning cheeks! The
+words of my grandmother came to my mind,-"Perhaps your
+mother and father are taken from the evil days to come." My disappointed heart could now praise God that it was so. But why,
+thought I, did my relatives ever cherish hopes for me? What was
+there to save me from the usual fate of slave girls? Many more
+beautiful and more intelligent than I had experienced a similar
+fate, or a far worse one. How could they hope that I should escape?
+My uncle's stay was short, and I was not sorry for it. I was
+too ill in mind and body to enjoy my friends as I had done. For
+some weeks I was unable to leave my bed. I could not have any
+doctor but my master, and I would not have him sent for. At
+last, alarmed by my increasing illness, they sent for him. I was
+
+68
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+very weak and nervous; and as soon as he entered the room, I began to scream. They told him my state was very critical. He had
+no wish to hasten me out of the world, and he withdrew.
+When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It
+weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.! I heard the doctor say I could not survive till morning. I had often prayed for
+death; but now I did not want to die, unless my child could die
+too. Many weeks passed before I was able to leave my bed. I was
+a mere wreck of my former self. For a year there was scarcely a
+day when I was free from chills and fever. My babe also was
+sickly. His little limbs were often racked with pain. Dr. Flint
+continued his visits, to look after my health; and he did not fail
+to remind me that my child was an addition to his stock of
+slaves.
+I felt too feeble to dispute with him, and listened to his remarks in silence. His visits were less frequent; but his busy spirit
+could not remain quiet. He employed my brother in his office,
+and he was made the medium of frequent notes and messages to
+me. William was a bright lad, and of much use to the doctor. He
+had learned to put up medicines, to leech, cup, and bleed. He had
+taught himself to read and spell. I was proud of my brother; and
+the old doctor suspected as much. One day, when I had not seen
+him for several weeks, I heard his steps approaching the door. I
+dreaded the encounter, and hid myself. He inquired for me, of
+course; but I was nowhere to be found. He went to his office,
+and despatched William with a note. The color mounted to my
+brother's face when he gave it to me; and he said, "Don't you
+hate me, Linda, for bringing you these things?" I told him I
+could not blame him; he was a slave, and obliged to obey his
+master's will. The note ordered me to come to his office. I went.
+He demanded to know where I was when he called. I told him I
+was at home. He flew into a passion, and said he knew better.
+Then he launched out upon his usual themes,-my crimes
+against him, and my ingratitude for his forbearance. The laws
+were laid down to me anew, and I was dismissed. I felt humiliated that my brother should stand by, and listen to such language
+as would be addressed only to a slave. Poor boy! He was powerless to defend me; but I saw the tears, which he vainly strove to
+
+THE NEW TIE TO LIFE
+
+69
+
+keep back. This manifestation of feeling irritated the doctor.
+William could do nothing to please him. One morning he did not
+arrive at the office so early as usual; and that circumstance afforded his master an opportunity to vent his spleen. He was put
+in jail. The next day my brother sent a trader to the doctor, with
+a request to be sold. His master was greatly incensed at what he
+called his insolence. He said he had put him there to reflect upon
+his bad conduct, and he certainly was not giving any evidence of
+repentance. For two days he harassed himself to find somebody
+to do his office work; but every thing went wrong without
+William. He was released, and ordered to take his old stand, with
+many threats, if he was not careful about his future behavior.
+As the months passed on, my boy improved in health. When
+he was a year old, they called him beautiful. The little vine was
+taking deep root in my existence, though its clinging fondness
+excited a mixture of love and pain. When I was most sorely oppressed I found a solace in his smiles. I loved to watch his infant
+slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment.
+I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that
+he might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very
+ill. The bright eyes grew dull, and the little feet and hands were
+so icy cold that I thought death had already touched them. I had
+prayed for his death, but never so earnestly as I now prayed for
+his life; and my prayer was heard. Alas, what mockery it is for a
+slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is
+better than slavery. It was a sad thought that I had no name to
+give my child. His father caressed him and treated him kindly,
+whenever he had a chance to see him. He was not unwilling that
+he should bear his name; but he had no legal claim to it; and if I
+had bestowed it upon him, my master would have regarded it as
+a new crime, a new piece of insolence, and would, perhaps, revenge it on the boy. 0, the serpent of Slavery has many and poisonous fangs!
+
+XII
+
+Fear of Insurrection
+
+NOT FAR FROM THIS time
+
+Nat Turner's insurrection' broke
+out; and the news threw our town into great commotion. Strange
+that they should be alarmed, when their slaves were so "contented and happy"! But so it was.
+It was always the custom to have a muster every year. On that
+occasion every white man shouldered his musket. The citizens
+and the so-called country gentlemen wore military uniforms.
+The poor whites took their places in the ranks in every-day
+dress, some without shoes, some without hats. This grand occasion had already passed; and when the slaves were told there was
+to be another muster, they were surprised and rejoiced. Poor
+creatures! They thought it was going to be a holiday. I was informed of the true state of affairs, and imparted it to the few I
+could trust. Most gladly would I have proclaimed it to every
+slave; but I dared not. All could not be relied on. Mighty is the
+power of the torturing lash.
+By sunrise, people were pouring in from every quarter within
+twenty miles of the town. I knew the houses were to be searched;
+and I expected it would be done by country bullies and the poor
+whites. I knew nothing annoyed them so much as to see colored
+people living in comfort and respectability; so I made arrangements for them with especial care. I arranged every thing in my
+grandmother's house as neatly as possible. I put white quilts on
+the beds, and decorated some of the rooms with flowers. When
+all was arranged, I sat down at the window to watch. Far as my
+eye could reach, it rested on a motley crowd of soldiers. Drums
+and fifes were discoursing martial music. The men were divided
+into companies of sixteen, each headed by a captain. Orders were
+given, and the wild scouts rushed in every direction, wherever a
+colored face was to be found.
+70
+
+FEAR OF INSURRECTION
+
+71
+
+It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no
+negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance
+to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to
+the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled
+on the calored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. Those who never witnessed such
+scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time
+on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was
+not the slightest ground for suspicion. Colored people and slaves
+who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial
+manner. In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot
+among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them,
+and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection. Every where men, women, and children were whipped
+till the blood stood in puddles at their feet. Some received five
+hundred lashes; others were tied hands and feet, and tortured
+with a bucking paddle, which blisters the skin terribly. The
+dwellings of the colored people, unless they happened to be protected by some influential white person, who was nigh at hand,
+were robbed of clothing and every thing else the marauders
+thought worth carrying away. All day long these unfeeling
+wretches went round, like a troop of demons, terrifying and tormenting the helpless. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the colored
+people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves
+in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. If any of the
+husbands or fathers told of these outrages, they were tied up to
+the public whipping post, and cruelly scourged for telling lies
+about white men. The consternation was universal. No two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be
+seen talking together.
+I entertained no positive fears about our household, because
+we were in the midst of white families who would protect us. We
+were ready to receive the soldiers whenever they came. It was
+not long before we heard the tramp of feet and the sound of
+voices. The door was rudely pushed open; and in they tumbled,
+like a pack of hungry wolves. They snatched at every thing
+within their reach. Every box, trunk, closet, and corner under-
+
+72
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+went a thorough examination. A box in one of the drawers containing some silver change was eagerly pounced upon. When I
+stepped forward to take it from them, one of the soldiers turned
+and said angrily, "What d'ye foller us fur? D'ye s'pose white
+folks is come to steal?"
+I replied, "You have come to search; but you have searched
+that box, and I will take it, if you please."
+At that moment I saw a white gentleman who was friendly to
+us; and I called to him, and asked him to have the goodness to
+come in and stay till the search was over. He readily complied.
+His entrance into the house brought in the captain of the company, whose business it was to guard the outside of the house,
+and see that none of the inmates left it. This officer was Mr.
+Litch, the wealthy slaveholder whom I mentioned, in the account of neighboring planters, as being notorious for his cruelty.
+He felt above soiling his hands with the search. He merely gave
+orders; and, if a bit of writing was discovered, it was carried to
+him by his ignorant followers, who were unable to read.
+My grandmother had a large trunk of bedding and table
+cloths. When that was opened, there was a great shout of surprise; and one exclaimed, "Where'd the damned niggers git all dis
+sheet an' table clarf?"
+My grandmother, emboldened by the presence of our white
+protector, said, "You may be sure we didn't pilfer'em from your
+houses."
+"Look here, mammy," said a grim-looking fellow without
+any coat, "you seem to feel mighty gran' 'cause you got all them
+'ere fixens. White folks oughter have 'em all."
+His remarks were interrupted by a chorus of voices shouting,
+"We's got 'em! We's got 'em! Dis 'ere yaller gal's got letters!"
+There was a general rush for the supposed letter, which, upon
+examination, proved to be some verses written to me by a friend.
+In packing away my things, I had overlooked them. When their
+captain informed them of their contents, they seemed much disappointed. He inquired of me who wrote them. I told him it was
+one of my friends. "Can you read them?" he asked. When I told
+him I could, he swore, and raved, and tore the paper into bits.
+"Bring me all your letters!" said he, in a commanding tone. I told
+
+FEAR OF INSURRECTION
+
+73
+
+him I had none. "Don't be afraid," he continued, in an insinuating way. "Bring them all to me. Nobody shall do you any
+harm." Seeing I did not move to obey him, his pleasant tone
+changed to oaths and threats. "Who writes to you? half free niggers?" inquired he. I replied, "0, no; most of my letters are from
+white people. Some request me to burn them after they are read,
+and some I destroy without reading."
+An exclamation of surprise from some of the company put a
+stop to our conversation. Some silver spoons which ornamented
+an old-fashioned buffet had just been discovered. My grandmother was in the habit of preserving fruit for many ladies in the
+town, and of preparing suppers for parties; consequently she had
+many jars of preserves. The closet that contained these was next
+invaded, and the contents tasted. One of them, who was helping
+himself freely, tapped his neighbor on the shoulder, and said,
+"Wal done! Don't wonder de niggers want to kill all de white
+folks, when dey live on 'sarves" [meaning preserves]. I stretched
+out my hand to take the jar, saying, "You were not sent here to
+search for sweetmeats."
+"And what were we sent for?" said the captain, bristling up to
+me. I evaded the question.
+The search of the house was completed, and nothing found to
+condemn us. They next proceeded to the garden, and knocked
+about every bush and vine, with no better success. The captain
+called his men together, and, after a short consultation, the order
+to march was given. As they passed out of the gate, the captain
+turned back, and pronounced a malediction on the house. He
+said it ought to be burned to the ground, and each of its inmates
+receive thirty-nine lashes. We came out of this affair very fortunately; not losing any thing except some wearing apparel.
+Towards evening the turbulence increased. The soldiers, stimulated by drink, committed still greater cruelties. Shrieks and
+shouts continually rent the air. Not daring to go to the door, I
+peeped under the window curtain. I saw a mob dragging along a
+number of colored people, each white man, with his musket upraised, threatening instant death if they did not stop their shrieks.
+Among the prisoners was a respectable old colored minister.
+They had found a few parcels of shot in his house, which his wife
+
+74
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+had for years used to balance her scales. For this they were going
+to shoot him on Court House Green. What a spectacle was that
+for a civilized country! A rabble, staggering under intoxication,
+assuming to be the administrators of justice!
+The better class of the community exerted their influence to
+save the innocent, persecuted people; and in several instances
+they succeeded, by keeping them shut up in jail till the excitement abated. At last the white citizens found that their own
+property was not safe from the lawless rabble they had summoned to protect them. They rallied the drunken swarm, drove
+them back into the country, and set a guard over the town.
+The next day, the town patrols were commissioned to search
+colored people that lived out of the city; and the most shocking
+outrages were committed with perfect impunity. Every day for a
+fortnight, if I looked out, I saw horsemen with some poor panting negro tied to their saddles, and compelled by the lash to keep
+up with their speed, till they arrived at the jail yard. Those who
+had been whipped too unmercifully to walk were washed with
+brine, tossed into a cart, and carried to jail. One black man, who
+had not fortitude to endure scourging, promised to give information about the conspiracy. But it turned out that he knew nothing at all. He had not even heard the name of N at Turner. The
+poor fellow had, however, made up a story, which augmented
+his own sufferings and those of the colored people.
+The day patrol continued for some weeks, and at sundown a
+night guard was substituted. Nothing at all was proved against
+the colored people, bond or free. The wrath of the slaveholders
+was somewhat appeased by the capture of Nat Turner. The imprisoned were released. The slaves were sent to their masters, and
+the free were permitted to return to their ravaged homes. Visiting was strictly forbidden on the plantations. The slaves begged
+the privilege of again meeting at their little church in the woods,
+with their burying ground around it. It was built by the colored
+people, and they had no higher happiness than to meet there and
+sing hymns together, and pour out their hearts in spontaneous
+prayer. Their request was denied, and the church was demolished. They were permitted to attend the white churches, a certain portion of the galleries being appropriated to their use.
+
+FEAR OF INSURRECTION
+
+75
+
+There, when every body else had partaken of the communion,
+and the benediction had been pronounced, the minister said,
+"Come down, now, my colored friends." They obeyed the summons, and partook of the bread and wine, in commemoration of
+the meek and lowly Jesus, who said, "God is your Father, and all
+ye are brethren."
+
+XIII
+
+The Church and Slavery
+
+AFTER THE ALARM CAUSED by Nat Turner's insurrection had
+
+subsided, the slaveholders came to the conclusion that it would
+be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep
+them from murdering their masters. The Episcopal clergyman
+offered to hold a separate service on Sundays for their benefit.
+His colored members were very few, and also very respectablea fact which I presume had some weight with him. The difficulty
+was to decide on a suitable place for them to worship. The
+Methodist and Baptist churches admitted them in the afternoon;
+but their carpets and cushions were not so costly as those at the
+Episcopal church. It was at last decided that they should meet at
+the house of a free colored man, who was a member.
+I was invited to attend, because I could read. Sunday evening
+came, and, trusting to the cover of night, I ventured out. I rarely
+ventured out by daylight, for I always went with fear, expecting
+at every turn to encounter Dr. Flint, who was sure to turn me
+back, or order me to his office to inquire where I got my bonnet,
+or some other article of dress. When the Rev. Mr. Pike came,
+there were some twenty persons present. The reverend gentleman knelt in prayer, then seated himself, and requested all present, who could read, to open their books, while he gave out the
+portions he wished them to repeat or respond to.
+His text was, "Servants, be obedient to them that are your
+masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ."
+Pious Mr. Pike brushed up his hair till it stood upright, and, in
+deep, solemn tones, began: "Hearken, ye servants! Give strict
+heed unto my words. You are rebellious sinners. Your hearts are
+filled with all manner of evil. 'Tis the devil who tempts you. God
+
+76
+
+THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY
+
+77
+
+is angry with you, and will surely punish you, if you don't forsake your wicked ways. You that live in town are eye-servants
+behind your master's back. Instead of serving your masters faithfully, which is pleasing in the sight of your heavenly Master, you
+are idle, and shirk your work. God sees you. You tell lies. God
+hears you. Instead of being engaged in worshipping him, you are
+hidden away somewhere, feasting on your master's substance;
+tossing coffee-grounds with some wicked fortuneteller, or cutting cards with another old hag. Your masters may not find you
+out, but God sees you, and will punish you. 0, the depravity of
+your hearts! When your master's work is done, are you quietly
+together, thinking of the goodness of God to such sinful creatures? No; you are quarrelling, and tying up little bags of roots
+to bury under the door-steps to poison each other with. God
+sees you. You men steal away to every grog shop to sell your
+master's corn, that you may buy rum to drink. God sees you.
+You sneak into the back streets, or among the bushes, to pitch
+coppers. Although your masters may not find you out, God sees
+you; and he will punish you. You must forsake your sinful ways,
+and be faithful servants. Obey your old master and your young
+master-your old mistress and your young mistress. If you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master.
+You must obey God's commandments. When you go from here,
+don't stop at the corners of the streets to talk, but go directly
+home, and let your master and mistress see that you have come."
+The benediction was pronounced. We went home, highly
+amused at brother Pike's gospel teaching, and we determined to
+hear him again. I went the next Sabbath evening, and heard
+pretty much a repetition of the last discourse. At the close of the
+meeting, Mr. Pike informed us that he found it very inconvenient
+to meet at the friend's house, and he should be glad to see us,
+every Sunday evening, at his own kitchen.
+I went home with the feeling that I had heard the Reverend
+Mr. Pike for the last time. Some of his members repaired to his
+house, and found that the kitchen sported two tallow candles;
+the first time, I am sure, since its present occupant owned it, for
+the servants never had any thing but pine knots. It was so long
+
+78
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+before the reverend gentleman descended from his comfortable
+parlor that the slaves left, and went to enjoy a Methodist shout.
+They never seem so happy as when shouting and singing at religious meetings. Many of them are sincere, and nearer to the gate
+of heaven than sanctimonious Mr. Pike, and other long-faced
+Christians, who see wounded Samaritans, and pass by on the
+other side.
+The slaves generally compose their own songs and hymns;
+and they do not trouble their heads much about the measure.
+They often sing the following verses:
+"Old Satan is one busy ale man;
+He rolls dem blocks all in my way;
+But Jesus is my bosom friend;
+He rolls dem blocks away.
+
+"If I had died when I was young,
+Den how my stam'ring tongue would have sung;
+But I am ale, and now I stand
+A narrow chance for to tread dat heavenly land."
+
+I well remember one occasion when I attended a Methodist
+class meeting. I went with a burdened spirit, and happened to sit
+next to poor, bereaved mother, whose heart was still heavier than
+mine. The class leader was the town constable-a man who
+bought and sold slaves, who whipped his brethren and sisters of
+the church at the public whipping post, in jail or out of jail. He
+was ready to perform that Christian office any where for fifty
+cents. This white-faced, black-hearted brother came near us, and
+said to the stricken woman, "Sister, can't you tell us how the
+Lord deals with your soul? Do you love him as you did formerly?"
+She rose to her feet, and said, in piteous tones, "My Lord and
+Master, help me! My load is more than I can bear. God has hid
+himself from me, and I am left in darkness and misery." Then,
+striking her breast, she continued, "I can't tell you what is in
+here! They've got all my children. Last week they took the last
+
+THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY
+
+79
+
+one. God only knows where they've sold her. They let me have
+her sixteen years, and then-O! O! Pray for her brothers and
+sisters! I've got nothing to live for now. God make my time
+short!"
+She sat down, quivering in every limb. I saw that constable
+class leader become crimson in the face with suppressed laughter,
+while he held up his handkerchief, that those who were weeping
+for the poor woman's calamity might not see his merriment.
+Then, with assumed gravity, he said to the bereaved mother,
+"Sister, pray to the Lord that every dispensation of his divine
+will may be sanctified to the good of your poor needy soul!"
+The congregation struck up a hymn, and sung as though they
+were as free as the birds that warbled round us,"Ole Satan thought he had a mighty aim;
+He missed my soul, and caught my sins.
+Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!
+"He took my sins upon his back;
+Went muttering and grumbling down to hell.
+Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!
+"Ole Satan's church is here below.
+Up to God's free church I hope to go.
+Cry Amen, cry Amen, cry Amen to God!"
+
+Precious are such moments to the poor slaves. If you were to
+hear them at such times, you might think they were happy. But
+can that hour of singing and shouting sustain them through the
+dreary week, toiling without wages, under constant dread of the
+lash?
+The Episcopal clergyman, who, ever since my earliest recollection, had been a sort of god among the slaveholders, concluded, as his family was large, that he must go where money
+was more abundant. A very different clergyman took his place.
+The change was very agreeable to the colored people, who said,
+"God has sent us a good man this time." They loved him, and
+their children followed him for a smile or a kind word. Even the
+
+80
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+slaveholders felt his influence. He brought to the rectory five
+slaves. His wife taught them to read and write, and to be useful
+to her and themselves. As soon as he was settled, he turned his
+attention to the needy slaves around him. He urged upon his
+parishioners the duty of having a meeting expressly for them
+every Sunday, with a sermon adapted to their comprehension.
+After much argument and importunity, it was finally agreed that
+they might occupy the gallery of the church on Sunday evenings.
+Many colored people, hitherto unaccustomed to attend church,
+now gladly went to hear the gospel preached. The sermons were
+simple, and they understood them. Moreover, it was the first
+time they had ever been addressed as human beings. It was not
+long before his white parishioners began to be dissatisfied. He
+was accused of preaching better sermons to the negroes than he
+did to them. He honestly confessed that he bestowed more pains
+upon those sermons than upon any others; for the slaves were
+reared in such ignorance that it was a difficult task to adapt himself to their comprehension. Dissensions arose in the parish.
+Some wanted he should preach to them in the evening, and to the
+slaves in the afternoon. In the midst of these disputings his wife
+died, after a very short illness. Her slaves gathered round her dying bed in great sorrow. She said, "I have tried to do you good
+and promote your happiness; and if I have failed, it has not been
+for want of interest in your welfare. Do not weep for me; but
+prepare for the new duties that lie before you. I leave you all free.
+May we meet in a better world." Her liberated slaves were sent
+away, with funds to establish them comfortably. The colored
+people will long bless the memory of that truly Christian
+woman. Soon after her death her husband preached his farewell
+sermon, and many tears were shed at his departure.
+Several years after, he passed through our town and preached
+to his former congregation. In his afternoon sermon he addressed the colored people. "My friends," said he, "it affords me
+great happiness to have an opportunity of speaking to you again.
+For two years I have been striving to do something for the colored people of my own parish; but nothing is yet accomplished.
+I have not even preached a sermon to them. Try to live according
+to the word of God, my friends. Your skin is darker than mine;
+
+THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY
+
+81
+
+but God judges men by their hearts, not by the color of their
+skins." This was strange doctrine from a southern pulpit. It was
+very offensive to slaveholders. They said he and his wife had
+made fools of their slaves, and that he preached like a fool to the
+negroes.
+1 knew an old black man, whose piety and childlike trust in
+God were beautiful to witness. At fifty-three years old he joined
+the Baptist church. He had a most earnest desire to learn to read.
+He thought he should know how to serve God better if he could
+only read the Bible. He came to me, and begged me to teach him.
+He said he could not pay me, for he had no money; but he would
+bring me nice fruit when the season for it came. 1 asked him if he
+didn't know it was contrary to law; and that slaves were whipped
+and imprisoned for teaching each other to read. This brought the
+tears into his eyes. "Don't be troubled, uncle Fred," said I. "I
+have no thoughts of refusing to teach you. 1 only told you of the
+law, that you might know the danger, and be on your guard." He
+thought he could plan to come three times a week without its being suspected. 1 selected a quiet nook, where no intruder was
+likely to penetrate, and there 1 taught him his A, B, C. Considering his age, his progress was astonishing. As soon as he could
+spell in two syllables he wanted to spell out words in the Bible.
+The happy smile that illuminated his face put joy into my heart.
+After spelling out a few words, he paused, and said, "Honey, it
+'pears when 1 can read dis good book 1 shall be nearer to God.
+White man is got all de sense. He can lam easy. It airi't easy for
+ale black man like me. 1 only wants to read dis book, dat 1 may
+know how to live; den 1 hab no fear 'bout dying."
+1 tried to encourage him by speaking of the rapid progress he
+had made. "Hab patience, child," he replied. "I lams slow."
+1 had no need of patience. His gratitude, and the happiness 1
+imparted, were more than a recompense for all my trouble.
+At the end of six months he had read through the New Testament, and could find any text in it. One day, when he had recited
+unusually well, 1 said, "Uncle Fred, how do you manage to get
+your lessons so well?"
+"Lord bress you, chile," he replied. "You nebber gibs me a
+lesson dat 1 don't pray to God to help me to understan' what 1
+
+82
+
+IN C ID ENT SIN THE LI F E 0 F A SL A V E G I R L
+
+spells and what I reads. And he does help me, chile. Bress his
+holy name!"
+There are thousands, who, like good uncle Fred, are thirsting
+for the water of life; but the law forbids it, and the churches
+withhold it. They send the Bible to heathen abroad, and neglect
+the heathen at home. I am glad that missionaries go out to the
+dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the
+dark corners at home. Talk to American slaveholders as you talk
+to savages in Africa. Tell them it is wrong to traffic in men. Tell
+them it is sinful to sell their own children, and atrocious to violate their own daughters. Tell them that all men are brethren, and
+that man has no right to shut out the light of knowledge from his
+brother. Tell them they are answerable to God for sealing up the
+Fountain of Life from souls that are thirsting for it.
+There are men who would gladly undertake such missionary
+work as this; but, alas! their number is small. They are hated by
+the south, and would be driven from its soil, or dragged to
+prison to die, as others have been before them. The field is ripe
+for the harvest, and awaits the reapers. Perhaps the great grandchildren of uncle Fred may have freely imparted to them the
+divine treasures, which he sought by stealth, at the risk of the
+prison and the scourge.
+Are doctors of divinity blind, or are they hypocrites? I suppose some are the one, and some the other; but I think if they felt
+the interest in the poor and the lowly, that they ought to feel,
+they would not be so easily blinded. A clergyman who goes to
+the south, for the first time, has usually some feeling, however
+vague, that slavery is wrong. The slaveholder suspects this, and
+plays his game accordingly. He makes himself as agreeable as
+possible; talks on theology, and other kindred topics. The reverend gentleman is asked to invoke a blessing on a table loaded
+with luxuries. After dinner he walks round the premises, and sees
+the beautiful groves and flowering vines, and the comfortable
+huts of favored household slaves. The southerner invites him to
+talk with these slaves. He asks them if they want to be free, and
+they say, "0, no, massa." This is sufficient to satisfy him. He
+comes home to publish a "South-Side View of Slavery," and to
+
+THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY
+
+83
+
+complain of the exaggerations of abolitionists. He assures people
+that he has been to the south, and seen slavery for himself; that it
+is a beautiful "patriarchal institution;" that the slaves don't want
+their freedom; that they have hallelujah meetings, and other religious privileges.
+What does he know of the half-starved wretches toiling from
+dawn till dark on the plantations? of mothers shrieking for their
+children, torn from their arms by slave-traders? of young girls
+dragged down into moral filth? of pools of blood around the
+whipping post? of hounds trained to tear human flesh? of men
+screwed into cotton gins to die? The slaveholder showed him
+none of these things, and the slaves dared not tell of them if he
+had asked them.
+There is a difference between Christianity and religion at the
+south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money
+into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of
+blood, he is called religious. If a pastor has offspring by a woman
+not his wife, the church dismiss him, if she is a white woman; but
+if she is colored, it does not hinder his continuing to be their
+good shepherd.
+When I was told that Dr. Flint had joined the Episcopal
+church, I was much surprised. I supposed that religion had a purifying effect on the character of men; but the worst persecutions
+I endured from him were after he was a communicant. The conversation of the doctor, the day after he had been confirmed, certainly gave me no indication that he had "renounced the devil
+and all his works." In answer to some of his usual talk, I reminded him that he had just joined the church. "Yes, Linda,"
+said he. "It was proper for me to do so. I am getting on in years,
+and my position in society requires it, and it puts an end to all
+the damned slang. You would do well to join the church, too,
+Linda."
+"There are sinners enough in it already," rejoined I. "If I
+could be allowed to live like a Christian, I should be glad."
+"You can do what I require; and if you are faithful to me, you
+will be as virtuous as my wife," he replied.
+I answered that the Bible didn't say so.
+
+84
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+His voice became hoarse with rage. "How dare you preach to
+me about your infernal Bible!" he exclaimed. "What right have
+you, who are my negro, to talk to me about what you would
+like, and what you wouldn't like? I am your master, and you
+shall obey me."
+No wonder the slaves sing,"Ole Satan's church is here below;
+Up to God's free church I hope to go."
+
+XIV
+
+Another Link to Life
+
+I HAD NOT RETURNED to my master's house since the birth of
+my child. The old man raved to have me thus removed from his
+immediate power; but his wife vowed, by all that was good and
+great, she would kill me if I came back; and he did not doubt
+her word. Sometimes he would stay away for a season. Then he
+would come and renew the old threadbare discourse about his
+forbearance and my ingratitude. He labored, most unnecessarily,
+to convince me that I had lowered myself. The venomous old
+reprobate had no need of descanting on that theme. I felt humiliated enough. My unconscious babe was the ever-present witness
+of my shame. I listened with silent contempt when he talked
+about my having forfeited his good opinion; but I shed bitter
+tears that I was no longer worthy of being respected by the good
+and pure. Alas! slavery still held me in its poisonous grasp. There
+was no chance for me to be respectable. There was no prospect
+of being able to lead a better life.
+Sometimes, when my master found that I still refused to accept what he called his kind offers, he would threaten to sell my
+child. "Perhaps that will humble you," said he.
+Humble me! Was I not already in the dust? But his threat lacerated my heart. I knew the law gave him power to fulfil it; for
+slaveholders have been cunning enough to enact that "the child
+shall follow the condition of the mother," not of the father; thus
+taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice.
+This reflection made me clasp my innocent babe all the more
+firmly to my heart. Horrid visions passed through my mind
+when I thought of his liability to fall into the slave trader's
+hands. I wept over him, and said, "0 my child! perhaps they will
+leave you in some cold cabin to die, and then throw you into a
+hole, as if you were a dog."
+85
+
+86
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+When Dr. Flint learned that I was again to be a mother, he
+was exasperated beyond measure. He rushed from the house,
+and returned with a pair of shears. I had a fine head of hair; and
+he often railed about my pride of arranging it nicely. He cut
+every hair close to my head, storming and swearing all the time.
+I replied to some of his abuse, and he struck me. Some months
+before, he had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion; and
+the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn
+myself in bed for many days. He then said, "Linda, I swear by
+God I will never raise my hand against you again;" but I knew
+that he would forget his promise.
+After he discovered my situation, he was like a restless spirit
+from the pit. He came every day; and I was subjected to such insults as no pen can describe. I would not describe them if I could;
+they were too low, too revolting. I tried to keep them from my
+grandmother's knowledge as much as I could. I knew she had
+enough to sadden her life, without having my troubles to bear.
+When she saw the doctor treat me with violence, and heard him
+utter oaths terrible enough to palsy a man's tongue, she could
+not always hold her peace. It was natural and motherlike that she
+should try to defend me; but it only made matters worse.
+When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, 1 my heart
+was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for
+men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the
+burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and
+mortifications peculiarly their own.
+Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last
+day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as
+he had me in his power he kept his word. On the fourth day after the birth of my babe, he entered my room suddenly, and
+commanded me to rise and bring my baby to him. The nurse
+who took care of me had gone out of the room to prepare some
+nourishment, and I was alone. There was no alternative. I rose,
+took up my babe, and crossed the room to where he sat. "Now
+stand there," said he, "till I tell you to go back!" My child bore a
+strong resemblance to her father, and to the deceased Mrs. Sands,
+her grandmother. He noticed this; and while I stood before him,
+trembling with weakness, he heaped upon me and my little one
+
+ANOTHER LINK TO LIFE
+
+87
+
+every vile epithet he could think of. Even the grandmother in her
+grave did not escape his curses. In the midst of his vituperations
+I fainted at his feet. This recalled him to his senses. He took the
+baby from my arms, laid it on the bed, dashed cold water in my
+face, took me up, and shook me violently, to restore my consciousness before anyone entered the room. Just then my grandmother came in, and he hurried out of the house. I suffered in
+consequence of this treatment; but I begged my friends to let me
+die, rather than send for the doctor. There was nothing I dreaded
+so much as his presence. My life was spared; and I was glad for
+the sake of my little ones. Had it not been for these ties to life, I
+should have been glad to be released by death, though I had lived
+only nineteen years.
+Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim
+to a name. Their father offered his; but, if I had wished to accept
+the offer, I dared not while my master lived. Moreover, I knew it
+would not be accepted at their baptism. A Christian name they
+were at least entitled to; and we resolved to call my boy for our
+dear good Benjamin, who had gone far away from us.
+My grandmother belonged to the church; and she was very
+desirous of having the children christened. I knew Dr. Flint
+would forbid it, and I did not venture to attempt it. But chance
+favored me. He was called to visit a patient out of town, and was
+obliged to be absent during Sunday. "Now is the time," said my
+grandmother; "we will take the children to church, and have
+them christened."
+When I entered the church, recollections of my mother came
+over me, and I felt subdued in spirit. There she had presented me
+for baptism, without any reason to feel ashamed. She had been
+married, and had such legal rights as slavery allows to a slave.
+The vows had at least been sacred to her, and she had never violated them. I was glad she was not alive, to know under what different circumstances her grandchildren were presented for
+baptism. Why had my lot been so different from my mother's?
+Her master had died when she was a child; and she remained
+with her mistress till she married. She was never in the power of
+any master; and thus she escaped one class of the evils that generally fall upon slaves.
+
+88
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+When my baby was about to be christened, the former mistress of my father stepped up to me, and proposed to give it her
+Christian name. To this I added the surname of my father, who
+had himself no legal right to it; for my grandfather on the paternal side was a white gentleman. What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery! I loved my father; but it mortified me to be
+obliged to bestow his name on my children.
+When we left the church, my father's old mistress invited me
+to go home with her. She clasped a gold chain round my baby's
+neck. I thanked her for this kindness; but I did not like the emblem. I wanted no chain to be fastened on my daughter, not even
+if its links were of gold. How earnestly I prayed that she might
+never feel the weight of slavery's chain, whose iron entereth into
+the soul!
+
+xv
+Continued Persecutions
+
+My CHILDREN GREW FINELY; and Dr. Flint would often say to
+me, with an exulting smile, "These brats will bring me a handsome sum of money one of these days."
+I thought to myself that, God being my helper, they should
+never pass into his hands. It seemed to me I would rather see
+them killed than have them given up to his power. The money
+for the freedom of myself and my children could be obtained;
+but I derived no advantage from that circumstance. Dr. Flint
+loved money, but he loved power more. After much discussion,
+my friends resolved on making another trial. There was a slaveholder about to leave for Texas, and he was commissioned to
+buy me. He was to begin with nine hundred dollars, and go up to
+twelve. My master refused his offers. "Sir," said he, "she don't
+belong to me. She is my daughter'S property, and I have no right
+to sell her. I mistrust that you come from her paramour. If so,
+you may tell him that he cannot buy her for any money; neither
+can he buy her children."
+The doctor came to see me the next day, and my heart beat
+quicker as he entered. I never had seen the old man tread with so
+majestic a step. He seated himself and looked at me with withering scorn. My children had learned to be afraid of him. The little
+one would shut her eyes and hide her face on my shoulder whenever she saw him; and Benny, who was now nearly five years old,
+often inquired, "What makes that bad man come here so many
+times? Does he want to hurt us?" I would clasp the dear boy in
+my arms, trusting that he would be free before he was old
+enough to solve the problem. And now, as the doctor sat there so
+grim and silent, the child left his play and came and nestled up by
+me. At last my tormentor spoke. "So you are left in disgust, are
+you?" said he. "It is no more than I expected. You remember I
+89
+
+90
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+told you years ago that you would be treated so. So he is tired of
+you? Ha! ha! ha! The virtuous madam don't like to hear about it,
+does she? Ha! ha! ha!" There was a sting in his calling me virtuous madam. I no longer had the power of answering him as I had
+formerly done. He continued: "So it seems you are trying to get
+up another intrigue. Your new paramour came to me, and offered to buy you; but you may be assured you will not succeed.
+You are mine; and you shall be mine for life. There lives no human being that can take you out of slavery. I would have done it;
+but you rejected my kind offer."
+I told him I did not wish to get up any intrigue; that I had
+never seen the man who offered to buy me.
+"Do you tell me I lie?" exclaimed he, dragging me from my
+chair. "Will you say again that you never saw that man?"
+I answered, "I do say so."
+He clinched my arm with a volley of oaths. Ben began to
+scream, and I told him to go to his grandmother.
+"Don't you stir a step, you little wretch!" said he. The child
+drew nearer to me, and put his arms round me, as if he wanted to
+protect me. This was too much for my enraged master. He
+caught him up and hurled him across the room. I thought he was
+dead, and rushed towards him to take him up.
+"Not yet!" exclaimed the doctor. "Let him lie there till he
+comes to."
+"Let me go! Let me go!" I screamed, "or I will raise the whole
+house." I struggled and got away; but he clinched me again.
+Somebody opened the door, and he released me. I picked up my
+insensible child, and when I turned my tormentor was gone.
+Anxiously I bent over the little form, so pale and still; and when
+the brown eyes at last opened, I don't know whether I was very
+happy.
+All the doctor's former persecutions were renewed. He came
+morning, noon, and night. No jealous lover ever watched a rival
+more closely than he watched me and the unknown slaveholder,
+with whom he accused me of wishing to get up an intrigue.
+When my grandmother was out of the way he searched every
+room to find him.
+In one of his visits, he happened to find a young girl, whom
+
+CONTINUED PERSECUTIONS
+
+91
+
+he had sold to a trader a few days previous. His statement was,
+that he sold her because she had been too familiar with the overseer. She had had a bitter life with him, and was glad to be sold.
+She had no mother, and no near ties. She had been torn from all
+her family years before. A few friends had entered into bonds for
+her safety, if the trader would allow her to spend with them the
+time that intervened between her sale and the gathering up of his
+human stock. Such a favor was rarely granted. It saved the trader
+the expense of board and jail fees, and though the amount was
+small, it was a weighty consideration in a slave-trader's mind.
+Dr. Flint always had an aversion to meeting slaves after he had
+sold them. He ordered Rose out of the house; but he was no
+longer her master, and she took no notice of him. For once the
+crushed Rose was the conqueror. His gray eyes flashed angrily
+upon her; but that was the extent of his power. "How came this
+girl here?" he exclaimed. "What right had you to allow it, when
+you knew I had sold her?"
+I answered, "This is my grandmother's house, and Rose came
+to see her. I have no right to turn any body out of doors, that
+comes here for honest purposes."
+He gave me the blow that would have fallen upon Rose if she
+had still been his slave. My grandmother's attention had been attracted by loud voices, and she entered in time to see a second
+blow dealt. She was not a woman to let such an outrage, in her
+own house, go unrebuked. The doctor undertook to explain that
+I had been insolent. Her indignant feelings rose higher and
+higher, and finally boiled over in words. "Get out of my house!"
+she exclaimed. "Go home, and take care of your wife and children, and you will have enough to do, without watching my
+family."
+He threw the birth of my children in her face, and accused her
+of sanctioning the life I was leading. She told him I was living
+with her by compulsion of his wife; that he needn't accuse her,
+for he was the one to blame; he was the one who had caused all
+the trouble. She grew more and more excited as she went on. "I
+tell you what, Dr. Flint," said she, "you ain't got many more
+years to live, and you'd better be saying your prayers. It will take
+'em all, and more too, to wash the dirt off your soul."
+
+92
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+"Do you know whom you are talking to?" he exclaimed.
+She replied, "Yes, I know very well who I am talking to."
+He left the house in a great rage. I looked at my grandmother.
+Our eyes met. Their angry expression had passed away, but she
+looked sorrowful and weary-weary of incessant strife. I wondered that it did not lessen her love for me; but if it did she never
+showed it. She was always kind, always ready to sympathize
+with my troubles. There might have been peace and contentment
+in that humble home if it had not been for the demon Slavery.
+The winter passed undisturbed by the doctor. The beautiful
+spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also. My drooping hopes came to life
+again with the flowers. I was dreaming of freedom again; more
+for my children's sake than my own. I planned and I planned.
+Obstacles hit against plans. There seemed no way of overcoming
+them; and yet I hoped.
+Back came the wily doctor. I was not at home when he called.
+A friend had invited me to a small party, and to gratify her I
+went. To my great consternation, a messenger came in haste to
+say that Dr. Flint was at my grandmother's, and insisted on seeing me. They did not tell him where I was, or he would have
+come and raised a disturbance in my friend's house. They sent
+me a dark wrapper; I threw it on and hurried home. My speed
+did not save me; the doctor had gone away in anger. I dreaded
+the morning, but I could not delay it; it came, warm and bright.
+At an early hour the doctor came and asked me where I had been
+last night. I told him. He did not believe me, and sent to my
+friend's house to ascertain the facts. He came in the afternoon to
+assure me he was satisfied that I had spoken the truth. He
+seemed to be in a facetious mood, and I expected some jeers were
+coming. "I suppose you need some recreation," said he, "but I
+am surprised at your being there, among those negroes. It was
+not the place for you. Are you allowed to visit such people?"
+I understood this covert fling at the white gentleman who was
+my friend; but I merely replied, "I went to visit my friends, and
+any company they keep is good enough for me."
+He went on to say, "I have seen very little of you of late, but
+my interest in you is unchanged. When I said I would have no
+
+CONTINUED PERSECUTIONS
+
+93
+
+more mercy on you I was rash. I recall my words. Linda, you desire freedom for yourself and your children, and you can obtain
+it only through me. If you agree to what I am about to propose,
+you and they shall be free. There must be no communication of
+any kind between you and their father. I will procure a cottage,
+where you and the children can live together. Your labor shall be
+light, such as sewing for my family. Think what is offered you,
+Linda-a home and freedom! Let the past be forgotten. If I have
+been harsh with you at times, your wilfulness drove me to it.
+You know I exact obedience from my own children, and I consider you as yet a child."
+He paused for an answer, but I remained silent.
+"Why don't you speak?" said he. "What more do you
+wait for?"
+"Nothing, sir."
+"Then you accept my offer?"
+"No, sir."
+His anger was ready to break loose; but he succeeded in curbing it, and replied, "You have answered without thought. But I
+must let you know there are two sides to my proposition; if you
+reject the bright side, you will be obliged to take the dark one.
+You must either accept my offer, or you and your children shall
+be sent to your young master's plantation, there to remain till
+your young mistress is married; and your children shall fare
+like the rest of the negro children. I give you a week to consider
+of it."
+He was shrewd; but I knew he was not to be trusted. I told
+him I was ready to give my answer now.
+"I will not receive it now," he replied. "You act too much
+from impulse. Remember that you and your children can be free
+a week from to-day if you choose."
+On what a monstrous chance hung the destiny of my children! I knew that my master's offer was a snare, and that if I entered it escape would be impossible. As for his promise, I knew
+him so well that I was sure if he gave me free papers, they would
+be so managed as to have no legal value. The alternative was inevitable. I resolved to go to the plantation. But then I thought
+how completely I should be in his power, and the prospect was
+
+94
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+appalling. Even if I should kneel before him, and implore him to
+spare me, for the sake of my children, I knew he would spurn me
+with his foot, and my weakness would be his triumph.
+Before the week expired, I heard that young Mr. Flint was
+about to be married to a lady! of his own stamp. I foresaw the
+position I should occupy in his establishment. I had once been
+sent to the plantation for punishment, and fear of the son had induced the father to recall me very soon. My mind was made up;
+I was resolved that I would foil my master and save my children,
+or I would perish in the attempt. I kept my plans to myself; I
+knew that friends would try to dissuade me from them, and I
+would not wound their feelings by rejecting their advice.
+On the decisive day the doctor came, and said he hoped I had
+made a wise choice.
+"I am ready to go to the plantation, sir," I replied.
+"Have you thought how important your decision is to your
+children?" said he.
+I told him I had.
+"Very well. Go to the plantation, and my curse go with you,"
+he replied. "Your boy shall be put to work, and he shall soon be
+sold; and your girl shall be raised for the purpose of selling welJ.2
+Go your own ways!" He left the room with curses, not to be repeated.
+As I stood rooted to the spot, my grandmother came and said,
+"Linda, child, what did you tell him?"
+I answered that I was going to the plantation.
+"Must you go?" said she. "Can't something be done to
+stop it?"
+I told her it was useless to try; but she begged me not to give
+up. She said she would go to the doctor, and remind him how
+long and how faithfully she had served in the family, and how
+she had taken her own baby from her breast to nourish his wife.
+She would tell him I had been out of the family so long they
+would not miss me; that she would pay them for my time, and
+the money would procure a woman who had more strength for
+the situation than I had. I begged her not to go; but she persisted
+in saying, "He will listen to me, Linda." She went, and was
+treated as I expected. He coolly listened to what she said, but de-
+
+CONTINUED PERSECUTIONS
+
+95
+
+nied her request. He told her that what he did was for my good,
+that my feelings were entirely above my situation, and that on
+the plantation I would receive treatment that was suitable to my
+behavior.
+My grandmother was much cast down. I had my secret hopes;
+but I must fight my battle alone. I had a woman's pride, and a
+mother's love for my children; and I resolved that out of the
+darkness of this hour a brighter dawn should rise for them. My
+master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will.
+There is might in each.
+
+XVI
+
+Scenes at the Plantation
+
+EARL Y THE NEXT MORNING I left my grandmother's with my
+youngest child. My boy was ill, and I left him behind. I had
+many sad thoughts as the old wagon jolted on. Hitherto, I had
+suffered alone; now, my little one was to be treated as a slave. As
+we drew near the great house, I thought of the time when I was
+formerly sent there out of revenge. I wondered for what purpose
+I was now sent. I could not tell. I resolved to obey orders so far
+as duty required; but within myself, I determined to make my
+stay as short as possible. Mr. Flint was waiting to receive us, and
+told me to follow him up stairs to receive orders for the day. My
+little Ellen was left below in the kitchen. It was a change for her,
+who had always been so carefully tended. My young master said
+she might amuse herself in the yard. This was kind of him, since
+the child was hateful to his sight. My task was to fit up the house
+for the reception of the bride. In the midst of sheets, tablecloths,
+towels, drapery, and carpeting, my head was as busy planning, as
+were my fingers with the needle. At noon I was allowed to go to
+Ellen. She had sobbed herself to sleep. I heard Mr. Flint say to a
+neighbor, "I've got her down here, and I'll soon take the town
+notions out of her head. My father is partly to blame for her
+nonsense. He ought to have broke her in long ago." The remark
+was made within my hearing, and it would have been quite as
+manly to have made it to my face. He had said things to my face
+which might, or might not, have surprised his neigh bar if he had
+known of them. He was "a chip of the old block."
+I resolved to give him no cause to accuse me of being too
+much of a lady, so far as work was concerned. I worked day and
+night, with wretchedness before me. When I lay down beside my
+child, I felt how much easier it would be to see her die than to see
+her master beat her about, as I daily saw him beat other little
+96
+
+SCENES AT THE PLANTA nON
+
+97
+
+ones. The spirit of the mothers was so crushed by the lash, that
+they stood by, without courage to remonstrate. How much more
+must I suffer, before I should be "broke in" to that degree?
+I wished to appear as contented as possible. Sometimes I had
+an opportunity to send a few lines home; and this brought up
+recollections that made it difficult, for a time, to seem calm and
+indifferent to my lot. Notwithstanding my efforts, I saw that Mr.
+Flint regarded me with a suspicious eye. Ellen broke down under
+the trials of her new life. Separated from me, with no one to look
+after her, she wandered about, and in a few days cried herself
+sick. One day, she sat under the window where I was at work,
+crying that weary cry which makes a mother's heart bleed. I was
+obliged to steel myself to bear it. After a while it ceased. I looked
+out, and she was gone. As it was near noon, I ventured to go
+down in search of her. The great house was raised two feet above
+the ground. I looked under it, and saw her about midway, fast
+asleep. I crept under and drew her out. As I held her in my arms,
+I thought how well it would be for her if she never waked up;
+and I uttered my thought aloud. I was startled to hear some one
+say, "Did you speak to me?" I looked up, and saw Mr. Flint
+standing beside me. He said nothing further, but turned, frowning, away. That night he sent Ellen a biscuit and a cup of
+sweetened milk. This generosity surprised me. I learned afterwards, that in the afternoon he had killed a large snake, which
+crept from under the house; and I supposed that incident had
+prompted his unusual kindness.
+The next morning the old cart was loaded with shingles for
+town. I put Ellen into it, and sent her to her grandmother. Mr.
+Flint said I ought to have asked his permission. I told him the
+child was sick, and required attention which I had no time to
+give. He let it pass; for he was aware that I had accomplished
+much work in a little time.
+I had been three weeks on the plantation, when I planned a
+visit home. It must be at night, after every body was in bed. I was
+six miles from town, and the road was very dreary. I was to go
+with a young man, who, I knew, often stole to town to see his
+mother. One night, when all was quiet, we started. Fear gave
+speed to our steps, and we were not long in performing the jour-
+
+98
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ney. I arrived at my grandmother's. Her bed room was on the
+first floor, and the window was open, the weather being warm.
+I spoke to her and she awoke. She let me in and closed the
+window, lest some late passer-by should see me. A light was
+brought, and the whole household gathered round me, some
+smiling and some crying. I went to look at my children, and
+thanked God for their happy sleep. The tears fell as I leaned over
+them. As I moved to leave, Benny stirred. I turned back, and
+whispered, "Mother is here." After digging at his eyes with his
+little fist, they opened, and he sat up in bed, looking at me curiously. Having satisfied himself that it was I, he exclaimed, "0
+mother! you airi't dead, are you? They didn't cut off your head
+at the plantation, did they?"
+My time was up too soon, and my guide was waiting for me. I
+laid Benny back in his bed, and dried his tears by a promise to
+come again soon. Rapidly we retraced our steps back to the plantation. About half way we were met by a company of four patrols. Luckily we heard their horse's hoofs before they came in
+sight, and we had time to hide behind a large tree. They passed,
+hallooing and shouting in a manner that indicated a recent
+carousal. How thankful we were that they had not their dogs
+with them! We hastened our footsteps, and when we arrived on
+the plantation we heard the sound of the hand-mill. The slaves
+were grinding their corn. We were safely in the house before the
+horn summoned them to their labor. I divided my little parcel of
+food with my guide, knowing that he had lost the chance of
+grinding his corn, and must toil all day in the field.
+Mr. Flint often took an inspection of the house, to see that no
+one was idle. The entire management of the work was trusted to
+me, because he knew nothing about it; and rather than hire a superintendent he contented himself with my arrangements. He
+had often urged upon his father the necessity of having me at the
+plantation to take charge of his affairs, and make clothes for the
+slaves; but the old man knew him too well to consent to that
+arrangement.
+When I had been working a month at the plantation, the great
+aunt of Mr. Flint came to make him a visit. This was the good old
+lady who paid fifty dollars for my grandmother, for the purpose
+
+SCENES AT THE PLANTA nON
+
+99
+
+of making her free, when she stood on the auction block. My
+grandmother loved this old lady, whom we all called Miss
+Fanny. She often came to take tea with us. On such occasions the
+table was spread with a snow-white cloth, and the china cups and
+silver spoons were taken from the old-fashioned buffet. There
+were hot muffins, tea rusks, and delicious sweetmeats. My
+grandmother kept two cows, and the fresh cream was Miss
+Fanny's delight. She invariably declared that it was the best in
+town. The old ladies had cosey times together. They would work
+and chat, and sometimes, while talking over old times, their spectacles would get dim with tears, and would have to be taken off
+and wiped. When Miss Fanny bade us good bye, her bag was
+filled with grandmother's best cakes, and she was urged to come
+agam soon.
+There had been a time when Dr. Flint's wife came to take tea
+with us, and when her children were also sent to have a feast of
+"Aunt Marthy's" nice cooking. But after I became an object of
+her jealousy and spite, she was angry with grandmother for giving a shelter to me and my children. She would not even speak to
+her in the street. This wounded my grandmother's feelings, for
+she could not retain ill will against the woman whom she had
+nourished with her milk when a babe. The doctor's wife would
+gladly have prevented our intercourse with Miss Fanny if she
+could have done it, but fortunately she was not dependent on the
+bounty of the Flints. She had enough to be independent; and that
+is more than can ever be gained from charity, however lavish it
+may be.
+Miss Fanny was endeared to me by many recollections, and I
+was rejoiced to see her at the plantation. The warmth of her
+large, loyal heart made the house seem pleasanter while she was
+in it. She staid a week, and I had many talks with her. She said
+her principal object in coming was to see how I was treated, and
+whether any thing could be done for me. She inquired whether
+she could help me in any way. I told her I believed not. She condoled with me in her own peculiar way; saying she wished that I
+and all my grandmother's family were at rest in our graves, for
+not until then should she feel any peace about us. The good old
+soul did not dream that I was planning to bestow peace upon
+
+100
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+her, with regard to myself and my children; not by death, but by
+securing our freedom.
+Again and again I had traversed those dreary twelve miles, to
+and from the town; and all the way, I was meditating upon some
+means of escape for myself and my children. My friends had
+made every effort that ingenuity could devise to effect our purchase, but all their plans had proved abortive. Dr. Flint was suspicious, and determined not to loosen his grasp upon us. I could
+have made my escape alone; but it was more for my helpless children than for myself that I longed for freedom. Though the boon
+would have been precious to me, above all price, I would not
+have taken it at the expense of leaving them in slavery. Every trial
+I endured, every sacrifice I made for their sakes, drew them
+closer to my heart, and gave me fresh courage to beat back the
+dark waves that rolled and rolled over me in a seemingly endless
+night of storms.
+The six weeks were nearly completed, when Mr. Flint's bride
+was expected to take possession of her new home. The arrangements were all completed, and Mr. Flint said I had done well. He
+expected to leave home on Saturday, and return with his bride
+the following Wednesday. After receiving various orders from
+him, I ventured to ask permission to spend Sunday in town. It
+was granted; for which favor I was thankful. It was the first I had
+ever asked of him, and I intended it should be the last. It needed
+more than one night to accomplish the project I had in view; but
+the whole of Sunday would give me an opportunity. I spent the
+Sabbath with my grandmother. A calmer, more beautiful day
+never came down out of heaven. To me it was a day of conflicting emotions. Perhaps it was the last day I should ever spend under that dear, old sheltering roof! Perhaps these were the last
+talks I should over have with the faithful old friend of my whole
+life! Perhaps it was the last time I and my children should be together! Well, better so, I thought, than that they should be
+slaves. I knew the doom that awaited my fair baby in slavery,
+and I determined to save her from it, or perish in the attempt. I
+went to make this vow at the graves of my poor parents, in the
+burying-ground of the slaves. "There the wicked cease from
+troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest
+
+SCENES AT THE PLANTATION
+
+101
+
+together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor; the servant is
+free from his master." I knelt by the graves of my parents, and
+thanked God, as I had often done before, that they had not lived
+to witness my trials, or to mourn over my sins. I had received my
+mother's blessing when she died; and in many an hour of tribulation I had seemed to hear her voice, sometimes chiding me,
+sometimes whispering loving words into my wounded heart. I
+have shed many and bitter tears, to think that when I am gone
+from my children they cannot remember me with such entire
+satisfaction as I remembered my mother.
+The graveyard was in the woods, and twilight was coming on.
+Nothing broke the death-like stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird. My spirit was overawed by the solemnity of the
+scene. For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but
+never had it seemed to me so sacred as now. A black stump, at
+the head of my mother's grave, was all that remained of a tree my
+father had planted. His grave was marked by a small wooden
+board, bearing his name, the letters of which were nearly obliterated. I knelt down and kissed them, and poured forth a prayer to
+God for guidance and support in the perilous step I was about to
+take. As I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where, before Nat Turner's time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for
+worship, I seemed to hear my father's voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed
+on with renovated hopes. My trust in God had been strengthened by that prayer among the graves.
+My plan was to conceal myself at the house of a friend, and
+remain there a few weeks till the search was over. My hope was
+that the doctor would get discouraged, and, for fear of losing my
+value, and also of subsequently finding my children among the
+missing, he would consent to sell us; and I knew somebody
+would buy us. I had done all in my power to make my children
+comfortable during the time I expected to be separated from
+them. I was packing my things, when grandmother came into the
+room, and asked what I was doing. "I am putting my things in
+order," I replied. I tried to look and speak cheerfully; but her
+watchful eye detected something beneath the surface. She drew
+me towards her, and asked me to sit down. She looked earnestly
+
+102
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+at me, and said, "Linda, do you want to kill your old grandmother? Do you mean to leave your little, helpless children?
+I am old now, and cannot do for your babies as I once did
+for you."
+I replied, that if I went away, perhaps their father would be
+able to secure their freedom.
+"Ah, my child," said she, "don't trust too much to him. Stand
+by your own children, and suffer with them till death. Nobody
+respects a mother who forsakes her children; and if you leave
+them, you will never have a happy moment. If you go, you will
+make me miserable the short time I have to live. You would be
+taken and brought back, and your sufferings would be dreadful.
+Remember poor Benjamin. Do give it up, Linda. Try to bear a
+little longer. Things may turn out better than we expect."
+My courage failed me, in view of the sorrow I should bring on
+that faithful, loving old heart. I promised that I would try longer,
+and that I would take nothing out of her house without her
+knowledge.
+Whenever the children climbed on my knee, or laid their
+heads on my lap, she would say, "Poor little souls! what would
+you do without a mother? She don't love you as I do." And she
+would hug them to her own bosom, as if to reproach me for my
+want of affection; but she knew all the while that I loved them
+better than my life. I slept with her that night, and it was the last
+time. The memory of it haunted me for many a year.
+On Monday I returned to the plantation, and busied myself
+with preparations for the important day. Wednesday came. It
+was a beautiful day, and the faces of the slaves were as bright as
+the sunshine. The poor creatures were merry. They were expecting little presents from the bride, and hoping for better times under her administration. I had no such hopes for them. I knew
+that the young wives of slaveholders often thought their authority and importance would be best established and maintained by
+cruelty; and what I had heard of young Mrs. Flint gave me no
+reason to expect that her rule over them would be less severe
+than that of the master and overseer. Truly, the colored race are
+the most cheerful and forgiving people on the face of the earth.
+That their masters sleep in safety is owing to their superabun-
+
+SCENES AT THE PLANTA nON
+
+103
+
+dance of heart; and yet they look upon their sufferings with less
+pity than they would bestow on those of a horse or a dog.
+I stood at the door with others to receive the bridegroom and
+bride. She was a handsome, delicate-looking girl, and her face
+flushed with emotion at sight of her new home. I thought it
+likely that visions of a happy future were rising before her. It
+made me sad; for I knew how soon clouds would come over her
+sunshine. She examined every part of the house, and told me she
+was delighted with the arrangements I had made. I was afraid old
+Mrs. Flint had tried to prejudice her against me, and I did my
+best to please her.
+All passed off smoothly for me until dinner time arrived. I did
+not mind the embarrassment of waiting on a dinner party, for the
+first time in my life, half so much as I did the meeting with Dr.
+Flint and his wife, who would be among the guests. It was a
+mystery to me why Mrs. Flint had not made her appearance at
+the plantation during all the time I was putting the house in order. I had not met her, face to face, for five years, and I had no
+wish to see her now. She was a praying woman, and, doubtless,
+considered my present position a special answer to hcr prayers.
+Nothing could please her better than to see me humbled and
+trampled upon. I was just where she would have me-in the
+power of a hard, unprincipled master. She did not speak to me
+when she took her seat at table; but her satisfied, triumphant
+smile, when I handed her plate, was more eloquent than words.
+The old doctor was not so quiet in his demonstrations. He ordered me here and there, and spoke with peculiar emphasis when
+he said "your mistress." I was drilled like a disgraced soldier.
+When all was over, and the last key turned, I sought my pillow,
+thankful that God had appointed a season of rest for the weary.
+The next day my new mistress began her housekeeping. I was
+not exactly appointed maid of all work; but I was to do whatever
+I was told. Monday evening came. It was always a busy time. On
+that night the slaves received their weekly allowance of food.
+Three pounds of meat, a peck of corn, and perhaps a dozen herring were allowed to each man. Women received a pound and a
+half of meat, a peck of corn, and the same number of herring.
+Children over twelve years old had half the allowance of the
+
+104
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+women. The meat was cut and weighed by the foreman of the
+field hands,' and piled on planks before the meat house. Then
+the second foreman went behind the building, and when the first
+foreman called out, "Who takes this piece of meat?" he answered
+by calling somebody's name. This method was resorted to as a
+means of preventing partiality in distributing the meat. The
+young mistress came out to see how things were done on her
+plantation, and she soon gave a specimen of her character.
+Among those in waiting for their allowance was a very old slave,
+who had faithfully served the Flint family through three generations. When he hobbled up to get his bit of meat, the mistress
+said he was too old to have any allowance; that when niggers
+were too old to work, they ought to be fed on grass. Poor old
+man! He suffered much before he found rest in the grave.
+My mistress and I got along very well together. At the end of
+a week, old Mrs. Flint made us another visit, and was closeted a
+long time with her daughter-in-law. I had my suspicions what
+was the subject of the conference. The old doctor's wife had been
+informed that I could leave the plantation on one condition, and
+she was very desirous to keep me there. If she had trusted me, as
+I deserved to be trusted by her, she would have had no fears of
+my accepting that condition. When she entered her carriage to
+return home, she said to young Mrs. Flint, "Don't neglect to
+send for them as quick as possible." My heart was on the watch
+all the time, and I at once concluded that she spoke of my children. The doctor came the next day, and as I entered the room to
+spread the tea table, I heard him say, "Don't wait any longer.
+Send for them to-morrow." I saw through the plan. They
+thought my children's being there would fetter me to the spot,
+and that it was a good place to break us all in to abject submission to our lot as slaves. After the doctor left, a gentleman called,
+who had always manifested friendly feelings towards my grandmother and her family. Mr. Flint carried him over the plantation
+to show him the results of labor performed by men and women
+who were unpaid, miserably clothed, and half famished. The cotton crop was all they thought of. It was duly admired, and the
+gentleman returned with specimens to show his friends. I was
+ordered to carry water to wash his hands. As I did so, he said,
+
+SCENES AT THE PLANTATION
+
+105
+
+"Linda, how do you like your new home?" I told him I liked it
+as well as I expected. He replied, "They don't think you are contented, and to-morrow they are going to bring your children to
+be with you. I am sorry for you, Linda. I hope they will treat
+you kindly." I hurried from the room, unable to thank him. My
+suspicions were correct. My children were to be brought to the
+plantation to be "broke in."
+To this day I feel grateful to the gentleman who gave me this
+timely information. It nerved me to immediate action.
+
+XVII
+
+The Flight
+
+MR. FLINT WAS HARD pushed for
+
+house servants, and rather
+than lose me he had restrained his malice. I did my work faithfully, though not, of course, with a willing mind. They were evidently afraid I should leave them. Mr. Flint wished that I should
+sleep in the great house instead of the servants' quarters. His wife
+agreed to the proposition, but said I mustri't bring my bed into
+the house, because it would scatter feathers on her carpet. I knew
+when I went there that they would never think of such a thing as
+furnishing a bed of any kind for me and my little one. I therefore
+carried my own bed, and now I was forbidden to use it. I did as
+I was ordered. But now that I was certain my children were to be
+put in their power, in order to give them a stronger hold on me,
+I resolved to leave them that night. I remembered the grief this
+step would bring upon my dear old grandmother; and nothing
+less than the freedom of my children would have induced me to
+disregard her advice. I went about my evening work with trembling steps. Mr. Flint twice called from his chamber door to inquire why the house was not locked up. I replied that I had not
+done my work. "You have had time enough to do it," said he.
+"Take care how you answer me!"
+I shut all the windows, locked all the doors, and went up to
+the third story, to wait till midnight. How long those hours
+seemed, and how fervently I prayed that God would not forsake
+me in this hour of utmost need! I was about to risk every thing
+on the throw of a die; and if I failed, 0 what would become of
+me and my poor children? They would be made to suffer for my
+fault.
+At half past twelve I stole softly down stairs. I stopped on the
+second floor, thinking I heard a noise. I felt my way down into
+the parlor, and looked out of the window. The night was so in106
+
+THE FLIGHT
+
+107
+
+tensely dark that I could see nothing. I raised the window very
+softly and jumped out. Large drops of rain were falling, and the
+darkness bewildered me. I dropped on my knees, and breathed a
+short prayer to God for guidance and protection. I groped my
+way to the road, and rushed towards the town with almost lightning speed. I arrived at my grandmother's house, but dared not
+see her. She would say, "Linda, you are killing me;" and I knew
+that would unnerve me. I tapped softly at the window of a room,
+occupied by a woman, who had lived in the house several years.
+I knew she was a faithful friend, and could be trusted with my
+secret. I tapped several times before she heard me. At last she
+raised the window, and I whispered, "Sally, I have run away. Let
+me in, quick." She opened the door softly, and said in low tones,
+"For God's sake, don't. Your grandmother is trying to buy you
+and de chillern. Mr. Sands was here last week. He to le her he was
+going away on business, but he wanted her to go ahead about
+buying you and de chillern, and he would help her all he could.
+Don't run away, Linda. Your grandmother is all bowed down
+wid trouble now."
+I replied, "Sally, they arc going to carry my children to the
+plantation to-morrow; and they will never sell them to any body
+so long as they have me in their power. Now, would you advise
+me to go back?"
+"No, chile, no," answered she. "When dey finds you is gone,
+dey won't want de plague ob de chillern; but where is you going
+to hide? Dey knows ebery inch ob dis house."
+I told her I had a hiding-place, and that was all it was best for
+her to know. I asked her to go into my room as soon as it was
+light, and take all my clothes out of my trunk, and pack them in
+hers; for I knew Mr. Flint and the constable would be there early
+to search my room. I feared the sight of my children would be
+too much for my full heart; but I could not go out into the uncertain future without one last look. I bent over the bed where
+lay my little Benny and baby Ellen. Poor little ones! fatherless
+and motherless! Memories of their father came over me. He
+wanted to be kind to them; but they were not all to him, as they
+were to my womanly heart. I knelt and prayed for the innocent
+little sleepers. I kissed them lightly, and turned away.
+
+108
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+As I was about to open the street door, Sally laid her hand on
+my shoulder, and said, "Linda, is you gwine all alone? Let me
+call your uncle."
+"No, Sally," I replied, "I want no one to be brought into trouble on my account."
+I went forth into the darkness and rain. I ran on till I came to
+the house of the friend who was to conceal me.
+Early the next morning Mr. Flint was at my grandmother's inquiring for me. She told him she had not seen me, and supposed
+I was at the plantation. He watched her face narrowly, and said,
+"Don't you know anything about her running off?" She assured
+him that she did not. He went on to say, "Last night she ran off
+without the least provocation. We had treated her very kindly.
+My wife liked her. She will soon be found and brought back. Are
+her children with you?" When told that they were, he said, "I am
+very glad to hear that. If they are here, she cannot be far off. If I
+find out that any of my niggers have had any thing to do with
+this damned business, I'll give 'em five hundred lashes." As he
+started to go to his father's, he turned round and added, persuasively, "Let her be brought back, and she shall have her children
+to live with her."
+The tidings made the old doctor rave and storm at a furious
+rate. It was a busy day for them. My grandmother's house was
+searched from top to bottom. As my trunk was empty, they concluded I had taken my clothes with me. Before ten o'clock every
+vessel northward bound was thoroughly examined, and the law
+against harboring fugitives was read to all on board. At night a
+watch was set over the town. Knowing how distressed my
+grandmother would be, I wanted to send her a message; but it
+could not be done. Everyone who went in or out of her house
+was closely watched. The doctor said he would take my children,
+unless she became responsible for them; which of course she
+willingly did. The next day was spent in searching. Before night,
+the following advertisement was posted at every corner, and in
+every public place for miles round:"$300 REWARD! Ran away from the subscriber, an intelligent,
+bright, mulatto girl, named Linda, 21 years of age. Five feet four
+
+THE FLIGHT
+
+109
+
+inches high. Dark eyes, and black hair inclined to curl; but it can
+be made straight. Has a decayed spot on a front tooth. She can
+read and write, and in all probability will try to get to the Free
+States. All persons are forbidden, under penalty of the law, to
+harbor or employ said slave. $150 will be given to whoever takes
+her in the state, and $300 if taken out of the state and delivered to
+me, or lodged in jail.
+DR. FLINT."
+
+XVIII
+
+Months of Peril
+
+THE SEARCH FOR ME was kept up with more perseverence than
+I had anticipated. I began to think that escape was impossible.
+I was in great anxiety lest I should implicate the friend who
+harbored me. I knew the consequences would be frightful; and
+much as I dreaded being caught, even that seemed better than
+causing an innocent person to suffer for kindness to me. A week
+had passed in terrible suspense, when my pursuers came into such
+close vicinity that I concluded they had tracked me to my hidingplace. I flew out of the house, and concealed myself in a thicket of
+bushes. There I remained in an agony of fear for two hours. Suddenly, a reptile of some kind seized my leg. In my fright, I struck
+a blow which loosened its hold, but I could not tell whether I had
+killed it; it was so dark, I could not see what it was; I only knew it
+was something cold and slimy. The pain I felt soon indicated that
+the bite was poisonous. I was compelled to leave my place of concealment, and I groped my way back into the house. The pain had
+become intense, and my friend was startled by my look of anguish. I asked her to prepare a poultice of warm ashes and vinegar, and I applied it to my leg, which was already much swollen.
+The application gave me some relief, but the swelling did not
+abate. The dread of being disabled was greater than the physical
+pain I endured. My friend asked an old woman, who doctored
+among the slaves, what was good for the bite of a snake or a
+lizard. She told her to steep a dozen coppers in vinegar, over
+night, and apply the cankered vinegar to the inflamed part.':'
+"The poison of a snake is a powerful acid, and is counteracted by powerful alkalies, such as potash, ammonia, &c. The Indians are accustomed to apply wet
+ashes, or plunge the limb into strong lie. White men, employed to layout railroads in snaky places, often carry ammonia with them as an antidoce.c-Enrrox.
+110
+
+MONTHS OF PERIL
+
+111
+
+I had succeeded in cautiously conveying some messages to my
+relatives. They were harshly threatened, and despairing of my
+having a chance to escape, they advised me to return to my master, ask his forgiveness, and let him make an example of me. But
+such counsel had no influence with me. When I started upon this
+hazardous undertaking, I had resolved that, come what would,
+there should be no turning back. "Give me liberty, or give me
+death," was my motto. When my friend contrived to make
+known to my relatives the painful situation I had been in for
+twenty-four hours, they said no more about my going back to
+my master. Something must be done, and that speedily; but
+where to turn for help, they knew not. God in his mercy raised
+up "a friend in need."
+Among the ladies who were acquainted with my grandmother, was one who had known her from childhood, and always been very friendly to her.' She had also known my mother
+and her children, and felt interested for them. At this crisis of affairs she called to see my grandmother, as she not unfrequently
+did. She observed the sad and troubled expression of her face,
+and asked if she knew where Linda was, and whether she was
+safe. My grandmother shook her head, without answering.
+"Come, Aunt Martha," said the kind lady, "tell me all about it.
+Perhaps I can do something to help you." The husband of this
+lady held many slaves, and bought and sold slaves. She also held
+a number in her own name; but she treated them kindly, and
+would never allow any of them to be sold. She was unlike the
+majority of slaveholders' wives. My grandmother looked
+earnestly at her. Something in the expression of her face said
+"Trust me!" and she did trust her. She listened attentively to the
+details of my story, and sat thinking for a while. At last she said,
+"Aunt Martha, I pity you both. If you think there is any chance
+of Linda's getting to the Free States, I will conceal her for a time.
+But first you must solemnly promise that my name shall never
+be mentioned. If such a thing should become known, it would
+ruin me and my family. No one in my house must know of it,
+except the cook. She is so faithful that I would trust my own life
+with her; and I know she likes Linda. It is a great risk; bur I trust
+no harm will come of it. Get word to Linda to be ready as soon
+
+112
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+as it is dark, before the patrols are out. 1 will send the housemaids on errands, and Betty shall go to meet Linda." The place
+where we were to meet was designated and agreed upon. My
+grandmother was unable to thank the lady for this noble deed;
+overcome by her emotions, she sank on her knees and sobbed
+like a child.
+1 received a message to leave my friend's house at such an
+hour, and go to a certain place where a friend would be waiting
+for me. As a matter of prudence no names were mentioned. 1 had
+no means of conjecturing who 1 was to meet, or where 1 was going. 1 did not like to move thus blindfolded, but 1 had no choice.
+It would not do for me to remain where 1 was. 1 disguised myself, summoned up courage to meet the worst, and went to the
+appointed place. My friend Betty was there; she was the last person 1 expected to see. We hurried along in silence. The pain in
+my leg was so intense that it seemed as if 1 should drop; but fear
+gave me strength. We reached the house and entered unobserved.
+Her first words were: "Honey, now you is safe. Dem devils ain't
+coming to search dis house. When 1 get you into missis' safe
+place, 1 will bring some nice hot supper. 1 specs you need it after
+all dis skeering." Berry's vocation led her to think eating the
+most important thing in life. She did not realize that my heart
+was too full for me to care much about supper.
+The mistress came to meet us, and led me up stairs to a small
+room over her own sleeping apartment. "You will be safe here,
+Linda," said she; "1 keep this room to store away things that are
+out of use. The girls are not accustomed to be sent to it, and they
+will not suspect any thing unless they hear some noise. 1 always
+keep it locked, and Betty shall take care of the key. But you must
+be very careful, for my sake as well as your own; and you must
+never tell my secret; for it would ruin me and my family. 1 will
+keep the girls busy in the morning, that Betty may have a chance
+to bring your breakfast; but it will not do for her to come to you
+again till night. 1 will come to see you sometimes. Keep up your
+courage. 1 hope this state of things will not last long." Betty came
+with the "nice hot supper," and the mistress hastened down
+stairs to keep things straight till she returned. How my heart
+overflowed with gratitude! Words choked in my throat; but 1
+
+MONTHS OF PERIL
+
+113
+
+could have kissed the feet of my benefactress. For that deed of
+Christian womanhood, may God forever bless her!
+I went to sleep that night with the feeling that I was for the
+present the most fortunate slave in town. Morning came and
+filled my little cell with light. I thanked the heavenly Father for
+this safe retreat. Opposite my window was a pile of feather beds.
+On the top of these I could lie perfectly concealed, and command a view of the street through which Dr. Flint passed to his
+office. Anxious as I was, I felt a gleam of satisfaction when I saw
+him. Thus far I had outwitted him, and I triumphed over it. Who
+can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and
+oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.
+I was daily hoping to hear that my master had sold my children; for I knew who was on the watch to buy them. But Dr.
+Flint cared even more for revenge than he did for money. My
+brother William, and the good aunt who had served in his family
+twenty years, and my little Benny, and Ellen, who was a little
+over two years old, were thrust into jail, as a means of compelling my relatives to give some information about me. He
+swore my grandmother should never see one of them again till I
+was brought back. They kept these facts from me for several
+days. When I heard that my little ones were in a loathsome jail,
+my first impulse was to go to them. I was encountering dangers
+for the sake of freeing them, and must I be the cause of their
+death? The thought was agonizing. My benefactress tried to
+soothe me by telling me that my aunt would take good care of
+the children while they remained in jail. But it added to my pain
+to think that the good old aunt, who had always been so kind to
+her sister's orphan children, should be shut up in prison for no
+other crime than loving them. I suppose my friends feared a
+reckless movement on my part, knowing, as they did, that my
+life was bound up in my children. I received a note from my
+brother William. It was scarcely legible, and ran thus: "Wherever
+you are, dear sister, I beg of you not to come here. We are all
+much better off than you are. If you come, you will ruin us all.
+They would force you to tell where you had been, or they would
+kill you. Take the advice of your friends; if not for the sake of me
+
+114
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+and your children, at least for the sake of those you would ruin."
+Poor William! He also must suffer for being my brother. I
+took his advice and kept quiet. My aunt was taken out of jail at
+the end of a month because Mrs. Flint could not spare her any
+longer. She was tired of being her own housekeeper. It was quite
+too fatiguing to order her dinner and eat it too. My children remained in jail, where brother William did all he could for their
+comfort. Betty went to see them sometimes, and brought me tidings. She was not permitted to enter the jail; but William would
+hold them up to the grated window while she chatted with them.
+When she repeated their prattle, and told me how they wanted to
+see their ma, my tears would flow. Old Betty would exclaim,
+"Lors, chile! what's you crying 'bout? Dem young uns viI kill
+you dead. Don't be so chick'n hearted! If you does, you vil nebber git thro' dis world."
+Good old soul! She had gone through the world childless.i
+She had never had little ones to clasp their arms round her neck;
+she had never seen their soft eyes looking into hers; no sweet little voices had called her mother; she had never pressed her own
+infants to her heart, with the feeling that even in fetters there was
+something to live for. How could she realize my feelings? Berry's
+husband loved children dearly, and wondered why God had denied them to him. He expressed great sorrow when he came to
+Betty with the tidings that Ellen had been taken out of jail and
+carried to Dr. Flint's. She had the measles a short time before
+they carried her to jail, and the disease had left her eyes affected.
+The doctor had taken her home to attend to them. My children
+had always been afraid of the doctor and his wife. They had
+never been inside of their house. Poor little Ellen cried all day to
+be carried back to prison. The instincts of childhood are true.
+She knew she was loved in the jail. Her screams and sobs annoyed Mrs. Flint. Before night she called one of the slaves, and
+said, "Here, Bill, carry this brat back to the jail. I can't stand her
+noise. If she would be quiet I should like to keep the little minx.
+She would make a handy waiting-maid for my daughter by and
+by. But if she staid here, with her white face, I suppose I should
+either kill her or spoil her. I hope the doctor will sell them as far
+
+MONTHS OF PERIL
+
+115
+
+as wind and water can carry them. As for their mother, her ladyship will find out yet what she gets by running away. She hasn't
+so much feeling for her children as a cow has for its calf. If she
+had, she would have come back long ago, to get them out of jail,
+and save all this expense and trouble. The good-for-nothing
+hussy! When she is caught, she shall stay in jail, in irons, for one
+six months, and then be sold to a sugar plantation. I shall see her
+broke in yet. What do you stand there for, Bill? Why don't you
+go off with the brat? Mind, now, that you don't let any of the
+niggers speak to her in the street!"
+When these remarks were reported to me, I smiled at Mrs.
+Flint's saying that she should either kill my child or spoil her. I
+thought to myself there was very little danger of the latter. I have
+always considered it as one of God's special providences that
+Ellen screamed till she was carried back to jail.
+That same night Dr. Flint was called to a patient, and did not
+return till near morning. Passing my grandmother's, he saw a
+light in the house, and thought to himself, "Perhaps this has
+something to do with Linda." He knocked, and the door was
+opened. "What calls you up so early?" said he. "I saw your light,
+and I thought I would just stop and tell you that I have found
+out where Linda is. I know where to put my hands on her, and I
+shall have her before twelve o'clock." When he had turned away,
+my grandmother and my uncle looked anxiously at each other.
+They did not know whether or not it was merely one of the doctor's tricks to frighten them. In their uncertainty, they thought it
+was best to have a message conveyed to my friend Betty. Unwilling to alarm her mistress, Betty resolved to dispose of me herself.
+She came to me, and told me to rise and dress quickly. We hurried down stairs, and across the yard, into the kitchen. She
+locked the door, and lifted up a plank in the floor. A buffalo skin
+and a bit of carpet were spread for me to lie on, and a quilt
+thrown over me. "Stay dar," said she, "till I sees if dey know
+'bout you. Dey say dey vil put thar hans on you afore twelve
+o'clock. If dey did know whar you are, dey won't know now.
+Dey'll be disapinted dis time. Dat's all I got to say. If dey comes
+rummagin 'mong my tings, dey'll get one bressed sarssin from
+
+116
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+dis 'ere nigger." In my shallow bed I had but just room enough
+to bring my hands to my face to keep the dust out of my eyes;
+for Betty walked over me twenty times in an hour, passing from
+the dresser to the fireplace. When she was alone, I could hear her
+pronouncing anathemas over Dr. Flint and all his tribe, every
+now and then saying, with a chuckling laugh, "Dis nigger's too
+cute for 'em dis time." When the housemaids were about, she
+had sly ways of drawing them out, that I might hear what they
+would say. She would repeat stories she had heard about my being in this, or that, or the other place. To which they would answer, that I was not fool enough to be staying round there; that I
+was in Philadelphia or N ew York before this time. When all
+were abed and asleep, Betty raised the plank, and said, "Come
+out, chile; come out. Dey don't know nottin 'bout you. 'Twas
+only white folks' lies, to skeer de niggers."
+Some days after this adventure I had a much worse fright. As
+I sat very still in my retreat above stairs, cheerful visions floated
+through my mind. I thought Dr. Flint would soon get discouraged, and would be willing to sell my children, when he lost all
+hopes of making them the means of my discovery. I knew who
+was ready to buy them. Suddenly I heard a voice that chilled my
+blood. The sound was too familiar to me, it had been too dreadful, for me not to recognize at once my old master. He was in the
+house, and I at once concluded he had come to seize me. I looked
+round in terror. There was no way of escape. The voice receded.
+I supposed the constable was with him, and they were searching
+the house. In my alarm I did not forget the trouble I was bringing on my generous benefactress. It seemed as if I were born to
+bring sorrow on all who befriended me, and that was the bitterest drop in the bitter cup of my life. After a while I heard approaching footsteps; the key was turned in my door. I braced
+myself against the wall to keep from falling. I ventured to look
+up, and there stood my kind benefactress alone. I was too much
+overcome to speak, and sunk down upon the floor.
+"I thought you would hear your master's voice," she said;
+"and knowing you would be terrified, I came to tell you there is
+nothing to fear. You may even indulge in a laugh at the old gentleman's expense. He is so sure you are in New York, that he
+
+MONTHS OF PERIL
+
+117
+
+came to borrow five hundred dollars to go in pursuit of you. My
+sister had some money to loan on interest. He has obtained it,
+and proposes to start for New York to-night. So, for the present,
+you see you are safe. The doctor will merely lighten his pocket
+hunting after the bird he has left behind."
+
+XIX
+
+The Children Sold
+
+THE DOCTOR CAME BACK from New York, of course without
+accomplishing his purpose. He had expended considerable
+money, and was rather disheartened. My brother and the children had now been in jail two months, and that also was some
+expense. My friends thought it was a favorable time to work on
+his discouraged feelings. Mr. Sands sent a speculator to offer him
+nine hundred dollars for my brother William, and eight hundred
+for the two children. These were high prices, as slaves were then
+selling; but the offer was rejected. If it had been merely a question of money, the doctor would have sold any boy of Benny's
+age for two hundred dollars; but he could not bear to give up the
+power of revenge. But he was hard pressed for money, and he revolved the matter in his mind. He knew that if he could keep
+Ellen till she was fifteen, he could sell her for a high price; but I
+presume he reflected that she might die, or might be stolen away.
+At all events, he came to the conclusion that he had better accept
+the slave-trader's offer. Meeting him in the street, he inquired
+when he would leave town. "To-day, at ten o'clock," he replied.
+"Ah, do you go so soon?" said the doctor; "I have been reflecting upon your proposition, and I have concluded to let you have
+the three negroes if you will say nineteen hundred dollars." After
+some parley, the trader agreed to his terms. He wanted the bill of
+sale drawn up and signed immediately, as he had a great deal to
+attend to during the short time he remained in town. The doctor
+went to the jail and told William he would take him back into his
+service if he would promise to behave himself; but he replied that
+he would rather be sold. "And you shall be sold, you ungrateful
+rascal!" exclaimed the doctor. In less than an hour the money
+was paid, the papers were signed, sealed, and delivered, and my
+brother and children were in the hands of the trader.
+118
+
+THE CHILDREN SOLD
+
+119
+
+It was a hurried transaction; and after it was over, the doctor's
+characteristic caution returned. He went back to the speculator,
+and said, "Sir, I have come to lay you under obligations of a
+thousand dollars not to sell any of those negroes in this state."
+"You come too late," replied the trader; "our bargain is closed."
+He had, in fact, already sold them to Mr. Sands, but he did not
+mention it. The doctor required him to put irons on "that rascal,
+Bill," and to pass through the back streets when he took his gang
+out of town. The trader was privately instructed to concede to
+his wishes. My good old aunt went to the jail to bid the children
+good bye, supposing them to be the speculator's property, and
+that she should never see them again. As she held Benny in her
+lap, he said, "Aunt Nancy, I want to show you something." He
+led her to the door and showed her a long row of marks, saying,
+"Uncle Will taught me to count. I have made a mark for every
+day I have been here, and it is sixty days. It is a long time; and
+the speculator is going to take me and Ellen away. He's a bad
+man. It's wrong for him to take grandmother's children. I want
+to go to my mother."
+My grandmother was told that the children would be restored
+to her, but she was requested to act as if they were really to be
+sent away. Accordingly, she made up a bundle of clothes and
+went to the jail. When she arrived, she found William handcuffed
+among the gang, and the children in the trader's cart. The scene
+seemed too much like reality. She was afraid there might have
+been some deception or mistake. She fainted, and was carried
+home.
+When the wagon stopped at the hotel, several gentlemen came
+out and proposed to purchase William, but the trader refused
+their offers, without stating that he was already sold. And now
+came the trying hour for that drove of human beings, driven
+away like cattle, to be sold they knew not where. Husbands were
+torn from wives, parents from children, never to look upon each
+other again this side of the grave. There was wringing of hands
+and cries of despair.
+Dr. Flint had the supreme satisfaction of seeing the wagon
+leave town, and Mrs. Flint had the gratification of supposing that
+my children were going "as far as wind and water would carry
+
+120
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+them." According to agreement, my uncle followed the wagon
+some miles, until they came to an old farm house. There the
+trader took the irons from William, and as he did so, he said,
+"You are a damned clever fellow. I should like to own you myself. Them gentlemen that wanted to buy you said you was a
+bright, honest chap, and I must git you a good home. I guess
+your old master will swear to-morrow, and call himself an old
+fool for selling the children. I reckon he'll never git their mammy
+back agin. I expect she's made tracks for the north. Good bye,
+old boy. Remember, I have done you a good turn. You must
+thank me by coaxing all the pretty gals to go with me next fall.
+That's going to be my last trip. This trading in niggers is a bad
+business for a fellow that's got any heart. Move on, you fellows!" And the gang went on, God alone knows where.
+Much as I despise and detest the class of slave-traders, whom
+I regard as the vilest wretches on earth, I must do this man the
+justice to say that he seemed to have some feeling. He took a
+fancy to William in the jail, and wanted to buy him. When he
+heard the story of my children, he was willing to aid them in
+getting out of Dr. Flint's power, even without charging the customary fee.
+My uncle procured a wagon and carried William and the children back to town. Great was the joy in my grandmother's
+house! The curtains were closed, and the candles lighted. The
+happy grandmother cuddled the little ones to her bosom. They
+hugged her, and kissed her, and clapped their hands, and
+shouted. She knelt down and poured forth one of her heartfelt
+prayers of thanksgiving to God. The father was present for a
+while; and though such a "parental relation" as existed between
+him and my children takes slight hold of the hearts or consciences of slaveholders, it must be that he experienced some moments of pure joy in witnessing the happiness he had imparted.
+I had no share in the rejoicings of that evening. The events of
+the day had not come to my knowledge. And now I will tell you
+something that happened to me; though you will, perhaps, think
+it illustrates the superstition of slaves. I sat in my usual place on
+the floor near the window, where I could hear much that was
+said in the street without being seen. The family had retired for
+
+THE CHILDREN SOLD
+
+121
+
+the night, and all was still. I sat there thinking of my children,
+when I heard a low strain of music. A band of serenaders were
+under the window, playing "Home, sweet home." I listened till
+the sounds did not seem like music, but like the moaning of children. It seemed as if my heart would burst. I rose from my sitting posture, and knelt. A streak of moonlight was on the floor
+before me, and in the midst of it appeared the forms of my two
+children. They vanished; but I had seen them distinctly. Some
+will call it a dream, others a vision. I know not how to account
+for it, but it made a strong impression on my mind, and I felt certain something had happened to my little ones.
+I had not seen Betty since morning. Now I heard her softly
+turning the key. As soon as she entered, I clung to her, and
+begged her to let me know whether my children were dead, or
+whether they were sold; for I had seen their spirits in my room,
+and I was sure something had happened to them. "Lor, chile,"
+said she, putting her arms round me, "you's got de highsterics.
+I'll sleep wid you to-night, 'cause you'll make a noise, and ruin
+missis. Something has stirred you up mightily. When you is done
+cryin, I'll talk wid you. De chillern is well, and mighty happy. I
+seed 'em myself. Does dat satisfy you? Dar, chile, be still! Somebody viII hear you." I tried to obey her. She lay down, and was
+soon sound asleep; but no sleep would come to my eyelids.
+At dawn, Betty was up and off to the kitchen. The hours
+passed on, and the vision of the night kept constantly recurring
+to my thoughts. After a while I heard the voices of two women
+in the entry. In one of them I recognized the housemaid. The
+other said to her, "Did you know Linda Brent's children was
+sold to the speculator yesterday. They say ole massa Flint was
+mighty glad to see'em drove out of town; but they say they've
+come back agin. I 'spect it's all their daddy's doings. They say
+he's bought WiIliam too. Lor! how it will take hold of ole massa
+Flint! I'm going roun' to aunt Marthy's to see 'bout it."
+I bit my lips till the blood came to keep from crying out. Were
+my children with their grandmother, or had the speculator carried them off? The suspense was dreadful. Would Betty never
+come, and tell me the truth about it? At last she came, and I eagerly repeated what I had overheard. Her face was one broad,
+
+122
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+bright smile. "Lor, you foolish ting!" said she. "I'se gwine to tell
+you all 'bout it. De gals is eating thar breakfast, and missus tole
+me to let her tell you; but, poor creeter! r'aint right to keep you
+waitin', and I'se gwine to tell you. Brudder, chillern, all is bought
+by de daddy! I'se laugh more dan nuff, tinking 'bout ole massa
+Flint. Lor, how he vill swar! He's got ketched dis time, any
+how; but I must be getting out 0' dis, or dem gals vill come and
+ketch me."
+Betty went off laughing; and I said to myself, "Can it be true
+that my children are free? I have not suffered for them in vain.
+Thank God!"
+Great surprise was expressed when it was known that my
+children had returned to their grandmother's. The news spread
+through the town, and many a kind word was bestowed on the
+little ones.
+Dr. Flint went to my grandmother's to ascertain who was the
+owner of my children, and she informed him. "I expected as
+much," said he. "1 am glad to hear it. 1 have had news from Linda
+lately, and 1 shall soon have her. You need never expect to see
+her free. She shall be my slave as long as 1 live, and when I am
+dead she shall be the slave of my children. If 1 ever find out that
+you or Phillip had any thing to do with her running off I'll kill
+him. And if I meet William in the street, and he presumes to look
+at me, I'll flog him within an inch of his life. Keep those brats out
+of my sight!"
+As he turned to leave, my grandmother said something to remind him of his own doings. He looked back upon her, as if he
+would have been glad to strike her to the ground.
+1 had my season of joy and thanksgiving. It was the first time
+since my childhood that 1 had experienced any real happiness. 1
+heard of the old doctor's threats, but they no longer had the
+same power to trouble me. The darkest cloud that hung over my
+life had rolled away. Whatever slavery might do to me, it could
+not shackle my children. If I fell a sacrifice, my little ones were
+saved. It was well for me that my simple heart believed all that
+had been promised for their welfare. It is always better to trust
+than to doubt.
+
+xx
+New Perils
+
+THE DOCTOR, MORE EXASPERATED than ever, again tried to
+revenge himself on my relatives. He arrested uncle Phillip on the
+charge of having aided my flight. He was carried before a court,
+and swore truly that he knew nothing of my intention to escape,
+and that he had not seen me since I left my master's plantation.
+The doctor then demanded that he should give bail for five hundred dollars that he would have nothing to do with me. Several
+gentlemen offered to be security for him; but Mr. Sands told him
+he had better go back to jail, and he would see that he came out
+without giving bail.
+The news of his arrest was carried to my grandmother, who
+conveyed it to Betty. In the kindness of her heart, she again
+stowed me away under the floor; and as she walked back and
+forth, in the performance of her culinary duties, she talked apparently to herself, but with the intention that I should hear
+what was going on. I hoped that my uncle's imprisonment
+would last but few days; still I was anxious. I thought it likely
+Dr. Flint would do his utmost to taunt and insult him, and I was
+afraid my uncle might lose control of himself, and retort in some
+way that would be construed into a punishable offence; and I
+was well aware that in court his word would not be taken against
+any white man's. The search for me was renewed. Something had
+excited suspicions that I was in the vicinity. They searched the
+house I was in. I heard their steps and their voices. At night,
+when all were asleep, Betty came to release me from my place of
+confinement. The fright I had undergone, the constrained posture, and the dampness of the ground, made me ill for several
+days. My uncle was soon after taken out of prison; but the movements of all my relatives, and of all our friends, were very closely
+watched.
+123
+
+124
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+We all saw that I could not remain where I was much longer.
+I had already staid longer than was intended, and I knew my
+presence must be a source of perpetual anxiety to my kind benefactress. During this time, my friends had laid many plans for my
+escape, but the extreme vigilance of my persecutors made it impossible to carry them into effect.
+One morning I was much startled by hearing somebody trying to get into my room. Several keys were tried, but none fitted.
+I instantly conjectured it was one of the housemaids; and I concluded she must either have heard some noise in the room, or
+have noticed the entrance of Betty. When my friend came, at her
+usual time, I told her what had happened. "I knows who it was,"
+said she. " 'Pend upon it, 'twas dat Jenny. Dat nigger allers got
+de debble in her." I suggested that she might have seen or heard
+something that excited her curiosity.
+"Tut! tut! chile!" exclaimed Betty, "she ain't seen notin', nor
+hearn notin', She only 'spects someting. Dat's all. She wants to
+fine out who hab cut and make my gownd. But she won't nebber
+know. Dat's sartin. I'll git missis to fix her."
+I reflected a moment, and said, "Berry, I must leave here tonight."
+"Do as you tink best, poor chile," she replied. "I'se mighty
+'fraid dat 'ere nigger vill pop on you some time."
+She reported the incident to her mistress, and received orders
+to keep Jenny busy in the kitchen till she could see my uncle
+Phillip. He told her he would send a friend for me that very
+evening. She told him she hoped I was going to the north, for it
+was very dangerous for me to remain any where in the vicinity.
+Alas, it was not an easy thing, for one in my situation, to go to
+the north. In order to leave the coast quite clear for me, she went
+into the country to spend the day with her brother, and took
+Jenny with her. She was afraid to come and bid me good bye, but
+she left a kind message with Betty. I heard her carriage roll from
+the door, and I never again saw her who had so generously befriended the poor, trembling fugitive! Though she was a slaveholder, to this day my heart blesses her!
+I had not the slightest idea where I was going. Betty brought
+me a suit of sailor's clothes,-jacket, trowsers, and tarpaulin hat.
+
+NEW PERILS
+
+125
+
+She gave me a small bundle, saying I might need it where I was
+going. In cheery tones, she exclaimed, "I'se so glad you is gwine
+to free parts! Don't forget ole Betty. P'raps I'll come 'long by
+and by."
+I tried to tell her how grateful I felt for all her kindness, but
+she interrupted me. "I don't want no tanks, honey. I'se glad I
+could help you, and I hope de good Lord vill open de path for
+you. I'se gwine wid you to de lower gate. Put your hands in your
+pockets, and walk ricketty, like de sailors."
+I performed to her satisfaction. At the gate I found Peter, a
+young colored man, waiting for me. I had known him for years.
+He had been an apprentice to my father, and had always borne a
+good character. I was not afraid to trust to him. Betty bade me a
+hurried good bye, and we walked off. "Take courage, Linda,"
+said my friend Peter. "I've got a dagger, and no man shall take
+you from me, unless he passes over my dead body."
+It was a long time since I had taken a walk out of doors, and
+the fresh air revived me. It was also pleasant to hear a human
+voice speaking to me above a whisper. I passed several people
+whom I knew, but they did not recognize me in my disguise. I
+prayed internally that, for Peter's sake, as well as my own, nothing might occur to bring out his dagger. We walked on till we
+came to the wharf. My aunt Nancy's husband was a seafaring
+man, and it had been deemed necessary to let him into our secret.
+He took me into his boat, rowed out to a vessel not far distant,
+and hoisted me on board. We three were the only occupants of
+the vessel. I now ventured to ask what they proposed to do with
+me. They said I was to remain on board till near dawn, and then
+they would hide me in Snaky Swamp, 1 till my uncle Phillip had
+prepared a place of concealment for me. If the vessel had been
+bound north, it would have been of no avail to me, for it would
+certainly have been searched. About four o'clock, we were again
+seated in the boat, and rowed three miles to the swamp. My fear
+of snakes had been increased by the venomous bite I had received, and I dreaded to enter this hiding-place. But I was in no
+situation to choose, and I gratefully accepted the best that my
+poor, persecuted friends could do for me.
+Peter landed first, and with a large knife cut a path through
+
+126
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+bamboos and briers of all descriptions. He came back, took me
+in his arms, and carried me to a seat made among the bamboos.
+Before we reached it, we were covered with hundreds of mosquitos. In an hour's time they had so poisoned my flesh that I was a
+pitiful sight to behold. As the light increased, I saw snake after
+snake crawling round us. I had been accustomed to the sight of
+snakes all my life, but these were larger than any I had ever seen.
+To this day I shudder when I remember that morning. As evening approached, the number of snakes increased so much that
+we were continually obliged to thrash them with sticks to keep
+them from crawling over us. The bamboos were so high and so
+thick that it was impossible to sec beyond a very short distance.
+Just before it became dark we procured a seat nearer to the entrance of the swamp, being fearful of losing our way back to the
+boat. It was not long before we heard the paddle of oars, and the
+low whistle, which had been agreed upon as a signal. We made
+haste to enter the boat, and were rowed back to the vessel. I
+passed a wretched night; for the heat of the swamp, the mosquitos, and the constant terror of snakes, had brought on a burning
+fever. I had just dropped asleep, when they came and told me it
+was time to go back to that horrid swamp. I could scarcely summon courage to rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were
+less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized. This time Peter took a quantity of tobacco to burn, to keep off the mosquitos. It produced the desired
+effect on them, but gave me nausea and severe headache. At dark
+we returned to the vessel. I had been so sick during the day, that
+Peter declared I should go home that night, if the devil himself
+was on patrol. They told me a place of concealment had been
+provided for me at my grandmother's. I could not imagine how
+it was possible to hide me in her house, every nook and corner of
+which was known to the Flint family. They told me to wait and
+see. We were rowed ashore, and went boldly through the streets,
+to my grandmother's. I wore my sailor's clothes, and had blackened my face with charcoal. I passed several people whom I
+knew. The father of my children came so near that I brushed
+against his arm; but he had no idea who it was.
+
+NEW PERILS
+
+127
+
+"You must make the most of this walk," said my friend Peter,
+"for you may not have another very soon."
+I thought his voice sounded sad. It was kind of him to conceal
+from me what a dismal hole was to be my home for a long, long
+time.
+
+XXI
+
+The Loophole of Retreat
+
+A SMALL SHED HAD been added to my grandmother's house
+years ago. Some boards were laid across the joists at the top, and
+between these boards and the roof was a very small garret, never
+occupied by any thing but rats and mice. It was a pent roof, covered with nothing but shingles, according to the southern custom for such buildings. The garret was only nine feet long and
+seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped
+down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission
+for either light or air. My uncle Phillip, who was a carpenter, had
+very skilfully made a concealed trap-door, which communicated
+with the storeroom.' He had been doing this while I was waiti ng
+in the swamp. The storeroom opened upon a piazza. To this hole
+I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I
+could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so
+sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the
+roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary, and I
+slept such sleep as the wretched may, when a tempest has passed
+over them. Morning came. I knew it only by the noises I heard;
+for in my small den day and night were all the same. I suffered
+for air even more than for light. But I was not comfortless. I
+heard the voices of my children. There was joy and there was
+sadness in the sound. It made my tears flow. How I longed to
+speak to them! I was eager to look on their faces; but there was
+no hole, no crack, through which I could peep. This continued
+darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a
+cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I
+would have chosen this, rather than my lot as a slave, though
+white people considered it an easy one; and it was so compared
+with the fate of others. I was never cruelly over-worked; I was
+!28
+
+THE LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT
+
+129
+
+never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so
+beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the
+other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running
+away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about,
+while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never
+branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. On the contrary, I had always been kindly treated, and tenderly cared for,
+until I came into the hands of Dr. Flint. I had never wished for
+freedom till then. But though my life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is
+compelled to lead such a life!
+My food was passed up to me through the trap-door my uncle had contrived; and my grandmother, my uncle Phillip, and
+aunt Nancy would seize such opportunities as they could, to
+mount up there and chat with me at the opening. But of course
+this was not safe in the daytime. It must all be done in darkness.
+It was impossible for me to move in an erect position, but I
+crawled about my den for exercise. One day I hit my head
+against something, and found it was a gimlet.! My uncle had left
+it sticking there when he made the trap-door. I was as rejoiced as
+Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a treasure. It
+put a lucky thought into my head. I said to myself, "Now I will
+have some light. Now I will see my children." I did not dare to
+begin my work during the daytime, for fear of attracting attention. But I groped round; and having found the side next the
+street, where I could frequently see my children, I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening. I bored three rows of holes, one
+above another; then I bored out the interstices between. I thus
+succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch
+broad. I sat by it till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of
+air that floated in. In the morning I watched for my children.
+The first person I saw in the street was Dr. Flint. I had a shuddering, superstitious feeling that it was a bad omen. Several familiar faces passed by. At last I heard the merry laugh of
+children, and presently two sweet little faces were looking up at
+me, as though they knew I was there, and were conscious of the
+joy they imparted. How I longed to tell them I was there!
+My condition was now a little improved. But for weeks I was
+
+130
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+tormented by hundreds of little red insects, fine as a needle's
+point, that pierced through my skin, and produced an intolerable
+burning. The good grandmother gave me herb teas and cooling
+medicines, and finally I got rid of them. The heat of my den was
+intense, for nothing but thin shingles protected me from the
+scorching summer's sun. But I had my consolations. Through
+my peeping-hole I could watch the children, and when they were
+near enough, I could hear their talk. Aunt Nancy brought me all
+the news she could hear at Dr. Flint's. From her I learned that
+the doctor had written to New York to a colored woman, who
+had been born and raised in our neighborhood, and had breathed
+his contaminating atmosphere. He offered her a reward if she
+could find out any thing about me. I know not what was the nature of her reply; but he soon after started for New York in
+haste, saying to his family that he had business of importance to
+transact. I peeped at him as he passed on his way to the steamboat. It was a satisfaction to have miles of land and water between us, even for a little while; and it was a still greater
+satisfaction to know that he believed me to be in the Free States.
+My little den seemed less dreary than it had done. He returned,
+as he did from his former journey to New York, without obtaining any satisfactory information. When he passed our house next
+morning, Benny was standing at the gate. He had heard them say
+that he had gone to find me, and he called out, "Dr. Flint, did
+you bring my mother home? I want to see her." The doctor
+stamped his foot at him in a rage, and exclaimed, "Get out of the
+way, you little damned rascal! If you don't, I'll cut off your
+head."
+Benny ran terrified into the house, saying, "You can't put me
+in jail again. I don't belong to you now." It was well that the
+wind carried the words away from the doctor's ear. I told my
+grandmother of it, when we had our next conference at the trapdoor; and begged of her not to allow the children to be impertinent to the irascible old man.
+Autumn came, with a pleasant abatement of heat. My eyes
+had become accustomed to the dim light, and by holding my
+book or work in a certain position near the aperture I contrived
+to read and sew. That was a great relief to the tedious monotony
+
+THE LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT
+
+131
+
+of my life. But when winter came, the cold penetrated through
+the thin shingle roof, and I was dreadfully chilled. The winters
+there are not so long, or so severe, as in northern latitudes; but
+the houses are not built to shelter from cold, and my little den
+was peculiarly comfortless. The kind grandmother brought me
+bed-clothes and warm drinks. Often I was obliged to lie in bed
+all day to keep comfortable; but with all my precautions, my
+shoulders and feet were frostbitten. 0, those long, gloomy days,
+with no object for my eye to rest upon, and no thoughts to occupy my mind, except the dreary past and the uncertain future! I
+was thankful when there came a day sufficiently mild for me to
+wrap myself up and sit at the loophole to watch the passers by.
+Southerners have the habit of stopping and talking in the streets,
+and I heard many conversations not intended to meet my ears. I
+heard slave-hunters planning how to catch some poor fugitive.
+Several times I heard allusions to Dr. Flint, myself, and the history of my children, who, perhaps, were playing near the gate.
+One would say, "I wouldn't move my little finger to catch her,
+as old Flint's property." Another would say, "I'll catch any nigger for the reward. A man ought to have what belongs to him, if
+he is a damned brute." The opinion was often expressed that I
+was in the Free States. Very rarely did anyone suggest that I
+might be in the vicinity. Had the least suspicion rested on my
+grandmother's house, it would have been burned to the ground.
+But it was the last place they thought of. Yet there was no place,
+where slavery existed, that could have afforded me so good a
+place of concealment.
+Dr. Flint and his family repeatedly tried to coax and bribe my
+children to tell something they had heard said about me. One
+day the doctor took them into a shop, and offered them some
+bright little silver pieces and gay handkerchiefs if they would tell
+where their mother was. Ellen shrank away from him, and would
+not speak; but Benny spoke up, and said, "Dr. Flint, I don't
+know where my mother is. I guess she's in New York; and when
+you go there again, I wish you'd ask her to come home, for I
+want to see her; but if you put her in jail, or tell her you'll cut her
+head off, I'll tell her to go right back."
+
+XXII
+
+Christmas Festivities
+
+CHRISTMAS WAS APPROACHING. Grandmother brought me
+materials, and I busied myself making some new garments and
+little playthings for my children. Were it not that hiring day is
+near at hand, and many families are fearfully looking forward to
+the probability of separation in a few days, Christmas might be a
+happy season for the poor slaves. Even slave-mothers try to
+gladden the hearts of their little ones on that occasion. Benny
+and Ellen had their Christmas stockings filled. Their imprisoned
+mother could not have the privilege of witnessing their surprise
+and joy. But I had the pleasure of peeping at them as they went
+into the street with their new suits on. I heard Benny ask a little
+playmate whether Santa Claus brought him any thing. "Yes,"
+replied the boy; "but Santa Claus ain't a real man. It's the children's mothers that put things into the stockings." "No, that
+can't be," replied Benny, "for Santa Claus brought Ellen and me
+these new clothes, and my mother has been gone this long time."
+How I longed to tell him that his mother made those garments, and that many a tear fell on them while she worked!
+Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the
+johnkannaus.' Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its
+greatest attraction. They consist of companies of slaves from the
+plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men, in
+calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all
+manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows' tails are fastened to
+their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box,
+covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat
+on this, while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which
+bands of dancers keep time. For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies,
+of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed
+132
+
+CHRISTMAS FESTIVITIES
+
+133
+
+to go round till twelve o'clock, begging for contributions. Not a
+door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining
+a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out,
+but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars. It
+is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle. If he does, they regale his ears with the following song:"Poor massa, so dey say;
+Down in de heel, so dey say;
+Got no money, so dey say;
+Not one shillin, so dey say;
+God A'mighty bress you, so dey say."
+Christmas is a day of feasting, both with white and colored
+people. Slaves, who are lucky enough to have a few shillings, are
+sure to spend them for good eating; and many a turkey and pig is
+captured, without saying, "By your leave, sir." Those who cannot obtain these, cook a 'possum, or a raccoon, from which savory dishes can be made. My grandmother raised poultry and
+pigs for sale; and it was her established custom to have both a
+turkey and a pig roasted for Christmas dinner.
+On this occasion, I was warned to keep extremely quiet, because two guests had been invited. One was the town constable,
+and the other was a free colored man, who tried to pass himself
+off for white, and who was always ready to do any mean work
+for the sake of currying favor with white people. My grandmother had a motive for inviting them. She managed to take
+them all over the house. All the rooms on the lower floor were
+thrown open for them to pass in and out; and after dinner, they
+were invited up stairs to look at a fine mocking bird my uncle
+had just brought home. There, too, the rooms were all thrown
+open, that they might look in. When I heard them talking on the
+piazza, my heart almost stood still. I knew this colored man had
+spent many nights hunting for me. Every body knew he had the
+blood of a slave father in his veins; but for the sake of passing
+himself off for white, he was ready to kiss the slaveholders' feet.
+How I despised him! As for the constable, he wore no false col-
+
+134
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ors. The duties of his office were despicable, but he was superior
+to his companion, inasmuch as he did not pretend to be what he
+
+was not. Any white man, who could raise money enough to buy
+a slave, would have considered himself degraded by being a constable; but the office enabled its possessor to exercise authority.
+If he found any slave out after nine o'clock, he could whip him
+as much as he liked; and that was a privilege to be coveted. When
+the guests were ready to depart, my grandmother gave each of
+them some of her nice pudding, as a present for their wives.
+Through my peep-hole I saw them go out of the gate, and I was
+glad when it closed after them. So passed the first Christmas in
+my den.
+
+XXIII
+
+Still in Prison
+
+WHEN SPRING RETURNED, AND I took in the little patch of
+green the aperture commanded, I asked myself how many more
+summers and winters I must be condemned to spend thus. I
+longed to draw in a plentiful draught of fresh air, to stretch my
+cramped limbs, to have room to stand erect, to feel the earth under my feet again. My relatives were constantly on the lookout
+for a chance of escape; but none offered that seemed practicable,
+and even tolerably safe. The hot summer came again, and made
+the turpentine drop from the thin roof over my head.
+During the long nights I was restless for want of air, and I had
+no room to toss and turn. There was but one compensation; the
+atmosphere was so stifled that even mosquitos would not condescend to buzz in it. With all my detestation of Dr. Flint, I could
+hardly wish him a worse punishment, either in this world or that
+which is to come, than to suffer what I suffered in one single
+summer. Yet the laws allowed him to be out in the free air, while
+I, guiltless of crime, was pent up here, as the only means of
+avoiding the cruelties the laws allowed him to inflict upon me! I
+don't know what kept life within me. Again and again, I thought
+I should die before long; but I saw the leaves of another autumn
+whirl through the air, and felt the touch of another winter. In
+summer the most terrible thunder storms were acceptable, for
+the rain came through the roof, and I rolled up my bed that it
+might cool the hot boards under it. Later in the season, storms
+sometimes wet my clothes through and through, and that was
+not comfortable when the air grew chilly. Moderate storms I
+could keep out by filling the chinks with oakum.
+But uncomfortable as my situation was, I had glimpses of
+things out of doors, which made me thankful for my wretched
+hiding-place. One day I saw a slave pass our gate, muttering,
+135
+
+136
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+"It's his own, and he can kill it if he will." My grandmother told
+me that woman's history. Her mistress had that day seen her
+baby for the first time, and in the lineaments of its fair face she
+saw a likeness to her husband. She turned the bondwoman and
+her child out of doors, and forbade her ever to return. The slave
+went to her master, and told him what had happened. He
+promised to talk with her mistress, and make it all right. The
+next day she and her baby were sold to a Georgia trader.
+Another time I saw a woman rush wildly by, pursued by two
+men. She was a slave, the wet nurse of her mistress's children.
+For some trifling offence her mistress ordered her to be stripped
+and whipped. To escape the degradation and the torture, she
+rushed to the river, jumped in, and ended her wrongs in death.
+Senator Brown, I of Mississippi, could not be ignorant of
+many such facts as these, for they are of frequent occurrence in
+every Southern State. Yet he stood up in the Congress of the
+United States, and declared that slavery was "a great moral, social, and political blessing; a blessing to the master, and a blessing
+to the slave!"
+I suffered much more during the second winter than I did
+during the first. My limbs were benumbed by inaction, and the
+cold filled them with cramp. I had a very painful sensation of
+coldness in my head; even my face and tongue stiffened, and I
+lost the power of speech. Of course it was impossible, under the
+circumstances, to summon any physician. My brother William
+came and did all he could for me.! Uncle Phillip also watched
+tenderly over me; and poor grandmother crept up and down to
+inquire whether there were any signs of returning life. I was restored to consciousness by the dashing of cold water in my face,
+and found myself leaning against my brother's arm, while he
+bent over me with streaming eyes. He afterwards told me he
+thought I was dying, for I had been in an unconscious state sixteen hours. I next became delirious, and was in great danger of
+betraying myself and my friends. To prevent this, they stupefied
+me with drugs. I remained in bed six weeks, weary in body and
+sick at heart. How to get medical advice was the question.
+William finally went to a Thompsonian doctor,' and described
+himself as having all my pains and aches. He returned with
+
+STILL IN PRISON
+
+137
+
+herbs, roots, and ointment. He was especially charged to rub on
+the ointment by a fire; but how could a fire be made in my little
+den? Charcoal in a furnace was tried, but there was no outlet for
+the gas, and it nearly cost me my life. Afterwards coals, already
+kindled, were brought up in an iron pan, and placed on bricks. I
+was so weak, and it was so long since I had enjoyed the warmth
+of a fire, that those few coals actually made me weep. I think the
+medicines did me some good; but my recovery was very slow.
+Dark thoughts passed through my mind as I lay there day after
+day. I tried to be thankful for my little cell, dismal as it was, and
+even to love it, as part of the price I had paid for the redemption
+of my children. Sometimes I thought God was a compassionate
+Father, who would forgive my sins for the sake of my sufferings.
+At other times, it seemed to me there was no justice or mercy in
+the divine government. I asked why the curse of slavery was permitted to exist, and why I had been so persecuted and wronged
+from youth upward. These things took the shape of mystery,
+which is to this day not so clear to my soul as I trust it will be
+hereafter.
+In the midst of my illness, grandmother broke down under
+the weight of anxiety and toil. The idea of losing her, who had always been my best friend and a mother to my children, was the
+sorest trial I had yet had. 0, how earnestly I prayed that she
+might recover! How hard it seemed, that I could not tend upon
+her, who had so long and so tenderly watched over me!
+One day the screams of a child nerved me with strength to
+crawl to my peeping-hole, and I saw my son covered with blood.
+A fierce dog, usually kept chained, had seized and bitten him. A
+doctor was sent for, and I heard the groans and screams of my
+child while the wounds were being sewed up. 0, what torture to
+a mother's heart, to listen to this and be unable to go to him!
+But childhood is like a day in spring, alternately shower and
+sunshine. Before night Benny was bright and lively, threatening
+the destruction of the dog; and great was his delight when the
+doctor told him the next day that the dog had bitten another boy
+and been shot. Benny recovered from his wounds; but it was
+long before he could walk.
+When my grandmother's illness became known, many ladies,
+
+138
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+who were her customers, called to bring her some little comforts,
+and to inquire whether she had every thing she wanted. Aunt
+Nancy one night asked permission to watch with her sick
+mother, and Mrs. Flint replied, "I don't see any need of your going. I can't spare you." But when she found other ladies in the
+neighborhood were so attentive, not wishing to be outdone in
+Christian charity, she also sallied forth, in magnificent condescension, and stood by the bedside of her who had loved her in
+her infancy, and who had been repaid by such grievous wrongs.
+She seemed surprised to find her so ill, and scolded uncle Phillip
+for not sending for Dr. Flint. She herself sent for him immediately, and he came. Secure as I was in my retreat, I should have
+been terrified if I had known he was so near me. He pronounced
+my grandmother in a very critical situation, and said if her attending physician wished it, he would visit her. Nobody wished
+to have him coming to the house at all hours, and we were not
+disposed to give him a chance to make out a long bill.
+As Mrs. Flint went out, Sally told her the reason Benny was
+lame was, that a dog had bitten him. ''I'm glad of it," replied she.
+"I wish he had killed him. It would be good news to send to his
+mother. Her day will come. The dogs will grab her yet." With
+these Christian words she and her husband departed, and, to my
+great satisfaction, returned no more.
+I heard from uncle Phillip, with feelings of unspeakable joy
+and gratitude, that the crisis was passed and grandmother would
+live. I could now say from my heart, "God is merciful. He has
+spared me the anguish of feeling that I caused her death."
+
+XXIV
+
+The Candidate for Congress
+
+THE SUMMER HAD NEARLY ended, when Or. Flint made a third
+visit to New York, in search of me.' Two candidates were running for Congress, and he returned in season to vote. The father
+of my children was the Whig candidate. The doctor had hitherto
+been a stanch Whig; but now he exerted all his energies for the
+defeat of Mr. Sands. He invited large parties of men to dine in the
+shade of his trees, and supplied them with plenty of rum and
+brandy. If any poor fellow drowned his wits in the bowl, and, in
+the openness of his convivial heart, proclaimed that he did not
+mean to vote the Democratic ticket, he was shoved into the street
+without ceremony.
+The doctor expended his liquor in vain. Mr. Sands was
+elected; an event which occasioned me some anxious thoughts.
+He had not emancipated my children, and if he should die they
+would be at the mercy of his heirs. Two little voices, that frequently met my ear, seemed to plead with me not to let their father depart without striving to make their freedom secure. Years
+had passed since I had spoken to him. I had not even seen him
+since the night I passed him, unrecognized, in my disguise of a
+sailor. I supposed he would call before he left, to say something
+to my grandmother concerning the children, and I resolved what
+course to take.
+The day before his departure for Washington I made arrangements, towards evening, to get from my hiding-place into the
+storeroom below. I found myself so stiff and clumsy that it was
+with great difficulty I could hitch from one resting place to another. When I reached the storeroom my ankles gave way under
+me, and I sank exhausted on the floor. It seemed as if I could
+never use my limbs again. But the purpose I had in view roused
+all the strength I had. I crawled on my hands and knees to the
+139
+
+140
+
+INCIDENTS IN TIlE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+window, and, screened behind a barrel, I waited for his coming.
+The clock struck nine, and I knew the steamboat would leave between ten and eleven. My hopes were failing. But presently I
+heard his voice, saying to some one, "Wait for me a moment. I
+wish to see aunt Martha." When he came out, as he passed the
+window, I said, "Stop one moment, and let me speak for my children." He started, hesitated, and then passed on, and went out of
+the gate. I closed the shutter I had partially opened, and sank
+down behind the barrel. I had suffered much; but seldom had I
+experienced a keener pang than I then felt. Had my children,
+then, become of so little consequence to him? And had he so little feeling for their wretched mother that he would not listen a
+moment while she pleaded for them? Painful memories were so
+busy within me, that I forgot I had not hooked the shutter, till I
+heard some one opening it. I looked up. He had come back.
+"Who called me?" said he, in a low tone. "I did," I replied. "Oh,
+Linda," said he, "I knew your voice; but I was afraid to answer,
+lest my friend should hear me. Why do you come here? Is it possible you risk yourself in this house? They are mad to allow it. I
+shall expect to hear that you are all ruined." I did not wish to implicate him, by letting him know my place of concealment; so 1
+merely said, "I thought you would come to bid grandmother
+good bye, and so 1 came here to speak a few words to you about
+emancipating my children. Many changes may take place during
+the six months you are gone to Washington, and it does not seem
+right for you to expose them to the risk of such changes. I want
+nothing for myself; all I ask is, that you will free my children, or
+authorize some friend to do it, before you go."
+He promised he would do it, and also expressed a readiness to
+make any arrangements whereby I could be purchased.
+I heard footsteps approaching, and closed the shutter hastily. I
+wanted to crawl back to my den, without letting the family
+know what I had done; for I knew they would deem it very imprudent. But he stepped back into the house, to tell my grandmother that he had spoken with me at the storeroom window,
+and to beg of her not to allow me to remain in the house over
+night. He said it was the height of madness for me to be there;
+that we should certainly all be ruined. Luckily, he was in too
+
+THE CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS
+
+141
+
+much of a hurry to wait for a reply, or the dear old woman
+would surely have told him all.
+1 tried to go back to my den, but found it more difficult to go
+up than 1 had to come down. Now that my mission was fulfilled,
+the little strength that had supported me through it was gone,
+and 1 sank helpless on the floor. My grandmother, alarmed at the
+risk 1 had run, came into the storeroom in the dark, and locked
+the door behind her. "Linda," she whispered, "where are you?"
+"I am here by the window," 1 replied. "I couldn't have him go
+away without emancipating the children. Who knows what may
+happen?"
+"Come, come, child," said she, "it won't do for you to stay
+here another minute. You've done wrong; but 1 can't blame you,
+poor thing!"
+1 told her 1 could not return without assistance, and she must
+call my uncle. Uncle Phillip came, and pity prevented him from
+scolding me. He carried me back to my dungeon, laid me tenderly on the bed, gave me some medicine, and asked me if there
+was any thing more he could do. Then he went away, and 1 was
+left with my own thoughts-starless as the midnight darkness
+around me.
+My friends feared 1 should become a cripple for life; and 1 was
+so weary of my long imprisonment that, had it not been for the
+hope of serving my children, 1 should have been thankful to die;
+but, for their sakes, 1 was willing to bear on.
+
+xxv
+
+Competition in Cunning
+
+DR. FLINT HAD NOT given me up. Every now and then he
+would say to my grandmother that I would yet come back, and
+voluntarily surrender myself; and that when I did, I could be
+purchased by my relatives, or anyone who wished to buy me. I
+knew his cunning nature too well not to perceive that this was a
+trap laid for me; and so all my friends understood it. I resolved to
+match my cunning against his cunning. In order to make him believe that I was in New York, I resolved to write him a letter
+dated from that place. I sent for my friend Peter, and asked him
+if he knew any trustworthy seafaring person, who would carry
+such a letter to N ew York, and put it in the post office there. He
+said he knew one that he would trust with his own life to the
+ends of the world. I reminded him that it was a hazardous thing
+for him to undertake. He said he knew it, but he was willing to
+do any thing to help me. I expressed a wish for a New York paper, to ascertain the names of some of the streets. He run his
+hand into his pocket, and said, "Here is half a one, that was
+round a cap I bought of a pedler yesterday." I told him the letter
+would be ready the next evening. He bade me good bye, adding, "Keep up your spirits, Linda; brighter days will come by
+and by."
+My uncle Phillip kept watch over the gate until our brief interview was over. Early the next morning, I seated myself near
+the little aperture to examine the newspaper. It was a piece of the
+New York Herald; and, for once, the paper that systematically
+abuses the colored people, was made to render them a service.
+Having obtained what information I wanted concerning streets
+and numbers, I wrote two letters, one to my grandmother, the
+other to Dr. Flint. I reminded him how he, a gray-headed man,
+had treated a helpless child, who had been placed in his power,
+142
+
+COMPETITION IN CUNNING
+
+143
+
+and what years of misery he had brought upon her. To my
+grandmother, I expressed a wish to have my children sent to me
+at the north, where I could teach them to respect themselves, and
+set them a virtuous example; which a slave mother was not allowed to do at the south. I asked her to direct her answer to a
+certain street in Boston, as I did not live in New York, though I
+went there sometimes. I dated these letters ahead, to allow for
+the time it would take to carry them, and sent a memorandum of
+the date to the messenger. When my friend came for the letters, I
+said, "God bless and reward you, Peter, for this disinterested
+kindness. Pray be careful. If you are detected, both you and I
+will have to suffer dreadfully. I have not a relative who would
+dare to do it for me." He replied, "You may trust to me, Linda. I
+don't forget that your father was my best friend, and I will be a
+friend to his children so long as God lets me live."
+It was necessary to tell my grandmother what I had done, in
+order that she might be ready for the letter, and prepared to hear
+what Dr. Flint might say about my being at the north. She was
+sadly troubled. She felt sure mischief would come of it. I also
+told my plan to aunt Nancy, in order that she might report to us
+what was said at Dr. Flint's house. I whispered it to her through
+a crack, and she whispered back, "I hope it will succeed. I shan't
+mind being a slave all my life, if I can only see you and the children free."
+I had directed that my letters should be put into the New
+York post office on the 20th of the month. On the evening of the
+24th my aunt came to say that Dr. Flint and his wife had been
+talking in a low voice about a letter he had received, and that
+when he went to his office he promised to bring it when he came
+to tea. So I concluded I should hear my letter read the next
+morning. I told my grandmother Dr. Flint would be sure to
+come, and asked her to have him sit near a certain door, and leave
+it open, that I might hear what he said. The next morning I took
+my station within sound of that door, and remained motionless
+as a statue. It was not long before I heard the gate slam, and the
+well-known footsteps enter the house. He seated himself in the
+chair that was placed for him, and said, "Well, Martha, I've
+brought you a letter from Linda. She has sent me a letter, also. I
+
+144
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+know exactly where to find her; but I don't choose to go to
+Boston for her. I had rather she would come back of her own accord, in a respectable manner. Her uncle Phillip is the best person to go for her. With him, she would feel perfectly free to act.
+I am willing to pay his expenses going and returning. She shall be
+sold to her friends. Her children are free; at least I suppose they
+are; and when you obtain her freedom, you'll make a happy family. I suppose, Martha, you have no objection to my reading to
+you the letter Linda has written to you."
+He broke the seal, and I heard him read it. The old villain! He
+had suppressed the letter I wrote to grandmother, and prepared a
+substitute of his own, the purport of which was as follows:Dear Grandmother:
+I have long wanted to write to you; but the disgraceful manner in
+which I left you and my children made me ashamed to do it. If
+you knew how much I have suffered since I ran away, you would
+pity and forgive me. I have purchased freedom at a dear rate. If
+any arrangement could be made for me to return to the south
+without being a slave, I would gladly come. If not, I beg ofyou to
+send my children to the north. I cannot live any longer without
+them. Let me know in time, and I will meet them in New York or
+Philadelphia, which ever place best suits my uncle's convenience.
+Write as soon as possible to your unhappy daughter,
+LINDA.
+
+"It is very much as I expected it would be," said the old hypocrite, rising to go. "You see the foolish girl has repented of her
+rashness, and wants to return. We must help her to do it, Martha,
+Talk with Phillip about it. If he will go for her, she will trust to
+him, and come back. I should like an answer tomorrow. Good
+morning, Martha."
+As he stepped out on the piazza, he stumbled over my little
+girl. "Ah, Ellen, is that you?" he said, in his most gracious manner. "I didn't see you. How do you do?"
+"Pretty well, sir," she replied. "I heard you tell grandmother
+that my mother is coming home. I want to see her."
+"Yes, Ellen, I am going to bring her home very soon," re-
+
+COMPETITION IN CUNNING
+
+145
+
+joined he; "and you shall see her as much as you like, you little
+curly-headed nigger."
+This was as good as a comedy to me, who had heard it all; but
+grandmother was frightened and distressed, because the doctor
+wanted my uncle to go for me.
+The next evening Dr. Flint called to talk the matter over. My
+uncle told him that from what he had heard of Massachusetts, he
+judged he should be mobbed if he went there after a runaway
+slave. "All stuff and nonsense, Phillip!" replied the doctor. "Do
+you suppose I want you to kick up a row in Boston? The business can all be done quietly. Linda writes that she wants to come
+back. You are her relative, and she would trust you. The case
+would be different if I went. She might object to coming with
+me; and the damned abolitionists, if they knew I was her master,
+would not believe me, if I told them she had begged to go back.
+They would get up a row; and I should not like to see Linda
+dragged through the streets like a common negro. She has been
+very ungrateful to me for all my kindness; but I forgive her, and
+want to act the part of a friend towards her. I have no wish to
+hold her as my slave. Her friends can buy her as soon as she arrives here."
+Finding that his arguments failed to convince my uncle, the
+doctor "let the cat out of the bag," by saying that he had written
+to the mayor of Boston, to ascertain whether there was a person
+of my description at the street and number from which my letter
+was dated. He had omitted this date in the letter he had made up
+to read to my grandmother. If I had dated from New York, the
+old man would probably have made another journey to that city.
+But even in that dark region, where knowledge is so carefully excluded from the slave, I had heard enough about Massachusetts
+to come to the conclusion that slaveholders did not consider it a
+comfortable place to go to in search of a runaway. That was before the Fugitive Slave Law was passed; before Massachusetts
+had consented to become a "nigger hunter" for the south.
+My grandmother, who had become skittish by seeing her family always in danger, came to me with a very distressed countenance, and said, "What will you do if the mayor of Boston sends
+
+146
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLA VE GIRL
+
+him word that you haven't been there? Then he will suspect the
+letter was a trick; and maybe he'll find out something about it,
+and we shall all get into trouble. 0 Linda, I wish you had never
+sent the letters."
+"Don't worry yourself, grandmother," said 1. "The mayor of
+Boston won't trouble himself to hunt niggers for Dr. Flint. The
+letters will do good in the end. I shall get out of this dark hole
+some time or other."
+"I hope you will, child," replied the good, patient old friend.
+"You have been here a long time; almost five years; but whenever you do go, it will break your old grandmother's heart. I
+should be expecting every day to hear that you were brought
+back in irons and put in jail. God help you, poor child! Let us be
+thankful that some time or other we shall go cc 'where the wicked
+cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' " My heart responded, Amen.
+The fact that Dr. Flint had written to the mayor of Boston
+convinced me that he believed my letter to be genuine, and of
+course that he had no suspicion of my being any where in the
+vicinity. It was a great object to keep up this delusion, for it
+made me and my friends feel less anxious, and it would be very
+convenient whenever there was a chance to escape. I resolved,
+therefore, to continue to write letters from the north from time
+to time.
+Two or three weeks passed, and as no news came from the
+mayor of Boston, grandmother began to listen to my entreaty to
+be allowed to leave my cell, sometimes, and exercise my limbs to
+prevent my becoming a cripple. I was allowed to slip down into
+the small storeroom, early in the morning, and remain there a little while. The room was all filled up with barrels, except a small
+open space under my trap-door. This faced the door, the upper
+part of which was of glass, and purposely left uncurtained, that
+the curious might look in. The air of this place was close; but it
+was so much better than the atmosphere of my cell, that I
+dreaded to return. I came down as soon as it was light, and remained till eight o'clock, when people began to be about, and
+there was danger that some one might come on the piazza. I had
+tried various applications to bring warmth and feeling into my
+
+COMPETITION IN CUNNING
+
+147
+
+limbs, but without avail. They were so numb and stiff that it was
+a painful effort to move; and had my enemies come upon me
+during the first mornings I tried to exercise them a little in the
+small unoccupied space of the storeroom, it would have been impossible for me to have escaped.
+
+XXVI
+
+Important Era in My Brother's Life
+
+I MISSED THE COMPANY and kind attentions of my brother
+William, who had gone to Washington with his master, Mr.
+Sands. We received several letters from him, written without any
+allusion to me, but expressed in such a manner that I knew he
+did not forget me. I disguised my hand, and wrote to him in the
+same manner. It was a long session; and when it closed, William
+wrote to inform us that Mr. Sands was going to the north, to be
+gone some time, and that he was to accompany him. I knew that
+his master had promised to give him his freedom, but no time
+had been specified. Would William trust to a slave's chances? I
+remembered how we used to talk together, in our young days,
+about obtaining our freedom, and I thought it very doubtful
+whether he would come back to us.
+Grandmother received a letter from Mr. Sands, saying that
+William had proved a most faithful servant, and he would also
+say a valued friend; that no mother had ever trained a better boy.
+He said he had travelled through the Northern States and
+Canada; and though the abolitionists had tried to decoy him
+away, they had never succeeded. He ended by saying they
+should be at home shortly.
+We expected letters from William, describing the novelties of
+his journey, but none came. In time, it was reported that Mr.
+Sands would return late in the autumn, accompanied by a bride.'
+Still no letters from William. I felt almost sure I should never see
+him again on southern soil; but had he no word of comfort to
+send to his friends at home? to the poor captive in her dungeon?
+My thoughts wandered through the dark past, and over the uncertain future. Alone in my cell, where no eye but God's could
+see me, I wept bitter tears. How earnestly I prayed to him to re-
+
+\48
+
+IMPORTANT ERA IN MY BROTHER'S LIFE
+
+149
+
+store me to my children, and enable me to be a useful woman
+and a good mother!
+At last the day arrived for the return of the travellers. Grandmother had made loving preparations to welcome her absent boy
+back to the old hearthstone. When the dinner table was laid,
+William's plate occupied its old place. The stage coach went by
+empty. My grandmother waited dinner. She thought perhaps he
+was necessarily detained by his master. In my prison I listened
+anxiously, expecting every moment to hear my dear brother's
+voice and step. In the course of the afternoon a lad was sent by
+Mr. Sands to tell grandmother that William did not return with
+him; that the abolitionists had decoyed him away. But he begged
+her not to feel troubled about it, for he felt confident she would
+see William in a few days. As soon as he had time to reflect he
+would come back, for he could never expect to be so well off at
+the north as he had been with him.
+If you had seen the tears, and heard the sobs, you would have
+thought the messenger had brought tidings of death instead of
+freedom. Poor old grandmother felt that she should never see her
+darling boy again. And I was selfish. I thought more of what I
+had lost, than of what my brother had gained. A new anxiety began to trouble me. Mr. Sands had expended a good deal of
+money, and would naturally feel irritated by the loss he had incurred. I greatly feared this might injure the prospects of my
+children, who were now becoming valuable property. I longed to
+have their emancipation made certain. The more so, because their
+master and father was now married. I was too familiar with slavery not to know that promises made to slaves, though with kind
+intentions, and sincere at the time, depend upon many contingencies for their fulfilment.
+Much as I wished William to be free, the step he had taken
+made me sad and anxious. The following Sabbath was calm and
+clear; so beautiful that it seemed like a Sabbath in the eternal
+world. My grandmother brought the children out on the piazza,
+that I might hear their voices. She thought it would comfort me
+in my despondency; and it did. They chatted merrily, as only
+children can. Benny said, "Grandmother, do you think uncle
+
+150
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+Will has gone for good? Won't he ever come back again? May be
+he'll find mother. If he does, won't she be glad to see him! Why
+don't you and uncle Phillip, and all of us, go and live where
+mother is? I should like it; wouldn't you, Ellen?"
+"Yes, I should like it," replied Ellen; "but how could we find
+her? Do you know the place, grandmother? I don't remember
+how mother looked-do you, Benny?"
+Benny was just beginning to describe me when they were interrupted by an old slave woman, a near neighbor, named Aggie.
+This poor creature had witnessed the sale of her children, and
+seen them carried off to parts unknown, without any hopes of
+ever hearing from them again. She saw that my grandmother had
+been weeping, and she said, in a sympathizing tone, "What's the
+matter, aunt Marthy?"
+"0 Aggie," she replied, "it seems as if I shouldn't have any of
+my children or grandchildren left to hand me a drink when I'm
+dying, and lay my old body in the ground. My boy didn't come
+back with Mr. Sands. He staid at the north."
+Poor old Aggie clapped her hands for joy. "Is dat what you's
+crying fur?" she exclaimed. "Cit down on your knees and bress
+de Lord! I don't know whar my poor chillern is, and I nebber
+'spect to know. You don't know whar poor Linda's gone to; but
+you do know whar her brudder is. He's in free parts; and dat's de
+right place. Don't murmur at de Lord's doings, but git down on
+your knees and tank him for his goodness."
+My selfishness was rebuked by what poor Aggie said. She
+rejoiced over the escape of one who was merely her fellowbondman, while his own sister was only thinking what his good
+fortune might cost her children. I knelt and prayed God to forgive me; and I thanked him from my heart, that one of my family was saved from the grasp of slavery.
+It was not long before we received a letter from William. He
+wrote that Mr. Sands had always treated him kindly, and that he
+had tried to do his duty to him faithfully. But ever since he was a
+boy, he had longed to be free; and he had already gone through
+enough to convince him he had better not lose the chance that
+offered. He concluded by saying, "Don't worry about me, dear
+grandmother. I shall think of you always; and it will spur me on
+
+IMPORTANT ERA IN MY BROTHER'S LIFE
+
+151
+
+to work hard and try to do right. When 1 have earned money
+enough to give you a home, perhaps you will come to the north,
+and we can all live happy together."
+Mr. Sands told my uncle Phillip the particulars about
+William's leaving him. He said, "1 trusted him as if he were my
+own brother, and treated him as kindly. The abolitionists talked
+to him in several places; but 1 had no idea they could tempt him.
+However, 1 don't blame William. He's young and inconsiderate,
+and those Northern rascals decoyed him. I must confess the
+scamp was very bold about it. 1 met him coming down the steps
+of the Astor House with his trunk on his shoulder, and 1 asked
+him where he was going. He said he was going to change his old
+trunk. 1 told him it was rather shabby, and asked if he didn't
+need some money. He said, No, thanked me, and went off. He
+did not return so soon as 1 expected; but 1 waited patiently. At
+last 1 went to see if our trunks were packed, ready for our journey. 1 found them locked, and a sealed note on the table informed me where 1 could find the keys. The fellow even tried to
+be religious. He wrote that he hoped God would always bless
+me, and reward me for my kindness; that he was not unwilling to
+serve me; but he wanted to be a free man; and that if 1 thought he
+did wrong, he hoped 1 would forgive him. 1 intended to give him
+his freedom in five years. He might have trusted me. He has
+shown himself ungrateful; but 1 shall not go for him, or send for
+him. 1 feel confident that he will soon return to me."
+1 afterwards heard an account of the affair from William himselP He had not been urged away by abolitionists. He needed
+no information they could give him about slavery to stimulate
+his desire for freedom. He looked at his hands, and remembered
+that they were once in irons. What security had he that they
+would not be so again? Mr. Sands was kind to him; but he might
+indefinitely postpone the promise he had made to give him his
+freedom. He might come under pecuniary embarrassments, and
+his property be seized by creditors; or he might die, without
+making any arrangements in his favor. He had too often known
+such accidents to happen to slaves who had kind masters, and he
+wisely resolved to make sure of the present opportunity to own
+himself. He was scrupulous about taking any money from his
+
+152
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+master on false pretences; so he sold his best clothes to pay for
+his passage to Boston. The slaveholders pronounced him a base,
+ungrateful wretch, for thus requiting his master's indulgence.
+What would they have done under similar circumstances?
+When Dr. Flint's family heard that William had deserted Mr.
+Sands, they chuckled greatly over the news. Mrs. Flint made her
+usual manifestations of Christian feeling, by saying, ''I'm glad of
+it. I hope he'll never get him again. I like to see people paid back
+in their own coin. I reckon Linda's children will have to pay for
+it. I should be glad to see them in the speculator's hands again,
+for I'm tired of seeing those little niggers march about the
+streets. "
+
+XXVII
+
+New Destination for the Children
+
+MRS. FLINT PROCLAIMED HER intention of informing Mrs.
+Sands who was the father of my children. She likewise proposed
+to tell her what an artful devil I was; that I had made a great deal
+of trouble in her family; that when Mr. Sands was at the north,
+she didn't doubt I had followed him in disguise, and persuaded
+William to run away. She had some reason to entertain such an
+idea; for I had written from the north, from time to time, and I
+dated my letters from various places. Many of them fell into Dr.
+Flint's hands, as I expected they would; and he must have come
+to the conclusion that I travelled about a good deal. He kept a
+close watch over my children, thinking they would eventually
+lead to my detection.
+A new and unexpected trial was in store for me. One day,
+when Mr. Sands and his wife were walking in the street, they met
+Benny. The lady took a fancy to him, and exclaimed, "What a
+pretty little negro! Whom does he belong to?"
+Benny did not hear the answer; but he came home very indignant with the stranger lady, because she had called him a negro.
+A few days afterwards, Mr. Sands called on my grandmother,
+and told her he wanted her to take the children to his house. He
+said he had informed his wife of his relation to them, and told
+her they were motherless; and she wanted to see them.
+When he had gone, my grandmother came and asked what I
+would do. The question seemed a mockery. What could I do?
+They were Mr. Sands's slaves, and their mother was a slave,
+whom he had represented to be dead. Perhaps he thought I was.
+I was too much pained and puzzled to come to any decision; and
+the children were carried without my knowledge.
+Mrs. Sands had a sister from Illinois staying with her. This
+lady, who had no children of her own, was so much pleased with
+153
+
+154
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+EIlen, that she offered to adopt her, and bring her up as she
+would a daughter. Mrs. Sands wanted to take Benjamin. When
+grandmother reported this to me, I was tried almost beyond endurance. Was this all I was to gain by what I had suffered for the
+sake of having my children free? True, the prospect seemed fair;
+but I knew too well how lightly slaveholders held such "parental
+relations." If pecuniary troubles should come, or if the new wife
+required more money than could conveniently be spared, my
+children might be thought of as a convenient means of raising
+funds. I had no trust in thee, 0 Slavery! Never should I know
+peace till my children were emancipated with all due formalities
+of law.
+I was too proud to ask Mr. Sands to do any thing for my own
+benefit; but I could bring myself to become a supplicant for my
+children. I resolved to remind him of the promise he had made
+me, and to throw myself upon his honor for the performance of
+it. I persuaded my grandmother to go to him, and tell him I was
+not dead, and that I earnestly entreated him to keep the promise
+he had made me; that I had heard of the recent proposals concerning my children, and did not feel easy to accept them; that he
+had promised to emancipate them, and it was time for him to redeem his pledge. I knew there was some risk in thus betraying
+that I was in the vicinity; but what will not a mother do for her
+children? He received the message with surprise, and said, "The
+children are free. I have never intended to claim them as slaves.
+Linda may decide their fate. In my opinion, they had better be
+sent to the north. I don't think they are quite safe here. Dr. Flint
+boasts that they are still in his power. He says they were his
+daughter's property, and as she was not of age when they were
+sold, the contract is not legally binding."
+So, then, after all I had endured for their sakes, my poor children were between two fires; between myoId master and their
+new master! And I was powerless. There was no protecting arm
+of the law for me to invoke. Mr. Sands proposed that Ellen
+should go, for the present, to some of his relatives, who had removed to Brooklyn, Long Island. It was promised that she
+should be well taken care of, and sent to school. I consented to it,
+as the best arrangement I could make for her. My grandmother,
+
+NEW DESTINA IrON FOR THE CHILDREN
+
+155
+
+of course, negotiated it all; and Mrs. Sands knew of no other person in the transaction. She proposed that they should take Ellen
+with them to Washington, and keep her till they had a good
+chance of sending her, with friends, to Brooklyn. She had an infant daughter. I had had a glimpse of it, as the nurse passed with
+it in her arms. It was not a pleasant thought to me, that the bondwoman's child should tend her free-born sister;' but there was
+no alternative. Ellen was made ready for the journey. 0, how it
+tried my heart to send her away, so young, alone, among
+strangers! Without a mother's love to shelter her from the storms
+of life; almost without memory of a mother! I doubted whether
+she and Benny would have for me the natural affection that children feel for a parent. I thought to myself that I might perhaps
+never see my daughter again, and I had a great desire that she
+should look upon me, before she went, that she might take my
+image with her in her memory. It seemed to me cruel to have her
+brought to my dungeon. It was sorrow enough for her young
+heart to know that her mother was a victim of slavery, without
+seeing the wretched hiding-place to which it had driven her. I
+begged permission to pass the last night in one of the open chambers, with my little girl. They thought I was crazy to think of
+trusting such a young child with my perilous secret. I told them
+I had watched her character, and I felt sure she would not betray
+me; that I was determined to have an interview, and if they
+would not facilitate it, I would take my own way to obtain it.
+They remonstrated against the rashness of such a proceeding; but
+finding they could not change my purpose, they yielded. I
+slipped through the trap-door into the storeroom, and my uncle
+kept watch at the gate, while I passed into the piazza and went
+up stairs, to the room I used to occupy. It was more than five
+years since I had seen it; and how the memories crowded on me!
+There I had taken shelter when my mistress drove me from her
+house; there came myoid tyrant, to mock, insult, and curse me;
+there my children were first laid in my arms; there I had watched
+over them, each day with a deeper and sadder love; there I had
+knelt to God, in anguish of heart, to forgive the wrong I had
+done. How vividly it all came back! And after this long, gloomy
+interval, I stood there such a wreck!
+
+156
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+In the midst of these meditations, I heard footsteps on the
+stairs. The door opened, and my uncle Phillip came in, leading
+Ellen by the hand. 1 put my arms round her, and said, "Ellen, my
+dear child, 1 am your mother." She drew back a little, and looked
+at me; then, with sweet confidence, she laid her cheek against
+mine, and I folded her to the heart that had been so long desolated. She was the first to speak. Raising her head, she said, inquiringly, "You really are my mother?" 1 told her 1 really was;
+that during all the long time she had not seen me, 1 had loved her
+most tenderly; and that now she was going away, 1 wanted to see
+her and talk with her, that she might remember me. With a sob in
+her voice, she said, "I'm glad you've come to see me; but
+why didn't you ever come before? Benny and 1 have wanted so
+much to see you! He remembers you, and sometimes he tells me
+about you. Why didn't you come home when Dr. Flint went
+to bring you?"
+I answered, "I couldn't come before, dear. But now that I am
+with you, tell me whether you like to go away." "I don't know,"
+said she, crying. "Grandmother says 1 ought not to cry; that 1 am
+going to a good place, where 1 can learn to read and write, and
+that by and by 1 can write her a letter. But I shan't have Benny,
+or grandmother, or uncle Phillip, or any body to love me. Can't
+you go with me? 0, do go, dear mother!"
+1 told her 1 couldn't go now; but sometime 1 would come to
+her, and then she and Benny and 1 would live together, and have
+happy times. She wanted to run and bring Benny to see me now.
+1 told her he was going to the north, before long, with uncle
+Phillip, and then 1 would come to see him before he went away.
+1 asked if she would like to have me stay all night and sleep with
+her. "0, yes," she replied. Then, turning to her uncle, she said,
+pleadingly, "May 1 stay? Please, uncle! She is my own mother."
+He laid his hand on her head, and said, solemnly, "Ellen, this is
+the secret you have promised grandmother never to tell. If you
+ever speak of it to any body, they will never let you see your
+grandmother again, and your mother can never come to Brooklyn." "Uncle," she replied, "I will never tell." He told her she
+might stay with me; and when he had gone, 1 took her in my
+arms and told her 1 was a slave, and that was the reason she must
+
+NEW DESTINATION FOR THE CHILDREN
+
+157
+
+never say she had seen me. 1 exhorted her to be a good child, to
+try to please the people where she was going, and that God
+would raise her up friends. 1 told her to say her prayers, and remember always to pray for her poor mother, and that God
+would permit us to meet again. She wept, and 1 did not check her
+tears. Perhaps she would never again have a chance to pour her
+tears into a mother's bosom. All night she nestled in my arms,
+and 1 had no inclination to slumber. The moments were too precious to lose any of them. Once, when 1 thought she was asleep,
+1 kissed her forehead softly, and she said, "1 am not asleep, dear
+mother."
+Before dawn they came to take me back to my den. 1 drew
+aside the window curtain, to take a last look of my child. The
+moonlight shone on her face, and 1 bent over her, as 1 had done
+years before, that wretched night when 1 ran away. 1 hugged her
+close to my throbbing heart; and tears, too sad for such young
+eyes to shed, flowed down her cheeks, as she gave her last kiss,
+and whispered in my ear, "Mother, 1 will never tell." And she
+never did.
+When I got back to my den, I threw myself on the bed and
+wept there alone in the darkness. It seemed as if my heart would
+burst. When the time for Ellen's departure drew nigh, 1 could
+hear neighbors and friends saying to her, "Good bye, Ellen. 1
+hope your poor mother will find you out. Won't you be glad to
+see her!" She replied, "Yes, ma' am;" and they little dreamed of
+the weighty secret that weighed down her young heart. She was
+an affectionate child, but naturally very reserved, except with
+those she loved, and 1 felt secure that my secret would be safe
+with her. I heard the gate close after her, with such feelings as
+only a slave-mother can experience. During the day my meditations were very sad. Sometimes 1 feared 1 had been very selfish
+not to give up all claim to her, and let her go to Illinois, to be
+adopted by Mrs. Sands's sister. It was my experience of slavery
+that decided me against it. 1 feared that circumstances might arise
+that would cause her to be sent back. 1 felt confident that 1
+should go to New York myself; and then 1 should be able to
+watch over her, and in some degree protect her.
+Dr. Flint's family knew nothing of the proposed arrangement
+
+158
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+till after Ellen was gone, and the news displeased them greatly.
+Mrs. Flint called on Mrs. Sands's sister to inquire into the matter.
+She expressed her opinion very freely as to the respect Mr. Sands
+showed for his wife, and for his own character, in acknowledging
+those "young niggers." And as for sending Ellen away, she pronounced it to be just as much stealing as it would be for him to
+come and take a piece of furniture out of her parlor. She said her
+daughter was not of age to sign the bill of sale, and the children
+were her property; and when she became of age, or was married,
+she could take them, wherever she could lay hands on them.
+Miss Emily Flint, the little girl to whom I had been bequeathed, was now in her sixteenth year.? Her mother considered it all right and honorable for her, or her future husband, to
+steal my children; but she did not understand how any body
+could hold up their heads in respectable society, after they had
+purchased their own children, as Mr. Sands had done. Dr. Flint
+said very little. Perhaps he thought that Benny would be less
+likely to be sent away if he kept quiet. One of my letters, that fell
+into his hands, was dated from Canada; and he seldom spoke of
+me now. This state of things enabled me to slip down into the
+storeroom more frequently, where I could stand upright, and
+move my limbs more freely.
+Days, weeks, and months passed, and there came no news of
+Ellen. I sent a letter to Brooklyn, written in my grandmother's
+name, to inquire whether she had arrived there. Answer was returned that she had not. I wrote to her in Washington; but no
+notice was taken of it. There was one person there, who ought to
+have had some sympathy with the anxiety of the child's friends
+at home; but the links of such relations as he had formed with
+me, are easily broken and cast away as rubbish. Yet how protectingly and persuasively he once talked to the poor, helpless slave
+girl! And how entirely I trusted him! But now suspicious darkened my mind. Was my child dead, or had they deceived me, and
+sold her?
+If the secret memoirs of many members of Congress should
+be published, curious details would be unfolded. I once saw a
+letter from a member of Congress to a slave, who was the mother
+of six of his children. He wrote to request that she would send
+
+NEW DESTINATION FOR THE CHILDREN
+
+159
+
+her children away from the great house before his return, as he
+expected to be accompanied by friends. The woman could not
+read, and was obliged to employ another to read the letter. The
+existence of the colored children did not trouble this gentleman,
+it was only the fear that friends might recognize in their features
+a resemblance to him.
+At the end of six months, a letter came to my grandmother,
+from Brooklyn. It was written by a young lady in the family, and
+announced that Ellen had just arrived. It contained the following
+message from her: "I do try to do just as you told me to, and I
+pray for you every night and morning." I understood that these
+words were meant for me; and they were a balsam to my heart.
+The writer closed her letter by saying, "EBen is a nice little girl,
+and we shall like to have her with us. My cousin, Mr. Sands,' has
+given her to me, to be my little waiting maid. I shall send her to
+school, and I hope some day she will write to you herself." This
+letter perplexed and troubled me. Had my child's father merely
+placed her there till she was old enough to support herself? Or
+had he given her to his cousin, as a piece of property? If the last
+idea was correct, his cousin might return to the south at any
+time, and hold Ellen as a slave. I tried to put away from me the
+painful thought that such a foul wrong could have been done to
+us. I said to myself, "Surely there must be some justice in man;"
+then I remembered, with a sigh, how slavery perverted all the
+natural feelings of the human heart. It gave me a pang to look on
+my light-hearted boy. He believed himself free; and to have him
+brought under the yoke of slavery, would be more than I could
+bear. How I longed to have him safely out of the reach of its
+power!
+
+XXVIII
+
+Aunt Nancy
+
+I HA YE MENTIONED MY great-aunt, who was a slave in Dr.
+Flint's family, and who had been my refuge during the shameful
+persecutions I suffered from him. This aunt had been married at
+twenty years of age; that is, as far as slaves can marry. She had
+the consent of her master and mistress, and a clergyman performed the ceremony. But it was a mere form, without any legal
+value. Her master or mistress could annul it any day they
+pleased. She had always slept on the floor in the entry, near Mrs.
+Flint's chamber door, that she might be within call. When she
+was married, she was told she might have the use of a small room
+in an out-house. Her mother and her husband furnished it. He
+was a seafaring man, and was allowed to sleep there when he was
+at home. But on the wedding evening, the bride was ordered to
+her old post on the entry floor.
+Mrs. Flint, at that time, had no children; but she was expecting
+to be a mother, and if she should want a drink of water in the
+night, what could she do without her slave to bring it? So my
+aunt was compelled to lie at her door, until one midnight she was
+forced to leave, to give premature birth to a child. In a fortnight
+she was required to resume her place on the entry floor, because
+Mrs. Flint's babe needed her attentions. She kept her station
+there through summer and winter, until she had given premature
+birth to six children; and all the while she was employed as
+night-nurse to Mrs. Flint's children. Finally, toiling all day, and
+being deprived of rest at night, completely broke down her constitution, and Dr. Flint declared it was impossible she could ever
+become the mother of a living child. The fear of losing so valuable a servant by death, now induced them to allow her to sleep
+in her little room in the out-house, except when there was sick-
+
+160
+
+AUNT NANCY
+
+161
+
+ness in the family. She afterwards had two feeble babes, one of
+whom died in a few days, and the other in four weeks. I well remember her patient sorrow as she held the last dead baby in her
+arms. "I wish it could have lived," she said; "it is not the will of
+God that any of my children should live. But I will try to be fit
+to meet their little spirits in heaven."
+Aunt Nancy was housekeeper and waiting-maid in Dr. Flint's
+family. Indeed, she was the factotum of the household. Nothing
+went on well without her. She was my mother's twin sister, and,
+as far as was in her power, she supplied a mother's place to us orphans. I slept with her all the time I lived in myoid master's
+house, and the bond between us was very strong. When my
+friends tried to discourage me from running away, she always
+encouraged me. When they thought I had better return and ask
+my master's pardon, because there was no possibility of escape,
+she sent me word never to yield. She said if I persevered I might,
+perhaps, gain the freedom of my children; and even if I perished
+in doing it, that was better than to leave them to groan under the
+same persecutions that had blighted my own life. After I was
+shut up in my dark cell, she stole away, whenever she could, to
+bring me the news and say something cheering. How often did I
+kneel down to listen to her words of consolation, whispered
+through a crack! "I am old, and have not long to live," she used
+to say; "and I could die happy if I could only see you and the
+children free. You must pray to God, Linda, as I do for you, that
+he will lead you out of this darkness." I would beg her not to
+worry herself on my account; that there was an end of all suffering sooner or later, and that whether I lived in chains or in freedom, I should always remember her as the good friend who had
+been the comfort of my life. A word from her always strengthened me; and not me only. The whole family relied upon her
+judgment, and were guided by her advice.
+I had been in my cell six years when my grandmother was
+summoned to the bedside of this, her last remaining daughter.
+She was very ill, and they said she would die. Grandmother had
+not entered Dr. Flint's house for several years. They had treated
+her cruelly, but she thought nothing of that now. She was grate-
+
+162
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ful for permission to watch by the death-bed of her child. They
+had always been devoted to each other; and now they sat looking
+into each other's eyes, longing to speak of the secret that had
+weighed so much on the hearts of both. My aunt had been
+stricken with paralysis. She lived but two days, and the last day
+she was speechless. Before she lost the power of utterance, she
+told her mother not to grieve if she could not speak to her; that
+she would try to hold up her hand, to let her know that all was
+well with her. Even the hard-hearted doctor was a little softened
+when he saw the dying woman try to smile on the aged mother,
+who was kneeling by her side. His eyes moistened for a moment,
+as he said she had always been a faithful servant, and they should
+never be able to supply her place. Mrs. Flint took to her bed,
+quite overcome by the shock. While my grandmother sat alone
+with the dead, the doctor came in, leading his youngest son, who
+had always been a great pet with aunt Nancy, and was much attached to her. "Martha," said he, "aunt Nancy loved this child,
+and when he comes where you are, I hope you will be kind to
+him, for her sake." She replied, "Your wife was my foster-child,
+Or. Flint, the foster-sister of my poor Nancy, and you little
+know me if you think I can feel any thing but good will for her
+children."
+"I wish the past could be forgotten, and that we might never
+think of it," said he; "and that Linda would come to supply her
+aunt's place. She would be worth more to us than all the money
+that could be paid for her. I wish it for your sake also, Martha.
+Now that Nancy is taken away from you, she would be a great
+comfort to your old age."
+He knew he was touching a tender chord. Almost choking
+with grief, my grandmother replied, "It was not I that drove
+Linda away. My grandchildren are gone; and of my nine children
+only one is left. God help me!"
+To me, the death of this kind relative was an inexpressible sorrow. I knew that she had been slowly murdered; and I felt that
+my troubles had helped to finish the work. After I heard of her
+illness, I listened constantly to hear what news was brought from
+the great house; and the thought that I could not go to her made
+
+AUNT NANCY
+
+163
+
+me utterly miserable. At last, as uncle Phillip came into the
+house, I heard some one inquire, "How is she?" and he answered, "She is dead." My little cell seemed whirling round, and
+I knew nothing more till I opened my eyes and found uncle
+Phillip bending over me. I had no need to ask any questions. He
+whispered, "Linda, she died happy." I could not weep. My fixed
+gaze troubled him. "Don't look so," he said. "Don't add to my
+poor mother's trouble. Remember how much she has to bear,
+and that we ought to do all we can to comfort her." Ah, yes, that
+blessed old grandmother, who for seventy-three years had borne
+the pelting storms of a slave-mother's life. She did indeed need
+consolation!
+Mrs. Flint had rendered her poor foster-sister childless, apparently without any compunction; and with cruel selfishness had
+ruined her health by years of incessant, unrequited toil, and broken rest. But now she became very sentimental. I supposed she
+thought it would be a beautiful illustration of the attachment existing between slaveholder and slave, if the body of her old
+worn-out servant was buried at her feet. She sent for the clergyman and asked if he had any objection to burying aunt Nancy in
+the doctor's family burial-place. No colored person had ever
+been allowed interment in the white people's burying-ground,
+and the minister knew that all the deceased of our family reposed
+together in the old graveyard of the slaves. He therefore replied,
+"I have no objection to complying with your wish; but perhaps
+aunt Nancy's mother may have some choice as to where her remains shall be deposited."
+It had never occurred to Mrs. Flint that slaves could have any
+feelings. When my grandmother was consulted, she at once said
+she wanted Nancy to lie with all the rest of her family, and
+where her own old body would be buried. Mrs. Flint graciously
+complied with her wish, though she said it was painful to her to
+have Nancy buried away from her. She might have added with
+touching pathos, "I was so long used to sleep with her lying near
+me, on the entry floor."
+My uncle Phillip asked permission to bury his sister at his
+own expense; and slaveholders are always ready to grant such fa-
+
+164
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIfE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+vors to slaves and their relatives. The arrangements were very
+plain, but perfectly respectable. She was buried on the Sabbath,
+and Mrs. Flint's minister read the funeral service. There was a
+large concourse of colored people, bond and free, and a few
+white persons who had always been friendly to our family. Dr.
+Flint's carriage was in the procession; and when the body was
+deposited in its humble resting place, the mistress dropped a tear,
+and returned to her carriage, probably thinking she had performed her duty nobly.
+It was talked of by the slaves as a mighty grand funeral.
+Northern travellers, passing through the place, might have described this tribute of respect to the humble dead as a beautiful
+feature in the "patriarchal institution;" a touching proof of the
+attachment between slaveholders and their servants; and tenderhearted Mrs. Flint would have confirmed this impression, with
+handkerchief at her eyes. We could have told them a different
+story. We could have given them a chapter of wrongs and sufferings, that would have touched their hearts, if they had any hearts
+to feel for the colored people. We could have told them how the
+poor old slave-mother had toiled, year after year, to earn eight
+hundred dollars to buy her son Phillip's right to his own earnings; and how that same Phillip paid the expenses of the funeral,
+which they regarded as doing so much credit to the master. We
+could also have told them of a poor, blighted young creature,
+shut up in a living grave for years, to avoid the tortures that
+would be inflicted on her, if she ventured to come out and look
+on the face of her departed friend.
+All this, and much more, I thought of, as I sat at my loophole,
+waiting for the family to return from the grave; sometimes weeping, sometimes falling asleep, dreaming strange dreams of the
+dead and the living.
+It was sad to witness the grief of my bereaved grandmother.
+She had always been strong to bear, and now, as ever, religious
+faith supported her. But her dark life had become still darker,
+and age and trouble were leaving deep traces on her withered
+face. She had four places to knock for me to come to the trapdoor, and each place had a different meaning. She now came oftener than she had done, and talked to me of her dead daughter,
+
+AUNT NANCY
+
+165
+
+while tears trickled slowly down her furrowed cheeks. I said all I
+could to comfort her; but it was a sad reflection, that instead of
+being able to help her, I was a constant source of anxiety and
+trouble. The poor old back was fitted to its burden. It bent under
+it, but did not break.
+
+XXIX
+
+Preparations for Escape
+
+I HARDLY EXPECT THAT the reader will credit me, when I affirm that I lived in that little dismal hole, almost deprived of light
+and air, and with no space to move my limbs, for nearly seven
+years. But it is a fact; and to me a sad one, even now; for my
+body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment, to
+say nothing of my soul. Members of my family, now living in
+New York and Boston, can testify to the truth of what I say.
+Countless were the nights that I sat late at the little loophole
+scarcely large enough to give me a glimpse of one twinkling star.
+There, I heard the patrols and slave-hunters conferring together
+about the capture of runaways, well knowing how rejoiced they
+would be to catch me.
+Season after season, year after year, I peeped at my children's
+faces, and heard their sweet voices, with a heart yearning all the
+while to say, "Your mother is here." Sometimes it appeared to
+me as if ages had rolled away since I entered upon that gloomy,
+monotonous existence. At times, I was stupefied and listless; at
+other times I became very impatient to know when these dark
+years would end, and I should again be allowed to feel the sunshine, and breathe the pure air.
+After Ellen left us, this feeling increased. Mr. Sands had agreed
+that Benny might go to the north whenever his uncle Phillip
+could go with him; and I was anxious to be there also, to watch
+over my children, and protect them so far as I was able. Moreover, I was likely to be drowned out of my den, if I remained
+much longer; for the slight roof was getting badly out of repair,
+and uncle Phillip was afraid to remove the shingles, lest some one
+should get a glimpse of me. When storms occurred in the night,
+they spread mats and bits of carpet, which in the morning appeared to have been laid out to dry; but to cover the roof in the
+166
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR ESCAPE
+
+167
+
+daytime might have attracted attention. Consequently, my
+clothes and bedding were often drenched; a process by which the
+pains and aches in my cramped and stiffened limbs were greatly
+increased. I revolved various plans of escape in my mind, which I
+sometimes imparted to my grandmother, when she came to
+whisper with me at the trap-door. The kind-hearted old woman
+had an intense sympathy for runaways. She had known too
+much of the cruelties inflicted on those who were captured. Her
+memory always flew back at once to the sufferings of her bright
+and handsome son, Benjamin, the youngest and dearest of her
+flock. So, whenever I alluded to the subject, she would groan
+out, "0, don't think of it, child. You'll break my heart." I had no
+good old aunt Nancy now to encourage me; but my brother
+William and my children were continually beckoning me to the
+north.
+And now I must go back a few months in my story. I have
+stated that the first of January was the time for selling slaves, or
+leasing them out to new masters. If time were counted by heartthrobs, the poor slaves might reckon years of suffering during
+that festival so joyous to the free. On the New Year's day preceding my aunt's death, one of my friends, named Fanny, was to
+be sold at auction, to pay her master's debts. My thoughts were
+with her during all the day, and at night I anxiously inquired
+what had been her fate. I was told that she had been sold to one
+master, and her four little girls to another master, far distant; that
+she had escaped from her purchaser, and was not to be found.
+Her mother was the old Aggie I have spoken of. She lived in a
+small tenement belonging to my grandmother, and built on the
+same lot with her own house. Her dwelling was searched and
+watched, and that brought the patrols so near me that I was
+obliged to keep very close in my den. The hunters were somehow eluded; and not long afterwards Benny accidentally caught
+sight of Fanny in her mother's hut. He told his grandmother,
+who charged him never to speak of it, explaining to him the
+frightful consequences; and he never betrayed the trust. Aggie
+little dreamed that my grandmother knew where her daughter
+was concealed, and that the stooping form of her old neighbor
+was bending under a similar burden of anxiety and fear; but these
+
+168
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLA VE GIRL
+
+dangerous secrets deepened the sympathy between the two old
+persecuted mothers.
+My friend Fanny and I remained many weeks hidden within
+call of each other; but she was unconscious of the fact.' I longed
+to have her share my den, which seemed a more secure retreat
+than her own; but I had brought so much trouble on my grandmother, that it seemed wrong to ask her to incur greater risks.
+My restlessness increased. I had lived too long in bodily pain and
+anguish of spirit. Always I was in dread that by some accident,
+or some contrivance, slavery would succeed in snatching my
+children from me. This thought drove me nearly frantic, and I
+determined to steer for the North Star at all hazards. At this crisis, Providence opened an unexpected way for me to escape. My
+friend Peter came one evening, and asked to speak with me.
+"Your day has come, Linda," said he. "I have found a chance for
+you to go to the Free States. You have a fortnight to decide." The
+news seemed too good to be true; but Peter explained his
+arrangements, and told me all that was necessary was for me to
+say I would go. I was going to answer him with a joyful yes,
+when the thought of Benny came to my mind. I told him the
+temptation was exceedingly strong, but I was terribly afraid of
+Dr. Flint's alleged power over my child, and that I could not go
+and leave him behind. Peter remonstrated earnestly. He said such
+a good chance might never occur again; that Benny was free, and
+could be sent to me; and that for the sake of my children's welfare I ought not to hesitate a moment. I told him I would consult
+with uncle Phillip. My uncle rejoiced in the plan, and bade me go
+by all means. He promised, if his life was spared, that he would
+either bring or send my son to me as soon as I reached a place of
+safety. I resolved to go, but thought nothing had better be said to
+my grandmother till very near the time of departure. But my uncle thought she would feel it more keenly if I left her so suddenly. "I will reason with her," said he, "and convince her how
+necessary it is, not only for your sake, but for hers also. You cannot be blind to the fact that she is sinking under her burdens." I
+was not blind to it. I knew that my concealment was an everpresent source of anxiety, and that the older she grew the more
+nervously fearful she was of discovery. My uncle talked with her,
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR ESCAPE
+
+169
+
+and finally succeeded in persuading her that it was absolutely
+necessary for me to seize the chance so unexpectedly offered.
+The anticipation of being a free woman proved almost too
+much for my weak frame. The excitement stimulated me, and at
+the same time bewildered me. I made busy preparations for my
+journey, and for my son to follow me. I resolved to have an interview with him before I went, that I might give him cautions
+and advice, and tell him how anxiously I should be waiting for
+him at the north. Grandmother stole up to me as often as possible to whisper words of counsel. She insisted upon my writing to
+Dr. Flint, as soon as I arrived in the Free States, and asking him
+to sell me to her. She said she would sacrifice her house, and all
+she had in the world, for the sake of having me safe with my children in any part of the world. If she could only live to know that
+she could die in peace. I promised the dear old faithful friend that
+I would write to her as soon as I arrived, and put the letter in a
+safe way to reach her; but in my own mind I resolved that not
+another cent of her hard earnings should be spent to pay rapacious slaveholders for what they called their property. And even
+if I had not been unwilling to buy what I had already a right to
+possess, common humanity would have prevented me from accepting the generous offer, at the expense of turning my aged relative out of house and home, when she was trembling on the
+brink of the grave.
+I was to escape in a vessel; but I forbear to mention any further particulars. I was in readiness, but the vessel was unexpectedly detained several days. Meantime, news came to town of a
+most horrible murder committed on a fugitive slave, named
+James. Charity, the mother of this unfortunate young man, had
+been an old acquaintance of ours. I have told the shocking particulars of his death, in my description of some of the neighboring slaveholders. My grandmother, always nervously sensitive
+about runaways, was terribly frightened. She felt sure that a similar fate awaited me, if I did not desist from my enterprise. She
+sobbed, and groaned, and entreated me not to go. Her excessive
+fear was somewhat contagious, and my heart was not proof
+against her extreme agony. I was grievously disappointed, but I
+promised to relinquish my project.
+
+170
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+When my friend Peter was apprised of this, he was both disappointed and vexed. He said, that judging from our past experience, it would be a long time before I had such another chance to
+throwaway. I told him it need not be thrown away; that I had a
+friend concealed near by, who would be glad enough to take the
+place that had been provided for me. I told him about poor
+Fanny, and the kind-hearted, noble fellow, who never turned his
+back upon any body in distress, white or black, expressed his
+readiness to help her. Aggie was much surprised when she found
+that we knew her secret. She was rejoiced to hear of such a
+chance for Fanny, and arrangements were made for her to go on
+board the vessel the next night. They both supposed that I had
+long been at the north, therefore my name was not mentioned in
+the transaction. Fanny was carried on board at the appointed
+time, and stowed away in a very small cabin. This accommodation had been purchased at a price that would pay for a voyage to
+England. But when one proposes to go to fine old England, they
+stop to calculate whether they can afford the cost of the pleasure;
+while in making a bargain to escape from slavery, the trembling
+victim is ready to say, "Take all I have, only don't betray me!"
+The next morning I peeped through my loophole, and saw
+that it was dark and cloudy. At night I received news that the
+wind was ahead, and the vessel had not sailed. I was exceedingly
+anxious about Fanny, and Peter too, who was running a tremendous risk at my instigation. Next day the wind and weather remained the same. Poor Fanny had been half dead with fright
+when they carried her on board, and I could readily imagine how
+she must be suffering now. Grandmother came often to my den,
+to say how thankful she was I did not go. On the third morning
+she rapped for me to come down to the storeroom. The poor old
+sufferer was breaking down under her weight of trouble. She was
+easily flurried now. I found her in a nervous, excited state, but I
+was not aware that she had forgotten to lock the door behind
+her, as usual. She was exceedingly worried about the detention of
+the vessel. She was afraid all would be discovered, and then
+Fanny, and Peter, and I, would all be tortured to death, and
+Phillip would be utterly ruined, and her house would be torn
+down. Poor Peter! If he should die such a horrible death as the
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR ESCAPE
+
+171
+
+poor slave James had lately done, and all for his kindness in trying to help me, how dreadful it would be for us all! Alas, the
+thought was familiar to me, and had sent many a sharp pang
+through my heart. I tried to suppress my own anxiety, and speak
+soothingly to her. She brought in some allusion to aunt Nancy,
+the dear daughter she had recently buried, and then she lost all
+control of herself. As she stood there, trembling and sobbing, a
+voice from the piazza called out, "Whar is you, aunt Marthy?"
+Grandmother was startled, and in her agitation opened the door,
+without thinking of me. In stepped Jenny, the mischievous
+housemaid, who had tried to enter my room, when I was concealed in the house of my white benefactress. ''I's bin huntin
+ebery whar for you, aunt Marthy," said she. "My missis wants
+you to send her some crackers." I had slunk down behind a barrel, which entirely screened me, but I imagined that Jenny was
+looking directly at the spot, and my heart beat violently. My
+grandmother immediately thought what she had done, and went
+out quickly with Jenny to count the crackers, locking the door
+after her. She returned to me, in a few minutes, the perfect picture of despair. "Poor child!" she exclaimed, "my carelessness
+has ruined you. The boat ain't gone yet. Get ready immediately,
+and go with Fanny. I ain't got another word to say against it
+now; for there's no telling what may happen this day."
+Uncle Phillip was sent for, and he agreed with his mother in
+thinking that Jenny would inform Dr. Flint in less than twentyfour hours. He advised getting me on board the boat, if possible;
+if not, I had better keep very still in my den, where they could
+not find me without tearing the house down. He said it would
+not do for him to move in the matter, because suspicion would
+be immediately excited; but he promised to communicate with
+Peter. I felt reluctant to apply to him again, having implicated
+him too much already; but there seemed to be no alternative.
+Vexed as Peter had been by my indecision, he was true to his
+generous nature, and said at once that he would do his best to
+help me, trusting I should show myself a stronger woman this
+time.
+He immediately proceeded to the wharf, and found that
+the wind had shifted, and the vessel was slowly beating down
+
+172
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+stream. On some pretext of urgent necessity, he offered two
+boatmen a dollar apiece to catch up with her. He was of lighter
+complexion than the boatmen he hired, and when the captain
+saw them coming so rapidly, he thought officers were pursuing
+his vessel in search of the runaway slave he had on board. They
+hoisted sails, but the boat gained upon them, and the indefatigable Peter sprang on board.
+The captain at once recognized him. Peter asked him to go below, to speak about a bad bill he had given him. When he told his
+errand, the captain replied, "Why, the woman's here already; and
+I've put her where you or the devil would have a tough job to
+find her."
+"But it is another woman I want to bring," said Peter. "She is
+in great distress, too, and you shall be paid any thing within reason, if you'll stop and take her."
+"What's her name?" inquired the captain.
+"Linda," he replied.
+"That's the name of the woman already here," rejoined the
+captain. "By George! I believe you mean to betray me."
+"O!" exclaimed Peter, "God knows I wouldn't harm a hair of
+your head. I am too grateful to you. But there really is another
+woman in great danger. Do have the humanity to stop and take
+her.I "
+After a while they came to an understanding. Fanny, not
+dreaming I was any where about in that region, had assumed my
+name, though she called herself Johnson. "Linda is a common
+name," said Peter, "and the woman I want to bring is Linda
+Brent."
+The captain agreed to wait at a certain place till evening, being
+handsomely paid for his detention.
+Of course, the day was an anxious one for us all. But we concluded that if Jenny had seen me, she would be too wise to let
+her mistress know of it; and that she probably would not get a
+chance to see Dr. Flint's family till evening, for I knew very well
+what were the rules in that household. I afterwards believed that
+she did not see me; for nothing ever came of it, and she was one
+of those base characters that would have jumped to betray a suffering fellow being for the sake of thirty pieces of silver.
+
+PREPARATIONS FOR ESCAPE
+
+173
+
+I made all my arrangements to go on board as soon as it was
+dusk. The intervening time I resolved to spend with my son. I
+had not spoken to him for seven years, though I had been under
+the same roof, and seen him every day, when I was well enough
+to sit at the loophole. I did not dare to venture beyond the storeroom; so they brought him there, and locked us up together, in a
+place concealed from the piazza door. It was an agitating interview for both of us. After we had talked and wept together for a
+little while, he said, "Mother, I'm glad you're going away. I wish
+I could go with you. I knew you was here; and I have been so
+afraid they would come and catch you!"
+I was greatly surprised, and asked him how he had found
+it out.
+He replied, "I was standing under the eaves, one day, before
+Ellen went away, and I heard somebody cough up over the wood
+shed. I don't know what made me think it was you, but I did
+think so. I missed Ellen, the night before she went away; and
+grandmother brought her back into the room in the night; and I
+thought maybe she'd been to see you, before she went, for I
+heard grandmother whisper to her, 'Now go to sleep; and re-
+
+member never to tell.' "
+I asked him if he ever mentioned his suspicions to his sister.
+He said he never did; but after he heard the cough, if he saw her
+playing with other children on that side of the house, he always
+tried to coax her round to the other side, for fear they would
+hear me cough, too. He said he had kept a close lookout for Dr.
+Flint, and if he saw him speak to a constable, or a patrol, he always told grandmother. I now recollected that I had seen him
+manifest uneasiness, when people were on that side of the house,
+and I had at the time been puzzled to conjecture a motive for
+his actions. Such prudence may seem extraordinary in a boy of
+twelve years, but slaves, being surrounded by mysteries, deceptions, and dangers, early learn to be suspicious and watchful, and
+prematurely cautious and cunning. He had never asked a question of grandmother, or uncle Phillip, and I had often heard him
+chime in with other children, when they spoke of my being at
+the north.
+I told him I was now really going to the Free States, and if he
+
+174
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+was a good honest boy, and a loving child to his dear old grandmother, the Lord would bless him, and bring him to me, and we
+and Ellen would live together. He began to tell me that grandmother had not eaten any thing all day. While he was speaking,
+the door was unlocked, and she came in with a small bag of
+money, which she wanted me to take. I begged her to keep a part
+of it, at least, to pay for Benny's being sent to the north; but she
+insisted, while her tears were falling fast, that I should take the
+whole. "You may be sick among strangers," she said, "and they
+would send you to the poorhouse to die." Ah, that good grandmother!
+For the last time I went up to my nook. Its desolate appearance no longer chilled me, for the light of hope had risen in my
+soul. Yet, even with the blessed prospect of freedom before me, I
+felt very sad at leaving forever that old homestead, where I had
+been sheltered so long by the dear old grandmother; where I
+had dreamed my first young dream of love; and where, after that
+had faded away, my children came to twine themselves so closely
+round my desolate heart. As the hour approached for me to
+leave, I again descended to the storeroom. My grandmother and
+Benny were there. She took me by the hand, and said, "Linda, let
+us pray." We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my
+heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I
+was about to leave forever. On no other occasion has it ever been
+my lot to listen to so fervent a supplication for mercy and protection. It thrilled through my heart, and inspired me with trust
+in God.
+Peter was waiting for me in the street. I was soon by his side,
+faint in body, but strong of purpose. I did not look back upon
+the old place, though I felt that I should never see it again.
+
+xxx
+Northward Bound
+
+I NEVER COULD TELL how we reached the wharf. My brain was
+all of a whirl, and my limbs tottered under me. At an appointed
+place we met my uncle Phillip, who had started before us on a
+different route, that he might reach the wharf first, and give us
+timely warning if there was any danger. A row-boat was in
+readiness. As I was about to step in, I felt something pull me gently, and turning round I saw Benny, looking pale and anxious. He
+whispered in my ear, "I've been peeping into the doctor's window, and he's at home. Good bye, mother. Don't cry; I'll come."
+He hastened away. I clasped the hand of my good uncle, to
+whom I owed so much, and of Peter, the brave, generous friend
+who had volunteered to run such terrible risks to secure my
+safety. To this day I remember how his bright face beamed with
+joy, when he told me he had discovered a safe method for me to
+escape. Yet that intelligent, enterprising, noble-hearted man was
+a chattel! liable, by the laws of a country that calls itself civilized,
+to be sold with horses and pigs! We parted in silence. Our hearts
+were all too full for words!
+Swiftly the boat glided over the water. After a while, one of
+the sailors said, "Don't be down-hearted, madam. We will take
+you safely to your husband, in ---." At first I could not
+imagine what he meant; but I had presence of mind to think that
+it probably referred to something the captain had told him; so I
+thanked him, and said I hoped we should have pleasant weather.
+When I entered the vessel the captain came forward to meet
+me. He was an elderly man, with a pleasant countenance. He
+showed me to a little box of a cabin, where sat my friend Fanny.
+She started as if she had seen a spectre. She gazed on me in utter
+astonishment, and exclaimed, "Linda, can this be you? or is it
+your ghost?" When we were locked in each other's arms, my
+175
+
+176
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+overwrought feelings could no longer be restrained. My sobs
+reached the ears of the captain, who came and very kindly reminded us, that for his safety, as well as our own, it would be
+prudent for us not to attract any attention. He said that when
+there was a sail in sight he wished us to keep below; but at other
+times, he had no objection to our being on deck. He assured us
+that he would keep a good lookout, and if we acted prudently, he
+thought we should be in no danger. He had represented us as
+women going to meet our husbands in - - - . We thanked him,
+and promised to observe carefully all the directions he gave us.
+Fanny and I now talked by ourselves, low and quietly, in our
+little cabin. She told me of the sufferings she had gone through in
+making her escape, and of her terrors while she was concealed in
+her mother's house. Above all, she dwelt on the agony of separation from all her children on that dreadful auction day. She could
+scarcely credit me, when I told her of the place where I had
+passed nearly seven years. "We have the same sorrows," said 1.
+"No," replied she, "you are going to see your children soon, and
+there is no hope that I shall ever even hear from mine."
+The vessel was soon under way, but we made slow progress.
+The wind was against us. I should not have cared for this, if we
+had been out of sight of the town; but until there were miles of
+water between us and our enemies, we were filled with constant
+apprehensions that the constables would come on board. Neither
+could I feel quite at ease with the captain and his men. I was an
+entire stranger to that class of people, and I had heard that sailors
+were rough, and sometimes cruel. We were so completely in
+their power, that if they were bad men, our situation would be
+dreadful. Now that the captain was paid for our passage,' might
+he not be tempted to make more money by giving us up to those
+who claimed us as property? I was naturally of a confiding disposition, but slavery had made me suspicious of every body.
+Fanny did not share my distrust of the captain or his men. She
+said she was afraid at first, but she had been on board three days
+while the vessel lay in the dock, and nobody had betrayed her, or
+treated her otherwise than kindly.
+The captain soon came to advise us to go on deck for fresh air.
+His friendly and respectful manner, combined with Fanny's tes-
+
+NORTHWARD BOUND
+
+177
+
+timony, reassured me, and we went with him. He placed us in a
+comfortable seat, and occasionally entered into conversation. He
+told us he was a Southerner by birth, and had spent the greater
+part of his life in the Slave States, and that he had recently lost a
+brother who traded in slaves. "But," said he, "it is a pitiable and
+degrading business, and I always felt ashamed to acknowledge
+my brother in connection with it." As we passed Snaky Swamp,
+he pointed to it, and said, "There is a slave territory that defies all
+the laws." I thought of the terrible days I had spent there, and
+though it was not called Dismal Swamp, it made me feel very dismal as I looked at it.
+I shall never forget that night. The balmy air of spring was so
+refreshing! And how shall I describe my sensations when we
+were fairly sailing on Chesapeake Bay? 0, the beautiful sunshine! the exhilarating breeze! and I could enjoy them without
+fear or restraint. I had never realized what grand things air and
+sunlight are till I had been deprived of them.
+Ten days after we left land we were approaching Philadelphia.
+The captain said we should arrive there in the night, but he
+thought we had better wait till morning, and go on shore in
+broad daylight, as the best way to avoid suspicion.
+I replied, "You know best. But will you stay on board and
+protect us?"
+He saw that I was suspicious, and he said he was sorry, now
+that he had brought us to the end of our voyage, to find I had so
+little confidence in him. Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would
+have known how difficult it was to trust a white man. He assured
+us that we might sleep through the night without fear; that he
+would take care we were not left unprotected. Be it said to the
+honor of this captain, Southerner as he was, that if Fanny and I
+had been white ladies, and our passage lawfully engaged, he
+could not have treated us more respectfully. My intelligent
+friend, Peter, had rightly estimated the character of the man to
+whose honor he had intrusted us.
+The next morning I was on deck as soon as the day dawned. I
+called Fanny to see the sun rise, for the first time in our lives, on
+free soil; for such I then believed it to be. We watched the reddening sky, and saw the great orb come up slowly out of the wa-
+
+178
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ter, as it seemed. Soon the waves began to sparkle, and every
+thing caught the beautiful glow. Before us lay the city of
+strangers. We looked at each other, and the eyes of both were
+moistened with tears. We had escaped from slavery, and we supposed ourselves to be safe from the hunters. But we were alone
+in the world, and we had left dear ties behind us; ties cruelly sundered by the demon Slavery.'
+
+XXXI
+
+Incidents in Philadelphia
+
+I HAD HEARD THAT the poor slave had many friends at the
+north. I trusted we should find some of them. Meantime, we
+would take it for granted that all were friends, till they proved to
+the contrary. I sought out the kind captain, thanked him for his
+attentions, and told him I should never cease to be grateful for
+the service he had rendered us. I gave him a message to the
+friends I had left at home, and he promised to deliver it. We were
+placed in a row-boat, and in about fifteen minutes were landed
+on a wood wharf in Philadelphia. As I stood looking round, the
+friendly captain touched me on the shoulder, and said, "There is
+a respectable-looking colored man behind you. I will speak to
+him about the New York trains, and tell him you wish to go directly on." I thanked him, and asked him to direct me to some
+shops where I could buy gloves and veils. He did so, and said he
+would talk with the colored man till I returned. I made what
+haste I could. Constant exercise on board the vessel, and frequent rubbing with salt water, had nearly restored the use of my
+limbs. The noise of the great city confused me, but I found the
+shops, and bought some double veils and gloves for Fanny and
+myself. The shopman told me they were so many levies.' I had
+never heard the word before, but I did not tell him so. I thought
+if he knew I was a stranger he might ask me where I came from.
+I gave him a gold piece, and when he returned the change, I
+counted it, and found out how much a levy was. I made my way
+back to the wharf, where the captain introduced me to the colored man, as the Rev. Jeremiah Durham," minister of Bethel
+church. He took me by the hand, as if I had been an old friend.
+He told us we were too late for the morning cars? to New York,
+and must wait until the evening, or the next morning. He invited
+me to go home with him, assuring me that his wife would give
+179
+
+180
+
+INCID E NTS I N THE LIFE OF A SLA VE GIRL
+
+me a cordial welcome; and for my friend he would provide a
+home with one of his neighbors. 1 thanked him for so much
+kindness to strangers, and told him if 1 must be detained, 1
+should like to hunt up some people who formerly went from our
+part of the country. Mr. Durham insisted that I should dine with
+him, and then he would assist me in finding my friends. The
+sailors came to bid us good bye. I shook their hardy hands, with
+tears in my eyes. They had all been kind to us, and they had rendered us a greater service than they could possibly conceive of.
+1 had never seen so large a city, or been in contact with so
+many people in the streets. It seemed as if those who passed
+looked at us with an expression of curiosity. My face was so blistered and peeled, by sitting on deck, in wind and sunshine, that I
+thought they could not easily decide to what nation I belonged.
+Mrs. Durham met me with a kindly welcome, without asking
+any questions. I was tired, and her friendly manner was a sweet
+refreshment. God bless her! 1 was sure that she had comforted
+other weary hearts, before 1 received her sympathy. She was surrounded by her husband and children, in a home made sacred by
+protecting laws. 1 thought of my own children, and sighed.
+After dinner Mr. Durham went with me in quest of the
+friends 1 had spoken of. They went from my native town, and 1
+anticipated much pleasure in looking on familiar faces. They
+were not at home, and we retraced our steps through streets delightfully clean. On the way, Mr. Durham observed that 1 had
+spoken to him of a daughter 1 expected to meet; that he was surprised, for I looked so young he had taken me for a single
+woman. He was approaching a subject on which I was extremely
+sensitive. He would ask about my husband next, I thought, and
+if 1 answered him truly, what would he think of me? I told him I
+had two children, one in New York, the other at the south. He
+asked some further questions, and I frankly told him some of the
+most important events of my life. It was painful for me to do it;
+but I would not deceive him. If he was desirous of being my
+friend, 1 thought he ought to know how far I was worthy of it.
+"Excuse me, if I have tried your feelings," said he. "1 did not
+question you from idle curiosity. I wanted to understand your
+situation, in order to know whether I could be of any service to
+
+INCIDENTS IN PHILADELPHIA
+
+181
+
+you, or your little girl. Your straight-forward answers do you
+credit; but don't answer every body so openly. It might give
+some heartless people a pretext for treating you with contempt."
+That word contempt burned me like coals of fire. I replied,
+"God alone knows how I have suffered; and He, I trust, will forgive me. If I am permitted to have my children, I intend to be a
+good mother, and to live in such a manner that people cannot
+treat me with contempt."
+"I respect your sentiments," said he. "Place your trust in God,
+and be governed by good principles, and you will not fail to find
+friends."
+When we reached home, I went to my room, glad to shut out
+the world for a while. The words he had spoken made an indelible impression upon me. They brought up great shadows from
+the mournful past. In the midst of my meditations I was startled
+by a knock at the door. Mrs. Durham entered, her face all beaming with kindness, to say that there was an anti-slavery friend
+down stairs, who would like to see me. I overcame my dread of
+encountering strangers, and went with her. Many questions were
+asked concerning my experiences, and my escape from slavery;
+but I observed how careful they all were not to say any thing
+that might wound my feelings. How gratifying this was, can be
+fully understood only by those who have been accustomed to be
+treated as if they were not included within the pale of human beings. The anti-slavery friend had come to inquire into my plans,
+and to offer assistance, if needed. Fanny was comfortably established, for the present, with a friend of Mr. Durham. The AntiSlavery Society agreed to pay her expenses to New York. The
+same was offered to me, but I declined to accept it; telling them
+that my grandmother had given me sufficient to pay my expenses
+to the end of my journey. We were urged to remain in Philadelphia a few days, until some suitable escort could be found for us.
+I gladly accepted the proposition, for I had a dread of meeting
+slaveholders, and some dread also of railroads. I had never entered a railroad car in my life, and it seemed to me quite an important event.
+That night I sought my pillow with feelings I had never carried to it before. I verily believed myself to be a free woman. I
+
+182
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+was wakeful for a long time, and I had no sooner fallen asleep,
+than I was roused by fire-bells. I jumped up, and hurried on my
+clothes. Where I came from, every body hastened to dress themselves on such occasions. The white people thought a great fire
+might be used as a good opportunity for insurrection, and that it
+was best to be in readiness; and the colored people were ordered
+out to labor in extinguishing the flames. There was but one engine in our town, and calored women and children were often
+required to drag it to the river's edge and fill it. Mrs. Durham's
+daughter slept in the same room with me, and seeing that she
+slept through all the din, I thought it was my duty to wake her.
+"What's the matter?" said she, rubbing her eyes.
+"They're screaming fire in the streets, and the bells are ringing," I replied.
+"What of that?" said she, drowsily. "We are used to it. We
+never get up, without the fire is very near. What good would
+it do?"
+I was quite surprised that it was not necessary for us to go
+and help fill the engine. I was an ignorant child, just beginning to
+learn how things went on in great cities.
+At daylight, I heard women crying fresh fish, berries,
+radishes, and various other things. All this was new to me. I
+dressed myself at an early hour, and sat at the window to watch
+that unknown tide of life. Philadelphia seemed to me a wonderfully great place. At the breakfast table, my idea of going out to
+drag the engine was laughed over, and I joined in the mirth.
+I went to see Fanny, and found her so well contented among
+her new friends that she was in no haste to leave. I was also very
+happy with my kind hostess. She had had advantages for education, and was vastly my superior. Every day, almost every hour,
+I was adding to my little stock of knowledge. She took me out to
+see the city as much as she deemed prudent. One day she took
+me to an artist's room, and showed me the portraits of some of
+her children. I had never seen any paintings of calored people
+before, and they seemed to me beautiful.
+At the end of five days, one of Mrs. Durham's friends offered
+to accompany us to New York the following morning. As I held
+the hand of my good hostess in a parting clasp, I longed to know
+
+INCIDENTS IN PHILADELPHIA
+
+183
+
+whether her husband had repeated to her what I had told him. I
+supposed he had, but she never made any allusion to it. I presume it was the delicate silence of womanly sympathy.
+When Mr. Durham handed us our tickets, he said, "I am
+afraid you will have a disagreeable ride; but I could not procure
+tickets for the first-class cars."
+Supposing I had not given him money enough, I offered
+more. "0, no," said he, "they could not be had for any money.
+They don't allow colored people to go in the first-class cars."?
+This was the first chill to my enthusiasm about the Free
+States. Colored people were allowed to ride in a filthy box, behind white people, at the south, but there they were not required
+to pay for the privilege. It made me sad to find how the north
+aped the customs of slavery.
+We were stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on
+each side, too high for us to look out without standing up. It was
+crowded with people, apparently of all nations. There were
+plenty of beds and cradles, containing screaming and kicking babies. Every other man had a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and jugs
+of whiskey were handed round freely. The fumes of the whiskey
+and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and
+my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald
+songs around me. It was a very disagreeable ride. Since that time
+there has been some improvement in these matters.
+
+XXXII
+
+The Meeting of Mother and Daughter
+
+WHEN WE ARRIVED IN New York, I was half crazed by the
+crowd of coachmen calling out, "Carriage, ma'am?" We bargained with one to take us to Sullivan Street for twelve shillings.'
+A burly Irishman stepped up and said, "I'll tak' yo for sax
+shillings." The reduction of half the price was an object to us,
+and we asked if he could take us right away. "Troth an I will,
+ladies," he replied. I noticed that the hackmen smiled at each
+other, and I inquired whether his conveyance was decent. "Yes,
+it's dacent it is, marm. Devil a bit would I be after takin' ladies in
+a cab that was not dacent. " We gave him our checks. He went for
+the baggage, and soon reappeared, saying, "This way, if you
+plase, ladies." We followed, and found our trunks on a truck,
+and we were invited to take our seats on them. We told him that
+was not what we bargained for, and he must take the trunks off.
+He swore they should not be touched till we had paid him six
+shillings. In our situation it was not prudent to attract attention,
+and I was about to pay him what he required, when a man near
+by shook his head for me not to do it. After a great ado we got
+rid of the Irishman, and had our trunks fastened on a hack. We
+had been recommended to a boarding-house in Sullivan Street,
+and thither we drove. There Fanny and I separated. The AntiSlavery Society provided a home for her, and I afterwards heard
+of her in prosperous circumstances. I sent for an old friend from
+my part of the country, who had for some time been doing business in New York. He came immediately. I told him I wanted to
+go to my daughter, and asked him to aid me in procuring an interview.
+I cautioned him not to let it be known to the family that I had
+just arrived from the south, because they supposed I had been at
+
+!84
+
+THE MEETING OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
+
+185
+
+the north seven years. He told me there was a colored woman in
+Brooklyn who came from the same town I did, and I had better
+go to her house, and have my daughter meet me there. I accepted
+the proposition thankfully, and he agreed to escort me to Brooklyn. We crossed Fulton ferry.? went up Myrtle Avenue, and
+stopped at the house he designated. I was just about to enter,
+when two girls passed. My friend called my attention to them. I
+turned, and recognized in the eldest, Sarah, the daughter of a
+woman who used to live with my grandmother, but who had left
+the south years ago. Surprised and rejoiced at this unexpected
+meeting, I threw my arms round her, and inquired concerning
+her mother.
+"You take no notice of the other girl," said my friend. I
+turned, and there stood my Ellen! I pressed her to my heart, then
+held her away from me to take a look at her. She had changed a
+good deal in the two years since I parted from her. Signs of neglect could be discerned by eyes less observing than a mother's.
+My friend invited us all to go into the house; but Ellen said she
+had been sent of an errand, which she would do as quickly as
+possible, and go home and ask Mrs. Hobbs to let her come and
+see me. It was agreed that I should send for her the next day. Her
+companion, Sarah, hastened to tell her mother of my arrival.
+When I entered the house, I found the mistress of it absent, and I
+waited for her return. Before I saw her, I heard her saying,
+"Where is Linda Brent? I used to know her father and mother."
+Soon Sarah came with her mother. So there was quite a company
+of us, all from my grandmother's neighborhood. These friends
+gathered round me and questioned me eagerly. They laughed,
+they cried, and they shouted. They thanked God that I had got
+away from my persecutors and was safe on Long Island. It was a
+day of great excitement. How different from the silent days I had
+passed in my dreary den!
+The next morning was Sunday. My first waking thoughts
+were occupied with the note I was to send to Mrs. Hobbs, the
+lady with whom Ellen lived. That I had recently come into that
+vicinity was evident; otherwise I should have sooner inquired for
+my daughter. It would not do to let them know I had just arrived
+
+186
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+from the south, for that would involve the suspicion of my having been harbored there, and might bring trouble, if not ruin, on
+several people.
+1 like a straight-forward course, and am always reluctant to
+resort to subterfuges. So far as my ways have been crooked, 1
+charge them all upon slavery. It was that system of violence and
+wrong which now left me no alternative but to enact a falsehood.
+1 began my note by stating that 1 had recently arrived from
+Canada, and was very desirous to have my daughter come to see
+me. She came and brought a message from Mrs. Hobbs, inviting
+me to her house, and assuring me that 1 need not have any fears.
+The conversation 1 had with my child did not leave my mind at
+ease. When 1 asked if she was well treated, she answered yes; but
+there was no heartiness in the tone, and it seemed to me that she
+said it from an unwillingness to have me troubled on her account. Before she left me, she asked very earnestly, "Mother,
+when will you take me to live with you?" It made me sad to
+think that 1 could not give her a home till 1 went to work and
+earned the means; and that might take me a long time. When she
+was placed with Mrs. Hobbs, the agreement was that she should
+be sent to school. She had been there two years, and was now
+nine years old, and she scarcely knew her letters. There was no
+excuse for this, for there were good public schools in Brooklyn,
+to which she could have been sent without expense.
+She staid with me till dark, and 1 went home with her. 1 was
+received in a friendly manner by the family, and all agreed in saying that Ellen was a useful, good girl. Mrs. Hobbs looked me
+coolly in the face, and said, "1 suppose you know that my cousin,
+Mr. Sands, has given her to my eldest daughter. She will make a
+nice waiting-maid for her when she grows up." I did not answer
+a word. How could she, who knew by experience the strength of
+a mother's love, and who was perfectly aware of the relation Mr.
+Sands bore to my children,-how could she look me in the face,
+while she thrust such a dagger into my heart?
+1 was no longer surprised that they had kept her in such a
+state of ignorance. Mr. Hobbs had formerly been wealthy, but he
+had failed, and afterwards obtained a subordinate situation in the
+Custom House. Perhaps they expected to return to the south
+
+THE MEETING OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
+
+187
+
+some day; and Ellen's knowledge was quite sufficient for a
+slave's condition. I was impatient to go to work and earn money,
+that I might change the uncertain position of my children. Mr.
+Sands had not kept his promise to emancipate them. I had also
+been deceived about Ellen. What security had I with regard to
+Benjamin? I felt that I had none.
+I returned to my friend's house in an uneasy state of mind. In
+order to protect my children, it was necessary that I should own
+myself. I called myself free, and sometimes felt so; but I knew I
+was insecure. I sat down that night and wrote a civil letter to Dr.
+Flint, asking him to state the lowest terms on which he would
+sell me; and as I belonged by law to his daughter, I wrote to her
+also, making a similar request.
+Since my arrival at the north I had not been unmindful of my
+dear brother William. I had made diligent inquiries for him, and
+having heard of him in Boston, I went thither. When I arrived
+there, I found he had gone to New Bedford.' I wrote to that
+place, and was informed he had gone on a whaling voyage, and
+would not return for some months. I went back to New York to
+get employment near Ellen. I received an answer from Dr. Flint,
+which gave me no encouragement. He advised me to return and
+submit myself to my rightful owners, and then any request I
+might make would be granted. I lent this letter to a friend, who
+lost it; otherwise I would present a copy to my readers.
+
+XXXIII
+
+A Home Found
+
+My GREATEST ANXIETY NOW was to obtain employment. My
+health was greatly improved, though my limbs continued to
+trouble me with swelling whenever I walked much. The greatest
+difficulty in my way was, that those who employed strangers required a recommendation; and in my peculiar position, I could,
+of course, obtain no certificates from the families I had so faithfully served.
+One day an acquaintance told me of a lady who wanted a
+nurse for her babe, and I immediately applied for the situation.
+The lady told me she preferred to have one who had been a
+mother, and accustomed to the care of infants. I told her I had
+nursed two babes of my own. She asked me many questions, but,
+to my great relief, did not require a recommendation from my
+former employers. She told me she was an English woman, 1 and
+that was a pleasant circumstance to me, because I had heard they
+had less prejudice against calor than Americans entertained. It
+was agreed that we should try each other for a week. The trial
+proved satisfactory to both parties, and I was engaged for a
+month.
+The heavenly Father had been most merciful to me in leading
+me to this place. Mrs. Bruce was a kind and gentle lady, and
+proved a true and sympathizing friend. Before the stipulated
+month expired, the necessity of passing up and down stairs
+frequently, caused my limbs to swell so painfully, that I became
+unable to perform my duties. Many ladies would have thoughtlessly discharged me; but Mrs. Bruce made arrangements to save
+me steps, and employed a physician to attend upon me. I had not
+yet told her that I was a fugitive slave. She noticed that I was often sad, and kindly inquired the cause. I spoke of being separated
+from my children, and from relatives who were dear to me; but I
+188
+
+A HOME FOUND
+
+189
+
+did not mention the constant feeling of insecurity which oppressed my spirits. I longed for some onc to confide in; but I had
+been so deceived by white people, that I had lost all confidence
+in them. If they spoke kind words to me, I thought it was for
+some selfish purpose. I had entered this family with the distrustful feelings I had brought with me out of slavery; but ere six
+months had passed, I found that the gentle deportment of Mrs.
+Bruce and the smiles of her lovely babe were thawing my chilled
+heart. My narrow mind also began to expand under the influences of her intelligent conversation, and the opportunities for
+reading, which were gladly allowed me whenever I had leisure
+from my duties. I gradually became more energetic and more
+cheerful.
+The old feeling of insecurity, especially with regard to my
+children, often threw its dark shadow across my sunshine. Mrs.
+Bruce offered me a home for Ellen; but pleasant as it would have
+been, I did not dare to accept it, for fear of offending the Hobbs
+family. Their knowledge of my precarious situation placed me in
+their power; and I felt that it was important for me to keep on
+the right side of them, till, by dint of labor and economy, I could
+make a home for my children. I was far from feeling satisfied
+with Elleri's situation. She was not well cared for. She sometimes
+came to New York to visit me; but she generally brought a request from Mrs. Hobbs that I would buy her a pair of shoes, or
+some article of clothing. This was accompanied by a promise of
+payment when Mr. Hobbs's salary at the Custom House became
+due; but some how or other the pay-day never came. Thus many
+dollars of my earnings were expended to keep my child comfortably clothed. That, however, was a slight trouble, compared with
+the fear that their pecuniary embarrassments might induce them
+to sell my precious young daughter. I knew they were in constant communication with Southerners, and had frequent opportunities to do it. I have stated that when Dr. Flint put Ellen in
+jail, at two years old, she had an inflammation of the eyes, occasioned by measles. This disease still troubled her; and kind Mrs.
+Bruce proposed that she should come to New York for a while,
+to be under the care of Dr. Elliott, a well known oculist. It did
+not occur to me that there was any thing improper in a mother's
+
+190
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+making such a request; but Mrs. Hobbs was very angry, and refused to let her go. Situated as I was, it was not politic to insist
+upon it. I made no complaint, but I longed to be entirely free to
+act a mother's part towards my children. The next time I went
+over to Brooklyn, Mrs. Hobbs, as if to apologize for her anger,
+told me she had employed her own physician to attend to Ellen's
+eyes, and that she had refused my request because she did not
+consider it safe to trust her in New York. I accepted the explanation in silence; but she had told me that my child belonged to her
+daughter, and I suspected that her real motive was a fear of my
+conveying her property away from her. Perhaps I did her injustice; but my knowledge of Southerners made it difficult for me to
+feel otherwise.
+Sweet and bitter were mixed in the cup of my life, and I was
+thankful that it had ceased to be entirely bitter. I loved Mrs.
+Bruce's babe. When it laughed and crowed in my face, and
+twined its little tender arms confidingly about my neck, it made
+me think of the time when Benny and Ellen were babies, and my
+wounded heart was soothed. One bright morning, as I stood at
+the window, tossing the baby in my arms, my attention was attracted by a young man in sailor's dress, who was closely observing every house as he passed. I looked at him earnestly.
+Could it be my brother William? It must be he-and yet, how
+changed! I placed the baby safely, flew down stairs, opened the
+front door, beckoned to the sailor, and in less than a minute I
+was clasped in my brother's arms. How much we had to tell each
+other! How we laughed, and how we cried, over each other's adventures! I took him to Brooklyn, and again saw him with Ellen,
+the dear child whom he had loved and tended so carefully, while
+I was shut up in my miserable den. He staid in New York a
+week. His old feelings of affection for me and Ellen were as
+lively as ever. There are no bonds so strong as those which are
+formed by suffering together.
+
+XXXIV
+
+The Old Enemy Again
+
+My YOUNG MISTRESS, MISS Emily Flint, did not return any answer to my letter requesting her to consent to my being sold. But
+after a while, I received a reply, which purported to be written
+by her younger brother. In order rightly to enjoy the contents of
+this letter, the reader must bear in mind that the Flint family supposed I had been at the north many years. They had no idea that
+I knew of the doctor's three excursions to N ew York in search of
+me; that I had heard his voice, when he came to borrow five hundred dollars for that purpose; and that I had seen him pass on his
+way to the steamboat. Neither were they aware that all the particulars of aunt Nancy's death and burial were conveyed to me at
+the time they occurred. I have kept the letter, of which I herewith subjoin a copy:"Your letter to sister was received a few days ago. I gather
+from it that you are desirous of returning to your native place,
+among your friends and relatives. We were all gratified with the
+contents of your letter; and let me assure you that if any members of the family have had any feeling of resentment towards
+you, they feel it no longer. We all sympathize with you in your
+unfortunate condition, and are ready to do all in our power to
+make you contented and happy. It is difficult for you to return
+home as a free person. If you were purchased by your grandmother, it is doubtful whether you would be permitted to remain, although it would be lawful for you to do so. If a servant
+should be allowed to purchase herself, after absenting herself so
+long from her owners, and return free, it would have an injurious
+effect. From your letter, I think your situation must be hard and
+uncomfortable. Come home. You have it in your power to be reinstated in our affections. We would receive you with open arms
+and tears of joy. You need not apprehend any unkind treatment,
+191
+
+192
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+as we have not put ourselves to any trouble or expense to get
+you. Had we done so, perhaps we should feel otherwise. You
+know my sister was always attached to you, and that you were
+never treated as a slave. You were never put to hard work, nor
+exposed to field labor. On the contrary, you were taken into the
+house, and treated as one of us, and almost as free; and we, at
+least, felt that you were above disgracing yourself by running
+away. Believing you may be induced to come home voluntarily
+has induced me to write for my sister. The family will be rejoiced
+to see you; and your poor old grandmother expressed a great desire to have you come, when she heard your letter read. In her
+old age she needs the consolation of having her children round
+her. Doubtless you have heard of the death of your aunt. She was
+a faithful servant, and a faithful member of the Episcopal church.
+In her Christian life she taught us how to live-and, 0, too high
+the price of knowledge, she taught us how to die! Could you
+have seen us round her death bed, with her mother, all mingling
+our tears in one common stream, you would have thought the
+same heartfelt tie existed between a master and his servant, as between a mother and her child. But this subject is too painful to
+dwell upon. I must bring my letter to a close. If you are contented to stay away from your old grandmother, your child, and
+the friends who love you, stay where you are. We shall never
+trouble ourselves to apprehend you. But should you prefer to
+come home, we will do all that we can to make you happy. If
+you do not wish to remain in the family, I know that father, by
+our persuasion, will be induced to let you be purchased by any
+person you may choose in our community. You will please answer this as soon as possible, and let us know your decision. Sister sends much love to you. In the mean time believe me your
+sincere friend and well wisher."
+This letter was signed by Emily's brother, who was as yet a
+mere lad. I knew, by the style, that it was not written by a person
+of his age, and though the writing was disguised, I had been
+made too unhappy by it, in former years, not to recognize at
+once the hand of Dr. Flint. 0, the hypocrisy of slaveholders! Did
+the old fox suppose I was goose enough to go into such a trap?
+Verily, he relied too much on "the stupidity of the African race."
+
+THE OLD ENEMY AGAIN
+
+193
+
+I did not return the family of Flints any thanks for their cordial
+invitation-a remissness for which I was, no doubt, charged with
+base ingratitude.
+Not long afterwards I received a letter from one of my friends
+at the south, informing me that Dr. Flint was about to visit the
+north. The letter had been delayed, and I supposed he might be
+already on the way. Mrs. Bruce did not know I was a fugitive. I
+told her that important business called me to Boston, where my
+brother then was, and asked permission to bring a friend to supply my place as nurse, for a fortnight. I started on my journey
+immediately; and as soon as I arrived, I wrote to my grandmother that if Benny came, he must be sent to Boston. I knew
+she was only waiting for a good chance to send him north, and,
+fortunately, she had the legal power to do so, without asking
+leave of any body. She was a free woman; and when my children
+were purchased, Mr. Sands preferred to have the bill of sale
+drawn up in her name. It was conjectured that he advanced the
+money, but it was not known. At the south, a gentleman may
+have a shoal of colored children without any disgrace; but if he is
+known to purchase them, with the view of setting them free, the
+example is thought to be dangerous to their "peculiar institution," and he becomes unpopular.
+There was a good opportunity to send Benny in a vessel coming directly to New York. He was put on board with a letter to a
+friend, who was requested to see him off to Boston. Early one
+morning, there was a loud rap at my door, and in rushed Benjamin, all out of breath. "0 mother!" he exclaimed, "here I am! I
+run all the way; and I come all alone. How d'you do?"
+o reader, can you imagine my joy? No, you cannot, unless
+you have been a slave-mother. Benjamin rattled away as fast as
+his tongue could go. "Mother, why don't you bring Ellen here? I
+went over to Brooklyn to see her, and she felt very bad when
+I bid her good bye. She said, '0 Ben, I wish I was going too.' I
+thought she'd know ever so much; but she don't know so much
+as I do; for I can read, and she can't. And, mother, I lost all my
+clothes coming. What can I do to get some more? I 'spose free
+boys can get along here at the north as well as white boys."
+I did not like to tell the sanguine, happy little fellow how
+
+194
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+much he was mistaken. I took him to a tailor, and procured a
+change of clothes. The rest of the day was spent in mutual asking
+and answering of questions, with the wish constantly repeated
+that the good old grandmother was with us, and frequent injunctions from Benny to write to her immediately, and be sure to tell
+her every thing about his voyage, and his journey to Boston.
+Dr. Flint made his visit to New York, and made every exertion to call upon me, and invite me to return with him; but not
+being able to ascertain where I was, his hospitable intentions
+were frustrated, and the affectionate family, who were waiting
+for me with "open arms," were doomed to disappointment.
+As soon as I knew he was safely at home, I placed Benjamin
+in the care of my brother William, and returned to Mrs. Bruce.
+There I remained through the winter and spring, endeavoring to
+perform my duties faithfully, and finding a good degree of happiness in the attractions of baby Mary, the considerate kindness
+of her excellent mother, and occasional interviews with my darling daughter.
+But when summer came, the old feeling of insecurity haunted
+me. It was necessary for me to take little Mary out daily, for exercise and fresh air, and the city was swarming with Southerners,
+some of whom might recognize me. Hot weather brings out
+snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous
+creatures as little as I do the other. What a comfort it is, to be
+free to say so!
+
+xxxv
+Prejudice Against Color
+
+IT WAS A RELIEF to my mind to see preparations for leaving the
+city. We went to Albany in the steamboat Knickerbocker. When
+the going sounded for tea, Mrs. Bruce said, "Linda, it is late, and
+you and baby had better come to the table with me." I replied, "I
+know it is time baby had her supper, but I had rather not go with
+you, if you please. I am afraid of being insulted." "0 no, not if
+you are with me," she said. I saw several white nurses go with
+their ladies, and I ventured to do the same. We were at the extreme end of the table. I was no sooner seated, than a gruff voice
+said, "Get up ! You know you are not allowed to sit here." I
+looked up, and, to my astonishment and indignation, saw that
+the speaker was a colored man. If his office required him to enforce the by-laws of the boat, he might, at least, have done it politely. I replied, "I shall not get up, unless the captain comes and
+takes me up." No cup of tea was offered me, but Mrs. Bruce
+handed me hers and called for another. I looked to see whether
+the other nurses were treated in a similar manner. They were all
+properly waited on.
+Next morning, when we stopped at Troy for breakfast, every
+body was making a rush for the table. Mrs. Bruce said, "Take my
+arm, Linda, and we'll go in together." The landlord heard her,
+and said, "Madam, will you allow your nurse and baby to take
+breakfast with my family?" I knew this was to be attributed to
+my complexion; but he spoke courteously, and therefore I did
+not mind it.
+At Saratoga' we found the United States Hotel crowded, and
+Mr. Bruce took one of the cottages belonging to the hotel. I had
+thought, with gladness, of going to the quiet of the country,
+where I should meet few people, but here I found myself in the
+midst of a swarm of Southerners. I looked round me with fear
+195
+
+196
+
+INCiDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+and trembling, dreading to see some one who would recognize
+me. I was rejoiced to find that we were to stay but a short time.
+We soon returned to New York, to make arrangements for
+spending the remainder of the summer at Rockaway.i While the
+laundress was putting the clothes in order, I took an opportunity
+to go over to Brooklyn to see Ellen. I met her going to a grocery
+store, and the first words she said, were, "0, mother, don't go to
+Mrs. Hobbs's, Her brother, Mr. Thorne, has come from the
+south, and may be he'll tell where you are." I accepted the warning. I told her I was going away with Mrs. Bruce the next day,
+and would try to see her when I came back.
+Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into
+a "Jim Crow car," on our way to Rockaway, neither was I invited to ride through the streets on the top of trunks in a truck;
+but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel
+prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the
+energies of the colored people. We reached Rockaway before
+dark, and put up at the Pavilion-a large hotel, beautifully situated by the sea-side-a great resort of the fashionable world.
+Thirty or forty nurses were there, of a great variety of nations.
+Some of the ladies had colored waiting-maids and coachmen, but
+I was the only nurse tinged with the blood of Africa. When the
+tea bell rang, I took little Mary and followed the other nurses.
+Supper was served in a long hall. A young man, who had the ordering of things, took the circuit of the table two or three times,
+and finally pointed me to a seat at the lower end of it. As there
+was but one chair, I sat down and took the child in my lap.
+Whereupon the young man came to me and said, in the blandest
+manner possible, "Will you please to seat the little girl in the
+chair, and stand behind it and feed her? After they have done,
+you will be shown to the kitchen, where you will have a good
+supper."
+This was the climax! I found it hard to preserve my selfcontrol, when I looked round, and saw women who were nurses,
+as I was, and only one shade lighter in complexion, eyeing me
+with a defiant look, as if my presence were a contamination.
+However, I said nothing. I quietly took the child in my arms,
+went to our room, and refused to go to the table again. Mr.
+
+PREJUDICE AGAINST COLOR
+
+197
+
+Bruce ordered meals to be sent to the room for little Mary and I.
+This answered for a few days; but the waiters of the establishment were white, and they soon began to complain, saying they
+were not hired to wait on negroes. The landlord requested Mr.
+Bruce to send me down to my meals, because his servants rebelled against bringing them up, and the colored servants of
+other boarders were dissatisfied because all were not treated
+alike.
+My answer was that the colored servants ought to be dissatisfied with themselves, for not having too much self-respect to
+submit to such treatment; that there was no difference in the
+price of board for colored and white servants, and there was no
+justification for difference of treatment. I staid a month after this,
+and finding I was resolved to stand up for my rights, they concluded to treat me well. Let every colored man and woman do
+this, and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by
+our oppressors.
+
+XXXVI
+
+The H airbreadth Escape
+
+AFTER WE RETURNED TO New York, I took the earliest opportunity to go and see Ellen. I asked to have her called down stairs;
+for I supposed Mrs. Hobbs's southern brother might still be
+there, and I was desirous to avoid seeing him, if possible. But
+Mrs. Hobbs came to the kitchen, and insisted on my going up
+stairs. "My brother wants to see you," said she, "and he is sorry
+you seem to shun him. He knows you are living in New York.
+He told me to say to you that he owes thanks to good old aunt
+Martha for too many little acts of kindness for him to be base
+enough to betray her grandchild."
+This Mr. Thorne' had become poor and reckless long before
+he left the south, and such persons had much rather go to one of
+the faithful old slaves to borrow a dollar, or get a good dinner,
+than to go to one whom they consider an equal. It was such acts
+of kindness as these for which he professed to feel grateful to my
+grandmother. I wished he had kept at a distance, but as he was
+here, and knew where I was, I concluded there was nothing to be
+gained by trying to avoid him; on the contrary, it might be the
+means of exciting his ill will. I followed his sister up stairs. He
+met me in a very friendly manner, congratulated me on my escape from slavery, and hoped I had a good place, where I felt
+happy.
+I continued to visit Ellen as often as I could. She, good
+thoughtful child, never forgot my hazardous situation, but always kept a vigilant lookout for my safety. She never made any
+complaint about her own inconveniences and troubles; but a
+mother's observing eye easily perceived that she was not happy.
+On the occasion of one of my visits I found her unusually serious. When I asked her what was the matter, she said nothing was
+the matter. But I insisted upon knowing what made her look so
+198
+
+THE HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE
+
+199
+
+very grave. Finally, I ascertained that she felt troubled about the
+dissipation that was continually going on in the house. She was
+sent to the store very often for rum and brandy, and she felt
+ashamed to ask for it so often; and Mr. Hobbs and Mr. Thorne
+drank a great deal, and their hands trembled so that they had to
+call her to pour out the liquor for them. "But for all that," said
+she, "Mr. Hobbs is good to me, and I can't help liking him. I feel
+sorry for him." I tried to comfort her, by telling her that I had
+laid up a hundred dollars, and that before long I hoped to be able
+to give her and Benjamin a home, and send them to school. She
+was always desirous not to add to my troubles more than she
+could help, and 1 did not discover till years afterwards that Mr.
+Thorne's intemperance was not the only annoyance she suffered
+from him. Though he professed too much gratitude to my
+grandmother to injure any of her descendants, he had poured
+vile language into the ears of her innocent great-grandchild.
+I usually went to Brooklyn to spend Sunday afternoon. One
+Sunday, I found Ellen anxiously waiting for me near the house.
+"0, mother," said she, "I've been waiting for you this long
+time. I'm afraid Mr. Thorne has written to tell Dr. Flint where
+you are. Make haste and come in. Mrs. Hobbs will tell you all
+about it!"
+The story was soon told. While the children were playing in
+the grape-vine arbor, the day before, Mr. Thorne came out with
+a letter in his hand, which he tore up and scattered about. Ellen
+was sweeping the yard at the time, and having her mind full of
+suspicions of him, she picked up the pieces and carried them to
+the children, saying, "1 wonder who Mr. Thorne has been writing to."
+"I'm sure I don't know, and don't care," replied the oldest of
+the children; "and I don't see how it concerns you."
+"But it does concern me," replied Ellen; "for I'm afraid he's
+been writing to the south about my mother."
+They laughed at her, and called her a silly thing, but goodnaturedly put the fragments of writing together, in order to read
+them to her. They were no sooner arranged, than the little girl
+exclaimed, "I declare, Ellen, I believe you are right."
+The contents of Mr. Theme's letter, as nearly as I can rernem-
+
+200
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ber, were as follows: "1 have seen your slave, Linda, and conversed with her. She can be taken very easily, if you manage prudently. There are enough of us here to swear to her identity as
+your property. I am a patriot, a lover of my country, and 1 do
+this as an act of justice to the laws." He concluded by informing
+the doctor of the street and number where I lived. The children
+carried the pieces to Mrs. Hobbs, who immediately went to her
+brother's room for an explanation. He was not to be found. The
+servants said they saw him go out with a letter in his hand, and
+they supposed he had gone to the post office. The natural inference was, that he had sent to Dr. Flint a copy of those fragments.
+When he returned, his sister accused him of it, and he did not
+deny the charge. He went immediately to his room, and the next
+morning he was missing. He had gone over to New York, before
+any of the family were astir.
+It was evident that 1 had no time to lose; and 1 hastened back
+to the city with a heavy heart. Again 1 was to be torn from a
+comfortable home, and all my plans for the welfare of my children were to be frustrated by that demon Slavery! 1 now regretted that 1 never told Mrs. Bruce my story. 1 had not concealed it
+merely on account of being a fugitive; that would have made her
+anxious, but it would have excited sympathy in her kind heart. 1
+valued her good opinion, and 1 was afraid of losing it, if 1 told
+her all the particulars of my sad story. But now 1 felt that it was
+necessary for her to know how 1 was situated. 1 had once left her
+abruptly, without explaining the reason, and it would not be
+proper to do it again. I went home resolved to tell her in the
+morning. But the sadness of my face attracted her attention, and,
+in answer to her kind inquiries, I poured out my full heart to her,
+before bed time. She listened with true womanly sympathy, and
+told me she would do all she could to protect me. How my heart
+blessed her!
+Early the next morning, Judge Vanderpool and Lawyer Hopper were consulted.' They said I had better leave the city at once,
+as the risk would be great if the case came to trial. Mrs. Bruce
+took me in a carriage to the house of one of her friends, where
+she assured me I should be safe until my brother could arrive,
+
+THE HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE
+
+201
+
+which would be in a few days. In the interval my thoughts were
+much occupied with Ellen. She was mine by birth, and she was
+also mine by Southern law, since my grandmother held the bill
+of sale that made her so. I did not feel that she was safe unless I
+had her with me. Mrs. Hobbs, who felt badly about her brother's
+treachery, yielded to my entreaties, on condition that she should
+return in ten days. I avoided making any promise. She came to
+me clad in very thin garments, all outgrown, and with a school
+satchel on her arm, containing a few articles. It was late in October, and I knew the child must suffer; and not daring to go out in
+the streets to purchase any thing, I took off my own flannel skirt
+and converted it into one for her. Kind Mrs. Bruce came to bid
+me good bye, and when she saw that I had taken off my clothing
+for my child, the tears came to her eyes. She said, "Wait for me,
+Linda," and went out. She soon returned with a nice warm shawl
+and hood for Ellen. Truly, of such souls as hers are the kingdom
+of heaven.
+My brother reached New York on Wednesday. Lawyer Hopper advised us to go to Boston by the Stonington route,' as there
+was less Southern travel in that direction. Mrs. Bruce directed
+her servants to tell all inquirers that I formerly lived there, but
+had gone from the city.
+We reached the steamboat Rhode Island in safety. That boat
+employed colored hands, but I knew that colored passengers
+were not admitted to the cabin. I was very desirous for the seclusion of the cabin, not only on account of exposure to the night
+air, but also to avoid observation. Lawyer Hopper was waiting
+on board for us. He spoke to the stewardess, and asked, as a particular favor, that she would treat us well. He said to me, "Go
+and speak to the captain yourself by and by. Take your little girl
+with you, and I am sure that he will not let her sleep on deck."
+With these kind words and a shake of the hand he departed.
+The boat was soon on her way, bearing me rapidly from the
+friendly home where I had hoped to find security and rest. My
+brother had left me to purchase the tickets, thinking that I might
+have better success than he would. When the stewardess came to
+me, I paid what she asked, and she gave me three tickets with
+
+202
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+clipped corners. In the most unsophisticated manner I said, "You
+have made a mistake; I asked you for cabin tickets. I cannot possibly consent to sleep on deck with my little daughter." She assured me there was no mistake. She said on some of the routes
+calored people were allowed to sleep in the cabin, but not on this
+route, which was much travelled by the wealthy. I asked her to
+show me to the captain's office, and she said she would after tea.
+When the time came, I took Ellen by the hand and went to the
+captain, politely requesting him to change our tickets, as we
+should be very uncomfortable on deck. He said it was contrary
+to their custom, but he would see that we had berths below; he
+would also try to obtain comfortable seats for us in the cars; of
+that he was not certain, but he would speak to the conductor
+about it, when the boat arrived. I thanked him, and returned to
+the ladies' cabin. He came afterwards and told me that the conductor of the cars was on board, that he had spoken to him, and
+he had promised to take care of us. I was very much surprised at
+receiving so much kindness. I don't know whether the pleasing
+face of my little girl had won his heart, or whether the stewardess
+inferred from Lawyer Hopper's manner that I was a fugitive, and
+had pleaded with him in my behalf.
+When the boat arrived at Stonington, the conductor kept his
+promise, and showed us to seats in the first car, nearest the engine. He asked us to take seats next the door, but as he passed
+through, we ventured to move on toward the other end of the
+car. No incivility was offered us, and we reached Boston in
+safety.
+The day after my arrival was one of the happiest of my life. I
+felt as if I was beyond the reach of the bloodhounds; and, for the
+first time during many years, I had both my children together
+with me. They greatly enjoyed their reunion, and laughed and
+chatted merrily. I watched them with a swelling heart. Their
+every motion delighted me.
+I could not feel safe in New York, and I accepted the offer of
+a friend, that we should share expenses and keep house together.
+I represented to Mrs. Hobbs that Ellen must have some schooling, and must remain with me for that purpose. She felt ashamed
+
+THE HAIRBREADTH ESCAPE
+
+203
+
+of being unable to read or spell at her age, so instead of sending
+her to school with Benny, I instructed her myself till she was fitted to enter an intermediate school. The winter passed pleasantly, while I was busy with my needle, and my children with
+their books.
+
+XXXVII
+
+A Visit to England
+
+IN THE SPRING, SAD news came to me. Mrs. Bruce was dead.
+
+Never again, in this world, should I see her gentle face, or hear
+her sympathizing voice. I had lost an excellent friend, and little
+Mary had lost a tender mother. Mr. Bruce wished the child to
+visit some of her mother's relatives in England, and he was desirous that I should take charge of her. The little motherless one
+was accustomed to me, and attached to me, and I thought she
+would be happier in my care than in that of a stranger. I could
+also earn more in this way than I could by my needle. So I put
+Benny to a trade, and left Ellen to remain in the house with my
+friend and go to school.
+We sailed from New York, and arrived in Liverpool after
+a pleasant voyage of twelve days. We proceeded directly to
+London, and took lodgings at the Adelaide Hotel. The supper
+seemed to me less luxurious than those I had seen in American
+hotels; but my situation was indescribably more pleasant. For
+the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion.
+I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my
+head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.
+As I had constant care of the child, I had little opportunity to
+see the wonders of that great city; but I watched the tide of life
+that flowed through the streets, and found it a strange contrast to
+the stagnation in our Southern towns. Mr. Bruce took his little
+daughter to spend some days with friends in Oxford Crescent,
+and of course it was necessary for me to accompany her. I had
+heard much of the systematic method of English education, and I
+was very desirous that my dear Mary should steer straight in the
+204
+
+A VISIT TO ENGLAND
+
+205
+
+midst of so much propriety. I closely observed her little playmates and their nurses, being ready to take any lessons in the science of good management. The children were more rosy than
+American children, but I did not see that they differed materially
+in other respects. They were like all children-sometimes docile
+and sometimes wayward.
+We next went to Steventon, in Berkshire. It was a small town,
+said to be the poorest in the county. I saw men working in the
+fields for six shillings, and seven shillings, a week, and women
+for sixpence, and sevenpence, a day, out of which they boarded
+themselves. Of course they lived in the most primitive manner; it
+could not be otherwise, where a woman's wages for an entire day
+were not sufficient to buy a pound of meat. They paid very low
+rents, and their clothes were made of the cheapest fabrics, though
+much better than could have been procured in the United States
+for the same money. I had heard much about the oppression of
+the poor in Europe. The people I saw around me were, many of
+them, among the poorest poor. But when I visited them in their
+little thatched cottages, I felt that the condition of even the
+meanest and most ignorant among them was vastly superior to
+the condition of the most favored slaves in America. They labored hard; but they were not ordered out to toil while the stars
+were in the sky; and driven and slashed by an overseer, through
+heat and cold, till the stars shone out again. Their homes were
+very humble; but they were protected by law. No insolent patrols could come, in the dead of night, and flog them at their
+pleasure. The father, when he closed his cottage door, felt safe
+with his family around him. No master or overseer could come
+and take from him his wife, or his daughter. They must separate
+to earn their living; but the parents knew where their children
+were going, and could communicate with them by letters. The
+relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too sacred
+for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity. Much
+was being done to enlighten these poor people. Schools were established among them, and benevolent societies were active in efforts to ameliorate their condition. There was no law forbidding
+them to learn to read and write; and if they helped each other
+in spelling out the Bible, they were in no danger of thirty-nine
+
+206
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+lashes, as was the case with myself and poor, pious, old uncle
+Fred. I repeat that the most ignorant and the most destitute of
+these peasants was a thousand fold better off than the most pampered American slave.
+I do not deny that the poor are oppressed in Europe. I am not
+disposed to paint their condition so rose-colored as the Hon.
+Miss Murray! paints the condition of the slaves in the United
+States. A small portion of my experience would enable her to
+read her own pages with anointed eyes. If she were to lay aside
+her title, and, instead of visiting among the fashionable, become
+domesticated, as a poor governess, on some plantation in Louisiana or Alabama, she would see and hear things that would
+make her tell quite a different story.
+My visit to England is a memorable event in my life, from the
+fact of my having there received strong religious impressions.
+The contemptuous manner in which the communion had been
+administered to colored people, in my native place; the church
+membership of Dr. Flint, and others like him; and the buying
+and selling of slaves, by professed ministers of the gospel, had
+given me a prejudice against the Episcopal church. The whole
+service seemed to me a mockery and a sham. But my home in
+Steventon was in the family of a clergyman, who was a true disciple of Jesus. The beauty of his daily life inspired me with faith
+in the genuineness of Christian professions. Grace entered my
+heart, and I knelt at the communion table, I trust, in true humility of soul.
+I remained abroad ten months, which was much longer than I
+had anticipated. During all that time, I never saw the slightest
+symptom of prejudice against color. Indeed, I entirely forgot it,
+till the time came for us to return to America.
+
+XXXVIII
+
+Renewed Invitations to Go South
+
+WE HAD A TEDIOUS winter passage, and from the distance spectres seemed to rise up on the shores of the United States. It is a
+sad feeling to be afraid of one's native country. We arrived in
+New York safely, and I hastened to Boston to look after my children. I found Ellen well, and improving at her school; but Benny
+was not there to welcome me. He had been left at a good place to
+learn a trade, and for several months every thing worked well.
+He was liked by the master, and was a favorite with his fellowapprentices; but one day they accidentally discovered a fact they
+had never before suspected-that he was colored! This at once
+transformed him into a different being. Some of the apprentices
+were Americans, others American-born Irish; and it was offensive to their dignity to have a "nigger" among them, after they
+had been told that he was a "nigger." They began by treating him
+with silent scorn, and finding that he returned the same, they resorted to insults and abuse. He was too spirited a boy to stand
+that, and he went off. Being desirous to do something to support
+himself, and having no one to advise him, he shipped for a whaling voyage. When I received these tidings I shed many tears, and
+bitterly reproached myself for having left him so long. But I had
+done it for the best, and now all I could do was to pray to the
+heavenly Father to guide and protect him.
+Not long after my return, I received the following letter from
+Miss Emily Flint, now Mrs. Dodge: 1"In this you will recognize the hand of your friend and mistress.
+Having heard that you had gone with a family to Europe, I have
+waited to hear of your return to write to you. I should have answered the letter you wrote to me long since, but as I could not
+then act independently of my father, I know there could be noth207
+
+208
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+ing done satisfactory to you. There were persons here who were
+willing to buy you and run the risk of getting you. To this I
+would not consent. I have always been attached to you, and
+would not like to see you the slave of another, or have unkind
+treatment. I am married now, and can protect you. My husband
+expects to move to Virginia this spring, where we think of settling. I am very anxious that you should come and live with me. If
+you are not willing to come, you may purchase yourself; but I
+should prefer having you live with me. If you come, you may, if
+you like, spend a month with your grandmother and friends, then
+come to me in Norfolk, Virginia. Think this over, and write as
+soon as possible, and let me know the conclusion. Hoping that
+your children are well, I remain you friend and mistress."
+
+Of course I did not write to return thanks for this cordial invitation. I felt insulted to be thought stupid enough to be caught by
+such professions.
+"'Come up into my parIor,' said the spider to the fly;
+, 'Tis the prettiest little parIor that ever you did spy.' "
+
+It was plain that Dr. Flint's family were apprised of my movements, since they knew of my voyage to Europe. I expected to
+have further trouble from them; but having eluded them thus far,
+I hoped to be as successful in future. The money I had earned, I
+was desirous to devote to the education of my children, and to
+secure a home for them. It seemed not only hard, but unjust, to
+pay for myself. I could not possibly regard myself as a piece of
+property. Moreover, I had worked many years without wages,
+and during that time had been obliged to depend on my grandmother for many comforts in food and clothing. My children
+certainly belonged to me; but though Dr. Flint had incurred no
+expense for their support, he had received a large sum of money
+for them. I knew the law would decide that I was his property,
+and would probably still give his daughter a claim to my children; but I regarded such laws as the regulations of robbers, who
+had no rights that I was bound to respect.
+The Fugitive Slave Law had not then passed. The judges of
+
+RENEWED INVITATIONS TO GO SOUTH
+
+209
+
+Massachusetts had not then stooped under chains to enter her
+courts of justice, so called. I knew my old master was rather skittish of Massachusetts. I relied on her love of freedom, and felt
+safe on her soil. I am now aware that I honored the old Commonwealth beyond her deserts.
+
+XXXIX
+
+The Confession
+
+FOR TWO YEARS MY daughter and I supported ourselves com-
+
+fortably in Boston. At the end of that time, my brother William
+offered to send Ellen to a boarding school.' It required a great effort for me to consent to part with her, for I had few near ties,
+and it was her presence that made my two little rooms seem
+home-like. But my judgment prevailed over my selfish feelings. I
+made preparations for her departure. During the two years we
+had lived together I had often resolved to tell her something
+about her father; but I had never been able to muster sufficient
+courage. I had a shrinking dread of diminishing my child's love.
+I knew she must have curiosity on the subject, but she had never
+asked a question. She was always very careful not to say any
+thing to remind me of my troubles. Now that she was going
+from me, I thought if I should die before she returned, she might
+hear my story from some one who did not understand the palliating circumstances; and that if she were entirely ignorant on the
+subject, her sensitive nature might receive a rude shock.
+When we retired for the night, she said, "Mother, it is very
+hard to leave you alone. I am almost sorry I am going, though I
+do want to improve myself. But you will write to me often;
+won't you, mother?"
+I did not throw my arms round her. I did not answer her. But
+in a calm, solemn way, for it cost me great effort, I said, "Listen
+to me, Ellen; I have something to tell you!" I recounted my early
+sufferings in slavery, and told her how nearly they had crushed
+me. I began to tell her how they had driven me into a great sin,
+when she clasped me in her arms, and exclaimed, "0, don't,
+mother! Please don't tell me any more."
+I said, "But, my child, I want you to know about your
+father."
+210
+
+THE CONFESSION
+
+211
+
+"I know all about it, mother," she replied; "I am nothing to
+my father, and he is nothing to me. All my love is for you. 1 was
+with him five months in Washington, and he never cared for me.
+He never spoke to me as he did to his little Fanny. 1 knew all the
+time he was my father, for Fanny's nurse told me so; but she said
+1 must never tell any body, and 1 never did. 1 used to wish he
+would take me in his arms and kiss me, as he did Fanny; or that
+he would sometimes smile at me, as he did at her. 1 thought if he
+was my own father, he ought to love me. 1 was a little girl then,
+and didn't know any better. But now 1 never think any thing
+about my father. All my love is for you." She hugged me closer
+as she spoke, and 1 thanked God that the knowledge 1 had so
+much dreaded to impart had not diminished the affection of my
+child. 1 had not the slightest idea she knew that portion of
+my history. If 1 had, 1 should have spoken to her long before; for
+my pent-up feelings had often longed to pour themselves out to
+some one 1 could trust. But 1 loved the dear girl better for the
+delicacy she had manifested towards her unfortunate mother.
+The next morning, she and her uncle started on their journey
+to the village in N ew York, where she was to be placed at school.
+It seemed as if all the sunshine had gone away. My little room
+was dreadfully lonely. 1 was thankful when a message came from
+a lady, accustomed to employ me, requesting me to come and
+sew in her family for several weeks. On my return, 1 found a letter from brother William. He thought of opening an anti-slavery
+reading room in Rochester.? and combining with it the sale of
+some books and stationery; and he wanted me to unite with him.
+We tried it, but it was not successful. We found warm antislavery friends there, but the feeling was not general enough to
+support such an establishment. 1 passed nearly a year in the family of Isaac and Amy Post, practical believers in the Christian
+doctrine of human brotherhood. They measured a man's worth
+by his character, not by his complexion. The memory of those
+beloved and honored friends will remain with me to my latest
+hour.'
+
+XL
+
+The Fugitive Slave Law
+
+My BROTHER, BEING DISAPPOINTED in his project, concluded
+to go to California; and it was agreed that Benjamin should go
+with him. Ellen liked her school, and was a great favorite there.
+They did not know her history, and she did not tell it, because
+she had no desire to make capital out of their sympathy. But
+when it was accidentally discovered that her mother was a fugitive slave, every method was used to increase her advantages and
+diminish her expenses.
+I was alone again. It was necessary for me to be earning
+money, and I preferred that it should be among those who knew
+me. On my return from Rochester, I called at the house of Mr.
+Bruce, to see Mary, the darling little babe that had thawed my
+heart, when it was freezing into a cheerless distrust of all my
+fellow-beings. She was growing a tall girl now, but I loved her always. Mr. Bruce had married again, 1 and it was proposed that I
+should become nurse to a new infant. I had but one hesitation,
+and that was my feeling of insecurity in New York, now greatly
+increased by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. However, I
+resolved to try the experiment. I was again fortunate in my employer. The new Mrs. Bruce was an American, brought up under
+aristocratic influences, and still living in the midst of them; but if
+she had any prejudice against color, I was never made aware of it;
+and as for the system of slavery, she had a most hearty dislike of
+it. No sophistry of Southerners could blind her to its enormity.
+She was a person of excellent principles and a noble heart. To
+me, from that hour to the present, she has been a true and sympathizing friend. Blessings be with her and hers!
+About the time that I reentered the Bruce family, an event occurred of disastrous import to the calored people.? The slave
+Hamlin, the first fugitive that came under the new law, was given
+212
+
+THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW
+
+213
+
+up by the bloodhounds of the north to the bloodhounds of the
+south. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored
+population. The great city rushed on in its whirl of excitement,
+taking no note of the "short and simple annals of the poor." But
+while fashionables were listening to the thrilling voice of Jenny
+Lind in Metropolitan Hall, the thrilling voices of poor hunted
+colored people went up, in an agony of supplication, to the Lord,
+from Zion's church.' Many families, who had lived in the city for
+twenty years, fled from it now. Many a poor washerwoman,
+who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was
+obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to
+friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. Many a
+wife discovered a secret she had never known before-that her
+husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own
+safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had
+fled from slavery years ago, and as "the child follows the condition of its mother," the children of his love were liable to be
+seized and carried into slavery. Every where, in those humble
+homes, there was consternation and anguish. But what cared the
+legislators of the "dominant race" for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?
+When my brother William spent his last evening with me, before he went to California, we talked nearly all the time of the
+distress brought on our oppressed people by the passage of this
+iniquitous law; and never had I seen him manifest such bitterness
+of spirit, such stern hostility to our oppressors. He was himself
+free from the operation of the law; for he did not run from any
+Slaveholding State, being brought into the Free States by his
+master. But I was subject to it; and so were hundreds of intelligent and industrious people all around us. I seldom ventured
+into the streets; and when it was necessary to do an errand for
+Mrs. Bruce, or any of the family, I went as much as possible
+through back streets and by-ways. What a disgrace to a city calling itself free, that inhabitants, guiltless of offence, and seeking to
+perform their duties conscientiously, should be condemned to
+live in such incessant fear, and have nowhere to turn for protection! This state of things, of course, gave rise to many impromptu vigilance committees. Every colored person, and every
+
+214
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+friend of their persecuted race, kept their eyes wide open. Every
+evening I examined the newspapers carefully, to see what Southerners had put up at the hotels. I did this for my own sake,
+thinking my young mistress and her husband might be among
+the list; I wished also to give information to others, if necessary;
+for if many were "running to and fro," I resolved that "knowledge should be increased."
+This brings up one of my Southern reminiscences, which I
+will here briefly relate. I was somewhat acquainted with a slave
+named Luke, who belonged to a wealthy man in our vicinity.
+His master died, leaving a son and daughter heirs to his large fortune. In the division of the slaves, Luke was included in the son's
+portion. This young man became a prey to the vices growing out
+of the "patriarchal institution," and when he went to the north,
+to complete his education, he carried his vices with him. He was
+brought home, deprived of the use of his limbs, by excessive dissipation. Luke was appointed to wait upon his bed-ridden master, whose despotic habits were greatly increased by exasperation
+at his own helplessness. He kept a cowhide beside him, and, for
+the most trivial occurrence, he would order his attendant to bare
+his back, and kneel beside the couch, while he whipped him till
+his strength was exhausted. Some days he was not allowed to
+wear any thing but his shirt, in order to be in readiness to be
+flogged. A day seldom passed without his receiving more or less
+blows. If the slightest resistance was offered, the town constable
+was sent for to execute the punishment, and Luke learned from
+experience how much more the constable's strong arm was to be
+dreaded than the comparatively feeble one of his master. The
+arm of his tyrant grew weaker, and was finally palsied, and then
+the constable's services were in constant requisition. The fact
+that he was entirely dependent on Luke's care, and was obliged
+to be tended like an infant, instead of inspiring any gratitude or
+compassion towards his poor slave, seemed only to increase his
+irritability and cruelty. As he lay there on his bed, a mere degraded wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest
+freaks of despotism; and if Luke hesitated to submit to his
+orders, the constable was immediately sent for. Some of these
+freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated. When I fled
+
+THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW
+
+215
+
+from the house of bondage, Lleft poor Luke still chained to the
+bedside of this cruel and disgusting wretch.
+One day, when I had been requested to do an errand for Mrs.
+Bruce, I was hurrying through back streets, as usual, when I saw
+a young man approaching, whose face was familiar to me. As he
+came nearer, I recognized Luke. I always rejoiced to see or hear
+of anyone who had escaped from the black pit; but, remembering this poor fellow's extreme hardships, I was peculiarly glad to
+see him on Northern soil, though I no longer called it free soil. I
+well remembered what a desolate feeling it was to be alone
+among strangers, and I went up to him and greeted him cordially. At first, he did not know me; but when I mentioned my
+name, he remembered all about me. I told him of the Fugitive
+Slave Law, and asked him if he did not know that New York was
+a city of kidnappers.
+He replied, "De risk ain't so bad for me, as 'tis fur you. 'Cause
+I runned away from de speculator, and you runned away from
+de massa. Dem speculators vont spen dar money to come here
+fur a runaway, if dey airi't sartin sure to put dar hans right on
+him. An I tell you I's tuk good car 'bout dat. I had too hard
+times down dar, to let 'em ketch dis nigger."
+He then told me of the advice he had received, and the plans
+he had laid. I asked if he had money enough to take him to
+Canada. " 'Pend upon it, I hab," he replied. "I tuk car fur dat. I'd
+bin workin all my days fur dem cussed whites, an got no pay but
+kicks and cuffs. So I tought dis nigger had a right to money nuff
+to bring him to de Free States. Massa Henry he lib till ebery
+body vish him dead; an ven he did die, I knowed de debbil would
+hab him, an vouldn't vant him to bring his money 'long too. So I
+tuk some of his bills, and put'em in de pocket of his ole trousers.
+An ven he was buried, dis nigger ask fur dem ole trousers, an dey
+gub 'em to me." With a low, chuckling laugh, he added, "You see
+I didn't steal it; dey gub it to me. I tell you, I had mighty hard
+time to keep de speculator from findin it; but he didn't git it."
+This is a fair specimen of how the moral sense is educated by
+slavery. When a man has his wages stolen from him, year after
+year, and the laws sanction and enforce the theft, how can he be
+expected to have more regard to honesty than has the man who
+
+216
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+robs him? 1 have become somewhat enlightened, but 1 confess
+that 1 agree with poor, ignorant, much-abused Luke, in thinking
+he had a right to that money, as a portion of his unpaid wages.
+He went to Canada forthwith, and 1 have not since heard from
+him.
+All that winter 1 lived in a state of anxiety. When 1 took the
+children out to breathe the air, 1 closely observed the countenances of all 1 met. 1 dreaded the approach of summer, when
+snakes and slaveholders make their appearance. 1 was, in fact, a
+slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as 1 had been in a
+Slave State. Strange incongruity in a State called free!
+Spring returned, and 1 received warning from the south that
+Dr. Flint knew of my return to my old place, and was making
+preparations to have me caught. 1 learned afterwards that my
+dress, and that of Mrs. Bruce's children, had been described to
+him by some of the Northern tools, which slaveholders employ
+for their base purposes, and then indulge in sneers at their cupidity and mean servility.
+1 immediately informed Mrs. Bruce of my danger, and she
+took prompt measures for my safety. My place as nurse could
+not be supplied immediately, and this generous, sympathizing
+lady proposed that 1 should carry her baby away. It was a comfort to me to have the child with me; for the heart is reluctant to
+be torn away from every object it loves. But how few mothers
+would have consented to have one of their own babes become a
+fugitive, for the sake of a poor, hunted nurse, on whom the legislators of the country had let loose the bloodhounds! When 1
+spoke of the sacrifice she was making, in depriving herself of her
+dear baby, she replied, "It is better for you to have baby with
+you, Linda; for if they get on your track, they will be obliged to
+bring the child to me; and then, if there is a possibility of saving
+you, you shall be saved."
+This lady had a very wealthy relative, a benevolent gentleman
+in many respects, but aristocratic and pro-slavery. He remonstrated with her for harboring a fugitive slave; told her she was
+violating the laws of her country; and asked her if she was aware
+of the penalty. She replied, "1 am very well aware of it. It is imprisonment and one thousand dollars fine. Shame on my country
+
+THE FUGITIVE SLA VE LAW
+
+217
+
+that it is so! I am ready to incur the penalty. I will go to the
+state's prison, rather than have any poor victim torn from my
+house, to be carried back to slavery."
+The noble heart! The brave heart! The tears are in my eyes
+while I write of her. May the God of the helpless reward her for
+her sympathy with my persecuted people!
+I was sent into New England, where I was sheltered by the
+wife of a senator, whom I shall always hold in grateful rernembrance." This honorable gentleman would not have voted for the
+Fugitive Slave Law, as did the senator in "Uncle Tom's Cabin;"
+on the contrary, he was strongly opposed to it; but he was
+enough under its influence to be afraid of having me remain in
+his house many hours. So I was sent into the country, where I remained a month with the baby. When it was supposed that Dr.
+Flint's emissaries had lost track of me, and given up the pursuit
+for the present, I returned to New York.
+
+XLI
+
+Free at Last
+
+MRS. BRUCE, AND EVERY member of her family, were exceedingly kind to me. I was thankful for the blessings of my lot, yet I
+could not always wear a cheerful countenance. I was doing harm
+to no one; on the contrary, I was doing all the good I could in
+my small way; yet I could never go out to breathe God's free air
+without trepidation at my heart. This seemed hard; and I could
+not think it was a right state of things in any civilized country.
+From time to time I received news from my good old grandmother. She could not write; but she employed others to write
+for her. The following is an extract from one of her last letters:"Dear Daughter: I cannot hope to see you again on earth; but
+I pray to God to unite us above, where pain will no more rack
+this feeble body of mine; where sorrow and parting from my
+children will be no more. God has promised these things if we
+are faithful unto the end. My age and feeble health deprive me of
+going to church now; but God is with me here at home. Thank
+your brother for his kindness. Give much love to him, and tell
+him to remember the Creator in the days of his youth, and strive
+to meet me in the Father's kingdom. Love to Ellen and Benjamin. Don't neglect him. Tell him for me, to be a good boy.
+Strive, my child, to train them for God's children. May he
+protect and provide for you, is the prayer of your loving old
+mother."
+These letters both cheered and saddened me. I was always
+glad to have tidings from the kind, faithful old friend of my unhappy youth; but her messages of love made my heart yearn to
+see her before she died, and I mourned over the fact that it was
+impossible. Some months after I returned from my flight to New
+England, I received a letter from her, in which she wrote, "Dr.
+
+218
+
+FREE AT LAST
+
+219
+
+Flint is dead.' He has left a distressed family. Poor old man! I
+hope he made his peace with God."
+I remembered how he had defrauded my grandmother of the
+hard earnings she had loaned; how he had tried to cheat her out
+of the freedom her mistress had promised her, and how he had
+persecuted her children; and I thought to myself that she was a
+better Christian than I was, if she could entirely forgive him. I
+cannot say, with truth, that the news of myoid master's death
+softened my feelings towards him. There are wrongs which even
+the grave does not bury. The man was odious to me while he
+lived, and his memory is odious now.
+His departure from this world did not diminish my danger.
+He had threatened my grandmother that his heirs should hold
+me in slavery after he was gone; that I never should be free so
+long as a child of his survived. As for Mrs. Flint, I had seen her in
+deeper afflictions than I supposed the loss of her husband would
+be, for she had buried several children; yet I never saw any signs
+of softening in her heart. The doctor had died in embarrassed circumstances, and had little to will to his heirs, except such property as he was unable to grasp. I was well aware what I had to
+expect from the family of Flints; and my fears were confirmed by
+a letter from the south, warning me to be on my guard, because
+Mrs. Flint openly declared that her daughter could not afford to
+lose so valuable a slave as I was.
+I kept close watch of the newspapers for arrivals; but one Saturday night, being much occupied, I forgot to examine the
+Evening Express as usual. I went down into the parlor for it,
+early in the morning, and found the boy about to kindle a fire
+with it. I took it from him and examined the list of arrivals.
+Reader, if you have never been a slave, you cannot imagine the
+acute sensation of suffering at my heart, when I read the names
+of Mr. and Mrs. Dodge, at a hotel in Courtland Street. It was a
+third-rate hotel, and that circumstance convinced me of the truth
+of what I had heard, that they were short of funds and had need
+of my value, as they valued me; and that was by dollars and
+cents. I hastened with the paper to Mrs. Bruce. Her heart and
+hand were always open to everyone in distress, and she always
+
+220
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE 01; A SLAVE GIRL
+
+warmly sympathized with mine. lt was impossible to tell how
+near the enemy was. He might have passed and repassed the
+house while we were sleeping. He might at that moment be waiting to pounce upon me if I ventured out of doors. I had never
+seen the husband of my young mistress, and therefore I could
+not distinguish him from any other stranger. A carriage was
+hastily ordered; and, closely veiled, I followed Mrs. Bruce, taking the baby again with me into exile. After various turnings and
+crossings, and returnings, the carriage stopped at the house of
+one of Mrs. Bruce's friends, where I was kindly received. Mrs.
+Bruce returned immediately, to instruct the domes tics what to
+say if anyone came to inquire for me.
+lt was lucky for me that the evening paper was not burned up
+before I had a chance to examine the list of arrivals. lt was not
+long after Mrs. Bruce's return to her house, before several people
+came to inquire for me. One inquired for me, another asked for
+my daughter Ellen, and another said he had a letter from my
+grandmother, which he was requested to deliver in person.
+They were told, "She has lived here, but she has left."
+"How long ago?"
+"I don't know, sir."
+"Do you know where she went?"
+"I do not, sir." And the door was closed.
+This Mr. Dodge, who claimed me as his property, was originally a Yankee pedler in the south; then he became a merchant,
+and finally a slaveholder. He managed to get introduced into
+what was called the first society, and married Miss Emily Flint.
+A quarrel arose between him and her brother, and the brother
+cowhided him. This led to a family feud, and he proposed to remove to Virginia. Dr. Flint left him no property, and his own
+means had become circumscribed, while a wife and children depended upon him for support. Under these circumstances, it was
+very natural that he should make an effort to put me into his
+pocket.
+I had a colared friend, a man from my native place, in whom I
+had the most implicit confidence. I sent for him, and told him
+that Mr. and Mrs. Dodge had arrived in New York. I proposed
+that he should call upon them to make inquiries about his friends
+
+FREE AT LAST
+
+221
+
+at the south, with whom Dr. Flint's family were well acquainted.
+He thought there was no impropriety in his doing so, and he
+consented. He went to the hotel, and knocked at the door of Mr.
+Dodge's room, which was opened by the gentleman himself,
+who gruffly inquired, "What brought you here? How came you
+to know I was in the city?"
+"Your arrival was published in the evening papers, sir; and I
+called to ask Mrs. Dodge about my friends at home. I didn't suppose it would give any offence."
+"Where's that negro girl, that belongs to my wife?"
+"What girl, sir?"
+"You know well enough. I mean Linda, that ran away from
+Dr. Flint's plantation, some years ago. I dare say you've seen her,
+and know where she is."
+"Yes, sir, I've seen her, and know where she is. She is out of
+your reach, sir."
+"Tell me where she is, or bring her to me, and I will give her a
+chance to buy her freedom."
+"I don't think it would be of any use, sir. I have heard her say
+she would go to the ends of the earth, rather than pay any man
+or woman for her freedom, because she thinks she has a right to
+it. Besides, she couldn't do it, if she would, for she has spent her
+earnings to educate her children."
+This made Mr. Dodge very angry, and some high words
+passed between them. My friend was afraid to come where I was;
+but in the course of the day I received a note from him. I supposed they had not come from the south, in the winter, for a
+pleasure excursion; and now the nature of their business was
+very plain.
+Mrs. Bruce came to me and entreated me to leave the city the
+next morning. She said her house was watched, and it was possible that some clew to me might be obtained. I refused to take her
+advice. She pleaded with an earnest tenderness, that ought to
+have moved me; but I was in a bitter, disheartened mood. I was
+weary of flying from pillar to post. I had been chased during half
+my life, and it seemed as if the chase was never to end. There I
+sat, in that great city, guiltless of crime, yet not daring to worship
+God in any of the churches. I heard the bells ringing for after-
+
+222
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+noon service, and, with contemptuous sarcasm, I said, "Will the
+preachers take for their text, 'Proclaim liberty to the captive, and
+the opening of prison doors to them that are bound'? or will
+they preach from the text, 'Do unto others as ye would they
+should do unto you'?" Oppressed Poles and Hungarians could
+find a safe refuge in that city; John Mitchell was free to proclaim
+in the City Hall his desire for "a plantation well stocked with
+slaves;'? but there I sat, an oppressed American, not daring to
+show my face. God forgive the black and bitter thoughts I indulged on that Sabbath day! The Scripture says, "Oppression
+makes even a wise man mad;" and I was not wise.
+I had been told that Mr. Dodge said his wife had never signed
+away her right to my children, and if he could not get me, he
+would take them. This it was, more than any thing else, that
+roused such a tempest in my soul. Benjamin was with his uncle
+William in California, but my innocent young daughter had
+come to spend a vacation with me. I thought of what I had suffered in slavery at her age, and my heart was like a tiger's when a
+hunter tries to seize her young.
+Dear Mrs. Bruce! I seem to see the expression of her face, as
+she turned away discouraged by my obstinate mood. Finding her
+expostulations unavailing, she sent Ellen to entreat me. When ten
+o'clock in the evening arrived and Ellen had not returned, this
+watchful and unwearied friend became anxious. She came to us
+in a carriage, bringing a well-filled trunk for my journey-trusting that by this time I would listen to reason. I yielded to her, as
+I ought to have done before.
+The next day, baby and I set out in a heavy snow storm,
+bound for New England again. I received letters from the City of
+Iniquity, addressed to me under an assumed name. In a few days
+one came from Mrs. Bruce, informing me that my new master
+was still searching for me, and that she intended to put an end to
+this persecution by buying my freedom. I felt grateful for the
+kindness that prompted this offer, but the idea was not so pleasant to me as might have been expected. The more my mind had
+become enlightened, the more difficult it was for me to consider
+myself an article of property; and to pay money to those who
+had so grievously oppressed me seemed like taking from my suf-
+
+FREE AT LAST
+
+223
+
+ferings the glory of triumph. I wrote to Mrs. Bruce, thanking
+her, but saying that being sold from one owner to another
+seemed too much like slavery; that such a great obligation could
+not be easily cancelled; and that I preferred to go to my brother
+in California.
+Without my knowledge, Mrs. Bruce employed a gentleman in
+New York:' to enter into negotiations with Mr. Dodge. He proposed to pay three hundred dollars down, if Mr. Dodge would
+sell me, and enter into obligations to relinquish all claim to me or
+my children forever after. He who called himself my master said
+he scorned so small an offer for such a valuable servant. The gentleman replied, "You can do as you choose, sir. If you reject this
+offer you will never get any thing; for the woman has friends
+who will convey her and her children out of the country."
+Mr. Dodge concluded that "half a loaf was better than no
+bread," and he agreed to the proffered terms. By the next mail I
+received this brief letter from Mrs. Bruce: "I am rejoiced to tell
+you that the money for your freedom has been paid to Mr.
+Dodge. Come home to-morrow. I long to see you and my sweet
+babe."
+My brain reeled as I read these lines. A gentleman near me
+said, "It's true; I have seen the bill of sale." "The bill of sale!"
+Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is
+on record, and future generations will learn from it that women
+were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth
+century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the
+progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the
+value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom, I do not
+like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend
+who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.
+I had objected to having my freedom bought, yet I must confess that when it was done I felt as if a heavy load had been lifted
+from my weary shoulders. When I rode home in the cars I was
+no longer afraid to unveil my face and look at people as they
+passed. I should have been glad to have met Daniel Dodge him-
+
+224
+
+INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL
+
+self; to have had him seen me and known me, that he might have
+mourned over the untoward circumstances which compelled him
+to sell me for three hundred dollars.
+When I reached home, the arms of my benefactress were
+thrown round me, and our tears mingled. As soon as she could
+speak, she said, "0 Linda, I'm so glad it's all over! You wrote to
+me as if you thought you were going to be transferred from one
+owner to another. But I did not buy you for your services. I
+should have done just the same, if you had been going to sail for
+California to-morrow. I should, at least, have the satisfaction of
+knowing that you left me a free woman."
+My heart was exceedingly full. I remembered how my poor
+father had tried to buy me, when I was a small child, and how he
+had been disappointed. I hoped his spirit was rejoicing over me
+now. I remembered how my good old grandmother had laid up
+her earnings to purchase me in later years, and how often her
+plans had been frustrated. How that faithful, loving old heart
+would leap for joy, if she could look on me and my children now
+that we were free! My relatives had been foiled in all their efforts,
+but God had raised me up a friend among strangers, who had bestowed on me the precious, long-desired boon. Friend! It is a
+common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful
+things, it may be tarnished by careless handling; but when I
+speak of Mrs. Bruce as my friend, the word is sacred.
+My grandmother lived to rejoice in my freedom; but not long
+after, a letter came with a black seal. She had gone "where the
+wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."
+Time passed on, and a paper came to me from the south, containing an obituary notice of my uncle Phillip. It was the only
+case I ever knew of such an honor conferred upon a colored person. It was written by one of his friends, and contained these
+words: "Now that death has laid him low, they call him a good
+man and a useful citizen; but what are eulogies to the black man,
+when the world has faded from his vision? It does not require
+man's praise to obtain rest in God's kingdom." So they called a
+colored man a citizen! Strange words to be uttered in that region!
+Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way,
+with marriage. I and my children are now free! We are as free
+
+FREE AT LAST
+
+225
+
+from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the
+north; and though that, according to my ideas, is not saying a
+great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition. The dream
+of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a
+home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children's sake far more than for
+my own. But God so orders circumstances as to keep me with
+my friend Mrs. Bruce. Love, duty, gratitude, also bind me to her
+side. It is a privilege to serve her who pities my oppressed people, and who has bestowed the inestimable boon of freedom on
+me and my children.
+It has been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary
+years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could.
+Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with
+those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good
+old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark
+and troubled sea.
+
+Appendix
+
+THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT IS from Amy Post, a member of
+the Society of Friends in the State of New York, well known and
+highly respected by friends of the poor and the oppressed. As
+has been already stated, in the preceding pages, the author of this
+volume spent some time under her hospitable roof.
+L. M. C.
+"The author of this book is my highly-esteemed friend. If its
+readers knew her as I know her, they could not fail to be deeply
+interested in her story. She was a beloved inmate of our family
+nearly the whole of the year 1849. She was introduced to us by
+her affectionate and conscientious brother, who had previously
+related to us some of the almost incredible events in his sister's
+life. I immediately became much interested in Linda; for her appearance was prepossessing, and her deportment indicated remarkable delicacy of feeling and purity of thought.
+"As we became acquainted, she related to me, from time to
+time some of the incidents in her bitter experiences as a slavewoman. Though impelled by a natural craving for human sympathy, she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in
+recounting her trials to me, in private confidential conversations.
+The burden of these memories lay heavily upon her spirit-naturally virtuous and refined. I repeatedly urged her to consent to
+the publication of her narrative; for I felt that it would arouse
+people to a more earnest work for the disinthralrnent of millions
+still remaining in that soul-crushing condition, which was so unendurable to her. But her sensitive spirit shrank from publicity.
+She said, 'You know a woman can whisper her cruel wrongs in
+the ear of a dear friend much easier than she can record them for
+the world to read.' Even in talking with me, she wept so much,
+and seemed to suffer such mental agony, that I felt her story was
+226
+
+APPENDIX
+
+227
+
+too sacred to be drawn from her by inquisitive questions, and I
+left her free to tell as much, or as little, as she chose. Still, I urged
+upon her the duty of publishing her experience, for the sake of
+the good it might do; and, at last, she undertook the task.
+"Having been a slave so large a portion of her life, she is unlearned; she is obliged to earn her living by her own labor, and
+she has worked untiringly to procure education for her children;
+several times she has been obliged to leave her cmployrnents, in
+order to fly from the man-hunters and woman-hunters of our
+land; but she pressed through all these obstacles and overcame
+them. After the labors of the day were over, she traced secretly
+and wearily, by the midnight lamp, a truthful record of her
+eventful life.
+"This Empire State is a shabby place of refuge for the oppressed; but here, through anxiety, turmoil, and despair, the freedom of Linda and her children was finally secured, by the
+exertions of a generous friend. She was grateful for the boon; but
+the idea of having been bought was always galling to a spirit that
+could never acknowledge itself to be a chattel. She wrote to us
+thus, soon after the event: '1 thank you for your kind expressions
+in regard to my freedom; but the freedom I had before the
+money was paid was dearer to me. God gave me that freedom;
+but man put God's image in the scales with the paltry sum of
+three hundred dollars. I served for my liberty as faithfully as ]acob served for Rachel. At the end, he had large possessions; but 1
+was robbed of my victory; I was obliged to resign my crown, to
+rid myself of a tyrant.'
+"Her story, as written by herself, cannot fail to interest the
+reader. It is a sad illustration of the condition of this country,
+which boasts of its civilization, while it sanctions laws and customs which make the experiences of the present more strange
+than any fictions of the past.
+AMY POST.
+"ROCHESTER, N. Y., OCT. 30TH, 1859."
+
+The following testimonial is from a man who is now a highly
+respectable colored citizen of Boston.
+L. M. C.
+
+228
+
+APPENDIX
+
+"This narrative contains some incidents so extraordinary, that,
+doubtless, many persons, under whose eyes it may chance to fall,
+will be ready to believe that it is calored highly, to serve a special
+purpose. But, however it may be regarded by the incredulous, I
+know that it is full of living truths. I have been well acquainted
+with the author from my boyhood. The circumstances recounted
+in her history are perfectly familiar to me. I knew of her treatment from her master; of the imprisonment of her children; of
+their sale and redemption; of her seven years' concealment; and
+of her subsequent escape to the North. I am now a resident of
+Boston, and am a living witness to the truth of this interesting
+narrative.
+GEORGE W. LOWTHER."l
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Some Account of My Early Lije"
+
+I WAS BORN in Edenton, North Carolina, one of the oldest
+States in the Union, and had four different owners in eighteen
+years. My first owner was Miss Penelope H--, the invalid
+daughter of an innkeeper. 1 After her death I became the property
+of her mother. My only sister was given to a niece of hers,
+daughter of Dr. James R. N--, also of Edenton.
+My father and mother were slaves.? I have a slight recollection
+of my mother, who died when I was young, though my father
+made impressions on my mind in childhood that can never be
+forgotten. I should do my dear old grandmother injustice did I
+not mention her too. There was a great difference between her
+meekness and my father's violent temper, although, in justice to
+him, I must say that slavery was the cause of it.
+To be a man, and not to be a man-a father without authority-a husband and no protector-is the darkest of fates. Such
+was the condition of my father, and such is the condition of
+every slave throughout the United States: he owns nothing, he
+can claim nothing. His wife is not his: his children are not his;
+they can be taken from him, and sold at any minute, as far away
+from each other as the human fleshmonger may see fit to carry
+them. Slaves are recognised as property by the law, and can own
+nothing except by the consent of their masters. A slave's wife or
+daughter may be insulted before his eyes with impunity. He
+himself may be called on to torture them, and dare not refuse. To
+raise his hand in their defence is death by the law. He must bear
+all things and resist nothing. If he leaves his master's premises at
+"The writer of these autobiographical sketches has, since his escape from slavery, held positions of trust in free countries, and every statement may be relied
+on, although it is not thought advisable to publish names in full.
+231
+
+232
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+any time without a written permit, he is liable to be flogged. Yet,
+it is said by slaveholders and their apologists, that we are happy
+and contented. I will admit that slaves are sometimes cheerful;
+they sing and dance, as it is politic for them to do. I myself had
+changed owners three times before I could see the policy of this
+appearance of contentment. My father taught me to hate slavery,
+but forgot to teach me how to conceal my hatred. I could frequently perceive the pent-up agony of his soul, although he tried
+hard to conceal it in his own breast. The knowledge that he was
+a slave himself, and that his children were also slaves, embittered
+his life, but made him love us the more.
+Up to this time our services had not been required, and the
+old lady to whom I belonged had paid little or no attention to
+how our time was spent. Our father, when working in or near
+the town, made our home his home.
+I should state here that my father was owned by a Mrs.
+K--,3 a widow lady, who was, however, no relative of Mrs.
+H--, to whom I belonged.
+Dr. N--, being related to the family of my owner, was permitted to take me from my father in my tenth year, and put me
+in his shop. He too well knew the value of knowledge, and the
+danger of communicating it to human "property," to allow it to
+be disseminated among his slaves; and he therefore instructed his
+sons, who had charge of me, to see that I did not learn to write.
+Soon after this, my sister was taken into his house, but no interdict against the acquisition of knowledge, such as he had
+imposed upon me, could avail in her case. Our father had endeavoured to bestow upon both of us some rays of intellectual
+light, which the tyrant could not rob us of.
+In the meanwhile, my father's young mistress married a rich
+planter, named C__,4 who lived in the neighbourhood of
+Edenton. Shortly afterwards the old lady died, and my father became Mr. James C--'s property. Being, as he was then considered, the best house-carpenter in or near the town, he was not
+put to field-work, although the privilege of working out, and
+paying his owner monthly, which he once enjoyed, was now
+denied him. This added another link to his galling chain-sent
+another arrow to his bleeding heart. My father, who had an in-
+
+SOME ACCOUNT OF MY EARLY LIFE
+
+233
+
+tensely acute feeling of the wrongs of slavery, sank into a state of
+mental dejection, which, combined with bodily illness, occasioned his death when I was eleven years of age. He left us the
+only legacy that a slave father can leave his child, his whips and
+chains. These he had taught us to hate, and we resolved to seek
+for liberty, though we travelled through the gates of death to
+find it.
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A Further Account of My Family,
+and of My New Master
+
+TIME PASSED SWIFTLY on, and in due season death smote down
+Mrs. H--, my mistress. The hungry heirs ordered us slaves to
+mount the auction-block; and all of us, old and young, male and
+female, married and single, were sold to the highest bidder. Even
+my grandmother'sl grey hairs and many years' hard service in
+the public-house did not save her from the auctioneer's hammer.
+But, fortunately for her, she possessed a tried and trusty friend,"
+in whose hands she placed the savings of thirty years, that he
+might purchase her and her son Mark. She had two other children, a son and a daughter, but they were owned by other parties.'
+They began to sell off the old slaves first, as rubbish. One very
+old man went for one dollar; the old cook sold for seventeen dollars. The prices varied from that to 1600 dollars, which was the
+price of a young man who was a carpenter. Dr. N-- bought
+me for a shop-boy. It would be in vain for me to attempt to give
+a description of my feelings while standing under the auctioneer's hammer: I can safely say that I shall not realize such feelings
+agam.
+The man whom my grandmother trusted to do her business
+for her acted very honourably. As soon as it could be done, after
+the sale, he procured her free papers and the bill of sale of her
+son, to show that he was her property by right of purchase. It
+may seem rather strange that my grandmother should hold her
+son a slave; but the law required it. She was obliged to give security that she would never be any expense to the town or state before she could come in possession of her freedom. Her property
+in him was sufficient to satisfy the law; he could be sold at any
+minute to pay her debts, though it was not likely this would ever
+234
+
+A FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MY FAMIL Y
+
+235
+
+be the case. They had a snug home of their own, but their troubles were not yet at an end.
+My uncle Joseph, who was owned by Mr. J. C--, ran away
+about this time, and got as far as New York, where he was seen
+by Mr. S-- of Edenton, who had him taken and sent back to
+his master. He was heavily manacled, and lodged in gaol, where
+he remained most of the winter, and was then sold to go to New
+Orleans.
+My uncle Mark, whom my grandmother had bought, was at
+that time steward on board of a packet or vessel of some kind,
+and some months after my uncle Joseph had been sold, my uncle
+Mark met him in New York. He had made his second escape.
+The vessel was about to sail, and they had but little time to spend
+with each other, though my uncle Joseph told him he had not
+come there to stop. His intention was to get beyond the reach of
+the stars and stripes of America. Unwilling to trust his liberty
+any longer in the hands of a professed Christian, he purposed
+seeking safety in another hemisphere.
+But to return to my subject. I left my sister in the doctor's
+family. Some six or eight years have passed since I was sold, and
+she has become the mother of two children. After the birth of
+her second child, she was sent to live on his plantation, where she
+remained for two or three months, and then ran away. As soon
+as she was gone, my aunt," the two children, and myself, were
+sent to gaol. My aunt was married, but happily her children were
+beyond the power of slavery. God had taken them to his rest.
+The old doctor no doubt thought that this would be the
+means of bringing my sister back; but you will by-and-by see
+that she did not leave with the intention of returning. She had
+not yet been called to make her back bare for the lash; but she
+had gone to live on the doctor's plantation, where she daily expected it. Her mental sufferings were more than she could longer
+bear. With her it was, in the language of one of our fathers "liberty or death."
+The doctor offered 100 dollars reward for he and threatened
+to punish to the extreme penalty of the law, any person or persons found harbouring, or assisting her in any way to make her
+escape. He then wrote a letter to a gentleman by the name of
+
+236
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVER Y
+
+T__ ,5 living in New York, who had formerly lived in North
+Carolina. I am not prepared to say that Mr. T-- took an interest in this letter. I rather believe he did not. But the news was
+soon circulated among the slave-catchers of the north, and they
+were sticking their unwanted faces in every coloured man's door,
+on account of my sister. The doctor pretended to sell me and the
+two children to a negro trader. In two or three weeks he received
+a letter from New York, stating (erroneously, as it turned out)
+that my sister was taken, and safely lodged in gaol. This called
+the old man from home. He had got to prove property and pay
+expenses. Now that the old doctor was gone, I had a good time.
+Mr. L--, the gaoler, was an old acquaintance of mine. Though
+he was a white man, and I a slave, we had spent many hours together in Mr. J--'s family. We had taken tea there.
+To make my story short, and go back to the doctor-Mr.
+J-- had a very fine daughter, and we were very fond of each
+other. Mr. L-- had been a visitor of Mr. J--'s for many
+years. Now that he had me under lock and key, and knowing
+that it was not for any crime that I was there, he could not be
+otherwise than kind. He allowed me every indulgence. My
+friends, such as could come, could call and see me whenever they
+pleased, and stop as long as they liked; he would never turn the
+key on them. Sometimes he would give me the key on the inside.
+While the doctor had me here for safe keeping, I could have
+made my escape every day or night; but in the first place, if I had
+wanted to go, I would not have taken the advantage of Mr.
+L--'s kindness; in the second place, I saw no chance of bettering myself. I knew he would not get my sister, because she had
+not left town. My uncle-in-law, who was a sea-faring man, had
+intended to take her to New York, but the doctor's threats
+frightened him so much, that he did not dare make the attempt.
+While the old man was gone, I had a negro trader call with
+others to see me. His name was G--; he said he would buy me
+if the old doctor would sell me; I told him I thought he wouldthat he told me he intended to do so when he put me in gaol.
+After some two weeks the doctor returned home without my
+sister. The woman that had been taken up and put in gaol was a
+free woman; but what could she do with the wretch who put her
+
+A FURTHER ACCOUNT OF MY FAMILY
+
+237
+
+there? America is a free country, and a white man can do what he
+pleases with a coloured man or woman in most of the States.
+They may have a few friends now, who would not allow this if
+they knew it; but they are hated by the nation at large.
+My aunt was taken out of gaol and sent home to the doctor's
+house; the children and myself were left in. The old man came to
+have a little talk with me about my sister.
+"Well, John, I have not got Harriet, but I will have her yet.
+Don't you know where she is?"
+"How can I know, sir? I have been in gaol ever since my sister
+left you. Mr. G-- was here while you were away, sir, and said
+that he wanted to buy me."
+"Buy you! I don't want to sell you."
+"Y ou told me when you put me here that you did."
+"Yes, but not if you will go back to the shop and behave
+yourself. Mr. G-- has not got money enough to buy you."
+"I do not know how to behave differently from what I have
+done."
+"Your behaviour will do; but I am afraid you are going to run
+away from me."
+"I have not said anything about running away from you, sir."
+"I know that; but your sister is gone, and you will be going
+next."
+Up to this time I had heard nothing of my sister; but I felt
+sure that she was with her friends in Edenton.
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+My Uncle's Troubles-My Further Experience of
+the Doctor, and Our Parting
+
+WHILE THE EVENTS DESCRIBED in the foregoing chapter were
+transpiring, my uncle-in-law Stephen returned from sea. His
+master, Mr. B--, was owner of the vessel in which he sailed;
+and, although he had had several chances to make his escape
+from slavery, yet he had returned on every voyage. The doctor,
+who owned my aunt, forbad his going to see her, although they
+had lived together for twenty years, and had never been known
+to quarrel. It was most cruel that they should be separated, not
+for their own, but for another's acts. The doctor was inexorable;
+they were strictly interdicted from seeing each other. The only
+tie that bound my uncle to slavery was his wife, to whom he was
+truly attached. When their sacred union-a union holy in the
+sight of God, however desecrated by wicked men-was broken,
+he would not longer submit to the yoke. He took advantage of
+his next voyage to release himself from it, and he returned no
+more. His wife was dead to him-ay, worse than dead. "That
+which God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," saith
+those Scriptures which the slaveholder professes to believe, but
+which he blasphemes day by day and hour by hour.
+At the doctor's last visit to the jail, he described to me the
+wretchedness of the free people of colour in New York, and
+stated that they had not the comforts of his slaves, and how
+much better off we were than they. To this I said nothing. My
+mind was fully made up, that I must, in order to effect my escape, hide as much as possible my hatred to slavery, and affect a
+respect to my master, whoever he might be. The doctor and myself knew each other too well for me to hope to get away from
+him. I must change owners in order to do that. Secondly, I had
+made up my mind that, let the condition of the coloured people
+238
+
+MY UNCLE'S TROUBLES
+
+239
+
+of New York be what it might, I would rather die a free man
+than live a slave. The doctor evidently did not want to sell me,
+neither did he want to run the risk of losing me. Not that he had
+any particular regard for me, but he could not replace me for the
+same money that a slave-trader would give for me.
+Before he left the jail, he told me that he did not want to keep
+me in jail any longer, and would let me out at any time when I
+would get my uncle Mark to be security that I would not run
+away from him. When leaving, he told me to send for my uncle,
+and see if he would not do it for me. To all this I was dumb. I
+was in no particular hurry to get out of jail. I wanted a little time
+for serious reflection, and this was the only place where I could
+get an opportunity for it.
+A few days passed, and he heard nothing from me. He saw
+my uncle, and told him that I wanted to see him at the jail. He
+accordingly came, and asked me if I wished him to become my
+security. I promptly told him no; that I wanted my liberty; that I
+would make good the first opportunity to secure it; that he
+might do as he pleased; but, God being my helper, I would die a
+free man. This satisfied my uncle at once, that he might as well
+take the money out of his pocket and pay for me as to become
+my security; and he thought, if I could get a chance to make my
+escape without bringing any expense on him, so much the better.
+Here we parted. The old doctor waited for an answer, but got
+none, which satisfied him that I no longer had a desire to make
+his shop my home.
+There were two or three slaveholders in the town, that would
+give him more for me than he could get from a trader, but he
+would not sell me to anyone in the town. Mr. S--, who afterwards bought me, came to the jail, and asked me if I would live
+with him if he bought me. I told him that I would; but the question was not asked how long.
+I had been here just two months when Mr. S__ 1 got a negro
+trader to buy the two children for my grandmother and me for
+himself. The doctor at first tried to bind the trader not to sell me
+to anyone in the State; but this he would not agree to, saying
+that he sold his slaves wherever he could get the most for them;
+he finally agreed to take me out of town in irons, but to sell me
+
+240
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+the first chance he could get. The old man did not think that he
+had bargained for me before I was sold. This important part of
+the business being settled, we were sold, the two children for 500
+dollars, I believe, and I for 900 dollars. The blacksmith's tools,
+handcuffs, and chain were all in readiness at the jail. The chain
+was thirty or forty feet long, with handcuffs every two or three
+feet. The slaves were handcuffed right and left on each side of the
+chain. In the gang there was one who was free by birth. He was
+born not more than fifty miles from Edenton, He had been put
+in jail here for some trifling offence; not being able to pay the
+fine, he was sold for six months or a year to William R--, a
+planter, who was so cruel to him that he ran away from him. He
+was caught, and, after being flogged, was put in irons and set to
+work. He attempted to cut the irons off, and being caught in the
+act, was sent to jail, and finally sold to a trader. I saw the irons
+that he had been made to work in; they were fetters for the ankles, weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds in weight.
+Now we were all snugly chained up, the children in the cart,
+and the women walking behind; friends weeping, and taking a
+farewell shake of the hand-wives of their husbands, and parents
+of their children. I went with the gang as far as Mr. J. B. 5-'s,
+the man that had my uncle taken in New York. Here the cart
+was stopped and the blacksmith's tools taken out, and Mr. L - began to hammer away at my irons. When they were off, he told
+me to take the children and go home to Mr. S--; the children
+went to my grandmother, and I to Mr. S--, who had purchased me for a body servant; but, knowing the temper of the
+doctor, who would be angry at being outwitted, he sent me to
+his plantation, where I stopped for three months. During that
+time I was often in town of an evening to see my grandmother;
+and on two occasions he tried to trap me. What he would have
+done to me I know not; but up to the day that I left North Carolina, I never dared to trust myself in his power. Again and again
+he searched my grandmother's house for my sister, and at length
+he put my uncle Mark in jail. After a few days he was taken before the magistrate. The doctor could prove nothing against him,
+and yet the magistrate made my uncle pay the jail fees. Had my
+grandmother been destitute of friends, as many of the coloured
+
+MY UNCLE'S TROUBLES
+
+241
+
+people in the Slave States are, doubtless the doctor would have
+tried to extort from my uncle my sister's hiding-place. It was for
+this purpose he wanted to get hold of me, for, with oaths of the
+most dreadful kind, he told me he would butcher me. I had seen
+too much of his cruelty to doubt his purpose.
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+My New Master's Plantation-My Medical
+Practice Among the SlavesMy Sister's Hiding-Place
+DURING THE THREE MONTHS that I was on the plantation, my
+master changed overseers. The last one was a member of a Christian church. He was particularly fond of two things, namely,
+singing hymns and flogging slaves; but he had been told to spare
+me from the lash. I could see that it went very much against his
+wishes to do so. Soon after this overseer came on the plantation,
+my master took me into town to live with him. He had one
+brother and a sister, who were both subject to fits, returning
+about every four weeks. When his brother Dr. M. E. S__ 1 was
+sick with them, I stopped by him for a few days, until the illness
+was over. His sister died soon after I went to live with him. My
+work had never been very hard, neither had I known, as many
+do, the want of food; and as for the lash, from a boy I had declared that I would never carry its stripes upon my back. It is
+true my condition was much bettered with my new master; but I
+was happier only as I could see my chance for escape clearer. At
+length I grew sick of myself in acting the deceitful part of a slave,
+and pretending love and friendship where I had none. Unpleasant as it was thus to act, yet, under the circumstances in which I
+was placed, I feel that I have done no wrong in so doing; I did
+everything that I could to please my master, who treated me with
+as much kindness as I could expect from anyone to whom I was
+a slave.
+Having been so long with Dr. N--, my master thought me
+quite capable of visiting the sick slaves on the plantation. This
+part of my work caused the overseer much unpleasantness; he
+would sometimes want to give them oil, or something of the
+kind, saying they were not sick; at other times he would say they
+242
+
+MY NEW MASTER'S PLANTATION
+
+243
+
+were well enough to go to work, and if they were too sick to
+work, they were too sick to eat. Knowing that he would not
+strike me for having my own way in what I was sent there forto see if they were sick and give them what they needed-I took
+great pleasure in differing with him on all occasions when I
+thought my patient dangerously ill. My judgment in regard to
+such diseases as are most common on a plantation was considered very good for one of my age; so much so, that a young
+planter who was studying medicine at the time, offered my master one thousand five hundred dollars for me. The way I came to
+know this was thus: he asked me one day if I wanted to be sold.
+This woke up a little of the old feeling, and I had almost forgotten myself for a minute. "No, sir," I said, "I am not anxious to be
+sold, but I know I have got to serve some one." Here he made
+me a promise which I shall never forget, though it was not consoling to me. He said, "You shall not serve anyone after me: I
+have been offered a very handsome price for you; but I don't
+want to sell you." True, I was glad to hear him say that I should
+serve no one after him; this required a little consideration; he was
+but a few years older than me, and to wait for him to die looked
+to me too much like giving a man who was in want of his daily
+bread a cheque on the bank to be paid when he is dead. To have
+prayed for his death would have been wrong; to have killed him
+would have been worse; so, finally, I concluded to let him live as
+long as the Lord was willing he should, and I would get off as
+soon as possible. My pride would not allow me to let a man feed
+and clothe me for nothing; I would work the ends of my fingers
+off first.
+I have said nothing about Mr. S--'s plantation slaves; I have
+only spoken of his treatment to me. I am willing to acknowledge
+kindness, even in a slaveholder, wherever I have seen it; but had
+he treated all of his slaves as he treated me, the probability is that
+they would have been of as little value to him as I was. Some may
+try to make out of this a case of ingratitude; but I do not feel myself under the slightest obligation to anyone who holds me
+against my will, though he starved himself to feast me. Doubtless
+he meant to do me a good turn; but he put it off too far. I appreciated his kindness, and endeavoured to be as useful as I could.
+
+244
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+At this time my condition was so much better than my sister's, that I had almost ceased to speak of leaving in the presence
+of my grandmother; for there is an inexpressible feeling in the
+breast of a woman who has lost child after child, whether it has
+been taken by force or by the hand of death, that makes her cling
+with tighter grasp to the last one. No doubt many of my readers
+can picture to themselves the force of the prayers and tears of a
+pious mother under such trials. My uncle Joseph was gone, she
+knew not where, and my sister was so closely pursued that they
+were obliged to hide her in the house between the roof and the
+ceiling. They are now beyond the reach of the slave power, or I
+would not dare to tell how this was done.
+My grandmother's house had seven rooms-two upper rooms,
+and five on the lower floor: on the west side there was a piazza.
+On the east side there were two rooms, with a lobby leading to
+the centre of the house. The room on the left on entering the
+lobby was used as a store-room; the ceiling of this room was of
+boards, the roof was shingled; the space between the roof and
+ceiling was from three and a half to four feet in height, running
+off to a point. My uncle made a cupboard in one corner of this
+room, with the top attached to the ceiling. The part of the board
+that covered the top of the cupboard was cut and made into a
+trap-door; the whole of it was so small and neatly done that no
+one would have believed it to be what it was-the entrance to
+her hiding-place. Everything that she received was put in that little cupboard. One of the upper rooms was lathed and plastered;
+a hole was broken in the wall, through which she could speak to
+my uncle or grandmother; and, to prevent her losing the use of
+her limbs, the windows were sometimes closed that she might
+come down and walk about the room. When she was sick, I visited her, and gave her such medicines as she needed. After my
+uncle-in-law left, Uncle Mark knew of no one in whom to confide; he was suspected by the doctor, and narrowly watched
+wherever he went; and although he could hear nothing of her, he
+somehow seemed to think that she had not made her escape.
+During the short time that my sister was on the plantation, she
+saw one of the women so cruelly whipped that she died in a few
+days: it was done by James N--, the doctor's son. These are
+
+MY NEW MASTER'S PLANTA nON
+
+245
+
+called isolated cases; but we shall never know the wrongs that
+have been perpetrated in the slave states of America, until the oppressor and the oppressed shall stand before the Judge of all the
+world, The doctor's wife was as anxious as himself to get my
+sister again, and made promises of handsome presents to the
+slaves if they would try to find out where she was, but to no
+effect. She remained in that strange place of concealment six
+years and eleven months before she could get away!
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+My Master Goes to Washington as Member of
+Congress-He Is Engaged to Be MarriedWedding Trip to Chicago-CanadaNew lOrk-My Escape from Slavery
+
+THE LATTER END OF the third year after I was sold, my master
+was elected Member of Congress.' I was ordered to get ready for
+Washington. We were not many days on the way to this place,
+which I so much wanted to see. It is a very lively place during the
+Session, and much enjoyed by the slaves, their privileges being
+greatly extended. They get up balls and parties, and seem to be as
+happy as their masters. I have had the pleasure of meeting some
+of these slaves in the Northern States, with whom I have danced,
+whose happiness, like mine, ended with the ball.
+I could tell many things I observed of the life of members of
+Congress when at Washington, but I refrain from mentioning
+more than one or two customs of social life.
+I will say it is twelve o'clock. The ladies have taken breakfast.
+A visitor comes and rings the door-bell, and you, on answering
+it, tell her that the mistress is not in; the reply most invariably is,
+"Go and tell her who it is, and she will be in." Just as well say,
+"Go and tell her she has lied, not knowing who has called to see
+her." The same is the case of the gentlemen. Here is a bill before
+the House, the merits and demerits of which they have spent
+weeks in discussing; it is now to be voted on at such an hour.
+The sergeant-at-arms is sent out in search of the absent members;
+some of them are having a little game of cards-could not think
+of waiting until after four o'clock; the pay is just the same for
+playing cards as though they were making laws, only you must
+lie a little when the sergeant-at-arms calls, and say that you are
+
+246
+
+MY MASTER GOES TO WASHINGTON
+
+247
+
+not in. I could not bear this system of lying. I avoided answering
+these calls whenever I could.
+After my master had been there a short time, he went to board
+with Mrs. P--, who had two young nieces here, to one of
+whom he was soon engaged to be married." As good luck would
+have it, this young lady had a sister living in Chicago, and no
+place would suit her like that to get married in. I admired her
+taste much. I wanted to go there too. My master could not do
+otherwise than give his consent to go there with her. The next
+question to be settled was about taking me with him into a free
+state. Near the time for him to leave, he told me that he intended
+to marry. 1 was pleased at this, and anxious to know who the fortunate lady might be. He did not hesitate to tell me what he intended to do, stating at the same time that he would take me with
+him if I would not leave him. "Sir," said I, "I never thought that
+you suspected me of wanting to leave you."
+"I do not suspect you, John. Some of the members of the
+House have tried to make me believe that you would run away if
+I took you with me. Well, get my things all ready; we are to leave
+on the first day of next week; I will try you, any how."
+Everything was ready, and the hoped-for time came. He took
+his intended, and off we started for the West. When we were taking the boat at Baltimore for Philadelphia, he came up to me and
+said, "Call me Mr. Sawyer; and if anybody asks you who you
+are, and where you are going, tell them that you are a free man,
+and hired by me."
+We stopped two or three days at the Niagara Falls; from
+thence we went to Buffalo, and took the boat for Chicago; Mr.
+Sawyer had been here but a few days before he was taken sick. In
+five weeks from the time of his arrival here, he was married and
+ready to leave for home. On our return, we went into Canada.
+Here 1 wanted to leave him, but there was my sister and a friend
+of mine at home in slavery; 1 had succeeded in getting papers that
+might have been of great value to my friend. 1 had tried, but
+could not get anything to answer my purpose. I tried to get a
+seaman's protection from the English Custom-house, but could
+not without swearing to a lie, which I did not feel disposed to do.
+
+248
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+We left here for New York, where we stopped three or four
+days. I went to see some of myoId friends from home, who I
+knew were living there. I told them that I wanted their advice.
+They knew me, they knew my master, and they knew my friends
+also. "Now tell me my duty," said I. The answer was a very natural one, "Look out for yourself first." I weighed the matter in
+my mind, and found the balance in favour of stopping. If I returned along with my master, I could do my sister no good, and
+could see no further chance of my own escape. I then set myself
+to work to get my clothes out of the Astor House Hotel, where
+we were stopping;' I brought them out in small parcels, as if to
+be washed. This job being done, the next thing was to get my
+trunk to put them in. I went to Mr. johnson's shop, which was in
+sight of the Astor House Hotel, and told him that I wanted to
+get my trunk repaired. The next morning I took my trunk in my
+hand with me: when I went down, whom should I see at the foot
+of the steps but Mr. Sawyer? I walked up to him, and showed
+him a rip in the top of the trunk, opening it at the same time that
+he might see that I was not running off. He told me that I could
+change it, or get a new one if I liked. I thanked him, and told him
+we were very near home now, and with a little repair the old one
+would do. At this we parted. I got a friend to call and get my
+trunk, and pack up my things for me, that I might be able to get
+them at any minute. Mr. Sawyer told me to get everything of his
+in, and be ready to leave for home the next day. I went to all the
+places where I had carried anything of his, and where they were
+not done, I got their cards and left word for them to be ready by
+the next morning. What I had got were packed in his trunk; what
+I had not been able to get, there were the cards for them in his
+room. They dine at the Astor at three o'clock; they leave the
+room at four o'clock; at half-past four o'clock I was to be on
+board the boat for Providence. Being unable to write myself at
+that time, and unwilling to leave him in suspense, I got a friend
+to write as follows:"Sir-I have left you, not to return; when I have got settled, I
+will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours, JOHN S.
+JACOB."
+
+This note was to be put into the post-office in time for him to
+
+MY MASTER GOES TO WASHINGTON
+
+249
+
+get it the next morning. I waited on him and his wife at dinner.
+As the town clock struck four, I left the room. I then went
+through to New Bedford, where I stopped for a few months.
+Thank God! I am now out of their reach; the old doctor is
+dead; I can forgive him for what he did do, and would have done
+if he could. The lawyer I have quite a friendly feeling for, and
+would be pleased to meet him as a countryman and a brother;
+but not as a master.
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Sensations of Freedom-Self-EducationA Whaling Voyage-l Meet My Sister, and Hear
+from Her About My Friends at EdentonThe Fugitive Slave Bill
+
+ON ARRIVING AT New Bedford, I was introduced to Mr.
+William P--, a very fatherly old man, who had been a slave in
+Alexandria. For the first week or so I could not realize the great
+transformation from a chattel slave to a man; it seemed to me like
+a dream; but I soon began to feel my responsibility, and the necessity of mental improvement. The first thing, therefore, that I
+strove to do was to raise myself above the level of the beast,
+where slavery had left me, and fit myself for the society of man.
+I first tried this in New Bedford by working in the day and going to school at night. Sometimes my business would be such
+that I could not attend evening schools; so I thought the better
+plan would be to get such books as I should want, and go a voyage to sea. I accordingly shipped on board the "Frances Henrietta," of New Bedford. This was a whaling voyage; but I will not
+trouble you with any fishing stories. I will make it short. After
+being absent three years and a half, we returned home with a full
+ship, 1700 barrels of sperm oil and 1400 of whale oil.
+I had made the best possible use of my leisure hours on board,
+and kept the object that drove me from my friends and my home
+before me when on shore. I had promised myself, if what money
+I had coming to me would be an inducement to anyone to bring
+my sister off from the south, that I would have her; but there was
+better news than that, in the bosom of an old friend, waiting to
+be delivered. The ship dropped her anchor, and the shore boats
+came off with friends of different persons on board, among
+whom was R. P--. He had scarcely spoken to me before he
+250
+
+SENSA nONS OF FREEDOM
+
+251
+
+began to tell me about my sister; her coming to New Bedford in
+search of me, and her going back to N ew York, where, he told
+me, I should find her. This news was to me quite unexpected. I
+said, if my sister was free from her oppressor, I was a happy
+man. I hurried on shore, drew some money of the owners, and
+made my way to New York. I found my sister living with a family as nurse at the Astor House. At first she did not look natural
+to me; but how should she look natural, after having been shut
+out from the light of heaven for six years and eleven months! I
+did not wish to know what her sufferings were, while living in
+her place of concealment. The change that it had made in her was
+enough to make one's soul cry out against this curse of curses,
+that has so long trampled humanity in the dust.
+After she had recovered a little from the surprise of seeing me,
+I began to speak of home. "Oh, brother," she said, "grandmother
+was so disappointed in your stopping behind. Mr. S-- had
+written for them to make ready his house for his reception on
+such a day; grandmother got the news of it, and invited some of
+your old friends to come and spend the evening with you. Supper was all ready, and our ears were all intent to catch the first
+blast of the stage horn, when Uncle Mark left the room to go and
+meet you. The coach drove up to the tavern door, and the passengers had all got out, when Dr. W-- asked Mr. S-- what
+had become of you. He said the abolitionists had got you away
+from him in New York. When Uncle Mark returned, grandmother looked for awhile, and then asked, 'Where is my child?'
+'He is gone, mother; he left Mr. S-- in New York.'
+"When she heard that you were gone, she wept like a child.
+Aunt Sue Bent was there, and on seeing grandmother's tears, said
+to her: 'Molly, my child, this is no time for crying. Dry up those
+tears, fall upon your knees, and thank God that one more has
+made his escape from the house of bondage. I came here to see
+him, but I am glad he is not here. God bless the boy, and keep
+him from all harm.'
+"This (continued my sister) increased my anxiety, and caused
+me to adopt new plans for my escape. I wrote a letter to the doctor, asking him if he would sell me to my grandmother. It was
+sent to New York, and there mailed for Edenton. The letter was
+
+252
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVER Y
+
+received by the doctor, and answered by his son Caspar. He
+could now no longer doubt that I was gone, and resorted to a
+cunningly-devised artifice to bring me back. Part of his son's letter ran as follows:-'Harriet, we are all glad to hear from you;
+and let me assure you, if our family ever did entertain anything
+different from the most friendly feelings for you, they exist no
+longer. We want to see you once more, with your old friends
+around you, made happy in your own home. We cannot sell you
+to your grandmother; the community would object to your returning to live in a state of freedom. Harriet, doubtless before
+this you have heard of the death of your aunt Betty. In her life
+she taught us how to live, and in her death she taught us how
+to die.'
+"From that letter, my uncle saw that escape was my only
+hope, and that there was no time like the present for action.
+While everybody believed that I was in New York was the best
+time to get there. He accordingly made arrangements with the
+captain of a vessel running between N ew York and Edenton, for
+my passage to the former port.
+"I had been here but a short time, when some of my friends
+sent for me to acquaint me of my danger. Mrs. T-- gave me a
+letter that Mr. T-- had received from Dr. N--. In that letter
+he said he wanted to catch me, to make an example of, for the
+good of the institution of slavery. But, brother, I have now fallen
+into new hands. Mary Matilda N-- is married to a northern
+man.' He, too, is trying to find out where I am stopping in New
+York. I know not where to go, nor what to do."
+I could see my sister's danger, and well imagine her feelings.
+We selected Boston, Massachusetts, for our home, and remained
+there quietly for a few years. Massachusetts had so far precluded
+the slaveholders from her borders, as to make the hunted fugitive
+feel himself somewhat secure under the shadow of her laws. Her
+great men had not sold themselves to the slave power, and her
+little men had not learnt that they were slaves until after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill. From that hour I resolved to seek a
+home in some foreign clime.
+Mrs.---, on hearing my intention to leave the north, sent
+
+MY MASTER GOES TO WASHINGTON
+
+253
+
+for me. I called on her and was shown to her room by my sister,
+when the following conversation took place.
+"John, I understand you intend to leave for some years."
+"I do, madam."
+"Then my business with you is with respect to your sister.
+She has spent many years in our family, and we are still desirous
+to have her remain with us. John, I know that the law is an absolute one, and that the prosecutors are deaf to the claims of justice and humanity; but I have resolved that Harriet shall not be
+taken out of my house. This I will promise you as a lady."
+A few months after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill, my
+sister was looking over the list of arrivals in one of the daily papers, when she saw the names of Mr. and Mrs. M-- of Edenton. She immediately made it known to Mrs.---, who sent
+her out of the house without a moment's delay. As the little girl
+that she had charge of at the time would not be separated from
+her, they were both sent off together. In due time Mr. M-came rapping at the door, not as an honest man, but as a slavecatcher. The door being opened, he said to the woman, "Go and
+tell Harriet that I have got a letter for her; it is from her grandmother, and I have promised to deliver it to her myself." The
+message was taken to Mrs.---, who informed him that my
+sister had left town, and that he could not see her. M-- saw
+that all of his plans were frustrated, and sold my sister for 300
+dollars. She was paid for by her mistress and her friends, and is
+now living in safety.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Cruel Treatment of Slaves-The Fugitive Slave
+Law-Slavery Opposed to Natural Rights
+and to Christianity
+
+IN CONCLUDING THIS SHORT statement of my experience of
+slavery, I beg the reader to remember that I am not writing of
+what I have heard, but of what I have seen, and of what I defy
+the world to prove false. There lived about two miles up a river
+emptying itself into the Albemarle Sound, a planter, whose name
+was Carabas. His plantation was called Pembroke. At his death
+his slaves were sold. I mention this because slaves seldom or ever
+have more than one name; their surname is most generally that of
+their first master. The person I am now about to allude to was
+known by the name of George Carabas. After the death of his
+own master, he was owned by Mr. Popelston: after that by
+young John Horton, who sold him to a negro trader.
+George was chained in the gang with other slaves, and
+dragged from his wife and his friends. After a few days' travel on
+the road, by some means or other he made his escape, and returned back to that spot where he knew he could find one heart
+to feel for him, and in whom he could confide; but he had not
+been there long before the bloodthirsty negro-hunters got on his
+trail, one beautiful Sunday morning, about midsummer, while
+the church-bells were ringing. Four of the pursuers overtook
+poor George, and shot him dead.
+"If he is outlawed," they doubtless argued, "we only need
+show his head, and the reward is ours; but if he is not outlawed,
+what then? Why, they may try to make us pay for him; but we
+will not be fools enough to say that we shot him, unless we are to
+be paid for shooting him." His body is put into a canoe, his head
+thrown in, which lies on his breast. These four southern gentle254
+
+eR VEL TREA TMENT OF SLAVES
+
+255
+
+men now return to the town, leaving the canoe to inquire how
+the advertisement reads. On finding that the reward was to be
+given to anyone who would apprehend and confine him in any
+jail in the State, they saw that they could not publicly boast of
+their fiendish work.
+Now, the question is, what had this man done that he should
+be so inhumanly butchered and beheaded? The crime that he had
+committed, and the only crime, was to leave the unnatural trader
+in slaves, and the souls of men, to return to his natural and affectionate wife. Nothing is done to the murderers. They only made
+a blunder. Slaves are outlawed and shot with impurity, and the
+tyrant who shoots them is paid for it; but in this case George was
+not outlawed, so their trouble was all for nothing, and the glory
+only known to themselves.
+Tom Hoskins was a slave belonging to James N--, the son
+of Dr. N __ .l This slave was found just out of the town, in the
+scrub. He was shot in the back, and must have been killed instantly. There was no pay for this-only a feast of blood. Tom's
+crime was running away from one whom I know to be an unmerciful tyrant. Another was shot, but not killed. There were
+three brothers, William, James, and Josiah N--. I know not
+which of the three this slave belonged to. They had been out that
+day with their bloodhounds hunting slaves. They shot Sirus a little before dark. By some means or other he made his escape from
+them, and reached Dr. S--'s shop soon after dark. He was
+taken in, and as many of the shots taken out of him as they could
+get at, and his wounds dressed. This being done, Dr. S-- sent a
+despatch to Mr. C--, to let him know that the slave that they
+had shot had come into him, and got his wounds dressed. As
+soon as they received this intelligence, they mounted their
+horses, and rode off in fiendish glee for town. They came up to
+the shop, hooting and yelling as if all Bedlam was coming. When
+they had reached the door, the first cry from them was, "Bring
+him out-finish him." The doctor came out and said to them,
+"Gentlemen, the negro has given himself up to me, and I will be
+responsible for his safe delivery to you as soon as he is able to be
+moved from hence; but at present he is not." Seeing that the doctor would not let them have him, they returned home.
+
+256
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+The C--s were very rich; they owned a great many slaves,
+and shooting with them was common. They did not feel the loss
+of a slave or two; it was a common thing for them to offer fifty
+or a hundred dollars reward for a slave, dead or alive, so that
+there was satisfactory proof of his being killed.
+Just at the back of the court-house and in front of the jail is a
+whipping post, where I have seen men and women stripped, and
+struck from fifteen to one hundred times and more. Some whose
+backs were cut to pieces were washed down with strong brine or
+brandy; this is done to increase pain. But the most cruel torture
+is backing; the hands are crossed and tied, then taken over the
+knee and pinned by running a stick between the arms and the
+legs, which tightens the skin and renders the slave as helpless as a
+child. The backing paddle is made of oak, about an inch and a
+quarter thick, and five by eight inches in the blade, with about
+twelve inches of a handle. The blade is full of small holes, which
+makes the punishment severer. I have seen the flesh like a steak.
+Slaves flogged in this way are unable to sit down for months.
+I will give you but one case of flogging in detail; that will be
+of Agnes, the slave of Augustus M--. She was hired to John
+B--; she was some six months advanced in pregnancy at the
+time. Being in an unfit state for field labour, she could not do as
+much as other slaves. For this cause, B--tied her up and commenced whipping her. With my own hands have I dressed her
+back, and I solemnly declare that she had not a piece of skin left
+on it as wide as my finger. She was a hired slave. Had B-killed her at a single blow, her master could have punished
+B--, if he could have got white witnesses to certify to that effect, which is not likely; but she might have died in an hour after
+being cut down, and there was no law to harm him. It would
+have been death caused by moderate correction, which North
+Carolina does not punish a slaveholder for.
+I know that the picture I have drawn of slavery is a black one,
+and looks most unnatural; but here you have the State, the town,
+and the names of all the parties. One who has never felt the sting
+of slavery would naturally suppose that it was to the slaveholder's advantage to treat his slaves with kindness; but the more
+indulgent the master the more intelligent the slave; the more in-
+
+CRUEL TREATMENT OF SLAVES
+
+257
+
+telligent the slave, the nearer he approximates to a man; the
+nearer he approximates to a man, the more determined he is to be
+a free man; and to argue that the slaves are happy, or can be
+happy while in slavery, is to argue that they have been brutalized
+to that degree that they cannot be considered men. What better
+proof do you want in favour of universal freedom than can be
+given? You can find thousands of ignorant men who will lay
+down their lives for their liberty; can you find one intelligent
+man who would prefer slavery?
+The last thing that remained to be done to complete this hell
+on earth was done in 1850, in passing the Fugitive Slave Law.
+There is not a State, a city, nor a town left as a refuge for the
+hunted slave; there is not a United States officer but what has
+sworn to act the part of the bloodhound in hunting me down, if
+I dare visit the land of Stars and Stripes, the home of the brave,
+and land of the free. Yet, according to the American declaration
+of independence, it is a self-evident truth that all men are created
+by their Maker free and equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights-life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where are
+the coloured man's rights to-day in America? They once had
+rights allowed them. Yes, in the days that tried men's souls they
+had a right to bleed and die for the country; but their deeds are
+forgotten, their swords and bayonets have been beaten into
+chains and fetters to bind the limbs of their children. The first
+man that was seen to fall in the revolutionary struggle for liberty,
+was a coloured man; and I have seen one of his brethren, who
+had fled from his whips and chains, within sight of that monument erected to liberty, dragged from it into slavery, not by the
+slave-owners of the south, for they knew not of his being there,
+but by northern men.
+I cannot agree with that statesman who said, "What the law
+makes property, is property." What is law, but the will of the
+people-a mirror to reflect a nation's character? Robbery is robbery; it matters not whether it is done by one man or a million,
+whether they were organized or disorganized; the principle is the
+same. No law, unless there be one that can change my nature, can
+make property of me. Freedom is as natural for man as the air he
+breathes, and he who robs him of his freedom is also guilty of
+
+258
+
+A TRUE TALE OF SLAVERY
+
+murder, for he has robbed him of his natural existence. On this
+subject the Church and the State are alike. One will tell a lie, and
+the other will swear to it. The State says, "That which the law
+makes property is property." The Church says that "organic sin
+is no sin at all;" both parties having reference to slavery. With a
+few exceptions, their politics and religion are alike oppressive,
+and rotten, and false. None but political tyrants would ever establish slavery, and none but religious hypocrites would ever
+support it. What says Matthew, 15th chapter, 8th and 9th verses:
+"This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in
+vain they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments
+of men."
+What is to be hoped of a people like this? They are full of lies
+and hypocrisy. Give me liberty amidst savages, rather than slavery with such professed Christians. No man should hold unlimited power over his fellow-man. From the repeated abuses of this
+power, he becomes the most brutal of the human species; and the
+more he himself has been abused, the more eager he is to abuse
+others. But slavery is unnatural, and it requires unnatural means
+to support it. Everything droops that feels its sting. Hope grows
+dimmer and dimmer, until life becomes bitter and burdensome.
+At last death frees the slave from his chains, but his wrongs are
+forgotten. He was oppressed, robbed, and murdered. Better
+would it be for the slaves, if they must submit to slavery, if the
+immortal part of them were blotted out. But, since God has
+breathed undying life into the soul of man, rather let us blot that
+out of existence which stands between man and his rights, God
+and his laws, the world and its progress. The Christian religion,
+that binds heart to heart and hand to hand, and makes each and
+every man a brother, is at war with it; and shall we, whose very
+souls it has wrung out, be longer at peace. If possible, let us make
+those whom we have left behind feel that the ground they till is
+cursed with slavery, the air they breathe poisoned with its venom
+breath, and that which made life dear to them lost and gone.
+In conclusion, let me say that the experience of the past, the
+present feeling, and above all this, the promise of God, assure me
+that the oppressor's rod shall be broken. But how it is to be done
+
+CRUEL TREATMENT OF SLAVES
+
+259
+
+has been the question among our friends for years. After the
+prayers of twenty-five years, the slaves' chains are tighter than
+they were before, their escape more dangerous, and their cup of
+misery filled nearer its brim. Since I cannot forget that I was a
+slave, I will not forget those that are slaves. What I would have
+done for my liberty I am willing to do for theirs, whenever I can
+see them ready to fill a freeman's grave, rather than wear a
+tyrant's chain. The day must come; it will come. Human nature
+will be human nature; crush it as you may, it changes not; but
+woe to that country where the sun of liberty has to rise up out of
+a sea of blood. When I have thought of all that would pain the
+eye, sicken the heart, and make us turn our backs to the scene
+and weep, I then think of the oppressed struggling with their oppressors, and have a scene more horrible still. But I must drop
+this subject; I do not like to think of the past, nor look to the future, of wrongs like these.
+
+‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘No justice, no peace’ and even ‘Black Power’ were
+chants bellowed by the crowd of protestors. The killings of Philando Castile
+in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in New Orleans sparked a mass reaction.
+Watching Castile bleed to death on Facebook was bound to provoke a
+response. Thousands of people poured out onto the streets to demonstrate
+their anger and disgust at the slaying of yet more Black bodies at the hands
+of the police. As the march settled outside the police station, speaker after
+speaker stepped to the mobile podium condemning the racism and brutality
+of the ‘pigs’. Family members of those who had died in police custody gave
+impassioned calls for justice. Tension on the streets of Birmingham
+crackled through the crowd. When Malcolm X spoke of a ‘racial powder
+keg’, it was this kind of scene he had in mind. Close your eyes, take in the
+crowd and you could well be in Alabama in the 1960s. But this is a protest
+in the second city of Britain in the twenty-first century and the picture tells
+us how little things have changed in the last fifty years, and speaks to the
+global nature of racism.
+Crowds of Black people came onto the streets following events that took
+place thousands of miles away because they related directly to our
+experiences. Just as in America, the police are often seen as ‘an occupying
+force’ in Black communities in Britain. There is a long history of overpolicing, harassment and brutality. To be Black is to be a suspect. To live in
+a Black neighbourhood is to be a target. In the 1980s the situation came to a
+head, with large-scale rebellions taking place across the country in cities
+like London, Birmingham and Liverpool. Communities tired of the police
+taking advantage of the ‘Sus Laws’, where they had the power to arrest on
+the basis of suspicion, to crack the head of a ‘darkie’. Despite changing
+laws and police reforms, if you are Black and in Britain today you are up to
+eighteen times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. You
+are more likely to be charged if arrested, and subject to a longer prison
+
+sentence if found guilty. The criminal injustice system means that in
+Britain, compared to our numbers in the country, Black people are actually
+more overrepresented in the prison population than in America. We only
+make up 3% of the population but account for 13% of prison inmates. Black
+people also represent 9% of deaths after police contact that were
+independently investigated.1 The protest in Birmingham was actually a prearranged march for justice for Kingsley Burrell, who died in police custody
+after a chain of events that started when he had called the police. At the
+march the families recounted the names of Demetre Fraser, Sarah Reed,
+Mark Duggan and many more. You are unlikely to be shot by the police in
+Britain because the majority do not carry guns. But if you are Black you are
+more vulnerable to death after police contact.
+Black Lives Matter protests sweeping across Britain were not just about
+the shared experiences of police abuse. The shootings in America drew a
+much larger protest than the typical marches for justice for people killed in
+Britain. To understand the depth of feeling in Britain to slayings in America
+is to grasp the connections of Blackness, which cannot be contained by
+national borders. When we see Philando Castile bleeding out we are not
+looking at a distant stranger. We are seeing our brother, our father, our
+cousin, our friend. His killing happened to Black communities in Britain as
+much as it did to those in Minnesota. It is that connection, that pain, which
+drew the largest Black mobilisations for years onto the streets of Britain.
+Black Lives Matter has re-energised Black political movements across
+the globe. In both Britain and America the battles and hard-fought victories
+for recognition and legislation have lulled us into a false sense of progress.
+Landmark gains for civil and voting rights in America, and race relations
+bills in Britain opened up the dreams of inclusion and equality for Black socalled citizens. The sad reality is that fifty years after these apparent gains
+racism is as embedded in the fabric of society as ever, coded into the DNA
+of the system. There may have been a Black man in the White House for
+eight years, but under his rule the value of Black life depreciated. The
+poverty rate, wealth gap, evictions and food stamp usage all went up under
+the watch of the first Black president.2 It was truly a case of a Black man,
+White house. Meanwhile, the police continued to bring the hammer down
+on Black communities, providing the horrifying footage that relit the sparks
+of protest. Now that the fires of protest have been lit the question is what
+direction they will take.
+
+There is no such thing as a unified Black politics. Mobilisations have
+taken forms so wide-ranging they have led to violent confrontations. Black
+people have disagreed with each other as to the way forward as much as, if
+not more than, we have with White people. One of the most frustrating
+rewrites of history is the common description of Malcolm X as a ‘civil
+rights leader’. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Malcolm
+was perhaps the fiercest critic of the civil rights movement, its tactics and
+its leaders. He famously called the showpiece 1963 March on Washington a
+‘farce’, denouncing it as a ‘circus with clowns and all’.3 Though he and the
+figure he is most tied to, Martin Luther King, were active at the same time,
+they only ever met once, very briefly. We should not be surprised given
+Malcolm’s public scorn for King, including calling him ‘a twentieth
+century, or modern day Uncle Tom’.4 These disagreements were not some
+personal squabble between two men; they were based on a fundamentally
+different view of the world. Malcolm and Martin did not have the same
+goals; they did not even see the problem through the same eyes.
+Broadly speaking, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement
+represent a liberal tradition in Black politics. Liberals acknowledge the
+problems of racial inequality but put them down to a lack of access to the
+system. So Black people are poorer because we do not have equal access to
+the job market. In order to get equal access it is seen as necessary to reform
+the system through legislation that outlaws discriminatory practices. A
+barrier to these laws being passed is that we also lack access to political
+power, and so it is necessary to get Black politicians elected to bring about
+reform. This is the logic that made ‘69% of African Americans believe that
+Obama’s election mean that King’s dream had been fulfilled’.5 It is also the
+logic that leads to campaigns for more Black police officers, chiefs and
+commissioners. The system is not the problem in this analysis, just the fact
+we are not fully part of it. If Black faces were in high places then of course
+a different set of decisions would be made and equality would emerge.
+In stark contrast, Malcolm represents a radical tradition in Black politics.
+He was never interested in being part of what he called the ‘American
+nightmare’. In the radical tradition the system is the problem. There can be
+no reform, no adjustments and we as Black people should not waste time
+daydreaming of equality. When Malcolm proclaimed ‘we want no part of
+integration with this wicked race of devils’,6 he was not attacking individual
+White people but condemning the system of the West as being evil at its
+
+core. So the battle is not to get good jobs or to be elected, but to end the
+system of oppression and create the world in a new image. No amount of
+Black faces in the police force will make it anti-racist. As the hip hop artist
+KRS-ONE pointed out, during apartheid (and after) it was the ‘Black cop
+killing Black kids in Johannesburg’.7
+Black radicalism therefore calls for an overturning of the system that
+oppresses Black people, and for nothing short of a revolution. The aim of
+this book is to reclaim that tradition of Black radicalism because it has been
+widely misused and misunderstood. Radicalism has become a dirty and
+even dangerous word in the current climate. It has been distorted in
+association with violence and most usually Islamic extremism. But
+radicalism and extremism are actually completely opposite concepts.
+Extremism is based on taking the fundamental principles of an idea to
+the extreme. Making them solid absolutes, with no room for flexibility or
+different interpretations. The terrorism we are seeing across the world in the
+name of Islam is extremism, taking the principles of Islam so far that they
+become destructive. But as Angela Davis explained, ‘radical simply means
+grasping things at the root’.8 Radicalism is based on rejecting the
+fundamental principles that govern society and creating a new paradigm. So
+one of President Trump’s favourite phrases, ‘radical Islam’, is completely
+nonsensical. A radical version of Islam would do away with the principles
+of the religion and cease even to be Islam. The Jihadists who are wreaking
+havoc in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa follow in the footsteps of
+a long line of extremists. Just as there was nothing radical about the Nazis,
+or Christian fundamentalism, there is nothing radical about Islamic
+extremism.
+For the goals of the Jihadists to be radical they would need to be based
+on overthrowing the existing social order. Sharia law may seem radically
+different to us in the West but the Middle East is made up of many countries
+observing conservative Islamic principles. The Jihadists are simply
+following a well-worn path of taking these to the extreme. In many ways
+this rise of extremism is in direct correlation to the decline of truly radical
+alternatives to Western domination. Once you give up on overthrowing the
+unjust social order it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to find spiritual
+salvation. For all of the rhetoric about fighting the infidels in the holy land,
+the main beneficiary of the chaos caused by extremism is the West. While
+Muslims are killing Muslims there is no prospect of the region uniting to
+
+challenge imperialism. The ongoing conflicts are a money-making machine
+for the war and reconstruction industries. Even if an Islamic caliphate were
+installed across the Middle East there is nothing to suggest this could not
+co-exist with Western interests. Saudi Arabia is governed by extremist
+principles and is one of the West’s closest allies.
+Radicalism is confused with extremism because we incorrectly conflate
+what is radical with what is violent. This confusion is dangerous and has
+helped to spread the contagion of Islamic extremism across the African
+continent, in particular. In Professor Robert Beckford’s excellent
+documentary The Great African Scandal he chronicled the impact of
+Western trade policies on Ghana.9 Rice farming was one of the successes of
+the post-independence economy, because it was supported by government
+subsidies and there was a ban on foreign imports. In the 1980s the country
+wanted to improve its rice production by developing irrigation systems, so
+it turned to the West for a helping hand. The International Monetary Fund
+(IMF) and World Bank loaned Ghana the money but on the condition that it
+‘liberalise’ its markets to help boost the economy. Liberalise meant open its
+market to free trade, and therefore the end of government subsidies to rice
+farmers and of course no more banning of foreign imports. The inevitable
+happened when the West gets involved in Africa. Much cheaper and higher
+quality, mostly American, rice flooded the Ghanaian market. Worse still,
+America subsidises its rice farmers, in the way that the Ghanaian
+government was now barred from doing. Even with the development from
+the loan, locally produced rice had no chance to compete and the deal with
+the devil ended up destroying rice production in the country. The first
+president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was right when he said that the
+relationship between Africa and the West has an ‘Alice in wonderland
+craziness’ about it.10 Beckford’s documentary highlighted the poverty that
+the collapse of rice farming had caused and the resentment of the people in
+Ghana. In a chilling and telling section of the film, one of the former rice
+farmers, who was living in poverty, showed Beckford that he had a picture
+of Osama Bin Laden as his phone’s screensaver. He explained that ‘he is the
+only one fighting the West’ and the system that had caused the destruction
+of his livelihood. The decline of radical liberation movements on the
+continent have left a space that is being filled by the violent rhetoric of
+resistance presented by Islamic extremism, and to deadly effect.
+
+Critical to understanding Black radicalism is to completely untangle its
+politics from the tactic of violence. The key distinction between Malcolm X
+and Martin Luther King was not whether to use violence or not, it was the
+diagnosis of the problems in society. Non-violence makes sense for liberal
+movements for racial justice because they want to be part of the system and
+therefore do not want to alienate the mainstream society. Malcolm objected
+to non-violence because he wanted to overturn the system, so was not
+interested in placating White officials. As radical politics is based on
+overthrow it is more than likely that a revolution would involve violence.
+But this is not because radicals are bloodthirsty and seeking violent
+confrontation. It is because the system of oppression is unlikely to give up
+its power without suppressing the struggle through violence. Black
+radicalism promotes violence only for self-defence and liberation, and
+recognises that the liberal forces of oppression are defined by violence. The
+hypocrisy of defining ‘political violence’ as the possession of the radicals,
+or the extremists, is truly frightening. Liberalism, upon which the West is
+built, is the most violent system that has ever existed on the planet. The
+West is founded on the genocide of 80% of the native people in the
+Americas. Once they had exhausted the native population they then brutally
+enslaved Africans for three centuries, murdering tens of millions of people.
+Colonial regimes were dominated by horrific violence; for example, it is
+estimated that Belgium killed half the population of the Congo during its
+rule. The legacy of underdevelopment and continued exploitation, like that
+which Beckford saw in Ghana, is a world where a child dies every ten
+seconds because of poor access to food.
+Violence is not a choice that Black radicals want to embrace. In fact, in
+one of Malcolm’s most famous speeches he gives America the chance to
+have a ‘bloodless revolution’ by offering either the ‘ballot or the bullet’.11
+The ballot represented America deciding to give its Black population equal
+citizenship, and if they refused then the bullet would be the violence that
+erupted across the nation. But Malcolm understood it was a fantasy to
+pretend that you can overthrow the murderous beast of the West without
+engaging in violence. This is why he was so scornful of the civil rights
+‘love thy enemy’ approach. Malcolm X’s most famous quote is ‘by any
+means necessary’, but this actually distorts the importance of his legacy.
+Radicalism is not about the means (violence/non-violence), but the ends
+(reform/revolution).
+
+Reclaiming Black radicalism is vital because it is one of the few politics
+that presents an alternative to the iniquitous system of the West. In the
+words of Kwame Ture, ‘a true revolutionary must provide an alternative,
+not just rhetoric condemning the existing system’.12 There have been any
+number of false prophets clothing themselves in revolutionary rhetoric. But
+there are true radical politics that live up to Ture’s challenge, that provide a
+blueprint for overturning the system. In 1963, Malcolm warned that ‘many
+of our people are using this word “revolution” loosely, without taking into
+account careful consideration of what it actually means’.13 So starved are
+we for radical politics that Beyoncé’s performance at the Super Bowl, the
+very pinnacle of commercialism, is being hailed as revolutionary.
+Even if you do not believe in the politics of Black radicalism, its revival
+is essential. Without the radical alternative putting pressure on the state,
+even the liberal demands fail to be met. As Malcolm explained, ‘at one time
+the Whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a
+communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the Whites thanked
+the Lord for Martin Luther King’.14 Black radicalism changes the nature of
+the debate and opens up space for liberal ‘progress’. Malcolm expanded on
+the complementary relationship between radical and liberal politics in a
+meeting with Coretta Scott King in Selma. Martin was furious that Malcolm
+had visited directly before he was due to speak, feeling he was trying to
+upstage him. Against her husband’s wishes Coretta took the opportunity to
+meet with Malcolm, and she recalls that he explained: ‘I want Dr. King to
+know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come
+thinking I could make it easier. If the White people realize what the
+alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King’.15
+A lot of credit is given to the civil rights campaigners for the legislative
+gains but it has to be recognised that the authorities were terrified of the
+alternative to supporting non-violent leaders. You will see a correlation
+between rebellions in the inner cities and civil rights legislation, as those in
+charge looked to the civil rights leaders to cool things down. It is also no
+coincidence that the initial police reforms in Britain followed urban
+rebellions. The uprisings in the 1980s led to the Scarman Report and
+acknowledgement of police racism, as well as the formation of the Police
+Complaints Authority, which significantly boosted the powers of
+independent investigations into the police. Anti-racism has stalled in the
+
+present day, and even reversed in America, without a radical politics to
+force the debate.
+More important than trying to achieve the illusory goals of the liberal
+project is to re-engage with the politics of Black radicalism. Black Lives
+Matter has caught the imagination of a younger generation who understand
+the system has failed them. The thousands who came onto the streets across
+the world to protest need to choose the kind of society they want to fight
+for. The last thing Black Lives Matter needs to become is the new civil
+rights movement. The legacy of civil rights struggle is the current system,
+which has opened up enough for some to ‘make it’ and receive some of the
+food from the table. However, the majority remain locked out, left to fight
+for the scraps. If fifty years of so-called progress has taught us anything, it
+should be that ‘this system can never provide freedom, justice and equality’
+for Black people in the same way that ‘a chicken can never lay a duck
+egg’.16 The West is built on and maintained by oppressing Black people and
+this oppression cannot end without overturning the system.
+We need to reclaim the politics of Black radicalism, connecting the
+struggles today to the long history of Black freedom movements. In doing
+so, we should stop thinking of Black radicalism as a tradition and start to
+understand it as its own political ideology. The aim of the book is to lay out
+the basis of this politics and how we can re-engage with Black radicalism in
+the twenty-first century. Essential to this project is to debunk the myths and
+distinguish Black radicalism from the various other forms of Black politics
+is it often confused with. The first misunderstanding that will be debunked
+is that Black Nationalism equals Black radicalism. In order to do this, we
+must undo the ugly caricature of Black Nationalism as ‘divisive, fanatical,
+dangerous, unprincipled, racist delusional and even mad’.17 We must also
+distinguish between radicalism and the many different forms of nationalism,
+most of which are narrow and regressive. Black radicalism has always been
+based on the connections that cannot be contained by national borders. We
+will outline the radical concept of ‘Black is a country’, which links the
+Black Lives Matter protests across the globe.
+Another important idea to detach from our understandings of Black
+radicalism is that of ‘cultural nationalism’. In Los Angeles in the 1960s
+there were actual gunfights over the differences between the revolutionary
+Black Panthers and the US cultural movement headed by Maulana Karenga.
+The Panthers rejected the idea that any salvation could be found in wishing
+
+ourselves back to Africa, culturally or spiritually. With the decline of radical
+politics, cultural nationalism has been confused with an actual radical
+politics of resistance. Much of the resistance to embracing Black radicalism
+is in truth a reaction to the restrictive forms of cultural nationalism. We will
+severely critique the limits of cultural nationalism and explain how Black
+radicalism is in part built on a rejection of fixed, regressive ideas of Africa,
+gender and the Black family. Blackness emerged as an identity rooted in the
+liberation of people of African descent, and has never been closed off
+because of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any of the other
+differences within the Diaspora.
+In terms of charting a way forward for movements today, the Black
+Panther Party is important both in America and globally. One of the key
+debates in Black politics has been the issue of class and Black Marxism has
+often been viewed as the Black radical tradition. While Marxism is
+certainly radical, we will explore the key departures of this politics from
+Black radicalism. We will consider the contradictions of the Panthers, who
+were Marxist in their rhetoric but Black radical in their activities. For all the
+talk of the Marxist revolution, most of the members were engaged in
+‘survival programmes’, providing support for Black communities that the
+state would not. This is a crucial lesson for movements today: as romantic
+as the idea of Marxism may sound, it can never provide freedom for the
+African Diaspora. We will explore what the Black revolution has
+historically looked like and imagine what that means for the politics of
+today.
+When it comes to outlining a vision for Black radicalism today, it is
+important to critique the limitations of my own position. I work in
+universities, spaces that are historically and structurally overwhelmingly
+White. Universities were culpable in producing the very racism that Black
+radicalism emerged to combat. Those of us privileged enough to enjoy the
+benefits of being part of the system have a complicated relationship to
+Black radicalism. In fact, it is not really complicated; Black academics have
+tended to take one of three options in the situation I find myself in.
+Complacency is common, where we enjoy the spoils and ignore the
+problem. Becoming complicit in the system of racism by denouncing
+radical alternatives from our pulpits is also a favoured route. But the most
+harmful has been what I call liberal radicalism, where academics embrace
+radical theory but reject revolutionary practice, calling out the system as
+
+inherently racist and then pretending there is nothing we can do about it. If
+the system is the problem, then the university cannot be decolonised, so we
+are basically fighting to be part of the oppressive machine.
+One of the biggest problems with mobilising around Black radicalism is
+that the analysis can make the issues we face feel insurmountable. If
+nothing can change without revolution, and the overthrow of the West
+seems unimaginable, then it easy to lose hope, to get stuck. We will end
+with tying the bigger issues into a programme of local action. All global
+movements are based on local groups coming together on the national and
+international stage. The struggle for Black liberation starts in your home,
+your community, your school. Black radicalism has always offered a
+concrete politics of liberation, and a blueprint to struggle where you are.
+Fifty years of so-called progress, false promises and symbolic change have
+meant we have moved away from a political programme that can lead to
+liberation. If we want freedom, justice and equality we need to root the next
+generation of mobilisations in the politics of Black radicalism.
+
+Chapter 1
+
+Narrow Nationalism
+
+A veteran campaigner against police abuse in Black communities, Stafford
+Scott was in many ways the ideal person to keynote the first major Black
+Lives Matter (BLM) conference held in Britain, in October 2015. He battled
+through the notorious Broadwater Farm rebellion in Tottenham in 1985,
+which were sparked by the police killing Joy Gardner; and, as he explained
+in his keynote speech, he has been ‘supporting the people who are receiving
+the hard face of racism’ for decades. After a day of listening to speeches in
+solidarity with the movement that started in America it was jarring to hear
+some of his scepticism about how BLM had been mobilised in Britain. In
+comments before the conference he explained that:
+When I have to talk to the parents of Jermaine Baker (shot dead by
+police in December 2015), and Pam Duggan, the mother of Mark
+Duggan and explain to them why they can’t get justice and why our
+young people are more interested in what is happening in America,
+than England, it irks me.1
+These words highlight the dwindling community support that movements
+for justice for Black people killed by the police in Britain have been
+receiving. The police in Britain do not routinely carry guns, so in
+comparison to America there are very few police killings. But the problem
+with the police is exactly the same and I have never met anyone who doubts
+that if all police were armed then the streets and social media feeds in
+Britain would be equally stained with Black blood. But aside from the
+killing of Mark Duggan, which sparked protests in 2011, there has not been
+the same reaction as to police brutality in America in recent years.
+The Black Lives Matter protest in Birmingham, which I referred to in the
+introduction, drew thousands people onto the streets in solidarity with
+
+America. It was planned on the same day as a march to put pressure on the
+authorities over the death of a local man, Kingsley Burrell, in custody. But
+the Kingsley Burrell march drew a fraction of the numbers of the BLM
+protest, and though the two eventually connected, it was not until a large
+proportion of the BLM protesters had gone home. It is easy to understand
+the frustrations of campaigners who have been fighting for justice for
+families, sometimes for decades, and do not feel the support of the
+community. Scott is also right when he argues that ‘when you cannot get
+justice for people that look like you in your own country, you ain’t got no
+chance for people that might look like you somewhere else’. In fairness to
+him, he has also been positive about the numbers on the street and has
+supported BLM demonstrations. However, the comments raise an important
+limitation on much of Black political thought in that it gets trapped within
+the boundaries of the nation state.
+Political movements that focus their attention solely on local or national
+problems, accepting the enforced separation of American, British or other
+issues, fall outside a radical analysis. The vicious system of racial
+oppression causes impacts at the ground level that must be addressed.
+Poverty, unemployment, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the list
+goes on. But we cannot be so focused on the symptoms of racism that we
+ignore the systemic problem. The issues that we see on the streets on a daily
+basis are caused by the same system of racism wherever we are located in
+the Diaspora. There is no ‘British’ problem that is not an American,
+Caribbean or African one. BLM protesters in Britain are not being seduced
+by the romanticism of America, they are responding to the same racism that
+impacts their lives here. Perhaps the majority of Black politics have not
+been driven by this global concern and any discussion of Black radicalism
+has to begin with a separation of the concept from various Black Nationalist
+traditions.
+Black Nationalism has become wrongly conflated with Black radicalism,
+and Black Nationalism itself is mostly misunderstood. The collective
+memory has created a set of ‘Black nationalist tropes of violence and ultrasexuality’ to represent the tradition,2 rather than focusing on the
+revolutionary and liberatory forms of nationalism. In these tropes Black
+nationalists are portrayed as ‘divisive, fanatical, dangerous, unprincipled,
+racist, delusional and even mad’;3 or ‘demonized as the civil rights
+movement’s “evil twin” and stereotyped as a politics of rage practiced by
+
+gun toting’ and ‘men’.4 The tropes are then used to discredit not only Black
+Nationalism but also the distinct yet conflated forms of Black radicalism.
+Complicating the effort to decouple the two concepts is that Black
+radicals have often embraced the rhetoric of nationalism. Malcolm X
+declared he was a ‘Black nationalist freedom fighter’5 and the call for Black
+nationhood is essential to the radical tradition. However, revolutionary
+forms of nationalism must be distinguished from a variety of narrow calls
+for nationhood that do not seek to radically transform the system.
+The nation within a nation
+It is wrong to speak of Black Nationalism as singular political philosophy.
+The label Black Nationalism has been applied to so many different contexts
+that Hill Collins argues we should now see it as a ‘system of meaning’
+rather than a cohesive set of ideas.6 Key to this system of meaning is the
+belief that the Black community needs to unite and work together in order
+to move forward. The looseness of this idea has brought something of a
+banality to the term, where anything remotely pro-Black can be included as
+nationalist. Justice Clarence Thomas, the right-wing ideologue, has been
+described as Black Nationalist because he ‘suggested that black middle and
+high schools “can function as the center and symbol of black communities,
+and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and
+achievement”’.7 In one of the more surreal discussions of Black politics,
+Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care About Us is said to be ‘Black
+nationalist in temperament’ because he talks of an ‘us’.8 As testament to the
+negative view of Black Nationalism, the apparently anti-Semitic use of the
+word ‘kike’ in the song is part of this ‘temperament’. When Black
+Nationalism is used to describe figures as diverse and incompatible as
+Malcolm X, Clarence Thomas and Michael Jackson, there is certainly a
+need for a much better understanding of the concept.
+Part of the reason for the wide application of Black Nationalism is that
+one of its common forms is what Shelby terms ‘weak Black Nationalism:
+the political program of black solidarity and group self’. The connection
+here is so weak that ‘it could mean working to create a racially integrated
+society or even a “post racial” polity, a political order where “race” has no
+social or political meaning’.9 This form of nationalism has also been
+
+described as ‘community nationalism’ which ‘seeks black selfdetermination within existing social and political arrangements’.10 These
+forms of nationalism are distinguished from the ‘strong’11 or ‘separatist’12
+nationalisms, which aim to provide a separate nation outside of the current
+nation state arrangement. Black Nationalism without a call for an actual
+nation has a long tradition, particularly in the United States.
+W.E.B. Du Bois, who early in his career was a staunch integrationist,
+argued that,
+With the use of their political powers, power as consumers, and their
+brain power, added to that a chance of personal appeal which
+proximity and neighbourhood always give to human beings, Negroes
+can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation,
+able to work through inner cooperation, to found its own institutions
+… it must happen in our case or there is no hope for the Negro in
+America.13
+The nation within a nation thesis laid the theoretical foundation for weak
+Black Nationalism. The pooling of resources in order to improve the
+conditions for Black communities within the American system is the basis
+for campaigns we see in Britain to support Black business, and ‘keep the
+Black pound circulating in the community’. This kind of Black Nationalism
+is not radical, it is simply rational. As a minority group, Black communities
+cannot rely on the wider society to support us. Any successful minority
+group, even White ones, have had to rely on community nationalism in
+order to have success in society. Little Italy in New York stands as
+testimony to this. When Italian Americans first settled in America, they
+faced discrimination and built a large community in New York full of
+Italian business using community support to create an economic base as a
+platform for success in society. Since the community has raised economic,
+social and cultural capital, Italians have integrated into mainstream
+American society and Little Italy is today a couple of streets with a lot of
+history. Carmichael and Hamilton captured this idea in their book Black
+Power:
+
+Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. By
+this we mean that group solidarity is necessary before a group can
+operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralist
+society … By building Irish Power, Italian Power, Polish Power or
+Jewish Power these groups got themselves together and operated from
+positions of strength.14
+Trying to decouple more liberal forms of nationalism from the radical ones
+is complicated because Black radicalism has argued for and mobilised
+community nationalism. Malcolm X explained that ‘the economic
+philosophy of Black Nationalism only means that we should own and
+operate and control the economy of our community’.15 Quotes like this
+support the ideas of Black capitalism and pooling resources in order to have
+a slice of the American Dream for Black communities. However, as will be
+explored in Chapter 3, Malcolm is invoking community nationalism as part
+of a radical strategy of liberation. He famously denounced capitalists as
+‘bloodsuckers’,16 and wanted no part of integration into the ‘American
+nightmare’.17 For those who embrace community nationalism, building a
+power base within the existing nation state is the end in itself. Black
+economic development is key to solving the problems in African American
+communities. Kunjufu argues that there is a need to increase the number of
+Black businesses; to convince the ‘talented tenth’ to invest in those
+enterprises; and to encourage children to go into business. He even goes so
+far as to argue that ‘we need African American institutions to emphasize
+economic over political development’.18 Even in his calls for reparatory
+justice he would use the capital to invest in ‘college scholarships, business
+loans and land’;19 in other words, to achieve success for Black people
+within the American system.
+Weak nationalism within the nation state is clearly not radical because it
+does not aim to overthrow the existing social system and is therefore
+perfectly compatible with liberal ideals.20 The malleability of Black
+Nationalism is similar to the way that the slogan ‘Black Power’ can be used
+to various political ends:
+For some the phrase became shorthand to articulate a critique of the
+middle class focus of civil rights. For others, ‘Black Power’ was a
+
+catchphrase pushing black America to get its fair share of American
+capitalism. And still others saw in the phrase a call for African
+Americans to celebrate themselves as beautiful and their culture as
+significant.21
+In his book Dark Days, Bright Nights, Joseph attempts to link Black Power
+politics to the emergence of Barack Obama. There is a passage where he
+connects the battle for Black Studies, trade union organising, Black
+feminism, the Black Arts movement and prison reform into a backdrop that
+led to ‘hundreds of thousands of ordinary local people’ backing a ‘new
+generation of Black politicians and successfully electing them as mayors of
+a range of urban cities in the 1960s and 1970s’.22 Although he is right that
+this history paved the way for Obama’s election, it was also composed of a
+disparate range of movements and ideologies which are only weakly
+connected on the basis of Blackness. One of Joseph’s arguments is that
+these movements transformed American democracy enough to allow
+Obama to be elected president. However, while they certainly made his
+presidency possible, neither they, nor his election, fundamentally changed
+the American system. Black faces on university campuses, in unions or the
+mayor’s office do not alter the function of those spaces. Institutional racism
+means that no matter the amount of Black presence, if the structure is racist,
+so too will be the outcomes.
+Obama certainly owes a debt to the array of Black social movements that
+came before him, but counter to the faith held by 69% of African
+Americans on his election, his presidency was not ‘the fulfilment of Martin
+Luther King’s dream’.23 The structural position of African Americans
+actually declined under the eight years of Obama’s presidency, with a
+higher proportion in poverty and four million more people in Black
+communities dependent on food aid.24 Weak Black Nationalism has rallied
+African Americans to support a growing political class that has
+demonstrated a total ‘inability to alter the poverty, unemployment, and
+housing and food insecurity their Black constituents face’.25 Even though
+there have been few tangible results from the incorporation of Black faces
+into the mainstream political machine, Taylor argues that Black
+communities hold out hope because the ‘potential for Black political and
+
+economic development was a welcome alternative to decades of neglect and
+disinvestment’.26
+The pull of weak Black Nationalism, even when it is irrational, can be
+seen in the widespread support for Obama’s presidency, even within socalled radical organisations. The New Black Panther Party (NBP), which
+claims to be more radical than the original Panthers, rhetorically rejects the
+American system and therefore the legitimacy of a president of any colour.
+However, it supported Obama based on the weak nationalist logic that
+‘every President has been a white man, now the Black man must have his
+time to rule’.27 The NBP is problematic for far more reasons than this
+(covered in Chapter 4) but it speaks to the banality of the idea of Black
+Nationalism when it is reduced to simply supporting anyone who is Black,
+in whatever endeavour, even if it goes against the core beliefs of your stated
+politics.
+Arguments for creating a Black nation within a nation are not confined
+to America, with one of the best examples being in South Africa. One of the
+mechanisms used to manage the country by apartheid governments was to
+give a measure of self-rule to the African population. Bantustans, or
+homelands, for specific African ethnic groups were established in 1951,
+with the move to provide Black people political rights only in their
+designated ‘homelands’ completed in 1971.28 This was not a new idea. The
+British had created ‘reserves’ to keep the African population segregated
+from Whites in the nineteenth century, codified in the 1913 Native Land
+Act.29 Bantustans were a form of control used to exclude Africans from the
+national government of South Africa. Anxiety over the results of the 1970
+census, which showed Black people significantly outnumbering Whites, led
+to calls to strengthen the ‘homelands’ and ensure that a greater proportion
+of the Black population was housed in them.30 Even given their complicity
+in the apartheid state there remained African leaders who supported the
+Bantustans as a legitimate means for Black progress.
+A good example of collusion with this idea of the Bantu nation within
+the White nation is Chief Buthelezi, who was appointed head of the Kwa
+Zulu Natal homeland by the authorities. He created the Inkatha Freedom
+Party in 1975 as a vehicle to drive Zulu nationalism within the apartheid
+state.31 In defence of his political project he argued:
+
+Zulu nationalism is a real factor in the context of South African
+politics. Nationalism is nothing to be ashamed of in a situation of
+cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. Therefore the emergence of Zulu
+self-consciousness in our attempts to develop inner directedness is
+inevitable in the circumstances in which fate has placed us.32
+The problem with his narrow conception of Zulu nationalism is that it was
+entirely predicated on the apartheid state, in the same way that his authority
+was. His rise to prominence was facilitated by apartheid leaders, who
+promoted pliant chiefs who would do their bidding. The combination of his
+royal Zulu heritage and the platform given by the state led him to be seen as
+‘a leader worthy of national and international recognition and as a bridge
+between black and white’ in South Africa.33 Buthelezi often posed as a
+supporter of the anti-apartheid struggle, but was supported by Nixon and
+Reagan, gave his support to regressive regimes in countries like
+Mozambique and carried out apartheid policy in Kwazulu Natal.34 No
+doubt his aim was to create a Zulu nation free from the rest of South Africa
+if apartheid did end. The quest for Zulu nationalism as opposed to joining
+forces with the rest of South Africa led to conflict with the African National
+Congress (ANC). From at least 1985 up until the elections in 1994 (and
+beyond) sectarian violence killed thousands of people in the Kwa Zulu
+Natal region.35 This conflict was complex, as are the claims in general for
+Zulu nationalism. However, the creation of a narrow Zulu nationalism, in
+violent opposition to other Black freedom movements, was facilitated by
+the apartheid state. As much as Mandela can be criticised for selling out the
+freedom movement in South Africa and beyond, his decision to make peace
+with the apartheid rulers was certainly influenced by violent confrontation
+with Inkatha.36 Confronting the forces of White supremacy was difficult
+enough, without the internal battle with the Zulus. Narrow nationalisms can
+never be the solution to the problem of Black freedom, because they create
+divisions that prevent the unity that is essential for overthrowing the
+existing social order.
+From a radical perspective, the fundamental problem with the idea of the
+nation within a nation is that it leaves the regressive structure of the nation
+state intact. The goal is to improve our standing with the national setting
+rather than to transform what the nation represents. Better integrating Black
+
+communities into oppressive Western nations, or former colonies, is not a
+radical challenge; but there are more seemingly critical approaches to Black
+nationhood which remain outside of the radical tradition.
+A nation outside the nation
+The Nation of Islam (NOI) is perhaps the most notorious Black Nationalist
+organisation, whose leader Elijah Muhammad appealed for a separate
+portion of land where a Black nation could be founded: ‘Come and let us
+unite under the crescent and do something for ourselves in the way of
+supporting our own needs. Go after some of this earth for our nation of 22
+million here in North America.’37 The NOI was by no means the first group
+to advocate for a separate nation, with calls to leave America tracing back
+at least to emancipation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, after being granted socalled freedom, ‘there is little evidence that for Blacks in general, being
+American was considered desirable, even if attainable, until well into the
+nineteenth century’.38 Figures such as Martin Delaney and Hubert Harrison
+argued that the only solution to African Americans’ problems was to leave
+America and create a new nation.39 Desire for separation has typically been
+seen as the radical alternative to integration into the existing society.
+However, advocating emigration from a Western nation state is not
+necessarily radical, because it does not always involve an overturning of the
+existing social order.
+Delaney has been dubbed the ‘father’ of Black Nationalism, being one of
+the first to articulate the call for Black emigration and laying the foundation
+for later appeals from groups like the NOI.40 While this move would
+require a strong form of nationalism, in a commitment from Black people to
+build a nation, his was not a radical call. Delaney planned for a carefully
+selected African American vanguard to establish social and industrial
+settlements in Africa, with the purpose of instituting the pursuits of ‘modern
+civilised life’.41 This is just a more advanced version of the Black capitalist
+logic, which runs through the nation within a national position. America
+itself is not the problem here; the issue is that because of prejudice Black
+people will never be accepted. Therefore it becomes necessary to leave
+America and replicate ‘modern civilised life’ but with Black faces. The
+structure of the existing society is maintained, but Black people are given
+
+the chance to replicate its success, just elsewhere. It is for this reason that
+emigration was a popular solution of White politicians to the problem
+caused by emancipation.
+The great Abraham Lincoln saw it as moral duty for African Americans
+to found a new society on the African continent. In 1862 he informed a
+group of free Black people that while they may want to live in America, the
+mere thought of doing so was ‘an extremely selfish view of the case’.42 Key
+figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson all
+supported African Americans leaving the United States. The American
+Colonization Society (ACS) was formed in 1816 and attempted to establish
+settlements in Liberia before emancipation, and afterwards in Haiti, in
+1867.43 The motivation behind this colonisation movement was to maintain
+the American system by keeping it White. There was no fear that the Black
+nations they were attempting to create would pose any threat to the social
+order. In fact, the paternalistic relationship that was at the core of White
+abolitionism meant that these colonies would always be defined by their
+relationship to the United States. It is no coincidence that the word colony
+was used; they were attempting to create a colonial relationship such as
+existed with European countries and their territories. The call from African
+Americans both during and after emancipation, including from Delaney, are
+bound up in this colonisation discourse. The aim was not to overturn the
+social order, but to create a co-existing society led by Black faces in another
+geographical area. Rather than challenging White domination, the creation
+of such apparently independent states would actually reinforce it.
+The idea of excluding Black people from the nation state also has a
+powerful history in Britain. Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’
+speech, delivered in 1968, has been remembered because of its prediction of
+chaos caused by allowing mass immigration of the dark peoples of the
+world into the country. However, an often overlooked argument in his
+speech is not simply that immigration has to stop, but that Britain needed to
+reverse the movement of people that had already taken place:
+I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of
+growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would
+be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in
+the population would still leave the basic character of the national
+danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable
+
+proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this
+country during the last ten years or so.44
+Repatriation was a common call from the far right who wanted to ‘keep
+Britain White’, who were perfectly happy for Black people to ‘go home’, to
+our ‘own countries’, as long as we no longer polluted Whiteness in Britain.
+Again, there was never any fear that the nations of the Caribbean or Africa
+would rise up and challenge the dominance of the Britain, because of the
+colonial relationship that makes the idea of ‘independence’ a hollow
+fantasy. Therefore no call to Black nationhood can be radical if it leaves the
+existing system intact and is welcomed by Whiteness.
+A halfway house between the weak Black Nationalism to connect us to
+the nation and the strong version that seeks to repatriate Black people to
+other lands is the call for separation within the geographic area of the
+existing nation state. The NOI appealed for a ‘portion of land’ in the South
+to be given over to African Americans to develop separately from the
+nation. This idea also spread in the ‘Black belt thesis’, which emerged from
+Black communists in the 1920s and held that the South was home to such a
+large Black population that part of it could secede from the union.45 But the
+dangers of segregation led by the White power structure were obvious in
+America.
+The doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ became enshrined in American race
+relations with the Plessy vs Ferguson decision in 1896.46 Segregation was
+deemed legal as long as the facilities provided for both Black and White
+were equal. This was a key ruling that provided the basis for Jim Crow, the
+system of segregation in the South, which remained intact until the civil
+rights movement bought about desegregation and voting reforms in the
+1960s. The problem with the concept is that while there was segregation,
+there was no equality, with African Americans not only being denied access
+to equivalent services, but also being second class citizens with restricted
+voting rights. Segregation was used as a tool to disempower and oppress
+African Americans, providing a glimpse into the problems any Black nation
+would experience in dealing with an unreformed America. Advocates of a
+Black nation just outside the nation were keenly aware of the problems with
+segregation.
+
+While still a member of the NOI, Malcolm X outlined the position on
+separation in the organisation. He was keen to stress that ‘we don’t want to
+be segregated by the white man. We don’t want to be integrated with the
+white man. We want to be separated from the white man’.47 The distinction
+between separation and segregation was an attempt to deal with the
+criticisms that they would simply rectify the oppression of Jim Crow.
+Malcolm actually argues that reparatory justice is key to this call for
+separation in that it would be unjust to expect African Americans to flourish
+in their new land without compensation for the exploitation they had
+endured:
+the government, again, should supply us with the machinery and the
+tools necessary to establish our own independent society and our own
+independent country and in this way it will be creating a solution that
+the Black man himself, our people ourselves, can bring about if we
+have that capability.48
+The separation into a new nation for African Americans was seen as the
+solution to the limitation of segregation in the United States. By providing
+the resources and also the possibility for African Americans to develop their
+own society, it was hoped that the equality that was denied in America
+could be achieved.
+In the same way that calls for colonisation had support from the far right,
+so too did the NOI’s ambitions for a separate Black nation. Due to their
+programmes of racial separation the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the NOI
+became curious bedfellows. According to Malcolm, the Klan was
+supportive of the NOI’s goals for national liberation and he negotiated a
+pact between the two groups to support each other’s agendas. As well as
+dealing with the KKK, the Nation formed alliances with the equally antiSemitic American Nazi Party, members of which would actually turn up to
+NOI rallies in their uniforms.49 At the 1996 National African American
+Leadership Summit that brought together a range of Black organisations,
+Farrakhan, leader of the NOI, caused a fist fight to break out when he
+invited Lyndon La Rouche to speak. La Rouche’s participation was so
+troubling because he was a high-profile far right activist, who supported
+
+apartheid and had historic links to the KKK. The NOI’s appeal to the far
+right did not stop at the American border:
+By the early 1980s, Farrakhan’s activities and speeches had come to
+the attention of British fascists, who quickly embraced the black
+Muslim’s programme of racial separatism. The far-right, racist
+National Front praised Farrakhan as ‘God-sent’ and subsequently
+distributed leaflets defending the Nation of Islam’s positions.50
+The political programme of the NOI should never be confused with, or even
+discussed in the same vein as, a radical politics. However, the aim for a
+separate Black nation in America was taken up by more progressive forces.
+After Malcolm’s death, his calls for a Black nation were picked up by the
+Republic of New Afrika (RNA), founded at the Black Government
+Conference in 1968. The aim of the movement was to set up a new republic
+in the Black Belt, which consisted of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
+Mississippi and South Carolina. In its 1972 Anti-Depression programme,
+the Republic demanded from America the territory, a vote for Black people
+on independence and $300 billion in reparations payments to establish the
+Black nation.51 The RNA rejected ideas of Western capitalism in how the
+state should be organised, proposing a form of African socialism, where the
+wealth was distributed equitably. It also aimed to build international links to
+protect the new republic by having the new nation recognised by the United
+Nations. The RNA featured high-profile membership, becoming a standard
+bearer for Black critical thought in the late 1960s and 1970s. Members
+included Robert Williams, Queen Mother Audely Moore, Amiri Baraka,
+Betty Shabazz and Assata Shakur. Given its aims, its roots in Malcolm’s
+ideas and its cast of supporters, the RNA on the surface would seem a
+logical contribution to Black radicalism. However, complete separation in
+this manner, even if calls for reparatory justice were fulfilled, still would
+not lead to the transformation necessary for Black radicalism.
+For one thing, the same criticism that was applied to the idea of
+repatriation still applies. The most likely scenario for the new Black nation
+in the South would be to fall into a colonial relationship with America.
+Even if we take Malcolm’s call for reparatory justice, America would only
+agree to a sum that would not cripple it, and to receive support for twenty-
+
+five years meant that the system would need to stay intact. It also stands to
+reason that for America to pay the $300 billion, it would need to be able to
+do so. In order to be radical, the solutions sought must overturn the system
+of oppression. America itself is the oppressor, and therefore radical politics
+must seek to overcome it. Simply leaving, and remaining next door, will not
+end racism, it will just change the way that it manifests. In many ways, this
+argument is similar to the ideas of the American Colonization Society, just
+within the geographic area of America. It is here that we can see another
+fundamental limitation of its radicalism.
+Muhammed specifically calls for a land for ‘the 22 million here in North
+America’, while the RNA aims to give a place for African Americans to
+find sanctuary from racism. This restrictive call entirely ignores the African
+Diaspora to provide a distinctively American response. It is a call that still
+clearly fits within the model of ‘separate but equal’ by not going beyond the
+boundaries of the nation state. Racism is a global system and therefore
+Black radicalism must be truly international in how it is conceived. Even if
+separation would solve the problems for African Americans, it would leave
+them intact for the rest of the Diaspora. The RNA attempted to add a
+dimension of internationalism by making connections through the United
+Nations to other oppressed nations. This approach is problematic because it
+displays too much faith in the UN as a body able to equalise power relations
+between richer and poorer nations. The RNA adopted this miscalculation
+from Malcolm, who put a lot of stock in taking ‘Uncle Sam to the world
+court’.52 As history has demonstrated, petitioning the UN has been fruitless
+for Black freedom movements, because the institution is controlled by
+Western powers.53 More problematically, the RNA attempted to add an
+international element to a fundamentally isolationist and narrow
+nationalism. Separation for African Americans, depending on the support of
+the American government, is not at its heart a radical project. It is one that
+seeks refuge for part of the Diaspora at the ultimate expense of the rest.
+The best example of the limits of the nation outside the nation may be,
+ironically, the most successful Black revolution in history. In 1804 Haiti
+declared its independence, completing the rebellion that had started over a
+decade before. The revolution sent shockwaves around the world, proving
+that the might of Europe could be challenged and defeated by enslaved
+Africans. One of the impacts of the revolution was the Abolition of the
+British Slave Trade Act passed in 1807, in large part because the British
+
+were terrified of the African-born enslaved who were so central to the
+revolution. Haiti’s particular brand of slavery meant that people were often
+worked to death and they would simply restock with fresh African flesh,
+meaning most of the population was African-born.54 Slaving nations were
+also terrified that the contagion of revolution would spread across the
+Americas and the system would be overturned. This was particularly the
+case in the Dominican Republic, which shared the island with the newly
+independent Haiti. Upon achieving freedom Haiti declared itself a sanctuary
+for those escaping slavery and repelled numerous attempts at European
+invasions to recapture the island. Haiti is still used as a symbol of resistance
+across the globe, with figures like Toussain’t L’Overture immortalised in
+the Black imagination. But though they were unable to retake Haiti,
+Western powers actually achieved a much bigger success with the newly
+liberated nation.
+In 1825 France threatened the young nation with its warships and
+demanded the equivalent of billions of dollars in compensation for the loss
+of the colony. In return France would recognise Haitian sovereignty.55 It
+took until 1947 for Haiti to make the payment, crippling the country’s
+economy during that time and since. The price paid for Haitain nationhood
+was not just symbolic; the problems Haiti has faced since its liberation is
+that it is surrounded by the hostile enemies of Black freedom. Haiti was
+effectively cut off from the rest of the world and never allowed to be a
+successful state. The result was internal chaos driven by the poverty that the
+West created. An American occupation of Haiti in 1915 further destabilised
+the country and it should come as no surprise that François Duvalier, also
+known as Papa Doc, was able to come to power in the 1950s and install a
+violent dictatorship over the island. Haiti remains one of the poorest nations
+in the world with no route to meaningful change. If ever there was a
+warning that a Black nation outside the West can succeed without the
+overthrow of the global system of oppression, it is the story of Haiti.
+In the case of Black populations in Western nation states, nationalism is
+a theoretical discussion, but post-independence there are now numerous
+former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean that are officially nation states.
+The search for racial equality in the nation states of the former colonies is
+even more problematic. At least in America or Britain, there is a faint hope,
+however illusory, that Black people will be fully integrated into the system
+and enjoy equal spoils from the nation. Given the neo-colonial relationship
+
+that exists with the former colonies, there is almost total futility in seeking a
+national response to the issues the countries face.
+Colonial nationalism
+The idea of Jamaican nationalism is a perfect example of the limits of
+national approaches to freedom. Jamaican nationalism began to emerge as a
+political project in 1938, with the founding of the People’s National Party
+(PNP) under Norman Manley, and the Jamaican Labour Party, led by his
+cousin Alexander Bustamate.56 Importantly, this nationalism was supported
+and nurtured by the British colonial government which had already
+cultivated an elite class to help govern the island. Britain designed the
+transition towards Jamaican independence to be a national system
+dominated by the two original parties, governed by leaders educated in and
+produced by the British system. This is the same relationship that exists to
+this day and should come as no surprise given that the Jamaican nation state
+is fundamentally a British creation.
+‘Out of Many, One People’ is the national mantra of Jamaica, a creation
+myth meant to tie the population into a national and multi-racial project. An
+editorial in the Jamaican Observer explained the motto’s creation:
+The leadership of the new independent Jamaica and colonialists
+happily vacating the country wanted to first, assure the wealthy and
+potential foreign investors that they had no need to fear the
+desperately poor black masses. Second, it sought to convince the poor
+black people that those with wealth were their genuine brothers and
+sisters.57
+Jamaican nationalism may have succeeded in its first aim of suppressing the
+masses, which is a key part of any Western nation state project.58 However,
+the current state of the nation should make it evident that the second is
+entirely untrue and has been since before the nation was founded.
+Prior to Western interference, Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean were
+islands sparsely populated by native Amerindians. Columbus’ so-called
+‘discovery’ of the region in 1492 led to European expansion and the
+
+genocide of 80% of the native population of the Americas as a whole.59 The
+slaughter of the natives meant that Europeans enslaved Africans in order to
+do the labour necessary to create the industrial revolution in Europe.60 The
+majority of the Jamaican population is only Black because of the countless
+Africans taken there in chains by Europeans. The common conception of
+Jamaica as ‘home’ for those who have left the island brings to mind
+Malcolm’s chastisement of African Americans who acted as though they
+arrived voluntarily on the ship Mayflower, with European pilgrims.61 The
+island of Jamaica was a key part of the British Empire, for centuries raising
+huge revenues from enslaving and killing Black people. There is no way to
+understand Jamaica and Britain as separate entities, because the entire
+colony was designed, built and run to enrich Britain. Up until so-called
+independence in 1962, people born in Jamaica were British subjects, ruled
+by the crown, paying taxes and living life in service to the mother country.
+After the Second World War, those born in Jamaica were even invited to
+work to rebuild Britain, leading to the substantial Jamaican community.
+This voluntary migration from the Caribbean to Britain is often seen as
+creating a different relationship between African Caribbeans in Britain and
+African Americans in the United States.
+It is important to recognise that this migration was only voluntary in a
+very limited view of the term. There are stark similarities in the relationship
+between the Caribbean and Britain, with the American South and the North.
+Africans were brought in chains to both the Caribbean and the South, and
+because they had been enslaved they could only voluntarily migrate after
+emancipation. During the period of mass migration after the Second World
+War, Jamaica was British soil, so even though people needed to cross an
+ocean, this was still internal migration within the British Empire. After
+independence in 1962 it is not as though the colonial relationship between
+Jamaica and Britain ceased to exist. It is also no coincidence that
+independence was granted in the same year that Britain started to limit the
+migration of Black and Asian people from the colonies by passing the
+Commonwealth Immigration Act. Therefore, the illusion of nationhood for
+Jamaica was primarily granted to limit the number of Black people entering
+the mother country. The continued migration after 1962 should still be seen
+in the same way as international migration in America.
+Up until 1962, the British Caribbean was essentially the British version
+of the American South: the former slaveholding part of the British nation,
+
+which produced an agrarian economy with a lack of opportunities and jobs,
+leading to migration to the industrial heartlands. One of the most important
+myths to dispel is that countries like Jamaica are self-functioning,
+independent nations. Jamaica has had a measure of political independence
+since 1962 but its economy is entirely controlled from the outside and is the
+perfect example of neo-colonial economics.
+During the 1970s the Jamaican government under Michael Manley
+attempted to introduce social democracy to more evenly distribute the
+wealth and close the gaping inequalities. But the lack of control the island
+has over its economy became apparent in the response from the
+international community. The global economic crisis in the 1970s meant
+that the experiment was blamed for the worsening economy and abandoned
+in the 1980s. At this point the Jamaican government looked to the
+International Monetary Fund for loans to support the economy. The
+problem with these loans is that, like any deal with the devil, there are
+debilitating strings attached. In order to access the money, nations have to
+agree to structural adjustments to their economy. These adjustments
+typically, and certainly in the case of Jamaica, include opening up trade and
+imports to foreign markets, slashing spending on welfare programmes and
+ending government subsidies to key industries like food production.62 The
+impact of these policies on Jamaica was devastating to the poor, with cuts to
+provision, and also collapsed agricultural production by flooding the market
+with foreign produce. In addition to increasing inequality and reducing the
+limited economic independence of the island, the series of loans from
+apparently benevolent Western institutions has led to Jamaica having one of
+the highest debt burdens in the world, currently at around 120% of Gross
+Domestic Product (GDP).63 As a result Jamaica spends ‘twice as much on
+debt repayments as it does on education and health combined’.64 The
+economic policy of Jamaica is largely dictated by external forces due to
+these loans, but the economic picture is even bleaker.
+In Jamaica the biggest industry by far is tourism, which accounts for
+30% of GDP, and employs almost a quarter of the total workforce.65 An
+overreliance on tourism is problematic due to the extent to which it makes a
+country dependent on outside forces. For example, the majority of
+investment in infrastructure in Jamaica is spent on the tourism trade,
+building hotels and facilities for visitors. A major road-building project was
+recently completed on the north coast, to connect the tourist side of the
+
+island to the airport. But this kind of investment neglects the less touristfriendly parts of the island, creating further exclusions. The other major
+problem with the tourist industry is that it is largely foreign owned,
+meaning that anywhere between 30% and 80% of the money spent in the
+industry ‘leaks’ out of Jamaica.66 The same is true for other exports, like
+the diminishing mineral deposits of bauxite.
+Foreign ownership of the key parts of the economy means that the
+biggest source of income for Jamaica is from remittances, which account
+for 30% of GDP.67 These are payments made by family members in the
+Jamaican Diaspora and also pensions to those who have retired to the island
+after working in the West. Therefore the Jamaican economy is being kept
+afloat by those who have migrated and kept economic ties. Importantly, this
+continued relationship depends on the countries to which migration has
+occurred continuing to welcome Jamaican migrants. In the case of the two
+primary countries for Jamaican migration, America and Britain, exactly the
+opposite trend is dominant in immigration policy. As fewer people migrate
+out, and the previous generations of migrants pass away, this vital source of
+income for the economy will decline. It is almost unimaginable to think
+what the impact of a growing population twinned with a steep decline in
+income will have on the island.
+Jamaica’s economic future is bleak, and the embrace of colonial
+nationalism has led to policies and ideas that are the definition of a cul-desac. One of the more depressing approaches to this nationalism is the
+pretence that the economy can become self-sufficient by streamlining and
+embracing neo-liberal austerity agendas. For example, Andre Haughton, an
+economics lecturer at the University of the West Indies, opined in his
+column in the Gleaner that ‘this year alone, the Government increased
+spending on social safety net projects to US$14.5 million; a fraction of this
+could be used to facilitate the establishment of social enterprises to produce
+niche goods and services for export’.68 Advocating that one of the most
+unequal countries in the world should cut back on its paltry welfare
+spending is problematic enough. Arguing that the money would be better
+spent in developing exportable commodities in a nation that is in a neocolonial dependency relationship with the rest of the world takes a special
+kind of short-sightedness. Jamaica, and the Caribbean as a whole, are net
+importers of fish.69 If an island nation cannot even control its waters then it
+is madness to expect it to be able to gain anything but oppression from the
+
+global economy. This is the problem with colonial nationalism; it creates
+the pretence that Jamaica can possibly be a self-functioning economy that
+can prosper on the global stage, even though all the evidence is to the
+contrary.
+Perhaps the best example of colonial nationalism is Jamaica’s National
+Diaspora policy. The basis of the policy is to ensure that ‘national identity,
+pride and cultural affinity with “Brand Jamaica” are tenets which will be
+embraced by all Jamaicans, at home and abroad, and future generations’.70
+The government has recognised that migration from Jamaica has kept the
+country afloat and is now making strengthening ‘national’ ties to those who
+have left a priority.
+Remittances are highlighted as an important aspect of Diaspora
+contributions, with the aim to develop the ‘legal and institutional
+mechanisms implemented to support the[ir] transmission, regulation,
+measurement’.71 However, the document also displays the government’s
+problems with individual remittances on a family or personal basis, and the
+damage that this can do to the nation-building project. In the particularly
+short section on remittances, given their centrality to the economy, the focus
+shifts to the ‘management’ of these payments and exploring ‘options for
+using a portion of remittances for investments created through partnerships
+with the government and financial institutions in Jamaica’.72 In the
+document there is an effort to shift the economic contribution away from an
+individual connection and towards a national idea of Jamaica, and using
+social ‘remittances, tourism and philanthropic engagements primarily in the
+sectors of health and education’.73
+In order to create a sustainable contribution from the Jamaican Diaspora,
+the policy also recognises the importance of ‘engendering national identity
+and cultural affinity among Jamaican descendants in the second generation
+and beyond, particularly the youth’.74 By creating this national affinity with
+Jamaica the aim is to encourage investment, philanthropy and partnership
+that will assure the country can succeed. At least the government is
+acknowledging that the survival of the island requires thinking beyond
+nation state boundaries. However, it is still based on a narrow conception of
+the nation. The entire basis of this project is the idea of ‘brand Jamaica’,
+and national unity as the mechanism for bringing in the Diaspora. The
+evidence of remittances is that the Diaspora, in particular the second
+
+generation, is personal, with money being sent to family members or in
+pension payments. There is no reason to assume that Black people born in
+Britain would have or want a national connection to Jamaica. Nations are
+always, in part, built on common culture and imagined bonds, but they are
+solidified by concrete realities of nationhood. The allure of nationhood is
+never enough, particularly when the second and third generations are often
+fighting for national status within the countries where they were born. If the
+fate of Jamaica lies with those born off the island embracing ‘brand
+Jamaica’ then the future is very bleak indeed. Even if it were possible to get
+this national buy-in from the Diaspora, it would remain a very limited and
+narrow form of colonial nationalism.
+One of the reasons the policy highlights that those outside of Jamaica are
+important is because ‘Diaspora capital markets can contribute significantly
+to national development by mobilizing savings for investments and
+providing long-term alternatives to facilitate wealth creation’.75 This is a
+recognition that out-migration has taken place to developed countries where
+there are more resources and the aim is to use the Diaspora to utilise access
+to this wealth to benefit Jamaica. The assumption appears to be that the
+Jamaican Diaspora has access to this capital, and has ignored the reality that
+Black people in places like Britain suffer severe forms of economic
+discrimination. If we cannot mobilise the resources of Britain for those of
+us in the country, there is little hope of us being able to spread their benefits
+to Jamaica.
+More importantly, what this idea entirely neglects is that the wealth that
+the Diaspora has access to is derived from the West exploiting countries like
+Jamaica through neo-colonial trade practices, effectively meaning that this
+is a policy of supporting the same system that impoverishes Jamaica, in an
+effort to enrich it. The same applies for all the areas of development in this
+policy, including remittances, tourism and philanthropy. The entire
+conception of Jamaica as a nation state, with its own Diaspora that can help
+better integrate the island into the global economic system is a form of neocolonialism. Jamaica is a creation of the Western imperial order, and
+therefore it cannot be the vehicle for its overthrow.
+Black Nationalism has all too often been conflated with Black radicalism,
+making it essential we began the book by drawing clear distinctions. The
+various forms of Black Nationalism are usually based on narrow concepts
+
+of the nation, which mean they do challenge the global social order. From
+the conservative idea of the ‘nation within a nation’ to the more militant
+arguments for land for African Americans, these politics can be
+accommodated within the status quo. Narrow forms of nationalism across
+the Diaspora and on the African continent present some of the most shortsighted and dangerous politics that promise to further embed Black people
+in the global system of racial oppression. Black radicalism must be based
+on a much broader idea of the nation, one that transcends the limits of the
+Western idea of the nation state, and unites Africa and its Diaspora to
+liberate all Black people across the globe.
+
+Chapter 2
+
+Pan-Africanism
+
+One of the most important books for introducing me to the politics of Black
+radicalism was Stokely Carmichael’s (he became Kwame Ture), Stokely
+Speaks. Up to this point I had avoided the vast array of Black political
+books commanding my parents’ bookshelf. I only picked up Stokely Speaks
+because the cover was so unintentionally funny. It had a red background
+with Stokely holding a shotgun over his head with both hands, complete
+with Afro and sunglasses. My teenage self was amused and started reading,
+expecting to find the content as ridiculous as the cover. Instead, the saying
+about books and their covers has never been truer and I was captivated from
+beginning to end. Over thirty years after it was published, thousands of
+miles away, its analysis rang out as though he was speaking to me about the
+day’s events from my living room setee. What really impressed was how
+the book outlined a politics of liberation that made practical sense. The
+subtitle of the work is From Black Power to Pan Africanism and he argued
+that the only logical conclusion of Black Power politics in the West was
+Pan-Africanism. Some of the most powerful words I recall from reading the
+book that first time are ‘a true revolutionary must provide an alternative, not
+just rhetoric condemning the existing system’.1 He outlines Pan-Africanism
+as an alternative, predicated on a land base and the ability to create a
+different political and economic system on the continent. Africa has been
+savaged by both the West and the East because of its wealth of resources,
+and in Stokely’s argument it is this wealth that made the continent uniquely
+placed to build a different model of society. Pan-Africanism was
+synonymous with Black radical politics, providing the substance behind the
+rhetoric.
+Pan-Africanism as the mode of the Black revolution has dominated my
+experience of activist circles since my first reading of Stokely Speaks. The
+Pan-African Congress Movement in Britain has been the standard bearer for
+work on the liberation of Africa. The fifth Pan-African Congress (PAC) in
+
+Manchester in 1945 has been elevated to an almost mythic status for its role
+in spurring liberation movements across the African continent. The recent
+commemorations of the seventieth anniversary re-lit this meeting in the
+radical imaginary and I got caught up in the hype, writing that ‘we need to
+revive the revolutionary spirit of the Pan-African Congress’.2 It is not
+difficult to see how the rhetoric of Pan-Africanism would be viewed as
+being at the forefront of the global movement against imperialism.
+Centred on a critique of European colonialism, the Pan-African
+movement certainly was at the heart of many of the African struggles for
+independence from colonialism. Shirley Graham DuBois summed up the
+Pan-African sentiment towards the European colonisers when she argued:
+‘They love our African sunshine, our beautiful broad rivers, our bright gold,
+sparkling diamonds, copper, magnesia, bauxite and oil. They do not love
+Africans or the Children of Africa – wherever they may be’.3 In his
+founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in 1964,
+Malcolm X proclaimed that ‘Africa will not go forward any faster than we
+[the Diaspora] will and we will not go forward any faster than Africa will.
+We have one destiny’.4 Pan-Africanism was seen to represent the
+revolutionary overthrow of imperialism on the African continent. PanAfricanism has become synonymous with movements such as Garveyism,
+which spread across the globe in the early twentieth century aiming to
+liberate ‘Africa for the Africans’.5
+Pan-Africanism, however, has a far more complicated history than being
+the revolutionary antidote to global racism.6 In much of the literature on the
+topic the consensus is that, rather than representing a clear set of politics,
+the movement has ‘no founder, or particular set of political tenets’ and so
+‘almost defies definition’.7 So broad is the realm of the Pan-African that it
+has been defined as including ‘the liberation of Africa; the economic, social
+and cultural regeneration of Africa; and the promotion of African unity and
+of African influence in world affairs’.8 These may all seem like worthwhile
+goals but Fanon warned that the main problem facing Africa in regard to
+independence was the lack of a coherent ideology.9 It is not enough to want
+to liberate Africa, the question is how we go about doing so. In order to
+begin to distinguish between the varying forms, Shepperson marked the
+difference between capital and small ‘p’ Africanism.10 Pan-Africanism with
+a capital letter marks the series of conferences and congresses that were
+
+started in London in 1900, while pan-Africanism captures the array of
+political movements that have put the unity of Africa and the Diaspora at
+their core.
+We must reject this orthodoxy of seeing Pan-Africanism as a wide range
+of different viewpoints and competing ideas. One of the most infuriating
+things about the way Black intellectual and political thought is understood
+is that we lump everything together as though it were one united history.
+The differences in how Africa is placed at the heart of Black politics are so
+diverse and contradictory it is an insult to think of them as being part of a
+whole. Instead, we should view Pan-Africanism only as the formal
+movement that may have had its roots before the first conference in 1900,
+but was launched at that point. Other traditions have different names, ideas
+and political bases. Importantly, to separate out the movement in this way is
+to trace a different reality than the one that has such a hold on the Black
+radical imaginary.
+Far from resulting in revolutionary politics in Africa, the legacy of PanAfricanism is the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and after its demise
+the African Union (AU). Quite rightly, both of these institutions have been
+heavily criticised for cementing imperialism on the African continent.11 It is
+not that Pan-Africanism has been too loosely defined so that it has been ‘coopted and used by the enemies of the African Revolution’,12 but that the
+movement has from its outset been one that has further embedded Africa
+into the system of oppression.
+Pan-Africanism as imperialism
+Britain has been an important site for the formal movement of PanAfricanism. The first Pan-African Conference and the second congress
+were convened in London, and perhaps the most influential meeting took
+place in Manchester in 1945.13 Britain as the location of the birthplace of
+organised Pan-Africanism is not a coincidence. Not only was the congress
+held in Britain, the seat of imperial power, it actually took place in the
+Palace of Westminster. This is not mere symbolism, but testament to the
+fact that the movement’s origins were not in direct conflict with the colonial
+administration. In many ways the forerunner to organised Pan-Africanism
+was not the politics of resistance embedded in slave revolts and anti-
+
+imperialism. Instead, it was in the imperial movement to resettle the
+formerly enslaved in the West back on the African continent. As explained
+in the previous chapter, efforts to ‘save’ Africa with enlightened African
+Americans were conceived as a solution to the supposed race problem in
+the nineteenth century. Far from representing a rejection of colonialism,
+these efforts were a collusion in the imperial project and essential to
+understanding the emergence of Pan-Africanism.
+The first Pan-African Conference was organised in Britain in 1900 and
+spearheaded by the barrister Henry Sylvester Williams.14 Though the aims
+of the conference included African unity and improving the conditions of
+those on the continent and in the Diaspora, the routes to achieving these lie
+more in the colonisation movement from America than in any radical
+politics of liberation. Williams saw one of the goals of Pan-Africanism as
+being to improve the relations between Europeans and Africans, not to
+overturn the oppressive relationship. He also wanted ‘to start a movement
+looking forward to securing all African races living in civilized countries
+their full rights and to promote their business interests’.15 Pan-Africanism
+was founded as a bourgeois project to bring modernisation to the African
+continent, within the framework of imperialism. There were subsequently
+Pan-African congresses held in London, Paris and New York. It was not
+until the fifth of these, in Manchester in 1945, that the delegates called for
+independence on the African continent. Up until this point they had argued
+for a form of trusteeship over the colonies, which would still be ruled by
+European powers. This was the liberal, gradualist, reformist approach of the
+civil rights movement being enacted on the world stage.
+Parallel to the emergence of Pan-Africanism there was a far more radical
+alternative that called for immediate independence and claimed ‘Africa for
+the Africans, at home and abroad’.16 The Garvey movement built the
+Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into a global
+organisation with over five million members across the African Diaspora, at
+its peak.17 Garvey’s message was similar to Pan-Africanism in that he
+planned for a physical return to the African continent, but not under the
+auspices of the colonial powers. Central to Garvey’s appeal was the
+rejection of the Westphalian notion of the nation state.18 Garvey aimed to
+create a global Black nation with Africa at its centre and a key part of this
+endeavour was the great conventions, which were held in New York from
+
+the 1920s.19 Unlike the smaller Pan-African congresses with their invited
+delegates from the limited bourgeois class of Black folk, these were mass
+events that drew thousands of people. The contrast here is vital to
+understanding the politics of Pan-Africanism. Due to Garvey’s embrace of
+Africa he is often incorrectly seen as a founder of Pan-Africanism. In fact,
+while Pan-Africanism developed at the time he was active, during the
+formative stages of the movement it rejected both him and his more radical
+ideas of Black sovereignty. The intellectual figure at the heart of PanAfricanism was W.E.B. Dubois, who was vehemently anti-Garvey, leading
+to a bitter personal rivalry.
+Garvey was an admirer of DuBois, who was actually part of the group
+that welcomed the American scholar on his visit to Jamaica in 1915.20
+When Garvey moved to Harlem he sought out Dubois in his offices at the
+Crisis magazine in order to see how the two could work together. His
+experience there was instructive to the differences between the two. Garvey
+was struck by the lack of Black people employed by the magazine, and
+Dubois was not keen to embrace Garvey.21 In fact, Dubois became one of
+Garvey’s fiercest critics, not only attacking his politics but also calling him
+stupid, ugly and black, in reference to his dark skin tone.22 This personal
+attack demonstrates some of the very limited racial politics of DuBois.
+Hallmarking his early (and continued to some extent later) work is the idea
+that:
+The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional
+men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all
+deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best
+of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the
+contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.23
+This notion of the ‘Best of the race’ elevating the masses is the kind of
+bourgeois sentiment that is the antithesis of Garveyism. Even more
+problematically, when civilisation is defined as proximity to Whiteness,
+these ideas also become entangled in the notion of colourism, where being
+phenotypically closer to Whiteness also becomes marked as a sign of
+advancement.24 Unfortunately, these sentiments are embedded within the
+early forms of Pan-Africanism, which involved bringing together these
+
+upright men to imagine the future for the African continent and Diaspora.
+While for Pan-Africanism, colourism may not play as central a role, the
+plan to colonise Africa with the more civilised Black people who had
+benefited from the West is at the core foundation of the movement. For all
+the problems of Garveyism, the movement always insisted on being rooted
+in mass appeal. Pan-Africanism has never achieved this, being mainly
+coordinated between the ‘Best of the race’ in formal settings.
+Britain as a location for the emergence of Pan-Africanism also speaks to
+the limitations of the movement. As one of the major imperial powers,
+Britain’s influence spreads across the African Diaspora. When PanAfricanism emerged in 1900, Britain was not limited to the shores of the
+British Isles. Large parts of Africa and the Caribbean were a part of
+Britain’s imperial project. Henry Sylvester Williams, born in Trinidad, was
+a barrister in South Africa and founded the first congress in London,25 and
+did all of this in Britain. It is not happenstance that London was the site for
+the first conference; given its status as the metropolis for the colonial
+outposts it was the logical venue.
+As the seat of British imperial power, London also had a central role in
+reproducing empire. Colonialism could only be carried out with the help of
+a native bourgeois class that would impart Western wisdom in the colonies.
+The civil servants and future leaders of Africa and the Caribbean were
+trained and educated in the West, with Britain being a key landing point.
+The Pan-African congresses in Europe were therefore mostly made up of
+this class, the appointed colonial elite. Even some of the more celebrated
+anti-colonial leaders like Jomo Kenyatta received their education in
+Britain.26 Attempts to hold the congresses on African soil were stopped by
+the imperial powers, worried that ideas of African unity were too dangerous
+on the continent itself.27 Separated from the masses, the congresses were
+free to develop along lines compatible with imperialism.
+Dubois himself admitted his earlier problematic view of the African
+continent. Writing towards the end of his life in 1959 he explained that:
+‘Once I thought of you Africans as children, whom we educated African
+Americans would lead to liberty. I was wrong. We could not even lead
+ourselves, much less you. Today I see you rising under your own
+leadership, guided by your own brains.’28 The fact that this realisation had
+to come to Dubois should be telling. Interestingly, Kwame Nkrumah, the
+first president of Ghana and a close friend of DuBois, saw his politics as
+
+representing ‘bourgeois Negro reformism’.29 In his celebration of DuBois at
+the sixth Pan-African Congress, Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania,
+pointed out that he was not a ‘mass or popular leader’ and limited his
+achievements to ‘the advances towards human dignity which black people
+have recorded’.30 This is one of the greatest limitations of DuBois; from the
+beginning his work aimed to prove that Black people were equal to, and
+deserving of, the same treatment as Whites. He was not interested in
+overthrowing the system of imperialism; he was fundamentally committed
+to carving out a space of equality for Black people within it. We can see this
+in his final vision of Pan-Africanism, where he calls for a re-engagement
+with the congress movement,
+The new series of Pan African congresses would seek common aims
+of progress for Black Africa, including types of political control,
+economic cooperation, cultural development, universal education and
+freedom from religious dogma. The consequent Pan Africa, working
+together as independent units should seek to develop a new African
+economy and cultural center standing between Europe and Asia,
+taking from and contributing to both.31
+For Dubois, Africa cannot stand on its own feet, and needs to find support
+from either the West or the East. He even talks of having to ‘starve a while
+longer’ in order to extract the best deal.32 This is not a vision of overturning
+the system of imperialism, but rather one where Africa can pull itself up to
+the level where it can fully integrate into the global order. The goal is a
+form of equality and not a politics of liberation. It is for this reason that
+‘DuBois’s pan-Africanist activities fit squarely within the realm of classical
+liberal thought’,33 and has contributed to the development of a Pan-African
+movement that never challenged imperialism. To fully understand the limits
+of Pan-Africanism it is necessary to examine the role of the nation state in
+the movement.
+Colonial nation state
+
+At the momentous fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945 the
+tenor of the movement changes. There is a declaration that independence is
+needed for Africa and many of the delegates, including Nkrumah, Nyerere,
+Kenyatta and Hastings Banda from Malawi, went on to lead their countries
+to independence.34 Though there was only one more recognised congress,
+in Tanzania in 1974, the movement continued through the legacy of formal
+Pan-African organisation on the continent after independence. The
+preceding Pan-African congresses laid the foundation for a politics where
+Africans ‘entrusted their new found independence in the colonial state,
+despite the fact that none of these states had any existence prior to their
+invention by colonial regimes’.35
+The container within which independence was allowed to develop in
+Africa was the colonial nation state. While there were a number of
+liberation struggles, Europeans were often happy to turn over the running of
+African nations to the natives.36 The limits of the nation state set enough
+boundaries to control against revolutionary notions of African unity. The
+impact of accepting nation state boundaries was to balkanise the continent,
+allowing imperial powers to control small territories with limited power. It
+also solidified national boundaries as artificial divides pitting the
+proliferation of nations against one another. Pan-African leaders at the time,
+such as Nyerere, insisted that ‘the African national State is an instrument
+for the unification of Africa, and not for dividing Africa’.37 The stated aim
+was to use the development of national movements to independence as a
+platform for developing a more fundamental African nationalism, which
+would permeate the colonial borders. However, in much the same way as
+communist revolutions tend to get stuck in the dictatorship of the
+proletariat, Pan-Africanism remained firmly rooted in the colonial nation
+state. As Diop noted, ‘for all the fine public statements, multifarious
+individual and general interests are at work to make people cling to the
+established frontiers of the various territories’.38
+From the outset of Pan-Africanism on the continent there were
+competing nations and groups. The most notable split was between what
+came to be known as the Monrovia and Casablanca groups of countries.
+The Casablanca bloc met in Morocco in 1961 and included nations such as
+Ghana, Egypt and Guinea whose leaders were open to a more fundamental
+cooperation of African states, under a federal system. Meanwhile, a group
+
+of nations met in Monrovia, also in 1961, composed of Nigeria and much of
+Francophone Africa.39 The setting of Liberia is more than symbolic given
+that the country had been the site for one of the largest settlements in the
+drive to colonise Africa with formerly enslaved Africans from America.
+This group was steadfastly opposed to the federal approach and insisted on
+maintaining nation state boundaries and sovereignty.
+Founded in 1962, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) officially
+brought together the disparate Casablanca and Monrovia groups. This
+formal commitment was seen by many as a radical step towards unity.
+Malcolm X took inspiration, explaining that the ‘organisation consists of all
+independent African states who reached the agreement to submerge all
+differences and combine their efforts toward eliminating from the continent
+of Africa colonialism and all vestiges of oppression and exploitation being
+suffered by African people’.40 So impressed was Malcolm with the OAU
+that he named his organisation to bring radical change in the West the
+Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm’s optimism, however,
+proved to be misplaced. This is one of the few miscalculations that
+Malcolm made in his analysis of the system of racial oppression, but is
+connected to his other misstep of having too much faith in the United
+Nations.
+By no means was Malcolm alone in putting stock in the promises
+enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of the UN. Liberal and more radical
+movements across the globe saw the body, with its one member, one vote
+system, as a vehicle for holding the West to account.41 Given the location of
+the headquarters in New York, the UN became a focal point for Black
+political movements in America. Malcolm spoke of taking America to the
+‘world court’,42 and after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961
+there was a protest inside the UN building involving high-profile Black
+activists including Maya Angelou. It is true, and remains so, that in the
+General Assembly it is one nation, one vote and the West is outnumbered
+by the rest of the nations in the world.
+In the areas where the General Assembly has control there have been
+limited benefits to the global majority. For instance, a UN Decade for
+People of African Descent was declared from 2015. Part of the remit is to
+call governments to recognise the impacts of their enslavement of African
+people and to consider paying reparations. However, the existence of the
+decade is also a reminder of the limits of the UN. There is no money to
+
+support these endeavours and no obligation on member states to do
+anything for the decade, much less consider reparatory justice. The decade
+is just a rhetorical tool, something that may make us feel empowered but
+does nothing to empower us. The power in the UN does not lie in the
+General Assembly. There is no chance that the West would hand over
+control of world affairs to an actual majority vote. Real decision-making
+power in global affairs lies in the Security Council and specifically in the
+hands of the five permanent members: the United States, Russia, France,
+China and the United Kingdom. While there are ten other member states
+that are elected to two-year terms, the permanent members all have the
+power of veto over globally important resolutions that the rest of the UN
+must adhere to.
+The permanent members are a snapshot in time of the bridge from the
+old colonial order dominated by Britain and France to the emergence of the
+neo-colonial empire led by America. It also shows the cold war
+compromises that were struck between East and West, capitalism and
+communism. In the 1960s, with the battle for the economic future of the
+globe taking place, this compromise may have represented a victory in
+itself, especially given the faith that Black radical movements placed in
+communist countries. However, with communism effectively finished and
+China and Russia folding into the neo-colonial global order it is now clear
+that the Security Council members have no interest in the liberation of
+Africa. Even if the UN did decide to act as a control on the neo-colonial
+adventures of member states, it has proven itself to be completely
+incapable. Without the support of a UN resolution America led the invasion
+of Iraq in 2003, which was effectively illegal. As much hand-wringing as
+there was from the international community, nothing was done and no one
+has been charged despite the chaos unleashed. There is no salvation to be
+found in any international body led by the West.
+As fundamental to the issue of power within the UN is the problem that
+it is based entirely on the Western model of the nation state. Particularly on
+the African continent this means cementing one of the most serious hurdles
+to radical political action. The prospect of mathematical superiority in the
+General Assembly actually led some in the movements for African
+liberation to celebrate the balkanisation of the continent.43 The more
+countries Africa was divided into the more votes it had at the UN. It should
+
+be a stark warning sign that the UN incentivised the break-up of Africa
+under the illusion of global influence.
+The UN works because it guarantees nation state sovereignty to each
+member, and nations are seeking protection for this statehood. In order for
+the OAU to bring the newly independent African nations together it also
+had to deal with the issue of sovereignty. The way this was achieved was to
+insert into the constitution of the OAU the principle of ‘non-interference in
+the internal affairs of individual states’.44 This nation state compromise
+blunted the radicalism of the OAU by promoting colonial state nationhood.
+As Adoghame argued, ‘the dilemma of African post-colonial states is that
+they have not really abandoned the colonial logic of oppression and
+domination … One major obstacle to African integration is the fear of
+losing state sovereignty’.45
+As much as is made of the Monrovia group leading the charge towards
+neo-colonial statehood, the Casablanca group was just as complicit. If the
+principle of African nationalism beyond the nation state was so important, it
+would not have ceded to the demands of the Monrovia group. So
+fundamental is the issue of sovereignty that basing unity on the premise of
+individual nation states undermines any point of having a collective. Even
+the preferred creation of a federation of states by the Casablanca group
+would have maintained colonial borders. They may have had less meaning
+but it is instructive that they would still have been the vehicle for African
+nationalism. The uncomfortable truth is that most of the leaders who
+attended the much heralded fifth Pan-African Congress did not strive for
+African nationalism and revolutionary change, but became heads of African
+colonial nation states and remained in power well beyond any reasonable
+period of time. The only leader to whom this does not apply is Nkrumah,
+who remained a stalwart for revolutionary nationalism until he was
+overthrown in a coup. Unsurprisingly, it appears as though accepting the
+limits of colonial nation statehood was a prerequisite for maintaining power
+in Africa.
+Rather than representing a revolutionary body on the African continent
+the OAU played a role in facilitating the continued grip of imperialism.
+Malcolm recognised that many of the key players were ‘considered Uncle
+Toms’,46 with a number being complicit in the assassination of the
+revolutionary leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba.47 He had hoped that
+uniting the continent would lead to differences being erased in the fight
+
+against colonialism. It is interesting that, looking at the case of Africa,
+Malcolm becomes accepting to the notion of compromising ideology. Just a
+few months earlier he had celebrated China as one ‘of the toughest,
+roughest, most feared countries on this earth’. The reason he gave for this
+was that there were ‘no more Toms in China’, because they had been wiped
+out in the revolution.48 On founding the OAAU, however, the idea of sitting
+down with reactionary, traitorous leaders becomes ‘maturity’. The OAU
+could serve as a case study in how unity is not worth sacrificing to ideology.
+The failure of the OAU to challenge imperialism is not simply down to a
+compromise between competing ideas in order to promote unity. The
+problem is that the ideology of Pan-Africanism was always suited to
+maintain and not challenge the imperial social order. Given its historical
+roots, ideas and the leadership of African countries there was little hope of
+revolutionary nationalism being embraced in the movement. Even at the
+most radical of the congresses, held in Tanzania in 1974, the ideological
+limitations of Pan-Africanism were apparent.
+Held at a time of armed struggle in Angola and Mozambique, the sixth
+PAC was the largest of the congresses, drawing in over 1400 delegates from
+the African continent, South America, Europe, the Caribbean and the
+United States. The congress came out in support of the armed struggle and
+also professed a commitment to ideas of socialism.49 However, for all the
+rhetoric of liberation that came from the congress it did not practically offer
+support to revolutionary movements. If anything it was hallmarked by the
+differences and disunity that have been features of Pan-Africanism in
+general. There was little agreement amongst the delegates and the African
+American delegation came in for particular criticism for being too large and
+disorganised.50 The sixth PAC also marked the last time an agreed congress
+took place. After this, formalised Pan-Africanism became crystallised in the
+OAU and later its successor the African Union.
+As with many progressive Black movements, Pan-Africanism became
+obsessed with Marxism, which will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6
+when we discuss the concept of African socialism. The infatuation with
+socialism in Pan-Africanism also had implications for questions of how
+race and racism were understood within the movement. Pan-Africanism
+developed alongside and was partly shaped by its relationship to
+Garveyism. While the movement was led in the West, with a heavy
+influence from African American academics like DuBois, ‘Garveyism was
+
+an embarrassment to it’; but when it moved to the African continent Garvey
+became ‘almost an essential element’.51 Garvey’s influence on the African
+continent cannot be overstated, with the red, black and green that appears in
+flags across the continent being a testament to this. Garvey’s politics of race
+were uncompromising and always at odds with a Marxist analysis. For
+Garvey it was race first, and he saw Black people coming together on the
+continent to liberate themselves.52 This has put him at odds with Marxists
+in early Pan-Africanism such as George Padmore, and Garvey’s stance on
+race was also heavily criticised.
+Garvey’s view of race was controversial because he appears to reify the
+European conceptions of racial difference. He was vehemently against race
+mixing so as not to dilute the Blackness of the Diaspora. His belief in this
+was so strong that he even met with the Ku Klux Klan in America to
+discuss their similarities on the issue.53 This problematic view of race led to
+accusations of racialism, that he reinforced the prejudices of the oppressor
+and that his politics were therefore ultimately regressive.54 As revered as
+Garvey became in Pan-Africanism once the movement shifted to the
+African continent, there are clear denunciations of unity around race.
+Two of the main speeches at the sixth PAC were given by Nyerere and
+Sekou Toure, president of Guinea. Nyerere makes direct reference to
+fighting against ideas of ‘racialism’ in his explanation that the congress had
+‘non-black participants, and has to concern itself with oppression affecting
+any man, of any color’.55 Toure railed against Leopold Senghor’s concept
+of negritude when he argued that ‘the racists of Southern Africa and the
+poets of Negritude all drink from the same fountain of racial prejudice and
+serve the same cause’.56 Though he does not mention Garvey, this is clearly
+logic used to critique his ideas of race and unity.
+The embrace of socialism should be seen in the context of rearticulating
+a rejection of Garveyism within Pan-Africanism. Marxism provided a
+theoretical basis for the renunciation of Garvey, as he prioritised race over
+class. The American delegation’s dogmatic insistence on scientific
+socialism at the sixth PAC is emblematic of this reaction.57 The rejection of
+Garveyism and the importance of Blackness had important consequences
+for Pan-Africanism.
+The Third World movement offered a promise of a unified resistance to
+imperialism from the darker parts of the globe.58 Pan-African leaders
+
+embraced this promise as early as the Bandung Afro-Asian conference in
+1954,59 and continued to do so in aligning with communism. As previously
+explained, this faith was ill-conceived and led to a path of further
+exploitation. By not rooting the politics around Blackness, the movement
+never safeguarded the interests of the Black people on the continent or in
+the Diaspora.
+The overt rejection of racialism is also one of the reasons why the
+movement became trapped in the colonial nation state. As we will discuss
+in the next chapter, for all of Garvey’s flaws, once you view the Black
+nation as consisting of ‘400,000,000 men and women with warm blood
+coursing through their veins’ it becomes impossible to be contained by the
+nation state.60 The irony is that in the desire to avoid racialism, embrace
+Marxism and make links to the Third World, Pan-Africanism needlessly
+rejected the one concept that could have provided the revolutionary glue to
+the project. Rather than redefining sovereignty, Pan-Africanism developed
+into one of the most frustrating movements centred on narrow nationalism.
+Pan-Africanism as neo-colonialism
+The African Union was launched in 2002, after the failure of the OAU to
+deal with the issues on the continent. The elusive search for African unity
+was spearheaded by Gadhafi in Libya, but carried over all the problems of
+its predecessor. The AU continued to enshrine colonial nation statehood as
+the vehicle for unity and if anything further embraced the logic of Western
+imperialism. The OAU arose at a time of global revolution, with armed
+struggle taking place on the African continent. There was real hope for an
+overturning of the capitalist world order, and though the OAU did nothing
+to aid in this endeavour it had to give a nod to more radical ideas. In
+contrast, the AU formed at a time of complete Western domination, after the
+collapse of not only the revolutionary struggles in Africa, but the fall of the
+Soviet Union and China’s wholehearted embrace of the Western economic
+and colonial model. All the dissenting voices to the tide of capitalism had at
+this point been assassinated or run out of office in Western-backed coups.
+The AU never had to present a façade of revolutionary politics and quickly
+set about fully integrating the future of the continent into the global system
+of oppression.
+
+Prior to the founding of the AU, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa
+was devising a new way forward for Africa’s development, creating a
+Millennium Action Plan in 2001. Demonstrating the fatal flaw in Mbeki’s
+efforts was that he was attempting to create a strategy that ‘both George
+Bush and Robert Mugabe would sign up to’.61 He had to appease the
+dominant Western power on the one hand, and on the other the demagogic
+leader who seized power in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle only after
+the revolutionary leaders had been killed. There is perhaps no better
+metaphor for the limits of Pan-Africanism. This plan was endorsed by the
+OAU before its demise, being fully adopted by the AU and launched as the
+New Plan for African Development (NEPAD); it became fully integrated
+into the structures of the Union in 2010.
+To understand the limits of NEPAD we need only listen to Olusegun
+Obasanjo, former president of Nigeria, who praised the programme for
+focusing on the key issues of ‘bad governance, democracy deficit,
+corruption, lack of transparency and poor leadership’.62 His analysis of the
+problems facing the continent entirely adopted the Western paradigm of
+development. In this model, Africa is poor because it is backwards and has
+not gone through the necessary industrial, scientific and political
+revolutions that have made the West exceptional. This is the classic logic
+from the Enlightenment, which promotes the idea that knowledge is
+produced in Europe by the great dead White men and spread out to the less
+advanced, savage parts of the world. In order to succeed, therefore, Africa
+needs to learn the lessons from the West and accept its benevolent helping
+hand.
+A doctrine called modernisation theory has come to dominate how we
+understand international development, which was developed by Rostow in
+the 1960s. The key tenets of the theory are that backwards countries need to
+move from their position as ‘traditional societies’ through a ‘drive to
+maturity’, eventually arriving at the ‘age of high mass consumption’.63 Just
+in case it is not clear that this is very much a hierarchical process, the
+transition is depicted as an ‘evolutionary ladder’ that the savages must
+scale. It is quite literally social Darwinism on a global level. Importantly,
+the essential element to so-called development is that the West has to come
+in and provide the necessary industrial and financial aid to set the
+conditions for economic development. As much work on development
+theory has evolved since Rostow, it is indisputable that this basic premise
+
+still drives the development industry. Whether it is on the nation state, notfor-profit or transnational level, aid is dispensed on the premise that the
+West knows best. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
+Bank have built a formidable reputation for dictating economic policy to
+developing nations in return for assistance in the form of loans. This advice
+always looks the same: liberalise the economy by removing trade barriers
+and state assistance; open up to foreign imports; remove what little state
+support existed by enforcing extreme austerity measures; and foster
+‘democratic’ models of governance. The technical term for this package of
+aid has been dubbed the ‘Washington consensus’, named because it is the
+proscription of the DC-based IMF, World Bank and the American treasury.
+Of course, this entire paradigm is utter nonsense and ignores the role that
+the West has played in the impoverishment of Africa. The continent is not
+poor because of corruption, but due to rampant colonial and neo-colonial
+economics that have destroyed any possibility of prosperity. The current
+existence of Africa is one entirely manufactured in order to promote the
+development of Western imperialism. Science and industry may have been
+central to the emergence of the West, but they were both built on the three
+pillars of genocide, slavery and colonialism: genocide of the natives of the
+Americas, where 80% of the population was erased to make way for
+Western expansion;64 the transatlantic slave trade, which for three centuries
+enriched the West on the backs of African flesh to unparalleled levels of
+wealth;65 and colonialism, which provided the markets, labour and
+resources necessary to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. The West
+was built and is maintained on the oppression of the African continent,
+underdeveloped by design to provide sustenance to global capital.66
+It would also be wrong to see these horrors as acts restricted to the
+distant past. For one thing they continue to shape the world today. Africa
+would not exist in its current form were it not for borders imposed by
+European powers, and also would not be the most underpopulated continent
+without transatlantic slavery killing or forcibly removing countless millions.
+The wealth extracted from the continent during slavery and colonialism did
+not just disappear; it is the foundation of the current inequalities. Africa was
+purposefully held back from developing, with the only infrastructure
+designed to take wealth out of the continent. Even if formal independence
+actually marked a removal of Western domination from Africa, the damage
+caused by slavery and colonialism still has far-reaching consequences
+
+today. But the end of Empire and direct rule did not signal the death of
+Western oppression in Africa. Domination continued, in a different form
+known as neo-colonialism. Africa is still under the control of the West, both
+economically and politically.
+Rather than providing a helping hand for poorer countries, the
+development initiatives are actually neo-colonial tools to further embed
+systems of oppression across the globe. Ghana, covered in the introduction,
+would be a case in point. The country went to the global institutions looking
+for money to develop its rice production and the opening up of the markets
+to American rice ended up destroying the industry, further developing only
+the nation’s dependency on the West. Ghana ended up owing the institutions
+crippling debts in return for destroying its rice industry.
+Ghana is far from the only case of the destruction on the continent by the
+IMF and the World Bank; we could pick out almost any developing country
+as an example. After independence in 1980 Zimbabwe managed to halve
+infant mortality, preside over a growing economy and had no problems with
+food security during the 1980s.67 The economy of Zimbabwe was by no
+means perfect, but it went to the IMF and the Word Bank for a loan after
+sluggish growth. The country received the money with all the strings that
+are usually attached. Amongst other things Zimbabwe had to open up to
+foreign trade, abolish subsidies for key industries like farming and cut
+government spending. Just some of the results of this action were to
+drastically reduce healthcare and education spending, cut a quarter of public
+sector jobs and collapse wages across the country. With reduced public
+spending the number of women dying in childbirth doubled from 1990 to
+1993, life expectancy fell from sixty-one to forty-eight and the vast
+majority of children did not attend secondary school because of the
+introduction of fees. To make matters worse, all of this social pain did not
+result in any economic gain. After the loans Zimbabwe fell into recession,
+manufacturing and farming declined and even foreign direct investment
+declined during the 1990s. On top of all of this, Zimbabwe was left with
+crippling debts from taking out loans that significantly damaged the
+economy and the life chances of the population. It is easy to blame Mugabe
+for hyperinflation after he kicked out the White farmers, but that disaster
+had been years in the making due to the neo-colonial claws that are so
+deeply embedded in Zimbabwe.
+
+When Malcolm stopped condemning individual White people as devils
+he could easily have reserved the term for the IMF and the World Bank.
+These two institutions have decimated the developing world, allowing
+corporations to exploit resources and markets while trapping poor countries
+into unsustainable debt. But when you make a deal with the devil the only
+thing you can be assured of is pain and suffering.
+The very concept of African nations owing any debt to the West is
+absurd. The West enriched itself through exploitation and Africa is clearly
+owed sizeable reparations for the exploitation of labour and resources and
+the damage caused to the continent. But reality is not shaped by what is
+just, rather simply by what is. Once we accept that Africa is poor because
+the West is rich then it is entirely impossible to conceive of any action the
+West would take to transform the situation on the continent. Liberation can
+only come at the expense of the prosperity of the West. In academic
+discussions much is made of the shift from production to consumption in
+Western economies. However, neither is possible without resources, and
+Africa remains the continent richest in mineral wealth. None of the
+technology that the West is so proud of could be produced without the
+wealth literally stolen from the ground in Africa. If the West had to pay a
+fair price for these resources then the entire edifice of Western capitalism
+would crumble.
+In order to maintain control of Africa the West has used direct tactics
+such as the assassination of revolutionary leaders like Patrice Lumumba in
+the Congo or supporting coups like that which deposed Nkrumah in Ghana.
+However, political violence has not been the preferred or necessary method
+for reproducing neo-colonial leadership. Any radical analysis must
+completely do away with any notion of Western-led development, which is
+why one of the most insidious features of neo-colonialism is the continued
+training of future African leaders in Western countries.
+The entire structure of Western education is designed to maintain and
+reproduce the oppressions upon which the system is based. Students from
+Africa come with good intentions to learn about systems of governance and
+development that can improve conditions at home. However, they leave
+poisoned with economic and political ideas created to continue the
+oppression of the continent. In fact the roots of neo-colonial education are
+so deep that they have probably already been trained into these ways of
+thinking in Africa before entering Western universities. White rule is not
+
+necessary when the mechanisms of knowledge production are so tightly
+controlled that the system can reproduce itself through the very population
+that is trying to overcome its oppression. There is nothing worse that the
+future leaders of Africa could fill their head with than the propaganda
+which disguises itself as international development.
+Given the Duboisian and colonisation roots of Pan-Africanism, the
+embrace of Western ideas of development in the AU should come as no
+surprise. In researching this book I came across an edited collection, PanAfricanism Reconsidered, which draws together papers from a Pan-African
+conference hosted by the American Society of African Culture in the 1960s.
+Not only were some of the contributors quoting Rostow but the man
+himself actually presented a paper. It was called ‘Some History Lessons for
+Africa’, and he argued the need on the continent for ‘men and women
+trained appropriately and motivated to operate a modern society’.68
+Obviously, not all of the movement embraced his ideas, but the fact that he
+could even be entertained at such an event points to the extreme limits of
+Pan-Africanism.
+The AU is effectively based on a model of nation state cooperation,
+which aims to fully integrate into the global economy. The key word in
+NEPAD is the partnerships that lie at the core of the supposedly new
+strategy for development. The agency is meant to be an African initiative
+but the partnerships it is seeking to form are with the G8, Western
+developed countries whose resources are seen as necessary to drive
+economic growth. Before he was deposed Gadhafi registered a defiant tone
+for NEPAD, proclaiming that Africa would ‘accept help, but we refuse
+conditions. We are not beggars’.69 Rhetorically, NEPAD is meant to
+represent a break with the neo-colonial relationship, where Africa decided
+the projects and engaged in meaningful partnerships with the West to
+deliver them. Any real hopes that this would happen were dashed very
+quickly when the G8 refused to back specific projects, like a hydroelectric
+dam in the Congo, in favour of more vague and general commitments to
+aid. They insisted on conditions for their funding, including only supporting
+countries with a track record of ‘good governance and economic
+performance’.70 The G8 was also keen to emphasise the role of good
+governance and security on the continent and gloss over the need for
+infrastructure development, food security and schools and hospitals. The
+fundamental problem with NEPAD is that rather than recasting the
+
+relationship with the West it is ultimately a continuation of the imperial
+legacy of Pan-Africanism. It is a strategy of going cap in hand to the West
+for billions of dollars of investment, while accepting all of the neo-colonial
+conditions which have so disabled African progress.71 NEPAD’s complete
+adoption of the neo-colonial framework of African development is the
+logical conclusion of Pan-Africanism: a bourgeois, colonial nation state-led
+enterprise that looks to further integrate into the oppressive world system,
+rather than to overturn it.
+Part of the reason that Pan-Africanism has been embraced as radicalism
+is because of the assumption that embracing Africa must represent a radical
+politics. We all too often act as though African unity in and of itself must
+lead to revolutionary politics. This was one of the few limitations of
+Malcolm X’s work and why he was more optimistic about the OAU than he
+should have been. Africa is a place, it is not a politics. If we only focus on
+unity then it is easy to develop a politics like Pan-Africanism, which
+compromises any radical analysis to keep the ‘uncle Toms’ at the table. It is
+certainly true that in order to rule the continent Western powers have used
+strategies to divide and conquer, but simply coming together does not
+represent revolutionary change. National unity within the colonial nation
+state was used to control the independence process in the same way that
+Pan-African unity has been used to bring the continent into the global
+system of oppression. Unity is not enough; we need clear politics and
+ideology if a movement is to produce radical change.
+As dispiriting as this journey from the Pan-African Conference in
+London to the formation of the AU and NEPAD has been, it is an essential
+step to charting a truly radical politics of Blackness. Too often we look for
+the positives in our history and find salvation in the rhetoric rather than the
+reality. There is not a number of different Pan-Africanisms, there is a clear
+history, tradition and doctrine that explains the current neo-colonial version
+of unity. There have certainly been competing ideas and politics for African
+unity and revolution, but to cast them all in the same mould as PanAfricanism actually does them a disservice. Pan-Africanism may not be the
+radical programme it is heralded as being, but there are movements which
+have radically redefined sovereignty that form the basis for a Black radical
+approach to nationhood and the liberation of Africa and its Diaspora.
+
+Chapter 3
+
+Black is a Country
+
+‘That’s offensive, you can’t say that’ came the interruption from the man in
+the front row who was so angry it looked as though he only came to the talk
+to tell me I was wrong. ‘There are too many countries in Africa alone to say
+that “Black is a Country”, that is what the Europeans think that we are all
+the same.’ At this point I hadn’t even started the talk, which was being held
+in Harriet Tubman bookshop in Handsworth, Birmingham. The angry
+audience member was from Zimbabwe and his frustration demonstrated the
+extent to which the nation state is such a powerful force in how we
+understand the world. ‘Country’ is taken to mean the nation state, best
+summarised by Smith’s five components: ‘an historic territory or homeland;
+common myths and historical memories; a common, mass public culture;
+common legal rights and duties for all members; and a common economy
+with territorial mobility for members’.1 For the man who challenged me on
+the title of the talk, to say that Black was a country erased the ‘national’
+standing that we have all become so invested in. There is no passport, no
+currency, no elections for the nation of Black, nothing that we are trained to
+cherish and obey in the nation state framework, so the idea seems foreign to
+us. In the previous chapter we explored how the trappings of the colonial
+nation state were a key tool used to entice African leaders into maintaining
+the neo-colonial oppression. The same is true for the masses, which are sold
+the idea of a national belonging that separates them from the rest of the
+continent and the Diaspora. We take for granted the reality of the nation
+state and believe, because we are told, that the millionaire bankers in the
+south of Britain are connected to the poor migrant workers picking cockles
+on the beaches in the north. To question the reality of the nation is to
+challenge some of the basic assumptions about how we understand the
+world. But as ingrained as these ideas have become, it does not take too
+much to unravel them. As I got into the talk and explained the argument and
+the weak foundation upon which our ideas of nation are built, I could see
+
+my accuser’s body language change. By the time I had come to the end of
+the talk he was interrupting me again, this time to tell me that we
+experienced the same issues across the Diaspora because ‘Black is a
+country’. In this chapter we will explore the idea of the global Black nation,
+an alternative construction of nationhood that is absolutely essential to the
+politics of Black radicalism.2
+Empires not nations
+One of the greatest myths at the heart of Western knowledge is that the
+treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, brought in the era of sovereign,
+separate nation states which became the driving force of the modern world.3
+The emergence of the great nations give immense pride to those embedded
+in nationalist projects in the present day. According to former British Prime
+Minister David Cameron, Britain is the country that ‘launched the
+Enlightenment, that abolished slavery, that drove the industrial revolution,
+that defeated fascism’.4 The dangers of the nation state go much further
+than promoting such misty-eyed, rose-tinted reminiscences.
+We have fallen into the trap of ‘methodological nationalism’, in which
+we ‘equate society with nation-state, and see states and their governments
+as the cornerstones of analysis’.5 But there are a number of problems with
+treating the nation state as though it is a natural site for analysis, which
+must be viewed as a social construction. What becomes key to a discussion
+about the concept of nation is how ‘particular definition[s] often favour one
+group (in terms of interests and identities) at the expense of the claims of
+another’.6 It turns out that the cultural and linguistic sameness central to
+classic understandings of nation exist in less than 10% of countries
+recognised by the United Nations. In order to understand this, the role of
+Western imperialism must be acknowledged. While promoting an ideal
+form of the culturally unified nation, Western powers enforced artificial
+national boundaries on continents like Africa, as we explored in the
+previous chapter. In fact, during the root period of the Western mythic
+nation, the colonial era, there were in truth very few nations.7 Most Western
+states were in reality empires, which do not adhere to any of Smith’s mythic
+five components, with the colonies being subjected to entirely different
+forms of national belonging than the metropolis.
+
+Once we understand the nation state as a controlling idea, rather than a
+reality; an ideology, not a natural creation, then we can begin to undo the
+dominance it has on how we understand the world. The hallmark of
+Western imperialism is a system of cooperation between so-called nation
+states in the service of White domination. On the surface it may seem as
+though there has been conflict between the nations of West, but these have
+been wars for the resources taken from the collective system of Western
+oppression. For instance, Britain and France battled for supremacy over the
+seas and colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two
+nations’ slave colonies were in direct competition in producing
+commodities for the world market, and the threat of one nation invading the
+other’s territories always had to be accounted for. But despite all of this,
+over half of the enslaved Africans in French colonies were taken there by
+British ships, meaning French slavery could not have survived without the
+support of Britain.8 The transatlantic slave trade was a system collectively
+maintained so that Western powers could engorge themselves. Even
+countries that were not directly involved in the trade in African flesh
+enriched themselves off the profits from the system.
+We often talk about globalisation as if the interconnectedness of the
+world today is something new, but ‘what is more global than a few
+European countries colonising almost all of Africa, Asia, Australia and the
+Americas and organising them into a hierarchical world system of nationstates?’9 The IMF and the World Bank may be the most blatant collective
+tools of Western oppression, but they are following in a long tradition.
+After the First World War, in the ‘scramble for Africa’, victorious
+European powers doled out German-owned territory. The treatment of
+Germany after the First World War was a major component in stoking the
+German nationalism that resulted in the barbarous Nazi Party. Again,
+though, we should not pretend that the Nazis, and their brutal final solution,
+were unique to the German national ideology. Racial science, a subject that
+was accepted across Western universities as valid, lay at the heart of the
+persecution of the Jews. Eugenicists, like Francis Galton at Britain’s
+University College London, were key to developing the logic that led to the
+extermination of six million Jews. Concentration camps had been
+developed by the British during the Boer War in South Africa, and lest we
+forget that genocide is at the foundation of the Western project. The
+
+holocaust is an expression of the logic of Western imperialism, the
+collective system that created race in order to facilitate conquest.10
+One of the most patronising and dishonest parts of British nationalism is
+the erasure of the colonies’ contribution to both world wars. The sentiment
+in the period after the war that servicemen were losing out to the foreigners
+in terms of housing sums up the national ignorance on this issue. Troops
+from the Empire fought and died in both world wars as well as fully
+contributing to the war efforts. This should come as no surprise given that
+the colonies were a part of Britain, and designed to support crown and
+country. After Britain needed to be rebuilt it again turned to the colonies for
+the necessary labour, inviting workers into the mother country in large
+numbers for the first time. The NHS is the perfect example of a so-called
+British staple that could not exist without support from the Empire. A
+significant proportion of doctors and nurses are still born in the former
+colonies, matching a trend that goes back to its founding. Black nurses have
+historically made a huge contribution to the NHS, so to pretend it is a story
+of the British Isles alone is a complete fantasy of Whiteness.
+The British Isles itself is a contested site of the nation. Scotland may be
+on the brink of leaving the union; Northern Ireland has always been
+controversial; and even Wales has its own parliament. The contestation over
+who is British has created a hiding place for some from the evils committed
+in the name of the nation. If we see Britain as an empire then it is possible
+to view Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as victims of English
+colonialism. While constructing the nation of Britain has certainly involved
+conflict and conquest, to do so would be to get lost in the fantasy of
+nostalgia. Nation building is always a contested project, and often involves
+one region subsuming others. The question is not whether there was any
+force used in creating a nation, but in building the state how regions were
+incorporated. It would be madness to suggest that the incorporation of the
+rest of the British Isles into the British nation state was on the same terms as
+the colonies. Northern Island would have the most compelling case given
+the terrible history of Britain in relation to Ireland. But so-called Irish
+slavery was actually indentured labour, which may not have been pleasant
+but was not equivalent to chattel slavery. As many problems as the Irish
+have had in Britain it would be difficult to make a case that they remain
+disadvantaged today. Around 10% of the British population is of Irish
+descent and they have better than average success in most major economic
+
+and social categories. Irish migrants have also made a major contribution to
+America, becoming White by, amongst other things, racially abusing and
+lynching African Americans. The traditions of the New York Police
+Department are as steeped in memories of Ireland as they are in the blood
+and bruises of Black people.
+For the Scots and the Welsh to claim affinity with the colonies really
+does display the levels to which the ‘psychosis of Whiteness’ prevents
+rational thought.11 Both parts of the British nation state hugely benefited
+from slavery and colonialism. It is no coincidence that my surname is
+Andrews, taken from the Scottish slaver who owned my ancestors in
+Jamaica. Cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh are knee-deep in money from
+the slave trade. Wales is no different, and there are still Welsh speakers in
+Argentina where a colony was formed in Patagonia in 1865. All of the
+countries of the British Isles benefited from the system of slavery and
+colonialism, and continue to do so to this day. Rethinking the concept of
+nation does not include revisiting the status of the component parts of socalled Great Britain. It does however change how we see the place of
+minorities within Western nation states.
+Ghetto as an internal colony
+In America, high residential segregation has created large inner city areas
+where the vast majority of the population is Black and which are
+hallmarked by high unemployment, poverty and violence. This experience
+has led to a 180-year tradition of viewing the ghetto as an internal colony.12
+Carmichael and Hamilton accept that the analogy of the colony is not
+perfect because in the ghetto there is no appropriation of land or
+exploitation of raw materials that are then sold back to the population.13
+Although with commodification of Black cultural forms you could argue
+that the process continues of exploiting raw materials (this time cultural) to
+be sold back to Black communities. Though the classical relationship of
+colonialism may not apply, they argue that the ‘white power structure is as
+monolithic as Europe’s colonial offices have been to African and Asian
+colonies’.14 This can be seen through the political, social and economic
+domination of Black America by the mainstream.
+
+In terms of political domination, Carmichael and Hamilton argue that the
+ghetto is controlled by a system of indirect rule, with the people elected to
+represent the ghetto serving as puppets for the mainstream political parties.
+As they explain, Black politicians have to ‘put loyalty to their political party
+over loyalty to their constituents and thus nullify any bargaining power the
+black community might develop … Colonial politics causes the subject to
+muffle his voice while participating in the councils of the white power
+structure’.15 Within this system Black people strive for political
+representation in order to get power, without realising that once in elected
+post their role is to keep the people in check. This dimension of political
+domination by Black faces, with strings pulled from the outside, is key to
+the internal colony argument.16 It is also important to note that this indirect
+rule is often carried out by the Black people fortunate enough to raise
+themselves out of the condition of ghettos.
+Allen explains how the civil rights gains led to the expansion of a Black
+middle class that could gain access to mainstream America.17 In keeping
+with classic colonialism, this class served to divide and conquer the Black
+colony and acted as a buffer between the Black masses and the White
+power structure. Following on from Malcolm X’s House versus Field Negro
+split,18 it is this class of ‘Uncle Toms’ that is appointed to manage and
+suppress revolt in the ghetto.
+That the classical colonial economic relationship is not present in the
+American ghetto has been used to diminish the internal colony argument
+even by those who mobilise it. Blauner rejects the term colonialism but
+instead argues that African Americans experience a colonisation complex.19
+This experience is deemed to be similar in many respects to those in the
+former colonies in terms of being forced into the system; the destruction of
+culture; being managed by the colonisers; and racism. Blauner’s utilisation
+of the internal colony argument is helpful in better understanding the
+experience of oppression of African Americans, but it does not see the
+ghetto as a real colony, subject to economic subordination. Such a lack of
+economic elaboration is taken by Marxists to be the fundamental flaw with
+the concept.
+In keeping with a Marxist analysis, Burawoy argues that Blacks in
+America should be ‘looked upon as an exploited but nevertheless integral
+part of capitalist societies’,20 unlike the colonies that are seen as separate
+
+entities to the metropolis. However, capitalism is not merely a process of
+economic development that emerges in Europe and then exploits less
+developed countries. The colonies are, and always have been, an ‘integral
+part of capitalist societies’. Far from lacking an economic analysis, as
+Burawoy claims, the internal colony argument is based on an understanding
+of both the ghetto and the external colonies being economically exploited
+units within the system of Western imperialism.
+The economic exploitation of the internal colony can be traced back to
+the surplus value extracted during the slave trade.21 Abolition of slavery
+was a strategy by the North to control the industrial economy of the South,
+and the Jim Crow laws further cemented the Black colonial economic
+exploitation. Post-segregation, economic stagnation and a lack of capital for
+business start-ups meant that African Americans were dependent for
+income and products from outside the ghetto, trapped in a colonial
+relationship.
+Alongside the political and economic domination of the ghetto, the
+internal colony argument also features social and psychological
+colonialism. The ideas of Black inferiority and imprints of the dominant
+culture are institutionalised into the ways of life that Black people must
+depend on in the internal colony. School plays a foundational role in this
+process, as Tabb explains:
+ghetto schools traditionally teach the history of the ‘Mother Country’
+as if blacks had no part in its development, as if blacks had no identity
+of their own, no culture, no origins worthy of mention in the
+chronicles of the world’s great nations and peoples. The dominant
+culture is constantly held up as good, desirable, worthy of emulation.
+The destruction of the [Black] culture is an important weapon in
+creating dependence and reinforcing control.22
+The internal colony argument presents the case that African Americans are
+controlled through political domination, economic dependency and cultural
+imperialism through institutionalised practice. However, due to the
+particular conditions of the American experience, namely slavery within the
+nation state and high residential segregation, there is a question as to
+whether this can be applied across Black populations in the West.
+
+In Britain, for instance, though minority groups are concentrated in
+particular urban centres there is not the high level of residential segregation
+that is seen in the United States.23 A key ingredient for an internal colony is
+therefore missing. However, Tabb argues that ‘the spatial separation of
+colony and colonial power is secondary to the existence of control of the
+ghetto from the outside through political and economic domination by
+white society’.24 Political domination by indirect rule can certainly be
+applied to the limited Black political class; economic dependency as seen in
+the United States is an insidious feature of the Black British experience;25
+and cultural imperialism embodied through institutions such as schools has
+been consistently argued in the British context.26
+In the traditional nation state view, African Caribbeans and African
+Americans are invited not to make allies across the Atlantic, but to create
+movements for equality within their respective nation states. In Britain this
+manifests itself in embracing ‘political blackness’, which is the unity of
+‘African, African-Caribbean, Asian and other visible minority ethnic
+communities who are oppressed by racism’,27 while in America it is argued
+that ‘people of colour’ must build an ‘epistemic coalition’ to battle against
+racial injustice.28 Although there is certainly a place for and a long history
+of activism in both nation states, such politics is limited by methodological
+nationalism. It is assumed in the strategic essentialism of people of colour
+that all those who are not White in a nation state are tied together by their
+experience of racism. However, this ignores the reality that racial inequality
+works in far more nuanced ways.
+Any analysis of racism in Britain shows that different minority groups
+experience different levels of success in British society. For example,
+educational attainment at sixteen (a key measure for success), shows Indian
+and Chinese students over-performing compared to the White average and
+Pakistani, Bangladeshi, African and African-Caribbean students
+traditionally under-performing. Different groups have different levels of
+access to success in British society, which should not be a surprise given the
+different histories and experiences of colonialism across the former
+colonies.
+Similar dynamics are true of minority groups in America. A good
+example of this would be in the Latino community; although they are
+viewed as people of colour, almost half of them identify as White.29 There
+
+is a history in the United States of Latinos claiming Whiteness, for example
+Mexican Americans attempting to assimilate in the 1950s as ‘whites of a
+different colour’.30 There remain issues that African Americans and Latinos
+should unite on, but it is also increasingly the case that ‘as Latinos become
+more Americanized it is likely that more among them will become white,
+and we will see an ever-growing distancing from Blackness’.31
+Political blackness traps us in a regressive nation state logic of race
+relations. Black radicalism is based on a radical politics that necessitates an
+analysis of racism that transcends nation state boundaries. Members of
+African Diasporas separated by thousands of miles are subject to processes
+of racial oppression that are more similar than those experienced by their
+allies ‘of colour’ in the adjacent neighbourhood. To illustrate this
+connection, the example of African Caribbeans in Britain and African
+Americans is instructive.
+Underlying the history of Black people in the West is the original sin of
+enslavement. It can be argued that the slave experience of Black people in
+America is markedly different because the plantations were not on the
+British Isles. But as we discussed in Chapter 1, we need to conceive of
+Britain as an empire, not a nation state. The Caribbean was Britain’s version
+of the American South. The migration from the slaveholding South to the
+free North, and from the Caribbean to enlightened Britain is remarkably
+similar.
+The size of America shielded much of the North from the realities of
+enslavement, but more importantly from the associated guilt, with it being
+seen very much as a Southern issue.32 In a very real way Northerners take
+responsibility for ending enslavement, but not the system itself. It was the
+South that had the plantations and the North that fought for the freedom of
+its African American citizenry. For an example of this, see none other than
+the romanticism surrounding New York. This was the same New York that
+was founded by one of the most vicious corporations in history, the Dutch
+West India Company, and was originally built by slave labour.33
+British notions of freedom and progressivism are also built on myths
+surrounding the slave trade. Britain is only ever actively conceived of being
+engaged in the ending of, and not participation in, enslavement, because the
+plantations were outside of its borders. Abolitionist heroes like William
+Wilberforce are elevated in the historical record to obscure the insidious
+
+history in which Britain took such a leading role.34 Largely ignored is the
+role which British cities played in the slave trade, Liverpool and Bristol in
+particular, having been built almost entirely off the back of enslavement.
+What is clearly set up on both sides of the Atlantic is an enlightened part of
+society that ended enslavement and embraced the Black population, which
+lies at the heart of the liberal myth of progressivism in both countries.
+Black people in both America and the Caribbean found themselves in a
+post-enslavement society where they remained firmly at the bottom. Both
+groups had little choice with unemployment but to migrate to the urban
+centres of their respective saviours. When they arrived in these
+‘progressive’ countries they encountered the same forms of racism. For
+African Caribbeans in Britain and African Americans in Northern cities of
+America the stereotype of the aggressive, over-sexualised savage that was
+key to enslavement formed the basis of relations with the majority
+population. It should come as no surprise then that in terms of
+discrimination the experience of African Caribbeans and African
+Americans (regardless of which part of the country) are mirror images.
+Education is very good example of this, where both groups are associated
+with lower educational attainment. If we look more closely at schooling, the
+arguments about the hidden curriculum, devaluation of Black cultural
+forms, treatment of Black vernacular language and teacher expectations
+have been argued to apply equally to both settings.35 The nature of the
+racism along with the formation of racial characterisations facing African
+Caribbeans in Britain is identical to that faced by African Americans.
+In Britain there is no internal colony akin to the expansive American
+ghetto because the descendants of the enslaved live in the Caribbean, not on
+the island. So the colonies are the Caribbean islands, or the African nations
+where migrant families arrived from, but relations on the British Isles
+remain defined by the colonial relationship. We have to go beyond a
+national analysis so as not to be blinded to this fundamental point, and
+when Black people are viewed as a colonised minority it necessitates a
+transformation, rather than reform, of the societies in which we reside.
+Perhaps the most serious issue the internal colony argument has to
+overcome is that of independence. In the former colonies battles for
+economic and political independence, though difficult, are conceivable
+because they exist outside of the physical encompass of the West. The
+question is how to disentangle the mechanisms of control that the West uses
+
+to dictate from afar. Residing in Western nation states means that however
+much community control can be gained there can never be full
+independence for the Black population. The advancement of Black people
+in the West is therefore inextricably linked to the success of the Western
+nation states in which people reside. For those in the former colonies the
+relationship is inverse, as Western power and success is generated from
+neo-colonial exploitation.36 This relationship would appear not only to
+undermine the internal colony argument but also to set Black people in the
+West in opposition to those in the former colonies. This can only be
+resolved by embracing Black radical positions that are grounded in global
+understandings, which transcend national boundaries.
+For Black radicals, America, Britain or any other Western nation state
+are not places which we should be seeking to integrate into but rather
+empires that we need to ‘oppose – not beloved communities of shared
+tradition and aspirations but coercive states to be overthrown’.37 Black
+radicalism sees the Black population in the West as cells of displaced
+Africans who must play their part in the overthrow of the Western empire,
+as we will explore further in Chapter 8.
+Redefining sovereignty
+Nation states in the Caribbean and Africa did not exist before European
+intervention; they are creations of imperialism. Supposed Caribbean nation
+states are even more so, because the people who inhabit the islands were
+taken there in chains on European slave ships. The Europeans erased the
+natives, created plantation societies from stolen Africans, ruled over the
+colonies and then freed them into separate nation states. Seeing the
+Caribbean as constituent parts of European nations also means that we have
+to do away with ideas of colonial nation state sovereignty.
+For instance, I often ask audiences who the most influential Black Briton
+is. When you confine yourselves to the British Isles the answers are
+uninspiring, which should not be surprising because there have not been
+that many of us on the island for all that long. Once we open up the nation
+to include the Empire the answer quickly becomes apparent: Marcus
+Mosiah Garvey. Garvey was born a subject of the British crown on the
+island of Jamaica long before the pretence of independence was bestowed.
+
+After his incarceration in America he was deported to London, because the
+authorities feared his influence on the Jamaican colony. They were only
+able to do this because of his nationality. He died in London in 1940, never
+having experienced the Jamaican so-called nation state. Garvey is as British
+as a cup of tea, or going to eat at an Indian restaurant on a weekend. This
+will sound like heresy to those committed to the Jamaican national project,
+but it should also point to the limitations of that venture. Garvey understood
+that he was rejecting the product of an oppressive world system that needed
+to be overturned and he put no faith in the Jamaican national state. He saw
+the solution as the physical return of Black people to the African continent,
+and in doing so entirely redefined claims of national sovereignty.
+Ethiopia’s place in the Bible meant that it had particular significance to
+Black movements in the West and also in Africa. ‘Princes shall come out of
+Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalms 68:31
+KJB) was used a rallying cry for various movements that sought to connect
+to Africa. Figures like Blyden and Delaney in the colonisation movement
+used the passage as a signal to their civilising mission on the continent;
+while Garvey embraced it as evidence of the need for African self-rule.
+The Bible has had so much importance historically because of the role of
+Christianity in Western imperialism. As Jomo Kenyatta, the first president
+of Kenya, explained: ‘When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the
+land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our
+eyes closed. When we opened them, they had our land and we had the
+Bible’.38 The same verse of the Bible that inspired Black people to self-rule
+was also used to justify civilising the African savage, stretching out their
+hands for help from enlightened Christians who could save their heathen
+souls. Colonialism was not only done by force but by implanting a Western
+religion with the aim to pacify and control the natives. Missionary
+education was the dominant form of schooling, teaching not only European
+languages but the codes of behaviour and values expected of the colonised.
+For those who were enslaved, Christianity also was used to attempt this
+pacifying role, and to de-Africanise the beasts of burden made to toil on the
+plantations. Reading was forbidden, with the only teaching permitted being
+from the Bible. A few of the enslaved were allowed to learn to read the
+Bible in order to teach the word and obedience to the rest of their kin. The
+result of this history is the embeddedness of Christianity across the Black
+world. Black participation in churches in the West, the Caribbean and
+
+Africa are now outstripping that of White people, with the Anglican Church
+facing a shift of power away from the mother country. It should come as no
+surprise that the Bible had such an impact with regard to understandings of
+Blackness. But as regressive as the history of Christianity and Black people
+is, they were never able to remove the spirit of resistance from how we
+interpreted it. There is not a single part of our history where we simply
+passively accepted what was passed down to us.
+Many of the revolts during slavery were led by preachers on the
+plantations, by figures such as Sam Sharpe in Jamaica and Nat Turner in
+America. Far from being disabled by the Bible they were spurred on by it,
+reading it not as a text of submission but as a liberation theology. With the
+greater freedom to travel around the plantations to spread the word they
+were also in a unique position to bring together slave revolts. Preacher as
+slave revolt leader is not our typical association but we need to reform our
+imaginations. Given the dominance of the church in Black communities,
+they are perhaps the only independent, well-funded institutions that
+regularly bring the masses of Black people together, even today. The Black
+church would do well to remember its roots of resistance.
+The spiritual connection to Ethiopia was transformed into a radical
+redefinition of sovereignty by the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italians.
+Ethiopia was one of the few parts of Africa untouched by European
+colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century, but the Italians wanted to
+expand their colonial territory, which included Eritrea and part of Somalia.
+In 1896 at the Battle of Adwa the Ethiopians won a decisive victory over
+colonialism that is still celebrated today. This was an immense source of
+pride across the Diaspora and galvanised the movement for Ethiopianism.
+When Ras Tafari Makonnen Woldemikae was crowned emperor of Ethiopia
+in 1930, he assumed the name Haile Selassie I, and Western dignitaries
+came to celebrate his coronation. A picture of Queen Mary bowing to the
+emperor during the celebrations was extremely powerful at a time when
+Europe dominated the world. Another image with his foot on an
+unexploded bomb gave him an almost supernatural aura of power. Selassie
+became seen as not only the emperor of Ethiopia but of the entire global
+Black nation.39 When Italy again launched a colonial invasion under
+Mussolini in 1934, the global Black nation rallied to protect Ethiopia. In the
+war that followed, Black people in South Africa and America were stopped
+by their respective nation states from going to join the battle for Ethiopia.
+
+Narrow conceptions of nationalism were torn apart by the desire for Black
+liberation.
+A connection to Ethiopia also birthed the influential Rastafari
+movement, which remains active today. The movement takes its name from
+Selassie’s title ‘Ras’ and name ‘Tafari’ before he became emperor. Rastafari
+was hugely influential in changing the terms of the debate on racism in
+West, critiquing the ‘Babylon system’ as corrupt. Rastas rejected the ways
+of the ‘crazy baldheads’ who integrated themselves into the system of
+colonialism, and they embraced the rural poor of Jamaica, aiming to create
+a political re-education of the masses. The message has been popularised in
+reggae music, but it is more than just a cultural movement. Rasta ideology
+changes how we see the world, presenting a radical critique of the system
+that oppresses Black people by design. Rastafari has been hugely influential
+in the West, particularly in Britain, and today represents one of the truly
+independent and radical critiques in the way that it aims to create new forms
+of liberatory knowledge.40 Rastafari also calls for a physical return to the
+African continent, pledging absolutely no allegiance to colonial nation
+statehood. In 1948 Selassie gave a portion of land in Ethiopia called
+Shashamane for Rastas to repatriate back to the continent. Though
+diminished in size, the settlement remains to this day.
+As much as both Ethiopianism and Rastafari redefined sovereignty,
+embracing the global Black nation, they were both limited in their radical
+scope by their roots in religion. Ethiopianism never really overcame its
+foundation in the Black Christian civilising mission of the colonisation
+movement. Rastafari has developed more along religious lines, making
+links to the Ethiopian Coptic Church, rather than strengthening its
+commitment to the revolutionary struggle. Given the religious basis of the
+connection, both movements have been hurt by their loyalty to Selassie as
+the vessel. The problem is that the Selassie of myth and divinity in no way
+matched the real-life figure. Selassie was a staunch ally of the West, a
+strong defender of colonial nationalism on the continent, and also had his
+own imperial agenda over Eritrea, which still has implications today.41 His
+vision for Pan-Africanism was for a limited set of African institutions, even
+more watered down than the Monrovia group’s plans. Rastafari will be
+further explored in Chapter 8, but for all its limitations it helped to develop
+the platform for the global Black nation.
+
+Garveyism
+Rastafari’s roots are as much in Garveyism as in Ethiopianism, explaining
+its radical take on sovereignty. Garvey’s appeal to the Rastas was his focus
+on the rural poor and devotion to Africa, and he remains revered in the
+movement. Garvey’s legacy is complicated and Garveyism has significant
+limitations, by no means representing the perfect ideology of liberation.
+Garvey’s was not a revolutionary economic analysis; in many ways his
+vision was to create a capitalist Africa that could take its place in the
+existing economic system. It would be tempting to see Garveyism in the
+same light as the American Colonization Society, a bourgeois Westernised
+project wanting to ‘modernise’ the continent. However, this would be an
+unfair caricature and ignores the importance of Garveyism’s redefinition of
+nationhood as a revolutionary concept.
+The inspiration for Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
+was his travels around the Caribbean, South America and the United States.
+He recognised that the plight of the formerly enslaved was the same in each
+location; that there was a common problem for all to oppose.42 From its
+conception Garveyism transcended the nation state, arguing that ‘Black is a
+country’, which includes all Africans and their descendants.43 At the root of
+his analysis is the conclusion that the West can never provide freedom for
+Black people, and therefore there is a need to liberate the African continent
+and for the physical return by those descendants in the Diaspora. The UNIA
+set about selling shares in order to purchase steamships for the Black Star
+Line, which would transport those in the West back to the African
+continent. Garvey was trying to secure land in Liberia in order to resettle
+the Black population in exile. This is completely different to the
+colonisation movement in that it was neither sanctioned nor controlled by
+the imperial powers. Garvey was arguing for the complete liberation and
+independence from imperialism in Africa, and building a mass organisation,
+owned by the people, in order to do so.
+It is true that Garvey’s position from outside the continent is effectively
+one of Black capitalism. He had a lot of reverence for the West and what he
+saw as the great achievements it had built. In a speech praising capitalism in
+general, and J.D. Rockefeller in particular, he explained that White people
+had nothing to fear from the Garvey movement. He argued that the UNIA
+
+was striving for ‘progress of and among’ Black people that would ‘advance
+them in the respect and appreciation of their fellows’.44 By their fellows he
+meant the White world that held Black people in such low esteem. In this
+respect Garvey’s self-help mission is similar to that of Booker T.
+Washington, who thought that Black people needed to ‘pull themselves up
+by their bootstraps’, and make no excuses for the state in which they found
+themselves.45 This conservative version of Black self-help still has
+resonance as it can easily be read as absolving White racism of all
+responsibility. But Garvey was making no simple appeal to hard work; the
+reason he advocated the physical return to Africa was that he recognised
+that due to the structures of racism, no amount of toil in the West could
+produce Black liberation. Garveyism did not extend to radically
+transforming the economic system but his reliance on capitalism has been
+overstated for a number of reasons.
+Firstly, because of imperial control Garvey was never able to visit Africa
+and he was also prevented by federal authorities in America from
+continuing the work of building the Black Star Line. This is important
+because political ideas adapt when they are enacted. Had the prospect of
+nation building been allowed to develop it is very possible that Garvey’s
+economic analysis would have changed. He was not raised to believe that
+the West could never provide for Black people, but came to this conclusion
+through experience. The practicalities of establishing a liberated Africa
+would have necessitated a radical rethink of the economy, given how
+embedded capitalism is in the system that impoverishes the continent.
+Second and relatedly, unlike Pan-Africanism, the UNIA was a mass
+movement, which meant that the people themselves shaped and influenced
+the politics and economic ideas. Once you base your politics on the concept
+of the global Black nation, it necessitates building an analysis that can
+provide for the masses. Capitalism and imperialism can never provide for
+all of us, so through the process of doing the work the movement would
+have to have oriented away from capitalism. This is where we need to
+separate out the radicalism of Garveyism from the limitations of the man
+himself. The power of Garveyism is creating a movement that both
+redefined the idea of sovereignty and was led by the masses, both central
+ingredients to Black radicalism.
+The UNIA was an achievement unmatched by any Black social
+movement before or since. The organisation spread across the Americas, the
+
+Caribbean, Europe and onto the African continent between 1915 and into
+the 1920s, a time before the internet, social media or even widespread use
+of the telephone. So successful was the UNIA that it was given observer
+status at the League of Nations in the 1920s. Garveyism was seen as an
+enemy to the British Empire with its focus on overturning colonialism, and
+the Negro World, the official publication of the organisation, was banned
+across the colonies because it was deemed to be a seditious paper.
+Nevertheless the UNIA was so effective at organising Jamaican (meaning
+British) migrant workers in Haiti that the colonial authorities seriously
+considered officially recognising the organisation.46
+Garveyism was full of pageantry and parades and he saw the UNIA as
+the bedrock of the new global Black nation. He even appointed
+ambassadors and handed out titles to those across the Black world who
+were seen as deserving. There was no room for colonial nation statehood in
+Garvey’s analysis or politics, which was a key reason for the success of the
+organisation. Even though he never set foot on African soil, Garveyism had
+a massive impact on the continent. During the Kenyan battle for
+independence people would go from village to village reading out the
+Negro World in their native tongues.47 As explained in the previous chapter,
+Garvey was one of the most influential thinkers for Pan-African leaders as
+his message captured the spirit of liberation. These notions were not alien
+concepts from a foreign elite: ‘Africans in Africa agreed to adopt the
+theories given birth by Africans in exile, because of the truth these theories
+embrace’.48 By no means does Garveyism provide a fully formed radical
+politics. However, it does include some of the key ingredients, including
+building a mass movement and being rooted in the revolutionary concept of
+the global Black nation. Malcolm X later developed these threads into the
+most complete understanding of revolutionary Black Nationalism.
+Revolutionary Black Nationalism
+Malcolm X defined himself as a ‘Black nationalist freedom fighter’ all the
+way up until his assassination in 1965.49 This is important because in the
+narratives that aim to redeem Malcolm from his days in the Nation of Islam
+he is often said to have abandoned his Black Nationalism in favour of a
+more civil rights type of approach to Black politics.50 This mythical
+
+convergence between Malcolm and Martin Luther King never actually took
+place. Malcolm never stopped embracing Black Nationalism; in fact he best
+articulates the radical nature of the global Black nation in his redefinition of
+the idea of being American. Five days before he died, Malcolm explained:
+When I speak of the Afro-American, I’m not speaking of just the 22
+million of us who are here in the United States. But the AfroAmerican is that large number of people in the Western Hemisphere,
+from the southernmost tip of South America to the northernmost tip
+of North America, all of whom have a common heritage and have a
+common origin when you go back to the roots of these people.51
+Malcolm was always destined to leave the Nation of Islam (NOI) because
+his politics was far more radical than its narrow nationalism. Throughout
+his time in the NOI he met with global revolutionary figures, most famously
+talking to Fidel Castro during his visit to New York. By the time he split
+with the NOI in 1963 his politics had fully integrated into the revolutionary
+struggles taking place on the African continent, and this global outlook put
+him at odds with the organisation that had raised him.
+In many ways Malcolm’s ‘basic ideology was Garveyism’.52 His father
+was murdered for being a Garveyite preacher and Malcolm was nurtured by
+the NOI, which was heavily influenced by the Garvey movement.53
+Malcolm’s analysis also located racism as the fundamental site of
+oppression, but he evolved from a narrower view of race to progress some
+of the more regressive positions of Garvey and the NOI. For instance,
+Malcolm abandoned the NOI’s blanket indictment of all White people as
+devils and began to indict Whiteness as a system of control. Prefiguring
+much of the literature on critical Whiteness, he distinguished White being
+used as an adjective, as he had heard on his trip through the Muslim world,
+from what White meant in America: ‘When he says he’s white, he means
+something else. You can listen to the sound of his voice – when he says he’s
+white, he means he’s a boss. That’s right. That’s what “white” means in this
+language’.54
+After leaving the NOI Malcolm also moved away from Black capitalist
+ideas of advancement to considering the global battle against imperialism.
+This meant engaging with, though not wholeheartedly embracing, Marxism,
+
+and it was at the Militant Labor Forum in 1965 that he declared: ‘it is
+impossible for this system; this economic system; this political system; this
+social system; this system, period. It is impossible for it as it stands to
+produce freedom right now [for Afro-Americans] … in the same way it is
+impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg’.55
+One of Malcolm’s strongest criticisms of the civil rights movement was
+that ‘whenever you are in a civil rights struggle, whether you know it or
+not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam’.56 If the
+goal is to get rights within the nation state, then the message will have to be
+accepted by the powers that be in order to make the necessary reforms to
+society. This means having to keep powerful people and the society at large
+on board. Here we find one of the most fundamental differences between
+the philosophies of Malcolm and Martin Luther King. King firmly believed
+that America could be reformed and that activists needed to get powerful
+people to listen. So he made allies of presidents, politicians and high-profile
+White people who could help spread the message to turn public opinion.
+The best example of this would be the 1963 March on Washington, a multiracial march that ended with a photo opportunity in the White House with
+Kennedy.
+Malcolm slammed the march, condemning it as the ‘farce on Washington
+… a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do’.57
+Malcolm’s frustration was that he saw the march as having been taken over
+by the civil rights leaders who wanted to contain and control the anger of
+the people. The march was originally a grassroots idea that had arisen out of
+frustration at the lack of progress on racial issues. The original protesters
+were going to march on the Congress, and ‘tie it up, bring it to a halt; not let
+the government proceed. They even said they was going out to the airport
+and lay down on the runway’; this is what Malcolm saw as the ‘the Black
+revolution’.58 After the civil rights leaders got involved, they sanitised the
+march by bringing to bear the weight of their organisations. The organic
+grassroots movement became tightly organised and controlled, with
+approved speakers, march route and timings, and they only allowed official
+placards to be displayed.59 Malcolm was furious that the march had been
+infiltrated and integrated, asking ‘who ever heard of angry revolutionists
+swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools,
+with gospels and guitars and “I Have a Dream” speeches?’60
+
+Contrary to the historical memory of Malcolm, his outright rejection of
+the march had nothing to do with its peaceful nature, or because he hated
+White people. Rather, the march was the opposite of his politics of
+liberation. Being limited to nation state boundaries, the civil rights leaders
+had to control the march, put on a good public face and keep the president
+happy. This put obvious limits around the appeals and demands that could
+be made. Malcolm was looking beyond the American nation state and
+therefore his audience was not the politicians or White society, but solely
+the Black masses. Only once you have given up on reforming the system
+can you articulate a politics of liberation, and this means going beyond the
+limits of the nation state.
+Methodological nationalism prevents the struggles in the Diaspora being
+systematically linked. When Garvey went to America he faced significant
+hostility to his politics, partly on the basis that he was from the Caribbean.
+His ultimate goal of a physical return to Africa was rejected by the Black
+intelligentsia at the time, who were committed to integrating into the nation
+state. Dubois dismissed Garvey because he did not understand that ‘the
+American Negro problem is very different from … the problem of the
+Negro in the West Indies’.61 This idea of American exceptionalism is
+something that has hallmarked much of Black political thought in the
+nation. By focusing only on African Americans, even the stronger forms of
+Black Nationalism have forgone a radical analysis. Racism is a global
+system and therefore any politics that offers a national solution can never be
+radical, because it will never overturn the existing system.
+Malcolm was able to develop and remove some of the serious limitations
+of Garveyism before he died, but he is indebted to the movement for his
+political ideology. This is clearest in the formation of the Organization of
+Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Focusing on his violent rhetoric and antiWhite sentiment, the Malcolm of the popular imaginary is a fiery
+demagogue with no practical programme. In truth when Malcolm died he
+was building the OAAU as the vehicle for revolutionary change and left a
+detailed blueprint for his vision in the organisation’s constitution.62 The
+OAAU insisted on mass membership and was organised around
+departments on issues such as education, health and defence. The idea was
+that different locations in the Diaspora would develop their own strategies
+for combating the key issues that faced them, funded by money from within
+the community. The different chapters would then form to make one
+
+cohesive organisation built for radical change. Key to this was that the
+OAAU was made to be an organisation for the Western Hemisphere, taking
+no regard for nation state boundaries. If this plan were to be fulfilled, the
+OAAU would have effectively created a government for the African
+Diaspora in the West, developed from the grassroots level into a global
+organisation. This may sound unlikely, but it is a model taken directly from
+the UNIA. If the OAAU were expanded to include the African continent,
+the blueprint would allow for the creation of a mass movement, rooted in
+local concerns replacing any idea of the colonial nation state. We explore
+the OAAU further and this practical programme in Chapter 8.
+A key ingredient of Black radicalism is the redefinition of national
+sovereignty. Radical politics must always reject and dismantle the central
+pillars of the status quo and there is none more pivotal to Western
+imperialism than the idea of the nation state. There can be no room in Black
+radicalism for the narrow nationalisms, in any of their varied forms, which
+have defined so many Black political movements. Revolutionary Black
+Nationalism transforms not only how we analyse the problem of racism, but
+more importantly how we solve it.
+
+Chapter 4
+
+Cultural Nationalism
+
+On 17 January 1969 a meeting took place at the University of California,
+Los Angeles to discuss the leadership of the Afro-American centre at the
+college. It was a small meeting with around fifteen people attending but the
+tension behind the gathering far outstripped the numbers present. The Black
+Panther Party for Self-Defense and the US Organisation had been fighting
+over control of not just the centre, but of the Black community in Los
+Angeles. At the end of the meeting a fight broke out between the groups
+and two Panthers, Alprentice ‘Bunchy’ Carter and John Huggins, were shot
+dead. The killings marked the lowest point of the struggle between the two
+groups and destabilised both organisations in the aftermath.1
+Many factors led to the rivalry between the two Black Power groups
+turning so destructive. Both groups recruited heavily from the ‘bad niggers
+off the block’,2 meaning the politics of the street often collided with
+revolutionary ideals. The competition for recruitment to an extent aligned
+along gang lines in LA, with the requisite territorial disputes. One of the
+main criticisms of the Panthers has been how they did not reform the streets
+but became trapped in the negative aspects of masculinity and violence.3 As
+well as importing gang culture into the politics, the White power structure
+also played a role in the conflict that led to the shootings. Sowing seeds of
+division both within and between Black Power groups was one of the major
+strategies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s infamous
+counterintelligence programme (COINTELPRO). The FBI specifically
+disrupted any alliances between the Panthers and the US Organisation by
+planting agent provocateurs and fabricating insulting messages in the name
+of each organisation.4 As much as it would be reassuring to believe that it
+was the state that caused the unrest between the two groups, they only
+added fuel to a much larger fire of division. The Panthers and the US
+Organisation were destined to conflict, not because of gangs or the feds but
+
+due to them embracing entirely different sets of political beliefs, one radical
+and the other reactionary.
+As we will cover in Chapter 6, the Panthers are firmly within the
+tradition of Black radicalism, with their global politics of liberation. The US
+Organisation, however, was based on cultural nationalism, which substitutes
+revolutionary change of the system for the internal mission of saving the
+self spiritually, by connecting with Africa. The Panthers referred to the US
+Organisation as ‘pork chop nationalists’,5 who obsessed over culture at the
+expense of revolution. It is no coincidence that US was founded by
+Malauna Karenga, who lies at the foundation of the regressive politics of
+cultural nationalism. If the Panthers were the children of Malcolm, then
+Karenga was his illegitimate child with no rightful claim to his legacy.
+Karenga has had a major influence on Black politics, with his influence
+reaching across the Diaspora. The problem is that the regressive politics of
+cultural nationalism have become conflated with Black radicalism in the
+popular imaginary. This chapter will present a detailed critique of cultural
+nationalism, making clear the distinction between its regressive ideals and
+the politics of Black radicalism. Before doing this, though, we need to
+consider what makes cultural nationalism so popular.
+We are a broken people
+It is indisputable that the destruction of African culture was a primary
+process in maintaining slavery. Europeans did not just enslave us; they
+sought to break us in order to control us. Central to being able to do so was
+to create what the late Cedric Robinson called ‘the Negro … who had no
+civilisation, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place, and finally no
+humanity that might command consideration’.6 The Negro was the beast of
+burden who had no more rights than cattle under the law. The Negro could
+be traded, abused, raped and worked to death. It was not enough that the
+enslavers saw us in this way; to prevent revolt they needed us to internalise
+the nature of the Negro. Therefore, from the very beginning of enslavement
+everything possible was done to break connections to the African continent.
+Different tribes were purposefully separated and mixed up on the slave
+ships to limit communication. African names were replaced with European
+ones, and we were given the surnames of the masters. African languages
+
+and religions were banned, and Christianity was enforced on the
+plantations. We were taught to loathe Africa, its backwardness and evil
+black magic. We were taught to fear the remnants of Africa that made it to
+the New World in the maroon communities that had escaped enslavement,
+which we will discuss in more depth in Chapter 7. In Jamaica, for example,
+the maroons were led in the early eighteenth century by Nanny and her
+brother Cudjoe, who had been Asante leaders in Ghana. In order to scare
+the enslaved away from attempting to escape to join them, Nanny was
+painted as an evil witch, with dark and supernatural powers. The idea of
+traditional African religion as evil and wicked, the voodoo from the horror
+movies, comes from trying to instil fear in the enslaved. These messages
+were so powerful they still have purchase; the mysticism surrounding
+Maroon Town in Jamaica leaves many afraid to stay beyond nightfall even
+today. As explained in Chapter 3, one of the main motivations for stopping
+the trade in Africans was because of fear of the influence of those who were
+African born, who still had connections to their roots.
+There was of course resistance, and the connection to Africa remains in
+the cultural forms that emerged out of enslavement. The widespread
+celebration of carnival across the Caribbean is a testament to the undying
+connection to Africa. On the solitary day of the year the enslaved were
+allowed to celebrate, they used the time to recuperate their African-ness.
+Carnival is not just culture, it is politics; a statement of never being cowed,
+of maintaining the links that were supposed to have been extinguished. But
+the separation of families, the widespread rape of men, women and
+children, and the unceasing brutality severely damaged the social lives of
+the enslaved.
+Cultural genocide against Black populations did not stop with the end of
+chattel slavery, nor was it confined to the process of enslavement. Images of
+the lazy coon, thieving nigger and salacious Black vixen have dominated
+popular culture for centuries. Blackface in Britain has been a consistent
+feature since the sixteenth century. Do not believe those who peddle the
+myth that Blackface is a harmless pastime from the days of mining; the
+practice far outdates the industry. Blackface comes from the early
+encounters in Europe with the African Moors who ruled Spain for 800 years
+from 711 AD. The Blackamoor and ‘Ethiop’ became features of English
+popular culture. Donning Blackface was done to signify either evil (the
+Black threat) or foolishness (the coon). The tradition of Blackface in Morris
+
+dancing not only includes the fool sooting up their face but also donning a
+frizzy wig, wearing coconuts and being called King Coffee, Old Sooty Face
+or Dirty Bet.7 Shakespeare’s character of Othello was an outlier in that he
+was seen to be a forthright, commanding and noble presence. That is until
+he caught the White woman disease and descended into madness,
+demonstrating the fragility of Blackness. From books, to film, to theatre and
+the arts, the cultural genocide of Blackness has continued to the present day.
+Representations of Black as evil, dirty and inferior have real-world
+implications. Studies going back as far as 1940 have consistently shown
+that Black children prefer to play with White dolls from a young age.8
+Results such as these are said to prove the low self-esteem of Black
+children, poisoned as a result of the legacy of ‘four centuries of white
+supremacist beliefs’ being programmed into them.9 Post-traumatic slave
+syndrome attempts to explain the devastating legacy that not only
+enslavement, but the lack of reparations after so-called emancipation had
+taken place.10 It is as impossible to truly account for the cost of the
+dehumanisation of Black people during enslavement as it is to ignore it. In a
+sense, then, we are seen as a broken people, who have fallen into
+destructive cultures of being that must be remedied. Healing plays an
+important role in Black politics, given this history of abuse. Even Kwame
+Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), who denounced cultural nationalism,
+argued that
+[the] cultural personality of the Black community must be preserved
+… integrity includes a pride – in the sense of self-acceptance, not
+chauvinism – in being Black, in the historical attainment and
+contributions of Black people. No person can be healthy, complete
+and mature if he must deny a part of himself.11
+Cultural ‘revolution’
+Cultural nationalism emerged to fill this void, the absence of African
+culture in Black life. In order to become whole again Afrocentrism is the
+most developed and popular paradigm. Pioneered by Molefi Asante, a
+professor at Temple University, the discipline aims to restore us to our
+cultural heritage. As he explains, ‘culture is at the base of all values … a
+
+people without an appreciation of the value of historical experiences will
+always create chaos’.12 Reclaiming Africa is said to allow for not only a
+fuller appreciation of the African self but also to restore African knowledge
+in the ‘global village’.13 This basic premise of centring Black life around a
+cultural and spiritual return to Africa has been very popular and cemented
+itself into American academic life and even onto high school curricula.14
+Afrocentrism owes its intellectual heritage to Maulana Karenga’s
+influence. Karenga laid the foundation for the academic flourishing of
+cultural nationalism, and is currently a professor at California State
+University. The founder of US thought that the first stage for Black
+liberation must be a cultural revolution. One of his lasting achievements
+was the creation of the celebration Kwanzaa, meaning ‘first fruits’, which
+starts on Boxing Day and lasts seven days. The festival is based on seven
+Afrocentric principles known as the Nguzo Saba, and drapes itself in
+Garvey’s colours, using the Swahili language to draw on for its legitimacy.
+Rhetorically, Kwanzaa hits all the right notes with its calls for kujichakalia
+(self-determination), umoja (unity) and uhuru (freedom). Kwanzaa is now
+very popular across the Diaspora, including in Britain, and is used as a tool
+to bring Black communities together. On the fiftieth anniversary of the
+celebration in 2016, Karenga reaffirmed how essential the celebration is to
+his politics,
+It is an act of freedom in its recovery and reconstruction of African
+culture, our return to its best values and practices and our resistance to
+the imposition of Eurocentric ways of understanding and engaging the
+world. Kwanzaa was also conceived as an instrument of struggle, to
+raise and cultivate the consciousness of the people, to unite them
+around principles that anchored and elevated their lives and involve
+them in the struggle to be themselves and free themselves and build
+the just and good world we all want, work for and deserve.15
+With the history of enslavement and psychological assault on the formerly
+enslaved, the appeal of Afrocentrism and a festival like Kwanzaa is easy to
+understand. Everything, including our names, was taken from us, meaning
+that we still bear the mark of the master even within our identities. One of
+the most fascinating clips to watch of Malcolm X is of an interview he did
+
+on Chicago’s news show ‘City Desk’ on 17 March 1963. Members of the
+Nation of Islam dropped their last name and replaced it with an X to
+remove the slave name that had been handed down from the plantation. The
+interviewer pushed Malcolm to reveal his ‘real’ or ‘legal’ name and he
+steadfastly refused to speak it. When the interviewer asked him his father’s
+last name he responded ‘my father didn’t know his last name. He got it
+from his grandfather, who got it from his grandfather, who got it from the
+slave master’. Malcolm also stressed the importance of connecting back to
+African history and at times spoke of a ‘cultural return’.16 There is no doubt
+that restoring a connection to Africa has to be a part of any progressive
+Black political movement in the Diaspora. As Garvey said, ‘take the kinks
+out of your minds, instead of your hair’.17
+Cultural nationalism also has a history and a role in Africa. Until socalled independence Africa was directly controlled by European powers,
+meaning Africans had the same colonial education as those in the Diaspora.
+The majority of these nations retain the school systems of their former
+mother countries and, as we explored in Chapter 3, one of the key neocolonial mechanisms is the training of the African political and economic
+class in Western universities. Africa has not been spared the cultural
+genocide, with high levels of skin bleaching being a testament to the depth
+of hatred of Blackness that has taken root. Leopold Senghor was the first
+president of independent Senegal, taking power in 1960. As well as being a
+politician he was also a poet who helped mould the negritude movement in
+the French-speaking colonies. Negritude was founded by the Martiniquean
+poet Aimé Césaire and focused on centring Blackness and Africa in cultural
+life, in order to overcome the whitewashing that was so endemic. Césaire’s
+impact was electrifying, creating a ‘delirium’ in the Caribbean and across
+the Diaspora.18 Fanon, never a fan of cultural nationalism, explained the
+importance of Black people being represented for the first time in cultural
+terms. He explained that ‘before Césaire … the West Indian identified
+himself with the white man’s attitude, “was a white man”’ and that
+negritude helped to bring a ‘new generation into being’.19 French
+colonialism always put a particular emphasis on the devastation of other
+cultures because to be ‘French’ means to submit to the country’s cultural
+values. This holds true today, with the republic adopting a policy of
+assimilation towards its minority groups. France does not even keep records
+of its ethnic population and therefore cannot measure discrimination,
+
+because it refuses to formally recognise that there are differences. To be
+French is to be one, the same, the unified body. Deviations from this cannot
+be acknowledged, much less tolerated. That is why the ban on face
+coverings in public was made law, in the name of protecting the sameness
+of the republic, not of course to penalise the un-French religion of Islam. It
+should come as no shock that France faces such a serious problem with
+terrorists bred in the country. The totalitarian approach to French culture
+and identity means it is impossible for the nation to come to terms with its
+horrendous slave and colonial history or its legacy. The banlieues are filled
+with the descendants of the French empire, who remain locked out from
+success in the nation, with far more reasons to hate France than to embrace
+its whitewashed identity.
+France’s cultural impact was no less great in its African colonies, with
+Blackness being just as erased. Therefore, Senghor’s influence on Senegal
+and the African continent was keenly felt. As president he argued for the
+role of negritude in fully liberating the people. The problem with negritude,
+or Afrocentrism, is not the idea of reclaiming African culture, which is
+clearly important given the extent of cultural genocide. The problem is that
+it presents reclaiming our culture as an end point to liberation itself. Asante
+would have us believe that ‘Malcolm’s philosophy generated a thousand
+ways to fight for liberation’,20 but this is untrue. Culture was one small part
+of Malcolm’s political philosophy of Black radicalism. To take that alone,
+or apart from political liberation, is to create a hollow and regressive form
+of politics.
+Civic religion
+The problems facing Black people worldwide are not in our minds. They
+are in our streets, the schools, and the political and economic system. There
+is no way to think, teach or drum our way to freedom. Senghor’s version of
+Pan-Africanism has been severely critiqued, where he reduced the
+connection of the Diaspora to the ‘realm of ideas and aesthetics rather than
+political activism’.21 Rather than embrace a revolutionary concept of Black
+Nationalism, Senghor relied on the poetics of Blackness and in fact was a
+keen advocate for keeping Senegal within the French system. He argued for
+the creation of a French commonwealth, explaining that ‘in Africa, when
+
+children have grown up, they leave their parents’ hut, and build a hut of
+their own by its side. Believe me, we don’t want to leave the French
+compound. We have grown up in it, and it is good to be alive in it. We
+simply want to build our own huts’.22
+On achieving independence Senegal maintained close ties to France,
+retaining the language and also French control of the currency. For all his
+rhetoric of negritude, Senghor was to all intents and purposes a French man.
+As president he married a White Frenchwoman; on leaving office he
+became the first African elected to the Académie Française, the key
+authority on the French language, and he died in 2001 in his spiritual
+homeland, France. Senghor’s version of Pan-Africanism was clearly a
+‘reactionary and dangerous concept advocated to retard the African
+Revolution’.23 Senghor’s politics were all about integrating into France, the
+imperial infrastructure, and there was no contradiction between this and his
+cultural nationalism.
+To understand the reactionary politics of cultural nationalism we need to
+view it as a ‘civic religion’ rather than a political ideology.24 Hill Collins
+explains that the movements are based on symbols, dress and other cultural
+codes. Though the rhetoric may be about freedom, the reality is that cultural
+nationalism prepares for internal rather than societal transformation. Ras
+Makonnen spoke of the need for ‘Pan-Africanism from within’ in order to
+liberate our minds.25 Karenga described the Black nation as ‘injured
+physicians who have it within themselves to heal, repair, re-new and remake
+themselves’.26 Asante ends his book detailing how Afrocentrism can be
+used for social change by declaring ‘let the artist imagine, let the scientists
+expand, let the priests see visions, let the writers be free to create, and let an
+Afrocentric revolution be born!’27 The whole metric for salvation is based
+on the cultural system: dressing correctly, using the right language and
+praying to the correct gods. Mazama, one of the key disciples of Asante,
+acknowledges as much when she explains that African spirituality is
+essential for Afrocentrism and that being in tune with ‘African
+metaphysics’ is necessary to produce liberatory practice.28 A version of
+history is presented where radical figures such as Nat Turner, who used the
+Bible as his motivation, embraced African spirituality as a starting point for
+liberatory practice.
+
+Afrocentrism is popular because of the historical attack on Blackness,
+but Asante’s attempts to make it the basis for social change border on the
+absurd. His practical uses of the concept are limited to a number of different
+ways to ‘help others to take control of their minds and bodies through an
+Afrocentric lifestyle’.29 These include avoiding deviations from African
+symbols and imagining greatness, and he actually argues that progress has
+been made because we now have salad dressings that are not just named
+after European countries. Apparently mental liberation includes such
+revolutionary practices as when flying in an aeroplane thoughtfully
+considering ‘how you would design it Afrocentrically’.30 Perhaps, the
+revolution will be televised on the back seat of the headrests at 30,000 feet,
+and there will be no Eurocentric commercials.
+It should come as no surprise that the largest section of Asante’s book on
+applying the lessons of Afrocentrism is focused on the church as these are
+the biggest Black-owned, Black-led institutions in the Diaspora. Thousands
+of people flock to Sunday services, and it is one of the few places you can
+see hundreds of Black people gathering that do not revolve around music
+and dancing (though even in the church this is a major part of the appeal).
+Focusing on spiritual salvation over trying to solve the problems facing
+people in their real lives has been a perpetual issue for the Black church.
+Once you gear your life towards eternal salvation, it can make the routine
+struggles seem mundane, even secondary. As Bob Marley famously sang,
+‘some people think great god will come from the sky, take away everything
+and make everybody feel high’.31
+Asante wants an Afrocentric revolution in the Black church, to remove
+the symbols of Whiteness and recommit the congregation to the Black
+community. Again, here Asante is drawing some inspiration from Malcolm
+X, who criticised churches that prayed to a ‘white Jesus and a white Mary
+and some white angels’, explaining that those churches were ‘preaching
+white nationalism’.32 While Malcolm recommends people support those
+churches that promote Black Nationalism, Asante misses the point.
+Malcolm is not making a special case for the church; he is telling the world
+that Black radicals will work with anyone, and explicitly pointing out that
+religion should not be used to drive the cause. His message in that same
+speech is ‘to leave your religion home … keep it between you and your
+god’, because it will only get in the way. Malcolm was not against any form
+of religion as long as it did not detract from the Black revolution, and he did
+
+not see an overhaul of the church as an essential or necessary step to
+revolution. This is one of the most fundamental changes to Malcolm’s
+philosophy after leaving the Nation of Islam.
+The NOI is one of the best examples of a civic religion, stressing as it
+does religious authority and using this as a basis of community action.
+According to the NOI, Whites were bred by the evil Dr Yacub in order to
+‘trick and rob and rule the earth’.33 They are literally devils on earth, whose
+purpose is to destroy Black people. The leader of the NOI when Malcolm
+was recruited, Elijah Mohammed, prophesied that the White man’s time on
+the earth had been preordained and that they would soon be wiped out in an
+Armageddon.34 Therefore, there could be no solution found to the problems
+of Black people in politics or revolution. The choice was simple: we could
+either ‘integrate into this wicked race’ and ‘be destroyed along with them’
+or separate and inherit the earth.35 So the NOI focused on building its own
+way of life; supporting itself through collective economics and; reclaiming
+minds by connecting to the original nature of the Black man. Importantly,
+because it was waiting for salvation the NOI did not want to cause too
+much tension with the state. Malcolm’s departure from the group occurred
+after he learnt that far from practising what he was preaching, Muhammad
+was committing adultery and had fathered a number of children with his
+young secretaries. But his split was inevitable on political grounds. Prior to
+his leaving he had been suspended for speaking his mind on the Kennedy
+assassination. His explanation that it was simply ‘chickens come home to
+roost’ angered Muhammad, who did not want to upset the country at such a
+tragic time. Malcolm had also been barred from engaging with the civil
+rights struggle. In 1965 he sent a telegram to George Lincoln Rockwell, the
+leader of the American Nazi Party, that he was ‘no longer held in check’
+and that ‘you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum
+physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the
+disarming philosophy of nonviolence’. For all its blood and damnation
+rhetoric towards White people, the reality is that the NOI has a history of
+collaborating with police and state forces to keep order in Black
+communities. There is a reason why Malcolm was assassinated, while
+Farrakhan is allowed to retain his pulpit even today. Once we accept
+religion as the solution to the problem of racism we have lost the battle.
+Rastafari has been a standard bearer for radical politics, producing the
+culture and soundtrack for the revolution. In Britain, in particular, the
+
+impact of Rasta was profound, with its calls to reject the evils of the
+‘Babylon system’ and presenting a liberation psychology.36 To be a ‘dread’
+came to be symbolised both by the community and the police as being a
+rebel, someone who resisted the system. Cloaked in the red, black, green
+and gold and the politics of Garvey, Rasta has been at the forefront of the
+rebellions and political movements of Blackness in Britain.
+As real as the radical roots of Rastafari are, there has been an ascendency
+of cultural nationalist themes.37 Authors such as Nettleford and Owens have
+highlighted the mysticism and religious sect-like qualities of Rastafari.38
+Campbell argues against this characterisation, but recognises a shift in
+Rastafari, with the doctrine becoming increasingly religious and more
+interested in maintaining cultural distinctions than being involved in
+liberatory politics. He explains how the Jamaican state was involved in
+strengthening the religious aspects of the Rastafari, by taking action such as
+officially recognising the Ethiopian Coptic Church.39 Visions of Selassie as
+a Christ-like figure emerge later on in Rastafari with this religious turn to
+the movement. While once Rastafari was shunned and demonised by the
+national apparatus, the dreaded figure, singing reggae and smoking a spliff,
+has become an integral part of brand Jamaica. All of this is made possible
+by the retreat to cultural nationalism that presents no threat to the neocolonial status quo on the island.
+Cultural nationalism is a way of making ourselves feel better without
+challenging the system. We can find salvation in our African spirituality, or
+our reasonings where we condemn the Babylon system. We can feel
+superior to the crazy baldheads and sell-outs who have not come to their
+true nature. We can fill ourselves with spiritual joy on a Sunday, feeling
+confident in navigating our lives as we walk with Christ. We can do any of
+these without having to address the structural causes that so harm us. There
+is no healing for a broken people while the system that breaks us is left
+intact.
+None of this is a critique of any religion or culture. There are many
+different routes to Blackness, to the politics of liberation. Islam,
+Christianity, Afrocentricity and Rastafari can all lead to and play in a part in
+Black radical becoming. But they should never be confused with Black
+radicalism itself. Religious people have a role in the Black revolution, but
+there is no religious solution to our problems, and certainly none that could
+ever be radical. Once we start to view cultural nationalism as another
+
+religious system of belief, we can allocate its place in the revolutionary
+struggle. As Warren succinctly explains, ‘Kwanzaa might liberate the mind
+but it does little to eliminate economic and political oppression … Culture
+is crucial to revolution, but it is not revolution’.40
+Cultural nation within a nation
+Cultural nationalism is at its most dangerous when it prevents radical action
+by masquerading as a politics of liberation. The main way it does this is by
+providing an alternative way of living that appears to take the followers out
+of the mainstream system. The NOI was the model for Karenga’s US
+Organisation in the sense that it involved a ‘complete acceptance of an
+alternative lifestyle … dress, mannerism and an entire social life’.41
+Members were given new names and had to submit to the principles of the
+Kawaida. This kind of wholesale devotion to a way of life can
+unsurprisingly have a profound impact on the individual, but it has little
+effect on wider society.
+The US Organisation was originally founded by Karenga and Hakim
+Jamal, who was a close friend of Malcolm X. One of their first activities
+was to found a newspaper, Message to the Grassroots, and to take up
+Malcolm’s political programme. However Jamal quickly left because he
+saw ‘little value in US’s use of African rituals and languages’ and was
+dismayed by the cult of personality growing around Karenga.42 Maulana
+means ‘master teacher’ in Swahili, a title Karenga anointed himself with.
+He was the unquestioned head of the organisation and members had to
+pledge ‘loyalty to Maulana Ron Karenga who believed in us and accepted
+us before we believed in or accepted ourselves, or him, who found in all our
+weaknesses a hidden strength who gave us more than we asked from us that
+something of value which no one can take’.43
+The new identity, lifestyle and value system showed a devotion to a
+Karenga that reached ‘mystical proportions’.44 The US Organisation was
+not only a form of cultural nationalism, but an actual cult. This brand of
+cult-ural nationalism even included the kind of violence and control we
+would expect from a sect. Karenga was jailed from 1971 to 1974 for
+torturing and imprisoning a female US member because he believed she
+was a traitor. Before those of you who believe in conspiracy theories
+
+protest, it should be noted that his own wife testified against him.45 US was
+clearly a regressive, cult-like organisation, whose leader’s idea of a cultural
+return was of no revolutionary value. Given this, it is somewhat astounding
+that Karenga’s legacy has been so long-lasting and pervasive. He is the
+definition of the fruit of the poisonous tree that invalidates Afrocentrism in
+particular, and post-NOI Black cultural nationalism in general.
+Amiri Baraka represents the best attempt, and also the severe limits, of
+applying cultural nationalism to the social world. Baraka also took his lead
+from Karenga, and faced the same accusations that his work amounts to
+‘telling Black people what Blackness is’.46 He was an integral member of
+Karenga’s US and later founded the Committee for Unified Newark
+(CFUN). One of the regular events it ran were Soul Sessions, a mixture of
+dancing, cultural and political talks. One of the attendees at a Soul Session
+remarked of a Baraka speech, ‘I will never forget it. It was dealing with
+morality, like cleaning up your lifestyle – like drinking smoking, this kind
+of stuff. The new man, and alternative system’.47 This kind of
+transformative appeal is key to the popularity of cultural nationalism, and
+also its inherently conservative nature.
+The Nation of Islam has probably been the most successful organisation
+at changing the lives of ex-convicts. It recruits heavily in prisons and aims
+to provide a new social and moral system for those who have been caught
+up crime. The NOI preaches moral responsibility, clean living, smart dress
+and discipline. Malcolm always wore a suit, even after he had left the NOI.
+He spent the first couple of minutes of one of his last speeches apologising
+because of his attire. His house had been firebombed, ruining his clothes,
+and he felt he had to give an explanation for his appearance.48 The sense of
+belonging and new structure provided to NOI members helps to keep them
+away from their former lives and from re-offending. But as we have already
+explained, the NOI does not change the situation for those outside its reach,
+simply creating a cocoon which members can be a part of. The result is that
+the politics of clean living becomes the solution to the problem, perfectly
+fitting into right-wing rhetoric about responsibility and family, affirming the
+‘Black cultural pathology paradigm’.49
+The high point of Farrakhan’s leadership of the Nation of Islam was the
+Million Man March in 1995. The march saw hundreds of thousands of
+African Americans march on Washington in order to ‘atone to God for our
+
+failure as men to be the providers, the protectors, the defenders of our
+women and children’.50 We will address the regressive gender politics of
+this idea later, but it is striking how over forty years after the march for jobs
+and freedom the rhetoric had changed to atonement for our failures. As
+much as Malcolm savaged the 1963 march, at least it was trying to address
+the issue of racism. Malcolm critiqued the alliances with liberal Whites, so
+it is not difficult to imagine how much scorn he would have poured over the
+Million Man March’s ‘political cooperation with white conservatives’.51
+Marching to Washington for atonement almost entirely removes any
+societal responsibility for the issues that are present in Black communities.
+Farrakhan and the NOI have always played off being able to reform the
+inner city, which is seen as ‘crime driven, drug crazed, and over-run with
+immorality’.52 Having designed a programme of self-repair, they can then
+stand as the moral guardians, the ones who have cleaned up and offer a
+model for others to follow. This is why the NOI was praised by Republican
+vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, in 1996, for its ‘emphasis on
+personal responsibility, Black self-sufficiency and morality’.53 When you
+focus on the cultural as political, you end up supporting the status quo,
+because the cultural nation has to fit into the existing one.
+In fairness to Baraka, he makes the best attempt to deal with the political
+conservativism at the core of cultural nationalism. He argued that it was not
+enough to produce revolutionary rhetoric and that the ‘most revolutionary
+Africans as far as the community are concerned, are those who can deliver
+goods and services’.54 In the 1960s and 1970s Baraka became one of the
+key figures of the Modern Black Convention Movement, which organised
+mass meetings of Black politicians and activists to try to create a Black
+political alliance. By 1972, at the Black Political Convention in Gary,
+Indiana Baraka was the de facto leader of the move to create a distinctive
+Black political agenda. The convention drew in over 10,000 delegates and
+Baraka’s fingerprints are all over the declaration from the convention,
+which called on the Black nation to stop relying on Democrats and
+Republicans, and seek to represent ourselves. It declared that the time had
+come to ‘consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in
+the struggle for a new society. To accept that challenge is to move into
+independent Black politics’.55 Creating the Black nation as a political force
+within America was seen as vital to success.
+
+Baraka’s work in Newark stuck to these narrow nationalist lines. He
+aimed to create a model for Black Power in practice, developing a ‘liberated
+zone’ for African Americans.56 In order to do this CFUN, along with
+Karenga’s United Brothers, campaigned successfully for Black
+representation on the city council. In 1974, both Mayor Kenneth Gibson
+and the head of the city council, Earl Harris, were Black and owed their
+success to Black cultural nationalist support. In fact, Harris was a former
+member of United Brothers. With this representation at the political level
+Baraka pushed forward two urban development projects. The first was
+Kawaida Towers, a 210-plot development to provide decent housing and a
+community hub for Black residents. The second was a more expansive
+vision called the New Ark, which would include affordable quality housing;
+communal cooking facilities; a multi-purpose community centre; a
+communications centre to produce television and radio; as well as a medical
+centre. Both were designed by Black architects and aimed to enhance
+community life, based as they were on Afrocentric principles.
+In order to get this plan approved and funded Baraka had to work closely
+with federal, state and local officials. To get the dig started on the Kawaida
+Towers project he even compromised on Afrocentric principles, hiring an
+Italian building firm as the main contractor and ensuring the building site
+had White as well as Black labour. He negotiated a minefield of local
+politics and mob justice to get the project ready to go. However, on the
+opening of the building site the web he had managed to weave quickly
+started to unravel. The site for Kawaida Towers was in an Italian
+neighbourhood, rather than one that housed predominantly African
+Americans, which caused uproar in the local community. A picket line
+formed around the dig, the same White politicians who had supported the
+project in secret openly challenged it in court and violence erupted to stop
+Black labourers entering the site. The project was held up in the courts and
+eventually ended when the city council removed its support in the form of a
+tax break. The collapse of Kawaida Towers also spelled the end of the New
+Ark project and Baraka’s vision of cultural nationalism in practice.
+That the project fell apart should come as no surprise given the history of
+racism and housing in America. White Americans have fought extremely
+hard to ensure that Black people stay in their place, in substandard housing
+and away from White neighbourhoods. The limits of any politics that works
+within the system always end up being the system itself. The idea that
+
+Baraka could create a liberation zone within a hostile and racist America
+speaks volumes to the problems of narrow nationalism. The best that could
+be hoped for is a much smaller version of the issues we discussed in
+Chapter 1 in regard to so-called independent former colonies, or Haiti after
+it won its freedom: a freedom so limited by the surrounding imperialism
+that it ends up being just another form of subjugation. Even the most
+progressive form of cultural nationalism cannot ever hope to be radical
+when it involves working within the system of oppression. The fact that
+mainstream institutions were keen to work with Baraka is testament enough
+to his lack of a radical project. What may (or may not) come as more of a
+surprise though is the role the Black elected officials played in the downfall
+of the CFUN initiatives.
+Within two years of being elected due to CFUN support, Mayor Gibson
+was already at odds with Baraka, attempting (and failing) to get an
+opposing slate of candidates elected to the city council. At the outbreak of
+the hostility over Kawaida Towers the mayor was at first silent, and
+eventually sided with the White power structure. Council leader Earl Harris
+was even more brazen in the betrayal of his former backer, at one point
+declaring him a ‘racial extremist’, a ‘dictator’ and declaring that the council
+would work with anyone else but him.57 Boiling point was reached when
+Harris had Karenga and a number of CFUN activists arrested during a
+council meeting. The strategy of electing Black officials severely backfired
+on Baraka, to the point that he ended up rejecting integration into the
+system and advocating a socialist revolution. The problem with cultural
+nationalism is that it transforms the individual, resurrects and empowers
+them. As the impact is on the individual then there is nothing that
+automatically leads to that person using any successes they reap for the
+benefit of the community. Leaving the structures of power and oppression
+in place allows for the possibility that these supposedly liberated
+individuals will fall into the system’s ways of working. This is particularly
+true of politicians, who have routinely showed that they become part of the
+machine, rather than challenging it.
+Lacking a political philosophy, cultural nationalism has also supported
+the narrow nationalism of Black capitalism. Asante makes it crystal clear
+that one of the steps to so-called liberation is to ‘gain a foothold in every
+sector of the American economy’.58 The logic goes that by doing capitalism
+Afrocentrically we will produce fairer practices. This is the classic liberal
+
+argument about representation. The only difference is the idea that we first
+need to transform into our true African selves in order to deliver the social
+change. Once we know our history, have pride in self and carry ourselves
+with an ‘erect posture’,59 we will be able to take our rightful seat at the
+table with the rest of civilised society.
+Not only does cultural nationalism embrace the politics of integration, it
+is also based on claiming ‘authenticity’ that can be measured by how
+‘rooted we are in our tradition’.60 This idea of cultural authenticity is
+hugely problematic, particularly when it is based on the concept of a return
+to some mythic, utopian ideal of pre-colonial Africa. The notion that we can
+look back to a specific point in time where the true African identity can be
+found is regressive in both theory and practice. There is not one truth of
+pre-colonial Africa that can be restored, but a number of different
+interpretations and understandings of that history. What cultural nationalism
+does is to take a particular view of African history and render it immovable.
+When we consider who is doing the rendering of history, it becomes clear
+that a narrow, patriarchal and heteronormative vision of Africa is being
+created.
+Black Power movements in general have been criticised for their gender
+and sexual politics. Kwame Ture once remarked that the best place for
+women in the movement was ‘prone’, meaning on their backs.61 The Black
+Panthers had many issues with gender inequality and sexual violence was
+not uncommon in the party.62 We tend to deify the great men of history like
+Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Toussaint L’Overture and ignore the
+women who were integral to those movements. In Chapter 5 we will discuss
+in more detail the Black radical position on gender, but it is essential to
+distinguish the politics from cultural nationalism, which is patriarchal and
+heteronormative at its core.
+Building on the success of the Million Man March, Farrakhan took the
+next logical cultural nationalist step and announced plans to marry 10,000
+couples on the fifth anniversary of the march. He explained that he wanted
+to ‘go into the new century and new millennium not black male, black
+female but as a wholesome family with God at the center’.63 He also
+claimed that the march had led to a drop in the crime rate as Black men
+were ‘returning to their families and taking responsibility for their lives’. It
+is not difficult to see how his ideas have so much support from conservative
+
+Whites because it clearly lays the responsibility on the community atoning
+and recommitting to a more positive and ‘wholesome’ culture with
+marriage and stable family at the core. The apparently dysfunctional Black
+family, with absent fathers and single mothers on welfare, is targeted as the
+cause of the issues facing Black people.
+Before taking these notions apart it is important to acknowledge that the
+destruction of Black family units has been a consistent feature of racism in
+the West. When we were kidnapped in chains from Africa this tore apart
+familial bonds. Systematic efforts were made to split up families on the
+plantations, breaking apart relationships and removing children from their
+parents. Constant sexual violence meant that there could be no sanctity of
+relationships or families. In America enslaved men had no paternal rights,
+and women were reduced to passing on the inheritance of slavery. After
+emancipation the conditions for raising a family were far from ideal.
+Poverty and racial violence made the prospect extremely difficult. We have
+to consider the impact that thousands of men being lynched would have on
+the family.
+In the British context, the mother country’s call for labour after the
+Second World War was a further assault on the family. The first migration
+was predominantly male, and people who came to the country started new
+lives and often families. There is a lot of work to be done on the impact this
+had on family life, on both the children who stayed in the Caribbean and
+those who were brought over and had to integrate into new family
+dynamics. These realities of migration still occur today, presenting the same
+complex issues.64 The state has also played a divisive role in Black
+families, often being far too eager to take children into care because of how
+they perceive cultural deficits. There have been campaigns both in America
+and in Britain to keep social workers and the state out of Black families due
+to this interference.
+It is certainly true that Black families in America (and Britain) are more
+likely to be headed by a single woman. But this should not come as a
+surprise given the staggeringly high Black male unemployment rate, and the
+historically unprecedented number who languish in prison every year. We
+live in a society that has made it extremely difficult for Black men to play a
+productive role in their families and then wonder why some do not. Western
+society is certainly geared towards the two-parent nuclear family, and
+
+financially it definitely makes sense to have two adults in the house. But
+there is a much bigger question here as to what is meant by a family.
+It is ironic that cultural nationalism puts such emphasis on the nuclear
+family, when African cultures have been replete with different family
+forms. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is not just a mantra to keep an eye
+out for your neighbour’s children. It is a recognition that child rearing is a
+communal activity that stretches beyond the boundaries of the two-parent
+family. These kinds of practices survived into post-enslavement
+communities, with grandparents, uncles and aunts (related by blood or
+otherwise) taking on roles within the family. In Baraka’s plans for the New
+Ark there were to be communal kitchens precisely to acknowledge the role
+of collective cooking that they did within the organisation. We should be
+extremely careful about demonising alternative forms of the family just
+because they do not fit the societal norm.
+The Black, or rather the African, family in cultural nationalism is a fixed
+idea, with specific gender roles. Even when different forms of family are
+embraced, they remain steeped in patriarchy. The separation of men’s and
+women’s roles that exist within the NOI were replicated in groups like the
+US Organisation. It was the women who did the cooking and served their
+men. Women were meant to reproduce for the revolution, not actively
+create it. Karenga made it abundantly clear that the role of a woman was to
+‘inspire her man, educate her children and participate in social
+organisation’.65 Black men were the gods of their household and Karenga
+even went as far as to say that ‘what makes a woman appealing is
+femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive’.66
+I had heard stories from my mother about women having to serve the
+men in some cultural nationalist movements in the old days. I only half
+believed them until I witnessed it myself in the twenty-first century. We
+were at a meeting and food was mentioned; the women around the table just
+got up, brought out the food and served it up to the hungry warriors. These
+regressive ideas of family and gender have no place in radical politics;
+aping the discrimination of mainstream society is not revolutionary.
+The narrow ideas of gender also mean that Black women bear the brunt
+of the blame for dysfunction in the family. By claiming their independence
+they are seen to be emasculating men and driving them away from their
+families. The welfare state is said to have destroyed the family by replacing
+
+the father with a benefits cheque. By restoring traditional family values,
+equilibrium can be restored to the family and Black life.
+By attempting to restore the traditional family, cultural nationalism
+logically leaves no room for same-sex relationships. Women’s role is to
+reproduce and men’s to plant their seed, so it is unquestioned that the
+healthy relationship is the heterosexual one. Asante attempts to take a
+measured tone, arguing that African culture has never persecuted anyone
+because of their sexuality, but is also sure to mention that it has never been
+promoted as ideal. He is keen to insist that although he is not ‘homophobic’,
+he does not ‘support homosexuality as a way of life for black people’.67 He
+sees same-sex relationships as a deviation from the African concept of
+being and therefore ‘the optimum relationship, the historical relationship,
+the biologically natural relationship is between men and women’.68 Also
+important in Asante’s position on same-sex relationships is what he sees as
+an agenda that is anti-Black liberation.
+One of the reasons he cites for homosexuality being a deviation is that it
+causes people to place their sexual orientation before their African-ness. He
+complains that ‘black gays are often put in front of white or integrated
+organizations to show the liberalism of the group’, essentially being used as
+token for another cause. The issue of the gay agenda is one that has a
+certain amount of purchase in Black communities. As part of the cultural
+genocide against Black people, the imposition of homosexuality is seen to
+be one of the tools. The ‘feminisation of Black boys’ is said to rob them of
+their manhood and effectively castrate them, so that they are pliable and
+easy to control.69 The images of Black homosexuality on television and the
+idea of teaching about same-sex relationships in schools are seen to be part
+of this conspiracy. I have had numerous conversations with people who are
+convinced that there is too much focus on the gay issue, with the aim of
+blunting Black progress. One of the most uncomfortable moments in my
+academic career occurred at one of our major Blackness in Britain
+conferences. A stalwart of the community struggle had been listening to
+discussions about Blackness and Queerness and snapped. He went on a
+tirade about the gay agenda, feminisation of Black boys, the spread of HIV
+and ended with ‘I’m sick of all this Battymanism!’ As you can probably
+imagine, the room exploded in outrage and dissent. When confronted with
+these kinds of attitudes it is easy to dismiss them as outrageous and try to
+silence them. Unfortunately, they are more commonplace and deep-rooted
+
+than we would perhaps like to believe. The idea of the gay agenda can be
+traced all the way back to enslavement. Rape was not just reserved for
+women, but was a tool used to ‘correct’ men who were enslaved, to punish
+and placate them. The rejection of homosexuality that is seen in Black
+communities is at least in part attributable to the legacy of such abuses
+never having been dealt with. None of this is to excuse homophobia, which
+has some terrible, even deadly consequences. But in order to overcome it
+we need to understand and trace its roots. The problem with cultural
+nationalism is that it is based on principles that will never be able to accept
+same-sex relationships.
+If freedom is about finding the authentic self, it means being entirely
+proscriptive in defining what that self is. There can be no space for
+deviation from the accepted norm, because to do so ruins the very basis of
+liberation. Defining the authentic by a mythic conception of Africa
+compounds the issue by freezing Black identity in the past. It may well be
+true that polygamy was the basis of tribal life and there was a clear
+gendered division of labour in pre-colonial Africa. It may also be true that
+homosexuality was given no space or legitimacy. It is likely that this is not
+actually the case, but the truth of the matter is irrelevant. Debating the
+cultural norms of communities centuries past can never lead to any
+progressive ideals or outcomes. Although Europe interrupted Africa’s
+progress, the idea that hundreds of years ago pre-colonial Africa was some
+kind of utopia of values is clearly nonsensical.
+There was no unified Africa in pre-colonial times. There were different
+kingdoms, empires and tribes speaking diverse languages with a range of
+cultural traditions. Attempting to define a restricted African culture is
+exactly how Europeans treated (and continue to treat) the continent. When
+Blackness becomes a set of behaviours, ideas and cultural codes then it is
+easy to conflate the idea with race, a limiting set of attributes to be that
+should rightfully be rejected. As will be discussed in the next chapter, it is
+precisely this kind of logic that has led to Blackness and Black politics
+being so heavily criticised.
+Just as importantly, the Sankofa bird of the Ghanaian Adinkrah symbols
+has two heads, one looking to the past and one to the future. It is not simply
+fixed on the past as the salvation, but acknowledges that as we develop we
+adapt and change. The radical nationalism that lies at the heart of Black
+radicalism cannot be contained in traditions from pre-colonial Africa. In
+
+fact, some of those traditions would necessarily need to be transcended.
+Tribalism is certainly an African tradition but it is the antithesis of the unity
+needed to create the global Black nation. Even Nkrumah, who used
+tribalism in order to gain power, understood that it prevented the unification
+he sought.70 Rather than being forward looking, however, cultural
+nationalism stresses tradition, even when it goes against the logic of African
+unity.
+Black or African
+A perfect example of the regressive nature of cultural nationalism is the
+insistence that proclaiming oneself to be African is an essential step to
+liberation. I have lost count of the number of times I have been challenged
+on using the word Black by people who insist that referring to yourself as
+African is an evolution. The logic runs that we used to be Niggers, then
+Negroes, then Coloured, then Black, then Afro, and finally African. We
+have now arrived at our rightful designation and ‘the use of the term
+“black” for Africans should be abandoned’.71 It is probably the question I
+am most asked about, and when we started the Black Studies degree at
+Birmingham City University I had to deal with a potential petition that
+wanted the course renamed because they found the term ‘Black’ offensive.
+The ‘African or Black’ question is a seemingly endless debate rooted in a
+cultural nationalist perspective that freedom is a mental state rather than a
+structural one. The fact the question is still raised indicates the limits of
+cultural nationalism.
+The idea of evolution suggests that as we have moved through different
+stages of identity we have also made social progress. When we were
+enslaved we were Niggers and now that we can be bankers we are Africans.
+This demonstrates the conservative nature of the politics. Rather than focus
+on Black suffering, we should rejoice in the glory of our African-ness.
+Unfortunately, progress is an illusion. For all the freedoms some of us
+enjoy, Black people remain locked out of the social system worldwide. The
+prison industrial complex and mass unemployment in the West; extreme
+poverty and violence in the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of Africa;
+and three million children a year dying in East and Southern Africa alone
+for no good reason. African migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea are
+
+purposely left to drown, their floating bodies used as dead Nigger buoys to
+warn off other Niggers from attempting to come to Europe. To pretend that
+we have made any progress in these conditions is to succumb to the
+delusions of advancement that have kept the West afloat. This brings to
+mind Tupac Shakur’s passionate defence of his use of the word Nigga
+during a panel discussion:
+I don’t care if you’re a lawyer, if you’re a man, if you’re an African
+American, if you’re whatever the fuck you think you are. We’re thugs
+and Niggas to these motherfuckers … How you gonna be a man if
+you’re starving? You know? You could go to four or five different
+houses and there ain’t a man in any one of those motherfuckers. How
+we gonna be African Americans if we out here dying? We’re thugs
+and we’re Niggas until we set this shit straight.72
+He is literally spitting these words out of his mouth, so frustrated is he by
+the idea that calling yourself an African is any kind of progress. We can
+only judge our success by how far we have improved the condition of the
+Black nation, and we are desperately failing by that metric. Calling yourself
+an African, wearing Kente cloth and celebrating Kwanzaa is a lifestyle
+choice and not an achievement. Tupac reminds us of our political
+commitment to each other over our individual quest for selfhood. His
+remarks should also challenge the idea that language is all-powerful.
+Meaning gives language sense rather than the other way round. When
+Tupac says Nigga, or Malcolm said Black, or Garvey said Negro, they were
+all drawing on radical conceptions of Black unity. How they used these
+words is far preferable to how the cultural nationalists mobilise the term
+African.
+Africa is a place, not a politics. As we discovered in the last chapter on
+Pan-Africanism, neo-colonialism can make just as strong claims to Africa
+as can radical politics. If being African meant embracing a politics of
+liberation then there would surely be no problems on the continent itself.
+Many supposedly authentic African leaders have sold out to Western
+interests; in fact many have done so in the name of Africanism. If being
+culturally African is the marker of authenticity then surely the White settler
+colonialists who have laid down roots and embraced the native culture are
+
+now equally African. I have sat in meetings with staunch cultural
+nationalists who refute the word Black, and when it has come to discussing
+the politics of the continent they have had to use Black to distinguish
+between the indigenous and the settlers. I constantly hear that Black is
+inauthentic because ‘they don’t use Black in Africa’. For one thing that is
+not actually true. But more importantly, the politics of Blackness is just as
+important for those on the continent as it is for the Diaspora.
+People who do not like the word Black simply do not understand it.
+Black is beautiful and Blackness is liberation. The politics of Blackness
+rejects the faux unity, principles and notions of self that lay at the
+foundation of cultural nationalism. These are entirely inauthentic visions of
+an African identity that in truth has never existed. In constructing a narrow,
+patriarchal and conservative view of African-ness not only is cultural
+nationalism not radical, it is actually a regressive politics that must be
+overcome. In the next chapter we will explore the Blackness that is
+forward-looking, building on what has gone before but laying a foundation
+for the liberation of Africa and its Diaspora. Blackness is never a complete
+process, but is essential for the politics of Black radicalism.
+
+Chapter 5
+
+Blackness
+
+Beyoncé’s performance during Super Bowl 50 was hailed as a representing
+‘a new political moment’,1 delivering as she did a ‘radical halftime
+statement’.2 Clad in black leather and singing about loving her ‘Negro
+nose’, she paid homage to the Black Panthers, with raised fists and all. This
+outpouring of Black pride was one of the most watched spectacles on
+television and drew praise, including from Black Lives Matter activist
+Melina Abdullah who was impressed that Beyoncé was using her ‘artistry
+to advance social justice’.3 The Super Bowl performance in tandem with the
+video for Formation, with its strong anti-police violence message, raised
+Beyoncé from performer to activist.
+For days after the Super Bowl my social media timelines were full of
+awe for Beyoncé’s bravery and apparently revolutionary act in taking
+Blackness to the half-time show. I was mostly surprised by the response. I
+had watched the performance live and honestly had not even noticed the
+supposedly political statement; as far as I could see it was a case of
+Beyoncé being Beyoncé. There were the customary well-choreographed
+dance routines, on-point vocals and of course the nod to sexualisation, with
+her and the dancers wearing fishnet tights, hot pants and garters. We get so
+used to this commodification of Blackness that I didn’t even have a
+response. Well done to Beyoncé for finding her niche and exploiting it for
+every penny. But the reaction from Black people across the spectrum was
+truly troubling. When we are canonising pop artists’ performances during
+the most commercial moment in mainstream culture as revolutionary, then
+Black politics has reached its low point.
+There was nothing brave or activist about Beyoncé’s performance, it was
+well-orchestrated and sanctioned by the mainstream media. She received
+some criticism from the right-wing press and the police, but all that just
+played into the marketing campaign. Beyoncé was not risking anything
+during the performance, unlike when Nina Simone wrote Mississippi
+
+Goddamn. The civil rights anthem about America’s naked racism sparked a
+major backlash against Simone. The song was banned in several states,
+significantly damaged her career and she eventually left the country.
+Simone openly condemned America at a time of extraordinary racial
+violence, and even her level of stardom could not guarantee her safety.
+Beyoncé eventually making the choice to sing about being Black, with mild
+references to her nose and the Jackson 5, once she had attained a level of
+celebrity that completely incubated her from real-world consequences, pales
+in comparison. To elevate Beyoncé’s performance to the level of activism
+disrespects the struggles and sacrifices that have gone before.
+What really incensed me about the reaction to the performance was the
+idea that Beyoncé was treading new ground with her ode to the Panthers. In
+reality she was drawing on the same tropes of Black Nationalism we
+covered in Chapter 1. The top half of her costume was two ammunition
+belts, invoking the violent masculinist memory of the Panthers. The bottom
+half, with fishnets and garters, clearly gives women a particular role in the
+struggle. The Black Panthers had a uniform, and it did not involve fishnet
+tights and garters. This sexualised representation of women in the Panthers
+in the mainstream media is nothing new. Blaxploitation movies in the 1970s
+were popular precisely because of this patriarchal representation of Black
+Power politics. Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown is the embodiment of this view of
+Black female supposed liberation. In one movie poster she is described as
+‘brown sugar and spice, but if you don’t treat her nice, she’ll put you on
+ice’. Foxy Brown had two main assets to appeal to mainstream audiences,
+and neither involved revolutionary politics. Worse still, Beyoncé had
+already invoked this trope of Blaxploitation when she played the role of
+Foxxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers in Goldmember. Not only was the
+representation of the Panthers regressive, but we had already seen it from
+Beyoncé over a decade ago.
+After a few days of being deluged by the adulation for the half-time
+show I penned a piece for the Independent explaining why I thought people
+were getting a bit too caught up in the hype. Of all the things I have written
+this got the most volume and negative response on social media. The
+headline that the paper gave the article certainly did not help the reception:
+‘Beyoncé’s “bootylicious” sexualisation of black women isn’t inspiring’.4
+My argument that Beyoncé was reproducing sexist tropes of Black women
+was greeted by a deluge of criticism, including being called an Uncle Tom
+
+and being guilty of misogynoir. I well and truly kicked the Beyhive by
+calling out the sexual politics and lack of revolutionary credentials of
+Queen Bey. I probably should not have been surprised by the response; the
+image of a Black man policing the body of a Black woman is one that
+sparks a lot of emotions and for good reason, as we will explore in this
+chapter. Something missed in the criticism of my piece is that I have no
+problem with Beyoncé advancing her career in any way she sees fit. If she
+wants to shake her booty, try to look as light skinned as possible or pay
+homage to the Panthers by drawing on regressive tropes, then more power
+(just not Black power) to her. My problem is with the response to her
+supposedly radical performance, rather than the spectacle itself, which I
+honestly had no reaction to at all. To dismiss the critique of her performance
+because of misogynoir is to divert attention from the point being made.
+Comments from bell hooks about Beyoncé’s Lemonade were just as mauled
+by the Beyhive.5 These arguments are not about trying to police how people
+use their bodies, but a critique of the politics that are attached to such
+performances.
+Beyoncé’s performance was undeniably a political act, one endorsed by
+the Columbia Broadcasting Service (CBS), the National Football League
+(NFL) and a whole host of corporate sponsors. It was not subversive, or
+remotely radical. Unfortunately, Beyoncé at the Super Bowl managed to
+draw on the same reductive problematic tropes of Black politics that have
+so prevented us from having a proper discussion of gender, sexuality and
+Blackness. Black radicalism has to account for all the varied forms of
+Blackness and in this chapter we will consider just how the politics has
+done so.
+Black radicalism is anti-misogynoir
+In the first four chapters of this book I have dealt in depth with the need to
+separate out different strands of Black politics. There is no such thing as a
+unified take on Black Power; there are a variety of different ideas and
+movements, many of which violently disagree with each other. But the
+collective memory conflates and confuses these different politics into a
+mass trope of a movement defined by violence and misogyny. In
+constructing our understandings of Black Power movements it is as though
+
+we have collectively agreed that ‘womanhood was not essential to
+revolution. Or so everyone thought by the end of the 1960s’.6 Michele
+Wallace’s highly controversial book Black Macho and the Myth of the Black
+Superwoman has been taken as a credible account of Black Power politics,
+even though she reduces the movement to a quest for ‘black manhood,
+black macho – which could combine the ghetto cunning, cool, and
+unrestrained sexuality of black survival’.7 In this reductive account of the
+movement, Kwame Ture’s call for Black Power was nothing more than ‘a
+black man with an erect phallus, and he was pushing it up into the face of
+America’.8 Endorsing this reductive view of the movement does a
+disservice not only to the men, but also to the women involved.
+Across a range of Black activist movements there is no denying that
+there have been issues with sexism and misogyny. For example, the
+Panthers have faced heavy criticism for the way women were treated in the
+movement. But there is nothing special about Black Power or Black
+activism in this regard. For example, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain
+is in crisis after covering up rapes of women in the organisation. To mark
+out Black Power as some kind of unique space of misogyny is to do the
+work of the state in discrediting the politics.
+Certainly true is that the ‘hetero-patriarchal Black male body’ has
+dominated ‘mainstream scholarship’.9 Not only do we view the history of
+Black struggle through great Black leaders, most of the writing is done by
+Black men too. This book is a case in point; a brief scan of the authors cited
+so far and their subjects demonstrates a male-centric discussion. Much more
+must be done to bring out the voice of women in this history and
+scholarship. But we should never confuse the historical record or collective
+memory with the actual reality of the movements that took place. This is
+why I have gone to such lengths in the book to distinguish the different
+traditions of Black politics. Cultural nationalism of groups like US and the
+Nation of Islam were, and remain, misogynistic at their core. The roles they
+assign for women are those of the domestic and caregiver, in support of
+their revolutionary men. But these are not radical movements; in fact they
+are regressive and can never form a basis for progressive Black politics. It
+is also in these groups that you find virulently anti-LGBTQ ideas. Much has
+been made about how efforts to integrate Black communities, such as
+Dubois’ ‘nation within a nation’, are structurally misogynistic because it
+means embracing the mainstream idea of a feminine home life and a
+
+masculine public sphere.10 Again these claims to mainstream nation
+statehood sit well outside of the Black radicalism I am outlining here so
+cannot be used to discredit the politics. In seeking to overturn the system,
+Black radicalism must be calling for ‘the whole system of colonialism’
+which produces misogyny to be transformed.11 Black radicalism is not the
+politics of Karenga, or Farrakhan, or even Dubois, so to criticise it for their
+gender biases is unfair.
+In the next chapter the Black Panthers will be discussed as a key strand
+in Black radicalism, but even here we need to distinguish which Panthers
+we are talking about. When I think Cleaver, I imagine Kathleen and not
+Eldridge. In the struggle to view Black Power as misogynoir, Eldridge is a
+key figure, especially because he admitted raping Black women in
+preparation for committing the crime against White ones.12 Rather than
+being spurred to a life of misogynoir action by his book Soul on Ice, I had
+to put it down in disgust before finishing it. If there is any person who is
+held as an example of Black radicalism but can lay least claim to it, it is
+probably Eldridge. His entire role in the Panthers seems to have been to
+destabilise it. He was famous for incendiary comments and for pushing
+violent confrontations with the police. On 4 April 1968, after the
+assassination of Martin Luther King, Eldridge led an ambush on a squad of
+police. This kind of action was the Black Macho in search of his manhood
+that Michele Wallace so caricatured and that is so present in the memory of
+the Panthers. The latest documentary, The Vanguard, lionises these ‘bad
+niggers off the block’ who were ready for action.13 The unsurprising result
+was a shootout that led to Eldridge and L’il Bobby Hutton being trapped in
+a burning building surrounded by the police. Hutton was shot to death but
+Eldridge survived. He later managed to smuggle himself out of the country
+and ended up in Algeria.14 From there he became a vocal critic of the
+Panthers and their programmes of free food and medical supplies. From the
+safety of abroad he demanded the party take violent action against the state.
+Even if Eldridge was not working with the state, he did just as much to
+undermine the solidity of the Panthers. His conversion to the Republicans in
+later life only adds fuel to the suspicion that his motives towards the party
+were never pure. His prominence in the memory of the Panthers and his
+actual place in their history do not match up. I was surprised when I
+mentioned Eldridge to my father; his first words were ‘we always thought
+
+he was planted by the FBI’. I am apparently not the only one who saw
+through Eldridge.
+The Panthers must take responsibility for creating a culture in which
+Eldridge was ever allowed to be a prominent figure. No doubt, many of the
+members subscribed to his poisonous views of women. But that doesn’t
+mean we should ignore the totality of the role of women in the party. The
+Panthers’ membership was 60% female and only a small fraction of their
+work involved armed confrontation. The bulk of the efforts involved
+producing and distributing the Black Panther newspaper, the free breakfast
+programme, free health clinics, running liberation schools and giving out
+free legal advice. Women were active across all areas of the Panthers’ work,
+and though men may have dominated powerful positions in Black politics
+we should not discount the role of women. As Kathleen Cleaver explained,
+‘the form of assistance that women give in political movements to men is
+just as crucial as the leadership that men give to those movements’.15 In the
+case of the Panthers, though, Elaine Brown spoke of the discrimination
+facing women in the party, of which she became chairperson in 1974.16
+This is a testament to the idea that the problem of misogyny within the
+Panthers was the members, rather than a structural limitation like those that
+render cultural nationalism inherently regressive.
+Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association also suffered from
+similar limitations of leadership. Both of Garvey’s wives were hugely
+influential in the organisation, with Amy Jacques being the de facto second
+in command and the person who curated the legacy of Garveyism through
+books like Garvey and Garveyism and The Philosophy and Opinions of
+Marcus Garvey. When Garvey was imprisoned in 1925, he entrusted the
+leadership of the UNIA to Amy Jacques but the men in the organisation
+rejected female direction, contributing to its downfall. Even though
+misogyny was certainly present in the UNIA, it did not define it. The
+organisation took leadership on ‘women’s issues’ from the very beginning
+because, as Amy Jacques explained, ‘if the mothers of men are not treated
+fairly, men are but limiting their own progress and development’.17 In 1920,
+Henrietta Vincent Davis founded the Black Cross Nurses (BCN) as part of
+the UNIA, set up as a vehicle for women to be involved in nation building.
+There is certainly something patriarchal in setting up the female work as
+that involving nursing, nutrition and education. But this was 1920, and an
+organisation openly discussing and working in women’s health, being run
+
+and led by women, was far ahead of its time. The role of women was also
+not limited to the BCN in the Garvey movement. The UNIA was an
+organisation of over five million members at its peak, so we should decentre the role of Garvey himself. While he was the founder and inspiration,
+the organization was successful because of the collective; and if we think of
+Garveyism as a movement, women were fundamentally involved at all
+levels. In many ways it is our memory of these movements that is the
+problem and not their actual structures; somehow ‘both historians of the
+Black movement and women’s movement have overlooked the activities of
+Black women in the most important mass movement in Black history’.18
+We should not be surprised misogyny exists in movements that developed
+in a misogynistic society; the question is whether the organisation itself
+allows the limitations of the mainstream to be overcome.
+Building the Black nation has been the central concern of Black radical
+politics in order to overturn the existing political and economic system. The
+focus on the nation has been used to argue that the movement is
+misogynistic because of the gendered nature of national formations.19 This
+argument misses the point of Black radicalism, which is to shatter the
+Western nation state in order to rebuild with a revolutionary foundation.
+Nation takes on an entirely different meaning in this context. The idea that
+only men have been involved in imagining revolutionary concepts of
+nationhood is disrespectful to the women who have been central in pushing
+for a redefinition. It is not just young Black men who obsess over the
+nation, as someone once disparagingly warned me at a conference. Women
+like ‘Queen Mother’ Audley Moore, Grace P. Campbell, Claudia Jones and
+Sunni Ali all engaged in rethinking the nation. Ironically, marking out the
+nation as something men think about is precisely the gendering of social
+thought that mainstream knowledge is based on. The same is true for the
+issue of violence.
+To engage in revolutionary politics means having to consider the
+question of violence. Not as some kind of psychoanalytic tool for Black
+manhood, but because the system that needs to be overturned is the most
+violent that has ever existed. When Malcolm admonished the Civil Rights
+movement for its ‘love thy enemy’ approach, he was chiding the naïve
+belief that non-violence could solve the systemic problems. To see this
+discussion of violence as inherently male is extraordinarily problematic. To
+do so again draws on the tropes of the masculine demagogues of Black
+
+Power: they must have meant men do the violence and women make the
+home. Though this was definitely true for some regressive figures, we are
+distorting Malcolm’s legacy if we cast him in the same light as someone
+like Eldridge Cleaver. ‘Message to the Grassroots’ is Malcolm’s most vivid
+speech on violence, where he consistently talks about ‘bloodshed’ in the
+cause of revolution. But the example he uses for revolutionary violence
+couldn’t be further from the caricature of the Black Macho:
+when I was in prison, I read an article in Life magazine showing a
+little Chinese girl, nine years old; her father was on his hands and
+knees and she was pulling the trigger ’cause he was an Uncle Tom
+Chinaman. When they had the revolution over there, they took a
+whole generation of Uncle Toms – just wiped them out. And within
+ten years that little girl become [sic] a full-grown woman. No more
+Toms in China.20
+Not only is his example of revolutionary violence enacted by a little girl,
+but the traitor, the Tom, is male. Malcolm made it clear that ‘you don’t have
+to be a man to fight for freedom’,21 and if we honestly account for the
+legacy of Black radicalism it should come as no surprise that he would draw
+on a female figure to represent the use of violence. Contrary to the failures
+of our collective memory, Black women have been just as involved in
+political violence as men. Dahir Al Kahina led troops against the Arab
+invasion into Tunisia in the seventh century, declaring ‘Africa for the
+Africans’.22 Queen Nzinga in Angola fought on the front lines in the battle
+against the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, until she was sixty. Queen
+Nanny of the Maroons in Jamaica led a fearsome guerrilla war against the
+slaveholders in Jamaica until her death in 1734. Her brother Cudjoe, on the
+other hand, signed a treaty with the British and colluded in returning
+enslaved Africans and rebels. During the Haitian revolution Black women
+were just as involved in revolutionary violence as the men. Mbuya Nehanda
+fought the British in Zimbabwe and was executed by hanging in 1897. Yaa
+Asantewaa led a rebellion of the Ashanti tribe against the British in 1900,
+chastising the men ‘if you the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we
+will. We the women will. We will fight till the last of us falls in the
+battlefields’.23 Whether it was the revolutionary post-war struggles in
+
+Guinea, Tanzania, Angola or South Africa, women shed just as much blood
+as men.
+Throughout this book you will hear me draw on Malcolm X more than
+any other person. This is not because he is a man, but because he provides
+the fullest account of Black radicalism that can be found. To centre on
+Malcolm does not mean to belittle the contributions of Black women,
+because Malcolm is harnessing a tradition that has always had Black
+women at its core. We absolutely do not need to create ‘definitions of
+Blackness that do not exclude, isolate or stigmatize’, because such an
+understanding is already the basis of Black radicalism.24
+Blackness is not race
+When Malcolm declared that there ‘is a new type of Negro, who calls
+himself Black … He doesn’t make any apology for his Black skin’,25 he
+ushered in a new type of Black politics. Prior to this, in the Englishspeaking world we did not refer to ourselves as Black. We were Niggers,
+Negroes, Coloureds, West Indians, and the list goes on. Malcolm was
+claiming Blackness as the political basis for revolution. He was also
+building on historical precedents like the Haitian constitution which
+declared the nation after the revolution in 1804 as a Negre, or Black,
+republic.26 Blackness in Haiti had to be built, and was a not a natural
+identity before the revolution. In his excellent analysis in Black Jacobins
+C.L.R. James explains in detail how the French built a system designed to
+fragment the population of African descent in the colony.27 As well as the
+enslaved, there was a small number of liberated Africans and also a class of
+free people whose heritage was mixed with the slave owners. None of the
+free Black people on the island were quick to join the revolution, which
+started on the plantations with those at the bottom of the system. The
+revolution was only successful when all the groups came together as Black
+and united to defeat the French. Blackness has never been simply about
+colour, but a commitment to a liberatory politics that our colour ties us into.
+Malcolm distinguished between the ‘Negro’ and ‘Black’ revolutions to
+make clear the politics behind Blackness. He dismissed the Negro
+revolution stating:
+
+The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro
+revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated
+lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a
+desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the
+toilet.28
+Blackness was a rejection of the politics of civil rights, of trying to gain
+access to a system that oppresses us. There would be no more patiently
+waiting, cap in hand, for incremental changes to the system. The Black
+revolution was ‘hostile’, knew ‘no compromise’ and ‘overturns and
+destroys everything in its way’. The key for Malcolm was to eradicate the
+existing system and build a new nation on a completely different set of
+principles, and Blackness was central to this goal.
+Blackness is a radical concept because it ties the destiny of the Diaspora
+together. As we discussed in Chapter 3, breaking the conceptual prison of
+the Western nation state is essential to building a radical project. To claim a
+connection to all those marked with Black skin means incorporating
+Fanon’s ‘wretched of the Earth’ into your political programme.29 The
+liberal politics of civil rights must be rejected because there is no way to
+integrate the three million children who die for no good reason in South
+East Africa every year into the global political social order. Malcolm’s
+embrace of Blackness took the struggle outside of the ‘jurisdiction of Uncle
+Sam’,30 and laid a foundation for connecting the struggles against apartheid
+in South Africa, Jim Crow in America and colonial rule in the Caribbean.
+Given that White supremacy has devastated most of the world, rooting
+Blackness on the wretched of the earth could lead to the inclusion of more
+than just the African Diaspora. A child dies every ten seconds because of
+lack of access to food, and many of those children live in Asia and Latin
+America. In fact, in the speech quoted above Malcolm says ‘when I say
+Black, I mean non-white’, and includes China in the Black revolution
+sweeping the globe. Malcolm very much believed in the Third World
+Movement against imperialism, which was hallmarked by meetings such as
+took place in Bandung between Pan-African and Asian leaders in 1954.31
+But it would be incorrect from this quote to think Malcolm saw Black as
+equal to non-White. His use of the term more often relates to what he
+termed the ‘so-called Negro’ and his Organization of Afro-American Unity,
+
+the political organisation he was building when he died, was explicitly
+targeted to those of African descent. As much as I have used Malcolm as
+the basis for the arguments in this book, he is also not infallible. Malcolm
+died before the optimism of the Third World Movement had waned. Not
+being White did not prevent Arab exploitation of North Africa or China’s
+neo-colonial role on the continent. It is also entirely disempowering to
+define yourself in relation to White people; it marks Whiteness out as the
+standard, the norm.32 The hierarchy of White supremacy creates the Negro
+at the bottom, as the inhuman beast of burden, cementing our location in the
+political economy. Blackness is a rejection of the Negro, the reclamation of
+our link to each other and to Africa. This political statement is an essential
+component of the Blackness at heart of Black radicalism.
+It would be easy to critique Malcolm’s expression of Blackness on the
+basis that he declares the Black subject as male: ‘he calls himself Black’.
+The focus on violence and the nation could be highlighted as the standard
+male imagining of agency. It would be easy to do so, but also lazy. As
+explained above, Malcolm imagines the revolutionary subject as female and
+draws on a tradition where women have been instrumental. Also,
+Malcolm’s OAAU did not have defined roles for men and women. The
+question is not whether Malcolm used the patriarchal language of the time
+but whether the idea is structurally exclusive. A slight tweak leads to a new
+type of Negro who calls themselves Black, making no apology for their
+Black skin. It is here that we have the radical platform of Blackness.
+Blackness was called into being during the 1960s but the concept predates this. At its root Blackness is the call to unite all those of African
+descent in order to organise a struggle for liberation. As we discussed in
+Chapter 3, one of the strongest influences on Malcolm was Marcus Garvey
+and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey mobilised
+around the idea of the Negro, but this was identical to how Malcolm used
+Black. In fact, Garvey was in Harlem and influential for the new Negro
+movement, which aimed to challenge the gradualist approach to freedom.
+Garvey built the UNIA into the most successful global organisation linking
+the African Diaspora.
+To understand the link of Blackness, we must be able to separate out the
+concept from race, because the two could not be more distinct.
+Unfortunately, the vast majority of scholarship on Blackness has conflated
+the two. For example, Michelle Wright argues in her book Physics of
+
+Blackness that ‘Blackness was not a scientific discovery but an economic
+and political argument first used to justify the slave trade’.33 That is an
+excellent description of race, the regressive concept used to slaughter and
+dominate the globe. However, it is literally the opposite of Blackness,
+which is first used to resist the work that race was doing. When Europeans
+loaded Africans onto the slave ships, purposefully mixing up tribes so that
+they could not communicate, it was the Blackness of the enslaved that
+brought them together. It was their Blackness that unified them into a force
+to resist and mutiny. Blackness is relational to Whiteness only in that sense;
+it was the contrast to the racism of Whites that brought together the
+expression of Blackness in that form. Our understandings of difference and
+Blackness are not simply to mimic those of White society. They have their
+own genealogy, and distinct meanings.
+In their inability to accept that we have produced our own knowledge
+and understandings, academia has been quick to distance itself from
+Blackness. Black liberation movements are patronised for their ‘romantic
+conceptions of “race”, “people” and “nation”’,34 and advised to ‘consider
+abandoning’ altogether the ‘misleading discourse’ of unity and
+nationhood.35 The inability to distinguish race from Blackness has led to
+figures such as Garvey being either demonised or ignored.
+Garvey’s embrace of race certainly had problematic elements; for
+instance, he viewed race mixing as a sin that could not stand. His motto was
+‘race first’, and to be a member of the UNIA meant pledging to maintain
+the purity of the Black race. The extreme end of this logic led him to meet
+with the Ku Klux Klan in America to discuss how they could work together
+on their common goal of preventing race mixing.36 This was actually very
+similar to Malcolm meeting the KKK during his time in the Nation of Islam
+and the uncomfortable alliance between the group and the American Nazi
+Party.37 Although this is clearly problematic, we have to be more nuanced
+in our analysis and not condemn him for ‘drinking from the same fountain
+of racial prejudice’ as the fascists.38 Western concepts of race are not only
+based on supposed genetic differences, but also on a hierarchy with
+Whiteness established as the pinnacle. Neither of these apply to how
+Garvey viewed race, or what it mean to be Black.
+Even the NOI’s view of race, which creates a distinct version of Black
+supremacy, cannot be simply lumped together with Western notions of race.
+
+In the NOI’s creation myth White people are literally the devil incarnate.
+While a member, Malcolm would teach the story of Dr Yacub, an evil
+scientist who started breeding the light-skinned Black people, then their
+offspring, and subsequent generations until he had created the ‘blonde
+haired, blue eyed devil’. Once he had bred the White devils, Yacub taught
+them ‘tricknology, which is a science of tricks and lies, and then this weak
+man’ was ‘able to use that science to trick and rob and rule the world’.39
+White people are inferior in this narrative and there are many
+uncomfortable references to the White race being more like dogs than
+people. However, this is still clearly distinct from European ideas of race.
+The basis of Whites’ inferiority is in some sense genetic, in that they were
+bred that way by Yacub. But the reason they are evil is because they were
+taught tricknology; it is based on their actions in the world rather than presupposed by genetic traits. There are clearly similarities here to race in that
+these traits become mapped on the biology of Whites; to be White is to be a
+devil and there is no redemption from this. In contrast to race, though, the
+role of this story is not to rule and dominate Whites, but as a tool for Black
+people to liberate themselves. Whites’ reign on earth was only supposed to
+last 6000 years, which ran out in 1914, and it is supposedly only because
+Black people have been asleep as to the nature of our divine selves that we
+have not yet inherited the earth. The story is told for Black people to resist
+racism, separate from White America and start anew in a land for ourselves.
+As flawed and regressive as this story is, it is the basis of a version of
+anti-racist politics, and therefore a repudiation, at least to some extent, of
+Western notions of race. By subverting the Western racial hierarchy it aims
+to deal with the problem of racism. White supremacy is a fundamental part
+of race, and you cannot reify race with claims of Black superiority. As
+problematic as this notion of Black supremacy is, it can also be a powerful
+step towards radical versions of Blackness. Malcolm was politically raised
+in the NOI and ended up articulating the most powerful and radical concept
+of Blackness. We cannot dismiss the influence of his eleven years in the
+organisation in a desire to present a sanitised version of Malcolm that the
+bourgeois and academic can relate to. We like to pretend that once Malcolm
+left the NOI he transformed, throwing off the shackles that were holding
+him back, with his visit to Mecca being this transformative part of his
+journey, his supposed reinvention. Nothing could be further from the truth.
+There is only one moment of complete transformation for Malcolm and that
+
+is from when he was Detroit Red, the hustler, to when, after immersing
+himself in reading in prison, he joined the NOI and became Malcolm X. He
+refers to that period as completely altering his way of thinking and entire
+approach to life, likening it to the suddenness of falling ‘snow off a roof’.40
+Malcolm’s radical approach to Blackness and the nation was developing
+during his time in the NOI, with his split being inevitable given his
+revolutionary politics. His trip to Mecca opened his eyes only to the reality
+that all White people were not evil and led him to condemn the system of
+Whiteness, rather than individuals. Malcolm’s journey is one of evolution,
+not transformation, and was the inspiration for one of the most influential
+psychological models of Black identity.
+William Cross developed the ‘Nigrescence’ model to explain what he
+called ‘Negro to Black conversion experiences’.41 Heavily influenced by
+both Malcolm’s journey and Kwame Ture’s statement that ‘every Negro is a
+potential Black man’, Cross tried to explain the stages someone could go
+through to achieve a radical Black identity. In the first stage they are the
+Negro, unaware of racism and playing along with their role in White
+society. For Malcolm this is him as the hustler, the stereotypical Black man
+for the mainstream to fear (and desire). Then, Cross theorised, came the
+Encounter, an event that shakes you out of the pretence that your colour is
+not important. Malcolm’s incarceration would serve as quite a vivid
+encounter with the racism of the criminal injustice system. Cross gives the
+example of people’s reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King,
+seeing the non-violent spokesman gunned down woke people to the realities
+of the system. After the Encounter there would be a period of intense antiWhiteness, what Cross called Immersion/Emersion. As people threw
+themselves into learning about racism they could not help being anti-White
+given all of the horrors and injustices that the West has wrought. This would
+be Malcolm embracing the NOI and its view of White people as devils. But
+eventually, as people went through a process of Internalisation of Black
+consciousness, they would become Committed to the liberation struggle and
+be the ‘new type of Negro’, Black, proud and in the struggle. Picture
+Malcolm after he leaves the NOI and founds the OAAU, pro-Black but no
+longer defined by Whiteness, whether for or against it. Cross’ model
+oversimplifies the issues here and he updated it in later versions,42 but the
+point is that anti-Whiteness can be a part of an oppositional politics and
+may even be a necessary stage to Black radicalism. To simply see even the
+
+most Black supremacist logic of groups like the NOI as the same concept as
+race is to badly miss the point. This is particularly the case when there are
+plenty of forms of Blackness that involve no hierarchy at all, such as
+Garveyism, which has often been dismissed as Black fascism.
+Although Garvey was against race mixing and met with the KKK, he
+was not arguing that White people were inferior or that mixing would ruin
+the Black racial stock. For Garvey, mixing meant diluting African blood
+and therefore weakening the connection to Africa, the Diaspora and the
+politics of liberation. It’s worth noting that in Garvey’s day the impact of
+colourism across the Americas was unmistakeable. He would have directly
+witnessed the privileges afforded to those with lighter skin tones and seen
+how some had been incorporated into the management of imperialism.
+Given the colour-coded hierarchy it is not surprising that he would have
+associated dark skin with the masses and liberation, and light skin with the
+bourgeois and imperialism. More problematic for Garvey in how he viewed
+White society was that he was too complimentary to it. Garvey wanted to
+elevate the Negro world to the level of the White race and can therefore
+stand accused of capitalism, but not mimicking the fascists.
+Garvey consistently mobilises the word ‘blood’ in talking about the
+connection of the African Diaspora, and this is a term that Appiah takes
+issue with in his supposed classic In My Father’s House. He rails against
+Dubois’ use of the term ‘common blood’ to speak of the connection of
+Blackness because he argues that ‘dressed with fancy craniometry, a dose of
+melanin, and some measure for curly hair is what the scientific notion
+amounts to’.43 For Appiah, the only use of colour, blood or ancestry in
+identity is rooted in the European concept of race, and he is entirely
+blinkered to the idea that Blackness is a separate and opposing concept. We
+need to be much more sophisticated in how we understand ‘blood’ in the
+connection of Blackness.
+For Garvey, blood is not meant as a genetic marker of attributes and
+abilities. Blood is the familial, historical connection to Africa. It does not
+presuppose any genetic traits, and limits the connection to a shared history
+and experiences of those whose skin in Black. Due to this connection,
+Garvey effectively argues that the Diaspora has a responsibility to each
+other, and must unite under a common destiny. Blood is our ancestral
+connection, the ties that bind us together. To the extent that it is genetic, it is
+the loose familial bond, that which colours our skin and curls our hair. It is
+
+our direct link back to the continent of Africa, the permanent reminder of a
+shared connection. Blood takes on such importance because due to the
+horrors of slavery and cultural genocide we have nothing else to connect us.
+What academics like Appiah are ignorant of is that Blackness is not about
+the colour, or even the blood, but is founded on what they both represent.
+We choose to see the connection to Africa and the Diaspora as important.
+This is why it is no way a surprise that, as Appiah admits, ‘Dubois managed
+to maintain Pan-Africanism while officially rejecting talk of race as
+anything other than a synonym for colour’.44 It has never been anything
+more than that, embracing our Blackness as the starting point for
+understanding our place and struggles in the world.
+Wright takes issue with a narrative of Blackness that ties the Diaspora
+together through the middle passage of slavery.45 She argues that it is
+impossible to maintain historical continuity and prioritise the middle
+passage at the same time as including all parts of the Diaspora. Wright
+argues that in order to have a more open definition of Blackness we need to
+use non-linear ideas of time and to de-centre the middle passage. The idea
+of linear progress may be central to narrow and cultural nationalism, but the
+same is not true of Black radicalism. To say that we are connected because
+of our shared history and roots in Africa does not mean this is based on a
+simple step-by-step link to the past. Wright expends a lot of intellectual
+energy using the analogy of quantum physics to argue the need to see the
+past, present and future as fluid in space and time. Rather than mooring her
+understandings on Eurocentric philosophies of knowledge, Wright would
+have found that this very concept is alive in African knowledge systems,
+and is the basis of Black radicalism.
+I am usually wary of claiming the idea of African epistemologies
+because of the large diversity of thought across the continent and Diaspora.
+But on the issues of time, specifically linked to death, there is a clear
+distinction to European thought. Death does not mark the end in African
+thought, because the ancestors retain a connection to the world.46 You pray
+and atone to your ancestors to influence the present and future, and it is this
+connection to the spirit world that Europeans have used to demonise and
+mock traditional African belief systems. The act of praying to the dead in
+the present to influence the future transcends any notion of linear time. The
+Akan Adinkrah symbol of the Sankofa bird, which looks backwards and
+forwards simultaneously, is the visual representation of this idea. When
+
+Garvey talks of blood, he is making that ancestral connection. Not in a
+simple linear sense, but viewing the future of Black people through the lens
+of the past. So the middle passage is not a horror that happened a long time
+ago and is necessary for a continuity narrative, it is something that we
+connect to from this moment to understand our place in the world. The
+same is true of slave rebellions and struggles for resistance across time.
+The idea that the middle passage is only important for the narrative of
+the enslaved Diaspora is extremely problematic. The victims of transatlantic
+slavery were not just those who boarded slave ships. There was fierce
+resistance to enslavement on the African continent and countless died
+fighting Europeans. The impact of transatlantic slavery on the continent was
+also devastating, removing millions of people, destroying communities and
+setting back economic and political progress for centuries.47 Slavery did not
+just happen to the Diaspora; nor did the middle passage break the link to the
+African continent. Many rebel leaders like Nanny of the Maroons were
+African born and drew on these roots for the struggle. Nanny was an Asante
+leader and used her knowledge of guerrilla warfare to get the best of the
+British in Jamaica. As discussed in Chapter 1, the presence of so many
+African-born leaders in Haiti was a key reason for the success of the
+revolution. Rather than seeing the middle passage as some sort of
+discontinuity between Africa and the Diaspora we should instead embrace it
+as the ‘unbreakable umbilical cord’ between the two.48 It is entirely
+incorrect to analyse the situation on the continent of Africa as somehow
+distinct from the Diaspora, as Appaih does when he argues that ‘the
+“discrimination and insult” Dubois experienced in the … industrialized
+world were different in character from that experienced by, say, Kwame
+Nkrumah in colonized West Africa’.49 This is a painting by numbers
+analysis of racism, which has become all too common when theorising
+Blackness.
+The middle passage is perhaps the ultimate example of the creation of
+the ‘Negro’. Stripped, shackled, beaten and packed like cattle with those
+whose language you cannot speak: this is the definition of the sub-human
+being with no history or culture; the beast of burden necessary to build the
+new world. But the Negro is not just essential outside of Africa, but also on
+the continent; to procure the labour force upon which capitalism is based,
+but also to control and dominate the continent. The mineral resources from
+Africa were as important as the labour, and certainly more so today.
+
+Negroes do not have claims to land, or need of mineral wealth. They do not
+have the capacity to rule themselves and it is therefore the ‘white man’s
+burden’ to do so.50 King Leopold’s Belgium killed up to ten million people
+in the Congo and maimed countless more. The punishment for not meeting
+your rubber quota was to lose your hand, even if you were a child.51 The
+justification for this genocide is no different than that for transatlantic
+slavery. White supremacy was, and remains, the same problem on the
+African continent as it is in the Diaspora. So while Dubois’ problems may
+have manifested differently in America than Nkrumah’s in Ghana, the root
+problem was the same.
+One of the most quoted parts of Fanon’s work is the story of when he
+first realised he was a Negro. Growing up in Martinique surrounded by
+other Black people he had never considered his colour, it was only in
+France when a young boy shouted ‘look mama, the Negro … I am
+frightened’ that he understood he was Black.52 Stuart Hall had a similar
+experience:
+Until I left [Jamaica], though I suppose 98 per cent of the Jamaican
+population is either Black or colored in one way or another, I had
+never ever heard anybody either call themselves, or refer to anybody
+else as ‘Black’. Never. I heard a thousand other words. My
+grandmother could differentiate about fifteen different shades
+between light brown and dark brown.53
+I cannot count the number of times I have heard these two accounts, or
+variations of them, used to distance the experiences in the West from those
+in the colonies, to argue against the unity of Blackness. The fact that you do
+not appreciate something does not mean it has not shaped your life. Once
+we accept that the Negro was created across the continent of Africa and all
+of the Diaspora, then even though Hall or Fanon did not realise the impact
+of this it does not mean they did not feel it. Hall’s reference to the
+multitudes of shades his grandmother could differentiate is an indication of
+the power of colourism in Jamaica. Even today the political world and
+economic prosperity in the island is colour coded. In fact, issues like skin
+bleaching, being so disgusted by your Blackness that you burn off the
+colour, are far more prevalent in Caribbean and African countries than they
+
+are in those nations where we are the minority. Fanon was keenly aware of
+the issues of racism in the Caribbean, arguing that the West Indian
+identified himself with the White man’s attitude, stating that ‘the West
+Indian … is a Negro’.54 The astronomical murder rate in Jamaica is allowed
+to continue because the victims are Negroes. Families trying to cross the
+Mediterranean from Africa in search of a better life are left to drown,
+because they are Negroes. Three million children die in South East Africa
+every year because they are Negroes. People do not become Negroes in the
+West, they just realise it when they see the contrasts to Whiteness.
+Wright’s other objection to how we understand Blackness is that in
+trying to find continuity we narrate a narrow story dominated by men as the
+only way to ‘point to the existence and pedigree of Black culture, Black
+politics, Black music, Black literature’.55 This is a perfect example of how
+academic discussions of Blackness have become limited to viewing the
+concept ‘as political expression of racial essentialism’.56
+Blackness is a political essentialism
+Essentialism in the discussion of Blackness means to ‘assume the existence
+of a transhistorical and organic “black essence”’ that defines all Black
+people.57 It is to reduce us to set ways of being and cultural forms, to make
+Blackness rigid and inflexible. There are two primary concerns from the
+academy with essentialism and Blackness. The first is that the ‘myth of a
+black community’58 ‘inadvertently helps to reproduce some of the thinking
+and practices that have created black disadvantage in the first place’.59 In
+this dubious logic, racist society is based on dealing with Black people as a
+unit, and we collude in this project by embracing the idea that we are a
+separate and different community. Basically, this is the latest version of the
+integration over separation debate. We should have long ago realised that
+dreaming that we can be an undifferentiated part of the system is a fantasy.
+Whether we imagine ourselves as equals, or cosmopolitan individuals who
+transcend the boundaries of race, makes absolutely no impact on the
+realities of racism. Even the most successful Black people, who have
+apparently ‘made it’, have their ‘acute moments of disrespect’ that Elijah
+Anderson calls the ‘nigger moment’.60 This whole argument is predicated
+on the idea that the only way to see Blackness is through the lens of
+
+Whiteness as if we have no control over our own meaning. When enslaved
+Africans during the middle passage united in their Blackness to mutiny,
+they were hardly supporting the logic that disadvantaged them. Perhaps
+they should have avoided embracing the myth of Blackness and appealed to
+the slave ship captains as equal members of the human family.
+The more serious critique the idea of essentialism presents for Blackness
+is the idea that it creates an exclusionary Black subject, which reinforces
+ideas of patriarchy and anti-LGBTQ narratives. Cultural nationalism, as we
+discussed in Chapter 4, is most certainly guilty of this error, with clear
+cultural and behavioural roles for the authentic ‘African’. There is no space
+in this logic for men who are not protectors, women who are not
+domesticated or anyone who is not straight and reproducing the Black
+family. It is from these kinds of politics that the obsession over creating a
+more open Blackness has emerged. Stuart Hall proposed that we need
+newer, more hybrid forms of identity that open up space for varying forms
+of identity.61 bell hooks articulated the need for a ‘postmodern Blackness’
+in order to ‘challenge notions of universality and over-determined identity’
+in movements.62 In trying to retain some sort of basis of Black politics Paul
+Gilroy tied himself in theoretical knots arguing for an ‘anti-antiessentialism’ to recognise both the lived experience and the limits of
+cultural authenticity.63
+Hundreds of thousands of words have been split on trying to retain a
+form of Blackness that can move beyond the limits of cultural authenticity.
+But lacking in this myriad of work is a recognition that Blackness is a
+political rather than a cultural essentialism. Blackness is the ultimate
+rejection of Negro status, the call for unity in order to overturn the system
+that oppresses Africa and the Diaspora. In this sense it is mediated through
+the Black body but there is no need for any cultural sameness or hierarchy.
+We are linked because of politics and not culture, and therefore whatever
+cultural forms people choose to embrace are unimportant. Authenticity for
+Black radicalism simply comes down to a commitment to the liberation of
+the Diaspora. But there is no doubt that authenticity has been generally
+misread, and more widely misused, even outside of cultural nationalism.
+To sell out, be a traitor to the race, has become defined in cultural
+terms.64 Having a White partner, dressing a certain way, speaking in a
+particular manner have all become symbols of ‘acting White’.65 The
+
+cultural performance of a so-called authentic Blackness determines who is
+labelled a ‘bounty bar’ or a ‘coconut’ (brown on the outside but white on
+the inside). Yet it was never meant to be this way.
+Malcolm likens the House Negro on the plantation to the middle class
+Black folk who receive material advantages in capitalist society. He
+contrasts this to the Field Negro who caught hell on the plantation, in the
+same way that poor Black folk experience the brutal realities of racism
+today. Malcolm is saying that the poor Black person is more authentically
+Black than the middle class, not because of their culture but due to their
+location in the system of oppression and more importantly their political
+outlook. The House Negro is duped by the system because they cannot see
+a reality where they can ‘get a better house’, ‘better clothes’ or ‘better food’
+than from the master. So they ‘identify with the master more than the
+master identifies with himself’,66 and refuse to run away from the
+plantation or separate from White society. Catching hell on the plantation
+makes the Field Negro much more attuned to the realities of racism. So if
+‘someone came to the Field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run”, he
+didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here”’.67
+The Field Negro is authentic because they embrace the politics of
+revolution, while the House Negro ‘is out of his mind’ because they are
+committed to the system that is oppressing them. Black radical authenticity
+takes this further and is not based on class distinctions but political ones. To
+understand this we must distinguish between the House Negro and the
+Uncle Tom.
+For Malcolm, it wasn’t just any old middle class Black person
+supporting a racist system who was an Uncle Tom. They were Kwame
+Ture’s ‘potential’ Black people who could be awakened to the system. The
+Uncle Tom was a specific role where the system ‘takes a so-called Negro,
+and makes him prominent, builds him up, publicizes him, makes him a
+celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes’.68 Tomming
+means to pretend to be speaking on behalf of Black liberation while being
+an agent of the system, a tool used to slow down progress. It is easy to point
+out the well-educated, middle class, government-appointed Uncle Toms like
+Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in America, or former head of the
+Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips in Britain. But we miss the
+point if we conflate Tomming with the culture of the middle class.69 A good
+example of the modern-day Uncle Tom would be a rapper like L’il Wayne
+
+who clothes himself in the culture of street to appeal the masses, but writes
+lyrics such as ‘I whip it like a slave’. By removing the cultural basis from
+authenticity we have a solid platform for the political nature of Black
+radical solidarity.
+Securing Black authenticity within this political framework is seen as
+problematic because of the lens though which Black radical history is
+viewed. Viewing Black politics as a history of misogyny means Blackness
+is seen to exclude those identities that do not fit, for example ‘LGBTTQ
+Blacks during decolonization and Black Power movements in Africa and
+the West’.70 In the same way that we discussed for women, this is in part a
+response to narrow and cultural nationalism. Huey P. Newton declared that
+people needed to ‘deal with their insecurities’ around homosexuality and
+that the Panthers needed to unite with gay and women’s movements in a
+‘revolutionary fashion’. He was open about his own prejudices but made it
+clear that there was nothing in the Panthers’ politics that was necessarily
+homophobic and even acknowledged that ‘a homosexual could be the most
+revolutionary’.71 It would be wrong to say that this demonstrates Huey’s,
+the Panther’s or Black radicalism’s excellent credentials on the issue of gay
+liberation. While not being hostile, there has been a lack of discussion of
+the issue. This absence has led to calls for ‘queer’ Black politics.72 Wright
+argues that the only way to create the concept as ‘wholly inclusive and nonhierarchical is to understand Blackness as the intersection of constructs’.73
+In other words it can only have meaning in relation to concepts of gender,
+sexuality, disability and class. But the assumption that Blackness, in its
+radical sense, needs to be transformed is problematic.
+It would be wrong to assume that because Black radicalism has not
+explicitly centred on LGBTQ issues it excludes those who are not
+heterosexual. When Africans were enslaved, or areas colonised, they didn’t
+separate out the Black population by sexuality. People of all sexualities and
+gender identities were both re-created as Negroes and rose up to resist,
+whether in slave rebellions, anti-colonial struggles or in post-war
+movements. Malcolm’s comments on religion could equally apply to sexual
+orientation: ‘they don’t hang you because you’re a Baptist; they hang you
+’cause you’re Black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim; they
+attack me ’cause I’m Black. They attack all of us for the same reason’.74 As
+the police killings in America demonstrate, being gay or transgender is no
+
+protection from police bullets. To underscore how the issues impact across
+the board, Black Lives Matter was founded by three queer women, Alicia
+Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Opal Tometi. Blackness cannot just exist
+at the intersection or it has no real meaning at all, it just becomes one of
+many differences. It is also true that being queer opens you to attacks that
+being Black and heterosexual do not, and we certainly need to understand
+how Blackness intersects with other oppressions; but a central feature of
+Black radicalism is that Blackness is the underlying concept that unites the
+Diaspora.
+One of the main reasons that LGBTQ issues have not been highlighted in
+Black radicalism is not because of the problems themselves but because the
+campaigns are often based on appeals to civil rights. Seeking legislative
+changes on age of consent, same-sex marriage or transgender recognition
+may be important but these are not radical challenges to the system. The
+same criticisms that were levelled at civil rights campaigns for racial
+equality apply to efforts to make the system fairer based on sexuality. Of
+course there should be equality, but it is not reasonable to expect a radical
+politics to engage in liberal struggles with the state. Black radicalism is
+concerned with liberation of Black people from the West, not social equality
+within the system. Black radicalism also unapologetically privileges
+Blackness analytically. But Blackness must be a cultural and expressive
+blank slate upon which we can build our revolution.
+There is no point in pretending that there is some Black radical blueprint
+for the nation after the revolution that is the model of gender and sexuality
+equality. But equally there is none that provides for Black straight men
+either. To this point Black radicalism has provided the basis and articulation
+for struggle but has not answered the question of what comes next.
+Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality is vital in making sure we
+do not lose sight of the plurality of Blackness, but debating the misogyny of
+Black radicalism based on the past will not get us very far.75 What Black
+radicalism has done is to provide the basis for liberation, with Blackness
+being at the centre. It is only by coming together, pushing the politics
+forward and articulating how the Black nation will function that we can
+fulfil the promise of the radical tradition. Black radicalism must be a space
+open to all those in the Diaspora who have felt on the outside. There can be
+no exclusions in what unites us in our Blackness. In terms of producing a
+radical culture that overcomes the centuries of Western influence, this can
+
+only be produced in the furnace of radical action. Communing together,
+working together and struggling together is the only way to build a society
+together.
+In the effort to distance themselves from race and to either link, or
+disconnect, the various cultures of the African Diaspora, scholars have had
+to abandon the real world for the imagined and theoretical. Wright seriously
+argues that ‘political traditions serve only a limited use’ in understanding
+Blackness and privileges intellectual formations, which she locates in the
+literary world.76 To effectively dismiss centuries of political resistance in
+order to prioritise the work of contemporary fiction writers is a dangerous
+indulgence in academia. Sadly, Wright is not alone in this kind of rewriting
+of Blackness, detaching the concept from its radical and grassroots origins.
+It is an ongoing ‘crisis of the Negro intellectual’ to be unable to articulate
+the radical nature of Blackness because of the limits of the White academic
+framework.77 Blackness is not a theoretical, literary or abstract construct. It
+is a concept produced in struggle, by those facing the brutal realities of
+racial oppression. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Black
+intelligentsia have been unable to comprehend the basis and importance of
+this radical idea. I can personally testify to the assault of the Eurocentric
+canon and the insular nature of the academic industrial project. It is only by
+rooting our understandings in that knowledge produced outside of the
+university, in the process of struggle, that we can trace radical versions of
+Blackness.
+The misogynistic Blackness that you have been led to believe has
+dominated our politics has never been at the heart of the radical project.
+Black political movements have been by no means perfect models of gender
+and sexuality equality, but Blackness provides the unifying concept that can
+build a truly inclusive and liberatory politics.
+
+Chapter 6
+
+Black Marxism
+
+In 2012 I attended a Black History Month event in an African Caribbean
+community centre in Birmingham. There was nothing particularly
+memorable about the event itself; it was one of the many indistinguishable
+celebrations of Blackness that we crowd into every October in Britain.
+There is nothing like state funding to remind the community of their roots.
+This occasion stands out because a discussion arose about South African
+farmers who were striking over pay and conditions at the time. The strikes
+began organically in the Western Cape and eventually spread across the
+country. At the event members of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP) were
+present and brought their rhetoric with them. You may well question why
+the SWP was at a random Black History Month workshop, but only if you
+have never attended a Black community event. Malcolm used to joke that
+the FBI always lingered at Black community meetings; in Britain it’s not
+the feds who are ever-present, but the SWP or some other variant of the left.
+An undeniable part of this hyper-presence is certainly to lecture us that our
+problems are really about class and not race. In fact, when Critical Race
+Theory first emerged in Britain, every conference was attended by Mike
+Cole and/or Dave Hill, Marxists sent to teach us the error of our ways. But
+there is also a genuine attempt to reach out to an audience that, as we will
+see in this chapter, has often been overlooked or side-lined in Marxist
+analysis.
+At this meeting the SWP was there to get support for a potential
+teachers’ strike over pension changes. It has stuck with me because their
+spokesperson seriously tried to tie the fate of the South African farm
+workers, who were going on strike at the time, to the struggle for teacher’s
+pensions. The argument was that these were both examples of the general
+oppression of the working classes. If we were supporting the South African
+farm workers we should also be backing the teachers. This argument
+demonstrates many of the problems with Marxism that we will discuss in
+
+the chapter, and as you can probably imagine did not go down very well at
+the event. In the simplistic calculations of groups like the SWP, we are all
+workers in a fight against the capitalists, and must unite to succeed. But
+they have neglected the privileges that those in the West receive. The case
+of teachers is a perfect example. The starting salary in England is over
+£22,000, meaning you begin your career in the top half of earners in the
+country. With increments and promotion you are set to end up anywhere as
+high as the top 5%. On the global scale that places teachers well in the
+upper section of earnings there is no material comparison to be made by
+those in a comfortable and financially sound profession fighting over their
+pensions, to farm workers in South Africa demanding a wage that can feed
+them. Worse still, teacher’s salary and pension contributions come from the
+state and therefore tax revenue. As we have seen already, the wealth in
+Britain is produced by historically under-developing places like South
+Africa and maintaining their poverty through neo-colonial economic
+practices. Not only are British teachers rich in comparison to South African
+farmers; they have that wealth in large part because the farmers are poor. It
+is actually offensive to pretend that they are in the same struggle, and makes
+a complete nonsense of the idea that there is a 99% in a battle with the
+global elite. However, as much as the central tenet of Marxism falls apart on
+scrutiny, Black Marxism has historically been a dominant form of
+organising.
+There is perhaps no more influential radical school of thought than
+Marxism. The Communist Manifesto published by Marx and Engels in 1848
+is, after the Bible, the most read book in the entire world and inspired
+revolutions in Russia, China, Korea, Cuba and across the globe. Marx
+provides a searing critique of capitalism, arguing that the rich are rich
+because the poor are poor, and concluding that there can be no justice
+within its economic framework. Nothing short of a revolution can bring
+about a transformation of the system, and liberate the oppressed. This is a
+direct parallel to the Black radical position that we have discussed so far.
+The similarities go further when we look at the processes of historical
+change in Marxism.
+In pursuing their exploitation of the workers, the oppressors or
+‘bourgeoisie’ were said to be creating their own ‘grave-diggers’.1 This is
+often taken to mean that Marx saw the end of capitalism as inevitable, but it
+is actually more complicated than this. The gravediggers of capitalism for
+
+Marx were the Proletariat, but we have to distinguish this group from the
+working class. Marx saw the Proletariat as a ‘class in itself’, oppressed but
+also controlled by the system. In order to bring about the revolution they
+would need to become a ‘class for themselves’, and understand their place
+and power to form as the Proletariat. In other words, every worker is a
+potential Proletarian but they need to be educated and awakened from the
+delusions trained into them by the system of oppression. Brazilian educator
+Paolo Freire called this processes ‘conscientization’,2 removing the veil of
+false consciousness, while Malcolm X explained the need for a programme
+of ‘political re-education to open our people’s minds to the truth’.3
+It is not difficult to see why Marxism would be appealing to Black
+communities looking for liberation from oppression. In the same way as
+those who rebelled in Haiti took inspiration from the French Revolution,
+Black communities will always rally to those movements that can bring
+down the oppressive system. Figures like George Padmore, Paul Robeson,
+Angela Davis and Claudia Jones have historically been prominently
+involved in Marxism. The late Stuart Hall, so influential in Britain, was
+probably most notable for his contributions to contemporary debates in
+Marxism, and the Black left in this country has deep links to the tradition.
+That is not even to mention the Black Panther Party and revolutionary
+movements in colonies such as Grenada in the Caribbean,4 or Guinea in
+Africa.5 So influential was Marxism on the continent that the first president
+of Tanzania, Nyerere, created the concept of ‘African Socialism’ to apply
+the doctrine in the conditions outside of Europe.6 The late Cedric
+Robinson’s classic text Black Marxism captures the deep connections across
+history.7 As excellent and foundational as this book is, Robinson makes the
+fundamental error of conflating Black Marxism with Black radicalism.
+Although Marxism is radical, it is not Black. There are almost as many
+Black activists who joined Marxist groups as who left them once they
+understood that the politics is undermined by how it views the questions of
+racism. Marxism is certainly one of the very few radical arguments, but
+there is a difference between Black radicalism and Black people being
+radical.
+The Negro question
+
+Marxism’s central problem is its relegation of the question of racism. Class
+is the central, underlying antagonism in Marxism, which has been widely
+critiqued as being too simplistic.8 It is also true that the accusation that
+Marx reduced everything to the economic has become an oversimplified
+critique that avoids engaging with Marxism’s complexities. Marx died a
+long time ago and intellectuals such as Gramsci have done much to move
+away from narrow interpretations of his work.9 There is some room for
+manoeuvre in how the question of racism is used in Marxism, and of course
+Black scholars have had a key influence in these discussions. We would be
+wrong to reject Marxism outright because it prioritises class over racism.
+The issue here is how and why class is given primacy and what this tells us
+about the limits of Marxism.
+The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) has historically been central
+in the discussion of race and class. As the Western country with the largest
+Black population, the issue of racism in the United States was pressing.
+After the emancipation of enslaved Africans in America the competition
+between Black and White workers impacted greatly on the future formation
+of the nation. Dubois argued that an opportunity had been lost in the South
+for the workers of both colours to unite and fight the wealthy exploiters. He
+argued that the psychological ‘wages of whiteness’ had convinced the
+White workers to despise the formerly enslaved.10 Resolving this conflict
+was seen as important because of the presence of millions of African
+American potential Proletarians. The CPUSA could not afford to ignore
+issues of race and set about discussing whether ‘African Americans be
+considered a subject nation, an oppressed race, or simply a particularly
+disadvantaged section of the American working class’.11
+The CPUSA doing the legwork on what the Communist Party as a whole
+called the ‘Negro Question’ is in itself an indictment of the party. Though
+Lenin had made it clear that the exploitation of the colonies was absolutely
+essential to the maintenance of capitalism, the Negro Question and wider
+issues of race were relegated to the side-lines. Communist groups in places
+like Britain and France were uninterested in the discussion because they had
+very few bodies from the colonies within their nation states. They did not
+have to deal with Negro workers, so they felt no urgency in addressing the
+issues of racism. Ironically, given that Marxism condemns the nation state,
+organisation of the Communist International took place firmly within the
+colonial national framework. Black Marxists colluded in the logic of the
+
+British and French by seeing America as the ‘headquarters and centre of
+political thought’ for Black people.12 The colonies were not viewed as
+advanced enough to be at the forefront of the revolution because the
+Proletariat was defined in relation to industry, which the colonies did not
+possess. The communist thesis on the Negro question in 1919, mostly
+authored by the Afro-Surinamese Otto Houiswood, acknowledged the
+importance of Black people worldwide but argued that their cooperation
+was essential to the Western ‘Proletarian Revolution’,13 which would
+deliver the victory against capitalism. In the very formulation of the Negro
+question the Communist Party placed Black people on the periphery.
+None of this should come as any surprise. Marx acknowledged the
+importance of slavery and colonialism in building the West, arguing that ‘it
+is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have
+created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of largescale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest
+importance’.14 The problem with a Marxist analysis, though, is that even
+though he recognised the role of slavery and colonialism, Marx saw this as
+‘pre-capitalist accumulation’. In the same way as you could not have
+capitalism without feudalism, colonialism was seen as a necessary
+precursor. But importantly they both lay outside of capitalism, which was
+seen to be more advanced and dominated by industrial relations. One of the
+most lasting critiques of Marx is how he downplays the role of peasants in
+the revolution. They are not workers in advanced economies and therefore
+are outside the system of capitalism. The Proletarians were meant be forged
+in the factories, but history has taught us it is actually that peasantry who
+have taken the lead. Russia, China, Grenada, Burkino Faso, Korea, Guinea,
+Cuba all depended on the agricultural communities. What should also stand
+out in this list is how little progress communism has made in the West. The
+biggest failing of Marx is that he ‘imagined that the industrial Proletariat
+was the hero of capitalism and invented a history whose narrative justified
+this’.15
+Far from marking a break with feudalism or colonialism, capitalism is an
+advanced form of the Western imperial project. It is impossible to separate
+what happens in the colonies from what happens in the West. While the
+West may have been rapidly urbanising and industrialising in Marx’s time,
+the colonies were not. They were purposefully being underdeveloped in
+order to maintain control by European powers. So although the peasantry
+
+were disappearing in the West they remained a force outside of it. It is only
+in recent years that globally more people live in cities than rural areas. The
+idea that colonial rule is ‘pre-capitalism’ is also inadequate. It is true that
+capitalism was built on the wealth from slavery and colonialism, but that is
+just as true today as it was in the nineteenth century, in terms of the legacies
+of historic oppression, which can be seen in the wealth generated, and the
+poverty caused. Even if the end of slavery and direct rule was the end of
+Western exploitation, the colonies would have been put back in their
+development by centuries. As no reparations have been forthcoming there is
+clearly still a debt owed; you cannot just steal the wealth, hold on to it and
+then blame your victims for being poor. Actually you can, and that is the
+basis of the global economy, which takes it further with neo-colonial trade
+practices. By prioritising the experience of Europe, drawing a line between
+pre- and post-capitalism and pretending you can understand the economies
+of the West without considering their exploitation of the rest of the world,
+Marx was just as guilty of Eurocentrism as his more liberal contemporaries.
+In fairness to Marxism, newer developments have attempted to deal with
+this problem. Wallerstein’s World System Theory, for example, places the
+wealth of the West at the core in relation to the exploitation of the colonies
+on the periphery of global economics.16 It is no longer controversial to
+argue that capitalism is a form of imperialism, rooted in the oppression of
+the former colonies. But it is one thing to recognise the problem of global
+capital and quite another to deal with the issue of racism.
+It is in the mechanism for change where we can see Marxism’s most
+fundamental error. The industrial working class has not and will never be
+the most exploited group in the system of imperialism, and therefore
+capitalism. Even though the conditions in the factories during the industrial
+revolution were terrible, they were a luxury compared to the enslavement of
+African people. Due to how dehumanising slavery was, the history has been
+sanitised in the collective memory. We can picture the chains, whippings
+and even rapes, but the scale of the torture, mutilations and genocide is
+mostly hidden from view. One brutal slave-owner in Jamaica, Thomas
+Thistlewood, as well as raping hundreds of women, invented a punishment
+where the enslaved ‘would be beaten, and salt pickle, lime juice, and bird
+pepper would be rubbed into his or her open wounds. Another slave would
+defecate into the mouth of the miscreant, who would then be gagged for
+four to five hours’.17 If we truly comprehended the horrors of slavery we
+
+would not only be saddened but sickened. We would certainly not do the
+history the disservice of comparing it to the labour that Europeans
+experienced in the workhouses. As horrible as it was, Thistlewood’s Derby
+Dose, as he called it, was not being practised on the production line. When
+Europeans had exhausted the lives of the natives in the America they did
+not enslave poor Whites to produce their commodities. In order to extract
+maximum wealth they needed to create the Negro, the commodity to be
+bought and sold. There were some White people on the plantations and you
+may have come across the popular ‘myth of Irish slaves’.18 The reality is
+that there were some poor Europeans on the plantations who were
+indentured servants. They had to serve for limited periods of time, and still
+had human rights.19 They were not slaves, they were not seen as beasts, or
+treated as subhuman. Indentured labourers were effectively serfs; by no
+means were they equal, and they experienced tremendous hardship, but they
+were not slaves. Britain did not round up its, or Ireland’s, poor at the barrel
+of a gun and chain them into chattel slavery. Those horrors were reserved
+for Africans, who were used to produce the wealth that the industrial
+revolution developed from.
+As the conditions for the working classes in the West improved, they did
+not do so in the colonies. In fact, the conditions in the West improved
+because of the continued poverty in the colonies. The wealth generated
+from imperialism was a key part of allowing for the abolition of child
+labour, the introduction of the working week and the comforts provided by
+the welfare state. The fear of communism after the Second World War was
+enough for Britain and other countries to offer social welfare, free
+schooling, free healthcare and to bring in more progressive taxation
+systems. But these benefits were not passed down to the colonies, which
+suffered further exploitation to secure social democracy in the West. If we
+take the example of Britain, at the founding of the welfare state the colonies
+were still controlled by the mother country and they provided the wealth
+and labour to make the project possible. The National Health Service was
+described by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson as ‘the very temple of
+our social security system’, providing universal, free medical care.20 From
+its outset the NHS has been entirely dependent on migrant workers from the
+colonies and nations after independence. The only reason Black people are
+in the country in large numbers is because our labour was needed to build a
+welfare state that the colonies saw no benefit from. As is typical of the
+
+White left, they tend to celebrate these advances in progress as the result of
+their tireless working class campaigning. But considering the welfare state
+should be impossible without recognising Britain’s colonial subjects.
+Therefore it was particularly offensive that Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45 movie,
+celebrating the era, was almost exclusively White.
+The unfortunate truth about Marx’s hero of history is that the Western
+working class has benefited from imperialism and forged political
+movements that mostly aim to distribute the wealth gained from the
+exploitation of darker people more equitably between Whites. Trades
+Unions have largely operated to ‘defend the short term interests’ for their
+members within the framework of the nation state.21 On top of this, the
+unions have also been a bastion of racism and exclusion. When Caribbean
+and Indian workers came to Britain they found themselves subject to colour
+bars from both the unions and workers’ organisations like social clubs.22
+Groups like the Indian Workers Association had to form because they had
+no representation in the mainstream unions. Even now, though we are
+welcome to pay our fees, I don’t remember anyone ever expressing the
+feeling that their union was particularly supportive over issues of racism. If
+we are honest, the history of working class movements in the West has
+largely been one based on self-interest, and these interests generally do not
+align with the victims of imperialism. Though this has never stopped the
+left attempting to organise on behalf of the Black and Brown.
+After the financial crisis in 2007, Western economies felt a severe
+impact: declines in share prices, the near collapse of Greece and banks
+having to be bailed out with public money. The result was the politics of
+austerity and a significant squeeze on public spending and resources. The
+credit crunch laid bare the lie of progress built on loans and the rebalancing
+of Western economies has been terrible for the poor. Wages have stagnated,
+public safety nets have been removed, houses repossessed and people are
+now regularly struggling to feed themselves. Unemployment in some
+countries has not been the problem it could have been, but
+underemployment is just as big an issue. Having a job that does not pay
+enough to live on is hardly better than not having one at all.
+All of this financial chaos led to a reaction from the left and the Occupy
+Movement was born, rallying around the slogan ‘we are the 99%’. Marxism
+is not in vogue at present so the movement was not keen to embrace its
+politics, although there is a clear influence in the idea of the elite against the
+
+rest of the world. We will not go into any depth of critique of Occupy,
+which has since become a distant memory, but will simply point out that all
+of those things that the movement were complaining about were not new to
+the former colonies. Poverty, food insecurity, precarious work and
+especially austerity have been features of the global development package
+for decades. It was only when these inequalities were felt in the West that
+people deemed it necessary to rise up. More to the point, the financial crisis
+did not bring anything new to Black and Brown communities in the West.
+Much has been made of the staggering unemployment in Southern Europe,
+but Black male youth unemployment has hit as high as 50% in some parts
+of Britain. One of the starkest figures I have seen on racial inequality
+recently is that, of all African Americans who have jobs in New York, half
+of them work in fast food outlets.23 Austerity and the financial crisis have
+also hit Black communities disproportionately hard. Losing a million public
+sector jobs is devastating in Britain to a Black community that has relied on
+public sector work because of discrimination in the employment sector. To
+be told that we are now in a collective struggle is a bit difficult to hear when
+our plight has mostly fallen on deaf ears for decades.
+The response to the politics of austerity has been typical of the White left
+through the ages: fight to get a more even distribution of the profits of
+imperialism, while making sure to keep the system in place. Appeals to the
+White working class have either been made directly on a racist, nationalist
+basis as we saw with Trump in America or Le Pen in France, or with calls
+for a return to social democracy and more equality within the nation state,
+as with Podemos in Spain or Corbynism in Britain. Nationalising railways
+and taxing the rich are good ideas but let’s not pretend that they will
+alleviate global poverty. Britain was a social democracy when my
+grandmother came to Britain and faced the kind of overt racism I have only
+seen on screen. Gains for workers in the West have always been secured off
+the backs of those in the underdeveloped world. This is a necessary feature
+of capitalism.
+A perfect example of the ignorance of racism and neo-colonialism from
+the left is the idea of the universal basic income (UBI). In short, the idea is
+to abolish welfare spending and give everyone a set income. This would
+mean everyone could eat, have a foothold in society and work to earn more
+money. It has been a part of the Green party agenda for years and the
+Finnish government has even run a trial. One of the justifications for UBI is
+
+that increases in robotics have eroded many of the manual jobs that were
+the staple of working class communities.24 Again we see the bias towards
+the West because the problem in the underdeveloped world is not the loss of
+manual work. In fact, in many places it is the opposite, the outsourcing of
+manual labour to poorer countries that do not have the same working
+conditions and are paid far less than the Western worker. When you are paid
+less than a dollar a day for your ten-hour shift, robots taking your job is not
+your number one concern. For the African continent the problem is the
+complete marginalisation of the economies, where the West (and China)
+take the resources and do not leave enough for the native populations. The
+fascination with robotics is the definition of a First World problem, and UBI
+is the fittingly Western solution.
+Even if UBI was a good idea, it would not necessarily do anything to
+alleviate the global issues of inequality. One of the pioneers of this idea,
+Guy Standing, actually researched the concept in the underdeveloped world,
+an ideal setting because the amount is pegged to subsistence levels.25 In a
+poor country UBI is much less than in a rich one, so he did not need as
+much research funding for the project. Surprise, surprise, the results were
+positive: if you give people money their lives get a bit easier. Setting aside
+the ethics of giving people money in a poor country and then stopping when
+the research finishes, the whole notion actually reinforces global
+inequalities. The West gets to keep its inflated UBI, while the rest live off a
+much lower figure. But because no one is starving, everything is alright
+with the world. Worse still, the campaigns for UBI are typically at the
+nation state level, so there is little concern for applying the model to the
+globe. UBI is the perfect example of the left coming up with a solution that
+benefits the West and does not challenge the world system, which provides
+the wealth for their social safety net.
+Psychosis of Whiteness
+Marxism has been unable to overcome what I call the ‘psychosis of
+Whiteness’,26 which infects Western thought. Whiteness is actually rooted
+in the political economy; it is in the fabric of the institutions and social life.
+You cannot work the natives in the Americas to death without Whiteness.
+You do not enslave millions of African people and kill millions more
+
+without Whiteness. You do not steal the resources from the places of the
+world you have underdeveloped and then create a system of unfair trade
+practices without Whiteness. The modern world was shaped in the image of
+Whiteness. Swedish botanist Linnaeus gave the perfect illustration of the
+hierarchy of Whiteness in his categorisations of the species of mankind in
+the eighteenth century:
+Eurpaues albus: ingenious, white, sanguine, governed by law,
+Americus rubescus; happy with his lot, liberty loving, tanned and
+irascible, governed by custom, Asiatic luridus; yellow, melancholy,
+governed by opinion, Afer Niger; crafty, lazy, black, governed by
+arbitrary will of the master.27
+Europeans perceived themselves as superior and built a world in the image
+of this belief. It is telling that the hierarchy outlined by Linnaeus is a very
+good approximation of global poverty. The wealth in the West is built and
+maintained off this embrace of Whiteness. The West never needs to account
+for its multiple sins because the poverty in the developing world is
+attributed to the inadequacies of the Black and Brown victims of the
+system. Western governments can brush off any claims for reparations for
+transatlantic slavery because it all happened so long ago that we should
+have pulled ourselves together by now. The ideology of Whiteness, the
+irrational set of ideas that distances White people from blame for the ills of
+the world, are absolutely essential to maintaining the system of imperialism.
+If White people were to acknowledge their role in the world, the blood and
+destruction upon which their liberty is built, then the whole system would
+come tumbling down. So Whiteness becomes ingrained in not only the
+political economy but also the intellectual ideas. The Enlightenment
+provides the knowledge necessary for science and progress in Europe, while
+at the same time cementing the hierarchy of Whiteness into how we
+understand the world. The idea of Europe being the centre of knowledge,
+which shines its light out onto the darker, savage parts of the world, is
+absolutely central to both the Enlightenment as a project and the West in
+general. It was no contradiction for John Locke to believe in freedom for
+all, but make money from the slave trade and be opposed to rights for
+Native Americans.28 He did not view the savage as worthy of the same
+
+liberty as Whites. Kant’s much praised writings on pure reason are of
+course in no way in conflict with his numerous clearly racist writings on the
+human family. Whiteness is not a reasonable frame, and once you exalt
+Europeans to a different level of existence you understand that liberty and
+freedom have never been meant for us. These are not just ideas; Whiteness
+is in the DNA of the social system. Therefore overcoming Whiteness is
+impossible because it is a product of the structural condition, a psychosis
+caused to ensure that the system remains intact.
+There is no reasoning with a psychosis, just as there is no point in
+engaging in a rational debate with Whiteness. So embedded within the
+fabric of society is the psychosis that it even frames the critical Whiteness
+Studies literature. Much has been written on critical Whiteness Studies in
+the last few decades, identifying Whiteness that privileges White skin.29
+When Whiteness is produced, it becomes normalised and invisible to the
+White population.30 The concept is not static, it shifts in time and space, in
+terms of who is and who is not included in the exclusive club.31 Whiteness
+has also been acknowledged as a key to a global system of oppression by
+the West over the ‘rest’, being used to mobilise the ‘civilised’ over the
+‘uncivilised’ world.32 However, the wealth of writing on the subject has
+remained too optimistic on the issues of Whiteness.
+In identifying Whiteness as an issue, the solution has often been to
+engage in critical pedagogy, to make people realise their Whiteness so that
+they can remedy it.33 If only Whiteness could be taught out of White people
+then they could play an important part in the ‘liberation of people of colour
+around the globe’.34 To see Whiteness as something that can be trained out
+of the poor souls infected by it is to locate the source of the problem in the
+wrong place. Unfortunately, this is a dominant theme in the literature, most
+perfectly represented by the so-called ‘new abolitionists’.
+Whiteness is something that can be abolished according to scholars such
+as Ignatiev, who argued that ‘so-called whites must cease to exist as whites
+in order to realize themselves as something else … White people must
+commit suicide as whites in order to come alive as workers … fully
+developed human subjects’.35 This is the classic Marxist appraisal of the
+problem of Whiteness, which is betrayed later in the talk by his assertion
+that by committing ‘race treason’ and defying ‘White rules’, poor White
+people would realise ‘their real condition of life’. In other words, Whiteness
+
+is nothing more than the false consciousness of working class Whites, who
+have been tricked into being racist by their capitalist oppressors. This theme
+is recurrent in the work of Ignatiev, who is famous for his How the Irish
+Became White,36 where he argues that the immigrants from Europe to
+America were not always accepted as White, but became so by embracing
+racism and defining themselves in opposition to African Americans. If
+Whiteness can be learned, then presumably it can be undone, if people are
+treasonous to their supposed race.
+Like all Marxist arguments in regard to racism, it misses the point and
+importance of the concept. The Irish did not become White in America,
+they arrived as White and were eventually accepted into the national
+framework. It is vitally important that we distinguish analytically between
+racism and xenophobia in this discussion. The Irish have undoubtedly
+historically experienced xenophobia in America and Britain. As foreigners
+they have been derided, scorned and faced discrimination. In competing for
+resources with those already inside the nation state they have faced
+marginalisation and had to overcome this to become part of the respective
+societies. This is a process that any migrant community has to go through
+and is distinct from racism, which works on a different set of metrics. Those
+groups that are not White will face the xenophobia of being a foreigner, but
+racism is more elemental than this. It is tied to and written on the body, it is
+rejection for having difference rooted in biology. Racism cannot be
+overcome through integration into the social system. While the Irish
+assimilated into America and Britain, Black people in both countries have
+largely remained marginalised. Even though I was born in Britain, and I am
+relatively successful, my children are still Black British, and will never
+fully be granted equality in the national picture. Structurally, the Irish are
+now indistinguishable from White people in general, while Black people
+remain subject to severe disadvantage. The idea that the Irish were not
+White before they arrived in America is also typically ahistorical. There is a
+reason that Irish people migrated voluntary to America on boats, while
+Africans were stolen and taken there in chains.
+The very notion that it is possible to abolish Whiteness speaks to how
+little weight is truly given to both the concept, and issues of racism in
+general. Abolition ties into the myth that anything other than one form of
+racial oppression was ended with the so-called emancipation of enslaved
+Africans. Rather than being the solution to the problem of racism, abolition
+
+just heralded the dawn of new ways to oppress Black people. But it is also
+the perfect metaphor for the new abolitionists, the illusion of progress while
+ignoring the structural issues of racism. Even better, abolition is the
+definition of the White saviour discourse, celebrating the White heroes who
+abolished the evil system of slavery. Central to the psychosis of Whiteness
+is that White people are the key agents of history, the ones who decide the
+future of the world, for all of us.
+Importantly, the psychosis of Whiteness is not limited to those whose
+skin is white. Whiteness is rooted in the political economy of the West and
+not only White people benefit from this. From the very outset of the
+imperial social order there were those who were bought off by Western
+interests, or elevated into positions of authority in order to manage the
+imperial system for the West. The former colonial elite very much exists
+today, allowing the West to leech off the homelands for a small share of the
+spoils. Those of us who reside in the West must also accept our collusion in
+the global system of oppression. While racial oppression is endemic for
+Black people in the West, we are mostly spared the harshest forms of
+brutality. Many of us have integrated to the point where we comfortably
+benefit from the fruits of imperialism. So we are also not immune to the
+psychosis of Whiteness. There are many Black members of the
+Conservative party; Black entertainers get rich living up to racial
+stereotypes; and everyone apparently lost their minds thinking that Barack
+Obama was going to end racism. Black Marxists have also fallen into the
+trap of the psychosis.
+In the 1920s African American scholar Abram Harris accused those who
+embraced race consciousness as being in the grip of ‘colour psychosis’ and
+needing to gain an ‘awareness of working-class-consciousness’ in order to
+join the real struggle.37 For Marxism, class always trumps race, and the
+history of Black Marxists lecturing those who cannot accept that equation is
+well worn. Garvey’s principle of ‘race first’ was the subject of scorn by
+Marxists, including the African Blood Brother (ABB). However, both the
+ABB and the CPUSA attempted to infiltrate the UNIA and convert the
+members to communism.38 Garveyism attracted the Black masses because
+it resonated with the situation they found themselves in. Instead of engaging
+with why this was, the Marxists sought to play the role of the revolutionary
+vanguard and lead the people to where they thought they needed to be, in
+desperation to provide the theoretical basis for solidarity with the White
+
+workers. Harris also wrote that ‘the negro was not enslaved because of his
+complexion’.39 It is here we see the fundamental fallacy at the heart of the
+Marxist discussion of race.
+In Eric Williams’ Black Marxist classic Capitalism and Slavery he
+repeats this idea when he argues that ‘slavery was born not of racism; rather
+racism was the consequence of slavery’.40 In this logic racism was justified
+after the decision was made to enslave countless African people. As we
+have noted earlier, this logic cannot be defended. The brutality of slavery
+was only an inevitable feature of capitalism because Whiteness was already
+driving the process of imperialism. In fact, racism actually pre-dates class in
+a Marxist sense, shaping the development of the system that will eventually
+lead to the Proletarian revolution.
+Williams goes into a lot of detail explaining how White indentured
+servants were not treated in the same way as enslaved Africans, and were
+even a ‘democratic force in society’.41 However, the main thrust of his
+argument is that the enslavement of Africans ‘seen in its historical
+perspective, forms a part of the general picture of the harsh treatment of the
+underprivileged classes’.42 Denying the particular experience of
+enslavement to Black populations is a particularly insidious form of the
+psychosis of Whiteness. Even more harmful in terms of activism is the
+reduction of Blackness to a product of class.
+By arguing that racism is produced by capitalism, race consciousness
+becomes problematic. Steeped in the psychosis of Whiteness, Marxists can
+only see the production of race through European eyes. The Negro is a
+product of racism, produced in the image of Whiteness. In that sense we are
+racialised through the eyes, oppression and institutions of Western society.
+Indeed, racialisation has become a central way in which academia
+understands the issue of race.43 The fundamental logic of Marxism is
+therefore to abolish Blackness and join the ranks of the oppressed workers.
+But, as we explored in the last chapter, Blackness was never created by
+Whiteness; it is a rejection of it. I am not racialised into Blackness; I am
+Black. My Blackness is a declaration of self and resistance, not a position of
+victimhood and oppression. The same cannot be said for the White working
+class who from the outset have been racialised into Whiteness. Far from
+breaking down this racialisation Marxism tends to feed it, transforming the
+White workers from collaborators in the system of oppression into the vital
+
+hero of the story. The White working class is part of the problem of
+imperialism; it does us no favours to pretend they will be the solution. But
+Black Marxists have been unable to break free of the illusion that the White
+working classes are a ‘sleeping beauty’ of allyship. It’s time to realise they
+have no intention of waking up.44
+African socialism
+As well as embracing Marxism in the West, Black activists in the colonies
+have attempted to apply the theory to their conditions. Walter Rodney’s
+How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was an essential text in applying a
+material analysis to the problems in the colonies. The idea of analysing the
+situations in the colonies through the lens of Marxism was a powerful one.
+The Communist bloc presented an alternative to Western imperialism and
+the Soviets, Chinese and Cubans also provided key support to African and
+Caribbean revolutionary struggles. For instance, before the hero of the
+Cuban revolution Che Guevara was assassinated in Bolivia, he spent part of
+1965 in Congo trying to support the revolutionary movement.45 The failure
+of this mission could stand as a metaphor for communism in Africa, but
+there was a time when the struggle between capitalism and communism was
+uncertain. Africa was a central battlefield given the continent’s wealth of
+material resources, so Marxist revolutions in places like Angola, Guinea
+and Mozambique were a clear threat to Western dominance.
+In adopting Marxism, efforts were made to adapt its core principles.
+Africa was not in an industrial stage of development and had vastly
+different social and cultural norms to Europe. Amilcar Cabral, who led the
+revolutionary struggle in Guinea and Cape Verde, also developed a
+significant analysis of Marxism on the African continent. Rather than
+dismiss colonialism as a prior force to capitalism he explained that ‘what
+commands history in colonial conditions is not the class struggle … it is the
+colonial state’.46 Colonialism is at the heart, not the periphery of the
+analysis and is the foundation of the class system. He explored the elevation
+of some tribal leaders into a managerial class overseeing Portuguese rule
+and the creation of a city-dwelling class to serve the Portuguese residents.
+The marginalisation of the rural peasants was total and they were locked
+away from any social advancement, even literacy. In presenting these class
+
+distinctions Cabral importantly does not conclude that the African petty
+bourgeoisie, who collude with the Portuguese, are a counterrevolutionary
+class. In fact, he argues that it is this class that is absolutely essential for the
+revolutionary struggle, because although they based the ‘whole armed
+liberation struggle on the peasantry’, the leadership was drawn from the
+petty bourgeoisie.47 National liberation became the primary objective in the
+colonial struggle and in order for this to occur all the classes of Black
+people in Guinea had to unite. The picture Cabral draws is very similar to
+the unity of the enslaved, Mulattoes and free Blacks that we examined in
+the Haitian revolution. However, this struggle for national liberation was
+not in itself Marxist, because to hope that the petty bourgeoisie ‘will just
+carry out a revolution when it comes to power in an undeveloped country is
+to hope for a miracle’.48 Classical colonialism stifled the petty bourgeoisie
+in African countries, but they could be bought off by the colonial powers
+offering them a place in the global elite with trappings of state power.
+Guarding against neo-colonialism, therefore, became key in the
+revolutionary struggle.
+In reinterpreting Marxism through the colonial relationship, Cabral
+based the revolutionary struggle on the immediate evil facing the African
+continent. In the 1980s, in Burkino Faso, Thomas Sankara would blend
+Marxism in a similar manner, in order to ‘eliminate imperialist domination
+and exploitation; and to purge the countryside of all social, economic, and
+cultural obstacles that keep it in a backward state’.49 Not only should this be
+a reminder that the material relations in the colonies are vastly different to
+those in the West, but it raises questions about whether Marxism in the
+African context is even the same concept.
+Cabral attempts to link the struggle in Africa to the West, arguing that
+‘neo-colonialism is more of a defeat for the international working class than
+for the colonised people’.50 If the welfare state was founded off the back of
+Empire in the 1950s, it should come as no surprise that social democracy
+starts to fall apart after independence movements in the colonies. Neocolonialism marks a shift to the dominance of the economic over the
+political in the West as well as the colonies: corporations, globalisation of
+trade and the ability to move production to poorer countries. All of these
+undermine the post-war settlement that kept the natives in the industrialised
+West happy. We are still seeing Western governments try to come to terms
+with this new reality of a smaller state, less unskilled work and a rampant
+
+and unpretending class of profiteering, tax-dodging elites. So we could be
+seeing the convergence of the interests of White workers in the West with
+the oppressed in the global South. However, this view would be ahistorical
+and overly optimistic.
+Levels of inequality within the West have risen to their highest since the
+1920s. A detached elite rubbing the faces of the poor in the dirt is not a
+production of neo-colonialism. The welfare state was founded off the back
+of the colonies, but not because of classic colonialism. It was the fear of the
+spread of communism that led to the gains after the Second World War. The
+collapse of the global revolution and the Soviet Union is the reason that the
+elite gorged themselves on the proceeds of inequality. Once there is an
+organised push-back the elite will make some concessions, which will no
+doubt placate the working classes in the West. There is no evidence, either
+historical or current, that the Western working class is throwing its lot in
+with the Black and Brown wretched of the earth.
+Cabral effectively spells out a vision that allows for African agency in
+the liberation struggle and also to remain non-aligned from the Soviet
+Union. This is very different to how Marxism was often applied in Africa.
+Socialism became a foundation of the left in the Pan-African movement.
+Nkrumah died in Bucharest after his exile from Ghana and even DuBois
+turned to China and Marxism in the end. Just as we explored in Chapter 2,
+Pan-Africanism was ultimately an imperial project, and even its embrace of
+socialism took this form. Dubois’ vision of socialism involved leaning on
+both West and East to provide the necessary support for Africa. In climbing
+into bed with China many African countries have now found themselves on
+the receiving end of imperialism under a different guise.51 Truly
+revolutionary projects like Cabral’s were not allowed to continue and the
+socialism that was largely embraced in Africa actually hindered any radical
+progress.
+Similar to how calls for Pan-Africanism became empty rhetoric, so did
+the call for socialism. It allowed leaders to sound progressive, without
+actually committing to socialist principles. Twenty years after independence
+‘none of the states implemented policies which would qualify as effectively
+fighting for socialism’.52 The extent of socialism for many countries was to
+allow China to interfere in their economic affairs. Whether by accident or
+design, when socialism was applied in the African context it largely became
+devoid of its revolutionary politics. Nyerere’s African socialism is an
+
+example of these limitations, being rooted in connecting communism to the
+communalism of traditional African society. In the village everyone’s fate
+was tied together. If the crop failed, the chief and the servant both suffered
+due to the nature of communal living. But the differences between
+communism and communalism are stark and undermine the radical nature
+of Marxism.
+In a society based on the communal production and distribution of food,
+where housing and clothing can be built within the family unit,
+communalism can thrive. Crops failing will be devastating to everyone, so
+it makes sense to pool resources. But there is no comparison of this
+situation to that of industrialised, mass production with wealth that far
+outstrips subsistence levels. Providing the basic material of life is no longer
+done on the village scale. Think of the complex system that gets milk to
+someone in the city. You need the farmer, farm machinery, the market,
+infrastructure, mechanics, vehicles, and the list goes on. There is not one
+aspect that everyone contributes to, which everyone relies on for the system
+to work. If one farmer has trouble and goes out of business, there is another
+one to take their place. Rich and poor are perfectly possible. The very
+individual idea of profit that underlines the system runs contrary to
+communalism. Once you base a system on the idea of individual wealth you
+structure inequality into social life. To argue that there is something innately
+African about sharing this wealth is to grossly oversimplify the situation.
+The limits of Nyerere’s concept of African socialism can be seen in his
+discussion of the role of individuals in socialism:
+In the individual, as in the society, it is an attitude of mind which
+distinguishes the socialist from the non-socialist. It has nothing to do
+with the possession or non-possession of wealth. Destitute people can
+be potential capitalist exploiters of their fellow human beings. A
+millionaire can equally well be socialist; he may value his wealth only
+because it can be used in the service of his fellow men.53
+Socialism is reduced to a mere state of mind, detached from all economic
+analysis. To argue that someone who is destitute is equally capable of being
+a capitalist exploiter as someone who is wealthy is to remove any Marxist
+analysis from socialism. It is this thinking that makes the bourgeoisie
+
+comfortable in their oppression, because if they do not hold capitalist
+attitudes then they can feel on the right side of history. By invoking
+platitudes about traditional African life and removing any material analysis,
+African socialism becomes a tool for maintaining the economic status quo
+of the imperial social order.
+Marxism on the African continent becomes so transformed that it is not
+recognisable to the Eurocentric doctrine. In the revolutionary case like
+Cabral the theory has to be changed, almost beyond recognition, or we are
+left with meaningless platitudes like Nyerere���s African socialism. Marx
+never had a monopoly on the concept of universalised resources, so it is
+best to abandon the label in order to build an alternative and Black radical
+economic analysis.
+Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
+Untangling Marxism from Black radicalism is difficult because of the
+crossover and linkages, as the Cabral discussion demonstrates. The Black
+Panther Party for Self-Defense is perhaps the best example of the
+complexities here. The Panthers were an openly Marxist-Leninist
+organisation that saw itself as part of the vanguard of the global revolution.
+The party first raised funds by selling copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red
+Book to college kids.54 Fred Hampton, a leader in Chicago who was
+famously murdered by the police while he slept,55 declared ‘I am a
+revolutionary … I am the proletariat, I am the people’. He even predicted
+that he would ‘die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary
+proletarian struggle’.56 The influence of their contemporary neo-Marxists
+on the Panthers was also keenly felt. Suspicions about Eldridge Cleaver
+aside, he penned a piece ‘On Lumpen Ideology’, where he argued that the
+pampered working classes in the West would not lead the revolution.57
+Instead, it would be the lumpen proletariat, those Marx called the ‘the
+dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass’ at the bottom
+of the society.58 The Panthers believed they could reform the dealers,
+robbers, murderers, pimps and put them in service of the revolution. Huey
+P. Newton was famous for long and theoretical speeches about Marxism,
+and he eventually completed a PhD on the Panthers with neo-Marxist Erik
+Olin Wright.59 There is absolutely no doubt that the Panthers were an avidly
+
+Marxist organisation, in theory at least. But we need to separate the practice
+of the Panthers to understand why they lie firmly within the Black
+radicalism.
+Organisationally it is important that the Panthers were not part of any
+overarching communist body. While they preached the international
+struggle and made links with communist groups, they were never part of, or
+led by them. In contrast, the African Blood Brotherhood was founded in
+1919 but folded into the CPUSA by 1924. The independence of the
+Panthers is important because they maintained Black leadership and
+therefore went beyond the limitations of seeing Black people as a ‘class
+fraction’ of the wider struggle.60 Unlike the framing of the ‘Negro
+question’, the Panthers always prioritised the issues of racism. In fact none
+of the key activities of the Panthers were Marxist in orientation.
+In the last chapter we debunked the masculine history of the Panthers,
+drawing attention to the newspaper, the free breakfast programmes, the
+liberation schools and free health clinics. The paper and the school could fit
+into Marxism with their political re-education to fight against the
+ideological tyranny of the elites. But providing free breakfast and medical
+care is not a classically revolutionary act (though we will pick up this
+discussion in Chapter 8). The Panthers also used violence for self-defence
+and spent most of the time organising programmes for survival; tactics
+which are not, in isolation, those of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary
+vanguard.
+None of this should come as a surprise because the Panthers were the
+self-proclaimed ‘children of Malcolm’,61 and Malcolm’s fundamental
+influence was Garveyism. Ignore the Marxist rhetoric and you see the tools
+of Garveyism at work, the newspaper and the programmes that were aiming
+to make the Black community self-sufficient and able to survive America.
+Bobby Seale running for mayor and Elaine Brown for city council in 1972
+fit perfectly into this Garveyite scheme, pulling the levers in order to
+generate power for the Black nation.
+The Panthers also inspired movements outside of America. In Britain,
+the Black Panther Party was founded in 1968 by a group including Althea
+Jones-LeCointe, Eddie Chambers and Darcus Howe. It is telling of their
+legacy that the Marxist rhetoric was even less present. The group set about
+campaigning on issues of policing, housing and immigration, following the
+lead of being rooted in the concerns of Black communities.
+
+Marxism is appealing because it offers a searing analysis of the problem
+of exploitation, tied directly into the material conditions people face. Black
+people are all too well aware of how inequality is woven into the fabric of
+society and therefore the need for a revolution. Black Marxism may well be
+an avenue to revolutionary overthrow and I have avoided getting into a
+discussion of the merits and logic of Marxist analysis. The aim of the
+chapter is to demonstrate that despite all of its appeal, Marxism remains a
+fundamentally Eurocentric paradigm. Robinson’s Black Marxism attempts
+to deal with the Eurocentric bias of Marxism by centring on Black activists
+rather than the European working class.62 But to do so changes the nature of
+Marxism to the point that it becomes a different political ideology. This is
+why we have seen Black activists often break away from Marxism or
+stretch it beyond its meaning; perhaps maintaining the rhetoric, but in
+reality engaging in other forms of engagement. Whether or not Marxism
+can produce revolution, it is a different project to Black radicalism.
+The categorical difference to Marxism is that Black radicalism does not
+rely on White agency. If the White working classes surprise the world and
+join the fight against imperialism then of course that would be welcome.
+But Black radicalism is based on seeing the fundamental contradiction in
+society as that of racism, Whiteness, hierarchy. The Black revolution will
+destroy this foundation and alter the lives of the working classes in the
+West, but it is just as likely (if not more so) that they will be a central
+component of the reactionary response. Increasingly this is also the case
+with workers in China, India and the rest of ‘dark mankind’. Black Marxists
+may have far more faith in the workers of the world, which is
+commendable, but the politics of Black radicalism has no room for this
+optimism.
+
+Chapter 7
+
+Liberal Radicalism
+
+Since being placed on the FBI’s most wanted list in August 1970, Angela
+Davis has been an iconic figure in radical circles. Davis was on the run
+because she had bought the gun that seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson
+had used to take a judge, prosecutor and three jurors hostage. Jackson was
+hoping to use the hostages to bargain for the release of his brother George
+and fellow ‘Soledad Brothers’ who were facing charges of murder for the
+death of a guard at Soledad Prison, in California.1 The situation did not end
+well; after a shootout with police as they were trying to escape, the judge
+and the three Black Panthers were dead.
+Davis had developed a relationship with George while he was in prison,
+and Jonathan served as her bodyguard. By 1970 Davis was heavily involved
+with the Communist Party and had been fired from her role as assistant
+professor at UCLA because of her politics. When she was caught, President
+Nixon celebrated the ‘capture of the dangerous terrorist’ and a mass
+campaign to free Angela spread across America and the world.2 One of the
+iconic images from the Black Power era is of Angela Davis, with her
+immaculate Afro, confronting the system of racism. Following her acquittal
+on all charges Davis resumed an academic career, writing on feminism,
+liberation and becoming one of the strongest critics of the ‘prison industry
+complex’, arguing that prisons should be abolished.3 Her work and activism
+make her one of the most sought-after speakers today and an inspiration to
+countless generations.
+For all these reasons I was extremely excited to get the chance to hear
+Davis speak at the Black Matters conference at the University of Texas in
+2016. It will become apparent in this chapter, if it has not already, that my
+biggest struggle is reconciling my role as an academic with the radical
+politics that I believe in. Universities are a central part of the system that
+oppresses Black communities. The very idea of race, the hierarchy of White
+supremacy, was produced and maintained by universities. Universities have
+
+continued to produce the knowledge that supports ideas of White
+supremacy, and are the peak of a school system that is the enemy of Black
+progress on a global level. Universities are as institutionally racist as the
+police force, so in the same way that a Black cop is always problematic, so
+too is a Black academic. I was fortunate enough to get to ask a question so I
+used the opportunity to ask Angela Davis how she had maintained being a
+radical, while being an academic. In my experience these two are entirely
+contradictory and it is a constant struggle to negotiate the academic
+industrial complex and maintain radical commitments. Much to my surprise
+her response was to explain that she ‘did not see the contradiction’, and that
+maintaining links outside of the university was the solution.
+Davis also raised the fact that as an academic she had been attacked by
+politicians and fired for her radical political beliefs. But it is precisely here
+that we can see the contradiction of the academic. When Davis was an
+active member of the Communist Party and providing the weapons for
+attempts to break Black Panthers out of prison, she was hunted down and
+arrested, and of course not permitted into the hallowed halls of the academy.
+When she shifted to writing, speaking and theorising revolution from the
+comfort of the university Professor Davis was no longer hounded by the
+state. In fact, she is one of the most celebrated academics in America. To be
+unable to see this contradiction demonstrates the level to which we can
+easily fall into the trap of liberal radicalism; to embrace radical theory, but
+ignore radical solutions because we benefit from the liberal system.
+Symptom-free racism
+One of the statements that Davis made in 2015, while in Berlin, is a good
+starting point in this discussion. After speaking to refugee activists and
+being taken to see one of the housing facilities, Davis remarked that ‘the
+refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century. It’s the movement
+that is challenging the effects of global capitalism, it’s the movement that is
+calling for civil rights for all human beings’.4 Due to the sheer numbers of
+people fleeing their homelands in search of refuge, immigration has become
+a priority issue across the globe. Not only in terms of refugees, who are in
+fear for their safety, but millions of people are seeking economic stability
+and escaping the biting poverty that exists where they were born. Despite
+
+the media panic, the majority of displaced people reside in countries in the
+global South. Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Uganda and Ethiopia are the
+nations that house the most displaced people.5 The refugees and economic
+migrants who do make it to the West face hostility and a range of different
+laws aimed to keep them out.
+In Berlin, Davis was greeted with stories of discrimination and saw the
+squalid living conditions that migrants faced in the city. This should come
+as no surprise given the anti-migrant feeling that has become a mainstay of
+political discourse in the West. The European Union reducing support for
+search and rescue in the Mediterranean is indicative of the callous approach
+to migrant life of Western governments. So keen are they to keep people
+out, they use floating bodies as a deterrent to migration. Britain has a
+particularly inhumane system for those who wish to claim asylum. People
+are prevented from working and forced to live on an income far below the
+poverty level while their cases can take years. During this time they are
+incredibly insecure and in danger of being apprehended at a moment’s
+notice if their case fails. Detention centres are used to house families and
+unaccompanied minors, and deportations are carried out by private security
+firms. Put this together with a hostile media and suspicious public and life
+for migrants in Britain should bring shame to us all. Davis is right when she
+compares the refugee movement to those campaigns for civil rights. The
+quest is for decency and dignity to be applied to all. But if this is the
+movement of the twenty-first century then we have given up on radical
+change.
+The plight of refugees is not the problem, it is a symptom of the wider
+structural issues. Rather than trying to simply deal with how migrants are
+treated in the West, we must be trying to prevent their arrival in the first
+place. In truth, there is too much migration, which is caused by the
+imbalances of global inequality. This is a resources issue, though it is not
+that migrants are stealing from the West, but the exact opposite. Due to the
+continued imperial global order the West enriches itself from the poverty
+and instability that is driving millions to flee their homes. We should be
+trying to stop there being any need to flee in the first place, not just trying to
+make the process of moving easier. Radical arguments seek to cure society,
+not just alleviate the suffering.
+Unfortunately, the desire for symptom-free racism is strong and at the
+core of much of our politics, activism and theory. We focus on surviving by
+
+treating the symptoms rather than the disease. Police brutality, educational
+inequalities, unemployment, migrant rights, and the list goes on. By
+engaging our energies in the symptoms we can convince ourselves that we
+are healing, without having to address the fundamental concern. We build a
+politics that helps us live with the disease of racism, rather than overcome
+it. This is the liberal individual approach to tackling racism. Our aim is to
+make the effects of racism as little seen in our lives as possible, to push it to
+the side-lines. We know we will not avoid the symptoms forever, but as
+long as they only act up every so often we can deal with it.
+The quest for symptom-free racism is most keenly felt in the Black
+bourgeoisie, those who have managed to alleviate some of their condition.
+Unsurprisingly, then, symptom-free contagion is rampant in Black
+academia. The best example of this would be the theorisation and focus on
+‘micro-aggressions’,6 which are the slights of everyday racism; the subtle
+papercuts that as they accumulate do enormous damage to the psyche. Any
+Black person in a professional job will testify to the pain caused by microaggressions. People are often surprised when I explain I have a ‘uniform’
+for work. I always go to the office in smart trousers and shoes because I
+have been scarred by being treated as a student by both the security and my
+colleagues. Any Black male academic will have a story of being harassed
+while carrying out their job because they simply did not fit the expected
+profile of an esteemed academic. For the first year as an academic I made
+sure to wear my staff card around my neck, because the treatment was so
+noticeably different when I did not. Having to adjust to the constant slights
+in the corridor, in meetings and in general takes its toll. But as my mother
+said when I tried to explain micro-aggressions to her, ‘that’s just what being
+Black is’. The micro-aggressions are a symptom of racism, and unless we
+thought the disease had gone away there is no reason we should expect not
+to suffer from its effects.
+As symptoms go, micro-aggressions are incredibly mild ones. I have to
+deal with slights and stresses at work, but I do not get harassed by the
+police; I am in one of the best paid professions in the world and reap the
+societal benefits that such an income provides. If the only symptoms of
+racism that we experience are micro-aggressions then we should be
+thankful, because we are extraordinarily privileged. In a world where a
+child dies every ten seconds because they cannot eat we should be grateful
+for the papercuts of racism. Instead, and I won’t name names here because
+
+the individuals are not important, many of us dedicate our privileged
+academic lives to researching and writing about micro-aggressions. Papers,
+books, inaugural lectures on how bad we have it because of the everyday
+slights and the pressure it puts us under.
+It is impossible to eradicate micro-aggressions and making them the
+focus of our work is the worst and most insular way we could approach the
+issue. Micro-aggressions are a reminder that we are Black, that no matter
+how far we have come we cannot cure racism within this system. We should
+use this reminder as our way of connecting to struggles off-campus, not
+indulge ourselves in trying to treat our minor symptoms. I can already hear
+the howls of disapproval from colleagues affected by micro-aggressions and
+fighting to stay sane in the halls of privilege. But the radical analysis has
+always been based on the liberation of the masses. You cannot build a
+revolution by trying to make it more comfortable for the lucky few to
+endure the master’s house.
+Symptom-free racism is by no means confined to Black academia. Much
+of the criticism that applied to cultural nationalism in Chapter 3 would
+apply here as well. The idea that we are a broken people who first need to
+be fixed is the perfect example of putting the symptoms before the disease.
+Cultural nationalists focus on those aspects they deem problematic like
+absentee fathers, substance abuse, violence and even dietary choices. To the
+extent that these are problems within Black communities, they are the
+symptoms of racism. For instance, Amos Wilson insightfully explored how
+the disproportionate numbers of Black people killing each other (a
+phenomenon we see across the globe) are caused by the destruction of
+Black selfhood in this system of oppression.7 Cultural nationalism can
+never be radical because it presents treating the symptoms as the solution to
+racism. In reality, embracing a new world view may make you feel better
+individually but it does nothing to end the problem of racism. We may well
+be a broken people but we cannot be fixed within a system of oppression.
+Treating the symptoms of racism necessarily locates the issues at the
+individual level. Even when we attempt to apply the treatment on a mass
+scale it often results in trying to inoculate individuals. We work with young
+people to help them navigate the school system, or avoid getting caught up
+in gangs. We mentor, coach and inspire people to survive and resist. There
+is nothing wrong with any of this work; it is vital given the conditions that
+find ourselves in. But we have to acknowledge that we are treating the
+
+symptoms and never the disease. The whole voluntary and not-for-profit
+sector is set up to be this way. The state, businesses, philanthropists and
+communities put resources into dealing with the results of racism but never
+the oppression itself.
+Medical metaphors are fitting here because there has been a push for
+‘self-care’ in activist circles,8 ensuring that we have the resources and time
+to recharge our batteries. Before we can love the people, we first need to
+love and look after ourselves. Again, there is nothing wrong with this in
+principle; running yourself into the ground is not a great strategy for social
+change. Though it may be a good idea, it is certainly not a radical one, and
+the self-care paradigm can easily cross over into the indulgent politics of
+self. No one individual is so vital to the revolution that they need to be
+pampered and cherished. Radical engagement must be built on collective
+agency. Also, the idea of sacrifice has always been at the basis of radical
+politics. When Assata Shakur threw off her slave name, she purposefully
+picked the name meaning ‘she who struggles’ in order to connect to the
+politics of the movement.9 We call it the struggle for a reason. It is
+uncomfortable, unforgiving and exposes you to all kinds of danger. Newton
+talked about the need to commit ‘revolutionary suicide’, to give your life to
+the people.10 We used to be prepared to die for the people, now we are not
+even committed enough to be stressed and overworked. It speaks to what
+we have on the line, the comforts of the West that we are so keen to cling on
+to.
+Self-care is also problematic because it again treats the symptoms, not
+the disease. There is no sanctuary within this imperial system; there is no
+respite, no safe space. We can only ever partially heal when we are
+constantly living under oppression. Our spaces of healing may enrich us
+individually, but they are a mirage and in the long term no more useful than
+the distant dream of paradise on the horizon. Rather than trying to escape
+from feelings of despair, anger, anxiety and depression, we should lean into
+them. Given the state of the world these are all appropriate responses. I
+keep coming back to dead children because the image is so stark. In the
+time it will take you to read this book the number of children who have
+been killed by this political and economic system would be overwhelming.
+If you do not despair at the brutal reality of the system then you either do
+not appreciate the depths of it, or are somewhere on the psychopathy scale.
+We should use our discomfort to challenge us, to propel us, to keep us on
+
+edge. We should be ‘angry’, we should be ‘hot’ and we must be
+‘uncompromising’.11 At its worst, self-care can act as a painkiller against
+the racial oppression that we face. Malcolm used the metaphor of the dentist
+applying novocaine to your gums to stop you fighting them pulling out your
+teeth. He warned that the worst we could do as a community was to take the
+novocaine and ‘don’t stop suffering – just suffer peacefully’.12 Embracing
+our suffering is key to our resisting it. We should not wallow in our pain, or
+be consumed by it. We must use it as the driving force to push us into
+building a radical alternative. Once we get too comfortable, we stop
+struggling, but struggle is the only route to freedom.
+Flight is not freedom
+In his book Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts made the argument that
+‘freedom is not a place, it is a state of being’.13 The book offers a
+fascinating account of maroon experiences, with a particular focus on Haiti.
+Maroon refers to communities of the formerly enslaved who liberated
+themselves from slavery and set up villages, towns and settlements out of
+the reaches of the slaving powers. Wherever there was slavery there were
+maroons. We have talked already about Queen Nanny Jamaica. The
+Quilombo settlements in Brazil were home to thousands of escaped
+Africans, with the largest, Palmares, operating as a republic that was
+hundreds of miles long and home to 30,000 people, from 1600 to 1694.14 In
+America, Harriet Tubman is the most notable maroon, who freed hundreds
+of the enslaved using the Underground Railroad. Roberts argues that
+refusing to be enslaved and reclaiming their bodies gave the maroons a
+measure of freedom. But flight is not the same as freedom, and Roberts
+recognises this when he distinguishes different forms of marronage. Petitmarronage was temporary flight, where the enslaved would leave the
+plantation from a few hours to a week, but return. Grand marronage was the
+quilombos and maroon communities who never returned to the plantations.
+But his highest form is sociogenic marronage that he models after the
+Haitian revolution, which by ‘abolishing slavery outright’ marked ‘a radical
+move’.15 That is precisely because fleeing the plantation did not bring
+freedom. The plantation continued to shape social life for the maroons. It
+defined where and how they could live and they had to constantly be
+
+vigilant for fear of raids and capture. The lack of freedom meant that many
+maroon communities signed treaties with the colonial powers in order to
+protect themselves. Under these treaties the maroons would have to agree
+not only to stop attempting to free the enslaved but also to return any
+runaways to the plantations. Collusion between some maroons and the
+imperialists ran so deep that it continued even after the end of slavery. Paul
+Bogle, who started the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, was
+captured for the British by maroons.
+Flight may be a rational response, but it is not a radical one. By leaving
+the system of slavery intact the maroons could never be free from it. This is
+an extension to the problem of narrow nationalism that we discussed in
+Chapter 1. Separation can never solve the problems, it just relocates them.
+This was even true for Haiti because the republic could never succeed,
+surrounded as it was by the imperial might of the West. Freedom can only
+be won by overturning the system that oppresses you. Flight, as part of a
+process of liberation, should never be confused with the condition of
+freedom. Roberts ends the book by connecting Rastafari into the history of
+marronage, and it works as the perfect case for its limits.
+In rejecting the language, culture and mind-set of the West, or the
+Babylon system, Rastafari represents cultural flight. At the birth of the
+movement Rastas also lived apart from the crazy baldheads in the city and
+survived off the land. In Chapter 3 we covered how the increasing cultural
+nationalism of the movement took it away from the Black radical tradition.
+But even in its most political sense Rastafari is based on fleeing Babylon
+rather than conquering it. The notion of ‘chanting down Babylon’ plays a
+key part in Rasta practice,16 using culture to transform the Black population
+and eventually to destroy the wicked system. But Rastafari offers a
+primarily ‘ideological assault’ and alternative cultural and value system as
+the solution.17 No matter how free Rastafari may make you feel, it cannot
+provide liberation.
+Attitudes to Rastafari by the mainstream have also dramatically changed.
+At one point the Jamaican government was in open warfare with Rastas and
+in Britain dreadlocks were synonymous with crime and drugs.18 In Britain,
+Rastafari became closely associated with the uprisings against police racism
+that shook Britain in the 1980s. Rasta’s overt connection to radical
+liberation struggles marked it out as something to be opposed. But as the
+movement took on more cultural nationalist overtones, the mainstream
+
+embraced Rasta, or at least the symbols of it. In Britain, dreadlocks, dub
+and parts of the Reggae scene have become gentrified. They are now
+markers of the White, middle class youth who are bravely reclaiming inner
+city spaces. Rastafari has become firmly a part of brand Jamaica, with the
+global success of Reggae being seen as a boost to the tourism industry.
+Undoubtedly, the diluted version of the culture being taken on in the
+mainstream bears no resemblance to the roots of Rastafari, but the fact that
+the movement is no longer seen as dangerous tells us its radical limits.
+Rastafari should remind us that there is no way to check out of the
+system. It is almost impossible not to engage in Babylon. I have seen all
+sorts of strategies for avoiding the system, including destroying your birth
+certificate and refusing to register your car, or even your child. None of
+these take you out, or put you beyond the reach of, the system. It may feel
+liberating to reject the formalities but you are still just as much a part of
+system as anyone else.
+Assata Shakur is probably the best example of a modern-day maroon.19
+Assata was part of the Black Liberation Army, active in the 1960s and
+1970s in America. Along with her comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd
+Shakur, Assata was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike with
+State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. Both Zayd and the officer were
+killed and Assata was badly injured, arrested and eventually convicted of
+murder. But in 1979 she was broken out of prison and escaped to Cuba,
+where she still lives with political asylum.
+Technically, Assata is free, out of prison and away from the clutches of
+the American state. But her entire existence remains framed by America.
+There is currently a $2 million bounty on her head and she is on the FBI’s
+Most Wanted Terrorist List. Therefore she has to remain in hiding in Cuba
+and have limited contact with family and the outside world. She cannot
+leave the island or lead anything remotely like a normal life. Cuba is
+effectively a prison for Assata, so it should be no surprise that when asked
+what freedom meant to her, she responded ‘you asking me about freedom? I
+know a whole lot more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is’.20
+Flight can never bring about freedom, because the act of running ensures
+that the system of oppression remains. Freedom is not a process, it is not the
+struggle. Freedom is the dream that we struggle for.
+Misuse of ‘revolution’
+
+Radical dreams of freedom are uncompromising, totalising and demand the
+complete transformation of the social, political and economic order. For
+radicals the only solution is revolution, in order to ‘overturn’ and ‘destroy’
+the existing system.21 But Malcolm warned that ‘many of our people are
+using this word “revolution” loosely’,22 lightly embracing radical rhetoric
+without truly taking on board revolutionary practice. This critique definitely
+applies to Black politics and theory, where to be radical or revolutionary
+appears to mean adopting a position that differs somewhat from the norm.
+Part of the misuse of the term revolution is closely tied to the idea that
+change must come from within before it can lead to social transformation.
+For cultural nationalists that is the spiritual and cultural transformation; in
+academia we focus on the ideas, the knowledge to produce change.
+While acknowledging that Cesaire’s negritude movement was ‘never
+intended to be a road map or a blueprint for revolution’, Kelley contends
+that his classic work Discourse on Colonialism was ‘poetry and therefore
+revolt’. He goes further to argue that the book was an ‘act of insurrection …
+a hand grenade thrown with deadly accuracy, clearing the field so that we
+might write a new history with what’s left standing’.23 Cesaire is the perfect
+figure to explain the limits of intellectual radicalism. As we explored in
+Chapter 3, his work was hugely influential, with Fanon crediting him for
+transforming how Black subjects of colonialism saw themselves. But we
+also discussed how Cesaire was a French republican to the core, who did
+not see liberation from France as being desirable. Negritude was about
+claiming Black personhood in order to integrate more equally into the
+Western ideal. There is nothing radical or revolutionary about the project.
+Just because it went against the prevailing ideas of the time (that Black
+people were inferior) that does not make it radical. To judge the radical
+nature of an argument we have to engage in the ‘new history’ that it writes,
+not just its condemnation of the old one.
+To be revolutionary also means going beyond deconstructing the present
+and offering abstract visions of a different future. This clearly applies to a
+range of post-structural theoretical reminiscences on society that even if
+they were written intelligibly would make little sense. In terms of Black
+radicalism the more common misuse of revolutionary relates to giving too
+much power to music and popular culture. Moten argues that ‘Black
+radicalism is (like) music. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way
+of listening to the music)’.24 He spends a lot of time making the argument
+
+that Black music with its different arrangements, soulful cries and
+boundary-breaking forms of expression represent the ‘aesthetics’ of Black
+radicalism. Kelley speaks of the ‘revolutionary nature of the blues’,25 and
+the power of the surreal in transforming our vision for reality. A lot of
+emphasis is placed on this work in the idea of desire, fantasy and soul being
+alternative concepts to build our understanding on rather than European
+ideas of rationality. To be a blues people is to embody a different form of
+being, and can perhaps lead to a revolutionary transformation of society
+based on ‘love and creativity’.26
+There’s certainly something romantic about the idea of the artists,
+writers, poets and musicians being the revolutionary vanguard, painting a
+new vision for the future and calling us to its tune. However, in reality this
+is just an intellectual version of cultural nationalism. We know society is
+corrupt but instead of trying to overthrow it we seek solace in the beauty
+that has been created in the hideous. We can affirm ourselves by getting lost
+in the sorrow songs, fiction and poetry or watching the achingly beautiful
+choreography of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre. But none of this culture,
+no matter how beautiful or genre defying, is revolutionary. It does not pave
+the way for revolution, or even in itself open up possibilities. Culture is
+always a product of the political moment. Slavery and marronage make the
+blues; the New Negro movement shapes the Harlem Renaissance; PanAfricanism calls into existence Afro-beat; Rastafari and Garveyism produce
+Reggae; and Black Power creates the Black Arts movement. Even the lack
+of cohesive Black political movements can be traced to the
+commercialisation and gangsta-isation of Hip Hop. In a memorable quote
+from the James Baldwin documentary I am Not Your Negro, he explains
+that he was a ‘witness’ to the political events that shaped his work. The film
+is based on a book he was writing about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King
+and Medgar Evers. Unlike those three he was not a leader in any
+organisation, and he did not pay with his life for his commitment. Baldwin
+was on the side-lines, linked in but not fully part of the movements. This is
+not to belittle or downplay Baldwin’s role, but to recognise it. Artists
+document the political moment, they do not create it. It is a vital role, but
+not a revolutionary one.
+Perhaps the loosest use of the term revolution I have come across is in
+Shayne Lee’s Erotic Revolutionaries. Lee argues that ‘erotic revolutionaries
+… effectively wage war against the politics of respectability and challenge
+
+traditional scripts offering women a greater space to indulge in a fuller
+range of sexual expressiveness’.27 His revolutionary vanguard includes
+singers, video vixens and models who blaze their transformative trail
+against sexual conformity. It is almost too obvious that this version of
+revolutionary is not radical, and is probably not meant to be. I doubt even
+Lee believes that doing video blogs giving tips on how to improve your sex
+life is a revolutionary act on a par with trying to bring down a political and
+economic system that kills children. But the redefinition of revolutionary is
+important to discuss because it has implications for Black political
+movements, particularly in the West where revolutionary overthrow is not
+an option.
+One of the most fundamental problems with Lee’s argument is his
+obsession with the politics of respectability and therefore the need to move
+beyond it. Respectability politics refers to the notion that Black people must
+represent ourselves as upright and decent citizens to counter the negative
+stereotypes of the lazy and deviant Black person. There is long history of
+respectability in Black politics, with Booker T. Washington and the ‘pull
+yourself up by your bootstraps’;28 and Dubois’ notion of the ‘Best of the
+Race’. For radical figures such as Garvey and even Malcolm, the idea of
+being clean-cut and upright was seen as paramount in how we portrayed
+ourselves. For more conservative versions of Black politics, it is not just a
+question of appearance but the idea that acting, dressing and talking ‘right’
+is the key ingredient to success in society.
+One of the best examples of this poisonous logic was when Bill Cosby
+used his speech at the fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of schooling
+to attack the ‘people with their hat on backwards, pants down around the
+crack’. He launched a tirade against women with their ‘dresses all the way
+up to the crack’ and ‘five or six different children’ with ‘eight or ten
+different’ fathers. He even goes as far as to blame victims of police killings
+for their deaths, using the hypothetical example of people getting upset over
+the police shooting someone who was stealing pound cake. The problem is
+not the police but that they ‘were holding the pound cake’ in the first
+place.29 Respectability politics is a problem with vastly negative
+consequences for Black politics and also has particular implications for
+gender.
+Rosa Parks was not the first Black woman in Montgomery, Alabama to
+refuse to give up her seat to a White passenger. Nine months previously
+
+Claudette Colvin had been carried off a bus in handcuffs after she asserted
+her constitutional right to a seat. She sought the support of the civil rights
+apparatus but they did not want to use her as a test case. Claudette was
+fifteen and pregnant, the opposite of the steadfast Black working woman
+they would later use as the symbol of the campaign.30 Rosa Parks is the
+embodiment of what Lisa Thompson calls the ‘Black lady’ archetype, a
+representation that ‘relies heavily on the aggressive shielding of the body
+concealing sexuality; and foregrounding morality, civility and
+intelligence’.31 Claudette was too much the stereotype, not respectable
+enough as the face of the campaign. In order to have the necessary esteem
+in the eyes of the public and the state they needed to call in the Black lady.
+Lee rails against how the Black lady has dominated not just Black
+political representation but also Black feminist scholarly work. Seminal
+scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins have forensically analysed how
+mainstream culture provides limited ‘controlling images’ of Black women.
+From the sexless, nurturing ‘mammy’ figure to the deviant, oversexed
+‘jezebel’,32 the Black female body has been policed in popular culture. Lee
+is critical of how scholarship has overdetermined the role that sexualisation
+of Black females has played and therefore limited the space for Black
+female sexuality to be appreciated on its own terms. There is some truth to
+this; the Black lady in particular is an over-correction to the negative
+representations of mainstream culture. But we have to view it as a response
+and a resistance to this cultural oppression.
+Sexual abuse of Black female bodies has historically been so central to
+racial oppression that it is difficult to overstate. Rape was part of the fabric
+of plantation life. The gruesome world tour that Saartije Baartman was
+subjected to, paraded naked in a cage to show off her big breasts and large
+backside, is testament to the powerful image of Black female sexuality
+underlying mainstream discourse. The controlling image of deviant Black
+people is not just used to make White people feel superior, but also to
+justify oppressive treatment. If Black women are sexual vixens then they
+cannot be raped. Embracing the image of the Black lady was a political
+manoeuvre in part enacted to protect Black women, to desexualise and
+make them less of a target of unwanted desire. Of course, this is a limited
+kind of defence and you could even argue it perpetuates rape myths about
+people bringing on their own assaults. But the reality is that the Black lady,
+and the politics of respectability in general, however misguided, are a
+
+defence mechanism. It is a symptom and not the disease. Therefore
+rejecting it is not a revolutionary act of liberation, just a correction of a
+problematic political position that arose in the struggle.
+It is also completely incorrect to paint the Black lady as the dominant
+form of Black female representation. Perhaps in the Black church, or even
+within some Black community circles this may be the case, but most
+certainly not in mainstream culture. Scholars object to seeing Black
+women’s bodies being displayed with same contempt for Black female
+sexuality as Saartije Baartman experienced, as they rightly should. Black
+female sexuality has been given space to be explored in popular culture,
+through the lens of White oppression. There is absolutely nothing new or
+transformative about the presentation of Nicki Minaj, or the plethora of
+video vixens. The only difference is that now they are paraded on screen,
+rather than in a cage.
+Liberation is not rebelling against Black political formation. Of course
+we need to refocus our lenses, learn from mistakes of the past and reject
+conservative ideas. But the trend that views Black politics as the problem is
+disturbing. If we strip back much of Lee’s argument we see an embrace of
+the individual, with Black women being restricted in their sexuality by the
+moralising Black feminists who take a more collective position on
+representation. There is an urge to free Black women to fulfil their desires
+and sexual fulfilment. Similar to cultural nationalism or finding solace in
+the break of the beat, this is an illusion of freedom. Revolutionising your
+sex life is not a radical act.
+More problematic from a Black radical perspective is how this is yet
+another example of forgoing the collective for the individual revolution.
+Broader critiques about the industry and the way that the Black female body
+is used are not about policing representation. You can believe that Nicki
+Minaj’s representation is problematic, while defending her right to pursue
+her career in whatever way she sees fit. But her individual career choices
+are not so sacred that they are above criticism and when they reproduce
+harmful controlling images we should have the right to critique those
+decisions. More importantly, to reassert Black radicalism we have to push
+back against the corrosive idea that there can ever be an individual
+revolution, whether centred on culture or the body.
+Part of the desire to shift the terrain to newer sites of resistance is
+because of the perceived gender dichotomy between the public, private and
+
+even personal spheres. This follows on from the discussion in Chapter 5
+about the critique of the masculine history of Black political movements.
+Opening new terrain for radical politics can be seen to break the gendered
+binary that placed men on the front lines and women on the domestic front.
+Recasting domestic labour as a site of resistance is an important project.33 If
+the kitchen is a radical space then the labour within it can be revolutionary.
+As we will discuss in the next chapter, redefining what we mean by
+revolutionary labour is vital to understanding Black radicalism. The
+Panthers’ survival programmes, which fed children and provided medical
+care, were just as revolutionary as their armed patrols of the police. But that
+does not mean that all domestic labour is revolutionary. The women who
+were cooking and cleaning for the men in Karenga’s US Organisation were
+not revolutionaries because they were contributing to a cultural nationalist
+and regressive project. Worse still, they were reproducing the gendered
+politics that have held back Black political progress. To embrace the
+domestic sphere as a potentially revolutionary site does not mean
+necessarily to cast it as one. Doing so runs the risk of further gendering the
+political movements. A radical role for women is carved out but only in the
+home, doing so-called women’s work. There is no real difference to the idea
+that the woman’s place in the struggle is to support her man, and to raise the
+family. The same danger is present in the idea of an erotic revolution.
+If the body can be a terrain for liberation, then embracing different forms
+of expression can be seen as a radical act. Egalitarian sexual relations and
+overcoming the misogyny that has been present in Black political
+movements are certainly necessary for revolutionary practice. Our visions
+of freedom must liberate all Black people, not just recreate patriarchal
+hierarchies. But this does not mean that every embrace of sexual freedom is
+revolutionary. Reproducing racialised gender norms would clearly be
+counterrevolutionary, as would embracing the individualism of desire at the
+expense of collective engagement. More importantly, radicalism means
+those politics that aim to overturn the existing system. If one of the goals of
+Black radicalism is to fundamentally transform patriarchy then no amount
+of individualised expression of desire and sexual liberation will achieve
+this. The same structure that produces the celebrity of video vixens,
+modern-day Saartije Baartmans and places celebrities as spokespeople is
+the very one that needs to be overturned. Revolutions in Black sexual
+
+expression will never happen in mainstream media, in the same way that ‘a
+chicken will never lay a duck egg’.34
+Maintaining this gendered binary also misses how supposedly feminine
+notions have been debated within Black politics. Love, for instance, has
+been frequently used in Black politics, with the difference being in how it is
+mobilised to distinguish radical from liberal movements. Martin Luther
+King believed in ‘love power’, in a soul force that could transform society
+by reaching the hearts of the oppressor. He argued that ‘we will meet the
+forces of hate with the power of love … we must say to our white brothers
+all over the South, we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our
+capacity to endure suffering … Bomb our homes and we will still love
+you’.35 King’s conception of unconditional love for the oppressor was a
+central concept underlying the political nature of the civil rights movement.
+In its focus on being a part of society, civil rights had to appeal to White
+people to let us in. Unconditional love was not just a moral issue of nonviolence and Christian ethics, it was the only way that the movement could
+make sense. Forgive them father for they know not what they do, and if we
+just keep loving them eventually they will come to their senses.
+Unsurprisingly, Black radicalism takes a different approach to love.
+In complete opposition to King’s approach, Malcolm declared ‘you don’t
+have a revolution in which you love your enemy’.36 In complete contrast to
+King’s politics, Malcolm was clear that ‘you don’t have a revolution in
+which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it’.37
+King’s unconditional love was that of the supplicant House Negro who
+‘loved their master more than they loved themselves’; who was desperate to
+remain on the plantation. For Black radicalism, embracing the oppressor is
+the antithesis of revolutionary love. Instead it is essential to ground the
+politics on an ‘undying love for the people’.38 The radical commitment is to
+the grassroots, the masses, to build the unity that is necessary to create the
+world anew. There is no space to love the oppressor. We cannot indulge in
+love for ourselves. It is love for the people, for the Black nation, that is
+absolute essential to bring about the Black revolution.
+Limits of Critical Race Theory
+
+Looking for revolution in aesthetics and desire expresses the cultural turn
+that we have seen in both academic and some activist circles. The result is
+to switch the terrain of revolution by removing the gaze from the structural
+concerns of Black radicalism. The most frustrating bodies of thought are
+those that embrace the radical analysis of Black radicalism but do not
+engage in the revolutionary solutions. There is a tendency for this kind of
+liberal radicalism to be present in Critical Race Theory (CRT), which has
+become a well-used paradigm for understanding racism in America and
+Europe.
+Critical Race Theory represents some of the best scholarship on the
+foundational role that racism plays in society. The movement emerged out
+of critical legal studies in America and the dissatisfaction once scholars
+realised that the momentous civil rights legislation many had devoted their
+lives to had failed to improve the conditions for most African Americans.39
+Derek Bell, the late founder of CRT, argued that Black people will ‘never
+gain fully equality’ in America because racism is a permanent feature of
+society.40 It is not so much that civil rights legislation failed, but that it was
+never meant to make society more equal. For Bell, even the most
+progressive legislation is meant only to further White interests. He explains
+that the motivation behind the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed
+citizenship to the formerly enslaved, was not equality but for the Northern
+states to prevent the South from exploiting the labour of African Americans
+by paying them inhuman wages. But the implications are far worse than
+simply empty legislation; the law is used to provide the illusion of equality
+and therefore discrimination becomes more effective because it is covert,
+and harder to prove. In a quote that I always use in talks, Bell explains how
+this basic framework means that ‘what we designate as “racial progress” is
+not a solution to that problem. It is a regeneration of the problem in a
+particularly perverse form’.41
+One of the reasons I appreciate CRT so much is that it is an academic
+articulation of many of the key Black radical ideas. These concepts were
+not alien to me when I came across them, but felt familiar. In fact,
+Malcolm’s condemnation of the civil rights movement pre-dates Bell by
+almost thirty years. We have already discussed Malcolm’s dismissal of the
+March on Washington as farce, in Chapter 3. Without the benefit of
+hindsight he saw that the best Black people could hope for was second class
+
+citizenship in America. The problem with CRT is that though it eventually
+embraces the analysis it does not adopt the revolutionary solution.
+Education has been a key site of CRT research in Britain. The
+longstanding racial inequalities in terms of both Black attainment and
+higher exclusion rates have persisted, despite funding and attention from
+policy makers. All that the money has done is ‘altered the processes and
+experiences of minority young people’ but ‘done little to alter the outcomes
+recorded for them’.42 CRT is useful because it removes the need for evil
+intent to reproduce racism; as Gillborn argues, the situation is ‘worse than
+that’.43 Britain is no different from any other nation in regard to schooling
+inequalities facing Black students. Even with good intent from teachers and
+policy makers, racism is reproduced because it is a necessary feature of the
+system. Once we have established the permanence of racism in schooling
+then surely we need to radically rethink how we educate our children.
+A mainstay of the educational response to the challenge of CRT has been
+to develop strategies of critical pedagogy. Often this entails using the school
+system to transform the understandings of White students by getting them
+to think critically about their own experiences and privileges of
+Whiteness.44 Also, by presenting counter-narratives and alternative
+understandings from marginalised communities critical pedagogy aims to
+be ‘productive of empathy’ and promote ‘awareness of racism in society’.45
+The only problem is that the theory of CRT tells us that awareness of racism
+could not possibly solve the problem because even with positive intent
+racism is reproduced. In a study of teachers’ racial attitudes this is exactly
+what was found:
+awareness did not lead to empathy amongst teachers, but resulted in a
+reinvention of meaning that reified existing, culturally constructed,
+racist frameworks … racism adapts to any new ideology introduced,
+accommodating the discourse within a framework of continued racial
+supremacy.46
+The problem has not been that people are unaware, but that they are fully
+aware and yet continue to reproduce a racist society even with the best
+intentions. As we discussed in Chapter 6, Whiteness is a psychosis; it is
+entirely irrational and immune to logical thought or persuasion. By
+
+presenting itself as some kind of solution to an issue it can never solve,
+critical pedagogy is in fact a ‘regeneration’ of the problem that is
+‘particularly perverse’ because of its good intent while actually
+contradicting the core theoretical foundations of CRT.
+Further contradictions in the theory and practice of CRT emerge when it
+comes to the idea of social justice. The term is littered through the writings
+of CRT and much progressive research. Milner sees the role of CRT as
+being to ‘assist social-justice-oriented individuals in organising to actively
+do something, to change racist systems, policies and practices’.47 What is
+meant by social justice is unclear, and also what it means to ‘do something’.
+Civil rights activists were no doubt ‘social justice oriented’ and certainly
+did ‘something’ to change racist systems; however, CRT is founded on the
+basis of critiquing these actions. In order to overcome the permanence of
+racism in society it must therefore be far more complex than supporting
+those with good intentions. Milner acknowledges ‘interests and their
+ideological convergence that are most profound for movements to be
+successful’,48 but this then precludes embracing the social justice mantra.
+CRT cannot at once be in support of ideologically committed and interest
+driven groups, while simultaneously agitating for vague coalitions of the
+well intentioned. But this is precisely what CRT often becomes, a method
+for diagnosing systemic inequality and championing solutions that
+contradict its own theory.
+Bell somehow argues that ‘we delegitimate it [racism] if we can pinpoint
+it’, and appears to present CRT as a claim of truth to power where stating
+the reality of oppression loudly and firmly is advanced as noble action.
+Bell’s paradox is most clearly demonstrated in his embrace of both the
+permanence of racism and the constant struggle against it. He bleakly
+contends that we must come to ‘both the recognition of the futility of action
+… and the unalterable conviction that something must be done, that action
+must be taken’.49 Cheerfully singing into the abyss is not the foundation of
+a radical politics and here is where we find the fundamental limit of CRT. A
+body of thought produced in the university is liberal by its very nature. So
+while CRT can appreciate radical rhetoric it can never make the next logical
+step to revolutionary practice. To do so would undermine the very
+foundation upon which the idea was produced in the first place.
+Universities are built on the basis of separating thought from action, of
+the intellectual from the communities they serve. The role of the academic
+
+is not to bring about social change but to reproduce the status quo, ‘the
+social relations of oppression and exploitation’.50 By becoming part of the
+academic furniture it is debateable to what extent we have changed our
+traditional oppressive function. By remaining largely detached from the
+movements for social change we cannot produce the knowledge of
+liberation. This is what separates Malcolm from CRT and why he was able
+to foresee the limits of the civil rights movement. He was with the
+grassroots, trying to enact change so understood how the system would
+react. Rather than producing knowledge that is engaged in social change,
+academics often prefer to take the traditional role of the intellectual. Gloria
+Ladson-Billings does not even see the academic��s role as necessarily
+creating the limited critical pedagogy. Instead, she argues that ‘CRT’s
+project is to uncover the way pedagogy is racialised and selectively offered
+to students according to the setting’;51 in other words, we just provide the
+analysis not the solution. Trapped in the academic industrial complex, our
+internal bubble where we write, speak and engage with the same audience,
+Bell’s theoretical cul-de-sac is transformed from a paradox into business as
+usual. We were never meant to actually solve the problem, so we can be
+content diagnosing the need to act, and the futility in doing so.
+Racism is a permanent feature of Western society, but we only become
+resigned to it if we cease to imagine the alternative. We make a fatal error to
+conflate this society with the only possible one. Taking on board the radical
+analysis and refusing to consider its solution means that we become trapped
+in a black hole, unable to see any real hope. Academic versions of
+radicalism therefore become hallmarked by either a misplaced optimism or
+an inherent pessimism.
+Orlando Patterson argued that slavery was a state of ‘social death’, being
+reduced to the subhuman, with no rights or full claims to humanity.52 The
+notion that this social death is the basis of Black life in the Western world is
+the foundation upon which Afro-pessimism is based. As Sexton argues,
+‘black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death’
+because society is built on, and therefore permeated by, anti-Blackness.53
+Afro-pessimism has been critiqued because it associates with the negative
+connotations of Blackness and appears to offer no hope of redemption.54 In
+keeping with a radical analysis, Afro-pessimism refuses to ignore the brutal
+reality of racism. One of the most enduring strengths of Blackness is its
+
+ability to endure and to create beauty in spite of oppression. But the fact we
+have survived while suffering such abuse does not negate the realities of
+that torment. As we discussed in Chapter 6, the Negro was a creation of the
+West with real consequences, and social death still exists today. Afropessimism is an ‘affirmation of pathological being’ in order that we
+comprehend the total incompatibility of Black life with Western society. As
+Sexton argues, ‘Blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world
+is’, it is an indictment of the society that creates Blackness as social death.
+But Afro-pessimism suffers from the same fundamental flaw as many
+analyses of racism emerging from the academy, in that it gives too much
+emphasis to how White society has conceived of Blackness.
+Negro-ness is a state of social death, the construction of non-humanness
+by the West. Blackness is rejection of the Negro and therefore the cure to
+the disease of racism. Blackness is the opposite of social death; it is the
+rejection of the condition imposed by the West. Not in the sense of being
+proud, or finding moments in cultural resistance, but in proclaiming an
+uncompromising commitment to the Black revolution. Ruminating on how
+social death still frames Black life is not the Black radical project. Calling
+into being the methodologies, strategies and politics for overturning the
+political system and building the Black nation is the work that needs to be
+done.
+Black radicalism is one of the most optimistic politics that exists. While
+recognising the totality of oppression that Black people face, it refuses to
+lose faith that the problem of racism can be solved. Given the nature of our
+oppression, and how far the condition has spread, this might seem unlikely.
+In fact, this is one of the main reasons that we have generally stopped
+fighting for a cure and tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible.
+But we are not resigned to treating the symptoms or relieving our pain with
+cultural palliative care. As Malcolm put it, ‘we don’t want to hear nothing
+about the odds are against us’.55 Black radicalism is built on a revolutionary
+vision that provides the antidote to racial oppression.
+
+Chapter 8
+
+Black Survival
+
+When Malcolm X died in 1965 the world was at a tipping point.
+Revolutions raged across Africa and the West was terrified that much of the
+continent would turn to communism and add to the powerful Eastern bloc.
+America was still entangled in the bloody conflict in Vietnam and European
+empires were losing control of their colonies. The Bay of Pigs fiasco in
+Cuba in 1961 showed just how close the world was to nuclear war.
+Capitalism was in crisis and overturning Western imperialism was a
+tangible possibility. The Black revolution was not some far-off fantasy, but
+a political reality. Malcolm’s optimism in the Organisation of African Unity
+and the United Nations must be seen in this context. With the right politics
+and strategy, the West could have been taken down. A unified Africa could
+have provided a new model for society, free from the domination of the
+West.
+Malcolm also died before the realisation of most civil rights legislation.
+There was little pretence of equality in the West; until 1965 it was legal to
+discriminate on grounds of race in Britain. It was only in the 1960s that
+many colonies achieved their so-called independence and before this it was
+obvious that they were exploited by colonialism. Black people were not
+accepted into the system in any meaningful way and therefore the idea of
+revolt was attractive. One of the reasons that the Garvey movement
+managed to build a membership of five million people before the internet
+was that it did not need to convince Black people that they had no place in
+the West. It was blindingly obvious due to the conditions of racial
+oppression.
+In the ensuing fifty years both the probability of revolution and the
+conditions that would lead those in the West to embrace regime change
+have steeply declined. Revolutionary movements were violently put down
+across the African Diaspora and the globe. The Western political consensus
+dominates to the point that the ‘end of history’ has been declared due to the
+
+lack of viable alternatives.1 Communism is now symbolic, after the collapse
+of the Soviet Union and China’s integration into the capitalist system. In the
+current context, the Black revolution can seem like a distant, utopian dream
+to those of us suffering the brunt of institutional racism. The realities of
+racism mean that there are any number of struggles on a daily basis that
+need to be resisted that do not necessarily aim to overturn the system. I was
+in fact once accused by a high-profile professor of ‘abandoning my sons to
+racism’ at home by focusing on the fantasy of revolution.
+Black radicalism also seems distant because for all of the racism we
+suffer, we have also become a part of the system. Alongside destroying
+revolutionary movements, the powers that be also offered just enough of a
+glimmer of access to provide the illusion of hope. Civil rights, race relations
+and so-called independence have blinded us to the totality of our
+oppression. As we discussed in the last chapter we are seeking to relieve the
+symptoms and not treat the disease of racism. We are trapped in a paradox,
+where we see no prospect for liberation and so cling to an illusion of false
+hope offered by our improved access to the system, and those who have
+benefited from it. In this limiting framework we are left with recognising
+the ‘historical limitation of the “new” black petite bourgeoisie’ but arguing
+that they ‘play a crucial role’ in the Black struggle. According to none other
+than Cornel West, the ‘Black middle class – preachers, teachers, lawyers,
+doctor, politicians – possesses the requisite skills and legitimacy’ that are
+essential for Black progress.2 In reality the Black middle class possesses the
+skills necessary to succeed within Western imperialism, a system opposed
+to Black freedom. We are deluding ourselves if we are looking for the
+House Negro to solve the problems of the plantation.
+Now all this may appear contradictory coming from a card-carrying
+member of the Black middle class. I have a level of income and privilege
+which would make it absurd for me to claim any other location than that
+firmly entrenched in the master’s house. It is a contradiction that none of us
+unfortunate enough to suffer the symptoms of racism in the West can escape
+from: from activists celebrating the smartphone, which is built off Black
+suffering, to the academic getting paid through the taxes from a system that
+kills Black children. The Black revolution is based on the idea of creating a
+world entirely independent of the oppression of the West, making it difficult
+to chart a radical politics by those who live off the teat of imperialism. In
+this chapter we will discuss how to navigate that contradiction and build a
+
+Black revolutionary politics that can deal with local symptoms and the
+global disease of racism.
+Separateness is not a problem
+Black separatism has been a central feature of Black Nationalism, as we
+discussed in Chapter 1. But we must distinguish these calls from the
+independence that lies at the heart of Black radicalism. Before we do so, it
+is necessary to offer a defence of the idea of separation, while recognising
+its limitations. Separatism has been used as an example to point to the
+obvious extremism of those who want to live apart. We reduce the debate to
+civil rights, love thy neighbour, integrationists vs. Black Power, hate
+Whitey, separatists. Separation is seen as problematic because it must
+prevent our progress in society. But the discussion on separateness is based
+on ideology, not evidence. Ironically, many of the arguments against
+separatism are actually harmful to Black progress even within the system.
+In Britain, the idea of communities living separate or ‘parallel’ lives is
+seen as not only problematic for integration but also as an essential element
+in the breeding of terrorists.3 Separate and isolated communities will
+obviously not be able to integrate and of course develop a mistrust of
+mainstream society. In the 1960s when Britain was first having to deal with
+large numbers of Black and Brown children, it was a left-wing government
+which issued an edict that schools could have no more than a third of
+students from a migrant background.4 In the cases where the numbers
+exceeded this limit, minority children were bussed to other schools. It was
+inconceivable that these migrant children could learn the culture and the
+language to fully assimilate into a British identity if there were too many of
+them in the schools. Britain has a limited history of bussing,5 but there is a
+much stronger legacy of the practice in America.6 In desegregating
+schooling and trying to create a racial mix, bussing was the perfectly liberal
+response to the problem of racial inequality. The aim was to give Black
+children access to the cultural resources of Whiteness so that all the good
+cultural capital could rub off onto the kids, who could then better integrate
+into mainstream society.
+Underlying the concept of bussing, and fear of separateness, is the
+wrongheaded idea that racism is located at the level of the individual and
+
+mostly caused by ignorance. Seeking increased contact between people
+from different backgrounds is meant to educate racism out of people as well
+as integrate minorities. Up until riots in the north of England in 2001 that
+pitted largely British Pakistani and Bangladeshi youth against White racists,
+Britain pursued a race relations policy of multiculturalism. In this doctrine
+the local and national state supported the development of Britain into a
+‘community of communities’ where support was offered for different ethnic
+groups.7 But after the riots, the ‘death of multiculturalism’ was proclaimed
+because it was seen as culpable in the unrest.8 Under the so-called
+community cohesion agenda the state is unlikely to provide funding to
+specific minority groups in order to prevent segregation. In the new
+paradigm cross-cultural initiatives with White and Muslim young people
+became a fixture of state-funded programmes.9 Such cross-cultural
+initiatives typically occur within cities between deprived communities,
+focusing on educating the White formerly working class who often display
+the most open and aggressive forms of racism. This is patronising and
+wrongheaded for a number of reasons.
+White working class racism is certainly problematic, vocal and
+distressing. In Britain, marches for far right groups such as Britain First and
+the English Defence League are filled with White people who feel
+dispossessed. This group also has real political clout, fuelling the success of
+the UK Independence Party, the vote for Brexit and the shift to the right on
+immigration for all the major parties. The same is true in America, with the
+Rust Belt providing Trump with his surprise presidential victory and his
+calls to Make America Great [White] Again. A section of poor Whites have
+always played this role in maintaining racist societies, but poor Whites
+embracing the wages of Whiteness is a symptom of racism. As we explored
+in the last chapter, we love nothing better than ignoring the disease and
+treating the symptoms. Whenever there is a fascist demonstration, there is
+an anti-racist response to let the ‘scum’ know that they are not welcome in
+our cities. These confrontations have become a staple of anti-racist
+movements. But they are more to salve the conscience of the protesters
+rather than to make meaningful change. The skinheads are not going to
+change their minds or stop acting out. We just give them attention so that
+we feel as though we are doing something active in the struggle. People
+count their anti-fascist demos like tours of duty in an actual conflict. The
+problem is that the White people in the streets are not the real enemy; they
+
+have little power and embrace their bigotry mostly out of frustration. I am
+writing this in the days after the Charlottesville White supremacist march in
+2017, and the counter anti-racist mobilisation. My twitter feed has been full
+for days with people dumping on Trump for not explicitly condemning the
+far right. The problem with this approach is that people are looking at
+Trump as though he is somehow distinguishable from the violent racism of
+White supremacy; that as odious as he is, he is somehow above the
+hideousness of the Klan. Not only did Trump court the very constituency he
+eventually came out to condemn, he actually represents the disease of
+racism far more than they do. Racism is systemic, not symbolic, vocal or
+overt, and Trump has been implicated in perpetuating the system of racism,
+first as a business guru and now as president. If Trump can gain some sort
+of credibility by disavowing White nationalist protests it tells us just how
+distorted our view of racism is. He is the embodiment of White nationalism,
+not the White masses on the street who have no other voice but to hold a
+rally and cause trouble. The real problem with racism lies with the
+privileged and it is here we can see the anti-separateness logic fall to pieces.
+The people who choose to have the least contact with ethnic minorities
+are typically not the White formerly working class. Due to residential
+segregation there are certainly areas that are predominantly White and
+deprived. But particularly in the major cities in countries like Britain,
+minorities have historically moved into areas that are occupied by those
+Whites with less resources. Contact in this context is competition, and
+highly unlikely to produce friendly relations. A major cause of the tensions
+has been based around the idea of migrants taking the jobs and resources
+from the supposedly native White folk. Even for those who have very little
+contact with minorities, they have been told they are in conflict with the
+hordes of undeserving migrants who are stealing their resources. As
+nonsensical as these notions are, they did not just emerge through the
+ignorance of the poor. Politicians have learnt to play the politics of like a
+drum creating the fear of the dark invaders in order to boost their electoral
+prospects. Thatcher talked about Britain being ‘swamped’, and Trump was
+elected on a solidly White nationalist platform. For all the middle class
+handwringing about separate lives and the need for contact between
+different communities, the most self-segregating group is always, without
+question, the White middle class and elite.
+
+Inner city areas in Britain are not dominated by minorities by accident.
+This was the housing that was available to us when we migrated and there
+was a strict colour bar as to where we could live. For example, when
+Birmingham City Council wanted to put a boarding house for Caribbean
+men in the then affluent Northfield, the residents protested and the
+residence ended up in the inner city area of Handsworth.10 Around 80% of
+inner city Birmingham is now ethnic minority (an ironic term given the
+numbers), not from our choice but because as we moved in the White
+people who could afford it moved out. White flight is the only way to
+explain how areas that were once entirely populated by White people have
+been almost completely emptied of the so-called native population. The
+most segregated areas in Britain are not those spaces inhabited by
+minorities but the almost exclusively White middle class enclaves that are
+self-selecting. In Birmingham the only area where over 90% of the
+population is one ethnicity is Sutton Coldfield, the Whitest part of town.
+Even in affluent neighbourhoods, there was a slight increase in the Indian
+population because some managed to afford to move in and the area has
+ceased to be the chosen destination for the White middle class. Now it is the
+villages in the commuter belt that are the dream, away from the hustle,
+bustle and darkness of the city. They don’t call the hit TV show, where
+people try out expensive homes in rural areas, Escape to the Country for
+nothing. White people with money get as far away from minorities as they
+can. In America this trend is even more pronounced, as the White middle
+class has effectively abandoned the city limits entirely in major cities and
+resides exclusively in the commuter belt, with the good (White) public
+schools and picture book homes. Residential segregation is so acute in
+America that the public schools are now more segregated than they were
+before the supposedly momentous decision of Brown vs Board of Education
+in 1954.11
+If separateness really were seen as a problem in itself then the focus of
+the concern would be entirely with the middle class and their parallel lives.
+Instead, in Britain there is constant handwringing about self-segregating
+minority communities that are failing to integrate properly. The 2016
+government review into integration led by Dame Casey opined that there
+were seventeen out 9456 local electoral wards where the non-White British
+population was over 90%. The report neglected to count the number where
+the inverse of this is true, but given that half of all minorities live in three
+
+cities,12 we can assume that there are thousands of electoral wards where
+more than 90% of the population is White. While the big inner cities might
+have very few White people in them, they are incredibly diverse. Migrants
+and their descendants from hundreds of different countries live side by side
+and manage to get on just fine. But the rhetoric from the government and
+the press is how multiculturalism has damaged the fabric of the great
+nation. This fear of separateness is really about ideology.
+The inclusion logic is not about separation itself but about who is living
+apart. There is no problem with White people, particularly those with
+money, living separately because they obviously have the correct values and
+identity in the first place. There is no need for them to mix with minorities
+to learn about tolerance, compromise and how to live with diversity because
+these can be taught in exclusively White neighbourhoods, schools and
+universities. They are the solution to the problem, not the cause of it. The
+anti-separateness agenda is fundamentally based on the politics of
+assimilation, trying to ensure that minorities can become sufficiently like
+White people to be a part of society.
+Railing against separateness is also problematic because it ignores all the
+available evidence as to how minorities succeed in a society, even when
+integration is your goal. The discrimination that new migrants feel in any
+country is acute and debilitating. Therefore a sensible and common practice
+is for communities to form, to support and protect each other. This process
+is no different for White migrants than it is for those of colour, as we
+discussed in Chapter 1. The idea of a Black, residentially segregated
+community coming together to support each other is not a radical but rather
+a rational response to the situation that any minority group finds itself in.
+Part of the problem with Black communities is that we have been so busy
+trying not to be separate, we forgot to focus on uniting to change the
+conditions we find ourselves in.13 Integration can also have negative
+effects. A much ignored impact of the infamous Brown vs the Board of
+Education decision was the closure of the Black schools that children were
+segregated into. These were deemed inferior and Black students were
+integrated into the supposedly better White institutions. In the aftermath of
+the decision, thousands of Black teachers lost their jobs in the South, and
+African Americans remain significantly underrepresented in the
+profession.14 In chasing the dream of integration African Americans
+
+undermined the systems of support they had built up within the Black
+community.
+Separation to independence
+As much as we must defend the notion of separation, we must also
+acknowledge its limitations. Separation is similar to flight in that you may
+feel liberated because you are out of the direct clutches of the oppressor, but
+it does not provide freedom. As long as the system that oppresses you
+remains in place you cannot be free from it, no matter how separate you
+feel. For Black people in the West, separation is a misguided goal. We are in
+the belly of the beast and cannot separate from it. We should certainly use
+the resources that we have better, and unite to improve our conditions, but
+we should never confuse relieving the symptoms with curing the disease.
+After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm understood that separateness
+was not enough. He argued that ‘this word separation has been misused … a
+better word than separation is independence’.15 Black independence is the
+basis of the politics of Black radicalism: aiming not just at being apart from
+the West, but being immune to its poisonous influence by being completely
+independent from it. As explored in Chapter 3, this is why Africa is so
+important for the Black revolution. Not only is independence possible, but it
+would cripple the Western empire, which is so dependent on the
+exploitation of the resources of the African continent.
+Black independence in the West is impossible, and the biggest paradox
+for Black radicalism is that we are part of the system (and therefore the
+problem), so how can we be engaged in bringing it to an end. Everything
+we do to improve our conditions here further embeds us into the system that
+we are aiming to fight against. Black businesses, Black schools, Black
+political parties, and every other attempt to be outside of the mainstream,
+ultimately can never be independent. We need to expand Malcolm’s
+metaphor of the House and Field Negro. On the plantation the divide was
+very clear and remained so after emancipation. Those who were locked out
+of the system were in the Field and those who managed to find some
+foothold in professional or political classes were in the House. But the
+situation has now changed with civil rights legislation that has opened up
+the doors to the House to many more than before. Make no mistake, there
+
+are plenty in the Field, poverty and mass incarceration ensure that.
+However, the distinction between House and Field now mostly needs to be
+made on the global level. The conditions facing Black people outside the
+West are not comparable, and explain why millions risk life and limb trying
+to escape the global South. Our relative prosperity in the West is based on
+the exploitation of Black people outside of our national and experiential
+borders. Worse still, we can unconsciously create a politics that is
+dependent on the exploitation at the heart of the West.
+Black Lives Matter has re-energised Black political movements by
+reshaping how we experience racial state violence. No longer do we hear
+about atrocities committed by the police through the news, or by word of
+mouth. We witnessed live on Facebook Philando Castile bleeding out after
+being shot by police. The ability to broadcast video and images across the
+globe instantly without a mainstream press filter has made state violence
+accessible. None of what people are protesting against is new, we just live
+in an age where it is impossible to hide the violence, and the exposure has
+reignited protests.
+Due to social media, the ability to mobilise and organise has also been
+key. Black Lives Matter emerged from a tweet by Patricia Cullors who used
+the phrase in a poem after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The hashtag was
+added to the phrase by a friend and the tagline grew into a movement.
+Social media allowed for Black Lives Matter to spread across the globe,
+connecting an array of local and national movements. We are also able to
+follow the protests from the perspectives of the activists and avoid the
+mainstream media’s lazy demonisation of peaceful protesters as rioters.
+Black Lives Matter is in many ways the product of social media, which
+has led to criticism of the substance of the movement and the limits of
+‘clicktivism’, where people will commit only in the digital realm where
+there is little real at stake.16 This kind of criticism is unfair when levelled at
+Black Lives Matter given the record of street protests and the platform
+‘Movement for Black Lives’, which outlines a clear agenda for the
+movement. The success of Black Lives Matter has been to transform what
+began as a hashtag into a meaningful network of local movements, bringing
+publicity and funding to the cause. From a radical perspective the issue is
+not with the digital beginnings of the movement but the contradictions of
+that digital platform.
+
+The smartphone is the key piece of technology that has facilitated the
+move, allowing instant access to video and content, streaming police
+brutality live wherever you are. Reverend Gregory Drumwright, who
+organised a protest in Washington, noted that the device meant ‘society has
+a body camera’ and Erica England, one of the protesters, explained that ‘it’s
+important to have a smartphone … It can mean life or death’.17 But the
+smartphone is also one of the most direct symbols of African oppression.
+The technology is only possible and so widely available because the raw
+materials necessary are stolen from the African continent in the neocolonial economic arrangement. Worse still, many of the key minerals are
+mined by young children who are not only exploited by the companies but
+risk death in their labour.18 The smartphone is the definition of what Audre
+Lorde called the master’s tools and Black Lives Matter cannot be for all
+Black lives if it relies on technology that oppresses African children. This
+does not of course mean that the movement cannot deal with this
+contradiction. We must struggle where we are and with the resources we
+have at our disposal. But it should be a reminder of Lorde’s warning that the
+‘master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.19
+The challenge for Black Lives Matter, or any movement that was born in
+the West, is to build meaningful connections to the African Diaspora. This
+does not mean abandoning oppressive instruments like the smartphone, but
+building a political connection that can transcend their limitations. As we
+have seen so far, it is easy to fall into narrow nationalist movements that
+only try to overcome problems for Black people within nation state
+boundaries. Black radicalism offers a blueprint for overcoming this
+contradiction.
+In the constitution of the Organization of Afro-American Unity
+(OAAU), Malcolm concretely tied Black progress in the West to that on the
+African continent. In the first article, ‘Establishment’, the importance of this
+connection was embedded in the organisation:
+Anyone of African descent, with African blood, can become a
+member of the Organization of Afro American Unity, and also any
+one of our brothers and sisters from the African continent. We must
+unite together in order to go forward together. Africa will not go
+
+forward any faster than we will and we will not go forward any faster
+than Africa will.20
+Importantly, this is not just a rhetorical connection to Africa but an
+organisational one. Not only was Malcolm encouraging African brothers
+and sisters to join, he also spent months of his last year on earth travelling
+and making connections with African leaders and freedom fighters. A key
+component of Black independence in the West is to be independent of the
+colonial nation state narrative that limits our politics. We must go beyond
+the idea of political alliances with the Diaspora and build a complete
+political movement. Only then can we overcome the contradiction of our
+successes being built on the Black people who live in poverty in the global
+South.
+As discussed in Chapter 3, the OAAU aimed to be the global
+organisation that could transcend the nation state. But its appeal and
+programme was hyper-local as well as attending to the global Black nation.
+Malcolm explained that ‘we start in Harlem with the intention of spreading
+throughout the state, and from the state throughout the country, and from
+the country throughout the Western Hemisphere’.21 Building the
+organisation from the grassroots outwards was absolutely essential to
+creating a strong foundation.
+There were four areas that the OAAU staked its ground on. The first was
+on the issues of self-defence, given the brutality that Black people were
+facing from racist mobs, during protests and from the police. The infamous
+battle between violence and non-violence had to play out at the
+organisational level. For Malcolm, not to defend yourself and your
+community was cowardly and criminal. A solid commitment to self-defence
+is very clearly stated early on in the charter for the OAAU. As we will see
+later in the chapter this was picked up by the Panthers after Malcolm was
+assassinated. But in spite of the prominence that self-defence has in much
+of Malcolm’s rhetoric and in the founding of the OAAU, it is not
+fundamental to the programme of the organisation. The idea was for the
+OAAU to create departments that would organise in the key areas of
+struggle; there was no self-defence department and concrete proposals are
+conspicuous by their absence. Self-defence appears more as a philosophy, a
+mind-set, rather than a practical reality. To understand this we must look at
+the context in the West. We are a minority in the most violent system that
+
+has ever existed on the planet. Engaging the state in violence is always
+going to be a losing battle. The downfall of the Panthers is a testament to
+this; many of them were murdered by the state. Malcolm talks about selfdefence in the context of protecting protestors in the South against White
+racists, and not taking on the state. When it comes to state violence this
+forms part of the political programme, exerting pressure over officials and
+politicians. Even the notion of self-defence is a particular form of violence
+reserved for the West. The goal is for protection, reacting to the violence
+from others. This is not the revolutionary violence that Malcolm endorses
+on the African continent where overthrowing the state is possible. For the
+other key objectives of the OAAU there is a more fully formed programme
+of action.
+Education was a prominent feature of the organisation because of the
+substandard schooling that Black people have historically received. One of
+the aims of the OAAU was to gain representation on school boards and take
+over 10% of the schools in New York, with the idea being to provide a
+platform for Black education. A department of education was seen as
+essential in terms of taking over Black schooling but also in providing a
+‘political re-education’ for the community as a whole. A Black education,
+independent of the mainstream, was vital to connect the community to a
+political programme for revolutionary change, rather than just for Black
+people to succeed in America. So we must distinguish the call of the OAAU
+from the more liberal and even conservative ideas of Black education that
+seek to fix perceived deficits in the Black children, rather than the system.
+My first book, Resisting Racism, studied the Black supplementary school
+movement in Britain, which began in the 1960s to counter the racism of the
+mainstream schools.22 Supplementary schools are the definition of a
+grassroots movement, with projects springing up in people’s houses,
+community centres, churches and school buildings as the community sought
+to respond to the crisis of racism in the school system. In the archives I
+came across teachings on Malcolm, Garvey, the Panthers and Caribbean and
+African histories. There were exercises where the students did reading
+comprehension with excerpts from George Jackson’s Soledad Brother. At
+one of the oldest supplementary schools, the Sankofa Sesh, run by the
+African Caribbean Self Help Organisation (ACSHO) in Birmingham since
+1967, they talked about the battles they had with the local education
+authorities and the police in setting up the school. Their curriculum
+
+included not only Black radical thinkers but also lessons on MarxismLeninism and revolutionary theory. ACHSO was also connected to the PanAfrican Congress Movement in Britain, and was a hub for Black radical
+organising in the city and country. The building that housed the school was
+the same venue where figures from the Black liberation movement
+worldwide would come and give talks. For example, Herman Chitepo, who
+was a key figure in the Zimbabwean freedom struggle, visited ACSHO
+weeks before he was assassinated in Zambia in 1975. ACSHO has
+organised the Africa Liberation Day celebrations in Birmingham since
+1977, annually bringing figures from the Black world into the city. Such a
+political organisation running a supplementary school for Black children
+was seen as dangerous by the state, which in the words of Bini Brown, one
+of the founders of the organisation, tried to ‘smash’ Sankofa Sesh. Given
+this history I was expecting to find in the movement a location for
+contemporary politics of Black radicalism. Instead, I found the opposite.
+Alongside the radical histories there was always a more conservative
+trend, a split between the ‘official’ and ‘self-help’ projects.23 Sankofa Sesh
+represents the self-help group of schools, independent from the state and its
+politics, while the official projects are those that take funding from the state
+and are often run by Black schoolteachers. These official projects may or
+may not have Black Studies curricula and are very much focused on
+mainstream subjects and success. The purpose of these schools is to boost
+the grades and performance in mainstream schools, not to provide Black
+education. Over the years the official sector has come to dominate the
+movement and radical education has almost disappeared. In its place is
+often a focus on culture, but lacking any concrete commitment to politics.
+Black Studies becomes about teaching Black children to know themselves
+and their history so that they will have the confidence and self-esteem to
+achieve mainstream success. Where once there was a movement indicting
+the mainstream school system, the focus now has moved to critiquing the
+community and the investment by parents in their children’s schooling.
+Black supplementary schooling is a perfect example of how the state funds
+and then accommodates a grassroots movement into the system. The Black
+independent education that the OAAU called for sought to reject this
+process by remaining financially, as well as politically, independent.
+Culture played an important part in the OAAU, with its own dedicated
+department. Malcolm envisioned a ‘cultural revolution to unbrainwash an
+
+entire people’ and start the ‘journey to our rediscovery of ourselves’.24
+Opening a cultural centre in Harlem was seen as a key step in this cultural
+revolution, and towards regaining the power to shape Black representation.
+Importantly, culture was not seen as a solution in itself, as in cultural
+nationalism. The role of culture was to educate people regarding their
+history and selves so that they would commit to ‘action’. Embracing Black
+culture was also central in building the connection back to Africa, not only
+historically but for constructing the global Black nation politically. Culture
+is crucial to any revolutionary politics, and Black radicalism is no different.
+A department for political action was also seen as essential to develop
+the OAAU. Just as with the rest of the organisation, the aim here was to
+build political independence within the Black community. Stressing local
+concerns, the goal was to ‘organize the Afro American community block by
+block’ and to form independent Black political clubs.25 Assessing the
+situation in New York in particular and America in general, the OAAU
+sought to capitalise on the possibility of building electoral power through
+the ballot box. Residential segregation provided possibilities for electoral
+gains at every level of local, state and national government. These
+opportunities have been seized upon, with a raft of Black elected officials,
+but the OAAU was against signing up to the politics of either Democrats or
+Republicans. The aim was to support Black politicians independent of the
+main parties, with the logical conclusion being an OAAU party. It may
+seem liberal and contradictory to the radical philosophy behind the OAAU
+to engage in the corrupt electoral system, with voter registration drives and
+running candidates. But again, we have to respond to the conditions that
+face us. While we are in the West a key lever of power is electoral, and
+therefore to create as independent a Black political front as possible is
+essential. But mainstream political representation was not seen as a solution
+to any of the problems facing Black people. I met Gus Newport, who was
+formerly mayor of Berkeley and knew Malcolm. He explained that people
+were trying to convince Malcolm to run for Adam Clayton Powell’s seat in
+Congress. Powell represented Harlem in the House of Representatives and
+if there was any seat that Malcolm could win, it would be the place he had
+become a legend. Newport was convinced that Malcolm was seriously
+considering the prospect and may well have run had he not been
+assassinated. As much as the move may have been tempting and would
+have provided some financing and a national platform, I just cannot see
+
+how it would fit into Malcolm’s politics. Wielding a limited influence in
+Congress and having to submit to the confines of a role so deeply imbedded
+in the political system runs contrary to the ethos of the OAAU. Malcolm
+could not have maintained the radical nature of the OAAU while
+representing Harlem in Congress. It is entirely possible that Malcolm would
+have run for Congress but, make no mistake, to do so would have been a
+betrayal of the Black radical politics he so well defined. Unfortunately,
+history is littered with examples of people who blazed radical trails and
+ended up dissolving into the very systems that they were trying to overturn.
+Given the groundwork laid in the OAAU I have faith that Malcolm would
+have stayed true to his Black radicalism and used the engagement in
+mainstream politics as a tool to further the liberation of Black people
+worldwide.
+Another area where the OAAU firmly staked a claim was in economics
+and as we saw in Chapter 1 this is also an issue where radical sentiment can
+bleed into liberal action. The desire to create Black businesses can often
+descend into Black capitalism, changing the colour of the skin of the people
+who are exploiting the community. There are plenty of Black millionaires,
+but if they refuse to support Black people then they are no better than
+anyone else who profits from the community. In the economic programme
+for the OAAU, building Black business and cooperatives certainly comes
+up as a focus, but does not have the prominence that may have been
+expected. Particularly while in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm professed the
+need for Black businesses and continued to do so once he left.26 Key to
+economic empowerment is being able to provide jobs for Black people
+when others will not. Economic independence is utterly reliant on building
+a base of Black businesses that support the community. But the focus on the
+launch of the OAAU was far more on stopping economic exploitation in
+housing, and the proposal to coordinate a Harlem-wide rent strike to
+respond to the economic injustice of high prices for substandard living. We
+can see that the economic programme was integrally tied to political action,
+moving beyond just empowerment to a political agenda.
+Perhaps the most important aspect of the OAAU was the funding model
+for the organisation. Malcolm was critical of the National Association for
+the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He criticised the $2.50
+annual membership and explained that it was this figure which meant that
+they had to always go begging to White liberals for support. Malcolm knew
+
+that whoever funded the organisation would own and control its message.
+Instead of charging a small fee and having to find funding from elsewhere
+to survive, Malcolm insisted that the Black community must fund the
+OAAU. Membership was set at $2.50 a week to ensure that the organisation
+was self-sufficient. This funding model is absolutely essential to making the
+politics of the OAAU different from other organisations. You could
+challenge the radical credentials of an organisation that does voting drives,
+plays electoral politics, organises rent strikes and supports Black business.
+As I have been at pains to explain throughout this book, none of these
+activities are radical as they involve engaging with, rather than overturning,
+the system. In fact, a number of organisations that I have been highly
+critical of in this book are engaged in similar activities. But being
+independently sourced from the grassroots changes the complexion of all
+these activities. Combined with the radical and Diasporic politics professed
+in the organisation, the independent funding means that these measures can
+be seen as tools to progress Black liberation, the sum being far greater than
+the parts. Remember that the New York chapter of the OAAU was only
+ever meant to be one of many dotted across the African Diaspora, all of
+which were dealing with local concerns but connected into a global
+movement for Black liberation. The aim was to build a power base within
+New York and spread the model out to other locations. Only from that
+position of power could the necessary revolutionary work take place. In the
+West, independence means taking as much control over our political and
+economic destinies as possible but always putting this in service to the
+wider global Black nation.
+Survival
+Strategies for Black independence in the West contain a fundamental
+contradiction in terms of their radical nature. Uniting and mobilising the
+community to gain political and economic power will undoubtedly improve
+the conditions facing Black communities. History suggests that once people
+are doing better they are less likely to revolt against a system they are
+making gains in. The biggest recruiter for Black politics has always been
+racism, and if the symptoms are lessened we are more likely to want to keep
+reaping the benefits of the master’s house. We should not delude ourselves
+
+into thinking that Black prosperity in the West is any more righteous than
+when White people enjoy the spoils of racial capitalism. The most likely
+outcome of a successful OAAU-type organisation is that it better integrates
+us into the system of oppression, creating more opportunities for symptomfree racism. That is why the political education and organic links to the
+global Black nation are so vital. But we also need to amend the equation
+away from independence, because self-sufficiency is impossible and the
+rhetoric allows us to believe we can be free within the belly of the beast.
+Once we accept that we are simply trying to survive, rather than thrive, we
+have an avenue to frame supporting Black communities in the West, while
+recognising that we must always internationalise the struggle.
+Survival itself is a testament to the endurance that has kept the spirit of
+resistance alive in Blackness. After centuries of unimaginable oppression
+we are still standing and have never just accepted our treatment. But
+survival is not enough and certainly does not on its own represent a radical
+political stance. It may sound contradictory to all the rhetoric put forward so
+far, but Black radicalism necessitates creating structures in the West to help
+us survive the system, allowing those of us located here to play our part in
+the global revolutionary struggle. The debate about the revolutionary nature
+of survival played out most publicly in the Black Panther Party.
+Huey P. Newton strongly advocated for the Panther survival
+programmes, which included providing free breakfasts for children, free
+medical care and liberation schools. He equated the programmes to a life
+raft for the struggling Black community and argued that they were part of a
+revolutionary process, ‘a means of bringing the people closer to the
+transformation of society’. But this point was not accepted by all members
+of the Panthers. Eldridge Cleaver’s mentality was that you ‘either pick up
+the gun or remain a snivelling coward’ and that the survival programmes
+were a distraction from the revolutionary work of the party.27 During his
+exile in Algeria he very publicly split with the party over this issue of
+revolutionary tactics, and took the New York chapter with him.
+Tensions had been brewing between Newton and Cleaver over the issue
+of tactics. Cleaver argued it was necessary to create a guerrilla army and
+wage direct war against the American government. Geronimo Pratt was
+expelled from the party by Newton for trying to raise an army of the
+vanguard. Further divisions were caused when Newton expelled the New
+York-based Panther 21, which included Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur. The
+
+Panther 21 were on trial for allegedly planning to target and kill police
+officers. Much of the discord in the party was stoked by the FBI and its
+counterintelligence
+programme
+(COINTELPRO),
+which
+fed
+misinformation and lies throughout the party. The FBI sent false letters
+between Panthers and started rumours that the Newton and Cleaver factions
+were planning to kill each other.28 As I made clear in Chapter 6, I am
+sceptical about Eldridge’s motives in relation to the party and firmly believe
+that his role in splitting the Panthers was no coincidence. The authorities
+took an ideological rift and helped create a chasm. In 1971 Newton hoped
+to heal the problems with Eldridge and arranged a phone call mediated by a
+San Francisco television presenter, live on air, between the two of them.
+The scene descended into farce, with Eldridge insisting that the Panther 21
+be reinstated and calling for the resignation of the central committee of the
+party, which he deemed inadequate. The end result was Newton expelling
+Eldridge from the party, and Eldridge declaring that Newton was no longer
+fit to lead and doing likewise. The resultant chaos severely damaged the
+party and, combined with the continued assault from the state, it never fully
+recovered.
+We should not be surprised that the FBI used this ideological split over
+tactics to divide the party. Guerrilla warfare with the American state
+apparatus is clearly a cul-de-sac, a blind alley with no possible exit. Not
+only is toppling the state in that manner impossible, but efforts to do so also
+provided the FBI and police with the perfect cover to destroy the Panthers.
+Picking up the gun in that way makes you an easy target for police
+repression, and COINTELPRO made sure that these aspects of the Panthers
+were always at the forefront of the public consciousness. J. Edgar Hoover,
+head of the FBI, called the Panthers ‘the greatest threat to the internal
+security of the country’.29 But America did not fear the Panthers because of
+the threat of some fantastical violent overthrow of the state.
+Hoover highlighted the free breakfast programme as particularly
+problematic because it gave the Panthers too much good publicity and built
+close connections to Black communities.30 The authorities were terrified a
+Black organisation that could rally the masses would emerge and present a
+serious threat to the status quo. The Panthers knew that dealing with the
+day-to-day concerns of the people was absolutely essential to build any
+meaningful political programme. After the split of the guerrilla-obsessed
+
+Panthers the party launched the slogan ‘survival pending revolution’,31
+which perfectly captures Black radical efforts in the West.
+Every political movement has to embed itself in the community it serves.
+To have ‘love for the people’ means that you have to address the very real
+and present suffering. Black radicalism cannot just operate on a theoretical
+or impractical level. Revolution is essential but there are stages that we
+need to take to get there. One of those stages is to organise Black people in
+every street, neighbourhood, city and nation where we reside. The only way
+to do this is to meet people where they are, to address the issues that impact
+on people’s lives. The Panthers increased popular support because they
+knew that there can be no revolution without survival as popular support is
+necessary in order to overthrow the system.
+So the day-to-day, the small acts and confronting racism where we find
+it, play an essential role in Black radical politics; but again we have to be
+aware of our privileges here. The Panthers sought to provide the
+fundamentals of food, education and healthcare to the Black poor. Survival
+programmes aimed at that purpose, to support those people who were being
+failed on a basic level by the state. Free legal advice and patrols of the
+police also served to help people survive the system. There is a stark
+difference to these programmes and efforts to integrate Black people into
+the mainstream through mentoring programmes or support to get youngsters
+into elite universities. We must also draw a strong distinction between the
+focus on micro-aggressions, the middle class problems of the aspiring Black
+bourgeoisie. Survival has to be aimed at those who are struggling to make
+ends meet, not those with the means suffering through the process of
+meeting them. Black politics must always root its authenticity in serving the
+least of those in our communities. Survival should also force us to take a
+global perspective on Black politics. Racism has a life or death impact on
+Black people, with children dying by the second due to entirely preventable
+causes on the African continent. Once we commit to the politics of survival
+we have to internationalise the struggle and make solving the problems of
+the whole Black nation our concern.
+Taking a global rather than a national view of revolution means
+understanding that the Black revolution will take place on the African
+continent. This is the only means of securing Black freedom and building
+an independent political and economic system. But that does not mean that
+we have no role to play if we reside outside of Africa. Those in the
+
+Diaspora have the responsibility to build up the resources and organisations
+to support the eventual revolution on the continent. It also does not mean
+that our struggles in the West are not relevant. We must build a movement
+that connects the grassroots struggles across the global Black nation to a
+cohesive politics of revolutionary resistance. None of this is new; we just
+need to go back to the politics of Blackness, which connected the Black
+nation into the same struggle for freedom. The OAAU is the perfect vehicle
+for the Black radical politics that we need, combining local concerns with a
+global politics of revolution. The blueprint is there and has been for the last
+fifty years. There is a reason that the organisation has been wiped from the
+collective memory of Malcolm X.
+Considering Malcolm was working on building the OAAU at the time he
+was being interviewed by Alex Haley for the autobiography, it is
+astounding that it receives scant attention in the book. Given the history of
+infiltration and subversion by the authorities into the workings of Black
+organisations and their leaders, we would be foolish to view this glaring
+omission as a coincidence. We also know that there are missing chapters
+and notes in the book on the OAAU that were never written up.32 The
+OAAU, with Malcolm’s links across the Diaspora, represented the
+organisation that could have built the global Black nation into a truly
+revolutionary force that threatened the West. Simply assassinating the
+character of Malcolm, controlling how he is remembered, and removing his
+radical programme of action from that memory is the perfect way to
+dismantle his political agenda.
+We have been taught to misunderstand and fear the politics of Black
+radicalism. We have been told that the ideas are unworkable and dangerous;
+that the leaders were irresponsible, misogynistic and violent. Black radical
+movements were attacked through spies and propaganda as well as with
+oppression and murder. We have been sold a distorted legacy, while being
+promised a slightly bigger slice of the diseased pie of capitalism. We need
+to reject the illusion of equality and the idea that Black radicalism has had
+its day. We must re-engage with the politics that so terrified those
+responsible for maintaining the status quo. We must organise for ‘survival
+pending revolution’ and pick up the baton from those who have gone
+before. We need to go back to Black.
+
+Epilogue
+
+It’s Already Too Late
+
+Black radicalism is an unapologetic politics that leaves little room for either
+practical or theoretical compromise. I have tried to match that approach in
+this book, clearly distinguishing radical politics from those that may clothe
+themselves in revolutionary rhetoric, but in reality offer nothing but
+maintaining the status quo. Critiquing movements like narrow Black
+Nationalism, cultural nationalism and even Pan-Africanism will likely bring
+howls of disapproval from the conscious community. Undermining the
+liberal radicalism of Black academia and challenging intellectual
+movements I have contributed to is also unlikely to be well received by my
+academic peers. But that is precisely the point of the politics of Black
+radicalism: to trouble and disturb, to shake us out of our complacency,
+especially that induced when we presume we are ‘awake’. The undeniable
+truth is that we are not on the right track. Whatever we are currently doing
+is not enough and is taking us no closer to the liberation of Black people
+worldwide. We need to rethink, reset and regather ourselves and our
+movements by facing the radical critique. This is not something that can
+ever be done comfortably. If you read a book on radicalism and it did not
+make you uneasy and cause you to question your basic assumptions then it
+could only be masquerading as revolutionary. There are very few radical
+politics for a reason: because revolution overturns everything we have come
+to accept. It is a lot to expect people to risk however little (or much) we
+have managed to claim to mobilise for a world that offers no promises, only
+the dream of liberation. It’s far more rational to try to improve what we
+have, to convince ourselves that this system that so reviles us can be
+redeemed. But we have to understand that there is no prospect of racism
+being eradicated from capitalism. One cannot exist without the other;
+racism is the system. Malcolm argued that we needed an ‘it’s already too
+late philosophy’ in order to push us towards the Black revolution,1 and
+accept nothing less than complete and total liberation.
+
+Liberty or death
+We opened the book with a discussion of nationalism and the need to break
+beyond the limits of the colonial national state. If you were just to focus
+your attention on Black people in Britain, Europe or the West you might see
+enough glimmers of progress to maintain the delusion that freedom is
+possible: the emergent Black middle class, Black millionaires and even a
+Black president. In Britain in particular, we make up only 3% of the
+population; even if we will never have full equality the harsher edges of
+oppression could be softened. But we do not need to look far to see futility
+of this logic. For the vast majority of us in Britain our roots lie in the
+Caribbean or Africa. As I have explained in detail throughout the book, the
+conditions facing our relatives there make the racism we experience here
+look like a privilege.
+In Chapter 1, we explored the bleak future prospects for places like
+Jamaica, and in Chapter 3 how neo-colonial trade policies keep most
+Africans in the grip of poverty. We have to build a politics that recognises
+the nature of the plight we are in and can deliver liberation for Black people
+across the globe. The West was built by reducing us to the Negro, the
+Nigger, devaluing our lives to the point where we could be treated as less
+than human. Nothing has changed in this regard, and we see the deadly
+results. We can mobilise against micro-aggressions in middle class jobs all
+we want, but it is already too late for the millions of children who die on the
+African continent because of the wealth exploited by the West. In the time it
+has taken you to read this book the number of Black children who have died
+because of our relative prosperity would form a pile so large that the
+thought of it should sicken you.
+It is already too late for the hundreds of thousands who have died by
+violence in South Africa since apartheid ended due to the utter failure to
+provide a state that can work for all. Make no mistake, it is life and death
+for many of those in the West. It is already too late for the thousands that
+die by the gun not only in the developing world but also for African
+Americans who have been killed at unimaginable rates. It is already too late
+for those who have died at the hands of, and in the custody of, police. It is
+already too late for those bodies left floating in the Mediterranean after
+trying to cross the sea to find some sanctuary in Europe. These are the
+stakes; it is liberty or death, not as a battle cry but the simple description of
+
+the state of the Black nation. Without liberation we will continue to die in
+the millions due to racial oppression.
+When we comprehend the struggle in terms of life and death it becomes
+easy to see the limits of most of our approaches to racial justice. Black
+capitalism actually makes the conditions outside of the West worse, feeding
+the system of economic exploitation. Subscribing to cultural nationalism, by
+dressing, talking and praying ‘African’, helps only to heal your psyche and
+does nothing to reduce the pile of dead children, which is added to by the
+second. Seeking liberation in our individual joy or experience offers
+nothing to those who do not have the luxury of existence, let alone desire.
+Trying to make ourselves safe in bourgeois institutions, or being
+represented in the mainstream of social and political life, is a lucrative culde-sac. We might be able to get some of the benefits of the system but it
+will always be oppressive to us and deadly to those who look like us but are
+not as fortunate. It’s already too late to try to reform a system built on our
+oppression. Freedom can only be found in overturning the Western imperial
+status quo. To do so means adopting an uncompromising politics, the
+radical politics of Blackness.
+Blackness is essential as a concept because it can be nothing other than
+political. To truly claim Blackness is to recognise our situation and
+ultimately commit to a revolutionary politics. Black is not negative. It is not
+taking on the words of the oppressor. It is not to be racialised. If you believe
+we need to go beyond Blackness then you simply do not understand the
+politics of the word. Faced with White oppression and the disregard for our
+African-ness there were many possible avenues for resistance. We could
+have tried to maintain ties to tribe, or region. We could have sought refuge
+in our individuality and tried to elevate our position within the system. We
+could have given in to desperation and ended it all. We could have focused
+on surviving, making sure that we prevailed. All of these were and still are
+tactics used to navigate racism. Embracing Blackness means uniting around
+not only our oppression but also our connection via Africa. It means taking
+on the responsibility for all those in the global Black nation. Blackness is a
+choice, a commitment to the ‘dead and unborn’ to engage in a politics of
+true liberation.2 Black is crucially different to African in this regard. Black
+is a politics, Africa is place. It is only a political statement to say you are
+African if you were born in the Diaspora. On the continent it is a
+description, and as we saw in Chapter 2, one of the main limitations of Pan-
+
+Africanism is the lack of any ideology. It is not an achievement to be
+African and there are many versions of African-ness that are just as bad for
+Black people as Whiteness. The radical politics of Blackness is just as
+necessary on the African continent as it is in the Diaspora. As Malcolm
+made clear, ‘if you’re Black, you should be thinking Black, and if you’re
+not thinking Black at this late stage I’m sorry for you’.3
+Thinking Black at the intersection
+To be clear, ‘thinking Black’ is not about how you dress, talk, walk or who
+you choose to sleep with. Thinking Black is solely about politics and not
+culture. It is about uniting around our Blackness to organise and mobilise.
+That Blackness must be open to diverse cultural and representational forms.
+We explored, in Chapter 5, how patriarchy and homophobia has infected
+Black political movements, something that cannot be accepted. Freedom for
+all of us must mean liberation for everyone. We need to recognise that our
+Blackness connects us across location, age, gender, sexuality, disability and
+the rest of our differences. That does not mean that those differences are not
+important, just a recognition that our Blackness is a connection that goes
+beyond them. Audre Lorde offered a warning that ‘there is no such thing as
+a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives’; the key is
+to stop thinking of Blackness as a single issue.4
+Hopefully, the systemic analysis that Black radicalism insists on has
+been apparent in the book. White supremacy is an essential part of the
+political economy and therefore our Blackness cannot be reduced to the
+cultural or representative. Our position within the system is as essential to
+its maintenance as the location of the heart in the body. There is no way to
+understand how class, gender, sexuality or disability impacts on a person
+without considering how this intersects with Blackness. You do not escape
+the oppression that comes from being Black because you are a woman or
+queer. For instance, no matter your gender identity you are more likely to be
+killed by the police. Being a man does not guarantee me typically male
+benefits; for example, Black men in Britain are less likely to be employed
+than women. As Malcolm put it, ‘we are all in the same boat and we’re all
+going to catch the same hell’.5
+
+Being Black obviously does not prevent us from experiencing the
+oppression that goes with being a woman or not being heterosexual, but it is
+the same society that discriminates on the grounds of gender and sexuality.
+You could argue then that we need allies across different struggles and
+communities to support the Black struggle. But anti-discrimination
+movements are not immune from Whiteness. Feminism has been accused of
+maintaining Whiteness from ignoring the pleas from activists like Ida B.
+Wells over lynching,6 to taking the same stance today on mass
+incarceration. Gender, sexuality and disability equality can be achieved for
+some without solving any of the issues facing the Black segments of these
+communities. In the same way that you are always a Black + nationality,
+you are always Black + discrimination. Coalitions can be important
+strategically but we must always remember that there can be no liberation
+within this political and economic system for Black people. Therefore we
+must always be agitating for revolution and building an alternative that can
+bring us freedom. It is vital that in building the alternative, it is one rooted
+in a Black politics open to all its various manifestations. But losing sight of
+our Blackness risks the global solidarity necessary for the revolution.
+Of course it is not just Black people who suffer horrifically at the hands
+of the West. The children that die every six seconds for lack of access to
+food are spread across the global South. In resisting Whiteness we could reengage with calls for Third World solidarity and the global majority of
+people of colour. But there is little more harmful we can do than base our
+political identity solely in relation to Whiteness. Blackness is of course
+relational, in the sense that if we were all the same colour it would not be a
+concept, but it is not just relational to Whiteness. To claim Blackness as the
+link to Africa is to tie ourselves into a shared heritage, the ‘unbreakable
+umbilical cord’ across the Diaspora.7 It also distinguishes us from other
+groups that have sought to exploit the continent, like the Arab invaders into
+North Africa who instituted their own slave trade.8 As much as the
+hierarchy of White supremacy ultimately oppresses all those who are not
+White, that does not mean it cannot be amended to give additional benefits
+to some over others. The reason that China was not wholly supportive of
+the anti-apartheid movement was because it was busy integrating itself into
+the economy of the West. It is true that the majority of Chinese are
+viciously oppressed both by their government and global system of
+capitalism that relies on their poverty wage labour. But given China’s
+
+exploitation of Africa’s resources it is also not hard to imagine the nation
+lifting its people out of poverty off the back of the continent. Capitalism has
+always required an army of destitute labourers and most of the world’s
+population growth will be in Africa over the next fifty years. If Africans are
+again to be the source of labour for capitalism, the whip may not be yielded
+by White hands.
+All of this is a speculative but necessary reminder that it is a delusion to
+think that people will not exploit us just because they are also not White.
+That is why independence is so important to the politics of Black
+radicalism. We of course have solidarity with oppressed people across the
+globe and the Black revolution will end the system that exploits them. But
+the only way to ensure Black liberation is to build the Black nation into one
+that can stand on its own two feet.
+Drawing these sharp lines around Blackness can lead to accusations of
+separatism and divisiveness that typically we can brush away. But this does
+pose a serious question. I have been asked a lot about where people of
+mixed heritage fit into the equation. Most often this is put to me as a
+question of choosing sides, as if embracing Blackness goes against White or
+other heritages that a person may possess. The choosing side’s metaphor
+demonstrates the way that rather than challenging the binary view of race,
+much of the rhetoric of mixedness reinforces it. At times it seems as though
+we are talking of a combining of oil and water, substances that can never
+truly mix but remain separate from one another in the same body. The
+reality is that the vast majority of those descended from enslaved Africans
+are mixed to some extent, so the idea that when you are half and half you
+are in a new category of ‘mixed’ is highly problematic. The uncomfortable
+truth is that our conceptions of mixedness are directly linked to racial
+categorisations from slavery. On British plantations the racial categories
+that deemed those with one White and one Black parent a Mulatto through
+successive generations could produce offspring who came closer to
+Whiteness. Having a Mulatto and ‘Negro’ parent, though, meant you were a
+‘Sambo’, remaining firmly on the Black side of the dividing line.9 No
+different than today, on the plantation a White grandparent meant you were
+Black, but a White parent represented being mixed. Part of the embrace of a
+mixed identity is to resist the legacy of the ‘one drop rule’, which in
+America both during slavery and segregation meant that any African
+heritage marked you as a Negro and restricted your legal status. Even on
+
+British plantations, though being mixed afforded advantages, to be in one of
+the many categories was still to be different and oppressed. The way to
+overcome the racist categorisation is to abandon the logic, not embrace it.
+Blackness is a rejection of race and so makes no claims to unity based on
+biological purity. You are no more or less likely to think Black based on
+your complexion. Blackness is rooted on our connection to the Diaspora
+and so the ‘one drop’ is the link to the Black nation. But this does not
+determine your biological or cultural destiny. Blackness is a choice,
+embracing the importance of that link as the basis for political mobilisation.
+You could argue that it may be more difficult with people of mixed heritage
+to embrace that connection, but some of the darkest skinned people on the
+African continent are less Black (politically) than some of the lightest
+people of mixed heritage. Make no mistake, Black radicalism does mean
+choosing sides: either maintaining faith in a system based on White
+supremacy or embracing your African descent to unite and struggle against
+that racist system. It really is that simple and is a choice that will not
+depend on how mixed you are, or are not. There may once have been a time
+where the system could have developed along a different path, and a
+melting pot society where these distinctions did not matter could exist. But
+it is already too late be deluded by that fantasy.
+Beyond repair
+We find ourselves at a turning point. In the 1960s we were poised for a
+revolution that could have toppled the West. But state violence, race
+relations legislations and so-called independence of the colonies offered a
+glimmer of hope that the system could be redeemed. Fifty years later it
+must be blatantly obvious that the promise was a mirage, a delusion to keep
+us surviving but still suffering. However, leaving the door ajar has given
+some of us access to resources and even some levers of power. Let’s not
+pretend that we are not still under surveillance and that the state will not use
+violent means to suppress any real opposition. But we are afforded
+platforms and technologies for building unity that we never had before. Yet
+so complete is the domination of our politics, economics and even
+intellectual life that we ourselves have stopped agitating for revolution,
+keeping faith in some faint hope in transforming the system from within.
+
+We are currently in the United Nations Decade for People of African
+Descent (2015–2024). It is mostly symbolic, with no funding provided and
+only a suggestion given to the nation state governments that they should
+provide resources. UN Resolution 69/16 of the General Assembly, which
+outlines the programme for the decade is strongly worded and advises
+member states to consider affirmative action, and for those states that have
+not have not yet ‘expressed remorse or presented apologies’ or paid
+reparations for slavery ‘to find some way to contribute to the restoration of
+the dignity of victims’.10 This focus on reparations has been pushed by
+grassroots activists to the point where Caribbean nations are pressing
+Europe for compensation for centuries of enslavement. The Movement for
+Black Lives in America and the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in
+Europe (PARCOE) also demand reparatory justice. In Britain there is an
+annual march and many organisations, including Rastas, ensuring
+reparations are on the agenda.
+The case for reparations is indisputable. In reality there is no credible
+argument that reparations are not due. Current wealth in the West is built off
+riches deriving from the enslavement of African people. Port cities like
+Bristol and Liverpool in Britain simply would not exist without the wealth
+from the triangular trade, and my hometown of Birmingham has its roots in
+the guns and shackles needed to subdue the enslaved.11 The industrial
+revolution was fuelled by the proceeds and also products of enslavement,
+with the steam engine processing cotton from the Americas. Finance
+capitalism engorged itself on the trade, with Britain’s biggest corporation,
+Lloyds of London, founded on insuring the merchant (slave) trade. The
+banking sector has so many links to slavery that it may as well sign all the
+companies over to the global Black nation. The church, the political class,
+the elites all owe their wealth in large part to the enslavement of African
+people. When slavery was abolished it was so lucrative that the British
+government paid the equivalent of £2 billion in compensation to the slave
+owners for their losses. Researchers at University College London have
+tracked where that money went and it demonstrates just how deeply
+implicated in slavery was a whole swathe of British society. Every other
+slave-trading nation will have similar stories, and even those that were not
+directly part of the trade benefited directly and indirectly from it. Swedish
+companies, in that social democratic beacon of justice, made a fortune
+selling iron ore to Britain for the manufacture of guns and chains. In return
+
+for building the West our ancestors received nothing. The bill for unpaid
+labour for centuries of work runs into the countless trillions. In America
+alone it is estimated that Black people are owed anywhere between $5.9 and
+$14.2 trillion in back pay,12 not including damages for murder, rape and
+torture. A staggering figure, but more so when you consider that less than
+20% of enslaved Africans ended up in America, not counting the millions
+who perished during the middle passage or fighting to remain free in Africa.
+A debt is clearly owed, and nothing short of full payment could even
+come close to repairing the damage that has been done. But rather than
+pushing for payment in full the reparations debate has now changed to
+being no longer ‘all about money’. The demands of the Caribbean
+Community and Common Market (Caricom) include a call for the end of
+debt repayments, an apology and a literacy programme. The Movement for
+Black Lives asks for free college tuition. In Britain we also hear appeals for
+educational and even psychological repair. What all these demands have in
+common is that they seek to reform the system. They retain hope that our
+relationship to the West can be healed. But the paradox of the reparations
+debate should tell us that this kind of repair can never happen.
+Reparations are long overdue and also impossible. Forget the logistics of
+where the money would go, the massive transfer of wealth necessary for
+reparatory justice would cripple the Western economy. Exploiting African
+flesh is one of the key foundation stones of the political economy, and to
+have to account for it would inevitably bring the house of cards tumbling
+down. Even if we could imagine that it was possible to transfer the wealth,
+we have to acknowledge that slavery was just a mechanism of our
+oppression, not the basis of it. The reality is that our lives are worth less and
+can therefore be exploited and discarded. After slavery the mechanism for
+this became direct colonial rule. As we discussed in Chapter 2, once the
+façade of so-called independence was granted, neo-colonial economic rule
+became the method. So the wealth that would be transferred would be based
+on a system that still oppresses us on the same basis for which reparations
+would be paid. If we used the wealth correctly we would eradicate the
+problems that inflict us, making it impossible for the West to continue to
+exploit us. Capitalism that had to pay fair price for the resources of Africa is
+not a feasible economic project. The West is not going to destroy itself
+paying off the debt, and even if it did the complete collapse of the economy
+would make the wealth meaningless. Once we understand that the entire
+
+political and economic system is based on our oppression then we should
+come to the realisation that it is already too late to be asking for reparations.
+The danger in the mobilisations for reparations are that the West
+complies with the demands but in a way that does not solve any of the
+problems. It may offer an apology, cut some debt and provide some (mostly
+privately funded) aid initiatives for the Caribbean. Given the trickery of
+Western states this is the most likely outcome of the campaigns. A big
+ceremony and display will be made about how the West is atoning for its
+original sin and making peace with Black communities and nations.
+Nothing substantive will be passed over, no repair will be made but we will
+have been lulled into thinking that we have made progress. The best
+possible outcome of the campaign for reparations is ‘not a solution … but a
+regeneration of the problem in a particularly perverse form’.13 I do not
+mean to argue that there is no value in the reparations movement. There has
+been excellent and tireless activism around this issue for decades that
+should never be downplayed. Reparations are the perfect tool for the
+political education necessary to explain the depth of our plight to Black
+communities. When used as a tool to mobilise Black people into radical
+action then reparations is an incredibly powerful campaign. But campaigns
+for reparations that expect to achieve repair from the West are the definition
+of liberal radicalism.
+Blueprint for Black radicalism
+Black radicalism is its own ideology and way of understanding the world.
+We must separate it out from more reactionary and liberal forms of Black
+politics. Throughout this book I have tried to be as precise, and
+unsentimental, as possible in distinguishing Black radicalism as its own
+ideology. My aim was to provide a blueprint that we can use to move
+forward, which deals with the critiques I have heard over the years. Many
+of those critiques were in fact of other politics I have never identified with,
+but others’ criticisms have shaped how I have come to understand the need
+for and process of the Black revolution. For me it has been at times an
+uncomfortable journey, having to unlearn and challenge my own position.
+The chapter on Pan-Africanism was probably the hardest because I had
+always been invested in Pan-Africanism as the solution to the Black
+
+struggle. That the opposite was true was a difficult, but necessary,
+realisation. The more I have written and talked about Black radicalism the
+more I have also become discomforted by my position. As an academic I
+am the model of the liberal radical I so criticised in Chapter 7. A semi-elite
+that makes a good living off talking about revolution, while reaping the
+benefits of racial oppression. My hands are just as soaked as anyone else’s
+in the blood of those who die by the second because of the relative wealth I
+enjoy. That realisation creates a jarring jolt of guilt, anguish and pain. I
+fully understand why people seek refuge in culture or religion, or convince
+themselves that we can be part of the system and part of the solution. I can
+see why people go off the grid and try to escape Babylon by rejecting it. But
+deep down all of those responses are to make us feel better because we do
+not believe that the system can change. We have learnt helplessness and
+either seek to escape or conclude that doing something, no matter if it
+makes little or no difference, is better than doing nothing. Instead of
+ignoring or debating our complicity, we need to embrace it. It is the feelings
+of anguish that will never let us be comfortable in this wicked system. We
+can turn the pain into anger, to fuel our constant movement towards
+liberation. More than anything, we must use the privileges we do have to
+build the politics of Black radicalism. We cannot change the system from
+within, but we can leverage the resources we have access to in support of
+mobilisations on the outside.
+What we can never do is lose hope that revolutionary change is possible.
+Fifty years is a long time. In the 1960s we were on the cusp of the Black
+revolution and we are now further away than we have ever been. In the next
+fifty years the world can be a completely different place if we choose to
+build it. The West was built on our backs because they have been able,
+through various means, to control us. But we have always had the power to
+bring the system crashing down, which is why they invested so much effort
+in shackling us. I do not pretend to present any new ideas in this book
+because that it is not what we need. Black radical politics has always been
+there; we have just not looked hard enough. What I have tried to do is to
+dust off, re-package and re-articulate the radical basis for the Black
+revolution. We need to go back to this politics, retrace our steps to the last
+turning point in the 1960s where we headed down the cul-de-sac of
+integrating into the system of racial oppression. The blueprint exists to
+build a grassroots organisation based on uniting the global Black nation;
+
+one which embraces a vision of Blackness that includes all of our cultural,
+social and representational forms and is rooted in providing for those
+suffering the worst oppression. There can be no shortcut to our liberation,
+no freedom without sacrifice. We cannot theorise or perform our way to
+revolution. When Kwame Ture visited Birmingham in 1983 his message
+was simple: ‘if you’re not part of an organisation then you are against your
+people’.14 The only vehicle to liberation is building an organisation that can
+empower the global Black nation. No excuses about how organisations have
+failed in the past, or how we have tried this before, will do. It’s already too
+late to be standing on the side-lines waiting to see whether you should
+commit.
+It is only by rejecting the system of Western imperialism that we can
+ever be free. But as we leave the house we must bring it crashing down in
+order to truly liberate not only the Black nation, but all oppressed peoples.
+
+Foreword
+Racism Is a Matter of Life and Death
+
+Witnessing the police killing George Floyd in May 2020 was the straw that
+broke the camel’s back, coming so close on the heels of the lynching of
+Ahmaud Arbery and state-sanctioned murder of Breonna Taylor. A wave of
+protest and rebellion was unleashed onto the streets in the United States,
+reminiscent of the hot summers of the 1960s, when racial tensions exploded
+and cities burned. Millions of people across the world joined the movement,
+protesting the experiences of racism that are all too common. Black Lives
+Matter came into vogue and was adopted by media companies, major
+corporations and even national governments. An optimism has been felt,
+that society is now ready to face up to the realities of racism. But rather
+than celebrating the new-found enthusiasm for talking about racism, we
+should approach with extreme caution. Unilever and L’Oréal loudly
+trumpeting that they were removing the word ‘fair’ from their skinlightening products is the perfect metaphor for the meaningless change
+being offered in response to the moment. Rebranding a racist product is not
+a step in the right direction, it is a kick in the teeth to all those who suffer
+the impacts of White supremacy. We entirely miss the point if we believe
+that racism can be overcome with token gestures, commitment to diverse
+hiring practices or statements of brand solidarity. It is not mere coincidence
+that the latest wave of protests took hold during the lockdowns for the
+Covid-19 pandemic. The cynic in me will always be convinced that the lack
+of other news and places to go was a major factor in the mainstreaming of
+racial justice. We saw the exact same responses to the murders of Alton
+Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016 from Black communities across the
+
+globe, which somehow failed to grasp the attention of the Whiter wider
+public. But by the time the protests kicked off, the pandemic itself had
+already exposed the racism underpinning society.
+Covid-19 tore through the West so completely that there were discussion
+about whether the virus was the ‘great leveller’ of conditions in society.
+When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized with the virus,
+we were reminded that no one was safe. Donald Trump, the most unlikely
+president of the United States, started taking the anti-malarial drug
+hydroxychloroquine, later proved to be ineffective, in an effort to protect
+himself. Facing the impending loss of tens of thousands of lives, nations
+went into unprecedented lockdowns, and even the most right-wing,
+neoliberal governments provided economic safety nets for families and
+business that would have won the approval of Marx. But the delusions of all
+being in it together, or that viruses do not discriminate, quickly fell apart as
+the evidence began to show that Covid-19 simply laid bare existing social
+inequalities. The poor, the vulnerable and ethnic minorities were all shown
+to be far more likely both to catch the virus and to die from it, in Britain and
+the United States. The surprise at these findings tells us just how little we
+understand racism, which is not about personal prejudice, but rather is a
+matter of life or death. Covid-19 targeted ethnic minorities, thanks in part to
+our heavy concentration in the inner cities; disproportionate rates of
+poverty; and over-representation in the ranks of key workers.1 These same
+conditions mean that in both Britain and the United States minorities are
+more likely to suffer almost all chronic illnesses and conditions, including
+asthma from polluted neighbourhoods, diabetes and obesity because of food
+deserts, and the rest of the so-called ‘comorbidities’ that increase the risk of
+Covid-19 deaths. The result of these inequalities is statistics like Black men
+in England and Wales being up to four times more likely to die from Covid
+than their White ‘counterparts’.2 The brutal and uncomfortable truth is that
+racism takes years off a life and the ability to enjoy it. But the racial fault
+lines in the developed world are minor cracks compared to the devastating
+chasms of the value of life across the globe, and the response to Covid-19
+reveals the logics of empire that continue to govern the world.
+When the West was threatened with a staggering death toll, it was
+remarkable to see how quickly investment in and the development of a
+vaccine occurred. A vaccine within a year of the virus appearing would
+previously have been truly unprecedented but has been willed into
+
+existence. Malaria has existed for over a hundred years and claims the lives
+of 400,000 children annually, but there is still no reliable vaccination. If
+those children were dying in Europe, rather than Africa, the political will
+would have existed to find a cure. We saw the speed with which a vaccine
+was developed for Ebola once the disease left Africa and arrived in the
+United States. Even illnesses for which there are vaccines, that have been
+all but eradicated in the West, still claim lives in the Rest. Tuberculosis kills
+1.5 million people annually. The primary logic underpinning the Western
+world order is that Black and Brown life is worth less.
+The Covid-19 death toll will pale into insignificance compared to the loss
+of life annually due to poverty. Nine million people die around the world
+each year due to hunger. A child dies every ten seconds because they do not
+have access to food and water. These lives are almost exclusively Black and
+Brown. One of the main reasons that Covid-19 was not as devastating in
+Africa is because there are far fewer old people, because they die younger.
+In Nigeria, which has the largest population on the continent, only 2.5 per
+cent are over sixty-five, compared to over 15 per cent of the United States.
+In South Africa, one of the supposed success stories of the continent, more
+people die each year in the 30–34 age bracket than the 80–84 range.3 Such
+a figure is unimaginable in the nation’s former colonial ruler, Britain, where
+there are almost fifty times as many fatalities in the older age group. A virus
+that mainly kills old people was never going to be as much of a problem for
+a region whose life expectancy has just crept above sixty. Covid-19 brought
+the fear of life and death into the West that is the daily experience of
+billions around the globe.
+For all the so-called aid dumped into the underdeveloped world, the
+problems of poverty remain entrenched. The majority of the progress of the
+much-lauded United Nations Development Goals, which sought to reduce
+world poverty by 2015, has been because of China’s success. We still live in
+a world where a family of four, including children, farming tobacco leaves
+in Malawi for multinational corporation British American Tobacco can
+expect to earn £140 for a whole year.4 These kinds of conditions are just as
+prevalent in the majority of the world, where people live in levels of
+poverty that we in the West can only imagine. We’re so used to this reality
+that we forget it is no historical accident. There is a reason and a logic
+behind global poverty. Although you would never guess it from the analysis
+of the United Nations (UN), World Bank, International Monetary Fund
+
+(IMF) or Western governments, racism still governs the entire political and
+economic system. Truly addressing this inequality cannot be done without a
+transfer of wealth and resources that would be transformative to the West.
+As long as we delude ourselves with rebranding and tinkering at the
+margins we will never be able to address the issue of racism.
+
+Introduction
+The Logic of Empire
+
+We urgently need to destroy the myth that the West was founded on the
+three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead we need to
+trace how genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones
+upon which the West was built. The legacies of each of these remain present
+today, shaping both wealth and inequality in the hierarchy of White
+supremacy. The Enlightenment was essential in providing the intellectual
+basis for Western imperialism, justifying White supremacy through
+scientific rationality. In other words, the West invented scientific theories to
+‘prove’ the superiority of White people and acted as if they were truth. It is
+also in the Enlightenment that we can see the roots of the new age of
+empire, the universal application of colonial logic.
+The breakdown of European countries’ direct administration of their
+colonies made way for the United States to become the centre of empire.
+The UN, IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization all play their part
+in administering colonial logic and neo-colonialism. In the new age of
+empire, the so-called independence of the colonies laid the groundwork for
+the emergence of an elite in the underdeveloped world who administer the
+system with brutal efficiency. Colonial logic has always incorporated the
+ladder of White supremacy, with some taking advantage of their superior
+positions in the racial hierarchy. We must consider how China has adopted
+Western approaches to enrich itself by plundering Africa for its resources.
+This feeding frenzy is not restricted to China but includes nations from
+across the underdeveloped world. If the former Third World cannot be
+relied on for solidarity the same is certainly true for the new so-called
+
+radicals of the Western left. Rather than offering truly radical visions of the
+future we must consider how Whiteness pervades these movements that are
+continuations of racist progress. Following the 2008 financial crisis we are
+in a moment where the chickens are coming home to roost in the seat of
+empire. China is becoming a more efficient version of the West; the
+financial crisis further unleashed the forces of neoliberalism; and the
+children of empire are migrating into the old mother countries because of
+what the West has done to their homelands. The world looks different today
+than it did four hundred years ago but the same logic which were being
+embedded into the system then continues to shape the world in the image of
+White supremacy.
+Before we delve into the book I want to draw attention to four aspects of
+the new age of empire that are not referred to by name again but are present
+throughout. The aim of the book is to build on these concepts and ideas in
+order to understand the logic of Western imperialism.
+
+RACIAL CAPITALISM
+In the new age of empire, the United States has become the centre of
+modern colonial power. The country likes to present itself as a victim of
+British colonialism, which freed itself from tyranny and now looks to do the
+same for the rest of the world. But this is a delusional fantasy. The United
+States is in fact the most extreme expression of the racist world order. Not
+only does the United States have its own history (and present) of colonial
+possession but its entire existence is based on the logic of Western empire.
+Built by enslaved Africans on land stolen through the genocide of the native
+inhabitants, the United States became a Garden of Eden for Europeans
+looking for wealth and opportunity. After the Second World War, the great
+European powers having exhausted themselves, the United States inherited
+its birthright as the leader of the new age. Now we have major institutions
+that manage globalization and maintain the logic of empire under the guise
+of ‘development’: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United
+Nations are all based in the US. This new regime is as effective as the
+European empires were at maintaining global White supremacy and
+colonial domination.
+
+Racism is not only the glue that holds the system together but the
+material of which it is comprised. In his classic work Black Marxism, the
+late Cedric Robinson explained the nature of ‘racial capitalism’.1 On the
+domestic front we can see how these dynamics play out in the United
+States. Ava DuVernay’s heartbreaking documentary 13th brought a greater
+awareness of the extent of the racist problem of mass incarceration, which
+is so stark that one in every three African American boys born in 2001 is
+expected to spend time in prison.2 The film takes its name from the
+Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which abolished slavery and
+‘involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
+shall have been duly convicted’. After emancipation, African Americans
+were far more likely to be arrested and imprisoned, to be put to work in
+various forms of prison labour, and slavery was therefore maintained within
+the prison system. The fact that the state of servitude was maintained in the
+very amendment that ended slavery is a chilling reminder that there is no
+such thing as progress in racial capitalism.3
+Michelle Alexander explained in The New Jim Crow how the ‘war on
+drugs’ following the crack epidemic took the problem of racialized
+incarceration and pumped it with steroids.4 By racializing the drug crisis in
+the 1980s the United States government targeted Black communities,
+flooding neighbourhoods with police and incarcerating unprecedented
+numbers of people. This was a shared conservative and liberal project, with
+each side outdoing the other to seem ‘tough on crime’. We should never
+forget that it was the so-called first ‘Black president’5 Bill Clinton who
+introduced the infamous Crime Bill in 1994 that was so pivotal in
+amplifying the impact of mass incarceration and which included threestrikes sentencing; flooding the streets with police officers; and a huge
+boost in funding for prisons. In the last forty years the United States prison
+population has ballooned by 500 per cent, almost exclusively by
+incarcerating predominantly African Americans for non-violent drug
+offences.6 There is perhaps no better illustration of how racism works in
+the United States today, but also of how intertwined it is with capitalism.
+One of the drivers of mass incarceration is the privatization of the prison
+industry, which creates incentives to lock up historic numbers of people.
+Slave labour is also an economic incentive; there is no need to outsource if
+you can pay prisoners a few cents an hour for their toil. In 1994 the
+
+telephone company AT&T broke its workers’ union action by laying off call
+centre workers and replacing them with prison labour. McDonald’s, Macy’s
+and Microsoft have all exploited prison labour, as well as countless more
+corporations across the United States. The US government has a Federal
+Prison Industries company, Unicor, producing a vast array of products
+including air filters and office supplies, that pays its workers between 23
+cents and $1.15 an hour. Prior to 2011 its products were only sold within the
+public sector, but since that restriction was lifted Unicor has been selling
+goods and services with relish to private corporations. As well as the
+benefits of modern-day slave labour wages Unicor also touts that
+companies can stamp their products as ‘Made in America’ with pride. This
+is Third World wages for homemade produce, the embodiment of Trump’s
+promise to ‘Make America Great Again’. In the first half of 2018 alone
+Unicor had made $300 million worth of sales in goods and services across
+the public and private sectors.7 Providing prison labour on the cheap is a
+form of corporate welfare: the state foots the bill for their incarceration and
+the companies make a profit off the lack of prisoner wages. Incarceration is
+expensive for the state – over $35,000 per prisoner per year in federal
+prison.8 It seems like insanity for them to provide labour at this huge
+expense – until we remember that it fits perfectly into the logic of racial
+capitalism.
+Veteran prison activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore explained how
+she first saw prisons a ‘consequence of state failure’ but had to learn they
+were actually a ‘project of state-building’.9 Billions of dollars spent on
+incarcerating a disproportionate number of Black people is not only
+corporate but social welfare. The major problem the United States has with
+its Black population is that they are now surplus to requirements. Slavery
+was the reason we were taken there in chains and that labour is no longer
+needed. During the era of the New Deal and national regeneration African
+American labour was needed once again to build the infrastructure and the
+promise of a new America. In the war years that followed African
+American labour was once again vital. But neoliberalism has cut public
+sector jobs and labour has either been outsourced to the underdeveloped
+world or mechanized. We are once again surplus to requirements, and it is
+no coincidence that mass incarceration coincided with the transition to
+Reaganomics. Neoliberalism is just a more extreme version of Western
+society, so racism was bound to be emphasized in an economic regime that
+
+steeply increases inequality. A major reason that the unrestrained
+individualism at the heart of the neoliberal project won at the ballot box is
+because there was no way that the body politic of the United States could
+survive if social welfare was dispensed to African Americans in the
+amounts needed, because the nation is so steeped in racism. A functioning
+welfare state, that at least dulled the harder edges of poverty, would
+probably cost the state less than mass incarceration in the long run. But we
+must remember that throughout the history of the West the state has been a
+mechanism for private enterprise to reap the benefits of racial exploitation.
+Various versions of the welfare state in different countries were but shortlived experiments in sharing the spoils of empire more fairly in the West.
+Racial capitalism makes the public happy for their tax dollars to be spent on
+caging the mostly Black and Brown, as corporations are then free to feast
+on modern-day American slave labour. And of course, all that profit will
+eventually trickle down to the average voter.
+
+COLONIAL NOSTALGIA
+‘Make America Great Again’ was a slogan built on colonial nostalgia, for a
+time when the logic of empire was much neater. Racial segregation; no civil
+rights legislation; respect for law and order; and unchecked United States
+dominance of the globe. Britain also experienced its own bout of yearning
+for the good old days. Once the nation had freed itself from the supposed
+shackles of the European Union in 2016, Whitehall officials fantasized
+about the prospect of the nation re-engaging with the world and establishing
+‘Empire 2.0’. The vote for Brexit was driven in large part by a colonial
+nostalgia to make Britain great again by returning to the days when
+Britannia ruled the waves. One of the main slogans from the Vote Leave
+campaign was ‘Take Back Control’ in order to return the nation to its
+former glories. Empire 2.0 was at least an acknowledgement that Britain
+was only ever ‘great’ when it ruled over an area so large that the sun never
+set on its dominions. Brexit, apparently, provided the opportunity to
+rekindle the country’s abusive relationship with its former colonies.
+Yearning for the glory days is not a new phenomenon in Britain, which
+has the Empire firmly embedded in its psyche. Almost 60 per cent of people
+believe that the Empire was ‘something to be proud of’, apparently either
+
+unaware of or uncaring about the centuries of slavery and brutality that
+Britain inflicted on other parts of the world.10 Given this, it is unsurprising
+that the monarchy in general, and the Queen in particular, are extremely
+popular. Replete with crowns crusted in jewels stolen from various
+colonies, Her Majesty may be the premier symbol of Whiteness on this
+planet. Britain’s former colonies remain part of the Commonwealth group
+of fifty-three nations, and the Queen is still the head of state of fifteen
+former colonies, a list that includes Jamaica, Australia, Canada and Belize.
+The royal family represents all the problems of elitism in Britain and
+privilege given to mediocre White people, with their only claim to their
+position being that they were born to rule. This is clearly not just a British
+problem, given the adulation the Queen receives from around the world.
+The popularity of Netflix’s The Crown shows the cross-Atlantic appeal of
+imperial romance.
+The idea of refashioning the Empire was problematic for an array of
+reasons. For a start, Britain lost the majority of its colonial possessions prior
+to joining the EU. In fact, the lack of an empire to exploit meant that Britain
+needed (and still needs) to be part of a large economic bloc to maintain its
+standing in the world. Many of its former colonies fought for their freedom
+and would not be happy to simply fall back under the thumb if Britain
+renewed its colonial ambitions. Not only that but India, at one point the
+jewel in the crown of the Empire, is now one of the fastest growing
+economies in the world, which Britain could not re-colonize even with
+force. The tables have turned so much that Indian company Tata took over
+what was British Steel in 2006. Whilst the ‘Empire 2.0’ episode did tell us
+just how much the colonial arrogance of the British ruling class remains, the
+Empire is never coming back, whatever the dreams of Whitehall officials.
+The emergence of nations like India as leading world powers has
+bolstered the narrative that the West is in decline. The G20 forum for
+international economic cooperation, made up of the most apparently
+influential countries in the world, now includes South Korea, Japan, India,
+Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
+Summit pictures are more reminiscent of a United Colours of Benneton
+advert than the imagery from the 1884–5 Berlin Conference, where
+European nations carved up Africa between them. China’s rise in particular
+has shaken the West’s confidence in itself and its prospects for continued
+global domination. This changing global arithmetic has led to many a think
+
+piece on the so-called decline of the West. In many ways Trump’s election
+was driven by this desire to see White America at the forefront of global
+politics again, with his ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan. On the
+campaign trail Trump railed against globalization and in office has sparked
+trade wars with China to try and recapture the lost power of the United
+States. Running through all of this is the existential dread that the West has
+lost the battle for power, and that the underdeveloped world is leading the
+path into the future. But don’t believe the hype. China’s rapid economic
+development has been achieved in large part by exploiting their own poor
+and looting Africa in a disturbingly European fashion. Diversifying those
+dining on the spoils of empire does not change the menu and there is
+nothing new about some Black and Brown people taking advantage of a
+framework designed to exploit them. In other words, a handful of rich
+Nigerian students studying at Oxford does not change the system of
+oppression. Conditions in the underdeveloped world today are marked by
+the kind of poverty that those of us in the West could not imagine. To
+pretend we have moved into a post-racial dream is to ensure that the
+majority of Black and Brown people of the world continue to experience
+the Western nightmare.
+So-called independence in the former colonies has provided for a
+privileged few to reap financial rewards from access to a slice of the
+Western imperial pie. A post-colonial elite have amassed wealth well
+beyond the dreams of even those doing relatively well in the West. There is
+also a growing middle class in the underdeveloped world who have some of
+the same opportunities as those in the West to spend money buying
+unneeded commodities. But their access and wealth are based on exploiting
+the same system that impoverishes the vast majority of those in the world
+who are Black and Brown. As I will discuss at length in Chapter 6, the
+multitude of ‘dark mankind’11 are not a homogenous mass but a varied
+group of people, many of whom have few qualms about using the
+hierarchical ladder of global White supremacy to pull themselves up on the
+back of those less fortunate.
+All the old inequalities were simply built into the supposedly progressive
+system of international trade and law, ensuring that the West remained in an
+exploitative relationship to the former colonies. The new age of empire
+depends on corporations, unfair trade practices and puppet governments in
+the underdeveloped world, all of whom are perfectly happy to take their cut
+
+from selling off their population’s assets and labour. The inclusion of the
+elite from the underdeveloped world has allowed for the mirage of progress
+in the new operating system. Institutions like the UN and the G20 even
+offer seats at the tables of power but, as Malcolm X warned us, ‘sitting at
+the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that
+plate’.12 If these leaders are meant to be representing their people then the
+question is not whether they are getting a taste of the delicacies of the West
+but whether their nations are being nourished. The stark reality is that the
+hierarchy of White supremacy is alive and well, with the White West at the
+head of the table and Africa lucky if it gets any scraps from the floor.
+Racism frames life in the new age of empire just as fundamentally as it did
+during the eras of slavery and direct colonization.
+
+RACIAL PATRIARCHY
+‘Thinking intersectionally’ means recognizing that there is no way to fully
+understand society without appreciating the interlocking oppressions that
+shape inequality. We must however recognize the roots of the concept in
+Critical Race Theory, Black Feminism and mobilizations such as the
+Combahee River Collective. It was by viewing the world from the
+standpoint of Black women that intersectionality was born, highlighting the
+nature of inequality. Unlike in some of the co-opted takes on
+intersectionality (which has been reduced to a buzzword in many academic
+and policy circles), it is impossible, in any genuine understanding, to
+remove racism from how we think intersectionally. A central thesis of this
+book is that White supremacy, and therefore anti-Blackness, is the
+fundamental basis of the political and economic system and therefore
+infects all interactions, institutions and ideas. My aim is to trace how White
+supremacy has been maintained and plays out in the various updates to
+Western empire. Discussions of genocide, slavery, colonialism, unfair trade
+practices and everything else we will consider all echo across the
+intersections of race, gender, class and other social divisions. But I have not
+generally touched the rich vein of vital work exploring the detailed
+intersections of racism and interlocking oppressions. If we see racism as the
+intersection then this book explores the junction but has not traced the roads
+that lead to it.13 Scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Keeanga-Yamahtta
+
+Taylor, Patricia Hill Collins, Mikki Kendall and many other Black feminists
+have travelled these arteries and produced exceptional insights into the
+intersectional dimensions of oppression.14
+It is essential to understand how fundamental patriarchy is to shaping the
+modern world. Academics have tended to locate class as the primary prism
+through which to understand society. But class relations in capitalism are
+produced out of the colonial logic of Western imperialism. Industrial labour
+is only possible because of the wealth generated from colonial exploitation.
+Without genocide, slavery and colonialism there is neither the wealth nor
+the resources for the supposedly revolutionary proletarian toiling in the
+European factory to come into existence. Therefore, Marx’s hero of history
+is in fact a product of racism. Social classes existed before the dawn of the
+new age but were fundamentally transformed by the new system. But the
+patriarchy is different. It was not created by Western imperialism, although
+empire was propagated through it, via figures like the great male explorers
+Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, who braved the new worlds and
+conquered the savages. Violence was the key ingredient in establishing
+Western empire, and sexual violence against women was a universal tool.
+The foot soldiers of empire, colonial leaders and slave owners, all
+presided over patriarchal households where women were relegated to the
+domestic realm and unable to contribute fully to public life. White men
+were deemed to be at the top of the food chain of human beings while
+women were thought to be incapable of rationality because of their
+troublesome biology. So deeply ingrained were these ideas that Black men
+in the United States were allowed to vote (at least in theory) decades before
+the privilege was extended to White women. Gendered inequality remains a
+hallmark of empire, deeply seated in the West and around the globe.
+The inspiration for this book came from a short video that I made for the
+Guardian called ‘The West Is Built on Racism’, which went viral. One of
+the responses to that was a tweet exclaiming that it was constructed on
+‘patriarchy too’. As fundamental as patriarchy is to the enactment of
+empire, this is not strictly true. The West is practised through patriarchy but
+is built on White supremacy. It is the expansion into the Americas and the
+exploitation of Black and Brown bodies and resources that enabled the West
+to come into being. I do not want to make the same mistake as Marx here in
+reducing other forms of oppression to the margins. To say that Western
+imperialism is practised through patriarchy does not diminish it, rather the
+
+opposite. Just as communism does not necessarily lead to the end of racism,
+overthrowing Western imperialism does not automatically dispense with
+patriarchy. It is perfectly possible to imagine a revolutionary future free
+from the West but governed by patriarchy. Equally important is the truth
+that patriarchy could potentially be abolished in a new iteration of Western
+imperialism, however unlikely that is.
+Racial patriarchy lies at the heart of the new age of empire and tracing its
+practice is utterly essential. To do so means understanding that gender plays
+out at the intersection with racism in complex ways. For instance, whilst
+there is no doubt that women have experienced, and continue to experience,
+gendered oppression it is also true that those who are White accrue the
+benefits of colonial logic. Like the working classes in the West, women here
+are also spared the conditions of the underdeveloped world. For all the
+exclusions of women in the middle and ruling classes, they remain
+privileged compared to those poorer than them. While we remember the
+brave male pioneers of genocide, slavery and colonialism it was Queen
+Isabella of Spain who gave the green light to this new world ‘discovery’
+and Queen Elizabeth I who launched Britain’s industrial involvement in the
+slave trade when she assented to John Hawkins’ mission on the slave ship
+Jesus. In the Jim Crow South thousands of Black people were lynched by
+mobs of predominantly White men. Not only were many White women
+happy to join in the festivities around the strange fruit hanging from the
+poplar trees but their false accusations of rape and sexual misconduct
+against Black men often triggered the lynching in the first place. In the
+infamous murder of Emmett Till – a fourteen-year-old boy – Carolyn
+Bryant Donham had the ‘decency’ (or rather, the audacity) six decades later
+to admit she had made up her allegations against him.15 Ida B. Wells, the
+African American anti-lynching activist, found support from White
+feminists of her day entirely absent because they did not view the murder of
+predominantly Black men as a feminist issue.16 The failure to see how the
+issue of lynching was a result of racial patriarchy, and that the so-called
+‘protection’ of White women was a central feature of anti-Black racism,
+was a major failing of White feminism at the time.17
+If thousands of Black men are being lynched then the impact will
+inevitably be felt by Black women, who lose their partners, brothers, family
+and friends. An assault aimed disproportionately at Black men is therefore
+an attack on Black women, and vice versa. We can see the same process at
+
+work today with mass incarceration and the incredible levels of state
+violence that Black men are subject to. It is estimated that there are 1.5
+million fewer Black men in the United States than there should be due to
+these effects. In Ferguson, the problem is so acute that there are 40 per cent
+fewer Black men than women.18 Given this disparity we really should not
+be surprised that single parenthood rates are higher in African American
+communities, the result being that Black women with children are far more
+likely to live in poverty and to be evicted. This is not to mention the police
+violence and surveillance that invades communities in order to maintain the
+sheer number of African Americans in prison or on probation. Black
+women are also caught up in the same processes, and are far more likely to
+be arrested, jailed and killed than their White counterparts. In the UK we
+see exactly the same processes playing out, with Black men far more likely
+to be arrested and far less likely to be employed than their White
+counterparts. One of the results of this is a mirroring of higher rates of
+single parent households and poverty for Black women.
+The assault on Black men is a result of the same racial patriarchy that
+subjugates Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains that ‘Black men are
+feared, Black women are despised.’19 Europeans enslaved Africans
+because they believed we were subhuman, more beast than person. Black
+men were seen to be hypermasculine, with no intellect but instead full of
+brute force and dangerous sexual energy. In plantation societies like Haiti,
+around two-thirds of the enslaved were men, and 80 per cent of the Africans
+enslaved by the British were male, because the nature of the labour required
+the savage brute.20 Deeply woven into these racist ideas was the brute
+sexual force of the beast, something that had to be restrained after
+emancipation. Black men were, and remain, very publicly assaulted.
+Beaten, whipped, lynched, and gunned down by police. Black women were
+also subject to all these crimes, but the primary mode of their oppression
+has been behind closed doors. They have been subjected to sexual violence,
+either in the house on the plantation or at the hands of the police in the
+present day. They have lived with the impact of poverty, evictions and steep
+health inequalities. As well as conforming to the public/private sphere split
+in terms of how we are oppressed, racial patriarchy also changes traditional
+expectations for men and women.
+Sexual violence was not reserved for women, but was also meted out to
+enslaved African men as away to pacify and control them on the plantation.
+
+Rape and castration were common punishments used to control the savage
+beast. The enslaved were prevented from marrying and families were
+subject to being sold at the whim of their ‘owners’. During slavery the
+nuclear family was essentially legislated against. After emancipation the
+idea of the male breadwinner was difficult to maintain due to high male
+unemployment, a process that has been exacerbated with mass
+incarceration. The right, in both Europe and the United States, criticizes
+Black communities for lacking the supposedly ‘correct’ familial structure,
+when it is racial patriarchy that makes the supposed ideal more elusive.
+In Britain, one of the reasons that Black women were encouraged to
+emigrate from the Caribbean to work as nurses was so that White women
+could be put back into the home after their taste of work during the War.
+While White feminism was bemoaning the role of the housewife, Black
+women were being conscripted into the labour force. There was nothing
+novel about this. Women were incorporated into plantation society in order
+to put them to work. Ideas about gender were transformed when
+intersecting with race and were not simply re-enacted on different bodies.
+Intersectionality is not about adding up various oppressions, but rather
+accounting for the interplay of race, gender, class and other divisions.21
+There have been attempts to treat an analysis of racism in intersectionality
+as optional but this completely undermines the concept.22 Racism is always
+there, an ever-present factor shaping the way we relate to each other and
+society. There is no way to understand how patriarchy plays out for Black,
+White or Brown women without considering the colonial logic of Western
+imperialism. For instance, rape was permissible on the plantations because
+Black women were seen as subhuman, not only the property of the master
+but chattels who had no rights that needed to be respected. White women
+were also subject to rape, but there really is no comparison to the systemic
+sexual violence used against the enslaved. Thomas Thistlewood, for
+example, was a Brit who worked his way up the slavery system in Jamaica,
+starting as an overseer in 1750 and eventually owning his own plantation.
+He is notable only because he kept a diary of his barbarous exploits that
+remains a testimony to the horrors of slavery. He kept a log of the 3,852
+sexual ‘encounters’ he had in his sorry life, the majority of those being with
+enslaved Africans.23 The fact that there appears to be debate as to whether
+these were consensual tells us just how poor understandings of both race
+and gender are in society. Thistlewood documented his subjection of
+
+numerous women to repeated rapes, none of which were considered crimes
+because of their racial status as slaves. Women do not escape colonial logic
+because of their gender. The same is true of White women, who benefit
+from Western imperialism.
+The liberalization of gender roles in the West is built on the same benefits
+from empire as those which accrued to the working classes. Gendered
+inequalities in the underdeveloped world are not a result of backward
+attitudes that can be undone with some Western education but are rooted in
+the political and economic system. For instance, when child mortality is
+high there is a need to have large families because the chances are some of
+the children will not survive. The role of women then becomes largely
+reproductive, delivering as many children as possible to ensure that the
+family can continue. Children are also necessary as labourers because pay
+and conditions are so poor. When women’s roles are seen as wholly
+reproductive, this intensifies a public–private dichotomy where the man is
+seen as the breadwinner, the earner. It should be no surprise then that boys
+are more valuable in such societies because they can work rather than
+reproduce. The liberalization of gender roles in the West was dependent on
+improving child mortality rates because this meant that women could afford
+to have fewer children, safe in the knowledge they would likely survive to
+adulthood. In the underdeveloped world, where we have seen child
+mortality rates decrease in recent decades, there has also been a decrease in
+the number of children per woman, reducing the maternity imperative. If
+current trends continue, with improved access to health, we will reach ‘peak
+child’ in 2057 when the average number of children per woman globally
+will be two (down from over five in 1950), meaning that the population will
+not continue to grow exponentially.24 It is because of the riches bestowed
+on the West from imperialism that women’s equality is at an advanced
+stage.
+We have not even mentioned how the riches stolen from the
+underdeveloped world allow for higher wages, the welfare state and
+therefore no need for child labourers to make ends meet. Contrary to
+popular belief, girls not being able to go to school in the underdeveloped
+world is not the same problem as the gender pay gap, thanks to the differing
+ways they experience womanhood, due to the intersection of race and
+gender. Women in the West are simply battling for equality of access to the
+resources leached from the underdeveloped world, the exploitation of which
+
+is a direct cause of why girls around the globe have poorer access to
+schooling.
+The New Age of Empire focuses on tracing the colonial logic of the West
+and explores how Whiteness is embedded into the political and economic
+system. In doing so I have not specifically engaged in how the application
+of empire is gendered. Tracing the histories and legacies of racial patriarchy
+is central to a complete understanding of Western imperialism, but such a
+task would require at least another book, and more likely several. It is my
+hope that this book can be useful for taking that vital work forward.
+
+POST-RACIALISM
+If the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he does not
+exist, then the proudest achievement of Western imperialism is the delusion
+that we have moved beyond racism, that we are in a post-racial society. We
+are assured that the real people losing out are not minorities, or those in the
+underdeveloped world, but White people who are being left behind by a
+changing world. It is multiculturalism, immigration and globalization that
+are all conspiring to hold White people down. In this climate the right have
+even managed to hijack the legacy of Martin Luther King.
+On the forty-seventh anniversary of the infamous ‘I have a dream’ speech
+Glenn Beck, a quasi-fascist talk radio host who had previously declared
+Obama ‘a racist who hates White culture’, took thousands of mostly White
+Tea Party supporters to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, invoking King’s
+famous speech.25 He even brought along one of King’s nieces, Alveda
+King, to burnish his post-racial credentials. The march was in order to
+‘restore the honor’ of the US by turning to God and also to raise money for
+a charity providing finance to the children of special forces killed in action.
+Alveda King’s address urged the audience to ‘focus not on elections or on
+political causes but on honor, on character … not the color of our skin’, as
+well as supporting Beck’s vision that ‘there is one human race … we are not
+here to divide. I’m about unity.’ She really twisted the post-racial knife
+when she announced the reason she was speaking was to ‘honor’ her
+uncle.26 Malcolm X denounced the 1963 March on Washington as a
+‘farce’, a ‘circus with clowns and all’, due to its integrationist ‘love thy
+
+enemy’ approach.27 After this debacle he is probably teasing a furious
+King with taunts of ‘I told you so.’
+King’s speech must be one of the most abused political statements of all
+time. A militant campaigner for racial justice who was widely unpopular
+when he died, has been transformed into the cuddly uncle (Tom) of the
+nation, used to ease the conscience of White America. The mechanism for
+this whitewashing of King is primarily the most famous soundbite from his
+dream that his ‘four little children will one day live in a nation where they
+will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
+character’.28 Rather than viewing this comment in the context of trying to
+solve racial inequality, it has been turned on its head to avoid addressing the
+very issues that King spent his life fighting against.
+The yearnings for the good old days of empire or Jim Crow could be
+used to indicate that there has been a fundamental shift, that we actually are
+in a post-racial moment thanks to all the progress that has been made over
+the last fifty years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Critical Race
+Theory (CRT) emerged in the United States in the late eighties precisely
+because those involved in key civil rights reforms realized just how limited
+they were.29 So successful was the civil rights movement that the United
+States now has affirmative action, something unimaginable in Britain. But
+for all the successes, and the likes of Jay-Z having too much money and too
+little sense to work with the NFL, the nation remains a beacon of racial
+inequality. Segregation is more of a problem today than after the landmark
+Brown vs Board of Education decision; poverty is still a blight on Black
+communities; the police continue to gun down the Black population; and
+there are new problems like mass incarceration that have made apartheidera South Africa the correct analogy for the US race problem.30 Britain is
+no better, with stark racial inequalities in every area of social life; police
+brutality and abuse of power; steep economic differences; health
+inequalities; and unemployment.31 If you want one statistic to tell you the
+scale of racial injustice in Britain then the fact that over half of the juvenile
+prison population is from an ethnic minority should send shudders down
+your spine.32 It is not just that we are making no strides towards freedom
+but as Derrick Bell, one of the founders of CRT explained, ‘what we
+designate as “racial progress” is not a solution to that problem. It is a
+regeneration of the problem in a particularly perverse form.’33 By creating
+
+enough opportunity for a Black middle class, and dare I say Black
+professors, to exist we have given fuel to the lie that everyone can make it if
+they would only just try hard enough and ignore the chips on their
+shoulders. This of course is utter nonsense for those of us discriminated
+against in the West and an even more ludicrous suggestion if applied to the
+underdeveloped world. The purpose of this book is to put the final nail in
+the coffin of the post-racial narrative, illustrating just how fundamental the
+racist logic of empire remains in shaping the world.
+
+1
+
+I’m White, Therefore I Am
+‘Of course the Enlightenment was racist,’ I responded to Emily Maitlis on
+the BBC television show Newsnight, when asked about the intellectual
+movement that underpins Western society. It was 2017 and I was debating
+the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) student union’s
+campaign demanding that ‘the majority of philosophers’ taught on their
+courses should be from Africa and Asia. Rather than questioning why the
+intellectual production of a narrow parade of dead White men was ever
+deemed a suitable basis of knowledge to understand the regions, the
+students’ mild demands caused an uproar in sections of the British media
+and the university establishment.1 The head of philosophy at SOAS called
+the demands ‘rather ridiculous’2 and a slew of right-wing commentators
+lined up to decry the ‘crackpot’ head of the union and the generation of
+‘snowflake students’ who were too wrapped up in their security blankets of
+political correctness to understand the real world.3 The backlash against the
+SOAS movement was part of a wider reaction to the student-led movements
+that asked ‘Why is my curriculum White?’ and campaigned to ‘decolonize
+the university’.4 As one of the founders of the first Black Studies degree in
+Europe I was there to give a counterpoint to the tired Eurocentric dogma
+that cherishes the Enlightenment as though it were holy.
+The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerged
+from Western Europe and the United States and is the intellectual basis of
+
+the modern world. Condemning the sacred foundations of Western
+knowledge as racist did not go down well with either the establishment or a
+large segment of the Twitter commentariat, but I wasn’t exaggerating for
+greater impact. My words were simply an honest and indisputable
+assessment of the intellectual movement. In his criticism of the SOAS
+students, my adversary in the debate Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of
+the University of Buckingham and author of numerous biographies of
+British prime ministers, accidentally hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have
+put it better myself – he said that ‘we need to understand the world as it was
+and not to rewrite history as some might like it to have been.’ 5 If we were
+to do this then we would understand the Enlightenment as the racist
+intellectual project it was, and how culpable the ideas it produced are in
+creating the unjust world we inhabit.
+These debates are not simply academic. The world can only ever be as
+equal as the knowledge it is built upon. The Enlightenment emerged at a
+time when Europe had laid waste to much of the world through genocide
+and slavery and was asserting its dominance through colonial expansion.
+The arrogance of its thinkers was only possible due to the violence of the
+first version of Western empire. The ‘great thinkers’ found themselves on
+top of the world as a result and theorized about their apparent supremacy.
+One of their purposes was to provide the justification for the genocide,
+slavery and colonialism that were utterly indispensable to Western progress.
+The Enlightenment was pivotal in the shift into the new age of empire: it
+provided the universalist, supposedly rational and scientific framework of
+knowledge that maintained colonial logic. It is heresy to question the dead
+White men because their bodies of work lie at the foundation of the current
+unjust social order. To push them aside would lead to the system crashing
+down. Understanding how the Enlightenment and racism cannot be
+separated is the first step in truly appreciating that colonial logic still
+governs the world today.
+
+YOU KANT BE SERIOUS
+In the history of European thought we are presented with all the positive
+aspects of the sainted philosophers and none of the negative. There is
+perhaps no better example of this Whitewashing of the record than
+
+Immanuel Kant. I never realized how cherished an icon Kant was until I
+pointed out he was racist on television. Apparently, criticizing Kant is the
+academic equivalent of questioning the morality of Jesus. His Critique of
+Pure Reason is offered not only as the basis for anti-racism but as the
+atonement for the sins of all mankind. I was surprised to find out that so
+many held the man and his work so dear, or that they had even read it. What
+is abundantly clear is that few have read Kant’s extensive writing on race,
+where his racism is simply a matter of historical fact.
+Even a scant review of his work would reveal Kant as a violent and ugly
+racist who saw ‘humanity at its greatest perfection in the race of the
+Whites’. Kant’s writing career spanned the second half of the eighteenth
+century, after the genocide of the natives in the Americas and during the
+peak of the transatlantic slave trade. He generously acknowledged that ‘the
+yellow [Asian] Indians do have a meagre talent’ but asserted that the
+‘Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the
+American peoples’.6 His belief that the ‘Negro’ was ‘lazy, indolent and
+dawdling’7 was not just used to disparage Black people but also to justify
+enslavement. Kant even used his pseudo-scientific approach to advise the
+most efficient way to beat the ‘indolent’ Negroes to get them to be
+productive labourers. He explained that it was best to
+use a split bamboo cane instead of a whip, so that the Negro will
+suffer a great deal of pains (because of the Negro’s thick skin, he
+would not be racked with sufficient agonies through a whip) but
+without dying … the blood needs to find a way out of the Negro’s
+thick skin to avoid festering.8
+Prior to writing this book I had always known that the idea you can separate
+Kant’s racism from his intellectual output is nonsense, but to see it so
+clearly illustrated in his own words is shocking. The devil really is in the
+detail. Not only did he use his ‘intellect’ to devise ways to inflict torture on
+Africans, his work was some of the most influential in creating the modern
+idea of so-called races and White supremacy.9
+He outlined four different races based on biology and climate: White; the
+Negro; the Hun (Mongol or Kalmuck); and the Hindu or Hindustani.10 He
+detested Native Americans the most but thought they were a ‘Hunnish race
+… not yet fully acclimated’.11 For Kant, geography was the key
+
+determining factor in racial categorizations. He argued that all the
+‘inhabitants of the hottest zones are, without exceptions, idle’.12 These
+declarations about the different races were not separate from his moral
+philosophy but an integral part of it. For Kant, through ‘moral geography’ it
+was possible to grasp the true nature of what it meant to be human. His
+pursuit was to find an ‘inner nature upon which to found moral
+existence’.13 But, for him, this was not possible without the exterior of
+moral geography, because he thought the climate shaped the extent to which
+the different races possessed the talents necessary for moral development.
+Importantly, these climates produce biological adaptions that become fixed
+as different races even if people move to other parts of the world.
+Kant’s explanation of how ‘blackness’ emerges is the perfect example of
+his racial logic:
+The growth of the spongy parts of the body had to increase in a hot
+and humid climate. This growth produced a thick, turned up nose
+and thick, fatty lips. The skin had to be oily, not only to lessen the
+too heavy perspiration, but also to ward off the harmful absorption
+of the foul, humid air. The profusion of iron particles, which are
+otherwise found in the blood of every human being, and, in this
+case, are precipitated in the net-shaped substance through the
+evaporation of the phosphoric acid (which explains why all Negroes
+stink), is the cause of the blackness that shines through the
+epidermis.14
+These supposed biological differences are used to explain why Black people
+are incapable of being fully and rationally human. In terms of attempting to
+understand reason and moral existence, Kant writes off those who are not
+White. We’ve already discounted ‘Negroes’, and remember he saw Native
+Americans as even less useful. Of the ‘Hindus’ Kant argued that they can be
+‘cultivated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences.
+They never achieve the level of abstract concepts.’15 It is for this reason
+that Kant focused his discovery of the state of rational human nature in
+Europe; he firmly believed that ‘the White race possess all the motivating
+forces and talents in itself; therefore we must examine it more closely.’16 If
+ever you need a quote that explains the Eurocentric curriculum you will not
+find a better one. We have only covered a few of Kant’s pronouncements on
+
+race but already it is abundantly clear that they are not just racist, but
+absurd.
+In order to defend his racial theory of climate Kant produced theories
+about the blood of ‘Negroes’. He also believed that ‘Hindus’ had a lower
+body temperature and therefore cold hands and that the ‘long slitty, half
+closed eyes’ of the ‘Hun race’ came from living in the snow and then
+migrating to East Asia.17 His declarations about the races were supposedly
+based on evidence but he never collected any of this first-hand and relied on
+the accounts of Europeans who actually ventured out to meet the savages.
+One of the most dishonest defences of Kant that is also used to defend the
+rest of the racist Enlightenment thinkers is when we are told that the
+‘evidence available’ to him at the time supported his racist theories.18 This
+is vitally important because it maintains the delusion that science is based
+on logic and reason. But as the evidence changes, so does the science, and
+therefore Kant was just a hostage to his time. We see this argument even
+today in the idea that advances in genetic science are all we need to undo
+racism; we have the proof that race is not real so we can all move on.19 But
+we should reject this notion out of hand. There was plenty of ‘evidence
+available’ that directly contradicted Kant’s ideas, he just chose to select the
+accounts that suited his twisted agenda. Towards the end of his career in
+1788 he wrote an article where he specifically chose to dismiss the claims
+of abolitionist James Ramsay, who had spent time with those of African
+descent and could testify to our humanity, and elevated the accounts of the
+pro-slavery James Tobin, who stressed our laziness and stupidity.20 What
+made this even more remarkable is that Kant’s work is part of his response
+to a challenge from the anthropologist Georg Forster, who had first-hand
+experience of the supposed savages and criticized Kant for his use of
+colonial stereotypes.21 Forster was interested in seeing whether Kant’s
+theories could offer a notion of humanity to the enslaved, and Kant
+responded by advancing pro-slavery arguments.22
+His racial philosophy was not based on evidence, but a particular – racist
+– view of the world, which produced an absurd racial theory. But it gets
+worse: at times Kant’s ideas cross the threshold into the ludicrous. His
+racial theory was so universal that he theorized it reached ‘as far as into
+space’. He genuinely supposed that ‘the intelligence of creatures on
+different planets depends on the distance of the planet from the centre of
+
+gravity: the closer the planet is to the sun, the mentally lazier its
+inhabitants.’23 Kant’s pronouncements are so wrong-headed and bizarre
+that it should make us question his entire intellectual output. Trying to
+salvage the Critique of Pure Reason from the wreckage of his racial theory
+is like looking for coherent moral philosophy on a far-right conspiracy
+YouTube channel.
+Nevertheless, Kant still has an array of defenders who contort themselves
+into various untenable positions to stand by their man. The most obvious
+example of doublespeak I came across was a defence in an academic work
+of his racial theory on the grounds that it ‘is not racist simply because it
+claims that there are superior and inferior races’. Apparently, a theory is
+only racist if it relies on a ‘culpable neglect of evidence … or expresses or
+encourages contempt or disregard for people because of the race they are
+alleged to belong to’.24 The fact that Kant’s theory of race is guilty of both
+of these is lost on the authors. Most defenders of Kant avoid trying to make
+excuses for his obviously racist theory and focus on his other works,
+essentially arguing that his universalist moral philosophy eventually makes
+him an outspoken critic of slavery and colonialism.
+It is certainly true that in his latest writings Kant condemns colonization.
+In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals he says that ‘even if a
+“superior” society encounters “savages” it is not justified in settling on their
+land, even with the motivation of spreading civilization.’25 But to pretend
+this makes him some kind of anti-racist takes a special kind of shortsightedness. Kant came to the realization that non-Europeans have rights
+that should be respected, but this is perfectly compatible with his racial
+theory. In fact, as late as 1788, just a few years before the Metaphysics of
+Morals, he reaffirms that the ‘Negro … holds the lowest of all remaining
+levels by which we have designated the different races’.26 These two
+positions are in no way contradictory; it is entirely possible to believe that
+apes should have dominion over their habitat and be free from the gun of
+the poacher. It is also reminiscent of the uncomfortable reality that, during
+the Victorian period in Britain, black-and-white minstrel shows were a
+central part of the British abolitionist movement. ‘White men in blackface
+delivered anti-racist speeches’ from the stage in performances that criticized
+slavery whilst embracing the stereotypes that made it possible. If even
+
+avowed abolitionists upheld racial hierarchies, this demonstrates just how
+inescapable they were, and remain, to understanding the world.27
+Kant is just one philosopher, but he is an important starting point because
+his work has all the ingredients that are so potent in the regimes of
+knowledge that underpin and maintain the current unjust social order. His
+concept of so-called universal human rights also laid the foundation for the
+United Nations and the European Union. He is so vigorously defended
+because he is one of the most important architects of the new age of empire.
+
+THE ENLIGHTENMENT AS WHITE IDENTITY
+POLITICS
+It is no coincidence that the architects of the Enlightenment were White
+men who had very exclusive views about race, class and gender. In the
+effort to deflect from the movement’s inherent problems there has been a
+move away from seeing the Enlightenment as a unified whole. We are
+directed to the English, Scottish, French and American versions and the
+debates within and between them.28 But the West is founded on collusion
+beyond national borders while pretending to maintain nationalist
+sovereignty. Intellectual production is certainly no exception, and while
+there has obviously been plenty of quite heated debate, there is consensus
+on the key issues. No concept is more important to the West than race, so it
+is no surprise that on the central premises the dead White men who
+represent the foundation stones of knowledge sang from the same sordid
+hymn sheet.
+Racial science arose as a discipline to explore the superiority of the
+White race, and it is telling that basically all the key Enlightenment thinkers
+were architects of its intellectual framework. Voltaire (in France) believed
+that ‘none but the blind can doubt that the Whites, the Negroes, the
+Albinoes [sic], the Hottentots, the Laplanders, the Chinese, the Americans,
+are races entirely different.’29 Hegel (in Germany) thought that ‘Negroes
+are to be regarded as a race of children who remain immersed in their state
+of naïveté. They are sold and let themselves be sold without any reflection
+on the rights or wrongs of the matter.’30 John Locke (in seventeenthcentury England) believed that ‘Negroes’ were the product of African
+
+women sleeping with apes and therefore that we were subhuman.31 David
+Hume (in Scotland) was ‘apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the
+other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be
+naturally inferior to the Whites’.32 One of the architects of the Greatest
+Democracy on Earth™, Thomas Jefferson (in the United States) believed
+that Black people ‘whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by
+time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments of
+both mind and body’.33 All agreed that race was real and defined in
+biology that determined the extent to which a people could claim full
+humanity. The racial hierarchy that the Enlightenment produced is best
+summed up by the botanist Linnaeus’ (who has a university in Sweden
+named after him) classification of the human species:
+Europaeus albus: ingenious, white, sanguine, governed by law;
+Americanus rubescus: happy with his lot, liberty loving, tanned and
+irascible, governed by custom; Asiaticus luridus: yellow,
+melancholy, governed by opinion; Afer niger: crafty, lazy, careless,
+black, governed by the arbitrary will of the master.34
+White in this metric is right and even Johann von Herder, who was first
+Kant’s student and later his rival, and is often ‘either quoted … in defence
+of the struggle against racialism or ignored’,35 presented the same beliefs
+(albeit more poetically):
+the perfect human form found a site on the coast of the
+Mediterranean, where it was capable of uniting with the intellect,
+and displaying all the charms of terrestrial and celestial beauty to the
+mind, as well as to the eye … Here figures were conceived and
+executed, which no admirer of Circassian beauty, no Indian or
+Cashmirian artist, could have invented. The human form ascended
+Olympus, and clothed itself in divine beauty.36
+Certainly there were differences in how each of these esteemed scholars
+understood what exactly race was. Whether or not the different races were
+from the same original source was the first dispute. Polygenists believed
+that there was more than one original man and that the races were
+completely distinct, whereas monogenists believed there to be one original
+
+source of humanity, but that White people represented the most developed,
+advanced incarnation of man. Voltaire and Hume were polygenists, who
+could not conceive of the lesser races having any relation to the perfection
+of Whiteness. The word mulatto was applied to those of mixed heritage
+because scholars such as Voltaire believed they were a ‘bastard race’
+produced by the same type of inter-species breeding as the mule, the
+offspring of a horse and a donkey.37 In perhaps the most obvious example
+of these great intellectuals ignoring all available evidence, Voltaire was
+among a number of his contemporaries who argued that just like mules,
+‘mulattoes’ were infertile because they were the combination of two
+different species.
+Whilst the monogenists believed that all races were part of a broader
+human family, this did not mean that their concepts were any less racist.
+Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the most notorious racial
+theorists, believed in the single human family and that ‘if Africans were
+imported to Europe, their colour would gradually change and become
+“perhaps as White as the native” of Europe.’38 Later, this idea was picked
+up by the monogenist-in-chief, Charles Darwin, who incorporated it into his
+theory of evolution. To support this hypothesis Darwin was not the first to
+cite the ‘considerable evidence showing that in the Southern states the
+house-slaves of the third generation present a markedly different
+appearance from the field slaves’.39 Apparently these theorists overlooked
+the rape of the enslaved by slave-masters as a far more logical explanation
+for the successively lighter skin tones. This is surprising not only because it
+is fairly obvious, but because it would have put a nail in the coffin of the
+polygenist notion that ‘mulattoes’ could not breed. But that is precisely the
+point: whichever side of the debate these so-called intellectuals fell on, they
+were jointly contributing to the same cause. Buffon believed in shared
+descent and also that slavery was justified on the grounds that ‘Negroes’
+were ‘so naturally lazy’ that they were in a ‘violent state’ if not subject to
+forced labour.40 Darwin’s theory of evolution was the perfect, supposedly
+scientific scheme to prove the superiority of Whites. Man evolved from
+apes, and Africans, with their differently shaped bodies and skulls, were
+evidence of the chain of human progression. The search for the so-called
+missing link between man and ape was in reality a discussion of which
+African people most closely resembled monkeys. Distinct races observed
+from supposedly scientific evidence are a key feature of White supremacy.
+
+These ideas permeate the Enlightenment and bled into the Eugenics
+movement that gave the theoretical basis for the Holocaust. There is a
+reason that Adolf Eichmann, who was executed for crimes against
+humanity, ‘appealed to Kant in justifying his behaviour’.41
+Racial science was not some marginal concern at the corners of European
+philosophy, it was an integral component of its intellectual framework. See
+how coldly Darwin justifies the imperial conquest by the West that cost the
+lives of tens of millions:
+When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the
+struggle is short … New diseases and vices are highly destructive;
+and it appears that in every nation a new disease causes much death,
+until those who are most susceptible to its destructive influence are
+gradually weeded out; and so it may be with the evil effects from
+spirituous liquors, as well as with the unconquerably strong taste for
+them shown by so many savages.42
+Darwin was simply building off the established intellectual order. Hegel had
+already declared the natives of the Americas a ‘vanishing, feeble race’, and
+asserted that ‘when brought into contact with brandy and guns these
+savages become extinct’.43 Whilst John Stuart Mill had proclaimed that
+‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,
+provided the end be their improvement’.44
+To think rationally is what separates man from beast, and the whole basis
+of the Enlightenment is that rational thought is the sole possession of the
+White man. Even the idea of bringing light to the world – that Europe is the
+beacon to shine its torch on the dark and savage corners of the globe – is
+instructive. For, whatever their disagreements, the dead White men were
+unified in the belief that Europe was the foundation through which
+knowledge was spread. As Herder explained, ‘The Negro has invented
+nothing for the European … From the region of well-formed people we
+have derived our religion, our arts, our sciences, and the whole frame of our
+cultivation and humanity.’45 This is nothing short of White identity
+politics, racist propaganda to boost the collective self-esteem of Europe.
+The truth is that Europe was not superior to the rest of the world in the
+fifteenth century. If anything, the only part of the world in a Dark Age
+during that period was Europe, and it was only through violence and the
+
+murder of hundreds of millions that the West established its superiority.
+Imperial violence created the blank slate, the intellectual terra nullius
+(empty land) from which the Enlightenment thinkers emerged with their
+claims to a unique form of rationality and understanding.46 Had the world
+not been built in the image of White supremacy the racial intellectual
+framework of the Enlightenment would have been impossible. It was selfevident that the natives of the Americas were inferior because they had
+been exterminated. ‘Negroes’ were obviously closer to livestock than
+humans because they were enslaved. Indians had nothing noteworthy to
+contribute because the West had already plundered their societies. It is from
+the rubble of colonial slaughter that supposedly universal reason emerges.
+Enlightenment thinkers claimed that to be rational, to think, to be human,
+was to be European. In other words, ‘I’m White, therefore I am’, and the
+imperial world at their feet was all the empirical evidence they needed to
+justify this claim. To sustain this belief, the truth about knowledge, science
+and reason had to first be erased.
+Kant once noted Hume’s challenge for ‘anyone to cite a simple example
+in which a Negro has shown talents’, arguing that ‘not a single one was ever
+found who presented anything great in art or science or any other
+praiseworthy quality’.47 In the twenty-first century it should not be
+necessary to offer a corrective to such racist fantasies. Unfortunately, I have
+been involved in far too many conversations with supposedly educated
+people to know that the idea that Europe produced science and reason is all
+too alive and well. So let’s take up Hume’s challenge and take it further.
+Not only can we find plenty of examples of talented ‘Negroes’, but the
+foundation of the knowledge we have today lies almost exclusively outside
+the West.
+
+DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE
+At the end of the fifteenth century Europe had been largely isolated from
+the rest of the world for centuries, ever since the collapse of the Roman
+Empire. The region was in a Dark Age dominated by religious dogma and
+feudal repression, and aside from the crusades into the Muslim world had
+little thought of, or interest in, conquering the globe. This was the age when
+Christian beliefs supposedly explained the universe, and located the earth at
+
+the centre of Creation. Such beliefs limited the European imagination, most
+notably the idea that the world was flat and that to travel over the horizon
+would lead to falling into the abyss. As I will discuss, 1492 marked the
+beginning of the West, but importantly it also coincided with the fall of the
+empire that Europe most directly drew its intellectual tradition from.
+Columbus’s maiden voyage was delayed until the Spanish had conquered
+Al-Andalus and driven the Moorish Empire out of Spain.48 For the 700
+years prior to this, a large part of the south of the country had been ruled by
+a Muslim empire that stretched out of North Africa. In fact, by the early
+eighth century the Muslims occupied over 5 million square miles of land, an
+area larger than the Roman Empire.49 Only once they were defeated could
+the West begin its path to global domination.
+By all accounts the Moorish occupation of southern Spain brought
+unparalleled levels of progress and development to the region. Prior to the
+Moors it had been ruled by the Visigoths who were so brutal and barbaric
+that the locals welcomed their foreign invaders as liberators. More than half
+the population had recently (707–9) died in a famine. When their Muslim
+saviours arrived they brought with them eastern ‘sophistication’ including
+the development of canals, irrigation techniques and farming expertise as
+well as relative luxuries like toothpaste, hairstyling and cutlery.50 Córdoba
+became a centre of knowledge and learning under the Moors and in the
+tenth century a university famous for astronomy was founded in the
+legendary Mezquita. In her book The Map of Knowledge historian Violet
+Moller gives us an indication of just how far advanced the Muslim world
+was compared to Europe during this period:
+twelfth-century scholar Bernard of Chartres [France] was proud of
+the twenty-four books he owned, but, in 1258, the city of Baghdad
+boasted thirty-six public libraries and over a hundred book
+merchants. The largest medieval library in Christian Europe, at the
+Abbey of Cluny, contained a few hundred books, while the royal
+library of Córdoba had 400,000.51
+Throughout the Muslim Empire learning flourished and cities like Baghdad
+competed for the honour of being the capital of knowledge production.
+Ophthalmology, medicine and astronomy all thrived. In ninth-century
+Baghdad scientists studying at Caliph Al-Ma’um’s ‘House of Wisdom’
+
+could calculate the circumference of the world to within 400 miles of
+modern measurements using astronomy. The algorithms that determine so
+much of twenty-first century life are named after the Persian scholar AlKhwarizmi, and for the concept of zero we owe a debt to Hindu intellectual
+Bramahgupta’s Siddhanta, which was written in the seventh century. These
+are simple truths in direct contradiction of Enlightenment thinkers’ ideas
+that only Europeans were capable of abstract thought. So central was the
+Muslim world to scholarship that Christian scholar Paul Alvarus of
+Córdoba lamented in the ninth century that ‘all talented young Christians
+read and study with enthusiasm Arab books; they gather immense libraries
+at great expense … they have forgotten their own language’.52
+At the heart of the intellectual tradition in the Muslim world was the
+acquisition and writing of books. After the fall of the Roman Empire there
+was little left of the once-great library in Alexandria or of the key texts
+essential to preserving knowledge. It was scholars in the Muslim world who
+went about securing and translating the classic texts as well as adding to
+them with new discoveries. Arabic became the language of knowledge until
+the fifteenth century. Once Europe asserted its dominion this was no longer
+allowed to be the case. Erasure of non-Europeans was at the core of the
+Western project in terms of both actual slaughter and symbolic destruction.
+After Granada was conquered by the Spanish, the powerful Cardinal
+Ximenéz de Cisneros, in his position as part of the Spanish Inquisition,
+organized a book burning on an almost unimaginable scale. In the city’s
+main square almost 2 million Arabic books were incinerated because he
+thought that to ‘destroy the written word is to deprive a culture of its soul,
+and eventually its identity’.53 Although the books were burnt, their content
+was not always lost. Latin translations had been made to Europeanize the
+knowledge, the Arabic names changed to Latin ones. Ibn Sina, an eleventhcentury Persian scientist credited with being the founder of modern
+medicine, became Avicenna. Abbas al-Zahrawi, who pioneered surgical
+techniques in Córdoba in the tenth century, was transformed into Abulcasis.
+By burning books and libraries and Whitewashing history, Western
+intellectual thought was able to start from a clean slate of White supremacy.
+It is likely that the Enlightenment scholars genuinely believed they had
+inherited their knowledge solely from Europe, given the source material
+they were working from.
+
+Tracing the history of knowledge through the Muslim world is important
+but also has limitations. For a start we could also explore the knowledge
+produced in the rest of Asia: China has had unbroken civilization for
+thousands of years. Then there’s the indigenous knowledges of the
+Americas and Australia. The other major limitation is that this narrative
+ends up leading back to Greece, where the texts that the Islamic scholars
+were translating and building upon were largely produced. We could
+therefore add in the Muslim world and still end up with a Eurocentric
+foundation of knowledge. In The Map of Knowledge, from which I have
+drawn many of the above examples, it is exactly this intellectual geography
+that is reproduced. This is made worse by the exclusion of Timbuktu in
+what is now Mali, which was at the heart of Muslim scholarship from as
+early as the twelfth century when the University of Sankore was founded.
+By the sixteenth century the university had grown to teach 25,000 students
+and the library was one of the largest in the world, with hundreds of
+thousands of manuscripts.54 The erasure of Africa from intellectual history
+continues in the book when the only Egyptian city that appears in it is
+Alexandria during its occupation by the Roman Empire. After reading it
+you could be forgiven for thinking that Egypt played a negligible part in the
+history of knowledge, when nothing could be further from the truth.
+Prior to Greek civilization, Egypt reigned as the centre of progress for
+thousands of years. The Greeks learned from the Egyptians and even their
+‘cult of the Gods’.55 Egypt was undoubtedly well advanced in science
+before Greece was. The pyramids alone are testimony to the civilization’s
+scientific achievements. In school we learn that Archimedes discovered pi
+in the third century BC, but if you divide half the perimeter of the Great
+Pyramid of Giza, built over 2,000 years earlier, by its height, the number
+you come to is an approximation of pi. It is clear that the level of
+development in Egypt far outstripped anything in Europe at the time: even
+scholars in early Europe agreed that the Egyptians, and before them the
+Ethiopians, produced developed civilizations whilst Europe was in a stage
+of ‘deep barbarism’.56 Just as Europeans Whitewashed the Muslims out of
+their intellectual history, so the Greeks did the Egyptians. The most
+excruciating example of this was Imhotep (c. 2700–2611), the great
+Egyptian scientist and one of the earliest founders of medicine, who became
+worshipped as Asclepius by the Greeks. Historical Whitewashing would be
+bad enough, but in the 1999 film The Mummy Imhotep is the character they
+
+choose to raise from the dead, and depicts an evil monster who wants to
+rule the world. Imagine watching a movie where Aristotle comes back to
+life to destroy the world and you have the scale of intellectual sacrilege we
+are dealing with. As if defaming a dead scholar was not enough, the film
+also managed to reproduce the commonplace racist depiction of the ancient
+Egyptians by Hollywood.
+Imhotep was played in the film by Arnold Vosloo, an actor who grew up
+in apartheid South Africa. Usually, ancient Egyptians are misrepresented as
+the Arabs who dominate the area today. In Vosloo’s case they browned-up
+an actor classified as White by the apartheid regime. As I will discuss in
+Chapter 2, Egypt is sealed off from ‘Africa proper’ in the intellectual
+imagination. We are told its inhabitants were not part of Black Africa but
+rather the Mediterranean, so that it can be annexed into the Western
+tradition of intellectual thought. The truth is that though the country, and
+North Africa, is now predominantly Arab this was not the case at the time
+of the ancient Egyptian civilization. The Arab invasion of North Africa
+occurred in the seventh century, in the same move that saw the Moors take
+over southern Spain. In his classic work The African Origin of Civilization,
+African intellectual Cheik Anta Diop forensically delivers the evidence in
+terms of sculptures, artwork and history that the ancient Egyptians were
+Black. He explains that ‘whenever the Egyptians use the word “Black”
+(khem) it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the
+Blacks.’57 He also traces Egyptian civilization back to Ethiopians who
+migrated north. The reality that maths, science and medicine were being
+practised across Africa centuries before the Greeks imagined any of them to
+be possible is undeniable. By focusing on the written word recorded in
+books we have ignored the truth that ‘Africa is home to mathematical
+bodies of knowledge so vital they provide the bedrock of modern
+computing’.58 In her excellent book Don’t Touch My Hair, Emma Dabiri
+uses the patterns encoded in African hairstyles as evidence of complex
+mathematical formulas that have been used on the continent for centuries.
+For instance, in braiding patterns widely used in Africa for centuries we can
+see a representation of infinity. This may not sound particularly important,
+but the concept of infinity was so far beyond the comprehension of the
+Greeks it was associated with ‘paradox and pathology’.59 In 1877,
+European scholar Georg Cantor tried to represent the concept but was
+denounced as a heretic and ended his days in an asylum. His treatment,
+
+even in the so-called age of reason, harks back to how scientists were
+treated in fifth-century Greece: ‘In 415, a mob of Christian zealots
+murdered the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia. Believing her to be a
+witch they flayed her alive with oyster shells.’60 Whilst infinity is
+commonplace in traditional African hairstyles, village design and clothing,
+it took centuries for the West to catch up.
+It was also not as though the Enlightenment thinkers needed to go far to
+find evidence of Black intelligence: there was plenty of it, they simply
+chose to ignore it. In direct response to Hume’s challenge that Kant used as
+evidence for Black inferiority we can present Thomas Fuller, an enslaved
+African in eighteenth-century Virginia. He was so talented in mathematics
+that he could ‘accurately count the hairs in a cow’s tail, or the number of
+grains in bushels of wheat or flax seed’ doing ‘complex astronomy-related
+calculations that today would be done by computers’.61 Fuller imported his
+mathematical genius into the United States from his education in West
+Africa before he was stolen into slavery. He was just one of countless
+examples of Black excellence that Europeans were well aware of but which
+were always discounted, interpreted as some kind of exception that proved
+the rules of racism. For example, Phyllis Wheatley was taken into slavery
+around 1760, but rose to become a world-renowned poet. Still, Thomas
+Jefferson discounted her talent, arguing that it was impossible to ‘find that a
+black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an
+elementary trait of painting or sculpture … Religion, indeed, has produced a
+Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet.’62 Of course Wheatley
+was just parroting White skills through her rigorous training, rather than
+being capable of actually producing poetry. In direct conflict to everything
+we are told about Western science, time and again the great thinkers of the
+time ignored the clear empirical evidence around them in order to protect
+the superiority that lay at the heart of their White identity politics.
+In Jefferson’s case this was particularly egregious given that he not only
+owned enslaved Africans but subjected one of his ‘property’ to long-term
+sexual abuse. Jefferson’s so-called relationship with Sally Hemings began
+when she was fourteen and his abuse of her continued for years. She bore
+him several children, who were freed, but Hemings remained Jefferson’s
+captive until he died. Jefferson’s ‘affection’ for Hemings and his children
+did not dissuade him from his White supremacist philosophy.
+Notwithstanding his obsession with Hemings, he asserted the ‘superior
+
+beauty’ of the White race; that Black people gave off a very strong and
+disagreeable odour; and that Black women preferred sleeping with orangutans than with Black men.63 These ideas were ideological, and the
+available evidence was twisted to fit his diseased view of the world.
+As should by now be obvious, the central thesis of the Enlightenment –
+that knowledge and reason spreads out from Europe – is entirely bogus. It is
+not an exaggeration to say that Europe is responsible for very few genuinely
+new ideas and made its advances by building on an inheritance of
+knowledge derived from other parts of the world. Science, maths, medicine,
+reason and even political organization all have their roots in the world
+outside the West, while Europe had a scant awareness of these concepts.
+Even racism was not a novel European idea. As I will discuss in Chapter 2,
+the Arab slave trade pre-dates Europe’s, and when Columbus started
+enslaving the natives of the Americas it was for markets in the Muslim
+world. As we have seen in this chapter, Western racial science codified the
+idea of White supremacy based on biological superiority to the so-called
+lesser races. But in the fourteenth century the Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun
+was hundreds of years ahead of the dead White men in declaring that
+Africans ‘have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are
+quite similar to those of dumb animals’.64 Before we get too carried away,
+although the West may not have birthed the idea of racism, it found its
+prosperity by exploiting the concept to its fullest.
+On the one hand, it is important to destroy the notion of the
+Enlightenment as some unique achievement of Western civilization, to
+recognize that it was built on a foundation of global knowledge. But we
+should not give up on the idea that it is an utterly transcendent intellectual
+tradition upon which the success of the West is built. It may be exclusive,
+wrong and racist but that is simply the nature of the West. Without the racial
+intellectual framework inherited from the Enlightenment the current version
+of Western empire would be impossible. Decolonizing the curriculum has to
+mean more than being a bit critical of Kant or adding some diversity to
+reading lists. If, and this is a big if, we want to build an anti-racist society
+we need to completely rethink the underlying basis of the knowledge that
+produces the world.
+
+WHITE WORLD SUPREMACY
+
+The global economy today is built in the image of White supremacy that
+was so neatly outlined by the Enlightenment thinkers. Africa is the poorest
+continent on earth, while the countries with White majorities are the richest.
+We only need to look at Linnaeus’ ladder of the species to understand the
+political and economic system. These debates are not simply about the past,
+because the Enlightenment shapes our present: a society can only be as fair
+as the knowledge it is built on, and established Western intellectual thought
+is rooted in racism. The most frustrating aspect of the way in which the
+Enlightenment is used is that we are told to believe ‘it is reason that will
+enable us to solve the problem’, if only we can just shine light on the
+relevant evidence.65 Absent from this propaganda is the reality that
+Western concepts of reason can never be the solution to the problem of
+racism they helped to create and continue to maintain. Ignorance was never
+the issue: Western reason is based on White supremacy, the idea that those
+at the top of the racial hierarchy have the monopoly on knowledge. Freeing
+ourselves from the very nature of this intellectual framework is essential.
+One of the main areas used to illustrate the positive contribution of the
+Western intellectual framework is the arena of human rights, which is
+deeply invested in the Enlightenment tradition.66 Key documents like the
+US Bill of Rights and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of
+Man are celebrated as the sacred texts of our freedoms, which are
+guaranteed by the human rights agenda. It is in this narrative that Locke,
+Hume, Kant, Voltaire and Hegel are applauded for their heroic theories of
+individual rights and freedom. The only problem is that you cannot separate
+their theories of rights from their racism, which goes to the core of their
+intellectual output.
+A case in point is the American framework of rights. All men were
+apparently created equal – apart from Black men, of course. When the
+founding fathers were designing the Bill of Rights at the 1787
+Constitutional Convention in the newly formed United States, they came
+upon the issue of representation for states based on population. The
+Southern states wanted to ensure that their slave populations could be used
+to give them representational power in the new nation. But a beast could
+obviously not be taken to be equal to a White person, and could certainly
+never vote. Therefore it was agreed that each of the enslaved would account
+for three-fifths of a White full human being. A dissenting voice from
+Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry objected ‘why should their representation be
+
+increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than
+[on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?’67
+It was not only race that limited rights in the United States:68 full rights
+were granted solely to those who were wealthy, White and male. It should
+be no surprise that it was only that same group who were able to access
+university education at the time, where they created a framework of
+knowledge and rights that only their kind could enjoy. Yale, one of the most
+prestigious universities in the world, takes its name from Elihu Yale, a slave
+trader who also enriched himself in colonial India. There is perhaps no
+better representative of the unbreakable links to colonial violence and
+knowledge, but Yale is by no means alone.
+The racist nature of inclusion in democracy is not incidental; it was
+embedded in those who were creating the concept of rights. Full
+participation in humanity was reserved for White and wealthy men while
+everyone else’s rights were contingent. We could presume that extending
+rights only to White people was based on the erroneous assumption that
+other so-called races were not human, and that now that those notions have
+been (largely) cast aside these universal rights can be applied to all the
+human family. While that might be a comforting idea, it is a dangerous one,
+and ignores the basic framework of both knowledge and the political and
+economic system in the last 200 years.
+When the Enlightenment is presented as the architect of the antiimperialist movement it is on the basis that the movement eventually
+accepted that freedom means tolerating the diversity, or pluralism, that
+makes up humanity.69 Ultimately, this is the position Kant arrives at in his
+later works. Whereas previously he used his ‘moral geography’ to justify
+the enslavement of the savages, he later saw that even though the natives
+were inferior they too possessed rights. But to pretend that this transformed
+his basic position is delusional. Kant essentially believed that ‘special
+protection’ was needed for the ‘childlike’ races, who could not be trusted to
+look after themselves.70 We become accepted into the human family but
+forever frozen in a state of nature, destined to remain a step below in the
+racial hierarchy. We have the right to life, but the standard of that life was
+never thought to be at the level of the enlightened European. So, not only
+does Kant contribute to the theory of racial hierarchy, he also outlines a
+moral universalist philosophy that can be summed up most neatly in
+Kipling’s idea of the ‘White man’s burden’. Here we can see the fatal
+
+weaknesses in the framework of human rights. It emerged at a time when it
+was understood that only White men were fully human citizens and that
+everyone else was deserving of rights according to their place in the
+hierarchy of ‘moral geography’. Diderot ‘praised the primitive and rejected
+the civilized … specifically celebrat[ing] the sexual freedom of
+Tahitians’.71 Reminiscent of Rousseau’s idea that savages lived in a state of
+nature which was purer than the rational world of Europeans, there was a
+celebration of their perceived basic and carnal instincts. In this framework
+the Tahitians have the right to maintain their supposedly backward ways of
+life, stuck for ever historically as the happy, smiling natives at peace with a
+world they do not truly understand.
+I’ve seen these ideas at play countless times when having discussions
+about global poverty. Well-meaning volunteers to the underdeveloped world
+often come back fulfilled by the work they have done and contented with
+the idea that the people they have met have been so ‘happy’ with their lives.
+When you ask about the grinding poverty and conditions in which the
+natives struggle, you are chastised for applying ‘Western’ ideals. In the
+Enlightenment framework, humanity is not universal, it is contextual,
+allowing us to provide a completely different set of standards of individual
+rights across the world.
+As seen in the example of the original US Constitution, property was at
+the foundation of how rights were granted. The same was true in Europe,
+where in order to vote, to have full rights, you had to be White, male and
+have money. Even White women only had a set of individual rights which
+disqualified them from taking part in democracy. The classed basis for the
+franchise is important too, because this economic limitation to rights is still
+in place today. There are no longer economic restrictions directly placed on
+voting rights in the West and most countries around the world have some
+sort of voting system. But wealth is indispensable to the kind of rights you
+will be afforded. Take for instance the UN Convention on the Rights of the
+Child that offers universal rights to young people around the globe. Article
+six has two parts, firstly that ‘every child has the inherent right to life’ and
+secondly that all ‘parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the
+survival and development of the child’. Sounds reasonable enough, but look
+more closely: the ‘maximum extent possible’ is wildly different depending
+on where you live. In the West child deaths are extremely rare and most
+often occur in tragic circumstances. However, a child in the underdeveloped
+
+world dies every ten seconds because they have no proper access to food
+and water. The UN Convention in theory stresses the rights of those
+children, but in practice absolves signatories from ensuring those rights are
+achieved, due to their economic circumstances. That is the cultural
+pluralism which is the hallmark of Enlightenment reason.
+It is a diversity that we accept all the time, whenever we enjoy the
+benefits of sweatshop labour or purchase smartphones powered by minerals
+stolen out of Africa’s ground. Because living standards are so much lower
+in the underdeveloped world, we have normalized a different framework of
+reality. When children’s rights are discussed in the West, apart from in the
+context of abuse, the topics are about the right to play or to not have too
+much stress from exams. In the underdeveloped world they are still stuck on
+the basic right to life. Vitally, these different economic conditions are racist.
+It is no coincidence that the poorest countries are the darkest ones. The
+West created a racial global order and then built a framework of rights that
+would maintain the status quo.
+A major vehicle for maintaining this uneven pluralism of rights is the
+nation state. Sovereign nations were meant to deliver rights through their
+constitutions and their representative democracies. Hopefully, it is easy to
+see how this enshrines the unequal global order, making it the responsibility
+of the nation state only to provide rights for its citizens. If nations were
+empires, like Britain, then the colonial populations were subject to a
+different set of rules and rights.72 It was Kant who first imagined a
+supranational collection of states to govern world affairs, something akin to
+the UN. It is the UN that has to ratify national sovereignty but, in testimony
+to the elastic nature of nation states, the only consistent aspect of their
+definition is that they have been legally recognized as individual states.73
+Rather than being natural systems of organization, nation states are
+containers used to control the political order. While the UN may look
+democratic from the outside, with its one-member-one-vote in the General
+Assembly, the organization is governed by fiat from the Security Council,
+with four of the five permanent members – France, the United States,
+Britain and Russia – being White Western countries. China is the exception
+whose economic might could not be ignored. This is again the cultural
+pluralism of rights: all nations have a right to a seat at the table, but only the
+preordained ones get to decide what to eat.
+
+Worse still, by operating under the framework of universal rights, the
+West is free to moralize over its superior democracy and human rights
+records compared to the underdeveloped world. The solution to the
+problems of impoverished nation states is explained as the deficit of rights
+and freedom: if only they had more democracy and good governance, then
+of course they would prosper. The failure to provide economic freedom and
+basic rights belongs to the nation state and the West has absolved itself of
+all responsibility. The West has maintained its control over the world by
+Balkanizing Africa into individual nation states so that it can be more
+effectively managed and controlled.74 This would appear to be
+contradictory to the universalist moral philosophy but, as we have seen, the
+only aspect of these ideas that is universal is that the globe should be
+exploited on the principle of White supremacy.
+Ultimately, the problem of the human rights framework is its perceived
+focus on the individual. The Enlightenment search for the moral agent, the
+rational core of humanity, was based on finding the uniqueness at the heart
+of man. This is usually taken to mean that what is true for one accounts for
+all, and therefore we are presented with a universal theory that elevates all
+humanity. As we have discussed, this is untrue. Human nature was
+theorized to be influenced by the external (racial factors) which determined
+the talents that people had to reach human potential. Full, rational, moral
+humanity was not understood as something that all humans achieved, only
+those with White skin. Therefore, the individual could be understood only
+through their race and through their gender. It is for this reason that there
+was no contradiction in Jefferson declaring that ‘all people were created
+equal’ whilst owning Africans. He saw them as ‘Negroes’, chattels, not in
+the category of human. All of the founding texts upon which the human
+rights framework was built were designed as the rights of White men.
+Within the West these rights have been extended, to some extent, to those
+who are not White and male. But countless Black people killed by the
+police would strongly contest their right to life. To be a full human being is
+still defined in Whiteness, the unquestioned right to freedom and prosperity
+that even the most privileged minority can only dream of. It remains the
+case that those who reside in the underdeveloped world are not afforded
+these rights. African migrants are left to drown crossing the Mediterranean;
+sweatshop workers in Asia are subject to medieval conditions; migrants in
+Latin America are brutalized on their journeys to find freedom; and Black
+
+and Brown children die by the second. The architecture of a society that
+creates these injustices is the Enlightenment and its universalist philosophy.
+The transition of Kant from adviser of slave drivers to opponent of
+colonialism is important because it marks the shift from the first version of
+Western empire, one that was rooted in violence and direct control, to the
+emergence of the updated system.
+The Enlightenment was a product of the first stage of Western
+imperialism, with slavery and colonialism clearing the ground for its
+intellectual project. It then provided the intellectual bridge to the new age of
+empire, which maintains colonial logic but has clothed itself in the
+legitimacy of democracy, human rights and universal values. It is essential
+that we unlearn the distorted view of history that we have been conditioned
+into. We will explore the truth of how the West brutally established its
+imperial dominance before the dawning of a new, more enlightened, age of
+empire. To do so means starting at the beginning of the tale, in 1492 when
+Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
+
+2
+
+Genocide
+In the wake of protests following the murder of George Floyd statues of
+Christopher Columbus became a target. Across the United States
+monuments were beheaded, vandalized, torched and even torn down
+entirely.1 The anger at Columbus shows the power he still holds in the
+psyche of the nation, as does President Trump’s 4 July speech celebrating
+the Italian as the person who ‘discovered America’.2 The reverence for
+Columbus has a long history, particularly in Colorado, which is where the
+Columbus national holiday celebrations first started.
+In 2016 Denver City Council announced they would be celebrating
+Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than marking Columbus Day. This came
+about as a result of decades of activism, notably in 1992 when, minutes
+before it was due to start, the Columbus Day parade had to be cancelled
+because 500 protestors descended on the scene.3 Halting the march in
+Denver was seen as a key victory for the activists because the idea of
+celebrating Christopher Columbus with a public holiday first came from
+Denver. Angelo Noce, an Italian immigrant to the city, persuaded the state
+to adopt Columbus Day in 1907 as a mark of recognition, given the
+significant discrimination that Italians were facing in the United States at
+the time.4 It took until 1937 for the celebration to be adopted nationally,
+although this wasn’t due to Columbus being controversial – on the contrary,
+Columbus is one of the most venerated figures in the United States. Most
+
+US cities have monuments in his honour as well as streets and major
+institutions named after him. There is a Columbus city in Ohio, and the
+United States seat of government is housed in the District of Columbia. The
+beatification of Columbus is remarkable, considering that he never set foot
+in what is now the United States of America.
+Protests against Columbus Day have been going on for decades, because
+in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and when he got off the boat
+unleashed a reign of genocidal terror on the indigenous people he
+supposedly ‘discovered’. Notwithstanding his historical role as slave trader
+and mass murderer, Columbus Day continues to be celebrated, but the tales
+told to schoolchildren may as well begin ‘Once upon a genocide’.5
+European expansion into the Americas was vital to the development of
+the West. And yet explorers like Columbus did not ‘discover’ a new and
+empty land to be exploited. When they arrived, they found millions of
+people living in complex societies who needed to be erased in order to
+create the clean slate necessary for Western progress. The genocide in the
+Americas is without precedent, wiping up to 99 per cent of the natives off
+the face of the earth. The bodies of those slaughtered are the foundation of
+the current social order. Westward expansion was the key that unlocked the
+bounties of European domination. Slavery, colonialism, industry, science
+and so-called democracy are all indebted to the tens of millions sacrificed at
+the altar of ‘progress’.
+Although the genocide in the Americas was by far the largest in human
+history, it is rarely commented on. It is consigned to the dustbin of history
+as Western commentators decry genocide as the possession either of evil
+regimes like the Nazis or of supposedly backward peoples in the
+underdeveloped world. In truth, the West was birthed by genocide and
+relied on the slaughter of millions of Black and Brown bodies to develop
+and enrich itself. You cannot separate genocide and the West, which is by
+far the most brutal, violent and murderous system to ever grace the globe.
+Rather than come to terms with the centrality of genocide to the West it is
+understood as a process alien to the progressive society built on science.
+Understanding genocide through the lens of the evil perpetuated by Nazis,
+or backward savages in Rwanda, allows the West to maintain its moral
+superiority. In truth both examples were products of the West, born out of
+the logic of empire. In order to appreciate this history we need to undo the
+lies at the heart of how the West understands itself.
+
+ONCE UPON A GENOCIDE
+This fairy tale revolving around Columbus has some key elements that we
+need to dismiss. The first is that when Columbus mistakenly came across
+the Americas, when he was in fact looking for India, he discovered the land.
+Not only were there indigenous peoples across the Americas, there is clear
+evidence that Africans had visited and settled long before Columbus took
+his wrong turn. The Olmec civilization in Latin America made statues with
+clear African features at least 2,500 years before Columbus made his
+journey; remains of Africans have also been found in Olmec territory, along
+with Egyptian artefacts, in the Americas.6 The finding of narcotics from
+the Americas in Egyptian mummies in 19927 was roundly criticized mostly
+because of the disbelief that Africans could have made it to the continent
+before Europeans. Despite a wealth of evidence, scholars have been
+deterred from tracing these connections for fear of career suicide.8 It is
+only because of the conceit of Western ideas of supremacy that we ignore
+the history of global travel and interaction that far pre-dates European
+exploration. In fact, prior to Columbus departing on his third voyage to the
+Americas King Juan of Portugal had told him that Africans had a trade
+route to the region from Guinea, and Columbus confirmed this with the
+indigenous people when he arrived.9 The notion that Columbus made a
+discovery is based on the White supremacist logic of knowledge. If a people
+live in a place and there are no Europeans around to witness it, contrary to
+Western beliefs, they still exist.
+Central to the idea of discovery is the notion that the Americas were
+sparsely populated by pre-civilization natives who, even if we accept their
+existence, are discounted because of their savagery. I must admit that this
+myth is so embedded in how we understand the world that until I started
+researching for this book I had assumed that the population numbers were
+very low, though I obviously rejected the savagery part. But the midpoint
+estimate for the number of people who lived in the Americas when
+Columbus landed is 72 million.10 The sheer number of people who
+inhabited the region is evidence that the image of the backward native is
+one of colonial fiction. Latin America was home to empires like the Aztecs,
+with cities and civilizations that dwarfed anything Europe had to offer.
+When Columbus landed on what was then named by Europeans,
+
+Hispaniola, rather than finding so-called primitives, he encountered a
+complex society that had a strong history of civilization and social order.
+Columbus did the most damage to the island that today is made up of Haiti
+and the Dominican Republic. The Taino and Arawaks who inhabited the
+islands had developed centuries of civilization, were experts in agriculture
+and lived in harmony with the land. From first contact in 1492 up until
+1509, when Columbus ceased to run the island, the population of native
+Taino went from a midpoint estimate of 8 million to just 100,000,11 and by
+1542 there were only 200 left. The scale of death has no parallel in human
+history.12
+Alongside grossly under-portraying the numbers of indigenous people
+erased by Europeans, the bulk of the deaths are attributed to disease. It is
+certainly true that illness was a major killer of tens of millions. Indigenous
+populations did not have immunity to European illnesses like smallpox and
+flu and these spread rapidly. But it would be wrong to excuse the invaders
+for their accidental murder of millions. For one, there is no doubt that the
+invaders could see the result of their presence and the deadly impact of their
+germs. Evidently there were no steps made to stop the spread of disease,
+because genocide was the logic of the European invasion. Instead
+throughout the ensuing period of history we see the exact opposite, with
+germ warfare being used to spread deadly diseases to eradicate indigenous
+populations. For instance, during a siege by Native Americans of Fort Pitt
+(now Pittsburgh) in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of the
+British forces, suggested that the indigenous people should be purposefully
+infected with smallpox ‘by means of [infected] blankets as well as to try
+every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race’. Captain
+Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, a colonial regiment of the British Army,
+later noted that ‘we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the
+smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.’13
+As well as biological warfare contributing to the spread of disease, we
+have to take into account the impact of the reign of colonial terror that
+Europeans executed. Columbus was particularly brutal in his colonization
+of Hispaniola. After his initial voyage he returned to the island in 1493,
+invading with a band of mercenaries and man-eating dogs who rounded up
+the natives and subjugated them violently by ‘hacking, roasting, burning
+and working them to death’.14 Columbus instituted a law of tribute which
+meant that if a native did not meet their quota of collected gold they would
+
+have limbs chopped off. The brutal conditions in which the indigenous
+people were forced to live made their succumbing to disease inevitable.
+Starved of access to their usual diet, sanitary conditions and traditional
+ways of healing, the Taino were unable to resist illness. There is no doubt
+that European diseases would have taken a toll, but their genocidal impact
+was only possible in the context of colonial brutality.15
+It is impossible to overstate, or even imagine, the scale of violence that
+Columbus inflicted on the Taino people. From the outset he saw them as
+subhuman, godless creatures who were to be used as fodder to enrich
+himself and his Spanish benefactors. After he realized he had ended up in
+entirely the wrong place and that the bounty he imagined did not readily
+exist, Columbus exploited the Taino, using them to find gold in newly
+constructed mines, and as commodities in themselves, becoming one of
+Europe’s first slave traders. In an example of the inhumanity and horror
+induced by Columbus, in 1495 his mercenaries rounded up 1,600 Taino.
+Five hundred and fifty were taken in chains and sold into slavery in Spain
+and 650 were shared out between the Spanish colonists. The remaining 400
+were set free but were so terrified that their tormentors would change their
+mind, according to Michele de Cuneo, one of Columbus’s men, many of the
+women with ‘infants at the breast … left their infants anywhere on the
+ground and started to flee like desperate people’.16 This is the terror that
+you are celebrating when you elevate Columbus to a hero worthy of naming
+buildings and cities after, erecting statues of, or marching in a parade in
+honour for. Columbus sparked the deadliest period in human history; it did
+not take long for other European powers to fully immerse themselves in the
+genocidal method.
+Britain entered the Americas later than the Spanish and Portuguese, who
+had an early monopoly over the region. But when the British did get
+involved, they built on what their fellow Europeans had developed. In order
+to establish themselves they had to overcome fierce resistance from the
+indigenous populations. In contrast to the picture book story of backward
+and disorganized natives, the indigenous people were extremely organized
+and resisted Europeans to the bitter end. Hilary Beckles, in his book
+Britain’s Black Debt, explains that one of the reasons that Britain’s first
+slave colony was Barbados in 1630 is because the island had largely been
+abandoned by the native Kalinago people.17 The Kalinago caused hell for
+the Europeans through their resistance and organization. They mostly left
+
+Barbados to build strongholds on St Vincent and Dominica, where they
+maintained resistance and launched raids on other islands. For example, in
+1640, the Kalinago attacked Antigua, killing at least fifty people and
+kidnapping the governor and his family. Resistance accelerated the
+genocidal impulses of the invaders, who viewed the Kalinago as enemies of
+Europe.
+Due to the disruption of British commercial interests on plantations in the
+Caribbean in 1675 ‘“several merchants of London” addressed the Lords of
+Trade and Plantations in support of Governor [of Barbados] Stapleton’s
+extermination plan … to destroy the barbarous savages’.18 The genocidal
+war with the Kalinago continued for a century, replete with expeditions and
+massacres of men, women and children. In 1795 this resistance was
+eventually broken on the stronghold of St Vincent and 5,000 Kalinago were
+transported by the British to the island of Baliceaux. Within four months a
+third had died from starvation and the rest were left to eventually die off in
+horrendous conditions.
+Massacres and removals were a pattern seen across the region, creating
+an industrial method of death that cleared the path for European
+advancement. This genocidal approach to conquest is the hallmark of
+Western development, and an absolutely essential ingredient to building the
+modern world. Columbus is an All American hero because he paved the
+way for the nation to develop. In keeping with Columbus’s model, the
+indigenous people were almost erased from the land with a complete lack of
+regard for their lives.
+During the American Revolutionary War, General George Washington
+launched the Sullivan Expedition to break the resistance of Native
+American Iroquois who had taken up arms for the British. With typical
+brutality, he ordered a scorched earth policy with his expressed intent to
+‘lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most
+effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but
+destroyed.’19 More than forty villages were destroyed and those who
+remained alive fled to Canada. This conquest was vital to victory and for
+establishing the US nation state. We see the same logic present in later
+efforts to expand the nation: the indigenous population of California was
+reduced from an estimated 310,000–750,000 in 1800 to just 18,000 in 1907.
+This was done in part through brutal massacres by death squads. In one
+such event around 1868 at Mill Creek, Norman Kingsley led a massacre of
+
+the Yahi Yana so sustained that he changed his gun mid-shooting because
+his rifle ‘tore up’ the bodies so badly, ‘particularly the babies’.20 A few
+years earlier, during the massacre of the Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek
+in 1864, a Colorado death squad led by former minister John Chivington
+raided a village shooting at unarmed men, women and children, following
+them to the Sand Creek as they fled. Around 150 civilians were slaughtered,
+and the following scene took place:
+One poor woman, heavy with child, fell behind the others racing up
+the stream bed. Soldiers killed her too. Then one of them cut her
+open, and pulling out her unborn baby, he threw the little one down
+on the earth bedside her.21
+Native Americans were erased from their lands and eventually moved onto
+reservations where they would be unable to interfere with the development
+of the United States. In keeping with the celebration of the genocidal
+Columbus, this period in American history is valorized in folklore. There is
+a whole genre of Cowboy movies that show the brave frontier folk battling
+savages and outlaws in order to make their way in the Wild West. The fairytale representation of this history, with the hardworking Europeans bravely
+taming the frontiers, provides the necessary comfort blanket for people
+looking back today. Rather than being the heroes of this history, the new
+Americans built their nation on genocidal slaughter. To recognize this
+would mean honestly accounting for the racist foundations of the nation.
+
+THE FOUNDATION OF THE WEST
+Atrocities in the Americas were not carried out because of some pathology
+within the European settlers. Erasing the natives was a necessary foundation
+upon which to build the development of the West. The expansion out of
+Europe was an essential step in the creation of industrial capitalism because
+it provided all the ingredients for the modern world.
+Columbus’s voyage was supported by the Spanish because he promised
+to bring back riches, and it was this pursuit of gold that drove the
+horrendous labour conditions for the natives of Hispaniola, which
+decimated the population. Later, it was the Gold Rush in the United States
+
+which accelerated expansion west. Rather than gold, Columbus stumbled
+into a far more valuable resource necessary for the West: the land itself. The
+Americas provided the territory necessary for the production that fuelled the
+development of industry. As I will explore in the next chapter on slavery,
+the key commodities that powered the Industrial Revolution were produced
+in the Americas. Cotton and sugar in particular were of outsize importance
+to capitalist growth. Colonizing the region was a pre-condition for slavery:
+once the natives were made extinct the transatlantic slave trade began, to
+provide the labour that built the modern world.
+When Columbus accidentally landed in the Americas, Europe was behind
+most of the world. Religious dogma, war and a Dark Age had caused
+European development to stagnate. Europe did not dominate the world in
+the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century. It was the wealth produced from
+the Atlantic system that propelled the West to the position it is in today.
+Gold and silver from the mines of Brazil allowed European countries to
+amass wealth and make inroads into the East, which was far richer, more
+developed and powerful than Europe at this time. It was the profits from the
+Atlantic that allowed Europe to come to dominate the globe, leading the
+way in industry and science. But none of this was possible without the
+genocide in the Americas. Europe could not spread into the West and allow
+the indigenous people to remain on the land. They had to be cleared away to
+create the blank slate on which the West could be built.
+Think of the Industrial Revolution, so much a part of the progressive
+myth the West tells about itself. I will never forget my A-level History
+course on the subject: the perfect example of schooling as propaganda. We
+learned about the accepted causes of industrial progress, which included the
+ingenuity of European scientists, capital investment, and also a population
+boom that meant there was more demand for goods and therefore the
+market had to work out ways to respond. At this point I did not know the
+specifics but I did wonder how it was possible that transatlantic slavery was
+not part of the discussion, given it was happening at the time and was
+extremely important to the economy. My teacher’s response was very clear.
+We would be ignoring any discussion of either slavery or colonialism
+because it ‘wasn’t in the textbook’ and ‘definitely wouldn’t be in the exam’.
+But if we want an honest assessment of the Industrial Revolution it is
+impossible to separate industry from colonial violence and genocide. Just
+
+consider the issue of population increase that was so central to providing
+the demand for industrial production.
+The Americas were not just a cash-cow, they became an extension of
+Europe. Millions of Europeans flooded into North and South America,
+leaving space for population growth in Europe. If increased demand was a
+key driver of industrialization, there is no honest way to discuss this without
+including the expansion into the West. As more commodities were needed,
+science and industry had to transform to keep up with demand. I cannot
+imagine my teacher’s response had I asked how it was possible for
+Europeans to expand into territory that had tens of millions of native
+inhabitants. Cooperating with the indigenous peoples, sharing land and
+coexisting could never have produced the modern world. In a very concrete
+way the genocide in the Americas cleared the way for the population
+explosion of Europeans and the political and economic systems which
+sustained them.
+Worshipping at the altar of Columbus is tragically the appropriate
+response, given his role in founding the West. It is not an accident that he is
+adulated because nothing that we currently have would have been possible
+without his so-called discovery of the Americas. To pretend that there is
+some way to celebrate the birth of the United States that is free from the
+history of genocide is perhaps worse than the delusional mainstream
+narratives of its beginnings. Not holding a parade, or taking down every
+statue of Columbus, would not alter the rotten foundations of the current
+world order. In a perverse way, both sides of this debate are attempting to
+present a distorted view of the nation. Pro-Columbus forces want to play
+down the negative aspects to ease collective guilt, whilst the anti-Columbus
+faction is hoping to eliminate the colonial nostalgia that makes it difficult
+for minorities to feel at home in the nation. There are many versions of this
+debate relating to all the horrors upon which the West is built. But
+recognition of atrocities does not change either their history or legacy.
+Acknowledging the barbarity of the West is meaningless unless we are
+committed to undoing the system that was created by it. If you are proud to
+be an American, Brit, European, or whatever else, and feel that there is
+some utility in this wicked system then you should proudly celebrate
+Columbus and all his genocidal contemporaries. They forged the way for
+the West, burning, hacking, roasting and enslaving their way along the path
+to the modern world. We can have theoretical debates about whether
+
+genocide was a necessary condition for Western development; in some
+alternate universe perhaps Europeans and the natives are coexisting in
+capitalist harmony, but in our reality, the foundation stone of the West is the
+tens of millions of bodies of the indigenous people of the Americas. If you
+fly the flag for the West then every last one of your heroes is drenched in
+blood. No amount of atonement can alter this basic fact.
+
+SETTLER COLONIALISM IS GENOCIDE
+As uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, settler colonialism in the
+Americas was an essential feature of Western development (it is not
+coincidence that the United States is the richest Western nation), and it is a
+method of imperialism that ‘destroys to replace’.22 Elimination of the
+native population became a necessary feature once the invading population
+became too large. Land and resources were taken away from the natives,
+making their survival almost impossible. In the United States, for example,
+the killing of buffalo for hides by Europeans drastically reduced the stock of
+food available to the indigenous population.23 Destroying indigenous
+peoples’ way of life ultimately led to conflict, and this resistance was used
+as an excuse to annihilate the troublesome savages. The pattern that we saw
+with Kalinago resistance in the Caribbean has been repeated so often that it
+should be treated as a fundamental process of modernity. Europeans needed
+land, the indigenous population resisted its seizure, and so they were
+exterminated. It is a pattern that can be seen across the history of Western
+colonialism around the globe.
+When the British settled in Tasmania, an island off Australia, in the
+nineteenth century, they eradicated between 4,000 and 7,000 of the
+indigenous population, including all of those who were ‘full-blooded
+natives’. Visiting after the native genocide was almost complete, the British
+Reverend Thomas Atkins attributed the ‘“almost extinct” condition of the
+Aborigines to the “universal law in the Divine government” that “savage
+tribes disappear before the progress of the civilized races”’ .24 This
+violence was essential to Enlightenment ideals of progress and White
+supremacy in civilization. The genocide accelerated after a native rebellion
+in 1826: extermination was the method chosen to quell resistance. The
+remainder of the indigenous population were forcibly removed to a
+
+reservation on Flinders Island, where the conditions were so dire that by
+1847 only forty-six remained alive.
+Exactly the same process occurred with the Yuki of California, whose
+population was reduced from between 5,000 and 20,000 to just 300 by
+1864. An article in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1856 justified the
+slaughter of the Yuki by explaining that ‘extermination is the quickest and
+cheapest remedy, and effectually prevents all other difficulties when an
+outbreak [of Indian violence] occurs.’25 Wherever Europeans settled and
+populated in mass numbers the policy of the British in Australia, terra
+nullus or ‘empty land’, was enforced, regardless of the existence of native
+populations. In places like the United States, Latin America and Australia,
+where settler colonialism took hold and millions of Europeans migrated, the
+genocide of the indigenous population was almost total. Space is, after all,
+finite.
+In Australia a debate has been ongoing over whether genocide is the
+correct term to use for the treatment of the Aborigines. Tasmania is often
+cited as a classic case study in genocide, but in Australia there has been
+extreme reluctance to use that label for the nation’s actions. At the height of
+the so-called ‘history wars’ between historians and right-wing
+commentators, Prime Minister John Howard decried the usage of the term
+as ‘outrageous’.26 Australia likes to see itself as a bastion of liberal values
+and multicultural tolerance, preferring to imagine a deluded version of
+history rather than the ugly truth that it is a ‘nation founded on genocide’.27
+As with every other example of settler colonialism, genocide was a
+necessary feature of creating the Australian state. The British did not find
+empty land but a population who had been there for tens of thousands of
+years. Britain’s entry and domination of the land led to the same patterns of
+destruction we saw in the Americas. It is estimated that in 1788 there were
+between 750,000 and 1.2 million Aborigines and by 1900 only 75,000
+remained.28 After the British settled in Melbourne in 1835 the native
+population dropped from more than 10,000 to less than 2,000 in eighteen
+years – a decline of over 80 per cent.29 So stark were the consequences of
+British settlement that in the ten years to 1849 there were only ten children
+born amongst all the native tribes in the area. In Queensland alone it is
+estimated that the death toll of indigenous people during the frontier period
+was at least 50,000.30
+
+In terms of dodging accusations of genocide there is the common refrain
+that much of this death was accidental. Disease or competition for food was
+what led to the expiration of the Aborigines – an unintended consequence
+of industrial progress. We should pour as much scorn on that notion as
+possible. Not only did British settlement lead to the extinguishing of
+countless Aboriginal lives, the settlers knew exactly what they were doing
+and intended that very outcome. The first governor of Western Australia
+pronounced in 1835 that the Aborigines must ‘gradually disappear’ and that
+nothing could ‘prevent the ulterior [sic] Extinction of that Race’.31 In 1913
+the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes celebrated that the inauguration
+of the new national capital at Canberra was ‘taking place “without the
+slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth”’ .32
+Australians were well aware that annexing the land meant the destruction of
+the Aborigines and had no problem watching a ‘backward’ race extinguish
+itself in the face of Darwinian progress. Just as in the United States, the
+settlers were also a key factor in perpetuating genocide.
+Between 1860 and 1895 in Alice Springs approximately 20 per cent of
+the Aboriginal population was lost to disease but 40 per cent to what the
+colonists called ‘dispersal’, a practice that involved clearing the land of the
+natives with the use of force and shootings.33 Queensland was notorious
+for settler violence, supported by the Native Police Force, who created an
+‘environment of terror which governed the lives of Aboriginal people’.34
+Thousands were slaughtered, a subject that the British High Commissioner,
+Arthur Hamilton Gordon, raised with British Prime Minister William
+Gladstone in 1883. He was troubled by the culture of terror in Queensland:
+The habit of regarding the natives as vermin, to be cleared off the
+face of the earth, has given the average Queenslander a tone of
+brutality and cruelty … I have heard men of culture and refinement
+… talk, not only of the wholesale butchery … but of the individual
+murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or
+having to kill some troublesome animal.35
+Such barbarity was not reserved for Queenslanders. In 1824 martial law
+was declared in Bathurst, west of Sydney, to deal with the problem of
+Aboriginal resistance. At a public meeting one of the largest sheep farmers
+declared that ‘the best thing that could be done, would be to shoot all the
+
+blacks and manure the ground with their carcases, which was all the good
+they were fit for !’ At the same meeting it was ‘recommended likewise that
+the Women and Children should especially be shot as the most certain
+method of getting rid of the race’. After martial law was declared the
+Aborigines were savagely attacked, which led to brutal inhumanities such
+as this event recounted by L. E. Threlkeld, a missionary at the time:
+A large number were driven into a swamp, and mounted police rode
+round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until they were
+all destroyed ! When one of the police enquired of the Officer if a
+return should be made of the killed, wounded there were none, all
+were destroyed, Men, Women and Children ! But forty-five heads
+were collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls ! My
+informant, a Magistrate, saw the skulls packed for exportation in a
+case at Bathurst ready for shipment to accompany the commanding
+Officer on his voyage shortly afterwards taken to England.36
+Such colonial brutality is the foundation stone of Australia, which could not
+have come into being without it. Genocide deniers can point to the fact that
+some in the leadership of the British Empire felt uncomfortable about the
+violence, and blame the slaughter on individual acts of the settlers. In
+theory the Aborigines were subjects of the British Crown and therefore
+extended protections. After one of the most notorious massacres, at Myall
+Creek, New South Wales in 1838, the perpetrators were eventually found
+guilty of murder and hanged for killing twenty-eight Aborigines. But it
+appears as though this massacre became notorious because it was one of the
+very few times that any murderers were punished. In fact, the case had to be
+re-tried after they were first acquitted and the perpetrators maintained that
+‘they were not aware that in destroying the aboriginals they were violating
+the law … as it had … been so frequently done in the colony before.’37
+The reality is that slaughter was an essential part of nation building: the
+state was happy to turn a blind eye and to participate in it when necessary.
+It is not as though an enlightened country emerged from this foundation
+of colonial genocide. Australia maintained the logic of empire and
+continued to treat its Aboriginal population as less than human. In 1956 in
+the Maralinga Lands in South Australia, Aborigines were removed from
+their lands to make way for atomic bomb tests. They were left wandering
+
+the desert and many died from starvation and thirst. Conditions were so bad
+that parliament commissioned a report, which condemned the awful fact
+that Aborigines were going ‘blind and dying from thirst’ in a nation as rich
+as Australia. But the report was dismissed as alarmist by politicians and the
+right-wing press. In an ominous sign of what was to come, none other than
+a young Rupert Murdoch flew in to investigate and found that the report
+was ‘“hopelessly exaggerated” and that “these fine native people have
+never enjoyed better conditions”’ .38 Aboriginal life was, and in many
+ways continues to be, expendable in the pursuit of Australian so-called
+progress.
+The more controversial dimension of the Australian genocide is the very
+clear attempt to biologically absorb the Aborigines, or to put it another way,
+to breed them out of existence. In Western Australia the 1936 Native
+Administration Act outlawed the marriage of so-called ‘half castes’ with
+supposedly ‘full bloods’, language steeped in the ideas of racial science. A.
+O. Neville (ironically titled ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’) was clear that
+the aim of this law was that Australia would be able to ‘forget that there
+ever were any aborigines’.39 This followed a precedent set by the
+Department of the Interior, which prohibited Aborigines from interracial
+‘mating’, but also from sexual union with women of ‘part aboriginal blood’.
+They were making ‘every endeavour to breed out the colour by elevating
+female half-castes to the White standard’.40 In both law and policy this aim
+was being driven by the state. Neville explained the policy of using socalled ‘half castes’ in domestic service:
+Our policy is to send them out into the white community, and if a
+girl comes back pregnant our rule is to keep her for two years. The
+child is then taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees
+her again. Thus these children grow up as whites, knowing nothing
+of their own environment. At the expiration of the period of two
+years the mother goes back into service so it really does not matter if
+she has half a dozen.41
+The region’s records from this period corroborate the impact of this sordid
+abuse of Aboriginal women. They reveal ‘a remarkably high rate of
+pregnancy for girls indentured to service, especially those sent to the
+cities’.42
+
+None of this should be surprising, given how Australia treated the
+children of Aborigines. Between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal
+children were removed from their families between around 1910 and
+1970.43 Those of mixed descent were particularly preyed upon, given the
+intent to breed out the natives. The award-winning 2002 film Rabbit-Proof
+Fence, based loosely on a true story of three young girls who ran away and
+made it back to their families, documents this history of abuse. Most were
+not so fortunate, and the legacies of the damage done are still being felt. So
+commonplace was the practice of removing children and placing them with
+White families that when researcher Colin Tatz paid a research visit to the
+Retta Dixon Home in Darwin in 1962 he and his wife were offered an
+Aboriginal child for the one-time price of just 25 guineas. So accepted was
+the practice that ‘they didn’t blanch at the prospective “sale”’ but drove
+around for an hour contemplating the offer.44 (In a chilling parallel, in the
+United States and Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there
+were policies of removing native children from their families and placing
+them in boarding schools in order to assimilate them into Western
+culture.)45 The debate about whether the policy of removing children from
+their parents was genocidal is essentially pointless: the intent was to
+forcibly assimilate the Aborigines into Australian life in order to extinguish
+them. It was part of the broader history of the nation where at both the local
+and national level for the majority of the twentieth century the state
+enforced a policy aimed at eventually destroying any trace of the
+Aborigines.46
+The question of whether we apply the genocidal label to Australia
+matters so much because we need to shake ourselves out of the usual
+delusions we apply to the term. One of the objections to using the term is
+that it supposedly diminishes the unique suffering of Jewish people during
+the Holocaust. If incidental killing, or frontier violence, or mating policies
+are equated with the death camps and systematic slaughter of the final
+solution, we are somehow devaluing the horror of what the Nazis did. The
+notion that the violence suffered by Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis
+is unique only holds true if you discount the suffering, torture and brutality
+meted out to those who are not considered White. There is no questioning
+the horrors of the concentration camps, but to elevate the Holocaust to the
+status of primary evil done in the world has the added advantage of
+meaning that our eyes are averted from the brutality that Europe inflicted
+
+across the globe. Race cannot possibly be the defining logic if White people
+suffered the worst crime against humanity. It also allows Western nations to
+distance themselves from evil: Australia is progressive because it is not
+Nazi Germany. To compare the two is therefore heresy because it shatters
+the mirage necessary to maintain the nation’s distorted image of itself. In
+truth the colonial logic of empire was at work in the destruction of both the
+Aborigines and Jewish people. The Holocaust was the logic of empire
+brought into the heart of Europe.
+Before we deal in depth with the Holocaust, it is important to trace the
+genocidal roots of the final solution to German colonialism in Africa.
+German treatment of the natives in their colonies is particularly instructive
+and, given the events of the twentieth century, also hugely influential in
+how we understand the roots of modern genocide.
+After the First World War, as a consequence of defeat, Germany was
+stripped of its colonies. Due to this it is easy to overlook Germany as a
+colonial nation, but make no mistake, the country was a major player in
+imperialism, particularly in Africa. What are now Namibia, Tanzania,
+Rwanda, Cameroon and Togo were part of the German Empire until
+Germany’s defeat in the War. South-west Africa was initially seen as a
+place that Germans could settle in, and as the British had done in India a
+private company, the Society for German Colonization, was established to
+lead the charge. The private enterprise’s progress was slower than expected,
+in large part because of the resistance of the indigenous population, who did
+not roll over and allow German conquest. As Chancellor, in 1891 Bismarck
+bought shares in the company, nationalizing the colonial effort and
+imposing the full force of the German Empire on the region.
+At the turn of the twentieth century the Germans found themselves at a
+military disadvantage to the native Herero and Nama people, who
+outgunned them and were skilled fighters on horseback. This did not
+prevent the colonizers from appropriating land, raping women or forcing
+the natives into work. The practice of rape was ‘so common that German
+settlers had names for it: Verkafferung, or going native, and
+Schmutzwirtschaft, or dirty trade’.47 When the Herero and Nama rose up
+against the Germans in 1904 the invaders were ill equipped to win a war,
+either conventional or guerrilla. As we have seen elsewhere, genocidal logic
+prevailed. In the Schrecklichkeit (extermination) order to his officers,
+
+General Lothar von Trotha proclaimed at Osombo-Windimbe, on 2 October
+1904:
+All Hereros must leave the country. If they do not do so, I will force
+them with cannons to do so. Within the German borders, every
+Herero, with or without weapons … will be shot. I shall no longer
+shelter women and children. They must either return to their people
+or I will shoot them. This is my message to the Herero nation.48
+After being slaughtered in the thousands, the Herero were on the run and
+the Germans purposely forced them to retreat into the desert, fully aware of
+what the consequences would be. Thousands perished in the harsh
+conditions and the remainder were rounded up and put into concentration
+camps. Of the 35,000 Herero forced into such camps between 1904 and
+1906 it is estimated that only 193 survived.49 At least 70,000 Herero and
+30,000 Nama were slaughtered by the Germans in just this two-year period,
+devastating the population. Overall, fighting, hunger and disease killed
+around 250,000 Africans as a result of German campaigns to stop rebellions
+in their southern African colonies.50
+In the present day, the populations have returned to what they were
+before the genocide but the fact it took a hundred years tells us the scale of
+the annihilation. The case of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia has
+recently been in the spotlight because their present-day leaders sued
+Germany in the United States for reparations for this genocide in 2017. The
+reparations suit aims for historical redress for the mass slaughter and uses
+the $90 billion paid to the survivors of the Jewish Holocaust as its
+precedent.51 Linking the atrocities in Namibia to the Holocaust is
+important because German actions in Africa were the precursor to the mass
+murder of Jewish people almost half a century later. All the ingredients
+existed: concentration camps, racial science, and of course genocide. The
+annihilation of the Herero and Nama was the first genocide of the twentieth
+century, and it provided the blueprint for what was to come.
+The genocide was committed in large part by up to 14,000 soldiers and
+became part of the folklore of the German nation. As though it were a
+routine holiday destination, ‘a host of photographs [were] taken, and made
+into picture postcards of soldiers sent with greetings from afar and
+representing anything from concentration camps, over [sic] emaciated
+
+prisoners in chains to execution scenes’.52 Gustav Frenssen’s 1906 novel
+Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest was a gruesome celebration of the horrors
+of the genocide told as an adventure of the German Empire. Not only was it
+translated into several languages (including English), it sold 400,000 copies
+in Germany up until 1945 and became standard school reading from 1908
+until it fell out of favour with the fall of the Nazi regime.53 Genocide in
+Namibia set an important precedent for the nation that may well have been
+a necessary pre-condition for the Holocaust.
+
+THE HOLOCAUST IS MODERNITY
+During the Second World War the lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term
+genocide. He was of Polish Jewish descent and lost almost fifty family
+members to the Nazi Holocaust that devastated Europe, so it is no surprise
+that he dedicated his life to defining and creating a legal framework for the
+prevention of genocide. Up until this point there was no conceptual or legal
+definition of the mass slaughter of particular groups and he based the word
+on the Greek genos (for tribe, race or family) and Latin cide (killing),
+explaining that genocide was the ‘crime of destroying national, racial or
+religious groups’.54 The horrors of the Holocaust reshaped much of the
+way that we think about the world, including defining generational
+slaughter.
+Undoubtedly the annihilation of 6 million Jewish people by the Nazis is
+one of history’s worst atrocities. The manner in which families were
+rounded up, forced into concentration camps and gassed to death as the
+‘final solution’ left a sickening trail of destruction. ‘Never again’ rightly
+became the mantra across Europe after seeing the consequences of
+genocidal logic in Germany. But the way that we understand the Holocaust
+detracts from an honest assessment of genocide and its fundamental role in
+shaping the West.
+Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote Modernity and the Holocaust in
+1989, which upended how we view the genocide. Having fled from the
+Nazis himself he was keenly aware of the brutality and significance of the
+Holocaust but disturbed by the mainstream narrative. British Historian
+Everett Hughes was typical of the dominant account:
+
+The National Socialist Government of Germany carried out the most
+colossal piece of ‘dirty work’ in history on the Jews. The crucial
+problems concerning such an occurrence are (1) who are the people
+who actually carry out such work and (2) what are the circumstances
+in which other ‘good’ people allow them to do it? What we need is
+better knowledge of the signs of their rise to power and better ways
+of keeping them out of power.55
+If we understand the Holocaust in this way then the genocide is an
+aberration in complete contrast to the progressive ideals of Western
+development. Hitler and his gang of Nazis are the bogeymen of history,
+pure evil in human form, whose type need to be prevented from seizing
+power by any means necessary. Evil is located at the individual level and
+soul searching is done to work out why so many people followed their
+sinister tune.
+Rather than seeing the Holocaust as an aberration, going against the
+principles of the West, Bauman argued that
+The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fullyeradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate
+resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at
+home in any other house.56
+In other words, to see the Holocaust as the result of evil people who are not
+modern is to miss the point. The logic of the Holocaust is the logic of
+Western development. When we acknowledge this we can see the fallacies
+within the dominant approach to ‘never again’. As we have already seen in
+this chapter, while the Holocaust was a horrendously brutal genocide, it
+does not stand alone in human history and certainly not within the
+formation of the West. Since 1492 genocide has been a key organizing
+principle of the rise of Western modernity, from the annihilation of tens of
+millions in the Americas and the Caribbean, to the almost total eradication
+of the Aborigines in Tasmania. The Holocaust represents colonial practices
+coming into play in Europe. Africans, Asians and indigenous people being
+slaughtered by Europeans did not trouble the psyche of the West, but seeing
+colonial violence enacted on White bodies meant a complete rethinking of
+long-held paradigms of race and power. Jewish people were racialized into
+
+a subhuman position using the same racial science that justified colonial
+brutality.
+The fact that the term genocide only came to exist in the West during the
+Holocaust is testament enough to the problem. Systematic killing of
+hundreds of millions of ‘savages’ in the colonies did not merit the creation
+of a new concept. There was unfortunately very little that was remarkable
+about mass murder of the Black and Brown. As is evident from even the
+smallest glance at history, the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia
+is the grandfather of the Holocaust. But in the cases seeking for reparations
+against Germany the government continues to resist calling the
+indiscriminate slaughter a genocide. In a perverse way they are correct to do
+so. The reason that the concept of genocide was not conceived of in the
+West until the Holocaust is that the term does not apply to those deemed
+subhuman, and the inhumanity of those that the Europeans encountered was
+presumed from the outset.
+In 1550 the question of whether the indigenous people of the Americas
+‘had a soul or not’ was put to a theological trial in Valladolid. Bartolomé de
+las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda debated the issue, with las Casas
+eventually prevailing in his proposition that although the natives were
+backward they nevertheless had a soul and so could be Christianized.57
+Prior to this declaration it was assumed that the natives were subhuman and
+therefore their annihilation and enslavement by Europeans was perfectly
+acceptable. Las Casas had been arguing for the rights of the indigenous
+Americans for years but at this point there was no doubt in the European
+mind that Africans were inhuman beasts, more akin to animals than
+humans. In fact, las Casas argued that indigenous slave labour could be
+replaced with savage beasts from Africa. Transatlantic slavery was one of
+the single most barbaric and murderous of systems and was justified by the
+belief that Africans were not people.
+It should come as no surprise then that even when the atrocities
+committed in the colonies were so egregious that they turned the stomachs
+of Europeans, their perpetration did not lead to any conceptual change in
+the West. As reward for organizing the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 that
+literally carved up Africa and divided it between the European powers,
+King Leopold II was granted the Congo Free State. We have already seen
+many examples of the European presumption that inhabited land was the
+possession of the colonizers. But this was a step beyond the usual: Congo
+
+was the personal possession of Leopold, who engaged his own private army
+to rule the region.58 The result was perhaps one of the most extreme and
+brutal colonial regimes, one that stands out even in the horrors of the time.
+As a direct result of Leopold’s reign from 1885 to 1908, approximately
+10 million, or half of the entire population of Congo were killed. Leopold’s
+atrocities were crafted in the furnaces of Enlightenment thought, which led
+him to actually believe he was on a noble mission. He declared that ‘to open
+to civilization the only part of our globe which it has yet to penetrate, to
+pierce the darkness which envelops entire peoples, is, I dare to say, a
+crusade worthy of this century of progress.’59 Massacres, starvation and
+extreme physical cruelty accounted for the mass loss of life, but even in
+current literature there is debate about whether the deaths amounted to
+genocide.60 In the twisted logic of Western scholarship, the intent to wipe
+out the population is seen as a vital ingredient for mass deaths to qualify as
+a genocide. In Congo much of the murder was done in efforts to get the
+natives to work rather than to erase the population. But when we consider
+the horrific brutality of Leopold’s regime it should be obvious that if we do
+not consider it a genocide, that is only because of a deeply problematic
+definition of the word.
+Congo is rubber rich and Leopold made a fortune extracting it. In a
+macabre similarity to Columbus four centuries earlier, he forced the locals
+to collect his bounty with horrific tactics. Not meeting your quota meant the
+amputation of your hand, even for small children. A particularly, but not
+uncommonly, gruesome account from a sub-agent of the Anversoise Trust,
+which Leopold set up to rule in Congo, told the story of being
+sent into a village to ascertain if the natives were collecting rubber,
+and in the contrary case to murder all, including men, women and
+children. We found the natives sitting peaceably. We asked them
+what they were doing. They were unable to reply, thereupon we fell
+upon them all, and killed them without mercy. An hour later we
+were joined by X—, and told him what had been done. He
+answered, ‘It is well, but you have not done enough !’ Thereupon he
+ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the
+village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women
+and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.61
+
+Obviously, Leopold did not want to annihilate all the natives because if he
+did he would have no one to do his labour. Settler colonialism was not an
+option for a state owned by one man. But to debate whether the acts that led
+to the deaths of 10 million people are genocide demonstrates the conceptual
+problem at the heart of modernity. Black and Brown death simply is of less
+value intellectually. The definition of genocide is taken from the Nazi aim
+to eradicate all Jews and if we accept that as the definition of genocide then
+it would not apply in the case of Congo. But the fact that we have no word
+to account for the killing (intentionally or otherwise) of millions of people
+shows how little thought went into the problem of colonial genocides.
+It is also noteworthy that, alongside the Holocaust, Lemkin repeatedly
+cited the Armenian genocide in 1915 as a motivator for a new language
+surrounding ethnic violence. The Armenian genocide was also horrendous:
+up to 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Ottoman Empire in
+Turkey, over fears that they would join the war effort against the Empire,
+which was allied with Germany in the First World War.62 But it is telling
+that the systematic murder of a Christian minority by a Muslim empire
+would be central for the conceptual framework of the term genocide. There
+is no doubt in Western philosophy that the Christian victim has a soul and is
+therefore worthy of conceptual consideration. Colonial slaughter like that in
+Congo has not, and maybe could never have had the same impact on
+Western thought.
+Apart from the sheer scale of the brutality, events in Congo stand out
+because they drew widespread condemnation from the rest of Europe. An
+international campaign to end the regime of terror in the Free State emerged
+to bring an end to the slaughter. In 1908 the Belgian parliament bowed to
+pressure and took Congo away from the sole control of Leopold. But before
+we celebrate this as some momentous victory and turning point in Europe’s
+relationship to the peoples of the colonies, we should tread with extreme
+caution. No doubt the massacres, rapes, and mutilation of children had an
+impact and brought home the realities of other nations’ own colonial
+brutality. But Edmund Morel, a British journalist who was one of the
+leading anti-Leopold campaigners, was honest in his objections to the Free
+State. As well as humanitarian concerns he was deeply troubled that
+Leopold’s private fiefdom was a ‘destruction of [the] commercial
+relationship between the European and the African’.63 Not only was
+Leopold disrupting free trade in the region with his monopoly of Congo, in
+
+his excessive brutality he was endangering the colonial relationship
+between Africa and Europe. The British have always favoured an approach
+to colonial exploitation that left enough room for them to pretend they were
+doing the savages a favour by nobly picking up the ‘White man’s burden’ to
+civilize the world. Mutilated children and mass killings put that fantasy
+beyond reasonable reach. Leopold had his playground taken away, but the
+exact same relationship of exploitation and a more managed brutality
+continued in its place. The rest of Europe also carried on with empire
+without the reality of their genocidal logic ever hitting home. That was
+impossible, until victims who we consider to be White were caught within
+the very same mechanisms.
+Nazis justified the Holocaust using the same racial science that
+legitimized genocide, slavery and colonialism in the colonies. Germany was
+at the forefront of racial science because of its genocidal approach in South
+West Africa. At a ceremony in Berlin in 2018, Germany handed back
+human remains including nineteen skulls from Africans in the region, but
+still holds 1,000 skulls it took between 1884 and 1915 to conduct scientific
+experiments.64 The archive of knowledge for scientific racism was built of
+such macabre colonial exploits that provided rigorous ‘evidence’ of the
+inferiority of Africans. Notorious Nazi scientist Eugen Fischer, whose work
+influenced Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, cut his teeth researching in Namibia
+in 1905 during the genocide. He created a device to categorize the ‘races’, a
+box with thirty different strands of hair from blonde to black, with colour
+and texture often meaning the difference between ‘life and death’.65 In a
+testament to how widespread these ideas were, he gave this device to Karl
+Pearson, who was one of the people who invented the field of statistics, at
+University College London in 1908. Pearson was the protégé of Francis
+Galton who pioneered the study of eugenics, which aimed to create a
+superior human family by breeding only the best stock and sterilizing the
+poor and non-White. These ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ were mainstream and
+powerful in the early twentieth century. Tens of thousands of poor and
+minority women in America were put through enforced sterilization and the
+notion of lesser peoples was used to limit immigration into the United
+States from Eastern European nations deemed to produce those of spoiled
+stock.
+Jewish people became subject to the same genocidal logic as natives in
+the colonies because they were rendered subhuman by racial science.
+
+Galton made it clear that ‘Jews are specialised for a parasitical existence’,
+and the eugenicists agreed that they were on a lower ladder of human
+development.66 The Nazis were not only influenced but also inspired by
+the network of Western scholars in esteemed universities who provided the
+‘evidence’ that Jews were less than human. They even copied the US
+sterilization laws as one of the first steps to eliminate the backward race.
+The Holocaust was the logic of race brought to bear within Europe. Racism
+is as essential to the West as water is to human beings, so in looking to
+explain the Holocaust we should not look for reasons outside the system
+itself.
+Bauman explains that only modernity could produce the Holocaust,
+because of notions of scientific rationality developed in the Enlightenment.
+Annihilating 6 million people over the course of a few years required an
+efficiency and cold-blooded ruthlessness perfected in Western development.
+Nazi scientists studied the most efficient methods to kill, devising the most
+effective gas for the desired effect. The process of massacre in gas
+chambers resembled the bureaucratic mechanisms of the assembly line.
+Race was used to determine that Jewish people were subhuman and
+capitalist bureaucracy was enacted to dispose of the unwanted people. Race,
+bureaucracy, science and rationality, all key principles of modernity, came
+together to produce a genocide, one of the key mechanisms for the
+development of the West. The uncomfortable truth is that the Nazis did not
+undermine the governing principles of the West, they took them to their
+extreme, with deadly consequences. The simple ‘never again’ rhetoric
+misses the mark so widely because it presents the West as the solution,
+when in fact it was the system that was the problem all along. The call is
+coming from inside the house that produced the Holocaust, and we can see
+this same logical fallacy with how modern-day genocides are understood.
+
+POST-COLONIAL GENOCIDE
+Between April and July 1994 approximately 1 million Rwandans were
+massacred in the worst genocide since the Holocaust. At its conclusion 70
+per cent of the Tutsi (who were the primary target for annihilation) in the
+country had been killed.67 Images of Africans butchering other Africans
+with machetes cast the genocide as being derived from a barbarism that
+
+went decidedly against the progressive values of the West. A tribal blood
+feud between the Hutus and Tutsis perfectly fits the narrative of savage
+Africa, unable to resist urges for violence and division. The West, and the
+United States in particular, faced a lot of criticism for not intervening in the
+violence sooner and for their reluctant to term the slaughter a genocide.
+Declaring a genocide would have included a responsibility to react, and the
+West was reluctant to do so. Rwanda had no strategic relevance and the
+United States had already suffered an embarrassment in Somalia in 1993,
+immortalized in the film Black Hawk Down, where a US helicopter was hit
+with a rocket-propelled grenade. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time
+of the Rwandan massacre, admitted in an interview with CNN in 2013 that
+the slow response cost lives, saying, ‘If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we
+could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost. It had an
+enduring impact on me.’ Whilst on a state visit to Rwanda in 1998 he
+apologized for the error, blaming a lack of awareness:
+It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who
+lost members of your family, but all over the world there were
+people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not
+fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being
+engulfed by this unimaginable terror.68
+It was in fact incredibly strange for the president to claim ignorance, when
+it was later revealed that the US government knew the scale of the slaughter
+almost immediately. Although the administration did not use the word
+publicly until 25 May, at least as early as 23 April internal memos to the
+government warned of the need to ‘stop the genocide’, and the words ‘final
+solution’ were used to describe the situation to officials.69 Worse still, both
+the CIA and US officials were well aware of the escalating tensions before
+the genocide and the US provided arms to neighbouring Uganda in full
+knowledge that these were crossing into Rwanda.70 All sorts of pragmatic
+and cynical reasons existed for the US in particular, and the West in general,
+to sit on their hands whilst the Tutsis were being exterminated. But the fact
+that the United Nations only officially designated the systematic
+annihilation of one ethnic group a genocide in February 2014 is a testament
+to the conceptual problem of genocide in the colonies. As we have seen
+throughout this chapter, the deaths of the Black and Brown do not matter in
+
+the formation of the West. Genocide is a category reserved for the human
+and even in the twenty-first century our presence in that category has to be
+argued for.
+The hand-wringing over the delayed response from the West in
+preventing the genocide is also problematic. It is entirely disempowering to
+portray the West as the benevolent hero in a tale of African savagery. Here
+again we can see the narrative of the ‘White man’s burden’ being to civilize
+the colonies. We can also see the same conceptual error as we did with the
+Holocaust: that the Rwandan genocide was anti-Western, caused by tribal
+barbarity. In reality, the unspeakable horror of Rwanda was entirely a
+production of Western imperialism.
+Hutus and Tutsis existed as distinct groups long before colonization by
+Europe, a process which began in earnest in 1890 when Germany was
+granted the region. Belgium also had an early influence in Rwanda due to
+the lack of clarity over borders until 1900. Although the different ethnic
+groups existed and there were tensions between the minority Tutsis and
+majority Hutus, the Europeans institutionalized and racialized these
+differences into solid absolutes that meant a person’s tribe determined their
+role in the colony. Missionaries began this process, with one of the first
+schools being opened in 1905 by Father Classe, who explained that the
+purpose was to ‘turn the Tutsi, the “born rulers” of Rwanda into an elite
+“capable of understanding and implementing progress”’ .71 The school was
+solely for Tutsis and if a stray Hutu was educated their instruction was in
+Swahili rather than the supposedly more civilized French. Once the
+Belgians took over the colony in 1916 they fully implemented a system of
+division that included forced labour for Hutus and a regime in which the
+highest local administrator was always a Tutsi chief. The 1933–4 census
+cemented the institutionalization of this policy by categorizing the
+population as either Tutsi, Hutu or Twa (another ethnic group in the region).
+It was not an arbitrary decision to elevate the Tutsi over the Hutu in
+Rwanda, but one rooted in racist ideas that the Belgians institutionalized.
+To explain the scientific superiority of Africa historically, European
+scholars had to create racial mythologies. Burning books or Whitewashing
+the names of scholars would only go so far. Hegel is famous for drawing a
+distinction between European Africa and Africa Proper, but there is a long
+history of that idea. We should reject the term sub-Saharan Africa out of
+hand because it is built on the premise that proper Africa is where the
+
+savage Black people live and the north is inhabited by a different, more
+civilized race. This belief was etched onto Rwandan society by way of the
+Tutsis tending to be taller and lighter-skinned that the Hutus, a physical
+difference that was seized upon as proof of their superiority. When the
+Belgians colonized Rwanda they did so believing the Hamitic myth that a
+Tutsi was a ‘European under a black skin’ rather than an African.72
+Ham is a biblical character, the son of Noah, who saw his father naked
+and drunk. As punishment for embarrassing him in front of his other sons,
+Noah cursed Ham’s son Canaan to be the ‘servant of servants’. The curse of
+Ham was used to justify both the Arab and European enslavement of
+Africans because Ham’s descendants were understood to have Black skin
+and the curse of servitude became linked to their colour.73 However, the
+Hamitic myth takes the same story and turns it on its head. In the version
+applied to Rwanda the Tutsis were claimed as the descendants of Ham cast
+into the wilderness in order to prove they were superior to real Africans.
+Based on anthropological studies, including of course examination of
+skulls, it was concluded that all inhabitants of Africa were not created
+equally, and the Hamites were identified as Caucasians with black skin. As
+academic Mahmood Mamdani explains,
+Every sign of ‘progress’ on the Dark Continent was now taken as
+evidence of a civilizing influence of an outsider race. This race of
+civilizers, it was said, were Caucasians who were black in color
+without being Negroid in race.74
+Unfortunately, both the Hutu and Tutsi leant into this racialization of their
+differences. Tutsis largely accepted the benefits of being the privileged
+colonial class and the Hutus built up an anti-Tutsi sentiment based on the
+supposedly foreign nature of their ruling class. While creating
+independence movements in the 1950s, Hutu nationalism coalesced around
+the slogan ‘Hutu Power’, whilst the Tutsi leadership attempted to maintain
+their colonial position. Colonial borders did not help matters, since the
+Hutu/Tutsi split was not contained in the neat parcels of land the Europeans
+made into nation states. Neighbouring Burundi was also Tutsi-controlled
+and supported Tutsi incursions to gain power in Rwanda. After a raid on the
+capital Kigali in 1963, between 5,000 and 20,000 Tutsis were massacred
+and a Hutu republic was declared in 1964 that removed all Tutsis from
+
+political office. In Burundi, which had very similar dynamics, 200,000 of
+the Hutu majority population were slaughtered to quell unrest. The postcolonial Hutu (Bantu)/Tutsi (Hamite) division based on race and sealed in
+blood was complete.
+The 1994 genocide came after a civil war sparked by the Tutsi Rwandan
+Patriotic Front (RPF) seizing land in Rwanda. By the time of the genocide
+the RPF had made substantial gains and one in seven Hutus from Rwanda
+were refugees who had fled from RPF-controlled areas. ‘Hutu Power’ made
+a strong comeback in Rwanda due to the war and fears of being dominated
+by the Tutsis again. A central part of this project was to restore the Hamitic
+myth and confirm that Tutsis were an alien race. By April 1994 a
+compromise sharing of power had been agreed and the Hutu republic had to
+concede to Tutsi representation. However, on 6 April a plane carrying the
+Hutu presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira
+Burundi was shot down. This act unleashed the anti-Tutsi sentiment that
+had been building up and when news spread the massacres began almost
+immediately. Given the scale of the violence, the genocide was wellplanned, with the groundwork being prepared some time in advance. But
+the roots of the slaughter were planted almost a century earlier with the
+racialization and institutionalization of tribal difference by Europeans. This
+is not to excuse the actions of the murderers but to understand their
+behaviour in the context that produced it.
+There are key similarities to the process of colonial genocide we have
+seen elsewhere. We have the idea of different racial groups pitted against
+one another and conflict that arises due to the clashes between the groups.
+When faced with defeat (in this case, power-sharing) the Hutu extremists
+did what all European forces in the colonies did, which was to exterminate
+the enemy to eliminate the threat. The history, logic, context and execution
+were not alien to the modern world: just as with the Holocaust, the
+Rwandan genocide was the product of the colonial logic of Western
+imperialism.
+Genocide is an essential component of the current political and economic
+order. The West was founded upon genocide in the Americas and the
+Caribbean and was sustained with colonial slaughter around the globe.
+Western prosperity is propped on the countless bodies sacrificed for socalled development. Instead of engaging with the brutality of the system,
+
+the popular imagination pictures genocides as the product of evil-doers and
+savages committing atrocities contrary to Western values of reason and
+tolerance. But as we have seen, the roots of genocides such as the Holocaust
+and the horrors in Rwanda are a product of the West, which that could only
+have occurred in the house built on the violence of Enlightenment thought.
+To understand that genocide is a central pillar of the West is to begin to
+unpick the myths that sustain the illusions of progress. Just as genocide still
+echoes in the present day, so too does the next foundation stone of the West
+that we will explore: transatlantic slavery.
+
+3
+
+Slavery
+On 9 February 2018 the Twitter account of Her Majesty’s Treasury posted
+the following surprising #FridayFact:
+Did you know that in 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its
+national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire? The
+amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so
+large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living
+British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.
+Whoever sent out the post seemed to think that the public would be proud
+that ‘millions of you’ helped end the slave trade through your taxes. We
+have become so accustomed to historical inaccuracies in understanding
+transatlantic slavery that we can set aside the lack of any distinction
+between the slave trade, abolished in 1807, and slavery itself, which
+continued until 1838 and is the subject of the #FridayFact. But the idea that
+the public would be happy we have been paying taxes for the ‘freedom’ of
+the so-called slaves is so offensive that this tweet should only make sense as
+a macabre parody. The revelation that I and generations of family
+descended from those enslaved in the Caribbean effectively paid
+compensation to slave owners is sickening, not comforting.
+Slavery was formally abolished in the British Empire by the Slavery
+Abolition Act passed in 1833, which became law in 1834. However, even
+
+though slavery was abolished, the enslaved were forced into what was
+called ‘apprenticeship’ for four further years. This meant having to spend
+three-quarters of their time working on the former slave plantations, for no
+wages. A funny sort of freedom. Perversely, the system was justified on the
+basis that the enslaved had to be trained into the ways of wage labour. The
+savages obviously could not be expected to understand how to be free. In
+defence of apprenticeship, Sir James Carmichael Smyth declared that the
+‘transition from the dejected and almost naked slave to the cheerful and
+decently clad labourer could only be believed by those who had recently
+revisited the colony after an absence of several years’.1 In reality,
+apprenticeship did not have the welfare of the formerly enslaved in mind.
+The goal was to ensure that the slave owners should not ‘lose … the benefit
+to which they were entitled to by contract’ of slavery.2 Therefore the
+enslaved had to pay for their own freedom by continuing to work for free, a
+key part of history oddly missing from the Treasury’s fun #FridayFact. The
+other essential ingredient absent from their tweet was from who exactly the
+British taxpayer bought the freedom of the enslaved. Just as with
+apprenticeship, the money went to compensate slave owners for their loss
+of wealth.
+In a shock development, the news that we have been paying slave owners
+with our tax money was not something the public widely celebrated.
+Especially considering that millions of us are descendants of the very
+enslaved who were not only never compensated but were also forced to
+work off their ‘debt’ to their masters. This incident speaks to the truth of
+slavery and Britain, but also the fantasy version of history that operates in
+the dominant historical narrative. Britain should, apparently, be proud of
+ending slavery but not feel guilty about profiting from it.
+The reparation payment for slave owners is of an unprecedented scale in
+British history. Twenty million pounds represented 40 per cent of the entire
+expenditure of the British government in 1833. In today’s money the
+payment would be the equivalent to £17 billion.3 But £20 million
+represented around 5 per cent of GDP in 1833, which would be over £100
+billion in 2020. Whichever number you prefer, it is clearly a massive
+transfer of wealth by the government. The only government pay-out in
+history that was larger was the one made to bail out the banks after the 2008
+financial crisis, which cost £200 billion. However, that was a series of loans
+that have supposedly been paid back since. There simply is no other
+
+example of the equivalent of over £100 billion to compensate for private
+individual losses, an amount of money so overwhelming that the
+government had to take a loan from the Bank of England that was so large it
+took 182 years to pay back. The fact the government invested so much
+money in this bailout demonstrates just how essential the plantation system
+was to the economy.
+Transatlantic slavery was the fuel that powered Western development. It
+was the massive wealth derived from the system that allowed the West to
+catch up with and then overtake the rest of the world. Slavery was not new:
+Europe developed on the back of the Arab slave trade that was hundreds of
+years old when Columbus sailed back from Hispaniola with indigenous
+Americans to sell into slavery. But the transatlantic trade was a unique
+development, reducing Africans to subhuman commodities who became the
+major currency for Western progress. By 1833, however, the system had
+begun to fray.
+The Haitian revolution in 1804 had been a major factor in Britain
+abandoning the trade from Africa: the British were terrified of Africans who
+would revolt in the Caribbean. Between 1831 and 1832 the Christmas
+Rebellion of the enslaved in Jamaica led by Sam Sharpe also shook the
+British commitment to slavery.4 Over 20,000 enslaved Africans took part
+and more than 300 were executed in the aftermath. Rebellion and resistance
+had made the system dangerous and less profitable. Sugar, which was the
+primary product in the British Caribbean, was also becoming cheaper and
+faced competition from new producers in places like India, who could pay
+close to slave-labour rates without the same risks. The plantation economies
+were in danger of collapse, which would have ruined the wider British
+economy.
+Britain was not alone. The entire Western economic system depended on
+the wealth from slavery. That wealth remains with us to this day, as does the
+poverty created through the brutal system. We think of slavery as belonging
+to the distant past, but the world we live in remains created in its image.
+
+LEGACIES OF SLAVERY
+Britain was by no means the only country to engage in the slave system, nor
+to give reparations to its slave owners at abolition. Denmark, the
+
+Netherlands and Spain all paid out compensation, and as I will discuss in
+more depth later, France forced Haiti to pay over 150 million francs for
+having the audacity to successfully revolt against slavery. After claiming its
+independence from Britain, the United States rose to become one of the
+primary nations reliant on slavery. Lincoln authorized compensation for
+slave owners in order to achieve emancipation in Virginia in 1862. Every
+enslaved African freed merited a payment of $100, over $2,500 in today’s
+money, and the largest individual pay-out was $18,000, the equivalent of
+almost $500,000.5 Compensation was not widespread in the United States;
+in fact after the Civil War General Sherman confiscated slave owners’ land
+and promised each emancipated African 40 acres and the use of a mule to
+tend the land, in reparation for their toil and suffering. But this order was
+reversed by President Andrew Johnson, who compensated the slave owners
+for their losses by returning the land taken from the defeated Confederacy.6
+Britain is unique, however, in that it holds a comprehensive record of
+where the slave reparations went, thanks to the Legacies of British Slave
+Ownership project at University College London (UCL). The project has
+documented the 47,000 recipients of payments to try to establish where the
+money ended up.7 What is abundantly clear from these records is just how
+widespread slave ownership was. The church, politicians, banks and
+thousands of individuals had personal stakes in slavery; and all were
+compensated at abolition. Among the notable people with links to slavery
+reparations are former prime minister David Cameron and his wife, who
+both have beneficiaries in their families. Samantha Cameron is descended
+from William Jolliffe, who received the equivalent of £3 million for his
+holding of 164 enslaved Africans. Slave-owning members of David
+Cameron’s family include Sir James Duff, who also received the equivalent
+of £3 million for his 202 enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Cameron is not the
+only British prime minister with links to the slave trade. William
+Gladstone’s father received £83 million in today’s money to compensate for
+his loss of the labour of the 2,508 enslaved Africans he owned across a
+number of Caribbean plantations. The news of Cameron’s links to slaveowner reparations was particularly egregious given that he famously told
+the Jamaican parliament in 2015 that their demands for reparations for
+being the victims of slavery were falling on deaf ears and that it was time to
+‘move on’.8
+
+Researchers at UCL were also keen to follow this money into
+investments in British industry. They found that the money was invested
+across society, including in the railways, industry and philanthropy.
+Financial services were particularly implicated in slavery: the Bank of
+England has recently acknowledged that many of the Bank’s directors in the
+eighteenth century were slave-owners or their descendants. The practice of
+banks using the enslaved as security for loans also ‘permeated banking’.9
+Insurance brokers were central to the slave system, underwriting the
+hazardous journeys of slave ships and also the plantations in the Americas
+and Caribbean, and slave owners were constant features on the boards of
+insurance companies. Two of the first five presidents of what is now Royal
+Sun Alliance, one of the biggest insurance firms today, were slave owners,
+and the group grew by incorporating slave-owner dominated companies.
+Accounting was no different: two of the largest firms in the world today,
+Deloitte and Price Waterhouse Coopers, were founded by families enriched
+by profits from slavery. By accounting for the slave compensation money,
+the UCL project demonstrated just some of the afterlives of slavery. But the
+extent to which Britain, and the West as a whole, engorged itself on slavery
+cannot be captured solely in the money from slave-owner compensation.
+As we have already seen, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas was the
+starting point of the West. Expansion across the Atlantic marked the shift
+from the limits of Europe to the endless possibilities of the so-called New
+World. Resources and labour were two of the elements that were essential
+to unlocking the wealth across the Atlantic, and slavery became central to
+both for over three centuries. Minerals such as gold, and other commodities
+that powered the industrial development of products like tobacco, sugar and
+cotton were all produced across the Atlantic, providing the fuel for Western
+expansion. In the first instance the natives were put to work, but genocide
+meant there were not enough workers to sustain production. European
+indentured labourers, conscripted as serfs to toil on the plantations for a
+limited number of years, were favoured by Britain into the seventeenth
+century. But when demand grew the nation enthusiastically embraced slave
+labour, in which the Spanish and Portuguese had been pre-eminent from the
+fifteenth century. Enslaving Africans to be put to work in the Americas and
+Caribbean became the basis of production in the Atlantic system, which
+was ‘the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the
+
+machine which sets every wheel in motion’ for the development of the
+West.10
+Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944,
+remains the go-to book for the case that slavery provided the fuel for British
+development. He painstakingly outlined how central slave labour and
+produce was to British industry and the development of capital. A chilling
+example is the case of Lloyd’s of London, which is now one of Britain’s
+largest companies, with assets in excess of £50 billion. In 2014 I remember
+watching an executive on BBC Breakfast News celebrating the company’s
+325th anniversary and being proud of their roots in ‘insuring the merchant
+trade’. What she neglected to mention was that what Lloyd’s cut their teeth
+on insuring was the slave trade. But Lloyd’s commitment to slavery predated its involvement in the trade, as Williams explains:
+In the early years, when Lloyd’s was a coffee house and nothing
+more, many advertisements in the London Gazette about runaway
+slaves listed Lloyd’s as the place where they should be returned.11
+Following the global protests after the murder of George Floyd, Lloyd’s
+apologized for its sordid past and committed to ‘invest in positive
+programmes to attract, retain and develop black and minority ethnic talent’
+and offer ‘financial support to charities and organizations promoting
+opportunity and inclusion for black and minority ethnic groups’.12 The fact
+this stomach-churning PR move was dubbed ‘reparations’ in the press tells
+us how little we understand the centrality of slavery to today’s conditions.
+There is nothing that a company that gorged on the flesh of enslaved
+Africans to amass its wealth could do to atone short of liquidating its assets
+and turning them over to Black communities.
+Lloyd’s was sued by the descendants of enslaved Africans, led by
+Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, in the United States in 2002 along with a slew
+of major companies and the US government. One of the US firms included
+in the suit was Aetna, among the nation’s largest health insurance
+companies, founded in 1853. The company issued a public apology in 2000
+for selling insurance policies for the enslaved on US plantations, after
+Farmer-Paellmann’s activism had revealed their links to slavery. In 1853
+Aetna New Orleans were selling policies for $17.53 per year, which would
+yield $600 if the enslaved African died. Such policies were not rare. There
+
+was a major industry of insuring the enslaved, with prices being cheaper for
+children than for those who were older.13
+The involvement of insurance companies, accounting firms and banks is
+central to the argument that slavery fuelled development because of how
+important the finance sector was to Western industry. Credit and capital
+were absolute prerequisites for industrial development, and for the majority
+of the eighteenth century there were few better placed than slave owners or
+cotton brokers to invest in industry.
+Plantations were hugely profitable, which is why so much money was
+paid out in reparations to slave owners to secure abolition. Barbados was
+Britain’s richest slave colony in the seventeenth century, off the back of
+sugar production. The island had been producing tobacco by using White
+indentured labourers, but switched to sugar and primarily slave labour in
+1640.14 The transformation in the fortunes of the island were swift. Half a
+plot of 5,000 acres which had been purchased for £400 in 1640 was valued
+at £7,000 by 1648.15 For an example of how much money could be made,
+Colonel Thomas Moyford emigrated to Barbados in 1647 and just three
+years later was boasting he had made a hundred times his initial £1,000
+investment. James Parker, who found his fortune on the island, wrote a year
+earlier that ‘a man with about 200 odd pounds … might quickly gaine an
+estate by sugar’.16 Sugar became a highly profitable commodity as
+consumption ballooned in Britain and across Europe. Between 1650 and
+1800 British sugar consumption increased 2,500 per cent, all of it produced
+by slave labour.17 These profits from sugar and other slave-produced
+commodities were ploughed back into the nation, reaping untold collective
+dividends.
+One of the many lies we like to tell about British development is that the
+Industrial Revolution was the product of scientific ingenuity and hard work.
+But what is often omitted from the story is how it also depended on the
+financing and resources from slavery and colonialism. James Watt and
+Matthew Boulton have for all intents and purposes been elevated to the
+status of saints in my hometown of Birmingham because of their input into
+the city. The story of the steam engine has an almost mythical quality,
+produced by the divine inspiration of our city’s patrons. But Watt expressed
+eternal ‘gratitude’ to slave owners in the Caribbean because it was their
+finance that allowed him to realize his design and ambitions for the steam
+
+engine, and plantations were some of the first places to benefit from
+industrial mechanization, to refine sugar.18 By 1808 the Spanish colony of
+Cuba already had twenty-five steam engines supplied by Fawcett and
+Preston, based in Liverpool.19
+Cotton was also indispensable to the Industrial Revolution, both in terms
+of mechanization and development. Contrary to the misguided belief that
+industrial development replaced the need for slave labour, the relationship
+was the inverse. When Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin in 1793, he
+unleashed the potential for the fabric to be used in mass production. The
+separation of seeds from fibres in the plants is essential to make fabric but
+before the cotton gin this process was done manually and was extremely
+time-consuming. Prior to the cotton gin’s invention slave labour was not
+generally applied to cotton because the time invested in the separation
+process made it unprofitable. But the invention gave a ‘terrible second
+wind’ to cotton produced on slave plantations and led to the major boom of
+the plantation economy, particularly in the United States.20 So fundamental
+was this transformation that cotton plantations became the new centre of
+American slavery in the nineteenth century and cotton came to represent
+half of all US exports. Enslaved Africans were sold into the deep South,
+where cotton could be grown more easily than in the more northern
+plantations, to cash in on the cotton boom.
+The boom in US cotton production also provided a major boost for the
+British economy. By the time of the abolition of slavery in the British
+colonies, cotton had become the dominant British industry. Between 1785
+and 1830 cotton exports had grown from £1 million to £30 million in value.
+Between 1788 and just 1806 the amount of people employed in the cotton
+industry in Britain leapt from 350,000 to 800,000, and off the back of this
+production the population of Manchester grew six-fold between 1773 and
+1824. Cotton was king, but the enterprise was based on the import of raw
+cotton, which grew from £11 million to £283 million between 1784 and
+1832.21 Cotton does not grow in Britain, and at this point the majority of
+the raw material was being imported from the United States, procured, of
+course, by slave labour. After Britain abolished slavery in 1833, its imports
+of slave-produced cotton from the US South continued to grow, until the
+emancipation of the enslaved in America in 1865. From 1790 to 1860 the
+enslaved population of the United States grew from around 790,000 to over
+4 million, and it was this growth that fed the cotton boom on both sides of
+
+the Atlantic. It is no exaggeration to say that slave labour built the north of
+England and that its beloved cotton mills, such a fixture in literary and
+historical imagination of the nation, are just as steeped in the history of
+slavery as the plantations in the Americas. The same is true for northern
+cities in the United States like Boston and New York, which were just as
+reliant on the wealth produced from the horrors of slavery.
+
+THE TRIANGULAR TRADE
+In the face of the insurmountable evidence of the importance of slavery to
+the development of Britain and the United States, various scholars have
+tried to downplay its significance for industrial development. A parade of
+academics in economics journals have apparently tested the idea that the
+slave trade was indispensable to British industry, their conclusion being to
+reassure everyone that Britain would have developed just fine without the
+horrendous trade in human flesh. Walter Rodney, the prominent Guyanese
+scholar, chided that ‘this kind of argument is worth noting more as an
+example of the distortions of which White bourgeois scholarship is capable
+than as something requiring serious consideration’.22 But this is not simply
+an academic debate that we can ignore, since these ideas frame how poorly
+society understands the centrality of slavery to the present day. My A-level
+teacher’s, and the textbooks’, off-hand dismissal of transatlantic slavery as a
+factor in the Industrial Revolution is a direct result of academic work. It is
+the same source which allows us to ignore massive global inequality today,
+since we believe the West deserves its riches and conveniently ignore the
+reality of oppression that produces them.
+Not much surprises me any more about the lengths to which White
+scholarship (this includes a lot written by authors of colour) will go to try to
+minimize the centrality of racism to their current position of privilege. But
+even I raised an eyebrow when reading supposedly ‘scientific’ analyses
+diminishing the importance of slavery to the development of the British
+economy. It is worth exploring the acrobatic contortions such ‘scholarship’
+has to go through to bend the abundance of evidence to support its dubious
+case. The principal device for doing this is by reducing the argument that
+the profits from slavery powered British industrial development, by
+counting solely the profits made from the voyages of slave ships.23
+
+It has been widely recognized that the business of trading the enslaved
+was a dangerous task.24 Voyages took months at sea, and from the time the
+ships landed on the African coast to when they left the Caribbean and
+Americas the crews had to deal with the resistance and revolt of their
+captured bounty. Conditions on slave ships were notoriously horrendous
+and the spread of disease was common. The death toll for those working on
+the ships was high, and was even higher for the enslaved Africans, a
+significant number of whom died in transit. Nations also tried to establish
+monopolies over the importation of the enslaved. Britain abandoned the
+approach of having one slave-trading Royal African Company for the logic
+of free trade in the ‘market’ in 1698.25 But British companies were legally
+forbidden from trading with foreign-owned plantations, thereby limiting the
+trade. The profits from slave-trading voyages varied but it is not difficult to
+see how the trade itself would not be the most lucrative part of the system.
+However, it is absurd to overstate the case. Focusing on only the voyages
+from Africa also ignores the internal trade, where the enslaved were sold
+within the plantation system across the Americas often for huge profits.
+Given that the slave ships would often sell Africans to brokers in markets in
+the ports who would then trade with plantations, the trade was far larger
+than the voyages to Africa.
+In a paper published in a peer-reviewed and respected academic journal it
+is argued that the ‘direct participants in trade’ did not profit ‘because the
+price of a slave was too low’.26 Reading this literature the focus and
+language of the research is as striking as it is disturbing. They reduced their
+scope of enquiry to ‘logbooks’, calculating expenses for transporting human
+cargo. This is like studying the Holocaust by a cost–benefit analysis of gas
+chambers.27 Leaving aside the callous, inhuman way that these scholars
+discuss enslaved Africans, the basis of their conclusion is the definition of
+so-called ‘voodoo’ economics. They try to argue that African slave catchers
+were the greatest beneficiaries of the trade because they had more control
+over ‘supply’ and therefore the costs they could charge for Africans. This is
+done in a desperate attempt to minimize the importance of slavery to the
+economics of the West and at the same time to argue that Africa actually
+profited from it. These twisted arguments are used to reject the idea of
+reparations for slavery, by asserting that the West never actually made any
+money from it. You do not need to have more than a superficial
+understanding of the slave trade to see through this nonsense.
+
+It is often called the triangular trade, because ships would leave from
+Europe, laden with goods to trade for the enslaved in Africa, then transport
+their human cargo to the Americas before returning to Europe with the
+products of slave labour from the plantations. There is no doubt that
+rewards on the African side of the transactions were far less valuable than
+the human capacity being traded away.
+The goods that Europeans traded included guns and textiles produced in
+Europe. Wool was a key commodity that Africans desired, along with
+cotton fabrics. But these were finished products imported into Africa and
+not capital-producing, like the labour of the enslaved. The textiles and guns
+traded in Africa were a key outlet for exports that benefited Western
+economies. An argument could be made that guns were valuable in terms of
+acquiring land, but often these were purchased in order to defend against
+slave raiders or other groups who also had guns.28 In return for millions of
+labourers who would produce untold wealth through commodity
+production, African enslavers received nothing that would stimulate any
+economic development. In addition, the risks to the enslavers on the
+continent were far greater than those for the Europeans involved. Journeys
+from the interior of the continent could take eight months, with up to 40 per
+cent of those enslaved dying on the way.29 The risk of mutiny and attack
+was extremely high and the reward for all of this was relatively minimal.
+The truth is that slavery devastated the African political and economic
+system. To suggest that this is where the profits of the trade ended up goes
+beyond delusion into the realm of racist propaganda.
+Reducing the impact of slavery to the profits of individual voyages is a
+fallacy, but so too is limiting the contribution of the slave trade only to its
+profit margin. Slaving voyages required a whole range of other industries to
+carry on the horrendous trade. Ships needed to be built and maintained,
+meaning a boom in the timber and shipbuilding trades. The ports involved
+also needed to develop, and these became focal points for commerce, labour
+and population. Bristol dominated the British slave trade in the early
+eighteenth century. Between 1721 and 1730 British ships in total carried
+100,000 enslaved, but from 1728 to 1732 ships launched from Bristol alone
+carried the same number.30 Bristol developed a trade that was bigger than
+the entire Dutch system and by 1790 40 per cent of the city’s income came
+from the trade.31 Slavery literally built Bristol. The hallmarks of this
+history remain across the city, most notably with the monuments and public
+
+commemoration of one of Bristol’s famous sons, Edward Colston. His only
+notable accomplishment was profiting from the trade in human flesh. He is
+deified in the city because he used some of the money he earned to invest in
+local philanthropy. In the wave of Black Lives Matters protests a statue of
+him in the city was toppled after years of activism from #ColstonMustFall.
+But in a macabre way it is perfectly sensible to celebrate Colston, given that
+his trade is responsible for building the city, and Bristol is certainly not
+alone in owing its development to slavery.
+By the late eighteenth century Liverpool had overtaken Bristol as the
+primary slave port in Britain, accounting for over 60 per cent of the nation’s
+slave trafficking and more than 40 per cent of Europe’s. Slave trading also
+sparked a population surge, with an increase from 5,000 inhabitants in 1700
+to 34,000 by 1773. The rise in trade triggered an exponential growth in
+customs duties, from an average of £51,000 between 1750 and 1757, to
+£648,000 in 1785.32 The slave trade brought money and people flooding
+into Liverpool, without which it could not have developed into the city it is
+today. None of this was lost on Liverpudlians at the time. There was fierce
+resistance to the abolition of the slave trade. James Penny, a principal owner
+of dozens of Liverpool slaving ventures, remarked in 1788,
+Should this trade be abolished, it would not only affect the
+Commercial Interest, but also the Landed Property of the County of
+Lancaster, and more particularly the Town of Liverpool, whose fall,
+in that case, would be as rapid as its Rise has been astounding.33
+London similarly benefited from being a port for slave ships, and – in case
+you were worried this was solely an English endeavour – after the Act of
+Union in 1707 Glasgow became a major player in the slave trade, providing
+another Atlantic port. Tobacco and in particular sugar were essential to
+Glasgow’s economy – as important as slave-produced sugar was to Bristol’s
+economy. By the late eighteenth century Glasgow had eighty sugar
+refineries compared to Bristol’s twenty, marking just how important the
+industry was to the city.34 Make no mistake: this was a collective effort,
+and the trade impacted all corners of the nation.
+Industrial cities away from the coast also saw an enormous boost to their
+income as a consequence of the development of the slave trade. To
+complete the trade triangle, the ships needed to be stocked with
+
+commodities to trade for human flesh. The wool industry boomed by
+providing the necessary currencies, and the same is true for cotton
+manufacturers, who turned the raw material from slave labour into fabrics
+that were used to purchase more of the enslaved. Manchester was a key
+beneficiary that depended heavily on the trade for its development.
+Liverpool becoming a centre for the trade led directly to the growth of
+Manchester through the cotton boom. In 1772 a canal was built linking the
+site of production with the port and it was this that led to the explosion of
+Manchester. By 1788 the city was exporting £200,000 worth of goods to
+Africa, the production of which employed 180,000 people.35
+Even further inland the impacts of the trade were being felt. It was
+remarked that ‘the price of a negro was one Birmingham gun’, and the city
+was exporting between 100,000 and 150,000 guns a year by the nineteenth
+century, largely to support the trade.36 Birmingham also produced the
+manacles and chains that were essential to enslave people. Unsurprisingly
+the city came out against the abolition of the trade, declaring that it ‘was
+dependent on the slave trade to a considerable extent … Abolition would
+ruin the town and impoverish many of its inhabitants’.37 In order to make
+these guns and shackles, huge quantities of iron were needed, boosting
+British ironworks in places like Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.
+London’s benefits from the trade extended beyond just being a port city.
+As we saw when tracing the legacies of slave ownership, insurance,
+accounting and banking all profited immensely from slavery. One of the
+factors that made the trade itself less profitable was its dangerous nature,
+and insurance took advantage of this by underwriting the voyages. While
+the cost of insurance premiums may have dented the profits of the ships,
+these were accrued by the insuring companies. The same is true for debt
+repayments for financing the loans. In fact, if you look at where all the
+money that reduced the profits of slave ship voyages went, the vast majority
+was dispersed throughout the British economy. To focus on solely the profit
+of individual slave voyages is to wilfully misrepresent how central slavery
+was to Britain as a whole. Untold sums of money were ploughed into the
+key industries that powered development, generated by the trade of
+enslaved Africans. But impact-of-slavery-deniers are correct about one
+thing: the trade itself was not the most significant aspect in terms of
+impacting Britain. It was the entire Atlantic system of production that could
+not have existed without the trade.
+
+Another device to minimize the importance of slavery is to solely focus
+on the sugar produced by slave labour in the Caribbean, which although
+highly profitable was a consumer good that was popular but not strictly
+necessary. By isolating sugar, the idea is to claim that Britain could have
+done without it. Comparing the size of the sugar business to other
+contributors to the economy, the conclusion is drawn that industries like
+‘banking, insurance, horse-breeding, canals, hospitality, construction, wheat
+farming, fishing, and the manufacture of wooden implements’ were equally,
+if not more, important to the British economy.38 Hopefully, you can see
+through the distortions of this kind of thinking by this point in the book.
+The majority of the industries thought of as being separate from sugar were
+either dependent on or heavily involved in slavery. Banking and insurance
+were necessary to finance and underwrite the trade. Canals were essential to
+connect the ports to the manufacturing centres. Hospitality would have at
+least in part been built up around slave ports to serve their wealthy
+beneficiaries. Whole cities developed out of their role in slavery, thereby
+boosting construction. No doubt wheat, fishing and wooden implements
+supported either the system directly or along the supply chain. Elsewhere in
+this kind of supposed scholarship we see comparisons to cotton, wool and
+iron again ignoring the obvious links to slavery (though how this is possible
+with cotton is beyond me). If anything, these academic delusions are a
+reminder of just how important slavery was, because it permeated the
+majority of British industry at the time.
+Yet all the evidence is distorted and misused to draw the conclusion
+(without any proof offered but their own certainty) that it was the Industrial
+Revolution itself that led to the increase in British industry. Apparently it is
+reasonable to believe that British ingenuity is so all-powerful that not only
+could it create the finance needed to bring about mass production, it could
+also create the markets necessary to sell its produce. This is the Immaculate
+Conception narrative of British industry, sparked into being by divine
+British genius. The truth is that the slave system produced the wealth,
+resources and markets that powered industrial progress.
+The Atlantic system was the key to unlocking Western progress in
+general, and the British Industrial Revolution in particular. Commodities
+like tobacco, sugar and cotton generated wealth and commerce that fed
+back into the nation. Even impact-of-slavery-deniers recognize that the key
+advantage was that an abundance of ‘suitable virgin land’ was available in
+
+the Americas for free in order to cultivate the commodities necessary for
+industry.39 What they fail to acknowledge is that this was because of the
+genocide of the indigenous people that I covered in the last chapter. Racism
+is the continuous underpinning logic of the West, and to solve the problem
+of labour in the Garden of Eden, Western powers enslaved millions of
+Africans. Without this labour the bounty of the Americas would have stayed
+locked away, unable to enrich Europe. That is the true value of the slave
+trade, which is impossible to calculate. You cannot isolate any one aspect
+because the enslavement of Africans made the whole system possible. Even
+if the trade itself was less profitable its contribution to economic
+development was indispensable. So while it may be possible that British
+industry would have developed without slavery, that is speculation best left
+for a science-fiction novel about alternative realities. In the timeline that we
+are in, slavery cannot be untangled from the development of either
+capitalism or industry.
+
+THE WESTERN SYSTEM
+The Atlantic system represents the dawn of the West, the founding logic
+based on the interdependent exploitation of the rest of the world by those of
+European descent. Columbus, an Italian sailing under the banner of the
+Spanish, is the perfect symbol because his voyages represent the beginning
+of the new system of global conquest that came out of Europe.40 Although
+there was fierce rivalry between European powers for domination of the
+system, it could not have prospered without their collaboration.
+The Portuguese and the Dutch dominated the slave trade in the
+seventeenth century. Portugal had the benefit of the enormous colony of
+Brazil to supply with enslaved Africans. In fact, the largest number of
+enslaved Africans anywhere toiled on Brazilian plantations, accounting for
+between 38 per cent and half of all those stolen from Africa.41 Between
+1721 and 1730 alone, nearly 150,000 Africans were taken to Brazil.42
+Portugal’s demand for slave labour was so high that the Portuguese held a
+near-monopoly of the slave trade in places like Angola, from where over 70
+per cent of those enslaved ended up in Brazil.43 Enslaved Africans in
+Brazil were forced to work mining for gold and diamonds as well as
+producing sugar, but the demand for labour was so great that it outstripped
+
+the Portuguese supply. Brazilian colonists relied on enslaved Africans from
+other slaving nations to make up the difference, particularly Holland in the
+seventeenth century.
+The Dutch held their own colonies, most notably Surinam, but rose to
+prominence off the back of the slave trade rather than the plantations.
+Despite military losses in the region that meant ceding plantations, in the
+1650s Amsterdam was the centre of the commercial world because it
+‘dominated the market’ of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.44 The
+Dutch West India Company was founded in 1621 to hold a monopoly over
+the Dutch involvement and was extremely successful in its terrible trade.
+The Dutch did not possess a large number of colonies, which meant that the
+company was free to trade African flesh to other European empires because
+they were not in direct competition for labour. They used the small
+Caribbean island of Curaçao not as a plantation, but as a docking station for
+their human cargo. In just one example of the company’s flexibility, when
+they were forced out of Brazil by a rebellion of Portuguese colonists, they
+took the opportunity to begin to trade with the British in Barbados.45
+From the very beginning the Dutch West India Company was a model of
+collaboration between European powers. When it was set up in 1621, the
+Dutch proposed to the Danes and the French that they incorporate similar
+companies and embark on collective expeditions. The Dutch were central to
+Britain’s early involvement in the slave system, not only supplying the
+enslaved but working together to break up Spain’s monopoly in the
+Caribbean.46 Without this facilitation and cooperation the system could not
+have fully developed in the seventeenth century. The same is true of the
+naval technological innovations which improved the speed and longevity of
+ships, which were essential in facilitating the trafficking of millions across
+the Atlantic. The Dutch developed the work of the Portuguese and Spanish,
+and ultimately Britain built on the advances of the Dutch and became preeminent.47
+When Britain and France came to dominate the trade in the eighteenth
+century, we could view this period as one marked more by intense rivalry
+than collusion. Both nations were fierce enemies and their plantations were
+in direct competition. Nantes, Marseilles and Bordeaux at various times
+rivalled Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow as slave ports. Nantes began
+trading in the enslaved in 1666 and by 1789 the city’s merchants were
+
+investing 50 million francs annually into the Caribbean.48 During the
+eighteenth century the Caribbean accounted for a fifth of France’s external
+trade,49 and the vast majority of French industries had links to either Africa
+or the Americas and the Caribbean.50 Haiti was the jewel in the crown of
+French slavery. In 1759, 1,587 ships docked in Haiti, more than in
+Marseilles, a port that was used for more than the triangular trade. Haiti was
+a huge success for France – by the middle of the eighteenth century
+Bordeaux alone was refining 10,000 tons of raw sugar from the colony –
+and it was one shared across Europe. Bordeaux became a hub of Flemish,
+Dutch, Irish and even rival English traders keen to make money out of the
+booming industry. Haiti’s produce was sold all across Europe, with profit
+being made across the region. In the early eighteenth century Hamburg was
+a major centre for refining sugar even though Germany was only a small
+player in the direct buying, selling and enslaving of Africans. The wealth
+from the Atlantic system created a new world order where Europe gorged
+on the fruits of empire, regardless of which nation state owned the various
+colonies.
+Alongside France, Britain also fed this market, providing raw materials
+and produce for the networks of capital. British slaving interests depended
+on other nations both for markets to sell produce and also for the raw
+materials necessary for slavery. Timber for the ships needed to be sourced
+as did the steel needed for Birmingham to manufacture the guns and
+shackles. Sweden was a major supplier of iron for the slave trade and
+enriched itself greatly from the Atlantic system.51 We often see Sweden
+and Scandinavia as some kind of bastion of equality, but the region is just as
+tied up with the history of slavery as anywhere else. Both Sweden and
+Denmark got their hands soaked in the blood of the trade. Denmark was
+more successful, having a foothold in Guinea for 200 years and trafficking
+as many as 4,000 enslaved Africans per year.52 St Croix, now part of the
+US Virgin Islands, was a Danish colony from 1672 to 1917, prompting the
+Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen to admit that the country
+had ‘exploited the slaves in the West Indian Islands during 250 years and
+made good money on them’, during a public commemoration of the 75th
+anniversary of passing the colony to the Americans in 1992.53 No corner of
+Western Europe is untouched by the history of slavery.
+
+As well as collaborating in the European economic network infused by
+their slave colonies, Britain and France also directly collaborated with each
+other in the trade. This seems counterintuitive, given that they were fierce
+rivals and both had to invest heavily in defence to ensure that their colonial
+treasures were not captured by the other power. Britain was jealous of Haiti
+and the revenues it was generating for its rival, but the reality was that
+Haiti, and all of French slavery, was only as successful as it was because of
+the British slave trade. By the start of the eighteenth century Britain had
+given up on the Dutch model of creating a monopoly company to run the
+British trade and had given into the logic of the free market. Although it
+was technically forbidden, traders made a fortune selling to whoever would
+buy. As a result, half of all the Africans trafficked onto French plantations
+came from the British slave trade.54 So during the time that Britain and
+France were in direct competition and even conflict, French slavery was
+kept afloat by British merchants. This was particularly the case in Haiti,
+where around two-thirds of the enslaved were African born when the
+revolution broke out in 1791.
+Conditions on Haitian plantations were so harsh that the enslaved were
+mostly worked to death like disposable beasts of burden, due to the cold
+calculation that it was cheaper to replace Africans than to raise them.55
+When William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of Britain, realized that the
+British trade was enabling the success of their bitter rival he enlisted a
+certain William Wilberforce to begin a campaign to end the slave trade in
+1786.56 The campaign was dressed up as a moral crusade but was driven
+by the calculation that British colonies had trafficked enough Africans to
+maintain the plantations for ever, whereas French plantations would be
+permanently damaged by losing their supply of enslaved Africans. This
+explains why a supposedly moral campaign did not attempt to end slavery
+itself and only focused on the trafficking of Africans. Even after the trade
+was officially abolished in the Empire, British merchants continued to
+supply those foreign colonies which continued to trade, and British
+companies carried on purchasing slave-produced commodities.
+One of the hallmarks of Western economies is the domination of private
+interests over the state, and the Atlantic system is where we can see this
+emerge. Business interests colluded across national boundaries until they
+convinced the nation states to change their approach. Pitt’s campaign is a
+reminder that whilst the state may well have wanted to maintain national
+
+supremacy and conflict, the market would not allow it. The abolition of the
+slave trade took over twenty years from his intervention and was mostly
+successful not because of the edicts of the nation state but because of
+resistance from the enslaved. After the trade ended the birth rate on the
+plantations plummeted as enslaved African women refused to breed the
+next batch of the enslaved.57 Those invested in slavery were also terrified
+by the Haitian revolution. In 1804 the Haitians completed history’s only
+recorded successful slave revolution, declaring their independence from
+France. The revolution took over a decade to complete, sparked by a Vodou
+ceremony at Bwa Kayiman in 1791 led by the enslaved Boukman Dutty and
+Cécile Fatiman. In a reminder of the collusion at the heart of the system,
+Boukman was originally enslaved in the British colony of Jamaica but sold
+to a Haitian plantation. The rebellion spread across the island, eventually
+uniting the enslaved and the far smaller number of free Black people, whose
+numbers included a class of ‘Creoles’ who were mixed heritage as a
+consequence of sexual abuse by plantation owners. Efforts were made by
+the French, Spanish and British to take back the island and break the revolt,
+but the revolutionaries stood firm. As already mentioned, one of the major
+causes of the revolution was that around two-thirds of the enslaved were
+African born. Not only were they born free, many were warriors sold into
+slavery as prisoners of a civil war in Congo. The direct linkages to Africa,
+and African traditions like Vodou, struck fear in the heart of the slave
+owners, and Britain decided it did not want to risk importing revolution into
+its plantations. Britain’s firms calculated they had enough home-grown
+cattle to toil in their fields.
+Spain was the empire that tried the hardest to maintain its national
+monopoly, to the detriment of its plantation holdings. In Cuba, the Spanish
+Crown refused to allow the importation of enslaved Africans by other
+nations until 1789. It was likely the British colonization of Cuba in 1762
+that changed Spanish thinking on this issue. During their brief occupation
+the British opened the island to the full economic opportunities of the
+Atlantic trade. Prior to the British presence only six ships a year docked;
+eighteen years later the number had increased to over 200. The result was
+that plantation slavery also greatly increased. Between 1512 and 1761
+around 60,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Cuba, but from 1762 to 1838
+that number was over 400,000.58 Although the Spanish Crown objected, its
+colonies had relied on foreign sales of the enslaved as far back as the
+
+seventeenth century from the Dutch. In fact, in 1692 Britain gave Jamaica
+and Barbados not only the freedom to trade the enslaved to the Spanish but
+also to provide protection to Spanish merchants during business. One of
+Spain’s greatest losses in the Caribbean was Jamaica, which was captured
+by the British; but it may actually have proved beneficial in the long run
+because the presence of a large British slave colony meant there was a
+steady flow of enslaved Africans to purchase.59
+In the Western imagination slavery often starts with the ships – the
+horrendous middle passage – and then follows on to plantation labour. It is
+this narrative that leads even contemporary Black scholars to mistakenly
+assume that a focus on slavery, or the ‘middle passage epistemology’,60
+excludes the experience of people in Africa. Slavery happened to Africa as
+much as it did to those who arrived in the Americas. It is as if we have
+forgotten that the people stolen in chains were African and left behind
+families, communities and societies. The loss of millions of people had a
+devastating impact from which Africa still has not recovered. If the
+population explosion in Europe is credited as a major factor leading to the
+Industrial Revolution then imagine the negative impact on economic
+development that the removal of millions of working or soon to be
+working-age people would have.
+The lower end of estimates is that 12 million Africans arrived in chains in
+the Americas and the Caribbean. But this does not account for those who
+were smuggled illegally, nor for the loss of life that occurred during the
+process of enslavement. As noted earlier, up to 40 per cent of those captured
+and transported from the interior of Africa to the coast died, though it is
+impossible to fully account for the scale of human loss. When they arrived
+at the coast the European traders would often house the enslaved in forts
+like the notorious Elmina in Ghana. Conditions in these prisons were
+appalling, with the enslaved often imprisoned underground in what they
+called the ‘slave hole’, which was a ‘massive airless cellar’.61 After these
+became too risky, because of attacks from the natives and competitors,
+Europeans took to mooring their slave ships off the coast and as captives
+arrived, keeping them in the holds of the ships, potentially for months until
+the vessel was full. Death was not uncommon, mostly due to disease; those
+who perished were dumped on the shore.
+I will not regale you with tales of just how harrowing the middle passage
+was. Rest assured, being kept cramped in the hold, bound together in chains
+
+and packed in so tightly that there was barely room to move, was not
+conducive to good health. So appalling were the conditions that some slave
+ships had a death rate of 50 per cent. It was not only disease that killed the
+enslaved: mutiny was common, as was suicide. So terrible was the situation
+that many would rather throw themselves overboard than continue to
+submit to the degradation. Given that the enslaved represented bounty and
+profits for the enslavers you might think that they would have had more
+concern for the health of those on board. But the price of an African was
+such that it was easier to pack them in as tightly as possible and anticipate
+that some of the niggers would die off. When all else failed there was
+always the option of an insurance write-off. The infamous case of the Zong
+slave ship is testament to how little African life was worth during slavery.
+In 1781 the ship was in trouble due to running out of water. So the
+captain took the, at the time perfectly reasonable, step of throwing 132 of
+the Africans overboard so that the remaining water could be saved for the
+crew. There was nothing particularly notable about the act itself; the
+disposal of cargo in times of necessity was commonplace and covered by
+insurance. The case became prominent solely because of a dispute over
+whether the insurance claim made by the Liverpool-based Gregson
+Company should be paid out. Abolitionists later popularized the story by
+using it as an example of the inhumanity of the system, and the fact remains
+that it is probably the most infamous insurance case in history. In his ruling
+in favour of the insurers, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield made abundantly
+clear that the enslaved were ‘property to be treated by the parties concerned
+as no different from any other animate chattel’.62 It is not an exaggeration
+to say that the bottom of the Atlantic became a tomb, an unmarked grave
+for countless Africans who perished crossing the ocean in chains.
+Accounting for the entire loss of population to Africa due to slavery is
+impossible but the lower end of the estimates is at least 24 million.63
+It was not only the loss of population that changed the continent. In order
+to procure millions of enslaved Africans for the Atlantic system an
+infrastructure had to be put in place: ports, slave castles and trafficking
+routes from the interior. African populations and communities were
+decimated and had to retreat from coastal areas and set up defensive
+mechanisms to avoid being stolen into the trade. The impact was the
+emergence of a way of life that dealt with the brutal reality of slavery. The
+changing state of African societies is the perfect example of the geopolitical
+
+shifts caused by the European trade. The historical record is somewhat
+cloudy as to the emergence of the Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. It
+conquered part of what is now Nigeria in the early eighteenth century, either
+to end the slave trade in the region or to gain access to the slave markets on
+the coast.64 What is indisputable is that the Dahomey Empire grew out of
+the chaos that slavery brought to the region and gained prominence from its
+role in supplying Africans for the trade. The same can be said to differing
+extents of the Asante and Oyo empires in Ghana and Nigeria respectively.
+While slavery was outlawed within both nations, they colluded with the
+European traders to supply those from other ethnic groups, either through
+raids or by selling those defeated in wars. There is no doubt at all that
+slavery was facilitated by collaboration with Africans, but that does not
+mean it was not a Western system.
+African collusion, and particularly the narrative that the involvement of
+Africans somehow mitigates the West’s responsibility for the system, is
+nonsense for a number of reasons. Most simply, there were countless
+numbers of Jewish collaborators with Hitler’s regime and this of course
+does not absolve the Nazis of responsibility. People respond to the
+situations that they find themselves in and slavery dominated the
+infrastructure of the continent. Make no mistake, this was a Western system
+from the outset: a range of European nations were involved in establishing
+the framework that some Africans collaborated in. By the end of the
+seventeenth century, Dutch, English, Danes and Germans were all present
+on the West African ‘Gold Coast’, creating the outposts to supply the
+Atlantic system.
+Violence was the underpinning logic of the framework, with Western
+superiority being embedded by the barrel of the gun. In this system
+collusion and resistance often blurred together in the impossible situation
+that the barbaric trade created. For instance, people were given the
+opportunity to free their relatives from the trade by exchanging two other
+Africans they had captured. People were traded for guns, with the express
+purpose of the weapons being to defend their communities from the trade.
+One of the driving forces for the collaboration of kingdoms like Dahomey
+or Asante was that by colluding with the enslavers they would preserve
+their own people from being ravaged by slavery. There was also the obvious
+allure of making a living out of trading in human flesh. None of this
+mitigates the European involvement and we should never lose sight of the
+
+fact that slavery was not something that was beneficial to Africa. The loss
+of population and reorganization of social life, either to avoid or to collude
+in the trade, devastated the African political and economic system – and all
+for guns, textiles and trinkets produced in Europe.
+In contrast to the Western system of slavery, we also need to recognize
+that Africans were not a unified political or economic entity at the time.
+There were different empires, nations and ethnic groups competing for land
+and commerce. The idea of African betrayal in this paradigm is clearly
+nonsensical because the disparate groups did not feel a particular affinity to
+each other. Europeans exploited these differences and rivalries to the fullest
+extent. To defend their own communities, Africans were enlisted to enslave
+others on the continent. Europeans used the lack of an organized African
+polity to exploit the continent, something that, as we will see, became a
+common tactic for Western domination of the globe.
+Alongside African involvement in slavery being used to mitigate Western
+guilt, the existence of slavery on the continent prior to the European trade is
+also often mobilized. It is important to dismiss the notion of so-called
+African slavery from the start. What is often referred to as slavery in Africa
+is more like serfdom, where people were tied to a lord for a fixed period of
+time and enjoyed basic human rights. Africans in this position of servitude
+could rise from their position and eventually take full part in civic life.
+Given the differences between European and African ‘slavery’ (so stark it
+make no sense to use the same word), it is likely that Africans had little
+knowledge of what exactly they were selling people into. They would have
+witnessed the enslaved being transported to the coast and had some
+knowledge of the slave castles. But once on the slave ships, slavery was out
+of sight of those in Africa, and the abuses of the middle passage and on the
+plantation may as well have taken place in an alternate universe.
+It is noteworthy that there were no plantations in Africa, although cotton
+and sugar could have been cultivated on the continent. Resistance from
+Africans is likely a major reason, given how much fortification Europeans
+had to invest in to prevent the natives rebelling. There were forts for a
+reason, because Africans would not tolerate plantation slavery on the
+continent, despite attempts to establish the system by Europeans. There was
+a stand-off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans did
+not have the capacity to conquer the mainland but Africans were unable to
+reclaim the coast.65 It took Europe time to develop enough military
+
+superiority to conquer and fully colonize Africa, with the devastation that
+the system of slavery left being a key contributing factor to that eventuality.
+European slavery decimated the continent but the West did not start the
+mass enslavement of African people. As with most ideas, the West did not
+originate the concept but took what existed before and developed it to new,
+unparalleled heights.
+Long before Europe had the idea to turn to Africa for a slave labour
+force, Arabs who invaded North Africa in the seventh century had
+established a system of slavery on the continent. Over a span of more than
+1,250 years around 6 to 7 million Africans were forcibly trafficked across
+the Sahara Desert.66 It was, in fact, the Arab system that gave Europeans
+the idea and early access to African flesh. When Columbus enslaved the
+500 indigenous Americans it was the Arab slave markets that he sold them
+into. Europe did not even invent the idea of Africans being inferior, as I
+explained in the last chapter. Ibn Khaldun, one of the most influential
+scholars in the fourteenth century (who is rarely recognized because he was
+Tunisian and not from the West), thought that Africans were submissive to
+slavery because ‘they have little [that is essentially] human and have
+attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals’.67 Even though
+Europe essentially plagiarized Arab racial thinking and Arab slavery lasted
+far longer, it is the Western system that had the most damaging impact on
+Africa and reaped the greatest rewards for the enslavers. Racial thinking
+was prevalent in the Arab world. But the West took those ideas and built
+them into the fabric of the political and economic system in order to exploit
+the globe and build the modern world.
+Whilst racial constructs certainly informed the Arab trade, the role that
+Africans played in the system was not based solely on racism. Europeans
+were prominent features of slave markets. In fact, the word ‘slave’ derives
+from ‘Slav’ because of their prominence in the trade. Notwithstanding the
+diversity of those enslaved, there was an anti-Black hierarchy in the system.
+The Arabic work mamluk referred to a high-status slave of White European
+stock, whereas enslaved Africans called abd were cheaper and consigned to
+more menial tasks.68 But, even so, the dehumanization that was an
+unremitting feature of European slavery was not always present. The story
+of Bilal ibn Rabah, at least in the Sunni view, is a case in point for the
+complexities of the relationship of the enslaved to society. An African born
+into slavery, Bilal was prevented from reaching the highest positions in
+
+Arab society, but he was one of the Prophet Mohammed’s most trusted
+companions who was given the responsibility of leading the call to prayer.
+We should not romanticize the Arab slave trade: it was a brutal system
+that killed countless Africans. The average life expectancy for the enslaved
+was only seven years and they were subject to savage mistreatment and
+abuse.69 The slave caravans that took Africans from the interior and
+crossed the Sahara were deadly and those who could not make it were left
+to die where they fell. Just as with European slavery, the impact on African
+society was devastating. Major Dixon Denham, a British traveller to Sudan
+in 1823, witnessed how ‘villages were raided, the young women and
+children enslaved, the surplus men who had not escaped massacred, and the
+old, the lame and the sick killed off or left to die on the roadside’.70 We
+cannot overestimate the damage that this scene, reproduced on an industrial
+scale, had on the continent and we must acknowledge the central role that
+the Arab system had in creating the European trade that followed. But there
+is a major difference that distinguishes the Arab trade from the Atlantic
+system, which goes to the core argument presented in this book: African
+slavery was endemic in the Arab world but it was not essential to the
+political and economic development of that region.
+The Atlantic system lasted for over 300 years, with a peak during the
+eighteenth century. The Arab trade existed over four times as long but
+enslaved around half the number of people. But it is not just the size of the
+trade that is important, we also have to look at the nature of the two
+systems. Around two-thirds of those captured in Arab slavery were women,
+and the two main employments of the enslaved were sexual labour and
+domestic work. The enslaved were luxuries of the elite, largely used for
+pleasure and as house servants. This is in complete contrast to the Atlantic
+system where around 80 per cent of those enslaved on British ships were
+men and the desire for slave labour was to produce commodities on
+plantations and to power the development of capitalism.71 As we have
+seen, European slavery produced untold wealth which fired industrial
+development and formed the bedrock of European advancement. In
+contrast, the profits were in Arab trade, not in slave ownership. As
+profitable as the Arab slave trade was, there are tales of slave traders in the
+medieval period with nowhere to spend their fortunes.72 The West is built
+in large part off the wealth of slavery, whereas the same cannot be said of
+the Arab world. This does not make Arab slavery less barbaric or
+
+objectionable but it is important to separate out the legacies of the two
+trades. The Atlantic slave trade is still with us, in both the wealth and
+poverty caused by the murderous industry.
+
+REPARATIONS NOW
+Photographs of slave markets in Libya, in 2017, sparked international
+protests against the treatment of Black Africans in the country. Under
+Colonial Gaddafi the African population was given protection and
+prominence, but after the US-led regime change in 2011 the forces of antiBlackness were unleashed in the nation. We should not be at all surprised,
+given how central anti-Black racism has been in the region since the Arab
+invasion of North Africa in the seventh century. The crisis in Sudan that
+sparked the creation of the new state of South Sudan was also a reminder of
+the significant tensions that continue to exist. The Arab slave trade is the
+most obvious example of the history of conflict and brutality towards
+African people, and the scenes in Libya were a reminder of that painful
+legacy. It is clear that the practice has not ended, though it is now usually
+forced underground and called human trafficking. But as reprehensible as
+the events in Libya are, we must not fall into the trap of conflating Arab
+slavery with the European trade; that is perhaps the worst way to discuss the
+legacy of the system.
+I have lost count of the number of times I have been at a Black History
+Month event and a discussion about Atlantic slavery has ended with a
+speaker talking about the need to end so-called ‘modern-day slavery’.
+Google ‘slavery’ right now and you will find some video claiming the need
+to end modern-day slavery with a link to the history of the transatlantic
+trade. But not only is this completely nonsensical, it actually prevents us
+from looking at the work that actually needs to be done to repair the
+damage of the Atlantic system. Human trafficking is an outrage to human
+decency and must end, but it has no relation to the transatlantic slave trade,
+which was a perfectly legal system of chattel slavery that produced the
+modern world. It may make those in the West feel better to embrace a
+narrative that places Britain at the centre of abolishing the evils of slavery
+and at the forefront of trying to end modern-day practices in backward parts
+of the world. But the legacies of slavery are all around us, in the very same
+
+political and economic system from which we generate money for charity in
+order to combat the ills of human trafficking. Please do not just take it from
+me. Britain’s favourite White supremacist, Winston Churchill,
+acknowledged as much when he explained
+Our possession of the West Indies, like that of India … gave us the
+strength, the support, but especially the capital … to come through
+the great struggles of the Napoleonic wars, the keen competition of
+commerce in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and enabled us
+not only to acquire the appendage of possessions which we have,
+but also to lay the foundations of that commercial and financial
+leadership which … enabled us to make our great position in the
+world.73
+As the wealth of Britain, and the wider Western world, was built on the
+back of slavery it therefore follows that a debt is owed to those descendants
+of the enslaved. I started this chapter by exploring the payment of
+reparations to slave owners, so large they created a debt so enormous that it
+was only paid off by the twenty-first century taxpayer. It is perverse that
+those who laboured and suffered received no restitution in any country.
+There is plenty of legal precedent for reparations that are based solely on
+the experience of oppression. In 1995 New Zealand agreed to pay the
+Maoris for historic abuses committed under the British crown dating back
+to 1863.74 Germany paid over $90 billion to Jewish victims of the
+Holocaust and their descendants, and the United States has made a number
+of payments and settlements with indigenous peoples, although these have
+been offensively small and little more than token gestures.75 The horrors of
+the slave trade are such that a claim based solely on the torture and
+inhumanity of it would be worthy of restitution. But in this case we are also
+talking about centuries of unpaid labour that needs to be accounted for. If
+the slave owners were compensated at the end of slavery there can be no
+justifiable reason for denying reparations to those suffering the legacies of
+the system. There have been many campaigns for reparations across the
+diaspora.
+The Nation of Islam and the Republic of New Afrika in the US in the
+1960s both called for General Sherman’s post-American Civil War promise
+of forty acres and a mule for each enslaved to be honoured by a parcel of
+
+land in the South being turned over to the Black population. The Black
+Lives Matter movement is currently campaigning for reparations for the
+damage caused and there is a Europe-wide movement for reparatory justice,
+the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE). In Britain
+there is an annual Stop the Maangamizi march and calls for an all-party
+parliamentary commission into the subject. Africa also formed a reparations
+movement through the Organization of African Unity in 1990. The
+Caribbean nations have joined the reparations case through the Caribbean
+Community (CARICOM), demanding restitution for the impact of slavery.
+There are now widespread social movements that recognize that the West
+was enriched on the back of slavery and also that the poverty we see across
+the Black world today is the legacy of the system. Since the killing of
+George Floyd we have even seen companies jump on the reparations PR
+bandwagon. The problem with reparations, though, is whether they can ever
+account for just how important the system of slavery was to the
+development of the West.
+Various calculations have been done based on damages and loss of
+earnings to arrive at an estimate of just how much the West owes. For the
+Caribbean alone, one estimate back in 2005 was $7.5 trillion.76 In the
+United States the estimates range from $3 to $14 trillion.77 What is clear
+from these figures is that if we were able to calculate a figure owed it would
+be so large that it would be impossible for the West to pay. The truth is that
+the figure is incalculable because of how steeped the West remains in the
+wealth from the Atlantic system. It touches every part of the West’s society
+and economy and has also impoverished the Black world to a degree that
+cannot be overestimated. The West remains built on these foundations and
+to transfer the wealth necessary to repair the damage would destroy the
+West, not only because of the money involved, but also because if the Black
+world had freedom that would mean the end of the Western project.
+Reparations are due, and tearing down Western capitalism is an utter
+necessity if we are serious about ending racism. But to realize the
+revolutionary politics necessary for this transformation we first need to
+recognize that the West can never pay full reparations for slavery without
+destroying itself.
+Slavery may have ended, but the next phase in Western supremacy was
+colonialism, built on the same principles of racial hierarchy and
+exploitation. The West simply cannot end racism through reparations
+
+because racial hierarchy is the fuel that feeds the system. The end of slavery
+dissolved into the colonial era of racial exploitation, which is still very
+much alive and well today.
+
+4
+
+Colonialism
+If you want to see colonialism at work today, take a visit to Cadbury World
+in Birmingham. The site is still a working factory, the home of the Cadbury
+empire, one of Britain’s leading brands with annual revenues exceeding $3
+billion.1 From its humble start as a grocery shop in 1824 the company has
+become a global juggernaut, selling over 350 million of its signature Dairy
+Milk bars every year. Cadbury’s employs more than 45,000 people
+worldwide and, including its supply chain, is responsible for keeping
+thousands of people in work in the city of Birmingham. Neither the city nor
+the company is shy of boasting about the tremendous success of the
+business and in 1990 Cadbury World opened on the site of its Bournville
+factory, attracting visitors to learn about the history and future plans of the
+company. They have added different attractions over the years but the
+central structure of the place has remained the same. A tour through
+Cadbury World takes you from the first European encounter with chocolate
+right through to its present-day production. While the aim is to celebrate the
+success of the company, walking through the space is the perfect tour of
+neo-colonialism, providing all the ingredients to explain why the West
+remains just as built on racism today as it ever was.
+Aztec civilization greets you when you first step into the exhibition.
+Well, a plastic replica of jungle replete with smiling cocoa beans and wax
+figures. There is at least a recognition here that Europeans did not invent or
+
+‘discover’ chocolate, which was introduced to the continent when the
+Spanish brought it back from South America. In fairness to the curators,
+they give a nod to some of the violence committed by the Spanish, and
+reference the Aztec ruler Montezuma being killed by the forces of Cortés in
+the sixteenth century. But, typical of how this period is remembered, the
+genocide we have already explored is breezily skipped over. I suppose
+recounting the murder of tens of millions in a children’s attraction would be
+bad for business.
+After you learn about the origins of chocolate the story moves to
+Birmingham, and the founding of the original shop by John Cadbury in
+1824. We hear about his ingenuity and hard work, and how he came up with
+the magic formula for the incredibly popular Dairy Milk. In these
+foundation stories we are told about cocoa and milk, but conspicuous in its
+absence is any reference to the other main ingredient, which is of course
+sugar. As we saw in the last chapter, sugar was one of the main slaveproduced commodities. When Cadbury’s began as a small shop, slavery
+was still fully functioning in the British Empire, and slave-produced sugar
+would have made it into the country until at least 1888, when Brazil
+abolished the system. Cadbury’s became a huge commercial success in the
+latter part of the nineteenth century after building the Bournville factory in
+1878, so is often not seen as having ties to slavery. But this misses the point
+for two main reasons. Firstly, Cadbury’s was able to open Bournville due to
+the wealth it had generated from using slave-produced sugar. As we have
+already seen, wealth produced from slavery was used after abolition to
+continue development. More importantly, the ending of slavery did not stop
+the exploitative relationship between the Caribbean (or the rest of the
+Empire) and Britain. Caribbean colonies continued to produce sugar, often
+in dire conditions and certainly for pay that was not too far removed from
+the realities of enslavement. Sugar production was a system created by
+slavery, with a workforce descended from those stolen in chains and
+indentured labourers from other parts of the Empire. There was nothing
+clean about the sugar that went into building Cadbury’s.
+Instead of focusing on the exploitation at the heart of Cadbury’s, the
+exhibition is a celebration of the entrepreneurial and philanthropic spirit of
+the Cadbury family. Not only did the family build the factory, they also
+secured a 120-acre site and on it created the village of Bournville. We are
+told that George Cadbury ‘was a housing reformer interested in improving
+
+the living conditions of working people in addition to advancing working
+practices’.2 Bournville was a model village for workers in the factory, with
+swimming pools and parks. Workers also received far better treatment than
+was usual in Victorian times, with the Cadburys seen as ‘pioneering
+employee welfare’.3 In fact, the housing and development of Bournville
+was so attractive that it is now one of the most expensive places to live in
+the city. The irony of celebrating the success of Cadbury’s in supporting the
+working classes when they have long since been priced out of the area
+seems entirely lost. Being serenaded with tales of how wonderful an
+employer the Cadburys were in Birmingham is also telling for what, or
+more particularly who, is absent in the story.
+Only once, and very briefly, do we see the workers in Ghana picking the
+key ingredient for Cadbury’s product: cocoa. I wish I were joking, but sadly
+not. In a grainy black-and-white film narrated by an exceedingly posh
+gentleman, who is actually wearing the white pith helmet we associate with
+colonialism, we see the smiling natives happily chopping down the cocoa
+and loading it into vans for export to Britain. There is no mention of the
+conditions they faced either historically or in the present day. But when the
+president of the World Cocoa Foundation declared in 2018 that ‘our first
+and most important target is to raise farmers above the extreme poverty
+line’ of $1.90 a day,4 you can imagine just how appalling the situation is
+still for those harvesting the base ingredient for a multibillion dollar empire.
+The complete lack of care by the Cadburys, or consideration by Cadbury
+World, for workers outside Britain is the perfect demonstration of how
+gains for workers in the West are built on the back of exploitation of those
+in the global South.
+By the end of the tour we are introduced to the innovations in advertising
+and the array of different products that Cadbury’s now produces. The
+impression given is very much that the company is a local and national
+success: the best of British as it were. But Cadbury World were honest, the
+tour would end with the singing of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as staff
+pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Cadbury’s has not been a British
+company for over a decade now, having been bought by American giant
+Kraft Foods in a hostile takeover in 2010. As testament to just how
+successful Cadbury’s neo-colonial business model is, the company cost
+them $18.9 billion. The US takeover also tells us much about what
+colonialism looks like in the present day. The old colonial regimes are no
+
+longer leading the charge. America is now setting the tone for Western
+imperialism.
+
+NO SUCH THING AS FAIR TRADE
+To understand the continued exploitation of the developing world by the
+West, we can start by undoing the fallacy of the idea of fair trade. Cadbury
+World again provides a good starting point for this discussion. In their
+exhibition they quite openly describe the process of raw cocoa leaving
+Ghana and being shipped to a processing plant in Britain before ending up
+in the Bournville factory. As part of the tour you get to witness the
+production process and see the finished commercial products (they are even
+nice enough to give you a discount at the gift shop). There is no recognition
+of the exploitation at the heart of this relationship. A resource from Africa
+is taken out of the continent at an extremely low cost, processed into a
+luxury good in Europe and sold for a huge profit, often back into Africa. It
+is the European company that makes all the money off an African resource.
+Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, said this reality had an
+‘Alice in Wonderland craziness’ about it.5
+In the context of trade relationships like this, companies like Cadbury’s
+partnering with the Fairtrade Partnership may mean that farmers get a few
+more pennies a day, but the notion that there can ever be fair trade is as
+offensive as it is absurd. Cocoa farmers receive only 6 per cent of the
+money made from the product they labour over.6 The nations which
+produce raw materials like cocoa receive a pittance for their resources,
+while Western corporations make a fortune exploiting resources that they
+otherwise would have no access to. As we saw in the first two chapters, the
+expansion of the West was necessary for both the resources and the labour
+needed for modern industrial progress.
+The thread that unites Western development since 1492 is the
+exploitation by those of European descent of the rest of the world. We
+incorrectly think of the horrors of Western empire as separate, disconnected
+historical events. First, genocide in the Americas, then transatlantic slavery
+and finally colonialism. But in reality they are overlapping manifestations
+of White supremacy that cannot be separated from each other and which
+bleed into the current forms of colonial domination. In the Caribbean, for
+
+instance, colonialism did not follow on after slavery. The islands were slave
+colonies, taken by deadly force from the natives who were wiped out in a
+genocide. Colonialism is often understood in its dictionary definition of
+direct rule over a subject people by a foreign power, but this is an
+inadequate way to view the process.
+Africa provides the perfect example of the far more widespread talons of
+colonialism. Most of the continent was under direct rule by European
+powers for a period less than a hundred years. But it would be wrong to
+think that a colonial relationship only existed for that short period of time.
+Ever since the West dug its claws into Africa it has been building and then
+sustaining its exploitative hold over the continent. As we saw in Chapter 2,
+the transatlantic slave trade fundamentally transformed the politics,
+economies and organization of the continent. As well as looting the
+continent for slave labour, Europe also plundered resources like gold from
+it. Before formally taking control of any part of the continent, Europe had
+already begun to ‘underdevelop’ Africa.7
+In Walter Rodney’s classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa he lays
+out with supreme clarity the damage done to the continent. The book
+explains the global economic contradiction that ‘many parts of the world
+that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in
+wealth of soil and sub-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living’.8
+Slavery powered Western development to the point that one of the main
+problems since the late ninetieth century has been finding the resources to
+feed into its industrial machine. The wealth from the Atlantic system
+enabled European powers to colonize large parts of Asia and replace slave
+labour with the inhumane wages we still see in the world. So the focus on
+Africa shifted from seeing it as a source of cheap labour to the rush to milk
+the continent for its resources. Centuries of slavery enabled this by
+devastating both the political and economic system of Africa and its ability
+to resist.
+By the end of the nineteenth century almost the entire continent was
+under colonial rule. ‘Underdevelopment’ is used to describe Europe’s
+involvement because when Europeans took control of the continent they
+halted any African progress in order to enrich their respective mother
+countries.
+At a time when Africa needed to be developing industrial farming
+techniques to provide food and resources for the continent, precisely the
+
+opposite was occurring. From the nineteenth century to the present day
+many African economies have depended on cash crops from small-scale
+farmers. It is these barely-above-subsistence-level farmers who provide
+much of the cocoa for Cadbury’s factories. Individual farmers selling their
+wares to a trader are extremely easy for large corporations to exploit
+financially, which is one of the main reasons why the price of most
+commodities is so low. This method of procuring crops has been doubly
+cheap for the West, which did not have to invest in heavy machinery or
+even worry about transporting the crops to the depot. Under colonial rule,
+infrastructure was only ever developed to the extent it was necessary to take
+commodities out of Africa, with ‘all roads and railways leading to the
+sea’.9 One result of this underdevelopment was that people, mostly women,
+were forced to trek miles on foot to deliver the cash crops to the depots.10
+Cotton, rubber, oil palm, cocoa, coffee and more were procured to be
+exploited away from Africa, with huge profits going to European
+companies.
+Under formal colonial rule Africans were often forced to work
+cultivating particular crops for their colonial masters and accept whatever
+price they were given. Conditions were particularly harsh during economic
+crises like the Depression, or the World Wars, when the colonies were
+expected to support the war effort. One of the most extreme examples of
+forced labour was the building of the Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway in
+Congo from 1921 to 1933. Every year 100,000 Africans were forced to
+work at the site in conditions so appalling that ‘25% died annually from
+starvation and disease’.11
+In 1938 Britain established the West African Produce Control Board to
+regulate prices for commodities. As evidence of just how lucrative this
+system was for European companies, in 1946 the control board paid £16.15
+to African suppliers for a ton of oil palm, and this same ton then sold for
+£95 in Britain. For groundnuts the purchase price was £15 and the sale price
+£110. This does not even consider what the British company then received
+after processing the product and selling it on.12 Whilst Africa may no
+longer be under colonial rule, and subject to direct physical oppression, it is
+abundantly clear that this economic relationship remains unchanged.
+One of Britain’s largest companies is so successful that its £44.68 billion
+turnover for 2018 represented a ‘dip’ in its performance due to ‘challenging
+
+market conditions’.13 Spare a thought for its shareholders who had to take
+a dividend of merely £8.6 billion for the year. Unilever is a global giant that
+makes all manner of soaps meant to clean everything from your skin to your
+floor. Much like Cadbury’s, the company has its roots in nineteenth-century
+Britain when the Lever brothers began manufacturing and selling soap. Like
+the Cadburys they procured the main ingredient for their product from
+Africa, in this case oil palm. Lever Brothers sourced this from Nigeria,
+Sierra Leone and Liberia, forming the United African Company to manage
+its procurement. Oil palm has a lot of uses, and the company expanded into
+foods, making margarines and oils, eventually merging with a Dutch
+company, Margarine Uni, in 1929. The growth of the company was based
+on its success in European markets but Unilever acknowledged the source
+of its prosperity. In 1920 the Information Division of the company
+recognized that
+Unilever’s centre of gravity is Europe, but far and away its largest
+member (the UAC) is almost wholly dependent for its livelihood
+(represented by a turnover of £300 million) on the well-being of
+Africa.14
+In a pattern we see repeated again and again, a Western corporation grew
+extraordinarily rich by exploiting the resources of a colony. Nothing has
+changed today, except that the countries are now formally free. Unilever
+still depends on oil palm for its success, a crop that is becoming
+increasingly important as an alternative fuel source. It is no coincidence that
+the same crops that were so important to development during colonialism
+are powering the global economy today. From 2000 to 2013 the space that
+sugar-cane plantations took up across the globe grew from 19 to 26 million
+hectares; rubber from 7 to 10 million; and oil palm from 10 to 18 million.15
+It is realities like this that make a nonsense of the Western navel-gazing
+concern with the apparent ‘rise of the robots’, which I will cover in more
+depth in Chapter 7. Millions of poor people in the underdeveloped world
+find themselves trapped in work and working conditions similar to those
+under colonial rule. Most oil palm production is now located outside Africa,
+with Indonesia and Malaysia producing over 80 per cent of the global
+market.16 Sadly, this is not a sign of progress, just a continuation of the
+same neo-colonial relations that mark the African story.
+
+Indonesia accounts for the bulk of oil palm production and farming in
+Malaysia is often done by Indonesian migrant workers. Dutch colonization
+of Indonesia goes back to 1602, with the Portuguese involved in the region
+prior to that. By 1823 the Netherlands East India Association, the successor
+to the much-reviled Dutch East India Company, was reliant on coffee
+produced in Java for 77 per cent of its export revenue. Forced labour was
+the norm in the colony and it is estimated that in 1840 30 per cent of
+Indonesian families were toiling against their will.17 Thousands of people
+were forced into what were effectively work camps in the nineteenth
+century because they would not voluntarily accept the low wages on offer.
+Oil palm did not develop as a crop in the region until 1930, and in a nod
+to just how global the colonial network was, the first workers were
+indentured labours from China. These workers had been in Indonesia before
+oil palm was, working under inhuman conditions. Known as ‘contract
+Coolies’ they were ruled by a set of ordinances which meant they were
+subject to whippings, prison and execution if they did not show enough
+deference to their masters, put in enough effort, or if they tried to escape
+their plight.18
+Today, such conditions no longer exist. However, there is a reason that
+most oil palm is produced in Indonesia, or by Indonesian labourers, and it is
+because Indonesians are cheap to employ. The majority of workers are not
+employed on a permanent basis, making them even more insecure. There
+has been much hand-wringing over the need to improve the wages and
+conditions of oil palm workers but Wilmar International, one of the largest
+global oil palm corporations, openly admits that on some of its plantations
+only 5 to 10 per cent of the workers are on permanent contracts.19
+
+CORRUPT ‘DEVELOPMENT’
+Africa became less attractive as a producer of cash crops like oil palm for a
+number of reasons. Demographics is the simplest explanation. Labour is
+cheaper in East Asia because there is an abundance of workers. India and
+China both have more inhabitants than the entire African continent. Slavery
+is the most important reason behind the lack of population in Africa, the
+only underpopulated part of the world. But after slavery ended, the logic of
+underdevelopment ensured that Africa’s population would remain low. The
+
+genocidal tendencies of the West spread into Africa. Leopold’s murder of
+10 million in Congo stands out, but countless Africans were killed across
+the continent to exert colonial control by all the major European powers.
+But it was not only direct slaughter that culled the African population.
+Under colonial rule the continent was only developed to the extent that it
+benefited the European powers, and this did not include supporting the
+welfare of the native population.
+On taking over as president of Ghana in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah
+inherited a state that had only thirty-seven hospitals for 4 million
+Ghanaians.20 This was no different to the rest of the continent. In
+neighbouring Nigeria in the 1930s under colonialism, the 4,000 British
+immigrants (let’s not dignify them by the term ‘ex-pats’) had the use of two
+modern hospitals while the 40 million Nigerians had to share fifty-two.21
+Facilities like medical care or sanitation were reserved mainly for the White
+population, meaning that when so-called independence came, African
+countries were sorely lacking in the infrastructure they needed to take good
+care of their populations. Europe had not only stolen their wealth but had
+also prevented the development necessary for them to prosper. This put
+African governments in an almost impossible position because their
+economies needed mass investment but remained under economic
+oppression from the West. Taking over the government offices did not mean
+removing the claws of the West, which dug so deep and extracted so much.
+Under colonial rule Europe made huge profits, with investments making
+25 per cent more in the colonies than in Britain. Profits being leached from
+Benin by French investors represented half of the colony’s GDP.22 The USbased Firestone Company, which extracted rubber from Liberia, made so
+much money that in 1951, even after it had paid tax to the Liberian
+government the company still made three times the amount of the total
+income of the state.23 By 1955 Africa was contributing £1.446 billion
+annually to British gold and dollar reserves – over half of the total. Belgium
+and France extracted so much wealth from their colonies that they did not
+need to take out loans to pay for their war efforts.24 The West literally
+drained the financial, human and mineral resources out of Africa and
+continues to exploit the continent using the same economic tools.
+France continues to use hard power, a ‘coercive neo-colonialism’25 that
+locks its African colonies into a currency union based around the West
+
+African CFA franc. As part of the West African Economic and Monetary
+Union, which covers Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau,
+Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, France can still veto monetary policy. This
+currency dependency also encourages the nations to remain over-reliant on
+French imports of goods manufactured from the former colonies’ raw
+materials. Britain and other Western powers take a more indirect approach,
+through international trade and bodies such as the International Monetary
+Fund and the World Bank, but the result is the same.
+There were varying models for running colonies in Africa. In places like
+Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, there was a far larger presence of British citizens
+than in countries like Nigeria. Even when indirect rule was chosen as the
+model, a very limited native elite was trained to administer colonialism.
+This meant there was a strong presence of European civil servants across
+Africa who worked above the native administrators. For example in 1930s
+Ghana, European civil servants were paid £40 per month, while Africans
+received only £4 for the same hours of work. There was no need to educate
+the locals because they were deemed unworthy of rising into the intellectual
+ranks that could lead the country. In 1959 Britain ‘spent £11 per African
+pupil, £38 per Indian and £186 per European’ in Uganda for their
+schooling.26 On independence Kenya had only thirty-five schools for 5.5
+million young people.27 In 1950 the student body of the University of
+Sakar, established for all those in the West African French colonies, was 50
+per cent White.28 This lack of educational provision was not only meant to
+convey the idea that Africans could not think, but created a reality where
+the native population did not have the skills (particularly in literacy) to
+administer their countries. The select few who were given the opportunity
+for education received the most Eurocentric indoctrination imaginable,
+having to travel to the mother country to be taught in the ways of
+Whiteness.
+The purpose of educating Africans was to create a class who could
+administer European colonialism as a proxy for Europeans. It brings to
+mind Malcolm X’s description of the Uncle Tom figure from the slave
+plantation:
+The slavemaster took Tom and dressed him well, and fed him well,
+and even gave him a little education – a little education; gave him a
+long coat and a top hat and made all the other slaves look up to him.
+
+Then he used Tom to control them. The same strategy that was used
+in those days is used today. He takes a Negro, a so-called Negro,
+and makes him prominent, builds him up, publicizes him, makes
+him a celebrity. And then he becomes a spokesman for Negroes.29
+Replace ‘Negro’ with ‘African’, and ‘celebrity’ with ‘administrator’ and
+you have the exact relationship of the colonial period. On independence it
+was these anointed ones who were trusted to ‘lead’ their countries. Given
+that all the leaders who emerged from the continent went through different
+varieties of this process, the surprise is that so many of them rejected their
+masters’ ideas. The movement to unite and liberate the continent from
+European control emerged in Britain and America and was spearheaded by
+Africans educated by their respective mother countries. It is also true that
+ultimately too many of the leaders betrayed the radical promise of
+continental unity in favour of the individual status and wealth gained from
+leading their nations further into the bowels of the West. But revolutionary
+leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea and
+Patrice Lumumba in Congo were also educated in the West. The problem is
+that they were never given the chance to implement their revolutionary
+programmes because the West made sure to dispose of them and support
+puppets in their place who had taken to the Western training they had
+received.
+Patrice Lumumba’s assassination is the perfect case study in the
+corruption the West embedded into Africa, post-independence. Lumumba
+was the first prime minister of independent Congo, who sought to
+Africanize the government and administer state-led economic development,
+using the resources of the nation for the benefit of its people. Congo was
+(and remains) far too important to the West to allow this to happen, being
+one of the most mineral-rich parts of the world. Rather than allow the
+people of Congo to decide their destiny the West, including the Belgians
+and the CIA, supported his rival, the reactionary Moise Tshombe. Malcom
+X devoted a lot of time speaking about the situation in Congo, condemning
+the United States’ role in supporting Tshombe, the ‘Uncle Tom’ leader who
+was a puppet for Western interests. In 1961 the Lumumba problem was
+taken care of when he was killed in what has been dubbed the ‘most
+important assassination of the twentieth century’.30
+
+Tshombe’s leadership led to the dictatorial reign of Mobuto Sese Seko,
+which lasted from 1965 to 1997, and which devastated Congo, opening up
+the nation to Western interests and impoverishing it further. He also
+personally looted billions of dollars. The civil wars sparked after his
+departure claimed more lives than any other conflict since the Second
+World War. Congo is just one example of what has happened across Africa
+and the rest of the underdeveloped world when leaders threaten the interests
+of the West: regimes are changed to install pro-Western governments. It is
+the political and economic system that is corrupt in Africa, and the puppet
+‘Uncle Tom’ leaders who syphon off money into Western bank accounts are
+a by-product of that central problem. Just as there is no such thing as free
+trade, so-called good governance is a nonsense in this system.
+
+THE DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION OF INDIA
+The British Empire was vast, by 1900 covering a quarter of the globe and
+ruling over 372 million subjects. This scene from Queen Victoria’s
+Diamond Jubilee in 1897 demonstrates the extent of her dominions:
+50,000 troops from every corner of the empire – Camel Corps and
+Gurkhas, Canadian hussars and Jamaicans in white gaiters, the
+procession led by the loftiest officer in the army, 6-foot-8 Captain
+Ames of the Horse Guards – had marched or trotted through London
+to celebrate.31
+India was Britain’s largest colony and Britain did not just underdevelop
+India, it actively de-industrialized the region. When Britain colonized India
+in the late eighteenth century, it was a rich nation that accounted for 25 per
+cent of the world’s trade. By the time Britain’s rule collapsed in 1947, India
+only held a 3 per cent share. Before British colonialism the standard of
+living in India was on a par with what would become the mother country.
+Afterwards, levels of absolute poverty no longer seen in Britain plagued the
+nation.32 During the initial eastern expansion of their Empire the British
+did not seize what they wanted at the barrel of a gun. Europeans used gifts
+and signed treaties to gain access to societies in the East. It was only in the
+eighteenth century that attitudes towards India began to change, and rather
+
+than being seen as people worthy of trade, Indians were viewed as brutes to
+be dominated.33
+That is not to say that in the beginning there was none of the underlying
+White supremacy we saw at work in the Atlantic system. Although the
+westward expansion of empire was important, the move into the East was
+just as indispensable to the emergence of the West, and equally brutal.
+Vasco da Gama is less celebrated than his Italian counterpart Columbus, but
+his opening up of India to the Portuguese in 1497–9 was as pivotal as
+Columbus’s so-called discovery, and he wrought a similar campaign of
+terror. The year 1492 marked the expulsion of the Muslim conquerors from
+Spain, but they maintained power in the East. Europeans set about
+destroying ports and strongholds in the Muslim world on their travels
+eastward, and da Gama showed no mercy, as this tale of how he dealt with a
+ship full of Muslim pilgrims returning to India shows:
+he ordered the ship to be set on fire … Women held up their
+jewellery to beg for mercy from the flames or from the water, while
+others held up their infants to try to protect them. Da Gama watched
+impassively, ‘cruelly and without pity’ as every last passenger and
+crew member drowned before his eyes.34
+Dehumanizing ideas about those from the ‘East’ have a long history in the
+European imagination. The battle of East versus West has been played out
+in the Greek and Roman Empires, in the Crusades from the eleventh
+century, the battles against the occupation of Spain by the Moors, wars with
+the Ottoman Empire, and into the present day with the supposed ‘clash of
+civilizations’ between the West and the Islamic world that is shaping much
+of the West’s policy agenda.35
+The long history of the West viewing the East through a lens of the exotic
+and inferior is dubbed ‘Orientalism’ by scholar Edward Said, who defines
+the idea as a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
+authority over the Orient’.36 Importantly, he argues that European culture
+gained strength and identity by setting itself ‘against the Orient as a sort of
+surrogate and even underground self’.37 In other words, the West’s selfbelief in its superiority, given supposedly scientific legitimacy in the
+Enlightenment, was in part bolstered by the supposed inferiority of the
+people and cultures it encountered in the East. But for all of Europe’s
+
+aggrandizing ideas, the reality was that Westerners were not superior to
+those they encountered in the East, and they had no choice but to ingratiate
+themselves in order to trade.
+In the fifteenth century Europe was emerging from its Dark Age and
+lagged behind the East. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the West
+was able to begin to assert its dominance. In fact, the same was true in
+Africa, where, although the first instinct may have been to conquer,
+Europeans found this impossible given the strength of the societies they
+encountered. There is a reason that Europe never directly colonized Africa
+until much later, and kept its forts and presence for the most part limited to
+the coast. White supremacy had to be established. It was not a divine right.
+Britain had to wait for its opportunity to fulfil its ambition to conquer
+India, which came with the decline of the Mughal Empire in the mid
+eighteenth century. The Mughals ruled a vast area in India from the
+sixteenth to well into the seventeenth century – a centralized power that the
+British could not displace. But the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707
+tipped the Empire into a series of wars to decide who would succeed as
+ruler. Within fifty years the Mughal regime had collapsed in on itself,
+unable to keep control of its sprawling dominions. Britain seized on the
+chaos caused by the fall of the Mughals, and through the East India
+Company (EIC) embarked on colonization. By 1857 the EIC had an army
+of 260,000 troops and dominion over 200 million subjects.38 Echoing
+present-day US imperialism driven by private corporations, the EIC was a
+business, set up with a monopoly over British interests in India.
+The British government provided loans and support to establish the
+company and individuals made massive profits from its endeavours. There
+was no surer investment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than EIC
+stock, and its directors amassed fortunes from exploiting the people and
+resources of India. Between 1765 and 1815 Indians paid over £18 million a
+year to the EIC in taxes alone. The word ‘loot’ comes from Hindi, and
+directly from the pillaging of India, incorporated into English by the same
+people who robbed it. Robert Clive ‘of India’, military general, first
+governor of Bengal and director of the EIC, amassed a personal fortune in
+excess of £40 million in today’s money. The seizure of Calcutta in 1757
+was a large source of this wealth. After claiming the region, the employees
+of the EIC shared the tax take of £2 million – billions in current money –
+between themselves. As the EIC was gorging itself on the locals’ taxes, the
+
+first Bengal famine struck, killing millions of people – up to a third of the
+region’s population – but the British ‘had thought only of enriching
+themselves as the local population starved to death’.39 Such callous
+disregard for lives that are not White in the face of profit has been the
+defining feature of Western development.
+The abuses by the EIC were such that eventually even the British
+government had to step in. It took a rebellion of the Indian population in
+1857 to spur the government into action and to disband the EIC. The last
+thing the country needed was restless natives in one of its most important
+colonies. India was hugely important for British trade and industry,
+particularly after the end of the transatlantic slave system. In fact the price
+of labour there was so cheap that it rivalled the economy of slavery even
+when the system was ongoing.40 Commodities like cotton and sugar were
+increasingly derived from cheap labour on Indian plantations and therefore
+Britain had to maintain order over the colony. But, in the same way as when
+Belgium took over Congo from Leopold, when the British government
+ruled India as a colony the relationship established by the private
+corporation did not change. Through violent subjugation India continued to
+be milked of its resources by Britain.
+In 1901, the salary for the Secretary of State of India brought in the same
+amount of income that 90,000 Indians survived on. By the 1920s 7,500
+British civil servants in India were taking a total of £20 million annually in
+pensions. The British Indian army was also paid for out of Indian taxes,
+sustaining a standing army of over 325,000 troops by the late nineteenth
+century.41 But robbing India through taxation was not the only way that
+Britain de-industrialized the nation.
+In keeping with the logic of Western imperialism, the sheer brutality of
+British colonialism did major demographic damage to India. This included
+the kind of genocide to conquer the natives we have seen in other parts of
+the world. Disease was also a major killer, where outbreaks such as cholera
+epidemics claimed the lives of millions. Cholera had existed in India before
+the arrival of the British but troop invasions into India were associated with
+outbreaks, as they carried the disease across the region. Cholera was also a
+massive killer during famines, intersecting with starvation to deadly
+effect.42 It was these famines in India that accounted for the majority of
+those killed by British colonialism. I have already briefly discussed the first
+famine in the nation in 1770, but these tragedies continued to beset colonial
+
+India even after the British government had taken the reins from the EIC.
+As Shashi Tharoor explains in his book Inglorious Empire,
+in the entire 107 years from 1793 to 1900, only an estimated 5
+million people had died in all the wars around the world combined,
+whereas in just ten years 1891–1900, 19 million had died in India in
+famines alone.43
+In total over 35 million Indians died in famines under British colonial rule.
+The most infamous is perhaps the second Bengal famine in 1943 which
+took the lives of 3 million people before Britain mobilized an appropriate
+response. This particular famine has had more public attention because of
+the involvement of British wartime hero Winston Churchill.
+Prime minister at the time, Churchill took the decision to divert grain
+away from India and actually import grain from the famine-hit country into
+Britain, so that it could be stockpiled for the war effort. He did so with full
+knowledge of the scale of the crisis. Worse still, Britain prohibited Indian
+ships from sailing to get food, or using their currency reserves to buy it.
+Churchill’s defence was to blame the Indians for ‘breeding like rabbits’; in
+any case they would soon replenish their number. He had such a total
+disregard for the Indian people that the Secretary of India at the time Leo
+Amery (hardly an avowed anti-racist) once told him that in terms of his
+views of Indians, he could not see ‘much difference between his outlook
+and Hitler’s’.44 This ghastly episode is a reminder of the disposability of
+Indian life in the Empire, but Churchill was just carrying on a wellestablished tradition. Viceroy Lord Lytton had banned any price reductions
+during famines in the nineteenth century and when colonial administrators
+imported rice to feed the hungry during the Orissa famine in 1866, The
+Economist magazine chastised them for sending the message to the Indians
+that it was ‘the duty of the Government to keep them alive’.45
+Such disregard for life was even seen when Britain left India. Labour’s
+Attlee government wanted a quick exit from the colony after the War, and
+Britain hastily drew up plans to leave. Divisions between the Hindu
+majority and Muslim minority had been stoked by Britain, divide and rule
+being one of the best forms of maintaining control. The Muslim League,
+under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was campaigning for a
+separate state for the large Muslim population. Lord Mountbatten was put in
+
+charge of the process and came up with the plan to partition India, creating
+the new state of Pakistan. You may know him as ‘Uncle Dickie’ in the
+Netflix series The Crown, although in keeping with the idealization of such
+figures you are much less likely to have heard about the significant amount
+of blood on his hands from the catastrophe of Indian Partition.
+Despite warnings of the carnage and upheaval that would be unleashed
+by creating a religious national divide overnight, the British went ahead
+and, following colonial tradition, arbitrarily drew a new boundary. On
+Independence the result was as expected: more than 14 million people
+became refugees, fleeing for the safety of their appointed homelands.
+During the ethnic violence that was then unleashed, over 1 million people
+lost their lives. British hands may not have been directly involved in the
+slaughter, but they were by no means clean: they had callously created the
+conditions that allowed India to become a bloodbath.
+Under British rule India went from being one of the richest places on
+earth to one of the most underdeveloped. The textile industry was purposely
+prevented from competing with Britain. Cities shrank as work disappeared.
+Indian shipping and steel production were also destroyed by the Empire to
+create British supremacy. By the time the British left in 1947 poverty and
+illiteracy had become the norm. It was only after Independence that the
+country began to grow and prosper, and today India is one of the fastestgrowing economies on the planet and expected to be in the top three in
+terms of size in the coming years.
+Extreme poverty has been slashed in India: according to the World Bank
+only 5 per cent of the population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2018,
+compared to a quarter in 2011. On Independence the literacy rate in the
+country was only 18 per cent, which improved to 80 per cent by 2017, the
+same year that Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash
+Javadekar announced a ‘guarantee that within next five years, it will be 100
+per cent’.46 In a seeming reversal of the economics of empire, India once
+again manufactures the clothes for Britain and much of the world. Even the
+steel sector is booming: in a sign of the apparently post-colonial times an
+Indian company, Tata, in 2007 took over what once was British Steel. Part
+of the pitch of those pushing for Britain to leave the EU was so that they
+could forge independent trade deals with countries like India. You could be
+mistaken for looking at India and claiming a success story; empire
+
+happened, but that is all in the past. That would be to mistake a mirage for a
+waterhole.
+Of all these prosperous figures, GDP is the most misleading. India is the
+second largest country by population, by some distance. Only China also
+has more than a billion inhabitants, and the third largest country is the
+United States with over 300 million people. GDP measures the product of
+the population and more people should lead to a higher output; India is
+supposed to have a large economy. Britain has a comparable GDP to India
+but a population of only 66 million. If we look at GDP per capita (person),
+India only ranks 139th in the world. In other words, poverty is still rife.
+Extreme poverty may well have declined in recent years, but hundreds of
+millions of Indians live in conditions unimaginable in the West. Wealth is
+not being equally distributed across the country. While claiming back textile
+production sounds like a success, it is actually the opposite. Manufacturing
+jobs moved to places like India because poverty made it cheaper to pay
+workers in the underdeveloped world a pittance in sweatshops, rather than
+pay a decent minimum wage in the West. Indian labour is being exploited
+by multinationals in exactly the same relationship as we saw under
+colonialism. We can celebrate the boom in the service sector in India, but
+just consider the economics of having people thousands of miles away
+working in call centres for Western countries. It is only cheaper to offshore
+this kind of work because the standard of living in India is so much lower
+than the West. If conditions improved and wages rose enough to provide the
+Western lifestyle that we are so comfortable with, then the jobs that are
+underpinning the so-called success of India would quickly be moved to a
+poorer part of the world. It is a strange sort of prosperity that depends on
+millions of your people being poor.
+Such poverty has dire consequences. Neo-colonial India may have dealt
+with the problem of famines, which were so widespread under British rule,
+but in 2018 almost a million children died in India before their fifth
+birthday because they were poor.47 India is making as much progress as
+any nation of a billion Brown people can in a racist world order. We only
+accept the poverty and appalling conditions because they are imposed on
+those who are not White. Doing the dirty work so that we in the West do not
+have to is exactly what they are worth, these disposable bodies propping up
+the West.
+
+AMERICAN EMPIRE
+The updated system of Western imperialism needs to be understood in the
+context of supposedly post-colonial nations like India, but also in the shift
+of the centre of power from Europe to the United States. One of the main
+lies America tells itself is that it was a victim of colonial oppression which
+freed itself from the tyranny of the British. While it is true that the original
+thirteen states were colonies of the British Empire, the Pilgrims were the
+first ex-pats, pioneers bravely taking their religion and so-called civilization
+to the New World. Opening the American frontier was the essential first
+step to building the West. American settlers are not just implicated in but
+directly benefited from the founding genocide. The nation was then built on
+the back of slave labour from Africa. The United States is a settler colony
+where we can see the logic of the West play out in its clearest, most
+undiluted form.
+When the newly United States broke away from their British overlords,
+this did not mark a break in the progress of the West but a necessary
+evolution. Losing the colony ended up being of benefit to Britain. Trade
+with the United States increased after independence in 1783. After the
+abolition of slavery in Britain, when the country was basking in its moral
+superiority to the United States, it was perfectly happy to import the
+products of US slave plantations. During the US Civil War in the early
+1860s, when the North blockaded Southern ships, there was a cotton famine
+in Britain that led to a steep decline in the industry, with many factories
+closing down and people out of work. The impact was to raise pro-slavery
+sentiment and support for the South in Britain, particularly in places
+dependent on slave-produced cotton.
+During the war Liverpool was a stronghold of Confederacy support, with
+three out of the four local papers on the side of the South. The city even
+held a Confederate Bazaar in 1864 to raise money for Southern prisoners of
+war. The bazaar was held in the grand St George’s Hall and was attended by
+prominent businesspeople, aristocrats and the local member of parliament.
+The Liverpool Daily Courier called the event a ‘triumphant success’ as it
+raised £20,000 (more than £2.5 million today) and was attended by
+thousands of people.48
+By 1850, 40 per cent of British exports were finished cotton goods and at
+least three-quarters, and in some years 95 per cent, of the raw material
+
+imported into the Liverpool docks was from US plantations.49 New
+Orleans hosted the biggest market in enslaved Africans because of its
+centrality in connecting US cotton plantations to factories in the north of
+England. The United States was also a key market for British industry, and
+a destination for capital finance, making it more important than any part of
+Britain’s actual empire. In the long term Britain has maintained a special
+relationship with its former colony, basking in the reflected glory of the new
+centre of Western imperialism.
+As well as being a settler colony, the United States has been and remains
+a colonial force in the classic sense of the word. At different times Puerto
+Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guam and
+Samoa have been US colonies. Hawaii has since been incorporated into the
+nation, Puerto Rico has a unique status as not quite colony or state, and the
+US Virgin Islands remain a colony to this very day. The United States even
+took the very European step of establishing a colony in Africa.
+Liberia was founded in 1847 with the intention of solving the supposed
+race problem that would result from having millions of formerly enslaved
+people running free in the United States. The idea was to repatriate the
+Black population to Liberia, thereby cleansing the nation.50 Liberia was
+formally a free state led by African Americans who, with support from the
+US military, subjugated the natives of the area in order to establish their
+new homeland. In reality, Liberia was a colony of the United States, entirely
+dependent on the mother country for resources, military support and trade.
+In keeping with the pattern across the rest of the continent, Liberia was
+developed only insofar as this benefited the mother country and was set up
+to strip the new nation of its resources. US companies flocked to Liberia to
+make their fortunes and underdevelopment was an essential element of this
+process. If Liberia had industrialized it would have challenged Western
+dominance on the continent.51 As well as using the colony to enrich the
+mother country, Liberia was also a tool in wider US interests in the region.
+One of the main reasons that a more revolutionary approach to African
+unity never occurred after most countries gained their independence was
+that a group of them, including Nigeria, Ethiopia and most of francophone
+Africa, were fundamentally opposed to truly unifying the continent. Instead
+they sought the trappings of nation-state sovereignty and maintaining close
+links to their paymasters in the West. It is no coincidence that this group
+were dubbed the ‘Monrovia bloc’, after the capital of Liberia, holding their
+
+first meeting there in 1961.52 Given the importance of Africa in terms of
+resources, the United States and the rest of the West were terrified of a
+radical vision of African political unity. Liberian president William Tubman
+spearheaded the successful efforts to block radical proposals for change,
+and the country went much further in doing its colonial master’s bidding.
+In 1975 President William Tolbert ignored the ban imposed by the
+Organization of African Unity and hosted South African apartheid prime
+minister John Vorster. The meeting of the leaders of two of America’s client
+states in Africa was more than just symbolic. Liberia was also used as a
+base for CIA operations in Chad in support of warlord Hissène Habré in
+1982, and more recently for US efforts to oust Gaddafi in Libya.53
+America’s use of Liberia as a military outpost is just part of a much larger
+aspect of US colonial foreign policy. To solidify its power across the globe
+the US has over 800 military bases in more than seventy countries. Africa is
+no exception: there are at least thirty-four US bases on the continent.54 In
+2007 the United States announced its intentions in Africa by launching its
+Africa Command, known as Africom. President George W. Bush explained
+that the aim was to ‘enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the
+people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health,
+education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa’.55 The neo-colonial
+intent of the operation is embedded in the quote, from the paternalism of
+wanting to ‘bring peace and security’ to the continent, to the list of
+aspirations that the mission wants to fulfil. Africom stands out from other
+US commands because of its largely non-military objectives. The official
+rhetoric makes it sound more like an aid agency than an army. The fact that
+the United States believes it needs the might of its military power to ‘bring’
+prosperity to the continent should be no surprise.
+Colonial civilizing missions were always done at the barrel of a gun. We
+should also be sceptical of these noble intentions. Africa is a key resource
+for oil and other minerals and Africom’s presence appears aimed at securing
+the safety of the extraction of these rather than promoting authentic
+continental supremacy. It should also be noted that even the reactionary
+African leaders that run the continent today are wary of Africom. No
+country has accepted US overtures to host the headquarters of the
+command, which runs out of Stuttgart in Germany. A US military command
+for Africa, run from Germany, should give all the symbolic clues to its
+nature that we need.
+
+A major part of US imperialism is the power it wields as the dedicated
+police force of the world. The establishment of Africom is meant to further
+those networks and allow the US to strike across the globe. We have already
+seen the use of US hard power, with Africom leading the coalition of
+Western forces to topple Gaddafi, military action that went expressly
+against the wishes of the African Union (which replaced the Organization
+of African Unity).
+The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the most blatant neo-colonial
+expression of hard power of the twenty-first century. A key source of oil
+and a strategic defence against Iran, Iraq has been a major piece in Western
+dominance of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein was once a key ally of the
+West; in fact, I grew up driving past the Saddam Hussein Mosque in
+Birmingham, built in the dictator’s honour. Not long after the Second Gulf
+War the name of the mosque was changed as Britain tried to create a new
+narrative around its involvement in the region. Whether we view the war as
+legal or moral are important questions, but what is indisputable is that it
+reflected the entitlement of the West, led by the United States, to enforce its
+will on other parts of the world. There was no global mandate for invasion –
+there was not even agreement across the West – but it occurred,
+nonetheless. The result was the destabilization of Iraq and the rise of the
+Islamic State, which quickly became the new bogeyman for the West. In the
+same way that the United States had not tried to create al-Qaeda as a
+terrorist group that would kill thousands of people in New York, neither was
+it a conscious act to create its descendants. But as damaging as both groups
+have been in the West, they have perversely served the expansion of the
+militarist US-led empire.
+Before the Iraq War the invasion of Afghanistan was supported by the
+Western world in order to bring down the Taliban regime that harboured alQaeda. Iraq was never implicated in 9/11 and therefore a different pretext
+was needed to expand the mission. But without the initial presence in
+Afghanistan it is very unlikely that the Iraq invasion would have happened,
+no matter how many weapons of mass destruction the United States
+imagined Saddam Hussein was stockpiling. Al-Qaeda provided the pretext
+for a reshaping of relations in the Middle East, one of the most important
+regions for the US Empire, which invested heavily in its neo-colonial
+adventure. The United States may have spent as much as $3 trillion on Iraq
+alone,56 not to mention the vast sums of money allies like Britain ploughed
+
+into the invasion. Part of this gigantic outlay was because of neo-colonial
+arrogance – the idea that these puny countries in the desert would quickly
+bow to Western military might.
+The sight of George Bush the younger landing in a fighter jet on the USS
+Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on 1 May 2003, to unveil a ‘mission
+accomplished’ banner is the most obvious symbol of the hubris of the US
+Empire. The war would not actually end for more than eight years and there
+is still chaos in the region. As has been true for anywhere there has been
+colonialism, there was also resistance, and the United States and its allies
+were trapped for years in conflict that claimed the lives of thousands of
+Western troops. But the blood and treasure were worth it. The invasion
+renewed Western control over resources in the region and solidified a new
+frontier in the US Empire.
+The bombing of the World Trade Center led directly to the signing of the
+Patriot Act in October 2001, which has been much criticized for trampling
+on domestic civil liberties. But the Patriot Act, and other laws passed in the
+aftermath of 9/11, allowed the United States to make more gains for its
+global empire. Following the attacks the US government froze the assets of
+any group suspected of funding terror abroad. Sanctions were imposed
+without the need for trial or much evidence. The ban was widespread and
+covered all ‘aspects of financial support including food and medical aid’.57
+As a result the assets of a number of Islamic charities were frozen,
+irrespective of whether they were actually funding terrorism. The impact of
+these decisions was felt not only by those in need of aid but may also have
+contributed directly to financial crisis in Somalia.
+As many underdeveloped countries do, Somalia relies on remittances
+from its diaspora. A large proportion of these were handled by Al-Barakaat,
+a Muslim money-transfer company which the United States financially
+ruined ‘despite lack of evidence, trial or conviction’.58 The collapse of the
+company sent Somalia into an economic tailspin. The economic attacks of
+the US Empire were the softer side of the wider offensive.
+Alongside massive military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
+United States also increased its militarization of the entire region, and
+beyond. Extraordinary rendition of subjects to black sites, beyond the
+jurisdiction of international law, where they were subsequently tortured,
+became the norm. Almost 800 people were imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay,
+including British citizens. The majority were eventually released without
+
+charge. Despite President Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo Bay
+within a year of his coming to office in 2009, at the time of writing there are
+still people imprisoned in the camp. The CIA has ramped up its activity
+around the world and legitimized the use of drone strikes to kill terror
+suspects without the need for anything like arrest and trial. The US security
+apparatus has extended across the globe and set precedents for the use of
+force that are reminiscent of old colonial days. It has been estimated that
+since the start of the ‘War on Terror’ between 244,124 and 266,427
+civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, the three main
+targets of the US mission. In addition, over 100,000 members of the local
+armies and police forces have lost their lives.59 Not all of these deaths were
+the direct consequence of US armed forces pulling the trigger or dropping a
+bomb, but they are a consequence of their neo-colonial agenda in the
+region. The callous disregard for life that is not White can be seen in the
+drone strikes targeting ‘terror’ suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen
+and Somalia. Between 8,858 and 16,901 people have been killed by remote
+control from the sky, including up to 2,200 civilians, of which as many as
+454 have been children.60 US imperialism has industrialized and
+legitimated the killing of Brown civilians, including children, in pursuit of
+its goals.
+A key feature of the expansion of the US Empire is one reminiscent from
+older forms of colonialism: of the fortune that the United States spent on the
+invasion of Iraq, a third was spent employing private military contractors,
+often ex-soldiers paid by a private company to wage war. As such, there is
+far less scrutiny of and accountability for their actions. The biggest force in
+Iraq apart from the US army was the private militia, paid for by US tax
+dollars. Iraq is just one example of the global trend. Private militias operate
+in more than ninety countries, amassing budgets of over $100 billion.61
+Not only did they make a financial killing from the conflict in Iraq, they
+also profited mightily in the reconstruction effort. Contracts worth at least
+$138 billion were handed out to private firms to rebuild the damage caused
+by the US-inflicted war. Most controversially, a company previously run by
+the then Vice President Dick Cheney was the most rewarded from this
+privatization of state rebuilding, receiving contracts worth $39.5 billion.62
+Capitalism, from Columbus’s voyages to slave-owning companies, to
+outsourced colonial corporations, to hedge-fund managers today, has been
+based on the state setting the table for private interests to fill their bellies.
+
+Western empires have facilitated the ransacking of various parts of the
+world, underdeveloping supposedly backward nations so that the West can
+continue to profit. The myth of the risk-taking entrepreneur is central to
+justifying the staggering inequality the system produces, but it is also rooted
+in colonial logic. In fact, the notion is central to Enlightenment ideals of
+progress, which identify the rational, individual White man as he who
+ploughs the way for capitalist progress. Ignored in this is the role various
+states have played in tilting the playing field so far in their favour that you
+would be forgiven for believing that it is natural for wealth to fall into the
+hands of the West. The current version of the US Empire is simply the
+latest, most efficient way of delivering Western imperialism.
+
+5
+
+Dawn of a New Age
+After the Second World War the initial version of Western imperialism
+could no longer continue to function in the same way it had during the
+previous centuries. Competition between European nation states vying to
+dominate the globe led to the loss of millions of lives and bankrupted these
+seats of empire. The great European powers simply no longer had the
+resources to directly control and maintain their colonies. Worse still, both
+World Wars were truly global and the natives who had fought in their
+millions for the mother countries were restless. They demanded freedom
+and had the experience of armed warfare to achieve it. The fifth PanAfrican Congress, which brought together leaders of resistance movements
+across Africa and the diaspora took place in Manchester in 1945. For the
+first time in the movement’s forty-five year history the delegates from
+Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas proclaimed their demands for the
+full independence of Africa from European rule.
+The writing was on the wall, and the empires that had defined the world
+were in danger of collapse. In fact, in the popular imagination this is exactly
+what is thought to have happened. Europe had to, either in response to
+armed resistance by the natives or through a supposedly benevolent process,
+eventually grant independence to its colonies. The old logic of racial
+domination melted away, leading to the globalized world we inhabit today.
+
+Unfortunately, that version of history is an utter myth. Rather than
+marking the beginning of the end of Western imperialism, the Second
+World War instead led to a system update that changed the delivery of a
+racist, unjust social order, but maintained all of its logic. By rebooting the
+system it was able to continue, in many ways more successfully than in the
+first, outdated version. In the deluded world-view of historians like Niall
+Ferguson, the brutal forms of colonial oppression in the earlier version of
+Western imperialism did more good than harm, representing a sort of
+‘liberal imperialism’ that brought light to the backward parts of the world.1
+These arguments are distorted, dangerous and wrong-headed, as any reader
+of the previous chapters will understand. Inadvertently, however, Ferguson
+stumbles upon the perfect phrase to capture the updated form of the system
+that emerged after the Second World War: liberal imperialism. The current
+incarnation of Western empire is one that presents itself as working for the
+good of humanity, while maintaining the colonial logic upon which it was
+founded.
+Before the Second World War had even ended, plans were being made to
+update the imperial system. After the carnage of the First World War and
+the subsequent Great Depression it was becoming clear that the system was
+unstable even prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. In order to move to a more
+sustainable system of imperialism the West realized that it had to go beyond
+the nation state-led format that had until this point been its dominant
+feature. Collaboration between Western powers was always a central feature
+of the emergence of the current racial order. European nation states simply
+could not have dominated the globe without cooperation and systematic
+coordination. But this was still done under the banner of nation statehood,
+with competition and wars an unrelenting reality. Given this history, the
+outbreak of neither the First nor the Second World War came as a great
+surprise.
+After the Germans lost in 1918 their colonies were divided up between
+the Allies, and this became a key source of national frustration that
+contributed to the rise of such a virulent, racist nationalism in the form of
+Nazism. Western nation states at war with each other was bad for the
+business of exploiting the world and therefore a more substantive form of
+unity was necessary. The League of Nations, founded in 1920, was the first
+attempt. It was ultimately doomed to failure because, although President
+Woodrow Wilson was a key proponent of the League, the United States
+
+never joined due to opposition in Congress. The fact that the United States
+was essential to making the alliance work also marks a key shift in the
+centre of Western imperialism. By 1920, although Europe still controlled
+most of the world, the stage was set for the United States to become the
+heart of the Western empire. The wealth and power of the United States
+were the definition of colonial logic and European collaboration. It was a
+nation formed in genocide, built by slave labour to offer a new frontier for
+peoples from across Europe. The US was engorged by wealth accrued from
+the first stage of Western imperialism and was ready to lead the transition
+into the new world order.
+When the United States decided to end its isolationist stance and take its
+place on the world stage, it did so on the basis of the same grand vision that
+remains largely intact today. While the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
+was the act of aggression that ultimately tipped the United States into the
+Second World War, the stage had been set earlier. In August 1941 Churchill
+and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter, which was not a treaty or
+binding document but rather a pledge of the principles that would govern
+world affairs after the Nazis had been defeated. The eight principles of the
+Charter were designed to create lasting peace and even included the
+‘abandonment of the use of force’, which, given the empire that Britain
+ruled over at the time, would have been a remarkable new principle, had
+they ever intended it to apply to the colonies.2 In fact the entire Charter
+reads like an anti-colonial manifesto, promising that ‘countries seek no
+aggrandizement, territorial or other’; ‘no territorial changes that do not
+accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’; and ‘the
+right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
+live’. Whether Britain liked it or not, once professed, the principles
+enshrined in these documents became used by decolonial freedom
+movements in both the colonies and the mother countries. When Malcolm
+X founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964 he explained
+that they were partly ‘inspired by’ the Atlantic Charter in their quest for
+self-determination.3
+As well as inspiring liberation movements, the Charter became the
+foundation of the United Nations (UN), created in 1945 in order to meet the
+aims of national cooperation, global peace and security. By maintaining the
+nation-state framework the UN has been able to convince countries to sign
+up and agree to general principles of collaboration. As each member has
+
+one vote the UN has been seen as a site where the global majority, i.e. those
+countries not in the West, can have its say. As an organization the UN has
+certainly done some good in the underdeveloped world, spearheading
+development programmes and working to reduce ills like infant mortality.
+But don’t be fooled by the façade of internationalism. It is no coincidence
+that the UN was originally conceived by the British and Americans, nor that
+its headquarters are in New York. The principal function of the UN has
+always been to aid the transition from the old system of imperialism to the
+new. Nothing could be stronger evidence of this than the make-up of the
+real decision-making body in the UN.
+The General Assembly, with its one-country-one-vote, may well be a
+perfect space for grand speeches denouncing colonialism, but all the real
+power lies with the Security Council, which is made up of five permanent
+members: France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United
+States and China; plus a further ten nations elected to two-year terms. At
+the time that the UN was founded, Russia was technically not in the West;
+at that point it was the major state in the Soviet Union and the foundation of
+the Communist bloc. The USSR was undoubtedly a major power, and since
+the Soviets had been pivotal in defeating the Nazis, they could not be
+excluded. And, of course, Communism’s difference to the West on the
+fundamental issue of the global racial order is a matter only of degree.
+China stands out as the only non-White country on the council, but it was
+also a key ally in the War and has been entirely complicit in racial
+capitalism in order to develop itself. Not being White has never
+automatically meant being opposed to the colonial logic of White
+supremacy.
+Permanent Security Council members have the right of veto over
+substantive resolutions, which is why the Iraq War was never declared
+illegal by the UN. That ultimate power means that the five permanent
+members shape the decision-making of the organization. As neither Russia
+nor China remain Communist in any meaningful sense, the domination of
+Western interests in the UN is now indisputable. The UN is the global
+institution with the best reputation in the world but it is inextricably bound
+up with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, whose
+names evoke fear across the underdeveloped world. In fact, article five of
+the Atlantic Charter speaks of the ‘desire to bring about the fullest
+collaboration between all nations in the economic field’, which became the
+
+most important frontier for the updated global system of Western
+imperialism.
+In 1944 the seeds were planted for the IMF, World Bank and World Trade
+Organization at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. They
+were later dubbed an ‘unholy trinity’ that developed a ‘regime’ of financial
+control over the world.4 Just as with the UN, Britain and the United States
+took the lead in establishing both the meeting and the ensuing global
+institutions. Bretton Woods’ express purpose was to reshape the global
+order after the War. In keeping with tradition, the headquarters of the IMF
+and the World Bank are in the United States, both in Washington, DC. The
+special relationship across the Atlantic was more than just symbolic. It
+represented a passing of the torch from the former centre of Western
+imperialism to the new one. Britain and the United States spent two years
+designing the framework of the new world order prior to Bretton Woods,
+and the purpose of the meeting was simply to ratify this. To maintain the
+appearance of a global agreement, forty-four countries attended; but only
+fifteen sent their finance ministers. Demonstrating just how central their
+role in the process was, Guatemala sent a postgraduate economics student.
+In testament to the attitudes of the architects of the new system, John
+Maynard Keynes, the British economist who was instrumental in Bretton
+Woods, had made an effort to restrict the participation of countries other
+than the United States and Britain ‘fearing that a “great monkey house”
+would result if all of the wartime allies were invited’.5 The financial
+regime ratified at Bretton Woods therefore represented US economic
+priorities, slightly steered by Britain, rather than any unified global
+alliance.6
+American dominance should not come as a shock given the context.
+Europe was bankrupt and depleted after years of war, whereas the United
+States’ economy was buoyant. The US used the opportunity to establish its
+place at the head of the table in the post-war period, notably giving the
+equivalent of $100 billion in aid to Western European countries impacted
+by the War, in the Marshall Plan of 1948. As well as providing aid directly
+to Europe, the US also supplied the bulk of funding to establish the new
+global economic institutions.
+The IMF began operating in 1947 and its principal initial purpose was to
+provide loans to stabilize Western economies and promote collaboration
+between countries. France was the first country to borrow from the IMF and
+
+between 1947 and 1971 Britain drew down $7.25 billion.7 There were five
+original shareholders: the United States, Britain, France, Germany and
+Japan. Voting rights depended on the amount of money a nation put in, and
+the size of the United States’ share in 1947 meant that it had an effective
+veto over the fund. The United States was willing to invest so much money
+in stabilizing the Western powers because it was in its economic interests to
+do so and shifted the centre of the global economy across the Atlantic. It
+was also in its economic and political interests to fight the spread of
+Communism. If Europe had become infected by the Red menace, the
+economic system that the United States had inherited leadership of could
+have come to an end.
+After 1971 the role of the IMF changed significantly. At this point
+Western economies had largely recovered from the War but there was a new
+problem. The West has always depended on the exploitation of the
+underdeveloped world, but by the seventies most of the former colonies
+were ruling themselves. There was a major fear that they would turn to
+Communism, which would also have ended Western economic dominance,
+given its dependence on the logic of empire. We should not pretend that the
+old forms of coercion were not attempted in this more liberal period of
+imperialism. Many countries had to win their freedom through armed
+struggle, and in places like Mozambique and Angola the death throes of
+direct colonization were brutal for the natives. Radical leaders were
+assassinated in order to install corrupt puppet regimes. The United States
+also began violent campaigns to prevent the spread of Communism, taking
+colonial-era violence to places like Vietnam and Korea. But for the most
+part the methods of control in the new age of empire were financial, and the
+IMF played a pivotal role.
+Colonialism had left the newly independent countries underdeveloped.
+They lacked basic infrastructure and were impoverished by colonial
+exploitation. After so-called independence neo-colonial trade practices
+ensured that even if they were rich in resources, like most African
+countries, their wealth was in the hands of foreign multinationals.
+Independence was gained by individual nation states that were too small to
+wield any influence on the world stage. Most of the underdeveloped nations
+found themselves in steep debt not long after the mirage of their liberation,
+and the IMF was only too willing to oblige them with loans. Unlike lending
+to Western countries, in the underdeveloped world these loans had strong
+
+conditions; they came with strings attached. The prevailing assumption was
+that the nations had got themselves in debt by acting economically
+inappropriately. For their economies to prosper and therefore pay back the
+loans they would have to make structural adjustments to their economic
+life. The orthodoxy of what apparently makes for a successful economy
+includes abolishing controls on imports, imposing austerity to reduce the
+size of the state, devaluing the currency and opening the doors to foreign
+private investors.8 Countries in desperate need of support continue to
+voluntarily submit to these conditions because they have no place else to
+turn.
+What on the surface was an economic bailout was in reality direct
+interference in the political decision-making of underdeveloped countries.
+Reducing public spending is a euphemism for cutting jobs and privatizing
+services, making them more expensive, in the poorest countries in the
+world. Consequently, IMF policies have caused strikes and riots across the
+underdeveloped world. In 1976 protests erupted in Argentina after
+government wages were frozen. A 1981 general strike occurred in Mexico
+after government subsidies on food were removed. The removal of
+subsidies on petrol brought unrest to Nigeria in 1988. Riots broke out in
+Egypt in 1997 and Indonesia in 1998 after food subsidies were removed or
+reduced. Decisions to make the poor even poorer are made with the
+coldness that only a global bureaucracy could produce.
+The evidence shows that IMF involvement in underdeveloped countries
+is a net negative. A study of 135 recipient countries found that accepting
+money from the IMF significantly increased income inequality.9 Structural
+adjustment has a negative effect on women’s employment.10 IMF loans
+lead to higher suicide rates in countries that accept them.11 IMF policies
+also reduce human rights in a recipient country, specifically increasing the
+incidence of torture and extra-judicial killings.12 The whole purpose of
+IMF intervention is meant to be to save struggling economies, but financial
+crises are a continuing feature for IMF recipients.13
+‘Structural adjustment’ is a term often associated with Latin America,
+where a debt crisis in the eighties sparked an economic shock across the
+continent. The root of the problem was that, particularly due to a steep rise
+in oil prices, in order to balance their budgets Latin American countries had
+been borrowing money from Western banks and governments, and were
+
+unable to service their foreign debts. For instance, by 1982 Bolivia was
+spending 15 per cent of its gross national product (GNP) on debt
+repayments, a clearly unsustainable position to be in. But Bolivia was not
+treated as harshly by the IMF for reasons that reveal the true motives for
+Western financial intervention.
+Although Bolivia had one of the worst debt ratios of any country, because
+it was a small and poor country its absolute debt was relatively low: it owed
+only $44 million to Western banks. Argentina, on the other hand, was
+spending 4.5 per cent of its GNP on debt repayments, but as a richer and
+larger country had a total debt of $45 billion.14 It seems obvious that the
+two economies were vastly different and would not require the same
+prescription, but the IMF mercilessly and harshly imposed structural
+adjustment on Argentina in any case. The purpose of these policies was not
+to solve the problems of the recipient economies but to secure Western
+interests. Argentina owed vastly more money to the West and needed to be
+squeezed to ensure this was paid back.
+Another reason for the blanket application of the IMF prescriptions is
+that by devaluing the currency, privatizing utilities and opening up the
+economy to foreign direct investment, structural adjustment makes the
+receiving nations ripe for takeover by Western interests. Global capital has
+been aided in its expansion across the world, looting whole economies to
+fill the coffers of Western financial capitals.15 The eighties are referred to
+as the ‘lost decade’ in Latin America for a reason: triple-digit inflation,
+enforced austerity and poverty had a devastating impact on the region.
+Mexico was one of the countries hardest hit by the debt crisis and the
+international financial regime: the impact was so severe that the economy
+had not fully recovered two decades later, remaining 30 per cent below
+where it should have been.16
+The idea that organizations like the IMF act solely on the basis of sound
+economic principles is a fairytale. The organization is based in Washington
+and funded by Western governments, on whose say the amount of money to
+be invested depends. Bolivia’s more favourable treatment by the IMF
+exposes the political incentives behind the actions of the Western financial
+regime. The United States is the dominant source of funding, and the
+priorities of the IMF align with the holders of the purse strings. In the 1980s
+the US pursued a ‘war on drugs’ in Central and South America, even
+though attacking the coca-leaf producers decimated the lives of the quarter
+
+of a million farmers and their families who depended on the crop.17 Bolivia
+was a key ally in this war, and as a reward for its fealty to American
+interests, received a somewhat more lenient ride with the IMF. This was
+also the case with the monstrous Pinochet regime in Chile, which received
+preferential treatment in negotiations with the IMF, after taking power
+following a CIA-backed coup d’état against socialist leader Salvador
+Allende in 1973.18 It is always worth remembering the dictators and
+despots whose politics have aligned so well with the West.
+The history of the IMF as a political tool is by no means restricted to
+Latin America: preferential negotiations were used to try and prevent
+Pakistan from arming itself with nuclear weapons as well as to induce
+Turkey’s support for the Gulf War.19 Countries in the underdeveloped
+world who vote more often with the United States in the UN also get a
+better deal from the IMF.20 The new age of empire functions on the basis
+of this financial intervention regime, one that plunders the economies of the
+underdeveloped world to support the interests of the West.
+It might be tempting to argue that the IMF takes its actions in good, but
+ill-conceived, faith. That the countries are in debt because their economies
+are badly run and they need support to make the correct adjustments on
+their way to becoming highly developed capitalist utopias. But the West is
+not rich because of its genius, democracy and capitalism. It is affluent
+because it has expropriated wealth from the underdeveloped word: the Rest
+is poor because the West is rich. Newly independent nations were always
+going to end up struggling and having to take loans from Western interests,
+who only had the resources to lend because they were plundered from the
+Rest. Third World debt is obscene at every level. It’s as if I stole your
+money and then, when you failed to make ends meet, offered you a payday
+loan at extortionate interest rates, all the while berating you for being bad at
+running your personal finances, and then forcing you to spend the money in
+the way that benefited me the most. The West can never be the solution to
+global poverty because it is the cause of it. The places in the
+underdeveloped world that have made the biggest strides forward since the
+dawn of the new age of empire are those that have had the least support
+from the West.
+Prior to the late nineties, East Asia was seen as a miracle of economic
+development. Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia had
+experienced three decades of economic growth and poverty reduction.
+
+Contrary to Western economic wisdom, this had not been achieved because
+they followed the dictates of the Washington consensus but because they
+had not.21 In particular, in these countries the state had been heavily
+involved in their economic transformation, and economic liberalization and
+privatization were happening only slowly.
+At the end of the Korean War in 1953 South Korea was poorer than
+India, but by 1990 it was so ‘successful’ it was a member of the
+Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a pool
+of largely Western countries tasked with stimulating economic trade and socalled global progress. All of this was done with little foreign direct
+investment, although it did rely on loans from Western banks. We should
+never forget that the so-called progress of nations like South Korea is built
+on their integration into the mechanism of Western imperialism. Alongside
+including steep inequalities within their borders, this also means feeding off
+the bounty of global White supremacy. Dealing with the devil has its
+consequences, as many of the nations in East Asia found out at the end of
+the nineties.
+In 1997 currency speculators drove down the value of the Thai baht,
+which caused an economic crisis that spread across the region. In stepped
+the saviour, in the form of the IMF, who managed to only make the problem
+worse. The IMF provided $95 billion in loans, which was in effect a bailout
+for the Western banks the nations were having difficulty repaying. As
+always, the money had strings attached that included austerity, tax increases
+on the poor and neoliberal structural reforms. The results were disastrous.
+GDP collapsed across the region and unemployment increased four-fold in
+Korea and three-fold in Indonesia. In Korean cities a quarter of the
+population fell into poverty. Austerity made the situation far worse than it
+could have been, and reductions in food and fuel subsidies for the poor led
+to riots in Indonesia. The IMF may not have started the crisis but their
+actions deepened it, and placed a heavy burden on the poor. As economist
+Joseph Stiglitz explains, the impact was so negative in the region that
+‘history is dated “before” and “after” the IMF, just as countries that are
+devastated by an earthquake or some other natural disaster date events
+“before” or “after” the earthquake’.22
+As an example of the absurdity of IMF orthodoxy, Stiglitz offers Ethiopia
+in 1997. The IMF refused to loan Ethiopia money in the midst of an
+economic crisis because they argued that foreign aid was too big a
+
+proportion of the country’s economy. They genuinely suggested that
+Ethiopia would be better served by paying foreign aid into the nation’s
+reserves, rather than spending the money on schools and hospitals. Stiglitz
+uses this example to make the case that the World Bank was a more
+benevolent organization, since it had workers on the ground trying to
+engage with and support the poor. But the World Bank was created by the
+same people and for the same purpose as the IMF. As a former director and
+chief economist of the World Bank, we should take Stiglitz’s
+pronouncements about the organization as little more than company PR.
+
+THE ‘WHITE MAN’S BURDEN’
+Unlike the IMF, the World Bank sees itself as a development agency. It
+aims to end extreme poverty and it was primarily set up to provide support
+for the underdeveloped world so that countries would not fall for the
+charms of the Soviets. Just as with the IMF, the organization is financed
+largely by Western governments and the United States is the biggest donor.
+Also like the IMF, the World Bank is used as a political tool, so it should be
+no surprise that its programme benefits wealthier nations, whilst supposedly
+supporting the underdeveloped world.23 While Stiglitz has been more
+critical of the economic orthodoxy of Western financial intervention, the
+World Bank generally has not. It has embraced the same conditionality to
+its loans as the IMF, and the two names are often used interchangeably
+because of the collective destruction they have wrought on underdeveloped
+economies. John Williamson, whose tenure at the World Bank spanned over
+a decade, said in 2004, ‘we argue the desirability of completing rather than
+reversing the liberalizing reforms of the Washington Consensus.’24
+Rather than challenging the cartel of Western intervention, the World
+Bank has been happy to enforce neoliberalism on the nations it is supposed
+to be helping. When the World Bank was considering the impact of
+charging people for healthcare in Peru in order to shrink public debt they
+came to the conclusion that ‘the introduction of user fees at public health
+facilities will have only a small effect on the rural poor because they tend
+not to visit health facilities.’25 The fact that the poor do not have access to
+healthcare somehow became a reason to introduce charges. The callous
+disregard for life outside the West is one of the key features that has been
+
+maintained in the updated system of racial oppression. To borrow from
+Stiglitz, ‘from one’s luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about
+which one would think twice if one knew the people whose lives one was
+destroying.’26
+The intentions of the World Bank may genuinely be positive. They are a
+resource of information on global poverty and invest billions of dollars in
+the underdeveloped world. But the road to neo-colonialism is paved with
+good intentions. Believing that you are doing good while inflicting damage
+is not a new feature of Western imperialism. Even during the horrific
+violence of its first iteration, colonialists imagined that they were doing the
+savages good by dragging them into civilization. Kipling said it was the
+‘White man’s burden’ to lift the world out of its state of nature. We can see
+this rhetoric at work in the new centre of empire when in 1901 Vice
+President Theodore Roosevelt declared the need to annex the Philippines,
+explaining that ‘it is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see
+that they are freed from their chains.’27 In the development agenda
+weapons are not used to save the savages. Instead aid is sent, and expertise
+is granted, to help pull up the underdeveloped world.
+In exactly the same way that the notion the underdeveloped world should
+be indebted to the developed world is absurd, so is the idea that aid could be
+of any serious benefit. We are trapped in a similar paradox to the
+reparations debate, where the wealth necessary to repair the damage would
+destroy the entire Western economic system. The West enriches itself off
+the Rest, and therefore donating an extremely small amount of that money
+back through aid is clearly not going to solve the problem. While the
+absolute numbers in terms of aid sound high, they are actually relatively
+small. By the early 2000s the West had spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid.28
+But when you consider that Britain’s GDP in 2017 alone was $2.6 trillion
+you can begin to understand the scale of the problem. It should be no
+surprise then that the record of foreign aid is not encouraging. For instance,
+$2 billion has been invested in Tanzania’s roads, but they show little
+improvement.29 There have been strides made in the underdeveloped world
+but most of the countries that have done well received relatively little
+development aid.
+In 2000 the United Nations committed to a series of Millennium
+Development Goals that it hoped the world could achieve by 2015. Progress
+was made in most areas and many of the targets were hit, including more
+
+than halving the number of people living in extreme poverty across the
+globe to 14 per cent.30 The proportion of undernourished children also fell
+by almost half, more children were in education, including girls, and the
+number of people in the global working middle class grew significantly. All
+this apparent progress is accompanied by a host of cheerleaders promising
+us that we are well on the path to a better world.
+Psychologist Steven Pinker assures us not only that the Enlightenment
+has ‘worked’ but that its ideals are ‘stirring, inspiring, noble’ and nothing
+short of a ‘reason to live’.31 Bill Gates, perhaps the embodiment of the
+White saviour complex, called Pinker’s ode to the Enlightenment his
+‘favourite book of all time’. Sam Harris, self-described neuroscientist (but
+in reality pop psychologist), is so convinced of the power of so-called
+science he believes it will ultimately determine correct moral values.32
+Having endured an undergraduate degree in psychology, it is no shock to
+me that authors steeped in the subject have so fully drunk the progressnarrative Kool-Aid. Psychology is trying to make its presence known,
+having been promoted to the premier league of pseudo-sciences, vying for
+position with stalwarts such as economics, politics and some versions of
+sociology. But wherever you look you can find plenty of academics waving
+pom-poms in support of progress. Development studies was basically
+designed to lead the PR campaign for Enlightenment ideals, and Hans
+Rosling, with his captivating TED talks, colourful charts and accessible
+books, is the leader of the cheer squad.33 But before we get lured by the
+allure of the future dead White men we only need to take a closer look at all
+these so-called gains to see through the mirage.
+In terms of the poverty indicators, China accounted for the vast majority
+of improvements. This is the same China that received very little aid and
+has a planned economy run by its central Communist Party machinery.
+Though the numbers of people living in extreme poverty fell in Africa, this
+did not happen to anything like the same extent. In fact, by 2015, 36 per
+cent of people in work in Africa lived in extreme poverty. The World Bank
+figures report that half of people living in extreme poverty are in so-called
+sub-Saharan Africa, and that figure will be nine in ten by 2030.34 As we
+have already explored, anti-Blackness is a feature of Western empire, so we
+should have been prepared for the news that progress is far slower in
+
+Africa. But we should not get carried away by how much life has changed
+for most of the world’s poor.
+The UN Millennium Development Goals report admits that ‘almost half
+of global workers are still working in vulnerable conditions, rarely enjoying
+the benefits associated with decent work’,35 while the World Bank
+estimates that half the world lives on less than $5.50 a day. To qualify for
+the working middle class you only need to earn more than $4 a day, and
+over 80 per cent of people in the world live on less than $13 daily. The
+development agenda has never been about equality, but has been tailored to
+remove the harshest edges of suffering from the global system of
+oppression. In a 1977 speech to the World Bank, Robert McNamara, its
+fifth president, gave the game away when he explained that
+closing the gap [between the developed and underdeveloped worlds]
+was never a realistic objective in the first place. Given the immense
+differences in the capital and technological base of the industrialized
+nations as compared with that of the developing countries, it was
+simply not a feasible goal. Nor is it one today.36
+The same is true now. The UN goals are all worthy. Reducing extreme
+poverty, educating children and tackling health emergencies like HIV are
+imperative to alleviate human suffering. But this is not the same as
+addressing global inequality. The fact that people earning $4 a day are
+labelled ‘working middle class’ should be proof of the obscenity of this
+paradigm. Conditions that we would never accept in the West are marked as
+progress in the Rest. Whereas we may have accepted that killing and
+enslaving the natives is wrong, we have normalized poverty for the Black
+and Brown because in the new world order our lives matter, just a lot less.
+In many ways this is the fulfilment of Kant’s universal reason, rooted in his
+‘ moral geography’. We have a supranational body (the UN) working to
+ensure that the savages are not murdered or deposed by colonial troops, but
+are given just enough to subsist on so that the West is free to carry on
+exploiting them through colonial logic, with no twinges of its conscience.
+The UN’s complete ignorance of race can only be understood in the
+context of Enlightenment reason, which imagines civilization rebooted in
+Europe in the eighteenth century (after a long hiatus following the fall of
+the Romans). Cheerleaders like Pinker and Rosling point to the data
+
+supporting the idea that progress is being made in areas like infant mortality
+and absolute poverty around the world. This is the world-view that allows
+the UN to claim victory in its millennium goals. Conveniently ignored is
+that we are measuring progress since the destruction wrought by Western
+imperialism. It is perverse to celebrate marginal gains in the
+underdeveloped world after genocide, slavery and colonialism produced the
+racially unjust social order. The number one cause of global poverty is
+racism, with nations so desperate to improve their condition because of the
+lived reality of White supremacy.
+It would be charitable to see this foreign-aid industrial complex as a
+benevolent form of imperialism, where at least people’s hearts are in the
+right place. In just one example, a UN-funded Millennium Villages project
+in Uganda trained farmers in techniques to provide a higher crop yield. The
+result was a bumper harvest, but there was no market for the goods and they
+ended up rotting, with the famers losing out even further because of their
+increased costs of production.37 Maybe we should forgive such misguided
+errors and the well-to-do bumbling of do-gooders. But when we look at
+how the money is spent it is very hard not to see a purposeful campaign to
+maintain the dispossession of the underdeveloped world. It is even more
+difficult to avoid this conclusion when the British Minister for International
+Development openly declares that she wants to use her budget to ‘tear down
+the barriers to free trade’, as Priti Patel did in 2017.38
+The Conservatives are not typically seen as a party that supports foreign
+aid. In both classical and neoliberal versions of Western economics the idea
+of giving handouts is a terrible distortion of the sanctity of the market.
+There is a whole body of economic thought, typified by Milton Friedman,
+that believes global inequality is caused in part because the underdeveloped
+world is ‘receiving unwarranted assistance’.39 But since gaining power in
+2010 the Conservatives have been keen to champion their foreign aid
+credentials. On his last day in office, after crashing his premiership on the
+rocks of Brexit, David Cameron claimed that his government’s commitment
+to spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid was one of his ‘proudest
+achievements’.40 The aid spending was particularly significant for a
+government that pursued the severest austerity agenda in British history,
+and they weren’t forced into it by the IMF either. The Department for
+International Development saw its budget increase by 24 per cent from
+
+2010/11 to 2015/16 at a time when cuts to other departments were 28 per
+cent.41
+Given how the aid budget is actually being spent, however, it becomes
+far less surprising that the Conservatives have been so keen to invest.
+Before the Cameron government came to power, in 2009, the Tories
+published a Green Paper extolling the virtues of ‘capitalism and
+development’ as ‘Britain’s gift to the world’.42 Once in power the
+Conservatives set about changing the law so that they could use the aid
+budget to support the interests of global capitalism and British business in
+particular.43 A perfect example of such worthwhile spending was to grant
+£450 million to Adam Smith International (ASI), a free-market Londonbased consultancy – more than the government spent in total on human
+rights and women’s equality, and double the amount given to combat the
+spread of HIV and AIDS.44 One of the roles of the ASI is to advise
+countries to liberalize (meaning privatize) whatever they can. Since 2005
+the ASI has led a £99 million project to advise Nigeria’s government on
+reforming infrastructure in order to benefit the poorest. Its main
+achievement has been the privatization of the electricity sector, which is
+seen as a success because it is so total it would be almost impossible to
+reverse. The result of this ‘progress’ is that electricity prices have been
+hiked by up to 45 per cent; over half the country remains without any
+power; and the service cuts out so regularly that even those with electricity
+have to rely on back-up generators. The only beneficiaries of the UK aid
+were the ASI and the private companies feasting on Nigeria.
+Another form of creative accounting in the UK aid budget is the dispersal
+of £1.5 billion over five years into the university sector. Announced as part
+of the comprehensive spending review of the coalition government in 2015,
+the Global Challenges Research Fund aims to ‘harness the expertise of the
+UK’s world-leading researchers’ in the cause of saving the underdeveloped
+world.45 I work in the sector so I do not want to totally undermine the
+validity of my profession, but the idea of transferring £1.5 billion of a
+budget meant to save lives to academics is obscene. This is even more so
+the case when we dig into how this money is being allocated.
+I first found out about it in a meeting at work where it was revealed that
+as part of our core research funding the university had been given a slice of
+the development budget without even having to request it. The university
+
+higher-ups then managed to retroactively find some activity that we could
+pass off as ‘development’ focused. In this meeting we were discussing how
+we could find projects to justify keeping our grant from the fund. Not all the
+money has just been dished out to UK universities. For most of it there are
+rigorous controls, and applications have to be sent through funding bodies.
+UK Research and Innovation has a website where you can see the various
+countries and research projects that have been funded.46 The sheer volume
+tells you just how much money is being invested in the scheme. Some very
+interesting projects on issues ranging from social policy to health and
+violence prevention have been funded. But identifying Western universities
+as a conduit for development creates the paradox of offering a ‘new White
+Man’s Burden to clean up the mess left behind by the old White Man’s
+Burden’.47
+The Eurocentric knowledge that is vitally important to maintaining the
+unjust racial order was produced in universities. That is no different today,
+with the dreaded Washington consensus, the name given to the economic
+policies supported by the IMF and World Bank, and by a wealth of
+academics. In fact, the workforce of the Western financial intervention
+regime is an army of graduates trained in development orthodoxy. It is
+through the façade of pseudo-scientific technical expertise presented by the
+World Bank and the IMF that their looting of economies in the
+underdeveloped world is justified. If we accept that the development
+industry is just another mechanism to continue Western imperialism, then
+universities are one of the foundation stones of that agenda. One of the key
+mechanisms of neo-colonialism is the training of thousands of students
+from the underdeveloped world who are sent back home with all the tools to
+continue letting the West ransack their economies. Giving development aid
+to universities only makes sense if the purpose is to continue to produce
+knowledge that entrenches global racial inequality.
+Syphoning money from the aid budget in order to support British private
+enterprise is a longstanding problem and so it makes perfect sense that
+funding is now being diverted to universities. Since the reforms of 2017
+British universities have almost fully completed their transition into private
+companies. We charge fees, operate in a marketplace and treat students as
+customers. Pumping in £300 million of the aid budget each year for half a
+decade is essentially a public investment in the private sector. As is the
+same with any non-governmental aid agency, the majority of costs go on
+
+employing staff in the West. It would be revealing to see just how much of
+the money ended up paying staff, overheads, travel and catering expenses in
+British universities. We are essentially using foreign aid to pay the elite
+(academics) to take on the burden of pulling the underdeveloped world out
+of its barbarism. The difference between sending administrators to the
+colonies, the Adam Smith International consultants, and universities
+producing expert solutions is one of degree.
+Britain is not alone in using its foreign aid budget to support its own
+companies or national interest. USAID (the United States Agency for
+International Development) is as much a brand that bolsters the progressive
+credentials of the United States as it is a development agency. In the recent
+past the United States has been guilty of the most brazen forms of using
+foreign aid to further its agenda. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the perfect
+example of how, when necessary, the United States has embraced ‘the
+violence, brutality, and barbarity befitting any European imperialist
+power’.48 After the carnage and devastation of Iraq, the rebuilding of the
+country provided an opportunity for USAID to loot an underdeveloped
+economy through ‘aid’. The United States prosecuted the war under the
+guise of ‘advancing freedom’ in the Middle East.
+Almost two years after the invasion President Bush delivered a live
+prime-time speech at the military base of Fort Bragg in North Carolina
+where he uttered the word ‘freedom’ twenty-one times to emphasize the
+civilizing mission of America.49 The freedom he was referring to was not
+what most would understand by the word. Rather than freedom from
+tyranny, want or fear, Bush really meant unleashing the forces of the free
+market in Iraq. Once President Saddam was toppled, the US-led Coalition
+set about regime change, installing the fundamental principles of Western
+financial intervention. The Coalition’s first acts, through USAID, included
+making half a million soldiers and public officials unemployed, removing
+barriers to foreign direct investment and privatizing 200 state industries. To
+put icing on the neoliberal cake they also contracted an affiliate of the
+leading international services firm KPMG to construct a free market from
+the ground zero the invasion had created.50 Iraq became a breeding ground
+for profiteering from nation-building.
+To truly understand the problematic nature of the foreign-aid industrial
+complex we need to look no further than the recipient of the highest amount
+of US aid dollars. Rather than pouring money into one of the poorest
+
+countries in the world, one in terrible need of infrastructure spending, the
+United States has donated around a fifth of its aid to Israel, a relatively rich
+country not considered a developing nation.51 In 2016 the United States
+signed a military aid package for Israel worth $38 billion over ten years.52
+Not only does Israel receive the most aid from the United States, it does so
+under the most favourable conditions: it does not have to account for where
+the money is spent like other recipient countries.
+The United States has company in using its aid budget to support Israel
+and its armed forces. In 2017 Priti Patel had to step down as Minister for
+International Development in Britain when it was revealed that she was
+having secret meetings with the Israelis and attempting to use her
+department’s budget to fund Israel’s military activity.53 Although this
+somehow did not prevent her from being appointed Home Secretary less
+than two years later. Israel’s subsidy through foreign aid is important not
+just because it exposes the contradictions in funding. It also highlights
+another fundamental change in the updated version of empire that marked
+the new age of empire that emerged after the Second World War.
+
+POST-RACIAL IMPERIALISM
+A visceral and overt form of racism underpinned the first iteration of
+Western empire. A racial hierarchy was clearly coded and enforced with
+racial science, providing the pseudo-intellectual backing for White
+supremacy. If the Second World War brought an end to violent competition
+between Western powers, as well as ending direct control of their colonies,
+it also reframed the racial logic necessary to dominate the world. The
+slaughter of 6 million Jewish people in Nazi Germany brought racial logic
+home, disturbing the otherwise largely settled consensus. The horror of the
+concentration camps upset the social order and it was decided that ‘race’
+had to be abandoned to the dustbin of history. A 1950 statement brought
+together by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
+Organization (UNESCO) declared that
+National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not
+necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of
+such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial
+
+traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed
+when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better
+when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and
+speak of ethnic groups.54
+In other words, the West had used the concept of race to slaughter people
+and dominate the globe, and when the horror of that system was brought
+home they decided to terminate the idea. On the face of it, abandoning such
+a flawed concept of race seems like a noble pursuit. Embracing ethnicity
+retains the idea of difference but allows for more complexity. But over sixty
+years after the UNESCO statement the world remains ordered around the
+logic of race, so this change has clearly only been semantic. This is largely
+because ethnicity merely became a stand-in for race, so all the hierarchies
+were retained, just with cultural justifications rather than biological ones.
+Africans were inferior not because of their genetics but because of their
+tribal affiliations and backward way of life.
+The main problem with this shift in discourse was that in erasing race it
+becomes almost impossible to talk about racism. Black people remain
+oppressed because of our race; we just talk about the problem in relation to
+ethnicity and then wonder why the inequalities persisted. There is a reason
+that the UN makes no mention of racism in its goals: it simply does not
+have the language to talk about race. This post-racialism is important to the
+system update of Western imperialism because it helps to maintain the
+façade of progressivism that is so important when it comes to justifying the
+continuing oppression. We tumble into a deluded view of the world where
+the West cannot possibly be racist, because they abandoned race and are
+investing trillions of dollars in aid.
+It is ironic then that one of the responses to the Holocaust was to reify
+race and racism, and to engage in older forms of colonial violence. Israel
+was founded in 1948 after a longer struggle of Zionism that sought to return
+Jewish people to their biblical homeland. Zionism had some support before
+the Second World War but it was the Holocaust that spurred action from
+Western powers, who became certain of the need for a Jewish homeland.
+The only problem of course was that the land where Israel was created had
+an established population. With a mindset reminiscent of those who created
+the settler colonies that cleared the way for the West, German rabbi Isaac
+Rolf declared before the War that
+
+In our land there is only room for us. We will say to the Arabs:
+move, and if they disagree, if they resist by force – we will force
+them to move, we will hit them on their heads and force them to
+move.55
+Before 1948 Palestine was a British-held colonial territory and therefore
+directly subject to the logic of empire. Zionists did not appeal to the Arabs
+living there but to the British who ruled the territory. Britain had been on
+the fence about Zionism but embraced the idea of a Jewish homeland in
+1917 when Lord Balfour declared, ‘His Majesty’s Government view with
+favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
+people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of
+this object.’56
+Britain had its own reasons for supporting Zionism. The Balfour
+Declaration was in part used to legitimize the British invasion of the
+territory earlier in the year in an effort to further extend the Empire. Coming
+out for Zionism was not an easy decision and was also predicated on the
+belief that the global Jewish citizenry were vital to the First World War
+effort. There was a genuine belief in the British government that if they won
+over American Jews they in turn would use their influence to get the United
+States involved in the War. It was also felt that after the Bolshevik
+Revolution, Russian Jews would move to take Russia, a key ally, out of the
+War and therefore needed to be appeased. In large part it was the fear of the
+power of the influence of a global Jewish cabal, a deeply racist trope at the
+heart of anti-Semitism, that sparked the Balfour Declaration. Activists were
+well aware of this reality. Edgar Suares, a leader in the important
+Alexandrian Jewish community, wrote to the Foreign Office in 1916 that
+‘England could assure to herself the active support of the Jews all over the
+neutral world if only the Jews knew that British policy accorded with their
+aspirations in Palestine.’57 The Zionist campaign depended on anti-Semitic
+ideas about the power and coordination of Jews worldwide for it to succeed.
+Theodor Herzl, a central figure in the early Zionist movement who died
+before the Balfour Declaration, argued that anti-Semitism was the ‘chief
+asset’ of the movement.58
+When the UN recommended the partition to create the Jewish state of
+Israel in 1947, they did so as an apparently anti-racist act. Supporting the
+Jewish people who had been racialized and slaughtered as an
+
+ethnic/national group in need of a homeland perfectly suited the new postracial order. But to establish the new nation the West would have to support
+the kind of racist colonial acts it had supposedly left behind. For a start, the
+very notion that a state of White settlers could be built with a complete
+disregard of the native Brown population is the epitome of colonial logic. In
+order to clear the land of the natives, large-scale violence reminiscent of the
+previous colonial era was necessary.
+At Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, 250 unarmed people were slaughtered, a
+number that included 100 women and children, by 120 militiamen from the
+Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi.59 Menachem Begin, the leader
+of Irgun, praised his troops, declaring ‘as in Deir Yassin, so everywhere …
+Oh Lord, Oh Lord you have chosen us for conflict.’60 This kind of violence
+was not uncommon and it was meant to terrorize the Palestinians into
+fleeing their land. It had the desired effect, with over 700,000 Palestinians
+becoming refugees by the time Israel was established in 1948. So traumatic
+was this period in history that Palestinians named it the Nakba, which
+literally translates as ‘the catastrophe’.
+The violence enacted to clear the ground for the Israeli state is eerily
+reminiscent of the genocidal frontier campaigns to establish the United
+States. This was not lost on Israel’s greatest ally. With the Jewish state
+facing threats from Arabs on all sides, in 1967 White House aide John
+Roche drew the perfect analogy, explaining, ‘I confess, I look on the Israelis
+as Texans’, drawing parallels with those who braved the United States’
+frontiers and tamed the threat from Mexicans.61 The United States’ dogged
+support for Israel could be in no small part down to recognizing the plight
+of a fellow settler colony that needed to rally the wagons in order to defend
+itself from the existential threat of the hordes of natives.
+The United States’ support for Israel has been questioned on the strategic
+front. The sheer amount of financial assistance means there is an economic
+burden, but there are other ways that Israel is detrimental to the interests of
+the United States. For one, Israel’s actions undoubtedly adversely impact on
+the United States’ global image. As a settler colony Israel is one of the few
+examples left of the unrestrained brutality of the previous colonial era. For
+all the pretence of ethnicity, Israel is a Jewish state with citizenship based
+on blood rights.62 Minorities are brutally oppressed and locked out of full
+participation in the state: to establish itself, Israel has serially abused the
+rights of the Palestinians. It continuously flouts both international law and
+
+United States’ advice by attacking civilians and building illegal settlements
+on the West Bank. The situation is so dire that comparisons to apartheid
+South Africa are not only common but appropriate. The United States’
+embrace of Israel means that it regularly defends abhorrent actions to
+protect its ally, particularly blocking the international community in the UN
+from taking any action against what is in many ways a rogue state.
+Reputational damage is not just about PR but has consequences for the
+United States. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has long been a
+motivating factor for Islamic extremism, and by being an extension of
+Israel, the United States is a prime target for terrorists.
+Israel has a dire relationship not only with Palestinians but also with its
+neighbouring Arab states, being involved in multiple wars and having
+annexed territory from Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Israel’s military policy
+frequently consists of ‘unilateral aggressive actions’ that destabilize the
+region and could jeopardize the United States’ access to its most valuable
+commodity, oil.63 Not to mention Israel is the nuclear power that may be
+the likeliest nation to unleash Armageddon. Israel’s existential crisis is
+rooted in its precarious position as a settler colony unable to fulfil its
+genocidal logic. European settlement into the Americas and Australia was
+secured by the almost complete erasure of the native threat. Israel will never
+achieve that security surrounded by hostile Arab states, which is why its
+reaction to threats is so extreme and disproportionate. It is certainly not too
+difficult to imagine Israel pressing the nuclear button in a pique of settler
+colonial genocide. Such murderous brutality would fit perfectly into the
+logic of Western imperialism. It is because of this existential dread that
+Israel is prone to bite the hand that feeds it, frequently spying on the United
+States, passing on information and colluding with its benefactor’s
+enemies.64
+To understand America’s steadfast support for Israel we need to put it in
+the context of the new age of empire. Whilst the West rallied to Zionism
+after the Second World War, the United States only began the journey
+towards wholeheartedly embracing Israel in 1956, and this transition was
+not complete until 1967. It was then that the fledgling nation was seen as an
+essential strategic interest to block the Soviets from influence in the Middle
+East.65 Israel was able to embarrass Egypt’s Soviet-backed President
+Nasser with swift victory in the Six Day War in 1967 and has since served
+as the battering ram for the United States’ soft power in the region.
+
+Oil was the key commodity underpinning the transition into the new age
+of empire and the United States needed to control the area that produced
+most of it. Israel is the reminder that, as much as things have changed, they
+have stayed the same within this iteration of empire. Aid may be the carrot,
+but the stick can be wielded at any time. By offshoring its violence to Israel,
+the United States can maintain the pretence of benevolence in world affairs.
+Islamic extremism is the new bogeyman raised to justify Israel’s role in the
+Middle East. It is the counterweight to Iran and the last bastion preventing
+an Islamic caliphate being established. Of course this is nonsense: for all its
+protestations about the clash of civilizations between Christianity and
+Islam, and moralizing about human rights in the region, the United States’
+other major partner in the region is Saudi Arabia. That nation is an Islamic
+state that harshly imposes its reading of Sharia law. Israel is useful to the
+United States because it can trample on the rights of the Brown natives to
+maintain Western imperialism.
+Israel is unique because it allows the old forms of imperial brutality to be
+continued in plain sight in the new age of empire. Because we have
+abandoned race, the Jewish state is defended as a mechanism of ethnic selfdetermination and therefore Israel has the ‘right to exist’, regardless of the
+consequences for the region or the Palestinians. In fact, because of the
+horrors of the Holocaust, to question Israel, Zionism or its steps to defend
+itself is to run the risk of being labelled anti-Semitic. Under the widely
+adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antiSemitism it is forbidden to claim that the ‘existence of a State of Israel is a
+racist endeavour’. But what other conclusion could we draw from looking
+at the historical record? And this has nothing to do with being anti-Semitic:
+the United States, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and any other settler colony
+are all ‘racist endeavours’. More to the point, we could say the same about
+the existence of every country in Africa, with their boundaries drawn by
+colonial administrators; or India and Pakistan after the horrors of Partition.
+But in the new post-racial order we exempt Israel from proper scrutiny and
+in doing so legitimize the continuation of Western imperialism, and the key,
+brutal role that Israel plays.
+Western imperialism did not end after the Second World War, it merely
+evolved. The horrors of the Holocaust did away with the notion of race,
+which was simply replaced by a version of ethnicity that allowed colonial
+logic to continue. Israel is a reminder of the brutality of the older order that
+
+underpins the new. The UN, IMF and World Bank pose as friends to the
+underdeveloped world, all whilst creating a framework that continues to
+allow the West to leach from the Rest. We live in a time defined by the
+dreams of the Enlightenment, universal values that set in stone the unjust
+racial order. Aid is offered as the solution to absolve the West of its sins,
+whilst it actually works to further oppress the underdeveloped world and
+enrich Western interests. But we are so keen to believe we are making
+progress that we ignore the uncomfortable truth before us. The starving
+children beamed in haunting images onto our TV screens are in dire poverty
+because of our excessive wealth. No matter how big your direct debit is to
+whichever charity tugged your heart strings, it cannot change the fact the
+reason you can afford to donate is because those children have no food. But
+we can all comfort ourselves with delusions that we are moving towards a
+better, more enlightened world.
+So complete and perverse is the new age of empire that it has allowed the
+face of Western domination to become increasingly diverse. In order to
+maintain the façade it is essential that the only diners at the trough of
+empire are no longer just White people. There have always been those in
+the underdeveloped world who colluded with the oppressive system to
+enrich themselves. One of the more dispiriting features of the new age is
+that there is a growing class of Black and Brown faces profiting off the
+logic of racial oppression who are, knowingly or not, being used to market
+the fairness of the system.
+
+6
+
+The Non-White West
+In 2018 US president Donald Trump launched a trade war against China,
+railing against the ‘billions of dollars’ lost to the country each year in
+unbalanced trading on his favourite medium, Twitter. In a particularly
+alarming social media rant, even for Trump, on 23 August 2019 he declared
+that
+The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the
+United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our
+great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start
+looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your
+companies HOME and making your products in the USA.
+Trying to reassert American economic protectionism is one thing, but
+believing that he had the power to order private corporations around
+displayed a spectacular misunderstanding of both global capital and his own
+role. Trump’s concern over China was the substantial trade deficit between
+the two countries. In 2018 the United States exported $120 billion worth of
+goods but imported over $539 billion worth, making an almost $420 billion
+loss in terms of trade.1 To counter this, the substance of Trump’s trade war
+was to increase tariffs on Chinese imports so that companies are
+disincentivized from doing business in the country. China retaliated,
+
+imposing its own tariffs on American imports, with both countries using
+their actions as leverage for a new trade agreement.
+Trump’s trade war was sparked by wider fears that globalization is
+disadvantaging the West, and in particular working-class communities that
+have seen their jobs disappear overseas. The reason for the trade imbalance
+is that China is now the workshop of the world, leading the way in
+manufacturing goods for sale in the West including the United States.
+Nations across the West have experienced the kind of de-industrialization
+that has seen factories relocate to the underdeveloped world and large
+swathes of people lose their jobs. Trump was elected in large part because
+he won in the American ‘rust belt’, the Midwestern states whose
+populations lost out when manufacturing moved overseas. The trade war
+was a key part of his ‘Make America Great Again’ appeal, taking on
+foreign nations who are attacking United States power, and reasserting
+economic nationalism. In this version of the new world order the real
+victims of the new age are the White formerly working class, left behind by
+a global system that now privileges foreign nations.
+It is undeniable that the post-war settlement has led to some interesting,
+and likely unintended, consequences in the operation of Western
+imperialism. Manufacturing was previously the domain of the West.
+Producing the goods to sell into newly found markets around the world was
+one of the main goals of empire. India’s textile industry was purposely
+destroyed so that Britain could lead the way in manufacturing. This
+situation has now been completely reversed. Along with China, India is one
+of the fastest growing economies and there is a real sense that centres of
+power are shifting to the underdeveloped world. China is now seen as the
+main threat to the West and there are projections that it will eventually
+become the largest economy in the world. It has positive trade deficits with
+every major nation and trillions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves.2
+The new economic and political order created after the Second World War
+has paved the way for the rise of China and other underdeveloped nations.
+But if we imagine that the development of non-Western, non-White
+countries proves that the racial logic of empire has changed in any
+substantive way we are sorely mistaken. China’s rise is instructive,
+considering its predicted global dominance has been due to the logic of
+Western imperialism, not in spite of it.
+
+After the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the
+nation was a key part of the Communist challenge to the capitalist status
+quo. China’s support was central to the defeat of United States forces in
+Korea and Vietnam, and China also backed several African liberation
+struggles that threatened Western dominance on that continent.3 But the
+China that has emerged today is not the revolutionary Communist state that
+sought to reshape the economic order. In truth, it is quite the opposite. To
+achieve its current status China had to realize that the ‘Western order is hard
+to overturn and easy to join’.4
+China’s economic rise only began after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976
+and the subsequent repudiation of his policies. At that point China was an
+extremely poor country which had undergone one of the worst famines in
+human history a decade earlier. From 1978 the nation embraced capitalism,
+undergoing a series of market reforms, welcoming foreign direct investment
+and making exports the basis of its economy.5 This meant opening up
+China to the rest of the world and fully engaging with global finance, and it
+was an extremely successful approach: the nation pulled 600 million of its
+citizens out of extreme poverty between 1978 and 2010. China’s success
+could be mistaken as evidence that the new economic system is not
+inherently racist, if an underdeveloped country can make such strides. But,
+as always, we should not get ahead of ourselves.
+China’s emergence has been due to the very reason that Trump started his
+trade war: its domination of global manufacturing. ‘Made in China’ has
+become so commonplace it is almost a surprise when an item is produced
+elsewhere. But this occurred because the cost of labour in China is so low
+relative to the West. It is the same problem I discussed in relation to India’s
+economic miracle. While there is lots of wealth in China, and many newly
+minted billionaires, there is also an abundance of poverty. China may have
+the second largest economy in the world, but the important measure is GDP
+per capita: the amount of wealth produced per person. By this measure
+China is 65th, demonstrating that many people are not feeling the benefits
+of the growing economy. China is extremely unequal and government
+statistics class anyone earning $295 a month as middle-income, despite the
+complaints from those living on that amount that they cannot make ends
+meet.6 Because China’s position depends on being the world’s primary
+exporter, mass poverty is necessary in order to sustain its economic growth.
+Just like India, if the standard of living rises so too do the wages and
+
+manufacturing costs. Soon enough China would find itself in the same
+position as the West, offshoring its factory labour to a poorer country. What
+Trump has seriously misunderstood in his trade war is that even if increased
+costs through tariffs on Chinese goods incentivized manufacturers to move,
+they would simply relocate to a different Black or Brown country with
+inhumanly low labour costs. There is only one source in the West that can
+compete with the wages in the underdeveloped world and that is prison
+labour, which no doubt explains why Trump is a supporter of increased
+privatization of the sector.
+In order to establish itself China has relied on hundreds of millions of its
+own citizens living in conditions and taking wages that would be
+unacceptable in the West. It’s one of the key principles of Western
+imperialism: Black and Brown life is worth less and it is therefore
+legitimate to exploit it. But it is not only in exploiting its own citizens that
+China has embraced the logic of empire. White supremacy is based on a
+hierarchy from White down to Black, with anti-Blackness a specific feature
+of the system. In order to establish a secure footing, or to move up the
+ladder of supremacy, there is a long history of other racialized groups using
+Black populations as a stepping stone. China is no different, as an
+examination of the nation’s increasing role in Africa demonstrates.
+
+THE CHINESE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA
+China’s links to Africa go back centuries, at least as far as the Han dynasty
+in 202 BC. (The idea that Europe initiated global trade and connectedness is
+one of the many fictions of Whitewashed intellectual history.) The
+Communist People’s Republic of China had strong ties to Africa and the
+liberation movements to end colonialism. In the global fight against capital,
+Mao was keen to support the armed struggle in places like Mozambique and
+Angola. China was a key player in the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung
+Conference, which sought to create a united non-aligned front to combat the
+global power of both the West and the Soviet bloc. China’s credentials in
+Africa were well forged and included building a railway line connecting
+Zambia to Tanzania in the early 1970s. In return for its support, African
+nations backed UN recognition of revolutionary China and supported the
+nation’s rise to prominence on the world stage.7
+
+China was influential in the Black radical imagination and was seen by
+many ‘as the land where true freedom might be had’.8 The Black Panther
+Party initially started fundraising by selling copies of Mao’s ‘Little Red
+Book’ to college students,9 and co-founder Huey P. Newton invoked Mao
+in his book Revolutionary Suicide when he argued that their revolutionary
+commitment was the Panthers’ ‘great leap forward’.10 Numerous Panthers
+visited China, including Elaine Brown who would become the party’s
+chairperson. Given China’s progressive history with Africa and Black
+politics, its increasing influence on the African continent has been
+welcomed by many. Indeed, China plays off its historical relationship,
+painting itself as an underdeveloped country aiming for a mutually
+beneficial relationship with a friend in need.
+Although China’s links to Africa are not new, its economic role in the
+continent has drastically changed since the start of the new millennium.
+From 2000 to 2012 trade between China and Africa grew twenty-fold to
+$200 billion.11 Between 2001 and 2010 China’s Export–Import Bank
+provided $67.2 billion in loans to so-called sub-Saharan African countries,
+$12.5 billion more than the World Bank.12 The West is wary of China’s
+rapid expansion in Africa due to the increased competition for resources in
+the region and also because Chinese money provides an alternative to the
+conditional loans enforcing the dreaded Washington consensus.13 China
+does not attach structural adjustment strings to its loans, preferring to stay
+out of matters of state and stick to finance. Chinese aid has empowered
+African countries to say no to the devilish pacts with the IMF and the World
+Bank.
+While the West has looted resources and meddled in political and
+economic systems, China has been busy building the roads, dams, buildings
+and railways that Africa so sorely needs. Not only that, but China has also
+invested in the manufacturing sector, to the tune of over $3 billion by the
+end of 2012.14 With its history of comradeship, its massive investment, and
+the fact it represents an alternative to the hated IMF and World Bank, it is
+easy to see why there is some optimism and a view that ‘the Chinese are our
+friends’ among many on the continent.15 But we must remember that the
+China that holds the revolutionary link to Africa is an historical artefact.
+Since China’s economic reforms, the country has embraced the same
+
+political and economic order that oppresses Africa, and in many ways has
+legitimized neo-colonialism by posing as a friend.16
+To understand China’s neo-colonial role in Africa we need look no
+further than the reason for its increased involvement in the first place. After
+China embraced the capitalist global order, and its economy grew on the
+basis of production, it needed to find fresh sources of raw materials. You
+cannot make the goods for the world without their ingredients. China’s
+entry into Africa has been driven by the need to acquire resources such as
+oil and minerals to secure its place in the global economy. China’s
+expansion in Africa also occurred mostly after it joined the World Trade
+Organization in 2001 and it therefore operates firmly within the global
+economic consensus that is a major part of the continued underdevelopment
+of Africa. While Chinese money may not come with the requirement for
+structural adjustment, it is a lie to say there are no strings attached. For
+China finance is tied to natural resource extraction rather than political
+control. China’s interest rates are typically higher than those from Western
+financial institutions and it generally takes payment in the form of mining
+rights rather than cash. Therefore the vast majority of Chinese assistance
+goes to mineral-rich African countries.
+In places like Congo, Angola and Zambia, China is providing money to
+build infrastructure while stripping the natural resources of the countries. A
+classic example of this arrangement, in what was dubbed the ‘deal of the
+century’ when it was signed between China and the Democratic Republic of
+Congo (DRC) in 2007, is a $9 billion loan that meant China would commit
+to building roads, hospitals and other vital infrastructure projects in return
+for almost monopolistic control over the mining of cobalt and copper.17 It
+may sound like a good deal for Congo, but consider that the minerals in
+question are worth an estimated $87 billion and it is quickly apparent that
+China is extracting the materials from Congo for a fraction of what they are
+worth.18 The IMF were against the loan because they wanted to offer their
+own finance package with the usual conditions. But by avoiding the
+Western institutions the DRC has jumped out of the frying pan and into the
+fire.
+Across the African continent, countries are making the same deals with
+China, selling off their most valuable resources on the cheap to get at least
+some infrastructure built. It is not hard to see why, when Africa is in dire
+need of such spending, with estimates that it requires well over $22 billion
+
+spent annually to address its infrastructure problems.19 But these resources
+are precious to the future of Africa, which by rights should be the richest
+place on earth thanks to its abundance of natural wealth. By cashing in, the
+continent is destroying its future. Natural resources are finite and for Africa
+to prosper it should be maximizing the wealth produced from them to truly
+transform the continent. Green technology will become the next boom
+industry and Africa holds a bounty of the minerals necessary for the shift to
+sustainable energy. China, on the other hand, has only accelerated the
+exploitation of Africa’s resources.
+Worse still, the model used to build this infrastructure is of more benefit
+to China than Africa. When signing agreements such as the ‘deal of the
+century’ China insists that it provides the majority of the equipment and
+labour (usually 70 per cent).20 In effect the vast majority of the ‘aid’ that is
+given to a country is spent buying goods from China and paying Chinese
+companies and workers to rebuild Africa. China is basically providing a
+stimulus to its own economy, dressed up as foreign aid. Not only does the
+recipient country have to pay this loan back with interest but China also
+reaps massive profits from its preferential access to precious mineral
+resources. This model has all of the ‘Alice in Wonderland craziness’ about it
+that Kwame Nkrumah described in Western neo-colonialism.21 Even
+China’s support for infrastructure spending is not as benevolent as it can
+appear.
+European colonizers spent massive sums on roads, railways and the like
+because they were necessary to extract the wealth out of the continent.
+When the Chinese offer to build roads that connect an untapped mine to the
+sea, they are not doing so out of their wish to better the economic
+circumstances of Africa. China has also built forty-four sports stadiums in
+Africa, raising serious questions about the nature and utility of its
+infrastructure spending.22 These projects routinely end up as white
+elephants, something the rulers can use to show off but which have no longterm beneficial impact on the economy.
+It is abundantly clear that China’s involvement in infrastructure is not a
+break with the logic of Western empire. It may be a different model, but it is
+one that supports the principles and functioning of the current system. After
+all, the Chinese are extracting these resources to make products to be sold,
+in large part, to the West. China’s presence in Africa is also not always at
+odds with Western interests. There are a number of direct collaborations
+
+between Chinese and Western companies in Africa, who are after all in the
+region for the same reasons. The French company Total partnered with a
+Chinese oil company to extract oil from the Nigerian seabed,23 and
+Chinese companies also enrich themselves by bidding for contracts funded
+by Western agencies like the World Bank. Bamako International Airport in
+Mali underwent a $181 million upgrade between 2007 and 2012 funded by
+the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US aid agency. Regardless of the
+fact that China and the United States may be in a struggle for global
+dominance, this United States government contract was carried out by
+Chinese workers.24
+Migrant workers being imported into Africa to rebuild the continent has
+created a specific form of tension. It is estimated that there are now over 1
+million Chinese people living in Africa, attracted to the continent by the
+opportunities there. It should be no surprise that the natives of the poorest
+continent in the world are wary. Chinese migrant workers enjoy better pay
+and working conditions. This marks a reversal of Chinese people being
+used as a cheap and discriminated-against labour force to build the original
+version of Western empire. China is now providing the frontier folk,
+seeking new opportunities. It is also not difficult to find attitudes
+reminiscent of the old European colonizers who went to Africa to make
+their fortunes. In journalist Howard French’s book China’s Second
+Continent he explains how commonplace colonial-era racism was with the
+Chinese migrants he spoke to across Africa. His discussion with Hao, a
+migrant to Mozambique, stands out. Hao had migrated with little, had not
+learned a local language, and yet managed to acquire 5,000 acres of land,
+much to the displeasure of the locals, and planned to grow cash crops to sell
+to Western countries. He explained his decision to try his luck in
+Mozambique as follows:
+Can you imagine if I had gone to America or to Germany first? The
+people in those fucking places are too smart. I wouldn’t have gotten
+anywhere. I don’t think I could have beaten them. So we had to find
+backward countries, poor countries that we can lead.25
+Colonial-era attitudes could also be found among those delivering aid
+projects. Li Jinjun, head of the Central Agricultural Research Institute in
+Liberia, explained that the Chinese would only run the project for a limited
+
+time in order that the locals ‘learn to support themselves’. In classic
+civilizing mission language, the Institute was proud that ‘little by little …
+can change them in this way.’26 Of course, we cannot generalize these
+attitudes to the whole of the Chinese migrant population in Africa but we
+also should not be surprised if they are prevalent. They are only important
+insofar as they speak to the wider power dynamics of the Chinese neocolonial relationship with Africa.
+Objections to Chinese migration are not solely down to their colonial
+attitudes or denying locals the opportunity to work on infrastructure
+projects, but tie into the other major area where China has continued the
+work of Western imperialism on the continent. As heralded as the increased
+trade between China and Africa has been, it represents the classic
+relationship between colonizer and colony. China’s imports from Africa are
+comprised of well over 90 per cent oil and other natural resources. At the
+same time, Africa’s imports from China are 90 per cent finished
+manufactured products. Africa exports its resources well below the value
+that they are worth to China, which manufactures goods and sells them back
+into Africa, collecting all the profit. As a result China is able to produce
+cheap goods and flood African markets at prices that local producers have
+no way of competing with. The result has been a de-industrialization of
+Africa as local manufacturers are forced out of business.
+In 2008 manufacturing made up 12.8 per cent of GDP in Africa, and just
+eight years later that figure had fallen to 10.5 per cent. Between 1980 and
+2008 Africa’s share of global manufacturing was down from 1.2 per cent to
+0.9 per cent.27 In Nigeria the impact of Chinese textile imports has been
+devastating to local manufacturing. In the 1980s there were 175 textile
+factories in the country, but within twenty-five years that number had
+declined to only twenty-five. Even though imported textiles are illegal they
+account for over 85 per cent of the market and are valued at $2.2 billion
+annually, versus only $40 million for locally produced products.28 The
+impact on jobs has been catastrophic, with the number of those working in
+Nigeria’s textile industry in 2015 declining to 20,000 from 600,000 in the
+1990s.29 The result has been tension and even strikes in Senegal over the
+presence of the Chinese in local markets: they have become a feature as
+imports have flooded in. There is no doubt that the Chinese who are trading
+into Africa are profiting from the underdeveloped state of Africa and taking
+advantage of the situation created by Western imperialism. This kind of
+
+opportunism from those whose skin is not White is also nothing new for
+Africa. Lebanese traders were dominant as middlemen between the French
+and their African colonies and there was a similar relationship between
+South Asian communities in East Africa and the British.
+The only real difference with the Chinese is that they are not playing the
+role of middlemen to European colonizers; instead they represent one of the
+strongest emerging neo-colonial forces. China is certainly not a colonial
+power in the same way as Britain, France or any of the other European
+nations were. There is no invasion, violence and domination of political
+affairs. But, as we already know, that is not how the new age of empire
+works. Although the former colonial masters may have links and historical
+advantages in particular countries (particularly in relation to language),
+underdeveloped economies are open to exploitation from any nation or
+corporation that has the capital. There is no metropolis, no mother country,
+just a racialized political and economic system that allows for such
+exploitation.
+
+BUILDING BRICS OF EMPIRE
+China is not alone in following Western colonial logic to build its wealth.
+The new scramble for Africa features a whole host of underdeveloped
+countries vying to make the most of the devastating position that the
+continent has been placed in. As underdeveloped nations begin to acquire
+more wealth there is celebration of the progress being made. None more so
+than in recent years with the rise of the so-called ‘BRICS’: Brazil, Russia,
+India, China and South Africa, whose rapid levels of growth have marked
+them out as new economic forces in a supposed reshaping of the global
+order. In reality, talk of BRICS is disingenuous because South Africa is in a
+very, very different situation to the rest of the perceived bloc. If we remove
+South Africa, then the BRIC countries increased their foreign direct
+investment from less than $10 billion in the 1990s to $147 billion by
+2008.30 Much of this ‘investment’ went to Africa in the same exploitative
+relationship as China’s investments.
+For all the Cold War tension between the capitalists and the Soviets, the
+USSR no longer exists and Russia has returned firmly to its historical place
+as part of the Western bloc. Putin’s Russia may seem like a menace, but
+
+remember there has always been discord between the various Western
+powers. On the fundamental issue of the economic world order Russia is
+firmly in step with the West. We should not be shocked to find the logic of
+empire alive and well in Mother Russia. But Brazil and India have taken the
+same approach as China to fuel their economic growth, using Africa as a
+stepping stone.
+Along with China, India was one of the main players in the Bandung
+Conference in 1955, which pledged allegiance to Afro-Asian solidarity.
+India also has a common experience of colonialism with Africa, having
+been part of the same British Empire that large chunks of the continent were
+occupied by. This shared history means that India has a presence in Africa,
+with around a tenth of the Indian diaspora living there, and it has tried to
+build on these links to make partnerships. Like China, India needs
+resources, and trade with Africa almost trebled between 2007 and 2013.31
+India has also been involved in infrastructure projects, and exports finished
+products to Africa, but its economy is based more on services than Chinesestyle manufacturing.
+A good example of how India offers aid to Africa is the telemedicine
+project that was piloted in Ethiopia and then rolled out in fifty-three
+countries. India provided finance for Africans to be able to access Indian
+doctors through video conferencing software to combat the shortage of
+doctors on the continent. Considering that Ethiopia has 0.1 doctors per
+1,000 people compared to India’s 0.9 and Britain’s 2.8, the shortage of
+doctors is a serious problem.32 Providing access to Indian healthcare on a
+short-term basis may be essential, but it does not solve the problem long
+term. Africa needs more doctors, and exporting medical care to places like
+India only makes the shortage more acute. In typical colonial fashion there
+is a built-in dependency, where Africans come to rely on the care provided
+over the internet instead of building up their own resources. In Britain we
+raise hell when our calls to the bank are diverted to India, and I can only
+imagine the outrage if our GP appointments were diverted to a
+teleconference with a doctor in Mumbai. But this is seen as acceptable for
+Africa because Africans are less valued. Teleconferencing projects are also
+seen as aid, and India is following the example of the West by spending
+development money on projects that benefit itself.
+Indian doctors and technicians are paid out of development funding, in
+the same way that a significant proportion of the aid from China is spent on
+
+Chinese labour. In many ways these projects are tools to provide
+employment opportunities for the two largest workforces in the world. It is
+also necessary to build the infrastructure to support teleconferencing, which
+is an area that Indian businesses excel in. Across Africa Indian companies
+are building (and owning) the telecommunications that are so vital to the
+twenty-first century. On the plus side this has meant that Africa is
+connected to the globe, with over 80 per cent of people in ‘Africa proper’
+owning a mobile phone (most likely imported cheaply from China).33 But
+the necessary infrastructure and access are foreign-owned, making Africa
+not only dependent on outside interests but also locked out of the wealth
+created by these industries.
+Brazil has a complicated relationship with Africa. At least 38 per cent of
+the enslaved people stolen from Africa were taken to Brazil and the nation
+has the largest population of African descent of any country other than
+Nigeria. Under the more progressive presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da
+Silva (Lula) between 2003 and 2010, Brazil rhetorically embraced its
+African roots and made overtures to the continent, increasing trade with
+Africa from $4 billion in 2002 to $27 billion in 2012.34 But Brazil is also
+the perfect case study in how wrong-headed our understanding of the racial
+nature of global capital is. In reality, there is no reason whatsoever to
+assume that Brazil would have any affinity with Africa, other than the
+colonial logic that built the country. Brazil is more like the United States
+than it is any African country. It was a European settler colony where the
+indigenous people were all but wiped out and enslaved African labour was
+used to build the economy. There may be a very large population of those of
+African descent but Brazil is one of the most racially unequal countries in
+the world, in which its Black population is subject to intense discrimination.
+In a country where half the population is Black, President Lula’s
+appointment of four cabinet members of African descent was seen as a
+watershed moment, but this only happened in 2009. Lula’s government was
+the exception, not the rule, and the current fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro,
+is far more representative of the racial politics of the nation.
+After independence in 1825 Brazil was happy to continue enslaving
+Africans legally until 1888, over fifty years after Britain implemented its
+so-called abolition, and more than twenty years later than the United States
+outlawed the inhumanity. Brazil was also the only underdeveloped nation
+that voted against UN resolutions condemning Portugal’s barbaric colonial
+
+regimes in Africa, and for good measure continued to trade with apartheid
+South Africa during the embargo.35 Brazil is representative of Latin
+America, which is a collection of European settler colony ethno-states
+where White supremacy exists in its most virulent form. It is only due to the
+poverty of Western political philosophy that we imagine Latin America as a
+bastion of ‘people of colour’ who can challenge the Western order.
+Make no mistake: there are millions of Black and Brown colonial
+subjects in the region, but they are victims of their various states rather than
+being represented by them. Latin America features poverty and conditions
+that we would not accept in the West, and Western financial institutions,
+particularly the IMF, devastated their emerging economies through
+structural adjustment. The colonial dependency relationship we have
+discussed in relation to Africa also applies to much of Latin America. So
+the region is definitely not (yet) in the West, but it is of it and far up the
+ladder of global White supremacy in general, which is why a nation like
+Brazil has the finances to be investing in Africa. But just as many people in
+the West are not of it, the same applies in Latin America and its millions of
+neo-colonial subjects. This is not really much different than during slavery,
+when Brazil’s population included millions of enslaved Africans, overseen
+by a European settler elite. Brazil was technically a colony, so not in the
+West, whilst the Portuguese settlers were of the West and the enslaved and
+indigenous were the system’s victims. That same relationship continues in
+the stark inequalities that exist today.
+Brazil may have some of the poorest people in the entire world, but tens
+of thousands of Portuguese migrated to Brazil following the global financial
+crisis to take advantage of its growing economy.36 As demonstrated by the
+hordes of almost exclusively White crowds at the 2014 football World Cup
+hosted in Brazil, the descendants of White settlers inhabit a different nation
+to those at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. It makes perfect sense that
+Brazil’s relationship to Africa follows the same exploitative logic of
+Western imperialism.
+Brazilian corporation Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (Vale) is one of the
+largest mining companies in the world and has a presence in Guinea,
+Zambia, Congo, Angola, Gabon and South Africa. Extracting a range of
+resources, it is also involved in the classic colonial relationship of funding
+infrastructure projects. To put the size of the company in perspective, its
+$34 billion revenue would make it the fifteenth biggest economy in Africa,
+
+with a larger GDP than almost all the countries it extracts resources from.
+Brazilian companies have also entered into partnerships similar to those of
+China across Africa, and have a tendency to use migrant labour. An area
+where Brazil is a world leader is in the production of biofuels and it has
+seen the potential for Africa to be a source for the necessary crops.
+Alongside mineral wealth Africa holds 60 per cent of the uncultivated
+arable farmland on the planet.37 In the new scramble for Africa this
+abundance of fertile farmland is one of the key commodities.
+The race for farmland is not only taking place in Africa. By 2020 it is
+estimated that investors had spent more than ‘one hundred billion dollars
+for over 40 million hectares … from Ethiopia to Indonesia’ in order to
+acquire land.38 As the Brazil example demonstrates, this is driven by the
+rising demand for food for an increasing population, and also for other
+commodities like biofuels. Oil palm is a key crop, used in a range of
+products from soap to plastics. It has become so popular that by 2040 an
+additional area the size of Germany may be necessary to cultivate enough
+of it to meet the demand.39 The fires spread in the Amazon rainforest in
+2019 are an example of the lengths that people will go to create additional
+farmland. With its vast acres of uncultivated land, Africa is a centre of
+global land acquisition.
+Alongside the West, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Qatar and China have all
+been key players in the land grab in Africa. It is estimated that between
+2004 and 2009 2.5 million hectares of choice land had been allocated to
+foreign entities in Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Sudan.40 In
+2007, China acquired rights to 2.7 million hectares in the Democratic
+Republic of Congo alone.41 As with all the other examples, we could
+welcome the investment that comes with foreign capital, but it is surely
+obvious how damaging it is to sell off every commodity that the continent
+has to foreign interests for far less than it is worth. The insanity of the land
+grab is demonstrated in the reality that the nations suffering the most from
+hunger are also those selling off their farmland.42 Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia
+and Congo are some of the countries where this contradiction is the
+sharpest. Africa is once again being carved up by foreign actors to feed the
+updated version of Western imperialism. The only difference now is that
+many of the nations leading the way are not led by White people. But
+
+throughout the book I have highlighted non-White collusion in building
+Western imperialism.
+Without the Arab slave trade, which lasted far longer than the Atlantic
+system, it is not clear that the enslavement of Africans would have
+occurred. It was Muslim scholars who first codified anti-Black racism,
+something later picked up by Europeans, and created the slave-trading
+networks that Europe tapped into. To gain access to the riches of the East,
+the West used the wealth gained from enslaving Africans. When the
+Portuguese and Spanish began mining precious metals in the so-called New
+World the wealth generated dispersed across Europe, with countries like
+France, Britain and Holland using the commodities to enrich themselves. At
+this point the West was not particularly advanced, but access to gold and
+silver in the Americas allowed the ‘relatively backward’ European
+merchants to tap into Asian markets and eventually monopolize them,
+creating conditions under which the West would come to rule.43 It was
+demand from China for silver that made the early slave plantations in the
+Americas profitable. The Taj Mahal was built with gold mined from slave
+labour, since empires in the East were more than happy to accept the wealth
+produced by racism. In the new age of empire it is this same relationship
+that survives today, with the economies of Asia and Latin America being
+boosted by the looting of Africa. There is nothing truly new in this system,
+just updated manifestations of the old order.
+As an indicator of how embedded India, China and Brazil are in the new
+global order, in addition to Africa’s resources, farmland and markets, they
+are also keen to gain the continent’s influence in the United Nations. China
+achieved its UN recognition largely through African votes. Brazil and India
+are both seeking permanent seats on the Security Council, and the continent
+with the most countries is not a bad place to garner influence.
+If the idea that the emergence of the BRIC countries represents systemic
+change is an illusion, then the idea that Africa, led by South Africa, is
+achieving some kind of renaissance is a mirage. Whilst there certainly have
+been some improvements in terms of health, literacy, poverty and economic
+growth rates, Africa remains firmly at the bottom of the global racial
+hierarchy.
+The illusion of the African renaissance is based on its levels of GDP
+growth, which from 2000 until 2015 ranged between 3 and 6 per cent
+annually, although they have tapered off since.44 South Africa was seen as
+
+the leader of the continent in growth and economic development, hence its
+inclusion in the BRICS. South Africa’s economic boom in the 2000s was
+also accompanied by a steady fall in its unemployment rate. After rising to
+33 per cent by 2000 the percentage of those out of work fell to 22 per cent
+by 2008. In a reminder of how connected African economies are to the
+West, the financial crisis caused by sub-prime lending in Europe and the
+United States had a devastating effect on the continent. Since 2008, the
+joblessness rate has been increasing and in 2019 stood at 28.5 per cent.45
+After the end of apartheid there was optimism about the future of the nation
+but South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world,
+and while the economy has grown in the last twenty years, so has the
+poverty rate.46 This same pattern is replicated across the continent. In
+Nigeria between 2005 and 2011 the economy grew by 5 per cent a year but
+unemployment rose from 15 to 20 per cent, with 60 per cent of young
+people out of work.47 None of these figures should be a shock given
+everything that we have learnt so far about African so-called development.
+Economic growth is entirely the wrong focus if we want to understand
+progress. African GDP figures are inflated by the increase in foreign
+investment and trade with the formerly underdeveloped world that has
+accelerated the stripping of the continent’s resources. All those cut-price
+sales of minerals boost GDP but harm progress in Africa. Billions of dollars
+in loans from the Chinese to pay Chinese companies and workers to build
+infrastructure may inflate the economic balance sheet but offer little work
+and few skills for African people. A large part of the supposed growth in
+Africa is really just an indication of increased wealth extraction.
+The other fallacy of growth is that it is inevitable that African economies
+will grow because the population is rising rapidly. In the next thirty years it
+is estimated that the majority of the world’s population growth will occur in
+Africa, with the number of people living on the continent doubling by
+2050.48 By 2100 it is possible that the population will have trebled to 3.5
+billion and there will be more people in Africa than in India and China
+combined.49 As the population grows, so too does the economy, but since
+2015 GDP growth has been smaller than it should be, given the rise in
+population.50 In other words, economies that are already struggling to
+provide for the people they have are falling further behind their rising
+populations. To put the growth figures in context, California has a larger
+
+GDP than the whole of Africa, and yet somehow we are supposed to be
+celebrating the rise of the continent.
+It is truly terrifying to imagine Africa with treble its current population,
+given the track of underdevelopment it remains firmly planted on. By 2100
+the majority of its natural resources will have been depleted by foreign
+interests and its farmland either overused or in the hands of offshore
+investors. On its current trajectory it is impossible to imagine a future that
+does not involve the same kind of colonial dependency that has been the
+hallmark of Africa’s relationship to Western empire. The fact that some
+countries which are not predominantly White will have firmly joined that
+system makes no difference.
+
+A CORRUPT SYSTEM
+Up to this point I have painted a very bleak picture of life in Africa, but we
+should avoid falling into the trap of seeing the continent through the eyes of
+Live Aid. Many people have been able to find success, build businesses and
+prosper. It is not uncommon to hear about those living in the West migrating
+back to Africa to invest in and pursue opportunities that are a distant dream
+to Black people living in their former mother countries. There are also
+many affluent Africans who travel frequently, settle and are educated in the
+West, who have the kind of wealth that is mythical to the majority of White
+people in the world. But just as we should not let the images from charity
+appeals distort our understanding of life in Africa, we should not allow the
+people who have acquired wealth make us fall for the lie that progress is
+being achieved.
+The proportion of those in the middle class in Africa has actually
+declined since 1980 to only 13.4 per cent.51 The reality is that the majority
+of Africans are not pot-bellied and covered in flies, but nor do they have the
+money to send their children to British private schools. There is a huge
+scale of inequality, and unfortunately most people in Africa are towards the
+wrong end of it. As with all features of the new order, there is nothing new
+about a scale of Black inequality. There have always been those who have
+been somewhat better off in the system.
+Studying the plight of Africa, it is clear that not all of its problems are to
+be located in the foreign interests which have ravaged the continent.
+
+Nothing that we have discussed to this point would be possible without
+systemic collaboration in Western imperialism by those who are
+empowered to run the continent. In Western development parlance, one of
+the main problems in Africa is the lack of ‘good governance’, which is a
+more polite way of saying that the disease of corruption is killing the
+continent. Many of the conditions tied to Western development aid are
+related to building greater transparency in political affairs, with the hope
+that by shedding the light of democracy through Africa this will end corrupt
+practices and allow the continent to succeed. We can again see the influence
+of Enlightenment ideals – that if only the savage parts of the world would
+embrace Western values they could be lifted out of their barbarism.
+Furthermore, billions of dollars have been spent on so-called good
+governance initiatives and there is even a ‘corruption perception index’,
+which ranks countries.52 Needless to say, African countries fare poorly, as
+does most of the underdeveloped world.
+On the Transparency International website, the German-based company
+that runs the index represents corruption on a world map with countries
+allocated a colour based on where they rank. The deeper the red, the more
+corrupt, the lighter the yellow, the less. It may as well be a map of the West
+versus the Rest, as the only areas in yellow are Western Europe, North
+America, Australia and Japan. The top two most corrupt countries by this
+measure are Somalia (in at number one) followed by South Sudan. The
+message is abundantly clear that the problem of corruption is something the
+West has dealt with and that it is holding the rest of the world back.
+There is clearly a problem with corruption across the underdeveloped
+world and certainly in Africa. Between 1970 and 2015, thirty African
+countries lost $1.8 trillion to capital flight – i.e., the money left those
+economies – a figure dwarfing the $497 billion these nations owed in
+foreign debt, and representing 65 per cent of their collective GDP in
+2015.53 Over $148 billion in capital flight occurs on the continent every
+year, with at least 60 per cent of this down to ‘mispricing of resources’, or
+in other words, fraud.54 There is no term to describe what many of the
+elites are doing in Africa other than looting.
+Consider the case of Angola, where between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion
+disappeared from the country’s account, which was at the time a figure
+larger than the GDP of forty-three African countries.55 Isabel dos Santos is
+celebrated as Africa’s richest woman, with a net worth of over $2 billion,
+
+but given that she is the daughter of Angola’s former president José
+Eduardo dos Santos we should not be impressed by this wealth. Dos Santos
+ran the country for thirty-eight years, during which time he took a personal
+stake in the nation’s resources and presided over the looting of billions of
+dollars. After 700,000 documents were leaked about how Isabel built her
+business empire she now finds herself subject to criminal investigation in
+Angola. The documents were damning, showing how numerous Western
+interests had enabled her to embezzle a fortune from her ownership stake in
+the state-run oil company Sonangol.56 Angola is the perfect model for how
+corruption functions in Africa. As well as personally enriching themselves,
+dictators like dos Santos use money from foreign investors to prop up their
+regimes. One of the poorest countries in the world, Angola ‘spent 1.4 times
+as much on defence as it did on health and schools combined’ in 2013.57
+Having access to vast amounts of money also helps to win elections when
+they are called.
+Angola is hardly alone. There is undoubtedly a political elite who are
+participating in Africa’s continued underdevelopment so that they can
+plunder its resources to fund their own personal wealth. In return they open
+up their countries to be exploited by foreign interests with extraordinarily
+favourable terms and tax requirements. The result is stark: for instance, the
+public purses of Zambia and Congo received only 2.4 and 2.5 per cent of
+revenues from their raw materials exported during the commodity price
+boom in the early 2000s.58 So it may seem relatively simple: African
+corruption is the problem that needs to be solved. But there is nothing
+African about this corruption.
+Even the slightest glance at this situation demonstrates that it is a
+problem created from the outside. Of cross-border corruption, between
+‘1995 and 2014, virtually all (99.5 per cent) involved non-African firms’
+and all of this money, which is being used to buy off African leaders, is
+flowing in from foreign interests.59 In a frankly astounding corruption case
+in the Italian courts, oil companies Shell and Eni stand accused of a $1.1
+billion bribe for President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria and other
+government officials in return for access to oil-drilling rights.60 Worse still,
+this money was not a gift from the companies but came out of Nigeria’s
+share of the future oil take. When this $1.1 billion was taken offshore the
+leaders were stealing money directly from the nation. Western companies
+
+like Shell have had to admit, or been found guilty of, a range of bribery
+schemes, with some being so ridiculous they would be funny if not for the
+consequences. An instalment of a $5 million kickback in Nigeria from
+Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) took up so much space when converted
+into Nigerian nairas that it had to be delivered in trucks.61 African leaders
+are being corrupted by foreign investment and showered with money so that
+the global system can continue to bleed the continent.
+Colonialism was a form of corruption, and what we are seeing today is
+just an updated version. When the European powers departed they left
+behind a local elite who took the place of colonial administrators but whose
+power remained limited.62 As long as the remaining elite followed the
+rules laid down by the departing powers they could survive, otherwise they
+would be deposed.
+When leaders like Patrice Lumumba emerged in Congo, pledging to
+overturn Western domination of Africa’s resources, they were dealt with. As
+already mentioned, Lumumba, the first elected prime minster after
+independence, was assassinated in 1961 with the help of the Belgians and
+the CIA in order to make way for a more pliable regime.63 The West were
+happy to support the brutal military dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko from
+1965 until 1997. During his reign Mobutu amassed a personal fortune of
+over $5 billion which he used, in part, to build a $400 million palace where
+he hosted such luminaries as the Pope, the King of Belgium and the director
+of the CIA.64 Like other African kleptocrats he spent lavishly in European
+department stores and had a penchant for flying Concorde. After Mobutu
+was chased out of office he was replaced by the equally Western-compliant
+Laurent Kabila, whose son, Joseph, inherited the presidency when Kabila
+senior was assassinated. In case you thought the Kabilas might have turned
+away from the colonial methods of running the country, it is estimated that
+Kabila Jr was taking $4 million a week from mining companies during his
+presidency. He also brutally put down a rebellion in Kilwa, killing over 100
+peaceful protestors in 2004.65 But he received full support from the West
+until he threatened to ignore his nation’s time limits on the presidency and
+illegally stand for re-election after his term expired in 2016.
+The framework established by the new age of empire is clear. Leaders
+who comply with the prevailing order are supported and lavished with
+money to keep them in power and build staggering personal wealth. If you
+
+are still questioning the complicity of the West in this system then just
+examine where all this wealth that is fleeing from Africa goes. It is
+offshored into the same banks used by hedge-fund managers and
+corporations who are seeking to avoid paying taxes at home. It is lavished
+in Western department stores and invested in property in places like
+London. None of this so-called African corruption would be possible were
+it not facilitated by Western interests. As former leader of opposition party
+UNITA in Angola, Isaías Samakuva, explained of corrupt African rulers,
+‘the only explanation we can find is that they have the blessing of the
+international community’.66
+Underdeveloped countries jumping on the foreign direct investment
+bandwagon have, if anything, made the problem more acute. While, largely
+through pressure from media and activism, Western governments and
+agencies have become more wary of supporting abusive regimes, China has
+avoided moral judgements. During the crisis in Darfur the UN Secretary
+General warned of the risks of genocide and the West wanted to isolate the
+regime, but China increased its investment, reaching $5.6 billion in 2006.67
+The West deserted Guinean military dictator Captain Moussa Dadis Camara
+after his troops slaughtered 156 protestors and gang-raped dozens of
+women in public in 2009. China, however, continued with a $7 billion
+investment package and Dadis used part of the money to buy arms to
+solidify his power. It was only his betrayal by his right-hand man, who shot
+him in the head, that ended Dadis’s reign of terror.68
+Empowering elites in the former colonies is also a continuation of older
+colonial logic. To control Africa, Europeans ruled through a system of tribal
+chiefs. Where none existed, Europeans created them to rule the people.69
+Each chief had only one superior and that was the European advising
+him.70 The chiefs collected taxes and enforced labour, doing the bidding of
+their colonial masters. The uncomfortable truth is that Europeans simply
+could not have run their colonies without the use of indigenous
+collaborators. Across their various empires Europeans established systems
+of indirect rule to administer colonialism. For example, by 1893 out of the
+4,849 officials running India only 898 were British, and in 1885 the 78,000
+British troops in the colony were outnumbered more than two to one by
+154,000 Indians.71 Those leaders today who are selling out Africa to the
+
+interests of global capital are simply picking up the baton from their
+predecessors.
+Consider Omar Bongo Ondimba, who ruled Gabon from 1967 until 2009
+(his son took over after him and is currently carrying on the family
+dynasty). Bongo served in the French army during colonialism and the
+French engineered his rise in Gabon following independence. He admired
+de Gaulle so much that he wept during the former French president’s
+funeral and is on record for declaring ‘his gratitude to the French for their
+assistance in the development of his country’.72 Despite being oil and
+mineral rich there is widespread poverty in the nation. Gabon actually has
+one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa but a third of the population
+live below the poverty line and 20 per cent of people are unemployed,
+including 35 per cent of young people.73 Bongo’s administration facilitated
+foreign control of Gabon’s economy and resources in exactly the same way
+you would expect a native chief doing the bidding of a European colonial
+agent. It is the system that is corrupt in Africa. The only difference now is
+that there are more Black people getting incredibly wealthy from the
+exploitation.
+Nowhere is this more apparent than in the economic darling of the
+continent, South Africa. The end of apartheid was meant to herald the birth
+of a non-racial democracy that could provide justice and equality for all of
+the nation’s citizens. Free and fair elections have been held since 1994, with
+South Africa not being beset by the kind of blatant abuses of power at the
+ballot box that we have seen in other nations. In terms of transparency,
+South African democracy was meant to lead the way for the future of the
+continent. But for all the promise of the fledgling state, since the advent of
+so-called democracy a Black elite has been created but a number of
+corruption scandals have shaken people’s faith in the new politicians. So
+rampant has the corruption been that even the former president Jacob Zuma
+is set to stand trial for taking bribes related to an arms sale whilst in office,
+and no one believes this to be his only offence.
+Given how deeply rooted corruption has become in South Africa, it is
+now common to talk about the ‘state capture’ by corrupt forces. There is
+even an official Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State
+Capture that started holding public hearings in August 2018. Much of this
+corruption is linked to the noble desire to boost so-called Black economic
+empowerment by ensuring that Black South Africans get access to lucrative
+
+contracts. The system has been open to abuse and has blurred the lines
+between politics, business and corruption. The case of the Watson brothers,
+two White anti-apartheid heroes, demonstrates that it is not just Black
+Africans who have managed to cheat the system. Bosasa, the company they
+ran, was supposedly a Black majority-owned company that received
+government contracts to run a range of privatized state operations, including
+prison catering and IT, worth up to $140 million between 2000 and 2016.74
+The Black ownership was a front for the Watson brothers to make money,
+allegedly using their contacts in the government, civil service and even the
+courts to bribe their way into a fortune.
+A Black front for White corruption is the perfect metaphor for the state
+capture of South Africa. As the Bosasa case demonstrates, Black economic
+empowerment is based on imposing neoliberalism on the post-apartheid
+economy. If it is not making money from government contracts it is making
+it in deals with multinationals involved in the same colonial relationship as
+on the rest of the continent. South Africa’s elite is not a sign of progress,
+especially when over half of all Black South Africans live below a poverty
+line that we could never imagine in the West.75
+South Africa was once a beacon of radical politics on the continent, with
+the anti-apartheid struggle committed to land reform that would have put
+the wealth of the country into the hands of the people. But like most of
+Africa, in order to end apartheid South Africa’s leaders compromised,
+accepting the basic political and economic framework that was already in
+place. The threat of violence was one of the key drivers of this, with the
+apartheid state being one of the most visceral reminders of the brutality of
+the West. But the West’s claws were so deep into the country that even if a
+revolutionary struggle had succeeded, it would have been difficult to
+survive without outside support. The biggest limitation of the revolutionary
+movements in Africa was that they each settled on a national struggle,
+winning control of the existing levers of power. But this was doomed to
+failure because the real power in the system is in the West, with the controls
+in Africa mostly being for show. Apartheid was a problem in South Africa
+but it was not the problem. Merely changing the colour of some of those at
+the wheel of the ship, or sitting on the top decks, was never going to be
+enough to change course, because it is a vessel that works by remote
+control.
+
+The logic of empire has always depended on a Black and Brown elite to
+administer Western domination across the globe. So we should not be
+surprised about a growing class filling their bellies from the misery of the
+poor in the underdeveloped world. The rise of China and other nations,
+somewhat higher up on the ladder of White supremacy, is only causing a
+stir because of how badly understood the racial dynamics of the system are.
+Anti-Black racism was a lynchpin in the establishment of Western global
+dominance, using the profits from the Atlantic system to finance the
+exploitation of the East. By using Africa as a stepping stone, countries like
+China are employing the codes of colonial logic embedded in the operating
+system. The wealth of these emerging economies is also based on the brutal
+exploitation of their own poor, whose bodies are sacrificed on the altar of
+progress. The West continues to enrich itself by leaching off the Black and
+Brown, but can now hide behind the rulers of its former colonies.
+The emergence of a non-White elite in the underdeveloped world
+collaborating with Western imperialism could be seen as an incentive to
+embrace a global politics of class solidarity. The elite can be viewed as the
+problem regardless of their colour and there is certainly no shortage of
+scholars and activists (mostly in the West) yearning for a politics that unites
+the global proletariat against the bourgeois ruling classes. Unfortunately, the
+left has always been incapable of coming to terms with both the centrality
+of racism to their position in the West and the extent to which the logic of
+Western imperialism radiates through their own politics.
+
+7
+
+Imperial Democracy
+Sitting on a plane on the way to São Paolo is not the most guilt-free way to
+watch a lecture about the dangers of climate change. But the poor movie
+selection had led me to the documentary section where I stumbled across
+The Third Industrial Revolution, a filmed lecture and Q&A delivered by the
+economist Jeremy Rifkin. Apocalyptic images of flooding and extreme
+weather events jarred me enough to keep me awake and feeling bad about
+my carbon footprint, if not guilty enough to rethink my next trip. Rifkin’s
+message was clear: the world is on the brink of annihilation, the sixth
+extinction-level event, due to our pollution of the atmosphere, and a radical
+new alternative is essential in order to save it. Thankfully for us all, he had
+come to deliver the plan to rescue humanity, embodied in what he called the
+third industrial revolution.
+According to the lecture, existence has been brought to the brink because
+of the previous two industrial revolutions. First, British ingenuity in the
+eighteenth century created the technology that became the engine behind
+rapid industrial progress, urbanization and factory labour. In the early
+twentieth century it was the United States’ turn to be the fulcrum behind
+progress with a second industrial revolution based on the exploitation of
+electricity, oil and the motor engine. While these revolutions both brought
+unprecedented development, they also created the climate crisis by
+polluting the air. But, fear not, we are at the cusp of a third industrial
+
+revolution that not only promises to bring even greater bounties than the
+first two but to do so in a completely carbon-neutral fashion that will pull
+humankind from the edge of the abyss.
+The third industrial revolution is based on the digital transformation to
+the ‘internet of things’, which opens up possibilities that can transform the
+world. For Rifkin, the key is the ‘zero marginal cost’ of producing
+innovations that the new interconnected world creates. He argues that in the
+future we will be able to sustain our energy needs for relatively little. The
+example that makes the most sense is electricity from solar power. The cost
+of producing solar power has been rapidly declining over the years and will
+shortly be cheaper than fossil fuel energy. If houses and other buildings
+were fitted with solar panels they could produce their own energy and, once
+connected to a grid, could feed back surpluses into the system. By
+connecting across a digital network that would manage the flow of
+electricity we could create a free source of power for everyone. Imagine the
+grid powering the train system or driverless electric car apps and you are
+beginning to imagine the dream that is the third industrial revolution. A
+networked, digital, green economy providing untold efficiency and
+therefore wealth for all. Given the setting of the plane I wondered if I had
+drifted off to sleep, but no, Rifkin had given the technological version of
+Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. It was full of all the same
+hope and promise but also contained the basic limitations present any time
+someone is picturing a fantasy, if not an outright delusion. Rifkin is not the
+only one to offer such a revolutionary mirage. A cottage industry has
+developed around imagining salvation in the form of Western technological
+development, and Rifkin’s lecture contained all the key ingredients.
+
+ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0
+Barely distinguishable from Rifkin’s ideas is the notion that we are
+currently embarking on a fourth industrial revolution, which will transform
+both the political sphere and the very fabric of the economy.1 In this
+narrative Britain and the steam engine are still at the foundation of industry
+but the second revolution is thought to have taken place between 1867 and
+1914, with greater scientific advancements and progress in manufacturing.
+Computing is said to mark the third major shift, after the Second World
+
+War. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is a key
+proponent, arguing that this fourth industrial revolution will bring ‘profound
+and systemic change’ in global power relations.2 Zero marginal costs mean
+that in theory everyone with an internet connection can plug in and benefit
+from the new economy. Rifkin actually argues that the underdeveloped
+world is at an advantage because of its lack of infrastructural development.
+Whereas the West is designed for an earlier system of production and needs
+to be retrofitted, the lack of infrastructure in developing countries will make
+it cheaper to just equip the nations with the hardware needed to exploit the
+next industrial revolution. I am sure those living in grinding poverty feel
+reassured.
+Both the third and fourth industrial revolutions are ideas generated from
+relatively mainstream political centres. Rifkin cites his experience of
+working with governments including Germany and China, and companies
+like the energy giant EDF and Daimler; and the fourth industrial revolution
+has been picked up by policy makers around the world and the United
+Nations.3 These are the classic Enlightenment progress narratives: more
+science, reason and technology will lead to a fairer, more just world.
+But we can also see very similar ideas about saving the world coming
+from newer, left-wing voices. Saving the planet from the impending climate
+catastrophe has rightly become a central issue in progressive politics. If
+drastic action is not taken shortly to reduce emissions there may well be
+little of the world left to save. Climate change is also decimating countries
+in the underdeveloped world, with extreme weather events set to create
+millions of climate refugees whose homelands will be uninhabitable.4 It
+seems even the climate has embraced the logic of White supremacy,
+punishing those in the Rest for the excesses of the West.
+Activists around the globe are protesting, with one of the most notable
+mobilizations being the climate strike movement led by children and young
+people. The third strike in 2019 spanned 150 countries, with over 4 million
+people estimated to have taken part. As valuable as this grassroots activism
+is, it remains strictly within the framework of empire. The strike was timed
+to coincide with the UN Climate Summit, and as powerful as figures like
+climate protestor Greta Thunberg are, they spend their time appealing to the
+heads of nation states. Once we locate the system as the problem then it
+should be clear that no matter how many Extinction Rebellion protestors
+stage nude protests in the British parliament, they will not dismantle the
+
+colonial logic of the world order. The concern for the underdeveloped world
+fits firmly within the framework of so-called universal rights, as developed
+in the Enlightenment. Sure, they have a right not to be flooded, burnt or
+starved out of their homes, but that remains the limit of their humanity.
+In fairness, there are attempts to formulate the climate debate in terms of
+the need for a transformative political agenda. Naomi Klein has been
+dubbed the ‘intellectual godmother’ of the push for a Green New Deal, an
+ambitious policy agenda for reducing carbon emissions to zero and
+reforming capitalism.5 Klein makes it abundantly clear that reducing
+emissions is not enough, and connects the climate struggle to her earlier
+work exposing conditions in sweatshops in the underdeveloped world.
+Climate goals can only be reached by ending an economy that seeks
+constant growth and luxuries, the pursuit of which exploits workers in the
+poorest parts of the world.6 The Sunrise Movement, who have been
+campaigning for the realization of the Green New Deal, sum up its vision as
+being ‘to stop climate change, achieve environmental sustainability, create
+millions of good jobs, and realize economic prosperity for all’.7
+So successful have the campaigns been that the Green New Deal forced
+its way into the political debate. Bernie Sanders put the proposals at the
+centre of his presidential campaigns and rising star of the Democratic Party
+Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped introduce a resolution in Congress to
+support this policy agenda. Ocasio-Cortez represents a younger, more
+diverse and more progressive slate of politicians in the United States, who
+are determined to change the policy agenda. As part of the campaign for the
+Green New Deal she voiced a video with The Intercept and Naomi Klein
+called ‘A Message from the Future’ that imagines herself looking back at
+the world created after achieving the Green New Deal. It is a beautifully
+realized utopia where the green economy has created jobs, shifted the
+debate on universal healthcare and inspired more women and minorities
+into office. Unfortunately, it contains much of the short-sightedness we
+should by now be used to.
+The Green New Deal takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
+package to counteract the Great Depression of the 1930s. As important as
+these reforms were, providing housing, jobs and welfare for millions of
+Americans, they did not tackle the problems of racism in the United States.
+In fact, the New Deal was racially unjust in its application, particularly in
+the extremely segregated housing boom it induced.8 Klein admits that the
+
+Green New Deal metaphor is somewhat limited by its predecessor and that
+delivering on climate justice is ‘not a magic cure for racism or misogyny or
+homophobia or transphobia’.9 The problem is that nowhere in the agenda is
+there any real attempt to address these issues. They remain on the margins
+in the classic mode of believing that the economy is somehow separate
+from issues of identity. Much of Sanders’ platform sounds like a direct
+appeal to the White working classes languishing in the rust belt of the
+Midwest, the alleged real victims of globalization, with promises of
+American jobs ‘with strong benefits, a living wage, training … and
+protecting the right of all workers to form a union’.10 These are all noble
+pursuits but they would not deal with racism in the United States and,
+crucially for understanding the implications of the new age of empire, they
+depend on the exploitation of the underdeveloped world.
+Proposals to tax the rich sound progressive, but the rich make their
+money from a system that brutally exploits Black and Brown bodies. Using
+that wealth to retrofit the West and provide high-quality jobs and healthcare
+depends on the very same colonial logic. The left in Britain is no different:
+Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party represented the resurgence of the left and
+embraced the politics of the Green New Deal. Underlying the promise of
+these new endeavours is a promise of equality for all; the liberation of
+society by technology. But it is telling that on neither side of the Atlantic is
+there any real effort to address the problems of global inequality. In keeping
+with colonial logic, ‘equality for all’ really means improving the lives of
+those in the West, which remain the central concern in the latest version of
+Western empire. The uncomfortable reality is that the new intellectual left is
+lining up to retrofit the Enlightenment for the present day.
+Dutch historian Rutger Bregman went viral when he attacked billionaires
+for not paying tax at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2019.
+He diagnosed the problem of inequality as being about ‘taxes, taxes, taxes.
+All the rest is bullshit in my opinion’ – much to the disappointment of the
+assembled tax dodgers. But in his book Utopia for Realists Bregman
+outlines a vision so deeply steeped in Enlightenment thinking that he argues
+that all we need to do is to ‘reclaim the language of progress’ in order to
+‘rehoist the sails !’ to a brighter future. The idea of picking up a fallen
+mantle is only possible because he somehow believes that ‘historically,
+politics was the preserve of the left’.11 As we have seen throughout this
+book, the truth is the complete opposite, at least with regard to the West. If
+
+we conceive of the left as broadly about redistributive politics and fighting
+for the rights of workers, then the only real period that was the preserve of
+the left was the social democratic era after the Second World War. But that
+settlement has already melted away in Britain and the United States, and is
+fraying even in the more progressive parts of Europe. Even during the
+heady days of the welfare state, the period was still characterized by White
+supremacy. Racism, sexism and labour exploitation have, in reality, been
+the preserve of Western politics.
+Bregman’s argument manages to get even more absurd when he names
+the historical figures we should look to for inspiration. He lavishes praise
+on the sixteenth-century Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas for
+advocating equality between the colonial masters and the indigenous people
+of the Americas and for attempting to found a colony where everyone
+received a comfortable living. Las Casas might ring a bell: in Chapter 2 I
+discussed how his ruling on the natives having souls also provided the
+justification for the enslavement of Africans, who were deemed incapable
+of salvation. John Stuart Mill also gets a shout-out for his belief in the
+equality of women. That would be the same Mill we encountered earlier
+who justified ‘despotism’ in attempting to improve the ‘barbarians’ in the
+colonies. For Bregman, without these ‘wide-eyed dreamers we would all
+still be poor, hungry, afraid, stupid and ugly’.12 This is just a more
+palatable version of lionizing Hitler for building motorways. Bregman was
+invited to the World Economic Forum in the first place, so perhaps it is
+unfair to put too much faith in his progressive credentials, but we see this
+same kind of thinking across the political spectrum.
+Novara Media has become an important source for alternative news for
+the left in Britain, with a major online presence. Co-founder Aaron Bastani
+has become a key figure on the left but he offers the same basic blueprint
+for technological progress freeing humanity. Rather than seeing three or
+four industrial revolutions, he acknowledges only two previous so-called
+‘disruptions’. First, the emergence of Homo sapiens, who started
+agricultural development, and second, the sacred British-led Industrial
+Revolution of the eighteenth century. We are supposedly in the midst of a
+third disruption that promises all the bounties that we have already spoken
+of. If anything, Bastani is even more optimistic, imagining that under ‘fully
+luxury automated communism … we will see more of the world than ever
+before, eat varieties of food we have never heard of, and lead lives
+
+equivalent – if we so wish – to those of today’s billionaires’. As if sensing
+the scepticism of the reader, he declares that ‘our ambitions must be
+Promethean because our technology is already making us gods – so we
+might as well get it.’13 Such hubris is not just reminiscent of
+Enlightenment thinking but lies at the very heart of the Eurocentric
+intellectual project.
+The greatest lie underpinning the Enlightenment is embedded in its name.
+Knowledge did not spread out of Europe to bring light to the uncivilized
+parts of the world. In fact, it was the very opposite: Europe took knowledge
+produced around the globe and Whitewashed it, pretending it was theirs.
+Science has certainly contributed much to the world but to pretend it is the
+possession of the West is only possible due to the conceits of Whiteness. A
+parallel in all the various progress narratives is that they imagine the
+modern world only begins with the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the
+eighteenth century. I suppose we should give some credit to Bastani for
+locating his first disruption outside the West with the emergence of Homo
+sapiens in Africa. But development is then apparently frozen in time until
+James Watt came onto the scene with his steam engine. To discount the
+thousands of years of history and development around the globe that laid
+the foundation for the Western Industrial Revolution is not just shortsighted but deeply offensive. Worse still is the complete lack of any
+acknowledgement of the dark side of the emergence of Western industry.
+The whole purpose of this book is to counter the dominant mythology
+around the progressive West. By now I hope you are convinced that
+genocide, slavery and colonialism were just as important, if not more so, as
+the emergence of science and industry to everything that we have today.
+You simply do not have the technological advances without the violence
+that underpinned them. Reading the new so-called radicals is just a
+reminder that the mythology of progressivism is endemic today even in the
+circles of the left. In none of the above accounts of history are any of the
+atrocities of the West even mentioned, let alone given their rightful strategic
+place. If Europeans colonizing almost the entire globe to exploit labour and
+resources does not meet the threshold for a disruption then we are in dire
+need of a new measuring stick.
+It is by no means a surprising development that the supposed new
+radicals are replicating the intellectual exclusions of the Enlightenment; it is
+just how they were raised. There is a reason that in 2015 students in Britain
+
+launched the #WhyIsMyCurriculumWhite campaign. Western thought is
+still dominated by the notion that knowledge springs forth from the
+foundation laid by the supposed founding fathers we are told to revere. It
+may be jarring for me to read a whole body of work written in the twentyfirst century that almost exclusively cites White men, but that is just the
+currency for those producing ideas today.
+We have come to expect too much from the left because we have
+neglected to understand that its intellectual heritage is just as rooted in the
+progress narratives as neoliberalism’s. Marx remains at the core of radical
+Western thought, but he was just as much a product of the Enlightenment as
+Kant. Marx saw capitalism as an evil that needed to be overturned, but a
+necessary one to bring about communism (even its luxury automated form).
+Just as we are seeing with the arguments today, Marx thought that the
+technological progress brought about by capitalism was essential to
+providing the abundance necessary for human liberation. Ideas of White
+supremacy and scientific progress led by the West are absolutely integral to
+Marxism and remain its greatest limitation. Marx’s inability to understand
+that the underdeveloped world was inhabited by fully human people
+capable of struggle led him to completely misidentify the revolutionary
+class. He could see no further than the Western industrial worker created by
+the contradictions of capital and labour, and theorized that it was from here
+that the proletariat would arise to overthrow the unjust system. But history
+has shown that those who have embraced Marxism and committed
+successfully to revolution have resided almost exclusively in the
+underdeveloped world. In Cuba, China, North Korea, Guinea, Grenada,
+Mozambique, Angola, North Vietnam, and even in beloved Mother Russia
+the revolution was largely led by the peasantry rather than the workers.14
+Marx’s principal failing was that he ‘imagined that the industrial
+proletariat was the hero of capitalism and had invented a history whose
+narrative justified this’.15 It was his roots in the Enlightenment that led him
+to this conclusion. If knowledge and progress spread out from Europe then
+so must the revolution. Rather than representing a break from intellectual
+White supremacy, Marxism is just the flipside of the coin of its logic. It is a
+paradox of Marxism that the Western industrial worker never managed to
+produce a communist revolution whilst across the underdeveloped world
+Marx inspired the overthrow of the state from Cuba to China, via GuineaBissau and many stops in between.16 Marx was so blinded by White
+
+supremacy that he was (and far too many of his disciples remain) unable to
+understand that the most oppressed, the true revolutionary class has always
+resided outside the West because of the racist nature of capitalism. The new
+so-called radicals today are no different, presenting alternative visions of
+the future clouded by Whiteness.
+
+WHOSE ECONOMY IS IT ANYWAY?
+Faith in technological progress stands out from the various alternative
+conceptions of the world because of how the left has typically been resistant
+to mechanization due to its impact on the workforce. Since the beginning of
+automation, workers have had an inherent fear of being replaced by
+machines. The word Luddite, used for someone sceptical of technology,
+comes from the followers of Ned Ludd who would break factory machinery
+in early nineteenth-century England. One of the strongest narratives shaping
+current social policy is the idea that (White) workers in the West are being
+left behind because of the disappearance of manufacturing jobs either
+overseas or because of the sinister sounding ‘rise of the robots’. There is no
+doubt that the economy is changing. Globally, factories employed 163
+million people in 2003, but that number is likely to dwindle to ‘a few
+million’ in the near future.17
+In the West the decimation of the manufacturing base played no small
+part in the election of Donald Trump, although it was on the outsourcing of
+so-called ‘American’ jobs to foreigners that he laid the blame. Robotics and
+artificial intelligence are replacing human labour at an alarming rate. But
+this circle can be squared by the promise of abundance that comes with the
+third/fourth industrial revolution, which is supposed to be more efficient,
+and therefore could provide greater levels of wealth to be distributed in the
+economy. Manufacturing output actually increased by 60 per cent between
+1997 and 2005 even though 4 million jobs vanished from the sector.18 It is
+the promise of abundance that holds the progress narrative together.
+The massive infrastructure development needed to complete the
+technological revolution when society commits to it will depend on millions
+of workers being trained, and paid to lead the charge into the new age.
+Robots are not equipped to install solar panels, cables and all the hardware
+necessary to network the internet of things together. This promise of
+
+employment is one of the key appeals of the Green New Deal, which will
+engage workers in the raft of new industries necessary to decarbonize the
+world. It is not that work will disappear, just that it will change. In the
+progressive utopia, due to the amount of wealth and efficiency, labour itself
+will become obsolete as the robots do all the dirty work, leaving us humans
+free to embrace our leisure time. Bregman has a whole section on the
+pursuit of leisure, quoting Marx’s desire to be free to ‘hunt in the morning,
+fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner’.19
+Central to the new left in Britain, underpinning Corbynism’s political
+programme, is this desire for leisure time, expressed in the demand to
+shorten the working week.
+Such faith in technological development to provide is a key feature of the
+progress narrative: science will create abundance that frees us all. There are
+a myriad of problems with the idea of creating an automated society where
+we are freed from the mundane. For one, the dystopia of the Terminator
+series of movies hangs over this whole concept, where the artificial
+intelligent network created to improve the world decides to eliminate the
+human race once it is switched on. Creating a world run by intelligent
+machines may actually be the ultimate version of building our own
+gravediggers. There’s an ancient South African legend about the evil Za-huRrellel who created creatures out of the earth, and who did everything for
+the people, including transfer the food into their stomachs. The population
+got so used to everything being done for them that they got fat and forgot
+how to walk or speak, allowing Za-hu-Rrellel to take over the land.20
+Despite the nightmarish quality of these visions of the future they both offer
+warnings. Terminator is about the unintended consequences of trying to
+master technology. The cautionary tale of Za-hu-Rrellel is about how
+technology can be used for nefarious purposes by the powerful. This is one
+of the principal limitations of the idea of utopia through technology.
+While pioneers like Rifkin are keen to point out the free products of the
+internet of things, like Wikipedia or open-source software, they are working
+with governments and corporations. Hardware for the networks that are
+building the future cannot be built for free, or by plucky start-ups.
+Governments and corporations are leading the charge and China is one of
+the principal forces in developing the third/fourth industrial revolution.
+China’s ‘belt and road’ initiative aims to bring the old trade routes into the
+new age by building digital hardware and capacity across much of Asia,
+
+Africa and Europe.21 While the nation may clothe itself in the red of
+Communism and fond memories of Chairman Mao, it is now a firmly
+capitalist country. The only aspect of old-style Communism left is a very
+large and authoritarian state. One of the key mechanisms to maintain the
+power of the Chinese state is the very same internet of things that Rifkin is
+so proud of. For instance, China’s Muslim minorities are under constant
+surveillance and attack. Since 2017, more than 1 million have been placed
+in detention centres because they have been deemed ‘unsafe’. By
+monitoring smartphone use the authorities have built algorithms to detect
+‘un-Chinese’ behaviours and flag Muslims, using their Integrated Joint
+Operations Platform. China has created a ‘web of surveillance’ with facial
+recognition cameras and mobile phone tracking that records the movement
+of its ethnic Muslim populations.22 The internet of things has created a
+virtual prison for Muslims in China.
+Technology in the West has always been used to suppress the population
+as much as to free it. The FBI’s counter-intelligence programme
+(COINTELPRO) of surveillance, wire-tapping and more mundane activities
+such as using spies undid groups like the Black Panthers in the sixties and
+seventies. It is terrifying to imagine what the modern-day version of that
+programme looks like, with the sheer access to our lives that technology
+allows the powerful. Your phone, computer, digital speaker, smart car,
+television, the internet, the cameras everywhere, can all be turned against
+you to curtail your freedom. The mechanisms of our supposed freedom very
+easily become the tools of oppression. Less violent but equally sinister
+accusations are already made against the uses of this technology, from
+algorithms personally tailored to get you to buy goods you do not need, to
+the targeting of fake news to convince you to support a political party that
+means you harm.
+In terms of employment, the outlook is potentially just as bleak. For all
+the talk of changing the nature of work, the reality is that there is a steep
+class divide in who has benefited from automation. Those in middle-class
+professions, which are less easy to mechanize, have prospered, whilst
+unemployment has befallen millions of those with low or no skills who
+could previously have worked in manufacturing. Digitization has also led to
+worsening conditions for low-wage workers, who are subject to monitoring
+and targets.
+
+On a different plane journey (carbon footprint alert !) I was watching a
+Vice documentary, The Future of Work, that had a whole segment on the
+role of automation in warehouses (please let’s refrain from calling them
+‘fulfilment centres’). The company was proud of their efforts to
+synchronize the work of humans and machines. But the workers were less
+enthusiastic because of the demands involved in keeping pace with the
+automated schedule. Rather than liberating the workers, the results of
+automation have largely been to cut the workforce along with their wages
+and working conditions, while increasing surveillance and allowing an evershrinking minority to amass untold wealth.23 Amazon represents the
+embodiment of all those forces, with its warehouse workers surveilled every
+moment to the point they are afraid to take bathroom breaks whilst doing
+back-breaking work to keep up with the targets mandated by an
+algorithm.24 Meanwhile founder Jeff Bezos is on the way to becoming the
+world’s first trillionaire, making roughly $2,489 every second, more than
+double the average US worker’s earnings in a week.25 Bezos and his ilk are
+the emperors in the new age of imperialism and the corporations are their
+fiefdoms. For those hoping for the liberating impact of technology, be
+warned: it is these corporations that are laying the foundation for the
+third/fourth industrial revolution. There is no reason to believe that the new
+system will differ from the old, in fact we should expect more of the same.
+Due to the liberation of capital from nation-state control, national
+governments find it almost impossible to regulate global corporations, for
+the obvious reason that they simply do not have the jurisdiction. More could
+certainly be done, but corporations pour their wealth into politicians
+precisely so they can influence inaction. Look at the difficulty in getting
+Facebook to stop sharing fake news stories. In 2019 Microsoft beat Apple
+to a $10 billion contract to host the cloud services for the US Department of
+Defense. Good luck regulating a company that stores your nation’s
+classified documents.
+The biggest flaw in the argument that abundance will save us is that we
+already live in the land of plenty. Just sixty-two people hold the wealth of
+an entire third of the world. There is more than enough food to feed
+everyone, yet millions die every year while tons of food rot in the West.
+Scarcity is not the problem, inequality is, and if the new system is built by
+the same people who profit from the old then it is lunacy to expect better
+technology to liberate the poor. It is particularly delusional to think that
+
+global inequality, or White supremacy in the flesh, could possibly be
+remedied by a reboot of Enlightenment narratives of progress.
+Greater than all other influences over your life chances is where you
+reside. Living in one of the top 10 per cent wealthiest areas of Britain could
+put ten more years on your life than if you are trapped in one of the most
+deprived.26 Meanwhile, a child born in Somalia today has a one in five
+chance of dying before their fifth birthday, more than the chances of a
+soldier being killed in the US Civil War, the Second World War, Vietnam or
+any other major conflict of the last two centuries.27 While we complain
+about our dodgy wi-fi connections most people in the world do not have an
+inside toilet. There is literally no parallel between our lives in the West and
+those of most around the globe. On average the poverty line is seventeen
+times higher in the West than the underdeveloped world. This is the greatest
+conceit of the supposedly radical new thinkers. By ignoring the dark side of
+history that created the modern world they have also neglected any serious
+analysis of how to repair the damage that has been done. Science and
+technology can never be the solution to the problem of racism.
+Absent from any of the analyses of the social order in the alternatives
+presented is any question about just where the West gets the money and
+resources needed to develop the next industrial revolution. Slavery and
+colonialism produced the first two/three revolutions. There is now a new
+scramble for Africa’s resources, which are being plundered for the green
+revolution. Africa is the most mineral-rich continent, home to the raw
+materials necessary for the solar panels and efficient batteries that are set to
+power the globe. As we have seen, the West has the wealth to steal these
+resources and develop them because of the racial global imbalances in
+power. If it is highly unlikely that the poor in the West will benefit from
+technological innovation it is unimaginable that the underdeveloped world,
+and in particular Africa, will. Bastani fantasizes about being able to mine
+asteroids for the bounties we will need to retrofit the globe. In the meantime
+Africa is being stripped of its wealth, and if it ever becomes possible to
+feast from the stars it remains to be seen how the continent will benefit.
+So that everyone can gain from the land of plenty, Bregman proposes
+tearing down the iron gates that are national borders and allowing those in
+the underdeveloped world to freely travel into the Garden of Eden that is
+the West. Apparently global freedom of movement would grow the world
+economy by between 67 and 147 per cent, bringing huge benefits to the
+
+underdeveloped world. He argues that ‘if all the developed countries would
+let in just 3 per cent more immigrants the world’s poor would have $305
+billion more to spend.’28 At least Bregman recognizes that most of the
+world is locked out from the fruits of Western progress and proposes a
+mechanism for sharing the dividends. It is just a shame that he presents
+such a short-sighted solution.
+Global freedom of movement would certainly lead to more money in the
+underdeveloped world. Jamaica is the perfect example of the power of
+migration, with the nation kept afloat by the reality that there are more
+Jamaicans in the diaspora than on the island. A reduced population means
+there are fewer mouths to feed, but the main benefit is the money made by
+those in the diaspora in places like Britain, the United States and Canada.
+Remittances, money sent back to Jamaica or claimed in foreign pensions,
+represent 15 per cent of the overall GDP of the nation, a number that
+somehow manages to mask Jamaica’s dependence on foreign payments.29
+When accounting for the amount of money that actually remains in the
+country (more than 60 per cent of tourism dollars immediately disappear to
+the foreign entities that own the resorts), remittances are the largest source
+of foreign income in the country.30 Outward migration has therefore
+massively boosted Jamaica’s economy. But after all these years of
+remittances Jamaica still remains extremely poor, unable to overcome its
+colonial legacy. Whilst the closing-off of migration routes to Britain and the
+United States makes the future look even bleaker, if they reopened the
+plight of the average Jamaican would not greatly improve.
+For a start, although freedom of movement sounds liberating in principle,
+only those who can afford to travel, and their families, receive any benefit.
+The poorest will stay exactly where they are and, worse still, migration
+encourages the so-called ‘brain drain’, where those with skills leave an
+underdeveloped nation to take advantage of opportunities in the West.31
+The impact on an economy is obvious, particularly on those that already
+lack infrastructure and services. Migration as the solution also suggests that
+the onus should be on the poor to migrate to countries in the West in order
+to live a better life. No one should want to come to Britain with its
+miserable weather, dodgy infrastructure and brutal inequalities. We should
+be trying to make the places people migrate from secure and wealthy
+enough so that there is no desperation to flee in the first place. But the
+
+bigger problem with the idea of open borders as a solution is the intellectual
+arrogance of the progress narrative.
+Only by pretending that the abundance in the West is produced by
+legitimate means can anyone suggest inviting those in the former colonies
+to feast. The fruits we are inviting them in to dine on are derived from the
+exploitation of their home countries. To take back any of that wealth the
+system of racism that exploits them has to stay intact. That is why Jamaica
+stayed poor even after it had sent half its population out to raise its fortunes.
+Jamaicans are in effect cannibalizing their own wealth when they cash a
+remittance cheque. It is no different for any of the many other countries
+dependent on remittances for their survival. ‘No borders’ would just keep
+the underdeveloped locked in dependency on the forces of neo-colonialism.
+Using GDP as a measure of progress is nonsensical in any case. GDP
+measures only certain contributions to the economy, missing out things like
+domestic labour whilst highlighting aspects like debt.32 I covered this
+mirage in the discussion of the illusion of Africa rising through loans from
+foreign sources. More money certainly does not mean more equality: it is
+often the opposite. For example, since Thatcherism in the eighties Britain
+has got a whole lot richer, but the gap between rich and poor has turned into
+a chasm. Growing global GDP is meaningless if we do not account for
+where the wealth ends up. Given both the history and present of how the
+abundance in the West is produced it should now be glaringly obvious that
+the spoils can never be equitably shared with the underdeveloped world.
+Troublesome as the idea of no borders as the solution is, it at least makes
+an attempt to include those in the underdeveloped world. This is rarely the
+case when imagining the new utopias. In response to the crisis of work and
+rise of the robots, one of the most fashionable ideas is that of a universal
+basic income (UBI). Rather than implementing welfare states based on
+various entitlements, the idea here is for the state to provide every citizen
+with a set level of guaranteed income. There are various proposals of how
+much this should be, but for the idea to work it would need to be a
+significant amount, set to cover subsistence.33 Providing enough to survive
+deals with the decline of available work and also the increased leisure time
+that we are all pursuing. But the point is not for the income to replace work,
+just to eradicate poverty by making sure everyone can survive.
+The aversion of policy makers to UBI is the narrative that it will make
+people lazy and workshy. When trialled the result has usually been that
+
+people spend the money wisely and work harder, and it vastly improves
+their lives and economies. Many of the pilots have taken place as
+development projects and there are suggestions that directly giving people
+aid would be better than dispensing it through Western agencies. But it is in
+the underdeveloped world that we can see the severe limitations of the
+entire project.
+The West is bloated with enough wealth to fund a generous basic income.
+One of the bastions of progressive left democracy, Finland, launched a twoyear UBI experiment in 2017, making unconditional payments of around
+$590 a month to 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals in order
+to research the impact on outcomes and their participation in the workforce.
+Contrast this to a similar experiment in Kenya, where the US charity
+GiveDirectly selected 44 villages to make unconditional payments of $23 a
+month per adult for twelve years in order to study the effects. The yawning
+chasm between the amounts tells us the scale of racial global inequality and
+how UBI does absolutely nothing to solve it.34 Providing enough money to
+allow people to survive in Kenya is useful but it is never going to be able to
+overturn the steep global inequalities that the nation is subject to.
+Eradicating absolute poverty may be a good thing, but UBI would
+actually lock in the logic of empire. Remember, the West only has such a
+disproportionate amount of wealth because of poverty in places like Kenya.
+A world in which a basic income is universal and paid for by no borders,
+where the Black and Brown poor can make money by doing low-paid
+migrant work in the West, is the definition of a dystopia. Everyone may be
+able to eat but the political and economic system would be frozen in the
+image of White supremacy, with the underdeveloped world unable to ever
+catch up. The problem for places like Kenya is a global economic system
+that exploits them, draining out their resources so that the standard of living
+is so low that a Western charity can afford to pay subsistence to 4,966
+villagers for twelve years. Whilst it may make those in the West feel better,
+the fact that charities have the resources to do UBI experiments on the best
+way to spend their benevolence is the problem.
+UBI is not a new or radical idea: one of its proponents is the archneoliberal economist Milton Friedman. There is a world in which UBI is
+‘Thatcherism on steroids’, where the welfare state is replaced by payments
+to the individuals who constitute the myth that is society.35 Given how
+unequal Western societies are, welfare spending is a major part of all
+
+Western budgets. In addition to further costs caused by poverty in areas
+such as criminal justice and the health service, UBI may actually present as
+a far more cost-efficient way of delivering a welfare state.
+Accounting for police, courts and prison, criminal justice alone costs an
+estimated $182 billion a year in the United States.36 This does not include
+the impacts of crime on the economy, just the price of dealing with the
+problem. This figure pales in comparison to estimates of how much poverty
+overall costs the US economy. Child poverty alone is estimated to cost
+$1.03 trillion a year.37 Overall poverty could cost the economy $4 trillion,
+which is more than the $3.8 trillion a UBI of $1,000 a month would
+entail.38 It should not be unimaginable that the right wing may seize on the
+opportunity to end welfare by bringing in an individualized system of
+payments, especially because it has already happened.
+In 1968 Richard Nixon almost enacted unconditional payments to poor
+families, which would have been the equivalent of $10,000 to a family of
+four in today’s money. Millions of dollars were spent on experiments
+involving thousands of families, with the results showing benefits and no
+huge decline in working hours. Nixon’s plan was eventually derailed by the
+ideological zeal of neo-conservatives who worshipped at the altar of Ayn
+Rand and the free market, consigning the dream of UBI to the dustbin of
+history.39 But the fact that Nixon was in favour should give us a big reason
+to think twice about the idea. UBI is basically a conversation about how to
+share out the spoils of empire and to mitigate the extreme inequality that
+capitalism creates.
+
+IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY
+What ultimately undermines the Enlightenment is the claim to the universal
+when its theories are based on the particular. Whiteness is at the heart of
+Enlightenment thinking and this is no different in the supposedly radical
+new approaches. All are fundamentally incapable of even naming the
+racism that is the basis of the global political and economic system, let
+alone able to offer any actual solutions. We can see this in the distorted
+Enlightenment progress narratives that underpin the new utopias, but also in
+the genesis and creation myths of the social movements that have informed
+the theory.
+
+The sparks that lit many of the new social movements were the financial
+crisis in 2008, the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit, which created,
+in Bregman’s words, ‘more and more people hungry for a real radical
+antidote to both xenophobia and inequality … for a new source of hope’.40
+Ground zero in this narrative is the birth of neoliberalism, ushered in by
+Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the eighties. Dismantling the social
+democratic settlement unleashed the forces of capital and sowed the seeds
+for the economic crash in 2008. The unemployment, insecurity and
+austerity that followed led to the inevitable rise of the new right as people
+looked for causes of their poverty. It also exposed the inherent
+contradictions of capital and stoked the embers of protest by revealing their
+oppression to the oppressed. One of the first and most high-profile
+responses to this crisis was the Occupy movement, which swept the globe.
+On 17 September 2011, protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in downtown
+Manhattan near the financial district in order to protest at the cause of the
+financial crisis. The movement grew rapidly, spreading to a thousand cities
+and racking up 6,500 arrests within its first six months.41 The occupation
+was prompted by the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters which
+‘issued a call to action for a “revolution,” a “people’s revolt in the West”’ in
+response to the crisis of capitalism.42 Occupy took inspiration from
+previous movements like the Indignados in Spain, who had occupied public
+space in response to rising unemployment, austerity and other structural
+adjustments enforced by external financial institutions.43 The Arab Spring,
+highlighted by the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, had a large
+influence on Occupy as the images of mass occupation of a public space
+took hold in the imagination. Thousands occupied Zuccotti Park for almost
+two months, until police raided and shut down the protest on 15 November.
+Occupy’s reach was such that President Obama gave the movement his
+approval in his 2012 re-election campaign. By focusing on the economic
+crisis Occupy changed the political language and ‘income inequality’
+became the ‘crisis du jour’, something that all the 2016 presidential
+candidates at least had to address.44 The power of the economic message
+was its simplicity. The Occupiers declared that they were the 99 per cent
+standing up to the evil 1 per cent who hoarded the wealth. The only
+problem is that this idea is a delusional fantasy and a continuation of the
+
+universalizing of the White particular that we have seen from both left and
+right.
+Global inequality is so stark that those on the poverty line in the United
+States are still in the top 14 per cent of earners worldwide. The average US
+salary puts you in the top 4 per cent of earners. There is simply no
+comparison between the conditions facing the poorest in the world and
+those who are at the bottom in the United States, or in the rest of the West.
+Only by focusing on a national analysis could the ‘99 per cent’ rhetoric
+make any sense. By looking at its demands, or at least its articulation of the
+problem, it is abundantly clear that Occupy was focused on those in the
+West, not the victims of it.
+The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, collectively
+produced by Occupiers, is a laundry list of national demands around
+healthcare, jobs and student debt. The most telling line is the complaint that
+the 1 per cent ‘have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing
+as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay’.45 No prizes for guessing
+which ‘workers’ they are referring to here. Presumably, bringing back those
+jobs and further impoverishing the underdeveloped world would be
+acceptable as long as the true ‘workers’ had access to unskilled and wellpaid work. The declaration does include a line condemning the elite
+because ‘they have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.’ But this is
+so vague and contradictory to the rest of the declaration that it makes a
+mockery of their plea for the ‘people of the world’ to join the struggle. In
+the same vein as the Enlightenment thinkers, the centre of Occupy’s world
+was the West because it contained the fully formed workers, the movers of
+history.
+Even within the West the movement faced criticism for its tendency to
+‘exclude minority voices’46 and faced serious issues of misogyny.47 There
+were also marked class differences, with the people who could afford to
+sleep in Zuccotti Park in protest brushing up against those who had already
+made it their home because of poverty. The classed differences also spread
+into tactics. Occupy Seattle angered working-class dock workers by closing
+down the port in protest against commercialism; their principled stance
+meant the people they were supposed to be fighting for, the ‘workers’, lost
+valuable income. Occupy prided itself on democratic decision-making but it
+was ‘limited by failures to build alliances beyond those implicit inside its
+
+inner community’.48 Democracy matters very little if your electorate is
+highly exclusive, a lesson that the left needs desperately to learn.
+It might be tempting to see Occupy as ‘a global movement (inspired by
+the Arab Spring)’, but the reality is that it was in a long tradition of Western
+social movements which broke out in the United States and spread into
+Europe and the rest of the world.49 In claiming to represent the 99 per cent,
+Occupy, perhaps unwittingly, followed in the path of Enlightenment
+universalism, speaking for the entire world through the very narrow lens of
+Western privilege.
+Occupy’s other main accomplishment is said to be its commitment to
+horizontal, leaderless organization and a democratic style of decisionmaking. It is commendable that although ‘Occupy’ itself is extremely
+memorable the names of its leaders do not immediately come to mind. This
+was done on purpose, with painstaking efforts taken to build consensus.
+During speeches the rest of the protestors could respond with hand signals
+and interject to make their points known. Due originally to lack of
+technology, they used a ‘human microphone’ to communicate, where the
+audience in earshot of the speaker would shout out their words to those
+behind and so on. With such commitment to participation it must have been
+almost impossible to come to any consensus. The declaration that came
+from the occupiers of Zuccotti Park is frustratingly vague, but given the
+circumstances it is miraculous that anything was produced at all. The
+looseness of its political goals was one of the strengths of Occupy but also
+its primary weakness. Due to its very broadly stated aims the movement had
+a wide range of support from figures ‘including Noam Chomsky, Michael
+Moore, Kanye West, Russell Simmons, Alec Baldwin and Susan
+Sarandon’.50 But with a tent that large it could never hope to articulate a
+coherent platform.
+There were attempts to produce a more defined agenda, particularly by
+those at Adbusters who had put out the call for action in the first place.
+Micah White and Kalle Lasn, both from the magazine, tried to put together
+a manifesto to send to Obama three days after the start of the occupation,
+including the threat to ‘to stay here in our encampment in Liberty Plaza’
+until their demands were met.51 The only problem was that they were
+thousands of miles away in Canada at the time. Credit to Occupy, although
+a lot of its success was found in digital networks, it relied on people on the
+ground coming together to form bonds and consensus. Given the broad
+
+range of people, ideas and motivations involved it is not surprising that the
+loose-knit coalition eventually splintered, but many of the protestors would
+argue that although occupation ended it achieved much of what it set out to
+do.
+It would be wrong to judge the movement by conventional metrics
+because it set out to subvert them. The most obvious way Occupy was
+effective was as a ‘communications success’, utilizing social media to
+spread its messages across the world and making truly global links.52
+Using these networks to bring people together during occupations allowed
+those gathered to think through how they could address social problems, to
+engage in ‘DIY politics’ in the space.53 During occupations, tent city
+universities sprang up offering seminars and workshops, food was delivered
+to the hungry, medical advice was dispensed and successes were had in
+buying people out of their debt. To truly see the power of Occupy you have
+to view it through a different lens:
+it is not a media object or a march. It is first and foremost, a church
+of dissent, a space made sacred by a community. But like Medieval
+churches, it is also now the physical center of that community. It has
+become many things. Public square. Carnival. Place to get news.
+Daycare center. Health care center. Concert venue. Library.
+Performance space. School.54
+In many ways Occupy was ‘the idealist moment, the performance rather
+than permanence’.55 In Zuccotti Park, or in their hundreds of other
+locations around the world, they were performing the ideal. Occupy was
+performance art, a grand piece of ‘utopian theatre’ dramatizing the other
+world that is otherwise out of reach.56
+Here we see the White left at its most stomach-churning. Reading
+through some of the misty-eyed reflections on the movement, they have the
+feeling of romantic holiday diaries. Nothing may have changed and the
+movement may have collapsed but no fear, we will always have Zuccotti
+Park. Occupy’s horizontal organization involved both a deep narcissism –
+with slogans such as ‘we are our demands’ – and a way of building
+community that relied on ‘people forming loose connections quickly’ which
+fit perfectly into current times.57 It was the swipe-right of social
+movements, with no deep ideological commitments, loose connections, and
+
+the ability to find some fun elsewhere without feeling guilty. Performance
+over permanence is only an option to those in the land of plenty who have
+jobs or at least a welfare state to fall back on.
+What made Tahrir Square a completely different sort of movement was
+that the protestors had a clear demand, which was life or death, and they
+refused to move until it was met. We can debate how much difference came
+about when the military took over from President Mubarak in Egypt but not
+the organic commitment of the people to their struggle, nor that they risked
+their lives for their cause. The stakes in the West are of a different nature
+and therefore so are the politics.
+Democracy as a principle runs through the new left agenda. In Britain the
+new left is pushing for a more inclusive economy, similar to the demands of
+Occupy. Neoliberalism is diagnosed as the source of the ills of society, with
+the rich taking too much of the economic pie. We are promised that by a
+‘democratic revolution’ we can transform the institutions of governance and
+society at large.58 Not only is this struggle about income but it is also about
+reducing the social distance between people in society so that ‘everyone can
+share a common life as citizens’.59 The Labour Party under the leadership
+of Jeremy Corbyn embraced these ideals when he was unexpectedly voted
+leader in 2015. Prior to this, Labour had been in a period of mimicking
+Conservative policy on the economy, fully embracing neoliberalism with
+the idea that the spoils could be shared across society. After Labour’s
+surprising success (but not victory) in the general election of 2017, Corbyn
+launched what he called Labour’s ‘radical and ambitious’ manifesto for the
+2019 election, promising to transform both society and the economy.60
+Labour’s plans mirrored much of the New Economic Foundation’s
+recommendations for policy reform (the NEF is a key think-tank for the
+new left).
+The NEF hits all the key notes with the goal to build a society where all
+people are ‘paid well, have more time off to spend with their families, have
+access to affordable housing, know there is a decent safety net if they need
+one, and are provided with a high level of care throughout their lives’.61 In
+order to do this they propose a four-day week, a living wage, boosting trade
+union membership and fashioning a ‘well-being state’ where targets are not
+simply economic but relate to the mental and physical health of the nation.
+They stopped short of a universal basic income, instead suggesting a far
+more modest national allowance of £50 a week that counts when calculating
+
+benefit entitlements. But they are in favour of universal basic services,
+nationalizing key industries and providing free childcare to support
+families. The Green New Deal is of course embraced as a motor for both
+saving the world and job creation. They are also keen on ‘people’s
+participation in decision making’ in both policy-making and business.62
+One of the NEF’s and Labour’s main focuses is on establishing workers’
+cooperatives as a model for sharing wealth.
+Preston, a small city in the north of England, has an outsize importance in
+the new economy, since it has become a model for local-government led
+cooperatives. The council’s decision to source more locally and create
+cooperatives in the city has both boosted income and dispersed that extra
+money somewhat more fairly. Other large local employers like the
+university have followed suit by engaging with local suppliers, and the city
+is improving. But we should be wary of celebrating a radical new dawn.63
+For a start it is nothing new, with democratic reforms being part of the leftwing imagination for ‘at least a century’. Labour governments and councils
+attempted such projects before neoliberalism took over in the Thatcher
+era.64 John McDonnell, the architect of Corbyn’s economic policy, served
+his political apprenticeship in the eighties under Tony Benn, who developed
+a series of cooperative projects.
+The major flaw with these concepts of participation is who is included
+and who remains firmly on the outside. For all the talk of participation there
+is scant regard for the fact that those in the underdeveloped world are
+equally stakeholders in the economic life of the West. One of the
+cooperatives so praised in Preston is a coffee shop, and while we celebrate
+the benefits to the worker in Britain, the shop’s success is only possible
+because of the racial exploitation of the poor people farming the coffee
+beans it uses for next to nothing (it may be a surprise, but coffee does not
+grow in the north of England). This is Cadbury World all over again but on
+a societal scale. The wealth the left wants to share with those in their
+nations is derived in large part from global, racial exploitation. What the
+new left are offering is just a modified version of social democracy. A
+return to the days of high taxes, social housing, reduced inequality and the
+guarantee of a decent wage … but only in the West. In reality it is not a
+social but an imperial democracy they are yearning for.
+My grandmother came to Britain during the wonderful days of social
+democracy and found a nation even more overtly racist than the one I grew
+
+up in under neoliberalism. Malcolm X visited Birmingham in 1965 and his
+trip to Smethwick is remembered because of his comments on the racial
+situation in the town, which he heard was similar to how the ‘Jews were
+[being treated] under Hitler’.65 This was in large part because he visited the
+year after what has been dubbed the most racist election in British history,
+when the Conservative Party candidate Peter Griffith won with the
+unofficial slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. But
+people often forget that the Labour club in the area was for Whites only;
+and there is a long tradition of the trade unions barring people of colour
+from membership.66 Imperial democracy cannot deal with the problem of
+racism because it limits the collective to the citizens of the West, allowing
+them to participate in economic decisions and to increase their access to the
+bounty stolen off the backs of the Black and Brown. It took the financial
+crisis in 2008 to spark this new so-called radicalism, and the uncomfortable
+truth is that if some of the wealth generated from the new age of empire was
+distributed fairly enough to provide stability and comfort to everyone in the
+West, calls for the transformation of society would swiftly end.
+The rebooted version of Western imperialism updated the colonial logic
+embedded in the progressive left. Undoubtedly, the inclusion of Black and
+Brown activists in the West has meant that there is currently more
+awareness of issues of racial justice. We have always organized, resisted
+and ensured that there was a spotlight on White supremacy. But if we are
+honest, activism for the most part remains one of the most segregated social
+spaces. Green issues have always formed a part of Black and Brown
+activism in the West and in the Rest because we are more likely to feel the
+impacts. But whilst the Green New Deal offers at least a view on racial
+justice, it is a partial and unfocused one. Solving the climate crisis is an
+existential priority, but doing so will not end the logic of empire.
+Enlightenment narratives of science and progress as the solution to the
+world’s ills are still the foundation of the various branches of the left. A
+narrow focus on full humanity for workers in the West, and merely the right
+to life for the those in the Rest, prevents any serious reckoning with the
+scale of injustice upon which global wealth disparities are built. Bernie or
+Trump, Corbyn or Boris, are decisions that matter, but the degree to which
+they end Western imperialism is the same. Heads the West wins, tails the
+Rest loses. Those of us lucky enough to be in the land of plenty will benefit
+
+from a return to social democratic values. But nothing short of a revolution
+that overturns the very foundations of empire can ever undo the problem of
+racism.
+
+8
+
+Chickens Coming Home to Roost
+Britain and the United States came towards the top of the death charts from
+Covid-19 in 2020 in an unwelcome demonstration of the much-vaunted
+‘special relationship’. Given the history there is a dark irony in a virus
+tearing through the past and present centres of Western imperialism. Unlike
+the genocide in the Americas and Caribbean this illness was never an
+existential threat, but the death toll is a reminder that imperialism has
+unintended consequences. Britain and the United States were not hit hard
+due to historical karma, but because they are at the most advanced stage of
+development of the new age of empire: neoliberalism. The deadly
+prescription of austerity, privatization and unrestrained private capital for
+the underdeveloped world is now being firmly implanted in the West, with
+Britain and the United States leading the way. The United States has a
+disastrous private healthcare system that fails to manage its normal load, so
+it is no surprise the pandemic was so catastrophic. Britain has the much
+cherished National Health Service, but decades of privatization and cuts
+have led to a service unable to effectively mobilize against the virus.
+Prioritizing profit and the individual over services and society is deadly at
+the best of times but utterly ruinous during a pandemic.
+The financial regimes inflicted on the Rest coming home to roost in the
+West was a likely but not inevitable result of the new age of empire. Once
+the nation state lost its centrality in coordinating empire, and business was
+
+free to exploit with no restraints, it was only a matter of time before
+neoliberal forces would try to bang down the door. Social democracy was a
+vital element in rebuilding the West after the devastation wrought by the
+Second World War. The post-war settlement shared the spoils of colonial
+plunder more fairly in the West, easing internal inequality and tying its
+White majorities firmly to the imperial project. High taxes, public
+ownership and restraints on financial markets were the status quo until the
+1980s. In order for the floodgates of neoliberalism to open, people had to be
+convinced to vote for an agenda that would reduce the quality of their lives.
+More than anything else it was the racist logic of empire that opened the
+floodgates to imposing the Washington consensus in the West.
+Brexit unleashed the rabid dogs of neoliberalism, hell-bent on
+maximizing their profits from liberating the United Kingdom from the
+regulation (or protection) of the European Union. The ironically named
+European Research Group, made up of a segment of Conservative members
+of parliament, made it impossible to get a deal done, effectively forcing the
+resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May in 2019. Let us be clear: May
+was part of one of the most racist British governments of recent times,
+creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants that included vans
+with ‘go home’ written on them driving around the capital, massdeportation flights, and withdrawing support for search-and-rescue missions
+for predominantly African migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea
+into Europe. If that wasn’t enough, she was also the architect of the
+‘Windrush Scandal’, which left thousands of people with every legal and
+historic right to live in Britain subject to losing their jobs and to deportation
+if they could not provide documentation to prove they had migrated before
+1973, when Commonwealth citizens were legally entitled to enter. Bear in
+mind that there was no need for documentation at the time and the only
+official proof of entry held by the government was destroyed in 2010
+because they ran out of office space. Thousands of those encouraged to
+migrate to Britain because of a labour shortage, who had grown up in
+Britain, were deemed illegal and subject to removal to countries they had
+often never previously returned to.1 May’s response to the Grenfell Tower
+tragedy, in which more than seventy mostly Black and Brown people were
+killed, was so disgraceful and lacking humanity she later admitted that
+failing to meet the families in the immediate aftermath was something she
+would ‘always regret’.2
+
+I despised her politics to the point I argued that she was ‘more dangerous
+than Donald Trump’.3 May was more problematic because she represented
+what Malcolm X called the ‘Northern foxes’ of racism who ‘show their
+teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling’.4 May shrouded
+herself in the pretence of social justice, making all the right noises about
+racial discrimination and the police, and commissioning reports into
+inequality, without making any changes and continuing policies of austerity
+that made everything worse. Trump is Malcolm’s Southern ‘bloody jawed
+wolf’, one of those who ‘show their teeth in a snarl’ by being openly racist
+in both word and deed.5
+Theresa May’s departure opened the door to Britain’s Trump, Boris
+Johnson, who has in the past referred to Black young people as
+‘piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’, claimed Obama had an ‘ancestral
+dislike for the United States because he is part Kenyan’,6 and compared
+Muslim women in the veil to ‘letterboxes’.7 Comparisons to Agent Orange
+– sorry, I mean President Trump – do not stop there. He is also a highly
+mediocre White man born into a wealthy family, with all the sense of
+entitlement that comes from growing up with a silver spoon in one’s mouth.
+Lies flow so effortlessly from both their mouths it is as if they feel that they
+are not bound by the rules of the poor and unwashed. They create their own
+realities, including the one where they represent the will of the people. I
+was never a fan of May but celebrating her decline was premature. Her
+replacement is not only an openly racist buffoon who is allergic to the truth
+but a cheerleader for the forces of unrestrained neoliberalism that are due to
+be unleashed on Britain.
+The new reality that Johnson and the hardcore Brexiteers have created is
+that people voted for a hard Brexit, a clean break from the EU. Although
+even the most extreme of those advocating to leave, including the vile Nigel
+Farage (another Trump favourite), assured voters in the referendum
+campaign that there would be a deal that maintained substantive EU links,
+they went on to pretend that leaving without a deal was what the people
+really wanted. No economist or sensible politician believes that leaving the
+EU without a deal is a practical strategy. So dire are the consequences that it
+would likely mean food shortages, the end of whole industries that rely on
+frictionless trade with the EU; and according to the government’s own
+watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, could cost the UK £30
+
+billion a year.8 The truth is no one knows the potential impact but the
+prospects are so bleak that the government allocated over £6 billion to
+prepare for the disaster that would ensue if Britain left without a deal.9
+None of this mattered to the hardcore Brexiteers, who were perfectly happy
+to risk the wellbeing of others if it means the creative destruction necessary
+to build the kind of society they can maximize profits from. They may even
+make a fortune off the chaos. There have been plenty of people with money
+making a profit from betting against the pound, whose value has fallen to
+historic lows due to the Brexit turmoil.
+Johnson’s Brexit promises to shed regulations and workers’ rights and
+open up the economy to even more privatization than Britain is currently
+defined by. Some of the biggest fears raised during the so-called ‘Brexit
+election’ in December 2019 were the looming impact of a trade deal with
+the United States that would allow weaker food standards and protections.
+Under a ‘Trump Brexit’, as the leader of the opposition dubbed it, we could
+expect to be flooded with chlorinated chicken, currently banned by EU
+regulations due to the unsanitary nature of the process. Worse still, the
+much-loved National Health Service, which provides free-at-the-point-ofdelivery care to the population is on the table to be carved up by US
+healthcare companies. Britain has always been far closer to the United
+States than most of Europe in its economic policy and the fear is that Brexit
+will push the nation more towards the neoliberal extremes of life across the
+Atlantic. If, and when, Britain tips fully into the neoliberal abyss it will be
+the result of ‘chickens coming home to roost’, the inevitable conclusion
+where the logic of imperialism returns to wreak havoc at home.
+
+WAGES OF WHITENESS
+The ground zero for the emergence of the new left is the wrecking ball that
+Thatcher and Reagan took to the welfare state in the eighties. Destroying
+the post-war social democratic settlement led to the unrestrained greed of
+bankers, which resulted in the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing misery
+of austerity. Steep declines in living standards, the casualization of work
+and whole communities being ‘left behind’ in the new economy led to the
+rise in populism that elected Trump and gave the charlatan Brexiteers the
+opportunity to argue that it was the EU that was to blame for society’s ills.
+
+Neither President Trump, Prime Minister Johnson or Brexit would be
+possible without the support of millions of poor (White) people for agendas
+that are diametrically opposed to their interests. There is no way to
+understand this phenomenon separate from the racism that underpins
+society. It is not an issue of class consciousness but the delusions of
+Whiteness that have allowed the harbingers of the neoliberal apocalypse to
+rise to power.
+African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that even the
+poorest of White people in the United States during the period of
+Reconstruction after the Civil War received a ‘public and psychological
+wage’ from their Whiteness.10 Even though they were being exploited by
+the same people as African Americans, their status as Whites gave them
+limited privilege, which they clung to. For Du Bois, this was the principal
+reason that Black and White workers did not unite against their common
+enemy and overthrow American capitalism. We see similar arguments
+throughout the critical literature on Whiteness, with historian Noel Ignatiev
+arguing that ‘White people must commit suicide as Whites in order to come
+alive as workers, or youth, or women.’11 This is a classically Marxist
+notion that race (Whiteness) is an inauthentic identity enacted by the ruling
+class to divide the workers. As should hopefully now be evident, it is not
+that simple. Whiteness is not a mirage, there are actual benefits to being in
+the category that White workers have fought, and continue to fight, very
+hard for. Still, Whiteness is a tool used by those in power to control poor
+Whites, to tie them to the project of imperialism. The rise of neoliberalism
+is the perfect case study.
+Social democracy distributed wealth, at least within places like Britain
+and the United States, reducing inequality between the rich and poor.
+Conditions for the poor in the early twentieth century were horrendous and
+there were almost no vehicles for social uplift. Providing housing,
+infrastructure, transport, social security benefits, healthcare and schooling
+vastly improved the lives of the poor. We should never forget that the
+wealth to do this was achieved through colonial exploitation, but at least
+within the bubble of the West social democracy transformed social
+conditions. The only problem with the model of state-led, protectionist
+economies is that they represented the outdated political and economic
+model of the original version of Western empire. In the new ‘globalized’
+world the state has less power and lacks sovereignty over the corporations
+
+that manage the new imperialism. Once capital is liberated from national
+constraints it becomes impossible for nation-state governments to control.
+High taxes on individuals and corporations cannot work because capital is
+mobile – often stored and registered offshore. There is no longer any such
+thing as a British or American corporation because they are now all global
+entities spread across disparate tax regimes.
+In order to impose neoliberal regimes internally the White masses,
+including the poor and the workers, needed to be convinced they were in
+their interests so that they would vote them into being. The oil crisis in the
+1970s destabilized the West and provided just the opportunity. Prior to
+ruining underdeveloped economies, the IMF was primarily used to support
+the West. Britain’s economy was so damaged by the crisis that it not only
+sought help from the fund in 1976 but also accepted some of the conditions
+that have been such a bane to the rest of the world, cutting back some of its
+more left-wing programmes.12
+The oil crisis was a result of the United States establishing its central role
+at the heart of empire. In 1971 Nixon broke the Bretton Woods agreement
+by removing the dollar from the gold standard, which had underpinned
+global trade. The result was a devastating loss of revenue for the oil-rich
+countries of the Middle East, who put an embargo on selling their most
+valuable commodity to the United States.13 A global recession took hold
+that made the costs of social democracy in the West exceedingly difficult to
+meet and forced Britain into the conditional IMF loan. The country’s
+economic crisis led to wage freezes in the public sector and a showdown
+with the trade unions, who organized a series of strikes, which included bin
+collectors and gravediggers. The chaos is seared into the political
+imagination as the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–9 and provided all the
+impetus necessary for the Thatcherite takeover in the election of 1979.
+Social democracy was scapegoated as too expensive given the financial
+crisis; inefficient; and as having given far too much power to the unions
+who could bring the country to a halt. Privatization, individualism and a
+small state were the obvious solutions to the statist former model. But
+remember that this economic context existed in large part because the
+United States was laying the foundations of the new age of empire. They
+eventually won the battle with the Middle East and liberation from the gold
+standard allowed for rapid expansion of finance capitalism, the boom on
+Wall Street and the eventual financial crash of 2008.
+
+It was not only economics that allowed the rise of neoliberalism. In
+Britain, Margaret Thatcher stormed to power in 1979 in large part because
+she was able to secure the support of some traditional Labour, workingclass voters whose aversion to the Tory party was deeply ingrained. An area
+that Thatcher could exploit was the issue of immigration. Due to labour
+shortages, post-war Britain had opened its doors to immigration from the
+colonies. Millions of people from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa had
+settled in the UK by the time of the momentous election in 1979. My family
+were part of that migration and the reason I am writing this book in Britain.
+There were also millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Old
+Commonwealth (Australasia, Canada, White South Africans) but they did
+not concern Thatcher, who openly spoke about the ‘four million people of
+the new Commonwealth or Pakistan’ flooding into Britain, in a nationally
+televised interview.14 She argued that
+people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather
+swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the
+British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done
+so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might
+be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those
+coming in.
+This was by no means the first time that the Conservatives had engaged in
+such racist political language. Thatcher was mobilizing a more polite
+version of Peter Griffiths’ ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote
+Labour’ tactic. ‘Swamped’ is important because it suggests there are too
+many darkies and that we are a corrupting influence on British institutions
+and values.
+Social democracy only works if society feels that everyone should have a
+stake in sharing the wealth. The idea that foreigners, Black ones at that,
+should be able to jump the queue for housing or doctor’s appointments
+undermines the idea of universal service provision. Notions of being ‘left
+behind’ are intrinsically tied up in this idea. White workers are supposedly
+being short-changed by multiculturalism, which is privileging the darkies
+who are swamping the country and demanding special protections under
+anti-racist legislation. Britain’s embrace of individualism was in large part
+driven by its rejection of diversity.
+
+There can be no ‘we’ if that includes the uninvited foreigners destroying
+the so-called British way of life. Thatcher’s famous declaration that ‘there’s
+no such thing as society’ must be seen in this context. She continued, ‘there
+are individual men and women and there are families … It is our duty to
+look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.’15 Given
+the context of steep racial segregation in housing it is clear who the
+neighbours are that she is referring to. In this logic, mass migration has torn
+down the fabric of what once were the shared British values that held the
+country together. Old ideas of community, nation and class are broken down
+with the idea that the uniqueness of Britain is being lost and the neoliberal
+individual is free to come into being, fending for themselves against the
+hordes of foreigners swamping the country.
+The anti-immigration rhetoric of Thatcher was key to her appeal and to
+being able to maintain a Conservative government for the following
+eighteen years. In that period taxes were slashed, public utilities privatized,
+and social housing sold off to those individuals with enough money to be
+able to afford to buy them. Finance capital was also set free to dominate the
+economy, and neoliberalism flourished in Britain. Of course, inequality
+soared and public services became run down through lack of investment,
+whilst the rich kept on getting filthier and richer.
+We saw the same use of racist logic in the campaign for Brexit. The
+expansion of the EU in 2007 to include Eastern European countries meant
+that freedom of movement within member states was open to those poorer
+citizens of the former Communist bloc. As a result, large numbers of
+migrants began to come to Britain to work, which became an increasing
+source of discontent for many. Right-wing racists like Nigel Farage came to
+prominence, with his United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), focused
+on the single issue of leaving the EU, with fears of uncontrolled
+immigration being its major talking point. Farage made clear the limits of
+the social democratic dream with his declaration during an election debate
+that the beloved NHS was ‘our National Health Service, not the
+International Health Service’.16 Extending the protections of the welfare
+state to bloody foreigners was not what the decent hardworking British
+people had signed up to.
+Fearing that the rise of UKIP, who did very well in the EU elections,
+could be dangerous for his party, Prime Minister David Cameron sought to
+outflank them on Europe by offering the referendum on membership of the
+
+EU. It worked to depress the UKIP vote in the 2015 general election but he
+was then left with the prospect of having to deliver on this promise. He
+made a massive miscalculation when he assumed that people would not
+‘vote themselves poorer because they don’t like the Poles living next
+door’.17 But by voting in the Conservatives for ever more austerity, that is
+precisely what a large chunk of the British electorate had already done.
+Cameron’s Brexit gamble was no doubt in part influenced by the history
+of racial politics and immigration. As we discussed earlier, migration from
+Eastern Europe is not a new phenomenon in Britain. In fact, Cameron’s
+opposite number in the Labour Party in 2015, Ed Miliband, was the son of
+Polish Jewish migrants.18 There was certainly some questionable coverage
+in the largely morally deficient right-wing press about his inability to eat a
+bacon sandwich and how his refugee Marxist father hated Britain.19 But
+his background did not receive any of the fanfare, for good or ill, that would
+have been made had his parents migrated from Jamaica. White migrants are
+still White and their children melt into the population in a way that we
+never can. In many ways freedom of movement from Europe was just a
+continuation of the long-held immigration policy to encourage White
+migration whilst discouraging those who are Black and Brown. But the
+pace and scale of migration had an impact on the debate.
+Between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of the UK population from
+Europe, excluding Ireland, rose from 1.5 per cent to 5 per cent. It is not
+incredibly surprising that the xenophobic backlash against EU migrants
+coincided with the financial crash and austerity. When people are struggling
+it is easy to pin the blame on the newly arrived, even when they are
+migrating from worse conditions. But Cameron should have seen this
+writing on the wall because it had his fingerprints all over it.
+Farage has been ridiculed for his blaming of all things on immigrants,
+including too much traffic,20 but Cameron’s government was just a more
+sophisticated version of the UKIP spin machine. During the 2015 general
+election campaign Cameron warned that a Labour government would
+massively increase immigration. His immigration minister James
+Brokenshire declared that ‘uncontrolled mass immigration makes it difficult
+to maintain social cohesion, puts pressure on public services and forces
+down wages.’21 Shifting the blame for poverty and lack of investment
+away from their root cause of neoliberalism and onto immigrants has been
+
+key to the Conservatives’ electoral success. Millions have been duped into
+believing that their problem is poor people from other countries looking for
+a better life, rather than the rich and politicians who are robbing the
+population of the opportunities to succeed.
+Even when immigration is not about race, it still is. EU migrants are
+overwhelmingly White but this did not stop the campaigners looking to
+leave the EU during the Brexit referendum invoking race. Farage
+consistently invoked the spectre of Turkey joining the EU, with its 75
+million Muslims supposedly threatening to invade Britain. This is ironic
+because Turkey has basically zero chance of EU membership because it is
+not a White country. The EU has always been an exclusive club. Farage
+also unveiled an infamous poster that depicted a long line of Syrian
+refugees crossing into Croatia from Slovenia with the slogan ‘Breaking
+Point: The EU has failed us all’. So egregious was the imagery that even
+Boris Johnson denounced it; the imagery was reported to the police and
+even evoked comparisons to Nazi propaganda. But the message was clear:
+immigration is always a racial issue.
+The result of all of this has been the vote for Brexit and the rise of Boris
+Johnson, who threatens to complete the neoliberal project. There should be
+no more worrying prospect for the average Brit. The problem is that the
+nation voted for all of it in no small part because they bought into the racial
+politics that underpin the system.
+Immigration, in and of itself, is the chickens of imperialism coming home
+to roost. By conquering a quarter of the globe Britain incorporated hundreds
+of millions of Black and Brown people into its Empire. For all the fantasies
+of Britain being great, the reality is that as a little, insignificant island, it
+was the Empire that established the role of the nation in the world. Colonial
+subjects were born in Britain, not outside it. Our blood, sweat and tears lay
+at the foundation of British progress. After the War, when the mother
+country needed labour to rebuild it naturally turned to the source it had been
+exploiting for centuries. It was seen as your duty to do your part for Queen
+and country in the same way as supporting the war effort had been.
+Often forgotten in the anti-immigration debate is that we were invited. In
+fact, Enoch Powell, who became infamous for his racist, anti-immigration
+‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was one of the first health secretaries to reach out
+to the colonies for nurses. More than any other cherished institution, the
+NHS has always relied, and still very much continues to rely, on the labour
+
+of doctors and nurses from the former colonies to exist. Farage’s quip about
+it not being the International Health Service is as ignorant as it is racist. The
+truth is that the British welfare state has heavily relied on the former
+colonies for both the wealth necessary to exist and the labour to run it. Fears
+of ‘swamping’ and ‘losing’ the country are entirely imagined and frankly
+ridiculous. But if immigration has been seen as a problem and has led to the
+embrace of the neoliberal individual, then this was a problem of Britain’s
+own making. As the late intellectual Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it, ‘we
+are here because you were there.’22 Had the West not colonized and then
+underdeveloped the world there would not be millions of former colonial
+subjects trying to migrate into their former mother countries for a better life.
+The dark chickens of the colonies coming home to roost happened later in
+Europe because of the nature of empire, with indirect rule and slavery in the
+Caribbean, but the United States had to deal with this issue from its
+foundation.
+The rise of neoliberalism in the United States was no different, driven by
+the same forces of White supremacy. Donald Trump’s victory has been seen
+as an outlier because he is so ill-suited and unprepared for the role of
+president, but his election was decades in the making. He is the poster boy
+for neoliberalism and the silver-spoon-in-the-mouth elite, posing as the
+friend of the people; and his election was driven by the same basic factors
+as we saw in Britain. Poor Whites supposedly being left behind by
+multiculturalism. Fear of the immigrants taking control. A wish to return to
+the glory days when racism could openly form public policy. Trump’s
+embrace of ‘law and order’ is the classic racialized language of the right:
+that the dark inner cities need to be heavily policed to keep the savages in
+the jungle in check.
+Following his tragicomic handling of the Covid-19 outbreak, the rise of
+the Black Lives Matter protests unfortunately gave Trump the opportunity
+to play to his strengths and his base. As well as threatening to use the army
+to quell the unrest, Trump has described Black Lives Matter as a ‘symbol of
+hate’23 and vowed to defend the monuments to the slave-owning ‘patriots’
+who built the United States that he described as ‘heroes’ rather than
+villains.24 Doubling down on his appeals to Whiteness was undoubtedly
+the best call in the lead-up to the presidential election. He may have
+ultimately lost but more voters voted for him than did for Obama in his
+historic victory of 2008. Millions of voters are seduced by the wages of
+
+Whiteness even in the absence of actual wages to support them.25 Just as in
+Britain, the real problem is the rich and the politicians who support them,
+while the blame for inequality is shifted to immigrants and Black folk.
+Du Bois declared that the issue of ‘the twentieth century was the problem
+of the color line’,26 and the so-called race problem has been a focus of
+attention, both well-meaning and mendacious, since emancipation. Having
+to deal with millions of African Americans is the definition of chickens
+coming home to roost, the result of stolen bodies, lives and labour. The
+wages of Whiteness can be traced to the development of the United States,
+to which the issue of the enslavement of African people was central. We
+should not delude ourselves with the mythology that the Civil War was
+about ending slavery. Lincoln made it clear that if he could ‘save the Union
+without freeing any slave’ he was perfectly happy to do so.27 To win the
+battle with the South, the North ended up issuing the emancipation
+proclamation in order to enlist the support of the enslaved. During the war
+so many African Americans had liberated themselves from bondage that if
+he wanted victory Lincoln had no real choice but to support emancipation.
+After the war the first solution to the ‘problem’ of living with millions of
+free Black folk was, in effect, to deport them to another country. The more
+polite term of ‘colonization’ was used, and Lincoln and his successors
+pursued the idea of ejecting their Black population to another place,
+possibly Haiti or Liberia.28 It is in the Reconstruction period that Du Bois’
+phrase ‘wages of Whiteness’ was applied to the inability of White workers
+to find comradeship with the formerly enslaved. This dynamic only got
+worse with the immigration of millions of Europeans into the nation who
+‘became White’ in large part by embracing the racism of the United States
+and directing hatred towards African Americans.29
+By being openly racist and segregationist wolves, politicians in the South
+were able to maintain their power whilst the cunning foxes in the North
+gave nods to racial equality while presiding over de facto Jim Crow through
+housing segregation, police brutality and institutional racism. In his 1964
+‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ speech Malcolm X declares that he is ‘not a
+Democrat, nor a Republican, nor even an American’ because of how
+misused the votes of Black people had been by politicians.30
+Like Thatcher, when Reagan wanted to usher in neoliberalism he knew
+the perfect scapegoat. During both his presidential campaigns, and while in
+
+office trying to dismantle the welfare state, he invoked the tale of a Black
+woman in Chicago who had been gaming the system to the extent that her
+‘tax-free cash income alone had been running at $150,000 a year’.31
+Reagan’s tale of the ‘welfare queen’ hit all the right notes with certain
+segments of the electorate. A freeloader, living off the backs of the
+hardworking. It was abundantly clear that this was a stereotype built on the
+longstanding racist idea that Black people are workshy. The United States is
+so racially segregated that nodding to the ‘woman in Chicago’, one of the
+cities where the problem of segregation is most acute, created a clear
+picture of exactly whom Reagan was talking about. Just as in Britain, social
+democratic principles can only hold if everyone feels everyone else is an
+equal part of the nation. African Americans, and immigrants, were the
+perfect weapon to break the New Deal consensus.
+Welfare reform was ushered in on the myth of the undeserving Blacks,
+and the ‘war on drugs’ sparked mass incarceration as an alternative to
+welfare provision for African Americans, as well as hugely expanding the
+role of the private sector in prisons. Trump’s election, on a tide of antiBlack and anti-immigration rhetoric, is not an aberration but the logical
+conclusion of the resentment at neoliberalism being turned onto those
+perceived as alien to the nation.
+We have seen the same process of neoliberal structural adjustment wreak
+havoc across Britain and the United States, enabled by the same colonial
+logic that remains deeply written into the political calculus. When covid
+struck with Trump on one side of the Atlantic and Johnson on the other, we
+were stuck in the middle, with the chickens that well and truly came home
+to roost.
+
+LOOK TO THE EAST
+Much has been made about the rise of the East as a major change in the
+global political and economic system. There is no doubt that ‘we are living
+in the Asian century’, with dramatic increases of both wealth and standards
+of living across the continent.32 China’s influence, in particular, is being
+increasingly felt on the world stage, with the trade war with the United
+States being just one example. There has undoubtedly been a shift in the
+balance of power to the East that is not set to reverse. With rising standards
+
+of living come greater economic influence, China and India alone hold
+more than a third of the world’s population. In India between 1990 and
+2014 the number of households with more than $10,000 a year in
+disposable income leapt from 2 to 50 million.33 China has become the new
+workshop of the world, manufacturing goods for global consumption, while
+the region is also at the forefront of technological and communications
+innovations. It is not difficult to see why the West would be worried about
+China hosting both the means of production and a mass consumer base. But
+the reality is that the emergence of Asia neither ends the Western imperial
+project nor calls for a system update. What we are seeing today is the logic
+of the current version of the system, and ‘the sun rising in the east does not
+mean that it is setting on the west.’34
+In order to deliver its remarkable economic growth the East has ingrained
+itself into the Western political and economic system. It is not a coincidence
+that it is not Mao’s China that is poised to become the centre of the global
+political and economic system; China holds that position because the
+Chairman’s legacy has been abandoned. The collapse of Communism led to
+the infamous declaration of the ‘end of history’ by Francis Fukuyama, who
+theorized ‘that liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind’s
+ideological evolution’.35 No one could accuse China of being a liberal
+democracy, but its surrender to market capitalism is almost total. While
+certainly not neoliberal, the country is remarkably comfortable with
+billionaires for a supposedly Communist nation. As China depends on the
+West for its prosperity there is nothing to be gained from trying to foment
+revolution. Fukuyama’s argument is wrong-headed because it is steeped so
+deeply in Enlightenment principles he forgets that actors, particularly in the
+former colonies, have agency. But he is right about the extent to which the
+Western economic model has erased almost all alternatives.
+Just as New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement,
+China is the ultimate success of the West: a potential successor to the seat of
+power that maintains the relations and exclusions of the old system. This is
+an absolute defeat of the revolutionary principles that the nation was
+founded upon. In fact, because China has yet to embrace liberal democracy,
+let alone neoliberalism, it may end up representing a better form of Western
+imperialism. With its population of over 1 billion led firmly by the state it is
+able to mobilize and plan its economy with military precision in a way the
+rest of the world should equally envy and fear.
+
+The fact that there are non-White faces at the head of the latest version of
+empire does not mean the system has changed. It is perfectly possible to
+maintain racism whilst diversifying those in charge of dispensing it. It was
+precisely by exploiting racial political and economic systems that the region
+grew. Asia’s growth depends on the extreme poverty of hundreds of
+millions of its own citizens and the continued evisceration of Africa in
+order to plunder the continent’s resources. There are no signs of this
+changing, and a collection of crazy rich Asians does not alter reality for the
+majority of people on the continent. One of the most disappointing
+arguments for the decline of racism is the presence of rich Black and Brown
+folk. A Black middle class is no more evidence of racial salvation than the
+existence of many more rich White people means that the class struggle is
+over. There have always been some who were better-off than others, even
+under the brutally violent version of Western imperialism. The current
+edition has meant that there are now far more opportunities for a limited
+elite, both in the West and the former colonies, to enjoy the fruits of the
+system. But we should not delude ourselves into believing that means that
+the nature of the system itself has changed.
+Rather than seeing the emergence of Black and Brown elites as a break
+from Western imperialism, we should understand them as one of the logics
+of the new system. The new age of empire is based on moving away from
+formal colonialism, breaking down the power of the state and delivering
+racial exploitation through economic, not physical, coercion. This meant
+granting so-called independence and relying even more on local elites to
+manage their countries. There are classes of the wealthy from the former
+colonies who owe their lifestyles and positions to Western imperialism. To
+be in the elite in the former colonies is to inhabit a position beyond most of
+those in the West. This also tends to come with Western education, offshore
+bank accounts and truly being able to access the world as a global citizen.
+Occupy’s 1 per cent certainly includes some of those who are not White,
+but we are mistaken if we think that their positions are not defined by
+Whiteness. To gain that level of wealth in economies that include some of
+the poorest people on the planet tells us the scale of the inequalities in the
+system. Even for those of us who are by no means rich but still successful,
+our relative prosperity remains built on the same colonial logic that keeps
+the masses of the Black and Brown in poverty. The most painful
+development of the new age of empire is that we have now become part of
+
+the problem, with our hands stained with the blood of the victims of our
+success.
+When the architects of the new age of empire were designing the update
+to the system they doubtless did not predict the emergence and potential
+takeover of China and the East. Belief in White supremacy has a tendency
+to override common sense, and they more than likely thought that the
+impoverished East could be contained. But taking the boot directly off the
+neck of the underdeveloped world allowed space for the changes that have
+occurred. One of the biggest factors has been offshoring as part of the
+neoliberal project. Due to the racist political and economic system, wages
+are far lower in the underdeveloped world and therefore when capital and
+technology were free to be global it made economic sense for companies to
+move their production overseas. China has been adept at using its cheap
+labour to become the workshop of the world. This labour was offshored
+precisely because of the wealth in the West: it became too expensive to pay
+the workers here for it, and the work is mundane.
+Consumption, technology and services replaced manufacturing as the
+basis of Western economies. In the pursuit of the middle-class dream this
+makes some kind of sense, but it is also a big driver of the ‘left behind’
+narrative because it means that unskilled manual jobs are in short supply.
+Ceding production to the underdeveloped world always had the potential
+for the rapid development we are seeing. For all the hype about
+consumption, it is impossible without production. China in particular, but
+also the region in general, has become expert at making the most of owning
+substantial elements of the means of production.
+When the centre of empire shifts to China, or robots take over
+production, it may well mean the West moves to its next stage. None of
+these developments will mean ending the racist political and economic
+system, and at best they only offer a slightly more bearable format.
+
+END OF EMPIRE
+No matter how many of the chickens come home to roost in the West they
+will never erase the racism at the heart of the global political and economic
+system. As Malcolm X warned us, ‘this system can no more provide
+freedom, justice and equality … than a chicken can lay a duck egg.’36 But
+
+history tells us that all empires end. They either collapse under their own
+contradictions or are brought crashing down by rebellion or conquest. We
+may have been told that there is no alternative, but Western imperialism
+will at some point come to a conclusion. The West has only been truly
+dominant for 250 years, a blip on the timeline of human history. But despite
+diagnosing racism as a fundamental sequence in the DNA of the current
+social order, the premise of this book is deeply optimistic. We do not need
+to placate the powers that be by limiting our vision to reforming a system
+that is not broken. Police brutality, health inequalities, thousands of children
+dying a day are all symptoms of the disease of racism caused by the
+machine of Western imperialism. Once we recognize that this racism is a
+necessary a by-product of the political and economic system then we have
+the freedom to imagine what comes after we have torn it down.
+Revolution is possible, but we have to accept that it will not come from
+those who benefit from Western imperialism. There are centuries-long
+traditions of radical politics emerging from the oppressed. The bulk of my
+work is about developing the politics of Black radicalism, which centres on
+uniting Africa and the African diaspora to create a true revolution, which
+remains the only solution to the problem of racism.37 The oppressed never
+accept their condition and will always struggle to overturn the system that
+holds them down. Enslaved Africans in Haiti cast off their shackles and
+took their freedom. Black Power movements changed the conditions of
+possibility for Black people in the belly of the beast. It was revolutions
+across the Third World that forced the West to abandon the brutally violent
+forms of colonial domination. This book is a reminder of the stakes, to not
+accept edits to the status quo as some kind of progress. Revolution is not
+only possible but it is absolutely essential if we truly want freedom.
+The protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd are deeply rooted in
+the histories of Black resistance but offer a new hope in one regard. In the
+sixties there was a struggle between the agendas of revolution and reform:
+overturning the system or trying to fix it. Reform won out in the shape of
+civil rights movements in the West and independence for nations in the
+underdeveloped world. These were some of the most successful movements
+in history, gaining access to voting rights, changes to legislation and even
+representation in the halls of power. For fifty years we have been promised
+we are on a path to freedom, but it is more than just symbolic that Black
+Lives Matter first came into existence with a Black man in the White
+
+House. No amount of editing or inclusion to this racist system will ever
+give us freedom, and we now have a generation who should no longer be
+persuaded we are on the right path. The future is now, and it is one in which
+we can watch a police officer kneel on the neck of a Black person in public
+for almost nine minutes. If that does not remove the scales from our eyes
+then nothing will.
+The question that I get asked the most, and have no answer to, is ‘What
+can White people do?’ If you got to the end of this book hoping there would
+be a magic bullet, some quick fix or anti-racist potion that could build
+meaningful allyship then you will leave disappointed. The quest for allyship
+is in itself misguided. The problem is that society is built on a White
+supremacy that permeates every institution, intellectual framework and
+interaction within it. If you have come this far and believe that White
+people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution then you
+have entirely missed the point. It is not the place of the oppressed to suggest
+a progressive role for those who benefit from their oppression. My hope is
+that understanding the scale of the problem and the limits of the solutions
+offered can spark a genuine conversation about how to overhaul this wicked
+system. In one of Malcolm X’s most famous speeches he offered a seeming
+olive branch to mainstream White society, arguing that America was ‘the
+only country in history in a position to actually become involved in a
+bloodless revolution’.38 All it had to do was give Black people ‘everything
+they’re due’, in order to repair the damage done over the centuries.
+Malcolm did not hold out much hope, and busied himself with organizing
+the Black masses. If anything should be clear by now, it is that we cannot
+wait for White allies to join the struggle to end their systemic privilege.
+The glimmer of hope for true transformation in the West is that if the
+system is left to collapse under its own weight it may well end human
+existence as we know it. The pile of Black and Brown bodies stacked up
+since Columbus, to millions each year dying from poverty, is of an
+unimaginable scale. But the West has not shied away from White-on-White
+violence when vying for the leadership of its empire. Millions of European
+and American lives were lost in the two World Wars, and we were on the
+brink of Armageddon more than once during the Cold War. One of the
+consequences of the rise of a non-White power such as China threatening to
+take control of the reins is the increased likelihood of nuclear holocaust. It
+was not by chance that the Japanese were used as guinea pigs for the atomic
+
+bomb. Black and Brown bodies are far easier to erase in the logic of empire.
+Violence consuming the West (and the entire globe in the process) would be
+the ultimate example of chickens coming home to roost, but there is an even
+more likely existential threat to humanity.
+Over-consumption is killing the planet. The constant pursuit of growth at
+all costs is polluting the atmosphere to the point where the world may
+become uninhabitable. If drastic action is not taken to reverse global
+warming soon then floods of a biblical nature are coming to not only wash
+away the sins of the West but also its victims. Solar panels, electric cars and
+planting trees are not enough to undo the damage that has been done. It is
+the very nature of Western consumption that is due to melt the ice-caps.39
+Climate justice is not just a matter of life and death for those who are Black
+and Brown; a radical rethink is necessary for humanity to continue.
+Maybe it is in this moment, standing on the cliff-edge of annihilation,
+staring into the abyss caused by Western so-called civilization, that the
+depth of the problem and scale of the solution can be grasped. Perhaps we
+can wipe away the illusions of progress based on the distorted vision of
+Whiteness we are brainwashed into. This is the chance to refuse the next
+system update of imperialism, destroy the hard drive and create an entirely
+new framework for the world’s political and economic system. But make no
+mistake, whether spurred by revolution or tipped into collapse under its
+own weight, the West will eventually fall. Malcolm was right when he
+warned that it will be ‘the ballot or the bullet, liberty or death, freedom for
+everybody or freedom for nobody’.40
+
+Preface
+This book is not for everyone. I have a specific audience in mind—people
+who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do
+not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color
+as a result of mass incarceration. In other words, I am writing this book for
+people like me—the person I was ten years ago. I am also writing it for
+another audience—those who have been struggling to persuade their
+friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers, co-workers, or political
+representatives that something is eerily familiar about the way our criminal
+justice system operates, something that looks and feels a lot like an era we
+supposedly left behind, but have lacked the facts and data to back up their
+claims. It is my hope and prayer that this book empowers you and allows
+you to speak your truth with greater conviction, credibility, and courage.
+Last, but definitely not least, I am writing this book for all those trapped
+within America’s latest caste system. You may be locked up or locked out
+of mainstream society, but you are not forgotten.
+
+Introduction
+Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather,
+and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in
+our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several
+generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were
+denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to
+vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life.
+Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His greatgrandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to
+vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His
+father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today,
+Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United
+States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.1
+Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more
+things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new
+tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the
+Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed
+essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later,
+America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and
+rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and
+discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the
+outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of
+black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as
+they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject
+to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public
+benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents once were.
+What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the
+basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In
+the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race,
+explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social
+contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice
+system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the
+
+practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to
+discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to
+discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the
+old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing
+discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity,
+denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury
+service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights,
+and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height
+of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely
+redesigned it.
+I reached the conclusions presented in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago, I
+would have argued strenuously against the central claim made here—
+namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the
+United States. Indeed, if Barack Obama had been elected president back
+then, I would have argued that his election marked the nation’s triumph
+over racial caste—the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. My elation would
+have been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised
+land of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely
+similar to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast.
+Today my elation over Obama’s election is tempered by a far more
+sobering awareness. As an African American woman, with three young
+children who will never know a world in which a black man could not be
+president of the United States, I was beyond thrilled on election night. Yet
+when I walked out of the election night party, full of hope and enthusiasm, I
+was immediately reminded of the harsh realities of the New Jim Crow. A
+black man was on his knees in the gutter, hands cuffed behind his back, as
+several police officers stood around him talking, joking, and ignoring his
+human existence. People poured out of the building; many stared for a
+moment at the black man cowering in the street, and then averted their gaze.
+What did the election of Barack Obama mean for him?
+Like many civil rights lawyers, I was inspired to attend law school by the
+civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. Even in the face of growing
+social and political opposition to remedial policies such as affirmative
+action, I clung to the notion that the evils of Jim Crow are behind us and
+that, while we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of an egalitarian,
+
+multiracial democracy, we have made real progress and are now struggling
+to hold on to the gains of the past. I thought my job as a civil rights lawyer
+was to join with the allies of racial progress to resist attacks on affirmative
+action and to eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow segregation, including our
+still separate and unequal system of education. I understood the problems
+plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with
+crime and rising incarceration rates, to be a function of poverty and lack of
+access to quality education—the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim
+Crow. Never did I seriously consider the possibility that a new racial caste
+system was operating in this country. The new system had been developed
+and implemented swiftly, and it was largely invisible, even to people, like
+me, who spent most of their waking hours fighting for justice.
+I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system more than a
+decade ago, when a bright orange poster caught my eye. I was rushing to
+catch the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed
+in large bold print: THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW. I paused
+for a moment and skimmed the text of the flyer. Some radical group was
+holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes
+law in California, and the expansion of America’s prison system. The
+meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it
+had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed, and muttered to
+myself something like, “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many
+ways, but it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People
+will just think you’re crazy.” I then crossed the street and hopped on the
+bus. I was headed to my new job, director of the Racial Justice Project of
+the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California.
+When I began my work at the ACLU, I assumed that the criminal justice
+system had problems of racial bias, much in the same way that all major
+institutions in our society are plagued with problems associated with
+conscious and unconscious bias. As a lawyer who had litigated numerous
+class-action employment-discrimination cases, I understood well the many
+ways in which racial stereotyping can permeate subjective decision-making
+processes at all levels of an organization, with devastating consequences. I
+was familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in
+which racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence
+of differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe,
+
+innate ability. While at the ACLU, I shifted my focus from employment
+discrimination to criminal justice reform and dedicated myself to the task of
+working with others to identify and eliminate racial bias whenever and
+wherever it reared its ugly head.
+By the time I left the ACLU, I had come to suspect that I was wrong
+about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution infected
+with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who
+posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the
+smattering of lawyers and advocates around the country who were
+beginning to connect the dots between our current system of mass
+incarceration and earlier forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to
+see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a
+stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social
+control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.
+In my experience, people who have been incarcerated rarely have
+difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control.
+Once they are released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded
+from juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated
+existence. Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of
+which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the
+margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream
+economy. They are legally denied the ability to obtain employment,
+housing, and public benefits—much as African Americans were once
+forced into a segregated, second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era.
+Those of us who have viewed that world from a comfortable distance—
+yet sympathize with the plight of the so-called underclass—tend to interpret
+the experience of those caught up in the criminal justice system primarily
+through the lens of popularized social science, attributing the staggering
+increase in incarceration rates in communities of color to the predictable,
+though unfortunate, consequences of poverty, racial segregation, unequal
+educational opportunities, and the presumed realities of the drug market,
+including the mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown.
+Occasionally, in the course of my work, someone would make a remark
+suggesting that perhaps the War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy to put
+blacks back in their place. This type of remark was invariably accompanied
+by nervous laughter, intended to convey the impression that although the
+
+idea had crossed their minds, it was not an idea a reasonable person would
+take seriously.
+Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the
+crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. This view holds
+that the racial disparities in drug convictions and sentences, as well as the
+rapid explosion of the prison population, reflect nothing more than the
+government’s zealous—but benign—efforts to address rampant drug crime
+in poor, minority neighborhoods. This view, while understandable, given
+the sensational media coverage of crack in the 1980s and 1990s, is simply
+wrong.
+While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a
+dramatic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing
+policies that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates),
+there is no truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in
+response to crack cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced
+the current drug war in 1982, before crack became an issue in the media or
+a crisis in poor black neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was
+declared, crack began to spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of
+Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country.2 The Reagan
+administration hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in
+1985 as part of a strategic effort to build public and legislative support for
+the war.3 The media campaign was an extraordinary success. Almost
+overnight, the media was saturated with images of black “crack whores,”
+“crack dealers,” and “crack babies”—images that seemed to confirm the
+worst negative racial stereotypes about impoverished inner-city residents.
+The media bonanza surrounding the “new demon drug” helped to catapult
+the War on Drugs from an ambitious federal policy to an actual war.
+The timing of the crack crisis helped to fuel conspiracy theories and
+general speculation in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was
+part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the
+United States. From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and
+other drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA.
+Eventually, even the Urban League came to take the claims of genocide
+seriously. In its 1990 report “The State of Black America,” it stated: “There
+is at least one concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive
+
+and insidious nature of the drug problem for the African American
+community. Though difficult to accept, that is the concept of genocide.”4
+While the conspiracy theories were initially dismissed as far-fetched, if not
+downright loony, the word on the street turned out to be right, at least to a
+point. The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in
+Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that
+were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in
+the form of crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the
+War on Drugs, it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug
+networks that were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.5
+It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence been
+revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruction of
+the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into the
+United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be forgiven for
+their bold accusation of genocide, in light of the devastation wrought by
+crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that an illegal drug
+crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not before—a drug
+war had been declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a time when
+illegal drug use was on the decline.6 During this same time period, however,
+a war was declared, causing arrests and convictions for drug offenses to
+skyrocket, especially among people of color.
+The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years,
+the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2
+million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.7
+The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world,
+dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those
+in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93
+people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United
+States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.8
+The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature.
+No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic
+minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black
+population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington,
+D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black
+men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve
+
+time in prison.9 Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black
+communities across America.
+These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime.
+Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at
+remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant differences in the surveys
+to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth,
+are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.11 That is not
+what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and
+jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some
+states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates
+twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.12 And in major cities
+wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African
+American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized
+discrimination for the rest of their lives.13 These young men are part of a
+growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream
+society.
+It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when
+a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of
+correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists
+have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a
+tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often
+unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking
+About Crime: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and
+these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates.”14 This fact, he
+points out, can be seen most clearly by putting crime and punishment in
+comparative perspective. Although crime rates in the United States have not
+been markedly higher than those of other Western countries, the rate of
+incarceration has soared in the United States while it has remained stable or
+declined in other countries. Between 1960 and 1990, for example, official
+crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to
+identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by
+60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period.15 Despite similar
+crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels of
+punishment.
+
+Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below the
+international norm. Nevertheless, the United States now boasts an
+incarceration rate that is six to ten times greater than that of other
+industrialized nations16—a development directly traceable to the drug war.
+The only country in the world that even comes close to the American rate of
+incarceration is Russia, and no other country in the world incarcerates such
+an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.
+The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to
+actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of
+social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the
+system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans,
+the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race. This is an
+astonishing development, especially given that as recently as the mid1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the
+prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime
+significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful
+economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes
+regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more
+likely to commit crimes again in the future. The growing consensus among
+experts was perhaps best reflected by the National Advisory Commission
+on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, which issued a recommendation
+in 1973 that “no new institutions for adults should be built and existing
+institutions for juveniles should be closed.”17 This recommendation was
+based on their finding that “the prison, the reformatory and the jail have
+achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence
+that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.”18
+These days, activists who advocate “a world without prisons” are often
+dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society
+would be much better off without prisons—and that the end of prisons was
+more or less inevitable—not only dominated mainstream academic
+discourse in the field of criminology but also inspired a national campaign
+by reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction. Marc Mauer,
+the executive director of the Sentencing Project, notes that what is most
+remarkable about the moratorium campaign in retrospect is the context of
+imprisonment at the time. In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being
+
+held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million
+people today. The rate of incarceration in 1972 was at a level so low that it
+no longer seems in the realm of possibility, but for moratorium supporters,
+that magnitude of imprisonment was egregiously high. “Supporters of the
+moratorium effort can be forgiven for being so naïve,” Mauer suggests,
+“since the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented
+in human history.”19 No one imagined that the prison population would
+more than quintuple in their lifetime. It seemed far more likely that prisons
+would fade away.
+Far from fading away, it appears that prisons are here to stay. And despite
+the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American
+community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three young
+African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice
+system—in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass
+incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed
+to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).
+The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other
+issues, such as affirmative action. During the past twenty years, virtually
+every progressive, national civil rights organization in the country has
+mobilized and rallied in defense of affirmative action. The struggle to
+preserve affirmative action in higher education, and thus maintain diversity
+in the nation’s most elite colleges and universities, has consumed much of
+the attention and resources of the civil rights community and dominated
+racial justice discourse in the mainstream media, leading the general public
+to believe that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race
+relations—even as our prisons fill with black and brown men.
+My own experience reflects this dynamic. When I first joined the ACLU,
+no one imagined that the Racial Justice Project would focus its attention on
+criminal justice reform. The ACLU was engaged in important criminal
+justice reform work, but no one suspected that work would eventually
+become central to the agenda of the Racial Justice Project. The assumption
+was that the project would concentrate its efforts on defending affirmative
+action. Shortly after leaving the ACLU, I joined the board of directors of
+the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
+
+Although the organization included racial justice among its core priorities,
+reform of the criminal justice system was not (and still is not) a major part
+of its racial justice work. The Lawyers’ Committee is not alone.
+In January 2008, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—an
+organization composed of the leadership of more than 180 civil rights
+organizations—sent a letter to its allies and supporters informing them of a
+major initiative to document the voting record of members of Congress.
+The letter explained that its forthcoming report would show “how each
+representative and senator cast his or her vote on some of the most
+important civil rights issues of 2007, including voting rights, affirmative
+action, immigration, nominations, education, hate crimes, employment,
+health, housing, and poverty.” Criminal justice issues did not make the list.
+That same broad-based coalition organized a major conference in October
+2007, entitled Why We Can’t Wait: Reversing the Retreat on Civil Rights,
+which included panels discussing school integration, employment
+discrimination, housing and lending discrimination, economic justice,
+environmental justice, disability rights, age discrimination, and immigrants’
+rights. Not a single panel was devoted to criminal justice reform.
+The elected leaders of the African American community have a much
+broader mandate than civil rights groups, but they, too, frequently overlook
+criminal justice. In January 2009, for example, the Congressional Black
+Caucus sent a letter to hundreds of community and organization leaders
+who have worked with the caucus over the years, soliciting general
+information about them and requesting that they identify their priorities.
+More than thirty-five topics were listed as areas of potential special interest,
+including taxes, defense, immigration, agriculture, housing, banking, higher
+education, multimedia, transportation and infrastructure, women, seniors,
+nutrition, faith initiatives, civil rights, census, economic security, and
+emerging leaders. No mention was made of criminal justice. “Re-entry” was
+listed, but a community leader who was interested in criminal justice reform
+had to check the box labeled “other.”
+This is not to say that important criminal justice reform work has not
+been done. Civil rights advocates have organized vigorous challenges to
+specific aspects of the new caste system. One notable example is the
+successful challenge led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to a racist
+drug sting operation in Tulia, Texas. The 1999 drug bust incarcerated
+
+almost 15 percent of the black population of the town, based on the
+uncorroborated false testimony of a single informant hired by the sheriff of
+Tulia. More recently, civil rights groups around the country have helped to
+launch legal attacks and vibrant grassroots campaigns against felon
+disenfranchisement laws and have strenuously opposed discriminatory
+crack sentencing laws and guidelines, as well as “zero tolerance” policies
+that effectively funnel youth of color from schools to jails. The national
+ACLU recently developed a racial justice program that includes criminal
+justice issues among its core priorities and has created a promising Drug
+Law Reform Project. And thanks to the aggressive advocacy of the ACLU,
+NAACP, and other civil rights organizations around the country, racial
+profiling is widely condemned, even by members of law enforcement who
+once openly embraced the practice.
+Still, despite these significant developments, there seems to be a lack of
+appreciation for the enormity of the crisis at hand. There is no broad-based
+movement brewing to end mass incarceration and no advocacy effort that
+approaches in scale the fight to preserve affirmative action. There also
+remains a persistent tendency in the civil rights community to treat the
+criminal justice system as just another institution infected with lingering
+racial bias. The NAACP’s Web site offers one example. As recently as May
+2008, one could find a brief introduction to the organization’s criminal
+justice work in the section entitled Legal Department. The introduction
+explained that “despite the civil rights victories of our past, racial prejudice
+still pervades the criminal justice system.” Visitors to the Web site were
+urged to join the NAACP in order to “protect the hard-earned civil rights
+gains of the past three decades.” No one visiting the Web site would learn
+that the mass incarceration of African Americans had already eviscerated
+many of the hard-earned gains it urged its members to protect.
+Imagine if civil rights organizations and African American leaders in the
+1940s had not placed Jim Crow segregation at the forefront of their racial
+justice agenda. It would have seemed absurd, given that racial segregation
+was the primary vehicle of racialized social control in the United States
+during that period. This book argues that mass incarceration is,
+metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social
+justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste
+system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil
+
+rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash
+against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes
+the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over
+race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The
+colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the
+widespread belief that race no longer matters—has blinded us to the
+realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste
+system.
+Clearly, much has changed in my thinking about the criminal justice system
+since I passed that bright orange poster stapled to a telephone pole ten years
+ago. For me, the new caste system is now as obvious as my own face in the
+mirror. Like an optical illusion—one in which the embedded image is
+impossible to see until its outline is identified—the new caste system lurks
+invisibly within the maze of rationalizations we have developed for
+persistent racial inequality. It is possible—quite easy, in fact—never to see
+the embedded reality. Only after years of working on criminal justice
+reform did my own focus finally shift, and then the rigid caste system
+slowly came into view. Eventually it became obvious. Now it seems odd
+that I could not see it before.
+Knowing as I do the difficulty of seeing what most everyone insists does
+not exist, I anticipate that this book will be met with skepticism or
+something worse. For some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a
+“racial caste system” may seem like a gross exaggeration, if not hyperbole.
+Yes, we may have “classes” in the United States—vaguely defined upper,
+middle, and lower classes—and we may even have an “underclass” (a
+group so estranged from mainstream society that it is no longer in reach of
+the mythical ladder of opportunity), but we do not, many will insist, have
+anything in this country that resembles a “caste.”
+The aim of this book is not to venture into the long-running, vigorous
+debate in the scholarly literature regarding what does and does not
+constitute a caste system. I use the term racial caste in this book the way it
+is used in common parlance to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into
+an inferior position by law and custom. Jim Crow and slavery were caste
+systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration.
+
+It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new
+caste system, to think of the criminal justice system—the entire collection
+of institutions and practices that comprise it—not as an independent system
+but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization
+and permanent marginalization. This larger system, referred to here as mass
+incarceration, is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in
+actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls—walls that are
+invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow
+laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class
+citizenship. The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal
+justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and
+customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once
+released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized
+discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of
+America’s new undercaste.
+The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some.
+Public discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We
+avoid talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our
+racial history. We also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking
+about class. Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a
+tendency to imagine that one’s class reflects upon one’s character. What is
+key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief—despite all
+evidence to the contrary—that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive,
+can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility
+may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption
+that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s
+character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up
+reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.
+What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the
+plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free
+to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor
+schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so.
+And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed
+to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of
+control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American
+community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system
+
+operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like
+a caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this
+perspective, the so-called underclass is better understood as an undercaste
+—a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and
+custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized
+social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial
+hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and
+slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws,
+policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the
+subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.
+This argument may be particularly hard to swallow given the election of
+Barack Obama. Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first
+black president could possibly have a racial caste system. It’s a fair
+question. But as discussed in chapter 6, there is no inconsistency
+whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in
+the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of
+colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black
+exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. Others may wonder
+how a racial caste system could exist when most Americans—of all colors
+—oppose race discrimination and endorse colorblindness. Yet as we shall
+see in the pages that follow, racial caste systems do not require racial
+hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as
+Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.
+The recent decisions by some state legislatures, most notably New
+York’s, to repeal or reduce mandatory drug sentencing laws have led some
+to believe that the system of racial control described in this book is already
+fading away. Such a conclusion, I believe, is a serious mistake. Many of the
+states that have reconsidered their harsh sentencing schemes have done so
+not out of concern for the lives and families that have been destroyed by
+these laws or the racial dimensions of the drug war, but out of concern for
+bursting state budgets in a time of economic recession. In other words, the
+racial ideology that gave rise to these laws remains largely undisturbed.
+Changing economic conditions or rising crime rates could easily result in a
+reversal of fortunes for those who commit drug crimes, particularly if the
+drug criminals are perceived to be black and brown. Equally important to
+understand is this: Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not
+
+disturb the basic architecture of the New Jim Crow. So long as large
+numbers of African Americans continue to be arrested and labeled drug
+criminals, they will continue to be relegated to a permanent second-class
+status upon their release, no matter how much (or how little) time they
+spend behind bars. The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison
+label, not prison time.
+Skepticism about the claims made here is warranted. There are important
+differences, to be sure, among mass incarceration, Jim Crow, and slavery—
+the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to
+date. Failure to acknowledge the relevant differences, as well as their
+implications, would be a disservice to racial justice discourse. Many of the
+differences are not as dramatic as they initially appear, however; others
+serve to illustrate the ways in which systems of racialized social control
+have managed to morph, evolve, and adapt to changes in the political,
+social, and legal context over time. Ultimately, I believe that the similarities
+between these systems of control overwhelm the differences and that mass
+incarceration, like its predecessors, has been largely immunized from legal
+challenge. If this claim is substantially correct, the implications for racial
+justice advocacy are profound.
+With the benefit of hindsight, surely we can see that piecemeal policy
+reform or litigation alone would have been a futile approach to dismantling
+Jim Crow segregation. While those strategies certainly had their place, the
+Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the concomitant cultural shift would never
+have occurred without the cultivation of a critical political consciousness in
+the African American community and the widespread, strategic activism
+that flowed from it. Likewise, the notion that the New Jim Crow can ever be
+dismantled through traditional litigation and policy-reform strategies that
+are wholly disconnected from a major social movement seems
+fundamentally misguided.
+Such a movement is impossible, though, if those most committed to
+abolishing racial hierarchy continue to talk and behave as if a statesponsored racial caste system no longer exists. If we continue to tell
+ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to
+ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too
+daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our
+
+energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us
+harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.
+A new social consensus must be forged about race and the role of race in
+defining the basic structure of our society, if we hope ever to abolish the
+New Jim Crow. This new consensus must begin with dialogue, a
+conversation that fosters a critical consciousness, a key prerequisite to
+effective social action. This book is an attempt to ensure that the
+conversation does not end with nervous laughter.
+It is not possible to write a relatively short book that explores all aspects of
+the phenomenon of mass incarceration and its implications for racial justice.
+No attempt has been made to do so here. This book paints with a broad
+brush, and as a result, many important issues have not received the attention
+they deserve. For example, relatively little is said here about the unique
+experience of women, Latinos, and immigrants in the criminal justice
+system, though these groups are particularly vulnerable to the worst abuses
+and suffer in ways that are important and distinct. This book focuses on the
+experience of African American men in the new caste system. I hope other
+scholars and advocates will pick up where the book leaves off and develop
+the critique more fully or apply the themes sketched here to other groups
+and other contexts.
+What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is
+to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal
+justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United
+States. The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black
+community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about
+racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the
+criminal justice system in our society. The fact that more than half of the
+young black men in any large American city are currently under the control
+of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not—as
+many argue—just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather
+evidence of a new racial caste system at work.
+Chapter 1 begins our journey. It briefly reviews the history of racialized
+social control in the United States, answering the basic question: How did
+we get here? The chapter describes the control of African Americans
+through racial caste systems, such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to
+
+die but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of
+the time. As we shall see, there is a certain pattern to the births and deaths
+of racial caste in America. Time and again, the most ardent proponents of
+racial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering
+a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been
+achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class
+whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they
+never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.
+This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste
+system in the United States: mass incarceration.
+The structure of mass incarceration is described in some detail in chapter
+2, with a focus on the War on Drugs. Few legal rules meaningfully
+constrain the police in the drug war, and enormous financial incentives have
+been granted to law enforcement to engage in mass drug arrests through
+military-style tactics. Once swept into the system, one’s chances of ever
+being truly free are slim, often to the vanishing point. Defendants are
+typically denied meaningful legal representation, pressured by the threat of
+lengthy sentences into a plea bargain, and then placed under formal control
+—in prison or jail, on probation or parole. Upon release, ex-offenders are
+discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, and most will
+eventually return to prison. They are members of America’s new
+undercaste.
+Chapter 3 turns our attention to the role of race in the U.S. criminal
+justice system. It describes the method to the madness—how a formally
+race-neutral criminal justice system can manage to round up, arrest, and
+imprison an extraordinary number of black and brown men, when people of
+color are actually no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes and many other
+offenses than whites. This chapter debunks the notion that rates of black
+imprisonment can be explained by crime rates and identifies the huge racial
+disparities at every stage of the criminal justice process—from the initial
+stop, search, and arrest to the plea bargaining and sentencing phases. In
+short, the chapter explains how the legal rules that structure the system
+guarantee discriminatory results. These legal rules ensure that the
+undercaste is overwhelmingly black and brown.
+Chapter 4 considers how the caste system operates once people are
+released from prison. In many respects, release from prison does not
+
+represent the beginning of freedom but instead a cruel new phase of
+stigmatization and control. Myriad laws, rules, and regulations discriminate
+against ex-offenders and effectively prevent their meaningful re-integration
+into the mainstream economy and society. I argue that the shame and stigma
+of the “prison label” is, in many respects, more damaging to the African
+American community than the shame and stigma associated with Jim Crow.
+The criminalization and demonization of black men has turned the black
+community against itself, unraveling community and family relationships,
+decimating networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and
+self-hate experienced by the current pariah caste.
+The many parallels between mass incarceration and Jim Crow are
+explored in chapter 5. The most obvious parallel is legalized discrimination.
+Like Jim Crow, mass incarceration marginalizes large segments of the
+African American community, segregates them physically (in prisons, jails,
+and ghettos), and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting,
+employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. The
+federal court system has effectively immunized the current system from
+challenges on the grounds of racial bias, much as earlier systems of control
+were protected and endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The parallels do
+not end there, however. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, helps to define
+the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, the stigma of
+criminality functions in much the same way that the stigma of race once
+did. It justifies a legal, social, and economic boundary between “us” and
+“them.” Chapter 5 also explores some of the differences among slavery, Jim
+Crow, and mass incarceration, most significantly the fact that mass
+incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—
+unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy—while earlier
+systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor. In
+addition, the chapter discusses the experience of white people in this new
+caste system; although they have not been the primary targets of the drug
+war, they have been harmed by it—a powerful illustration of how a racial
+state can harm people of all colors. Finally, this chapter responds to skeptics
+who claim that mass incarceration cannot be understood as a racial caste
+system because many “get tough on crime” policies are supported by
+African Americans. Many of these claims, I note, are no more persuasive
+today than arguments made a hundred years ago by blacks and whites who
+
+claimed that racial segregation simply reflected “reality,” not racial animus,
+and that African Americans would be better off not challenging the Jim
+Crow system but should focus instead on improving themselves within it.
+Throughout our history, there have been African Americans who, for a
+variety of reasons, have defended or been complicit with the prevailing
+system of control.
+Chapter 6 reflects on what acknowledging the presence of the New Jim
+Crow means for the future of civil rights advocacy. I argue that nothing
+short of a major social movement can successfully dismantle the new caste
+system. Meaningful reforms can be achieved without such a movement, but
+unless the public consensus supporting the current system is completely
+overturned, the basic structure of the new caste system will remain intact.
+Building a broad-based social movement, however, is not enough. It is not
+nearly enough to persuade mainstream voters that we have relied too
+heavily on incarceration or that drug abuse is a public health problem, not a
+crime. If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to
+confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our
+society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and
+concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—
+within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted
+against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not
+mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of
+racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as
+the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty
+years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice advocates today than
+ensuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last.
+
+1
+The Rebirth of Caste
+
+[T]he slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved
+back again toward slavery.
+—W.E.B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
+
+For more than one hundred years, scholars have written about the illusory
+nature of the Emancipation Proclamation. President Abraham Lincoln
+issued a declaration purporting to free slaves held in Southern Confederate
+states, but not a single black slave was actually free to walk away from a
+master in those states as a result. A civil war had to be won first, hundreds
+of thousands of lives lost, and then—only then—were slaves across the
+South set free. Even that freedom proved illusory, though. As W.E.B. Du
+Bois eloquently reminds us, former slaves had “a brief moment in the sun”
+before they were returned to a status akin to slavery. Constitutional
+amendments guaranteeing African Americans “equal protection of the
+laws” and the right to vote proved as impotent as the Emancipation
+Proclamation once a white backlash against Reconstruction gained steam.
+Black people found themselves yet again powerless and relegated to convict
+leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery. Sunshine gave
+way to darkness, and the Jim Crow system of segregation emerged—a
+system that put black people nearly back where they began, in a subordinate
+racial caste.
+Few find it surprising that Jim Crow arose following the collapse of
+slavery. The development is described in history books as regrettable but
+predictable, given the virulent racism that gripped the South and the
+political dynamics of the time. What is remarkable is that hardly anyone
+
+seems to imagine that similar political dynamics may have produced
+another caste system in the years following the collapse of Jim Crow—one
+that exists today. The story that is told during Black History Month is one of
+triumph; the system of racial caste is officially dead and buried. Suggestions
+to the contrary are frequently met with shocked disbelief. The standard
+reply is: “How can you say that a racial caste system exists today? Just look
+at Barack Obama! Just look at Oprah Winfrey!”
+The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in
+recent years does not mean that something akin to a racial caste system no
+longer exists. No caste system in the United States has ever governed all
+black people; there have always been “free blacks” and black success
+stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow. The superlative nature of
+individual black achievement today in formerly white domains is a good
+indicator that Jim Crow is dead, but it does not necessarily mean the end of
+racial caste. If history is any guide, it may have simply taken a different
+form.
+Any candid observer of American racial history must acknowledge that
+racism is highly adaptable. The rules and reasons the political system
+employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy,
+evolve and change as they are challenged. The valiant efforts to abolish
+slavery and Jim Crow and to achieve greater racial equality have brought
+about significant changes in the legal framework of American society—new
+“rules of the game,” so to speak. These new rules have been justified by
+new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus, while producing
+many of the same results. This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel
+has dubbed “preservation through transformation,” is the process through
+which white privilege is maintained, though the rules and rhetoric change.1
+This process, though difficult to recognize at any given moment, is easier
+to see in retrospect. Since the nation’s founding, African Americans
+repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim
+Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the
+needs and constraints of the time. As described in the pages that follow,
+there is a certain pattern to this cycle. Following the collapse of each system
+of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those
+who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to
+
+achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is
+during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new
+form of racialized social control begins to take hold. The adoption of the
+new system of control is never inevitable, but to date it has never been
+avoided. The most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have consistently
+succeeded in implementing new racial caste systems by triggering a
+collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been
+achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class
+whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they
+never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.
+The emergence of each new system of control may seem sudden, but
+history shows that the seeds are planted long before each new institution
+begins to grow. For example, although it is common to think of the Jim
+Crow regime following immediately on the heels of Reconstruction, the
+truth is more complicated. And while it is generally believed that the
+backlash against the Civil Rights Movement is defined primarily by the
+rollback of affirmative action and the undermining of federal civil rights
+legislation by a hostile judiciary, the seeds of the new system of control—
+mass incarceration—were planted during the Civil Rights Movement itself,
+when it became clear that the old caste system was crumbling and a new
+one would have to take its place.
+With each reincarnation of racial caste, the new system, as sociologist
+Loïc Wacquant puts it, “is less total, less capable of encompassing and
+controlling the entire race.”2 However, any notion that this evolution
+reflects some kind of linear progress would be misguided, for it is not at all
+obvious that it would be better to be incarcerated for life for a minor drug
+offense than to live with one’s family, earning an honest living under the
+Jim Crow regime—notwithstanding the ever-present threat of the Klan.
+Moreover, as the systems of control have evolved, they have become
+perfected, arguably more resilient to challenge, and thus capable of
+enduring for generations to come. The story of the political and economic
+underpinnings of the nation’s founding sheds some light on these recurring
+themes in our history and the reasons new racial caste systems continue to
+be born.
+
+The Birth of Slavery
+
+Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the
+white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial
+population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black
+bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and
+were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and
+legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people
+worked together and relaxed together.3
+—Lerone Bennett Jr.
+
+The concept of race is a relatively recent development. Only in the past
+few centuries, owing largely to European imperialism, have the world’s
+people been classified along racial lines.4 Here, in America, the idea of race
+emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery—as well as the
+extermination of American Indians—with the ideals of freedom preached
+by whites in the new colonies.
+In the early colonial period, when settlements remained relatively small,
+indentured servitude was the dominant means of securing cheap labor.
+Under this system, whites and blacks struggled to survive against a
+common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as “the big
+planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and
+white bondsmen.” 5 Initially, blacks brought to this country were not all
+enslaved; many were treated as indentured servants. As plantation farming
+expanded, particularly tobacco and cotton farming, demand increased
+greatly for both labor and land.
+The demand for land was met by invading and conquering larger and
+larger swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment
+
+to white European “progress,” and during this period, the images of
+American Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became
+increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have
+observed, eliminating “savages” is less of a moral problem than eliminating
+human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a
+lesser race—uncivilized savages—thus providing a justification for the
+extermination of the native peoples.6
+The growing demand for labor on plantations was met through slavery.
+American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves, largely because
+native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of raids by
+Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free
+labor. European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery,
+not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and
+enslavement would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to
+the new colonies. Plantation owners thus viewed Africans, who were
+relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systematic enslavement of
+Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all
+deliberate speed—quickened by events such as Bacon’s Rebellion.
+Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia,
+who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a
+revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves clearly
+occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and suffered the most
+under the plantation system, the condition of indentured whites was barely
+better, and the majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As
+explained by historian Edmund Morgan, in colonies like Virginia, the
+planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly superior position to
+workers of all colors.7 Southern colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to
+extend the terms of servitude, and the planter class accumulated
+uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering
+resentment against the planter class created conditions that were ripe for
+revolt.
+Varying accounts of Bacon’s rebellion abound, but the basic facts are
+these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in
+order to acquire more property for himself and others and nullify the threat
+of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia
+
+support for his scheme, Bacon retaliated, leading an attack on the elite, their
+homes, and their property. He openly condemned the rich for their
+oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond
+laborers, as well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. The
+attempted revolution was ended by force and false promises of amnesty. A
+number of the people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The
+events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply
+fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slaves. Word of
+Bacon’s rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a
+similar type followed.
+In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the
+planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned
+their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of
+more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves from the
+West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language
+and culture, many more slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These
+slaves would be far easier to control and far less likely to form alliances
+with poor whites.
+Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their
+interests, the planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step that
+would later come to be known as a “racial bribe.” Deliberately and
+strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in
+an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers
+were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were
+allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers
+were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with
+slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future
+alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a
+direct, personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery.
+Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not
+slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to
+the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand their racially
+privileged position.8
+By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly
+transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded
+
+status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians,
+were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence
+and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of
+white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites
+endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and
+justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born.
+It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the
+basic structure of American society. The structure and content of the
+original Constitution was based largely on the effort to preserve a racial
+caste system—slavery—while at the same time affording political and
+economic rights to whites, especially propertied whites. The southern
+slaveholding colonies would agree to form a union only on the condition
+that the federal government would not be able to interfere with the right to
+own slaves. Northern white elites were sympathetic to the demand for their
+“property rights” to be respected, as they, too, wanted the Constitution to
+protect their property interests. As James Madison put it, the nation ought to
+be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”9
+Consequently, the Constitution was designed so the federal government
+would be weak, not only in its relationship to private property, but also in
+relationship to the rights of states to conduct their own affairs. The language
+of the Constitution itself was deliberately colorblind (the words slave or
+Negro were never used), but the document was built upon a compromise
+regarding the prevailing racial caste system. Federalism—the division of
+power between the states and the federal government—was the device
+employed to protect the institution of slavery and the political power of
+slaveholding states. Even the method for determining proportional
+representation in Congress and identifying the winner of a presidential
+election (the electoral college) were specifically developed with the interest
+of slaveholders in mind. Under the terms of our country’s founding
+document, slaves were defined as three-fifths of a man, not a real, whole
+human being. Upon this racist fiction rests the entire structure of American
+democracy.
+
+The Death of Slavery
+
+The history of racial caste in the United States would end with the Civil
+War if the idea of race and racial difference had died when the institution of
+slavery was put to rest. But during the four centuries in which slavery
+flourished, the idea of race flourished as well. Indeed, the notion of racial
+difference—specifically the notion of white supremacy—proved far more
+durable than the institution that gave birth to it.
+White supremacy, over time, became a religion of sorts. Faith in the idea
+that people of the African race were bestial, that whites were inherently
+superior, and that slavery was, in fact, for blacks’ own good, served to
+alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery
+and the democratic ideals espoused by whites in the so-called New World.
+There was no contradiction in the bold claim made by Thomas Jefferson in
+the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” if Africans
+were not really people. Racism operated as a deeply held belief system
+based on “truths” beyond question or doubt. This deep faith in white
+supremacy not only justified an economic and political system in which
+plantation owners acquired land and great wealth through the brutality,
+torture, and coercion of other human beings; it also endured, like most
+articles of faith, long after the historical circumstances that gave rise to the
+religion passed away. In Wacquant’s words: “Racial division was a
+consequence, not a precondition of slavery, but once it was instituted it
+became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all
+its own.”10 After the death of slavery, the idea of race lived on.
+One of the most compelling accounts of the postemancipation period is
+The Strange Career of Jim Crow, written by C. Vann Woodward in 1955.11
+The book continues to be the focal point of study and debate by scholars
+and was once described by Martin Luther King Jr. as the “historical bible of
+the Civil Rights Movement.” As Woodward tells the story, the end of
+slavery created an extraordinary dilemma for Southern white society.
+
+Without the labor of former slaves, the region’s economy would surely
+collapse, and without the institution of slavery, there was no longer a formal
+mechanism for maintaining racial hierarchy and preventing “amalgamation”
+with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile. This state
+of affairs produced a temporary anarchy and a state of mind bordering on
+hysteria, particularly among the planter elite. But even among poor whites,
+the collapse of slavery was a bitter pill. In the antebellum South, the
+lowliest white person at least possessed his or her white skin—a badge of
+superiority over even the most skilled slave or prosperous free African
+American.
+While Southern whites—poor and rich alike—were utterly outraged by
+emancipation, there was no obvious solution to the dilemma they faced.
+Following the Civil War, the economic and political infrastructure of the
+South was in shambles. Plantation owners were suddenly destitute, and
+state governments, shackled by war debt, were penniless. Large amounts of
+real estate and other property had been destroyed in the war, industry was
+disorganized, and hundreds of thousands of men had been killed or maimed.
+With all of this went the demoralizing effect of an unsuccessful war and the
+extraordinary challenges associated with rebuilding new state and local
+governments. Add to all this the sudden presence of 4 million newly freed
+slaves, and the picture becomes even more complicated. Southern whites,
+Woodward explains, strongly believed that a new system of racial control
+was clearly required, but it was not immediately obvious what form it
+should take.
+Under slavery, the racial order was most effectively maintained by a large
+degree of contact between slave owners and slaves, thus maximizing
+opportunities for supervision and discipline, and minimizing the potential
+for active resistance or rebellion. Strict separation of the races would have
+threatened slaveholders’ immediate interests and was, in any event, wholly
+unnecessary as a means of creating social distance or establishing the
+inferior status of slaves.
+Following the Civil War, it was unclear what institutions, laws, or
+customs would be necessary to maintain white control now that slavery was
+gone. Nonetheless, as numerous historians have shown, the development of
+a new racial order became the consuming passion for most white
+Southerners. Rumors of a great insurrection terrified whites, and blacks
+
+increasingly came to be viewed as menacing and dangerous. In fact, the
+current stereotypes of black men as aggressive, unruly predators can be
+traced to this period, when whites feared that an angry mass of black men
+might rise up and attack them or rape their women.
+Equally worrisome was the state of the economy. Former slaves literally
+walked away from their plantations, causing panic and outrage among
+plantation owners. Large numbers of former slaves roamed the highways in
+the early years after the war. Some converged on towns and cities; others
+joined the federal militia. Most white people believed African Americans
+lacked the proper motivation to work, prompting the provisional Southern
+legislatures to adopt the notorious black codes. As expressed by one
+Alabama planter: “We have the power to pass stringent police laws to
+govern the Negroes—this is a blessing—for they must be controlled in
+some way or white people cannot live among them.”12 While some of these
+codes were intended to establish systems of peonage resembling slavery,
+others foreshadowed Jim Crow laws by prohibiting, among other things,
+interracial seating in the first-class sections of railroad cars and by
+segregating schools.
+Although the convict laws enacted during this period are rarely seen as
+part of the black codes, that is a mistake. As explained by historian William
+Cohen, “the main purpose of the codes was to control the freedmen, and the
+question of how to handle convicted black law breakers was very much at
+the center of the control issue.”13 Nine southern states adopted vagrancy
+laws—which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were
+applied selectively to blacks—and eight of those states enacted convict laws
+allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and
+private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay. One
+vagrancy act specifically provided that “all free negroes and mulattoes over
+the age of eighteen” must have written proof of a job at the beginning of
+every year. Those found with no lawful employment were deemed vagrants
+and convicted. Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the
+vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor.
+In W.E.B. Du Bois’s words: “The Codes spoke for themselves.... No openminded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing
+more nor less than slavery in daily toil.”14
+
+Ultimately, the black codes were overturned, and a slew of federal civil
+rights legislation protecting the newly freed slaves was passed during the
+relatively brief but extraordinary period of black advancement known as the
+Reconstruction Era. The impressive legislative achievements of this period
+include the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery; the Civil Rights Act
+of 1866, bestowing full citizenship upon African Americans; the Fourteenth
+Amendment, prohibiting states from denying citizens due process and
+“equal protection of the laws”; the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that the
+right to vote should not be denied on account of race; and the Ku Klux Klan
+Acts, which, among other things, declared interference with voting a federal
+offense and the violent infringement of civil rights a crime. The new
+legislation also provided for federal supervision of voting and authorized
+the president to send the army and suspend the writ of habeas corpus in
+districts declared to be in a state of insurrection against the federal
+government.
+In addition to federal civil rights legislation, the Reconstruction Era
+brought the expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency charged with
+the responsibility of providing food, clothing, fuel, and other forms of
+assistance to destitute former slaves. A public education system emerged in
+the South, which afforded many blacks (and poor whites) their first
+opportunity to learn to read and write.
+While the Reconstruction Era was fraught with corruption and arguably
+doomed by the lack of land reform, the sweeping economic and political
+developments in that period did appear, at least for a time, to have the
+potential to seriously undermine, if not completely eradicate, the racial
+caste system in the South. With the protection of federal troops, African
+Americans began to vote in large numbers and seize control, in some areas,
+of the local political apparatus. Literacy rates climbed, and educated blacks
+began to populate legislatures, open schools, and initiate successful
+businesses. In 1867, at the dawn of the Reconstruction Era, no black man
+held political office in the South, yet three years later, at least 15 percent of
+all Southern elected officials were black. This is particularly extraordinary
+in light of the fact that fifteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights
+Act of 1965—the high water mark of the Civil Rights Movement—fewer
+than 8 percent of all Southern elected officials were black.15
+
+At the same time, however, many of the new civil rights laws were
+proving largely symbolic.16 Notably absent from the Fifteenth Amendment,
+for example, was language prohibiting the states from imposing
+educational, residential, or other qualifications for voting, thus leaving the
+door open to the states to impose poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices
+to prevent blacks from voting. Other laws revealed themselves as more an
+assertion of principle than direct federal intervention into Southern affairs,
+because enforcement required African Americans to take their cases to
+federal courts, a costly and time-consuming procedure that was a practical
+impossibility for the vast majority of those who had claims. Most blacks
+were too poor to sue to enforce their civil rights, and no organization like
+the NAACP yet existed to spread the risks and costs of litigation. Moreover,
+the threat of violence often deterred blacks from pressing legitimate claims,
+making the “civil rights” of former slaves largely illusory—existing on
+paper but rarely to be found in real life.
+Meanwhile, the separation of the races had begun to emerge as a
+comprehensive pattern throughout the South, driven in large part by the
+rhetoric of the planter elite, who hoped to re-establish a system of control
+that would ensure a low-paid, submissive labor force. Racial segregation
+had actually begun years earlier in the North, as an effort to prevent racemixing and preserve racial hierarchy following the abolition of Northern
+slavery. It had never developed, however, into a comprehensive system—
+operating instead largely as a matter of custom, enforced with varying
+degrees of consistency. Even among those most hostile to Reconstruction,
+few would have predicted that racial segregation would soon evolve into a
+new racial caste system as stunningly comprehensive and repressive as the
+one that came to be known simply as Jim Crow.
+
+The Birth of Jim Crow
+
+The backlash against the gains of African Americans in the Reconstruction
+Era was swift and severe. As African Americans obtained political power
+and began the long march toward greater social and economic equality,
+whites reacted with panic and outrage. Southern conservatives vowed to
+reverse Reconstruction and sought the “abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau
+and all political instrumentalities designed to secure Negro supremacy.”17
+Their campaign to “redeem” the South was reinforced by a resurgent Ku
+Klux Klan, which fought a terrorist campaign against Reconstruction
+governments and local leaders, complete with bombings, lynchings, and
+mob violence.
+The terrorist campaign proved highly successful. “Redemption” resulted
+in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the effective
+abandonment of African Americans and all those who had fought for or
+supported an egalitarian racial order. The federal government no longer
+made any effort to enforce federal civil rights legislation, and funding for
+the Freedmen’s Bureau was slashed to such a degree that the agency
+became virtually defunct.
+Once again, vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as
+“mischief” and “insulting gestures” as crimes were enforced vigorously
+against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses
+opened up an enormous market for convict leasing, in which prisoners were
+contracted out as laborers to the highest private bidder. Douglas Blackmon,
+in Slavery by Another Name, describes how tens of thousands of African
+Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit
+with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure
+their release.18 With no means to pay off their “debts,” prisoners were sold
+as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms,
+plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. Death rates
+were shockingly high, for the private contractors had no interest in the
+
+health and well-being of their laborers, unlike the earlier slave-owners who
+needed their slaves, at a minimum, to be healthy enough to survive hard
+labor. Laborers were subject to almost continual lashing by long horse
+whips, and those who collapsed due to injuries or exhaustion were often left
+to die.
+Convicts had no meaningful legal rights at this time and no effective
+redress. They were understood, quite literally, to be slaves of the state. The
+Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but
+allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment
+for a crime. In a landmark decision by the Virginia Supreme Court, Ruffin v.
+Commonwealth, issued at the height of Southern Redemption, the court put
+to rest any notion that convicts were legally distinguishable from slaves:
+For a time, during his service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of
+penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not
+only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which
+the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave
+of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is
+administered like that of a dead man.19
+The state of Mississippi eventually moved from hiring convict labor to
+organizing its own convict labor camp, known as Parchman Farm. It was
+not alone. During the decade following Redemption, the convict population
+grew ten times faster than the general population: “Prisoners became
+younger and blacker, and the length of their sentences soared.”20 It was the
+nation’s first prison boom and, as they are today, the prisoners were
+disproportionately black. After a brief period of progress during
+Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves, once again, virtually
+defenseless. The criminal justice system was strategically employed to
+force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and
+control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to
+come. Even as convict leasing faded away, strategic forms of exploitation
+and repression emerged anew. As Blackmon notes: “The apparent demise . .
+. of leasing prisoners seemed a harbinger of a new day. But the harsher
+reality of the South was that the new post-Civil War neoslavery was
+evolving—not disappearing.”21
+
+Redemption marked a turning point in the quest by dominant whites for a
+new racial equilibrium, a racial order that would protect their economic,
+political, and social interests in a world without slavery. Yet a clear
+consensus among whites about what the new racial order should be was still
+lacking. The Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction were inclined to
+retain such segregation practices as had already emerged, but they displayed
+no apparent disposition to expand or universalize the system.
+Three alternative philosophies of race relations were put forward to
+compete for the region’s support, all of which rejected the doctrines of
+extreme racism espoused by some Redeemers: liberalism, conservatism,
+and radicalism. 22 The liberal philosophy of race relations emphasized the
+stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a government that celebrates
+freedom and equality yet denies both on account of race. This philosophy,
+born in the North, never gained much traction among Southern whites or
+blacks.
+The conservative philosophy, by contrast, attracted wide support and was
+implemented in various contexts over a considerable period of time.
+Conservatives blamed liberals for pushing blacks ahead of their proper
+station in life and placing blacks in positions they were unprepared to fill, a
+circumstance that had allegedly contributed to their downfall. They warned
+blacks that some Redeemers were not satisfied with having decimated
+Reconstruction, and were prepared to wage an aggressive war against
+blacks throughout the South. With some success, the conservatives reached
+out to African American voters, reminding them that they had something to
+lose as well as gain and that the liberals’ preoccupation with political and
+economic equality presented the danger of losing all that blacks had so far
+gained.
+The radical philosophy offered, for many African Americans, the most
+promise. It was predicated on a searing critique of large corporations,
+particularly railroads, and the wealthy elite in the North and South. The
+radicals of the late nineteenth century, who later formed the Populist Party,
+viewed the privileged classes as conspiring to keep poor whites and blacks
+locked into a subordinate political and economic position. For many
+African American voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the
+paternalism of liberals. Populists preached an “equalitarianism of want and
+
+poverty, the kinship of a common grievance, and a common oppressor.”23
+As described by Tom Watson, a prominent Populist leader, in a speech
+advocating a union between black and white farmers: “You are kept apart
+that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate
+each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of
+financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded
+that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary
+system which beggars both.”24
+In an effort to demonstrate their commitment to a genuinely multiracial,
+working-class movement against white elites, the Populists made strides
+toward racial integration, a symbol of their commitment to class-based
+unity. African Americans throughout the South responded with great hope
+and enthusiasm, eager to be true partners in a struggle for social justice.
+According to Woodward, “It is altogether probable that during the brief
+Populist upheaval in the nineties Negroes and native whites achieved a
+greater comity of mind and harmony of political purpose than ever before
+or since in the South.”25
+The challenges inherent in creating the alliance sought by the Populists
+were formidable, as race prejudice ran the highest among the very white
+populations to which the Populist appeal was specifically addressed—the
+depressed lower economic classes. Nevertheless, the Populist movement
+initially enjoyed remarkable success in the South, fueled by a wave of
+discontent aroused by the severe agrarian depression of the 1880s and
+1890s. The Populists took direct aim at the conservatives, who were known
+as comprising a party of privilege, and they achieved a stunning series of
+political victories throughout the region. Alarmed by the success of the
+Populists and the apparent potency of the alliance between poor and
+working-class whites and African Americans, the conservatives raised the
+cry of white supremacy and resorted to the tactics they had employed in
+their quest for Redemption, including fraud, intimidation, bribery, and
+terror.
+Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a
+wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory
+barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of
+superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain
+
+interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws
+were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted,
+“As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the
+black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed
+against them.”26 Indeed, in order to overcome the well-founded suspicions
+of poor and illiterate whites that they, as well as blacks, were in danger of
+losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement pursued an aggressive
+campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to black
+disenfranchisement.
+Ultimately, the Populists caved to the pressure and abandoned their
+former allies. “While the [Populist] movement was at the peak of zeal,”
+Woodward observed, “the two races had surprised each other and
+astonished their opponents by the harmony they achieved and the good will
+with which they co-operated.”27 But when it became clear that the
+conservatives would stop at nothing to decimate their alliance, the biracial
+partnership dissolved, and Populist leaders re-aligned themselves with
+conservatives. Even Tom Watson, who had been among the most forceful
+advocates for an interracial alliance of farmers, concluded that Populist
+principles could never be fully embraced by the South until blacks were
+eliminated from politics.
+The agricultural depression, taken together with a series of failed reforms
+and broken political promises, had pyramided to a climax of social tensions.
+Dominant whites concluded that it was in their political and economic
+interest to scapegoat blacks, and “permission to hate” came from sources
+that had formerly denied it, including Northern liberals eager to reconcile
+with the South, Southern conservatives who had once promised blacks
+protection from racial extremism, and Populists, who cast aside their darkskinned allies when the partnership fell under siege.28
+History seemed to repeat itself. Just as the white elite had successfully
+driven a wedge between poor whites and blacks following Bacon’s
+Rebellion by creating the institution of black slavery, another racial caste
+system was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by
+white elites to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people. By the turn of
+the twentieth century, every state in the South had laws on the books that
+disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them in virtually every
+
+sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to
+schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals,
+orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. Politicians
+competed with each other by proposing and passing ever more stringent,
+oppressive, and downright ridiculous legislation (such as laws specifically
+prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together). The public
+symbols and constant reminders of black subjugation were supported by
+whites across the political spectrum, though the plight of poor whites
+remained largely unchanged. For them, the racial bribe was primarily
+psychological.
+The new racial order, known as Jim Crow—a term apparently derived
+from a minstrel show character—was regarded as the “final settlement,” the
+“return to sanity,” and “the permanent system.”29 Of course, the earlier
+system of racialized social control—slavery—had also been regarded as
+final, sane, and permanent by its supporters. Like the earlier system, Jim
+Crow seemed “natural,” and it became difficult to remember that alternative
+paths were not only available at one time, but nearly embraced.
+
+The Death of Jim Crow
+
+Scholars have long debated the beginning and end of Reconstruction, as
+well as exactly when Jim Crow ended and the Civil Rights Movement or
+“Second Reconstruction” began. Reconstruction is most typically described
+as stretching from 1863 when the North freed the slaves to 1877, when it
+abandoned them and withdrew federal troops from the South. There is
+much less certainty regarding the beginning of the end of Jim Crow.
+The general public typically traces the death of Jim Crow to Brown v.
+Board of Education, although the institution was showing signs of
+weakness years before. By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North
+had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not
+entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors,
+including the increased political power of blacks due to migration to the
+North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP,
+particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws
+in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars,
+however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction
+between the country’s opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against
+European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the
+United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation’s
+credibility as leader of the “free world.” There was also increased concern
+that, without greater equality for African Americans, blacks would become
+susceptible to communist influence, given Russia’s commitment to both
+racial and economic equality. In Gunnar Myrdal’s highly influential book
+The American Dilemma, published in 1944, Myrdal made a passionate plea
+for integration based on the theory that the inherent contradiction between
+the “American Creed” of freedom and equality and the treatment of African
+Americans was not only immoral and profoundly unjust, but was also
+against the economic and foreign-policy interests of the United States.30
+
+The Supreme Court seemed to agree. In 1944, in Smith v. Allwright, the
+Supreme Court ended the use of the all-white primary election; and in 1946,
+the Court ruled that state laws requiring segregation on interstate buses
+were unconstitutional. Two years later, the Court voided any real estate
+agreements that racially discriminated against purchasers, and in 1949 the
+Court ruled that Texas’s segregated law school for blacks was inherently
+unequal and inferior in every respect to its law school for whites. In 1950,
+in McLaurin v. Oklahoma, it declared that Oklahoma had to desegregate its
+law school. Thus, even before Brown, the Supreme Court had already begun
+to set in motion a striking pattern of desegregation.
+Brown v. Board of Education was unique, however. It signaled the end of
+“home rule” in the South with respect to racial affairs. Earlier decisions had
+chipped away at the “separate but equal” doctrine, yet Jim Crow had
+managed to adapt to the changing legal environment, and most Southerners
+had remained confident that the institution would survive. Brown threatened
+not only to abolish segregation in public schools, but also, by implication,
+the entire system of legalized discrimination in the South. After more than
+fifty years of nearly complete deference to Southern states and
+noninterference in their racial affairs, Brown suggested a reversal in course.
+A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction
+to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial
+equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and
+by 1956 Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a
+vicious backlash. In Congress, North Carolina Senator Sam Erwin Jr.
+drafted a racist polemic, “the Southern Manifesto,” which vowed to fight to
+maintain Jim Crow by all legal means. Erwin succeeded in obtaining the
+support of 101 out of 128 members of Congress from the eleven original
+Confederate states.
+A fresh wave of white terror was hurled at those who supported the
+dismantling of Jim Crow. White Citizens’ Councils were formed in almost
+every Southern city and backwater town, comprised primarily of middle- to
+upper-middle-class whites in business and the clergy. Just as Southern
+legislatures had passed the black codes in response to the early steps of
+Reconstruction, in the years immediately following Brown v. Board, five
+Southern legislatures passed nearly fifty new Jim Crow laws. In the streets,
+resistance turned violent. The Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself as a powerful
+
+terrorist organization, committing castrations, killings, and the bombing of
+black homes and churches. NAACP leaders were beaten, pistol-whipped,
+and shot. As quickly as it began, desegregation across the South ground to a
+halt. In 1958, thirteen school systems were desegregated; in 1960, only
+seventeen.31
+In the absence of a massive, grassroots movement directly challenging
+the racial caste system, Jim Crow might be alive and well today. Yet in the
+1950s, a civil rights movement was brewing, emboldened by the Supreme
+Court’s decisions and a shifting domestic and international political
+environment. With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and
+progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the
+Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and
+beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops
+were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to
+exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met
+with horror in the North.
+The dramatic high point of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in 1963.
+The Southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students
+demonstrating peacefully at one lunch counter to the largest mass
+movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century.
+Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men,
+women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen
+thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests
+occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32
+On June 12, 1963, President Kennedy announced that he would deliver to
+Congress a strong civil rights bill, a declaration that transformed him into a
+widely recognized ally of the Civil Rights Movement. Following Kennedy’s
+assassination, President Johnson professed his commitment to the goal of
+“the full assimilation of more than twenty million Negroes into American
+life,” and ensured the passage of comprehensive civil rights legislation. The
+Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of
+discrimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education,
+and federally financed activities. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 arguably
+had even greater scope, as it rendered illegal numerous discriminatory
+barriers to effective political participation by African Americans and
+
+mandated federal review of all new voting regulations so that it would be
+possible to determine whether their use would perpetuate voting
+discrimination.
+Within five years, the effects of the civil rights revolution were
+undeniable. Between 1964 and 1969, the percentage of African American
+adults registered to vote in the South soared. In Alabama the rate leaped
+from 19.3 percent to 61.3 percent; in Georgia, 27.4 percent to 60.4 percent;
+in Louisiana, 31.6 percent to 60.8 percent; and in Mississippi, 6.7 percent to
+66.5 percent.33 Suddenly black children could shop in department stores,
+eat at restaurants, drink from water fountains, and go to amusement parks
+that were once off-limits. Miscegenation laws were declared
+unconstitutional, and the rate of interracial marriage climbed.
+While dramatic progress was apparent in the political and social realms,
+civil rights activists became increasingly concerned that, without major
+economic reforms, the vast majority of blacks would remain locked in
+poverty. Thus at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, activists and others
+began to turn their attention to economic problems, arguing that
+socioeconomic inequality interacted with racism to produce crippling
+poverty and related social problems. Economic issues emerged as a major
+focus of discontent. As political scientists Frances Fox Piven and Richard
+Cloward have described, “blacks became more indignant over their
+condition—not only as an oppressed racial minority in a white society but
+as poor people in an affluent one.”34 Activists organized boycotts, picket
+lines, and demonstrations to attack discrimination in access to jobs and the
+denial of economic opportunity.
+Perhaps the most famous demonstration in support of economic justice is
+the March on Washington for Jobs and Economic Freedom in August 1963.
+The wave of activism associated with economic justice helped to focus
+President Kennedy’s attention on poverty and black unemployment. In the
+summer of 1963, he initiated a series of staff studies on those subjects. By
+the end of the summer, he declared his intention to make the eradication of
+poverty a key legislative objective in 1964.35 Following Kennedy’s
+assassination, President Lyndon Johnson embraced the antipoverty rhetoric
+with great passion, calling for an “unconditional war on poverty,” in his
+
+State of the Union Address in January 1964. Weeks later he proposed to
+Congress the Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964.
+The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement
+with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also
+demanding economic reforms. As the Civil Rights Movement began to
+evolve into a “Poor People’s Movement,” it promised to address not only
+black poverty, but white poverty as well—thus raising the specter of a poor
+and working-class movement that cut across racial lines. Martin Luther
+King Jr. and other civil rights leaders made it clear that they viewed the
+eradication of economic inequality as the next front in the “human rights
+movement” and made great efforts to build multiracial coalitions that
+sought economic justice for all. Genuine equality for black people, King
+reasoned, demanded a radical restructuring of society, one that would
+address the needs of the black and white poor throughout the country.
+Shortly before his assassination, he envisioned bringing to Washington,
+D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged in an interracial alliance that
+embraced rural and ghetto blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans,
+Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the
+right to live. In a speech delivered in 1968, King acknowledged there had
+been some progress for blacks since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
+1964, but insisted that the current challenges required even greater resolve
+and that the entire nation must be transformed for economic justice to be
+more than a dream for poor people of all colors. As historian Gerald
+McKnight observes, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical
+transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling
+for redistribution of economic and political power. America’s only civil
+rights leader was now focusing on class issues and was planning to descend
+on Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power
+structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored
+underclass.”36
+With the success of the Civil Rights Movement and the launching of the
+Poor People’s Movement, it was apparent to all that a major disruption in
+the nation’s racial equilibrium had occurred. Yet as we shall see below,
+Negroes stood only a “brief moment in the sun.” Conservative whites
+began, once again, to search for a new racial order that would conform to
+
+the needs and constraints of the time. This process took place with the
+understanding that whatever the new order would be, it would have to be
+formally race-neutral—it could not involve explicit or clearly intentional
+race discrimination. A similar phenomenon had followed slavery and
+Reconstruction, as white elites struggled to define a new racial order with
+the understanding that whatever the new order would be, it could not
+include slavery. Jim Crow eventually replaced slavery, but now it too had
+died, and it was unclear what might take its place. Barred by law from
+invoking race explicitly, those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to
+search for new means of achieving their goals according to the new rules of
+American democracy.
+History reveals that the seeds of the new system of control were planted
+well before the end of the Civil Rights Movement. A new race-neutral
+language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language
+accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast
+majority of blacks back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found
+they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the
+new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding “law and order”
+rather than “segregation forever.”
+
+The Birth of Mass Incarceration
+
+The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as
+Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate
+and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years
+following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used directaction tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate
+public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often
+characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil
+Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support
+of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely
+“rewarding lawbreakers.”
+For more than a decade—from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s—
+conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil
+rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King
+Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime. Civil
+rights protests were frequently depicted as criminal rather than political in
+nature, and federal courts were accused of excessive “lenience” toward
+lawlessness, thereby contributing to the spread of crime. In the words of
+then-Vice President Richard Nixon, the increasing crime rate “can be traced
+directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses
+an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to
+disobey them.”37 Some segregationists went further, insisting that
+integration causes crime, citing lower crime rates in Southern states as
+evidence that segregation was necessary. In the words of Representative
+John Bell Williams, “This exodus of Negroes from the South, and their
+influx into the great metropolitan centers of other areas of the Nation, has
+been accompanied by a wave of crime.... What has civil rights
+accomplished for these areas? . . . Segregation is the only answer as most
+Americans—not the politicians—have realized for hundreds of years.”38
+
+Unfortunately, at the same time that civil rights were being identified as a
+threat to law and order, the FBI was reporting fairly dramatic increases in
+the national crime rate. Despite significant controversy over the accuracy of
+the statistics, these reports received a great deal of publicity and were
+offered as further evidence of the breakdown in lawfulness, morality, and
+social stability.39 To make matters worse, riots erupted in the summer of
+1964 in Harlem and Rochester, followed by a series of uprisings that swept
+the nation following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
+The racial imagery associated with the riots gave fuel to the argument that
+civil rights for blacks led to rampant crime. Cities like Philadelphia and
+Rochester were described as being victims of their own generosity.
+Conservatives argued that, having welcomed blacks migrating from the
+South, these cities “were repaid with crime-ridden slums and black
+discontent.”40
+Barry Goldwater, in his 1964 presidential campaign, aggressively
+exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the
+“get tough on crime” movement that would emerge years later. In a widely
+quoted speech, Goldwater warned voters, “Choose the way of [the Johnson]
+Administration and you have the way of mobs in the street.”41 Civil rights
+activists who argued that the uprisings were directly related to widespread
+police harassment and abuse were dismissed by conservatives out of hand.
+“If [blacks] conduct themselves in an orderly way, they will not have to
+worry about police brutality,” argued West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd.42
+Early on, little effort was made to disguise the racial motivations behind
+the law and order rhetoric and the harsh criminal justice legislation
+proposed in Congress. The most ardent opponents of civil rights legislation
+and desegregation were the most active on the emerging crime issue. Wellknown segregationist George Wallace, for example, argued that “the same
+Supreme Court that ordered integration and encouraged civil rights
+legislation” was now “bending over backwards to help criminals.”43 Three
+other prominent segregationists—Senators McClellan, Erwin, and
+Thurmond—led the legislative battle to curb the rights of criminal
+defendants.44
+As the rules of acceptable discourse changed, however, segregationists
+distanced themselves from an explicitly racist agenda. They developed
+
+instead the racially sanitized rhetoric of “cracking down on crime”—
+rhetoric that is now used freely by politicians of every stripe. Conservative
+politicians who embraced this rhetoric purposefully failed to distinguish
+between the direct action tactics of civil rights activists, violent rebellions in
+inner cities, and traditional crimes of an economic or violent nature.
+Instead, as Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project has noted, “all of these
+phenomenon were subsumed under the heading of ‘crime in the streets.’”45
+After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the public debate shifted focus
+from segregation to crime. The battle lines, however, remained largely the
+same. Positions taken on crime policies typically cohered along lines of
+racial ideology. Political scientist Vesla Weaver explains: “Votes cast in
+opposition to open housing, busing, the Civil Rights Act, and other
+measures time and again showed the same divisions as votes for
+amendments to crime bills.... Members of Congress who voted against civil
+rights measures proactively designed crime legislation and actively fought
+for their proposals.”46
+Although law and order rhetoric ultimately failed to prevent the formal
+dismantling of the Jim Crow system, it proved highly effective in appealing
+to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were
+opposed to integration and frustrated by the Democratic Party’s apparent
+support for the Civil Rights Movement. As Weaver notes, “rather than
+fading, the segregationists’ crime-race argument was reframed, with a
+slightly different veneer,” and eventually became the foundation of the
+conservative agenda on crime.47 In fact, law and order rhetoric—first
+employed by segregationists—would eventually contribute to a major
+realignment of political parties in the United States.
+Following the Civil War, party alignment was almost entirely regional.
+The South was solidly Democratic, embittered by the war, firmly
+committed to the maintenance of a racial caste system, and extremely
+hostile to federal intervention on behalf of African Americans. The North
+was overwhelming Republican and, while Republicans were ambivalent
+about equality for African Americans, they were far more inclined to adopt
+and implement racial justice reforms than their Democratic counterparts
+below the Mason-Dixon line.
+
+The Great Depression effectuated a sea change in American race
+relations and party alignment. The New Deal—spearheaded by the
+Democratic Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—was designed to
+alleviate the suffering of poor people in the midst of the Depression, and
+blacks, the poorest of the poor, benefited disproportionately. While New
+Deal programs were rife with discrimination in their administration, they at
+least included blacks within the pool of beneficiaries—a development,
+historian Michael Klarman has noted, that was “sufficient to raise black
+hopes and expectations after decades of malign neglect from
+Washington.”48 Poor and working-class whites in both the North and South,
+no less than African Americans, responded positively to the New Deal,
+anxious for meaningful economic relief. As a result, the Democratic New
+Deal coalition evolved into an alliance of urban ethnic groups and the white
+South that dominated electoral politics from 1932 to the early 1960s.
+That dominance came to an abrupt end with the creation and
+implementation of what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy.
+The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the
+intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led
+conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be
+created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional
+Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of
+the big cities.49 Some conservative political strategists admitted that
+appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy,
+though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s
+key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a southern,
+racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the
+fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a
+system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”50 Similarly, John
+Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon
+administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the
+racists.”51 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black
+voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”52
+Republican strategist Kevin Phillips is often credited for offering the
+most influential argument in favor of a race-based strategy for Republican
+political dominance in the South. He argued in The Emerging Republican
+
+Majority, published in 1969, that Nixon’s successful presidential election
+campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and
+the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to
+campaign primarily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack
+rhetoric.53 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so
+angered and alienated by the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights
+reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily
+persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained.
+Warren Weaver, a New York Times journalist who reviewed the book upon
+its release, observed that Phillips’s strategy largely depended upon creating
+and maintaining a racially polarized political environment. “Full racial
+polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillip’s political pragmatism. He
+wants to see a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because
+this will drive into the Republican party precisely the kind of anti-Negro
+whites who will help constitute the emerging majority. This even leads him
+to support some civil rights efforts.” 54 Appealing to the racism and
+vulnerability of working-class whites had worked to defeat the Populists at
+the turn of the century, and a growing number of conservatives believed the
+tactic should be employed again, albeit in a more subtle fashion.
+Thus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two schools of thought were
+offered to the general public regarding race, poverty, and the social order.
+Conservatives argued that poverty was caused not by structural factors
+related to race and class but rather by culture—particularly black culture.
+This view received support from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now infamous
+report on the black family, which attributed black poverty to a black
+“subculture” and the “tangle of pathology” that characterized it. As
+described by sociologist Katherine Beckett, “The (alleged) misbehaviors of
+the poor were transformed from adaptations to poverty that had the
+unfortunate effect of reproducing it into character failings that accounted for
+poverty in the first place.”55 The “social pathologies” of the poor,
+particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined
+by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief
+arrangements. Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring
+emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.
+
+Liberals, by contrast, insisted that social reforms such as the War on
+Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the “root causes” of
+criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably
+generate crime. Lyndon Johnson, for example, argued during his 1964
+presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater that antipoverty programs
+were, in effect, anticrime programs: “There is something mighty wrong
+when a candidate for the highest office bemoans violence in the streets but
+votes against the War on Poverty, votes against the Civil Rights Act and
+votes against major educational bills that come before him as a legislator.”56
+Competing images of the poor as “deserving” and “undeserving” became
+central components of the debate. Ultimately, the racialized nature of this
+imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives, who succeeded in
+using law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of
+white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden
+progress of African Americans. As explained by Thomas and Mary Edsall
+in their insightful book Chain Reaction, a disproportionate share of the
+costs of integration and racial equality had been borne by lower- and lowermiddle-class whites, who were suddenly forced to compete on equal terms
+with blacks for jobs and status and who lived in neighborhoods adjoining
+black ghettos. Their children—not the children of wealthy whites—attended
+schools most likely to fall under busing orders. The affluent white liberals
+who were pressing the legal claims of blacks and other minorities “were
+often sheltered, in their private lives, and largely immune to the costs of
+implementing minority claims.”57 This reality made it possible for
+conservatives to characterize the “liberal Democratic establishment” as
+being out of touch with ordinary working people—thus resolving one of the
+central problems facing conservatives: how to persuade poor and workingclass voters to join in alliance with corporate interests and the conservative
+elite. By 1968, 81 percent of those responding to the Gallup Poll agreed
+with the statement that “law and order has broken down in this country,”
+and the majority blamed “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists.”58
+During the presidential election that year, both the Republican candidate,
+Richard Nixon, and the independent segregationist candidate, George
+Wallace, made “law and order” a central theme of their campaigns, and
+together they collected 57 percent of the vote.59 Nixon dedicated seventeen
+
+speeches solely to the topic of law and order, and one of his television ads
+explicitly called on voters to reject the lawlessness of civil rights activists
+and embrace “order” in the United States.60 The advertisement began with
+frightening music accompanied by flashing images of protestors, bloodied
+victims, and violence. A deep voice then said:
+It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United
+States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of
+government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that
+justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first right of every
+American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we
+shall have order in the United States.
+At the end of the ad, a caption declared: “This time . . . vote like your
+whole world depended on it . . . NIXON.” Viewing his own campaign ad,
+Nixon reportedly remarked with glee that the ad “hits it right on the nose.
+It’s all about those damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”61
+Race had become, yet again, a powerful wedge, breaking up what had
+been a solid liberal coalition based on economic interests of the poor and
+the working and lower-middle classes. In the 1968 election, race eclipsed
+class as the organizing principle of American politics, and by 1972,
+attitudes on racial issues rather than socioeconomic status were the primary
+determinant of voters’ political self-identification. The late 1960s and early
+1970s marked the dramatic erosion in the belief among working-class
+whites that the condition of the poor, or those who fail to prosper, was the
+result of a faulty economic system that needed to be challenged. As the
+Edsalls explain, “the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the
+income distribution against each other intensified the view among many
+whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged—particularly for
+disadvantaged blacks—is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the
+responsibility of the larger society.”62 Just as race had been used at the turn
+of the century by Southern elites to rupture class solidarity at the bottom of
+the income ladder, race as a national issue had broken up the Democratic
+New Deal “bottom-up” coalition—a coalition dependent on substantial
+support from all voters, white and black, at or below the median income.
+
+The conservative revolution that took root within the Republican Party in
+the 1960s did not reach its full development until the election of 1980. The
+decade preceding Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency was
+characterized by political and social crises, as the Civil Rights Movement
+was promptly followed by intense controversy over the implementation of
+the equality principle—especially busing and affirmative action—as well as
+dramatic political clashes over the Vietnam War and Watergate. During this
+period, conservatives gave lip service to the goal of racial equality but
+actively resisted desegregation, busing, and civil rights enforcement. They
+repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a contest between
+hardworking, blue-collar whites and poor blacks who refused to work. The
+not-so-subtle message to working-class whites was that their tax dollars
+were going to support special programs for blacks who most certainly did
+not deserve them. During this period, Nixon called for a “war on drugs”—
+an announcement that proved largely rhetorical as he declared illegal drugs
+“public enemy number one” without proposing dramatic shifts in drug
+policy. A backlash against blacks was clearly in force, but no consensus had
+yet been reached regarding what racial and social order would ultimately
+emerge from these turbulent times.
+In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the “excision of the
+language of race from conservative public discourse” and thus built on the
+success of earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting
+racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit
+reference to race.63 Condemning “welfare queens” and criminal
+“predators,” he rode into office with the strong support of disaffected whites
+—poor and working-class whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic
+Party’s embrace of the civil rights agenda. As one political insider
+explained, Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of
+the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those
+who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep
+him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.”64 To
+great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through
+implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes,
+and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as
+having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to
+
+prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of
+his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan
+kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair
+near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three civil rights activists
+were murdered in 1964—he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights,”
+and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that
+properly belonged to them.65 His critics promptly alleged that he was
+signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those
+who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals
+into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that something is
+racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist
+language.
+Crime and welfare were the major themes of Reagan’s campaign rhetoric.
+According to the Edsalls, one of Reagan���s favorite and most-often-repeated
+anecdotes was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30
+addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax-free income alone is over
+$150,000.”66 The term “welfare queen” became a not-so-subtle code for
+“lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a
+vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you
+were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”67 These
+highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were
+nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime
+and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it. Reagan
+portrayed the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a
+frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”68 Reagan’s
+racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22
+percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Reagan. The
+defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed
+civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”69
+Once elected, Reagan’s promise to enhance the federal government’s role
+in fighting crime was complicated by the fact that fighting street crime has
+traditionally been the responsibility of state and local law enforcement.
+After a period of initial confusion and controversy regarding whether the
+FBI and the federal government should be involved in street crime, the
+Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of
+
+specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white-collar criminals and to
+shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement.70 In
+October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration’s
+War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of
+the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the
+nation.71 This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the
+outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with
+public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers,
+Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined
+“others”—the undeserving.
+Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies
+soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8
+million to $95 million.72 Department of Defense antidrug allocations
+increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that
+same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and
+FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million.73 By contrast,
+funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and
+education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on
+Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million
+from 1981 to 1984, and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of
+Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.74
+Determined to ensure that the “new Republican majority” would continue
+to support the extraordinary expansion of the federal government’s law
+enforcement activities and that Congress would continue to fund it, the
+Reagan administration launched a media offensive to justify the War on
+Drugs.75 Central to the media campaign was an effort to sensationalize the
+emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods—communities
+devastated by deindustrialization and skyrocketing unemployment. The
+media frenzy the campaign inspired simply could not have come at a worse
+time for African Americans.
+In the early 1980s, just as the drug war was kicking off, inner-city
+communities were suffering from economic collapse. The blue-collar
+factory jobs that had been plentiful in urban areas in the 1950s and 1960s
+had suddenly disappeared.76 Prior to 1970, inner-city workers with
+relatively little formal education could find industrial employment close to
+
+home. Globalization, however, helped to change that. Manufacturing jobs
+were transferred by multinational corporations away from American cities
+to countries that lacked unions, where workers earn a small fraction of what
+is considered a fair wage in the United States. To make matters worse,
+dramatic technological changes revolutionized the workplace—changes that
+eliminated many of the jobs that less skilled workers once relied upon for
+their survival. Highly educated workers benefited from the pace of
+technological change and the increased use of computer-based technologies,
+but blue-collar workers often found themselves displaced in the sudden
+transition from an industrial to a service economy.
+The impact of globalization and deindustrialization was felt most
+strongly in black inner-city communities. As described by William Julius
+Wilson, in his book When Work Disappears, the overwhelming majority of
+African Americans in the 1970s lacked college educations and had attended
+racially segregated, underfunded schools lacking basic resources. Those
+residing in ghetto communities were particularly ill equipped to adapt to the
+seismic changes taking place in the U.S. economy; they were left isolated
+and jobless. One study indicates that as late as 1970, more than 70 percent
+of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-collar jobs.77 Yet by
+1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black
+men had plummeted to 28 percent.78
+The new manufacturing jobs that opened during this time period were
+generally located in the suburbs. The growing spatial mismatch of jobs had
+a profound impact on African Americans trapped in ghettos. A study of
+urban black fathers found that only 28 percent had access to an automobile.
+The rate fell to 18 percent for those living in ghetto areas.79
+Women fared somewhat better during this period because the socialservice sector in urban areas—which employs primarily women—was
+expanding at the same time manufacturing jobs were evaporating. The
+fraction of black men who moved into so called pink-collar jobs like
+nursing or clerical work was negligible.80
+The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among inner-city
+residents increased incentives to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine.
+Crack is pharmacologically almost identical to powder cocaine, but it has
+been converted into a form that can be vaporized and inhaled for a faster,
+
+more intense (though shorter) high using less of the drug—making it
+possible to sell small doses at more affordable prices. Crack hit the streets
+in 1985, a few years after Reagan’s drug war was announced, leading to a
+spike in violence as drug markets struggled to stabilize, and the anger and
+frustration associated with joblessness boiled. Joblessness and crack swept
+inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil
+Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs. The
+Reagan administration leaped at the opportunity to publicize crack cocaine
+in inner-city communities in order to build support for its new war.
+In October 1985, the DEA sent Robert Stutman to serve as director of its
+New York City office and charged him with the responsibility of shoring up
+public support for the administration’s new war. Stutman developed a
+strategy for improving relations with the news media and sought to draw
+journalists’ attention to the spread of crack cocaine. As Stutman recounted
+years later:
+The agents would hear me give hundreds of presentations to the media
+as I attempted to call attention to the drug scourge. I wasted no time in
+pointing out its [the DEA’s] new accomplishments against the drug
+traffickers.... In order to convince Washington, I needed to make it
+[drugs] a national issue and quickly. I began a lobbying effort and I
+used the media. The media were only too willing to cooperate, because
+as far the New York media was concerned, crack was the hottest
+combat reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam
+War.81
+The strategy bore fruit. In June 1986, Newsweek declared crack to be the
+biggest story since Vietnam/Watergate, and in August of that year, Time
+magazine termed crack “the issue of the year.” Thousands of stories about
+the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a
+clear racial subtext. The articles typically featured black “crack whores,”
+“crack babies,” and “gangbangers,” reinforcing already prevalent racial
+stereotypes of black women as irresponsible, selfish “welfare queens,” and
+black men as “predators”—part of an inferior and criminal subculture.82
+When two popular sports figures, Len Bias and Don Rogers, died of
+cocaine overdoses in June 1986, the media erroneously reported their deaths
+
+as caused by crack, contributing to the media firestorm and groundswell of
+political activity and public concern relating to the new “demon drug,”
+crack cocaine. The bonanza continued into 1989, as the media continued to
+disseminate claims that crack was an “epidemic,” a “plague,” “instantly
+addictive,” and extraordinarily dangerous—claims that have now been
+proven false or highly misleading. Between October 1988 and October
+1989, the Washington Post alone ran 1,565 stories about the “drug scourge.”
+Richard Harwood, the Post’s ombudsmen, eventually admitted the paper
+had lost “a proper sense of perspective” due to such a “hyperbole
+epidemic.” He said that “politicians are doing a number on people’s
+heads.”83 Sociologists Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine later made a
+similar point: “Crack was a god-send to the Right.... It could not have
+appeared at a more politically opportune moment.”84
+In September 1986, with the media frenzy at full throttle, the House
+passed legislation that allocated $2 billion to the antidrug crusade, required
+the participation of the military in narcotics control efforts, allowed the
+death penalty for some drug-related crimes, and authorized the admission of
+some illegally obtained evidence in drug trials. Later that month, the Senate
+proposed even tougher antidrug legislation, and shortly thereafter, the
+president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other
+harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for
+the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for
+distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine,
+associated with whites.
+Few criticisms of the legislation could be heard en route to enactment.
+One senator insisted that crack had become a scapegoat distracting the
+public’s attention from the true causes of our social ills, arguing: “If we
+blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the
+failed schools, the malign welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods,
+the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if
+crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal
+grant to develop it.”85 Critical voices, however, were lonely ones.
+Congress revisited drug policy in 1988. The resulting legislation was
+once again extraordinarily punitive, this time extending far beyond
+traditional criminal punishments and including new “civil penalties” for
+
+drug offenders. The new Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized public housing
+authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal
+activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many
+federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug
+offense. The act also expanded use of the death penalty for serious drugrelated offenses and imposed new mandatory minimums for drug offenses,
+including a five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession of cocaine
+base—with no evidence of intent to sell. Remarkably, the penalty would
+apply to first-time offenders. The severity of this punishment was
+unprecedented in the federal system. Until 1988, one year of imprisonment
+had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug. Members
+of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) were mixed in their assessment
+of the new legislation—some believing the harsh penalties were necessary,
+others convinced that the laws were biased and harmful to African
+Americans. Ultimately the legislation passed by an overwhelming margin—
+346 to 11. Six of the negative votes came from the CBC.86
+The War on Drugs proved popular among key white voters, particularly
+whites who remained resentful of black progress, civil rights enforcement,
+and affirmative action. Beginning in the 1970s, researchers found that racial
+attitudes—not crime rates or likelihood of victimization—are an important
+determinant of white support for “get tough on crime” and antiwelfare
+measures. 87 Among whites, those expressing the highest degree of concern
+about crime also tend to oppose racial reform, and their punitive attitudes
+toward crime are largely unrelated to their likelihood of victimization.88
+Whites, on average, are more punitive than blacks, despite the fact that
+blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime. Rural whites are often the
+most punitive, even though they are least likely to be crime victims.89 The
+War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to
+racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks
+and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
+Reagan’s successor, President George Bush Sr., did not hesitate to
+employ implicit racial appeals, having learned from the success of other
+conservative politicians that subtle negative references to race could
+mobilize poor and working-class whites who once were loyal to the
+Democratic Party. Bush’s most famous racial appeal, the Willie Horton ad,
+
+featured a dark-skinned black man, a convicted murderer who escaped
+while on a work furlough and then raped and murdered a white woman in
+her home. The ad blamed Bush’s opponent, Massachusetts governor
+Michael Dukakis, for the death of the white woman, because he approved
+the furlough program. For months, the ad played repeatedly on network
+news stations and was the subject of incessant political commentary.
+Though controversial, the ad was stunningly effective; it destroyed
+Dukakis’s chances of ever becoming president.
+Once in the Oval Office, Bush stayed on message, opposing affirmative
+action and aggressive civil rights enforcement, and embracing the drug war
+with great enthusiasm. In August 1989, President Bush characterized drug
+use as “the most pressing problem facing the nation.”90 Shortly thereafter, a
+New York Times/CBS News Poll reported that 64 percent of those polled—
+the highest percentage ever recorded—now thought that drugs were the
+most significant problem in the United States.91 This surge of public
+concern did not correspond to a dramatic shift in illegal drug activity, but
+instead was the product of a carefully orchestrated political campaign. The
+level of public concern about crime and drugs was only weakly correlated
+with actual crime rates, but highly correlated with political initiatives,
+campaigns, and partisan appeals.92
+The shift to a general attitude of “toughness” toward problems associated
+with communities of color began in the 1960s, when the gains and goals of
+the Civil Rights Movement began to require real sacrifices on the part of
+white Americans, and conservative politicians found they could mobilize
+white racial resentment by vowing to crack down on crime. By the late
+1980s, however, not only conservatives played leading roles in the gettough movement, spouting the rhetoric once associated only with
+segregationists. Democratic politicians and policy makers were now
+attempting to wrest control of the crime and drug issues from Republicans
+by advocating stricter anticrime and antidrug laws—all in an effort to win
+back the so-called “swing voters” who were defecting to the Republican
+Party. Somewhat ironically, these “new Democrats” were joined by virulent
+racists, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, which announced in 1990 that it
+intended to “join the battle against illegal drugs” by becoming the “eyes and
+ears of the police.”93 Progressives concerned about racial justice in this
+
+period were mostly silent about the War on Drugs, preferring to channel
+their energy toward defense of affirmative action and other perceived gains
+of the Civil Rights Movement.
+In the early 1990s, resistance to the emergence of a new system of
+racialized social control collapsed across the political spectrum. A century
+earlier, a similar political dynamic had resulted in the birth of Jim Crow. In
+the 1890s, Populists buckled under the political pressure created by the
+Redeemers, who had successfully appealed to poor and working-class
+whites by proposing overtly racist and increasingly absurd Jim Crow laws.
+Now, a new racial caste system—mass incarceration—was taking hold, as
+politicians of every stripe competed with each other to win the votes of poor
+and working-class whites, whose economic status was precarious, at best,
+and who felt threatened by racial reforms. As had happened before, former
+allies of African Americans—as much as conservatives—adopted a
+political strategy that required them to prove how “tough” they could be on
+“them,” the dark-skinned pariahs.
+The results were immediate. As law enforcement budgets exploded, so
+did prison and jail populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported
+that the number of people behind bars in the United States was
+unprecedented in world history, and that one fourth of young African
+American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system.
+Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the “get tough” movement on the
+African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans
+revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration.
+To the contrary, in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that
+he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime
+than he. True to his word, just weeks before the critical New Hampshire
+primary, Clinton chose to fly home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of
+Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who had so little
+conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert
+from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning. After the
+execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m
+soft on crime.”94
+Once elected, Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal “three strikes and
+you’re out” law, which he advocated in his 1994 State of the Union address
+
+to enthusiastic applause on both sides of the aisle. The $30 billion crime bill
+sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the
+Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans
+and make it their own.”95 The bill created dozens of new federal capital
+crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and
+authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of
+state and local police forces. Far from resisting the emergence of the new
+caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had
+imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has
+observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted
+in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president
+in American history.”96
+Clinton eventually moved beyond crime and capitulated to the
+conservative racial agenda on welfare. This move, like his “get tough”
+rhetoric and policies, was part of a grand strategy articulated by the “new
+Democrats” to appeal to the elusive white swing voters. In so doing,
+Clinton—more than any other president—created the current racial
+undercaste. He signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
+Reconciliation Act, which “ended welfare as we know it,” and replaced it
+with a block grant to states called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
+(TANF). TANF imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, as
+well as a permanent, lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps
+for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense—including simple possession
+of marijuana.
+Clinton did not stop there. Determined to prove how “tough” he could be
+on “them,” Clinton also made it easier for federally-assisted public housing
+projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history—an extraordinarily
+harsh step in the midst of a drug war aimed at racial and ethnic minorities.
+In his announcement of the “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, Clinton
+explained: “From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and
+peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.”97 The new rule promised
+to be “the toughest admission and eviction policy that HUD has
+implemented.” 98 Thus, for countless poor people, particularly racial
+minorities targeted by the drug war, public housing was no longer available,
+
+leaving many of them homeless—locked out not only of mainstream
+society, but their own homes.
+The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the
+Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly
+hegemonic two decades later. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives to
+the War on Drugs and “get tough” movement were being entertained in
+mainstream political discourse. Once again, in response to a major
+disruption in the prevailing racial order—this time the civil rights gains of
+the 1960s—a new system of racialized social control was created by
+exploiting the vulnerabilities and racial resentments of poor and workingclass whites. More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at
+the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the
+margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not
+unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access
+to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right
+to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing
+system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed
+natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in
+many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of
+communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to
+the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow
+was born.
+
+2
+The Lockdown
+We may think we know how the criminal justice system works. Television
+is overloaded with fictional dramas about police, crime, and prosecutors—
+shows such as Law & Order. These fictional dramas, like the evening news,
+tend to focus on individual stories of crime, victimization, and punishment,
+and the stories are typically told from the point of view of law enforcement.
+A charismatic police officer, investigator, or prosecutor struggles with his
+own demons while heroically trying to solve a horrible crime. He ultimately
+achieves a personal and moral victory by finding the bad guy and throwing
+him in jail. That is the made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system.
+It perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep
+our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals
+and punishing them. These television shows, especially those that
+romanticize drug-law enforcement, are the modern-day equivalent of the
+old movies portraying happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal
+system of racialized oppression and control.
+Those who have been swept within the criminal justice system know that
+the way the system actually works bears little resemblance to what happens
+on television or in movies. Full-blown trials of guilt or innocence rarely
+occur; many people never even meet with an attorney; witnesses are
+routinely paid and coerced by the government; police regularly stop and
+search people for no reason whatsoever; penalties for many crimes are so
+severe that innocent people plead guilty, accepting plea bargains to avoid
+harsh mandatory sentences; and children, even as young as fourteen, are
+sent to adult prisons. Rules of law and procedure, such as “guilt beyond a
+reasonable doubt” or “probable cause” or “reasonable suspicion,” can easily
+be found in court cases and law-school textbooks but are much harder to
+find in real life.
+
+In this chapter, we shall see how the system of mass incarceration
+actually works. Our focus is the War on Drugs. The reason is simple:
+Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the
+explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. Drug offenses alone
+account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more
+than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.1
+Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense
+today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980—an increase of 1,100
+percent.2 Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31
+million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war
+began.3 Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration
+of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs.
+Before we begin our tour of the drug war, it is worthwhile to get a couple
+of myths out of the way. The first is that the war is aimed at ridding the
+nation of drug “kingpins” or big-time dealers. Nothing could be further
+from the truth. The vast majority of those arrested are not charged with
+serious offenses. In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for
+possession, and only one out of five was for sales. Moreover, most people
+in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant
+selling activity.4
+The second myth is that the drug war is principally concerned with
+dangerous drugs. Quite to the contrary, arrests for marijuana possession—a
+drug less harmful than tobacco or alcohol—accounted for nearly 80 percent
+of the growth in drug arrests in the 1990s.5 Despite the fact that most drug
+arrests are for nonviolent minor offenses, the War on Drugs has ushered in
+an era of unprecedented punitiveness.
+The percentage of drug arrests that result in prison sentences (rather than
+dismissal, community service, or probation) has quadrupled, resulting in a
+prison-building boom the likes of which the world has never seen. In two
+short decades, between 1980 and 2000, the number of people incarcerated
+in our nation’s prisons and jails soared from roughly 300,000 to more than 2
+million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans—or one in
+every 31 adults—were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.6
+We begin our exploration of the drug war at the point of entry—arrest by
+the police—and then consider how the system of mass incarceration is
+
+structured to reward mass drug arrests and facilitate the conviction and
+imprisonment of an unprecedented number of Americans, whether guilty or
+innocent. In subsequent chapters, we will consider how the system
+specifically targets people of color and then relegates them to a secondclass status analogous to Jim Crow. At this point, we simply take stock of
+the means by which the War on Drugs facilitates the roundup and lockdown
+of an extraordinary percentage of the U.S. population.
+
+Rules of the Game
+
+Few legal rules meaningfully constrain the police in the War on Drugs. This
+may sound like an overstatement, but upon examination it proves accurate.
+The absence of significant constraints on the exercise of police discretion is
+a key feature of the drug war’s design. It has made the roundup of millions
+of Americans for nonviolent drug offenses relatively easy.
+With only a few exceptions, the Supreme Court has seized every
+opportunity to facilitate the drug war, primarily by eviscerating Fourth
+Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the
+police. The rollback has been so pronounced that some commentators
+charge that a virtual “drug exception” now exists to the Bill of Rights.
+Shortly before his death, Justice Thurgood Marshall felt compelled to
+remind his colleagues that there is, in fact, “no drug exception” written into
+the text of the Constitution.7
+Most Americans do not know what the Fourth Amendment of the U.S.
+Constitution actually says or what it requires of the police. It states, in its
+entirety:
+The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
+and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
+violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
+supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
+to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.
+Courts and scholars agree that the Fourth Amendment governs all
+searches and seizures by the police and that the amendment was adopted in
+response to the English practice of conducting arbitrary searches under
+general warrants to uncover seditious libels. The routine police harassment,
+arbitrary searches, and widespread police intimidation of those subject to
+English rule helped to inspire the American Revolution. Not surprisingly,
+then, preventing arbitrary searches and seizures by the police was deemed
+
+by the Founding Fathers an essential element of the U.S. Constitution. Until
+the War on Drugs, courts had been fairly stringent about enforcing the
+Fourth Amendment’s requirements.
+Within a few years after the drug war was declared, however, many legal
+scholars noted a sharp turn in the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment
+jurisprudence. By the close of the Supreme Court’s 1990-91 term, it had
+become clear that a major shift in the relationship between the citizens of
+this country and the police was underway. Justice Stevens noted the trend in
+a powerful dissent issued in California v. Acevedo, a case upholding the
+warrantless search of a bag locked in a motorist’s trunk:
+In the years [from 1982 to 1991], the Court has heard argument in 30
+Fourth Amendment cases involving narcotics. In all but one, the
+government was the petitioner. All save two involved a search or
+seizure without a warrant or with a defective warrant. And, in all
+except three, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the search or
+seizure. In the meantime, the flow of narcotics cases through the courts
+has steadily and dramatically increased. No impartial observer could
+criticize this Court for hindering the progress of the war on drugs. On
+the contrary, decisions like the one the Court makes today will support
+the conclusion that this Court has become a loyal foot soldier in the
+Executive’s fight against crime.8
+The Fourth Amendment is but one example. Virtually all constitutionally
+protected civil liberties have been undermined by the drug war. The Court
+has been busy in recent years approving mandatory drug testing of
+employees and students, upholding random searches and sweeps of public
+schools and students, permitting police to obtain search warrants based on
+an anonymous informant’s tip, expanding the government’s wiretapping
+authority, legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police
+and prosecutors, approving the use of helicopter surveillance of homes
+without a warrant, and allowing the forfeiture of cash, homes, and other
+property based on unproven allegations of illegal drug activity.
+For our purposes here, we limit our focus to the legal rules crafted by the
+Supreme Court that grant law enforcement a pecuniary interest in the drug
+war and make it relatively easy for the police to seize people virtually
+
+anywhere—on public streets and sidewalks, on buses, airplanes and trains,
+or any other public place—and usher them behind bars. These new legal
+rules have ensured that anyone, virtually anywhere, for any reason, can
+become a target of drug-law enforcement activity.
+
+Unreasonable Suspicion
+
+Once upon a time, it was generally understood that the police could not stop
+and search someone without a warrant unless there was probable cause to
+believe that the individual was engaged in criminal activity. That was a
+basic Fourth Amendment principle. In Terry v. Ohio, decided in 1968, the
+Supreme Court modified that understanding, but only modestly, by ruling
+that if and when a police officer observes unusual conduct by someone the
+officer reasonably believes to be dangerous and engaged in criminal
+activity, the officer “is entitled for the protection of himself and others in
+the area” to conduct a limited search “to discover weapons that might be
+used against the officer.”9 Known as the stop-and-frisk rule, the Terry
+decision stands for the proposition that, so long as a police officer has
+“reasonable articulable suspicion” that someone is engaged in criminal
+activity and dangerous, it is constitutionally permissible to stop, question,
+and frisk him or her—even in the absence of probable cause.
+Justice Douglas dissented in Terry on the grounds that “grant[ing] police
+greater power than a magistrate [judge] is to take a long step down the
+totalitarian path.”10 He objected to the notion that police should be free to
+conduct warrantless searches whenever they suspect someone is a criminal,
+believing that dispensing with the Fourth Amendment’s warrant
+requirement risked opening the door to the same abuses that gave rise to the
+American Revolution. His voice was a lonely one. Most commentators at
+the time agreed that affording police the power and discretion to protect
+themselves during an encounter with someone they believed to be a
+dangerous criminal is not “unreasonable” under the Fourth Amendment.
+History suggests Justice Douglas had the better of the argument. In the
+years since Terry, stops, interrogations, and searches of ordinary people
+driving down the street, walking home from the bus stop, or riding the train,
+have become commonplace—at least for people of color. As Douglas
+suspected, the Court in Terry had begun its slide down a very slippery
+
+slope. Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to
+believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to
+stop and search them. As long as you give “consent,” the police can stop,
+interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all.
+
+Just Say No
+
+The first major sign that the Supreme Court would not allow the Fourth
+Amendment to interfere with the prosecution of the War on Drugs came in
+Florida v. Bostick. In that case, Terrance Bostick, a twenty-eight-year-old
+African American, had been sleeping in the back seat of a Greyhound bus
+on his way from Miami to Atlanta. Two police officers, wearing bright
+green “raid” jackets and displaying their badges and a gun, woke him with a
+start. The bus was stopped for a brief layover in Fort Lauderdale, and the
+officers were “working the bus,” looking for persons who might be carrying
+drugs. Bostick provided them with his identification and ticket, as
+requested. The officers then asked to search his bag. Bostick complied, even
+though he knew his bag contained a pound of cocaine. The officers had no
+basis for suspecting Bostick of any criminal activity, but they got lucky.
+They arrested Bostick, and he was charged and convicted of trafficking
+cocaine.
+Bostick’s search and seizure reflected what had become an increasingly
+common tactic in the War on Drugs: suspicionless police sweeps of buses in
+interstate or intrastate travel. The resulting “interviews” of passengers in
+these dragnet operations usually culminate in a request for “consent” to
+search the passenger’s luggage.11 Never do the officers inform passengers
+that they are free to remain silent or to refuse to answer questions. By
+proceeding systematically in this manner, the police are able to engage in an
+extremely high volume of searches. One officer was able to search over
+three thousand bags in a nine-month period employing these techniques.12
+By and large, however, the hit rates are low. For example, in one case, a
+sweep of one hundred buses resulted in only seven arrests.13
+On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Bostick’s case that the
+police officer’s conduct violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of
+unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fourth Amendment, the court
+reasoned, forbids the police from seizing people and searching them
+
+without some individualized suspicion that they have committed or are
+committing a crime. The court thus overturned Bostick’s conviction, ruling
+that the cocaine, having been obtained illegally, was inadmissible. It also
+broadly condemned “bus sweeps” in the drug war, comparing them to
+methods employed by totalitarian regimes:
+The evidence in this case has evoked images of other days, under other
+flags, when no man traveled his nation’s roads or railways without fear
+of unwarranted interruption, by individuals who had temporary power
+in Government.... This is not Hitler’s Berlin, nor Stalin’s Moscow, nor
+is it white supremacist South Africa. Yet in Broward County, Florida,
+these police officers approach every person on board buses and trains
+(“that time permits”) and check identification, tickets, ask to search
+luggage—all in the name of “voluntary cooperation” with law
+enforcement.14
+The U.S. Supreme Court reversed. The Court ruled that Bostick’s
+encounter with the police was purely voluntary, and therefore he was not
+“seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Even if Bostick did
+not feel free to leave when confronted by police at the back of the bus, the
+proper question, according to the Court, was whether “a reasonable person”
+in Bostick’s shoes would have felt free to terminate the encounter. A
+reasonable person, the Court concluded, would have felt free to sit there and
+refuse to answer the police officer’s questions, and would have felt free to
+tell the officer “No, you can’t search my bag.” Accordingly, Bostick was
+not really “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and the
+subsequent search was purely consensual. The Court made clear that its
+decision was to govern all future drug sweeps, no matter what the
+circumstances of the targeted individual. Given the blanket nature of the
+ruling, courts have found police encounters to be consensual in truly
+preposterous situations. For example, a few years after Bostick, the District
+of Columbia Court of Appeals applied the ruling to a case involving a
+fourteen-year-old girl interrogated by the police, concluding that she must
+be held to the same reasonable-person standard.15
+Prior to the Bostick decision, a number of lower courts had found absurd
+the notion that “reasonable people” would feel empowered to refuse to
+
+answer questions when confronted by the police. As federal judge Prentiss
+Marshall explained, “The average person encountered will feel obliged to
+stop and respond. Few will feel that they can walk away or refuse to
+answer.”16 Professor Tracey Maclin put it this way: “Common sense
+teaches that most of us do not have the chutzpah or stupidity to tell a police
+officer to ‘get lost’ after he has stopped us and asked us for identification or
+questioned us about possible criminal conduct.”17 Other courts emphasized
+that granting police the freedom to stop, interrogate, and search anyone who
+consented would likely lead to racial and ethnic discrimination. Young
+black men would be the likely targets, rather than older white women.
+Justice Thurgood Marshall acknowledged as much in his dissent in Bostick,
+noting “the basis of the decision to single out particular passengers during a
+suspicionless sweep is less likely to be inarticulable than unspeakable.”18
+Studies have shown that Maclin’s common sense is correct: the
+overwhelming majority of people who are confronted by police and asked
+questions respond, and when asked to be searched, they comply.19 This is
+the case even among those, like Bostick, who have every reason to resist
+these tactics because they actually have something to hide. This is no secret
+to the Supreme Court. The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use
+of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted. In Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, decided in
+1973, the Court admitted that if waiver of one’s right to refuse consent were
+truly “knowing, intelligent, and voluntary,” it would “in practice create
+serious doubt whether consent searches would continue to be conducted.”20
+In other words, consent searches are valuable tools for the police only
+because hardly anyone dares to say no.
+
+Poor Excuse
+
+So-called consent searches have made it possible for the police to stop and
+search for drugs just about anybody walking down the street. All a police
+officer has to do in order to conduct a baseless drug investigation is ask to
+speak with someone and then get their “consent” to be searched. So long as
+orders are phrased as a question, compliance is interpreted as consent. “May
+I speak to you?” thunders an officer. “Will you put your arms up and stand
+against the wall for a search?” Because almost no one refuses, drug sweeps
+on the sidewalk (and on buses and trains) are easy. People are easily
+intimidated when the police confront them, hands on their revolvers, and
+most have no idea the question can be answered, “No.” But what about all
+the people driving down the street? How do police extract consent from
+them? The answer: pretext stops.
+Like consent searches, pretext stops are favorite tools of law enforcement
+in the War on Drugs. A classic pretext stop is a traffic stop motivated not by
+any desire to enforce traffic laws, but instead motivated by a desire to hunt
+for drugs in the absence of any evidence of illegal drug activity. In other
+words, police officers use minor traffic violations as an excuse—a pretext—
+to search for drugs, even though there is not a shred of evidence suggesting
+the motorist is violating drug laws. Pretext stops, like consent searches,
+have received the Supreme Court’s unequivocal blessing. Just ask Michael
+Whren and James Brown.
+Whren and Brown, both of whom are African American, were stopped by
+plainclothes officers in an unmarked vehicle in June 1993. The police
+admitted to stopping Whren and Brown because they wanted to investigate
+them for imagined drug crimes, even though they did not have probable
+cause or reasonable suspicion such crimes had actually been committed.
+Lacking actual evidence of criminal activity, the officers decided to stop
+them based on a pretext—a traffic violation. The officers testified that the
+driver failed to use his turn signal and accelerated abruptly from a stop sign.
+
+Although the officers weren’t really interested in the traffic violation, they
+stopped the pair anyway because they had a “hunch” they might be drug
+criminals. It turned out they were right. According to the officers, the driver
+had a bag of cocaine in his lap—allegedly in plain view.
+On appeal, Whren and Brown challenged their convictions on the ground
+that pretextual stops violate the Fourth Amendment. They argued that,
+because of the multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations,
+and the difficulty of obeying all traffic rules perfectly at all times, the police
+will nearly always have an excuse to stop someone and go fishing for drugs.
+Anyone driving more than a few blocks is likely to commit a traffic
+violation of some kind, such as failing to track properly between lanes,
+failing to stop at precisely the correct distance behind a crosswalk, failing to
+pause for precisely the right amount of time at a stop sign, or failing to use a
+turn signal at the appropriate distance from an intersection. Allowing the
+police to use minor traffic violations as a pretext for baseless drug
+investigations would permit them to single out anyone for a drug
+investigation without any evidence of illegal drug activity whatsoever. That
+kind of arbitrary police conduct is precisely what the Fourth Amendment
+was intended to prohibit.
+The Supreme Court rejected their argument, ruling that an officer’s
+motivations are irrelevant when evaluating the reasonableness of police
+activity under the Fourth Amendment. It does not matter, the Court
+declared, why the police are stopping motorists under the Fourth
+Amendment, so long as some kind of traffic violation gives them an excuse.
+The fact that the Fourth Amendment was specifically adopted by the
+Founding Fathers to prevent arbitrary stops and searches was deemed
+unpersuasive. The Court ruled that the police are free to use minor traffic
+violations as a pretext to conduct drug investigations, even when there is no
+evidence of illegal drug activity.
+A few months later, in Ohio v. Robinette, the Court took its twisted logic
+one step further. In that case, a police officer pulled over Robert Robinette,
+allegedly for speeding. After checking Robinette’s license and issuing a
+warning (but no ticket), the officer then ordered Robinette out of his
+vehicle, turned on a video camera in the officer’s car, and then asked
+Robinette whether he was carrying any drugs and would “consent” to a
+
+search. He did. The officer found a small amount of marijuana in
+Robinette’s car, and a single pill, which turned out to be methamphetamine.
+The Ohio Supreme Court, reviewing the case on appeal, was obviously
+uncomfortable with the blatant fishing expedition for drugs. The court noted
+that traffic stops were increasingly being used in the War on Drugs to
+extract “consent” for searches, and that motorists may not believe they are
+free to refuse consent and simply drive away. In an effort to provide some
+minimal protection for motorists, the Ohio court adopted a bright-line rule,
+that is, an unambiguous requirement that officers tell motorists they are free
+to leave before asking for consent to search their vehicles. At the very least,
+the justices reasoned, motorists should know they have the right to refuse
+consent and to leave, if they so choose.
+The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this basic requirement as
+“unrealistic.” In so doing, the Court made clear to all lower courts that,
+from now on, the Fourth Amendment should place no meaningful
+constraints on the police in the War on Drugs. No one needs to be informed
+of their rights during a stop or search, and police may use minor traffic
+stops as well as the myth of “consent” to stop and search anyone they
+choose for imaginary drug crimes, whether or not any evidence of illegal
+drug activity actually exists.
+One might imagine that the legal rules described thus far would provide
+more than enough latitude for the police to engage in an all-out, no-holdsbarred war on drugs. But there’s more. Even if motorists, after being
+detained and interrogated, have the nerve to refuse consent to a search, the
+police can arrest them anyway. In Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the
+Supreme Court held that the police may arrest motorists for minor traffic
+violations and throw them in jail (even if the statutory penalty for the traffic
+violation is a mere fine, not jail time).
+Another legal option for officers frustrated by a motorist’s refusal to
+grant “consent” is to bring a drug-sniffing dog to the scene. This option is
+available to police in traffic stops, as well as to law enforcement officials
+confronted with resistant travelers in airports and in bus or train stations
+who refuse to give the police consent to search their luggage. The Supreme
+Court has ruled that walking a drug-sniffing dog around someone’s vehicle
+(or someone’s luggage) does not constitute a “search,” and therefore does
+
+not trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny.21 If the dog alerts to drugs, then the
+officer has probable cause to search without the person’s consent. Naturally,
+in most cases, when someone is told that a drug-sniffing dog will be called,
+the seized individual backs down and “consents” to the search, as it has
+become apparent that the police are determined to conduct the search one
+way or another.
+
+Kissing Frogs
+
+Court cases involving drug-law enforcement almost always involve guilty
+people. Police usually release the innocent on the street—often without a
+ticket, citation, or even an apology—so their stories are rarely heard in
+court. Hardly anyone files a complaint, because the last thing most people
+want to do after experiencing a frightening and intrusive encounter with the
+police is show up at the police station where the officer works and attract
+more attention to themselves. For good reason, many people—especially
+poor people of color—fear police harassment, retaliation, and abuse. After
+having your car torn apart by the police in a futile search for drugs, or being
+forced to lie spread-eagled on the pavement while the police search you and
+interrogate you for no reason at all, how much confidence do you have in
+law enforcement? Do you expect to get a fair hearing? Those who try to
+find an attorney to represent them in a lawsuit often learn that unless they
+have broken bones (and no criminal record), private attorneys are unlikely
+to be interested in their case. Many people are shocked to discover that
+what happened to them on the side of the road was not, in fact, against the
+law.
+The inevitable result is that the people who wind up in front of a judge
+are usually guilty of some crime. The parade of guilty people through
+America’s courtrooms gives the false impression to the public—as well as
+to judges—that when the police have a “hunch,” it makes sense to let them
+act on it. Judges tend to imagine the police have a sixth sense—or some
+kind of special police training—that qualifies them to identify drug
+criminals in the absence of any evidence. After all, they seem to be right so
+much of the time, don’t they?
+The truth, however, is that most people stopped and searched in the War
+on Drugs are perfectly innocent of any crime. The police have received no
+training that enhances the likelihood they will spot the drug criminals as
+they drive by and leave everyone else alone. To the contrary, tens of
+
+thousands of law enforcement officers have received training that
+guarantees precisely the opposite. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
+trains police to conduct utterly unreasonable and discriminatory stops and
+searches throughout the United States.
+Perhaps the best known of these training programs is Operation Pipeline.
+The DEA launched Operation Pipeline in 1984 as part of the Reagan
+administration’s rollout of the War on Drugs. The federal program,
+administered by over three hundred state and local law enforcement
+agencies, trains state and local law enforcement officers to use pretextual
+traffic stops and consent searches on a large scale for drug interdiction.
+Officers learn, among other things, how to use a minor traffic violation as a
+pretext to stop someone, how to lengthen a routine traffic stop and leverage
+it into a search for drugs, how to obtain consent from a reluctant motorist,
+and how to use drug-sniffing dogs to obtain probable cause.22 By 2000, the
+DEA had directly trained more than 25,000 officers in forty-eight states in
+Pipeline tactics and helped to develop training programs for countless
+municipal and state law enforcement agencies. In legal scholar Ricardo
+Bascuas’s words, “Operation Pipeline is exactly what the Framers meant to
+prohibit: a federally-run general search program that targets people without
+cause for suspicion, particularly those who belong to disfavored groups.”23
+The program’s success requires police to stop “staggering” numbers of
+people in shotgun fashion.24 This “volume” approach to drug enforcement
+sweeps up extraordinary numbers of innocent people. As one California
+Highway Patrol Officer said, “It’s sheer numbers.... You’ve got to kiss a lot
+of frogs before you find a prince.”25 Accordingly, every year, tens of
+thousands of motorists find themselves stopped on the side of the road,
+fielding questions about imaginary drug activity, and then succumbing to a
+request for their vehicle to be searched—sometimes torn apart—in the
+search for drugs. Most of these stops and searches are futile. It has been
+estimated that 95 percent of Pipeline stops yield no illegal drugs.26 One
+study found that up to 99 percent of traffic stops made by federally funded
+narcotics task forces result in no citation and that 98 percent of task-force
+searches during traffic stops are discretionary searches in which the officer
+searches the car with the driver’s verbal “consent” but has no other legal
+authority to do so.27
+
+The “drug-courier profiles” utilized by the DEA and other law
+enforcement agencies for drug sweeps on highways, as well as in airports
+and train stations, are notoriously unreliable. In theory, a drug-courier
+profile reflects the collective wisdom and judgment of a law enforcement
+agency’s officials. Instead of allowing each officer to rely on his or her own
+limited experience and biases in detecting suspicious behavior, a drugcourier profile affords every officer the advantage of the agency’s collective
+experience and expertise. However, as legal scholar David Cole has
+observed, “in practice, the drug-courier profile is a scattershot hodgepodge
+of traits and characteristics so expansive that it potentially justifies stopping
+anybody and everybody.”28 The profile can include traveling with luggage,
+traveling without luggage, driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs
+repairs, driving with out-of-state license plates, driving a rental car, driving
+with “mismatched occupants,” acting too calm, acting too nervous, dressing
+casually, wearing expensive clothing or jewelry, being one of the first to
+deplane, being one of the last to deplane, deplaning in the middle, paying
+for a ticket in cash, using large-denomination currency, using smalldenomination currency, traveling alone, traveling with a companion, and so
+on. Even striving to obey the law fits the profile! The Florida Highway
+Patrol Drug Courier Profile cautioned troopers to be suspicious of
+“scrupulous obedience to traffic laws.”29 As Cole points out, “such profiles
+do not so much focus an investigation as provide law enforcement officials
+a ready-made excuse for stopping whom-ever they please.”30
+The Supreme Court has allowed use of drug-courier profiles as guides for
+the exercise of police discretion. Although it has indicated that the mere fact
+that someone fits a profile does not automatically constitute reasonable
+suspicion justifying a stop, courts routinely defer to these profiles, and the
+Court has yet to object. As one judge said after conducting a review of
+drug-courier profile decisions: “Many courts have accepted the profile, as
+well as the Drug Enforcement Agency’s scattershot enforcement efforts,
+unquestioningly, mechanistically, and dispositively.”31
+
+It Pays to Play
+
+Clearly, the rules of the game are designed to allow for the roundup of an
+unprecedented number of Americans for minor, nonviolent drug offenses.
+The number of annual drug arrests more than tripled between 1980 and
+2005, as drug sweeps and suspicionless stops and searches proceeded in
+record numbers.32
+Still, it is fair to wonder why the police would choose to arrest such an
+astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes. The
+fact that police are legally allowed to engage in a wholesale roundup of
+nonviolent drug offenders does not answer the question why they would
+choose to do so, particularly when most police departments have far more
+serious crimes to prevent and solve. Why would police prioritize drug-law
+enforcement? Drug use and abuse is nothing new; in fact, it was on the
+decline, not on the rise, when the War on Drugs began. So why make druglaw enforcement a priority now?
+Once again, the answer lies in the system’s design. Every system of
+control depends for its survival on the tangible and intangible benefits that
+are provided to those who are responsible for the system’s maintenance and
+administration. This system is no exception.
+At the time the drug war was declared, illegal drug use and abuse was not
+a pressing concern in most communities. The announcement of a War on
+Drugs was therefore met with some confusion and resistance within law
+enforcement, as well as among some conservative commentators.33 The
+federalization of drug crime violated the conservative tenet of states’ rights
+and local control, as street crime was typically the responsibility of local
+law enforcement. Many state and local law enforcement officials were less
+than pleased with the attempt by the federal government to assert itself in
+local crime fighting, viewing the new drug war as an unwelcome
+distraction. Participation in the drug war required a diversion of resources
+away from more serious crimes, such as murder, rape, grand theft, and
+
+violent assault—all of which were of far greater concern to most
+communities than illegal drug use.
+The resistance within law enforcement to the drug war created something
+of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. In order for the war to actually
+work—that is, in order for it to succeed in achieving its political goals—it
+was necessary to build a consensus among state and local law enforcement
+agencies that the drug war should be a top priority in their hometowns. The
+solution: cash. Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement
+agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority. The
+new system of control is traceable, to a significant degree, to a massive
+bribe offered to state and local law enforcement by the federal government.
+In 1988, at the behest of the Reagan administration, Congress revised the
+program that provides federal aid to law enforcement, renaming it the
+Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance
+Program after a New York City police officer who was shot to death while
+guarding the home of a drug-case witness. The Byrne program was
+designed to encourage every federal grant recipient to help fight the War on
+Drugs. Millions of dollars in federal aid have been offered to state and local
+law enforcement agencies willing to wage the war. This federal grant
+money has resulted in the proliferation of narcotics task forces, including
+those responsible for highway drug interdiction. Nationally, narcotics task
+forces make up about 40 percent of all Byrne grant funding, but in some
+states as much as 90 percent of all Byrne grant funds go toward specialized
+narcotics task forces.34 In fact, it is questionable whether any specialized
+drug enforcement activity would exist in some states without the Byrne
+program.
+Other forms of valuable aid have been offered as well. The DEA has
+offered free training, intelligence, and technical support to state highway
+patrol agencies that are willing to commit their officers to highway drug
+interdiction. The Pentagon, for its part, has given away military intelligence
+and millions of dollars in firepower to state and local agencies willing to
+make the rhetorical war a literal one.
+Almost immediately after the federal dollars began to flow, law
+enforcement agencies across the country began to compete for funding,
+equipment, and training. By the late 1990s, the overwhelming majority of
+
+state and local police forces in the country had availed themselves of the
+newly available resources and added a significant military component to
+buttress their drug-war operations. According to the Cato Institute, in 1997
+alone, the Pentagon handed over more than 1.2 million pieces of military
+equipment to local police departments.35 Similarly, the National Journal
+reported that between January 1997 and October 1999, the agency handled
+3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from over eleven thousand
+domestic police agencies in all fifty states. Included in the bounty were
+“253 aircraft (including six- and seven-passenger airplanes, UH-60
+Blackhawk and UH-1 Huey helicopters, 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade
+launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, and 1,161 pairs of night-vision
+goggles.”36 A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the New
+York Times, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”37
+
+Waging War
+
+In barely a decade, the War on Drugs went from being a political slogan to
+an actual war. Now that police departments were suddenly flush with cash
+and military equipment earmarked for the drug war, they needed to make
+use of their new resources. As described in a Cato Institute report,
+paramilitary units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or
+SWAT, teams) were quickly formed in virtually every major city to fight the
+drug war.38
+SWAT teams originated in the 1960s and gradually became more
+common in the 1970s, but until the drug war, they were used rarely,
+primarily for extraordinary emergency situations such as hostage takings,
+hijackings, or prison escapes. That changed in the 1980s, when local law
+enforcement agencies suddenly had access to cash and military equipment
+specifically for the purpose of conducting drug raids.
+Today, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve narcotics
+warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. In fact, in
+some jurisdictions drug warrants are served only by SWAT teams—
+regardless of the nature of the alleged drug crime. As the Miami Herald
+reported in 2002, “Police say they want [SWAT teams] in case of a hostage
+situation or a Columbine-type incident, but in practice the teams are used
+mainly to serve search warrants on suspected drug dealers. Some of these
+searches yield as little as a few grams of cocaine or marijuana.”39
+The rate of increase in the use of SWAT teams has been astonishing. In
+1972, there were just a few hundred paramilitary drug raids per year in the
+United States. By the early 1980s, there were three thousand annual SWAT
+deployments, by 1996 there were thirty thousand, and by 2001 there were
+forty thousand.40 The escalation of military force was quite dramatic in
+cities throughout the United States. In the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota,
+for example, its SWAT team was deployed on no-knock warrants thirty-five
+
+times in 1986, but in 1996 that same team was deployed for drug raids more
+than seven hundred times.41
+Drug raids conducted by SWAT teams are not polite encounters. In
+countless situations in which police could easily have arrested someone or
+conducted a search without a military-style raid, police blast into people’s
+homes, typically in the middle of the night, throwing grenades, shouting,
+and pointing guns and rifles at anyone inside, often including young
+children. In recent years, dozens of people have been killed by police in the
+course of these raids, including elderly grandparents and those who are
+completely innocent of any crime. Criminologist Peter Kraska reports that
+between 1989 and 2001 at least 780 cases of flawed paramilitary raids
+reached the appellate level, a dramatic increase over the 1980s, when such
+cases were rare, or earlier, when they were nonexistent.42 Many of these
+cases involve people killed in botched raids.
+Alberta Spruill, a fifty-seven-year-old city worker from Harlem, is
+among the fallen. On May 16, 2003, a dozen New York City police officers
+stormed her apartment building on a no-knock warrant, acting on a tip from
+a confidential informant who told them a convicted felon was selling drugs
+on the sixth floor. The informant had actually been in jail at the time he said
+he’d bought drugs in the apartment, and the target of the raid had been
+arrested four days before, but the officers didn’t check and didn’t even
+interview the building superintendent. The only resident in the building was
+Alberta, described by friends as a “devout churchgoer.” Before entering,
+police deployed a flash-bang grenade, resulting in a blinding, deafening
+explosion. Alberta went into cardiac arrest and died two hours later. The
+death was ruled a homicide but no one was indicted.
+Those who survive SWAT raids are generally traumatized by the event.
+Not long after Spruill’s death, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia
+Fields held hearings on SWAT practices in New York City. According to the
+Village Voice, “Dozens of black and Latino victims—nurses, secretaries,
+and former officers—packed her chambers airing tales, one more horrifying
+than the next. Most were unable to hold back tears as they described police
+ransacking their homes, handcuffing children and grandparents, putting
+guns to their heads, and being verbally (and often physically) abusive. In
+
+many cases, victims had received no follow-up from the NYPD, even to fix
+busted doors or other physical damage.”43
+Even in small towns, such as those in Dodge County, Wisconsin, SWAT
+teams treat routine searches for narcotics as a major battlefront in the drug
+war. In Dodge County, police raided the mobile home of Scott Bryant in
+April 1995, after finding traces of marijuana in his garbage. Moments after
+busting into the mobile home, police shot Bryant—who was unarmed—
+killing him. Bryant’s eight-year-old son was asleep in the next room and
+watched his father die while waiting for an ambulance. The district attorney
+theorized that the shooter’s hand had clenched in “sympathetic physical
+reaction” as his other hand reached for handcuffs. A spokesman for the
+Beretta company called this unlikely because the gun’s double-action
+trigger was designed to prevent unintentional firing. The Dodge County
+sheriff compared the shooting to a hunting accident.44
+SWAT raids have not been limited to homes, apartment buildings, or
+public housing projects. Public high schools have been invaded by SWAT
+teams in search of drugs. In November 2003, for example, police raided
+Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. The raid was
+recorded by the school’s surveillance cameras as well as a police camera.
+The tapes show students as young as fourteen forced to the ground in
+handcuffs as officers in SWAT team uniforms and bulletproof vests aim
+guns at their heads and lead a drug-sniffing dog to tear through their book
+bags. The raid was initiated by the school’s principal, who was suspicious
+that a single student might be dealing marijuana. No drugs or weapons were
+found during the raid and no charges were filed. Nearly all of the students
+searched and seized were students of color.
+The transformation from “community policing” to “military policing,”
+began in 1981, when President Reagan persuaded Congress to pass the
+Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which encouraged the
+military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases,
+intelligence, research, weaponry, and other equipment for drug interdiction.
+That legislation carved a huge exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, the
+Civil War-era law prohibiting the use of the military for civilian policing. It
+was followed by Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive, which
+declared drugs a threat to U.S. national security, and provided for yet more
+
+cooperation between local, state, and federal law enforcement. In the years
+that followed, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton enthusiastically
+embraced the drug war and increased the transfer of military equipment,
+technology, and training to local law enforcement, contingent, of course, on
+the willingness of agencies to prioritize drug-law enforcement and
+concentrate resources on arrests for illegal drugs.
+The incentives program worked. Drug arrests skyrocketed, as SWAT
+teams swept through urban housing projects, highway patrol agencies
+organized drug interdiction units on the freeways, and stop-and-frisk
+programs were set loose on the streets. Generally, the financial incentives
+offered to local law enforcement to pump up their drug arrests have not
+been well publicized, leading the average person to conclude reasonably
+(but mistakenly) that when their local police departments report that drug
+arrests have doubled or tripled in a short period of time, the arrests reflect a
+surge in illegal drug activity, rather than an infusion of money and an
+intensified enforcement effort.
+One exception is a 2001 report by the Capital Times in Madison,
+Wisconsin. The Times reported that as of 2001, sixty-five of the state’s
+eighty-three local SWAT teams had come into being since 1980, and that
+the explosion of SWAT teams was traceable to the Pentagon’s weaponry
+giveaway program, as well as to federal programs that provide money to
+local police departments for drug control. The paper explained that, in the
+1990s, Wisconsin police departments were given nearly a hundred thousand
+pieces of military equipment. And although the paramilitary units were
+often justified to city councils and skeptical citizens as essential to fight
+terrorism or deal with hostage situations, they were rarely deployed for
+those reasons but instead were sent to serve routine search warrants for
+drugs and make drug arrests. In fact, the Times reported that police
+departments had an extraordinary incentive to use their new equipment for
+drug enforcement: the extra federal funding the local police departments
+received was tied to antidrug policing. The size of the disbursements was
+linked to the number of city or county drug arrests. Each arrest, in theory,
+would net a given city or county about $153 in state and federal funding.
+Non-drug-related policing brought no federal dollars, even for violent
+crime. As a result, when Jackson County, Wisconsin, quadrupled its drug
+
+arrests between 1999 and 2000, the county’s federal subsidy quadrupled
+too.45
+
+Finders Keepers
+
+As if the free military equipment, training, and cash grants were not
+enough, the Reagan administration provided law enforcement with yet
+another financial incentive to devote extraordinary resources to drug law
+enforcement, rather than more serious crimes: state and local law
+enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use,
+the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war.
+This dramatic change in policy gave state and local police an enormous
+stake in the War on Drugs—not in its success, but in its perpetual existence.
+Law enforcement gained a pecuniary interest not only in the forfeited
+property, but in the profitability of the drug market itself.
+Modern drug forfeiture laws date back to 1970, when Congress passed
+the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The Act
+included a civil forfeiture provision authorizing the government to seize and
+forfeit drugs, drug manufacturing and storage equipment, and conveyances
+used to transport drugs. As legal scholars Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen
+have explained, the provision was justified as an effort “to forestall the
+spread of drugs in a way criminal penalties could not—by striking at its
+economic roots.”46 When a drug dealer is sent to jail, there are many others
+ready and willing to take his place, but seizing the means of production,
+some legislators reasoned, may shut down the trafficking business for good.
+Over the years, the list of properties subject to forfeiture expanded greatly,
+and the required connection to illegal drug activity became increasingly
+remote, leading to many instances of abuse. But it was not until 1984, when
+Congress amended the federal law to allow federal law enforcement
+agencies to retain and use any and all proceeds from asset forfeitures, and to
+allow state and local police agencies to retain up to 80 percent of the assets’
+value, that a true revolution occurred.
+Suddenly, police departments were capable of increasing the size of their
+budgets, quite substantially, simply by taking the cash, cars, and homes of
+
+people suspected of drug use or sales. At the time the new rules were
+adopted, the law governing civil forfeiture was so heavily weighted in favor
+of the government that fully 80 percent of forfeitures went uncontested.
+Property or cash could be seized based on mere suspicion of illegal drug
+activity, and the seizure could occur without notice or hearing, upon an ex
+parte showing of mere probable cause to believe that the property had
+somehow been “involved” in a crime. The probable cause showing could be
+based on nothing more than hearsay, innuendo, or even the paid, selfserving testimony of someone with interests clearly adverse to the property
+owner. Neither the owner of the property nor anyone else need be charged
+with a crime, much less found guilty of one. Indeed, a person could be
+found innocent of any criminal conduct and the property could still be
+subject to forfeiture. Once the property was seized, the owner had no right
+of counsel, and the burden was placed on him to prove the property’s
+“innocence.” Because those who were targeted were typically poor or of
+moderate means, they often lacked the resources to hire an attorney or pay
+the considerable court costs. As a result, most people who had their cash or
+property seized did not challenge the government’s action, especially
+because the government could retaliate by filing criminal charges—baseless
+or not.
+Not surprisingly, this drug forfeiture regime proved highly lucrative for
+law enforcement, offering more than enough incentive to wage the War on
+Drugs. According to a report commissioned by the Department of Justice,
+between 1988 and 1992 alone, Byrne-funded drug task forces seized over
+$1 billion in assets.47 Remarkably, this figure does not include drug task
+forces funded by the DEA or other federal agencies.
+The actual operation of drug forfeiture laws seriously undermines the
+usual rhetoric offered in support of the War on Drugs, namely that it is the
+big “kingpins” that are the target of the war. Drug-war forfeiture laws are
+frequently used to allow those with assets to buy their freedom, while drug
+users and small-time dealers with few assets to trade are subjected to
+lengthy prison terms. In Massachusetts, for example, an investigation by
+journalists found that on average a “payment of $50,000 in drug profits won
+a 6.3 year reduction in a sentence for dealers,” while agreements of $10,000
+or more bought elimination or reduction of trafficking charges in almost
+
+three-fourths of such cases.48 Federal drug forfeiture laws are one reason,
+Blumenson and Nielsen note, “why state and federal prisons now confine
+large numbers of men and women who had relatively minor roles in drug
+distribution networks, but few of their bosses.”49
+
+The Shakedown
+
+Quite predictably, the enormous economic rewards created by both the
+drug-war forfeiture and Byrne-grant laws has created an environment in
+which a very fine line exists between the lawful and the unlawful taking of
+other people’s money and property—a line so thin that some officers
+disregard the formalities of search warrants, probable cause, and reasonable
+suspicion altogether. In United States v. Reese, for example, the Ninth
+Circuit Court of Appeals described a drug task force completely corrupted
+by its dependence on federal drug money. Operating as a separate unit
+within the Oakland Housing Authority, the task force behaved, in the words
+of one officer, “more or less like a wolfpack,” driving up in police vehicles
+and taking “anything and everything we saw on the street corner.”50 The
+officers were under tremendous pressure from their commander to keep
+their arrest numbers up, and all of the officers were aware that their jobs
+depended on the renewal of a federal grant. The task force commander
+emphasized that they would need statistics to show that the grant money
+was well spent and sent the task force out to begin a shift with comments
+like, “Let’s go out and kick ass,” and “Everybody goes to jail tonight for
+everything, right?”51
+Journalists and investigators have documented numerous other instances
+in which police departments have engaged in illegal shakedowns, searches,
+and threats in search of forfeitable property and cash. In Florida, reporters
+reviewed nearly one thousand videotapes of highway traffic stops and found
+that police had used traffic violations as an excuse—or pretext—to
+confiscate “tens of thousands of dollars from motorists against whom there
+[was] no evidence of wrongdoing,” frequently taking the money without
+filing any criminal charges.52 Similarly, in Louisiana, journalists reported
+that Louisiana police engaged in massive pretextual stops in an effort to
+seize cash, with the money diverted to police department ski trips and other
+unauthorized uses.53 And in Southern California, a Los Angeles Sheriff’s
+
+Department employee reported that deputies routinely planted drugs and
+falsified police reports to establish probable cause for cash seizures.54
+Lots of small seizures can be nearly as profitable, and require the
+expenditure of fewer investigative resources, than a few large busts. The
+Western Area Narcotics Task Force (WANT) became the focus of a major
+investigation in 1996 when almost $66,000 was discovered hidden in its
+headquarters. The investigation revealed that the task force seized large
+amounts of money, but also small amounts, and then dispensed it freely,
+unconstrained by reporting requirements or the task force’s mission. Some
+seizures were as small as eight cents. Another seizure of ninety-three cents
+prompted the local newspaper to observe that “once again the officers were
+taking whatever the suspects were carrying, even though by no stretch
+could pocket change be construed to be drug money.”55
+In 2000, Congress passed the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act which
+was meant to address many of the egregious examples of abuse of civil
+forfeiture. Some of the most widely cited examples involved wealthy whites
+whose property was seized. One highly publicized case involved a reclusive
+millionaire, Donald Scott, who was shot and killed when a multiagency task
+force raided his two-hundred-acre Malibu ranch purportedly in search of
+marijuana plants. They never found a single marijuana plant in the course of
+the search. A subsequent investigation revealed that the primary motivation
+for the raid was the possibility of forfeiting Scott’s property. If the forfeiture
+had been successful, it would have netted the law enforcement agencies
+about $5 million in assets.56 In another case, William Munnerlynn had his
+Learjet seized by the DEA after he inadvertently used it to transport a drug
+dealer. Though charges were dropped against him within seventy-two
+hours, the DEA refused to return his Learjet. Only after five years of
+litigation and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees was he able to secure
+return of his jet. When the jet was returned, it had sustained $100,000 worth
+of damage. 57 Such cases were atypical but got the attention of Congress.
+The Reform Act resulted in a number of significant due-process changes,
+such as shifting the burden of proof onto the government, eliminating the
+requirement that an owner post a cost bond, and providing some minimal
+hardship protections for innocent parties who stand to lose their homes.
+These reforms, however, do not go nearly far enough.
+
+Arguably the most significant reform is the creation of an “innocent
+owner” defense. Prior to the Reform Act, the Supreme Court had ruled that
+the guilt or innocence of the property’s owner was irrelevant to the
+property’s guilt—a ruling based on the archaic legal fiction that a piece of
+property could be “guilty” of a crime. The act remedied this insanity to
+some extent; it provides an “innocent owner” defense to those whose
+property has been seized. However, the defense is seriously undermined by
+the fact that the government’s burden of proof is so low—the government
+need only establish by a “preponderance of the evidence” that the property
+was involved in the commission of a drug crime. This standard of proof is
+significantly lower than the “clear and convincing evidence” standard
+contained in an earlier version of the legislation, and it is far lower than the
+“proof beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for criminal convictions.
+Once the government meets this minimal burden, the burden then shifts
+to the owner to prove that she “did not know of the conduct giving rise to
+the forfeiture” or that she did “all that reasonably could be expected under
+the circumstances to terminate such use of the property.” This means, for
+example, that a woman who knew that her husband occasionally smoked
+pot could have her car forfeited to the government because she allowed him
+to use her car. Because the “car” was guilty of transporting someone who
+had broken a drug law at some time, she could legally lose her only form of
+transportation, even though she herself committed no crime. Indeed, women
+who are involved in some relationship with men accused of drug crimes,
+typically husbands or boyfriends, are among the most frequent claimants in
+forfeiture proceedings.58 Courts have not been forgiving of women in these
+circumstances, frequently concluding that “the nature and circumstances of
+the marital relationship may give rise to an inference of knowledge by the
+spouse claiming innocent ownership.”59
+There are other problems with this framework, not the least of which
+being that the owner of the property is not entitled to the appointment of
+counsel in the forfeiture proceeding, unless he or she has been charged with
+a crime. The overwhelming majority of forfeiture cases do not involve any
+criminal charges, so the vast majority of people who have their cash, cars,
+or homes seized must represent themselves in court, against the federal
+government. Oddly, someone who has actually been charged with a crime is
+
+entitled to the appointment of counsel in civil forfeiture proceedings, but
+those whose property has been forfeited but whose conduct did not merit
+criminal charges are on their own. This helps to explain why up to 90
+percent of forfeiture cases in some jurisdictions are not challenged. Most
+people simply cannot afford the considerable cost of hiring an attorney.
+Even if the cost is not an issue, the incentives are all wrong. If the police
+seized your car worth $5,000, or took $500 cash from your home, would
+you be willing to pay an attorney more than your assets are worth to get
+them back? If you haven’t been charged with a crime, are you willing to
+risk the possibility that fighting the forfeiture might prompt the government
+to file criminal charges against you?
+The greatest failure of the Reform Act, however, has nothing to do with
+one’s due process rights once property has been seized in a drug
+investigation. Despite all of the new procedural rules and formal
+protections, the law does not address the single most serious problem
+associated with drug-war forfeiture laws: the profit motive in drug-law
+enforcement. Under the new law, drug busts motivated by the desire to
+seize cash, cars, homes, and other property are still perfectly legal. Law
+enforcement agencies are still allowed, through revenue-sharing agreements
+with the federal government, to keep seized assets for their own use.
+Clearly, so long as law enforcement is free to seize assets allegedly
+associated with illegal drug activity—without ever charging anyone with a
+crime—local police departments, as well as state and federal law
+enforcement agencies, will continue to have a direct pecuniary interest in
+the profitability and longevity of the drug war. The basic structure of the
+system remains intact.
+None of this is to suggest that the financial rewards offered for police
+participation in the drug war are the only reason that law enforcement
+decided to embrace the war with zeal. Undoubtedly, the political and
+cultural context of the drug war—particularly in the early years—
+encouraged the roundup. When politicians declare a drug war, the police
+(our domestic warriors) undoubtedly feel some pressure to wage it. But it is
+doubtful that the drug war would have been launched with such intensity on
+the ground but for the bribes offered for law enforcement’s cooperation.
+Today the bribes may no longer be necessary. Now that the SWAT teams,
+the multiagency drug task forces, and the drug enforcement agenda have
+
+become a regular part of federal, state, and local law enforcement, it
+appears the drug war is here to stay. Funding for the Byrne-sponsored drug
+task forces has dwindled in recent years, but President Obama has promised
+to revive the Byrne grant program, claiming that it is “critical to creating
+the anti-drug task forces our communities need.”60 Relatively little
+organized opposition to the drug war currently exists, and any dramatic
+effort to scale back the war may be publicly condemned as “soft” on crime.
+The war has become institutionalized. It is no longer a special program or
+politicized project; it is simply the way things are done.
+
+Legal Misrepresentation
+
+So far, we have seen that the legal rules governing the drug war ensure that
+extraordinary numbers of people will be swept into the criminal justice
+system—arrested on drug charges, often for very minor offenses. But what
+happens after arrest? How does the design of the system help to ensure the
+creation of a massive undercaste?
+Once arrested, one’s chances of ever being truly free of the system of
+control are slim, often to the vanishing point. Defendants are typically
+denied meaningful legal representation, pressured by the threat of a lengthy
+sentence into a plea bargain, and then placed under formal control—in
+prison or jail, on probation or parole. Most Americans probably have no
+idea how common it is for people to be convicted without ever having the
+benefit of legal representation, or how many people plead guilty to crimes
+they did not commit because of fear of mandatory sentences.
+Tens of thousands of poor people go to jail every year without ever
+talking to a lawyer, and those who do meet with a lawyer for a drug offense
+often spend only a few minutes discussing their case and options before
+making a decision that will profoundly affect the rest of their lives. As one
+public defender explained to the Los Angeles Times, “They are herded like
+cattle [into the courtroom lockup], up at 3 or 4 in the morning. Then they
+have to make decisions that affect the rest of their lives. You can imagine
+how stressful it is.”61
+More than forty years ago, in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court
+ruled that poor people accused of serious crimes were entitled to counsel.
+Yet thousands of people are processed through America’s courts annually
+either with no lawyer at all or with a lawyer who does not have the time,
+resources or, in some cases, the inclination to provide effective
+representation. In Gideon, the Supreme Court left it to state and local
+governments to decide how legal services should be funded. However, in
+the midst of a drug war, when politicians compete with each other to prove
+
+how “tough” they can be on crime and criminals, funding public defender
+offices and paying private attorneys to represent those accused of crimes
+has been a low priority.
+Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus
+unable to hire a lawyer.62 Yet our nation’s public defender system is
+woefully inadequate. The most visible sign of the failed system is the
+astonishingly large caseloads public defenders routinely carry, making it
+impossible for them to provide meaningful representation to their clients.
+Sometimes defenders have well over one hundred clients at a time; many of
+these clients are facing decades behind bars or life imprisonment. Too often
+the quality of court-appointed counsel is poor because the miserable
+working conditions and low pay discourage good attorneys from
+participating in the system. And some states deny representation to
+impoverished defendants on the theory that somehow they should be able to
+pay for a lawyer, even though they are scarecely able to pay for food or
+rent. In Virginia, for example, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for
+representing someone charged with a felony that carries a sentence of less
+than twenty years are capped at $428. And in Wisconsin, more than 11,000
+poor people go to court without representation every year because anyone
+who earns more than $3,000 per year is considered able to afford a
+lawyer.63 In Lake Charles, Louisiana, the public defender office has only
+two investigators for the 2,500 new felony cases and 4,000 new
+misdemeanor cases assigned to the office each year.64 The NAACP Legal
+Defense Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta sued
+the city of Gulfport, Mississippi, alleging that the city operated a “modern
+day debtor’s prison” by jailing poor people who are unable to pay their
+fines and denying them the right to lawyers.
+In 2004, the American Bar Association released a report on the status of
+indigent defense, concluding that, “All too often, defendants plead guilty,
+even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or
+what is occurring. Sometimes the proceedings reflect little or no recognition
+that the accused is mentally ill or does not adequately understand English.
+The fundamental right to a lawyer that Americans assume applies to
+everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice
+for countless people across the United States.”65
+
+Even when people are charged with extremely serious crimes, such as
+murder, they may find themselves languishing in jail for years without
+meeting with an attorney, much less getting a trial. One extreme example is
+the experience of James Thomas, an impoverished day laborer in Baton
+Rouge, Louisiana, who was charged with murder in 1996, and waited eight
+and a half years for his case to go to trial. It never did. His mother finally
+succeeded in getting his case dismissed, after scraping together $500 to hire
+an attorney, who demonstrated to the court that, in the time Thomas spent
+waiting for his case to go to trial, his alibi witness had died of kidney
+disease. Another Louisiana man, Johnny Lee Ball, was convicted of seconddegree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of
+parole after meeting with a public defender for just eleven minutes before
+trial. If indicted murderers have a hard time getting meaningful
+representation, what are the odds that small-time drug dealers find
+themselves represented by a zealous advocate? As David Carroll, the
+research director for the National Legal Aid & Defender Association
+explained to USA Today, “There’s a real disconnect in this country between
+what people perceive is the state of indigent defense and what it is. I
+attribute that to shows like Law & Order, where the defendant says, ‘I want
+a lawyer,’ and all of a sudden Legal Aid appears in the cell. That’s what
+people think.”66
+Children caught up in this system are the most vulnerable and yet are the
+least likely to be represented by counsel. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court
+ruled in In re Gault that children under the age of eighteen have the right to
+legal assistance with any criminal charges filed against them. In practice,
+however, children routinely “waive” their right to counsel in juvenile
+proceedings. In some states, such as Ohio, as many as 90 percent of
+children charged with criminal wrongdoing are not represented by a lawyer.
+As one public defender explained, “The kids come in with their parents,
+who want to get this dealt with as quickly as possible, and they say, ‘You
+did it, admit it.’ If people were informed about what could be done, they
+might actually ask for help.”67
+
+Bad Deal
+
+Almost no one ever goes to trial. Nearly all criminal cases are resolved
+through plea bargaining—a guilty plea by the defendant in exchange for
+some form of leniency by the prosecutor. Though it is not widely known,
+the prosecutor is the most powerful law enforcement official in the criminal
+justice system. One might think that judges are the most powerful, or even
+the police, but in reality the prosecutor holds the cards. It is the prosecutor,
+far more than any other criminal justice official, who holds the keys to the
+jailhouse door.
+After the police arrest someone, the prosecutor is in charge. Few rules
+constrain the exercise of his or her discretion. The prosecutor is free to
+dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all. The prosecutor is also free
+to file more charges against a defendant than can realistically be proven in
+court, so long as probable cause arguably exists—a practice known as
+overcharging.
+The practice of encouraging defendants to plead guilty to crimes, rather
+than affording them the benefit of a full trial, has always carried its risks
+and downsides. Never before in our history, though, have such an
+extraordinary number of people felt compelled to plead guilty, even if they
+are innocent, simply because the punishment for the minor, nonviolent
+offense with which they have been charged is so unbelievably severe. When
+prosecutors offer “only” three years in prison when the penalties defendants
+could receive if they took their case to trial would be five, ten, or twenty
+years—or life imprisonment—only extremely courageous (or foolish)
+defendents turn the offer down.
+The pressure to plead guilty to crimes has increased exponentially since
+the advent of the War on Drugs. In 1986, Congress passed The Anti-Drug
+Abuse Act, which established extremely long mandatory minimum prison
+terms for low-level drug dealing and possession of crack cocaine. The
+typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is
+
+five or ten years. By contrast, in other developed countries around the
+world, a first-time drug offense would merit no more than six months in
+jail, if jail time is imposed at all.68 State legislatures were eager to jump on
+the “get tough” bandwagon, passing harsh drug laws, as well as “three
+strikes” laws mandating a life sentence for those convicted of any third
+offense. These mandatory minimum statutory schemes have transferred an
+enormous amount of power from judges to prosecutors. Now, simply by
+charging someone with an offense carrying a mandatory sentence of ten to
+fifteen years or life, prosecutors are able to force people to plead guilty
+rather than risk a decade or more in prison. Prosecutors admit that they
+routinely charge people with crimes for which they technically have
+probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could ever win in
+court.69 They “load up” defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh
+sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and—
+here’s the kicker—to obtain testimony for a related case. Harsh sentencing
+laws encourage people to snitch.
+The number of snitches in drug cases has soared in recent years, partly
+because the government has tempted people to “cooperate” with law
+enforcement by offering cash, putting them “on payroll,” and promising
+cuts of seized drug assets, but also because ratting out co-defendants,
+friends, family, or acquaintances is often the only way to avoid a lengthy
+mandatory minimum sentence.70 In fact, under the federal sentencing
+guidelines, providing “substantial assistance” is often the only way
+defendants can hope to obtain a sentence below the mandatory minimum.
+The “assistance” provided by snitches is notoriously unreliable, as studies
+have documented countless informants who have fabricated stories about
+drug-related and other criminal activity in exchange for money or leniency
+in their pending criminal cases.71 While such conduct is deplorable, it is not
+difficult to understand. Who among us would not be tempted to lie if it was
+the only way to avoid a forty-year sentence for a minor drug crime?
+The pressure to plea-bargain and thereby “convict yourself” in exchange
+for some kind of leniency is not an accidental by-product of the mandatorysentencing regime. The U.S. Sentencing Commission itself has noted that
+“the value of a mandatory minimum sentence lies not in its imposition, but
+in its value as a bargaining chip to be given away in return for the resource-
+
+saving plea from the defendant to a more leniently sanctioned charge.”
+Describing severe mandatory sentences as a bargaining chip is a major
+understatement, given its potential for extracting guilty pleas from people
+who are innocent of any crime.
+It is impossible to know for certain how many innocent drug defendants
+convict themselves every year by accepting a plea bargain out of fear of
+mandatory sentences, or how many are convicted due to lying informants
+and paid witnesses, but reliable estimates of the number of innocent people
+currently in prison tend to range from 2 percent to 5 percent.72 While those
+numbers may sound small (and probably are underestimates), they translate
+into thousands of innocent people who are locked up, some of whom will
+die in prison. In fact, if only 1 percent of America’s prisoners are actually
+innocent of the crimes for which they have been convicted, that would
+mean tens of thousands of innocent people are currently languishing behind
+bars in the United States.
+The real point here, however, is not that innocent people are locked up.
+That has been true since penitentiaries first opened in America. The critical
+point is that thousands of people are swept into the criminal justice system
+every year pursuant to the drug war without much regard for their guilt or
+innocence. The police are allowed by the courts to conduct fishing
+expeditions for drugs on streets and freeways based on nothing more than a
+hunch. Homes may be searched for drugs based on a tip from an unreliable,
+confidential informant who is trading the information for money or to
+escape prison time. And once swept inside the system, people are often
+denied attorneys or meaningful representation and pressured into plea
+bargains by the threat of unbelievably harsh sentences—sentences for minor
+drug crimes that are higher than many countries impose on convicted
+murderers. This is the way the roundup works, and it works this way in
+virtually every major city in the United States.
+
+Time Served
+
+Once convicted of felony drug charges, one’s chances of being released
+from the system in short order are slim, at best. The elimination of judicial
+discretion through mandatory sentencing laws has forced judges to impose
+sentences for drug crimes that are often longer than those violent criminals
+receive. When judges have discretion, they may consider a defendant’s
+background and impose a lighter penalty if the defendant’s personal
+circumstances—extreme poverty or experience of abuse, for example—
+warrant it. This flexibility—which is important in all criminal cases—is
+especially important in drug cases, as studies have indicated that many drug
+defendants are using or selling to support an addiction.73 Referring a
+defendant to treatment, rather than sending him or her to prison, may well
+be the most prudent choice—saving government resources and potentially
+saving the defendant from a lifetime of addiction. Likewise, imposing a
+short prison sentence (or none at all) may increase the chances that the
+defendant will experience successful re-entry. A lengthy prison term may
+increase the odds that reentry will be extremely difficult, leading to relapse,
+and re-imprisonment. Mandatory drug sentencing laws strip judges of their
+traditional role of considering all relevant circumstances in an effort to do
+justice in the individual case.
+Nevertheless, harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders
+have been consistently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1982, the
+Supreme Court upheld forty years of imprisonment for possession and an
+attempt to sell 9 ounces of marijuana.74 Several years later, in Harmelin v.
+Michigan, the Court upheld a sentence of life imprisonment for a defendant
+with no prior convictions who attempted to sell 672 grams (approximately
+23 ounces) of crack cocaine.75 The Court found the sentences imposed in
+those cases “reasonably proportionate” to the offenses committed—and not
+“cruel and unusual” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. This ruling was
+remarkable given that, prior to the Drug Reform Act of 1986, the longest
+
+sentence Congress had ever imposed for possession of any drug in any
+amount was one year. A life sentence for a first-time drug offense is
+unheard of in the rest of the developed world. Even for high-end drug
+crimes, most countries impose sentences that are measured in months,
+rather than years. For example, a conviction for selling a kilogram of heroin
+yields a mandatory ten-year sentence in U.S. federal court, compared with
+six months in prison in England.76 Remarkably, in the United States, a life
+sentence is deemed perfectly appropriate for a first-time drug offender.
+The most famous Supreme Court decision upholding mandatory
+minimum sentences is Lockyer v. Andrade.77 In that case, the Court rejected
+constitutional challenges to sentences of twenty-five years without parole
+for a man who stole three golf clubs from a pro shop, and fifty years
+without parole for another man for stealing children’s videotapes from a
+Kmart store. These sentences were imposed pursuant to California’s
+controversial three strikes law, which mandates a sentence of twenty-five
+years to life for recidivists convicted of a third felony, no matter how minor.
+Writing for the Court’s majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
+acknowledged that the sentences were severe but concluded that they are
+not grossly disproportionate to the offense, and therefore do not violate the
+Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishments. In dissent,
+Justice David H. Souter retorted, “If Andrade’s sentence [for stealing
+videotapes] is not grossly disproportionate, the principle has no meaning.”
+Similarly, counsel for one of the defendants, University of Southern
+California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, noted that the Court’s
+reasoning makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to challenge any
+recidivist sentencing law: “If these sentences aren’t cruel and unusual
+punishment, what would be?”78
+Mandatory sentencing laws are frequently justified as necessary to keep
+“violent criminals” off the streets, yet these penalties are imposed most
+often against drug offenders and those who are guilty of nonviolent crimes.
+In fact, under three-strikes regimes, such as the one in California, a “repeat
+offender” could be someone who had a single prior case decades ago. First
+and second strikes are counted by individual charges, rather than individual
+cases, so a single case can result in first, second, and even third strikes. For
+example, a person arrested for possession of a substantial amount of
+
+marijuana, as well as a tiny amount of cocaine, could be charged with at
+least two separate felonies: possession with intent to sell marijuana, as well
+as possession of cocaine. Pleading guilty to each of these crimes would
+result in “two strikes.” Fifteen years later, if the individual is arrested for
+passing a bad check, he or she could be facing a third strike and a life
+sentence. To make matters worse, sentences for each charge can run
+consecutively, so a defendant can easily face a sentence of fifty, seventyfive, or one hundred years to life arising from a single case. In fact, fifty
+years to life was the actual sentence given to Leandro Andrade, whose
+sentence for stealing videotapes was upheld by the Supreme Court.
+The clear majority of those subject to harsh mandatory minimum
+sentences in the federal system are drug offenders. Most are low-level,
+minor drug dealers—not “drug kingpins.” The stories are legion. Marcus
+Boyd was arrested after selling 3.9 grams of crack cocaine to a confidential
+informant working with a regional drug task force. At the time of his arrest,
+Marcus was twenty-four years old and had been addicted to drugs for six
+years, beginning shortly after his mother’s death and escalating throughout
+his early twenties. He met the informant through a close family friend,
+someone he trusted. At sentencing, the judge based the drug quantity
+calculation on testimony from the informant and another witness, who both
+claimed they bought crack from Marcus on other occasions. As a result,
+Marcus was held accountable for 37.4 grams (the equivalent of 1.3 ounces)
+based on the statements made by the informant and the other witness. He
+was sentenced to more than fourteen years in prison. His two children were
+six and seven years old at the time of his sentencing. They will be adults
+when he is released.79
+Weldon Angelos is another casualty of the drug war. He will spend the
+rest of his life in prison for three marijuana sales. Angelos, a twenty-fouryear-old record producer, possessed a weapon—which he did not use or
+threaten to use—at the time of the sales. Under federal sentencing
+guidelines, however, the sentencing judge was obligated to impose a fiftyfive-year mandatory minimum sentence. Upon doing so, the judge noted his
+reluctance to send the young man away for life for three marijuana sales.
+He said from the bench, “The Court believes that to sentence Mr. Angelos
+to prison for the rest of his life is unjust, cruel, and even irrational.”80
+
+Some federal judges, including conservative judges, have quit in protest
+of federal drug laws and sentencing guidelines. Face-to-face with those
+whose lives hang in the balance, they are far closer to the human tragedy
+occasioned by the drug war than the legislators who write the laws from
+afar. Judge Lawrence Irving, a Reagan appointee, noted upon his
+retirement: “If I remain on the bench, I have no choice but to follow the
+law. I just can’t, in good conscience, continue to do this.”81 Other judges,
+such as Judge Jack Weinstein, publicly refused to take any more drug cases,
+describing “a sense of depression about much of the cruelty I have been a
+party to in connection with the ‘war on drugs.’”82 Another Reagan
+appointee, Judge Stanley Marshall, told a reporter, “I’ve always been
+considered a fairly harsh sentencer, but it’s killing me that I’m sending so
+many low-level offenders away for all this time.”83 He made the statement
+after imposing a five-year sentence on a mother in Washington, D.C., who
+was convicted of “possession” of crack found by police in a locked box that
+her son had hidden in her attic. In California, reporters described a similar
+event:
+U.S. District Judge William W. Schwarzer, a Republican appointee, is
+not known as a light sentencer. Thus it was that everyone in his San
+Francisco courtroom watched in stunned silence as Schwarzer, known
+for his stoic demeanor, choked with tears as he anguished over
+sentencing Richard Anderson, a first offender Oakland longshoreman,
+to ten years in prison without parole for what appeared to be a minor
+mistake in judgment in having given a ride to a drug dealer for a
+meeting with an undercover agent.84
+Even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has condemned the harsh
+mandatory minimum sentences imposed on drug offenders. He told
+attorneys gathered for the American Bar Association’s 2003 annual
+conference: “Our [prison] resources are misspent, our punishments too
+severe, our sentences too loaded.” He then added, “I can accept neither the
+necessity nor the wisdom of federal mandatory minimum sentences. In all
+too many cases, mandatory minimum sentences are unjust.”85
+
+The Prison Label
+
+Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during
+the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess
+that our prison population leapt from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million
+in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not
+changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws—particularly the
+dramatic increases in the length of prison sentences—that have been
+responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One
+study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to
+2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes.86
+Because harsh sentencing is the primary cause of the prison explosion,
+one might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of
+prison sentences would effectively dismantle this new system of control.
+That view, however, is mistaken. This system depends on the prison label,
+not prison time.
+Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel
+universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal,
+and privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It
+does not matter whether you have actually spent time in prison; your
+second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded a felon. Most
+people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there
+were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering
+5.1 million people under “community correctional supervision”—i.e., on
+probation or parole.87 Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major
+impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of inferiority
+—the felony record—that relegates people for their entire lives, to secondclass status. As described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of
+escape. Barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private
+landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to “check the box” indicating a
+felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job, and
+
+denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose only crime is
+drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for recreational use
+find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and economy—
+permanently.
+No wonder, then, that most people labeled felons find their way back into
+prison. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about 30 percent
+of released prisoners in its sample were rearrested within six months of
+release. 88 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least
+once for a new offense.89 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent
+crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property offenses, drug offenses,
+and offenses against the public order.90
+For those released on probation or parole, the risks are especially high.
+They are subject to regular surveillance and monitoring by the police and
+may be stopped and searched (with or without their consent) for any reason
+or no reason at all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested
+(again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant scrutiny by law
+enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest
+because their lives are governed by additional rules that do not apply to
+everyone else. Myriad restrictions on their travel and behavior (such as a
+prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various
+requirements of probation and parole (such as paying fines and meeting
+with probation officers), create opportunities for arrest. Violation of these
+special rules can land someone right back in prison. In fact, that is what
+happens a good deal of the time.
+The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and
+probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With
+respect to parole, in 1980, only 1 percent of all prison admissions were
+parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35 percent) of
+prison admissions resulted from parole violations.91 To put the matter more
+starkly: About as many people were returned to prison for parole violations
+in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.92 Of all parole
+violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new
+conviction; two-thirds were returned for a technical violation such as
+missing appointments with a parole officer, failing to maintain employment,
+or failing a drug test.93 In this system of control, failing to cope well with
+
+one’s exile status is treated like a crime. If you fail, after being released
+from prison with a criminal record—your personal badge of inferiority—to
+remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get
+depressed and miss an appointment with your parole officer (or if you
+cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to
+prison—where society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong.
+This disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison,
+trapped by their second-class status, has been described by Loïc Wacquant
+as a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality.”94 Hundreds of thousands of
+people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked
+out of the mainstream society and economy. Most ultimately return to
+prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released again, only
+to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before,
+unable to cope with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent
+pariah status.
+Reducing the amount of time people spend behind bars—by eliminating
+harsh mandatory minimums—will alleviate some of the unnecessary
+suffering caused by this system, but it will not disturb the closed circuit.
+Those labeled felons will continue to cycle in and out of prison, subject to
+perpetual surveillance by the police, and unable to integrate into the
+mainstream society and economy. Unless the number of people who are
+labeled felons is dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that
+keep ex-offenders marginalized from the mainstream society and economy
+are eliminated, the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous
+undercaste.
+
+3
+The Color of Justice
+Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African
+American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in
+Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American.
+You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two
+small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney
+urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the
+prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your
+innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty
+so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years
+of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to
+pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now
+branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may
+be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve
+years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless,
+your children will be taken from you and put in foster care.
+A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not
+plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the
+testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however,
+are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your
+children.
+Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African
+American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan,
+Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the
+funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the
+officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried.
+The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify
+against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing
+any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because
+
+of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a
+month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are
+technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration,
+you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to
+mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl.
+This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not
+isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and
+Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation,
+African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are
+subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and
+scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods. In the drug war,
+the enemy is racially defined. The law enforcement methods described in
+chapter 2 have been employed almost exclusively in poor communities of
+color, resulting in jaw-dropping numbers of African Americans and Latinos
+filling our nation’s prisons and jails every year. We are told by drug
+warriors that the enemy in this war is a thing—drugs—not a group of
+people, but the facts prove otherwise.
+Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African
+Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.3
+In at least fifteen states, blacks are admitted to prison on drug charges at a
+rate from twenty to fifty-seven times greater than that of white men.4 In
+fact, nationwide, the rate of incarceration for African American drug
+offenders dwarfs the rate of whites. When the War on Drugs gained full
+steam in the mid-1980s, prison admissions for African Americans
+skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, and then increasing steadily
+until it reached in 2000 a level more than twenty-six times the level in
+1983.5 The number of 2000 drug admissions for Latinos was twenty-two
+times the number of 1983 admissions.6 Whites have been admitted to prison
+for drug offenses at increased rates as well—the number of whites admitted
+for drug offenses in 2000 was eight times the number admitted in 1983—
+but their relative numbers are small compared to blacks’ and Latinos’.7
+Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are
+white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been
+black or Latino.8 In recent years, rates of black imprisonment for drug
+offenses have dipped somewhat—declining approximately 25 percent from
+
+their zenith in the mid-1990s—but it remains the case that African
+Americans are incarcerated at grossly disproportionate rates throughout the
+United States.9
+There is, of course, an official explanation for all of this: crime rates.
+This explanation has tremendous appeal—before you know the facts—for it
+is consistent with, and reinforces, dominant racial narratives about crime
+and criminality dating back to slavery. The truth, however, is that rates and
+patterns of drug crime do not explain the glaring racial disparities in our
+criminal justice system. People of all races use and sell illegal drugs at
+remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant differences in the surveys
+to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth,
+are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color.11 One
+study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug
+Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of
+black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students,
+and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.12 That same survey
+revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school
+seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse
+reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more
+likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.13 Thus the
+very same year Human Rights Watch was reporting that African Americans
+were being arrested and imprisoned at unprecedented rates, government
+data revealed that blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes
+than whites and that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial
+or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion
+that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the
+data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related
+emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.14
+The notion that whites comprise the vast majority of drug users and
+dealers—and may well be more likely than other racial groups to commit
+drug crimes—may seem implausible to some, given the media imagery we
+are fed on a daily basis and the racial composition of our prisons and jails.
+Upon reflection, however, the prevalence of white drug crime—including
+drug dealing—should not be surprising. After all, where do whites get their
+illegal drugs? Do they all drive to the ghetto to purchase them from
+
+somebody standing on a street corner? No. Studies consistently indicate that
+drug markets, like American society generally, reflect our nation’s racial
+and socioeconomic boundaries. Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to
+blacks.15 University students tend to sell to each other.16 Rural whites, for
+their part, don’t make a special trip to the ’hood to purchase marijuana.
+They buy it from somebody down the road.17 White high school students
+typically buy drugs from white classmates, friends, or older relatives. Even
+Barry McCaffrey, former director of the White House Office of National
+Drug Control Policy, once remarked, if your child bought drugs, “it was
+from a student of their own race generally.”18 The notion that most illegal
+drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is pure fiction. Drug trafficking
+occurs there, but it occurs everywhere else in America as well.
+Nevertheless, black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges
+at a rate that is more than thirteen times higher than white men.19 The racial
+bias inherent in the drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men
+was behind bars in 2006, compared with 1 in 106 white men.20 For young
+black men, the statistics are even worse. One in 9 black men between the
+ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006, and far more were
+under some form of penal control—such as probation or parole.21 These
+gross racial disparities simply cannot be explained by rates of illegal drug
+activity among African Americans.
+What, then, does explain the extraordinary racial disparities in our
+criminal justice system? Old-fashioned racism seems out of the question.
+Politicians and law enforcement officials today rarely endorse racially
+biased practices, and most of them fiercely condemn racial discrimination
+of any kind. When accused of racial bias, police and prosecutors—like most
+Americans—express horror and outrage. Forms of race discrimination that
+were open and notorious for centuries were transformed in the 1960s and
+1970s into something un-American—an affront to our newly conceived
+ethic of colorblindness. By the early 1980s, survey data indicated that 90
+percent of whites thought black and white children should attend the same
+schools, 71 percent disagreed with the idea that whites have a right to keep
+blacks out of their neighborhoods, 80 percent indicated they would support
+a black candidate for president, and 66 percent opposed laws prohibiting
+intermarriage. 22 Although far fewer supported specific policies designed to
+
+achieve racial equality or integration (such as busing), the mere fact that
+large majorities of whites were, by the early 1980s, supporting the
+antidiscrimination principle reflected a profound shift in racial attitudes.
+The margin of support for colorblind norms has only increased since then.
+This dramatically changed racial climate has led defenders of mass
+incarceration to insist that our criminal justice system, whatever its past
+sins, is now largely fair and nondiscriminatory. They point to violent crime
+rates in the African American community as a justification for the
+staggering number of black men who find themselves behind bars. Black
+men, they say, have much higher rates of violent crime; that’s why so many
+of them are locked in prisons.
+Typically, this is where the discussion ends.
+The problem with this abbreviated analysis is that violent crime is not
+responsible for the prison boom. As numerous researchers have shown,
+violent crime rates have fluctuated over the years and bear little relationship
+to incarceration rates—which have soared during the past three decades
+regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down.23 Today violent
+crime rates are at historically low levels, yet incarceration rates continue to
+climb.
+Murder convictions tend to receive a tremendous amount of media
+attention, which feeds the public’s sense that violent crime is rampant and
+forever on the rise. But like violent crime in general, the murder rate cannot
+explain the prison boom. Homicide convictions account for a tiny fraction
+of the growth in the prison population. In the federal system, for example,
+homicide offenders account for 0.4 percent of the past decade’s growth in
+the federal prison population, while drug offenders account for nearly 61
+percent of that expansion.24 In the state system, less than 3 percent of new
+court commitments to state prison typically involve people convicted of
+homicide. 25 As much as a third of state prisoners are violent offenders, but
+that statistic can easily be misinterpreted. Violent offenders tend to get
+longer prison sentences than nonviolent offenders, and therefore comprise a
+much larger share of the prison population than they would if they had
+earlier release dates. The uncomfortable reality is that convictions for drug
+offenses—not violent crime—are the single most important cause of the
+
+prison boom in the United States, and people of color are convicted of drug
+offenses at rates out of all proportion to their drug crimes.
+These facts may still leave some readers unsatisfied. The idea that the
+criminal justice system discriminates in such a terrific fashion when few
+people openly express or endorse racial discrimination may seem farfetched, if not absurd. How could the War on Drugs operate in a
+discriminatory manner, on such a large scale, when hardly anyone
+advocates or engages in explicit race discrimination? That question is the
+subject of this chapter. As we shall see, despite the colorblind rhetoric and
+fanfare of recent years, the design of the drug war effectively guarantees
+that those who are swept into the nation’s new undercaste are largely black
+and brown.
+This sort of claim invites skepticism. Nonracial explanations and excuses
+for the systematic mass incarceration of people of color are plentiful. It is
+the genius of the new system of control that it can always be defended on
+nonracial grounds, given the rarity of a noose or a racial slur in connection
+with any particular criminal case. Moreover, because blacks and whites are
+almost never similarly situated (given extreme racial segregation in housing
+and disparate life experiences), trying to “control for race” in an effort to
+evaluate whether the mass incarceration of people of color is really about
+race or something else—anything else—is difficult. But it is not impossible.
+A bit of common sense is overdue in public discussions about racial bias
+in the criminal justice system. The great debate over whether black men
+have been targeted by the criminal justice system or unfairly treated in the
+War on Drugs often overlooks the obvious. What is painfully obvious when
+one steps back from individual cases and specific policies is that the system
+of mass incarceration operates with stunning efficiency to sweep people of
+color off the streets, lock them in cages, and then release them into an
+inferior second-class status. Nowhere is this more true than in the War on
+Drugs.
+The central question, then, is how exactly does a formally colorblind
+criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather
+easily, it turns out. The process occurs in two stages. The first step is to
+grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to
+stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that
+conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free
+
+reign. Unbridled discretion inevitably creates huge racial disparities. Then,
+the damning step: Close the courthouse doors to all claims by defendants
+and private litigants that the criminal justice system operates in racially
+discriminatory fashion. Demand that anyone who wants to challenge racial
+bias in the system offer, in advance, clear proof that the racial disparities are
+the product of intentional racial discrimination—i.e., the work of a bigot.
+This evidence will almost never be available in the era of colorblindness,
+because everyone knows—but does not say—that the enemy in the War on
+Drugs can be identified by race. This simple design has helped to produce
+one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world
+has ever seen.
+
+Picking and Choosing—The Role of Discretion
+
+Chapter 2 described the first step in some detail, including the legal rules
+that grant police the discretion and authority to stop, interrogate, and search
+anyone, anywhere, provided they get “consent” from the targeted
+individual. It also examined the legal framework that affords prosecutors
+extraordinary discretion to charge or not charge, plea bargain or not, and
+load up defendants with charges carrying the threat of harsh mandatory
+sentences, in order to force guilty pleas, even in cases in which the
+defendants may well be innocent. These rules have made it possible for law
+enforcement agencies to boost dramatically their rates of drug arrests and
+convictions, even in communities where drug crime is stable or declining.26
+But that is not all. These rules have also guaranteed racially discriminatory
+results.
+The reason is this: Drug-law enforcement is unlike most other types of
+law enforcement. When a violent crime or a robbery or a trespass occurs,
+someone usually calls the police. There is a clear victim and perpetrator.
+Someone is hurt or harmed in some way and wants the offender punished.
+But with drug crime, neither the purchaser of the drugs nor the seller has
+any incentive to contact law enforcement. It is consensual activity. Equally
+important, it is popular. The clear majority of Americans of all races have
+violated drug laws in their lifetime. In fact, in any given year, more than one
+in ten Americans violate drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the
+politics of the drug war), only a small fraction are arrested, convicted, and
+incarcerated. In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug
+users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to
+prison for a drug offense.27
+The ubiquity of illegal drug activity, combined with its consensual
+nature, requires a far more proactive approach by law enforcement than
+what is required to address ordinary street crime. It is impossible for law
+enforcement to identify and arrest every drug criminal. Strategic choices
+
+must be made about whom to target and what tactics to employ. Police and
+prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs—and some initially opposed
+it—but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too
+attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if
+we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be
+taken prisoner?
+That question was not difficult to answer, given the political and social
+context. As discussed in chapter 1, the Reagan administration launched a
+media campaign a few years after the drug war was announced in an effort
+to publicize horror stories involving black crack users and crack dealers in
+ghetto communities. Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets
+when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years
+later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build
+support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health
+matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a
+grave threat to the national order.
+Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell show in their research how the
+media imagery surrounding cocaine changed as the practice of smoking
+cocaine came to be associated with poor blacks.28 Early in the 1980s, the
+typical cocaine-related story focused on white recreational users who
+snorted the drug in its powder form. These stories generally relied on news
+sources associated with the drug treatment industry, such as rehabilitation
+clinics, and emphasized the possibility of recovery. By 1985, however, as
+the War on Drugs moved into high gear, this frame was supplanted by a
+new “siege paradigm,” in which transgressors were poor, nonwhite users
+and dealers of crack cocaine. Law enforcement officials assumed the role of
+drug “experts,” emphasizing the need for law and order responses—a
+crackdown on those associated with the drug. These findings are consistent
+with numerous other studies, including a study of network television news
+from 1990 and 1991, which found that a predictable “us against them”
+frame was used in the news stories, with “us” being white, suburban
+America, and “them” being black Americans and a few corrupted whites.29
+The media bonanza inspired by the administration’s campaign solidified
+in the public imagination the image of the black drug criminal. Although
+explicitly racial political appeals remained rare, the calls for “war” at a time
+
+when the media was saturated with images of black drug crime left little
+doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs and exactly what he
+looked like. Jerome Miller, the former executive director of the National
+Center for Institutions and Alternatives, described the dynamic this way:
+“There are certain code words that allow you never to have to say ‘race,’
+but everybody knows that’s what you mean and ‘crime’ is one of those....
+So when we talk about locking up more and more people, what we’re really
+talking about is locking up more and more black men.”30 Another
+commentator noted, “It is unnecessary to speak directly of race [today]
+because speaking about crime is talking about race.”31 Indeed, not long
+after the drug war was ramped up in the media and political discourse,
+almost no one imagined that drug criminals could be anything other than
+black.
+A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would
+you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that
+person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of
+Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a
+black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.32 These
+results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African
+Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and
+they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the
+vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a
+white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same
+group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.
+There is no reason to believe that the survey results would have been any
+different if police officers or prosecutors—rather than the general public—
+had been the respondents. Law enforcement officials, no less than the rest
+of us, have been exposed to the racially charged political rhetoric and media
+imagery associated with the drug war. In fact, for nearly three decades,
+news stories regarding virtually all street crime have disproportionately
+featured African American offenders. One study suggests that the standard
+crime news “script” is so prevalent and so thoroughly racialized that
+viewers imagine a black perpetrator even when none exists. In that study,
+60 percent of viewers who saw a story with no image falsely recalled seeing
+
+one, and 70 percent of those viewers believed the perpetrator to be African
+American.33
+Decades of cognitive bias research demonstrates that both unconscious
+and conscious biases lead to discriminatory actions, even when an
+individual does not want to discriminate.34 The quotation commonly
+attributed to Nietzsche, that “there is no immaculate perception,” perfectly
+captures how cognitive schemas—thought structures—influence what we
+notice and how the things we notice get interpreted.35 Studies have shown
+that racial schemas operate not only as part of conscious, rational
+deliberations, but also automatically—without conscious awareness or
+intent.36 One study, for example, involved a video game that placed
+photographs of white and black individuals holding either a gun or other
+object (such as a wallet, soda can, or cell phone) into various photographic
+backgrounds. Participants were told to decide as quickly as possible
+whether to shoot the target. Consistent with earlier studies, participants
+were more likely to mistake a black target as armed when he was not, and
+mistake a white target as unarmed, when in fact he was armed.37 This
+pattern of discrimination reflected automatic, unconscious thought
+processes, not careful deliberations.
+Most striking, perhaps, is the overwhelming evidence that implicit bias
+measures are disassociated from explicit bias measures.38 In other words,
+the fact that you may honestly believe that you are not biased against
+African Americans, and that you may even have black friends or relatives,
+does not mean that you are free from unconscious bias. Implicit bias tests
+may still show that you hold negative attitudes and stereotypes about
+blacks, even though you do not believe you do and do not want to.39 In the
+study described above, for example, black participants showed an amount
+of “shooter bias” similar to that shown by whites.40 Not surprisingly, people
+who have the greatest explicit bias (as measured by self-reported answers to
+survey questions) against a racial group tend also to have the greatest
+implicit bias against them, and vice versa.41 Yet there is often a weak
+correlation between degrees of explicit and implicit bias; many people who
+think they are not biased prove when tested to have relatively high levels of
+bias.42 Unfortunately, a fairly consistent finding is that punitiveness and
+hostility almost always increase when people are primed—even
+
+subliminally—with images or verbal cues associated with African
+Americans. In fact, studies indicate that people become increasingly harsh
+when an alleged criminal is darker and more “stereotypically black”; they
+are more lenient when the accused is lighter and appears more
+stereotypically white. This is true of jurors as well as law enforcement
+officers.43
+Viewed as a whole, the relevant research by cognitive and social
+psychologists to date suggests that racial bias in the drug war was
+inevitable, once a public consensus was constructed by political and media
+elites that drug crime is black and brown. Once blackness and crime,
+especially drug crime, became conflated in the public consciousness, the
+“criminalblackman,” as termed by legal scholar Kathryn Russell, would
+inevitably become the primary target of law enforcement.44 Some
+discrimination would be conscious and deliberate, as many honestly and
+consciously would believe that black men deserve extra scrutiny and
+harsher treatment. Much racial bias, though, would operate unconsciously
+and automatically—even among law enforcement officials genuinely
+committed to equal treatment under the law.
+Whether or not one believes racial discrimination in the drug war was
+inevitable, it should have been glaringly obvious in the 1980s and 1990s
+that an extraordinarily high risk of racial bias in the administration of
+criminal justice was present, given the way in which all crime had been
+framed in the media and in political discourse. Awareness of this risk did
+not require intimate familiarity with cognitive bias research. Anyone
+possessing a television set during this period would likely have had some
+awareness of the extent to which black men had been demonized in the War
+on Drugs.
+The risk that African Americans would be unfairly targeted should have
+been of special concern to the U.S. Supreme Court—the one branch of
+government charged with the responsibility of protecting “discrete and
+insular minorities” from the excesses of majoritarian democracy, and
+guaranteeing constitutional rights for groups deemed unpopular or subject
+to prejudice.45 Yet when the time came for the Supreme Court to devise the
+legal rules that would govern the War on Drugs, the Court adopted rules
+that would maximize—not minimize—the amount of racial discrimination
+
+that would likely occur. It then closed the courthouse doors to claims of
+racial bias.
+Whren v. United States is a case in point. As noted in chapter 2, the Court
+held in Whren that police officers are free to use minor traffic violations as
+an excuse to stop motorists for drug investigations—even when there is no
+evidence whatsoever that the motorist has engaged in drug crime. So long
+as a minor traffic violation—such as failing to use a turn signal, exceeding
+the speed limit by a mile or two, tracking improperly between the lines, or
+stopping on a pedestrian walkway—can be identified, police are free to stop
+motorists for the purpose of engaging in a fishing expedition for drugs.
+Such police conduct, the Court concluded, does not violate the Fourth
+Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”46
+For good reason, the petitioners in Whren argued that granting police
+officers such broad discretion to investigate virtually anyone for drug
+crimes created a high risk that police would exercise their discretion in a
+racially discriminatory manner. With no requirement that any evidence of
+drug activity actually be present before launching a drug investigation,
+police officers’ snap judgments regarding who seems like a drug criminal
+would likely be influenced by prevailing racial stereotypes and bias. They
+urged the Court to prohibit the police from stopping motorists for the
+purpose of drug investigations unless the officers actually had reason to
+believe a motorist was committing, or had committed, a drug crime. Failing
+to do so, they argued, was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment and
+would expose African Americans to a high risk of discriminatory stops and
+searches.
+Not only did the Court reject the petitioners’ central claim—that using
+traffic stops as a pretext for drug investigations is unconstitutional—it ruled
+that claims of racial bias could not be brought under the Fourth
+Amendment. In other words, the Court barred any victim of race
+discrimination by the police from even alleging a claim of racial bias under
+the Fourth Amendment. According to the Court, whether or not police
+discriminate on the basis of race when making traffic stops is irrelevant to a
+consideration of whether their conduct is “reasonable” under the Fourth
+Amendment.
+
+The Court did offer one caveat, however. It indicated that victims of race
+discrimination could still state a claim under the equal protection clause of
+the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees “equal treatment under the
+laws.” This suggestion may have been reassuring to those unfamiliar with
+the Court’s equal protection jurisprudence. But for those who have actually
+tried to prove race discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment, the
+Court’s remark amounted to cruel irony. As we shall see below, the
+Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible to challenge racial bias in
+the criminal justice system under the Fourteenth Amendment, and it has
+barred litigation of such claims under federal civil rights laws as well.
+
+Closing the Courthouse Doors—McCleskey v. Kemp
+
+First, consider sentencing. In 1987, when media hysteria regarding black
+drug crime was at fever pitch and the evening news was saturated with
+images of black criminals shackled in courtrooms, the Supreme Court ruled
+in McCleskey v. Kemp that racial bias in sentencing, even if shown through
+credible statistical evidence, could not be challenged under the Fourteenth
+Amendment in the absence of clear evidence of conscious, discriminatory
+intent. On its face, the case appeared to be a straightforward challenge to
+Georgia’s death penalty scheme. Once the Court’s opinion was released,
+however, it became clear the case was about much more than the death
+penalty. The real issue at hand was whether—and to what extent—the
+Supreme Court would tolerate racial bias in the criminal justice system as a
+whole. The Court’s answer was that racial bias would be tolerated—
+virtually to any degree—so long as no one admitted it.
+Warren McCleskey was a black man facing the death penalty for killing a
+white police officer during an armed robbery in Georgia. Represented by
+the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, McCleskey challenged his
+death sentence on the grounds that Georgia’s death penalty scheme was
+infected with racial bias and thus violated the Fourteenth and Eighth
+Amendments. In support of his claim, he offered an exhaustive study of
+more than two thousand murder cases in Georgia. The study was known as
+the Baldus study—named after Professor David Baldus, who was its lead
+author. The study found that defendants charged with killing white victims
+received the death penalty eleven times more often than defendants charged
+with killing black victims. Georgia prosecutors seemed largely to blame for
+the disparity; they sought the death penalty in 70 percent of cases involving
+black defendants and white victims, but only 19 percent of cases involving
+white defendants and black victims.47
+Sensitive to the fact that numerous factors besides race can influence the
+decision making of prosecutors, judges, and juries, Baldus and his
+
+colleagues subjected the raw data to highly sophisticated statistical analysis
+to see if nonracial factors might explain the disparities. Yet even after
+accounting for thirty-five nonracial variables, the researchers found that
+defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3 times more likely to
+receive a death sentence than defendants charged with killing blacks. Black
+defendants, like McCleskey, who killed white victims had the highest
+chance of being sentenced to death in Georgia.48
+The case was closely watched by criminal lawyers and civil rights
+lawyers nationwide. The statistical evidence of discrimination that Baldus
+had developed was the strongest ever presented to a court regarding race
+and criminal sentencing. If McCleskey’s evidence was not enough to prove
+discrimination in the absence of some kind of racist utterance, what would
+be?
+By a one-vote margin, the Court rejected McCleskey’s claims under the
+Fourteenth Amendment, insisting that unless McCleskey could prove that
+the prosecutor in his particular case had sought the death penalty because of
+race or that the jury had imposed it for racial reasons, the statistical
+evidence of race discrimination in Georgia’s death penalty system did not
+prove unequal treatment under the law. The Court accepted the statistical
+evidence as valid but insisted that evidence of conscious, racial bias in
+McCleskey’s individual case was necessary to prove unlawful
+discrimination. In the absence of such evidence, patterns of discrimination
+—even patterns as shocking as demonstrated by the Baldus study—did not
+violate the Fourteenth Amendment.
+In erecting this high standard, the Court knew full well that the standard
+could not be met absent an admission that a prosecutor or judge acted
+because of racial bias. The majority opinion openly acknowledged that
+longstanding rules generally bar litigants from obtaining discovery from the
+prosecution regarding charging patterns and motives, and that similar rules
+forbid introduction of evidence of jury deliberations even when a juror has
+chosen to make deliberations public.49 The very evidence that the Court
+demanded in McCleskey—evidence of deliberate bias in his individual case
+—would almost always be unavailable and/or inadmissible due to
+procedural rules that shield jurors and prosecutors from scrutiny. This
+
+dilemma was of little concern to the Court. It closed the courthouse doors to
+claims of racial bias in sentencing.
+There is good reason to believe that, despite appearances, the McCleskey
+decision was not really about the death penalty at all; rather, the Court’s
+opinion was driven by a desire to immunize the entire criminal justice
+system from claims of racial bias. The best evidence in support of this view
+can be found at the end of the majority opinion where the Court states that
+discretion plays a neccessary role in the implementation of the criminal
+justice system, and that discrimination is an inevitable by-product of
+discretion. Racial discrimination, the Court seemed to suggest, was
+something that simply must be tolerated in the criminal justice system,
+provided no one admits to racial bias.
+The majority observed that significant racial disparities had been found
+in other criminal settings beyond the death penalty, and that McCleskey’s
+case implicitly calls into question the integrity of the entire system. In the
+Court’s words: “Taken to its logical conclusion, [Warren McCleskey’s
+claim] throws into serious question the principles that underlie our criminal
+justice system. . . . [I]f we accepted McCleskey’s claim that racial bias has
+impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be
+faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty.”50 The Court openly
+worried that other actors in the criminal justice system might also face
+scrunity for allegedly biased decision-making if similar claims of racial bias
+in the system were allowed to proceed. Driven by these concerns, the Court
+rejected McCleskey’s claim that Georgia’s death penalty system violates the
+Eighth Amendment’s ban on arbitrary punishment, framing the critical
+question as whether the Baldus study demonstrated a “constitutionally
+unacceptable risk” of discrimination. Its answer was no. The Court deemed
+the risk of racial bias in Georgia’s capital sentencing scheme
+“constitutionally acceptable.” Justice Brennan pointedly noted in his dissent
+that the Court’s opinion “seems to suggest a fear of too much justice.”51
+
+Cracked Up—Discriminatory Sentencing in the War on Drugs
+
+Anyone who doubts the devastating impact of McCleskey v. Kemp on
+African American defendants throughout the criminal justice system,
+including those ensnared by the War on Drugs, need only ask Edward Clary.
+Two months after his eighteenth birthday, Clary was stopped and searched
+in the St. Louis airport because he “looked like” a drug courier. At the time,
+he was returning home from visiting some friends in California. One of
+them persuaded him to take some drugs back home to St. Louis. Clary had
+never attempted to deal drugs before, and he had no criminal record.
+During the search, the police found crack cocaine and promptly arrested
+him. He was convicted in federal court and sentenced under federal laws
+that punish crack offenses one hundred times more severely than offenses
+involving powder cocaine. A conviction for the sale of five hundred grams
+of powder cocaine triggers a five-year mandatory sentence, while only five
+grams of crack triggers the same sentence. Because Clary had been caught
+with more than fifty grams of crack (less than two ounces), the sentencing
+judge believed he had no choice but to sentence him—an eighteen-year-old,
+first-time offender—to a minimum of ten years in federal prison.
+Clary, like defendants in other crack cases, challenged the
+constitutionality of the hundred-to-one ratio. His lawyers argued that the
+law is arbitrary and irrational, because it imposes such vastly different
+penalties on two forms of the same substance. They also argued that the law
+discriminates against African Americans, because the majority of those
+charged with crimes involving crack at that time were black (approximately
+93 percent of convicted crack offenders were black, 5 percent were white),
+whereas powder cocaine offenders were predominantly white.
+Every federal appellate court to have considered these claims had
+rejected them on the ground that Congress—rightly or wrongly—believed
+that crack was more dangerous to society, a view supported by the
+testimony of some drug-abuse “experts” and police officers. The fact that
+
+most of the evidence in support of any disparity had since been discredited
+was deemed irrelevant; what mattered was whether the law had seemed
+rational at the time it was adopted. Congress, the courts concluded, is free
+to amend the law if circumstances have changed.
+Courts also had rejected claims that crack sentencing laws were racially
+discriminatory, largely on the ground that the Supreme Court’s decision in
+McCleskey v. Kemp precluded such a result. In the years following
+McCleskey , lower courts consistently rejected claims of race discrimination
+in the criminal justice system, finding that gross racial disparities do not
+merit strict scrutiny in the absence of evidence of explicit race
+discrimination—the very evidence unavailable in the era of colorblindness.
+Judge Clyde Cahill of the Federal District of Missouri, an African
+American judge assigned Clary’s case, boldly challenged the prevailing
+view that courts are powerless to address forms of race discrimination that
+are not overtly hostile. Cahill declared the hundred-to-one ratio racially
+discriminatory in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, notwithstanding
+McCleskey .52 Although no admissions of racial bias or racist intent could
+be found in the record, Judge Cahill believed race was undeniably a factor
+in the crack sentencing laws and policies. He traced the history of the gettough movement and concluded that fear coupled with unconscious racism
+had led to a lynch-mob mentality and a desire to control crime—and those
+deemed responsible for it—at any cost. Cahill acknowledged that many
+people may not believe they are motivated by discriminatory attitudes but
+argued that we all have internalized fear of young black men, a fear
+reinforced by media imagery that has helped to create a national image of
+the young black male as a criminal. “The presumption of innocence is now
+a legal myth,” he declared. “The 100-to-1 ratio, coupled with mandatory
+minimum sentencing provided by federal statute, has created a situation that
+reeks with inhumanity and injustice.... If young white males were being
+incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statute would have
+been amended long ago.” Judge Cahill sentenced Clary as if the drug he had
+carried home had been powder cocaine. The sentence imposed was four
+years in prison. Clary served his term and was released.
+The prosecution appealed Clary’s case to the Eighth Circuit Court of
+Appeals, which reversed Judge Cahill in a unanimous opinion, finding that
+
+the case was not even close. In the court’s view, there was no credible
+evidence that the crack penalties were motivated by any conscious racial
+bigotry, as required by McCleskey v. Kemp. The court remanded the case
+back to the district court for resentencing. Clary—now married and a father
+—was ordered back to prison to complete his ten-year term.53
+Few challenges to sentencing schemes, patterns, or results have been
+brought since McCleskey, for the exercise is plainly futile. Yet in 1995, a
+few brave souls challenged the implementation of Georgia’s “two strikes
+and you’re out” sentencing scheme, which imposes life imprisonment for a
+second drug offense. Georgia’s district attorneys, who have unbridled
+discretion to decide whether to seek this harsh penalty, had invoked it
+against only 1 percent of white defendants facing a second drug conviction
+but against 16 percent of black defendants. The result was that 98.4 percent
+of those serving life sentences under the provision were black. The Georgia
+Supreme Court ruled, by a 4-3 vote, that the stark racial disparity presented
+a threshold case of discrimination and required the prosecutors to offer a
+race-neutral explanation for the results. Rather than offer a justification,
+however, the Georgia attorney general filed a petition for rehearing signed
+by every one of the state’s forty-six district attorneys, all of whom were
+white. The petition argued that the Court’s decision was a dire mistake; if
+the decision were allowed to stand and prosecutors were compelled to
+explain gross racial disparities such as the ones at issue, it would be a
+“substantial step toward invalidating” the death penalty and would
+“paralyze the criminal justice system”—apparently because severe and
+inexplicable racial disparities pervaded the system as a whole. Thirteen
+days later, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed itself, holding that the fact
+that 98.4 percent of the defendants selected to receive life sentences for
+repeat drug offenses were black required no justification. The court’s new
+decision relied almost exclusively on McCleskey v. Kemp. To date, not a
+single successful challenge has ever been made to racial bias in sentencing
+under McCleskey v. Kemp anywhere in the United States.
+
+Charging Ahead—Armstrong v. United States
+
+If sentencing were the only stage of the criminal justice process in which
+racial biases were allowed to flourish, it would be a tragedy of gargantuan
+proportions. Thousands of people have had years of their lives wasted in
+prison—years they would have been free if they had been white. Some, like
+McCleskey, have been killed because of the influence of race in the death
+penalty. Sentencing, however, is not the end, but just the beginning. As we
+shall see, the legal rules governing prosecutions, like those that govern
+sentencing decisions, maximize rather than minimize racial bias in the drug
+war. The Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to ensure that prosecutors
+are free to exercise their discretion in any manner they choose, and it has
+closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias.
+As discussed in chapter 2, no one has more power in the criminal justice
+system than prosecutors. Few rules constrain the exercise of prosecutorial
+discretion. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no
+reason at all, regardless of the strength of the evidence. The prosecutor is
+also free to file more charges against a defendant than can realistically be
+proven in court, so long as probable cause arguably exists. Whether a good
+plea deal is offered to a defendant is entirely up to the prosecutor. And if the
+mood strikes, the prosecutor can transfer drug defendants to the federal
+system, where the penalties are far more severe. Juveniles, for their part,
+can be transferred to adult court, where they can be sent to adult prison.
+Angela J. Davis, in her authoritative study Arbitrary Justice: The Power of
+the American Prosecutor, observes that “the most remarkable feature of
+these important, sometimes life-and-death decisions is that they are totally
+discretionary and virtually unreviewable.”54 Most prosecutors’ offices lack
+any manual or guidebook advising prosecutors how to make discretionary
+decisions. Even the American Bar Association’s standards of practice for
+prosecutors are purely aspirational; no prosecutor is required to follow the
+standards or even consider them.
+
+Christopher Lee Armstrong learned the hard way that the Supreme Court
+has little interest in ensuring that prosecutors exercise their extraordinary
+discretion in a manner that is fair and nondiscriminatory. He, along with
+four of his companions, was staying at a Los Angeles motel in April 1992
+when federal and state agents on a joint drug crime task force raided their
+room and arrested them on federal drug charges—conspiracy to distribute
+more than fifty grams of crack cocaine. The federal public defenders
+assigned to Armstrong’s case were disturbed by the fact that Armstrong and
+his friends had something in common with every other crack defendant
+their office had represented during the past the past year: they were all
+black. In fact, of the fifty-three crack cases their office had handled over the
+prior three years, forty-eight defendants were black, five were Hispanic, and
+not a single one was white. Armstrong’s lawyers found it puzzling that no
+white crack offenders had been charged, given that most crack offenders are
+white. They suspected that whites were being diverted by federal
+prosecutors to the state system, where the penalties for crack offenses were
+far less severe. The only way to prove this, though, would be to gain access
+to the prosecutors’ records and find out just how many white defendants
+were transferred to the state system and why. Armstrong’s lawyers thus
+filed a motion asking the district court for discovery of the prosecutors’
+files to support their claim of selective prosecution under the Fourteenth
+Amendment.
+Nearly one hundred years earlier, in a case called Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the
+Supreme Court had recognized that racially selective enforcement violates
+equal protection of the laws. In that case, decided in 1886, the Court
+unanimously overturned convictions of two Chinese men who were
+operating laundries without a license. San Francisco had denied licenses to
+all Chinese applicants, but granted licenses to all but one of the nonChinese laundry operators who applied. Law enforcement arrested more
+than a hundred people for operating laundries without licenses, and every
+one of the arrestees was Chinese. Overturning Yick Wo’s conviction, the
+Supreme Court declared in a widely quoted passage, “Though the law itself
+be fair on its face, and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and
+administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so
+as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations, between persons in
+similar circumstances . . . the denial of equal justice is still within the
+
+prohibition of the Constitution.”55 Armstrong’s lawyers sought to prove
+that, like the law at issue in Yick Wo, federal crack laws were fair on their
+face and impartial in their appearance, but were selectively enforced in a
+racially discriminatory manner.
+In support of their claim that Armstrong should, at the very least, be
+entitled to discovery, Armstrong’s lawyers offered two sworn affidavits.
+One was from a halfway house intake coordinator who testified that, in his
+experience treating crack addicts, whites and blacks dealt and used the
+drugs in similar proportions. The other affidavit was from a defense
+attorney who had extensive experience in state prosecutions. He testified
+that nonblack defendants were routinely prosecuted in state, rather than
+federal, court. Arguably the best evidence in support of Armstrong’s claims
+came from the government, which submitted a list of more than two
+thousand people charged with federal crack cocaine violations over a threeyear period, all but eleven of whom were black. None were white.
+The district court ruled that the evidence presented was sufficient to
+justify discovery for the purposes of determining whether the allegations of
+selective enforcement were valid. The prosecutors, however, refused to
+release any records and appealed the issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme
+Court. In May 1996, the Supreme Court reversed. As in McCleskey, the
+Court did not question the accuracy of the evidence submitted, but ruled
+that because Armstrong failed to identify any similarly situated white
+defendants who should have been charged in federal court but were not, he
+was not entitled even to discovery on his selective-prosecution claim. With
+no trace of irony, the Court demanded that Armstrong produce in advance
+the very thing he sought in discovery: information regarding white
+defendants who should have been charged in federal court. That
+information, of course, was in the prosecution’s possession and control,
+which is why Armstrong filed a discovery motion in the first place.
+As a result of the Armstrong decision, defendants who suspect racial bias
+on the part of prosecutors are trapped in a classic catch-22. In order to state
+a claim of selective prosecution, they are required to offer in advance the
+very evidence that generally can be obtained only through discovery of the
+prosecutor’s files. The Court justified this insurmountable hurdle on the
+grounds that considerable deference is owed the exercise of prosecutorial
+
+discretion. Unless evidence of conscious, intentional bias on the part of the
+prosecutor could be produced, the Court would not allow any inquiry into
+the reasons for or causes of apparent racial disparities in prosecutorial
+decision making. Again the courthouse doors were closed, for all practical
+purposes, to claims of racial bias in the administration of the criminal
+justice system.
+Immunizing prosecutors from claims of racial bias and failing to impose
+any meaningful check on the exercise of their discretion in charging, plea
+bargaining, transferring cases, and sentencing has created an environment in
+which conscious and unconscious biases are allowed to flourish. Numerous
+studies have shown that prosecutors interpret and respond to identical
+criminal activity differently based on the race of the offender.56 One widely
+cited study was conducted by the San Jose Mercury News. The study
+reviewed 700,000 criminal cases that were matched by crime and criminal
+history of the defendant. The analysis revealed that similarly situated whites
+were far more successful than African Americans and Latinos in the plea
+bargaining process; in fact, “at virtually every stage of pretrial negotiation,
+whites are more successful than nonwhites.”57
+The most comprehensive studies of racial bias in the exercise of
+prosecutorial and judicial discretion involve the treatment of juveniles.
+These studies have shown that youth of color are more likely to be arrested,
+detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to
+secure residential facilities than their white counterparts.58 A report in 2000
+observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison
+before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to
+be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.59 A study sponsored by the U.S.
+Justice Department and several of the nation’s leading foundations,
+published in 2007, found that the impact of the biased treatment is
+magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system.
+African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of
+all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court,
+and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison.60 A major reason for
+these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting
+decision making. In the state of Washington, for example, a review of
+juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black
+
+and white offenders differently.61 Blacks committed crimes because of
+internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of
+external conditions such as family conflict.
+The risk that prosecutorial discretion will be racially biased is especially
+acute in the drug enforcement context, where virtually identical behavior is
+susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations and responses and the media
+imagery and political discourse has been so thoroughly racialized. Whether
+a kid is perceived as a dangerous drug-dealing thug or instead is viewed as
+a good kid who was merely experimenting with drugs and selling to a few
+of his friends has to do with the ways in which information about illegal
+drug activity is processed and interpreted, in a social climate in which drug
+dealing is racially defined. As a former U.S. Attorney explained:
+I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge
+against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no extenuating
+circumstances. I asked, “Why do you want to drop the gun offense?”
+And he said, “‘He’s a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had
+with him was a rifle. He’s a good ol’ boy, and all good ol’ boys have
+rifles, and it’s not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.” But he was a
+gun-toting drug dealer, exactly.
+The decision in Armstrong effectively shields this type of biased decision
+making from judicial scrutiny for racial bias. Prosecutors are well aware
+that the exercise of their discretion is unchecked, provided no explicitly
+racist remarks are made, as it is next to impossible for defendants to prove
+racial bias. It is difficult to imagine a system better designed to ensure that
+racial biases and stereotypes are given free reign—while at the same time
+appearing on the surface to be colorblind—than the one devised by the U.S.
+Supreme Court.
+
+In Defense of the All-White Jury—Purkett v. Elm
+
+The rules governing jury selection provide yet another illustration of the
+Court’s complete abdication of its responsibility to guarantee racial
+minorities equal treatment under the law. In 1985, in Batson v. Kentucky,
+the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits prosecutors from
+discriminating on the basis of race when selecting juries, a ruling hailed as
+an important safeguard against all-white juries locking up African
+Americans based on racial biases and stereotypes. Prior to Batson,
+prosecutors had been allowed to strike blacks from juries, provided they did
+not always strike black jurors. The Supreme Court had ruled in 1965, in
+Swain v. Alabama, that an equal-protection claim would arise only if a
+defendant could prove that a prosecutor struck African American jurors in
+every case, regardless of the crime involved or regardless of the races of the
+defendant or the victim.62 Two decades later, in Batson, the Supreme Court
+reversed course, a nod to the newly minted public consensus that explicit
+race discrimination is an affront to American values. Almost immediately
+after Batson was decided, however, it became readily apparent that
+prosecutors had no difficulty circumventing the formal requirement of
+colorblindness in jury selection by means of a form of subterfuge the Court
+would come to accept, if not endorse.
+The history of race discrimination in jury selection dates back to slavery.
+Until 1860, no black person had ever sat on a jury in the United States.
+During the Reconstruction era, African Americans began to serve on juries
+in the South for the first time. The all-white jury promptly returned,
+however, when Democratic conservatives sought to “redeem” the South by
+stripping blacks of their right to vote and their right to serve on juries. In
+1880, the Supreme Court intervened, striking down a West Virginia statute
+that expressly reserved jury service to white men. Citing the recently
+enacted Fourteenth Amendment, the Court declared that the exclusion of
+blacks from jury service was “practically a brand upon them, affixed by
+
+law, an assertion of their inferiority, and a stimulant to that race prejudice
+which is an impediment to . . . equal justice.”63 The Court asked, “How can
+it be maintained that compelling a colored man to submit to a trial for his
+life by a jury drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly
+excluded every man of his race, because of his color alone, however well
+qualified in other respects, is not a denial to him of equal protection?”64
+For all its bluster, the Court offered no meaningful protection against jury
+discrimination in the years that followed. As legal scholar Benno Schmidt
+has observed, from the end of Reconstruction through the New Deal, “the
+systematic exclusion of black men from Southern juries was about as plain
+as any legal discrimination could be short of proclamation in state statutes
+or confession by state officials.”65 The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld
+convictions of black defendants by all-white juries in situations where
+exclusion of black jurors was obvious.66 The only case in which the Court
+overturned a conviction on the grounds of discrimination in jury selection
+was Neal v. Delaware, a case decided in 1935. State law in Delaware once
+had explicitly restricted jury service to white men, and “no colored citizen
+had ever been summoned as a juror.”67 The Delaware Supreme Court had
+rejected Neal’s equal protection claim on the ground that “the great body of
+black men residing in this State are utterly unqualified [for jury service] by
+want of intelligence, experience, or moral integrity.”68 The Supreme Court
+reversed. Clearly, what offended the U.S. Supreme Court was not the
+exclusion of blacks from jury service per se, but rather doing so openly and
+explicitly. That orientation continues to hold today.
+Notwithstanding Batson’s formal prohibition on race discrimination in
+jury selection, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have tolerated
+all but the most egregious examples of racial bias in jury selection. Miller
+El v. Cockrell was such a case.69 That case involved a jury-selection manual
+that sanctioned race-based selection. The Court noted that it was unclear
+whether the official policy of race-based exclusion was still in effect, but
+the prosecution did in fact exclude ten of eleven black jurors, in part by
+employing an unusual practice of “jury shuffling” that reduced the number
+of black jurors.70 The prosecution also engaged in disparate questioning of
+jurors based on race—practices that seemed linked to the jury-selection
+manual. This was a highly unusual case. In typical cases, there are no
+
+official policies authorizing race discrimination in jury selection still
+lurking around, arguably in effect. Normally, the discrimination is obvious
+yet unstated, and the systematic exclusion of black jurors continues largely
+unabated through use of the peremptory strike.
+Peremptory strikes have long been controversial. Both prosecutors and
+defense attorneys are permitted to strike “peremptorily” jurors they don’t
+like—that is, people they believe will not respond favorably to the evidence
+or witnesses they intend to present at trial. In theory, peremptory strikes
+may increase the fairness of the proceeding by eliminating jurors who may
+be biased but whose biases cannot be demonstrated convincingly to a judge.
+In practice, however, peremptory challenges are notoriously discriminatory.
+Lawyers typically have little information about potential jurors, so their
+decisions to strike individual jurors tend to be based on nothing more than
+stereotypes, prejudices, and hunches. Achieving an all-white jury, or nearly
+all-white jury, is easy in most jurisdictions, because relatively few racial
+minorities are included in the jury pool. Potential jurors are typically called
+for service based on the list of registered voters or Department of Motor
+Vehicle lists—sources that contain disproportionately fewer people of color,
+because people of color are significantly less likely to own cars or register
+to vote. Making matters worse, thirty-one states and the federal government
+subscribe to the practice of lifetime felon exclusion from juries. As a result,
+about 30 percent of black men are automatically banned from jury service
+for life.71 Accordingly, no more than a handful of strikes are necessary in
+many cases to eliminate all or nearly all black jurors. The practice of
+systematically excluding black jurors has not been halted by Batson; the
+only thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a raceneutral excuse for the strikes—an exceedingly easy task.
+In fact, one comprehensive study reviewed all published decisions
+involving Batson challenges from 1986 to 1992 and concluded that
+prosecutors almost never fail to successfully craft acceptable race-neutral
+explanations to justify striking black jurors.72 Courts accept explanations
+that jurors are too young, too old, too conservative, too liberal, too
+comfortable, or too uncomfortable. Clothing is also favorite reason; jurors
+have been stricken for wearing hats or sunglasses. Even explanations that
+might correlate with race, such as lack of education, unemployment,
+
+poverty, being single, living in the same neighborhood as the defendant, or
+prior involvement with the criminal justice system—have all been accepted
+as perfectly good, non-pretextual excuses for striking African Americans
+from juries. As professor Sheri Lynn Johnson once remarked, “If
+prosecutors exist who . . . cannot create a ‘racially neutral’ reason for
+discriminating on the basis of race, bar exams are too easy.”73
+Given how flagrantly prosecutors were violating Batson’s ban on race
+discrimination in jury selection, it was reasonable to hope that, if presented
+with a particularly repugnant case, the Supreme Court might be willing to
+draw the line at practices that make a mockery of the antidiscrimination
+principle. Granted, the Court had been unwilling to accept statistical proof
+of race discrimination in sentencing in McCleskey, and it had brushed off
+concerns of racial bias in discretionary police stops in Whren, and it had
+granted virtual immunity to prosecutors in their charging decisions in
+Armstrong , but would it go so far as to allow prosecutors to offer blatantly
+absurd, downright laughable excuses for striking blacks from juries? It turns
+out the answer was yes.
+In Purkett v. Elm, in 1995, the Supreme Court ruled that any race-neutral
+reason, no matter how silly, ridiculous, or superstitious, is enough to satisfy
+the prosecutor’s burden of showing that a pattern of striking a particular
+racial group is not, in fact, based on race. In that case, the prosecutor
+offered the following explanation to justify his strikes of black jurors:
+I struck [juror] number twenty-two because of his long hair. He had
+long curly hair. He had the longest hair of anybody on the panel by far.
+He appeared not to be a good juror for that fact.... Also, he had a
+mustache and a goatee type beard. And juror number twenty-four also
+had a mustache and goatee type beard.... And I don’t like the way they
+looked, with the way the hair is cut, both of them. And the mustaches
+and the beards look suspicious to me.74
+The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that the foregoing
+explanation for the prosecutor’s strikes of black jurors was insufficient and
+should have been rejected by the trial court because long hair and facial hair
+are not plausibly related to a person’s ability to perform as a juror. The
+appellate court explained: “Where the prosecution strikes a prospective
+
+juror who is a member of the defendant’s racial group, solely on the basis of
+factors which are facially irrelevant to the question of whether that person is
+qualified to serve as a juror in the particular case, the prosecution must at
+least articulate some plausible race neutral reason for believing that those
+factors will somehow affect the person’s ability to perform his or her duties
+as a juror.”75
+The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, holding that when a pattern of racebased strikes has been identified by the defense, the prosecutor need not
+provide “an explanation that is persuasive, or even plausible.”76 Once the
+reason is offered, a trial judge may choose to believe (or disbelieve) any
+“silly or superstitious” reason offered by prosecutors to explain a pattern of
+strikes that appear to be based on race.77 The Court sent a clear message
+that appellate courts are largely free to accept the reasons offered by a
+prosecutor for excluding prospective black jurors—no matter how irrational
+or absurd the reasons may seem.
+
+The Occupation—Policing the Enemy
+
+The Court’s blind eye to race discrimination in the criminal justice system
+has been especially problematic in policing. Racial bias is most acute at the
+point of entry into the system for two reasons: discretion and authorization.
+Although prosecutors, as a group, have the greatest power in the criminal
+justice system, police have the greatest discretion—discretion that is
+amplified in drug-law enforcement. And unbeknownst to the general public,
+the Supreme Court has actually authorized race discrimination in policing,
+rather than adopting legal rules banning it.
+Racially biased police discretion is key to understanding how the
+overwhelming majority of people who get swept into the criminal justice
+system in the War on Drugs turn out to be black or brown, even though the
+police adamantly deny that they engage in racial profiling. In the drug war,
+police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well
+as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities). As noted earlier,
+at least 10 percent of Americans violate drug laws every year, and people of
+all races engage in illegal drug activity at similar rates. With such an
+extraordinarily large population of offenders to choose from, decisions must
+be made regarding who should be targeted and where the drug war should
+be waged.
+From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in
+overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could
+have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided
+the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and
+ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions,
+furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a
+few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser
+drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance
+and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating
+
+laws regulating the use and sale of prescription “uppers.” All of this could
+have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not.
+Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ’hood. Tactics
+that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even
+newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug
+arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have
+little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and
+warlike the efforts may be. And so long as the number of drug arrests
+increases or at least remains high, federal dollars continue to flow in and fill
+the department’s coffers. As one former prosecutor put it, “It’s a lot easier
+to go out to the ’hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your
+resources in an undercover [operation in a] community where there are
+potentially politically powerful people.”78
+The hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made
+the roundup easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the
+black poor are convenient targets. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s
+book, American Apartheid, documents how racially segregated ghettos
+were deliberately created by federal policy, not impersonal market forces or
+private housing choices.79 The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor
+has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to
+them does not directly affect—and is scarcely noticed by—the privileged
+beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken,
+racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned
+and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the
+greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations
+are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stopand-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are
+the primary targets. It is not uncommon for a young black teenager living in
+a ghetto community to be stopped, interrogated, and frisked numerous times
+in the course of a month, or even a single week, often by paramilitary units.
+Studies of racial profiling typically report the total number of people
+stopped and searched, disaggregated by race. These studies have led some
+policing experts to conclude that racial profiling is actually “worse” in
+white communities, because the racial disparities in stop and search rates
+are much greater there. What these studies do not reveal, however, is the
+
+frequency with which any given individual is likely to be stopped in
+specific, racially defined neighborhoods.
+The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has
+inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to the police presence in black
+communities as “The Occupation.” In these occupied territories, many
+black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up,
+knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.
+This dynamic often comes as a surprise to those who have spent little time
+in ghettos. Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago,
+reports that his students frequently express shock and dismay when they
+venture into those communities for the first time and witness the distance
+between abstract legal principles and actual practice. One student reported,
+following her ride-along with Chicago police: “Each time we drove into a
+public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the
+area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread
+his legs to be searched. And the officers would search them. The officers
+would then get back in the car and stop in another project, and this would
+happen again. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn’t
+believe it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just
+seemed so normal—for the police and the young men.”
+Numerous scholars (and many law enforcement officials) attempt to
+justify the concentration of drug law enforcement resources in ghetto
+communities on the ground that it is easier for the police to combat illegal
+drug activity there. The theory is that black and Latino drug users are more
+likely than white users to obtain illegal drugs in public spaces that are
+visible to the police, and therefore it is more efficient and convenient for the
+police to concentrate their efforts on open-air drug markets in ghetto
+communities. Sociologists have been major proponents of this line of
+reasoning, pointing out that differential access to private space influences
+the likelihood that criminal behavior will be detected. Because poor people
+lack access to private space (often sharing small apartments with numerous
+family members or relatives), their criminal activity is more likely to be
+conducted outdoors. Concentrating law enforcement efforts in locations
+where drug activity will be more easily detected is viewed as a race-neutral
+organizational necessity. This argument is often buttressed by claims that
+most citizen complaints about illegal drug activity come from ghetto areas,
+
+and that the violence associated with the drug trade occurs in inner cities.
+These facts, drug war defenders claim, make the decision to wage the drug
+war almost exclusively in poor communities of color an easy and logical
+choice.
+This line of reasoning is weaker than it initially appears. Many law
+enforcement officials acknowledge that the demand for illegal drugs is so
+great—and the lack of alternative sources of income so few in ghetto
+communities—that “if you take one dealer off the street, he’ll be replaced
+within an hour.” Many also admit that a predictable consequence of
+breaking up one drug ring is a slew of violence as others fight for control of
+the previously stabilized market.80 These realities suggest—if the past two
+decades of endless war somehow did not—that the drug war is doomed to
+fail. They also call into question the legitimacy of “convenience” as an
+excuse for the mass imprisonment of black and brown men in ghetto
+communities.
+Even putting aside such concerns, though, recent research indicates that
+the basic assumptions upon which drug war defenses typically rest are
+simply wrong. The conventional wisdom—that “get tough” tactics are a
+regrettable necessity in poor communities of color and that efficiency
+requires the drug war to be waged in the most vulnerable neighborhoods—
+turns out to be, as many have long suspected, nothing more than wartime
+propaganda, not sound policy.
+
+Unconventional Wisdom
+
+In 2002, a team of researchers at the University of Washington decided to
+take the defenses of the drug war seriously, by subjecting the arguments to
+empirical testing in a major study of drug-law enforcement in a racially
+mixed city—Seattle.81 The study found that, contrary to the prevailing
+“common sense,” the high arrest rates of African Americans in drug-law
+enforcement could not be explained by rates of offending; nor could they be
+explained by other standard excuses, such as the ease and efficiency of
+policing open-air drug markets, citizen complaints, crime rates, or drugrelated violence. The study also debunked the assumption that white drug
+dealers deal indoors, making their criminal activity more difficult to detect.
+The authors found that it was untrue stereotypes about crack markets,
+crack dealers, and crack babies—not facts—that were driving discretionary
+decision making by the Seattle Police Department. The facts were as
+follows: Seattle residents were far more likely to report suspected narcotics
+activities in residences—not outdoors—but police devoted their resources
+to open-air drug markets and to the one precinct that was least likely to be
+identified as the site of suspected drug activity in citizen complaints. In fact,
+although hundreds of outdoor drug transactions were recorded in
+predominantly white areas of Seattle, police concentrated their drug
+enforcement efforts in one downtown drug market where the frequency of
+drug transactions was much lower. In racially mixed open-air drug markets,
+black dealers were far more likely to be arrested than whites, even though
+white dealers were present and visible. And the department focused
+overwhelmingly on crack—the one drug in Seattle more likely to be sold by
+African Americans—despite the fact that local hospital records indicated
+that overdose deaths involving heroin were more numerous than all
+overdose deaths for crack and powder cocaine combined. Local police
+acknowledged that no significant level of violence was associated with
+crack in Seattle and that other drugs were causing more hospitalizations, but
+
+steadfastly maintained that their deployment decisions were
+nondiscriminatory.
+The study’s authors concluded, based on their review and analysis of the
+empirical evidence, that the Seattle Police Department’s decisions to focus
+so heavily on crack, to the near exclusion of other drugs, and to concentrate
+its efforts on outdoor drug markets in downtown areas rather than drug
+markets located indoors or in predominantly white communities, reflect “a
+racialized conception of the drug problem.”82 As the authors put it: “[The
+Seattle Police Department’s] focus on black and Latino individuals and on
+the drug most strongly associated with ‘blackness’ suggest that law
+enforcement policies and practices are predicated on the assumption that the
+drug problem is, in fact, a black and Latino one, and that crack, the drug
+most strongly associated with urban blacks, is ‘the worst.’”83 This
+racialized cultural script about who and what constitutes the drug problem
+renders illegal drug activity by whites invisible. “White people,” the study’s
+authors observed, “are simply not perceived as drug offenders by Seattle
+police officers.”84
+
+Hollow Hope
+
+One might imagine that the facts described above would provide grounds
+for a lawsuit challenging the Seattle Police Department’s drug war tactics as
+a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and
+demanding reform. After all, obtaining reform through the city council or
+state legislature may seem unlikely, for black “criminals” are perhaps the
+most despised minority in the U.S. population. Few politicians will leap at
+the opportunity to support black people labeled criminals. Accordingly, a
+lawsuit may seem like the best option. The purpose of our Constitution—
+especially the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee—is to
+protect minority rights even when, or especially when, they are unpopular.
+So shouldn’t African American defendants be able to file a successful
+lawsuit demanding an end to these discriminatory practices or challenge
+their drug arrests on the grounds that these law enforcement practices are
+unlawfully tainted by race? The answer is yes, they should, but no, they
+probably can’t.
+As legal scholar David Cole has observed, “The Court has imposed
+nearly insurmountable barriers to persons challenging race discrimination at
+all stages of the criminal justice system.”85 The barriers are so high that few
+lawsuits are even filed, notwithstanding shocking and indefensible racial
+disparities. Procedural hurdles, such as the “standing requirement,” have
+made it virtually impossible to seek reform of law enforcement agencies
+through the judicial process, even when the policies or practices at issue are
+illegal or plainly discriminatory.
+Adolph Lyons’s attempt to ban the use of lethal chokeholds by the Los
+Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is a good example. Lyons, a twentyfour-year-old black man, was driving his car in Los Angeles one morning
+when he was pulled over by four police officers for a burnt-out taillight.
+With guns drawn, police ordered Lyons out of his car. He obeyed. The
+officers told him to face the car, spread his legs, and put his hands on his
+
+head. Again, Lyons did as he was told. After the officers completed a patdown, Lyons dropped his hands, prompting an officer to slam Lyons’s
+hands back on his head. When Lyons complained that the car keys he was
+holding were causing him pain, the officer forced Lyons into a chokehold.
+He lost consciousness and collapsed. When he awoke, “he was spitting up
+blood and dirt, had urinated and defecated, and had suffered permanent
+damage to his larynx.”86 The officers issued a traffic ticket for the burnt-out
+taillight and released him.
+Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violation of his constitutional
+rights and sought, as a remedy, a ban against future use of the chokeholds.
+By the time his case reached the Supreme Court, sixteen people had been
+killed by police use of the chokehold, twelve of them black men. The
+Supreme Court dismissed the case, however, ruling that Lyons lacked
+“standing” to seek an injunction against the deadly practice. In order to
+have standing, the Court reasoned, Lyons would have to show that he was
+highly likely to be subject to a chokehold again.
+Lyons argued that, as a black man, he had good reason to fear he would
+be stopped by the police for a minor traffic violation and subjected to a
+chokehold again. He had done nothing to provoke the chokehold; to the
+contrary, he had obeyed instructions and cooperated fully. Why wouldn’t he
+believe he was at risk of being stopped and choked again? The Court,
+however, ruled that in order to have standing
+Lyons would have had not only to allege that he would have another
+encounter with the police but also to make the incredible assertion
+either (1) that all police officers in Los Angeles always choke any
+citizen with whom they have an encounter, whether for the purpose of
+arrest, issuing a citation or for questioning, or (2) that the City ordered
+or authorized the police to act in such a manner.87
+Lyons did not allege race discrimination, but if he had, that claim would
+almost certainly have been a loser too. The Court’s ruling in Lyons makes it
+extremely difficult to challenge systemic race discrimination in law
+enforcement and obtain meaningful policy reform. For example, African
+Americans in Seattle who hope to end the Seattle police department’s
+discriminatory tactics through litigation would be required to prove that
+
+they plan to violate drug laws and that they will almost certainly face race
+discrimination by Seattle police officers engaged in drug-law enforcement,
+in order to have standing to seek reform—i.e., just to get in the courthouse
+door.
+It is worthy of note that the Lyons standard does not apply to suits for
+damages. But any suggestion that litigants need not worry about policy
+reform because they can always sue for damages would be disingenuous—
+particularly as applied to race discrimination cases. Why? Neither the state
+nor the state police can be sued for damages. In a series of cases, the
+Supreme Court has ruled that the state and its offices are immune from
+federal suits for damages under the Eleventh Amendment to the
+Constitution (unless they consent), and the state can’t be sued for damages
+for constitutional violations in state court either.88 City police departments,
+like the LAPD, are also typically off limits. The Court has ruled that a city
+police department cannot be sued for damages unless a specific city policy
+or custom can be identified authorizing the illegal practice.89 Most cities, of
+course, do not have policies specifically authorizing illegal conduct
+(particularly race discrimination), and “custom” is notoriously difficult to
+prove. Accordingly, suing a city police department for damages is generally
+not an option. Yet even if all of those hurdles can somehow be overcome,
+there is still the matter of proving a claim of race discrimination. As we
+have seen, to establish an equal-protection violation, one must prove
+intentional discrimination—conscious racial bias. Law enforcement
+officials rarely admit to having acted for racial reasons, leaving most
+victims of discriminatory law enforcement without anyone to sue and
+without a claim that can be proven in a court of law. But even if a plaintiff
+managed to overcome all of the procedural hurdles and prove that a police
+officer deliberately exercised his or her discretion on the basis of race, that
+still might not be enough.
+
+Race as a Factor
+
+The dirty little secret of policing is that the Supreme Court has actually
+granted the police license to discriminate. This fact is not advertised by
+police departments, because law enforcement officials know that the public
+would not respond well to this fact in the era of colorblindness. It is the sort
+of thing that is better left unsaid. Civil rights lawyers—including those
+litigating racial profiling cases—have been complicit in this silence, fearing
+that any acknowledgment that race-based policing is authorized by law
+would legitimate in the public mind the very practice they are hoping to
+eradicate.
+The truth, however, is this: At other stages of the criminal justice process,
+the Court has indicated that overt racial bias necessarily triggers strict
+scrutiny—a concession that has not been costly, as very few law
+enforcement officials today are foolish enough to admit bias openly. But the
+Supreme Court has indicated that in policing, race can be used as a factor in
+discretionary decision making. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the
+Court concluded it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the
+Fourteenth Amendment for the police to use race as a factor in making
+decisions about which motorists to stop and search. In that case, the Court
+concluded that the police could take a person’s Mexican appearance into
+account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain
+undocumented immigrants. The Court said that “the likelihood that any
+person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican
+appearance a relevant factor.”90 Some commentators have argued that
+Brignoni-Ponce may be limited to the immigration context; the Court might
+not apply the same principle to drug-law enforcement. It is not obvious
+what the rational basis would be for limiting overt race discrimination by
+police to immigration. The likelihood that a person of Mexican ancestry is
+an “alien” could not be significantly higher than the likelihood that any
+random black person is a drug criminal.
+
+The Court’s quiet blessing of race-based traffic stops has led to
+something of an Orwellian public discourse regarding racial profiling.
+Police departments and highway patrol agencies frequently declare, “We do
+not engage in racial profiling,” even though their officers routinely use race
+as a factor when making decisions regarding whom to stop and search. The
+justification for the implicit doublespeak—“we do not racial-profile; we just
+stop people based on race”—can be explained in part by the Supreme
+Court’s jurisprudence. Because the Supreme Court has authorized the police
+to use race as a factor when making decisions regarding whom to stop and
+search, police departments believe that racial profiling exists only when
+race is the sole factor. Thus, if race is one factor but not the only factor, then
+it doesn’t really count as a factor at all.
+The absurdity of this logic is evidenced by the fact that police almost
+never stop anyone solely because of race. A young black male wearing
+baggy pants, standing in front of his high school surrounded by a group of
+similarly dressed black friends, may be stopped and searched because
+police believe he “looks like” a drug dealer. Clearly, race is not the only
+reason for that conclusion. Gender, age, attire, and location play a role. The
+police would likely ignore an eighty-five-year-old black man standing in the
+same spot surrounded by a group of elderly black women.
+The problem is that although race is rarely the sole reason for a stop or
+search, it is frequently a determinative reason. A young white male wearing
+baggy pants, standing in front of his high school and surrounded by his
+friends, might well be ignored by police officers. It might never occur to
+them that a group of young white kids might be dealing dope in front of
+their high school. Similarly situated people inevitably are treated differently
+when police are granted permission to rely on racial stereotypes when
+making discretionary decisions.
+Equally important, though, the sole-factor test ignores the ways in which
+seemingly race-neutral factors—such as location—operate in a highly
+discriminatory fashion. Some law enforcement officials claim that they
+would stop and search white kids wearing baggy jeans in the ghetto (that
+would be suspicious)—it just so happens they’re rarely there. Subjecting
+people to stops and searches because they live in “high crime” ghettos
+cannot be said to be truly race-neutral, given that the ghetto itself was
+
+constructed to contain and control groups of people defined by race.91 Even
+seemingly race-neutral factors such as “prior criminal history” are not truly
+race-neutral. A black kid arrested twice for possession of marijuana may be
+no more of a repeat offender than a white frat boy who regularly smokes pot
+in his dorm room. But because of his race and his confinement to a racially
+segregated ghetto, the black kid has a criminal record, while the white frat
+boy, because of his race and relative privilege, does not. Thus, when
+prosecutors throw the book at black repeat offenders or when police stalk
+ex-offenders and subject them to regular frisks and searches on the grounds
+that it makes sense to “watch criminals closely,” they are often exacerbating
+racial disparities created by the discretionary decision to wage the War on
+Drugs almost exclusively in poor communities of color.
+Defending against claims of racial bias in policing is easy. Because race
+is never the only reason for a stop or search, any police officer with a fifthgrade education will be able to cite multiple nonracial reasons for initiating
+an encounter, including any number of the so-called “indicators” of drug
+trafficking discussed in chapter 2, such as appearing too nervous or too
+calm. Police officers (like prosecutors) are highly adept at offering raceneutral reasons for actions that consistently disadvantage African
+Americans. Whereas prosecutors claim they strike black jurors not because
+of their race but because of their hairstyle, police officers have their own
+stock excuses—e.g., “Your honor, we didn’t stop him because he’s black;
+we stopped him because he failed to use his turn signal at the right time,” or
+“It wasn’t just because he was black; it was also because he seemed nervous
+when he saw the police car.” Judges are just as reluctant to second-guess an
+officer’s motives as they are to second-guess prosecutors’. So long as
+officers refrain from uttering racial epithets and so long as they show the
+good sense not to say “the only reason I stopped him was ’cause he’s
+black,” courts generally turn a blind eye to patterns of discrimination by the
+police.
+Studies of racial profiling have shown that police do, in fact, exercise
+their discretion regarding whom to stop and search in the drug war in a
+highly discriminatory manner.92 Not only do police discriminate in their
+determinations regarding where to wage the war, but they also discriminate
+
+in their judgments regarding whom to target outside of the ghetto’s invisible
+walls.
+The most famous of these studies were conducted in New Jersey and
+Maryland in the 1990s. Allegations of racial profiling in federally funded
+drug interdiction operations resulted in numerous investigations and
+comprehensive data demonstrating a dramatic pattern of racial bias in
+highway patrol stops and searches. These drug interdiction programs were
+the brain-child of the DEA, part of the federally funded program known as
+Operation Pipeline.
+In New Jersey, the data showed that only 15 percent of all drivers on the
+New Jersey Turnpike were racial minorities, yet 42 percent of all stops and
+73 percent of all arrests were of black motorists—despite the fact that
+blacks and whites violated traffic laws at almost exactly the same rate.
+While radar stops were relatively consistent with the percentage of minority
+violators, discretionary stops made by officers involved in drug interdiction
+resulted in double the number of stops of minorities.93 A subsequent study
+conducted by the attorney general of New Jersey found that searches on the
+turnpike were even more discriminatory than the initial stops—77 percent
+of all consent searches were of minorities. The Maryland studies produced
+similar results: African Americans comprised only 17 percent of drivers
+along a stretch of I-95 outside of Baltimore, yet they were 70 percent of
+those who were stopped and searched. Only 21 percent of all drivers along
+that stretch of highway were racial minorities (Latinos, Asians, and African
+Americans), yet those groups comprised nearly 80 percent of those pulled
+over and searched.94
+What most surprised many analysts was that, in both studies, whites were
+actually more likely than people of color to be carrying illegal drugs or
+contraband in their vehicles. In fact, in New Jersey, whites were almost
+twice as likely to be found with illegal drugs or contraband as African
+Americans, and five times as likely to be found with contraband as
+Latinos.95 Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs,
+they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious, resulting in relatively
+few stops, searches, and arrests of whites. The former New Jersey attorney
+general dubbed this phenomenon the “circular illogic of racial profiling.”
+Law enforcement officials, he explained, often point to the racial
+
+composition of our prisons and jails as a justification for targeting racial
+minorities, but the empirical evidence actually suggested the opposite
+conclusion was warranted. The disproportionate imprisonment of people of
+color was, in part, a product of racial profiling—not a justification for it.
+In the years following the release of the New Jersey and Maryland data,
+dozens of other studies of racial profiling have been conducted. A brief
+sampling:
+• In Volusia County, Florida, a reporter obtained 148 hours of
+video footage documenting more than 1,000 highway stops conducted
+by state troopers. Only 5 percent of the drivers on the road were
+African American or Latino, but more than 80 percent of the people
+stopped and searched were minorities.96
+• In Illinois, the state police initiated a drug interdiction program
+known as Operation Valkyrie that targeted Latino motorists. While
+Latinos comprised less than 8 percent of the Illinois population and
+took fewer than 3 percent of the personal vehicle trips in Illinois, they
+comprised approximately 30 percent of the motorists stopped by drug
+interdiction officers for discretionary offenses, such as failure to signal
+a lane change.97 Latinos, however, were significantly less likely than
+whites to have illegal contraband in their vehicles.
+• A racial profiling study in Oakland, California, in 2001 showed
+that African Americans were approximately twice as likely as whites
+to be stopped, and three times as likely to be searched.98
+Pedestrian stops, too, have been the subject of study and controversy. The
+New York Police Department released statistics in February 2007 showing
+that during the prior year its officers stopped an astounding 508,540 people
+—an average of 1,393 per day—who were walking down the street, perhaps
+on their way to the subway, grocery store, or bus stop. Often the stops
+included searches for illegal drugs or guns—searches that frequently
+required people to lie face down on the pavement or stand spread-eagled
+against a wall while police officers aggressively groped all over their bodies
+while bystanders watched or walked by. The vast majority of those stopped
+and searched were racial minorities, and more than half were African
+American.99
+
+The NYPD began collecting data on pedestrian stops following the
+shooting of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant who died in a hail of
+police bullets on the front steps of his own home in February 1999. Diallo
+was followed to his apartment building by four white police officers—
+members of the elite Street Crime Unit—who viewed him as suspicious and
+wanted to interrogate him. They ordered him to stop, but, according to the
+officers, Diallo did not respond immediately. He walked a bit further to his
+apartment building, opened the door, and retrieved his wallet—probably to
+produce identification. The officers said they thought the wallet was a gun,
+and fired forty-one times. Amadou Diallo died at the age of twenty-two. He
+was unarmed and had no criminal record.
+Diallo’s murder sparked huge protests, resulting in a series of studies
+commissioned by the attorney general of New York. The first study found
+that African Americans were stopped six times more frequently than whites,
+and that stops of African Americans were less likely to result in arrests than
+stops of whites—presumably because blacks were less likely to be found
+with drugs or other contraband.100 Although the NYPD attempted to justify
+the stops on the grounds that they were designed to get guns off the street,
+stops by the Street Crime Unit—the group of officers who supposedly are
+specially trained to identify gun-toting thugs—yielded a weapon in only 2.5
+percent of all stops.101
+Rather than reducing reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics following the
+Diallo shooting and the release of this disturbing data, the NYPD
+dramatically increased its number of pedestrian stops and continued to stop
+and frisk African Americans at grossly disproportionate rates. The NYPD
+stopped five times more people in 2005 than in 2002—the overwhelming
+majority of whom were African American or Latino.102
+In Los Angeles, mass stops of young African American men and boys
+resulted in the creation of a database containing the names, addresses, and
+other biographical information of the overwhelming majority of young
+black men in the entire city. The LAPD justified its database as a tool for
+tracking gang or “gang-related” activity. However, the criterion for
+inclusion in the database is notoriously vague and discriminatory. Having a
+relative or friend in a gang and wearing baggy jeans is enough to put youth
+on what the ACLU calls a Black List. In Denver, displaying any two of a
+
+list of attributes—including slang, “clothing of a particular color,” pagers,
+hairstyles, or jewelry—earns youth a spot in the Denver Police’s gang
+database. In 1992, citizen activism led to an investigation, which revealed
+that eight out of every ten people of color in the entire city were on the list
+of suspected criminals.103
+
+The End of an Era
+
+The litigation that swept the nation in the 1990s challenging racial profiling
+practices has nearly vanished. The news stories about people being stopped
+and searched on their way to church or work or school have faded from the
+evening news. This is not because the problem has been solved or because
+the experience of being of being stopped, interrogated, and searched on the
+basis of race has become less humiliating, alienating, or demoralizing as
+time has gone by. The lawsuits have disappeared because, in a little noticed
+case called Alexander v. Sandoval, decided in 2001, the Supreme Court
+eliminated the last remaining avenue available for challenging racial bias in
+the criminal justice system.104
+Sandoval was not, on its face, even about criminal justice. It was a case
+challenging the Alabama Department of Public Safety’s decision to
+administer state driver’s license examinations only in English. The plaintiffs
+argued that the department’s policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act
+of 1964 and its implementing regulations, because the policy had the effect
+of subjecting non-English speakers to discrimination based on their national
+origin. The Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the case, ruling
+instead that the plaintiffs lacked the legal right even to file the lawsuit. It
+concluded that Title VI does not provide a “private right of action” to
+ordinary citizens and civil rights groups; meaning that victims of
+discrimination can no longer sue under the law.
+The Sandoval decision virtually wiped out racial profiling litigation
+nationwide. Nearly all of the cases alleging racial profiling in drug-law
+enforcement were brought pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of
+1964 and its implementing regulations. Title VI prohibits federally funded
+programs or activities from discriminating on the basis of race, and the
+regulations employ a “disparate impact test” for discrimination—meaning
+that plaintiffs could prevail in claims of race discrimination without proving
+discriminatory intent. Under the regulations, a federally funded law
+
+enforcement program or activity is unlawful if it has a racially
+discriminatory impact and if that impact cannot be justified by law
+enforcement necessity. Because nearly all law enforcement agencies receive
+federal funding in the drug war, and because drug war tactics—such as
+pretext stops and consent searches—have a grossly discriminatory impact
+and are largely ineffective, plaintiffs were able to argue persuasively that
+the tactics could not be justified by law enforcement necessity.
+In 1999, for example, the ACLU of Northern California filed a class
+action lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol (CHP), alleging that its
+highway drug interdiction program violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act
+because it relied heavily on discretionary pretext stops and consent searches
+that are employed overwhelmingly against African American and Latino
+motorists. During the course of the litigation, the CHP produced data that
+showed African Americans were twice as likely, and Latinos three times as
+likely, to be stopped and searched by its officers as were whites. The data
+further showed that consent searches were ineffective; only a tiny
+percentage of the discriminatory searches resulted in the discovery of drugs
+or other contraband, yet thousands of black and brown motorists were
+subjected to baseless interrogations, searches, and seizures as a result of
+having committed a minor traffic violation. The CHP entered into a consent
+decree that provided for a three-year moratorium on consent searches and
+pretext stops statewide and the collection of comprehensive data on the race
+and ethnicity of motorists stopped and searched by the police, so that it
+would be possible to determine whether discriminatory practices were
+continuing. Similar results were obtained in New Jersey, as a result of
+landmark litigation filed against the New Jersey State Police. After
+Sandoval, these cases can no longer be brought under Title VI by private
+litigants. Only the federal government can sue to enforce Title VI’s
+antidiscrimination provisions—something it has neither the inclination nor
+the capacity to do in most racial profiling cases due to its limited resources
+and institutional reluctance to antagonize local law enforcement. Since the
+War on Drugs, private litigants represented by organizations such as the
+ACLU have been at the forefront of racial profiling litigation. Those days,
+however, have come to an end. The racial profiling cases that swept the
+nation in the 1990s may well be the last wave of litigation challenging
+racial bias in the criminal justice system that we see for a very long time.
+
+The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of
+racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and
+searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass
+incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from
+claims of racial bias. Staggering racial disparities in the drug war continue
+but rarely make the news. The Obama administration has indicated it
+supports abolition of the hundred-to-one disparity in sentencing for crack
+versus powder cocaine—the most obvious and embarrassing example of
+racial bias in a system that purports to be colorblind. But that disparity is
+just the tip of the iceberg. As noted in chapter 2, this system depends
+primarily on the prison label, not prison time. What matters most is who
+gets swept into this system of control and then ushered into an undercaste.
+The legal rules adopted by the Supreme Court guarantee that those who find
+themselves locked up and permanently locked out due to the drug war are
+overwhelmingly black and brown.
+
+4
+The Cruel Hand
+
+A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel
+ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood.
+Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our
+character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and
+progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that
+control and guide us, as a people. The great mass of American citizens
+estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and
+hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of
+a nation’s scorn and contempt.1
+—Frederick Douglass, in a statement on behalf of delegates to the National Colored Convention held
+in Rochester, New York, in July 1853
+
+When Frederick Douglass and the other delegates to the National Colored
+Convention converged in Rochester, New York, in the summer of 1853 to
+discuss the condition, status, and future of “coloreds” (as they were called
+then), they decried the stigma of race—the condemnation and scorn heaped
+upon them for no reason other than the color of their skin. Most of the
+delegates were freed slaves, though the younger ones may have been born
+free. Northern emancipation was complete, but freedom remained elusive.
+Blacks were finally free from the formal control of their owners, but they
+were not full citizens—they could not vote, they were subject to legal
+discrimination, and at any moment, Southern plantation owners could
+capture them on the street and whisk them back to slavery. Although
+Northern slavery had been abolished, every black person was still presumed
+a slave—by law—and could not testify or introduce evidence in court. Thus
+
+if a Southern plantation owner said you were a slave, you were—unless a
+white person interceded in a court of law on your behalf and testified that
+you were rightfully free. Slavery may have died, but for thousands of
+blacks, the badge of slavery lived on.
+Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and
+arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living “free” in
+Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow. Those released from prison on parole
+can be stopped and searched by the police for any reason—or no reason at
+all—and returned to prison for the most minor of infractions, such as failing
+to attend a meeting with a parole officer. Even when released from the
+system’s formal control, the stigma of criminality lingers. Police
+supervision, monitoring, and harassment are facts of life not only for all
+those labeled criminals, but for all those who “look like” criminals. Lynch
+mobs may be long gone, but the threat of police violence is ever present. A
+wrong move or sudden gesture could mean massive retaliation by the
+police. A wallet could be mistaken for a gun. The “whites only” signs may
+gone, but new signs have gone up—notices placed in job applications,
+rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school
+applications, and petitions for licenses, informing the general public that
+“felons” are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely
+the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in
+employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those
+labeled criminals can even be denied the right to vote.
+Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have
+permission to hate. In “colorblind” America, criminals are the new
+whipping boys. They are entitled to no respect and little moral concern.
+Like the “coloreds” in the years following emancipation, criminals today
+are deemed a characterless and purposeless people, deserving of our
+collective scorn and contempt. When we say someone was “treated like a
+criminal,” what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than
+human, like a shameful creature. Hundreds of years ago, our nation put
+those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years
+ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in
+cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid
+upon them.
+
+Brave New World
+
+One might imagine that a criminal defendant, when brought before the
+judge—or when meeting with his attorney for the first time—would be told
+of the consequences of a guilty plea or conviction. He would be told that, if
+he pleads guilty to a felony, he will be deemed “unfit” for jury service and
+automatically excluded from juries for the rest of his life.2 He would also be
+told that he could be denied the right to vote. In a country that preaches the
+virtues of democracy, one could reasonably assume that being stripped of
+basic political rights would be treated by judges and court personnel as a
+serious matter indeed. Not so. When a defendant pleads guilty to a minor
+drug offense, nobody will likely tell him that he may be permanently
+forfeiting his right to vote as well as his right to serve on a jury—two of the
+most fundamental rights in any modern democracy.
+He will also be told little or nothing about the parallel universe he is
+about to enter, one that promises a form of punishment that is often more
+difficult to bear than prison time: a lifetime of shame, contempt, scorn, and
+exclusion. In this hidden world, discrimination is perfectly legal. As Jeremy
+Travis has observed, “In this brave new world, punishment for the original
+offense is no longer enough; one’s debt to society is never paid.”3 Other
+commentators liken the prison label to “the mark of Cain” and characterize
+the perpetual nature of the sanction as “internal exile.”4 Myriad laws, rules,
+and regulations operate to discriminate against ex-offenders and effectively
+prevent their reintegration into the mainstream society and economy. These
+restrictions amount to a form of “civic death” and send the unequivocal
+message that “they” are no longer part of “us.”
+Once labeled a felon, the badge of inferiority remains with you for the
+rest of your life, relegating you to a permanent second-class status.
+Consider, for example, the harsh reality facing a first-time offender who
+pleads guilty to felony possession of marijuana. Even if the defendant
+manages to avoid prison time by accepting a “generous” plea deal, he may
+
+discover that the punishment that awaits him outside the courthouse doors is
+far more severe and debilitating than what he might have encountered in
+prison. A task force of the American Bar Association described the bleak
+reality facing a petty drug offender this way:
+[The] offender may be sentenced to a term of probation, community
+service, and court costs. Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps
+any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction
+he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare
+benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal educational
+assistance. His driver’s license may be automatically suspended, and
+he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional
+licenses. If he is convicted of another crime he may be subject to
+imprisonment as a repeat offender. He will not be permitted to enlist in
+the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance.
+If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes
+immediately deportable.5
+Despite the brutal, debilitating impact of these “collateral consequences”
+on ex-offenders’ lives, courts have generally declined to find that such
+sanctions are actually “punishment” for constitutional purposes. As a result,
+judges are not required to inform criminal defendants of some of the most
+important rights they are forfeiting when they plead guilty to a felony. In
+fact, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys may not even be aware of
+the full range of collateral consequences for a felony conviction. Yet these
+civil penalties, although not considered punishment by our courts, often
+make it virtually impossible for ex-offenders to integrate into the
+mainstream society and economy upon release. Far from collateral, these
+sanctions can be the most damaging and painful aspect of a criminal
+conviction. Collectively, these sanctions send the strong message that, now
+that you have been labeled, you are no longer wanted. You are no longer
+part of “us,” the deserving. Unable to drive, get a job, find housing, or even
+qualify for public benefits, many ex-offenders lose their children, their
+dignity, and eventually their freedom—landing back in jail after failing to
+play by rules that seem hopelessly stacked against them.
+
+The churning of African Americans in and out of prisons today is hardly
+surprising, given the strong message that is sent to them that they are not
+wanted in mainstream society. In Frederick Douglass’s words, “Men are so
+constituted that they derive their conviction of their own possibilities
+largely from the estimate formed of them by others. If nothing is expected
+of a people, that people will find it difficult to contradict that expectation.”6
+More than a hundred years later, a similar argument was made by an exoffender contemplating her eventual release into a society that had
+constructed a brand-new legal regime designed to keep her locked out, fifty
+years after the demise of Jim Crow. “Right now I’m in prison,” she said.
+“Like society kicked me out. They’re like, ‘Okay, the criminal element, We
+don’t want them in society, we’re going to put them in prisons.’ Okay, but
+once I get out, then what do you do? What do you do with all these millions
+of people that have been in prison and been released? I mean, do you accept
+them back? Or do you keep them as outcasts? And if you keep them as
+outcasts, how do you expect them to act?”7
+Remarkably, the overwhelming majority of ex-offenders struggle
+mightily to play by the rules and to succeed in a society seemingly hell-bent
+on excluding them. Like their forbears, they do their best to survive, even
+thrive—against all odds.
+
+No Place Like Home
+
+The first question on the minds of many released prisoners as they take their
+first steps outside the prison gates is where they will sleep that night. Some
+prisoners have families eagerly awaiting them—families who are willing to
+let their newly released relative sleep on the couch, floor, or extra bed
+indefinitely. Most, however, desperately need to find a place to live—if not
+immediately, at least soon. After several days, weeks, or months of sleeping
+in your aunt’s basement or on a friend’s couch, a time comes when you are
+expected to fend for yourself. Figuring out how, exactly, to do that is no
+easy task, however, when your felony record operates to bar you from any
+public housing assistance. As one young man with a felony conviction
+explained in exasperation, “I asked for an application for Section 8. They
+asked me if I had a felony. I said, ‘yes.’ . . . They said, ‘Well, then, this
+application isn’t for you.’”8
+This young man had just hit his first brick wall coming out of prison.
+Anyone convicted of a felony—any felony—is automatically ineligible for
+public housing assistance for at least five years. Even after the five-year
+period has expired, those labeled “criminals” face a lifetime of
+discrimination in public and private housing markets. Housing
+discrimination against former felons (as well as suspected “criminals”) is
+perfectly legal. During Jim Crow, it was legal to deny housing on the basis
+of race, through restrictive covenants and other exclusionary practices.
+Today, discrimination against felons, criminal suspects, and their families is
+routine among public and private landlords alike. Rather than racially
+restrictive covenants, we have restrictive lease agreements, barring the new
+“undesirables.”
+The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, passed by Congress as part of the War
+on Drugs, called for strict lease enforcement and eviction of public housing
+tenants who engage in criminal activity. The Act granted public housing
+agencies the authority to use leases to evict any tenant, household member,
+
+or guest engaged in any criminal activity on or near public housing
+premises. In 1996, President Clinton, in an effort to bolster his “tough on
+crime” credentials, declared that public housing agencies should exercise no
+discretion when a tenant or guest engages in criminal activity, particularly if
+it is drug-related. In his 1996 State of the Union address, he proposed “One
+Strike and You’re Out” legislation, which strengthened eviction rules and
+strongly urged that drug offenders be automatically excluded from public
+housing based on their criminal records. He later declared, “If you break the
+law, you no longer have a home in public housing, one strike and you’re
+out. That should be the law everywhere in America.”9 In its final form, the
+act, together with the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of
+1998, not only authorized public housing agencies to exclude automatically
+(and evict) drug offenders and other felons; it also allowed agencies to bar
+applicants believed to be using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol—whether or
+not they had been convicted of a crime. These decisions can be appealed,
+but appeals are rarely successful without an attorney—a luxury most public
+housing applicants cannot afford.
+In response to the new legislation and prodding by President Clinton, the
+Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) developed guidelines
+to press public housing agencies to “evict drug dealers and other criminals”
+and “screen tenants for criminal records.”10 HUD’s “One Strike Guide”
+calls on housing agencies to “take full advantage of their authority to use
+stringent screening and eviction procedures.” It also encourages housing
+authorities not only to screen all applicants’ criminal records, but to develop
+their own exclusion criteria. The guide notes that agency ratings and
+funding are tied to whether they are “adopting and implementing effective
+applicant screening,” a clear signal that agencies may be penalized for not
+cleaning house.11
+Throughout the United States, public housing agencies have adopted
+exclusionary policies that deny eligibility to applicants even with the most
+minor criminal backgrounds. The crackdown inspired by the War on Drugs
+has resulted in unprecedented punitiveness, denying poor people access to
+public housing for virtually any crime. “Just about any offense will do, even
+if it bears scant relation to the likelihood the applicant will be a good
+tenant.”12
+
+The consequences for real families can be devastating. Without housing,
+people can lose their children. Take for example, the forty-two-year-old
+African American man who applied for public housing for himself and his
+three children who were living with him at the time.13 He was denied
+because of an earlier drug possession charge for which he had pleaded
+guilty and served thirty days in jail. Of course, the odds that he would have
+been convicted of drug possession would have been extremely low if he
+were white. But as an African American, he was not only targeted by the
+drug war but then denied access to housing because of his conviction. Since
+being denied housing, he has lost custody of his children and is homeless.
+Many nights he sleeps outside on the streets. Stiff punishment, indeed, for a
+minor drug offense—especially for his children, who are innocent of any
+crime.
+Remarkably, under current law, an actual conviction or finding of a
+formal violation is not necessary to trigger exclusion. Public housing
+officials are free to reject applicants simply on the basis of arrests,
+regardless of whether they result in convictions or fines. Because African
+Americans and Latinos are targeted by police in the War on Drugs, it is far
+more likely that they will be arrested for minor, nonviolent crimes.
+Accordingly, HUD policies excluding people from housing assistance based
+on arrests as well as convictions guarantee highly discriminatory results.
+Perhaps no aspect of the HUD regulatory regime has been as
+controversial, however, as the “no-fault” clause contained in every public
+housing lease. Public housing tenants are required to do far more than
+simply pay their rent on time, keep the noise down, and make sure their
+homes are kept in good condition. The “One Strike and You’re Out” policy
+requires every public housing lease to stipulate that if the tenant, or any
+member of the tenant’s household, or any guest of the tenant, engages in
+any drug-related or other criminal activity on or off the premises, the
+tenancy will be terminated. Prior to the adoption of this policy, it was
+generally understood that a tenant could not be evicted unless he or she had
+some knowledge of or participation in alleged criminal activity.
+Accordingly, in Rucker v. Davis, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck
+down the “no-fault” clause, on the ground that the eviction of innocent
+
+tenants—who were not accused or even aware of the alleged criminal
+activity—was inconsistent with the legislative scheme.14
+The U.S. Supreme Court reversed.15 The Court ruled in 2002 that, under
+federal law, public housing tenants can be evicted regardless of whether
+they had knowledge of or participated in alleged criminal activity.
+According to the Court, William Lee and Barbara Hill were rightfully
+evicted after their grandsons were charged with smoking marijuana in a
+parking lot near their apartments. Herman Walker was properly evicted as
+well, after police found cocaine on his caregiver. And Perlie Rucker was
+rightly evicted following the arrest of her daughter for possession of
+cocaine a few blocks from home. The Court ruled these tenants could be
+held civilly liable for the nonviolent behavior of their children and
+caregivers. They could be tossed out of public housing due to no fault of
+their own.
+In the abstract, policies barring or evicting people who are somehow
+associated with criminal activity may seem like a reasonable approach to
+dealing with crime in public housing, particularly when crime has gotten
+out of control. Desperate times call for desperate measures, it is often said.
+The problem, however, is twofold: These vulnerable families have nowhere
+to go, and the impact is inevitably discriminatory. People who are not poor
+and who are not dependent upon public assistance for housing need not fear
+that, if their son, daughter, caregiver, or relative is caught with some
+marijuana at school or shoplifts from a drugstore, they will find themselves
+suddenly evicted—homeless. But for countless poor people—particularly
+racial minorities who disproportionately rely on public assistance—that
+possibility looms large. As a result, many families are reluctant to allow
+their relatives—particularly those who are recently released from prison—
+to stay with them, even temporarily.
+No one knows exactly how many people are excluded from public
+housing because of criminal records, or even the number of people with
+criminal records who would be ineligible if they applied. There is no
+national data available. We do know, however, that there are several million
+ex-felons in the United States and that under existing rules everyone
+convicted of a felony is automatically ineligible for a minimum of five
+years. We also know there are tens of millions of Americans who have been
+
+arrested but never convicted of any offense, or convicted only of minor
+misdemeanors, and they too are routinely excluded from public housing.
+What happens to these people denied housing assistance or evicted from
+their homes? Where do they go? Thousands of them become homeless. A
+study conducted by the McCormick Institute of Public Affairs found that
+nearly a quarter of guests in homeless shelters had been incarcerated within
+the previous year—people who were unable to find somewhere to live after
+release from prison walls.
+Prisoners returning “home” are typically the poorest of the poor, lacking
+the ability to pay for private housing and routinely denied public housing
+assistance—the type of assistance which could provide some much-needed
+stability in their lives. For them, “going home” is more a figure of speech
+than a realistic option. More than a half million people are released from
+prison each year, and for many, finding a new home appears next to
+impossible, not just in the short term, but for the rest of their lives. As a
+forty-one-year-old African American mother remarked after being denied
+housing because of a single arrest four years prior to her application, “I’m
+trying to do the right thing; I deserve a chance. Even if I was the worst
+criminal, I deserve a chance. Everybody deserves a chance.”16
+
+Boxed In
+
+Aside from figuring out where to sleep, nothing is more worrisome for
+people leaving prison than figuring out where to work. In fact, a study by
+the Vera Institute found that during the first month after release from prison,
+people consistently were more preoccupied with finding work than anything
+else.17 Some of the pressure to find work comes directly from the criminal
+justice system. According to one survey of state parole agencies, forty of
+the fifty-one jurisdictions surveyed (the fifty states and the District of
+Columbia) required parolees to “maintain gainful employment.”18 Failure
+to do so could mean more prison time.
+Even beyond the need to comply with the conditions of parole,
+employment satisfies a more basic human need—the fundamental need to
+be self sufficient, to contribute, to support one’s family, and to add value to
+society at large. Finding a job allows a person to establish a positive role in
+the community, develop a healthy self-image, and keep a distance from
+negative influences and opportunities for illegal behavior. Work is deemed
+so fundamental to human existence in many countries around the world that
+it is regarded as a basic human right. Deprivation of work, particularly
+among men, is strongly associated with depression and violence.
+Landing a job after release from prison is no small feat. “I’ve watched
+the discrimination and experienced it firsthand when you have to check the
+box,” says Susan Burton, an ex-offender who founded a business aimed at
+providing formerly incarcerated women the support necessary to reestablish themselves in the workforce. The “box” she refers to is the
+question on job applications in which applicants are asked to check “yes” or
+“no” if they have ever been convicted of a crime. “It’s not only [on] job
+[applications],” Burton explains. “It’s on housing. It’s on a school
+application. It’s on welfare applications. It’s everywhere you turn.”19
+Nearly every state allows private employers to discriminate on the basis
+of past criminal convictions. In fact, employers in most states can deny jobs
+
+to people who were arrested but never convicted of any crime. Only ten
+states prohibit all employers and licensing agencies from considering
+arrests, and three states prohibit some employers and occupational and
+licensing agencies from doing so.20 Employers in a growing number of
+professions are barred by state licensing agencies from hiring people with a
+wide range of criminal convictions, even convictions unrelated to the job or
+license sought.21
+The result of these discriminatory laws is that virtually every job
+application, whether for dog catcher, bus driver, Burger King cashier, or
+accountant, asks ex-offenders to “check the box.” Most ex-offenders have
+difficulty even getting an interview after they have checked the box,
+because most employers are unwilling to consider hiring a self-identified
+criminal. One survey showed that although 90 percent of employers say
+they are willing to consider filling their most recent job vacancy with a
+welfare recipient, only 40 percent are willing to consider doing so with an
+ex-offender.22 Similarly, a 2002 survey of 122 California employers
+revealed that although most employers would consider hiring someone
+convicted of a misdemeanor offense, the numbers dropped dramatically for
+those convicted of felonies. Less than a quarter of employers were willing
+to consider hiring someone convicted of a drug-related felony; the number
+plummeted to 7 percent for a property-related felony, and less than 1
+percent for a violent felony.23 Even those who hope to be self-employed—
+for example, as a barber, manicurist, gardener, or counselor—may discover
+that they are denied professional licenses on the grounds of past arrests or
+convictions, even if their offenses have nothing at all to do with their ability
+to perform well in their chosen profession.
+For most people coming out of prison, a criminal conviction adds to their
+already problematic profile. About 70 percent of offenders and ex-offenders
+are high school dropouts, and according to at least one study, about half are
+functionally illiterate.24 Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages,
+labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their
+decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.
+The communities and schools from which they came failed to prepare them
+for the workforce, and once they have been labeled criminals, their job
+prospects are forever bleak.
+
+Adding to their troubles is the “spatial mismatch” between their
+residence and employment opportunities.25 Willingness to hire ex-offenders
+is greatest in construction or manufacturing—industries that require little
+customer contact—and weakest in retail trade and other service sector
+businesses.26 Manufacturing jobs, however, have all but disappeared from
+the urban core during the past thirty years. Not long ago, young, unskilled
+men could find decent, well-paying jobs at large factories in most major
+Northern cities. Today, due to globalization and deindustrialization, that is
+no longer the case. Jobs can be found in the suburbs—mostly service sector
+jobs—but employment for unskilled men with criminal convictions, while
+difficult to find anywhere, is especially hard to find close to home.
+An ex-offender whose driver’s license has been suspended or who does
+not have access to a car, often faces nearly insurmountable barriers to
+finding employment. Driving to the suburbs to pick up and drop off
+applications, attend interviews, and pursue employment leads may be
+perfectly feasible if you have a driver’s license and access to a vehicle, but
+attempting to do so by bus is another matter entirely. An unemployed black
+male from Chicago’s South Side explains: “Most of the time ... the places
+be too far and you need transportation and I don’t have none right now. If I
+had some I’d probably be able to get one [a job]. If I had a car and went
+way into the suburbs, ’cause there ain’t none in the city.”27 Those who
+actually land jobs in the suburbs find it difficult to keep them without
+reliable, affordable transportation.
+Murray McNair, a twenty-two-year-old African American, returned to
+Newark, New Jersey, after being locked up for drug offenses. He shares a
+small apartment with his pregnant girlfriend, his sister, and her two
+children. Through a federally funded job training program operated by
+Goodwill Industries, McNair found a $9-an-hour job at a warehouse twenty
+miles—two buses and a taxi ride—away. “I know it’s going to be tough,” he
+told a New York Times reporter. “But I can’t be thinking about myself
+anymore.”28
+The odds of McNair, or any ex-offender in a similar situation, succeeding
+under these circumstances are small. If you make $9 per hour, but spend
+$20 dollars or more getting to and from work every day, how do you
+manage to pay rent, buy food, and help to support yourself and a growing
+
+family? An unemployed thirty-six-year-old black man quit his suburban job
+because of the transportation problem. “I was spending more money getting
+to work than I earned working.”29
+
+The Black Box
+
+Black ex-offenders are the most severely disadvantaged applicants in the
+modern job market. While all job applicants—regardless of race—are
+harmed by a criminal record, the harm is not equally felt. Not only are
+African Americans far more likely to be labeled criminals, they are also
+more strongly affected by the stigma of a criminal record. Black men
+convicted of felonies are the least likely to receive job offers of any
+demographic group, and suburban employers are the most unwilling to hire
+them.30
+Sociologist Devah Pager explains that those sent to prison “are
+institutionally branded as a particular class of individuals” with major
+implications for their place and status in society.31 The “negative
+credential” associated with a criminal record represents a unique
+mechanism of state-sponsored stratification. As Pager puts it, “it is the state
+that certifies particular individuals in ways that qualify them for
+discrimination or social exclusion.” The “official status” of this negative
+credential differentiates it from other sources of social stigma, offering
+legitimacy to its use as a basis for discrimination. Four decades ago,
+employers were free to discriminate explicitly on the basis of race; today
+employers feel free to discriminate against those who bear the prison label
+—i.e., those labeled criminals by the state. The result is a system of
+stratification based on the “official certification of individual character and
+competence”—a form of branding by the government.32
+Given the incredibly high level of discrimination suffered by black men
+in the job market and the structural barriers to employment in the new
+economy, it should come as no surprise that a huge percentage of African
+American men are unemployed. Nearly one-third of young black men in the
+United States today are out of work.33 The jobless rate for young black
+male dropouts, including those incarcerated, is a staggering 65 percent.34
+
+In an effort to address the rampant joblessness among black men labeled
+criminals, a growing number of advocates in recent years have launched
+Ban the Box campaigns. These campaigns have been successful in cities
+like San Francisco, where All of Us or None, a nonprofit grassroots
+organization dedicated to eliminating discrimination against ex-offenders,
+persuaded the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to approve a resolution
+designed to eliminate hiring discrimination against people with criminal
+records. San Francisco’s new policy (which took effect in June 2006) seeks
+to prevent discrimination on the basis of a criminal record by removing the
+criminal-history box from the initial application. An individual’s past
+convictions will still be considered, but not until later in the hiring process,
+when the applicant has been identified as a serious candidate for the
+position. The only exception is for those jobs for which state or local laws
+expressly bar people with certain specific convictions from employment.
+These applicants will still be required to submit conviction-history
+information at the beginning of the hiring process. However, unlike a
+similar ordinance adopted in Boston, San Francisco’s policy applies only to
+public employment, not to private vendors that do business with the city or
+county of San Francisco.
+While these grassroots initiatives and policy proposals are major
+achievements, they raise questions about how best to address the complex
+and interlocking forms of discrimination experienced by black ex-offenders.
+Some scholars believe, based on the available data, that black males may
+suffer more discrimination—not less—when specific criminal history
+information is not available.35 Because the association of race and
+criminality is so pervasive, employers may use less accurate and
+discriminatory methods to screen out those perceived to be likely criminals.
+Popular but misguided proxies for criminality—such as race, receipt of
+public assistance, low educational attainment, and gaps in work history—
+could be used by employers when no box is available on the application
+form to identify criminals. This concern is supported by ethnographic work
+suggesting that employers have fears of violence by black men relative to
+other groups of applicants and act on those fears when making hiring
+decisions. Without disconfirming information in the job application itself,
+employers may (consciously or unconsciously) treat all black men as
+
+though they have a criminal record, effectively putting all (or most) of them
+in the same position as black ex-offenders. This research suggests that
+banning the box is not enough. We must also get rid of the mind-set that
+puts black men “in the box.”
+
+Debtor’s Prison
+
+The lucky few who land a decent job—one that pays a living wage and is in
+reasonable proximity to their residence—often discover that the system is
+structured in such a way that they still cannot survive in the mainstream,
+legal economy. Upon release from prison, ex-offenders are typically
+saddled with large debts—financial shackles that hobble them as they
+struggle to build a new life. In this system of control, like the one that
+prevailed during Jim Crow, one’s “debt to society” often reflects the cost of
+imprisonment.
+Throughout the United States, newly released prisoners are required to
+make payments to a host of agencies, including probation departments,
+courts, and child-support enforcement offices. In some jurisdictions, exoffenders are billed for drug testing and even for the drug treatment they are
+supposed to receive as a condition of parole. These fees, costs, and fines are
+generally quite new—created by law within the past twenty years—and are
+associated with a wide range of offenses. Every state has its own rules and
+regulations governing their imposition.
+Examples of preconviction service fees imposed throughout the United
+States today include jail book-in fees levied at the time of arrest, jail per
+diems assessed to cover the cost of pretrial detention, public defender
+application fees charged when someone applies for court-appointed
+counsel, and the bail investigation fee imposed when the court determines
+the likelihood of the accused appearing at trial. Postconviction fees include
+pre-sentence report fees, public defender recoupment fees, and fees levied
+on convicted persons placed in a residential or work-release program. Upon
+release, even more fees may attach, including parole or probation service
+fees. Such fees are typically charged on a monthly basis during the period
+of supervision. 36 In Ohio, for example, a court can order probationers to
+pay a $50 monthly supervision fee as a condition of probation. Failure to
+
+pay may warrant additional community control sanctions or a modification
+in the offender’s sentence.37
+Two-thirds of people detained in jails report annual incomes under
+$12,000 prior to arrest. Predictably, most ex-offenders find themselves
+unable to pay the many fees, costs, and fines associated with their
+imprisonment, as well as their child-support debts (which continue to
+accumulate while a person is incarcerated). As a result, many ex-offenders
+have their paychecks garnished. Federal law provides that a child-support
+enforcement officer can garnish up to 65 percent of an individual’s wages
+for child support. On top of that, probation officers in most states can
+require that an individual dedicate 35 percent of his or her income toward
+the payment of fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution charged by numerous
+agencies.38 Accordingly, a former inmate living at or below the poverty
+level can be charged by four or five departments at once and can be
+required to surrender 100 percent of his or her earnings. As a New York
+Times editorial soberly observed, “People caught in this impossible
+predicament are less likely to seek regular employment, making them even
+more susceptible to criminal relapse.”39
+Whether or not ex-offenders make the rational choice to participate in the
+illegal economy (rather than have up to 100 percent of their wages
+garnisheed), they may still go back to prison for failure to meet the financial
+portion of their probation supervision requirements. One study of probation
+revocations found that 12 percent were due at least in part to a failure of
+probationers to pay their debts. Some ex-offenders are thrown back in
+prison simply because they have been unable—with no place to live, and no
+decent job—to pay back thousands of dollars of prison-related fees, fines,
+and child support.
+Some offenders, like Ora Lee Hurley, find themselves trapped by fees
+and fines in prison and find it nearly impossible to get out. Hurley was a
+prisoner held at the Gateway Diversion Center in Atlanta in 2006. She was
+imprisoned because she owed a $705 fine. As part of the diversion program,
+Hurley was permitted to work during the day and return to the center at
+night. “Five days a week she work[ed] fulltime at a restaurant earning $6.50
+an hour and, after taxes, net about $700 a month.”40 Room and board at the
+diversion center was about $600, and her monthly transportation cost $52.
+
+Miscellaneous other expenses, including clothes, shoes, and personal items
+such as toothpaste, quickly exhausted what was left. Hurley’s attorney
+decried the trap she was in: “This is a situation where if this woman was
+able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there.
+And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.”41
+Although she worked a full-time job while in custody, most of her income
+went to repay the diversion program, not the underlying fine that put her in
+custody in the first place.
+This harsh reality harks back to the days after the Civil War, when former
+slaves and their descendents were arrested for minor violations, slapped
+with heavy fines, and then imprisoned until they could pay their debts. The
+only means to pay off their debts was through labor on plantations and
+farms—known as convict leasing—or in prisons that had been converted to
+work farms. Paid next to nothing, convicts were effectively enslaved in
+perpetuity, as they were unable to earn enough to pay off their debts.
+Today, many inmates work in prison, typically earning far less than the
+minimum wage—often less than $3 per hour, sometimes as little as 25
+cents. Their accounts are then “charged” for various expenses related to
+their incarceration, making it impossible for them to save the money that
+otherwise would allow them to pay off their debts or help them make a
+successful transition when released from prison. Prisoners are typically
+released with only the clothes on their backs and a pittance in gate money.
+Sometimes the money is barely enough to cover the cost of a bus ticket
+back home.
+
+Let Them Eat Cake
+
+So here you are—a newly released prisoner—homeless, unemployed, and
+carrying a mountain of debt. How do you feed yourself? Care for your
+children? There is no clear answer to that question, but one thing is for sure:
+do not count on the government for any help. Not only will you be denied
+housing, but you may well be denied food.
+Welfare reform legislation signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 ended
+individual entitlements to welfare and provided states with block grants.
+The Temporary Assistance for Needy Family Program (TANF) imposes a
+five-year lifetime limit on benefits and requires welfare recipients,
+including those who have young children and lack child care, to work in
+order to receive benefits. In the abstract, a five-year limit may sound
+reasonable. But consider this: When one is labeled a criminal, forced to
+“check the box” on applications for employment and housing, and burdened
+by thousands of dollars in debt, is it possible that one will live on the brink
+of severe poverty for more than five years and thus require food stamps for
+oneself and one’s family? Until 1996, there was a basic understanding that
+poverty-stricken mothers raising children should be afforded some minimal
+level of assistance with food and shelter.
+The five-year limit on benefits, however, is not the law’s worst feature.
+The law also requires that states permanently bar individuals with drugrelated felony convictions from receiving federally funded public
+assistance. No exceptions are made to the felony drug ban. Accordingly,
+pregnant women, women raising young children, people in drug treatment
+or recovery, and people suffering from HIV/AIDS are ineligible for food
+assistance for the rest of their lives—simply because they were once caught
+with drugs.
+
+The Silent Minority
+
+If shackling former prisoners with a lifetime of debt and authorizing
+discrimination against them in employment, housing, education, and public
+benefits is not enough to send the message that they are not wanted and not
+even considered full citizens, then stripping voting rights from those labeled
+criminals surely gets the point across.
+Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from
+voting while incarcerated for a felony offense. Only two states—Maine and
+Vermont—permit inmates to vote. The vast majority of states continue to
+withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after
+the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a
+period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one’s life.42
+This is far from the norm in other countries—like Germany, for instance,
+which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of
+European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others
+disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls.43 Prisoners vote
+either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in
+their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some
+restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former
+Communist bloc.44
+No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released
+from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In
+fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S.
+disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.
+In those few European countries that permit limited postprison
+disqualification, the sanction is very narrowly tailored and the number of
+people disenfranchised is probably in the dozens or hundreds.45 In the
+United States, by contrast, voting disqualification upon release from prison
+is automatic, with no legitimate purpose, and affects millions.
+
+Even those former prisoners who are technically eligible to vote
+frequently remain disenfranchised for life. Every state has developed its
+own process for restoring voting rights to ex-offenders. Typically the
+restoration process is a bureaucratic maze that requires the payment of fines
+or court costs. The process is so cumbersome, confusing, and onerous that
+many ex-offenders who are theoretically eligible to vote never manage to
+get their voting rights back.46 Throughout much of the United States, exoffenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork
+to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have
+been taken away in a democracy. These bureaucratic minefields are the
+modern-day equivalent of poll taxes and literacy tests—“colorblind” rules
+designed to make voting a practical impossibility for a group defined
+largely by race.
+The message communicated by felon disenfranchisement laws, policies,
+and bureaucratic procedures is not lost on those, such as Clinton Drake,
+who are effectively barred from voting for life.47 Drake, a fifty-five-yearold African American man in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested in 1988
+for possession of marijuana. Five years later, he was arrested again, this
+time for having about $10 worth of the drug on him. Facing between ten
+and twenty years in prison as a repeat offender, Drake, a Vietnam veteran
+and, at the time, a cook on a local air force base, took his public defender’s
+advice and accepted a plea bargain. Under the plea agreement, he would
+“only” have to spend five years behind bars. Five years for five joints.
+Once released, Drake found he was forbidden by law from voting until he
+paid his $900 in court costs—an impossible task, given that he was
+unemployed and the low-wage jobs he might conceivably find would never
+allow him to accumulate hundreds of dollars in savings. For all practical
+purposes, he would never be able to vote again. Shortly before the 2004
+presidential election, he said in despair:
+I put my life on the line for this country. To me, not voting is not right;
+it lead to a lot of frustration, a lot of anger. My son’s in Iraq. In the
+army just like I was. My oldest son, he fought in the first Persian Gulf
+conflict. He was in the Marines. This is my baby son over there right
+now. But I’m not able to vote. They say I owe $900 in fines. To me,
+that’s a poll tax. You’ve got to pay to vote. It’s “restitution,” they say. I
+
+came off parole on October 13, 1999, but I’m still not allowed to vote.
+Last time I voted was in ’88. Bush versus Dukakis. Bush won. I voted
+for Dukakis. If it was up to me, I’d vote his son out this time too. I
+know a lot of friends got the same cases like I got, not able to vote. A
+lot of guys doing the same things like I was doing. Just marijuana.
+They treat marijuana in Alabama like you committed treason or
+something. I was on the 1965 voting rights march from Selma. I was
+fifteen years old. At eighteen, I was in Vietnam fighting for my
+country. And now? Unemployed and they won’t allow me to vote.48
+Drake’s vote, along with the votes of millions of other people labeled
+felons, might have made a real difference in 2004. There is no doubt their
+votes would have changed things in 2000. Following the election, it was
+widely reported that, had the 600,000 former felons who had completed
+their sentence in Florida been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have been
+elected president of the United States rather than George W. Bush.49
+Four years later, voter registration workers in the South encountered
+scores of ex-offenders who were reluctant to register to vote, even if they
+were technically eligible, because they were scared to have any contact with
+governmental authorities. Many on welfare were worried that any little
+thing they did to bring attention to themselves might put their food stamps
+at risk. Others had been told by parole and probation officers that they could
+not vote, and although it was not true, they believed it, and the news spread
+like wildfire. “How long you think it take if someone tells you you can’t
+vote before it spreads?” asked one ex-offender. “It’s been years and years
+people telling you you can’t vote. You live in a slum, you’re not counted.”50
+Even those who knew they were eligible to register worried that
+registering to vote would somehow attract attention to them—perhaps land
+them back in jail. While this might strike some as paranoia, many Southern
+blacks have vivid memories of the harsh consequences that befell their
+parents and grandparents who attempted to vote in defiance of poll taxes,
+literacy tests, and other devices adopted to suppress the black vote. Many
+were terrorized by the Klan. Today, ex-offenders live in constant fear of a
+different form of racial repression—racial profiling, police brutality, and
+revocation of parole. One investigative journalist described the situation
+
+this way: “Overwhelmingly, black people [in Mississippi] are scared of any
+form of contact with authorities they saw as looking for excuses to
+reincarcerate them. In neighborhood after neighborhood, the grandchildren
+of the civil rights pioneers from the 1950s were as scared to vote, because
+of prisons and the threat of prisons, as their grandparents were half a
+century ago because of the threat of the lynch mob.”51 Nshombi Lambright,
+of the Jackson ACLU, concurs. “People aren’t even trying to get their vote
+back,” she said. “It’s hard just getting them to attempt to register. They’re
+terrorized. They’re so scared of going back to jail that they won’t even try
+it.”52
+Research indicates that a large number of close elections would have
+come out differently if felons had been allowed to vote, including at least
+seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000.53 The impact on those major
+elections undoubtedly would be greater if all those deterred or prevented
+from voting were taken into account. But as ex-offenders will hasten to
+emphasize, it is not just the “big” elections that matter. One ex-offender put
+it this way: “I have no right to vote on the school referendums that ... will
+affect my children. I have no right to vote on how my taxes is going to be
+spent or used, which I have to pay whether I’m a felon or not, you know?
+So basically I’ve lost all voice or control over my government.... I get mad
+because I can’t say anything because I don’t have a voice.”54
+Those who do have their voting rights restored often describe a feeling of
+validation, even pride. “I got a voice now,” said Willa Womack, a fortyfour-year-old African American woman who had been incarcerated on drug
+charges. “I can decide now who will be my governor, who will be my
+president. I have a vote now. I feel like somebody. It’s a feeling of relief
+from where I came from—that I’m actually somebody.”55
+
+The Pariahs
+
+For Americans who are not caught up in this system of control, it can be
+difficult to imagine what life would be like if discrimination against you
+were perfectly legal—if you were not allowed to participate in the political
+system and if you were not even eligible for food stamps or welfare and
+could be denied housing assistance. Yet as bad as these forms of
+discrimination are, many ex-offenders will tell you that the formal
+mechanisms of exclusion are not the worst of it. The shame and stigma that
+follows you for the rest of your life—that is the worst. It is not just the job
+denial but the look that flashes across the face of a potential employer when
+he notices that “the box” has been checked—the way he suddenly refuses to
+look you in the eye. It is not merely the denial of the housing application
+but the shame of being a grown man who has to beg his grandmother for a
+place to sleep at night. It is not simply the denial of the right to vote but the
+shame one feels when a co-worker innocently asks, “Who you gonna vote
+for on Tuesday?”
+One need not be formally convicted in a court of law to be subject to this
+shame and stigma. As long as you “look like” or “seem like” a criminal,
+you are treated with the same suspicion and contempt, not just by police,
+security guards, or hall monitors at your school, but also by the woman who
+crosses the street to avoid you and by the store employees who follow you
+through the aisles, eager to catch you in the act of being the
+“criminalblackman”—the archetypal figure who justifies the New Jim
+Crow.56
+Practically from cradle to grave, black males in urban ghettos are treated
+like current or future criminals. One may learn to cope with the stigma of
+criminality, but like the stigma of race, the prison label is not something that
+a black man in the ghetto can ever fully escape. For those newly released
+from prison, the pain is particularly acute. As Dorsey Nunn, an ex-offender
+and cofounder of All of Us or None, once put it, “The biggest hurdle you
+
+gotta get over when you walk out those prison gates is shame—that shame,
+that stigma, that label, that thing you wear around your neck saying ‘I’m a
+criminal.’ It’s like a yoke around your neck, and it’ll drag you down, even
+kill you if you let it.” Many ex-offenders experience an existential angst
+associated with their permanent social exclusion. Henry, a young African
+American convicted of a felony, explains, “[It’s like] you broke the law, you
+bad. You broke the law, bang—you’re not part of us anymore.”57 That
+sentiment is shared by a woman, currently incarcerated, who described the
+experience this way:
+When I leave here it will be very difficult for me in the sense that I’m a
+felon. That I will always be a felon ... for me to leave here, it will
+affect my job, it will affect my education ... custody [of my children],
+it can affect child support, it can affect everywhere—family, friends,
+housing.... People that are convicted of drug crimes can’t even get
+housing anymore.... Yes, I did my prison time. How long are you going
+to punish me as a result of it? And not only on paper, I’m only on
+paper for ten months when I leave here, that’s all the parole I have.
+But, that parole isn’t going to be anything. It���s the housing, it’s the
+credit reestablishing.... I mean even to go into the school, to work with
+my child’s class—and I’m not a sex offender—but all I need is one
+parent who says, “Isn’t she a felon? I don’t want her with my child.”58
+The permanence of one’s social exile is often the hardest to swallow. For
+many it seems inconceivable that, for a minor offense, you can be subjected
+to discrimination, scorn, and exclusion for the rest of your life. Human
+Rights Watch, in its report documenting the experiences of America’s
+undercaste, tells the story of a fifty-seven-year-old African American
+woman, denied rental housing by a federally funded landlord due to a minor
+conviction she did not even know was on her record. After being refused
+reconsideration, she asked her caseworker in pained exasperation, “Am I
+going to be a criminal for the rest of my life?”59
+When someone is convicted of a crime today, their “debt to society” is
+never paid. The “cruel hand” that Frederick Douglass spoke of more than
+150 years ago has appeared once again. In this new system of control, like
+the last, many black men “hold up [their] heads, if at all, against the
+
+withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.” Willie Johnson, a
+forty-three-year-old African American man recently released from prison in
+Ohio, explained it this way:
+My felony conviction has been like a mental punishment, because of
+all the obstacles.... Every time I go to put in a [job] application—I have
+had three companies hire me and tell me to come to work the next day.
+But then the day before they will call and tell me don’t come in—
+because you have a felony. And that is what is devastating because you
+think you are about to go to work and they call you and say because of
+your felony we can’t hire [you]. I have run into this at least a dozen
+times. Two times I got very depressed and sad because I couldn’t take
+care of myself as a man. It was like I wanted to give up—because in
+society nobody wants to give us a helping hand. Right now I am
+considered homeless. I have never been homeless until I left the
+penitentiary, and now I know what it feels to be homeless. If it was not
+for my family I would be in the streets sleeping in the cold.... We
+[black men] have three strikes against us: 1) because we are black, and
+2) because we are a black male, and the final strike is a felony. These
+are the greatest three strikes that a black man has against him in this
+country. I have friends who don’t have a felony—and have a hard time
+getting a job. But if a black man can’t find a job to take care of himself
+—he is ashamed that he can’t take care of his children.60
+Not surprisingly, for many black men, the hurt and depression gives way
+to anger. A black minister in Waterloo, Mississippi, explained his outrage at
+the fate that has befallen African Americans in the post-civil rights era. “It’s
+a hustle,” he said angrily. “‘Felony’ is the new N-word. They don’t have to
+call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon. In every ghetto you
+see alarming numbers of young men with felony convictions. Once you
+have that felony stamp, your hope for employment, for any kind of
+integration into society, it begins to fade out. Today’s lynching is a felony
+charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are
+professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a
+modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you
+get that F, you’re on fire.”61
+
+Remarkably, it is not uncommon today to hear media pundits, politicians,
+social critics, and celebrities—most notably Bill Cosby—complain that the
+biggest problem black men have today is that they “have no shame.” Many
+worry that prison time has become a badge of honor in some communities
+—“a rite of passage” is the term most often used in the press. Others claim
+that inner-city residents no longer share the same value system as
+mainstream society, and therefore are not stigmatized by criminality. Yet as
+Donald Braman, author of Doing Time on the Outside, states, “One can only
+assume that most participants in these discussion have had little direct
+contact with the families and communities they are discussing.”62
+Over a four-year period, Braman conducted a major ethnographic study
+of families affected by mass incarceration in Washington, D.C., a city where
+three out of every four young black men can expect to spend some time
+behind bars.63 He found that, contrary to popular belief, the young men
+labeled criminals and their families are profoundly hurt and stigmatized by
+their status: “They are not shameless; they feel the stigma that accompanies
+not only incarceration but all the other stereotypes that accompany it—
+fatherlessness, poverty, and often, despite every intent to make it otherwise,
+diminished love.” The results of Braman’s study have been largely
+corroborated by similar studies elsewhere in the United States.64
+These studies indicate that the biggest problem the black community may
+face today is not “shamelessness” but rather the severe isolation, distrust,
+and alienation created by mass incarceration. During Jim Crow, blacks were
+severely stigmatized and segregated on the basis of race, but in their own
+communities they could find support, solidarity, acceptance—love. Today,
+when those labeled criminals return to their communities, they are often
+met with scorn and contempt, not just by employers, welfare workers, and
+housing officials, but also by their own neighbors, teachers, and even
+members of their own families. This is so, even when they have been
+imprisoned for minor offenses, such as possession and sale of a small
+amount of drugs. Young black males in their teens are often told “you’ll
+amount to nothing” or “you’ll find yourself back in jail, just like your
+father”—a not-so-subtle suggestion that a shameful defect lies deep within
+them, an inherited trait perhaps—part of their genetic makeup. “You are a
+criminal, nothing but a criminal. You are a no good criminal.”65
+
+The anger and frustration directed at young black men returning home
+from prison is understandable, given that they are returning to communities
+that are hurt by joblessness and crime. These communities desperately need
+their young men to be holding down jobs and supporting their families,
+rather than wasting away in prison cells. While there is widespread
+recognition that the War on Drugs is racist and that politicians have refused
+to invest in jobs or schools in their communities, parents of offenders and
+ex-offenders still feel intense shame—shame that their children have turned
+to crime despite the lack of obvious alternatives. One mother of an
+incarcerated teen, Constance, described her angst this way: “Regardless of
+what you feel like you’ve done for your kid, it still comes back on you, and
+you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I messed up.
+You know, maybe if I had a did it this way, then it wouldn’t a happened that
+way.’” After her son’s arrest, she could not bring herself to tell friends and
+relatives and kept the family’s suffering private. Constance is not alone.
+
+Eerie Silence
+
+David Braman’s ethnographic research shows that mass incarceration, far
+from reducing the stigma associated with criminality, actually creates a
+deep silence in communities of color, one rooted in shame. Imprisonment is
+considered so shameful that many people avoid talking about it, even within
+their own families. Some, like Constance, are silent because they blame
+themselves for their children’s fate and believe that others blame them as
+well. Others are silent because they believe hiding the truth will protect
+friends and family members—e.g., “I don’t know what [his incarceration]
+would do to his aunt. She just thinks so highly of him.” Others claim that a
+loved one’s criminality is a private, family matter: “Somebody’s business is
+nobody’s business.”66
+Remarkably, even in communities devastated by mass incarceration,
+many people struggling to the cope with the stigma of imprisonment have
+no idea that their neighbors are struggling with the same grief, shame, and
+isolation. Braman reported that “when I asked participants [in the study] if
+they knew of other people in the neighborhood, many did know of one or
+two out of the dozens of households on the block that had members
+incarcerated but did not feel comfortable talking with others.”67 This type
+of phenomenon has been described in the psychological literature as
+pluralistic ignorance, in which people misjudge the norm. One example is
+found in studies of college freshman who overestimate the drinking among
+other freshman.68 When it comes to families of prisoners, however, their
+underestimation of the extent of incarceration in their communities
+exacerbates their sense of isolation by making the imprisonment of their
+family members seem more abnormal than it is.
+Even in church, a place where many people seek solace in times of grief
+and sorrow, families of prisoners often keep secret the imprisonment of
+their children or relatives. As one woman responded when asked if she
+could turn to church members for support, “Church? I wouldn’t dare tell
+
+anyone at church.”69 Far from being a place of comfort or refuge, churches
+can be a place where judgment, shame, and contempt are felt most acutely.
+Services in black churches frequently contain a strong mixture of concern
+for the less fortunate and a call to personal responsibility. As Cathy Cohen
+has observed, ministers and members of black congregations have helped to
+develop what she calls the “indigenous constructed image of ‘good, black
+Christian folk.’”70 Black churches, in this cultural narrative, are places
+where the “good” black people in the community can be found. To the
+extent that the imprisonment of one’s son or relative (or one’s own
+imprisonment) is experienced as a personal failure—a failure of personal
+responsibility—church can be a source of fresh pain rather than comfort.
+Those who have had positive experiences of acceptance and sympathy
+after disclosing the status of a loved one (or their own status) report they are
+better able to cope. Notably, however, even after such positive experiences,
+most family members remain committed to maintaining tight control over
+who knows and who does not know about the status of their loved one.
+According to Braman, not one of the family members in his study “had
+‘come out’ completely to their extended families at church and at work.”71
+
+Passing (Redux)
+
+Lying about incarcerated family members is another common coping
+strategy—a form of passing. Whereas light-skinned blacks during the Jim
+Crow era sometimes cut off relations with friends and family in an effort to
+“pass” as white and enjoy the upward mobility and privilege associated
+with whiteness, today many family members of prisoners lie and try to hide
+the status of their relatives in an effort to mitigate the stigma of criminality.
+This is especially the case at work—employment settings where family
+members interact with people they believe could not possibly understand
+what they are going through.
+One woman, Ruth, whose younger brother is incarcerated, says she
+would never discuss her brother with her co-workers or supervisor, though
+they have long shared information about their personal lives. “You know, I
+talk to [my supervisor] about stuff, but not this. This was too much, and it
+definitely made, well it was just harder to talk to him. He wants to know
+how my brother is. I just can’t tell it to him. What does he know about
+prison?”72 When asked to explain why her white co-workers and
+supervisors would have trouble understanding her brother’s incarceration,
+Ruth explained that it was not just incarceration but “everything”—
+everything related to race. As an example, she mentioned nights when she
+works late: “I tell my boss all the time, I say, ‘If you want me to take a taxi
+you go down there and flag one for me. I’m not going out there and stand
+twenty minutes for a cab when they’ll run over me to get to you.’ ... He’s
+white and, see, he don’t know the difference because he’s from Seattle,
+Washington. He looks at me real strange, like, ‘What are you talking
+about?’”73
+Many ex-offenders and families of prisoners are desperately attempting
+to be perceived as part of the modern upwardly mobile class, even if their
+income does not place them in it. Ex-offenders lie (by refusing to check the
+box on employment applications), and family members lie through
+
+omission or obfuscation because they are painfully aware of the historically
+intransigent stereotypes of criminal, dysfunctional families that pervade not
+only public discussions of inner cities but of the black community in
+general. This awareness can lead beyond shame to a place of self-hate.
+One mother of an incarcerated teenager described the self-hate she
+perceives in the black community this way:
+All your life you been taught that you’re not a worthy person, or
+something is wrong with you. So you don’t have no respect for
+yourself. See, people of color have—not all of them, but a lot of them
+—have poor self-esteem, because we’ve been branded. We hate
+ourselves, you know. We have been programmed that it’s something
+that’s wrong with us. We hate ourselves.74
+This self-hate, she explained, does not affect just the young boys who
+find themselves getting in trouble and fulfilling the negative expectations of
+those in the community and beyond. Self-hate is also part of the reason
+people in her neighborhood do not speak to each other about the impact of
+incarceration on their families and their lives. In her nearly all-black
+neighborhood, she worries about what the neighbors would think about her
+if she revealed that her son had been labeled a criminal: “It’s hard, because,
+like I say ... we’ve been labeled all our lives that we are the bad people.”75
+The silence this stigma engenders among family members, neighbors,
+friends, relatives, co-workers, and strangers is perhaps the most painful—
+yet least acknowledged—aspect of the new system of control. The historical
+anthropologist Gerald Sider once wrote, “We can have no significant
+understanding of any culture unless we also know the silences that were
+institutionally created and guaranteed along with it.”76 Nowhere is that
+observation more relevant in American society today than in an analysis of
+the culture of mass incarceration.
+Descriptions of the silence that hovers over mass incarceration are rare
+because people—whether they are social scientists, judges, politicians, or
+reporters—are usually more interested in speech, acts, and events than in
+the negative field of silence and estrangement that lurks beneath the
+surface. But, as Braman rightly notes, those who live in the shadows of this
+silence are devalued as human beings:
+
+There is a repression of self experienced by these families in their
+silence. The retreat of a mother or wife from friendships in church and
+at work, the words not spoken between friends, the enduring silence of
+children who guard what for them is profound and powerful
+information—all are telling indicators of the social effects of
+incarceration. As relationships between family and friends become
+strained or false, not only are people’s understandings of one another
+diminished, but, because people are social, they themselves are
+diminished as well.77
+The harm done by this social silence is more than interpersonal. The
+silence—driven by stigma and fear of shame—results in a repression of
+public thought, a collective denial of lived experience. As Braman puts it,
+“By forcing out of public view the struggles that these families face in the
+most simple and fundamental acts—living together and caring for one
+another—this broader social silence makes it seem as though [ghetto
+families] simply are ‘that way’: broken, valueless, irreparable.”78 It also
+makes community healing and collective political action next to impossible.
+
+Gangsta Love
+
+For some, the notion that black communities are severely stigmatized and
+shamed by criminality is counterintuitive: if incarceration in many urban
+areas is the statistical norm, why isn’t it socially normative as well? It is
+true that imprisonment has become “normal” in ghetto communities. In
+major cities across the United States, the majority of young black men are
+under the control of the criminal justice system or saddled with criminal
+records. But just because the prison label has become normal does not mean
+that it is generally viewed as acceptable. Poor people of color, like other
+Americans—indeed like nearly everyone around the world—want safe
+streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful
+opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that ghetto families do not,
+in fact, want those things, and instead are perfectly content to live in crimeridden communities, feeling no shame or regret about the fate of their
+young men is, quite simply, racist. It is impossible to imagine that we would
+believe such a thing about whites.
+The predictable response is: What about gangsta rap and the culture of
+violence that has been embraced by so many black youth? Is there not some
+truth to the notion that black culture has devolved in recent years, as
+reflected in youth standing on the street corners with pants sagging below
+their rears and rappers boasting about beating their “hos” and going to jail?
+Is there not some reason to wonder whether the black community, to some
+extent, has lost its moral compass?
+The easy answer is to say yes and wag a finger at those who are behaving
+badly. That is the road most traveled, and it has not made a bit of difference.
+The media fawn over Bill Cosby and other figures when they give stern
+lectures to black audiences about black men failing to be good fathers and
+failing to lead respectable lives. They act as though this is a message black
+audiences have not heard many times before from their ministers, from their
+family members, and from politicians who talk about the need for more
+
+“personal responsibility.” Many seem genuinely surprised that blacks in the
+audience applaud these messages; for them, it is apparently news that black
+people think men should be good fathers and help to support their families.
+The more difficult answer—the more courageous one—is to say yes, yes
+we should be concerned about the behavior of men trapped in ghetto
+communities, but the deep failure of morality is our own. Economist Glenn
+Loury once posed the question: “are we willing to cast ourselves as a
+society that creates crimogenic conditions for some of its members, and
+then acts-out rituals of punishment against them as if engaged in some
+awful form of human sacrifice?” A similar question can be posed with
+respect to shaming those trapped in ghettos: are we willing to demonize a
+population, declare a war against them, and then stand back and heap shame
+and contempt upon them for failing to behave like model citizens while
+under attack?
+In this regard, it is helpful to step back and put the behavior of young
+black men who appear to embrace “gangsta culture” in the proper
+perspective. There is absolutely nothing abnormal or surprising about a
+severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long
+observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping
+strategy—often the only apparent route to self-esteem—is embracing one’s
+stigmatized identity. Hence, “black is beautiful” and “gay pride”—slogans
+and anthems of political movements aimed at ending not only legal
+discrimination, but the stigma that justified it. Indeed, the act of embracing
+one’s stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act
+—an act of resistance and defiance in a society that seeks to demean a
+group based on an inalterable trait. As a gay activist once put it, “Only by
+fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it
+laughable.”79
+For those black youth who are constantly followed by the police and
+shamed by teachers, relatives, and strangers, embracing the stigma of
+criminality is an act of rebellion—an attempt to carve out a positive identity
+in a society that offers them little more than scorn, contempt, and constant
+surveillance. Ronny, a sixteen-year-old African American on probation for
+a drug-related offense, explains it this way:
+
+My grandma keeps asking me about when I’m gonna get arrested
+again. She thinks just ’cause I went in before, I will go in again.... At
+my school my teachers talk about calling the cop[s] again to take me
+away.... [The] cop keeps checking up on me. He’s always at the park
+making sure I don’t get into trouble again.... My P.O. [probation
+officer] is always knocking on my door talking shit to me.... Even at
+the BYA [the local youth development organization] the staff treat me
+like I’m a fuck up.... Shit don’t change. It doesn’t matter where I go,
+I’m seen as a criminal. I just say, if you are going to treat me as a
+criminal then I’m gonna treat you like I am one, you feel me? I’m
+gonna make you shake so that you can say that there is a reason for
+calling me a criminal.... I grew up knowing that I had to show these
+fools [adults who criminalize youth] that I wasn’t going to take their
+shit. I started to act like a thug even if I wasn’t one.... Part of it was me
+trying to be hard, the other part was them treating me like a criminal.80
+The problem, of course, is that embracing criminality—while a natural
+response to the stigma—is inherently self-defeating and destructive. While
+“black is beautiful” is a powerful antidote to the logic of Jim Crow, and
+“gay pride” is a liberating motto for those challenging homophobia, the
+natural corollary for young men trapped in the ghetto in the era of mass
+incarceration is something akin to “gangsta love.” While race and sexual
+orientation are perfectly appropriate aspects of one’s identity to embrace,
+criminality for its own sake most certainly is not. The War on Drugs has
+greatly exacerbated the problems associated with drug abuse, rather than
+solved them, but the fact remains that the violence associated with the
+illegal drug trade is nothing to be celebrated. Black crime cripples the black
+community and does no favors to the individual offender.
+So herein lies the paradox and predicament of young black men labeled
+criminals. A war has been declared on them, and they have been rounded up
+for engaging in precisely the same crimes that go largely ignored in middleand upper-class white communities—possession and sale of illegal drugs.
+For those residing in ghetto communities, employment is scarce—often
+nonexistent. Schools located in ghetto communities more closely resemble
+prisons than places of learning, creativity, or moral development. And
+because the drug war has been raging for decades now, the parents of
+
+children coming of age today were targets of the drug war as well. As a
+result, many fathers are in prison, and those who are “free” bear the prison
+label. They are often unable to provide for, or meaningfully contribute to, a
+family. Any wonder, then, that many youth embrace their stigmatized
+identity as a means of survival in this new caste system? Should we be
+shocked when they turn to gangs or fellow inmates for support when no
+viable family support structure exists? After all, in many respects, they are
+simply doing what black people did during the Jim Crow era—they are
+turning to each other for support and solace in a society that despises them.
+Yet when these young people do what all severely stigmatized groups do
+—try to cope by turning to each other and embracing their stigma in a
+desperate effort to regain some measure of self esteem—we, as a society,
+heap more shame and contempt upon them. We tell them their friends are
+“no good,” that they will “amount to nothing,” that they are “wasting their
+lives,” and that “they’re nothing but criminals.” We condemn their baggy
+pants (a fashion trend that mimics prison-issue pants) and the music that
+glorifies a life many feel they cannot avoid. When we are done shaming
+them, we throw up our hands and then turn our backs as they are carted off
+to jail.
+
+The Minstrel Show
+
+None of the foregoing should be interpreted as an excuse for the violence,
+decadence, or misogyny that pervades what has come to be known as
+gangsta culture. The images and messages are extremely damaging. On an
+average night, one need engage in only a few minutes of channel surfing
+during prime-time hours to stumble across images of gangsta culture on
+television. The images are so familiar no description is necessary here.
+Often these images emanate from BET or black-themed reality shows and
+thus are considered “authentic” expressions of black attitudes, culture, and
+mores.
+Again, though, it is useful to put the commodification of gangsta culture
+in proper perspective. The worst of gangsta rap and other forms of
+blaxploitation (such as VH1’s Flavor of Love) is best understood as a
+modern-day minstrel show, only this time televised around the clock for a
+worldwide audience. It is a for-profit display of the worst racial stereotypes
+and images associated with the era of mass incarceration—an era in which
+black people are criminalized and portrayed as out-of-control, shameless,
+violent, oversexed, and generally undeserving.
+Like the minstrel shows of the slavery and Jim Crow eras, today’s
+displays are generally designed for white audiences. The majority of
+consumers of gangsta rap are white, suburban teenagers. VH1 had its best
+ratings ever for the first season of Flavor of Love—ratings driven by large
+white audiences. MTV has expanded its offerings of black-themed reality
+shows in the hopes of attracting the same crowd. The profits to be made
+from racial stigma are considerable, and the fact that blacks—as well as
+whites—treat racial oppression as a commodity for consumption is not
+surprising. It is a familiar form of black complicity with racialized systems
+of control.
+Many people are unaware that, although minstrel shows were plainly
+designed to pander to white racism and to make whites feel comfortable
+
+with—indeed, entertained by—racial oppression, African Americans
+formed a large part of the black minstrels’ audience. In fact, their numbers
+were so great in some areas that theater owners had to relax rules
+segregating black patrons and restricting them to certain areas of the
+theater.81
+Historians have long debated why blacks would attend minstrel shows
+when the images and content were so blatantly racist. Minstrels projected a
+greatly romanticized and exaggerated image of black life on plantations
+with cheerful, simple, grinning slaves always ready to sing, dance, and
+please their masters. Some have suggested that perhaps blacks felt in on the
+joke, laughing at the over-the-top characters from a sense of “in-group
+recognition.” 82 It has also been argued that perhaps they felt some
+connection to elements of African culture that had been suppressed and
+condemned for so long but were suddenly visible on stage, albeit in racist,
+exaggerated form.83 Undeniably, though, one major draw for black
+audiences was simply seeing fellow African Americans on stage. Black
+minstrels were largely viewed as celebrities, earning more money and
+achieving more fame than African Americans ever had before.84 Black
+minstrelsy was the first large-scale opportunity for African Americans to
+enter show business. To some degree, then, black minstrelsy—as degrading
+as it was—represented success.
+It seems likely that historians will one day look back on the images of
+black men in gangsta rap videos with a similar curiosity. Why would these
+young men, who are targets of a brutal drug war declared against them, put
+on a show—a spectacle—that romanticizes and glorifies their
+criminalization? Why would these young men openly endorse and
+perpetuate the very stereotypes that are invoked to justify their second-class
+status, their exclusion from mainstream society? The answers, historians
+may find, are not that different from the answers to the minstrelsy puzzle.
+It is important to keep in mind, though, that many hip-hop artists today
+do not embrace and perpetuate the worst racial stereotypes associated with
+mass incarceration. Artists like Common, for example, articulate a sharp
+critique of American politics and culture and reject the misogyny and
+violence preached by gangsta rappers. And while rap is often associated
+with “gangsta life” in the mainstream press, the origins of rap and hip-hop
+
+culture are not rooted in outlaw ideology. When rap was born, the early rap
+stars were not rapping about gangsta life, but “My Adidas” and good times
+in the ’hood in tunes like “Rapper’s Delight.” Rap music changed after the
+War on Drugs shifted into high gear and thousands of young, black men
+were suddenly swept off the streets and into prisons. Violence in urban
+communities flared in those communities, not simply because of the new
+drug—crack—but because of the massive crackdown, which radically
+reshaped the traditional life course for young black men. As a tidal wave of
+punitiveness, stigma, and despair washed over poor communities of color,
+those who were demonized—not only in the mainstream press but often in
+their own communities—did what all stigmatized groups do: they struggled
+to preserve a positive identity by embracing their stigma. Gangsta rap—
+while it may amount to little more than a minstrel show when it appears on
+MTV today—has its roots in the struggle for a positive identity among
+outcasts.
+
+The Antidote
+
+It is difficult to look at pictures of black people performing in minstrel
+shows during the Jim Crow era. It is almost beyond belief that at one time
+black people actually covered their faces with pitch-black paint, covered
+their mouths with white paint drawn in an exaggerated, clownish smile, and
+pranced on stage for the entertainment and delight of white audiences, who
+were tickled by the sight of a black man happily portraying the worst racial
+stereotypes that justified slavery and later Jim Crow. The images are so
+painful they can cause a downright visceral reaction. The damage done by
+the minstrel’s complicity in the Jim Crow regime was considerable. Even
+so, do we hate the minstrel? Do we despise him? Or do we do understand
+him as an unfortunate expression of the times?
+Most people of any race would probably condemn the minstrel show but
+stop short of condemning the minstrel as a man. Pity, more than contempt,
+seems the likely response. Why? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see
+the minstrel in his social context. By shuckin’and jivin’for white audiences,
+he was mirroring to white audiences the shame and contempt projected onto
+him. He might have made a decent living that way—may even have been
+treated as a celebrity—but from a distance, we can see the emptiness, the
+pain.
+When the system of mass incarceration collapses (and if history is any
+guide, it will), historians will undoubtedly look back and marvel that such
+an extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed
+in the United States. How fascinating, they will likely say, that a drug war
+was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color—people already
+trapped in ghettos that lacked jobs and decent schools. They were rounded
+up by the millions, packed away in prisons, and when released, they were
+stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of
+discrimination. Legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare
+benefits—and saddled with thousands of dollars of debt—these people were
+
+shamed and condemned for failing to hold together their families. They
+were chastised for succumbing to depression and anger, and blamed for
+landing back in prison. Historians will likely wonder how we could
+describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is
+difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent
+—crime.
+None of this is to suggest that those who break the law bear no
+responsibility for their conduct or exist merely as “products of their
+environment.” To deny the individual agency of those caught up in the
+system—their capacity to overcome seemingly impossible odds—would be
+to deny an essential element of their humanity. We, as human beings, are
+not simply organisms or animals responding to stimuli. We have a higher
+self, a capacity for transcendence.
+Yet our ability to exercise free will and transcend the most extraordinary
+obstacles does not make the conditions of our life irrelevant. Most of us
+struggle and often fail to meet the biggest challenges of our lives. Even the
+smaller challenges—breaking a bad habit or sticking to a diet—often prove
+too difficult, even for those of us who are relatively privileged and
+comfortable in our daily lives.
+In fact, what is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of
+people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how
+many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of
+prison against all the odds. Considering the design of this new system of
+control, it is astonishing that so many people labeled criminals still manage
+to care for and feed their children, hold together marriages, obtain
+employment, and start businesses. Perhaps most heroic are those who, upon
+release, launch social justice organizations that challenge the discrimination
+ex-offenders face and provide desperately needed support for those newly
+released from prison. These heroes go largely unnoticed by politicians who
+prefer to blame those who fail, rather than praise with admiration and awe
+all those who somehow manage, despite seemingly insurmountable hurdles,
+to survive.
+As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who
+struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked
+out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.
+
+There is another path. Rather than shaming and condemning an already
+deeply stigmatized group, we, collectively, can embrace them—not
+necessarily their behavior, but them—their humanness. As the saying goes,
+“You gotta hate the crime, but love the criminal.” This is not a mere
+platitude; it is a prescription for liberation. If we had actually learned to
+show love, care, compassion, and concern across racial lines during the
+Civil Rights Movement—rather than go colorblind—mass incarceration
+would not exist today.
+
+5
+The New Jim Crow
+It was no ordinary Sunday morning when presidential candidate Barack
+Obama stepped to the podium at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.
+It was Father’s Day. Hundreds of enthusiastic congregants packed the pews
+at the overwhelmingly black church eager to hear what the first black
+Democratic nominee for president of the United States had to say.
+The message was a familiar one: black men should be better fathers. Too
+many are absent from their homes. For those in the audience, Obama’s
+speech was an old tune sung by an exciting new performer. His message of
+personal responsibility, particularly as it relates to fatherhood, was anything
+but new; it had been delivered countless times by black ministers in
+churches across America. The message had also been delivered on a
+national stage by celebrities such as Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. And the
+message had been delivered with great passion by Louis Farrakhan, who
+more than a decade earlier summoned one million black men to
+Washington, D.C., for a day of “atonement” and recommitment to their
+families and communities.
+The mainstream media, however, treated the event as big news, and many
+pundits seemed surprised that the black congregants actually applauded the
+message. For them, it was remarkable that black people nodded in approval
+when Obama said: “If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too
+many fathers are missing—missing from too many lives and too many
+homes. Too many fathers are MIA. Too many fathers are AWOL. They
+have abandoned their responsibilities. They’re acting like boys instead of
+men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and
+I know this is true everywhere, but nowhere is this more true than in the
+African American community.”
+The media did not ask—and Obama did not tell—where the missing
+fathers might be found.
+
+The following day, social critic and sociologist Michael Eric Dyson
+published a critique of Obama’s speech in Time magazine. He pointed out
+that the stereotype of black men being poor fathers may well be false.
+Research by Boston College social psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley
+found that black fathers not living at home are more likely to keep in
+contact with their children than fathers of any other ethnic or racial group.
+Dyson chided Obama for evoking a black stereotype for political gain,
+pointing out that “Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but
+they were aimed at those whites still on the fence about whom to send to the
+White House.”1 Dyson’s critique was a fair one, but like other media
+commentators, he remained silent about where all the absent black fathers
+could be found. He identified numerous social problems plaguing black
+families, such as high levels of unemployment, discriminatory mortgage
+practices, and the gutting of early-childhood learning programs. Not a word
+was said about prisons.
+The public discourse regarding “missing black fathers” closely parallels
+the debate about the lack of eligible black men for marriage. The majority
+of black women are unmarried today, including 70 percent of professional
+black women.2 “Where have all the black men gone?” is a common refrain
+heard among black women frustrated in their efforts to find life partners.
+The sense that black men have disappeared is rooted in reality. The U.S.
+Census Bureau reported in 2002 that there are nearly 3 million more black
+adult women than men in black communities across the United States, a
+gender gap of 26 percent.3 In many urban areas, the gap is far worse, rising
+to more than 37 percent in places like New York City. The comparable
+disparity for whites in the United States is 8 percent.4 Although a million
+black men can be found in prisons and jails, public acknowledgement of the
+role of the criminal justice system in “disappearing” black men is
+surprisingly rare. Even in the black media—which is generally more willing
+to raise and tackle issues related to criminal justice—an eerie silence can
+often be found.5
+Ebony magazine, for example, ran an article in December 2006 entitled
+“Where Have the Black Men Gone?” The author posed the popular question
+but never answered it.6 He suggested we will find our black men when we
+rediscover God, family, and self-respect. A more cynical approach was
+
+taken by Tyra Banks, the popular talk show host, who devoted a show in
+May 2008 to the recurring question, “Where Have All the Good Black Men
+Gone?” She wondered aloud whether black women are unable to find “good
+black men” because too many of them are gay or dating white women. No
+mention was made of the War on Drugs or mass incarceration.
+The fact that Barack Obama can give a speech on Father’s Day dedicated
+to the subject of fathers who are “AWOL” without ever acknowledging that
+the majority of young black men in large urban areas are currently under the
+control of the criminal justice system is disturbing, to say the least. What is
+more problematic, though, is that hardly anyone in the mainstream media
+noticed the oversight. One might not expect serious analysis from Tyra
+Banks, but shouldn’t we expect a bit more from the New York Times and
+CNN? Hundreds of thousands of black men are unable to be good fathers
+for their children, not because of a lack of commitment or desire but
+because they are warehoused in prisons, locked in cages. They did not walk
+out on their families voluntarily; they were taken away in handcuffs, often
+due to a massive federal program known as the War on Drugs.
+More African Americans are under correctional control today—in prison
+or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before
+the Civil War began.7 The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part
+of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both
+parents than a black child born during slavery.8 The absence of black
+fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness,
+immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black
+men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes
+that are largely ignored when committed by whites.
+The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though
+scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack
+Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who have defied the odds and risen to power,
+fame, and fortune. For those left behind, especially those within prison
+walls, the celebration of racial triumph in America must seem a tad
+premature. More black men are imprisoned today than at any other moment
+in our nation’s history. More are disenfranchised today than in 1870, the
+year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly
+deny the right to vote on the basis of race.9 Young black men today may be
+
+just as likely to suffer discrimination in employment, housing, public
+benefits, and jury service as a black man in the Jim Crow era—
+discrimination that is perfectly legal, because it is based on one’s criminal
+record.
+This is the new normal, the new racial equilibrium.
+The launching of the War on Drugs and the initial construction of the
+new system required the expenditure of tremendous political initiative and
+resources. Media campaigns were waged; politicians blasted “soft” judges
+and enacted harsh sentencing laws; poor people of color were vilified. The
+system now, however, requires very little maintenance or justification. In
+fact, if you are white and middle class, you might not even realize the drug
+war is still going on. Most high school and college students today have no
+recollection of the political and media frenzy surrounding the drug war in
+the early years. They were young children when the war was declared, or
+not even born yet. Crack is out; terrorism is in.
+Today, the political fanfare and the vehement, racialized rhetoric
+regarding crime and drugs are no longer necessary. Mass incarceration has
+been normalized, and all of the racial stereotypes and assumptions that gave
+rise to the system are now embraced (or at least internalized) by people of
+all colors, from all walks of life, and in every major political party. We may
+wonder aloud “where have the black men gone?” but deep down we already
+know. It is simply taken for granted that, in cities like Baltimore and
+Chicago, the vast majority of young black men are currently under the
+control of the criminal justice system or branded criminals for life. This
+extraordinary circumstance—unheard of in the rest of the world—is treated
+here in America as a basic fact of life, as normal as separate water fountains
+were just a half century ago.
+
+States of Denial
+
+The claim that we really know where all the black men have gone may
+inspire considerable doubt. If we know, why do we feign ignorance? Could
+it be that most people really don’t know? Is it possible that the roundup,
+lockdown, and exclusion of black men en masse from the body politic has
+occurred largely unnoticed? The answer is yes and no.
+Much has been written about the ways in which people manage to deny,
+even to themselves, that extraordinary atrocities, racial oppression, and
+other forms of human suffering have occurred or are occurring.
+Criminologist Stanley Cohen wrote perhaps the most important book on the
+subject, States of Denial. The book examines how individuals and
+institutions—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders—know about yet deny
+the occurrence of oppressive acts. They see only what they want to see and
+wear blinders to avoid seeing the rest. This has been true about slavery,
+genocide, torture, and every form of systemic oppression.
+Cohen emphasizes that denial, though deplorable, is complicated. It is not
+simply a matter of refusing to acknowledge an obvious, though
+uncomfortable, truth. Many people “know” and “not-know” the truth about
+human suffering at the same time. In his words, “Denial may be neither a
+matter of telling the truth nor intentionally telling a lie. There seem to be
+states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we know and don’t know at
+the same time.”10
+Today, most Americans know and don’t know the truth about mass
+incarceration. For more than three decades, images of black men in
+handcuffs have been a regular staple of the evening news. We know that
+large numbers of black men have been locked in cages. In fact, it is
+precisely because we know that black and brown people are far more likely
+to be imprisoned that we, as a nation, have not cared too much about it. We
+tell ourselves they “deserve” their fate, even though we know—and don’t
+know—that whites are just as likely to commit many crimes, especially
+
+drug crimes. We know that people released from prison face a lifetime of
+discrimination, scorn, and exclusion, and yet we claim not to know that an
+undercaste exists. We know and we don’t know at the same time.
+Upon reflection, it is relatively easy to understand how Americans come
+to deny the evils of mass incarceration. Denial is facilitated by persistent
+racial segregation in housing and schools, by political demagoguery, by
+racialized media imagery, and by the ease of changing one’s perception of
+reality simply by changing television channels. There is little reason to
+doubt the prevailing “common sense” that black and brown men have been
+locked up en masse merely in response to crime rates when one’s sources of
+information are mainstream media outlets. In many respects, the reality of
+mass incarceration is easier to avoid knowing than the injustices and
+sufferings associated with slavery or Jim Crow. Those confined to prisons
+are out of sight and out of mind; once released, they are typically confined
+in ghettos. Most Americans only come to “know” about the people cycling
+in and out of prisons through fictional police dramas, music videos, gangsta
+rap, and “true” accounts of ghetto experience on the evening news. These
+racialized narratives tend to confirm and reinforce the prevailing public
+consensus that we need not care about “those people”; they deserve what
+they get.
+Of all the reasons that we fail to know the truth about mass incarceration,
+though, one stands out: a profound misunderstanding regarding how racial
+oppression actually works. If someone were to visit the United States from
+another country (or another planet) and ask: Is the U.S. criminal justice
+system some kind of tool of racial control? Most Americans would swiftly
+deny it. Numerous reasons would leap to mind why that could not possibly
+be the case. The visitor would be told that crime rates, black culture, or bad
+schools were to blame. “The system is not run by a bunch of racists,” the
+apologist would explain. “It’s run by people who are trying to fight crime.”
+That response is predictable because most people assume that racism, and
+racial systems generally, are fundamentally a function of attitudes. Because
+mass incarceration is officially colorblind, it seems inconceivable that the
+system could function much like a racial caste system. The widespread and
+mistaken belief that racial animus is necessary for the creation and
+maintenance of racialized systems of social control is the most important
+reason that we, as a nation, have remained in deep denial.
+
+The misunderstanding is not surprising. As a society, our collective
+understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking
+images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights. When we think
+of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the
+schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and
+“whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many
+wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others,
+respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners,
+or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and
+voted for racial segregation. Many whites who supported Jim Crow justified
+it on paternalist grounds, actually believing they were doing blacks a favor
+or believing the time was not yet “right” for equality. The disturbing images
+from the Jim Crow era also make it easy to forget that many African
+Americans were complicit in the Jim Crow system, profiting from it
+directly or indirectly or keeping their objections quiet out of fear of the
+repercussions. Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most
+extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it
+functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign
+intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.
+The unfortunate reality we must face is that racism manifests itself not
+only in individual attitudes and stereotypes, but also in the basic structure of
+society. Academics have developed complicated theories and obscure
+jargon in an effort to describe what is now referred to as structural racism,
+yet the concept is fairly straightforward. One theorist, Iris Marion Young,
+relying on a famous “birdcage” metaphor, explains it this way: If one thinks
+about racism by examining only one wire of the cage, or one form of
+disadvantage, it is difficult to understand how and why the bird is trapped.
+Only a large number of wires arranged in a specific way, and connected to
+one another, serve to enclose the bird and to ensure that it cannot escape.11
+What is particularly important to keep in mind is that any given wire of
+the cage may or may not be specifically developed for the purpose of
+trapping the bird, yet it still operates (together with the other wires) to
+restrict its freedom. By the same token, not every aspect of a racial caste
+system needs to be developed for the specific purpose of controlling black
+people in order for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and
+
+practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of
+mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—
+ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political
+disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap
+African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage.
+Fortunately, as Marilyn Frye has noted, every birdcage has a door, and
+every birdcage can be broken and can corrode.12 What is most concerning
+about the new racial caste system, however, is that it may prove to be more
+durable than its predecessors. Because this new system is not explicitly
+based on race, it is easier to defend on seemingly neutral grounds. And
+while all previous methods of control have blamed the victim in one way or
+another, the current system invites observers to imagine that those who are
+trapped in the system were free to avoid second-class status or permanent
+banishment from society simply by choosing not to commit crimes. It is far
+more convenient to imagine that a majority of young African American
+men in urban areas freely chose a life of crime than to accept the real
+possibility that their lives were structured in a way that virtually guaranteed
+their early admission into a system from which they can never escape. Most
+people are willing to acknowledge the existence of the cage but insist that a
+door has been left open.
+One way of understanding our current system of mass incarceration is to
+think of it as a birdcage with a locked door. It is a set of structural
+arrangements that locks a racially distinct group into a subordinate political,
+social, and economic position, effectively creating a second-class
+citizenship. Those trapped within the system are not merely disadvantaged,
+in the sense that they are competing on an unequal playing field or face
+additional hurdles to political or economic success; rather, the system itself
+is structured to lock them into a subordinate position.
+
+How It Works
+
+Precisely how the system of mass incarceration works to trap African
+Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage can best be understood by viewing
+the system as a whole. In earlier chapters, we considered various wires of
+the cage in isolation; here, we put the pieces together, step back, and view
+the cage in its entirety. Only when we view the cage from a distance can we
+disengage from the maze of rationalizations that are offered for each wire
+and see how the entire apparatus operates to keep African Americans
+perpetually trapped.
+This, in brief, is how the system works: The War on Drugs is the vehicle
+through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage.
+The entrapment occurs in three distinct phases, each of which has been
+explored earlier, but a brief review is useful here. The first stage is the
+roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system
+by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities
+of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and
+federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and
+they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once
+were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone
+they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.” Because
+there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial
+biases are granted free reign. In fact, police are allowed to rely on race as a
+factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color
+are no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites)—effectively
+guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black
+and brown.
+The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of
+formal control. Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful
+legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not.
+Prosecutors are free to “load up” defendants with extra charges, and their
+
+decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once convicted, due to the
+drug war’s harsh sentencing laws, drug offenders in the United States spend
+more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control—in jail or
+prison, on probation or parole—than drug offenders anywhere else in the
+world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one’s life is
+regulated and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or
+disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period of control may last a
+lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses,
+but the vast majority of those swept into the system are eventually released.
+They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage.
+The final stage has been dubbed by some advocates as the period of
+invisible punishment.13 This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant
+to describe the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on
+individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of punishment
+that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the
+traditional sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation
+of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a
+greater impact on one’s life course than the months or years one actually
+spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure that the vast
+majority of convicted offenders will never integrate into mainstream, white
+society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives
+—denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to
+surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be
+released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.
+In recent years, advocates and politicians have called for greater
+resources devoted to the problem of “prisoner re-entry,” in view of the
+unprecedented numbers of people who are released from prison and
+returned to their communities every year. While the terminology is well
+intentioned, it utterly fails to convey the gravity of the situation facing
+prisoners upon their release. People who have been convicted of felonies
+almost never truly reenter the society they inhabited prior to their
+conviction. Instead, they enter a separate society, a world hidden from
+public view, governed by a set of oppressive and discriminatory rules and
+laws that do not apply to everyone else. They become members of an
+undercaste—an enormous population of predominately black and brown
+
+people who, because of the drug war, are denied basic rights and privileges
+of American citizenship and are permanently relegated to an inferior status.
+This is the final phase, and there is no going back.
+
+Nothing New?
+
+Some might argue that as disturbing as this system appears to be, there is
+nothing particularly new about mass incarceration; it is merely a
+continuation of past drug wars and biased law enforcement practices. Racial
+bias in our criminal justice system is simply an old problem that has gotten
+worse, and the social excommunication of “criminals” has a long history; it
+is not a recent invention. There is some merit to this argument.
+Race has always influenced the administration of justice in the United
+States. Since the day the first prison opened, people of color have been
+disproportionately represented behind bars. In fact, the very first person
+admitted to a U.S. penitentiary was a “light skinned Negro in excellent
+health,” described by an observer as “one who was born of a degraded and
+depressed race, and had never experienced anything but indifference and
+harshness.”14 Biased police practices are also nothing new, a recurring
+theme of African American experience since blacks were targeted by the
+police as suspected runaway slaves. And every drug war that has ever been
+waged in the United States—including alcohol prohibition—has been
+tainted or driven by racial bias.15 Even postconviction penalties have a long
+history. The American colonies passed laws barring criminal offenders from
+a wide variety of jobs and benefits, automatically dissolving their marriages
+and denying them the right to enter contracts. These legislatures were
+following a long tradition, dating back to ancient Greece, of treating
+criminals as less than full citizens. Although many collateral sanctions were
+repealed by the late 1970s, arguably the drug war simply revived and
+expanded a tradition that has ancient roots, a tradition independent of the
+legacy of American slavery.
+In view of this history and considering the lack of originality in many of
+the tactics and practices employed in the era of mass incarceration, there is
+good reason to believe that the latest drug war is just another drug war
+corrupted by racial and ethnic bias. But this view is correct only to a point.
+
+In the past, the criminal justice system, as punitive as it may have been
+during various wars on crime and drugs, affected only a relatively small
+percentage of the population. Because civil penalties and sanctions imposed
+on ex-offenders applied only to a few, they never operated as a
+comprehensive system of control over any racially or ethnically defined
+population. Racial minorities were always overrepresented among current
+and ex-offenders, but as sociologists have noted, until the mid-1980s, the
+criminal justice system was marginal to communities of color. While young
+minority men with little schooling have always had relatively high rates of
+incarceration, “before the 1980s the penal system was not a dominant
+presence in the disadvantaged neighborhoods.”16
+Today, the War on Drugs has given birth to a system of mass
+incarceration that governs not just a small fraction of a racial or ethnic
+minority but entire communities of color. In ghetto communities, nearly
+everyone is either directly or indirectly subject to the new caste system. The
+system serves to redefine the terms of the relationship of poor people of
+color and their communities to mainstream, white society, ensuring their
+subordinate and marginal status. The criminal and civil sanctions that were
+once reserved for a tiny minority are now used to control and oppress a
+racially defined majority in many communities, and the systematic manner
+in which the control is achieved reflects not just a difference in scale. The
+nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned
+primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the
+management and control of the dispossessed. Prior drug wars were ancillary
+to the prevailing caste system. This time the drug war is the system of
+control.
+If you doubt that this is the case, consider the effect of the war on the
+ground, in specific locales. Take Chicago, Illinois, for example. Chicago is
+widely considered to be one of America’s most diverse and vibrant cities. It
+has boasted black mayors, black police chiefs, black legislators, and is
+home to the nation’s first black president. It has a thriving economy, a
+growing Latino community, and a substantial black middle class. Yet as the
+Chicago Urban League reported in 2002, there is another story to be told.17
+If Martin Luther King Jr. were to return miraculously to Chicago, some
+forty years after bringing his Freedom Movement to the city, he would be
+
+saddened to discover that the same issues on which he originally focused
+still produce stark patterns of racial inequality, segregation, and poverty. He
+would also be struck by the dramatically elevated significance of one
+particular institutional force in the perpetuation and deepening of those
+patterns: the criminal justice system. In the few short decades since King’s
+death, a new regime of racially disparate mass incarceration has emerged in
+Chicago and become the primary mechanism for racial oppression and the
+denial of equal opportunity.
+In Chicago, like the rest of the country, the War on Drugs is the engine of
+mass incarceration, as well as the primary cause of gross racial disparities in
+the criminal justice system and in the ex-offender population. About 90
+percent of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense in Illinois are
+African American.18 White drug offenders are rarely arrested, and when
+they are, they are treated more favorably at every stage of the criminal
+justice process, including plea bargaining and sentencing.19 Whites are
+consistently more likely to avoid prison and felony charges, even when they
+are repeat offenders. 20 Black offenders, by contrast, are routinely labeled
+felons and released into a permanent racial undercaste.
+The total population of black males in Chicago with a felony record
+(including both current and ex-felons) is equivalent to 55 percent of the
+black adult male population and an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black
+male workforce in the Chicago area.21 This stunning development reflects
+the dramatic increase in the number and race of those sent to prison for drug
+crimes. From the Chicago region alone, the number of those annually sent
+to prison for drug crimes increased almost 2,000 percent, from 469 in 1985
+to 8,755 in 2005.22
+When people are released from Illinois prisons, they are given as little as
+$10 in “gate money” and a bus ticket to anywhere in the United States.
+Most return to impoverished neighborhoods in the Chicago area, bringing
+few resources and bearing the stigma of their prison record.23 In Chicago,
+as in most cities across the country, ex-offenders are banned or severely
+restricted from employment in a large number of professions, job
+categories, and fields by professional licensing statutes, rules, and practices
+that discriminate against potential employees with felony records.
+According to a study conducted by the DePaul University College of Law
+
+in 2000, of the then ninety-eight occupations requiring licenses in Illinois,
+fifty-seven placed stipulations and/or restrictions on applicants with a
+criminal record.24 Even when not barred by law from holding specific jobs,
+ex-offenders in Chicago find it extraordinarily difficult to find employers
+who will hire them, regardless of the nature of their conviction. They are
+also routinely denied public housing and welfare benefits, and they find it
+increasingly difficult to obtain education, especially now that funding for
+public education has been hard hit, due to exploding prison budgets.
+The impact of the new caste system is most tragically felt among the
+young. In Chicago (as in other cities across the United States), young black
+men are more likely to go to prison than to college.25 As of June 2001, there
+were nearly 20,000 more black men in the Illinois state prison system than
+enrolled in the state’s public universities.26 In fact, there were more black
+men in the state’s correctional facilities that year just on drug charges than
+the total number of black men enrolled in undergraduate degree programs in
+state universities.27 To put the crisis in even sharper focus, consider this:
+just 992 black men received a bachelor’s degree from Illinois state
+universities in 1999, while roughly 7,000 black men were released from the
+state prison system the following year just for drug offenses.28 The young
+men who go to prison rather than college face a lifetime of closed doors,
+discrimination, and ostracism. Their plight is not what we hear about on the
+evening news, however. Sadly, like the racial caste systems that preceded it,
+the system of mass incarceration now seems normal and natural to most, a
+regrettable necessity.
+
+Mapping the Parallels
+
+Those cycling in and out of Illinois prisons today are members of America’s
+new racial undercaste. The United States has almost always had a racial
+undercaste—a group defined wholly or largely by race that is permanently
+locked out of mainstream, white society by law, custom, and practice. The
+reasons and justifications change over time, as each new caste system
+reflects and adapts to changes in the social, political, and economic context.
+What is most striking about the design of the current caste system, though,
+is how closely it resembles its predecessor. There are important differences
+between mass incarceration and Jim Crow, to be sure—many of which will
+be discussed later—but when we step back and view the system as a whole,
+there is a profound sense of déjà vu. There is a familiar stigma and shame.
+There is an elaborate system of control, complete with political
+disenfranchisement and legalized discrimination in every major realm of
+economic and social life. And there is the production of racial meaning and
+racial boundaries.
+Many of these parallels have been discussed at some length in earlier
+chapters; others have yet to be explored. Listed below are several of the
+most obvious similarities between Jim Crow and mass incarceration,
+followed by a discussion of a few parallels that have not been discussed so
+far. Let’s begin with the historical parallels.
+Historical parallels. Jim Crow and mass incarceration have similar
+political origins. As described in chapter 1, both caste systems were born, in
+part, due to a desire among white elites to exploit the resentments,
+vulnerabilities, and racial biases of poor and working-class whites for
+political or economic gain. Segregation laws were proposed as part of a
+deliberate and strategic effort to deflect anger and hostility that had been
+brewing against the white elite away from them and toward African
+Americans. The birth of mass incarceration can be traced to a similar
+political dynamic. Conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s sought to appeal to
+
+the racial biases and economic vulnerabilities of poor and working-class
+whites through racially coded rhetoric on crime and welfare. In both cases,
+the racial opportunists offered few, if any, economic reforms to address the
+legitimate economic anxieties of poor and working-class whites, proposing
+instead a crackdown on the racially-defined “others.” In the early years of
+Jim Crow, conservative white elites competed with each other by passing
+ever more stringent and oppressive Jim Crow legislation. A century later,
+politicians in the early years of the drug war competed with each other to
+prove who could be tougher on crime by passing ever harsher drug laws—a
+thinly veiled effort to appeal to poor and working-class whites who, once
+again, proved they were willing to forego economic and structural reform in
+exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back “in their place.”29
+Legalized discrimination. The most obvious parallel between Jim Crow
+and mass incarceration is legalized discrimination. During Black History
+Month, Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to
+discrimination against African Americans in employment, housing, public
+benefits, and public accommodations. Schoolchildren wonder out loud how
+discrimination could ever have been legal in this great land of ours. Rarely
+are they told that it is still legal. Many of the forms of discrimination that
+relegated African Americans to an inferior caste during Jim Crow continue
+to apply to huge segments of the black population today—provided they are
+first labeled felons. If they are branded felons by the time they reach the age
+of twenty-one (as many of them are), they are subject to legalized
+discrimination for their entire adult lives. The forms of discrimination that
+apply to ex-drug offenders, described in some detail in chapter 4, mean that,
+once prisoners are released, they enter a parallel social universe—much like
+Jim Crow—in which discrimination in nearly every aspect of social,
+political, and economic life is perfectly legal. Large majorities of black men
+in cities across the United States are once again subject to legalized
+discrimination effectively barring them from full integration into
+mainstream, white society. Mass incarceration has nullified many of the
+gains of the Civil Rights Movement, putting millions of black men back in
+a position reminiscent of Jim Crow.
+Political disenfranchisement. During the Jim Crow era, African
+Americans were denied the right to vote through poll taxes, literacy tests,
+
+grandfather clauses, and felon disenfranchisement laws, even though the
+Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically provides that
+“the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied ... on
+account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Formally raceneutral devices were adopted to achieve the goal of an all-white electorate
+without violating the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment. The devices
+worked quite well. Because African Americans were poor, they frequently
+could not pay poll taxes. And because they had been denied access to
+education, they could not pass literacy tests. Grandfather clauses allowed
+whites to vote even if they couldn’t meet the requirements, as long as their
+ancestors had been able to vote. Finally, because blacks were
+disproportionately charged with felonies—in fact, some crimes were
+specifically defined as felonies with the goal of eliminating blacks from the
+electorate—felony disenfranchisement laws effectively suppressed the
+black vote as well.30
+Following the collapse of Jim Crow, all of the race-neutral devices for
+excluding blacks from the electorate were eliminated through litigation or
+legislation, except felon disenfranchisement laws. Some courts have found
+that these laws have “lost their discriminatory taint” because they have been
+amended since the collapse of Jim Crow; others courts have allowed the
+laws to stand because overt racial bias is absent from the legislative
+record.31 The failure of our legal system to eradicate all of the tactics
+adopted during the Jim Crow era to suppress the black vote has major
+implications today. Felon disenfranchisement laws have been more
+effective in eliminating black voters in the age of mass incarceration than
+they were during Jim Crow. Less than two decades after the War on Drugs
+began, one in seven black men nationally had lost the right to vote, and as
+many as one in four in those states with the highest African American
+disenfranchisement rate.32 These figures may understate the impact of
+felony disenfranchisement, because they do not take into account the
+millions of ex-felons who cannot vote in states that require ex-felons to pay
+fines or fees before their voting rights can be restored—the new poll tax. As
+legal scholar Pamela Karlan has observed, “felony disenfranchisement has
+decimated the potential black electorate.”33
+
+It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from
+polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been
+suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much
+Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau
+counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they
+are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in
+predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated
+population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority
+communities from which the prisoners come.34 This has enormous
+consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that
+house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing
+them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it
+appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly
+reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which
+enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent
+of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and
+electoral votes, even though they could not vote.
+Exclusion from juries. Another clear parallel between mass
+incarceration and Jim Crow is the systematic exclusion of blacks from
+juries. One hallmark of the Jim Crow era was all-white juries trying black
+defendants in the South. Although the exclusion of jurors on the basis of
+race has been illegal since 1880, as a practical matter, the removal of
+prospective black jurors through race-based peremptory strikes was
+sanctioned by the Supreme Court until 1985, when the Court ruled in
+Batson v. Kentucky that racially biased strikes violate the equal protection
+clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.35 Today defendants face a situation
+highly similar to the one they faced a century ago. As described in chapter
+3, a formal prohibition against race-based peremptory strikes does exist; as
+a practical matter, however, the Court has tolerated the systematic exclusion
+of blacks from juries by allowing lower courts to accept “silly” and even
+“superstitious” reasons for striking black jurors.36 To make matters worse, a
+large percentage of black men (about 30 percent) are automatically
+excluded from jury service because they have been labeled felons.37 The
+combined effect of race-based peremptory strikes and the automatic
+
+exclusion of felons from juries has put black defendants in a familiar place
+—in a courtroom in shackles, facing an all-white jury.
+Closing the courthouse doors. The parallels between mass incarceration
+and Jim Crow extend all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the
+years, the Supreme Court has followed a fairly consistent pattern in
+responding to racial caste systems, first protecting them and then, after
+dramatic shifts in the political and social climate, dismantling these systems
+of control and some of their vestiges. In Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme
+Court immunized the institution of slavery from legal challenge on the
+grounds that African Americans were not citizens, and in Plessy v.
+Ferguson, the Court established the doctrine of “separate but equal”—a
+legal fiction that protected the Jim Crow system from judicial scrutiny for
+racial bias.
+Currently, McCleskey v. Kemp and its progeny serve much the same
+function as Dred Scott and Plessy. In McCleskey, the Supreme Court
+demonstrated that it is once again in protection mode—firmly committed to
+the prevailing system of control. As chapter 3 demonstrated, the Court has
+closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the
+criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and
+sentencing. Mass incarceration is now off-limits to challenges on the
+grounds of racial bias, much as its predecessors were in their time. The new
+racial caste system operates unimpeded by the Fourteenth Amendment and
+federal civil rights legislation—laws designed to topple earlier systems of
+control. The Supreme Court’s famous proclamation in 1857—“[the black
+man] has no rights which the white man is bound to respect”—remains true
+to a significant degree today, so long as the black man has been labeled a
+felon.38
+Racial segregation. Although the parallels listed above should be
+enough to give anyone pause, there are a number of other, less obvious,
+similarities between mass incarceration and Jim Crow that have not been
+explored in earlier chapters. The creation and maintenance of racial
+segregation is one example. As we know, Jim Crow laws mandated
+residential segregation, and blacks were relegated to the worst parts of
+town. Roads literally stopped at the border of many black neighborhoods,
+shifting from pavement to dirt. Water, sewer systems, and other public
+
+services that supported the white areas of town frequently did not extend to
+the black areas. The extreme poverty that plagued blacks due to their legally
+sanctioned inferior status was largely invisible to whites—so long as whites
+remained in their own neighborhoods, which they were inclined to do.
+Racial segregation rendered black experience largely invisible to whites,
+making it easier for whites to maintain racial stereotypes about black values
+and culture. It also made it easier to deny or ignore their suffering.
+Mass incarceration functions similarly. It achieves racial segregation by
+segregating prisoners—the majority of whom are black and brown—from
+mainstream society. Prisoners are kept behind bars, typically more than a
+hundred miles from home.39 Even prisons—the actual buildings—are a rare
+sight for many Americans, as they are often located far from population
+centers. Although rural counties contain only 20 percent of the U.S.
+population, 60 percent of new prison construction occurs there.40 Prisoners
+are thus hidden from public view—out of sight, out of mind. In a sense,
+incarceration is a far more extreme form of physical and residential
+segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting black
+people to the other side of town or corralling them in ghettos, mass
+incarceration locks them in cages. Bars and walls keep hundreds of
+thousands of black and brown people away from mainstream society—a
+form of apartheid unlike any the world has ever seen.
+Prisons, however, are not the only vehicle for racial segregation.
+Segregation is also created and perpetuated by the flood of prisoners who
+return to ghetto communities each year. Because the drug war has been
+waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, when drug
+offenders are released, they are generally returned to racially segregated
+ghetto communities—the places they call home. In many cities, the re-entry
+phenomenon is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods.
+According to one study, during a twelve-year period, the number of
+prisoners returning home to “core counties”—those counties that contain
+the inner city of a metropolitan area—tripled.41 The effects are felt
+throughout the United States. In interviews with one hundred residents of
+two Tallahassee, Florida, communities, researchers found that nearly every
+one of them had experienced or expected to experience the return of a
+family member from prison.42 Similarly, a survey of families living in the
+
+Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago found that the majority of residents either
+had a family member in prison or expected one to return within the next
+two years.43 Fully 70 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and
+forty-five in the impoverished and overwhelmingly black North Lawndale
+neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side are ex-offenders, saddled for life
+with a criminal record.44 The majority (60 percent) were incarcerated for
+drug offenses.45 These neighborhoods are a minefield for parolees, for a
+standard condition of parole is a promise not to associate with felons. As
+Paula Wolff, a senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020 observes, in
+these ghetto neighborhoods, “It is hard for a parolee to walk to the corner
+store to get a carton of milk without being subject to a parole violation.”46
+By contrast, whites—even poor whites—are far less likely to be
+imprisoned for drug offenses. And when they are released from prison, they
+rarely find themselves in the ghetto. The white poor have a vastly different
+experience in America than do poor people of color. Because whites do not
+suffer racial segregation, the white poor are not relegated to racially defined
+areas of intense poverty. In New York City, one study found that 70 percent
+of the city’s poor black and Latino residents live in high-poverty
+neighborhoods, whereas 70 percent of the city’s poor whites live in
+nonpoverty neighborhoods—communities that have significant resources,
+including jobs, schools, banks, and grocery stores.47 Nationwide, nearly
+seven out of eight people living in high-poverty urban areas are members of
+a minority group.48
+Mass incarceration thus perpetuates and deepens pre-existing patterns of
+racial segregation and isolation, not just by removing people of color from
+society and putting them in prisons, but by dumping them back into ghettos
+upon their release. Youth of color who might have escaped their ghetto
+communities—or helped to transform them—if they had been given a fair
+shot in life and not been labeled felons, instead find themselves trapped in a
+closed circuit of perpetual marginality, circulating between ghetto and
+prison.49
+The racially segregated, poverty-stricken ghettos that exist in inner-city
+communities across America would not exist today but for racially biased
+government policies for which there has never been meaningful redress.50
+Yet every year, hundreds of thousands of poor people of color who have
+
+been targeted by the War on Drugs are forced to return to these racially
+segregated communities—neighborhoods still crippled by the legacy of an
+earlier system of control. As a practical matter, they have no other choice.
+In this way, mass incarceration, like its predecessor Jim Crow, creates and
+maintains racial segregation.
+Symbolic production of race. Arguably the most important parallel
+between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define
+the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary
+function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its
+time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow
+defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass
+incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people,
+especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
+The temptation is to insist that black men “choose” to be criminals; the
+system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery
+made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The
+myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African
+Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs
+than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for
+precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals
+may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity
+in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals.51 The
+prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups
+creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and
+political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not.
+Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree
+that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites.
+And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma.
+Every racial caste system in the United States has produced racial stigma.
+Mass incarceration is no exception. Racial stigma is produced by defining
+negatively what it means to be black. The stigma of race was once the
+shame of the slave; then it was the shame of the second-class citizen; today
+the stigma of race is the shame of the criminal. As described in chapter 4,
+many ex-offenders describe an existential angst associated with their pariah
+status, an angst that casts a shadow over every aspect of their identity and
+
+social experience. The shame and stigma is not limited to the individual; it
+extends to family members and friends—even whole communities are
+stigmatized by the presence of those labeled criminals. Those stigmatized
+often adopt coping strategies African Americans once employed during the
+Jim Crow era, including lying about their own criminal history or the status
+of their family members in an attempt to “pass” as someone who will be
+welcomed by mainstream society.
+The critical point here is that, for black men, the stigma of being a
+“criminal” in the era of mass incarceration is fundamentally a racial stigma.
+This is not to say stigma is absent for white criminals; it is present and
+powerful. Rather, the point is that the stigma of criminality for white
+offenders is different—it is a nonracial stigma.
+An experiment may help to illustrate how and why this is the case. Say
+the following to nearly anyone and watch the reaction: “We really need to
+do something about the problem of white crime.” Laughter is a likely
+response. The term white crime is nonsensical in the era of mass
+incarceration, unless one is really referring to white-collar crime, in which
+case the term is understood to mean the types of crimes that seemingly
+respectable white people commit in the comfort of fancy offices. Because
+the term white crime lacks social meaning, the term white criminal is also
+perplexing. In that formulation, white seems to qualify the term criminal—
+as if to say, “he’s a criminal but not that kind of criminal.” Or, he’s not a
+real criminal—i.e., not what we mean by criminal today.
+In the era of mass incarceration, what it means to be a criminal in our
+collective consciousness has become conflated with what it means to be
+black, so the term white criminal is confounding, while the term black
+criminal is nearly redundant. Recall the study discussed in chapter 3 that
+revealed that when survey respondents were asked to picture a drug
+criminal, nearly everyone pictured someone who was black. This
+phenomenon helps to explain why studies indicate that white ex-offenders
+may actually have an easier time gaining employment than African
+Americans without a criminal record.52 To be a black man is to be thought
+of as a criminal, and to be a black criminal is to be despicable—a social
+pariah. To be a white criminal is not easy, by any means, but as a white
+criminal you are not a racial outcast, though you may face many forms of
+
+social and economic exclusion. Whiteness mitigates crime, whereas
+blackness defines the criminal.
+As we have seen in earlier chapters, the conflation of blackness with
+crime did not happen organically; rather, it was constructed by political and
+media elites as part of the broad project known as the War on Drugs. This
+conflation served to provide a legitimate outlet to the expression of
+antiblack resentment and animus—a convenient release valve now that
+explicit forms of racial bias are strictly condemned. In the era of
+colorblindness, it is no longer permissible to hate blacks, but we can hate
+criminals. Indeed, we are encouraged to do so. As writer John Edgar
+Wideman points out, “It’s respectable to tar and feather criminals, to
+advocate locking them up and throwing away the key. It’s not racist to be
+against crime, even though the archetypal criminal in the media and the
+public imagination almost always wears Willie Horton’s face.”53
+It is precisely because our criminal justice system provides a vehicle for
+the expression of conscious and unconscious antiblack sentiment that the
+prison label is experienced as a racial stigma. The stigma exists whether or
+not one has been formally branded a criminal, yet another parallel to Jim
+Crow. Just as African Americans in the North were stigmatized by the Jim
+Crow system even if they were not subject to its formal control, black men
+today are stigmatized by mass incarceration—and the social construction of
+the “criminalblackman”—whether they have ever been to prison or not. For
+those who have been branded, the branding serves to intensify and deepen
+the racial stigma, as they are constantly reminded in virtually every contact
+they have with public agencies, as well as with private employers and
+landlords, that they are the new “untouchables.”
+In this way, the stigma of race has become the stigma of criminality.
+Throughout the criminal justice system, as well as in our schools and public
+spaces, young + black + male is equated with reasonable suspicion,
+justifying the arrest, interrogation, search, and detention of thousands of
+African Americans every year, as well as their exclusion from employment
+and housing and the denial of educational opportunity. Because black youth
+are viewed as criminals, they face severe employment discrimination and
+are also “pushed out” of schools through racially biased school discipline
+policies.54
+
+For black youth, the experience of being “made black” often begins with
+the first police stop, interrogation, search, or arrest. The experience carries
+social meaning—this is what it means to be black. The story of one’s “first
+time” may be repeated to family or friends, but for ghetto youth, almost no
+one imagines that the first time will be the last. The experience is
+understood to define the terms of one’s relationship not only to the state but
+to society at large. This reality can be frustrating for those who strive to
+help ghetto youth “turn their lives around.” James Forman Jr., the cofounder
+of the See Forever charter school for juvenile offenders in Washington,
+D.C., made this point when describing how random and degrading stops
+and searches of ghetto youth “tell kids that they are pariahs, that no matter
+how hard they study, they will remain potential suspects.” One student
+complained to him, “We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right and
+still they treat us like dogs. No, worse than dogs, because criminals are
+treated worse than dogs.” Another student asked him pointedly, “How can
+you tell us we can be anything when they treat us like we’re nothing?”55
+The process of marking black youth as black criminals is essential to the
+functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. For the system to
+succeed—that is, for it to achieve the political goals described in chapter 1
+—black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject
+to control. The criminal label is essential, for forms of explicit racial
+exclusion are not only prohibited but widely condemned. Thus black youth
+must be made—labeled—criminals. This process of being made a criminal
+is, to a large extent, the process of “becoming” black. As Wideman
+explains, when “to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu
+is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal,” being processed by the
+criminal justice system is tantamount to being made black, and “doing
+time” behind bars is at the same time “marking race.”56 At its core, then,
+mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, is a “race-making institution.” It serves
+to define the meaning and significance of race in America.
+
+The Limits of the Analogy
+
+Saying that mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow can leave a
+misimpression. The parallels between the two systems of control are
+striking, to say the least—in both, we find racial opportunism by politicians,
+legalized discrimination, political disenfranchisement, exclusion of blacks
+from juries, stigmatization, the closing of courthouse doors, racial
+segregation, and the symbolic production of race—yet there are important
+differences. Just as Jim Crow, as a system of racial control, was
+dramatically different from slavery, mass incarceration is different from its
+predecessor. In fact, if one were to draft a list of the differences between
+slavery and Jim Crow, the list might well be longer than the list of
+similarities. The same goes for Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Each
+system of control has been unique—well adapted to the circumstances of its
+time. If we fail to appreciate the differences, we will be hindered in our
+ability to meet the challenges created by the current moment. At the same
+time, though, we must be careful not to assume that differences exist when
+they do not, or to exaggerate the ones that do. Some differences may appear
+on the surface to be major, but on close analysis they prove less significant.
+An example of a difference that is less significant than it may initially
+appear is the “fact” that Jim Crow was explicitly race-based, whereas mass
+incarceration is not. This statement initially appears self-evident, but it is
+partially mistaken. Although it is common to think of Jim Crow as an
+explicitly race-based system, in fact a number of the key policies were
+officially colorblind. As previously noted, poll taxes, literacy tests, and
+felon disenfranchisement laws were all formally race-neutral practices that
+were employed in order to avoid the prohibition on race discrimination in
+voting contained in the Fifteenth Amendment. These laws operated to
+create an all-white electorate because they excluded African Americans
+from the franchise but were not generally applied to whites. Poll workers
+had the discretion to charge a poll tax or administer a literacy test, or not,
+
+and they exercised their discretion in a racially discriminatory manner.
+Laws that said nothing about race operated to discriminate because those
+charged with enforcement were granted tremendous discretion, and they
+exercised that discretion in a highly discriminatory manner.
+The same is true in the drug war. Laws prohibiting the use and sale of
+drugs are facially race neutral, but they are enforced in a highly
+discriminatory fashion. The decision to wage the drug war primarily in
+black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African
+Americans but not whites on freeways and train stations has had precisely
+the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era. A facially
+race-neutral system of laws has operated to create a racial caste system.
+Other differences between Jim Crow and mass incarceration are actually
+more significant than they may initially appear. An example relates to the
+role of racial stigma in our society. As discussed in chapter 4, during Jim
+Crow, racial stigma contributed to racial solidarity in the black community.
+Racial stigma today, however—that is, the stigma of black criminality—has
+turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual
+support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of
+the people most affected by it.57 The implications of this difference are
+profound. Racial stigma today makes collective action extremely difficult—
+sometimes impossible; whereas racial stigma during Jim Crow contained
+the seeds of revolt.
+Described below are a number of the other important differences between
+Jim Crow and mass incarceration. Listing all of the differences here is
+impractical; so instead we will focus on a few of the major differences that
+are most frequently cited in defense of mass incarceration, including the
+absence of overt racial hostility, the inclusion of whites in the system of
+control, and African American support for some “get tough” policies and
+drug war tactics.
+Absence of racial hostility. First, let’s consider the absence of overt
+racial hostility among politicians who support harsh drug laws and the law
+enforcement officials charged with enforcing them. The absence of overt
+racial hostility is a significant difference from Jim Crow, but it can be
+exaggerated. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, was born of racial
+opportunism—an effort by white elites to exploit the racial hostilities,
+
+resentments, and insecurities of poor and working-class whites. Moreover,
+racial hostility and racial violence have not altogether disappeared, given
+that complaints of racial slurs and brutality by the police and prison guards
+are fairly common. Some scholars and commentators have pointed out that
+the racial violence once associated with brutal slave masters or the Ku Klux
+Klan has been replaced, to some extent, by violence perpetrated by the
+state. Racial violence has been rationalized, legitimated, and channeled
+through our criminal justice system; it is expressed as police brutality,
+solitary confinement, and the discriminatory and arbitrary imposition of the
+death penalty.58
+But even granting that some African Americans may fear the police
+today as much as their grandparents feared the Klan (as a wallet can be
+mistaken for a gun) and that the penal system may be as brutal in many
+respects as Jim Crow (or slavery), the absence of racial hostility in the
+public discourse and the steep decline in vigilante racial violence is no
+small matter. It is also significant that the “whites only” signs are gone and
+that children of all colors can drink from the same water fountains, swim in
+the same pools, and play on the same playgrounds. Black children today
+can even dream of being president of the United States.
+Those who claim that mass incarceration is “just like” Jim Crow make a
+serious mistake. Things have changed. The fact that a clear majority of
+Americans were telling pollsters in the early 1980s—when the drug war
+was kicking off—that they opposed race discrimination in nearly all its
+forms should not be dismissed lightly.59 Arguably some respondents may
+have been telling pollsters what they thought was appropriate rather than
+what they actually believed, but there is no reason to believe that most of
+them were lying. It is more likely that most Americans by the early 1980s
+had come to reject segregationist thinking and values, and not only did not
+want to be thought of as racist but did not want to be racist.
+This difference in public attitudes has important implications for reform
+efforts. Claims that mass incarceration is analogous to Jim Crow will fall on
+deaf ears and alienate potential allies if advocates fail to make clear that the
+claim is not meant to suggest or imply that supporters of the current system
+are racist in the way Americans have come to understand that term. Race
+plays a major role—indeed, a defining role—in the current system, but not
+
+because of what is commonly understood as old-fashioned, hostile bigotry.
+This system of control depends far more on racial indifference (defined as a
+lack of compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial
+hostility—a feature it actually shares with its predecessors.
+All racial caste systems, not just mass incarceration, have been supported
+by racial indifference. As noted earlier, many whites during the Jim Crow
+era sincerely believed that African Americans were intellectually and
+morally inferior. They meant blacks no harm but believed segregation was a
+sensible system for managing a society comprised of fundamentally
+different and unequal people. The sincerity of many people’s racial beliefs
+is what led Martin Luther King Jr. to declare, “Nothing in all the world is
+more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” The
+notion that racial caste systems are necessarily predicated on a desire to
+harm other racial groups, and that racial hostility is the essence of racism, is
+fundamentally misguided. Even slavery does not conform to this limited
+understanding of racism and racial caste. Most plantation owners supported
+the institution of black slavery not because of a sadistic desire to harm
+blacks but instead because they wanted to get rich, and black slavery was
+the most efficient means to that end. By and large, plantation owners were
+indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery; they were motivated by
+greed. Preoccupation with the role of racial hostility in earlier caste systems
+can blind us to the ways in which every caste system, including mass
+incarceration, has been supported by racial indifference—a lack of caring
+and compassion for people of other races.
+White victims of racial caste. We now turn to another important
+difference between mass incarceration and Jim Crow: the direct harm to
+whites caused by the current caste system. Whites never had to sit at the
+back of the bus during Jim Crow, but today a white man may find himself
+in prison for a drug offense, sharing a cell with a black man. The direct
+harm caused to whites caused by mass incarceration seems to distinguish it
+from Jim Crow; yet, like many of the other differences, this one requires
+some qualification. Some whites were directly harmed by Jim Crow. For
+example, a white woman who fell in love with a black man and hoped to
+spend the rest of her life with him was directly harmed by antimiscegenation laws. The laws were intended for her benefit—to protect her
+
+from the corrupting influence of the black man and the “tragedy” of mulatto
+children—but she was directly harmed nonetheless.
+Still, it seems obvious that mass incarceration directly harms far more
+whites than Jim Crow ever did. For some, this fact alone may be reason
+enough to reject the analogy. An “interracial racial caste system” may seem
+like an oxy-moron. What kind of racial caste system includes white people
+within its control? The answer: a racial caste system in the age of
+colorblindness.
+If 100 percent of the people arrested and convicted for drug offenses
+were African American, the situation would provoke outrage among the
+majority of Americans who consider themselves nonracist and who know
+very well that Latinos, Asian Americans, and whites also commit drug
+crimes. We, as a nation, seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people
+arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African
+American, but if the figure were 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness
+would be lost. We could no longer tell ourselves stories about why 90
+percent might be a reasonable figure; nor could we continue to assume that
+good reasons exist for extreme racial disparities in the drug war, even if we
+are unable to think of such reasons ourselves. In short, the inclusion of
+some whites in the system of control is essential to preserving the image of
+a colorblind criminal justice system and maintaining our self-image as fair
+and unbiased people. Because most Americans, including those within law
+enforcement, want to believe they are nonracist, the suffering in the drug
+war crosses the color line.
+Of course, the fact that white people are harmed by the drug war does not
+mean they are the real targets, the designated enemy. The harm white
+people suffer in the drug war is much like the harm Iraqi civilians suffer in
+U.S. military actions targeting presumed terrorists or insurgents. In any war,
+a tremendous amount of collateral damage is inevitable. Black and brown
+people are the principal targets in this war; white people are collateral
+damage.
+Saying that white people are collateral damage may sound callous, but it
+reflects a particular reality. Mass incarceration as we know it would not
+exist today but for the racialization of crime in the media and political
+discourse. The War on Drugs was declared as part of a political ploy to
+capitalize on white racial resentment against African Americans, and the
+
+Reagan administration used the emergence of crack and its related violence
+as an opportunity to build a racialized public consensus in support of an allout war—a consensus that almost certainly would not have been formed if
+the primary users and dealers of crack had been white.
+Economist Glenn Loury made this observation in his book The Anatomy
+of Racial Inequality. He noted that it is nearly impossible to imagine
+anything remotely similar to mass incarceration happening to young white
+men. Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost
+exclusively among young white men and largely ignore drug crime among
+young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men
+being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the
+criminal justice system, labeled felons, and then subjected to a lifetime of
+discrimination, scorn, and exclusion? Can we imagine this happening while
+most black men landed decent jobs or trotted off to college? No, we cannot.
+If such a thing occurred, “it would occasion a most profound reflection
+about what had gone wrong, not only with THEM, but with US.”60 It would
+never be dismissed with the thought that white men were simply reaping
+what they have sown. The criminalization of white men would disturb us to
+the core. So the critical questions are: “What disturbs us? What is
+dissonant? What seems anomalous? What is contrary to expectation?”61 Or
+more to the point: Whom do we care about?
+An answer to the last question may be found by considering the
+drastically different manner that we, as a nation, responded to drunk driving
+in the mid-1980s, as compared to crack cocaine. During the 1980s, at the
+same time crack was making headlines, a broad-based, grassroots
+movement was under way to address the widespread and sometimes fatal
+problem of drunk driving. Unlike the drug war, which was initiated by
+political elites long before ordinary people identified it as an issue of
+extraordinary concern, the movement to crack down on drunk drivers was a
+bottom-up movement, led most notably by mothers whose families were
+shattered by deaths caused by drunk driving.
+Media coverage of the movement peaked in 1988, when a drunk driver
+traveling the wrong way on Interstate 71 in Kentucky caused a head-on
+collision with a school bus. Twenty-seven people died and dozens more
+were injured in the ensuing fire. The tragic accident, known as the
+
+Carrollton bus disaster, was one of the worst in U.S. history. In the
+aftermath, several parents of the victims became actively involved in
+Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and one became its national
+president. Throughout the 1980s, drunk driving was a regular topic in the
+media, and the term designated driver became part of the American lexicon.
+At the close of the decade, drunk drivers were responsible for
+approximately 22,000 deaths annually, while overall alcohol-related deaths
+were close to 100,000 a year. By contrast, during the same time period,
+there were no prevalence statistics at all on crack, much less crack-related
+deaths. In fact, the number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined
+was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk drivers. The
+total of all drug-related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence
+associated with the illegal drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually—
+less than the number of deaths directly caused by drunk drivers, and a small
+fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths that occur every year.62
+In response to growing concern—fueled by advocacy groups such as
+MADD and by the media coverage of drunk-driving fatalities—most states
+adopted tougher laws to punish drunk driving. Numerous states now have
+some type of mandatory sentencing for this offense—typically two days in
+jail for a first offense and two to ten days for a second offense.63 Possession
+of a tiny amount of crack cocaine, on the other hand, carries a mandatory
+minimum sentence of five years in federal prison.
+The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders
+speaks volumes regarding who is viewed as disposable—someone to be
+purged from the body politic—and who is not. Drunk drivers are
+predominantly white and male. White men comprised 78 percent of the
+arrests for this offense in 1990 when new mandatory minimums governing
+drunk driving were being adopted.64 They are generally charged with
+misdemeanors and typically receive sentences involving fines, license
+suspension, and community service. Although drunk driving carries a far
+greater risk of violent death than the use or sale of illegal drugs, the societal
+response to drunk drivers has generally emphasized keeping the person
+functional and in society, while attempting to respond to the dangerous
+behavior through treatment and counseling.65 People charged with drug
+
+offenses, though, are disproportionately poor people of color. They are
+typically charged with felonies and sentenced to prison.
+Another clue that mass incarceration, as we know it, would not exist but
+for the race of the imagined enemy can be found in the history of drug-law
+enforcement in the United States. Yale historian David Musto and other
+scholars have documented a disturbing, though unsurprising pattern:
+punishment becomes more severe when drug use is associated with people
+of color but softens when it is associated with whites.66 The history of
+marijuana policy is a good example. In the early 1900s, marijuana was
+perceived—rightly or wrongly—as a drug used by blacks and Mexican
+Americans, leading to the Boggs Act of the 1950s, penalizing first-time
+possession of marijuana with a sentence of two to five years in prison.67 In
+the 1960s, though, when marijuana became associated with the white
+middle class and college kids, commissions were promptly created to study
+whether marijuana was really as harmful as once thought. By 1970, the
+Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act differentiated
+marijuana from other narcotics and lowered federal penalties.68 The same
+drug that had been considered fearsome twenty years earlier, when
+associated with African Americans and Latinos, was refashioned as a
+relatively harmless drug when associated with whites.
+In view of the nation’s treatment of predominately white drunk drivers
+and drug offenders, it is extremely difficult to imagine that our nation
+would have declared all-out war on drug offenders if the enemy had been
+defined in the public imagination as white. It was the conflation of
+blackness and crime in the media and political discourse that made the drug
+war and the sudden, massive expansion of our prison system possible.
+White drug “criminals” are collateral damage in the War on Drugs because
+they have been harmed by a war declared with blacks in mind. While this
+circumstance is horribly unfortunate for them, it does create important
+opportunities for a multiracial, bottom-up resistance movement, one in
+which people of all races can claim a clear stake. For the first time in our
+nation’s history, it may become readily apparent to whites how they, too,
+can be harmed by antiblack racism—a fact that, until now, has been difficult
+for many to grasp.
+
+Black support for “get tough” policies. Yet another notable difference
+between Jim Crow and mass incarceration is that many African Americans
+seem to support the current system of control, while most believe the same
+could not be said of Jim Crow. It is frequently argued in defense of mass
+incarceration that African Americans want more police and more prisons
+because crime is so bad in some ghetto communities. It is wrong, these
+defenders claim, for the tactics of mass incarceration—such as the
+concentration of law enforcement in poor communities of color, the stopand-frisk programs that have proliferated nationwide, the eviction of drug
+offenders and their families from public housing, and the drug sweeps of
+ghetto neighborhoods—to be characterized as racially discriminatory,
+because those programs and policies have been adopted for the benefit of
+African American communities and are supported by many ghetto
+residents.69 Ignoring rampant crime in ghetto communities would be
+racially discriminatory, they say; responding forcefully to it is not.
+This argument, on the surface, seems relatively straightforward, but there
+are actually many layers to it, some of which are quite problematic. To
+begin with, the argument implies that African Americans prefer harsh
+criminal justice policies to other forms of governmental intervention, such
+as job creation, economic development, educational reform, and restorative
+justice programs, as the long-term solution to problems associated with
+crime. There is no evidence to support such a claim. To the contrary,
+surveys consistently show that African Americans are generally less
+supportive of harsh criminal justice policies than whites, even though
+blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime.70 This pattern is
+particularly remarkable in that less educated people tend to be more
+punitive and blacks on average are less educated than whites.71
+The notion that African Americans support “get tough” approaches to
+crime is further complicated by the fact that “crime” is not a generic
+category. There are many different types of crime, and violent crime tends
+to provoke the most visceral and punitive response. Yet as we have seen in
+chapter 2, the drug war has not been aimed at rooting out the most violent
+drug traffickers, or so-called kingpins. The vast majority of those arrested
+for drug crimes are not charged with serious offenses, and most of the
+people in state prison on drug charges have no history of violence or
+
+significant selling activity. Those who are “kingpins” are often able to buy
+their freedom by forfeiting their assets, snitching on other dealers, or
+becoming paid government informants. Thus, to the extent that some
+African Americans support harsh policies aimed at violent offenders, they
+cannot be said to support the War on Drugs, which has been waged
+primarily against nonviolent, low-level offenders in poor communities of
+color.
+The one thing that is clear from the survey data and ethnographic
+research is that African Americans in ghetto communities experience an
+intense “dual frustration” regarding crime and law enforcement. As Glenn
+Loury explained more than a decade ago, when violent crime rates were
+making headlines, “The young black men wreaking havoc in the ghetto are
+still ‘our youngsters’ in the eyes of many of the decent poor and workingclass black people who sometimes are their victims.”72 Throughout the
+black community, there is widespread awareness that black ghetto youth
+have few, if any, realistic options, and therefore dealing drugs can be an
+irresistible temptation. Suburban white youth may deal drugs to their
+friends and acquaintances as a form of recreation and extra cash, but for
+ghetto youth, drug sales—though rarely lucrative—are often a means of
+survival, a means of helping to feed and clothe themselves and their
+families. The fact that this “career” path leads almost inevitably to jail is
+often understood as an unfortunate fact of life, part of what it means to be
+black in America.
+Women, in particular, express complicated, conflicted views about crime,
+because they love their sons, husbands, and partners and understand their
+plight as current and future members of the racial undercaste. At the same
+time, though, they abhor gangs and the violence associated with inner-city
+life. One commentator explained, “African American women in poor
+neighborhoods are torn. They worry about their young sons getting
+involved in gang activity. They worry about their sons possibly selling or
+using drugs. They worry about their children getting caught in the crossfire
+of warring gangs.... These mothers want better crime and law enforcement.
+Yet, they understand that increased levels of law enforcement potentially
+saddle their children with a felony conviction—a mark that can ensure
+economic and social marginalization.”73
+
+Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say
+that black people “support” mass incarceration or “get tough” policies. The
+fact that some black people endorse harsh responses to crime is best
+understood as a form of complicity with mass incarceration—not support
+for it. This complicity is perfectly understandable, for the threat posed by
+crime—particularly violent crime—is real, not imagined. Although African
+Americans do not engage in drug crime at significantly higher rates than
+whites, black men do have much higher rates of violent crime, and violent
+crime is concentrated in ghetto communities. Studies have shown that
+joblessness—not race or black culture—explains the high rates of violent
+crime in poor black communities. When researchers have controlled for
+joblessness, differences in violent crime rates between young black and
+white men disappear.74
+Regardless, the reality for poor blacks trapped in ghettos remains the same:
+they must live in a state of perpetual insecurity and fear. It is perfectly
+understandable, then, that some African Americans would be complicit with
+the system of mass incarceration, even if they oppose, as a matter of social
+policy, the creation of racially isolated ghettos and the subsequent transfer
+of black youth from underfunded, crumbling schools to brand-new, hightech prisons. In the era of mass incarceration, poor African Americans are
+not given the option of great schools, community investment, and job
+training. Instead, they are offered police and prisons. If the only choice that
+is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and
+understandable) answer will be “more prisons.”
+The predicament African Americans find themselves in today is not
+altogether different from the situation they faced during Jim Crow. Jim
+Crow, as oppressive as it was, offered a measure of security for blacks who
+were willing to play by its rules. Those who flouted the rules or resisted
+them risked the terror of the Klan. Cooperation with the Jim Crow system
+often seemed far more likely to increase or maintain one’s security than any
+alternative. That reality helps to explain why African American leaders
+such as Booker T. Washington urged blacks to focus on improving
+themselves rather than on challenging racial discrimination. It is also why
+the Civil Rights Movement initially met significant resistance among some
+African Americans in the South. Civil rights advocates strenuously argued
+
+that it was the mentality and ideology that gave rise to Jim Crow that was
+the real source of the danger experienced by blacks. Of course they were
+right. But it is understandable why some blacks believed their immediate
+safety and security could best be protected by cooperation with the
+prevailing caste system. The fact that black people during Jim Crow were
+often complicit with the system of control did not mean they supported
+racial oppression.
+Today complicity with the system of mass incarceration may seem like
+the best option for African Americans, though in reality it is no option at
+all. We declared a war on people residing in racially segregated ghettos—
+just at the moment their economies had collapsed—rather than providing
+community investment, quality education, and job training when work
+disappeared. Of course those communities are suffering from serious crime
+today. Did we expect otherwise? Did we think that, miraculously, they
+would thrive? And now, having waged this war for decades, we claim some
+blacks “support” mass incarceration, as though they would rather have their
+young men warehoused in prison than going off to college. As political
+theorist Tommie Shelby has observed, “Individuals are forced to make
+choices in an environment they did not choose. They would surely prefer to
+have a broader array of good opportunities. The question we should be
+asking—not instead of but in addition to questions about penal policy—is
+whether the denizens of the ghetto are entitled to a better set of options, and
+if so, whose responsibility it is to provide them.”75
+Clearly a much better set of options could be provided to African
+Americans—and poor people of all colors—today. As historian Lerone
+Bennett Jr. eloquently reminds us, “a nation is a choice.” We could choose
+to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are
+locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to
+vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own
+children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can
+choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes
+badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a
+permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and
+it leads to a familiar place.
+
+We faced a fork in the road one decade after Martin Luther King Jr. and
+Malcolm X were laid to rest. As described in chapter 1, during the late
+1970s, jobs had suddenly disappeared from urban areas across America,
+and unemployment rates had skyrocketed. In 1954, black and white youth
+unemployment rates in America were equal, with blacks actually having a
+slightly higher rate of employment in the age group sixteen to nineteen. By
+1984, however, the black unemployment rate had nearly quadrupled, while
+the white rate had increased only marginally.76 This was not due to a major
+change in black values or black culture; this dramatic shift was the result of
+deindustrialization, globalization, and technological advancement. Urban
+factories shut down as our nation transitioned to a service economy.
+Suddenly African Americans were trapped in jobless ghettos, desperate for
+work.
+The economic collapse of inner-city black communities could have
+inspired a national outpouring of compassion and support. A new War on
+Poverty could have been launched. Economic stimulus packages could have
+sailed through Congress to bail out those trapped in jobless ghettos through
+no fault of their own. Education, job training, public transportation, and
+relocation assistance could have been provided, so that youth of color
+would have been able to survive the rough transition to a new global
+economy and secure jobs in distant suburbs. Constructive interventions
+would have been good not only for African Americans trapped in ghettos,
+but also for blue-collar workers of all colors, many of whom were suffering
+too, if less severely. A wave of compassion and concern could have flooded
+poor and working-class communities, in honor of the late Martin Luther
+King Jr. All of this could have happened, but it didn’t. Instead we declared a
+War on Drugs.
+The collapse of inner-city economies coincided with the conservative
+backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, resulting in the perfect storm.
+Almost overnight, black men found themselves unnecessary to the
+American economy and demonized by mainstream society. No longer
+needed to pick cotton in the fields or labor in factories, lower-class black
+men were hauled off to prison in droves. They were vilified in the media
+and condemned for their condition as part of a well-orchestrated political
+campaign to build a new white, Republican majority in the South. Decades
+
+later, curious onlookers in the grips of denial would wonder aloud, “Where
+have all the black men gone?”
+No one has made this point better than sociologist Loïc Wacquant.
+Wacquant has written extensively about the cyclical nature of racial caste in
+America. He emphasizes that the one thing that makes the current penal
+apparatus strikingly different from previous racial caste systems is that “it
+does not carry out the positive economic mission of recruitment and
+disciplining of the workforce.”77 Instead it serves only to warehouse poor
+black and brown people for increasingly lengthy periods of time, often until
+old age. The new system does not seek primarily to benefit unfairly from
+black labor, as earlier caste systems have, but instead views African
+Americans as largely irrelevant and unnecessary to the newly structured
+economy—an economy that is no longer driven by unskilled labor.
+It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States
+from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one
+based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by
+marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far
+preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous.
+Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history, poses
+the risk of extermination. Tragedies such as the Holocaust in Germany or
+ethnic cleansing in Bosnia are traceable to the extreme marginalization and
+stigmatization of racial and ethnic groups. As legal scholar john a. powell
+once commented, only half in jest, “It’s actually better to be exploited than
+marginalized, in some respects, because if you’re exploited presumably
+you’re still needed.”78
+Viewed in this light, the frantic accusations of genocide by poor blacks in
+the early years of the War on Drugs seem less paranoid. The intuition of
+those residing in ghetto communities that they had suddenly become
+disposable was rooted in real changes in the economy—changes that have
+been devastating to poor black communities as factories have closed, lowskill jobs have disappeared, and all those who had the means to flee the
+ghetto did. The sense among those left behind that society no longer has use
+for them, and that the government now aims simply to get rid of them,
+reflects a reality that many of us who claim to care prefer to avoid simply
+by changing channels.
+
+6
+The Fire This Time
+Shortly after sunrise on September 20, 2007, more than ten thousand
+protestors had already descended on Jena, Louisiana, a small town of about
+three thousand people. Because of the congestion on the roads to Jena,
+some protestors left their vehicles and walked into town on foot. Jesse
+Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Martin Luther King III were among those who
+traveled hundreds of miles to participate in what was heralded as “the
+beginnings of a new civil rights movement.”1
+Black youth turned out to protest in record numbers, joined by rappers
+Mos Def, Ice Cube, and Salt-n-Pepa. National news media swarmed the
+town; cameras rolled as thousands of protestors from all over the country
+poured into the rural community to condemn the attempted murder charges
+filed against six black teenagers who allegedly beat a white classmate at a
+local high school.
+This was no ordinary schoolyard fight. Many believed the attack was
+related to a string of racially charged conflicts and controversies at the
+school, most notably the hanging of nooses from a tree in the school’s main
+courtyard. Rev. Al Sharpton captured the spirit of the protest when he stated
+boldly, “We’ve gone from plantations to penitentiaries.... They have tried to
+create a criminal justice system that particularly targets our young black
+men. And now we sit and stand in a city that says it’s a prank to hang a
+hangman’s noose, but that it is attempted murder to have a fight. We cannot
+sit by silently. That’s why we came, and that’s why we intend to keep
+coming.”2
+For a moment, the nation’s eyes were trained on the plight of the “Jena
+6,” and debates could be heard in barber shops, in cafés, and in lines at
+grocery stores about whether the criminal justice system was, in fact, biased
+against black men or whether the black teens got exactly what they
+deserved for a brutal attack on a defenseless young white teen. Grim
+
+statistics about the number of black men in prison were trotted out, and
+commentators argued over whether those numbers reflected crime rates or
+bias and whether white teens would ever be charged with attempted murder
+and tried as adults if they attacked a black kid in a schoolyard fight.
+The uprising on behalf of the six black teens paid off. Although the
+prosecutor refused to back down from his decision to bring adult charges
+against the youths, an appellate court ultimately ruled the teens had to be
+tried as juveniles, and many of the charges were reduced or dropped. While
+this result undoubtedly cheered the thousands of Jena 6 supporters around
+the country, the spectacle may have been oddly unsettling to parents of
+children imprisoned for far less serious crimes, including those locked up
+for minor drug offenses. Where were the protestors and civil rights leaders
+when their children were tried as adults and carted off to adult prisons?
+Where was the national news media then? Their children were accused of
+no crimes of violence, no acts of cruelty, yet they faced adult criminal
+charges and the prospect of serving years, perhaps decades, behind bars for
+possessing or selling illegal drugs—crimes that go largely ignored when
+committed by white youth. Why the outpouring of support and the promises
+of a “new civil rights movement” on behalf of the Jena youth but not their
+children?
+If there had been no nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree, there would
+have been no Jena 6—no mass protests, no live coverage on CNN. The
+decision to charge six black teens as adults with attempted murder in
+connection with a schoolyard fight was understood as possibly racist by the
+mainstream media and some protestors only because of the sensational fact
+that nooses were first hung from a tree. It was this relic—the noose—
+showing up so brazenly and leading to a series of racially charged conflicts
+and controversies that made it possible for the news media and the country
+as a whole to entertain the possibility that these six youths may well have
+been treated to Jim Crow justice. It was this evidence of old-fashioned
+racism that made it possible for a new generation of protestors to frame the
+attempted murder charges against six black teens in a manner that
+mainstream America would understand as racist.
+Ironically, it was precisely this framing that ensured that the events in
+Jena would not actually launch a “new civil rights movement.” A new civil
+rights movement cannot be organized around the relics of the earlier system
+
+of control if it is to address meaningfully the racial realities of our time.
+Any racial justice movement, to be successful, must vigorously challenge
+the public consensus that underlies the prevailing system of control.
+Nooses, racial slurs, and overt bigotry are widely condemned by people
+across the political spectrum; they are understood to be remnants of the
+past, no longer reflective of the prevailing public consensus about race.
+Challenging these forms of racism is certainly necessary, as we must always
+remain vigilant, but it will do little to shake the foundations of the current
+system of control. The new caste system, unlike its predecessors, is
+officially colorblind. We must deal with it on its own terms.
+
+Rethinking Denial—Or, Where Are Civil Rights Advocates
+When You Need Them?
+
+Dealing with this system on its own terms is complicated by the problem of
+denial. Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: a
+new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness. Hundreds of
+thousands of people of color are swept into this system and released every
+year, yet we rationalize the systematic discrimination and exclusion and
+turn a blind eye to the suffering. Our collective denial is not merely an
+inconvenient fact; it is a major stumbling block to public understanding of
+the role of race in our society, and it sharply limits the opportunities for
+truly trans-formative collective action.
+The general public’s collective denial is fairly easy to forgive—if not
+excuse—for all the reasons discussed in chapter 5. The awkward silence of
+the civil rights community, however, is more problematic. If something akin
+to a racial caste system truly exists, why has the civil rights community
+been so slow to acknowledge it? Indeed, how could civil rights
+organizations, some of which are larger and better funded than at any point
+in American history, have allowed this human rights nightmare to occur on
+their watch?
+The answer is not that civil rights advocates are indifferent to racial bias
+in the criminal justice system. To the contrary, we care quite a lot. Nor have
+we been entirely ignorant of the realities of the new caste system. In recent
+years, civil rights advocates have launched important reform efforts, most
+notably the campaigns challenging felon disenfranchisement laws, cracksentencing policies, and racial profiling by law enforcement. Civil rights
+groups have also developed litigation and important coalitions related to the
+school-to-prison pipeline, inadequate indigent defense, and juvenile justice
+reform, to name a few.
+Despite these important efforts, what is most striking about the civil
+rights community’s response to the mass incarceration of people of color is
+
+the relative quiet. Given the magnitude—the sheer scale—of the New Jim
+Crow, one would expect that the War on Drugs would be the top priority of
+every civil rights organization in the country. Conferences, strategy
+sessions, and debates regarding how best to build a movement to dismantle
+the new caste system would be occurring on a regular basis. Major
+grassroots organizing efforts would be under way in nearly every state and
+city nationwide. Foundations would be lobbied to prioritize criminal justice
+reform. Media campaigns would be unleashed in an effort to overturn the
+punitive public consensus on race. The rhetoric associated with specific
+reform efforts would stress the need to end mass incarceration, not merely
+tinker with it, and efforts would be made to build multiracial coalitions
+based on the understanding that the racial politics that gave birth to the War
+on Drugs have harmed poor and working-class whites as well as people of
+color. All of that could have happened, but it didn’t. Why not?
+Part of the answer is that civil rights organizations—like all institutions—
+are comprised of fallible human beings. The prevailing public consensus
+affects everyone, including civil rights advocates. Those of us in the civil
+rights community are not immune to the racial stereotypes that pervade
+media imagery and political rhetoric; nor do we operate outside of the
+political context. Like most people, we tend to resist believing that we
+might be part of the problem.
+One day, civil rights organizations may be embarrassed by how long it
+took them to move out of denial and do the hard work necessary to end
+mass incarceration. Rather than blaming civil rights groups, however, it is
+far more productive to understand the reasons why the response to mass
+incarceration has been so constrained. Again, it’s not that civil rights
+advocates don’t care; we do. And it’s not just that we are afflicted by
+unconscious racial bias and stereotypes about those behind bars. Civil rights
+organizations have reasons for their constraint—reasons that no longer
+make good sense, even if they once did.
+A bit of civil rights history may be helpful here. Civil rights advocacy
+has not always looked the way it does today. Throughout most of our
+nation’s history—from the days of the abolitionist movement through the
+Civil Rights Movement—racial justice advocacy has generally revolved
+around grassroots organizing and the strategic mobilization of public
+opinion. In recent years, however, a bit of mythology has sprung up
+
+regarding the centrality of litigation to racial justice struggles. The success
+of the brilliant legal crusade that led to Brown v. Board of Education has
+created a widespread perception that civil rights lawyers are the most
+important players in racial justice advocacy. This image was enhanced
+following the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, when civil rights
+lawyers became embroiled in highly visible and controversial efforts to end
+hiring discrimination, create affirmative action plans, and enforce school
+desegregation orders. As public attention shifted from the streets to the
+courtroom, the extraordinary grassroots movement that made civil rights
+legislation possible faded from public view. The lawyers took over.
+With all deliberate speed, civil rights organizations became
+“professionalized” and increasingly disconnected from the communities
+they claimed to represent. Legal scholar and former NAACP Legal Defense
+Fund lawyer Derrick Bell was among the first to critique this phenomenon,
+arguing in a 1976 Yale Law Journal article that civil rights lawyers were
+pursuing their own agendas in school desegregation cases even when they
+conflicted with their clients’ expressed desires.3 Two decades later, former
+NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer and current Harvard Law School
+professor Lani Guinier published a memoir in which she acknowledged
+that, “by the early 1990s, [civil rights] litigators like me had become like
+the Washington insiders we were so suspicious of.... We reflexively
+distanced ourselves from the very people on whose behalf we brought the
+cases in the first place.”4 This shift, she noted, had profound consequences
+for the future of racial justice advocacy; in fact, it was debilitating to the
+movement. Instead of a moral crusade, the movement became an almost
+purely legal crusade. Civil rights advocates pursued their own agendas as
+unelected representatives of communities defined by race and displayed
+considerable skill navigating courtrooms and halls of power across
+America. The law became what the lawyers and lobbyists said it was, with
+little or no input from the people whose fate hung in the balance. Guinier
+continued:
+In charge, we channeled a passion for change into legal negotiations
+and lawsuits. We defined the issues in terms of developing legal
+doctrine and establishing legal precedent; our clients became
+important, but secondary, players in a formal arena that required
+
+lawyers to translate lay claims into technical speech. We then
+disembodied plaintiffs’ claims in judicially manageable or judicially
+enforceable terms, unenforceable without more lawyers.
+Simultaneously, the movement’s center of gravity shifted to
+Washington, D.C. As lawyers and national pundits became more
+prominent than clients and citizens, we isolated ourselves from the
+people who were our anchor and on whose behalf we had labored. We
+not only left people behind; we also lost touch with the moral force at
+the heart of the movement itself.5
+Not surprisingly, as civil rights advocates converted a grassroots
+movement into a legal campaign, and as civil rights leaders became
+political insiders, many civil rights organizations became top-heavy with
+lawyers. This development enhanced their ability to wage legal battles but
+impeded their ability to acknowledge or respond to the emergence of a new
+caste system. Lawyers have a tendency to identify and concentrate on
+problems they know how to solve—i.e., problems that can be solved
+through litigation. The mass incarceration of people of color is not that kind
+of problem.
+Widespread preoccupation with litigation, however, is not the only—or
+even the main—reason civil rights groups have shied away from
+challenging the new caste system. Challenging mass incarceration requires
+something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy
+on behalf of criminals. Even at the height of Jim Crow segregation—when
+black men were more likely to be lynched than to receive a fair trial in the
+South—NAACP lawyers were reluctant to advocate on behalf of blacks
+accused of crimes unless the lawyers were convinced of the men’s
+innocence.6 The major exception was anti-death penalty advocacy. Over the
+years, civil rights lawyers have made heroic efforts to save the lives of
+condemned criminals. But outside of the death penalty arena, civil rights
+advocates have long been reluctant to leap to the defense of accused
+criminals. Advocates have found they are most successful when they draw
+attention to certain types of black people (those who are easily understood
+by mainstream whites as “good” and “respectable”) and tell certain types of
+stories about them. Since the days when abolitionists struggled to eradicate
+slavery, racial justice advocates have gone to great lengths to identify black
+
+people who defy racial stereotypes, and they have exercised considerable
+message discipline, telling only those stories of racial injustice that will
+evoke sympathy among whites.
+A prime example is the Rosa Parks story. Rosa Parks was not the first
+person to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery,
+Alabama. Civil rights advocates considered and rejected two other black
+women as plaintiffs when planning a test case challenging segregation
+practices: Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. Both of them were
+arrested for refusing to give up their seats on Montgomery’s segregated
+buses, just months before Rosa Parks refused to budge. Colvin was fifteen
+years old when she defied segregation laws. Her case attracted national
+attention, but civil rights advocates declined to use her as a plaintiff because
+she got pregnant by an older man shortly after her arrest. Advocates worried
+that her “immoral” conduct would detract from or undermine their efforts to
+show that blacks were entitled to (and worthy of) equal treatment. Likewise,
+they decided not to use Mary Louise Smith as a plaintiff because her father
+was rumored to be an alcoholic. It was understood that, in any effort to
+challenge racial discrimination, the litigant—and even the litigant’s family
+—had to be above reproach and free from every negative trait that could be
+used as a justification for unequal treatment.
+Rosa Parks, in this regard, was a dream come true. She was, in the words
+of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (another key figure in the Montgomery Bus
+Boycott), a “medium-sized, cultured mulatto woman; a civic and religious
+worker; quiet, unassuming, and pleasant in manner and appearance;
+dignified and reserved; of high morals and strong character.”7 No one
+doubted that Parks was the perfect symbol for the movement to integrate
+public transportation in Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled in his
+memoir that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history,”
+largely because “her character was impeccable” and she was “one of the
+most respected people in the Negro community.”8
+The time-tested strategy of using those who epitomize moral virtue as
+symbols in racial justice campaigns is far more difficult to employ in efforts
+to reform the criminal justice system. Most people who are caught up in the
+criminal justice system have less than flawless backgrounds. While many
+black people get stopped and searched for crimes they did not commit, it is
+
+not so easy these days to find young black men in urban areas who have
+never been convicted of a crime. The new caste system labels black and
+brown men as criminals early, often in their teens, making them “damaged
+goods” from the perspective of traditional civil rights advocates. With
+criminal records, the majority of young black men in urban areas are not
+seen as attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation or good “poster boys”
+for media advocacy.
+The widespread aversion to advocacy on behalf of those labeled
+criminals reflects a certain political reality. Many would argue that
+expending scarce resources on criminal justice reform is a strategic mistake.
+After all, criminals are the one social group in America that nearly everyone
+—across political, racial, and class boundaries—feels free to hate. Why
+champion the cause of the despised when there are so many sympathetic
+stories about racial injustice one could tell? Why draw public attention to
+the “worst” of the black community, those labeled criminals? Shouldn’t we
+direct scarce resources to battles that are more easily won, such as
+affirmative action? Shouldn’t we focus the public’s attention on the socalled root causes of mass incarceration, such as educational inequity?
+We can continue along this road—it is a road well travelled—but we
+must admit the strategy has not made much of a difference. African
+Americans, as a group, are no better off than they were in 1968 in many
+respects.9 In fact, to some extent, they are worse off. When the incarcerated
+population is counted in unemployment and poverty rates, the best of times
+for the rest of America have been among the worst of times for African
+Americans, particularly black men. As sociologist Bruce Western has
+shown, the notion that the 1990s—the Clinton years—were good times for
+African Americans, and that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” is pure fiction. As
+unemployment rates sank to historically low levels in the late 1990s for the
+general population, jobless rates among noncollege black men in their
+twenties rose to their highest levels ever, propelled by skyrocketing
+incarceration rates.10
+One reason so many people have a false impression of the economic
+well-being of African Americans, as a group, is that poverty and
+unemployment statistics do not include people who are behind bars.
+Prisoners are literally erased from the nation’s economic picture, leading
+
+standard estimates to underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24
+percentage points for less-educated black men.11 Young African American
+men were the only group to experience a steep increase in joblessness
+between 1980 and 2000, a development directly traceable to the increase in
+the penal population. During the much heralded economic boom of the
+1990s, the true jobless rate among noncollege black men was a staggering
+42 percent (65 percent among black male dropouts).12
+Despite these inconvenient truths, though, we can press on. We can
+continue to ignore those labeled criminals in our litigation and media
+advocacy and focus public attention on more attractive plaintiffs—like
+innocent doctors and lawyers stopped and searched on freeways, innocent
+black and brown schoolchildren attending abysmal schools, or innocent
+middle- and upper-middle-class black children who will be denied access to
+Harvard, Michigan, and Yale if affirmative action disappears. We can
+continue on this well-worn path. But if we do so, we should labor under no
+illusions that we will end mass incarceration or shake the foundations of the
+current racial order. We may improve some school districts, prolong
+affirmative action for another decade or two, or force some police
+departments to condemn racial profiling, but we will not put a dent in the
+prevailing caste system. We must face the realities of the new caste system
+and embrace those who are most oppressed by it if we hope to end the new
+Jim Crow.
+That said, no effort is made here to describe, in any detail, what should or
+should not be done in the months and years ahead to challenge the new
+caste system. Such an undertaking is beyond the scope of this book. The
+aim of this chapter is simply to reflect on whether traditional approaches to
+racial justice advocacy are adequate to the task at hand. What follows is not
+a plan, but several questions and claims offered for serious consideration by
+those committed to racial justice and interested in dismantling mass
+incarceration. They are offered as conversation starters—food for thought,
+debate, and—I hope—collective action. Each is a challenge to conventional
+wisdom or traditional strategies. Far more should be said about each point
+made, but, as indicated, this is meant to be the beginning of a conversation,
+not an end.
+
+Tinkering Is for Mechanics, Not Racial-Justice Advocates
+
+The first and arguably most important point is that criminal justice reform
+efforts—standing alone—are futile. Gains can be made, yes, but the new
+caste system will not be overthrown by isolated victories in legislatures or
+courtrooms. If you doubt this is the case, consider the sheer scale of mass
+incarceration. If we hope to return to the rate of incarceration of the 1970s
+—a time when many civil rights activists believed rates of imprisonment
+were egregiously high—we would need to release approximately four out of
+five people currently behind bars today.13 Prisons would have to be closed
+across America, an event that would likely inspire panic in rural
+communities that have become dependent on prisons for jobs and economic
+growth. Hundreds of thousands of people—many of them unionized—
+would lose their jobs. As Marc Mauer has observed, “The more than
+700,000 prison and jail guards, administrators, service workers, and other
+personnel represent a potentially powerful political opposition to any
+scaling-down of the system. One need only recall the fierce opposition to
+the closing of military bases in recent years to see how these forces will
+function over time.”14
+Arguably, Mauer underestimates the scope of the challenge by focusing
+narrowly on the prison system, rather than counting all of the people
+employed in the criminal justice bureaucracy. According to a report
+released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006,
+the U.S. spent a record $185 billion for police protection, detention,
+judicial, and legal activities in 2003. Adjusting for inflation, these figures
+reflect a tripling of justice expenditures since 1982. The justice system
+employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003—58 percent of them at the
+local level and 31 percent at the state level. If four out of five people were
+released from prisons, far more than a million people could lose their jobs.
+There is also the private-sector investment to consider. Prisons are big
+business and have become deeply entrenched in America’s economic and
+
+political system. Rich and powerful people, including former Vice President
+Dick Cheney, have invested millions in private prisons.15 They are deeply
+interested in expanding the market—increasing the supply of prisoners—
+not eliminating the pool of people who can be held captive for a profit. The
+2005 annual report for the Corrections Corporation of America explained
+the vested interests of private prisons matter-of-factly in a filing with the
+Securities and Exchange Commission:
+Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new
+contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention
+facilities. This possible growth depends on a number of factors we
+cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in
+various jurisdictions and acceptance of privatization. The demand for
+our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation
+of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices
+or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently
+proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with
+respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could
+affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced,
+thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house
+them.16
+American Correctional Association President Gwendolyn Chunn put the
+matter more bluntly that same year when lamenting that the unprecedented
+prison expansion boom of the 1990s seemed to be leveling off. “We’ll have
+a hard time holding on to what we have now,” she lamented.17 As it turns
+out, her fears were unfounded. Although prison growth appeared to be
+slowing in 2005, the market for prisoners has continued to expand. The
+nation’s prison population broke new records in 2008, with no end in sight.
+The nonprofit PEW Charitable Trusts reports that inmate populations in at
+least ten states are expected to increase by 25 percent or more between 2006
+and 2011. In short, the market for private prisons is as good as it has ever
+been. Damon Hininger, the president and chief operations officer of
+Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private-prison operator in
+the United States, is thoroughly optimistic. His company boosted net
+
+income by 14 percent in 2008, and he fully expects the growth to continue.
+“There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future,” he said.18
+Even beyond private prison companies, a whole range of prison
+profiteers must be reckoned with if mass incarceration is to be undone,
+including phone companies that gouge families of prisoners by charging
+them exorbitant rates to communicate with their loved ones; gun
+manufacturers that sell Taser guns, rifles, and pistols to prison guards and
+police; private health care providers contracted by the state to provide
+(typically abysmal) health care to prisoners; the U.S. military, which relies
+on prison labor to provide military gear to soldiers in Iraq; corporations that
+use prison labor to avoid paying decent wages; and the politicians, lawyers,
+and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons often in
+predominately white rural communities—deals that often promise far more
+to local communities than they deliver.19 All of these corporate and political
+interests have a stake in the expansion—not the elimination—of the system
+of mass incarceration.
+Consider also the lengthy to-do list for reformers. If we become serious
+about dismantling the system of mass incarceration, we must end the War
+on Drugs. There is no way around it. The drug war is largely responsible for
+the prison boom and the creation of the new undercaste, and there is no path
+to liberation for communities of color that includes this ongoing war. So
+long as people of color in ghetto communities are being rounded up by the
+thousands for drug offenses, carted off to prisons, and then released into a
+permanent undercaste, mass incarceration as a system of control will
+continue to function well.
+Ending the drug war is no simple task, however. It cannot be
+accomplished through a landmark court decision, an executive order, or
+single stroke of the presidential pen. Since 1982, the war has raged like a
+forest fire set with a few matches and a gallon of gasoline. What began as
+an audacious federal program, has spread to every state in the nation and
+nearly every city. It has infected law enforcement activities on roads,
+sidewalks, highways, train stations, airports, and the nation’s border. The
+war has effectively shredded portions of the U.S. Constitution—eliminating
+Fourth Amendment protections once deemed inviolate—and it has
+militarized policing practices in inner cities across America. Racially
+
+targeted drug-law enforcement practices taken together with laws that
+specifically discriminate against drug offenders in employment, housing,
+and public benefits have relegated the majority of black men in urban areas
+across the United States to a permanent second-class status.
+If we hope to end this system of control, we cannot be satisfied with a
+handful of reforms. All of the financial incentives granted to law
+enforcement to arrest poor black and brown people for drug offenses must
+be revoked. Federal grant money for drug enforcement must end; drug
+forfeiture laws must be stripped from the books; racial profiling must be
+eradicated; the concentration of drug busts in poor communities of color
+must cease; and the transfer of military equipment and aid to local law
+enforcement agencies waging the drug war must come to a screeching halt.
+And that’s just for starters.
+Equally important, there must be a change within the culture of law
+enforcement. Black and brown people in ghetto communities must no
+longer be viewed as the designated enemy, and ghetto communities must no
+longer be treated like occupied zones. Law enforcement must adopt a
+compassionate, humane approach to the problems of the urban poor—an
+approach that goes beyond the rhetoric of “community policing” to a
+method of engagement that promotes trust, healing, and genuine
+partnership. Data collection for police and prosecutors should be mandated
+nationwide to ensure that selective enforcement is no longer taking place.
+Racial impact statements that assess the racial and ethnic impact of criminal
+justice legislation must be adopted.20 Public defender offices should be
+funded at the same level as prosecutor’s offices to eliminate the unfair
+advantage afforded the incarceration machine. The list goes on: Mandatory
+drug sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized
+(and perhaps other drugs as well). Meaningful re-entry programs must be
+adopted—programs that provide a pathway not just to dead-end, minimumwage jobs, but also training and education so those labeled criminals can
+realistically reach for high-paying jobs and viable, rewarding career paths.
+Prison workers should be retrained for jobs and careers that do not involve
+caging human beings. Drug treatment on demand must be provided for all
+Americans, a far better investment of taxpayer money than prison cells for
+drug offenders. Barriers to re-entry, specifically the myriad laws that
+
+operate to discriminate against drug offenders for the rest of their lives in
+every aspect of their social, economic, and political life, must be eliminated.
+The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The central
+question for racial justice advocates is this: are we serious about ending this
+system of control, or not? If we are, there is a tremendous amount of work
+to be done. The notion that all of these reforms can be accomplished
+piecemeal—one at a time, through disconnected advocacy strategies—
+seems deeply misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with
+failed policies than a deeply flawed public consensus, one that is
+indifferent, at best, to the experience of poor people of color. As Martin
+Luther King Jr. explained back in 1965, when describing why it was far
+more important to engage in mass mobilizations than file lawsuits, “We’re
+trying to win the right to vote and we have to focus the attention of the
+world on that. We can’t do that making legal cases. We have to make the
+case in the court of public opinion.”21 King certainly appreciated the
+contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of
+jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a
+handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law,
+then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize
+thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it
+was a flawed public consensus—not merely flawed policy—that was at the
+root of racial oppression.
+Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed public consensus lies at the
+core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime,
+especially drug crime, they do not think about suburban housewives
+violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using ecstasy.
+Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown, and it is
+because drug crime is racially defined in the public consciousness that the
+electorate has not cared much what happens to drug criminals—at least not
+the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be
+white. It is this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the
+core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed
+in the United States or anywhere else in the world.
+Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be
+successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are
+
+engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be
+won—even a string of victories—but in the absence of a fundamental shift
+in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the
+extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system
+will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict
+leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration
+replaced Jim Crow.
+Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in
+their book Racial Formation in the United States. They attribute the
+cyclical nature of racial progress to the “unstable equilibrium” that
+characterizes the United States’ racial order.22 Under “normal” conditions,
+they argue, state institutions are able to normalize the organization and
+enforcement of the prevailing racial order, and the system functions
+relatively automatically. Challenges to the racial order during these periods
+are easily marginalized or suppressed, and the prevailing system of racial
+meanings, identity, and ideology seems “natural.” These conditions clearly
+prevailed during slavery and Jim Crow. When the equilibrium is disrupted,
+however, as in Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, the state
+initially resists, then attempts to absorb the challenge through a series of
+reforms “that are, if not entirely symbolic, at least not critical to the
+operation of the racial order.” In the absence of a truly egalitarian racial
+consensus, these predictable cycles inevitably give rise to new,
+extraordinarily comprehensive systems of racialized social control.
+One example of the way in which a well established racial order easily
+absorbs legal challenges is the infamous aftermath of the Brown v. Board of
+Education decision. After the Supreme Court declared separate schools
+inherently unequal in 1954, segregation persisted unabated. One
+commentator notes: “The statistics from the Southern states are truly
+amazing. For ten years, 1954-1964, virtually nothing happened.”23 Not a
+single black child attended an integrated public grade school in South
+Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi as of the 1962-1963 school year. Across
+the South as a whole, a mere 1 percent of black school children were
+attending school with whites in 1964—a full decade after Brown was
+decided.24 Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge
+first—one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils
+
+of Jim Crow. This does not mean Brown v. Board was meaningless, as some
+commentators have claimed.25 Brown gave critical legitimacy to the
+demands of civil rights activists who risked their lives to end Jim Crow, and
+it helped to inspire the movement (as well as a fierce backlash).26 But
+standing alone, Brown accomplished for African Americans little more than
+Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. A civil war had to be
+waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal
+end to Jim Crow. Those who imagine that far less is required to dismantle
+mass incarceration and build a new, egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a
+compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward poor people of color fail
+to appreciate the distance between Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and the
+ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American
+society.
+The foregoing should not be read as a call for movement building to the
+exclusion of reform work. To the contrary, reform work is the work of
+movement building, provided that it is done consciously as movementbuilding work. If all the reforms mentioned above were actually adopted, a
+radical transformation in our society would have taken place. The relevant
+question is not whether to engage in reform work, but how. There is no
+shortage of worthy reform efforts and goals. Differences of opinion are
+inevitable about which reforms are most important and in what order of
+priority they should be pursued. These debates are worthwhile, but it is
+critical to keep in mind that the question of how we do reform work is even
+more important than the specific reforms we seek. If the way we pursue
+reforms does not contribute to the building of a movement to dismantle the
+system of mass incarceration, and if our advocacy does not upset the
+prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system, none of the
+reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nation’s racial
+equilibrium. Challenges to the system will be easily absorbed or deflected,
+and the accommodations made will serve primarily to legitimate the system,
+not undermine it. We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the
+larger war.
+
+Let’s Talk About Race—Resisting the Temptation of
+Colorblind Advocacy
+
+So how should we go about building this movement to end mass
+incarceration? What should be the core philosophy, the guiding principles?
+Another book could be written on this subject, but a few key principles
+stand out that can be briefly explored here. These principles are rooted in an
+understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with
+mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control.
+This is not to say crime is unimportant; it is very important. We need an
+effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but
+that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to
+create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals, rather than
+to eliminate crime or reduce the number of criminals.
+It is not uncommon, however, to hear people claim that the mere fact that
+we have the lowest crime rates, at the same time that we have the highest
+incarceration rates, is all the proof needed that this system works well to
+control crime. But if you believe this system effectively controls crime,
+consider this: standard estimates of the amount of crime reduction that can
+be attributable to mass incarceration range from 3 to 25 percent.27 Some
+scholars believe we have long since passed a tipping point where the
+declining marginal return on imprisonment has dipped below zero.
+Imprisonment, they say, now creates far more crime than it prevents, by
+ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a
+permanent class of unemployables. 28 Although it is common to think of
+poverty and joblessness as leading to crime and imprisonment, this research
+suggests that the War on Drugs is a major cause of poverty, chronic
+unemployment, broken families, and crime today. But even assuming 25
+percent is the right figure, it still means that the overwhelming majority of
+incarceration—75 percent—has had absolutely no impact on crime, despite
+costing nearly $200 billion annually. As a crime reduction strategy, mass
+
+incarceration is an abysmal failure. It is largely ineffective and
+extraordinarily expensive.
+Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though,
+only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent
+and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of
+social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic
+success. 29 In less than two decades, the prison population quadrupled, and
+large majorities of poor people of color in urban areas throughout the
+United States were placed under the control of the criminal justice system
+or saddled with criminal records for life. Almost overnight, huge segments
+of ghetto communities were permanently relegated to a second-class status,
+disenfranchised, and subjected to perpetual surveillance and monitoring by
+law enforcement agencies. One could argue this result is a tragic,
+unforeseeable mistake, and that the goal was always crime control, not the
+creation of a racial undercaste. But judging by the political rhetoric and the
+legal rules employed in the War on Drugs, this result is no freak accident.
+In order to make this point, we need to talk about race openly and
+honestly. We must stop debating crime policy as though it were purely
+about crime. People must come to understand the racial history and origins
+of mass incarceration—the many ways our conscious and unconscious
+biases have distorted our judgments over the years about what is fair,
+appropriate, and constructive when responding to drug use and drug crime.
+We must come to see, too, how our economic insecurities and racial
+resentments have been exploited for political gain, and how this
+manipulation has caused suffering for people of all colors. Finally, we must
+admit, out loud, that it was because of race that we didn’t care much what
+happened to “those people” and imagined the worst possible things about
+them. The fact that our lack of care and concern may have been, at times,
+unintentional or unconscious does not mitigate our crime—if we refuse,
+when given the chance, to make amends.
+Admittedly, though, the temptation to ignore race in our advocacy may
+be overwhelming. Race makes people uncomfortable. One study found that
+some whites are so loath to talk about race and so fearful of violating racial
+etiquette that they indicate a preference for avoiding all contact with black
+people.30 The striking reluctance of whites, in particular, to talk about or
+
+even acknowledge race has led many scholars and advocates to conclude
+that we would be better off not talking about race at all. This view is
+buttressed by the fact that white liberals, nearly as much as conservatives,
+seem to have lost patience with debates about racial equity. Barack Obama
+noted this phenomenon in his book, The Audacity of Hope: “Rightly or
+wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most
+fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial
+inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against racial
+victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race
+discrimination in this country.”
+Adding to the temptation to avoid race is the fact that opportunities for
+challenging mass incarceration on purely race-neutral grounds have never
+been greater. With budgets busting, more than two dozen states have
+reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum sentences, restored earlyrelease programs, and offered treatment instead of incarceration for some
+drug offenders.31 The financial crisis engulfing states large and small has
+led to a conversion among some legislators who once were “get tough” true
+believers. Declining crime rates, coupled with a decline in public concern
+about crime, have also helped to create a rare opening for a productive
+public conversation about the War on Drugs. A promising indicator of the
+public’s receptivity to a change in course is California’s Proposition 36,
+which mandated drug treatment rather than jail for first-time offenders, and
+was approved by more than 60 percent of the electorate in 2000.32 Some
+states have decriminalized marijuana, including Massachusetts, where 65
+percent of state voters approved the measure.33 Taken together, these factors
+suggest that, if a major mobilization got underway, impressive changes in
+our nation’s drug laws and policies would be not only possible, but likely,
+without ever saying a word about race.
+This is tempting bait, to put it mildly, but racial justice advocates should
+not take it. The prevailing caste system cannot be successfully dismantled
+with a purely race-neutral approach. To begin with, it is extremely unlikely
+that a strategy based purely on costs, crime rates, and the wisdom of drug
+treatment will get us back even to the troubling incarceration rates of the
+1970s. As indicated earlier, any effort to downsize dramatically our nation’s
+prisons would inspire fierce resistance by those faced with losing jobs,
+
+investments, and other benefits provided by the current system. The
+emotion and high anxiety would likely express itself in the form of a
+racially charged debate about values, morals, and personal responsibility
+rather than a debate about the prison economy. Few would openly argue
+that we should lock up millions of poor people just so that other people can
+have jobs or get a good return on their private investments. Instead, familiar
+arguments would likely resurface about the need to be “tough” on criminals,
+not coddle them or give “free passes.” The public debate would inevitably
+turn to race, even if no one was explicitly talking about it. As history has
+shown, the prevalence of powerful (unchallenged) racial stereotypes,
+together with widespread apprehension regarding major structural changes,
+would create a political environment in which implicit racial appeals could
+be employed, once again, with great success. Failure to anticipate and
+preempt such appeals would set the stage for the same divide-and-conquer
+tactics that have reliably preserved racial hierarchy in the United States for
+centuries.
+Even if fairly dramatic changes were achieved while ignoring race, the
+results would be highly contingent and temporary. If and when the economy
+improves, the justification for a “softer” approach would no longer exist.
+States would likely gravitate back to their old ways if a new, more
+compassionate public consensus about race had not been forged. Similarly,
+if and when crime rates rise—which seems likely if the nation’s economy
+continues to sour—nothing would deter politicians from making black and
+brown criminals, once again, their favorite whipping boys. Since the days
+of slavery, black men have been depicted and understood as criminals, and
+their criminal “nature” has been among the justifications for every caste
+system to date. The criminalization and demonization of black men is one
+habit America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the
+racial dynamics that have given rise to successive caste systems. Although
+colorblind approaches to addressing the problems of poor people of color
+often seem pragmatic in the short run, in the long run they are
+counterproductive. Colorblindness, though widely touted as the solution, is
+actually the problem.
+
+Against Colorblindness
+
+Saying that colorblindness is the problem may alarm some in the civil rights
+community, especially the pollsters and political consultants who have
+become increasingly influential in civil rights advocacy. For decades, civil
+rights leaders have been saying things like “we all want a colorblind
+society, we just disagree how to get there” in defense of race-conscious
+programs like affirmative action or racial data collection.34 Affirmative
+action has been framed as a legitimate exception to the colorblindness
+principle—a principle now endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the
+American electorate. Civil rights leaders are quick to assure the public that
+when we reach a colorblind nirvana, race consciousness will no longer be
+necessary or appropriate.
+Far from being a worthy goal, however, colorblindness has proved
+catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an overstatement to say the
+systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States would
+not have been possible in the post-civil rights era if the nation had not fallen
+under the spell of a callous colorblindness. The seemingly innocent phrase,
+“I don’t care if he’s black ...” perfectly captures the perversion of Martin
+Luther King Jr.’s dream that we may, one day, be able to see beyond race to
+connect spiritually across racial lines. Saying that one does not care about
+race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of
+cruelty. It is precisely because we, as a nation, have not cared much about
+African Americans that we have allowed our criminal justice system to
+create a new racial undercaste.
+The deeply flawed nature of colorblindness, as a governing principle, is
+evidenced by the fact that the public consensus supporting mass
+incarceration is officially colorblind. It purports to see black and brown men
+not as black and brown, but simply as men—raceless men—who have
+failed miserably to play by the rules the rest of us follow quite naturally.
+The fact that so many black and brown men are rounded up for drug crimes
+
+that go largely ignored when committed by whites is unseen. Our collective
+colorblindness prevents us from seeing this basic fact. Our blindness also
+prevents us from seeing the racial and structural divisions that persist in
+society: the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated, jobless ghettos,
+and the segregated public discourse—a public conversation that excludes
+the current pariah caste. Our commitment to colorblindness extends beyond
+individuals to institutions and social arrangements. We have become blind,
+not so much to race, but to the existence of racial caste in America.
+More than forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned of this
+danger. He insisted that blindness and indifference to racial groups is
+actually more important than racial hostility to the creation and
+maintenance of racialized systems of control. Those who supported slavery
+and Jim Crow, he argued, typically were not bad or evil people; they were
+just blind. Even the Justices who decided the infamous Dred Scott case,
+which ruled “that the Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to
+respect,” were not wicked men, he said. On the contrary, they were decent
+and dedicated men. But, he hastened to add, “They were victims of a
+spiritual and intellectual blindness. They knew not what they did. The
+whole system of slavery was largely perpetuated through spiritually
+ignorant persons.” He continued:
+This tragic blindness is also found in racial segregation, the not-toodistant cousin of slavery. Some of the most vigorous defenders of
+segregation are sincere in their beliefs and earnest in their motives.
+Although some men are segregationists merely for reasons of political
+expediency and political gain, not all of the resistance to integration is
+the rearguard of professional bigots. Some people feel that their
+attempt to preserve segregation is best for themselves, their children,
+and their nation. Many are good church people, anchored in the
+religious faith of their mothers and fathers.... What a tragedy! Millions
+of Negroes have been crucified by conscientious blindness.... Jesus
+was right about those men who crucified him. They knew not what
+they did. They were inflicted by a terrible blindness.35
+Could not the same speech be given about mass incarceration today?
+Again, African Americans have been “crucified by conscientious
+
+blindness.” People of good will have been unwilling to see black and brown
+men, in their humanness, as entitled to the same care, compassion, and
+concern that would be extended to one’s friends, neighbors, or loved ones.
+King recognized that it was this indifference to the plight of other races that
+supported the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow. In his words, “One of
+the great tragedies of man’s long trek along the highway of history has been
+the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation.” The
+consequence of this narrow, insular attitude “is that one does not really
+mind what happens to the people outside his group.”36 Racial indifference
+and blindness—far more than racial hostility—form the sturdy foundation
+for all racial caste systems.
+Abandoning the quest for a colorblind society is easier said than done, of
+course. Racial justice advocates, if they should choose this path, will be
+required to provide uncomfortable answers to commonly asked questions.
+For example, advocates are frequently asked, When will we (finally)
+become a colorblind society? The pursuit of colorblindness makes people
+impatient. With courage, we should respond: Hopefully never. Or if those
+words are too difficult to utter, then say: “Not in the foreseeable future.”
+More than a little patience will be needed when explaining the complete
+about-face. Probably around the same number of people think the Earth is
+flat as think race consciousness should be the rule in perpetuity, rather than
+the exception. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that people are
+incapable of embracing a permanent commitment to color consciousness.
+The shift may, in fact, come as something of a relief, as it moves our
+collective focus away from a wholly unrealistic goal to one that is within
+anyone’s reach right now. After all, to aspire to colorblindness is to aspire to
+a state of being in which you are not capable of seeing racial difference—a
+practical impossibility for most of us. The shift also invites a more
+optimistic view of human capacity. The colorblindness ideal is premised on
+the notion that we, as a society, can never be trusted to see race and treat
+each other fairly or with genuine compassion. A commitment to color
+consciousness, by contrast, places faith in our capacity as humans to show
+care and concern for others, even as we are fully cognizant of race and
+possible racial differences.
+
+If colorblindness is such a bad idea, though, why have people across the
+political spectrum become so attached to it? For conservatives, the ideal of
+colorblindness is linked to a commitment to individualism. In their view,
+society should be concerned with individuals, not groups. Gross racial
+disparities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity should be of no
+interest to our government, and racial identity should be a private matter,
+something best kept to ourselves. For liberals, the ideal of colorblindness is
+linked to the dream of racial equality. The hope is that one day we will no
+longer see race because race will lose all of its significance. In this fantasy,
+eventually race will no longer be a factor in mortality rates, the spread of
+disease, educational or economic opportunity, or the distribution of wealth.
+Race will correlate with nothing; it will mean nothing; we won’t even
+notice it anymore. Those who are less idealistic embrace colorblindness
+simply because they find it difficult to imagine a society in which we see
+race and racial differences yet consistently act in a positive, constructive
+way. It is easier to imagine a world in which we tolerate racial differences
+by being blind to them.
+The uncomfortable truth, however, is that racial differences will always
+exist among us. Even if the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass
+incarceration were completely overcome, we would remain a nation of
+immigrants in a larger world divided by race and ethnicity. It is a world in
+which there is extraordinary racial and ethnic inequality, and our nation has
+porous boundaries. For the foreseeable future, racial and ethnic inequality
+will be a feature of American life.
+This reality is not cause for despair. The idea that we may never reach a
+state of perfect racial equality—a perfect racial equilibrium—is not cause
+for alarm. What is concerning is the real possibility that we, as a society,
+will choose not to care. We will choose to be blind to injustice and the
+suffering of others. We will look the other way and deny our public
+agencies the resources, data, and tools they need to solve problems. We will
+refuse to celebrate what is beautiful about our distinct cultures and histories,
+even as we blend and evolve. That is cause for despair.
+Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is
+the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose
+much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. We should
+hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can
+
+see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond
+to each other with love. That was King’s dream—a society that is capable
+of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for.
+
+The Racial Bribe—Let’s Give It Back
+
+The foregoing could be read as a ringing endorsement of affirmative action
+and other diversity initiatives. To a certain extent, it is. It is difficult to
+imagine a time, in the foreseeable future, when the free market and partisan
+politics could be trusted to produce equitable inclusion in all facets of
+American political, economic, and social life, without anyone giving any
+thought—caring at all—about race. It may always be necessary for us, as a
+society, to pay careful attention to the impact of our laws, policies, and
+practices on racial and ethnic groups and consciously strive to ensure that
+biases, stereotypes, and structural arrangements do not cause unnecessary
+harm or suffering to any individual or any group for reasons related to race.
+There is, however, a major caveat. Racial justice advocates should
+consider, with a degree of candor that has not yet been evident, whether
+affirmative action—as it has been framed and defended during the past
+thirty years—has functioned more like a racial bribe than a tool of racial
+justice. One might wonder, what does affirmative action have to do with
+mass incarceration? Well, perhaps the two are linked more than we realize.
+We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve “cosmetic” racial
+diversity—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the
+surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to
+facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the
+development of a more compassionate race consciousness. In earlier
+chapters, we have seen that throughout our nation’s history, poor and
+working-class whites have been bought off by racial bribes. The question
+posed here is whether affirmative action has functioned similarly, offering
+relatively meager material advantages but significant psychological benefits
+to people of color, in exchange for the abandonment of a more radical
+movement that promised to alter the nation’s economic and social structure.
+To be clear: This is not an argument that affirmative action policies
+conflict with King’s dream that we might one day be “judged by the content
+
+of our character, not the color of our skin.” King himself would have almost
+certainly endorsed affirmative action as a remedy, at least under some
+circumstances. In fact, King specifically stated on numerous occasions that
+he believed special—even preferential—treatment for African Americans
+may be warranted in light of their unique circumstances.37 And this is not
+an argument that affirmative action has made no difference in the lives of
+poor or working-class African Americans—as some have claimed. Fire
+departments, police departments, and other public agencies have been
+transformed, at least in part, due to affirmative action.38 Finally, this is not
+an argument that affirmative action should be reconsidered simply on the
+grounds that it is “unfair” to white men as a group. The empirical evidence
+strongly supports the conclusion that declining wages, downsizing,
+deindustrialization, globalization, and cutbacks in government services
+represent much greater threats to the position of white men than so-called
+reverse discrimination.39
+The argument made here is a less familiar one. It is not widely debated in
+the mainstream media or, for that matter, in civil rights organizations. The
+claim is that racial justice advocates should reconsider the traditional
+approach to affirmative action because (a) it has helped to render a new
+caste system largely invisible; (b) it has helped to perpetuate the myth that
+anyone can make it if they try; (c) it has encouraged the embrace of a
+“trickle down theory of racial justice”; (d) it has greatly facilitated the
+divide-and-conquer tactics that gave rise to mass incarceration; and (e) it
+has inspired such polarization and media attention that the general public
+now (wrongly) assumes that affirmative action is the main battlefront in
+U.S. race relations.
+It may not be easy for the civil rights community to have a candid
+conversation about any of this. Civil rights organizations are populated with
+beneficiaries of affirmative action (like myself) and their friends and allies.
+Ending affirmative action arouses fears of annihilation. The reality that so
+many of us would disappear overnight from colleges and universities
+nationwide if affirmative action were banned, and that our children and
+grandchildren might not follow in our footsteps, creates a kind of panic that
+is difficult to describe. It may be analogous, in some respects, to the panic
+once experienced by poor and working-class whites faced with
+
+desegregation—the fear of a sudden demotion in the nation’s racial
+hierarchy. Mari Matsuda and Charles Lawrence’s book We Won’t Go Back
+captures the determination of affirmative-action beneficiaries not to allow
+the clock to be turned back on racial justice, back to days of racial caste in
+America. The problem, of course, is that we are already there.
+Affirmative action, particularly when it is justified on the grounds of
+diversity rather than equity (or remedy), masks the severity of racial
+inequality in America, leading to greatly exaggerated claims of racial
+progress and overly optimistic assessments of the future for African
+Americans. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and
+become CEOs or corporate lawyers—not to mention president of the United
+States—causes us all to marvel at what a long way we have come. As recent
+data shows, however, much of black progress is a myth. Although some
+African Americans are doing very well—enrolling in universities and
+graduate schools at record rates thanks to affirmative action—as a group,
+African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther
+King Jr. was assassinated and riots swept inner cities across America.
+Nearly one-fourth of African Americans live below the poverty line today,
+approximately the same as in 1968. The child poverty rate is actually higher
+today than it was then.40 Unemployment rates in black communities rival
+those in Third World countries. And that is with affirmative action!
+When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our so-called
+colorblind society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar
+social, political, and economic structure—the structure of racial caste.
+When those behind bars are taken into account, America’s institutions
+continue to create nearly as much racial inequality as existed during Jim
+Crow.41 Our elite universities, which now look a lot like America, would
+whiten overnight if affirmative action suddenly disappeared. One recent
+study indicates that the elimination of race-based admissions policies would
+lead to a 63 percent decline in black matriculants at all law schools and a 90
+percent decline at elite law schools.42 Sociologist Stephen Steinberg
+describes the bleak reality this way: “Insofar as this black middle class is an
+artifact of affirmative action policy, it cannot be said to be the result of
+autonomous workings of market forces. In other words, the black middle
+class does not reflect a lowering of racist barriers in occupations so much as
+
+the opposite: racism is so entrenched that without government intervention
+there would be little ‘progress’ to boast about.”43
+In view of all this, we must ask, to what extent has affirmative action
+helped us remain blind to, and in denial about, the existence of a racial
+undercaste? And to what extent have the battles over affirmative action
+distracted us and diverted crucial resources and energy away from
+dismantling the structures of racial inequality?
+The predictable response is that civil rights advocates are as committed to
+challenging mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism as they
+are to preserving affirmative action. But where is the evidence of this? Civil
+rights activists have created a national movement to save affirmative action,
+complete with the marches, organizing, and media campaigns, as well as
+incessant strategy meetings, conferences, and litigation. Where is the
+movement to end mass incarceration? For that matter, where is the
+movement for educational equity? Part of the answer is that it is far easier
+to create a movement when there is a sense of being under attack. It is also
+easier when a single policy is at issue, rather than something as enormous
+(and seemingly intractable) as educational inequity or mass incarceration.
+Those are decent explanations, but they are no excuse. Try telling a sixteenyear-old black youth in Louisiana who is facing a decade in adult prison
+and a lifetime of social, political, and economic exclusion that your civil
+rights organization is not doing much to end the War on Drugs—but would
+he like to hear about all the great things that are being done to save
+affirmative action? There is a fundamental disconnect today between the
+world of civil rights advocacy and the reality facing those trapped in the
+new racial undercaste.
+There is another, more sinister consequence of affirmative action: the
+carefully engineered appearance of great racial progress strengthens the
+“colorblind” public consensus that personal and cultural traits, not structural
+arrangements, are largely responsible for the fact that the majority of young
+black men in urban areas across the United States are currently under the
+control of the criminal justice system or branded as felons for life. In other
+words, affirmative action helps to make the emergence of a new racial caste
+system seem implausible. It creates an environment in which it is
+reasonable to ask, how can something akin to a racial caste system exist
+
+when people like Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Barack Obama are
+capable of rising from next to nothing to the pinnacles of wealth and
+power? How could a caste system exist, in view of the black middle class?
+There are answers to these questions, but they are difficult to swallow
+when millions of Americans have displayed a willingness to elect a black
+man president of the United States. The truth, however, is this: far from
+undermining the current system of control, the new caste system depends,
+in no small part, on black exceptionalism. The colorblind public consensus
+that supports the new caste system insists that race no longer matters. Now
+that America has officially embraced Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream (by
+reducing it to the platitude “that we should be judged by the content of our
+character, not the color of our skin”), the mass incarceration of people of
+color can be justified only to the extent that the plight of those locked up
+and locked out is understood to be their choice, not their birthright.
+In short, mass incarceration is predicated on the notion that an
+extraordinary number of African Americans (but not all) have freely chosen
+a life of crime and thus belong behind bars. A belief that all blacks belong
+in jail would be incompatible with the social consensus that we have
+“moved beyond” race and that race is no longer relevant. But a widespread
+belief that a majority of black and brown men unfortunately belong in jail is
+compatible with the new American creed, provided that their imprisonment
+can be interpreted as their own fault. If the prison label imposed on them
+can be blamed on their culture, poor work ethic, or even their families, then
+society is absolved of responsibility to do anything about their condition.
+This is where black exceptionalism comes in. Highly visible examples of
+black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the
+era of colorblindness. Black success stories lend credence to the notion that
+anyone, no matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the
+top, if only you try hard enough. These stories “prove” that race is no
+longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim
+Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass
+incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all
+those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate.
+Viewed from this perspective, affirmative action no longer appears
+entirely progressive. So long as some readily identifiable African
+Americans are doing well, the system is largely immunized from racial
+
+critique. People like Barack Obama who are truly exceptional by any
+standards, along with others who have been granted exceptional
+opportunities, legitimate a system that remains fraught with racial bias—
+especially when they fail to challenge, or even acknowledge, the prevailing
+racial order. In the current era, white Americans are often eager to embrace
+token or exceptional African Americans, particularly when they go out of
+their way not to talk about race or racial inequality.
+Affirmative action may be counterproductive in yet another sense: it
+lends credence to a trickle-down theory of racial justice. The notion that
+giving a relatively small number of people of color access to key positions
+or institutions will inevitably redound to the benefit of the larger group is
+belied by the evidence. It also seems to disregard Martin Luther King Jr.’s
+stern warnings that racial justice requires the complete transformation of
+social institutions and a dramatic restructuring of our economy, not
+superficial changes that can purchased on the cheap. King argued in 1968,
+“The changes [that have occurred to date] are basically in the social and
+political areas; the problems we now face—providing jobs, better housing
+and better education for the poor throughout the country—will require
+money for their solution, a fact that makes those solutions all the more
+difficult.”44 He emphasized that “most of the gains of the past decade were
+obtained at bargain prices,” for the desegregation of public facilities and the
+election and appointment of a few black officials cost close to nothing.
+“White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be
+achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The
+comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at
+the prospect of change in the status quo.”45
+Against this backdrop, diversity-driven affirmative action programs seem
+to be the epitome of racial justice purchased on the cheap. They create the
+appearance of racial equity without the reality and do so at no great cost,
+without fundamentally altering any of the structures that create racial
+inequality in the first place. Perhaps the best illustration of this fact is that,
+thanks in part to affirmative action, police departments and law
+enforcement agencies nationwide have come to look more like America
+than ever, at precisely the moment that they have waged a war on the ghetto
+poor and played a leading role in the systematic mass incarceration of
+
+people of color. The color of police chiefs across the country has changed,
+but the role of the police in our society has not.
+Gerald Torres and Lani Guinier offer a similar critique of affirmative
+action in The Miner’s Canary. They point out that “conventional strategies
+for social change proceed as though a change in who administers power
+fundamentally affects the structure of power itself.”46 This narrow approach
+to social change is reflected in the justifications offered for affirmative
+action, most notably the claim that “previous outsiders, once given a
+chance, will exercise power differently.”47 The reality, however, is that the
+existing hierarchy disciplines newcomers, requiring them to exercise power
+in the same old ways and play by the same old rules in order to survive. The
+newcomers, Torres and Guinier explain, are easily co-opted, as they have
+much to lose but little to gain by challenging the rules of the game.
+Their point is particularly relevant to the predicament of minority police
+officers charged with waging the drug war. Profound racial injustice occurs
+when minority police officers follow the rules. It is a scandal when the
+public learns they have broken the rules, but no rules need be broken for the
+systematic mass incarceration of people of color to proceed unabated. This
+uncomfortable fact creates strong incentives for minority officers to deny, to
+rationalize, or to be willingly blind to the role of law enforcement in
+creating a racial undercaste. Reports that minority officers may engage in
+nearly as much racial profiling as white officers have been met with some
+amazement, but the real surprise is that some minority police officers have
+been willing to speak out against the practice, given the ferocity of the drug
+war. A war has been declared against poor communities of color, and the
+police are expected to wage it. Do we expect minority officers, whose
+livelihood depends on the very departments charged with waging the war,
+to play the role of peacenik? That expectation seems unreasonable, yet the
+dilemma for racial justice advocates is a real one. The quiet complicity of
+minority officers in the War on Drugs serves to legitimate the system and
+insulate it from critique. In a nation still stuck in an old Jim Crow mind-set
+—which equates racism with white bigotry and views racial diversity as
+proof the problem has been solved—a racially diverse police department
+invites questions like: “How can you say the Oakland Police Department’s
+drug raids are racist? There’s a black police chief, and most of the officers
+
+involved in the drug raids are black.” If the caste dimensions of mass
+incarceration were better understood and the limitations of cosmetic
+diversity were better appreciated, the existence of black police chiefs and
+black officers would be no more encouraging today than the presence of
+black slave drivers and black plantation owners hundreds of years ago.
+When meaningful change fails to materialize following the achievement
+of superficial diversity, those who remain locked out can become extremely
+discouraged and demoralized, resulting in cynicism and resignation.
+Perhaps more concerning, though, is the fact that inclusion of people of
+color in power structures, particularly at the top, can paralyze reform
+efforts. People of color are often reluctant to challenge institutions led by
+people who look like them, as they feel a personal stake in the individual’s
+success. After centuries of being denied access to leadership positions in
+key social institutions, people of color quite understandably are hesitant to
+create circumstances that could trigger the downfall of “one of their own.”
+An incident of police brutality that would be understood as undeniably
+racist if the officers involved were white may be given a more charitable
+spin if the officers are black. Similarly, black community residents who
+might have been inspired to challenge aggressive stop-and-frisk policies of
+a largely white police department may worry about “hurting” a black police
+chief. People of color, because of the history of racial subjugation and
+exclusion, often experience success and failure vicariously through the few
+who achieve positions of power, fame, and fortune. As a result, cosmetic
+diversity, which focuses on providing opportunities to individual members
+of under-represented groups, both diminishes the possibility that unfair
+rules will be challenged and legitimates the entire system.
+
+Obama—the Promise and the Peril
+
+This dynamic poses particular risks for racial justice advocacy during an
+Obama presidency. On the one hand, the election of Barack Obama to the
+presidency creates an extraordinary opportunity for those seeking to end the
+system of mass incarceration in America. Obama’s stated positions on
+criminal justice reform suggest that he is opposed to the War on Drugs and
+the systematic targeting of African Americans for mass incarceration.48
+Shouldn’t we trust him, now that he is holding the reins of power, to do the
+right thing?
+Trust is tempting, especially because Obama himself violated our
+nation’s drug laws and almost certainly knows that his life would not have
+unfolded as it did if he had been arrested on drug charges and treated like a
+common criminal. As he wrote in his memoir about his wayward youth,
+“Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.”
+Unlike Bill Clinton, who famously admitted he experimented with
+marijuana on occasion “but didn’t inhale,” Obama has never minimized his
+illegal drug use. As he said in a 2006 speech to the American Society of
+Magazine Editors, “Look, you know, when I was a kid, I inhaled.
+Frequently. That was the point.”49 Those “bad decisions,” Obama has
+acknowledged, could have led him to a personal dead end. “Junkie.
+Pothead. That’s where I’d have been headed: the final, fatal role of the
+young would-be black man.” No doubt if Obama had been arrested and
+treated like a common criminal, he could have served years in prison and
+been labeled a drug felon for life. What are the chances he would have gone
+to Harvard Law School, much less become president of the United States, if
+that had happened? It seems reasonable to assume that Obama, who knows
+a little something about poverty and the temptations of drugs, would have a
+“there but for the grace of God go I” attitude about the millions of African
+and Latino men imprisoned for drug offenses comparable to his own or
+saddled for life with felony records.
+
+But before we kick back, relax, and wait for racial justice to trickle down,
+consider this: Obama chose Joe Biden, one of the Senate’s most strident
+drug warriors, as his vice president. The man he picked to serve as his chief
+of staff in the White House, Rahm Emanuel, was a major proponent of the
+expansion of the drug war and the slashing of welfare rolls during President
+Clinton’s administration. And the man he tapped to lead the U.S.
+Department of Justice—the agency that launched and continues to oversee
+the federal war on drugs—is an African American former U.S. attorney for
+the District of Columbia who sought to ratchet up the drug war in
+Washington, D.C., and fought the majority black D.C. City Council in an
+effort to impose harsh mandatory minimums for marijuana possession.
+Moreover, on the campaign trail, Obama took a dramatic step back from an
+earlier position opposing the death penalty, announcing that he now
+supports the death penalty for child rapists—even if the victim is not killed
+—even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty for
+nonhomicides unconstitutional and international law strongly disfavors the
+practice. The only countries that share Obama’s view are countries like
+Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and China, which allow the death penalty for things
+like adultery and tax evasion. So why did Obama, on the campaign trail, go
+out of his way to announce disagreement with a Supreme Court decision
+ruling the death penalty for child rapists unconstitutional? Clearly he was
+attempting to immunize himself from any attempt to portray him as “soft”
+on crime—a tactic reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s decision to fly back to
+Arkansas during the 1992 presidential campaign to oversee the execution of
+a mentally retarded black man.
+Seasoned activists may respond that all of this is “just politics,” but, as
+we have seen in earlier chapters, they are the same politics that gave rise to
+the New Jim Crow. Now that crime seems to be rising again in some ghetto
+communities, Obama is pledging to revive President Clinton’s Community
+Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program and increase funding for the
+Byrne grant program—two of the worst federal drug programs of the
+Clinton era.50 These programs, despite their benign names, are responsible
+for the militarization of policing, SWAT teams, Pipeline drug task forces,
+and the laundry list of drug-war horrors described in chapter 2.
+
+Clinton once boasted that the COPS program, which put tens of
+thousands of officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic
+fifteen-year drop in violent crime that began in the 1990s. Recent studies,
+however, have shown that is not the case. A 2005 report by the Government
+Accountability Office concluded the program may have contributed to a 1
+percent reduction in crime—at a cost of $8 billion.51 A peer-reviewed study
+in the journal Criminology found that the COPS program, despite the hype,
+“had little or no effect on crime.”52 And while Obama’s drug czar, former
+Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, has said the War on Drugs should no
+longer be called a war, Obama’s budget for law enforcement is actually
+worse than the Bush administration’s in terms of the ratio of dollars devoted
+to prevention and drug treatment as opposed to law enforcement.53 Obama,
+who is celebrated as evidence of America’s triumph over race, is proposing
+nothing less than revving up the drug war through the same failed policies
+and programs that have systematically locked young men of color into a
+permanent racial undercaste.
+The unique and concerning situation racial justice advocates now face is
+that the very people who are most oppressed by the current caste system—
+African Americans—may be the least likely to want to challenge it, now
+that a black family is living in the White House. If Obama were white, there
+would be no hesitation to remind him of his youthful drug use when arguing
+that he should end the drug war and make good on his promises to end
+unjust mandatory minimums. But do African Americans want the media to
+talk about Obama’s drug use? Do African Americans want to pressure
+Obama on any issue, let alone issues of race? To go one step further, could
+it be that many African Americans would actually prefer to ignore racial
+issues during Obama’s presidency, to help ensure him smooth sailing and a
+triumphant presidency, no matter how bad things are for African Americans
+in the meantime?
+The fact that the last question could plausibly be answered yes raises
+serious questions for the civil rights community. Have we unwittingly
+exaggerated the importance of individuals succeeding within pre-existing
+structures of power, and thereby undermined King’s call for a “complete
+restructuring” of our society? Have we contributed to the disempowerment
+and passivity of the black community, not only by letting the lawyers take
+
+over, but also by communicating the message that the best path—perhaps
+the only path—to the promised land is infiltrating elite institutions and
+seizing power at the top, so racial justice can trickle down?
+Torres and Guinier suggest the answer to these questions may be yes.
+They observe that, “surprisingly, strategists on both the left and right,
+despite their differences, converge on the individual as the unit of power.”54
+Conservatives challenge the legitimacy of group rights or race
+consciousness and argue that the best empowerment strategy is
+entrepreneurship and individual initiative. Civil rights advocates argue that
+individual group members “represent” the race and that hierarchies of
+power that lack diversity are illegitimate. The theory is, when black
+individuals achieve power for themselves, black people as a group benefit,
+as does society as a whole. “Here we see both liberals and conservatives
+endorsing the same meta-narrative of American individualism: When
+individuals get ahead, the group triumphs. When individuals succeed,
+American democracy prevails.”55
+The absence of a thoroughgoing structural critique of the prevailing
+racial order explains why so many civil rights advocates responded to
+Barack Obama’s election with glee, combined with hasty reminders that
+“we still have a long way to go.” The predictable response from the casual
+observer is: well, how much further? A black man was just elected
+president. How much further do black people want to go? If a black person
+can be elected president, can’t a black person do just about anything now?
+
+All of Us or None
+
+At the same time that many civil rights advocates have been pursuing
+lawyer-driven, trickle-down strategies for racial justice, a growing number
+of formerly incarcerated men and women have been organizing in major
+cities across the United States, providing assistance to those newly released
+from prison and engaging in grassroots political activism in pursuit of basic
+civil rights. One such organization, based in Oakland, California, is named
+All of Us or None. The name explicitly challenges a politics that affords
+inclusion and acceptance for a few but guarantees exclusion for many. In
+spirit, it asserts solidarity with the “least of these among us.”
+Diversity-driven affirmative action, as described and implemented today,
+sends a different message. The message is that “some of us” will gain
+inclusion. As a policy, it is blind to those who are beyond its reach, the
+colored faces at the bottom of the well. One policy alone can’t save the
+world, the skeptic might respond. True enough. But what if affirmative
+action, as it has been framed and debated, does more harm than good,
+viewed from the perspective of “all of us”?
+This brings us to a critical question: who is the us that civil rights
+advocates are fighting for? Judging from the plethora of groups that have
+embarked on their own civil rights campaigns since Martin Luther King
+Jr.’s assassination—women, gays, immigrants, Latinos, Asian Americans—
+the answer seems to be that us includes everyone except white men.
+This result is not illogical. When Malcolm X condemned “the white
+man” and declared him the enemy, he was not, of course, speaking about
+any particular white man, but rather the white, patriarchal order that
+characterized both slavery and Jim Crow. Malcolm X understood that the
+United States was created by and for privileged white men. It was white
+men who dominated politics, controlled the nation’s wealth, and wrote the
+rules by which everyone else was forced to live. No group in the United
+
+States can be said to have experienced more privilege, and gone to greater
+lengths to protect it, than “the white man.”
+Yet the white man, it turns out, has suffered too. The fact that his
+suffering has been far less extreme, and has not been linked to a belief in his
+inherent inferiority, has not made his suffering less real. Civil rights
+advocates, however, have treated the white man’s suffering as largely
+irrelevant to the pursuit of the promised land. As civil rights lawyers
+unveiled plans to desegregate public schools, it was poor and working-class
+whites who were expected to bear the burden of this profound social
+adjustment, even though many of them were as desperate for upward social
+mobility and quality education as African Americans. According to the
+1950 census, among Southerners in their late twenties, the state-by-state
+percentages of functional illiterates (people with less than five years of
+schooling) for whites on farms overlapped with those for blacks in the
+cities. The majority of Southern whites were better off than Southern
+blacks, but they were not affluent or well educated by any means; they were
+semiliterate (with less than twelve years of schooling). Only a tiny minority
+of whites were affluent and well educated. They stood far apart from the
+rest of the whites and virtually all blacks.56
+What lower-class whites did have was what W.E.B. Du Bois described as
+“the public and psychological wage” paid to white workers, who depended
+on their status and privileges as whites to compensate for low pay and harsh
+working conditions.57 As described in chapter 1, time and time again, poor
+and working-class whites were persuaded to choose their racial status
+interests over their common economic interests with blacks, resulting in the
+emergence of new caste systems that only marginally benefited whites but
+were devastating for African Americans.
+In retrospect, it seems clear that nothing could have been more important
+in the 1970s and 1980s than finding a way to create a durable, interracial,
+bottom-up coalition for social and economic justice to ensure that another
+caste system did not emerge from the ashes of Jim Crow. Priority should
+have been given to figuring out some way for poor and working-class
+whites to feel as though they had a stake—some tangible interest—in the
+nascent integrated racial order. As Lani Guinier points out, however, the
+racial liberalism expressed in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and
+
+endorsed by civil rights litigators “did not offer poor whites even an
+elementary framework for understanding what they might gain as a result of
+integration.”58 Nothing in the opinion or in the subsequent legal strategy
+made clear that segregation had afforded elites a crucial means of
+exercising social control over poor and working-class whites as well as
+blacks. The Southern white elite, whether planters or industrialists, had
+successfully endeavored to make all whites think in racial rather than class
+terms, predictably leading whites to experience desegregation, as Derrick
+Bell put it, as a net “loss.”59
+Given that poor and working-class whites (not white elites) were the ones
+who had their world rocked by desegregation, it does not take a great leap
+of empathy to see why affirmative action could be experienced as salt in a
+wound. Du Bois once observed that the psychological wage of whiteness
+put “an indelible black face to failure.”60 Yet with the advent of affirmative
+action, suddenly African Americans were leapfrogging over poor and
+working-class whites on their way to Harvard and Yale and taking jobs in
+police departments and fire departments that had once been reserved for
+whites. Civil rights advocates offered no balm for the wound, publicly
+resisting calls for class-based affirmative action and dismissing claims of
+unfairness on the grounds that whites had been enjoying racial preferences
+for hundreds of years. Resentment, frustration, and anger expressed by poor
+and working-class whites was chalked up to racism, leading to a
+subterranean discourse about race and to implicitly racial political appeals,
+but little honest dialogue.
+Perhaps the time has come to give up the racial bribes and begin an
+honest conversation about race in America. The topic of the conversation
+should be how us can come to include all of us. Accomplishing this degree
+of unity may mean giving up fierce defense of policies and strategies that
+exacerbate racial tensions and produce for racially defined groups primarily
+psychological or cosmetic racial benefits.
+Of course, if meaningful progress is to be made, whites must give up
+their racial bribes too, and be willing to sacrifice their racial privilege.
+Some might argue that in this game of chicken, whites should make the first
+move. Whites should demonstrate that their silence in the drug war cannot
+be bought by tacit assurances that their sons and daughters will not be
+
+rounded up en masse and locked away. Whites should prove their
+commitment to dismantling not only mass incarceration, but all of the
+structures of racial inequality that guarantee for whites the resilience of
+white privilege. After all, why should “we” give up our racial bribes if
+whites have been unwilling to give up theirs? In light of our nation’s racial
+history, that seems profoundly unfair. But if your strategy for racial justice
+involves waiting for whites to be fair, history suggests it will be a long wait.
+It’s not that white people are more unjust than others. Rather it seems that
+an aspect of human nature is the tendency to cling tightly to one’s
+advantages and privileges and to rationalize the suffering and exclusion of
+others. This tendency is what led Frederick Douglass to declare that “power
+concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”
+So what is to be demanded in this moment in our nation’s racial history?
+If the answer is more power, more top jobs, more slots in fancy schools for
+“us”—a narrow, racially defined us that excludes many—we will continue
+the same power struggles and can expect to achieve many of the same
+results. Yes, we may still manage to persuade mainstream voters in the
+midst of an economic crisis that we have relied too heavily on incarceration,
+that prisons are too expensive, and that drug use is a public health problem,
+not a crime. But if the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration
+does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that
+gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine
+care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race,
+and nationality—within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who
+are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass
+incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably
+a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot
+foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted
+by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice
+advocates today than ensuring that America’s current racial caste system is
+its last.
+Given what is at stake at this moment in history, bolder, more inspired
+action is required than we have seen to date. Piecemeal, top-down policy
+reform on criminal justice issues, combined with a racial justice discourse
+that revolves largely around the meaning of Barack Obama’s election and
+“post-racialism,” will not get us out of our nation’s racial quagmire. We
+
+must flip the script. Taking our cue from the courageous civil rights
+advocates who brazenly refused to defend themselves, marching unarmed
+past white mobs that threatened to kill them, we, too, must be the change
+we hope to create. If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—
+if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must
+lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not
+content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would
+stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.
+That is the basic message that Martin Luther King Jr. aimed to deliver
+through the Poor People’s Movement back in 1968. He argued then that the
+time had come for racial justice advocates to shift from a civil rights to a
+human rights paradigm, and that the real work of movement building had
+only just begun.61 A human rights approach, he believed, would offer far
+greater hope for those of us determined to create a thriving, multiracial,
+multiethnic democracy free from racial hierarchy than the civil rights model
+had provided to date. It would offer a positive vision of what we can strive
+for—a society in which all human beings of all races are treated with
+dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and
+security.62 This expansive vision could open the door to meaningful
+alliances between poor and working-class people of all colors, who could
+begin to see their interests as aligned, rather than in conflict—no longer in
+competition for scarce resources in a zero-sum game.
+A human rights movement, King believed, held revolutionary potential.
+Speaking at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in
+May 1967, he told SCLC staff, who were concerned that the Civil Rights
+Movement had lost its steam and its direction, “It is necessary for us to
+realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human
+rights.” Political reform efforts were no longer adequate to the task at hand,
+he said. “For the last 12 years, we have been in a reform movement.... [But]
+after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must
+be an era of revolution. We must see the great distinction between a reform
+movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise
+certain basic questions about the whole society.”63
+More than forty years later, civil rights advocacy is stuck in a model of
+advocacy King was determined to leave behind. Rather than challenging the
+
+basic structure of society and doing the hard work of movement building—
+the work to which King was still committed at the end of his life—we have
+been tempted too often by the opportunity for people of color to be included
+within the political and economic structure as-is, even if it means alienating
+those who are necessary allies. We have allowed ourselves to be willfully
+blind to the emergence of a new caste system—a system of social
+excommunication that has denied millions of African Americans basic
+human dignity. The significance of this cannot be overstated, for the failure
+to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the
+root of every racial caste system. This common thread explains why, in the
+1780s, the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as its official
+seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read, “AM I NOT A
+MAN AND A BROTHER?” That symbol was followed more than a
+hundred years later by signs worn around the necks of black sanitation
+workers during the Poor People’s Campaign answering the slave’s question
+with the simple statement, I AM A MAN.
+The fact that black men could wear the same sign today in protest of the
+new caste system suggests that the model of civil rights advocacy that has
+been employed for the past several decades is, as King predicted,
+inadequate to the task at hand. If we can agree that what is needed now, at
+this critical juncture, is not more tinkering or tokenism, but as King insisted
+forty years ago, a “radical restructuring of our society,” then perhaps we can
+also agree that a radical restructuring of our approach to racial justice
+advocacy is in order as well.
+All of this is easier said than done, of course. Change in civil rights
+organizations, like change in society as a whole, will not come easy. Fully
+committing to a vision of racial justice that includes grassroots, bottom-up
+advocacy on behalf of “all of us” will require a major reconsideration of
+priorities, staffing, strategies, and messages. Egos, competing agendas,
+career goals, and inertia may get in the way. It may be that traditional civil
+rights organizations simply cannot, or will not, change. To this it can only
+be said, without a hint of disrespect: adapt or die.
+If Martin Luther King Jr. is right that the arc of history is long, but it
+bends toward justice, a new movement will arise; and if civil rights
+organizations fail to keep up with the times, they will pushed to the side as
+another generation of advocates comes to the fore. Hopefully the new
+
+generation will be led by those who know best the brutality of the new caste
+system—a group with greater vision, courage, and determination than the
+old guard can muster, trapped as they may be in an outdated paradigm. This
+new generation of activists should not disrespect their elders or disparage
+their contributions or achievements; to the contrary, they should bow their
+heads in respect, for their forerunners have expended untold hours and
+made great sacrifices in an elusive quest for justice. But once respects have
+been paid, they should march right past them, emboldened, as King once
+said, by the fierce urgency of now.
+Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and
+when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked
+out finally have the chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is
+rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings, and
+buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it, or douse it with buckets
+of doubt, dismay, and disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead,
+when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life
+beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become
+his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more
+than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. We should tell him the same
+truth the great African American writer James Baldwin told his nephew in a
+letter published in 1962, in one of the most extraordinary books ever
+written, The Fire Next Time. With great passion and searing conviction,
+Baldwin had this to say to his young nephew:
+This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,
+and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that
+they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives
+and do not know it and do not want to know it.... It is their innocence
+which constitutes the crime.... This innocent country set you down in a
+ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. The limits
+of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born
+into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many
+ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were
+not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace
+with mediocrity.... You have, and many of us have, defeated this
+intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents
+
+who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their
+grasp on reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger
+brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it
+means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as
+they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is
+your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done
+great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it
+must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock,
+men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in
+the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and
+monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since
+Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My
+dungeon shook and my chains fell off.... We cannot be free until they
+are free. God bless you, and Godspeed.64
+
+Prologue:
+
+Prophets
+Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself:
+“peace” was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth,
+Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620,
+over roast turkey and yams. To consummate the wanton slaughter of some
+700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
+William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated “in
+honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”
+Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.
+It was Thanksgiving 2016. We had spent a bitterly cold night at a
+Wyoming gas station off I-80, among a half-dozen other cars loaded with
+camp supplies and Water Protectors. Everyone was up before sunrise,
+hoping the interstate would reopen after the overnight freeze. Among them
+were Natives and non-Natives from the Pacific Northwest and West Coast,
+sporting fatigues and signature black and tan Carhartt jackets with patches
+declaring: “WATER IS LIFE.” “This is Trump country—we gotta hit the
+road!” one of the Water Protectors exclaimed, half-jokingly, to the packed
+truck stop bathroom. Outside, white men glared at us from their dually
+pickups. Wyoming is an oil, gas, and coal state, and it was sending its
+police to fight the modern-day Indian war that we were on our way to help
+resist. We filed into our cars and took the on-ramp toward Standing Rock.
+This was my fourth and final trip to Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of
+several camps that existed at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri
+Rivers, north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, from April 2016 to
+February 2017. Initially, the camps had been established to block
+construction of Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion Dakota Access
+Pipeline (DAPL), a 1,712-mile oil pipeline that cut through unceded
+territory of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and crossed under Mni Sose (the
+
+Missouri River) immediately upstream from Standing Rock, threatening the
+reservation’s water supply.
+This was not just about Standing Rock water: The pipeline crossed
+upriver from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation on the Missouri River,
+transporting oil extracted from that reservation’s booming fracking industry.
+It cut under the Mississippi River at the Iowa–Illinois border, where a
+coalition of Indigenous peoples and white farmers, ranchers, and
+environmentalists in Iowa opposed it. And it crossed four states—North
+Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. But it was Standing Rock and
+allied Indigenous nations, including Fort Berthold, who had put up the most
+intense resistance.
+After North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple declared a state of
+emergency on August 19, 2016—to safeguard the pipeline’s final
+construction—the movement surged. Dalrymple deployed the National
+Guard and invoked powers under the Emergency Management Assistance
+Compact (EMAC) that are normally used only during natural disasters, such
+as floods, fires, and hurricanes. EMAC also allows for state, municipal, and
+federal law enforcement agencies to share equipment and personnel during
+what are declared “community disorders, insurgency, or enemy attack.” In
+April 2015, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had also used EMAC powers
+to crush a Black-led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray, a Black man
+killed by Baltimore police. This time it was an Indigenous nation that was
+declared the threat.
+The encampments were about more than stopping a pipeline. Scattered
+and separated during invasion, the long-awaited reunification of all seven
+nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking peoples hadn’t occurred
+in more than a hundred years, or at least seven generations. Oceti Sakowin,
+dubbed the “Great Sioux Nation” by settlers, once encompassed territory
+that spanned from the western shores of Lake Superior to the Bighorn
+Mountains. Only in stories had I heard about the Oceti Sakowin uniting, its
+fire lit, and the seven tipis or lodges—each representing a nation—arranged
+in the shape a buffalo horn. Historically, this reunification had happened in
+times of celebration, for annual sun dances, large multi-tribal trading fairs,
+and buffalo hunts. But the last time was also in a time of war—to resist
+invasion. Now, the gathering had become what the passengers of our car—
+Carolina, an Indigenous immigration lawyer, Dina, an Indigenous writer,
+and I—liked to call “Indian City”; at its peak, the camp was North Dakota’s
+
+tenth-largest city. Its population surpassed 10,000 people, possibly reaching
+as many as 15,000.
+The camp was at a standstill when we arrived, and completely encircled
+by law enforcement employing hundreds of miles of concertina wire, road
+blocks, and twenty-four-hour aerial surveillance, in what resembled a
+military occupation. In an effort to sow division, TigerSwan, a private
+security contractor hired by DAPL to assist North Dakota law enforcement,
+infiltrated the camps and planted false reports on social media and local
+news comparing Water Protectors to jihadist insurgents. The #NoDAPL
+movement was “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious
+component,” they claimed, in documents released by the Intercept.1 The
+effects were devastating, and many of the planted stories continue to
+circulate as truth, the divisions cleaved still festering. And because of the
+violent police crackdown on protests, including the infamous October 27
+raid on the 1851 Treaty Camp, a hiatus had been placed on high-risk direct
+actions like placing bodies before earthmovers.
+So the next day—Black Friday—we went to the mall. In Bismarck,
+North Dakota, shoppers, mostly white, flooded the Kirkwood Mall, eager to
+cash in on holiday discounts. Our plan was to disrupt Black Friday
+shopping, in unison with other Black Friday actions, to keep the message of
+#NoDAPL in the news and the fire burning in people’s hearts and minds.
+Back at camp, I had run into a childhood friend, Michael, and his partner
+Emma, and we had packed into his car. Through traffic was entirely blocked
+on Highway 1806, the fastest route to reservation border towns Mandan and
+Bismarck, and military checkpoints choked off business to Prairie Knights
+Casino—a major employer in the reservation and source of revenue for
+Standing Rock—and hampered residents’ access to off-reservation jobs and
+groceries. What resembled an economic embargo and, in different
+circumstances, could be considered an act of war against a sovereign nation,
+added an extra half hour to forty-five minutes to our drive.
+The mall was packed. Bismarck police, all of them white, guarded the
+entrances with AR-15 rifles. Once inside, our goal was to create a prayer
+circle in the mall’s large food court, without getting caught; this meant we
+would have to “blend in.” That’s hard enough for Natives in a sea of whites.
+Our cover was blown. A white woman cried out: “They smell like
+campfire!” Shoppers stopped and looked. She pointed to a group of women
+—faces wind and sun-burnt, jackets and skirts unwashed—heading toward
+
+the mall’s restrooms. Two cops, their AR-15s slung over their shoulders,
+approached, and grabbed and twisted one of the women’s arm. She was
+dark-skinned, and her black hair was neatly braided to her waist. I waited to
+hear her arm pop from dislocation or fracture, as the cop slammed her facefirst on the thin carpet.
+“I’m trying to go to the bathroom!”
+“Shut the fuck up!”
+Soon all four of them were sitting on the ground with their hands zip-tied
+behind them, and then the cops dragged them away. The smell of fire, a
+central aspect of camp life—ceremony, planning, cooking, eating, sleeping,
+singing, storytelling, and keeping warm—had given them away. “Oceti” in
+“Oceti Sakowin,” after all, means “council fire.” In another time, they
+might have been accused of “smelling like an Indian” because fire is central
+to Lakota ceremonial life; but now, smoke also indicated that one had come
+from the #NoDAPL camps.
+“What’s your problem?” asked a white man, approaching the cops. With
+a leg sweep, he was also facedown, with a knee on his neck and knee on his
+spine.
+“Quit resisting!” the officer shouted. They didn’t bother to pick him up,
+instead dragging him belly-first across the ground.
+“He smelled like campfire,” shrugged the cop who had thrown him
+down.
+Eventually, we formed a prayer circle—before cops began tackling,
+punching, and kicking us too. A man’s crutches were taken from him, and
+he hobbled on one foot as another cop tackled him. White men from the
+crowd began holding Water Protectors for the police or throwing them into
+the police line.
+“Go back to the reservation! Prairie niggers!” one of them screamed in
+our faces.
+White children looking on also screamed, though they seemed more
+scared of the police than of the Water Protectors. A woman got caught
+between the police and our retreating line, and cops grabbed her by the hair
+and dragged her to the ground crying. Her partner stepped in and was kneed
+several times in the face. A woman began running as we made our way
+through the exit doors and was tackled on the pavement by a cop.
+We had flinched each time they nabbed one of us from the crowd,
+expecting the now-familiar chemical shower of CS gas or pepper spray—
+
+another odor that was mixed in with the smoke, and that, in a single attack,
+could dull a person’s sense of smell for days, sometimes weeks. But the
+presence of white shoppers and their families—unwanted collateral damage
+—protected us from being shot or sprayed. Instead, the cops used their
+hands and feet. Thirty-three were arrested. After Michael, Emma, and I
+escaped, we rendezvoused at the car.
+Michael turned to me, his hands shaking. “Now I know what it’s like to
+be hunted.”
+At camp, the smell of campfire brought us back to another world—an
+older world, an Indigenous world always thought to be on the brink of
+extinction, a place at once familiar to Native peoples and radically
+unfamiliar to settlers. In the twilight hours, Water Protectors told stories and
+shared the prophetic visions of a better world, not just in the past, but one
+currently in the making, as purple-grey smoke filled the spaces between
+tipis, tents, and lines of cars and trucks.
+The camps had attracted Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from
+across North America. On my first day in camp, in August, I dug compost
+holes with my Ojibwe relative Josh—a cook from Bismarck—and built a
+cook shack at the camp’s main kitchen with my Diné relative Brandon and a
+Palestinian network administrator, Emad, from Yankton, South Dakota—
+himself a refugee from the US-backed Israeli colonization of his
+homelands. My Palestinian comrade Samia once called our sacrosanct duty
+at camp an “intifada on the plains,” because she saw it as an uprising
+against the same occupier. The cook shack, pieced together with genuine
+solidarity and gnarly fallen trees, survived a brutal Northern Plains winter
+and helped feed thousands.
+I also knew Michael, a white kid from my small hometown of
+Chamberlain, South Dakota, along the Missouri River. I grew up in a
+single-parent, single-income household, in a mobile home literally on the
+wrong side of the tracks. Michael’s parents made ends meet by working at
+the Catholic-run Indian boarding school where my father and his siblings
+had their Lakota culture and language beaten from them. Along with other
+kids like us, both Native and white, the two of us bonded over
+skateboarding, punk rock, and left politics—everything we felt rebelled
+against the pervasive, and often violent, conservatism of our hometown.
+Politicians and media attempted to play up divisions in the camps,
+depicting white Water Protectors as “hippies” who treated the movement
+
+like “Burning Man.” Those elements existed, and some Native people
+played along. But such portrayals gloss over meaningful solidarities. For
+example, our national camp, Kul Wicasa, welcomed everyone. Our camp’s
+leader, my friend and Tahansi (cousin) Lewis Grassrope, helped create the
+Oceti Sakowin Horn, inviting not only Indigenous, but also non-Indigenous
+peoples to participate. (Our families had shared political commitments that
+went back generations. In the 1930s his great-grandfather Daniel Grassrope,
+a traditional headman, and my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, a translator,
+traveled together to Washington, DC, to encourage Congress to pass the
+1934 Indian Reorganization Act.)2 Lewis knew the importance of allies.
+Two years earlier he and I had spent cold nights in poorly insulated tipis
+protesting our own nation. Of all the tribal councils, that of the Lower Brule
+Sioux Tribe was the only to cast support for TransCanada, the company
+building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Our protest camp had little to no help
+from our own people, nor from the outside world. There were no television
+cameras or social media live streams, and there was no Mark Ruffalo. But
+now the world had come to #NoDAPL. A white woman named Maria, a
+local reporter and a friend from Chamberlain, embedded herself in the camp
+as a cook, feeding thousands. Abe, a white military veteran from Colorado,
+ran our camp security. In Chicago, my comrades Kofi from
+#BlackLivesMatter and Renae, a Nuu-chah-nulth revolutionary socialist,
+led solidarity delegations. And there were many more.
+Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites
+and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground
+competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet,
+the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together. Although
+not perfect, Oceti Sakowin camp was a home to many for months. And the
+bonds were long lasting, despite the horrific histories working against them.
+Chamberlain is a white-dominated border town next to the Lower Brule
+and Crow Creek Indian reservations. The settlement began as Fort Kiowa,
+across the river, a notorious trade hub whose early history is depicted in the
+2015 blockbuster film The Revenant with great historical accuracy, despite
+its tired trope of a white savior “playing Indian.” The film shows the
+nineteenth-century fur trade’s organized plunder of not only the river
+ecosystem, but entire nations of people, and its apocalyptic death-world of
+rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox. In the final scene,
+the main protagonist, Hugh Glass, a real historical figure, approaches Fort
+
+Kiowa, where he sees Native women and children begging outside the gates
+and being bought and sold inside by drunk white traders. These river trade
+forts were the first “man camps”: large, usually temporary, encampments of
+men working in extractive industries, from the fur trade to oil and gas
+development, where rates of sexual and domestic violence, and murders and
+disappearances of Native women and girls are intensified. As Ihanktonwan
+elder and member of the Brave Heart Society Faith Spotted Eagle has
+pointed out, “history teaches us that during times of crisis violence
+escalates;”3 indeed, the proliferation of violence against the land has been
+directly related to attacks on Indigenous women’s bodies.
+This region—our homeland—is also part of He Sapa, the Black Hills, or
+the heart of everything that is. He Sapa is the beating heart of the Lakota
+cosmos, where we emerged from red earth, took our first breath, and gained
+our humanity as Oyate Luta: the “Red People,” or the “Red Nation.” During
+the last ice age, massive glaciers carved up the land. After the ice retreated,
+it left rolling hills and tunneling valleys that became buffalo roads, where
+herds that once blackened the plains traveled during seasonal migrations to
+and from water. The buffalo followed the stars, and the people followed the
+buffalo. To honor our relations, we called ourselves “Pte Oyate” (the
+Buffalo Nation), and “Wicahpi Oyate” (the Star Nation). In these ebbs and
+flows of migration, all roads led to Mni Sose, which translates to “roiling
+water,” for the once-astir and often-muddy river. Many Lakotayapi nouns,
+like “Mni Sose,” indicate not merely static, inanimate form, but also action.
+In this landscape, water is animated and has agency; it streams as liquid,
+forms clouds as gas, and even moves earth as solid ice—because it is alive
+and gives life. If He Sapa is the heart of the world, then Mni Sose is its
+aorta. This is a Lakota and Indigenous relationship to the physical world.
+What has been derided for centuries as “primitive superstition” has only
+recently been “discovered” by Western scientists and academics as “valid”
+knowledge. Nevertheless, knowledge alone has never ended imperialism.
+The US military understood this vital connection to place and other-thanhumans in the 1860s when it annihilated the remaining 10 to 15 million
+buffalos in less than two decades. A century later another branch of the
+military, the US Army Corps of Engineers, constructed five earthen rolled
+dams on the main stem of the Missouri River, turning life-giving waters
+into life-taking waters. A river that was once astir was now choked and
+plugged. After World War II, the United States also aimed to “get out of the
+
+Indian business”: to terminate federal responsibilities to Indigenous peoples
+that had been guaranteed through treaties, to relocate Indigenous peoples
+off their reservations, and to sell off remaining lands and resources to
+private industry and white settlers. The Pick-Sloan Plan, a basin-wide
+multipurpose dam project—which aimed to provide postwar employment,
+hydroelectricity, flood control, and irrigation to white farming communities
+and far-off cities—worked in tandem with Indian termination and
+relocation. With the flooding of the fertile river bottomlands, people were
+forced off the reservation. Remaining lands were largely uninhabitable,
+making relocation the only option for many. Thirty percent of Missouri
+River reservation populations were removed; 90 percent of commercial
+timber was destroyed; thousands of acres of subsistence farms and gardens
+were flooded; and 75 percent of wildlife and plants indigenous to the river
+bottomlands disappeared.
+Oglala visionary and prophet Nicholas Black Elk, himself a Catholic,
+compared the invasion of white Christians as akin to the biblical flood. But
+unlike the Genesis flood that receded after 150 days, Black Elk’s
+apocalyptic deluge had no end. It has worked continuously to eliminate
+Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human relatives from the land,
+thereby severing their relationship with the land. According to the vision
+Black Elk described to poet John Neihardt in 1931, white men came like an
+endless wall of floodwater, creating “a little island,” or a reservation,
+“where we were free to try to save our nation, but we couldn’t do it.”
+Constantly hounded as fugitives, escaping from one patch of dry land to the
+next, the people “were always leaving our lands and the flood devours the
+four-leggeds as they flee.” The four-leggeds were bears, elk, deer, buffalos,
+wolves, and so forth—some of whom are presently extinct in the lands of
+the Oceti Sakowin. The Department of the Interior is tasked with managing
+the diminished lands and territories of both wildlife and Indians, survivors
+of an ongoing holocaust. “All of our religion of the old times that the early
+Indians had was left behind them as they fled and the water covered the
+region,” Black Elk lamented. “Now, as I look ahead, we are nothing but
+prisoners of war.”4 His “we” included the four-leggeds.
+Over the last 200 years, the US military has waged relentless war on the
+Oceti Sakowin as much as it has on their kinship relations, such as Pte
+Oyate (the buffalo nation) and Mni Sose (the Missouri River). What
+happened at Standing Rock was the most recent iteration of an Indian War
+
+that never ends. DAPL was originally meant to cross the Missouri River
+upstream from Bismarck, a city that is 90 percent white. But the Army
+Corps rerouted it to cross downstream, citing a shorter route, fewer water
+crossings, and reduced proximity to residential areas. Now, it crossed the
+river just upstream from an 84 percent Native residential area—a
+suggestion made not by Dakota Access, but by the Army Corps, which
+went so far as to guide companies funding the pipeline to create
+environmental justice studies that would find no “disproportionate risk to a
+racial minority.”5
+In fact, the Army Corps had been one of the main driving forces behind
+choking the Missouri River after World War II. In 1946, without
+authorization from Congress, the Army Corps modified the Garrison Dam
+project to protect the small majority-white town of Williston, North Dakota,
+from flooding. Nothing was done, however, to protect against the flooding
+of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The 212-foot dam flooded 152,360
+acres of reservation lands, dislocating 325 families (80 percent of the tribal
+membership) and destroying 94 percent of their agricultural lands.6 In 1955,
+the Army Corps selected the Big Bend dam site on Lower Brule and Crow
+Creek reservation lands, without notifying either tribal council. Six different
+sites were considered, four of which would not have flooded the agency
+town of Lower Brule. The reservation site was chosen for hydraulic reasons
+but also because its location wouldn’t flood the upriver town of Pierre, the
+white-dominated state capital of South Dakota, or its neighboring town of
+Fort Pierre.7 Big Bend Dam flooded and dislocated both reservation
+communities for the second time, forcing some families who had moved to
+higher ground to relocate yet again. The first flood took out the Crow Creek
+Agency (the combined headquarters of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule
+tribes). A quarter of Lower Brule’s population was removed during the first
+deluge, and half during the second.
+My grandparents, Joyce and Andrew Estes—both Kul Wicasa from
+Lower Brule—fought the construction of the Pick-Sloan dams in the 1950s
+and 1960s. The dams flooded nearly all of my great-grandmother Cornelia
+Swalla’s allotment. My grandfather, a World War II veteran and, according
+to my father, Ben, a Lakota code talker, returned from the war to find his
+homelands and nation under threat from the very government he fought to
+defend. Our lands, and lives, were targeted not because they held precious
+resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the opposite was true: our lands
+
+and lives were targeted and held value because they could be wasted—
+submerged, destroyed. Grandpa Andrew, nicknamed “Brown” for his dark
+complexion, later gifted his mother Cornelia’s remaining allotted lands to
+the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe so that our nation could rebuild the inundated
+Lower Brule town site. In 1937, my great-grandfather Ruben Estes,
+Cornelia’s husband and the first tribal chairman, opposed the state of South
+Dakota’s attempt to build dams on the Missouri River without Lower
+Brule’s consent. The old ones called Ruben “Tongue” because, after
+butchering his cattle, he gave away all the meat to elders and the hungry,
+keeping only the tongues for himself. My ancestors were tribal historians,
+writers, intellectuals, and fierce Indigenous nationalists at a time when
+Indians weren’t supposed to be anything but drunk, stupid, or dead. They
+were also Water Protectors, treaty defenders, and humble people of the
+earth, and they fought for and took care of Mni Sose as best as they could.
+In 1963, my grandfather Frank Estes, who was named after Franklin
+Delano Roosevelt in honor of the “Indian New Deal,” wrote and published
+the first book on Lower Brule, Make Way for the Brules.8 His book was a
+study of Indigenous movement before and during the reservation period. It
+was a response to the forced removals caused by the Fort Randall and Big
+Bend Dams and a challenge to the confinement narrative that Native people
+should just stay “home” in prisoner of war camps, now called
+“reservations,” out of sight and out of mind. In 1971, my grandfather
+George Estes, with Richard Loder, cowrote Kul-Wicasa-Oyate—a more
+extensive history of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, including the reconstitution
+of communities and families after surviving forced removal by the US
+military to our river reservation homeland in the nineteenth century, as well
+as the two forced relocations caused by the Pick-Sloan dams in the
+twentieth century.
+My grandfather Andrew, who had an eighth-grade education, wrote in
+the preface of Kul-Wicasa-Oyate what would have been a fitting epigraph
+for this book about our nation’s history of the defense of our land, our
+water, and our people:
+My people’s history has been lost or destroyed since the coming of the white man. My people, in
+many ways, have been lost and destroyed by the coming of the white man … This book is not the
+whole story of my people nor is it all that is best in our heritage. Some of our traditions, our hopes
+and our roots, we will never write down for the world to see. What we will allow the world to see is,
+in good part, in these pages. Read them my brothers and you white man, you read them too. It is a
+history of a proud people: a people who believe in the land and themselves. My people were civilized
+
+before the white came and we will be civilized and be here after the white man goes away, poisoned
+by his misuse of the land and eaten up by his own greed and diseases.9
+
+In September 2016, at a #NoDAPL protest in Chicago organized by the
+Native community and groups such as #BlackLivesMatter, I told this family
+history in front of a crowd of thousands outside the Army Corps
+headquarters. That city’s vibrant Native community was itself a result of
+federal relocation programs onto traditional Potawatomi territory, an
+Indigenous nation subjected to genocide and removed from its homelands
+in the place currently called “Chicago.” My ancestors could never have
+imagined that thousands, perhaps millions, would one day rally to defend
+the river, our relative Mni Sose. Half a century ago, there were no mass
+protests against the dams that still wreak havoc on our river, a history I have
+spent the more than a decade speaking and writing about, with little interest
+from the outside world.
+As we marched, a light rain fell.
+“Tell me what the prophecy looks like!” we chanted.
+“This is what the prophecy looks like!”
+And it was prophecy. Prophecy told of Zuzeca Sapa, the Black Snake,
+extending itself across the land and imperiling all life, beginning with the
+water. From its heads, or many heads, it would spew death and destruction.
+Zuzeca Sapa is DAPL—and all oil pipelines trespassing through Indigenous
+territory. But while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also
+foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories not seen
+for generations, if ever. To protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth,
+Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will have to unite to turn back the
+forces destroying the earth—capitalism and colonialism. But prophets and
+prophecies do not predict the future, nor are they mystical, ahistorical
+occurrences. They are simply diagnoses of the times in which we live, and
+visions of what must be done to get free. In the past, youth followed the
+guidance of Indigenous elders, the old ones. But in these prophetic times, it
+is the old ones who are following the leadership of the young, the youth
+leaders of the #NoDAPL movement—among them, Zaysha Grinnell, Bobbi
+Jean Three Legs, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes, among others,
+who brought the message of the Black Snake to the world through
+thousand-mile relay runs from April to July of 2016.
+For the Oceti Sakowin, prophecies like the Black Snake are
+revolutionary theory, a way to help us think about our relationship to the
+
+land, to other humans and other-than-humans, and to history and time. How
+does one relate to the past? Settler narratives use a linear conception of time
+to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against
+Indigenous peoples and the land. This includes celebrating bogus origin
+stories like Thanksgiving. But Indigenous notions of time consider the
+present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is
+no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future
+is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the
+future. Concepts such as Mni Wiconi (water is life) may be new to some,
+but like the nation of people the concept belongs to, Mni Wiconi predates
+and continues to exist in spite of white supremacist empires like the United
+States.
+The protestors called themselves Water Protectors because they weren’t
+simply against a pipeline; they also stood for something greater: the
+continuation of life on a planet ravaged by capitalism. This reflected the
+Lakota and Dakota philosophy of Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “all my
+relations” or “we are all related.” Water Protectors led the movement in a
+disciplined way, by what Lakotas call Wocekiye, meaning “honoring
+relations.” To the outside world this looks like “praying,” the smoking of
+the Canupa, the sacred pipe, offering tobacco, ceremony, and song to
+human and other-than-human life. The late Lakota linguist and scholar
+Albert White Hat Sr. notes that Wocekiye was purposely mistranslated to
+“praying” by Christian missionaries to describe “bowing and kneeling to a
+supreme power, which is much different from the original meaning of
+acknowledging or meeting a relative.” There was no equivalent to
+“praying” in the Lakota language, although the word has taken on that
+meaning because of Christian influence.10
+For the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, the Missouri River, is one such
+nonhuman relative who is alive, and who is also of the Mni Oyate, the
+Water Nation. Nothing owns her, and therefore she cannot be sold or
+alienated like a piece of property. (How do you sell a relative?) And
+protecting one’s relatives is part of enacting kinship and being a good
+relative, or Wotakuye, including from the threat of contamination by
+pipeline leak—in other words, death. This would also spell death for the
+Oceti Sakowin and its nonhuman relations. In this way, the rallying cry of
+Mni Wiconi—“water is life”—is also an affirmation that water is alive.
+Hunkpapa historian Josephine Waggoner has suggested that the word mni
+
+(water) is a combination of the words mi (meaning “I”) and ni (meaning
+“being”), indicating that it also contains life.11
+Mni Wiconi and these Indigenous ways of relating to human and otherthan-human life exist in opposition to capitalism, which transforms both
+humans and nonhumans into labor and commodities to be bought and sold.
+These ways of relating also exist in opposition to capitalism’s twin, settler
+colonialism, which calls for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples and their
+other-than-human kin. This is distinct from the romantic notion of
+Indigenous people and culture that is popular among non-Natives and has
+been aided by disciplines such as anthropology—a discipline that has
+robbed us of a viable future by trapping us in a past that never existed. In
+the last two centuries, armies of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists,
+hobbyists, and grave robbers have pillaged and looted Indigenous bodies,
+knowledges, and histories, in the same way that Indigenous lands and
+resources were pillaged and looted. Their distorted, misinterpreted
+Indigenous histories are both irrelevant and unfamiliar to actually existing
+Indigenous peoples, and they are deeply disempowering.
+There exists no better example of Indigenous revolutionary theory, and
+its purposeful distortion, than the Ghost Dance. In popular history books,
+the Ghost Dance appears briefly, only to die at the Wounded Knee Massacre
+in 1890. The Ghost Dance, in the revolutionary sense, was about life, not
+death; it was about imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous
+future free from the death world brought on by settler invasion. It originated
+with Paiute prophet and healer Wovoka. In his vision, the Great Spirit’s Red
+Son transforms the earth. This Red coming of the Messiah wipes away the
+colonial world, bringing back the animals, plants, and human and otherthan-human ancestors destroyed by white men and, in turn, destroying the
+destroyers. Wovoka did not predict the future. Rather, he profoundly
+understood the times in which he lived, and his prophecy occurred in
+response to the hardships brought on by reservation life. Its message of a
+coming Indigenous future spread like wildfire up the Western Canadian
+coast, down to the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, and
+onto the Plains. The Ghost Dance unified Indigenous peoples behind a
+revolutionary movement—one that sought nothing less than the complete
+departure of the colonial reality. Its visions were powerful and remain so
+today. Indigenous dancing had itself been outlawed and was therefore a
+criminal act. Lakota and Dakota Ghost Dancers attempted to shut down the
+
+reservation system by refusing to send children to boarding schools or to
+heed the orders of Indian agents. But the absence of the colonial system was
+not enough to bring about true freedom; rather, freedom could only find its
+genuine expression in actions that would create a new Indigenous world to
+replace the nightmarish present.
+The beauty and power of the Ghost Dance moved Oglala prophet
+Nicholas Black Elk, who saw it as parallel to his own vision: that the people
+must unite to nourish back to health the tree of life, so that it can bloom
+once again. The dance brought Black Elk new visions of Wanikiya, the
+Lakota word for the Red Messiah that literally means “to make live.” In
+1932, poet John Neihardt published a literary interpretation of Black Elk’s
+vision in Black Elk Speaks, an influential book that Standing Rock scholar
+Vine Deloria Jr. described as “a North American bible of all tribes.”12 After
+the Seventh Cavalry Regiment massacred more than 300 Lakota Ghost
+Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance and Black Elk’s vision
+were thought to be dead or dying, like Native people. Neihardt contributed
+to this notion by fabricating the most-quoted lines in Black Elk Speaks. “A
+people’s dream died there,” mourned Black Elk in this made-up version,
+seeing the carnage at Wounded Knee and his relatives’ bodies strewn across
+the bloody snow. “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.”13 But Black
+Elk never believed that, and he knew that collective visions for liberation
+didn’t die at Wound Knee. “The tree that was to bloom just faded away,” he
+said reflecting on the massacre forty years later, “but the roots will stay
+alive, and we are here to make that tree bloom.”14
+Roots are an apt metaphor to explain how the aspirations for freedom—
+the tree of life—had stayed alive. Ceremonies, dance, language, warrior and
+political societies, and spiritual knowledge were forced underground, each
+of them made illegal by the punitive Civilization Regulations and only fully
+“legalized” in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Like
+many, to protect himself and his family, Black Elk had converted to
+Catholicism, but he never lost faith in his vision. For him, liberation wasn’t
+a one-off event, a single action, or a moment. If history books do not
+altogether deny the Wounded Knee Massacre, sympathetic treatments tend
+to label the Ghost Dance as a “harmless” trend that would have faded into
+the past, like the Indians practicing it. But if it were just dancing that was
+the threat, then why did the United States deploy nearly half its army
+against starving, horseless, and unarmed people in order to crush it?
+
+Indigenous resistance draws from a long history, projecting itself
+backward and forward in time. While traditional historians merely interpret
+the past, radical Indigenous historians and Indigenous knowledge-keepers
+aim to change the colonial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by
+reconnecting to Indigenous places and histories. For this to occur, those
+suppressed practices must make a crack in history.
+Karl Marx explained the nature of revolutions through the figure of the
+mole, which burrows through history, making elaborate tunnels and
+preparing to surface again. The most dramatic moments come when the
+mole breaks the surface: revolution. But revolution is a mere moment
+within the longer movement of history. The mole is easily defeated on the
+surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her
+subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even when pushed
+back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work. In song and ceremony,
+Lakotas revere the mole for her hard work collecting medicines from the
+roots underfoot. During his campaign against US military invasion, to
+protect himself Crazy Horse collected fresh dirt from mole mounds.
+Because he knew it to contain medicines, he washed his body with the dirt.
+Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant tunneling, plotting, planning,
+harvesting, remembering, and conspiring for freedom—the collective faith
+that another world is possible—is the most important aspect of
+revolutionary work. It is from everyday life that the collective confidence to
+change reality grows, giving rise to extraordinary events.
+At Oceti Sakowin Camp, courage manifested through the combination of
+direct actions and the legal strategy to defeat DAPL in court, which the
+Standing Rock Sioux Tribe spearheaded. Direct actions drew media
+attention and thus amplified the messages of #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi,
+putting pressure on the federal courts and institutions to weigh in on the
+issue of Standing Rock’s sovereignty. Direct actions also had the
+immeasurable psychological effect of empowering the powerless to action,
+by encouraging everyday people to take control of their lives and to shrug
+off the self-doubt and genuine fear that accompanies centuries of violent
+occupation. It also formed in everyday camp life.
+The camps also performed another critical function: caretaking, or
+providing nourishment, replenishment, comradery, encouragement, warmth,
+songs, stories, and love. The ultimate goal for Dakotas, and therefore the
+Oceti Sakowin, “was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must
+
+be a good relative,” wrote the Dakota scholar Ella Deloria.15 This was the
+underground work of the mole and the foundation of any long-term
+struggle, though it often receives less attention than headline-grabbing
+spectacles of mass protest and frontline action. Yet, both are equally
+important and necessary. As Dakota scholar Kim TallBear argues,
+caretaking labor is often gendered, and is seen as the work of women. But
+the fact that many contemporary social movements—in particular
+#NoDAPL, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter—were led by women,
+and Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, is important.16
+My friend and relative, Lakota Water Protector Marcella Gilbert, pointed
+out how these roles have been taken up by generations of Indigenous
+women. Marcella’s mother, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and her aunties,
+Phyllis Young and Mabel Anne Eagle Hunter, were all leaders and
+participants of the Red Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. They
+were all pivotal members of the American Indian Movement, helped found
+the International Indian Treaty Council at Standing Rock in 1974, and
+formed Women of All Red Nations that same year—movements I will
+describe later in this book. Their leadership continued at Oceti Sakowin
+Camp by seeing to it that the next generation carried on the tradition.
+Phyllis Young was a respected Standing Rock elder and former
+councilwoman. Madonna and Mabel Anne fell back into leadership roles in
+their own camps, teaching and mentoring young people. For Marcella,
+freedom was education. She was a product of the “We Will Remember”
+Survival School, founded in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974. Her
+mother, Madonna, helped to create the school, where students were taught
+treaty rights and Native culture and history. We Will Remember was one of
+many survival schools created to address rampant discrimination against
+Native students in public schools, and to undo the indoctrination of
+Christianity and US patriotism at government- and church-run boarding
+schools. For Marcella, the #NoDAPL camps continued the tradition,
+providing a radical grassroots education on Indigenous self-determination
+and political autonomy—what it’s like to live and be free—to thousands of
+young Native people.17 In other words, moments like #NoDAPL are ones
+where the Indigenous movement reproduces itself and grows.
+Our History Is the Future explores the movement to protect the Missouri
+River marching under the banner of Mni Wiconi. How did it emerge, and
+how does settler colonialism, a key element of US history, continue to
+
+inform our present? #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi are part of a longer history
+of Indigenous resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams, and pipelines
+across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River. The Oceti Sakowin—our
+relationship to Mni Sose, and our historic struggle for liberation—are
+fundamentally tied to our prior history of Indigenous nationhood and
+political authority. This book is less a story about objects, individuals, and
+ideas than it is a history of relationships—those between the Oceti Sakowin,
+Mni Sose, and the United States as an occupying power. By focusing on
+these relationships, we can see that Indigenous history is not a narrow
+subfield of US history—or of the history of capitalism or imperialism, for
+that matter. Rather, Indigenous peoples are central subjects of modern world
+history.
+This is not simply an examination of the past. Like #NoDAPL and Mni
+Wiconi, what I call traditions of Indigenous resistance have far-reaching
+implications, extending beyond the world that is normally understood as
+“Indigenous.” A tradition is usually defined as a static or unchanging
+practice. This view often suggests that Indigenous culture or tradition
+doesn’t change over time—that Indigenous people are trapped in the past
+and thus have no future. But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too
+does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating
+elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to
+build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences
+build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and
+nations.
+For the Oceti Sakowin, the affirmation Mni Wiconi, “water is life,”
+relates to Wotakuye, or “being a good relative.” Indigenous resistance to the
+trespass of settlers, pipelines, and dams is part of being a good relative to
+the water, land, and animals, not to mention the human world. Contrast this
+with the actions of Energy Transfer Partners (the financial backers of
+DAPL)—and of capitalism, more broadly, which seeks above all else to
+extract profits from the land and all forms of life. This is not to suggest that
+Indigenous societies possess the solution to climate change (and in fact,
+many Indigenous nations actively participate in resource extraction and
+capitalist economies in order to strengthen their self-determination). But in
+its best moments, #NoDAPL showed us a future that becomes possible
+when everyday Native people take control of their own destinies and lands,
+while drawing upon their own traditions of resistance. I am interested in the
+
+kind of tradition of Indigenous resistance that is a radical consciousness,
+both anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and is deeply embedded in history and
+place—one that expresses the ultimate desire for freedom.
+In this book, I move through seven episodes of Oceti Sakowin history
+and resistance. This history is by no means exhaustive, but I have chosen to
+focus on these particular cases to show how they inform our present
+moment, and to chart a historical road map for collective liberation.
+Chapter 1 tells the story of the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock
+and its origins in the battle against tar sands extraction and the Keystone XL
+Pipeline, whose defense of Lakota and Dakota lands are part of a tradition
+of resistance against US imperialism that began centuries ago. I turn to the
+beginning of that history in chapter 2, which describes the Oceti Sakowin’s
+emergence as a nation and its first encounters, in the nineteenth century,
+with the United States as a predator nation.
+Before long, those encounters evolved into the Indian Wars of the
+nineteenth century—the subject of chapter 3—that raged across the
+Northern Plains, in which the Oceti Sakowin defended against US military
+invasion and counterinsurgency tactics. By the turn of the twentieth century,
+Indigenous people had been largely confined to ever-dwindling
+reservations. The Oceti Sakowin, however, confronted the US military—the
+Army Corps of Engineers—again in the mid twentieth century, as US
+policy turned to the use of large-scale river development to continue the
+project of Indigenous dispossession—with policymakers attempting, all the
+while, to relieve themselves of the responsibilities outlined in the treaties.
+In chapter 4, I outline these schemes through the story of the midcentury Pick-Sloan Plan, which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers
+and the Bureau of Reclamation to dam the main stem of the Missouri River.
+These dams specifically targeted and destroyed Native lives and lands, with
+611,642 acres of land condemned through eminent domain, 309,584 acres
+of which were vital reservation bottomlands. Flooding also forced more
+than a thousand Native families to relocate, in patent violation of treaties
+and without prior consent. The memory of this experience was still fresh at
+the #NoDAPL camps.
+Chapter 5 outlines the story of the urban-centered American Indian
+Movement (AIM) and their 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in the Pine
+Ridge Indian Reservation—the culmination of more than a decade of Red
+Power organizing. This became the catalyst for a mass gathering of
+
+thousands at Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the
+International Indian Treaty Council—a body that would eventually lead
+international efforts for Indigenous recognition that have had a deep, global
+significance.
+Chapter 6 traces the history of twentieth-century Indigenous
+internationalism—particularly, the Oceti Sakowin’s central role in
+spearheading the four-decade-long campaign for Indigenous recognition at
+the United Nations, which was the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the
+Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The global Red Power movement eventually
+became a catalyst for the contemporary #NoDAPL movement at Standing
+Rock. Chapter 7 draws out these links, reflecting upon the ways our past
+and present struggles are connected, as they are to both past and present
+international anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements around the world.
+
+Two-Spirit Nation leads a march to the police line. October 2016. Photo by author.
+
+1
+
+Siege
+To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the special responsibility of turning back the
+powers of destruction … Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of
+such terrible danger?
+—Chief Arvol Looking Horse,
+Keeper of the Sacred Buffalo Calf Pipe1
+
+“We’re going to declare war on the Keystone XL Pipeline,” announced
+Oglala Sioux Tribal President Bryan Brewer, before a throng of cameras
+and microphones.2 It was late March 2014, at an opening ceremony for a
+spirit camp on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A crowd
+erupted into bursts of akisas and lililis—Lakota war cries and the highpitched tremolos of assent. Keystone XL (KXL), or any oil pipeline, would
+not pass through Oceti Sakowin territory without a fight. This is a war story.
+But it is not always with weapons that warriors wage their struggle.
+A dozen tribal national flags fluttered behind Brewer in the prairie wind,
+a sign of growing unity among Indigenous nations. His speech marked the
+beginning of a historic resistance that was to coalesce against the Dakota
+Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. It was not orchestrated behind
+closed doors by wealthy think tanks or big environmental NGOs. Rather,
+like its people, it grew from the earth and this humble landscape, often
+viewed as flyover country. It also grew from a deep history of struggles
+over land and water, and a fight for a livable future on a planet so
+thoroughly devastated by climate change.
+Earlier in March, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, under the direction of its
+president, Cyril “Whitey” Scott, abruptly ended a lease with a white farmer
+renting reservation land adjacent to the KXL pipeline’s path. The pipeline
+snaked carefully through a complex checkerboard of private and tribal land
+ownership, a legacy of the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act that broke
+
+up large chunks of reservation land by selling it off to white settlers. With
+yellow cornstalks still jutting through the snow from last year’s harvest,
+workers from the Wica Agli men’s health initiative, citizens of Rosebud,
+and supporting Native people erected tipis on reclaimed earth—directly in
+the path of the pipeline. They called the camp Oyate Wahacanka Woecun,
+meaning “shield the people.” Large, round hay bales were taken from
+another plot leased by a white rancher and stacked to surround the camp,
+forming a barrier against harsh winds. The thick straw walls, it was said,
+may have also stopped bullets fired in the cover of darkness by vengeful
+white farmers.
+It didn’t matter if this was private property. It was still treaty territory,
+territory that generations of Lakotas and Dakotas had died defending and
+lived to care for. If not stopped, 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil would be
+transported each day across 1,200 miles of land—from Hardisty, Alberta, to
+Steele City, Nebraska—traversing 357 streams and rivers (all tributaries of
+the Missouri River), and crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, North America’s
+largest aquifer. Because everyone depended on the water, whether for
+drinking or agriculture, Mni Wiconi (Water is life) trumped the sacredness
+of private property. “It’s not an Indian thing, it’s not a white thing,”
+Rosebud Sioux Council Representative Wayne Frederick explained. “It’s
+everybody’s issue.”3
+White landowners from Nebraska were also at the camp’s opening,
+standing at the edge of the crowd holding signs that read “PIPELINE
+FIGHTER.” They had joined the Cowboy-Indian Alliance, a campaign led
+by a progressive group of white farmers and ranchers from Bold Nebraska
+and Dakota Rural Action. Some of the landowners, however, were
+libertarians who were more concerned with the sanctity of private property
+and the evils of “big government” than with Indian treaties and climate
+change. And while they captured much of the media attention around KXL
+resistance, they represented a minority of the affected white landowners
+from Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.4 On the plains, solidarity with
+Indigenous nations is a hard sell that often comes down to land and money.
+By this time, TransCanada, the company building the KXL, reported at least
+92 percent of the 302 South Dakotan landowners in the pipeline’s path had
+agreed to sell their lands voluntarily.5 The situation was similar in Nebraska
+and Montana. The holdouts had filed lawsuits to stop eminent domain
+proceedings, the seizure of private land for “public use,” the definition of
+
+which includes privately owned oil pipelines. But these were a mere
+handful of individuals, as compared to the many Indigenous nations who,
+for the most part, wholly opposed KXL.
+This leg of KXL crossed through the permanent reservation boundaries
+of the Great Sioux Nation and unceded lands of the 1868 Fort Laramie
+Treaty, which forbids white settlement without Indigenous consent. The
+irony, Lakota historian Edward Valandra observed, was that any condemned
+private land would be “twice stolen”—land white squatters first stole from
+Natives would then be taken by a Canadian oil company.6 Settlers and
+private property have always been the vanguards of invasion, and the
+sanctity of private property never applied to Indigenous peoples. But
+instead of turning their backs, like the first settlers did to them, Native
+nations—such as Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Yankton, Cheyenne River, and
+Standing Rock—welcomed the potential allies. After all, “Lakota” (or
+“Nakota” or “Dakota”) translates to “ally.” To turn away, on account of
+differences, those with shared enemies or mutual interests goes against the
+very being of Lakota culture.
+Much as it has been for centuries, this conflict was about the land: who
+stole it, who owned it, and who claimed it. On the High Plains, land is a
+matter of race, class, and colonialism. KXL was possible only because
+Indigenous genocide and removal had cleared the way for private
+ownership of land. Federal laws such as the Dawes Act and the 1862
+Homestead Act, which opened up 270 million acres of Native land,
+subsidized white settlement to supplant entire Native nations, and
+eventually concentrated it in the hands of a few. According to a 2002 report
+by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), white settlers own
+96 percent of all private agricultural lands in the United States, and 98
+percent of private lands overall.7 According to a 2012 USDA report, in
+Lakota and Dakota reservations, non-Natives collect 84.5 percent of all
+agricultural income, controlling nearly 60 percent of the agricultural lands
+and 65 percent of all reservation-based farms.8 This includes the white
+billionaire and media tycoon Ted Turner, who owns more than 2 million
+acres of ranchland across the globe and more than 200,000 acres of Oceti
+Sakowin treaty land in western South Dakota.9 The radical scholar Cedric
+Robinson identified this system, in which a single white man owns more
+wealth and land than entire Indigenous nations, as racial capitalism.10
+
+Capitalism arose under a racist European feudal system. It used “race” as a
+form of rule—to subordinate, to kill, and to enslave others—and used that
+difference for profit-making. Racial capitalism was exported globally as
+imperialism, including to North America in the form of settler colonialism.
+As a result, the colonized and racialized poor are still burdened with the
+most harmful effects of capitalism and climate change, and this is why they
+are at the forefront of resistance. The legacy of racial capitalism and
+ongoing settler colonialism were why the Oceti Sakowin had gathered to
+oppose KXL in 2014, and why they would gather again to oppose DAPL.
+KXL resistance emerged six years after the US housing market collapsed
+and the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, inherited the mantle
+of a white supremacist empire. As global temperatures continued rising,
+Obama committed to curbing carbon emissions, but as part of his “all-ofthe-above energy strategy,” he also embraced the oil industry as it opened
+new markets and lands to exploit. US domestic crude oil production
+skyrocketed from 2008 to 2016—an 88 percent increase, thanks to the shale
+oil boom in the United States and the tar sands boom in Canada. With this
+acceleration came new oil pipelines and new sites of extraction. As 9.3
+million US families—many of them poor, Black, and Latinx—faced home
+foreclosures, Indigenous lives, lands, waters, and air were once again
+sacrificed to help pull settler economies out of the gutter.
+In response to the economic crisis, revolutionary flowers had blossomed
+in public squares around the world, offering for a brief moment a vision for
+a different world. In 2010, young people of the Arab Spring toppled
+dictators, and tragedy and betrayal soon followed. In 2011, disenchanted
+millennials of the Occupy Wall Street movement put anti-capitalism back
+on the agenda to challenge the rule of the 1 percent, the wealthy elite. In
+response, police bludgeoned, tear gassed, and jailed the 99 percent. Out of
+this chaos, a mass Indigenous movement reawakened, the seeds of which
+were planted generations before. While the movements of public squares
+arose in the cities, the Indigenous uprising mobilized city and country alike,
+everywhere Indigenous peoples and their allies were found.
+During the winter of 2012 to 2013, Indigenous rebellion was afoot on
+Turtle Island. Its heartbeat was a drum, its voice a song. In what is currently
+Canada, Indigenous women of Idle No More led a mass movement of round
+dances (traditional healing and celebratory dancing and singing) in
+shopping malls and blockades of rail lines transporting oil. They protested
+
+Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s abuse of Indigenous rights,
+privatization of Indigenous lands, and rollback of environmental protections
+to intensify fossil fuel extraction. As Cree Idle No More cofounder Sylvia
+McAdam noted, it was out of necessity that the movement linked
+Indigenous and environmental struggles to protest a system that, if not
+stopped, will continue to “devastate the very things needed to sustain
+humanity—our lands and waters—for the generations to come.”11 It was
+more than a battle for the present; it was a battle for the future. The growing
+alliances resonated across the Medicine Line, the US–Canada divide. In
+February 2013, one of the largest actions in the history of the US climate
+movement descended on Washington, DC. More than 40,000 people
+gathered outside the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline,
+bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous movements committed to
+halting the extraction and transportation of highly toxic and volatile tar
+sands.
+That summer, Métis and Cree women and elders led hundreds in a twoday journey through the Alberta tar sands during an annual Healing Walk.
+Jesse Cardinal, a Métis cofounder of the walk, described how “participants
+[saw] tailings ponds and desert-like areas of ‘reclaimed land’ that was once
+the boreal forest and now grows almost nothing.”12 It’s a stark and immense
+landscape, encompassing an area larger than the state of Florida. In Treaty 6
+and Treaty 8 territories, tar sands extraction—by companies such as Suncor
+Energy, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell Canada—has poisoned
+water, land, air, plants, animals, and people. Duck and moose—staple foods
+of many Indigenous communities—have become contaminated with toxins,
+and harvests of wild berries and plants have been decimated. According to
+Cardinal, in this modern-day gold rush, “many ‘outsiders’ are driven here
+by their own economic desperation.”13
+Like the land itself, the bodies of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and
+Two-Spirit people are also seen as open for violence and violation.
+Resource extraction intensifies a murderous heteropatriarchy, meaning that
+grounding resistance in Indigenous feminist interventions has become all
+the more urgent. An influx of men has also flooded the region’s “man
+camps,” which house migrant oil laborers.14 Men outnumber women two to
+one in the tar sands boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta. While a
+movement has existed since the 1970s to honor the lives of the thousands of
+missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, the Two-Spirit
+
+Métis activist Sâkihitowin Awâsis has noted the “links between presence of
+the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered
+Indigenous Two-Spirits, women, and girls.”15 It’s no coincidence that
+Indigenous women led the movement against the tar sands.
+Put another way, settler states like Canada and the United States continue
+to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in
+order to do so. From the 1970s onward, communities and activists have
+documented thousands of cases where Indigenous women, girls, trans, and
+Two-Spirited people who have been murdered, disappeared, and targeted by
+all forms of violence in Canada. The movement, operating under the
+hashtag #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls),
+holds rallies around Canada every February 14, honoring the lives of the
+disappeared and demanding answers—a call that has been partially
+answered by the creation of the National Inquiry into Murdered and
+Missing Indigenous Women. Canada’s death culture, however, is little
+different than its southern neighbor. In the United States, May 5 has been
+declared the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native
+Women and Girls. In a 2016 report, there were 5,712 cases of missing
+Indigenous women nationwide; experts and activists, however, believe the
+number to be considerably higher.16
+And Canadian prosperity is gained not just at the expense of First
+Nations. More than half the world’s mining companies are headquartered in
+Canada, with properties in more than one hundred countries. Canadian
+extractive industries target Indigenous and colonized people throughout the
+world, and some have been linked to egregious human rights abuses,
+especially against Indigenous peoples. For example, beginning in 2007,
+Hudbay Minerals, a Canadian company with investments in the Fenix
+nickel mine, was linked to assassinations, beatings, gang rapes of women
+and girls, and arsons in Mayan communities in Guatemala.17
+The links between the extractive industry and violence against
+Indigenous peoples also turn up in the United States. The Bakken shale oil
+boom that began in 2007, and would eventually prompt the construction of
+the Dakota Access pipeline, made North Dakota the second-largest oil
+producing state, after Texas. Much of this occurred on the Fort Berthold
+Reservation, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, which sits
+atop some of the region’s deepest oil reserves. In 2011, Tex Hall, the tribal
+chairman, adopted the mantra “sovereignty by the barrel,” expressing a
+
+belief that oil wealth can strengthen economic self-determination and
+autonomy. Oil revenues, Hall hoped, would bring his nation out of crushing
+poverty and relieve the enduring devastation caused by the federal
+government’s construction of the Garrison Dam in the heart of the
+reservation in the 1950s, which forced the reservation’s residents from the
+fertile Missouri River valley onto the open, less productive plains. In short
+order, the MHA Nation became one of the wealthiest in Indian Country, and
+with this ascent came political corruption and high rates of violence,
+especially against women and girls.18
+“We found a crying, naked, four-year-old girl running down one of the
+roads right outside of the Man Camp. She had been sexually assaulted,”
+Grace Her Many Horses recalled. It was just one of many horrific incidents
+of rape, abuse, and sex trafficking during Her Many Horses’ time at Fort
+Berthold in 2013 as a tribal cop. Most of her calls were related to man
+camps or the oil and gas industry they served.19 Towns of thousands
+literally sprang up overnight, made up of mobile homes and FEMA trailers,
+as hotels overflowed. Existing towns doubled and quadrupled in population,
+taxing already overstretched or nonexistent social infrastructure, including
+reservation emergency services. Nearly all the new arrivals were men,
+leading to some of the highest concentrations of men, outside of prisons, in
+North America. While emergency calls and violent assaults were frequent,
+prosecutions were not. Non-Native oil workers exploited a complex
+patchwork of federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions in which tribal law
+enforcement has little or no jurisdiction over non-Natives, allowing
+perpetrators to escape tribal justice.20
+Since the Bakken boom, the rolling prairies and lush river valleys that
+had survived Army Corps flooding in 1953 have been replaced by miles of
+metal fracking rigs and heavy construction equipment. Clustered
+constellations of oil flares burning off methane are visible from space at
+night. “What we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts,” said Kandi
+Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and
+citizen of the MHA Nation.21 She explained that cancer, asthma, and
+respiratory diseases have increased among the children and elders because
+of the toxic environment. Mossett herself is a cancer survivor. But this toxic
+landscape is connected to another. “You would never see this in Houston’s
+most affluent neighborhoods,” said Yudith Neito, a resident of Houston’s
+mostly Latinx community Manchester, where the air smells of burnt plastic
+
+and diesel from the oil refineries along the Houston Ship Channel next
+door.22 These are the refineries that process oil from the Canadian tar sands
+and the Bakken shale.
+Nevertheless, in 2012, despite massive opposition, Obama fast-tracked
+the construction of KXL’s southern leg from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the
+Gulf Coast. “As long as I’m president,” he boasted in 2012, “we’re going to
+keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to
+do it in a way that protects the health and safety of American people.”23 But
+those protections didn’t extend to communities like Neito’s or Mossett’s—
+nor would they be extended, with the Dakota Access Pipeline, to Standing
+Rock and the millions who depend on the Missouri River for fresh water.
+In response to Obama’s order, that same year the Tar Sands Blockade
+sprang into action, a coalition that reflected the diversity of communities
+affected: conservative landowners, green anarchists and leftists, Latinx and
+Mexican-American communities, and Indigenous organizations from
+Canada and the United States. At an eighty-day sit-in action obstructing
+KXL construction on its southern route, local authorities and private
+security crushed the opposition with beatings, Tasers, and pepper spray—a
+prelude of what was to come.24 It was also part of what Canadian author
+and activist Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia,” a “roving transnational conflict
+zone” of grassroots resistance to the fossil fuel developments—whether
+“open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands pipelines”—that are not
+simply causing climate change, but threatening the very livelihoods of
+communities.25
+But some communities remained disunited, especially among the Oceti
+Sakowin. Despite pulling together a historic alliance with non-Natives, one
+small nation remained an outlier—my own. TransCanada had carefully
+avoided crossing reservation lands to avoid provoking Indigenous
+resistance, except at one key location: the Lower Brule Indian Reservation,
+a place that received little media attention, despite its central role.
+TransCanada needed to build a seventy-one-mile electric transmission
+line that connected hydroelectricity generated at the Big Bend Dam to one
+of seventeen pipeline pump stations at Witten, South Dakota. Because the
+power line crossed sixteen acres of Lower Brule land, it required tribal
+consent. Although a crucial detail, the power line project was easy to miss,
+buried in the thousand-page technical manuals TransCanada produced. It
+was also easy to miss the name of the Lower Brule Sioux tribal chairman,
+
+Michael B. Jandreau, listed among the “Consulting Tribes’ Points of
+Contact.” Jandreau was the longest-serving tribal chairman in US history, in
+office for more than three decades before dying in office in 2015. As his
+health declined during his last term, so too did faith in his administration.
+After months of denying negotiating with the company, in March 2014
+suspicions surrounding the Lower Brule Tribal Council’s collaboration with
+TransCanada had been confirmed. A November 12, 2013, Lower Brule
+Sioux Tribal Council resolution had been leaked to the public in which the
+council spelled out plans to pursue “prospective benefits and working
+relationships” with TransCanada and to inform President Obama and Vice
+President Joe Biden of its support for the Canadian oil company.26 Lower
+Brule’s actions directly violated the spirit of the Mother Earth Accord,
+which its leaders signed in September 2011 at a historic summit held in
+Rosebud with Alberta First Nations, Indigenous governments, grassroots
+treaty councils, human rights NGOs, and the Cheyenne River, Crow Creek,
+Fort Peck, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Santee Reservations.
+By signing the accord, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe committed to end the
+extraction, transportation, and refinement of Alberta tar sands by asking
+President Obama to reject the presidential permit required for KXL.27 Now,
+Lower Brule had crossed a picket line, betraying not only their relatives in
+the Oceti Sakowin but also frontline communities around the world being
+devastated by climate change and extractivism.
+The label “sellouts” stung, spurring the small nation into action. The Kul
+Wicasa, the people of Lower Brule, called an emergency town hall meeting,
+inviting tribal leaders and organizations from other reservations as well as
+the entire Lower Brule Tribal Council. Members of Owe Aku (Bring Back
+the Way), led by renowned Oglala environmentalist Debra White Plume,
+facilitated the meeting in a show of solidarity.28 From Lower Brule, the
+brother-and-sister twins Loretta and Lewis Grassrope, Kevin Wright, and
+Marlo Langdeau, among others, organized a town hall meeting calling on
+their nation to end its relationship with TransCanada, to uphold the Mother
+Earth Accord, and to join the growing alliance against KXL. More than a
+hundred attended, including the presidents of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. But
+the Lower Brule council boycotted the entire gathering.
+“I used to be proud to be from here,” said Langdeau, with tears in her
+eyes, after Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Rosebud had booted
+TransCanada officials off the reservation. Now, their leaders refused to face
+
+their own people. “It’s embarrassing to be called a ‘sellout’ when you don’t
+even know what’s going on.”
+When there was no response from their elected officials, the organizers
+took matters into their own hands. Lewis Grassrope and Kevin Wright
+attempted to occupy land in front of the proposed transmission line, but
+before they could establish a camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs police (a
+federal police agency that operates without tribal oversight) stopped them.
+Undeterred, they set up on Grassrope’s mother’s homesite, several miles
+north of Medicine Butte on reservation land. They called the camp “Wiconi
+Un Tipi,” which loosely translates to “the way we live when we live in
+community.” As the name suggests, this was about more than stopping a
+pipeline. It was about restoring dignity to a little nation of people that had
+earned the reputation as “the forgotten Sioux.”29
+For Grassrope, a former tribal cop, it was Indigenous people at the grass
+roots who made the movement. The ikce wicasa, the ikce winyan, (the
+common men and women, the humble people of the earth), were the ones
+who changed history, not “great men” or tribal councils. When humble
+people moved, the earth moved with them. “We don’t have a voice. We
+don’t have a standing. We don’t have influence. But as you can see here,”
+Grassrope said in November 2016, gesturing to seven tipis embodying the
+reunification of the Oceti Sakowin Camp at the confluence of the
+Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, “we are the tip of the spear. We’re saying,
+‘mni wiconi.’ We’re saying, ‘treaty.’”
+Wright, a firefighter, was a Water Protector from a different generation
+and a long-time dissident of his own government. In 1999 Wright joined
+members of the Lakota Student Alliance in a yearlong occupation of
+LaFramboise Island, a nature reserve in the middle of the Missouri River
+and, to the Oceti Sakowin, unceded earth. At the time, he also stood against
+the Lower Brule council’s support of federal legislation known as the
+“Mitigation Bill,” in which South Dakota lawmakers had proposed
+transferring jurisdiction over more than 200,000 acres of Missouri shoreline
+from the Army Corps of Engineers to the state of South Dakota. All
+Missouri River Indigenous nations objected to it except for Cheyenne River
+and Lower Brule, who chose to support it.30
+This history of bad faith on the part of both state politicians and their
+own tribal council was fresh in the minds of the Lower Brule opposition in
+2014. To Wright and Grassrope, the primary conflict boiled down to
+
+governance. The reservation system and the imposition of the elected tribal
+councils had all but dissolved traditional governance. In its place, a winnertakes-all electoral system turned relatives against each other, and harsh
+political divisions broke down the family kinship unit, the tiospaye—an
+extended network of relatives that was fundamental to decision making and
+caretaking. The arrangement that replaced it instead fomented division and
+rivalry over scant resources, catering to outside corporate and state
+interests; it was a type of neocolonialism.
+The divisions were a result of a sordid history of colonial land grabs. In
+1889, in advance of North and South Dakota statehood and to encourage
+white settlement, Congress passed the so-called “Sioux Agreement” that
+broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate reservations—
+Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Lower Brule.
+For traditionalists and treaty councils, it was hardly an agreement; the 1889
+partition didn’t get the required three-fourths approval from adult Native
+men, as stipulated by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In their eyes the
+creation, under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), of modern
+reservations, which later became separate governments, fractured national
+unity and undermined customary government and treaty law. This was the
+primary dispute in 1973 when American Indian Movement members, at the
+request of Oglala elders, took over Wounded Knee in protest of Pine
+Ridge’s IRA government, which was under the authoritarian leadership of
+Chairman Dick Wilson, who was criminalizing dissent. In short, AIM and
+their supporters opposed colonial administration. While AIM promoted
+traditional governance, it never achieved the reunification of the Oceti
+Sakowin on the scale realized at Standing Rock in 2016. But AIM’s
+militancy a generation earlier paved the way for the historic movement.
+While Indigenous nations rallied to support Standing Rock and the Oceti
+Sakowin, two years earlier Lower Brule was thrown into turmoil as
+grassroots councils called for overturning the status quo.
+The so-called “Lower Brule constitutional crisis” of 2014 to 2016 was
+not an armed takeover like the one that took place at Wounded Knee in
+1973. Nevertheless, it was without hesitation that supporters of the old
+order called it “an attempted overthrow of the tribal government.”31 And
+they weren’t entirely wrong. In the fall of 2014, a grassroots reform
+movement had galvanized under the slogan Mni Wiconi, electing three antiKXL candidates to the six-person council: Sonny Zeigler and Desiree
+
+LaRoche as council members, and Kevin Wright as vice-chair. Michael
+Jandreau defeated Lewis Grassrope for the position of chairman by a slim
+margin. The new council members quickly set to work pushing for reform
+and transparency, and they met a strident opposition.
+A November council meeting escalated to a shouting match, nearly
+ending in a fistfight between opposing sides, when Wright called for
+Jandreau’s removal for corruption and financial malfeasance, among other
+charges. In December, the opposition council members attempted to
+circumvent Jandreau and his supporters by appointing an entirely new
+council. This back-and-forth led to a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits, and
+day-to-day operations ground to a halt. After Jandreau passed away in April
+2015, Grassrope was named his successor, but due to opposition from other
+council members, he never fully assumed the role. In May, in response to
+the unfolding political chaos, the Kul Wicasa Ospiye, a grassroots treaty
+organization, gathered signatures from the leadership of the traditional
+tiospayes of the Kul Wicasa to assert their right to be “self-governing” and
+that the people, not the federally recognized IRA council, were “the sole
+source for the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s existence.”32 The move
+underscored the gravity of the vicious power struggle that was unfolding,
+and the profound desire for an accountable government based on Lakota
+values, including kinship.
+In Jandreau’s absence, and with the backing of the grassroots movement,
+Wright called for the removal of TransCanada from 1868 Treaty lands. “We
+see [TransCanada] as ‘bad men’ as defined by our treaties with the United
+States,” Wright said in a statement. He cited a treaty clause that allows for
+the removal of “bad men among the whites” who “commit any wrong upon
+the person or property of the Indians.” It was a bold move: the question of
+whether or not a corporation, which has personhood under US law, can be
+removed from treaty lands has yet to be tested in court. But for Wright and
+his supporters, the existential threat posed by KXL and climate change
+justified the risk. “This land is all we have,” Wright explained, “and we are
+obligated to preserve it for our future generations.”33 However, the action
+went nowhere, as the council had failed to form a consensus—or even to
+convene.
+The Lower Brule opposition, even with support from the grassroots
+community, was unable to dramatically improve conditions on the
+reservation or to significantly change the structure of the IRA council
+
+during their brief two-year tenure. Nevertheless, their advocacy would have
+a resonating impact. After Obama denied the required presidential permit
+for KXL’s northern leg in December of 2015, the newly elected Lower
+Brule council changed course. One of its first actions was the passage of a
+resolution supporting Standing Rock’s battle against the Dakota Access
+Pipeline. And in December 2016, preempting Donald Trump’s incoming
+administration, which was expected to reapprove KXL’s northern leg, the
+council passed a resolution opposing construction of the Big Bend–Witten
+line that would power KXL, stating that they opposed oil pipeline
+development and the construction of any infrastructure related to it.34 Those
+two major victories would not have occurred without the tumultuous
+grassroots struggle against KXL, a movement that fed into the DAPL fight.
+In November 2016 at Oceti Sakowin Camp, Lewis Grassrope was sitting
+in his tipi. It was one of seven that were arranged in the shape of a buffalo
+horn, with a large fire pit in the middle. The entire camp was arranged in a
+half circle facing Mni Sose and Wiyohiyapata (meaning “where the sun
+rises”). About half the size of a football field, the camp horn at the
+confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers was surrounded by
+Indigenous national camps—such as Ihanktonwan Camp, Oglala Camp, and
+Kul Wicasa Camp—and organizations’ camps—such as Indigenous
+People’s Power Project and Red Warrior Camp. The Seven Council Fires of
+the seven nations—the Mdewakantonwan, Sissintonwan, Wahpetonwan,
+Wahpekute, Ihanktonwan, Ihanktonwanna, and Tintonwan—had been lit,
+and a nation reunited. It was a dream come true. On the horizon, on a hill,
+shadowy figures of cops in riot gear idled under floodlights and behind
+tangled razor wire. But the constant drone of the surveillance aircraft
+circling above was hardly noticeable over the sounds of children playing
+and the boisterous chuckles around campfires. Young boys and girls sang
+round dance songs and raced horses along the shoreline. Men and women
+cleaned and sliced up tripe for menudo. This was Wiconi Un Tipi, Lower
+Brule’s national camp and one of the first camps to set up at Oceti Sakowin
+after Standing Rock put out the call in August.
+“A lot of people didn’t believe, they didn’t have faith,” Grassrope said,
+reflecting on the adversity he and his small nation faced over the years. He
+looked outside his tipi to the life, breath, prayer, and song around him.
+“When KXL happened, the belief came back. When DAPL happened, the
+belief came back.”
+
+The harbingers of the Dakota Access Pipeline arrived on an early fall
+morning, September 30, 2014, to Fort Yates, the headquarters of the
+Standing Rock tribe. A special meeting had been scheduled between the
+Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, and representatives of the Dakota
+Access Pipeline (DAPL) and Energy Transfer Partners (ETP, the Texasbased firm financing the project).
+Earlier in 2014, the Army Corps had rerouted the pipeline from upriver
+of North Dakota’s white-dominated capital, Bismarck, to upriver of the
+poorest county in North Dakota, Sioux County—the Standing Rock
+Reservation. In its environmental analysis, the Army Corps had concluded
+that the Bismarck path crossed a “high consequence area,” which meant
+that a spill would have an adverse effect.35 Not once did it mention
+Standing Rock, for which a spill half a mile upriver was of no consequence
+to the Army Corps. The new route also saved on time, constructions costs,
+and the unwanted headache of contaminating the drinking water of white
+settlers in the state’s capital.
+In an audio recording of the September meeting in Fort Yates released by
+the tribe, Chairman David Archambault II can be heard whispering off mic,
+“What is the name of the company?” He then asks, “Dakota Access
+Pipeline, are they here?”36 No answer. DAPL was late. It seemed fitting.
+Amid the historic resistance unfolding against tar sands and KXL across the
+continent, DAPL seemed like an afterthought, arriving late and under the
+radar. At this time, a year ahead of the pipeline permitting process, hardly
+anyone had heard of DAPL. But those who saw it coming knew it was
+dangerous.
+When DAPL representatives finally arrived, Archambault made
+Standing Rock’s position clear: “We oppose the pipeline,” he stated.
+Archambault cited a 2012 resolution that forbade any oil pipeline within the
+boundaries of the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. Where federal
+and state governments have historically chosen to ignore them, Standing
+Rock has recognized and enforced its original treaty boundaries. In their
+report, DAPL representatives Tammy Ibach, Chuck Frey, and Joe Malucci
+mentioned that the pipeline crossed less than a mile north of the reservation
+boundaries, but they never mentioned treaty lands. They also never asked
+whether Standing Rock wanted the pipeline in the first place. DAPL was
+looking for “consultation,” not consent.
+
+“It’s not consultation, because the plan’s already done,” Councilman
+Randy White rebuked the representatives. “And to me, that’s really wrong.”
+Wasté Win Young, the Standing Rock Tribal Historic Preservation
+Officer, agreed. After studying the company’s initial reports, what
+concerned her most was the Army Corps’ intention to fast-track the project.
+(Despite their central role planning DAPL’s route, the Army Corps did not
+attend the September 30 meeting.) Unlike KXL, which crossed an
+international border and therefore required State Department review and
+presidential approval, DAPL was a domestic project. This allowed the
+Army Corps to assess the pipeline according to a Nationwide Permit 12,
+which only considers individual construction sites, rather than cumulative
+negative impacts on entire nations of people, ecosystems, or the climate. As
+Young pointed out, fast-tracking the project under Permit 12 regulations
+bypassed environmental reviews under the Clean Water Act and the
+National Environmental Policy Act. It also skirted the type of public
+scrutiny received by KXL and significantly undermined the ability of
+impacted communities to mobilize, protect, and defend themselves.
+Moreover, DAPL cut through about 380 archeological sites, such as
+burials, with at least 60 at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri
+Rivers alone. Though not recognized as reservation land, under the National
+Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106, the presence of these culturally
+sensitive sites made the area “ancestral territory.” Any potential disturbance
+required the Army Corps to consult with Standing Rock in order to proceed,
+a procedure Young claimed the Army Corps had failed to do in the past.
+The place where the pipeline crossed the river also held deep historical and
+cultural significance. Many Horses Heads Bottom, where DAPL crossed the
+Missouri River, Young explained, was where Dakotas fled generals Sibley
+and Sully’s 1863 “columns of vengeance.” After the 1862 Dakota Uprising,
+the United States punished survivors of that war at the Whitestone Hill
+Massacre, where they gunned down more than 400 Lakotas and Dakotas on
+a buffalo hunt. It was a massacre nearly forgotten by settlers, but no less
+horrific than Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. The soldiers led a manhunt
+up and down the river, capturing or killing survivors. Mothers plugged their
+babies’ noses to silence their cries as they swam to safety across the river in
+the cover of darkness.
+“I struggled with this last night,” said Young at the meeting. “Do we
+want to tell something so important and sacred to us to a pipeline
+
+company?” Descendants of those who survived that genocidal campaign
+were sitting in the room, face to face with the very people who would two
+years later bring a whole new wave of chaos and violence.
+What concerned Councilwoman Avis Little Eagle was the water. “Every
+oil pipeline leaks,” she said, “and it’s going to ruin the water we consume
+and that future generations are going to consume.” Her fears were
+warranted: from 2010 to 2016, Sunoco Logistics, the operators of DAPL,
+had more than 200 of their pipelines leak;37 indeed, DAPL would leak five
+times within six months of beginning operation.38 Little Eagle also sat on
+the Standing Rock water control board, which, having reviewed DAPL’s
+route the previous day, passed a resolution opposing it on the grounds that it
+threatened the reservation’s source of drinking water, the Missouri River.
+This action fell in line with Standing Rock’s Constitution, which was
+drafted with the water in mind. Article 1 of the Constitution reserves
+jurisdiction over “all rights-of-way, waterways, watercourses[,] and streams
+running through any part of the Reservation.”39 A threat to its drinking
+water was thus a threat to Standing Rock’s sovereignty, as well.
+“Our water is our single last property that we have for our people, and
+water is life—Mni Wiconi,” remarked Phyllis Young to the DAPL
+representatives. Young was a council-woman, a longtime AIM member, and
+Wasté Win Young’s mother. The elder stateswoman described her
+homelands as a “national sacrifice area.” In order to generate
+hydroelectricity to power homes in far-off cities like Minneapolis and
+Chicago, the Army Corps had flooded her home in the middle of a cold
+winter. “I know what it is to be homeless,” Young said. “I know what it is to
+be hungry in this great land of plenty, where we lived in the richest riverbed
+in the world.”
+The dams, which I describe in chapter 5, were the reason why the Army
+Corps had final say over DAPL’s route: claiming sole jurisdiction over the
+river and shoreline, they had inundated the land in the 1950s and 1960s,
+usurping Indigenous jurisdiction, kicking people out of their homes,
+destroying the river that nurtured them, and shrinking reservation
+boundaries in the process. The Army Corps never sought the consent of
+Missouri River Indigenous nations for these incursions, nor did Congress
+ever authorize them to extinguish Indigenous jurisdiction over the river.40
+Now, it was also without their consent that the Army Corps sought to route
+the Dakota Access Pipeline through their homelands.
+
+“We are not stupid people. We are not ignorant people,” Young chided
+the DAPL spokespeople. “Do not underestimate the people of Standing
+Rock. We know what’s going on, and we know what belongs to us, and we
+know what we have to keep for our children and our grandchildren.”
+This was a history she had lived through, and it was an intergenerational
+struggle her children had inherited. In 1974, Phyllis Young and Standing
+Rock council representatives, including David Archambault Sr. (David
+Archambault II’s father), organized the first International Indian Treaty
+Council at Standing Rock (detailed in chapter 6). Standing Rock gave AIM
+the mandate to pursue, at the United Nations, all legal means available to
+enforce the 1868 Treaty. The historic meeting brought together 5,000
+people from ninety-seven Indigenous nations from around the world, and it
+was the beginning of a movement that culminated in a touchstone document
+on Indigenous rights: the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
+Peoples. Unlike other federally recognized IRA governments at the time,
+Standing Rock had maintained amiable relations with treaty councils,
+grassroots movements, and even militants such as AIM. On occassions
+when, as in Lower Brule in 2014, the antagonisms between these bodies
+turned destructive or violent, the Standing Rock’s capacity to bridge these
+divides set it apart from other IRA governments. This history was decisive
+in the creation of the #NoDAPL movement, which began with the
+coalescence of tribal councils and Indigenous grassroots movements.
+“It’s nothing for you to come and say, ‘We want to do this [build a
+pipeline]. We want to be friends with you,’” Young said to DAPL. To her,
+naming a pipeline, Dakota Access, and a state, North Dakota, after the very
+people they intended to swindle, and about whom they knew nothing, was
+an insult. “North Dakota?” she asked. “Miye ma Dakota! I am Dakota!
+Dakota means ‘friend’ and ‘ally.’” By trespassing, the pipeline company
+and the state didn’t behave as “friends” or “allies.” Quite the opposite.
+“This is Dakota territory. This is treaty territory. This is where you
+agreed not to come into my territory,” she continued. It was a reminder that
+treaties are not an “Indian problem”; they are everyone’s problem. Signed
+between settler government and Indigenous nations, they are also the
+responsibility of non-Natives: an even older document, the US Constitution,
+regards treaties as “the supreme law of the land.”
+If DAPL didn’t respect Standing Rock’s sovereignty or the Oceti
+Sakowin’s ancestral and treaty territory, then, Young warned, “We will put
+
+our best warriors in the front. We are the vanguard. We are Hunkpapa
+Lakota. That means the ‘horn of the buffalo.’ That’s who we are. We are the
+protectors of our nation, of Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. Know
+who we are.” She left them with this final message: “We understand the
+forked tongue that our grandfathers talked about. We know about talking
+[out of] both sides of your mouth, smiling with one side of your face. We
+know all the tricks of the wasicu world [the colonizer’s world]. Our young
+people have mastered it. I have mastered your language. I can speak
+eloquently in the English language. My grandmother taught me. But I also
+know the genetic psyche. And I also have the collective memory of the
+damages that have occurred to my people. And I will never submit to any
+pipeline to go through my homeland. Mitakuye Oyasin!”
+DAPL seemed to have forgotten the lessons imparted that day. “I really
+wish for the Standing Rock Sioux that they had engaged in discussions way
+before they did,” Kelcy Warren, a billionaire Texas oilman and CEO of
+ETP, told the Wall Street Journal in November 2016. “We could have
+changed the route. It could have been done, but it’s too late.”41 Apparently,
+Warren didn’t consider the initial 2014 meeting a “discussion,” nor did he
+accept Standing Rock’s flat-out refusal. In a 2016 statement to a federal
+judge, however, DAPL Vice-President Joey Mahmoud did confirm his
+company had received Standing Rock’s message loud and clear. He
+admitted the company was told “to stop the project” and to avoid Oceti
+Sakowin territory altogether. But Mahmoud found it “an impossible request
+to accommodate,” and he and his employees could hardly hide their
+contempt.42 In March 2016, an Army Corps archeologist warned in an
+email: “Someone needs to tell Joey [Mahmoud] the next RACIST comment
+will shut down the entire project.”43 The email concerned Mahmoud and his
+employees’ treatment of Native cultural resource workers who had
+identified culturally sensitive sites, such as graves and sacred sites, along
+the pipeline route. This wasn’t a “clash of cultures” or a lack of “cultural
+sensitivity” towards those they saw as different; this was full-blown settler
+colonialism—a struggle over the land and water in which a people were
+fighting for their lives.
+#NoDAPL was also a struggle over the meaning of land. For the Oceti
+Sakowin, history is the land itself: the earth cradles the bones of the
+ancestors. As Tasunka Witko, Crazy Horse, once said, “My land is where
+my dead lie buried.” For others, however, the earth had to be tamed and
+
+dominated by a plow or drilled for profit. Because Native people remain
+barriers to capitalist development, their bodies needed to be removed—both
+from beneath and atop the soil—therefore eliminating their rightful
+relationship with the land.
+Recognizing this, Standing Rock chose a legal route to stop the pipeline,
+filing a complaint in federal court against the Army Corps on July 27, 2016,
+the day after the Army Corps approved DAPL’s route across the Missouri
+River and through culturally sensitive sites. In late August 2016, as pipeline
+construction approached Highway 1806, Standing Rock grew desperate.
+Legal mechanisms weren’t working; more drastic measures had to be taken.
+Sensing what was coming, on August 15, DAPL filed a lawsuit seeking an
+injunction against a number of individuals, including Chairman
+Archambault, from interfering with pipeline construction (a suit dismissed
+on September 19). Four days later, the governor, Jack Dalrymple, a legacy
+Yale man, declared a state of emergency, asking for assistance from the
+federal government, DAPL, “and any entity we can think of.”44
+“Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected
+officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to
+the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed
+enforcement for corporate interests,” penned Archambault in a New York
+Times op-ed, days before police arrested him. “In recent weeks, the state has
+militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, lowflying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians.”45
+Standing Rock, the nation of the great Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, was
+facing down county, state, federal, and corporate powers. His people—some
+of the poorest in North America, and armed only with sage, prayer bundles,
+Canupas (sacred pipes), and the spirit of their ancestors—were facing down
+a mounting legion of police and private security backed by some of the
+most powerful people in the world.
+On Friday, August 26, Chairman Dave Archambault II gave tribal
+employees the day off. He joined a prayer action at the location where
+DAPL crossed the highway and was arrested trying to break through a
+police line, along with eighteen others, during a two-day blockade of a
+construction site. Tribal cultural resource management experts, among them
+Tim Mentz Sr., an elder and citizen of Standing Rock, had identified at least
+twenty-seven burials west of the highway—on private land, and directly in
+the pipeline’s path. The immense historical importance of the discoveries,
+
+in other circumstances, would have given pause to tribal historians and
+scholars. Mentz characterized one finding—a rock structure arranged in the
+shape of the Dakota constellation Iyokaptan Tanka (the “Big Dipper”)—as
+“one of the most significant archeological finds in North Dakota in many
+years.”46 He notified a federal court of the discovery on Friday, September
+2, and requested immediate action to protect the site. What happened the
+next day, Mentz and others believed, was no accident.
+In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 3, 2016, blood was
+spilled in the struggle over hallowed ground. Caterpillar earthmovers came
+barreling across the prairie. A small army of attack dogs and their handlers,
+private security hired by DAPL, guarded the site, followed closely by a
+spotter helicopter whirling above; all of them were ready for a fight. It was
+Saturday of Labor Day weekend, a holiday celebrating the working poor
+who had picketed and protested (and were beaten and shot) to win an eighthour workday. But this holiday weekend, it was unionized pipeline workers
+who clocked in while Indigenous people formed a picket line. The
+Indigenous marchers who showed up that day were working to protect their
+lands and waters—they were Land Defenders and Water Protectors.47
+Workers who cross picket lines, on the other hand, are called “scabs”
+because they undermine working-class solidarity. The pipeline workers met
+a march of Water Protectors coming down Highway 1806, which had begun
+with the Canupa, a pipe ceremony (as had nearly all actions), to grant
+strength and protection for the ancestors who might be unearthed. When the
+Water Protectors saw the heavy machinery that morning turning soil, it was
+human remains—their relatives—that were unearthed. Native people
+quickly formed a blockade. The Water Protectors pushed down fences,
+throwing themselves in front of bulldozers. A white man jumped from a
+truck, spraying a line of women and children with CS gas, a chemical that
+burns skin, eyes, and throats and can cause blindness. The handlers—the
+people who train animals to hunt human beings: manhunters—sicced attack
+dogs on the picket line. Blood dripped from the dogs’ maws.
+“In that moment, everything changed,” recalled LaDonna BraveBull
+Allard, Tamakawastewin, Her Good Earth Woman. That morning
+Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was interviewing BraveBull Allard
+when the phone rang. “The bulldozers are here!” They rushed to film the
+scene. BraveBull Allard had been in the middle of telling the story of Nape
+Hota Winyan, her great-grandmother, a survivor of the Whitestone Hill
+
+Massacre, which occurred September 3, 1863; the same day 155 years later,
+Caterpillar earthmovers desecrated her ancestors’ graves. At Whitestone
+Hill, women tied their babies to dogs in hopes that they would escape the
+soldiers. As soldiers finished off the wounded, the order came to shoot the
+dogs. These terrible histories, separated by time, were eerily similar.
+“They took our footprint out of the ground,” said BraveBull Allard of the
+havoc wreaked upon the land. “And who has the right to do that?” Before
+DAPL, Ladonna BraveBull Allard considered herself a tribal historian, but
+never an activist. That changed when DAPL released its plans showing the
+proposed pipeline crossing near the confluence of Mni Sose (the Missouri
+River) and Inyan Wakanagapi Wakpa (the Cannonball River), threatening
+the land and water. Once, shallow waters made it a place of passage, trade,
+and commerce. Large villages of the Mandan, Arikara, and Dakota peoples
+hugged the lush riverfront, and the Cheyennes and Pawnees were known to
+frequent the area, too. Many came to fast and hold ceremony; and because
+of its deep spiritual significance, the landscape was also considered neutral
+territory where, out of reverence, warring factions laid down their arms and
+camped within sight of each other without incident. Lewis and Clark
+misnamed it “Cannonball”—to their minds, the spherical sandstones
+resembled tools of war—but for the Dakota people, it was a place of life.
+They called it “Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa” (River that Makes the Sacred
+Stones). BraveBull Allard’s grandfather, Tatanka Ohitika (Brave Bull) held
+sun dances here, continuing to maintain relations with the landscape by
+putting medicine and prayer into the earth while also harvesting food from
+it.
+It was here that water shaped earth—making sacred stones. It was also
+here that state institutions used water and earth to shape and destroy a
+people’s history. After the Army Corps dredged the mouth of the
+Cannonball River, the swirling waters stopped creating the sacred stones. In
+the 1950s, the Army Corps built the Oahe Dam, flooding the sun dance
+grounds and the most fertile, arable land. When land and water are taken
+and destroyed, so too is the possibility of a livable future.
+“Our people are in that water,” recalled BraveBull Allard who, as a little
+girl, saw the floodwaters take her land. “This river holds the story of my
+entire life.” To honor this history, “Inyan Wakanagapi Oti,” the name for the
+Cannon Ball area, became the name for the prayer camp that BraveBull
+Allard helped found in April 2016. She was in Long Soldier District at a
+
+meeting on the KXL fight with Joye Braun, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph
+White Eyes from Cheyenne River, and Wiyaka Eagleman from Standing
+Rock. Together they decided to start a #NoDAPL camp. BraveBull Allard
+approached Braun afterward and offered up her land.
+On April 1, they attended a meeting with the Army Corps to give
+testimony against DAPL. The Oceti Sakowin, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota
+nations arrived in caravans by horse, motorcycle, and car to show support.
+Indigenous youth organized a run. Elders came to offer their Canupas and
+prayers, and tipis went up; they called it “Sacred Stone.”
+BraveBull Allard remembers one day coming down to camp after work:
+“They were roasting deer meat on the grill. The women were cutting meat
+on the side to dry it. Kids were running and screaming. All of these people
+sitting around the fire were telling stories and what it was like to live on the
+river. Here was the catch: nobody was speaking English. They were all
+speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘This is how we’re
+supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day I came down to the
+camp and saw such blessings. I saw our culture and our way of life come
+alive. Nobody can take that away from me.”
+Between the first meeting with DAPL in 2014 and the founding of
+Sacred Stone in 2016, Standing Rock ran grassroots awareness campaigns
+about Mni Wiconi and #NoDAPL. Chairman Dave Archambault II traveled
+tirelessly from district to district, informing the reservation that DAPL was
+coming. The youth organized a water campaign called “Rezpect Our
+Water,” crafting the media message to the outside world and demonstrating
+this was a youth-led movement. But as construction began in April 2016, a
+sense of urgency grew. Given that Obama denied the permit for KXL,
+would he do the same for DAPL? Did he care about Native sovereignty and
+lives?
+Archambault once had a connection to, and admiration for, President
+Obama. His sister, Jodi Archambault Gillette, had served as the president’s
+special assistant for Native American affairs from 2009 to 2015. On June
+13, 2014, Obama gave the opening remarks at Cannon Ball’s annual Flag
+Day Powwow, accompanied by Archambault and his family. Obama’s visit
+was historic. Only eight sitting US presidents had ever visited Indian
+reservations, the last being Bill Clinton.
+During his speech, Obama focused on Native youth and played off the
+oft-quoted line by Sitting Bull: “Let’s put our minds together to see what
+
+life we can build for our children.” “Let’s put our minds together to advance
+justice—because like every American, you deserve to be safe in your
+communities and treated equally under the law,” Obama told a crowd of
+thousands of cheering Lakotas and Dakotas.
+Shortly after Obama’s visit, Archambault issued a statement assuring
+Native youth across the nation “that the President and First Lady are truly
+listening to them.”48 But were they really? Beginning in July 2016, thirtyeight Indigenous youth ran a grueling 2,000 mile relay from their homes in
+North Dakota to Washington, DC and hand-delivered to the White House
+and the Army Corps a petition with 160,000 signatures opposing DAPL’s
+construction. Tariq Brownotter, a sixteen-year-old Standing Rock youth
+runner and organizer with Rezpect Our Water, wrote to Obama: “After your
+visit to Standing Rock you said you felt we were like your own children.
+Mr. President and First Lady we have no doubt you meant every word you
+said and we know you have not forgotten us.”49 There was no public
+response from Obama to the youth’s demands to stop DAPL.
+Not until November 2—months after DAPL began construction, and
+hundreds of arrests later—did Obama speak publicly about the pipeline,
+simply saying he wanted to respect Native sacred lands, was open to a
+possible reroute (by then the pipeline was less than a half mile from the
+river), and would take cues from the Army Corps of Engineers. He would
+“let it play out for several more weeks.”50 This stance angered both North
+Dakota politicians like governor Jack Dalrymple, who demanded federal
+intervention to crush the protests, and Indigenous people, who were being
+mercilessly brutalized by cops. Obama’s statement came five days after live
+video showed a militarized police force, acting on orders from the state of
+North Dakota, violently evict the short-lived 1851 Treaty Camp that
+blockaded DAPL construction crews on Highway 1806. Cops in riot gear
+conducted tipi-by-tipi raids, slashing tents and tipi canvases. They dragged
+half-naked elders from ceremonial sweat lodges, tasered a man in the face,
+doused people with CS gas and tear gas, and blasted adults and youth with
+deafening LRAD sound cannons. The 142 arrested were marked with a
+number in black permanent marker on their forearm, led onto buses, and
+kept overnight in dog kennels. To add insult to injury, personal belongings
+—including ceremonial items like pipes and eagle feathers, as well as
+jackets and tents—confiscated by the police during the raid were returned
+soaked in urine.
+
+When asked what Obama thought about this level of brutality and
+dehumanization, the Nobel laureate admonished “both sides,” the unarmed
+protestors defending Indigenous land and the heavily-militarized, small
+army of police who ritualistically beat the Water Protectors, all the while
+extolling the virtues of civility: “There’s an obligation for protestors to be
+peaceful and there’s and obligation for authorities to show restraint.”51
+Three days before the 1851 Treaty Camp raid, Archambault wrote to US
+Attorney General Lorretta Lynch, urgently requesting a civil rights
+investigation into the escalating police violence. After declaring a state of
+emergency, Governor Dalrymple immediately went to work soliciting aid
+and personnel under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact. It
+was the largest mobilization of cops and military in the state’s history since
+1890, when nearly half the standing military was deployed to crush the
+horseless and starving Ghost Dancers in Standing Rock. Seventy-six law
+enforcement jurisdictions responded to Dalrymple’s call and were deployed
+alongside the National Guard and private security firms hired by DAPL
+such as TigerSwan. The agencies that arrived were among the largest
+recipients of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program that ships surplus
+military equipment to law enforcement agencies nationwide. For example,
+between 2006 and 2015 the South Dakota Highway Patrol, which sent
+troopers to police Water Protectors, obtained $2 million worth of military
+equipment, including dozens of assault rifles and five armored vehicles.
+The Lake County Sheriff’s Office in northwestern Indiana, which sent four
+deputies, had collected $1.5 million in military gear, including one hundred
+assault rifles and two armored trucks. (Demonstrating incompetence with
+this military-grade weaponry, one deputy shot himself in the foot with one
+of the assault rifles while deployed at the protests.) The fifteen-ton, tanklike MRAP vehicles, which were visible at nearly all the major police
+actions, were also Department of Defense military surplus placed at the
+disposal of county sheriff’s offices.52 Because of the large influx of
+equipment and personnel, police saw it “as a sort of law enforcement
+laboratory.” Tom Butler, a colonel with Montana Highway Patrol, called the
+multi-agency police response “enlightening and educational,” encouraging
+police agencies in western states like Montana to attend on account that
+they share “all those same issues” with states like North Dakota. To Butler,
+those “same issues” were the large, land-based Indigenous nations
+protesting extractive industries.53 In other words, these states had a lot to
+
+learn from North Dakota about how better to police their own “Indian
+problem.”
+Despite the intimidating display of force, it was the standard-issue
+weapons of police—chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray—that
+inflicted the most pain and violence. As Paiute anthropologist Kristen
+Simmons points out, because these weapons were the dominant means of
+crowd control, rather than military combat gear, they inflicted more injuries
+upon Water Protectors. While the Geneva Protocol prohibits such chemical
+weapons in warfare, they are, paradoxically, permitted for domestic
+policing. For example, on November 20, a day known as “Backwater
+Sunday,” police sprayed Water Protectors with water laced with pepper
+spray from a water cannon mounted to an MRAP and shot with tear gas
+canisters, used as projectile weapons. Temperatures dropped below
+freezing. Police also used beanbag rounds, rubber bullets, and flashbang
+grenades to pummel the young, the old, the unarmed. More than 200 people
+suffered injuries—one Navajo woman lost an eye, becoming permanently
+disabled, and one white woman had her arm nearly blown off by an
+exploding crowd-control agent lobbed at her by police. Most, however,
+suffered from hypothermia and chemical exposure. Camp medics saved
+many lives that night by treating hypothermia with heat blankets and by
+applying an antacid mixture to chemical burns in the eyes, nose, and mouth
+to prevent suffocation.54
+In a Democracy Now! interview, Archambault also pointed out how
+police humiliated Water Protectors by strip-searching them upon arrest (he
+was also strip-searched in late August).55 According to Laguna Pueblo
+journalist Jenni Monet, strip searches were common and primarily reserved
+for Native people and people of color, while white inmates were often
+exempt. Monet also reported that some Native transgender people were
+separated from the general population and placed in solitary confinement as
+a “policy.”56 The police also targeted journalists covering the protests,
+arresting Amy Goodman in September 2016, Monet in January 2017, and
+several reporters from the media collective Unicorn Riot.
+In his letter to Lynch, Archambault compared the policing tactics used
+against Water Protectors as “reminiscent of the tactics used against
+protesters during the civil rights movement some 50 years ago.” In an 2018
+Netflix interview, Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black
+civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses,
+
+and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.”57
+Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed
+attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop
+bulldozers from destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s
+deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing
+temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security
+guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protesters. All of this violence was
+part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands. In the twilight
+of his presidency, on December 4, 2016, the Army Corps denied the permit
+for DAPL to cross the Missouri River. But the move was too little, too late,
+and it was quickly reversed by President Trump within two weeks of taking
+office. (Trump also reversed KXL’s presidential permit, bringing back to
+life the all-but-dead pipeline project.)
+Even though Obama had thus far turned his back on Indigenous youth
+and written off the violence inflicted upon them by police, their courage,
+demonstrated in the thousand-mile relay across the country, had won the
+hearts and minds of conscientious people, regardless of political affiliation.
+Following the historic run, the ranks of Sacred Stone swelled. By late
+August there were more than 90 Indigenous nations present, as well as
+allies from across the globe; by November that number had grown to nearly
+400. Oceti Sakowin Camp was created partially to capture the growing
+influx of people, who came pouring in from all corners of the globe.
+The media also arrived in droves, often covering the violent clashes
+between Water Protectors and the police that, while frequent, also gave a
+distorted view of both everyday camp life and the actions themselves. From
+August to October, marches and rallies occurred almost daily, and without
+incident. At first, they started from Oceti Sakowin Camp and headed
+several miles north, where the pipeline crossed Highway 1806. The keeper
+of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, frequently led
+these early marches, beginning with a pipe ceremony. Later on, marches
+branched out to target construction sites or to provide a distraction for those
+brave enough to chain themselves to heavy machinery.
+“Men have come up to me, young men who said they were ready to lay
+down their lives,” Archambault said to a crowd in late August. From the
+beginning, he had feared someone would be killed (fortunately, no one
+was), and his message was one of life: “But I told them, no! We do not want
+
+that! We want you to live and prosper and be good fathers and
+grandfathers.”
+Indeed, Mni Wiconi and the spirit of #NoDAPL, enacted daily in camp
+life, embodied a brief vision of what Native life could be.
+“I think it’s a rebirth of a nation,” Faith Spotted Eagle said. “And I think
+that all of these young people here dreamed that one day they would live in
+a camp like this, because they heard the old people tell them stories of
+living along the river. They heard them talking about the campfires and the
+Horse Nation, and they’re actually living it. They’re living the dream.”58
+All one had to do was walk through camp to witness that dream. Flag
+Row—a half-mile procession of more than 300 Indigenous national flags
+that lined each side of the road—cut through the heart of camp. Starting at
+the north gate, where new arrivals checked in with camp security, it was the
+“main drag” of the “Indian city”—the tenth-largest city in North Dakota at
+its peak. Alcohol and drugs were strictly prohibited. Media were required to
+report to the media tent. No photographs of children, or of anyone, were
+permitted without consent. Nor was the recording of prayers or ceremonies.
+Facebook Hill rose beyond the main camp kitchen; a grassy knoll with the
+only decent cellphone reception in the entire camp, it was where people
+reconnected with loved ones. (Someone jokingly called it “little Brooklyn,”
+for all the white filmmakers from Brooklyn who congregated there.)
+The main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water,
+but the Cannon Ball Community Center opened its doors for showers.
+There was no electricity, but Prairie Knights Casino, the tribal casino two
+miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but
+Standing Rock paid for porta potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked,
+an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking of relations
+proliferated—of living and being in community according to Indigenous
+values—which for the most part kept people safe and warm.
+If you brought donations, you checked in at the main council fire.
+Supervised by Standing Rock elders, the council fire remained lit twentyfour hours a day. A steady rotation of young Native men, the firekeepers,
+fed logs to the fire at all hours, a humble but important duty. An Eyapaha (a
+town crier or emcee) handled the mic, announcing grand entries of visiting
+delegations, mealtimes, activities for children, missing or lost items, and
+guest speakers. At sunup and sundown, elders of Standing Rock and the
+Oceti Sakowin sang grandmother’s lullabies for the children and gave
+
+words of encouragement to Water Protectors. Next to the PA system stood
+several large fire pits with industrial-grade cooking pots, always boiling
+corn and soup. The main kitchen served three hot meals a day. (At its
+height, there were about thirteen free camp kitchens and a half dozen medic
+tents.) Elders and children ate first, following a meal prayer. If there were
+guests (and there were often delegations from around the world), they ate
+first. The donations tent was well stocked with sleeping bags, blankets,
+tents, socks, gloves, hats, boots, and so forth. Native families frequently
+arrived by the carload, sometimes wearing only T-shirts and gym shorts.
+Everyone was fed and clothed. Everyone had a place. At camp check-in,
+bodies were needed to cook, dig compost holes, chop wood, take care of
+children, give rides to Walmart, among other tasks. Many quit their jobs,
+instead making it their full-time work to cook and to keep others warm and
+safe. After all, one ceases to be Lakota if relatives or travelers from afar are
+not nurtured and welcomed. Generosity, Wowacantognake, is a fundamental
+Lakota virtue. And it was this Indigenous generosity—so often exploited as
+a weakness—that held the camp together.
+It was an all-ages affair in which youth played a major role, and there
+was a fully functioning day school. The camp was an unprecedented
+concentration of Indigenous knowledge keepers. Standing Rock Lakota
+language specialist Alayna Eagle Shield saw this. She went to every camp
+asking if they could share their knowledge with the children families
+brought with them. “From there,” Eagle Shield recalled, “I was told that we
+need a school and a place for children to be.”59 So she founded the Mní
+Wičhóni Nakíčižin Owáyawa, the Defenders of the Water School, a name
+chosen by the students. Education centered treaties, language, culture, and
+land and water defense. The curriculum of Indigenous song, dance, math,
+history, and science was less about indoctrinating youth to be good citizens
+of settler society. As Indigenous educator Sandy Grande points out, the
+Defenders of the Water School provided anticolonial education for
+liberation—how to live and be free and in good relation with others and the
+land and water.60
+If one was willing and able, there were nonviolent direct action trainings
+hosted daily. Mark Tilsen, an Oglala poet and teacher from Pine Ridge, led
+most of the direct action trainings. He possessed a biting but magnetic
+humor that added a playfulness to otherwise-serious trainings on nonviolent
+resistance. Dallas Goldtooth, comedian and organizer with Indigenous
+
+Environmental Network, lightheartedly referred to Tilsen as the camp’s
+“spirit animal” because nearly everyone knew him and turned to him for
+advice on actions. Almost every day, Tilsen read aloud and explained the
+Oceti Sakowin Camp principles to new arrivals, whose numbers typically
+ranged from a handful to several dozen. The rules, which applied to
+everyone, were scrawled on whiteboards and hand-painted signs:
+We are protectors.
+We are peaceful and prayerful.
+“Isms” have no place here.
+Here we all stand together.
+We are non-violent. We are proud to stand, no masks.
+Respect locals.
+No weapons or what could be construed as a weapon.
+Property damage does not get us closer to our goal.
+All campers must get an orientation.
+Direct action training is required for everyone taking action.
+We keep each other accountable to these principles.
+This is a ceremony—act accordingly.
+
+Campers were also directed to the legal tent, where they wrote a phone
+number in permanent marker on their forearms to call in case they were
+arrested. Volunteer lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and elsewhere
+provided free legal aid and kept in touch with arrestees.
+Prayer actions generally started with the call “Kikta po! Kikta po! Wake
+up! Wake up!”—a voice blaring over a megaphone as the sun rose. When
+there was an action planned for the day, an Eyapaha rode through the camp
+on a bicycle, a horse, or in the back of a pickup rousing people from
+slumber. “You didn’t come here to sleep. This ain’t a vacation. We came
+here to stop a pipeline!”
+At one action in mid October, the Two-Spirit Nation led the prayer and
+march. Police intercepted the caravan of cars and barred vehicle travel on a
+gravel road. Only foot traffic, they said. By the time the march arrived at
+the construction site, more than a hundred police officers with riot gear and
+sniper rifles, a dozen SUVs, and an armored personnel carrier had formed a
+police line. The Two-Spirit Nation offered tobacco and water to the land
+and marched toward the police line. The officers rebuffed them, telling the
+entire crowd to disperse over a megaphone. But where? It was surreal, but
+soon it became a normal experience. Unlike protest marches in the cities
+where there are bystanders, buildings, and plenty of media, the majority of
+
+#NoDAPL marches happened on backcountry roads where there was no
+CNN, just independent media like Democracy Now!, Unicorn Riot, and
+Indian Country Today. Sometimes the police outnumbered protestors—in
+the middle of nowhere! Because it was private property, Water Protectors
+couldn’t go as far as the ditch on the road; the fields were off limits. And
+there were certainly no bathrooms or water fountains to be found in the
+midday heat. That day, the march was a grueling eight miles, and an elder
+fainted from exhaustion.
+“What you’re doing here is wrong,” Brandon Sazue, the Crow Creek
+tribal chairman, approached the line of masked police as Water Protectors
+retreated once the action ended. “What we’re doing here is right, because
+we are not the ones [who are] trespassing. You are trespassing for big
+money. But we pray for you, we pray for your children.”
+Sazue was a man of his people. In 2009, the IRS attempted to seize
+7,100 acres of Crow Creek land—in Buffalo County, the poorest in the
+United States—for purported back payroll taxes. During the brutal South
+Dakota winter of 2009 to 2010, Sazue camped out on a portion of the land
+in protest of the sale. He joined the DAPL protests in August, providing
+tribal resources to the Crow Creek Riders, a group of youth horse riders. On
+October 27, Sazue was arrested during the police raid of the 1851 Treaty
+Camp.
+While the media foregrounded images of the camp’s leadership, often
+donning headdresses, and frequently men, it was common for Two-Spirited
+people and women to hold leadership roles in all aspects of camp life—
+from sitting on the general camp council (composed of elders and
+traditional leadership), to leading direct actions. Candi Brings Plenty, an
+Oglala trans and queer healthcare specialist, was the leader of Two-Spirit
+Nation at Oceti Sakowin camp. For Brings Plenty, “Two-Spirit” is “an
+umbrella term for Indigenous people who identify as LGBTQAI+.”
+Colonization imposed a gender binary that largely destroyed historically
+plural Indigenous gender formations and fluid Indigenous sexualities, which
+are much more dynamic and expansive than those of the hetero-nuclear
+family introduced by white Christian society. Prior to colonization, TwoSpirited people also held social and cultural significance among Indigenous
+societies, from performing naming ceremonies to adopting the roles and
+responsibilities of male-, female-, or nonbinary-gendered people. TwoSpirit Nation played a central role in camp life, and one that went far
+
+beyond merely calling out heteropatriarchy. “We have Two-Spirit folk in
+security, at the school, at the medics, at the kitchen, and I sit on the
+Council,” Brings Plenty explained. In other words, Two-Spirit Nation was
+represented in all aspects of everyday life at camp.61
+The vision of an anticolonial Indigenous world coexisting with nonIndigenous people has been overshadowed by violent police crackdowns.
+There were important political victories, but they were short lived, too late,
+and not enough to stop DAPL. On November 25, 2016, the Army Corps
+issued an evacuation order for Oceti Sakowin Camp, setting December 5 as
+the deadline. On December 4, the Army Corps announced that they would
+not grant DAPL the easement to cross the Missouri River, pending a more
+thorough environmental assessment. This temporary win coincided with the
+arrival of more than 4,000 veterans, who braved a whiteout blizzard to
+march to the barricade where police were mercilessly dousing Water
+Protectors with chemical weapons and water in freezing temperatures.
+Veterans also staged a forgiveness ceremony, asking Indigenous elders—
+Arvol Looking Horse, Faith Spotted Eagle, Phyllis Young, Paula Horne, Jon
+Eagle Sr., and Leonard Crow Dog—for forgiveness for the horrors the US
+military inflicted upon Indigenous peoples that continued with the police
+and military violence against unarmed protesters. It was vindication for the
+months of brutality. But it didn’t last long.
+While the punishment was collective, it proved effective at fomenting
+divisions. For months police blockaded Highway 1806, cutting off Standing
+Rock from the state of North Dakota and creating a strain between the
+camps and local community. Chairman Archambault asked Water
+Protectors to go home in December, in hopes of relieving the burden of the
+police checkpoints and constant influx of outsiders to the reservation. When
+Trump took office in January 2017, he expedited the environmental review
+process, giving the go-ahead for DAPL to drill under the Missouri River.
+With the camps largely evacuated, Standing Rock activist Chase Iron Eyes
+led a group called “Last Child Camp” to reclaim treaty land in response to
+Trump’s decision. Police quickly raided the camp, which was on private
+land, and arrested seventy-six, including Iron Eyes. In February, the Cannon
+Ball District and the Standing Rock Council passed resolutions calling for
+the evacuation of remaining campers at Sacred Stone and the defunct Oceti
+Sakowin Camp. It was a controversial move that pitted factions against
+each other at a critical juncture when unity was needed most.
+
+On February 22, 2017, the Army Corps, Morton County deputies, and
+North Dakota Highway Patrol forcefully evicted the remaining campers at
+Oceti Sakowin. The same day, the Bureau of Indian Affairs raided and
+evicted campers at Sacred Stone—the only police action to take place on
+reservation land, and one that contributed to mounting divisions between
+grassroots organizers and Standing Rock. Those divisions came to a head at
+a March 10 Native Nations Rise march in Washington, DC, when Water
+Protectors booed Archambault during his speech and confronted him as he
+left the rally. The march garnered 5,000 attendees and arrived on the heels
+of the larger Women’s March. Despite the smaller turnout, it was a unified
+showing of support for Standing Rock, even if some didn’t agree with its
+political leadership. There was also mounting disillusionment with the
+established political order, both Democrat and Republican, for selling out
+the movement under Obama, and now under Trump.
+“There’s only one resolution,” said Lewis Grassrope reflecting on the
+camp eviction and the march in Washington, DC. “Let us be who we are.
+Let us live. Let us be free.”
+By the time that the last Water Protector was led off the land in
+handcuffs, 832 had been arrested. Four Water Protectors face years in
+prison. Red Fawn Fallis faced charges for discharging a firearm (later
+dropped) when she was arrested during the October 27, 2016, Treaty Camp
+raid. The gun belonged to Heath Harmon, an FBI informant, who had
+infiltrated the camp and had a relationship with Fallis. As it has for all
+political struggles, the state created a new generation of political prisoners
+to discourage other potential movements. Fallis’s family was active in AIM
+and had been also surveilled by the FBI. In their day, Dakota political
+prisoner Leonard Peltier, who is currently serving two life sentences,
+represented the suppression of the Red Power movement. During the
+#NoDAPL movement, Obama once again turned his back on Indigenous
+peoples. Because he had already issued so many pardons (including, for
+example, Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera), and with so
+much pressure mounting from the horrific police violence against Water
+Protectors, many through Indian Country thought Obama would grant
+clemency to Peltier. But Obama denied his clemency application. And after
+#NoDAPL, there are even more Native political prisoners, more Leonard
+Peltiers: Redfawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison;
+Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to 36 months in federal
+
+prison; and Michael “Rattler” Markus and Dion Ortiz face years in federal
+prison.62
+Though not without its faults, the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin
+reawakened an Indigenous movement intent on making, and remaking, a
+world premised on Indigenous values, rather than on private ownership and
+heteropatriarchy. While Indigenous peoples committed themselves to
+caretaking relations, the police had also taken up their familiar role as
+caretakers of violence, attempting to snuff out the fires of resistance before
+they burned too hot or spread too far. But the fire of the prophesied Seventh
+Generation had been lit, and although the Oceti Sakowin campfire was
+ceremonially extinguished to mark the end of one form of resistance (and
+the beginning of another), its warm coals went on to rekindle the fires of
+Water Protectors’ home communities.
+For Lakotas, fire is also a gateway to the past, because it is around fires
+that histories are shared and ceremonies held. Now, the long tradition of
+Indigenous resistance also includes the story of #NoDAPL. But to
+understand it, we have to look further into the past: to the history of the
+land, the water, and its people, the Oceti Sakowin.
+
+The first pictograph of the 1880 Battiste Good (Brown Hat) winter count documents the arrival of Pte
+Ska Win, the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the most significant historical figure of the Oceti Sakowin
+who formalized the first treaty with the human and other-than-human worlds. Manuscript 2372: Box
+12: F6, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, National Anthropological
+Archives, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Suitland, Maryland.
+
+2
+
+Origins
+There are no two sides to the history of the United States and its relationship to people who have
+lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace
+people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives … What America has done is criminal. And
+they’re still doing it.
+—Elizabeth Cook-Lynn1
+
+There is one essential reason why Indigenous peoples resist, refuse, and
+contest US rule: land. In fact, US history is all about land and the
+transformation of space, fundamentally driven by territorial expansion, the
+elimination of Indigenous peoples, and white settlement. From its original
+1784 boundaries of the first thirteen colonies, the US rapidly expanded
+westward from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific coast, annexing nearly 2
+billion acres of Indigenous territory in less than a century. Most was west of
+the Mississippi River.
+This includes the Missouri basin, a massive circulatory system of
+streams, rivers, creeks, and tributaries that empties into its main artery, Mni
+Sose (the Missouri River). In Oceti Sakowin cosmology, Mni Sose begins
+everywhere the water falls from the sky to touch the earth and trickle into
+one of these waterways. The river is 2,466 miles long, with a drainage basin
+encompassing a massive 529,000 square miles, a landmass one-sixth the
+size of the continental United States. The Oceti Sakowin and the Indigenous
+nations with which it has shared territory, and has sometimes fought, are as
+much defined by Mni Sose as they are by their own political, cultural, and
+social relationship to its life-giving waters.
+In this world, water is life, and so too is the buffalo nation, the Pte
+Oyate. Vast buffalo herds once migrated according to the river’s seasonal
+ebbs and flows, followed by the hunting nations of the Northern Plains. At
+the center of this world is He Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything
+that is. If He Sapa is the heart of the earth, then Mni Sose is its aorta. It is
+
+from this country that the Oceti Sakowin emerged as a nation, a people, and
+gained its humanity.
+Much has been written about the history of the Missouri River. Yet, few
+histories have focused on the river’s role in the colonial project. Book titles
+such as Unruly River, River of Promise, River of Peril, and The Dark
+Missouri, as well as the settler nickname for the Missouri—“Old Misery,”
+for its frequent flooding and the property damage that ensued—depict the
+river as a deadly, treacherous, and inhospitable landscape.2 Early settlers
+often described the Missouri basin as an irrational and violent country,
+plagued by endless inter-Indigenous warfare; settlers saw Indigenous
+peoples as equally irrational and violent. “This is a delightful country,”
+wrote British trader Alexander Henry about the Northern Plains in 1800,
+“and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people
+on earth.”3
+European and US explorers, traders, and settlers dubbed the many
+nations here “the Sioux,” mythologizing them as the most hated, the most
+feared, and the most violent North American Indigenous people. Viewed as
+a noble warrior society, they have come to symbolize the violent
+hypermasculinity of the frontier and are the basis of the standard image of
+Indigenous culture as equestrians who lived in tipis, wore headdresses, and
+aimlessly wandered the land like the wild game they called kin. The
+University of North Dakota’s racist “Fighting Sioux” mascot (retired in
+2012), a disembodied head of a Native male warrior, represented such
+views. (Among the tribes in the state, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe stood
+alone in opposing it).4 The “Sioux warrior” myth is portrayed in the awardwinning film Dances with Wolves (1990). Such stereotypes, however, are
+not confined to the realm of popular culture. Prominent US historians such
+as Richard White portray the Sioux as a pillaging band of expansionists
+who violently expelled their Indigenous neighbors, and who never crossed
+west of the Missouri River—with no small irony—until the signing of the
+Declaration of Independence in 1776.5 In fact, these attempts to classify the
+Sioux as imperialist newcomers—a label that more accurately describes the
+United States—marked the Sioux as nomadic, rootless, unsettled, and
+malicious, which made their removal, genocide, and colonization more
+palatable.6 Oral histories and careful Indigenous record keeping, including
+Dakota and Lakota winter counts, show otherwise. Winter counts marked
+
+each year or winter by recording a significant event with a pictograph on
+hide (or sometimes on paper), accompanied by an oral recounting of the
+event, and constitute a meticulous record of family, individual, and larger
+national histories.7 US historians, however, have misinterpreted winter
+counts to support their claims that the Lakotas crossed the Missouri River
+and subsequently “discovered” the Black Hills sometime around 1776.8
+The Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations never called themselves
+“Sioux”—that term derives from an abbreviation of “Nadouessioux,” a
+French adoption of the Ojibwe word for “little snakes,” denoting the
+Ojibwe’s enemies to its west. Instead, they simply called themselves the
+“Oyate,” the “Nation,” or the “People,” and sometimes the “Oyate Luta”
+(the Red Nation); as a political confederacy, they called themselves the
+“Oceti Sakowin Oyate” (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires). Their
+geographical span was vast. The oldest Dakota-speaking nations were
+located mostly in the western Great Lakes forests, glacial lakes, and rivers.
+They are the Mdewakantonwan (the Sacred Nation that Lives by the
+Water); the Sissintonwan (the Medicine Nation that Lives by the Water); the
+Wahpetonwan (the Nation that Lives in the Forest); and the Wahpekute (the
+Nation that Shoots Among the Leaves).9 The Nakota-speaking nations are
+the caretakers of the middle territory that began on the eastern banks of the
+Missouri River. Their names came from their location in the camp horn:
+Ihanktonwan (the Nation that Camps at the End) and Ihanktonwanna (the
+Little Nation that Camps at the End). And the youngest and largest, the
+Lakota-speaking nations, covered the vast expanse of the Northern Plains
+west of the Missouri River, called Tintonwan (the Nation of the Plains).
+Among the Tintonwans, there are also seven divisions: the Oglala (the
+Nation that Scatters Their Own); the Sicangu (the Nation of the Burnt
+Thighs, also known as the Brulé); the Hunkpapa (the Nation at the Head of
+the Circle); the Mniconjou (the Nation that Plants by the Water); Itazipco
+(the Nation without Bows, or the Sans Arc); the Sihasapa (the Blackfeet
+Nation); and the Oohenupa (the Nation of Two Kettles).10
+Like most human societies, the origin stories of the Oceti Sakowin are as
+diverse as its people and the lands they continue to live with and protect. To
+name but a few examples, their origin histories include emergence from the
+earth—from the Wase (red clay); emergence from He Sapa; emergence
+from Bde Wakan (Spirit Lake or Mille Lacs); descent from the Wicahpi
+Oyate (the Star Nation); descent from the Pte Oyate (the Buffalo Nation);
+
+and westward and southern migrations from the Atlantic Seaboard or
+Central America. None of these origin stories are more or less true than
+others. What they have in common, however, is their collective significance
+in defining both a historical experience within a specific geography, and the
+moral universe of how one relates to others and the land. The origin stories
+contradict settler narratives that describe the Oceti Sakowin as “late
+arrivals” west of the Missouri River, at best; or as expansionists, at worst—
+driven, like their US counterpart, by purely economic motives to control
+river trade by violently displacing other Indigenous nations.
+In the absence of written law, according to Lakota author Luther
+Standing Bear, “a great tribal consciousness” reigned at the individual level
+in Oceti Sakowin societies. No human institution employed force or
+violence to compel behavior. Social conduct was based on mutual solidarity
+and kinship, in what Standing Bear calls Woucage, “our way of doing
+things.” The ultimate punishment for breaking group solidarity was exile,
+which “meant to lose identity or die.” An individual’s responsibility was
+first and foremost to ensure the survival of the collective. Decisions—
+concerning anything from hunting to travel to warfare—were made at the
+community level in the open council, a decentralized political authority that
+frequently rotated leadership, affording equal say, that is, to separate
+societies of men and of women and, in some cases, places of honor to
+Wintke societies, those who did not conform to the binary gender roles. An
+Oyate Okizu, or the assembly of the entire Oceti Sakowin, was called only
+for matters of great importance such as sun dances, or, in the late nineteenth
+century, the negotiation of treaties and repulsion of US invasion. In contrast
+to their own customary laws, Lakotas created the word Woope Wasicu to
+describe the white man’s law. Woope Wasicu described “the cruel
+equipment” of law—from armed soldiers and cops, to guns, cannons, balls
+and chains, and prisons. According to Luther Standing Bear, this kind of
+law “designated not order but force and disorder.”11 Next to the
+maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second
+duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice
+patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated
+Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo
+herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas,
+Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they
+
+cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was
+sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.
+For example, the Lakotas were by no means the only Indigenous nation
+with connections to the Black Hills. When different peoples combined
+through alliance (whether through the formation of kinship relations, or
+purely for survival), they often incorporated aspects of one another’s
+histories. Among the more than fifty Indigenous nations who possessed
+similar, often overlapping, relationships and claims to the Black Hills were
+the Arikara, Osage, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Pawnee, Mandan,
+Hidatsa, Kiowa, Ponca, Crow, Omaha, Winnebago, Cheyenne, Arapaho,
+and Blackfeet.12
+Like the countries that constitute the United Nations, the political
+authority of the Oceti Sakowin didn’t prevent them from sometimes warring
+with other Indigenous nations. Luther Standing Bear, commenting on
+Lakota warfare in 1931, admits as much. He notes how the United States
+criminalized the assertion of Indigenous political authority to make war and
+defend territory. “We kept our lands to ourselves,” he writes, “by making all
+other tribes stay away from us.” When whites began to fear the Oceti
+Sakowin’s political power, Standing Bear observed, “they called us
+Sioux.”13 In settler vernacular, “Sioux” became equivalent to “criminal”
+and was used to justify invasion and endless war. But, as Indigenous
+scholars and intellectuals have contended for the last two centuries, war,
+diplomacy, and sovereignty are just a few of the Oceti Sakowin’s many
+characteristics. Nonetheless, “Sioux” warfare, diplomacy, and sovereignty
+dominate settler histories of nineteenth-century Indigenous life on the
+Missouri River and in the Northern Plains. This is not because Indigenous
+nations are inherently militaristic, but because they had come to know the
+United States—which the Lakotas called “Milahanskan” (the nation of the
+long knives)—best through its army.
+The first Indigenous–US interactions on the Missouri River were
+military encounters. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson finalized the
+Louisiana Purchase from the French Republic: an annexation of 827 million
+acres. Louisiana Territory encompassed the entire Missouri River basin and
+more than doubled the territory of the fledgling United States. Shortly
+thereafter, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead a
+military expedition up the Missouri River, bearing arms, flags, and “gifts,”
+to claim the “new” land and its people. Their goal was to proclaim US
+
+sovereignty over the region and its nations, and to bring the Indigenous
+people into trade relations with the United States. And of all the Indigenous
+nations, Jefferson mentioned only “the Sioux” by name. “On that nation,”
+Jefferson ordered Lewis, “we wish most particularly to make a friendly
+impression, because of their immense power, and because we learn they are
+very desirous of being on the most friendly terms with us.”14
+The Corps of Discovery (a unit of the US Army) met several divisions of
+the Oceti Sakowin as they traveled upriver. After navigating the Big Bend
+of the Missouri (present-day Crow Creek and Lower Brule Reservations) in
+late September of 1804, the expedition was intercepted by a camp of
+Sicangus, a political subdivision of the Lakotas.15 As per custom, the
+Lakotas hailed the corps with a plume of smoke that rose in the northwest,
+signaling the expedition had been spotted. The Lakotas sought council and
+some form of payment to pass through their territory, but Lewis and Clark
+rebuffed the Lakotas’ assertion to determine who shall pass and at what cost
+—clearly disobeying Jefferson’s instructions “to make a friendly
+impression.”
+After eight days of failing to negotiate their passage without paying a
+toll, Lewis and Clark resorted to violence. According to John Ordway, an
+expedition volunteer, Clark informed the intransigent Lakota headman,
+Black Buffalo, that they were sent by Thomas Jefferson, who could “have
+them all distroyed [sic].”16 But, obviously surrounded and overwhelmed,
+Lewis and Clark’s threats were worthless. Because he led the negotiations
+between the Corps of Discovery and the Sicangus and he refused to let the
+expedition pass, Lewis and Clark took Buffalo Medicine (and possibly
+other leaders like him) hostage and to secure their passage north. (Buffalo
+Medicine was later released once the expedition was free from Lakota
+country.) Taking Indigenous hostages was common practice; Jefferson had
+earlier advised Lewis that “taking influential chiefs” or their children
+“would give some security to your party.”17 Reflecting on the encounter,
+Clark later wrote that the Lakotas were “the vilest miscreants of the savage
+race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri.” “Unless these
+people are reduced to order, by coercive measures, I am ready to pronounce
+that the citizens of the United States can never enjoy but partially the
+advantages which the Missouri presents,” he continued. “[The Sioux] view
+
+with contempt the merchants of the Missouri, whom they never fail to
+plunder, when in their power.”18
+Historians have uncritically taken Lewis and Clark’s testimony of that
+first encounter at face value: they were waylaid by a band of river pirates
+straight from the pages of a Robinson Crusoe fantasy novel. This was most
+recently retold in popular accounts like US historian Stephen Ambrose’s
+1997 bestselling book Undaunted Courage and documentarian Ken Burns’s
+2001 PBS film Lewis and Clark.19 But in their estimation, the Lakotas
+didn’t make much of the encounter. Lewis and Clark came and left, and the
+Lakotas continued living as before. This was a fairly routine engagement:
+merely a different flavor of whites traveling through their territory bearing
+flags and guns. According to Clark, even the downriver and more
+“peaceful” Ihanktonwan “invariably arrested the progress” of all traders
+traversing the river by exacting tolls and demanding more accommodating
+trade prices.20 However, for the United States this first interaction held
+great significance, and it profoundly shaped their feelings toward a nation
+they viewed as criminal “pirates of the Missouri.” As Oglala historian Craig
+Howe observes, this exchange “gave rise to storm clouds of deceit that have
+in some sense darkened two centuries” of Lakota–US relations.21
+But for the historian Jeffrey Ostler, the foundation for genocide in US
+Indian policy had in fact been laid decades earlier, in the 1787 Northwest
+Ordinance.22 The ordinance opened up the area north of the Ohio River and
+in the Great Lakes region for settlement, creating territories that became the
+states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Additionally,
+Article 3 stated (of the “Indians”) that “in their property, rights, and liberty,
+they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars
+authorized by Congress.” While, as Ostler observes, this “did not call for
+genocide in the first instance,” it legalized genocidal war in the event that
+land cessions could not be achieved through “peaceful” means and
+Indigenous people were unwilling to submit to US authority.”23
+The 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which Chief
+Justice John Marshall spelled out the rights of the United States to
+Indigenous lands, also drew upon a centuries-old doctrine. Indigenous
+peoples, he ruled, only possessed “occupancy” rights, meaning their lands
+could be taken by powers that “discovered” them: the “Doctrine of
+Discovery.” The origin of this notion was a fifteenth-century papal bull
+
+known as the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that distinguished Christian
+from non-Christian nations. The latter were regarded as little more than
+“savage” peoples awaiting the gift of European civilization, and according
+to Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb, the United States interpreted the
+doctrine as describing Indigenous peoples as “politically non-existent,
+partially or entirely.”24 Therefore, Indigenous title to the land could not be
+extinguished where it did not exist. Commenting on the Johnson decision,
+Onondaga international jurist Tonya Gonnella Frichner observes, “The
+newly formed United States needed to manufacture an American Indian
+political identity and concept of Indian land that would open the way for the
+United States in its westward colonial expansion.”25 This founding myth
+eventually became known as “Manifest Destiny.”
+In 1807, following the expedition, Jefferson appointed Clark brigadier
+general and Indian agent for Louisiana Territory, and he served as an Indian
+Affairs agent under the War Department until his death in 1838. The
+expedition and the annexation of land west of the Mississippi was a part of
+a rapid push westward, and the Louisiana Purchase was a landmark
+achievement. For one, it provided the means by which southern plantation
+capitalists could expand their “cotton kingdom” to new markets—hence the
+importance of imposing trade relations with the Indigenous nations.
+Without expansion, the plantation system was doomed to fail.26 Jefferson
+envisioned an “Empire of Liberty” for the lands west of the Mississippi;
+one that required the expansion of Black slavery and the transformation of
+Indigenous land into private property for advancing a yeoman farming
+empire. In this way, the expansion of the plantation system coincided with
+Indigenous dispossession and removal.
+Jefferson saw the Louisiana Territory as a partial solution to the “Indian
+problem”—the problem being that the “Indian tribes” still resided on lands
+coveted by the United States. His primary targets were the so-called “Five
+Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and
+Seminole—and his intention was to break up and ultimately dissolve these
+eastern nations. Because these nations had become slaveowners with farms
+and plantations, like their white neighbors, their system of land tenure
+resembled a claim to permanence. Thus, they had to be departed. And new
+lands in the West offered a new opportunity for eastern Indigenous removal.
+For example, Section 15 of the 1804 Louisiana Territorial Act afforded that
+“the President of the United States is hereby authorized to stipulate with
+
+any Indian tribes owning lands on the east side of the Mississippi, and
+residing thereon, for an exchange of lands, the property of the United
+States, on the west side of the Mississippi, in case the said tribes shall
+remove and settle thereon.” Jefferson wanted to further concentrate eastern
+Indigenous nations into ever-diminishing territories. By making their wild
+game, land, and resources scarce, he could force them to either
+“incorporate” or “remove beyond the Mississippi.”27
+Dakotas, Nakotas, and Lakotas had been trading with the French and
+British for decades by the time the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived. By
+the early 1800s, the fur trade had enveloped Northern Plains life (the
+Europeans also brought the Bible, the gun, and disease), and the Lakotas
+had a vested interest in maintaining a foothold in the river trade; they
+certainly didn’t consent to the US claim over the land and waterway.28 But
+the Lakotas never saw themselves as owning the river; on the contrary, it
+was to the river that they belonged. The many centuries they spent living in
+relationship to the land and water reinforced this understanding. And by
+1804 they also belonged to the river trade, both economically and
+politically, making the river a different source of their livelihood and
+survival.
+Early settlers and traders heavily relied on Indigenous labor and
+patronage for trapping and hunting, while Indigenous societies in turn relied
+on trade goods such as cloth, guns, ammunition, knives, iron cooking
+utensils, and food items.29 From the early colonial times through the end of
+the nineteenth century, the fur trade was dominated by rival trading firms
+(and rival European colonizers), who encouraged sporadic inter-Indigenous
+trade wars. From 1806 to 1835, US Indian policy introduced a factory
+system of trade houses to curb the criminal behavior of these white traders,
+but the policy had little effect, because the US government and traders
+themselves participated in the same criminal enterprise of trespass and
+theft.30 All of these companies were in the business of trading beaver pelts,
+to be sold on the European and US markets; however, by the 1830s beaver
+populations had been all but exterminated.
+Historians and archeologists largely view Indigenous peoples as
+responsible for the decline of fur-bearing animals in the Northern Plains,
+and the adoption of horse culture increased the ability of Indigenous
+peoples to hunt buffalo.31 But their capabilities never compared to the
+
+killing efficiency of white trappers and hunters. For example, the killing
+efficiency of the “Rocky Mountain system” of trapping, dominant in the
+early nineteenth century, rapidly depleted fur-bearing animals. Made up of
+heavily armed company employees, these units knowingly trespassed into
+Lakota and Arikara territories, fortifying their positions and trade routes as
+they advanced.32 According to Indigenous custom, no one was barred from
+hunting for subsistence and survival. But they did place restrictions on
+whites who hunted for profit; thus, these highly romanticized frontiersmen
+were in fact little more than poachers. As beaver populations declined and
+demand for their pelts decreased, buffalo robes were quick to fill their
+place. Yet when US companies began to bypass Indigenous peoples and
+dominate the trade, buffalo herds, like the beaver, were all but exterminated,
+from the 1870s to the 1880s. This expropriation went hand in hand with
+military-sponsored extermination campaigns, which began in 1865.33
+Taking only the hides, white hunters not only left buffalo carcasses to rot on
+the plains, but also poisoned them with strychnine to kill off coyotes,
+wolves, and other scavengers—and sometimes starving Native people.34
+Estimates place the precontact North American buffalo population at 25 to
+30 million. It took settlers nearly a century to exterminate the herds in the
+east, forcing the survivors of the holocaust, much like their human kin, west
+of the Mississippi River. Annihilating the remaining 10 to 15 million in the
+Great Plains took just two decades.35
+These were acts of genocide. For genocide encompasses much more than
+merely acts committed during war, as most US historians believe. The 1948
+UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
+Genocide defines the intent of genocide as “to destroy, in whole or in part, a
+national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Examples include, but are not
+limited to, murder, torture, or the deliberate deprivation of resources needed
+for physical survival, like clean water, food (e.g., buffalo), clothing, shelter
+or medical services. This definition also includes actions targeting women
+specifically, like involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of
+marriage, and long-term separation of men and women, all of which
+threaten the ability to produce future generations. (Another tactic is the
+forcible transfer of children.) United States policy has subjected Indigenous
+peoples to all of these genocidal acts. Some of which are historical, others
+are ongoing. “Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the
+
+genocide convention,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.36 Although
+the genocide convention is not retroactive (it only became applicable in the
+United States in 1988, the year the US Senate ratified it), it is a useful lens
+for studying Indigenous history.
+The fur trading forts were rampant with sexual violence. White traders,
+low-level laborers, and soldiers often stopped by for a drunken “frolic,”
+which involved demanding the sexual services of Indigenous women’s
+bodies—with or without their consent. Access to whiskey, treaty annuities,
+and trade goods sometimes came with the expectation that Indigenous men
+should forfeit their daughters’, sisters’, and wives’ bodies to white men (as
+if Indigenous women’s bodies were theirs to give), and soldiers also
+frequently raped Indigenous women whom they had taken prisoner. “To
+celebrate victory, troopers often rounded up the prettiest girls to be passed
+around among the officers, leaving the enlisted men with the less attractive,
+older women,” wrote Sicangu scholar Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve in her
+account, based on family oral histories of the well-known abuses against
+Lakota women at Fort Platte (in operation from 1840 to 1846).37 Many
+Indigenous activists today have identified “man camps,” the transient allmen communities of oil and gas workers, as hubs for the exploitation of
+Indigenous women through trafficking and sex work.38 In some ways,
+trading forts were the first man camps—the vanguards of capital that
+extracted wealth not only from the land, but also through the conquest of
+Indigenous women’s bodies. Later, these trade forts also became border
+towns, the white-dominated settlements that today ring Indigenous
+reservations.
+The fur trade also violently transformed gender relations. As Driving
+Hawk Sneve recounts, Lakota society didn’t adhere to monogamous sexual
+values, possessed nothing on par with the puritanical Christian views of
+sexual conduct or marriage, and considered property in the home to be
+owned by the women.39 But Lakota women who married white traders were
+placed under the protection and control of a patriarch (a practice known as
+“coverture”). Descending from a society where women owned all the
+property in the home, losing control of their property, their bodies, and their
+children, and being placed under the dominion of a white patriarch was a
+harrowing, alien experience.40 Maybe this should come as no surprise. In
+white society women and children held little or no political authority and
+
+were little more than domestic servants. Diplomacy, trade, and war—the
+public sphere—were the sole privilege of men. This included the sale and
+trade of hides at European or US forts along the Missouri River, unlike the
+Indigenous systems they had replaced, in which trade, exchange, and the
+sharing of material wealth was intended to strengthen kinship relations,
+rather than a market economy and private ownership. During the fur trade,
+Indigenous women labored to prepare the buffalo hides, but they didn’t
+“own” the hides sold to whites because the hunting and sale of those hides
+was a male-dominated business. And white traders often owned or
+“married” multiple Indigenous women to increase their access to the
+women’s relatives—and their trade markets—or to sell her off to others. In
+this sense, the subordination of Indigenous women was lucrative for a
+trader and increased his social standing.41
+One of these men was the French Canadian trader Toussaint
+Charbonneau, who is famous for joining Lewis and Clark in November
+1804, when the expedition camped among the Mandans at Fort Mandan. He
+offered up his services and those of his “wife,” a Shoshone woman by the
+name of Sacagawea, as interlocutors and interpreters for Indigenous peoples
+they would encounter upriver. Although Sacagawea has surpassed
+Charbonneau in fame for her aid to the expedition, little is known about her
+other than her services to white men. Captured by Hidatsas at the age of
+thirteen, Sacagawea was one of many women Charbonneau purchased
+throughout his life.42 Although she bore him children, Sacagawea was little
+more than chattel to Charbonneau—a piece of property he sometimes
+resented, and at others physically abused.43 And it wasn’t only Sacagawea
+whom he subjected to violence. In May 1795, while working for the
+Montreal-based North West Company, Charbonneau was sent to pick up
+supplies at a trading post near Lake Manitou. According to the journal of
+John Macdonell, a North West Company clerk, an elder Ojibwe woman
+caught Charbonneau “in the act of committing Rape upon her Daughter.”
+Furious, the woman stabbed Charbonneau with a canoe awl, “a fate he
+highly deserved for his brutality.”44
+Like Charbonneau, white traders, explorers, soldiers, and settlers
+believed they possessed the right to trespass freely across Indigenous
+territory, and they also believed they possessed unrestricted access to
+Indigenous women’s bodies and their children. Muscogee jurist Sarah Deer
+argues that rape “can be employed as a metaphor for the entire concept of
+
+colonialism” because it is not only experienced individually but is also part
+of an ongoing structure of domination—one with a beginning, but no end.45
+More so than Indigenous men, the subordination of Indigenous women was
+about realizing profits in the fur trade. Violence against Native women
+undermined their customary political authority and used their bodies to
+create profit. As noted above, unlike their white counterparts, whose bodies
+were used for sexual reproduction, Indigenous women’s bodies increased
+white traders’ access to new markets through their kin—and by extension,
+land, capital, and political and economic influence. Thus, while Indigenous
+women did bear children for white men, their main use was for securing the
+future of white settlement. As Athabascan scholar Dian Million puts it,
+“Gender violence marks … the evisceration of Indigenous nations.”46
+White traders and trappers appropriated Indigenous women’s bodies as
+much as they had appropriated the wealth of the land by harvesting and
+selling the skins of animals. The two practices went hand in hand.
+But this was only one component of settler society’s attack on
+Indigenous women’s political authority. With women already shut out of the
+fur trade, the treaties, which barred Indigenous women from participation in
+this specific realm of diplomacy, offered an externally imposed means to
+recognize Indigenous men’s political authority.47 From 1805 to 1873, the
+United States made thirty-five treaties and agreements with various political
+divisions of the Oceti Sakowin—or, as they became known in treaty
+parlance, “the Sioux Nation of Indians.” Not one woman was allowed to
+“touch-the-pen,” place an “x-mark,” or formally consent to any land
+cessions, peace agreements, or political relationships with the United
+States.48 By the time the Oceti Sakowin had been forcefully confined to
+reservations in the 1890s, Indigenous women had been completely confined
+to the domestic sphere, while Indigenous men occupied the primary roles in
+the reservation political economy, including as reservation police, political
+leaders, and traders.49 Gender divisions were sometimes enforced by
+military rule, and the boarding school system, which was controlled by the
+military like the reservations, further entrenched these divisions, ripping
+children from their families and educating young girls and boys on their
+proper places in a “civilized Christian society”: homemaking for the girls,
+and wage labor for the boys.50 Finally, in 1924—after Indigenous peoples
+had achieved a relative degree of “civilization”—the United States granted
+
+them citizenship, annexing both Indigenous lands and lives into the US
+nation-state. It was not only within the home that Indigenous women’s
+political authority been domesticated, but also in the settler nation as a
+whole.
+This upheaval of gender relations significantly undermined the political
+traditions of the Oceti Sakowin. After all, it was a woman who formalized
+the first compact—or treaty—with the human and other-than-human world.
+Pte Ska Win, White Buffalo Calf Woman—the most significant historical
+figure in Oceti Sakowin history—established not only the basis of
+customary and ceremonial laws of humans, but also how humans would
+exist in correct relations to the Pte Oyate and the nonhuman world. In his
+earliest entry on his winter count, the Sicangu historian Brown Hat depicts
+White Buffalo Calf Woman as a white buffalo arriving in the center of a
+camp circle in the first decade of the tenth century. Above her are the Calf
+Pipe, a yucca plant, and a cornstalk. To the right, in English, Brown Hat
+lists the various animal nations the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought into
+formal relations with the Oceti Sakowin: elk, deer, antelope, buffalo,
+beaver, and wolves. Corn kernels fall from her udders into water, making
+the connection between humans, plants, animals, the earth, and water.51
+Therefore, no one had the right to cede these relations to the land, water,
+plants, and animals—because those relations were grounded in the first
+compact, the first treaty with Pte Ska Win. (This is why Arvol Looking
+Horse, the nineteenth-generation keeper of this Calf Pipe, led the prayer
+marches at #NoDAPL to honor those original instruction and the Oceti
+Sakowin’s first commitments.)
+To gain access to Indigenous lands, white men had used Indigenous men
+to break communal land practices and undermine Indigenous women’s
+political authority. As a result, Indigenous women are largely absent from
+early historical narratives.52 Yet their power posed an obstacle to US
+annexation of Indigenous lands.53 It should come as no surprise that
+#NoDAPL was led primarily by Indigenous women, from youth leaders,
+such as Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Zaysha Grinnell, Tokata Iron Eyes, and
+Jasilyn Charger; to women like LaDonna BraveBull Allard, Phyllis Young,
+and Faith Spotted Eagle.
+Zaysha Grinnell, a fifteen-year-old citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa
+Arikara Nation, the descendants of Sacagawea, successfully petitioned her
+tribal council in March 2016 to oppose DAPL. She described the scene
+
+faced by her nation during the oil boom as similar to the one confronted by
+her ancestors during the fur trade, two centuries ago:
+When these oil companies come in, they bring in the men … These men bring with them the man
+camps, and with that comes violence and sex trafficking. Indigenous women and girls near the camps
+are really affected by this and we are not going to put up with it. Making more girls into leaders,
+because we witness it firsthand, is so important.54
+
+As the first entry of capitalism in the Upper Missouri, the fur trade,
+spreading through existing Indigenous networks, brought with it apocalypse
+in the form of smallpox. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived, the European
+disease had already devastated the Missouri River Indigenous peoples
+several times, most likely being introduced by French and British traders.
+The advent of steamboats greatly increased the spread of smallpox. In 1824
+Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers, a construction branch of
+the military, to regulate the navigation of rivers and harbors. By 1838
+Congress had assigned the Army Corps to pull snags and clear the river for
+steamboat traffic coming from Saint Louis. The federal government
+assumed its authority over navigable waterways under the Constitution’s
+commerce clause—the same clause that also regulated trade with
+Indigenous nations. Indian affairs, under the supervision of the War
+Department, was tasked with the creation and management of federally
+subsidized trading posts to undercut British, Spanish, and French trade and
+bolster US influence over Indigenous nations.55 The increase in steamboat
+traffic intensified the fur trade; and the fur trade in turn intensified
+commerce and, therefore, US authority over the river. As R. G. Robertson
+points out, the fur trade “was the primary means by which smallpox reached
+the Indians in the interior.”56 In other words, the spread of smallpox and
+other diseases coincided with an intensification of colonial invasion.
+Steamships transporting treaty annuities, ammunition, Indian agents,
+traders and soldiers to Missouri River forts and trading posts also brought
+disease and death. The consequences of their passage brought pure horror to
+Indigenous nations. In the summer of 1837, an American Fur Company
+steamboat, the St. Peter’s, traveled from Saint Louis transporting trade
+goods and Indigenous treaty annuities; it was, in turn, to collect Indigenousharvested buffalo hides. It also knowingly carried, in its human cargo, the
+smallpox virus.
+
+At Fort Clark, where the Mandans lived, along the Missouri River, the
+deadly virus arrived on June 19, 1837, via the St. Peter’s. As early as April,
+the crew had seen signs of the disease among themselves, but they
+nevertheless unloaded treaty annuities and loaded buffalo robes onto the
+ship that day. Smallpox, too, was unloaded, as the infected crew embarked
+on a drunken “frolic” with the Mandans. Within twenty-five days, the
+Mandans showed the first signs of infections. The only ones spared were
+elders who had built up an immunity, and who were already scarred from
+previous outbreaks. Children and adults writhed and stung from intense
+fevers. Putrid, hideous sores filled with pus, scarring them for life—if they
+survived. Francis A. Chardon, a fur trader at the fort, stopped counting the
+dead “as they die so fast it is impossible.” To end the suffering, parents
+killed their children; friends, relatives, and lovers killed each other; and
+some committed suicide. The smell of decaying corpses was discernable
+from miles away.57
+Many have speculated that Indigenous peoples were incapable of
+understanding infection and the spread of disease. What is clear from
+Chardon’s journals is that Indigenous peoples knew the source of their
+affliction—the fur trade and the trading forts—and sought retribution
+against the traders and the fur trade itself. “We are badly situated,” wrote
+Chardon, “as we are threatened to be Murdered by the Indians every
+instant.” Indigenous peoples knew traders and explorers sometimes carried
+smallpox or cowpox with them in vials for inoculations. George Catlin, a
+white painter and traveler of the American West, recounted a story he heard
+among the Pawnees that a trader threatened unleashing smallpox upon them
+if they didn’t submit to his will: “He would let the smallpox out of a bottle
+and destroy the whole [lot] of them.”58 “The Sioux had it in contemplation
+… to murder us in the spring,” Lewis wrote while he and Clark wintered
+with the Mandans in 1805 and 1805, “but were prevented from making the
+attack, by our threatening to spread the smallpox, with all its horrors among
+them.”59
+Accurate Indigenous population data does not exist, but some studies
+suggest that Indigenous nations with closer contact to the whites had
+increased exposure to diseases. These nations, such as the Mandans at Fort
+Clark, had positioned themselves as brokers in the fur trade, often settling
+near trading forts or allowing trade posts in or near their villages. Diseases
+were quick to spread in these intimate river communities, making
+
+quarantine or flight nearly impossible. Some calculations estimate that from
+1780 to 1877, Indigenous river nations lost around 80 percent of their
+populations, with the Mandan, Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee experiencing
+almost 90 percent population loss. Buffalo-hunting nations on the Northern
+Plains from 1780 to 1877 experienced a 40 percent population decline
+overall; among them, this figure approached 80 percent for the Assiniboine,
+Atsina, and Comanche. While smallpox epidemics arrived again and again
+to the Plains nations—1778, 1781, 1801—the 1837 outbreak was the most
+devastating for those along the Missouri River, nearly wiping out the
+Mandans and forcing them to join together with the Hidatsas and Arikaras.
+(The Lakotas and Dakotas, however, largely escaped the outbreak because
+of prior inoculation and by avoiding trading posts after learning of the
+epidemic.)60 In 1849 cholera killed about one-fourth of the Pawnees, along
+with many Lakotas. The last major smallpox epidemic in the region
+occurred in 1871, killing thousands of Assiniboines and Blackfeet.61
+Turning the river into profit required little capital investment in
+Indigenous lives, as long as the trade goods and annuities continued to flow.
+But it did require the continual extraction of furs. The employment of
+Indigenous societies as trappers, hunters, and patrons was the first effort at
+turning the river into a source of wealth. But the Missouri River wasn’t a
+“middle ground” scenario where all parties were equals, even when the
+British and French dominated trade. A popular convention in US history,
+the “middle ground” thesis posits that in some cases, such as the fur trade,
+Indigenous and white people found common ground in forms of trade
+where one group was not allowed to assert too much control or influence
+over the other.62 Lost in these imaginary and ahistorical situations, however,
+is the simple fact that early European and US colonization, in all its forms,
+was fundamentally extractive and imperial. Lakotas and Dakotas did
+actively compete with other Indigenous nations for control over the river
+trade, but such conflict never approached the holocaust brought by disease
+and the calculated violence of the US military and traders.
+The Oceti Sakowin had good reason to despise the imposition of white
+traders and US forts. As the fur trade peaked, the Oceti Sakowin east and
+west of the Missouri began to wage defensive wars to expel the invaders
+whom they rightfully blamed for the disappearing buffalo and other animal
+kin. Foremost among their grievances was the devastation inflicted by white
+traders, emigrants traversing the land, and the increasing US military
+
+presence. Each was a foreboding sign of white encroachment. Instead of
+justice, however, what they got was a “peace” through the permanence of
+war.
+
+Rochelle Bullhead wears a penny dress during the October 27, 2016 police raid on the 1851 Treaty
+Camp. Photo by Linsey Norton.
+
+3
+
+War
+The whole world is coming.
+A Nation is coming,
+A Nation is coming.
+The Eagle has brought the message to the Nation …
+Over the whole earth they are coming.
+The Buffalo are coming,
+The Buffalo are coming.
+—“Maka Sitomaniya Olowan,”
+Lakota Ghost Dance Song, 18901
+
+The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the
+specific form of colonialism whereby an imperial power seizes Native
+territory, eliminates the original people by force, and resettles the land with
+a foreign, invading population. Unlike other forms of colonialism in which
+the colonizers rule from afar and sometimes leave, settler colonialism
+attempts to permanently and completely replace Natives with a settler
+population. The process is never complete, and the colonial state’s methods
+for gaining access to new territories change over time, evolving from a
+program of outright extermination to one of making Indigenous peoples
+“racial minorities” and “domestic dependent nations” within their own
+lands, and of sacrificing Indigenous lands for resource extraction. But even
+if elimination strategies evolve to appear more humane or ethical, “the
+question of genocide,” writes anthropologist Patrick Wolfe, “is never far
+from discussions of settler colonialism.”2
+Indigenous elimination, in all its orientations, is the organizing principle
+of settler society. Unlike the European Holocaust, which had a beginning
+and an end, and targeted humans alone, Indigenous elimination, as a
+practice and formal policy, continues today, entailing the wholesale
+destruction of nonhuman relations. Today’s state violence and surveillance
+
+against Water Protectors is a continuation of the Indian Wars of the
+nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that the law enforcement agency
+that led the siege against the #NoDAPL camps in order to protect DAPL
+construction, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, inherited the legacy
+of the infamous Indian fighter and Seventh Cavalry general George
+Armstrong Custer. Present-day Mandan, North Dakota, a white-dominated
+border town to Standing Rock and the county seat of Morton County, is
+seven miles north of Fort Abraham Lincoln, where Custer was stationed to
+secure the passage of the Northern Pacific Railroad across the Missouri
+River and through Oceti Sakowin territory.
+Bloody wars of conquest defined the period following the United States’
+assertion of control over the river trade, lasting for nearly half of the
+nineteenth century. Its goal was to control the river, and then the entire
+Missouri River basin (especially the fertile buffalo hunting grounds in the
+western Powder River country). Following the Civil War, the Oceti
+Sakowin’s relationship with the Missouri River was increasingly defined by
+avoidance, because the river had since been enflamed by invasion: violence,
+death, and disease. The escalation of the river trade brought unwanted
+changes, such as an increased US presence through the construction of
+military and trade forts, and an intensifying assault on rapidly thinning
+buffalo herds.
+Initially, Indigenous subsistence hunting, gathering, and agriculture had
+provided the means to effectively resist settler encroachment. But by
+separating Indigenous producers from the land and attempting to make
+them dependent on treaty annuities or cash economies, the colonizers
+waged total war on Indigenous life. The Oceti Sakowin were not the first to
+confront US total war. Haudenosaunees, for instance, call every US
+commander in chief “town destroyer”—a title bestowed on the first US
+president, George Washington, who ordered a bloody, punitive campaign
+that burned forty Haudenosaunee towns in New York during the
+Revolutionary War. Haudenosaunee cornfields were also burned to thwart
+the reclamation of the land and impose starvation. To consummate
+possession by mixing blood and soil, the troops responsible for razing the
+Haudenosaunee towns were afterward rewarded with title to Indigenous
+lands.3
+In a very real sense, the founding of the United States was a declaration
+of war against Indigenous peoples. But to formally declare war would have
+
+been to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ status among the “civilized” or
+“Christian” nations. On the other hand, an undeclared war was a “savage
+war,” in which the rules of “civilized war” were suspended. US army
+historian Andrew Birtle reports that the military academy at West Point
+studies US Indian Wars only in its course on the law, and in “the same
+manner as it did the treatment of guerrillas and actively hostile civilian
+populations in civilized warfare.” The implication was “that soldiers were
+free to employ the harshest measures necessary to subdue them.”4
+In other words, the US Indian Wars developed the tactics and strategies
+that would inform US counterinsurgency operations abroad. As Chickasaw
+scholar Jodi Byrd argues, “the United States propagates empire not through
+frontiers but through the production of a paradigmatic Indianness.”5 As the
+US military became professionalized following the Civil War, these lessons
+were passed down informally, though most never became written doctrine.
+And as anthropologist Laleh Khalili argues, they “became the necessary, if
+unwritten, manual for subsequent overseas asymmetric warfare, in the
+Philippines, the Caribbean, and Latin America.”6 These included techniques
+like the use of native scouts, the establishment of reservations to control and
+monitor native fighters and civilians, and attacks on villages to undermine
+native economies.
+But because Indigenous peoples are not seen as full sovereigns under US
+or international law, Indigenous resistance to colonialism—even if for selfdefense—is considered criminal, much as it was in places throughout the
+Americas, Africa, and more recently in Palestine.7 Libraries have been
+filled with volumes written by armchair historians, colonial apologists, and
+scholars of all stripes—too many to name here—on Northern Plains
+Indigenous warfare. Very few researchers, however, have actually
+questioned the premises of waging just wars on the part of Indigenous
+nations against US empire. A question that many historians have
+entertained—did the Oceti Sakowin have a right to defend itself with armed
+force?—is not posed here. The simple truth is that Indigenous nations, like
+all nations, possess the right to defend themselves, and how a people choose
+to defend themselves cannot be placed neatly into categories of “right” and
+“wrong.” Survival by any means necessary is an act of resistance.
+It was through war and self-defense that the Oceti Sakowin made their
+most historic agreements with the United States: the 1851 and 1868 treaties
+of peace. In 1849 Congress transferred the Bureau of Indian Affairs from
+
+the Department of War to the Department of Interior, a newly created
+federal bureaucracy dedicated to the management of wildlife, public lands,
+and the conservation of natural resources. Indian affairs have remained
+there ever since. The shift marked a new direction in Indian policy that
+emphasized “peace” while explicitly promoting the “civilizing mission.”
+“Peace and friendship” treaties had already placed the various divisions of
+the Oceti Sakowin exclusively “under the protection of the United States of
+America, and of no other nation, power, or sovereign” (in 1805, 1815 and
+1825), but they never ceded large amounts of territory or drastically
+diminished Oceti Sakowin political authority.8
+The Oceti Sakowin possessed significant military and political power, so
+it is unlikely this Indigenous nation viewed treaties with the United States
+as acquiescing to a superior sovereign power. This began to change after
+decades of the fur trade and diseases exacted their toll on the Northern
+Plains ecology and Indigenous nations. By the time of the peace policy,
+thousands of Lakotas had already withdrawn west of the Missouri into the
+Powder River country to avoid the unfolding apocalypse brought on by the
+river trade. In the east traders had swindled the Dakotas out of land and
+treaty annuities, reducing them to starvation and creating the conditions for
+an Indigenous uprising. In some areas, the once-numerous buffalo nations
+that blackened the Missouri River valley had been all but wiped out, and
+elsewhere they had been totally exterminated. Infectious disease—cholera,
+measles, and smallpox outbreaks—arrived with the white invasion of the
+West, which swept through Pawnee, Crow, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho
+hunting grounds and into Oregon Territory.
+In 1847 Brigham Young led an exodus of tens of thousands of Mormons
+to settle Indigenous lands in Utah, while the discovery of gold in California
+in 1849 and later in Montana in 1853 added to the westward white flood. In
+1846 a group of Sicangus and Oglalas in Powder River country demanded
+payment for the damages that the increased overland travel had inflicted on
+the land: the depletion of game, the clearing of scarce timber, and the
+spreading of disease.9 They got escalated military occupation instead. The
+US military found it impossible to control the waves of white settlers and
+mounting Indigenous indignation. The year the peace policy was declared,
+the United States established a fort at the confluence of the North Platte and
+Laramie rivers to address the problem. Fort Laramie thus became the site
+for them to pursue “peace” by means of increased military occupation in
+
+Powder River country. Strategically positioned at the point where the
+overland trail trespassed through the territory of the last remaining large
+buffalo herds, the fort was a symbol of increasing US presence and
+authority.
+The vision for the military outpost came from the Upper Platte Indian
+agent Thomas Fitzpatrick, a leading advocate of peace by military
+occupation.10 As part of his vision for peace, Fitzpatrick hoped to advance
+US interests by securing a wide-ranging inter-Indigenous peace treaty to
+definitively establish Indigenous territory, guarantee safe passage for
+overland travelers, and secure land cessions. The Plains nations called a
+mass council. For three weeks in September 1851, tens of thousands from
+the Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Gros Ventre, Blackfeet, Assiniboine,
+Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Dakota nations met with US
+treaty commissioners at Horse Creek, thirty-six miles downriver of Fort
+Laramie. The first Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 was signed by all parties,
+ensuring the right of the United States to build wagon roads and railroads,
+and payment of $50,000 for fifty years for damages caused by the overland
+emigrations.11 Perhaps demonstrating the commitment of the United States
+to this “peace” policy, the Senate limited the period of treaty annuities to
+ten years, with the possibility of a five-year renewal. The amendment was
+sent back to the Plains nations for approval, and then back to the Senate,
+where it was never ratified. Regardless, the United States paid the $50,000
+in annuities for the next fifteen years.12 The spirit of peace, however, was
+short-lived and the treaty was deeply flawed.
+Six headmen of the Oceti Sakowin signed the treaty, presumably with
+the understanding that the emigrant depredations would cease and that the
+United States would live up to its commitments. The Oceti Sakowin
+representatives, however, protested over having to select a single “head
+chief” to represent all the nations in the treaty negotiations because it
+contradicted the decentralized political structure more familiar to them,
+which allowed each division to select its own representatives. This
+configuration offended the autonomy previously possessed by each political
+division. Mato Wayuhi (Conquering Bear), a Sicangu, was arbitrarily
+chosen by the Oceti Sakowin councils as a representative of the 1851 Fort
+Laramie Treaty, but he protested his appointment because of his own young
+age—he was fifty years old, not yet an elder—and lack of experience.13 The
+selection of “treaty chiefs” to represent entire Indigenous nations was an
+
+age-old settler tactic to exert influence and concentrate leadership, while
+cleaving political factions. Most Indigenous leaders were more committed
+to diplomacy than to armed resistance, though the two strategies sometimes
+worked in tandem. Some wanted to give up the Powder River country and
+remove to reservations to start a new life. “The hostiles,” as the Indian
+agents called them, wished to end treaty making altogether and keep their
+lands free of reservations and restrictions. Although the two divisions both
+agreed with the premises of the 1851 Treaty, the western divisions
+demanded that the reservation groups cease accepting annuities and remove
+themselves from the negative influence of the trading forts, where the
+annuities were distributed.14
+In 1853 Fitzpatrick criticized the outcome of the 1851 Treaty, calling it a
+temporary fix to coming war. “Either an inducement must be offered to
+them greater than the gains of plunder, or a force must be at hand able to
+restrain them and check their depredations. Any compromise between the
+systems will only be liable to all the miseries of failure,” he argued.15
+Neither was agreeable to the Oceti Sakowin. Annuities meant submission
+and land cessions, while an increased military presence meant violence. To
+the Oceti Sakowin, treaty making became more and more a zero-sum game,
+in which all roads led to diminishing independence and increasing relations
+with the United States.
+Three years after the treaty signing, in August, a lame calf belonging to
+an emigrant Mormon wandered into a camp of near-starving Sicangus.
+Believing the calf was abandoned, it was killed, butchered, and almost
+immediately consumed. The Mormon owner called for retribution, and John
+L. Grattan, a young West Point graduate stationed at the nearby Fort
+Laramie, answered. Although Indigenous peoples at first allowed the
+overland emigrants to travel through and hunt freely within their territories,
+under US law the killing or theft of a domestic animal, such as a lame calf,
+was considered a property crime. Private property held more sanctity than
+the Indigenous treaties or lives. Grattan descended on the camp, demanding
+that Conquering Bear relinquish the guilty party. As the “treaty chief” of the
+1851 Treaty that was committed to maintaining peace, Conquering Bear
+offered restitution to the Mormon and pled for a peaceful resolution.
+Grattan’s men responded by shooting Conquering Bear. The Sicangus
+descended on Grattan and his soldiers, killing him and all twenty-eight of
+his men. Six days later, Conquering Bear died, and with him the spirit of the
+
+1851 peace treaty. The Sicangus, quick to seek revenge, robbed a mail
+coach near Fort Laramie, making off with a large amount of money and
+killing three white men.16
+Tensions remained high. While treaty annuities continued to arrive on
+time, white traders preyed on the Lakotas and Dakotas collecting their
+annuities at Missouri River trading posts. In the winter of 1853 to 1854,
+Sihasapas and Hunkpapas refused treaty annuities and began to wage war
+on white traders. Traders (and even contemporary historians) have
+mistakenly called treaty annuities “gifts.” Annuities were not gifts, but
+contractual treaty obligations. Although their intended purpose was to
+guarantee peace, they were often withheld to pay trade “debts” or used to
+coerce “hostile” groups into submitting to a trader’s will. White traders
+were welcomed for their seemingly endless supply of highly prized
+commodities such as guns and cloth, for which the Oceti Sakowin called
+them “Wasichun,” or “people who possess a mysterious power.” Now, it
+was clear that this power also brought evil, earning them a second name,
+which played on the first: “Wasicu”—the “fat taker,” the settler, the
+colonizer, the capitalist. To be called “Wasicu” was the highest insult. It
+meant that a person behaved selfishly, individualistically, with no
+accountability, as if they had no relatives. Such behavior was normally
+punished by alienation or banishment. “Wasicu” became synonymous with
+the United States, a nation that behaved as if it had no relatives.17
+For this reason, Little Bear, a leader of the Hunkpapa, waged a bitter
+campaign against the white traders on the Upper Missouri. According to
+American Fur Company employee Edwin Thompson Denig, in 1853 when
+the fur company attempted to construct a trade fort in Hunkpapa territory
+without their consent, Little Bear’s akicitas (soldiers) “cut up the carts,
+killed the horses, and flogged the traders and sent them home.” Little Bear
+first earned his status as a leader when he killed a despised white trader
+from the American Fur Company in the trader’s own home, for which
+Denig assumed he sought the “destruction of all traders in the country.”
+According to Denig, the Sihasapas and Hunkpapas under Little Bear’s
+command
+cut off every white man they meet and pillage or destroy all property outside the forts at the
+Yellowstone. They declare war to the knife with the Government of the United States and all whites
+in the country, threaten to burn up the forts, make no buffalo robes except what they want for their
+own use and wish to return to their primitive mode of life.18
+
+Some Missouri River Lakotas and Dakotas revolted against the fur trade
+and the profit motive by eschewing alcohol, boycotting the fur and river
+trade, and actively sabotaging the trading forts—the primary source of their
+affliction. These efforts, along with the return to subsistence buffalo
+hunting, allowed Indigenous nations to resist the encroachment of
+capitalism.
+Later that year Indian agent Alfred J. Vaughn traveled the Missouri
+River, meeting with various divisions of the Oceti Sakowin to distribute
+annuities and gather reports on the recent hostilities against traders. When
+he arrived at the Sihasapas and Hunkpapas’ camp, they firmly refused
+Vaughn’s annuities. And in an encounter with the Ihanktonwannas, the
+headman, Red Leaf, cut open all the bags of the Indian agent’s provisions,
+scattering the contents across the prairie. The akicitas then threw the
+remaining gunpowder keg in the river, shooting it until it exploded.19 The
+more militant divisions among the Oceti Sakowin resented what the trading
+posts and the treaty annuities symbolized: nonconsensual occupation and an
+attack on the land. The frequency of these acts of resistance should put to
+rest any claims that the Oceti Sakowin had become helplessly dependent
+and devastatingly transformed by the fur trade, thus leading to their
+inevitable defeat and collapse. However, this strident refusal depended upon
+maintaining access to a crucial resource: the buffalo herds. Like a good
+relative, the Pte Oyate initially provided the means to confront invasion;
+however, this dependency would soon be exploited as a weakness when the
+military targeted the buffalo nations for extermination. An attack on the
+land and the buffalo was an attack on Indigenous subsistence practices and
+the ability to resist encroachment.
+The military and traders were quick to claim victimhood following
+Grattan’s defeat and the war on the Missouri River trade.20 In response the
+War Department sent 600 soldiers under the command of General William
+S. Harney up the Platte River. On September 5, 1855, Harney engaged 250
+Sicangus camped at Blue Water Creek. The leaders, Tukiha Maza (Iron
+Shell), and Wakinyan Cikala (Little Thunder), asked for peace, telling
+Harney their camp was peaceful and mostly made up of women and
+children. Harney ordered his men to raze the camp, killing eighty-six—half
+of them women and children. They took another seventy women and
+children as prisoners, holding them at Fort Laramie. According to one
+account, the soldiers seized an infant from her wounded mother and used
+
+the child as target practice.21 At Fort Laramie, the officers raped the
+Sicangu women, who, according to the testimony of Susan Bettelyoun
+Bordeaux, “became the property of their captors.” In a letter accompanying
+Bordeaux’s testimony, Hunkpapa historian Josephine Waggoner writes,
+“There were many war babies born after Harney left Laramie.”22 That day
+Harney earned his Lakota name—“Woman Killer.”23
+Woman Killer intended to terrorize the Lakotas into submission, but this
+had the opposite effect. A young man, who would later earn the name
+“Tasunka Witko” (Crazy Horse), returned from a hunting trip to find his
+relatives’ mutilated bodies scattered across the prairie. That day Crazy
+Horse committed his life to fighting the Woman Killer’s nation. Crazy
+Horse’s uncle Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) had attempted to stop the
+massacre. Although unarmed and surrounded by soldiers, Spotted Tail
+grabbed a soldier’s knife and killed ten of Woman Killer’s men before
+being taken down, wounded but not killed, by two bullets.24 Crazy Horse
+and Spotted Tail came to represent two traditions of Indigenous resistance;
+one would follow a path of armed struggle, the other the path of diplomacy.
+Despite these divergences, the two remained good relatives to each other in
+the trying years to come, a testament to the strong bonds of kinship that
+held the nation together as their world was taken from them. While Crazy
+Horse and Spotted Tail were accomplished warriors and leaders, their
+highest virtue was their commitment to the defense of their human and
+nonhuman relations. The events of that day forever shaped their resolve for
+self-defense and survival; this did not always mean picking up the gun, but
+sometimes it did. At that moment, however, for both Crazy Horse and
+Spotted Tail, preserving a grounded authority in the land was the theory,
+and the gun was the practice. Both were necessary for the survival of
+human and nonhuman relations. It was from settler colonialism’s
+nightmarish scenario of fight, flight, or accommodate that Indigenous
+heroes were made and immortalized—some known, and many more
+unknown. Heroes of Indigenous resistance didn’t just make history. History
+made them.
+While in the west the Lakotas confronted the punitive campaigns of the
+US peace policy, in the east the Dakotas faced increased settler
+encroachment. White settlements depleted nearly all the game, and the
+treaty annuities were meager and slow to arrive—when they arrived at all.
+Starvation set in. To make matters worse, Minnesota Territory organized in
+
+1849 and began its path toward statehood, which meant the expulsion of
+Indigenous peoples. In 1857 Inkpaduta, a Wahpekute leader, led a
+retaliatory campaign against white settlers at Spirit Lake and Springfield
+after settlers wantonly murdered his brother and forcefully exiled the
+Wahpekutes from their homelands in 1856. In total the Wahpekutes killed
+twenty-eight settlers and sustained minimal casualties. Inkpaduta, whose
+body was badly scarred from the 1837 smallpox scourge, which he survived
+as a child, became a veteran of many major engagements with the US
+military and died in exile Canada in the 1880s. His attacks on settlements
+earned him the reputation as a frontier bogeyman. He was so hated and
+feared by whites that his name was never translated into English unlike his
+more celebrated and well-known contemporaries.25 Nevertheless,
+Inkpaduta’s legacy is now widely revered for his evasion of capture and
+death, refusal to surrender, and rejection of reservation life.
+The Wahpekute’s attacks were also partly in response to the Treaty of
+Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota. Together these treaties,
+signed in 1851 by all four Dakota nations, ceded all Dakota land claims
+except for a narrow twenty-mile strip. There is no doubt that the Dakota
+leaders were coerced into making such disastrous concessions. To force
+signatures, treaty commissioners threatened military force and the
+withholding of rations. White traders got first access to any treaty moneys,
+which they used to pay outstanding debts allegedly accrued by the Dakotas.
+When the treaties went through the Senate for approval, amendments were
+attached that left the Dakotas without any legal title to the land, essentially
+making them homeless or trespassers in their own homelands.26
+In August 1862, when Taoyateduta (He Loves His Red Nation), also
+known as Kangi Cistinna (Little Crow), and his warriors began to expel
+white settlers from their Dakota homelands, most of the Dakota
+communities were starving, horseless, unarmed, and living on reservations.
+With the outbreak of the Civil War, treaty annuities arrived late or not at all
+—and were sometimes intentionally withheld by traders. Andrew Myrick, a
+notorious white trader responsible for distributing treaty annuities and
+rations at the Lower Sioux Agency, put it bluntly: “So far as I’m concerned,
+if they are hungry, let them eat grass or dung.” The Dakotas, facing the real
+possibility of starving to death, came to the Lower Agency, and, some
+stories say, killed Myrick while he was running away; according to these
+accounts, his body was found with grass stuffed in his mouth.27 The
+
+criminal acts of the traders and agency officials had led to the uprising. But
+the United States’ theft, mass killing, starvation, and punishment of all
+Dakotas remained “lawful.”
+The Dakotas waged deadly battles, killing more than 800 white settlers,
+traders, and soldiers. By late September most Dakotas had surrendered,
+ending the brief thirty-seven-day war. The captured Dakotas were not
+treated as prisoners of war but instead faced a military tribunal created by
+Henry Sibley, Minnesota’s first governor, and colonel of the state militia.
+Military officers who had just fought Dakotas were appointed to oversee the
+trials. By November the military tribunal tried 392 Dakotas for “murder and
+outrages,” convicting 323 of them, 303 of whom they condemned to death.
+More than 2,000 Dakotas were also imprisoned at Fort Snelling in a large
+concentration camp, where many died. Whether or not they participated in
+the war mattered little; all Dakotas became targets for collective
+punishment. President Lincoln, though he commuted most of the Dakota
+death sentences, maintained an iron fist to crush Indigenous resistance—
+one he wielded not only against the Dakotas, but others too. In 1864 in the
+Southwest, a similar policy of collective punishment and removal targeted
+Navajo and Apache resistance, resulting in the Hwéeldi, or the Long Walk.
+The removal, forced march, and imprisonment at Bosque Redondo in New
+Mexico killed more than 2,000 Navajos.28
+On December 26, 1862, a week before signing the Emancipation
+Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota men
+at Maka To (or “Blue Earth”—present-day Mankato, Minnesota) as
+retribution for the 1862 US–Dakota War. The execution of the Dakota
+thirty-eight remains the largest mass execution in US history. Minnesota
+Governor Alexander Ramsey, who helped negotiate the 1851 Treaty with
+the Dakotas, then ordered the extermination or complete banishment of
+remaining Dakotas from the state. Settlers were encouraged and rewarded
+to take their own revenge with government-issued $25 scalp bounties,
+which later increased to $200. When the Civil War came to an end, very
+few confederate officials and soldiers were sent to prison, and only one was
+hanged for war crimes. After surrender, many confederates went back to
+holding public office. General Sibley ordered that the Dakotas were to be
+treated as criminals, and not as prisoners of war.29 The aftermath of the war
+to maintain slavery, which cost half a million lives, was profoundly
+
+different from the aftermath of the Dakota uprising—and rarely are the two
+stories told side by side.
+In punishment for his part in the uprising, in 1863 Minnesotan settlers
+murdered Little Crow, collecting $500 for his scalp and decapitated head.
+Little Crow’s scalp, severed head, and the rest of his body were collected
+and put on public display by the Minnesota Historical Society until 1915, a
+grim trophy to remind settlers exactly how they “won” the land. Little
+Crow’s remains were only returned to his family in 1971. Nearly a thousand
+Dakotas fled to Canada, and 2,500 remained at large, fleeing into Dakota
+Territory to join their relatives on the Missouri River. In 1863 in Minnesota,
+General John Pope organized “columns of vengeance” to punish and
+capture fugitive Dakotas.30 Instead of recognizing their own criminality for
+outright land theft and state-imposed starvation, they would force Dakotas
+to pay with their lives. Facing scalp bounties and the harsh imprisonment of
+their relatives, surrender usually meant death and was simply not an option.
+To survive—to resist—meant to flee.
+Pope sent two columns, led by brigadier generals Henry Sibley and
+Alfred Sully, to halt the fleeing Dakotas from crossing the Missouri River
+and joining their western relatives. The campaign had three goals: crush the
+fleeing Dakotas, secure the Missouri River for steamboat travel, and
+eliminate remaining Indigenous opposition to the settlement of eastern
+Dakota Territory. By 1863, overland travel on the Oregon Trail had greatly
+subsided. But the 1862 Montana gold rush drew throngs of miners and
+settlers who traveled overland on the Bozeman Trail, which cut through
+1851 Treaty territory and up the Missouri River via steamship. Sibley’s
+mounted cavalry headed south, then traveled north up the eastern shoreline
+of the Missouri, encountering little opposition. Sully commanded more than
+2,000 soldiers, and the skirmishes they engaged in were minor and inflicted
+minimal casualties—all except for one.
+On September 3, 1863, Sibley’s men attacked 4,000 peaceful Dakotas
+and Lakotas in a summer camp after a buffalo hunt at Inyan Ska
+(Whitestone Hill). Standing Rock historian and Sacred Stone Camp founder
+LaDonna Bravebull Allard recounts the events of that day through the oral
+history of her ancestor Mary Big Moccasin:
+It was a time of celebration and ceremony—a time to pray for the coming year, meet relatives,
+arrange marriages, and make plans for winter camps. Many refugees from the 1862 uprising in
+Minnesota, mostly women and children, had been taken in as family. Mary’s father, Oyate Tawa, was
+
+one of the 38 Dah’kotah hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, less than a year earlier, in the largest mass
+execution in the country’s history … As my great-great-grandmother Mary Big Moccasin told the
+story, the attack came the day after the big hunt, when spirits were high. The sun was setting and
+everyone was sharing an evening meal when Sully’s soldiers surrounded the camp on Whitestone
+Hill. In the chaos that ensued, people tied their children to their horses and dogs and fled. Mary was 9
+years old. As she ran, she was shot in the hip and went down. She laid there until morning, when a
+soldier found her. As he loaded her into the wagon, she heard her relatives moaning and crying on the
+battlefield. She was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Crow Creek where she stayed until her release
+in 1870.31
+
+The dogs returned to camp with babies still tied to them, where they were
+shot by the soldiers. In all, the soldiers slaughtered more than 400 Lakotas
+and Dakotas, most of them women and children. They destroyed half a
+million pounds of dried buffalo meat and razed more than 300 lodges.
+Thirty-two men and 124 women were taken prisoner and transported to Fort
+Pierre to be shipped to Crow Creek, where the remaining survivors of the
+US–Dakota War were held.32
+The massacre had a profound psychological impact on the Dakotas and
+Lakotas. The scorched-earth campaign against the Dakotas and the
+“columns of vengeance” were intended to deter a military alliance among
+the Oceti Sakowin; and indeed, the tactic may have worked on some. On
+the other hand, it also encouraged many to risk everything to repel the
+invaders. The success of armed resistance, in fact, would be measured not
+in the annihilation of the United States as an enemy nation, but in the
+resilience of the political alliances that formed.
+Immediately following the punitive campaigns waged against the
+Dakotas, in November 1863 Colonel John M. Chivington and his soldiers
+massacred more than 200 peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek in Colorado
+Territory, taking scalps and severed genitals as souvenirs. Enraged at the
+growing brutality, the Cheyennes, Lakotas, Arapahos, and some Dakotas
+formed a political alliance under the leadership of Mahpiya Luta (Red
+Cloud). Believing the United States had violated the spirit of the 1851 Fort
+Laramie Treaty with the construction of the Bozeman Trail, the historic
+alliance vowed to expel them from the buffalo hunting grounds.33 The
+alliance successfully defeated the US military in hit-and-run battles from
+1866 to 1868. In December 1866, most famously, Crazy Horse, a rising
+military leader, drew one hundred soldiers under the command of Colonel
+William J. Fetterman from Fort Kearney into a trap, killing Fetterman and
+all his men. The fort had been established along the Bozeman Trail to
+
+protect white miners heading to the Montana goldmines.34 Facing an
+undefeatable, highly mobile guerrilla force, in 1868 the United States once
+again sought peace.
+In the summer of 1868, a mass council was called at Mato Paha (Bear
+Butte) to discuss a treaty of peace, and Red Cloud was selected to lead any
+negotiations with the United States. Since 1857 most of the Oceti Sakowin
+had been gathering annually at Mato Paha, at the northeast fringes of the
+Black Hills, to discuss the peace treaties and mounting resistance. Some
+historians and scholars have challenged the idea that the “Sioux Nation,” or
+the Oceti Sakowin, ever existed, or that such gatherings took place in the
+Black Hills prior to US invasion. What is known is that all seven political
+divisions met at these annual summer councils, and that all were
+represented in the most famous battles. But it is true the Oceti Sakowin had
+not gathered in quite this way since 1857, when they were joined by allied
+nations such as the Arapaho and Cheyenne in considering “taking the fight
+to the wasicu” (in other words, to US imperialism)—by marching all the
+way down to Saint Louis and wiping out every white settlement—as
+Sicangu historian Edward Valandra has asserted.35
+Previously, the Oceti Sakowin more often gathered at Mato Paha for
+peace, including for the Wiwang Wacipi, the sun dance. The Oceti Sakowin
+war councils, however, have drawn more scrutiny and attention than the
+ceremonial celebrations of life.36 In fact, most political divisions chose to
+avoid armed resistance altogether and, as the buffalo became scarce, slowly
+began to accustom themselves to living near the agencies. Soldiers and
+fellow Indigenous peoples pejoratively termed these people “loafer bands”
+for hanging around the forts.37 Others who were willing to break policy and
+sell land, which they were not authorized to do, were called Maka Utacipi,
+or “earth eaters.”38 Many Oceti Sakowin disapproved of these individuals’
+behavior, but they were still considered relatives, though pitied for “eating”
+the land for the annuities and food rations they received for selling it.
+Political custom dictated that families and larger political divisions were
+allowed to disagree with or decline to follow a course of action set out by
+others. If the disagreement was serious, individuals or entire nations were
+allowed to leave. Just as easily as they could leave, they could also rejoin
+their relatives. Force or coercion never compelled others to action, or to
+stay.39 But when the entire Oceti Sakowin was confined to the reservation,
+
+this harmony was disturbed because differing factions could not depart each
+other’s company. In other instances, “agency chiefs” were selected to
+represent an entire Indigenous nation, breaking down internal democratic
+processes. Whatever these competing views, the war on the Bozeman Trail
+drew the United States to the negotiation table once again.
+By 1865, the 1851 Treaty had expired with little consequence, having
+failed to bring about the peace it promised. Another costly military
+campaign in the Northern Plains was not an option. Most of the US military
+was stationed in the South to oversee Reconstruction, following the
+conclusion of the Civil War. As an effort to make freed Blacks into citizens,
+W. E. B. Du Bois called Reconstruction “a splendid failure”—one that
+offered only a temporary vision of a free society, because absolute equality
+demanded too much of a departure from the white supremacist status quo.40
+The same could also be said of its contemporaneous US–Indigenous
+treaties. Allowing Indigenous peoples to live in peace and respecting their
+political autonomy proved too much to ask of a settler state. So why did it
+make Indigenous treaties in the first place?
+Treaties are the central agreements among sovereigns and the primary
+instruments of international relations. After all, a sovereign nation does not
+enter into international relations with internal or domestic peoples. But
+despite the 1831 Supreme Court decision that found Indigenous nations to
+be “domestic dependent nations,” the United States entered into
+international relations with the Oceti Sakowin.41 This is the fundamental
+paradox of federal Indian law: it takes international agreements and
+attempts to determine their validity in the realm of domestic federal law—
+that is, in the courts of the colonizers.
+Patrick Wolfe argues that “domestic dependent nations” was less a legal
+redefinition than a “manifesto” for settler colonialism.42 The intention
+behind the treaties was not to recognize the inherent political sovereignty or
+self-determining authority of Indigenous nations, but to facilitate land
+cessions and eventual incorporation. Justifying what would otherwise be a
+criminal act—invasion—the treaties were really an instrument for affirming
+US design over all lands, and especially lands that could not be taken by
+force. And to carry out the land cessions, the US government needed
+settlers to hold private property in perpetuity. Private ownership (or “fee
+simple”) is seen, under US law, as the highest possible form of ownership,
+while Indigenous occupancy is seen as temporary; thus, collective
+
+Indigenous ownership and use could be dissolved for private ownership, but
+not the other way around. But because private property is exclusive, the two
+systems of land tenure fundamentally could not overlap. The confinement
+and removal of Indigenous peoples to reservations was racial segregation,
+and Indigenous peoples were the original “Red Scare.”
+It was from this belief of political superiority that the United States sued
+the Oceti Sakowin for peace. As a token of good will, the United States
+abandoned several forts along the Bozeman Trail, and Red Cloud and his
+followers set fire to the deserted buildings. The forts on the Missouri River,
+however, remained untouched and became the new bases of operations for
+corralling the Oceti Sakowin closer to the influence of the United States,
+and away from the Powder River country which more and more represented
+freedom.43 The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty established a 32-million-acre
+“permanent reservation,” which encompassed the entirety of the presentday West River region of South Dakota. To appease those who refused
+agency life, a vast expanse of hunting grounds was set aside at nearly the
+same acreage of the permanent reservation, making the total territory more
+than 70 million acres, or about the size of the present-day state of Nevada.
+Article 11 of the treaty, however, stipulated that the Lakotas surrendered
+“all right to occupy permanently the territory outside their reservation as
+herein defined,” but retained the right to hunt in the Powder River country
+“so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers to justify the
+chase.”44 General William Tecumseh Sherman, a member of the peace
+commission, at first opposed this provision, fearing that sustained resistance
+through buffalo hunting over a vast region would make it impossible to
+reign in the militant divisions. Fellow peace commissioners, however,
+assured him the treaty’s clause was “merely temporary” because once the
+buffalo were vanquished so too would the millions of acres of hunting
+territory.45
+In 1903 Red Cloud recalled what Lakotas said to treaty commissioners
+regarding the hunting lands: “We told them that the country of the buffalo
+was the country of the Lakotas. We told them that the buffalo must have
+their country and the Lakotas must have their buffalo.”46 The Lakotas
+didn’t believe the United States had the authority to simply “give” them
+back land that already rightfully belonged to them and their buffalo kin.
+Red Cloud made clear that the 1868 Treaty was not just an agreement
+between two human nations, but also an agreement among the nonhuman
+
+ones as well—including the buffalo nations. His interpretation, that Lakota
+territory began and ended with the buffalo nations’ territory, was not a
+“mystical” reading, but a simple fact of Lakota life—and, at the time, a fact
+linked to pure survival.
+For example, the most significant figure in Oceti Sakowin history
+descended from the Pte Oyate. It was a woman, Pte Ska Win (the White
+Calf Buffalo Woman), who made the first treaty with the human and
+nonhuman worlds. To be a good relative is to honor that original instruction.
+Lakotas often viewed treaties with the United States and other nations as
+commitments not just to human relations, but also to nonhuman ones. And
+such agreements were not the sole domain of men, as was the tradition of
+white society. Most important, pte means “female buffalo,” and the Pte
+Oyate was alternatively known as “her nation.”47 When Red Cloud spoke of
+the Pte Oyate, he spoke of their true leaders—of the women, not the bulls
+(men), and of the original covenant with the White Buffalo Calf Woman.
+The future of the Oceti Sakowin was bound to the future of the Pte Oyate.
+For its part, the military began to take seriously this vital connection
+with the buffalo as sustaining continued Indigenous resistance. The frontier
+army’s operations turned toward exterminating Oceti Sakowin kin—the Pte
+Oyate—as defeating highly mobile Plains nations in conventional battles
+was near impossible. From 1865 to 1883, the frontier army sanctioned the
+mass slaughter of buffalo to shatter the will to resist by eliminating a
+primary food supply and a close relative. Russia’s Grand Duke Alexie
+Alexandrovich even joined a buffalo hunt in 1872 near Denver with the
+frontier army, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong
+Custer and General Philip Sheridan. As they descended upon a herd, the
+hunters and soldiers acted as if the buffalo slaughter was also a massacre of
+Indigenous peoples, with a guide, Chalkley M. Beeson, recounting that they
+even called the buffalo “redskins.”48
+The extermination of the buffalo was incredibly effective and efficient.
+In two decades, soldiers and hunters had eradicated the remaining 10 to 15
+million buffalo, leaving only several hundred survivors. The “Indian
+problem” was also a “buffalo problem,” and both faced similar
+extermination processes, as much connected in death as they were in life.
+The destruction of one required the destruction of the other. The treaty
+clause “so long as the buffalo may range” was effectively a warrant to kill
+millions of buffalo, which translated literally into the killing of Indians and
+
+the seizure of millions of acres of 1868 Treaty territory—a direct attack on
+Indigenous sovereignty.
+Another contentious aspect of the 1868 Treaty was the granting of the
+right to construct railroads through Oceti Sakowin territory. By the time the
+Northern Pacific Railroad began building its line through the Yellowstone
+Valley connecting Duluth, Minnesota, to the Puget Sound, Red Cloud,
+Spotted Tail, and their followers had accepted the terms of the peace treaty.
+Most took it to mean that if they refrained from attacking the railroads,
+stage coaches, and overland emigrants, they would in turn be free from the
+threat of attack if they stayed within the reservation boundaries. The
+hunting grounds remained open, and so they thought that they could go on
+living as they always had, with little change. But railroads threatened that
+precarious peace and the provisional space of the hunting grounds that came
+with it. They provoked another fight and hardened the resolve of the
+remaining militants to stay off the reservations. Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting
+Bull), a powerful political leader of the Hunkpapas, refused the conditions
+of peace specifically over the question of rail lines and began making war
+on the railroad surveyors as they trespassed into Yellowstone territory. The
+military sent two expeditions of thousands of men in 1871 and 1873 to
+secure the passage of railroad engineers. But Sitting Bull and his followers
+halted construction of the Northern Pacific across the Missouri River at
+Bismarck, and the 1873 economic crisis further imperiled the Northern
+Pacific’s progress westward. Nevertheless, the military now had a sizeable
+standing army at Fort Rice downriver, under the command of Custer, a less
+well-known veteran officer of the Civil War who history would only
+remember because he was killed by the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho
+alliance in 1876 at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Battle of the Little Bighorn).
+Custer and his men were stationed at the northern border of the “Great
+Sioux Reservation” to prevent the Hunkpapas and Sihasapas from leaving
+the reservation, waging war on the railroad surveys, and joining their offreservation relatives in the west.49
+Soon, those living off the reservation were considered outlaws,
+renegades, hostiles, and criminals to be hunted down, summarily shot,
+hanged, or imprisoned. Those on the reservation were considered
+“peaceful,” and as “friendlies” who were not to be disturbed. Either way,
+soldiers and settlers could hardly distinguish between the two; when it came
+to collective punishment, all were at fault.
+
+Since 1865, transcontinental railroads began lurching from east to west.
+With the Panic of 1873, US capitalists and politicians sought a new form of
+currency and a new national project that would pull the country out of
+recession. Relief would come in the form of gold, more railroads, and
+continuous westward expansion—in other words, through the acquisition of
+more Indigenous land, and more Indian Wars. The discovery of gold in the
+Black Hills in 1874 triggered a massive push to quickly end the Indian
+problem on the Northern Plains. From the military’s perspective, reformers
+had failed to secure peace with the 1868 Treaty. Prior military campaigns in
+the West and the South were also coming to a close. The wars of conquests
+against the Apaches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and
+Modocs from 1869 to 1873 had largely ended. Meanwhile, in the South,
+Radical Reconstruction had lost political backing from a growing
+conservatism in the North, and as the United States began withdrawing
+federal troops, freed Blacks were left to fend for themselves against the
+white Southern elites who sought to violently recapture political and
+economic power. Facing the squeeze of economic recession, labor in the
+industrial east also began agitating. As historian Richard Slotkin argues,
+depictions of Black lawlessness in the South, relentless Indigenous
+criminality in the West, and growing labor militancy in the east provided
+the moral justification for the seizure of the Black Hills as a way to
+prioritize national economic development.50 To contain the “threat” on its
+western frontier, in an 1871 Indian appropriations bill the United States
+abolished treaty making with Indigenous nations (although the treaties
+themselves were never abolished). Meanwhile, the nationalistic military
+campaign to seize the Black Hills and continue westward expansion was a
+much-needed pressure valve for anxieties of social unrest and economic
+uncertainty. An order to the US military went out to notify all the Lakotas
+and Dakotas to return to the reservation by January 31, 1876, or face
+military action. Because it was issued during winter, both the US military
+and the Oceti Sakowin largely ignored the impractical command.
+By spring 1876, the majority of the Lakotas lived on reservations and
+were horseless, unarmed, and starving. Nevertheless, several groups had
+refused reservation life, and the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho alliance
+had evaded army capture for several years. Crazy Horse, no longer a
+military leader at this point, led several small groups into the Black Hills,
+killing numerous white miners. But the imposition of reservation borders
+
+combined with the cutting off of British-Canadian and US traders made
+ammunition scarce and sustained armed resistance increasingly
+impossible.51 General Sheridan and Brigadier General George Crook had
+decided to stop evicting gold miners, in hopes of making real what could
+only be imagined at this point: the takeover of the Black Hills, the
+settlement of treaty lands, and the final surrender of the Oceti Sakowin.
+Allowing the trespass of settlers and miners was a clear violation of the
+1868 Treaty, which forbade whites from entering the permanent reservation
+encompassing the entirety of the Black Hills. A violation of the treaty, as an
+international agreement, would have meant conditions reverted to pre-treaty
+terms. Therefore, the Oceti Sakowin, at this point, could have suspended
+their obligations—such as allowing the passage of settlers, roads, or
+railways, or the cession of certain lands. However, instead of curbing the
+criminal behavior of the white trespassers and living up to their treaty
+obligations, the army mobilized to the enforce the “peace” of the 1868
+Treaty by making war against the Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos who
+refused to stay on the reservation.
+On June 25, 1876, Custer and Brigadier General Marcus Reno led a
+group of 650 men against a camp of thousands of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and
+Arapahos. Among them were Sitting Bull, Pizi (or Gall), Inkpaduta, Crazy
+Horse, Pretty Nose, Left Hand, Two Moons, Wooden Leg, and many more
+who would be remembered as among the heroic armed resisters of the
+Cheyennes, Arapahos, Dakotas, and Lakotas. Custer led the first assault on
+the large camp, which was supposed to be a surprise attack. Custer’s men
+were quickly halted and forced to retreat uphill. Despite popular myths,
+Custer and his men never mounted a brave last stand but were instead taken
+down as they ran away from the Indigenous warrior men and warrior
+women. For his courage, Custer was promoted to the rank of general after
+his death.
+Hunkpapa warrior woman Moving Robe Woman, who fought against
+cavalrymen, later remembered that historic day. A young woman at the
+time, Moving Robe Woman was harvesting tinpsila, or prairie turnips, when
+the cavalry stormed the camp. After hearing her brother was killed in the
+initial attack, she recalled, “I ran to a nearby thicket and got my black horse.
+I painted my face with crimson and braided my black hair. I was mourning.
+I was a woman, but I was not afraid.”52 Among Plains nations, it was
+common for warriors to be women. In fact, according to Northern
+
+Cheyenne histories, Buffalo Calf Trail Woman is credited for knocking
+Custer from his horse before he was killed.53 Indigenous women also knew
+what defeat meant—if they were not killed, their bodies would be forced
+over to the desires of their captors. They fought back not because they
+wanted to, but because they had to.
+The defeat of Custer’s Seventh Calvary and the killing of 268 of his men
+was a major victory. But according to Moving Robe Woman, no one
+“staged a victory dance that night. They were mourning for their own
+dead.”54 About four dozen Indigenous warriors were killed during the fight.
+Many popular accounts of the Battle of Greasy Grass and histories of the
+West over-romanticize the extreme violence and wanton slaughter of what
+became known as “the Great Sioux Wars.” Each victory against the
+invaders also resulted in immeasurable casualties in later battles, and armed
+resistance was a calculated risk that was not undertaken carelessly. Either
+way, the Oceti Sakowin was in constant mourning over the theft of their
+lives, their world, and so many countless relatives—ancestors both present
+and future. Armed Indigenous resistance has always been a future-oriented
+and life-oriented project, and it is because of this fearless struggle that we
+survived and that we can remember.
+After Greasy Grass, the military sought retribution. Unable to sustain
+long, drawn-out resistance, the Plains alliance dispersed and Sitting Bull
+and his followers, including Inkpaduta, fled to Canada. In May 1877, Crazy
+Horse surrendered himself and his followers at the Red Cloud Agency near
+Fort Robinson in Nebraska, and he was imprisoned there by the reservation
+authorities. On September 5, 1877, Crazy Horse was led to Fort Robinson
+to be formally arrested on the charge he was planning an uprising. While
+attempting to flee, one of the guards stabbed Crazy Horse in the back with a
+bayonet, killing him. He was thirty-seven. In 1881 Sitting Bull finally
+surrendered himself and his followers and was taken to Fort Yates on the
+Missouri River at present-day Standing Rock. The battleground had shifted:
+Christian missionaries, boarding schools, and military discipline and
+punishment were the new vanguards of white civilization.
+The design and development of the carceral reservation world was well
+under way by the time Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos made Custer and
+his Seventh Cavalry famous. In 1876 Indian Commissioner John Q. Smith
+envisioned US Indian policy as having three central goals: to concentrate
+remaining Indigenous peoples onto fewer reservations, to allot remaining
+
+lands, and to expand US laws and courts’ jurisdiction over reservations.55
+Although the number of reservations didn’t decline, the latter two goals
+were achieved through the disintegration of political and social structures,
+and the carving up of the remaining communally held lands. The fur trade
+may have introduced the capitalist market, but it never made the Oceti
+Sakowin truly individualistic, and communal land practices and social
+customs still prevailed. This was the final frontier.
+First came the assertion of US law. In 1881 an ongoing dispute between
+Spotted Tail and Kangi Sunka (Crow Dog) on the Rosebud Reservation led
+to Crow Dog murdering Spotted Tail, a reservation leader and “agency
+chief.” Crow Dog made amends with Spotted Tail’s surviving family,
+paying restitution for the slain relative according to customary law. Internal
+harmony was quickly and effectively restored. Nevertheless, federal and
+territorial officials demanded Crow Dog’s arrest and prosecution. With little
+legal authority to do so, the case wound up at the Supreme Court, where it
+was ruled federal courts had no jurisdiction on reservation lands. As a
+result, Congress passed the 1885 Major Crimes Act, authorizing federal
+jurisdiction over certain crimes committed in Indian Country—including
+murder, larceny, rape, arson, and burglary. Congress used Crow Dog’s case
+as an opportunity to extend plenary power—or complete or absolute power
+—over Indigenous nations and assert criminal jurisdiction, further eroding
+and defining the parameters of Indigenous sovereignty.56
+The creation of the modern-day reservation system had a significant
+impact on both Indigenous and settler societies. Military and trading forts
+grew into either white settlements or reservation agency towns. As a new
+spatial arrangement of apartheid, the confinement of Native people to
+diminishing reservation lands made it simpler for settlers to assume
+ownership over “unused” land. Among the most highly prized possessions
+were the gold-rich Black Hills. To secure title to the land, Congress passed
+the 1877 Black Hills Act, which stole the Black Hills from the Oceti
+Sakowin and opened it to white settlement. A clause of the 1868 Treaty
+stipulated that any future land cessions, including the Black Hills, must “be
+signed by three-fourths of all the adult male” members. Its passage was thus
+a clear case of fraud and theft, as the United States was able to obtain only
+10 percent of the needed signatures.57
+Agency towns, which were often located at military forts or near them,
+were established to control and surveil the movements and the behaviors of
+
+Indigenous peoples, both on and off reservation. Reservations thus became
+sites where social engineering was used to break communal organization. In
+1878, to administer law and order, the first reservation police forces were
+formed, drawing from Indigenous ranks to enforce the new social order
+dictated by federal agents and church officials. In 1883 the Bureau of Indian
+Affairs created the Court of Indian Offenses to compel “civilization.”
+Punishable offenses included sun dancing, ceremonial dancing, customary
+giveaways, owning guns or weapons, owning ponies, men wearing long
+hair, polygamy, large feasts not organized by the church, Indigenous
+funerary rites, leaving the reservation, and honoring ceremonies. A
+violation brought punishment through starvation by withholding rations or
+imprisonment. These ���offenses,” also known as “the civilization
+regulations,” were enforced until their repeal in 1935.58 The use of coercive
+force by an armed body of the state, such as the police or the courts, to
+control behavior was relatively unknown to the Oceti Sakowin. “No Lakota
+chief,” writes Luther Standing Bear, “ever dreamed of using the power of a
+judge in court, or a policeman on a street corner, for it was not a tenet of his
+society that one individual should account to another for his conduct.”59
+As punishment for the defiant political leadership, their children were
+taken from them and sent to far-off boarding schools, where many died.
+Although leaders such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail voluntarily sent their
+children to boarding schools, they protested the military-like discipline and
+corporal punishment. The system, however, was as much about taking the
+children hostage as it was using them as leverage to coerce the behavior of
+reservation leadership. Richard Pratt, a former Indian fighter who marched
+under Custer against the Oceti Sakowin, was the main architect for the
+modern off-reservation boarding school system. The idea first came to him
+when in charge of Indigenous prisoners of war at Fort Marion in Florida.
+Assigned to oversee the confinement of Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne
+inmates, Pratt experimented with assimilation through education. To his
+military mind, the Indian War would no longer be waged on the battlefield
+but in the classroom. Pratt’s vision won him the backing of Indian
+reformers, and in 1879 he founded the Carlisle Boarding School in
+Pennsylvania.
+The success of the Fort Marion experiment, however, could only be
+reproduced in similar prison-like and militarized conditions because it was
+impossible to “recruit” and “retain” students without the use of force.
+
+Complete removal from their parents, it was believed, was the only way to
+prevent relapse to Indigenous ways. Taken and then returned to their
+communities, the children were sometimes alienated from their parents and
+relatives because they could not speak their languages or had no bonds to
+their kin. At Carlisle, Indigenous students were subjected to a highly
+regimented routine. Although founded on military principles of discipline
+and order, the boarding schools didn’t train Indigenous students to fight;
+rather, they taught them docility, compliance, and submission—the
+necessary ingredients for indoctrinating US patriotism and citizenship. “The
+Indians are destined to become absorbed into the national life,” one Indian
+commissioner advised in an 1889 memo entitled “Inculcation of Patriotism
+in Indian Schools,” “not as Indians, but as Americans.”60
+To many the US flag, which flew above the soldiers as they killed, raped,
+and pillaged Indigenous peoples and lands, was a detested symbol of
+growing US authority. It was one of the first means used to signify US
+supremacy at reservation headquarters. When soldiers attempted to build
+the first flagpole to fly the “Stars and Stripes” at the Red Cloud Agency in
+1874, outraged Oglalas took hatchets and chopped it down. The troopers
+rebuilt the flagpole and proceeded to take the population count of the
+reservation agency—wielding two highly symbolic instruments of growing
+colonial rule: a flag and a census.61 With armed struggle mostly abandoned,
+Indigenous resistance changed from military resistance to a strategy of
+challenging the reservation system by continuing to refuse to sell land or to
+cooperate with reservation officials.
+On the heels of a five-year recession, from 1878 to 1887 the desire for
+cheap or “free” Indigenous land in Dakota Territory infected white settlers
+like a fever. The decade, during which the white population in the region
+nearly doubled, was known as the “Great Dakota Boom.” In 1887, under
+increasing pressure to open more of the remaining 1868 Treaty lands,
+Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, signaling a new assault on
+Lakota and Dakota lands. Dawes sought to disintegrate collective Native
+identities and communal land practices by allotting private plots to Native
+families and opening millions of acres of “excess” land for white
+settlement. The Plains nations began organizing against the Dawes Bill as
+soon as they learned of its dire consequences, and the Lakotas and Dakotas
+came to a consensus that they would refuse unconditionally to sell the land
+or to accept the terms of allotment. Achieving mass consensus and the
+
+consent of all divisions of the western Lakotas and Dakotas—under the
+ever-watchful eye of agency and church officials, and in conditions where
+most were half-starved—was a significant feat of political mobilization and
+discipline. In 1888 Pratt led a commission to convince the Lakotas to accept
+the terms of the Dawes Bill. While the United States had not followed 1868
+Treaty protocol for the Black Hills Act, this time the Pratt Commission, as
+it was known, attempted to obtain the three-fourths male consent required
+to fractionate remaining reservation lands and open up millions of acres for
+eventual settlement.
+In one instance the Pratt Commission came to the Standing Rock
+Reservation. All the commissioners needed were votes of either “yes” or
+“no” to accept allotment or not. Twenty-two million acres remained of the
+1868 Treaty lands. If half were sold, the United States would sell land at 50
+cents an acre, which would create a permanent fund of $1 million. Earning
+5 percent interest per year, half would go toward education and agriculture,
+while the other half would be payed to those who accepted allotments.
+Under the leadership of Hunkpapa John Grass, the entire Standing Rock
+Reservation held council to discuss the conditions of the Dawes Bill. In allnight meetings, the Standing Rock council calculated the total distribution
+of money, which would amount to an insulting payment of $1 per year to
+each individual on the reservations. Grass had signed the 1877 Black Hills
+Act, which ceded the Black Hills, without understanding the terms. For
+him, the Dawes Bill was most likely another elaborate scheme to swindle
+lands. On the basis of the earlier act’s outright fraud and failure to address
+either past wrongs or ongoing depredations, Grass led Standing Rock’s
+opposition to allotment. In a speech enunciating his refusal to sign any
+paper—either the red for “no,” or the black for “yes”—Grass remarked,
+The whole nation here that are located on this reservation have come to the conclusion that we will
+not sign that black paper. We say also that we will not sign the red paper. You know exactly how
+many there are of us. I do not see what further evidence you would want. Here is the whole nation,
+and we say: “We decline.”62
+
+The Pratt Commission, unable to acquire minimal consent to even vote on
+the Dawes Bill at Standing Rock, went to the remaining reservations and
+faced similar unified refusal. An utter failure, the bill received a mere 120
+signatures.
+The initial defeat of the Dawes Bill was but a momentary victory. In
+1889 General George Crook, a veteran Indian fighter who was responsible
+
+for coaxing Crazy Horse to surrender, led another commission to secure
+“consent.” This time Crook lied about the bill, saying it would alleviate
+restrictions on dancing and generally improve reservation life without
+affecting prior treaty agreements. At first, when lies didn’t work, threats of
+violence and of the outright taking of the land, with or without Indigenous
+consent, pressured many to sign. When met with resistance, the Indian
+agent at Rosebud warned the opposition that their refusal to sign would
+jeopardize not just their standing with the United States, but also their entire
+legacy: “After you are dead and gone, and somebody reads … the names of
+the people who signed this treaty, I think you will want your names to be
+read out.”63 At Pine Ridge Agency, when Oglalas under the leadership of
+Red Cloud refused to sign, an Indian agent “read the riot act” to Red Cloud
+and his followers to criminalize those who refused to sign away land.64
+Oglala leader Wasicu Tasunka (American Horse) had signed but regretted
+his decision later when beef rations were drastically cut, further imperiling
+an already-famished people. The commissioners previously stated that the
+bill would not affect rations or annuities. Cutting rations, combined with a
+whole host of other grievances that went unaddressed, according to
+American Horse, was like “cutting our heads off.”65 Among the unfulfilled
+promises were the failure to improve the poor quality of annuity goods such
+as clothing and farming equipment, and continued unexplained deaths of
+children at off-reservation boarding schools such as Carlisle.
+Indeed, the new reservation political order had attempted to sever the
+heads of the Oceti Sakowin by taking children, usurping land,
+exterminating the buffalo nations, and diminishing Indigenous political
+authority. Having gained the necessary signatures to enforce allotment, the
+“permanent reservation” guaranteed under the 1868 Treaty was now open
+for white settlement. Crook’s commission had left the western divisions of
+the Oceti Sakowin deeply divided and in disarray after it destroyed the
+unified effort to resist the sale and further dissolution of remaining
+reservation lands. Now the Black Hills had been taken and 9 million acres
+of land opened for white settlement. What became known as the 1889 Sioux
+Agreement created the six modern reservation boundaries for the Pine
+Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Lower Brule, and Crow
+Creek Reservations.
+During the late 1880s—disarmed, hungry, horseless, confined to
+concentration camps, the buffalo nearly exterminated, their land broken up
+
+and taken, and their children stolen from them—a new political movement
+spread like prairie fire across the West, promising Indigenous rebirth.
+Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, had a vision that assured the restoration of
+Indigenous peoples to their rightful place in a world taken from them.
+According to him, dead relatives and the buffalo nations would once again
+walk the earth. The Ghost Dance prophecy envisioned the end of the
+present world through the settlers’ erasure from the earth, and the return of
+human and nonhuman relations that had been vanquished by colonialism. It
+was foretold that, at some unspecified time in the near future, a cataclysmic
+event—such as an earthquake or whirlwind—would wipe the United States
+off the surface of the earth. Once the land was cleansed, life would be free
+of disease and colonialism, and correct relations among human and
+nonhuman worlds would be restored. Dakota anthropologist Ella Deloria
+recorded the following description of the Ghost Dance from the viewpoint
+of an unnamed Lakota man who participated in the dance at the Pine Ridge
+Agency as a young runaway from boarding school:
+The rumor got about: “The dead are to return. The buffalo are to return. The Dakota people will get
+back their own way of life. The white people will soon go away, and that will mean happier times for
+us once more!” That part about the dead returning was what appealed to me …
+Soon fifty of us, little boys about eight to ten, started out across country over hills and valleys,
+running all night … There on Porcupine Creek thousands of Dakota people were in camp, all
+hurrying about very purposefully … A woman quickly spied us and came weeping toward us. “These
+[children] also shall take part,” she was saying of us. So a man called out, “You runaway boys, come
+here.” They stripped our ugly clothes from us and sent us inside [a purification lodge]. When we
+were well purified, they sent us out the other end and placed sacred shirts on us … Everyone wore
+one magpie and one eagle feather in his hair, but in our case there was nothing to tie them to. The
+school had promptly ruined us by shaving off our long hair till our scalps showed lighter than our
+faces!
+The people, wearing the sacred shirts and feathers, now formed a ring … All walked cautiously
+and in awe, feeling their dead were close at hand … The leaders beat time and sang as the people
+danced going round to the left in a sidewise step. They danced without rest, on and on, and they got
+out of breath but still they kept going as long as possible. Occasionally someone thoroughly
+exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there “dead” … After a while, many lay
+about in that condition. They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones. As each one came to, she,
+or he, slowly sat up and looked about, bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably …
+The visions varied at the start, but they ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great
+encampment of all the Dakotas who had ever died, where the buffalo came eagerly to feed them, and
+there was no sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy laughter to greet the
+newcomer. That was the best of all!
+Waking up to the drab and wretched present after such a glowing vision, it was little wonder that
+they walked as if their poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at least they had
+seen! … They preferred that to rest or food or sleep. And so I suppose the authorities did think they
+were crazy—but they weren’t. They were only terribly unhappy.66
+
+The visions were not escapist, but rather part of a growing anticolonial
+theory and movement. Participants were transported to a forthcoming world
+where the old ways and dead relatives lived. It was a utopian dream that
+briefly suspended the nightmare of the “wretched present” by folding the
+remembered experience of a precolonial freedom into an anti-colonial
+future. Upon awakening, dancers were forced to relive the horrors of their
+current reality. Above all, the visions were a reminder that life need not
+always be this way, and the Ghost Dance anticipated nothing less than the
+utter destruction of the colonial relation with the United States. But this was
+no cultural revitalization movement—anyway, the Ghost Dance did not
+derive from Oceti Sakowin culture. Also, the Ghost Dance was
+fundamentally oppositional in spirit. Lakota Ghost Dancers, historian
+Jeffrey Ostler observes, “hoped to see the present world destroyed and a
+new one come into being.”67 Indigenous life could not be remade inside
+reservations, nor within a colonial system, but only through the complete
+destruction of both.
+Nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists and historians have
+often downplayed (or misconstrued) the revolutionary premises of the
+Ghost Dance. The most widely used text on the movement, The GhostDance Religion and Wounded Knee, written in 1896 by armchair
+ethnographer James Mooney, for instance, distorted the meaning of the
+Ghost Dance. Pandering to the sympathies of a US public in an attempt to
+make the Ghost Dance more palatable, Mooney used cultural relativism to
+justify its existence. In his mind, because Ghost Dancers followed a Christlike messianic figure, Wovoka, the movement had largely embraced
+elements of Christianity and thus resembled modern Judeo-Christian
+religions. Further, he claimed, Lakota Ghost Dancers failed to properly
+adhere to Wovoka’s message of nonviolence and pacifism, warping it into a
+“hostile expression” and confirming the US military’s later characterization
+of the Lakota Ghost Dancers as “militants.”68 But in reality, Wovoka taught
+peace—not through perpetual harmony with white settlers, and certainly not
+through submission to Christian morality or dogmatic pacifism. Rather, his
+call for peace was pragmatic: under present conditions, armed Indigenous
+resistance was futile. Thus, the Ghost Dance’s mass appeal had less in
+common with Christianity than it did with earlier prophet-inspired panIndigenous movements. These include the 1760s Lenni Lenape prophet
+Neolin and his Odawa follower Pontiac (who fought British military
+
+occupation in the Great Lakes region); the 1800s Shawnee prophet
+Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, who together fought US
+occupation of the Ohio River valley; the 1860s Wanapum prophet Smohalla
+and his follower, the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph; and the 1870s Pauite
+prophet Wodziwob, Wovoka’s predecessor and the first practitioner of the
+Ghost Dance.69 Each of these successive prophets built upon the messages
+and doctrines of the others by calling for pan-Indigenous resistance—
+sometimes through armed struggle—to reject colonial occupation. Each
+drew upon an accumulation of historical experience, and all were united by
+a common desire for Indigenous liberation.
+Public debate at the time over Lakotas’ adherence to the Ghost Dance’s
+alleged pacifism served only to divide people fighting for survival into two
+camps: “legitimate” nonviolent pacifists and “illegitimate” violent militants.
+Indeed, these divisions cater to the feelings of settler society more than they
+accurately portray the lived experiences of real Indigenous peoples. The
+categories of “good Indians” and “bad Indians” purposefully create criminal
+elements within Indigenous nations and movements, in order to obscure or
+hide the United States’ own criminal enterprise. But the Ghost Dance was
+not meant for the US colonizers, nor did its followers seek its recognition as
+a “legitimate” religion equivalent to Christianity. It was the US state’s
+criminalization of not only the dancers themselves, but all things defying
+the civilizing mission, that led the military to conclude that the dance was a
+“hostile expression.” All dancing—and practicing Indigenous lifeways, in
+general—was a criminal act punishable by imprisonment or the withholding
+of rations. To reservation officials, it didn’t matter if the dancers were
+militant or nonviolent: Ghost Dancing was inherently an oppositional,
+political act.
+Nearly a third of all Lakotas—between four and five thousand—along
+with many Dakotas, participated in the Ghost Dance, a figure that
+demonstrates its mass influence. As a resistance movement, its tactics
+included complete withdrawal from reservation life; opposition to
+reservation authorities; the creation of resistance camps in remote areas far
+removed the influence of the agency; the pilfering of annuity distribution
+centers (and sometimes white settlers’ cattle and crops); the destruction of
+agricultural equipment; and the refusal to send children to school, to speak
+English, to participate in censuses, and to attend work, church, or agency
+and council meetings; their tactics also included the refusal to live on
+
+assigned allotments, to obey “agency chiefs,” to cut one’s hair, to quit
+dancing, to wear white clothing and attire, or to use metal tools. In short,
+the movement posed a comprehensive challenge to the colonial order of
+things. At first Indian police were sent to suppress the dances, which were
+illegal, but their resolve was shaken when they were met by armed guards
+willing to defend the dancers with violence if necessary. Upon meeting a
+strident refusal to quit dancing, some Indian police simply resigned, rather
+than face the prospect of killing their relatives or imprisoning them.70
+The widespread appeal of the Ghost Dance as an anti-colonial movement
+was in large part due to historical experience of its primary promoters and
+interlocutors: boarding school–educated Indigenous students. Two of its
+primary Lakota visionaries, Mato Wanahtake (Kicking Bear) and Tatanka
+Ptecela (Short Bull), used trains and writing to diffuse the message of the
+Ghost Dance to the Oceti Sakowin. Boarding school students who could
+read and write, often in both English and Lakota, transcribed Kicking
+Bear’s and Short Bull’s reports after the two men traveled by train to meet
+with Wovoka in Nevada. Ghost Dance prophesies, prayers, and songs were
+also transcribed and mailed to the various reservations, where boarding
+school students would read them aloud to fellow Ghost Dancers. Without
+this means of dissemination, the Ghost Dance would not have been so
+widespread—a fact Mooney admits in his ethnography. Letters conveying
+Ghost Dance songs and doctrines poured into Oceti Sakowin reservations
+from Indigenous nations in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma.71
+When Ghost Dancing began among the Lakotas, it was reported in the
+press as troubling and unrelenting. The largest deployment of the military
+since the Civil War arrived on the Northern Plains to crush the movement,
+and National Guard units from the surrounding states were brought in as
+backup for the federal troops. The first target was Sitting Bull, the last
+remaining powerful leader who had never signed a treaty and who still
+resisted the imposition of reservation life. The Standing Rock Indian agent,
+James McLaughlin, feared Sitting Bull and his Ghost Dancers would leave
+the reservation. On December 15, 1890, under heavy surveillance for his
+role in spreading the Ghost Dance, Indian police attempted to arrest Sitting
+Bull. Roused from bed early that morning, Indian police dragged Sitting
+Bull from his log cabin and shot him in the head. A brief firefight ensued, in
+which Sitting Bull’s followers killed six Indian police and the Indian police
+killed seven of his followers. After Sitting Bull’s assassination, military
+
+arrest warrants were issued for other Ghost Dance leaders such as
+Mniconjou chief Hehaka Gleska (Spotted Elk). In an effort to diminish
+Spotted Elk’s standing among his own people, white soldiers derisively
+called him “Si Tanka,” or “Big Foot,” because he wore US government–
+issued shoes that were too small for his feet. Fearing further reprisals,
+Sitting Bull’s followers joined with Spotted Elk’s people at the Cheyenne
+River Reservation. The Ghost Dancers then fled to turn themselves in at
+Red Cloud’s agency in Pine Ridge, where they were detained at Wounded
+Knee Creek and surrounded by soldiers. The Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old
+regiment, took command of the camp and began by demanding the group
+turn over all weapons and surrender. They conducted tipi-by-tipi raids,
+confiscating anything that could be construed as a weapon, such as hatchets
+and knives.
+On the morning of December 29, 1890, Spotted Elk and all the camp
+leaders were called to council with soldiers to turn in the last remaining
+guns. Hotchkiss guns (mobile light artillery) were strategically placed on
+the hillsides and trained at the starving, surrendering, and mostly unarmed
+Ghost Dancers. A scuffle broke out and a shot was fired. The Seventh
+Cavalry massacred between 270 and 300 Lakotas that day, including
+Spotted Elk. More than two-thirds among the slain were women and
+children. The Ghost Dancers fought back against the soldiers, inflicting
+casualties; if not for their struggle, there is no doubt more would have been
+killed, and that others would not have been able to escape. In the course of
+several hours, the cavalry chased down and killed the fleeing Lakotas.
+When the soldiers administered the killing blows, often by point-blank
+execution, they were heard muttering, “Remember Custer.”72
+The military still refers to the massacre of half-starved and surrendering
+people as a battle against armed militants. Congress awarded twenty medals
+of honor to the soldiers involved in the massacre. In retaliation for the
+unprovoked slaughter, Ghost Dancers sought revenge. The story of a young
+Sicangu Carlisle boarding school graduate who returned to the reservation
+and joined the Ghost Dance movement is significant in this regard. Tasunka
+(Plenty Horses) was stripped of his language and culture at a crucial
+moment in his childhood, returning to his family and community with
+nothing to offer. “I found that the education I had received,” Plenty Horses
+recalled, “was of no benefit to me. There was no chance to get employment,
+nothing for me to do whereby I could earn my board and clothes, no
+
+opportunity to learn more and remain with the whites. It disheartened me
+and I went back to live as I had before going to school.”73
+His experience was not exceptional. The civilization experiment failed.
+Growing his hair long and donning pre–boarding school Lakota clothing,
+Plenty Horses joined armed resisters in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee
+Massacre. Lieutenant Edward Casey went to meet with the resistance camp
+that had holed up in the Badlands. Angry at what he had experienced in
+boarding school, the starving conditions to which he returned on the
+reservation, and witnessing his people killed with impunity at Wounded
+Knee, Plenty Horses positioned himself behind Casey as he approached and
+shot him in the back of the head. Army officials charged Plenty Horses with
+murder, but he was later acquitted. Had he been guilty of murder, then so
+too were the soldiers who massacred his people at Wounded Knee, the court
+reasoned. At trial, the court concluded that a state of war existed, although
+not formally declared, and therefore that Plenty Horses was not at fault, and
+neither were the soldiers involved in the Wounded Knee massacre—thus
+suspending the criminal act of genocidal murder.74
+In the aftermath of the October 27, 2016, raid on the 1851 Treaty Camp
+blockading the Dakota Access Pipeline, a rancid smell permeated the
+camps. Police and private security had heaped the camp’s remnants—
+ceremonial items, such as eagle feathers, pipes, medicine bundles, and
+staffs, along with mangled tents, sleeping bags, clothing, and tipis—into a
+large pile near the entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp. Cops and private
+security had urinated on the items before returning them.
+One night, after it was decided to ceremonially burn the urine-soaked
+remnants, an Ihanktonwan elder gathered young Water Protectors around a
+fire. She was dressed in the regalia she wore the day of the raid. Hundreds
+of copper pennies hung by red ribbons from her dark blue trade cloth dress.
+She told of her ancestors who were killed during the 1862 US–Dakota War.
+Evicted from their homelands, they fled to present-day Standing Rock,
+crossing the Missouri River not far from the location of Oceti Sakowin
+Camp, after US cavalrymen massacred Dakotas and Lakotas in the
+Whitestone Hill buffalo hunt camp. This was, to the day, exactly 150 years
+before DAPL private security unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water
+Protectors at a nearby pipeline construction site.
+The day after Christmas in 1862, soldiers gathered up thirty-eight
+Dakota men and boys and imprisoned them at Fort Snelling in Mankato,
+
+Minnesota. Their medicine bundles were confiscated, heaped in a large pile,
+and burned as they were led to the gallows, singing their death songs. Their
+crime? Defending their nation and homelands. The same week that
+President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing
+Black slaves, he also signed the death sentences of the thirty-eight Dakota
+patriots. The copper pennies hanging from the elder’s regalia had holes
+drilled into Lincoln’s ears with red ribbon threaded through. “He didn’t
+listen,” she said of the Great Emancipator, “so we opened his ears.”
+After the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, Lakota women used awls to carve
+holes in Custer’s ears so he would hear better in the afterlife. Now, it was
+President Barack Obama, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple, and
+Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier who refused to listen. As singers
+began a prayer song, the elder reminded the younger ones that the tears
+flowing from their eyes were their “ancestors speaking through them,” and
+that they were not tears of trauma but of liberation. “We survived genocide
+after genocide.”
+Then she danced, and the pennies swayed with the flickering fire and
+billowing smoke. Behind her, armed police were perched on a hill half a
+mile away, and their bright floodlights glared down on us. Our history is the
+future.
+What continues to sustain Indigenous peoples through the horrors of
+settler colonialism are the recent memories of freedom, the visions enacting
+it, and the daring conspiracies to recapture it. The Ghost Dance was not a
+monolithic movement, but an accumulation of prior anti-colonial
+experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each
+struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous
+resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present
+reality, and, consequently, projected Indigenous liberation into the future.
+Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as
+perpetually wounded, we cannot possibly understand how they formed
+kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families,
+communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and
+prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they
+loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how
+they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest
+political authority.
+
+Water Protectors protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline outside the US Army Corps of Engineers
+headquarters in downtown Chicago. September 2016. Photo by Kristen Simmons.
+
+4
+
+Flood
+When our land is gone, our way of life is gone, our tribes are destroyed. The bottom lands the Corps
+of Engineers want to take are the very best on the reservations. They are our heart lands. They can
+never be replaced. No similar lands are for sale. We depend on land for our livelihood, it furnishes us
+our income. To take our land is to take our homes and income, and a part of our history and heritage.
+—J. W. “Jiggs” Thompson, US Senate Subcommittee
+on Public Works, Washington, DC, 19591
+
+After Wounded Knee, spectacular armed struggle would not come again
+until the 1970s. In the meantime, nevertheless, the fight for land, life, and
+self-determination continued. Over the course of the mid twentieth century,
+the United States increasingly used its powers of eminent domain to seize
+Indigenous lands for large public works projects, especially for Army Corps
+of Engineers dams. For the Oceti Sakowin along the Missouri River,
+dispossession through eminent domain emerged in the form of floods and
+dams. The Pick-Sloan Plan, a joint water-development project designed by
+the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation in 1944 with
+the input of Missouri River states, called for the construction of large
+multipurpose earthen-rolled dams for flood control, reclamation, and
+irrigation that, as its promoters claimed, promised to make otherwise-arid
+grasslands bloom. Four of the five Pick-Sloan dams flooded seven Missouri
+River Lakota and Dakota reservations—Santee, Yankton, Rosebud, Lower
+Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock. But unlike during
+the previous century, when Indigenous land was coveted for its endless
+bounty, for the Pick-Sloan Plan in the twentieth century, Indigenous land
+was desired merely so that it could be wasted—covered with water. All of
+the risks, and none of the rewards, of cheap hydroelectricity and irrigation,
+were imposed on generations of Indigenous people who depended upon
+their relations to the land and water for life. And floodwaters provided the
+physical means to terminate Indigenous nations and relocate people—a
+
+violent severing of those relations—to end the “Indian problem” once and
+for all.
+The Pick-Sloan dams were a twentieth-century Indigenous apocalypse,
+inflicting an immeasurable amount of loss that is still experienced today.
+When the river trade increased violence in the nineteenth century, the Oceti
+Sakowin escaped invasion by following the buffalo onto the plains. When
+the US Army annihilated the buffalo, the survivors were forced onto
+reservations, where they found refuge once again in the lush river
+bottomlands where food and game abounded, subsistence agriculture
+flourished, and fresh water was plenty. When the reservation cattle boom
+came in the early twentieth century, river bottomlands provided shelter for
+livestock and prime ranchland for small-scale, Native-owned cattle
+enterprises. A mixed economy consisted of subsistence hunting and
+gathering, along with small-scale agriculture and small-scale reservation
+cattle enterprises. Virtually all reservation timber was concentrated along
+shoreland, providing the necessary materials for home construction, shelter,
+and fuel for heating and cooking. What could not be produced by the sale of
+livestock was replaced with the harvest of wild game, fruits, and vegetables
+that flourished in the river valley. Those less fortunate avoided starvation in
+winter months, when employment was scarce, through total dependence on
+“the free goods of nature” that the river provided.
+All of this was destroyed by the Pick-Sloan Plan, setting the stage for the
+#NoDAPL movement half a century later. The Army Corps’ discretion to
+plot the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2014 rested on power they
+assumed under the Pick-Sloan Plan, following which the Army Corps have
+continually asserted—but never been officially granted—jurisdiction over
+the Missouri River flowing through Oceti Sakowin reservations. This was a
+direct violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which delineated treaty
+territory as encompassing the entire channel of the river flowing through it,
+including the eastern shoreline. According to US law, only Congress had
+the power to alter treaty boundaries or extinguish Indigenous jurisdiction,
+and the Pick-Sloan Plan authorized the Army Corps to do neither; it merely
+authorized them to build dams on the reservations. However, the assertion
+of jurisdiction didn’t just happen with the stroke of a pen. Rather, it arrived
+as a wall of water brought on by the dams—extinguishing life and
+Indigenous jurisdiction along with it. And because reservation life had
+imposed starvation conditions on the Oceti Sakowin in the earlier half of
+
+the twentieth century, by the mid twentieth century when the Pick-Sloan
+dams were built, it was hard to assemble a formidable resistance against the
+Army Corps and its allied federal agencies. The results were nothing short
+of genocide: by destroying the land—and with it the plants, animals, and
+water—the dams targeted and destroyed the very nations of people who
+reproduced themselves upon the soil. In this way, taking land and water also
+took away the possibility of a viable future.
+Pick-Sloan also dovetailed with federal policies of termination and
+relocation, which liquidated federally recognized Indigenous nations and
+removed people from the reservation to far-off urban centers. In 1953,
+Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108, which called for the
+immediate termination of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi,
+and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes—opening millions of acres of
+Indigenous lands for privatization. The bill adopted a perverse logic: only
+through the destruction of Indigenous nations could they “be freed from
+Federal supervision and control from all disabilities and limitations.”2 That
+same year, Public Law 280 authorized states to assume criminal and civil
+jurisdiction over Native lands. Together, the bills promised to end federal
+trust protections and transfer payments guaranteed by treaties and
+agreements, extinguishing what little Indigenous political authority
+remained after close to a century of genocidal policies. In tandem with this
+termination legislation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began busing Natives
+off reservations to cities like San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles,
+and Cleveland as part of the federal relocation program. Between the 1950s
+and 1960s, an estimated 750,000 Native people moved off reservation.
+Termination, in the words of Edward Valandra, “made legal the overthrow
+of Native governments, the stealing of their lands, and the extermination of
+Native Peoples and cultures.”3
+Termination marked a dramatic shift in policy from the gains made
+during the Indian New Deal, which, despite its flaws, had ushered in a new
+era of tribal self-determination under the 1935 Indian Reorganization Act
+(IRA). The dramatic reforms overhauled years of collective punishment that
+the Indian Bureau had inflicted on whole nations held captive on
+reservations. The year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the US Census
+concluded that the western frontier was officially “closed.” With it, the
+centuries of war, famine, disease, and genocidal policy brought the
+American Indian population to its lowest point in the history of North
+
+American settler colonialism. In 1928, in response to American Indian
+activists’ demands, an extensive study, The Problem of Indian
+Administration, also known as the Meriam Report, found the Indian Bureau
+incompetent, corrupt, and murderous. Among its most egregious acts was
+mass starvation across reservations, as what little land remained for Natives
+to eke out a living was sold off to white settlers. Because of the disastrous
+Dawes Act, between 1887 and 1932 allotment—and the “surplus” land sold
+to whites—devoured 91 million acres of Indigenous lands, leaving just 48
+million acres for reservations. In order to limit the number of individual
+American Indians who could receive an allotment and become landowners,
+a racist federal “competency commission” issued patents based on racial
+mixture, disallowing “full-bloods” from becoming private owners, and
+instead keeping their lands in trust. This created conflict between landless
+“mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods” who kept allotments because they were
+deemed too “incompetent” to sell them to whites. Oklahoma tribes were
+hardest hit; for instance, the Osage lost 70 percent of their allotted lands
+during the oil boom of the 1920s. By contrast, the Oceti Sakowin lost 30
+percent of their allotted lands overall; among them, Rosebud and Lower
+Brule experienced the greatest hit, losing 40 percent of their lands.4
+The IRA provided a temporary reprieve to the onslaught by making three
+important reforms: First, it ended the catastrophic allotment policy. Second,
+it ended the draconian prohibition on dancing, improved Indigenous
+freedom of religion and speech, improved the reservation criminal justice
+system, and provided monies for land reacquisition and economic
+development. Lastly, it imposed Western-style governance through a BIA
+model constitution, which required reservations to adopt a constitution
+based on the US Constitution and pledge fealty to the United States. The
+last point was the most contentious. While Indigenous peoples desired
+increased political autonomy, they didn’t want to replace existing
+governance, based on consensus and kinship, with colonial institutions.
+They also feared the competitive Western-style electoral system would
+further intensify political factionalism and create a class of reservation
+elites whose allegiance lay not with community councils but with an
+external authority—the US government—and whose political power would
+be kept in check by the BIA and the Department of the Interior.
+In fact, the IRA’s primary architect, Commissioner of Indian Affairs
+John Collier, saw the IRA as part of a global design of colonial
+
+administration. Collier drew inspiration from Lord Lugord’s earlytwentieth-century model for British colonial administration. Under this
+system national independence was prevented through its permanent
+suspension. In 1947 Collier even compared the US colonial administration
+of Indigenous peoples to its imperial annexation and colonial management
+of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, the Pacific Islands, the
+Panama Canal, and the Virgin Islands.5 The IRA was a New Deal program,
+but it was also part of global imperialism; the view that Indian policy is
+only “domestic policy” fails take this fact seriously, and normalizes
+colonialism by reproducing the notion that Indigenous peoples are domestic
+US subjects. Indian affairs were thus removed from the realm of
+international relations—from treaty making and diplomacy—and relegated
+to domestic, territorial rule, a process that should be challenged rather than
+reproduced.
+National independence for colonized peoples was never the goal for US
+imperial endeavors. Nevertheless, the IRA lifted the Oceti Sakowin “from
+absolute deprivation to mere poverty, and this was the best time the
+reservation had,” as Standing Rock Sioux scholar and activist Vine Deloria
+Jr. observed.6 And for all its flaws, the IRA enshrined certain principles of
+self-government for Indigenous peoples and provided them with a federally
+recognized government. Not all reservations accepted the IRA, but those
+that did possessed a distinct advantage in years to come. For example, the
+Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, and Crow Creek
+Reservations created IRA tribal councils. The Yankton Reservation adopted
+the IRA but never formally adopted a model constitution or tribal council.
+With no federally recognized government, the Yankton reservation and its
+trustee, the Secretary of the Interior, were completely bypassed by the Army
+Corps, which proceeded to seize Native property by right of eminent
+domain in order to construct the Fort Randall Dam. Yankton Reservation
+members had little to no recourse. In the end, while IRA governments were
+deeply flawed, without them the Oceti Sakowin would not have been able
+to negotiate Army Corps damages—nor to ultimately resist termination. But
+it was a false choice to begin with: adopt the colonizers’ model fully; accept
+“self-determination” with permanent tutelage; or perish.
+During this era, treaties were broken by statute rather than by brute
+force. In the Missouri River basin, the Pick-Sloan Plan destroyed more
+Indigenous lands than any other public works project in US history,
+
+affecting twenty-three different reservation communities. The project,
+writes Deloria, “was without a doubt, the single most destructive act ever
+perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.”7 The land taken and
+destroyed was the best land on the reservation: riverfront bottomlands that
+were heavily wooded on otherwise treeless plains, and full of wildlife and
+plants, including animals on which many Indigenous peoples still depended
+for sustenance. A third of the residents of Standing Rock, Cheyenne River,
+Lower Brule, Crow Creek, and Yankton reservations were removed to
+marginal lands on the open prairies or were forced to leave the reservation
+entirely; in either case, they could not reproduce the lives they lived in the
+lush river bottoms. In total, the United States took 550 square miles of
+Indigenous lands, an area half the size of Rhode Island.
+During the nineteenth century, treaty making was deployed as a way to
+ensure Indian title over lands so they could later be ceded to the United
+States. D’Arcy McNickle, a Flathead scholar and Indian Affairs employee
+at the time of the Pick-Sloan Plan, argued that under eminent domain,
+Indian tribes became categorized as private landowners “against whom the
+state could proceed.” In other words, the identity of entire Indigenous
+nations became nothing more than a dollar sign. “The process, in time,”
+McNickle argued, “can only lead to the extinction of the Indian people.”8
+Unlike white farmers and landowners, who could easily reproduce their
+businesses and lifestyles elsewhere, Indigenous peoples and the favorable
+river environment upon which they depended could not be replaced.
+This was a cruel reward for those returning from the Second World War.
+In every war from the First World War to present, Indigenous peoples have
+served and volunteered at rates higher than the US population. The US
+military has also purposely distorted Indigenous warrior culture for its own
+ends, often enlisting Indigenous names and motifs, such as the “Lakota”
+helicopter or the “Tomahawk” cruise missile, for imperialist endeavors.
+Natives have served not so much as “national minorities” but more often as
+separate, sovereign nations. During World War I, the Haudenosaunee
+Confederacy, for example, independently declared war on Germany in
+1917, choosing to send their soldiers to fight for their own nation. They did
+the same during World War II, independently declaring war on the Axis
+powers. Initially, Native military service had much to do with the
+maintenance of Indigenous sovereignty, with Native soldiers fighting
+alongside an empire in which they were not citizens. Although widely
+
+resisted by Indigenous nations, American Indian citizenship would not be
+granted until 1924.
+The Oceti Sakowin held similar views toward military service,
+maintaining an understanding with the United States that their military
+service was for the protection of their own homelands, and nothing more.
+They understood their service would not require deployment overseas
+against enemies named by the US empire that didn’t directly threaten
+Indigenous livelihoods. “There was an agreement between the [US]
+Government and the Indian people,” Lakota holy man Fools Crow
+explained in 1978, regarding Lakotas’ volunteerism during World War I,
+“that they will only fight within their own country, in defense. They send
+him [Lakotas] overseas which is contrary to the agreement that was made. It
+is something unusual for an Indian to fight in a foreign country … When
+they come back they are not the same boys. They drink. They destroy
+themselves.”
+When thousands returned home after the Second World War, the enemy
+threatening their homelands was the very military they fought for. A
+country that demanded Natives sacrifice their lives in war now demanded
+the sacrifice of their best lands and their governments. What was coming up
+the river was a new round of dispossession, a new round of enclosure, that
+used the most precious resource—water—as its weapon to eliminate and
+destroy nations and the land on which they depended for life. However, the
+struggle for control over the river began not with the Army Corps, but with
+states like South Dakota, whose political elite became staunch advocates for
+termination. But like termination, river development met resistance.
+By 1910 the state of South Dakota, barely two decades old, was at the
+forefront of the movement to develop the Upper Missouri. Other states such
+as Montana and North Dakota had their own plans, but none compared to
+the scale and organization of those in South Dakota. Early attempts had
+failed to garner federal support, especially from the US Army Corps of
+Engineers, who had final say over any river improvement projects. In 1924
+the state designated Big Bend, the largest oxbow bend on the Missouri, as
+the site for a hydroelectric plant. A large multipurpose dam, according to
+this plan, promised cheap electricity and irrigation for the exclusive benefit
+of the nearby white-dominated border towns of Pierre, Winner,
+Chamberlain, White River, Mitchell, Huron, Redfield, and Murdo. Ignored
+were the very people most impacted: the Lower Brule and Crow Creek
+
+reservations. Although the dam targeted their lands and threatened their
+water rights, neither Indigenous nation was consulted, and both were
+disregarded entirely during the initial planning of the project. And when
+South Dakota’s river development projects failed to gain the necessary
+federal support, the Upper Missouri Valley Development Association
+formed in the spring of 1933 to take up their campaign.
+The Big Bend site was just miles south from where the Lakotas first
+discovered the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, attempting to trespass
+through their territory unnoticed. So too did boosters of river development
+attempt to bypass the scrutiny of the Oceti Sakowin. Like the expedition,
+their plan was soon discovered. On May 16, 1937, Lower Brule Tribal
+Chairman Ruben Estes wrote to South Dakota Republican Congressman
+Francis Case expressing support for a hydroelectric plant at Big Bend that
+could provide “labor and relief,” and electricity to the Lower Brule town
+site. But Estes also expressed concern at the tribal council’s exclusion from
+plans for the development of Lower Brule lands and water, invoking the
+new powers Lower Brule was willing to exercise under the IRA to
+challenge a state project initiated on tribal lands without their consent.
+Ultimately, he questioned if the state or the federal government had the
+right to develop water within reservation boundaries “without the consent
+of the people” of Lower Brule and Crow Creek, or perhaps any Indigenous
+nation living on the river.9
+By 1935 the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe adopted the IRA, becoming the
+first tribe among the Oceti Sakowin to do so, and the second in the United
+States.10 They did so for pragmatic reasons: to counter attempts by state and
+federal agencies to lay claim to and develop the Missouri River.11 Without
+an IRA council, the Lower Brule had little power to halt river development,
+to apply for federal loans, or to employ legal counsel to defend its lands. In
+the first instance, the Lower Brule did not support the development of the
+river without their consent. But they did support plans in which they could
+determine what that development would look like, and to what extent it
+would provide much-needed relief in the form of employment, and
+electricity during the Great Depression.
+On June 1, 1937, Case responded to Estes agreeing that the Big Bend
+site “is right there in your reservation and you are entitled to first
+consideration.”12 Lower Brule followed suit, passing a resolution seeking
+federal loans from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to develop a small-
+
+scale hydroelectric plant. While the tribe had planned a smaller project for
+the immediate benefit of their community, Case had bigger ideas, in which
+the Indigenous communities were not considered or were minor players.
+Case claimed that the Big Bend site “could mean much to national defense,
+to Indian rehabilitation and to the general welfare of central South
+Dakota.”13 From 1937 to 1940, the Lower Brule requested approval for
+developing the site, and the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, favored
+the plan as a BIA-led project to increase the Department of Interior’s
+influence and control over the river.14 But the Army Corps rejected both the
+BIA and Lower Brule proposals, basing their decision on a “cost-to-benefit”
+analysis and the simple fact that they didn’t want to relinquish any authority
+to tribes or the federal government.15 On the surface, it may have seemed
+like bureaucratic conflict or a lack of political will. What South Dakota, the
+Army Corps, and BIA did agree on, however, was that river development
+would happen—with or without Indigenous consent.
+Lower Brule’s initial opposition was consistent with other Indigenous
+nations’ earlier attempts to protect their water rights. In the 1908 Winters
+decision, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Fort Belknap
+Reservation’s claim to water rights over a white farmer’s effort to control
+the flow of the Milk River, a tributary of the Missouri River in Montana.
+The court ruled that even if Fort Belknap had given up its fertile former
+lands in exchange for arid ones—which were, according to the court,
+adequate for “nomadic uncivilized people”—that their occupancy of those
+lands was inconsistent with the federal government’s desire to have them
+“become a pastoral and civilized people.”16 Put simply, Indigenous peoples
+retained quantifiable water rights if, and only if, the water was used in
+accordance with the civilizing mission of the federal government. The
+decision became known as the Winters Doctrine. The doctrine holds that,
+however diminished current reservation boundaries may be, tribes retain
+senior, reserved rights to water flowing through the originally defined
+boundaries established by treaty, statute, or executive order.17
+Neither the Lower Brule or any Indigenous nation challenging Missouri
+River development had ever invoked the Winters Doctrine. But they still
+possessed the power to do so. The doctrine’s intended use illustrates limits
+to Indigenous water rights under settler law; nevertheless, state or federal
+alteration or disruption of the flow of the river for any reason without the
+
+consent of the tribes, such as through the construction of dams, violates the
+spirit of the Winters Doctrine.
+The 1944 Flood Control Act, which authorized the Pick-Sloan Plan,
+permitted the Army Corps only to construct dams—not to expunge
+Indigenous jurisdiction, treaty rights, or water rights. In less-than-precise
+language, Section 4 of the act opened the river for “public use” and
+“recreational purposes.” It didn’t strip Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Standing
+Rock, Cheyenne River, Yankton, Fort Berthold, or any Indigenous nation,
+for that matter, of their political authority over their river. Regardless, from
+the 1950s to the 1960s the Army Corps condemned reservation lands under
+eminent domain and Congress awarded compensation to the affected
+reservations. Neither the Flood Control Act (which took the land) nor the
+congressional acts addressing damages (which rewarded compensation for
+taking the land) explicitly extinguished Indigenous jurisdiction; and neither
+authorized nor provided any compensation for the Army Corps’ taking the
+Missouri River itself. Compensation was provided only for taking the land,
+but not for the water. Since then, the Oceti Sakowin have contended that the
+Missouri River and its shoreline were never legally ceded. And, according
+to statute, they are right: the Army Corps’ alteration of the flow of the river
+by damming it directly violates both the Winters Doctrine and the 1868 Fort
+Laramie Treaty.18 But, regardless of treaty rights and sheer legality, the
+Army Corps proceeded anyway.
+For Dakotas and Lakotas, water rights are defined by treaty. For
+example, Article 2 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty delineated the eastern
+boundary of “Sioux territory” as beginning at the “low-water mark” of the
+east bank of the Missouri River. In contrast, the tribal constitutions for the
+Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Lower Brule Reservations delineated
+reservation boundaries according to the 1889 Sioux Agreement. The
+agreement divided West River tribes into five distinct reservations (Pine
+Ridge, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, and Standing Rock) and
+defined the eastern boundary of the three reservations bordering the river
+(Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Lower Brule) as beginning at “the
+center of the main channel of the Missouri River.”19 Regardless of the 1889
+Agreement’s diminishment of reservation lands, all these reservations and
+the Oceti Sakowin still possess powers under the Winters Doctrine to the
+Missouri River according to the original 1868 Treaty boundaries, as long as
+the water is used in a “civilized” manner.
+
+Winters rights take effect on the date reservations are created by federal
+authority and are considered unquantifiable or, according to the court
+decision, “uncircumscribed,” allowing for the perpetual benefit and use for
+a permanent Indigenous homeland. According to Diné scholar Melanie K.
+Yazzie in her analysis of the 2012 Navajo-Hopi Little Colorado River water
+settlement, subsequent Supreme Court decisions have interpreted this
+“uncircumscribed” quality to mean a “minimal need” required by the
+reservation. In other words, Indigenous nations are only entitled to water
+they can use for “civilized” purposes. Those purposes are quantified—or,
+put another way, Indigenous sovereignty is quantified according to water
+usage and degrees of “civilized” usage. Anything falling outside these
+qualifications is considered surplus, unused, or wasted. The rest can be
+measured and siphoned away to meet the need of non-Native interests.
+After each party quantifies their needs, water that flows through reservation
+or treaty lands is then, by no small feat of the imagination, not entirely
+“owned” by Indigenous nations. The result is that Indigenous nations can
+only use a restricted amount—in some instances, a fraction of a percentage
+—of the water flowing through their territory.
+Settler agricultural interests in water, because they are so insatiable, have
+always outweighed the bare survival of Indigenous peoples. On the plains
+of the Missouri River basin, irrigation is necessary for agriculture, which as
+a mode of production personifies settler colonialism: it’s sedentary and
+mostly permanent; it reproduces itself; and it always needs more land and
+water. As it expands, it eats away at Indigenous territory, destroying fauna
+and flora and annihilating Indigenous subsistence economies. This is not to
+say Indigenous peoples were not pastoralists, farmers, or ranchers before
+and during colonization. (Prior to colonization most Indigenous societies
+were agricultural, not “hunter-gatherer,” with great affinities to
+domesticated plants such as corn.)20 Indeed, by the time the Pick-Sloan
+Plan was proposed, Missouri River Indigenous nations had already
+developed successful Native-run cattle ranching enterprises and small-scale
+agricultural projects, often reflecting communal practices. These smallscale economies allowed Indigenous nations to resist and challenge the
+further diminishment of their reservation lands by preventing the need to
+sell it off to feed themselves.
+Lanniko L. Lee, a Lakota writer and a citizen of Cheyenne River
+Reservation, remembers the river bottomlands before the floods. Drawing
+
+on memories of her childhood, she recalls what life was like before the
+Oahe Dam took her lands:
+I see a river shoreline of men and women, young and old, carrying water, picking berries, gathering
+firewood, fishing from the shore, wading in the sloughs for cattail root, gathering teas of so many
+kinds, making toys for children from the fallen leaves and branches, telling stories of how we came
+to be a people, making furniture, women telling river stories to their grandchildren, children learning
+the gifts of the river. I hear men singing; I hear women, old and young, singing as they work and live
+among the trees. I hear children’s laughter, too.21
+
+Pick-Sloan’s massive dam projects, for instance, quite literally snatched
+the food from the mouths of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous sovereignty
+could be felt through the hunger in one’s stomach, as was the case for the
+Oceti Sakowin who had their most productive lands taken. In this sense,
+Indigenous sovereignty can be calculated according to their water rights,
+which, according to Yazzie, face “unlimited limitations” in federal courts.22
+That is, settler law has never expanded the material basis of Indigenous
+sovereignty—land and water; it has only eroded it by placing upon it
+endless restrictions. When it comes to water rights, it is not just the legal
+character of “Indians” that is defined. “Settlers,” too, become legal subjects
+with a vested interest in the taking of Indigenous water. Put differently, in
+cases where Indigenous peoples possess water rights according to federal
+statute, executive order, or treaty, settler communities, to fulfill their needs,
+are dependent on diminishing those rights—with or without Indigenous
+consent. Thus, Indigenous water rights are calculated first and foremost
+according to settler needs.
+The undercurrents of the Pick-Sloan Plan also originated from the
+centralization of the power of the federal government to imagine and enact
+theories of space through land policy. The practice began as early as the
+1785 Land Ordinance and continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth
+centuries as federal authorities worked to know, map, reorganize, and
+manage land as territory. Water management was vital to these policies, as
+westward expansion and the taking of Indigenous lands confronted the
+problem of creating irrigation systems to make settler life possible in arid
+environments. After removing Indigenous peoples, the first task was to
+induce colonization. Federal policies such as the 1862 Homestead Act
+encouraged agricultural settlement on dry western lands unsuitable for
+settler farming techniques developed in the east. Pushed by the railroad
+lobby to spur settlement and therefore the need for railroads to transport
+
+agricultural goods, the 1877 Desert Land Act amended the Homestead Act
+and provided federal money for western irrigation projects. The Northern
+Pacific Railway, for example, also opened colonization offices in Germany,
+Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and England to entice European immigrants to
+settle the Northern Plains and, therefore, to create a demand for railroad
+transportation.23 Conservation policy, influenced by President Theodore
+Roosevelt at the turn of the century, led to the creation of the Bureau of
+Reclamation in 1902 to provide for the irrigation of arid lands in the West.
+Land policy was the legal justification for the sometimes-unwilling shock
+troops of colonization—white European settlers. Settlement and settlers
+literally made “legal” and operational contemporary water law that depends
+so heavily on the theft of Indigenous water.
+“Public land” for “public good” was a highly subsidized federal
+endeavor for private enterprise, racial exclusion, and Indigenous
+elimination. One and a half million white families gained title to 246
+million acres of Indigenous lands—an area nearly the size of California and
+Texas combined—under the Homestead Act, with the added value of
+federally subsidized irrigation. A quarter of adults alive today in the United
+States are direct descendants of those who profited from the Homestead
+Act’s legacy of exclusive, racialized property ownership and economic
+mobility, a legacy that categorically excluded Black, Indigenous, and other
+nonwhite peoples.24 Access to Indigenous water was crucial for securing
+the ownership of Indigenous lands and generating wealth from these lands
+over generations. Thus, a single land policy has had a profound lasting
+political and economic legacy. It informs present disparities, which boil
+down to a single axiom: land is wealth and water is wealth. The Pick-Sloan
+Plan is part and parcel of this massive settler-colonial agricultural machine
+that greases its gears with water. Today, agriculture in the western United
+States accounts for three-quarters of all water usage.25 Water is settler
+colonialism’s lifeblood—blood that has to be continually excised from
+Indigenous peoples.
+To meet incessant demands for irrigation, the Pick-Sloan Plan was made
+to appear inevitable. But it was not a dream manifested in a dusty federal
+office building in Washington, DC, to be handed down to unwitting
+agricultural communities. States, local governments, the Army Corps, and
+other federal agencies all pushed for Missouri River development in various
+ways, in spite of the consequences for Indigenous communities. Although
+
+most of the power was concentrated in federal authorities by 1944,
+“grassroots” organizations continued to play a significant role. By 1941, the
+Upper Missouri River Valley Development Authority had dissolved. In its
+place formed the Missouri River States Committee, an organization of
+governors from Missouri basin states. It is rather telling that the first states
+to enthusiastically join the committee (South Dakota, North Dakota,
+Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska) encompassed thirteen Indian
+reservations whose lands either immediately included or bordered the
+Missouri River (the Omaha, Winnebago, Santee, Rosebud, Ponca, Yankton,
+Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Fort Berthold,
+and Fort Peck Reservations). Later, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa would join
+the committee. Representation ranged from federal, state, and municipal
+agencies and officials to businesses and community organizations. The
+channelization of the river benefited mostly downriver states, while upriver
+states would bear the heaviest burden by taking on the majority of the dams
+and reservoirs. Since most of the land to be flooded was Indigenous, this
+was a “burden” South Dakota and North Dakota politicians were willing to
+assume. In 1951 during an appraisal hearing, Standing Rock Chairwoman
+Josephine Kelly challenged this aspect of the Pick-Sloan Plan, and
+especially the Oahe Dam’s appropriation of Standing Rock lands. Someone
+asked why the dams were not built in the lower basin states, who benefitted
+the most from flood control, to which Kelly responded bluntly, in front of
+Army Corps and federal authorities: “Because there are no Indians down in
+that country.”26
+At no time did the state committee solicit the attendance or input of a
+single Indigenous representative from the affected reservations. The
+committee would work closely with the Bureau of Reclamation and the
+Army Corps, in the words of its chair M. Q. Sharpe, “for the general
+development [of the Missouri River] for the multiple purposes of flood
+control, power development, irrigation, navigation, soil conservation, [and]
+wildlife and recreational development.” As he went on to explain, “the
+Missouri River States Committee had really become the general over-all
+supervising, coordinating, steering and representative committee for the
+development of the Missouri River basin on a valley-wide, over-all plan,
+representing all the sovereign states of the basin in their sovereign status
+and in a semi-official way.”27 Thus, states’ interests didn’t lay solely in
+
+river development; they also proposed the total liquidation of Indigenous
+political authority through termination.
+The construction of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in
+Montana in 1933 set a precedent for the way the Army Corps would ignore
+Indigenous communities, treaties, and water rights. After destructive floods
+in 1927, the Army Corps conducted an exhaustive four-year hydrological
+study on the Missouri River. The findings were published in what was
+called the 308 Report, which became the go-to manual for all future
+developments in the basin, including the 1944 Pick-Sloan Plan. The report
+also designated Fort Peck (not to be confused with the Fort Peck Indian
+Reservation) as the best site for a massive reservoir. The project fell in line
+with New Deal labor relief and public work projects, and President Franklin
+D. Roosevelt quickly authorized the Fort Peck Dam under the 1933
+National Industrial Recovery Act. The Army Corps built what was at the
+time of its construction the largest dam on earth, in the process providing
+much-needed employment for about 10,000 workers. Regional histories
+celebrate the dam as a historic engineering masterpiece, and it is considered
+instrumental in pulling Montana and the region out of the Great Depression.
+The successes of the Fort Peck Dam secured Army Corps control in
+planning and constructing future massive multipurpose dams on the main
+stem of the Missouri and, according to historian Michael Lawson, “greatly
+expanded its powers and functions beyond its constitutional limits.”28
+While the dam’s history is well publicized and well remembered as an
+economic boon and engineering marvel, missing from these popular
+accounts is the largely untold and undocumented history of the removal of
+350 Nakota, Dakota, and Assiniboine families on the Fort Peck Indian
+Reservation and the flooding of earlier Indian Affairs irrigation projects that
+had benefited Native farmers.29 The Fort Peck project paved the way for the
+1944 Pick-Sloan Plan and Flood Control Act, and a similar process would
+repeat itself: postwar employment and river development projects would
+come primarily at the sacrifice of Indigenous lives and lands.
+In anticipation of the need for postwar employment, and on the heels of
+massive flooding, in 1944 the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps,
+with the input and guidance of the Missouri River states, called for the
+construction of five earthen rolled dams that would create massive
+reservoirs on the river’s main stem. In South Dakota and North Dakota, the
+dams flooded 611,642 acres of land. Just over a half of this land—309,584
+
+acres in all—belonged to the Yankton, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Cheyenne
+River, Standing Rock, Rosebud, Santee, and Fort Berthold reservations.
+Oahe Dam flooded the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock; Fort Randall
+Dam flooded the Yankton and Rosebud Reservations; Fort Randall and Big
+Bend Dams flooded the Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservations, while
+Garrison Dam flooded Fort Berthold and Gavin’s Point Dam flooded the
+Santee Reservation. As a result, from these five reservations alone more
+than 900 Native families, one-third of their overall populations, were forced
+to relocate. Entire communities were forever submerged. Indigenous
+communities were well aware of the Pick-Sloan dams but had little idea
+where they would be built and how much it would affect them. Some
+communities were even flooded twice and experienced two dislocations,
+such as Crow Creek and Lower Brule. Seventy-five percent of wildlife and
+plants, and 90 percent of all commercial timber on these reservations lands
+were destroyed.30 By design, the Pick-Sloan Plan was a destroyer of
+nations.
+The Garrison Dam inundated the Fort Berthold Reservation, composed
+of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations, taking 152,360 acres of their
+land. Thirty percent of the community populations from Lower Brule, Crow
+Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock would be removed. Although
+less land was taken by the Garrison Dam than by the Oahe Dam, Fort
+Berthold lost a quarter of its entire land base, including its agency at
+Elbowoods. Because of its smaller size and the greater concentration of its
+residents in the river valley, approximately 80 percent of its people (325
+families) were removed and 94 percent of its agricultural lands were
+destroyed.31 No care was exercised to minimize the damage to Indigenous
+lands. To protect the majority-white border town of Williston, North
+Dakota, from losing its land, however, the Army Corps modified the
+Garrison Dam. The dam was also built safely upriver so as not to flood
+Bismarck, a white-dominated border town and the state capital of North
+Dakota. (Such were the considerations the Army Corps made when
+planning the Dakota Access Pipeline: minimization of damage to white
+settlements was prioritized.) The reservoir that sits atop Fort Berthold lands
+was named “Lake Sakakawea,” after the Shoshone woman, captured and
+sold by the Hidatsas, who gained notoriety for her services to the Lewis and
+Clark expedition and US empire.32 According to historian Michael Lawson,
+
+the Pick-Sloan dams “destroyed more Indian land than any single public
+works project in the United States.”33
+Lanniko Lee remembers teary-eyed women and men, young and old,
+gathering near the shorelines to watch as Mni Sose, the Missouri River,
+slowly widened and the flood waters crept up the rolling gumbo hills.
+“Some of them were singing the ancient songs for mourning,” she recalled.
+“They sang of the coming death to the river life that the people had known.”
+To Lee, it was an existential question about Indigenous identity grounded in
+land and water: “Would we still be able to call ourselves Minnecoujou,
+planters by the water?”34
+While Indigenous peoples mourned the loss of their river, US President
+John F. Kennedy celebrated the Oahe’s construction. At a dedication
+ceremony for the dam on August 17, 1962, held in Pierre, South Dakota,
+Kennedy spoke to a crowd of thousands, including businessmen,
+politicians, and the very Indigenous peoples whose lands were sacrificed.
+His message was one of salvation—the triumph of lightness over darkness,
+civilization over savagery. “This dam and the rest of the dams on this river,”
+he said, “which 30 years ago would have provided only floods and
+darkness, now provide irrigation and light.”
+Although the Army Corps proclaimed before Congress that they would
+negotiate with the affected reservations, they never did.35 White landowners
+were dealt with on an individual, case-by-case basis, and Missouri River
+tribes were dealt with as separate reservations. In contrast to the treatment
+of white landowners, the entire tribe received compensation, rather than the
+individual tribal members whose allotments were directly flooded or
+condemned. The creation of separate reservations had already severely
+weakened national unity for the Oceti Sakowin. Allotment emphasized
+individualism, breaking up the tightly knit family units of direct kin and
+extended relations called the tiospaye, isolating them on different plots of
+land in distant parts of the reservation. Tiospayes were the fundamental
+political unit of Oceti Sakowin governance, and they were where each
+family collectively selected its own representatives for general councils;
+though individuals once identified by political affiliation (for instance, as
+Hunkpapapa or Sicangu), they now identified by reservation (as Standing
+Rock or Rosebud). Now, Pick-Sloan, by negotiating with separate
+reservations rather than individual allottees, further fomented disunity
+
+between reservations, individual tribal members, and their tribal
+governments.
+Indigenous nations were, nevertheless, awarded more money per acre
+than their white neighbors; this was to better enable tribes to “throw off the
+shackles of Federal supervision,” as South Dakota Congressman E. Y. Berry
+declared during a debate on the Cheyenne River settlement in 1954.36 In
+other words, Berry wanted to terminate the reservations and extinguish
+treaty obligations, and the dams provided the perfect opportunity. The
+initial negotiations for taken lands and relocation resulted in a $34 million
+award to Lower Brule, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Yankton, and
+Standing Rock. But this came with strings attached—namely, that these
+tribes would eventually give up their political authority.
+As early damages were still being calculated, on November 2, 1949, BIA
+Superintendent Frell M. Owl wrote to the Lower Brule and Crow Creek
+Tribal Councils advising them, perhaps for the first time, of the inevitable
+flooding of their lands. The two tribes no doubt knew about Pick-Sloan, but
+none fathomed the catastrophe it would bring. Owl told them Congress
+transferred to the Army Corps all the lands “required” for the Big Bend and
+Fort Randall Dams. Emphasizing Lower Brule and Crow Creek had no say
+in the matter, Owl wrote that the proposal to take their lands “is submitted
+to you not as a document that you should adopt but it, more or less, points
+out the events to come in the future.” Owl later conveyed the convoluted
+negotiations process: the Army Corps would condemn the land and
+negotiate directly with Crow Creek and Lower Brule legal counsel. The
+BIA would then approve and submit estimates of damages, but Congress
+would hold final approval over all the negotiations and pass legislation
+awarding monetary compensation.37 This lengthy back-and-forth process
+resulted in the tribes negotiating with three different entities—the Army
+Corps, the BIA, and Congress—often causing such a backlog in hearings
+and proceedings that tribes received their relocation money only after their
+lands were flooded.
+In 1946 the BIA sponsored a two-year fact-finding mission, known as
+the Missouri River Basin Investigation (MRBI), to estimate damages to
+Missouri River tribes and estimate monetary awards for relocation, taken
+lands, and “intangible damages.” In the process, they saw “opportunity” in
+Indigenous “removal,” “relocation,” and “rehabilitation,” words that were
+synonymous with “termination.” This would sever Native people from the
+
+one thing keeping them from “merging with the total population” and
+evolving beyond their “primitive status”: the reservation and the land. Put
+plainly, the dams would speed up termination and relocation. Indigenous
+culture, a “self-contained and ingrowing” culture of poverty, the BIA
+investigation concluded, wanted for benevolent state intervention and the
+civilizing project. Indigenous nations had achieved a relative degree of
+autonomy under the IRA, but it was only through the liquidation of
+Indigenous political authority and federal trust responsibilities—undergoing
+destruction as nations—that they could receive the “gift of democracy.”38
+Most Indigenous river communities, as the MRBI put it, still depended
+on the “free goods of Nature”—such as hunting, trapping, and gathering—
+in the lush bottomlands where many Lakotas and Dakotas historically
+camped, and taking those lands would “force [Indians] into seeking cash
+income to make up for the substantial portion of income now represented in
+their use of natural resources of their present environment,” the BIA
+concluded.39 In other words, Indigenous peoples could only attain
+democracy once they were destroyed as nations.
+The BIA made it sound like flooding agencies, the reservations’
+headquarters, constituted liberation from dictatorial rule. “Our Indian
+agencies are growths descended from the frontier,” the report claimed. It
+called the towns “undemocratic” and stated that their end “might take the
+course of transferring most of the Federal Government’s services to the
+States.” The transfer of treaty obligations (federal services such as
+healthcare and education) to the states is termination in line with Public
+Law 280. The “wiping out” of the agencies, the MRBI concluded, was a
+“rare opportunity” that “may lead to significant discoveries which will have
+wide application to the conduct of Indian affairs in the United States.” In
+other words, it was an experiment in democracy.40
+“It takes the very heart out of these Indians,” one congressman said,
+speaking candidly about the legislation. “When you take reservation land,
+you destroy not only the land that is taken, but you destroy the community
+life, [the] religious and civil life of the people. You destroy nations, as a
+matter of fact.”
+Agencies were the heart of these nations. Hospitals, health clinics,
+schools, and administrative offices—the very institutions necessary to
+continue on as a sovereign nation—were all located in agency towns. The
+damages are worth reviewing in full.
+
+The Oahe Dam entirely inundated Cheyenne Agency, Cheyenne River’s
+largest community. The agency had to reestablish sixty miles inland at the
+isolated prairie town of Eagle Butte. More than 180 families, about 30
+percent of the population of the agency, were forced to leave their homes.
+Fort Yates, the Standing Rock Agency, remained above the Oahe Dam flood
+waters, but the land below it, where most of the community’s population
+lived, was flooded. As a result, Fort Yates was made into an island that had
+to be connected by a bridge, and 170 families were forced to relocate—25
+percent of the reservation population. At Crow Creek, the Fort Randall Dam
+flooded Fort Thompson, the agency headquarters for Lower Brule and
+Crow Creek and the largest community, dislocating eighty-four families
+from Crow Creek, thirty-five families from Lower Brule, and twenty
+families from Yankton. The combined agency headquarters from Crow
+Creek and Lower Brule were relocated to Pierre, the small capital city of
+South Dakota some sixty miles north of both reservations. Indian health
+services were relocated to Chamberlain, a notoriously racist, whitedominated border town twenty miles to the south.
+Beyond the agencies, the damage to the rest of the reservations was no
+less diffuse. The Oahe Dam, the most destructive, destroyed 160,889 acres
+of Standing Rock and Cheyenne River, including 104,420 acres of
+Cheyenne River lands and 55,994 acres of Standing Rock lands. Nearly all
+the Cheyenne River lands taken were grazing lands; 75 percent and 60
+percent of Native ranchers were displaced at Cheyenne River and Standing
+Rock, respectively. The most expensive and largest of the Pick-Sloan dams,
+the Oahe project cost $346 million, is 245 feet high, and generates 595,000
+kilowatts of hydropower. The Oahe reservoir (Lake Oahe), stretching 250
+miles from Pierre to Bismarck and storing 23.5 million acre-feet of water, is
+as deep as Lake Eerie and longer than Lake Ontario.
+The second-largest, Fort Randall Dam, rises 160 feet high and destroyed
+21,497 acres of Indigenous land. Crow Creek lost 9,418 acres of land in the
+flooding and had eighty-four families removed; Lower Brule lost 7,997
+acres and had thirty-five families removed; Yankton lost 2,851 acres and
+had twenty families removed; and Rosebud lost 1,231 acres of land. The
+Fort Randall generates 320,000 kilowatts of hydro-power and cost $200
+million. The reservoir it created, Lake Francis Case (named after a South
+Dakota congressman and early river-development advocate) is 107 miles
+long and has a storage capacity of 5.7 million acre-feet.
+
+In an incredibly stupid and cruel engineering calculation, the Big Bend
+Dam, the third-largest of those constructed under Pick-Sloan, flooded and
+dislocated Crow Creek and Lower Brule lands to which communities had
+been already relocated from the previous Fort Randall flooding. Both
+reservations would have to relocate twice. Ninety-four feet high and
+producing 468,000 kilowatts of power, the Big Bend Dam was built directly
+on the now-inundated Fort Thompson town site and directly on Crow Creek
+and Lower Brule lands, flooding 20,478 acres of each and destroying the
+Lower Brule Agency headquarters. Lower Brule lost 14,299 acres and had
+sixty-two families, more than half its population, removed. Half the
+remaining Lower Brule farms not destroyed by the Fort Randall project
+were destroyed by Big Bend. Crow Creek lost 6,179 acres and had twentyseven families removed. The reservoir behind Big Bend, Lake Sharpe, was
+named after the appointed Lower Brule and Crow Creek attorney M. Q.
+Sharpe, who represented the two tribes during the Pick-Sloan negotiations.
+For his lifelong commitment, not to Indigenous peoples, but to the taking of
+their lands by flooding it, Sharpe is immortalized by the water that sits atop
+Lower Brule and Crow Creek lands.
+The smallest and southernmost dam, Gavin’s Point, took 593 acres of
+Santee lands. Gavin’s Point created Lewis and Clark Lake, named for the
+two US explorers who famously branded the Oceti Sakowin as “the vilest
+miscreants of the savage race.”
+As much as the Army Corps already viewed the Missouri River as a
+technical problem to be managed and administered, the MRBI reduced
+Indigenous relocation and the trauma it inflicted to a set of technical
+questions and problems to be sorted out by the administration of federal and
+state services. Each of these problems had a solution, followed with a cash
+payment. By all accounts most of the Indigenous river communities, as the
+MRBI put it, still depended on the “free goods of Nature”—such as
+hunting, trapping, and gathering. This relationship was viewed as
+preventing full integration into the market economy. The BIA argued that
+taking the bottomlands would “force [Indians] into seeking cash income to
+make up for the substantial portion of income now represented in their use
+of natural resources of their present environment.” “Income” calculated not
+only cash income from wage labor, but also what was harvested from the
+land for consumption, rather than for profit. The assessment of “intangible”
+and “tangible” resources would force Indigenous people to begin thinking
+
+in terms of the cash economy, rather than relying upon goods that were
+otherwise considered “free” and, if properly managed, naturally
+replenishing. “Substitutes for native products destroyed by the reservoirs
+will be commercial products acquired through cash payments,” reasoned
+the MRBI.41
+During a 1958 congressional hearing on the Oahe Dam, Standing Rock
+member Louis Thief compared the catastrophic impact of “intangible
+damages” to the delayed explosion of an atomic bomb—unfolding
+gradually over time and space rather than in a split second—forever
+destroying the land, and whose consequences could only be fully
+understood by future generations. The bomb killed the “little things” that
+had no market value, such as mice or mouse beans, which had prevented
+many Indigenous peoples from starvation on the reservations. Mouse beans,
+or makatomnica in Lakota, are ground beans that are highly revered in
+Indigenous culture. Lakota and Dakota women would sing special songs in
+which they asked the mice for permission to take their beans, promising to
+leave appropriate gifts. The beans were a major source of protein for many
+families and today remain nearly extinct.42 Thief explained how the
+previous winter a man had dug up some of these mouse beans and had
+“enough to tide him over two weeks and [save] his family from starving.”43
+The loss of wildlife and plant life and the gardens also had a deleterious
+health impact. Prior to the dams, there was no diabetes. After the dams,
+diabetes rates soared. US Department of Agriculture commodity foods,
+such as canned meats and vegetables, white flour, and white sugar, replaced
+healthy foods. “Civilizing” the river landscape replaced a healthy diet of
+vegetables and lean meats with a high carb, sugar, and fat diet, causing
+generational health issues.44
+Thief’s testimony evoked the idea that Missouri Indigenous communities
+were also “energy sacrifice zones,” a term that the Nixon-era National
+Academy of Sciences used to describe the Shoshone and Paiute lands that
+were taken for nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. With no small irony,
+the US Department of Energy created a 1,360-square-mile “reservation”
+where 928 nuclear bombs were detonated, making it the most heavily
+nuclear-bombed area in the world. The only difference was that while the
+Nevada Test Site sought to transform atoms into nuclear energy, Pick-Sloan
+sought to transform water into hydropower. Both made the landscapes
+
+uninhabitable. Despite MRBI attempts to calculate the costs of damage, the
+value of the land could never be replaced.
+Also at stake was the future realization of life that sustained Indigenous
+lives, that kept families from starving to death. In this sense, the dams
+reached into the future to take human and nonhuman life, and literally
+drowned its potential reproduction. Calculations were not for immediate
+damages but future damages, demonstrating the MRBI’s inability to realize
+relations with other-than-human life. For the Oceti Sakowin, the attempt at
+compensation for taking their future was not a new phenomenon. During
+the illegal annexation of the Black Hills, a federal official offered Red
+Cloud and his people $6 million for the Black Hills. When Red Cloud
+refused, the official asked him the value of the Black Hills. “The Black
+Hills [are] worth seven generations to me,” Red Cloud responded.45 In
+other words, it was not about money but about a viable future, something
+entirely unquantifiable. It was not merely about surrendering one’s lands,
+but also surrendering one’s future relations to that land. As Lower Brule
+Tribal Council member Richard LaRoche Jr. testified before Congress in
+1955,
+We doubt if any group of strangers to this land, even though they may have some skill as
+appraisers[,] could come on to it and find all of the real values of it and appraise them accurately. We
+who have lived with it and owned some of it and worked it all of our lives, we think, are better able
+to tell you its true value.46
+
+The BIA, seeking to account for the loss of “intangible” things like mice
+beans, wild plums, chokecherries, buffalo berries, wild game, plant
+medicines, and a bountiful timber supply, was estimating the “value of wild
+products” to be equivalent to “the grocery of food to replace the loss of wild
+products.”47 But many of the “wild products” lost also played central roles
+in seasonal ceremonial practices. One such practice involving women’s
+coming of age required the use of buffalo berries, which would never again
+grow on Lower Brule land after inundation, thus ending the ceremonial
+practice. LaRoche was outraged at having to explain this and place a
+monetary value on the loss of ceremonial rites: “Well, the white man, he
+never cared about these things; he didn’t even know what it was.”48
+In a 1958 congressional hearing on the Oahe relocation and
+rehabilitation program for Standing Rock, Josephine Kelly, no longer the
+chairwoman, expressed disgust at the way the United States government
+
+and the Army Corps ran roughshod over treaties. Frustrated congressmen
+told her in patronizing tones that the settlement would provide agricultural
+and community development loans. “We don’t want loans,” Kelly shot
+back. The congressman compared the loan to a gift from Santa Claus, as if
+Kelly was an entitled child. “We have been Santa Clauses, too, the Sioux
+Indians. We gave up our Black Hills and gave up our land,” she replied,
+“and now we are down to bedrock, just like a bunch of beggars, and that is
+really sad.”49
+No matter. Human and animal life, BIA officials harshly explained,
+would “have to reestablish on the open upland plains where a less
+hospitable and more rigorous climate prevails.”50 And compensating land
+loss at “fair market value” was next to impossible because this sudden rise
+in demand for hospitable lands drove up real estate prices and market
+competition for prime ranchland.51 As a result, many families had to subsist
+on a monetary compensation that arrived only after their homes had been
+flooded, “with the result that they run the real risk of ending up penniless
+and homeless.”52 And many did. Michael Lawson describes an all-toofamiliar scene that unfolded at Standing Rock, which was also experienced
+by the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Reservations:
+In January 1960, when the Corps of Engineers finally delivered the settlement funds to Standing
+Rock, it also served the tribe with an immediate eviction order. In the midst of a fierce Dakota winter,
+with temperatures falling as low as thirty degrees below zero, tribal families who lived within the
+Oahe reservoir taking area were forced to gather all their possessions and to leave their land. Because
+the federal government had not yet made funds available for either the construction of new homes or
+the relocation of old dwellings, these people were crowded into cold and cheerless trailer houses,
+which they had to maintain at their own expense until permanent housing could be prepared.53
+
+Although the dams promised to hasten the death of Indigenous nations
+by destroying the land, they failed to accomplish this task, thanks to the
+Oceti Sakowin’s ability to mobilize, unite, and defeat termination
+legislation—not once, but twice. However, it was an enormous task. During
+early Pick-Sloan negotiations, most of the politicians “advocating” for the
+Oceti Sakowin were also ardent terminationists and Pick-Sloan supporters,
+like South Dakota congressmen Karl Mundt, E. Y. Berry, and Francis Case;
+the Lower Brule and Crow Creek legal counsel M. Q. Sharpe; and the
+commissioner of Indian Affairs, Dillon Myer. From the time Myer took
+over as commissioner of Indian affairs, he was intent on overturning the
+progressive legacy of his predecessor, John Collier, who introduced the
+
+IRA. Myer was also the perfect man for overseeing the overthrow of
+Indigenous nations. Appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as director
+of the War Relocation Authority, Myer earned his credentials, imprisoning
+more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in concentration
+camps during World War II.
+If facing imminent flooding were not a bleak enough situation for the
+Lower Brule and Crow Creek, they also had an enthusiastic Pick-Sloan
+advocate and terminationist representing them in the negotiations process.
+In June 1951, the consolidated agencies of Lower Brule and Crow Creek
+appointed M. Q. Sharpe as their legal counsel because his law practice was
+located near the reservations and he had political connections in Congress
+and within federal agencies—and, above all, because he was the most
+affordable lawyer. Indian Commissioner Dillon Myer had also refused to
+allow Crow Creek to hire separate legal counsel after they selected Lakota
+attorney Ramon Roubideaux.54 When the failure to select a legal counsel
+for both reservations delayed negotiations, Myer intervened and made the
+decision for them.55 In the course of the negotiations, Myer, as well as the
+South Dakota politicians, consistently tried to steer the conversation toward
+termination.
+The issue arose of relocating the agency headquarters—the seat of the
+tribes’ IRA government—off the reservation to nearby white-dominated
+towns, a move which would fulfill the dual purpose of providing a model
+for termination while also beginning the process of Indigenous relocation
+into surrounding white communities. Berry and Myer claimed that the
+leaders of the white-dominated border town Chamberlain offered up their
+town as a potential site for Lower Brule. This move, wrote Myer to Berry
+on August 31, might “result in some inconvenience to individual Indians,”
+but in the longer-term, “many of the Indians who now take all their
+problems, great and small, to the agency superintendent might through
+necessity have to start taking care of some of them for themselves.” The
+completion of Fort Randall Dam, Myer continued, might “become the
+starting point” for pushing them toward “more assimilation and
+integration”—and away from the “narrow and inbred way of life” that was
+“customary of reservation living.”56
+Local white leadership reacted virulently. Because Chamberlain was the
+seat of Brule County, the county commissioners adopted a resolution to
+thwart an effort by the BIA and Congress to force the members of Lower
+
+Brule and Crow Creek into integration at the public schools and into the
+community at large, claiming it “would place an intolerable financial
+burden on Brule County, South Dakota.”57 Chamberlain Mayor Herschel V.
+Melcher took an even more threatening tone, in a March 30, 1954, letter to
+Case and Berry, reminding them that carrying the “relief load for Indians”
+was the job of the federal government.58 “We do not intend to let an Indian
+light around here at all. We do not want to live with them, we don’t want
+them in our schools,” he wrote. Impatient, he sent another letter just two
+weeks later, threatening racial violence. “Anybody who rents them any
+property will have to change his address and I would not want the insurance
+on his building. We do not feel that this town should be ruined by a mess
+like this and we do not intend to take this lying down.”59
+Crow Creek and Lower Brule also opposed the proposed relocation,
+adopting a resolution that barred Commissioner Myer from further
+obstructing the tribe’s requests for legal counsel and to open negotiations
+with Congress and the Corps of Engineers.60 But Myer refused to halt the
+proposed relocation, to allow the tribe to select its own legal counsel, or to
+open immediate negotiations for Fort Randall claims. This rebuff
+highlighted a larger failure of termination, and a persistent feature of settler
+colonialism’s “Indian problem”: white settlers want Indigenous lands, but
+they don’t want Indigenous peoples. Federal agencies adopted a hands-off
+approach when dealing with tribes once their land bases were destroyed,
+with the BIA and Congress recommending a course of action, then standing
+back, leaving already hard-pressed Indigenous communities to fight for
+themselves against powerful federal bureaucracies and violently hostile
+white settlers. It was a tactic of neglect. The Pick-Sloan Plan created an
+opportunity to experiment with forced Native relocation and assimilation as
+a way of relinquishing federal wardship responsibilities. Ultimately, the
+experiment failed, but termination remained on the table.
+In 1957 the South Dakota legislature introduced a bill to assume criminal
+jurisdiction over Dakota and Lakota lands, but the Oceti Sakowin fought
+back. The majority of the Lakotas and Dakotas whose lands were
+circumscribed by the state resoundingly rejected state jurisdiction in a 1958
+reservation-wide referendum.61 But the victory was short-lived. In 1963
+South Dakota again introduced legislation to attempt to overthrow tribal
+governments under the auspices of Public Law 280, which did not
+
+immediately require Indigenous consent but mandated states to assume all
+the financial burdens of taking over Indigenous authority. Within weeks the
+Oceti Sakowin formed United Sioux Tribes (UST) and collected more than
+20,000 signatures to put the legislation up for a statewide referendum. In
+1964 UST mobilized both Native and non-Native communities with a savvy
+media and publicity campaign appealing to the “fairness” of state
+jurisdiction, which had been imposed without consent. Although they had
+never participated in large numbers in state politics, because of South
+Dakota’s history of anti-Indian hostilities, nearly 90 percent of Natives in
+South Dakota turned out to vote. The referendum won in a landslide
+victory, with nearly 80 percent in favor (and therefore against termination)
+statewide.62 South Dakota, which was deeply anti-Indian, wanted to take
+reservation land but could not fathom taking care of Indigenous peoples
+once they were “liberated” from federal rule, as the financial “burden” of
+termination and state jurisdiction was too much to bear. Nevertheless, the
+victory of the plebiscite killed the state’s terminationist agenda,
+demonstrating the resiliency of the Oceti Sakowin.
+Yet the Pick-Sloan dams endure, remaining disruptive structures on the
+riverscape whose longer-term impacts are hard to ascertain. Rob Nixon
+argues that environmental devastation, much like climate change, is
+difficult to understand because it unfolds over such a long duration.
+Violence is often viewed as immediate, explosive, and spectacular, like the
+Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. But Nixon sees environmental
+degradation as a kind of “slow violence”: a violence that is neither
+“spectacular [n]or instantaneous.”63 Pick-Sloan might not have been an
+explicit attempt to overthrow tribal governments, but it nevertheless
+perpetuated “slow violence” on Indigenous people as sovereign nations—
+not simply as cultures. These are nations of people who need food, shelter,
+warmth, safety, and care, without which the nations cannot reproduce
+themselves or live as they choose. And this is far more than a question of
+cultural survival; cultural revitalization, while important, cannot bring back
+the stolen lands that once offered up food, clothes, materials for shelter, and
+medicines. Any cultural and spiritual connection to Mni Sose was also
+accompanied by a material connection: the river kept people from starving
+or freezing to death.
+Indigenous peoples are more than cultures, they are sovereign nations.
+Thinking purely in terms of culture as a form of historical agency tends to
+
+neglect the concrete reality of Indigenous life. While Nixon’s framework of
+“slow violence” as a steady accumulation—a gradual buildup—of violences
+through environmental contamination is useful for understanding the lasting
+impact of the Pick-Sloan Plan, there is also another kind of accumulation,
+one that is not always spectacular, nor instantaneous, but that nevertheless
+makes the endgame of elimination an impossibility: the tradition of
+Indigenous resistance. This accumulation is a radical consciousness and
+political practice, deeply embedded in history and place, and cannot be
+simply overturned by colonial fiat or by inundation with water. It cannot be
+killed. It endures the long game of colonial occupation. With the Pick-Sloan
+dams and the failed project of termination, a new generation of young
+people, thrown from their reservation homelands and shipped off to the city,
+took up the mantle of Red Power in the spirit of their ancestors and
+demanded freedom and justice in the face of this history of dispossession.
+
+Water Protectors protest outside the White House for the Native Nations Rise march and rally. March
+2017. Photo by author.
+
+5
+
+Red Power
+They can’t stop the wind and they can’t stop the rain. They can’t stop the earthquake and the volcano
+and the tornado. They can’t stop power.
+—John Trudell, “We Are Power,” Black Hills
+Survival Gathering, South Dakota, July 18, 19801
+
+Visions for Indigenous freedom coalesced into the Red Power movement in
+the 1960s. For the Oceti Sakowin, the American Indian Movement (AIM)
+became the militant vanguard for the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and
+Indigenous nationhood in the 1970s. Policies of termination, relocation, and
+the damming and flooding of the Missouri River had torn thousands of
+Indigenous peoples from rural reservations, scattering them in far-off urban
+centers. Many of them saw a direct link between the Pick-Sloan Plan, which
+took reservation lands in the 1950s and 1960s, and relocation policies. “I
+grew up along the Missouri River,” Madonna Thunder Hawk told Indian
+Country Today, “and I saw that land go when it was flooded.” The Oahe
+Dam flooded her home and community on the Cheyenne River Reservation.
+“I’ve never been able to take my children and grandchildren to where I
+grew up. That was probably one of the major events that put me on the road
+to activism.”2 She later joined AIM, following the 1969 Alcatraz takeover.
+The eighty-nine-day occupation of the federal prison island in the San
+Francisco Bay marked the beginning of a militant protest movement. “It
+was like a bomb that dropped, and we were scattered like shrapnel,” Lakota
+and Ho-Chunk AIM activist Lakota Harden recalls.3 The shrapnel that was
+Native life, which became radical activism, was scattered to places like
+Minneapolis, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Denver, and
+other major cities.
+In 1973, Thunder Hawk served as a leader and medic during AIM’s
+armed takeover of Wounded Knee. But the hard work for her began once
+
+the occupation ended. She was central to organizing the Wounded Knee
+Legal Defense/Offense Committee, to combat the legal repression
+following the takeover; the We Will Remember Survival School, to provide
+an alternative education for Native youth; the International Indian Treaty
+Council, which advocates for the defense of Indigenous treaty rights at the
+United Nations; the Women of All Red Nations, organizing American
+Indian women around reproductive health, including against illegal
+sterilization and environmental contamination of Native lands; and the
+Black Hills Alliance, a Native and non-Native alliance formed to halt
+uranium mining in Black Hills. Lakota Harden, like her sister Marcella
+Gilbert (Thunder Hawk’s daughter), came of age in the movement. As a
+student of the We Will Remember Survival School, she also became a
+leader. Each of these women had been impacted by genocidal Indian policy.
+Finding themselves flung far from their reservation homelands, instead of
+dissolving into the melting pot of settler society, they helped organize the
+twentieth century’s most audacious Indigenous uprisings: Red Power.
+Originally envisioned as a means to dismantle Native communities by
+removing them from the land and integrating them into mainstream urban
+society, relocation in fact had the opposite effect. Indians didn’t simply stop
+being Indians once they left the reservation. Relocation, for all its malicious
+intent, helped birth a new movement that arose from both poverty-stricken
+urban ghettos and rural reservations. Natives on relocation found each other
+in the cities and at universities, forming pan-Indigenous organizations such
+as the National Indian Youth Council, United Native Americans, AIM, and
+many more. Their concerns, however, were fundamentally no different than
+those of their reservation-based relatives. They merged their respective rural
+and urban experiences into one, and what emerged was a radical, explicitly
+anti-colonial political consciousness that took the world by storm. It viewed
+the federal system as a colonial structure rather than as a solution. And,
+unlike youthful generational protests of its day, Red Power looked to older
+generations, the traditional reservation leadership, for guidance—the elders
+who had rejected federal administration and kept alive the “old ways.”
+In less than a decade from its founding in 1968, AIM would go from
+being a neighborhood patrol in the streets of Minneapolis, stopping police
+violence against Natives on relocation, to a far grander stage: the United
+Nations. To understand this trajectory, and how they wound up there, it is
+necessary to take a deeper look at the historical context of Red Power.
+
+Powerful pan-Indigenous organizations, including the National Congress
+of American Indians (NCAI), preceded Red Power by nearly two decades.
+While it had led the fight against and successfully defeated termination
+legislation in the 1950s, which sought to end trust responsibilities to tribes,
+NCAI was ambivalent about the future of Native sovereignty, seeing it as
+heavily wedded to formal IRA governments and incremental reforms within
+the federal system. NCAI hoped to keep in place what a younger generation
+intended to end: colonial administration. Like its predecessors, many of
+NCAI’s solutions pandered to the rampant anti-communism and flagwaving patriotism at the time. It was the height of the Cold War. To curb
+Soviet influence in the Third World, where colonial regimes were being
+violently overturned, the United States expanded its covert
+counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America, the Middle East, and
+Southeast Asia. The justification was an intensifying ideological and
+economic struggle between Soviet Communism and Third World
+decolonization, on one side, and North Atlantic imperialism and capitalism,
+on the other. Humanitarian aid became empire’s bargaining chip, a way to
+win hearts and minds, both at home and abroad. NCAI leaders understood
+this and appealed to domestic contests over the meaning of freedom and
+democracy. Black Americans had also pointed to the disparities in civil
+rights and racial injustice in the United States. In 1951 NCAI cofounder
+D’Arcy McNickle called for “a domestic Point Four Program for our Indian
+reservations.” McNickle drew parallels with President Harry Truman’s
+Point Four Program for international aid, which he undertook in the world’s
+poorest countries in an effort to forestall the spread of communism.4
+Furthermore, McNickle understood that Natives shared “the world
+experience of other native peoples subjected to colonial domination.”5
+How could the United States defend its claims to moral superiority when
+Native people were not free and remained in an impoverished state,
+excluded from the wealth and bounty of the new global superpower? “The
+assertion of a global indigenous identity stands among the most potentially
+transformative aspects of the struggle for tribal sovereignty during the Cold
+War era (1945–1991),” writes Daniel Cobb.6 The geopolitical realignment
+of the world created a sense of uncertainty and urgency. New nation-states
+emerged as old European empires were carved up, and more division was
+on the horizon as colonized people clamored for independence. Native
+people posed a parallel threat to the United States, and the fast-growing
+
+decolonization movement inspired Indigenous activists. During the Cold
+War, the Indigenous movement began to identify less with domestic policy
+solutions, instead starting to imagine itself as part of a larger political
+community of colonized peoples.
+The more Native youth followed NCAI leadership, the more they
+became disenchanted with its limited vision for change. As part of President
+Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” NCAI’s efforts had garnered funding
+from the new Office of Economic Opportunity for rural and community
+development known as “Community Action Programs.” Once Johnson’s
+priorities switched from the war on poverty to the war in Vietnam,
+organizations like the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) adopted more
+militant tactics, arguing for a more robust form of Indigenous autonomy
+that wasn’t wedded to the Indian Bureau. NIYC was founded in Gallup,
+New Mexico, in 1961 after the fallout of an NCAI conference in Chicago,
+where young activists “grabbed the mic” to protest the conservatism of the
+older generation and demanded for more radical change. The young
+militants initially gained traction by supporting the “fish-ins,” a drawn-out
+struggle for Pacific Northwest Native treaty rights where many were beaten,
+and some killed, by white vigilantes and state officials.7 This generation of
+activists—including Hank Adams, Clyde Warrior, Shirley Hill Witt, Janet
+McCloud, and many others—pioneered a new era of Indigenous protest that
+called itself “Red Power.” It deployed confrontational tactics that included
+sit-ins, occupations, and direct action, while also working within existing
+channels of power.
+At its core, as Vine Deloria has suggested, Red Power was ideological,
+and it went beyond the facile settler politics of liberal versus conservative.
+In line with a flowering worldwide revolutionary spirit, Red Power was
+about Indigenous liberation. More so than others of his generation, Deloria
+read the pulse of Indian Country. His wit and relentless advocacy made him
+the most prolific and iconic Oceti Sakowin intellectual of the twentieth
+century. His 1969 classic Custer Died for Your Sins set aflame a generation
+of young Indigenous activists. Deloria’s calls for a renewal of Native
+politics and culture spoke truth to everyday Native experiences. What’s
+more, Custer Died for Your Sins’s main arguments still ring true today:
+Indigenous peoples are political by default. They continue to exist as
+nations when they are supposed to have disappeared, and they have to fight,
+not only for bare survival, but also for accurate representation. They
+
+incarnate the inconvenient truth that the United States was founded on
+genocide and the continuing theft of a continent. Deloria understood all this.
+He also came from a prominent family of scholars and activists—his aunt
+Ella Deloria was a prominent anthropologist who studied under Franz Boas;
+his father, Vine Deloria Sr., was a well-known reservation-based Episcopal
+priest; and his son Philip Deloria is a preeminent Native historian.8 This
+pedigree, combined with the tumultuous years—in which, according to him,
+“the Indian revolution was well under-way��—situated Deloria as the
+intellectual lightning rod for the burgeoning movement.9
+Deloria’s potent Red Power ideology—spelled out in his numerous
+writings—was fundamentally at odds with US and Western values and their
+corresponding economic and political systems. This new ideology sought to
+reclaim tribalism, not as a thing of the past, but as a modern political
+identity that existed both within and beyond the borders of the United
+States. From the reservation era onward, a collective Indigenous national
+identity had been targeted by assimilation and allotment policies and was
+seen as preventing individuals from achieving “civilization.” The
+destruction of tribalism meant the eradication of nationhood, which worked
+in tandem with land theft. In a 1964 Senate hearing on termination
+legislation, Deloria, then the executive director of NCAI, charted a new
+path forward. “We suggest that tribes are not vestiges of a past, but
+laboratories of the future,” he stated. For him, the difference between “civil
+rights” and Indigenous rights was that settlers “came over as individuals”
+and earned citizenship by converting Indigenous lands into private property.
+Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, had been brought into the US
+constitutional framework as separate nations through treaties—not by way
+of individual or civil rights. “We were here as independent nations,” he
+proclaimed, “and treaties were made with us, and we each have traditions.”
+Pan-Indigenous organizations such as NCAI and NIYC unified Indigenous
+nations, not in sameness, but in difference, with “independent relations to
+each other” as “a kind of miniature United Nations.”10 He envisioned
+Indigenous international relations as existing not only among themselves or
+within the United States, but also with nations from around the world.
+Deloria was especially taken by the version of Black Power enunciated
+by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). Kwame Ture, the former leader of
+SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), had adopted a
+pan-African Black nationalism, which saw little use for civil rights or
+
+further incorporation into a white supremacist state. For Deloria, Black
+Power and Red Power weren’t just repudiations of “the exploitation of land,
+people, and life itself” by capitalism, colonialism, and racism; they were
+also affirmations of peoplehood. “Peoplehood is impossible without cultural
+independence,” Deloria argued, “which in turn is impossible without a land
+base.”11 The notion of peoplehood was a departure from civil rights
+discourse that called for equality under the law. Rather, Deloria’s calls for
+peoplehood—an understanding of unique tribal or national status—were a
+step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples
+taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the
+restoration of Indigenous governance and territories, a project long in the
+making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system.
+Deloria saw the 1960s and 1970s as “the third ideological American
+revolution.” According to his thinking, major racial groups—Blacks,
+Mexicans, and Native nations—had been brought under the US
+constitutional framework not as individuals, but as entire groups of people
+and nations, making them more apt to wage struggle as whole peoples or
+nations (versus as alienated individuals). For example, the 1848 Treaty of
+Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the US–Mexican war and annexed Mexican
+territory and citizens; the end of the Civil War in 1865 made freed Black
+slaves citizens; and the 1871 abolition of Indigenous treaty making made
+Native nations an internal “problem” to be dealt with.12 In each instance,
+each group had no say about citizenship or how they would be incorporated.
+It was thrust upon them, often without consent. The revolutionary potential
+of these colonized peoples had to do with the inability of the settler state to
+seamlessly “absorb” them into mainstream political and social life as
+individuals. At the same time, understanding Native grievances as simply
+linked to their economic status as poor people failed to account for how
+race and colonialism intersected with class; doing so also reproduced the
+“melting pot” theory that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.”
+Native nations and Indigenous Mexicans had not migrated from elsewhere.
+Black slaves had come in chains. These people were not “immigrants.” And
+even if economic inequality could be leveled, it would still be atop stolen
+Indigenous land. After all, Third World nations, at the time, had waged the
+most successful and widespread struggles, linking race, class, and
+colonialism. Why couldn’t the same happen in the United States, where
+
+entire peoples had been incorporated into a colonial system against their
+will?
+Indigenous concerns were, nevertheless, socioeconomic. The devastating
+poverty experienced both on and off the reservation was closely linked to
+centuries of land theft and forced removals. But the false promise of
+“equality” had also been guaranteed under termination. For Natives, “civil
+rights” frequently meant assimilation into settler society, and the language
+of civil rights had been the justification for termination. “Equality of the
+law” was the language of termination Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins, a
+right-wing Mormon, used in 1954 when he invoked the Emancipation
+Proclamation: “I see the following words emblazoned in letters of fire
+above the heads of the Indians—THESE PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!”13
+“Restrictions” on Native property, so the argument went, held Native people
+back from “freely” selling their lands and lives to white people. Native
+concerns dealt specifically with the colonial relation that many saw
+enshrined in the 1871 abolition of treaty making. Prior to this, the United
+States had confirmed through its ratification of more than 370 Indigenous
+treaties that Indigenous peoples were in fact distinct, self-governing nations
+in control of their own territories. In total, the United States negotiated
+more than 500 treaties and agreements with Indigenous nations. As a result
+of treaty making, numerous other agreements, and the reservation system,
+more than 567 federally recognized tribes still exist as largely autonomous
+political entities. “The real issue for Indians—tribal existence within the
+homeland reservation—appeared to have been completely be ignored,”
+Deloria observed, criticizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s
+Campaign, which had not garnered significant Native support.14 Poverty
+was only a symptom of the root problem: colonialism. And the Native
+struggle, for Deloria, “was one of historical significance, not of temporary
+domestic discontent.”15 If Native people truly were nations, then they
+should act like nations, make their own relations, and determine their own
+futures.
+A fellow traveler, the fiery Ponca prophet and NIYC president Clyde
+Warrior, explained in a 1967 speech before a presidential committee on
+poverty that the very things holding back Native freedom were the systems
+in place to secure it:
+We are not free. We do not make choices. Our choices are made for us; we are the poor. For those of
+us who live on reservations these choices and decisions are made by federal administrators,
+
+bureaucrats, and their “yes men,” euphemistically called tribal governments. Those of us who live in
+non-reservation areas have our lives controlled by white power elites. They are called social workers,
+“cops,” school teachers, churches, etc., and now OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity]
+employees.16
+
+The bureaucratic practices of the BIA, tribal governments, and state
+institutions were part of the same colonial structure, he argued, and
+therefore part of the same problem. Throwing money at the “Indian
+problem” wouldn’t make it go away, especially when Congress determined
+the amount of money (which was never enough), and unelected bureaucrats
+determined how and where it was spent. According to Warrior, “the solution
+to Indian poverty is not ‘government programs.’” Rather, the solution could
+only be self-determination: “Let poor people decide for once, what is best
+for themselves.”17 Centuries of paternalism dictated everyday Native life. It
+was engrained in the very institutions and ways of thinking that were meant
+to lift them out of poverty; it was an ideological force with real power that
+had to be reckoned with.
+By contrast, Red Power was not just an abstract theory or an intellectual
+exercise. It was a practice of everyday Native people taking charge of their
+lives and their communities. It was a movement, a revolution. Education,
+paternalism, police violence and incarceration, and the false promise of
+citizenship all had to be challenged, if not entirely undone. Red Power, built
+upon centuries-old traditions of Indigenous resistance, sprang into action in
+rural reservations and urban centers alike.
+In the coming years, Red Power galvanized around attention-grabbing
+occupations and protests, including takeovers of Alcatraz, the BIA
+headquarters in Washington, DC, Mount Rushmore, and Wounded Knee.
+While these actions often overshadow their origins, specifically in the
+1960s and with NIYC, they also point toward a significant shift. The 1969
+occupation of Alcatraz island, an abandoned federal prison, by Natives in
+the San Francisco Bay was the spark, and growing Native discontent was
+the kindling. Previously, in 1964, a group of Lakotas—Russell and Hank
+Means, Belva Cottier, Richard McKenzie, and others—attempted
+unsuccessfully to reclaim the island as federal surplus property when the
+prison shut down, under an alleged provision of the 1868 Fort Laramie
+Treaty. In fact, the island is Indigenous land belonging to the Ohlone
+people. Five years later, another group—organized by LaNada Means (War
+Jack), a Shoshone-Bannock student who helped organize the Third World
+
+Liberation Front strikes (calling for the creation of ethnic studies programs,
+among other things, at the University of California Berkeley), and Mohawk
+activist Richard Oakes (murdered in 1972 by a white man)—led a nineteenmonth occupation of the island.18 Calling themselves “Indians of All
+Tribes,” the Alcatraz occupiers symbolized and practiced a pan-Indigenous
+unity that had been “long dreamed by our people.” They saw themselves as
+a “new” but “old” movement, beholden not to government funding, but to
+the people. Its principles arose from desires and experiences of everyday
+Natives, both on relocation and in reservation communities. “New concepts
+based upon old ideas demand that new leaders emerge,” their manifesto
+read. “Our children will know Freedom and Justice.”19 To be sure, the
+reclamation of the island and the plans to turn it into an “all-Indian
+university” constituted a major historical event and turning point. Although
+they never achieved their goals and were evicted by police under orders
+from the Nixon administration, the occupiers had galvanized the movement
+to go beyond merely seeking reform within the halls of power, turning
+power into the hands of poor, working-class Native people.
+The formation of United Native Americans in the San Francisco Bay and
+the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis made the occupation
+possible. In 1968 AIM was founded by a group of Ojibwes—Dennis Banks,
+Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Patricia Bellanger, George Mitchell, and
+others—as a community patrol, partly inspired by the Black Panther Party
+for Self-Defense, founded two years earlier in Oakland. Like the Black
+Panthers, the original focus was on community empowerment and service
+programs, such as creating survival schools to educate urban Native youth
+about native history and culture. But AIM also confronted the institutions of
+the state, such as the police and education systems. At the time, police often
+swept Indian bars, making mass arrests and profiling poor, urban Natives,
+many of whom were on relocation. Through community organizing and
+AIM patrols, often involving violent confrontations with police that ended
+in the arrests of AIM members, they succeeded in bringing the practice to a
+near halt.
+Even in its early days, AIM was more than a protest movement. It
+founded survival schools in Minneapolis, Rapid City, and Pine Ridge—an
+alternative for youth who had faced discrimination in public schools. By the
+1970s there were about sixteen AIM survival schools in urban centers and
+reservation communities. The founders of these schools were all women,
+
+among them Miniconjou activist Madonna Thunder Hawk and Ojibwe
+activist Patricia Bellanger. According to the We Will Remember Survival
+School, founded in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974 and then moved to
+the Pine Ridge Reservation, the school didn’t accept government funds. “If
+we are to learn the truth about the history of the Lakota since the start of
+colonization and its results called genocide,” the teachers and students
+wrote in a collective document, “we must maintain our independence. To
+learn the true meaning of Native American Sovereignty, we must have full
+control of what our young people are taught.”20 AIM also provided legal
+advocacy for parents and children against state welfare programs that
+incarcerated Native youth, or otherwise removed them from their homes
+and placed them in the custody of white families—a practice that continues,
+to a large degree, to this day.21
+As in every revolutionary movement, women’s roles in AIM are nearly
+forgotten, with men taking center stage as leaders. The feminist slogan
+“women hold up more than half the sky” was equally true for AIM and has
+been for Indigenous movements, in general. When the FBI began targeting
+AIM men, AIM women filled the vacuum and kept the movement going.
+As in the past, Indigenous women were not seen as leaders by the media or
+by state institutions; this relative invisibility, however, also provided
+freedom and security in ways not granted to male leadership. “The women
+of AIM then realized that we could just about do anything under the eyes of
+the feds and press because we were invisible,” Madonna Thunder Hawk
+recalled.22 “The stability of our people has always been with the women,
+regardless of what disease has come along, whether it has been religion, or
+federal Indian policy.”23
+Nevertheless, Indigenous women participated and filled leadership roles
+in all major AIM actions, takeovers, and campaigns. In 1977, after
+attending an international conference on ending apartheid and colonialism,
+and seeing other women’s committees with other revolutionary movements,
+the AIM women decided to create their own. The next year in Rapid City,
+with the motto “Indian women have always been in the front lines in the
+defense of our nations,” Thunder Hawk, Young, Bellanger, Lorelei DeCora
+Means, Agnes Williams, Lakota Harden, and Janet McCloud formed
+Women of All Red Nations (WARN).24 “We are American Indian women,
+in that order,” their manifesto read, which was read by Oglala activist
+
+Lorelei DeCora Means. “We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American
+Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as
+women.” Moreover, what defined American Indian women’s struggles was
+decolonization—the end of the continual destruction of Native life and land
+—which Means declared as “the only agenda that counts.”25 Within the
+movement, WARN argued that colonialism had different consequences for
+American Indian women than it did for men. Both on and off the
+reservation, women faced forced sterilization, malnutrition among young
+children, and high levels of domestic violence and abuse.
+But ultimately, AIM came to be known more for its high-publicity
+protests. After Alcatraz, AIM grew rapidly: by 1973, there were seventynine chapters, eight of them in Canada.26 When the movement swept
+through Oceti Sakowin country, it adopted a specifically nationalist
+character, focusing on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the Oceti Sakowin.
+In 1970, AIM, United Native Americans, and Lakota activists from South
+Dakota occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills to bring attention to
+the 1868 Treaty and the fact that the land upon which the monument had
+been built was stolen. Activists pointed out that the monument itself was a
+form of vandalism—not “a shrine of democracy” but “a shrine of
+hypocrisy.” Each president—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt
+—had participated in Indigenous genocide and land theft. The
+Haudenosaunee Confederacy called Washington “Town Destroyer” for his
+role in the extirpation of their villages. Jefferson had advanced Indigenous
+removal policies and begun the expansion of the US empire west of the
+Mississippi. Lincoln had ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota patriots
+after the 1862 US–Dakota War and oversaw the 1864 Long Walk for
+Navajos in the Southwest. Roosevelt had “nationalized” millions of acres of
+Indigenous lands for national parks. While symbolic, there was a growing
+militancy to the tactics of takeover and occupation. Across the United
+States, BIA headquarters became the targets for protest. Among the
+protestors’ many concerns was the failure to uphold treaties. Critics in the
+federal government viewed treaty claims as mere rhetoric.
+As the war in Vietnam intensified, by 1972 a full-throated treaty
+movement had crystallized. Eight Native organizations—including AIM,
+NIYC, and the Canadian National Indian Brotherhood, among others—led a
+coast-to-coast caravan of thousands of Natives to Washington, DC,
+gathering participants in each city and reservation along the way, and
+
+occupied the BIA headquarters from November 3 to 9. The occupation and
+the negative media it attracted overshadowed the real issues of the caravan.
+The Trail of Broken Treaties, as it was known, intended to disrupt the
+presidential election by drawing attention to unfulfilled treaty rights.
+Organizers drafted a document, primarily authored by Hank Adams, called
+the “Twenty Points.” The first point demanded, “Restoration of
+Constitutional Treaty-making Authority: This would force federal
+recognition of each Indian nation’s sovereignty.”27 The most salient points
+proposed the restoration and enforcement of treaty making. Although the
+federal officials promised to look into the demands, their response led to no
+action. A genius document, the Twenty Points was presented in 1977 at the
+United Nations, forming the basis of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights
+of Indigenous Peoples.28
+After the Trail of Broken Treaties, AIM regrouped and continued
+working on urban Native rights, or what Paul Chaat Smith and Robert
+Warrior call its “border town campaign.”29 In February 1972, in brutally
+harsh winter conditions, four white men—Melvin and Leslie Hare, Bernard
+Ludder, and Robert Bayless—kidnapped fifty-one-year-old Oglala man
+Raymond Yellow Thunder, stripped him naked, beat him, forced him to
+dance as a “drunk Indian” for the entertainment of whites in a dance hall,
+and left him to die in Gordon, Nebraska. The town is on the southern border
+of the Pine Ridge Reservation. In common vernacular, the white-dominated
+settlements—cities and towns—that ring Indian reservations are called
+“border towns.” In border towns, persistent patterns of anti-Indian
+exploitation, discrimination, violence, and criminalization define everyday
+Native life. Gordon was such a place. AIM was called to investigate the
+death by Yellow Thunder’s family, who were worried that the authorities
+would chalk it up as “just another dead Indian,” an all-too-frequent
+sentiment for dead Natives found off the reservation. Because of AIM’s
+advocacy, Leslie and Melvin Hare were charged with manslaughter and
+sentenced to prison. Yellow Thunder was immortalized in the “Raymond
+Yellow Thunder Song” that became the AIM anthem.30 The successful
+campaign earned AIM the respect of the Oglala elders and traditionalists in
+Pine Ridge, who called upon AIM again in 1973 to take a stand at Wounded
+Knee.
+Despite the horrific nature of the crime, it is important to turn to career
+anti-AIM critic and journalist Stew Magnuson who has cast doubt on
+
+Yellow Thunder’s murder. He criminalizes Red Power activists much in the
+same way Yellow Thunder’s killers targeted him for violence: they were all
+Indians off the reservation and deserved what they got. For example,
+Magnuson’s award-winning 2008 book, The Death of Raymond Yellow
+Thunder, purposefully questions calling a “murder” what even an all-white
+jury had unequivocally decided was one. Like generations of journalists
+before him, Magnuson peddles a myth of white settlers and friendly Indians
+as victims of “criminal, “militant,” and “hostile” “Sioux warriors.” In this
+view, there are “good Indians” and “bad Indians.” AIM members were the
+“bad Indians.” Magnuson’s narrative has less to do with the historical and
+brutal reality of colonialism than it does with an obsession with the bravado
+of AIM men. In the book’s opening pages, he describes a 1999 protest
+against alcohol sales in White Clay, a notorious border town less than a
+mile south of the reservation, with a population of about a dozen. White
+Clay liquor stores sold millions of cans of beer a year, entirely to residents
+of Pine Ridge, where alcohol is banned. A frequent site of protest until
+relatively recently after liquor stores closed, countless Native lives have
+been consumed and destroyed by such profiteering of death and suffering
+on the part of White Clay and border towns like it. “Everyone feared the
+young men,” Magnuson writes of the protestors as they descended on White
+Clay—a description evocative of the common trope of settlers being
+surrounded by lawless Natives.31 By casting the settlers as victims—in this
+case, a handful of white liquor store owners—he makes colonialism look
+like self-defense. The description also invokes the fearsome image of AIM
+warriors descending on racist border towns, like they did in Gordon and
+elsewhere in the 1970s.
+Despite its racial undertones, Magnuson’s “angry Indians” stereotype is
+useful for understanding what AIM was trying to accomplish and how they
+became criminalized for it. AIM consisted primarily of Natives “off the
+reservation.” “Off the reservation” is an American English idiom that took
+on murderous meaning with the creation of Indian reservations. The Oxford
+English Dictionary defines the phrase as meaning “to deviate from what is
+expected or customary.”32 The expression is also current in military and
+political spheres to describe someone who defies orders, who is
+unpredictable and therefore ungovernable. Those who “go off the
+reservation” are rogues or mavericks in military jargon—the ones who
+“cross the wire” of military bases (called “reservations”) or enter hostile
+
+territory (called “Indian Country”).33 For Natives, to “go off the
+reservation” refers to those who historically refused reservation life or
+refused to respect its borders, where they could be contained and managed.
+Those willfully crossing borders were considered renegades, outlaws, or
+hostiles and were usually hunted down and summarily shot, hanged, or
+imprisoned. It is no coincidence the phrase arose from the language of the
+nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the murderous consequences inflicted
+upon those who refused reservation life. In this way, to go “off the
+reservation” is to question territory and sovereignty, and a political practice.
+To evoke Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, Native trespass
+into the domain of what is considered “settled” territory calls into question
+the legitimacy of settlement—asserting that indeed it is anything but
+settled.34 In other words, Natives off the reservation are the unfinished
+business of settler colonialism—the ones who refused to disappear, refused
+to sell their lands, and refused to quit being Indians.
+In Rapid City, South Dakota, such sentiments thrived and became a
+target for AIM’s border town campaign. The city occupies the moral and
+political universe of the Oceti Sakowin, He Sapa, the Black Hills, and, like
+the towns of Gordon and White Clay, is within the territory of the 1868 Fort
+Laramie Treaty. As they had for generations, most Natives in Rapid City
+lived in squalor in shantytowns near Rapid Creek, the downtown area next
+to the railroad district, or in Sioux Addition, the “Indian ghetto” (or “Red
+ghetto”) outside city limits and built upon remaining trust lands of the
+Rapid City Indian School, an off-reservation boarding school that closed its
+doors in the 1930s.35 The “Indian problem” had returned in the form of
+“urban Indians” who left the reservation.
+To curb and control off-reservation migration into white towns, in 1939
+South Dakota passed a series of “warning out” laws that required
+“transient” populations to fill out and sign “certificates of non-residence”
+that excluded them from poor relief, public welfare, voting, and establishing
+permanent residency. In Rapid City, Pennington County, and South Dakota
+more broadly, warning-out laws specifically targeted off-reservation
+Natives, barring them from legally residing within certain communities or
+receiving basic housing, social, welfare, educational, and medical services.
+Ramon Roubideaux, a Sicangu attorney from the Rosebud Reservation,
+described the practice at a 1962 civil rights hearing: “In Rapid City they
+follow that program religiously. They serve transient Indians … a
+
+nonresident notice. This is what they call it. In other words, by service of
+this notice on the individual, you prevent him [sic] from acquiring, as the
+statute says, a legal settlement.”36 Often county social service and health
+officials issued nonresident certificates when Natives applied for services,
+or they were simply denied services altogether. The labeling of Natives off
+reservation as “transient” did important work. It normalized the practice of
+settling—home ownership, citizenship, paying taxes, employment, and so
+forth—as a prerequisite for personhood, as opposed to the lifestyle of a
+“nomadic” or “transient” Indian. Questions of personhood and citizenship
+came to a head in 1972. It began with a flood.
+On June 9, fifteen inches of torrential rain clogged the Canyon Lake
+Dam, which burst early the next morning, sending a wall of water down
+Rapid Creek. In a matter of hours, the flood swept away more than 1,300
+homes, 5,000 automobiles, and 238 lives. Hardest hit were the poor—both
+Natives and whites—who lived near the creek in mobile homes and
+dilapidated structures. Although Natives made up 5 percent of Rapid City’s
+population, they accounted for 14 percent of those who perished in the
+flood, and a significant number of those displaced. The city received $160
+million for disaster relief and urban renewal programs.37 The relief money,
+however, was allocated along racial and class lines. While all flood victims
+were equally entitled to relief, Mayor Don Bartlett, a liberal Democrat,
+observed, “That doesn’t mean that we just divvied up the money equally all
+around. The Indian who lost a shack and few sticks of furniture didn’t get as
+much as somebody who lost a $40,000 house with 25 years of accumulated
+possessions.”38 More relief was dispensed to white, middle-class
+homeowners and business owners. Discrimination didn’t end there. Many
+Natives fled to live with relatives elsewhere, including on the reservation,
+making them ineligible for relief. For those who stayed, temporary shelter
+was offered but was segregated.39
+While white residents re-sheltered within city gymnasiums and churches,
+hundreds of Natives were concentrated at “Camp Rapid” at the National
+Guard base, on land originally belonging to the Rapid City Indian School.
+The camp housed Natives in militarized conditions that were intensely
+policed and they were kept under constant surveillance, in what amounted
+to little more than an open-air concentration camp. “The segregating of
+HUD [Housing and Urban Development] trailers, we believe, was partly
+done out of prejudice against the stereotype (drunken, troublemaking)
+
+Indian,” described Lakota housing activist Edgar Lonehill. “It was done, we
+think, so that it would be easier for the white police and HUD to ‘keep an
+eye on us.’ Further proof of this is offered by the fact that the Indian trailer
+courts are floodlighted at night.”40
+Relief was slow, uneven, and often used to collectively punish the Native
+community. Camp Rapid was supposed to be temporary, but months passed
+before all the Native families were given homes, although many white
+families had already been rehoused. HUD homes were made available at
+Sioux Addition for Native families—which became the federal housing
+project Lakota Homes—outside city limits. Yet, community harassment and
+policing intensified because Natives were now cordoned off into a
+designated neighborhood—a permanent fix to the city’s perpetual “Indian
+problem.” It wasn’t leaving the reservation but rather leaving the “Red
+ghetto” that made the Indian suspect.41
+The flood accomplished what could not be done previously: it gave the
+city a clean slate, as the built environment that had kept everyone in their
+place was destroyed. City officials viewed the flood as a social equalizer
+that leveled not only homes but also race and class divisions. Yet, the flood
+also cleared the way to reinforce structural racism in new ways. It removed
+(and killed) the undesirable, poor, and Native people concentrated in the
+city center, literally forcing them out of town to make way for the business
+community’s “urban renewal” program to rebuild the destroyed downtown
+area. The practice aligned with federal housing policies and community
+development programs in targeting low-income families and
+disenfranchised communities. Housing activists call this “gentrification”—
+the process, often backed by wealthy business interests, of removing poor,
+racialized urban communities to make way for middle-class and wealthier
+neighborhoods and businesses that raise real estate values. High rent and
+housing prices make it nearly impossible for poor communities to return to
+or inhabit these “renewed” neighborhoods. Typically, activists and scholars
+see such practices as taking place in larger cities, most famously in New
+York City’s Lower East Side during the 1970s. But gentrification doesn’t
+only happen in cities, and it doesn’t only mimic colonial processes—it is
+colonialism. Settler colonialism, whether in border towns, rural areas, or
+urban geographies, is fundamental to the history of US expansion that has
+required the removal, dispossession, and elimination of Indigenous peoples.
+Rapid City is thrice-stolen land—first, in the illegal seizure of the Black
+
+Hills; second, in the theft of remaining Indian trust lands from the Rapid
+City Indian School; and third, in the taking of Native and poor communities
+by the flood and the subsequent imposition of exploitative housing policies.
+But the colonial parallels don’t end there.
+A 1974 article in HUD’s serial publication, the Challenge, promoted
+“urban homesteading” inspired by the 1862 Homestead Act that gave rural
+acreage to farmers for free under the condition they migrate to it and
+improve it. “Just as nineteenth century homesteaders required government
+aid to hack out an existence as they helped to develop the West,” the article
+reasoned, “people who are willing to undertake a difficult and rugged
+experience in the urban wilderness require aid designed to make the
+communities around them viable.” In other words, urban homesteading
+sought to revitalize and repurpose land and housing “not worth maintaining
+because disease, crime, and lack of public services have made it too
+depressing and dangerous for anyone to live in.”42 Former slums and
+abandoned neighborhoods would be made anew. It was a civilizing effort.
+Rapid City utilized this program to deal with its own “urban wilderness,”
+the savage Indians who refused to go away and who brought down property
+values because they embodied the disease and crime of what Lonehill
+identified as the criminal, “drunken, troublemaking Indian.” Nevertheless,
+the city rebuilt itself and became an HUD success story. Meanwhile, Native
+resentment simmered against enforced gentrification and further
+segregation. In fact, the fundamental “challenge”—that the city sat atop
+stolen land—was never addressed, and was only exacerbated by the influx
+of federal programs meant to “improve” Native lives by granting
+community self-determination and autonomy through subsidized housing.
+While federal housing policies re-entrenched Native-settler boundaries
+within border towns such as Rapid City, vigilantes, police, and everyday
+settlers defended (often with violence) against the hyperbolic threat of
+Native invasion. The figure of the “drunk Indian” became a specific target.
+The murderous practice of “Indian busting”—the targeting of intoxicated
+Native men for beating, torture, and homicide—was a weekend pastime and
+sport for white settlers in border towns. In January 1973, after Wesley Bad
+Heart Bull was stabbed to death by a white man in Buffalo Gap near Custer,
+South Dakota, 200 AIM members descended on Custer to demand murder
+charges be brought against the accused. After being denied access to the
+courthouse where Bad Heart Bull’s murderer was being arraigned for
+
+manslaughter, a violent confrontation with police ensued. Several police
+cars were set ablaze. Dozens were arrested.
+The Custer fight spilled over into Rapid City’s bar district, where
+Natives faced violent discrimination from both white vigilantes and the
+police. The figure of the “drunk Indian” is seared into the popular settler
+imaginary. Although being “drunk” or “Indian,” or both, as not definitively
+illegal, constructing Natives off the reservation as drunk, militant, and
+violent is a classic example of the political art of policing. Native presence
+in border towns, therefore, is always conflated with criminality and
+lawlessness. “I don’t think any of us go out on purpose to arrest Innuns [sic]
+for being drunk, but chances are an Innun’s on the street by himself, he’ll be
+arrested, because chances are he’s got no place to go. A drunken white
+man’ll have a home,” explained a Rapid City police officer in 1973. “Of
+course that makes our record for arresting Innuns look pretty high.”43
+To counter this, AIM called for actions in Rapid City bars and saloons—
+where Natives had been victimized by vigilantes and the police—to “keep
+the people stirred up.”44 Mayor Bartlett described AIM’s campaign as
+creating “a sense of uncertainty and fear.”45 On February 6, 1973, just
+weeks before the armed takeover of Wounded Knee, AIM stormed a
+hearing of the Racial Conciliation Committee, a commission created partly
+to resolve ongoing discrimination in housing and employment (exacerbated
+by the flood) and to improve “race relations.” About 200 Natives packed
+the meeting. “They weren’t committed civil rights people,” Bartlett
+described the crowd. The officials sank in their seats as AIM leadership
+gave fiery speeches calling for revolt if their demands for equal housing,
+more Native police officers, and the hiring of a Native city attorney were
+not met. AIM leader Dennis Banks stated that they were prepared “to
+declare war on every town in the Black Hills” if demands were not met. The
+committee agreed to host a series of meetings to discuss the demands—
+some of which were carried out, although most were not.46
+In response, Bartlett reminded the Native community that if they
+participated in “uncivil” disobedience and didn’t follow the liberal doctrine
+of level-headed, rational dialogue, he would respond with violence. “If
+[AIM] wanted Rapid City to be as famous as Selma, Alabama I could take
+care of that in about 15 minutes,” he said. AIM didn’t relent. Neither did
+Rapid City. For several nights AIM members took to the streets after their
+demand to close the bars for thirty days, while they negotiated with city
+
+officials, was not met. Street fights broke out. Riot cops were deployed and
+hundreds were beaten, arrested, and driven out of town. Bartlett even
+directly participated in strong-arming AIM members from local motels and
+out of downtown.47 White elites were on high alert as the tenuousness of
+their claims to the land were made clear.
+The same month that AIM took Rapid City by storm, they also occupied
+Wounded Knee. In February 1973, the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights
+Commission (OSCRC), a grassroots organization, along with a group of
+traditional leaders, called upon AIM to take a stand. Richard “Dick”
+Wilson, the elected tribal councilman of Pine Ridge, had become
+increasingly authoritarian, terrorizing political opponents with his
+paramilitary “GOON” squad (which stood for “Guardians of the Oglala
+Nation”). In particular, the grassroots people opposed the Indian
+Reorganization Act government and called for the restoration of the treaty
+councils and customary leadership. At this time, ceremonies such as the sun
+dance were still criminalized and were practiced underground. People
+wanted a return of the “old ways,” the return to treaty relations with the
+United States, and the end to the rampant violence on the reservation. They
+saw the successful publicity received by AIM as potentially useful for
+inspiring a political and cultural revitalization of the Oceti Sakowin. More
+importantly, they wanted the means for their own self-defense against the
+GOONs and the rest of Dick Wilson’s regime, which was backed by federal
+marshals.
+On February 27, in a late-night meeting in Calico, a small village in Pine
+Ridge, the OSCRC and a council of customary chiefs—Red Cloud, Iron
+Cloud, Fools Crow, Bad Cob, and Kills Enemy—met with AIM and
+deliberated on what was to be done. But it was the elder women who
+proved decisive. While the men discussed in the public forum, Oglala elders
+Gladys Bissonette and Ellen Moves Camp spoke directly to the AIM
+warriors, pleading with them to take a stand. The two recalled how those
+who protested Wilson were mostly elders and women who strongly
+believed in traditional governance. Moves Camp asked, “Where are our
+men? Where are our defenders?”48 Their impassioned plea worked, and
+Fools Crow asked Russell Means, an Oglala leader of AIM, to take his
+warriors to the hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre at
+the hands of the vengeful Seventh Cavalry. AIM would make a stand for the
+
+life and liberation of all Indigenous peoples. The message was heard around
+the world.
+While the media trailed AIM and the Red Power movement from one
+action to another, the FBI also followed. Informants infiltrated the
+organization, and a smear campaign began. In 1956 the FBI began its
+Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate, disrupt, and
+destroy the Communist Party. By the 1960s and 1970s, COINTELPRO also
+targeted civil rights leaders, student antiwar movements, the Black Panther
+Party, and the Black freedom movement in general. According to an
+internal 1967 memo titled “Counter Intelligence Program Black NationalistHate Groups,” the program’s stated goal was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect,
+discredit, or otherwise neutralize” targeted groups and “their leadership,
+spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to count the propensity for
+violence and civil disorder.”49 After reports were leaked to the press about
+COINTELPRO, it was officially terminated in 1971. It was later revealed,
+however, that the FBI had infiltrated AIM and begun its own
+COINTELPRO operation to discredit and neutralize the organization and its
+leadership.
+The seventy-one-day takeover of Wounded Knee revealed to AIM and
+the world the lengths to which the United States was willing to go to crush
+the Indigenous movement. Armed mainly with shotguns and hunting rifles,
+AIM faced off with the paramilitary GOON squad and federal marshals
+armed with fully automatic weapons and armored personnel carriers. Fire
+fights broke out daily. On AIM’s side, Frank Clearwater and Lawrence
+“Buddy” Lamont were killed by law enforcement. Despite the heavyhanded police tactics, AIM, OSCRC, and the Oglala traditional leadership
+declared the Independent Oglala Nation under the authority of the 1868 Fort
+Laramie Treaty, and with it the need to end the colonial relationship
+between the United States and the Oceti Sakowin and Indigenous peoples.
+Coincidentally, the five-year anniversary of the My Lai Massacre
+occurred during the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover. It was hard to miss the
+similarities between Wounded Knee in 1890 and the US Army’s wanton
+slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers. Military historian John
+Grenier defines what he calls “the first way of war” as frontier violence:
+“From both military necessity and hands-on experience, successive
+generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of
+Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military
+
+tradition and thereby part of a shared identity.”50 What D’Arcy McNickle in
+1949 termed “the Indian war that never ends”—the perpetual conflict
+between Natives and imperial dispossessors—clearly had global
+implications.51 It’s been said that the war was “brought home” to America
+in the 1960s and 1970s, but it had always been “home” in occupied
+Indigenous lands. The US empire’s counterrevolutionary wars to crush the
+decolonization campaign, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, and Black Power and
+Red Power activists in the United States employed tactics first used in its
+“irregular wars” against Indigenous people—the original enemies of
+empire. Vigilante murders and rampant police violence against Indigenous
+peoples in border towns were simply the modern face of the military
+tradition of frontier homicide. AIM had painstakingly linked the everyday
+policing, surveillance, and criminalization of Indigenous peoples in border
+towns to the global anti-colonial struggle and treaty rights. The takeover of
+Wounded Knee was the continuation of this struggle.
+For seventy-one days, Wounded Knee was an independent Indigenous
+territory, attracting worldwide attention and the support of revolutionary
+movements. For the first time, American Indians had a captive and
+sympathetic international audience, the awareness of which attracted a
+harsh military and police response. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee in
+1973, the FBI and Dick Wilson waged a dirty war against their opponents in
+Pine Ridge in what became known as the “reign of terror.” Dozens were
+murdered. Hundreds were imprisoned. On June 26, 1975, ninety-nine years
+after Custer Jumping Bull ranch. The two FBI agents entered the property
+over a reported theft of a pair of cowboy boots. AIM had set up camp on the
+property to protect the Jumping Bulls, an elderly couple, from GOON and
+FBI harassment. They had also constructed a culture camp there for youth.
+A firefight broke out, in which agents Ronald A. Williams and Jack R.
+Coler were killed. In the ensuing battle with FBI and BIA officers, Joeseph
+Stuntz Killsright, a young Native man, was killed by sniper fire. A massive
+manhunt ensued. AIM leader Leonard Peltier was later charged and
+condemned to two life sentences for the murder of the FBI agents. Federal
+prosecutors and agents manufactured evidence, hid proof of innocence,
+presented false testimony, ignored court orders, and lied to the jury about
+Peltier’s involvement in the murders. Since his incarceration, former FBI
+agents and federal prosecutors (including the head of the prosecution team
+that convicted him), along with numerous civil rights and human rights
+
+organizations, have found faults on the FBI’s handling of Peltier’s case and
+called for his clemency. Twice Peltier’s case has come close to presidential
+pardon or clemency. In both instances, the FBI led a smear campaign
+against AIM and Peltier, showing that the Indian War continues unabated.
+Most recently, President Obama denied Peltier’s clemency application
+during the efforts to halt Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, after
+issuing more executive clemencies than the past thirteen administrations.
+He could not let go of neither his commitments to the oil and gas industry,
+nor to the continued imprisonment of an innocent Indigenous freedom
+fighter.
+As a result of the loss of life at Wounded Knee in 1973, AIM has been
+blamed for the murderous crackdown and the increased deprivations of
+Indigenous communities that followed. The dirty war that came after in
+Pine Ridge left forty-five unsolved homicides of AIM leaders and
+organizers. Among the more well known was the execution of Anna Mae
+Aquash, a Mi’kmaq activist, whose murder resulted in the conviction, years
+later, of two Native men associated with AIM. While the rumors swirl about
+Aquash, the other forty-five killed, mostly Lakotas who were less well
+known, left behind families, relatives, and children who are to this day
+without answers.52 While Red Power attracted a heavy response from the
+state, historian Jordan Camp notes that “those focusing on the
+criminalization of street protests rarely connect it to the everyday and
+routine policing, surveillance, and criminalization of the racialized poor.”53
+In other words, those struggles—whether on the part of AIM or the Black
+Panthers—seek to undo the state violence inflicted on them each day.
+AIM’s border town campaign, which confronted rampant police and
+vigilante violence head-on, is a case in point.
+Pervasive anti-AIM sentiment persists, especially in places like South
+Dakota, where state politicians, including William Janklow, have made
+careers out of arresting and demonizing Indigenous activists. In 1974, after
+being elected attorney general on a wave of anti-Indianism, Janklow
+remarked: “The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota
+is to put a gun to the AIM leaders’ heads and pull the trigger.”54 But instead
+of killing AIM members, in 2003 the two-time state governor and South
+Dakota senator killed a white man, Randy Scott, with his Cadillac. Janklow
+subsequently resigned from politics, serving one hundred days in jail for
+manslaughter, and died in disrepute in 2012.
+
+Anti-Indianism has also been reinforced under neoliberalism—the
+restructuring of politics and economy towards privatization, including the
+widespread defunding of public education, transportation, healthcare, and
+public sector employment—services that in other parts of the world are
+considered fundamental human rights. But the role of the US state in
+reproducing anti-Indianism has also increased since the mid twentieth
+century, including through the expansion of the military and prisons. For
+example, the prison population increased from about 200,000 in the late
+1960s to 2.4 million in the 2000s; as of 2018, there are 6.9 million adults in
+jail, in prison, or on probation or parole. Most are nonwhite and poor. In
+South Dakota, incarceration rates are among the highest in the nation. In
+spite of an overall decrease in crime nationally and statewide over the last
+two decades, South Dakota’s imprisonment rate is ten times higher than the
+national average, growing over 500 percent from 1977 to 2012. Native
+inmates make up over 30 percent of the total population while only
+constituting about 9 percent of the state’s population.55 The rise in
+incarceration rates directly correlates with increased Native political
+activity in the 1970s. The historical process of elimination as a tool for
+political repression—removing Natives from the land and imprisoning them
+—has taken the new form of mass incarceration. The “Indian problem” was
+thus solved not through granting treaty rights—such as access to healthcare,
+employment, education, and social welfare—but through the use of police
+and prisons.
+Today, in Rapid City, South Dakota—a city located in the cosmological
+and political center of the Lakota universe, He Sapa (the Black Hills)—
+Natives (mostly Lakotas) make up 12 percent of the urban population. Yet,
+more than half of the Native population lives below the poverty line—a rate
+higher than in most reservations.56 Three-fourths of the city’s homeless are
+Native. Natives also make up half the city’s jail population and are five
+times more likely to get arrested or receive traffic citations.57 These
+statistics reveal a general pattern of police violence against Natives in the
+United States. According to The Guardian’s “The Counted,” an online
+database of police killings, 2016 was a particularly deadly year for Natives.
+Police killed twenty-four Natives, more than they had the previous year and
+at a rate higher than any other group. Almost all the killings were at the
+hands of non-reservation law enforcement.58 Police are the instrument
+employed to manage the political, social, and economic crisis that is
+
+Indigenous life, especially off reservation. The intense police violence
+directed against the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock was no
+aberration: most, if not all, arrests of Water Protectors protesting the
+pipeline were at the hands of non-Native, off-reservation law enforcement
+agencies.
+From the perspective of the United States, it has been more realistic to
+increase incarceration and law enforcement budgets than it has to uphold
+the basic tenets of treaties—international agreements—made with
+Indigenous nations. Despite the violent backlash, AIM and Red Power
+turned their sights elsewhere (as noted earlier in this chapter), to the United
+Nations, to let the world judge the United States for its criminal behavior.
+But the legacy of AIM remains incomplete and underappreciated to this
+day. In 1981 Nisqually activist Janet McCloud (Yet-Si-Blue) noted that
+“AIM’s brave and daring effort to uplift the lives of their people, to
+challenge a powerfully hostile enemy, and to promote a better social order
+for all Indian people” inspired not only Native people but the oppressed of
+North Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the peasants of Southern France, and the
+aboriginal peoples of Australia and Africa. But “the greatest beneficiaries of
+the American Indian Movement are the tribal council leaders who are
+always quick to seize opportunities created by the Movement, and to claim
+unwarranted credit for the positive social changes won for Indian people.”
+Yet many others benefited too: Native youth who enjoy “new cars, live
+longer, have better health, are bettered educated, have well-paid jobs,” she
+said.59
+The formation of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974—
+another outcome of Wounded Knee and the rise of AIM—also paved the
+way for Indigenous internationalism at the UN and laid the groundwork for
+the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 1980, AIM
+returned to the Black Hills and Rapid City. This time, however, Women of
+All Red Nations, an AIM contingent of women leadership, formed the
+Black Hills Alliance (BHA), a coalition of white ranchers and Native
+activists to halt uranium and coal mining in the Black Hills. Eleven
+thousand people from around the world gathered, succeeding in halted
+mining operations altogether. After the Alliance dissipated, AIM formed a
+short-lived encampment on the outskirts of Rapid City, named “Yellow
+Thunder Camp” (YTC), after Raymond Yellow Thunder. Their goal was to
+begin to reclaim the Black Hills region under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.
+
+Unlike the previous border town campaign, BHA and YTC garnered local
+white support under the umbrella of environmentalism and treaty rights. For
+example, a union of Black Hills gold miners supported both campaigns,
+citing the inviolability of Lakota treaty rights and concerns regarding
+corporate energy development that jeopardized “the health and welfare of
+working people.”60
+The alliance with white working people and farmers—historic enemies
+of Lakotas—proved vital because it demonstrated that working-class
+settlers and Natives shared a common struggle against corporate
+exploitation. Fighting for Native land rights and sovereignty was also
+necessary to protect the lands upon which both groups depended for their
+continued existence. If dispossession was the primary mode for exploitation
+in Rapid City and the Black Hills, then liberation for both Native and settler
+required upholding, at bare minimum, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. For a
+while, white sentiments toward Natives in border towns actually improved.
+Even one of AIM’s main detractors, Mayor Bartlett, conceded that in the
+wake of the uprisings, “quietly behind the scenes there is an effort being
+made without headlines” to improve the lives of Natives in Rapid City.61
+
+A signpost at Oceti Sakowin Camp shows the diversity of movements and Indigenous nations
+represented at the camps, an outcome of decades of international work. November 2016. Photo by
+author.
+
+6
+
+Internationalism
+As we came with this Pipe, also we come with the Treaty, the 1868 Treaty. That Treaty is bloody. It
+was made over a hundred years ago. It was our elders who told us that this was a good Treaty. But
+somebody spilled blood on this Treaty. And they said, “You are going before the world with your
+Pipe, and you will offer it to the world, the world community, and if they accept, then together we
+can help to clean this Treaty.”
+—Larry Red Shirt, Palais des Nations, Geneva, 19771
+
+In the late summer of 1977, a small group of Indigenous elders from
+Canada’s Six Nations, the Oceti Sakowin, Hopi, Panama, Guatemala, the
+Amazon, Mexico, and Chile led a delegation of 120 through Geneva,
+Switzerland. The march bore the marks of history. Having survived
+centuries of genocide and punitive colonial policies of assimilation and land
+theft, they also carried with them the aspirations of hundreds of millions of
+Indigenous peoples from around the globe to gain a seat at the United
+Nations. Geneva and the UN had never seen anything like it before, and
+probably have not since. Dressed in their traditional regalia, the delegation
+sang the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song,” (widely known as the “AIM
+Song”) to honor the Oglala elder brutally murdered by white vigilantes in
+1972. The procession wound through the quaint mountain town, arriving at
+the Palais des Nations. UN security guards opened the tall double doors as
+they approached. The singing grew louder as they ascended the stairwell to
+the second-floor council chambers, where world leaders had met to decide
+the fates of colonized peoples, and where generations of American Indians
+had been categorically denied entry as nations. Fifty-four years earlier at
+this exact location, the Cayuga leader Deskaheh (Levi General) from the
+Haudenosaunee Confederacy made an unsuccessful appeal to the League of
+Nations in defense of Indigenous rights and nationhood, in protest of the
+overthrow of the Six Nations government by the Canadian state. This time,
+however, with the support of Soviet bloc countries, Third World nations of
+
+the Non-Aligned Movement, and national liberation movements such as the
+South African anti-apartheid struggle and the Palestine Liberation
+Organization, Indigenous peoples had, to a large degree, provincialized the
+influence of North Atlantic powers to dictate their diplomatic relations
+“outside” the settler colony. Consequently, US media and diplomats largely
+boycotted the conference that laid the groundwork for what became the
+touchstone document of international Indigenous rights: the 2007
+Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a document four Anglo
+settler states—the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—
+initially refused to endorse.
+While Indigenous representation has become a permanent feature at the
+UN, its radical origins are less well known. The historic 1977 Geneva
+gathering was preceded by a simpler, but no less monumental, gathering in
+Standing Rock, along the banks of the Missouri River. In the heat of the
+Northern Plains summer, 5,000 people from more than ninety-seven
+different Indigenous nations met from June 8 to 16, 1974. By the end of the
+week, the International Indian Treaty Council was founded as an
+international arm of the American Indian Movement (AIM), tasked with
+gaining international recognition at the UN for Indigenous peoples of the
+Western Hemisphere. The Treaty Council’s founding document, the
+“Declaration of Continuing Independence,” foregrounded nationhood and
+treaty rights as central features of an American Indian political identity.
+“We condemn the United States of America for its gross violation of the
+1868 Fort Laramie Treaty in militarily surrounding, killing, and starving the
+citizens of the Independent Oglala Nation into exile,” it read, in reference to
+the brutal crackdown on AIM following their occupation of Wounded Knee
+in 1973. The Treaty Council appealed to “conscionable nations” to join “in
+charging and prosecuting the United States of America for its genocidal
+practices against the sovereign Native Nations; most recently illustrated by
+Wounded Knee 1973 and the continued refusal to sign the United Nations
+1948 Treaty on Genocide.”2 Following the seventy-one-day siege, AIM
+leadership had been arrested and tied up in court proceedings. Then came
+the brutal repression under the infamous FBI Counterintelligence Program
+(COINTELPRO) that nearly destroyed Indigenous, Black, and
+revolutionary movements in the United States. The strategic turn to
+international human rights law largely saved the Indigenous movement
+from utter collapse in a moment of intense state repression.3
+
+The Treaty Council, however, was not the first or only version of what
+historian Daniel Cobb calls a “global Indigenous identity.”4 Rather, it
+belonged to and drew from a long tradition of Indigenous internationalism.5
+Prior to European contact, Indigenous nations had often entered into
+relations with each other for alliance, kinship, war, peace, or trade. As
+shown in previous chapters, agreements were made not solely between
+human nations, but also among nonhuman nations as well, such as the
+buffalo and the land. Such treaties were, and continue to be, the basis of
+diplomacy and the evidence of a prior and continuing status of Indigenous
+nationhood. Sovereign nations do not enter into international relations or
+treaties with domestic or “internal” populations. On the contrary, the very
+basis of sovereignty is the power to negotiate relationships between those
+who are seen as different—between other sovereigns and nations. But
+concepts of “sovereignty” and “nation” possess different meanings for
+Indigenous peoples than for their European-derived counterparts. And they
+are not entirely consistent, either, with the aspirations for a nation-state that
+came to define decolonization movements in the Third World. While doing
+important defensive work, on face value these Western and Third World
+concepts only partially reflect traditions of Indigenous resistance.
+Far beyond the project of seeking equality within the colonial state, the
+tradition of radical Indigenous internationalism imagined a world altogether
+free of colonial hierarchies of race, class, and nation. This vision allowed
+revolutionary Indigenous organizations such as the Treaty Council to make
+relatives, so to speak, with those they saw as different, imagining
+themselves as part of Third World struggles and ideologies, and entirely
+renouncing the imperialism and exceptionalism of the First World (while
+still living in it). They were in the First World but not of it—much like
+American Indians are in, but not entirely of, the United States. Indigenous
+peoples across North America and the world have fought, died, and
+struggled to reclaim, restore, and redefine these powerful ideas. Their goal
+has been to take their proper place in the family of nations.
+Radical Indigenous internationalism, however, predates AIM and the
+Treaty Council. Contemporary pan-Indigenous movements were a result of
+more than a decade of Red Power organizing that began in the early 1960s,
+nearly a decade before the creation of AIM. Earlier, in the 1950s, Flathead
+scholar and writer D’Arcy McNickle and the National Congress of
+American Indians had explored a similar intellectual and political terrain of
+
+internationalism. And before that, the Society of American Indians
+advocated for a seat at the table during the 1919 Paris peace talks and
+representation at the League of Nations. Each distinct instance posed a
+similar question: If Indigenous peoples are nations, why are they not
+afforded the right to self-determination?
+Two strands of thinking about self-determination for the colonial world
+prevailed following the First World War. In the first, US President
+Woodrow Wilson argued for self-determination with a limited set of rights
+that would not radically upset the colonial order. Such liberal
+internationalism, however, glaringly omitted Indigenous peoples, as they
+understood themselves as nations that existed prior to the formation of
+settler states. Rarely were Wilson’s principles applied to North America or
+the United States; nor were they ever intended to extend to Indigenous
+peoples.
+A second, more radical vision put forward by Communist revolutionary
+V. I. Lenin argued for the right of colonized nations to secede and declare
+independence from their colonial masters. This view was echoed by the
+Third World decolonization movement, as part of a global Socialist and
+Communist revolution, and it has frequently been applied in the Asian,
+African, and South American contexts. But this view remained almost
+entirely absent in North America, except among radical Indigenous, Black,
+Asian, Caribbean, and Chicanx national liberation movements.
+The Treaty Council advocated Indigenous nationhood as part of this
+global anti-colonial movement and in line with Third World liberation
+movements. After decades of experiencing land loss, enduring bare
+survival, attempting to work with federal programs, filing court cases,
+defeating termination legislation, and facing mass relocation, an assertion of
+Oceti Sakowin sovereignty went from ambition to prescription. Few
+avenues remained other than the pursuit of international treaty rights.
+Treaties made with the United States were proof of nationhood. But what
+legal institution would uphold this position if the United States refused to?
+If the goal was to reverse the unjust occupation of an entire continent, the
+advancement of Indigenous rights through the very legal and political
+systems that justified that occupation in the first place had proven limited in
+some instances, and hopeless in others. To survive, AIM and the Treaty
+Council therefore had to look elsewhere to make their case—beyond the
+
+confines of the most powerful political construct in world history, the
+nation-state.
+Prior to and during colonization, Indigenous nations had self-organized
+into deliberate confederacies, alliances, and governments. The Nation of the
+Seven Council Fires (the Oceti Sakowin), for instance, is a confederacy of
+seven different nations of Lakota-, Dakota-, and Nakota-speaking peoples
+in the Northern Plains and Western Great Lakes. They are hardly unique; in
+North America alone there are the Creek Confederacy in the Southeast, the
+Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Six Nations in the Northeast, the Council
+of Three Fires (made up of Ojibwes, Odawas, and Potawatomis) in the
+Great Lakes region, the United Indian Nations in the Ohio River valley
+(under the Shawnee leadership of Tecumseh), the All Indian Pueblo Council
+of the Southwest, and the Iron Confederacy of the Northern Plains. Many
+other political confederacies also flourished prior to, alongside, and in spite
+of settler states in North America.6 And their legacies are hardly relegated
+to the primordial past.
+Modern Oceti Sakowin internationalism, for instance, traces its origins
+to the early twentieth century, an era generally viewed as a low point for
+Indigenous activism and resistance. In North America alone, an estimated
+precolonial population of tens of millions of Indigenous peoples had been
+reduced to about 300,000, and for Flathead historian D’Arcy McNickle,
+writing in 1949, two processes contributed greatly to this decimation: the
+institution of private property and the destruction of Indigenous governance
+that once held land in common. Indigenous nations at the time also
+possessed little in the way of either collective property or political power, as
+Indigenous territory had been drastically diminished, and the reservation
+system had overthrown or almost entirely dissolved customary
+governments. If Indigenous peoples once constituted the tree of the
+Americas, whose roots deeply entwined in the land, the cultivation of
+“growth from the severed stump,” McNickle argued, was the pivotal
+challenge of the twentieth century.7
+Physical extermination and the repression of Indigenous political power
+verified the United States’ genocidal intent, but these had not accomplished
+their purpose. And despite otherwise stating pluralistic claims to inclusion,
+McNickle concluded that the United States simply “can not tolerate a nation
+within a nation.” If Natives were to be assimilated, they would be
+assimilated as individuals and not as nations. In the popular imaginary,
+
+Natives disappeared into the wilderness of history, were never truly nations,
+and had been overpowered by a superior civilization. If they were nations,
+they were eclipsed and replaced by the real nation—the United States. Such
+erasure notwithstanding, vibrant Indigenous political traditions persisted.
+But to the untrained eye, nothing was awry. From the severed stump began
+to regrow the tree of life—the tree of resistance that would blossom into
+revolt decades later.
+Two Dakota activists of the early twentieth century stand out as
+forbearers to current Indigenous internationalism, but they are by no means
+the only ones. The first was Ohiyesa, or Charles Eastman, a
+Mdewakantonwan medical doctor born and raised in buffalo hide tipis in
+his Dakota homelands. At age four, after the Dakotas were violently
+expelled from Minnesota Territory during the 1862 US–Dakota War,
+Eastman and his family fled to Canada. He later attended a Christian
+mission school, graduating from Dartmouth College in 1887, then from
+Boston University with a medical degree. Dr. Eastman was among the first
+American Indians to practice European medicine as a licensed physician,
+becoming a BIA physician who treated casualties of the 1890 Wounded
+Knee Massacre in Pine Ridge.8
+The other was Zitkala-Ša, née Gertrude Simmons, an Ihanktonwan
+writer, musician, and activist born the same year as the Battle of Greasy
+Grass, along the Missouri River in the Yankton Reservation. Quaker
+missionaries plucked Zitkala-Ša from her homeland when she was a child
+and sent her to a Christian mission school in Indiana. A product of
+government- and church-run boarding schools, Zitkala-Ša became an
+instructor at the Carlisle Indian School and also one of its staunchest critics.
+Her biting wit and strident Indigenous nationalism launched her literary
+career and lifelong commitment to restore her nation to its proper place in
+history. More so than her peers, including Eastman, Zitkala-Ša advocated
+Indigenous cultural renewal and a radical form of political selfdetermination, which made her, according to one biographer, “a forerunner
+of Red Power.”9 Both were, however, unique products of their time:
+boarding school–educated, but firmly rooted in Indigenous history, culture,
+and politics. Eastman and Zitkala-Ša both joined the ranks by attending the
+first meetings of the formally educated American Indians known as “Red
+Progressives.”
+
+In 1911, Oglala treaty council member Henry Standing Bear joined with
+Charles Eastman to form a national organization to bridge grassroots treaty
+council organizing with the younger generation of boarding school–
+educated American Indians. On Columbus Day, the Society of American
+Indians (SAI) emerged with the aim of combatting the continued dissolution
+of Oceti Sakowin lands, which had dwindled from 13 million acres to 8
+million in less than a decade. Foremost among their grievances was He
+Sapa (the Black Hills), which was “taken by the gun,” in the words of
+James Crow Feather, a Cheyenne River leader, after the so-called 1876
+Black Hills Act.10 Predating the workers’ councils—or soviets—that
+formed in revolutionary Russia in 1905 and took power in 1917, Oceti
+Sakowin grassroots leadership formed treaty councils in North America as
+early as 1887 (the same year as the Dawes Allotment Act) to oppose a
+reservation system dominated by federal Indian agents. (Zitkala-Ša later
+joined to serve as SAI’s secretary and editor of its quarterly publication,
+American Indian Magazine.)
+In many ways, the treaty councils—which were primarily formed around
+historical leadership structures based on kinship—were the political
+collectives that passed on traditions of Indigenous resistance from the
+generations who made and signed treaties to those who Indian agents
+designated “assimilated” by the boarding school system. As the name
+suggests, central to the councils’ political identity were treaties made
+between the United States and Indigenous nations. Treaties, in this case the
+1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, were therefore proof of international relations
+and separate nationhood status.
+Although short lived (officially disbanding in 1923), SAI became the
+first entirely American Indian–led, national professional organization, and
+an ideological predecessor to the National Congress of American Indians,
+which would be founded in 1944. SAI is typically compared to its
+Progressive Era contemporaries, such as the Black-led NAACP, formed two
+years earlier. But the organizations differed in their understandings of how
+to get free. Foremost among SAI’s goals were the abolition of the Indian
+Bureau, the end of allotment, the upholding of treaty rights, and the
+granting of US citizenship to Indigenous peoples. But the fulfilment of
+treaty obligations, on the one hand, and US citizenship, on the other, didn’t
+—and still don’t—neatly fit within Black and white racial binaries.
+Whereas the former is about racial inclusion and democratizing the settler
+
+colony, the latter stands in for opposition to the US occupation, invasion,
+and colonization of Turtle Island.
+Calls for citizenship and formal equality under the law could be viewed
+as assimilationist—and in many cases they were. Some Indigenous nations,
+such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, asserted their sovereignty by
+flatly rejecting settler citizenship in the United States and in Canada. For
+others citizenship was not about complete surrender to the nation-state. At
+its first annual meeting in 1912, for instance, SAI framed the “Indian
+problem” as one of being “doubly wronged” and “held in the grip of false
+conditions.” On one hand, the return to a “former condition” of absolute
+independence was impossible under colonial rule. On the other, US
+citizenship had been denied. American Indians were “neither citizen nor
+foreigner.” “Contracts made with his ‘nation’ are dignified with the title of
+‘treaty,’” SAI argued, “yet he is unable to exercise the rights of a nation or
+to enforce the provisions of the treaty.”11 Eastman scoffed at the absurdity
+of devolving from “an independent foreign nation” to a “domestic
+dependent nation.” He preferred, as a more accurate description, a
+“perpetual inhabitant with diminutive rights,” citing Chief Justice John
+Marshall’s ruling in the 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh decision.12
+Thanks to the 1887 Dawes Act, US citizenship could be achieved only
+by individual Natives, by privatizing their land—thereby, diminishing
+collective treaty lands. Once individual Natives proved “competence”
+through land stewardship and agriculture, they were eligible for citizenship,
+which was granted to American Indians in 1924. Land allotment formally
+ended in 1934 with the Indian Reorganization Act. This made citizenship a
+form of elimination because it required individuals to relinquish collective
+rights, collective property, and a distinct political identity in order to
+become private landowners and citizens. They were not considered
+permanent members of nations in control of their own territory and
+destinies. On the contrary, “after negotiating treaties as an equal,” Eastman
+commented, the Indian was “strangely born again a child—incompetent,
+irresponsible, and unable to think for himself.”13 Despite this unequal
+position of ward to guardian, he affirmed, “we must try the highest
+obligation of all civilized nations; treaties; the highest obligation; the
+international law.”14
+The paradox of settler citizenship and the perpetual colonial condition
+didn’t stop SAI from working within the framework of US racial politics, or
+
+what were dubiously called “race relations.” Eastman had befriended Black
+intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who no doubt influenced
+Eastman and the early direction of SAI, of which Du Bois was the only
+non-Native voting member.15 In 1911 Eastman published The Soul of the
+Indian, whose title was inspired by Du Bois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black
+Folk. While different in scope, each book shared a similar commitment to
+crafting a racial imaginary in which the souls of a white nation and those
+who it excluded were both at stake. “Between me and the other world there
+is ever an unasked question,” Du Bois famously wrote. “How does it feel to
+be a problem?” The question cut to the bone of Black experience in the
+United States under Jim Crow: that of being considered a problem to be
+dealt with. This definition of the “Negro problem” was an issue for Du Bois
+because it was dissociated from what actually constituted racism—the
+legacies of slavery, institutions of segregation, lynching, and racial terror.
+His diagnosis of the “Negro problem” was that Blacks had developed a
+“double consciousness,” “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
+strivings”—one “American” and the other “Negro.” This racial imaginary
+extended beyond the United States; as Du Bois famously declared, “The
+problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the
+relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in
+America and the islands of the sea.”16
+Du Bois looked to the South for a history of the color line. In his
+narrative he navigates the “Black Belt” by train, inviting fellow travelers to
+witness US history from the vantage of a segregated “Jim Crow Car.” The
+train cuts through the “ancient land of the Cherokees—that brave Indian
+nation which strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United
+States Government drove them beyond the Mississippi.” He summarizes the
+history of the Black Belt with mentions of Hernando de Soto, the Georgia
+slave trade, the Creek Confederacy, the Haitian Revolution, and Cherokee
+presence and removal. According to Du Bois’s account of Southeastern
+Indigenous resistance, “the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back
+into the west.”17 While perceptive of race in the binary, Du Bois could not
+make sense of the vexed history of settler colonialism, nor of the continued
+existence of Indigenous nations in the South and elsewhere.
+Relegating Native presence to a past or “ancient” culture is a popular
+convention in history and contemporary politics. To counter this, in The
+Soul of the Indian, Eastman embraced “the human, not the ethnological
+
+standpoint.” He dismissed ethnographies written by “strangers” that
+reduced complex Indigenous social systems to a “matter of curiosity,” and
+he didn’t see Indigenous peoples as the last vestiges of a dying race, far
+removed from their homelands and from the modern world. During this
+time, anthropologists flooded Indian reservations, intent on preserving this
+“ancient” people they believed to be always on the brink of extinction.
+Knowledge of this vanishing race had to be extracted through their stories
+and by digging up their remains, in what amounted to little more than grave
+robbery under the guise of “archeology.” In contrast, Eastman aimed “not to
+pile up more bones, but to clothe them with flesh and blood.” Put simply,
+Indigenous peoples were humans with rights, and Eastman desired to
+engage the world on terms of cultural integrity and self-determination. He
+compared Native religion against Christianity, emphasizing the fallacy of
+Europe’s impulse to civilize, which was merely the “lust for money, power
+and conquest so characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Under the moral
+authority “of their God,” the United States made treaties with Indigenous
+nations that “were promptly and shamelessly broken.” Indigenous history
+could not be simply grafted onto Black–white racial dynamics. It missed
+what Eastman characterized as “not only the anger, but contempt” for
+earlier crimes and ongoing colonialism.18
+Such erasure is not Du Bois’s alone, and it still persists today. Despite
+his conceptual shortcomings, Du Bois himself was more ally than
+antagonist to American Indian rights. As race progressives, Eastman and
+Du Bois didn’t confine their activism to just US audiences. In 1911, the
+same year SAI formed, Eastman was chosen to represent American Indians
+at the Universal Races Congress in London, held from July 26 to 29. He
+was the only Indigenous person invited from the Western Hemisphere.
+According to conference proceedings, the gathering proposed to address
+“the problem of the contact of European with other developed types of
+civilization.” Most discussion, however, focused on East–West binaries, as
+though colonization and imperialism were happening everywhere other than
+North America. The debates were framed as ethical and barred any
+presentations of “a political character” or any “particular scheme for
+reforms.”19
+In London, Eastman presented during the same session as Du Bois. In
+his talk, Eastman attempted to establish racial identity for Natives as a way
+to be counted among the minorities of the world. But he was quick to note
+
+the “pauperising effect” of the reservation system as a “miserable prison
+existence.” Under this system, the world could ignore the imprisonment of
+Indigenous peoples while praising their culture, making them “like that of a
+wild animal confined in a zoological garden.”20 His solution to the “Indian
+problem” was not a return to the past. US citizenship and the abolition of
+the Indian Bureau were all that prevented the fulfilment of treaty rights. But
+citizenship and equality didn’t imply becoming the same as the settlers.
+Rather, Indigenous identity could be simultaneously “American” and
+distinctly “Indian.” But identity was as far as Eastman ever went. His vision
+was one of spiritual awakening, and a reconciliation of the Native identity
+with the modern world. Eastman admitted that he was an advocate “in this
+new line of defense of the native American, not so much of his rights in the
+land as of his character and religion.”21
+Zitkala-Ša and the later phase of the SAI took a more robust and
+confrontational approach. When the United States entered the First World
+War in 1917, SAI began adopting the language of nationalism,
+internationalism, and anti-colonialism. Natives volunteered for military
+service at rates far surpassing any other group, even though most were not
+considered US citizens—circumstances much like those of other colonized
+peoples serving in white Europe’s bloody civil war. An astounding 25
+percent of all adult Native men served in some capacity, compared to 15
+percent of men in the US overall. Most were drawn from the ranks of offreservation boarding schools—such as Carlisle Indian School where
+Zitkala-Ša was once a teacher—where pupils had been indoctrinated with
+military discipline and US patriotism.22
+Yet the war and Wilsonian internationalism provided the possibility of a
+new terrain of Native struggle. For many Red Progressives, Wilson’s
+Fourteen Points, in which he outlined his vision for long-term peace in
+Europe, gave meaning to US and American Indian involvement in the
+bloody war. Wilson argued the sacrifice of lives and resources and the
+creation of an international body would prevent another great war. The
+principal vision was the right to self-determination and the abolition of
+colonial regimes. Because of military service, SAI thought the United
+States would live up to its democratic commitments to Indigenous peoples
+and help them attain representation in a world forum alongside other
+colonized peoples. “The sunbursts of democratic ideals cannot bring new
+hope and courage to the small peoples of the earth without reaching the
+
+remotest corners within America’s own bounds,” wrote Zitkala-Ša in SAI’s
+quarterly American Indian Magazine. “As America has declared democracy
+abroad, so must we consistently practice it at home.”23 Wilson’s stance,
+however, ran contrary to the strong isolationism of the United States, and,
+in the end, Congress rejected membership in the League of Nations.
+Celebrations of Wilson’s internationalism overshadow other histories or
+futures that could have been. This is not to mention that Wilson, a so-called
+“progressive,” also resegregated the federal civil service and valorized the
+Ku Klux Klan—positions entirely consistent with his foreign policy, which
+included the military invasions of Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The
+Russian Revolution, however, offered an alternative vision for another
+world: proletarian and anti-colonial revolution. What came immediately
+was imperial counterrevolution; and what came later was a decolonization
+movement that toppled colonial regimes. For American Indians, following
+the Second World War, an anti-colonial nationalism came in the form of
+Red Power. Yet none of this could have become possible without ZitkalaŠa’s unrelenting advocacy for American Indian political renewal and selfdetermination during the early twentieth century.
+The war—and with it the draft—was also a turning point in the political
+direction of SAI. How could a country conscript those it did not consider
+citizens? Apache medical doctor Carlos Montezuma, a former SAI member
+who left the organization as his politics became more radical, argued that a
+Native draft was morally wrong. Intensely suspicious of the Indian Office
+and the federal government, Montezuma became a strident opponent of
+forced conscription. “The Indian Office keeps us Indians from our rights,”
+Montezuma wrote in 1917, the year the Selective Service Act was passed.
+“It tells the country that we are competent soldiers, but are not competent
+citizens … We are nothing but wards; we are not citizens and we are
+without a country in this world … The wards are called upon to protect
+their Protectors!”24 His fiery rhetoric and activism attracted the attention of
+the US Bureau of Investigation (which would later become the FBI). That
+same year the Espionage Act made anti-war activity a criminal offense
+punishable by imprisonment, while the 1918 Sedition Act did the same for
+those using “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” toward US
+institutions such as the Indian Bureau or national symbols such as the flag.
+Thousands of draft resisters were either deported or imprisoned. Most
+famously, six-time Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was
+
+charged in the summer of 1918 and swiftly sentenced to prison. Perhaps
+fearing reprisals against its own members, SAI adopted a nationalist stance
+on the war. One member went as far as to denounce the 1917 Green Corn
+Rebellion in Oklahoma, which was a Native-led armed uprising of poor
+whites, Blacks, Seminoles, and Muscogee Creeks against the Selective
+Service Act.25
+In spite of its best efforts, however, the American Indian Magazine,
+under the leadership of Zitkala-Ša, came under fire for subversive content.
+After US entry into the war and during the same month of the October 1917
+Bolshevik Revolution, Zitkala-Ša’s opening editorial read, “BREAK THE
+SHACKLES NOW, MAKE US FREE.” The controversial special issue,
+called “The Sioux Number,” detailed the horror the Oceti Sakowin endured
+during the brutal military campaigns after the 1862 US–Dakota War, at the
+1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, and the legacy of the United States’ broken
+promises contained in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The editors also called
+for the abolition of the Indian Bureau, the creation of a comprehensive
+program that allowed individual Indigenous nations to opt for or against US
+citizenship, and the upholding of treaty rights, especially the 1868 Treaty.
+Only once these bold demands were met could the United States retain
+moral authority in the world—or so they believed.26
+The special issue also targeted US military aggression. A sarcastic play
+on the patriotic anthem “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” Zitkala-Ša penned a
+rebuke of US nationalism in her poem “The Red Man’s America.” She
+changed the verse “Land where my fathers died / Land of the pilgrims’
+pride / From ev’ry mountainside / Let freedom ring!” to “Land where OUR
+fathers died / Whose offspring are denied / The Franchise given wide /
+Hark, while I sing.”27 In another poem, “A Sioux Woman’s Love for Her
+Grandchild,” she depicted the courage of a grandmother who refuses to
+leave her grandchild behind as they are overrun by US soldiers, noting the
+courage of the Oceti Sakowin and the tyranny of the military.28 Other
+contributors joined her in condemning militarism. “Why proclaim the
+sacredness of a treaty, or cry ‘Shame!’ to the German invasion of
+Belgium?” Eastman asked, attacking the hypocrisy of US military
+intervention in Europe, when the US continually violated the 1868 Treaty
+(among others).
+This brutal honesty unnerved policy makers and allies with “unmixed
+horror.” Critics accused Zitkala-Ša of becoming the “rankest Bolshevekist”
+
+who had descended into “Apacheism,” a derogatory term for criminal
+gangs. “If we were severe,” Zitkala-Ša reminded critics, “the faults we saw
+were still more severe.”29 She clarified her position in a 1919 editorial titled
+“The Black Hills Council.” In it, she argued that if “[the Sioux] were good
+enough to fight and die for world democracy,” then they were “worthy of
+full American citizenship and the protection of the law under our
+constitution.”30 The eagerness of Congress to send noncitizens to war but to
+ignore their legitimate grievances over treaty rights infuriated Zitkala-Ša.
+While they sent their sons overseas to fight and die, Oceti Sakowin treaty
+council leaders—all respected elders—pleaded their case before Congress
+and drafted bills that would allow them to take the Black Hills claim to
+court. “One after another these bills failed passage by Congress,” she
+recalled, “while access to the Court of Claims to all other Americans was
+comparatively easy, types of men like the IWW [the Industrial Workers of
+the World] and the Bolsheveki [were] not excepted.” Clearly referencing
+the attacks on SAI and its magazine, Zitkala-Ša spoke a simple truth: even
+the anarchists, socialists, communists, and draft resisters—all considered
+enemies of the state—had their day in court, a national headline, and some
+protections under the law. But any talk of Indigenous treaties, stolen land,
+genocide, the Black Hills, or citizenship was rejected as treasonous, or
+simply ignored. Those issues could not even be entertained in a court room,
+because the United States refused to recognize its own criminal behavior—
+and it refused to recognize the Oceti Sakowin as either citizens or their own
+nation. “Small wonder that Immortal Justice must be blindfolded upon her
+marble pedestal lest her tranquility be marred by the Red Man’s dilemma!”
+Zitkala-Ša remarked.31 But SAI offered other possibilities beyond the
+United States, as the promise of a new political order arose at the
+conclusion of the Great War.
+As peace approached, SAI members, including Eastman, Zitkala-Ša, and
+Montezuma, were undeterred by Congress’s stubbornness and seized upon
+Wilson’s principles to defend Native rights. “Under the new sun an epoch is
+being staged. Little peoples are to be granted the right of selfdetermination!” exclaimed Zitkala-Ša in 1919.32 Montezuma was more
+critical. “There is no picture as black as the history of our race. You may
+speak about abuses and mistreatment received by the Belgians, Bohemians,
+Poles, Serbians and other nations of the old country, their griefs and wild
+kings are no comparison to the treatment of the Indians at the hands of the
+
+American Government,” he wrote in a 1918 piece, provocatively titled
+“Another Kaiser in America.”33
+Eastman, however, echoed Zitkala-Ša, arguing that the scourge of
+wardship was thoroughly undemocratic, stunted the renewal of Indigenous
+autonomy, and ran counter to Wilson’s principles of self-determination.
+“The whole system reminds of the story of Two-Face in the Sioux legend.
+He stole a child to feed on his tender substance, sucking his blood while
+still living, and if anyone protested or aroused by the baby’s screams,
+attempted a rescue, he would pat it tenderly and pretend to caress it,” he
+wrote. A vampiric Indian Bureau, if not stopped, would continue to wither
+away Indigenous life and land. But Eastman cautioned, “We do not ask for
+territorial grant or separate government. We ask only to enjoy with Europe’s
+sons the full privileges of American citizenship.”34
+Despite their best efforts, Eastman, Zitkala-Ša, and SAI could not break
+the mold that cast them. Conservative factions within prevented SAI from
+petitioning President Wilson to attend the peace conference. Non-Native
+supporters viewed SAI as novelty, rather than a serious political
+organization. Slowly, the organization descended into obscurity, officially
+disbanding in 1923, a year before the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act,
+which unilaterally imposed citizenship upon all individual Indigenous
+peoples without consent. The criticism leveled at the Indian Bureau did,
+however, result in a sweeping investigation and report of its practices. The
+publication in 1928 of The Problem of Indian Administration, also known
+as the Meriam Report, was a massive indictment of federal Indian policies
+of assimilation and allotment. Whether as an intentional or unintentional
+outcome, the report found, Natives lived in destitution, poverty, and misery,
+and they had access only to highly deficient education and health services.
+The Indian Bureau became the focus of a massive reform under the Indian
+New Deal, which ended allotment, along with some bans on Native cultural
+and religious ceremonies. SAI’s ideas, especially those of Zitkala-Ša around
+cultural and political renewal, were taken up by John Collier, who is often
+credited with envisioning the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. It is clear
+that many elements of the IRA drew inspiration from SAI, but none of its
+members received credit.
+Having failed to gain entry to the Paris peace talks and the League of
+Nations, and likewise failed to garner support for the treaty claims (despite
+overwhelming numbers of American Indian servicemen), Zitkala-Ša penned
+
+a final rebuke of the United States in 1923, the year SAI collapsed. “It were
+better to slay this greedy octopus for a museum exhibit, before it sucked all
+the life blood of helpless Indian victims,” she scathingly wrote of the Indian
+Bureau in an unpublished tract called “Our Sioux People.” “In spite of all
+the efforts to segregate and differentiate the human family by color, and a
+sea of names,” she continued, “at heart they are all the same.” It was the
+white man who with “his Bible under one arm and gun powder under the
+other” had excluded himself from any true claim to humanity. The Sioux
+had not been militarily defeated but “subdued by starvation,” forced to
+surrender lands “filled with the stench of putrefying carcass of buffalo herds
+wantonly killed by paid sharp shooters, [the] outcome of the white man’s
+broken promises to the Sioux weeping over little cold lifeless bodies in their
+weak arms, their little darlings dead from hunger and fever.” After
+relentless imperial expansion, “the Sioux were driven into smaller
+reservations, out of which they were never to go again without a pass—
+never again as free men.” Segregated by reservations, “the course of their
+evolution, determined by their own initiative, and according to their own
+philosophy, has been interrupted.” Yet, those who held most tightly to their
+political traditions—those of the treaty councils—were rendered “criminal”
+and “the most backward.” The treaty councils, nevertheless, were “the most
+helpful because of their reluctance to cast aside our native culture.” This
+fact didn’t necessarily prevent American Indians from taking part in society.
+What prevented that success was the Indian Bureau, whose legacy was one
+“of absolute tyranny over America’s aboriginal people, and a despoliation
+of his land and native culture.” The more serious crime of “treaty
+mutilation” had been the cause of great wars in this country when Sioux
+people, who successfully resisted, were tricked by “good faith” but were
+“trampled underfoot when the wild lust for gold stampeded white men
+across the place to the Black Hills, into the country of the Sioux.”
+Subsequent laws disallowed them the right to interpret the very documents
+that were meant to guarantee their freedom. “Who owned America before
+the white man came?” Zitkala-Ša asked. “And by what process has the
+ownership vested in the United States?” These were supposed to be
+“pertinent questions” of any “highly civilized nations” wishing to represent
+“the universal laws of justice.” The United States, thus, is the antithesis of
+civilization and justice. To Zitkala-Ša, America is the root of war.35
+
+Angered by Collier’s dismissal of her work and activism, and concerned
+that the IRA didn’t go far enough, Zitkala-Ša organized her nation, the
+Yankton Reservation, to oppose the IRA. Although Yankton ultimately
+accepted the IRA, they never adopted an IRA constitution. Instead, a
+council of Ihanktonwan traditionals, organized by Zitkala-Ša, drafted a
+different constitution, with a broader vision of sovereignty that granted
+voting rights to off-reservation members and self-appointed tribal officials,
+and allowed the tribal council full veto power over any federal decisions
+over tribal lands, jurisdiction, and members. Effectively, the constitution
+virtually eliminated any influence of BIA and federal government
+interference over internal tribal affairs. Of course, Collier and the secretary
+of interior opposed the new constitution, which left the Yankton
+Reservation without a formally recognized council—a decision that had
+dire consequences when the Army Corps flooded their lands in the 1950s.36
+Even by today’s standards, Zitkala-Ša’s visions for Indigenous nationhood
+and sovereignty are radical and beyond the imagination and will of most
+tribal governments. In spite of her monumental contributions to traditions of
+Indigenous resistance, she died exhausted, poor, and unrecognized. Her
+death certificate ingloriously read: “Gertrude Bonnin from South Dakota—
+Housewife.”37
+In the end, SAI never accomplished its major goals. But the organization
+nevertheless succeeded in carrying forward previous notions of Indigenous
+nationhood and sovereignty. Against the background of anti-colonial
+movements, their internationalism was at best aspirational, as it failed to
+imagine itself outside the nation-state. On one hand, SAI’s nationalistic
+rhetoric was strategic, given the intense climate of repression; but on the
+other, it descended into blind patriotism. The political visions of Zitkala-Ša
+and Eastman were nevertheless far reaching. Treaty rights, human rights,
+and governance continue to be central challenges facing Indigenous nations;
+and central to each of these issues was the failure of the United States to
+live up to its agreements in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty for peaceful
+coexistence. Both envisioned an Indigenous sovereignty that existed
+alongside US state sovereignty, but that could, at the same time, refuse US
+colonial rule because it represented a prior (and therefore superior) form of
+governance and authority. Those bold visions, however, would not come to
+fruition for the Oceti Sakowin in the international arena until the 1970s,
+with the creation of the International Indian Treaty Council.
+
+After the SAI failed to accomplish its goals of attending the 1919 Paris
+peace talks and gaining the recognition of the League of Nations, in 1923,
+Haudenosaunee hereditary chief Deskaheh (Levi General) took his nation’s
+grievances against the United States and Canadian governments to the
+League of Nations. Although unsuccessful, the Treaty Council picked up
+where Deskaheh and SAI left off. They, too, attempted to transcend the
+colonial bureaucracy and assert treaty rights to a wider world, transposing
+the frontlines of struggle from armed barracks to the US courts and, finally,
+to the international arena.
+In the aftermath of Wounded Knee 1973, many tribal governments
+wanted nothing to do with the American Indian Movement. They could
+hardly go anywhere without attracting negative attention. Nevertheless, the
+Standing Rock Tribal Council unanimously passed a resolution inviting
+AIM to the reservation to form a council to take the treaty issue to the
+World Court and the United Nations Committee on Colonialism. Standing
+Rock spelled out its intentions unambiguously: “The Great Sioux Nation
+does not want money damages and is determined to enforce the Treaty of
+1868 for all Sioux people.”38 The treaty meeting also had the blessing of the
+Oglala Treaty Council, the same group of traditional elders who invited
+AIM to Wounded Knee. The Oglala Treaty Council demanded “total
+recognition of the treaty—nothing less” and the remuneration of all lands
+and resources that had been taken either by the Pick-Sloan flooding or
+goldmining in the Black Hills. Acts on behalf of the United States
+subsequent to the 1868 Treaty, the council determined, “did not diminish
+our inherent right to govern ourselves as a sovereign nation”; also, “all
+actions taken by the US government on the 1868 treaty has been illegal and
+contrary to the practices of international law and the usual relationship
+between sovereign nations.”39 Further, they pushed the United States to
+sign and ratify the 1948 Genocide Convention. In spite of its prior hostility
+toward IRA governments, AIM now had the backing of the traditionalists,
+the grassroots people, and Standing Rock’s IRA tribal council.
+The coalescence of forces was truly historic, yet the June 1974 treaty
+meeting attracted hardly any media attention. This was in part due to Indian
+Health Service misdiagnosing a case of hepatitis at the gathering. Immune
+booster shots ran out on the reservation, forcing many UN observers and
+media to cancel their participation.40 However, this made the gathering no
+less important for its 5,000 attendees, representing ninety-seven different
+
+Indigenous nations. To mark the landmark occasion, Hunkpapa elder
+Evelyn Gabe—a direct descendent of John Grass, the Hunkpapa chief and
+treaty council leader who led the successful resistance against allotment in
+1887—welcomed AIM and thanked them for coming to Standing Rock.
+“We have agreed to make a stand in unity with the most valid treaties, one
+of which is the 1868 treaty,” she told the crowd in attendance.41 As a result
+of Standing Rock’s support, the 1868 Treaty became the tip of the spear for
+the UN work. With this reminder of why they had come, they posed these
+questions first: How was Indigenous law to be judged by a court of nonIndigenous peers? Who were peers to Indigenous knowledge keepers, the
+lawmakers and elders?
+It was decided that only other Indigenous peoples could determine their
+peers, and that other colonized peoples could be their peers, along with any
+nation willing to recognize them—since the United States wouldn’t. To get
+the UN to work for them, Jimmie Durham, who was later appointed
+executive director of the Treaty Council, suggested following the lead of
+African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, whom he had befriended in Geneva.
+To get his message across to the UN and to the European world, Cabral had
+“to make speeches and use ‘white’ ideals and pretentions.”42 Those “white”
+ideals and pretentions included speaking in the language of sovereignty,
+culture, and nationhood. Pressed by their legal counsel that they would need
+“concrete evidence of sovereignty” at the UN, Santee AIM member John
+Trudell responded, “The treaties are our evidence.”43
+For Russell Means, Indigenous treaties and culture were only steppingstones to a larger goal. Recognition, whether cultural or political, was
+pointless if it didn’t entail the destruction of the colonial system and, above
+all, the restoration of treaty lands and Indigenous modes of governance.
+Although Means never knew Amílcar Cabral, the two shared a similar
+vision of decolonization. Throughout the Treaty Council documents,
+meeting notes, and newsletters, Cabral’s thoughts and visions of anticolonial struggle were occasionally cited. Cabral, who founded the African
+Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (or PAIGC), a
+Marxist revolutionary party, proposed that colonized Africans “return to the
+source.” That source was a distinct African culture that was preserved
+primarily by those most oppressed by Portuguese colonialism—not urban
+elites, but the villagers and the tribal people who lived in the forest. The
+power of the latter lay in their culture of resistance, which had held at bay
+
+complete domination by a foreign culture. Revolution, for Cabral, didn’t
+mean becoming a European society or a European-style state, but becoming
+a society that reflected its own culture and values. Yet more than cultural
+resistance was at stake. These Indigenous cultures also exemplified
+horizontalism, as they were free of arbitrary hierarchy and abundant with
+self-rule.44
+On the last day of the Standing Rock Treaty Council meeting, Russell
+Means took the microphone. Throughout the day, he had been reading
+various communiqués from the Irish Republican Army, the Organization of
+African Unity, and several Arab nations in support of the Standing Rock
+gathering. There was some tension about the direction the Treaty Council
+would take. Most of AIM’s leadership was still tied up in the courts from
+the Wounded Knee arrests, so how could the organization fight for
+recognition at the UN? More importantly, people who had no experience
+with international law or human rights were in charge of their destinies but
+had no clue about the maze of UN decision-making processes. The path
+ahead was daunting and uncertain, and the tenor of the meetings sober. This
+was clearly a departure from the past one-off actions. Means stated that the
+Treaty Council must look to all potential allies, “the United Nations, the
+Organization of American States, the Organization of African Unity, the
+Arab countries, the communist bloc and whatever is necessary for us to get
+our treaties in court and would give the world forums a chance to hear us.”
+Moreover, Means emphasized the historic character of American Indian
+struggle as it related to the rest of the world. “What we are into is
+revolution, turning that cycle of life always back,” he said. It wasn’t just
+about Turtle Island, because “in the history of the world the successful
+struggles for independence and the struggles which are still going on for
+independence all involve land, all involve land—whether it’s in Africa or
+Asia or Southeast Asia or the [Mediterranean], or in the Middle East, or in
+Ireland and the United States or Canada or South America or Central
+America, or Micronesia or Puerto Rico.” In the nineteenth century, the
+Oceti Sakowin had no way to enlist the aid of other countries, or even the
+people of the United States. Now the Treaty Council had a global forum and
+allies worldwide. “If we are going to struggle for our land, it can’t be just
+with words, just with paper,” Means solemnly declared. “It has to be with
+our lives.”45
+
+The outcome of the conference was the “Declaration of Continuing
+Independence,” which was in large part written and framed by Phyllis
+Young—the Standing Rock leader who, decades later, stood defiant against
+the Dakota Access Pipeline (see chapter 1). The declaration called for (1)
+the recognition of the United States’ violation of Indigenous treaties; (2)
+acknowledgment of the “inviolate international relationship” between
+Native nations and the United States; (3) restoration of treaty land; (4)
+eschewal of violence, except in self-defense; (5) rejection of all legislative
+and executive acts since 1871; and (6) entry into international diplomatic
+relations with the United States and colonial states through UN recognition
+and membership. Above all, the 1974 Declaration cited violations arising
+from the failure of the United States and other colonial states to adhere to
+international human rights standards, which it charged had not yet been
+adequately extended to Indigenous peoples, or to abide by Convention on
+the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
+While these were bold statements, AIM leadership was still hamstrung
+by the courts. Hundreds of cases still had to be resolved. The traditional
+leadership suggested near the conclusion of the treaty meeting at Standing
+Rock that these cases be resolved before moving on with the international
+work. And there was one more request. AIM should try one last time to get
+the federal courts to recognize Oceti Sakowin sovereignty.
+With its high-risk, attention-grabbing protests, including the siege at
+Wounded Knee in 1973, AIM had won in the court of public opinion, or at
+least held its attention. But the movement soon found itself and its
+aspirations for freedom on trial in the courts of the conquerors—a situation
+that was immobilizing for an organization sustained by constant action. By
+the end of 1973, arrests from Wounded Knee had tied up most of the AIM
+leadership in federal and state courts for months, and sometimes years. The
+case against Dennis Banks and Russell Means was one of the longest
+criminal trials in US history at the time; following a nine-month trial,
+Federal Judge Fred Nichols threw out all charges against Means and Banks
+on the grounds of government misconduct. After the tanks rolled away from
+Wounded Knee, a team of volunteer lawyers rolled in, forming the
+Wounded Knee Defense/Offense Committee, led by attorney Ken Tilsen, to
+represent to the hundred-plus AIM members. Five defendants initially
+cooperated with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty in exchange for the
+dismissal of the other hundred-plus cases. However, the Justice Department
+
+would have none of it, and the trials continued on for nearly two years. The
+US lawyers came down heavy. Nevertheless, for all their efforts, only two
+of the five AIM members who took the plea deal served any jail time.
+Because of a committed legal defense and the weak nature of the charges,
+most of the other cases were thrown out.46
+In another well-known case, some sixty-five AIM defendants argued that
+the United States lacked criminal jurisdiction in Oceti Sakowin territory
+protected under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Because the defendants were
+charged with alleged criminal acts in the Pine Ridge Reservation and were
+within the 1868 Treaty boundaries, the legal defense team moved for
+dismissal. The Lakota patriots and their allies who made their stand at
+Wounded Knee had also asserted sovereignty based on the 1868 Treaty. “I
+went to Wounded Knee only because of that Treaty,” declared Russell
+Means. “The first night we were in there, we [sent] out a copy of the 1868
+Sioux Treaty to the FBI and said that was why we were at Wounded
+Knee.”47
+The hearing became known as the “Sioux Treaty Hearing.” Vine Deloria
+Jr., along with lead defense attorney John Thorne, engineered the treaty
+defense. Deloria cited the accuracy of oral tradition as the basis for the
+Oceti Sakowin’s understanding of treaties. These oral histories were just as
+accurate as US records of treaty proceedings and provided a point of view
+often overlooked. “You can’t imply that the Sioux[,] in signing any treaty,
+ever thought that they were submitting to a process whereby they would
+someday be in a federal court with endless appeals leading up the United
+States Supreme Court,” argued Deloria. “We cannot say that the United
+States has ever legally taken jurisdiction over the Sioux Nation of
+Indians.”48
+For the defense, the 1868 Treaty was undeniable evidence of Oceti
+Sakowin sovereignty and nationhood, not only because Natives said so, but
+also because the United States itself said so. Nothing could be clearer than
+Article 6 of the US Constitution, which unequivocally states that “all
+Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United
+States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”49 If the United States had
+abrogated its responsibility or changed the terms of the treaty, Deloria
+reasoned, it had done so without the consent of the Oceti Sakowin, which
+was beyond the original intent of the agreement. Treaty signing was also
+not an acquiescence to a superior sovereign; rather the United States has
+
+interpreted it that way, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. In
+spite of its strengths, the treaty defense was a bold and controversial claim
+with little chance of success.
+Questions of Indigenous survival were of pressing concern during the
+thirteen-day hearing. In December 1974 in a Lincoln, Nebraska, courthouse,
+Federal Judge Warren Urbom listened attentively to the testimony from
+Lakota and Dakota elders, scholars, and activists. The hearing was unique
+and groundbreaking. Among the forty-nine “expert witnesses” on the
+defense’s witness list were historians, anthropologists, activists, and
+Indigenous elders and traditionalists. The list was the who’s who, not just of
+AIM, but of the entire Indigenous movement and its organic and new
+intellectuals, including Leonard Crow Dog, Vine Deloria Jr., Roxanne
+Dunbar-Ortiz, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, Edith Bull Bear, Beatrice
+Medicine, Irma Bear Stops, Severt Young Bear, Alex Chasing Hawk,
+Evelyn Gabe, Francis He Crow, Gladys Bissonette, Robert Yellow Bird,
+Frank Kills Enemy, Ted Means, Nellie Red Owl, Faith Traversie, Matthew
+King, and many more. Breaking with tradition, witnesses could swear to the
+truth over the Canupa (a Lakota ceremonial pipe), rather than the Bible.
+Because the hearing didn’t require a jury, Lakota and Dakota elders and
+traditionalists filled the empty jury box. For the first time in a US court of
+law, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz contends, “it was the Great Sioux Nation
+sitting in judgment on America, not the reverse.”50 The issues presented—
+treaty rights, sovereignty, colonialism, and genocide—were matters of
+survival for all Indigenous peoples, not just the Oceti Sakowin.
+While a sympathetic US public expressed concern for the abuse of
+Native peoples and the heroic patriots of Wounded Knee 1973, they tended
+to—and, to a large extent, still do—view Indigenous issues as just another
+civil rights movement. But the testimony threw into question the very
+legitimacy of the United States’ control of the continent, positioning the
+Oceti Sakowin and, by default, all Indigenous peoples, in the camp of other
+colonized people unjustly subjected to US and European colonialism.
+It was a long shot. Everyone knew it. In the end Judge Urbom ruled
+against the defendants’ dismissal. The Oceti Sakowin, Urbom decided,
+“were once fully sovereign people. They are not now and have not been for
+a long time. Whether they ever will be again is dependent upon actions of
+the Congress and the President of the United States and not of the courts.”51
+While not the desired outcome, the hearing forced Urbom to confront the
+
+inherent conservative nature of his profession, especially when it came to
+Indigenous peoples. US law, and the entire Western legal tradition for that
+matter, is conservative—and not in the binary political sense of liberal
+versus conservative. Western court law is conservative because in the
+absence of “good” legislation, it frequently draws from crude and archaic
+expressions of its own past to determine “justice” in the present, therefore
+setting precedent for future cases. Only congressional or executive action
+can redirect the course of law away from its inherent conservativism,
+avenues that have provided little relief for Indigenous peoples. Otherwise,
+as is often the case for major Indian court decisions, a “bad” decision
+becomes doctrine. By following its own legal traditions, the arc of the
+Western moral universe never bends toward Indigenous justice. At best, it
+ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.
+To justify conquest, enslavement, and genocide under European law,
+Indigenous peoples, and the darker nations, have been categorically
+excluded from the realm of humanity—a principle that has been little
+challenged.52 For example, in his ruling Urbom questioned, but reaffirmed,
+the basis of federal Indian law as defined by Chief Justice John Marshall in
+the early nineteenth century, when the United States was a fledgling nation.
+“Every lower federal court is bound” by Marshall’s assertion in the 1823
+Johnson v. McIntosh decision, he argued. In that decision Marshall held that
+under US law, Indigenous nations cannot be considered fully sovereign,
+because prior to European contact, Indigenous peoples were “fierce
+savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn
+chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to
+leave the country a wilder-ness.”53 And only “civilized” people can be fully
+sovereign. Such logic virtually mandates settler colonialism to “civilize”
+“fierce savages” and their “wilderness” landscape. Nevertheless, every
+court is expected to uphold this view—even if it has never been factually
+true, and even if the world no longer views it as legitimate. Urbom was
+merely keeping with tradition.
+All was not lost, however. The defense viewed the decision as a partial,
+if not significant, victory. While he dismissed the main jurisdiction claim,
+Urbom agreed that the 1868 Treaty was proof of an international
+relationship between the Oceti Sakowin and the United States, a
+relationship no US court had the authority to resolve. To the casual
+observer, this may not seem important. But it was why AIM members
+
+risked their lives at Wounded Knee against the US government, and why
+North America’s poorest people faced off with the greatest military power
+the world had ever known. In his fiery closing statement, defense attorney
+John Thorne compared the Oceti Sakowin’s aspiration for international
+recognition to that of other oppressed nations like the Palestine Liberation
+Organization, Northern Ireland, Black South Africa under apartheid, and
+within the United States, the Black Panther Party, La Raza, and the United
+Farm Workers.
+“They talk about oppression, and they talk about a better life. They move
+and they act. In response, we build bigger and better prisons, appoint more
+and more judges, more police officers, and make more arrests,” said Thorne
+to Judge Urbom. “I want you to be bound by moral law.”
+“Whence comes my authority?” asked Urbom.
+“To do what?”
+“To do anything. I am a judge. Where did I get my authority?” Urbom
+shot back.
+“Exactly the same place that the [1868] Treaty between the United States
+and the Sioux Nation gained its status as a solemn agreement,” Thorne
+reminded the court.54
+“Feeling what was wrong does not describe what is right,” Urbom
+reasoned, as if the colonial reality were in the past. “Anguish about
+yesterday does not alone make wise answers for tomorrow.”55
+Urbom spoke as if the Indigenous elders who had for two weeks stood
+before the judge sharing their stories had walked out of a history book.
+Nevertheless, the defendants had gotten what they came for: admission that
+Indigenous treaties were rooted in international law. The next step was to
+take the struggle to the world.
+Indigenous nationhood is often misunderstood as an exclusive project—
+the sole aspiration of just Indigenous peoples—or as confined within
+narrow definitions of the nation-state. This is similar to the way the “Indian
+problem” is treated as solely an Indian problem. According to the
+International Indian Treaty Council that first met at the Standing Rock
+Indian Reservation in 1974 and drafted the “Declaration of Continuing
+Independence,” the problem was not Indigenous peoples; the problem was,
+and always has been, imperialism. The aspiration for nationhood set the
+Treaty Council apart from other Red Power movements that sought the
+freedom associated with nation-states. It looked instead to the global South,
+
+to the darker nations. The Treaty Council made common cause with Third
+World movements (including within the US) to gain recognition for
+Indigenous peoples at the United Nations. In response to more than a
+decade of Red Power protests beginning in the 1960s, in the 1970s
+President Nixon authorized Indian self-determination as domestic policy,
+thus ending termination and granting more powers to tribal councils to
+manage their own affairs and increasing “nation-to-nation” relations. But
+the Treaty Council had bigger dreams.
+In its early days the Treaty Council faced several obstacles. The first was
+the lack of media publicity in the United States. While they maintained
+strong connections with grassroots communities (their base) and some tribal
+councils, the broader public was largely unaware of their important work.
+Second, according to its “Declaration,” the Treaty Council was a national
+liberation organization that desired full representation at the UN. The
+Indigenous nations the Treaty Council represented, however, were not
+recognized as independent sovereign states by the world community—a
+prerequisite for entry into the UN. Still, the Treaty Council filed for
+nongovernmental organization (NGO) status with the UN Economic and
+Social Council, gaining consultative status in 1977. To some, the
+channeling of energy into an NGO—arguably a non-revolutionary and nonsovereign entity—seemed in contradiction to their larger project.56 A 1977
+Treaty Council communiqué titled “Decolonization, Liberation and the
+International Community” offered their explaination of the NGO strategy:
+“Decolonization, or a better term, liberation, is a slow, painstaking process.
+What the colonialists accomplished over the past four centuries cannot be
+overcome easily.”57
+The Treaty Council also faced two obstacles in seeking international
+recognition. First, the United States simply could not tolerate Indigenous
+rights, let alone sovereign Indigenous nations, and it did everything in its
+power to thwart their efforts. Second, the very internal mechanisms of the
+UN prevented the delivery of full Indigenous sovereignty that was on par
+with that of states. The formal process of decolonization, outlined in UN
+decolonization charters, didn’t account for, nor did it recognize, Indigenous
+peoples as potential nations. Typically, colonized nations gained their
+independence through a combination of armed struggle and international
+recognition. After Wounded Knee, AIM had eschewed the former in favor
+of the latter, but international legal frameworks ultimately proved
+
+inadequate. Allies elsewhere in the world had to be sought and maintained.
+Only by winning world opinion could international recognition be achieved.
+Immediately following the 1974 Treaty Council meeting, two offices
+were set up—one in San Francisco and the other across the street from the
+UN in New York City. The slow process of gaining international
+recognition began. A Treaty Council delegation attended the International
+Conference of Solidarity with the Independence of Puerto Rico in Havana
+at the invitation of the Cuban government, where the Treaty Council was
+recognized alongside seventy-six other nations and fourteen liberation
+movements from around the world. Thus began a close collaboration with
+Third World independence movements and Socialist countries. Soon Treaty
+Council delegations visited the Eastern bloc and nations of the global South
+in North Africa, South America, and the Middle East in an effort to garner
+support. At their second gathering in the Yankton Reservation in June 1976,
+the Treaty Council drafted a “Red Paper,” condemning the United States for
+ongoing practices of genocide and imperialist intervention across the globe.
+The Treaty Council directed international delegations to make friendly
+relations with other countries and to ask them to recognize the 1868 Fort
+Laramie.58
+The delegations were well received by their hosts, especially in the
+Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries, who were eager not only to
+support Indigenous causes but also to point out the hypocrisy of US
+“humanitarian” intervention abroad while it denied freedom to its own
+people. During a 1977 visit to the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and
+West Germany, Treaty Council representatives—Allene Goddard, Bill
+Means, Greg Zephier, and Bill Wahpepah—met with Iraqi, Algerian, and
+Namibian delegations. “I think because we got to know our brothers from
+the south better on these tours, we understand more than before that we are
+one people,” observed Wahpepah.59 Sherry Means, the fifteen-year-old
+daughter of Russell Means, found the tour of the Eastern bloc eye-opening.
+In contrast to the United States’ treatment of Indigenous peoples, “these
+countries believe strongly in human rights,” she reported.60 The warm
+reception by Eastern bloc countries in Europe was in part due to a prolific
+Indian hobbyist culture. Under Socialist regimes such as the German
+Democratic Republic (or East Germany), Indian hobbyist clubs received
+state funding and played a significant role in providing transnational
+solidarity to American Indian causes. Much like the European Socialist
+
+regimes supported Black revolutionaries like Angela Davis, who was
+imprisoned by the state of California and later released, Eastern bloc
+countries provided genuine transnational solidarity to American Indian
+struggles.61 More importantly, where Indigenous peoples found a hostile
+audience in North America, they found a welcoming one abroad, especially
+among Socialist nations and other colonized peoples. The “red nations” of
+Europe and Asia now provided a platform of support for the Red nations of
+North America.
+Treaty Council delegations were frequent, and the relationships they
+fostered were lasting and deep. For example, in 1979 when the Iranian
+Revolution erupted, revolutionary students took hostage fifty-two US
+diplomats and citizens, holding them at the US embassy for more than a
+year. By taking US hostages, revolutionary students hoped to prevent the
+US-backed dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, from returning to
+power. Nearly forgotten, however, is the Treaty Council’s role in helping to
+peacefully end the situation, as well as the mail exchange program they ran
+for the US hostages. According to Russell Means, after the 1977 Geneva
+conference AIM’s ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) gave
+the Treaty Council “some credibility in that part of the world.” Since Means
+was barred from leaving the United States as part of the terms of his parole,
+John Thomas, a Dakota AIM member and Means’s second in command
+—“a witty, lovable guy who gets along with everybody”—served as a
+“roving ambassador” in Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt. The Treaty Council sent
+Thomas to Tehran after the Revolutionary Guards took over the US
+embassy “to see what he could do.” Ultimately, the students only allowed
+packages and mail to be delivered in person by an AIM member.62
+In one instance, Thomas arrived at the embassy with a bag of 150 letters.
+Iranian students welcomed him, and he was allowed to see one hostage,
+Army Sergeant Joseph Subic Jr. “You have our deepest sympathy. Our
+people [American Indians] have been held in bondage for 150 years by the
+US government,” Thomas told the sergeant.
+“I know. Thank you for coming,” Subic answered.63 For their efforts Bill
+Means, John Thomas, and the Treaty Council received a formal “thank
+you” from the UN secretary general, commending the mail exchange for
+helping in “the negotiation of a peaceful settlement.”64 Although the mail
+exchange didn’t receive widespread publicity, the humanitarian diplomatic
+mission showed that American Indians were at odds with the US
+
+government and its colonial policies, but not with US citizens in general.
+That it was authorized to carry out such a unique humanitarian mission also
+revealed the level of trust the Treaty Council had developed with the UN,
+Third World regimes, and national liberation organizations.
+While the Treaty Council brought the struggle of Turtle Island to the
+world, the world also came to Turtle Island. International delegations were
+often guests of Indigenous nations in the United States, and Palestinian and
+Indigenous solidarity was particularly strong and visible. Both Palestinians
+and American Indians were unrecognized nations, stateless peoples, who
+were fighting settler-colonial regimes occupying their lands. At nearly
+every major Treaty Council event, Palestinians were in attendance. And it
+wasn’t just political meetings. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn recalls their presence at
+powwows in the 1970s and 1980s. “Groups of thirty, forty, fifty Palestinians
+with their guns, with their uniforms, came after the prayers in the morning,
+after and before the grand entry, and when people could go to breakfast and
+[were] having coffee and getting organized, the Palestinians were out on
+that tarmac doing military maneuvers,” she recalls. “They were invited
+there by our tribes.”65
+While American Indians sometimes referred to themselves as the
+Palestinians of North America, in the sense that they had been invaded and
+were being replaced by a foreign occupying power, not all Palestinians saw
+themselves as American Indians. To some, American Indians were a fait
+accompli—a lesson to Palestinians that they could end up stateless,
+unrecognized, in exile, or permanently placed on reservations if they did not
+overturn occupation. In the 1980s, when asked how he felt about the
+comparison, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat responded, “This is one part of
+our struggle—to ensure that we do not suffer the same fate of the American
+Indians at the hands of the Yankees.”66 His implication was not that
+American Indians were beneath Palestinians. But Palestine and Turtle
+Island have different histories and are experiencing different stages of
+settler colonialism. From 1516 to 1918, Palestine was part of the Ottoman
+Empire. In 1920 it was placed under British authority as part of the League
+of Nations mandate system that allowed states (primarily European ones) to
+administer overseas territory. In 1948 Israel became a “Jewish homeland,”
+and their expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians (around 85 percent of
+the Arab population) from their homes became known as the Nakba—the
+“catastrophe.” Israel soon attacked surrounding Arab states, leading to three
+
+major wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973, resulting in the Israeli occupation of
+Eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
+In other words, Palestinians were still engaged in direct combat with Israeli
+settlers at this time, much in the same way the Oceti Sakowin had fought to
+repel settler invasion a century earlier. Like the tens of thousands of Oceti
+Sakowin who were displaced by military occupation, flooding, and
+industrial development, today there are around 6 million Palestinian
+refugees who do not have the right of return to their homelands.
+Palestine, with a landmass the size of New Jersey—smaller than some
+Indian reservations—was like a microcosm of nineteenth-century settler
+colonialism in North America. So, in some ways Arafat was correct:
+Indigenous peoples of North America were the evidence of the advanced
+stages of settler colonialism, today making up less than 1 percent of the
+total population and possessing less than 3 percent of their original land. Yet
+Palestinians had something American Indians didn’t have in the nineteenth
+century: access to the UN, an international body founded in 1945—partly to
+end colonialism—where they could attempt to change world opinion. At the
+height of their physical elimination and removal, American Indians didn’t
+have an international institution to which they could bring their grievances.
+They couldn’t even enlist the aid of US citizens, who were benefiting from
+and actively participating in their elimination.
+Not all American Indian activists supported this close relationship with
+Palestine. A common trope used to explain the existence of Indigenous
+peoples in the Americas, since the Bible made no mention of them, was that
+they were a lost tribe of Israel. Many American Indians, having been
+indoctrinated into Christianity, accepted as a matter of biblical doctrine the
+legitimacy of the state of Israel as a “Jewish homeland,” much in the same
+manner the United States has commonly called itself a “Christian nation.”
+Vine Deloria Jr. stands out during this time as a promoter of this view of
+Zionism—an ideology, on par with Manifest Destiny, that calls for the
+reestablishment and the protection of a Jewish nation, Israel. In his 1974
+book Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria predicted the rise of the
+international Indigenous movement, but he argued that full Indigenous
+sovereignty and autonomy wouldn’t radically threaten the political and
+territorial sovereignty of the United States. Israel and Zionism, he asserted,
+were prime examples of how traditional, historical claims to specific
+territory as the sovereign heritage of a particular people could become
+
+legitimate. “If the US is capable of recognizing Jewish rights to sovereign
+land in Israel, it must be capable of acknowledging a similar right for
+American Indians in the US.”67 The opposite was true, however, and
+Deloria’s views were entirely out of step with radical Indigenous
+internationalism at the time. Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita
+argues that the Israeli Zionist project was not so much a departure from US
+Manifest Destiny as it was an extension of it. The dog (the US) wags its tail
+(Israel)—not the other way around. Both were different versions of what he
+calls a “holy land in transit”—the usage of biblical references and imperial
+ideologies to map a European “old world” onto a Native “new world” of
+Turtle Island and Palestine, and to erase the histories and presence of both
+native peoples.68
+Tellingly, Israel (like the US at this time) sided with the white
+supremacist South African apartheid regime when the rest of the world
+condemned it. Israel also adopted settler-colonial tactics similar to those of
+the United States in order to expel, remove, contain, and ultimately
+eliminate Palestinians; at the same time, the United States has politically,
+economically, and culturally backed the Israeli occupation of Palestine,
+effectively making the colonization project an extension of US domestic
+and foreign policy and intervention in the Middle East. In this way, each
+struggle was bound to the other. And this view wasn’t unique to American
+Indians. Scholar Alex Lubin, for instance, describes the interconnection of
+global struggles as “geographies of liberation.” The Black Panther Party’s
+concept of “intercommunalism,” which resembled radical Indigenous
+internationalism at the time, also moved away from efforts to win equality
+within the nation-state. In this way, Lubin argues, these disparate struggles
+all sought to imagine a world that was fundamentally different—one absent
+of class, race, national, and colonial hierarchies.69
+In its publication Oyate Wicaho (voice of the people), Dakota AIM
+frequently published interviews, short stories, poetry, and reports from
+Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation, even referring to Palestinians as
+“relatives.” Indigenous internationalism, as Means spelled out in his 1974
+speech at the first Treaty Council meeting, was bound to the struggles of
+those fighting for the emancipation of their lands. And in the end, these
+alliances with the global South and national liberation organizations proved
+the most productive for the Treaty Council. When the world turned its back
+on AIM after Wounded Knee, the world’s colonized reached out and helped
+
+launch Indigenous peoples’ rights to the international level. The very notion
+that the Treaty Council met with Third World and Socialist regimes
+offended even some of their Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies,
+especially those engaged in the UN campaigns. Other organizations, such as
+the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Indian Law Resource
+Center, chose to ally themselves with the North Atlantic states (the
+traditional imperial powers) and take money from their own colonial
+governments—both moves that AIM and the Treaty Council vehemently
+eschewed. But the alliances made sense, pragmatically and ideologically.
+And there was also the issue of funding: to avoid being beholden to private
+or government donors, the Treaty Council depended mostly on donations
+from church groups to exert autonomy from settler states.
+The Treaty Council also faced a greater challenge: there were no
+appropriate working definitions of Indigenous peoples under international
+law. Until then, the UN categorized Indigenous peoples as internal
+“populations.” At the urging of Indigenous activists, “indigenous peoples”
+was included as a category in the first UN Decade for Action to Combat
+Racism and Racial Discrimination, which began in 1974. The
+corresponding UN resolution also called out South African apartheid and
+Israeli Zionism as forms of racism.70 For this reason, US presidents from
+Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush boycotted both the first and second
+iterations of the UN “Decade” program, spanning from 1974 to 1993.
+The crucial event, however, was the 1977 International NGO Conference
+on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas at the
+UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, from September 20 to 23. The
+Treaty Council initiated the conference and the NGO Sub-Committee on
+Racism, Racial Discrimination, Apartheid, and Colonialism organized it. At
+the invitation of the Treaty Council, more than one hundred Indigenous
+representatives from across the hemisphere attended, including Indigenous
+delegates from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala,
+Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela, and the
+United States. Representatives also joined from Australia, Cuba, France,
+Iraq, Mongolia, Syria, and Yemen, among others. Notable NGOs and
+international organizations in attendance included Amnesty International,
+the World Alliance of YMCAs, and the Muslim World League.71
+The conference was a monumental achievement and was covered widely
+by the international press—unsurprisingly, the US press boycotted the
+
+entire affair. In all-night sessions, the Indigenous leaders hammered out a
+collective document, called the “Draft Declaration of Principles for the
+Defense of the Indigenous Nations and Peoples of the Western
+Hemisphere.” It contained thirteen principles, defining the parameters of
+Indigenous nationhood under international law, the right to Indigenous
+independence and autonomy, the upholding of treaties and other agreements
+with colonizing nations, Indigenous legal and territorial jurisdiction over
+their lands and members, a process to settle disputes with colonizing states,
+rights to environmental protection, and the rights to define Indigenous
+membership. The first principle urged that “Indigenous people shall be
+accorded recognition as nations” if they possess the requirements of
+nationhood under international law—namely, a permanent population, a
+defined territory, a government, and the ability to enter into relations with
+other states. The Oceti Sakowin, by this point, had long since checked all
+the boxes for nationhood status.72 These points built upon the Twenty
+Points of the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties that demanded the return to
+Indigenous treaty relations—that is, international relations—with the
+United States. The Indigenous movement came full circle. Roxanne
+Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the draft declaration may be “the fundamental
+political document of the international Indigenous movement.”73 But it
+would not be until four decades later, in 2007, that the UN adopted the
+Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.74
+In 1987, under mandate from the UN, Cuban special rapporteur Miguel
+Alfonso Martínez led a ten-year investigation into the status of the treaties
+and agreements. He concluded that colonial powers like the United States,
+by virtue of treaties such as the 1868 Treaty, have unjustly claimed
+authority over Indigenous nations and lands. Martínez calls this the
+“domestication” process, whereby Indigenous nations were “removed from
+the sphere of international law and placed squarely under the exclusive
+competence and internal jurisdiction” of settler states.75 In spite of
+continued US aggression toward Indigenous nations, Martínez argues that
+treaty rights have ongoing effective status under both domestic and
+international law. Verifying his claim, some legal decisions have, in fact,
+come down on the side of the Oceti Sakowin.
+In 1980, the US Supreme Court confirmed the Oceti Sakowin’s claim
+that the Black Hills had indeed been stolen. “A more ripe and rank case of
+dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history,”
+
+the ruling stated.76 As a result, the court awarded a $106 million settlement.
+The Oceti Sakowin responded nearly unanimously under a popular slogan:
+“The Black Hills are not for sale!” In the spirit of Standing Rock and the
+Treaty Council’s original 1974 contention, they considered a full restoration
+of the illegally taken lands to be the only just solution. And this gets at the
+heart of the matter. The Oceti Sakowin’s struggle for its land is not about
+getting reparations, apologies, or reconciliation. It is about justice and
+ending the settler-colonial system. Still, many settlers cannot imagine the
+return of lands—or, for that matter, future peaceful coexistence of the more
+than 500 distinct Indigenous nations. While many will agree that
+colonialism is wrong, they cannot imagine a future without it.
+During a 1999 civil rights commission hearing in Rapid City, South
+Dakota, renowned Lakota environmentalist Charmaine White Face
+reflected upon the fact that when the US Supreme Court issued its ruling on
+the 1868 Treaty, many of South Dakota’s “non-Indian” people feared losing
+their land. “Are they remembering the fashion in which many of their
+ancestors forced the loss of the homes and livelihoods of Lakota people and
+think the same will happen to them, or are they afraid that the federal
+government will turn on them also as it has turned on Lakota people?” she
+asked.77
+White Face was identifying the implicit admission from non-Natives that
+indeed this land was stolen by force and coercion. This also implies a limit
+to the project of settler justice, which can extract an admission of
+wrongdoing, but cannot reorder the world or redistribute wealth, especially
+land, back to its rightful owners. Non-Natives believe that somehow
+Indigenous peoples will do to settlers what they did to them. But the
+opposite is true. The example of the Black Hills Alliance in the previous
+chapter demonstrates that when Indigenous and poor settlers organize
+around treaty rights, they can beat multinational energy corporations and
+take control of their lives. The same happened during the 2013 protests to
+stop the Keystone XL Pipeline and the 2016 efforts at Standing Rock to
+defeat the Dakota Access Pipeline. Although both projects remain active, a
+diversity of forces, from environmentalist groups, to farmers and ranchers,
+to labor unions—what Zoltán Grossman calls “unlikely alliances”—have
+put up significant obstacles.78
+Renowned Pawnee jurist Walter Echo-Hawk sees contemporary Native
+nations as “simply coasting under the Indian Self-Determination Policy
+
+initiated by President Nixon in 1970,” suggesting that they have failed to
+adequately address “indigenous conditions, problems, or rights in over
+thirty-five years.”79 But the much-lauded accomplishment of the 2007
+United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)
+is testament to Indigenous internationalism’s commitment to seeking selfdetermination beyond nation-state solutions. The Non-Aligned Movement,
+the Eastern bloc, and the Soviet Union provided a check to Western
+aggression. The decline of each hindered the work of the radical Indigenous
+internationalist movement, as they lost allies at the UN. Where visions of
+Indigenous freedom had eclipsed the confines of the imperial nation-state,
+they were now forced once again to seek recognition and rights from the
+colonizer. Even though the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and
+Australia voted against UNDRIP’s passage, all three states have reversed
+their decisions—a possibility because of the “non-binding” aspect of UN
+declarations. More troubling, however, was what accompanied the United
+States’ 2010 decision to reverse its vote against UNDRIP—an official
+apology resolution as part of the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.
+In 2009, Congress approved the largest and most expansive defense
+appropriations bill in world history. Defense expenditures totaled $683.7
+billion for fiscal year 2010. This exorbitant sum has served as a benchmark
+that continues to justify the US-led “war on terror,” which has extended
+covert military actions abroad and increased national security and
+surveillance programs domestically. Buried in the 2010 Department of
+Defense Appropriations Act, which Obama signed into law in 2010, is an
+official “Apology to Native Peoples of the United States”80—what has been
+called “the world’s quietest apology.”81 More importantly, the “Apology”
+stipulated, “Nothing in this section (1) authorizes or supports any claim
+against the United States; or (2) serves as a settlement of any claim against
+the United States.”82 Within a single bill, billions of dollars were devoted to
+policing the world, but not a cent went toward upholding the original
+treaties, the original promises, made with North America’s first nations.
+In a 2012 report, The Situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United
+States of America, the UN special rapporteur on Indigenous people, James
+Anaya, discusses the general lack of awareness of the 2010 “Apology”
+resolution. Moreover, Anaya links the lack of concrete action on
+outstanding Indigenous land claims to devastating social realities such as
+poverty, domestic and family violence, youth suicide, and lack of education
+
+or adequate healthcare. Chief among the Oceti Sakowin’s outstanding
+claims is the Black Hills, of which the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty is the
+“emblematic” and “visible reminder of their loss.”83
+The theft of Indigenous lands and the subdual of Indigenous nations is an
+essential part of global imperialism. Recognizing this, the international
+Indigenous movement continues its work today (though often quietly). This
+is necessary because the Indian Wars have never truly ended. The Treaty
+Council saw its sacred duty as ending imperialism abroad by ending it at
+home, and at Standing Rock in 2016, this spirit of internationalism was
+visible once again as a parade of Indigenous nations from around the world
+showed up in solidarity.
+
+A hand-drawn map of Oceti Sakowin Camp given to new camp arrivals. Map by author.
+
+7
+
+Liberation
+At Greasy Grass on June 25, 1876, Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos blew
+out the birthday candles a week before the United States celebrated its one
+hundred years of “liberty.” The Plains Indigenous alliance annihilated
+Custer and 268 of his men. Custer had launched the surprise attack on the
+large encampment to kill Indians and force them back onto reservations, in
+a perfect expression of the settler state’s death culture. The Indigenous
+encampment was, in contrast, a life culture, celebrating the annual renewal
+of life with a sun dance—a humble ceremony in which dancers sacrifice
+their bodies by fasting without food or water for four days in order for their
+nation and the world to live. Indigenous peoples from reservations had
+slipped away to join their relatives at the camp and enjoy a brief taste of
+freedom. US history books and popular culture typically depict the battle as
+“Custer’s Last Stand.” “The very earth seemed to grow Indians,” Colonel
+Marcus Reno later reported, “running toward me in swarms, and from all
+directions.” Put simply, they were surrounded.
+In their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study,
+Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw from Michael Parenti’s antiimperialist study of Hollywood films, which always portray colonization
+“upside down”: invasion looks like self-defense, and the settlers, hiding in
+their militarized forts, are the “real” victims of an encircling native
+aggression. Such a reversal of roles, in which aggressor becomes victim, is
+a make-believe national narrative that began when settlers first invaded
+Indigenous lands in North America and repeats itself every time the United
+States invades or bombs another country in its overseas imperial project.
+Yet, Moten and Harney argue, it is simultaneously very much true that the
+settler is, in a way, surrounded and outnumbered.1 While Indigenous
+peoples have been rendered a statistical minority within their own
+
+homelands, the power of Indigenous lifeways and resistance has always
+surrounded settlers in North America, along with their tenuous claims to
+land ownership. The perpetual threat of Indigenous nations is that they are a
+reminder of the settler’s own precarious claims to land and belonging.
+Ancestors of Indigenous resistance didn’t merely fight against settler
+colonialism; they fought for Indigenous life and just relations with human
+and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth. When Custer and his men
+descended on the sun dance at Greasy Grass, the ancestors were dancing, as
+they have since time immemorial, to make the tree of life in Black Elk’s
+vision bloom, and to ensure the rebirth of their people and the earth. In
+2016, as construction of the Black Snake—the Dakota Access pipeline—
+began, they danced again, this time on the shores at Oceti Sakowin Camp
+and at Sacred Stone to protect Mni Sose (the Missouri River) and Unci
+Maka (Grandmother Earth). Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event.
+It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it
+defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the
+amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and
+nonhuman relatives, and with the earth. To invoke the Kahnawà:ke
+Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, the refusal to accept the impossible
+condition of banishment and disappearance from one’s homelands, and
+outright dispossession, structures the Indigenous political practice of return,
+restoration, and reclamation of belonging and place.2
+Ancestors also danced during the initial planning stage of the Pick-Sloan
+dams on the Missouri River, before their sun dance grounds were flooded.
+Indian reservations and Indigenous life were entirely absent from the
+original Army Corps maps and plans. When the Army Corps flooded our
+homelands and agency headquarters twice, our nation, the Lower Brule
+Sioux Tribe, was forced to imagine how to reconstruct itself after flooding
+and relocation, and how to do so in a way that would reflect our values. We
+drew, and redrew, the layout of our community. New roads and water
+pipelines had to be planned and constructed. Entire cemeteries—our dead
+ancestors—had to be disinterred and relocated along with our living
+ancestors to higher ground. Planners ultimately chose a half-moon-shaped
+community structure, a symbolic gesture to traditional camp arrangements
+with an open community center surrounded by tipi lodges whose entrances
+opened east to the rising sun. In the center of the newly planned Lower
+Brule community was a school, emphasizing the importance placed on
+
+education. Fanning out from there were municipal and administration
+buildings, churches, a juvenile detention facility, and several outer rows of
+housing. While imprisonment and Christianity were foreign institutions to
+traditional Oceti Sakowin societies, the modern relocated community made
+and imagined space for youth incarceration and churches.
+Like the Army Corps (and often working alongside them), the planners
+of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) imagined building a pipeline in a
+world where Native people did not exist. And they had to imagine us out of
+existence to justify trespassing on Indigenous territory and protected treaty
+lands. When the pipeline risked interfering with white residential areas in
+Bismarck, North Dakota, it was rerouted such that the danger of water
+contamination was outsourced to the downriver Native nation of Standing
+Rock. When DAPL sought protection of its private property and
+investments—the rights of way across the land—police and private security
+stepped in on their behalf, imagining Indigenous peoples as the threat.
+These were modern-day settlers surrounded by an Indigenous-led uprising.
+DAPL’s trespass through unceded treaty territory and the militarized
+crackdown on Water Protectors was made to look like self-defense—settlers
+in the fort, surrounded by hostile natives.
+Police, military, and private security set up their own bases and planned
+their own theater of operations to wage low-level warfare against the prayer
+camps. In emails published by the MuckRock watchdog website, Toby
+Schweitzer, a helicopter contractor from Bakken Western, a quick-response
+oil spill and environmental cleanup company operating out of Mandan,
+North Dakota, sent an email on September 14, 2016, with the subject line
+“Israeli Crowd Control Method” to North Dakota probation officers
+working the #NoDAPL protests. “U tube [sic] crowd control. Have a great
+day!” Schweitzer wrote to the police officers. In the email, sent prior to the
+major police attacks and raids that would later make national headline
+news, he suggested the cops policing pipeline protest invest in “skunk
+spray”—an Israeli chemical weapon invented to degrade and humiliate
+Palestinians by dousing them in a nauseating, putrid biomedical odor that
+takes days to remove. “Forget the wall,” he wrote. “Just put sprayers all
+along the southern border with sensors. Might have saved lots of store
+fronts in Baltimore and Ferguson. The US needs to get some of this for the
+looters in any out of control demonstrations. Israelis crowd control method.
+NOW WE ARE TALKING. BRILLIANT. Skunk spray!”3 Such comments
+
+add insult to injury for Palestinians defending their homes against
+demolition or protesting the killing of loved ones.
+In other emails, officers shared a Federal Emergency Management
+Agency “Field Force Operations” manual, which guided police officers in
+correct “crowd control” methods, “pain compliance” techniques, and
+application of “riot control agents,” including chemical weapons and
+projectiles such as rubber bullets and beanbag rounds. These “non-lethal”
+weapons were deployed against unarmed protestors with ritualistic brutality,
+taking two individuals’ eyesight and one woman’s arm, while wounding
+and traumatizing countless others. The connections were clear: local law
+enforcement and private security imagined themselves participating in a
+global counterinsurgency against civilian populations that extended from
+Palestine to Baltimore, Ferguson, the US–Mexico border, and now Standing
+Rock. The war was against Black life, Palestinian life, migrant life, and
+Native life.
+The tactics employed by TigerSwan, the murky mercenary security
+contractor hired by DAPL, were also confirmation that this was a global
+war. The security company had cut its teeth in the United States’ neverending “war on terror,” in which it was deployed to run counterinsurgency
+operations against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. TigerSwan now
+applied the same techniques to Water Protectors. The Intercept reports that
+security personnel frequently referred to Water Protectors as “terrorists,”
+planned prayer actions as “attacks,” and the camps as a “battlefield.” They
+also tracked the presence of Water Protectors of Middle Eastern descent,
+noting specifically the presence of Palestinians in the camps. TigerSwan
+went so far as to describe the Indigenous uprising as a “jihadist insurgency.”
+When TigerSwan briefed local law enforcement on the camp activities, they
+frequently referenced aerial photography, which they used to monitor the
+growth and movement of the camps. In one situation report, an image of a
+gorilla is superimposed atop the camp. This was Harambe, the gorilla killed
+at the Cincinnati Zoo when a Black child fell into his cage. On one hand,
+white supremacists have used the killing of Harambe to mock Black people
+online, charging that the gorilla had to be killed because the Black parents
+are careless. On the other, the comparison of Black people to monkeys and
+gorillas is a well-established racist trope. Now, TigerSwan was evoking this
+anti-Black history to racialize, mock, and degrade Water Protectors with
+tropes of primitivism. To DAPL and law enforcement, the camps were a
+
+place of death, a place to be destroyed, a place that threatened to expose the
+illegitimacy of settlement.
+In the orientation pamphlet for new camp arrivals at the #NoDAPL camp
+was a hand-drawn map of the site. Roads had been named for Indigenous
+revolutionary heroes, such as Red Cloud and the Red Warrior Society.
+Indigenous nations had set up their own camps on site, and their locations
+were also shown. The map indicated where to find camp security, who were
+tasked, in part, with keeping out drugs and alcohol; it also showed where to
+get food, medical care, and camp supplies. This reflected the values of the
+new community: that Indigenous peoples not merely survive, but thrive.
+#NoDAPL offered a brief vision of what a future premised on Indigenous
+justice would look like. For all its faults, there is something to be learned
+from the treaty camps at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball
+Rivers. Free food, free education, free health care, free legal aid, a strong
+sense of community, safety, and security were guaranteed to all. Most
+reservations in the United States don’t have access to these services, nor do
+most poor people. Yet, in the absence of empire, people came together to
+help each other, to care for one another. The #NoDAPL camps were
+designed according to need, not profit. (There were no prisons or armed
+bodies of the state.) That’s what separated them from the world of cops,
+settlers, and oil companies that surrounded them. Capitalism is not merely
+an economic system, but also a social system. And it was here abundantly
+evident that Indigenous social systems offered a radically different way of
+relating to other people and the world.
+Drawing from the Black radical tradition, Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the
+creation of this kind of world a form of “abolition geography” that “starts
+from the homely premise that freedom is a place.”4 Indeed, Indigenous
+freedom was, and is, a place; and for a moment, it took shape in the form of
+the #NoDAPL camps. The #NoDAPL camps didn’t just imagine a future
+without settler colonialism and the oppressive institution of the state, but
+created that future in the here and now. They were a resurgent geography
+that reconnected Indigenous peoples with the land. Unlike the cynical and
+exclusive world of the settler, who had removed, confined, erased, and
+dispossessed Indigenous peoples from place, this place capaciously
+welcomed the excluded, while also centering the core of an Indigenous
+lifeworld—relationality. At its center was the resurgence and reunification
+of the Oceti Sakowin. Much like the First Palestinian Intifada, anti-colonial
+
+resistance began by de-linking the community from the settler state. From
+1987 to 1993, Palestinians built alternative economies, popular education
+models, healthcare services, and women’s committees. Palestinian women
+also used the revolution underway to challenge heteropatriarchy, which was
+as anathema to Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation.5 During the
+#NoDAPL camps, women, LGBTQ, and Two-Spirit activists challenged
+settler colonialism, and did so according to their own customs, calling on
+cis Indigenous men to recognize that heteropatriarchy was just as untenable
+as the US occupation, or as the destruction of land and water.
+Beyond the Dakota Access Pipeline, a growing international movement
+is fighting the expanding network of pipelines across North America. The
+Kinder Morgan, Keystone XL, Enbridge Line 9, Bayou Bridge, and
+TransCanada Energy East, among a whole host of others, connect
+Indigenous nations and frontline communities. The appearance of each new
+flashpoint of struggle indicates a growing anti-colonial resistance, led by
+Indigenous peoples against settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.
+New pipelines are creeping across the continent like a spiderweb, with
+frightening speed, but in the process, they are also connecting and inciting
+to action disparate communities of the exploited and dispossessed. Each
+pipeline exists in relation to other pipelines, and while DAPL technically
+only extends from North Dakota to Illinois, it is fundamentally a
+transnational project, interlinking with other pipelines and infrastructure to
+ship oil to a global market, crossing the boundaries of settler states and
+trespassing through Indigenous territory.6
+A vast array of solidarity networks supported the #NoDAPL struggle.
+Black Lives Matter, Palestinian justice organizations, religious groups,
+military veterans, and many more from other social locations and
+movements galvanized support for the Indigenous-led resistance from far
+beyond the physical geography of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
+#NoDAPL was reminiscent of other allied struggles that have enriched the
+Indigenous struggles in the past, including the International Indian Treaty
+Council and Indigenous internationalist movements of the twentieth
+century. Countering settler colonialism’s own physical infrastructure—trade
+routes, railroads, dams, and oil pipelines—is the infrastructure of
+Indigenous resistance, its ideas and practices of solidarity. The resistance
+camps may have been temporary, but the struggle for Native liberation
+continues, and the fort is falling.
+
+Given that the western frontier of US expansion closed in 1890 (the
+nineteenth-century Indian Wars fought and won), Indian citizenship was
+imposed in 1924, a formal apology was issued in 2010, the tribal “SelfDetermination Era” was inaugurated by Nixon in 1970, past wrongs were
+“settled” under the recent Cobell lawsuit, and “nation-to-nation” rhetoric
+and policies increased under Obama (along with the placement of
+Indigenous leaders in key roles within his administration), why was there
+the need to create a new movement?
+One way of answering this question is to look to the movement marching
+under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” Why did it arise under the
+Obama administration? Anti-Black police violence didn’t profoundly
+increase under Obama’s presidency, but it did not dramatically decrease
+either. Nevertheless, Obama’s presidency brought into sharp focus the limits
+of racial inclusion under the rule of liberalism and capitalism. Consider the
+2015 police murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Freddie Gray was killed
+by Black police officers, and neither a Black district attorney, a Black
+mayor, nor a Black president could save his life. No matter who’s in charge,
+as Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, the current political system cannot
+save Black lives.7 The same could be said for Indigenous peoples and the
+warming planet. Obama’s 2010 “new energy security plan”—greatly
+enhanced under Trump in 2017—incentivized and dramatically increased
+domestic oil and gas production, opening up previously protected federal
+lands managed by the Department of the Interior. Under capitalism, neither
+Democrat nor Republican can save Indigenous lands or Black and
+Indigenous lives. The continuation of state-sanctioned racial terror against
+Black and Native people, from police violence to energy development, from
+one administration to the next demonstrates only radical change in the form
+of decolonization, the repatriation of stolen lands and stolen lives, can undo
+centuries of settler colonialism.
+The continuing legacy of the Pick-Sloan dams also thwarts the
+possibility of a liveable future for the Oceti Sakowin and the millions of
+people who depend the Missouri River for life. The dams personify settler
+colonialism—their concrete and rolled earth endowed with the will to
+disrupt, flood, dispossess, remove, and ultimately eliminate Native society.
+The Dakota Access Pipeline echoed this process. The full force of the
+settler state—politicians, police, private security, banks, and private
+companies—carried out the will of Energy Transfer Partners, the
+
+corporation building the $3.7 billion pipeline that would tunnel under the
+Missouri River twice, the Mississippi River once, and cross four states
+(South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois). Today, their tools are
+more sophisticated: assault rifles, arrest warrants, rural county jails,
+felonies, misdemeanors, body armor, armed drones, tear gas, mace, armored
+Humvees, the National Guard and state patrol, Black Hawk helicopters,
+Caterpillar earthmovers, and media censorship. But the Water Protectors
+draw from the history of past Water Protectors who fought to protect the
+same relative, Mni Sose. While corporations take on legal personhood
+under current US law, Water Protectors personify water and enact kinship to
+the water, the river, enforcing a legal order of their own. If the water, a
+relative, is not protected, then the river is not free, and neither are its
+people.
+Mni Wiconi, as much as it reaches into the past, is a future-oriented
+project. It forces some to confront their own unbe-longing to the land and
+the river. How can settler society, which possesses no fundamental ethical
+relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premised on
+justice? There is no simple answer. But whatever the answer may be,
+Indigenous peoples must lead the way. Our history and long traditions of
+Indigenous resistance provide possibilities for futures premised on justice.
+After all, Indigenous resistance is animated by our ancestors’ refusal to be
+forgotten, and it is our resolute refusal to forget our ancestors and our
+history that animates our visions for liberation. Indigenous revolutionaries
+are the ancestors from the before and before and the already forthcoming.
+Perhaps the answers lie within the kinship relations between Indigenous
+and non-Indigenous and the lands we both inhabit. There is a capaciousness
+to Indigenous kinship that goes beyond the human and that fundamentally
+differs from the heteronuclear family or biological family. “Making kin is to
+make people into familiars in order to relate,” writes Dakota scholar Kim
+TallBear. “This seems fundamentally different from negotiating relations
+between those who are seen as different—between ‘sovereigns’ or
+‘nations’—especially when one of those nations is a militarized and white
+supremacist empire.”8
+The Water protectors also ask us: What does water want from us? What
+does the earth want from us? Mni Wiconi—water is life—exists outside the
+logic of capitalism. Whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for
+the emancipation of labor from capital, we are challenged not just to
+
+imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the
+earth to live, capitalism must die.
+Hecetu welo!
+
+Introduction
+I did not know James Baldwin the essayist before my rst year of
+college. I knew only the James Baldwin of novels and short stories
+and plays, a trusted man who gave me, with his Harlem and his
+Harlem people, the kind of world I knew so well from growing up
+in my Washington, D.C. They were all one family, the people in
+Harlem and the people in Washington, Baldwin told me in that
+way of all grand and eloquent writers who speak the eternal and
+universal by telling us, word by hard-won word, of the minutiae of
+the everyday: The church ladies who put heart and soul into every
+church service as if to let their god know how worthy they are to
+step through the door into his heaven. The dust of poor folks’
+apartments that forever hangs in the air as though to remind the
+people of their station in life. The streets of a city where the
+buildings Negroes live in never stand straight up but lean in
+mourning every which way.
+So I knew this Baldwin and, in that strange way of members of
+the same family, he knew me. When I went o to college in late
+August 1968, I took few books, anticipating the adequacy of the
+library that awaited me at Holy Cross College. I packed only two
+books of non ction, both bought in a used bookstore not long after
+I was accepted to college. Both had never been read. The rst was
+a ponderous 1950s tome on writing logical and well-reasoned
+essays. I was never to read it in my time at Holy Cross, perhaps
+because it was so inaccessible. (Seeing it on my dormitory room’s
+bookshelf, Clarence Thomas, a month before his graduation from
+Holy Cross in 1971, purchased the book from me for $5; I do not
+recall what I paid for it.) And the second was Notes of a Native Son.
+I was going o to a new life, a life of the mind and education
+among white people, and I felt that since Baldwin’s ction had
+
+taught me so much about black people, his essays might have a
+similar e ect given where I was going.
+I entered Holy Cross as a mathematics major, primarily because
+I had done well in math in high school. I was extremely shy then,
+and I had never had my vision tested and did not know enough
+about anything to realize that my frequent inability to see the
+blackboard could be solved with eyeglasses. I sat in the back of the
+freshman calculus class run by a stando sh professor who spent
+most of the period with his back to his students as he wrote on the
+blackboard, and with all of that, I fell further and further behind as
+the semester progressed.
+I will go into English, I told myself in December, knowing how
+much I loved to read and knowing that a calculus D was coming
+and so there would be no life in mathematics. Before leaving for
+Christmas vacation, I picked up Notes of a Native Son for the rst
+time, perhaps understanding that now my life would be
+increasingly one of essay writing. The rst thing James Baldwin
+tells me in “Autobiographical Notes” is, “I was born in Harlem….”
+A simple, unadorned statement, as if in saying it plainly the reader
+would have a better sense of the importance of that fact. It was
+Harlem, but because I was so familiar with the Baldwin of ction,
+the Baldwin whose black people could be Washingtonians, he could
+only have begun to connect in a better way if he had said, “I was
+born in Washington, D.C….”
+A good bit of that introductory essay deals with being a writer,
+something that would not have much meaning for me for many
+years: the necessity of delving into oneself to be able to tell the
+truth about the world one writes about; the di culties of being a
+Negro writer when “the Negro problem” is so widely written about;
+the desire, at the end of the day, to be “a good writer.”
+But within that short essay is a thirty-one-year-old, somewhat
+worldly man (I did not get my rst passport until I was fty-four)
+who is still grappling with having been born into a small and often
+less than caring world, which was, for good or bad, a part of a
+larger world that generally rejected him and his small world. I was
+
+a Holy Cross student—often happy to be a student at “the Cross”—
+but I knew every time I stepped out of my room in Beaven
+dormitory that no part of that place in Worcester, Massachusetts,
+had been made with me in mind. I felt that but did not yet have
+very many words for it. Baldwin gave them to me. This is Baldwin,
+with his “special attitude,” talking of Shakespeare and the
+cathedral at Chartres and Rembrandt and the Empire State
+Building and Bach: “These were not really my creations, they did
+not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for
+any re ection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my
+heritage.”
+And so he continued throughout the rest of Notes, a gloriously
+keen and sensitive mind, something I did not completely
+appreciate at the time, something I’m sure he would smile about
+now. I confess that I could not then grasp some of his more
+complex thoughts, perhaps because I was merely too young and
+the world had yet to take such a harsh hold on me. And other
+thoughts of his I just dismissed, no doubt because I was, again, too
+young and because I was developing a militant streak that sco ed
+at notions not in line with my own developing ones. That
+militancy came naturally with the murder of Martin Luther King
+Jr. and the Vietnam War and with the new awareness that I was
+black in a white world. The militant me asked, for example, why
+would Baldwin write at times as if he were not black but some
+observer, a guilty one, true, but still an observer. “Our
+dehumanization of the Negro then,” he says to me in “Many
+Thousands Gone,” “is indivisible from dehumanization of ourselves:
+the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment
+of his.” And later: “We (Americans in general, that) like to point to
+Negroes and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant
+scorn….”
+But with my focus on the constant use of words like “we” and
+“our,” it was easy for eighteen-year-old me in those last days of
+December 1968 to lose sight of so much of the truth and pain of
+that and other statements in “Thousands.” People, I have learned,
+
+have a way of taking root in one’s still-developing mind without
+our knowing it, especially people, like Baldwin, who live in the
+world of words. How else, then, to explain my every e ort to tell
+in a novel as best I could the stories of slave masters, black and
+white, and how slavery crushed their souls every morning they got
+up from their beds and thanked their god for their dominion over
+others. If I knew the importance of telling that, it was because
+Baldwin and his kind had planted the idea long ago. (I give him so
+much credit because he was in the minority of all the black writers
+I was reading who understood the importance of giving white
+people their due as full- edged human beings. Even before I knew
+I would get into this writing thing, Baldwin told me this: You do
+not have to fully humanize your black characters by dehumanizing
+the white ones.)
+Traveling with Baldwin through Notes’ “The Harlem Ghetto,”
+“Journey to Atlanta,” and “Notes of a Native Son,” I was given a
+grander portrait of the man I had known only through ction. His
+ction certainly had an unprecedented and absolute life of its own,
+and I might have tried to imagine the man I was dealing with, but
+those essays a orded me something beyond the postage stamp–
+sized pictures of him and the few sentences of biography that came
+with my paperback editions of, say, Go Tell It on the Mountain or
+Another Country. He would have been Baldwin had I never read
+those essays, but he would not have been real enough to deign to
+share a moment or two with me. The ction o ered a person of
+enormous humanity. The essays o ered a man, a neighbor, or, yes,
+an older brother.
+I had gone through the Washington, D.C., riots after King’s
+assassination, an explosion that took place some twenty- ve years
+after the Harlem riots Baldwin describes in “Notes.” Di erent city,
+di erent actors, but the same script as that used in the nationwide
+riots of the 1910s, also a con agration that included Washington. I
+was mainly on the periphery of matters that April 1968. (My poor
+mother had enough to worry about; the last thing I wanted was to
+
+add another thousand pounds to her burden and have her see her
+college-bound child in jail.) And with a summer job and college
+looming, I had not had time to assess my feelings or consider those
+of my classmates or neighbors. The wonderful thing about writers
+like Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages
+that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our
+eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away. During those
+few days in April, I had been out and about enough in my city to
+sense something new and di erent about all the shouting and
+window-breaking and looting people, something ancient and deep.
+This is Baldwin explaining to me in words written twelve years
+after the Harlem riots and thirteen years before the Washington
+riots: “[S]omething heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that
+they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision, and on each face
+there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow.”
+Time after time, he keeps doing this so that it becomes not
+enough for the reader to just raise the eyes to nd breath again. In
+“Equal in Paris,” there is the sad tale of Baldwin being jailed for
+days during Christmastime in 1949 after being given a used hotel
+sheet he did not know had been stolen. Yes. Days. Used sheet. One
+does not understand the full meaning of “Kafkaesque” until this
+tale has been absorbed. Baldwin does not say it outright, but what
+becomes clear with his journey through a perversely blind justice
+system is that France, for “all the wretched,” had not moved very
+far from what the people were enduring before the French
+Revolution.
+It is all so utterly absurd (and this absurdity is another layer of
+oppression) that it truly becomes humorous. And with that as well
+is Baldwin’s realization that the people who run such a system are
+rst cousins of those who run things in “my native land.” He
+cannot escape them, even in a place called Paris, and he is better
+for knowing this. “In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way,
+my life, in my own eyes, began during that rst year in Paris….”
+
+And so he continues on, page after page, o ering light and
+understanding and a ruthless insistence not so much that he is
+correct with his vision of matters, but that to ignore his side of
+things is to see only a partial picture that will not lead to lasting
+solutions. I can see this best now that I have reread Notes for this
+essay and now that life has done things to me. Which is why his
+book is to be treasured. In small ways, in large ways.
+Of the Amsterdam Star-News, he notes in “The Harlem Ghetto”
+that it “is Republican [no doubt the legacy of Abraham Lincoln
+freeing the slaves with the belief that it would shorten the Civil
+War], a political a liation that has led it into some strange
+doubletalk….” I had to chuckle. He was writing of possibly gentler,
+kinder Republicans, who were, in a matter of years, to grow into
+even more vicious and uncaring political animals. I do not know if
+Baldwin witnessed any of what happened when black
+conservatives came out of the woodwork during Ronald Reagan’s
+presidency. A collection of blacks who to this day have to defend
+all the white racists in the various spokes of the Republican Party
+wheel. Doubletalk.
+And the entire essay “Journey to Atlanta” is a grand cautionary
+story about black politicians and white radicals and liberals, who
+with their own doubletalk seek to mask a paternalism that sees
+black people as no more than children. As I read his words again, I
+kept thinking of all the white liberals around Washington, D.C.,
+who wrote racist comments in 2010 to area newspapers and blogs
+after the black mayor (a rather reviled gure among many black
+folks) was defeated by another black candidate, complaining that
+“nigger” voters simply did not know what was good for them.
+Baldwin—with his tale of his teenage brother David going South—
+o ered his warning in 1948.
+One of the wonders of coming back to Notes after such a long time
+is how “current” Baldwin is. That might sound like a cliché, but in
+so many instances in our lives we learn that some clichés are built
+
+on things solid and familiar and timeless. “Journey to Atlanta” is
+but one of a hundred examples in Notes. What also comes across,
+again, is how optimistic James Baldwin was about himself, his
+world, black people. Even when he describes the awfulness of
+being black in America, he presents us with an optimism that is
+sometimes like subtle background music, and sometimes like an
+insistent drumbeat. But through it all, with each word—perhaps as
+evidence of a man certain of his message—he never shouts.
+—Edward P. Jones
+June 29–July 5, 2012
+Washington, D.C.
+
+Acknowledgments
+The author is grateful to the following publications for permission
+to reprint material that rst appeared in their pages: Commentary
+for “Carmen Jones” (which appeared in the January 1955 issue as
+“Life Straight in De Eye”), “The Harlem Ghetto” (February 1948),
+and “Equal in Paris” (March 1955); Harper’s Magazine for “Notes of
+a Native Son” (November 1955) and “Stranger in the Village”
+(October 1953); The New Leader for “Journey to Atlanta” (October
+9, 1948); Partisan Review for “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (June
+1949), “Many Thousands Gone” (November–December 1951), and
+“A Question of Identity” (July–August 1954); and The Reporter for
+“Encounter on the Seine” (which appeared in the issue of June 6,
+1950, as “The Negro in Paris”).
+
+Preface to the 1984 Edition
+James Baldwin
+
+It was Sol Stein, high school buddy, editor, novelist, playwright,
+who rst suggested this book. My reaction was not enthusiastic: as
+I remember, I told him that I was too young to publish my
+memoirs.
+I had never thought of these essays as a possible book. Once they
+were behind me, I don’t, in fact, think that I thought of them at all.
+Sol’s suggestion had the startling and unkind e ect of causing me
+to realize that time had passed. It was as though he had dashed
+cold water in my face.
+Sol persisted, however, and so did the dangers and rigors of my
+situation. I had returned from Paris, in 1954, out of motives not at
+all clear to me. I had promised a Swiss friend a visit to the land of
+my birth, but that, I think, has to be recognized as a pretext: it fails
+to have the weight of a motive. I nd no objective reason for my
+return to America at that time—I am not sure that I can nd the
+subjective one, either.
+Yet, here I was, at the top of 1954, several months shy of thirty,
+scared to death, but happy to be with my family and my friends. It
+was my second return since my departure, in 1948.
+
+I had returned in 1952, with my rst novel, stayed long enough
+to show it to my family, and to sell it, and, then, I hauled on out of
+here. In 1954, I came back with The Amen Corner, and I was
+working on Giovanni’s Room—which had broken o from what was
+to become Another Country.
+Actually, ’54–’55, in spite of frightening moments, and not only
+in retrospect, was a great year. I had, after all, survived something
+—the proof was that I was working. I was at the Writer’s Colony,
+
+Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, when my buddy, Marlon Brando, won
+the Oscar, and I watched Bette Davis present it to him, and kiss
+him, on TV. The late Owen Dodson called me there, from
+Washington, D.C., to say that he was directing, at Howard
+University, a student production of my play. I went to
+Washington, where I met the late, great E. Franklin Frazier and
+the great Sterling Brown. Howard was the rst college campus I
+had ever seen, and, without these men, I do not know what would
+have become of my morale. The play, thank God, was a
+tremendous seven-or ten-day wonder, playing to standing room
+only on the last night, in spite of a reluctant, not yet Black faculty
+(“This play will set back the Speech Department by thirty years!”),
+a bewildered Variety (“What do you think Negroes in the North will
+think of this play?”), and the fact that it was not to be seen again
+for nearly ten years. And I had fallen in love. I was happy—the
+world had never before been so beautiful a place.
+There was only one small hitch. I—we—didn’t have a dime, no
+pot, nor no window.
+Sol Stein returned to the attack. We had agreed on nine essays,
+he wanted a tenth, and I wrote the title essay between Owen’s
+house and the Dunbar Hotel. Returned to New York, where I
+nished Giovanni’s Room. Publisher’s Row, that hotbed of
+perception, looked on the book with horror and loathing, refused
+to touch it, saying that I was a young Negro writer, who, if he
+published this book, would alienate his audience and ruin his
+career. They would not, in short, publish it, as a favor to me. I
+conveyed my gratitude, perhaps a shade too sharply, borrowed
+money from a friend, and myself and my lover took the boat to
+France.
+I had never thought of myself as an essayist: the idea had never
+entered my mind. Even—or, perhaps, especially now—I nd it
+hard to re-create the journey.
+It has something to do, certainly, with what I was trying to
+discover and, also, trying to avoid. If I was trying to discover
+myself—on the whole, when examined, a somewhat dubious
+
+notion, since I was also trying to avoid myself—there was,
+certainly, between that self and me, the accumulated rock of ages.
+This rock scarred the hand, and all tools broke against it. Yet, there
+was a me, somewhere: I could feel it, stirring within and against
+captivity. The hope of salvation—identity—depended on whether
+or not one would be able to decipher and describe the rock.
+One song cries, “lead me to the rock that is higher than I,” and
+another cries, “hide me in the rock!” and yet another proclaims, “I
+got a home in that rock.” Or, “I ran to the rock to hide my face: the
+rock cried out, no hiding place!”
+The accumulated rock of ages deciphered itself as a part of my
+inheritance—a part, mind you, not the totality—but, in order to
+claim my birthright, of which my inheritance was but a shadow, it
+was necessary to challenge and claim the rock. Otherwise, the rock
+claimed me.
+Or, to put it another way, my inheritance was particular,
+speci cally limited and limiting: my birthright was vast,
+connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one
+cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.
+Therefore, when I began, seriously, to write—when I knew I was
+committed, that this would be my life—I had to try to describe that
+particular condition which was—is—the living proof of my
+inheritance. And, at the same time, with that very same
+description, I had to claim my birthright. I am what time,
+circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also,
+much more than that. So are we all.
+The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be
+he/she legally or actually Black or White. It is a fearful
+inheritance, for which untold multitudes, long ago, sold their
+birthright. Multitudes are doing so, until today. This horror has so
+welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and
+certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as it were, in
+time. It can be, and it has been, suicidal to attempt to speak of this
+
+to a multitude, which, assuming it knows that time exists, believes
+that time can be outwitted.
+Something like this, anyway, has something to do with my
+beginnings. I was trying to locate myself within a speci c
+inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the
+birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and
+speci cally excluded me.
+It is not pleasant to be forced to recognize, more than thirty
+years later, that neither this dynamic nor this necessity have
+changed. There have been super cial changes, with results at best
+ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no
+change at all and a moral change is the only real one. “Plus ça
+change,” groan the exasperated French (who should certainly
+know), “plus c’est le même chose.” (The more it changes, the more it
+remains the same.) At least they have the style to be truthful about
+it.
+The only real change vividly discernible in this present,
+unspeakably dangerous chaos is a panic-stricken apprehension on
+the part of those who have maligned and subjugated others for so
+long that the tables have been turned. Not once have the Civilized
+been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. He is,
+practically speaking, the source of their wealth, his continued
+subjugation the key to their power and glory. This is absolutely
+and unanswerably true in South Africa—to name but one section of
+Africa—and, as to how things fare for Black men and women;
+here, the Black has become, economically, all but expendable and
+is, therefore, encouraged to join the Army, or, a notion espoused, I
+believe, by Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, to become a
+postman—to make himself useful, for Christ’s sake, while White
+men take on the heavy burden of ruling the world.
+Well. Plus ça change. To say nothing, speaking as a Black citizen,
+regarding his countrymen, of friends like these.
+There is an unadmitted icy panic coiled beneath the sca olding
+of these present days, hopes, endeavors. I have said that the
+
+Civilized have never been able to honor, recognize, or describe the
+Savage. Once they had decided that he was savage, there was
+nothing to honor, recognize or describe. But the savages describe
+the Europeans, who were not yet, when they landed in the New (!)
+World, White, as the people from heaven. Neither did the savages in
+Africa have any way of foreseeing the anguished diaspora to which
+they were about to be condemned. Even the chiefs who sold
+Africans into slavery could not have had any idea that this slavery
+was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years.
+Nothing in the savage experience could have prepared them for
+such an idea, any more than they could conceive of the land as
+something to be bought and sold. (As I cannot believe that people
+are actually buying and selling air space above the towers of
+Manhattan.)
+Nevertheless, all of this happened, and is happening. Out of this
+incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone
+With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these
+legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in
+reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are
+attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never
+been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly
+vindictive and unutterably dangerous.
+The unadmitted panic of which I spoke above is created by the
+terror that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized: the only
+way to prevent this is to obliterate humanity. This panic proves
+that neither a person nor a people can do anything without
+knowing what they are doing. Neither can anyone avoid paying
+for the choices he or she has made. It is savagely, if one may say
+so, ironical that the only proof the world—mankind—has ever had
+of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never
+scrutinized, that voice never heard. The eyes in that face prove the
+unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the
+promised land, but also prove that trouble don’t last always: and the
+voice, once lled with a rage and pain that corroborated the
+reality of the jailer, is addressing another reality, in other tongues.
+
+The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of
+becoming human or irrelevant.
+Or—as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete.
+For, if trouble don’t last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither
+does Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power
+that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to
+depend.
+I had just turned thirty-one when this book was rst published,
+and, by the time you read this, I will be sixty. I think that quite
+remarkable, but I do not mention it, now, as an occasion for
+celebrations or lamentations. I don’t feel that I have any reason to
+complain: emphatically, the contrary, to leave it at that, and no
+matter what tomorrow brings. Yet, I have reason to re ect—one
+always does, when forced to take a long look back. I remember
+many people who helped me in indescribable ways, all those years
+ago, when I was the popeyed, tongue-tied kid, in my memory
+sitting in a corner, on the oor. I was having a rough time in the
+Village, where the bulk of the populace, egged on by the cops,
+thought it was great fun to bounce tables and chairs o my head,
+and I soon stopped talking about my “constitutional” rights. I am, I
+suppose, a survivor.
+A survivor of what? In those years, I was told, when I became
+terri ed, vehement, or lachrymose: It takes time, Jimmy. It takes
+time. I agree: I still agree: though it certainly didn’t take much time
+for some of the people I knew then—in the Fifties—to turn tail, to
+decide to make it, and drape themselves in the American ag. A
+wretched and despicable band of cowards, whom I once trusted
+with my life—friends like these!
+But we will discuss all that another day. When I was told, it
+takes time, when I was young, I was being told it will take time
+before a Black person can be treated as a human being here, but it
+will happen. We will help to make it happen. We promise you.
+Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a
+promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and
+
+surrounding my own.
+What has happened, in the time of my time, is the record of my
+ancestors. No promise was kept with them, no promise was kept
+with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global
+kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my morally bankrupt and
+desperately dishonest countrymen.
+“And,” says Doris Lessing, in her preface to African Stories, “while
+the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the
+heaviest counts in the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is
+not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the
+imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature
+that breathes under the sun.”
+Amen. En avant.
+18 April 1984
+Amherst, Massachusetts
+
+Autobiographical Notes
+I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels
+at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is
+the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained
+observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In
+those days my mother was given to the exasperating and
+mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them
+over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children
+probably su ered, though they have since been kind enough to
+deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Tale of Two
+Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just
+about everything I could get my hands on—except the Bible,
+probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I
+must also confess that I wrote—a great deal—and my rst
+professional triumph, in any case, the rst e ort of mine to be
+seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a
+short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some
+sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I
+remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don’t
+remember why, and I was outraged.
+Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter
+of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about
+which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all
+these goings-on, but my father wasn’t; he wanted me to be a
+preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I
+was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For
+God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and
+industry—I guess they would say they struggled with me—and
+when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get
+a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was
+over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on
+
+tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews—mostly, as
+it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color
+of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in
+company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the storefront churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as
+my rst—fellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowship.)
+By the time I was twenty-four I had decided to stop reviewing
+books about the Negro problem—which, by this time, was only
+slightly less horrible in print than it was in life—and I packed my
+bags and went to France, where I nished, God knows how, Go Tell
+It on the Mountain.
+Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was
+born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his
+talent—which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On
+the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with
+such a frightening indi erence that the artist is compelled to make
+his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so
+short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, nds that the
+things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be
+divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only
+because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be
+enabled to move from one conundrum to the next—one is tempted
+to say that he moves from one disaster to the next. When one
+begins looking for in uences one nds them by the score. I haven’t
+thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that
+the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church,
+something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro
+speech—and something of Dickens’ love for bravura—have
+something to do with me today; but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.
+Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but
+nally, I suppose, the most di cult (and most rewarding) thing in
+my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced,
+therefore, to e ect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by
+the way, is the best one can hope for.)
+
+One of the di culties about being a Negro writer (and this is not
+special pleading, since I don’t mean to suggest that he has it worse
+than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written about so
+widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of information,
+and everyone therefore considers himself informed. And this
+information, furthermore, operates usually (generally, popularly)
+to reinforce traditional attitudes. Of traditional attitudes there are
+only two—For or Against—and I, personally, nd it di cult to say
+which attitude has caused me the most pain. I am speaking as a
+writer; from a social point of view I am perfectly aware that the
+change from ill-will to good-will, however motivated, however
+imperfect, however expressed, is better than no change at all.
+But it is part of the business of the writer—as I see it—to
+examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.
+From this point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It
+is not only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It
+is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming
+articulate is to nd himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate
+about. (“You taught me language,” says Caliban to Prospero, “and
+my pro t on’t is I know how to curse.”) Consider: the tremendous
+social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and
+Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to bring
+about a better day. This is ne, it keeps the waters troubled; it is
+all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro’s progress.
+Nevertheless, social a airs are not generally speaking the writer’s
+prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely
+necessary that he establish between himself and these a airs a
+distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can
+look forward in any meaningful sense, he must rst be allowed to
+take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither
+whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the
+faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that
+makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain
+horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
+
+I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own
+development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a
+kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I
+did not nd myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in
+some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to
+Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the
+cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special
+attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain
+my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any
+re ection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.
+At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly
+hope to use—I had certainly been un tted for the jungle or the
+tribe. I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would
+have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special
+attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have
+no place in any scheme. What was the most di cult was the fact
+that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from
+myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as
+the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white
+people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the
+contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce
+Rembrandt. In e ect, I hated and feared the world. And this
+meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether
+murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying
+limbo I could never hope to write.
+One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience.
+Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this
+experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This
+is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder
+of life that order which is art. The di culty then, for me, of being
+a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in e ect, prohibited from
+examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous
+demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.
+I don’t think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do
+think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of
+
+language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of
+the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the
+example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been
+generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about
+being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only
+subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I
+could hope to write about anything else. I don’t think that the
+Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently
+without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history,
+traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of
+the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the
+contrary, no one in America escapes its e ects and everyone in
+America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more
+rmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this
+problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of
+Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain speci c passages in
+Robert Penn Warren, and, most signi cantly, in the advent of
+Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings—at least—of a more
+genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the rst
+Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and
+brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life.
+About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid
+desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental
+movies can be so classi ed. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink—it’s
+my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to
+eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried
+about the next meal)—and I love to argue with people who do not
+disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like
+bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is
+pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything.
+I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I
+like people who nd in the same accident grounds for contempt. I
+love America more than any other country in the world, and,
+exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her
+perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the nest
+
+principles may have to be modi ed, or may even be pulverized by
+the demands of life, and that one must nd, therefore, one’s own
+moral center and move through the world hoping that this center
+will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities,
+but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my
+work done.
+I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
+
+PART ONE
+
+Everybody’s Protest Novel
+In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest
+ction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his coldly
+disapproving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is
+able to tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the
+bene t of the whites in this world—however, he adds thoughtfully,
+it may turn out in the next. Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least,
+vehemently right-minded: “This is perfectly horrible!” she exclaims.
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”
+Miss Ophelia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author;
+her exclamation is the moral, neatly framed, and incontestable like
+those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of
+furnished rooms. And, like these mottoes, before which one
+invariably inches, recognizing an insupportable, almost an
+indecent glibness, she and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither
+of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue
+springs: black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its
+alternatives between heaven and the ames—were realities for
+them as, of course, they were for their creator. They spurned and
+were terri ed of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and
+considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia’s exclamation, like Mrs.
+Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid signi cance, like
+the light from a re which consumes a witch. This is the more
+striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression written in
+our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: “This is
+perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” (Let us
+ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by
+Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this
+statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the
+principles which activate the oppression they decry.)
+
+Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its selfrighteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little
+Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and
+spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel;
+the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to
+experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always,
+therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of
+cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled
+descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the
+nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination
+to inch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an
+explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not
+her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of
+perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality
+—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed
+the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her
+people to such deeds.
+But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was
+not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book
+was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was
+wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a
+pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question
+left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction.
+How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that
+made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little
+closer to the truth?
+But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here,
+confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has,
+moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate
+tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as
+used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his
+freedom and ful llment; freedom which cannot be legislated,
+ful llment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the
+frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to
+Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause;
+
+and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty. We have, as
+it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of
+civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a
+time-saving invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a
+Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by
+Science. He is—and how old-fashioned the words sound!—
+something more than that, something resolutely inde nable,
+unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity—
+which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves
+—we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of
+ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we nd at
+once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is
+this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this
+journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence
+over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility
+—which seems to mean that he must make formal declaration that
+he is involved in, and a ected by, the lives of other people and to
+say something improving about this somewhat self-evident fact—
+is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is
+rooted in, interlocked with and intensi es this same
+mechanization. Both Gentleman’s Agreement and The Postman
+Always Rings Twice exemplify this terror of the human being, the
+determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
+we may nd foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the
+necessity to nd a lie more palatable than the truth has been
+handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible
+power.
+It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. Stowe’s
+novel, the method she used to solve the problem of writing about a
+black man at all. Apart from her lively procession of eld hands,
+house niggers, Chloe, Topsy, etc.—who are the stock, lovable
+gures presenting no problem—she has only three other Negroes
+in the book. These are the important ones and two of them may be
+dismissed immediately, since we have only the author’s word that
+they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she
+
+can make them. The two are George and Eliza, a married couple
+with a wholly adorable child—whose quaintness, incidentally, and
+whose charm, rather put one in mind of a darky bootblack doing a
+buck and wing to the clatter of condescending coins. Eliza is a
+beautiful, pious hybrid, light enough to pass—the heroine of
+Quality might, indeed, be her reincarnation—di ering from the
+genteel mistress who has overseered her education only in the
+respect that she is a servant. George is darker, but makes up for it
+by being a mechanical genius, and is, moreover, su ciently unNegroid to pass through town, a fugitive from his master, disguised
+as a Spanish gentleman, attracting no attention whatever beyond
+admiration. They are a race apart from Topsy. It transpires by the
+end of the novel, through one of those energetic, last-minute
+convolutions of the plot, that Eliza has some connection with
+French gentility. The gure from whom the novel takes its name,
+Uncle Tom, who is a gure of controversy yet, is jet-black, woolyhaired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing. He has to be;
+he is black; only through this forbearance can he survive or
+triumph. (Cf. Faulkner’s preface to The Sound and the Fury: These
+others were not Compsons. They were black:—They endured.) His
+triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he is black, born without
+the light, it is only through humility, the incessant morti cation of
+the esh, that he can enter into communion with God or man. The
+virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal as
+a concern for the relationship of men to one another—or, even, as
+she would have claimed, by a concern for their relationship to God
+—but merely by a panic of being hurled into the ames, of being
+caught in tra c with the devil. She embraced this merciless
+doctrine with all her heart, bargaining shamelessly before the
+throne of grace: God and salvation becoming her personal
+property, purchased with the coin of her virtue. Here, black
+equates with evil and white with grace; if, being mindful of the
+necessity of good works, she could not cast out the blacks—a
+wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claiming, like an obsession,
+her inner eye—she could not embrace them either without
+purifying them of sin. She must cover their intimidating nakedness,
+
+robe them in white, the garments of salvation; only thus could she
+herself be delivered from ever-present sin, only thus could she
+bury, as St. Paul demanded, “the carnal man, the man of the esh.”
+Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his
+humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness
+with which he has been branded.
+Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a
+theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that
+breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not di erent
+from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by
+burning witches; and is not di erent from that terror which
+activates a lynch mob. One need not, indeed, search for examples
+so historic or so gaudy; this is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a
+warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial
+handshake or the interracial marriage can be as crucifying as the
+public hanging or the secret rape. This panic motivates our cruelty,
+this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be
+other than super cial; this, interlocked with and feeding our
+glittering, mechanical, inescapable civilization which has put to
+death our freedom.
+This, notwithstanding that the avowed aim of the American
+protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They
+are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever
+violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they
+make of credibility. It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity
+so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books
+are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put
+rst things rst, the good of society coming before niceties of style
+or characterization. Even if this were incontestable—for what
+exactly is the “good” of society?—it argues an insuperable
+confusion, since literature and sociology are not one and the same;
+it is impossible to discuss them as if they were. Our passion for
+categorization, life neatly
+tted into pegs, has led to an
+unforeseen, paradoxical distress; confusion, a breakdown of
+meaning. Those categories which were meant to de ne and control
+
+the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo
+we whirl, clutching the straws of our de nitions. The “protest”
+novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting
+aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we
+believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are
+raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do
+with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it
+has nothing to do with anyone, so that nally we receive a very
+de nite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a
+book at all. This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and
+its darkness and of our own salvation; and “As long as such books
+are being published,” an American liberal once said to me,
+“everything will be all right.”
+But unless one’s ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed,
+hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels
+the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present
+optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a
+mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and
+immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They are
+fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly
+the same sense that such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives or
+the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies. Beneath the
+dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern,
+as the controlling force, the intense theological preoccupations of
+Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacuities of The Rover Boys. Finally, the aim of
+the protest novel becomes something very closely resembling the
+zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the
+nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of
+Jesus and thence into slavery. The aim has now become to reduce
+all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy
+named Joe.
+It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able
+to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the
+reality of this decree; it has the force and the weapons to translate
+its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made
+
+so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned. This is a more
+hidden phenomenon now than it was in the days of serfdom, but it
+is no less implacable. Now, as then, we nd ourselves bound, rst
+without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And
+escape is not e ected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is
+as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring
+the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against
+that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is
+precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most
+endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it
+together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we
+will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before
+the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From
+this void—ourselves—it is the function of society to protect us; but
+it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a
+new act of creation, which can save us—“from the evil that is in
+the world.” With the same motion, at the same time, it is this
+toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we
+struggle to escape.
+It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are
+bound together within the same society; they accept the same
+criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the
+same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to
+speak of a “new” society as the desire of the oppressed, for that
+shivering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with
+the Herrenvolk makes a truly “new” society impossible to conceive.
+What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will
+disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be
+no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will
+change places. But, nally, as it seems to me, what the rejected
+desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present
+community. Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried o the auction
+block and into the elds, fell on his knees before that God in
+Whom he must now believe; who had made him, but not in His
+image. This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro
+
+in America: Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be
+whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the
+robes of the saved are white. It is this cry, implacable on the air
+and in the skull, that he must live with. Beneath the widely
+published catalogue of brutality—bringing to mind, somehow, an
+image, a memory of church-bells burdening the air—is this reality
+which, in the same nightmare notion, he both ees and rushes to
+embrace. In America, now, this country devoted to the death of the
+paradox—which may, therefore, be put to death by one—his lot is
+as ambiguous as a tableau by Kafka. To ee or not, to move or not,
+it is all the same; his doom is written on his forehead, it is carried
+in his heart. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago
+street corner watching airplanes own by white men racing
+against the sun and “Goddamn” he says, the bitterness bubbling up
+like blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, ratinfested house, the humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless,
+ugly bickering, hating it; hatred smoulders through these pages like
+sulphur re. All of Bigger’s life is controlled, de ned by his hatred
+and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his
+hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are
+told, for the rst time, to a kind of life, having for the rst time
+redeemed his manhood. Below the surface of this novel there lies,
+as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous
+legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant,
+esh of his esh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the
+books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro
+novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in
+a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations,
+the other shouting curses. And, indeed, within this web of lust and
+fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for
+each other’s slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid, knives
+and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the
+heavier that cloud which blinds and su ocates them both, so that
+they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us
+all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible
+attempts to insure it. For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or
+
+black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he
+has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the
+possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore,
+to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria
+bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our
+life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is in nitely
+more di cult—that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel
+lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his
+beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization
+alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.
+
+Many Thousands Gone
+It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because
+a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the
+Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which
+otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to
+hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we nd ourselves
+until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence;
+and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in
+hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the
+white majority and in their di erent frames of reference. The ways
+in which the Negro has a ected the American psychology are
+betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our
+estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from
+ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him—such a
+question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel
+about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about
+everyone, about ourselves.
+The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or,
+more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty
+story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in
+America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart
+our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows,
+self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle. One
+may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in
+the darkness of our minds.
+This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all
+other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social
+and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think
+of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be
+confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes;
+it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing
+
+status among us were somehow analogous to disease—cancer,
+perhaps, or tuberculosis—which must be checked, even though it
+cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite
+another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know
+what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and
+sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel
+ourselves betrayed. When he violates this image, therefore, he
+stands in the greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect
+that he is very often playing a part for our bene t); and, what is
+not always so apparent but is equally true, we are then in some
+danger ourselves—hence our retreat or our blind and immediate
+retaliation.
+Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our
+dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the
+price we pay for our annulment of his. Time and our own force act
+as our allies, creating an impossible, a fruitless tension between
+the traditional master and slave. Impossible and fruitless because,
+literal and visible as this tension has become, it has nothing to do
+with reality.
+Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has
+succeeded in making it exactly like our own, though the general
+desire seems to be to make it blank if one cannot make it white.
+When it has become blank, the past as thoroughly washed from the
+black face as it has been from ours, our guilt will be nished—at
+least it will have ceased to be visible, which we imagine to be
+much the same thing. But, paradoxically, it is we who prevent this
+from happening; since it is we, who, every hour that we live,
+reinvest the black face with our guilt; and we do this—by a further
+paradox, no less ferocious—helplessly, passionately, out of an
+unrealized need to su er absolution.
+Today, to be sure, we know that the Negro is not biologically or
+mentally inferior; there is no truth in those rumors of his body odor
+or his incorrigible sexuality; or no more truth than can be easily
+explained or even defended by the social sciences. Yet, in our most
+recent war, his blood was segregated as was, for the most part, his
+
+person. Up to today we are set at a division, so that he may not
+marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he—for the most part
+—eat at our tables or live in our houses. Moreover, those who do,
+do so at the grave expense of a double alienation: from their own
+people, whose fabled attributes they must either deny or, worse,
+cheapen and bring to market; from us, for we require of them,
+when we accept them, that they at once cease to be Negroes and
+yet not fail to remember what being a Negro means—to remember,
+that is, what it means to us. The threshold of insult is higher or
+lower, according to the people involved, from the bootblack in
+Atlanta to the celebrity in New York. One must travel very far,
+among saints with nothing to gain or outcasts with nothing to lose,
+to nd a place where it does not matter—and perhaps a word or a
+gesture or simply a silence will testify that it matters even there.
+For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means
+something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where
+one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but
+rubble or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our
+origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key
+—could we but nd it—to all that we later become. What it means
+to be a Negro is a good deal more than this essay can discover;
+what it means to be a Negro in America can perhaps be suggested
+by an examination of the myths we perpetuate about him.
+Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead, their places taken by a
+group of amazingly well-adjusted young men and women, almost
+as dark, but ferociously literate, well-dressed and scrubbed, who
+are never laughed at, who are not likely ever to set foot in a cotton
+or tobacco eld or in any but the most modern of kitchens. There
+are others who remain, in our odd idiom, “underprivileged”; some
+are bitter and these come to grief; some are unhappy, but,
+continually presented with the evidence of a better day soon to
+come, are speedily becoming less so. Most of them care nothing
+whatever about race. They want only their proper place in the sun
+and the right to be left alone, like any other citizen of the republic.
+We may all breathe more easily. Before, however, our joy at the
+
+demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent,
+we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what
+limbo have they vanished?
+However inaccurate our portraits of them were, these portraits
+do suggest, not only the conditions, but the quality of their lives
+and the impact of this spectacle on our consciences. There was no
+one more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger or more
+pious or more loyal or more wise; there was, at the same time, no
+one weaker or more faithless or more vicious and certainly no one
+more immoral. Uncle Tom, trustworthy and sexless, needed only to
+drop the title “Uncle” to become violent, crafty, and sullen, a
+menace to any white woman who passed by. They prepared our
+feast tables and our burial clothes; and, if we could boast that we
+understood them, it was far more to the point and far more true
+that they understood us. They were, moreover, the only people in
+the world who did; and not only did they know us better than we
+knew ourselves, but they knew us better than we knew them. This
+was the piquant avoring to the national joke, it lay behind our
+uneasiness as it lay behind our benevolence: Aunt Jemima and
+Uncle Tom, our creations, at the last evaded us; they had a life—
+their own, perhaps a better life than ours—and they would never
+tell us what it was. At the point where we were driven most
+privately and painfully to conjecture what depths of contempt,
+what heights of indi erence, what prodigies of resilience, what
+untamable superiority allowed them so vividly to endure, neither
+perishing nor rising up in a body to wipe us from the earth, the
+image perpetually shattered and the word failed. The black man in
+our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We
+carried murder too, we wanted peace.
+In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead
+but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics. It
+is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends
+to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously
+smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast
+may spring, lling the air with ying things and an unenlightened
+
+wailing. Wherever the problem touches there is confusion, there is
+danger. Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the
+tension of a silence lled with things unutterable. It is a
+sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it
+means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself
+has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not
+remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks
+they left testi ed to that doom toward which his feet were leading
+him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the
+darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand
+and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself
+forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to
+take ight.
+The making of an American begins at that point where he himself
+rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the
+vesture of his adopted land. This problem has been faced by all
+Americans throughout our history—in a way it is our history—and
+it ba es the immigrant and sets on edge the second generation
+until today. In the case of the Negro the past was taken from him
+whether he would or no; yet to forswear it was meaningless and
+availed him nothing, since his shameful history was carried, quite
+literally, on his brow. Shameful; for he was heathen as well as
+black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ
+had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings.
+Shameful; for, since our role as missionary had not been wholly
+disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we
+had delivered him in order more easily to escape our own. As he
+accepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody cross—in the bearing
+of which he would nd his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged
+astonishment, he sometimes did—he must, henceforth, accept that
+image we then gave him of himself: having no other and standing,
+moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling
+light thus brought into such darkness. It is this quite simple
+
+dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his
+psychology.
+However we shift the light which beats so ercely on his head, or
+prove, by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how
+we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized.
+And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the
+subject—“problem” literature when written by whites, “protest”
+literature when written by Negroes—and nothing is more striking
+than the tremendous disparity of tone between the two creations.
+Kingsblood Royal bears, for example, almost no kinship to If He
+Hollers Let Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both
+for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These
+reasons may be suggested, far too brie y but not at all unjustly, by
+observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the
+same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world.
+Now the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet
+had of what it means to be a Negro in America is unquestionably
+Richard Wright’s Native Son. The feeling which prevailed at the
+time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter,
+uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of
+what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its
+indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look
+full in the face without inching the dreadful facts. Americans,
+unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter
+truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform
+their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such
+contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for
+heroism on the eld of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride,
+could never have been written before—which was true. Nor could
+it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for
+Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another
+metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and
+by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most
+favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to
+
+encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one
+that can begin to challenge this most signi cant novel.
+It is, in a certain American tradition, the story of an
+unremarkable youth in battle with the force of circumstance; that
+force of circumstance which plays and which has played so
+important a part in the national fables of success or failure. In this
+case the force of circumstance is not poverty merely but color, a
+circumstance which cannot be overcome, against which the
+protagonist battles for his life and loses. It is, on the surface,
+remarkable that this book should have enjoyed among Americans
+the favor it did enjoy; no more remarkable, however, than that it
+should have been compared, exuberantly, to Dostoevsky, though
+placed a shade below Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Steinbeck; and
+when the book is examined, its impact does not seem remarkable
+at all, but becomes, on the contrary, perfectly logical and
+inevitable.
+We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the speci c
+social climate of that time: it was one of the last of those angry
+productions, encountered in the late twenties and all through the
+thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of
+America. It was published one year before our entry into the last
+world war—which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of
+the WPA and the end of the New Deal and at a time when bread
+lines and soup kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in
+everyone’s memory. The rigors of that unexpected time lled us
+not only with a genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism—so
+that, because there at least was something to ght for, young men
+went o to die in Spain—but also with a genuinely bewildered selfconsciousness. The Negro, who had been during the magni cent
+twenties a passionate and delightful primitive, now became, as
+one of the things we were most self-conscious about, our most
+oppressed minority. In the thirties, swallowing Marx whole, we
+discovered the Worker and realized—I should think with some
+relief—that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the Negro were
+one. This theorem—to which we shall return—seems now to leave
+
+rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of the
+slogans of the “class struggle” and the gospel of the New Negro.
+As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most
+eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most
+clearly committed to the social struggle. Leaving aside the
+considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist
+bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is
+not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to
+deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has,
+moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the
+representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false
+responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible,
+by its nature, of ful llment. The unlucky shepherd soon nds that,
+so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the
+wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed—
+so fearful was his burden, so present his audience!—to recreate his
+own experience. Further, the militant men and women of the
+thirties were not, upon examination, signi cantly emancipated
+from their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider
+themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggled to build
+a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a
+better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain
+thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly
+digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste. Finally,
+the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up,
+nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one. It
+is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions
+and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to
+achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honesty go.
+In this climate Wright’s voice rst was heard and the struggle
+which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose
+also xed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Recording his days
+of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him
+had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when
+they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we
+
+have lived with since the rst slave fell beneath the lash. This is the
+signi cance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming
+limitation.
+Native Son begins with the Brring! of an alarm clock in the squalid
+Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live. Rats live there
+too, feeding o the garbage, and we rst encounter Bigger in the
+act of killing one. One may consider that the entire book, from
+that harsh Brring! to Bigger’s weak “Good-by” as the lawyer, Max,
+leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles
+inverted, of this chilling metaphor. Bigger’s situation and Bigger
+himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise
+of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these rst pages: we
+are confronting a monster created by the American republic and
+we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive
+illumination as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity
+and horror at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting
+and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very
+di erent novel if Wright’s execution had been more perceptive and
+if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social
+terms.
+One may object that it was precisely Wright’s intention to create
+in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and
+prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this assumption
+which we ought to examine more carefully. Bigger has no
+discernible relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own
+people, nor to any other people—in this respect, perhaps, he is
+most American—and his force comes, not from his signi cance as a
+social (or anti-social) unit, but from his signi cance as the
+incarnation of a myth. It is remarkable that, though we follow him
+step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as
+little about him when this journey is ended as we did when it
+began; and, what is even more remarkable, we know almost as
+little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created
+him. Despite the details of slum life which we are given, I doubt
+
+that anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from
+sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the novel
+for a moment. Those Negroes who surround him, on the other
+hand, his hard-working mother, his ambitious sister, his poolroom
+cronies, Bessie, might be considered as far richer and far more
+subtle and accurate illustrations of the ways in which Negroes are
+controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have
+evolved for their survival. We are limited, however, to Bigger’s
+view of them, part of a deliberate plan which might not have been
+disastrous if we were not also limited to Bigger’s perceptions. What
+this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut
+away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to
+one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition
+of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel
+re ects—and at no point interprets—is the isolation of the Negro
+within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It
+is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and
+unapprehended disaster; and it is this climate, common to most
+Negro protest novels, which has led us all to believe that in Negro
+life there exists no tradition, no eld of manners, no possibility of
+ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example, sustain the Jew
+even after he has left his father’s house. But the fact is not that the
+Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no
+sensibility su ciently profound and tough to make this tradition
+articulate. For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than
+the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the
+battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply,
+out of their struggle to survive. When we speak of the Jewish
+tradition we are speaking of centuries of exile and persecution, of
+the strength which endured and the sensibility which discovered in
+it the high possibility of the moral victory.
+This sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long
+endured is hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro’s
+public progress, a progress so heavy with complexity, so
+bewildering and kaleidoscopic, that he dare not pause to
+
+conjecture on the darkness which lies behind him; and by the
+nature of the American psychology which, in order to apprehend
+or be made able to accept it, must undergo a metamorphosis so
+profound as to be literally unthinkable and which there is no doubt
+we will resist until we are compelled to achieve our own identity
+by the rigors of a time that has yet to come. Bigger, in the
+meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the
+notorious national taste for the sensational and to reinforce all
+that we now nd it necessary to believe. It is not Bigger whom we
+fear, since his appearance among us makes our victory certain. It
+is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for
+complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with
+pity, even with a ection—and in whose faces we sometimes
+surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest,
+withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt—who make us
+uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, atter, fear; who to us remain
+unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility
+and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them. It is out of our
+reaction to these hewers of wood and drawers of water that our
+image of Bigger was created.
+It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade
+with good works; and this image which makes of all our good
+works an intolerable mockery. The “nigger,” black, benighted,
+brutal, consumed with hatred as we are consumed with guilt,
+cannot be thus blotted out. He stands at our shoulders when we
+give our maid her wages, it is his hand which we fear we are
+taking when struggling to communicate with the current
+“intelligent” Negro, his stench, as it were, which lls our mouths
+with salt as the monument is unveiled in honor of the latest Negro
+leader. Each generation has shouted behind him, Nigger! as he
+walked our streets; it is he whom we would rather our sisters did
+not marry; he is banished into the vast and wailing outer darkness
+whenever we speak of the “purity” of our women, of the “sanctity”
+of our homes, of “American” ideals. What is more, he knows it. He
+is indeed the “native son”: he is the “nigger.” Let us refrain from
+
+inquiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we
+believe that he exists. Whenever we encounter him amongst us in
+the esh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody
+end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy.
+But there is a complementary faith among the damned which
+involves their gathering of the stones with which those who walk
+in the light shall stone them; or there exists among the intolerably
+degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena
+of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been
+accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction
+through making the nightmare real. The American image of the
+Negro lives also in the Negro’s heart; and when he has surrendered
+to this image life has no other possible reality. Then he, like the
+white enemy with whom he will be locked one day in mortal
+struggle, has no means save this of asserting his identity. This is
+why Bigger’s murder of Mary can be referred to as an “act of
+creation” and why, once this murder has been committed, he can
+feel for the rst time that he is living fully and deeply as a man
+was meant to live. And there is, I should think, no Negro living in
+America who has not felt, brie y or for long periods, with anguish
+sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying e ect, simple,
+naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash
+any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of
+motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the
+bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust
+into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no Negro,
+nally, who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment to
+the “nigger” who surrounds him and to the “nigger” in himself.
+Yet the adjustment must be made—rather, it must be attempted,
+the tension perpetually sustained—for without this he has
+surrendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a
+black man. The entire universe is then peopled only with his
+enemies, who are not only white men armed with rope and ri e,
+but his own far- ung and contemptible kinsmen. Their blackness is
+
+his degradation and it is their stupid and passive endurance which
+makes his end inevitable.
+Bigger dreams of some black man who will weld all blacks
+together into a mighty st, and feels, in relation to his family, that
+perhaps they had to live as they did precisely because none of
+them had ever done anything, right or wrong, which mattered very
+much. It is only he who, by an act of murder, has burst the
+dungeon cell. He has made it manifest that he lives and that his
+despised blood nourishes the passions of a man. He has forced his
+oppressors to see the fruit of that oppression: and he feels, when
+his family and his friends come to visit him in the death cell, that
+they should not be weeping or frightened, that they should be
+happy, proud that he has dared, through murder and now through
+his own imminent destruction, to redeem their anger and
+humiliation, that he has hurled into the spiritless obscurity of their
+lives the lamp of his passionate life and death. Henceforth, they
+may remember Bigger—who has died, as we may conclude, for
+them. But they do not feel this; they only know that he has
+murdered two women and precipitated a reign of terror; and that
+now he is to die in the electric chair. They therefore weep and are
+honestly frightened—for which Bigger despises them and wishes to
+“blot” them out. What is missing in his situation and in the
+representation of his psychology—which makes his situation false
+and his psychology incapable of development—is any revelatory
+apprehension of Bigger as one of the Negro’s realities or as one of
+the Negro’s roles. This failure is part of the previously noted failure
+to convey any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex
+group reality. Bigger, who cannot function therefore as a re ection
+of the social illness, having, as it were, no society to re ect,
+likewise refuses to function on the loftier level of the Christsymbol. His kinsmen are quite right to weep and be frightened,
+even to be appalled: for it is not his love for them or for himself
+which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred; he does
+not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals, on the
+contrary, nothing more than his own erce bitterness at having
+
+been born one of them. In this also he is the “native son,” his
+progress determinable by the speed with which the distance
+increases between himself and the auction-block and all that the
+auction-block implies. To have penetrated this phenomenon, this
+inward contention of love and hatred, blackness and whiteness,
+would have given him a stature more nearly human and an end
+more nearly tragic; and would have given us a document more
+profoundly and genuinely bitter and less harsh with an anger
+which is, on the one hand, exhibited and, on the other hand,
+denied.
+Native Son nds itself at length so trapped by the American
+image of Negro life and by the American necessity to nd the ray
+of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications. This is why
+Bigger must be at the last redeemed, to be received, if only by
+rhetoric, into that community of phantoms which is our tenaciously
+held ideal of the happy social life. It is the socially conscious whites
+who receive him—the Negroes being capable of no such objectivity
+—and we have, by way of illustration, that lamentable scene in
+which Jan, Mary’s lover, forgives him for her murder; and,
+carrying the explicit burden of the novel, Max’s long speech to the
+jury. This speech, which really ends the book, is one of the most
+desperate performances in American ction. It is the question of
+Bigger’s humanity which is at stake, the relationship in which he
+stands to all other Americans—and, by implication, to all people—
+and it is precisely this question which it cannot clarify, with which
+it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms. He is the monster
+created by the American republic, the present awful sum of
+generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall
+into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be
+made representative of a way of life which is real and human in
+precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and
+strange. It seems to me that this idea carries, implicitly, a most
+remarkable confession: that is, that Negro life is in fact as debased
+and impoverished as our theology claims; and, further, that the use
+to which Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the
+
+assumption—not entirely unsound—that Americans, who evade, so
+far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of
+assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing
+themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own.
+The privacy or obscurity of Negro life makes that life capable, in
+our imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea
+of Bigger’s monstrosity can be presented without fear of
+contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to
+contest it and no Negro has the voice. It is an idea, which, in the
+framework of the novel, is digni ed by the possibility it promptly
+a ords of presenting Bigger as the herald of disaster, the danger
+signal of a more bitter time to come when not Bigger alone but all
+his kindred will rise, in the name of the many thousands who have
+perished in re and ood and by rope and torture, to demand their
+rightful vengeance.
+But it is not quite fair, it seems to me, to exploit the national
+innocence in this way. The idea of Bigger as a warning
+boomerangs not only because it is quite beyond the limit of
+probability that Negroes in America will ever achieve the means of
+wreaking vengeance upon the state but also because it cannot be
+said that they have any desire to do so. Native Son does not convey
+the altogether savage paradox of the American Negro’s situation,
+of which the social reality which we prefer with such hopeful
+super ciality to study is but, as it were, the shadow. It is not
+simply the relationship of oppressed to oppressor, of master to
+slave, nor is it motivated merely by hatred; it is also, literally and
+morally, a blood relationship, perhaps the most profound reality of
+the American experience, and we cannot begin to unlock it until
+we accept how very much it contains of the force and anguish and
+terror of love.
+Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny.
+They have no other experience besides their experience on this
+continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, which
+yet remains to be embraced. If, as I believe, no American Negro
+exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the
+
+skull, then what most signi cantly fails to be illuminated here is
+the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro
+being compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous
+and unloved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this
+recognition sets him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary
+ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the
+word, to exploit the “nigger,” which lends to Negro life its high
+element of the ironic and which causes the most well-meaning of
+their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when
+attempting to understand them. To present Bigger as a warning is
+simply to reinforce the American guilt and fear concerning him, it
+is most forcefully to limit him to that previously mentioned social
+arena in which he has no human validity, it is simply to condemn
+him to death. For he has always been a warning, he represents the
+evil, the sin and su ering which we are compelled to reject. It is
+useless to say to the courtroom in which this heathen sits on trial
+that he is their responsibility, their creation, and his crimes are
+theirs; and that they ought, therefore, to allow him to live, to make
+articulate to himself behind the walls of prison the meaning of his
+existence. The meaning of his existence has already been most
+adequately expressed, nor does anyone wish, particularly not in
+the name of democracy, to think of it any more; as for the
+possibility of articulation, it is this possibility which above all
+others we most dread. Moreover, the courtroom, judge, jury,
+witnesses and spectators, recognize immediately that Bigger is
+their creation and they recognize this not only with hatred and
+fear and guilt and the resulting fury of self-righteousness but also
+with that morbid fullness of pride mixed with horror with which
+one regards the extent and power of one’s wickedness. They know
+that death is his portion, that he runs to death; coming from
+darkness and dwelling in darkness, he must be, as often as he rises,
+banished, lest the entire planet be engulfed. And they know,
+nally, that they do not wish to forgive him and that he does not
+wish to be forgiven; that he dies, hating them, scorning that appeal
+which they cannot make to that irrecoverable humanity of his
+which cannot hear it; and that he wants to die because he glories in
+
+his hatred and prefers, like Lucifer, rather to rule in hell than serve
+in heaven.
+For, bearing in mind the premise on which the life of such a man
+is based, i.e., that black is the color of damnation, this is his only
+possible end. It is the only death which will allow him a kind of
+dignity or even, however horribly, a kind of beauty. To tell this
+story, no more than a single aspect of the story of the “nigger,” is
+inevitably and richly to become involved with the force of life and
+legend, how each perpetually assumes the guise of the other,
+creating that dense, many-sided and shifting reality which is the
+world we live in and the world we make. To tell his story is to
+begin to liberate us from his image and it is, for the rst time, to
+clothe this phantom with esh and blood, to deepen, by our
+understanding of him and his relationship to us, our understanding
+of ourselves and of all men.
+But this is not the story which Native Son tells, for we nd here
+merely, repeated in anger, the story which we have told in pride.
+Nor, since the implications of this anger are evaded, are we ever
+confronted with the actual or potential signi cance of our pride;
+which is why we fall, with such a positive glow of recognition,
+upon Max’s long and bitter summing up. It is addressed to those
+among us of good will and it seems to say that, though there are
+whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not;
+there are those who are betrayed by greed, by guilt, by blood lust,
+but not we; we will set our faces against them and join hands and
+walk together into that dazzling future when there will be no white
+or black. This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all
+dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream. For, let us join hands on
+this mountain as we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far
+from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men
+are betrayed by greed and guilt and bloodlust and where no one’s
+hands are clean. Our good will, from which we yet expect such
+power to transform us, is thin, passionless, strident: its roots,
+examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was
+that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must
+
+rst become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in
+America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own
+personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience,
+surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity
+and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening
+world.
+
+Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough
+Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk, so to speak, the cow and the
+goat at the same time—and then to peddle the results as ginger ale
+—has seldom produced anything more arresting than the 1955
+production of Carmen Jones. In Hollywood, for example,
+immorality and evil (which are synonyms in that lexicon) are
+always vividly punished, though it is the way of the transgressor—
+hard perhaps but far from unattractive—which keeps us on the
+edge of our seats, and the transgressor himself (or herself) who
+engages all our sympathy. Similarly, in Carmen Jones, the implicit
+parallel between an amoral Gypsy and an amoral Negro woman is
+the entire root idea of the show; but at the same time, bearing in
+mind the distances covered since The Birth of a Nation, it is
+important that the movie always be able to repudiate any
+suggestion that Negroes are amoral—which it can only do,
+considering the role of the Negro in the national psyche, by
+repudiating any suggestion that Negroes are not white. With a
+story like Carmen interpreted by a Negro cast this may seem a
+di cult assignment, but Twentieth Century-Fox has brought it o .
+At the same time they have also triumphantly not brought it o ,
+that is to say that the story does deal with amoral people, Carmen
+is a baggage, and it is a Negro cast.
+This is made possible in the rst place, of course, by the fact that
+Carmen is a “classic” or a “work of art” or something, therefore,
+sacrosanct and, luckily, quite old: it is as ludicrously unenlightened
+to accuse Mérimée and Bizet of having dirty minds as it is
+impossible to accuse them of being anti-Negro. (Though it is
+possible perhaps to accuse them of not knowing much and caring
+less about Gypsies.) In the second place the music helps, for it has
+assuredly never sounded so bald, or been sung so badly, or had less
+relevance to life, anybody’s life, than in this production. The lyrics,
+
+too, in their way, help, being tasteless and vulgar in a way, if not
+to a degree, which cannot be called characteristic of Negroes. The
+movie’s lifeless unreality is only occasionally threatened by Pearl
+Bailey, who has, however, been forestalled by Mr. Preminger’s
+direction and is reduced—in a series of awful costumes, designed,
+it would appear, to camou age her personality—to doing what is
+certainly the best that can be done with an abomination called
+Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum and delivering her lines for the
+rest of the picture with such a murderously amused disdain that
+one cannot quite avoid the suspicion that she is commenting on the
+lm. For a second or so at a time she escapes the lm’s deadly
+inertia and in Miss Bailey one catches glimpses of the imagination
+which might have exploded this movie into something worth
+seeing.
+But this movie, more than any movie I can remember having
+seen, cannot a ord, dare not risk, imagination. The “sexiness,” for
+example, of Dorothy Dandridge, who plays Carmen, becomes quite
+clearly manufactured and even rather silly the moment Pearl
+Bailey stands anywhere near her.1 And the moment one wishes
+that Pearl Bailey were playing Carmen one understands that
+Carmen Jones is controlled by another movie which Hollywood was
+studiously not making. For, while it is amusing to parallel Bizet’s
+amoral Gypsy with a present-day, lower-class Negro woman, it is a
+good deal less amusing to parallel the Bizet violence with the
+violence of the Negro ghetto.
+To avoid this—to exploit, that is, Carmen as a brown-skinned
+baggage but to avoid even suggesting any of the motivations such
+a present-day Carmen might have—it was helpful, rst of all, that
+the script failed to require the services of any white people. This
+seals the action o , as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle
+of color is divested of its danger. The color itself then becomes a
+kind of vacuum which each spectator will ll with his own
+fantasies. But Carmen Jones does not inhabit the never-never land
+of such bogus but rather entertaining works as Stormy Weather or
+Cabin in the Sky—in which at least one could listen to the music;
+
+Carmen Jones has moved into a stratosphere rather more
+interesting and more pernicious, in which even Negro speech is
+parodied out of its charm and liberalized, if one may so put it, out
+of its force and precision. The result is not that the characters
+sound like everybody else, which would be bad enough; the result
+is that they sound ludicrously false and a ected, like ante-bellum
+Negroes imitating their masters. This is also the way they look, and
+also rather the way they are dressed, and the word that springs
+immediately to mind to describe the appallingly technicolored sets
+—an army camp, a room, and a street on Chicago’s South Side,
+presumably, which Bigger Thomas would certainly fail to recognize
+—is “spotless.” They could easily have been dreamed up by
+someone determined to prove that Negroes are as “clean” and as
+“modern” as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another,
+that is exactly how they were dreamed up.
+And one is not allowed to forget for an instant that one is
+watching an opera (a word apparently synonymous in Mr.
+Preminger’s mind with tragedy and fantasy), and the tone of
+Carmen Jones is sti ing: a wedding of the blank, lofty solemnity
+with which Hollywood so often approaches “works of art” and the
+really quite helpless condescension with which Hollywood has
+always handled Negroes. The fact that one is watching a Negro
+cast interpreting Carmen is used to justify their remarkable vacuity,
+their complete improbability, their total divorce from anything
+suggestive of the realities of Negro life. On the other hand, the
+movie cannot possibly avoid depending very heavily on a certain
+quaintness, a certain lack of inhibition taken to be typical of
+Negroes, and further, the exigencies of the story—to say nothing of
+the images, which we will discuss in a moment—make it necessary
+to watch this movie, holding in the mind three disparate ideas: (1)
+that this is an opera having nothing to do with the present day,
+hence, nothing, really, to do with Negroes; but (2) the greater
+passion, that winning warmth (of which the movie exhibits not a
+trace), so typical of Negroes makes Carmen an ideal vehicle for
+their graduation into Art; and (3) these are exceptional Negroes, as
+
+American, that is, as you and me, interpreting lower-class Negroes
+of whom they, also, are very fond, an a ection which is proven
+perhaps by the fact that everyone appears to undergo a tiny,
+strangling death before resolutely substituting “de” for “the.”
+A movie is, literally, a series of images, and what one sees in a
+movie can really be taken, beyond its stammering or misleading
+dialogue, as the key to what the movie is actually involved in
+saying. Carmen Jones is one of the rst and most explicit—and far
+and away the most self-conscious—weddings of sex and color
+which Hollywood has yet turned out. (It will most certainly not be
+the last.) From this point of view the color wheel in Carmen Jones
+is very important. Dorothy Dandridge—Carmen—is a sort of ta ycolored girl, very obviously and vividly dressed, but really in
+herself rather more sweet than vivid. One feels—perhaps one is
+meant to feel—that here is a very nice girl making her way in
+movies by means of a bad-girl part; and the glow thus caused,
+especially since she is a colored girl, really must make up for the
+glow which is missing from the performance she is clearly working
+very hard at. Harry Belafonte is just a little darker and just as
+blankly handsome and fares very badly opposite her in a really
+o ensive version of an already unendurable role. Olga James is
+Micaela, here called Cindy Lou, a much paler girl than Miss
+Dandridge but also much plainer, who is compelled to go through
+the entire movie in a kind of tearful stoop. Joe Adams is Husky
+Miller (Escamillo) and he is also rather ta y-colored, but since he
+is the second lead and by way of being the villain, he is not
+required to be as blank as Mr. Belafonte and there is therefore,
+simply in his presence, some eeting hint of masculine or at least
+boyish force. For the rest, Pearl Bailey is quite dark and she plays,
+in e ect, a oozie. The wicked sergeant who causes Joe to desert
+the army—in one of many wildly improbable scenes—and who has
+evil designs on Carmen is very dark indeed; and so is Husky
+Miller’s trainer, who is, one is given to suppose, Miss Bailey’s
+sugar-daddy. It is quite clear that these people do not live in the
+same world with Carmen, or Joe, or Cindy Lou. All three of the
+
+leads are presented as inde nably complex and tragic, not after
+money or rhinestones but something else which causes them to be
+misunderstood by the more earthy types around them. This
+something else is love, of course, and it is with the handling of this
+love story that the movie really goes to town.
+It is true that no one in the original Carmen, least of all Carmen
+and her lover, are very clearly motivated; but there it scarcely
+matters because the opera is able to get by on a purely theatrical
+excitement, a sort of papier-mâché violence, and the intense, if
+nally incredible, sexuality of its heroine. The movie does not have
+any of this to work with, since here excitement or violence could
+only blow the movie to bits, and, while the movie certainly
+indicates that Carmen is a luscious lollipop, it is on rather more
+uncertain ground when confronted with the notion of how
+attractive she nds men, and it cannot, in any case, use this as a
+motivating factor. Carmen is thus robbed at a stroke of even her
+fake vitality and all her cohesiveness and has become, instead, a
+nice girl, if a little ery, whose great fault—and, since this is a
+tragedy, also her triumph—is that she looks at “life,” as her nal
+aria states it, “straight in de eye.” In lieu of sexuality the moviemakers have dreamed up some mumbo jumbo involving buzzards’
+wings, signs of the zodiac, and death-dealing cards, so that, it
+appears, Carmen ruins Joe because she loves him and decides to
+leave him because the cards tell her she is going to die. The fact
+that between the time she leaves him and the time he kills her she
+acquires some new clothes, and drinks—as one of her arias rather
+violently indicates she intends to—a great deal of champagne is
+simply a sign of her intense inner su ering.
+Carmen has come a long way from the auction block, but Joe, of
+course, cannot be far behind. This Joe is a good, ne-looking boy
+who loves his Maw, has studied hard, and is going to be sent to
+ying school, and who is engaged to a girl who rather resembles
+his Maw, named Cindy Lou. His indi erence to Carmen, who has
+all the other males in sight quivering with a passion never seen on
+land or sea, sets her ablaze; in a series of scenes which it is di cult
+
+to call erotic without adding that they are also infantile, she goes
+after him and he falls. Here the technicolored bodies of Dandridge
+and Belafonte, while the movie is being glum about the ruin of
+Joe’s career and impending doom, are used for the maximum erotic
+e ect. It is a sterile and distressing eroticism, however, because it
+is occurring in a vacuum between two mannequins who clearly are
+not involved in anything more serious than giving the customers a
+run for their money. One is not watching either tenderness or love,
+and one is certainly not watching the complex and consuming
+passion which leads to life or death—one is watching a timorous
+and vulgar misrepresentation of these things.
+And it must be said that one of the reasons for this is that, while
+the movie-makers are pleased to have Miss Dandridge ouncing
+about in tight skirts and plunging necklines—which is not exactly
+sexuality, either—the Negro male is still too loaded a quantity for
+them to know quite how to handle. The result is that Mr. Belafonte
+is really not allowed to do anything more than walk around
+looking like a spaniel: his sexuality is really taken as given because
+Miss Dandridge wants him. It does not, otherwise, exist and he is
+not destroyed by his own sexual aggressiveness, which he is not
+allowed to have, but by the sexual aggressiveness of the girl—or,
+as it turns out, not even really by that, but by tea leaves. The only
+reason, nally, that the eroticism of Carmen Jones is more potent
+than, say, the eroticism of a Lana Turner vehicle is that Carmen
+Jones has Negro bodies before the camera and Negroes are
+associated in the public mind with sex. Since darker races always
+seem to have for lighter races an aura of sexuality, this fact is not
+distressing in itself. What is distressing is the conjecture this movie
+leaves one with as to what Americans take sex to be.
+The most important thing about this movie—and the reason that,
+despite itself, it is one of the most important all-Negro movies
+Hollywood has yet produced—is that the questions it leaves in the
+mind relate less to Negroes than to the interior life of Americans.
+One wonders, it is true, if Negroes are really going to become the
+ciphers this movie makes them out to be; but, since they have until
+
+now survived public images even more appalling, one is
+encouraged to hope, for their sake and the sake of the Republic,
+that they will continue to prove themselves incorrigible. Besides,
+life does not produce ciphers like these: when people have become
+this empty they are not ciphers any longer, but monsters. The
+creation of such ciphers proves, however, that Americans are far
+from empty; they are, on the contrary, very deeply disturbed. And
+this disturbance is not the kind which can be eased by the doing of
+good works, but seems to have turned inward and shows every
+sign of becoming personal. This is one of the best things that can
+possibly happen. It can be taken to mean—among a great many
+other things—that the ferment which has resulted in as odd a brew
+as Carmen Jones can now be expected to produce something which
+will be more bitter on the tongue but sweeter in the stomach.
+1 I have singled out Miss Bailey because the quality of her personality, forthright and wry,
+
+and with the authoritative ring of authenticity, highlights for me the lack of any of these
+qualities, or any positive qualities at all, in the movie itself. She is also the only performer
+
+with whose work I am more or less familiar. Since even she is so thoroughly handicapped
+
+by the peculiar necessities of Carmen Jones, I should like to make it clear that, in
+discussing the rest of the cast, I am not trying to judge their professional competence,
+
+which, on the basis of this movie—they do not even sing in their own voices—it would be
+quite unfair to do.
+
+PART TWO
+
+The Harlem Ghetto
+Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’
+lifetime or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in
+desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there
+are too many human beings per square block. Rents are 10 to 58
+per cent higher than anywhere else in the city; food, expensive
+everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality; and
+now that the war is over and money is dwindling, clothes are
+carefully shopped for and seldom bought. Negroes, traditionally
+the last to be hired and the rst to be red, are nding jobs harder
+to get, and, while prices are rising implacably, wages are going
+down. All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy
+with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and
+it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.
+All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like
+the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that
+comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the
+windows shut. Yet the white man walking through Harlem is not at
+all likely to nd it sinister or more wretched than any other slum.
+Harlem wears to the casual observer a casual face; no one
+remarks that—considering the history of black men and women
+and the legends that have sprung up about them, to say nothing of
+the ever-present policemen, wary on the street corners—the face
+is, indeed, somewhat excessively casual and may not be as open or
+as careless as it seems. If an outbreak of more than usual violence
+occurs, as in 1935 or in 1943, it is met with sorrow and surprise
+and rage; the social hostility of the rest of the city feeds on this as
+proof that they were right all along, and the hostility increases;
+speeches are made, committees are set up, investigations ensue.
+Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding
+or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social
+
+liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper. Thus, we
+have the Boys’ Club on West 134th Street, the playground at West
+131st and Fifth Avenue; and, since Negroes will not be allowed to
+live in Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life is thoughtfully erecting
+a housing project called Riverton in the center of Harlem;
+however, it is not likely that any but the professional class of
+Negroes—and not all of them—will be able to pay the rent.
+Most of these projects have been stimulated by perpetually
+embattled Negro leaders and by the Negro press. Concerning Negro
+leaders, the best that one can say is that they are in an impossible
+position and that the handful motivated by genuine concern
+maintain this position with heartbreaking dignity. It is unlikely
+that anyone acquainted with Harlem seriously assumes that the
+presence of one playground more or less has any profound e ect
+upon the psychology of the citizens there. And yet it is better to
+have the playground; it is better than nothing; and it will, at least,
+make life somewhat easier for parents who will then know that
+their children are not in as much danger of being run down in the
+streets. Similarly, even though the American cult of literacy has
+chie y operated only to provide a market for the Reader’s Digest
+and the Daily News, literacy is still better than illiteracy; so Negro
+leaders must demand more and better schools for Negroes, though
+any Negro who takes this schooling at face value will nd himself
+virtually incapacitated for life in this democracy. Possibly the most
+salutary e ect of all this activity is that it assures the Negro that he
+is not altogether forgotten: people are working in his behalf,
+however hopeless or misguided they may be; and as long as the
+water is troubled it cannot become stagnant.
+The terrible thing about being a Negro leader lies in the term
+itself. I do not mean merely the somewhat condescending
+di erentiation the term implies, but the nicely re ned torture a
+man can experience from having been created and defeated by the
+same circumstances. That is, Negro leaders have been created by
+the American scene, which thereafter works against them at every
+point; and the best that they can hope for is ultimately to work
+
+themselves out of their jobs, to nag contemporary American
+leaders and the members of their own group until a bad situation
+becomes so complicated and so bad that it cannot be endured any
+longer. It is like needling a blister until it bursts. On the other
+hand, one cannot help observing that some Negro leaders and
+politicians are far more concerned with their careers than with the
+welfare of Negroes, and their dramatic and publicized battles are
+battles with the wind. Again, this phenomenon cannot be changed
+without a change in the American scene. In a land where, it is said,
+any citizen can grow up and become president, Negroes can be
+pardoned for desiring to enter Congress.
+The Negro press, which supports any man, provided he is
+su ciently dark and well-known—with the exception of certain
+Negro novelists accused of drawing portraits un attering to the
+race—has for years received vastly confusing criticism based on the
+fact that it is helplessly and always exactly what it calls itself, that
+is, a press devoted entirely to happenings in or about the Negro
+world. This preoccupation can probably be forgiven in view of the
+great indi erence and frequent hostility of the American white
+press. The Negro press has been accused of not helping matters
+much—as indeed, it has not, nor do I see how it could have. And it
+has been accused of being sensational, which it is; but this is a
+criticism di cult to take seriously in a country so devoted to the
+sensational as ours.
+The best-selling Negro newspaper, I believe, is the Amsterdam
+Star-News, which is also the worst, being gleefully devoted to
+murders, rapes, raids on love-nests, interracial wars, any item—
+however meaningless—concerning prominent Negroes, and
+whatever racial gains can be reported for the week—all in just
+about that order. Apparently, this policy works well; it sells papers
+—which is, after all, the aim; in my childhood we never missed an
+edition. The day the paper came out we could hear, far down the
+street, the news vendor screaming the latest scandal and people
+rushing to read about it.
+
+The Amsterdam has been rivaled, in recent years, by the People’s
+Voice, a journal, modeled on PM and referred to as PV. PV is not so
+wildly sensational a paper as the Amsterdam, though its coverage is
+much the same (the news coverage of the Negro press is naturally
+pretty limited). PV’s politics are less murky, to the left of center
+(the Amsterdam is Republican, a political a liation that has led it
+into some strange doubletalk), and its tone, since its inception, has
+been ever more hopelessly militant, full of warnings, appeals, and
+open letters to the government—which, to no one’s surprise, are
+not answered—and the same rather pathetic preoccupation with
+prominent Negroes and what they are doing. Columns signed by
+Lena Horne and Paul Robeson appeared in PV until several weeks
+ago, when both severed their connections with the paper. Miss
+Horne’s column made her sound like an embittered Eleanor
+Roosevelt, and the only column of Robeson’s I have read was
+concerned with the current witch-hunt in Hollywood, discussing the
+kind of movies under attack and Hollywood’s traditional treatment
+of Negroes. It is personally painful to me to realize that so gifted
+and forceful a man as Robeson should have been tricked by his
+own bitterness and by a total inability to understand the nature of
+political power in general, or Communist aims in particular, into
+missing the point of his own critique, which is worth a great deal
+of thought: that there are a great many ways of being unAmerican, some of them nearly as old as the country itself, and
+that the House Un-American Activities Committee might nd
+concepts and attitudes even more damaging to American life in a
+picture like Gone With the Wind than in the possibly equally
+romantic but far less successful Watch on the Rhine.
+The only other newspapers in the eld with any signi cant sale
+in Harlem are the Pittsburgh Courier, which has the reputation of
+being the best of the lot, and the Afro-American, which resembles
+the New York Journal-American in layout and type and seems to
+make a consistent if unsuccessful e ort to be at once readable,
+intelligent, and ery. The Courier is a high-class paper, reaching its
+peak in the handling of its society news and in the columns of
+
+George S. Schuyler, whose Olympian serenity infuriates me, but
+who, as a matter of fact, re ects with great accuracy the state of
+mind and the ambitions of the professional, well-to-do Negro who
+has managed to nd a place to stand. Mr. Schuyler, who is
+remembered still for a satirical novel I have not read, called Black
+No More, is aided enormously in this position by a genteel white
+wife and a child-prodigy daughter—who is seriously regarded in
+some circles as proof of the incomprehensible contention that the
+mating of white and black is more likely to produce genius than
+any other combination. (The Afro-American recently ran a series of
+articles on this subject, “The Education of a Genius,” by Mrs.
+Amarintha Work, who recorded in detail the development of her
+mulatto son, Craig.)
+Ebony and Our World are the two big magazines in the eld,
+Ebony looking and sounding very much like Life, and Our World
+being the black man’s Look. Our World is a very strange,
+disorganized magazine indeed, sounding sometimes like a college
+newspaper and sometimes like a call to arms, but principally, like
+its more skillful brothers, devoted to the proposition that anything
+a white man can do a Negro can probably do better. Ebony digs
+feature articles out of such things as the “real” Lena Horne and
+Negro FBI agents, and it travels into the far corners of the earth for
+any news, however trivial, concerning any Negro or group of
+Negroes who are in any way unusual and/or newsworthy. The
+tone of both Ebony and Our World is a rmative; they cater to the
+“better class of Negro.” Ebony’s November 1947 issue carried an
+editoral entitled “Time To Count Our Blessings,” which began by
+accusing Chester Himes (author of the novel Lonely Crusade) of
+having a color psychosis, and went on to explain that there are
+Negro racists also who are just as blind and dangerous as Bilbo,
+which is incontestably true, and that, compared to the millions of
+starving Europeans, Negroes are sitting pretty—which comparison,
+I hazard, cannot possibly mean anything to any Negro who has not
+seen Europe. The editorial concluded that Negroes had come a long
+way and that “as patriotic Americans” it was time “we” stopped
+
+singing the blues and realized just how bright the future was. These
+cheering sentiments were anked—or underscored, if you will—by
+a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Negro farm woman
+carrying home a bumper crop of onions. It apparently escaped the
+editors of Ebony that the very existence of their magazine, and its
+table of contents for any month, gave the lie to this e ort to make
+the best of a bad bargain.
+The true raison d’être of the Negro press can be found in the
+letters-to-the-editor sections, where the truth about life among the
+rejected can be seen in print. It is the terrible dilemma of the
+Negro press that, having no other model, it models itself on the
+white press, attempting to emulate the same e ortless,
+sophisticated tone—a tone its subject matter renders utterly
+unconvincing. It is simply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly
+or not, when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh
+and stunted. It is not the Negro press that is at fault: whatever
+contradictions, inanities, and political infantilism can be charged
+to it can be charged equally to the American press at large. It is a
+black man’s newspaper straining for recognition and a foothold in
+the white man’s world. Matters are not helped in the least by the
+fact that the white man’s world, intellectually, morally, and
+spiritually, has the meaningless ring of a hollow drum and the odor
+of slow death. Within the body of the Negro press all the wars and
+falsehoods, all the decay and dislocation and struggle of our
+society are seen in relief.
+The Negro press, like the Negro, becomes the scapegoat for our
+ills. There is no di erence, after all, between the Amsterdam’s
+handling of a murder on Lenox Avenue and the Daily News’
+coverage of a murder on Beekman Hill; nor is there any di erence
+between the chauvinism of the two papers, except that the News is
+smug and the Amsterdam is desperate. Negroes live violent lives,
+unavoidably; a Negro press without violence is therefore not
+possible; and, further, in every act of violence, particularly
+violence against white men, Negroes feel a certain thrill of
+identi cation, a wish to have done it themselves, a feeling that old
+
+scores are being settled at last. It is no accident that Joe Louis is
+the most idolized man in Harlem. He has succeeded on a level that
+white America indicates is the only level for which it has any
+respect. We (Americans in general, that is) like to point to Negroes
+and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn; but it
+is ourselves we are watching, ourselves we are damning, or—
+condescendingly—bending to save.
+I have written at perhaps excessive length about the Negro press,
+principally because its many critics have always seemed to me to
+make the irrational demand that the nation’s most oppressed
+minority behave itself at all times with a skill and foresight no one
+ever expected of the late Joseph Patterson or ever expected of
+Hearst; and I have tried to give some idea of its tone because it
+seems to me that it is here that the innate desperation is betrayed.
+As for the question of Negro advertising, which has caused so much
+comment, it seems to me quite logical that any minority identi ed
+by the color of its skin and the texture of its hair would eventually
+grow self-conscious about these attributes and avoid advertising
+lotions that made the hair kinkier and soaps that darkened the
+skin. The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as
+much alike as possible.
+It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he
+stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom
+we all tremble yet. There are probably more churches in Harlem
+than in any other ghetto in this city and they are going full blast
+every night and some of them are lled with praying people every
+day. This, supposedly, exempli es the Negro’s essential simplicity
+and good-will; but it is actually a fairly desperate emotional
+business.
+These churches range from the august and publicized Abyssinian
+Baptist Church on West 138th Street to resolutely unclassi able
+lofts, basements, store-fronts, and even private dwellings. Nightly,
+Holyroller ministers, spiritualists, self-appointed prophets and
+Messiahs gather their ocks together for worship and for strength
+through joy. And this is not, as Cabin in the Sky would have us
+
+believe, merely a childlike emotional release. Their faith may be
+described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may,
+indeed, “keep them happy”—a phrase carrying the inescapable
+inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them
+quite actively unhappy—but also, and much more signi cantly,
+religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge:
+white people own the earth and commit all manner of
+abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the
+good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far o .
+It does not require a spectacular degree of perception to realize
+that bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white
+man, believing what he wishes to believe, has misread the symbols.
+Quite often the Negro preacher descends to levels less abstract and
+leaves no doubt as to what is on his mind: the pressure of life in
+Harlem, the conduct of the Italian-Ethiopian war, racial injustice
+during the recent war, and the terrible possibility of yet another
+very soon. All these topics provide excellent springboards for
+sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to
+illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his
+certain and long overdue punishment.
+Here, too, can be seen one aspect of the Negro’s ambivalent
+relation to the Jew. To begin with, though the traditional Christian
+accusation that the Jews killed Christ is neither questioned nor
+doubted, the term “Jew” actually operates in this initial context to
+include all in dels of white skin who have failed to accept the
+Savior. No real distinction is made: the preacher begins by
+accusing the Jews of having refused the light and proceeds from
+there to a catalog of their subsequent sins and the su erings visited
+on them by a wrathful God. Though the notion of the su ering is
+based on the image of the wandering, exiled Jew, the context
+changes imperceptibly, to become a fairly obvious reminder of the
+trials of the Negro, while the sins recounted are the sins of the
+American republic.
+At this point, the Negro identi es himself almost wholly with the
+Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage
+
+to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of
+Egypt. The hymns, the texts, and the most favored legends of the
+devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin:
+the ight from Egypt, the Hebrew children in the ery furnace, the
+terrible jubilee songs of deliverance: Lord, wasn’t that hard trials,
+great tribulations, I’m bound to leave this land! The covenant God
+made in the beginning with Abraham and which was to extend to
+his children and to his children’s children forever is a covenant
+made with these latter-day exiles also: as Israel was chosen, so are
+they. The birth and death of Jesus, which adds a non-Judaic
+element, also implements this identi cation. It is the covenant
+made with Abraham again, renewed, signed with his blood.
+(“Before Abraham was, I am.”) Here the gure of Jesus operates as
+the intercessor, the bridge from earth to heaven; it was Jesus who
+made it possible, who made salvation free to all, “to the Jew rst
+and afterwards the Gentile.” The images of the su ering Christ and
+the su ering Jew are wedded with the image of the su ering slave,
+and they are one: the people that walked in darkness have seen a
+great light.
+But if the Negro has bought his salvation with pain and the New
+Testament is used to prove, as it were, the validity of the
+transformation, it is the Old Testament which is clung to and most
+frequently preached from, which provides the emotional re and
+anatomizes the path of bondage; and which promises vengeance
+and assures the chosen of their place in Zion. The favorite text of
+my father, among the most earnest of ministers, was not “Father,
+forgive them, for they know not what they do,” but “How can I
+sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
+This same identi cation, which Negroes, since slavery, have
+accepted with their mothers’ milk, serves, in contemporary
+actuality, to implement an involved and speci c bitterness. Jews
+in Harlem are small tradesmen, rent collectors, real estate agents,
+and pawnbrokers; they operate in accordance with the American
+business tradition of exploiting Negroes, and they are therefore
+identi ed with oppression and are hated for it. I remember
+
+meeting no Negro in the years of my growing up, in my family or
+out of it, who would really ever trust a Jew, and few who did not,
+indeed, exhibit for them the blackest contempt. On the other hand,
+this did not prevent their working for Jews, being utterly civil and
+pleasant to them, and, in most cases, contriving to delude their
+employers into believing that, far from harboring any dislike for
+Jews, they would rather work for a Jew than for anyone else. It is
+part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that,
+as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting. A Negro
+learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him
+desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness. The friends I
+had, growing up and going to work, grew more bitter every day;
+and, conversely, they learned to hide this bitterness and to t into
+the pattern Gentile and Jew alike had xed for them.
+The tension between Negroes and Jews contains an element not
+characteristic of Negro-Gentile tension, an element which accounts
+in some measure for the Negro’s tendency to castigate the Jew
+verbally more often than the Gentile, and which might lead one to
+the conclusion that, of all white people on the face of the earth, it
+is the Jew whom the Negro hates most. When the Negro hates the
+Jew as a Jew he does so partly because the nation does and in
+much the same painful fashion that he hates himself. It is an aspect
+of his humiliation whittled down to a manageable size and then
+transferred; it is the best form the Negro has for tabulating vocally
+his long record of grievances against his native land.
+At the same time, there is a subterranean assumption that the
+Jew should “know better,” that he has su ered enough himself to
+know what su ering means. An understanding is expected of the
+Jew such as none but the most naïve and visionary Negro has ever
+expected of the American Gentile. The Jew, by the nature of his
+own precarious position, has failed to vindicate this faith. Jews,
+like Negroes, must use every possible weapon in order to be
+accepted, and must try to cover their vulnerability by a frenzied
+adoption of the customs of the country; and the nation’s treatment
+of Negroes is unquestionably a custom. The Jew has been taught—
+
+and, too often, accepts—the legend of Negro inferiority; and the
+Negro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with
+Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed. Here the American
+white Gentile has two legends serving him at once: he has divided
+these minorities and he rules.
+It seems unlikely that within this complicated structure any real
+and systematic cooperation can be achieved between Negroes and
+Jews. (This is in terms of the over-all social problem and is not
+meant to imply that individual friendships are impossible or that
+they are valueless when they occur.) The structure of the American
+commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of
+perpetual hostility. They do not dare trust each other—the Jew
+because he feels he must climb higher on the American social
+ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from
+identi cation with any minority even more unloved than he; while
+the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring
+to trust anyone.
+This applies, with quali cations and yet with almost no
+exceptions, even to those Negroes called progressive and
+“unusual.” Negroes of the professional class (as distinct from
+professional Negroes) compete actively with the Jew in daily
+contact; and they wear anti-Semitism as a de ant proof of their
+citizenship; their positions are too shaky to allow them any real
+ease or any faith in anyone. They do not trust whites or each other
+or themselves; and, particularly and vocally, they do not trust
+Jews. During my brief days as a Socialist I spent more than one
+meeting arguing against anti-Semitism with a Negro college
+student, who was trying to get into civil service and was
+supporting herself meanwhile as a domestic. She was by no means
+a stupid girl, nor even a particularly narrow-minded one: she was
+all in favor of the millennium, even to working with Jews to
+achieve it; but she was not prepared ever to accept a Jew as a
+friend. It did no good to point out, as I did, that the exploitation of
+which she accused the Jews was American, not Jewish, that in fact,
+behind the Jewish face stood the American reality. And my Jewish
+
+friends in high school were not like that, I said, they had no
+intention of exploiting me, we did not hate each other. (I
+remember, as I spoke, being aware of doubt crawling like fog in
+the back of my mind.) This might all be very well, she told me, we
+were children now, with no need to earn a living. Wait until later,
+when your friends go into business and you try to get a job. You’ll
+see!
+It is this bitterness—felt alike by the inarticulate, hungry
+population of Harlem, by the wealthy on Sugar Hill, and by the
+brilliant exceptions ensconced in universities—which has defeated
+and promises to continue to defeat all e orts at interracial
+understanding. I am not one of the people who believe that
+oppression imbues a people with wisdom or insight or sweet
+charity, though the survival of the Negro in this country would
+simply not have been possible if this bitterness had been all he felt.
+In America, though, life seems to move faster than anywhere else
+on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get:
+which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the
+rage of people who cannot nd solid ground beneath their feet.
+Just as a mountain of sociological investigations, committee
+reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change
+the face of Harlem or prevent Negro boys and girls from growing
+up and facing, individually and alone, the unendurable frustration
+of being always, everywhere, inferior—until nally the cancer
+attacks the mind and warps it—so there seems no hope for better
+Negro-Jewish relations without a change in the American pattern.
+Both the Negro and the Jew are helpless; the pressure of living is
+too immediate and incessant to allow time for understanding. I can
+conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the
+age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his
+life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into
+stunted maturity, trying desperately to nd a place to stand; and
+the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many
+survive. The Negro’s outlets are desperately constricted. In his
+dilemma he turns rst upon himself and then upon whatever most
+
+represents to him his own emasculation. Here the Jew is caught in
+the American cross re. The Negro, facing a Jew, hates, at bottom,
+not his Jewishness but the color of his skin. It is not the Jewish
+tradition by which he has been betrayed but the tradition of his
+native land. But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred
+must have a symbol. Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the
+Jew.
+
+Journey to Atlanta
+The Progressive Party has not, so far as I can gather, made any
+very great impression in Harlem, and this is not so much despite as
+because of its campaign promises, promises rather too extravagant
+to be believed. It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all
+Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less
+cheerful step of considering just what e ect this mutual contempt
+has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very
+little to do with one another.) Of all Americans, Negroes distrust
+politicians most, or, more accurately, they have been best trained
+to expect nothing from them; more than other Americans, they are
+always aware of the enormous gap between election promises and
+their daily lives. It is true that the promises excite them, but this is
+not because they are taken as proof of good intentions. They are
+the proof of something more concrete than intentions: that the
+Negro situation is not static, that changes have occurred, and are
+occurring and will occur—this, in spite of the daily, dead-end
+monotony. It is this daily, dead-end monotony, though, as well as
+the wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping, which
+causes them to look on politicians with such an extraordinarily
+disenchanted eye.
+This fatalistic indi erence is something that drives the optimistic
+American liberal quite mad; he is prone, in his more exasperated
+moments, to refer to Negroes as political children, an appellation
+not entirely just. Negro liberals, being consulted, assure us that this
+is something that will disappear with “education,” a vast, allpurpose term, conjuring up visions of sunlit housing projects,
+stacks of copybooks and a race of well-soaped, dark-skinned
+people who never slur their R’s. Actually, this is not so much
+political irresponsibility as the product of experience, experience
+which no amount of education can quite e ace. It is, as much as
+
+anything else, the reason the Negro vote is so easily bought and
+sold, the reason for that exclamation heard so frequently on Sugar
+Hill: “Our people never get anywhere.”
+“Our people” have functioned in this country for nearly a
+century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies’
+sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat
+levelled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is
+the pawn. It is inescapable that this is only possible because of his
+position in this country and it has very frequently seemed at least
+equally apparent that this is a position which no one, least of all
+the politician, seriously intended to change.
+Since Negroes have been in this country their one major,
+devastating gain was their Emancipation, an emancipation no one
+regards any more as having been dictated by humanitarian
+impulses. All that has followed from that brings to mind the rather
+unfortunate image of bones thrown to a pack of dogs su ciently
+hungry to be dangerous. If all this sounds rather deliberately grim,
+it is not through any wish to make the picture darker than it is; I
+would merely like to complete the picture usually presented by
+pointing out that no matter how many instances there have been
+of genuine concern and good-will, nor how many hard, honest
+struggles have been carried on to improve the position of the
+Negro people, their position has not, in fact, changed so far as
+most of them are concerned.
+Sociologists and historians, having the historical perspective in
+mind, may conclude that we are moving toward ever-greater
+democracy; but this is beyond the ken of a Negro growing up in
+any one of this country’s ghettos. As regards Negro politicians,
+they are considered with pride as politicians, a pride much akin to
+that felt concerning Marian Anderson or Joe Louis: they have
+proven the worth of the Negro people and in terms, American
+terms, which no one can negate. But as no housewife expects
+Marian Anderson’s genius to be of any practical aid in her dealings
+with the landlord, so nothing is expected of Negro representatives.
+The terrible thing, and here we have an American phenomenon in
+
+relief, is the fact that the Negro representative, by virtue of his
+position, is ever more removed from the people he ostensibly
+serves. Moreover, irrespective of personal integrity, his position—
+neatly and often painfully paradoxical—is utterly dependent on
+the continuing debasement of fourteen million Negroes; should the
+national ideals be put into practice tomorrow, countless prominent
+Negroes would lose their raison d’être.
+Finally, we are confronted with the psychology and tradition of
+the country; if the Negro vote is so easily bought and sold, it is
+because it has been treated with so little respect; since no Negro
+dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the
+fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the
+vote must be bartered for what it will get, for whatever short-term
+goals can be managed. These goals are mainly economic and
+frequently personal, sometimes pathetic: bread or a new roof or
+ve dollars, or, continuing up the scale, schools, houses or more
+Negroes in hitherto Caucasian jobs. The American commonwealth
+chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: they
+are not really considered a part of it. Like Aziz in A Passage to India
+or Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they know that white people,
+whatever their love for justice, have no love for them.
+This is the crux of the matter; and the Progressive Party, with its
+extravagant claims, has, therefore, imposed on itself the
+considerable burden of proof. The only party within recent
+memory which made equally strident claims of fellowship were the
+Communists, who failed to survive this test; and the only politician
+of similar claims was, of course, Wallace’s erstwhile master,
+Roosevelt, who did not after all, now that the magic of his voice is
+gone, succeed in raising the darker brother to the status of a
+citizen. This is the ancestry of the Wallace party, and it does not
+work wholly in its favor. It operates to give pause to even the most
+desperate and the most gullible.
+It is, however, considered on one level, the level of short-term
+goals, with approval, since it does a ord temporary work for
+Negroes, particularly those associated in any manner with the arts.
+
+The rather ippant question on 125th Street now is: “So? You
+working for Mr. Wallace these days?” For at least there is that:
+entertainers, personalities are in demand. To forestall lawsuits, I
+must explain that I am not discussing “names”—who are in rather
+a di erent position, too touchy and complex to analyze here—but
+the unknown, the struggling, endless armies of Negro boys and
+girls bent on, and as yet very far from, recognition. A segment of
+this army, a quartet called The Melodeers, made a trip to Atlanta
+under the auspices of the Progressive Party in August, a trip which
+lasted about eighteen days and which left them with no love for
+Mr. Wallace. Since this quartet included two of my brothers, I was
+given the details of the trip; indeed, David, the younger, kept a
+sort of journal for me—literally a blow-by-blow account.
+Harlem is lled with churches and on Sundays it gives the
+impression of being lled with music. Quartets such as my
+brothers’ travel from church to church in the fashion of circuit
+preachers, singing as much for the love of singing and the need for
+practice as for the rather indi erent sums collected for them which
+are then divided. These quartets have “battles of song,” the
+winning team adding, of course, immensely to its prestige, the
+most consistent winners being the giants in this eld. The aim of
+all these quartets, of course, is to branch out, to hit the big time
+and sing for a livelihood. The Golden Gate Quartet, judging at
+least from its music, had its roots here, and out of such a
+background came Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom I heard, not quite
+ten years ago, plunking a guitar in a storefront church on Fifth
+Avenue. The Melodeers have not been singing very long and are
+very far from well-known, and the invitation to sing on tour with
+the Wallace party in the South seemed, whatever their misgivings
+about the Mason-Dixon line, too good an opportunity to pass up.
+This invitation, by the way, seems to have been the brainstorm
+of a Clarence Warde, a Negro merchant seaman once employed as
+a cottage father in a corrective institution up-state; it was he in
+New York who acted as a go-between, arranging, since The
+Melodeers are minors, to be their legal guardian and manager on
+
+the road. An extended tour, such as was planned, met with some
+opposition from the parents, an opposition countered by the
+possible long-term bene ts of the tour in so far as the boys’ careers
+were concerned and, even more urgently, by the assurance that, at
+the very least, the boys would come home with a considerably
+larger sum of money than any of them were making on their jobs.
+(The political implications do not seem to have carried much
+weight.) A series of churches had been lined up for them
+presumably throughout the South. “The understanding,” writes
+David, “was that we were supposed to sing”; after which the party
+was to take over to make speeches and circulate petitions. “The
+arrangement,” David notes laconically, “sounded very promising,
+so we decided to go.”
+And, indeed, they traveled South in splendor, in a Pullman, to be
+exact, in which, since what David describes as a “Southern
+gentleman and wife” took exception to their presence, they
+traveled alone.
+At the Wallace headquarters in Atlanta they were introduced to a
+Mrs. Branson Price, a grey-haired white woman of incurably
+aristocratic leanings who seems to have been the directress of the
+party in that region. The graciousness of her reception was only
+slightly marred by the fact that she was not expecting singers and
+thought they were a new group of canvassers. She arranged for
+them to take rooms on Butler Street at the YMCA. Here the rst
+gap between promise and performance was made manifest, a gap,
+they felt, which was perhaps too tri ing to make a fuss about. In
+New York they had been promised comparative privacy, two to a
+room; but now, it developed, they were to sleep in a dormitory.
+This gap, in fact, it was the province of Mr. Warde to close, but
+whether he was simply weary from the trip or overwhelmed by the
+aristocratic Mrs. Price, he kept his mouth shut and, indeed, did not
+open it again for quite some time.
+
+When they returned to headquarters, somewhat irritated at
+having had to wait three hours for the arrival of Louis Burner, who
+had the money for their rooms, Mrs. Price suggested that they go
+out canvassing. This was wholly unexpected, since no one had
+mentioned canvassing in New York and, since, moreover,
+canvassers are voluntary workers who are not paid. Further, the
+oldest of them was twenty, which was not voting age, and none of
+them knew anything about the Progressive Party, nor did they care
+much. On the other hand, it is somewhat di cult to refuse a greyhaired, aristocratic lady who is toiling day and night for the
+bene t of your people; and Mr. Warde, who should have been their
+spokesman, had not yet recovered his voice; so they took the
+petitions, which were meant to put the Wallace party on the
+ballot, and began knocking on doors in the Negro section of
+Atlanta. They were sent out in pairs, white and black, a political
+device which operates not only as the living proof of brotherhood,
+but which has the additional virtue of intimidating into passive
+silence the more susceptible beholder, who cannot, after all,
+unleash the impatient scorn he may feel with a strange, benevolent
+white man sitting in his parlor.
+They canvassed for three days, during which time their expenses
+—$2.25 per man per day—were paid, but during which time they
+were doing no singing and making no money. On the third day
+they pointed out that this was not quite what they had been
+promised in New York, to be met with another suggestion from the
+invincible Mrs. Price: how would they like to sing on the soundtruck? They had not the faintest desire to sing on a sound-truck,
+especially when they had been promised a string of churches;
+however, the churches, along with Mr. Warde’s vigor, seemed
+unavailable at the moment; they could hardly sit around Atlanta
+doing nothing; and so long as they worked with the party they
+were certain, at least, to be fed. “The purpose of our singing,”
+David writes, “was to draw a crowd so the party could make
+speeches.” Near the end of the singing and during the speeches,
+lea ets and petitions were circulated through the crowd.
+
+David had not found Negroes in the South di erent in any
+important respect from Negroes in the North; except that many of
+them were distrustful and “they are always talking about the
+North; they have to let you know they know somebody in New
+York or Chicago or Detroit.” Of the crowds that gathered—and,
+apparently, The Melodeers attracted great numbers—“many of
+these people couldn’t read or write their names” and not many of
+them knew anything at all about the Progressive Party. But they
+did divine, as American Negroes must, what was expected of them;
+and they listened to the speeches and signed the petitions.
+Becoming both desperate and impatient, The Melodeers began
+making engagements and singing on their own, stealing time from
+canvassing to rehearse. They made more appointments than they
+were able to keep; partly because the lack of money limited their
+mobility but also because the Party, discovering these clandestine
+appointments, moved in, demanding to be heard. Those churches
+which refused to make room for the Party were not allowed to hear
+the quartet, which thus lost its last hope of making any money. The
+quartet wondered what had happened to Mr. Warde. David’s
+account all but ignores him until nearly the end of the trip, when
+his position during all this is perhaps given some illumination.
+Things now began to go steadily worse. They got into an argument
+with the manager of the Y, who objected to their rehearsing, and
+moved to a private home, for which the Party paid 75¢ per man
+per day; and the Party, which was, one gathers, furiously
+retrenching, arranged for them to eat at Fraziers’ Cafe, a Negro
+establishment on Hunter Street, for $1.25 per man per day. My
+correspondent notes that they had no choice of meals—“they
+served us what they liked”—which seems to have been mainly limp
+vegetables—and “we were as hungry when we walked out as we
+were when we walked in.” On the other hand, they were allowed
+to choose their beverage: tea or co ee or soda pop.
+
+Heaven only knows what prompted Mrs. Branson Price to give a
+party at this point. Perhaps the campaign was going
+extraordinarily well; perhaps Fraziers’ Cafe, where the party was
+held, was in need of a little extra revenue as well as the knowledge
+that its adoption of the Party would help to bring about a better
+world; perhaps Mrs. Price merely longed to be a gracious hostess
+once again. In any case, on a Sunday night she gave a party to
+which everyone was invited. My brother, who at this point was
+much concerned with food, observed glumly, “We had ice-cream.”
+The quartet sat at a table by itself, robbed, however, of the
+presence of Mr. Warde, who was invited to sit at Mrs. Price’s table:
+“she said it would be an honor,” my correspondent notes, failing,
+however, to say for whom. “There was a man there called a folksinger,” says David with venom, “and, naturally, everybody had to
+hear some folk songs.” Eventually, the folksy aspect of the evening
+was exhausted and the quartet was invited to sing. They sang four
+selections, apparently to everyone’s delight for they had to be
+quite adamant about not singing a fth. The strain of continual
+singing in the open air had done their voices no good and it had
+made one of them extremely hoarse. So they refused, over loud
+protests, and apologized. “This displeased Mrs. Price.”
+Indeed, it had. She was not in the least accustomed to having her
+suggestions, to say nothing of her requests, refused. Early Monday
+morning she called Mr. Warde to her o ce to inquire who those
+black boys thought they were? and determined to ship them all
+back that same day in a car. Mr. Warde, who, considering the
+honors of the evening before, must have been rather astounded,
+protested such treatment, to be warned that she might very well
+ship them o without a car; the six of them might very well be
+forced to take to the road. This is not a pleasant mode of traveling
+for a Negro in the North and no Negro in Atlanta, particularly no
+Northern Negro, is likely to get very far. Mr. Warde temporized:
+they could not leave on such short notice; for one thing, the boys
+had clothes at the cleaners which would not be ready for a while
+and which they could hardly a ord to lose. Mrs. Price, every
+
+aristocratic vein pounding, did not wish to be concerned with such
+plebeian matters and, nally, losing all patience, commanded Mr.
+Warde to leave her o ce: Had he forgotten that he was in
+Georgia? Didn’t he know better than sit in a white woman’s o ce?
+Mr. Warde, in whose bowels last night’s bread of fellowship must
+have acquired the weight of rock, left the o ce. Then the quartet
+attempted to secure an audience; to be met with implacable refusal
+and the threat of the police. There were, incidentally, according to
+my brother, ve Negro policemen in Atlanta at this time, who,
+though they were not allowed to arrest whites, would, of course, be
+willing, indeed, in their position, anxious, to arrest any Negro who
+seemed to need it. In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared even
+more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to
+prove it. The prospect of being arrested in Atlanta made them a
+little dizzy with terror: what might mean a beating in Harlem
+might quite possibly mean death here. “And at the same time,”
+David says, “it was funny”; by which he means that the ve
+policemen were faint prophecies of that equality which is the
+Progressive Party’s goal.
+They did not see Mrs. Price again; this was their severance from
+the Party, which now refused to pay any expenses; it was only the
+fact that their rent had been paid in advance which kept them o
+the streets. Food, however, remained a problem. Mr. Warde
+brought them a “couple of loaves of bread” and some jam; they
+sang one engagement. During this week Mrs. Price relented
+enough to get their clothes from the cleaners and send Mr. Warde,
+in custody of a white man who had been at the party, to the bus
+station for tickets. This man, whose resemblance to the Southern
+Gentleman of the Pullman is in no way diminished by his
+allegiance to Mr. Wallace, bought the tickets and threw them on
+the ground at Mr. Warde’s feet, advising him not to show his black
+face in Georgia again.
+The quartet, meanwhile, had gotten together six dollars doing
+odd jobs, which was enough, perhaps, for three of them to eat on
+the road. They split up, three leaving that Friday and the other two
+
+staying on about ten days longer, working for a construction
+company. Mr. Warde stopped o to visit his family, promising to
+see The Melodeers in New York, but he had not arrived as this was
+being written. The Melodeers laugh about their trip now, that goodnatured, hearty laughter which is, according to white men, the
+peculiar heritage of Negroes, Negroes who were born with the
+fortunate ability to laugh all their troubles away. Somewhat
+surprisingly, they are not particularly bitter toward the Progressive
+Party, though they can scarcely be numbered among its supporters.
+“They’re all the same,” David tells me, “ain’t none of ’em gonna do
+you no good; if you gonna be foolish enough to believe what they
+say, then it serves you good and right. Ain’t none of ’em gonna do
+a thing for me.”
+
+Notes of a Native Son
+On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a
+few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this,
+while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these
+events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of
+the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in
+state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem.
+On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the
+graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.
+The day of my father’s funeral had also been my nineteenth
+birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice,
+anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to
+me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the
+most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to
+me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left
+the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his
+eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had
+been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be
+saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse
+until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous
+of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our
+lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life
+and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.
+I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly,
+partly because we shared, in our di erent fashions, the vice of
+stubborn pride. When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever
+spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish
+I had. It seems to be typical of life in America, where
+opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on
+the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the
+rst. No one, including my father, seems to have known exactly
+
+how old he was, but his mother had been born during slavery. He
+was of the rst generation of free men. He, along with thousands
+of other Negroes, came North after 1919 and I was part of that
+generation which had never seen the landscape of what Negroes
+sometimes call the Old Country.
+He had been born in New Orleans and had been a quite young
+man there during the time that Louis Armstrong, a boy, was
+running errands for the dives and honky-tonks of what was always
+presented to me as one of the most wicked of cities—to this day,
+whenever I think of New Orleans, I also helplessly think of Sodom
+and Gomorrah. My father never mentioned Louis Armstrong,
+except to forbid us to play his records; but there was a picture of
+him on our wall for a long time. One of my father’s strong-willed
+female relatives had placed it there and forbade my father to take
+it down. He never did, but he eventually maneuvered her out of
+the house and when, some years later, she was in trouble and near
+death, he refused to do anything to help her.
+He was, I think, very handsome. I gather this from photographs
+and from my own memories of him, dressed in his Sunday best and
+on his way to preach a sermon somewhere, when I was little.
+Handsome, proud, and ingrown, “like a toe-nail,” somebody said.
+But he looked to me, as I grew older, like pictures I had seen of
+African tribal chieftains: he really should have been naked, with
+war-paint on and barbaric mementos, standing among spears. He
+could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his
+personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever
+met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him,
+buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a
+rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I
+think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and
+with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that
+he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it
+had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had xed bleak
+boundaries to his life. He was not a young man when we were
+growing up and he had already su ered many kinds of ruin; in his
+
+outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children,
+who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these
+things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my
+knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us.
+When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child
+always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one
+of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which
+emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become
+paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, ew into a rage and
+the child, not knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his
+head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost
+unfailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he
+often brought home on his back in the summertime led to the most
+appalling scenes. I do not remember, in all those years, that one of
+his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was
+able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to
+establish contact with other people had always marked him and
+had been one of the things which had driven him out of New
+Orleans. There was something in him, therefore, groping and
+tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with
+him. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and
+hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went
+from church to smaller and more improbable church, he found
+himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he
+died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time. He
+had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it
+frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those
+unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and over owing this
+bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was
+mine.
+When he died I had been away from home for a little over a
+year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning
+of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his
+proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight
+of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my
+
+ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and
+that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also
+kill me.
+He had been ill a long time—in the mind, as we now realized,
+reliving instances of his fantastic intransigence in the new light of
+his a iction and endeavoring to feel a sorrow for him which
+never, quite, came true. We had not known that he was being
+eaten up by paranoia, and the discovery that his cruelty, to our
+bodies and our minds, had been one of the symptoms of his illness
+was not, then, enough to enable us to forgive him. The younger
+children felt, quite simply, relief that he would not be coming
+home anymore. My mother’s observation that it was he, after all,
+who had kept them alive all these years meant nothing because the
+problems of keeping children alive are not real for children. The
+older children felt, with my father gone, that they could invite their
+friends to the house without fear that their friends would be
+insulted or, as had sometimes happened with me, being told that
+their friends were in league with the devil and intended to rob our
+family of everything we owned. (I didn’t fail to wonder, and it
+made me hate him, what on earth we owned that anybody else
+would want.)
+His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone
+realized that he was ill. He had always been so strange and had
+lived, like a prophet, in such unimaginably close communion with
+the Lord that his long silences which were punctuated by moans
+and hallelujahs and snatches of old songs while he sat at the livingroom window never seemed odd to us. It was not until he refused
+to eat because, he said, his family was trying to poison him that
+my mother was forced to accept as a fact what had, until then,
+been only an unwilling suspicion. When he was committed, it was
+discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the
+disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him.
+For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he
+was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there
+was no hope for him.
+
+In my mind’s eye I could see him, sitting at the window, locked
+up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his
+children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world
+which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder
+what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine
+children whom he could barely feed. He used to make little jokes
+about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to
+us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else
+our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such
+rages. He spent great energy and achieved, to our chagrin, no
+small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who
+surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we
+listened when we should have been sleeping, people who cursed
+and drank and ashed razor blades on Lenox Avenue. He could not
+understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could
+not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost everybody
+on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they,
+nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate.
+The only white people who came to our house were welfare
+workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who
+dealt with them, for my father’s temper, which was at the mercy of
+his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their
+very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by
+his carriage, almost ludicrously sti , and by his voice, harsh and
+vindictively polite. When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play
+which was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman,
+who then took an interest in me, and gave me books to read and,
+in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to
+see what she somewhat tactlessly referred to as “real” plays.
+Theater-going was forbidden in our house, but, with the really
+cruel intuitiveness of a child, I suspected that the color of this
+woman’s skin would carry the day for me. When, at school, she
+suggested taking me to the theater, I did not, as I might have done
+if she had been a Negro, nd a way of discouraging her, but agreed
+that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, very
+
+cleverly, left all the rest to my mother, who suggested to my father,
+as I knew she would, that it would not be very nice to let such a
+kind woman make the trip for nothing. Also, since it was a
+schoolteacher, I imagine that my mother countered the idea of sin
+with the idea of “education,” which word, even with my father,
+carried a kind of bitter weight.
+Before the teacher came my father took me aside to ask why she
+was coming, what interest she could possibly have in our house, in
+a boy like me. I said I didn’t know but I, too, suggested that it had
+something to do with education. And I understood that my father
+was waiting for me to say something—I didn’t quite know what;
+perhaps that I wanted his protection against this teacher and her
+“education.” I said none of these things and the teacher came and
+we went out. It was clear, during the brief interview in our living
+room, that my father was agreeing very much against his will and
+that he would have refused permission if he had dared. The fact
+that he did not dare caused me to despise him: I had no way of
+knowing that he was facing in that living room a wholly
+unprecedented and frightening situation.
+Later, when my father had been laid o from his job, this
+woman became very important to us. She was really a very sweet
+and generous woman and went to a great deal of trouble to be of
+help to us, particularly during one awful winter. My mother called
+her by the highest name she knew: she said she was a “christian.”
+My father could scarcely disagree but during the four or ve years
+of our relatively close association he never trusted her and was
+always trying to surprise in her open, Midwestern face the
+genuine, cunningly hidden, and hideous motivation. In later years,
+particularly when it began to be clear that this “education” of mine
+was going to lead me to perdition, he became more explicit and
+warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my
+friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people
+would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could be
+nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of
+them were not even nice. The best thing was to have as little to do
+
+with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was certain, in
+my innocence, that I never would.
+But the year which preceded my father’s death had made a great
+change in my life. I had been living in New Jersey, working in
+defense plants, working and living among southerners, white and
+black. I knew about the south, of course, and about how
+southerners treated Negroes and how they expected them to
+behave, but it had never entered my mind that anyone would look
+at me and expect me to behave that way. I learned in New Jersey
+that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at
+but was simply at the mercy of the re exes the color of one’s skin
+caused in other people. I acted in New Jersey as I had always
+acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself—I had to
+act that way—with results that were, simply, unbelievable. I had
+scarcely arrived before I had earned the enmity, which was
+extraordinarily ingenious, of all my superiors and nearly all my coworkers. In the beginning, to make matters worse, I simply did not
+know what was happening. I did not know what I had done, and I
+shortly began to wonder what anyone could possibly do, to bring
+about such unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility. I
+knew about jim-crow but I had never experienced it. I went to the
+same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the
+Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and
+co ee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything
+was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I
+learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had
+simply picked something up. Negroes were not served there, I was
+told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always
+the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go
+there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though
+some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant,
+I never ate there again.
+It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling
+alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave,
+silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became
+
+notorious and children giggled behind me when I passed and their
+elders whispered or shouted—they really believed that I was mad.
+And it did begin to work on my mind, of course; I began to be
+afraid to go anywhere and to compensate for this I went places to
+which I really should not have gone and where, God knows, I had
+no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally enhanced my
+reputation at work and my working day became one long series of
+acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble. I cannot say that
+these acrobatics succeeded. It began to seem that the machinery of
+the organization I worked for was turning over, day and night,
+with but one aim: to eject me. I was red once, and contrived, with
+the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll; was
+red again, and bounced back again. It took a while to re me for
+the third time, but the third time took. There were no loopholes
+anywhere. There was not even any way of getting back inside the
+gates.
+That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the
+year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I rst
+contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of
+which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and re in
+the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really
+carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can
+recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than
+race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this
+rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it
+consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred
+in me, and does, and will until the day I die.
+My last night in New Jersey, a white friend from New York took
+me to the nearest big town, Trenton, to go to the movies and have
+a few drinks. As it turned out, he also saved me from, at the very
+least, a violent whipping. Almost every detail of that night stands
+out very clearly in my memory. I even remember the name of the
+movie we saw because its title impressed me as being so patly
+ironical. It was a movie about the German occupation of France,
+starring Maureen O’Hara and Charles Laughton and called This
+
+Land Is Mine. I remember the name of the diner we walked into
+when the movie ended: it was the “American Diner.” When we
+walked in the counterman asked what we wanted and I remember
+answering with the casual sharpness which had become my habit:
+“We want a hamburger and a cup of co ee, what do you think we
+want?” I do not know why, after a year of such rebu s, I so
+completely failed to anticipate his answer, which was, of course,
+“We don’t serve Negroes here.” This reply failed to discompose me,
+at least for the moment. I made some sardonic comment about the
+name of the diner and we walked out into the streets.
+This was the time of what was called the “brown-out,” when the
+lights in all American cities were very dim. When we re-entered the
+streets something happened to me which had the force of an
+optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets were very crowded and
+I was facing north. People were moving in every direction but it
+seemed to me, in that instant, that all of the people I could see,
+and many more than that, were moving toward me, against me,
+and that everyone was white. I remember how their faces gleamed.
+And I felt, like a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck
+as though some interior string connecting my head to my body had
+been cut. I began to walk. I heard my friend call after me, but I
+ignored him. Heaven only knows what was going on in his mind,
+but he had the good sense not to touch me—I don’t know what
+would have happened if he had—and to keep me in sight. I don’t
+know what was going on in my mind, either; I certainly had no
+conscious plan. I wanted to do something to crush these white
+faces, which were crushing me. I walked for perhaps a block or
+two until I came to an enormous, glittering, and fashionable
+restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the Virgin
+would cause me to be served. I pushed through the doors and took
+the rst vacant seat I saw, at a table for two, and waited.
+I do not know how long I waited and I rather wonder, until
+today, what I could possibly have looked like. Whatever I looked
+like, I frightened the waitress who shortly appeared, and the
+moment she appeared all of my fury owed towards her. I hated
+
+her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened
+eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would
+make her fright worth-while.
+She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she
+had learned it somewhere, “We don’t serve Negroes here.” She did
+not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so
+accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and
+fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I
+had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close
+enough for me to get her neck between my hands.
+So I pretended not to have understood her, hoping to draw her
+closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil
+poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: “…
+don’t serve Negroes here.”
+Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already
+ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a nightmare, I realized
+that she would never come any closer and that I would have to
+strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an
+ordinary water-mug half full of water, and I picked this up and
+hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her
+and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that
+sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever
+I had been, I saw, for the rst time, the restaurant, the people with
+their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man,
+and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was
+frightened. I rose and began running for the door. A round,
+potbellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I
+reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I kicked
+him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered,
+“Run!” and I ran.
+My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to misdirect
+my pursuers and the police, who arrived, he told me, at once. I do
+not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night.
+I could not have said much. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way,
+that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over
+
+again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has
+happened and one nds oneself alone and safe. I could not get
+over two facts, both equally di cult for the imagination to grasp,
+and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was
+that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very
+clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger,
+and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I
+carried in my own heart.
+II
+I had returned home around the second week in June—in great
+haste because it seemed that my father’s death and my mother’s
+con nement were both but a matter of hours. In the case of my
+mother, it soon became clear that she had simply made a
+miscalculation. This had always been her tendency and I don’t
+believe that a single one of us arrived in the world, or has since
+arrived anywhere else, on time. But none of us dawdled so
+intolerably about the business of being born as did my baby sister.
+We sometimes amused ourselves, during those endless, sti ing
+weeks, by picturing the baby sitting within in the safe, warm dark,
+bitterly regretting the necessity of becoming a part of our chaos
+and stubbornly putting it o as long as possible. I understood her
+perfectly and congratulated her on showing such good sense so
+soon. Death, however, sat as purposefully at my father’s bedside as
+life stirred within my mother’s womb and it was harder to
+understand why he so lingered in that long shadow. It seemed that
+he had bent, and for a long time, too, all of his energies towards
+dying. Now death was ready for him but my father held back.
+All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. I had
+never before known it to be so violently still. Racial tensions
+throughout this country were exacerbated during the early years of
+the war, partly because the labor market brought together
+hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared people and partly because
+Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their
+
+military training in the south. What happened in defense plants
+and army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro
+ghetto. The situation in Harlem had grown bad enough for
+clergymen, policemen, educators, politicians, and social workers to
+assert in one breath that there was no “crime wave” and to o er,
+in the very next breath, suggestions as to how to combat it. These
+suggestions always seemed to involve playgrounds, despite the fact
+that racial skirmishes were occurring in the playgrounds, too.
+Playground or not, crime wave or not, the Harlem police force had
+been augmented in March, and the unrest grew—perhaps, in fact,
+partly as a result of the ghetto’s instinctive hatred of policemen.
+Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of
+reports of muggings, stabbings, shootings, assaults, gang wars, and
+accusations of police brutality, is the item concerning six Negro
+girls who set upon a white girl in the subway because, as they all
+too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she
+was, all over the nation.
+I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on
+horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I
+ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops
+and on corners and in doorways, and what was striking about
+them, I think, was that they did not seem to be talking. Never,
+when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a
+laugh ring out and neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip.
+There was certainly, on the other hand, occurring between them
+communication extraordinarily intense. Another thing that was
+striking was the unexpected diversity of the people who made up
+these groups. Usually, for example, one would see a group of
+sharpies standing on the street corner, jiving the passing chicks; or
+a group of older men, usually, for some reason, in the vicinity of a
+barber shop, discussing baseball scores, or the numbers, or making
+rather chilling observations about women they had known.
+Women, in a general way, tended to be seen less often together—
+unless they were church women, or very young girls, or prostitutes
+met together for an unprofessional instant. But that summer I saw
+
+the strangest combinations: large, respectable, churchly matrons
+standing on the stoops or the corners with their hair tied up,
+together with a girl in sleazy satin whose face bore the marks of
+gin and the razor, or heavy-set, abrupt, no-nonsense older men, in
+company with the most disreputable and fanatical “race” men, or
+these same “race” men with the sharpies, or these sharpies with the
+churchly women. Seventh Day Adventists and Methodists and
+Spiritualists seemed to be hobnobbing with Holyrollers and they
+were all, alike, entangled with the most agrant disbelievers;
+something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had
+all, incredibly, seen a common vision, and on each face there
+seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow.
+The churchly women and the matter-of-fact, no-nonsense men
+had children in the Army. The sleazy girls they talked to had lovers
+there, the sharpies and the “race” men had friends and brothers
+there. It would have demanded an unquestioning patriotism,
+happily as uncommon in this country as it is undesirable, for these
+people not to have been disturbed by the bitter letters they
+received, by the newspaper stories they read, not to have been
+enraged by the posters, then to be found all over New York, which
+described the Japanese as “yellow-bellied Japs.” It was only the
+“race” men, to be sure, who spoke ceaselessly of being revenged—
+how this vengeance was to be exacted was not clear—for the
+indignities and dangers su ered by Negro boys in uniform; but
+everybody felt a directionless, hopeless bitterness, as well as that
+panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a
+human being one loves is beyond one’s reach, and in danger. This
+helplessness and this gnawing uneasiness does something, at
+length, to even the toughest mind. Perhaps the best way to sum all
+this up is to say that the people I knew felt, mainly, a peculiar
+kind of relief when they knew that their boys were being shipped
+out of the south, to do battle overseas. It was, perhaps, like feeling
+that the most dangerous part of a dangerous journey had been
+passed and that now, even if death should come, it would come
+
+with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen. Such a
+death would be, in short, a fact with which one could hope to live.
+It was on the 28th of July, which I believe was a Wednesday,
+that I visited my father for the rst time during his illness and for
+the last time in his life. The moment I saw him I knew why I had
+put o this visit so long. I had told my mother that I did not want
+to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only
+that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did
+not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I
+imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so
+stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will
+be forced to deal with pain.
+We traveled out to him, his older sister and myself, to what
+seemed to be the very end of a very Long Island. It was hot and
+dusty and we wrangled, my aunt and I, all the way out, over the
+fact that I had recently begun to smoke and, as she said, to give
+myself airs. But I knew that she wrangled with me because she
+could not bear to face the fact of her brother’s dying. Neither could
+I endure the reality of her despair, her unstated ba ement as to
+what had happened to her brother’s life, and her own. So we
+wrangled and I smoked and from time to time she fell into a heavy
+reverie. Covertly, I watched her face, which was the face of an old
+woman; it had fallen in, the eyes were sunken and lightless; soon
+she would be dying, too.
+In my childhood—it had not been so long ago—I had thought her
+beautiful. She had been quick-witted and quick-moving and very
+generous with all the children and each of her visits had been an
+event. At one time one of my brothers and myself had thought of
+running away to live with her. Now she could no longer produce
+out of her handbag some unexpected and yet familiar delight. She
+made me feel pity and revulsion and fear. It was awful to realize
+that she no longer caused me to feel a ection. The closer we came
+to the hospital the more querulous she became and at the same
+time, naturally, grew more dependent on me. Between pity and
+guilt and fear I began to feel that there was another me trapped in
+
+my skull like a jack-in-the-box who might escape my control at any
+moment and ll the air with screaming.
+She began to cry the moment we entered the room and she saw
+him lying there, all shriveled and still, like a little black monkey.
+The great, gleaming apparatus which fed him and would have
+compelled him to be still even if he had been able to move brought
+to mind, not bene cence, but torture; the tubes entering his arm
+made me think of pictures I had seen when a child, of Gulliver, tied
+down by the pygmies on that island. My aunt wept and wept,
+there was a whistling sound in my father’s throat; nothing was
+said; he could not speak. I wanted to take his hand, to say
+something. But I do not know what I could have said, even if he
+could have heard me. He was not really in that room with us, he
+had at last really embarked on his journey; and though my aunt
+told me that he said he was going to meet Jesus, I did not hear
+anything except that whistling in his throat. The doctor came back
+and we left, into that unbearable train again, and home. In the
+morning came the telegram saying that he was dead. Then the
+house was suddenly full of relatives, friends, hysteria, and
+confusion and I quickly left my mother and the children to the care
+of those impressive women, who, in Negro communities at least,
+automatically appear at times of bereavement armed with lotions,
+proverbs, and patience, and an ability to cook. I went downtown.
+By the time I returned, later the same day, my mother had been
+carried to the hospital and the baby had been born.
+III
+For my father’s funeral I had nothing black to wear and this posed
+a nagging problem all day long. It was one of those problems,
+simple, or impossible of solution, to which the mind insanely clings
+in order to avoid the mind’s real trouble. I spent most of that day
+at the downtown apartment of a girl I knew, celebrating my
+birthday with whiskey and wondering what to wear that night.
+When planning a birthday celebration one naturally does not
+
+expect that it will be up against competition from a funeral and
+this girl had anticipated taking me out that night, for a big dinner
+and a night club afterwards. Sometime during the course of that
+long day we decided that we would go out anyway, when my
+father’s funeral service was over. I imagine I decided it, since, as
+the funeral hour approached, it became clearer and clearer to me
+that I would not know what to do with myself when it was over.
+The girl, sti ing her very lively concern as to the possible e ects of
+the whiskey on one of my father’s chief mourners, concentrated on
+being conciliatory and practically helpful. She found a black shirt
+for me somewhere and ironed it and, dressed in the darkest pants
+and jacket I owned, and slightly drunk, I made my way to my
+father’s funeral.
+The chapel was full, but not packed, and very quiet. There were,
+mainly, my father’s relatives, and his children, and here and there
+I saw faces I had not seen since childhood, the faces of my father’s
+one-time friends. They were very dark and solemn now, seeming
+somehow to suggest that they had known all along that something
+like this would happen. Chief among the mourners was my aunt,
+who had quarreled with my father all his life; by which I do not
+mean to suggest that her mourning was insincere or that she had
+not loved him. I suppose that she was one of the few people in the
+world who had, and their incessant quarreling proved precisely the
+strength of the tie that bound them. The only other person in the
+world, as far as I knew, whose relationship to my father rivaled
+my aunt’s in depth was my mother, who was not there.
+It seemed to me, of course, that it was a very long funeral. But it
+was, if anything, a rather shorter funeral than most, nor, since
+there were no overwhelming, uncontrollable expressions of grief,
+could it be called—if I dare to use the word—successful. The
+minister who preached my father’s funeral sermon was one of the
+few my father had still been seeing as he neared his end. He
+presented to us in his sermon a man whom none of us had ever
+seen—a man thoughtful, patient, and forbearing, a Christian
+inspiration to all who knew him, and a model for his children. And
+
+no doubt the children, in their disturbed and guilty state, were
+almost ready to believe this; he had been remote enough to be
+anything and, anyway, the shock of the incontrovertible, that it
+was really our father lying up there in that casket, prepared the
+mind for anything. His sister moaned and this grief-stricken
+moaning was taken as corroboration. The other faces held a dark,
+non-committal thoughtfulness. This was not the man they had
+known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him;
+this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they
+had not known, and the man they had not known may have been
+the real one. The real man, whoever he had been, had su ered and
+now he was dead: this was all that was sure and all that mattered
+now. Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he,
+too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of
+his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be
+invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was
+perhaps the last thing human beings could give each other and it
+was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord. Only the Lord saw
+the midnight tears, only He was present when one of His children,
+moaning and wringing hands, paced up and down the room. When
+one slapped one’s child in anger the recoil in the heart
+reverberated through heaven and became part of the pain of the
+universe. And when the children were hungry and sullen and
+distrustful and one watched them, daily, growing wilder, and
+further away, and running headlong into danger, it was the Lord
+who knew what the charged heart endured as the strap was laid to
+the backside; the Lord alone who knew what one would have said if
+one had had, like the Lord, the gift of the living word. It was the
+Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room
+faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would
+be despised and how to create in the child—by what means?—a
+stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself.
+The avenues, side streets, bars, billiard halls, hospitals, police
+stations, and even the playgrounds of Harlem—not to mention the
+houses of correction, the jails, and the morgue—testi ed to the
+potency of the poison while remaining silent as to the e cacy of
+
+whatever antidote, irresistibly raising the question of whether or
+not such an antidote existed; raising, which was worse, the
+question of whether or not an antidote was desirable; perhaps
+poison should be fought with poison. With these several schisms in
+the mind and with more terrors in the heart than could be named,
+it was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an
+impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this
+man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling.
+While the preacher talked and I watched the children—years of
+changing their diapers, scrubbing them, slapping them, taking
+them to school, and scolding them had had the perhaps inevitable
+result of making me love them, though I am not sure I knew this
+then—my mind was busily breaking out with a rash of
+disconnected impressions. Snatches of popular songs, indecent
+jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, faces, voices,
+political issues—I thought I was going mad; all these impressions
+suspended, as it were, in the solution of the faint nausea produced
+in me by the heat and liquor. For a moment I had the impression
+that my alcoholic breath, ine ciently disguised with chewing gum,
+lled the entire chapel. Then someone began singing one of my
+father’s favorite songs and, abruptly, I was with him, sitting on his
+knee, in the hot, enormous, crowded church which was the rst
+church we attended. It was the Abyssinia Baptist Church on 138th
+Street. We had not gone there long. With this image, a host of
+others came. I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how
+proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I
+had had a voice and my father had liked to show me o before the
+members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like
+when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always
+been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I even
+remembered certain expressions on his face when he teased my
+mother—had he loved her? I would never know. And when had it
+all begun to change? For now it seemed that he had not always
+been cruel. I remembered being taken for a haircut and scraping
+my knee on the footrest of the barber’s chair and I remembered my
+
+father’s face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging
+iodine. Then I remembered our ghts, ghts which had been of the
+worst possible kind because my technique had been silence.
+I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had
+really spoken to each other.
+It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left
+home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to
+or from church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of
+writing and I was, at about this time, the editor of the high school
+magazine. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been
+preaching from the pulpit. Lately, I had been taking fewer
+engagements and preached as rarely as possible. It was said in the
+church, quite truthfully, that I was “cooling o .”
+My father asked me abruptly, “You’d rather write than preach,
+wouldn’t you?”
+I was astonished at his question—because it was a real question.
+I answered, “Yes.”
+That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all
+we had ever said.
+The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up
+the aisle to look for the last time on the deceased. The assumption
+was that the family was too overcome with grief to be allowed to
+make this journey alone and I watched while my aunt was led to
+the casket and, mu ed in black, and shaking, led back to her seat.
+I disapproved of forcing the children to look on their dead father,
+considering that the shock of his death, or, more truthfully, the
+shock of death as a reality, was already a little more than a child
+could bear, but my judgment in this matter had been overruled and
+there they were, bewildered and frightened and very small, being
+led, one by one, to the casket. But there is also something very
+gallant about children at such moments. It has something to do
+with their silence and gravity and with the fact that one cannot
+help them. Their legs, somehow, seem exposed, so that it is at once
+
+incredible and terribly clear that their legs are all they have to hold
+them up.
+I had not wanted to go to the casket myself and I certainly had
+not wished to be led there, but there was no way of avoiding either
+of these forms. One of the deacons led me up and I looked on my
+father’s face. I cannot say that it looked like him at all. His
+blackness had been equivocated by powder and there was no
+suggestion in that casket of what his power had or could have
+been. He was simply an old man dead, and it was hard to believe
+that he had ever given anyone either joy or pain. Yet, his life lled
+that room. Further up the avenue his wife was holding his newborn
+child. Life and death so close together, and love and hatred, and
+right and wrong, said something to me which I did not want to
+hear concerning man, concerning the life of man.
+After the funeral, while I was downtown desperately celebrating
+my birthday, a Negro soldier, in the lobby of the Hotel Braddock,
+got into a ght with a white policeman over a Negro girl. Negro
+girls, white policemen, in or out of uniform, and Negro males—in
+or out of uniform—were part of the furniture of the lobby of the
+Hotel Braddock and this was certainly not the rst time such an
+incident had occurred. It was destined, however, to receive an
+unprecedented publicity, for the ght between the policeman and
+the soldier ended with the shooting of the soldier. Rumor, owing
+immediately to the streets outside, stated that the soldier had been
+shot in the back, an instantaneous and revealing invention, and
+that the soldier had died protecting a Negro woman. The facts
+were somewhat di erent—for example, the soldier had not been
+shot in the back, and was not dead, and the girl seems to have
+been as dubious a symbol of womanhood as her white counterpart
+in Georgia usually is, but no one was interested in the facts. They
+preferred the invention because this invention expressed and
+corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to
+remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of
+those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings
+began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted
+
+surrender to distortion. The e ect, in Harlem, of this particular
+legend was like the e ect of a lit match in a tin of gasoline. The
+mob gathered before the doors of the Hotel Braddock simply began
+to swell and to spread in every direction, and Harlem exploded.
+The mob did not cross the ghetto lines. It would have been easy,
+for example, to have gone over Morningside Park on the west side
+or to have crossed the Grand Central railroad tracks at 125th Street
+on the east side, to wreak havoc in white neighborhoods. The mob
+seems to have been mainly interested in something more potent
+and real than the white face, that is, in white power, and the
+principal damage done during the riot of the summer of 1943 was
+to white business establishments in Harlem. It might have been a
+far bloodier story, of course, if, at the hour the riot began, these
+establishments had still been open. From the Hotel Braddock the
+mob fanned out, east and west along 125th Street, and for the
+entire length of Lenox, Seventh, and Eighth avenues. Along each of
+these avenues, and along each major side street—116th, 125th,
+135th, and so on—bars, stores, pawnshops, restaurants, even little
+luncheonettes had been smashed open and entered and looted—
+looted, it might be added, with more haste than e ciency. The
+shelves really looked as though a bomb had struck them. Cans of
+beans and soup and dog food, along with toilet paper, corn akes,
+sardines and milk tumbled every which way, and abandoned cash
+registers and cases of beer leaned crazily out of the splintered
+windows and were strewn along the avenues. Sheets, blankets, and
+clothing of every description formed a kind of path, as though
+people had dropped them while running. I truly had not realized
+that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open;
+the rst time the word wealth ever entered my mind in relation to
+Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets. But one’s rst,
+incongruous impression of plenty was countered immediately by
+an impression of waste. None of this was doing anybody any good.
+It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been
+and the goods lying in the stores.
+
+It would have been better, but it would also have been
+intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash
+something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the
+members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But
+as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a
+moment when these outlets do not work. That summer, for
+example, it was not enough to get into a ght on Lenox Avenue, or
+curse out one’s cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the
+violence which lls Harlem’s churches, pool halls, and bars erupts
+outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely
+to vanish in an apocalyptic ood. That this is not likely to happen
+is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among
+them the Negro’s real relation to the white American. This relation
+prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and satisfactory as
+pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, one has to blot
+so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself
+becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not
+mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is
+too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous
+humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that.
+One is absolutely forced to make perpetual quali cations and one’s
+own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this,
+really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and
+black. One is always in the position of having to decide between
+amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove
+that the amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the
+amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be
+sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going
+through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally
+unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison.
+And the trouble, nally, is that the risks are real even if the choices
+do not exist.
+“But as for me and my house,” my father had said, “we will serve
+the Lord.” I wondered, as we drove him to his resting place, what
+this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times.
+
+I had preached it once myself, proudly giving it an interpretation
+di erent from my father’s. Now the whole thing came back to me,
+as though my father and I were on our way to Sunday school and I
+were memorizing the golden text: And if it seem evil unto you to
+serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the
+gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the ood,
+or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and
+my house, we will serve the Lord. I suspected in these familiar lines a
+meaning which had never been there for me before. All of my
+father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless,
+were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting
+to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was
+his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable
+morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and
+whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it
+was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It
+was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead
+man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did
+not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own
+destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to
+destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
+It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind
+forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The rst idea
+was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it
+is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without
+saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that
+one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power:
+that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as
+commonplace but must ght them with all one’s strength. This
+ght begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my
+charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This
+intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was
+irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could
+have searched his face for the answers which only the future would
+give me now.
+
+PART THREE
+
+Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown
+In Paris nowadays it is rather more di cult for an American Negro
+to become a really successful entertainer than it is rumored to have
+been some thirty years ago. For one thing, champagne has ceased
+to be drunk out of slippers, and the frivolously colored thousandfranc note is neither as elastic nor as freely spent as it was in the
+1920’s. The musicians and singers who are here now must work
+very hard indeed to acquire the polish and style which will land
+them in the big time. Bearing witness to this eternally tantalizing
+possibility, performers whose eminence is unchallenged, like Duke
+Ellington or Louis Armstrong, occasionally pass through. Some of
+their ambitious followers are in or near the big time already;
+others are gaining reputations which have yet to be tested in the
+States. Gordon Heath, who will be remembered for his
+performances as the embattled soldier in Broadway’s Deep Are the
+Roots some seasons back, sings ballads nightly in his own night
+club on the Rue L’Abbaye; and everyone who comes to Paris these
+days sooner or later discovers Chez Inez, a night club in the Latin
+Quarter run by a singer named Inez Cavanaugh, which specializes
+in fried chicken and jazz. It is at Chez Inez that many an unknown
+rst performs in public, going on thereafter, if not always to
+greater triumphs, at least to other night clubs, and possibly landing
+a contract to tour the Riviera during the spring and summer.
+In general, only the Negro entertainers are able to maintain a
+useful and unquestioning comradeship with other Negroes. Their
+nonperforming, colored countrymen are, nearly to a man,
+incomparably more isolated, and it must be conceded that this
+isolation is deliberate. It is estimated that there are ve hundred
+American Negroes living in this city, the vast majority of them
+veterans studying on the G.I. Bill. They are studying everything
+from the Sorbonne’s standard Cours de Civilisation Française to
+
+abnormal psychology, brain surgery, music,
+ne arts, and
+literature. Their isolation from each other is not di cult to
+understand if one bears in mind the axiom, unquestioned by
+American landlords, that Negroes are happy only when they are
+kept together. Those driven to break this pattern by leaving the
+U.S. ghettos not merely have e ected a social and physical leavetaking but also have been precipitated into cruel psychological
+warfare. It is altogether inevitable that past humiliations should
+become associated not only with one’s traditional oppressors but
+also with one’s traditional kinfolk.
+Thus the sight of a face from home is not invariably a source of
+joy, but can also quite easily become a source of embarrassment or
+rage. The American Negro in Paris is forced at last to exercise an
+undemocratic discrimination rarely practiced by Americans, that of
+judging his people, duck by duck, and distinguishing them one
+from another. Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of
+numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be,
+as it were, forgotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly
+the invisible man.
+The wariness with which he regards his colored kin is a natural
+extension of the wariness with which he regards all of his
+countrymen. At the beginning, certainly, he cherishes rather
+exaggerated hopes of the French. His white countrymen, by and
+large, fail to justify his fears, partly because the social climate does
+not encourage an outward display of racial bigotry, partly out of
+their awareness of being ambassadors, and nally, I should think,
+because they are themselves relieved at being no longer forced to
+think in terms of color. There remains, nevertheless, in the
+encounter of white Americans and Negro Americans the high
+potential of an awkward or an ugly situation.
+The white American regards his darker brother through the
+distorting screen created by a lifetime of conditioning. He is
+accustomed to regard him either as a needy and deserving martyr
+or as the soul of rhythm, but he is more than a little intimidated to
+nd this stranger so many miles from home. At rst he tends
+
+instinctively, whatever his intelligence may belatedly clamor, to
+take it as a re ection on his personal honor and good-will; and at
+the same time, with that winning generosity, at once good-natured
+and uneasy, which characterizes Americans, he would like to
+establish communication, and sympathy, with his compatriot. “And
+how do you feel about it?” he would like to ask, “it” being anything
+—the Russians, Betty Grable, the Place de la Concorde. The trouble
+here is that any “it,” so tentatively o ered, may suddenly become
+loaded and vibrant with tension, creating in the air between the
+two thus met an intolerable atmosphere of danger.
+The Negro, on the other hand, via the same conditioning which
+constricts the outward gesture of the whites, has learned to
+anticipate: as the mouth opens he divines what the tongue will
+utter. He has had time, too, long before he came to Paris, to re ect
+on the absolute and personally expensive futility of taking any one
+of his countrymen to task for his status in America, or of hoping to
+convey to them any of his experience. The American Negro and
+white do not, therefore, discuss the past, except in considerately
+guarded snatches. Both are quite willing, and indeed quite wise, to
+remark instead the considerably overrated impressiveness of the
+Ei el Tower.
+The Ei el Tower has naturally long since ceased to divert the
+French, who consider that all Negroes arrive from America,
+trumpet-laden and twinkle-toed, bearing scars so unutterably
+painful that all of the glories of the French Republic may not
+su ce to heal them. This indignant generosity poses problems of
+its own, which, language and custom being what they are, are not
+so easily averted.
+The European tends to avoid the really monumental confusion
+which might result from an attempt to apprehend the relationship
+of the forty-eight states to one another, clinging instead to such
+information as is a orded by radio, press, and lm, to anecdotes
+considered to be illustrative of American life, and to the myth that
+we have ourselves perpetuated. The result, in conversation, is
+rather like seeing one’s back yard reproduced with extreme
+
+delity, but in such a perspective that it becomes a place which
+one has never seen or visited, which never has existed, and which
+never can exist. The Negro is forced to say “Yes” to many a
+di cult question, and yet to deny the conclusion to which his
+answers seem to point. His past, he now realizes, has not been
+simply a series of ropes and bon res and humiliations, but
+something vastly more complex, which, as he thinks painfully, “It
+was much worse than that,” was also, he irrationally feels,
+something much better. As it is useless to excoriate his countrymen,
+it is galling now to be pitied as a victim, to accept this ready
+sympathy which is limited only by its failure to accept him as an
+American. He nds himself involved, in another language, in the
+same old battle: the battle for his own identity. To accept the
+reality of his being an American becomes a matter involving his
+integrity and his greatest hopes, for only by accepting this reality
+can be hope to make articulate to himself or to others the
+uniqueness of his experience, and to set free the spirit so long
+anonymous and caged.
+The ambivalence of his status is thrown into relief by his
+encounters with the Negro students from France’s colonies who live
+in Paris. The French African comes from a region and a way of life
+which—at least from the American point of view—is exceedingly
+primitive, and where exploitation takes more naked forms. In
+Paris, the African Negro’s status, conspicuous and subtly
+inconvenient, is that of a colonial; and he leads here the intangibly
+precarious life of someone abruptly and recently uprooted. His
+bitterness is unlike that of his American kinsman in that it is not so
+treacherously likely to be turned against himself. He has, not so
+very many miles away, a homeland to which his relationship, no
+less than his responsibility, is overwhelmingly clear: His country
+must be given—or it must seize—its freedom. This bitter ambition
+is shared by his fellow colonials, with whom he has a common
+language, and whom he has no wish whatever to avoid; without
+whose sustenance, indeed, he would be almost altogether lost in
+Paris. They live in groups together, in the same neighborhoods, in
+
+student hotels and under conditions which cannot fail to impress
+the American as almost unendurable.
+Yet what the American is seeing is not simply the poverty of the
+student but the enormous gap between the European and American
+standards of living. All of the students in the Latin Quarter live in
+ageless, sinister-looking hotels; they are all forced continually to
+choose between cigarettes and cheese at lunch.
+It is true that the poverty and anger which the American Negro
+sees must be related to Europe and not to America. Yet, as he
+wishes for a moment that he were home again, where at least the
+terrain is familiar, there begins to race within him, like the
+despised beat of the tom-tom, echoes of a past which he has not yet
+been able to utilize, intimations of a responsibility which he has
+not yet been able to face. He begins to conjecture how much he has
+gained and lost during his long sojourn in the American republic.
+The African before him has endured privation, injustice, medieval
+cruelty; but the African has not yet endured the utter alienation of
+himself from his people and his past. His mother did not sing
+“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and he has not, all his
+life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced
+straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty.
+They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of
+three hundred years—an alienation too vast to be conquered in an
+evening’s good-will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be
+trapped in speech. This alienation causes the Negro to recognize
+that he is a hybrid. Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of
+his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the
+impact of the happy ending. In white Americans he nds re ected
+—repeated, as it were, in a higher key—his tensions, his terrors,
+his tenderness. Dimly and for the rst time, there begins to fall
+into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the
+lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, esh
+of their esh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared
+each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny
+them, nor can they ever be divorced.
+
+The American Negro cannot explain to the African what surely
+seems in himself to be a want of manliness, of racial pride, a
+maudlin ability to forgive. It is di cult to make clear that he is not
+seeking to forfeit his birthright as a black man, but that, on the
+contrary, it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to
+recognize and make articulate. Perhaps it now occurs to him that
+in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most
+American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one’s
+people is, in sum, the American experience.
+Yet one day he will face his home again; nor can he realistically
+expect to nd overwhelming changes. In America, it is true, the
+appearance is perpetually changing, each generation greeting with
+short-lived exultation yet more dazzling additions to our renowned
+façade. But the ghetto, anxiety, bitterness, and guilt continue to
+breed their indescribable complex of tensions. What time will bring
+Americans is at last their own identity. It is on this dangerous
+voyage and in the same boat that the American Negro will make
+peace with himself and with the voiceless many thousands gone
+before him.
+
+A Question of Identity
+The American student colony in Paris is a social phenomenon so
+amorphous as to at once demand and defy the generality. One is
+far from being in the position of nding not enough to say—one
+nds far too much, and everything one nds is contradictory. What
+one wants to know at bottom, is what they came to nd: to which
+question there are—at least—as many answers as there are faces
+at the café tables.
+The assumed common denominator, which is their military
+experience, does not shed on this question as much light as one
+might hope. For one thing, it becomes impossible, the moment one
+thinks about it, to predicate the existence of a common experience.
+The moment one thinks about it, it becomes apparent that there is
+no such thing. That experience is a private, and a very largely
+speechless a air is the principal truth, perhaps, to which the
+colony under discussion bears witness—though the aggressively
+unreadable face which they, collectively, present also suggests the
+more disturbing possibility that experience may perfectly well be
+meaningless. This loaded speculation aside, it is certainly true that
+whatever this experience has done to them, or for them, whatever
+the e ect has been, is, or will be, is a question to which no one has
+yet given any strikingly coherent answer. Military experience does
+not, furthermore, necessarily mean experience of battle, so that the
+student colony’s common denominator reduces itself to nothing
+more than the fact that all of its members have spent some time in
+uniform. This is the common denominator of their entire
+generation, of which the majority is not to be found in Paris, or,
+for that matter, in Europe. One is at the outset, therefore,
+forbidden to assume that the fact of having surrendered to the
+necessary anonymity of uniform, or of having undergone the shock
+of battle, was enough to occasion this ight from home. The best
+
+that one can do by way of uniting these so disparate identities is
+simply to accept, without comment, the fact of their military
+experience, without questioning its extent; and, further, to suggest
+that they form, by virtue of their presence here, a somewhat
+unexpected minority. Unlike the majority of their fellows, who
+were simply glad to get back home, these have elected to tarry in
+the Old World, among scenes and people unimaginably removed
+from anything they have known. They are willing, apparently, at
+least for a season, to endure the wretched Parisian plumbing, the
+public baths, the Paris age, and dirt—to pursue some end,
+mysterious and largely inarticulate, arbitrarily summed up in the
+verb to study.
+Arbitrarily, because, however hard the ex-GI is studying, it is
+very di cult to believe that it was only for this reason that he
+traveled so far. He is not, usually, studying anything which he
+couldn’t study at home, in far greater comfort. (We are limiting
+ourselves, for the moment, to those people who are—more or less
+seriously—studying, as opposed to those, to be considered later,
+who are merely gold-bricking.) The people, for example, who are
+studying painting, which seems, until one looks around, the best
+possible subject to be studying here, are not studying, after all,
+with Picasso, or Matisse—they are studying with teachers of the
+same caliber as those they would have found in the States. They
+are treated by these teachers with the same highhandedness, and
+they accept their dicta with the very same measure of American
+salt. Nor can it be said that they produce canvases of any greater
+interest than those to be found along Washington Square, or in the
+cold-water ats of New York’s lower east side. There is, au
+contraire, more than a little truth to the contention that the east
+side has a certain edge over Montparnasse, and this in spite of the
+justly renowned Paris light. If we tentatively use—purely by virtue
+of his numbers—the student painter as the nearest possible
+approach to a “typical” student, we nd that his motives for
+coming to Paris are anything but clear. One is forced to suppose
+that it was nothing more than the legend of Paris, not infrequently
+
+at its most vulgar and super cial level. It was certainly no love for
+French tradition, whatever, indeed, in his mind, that tradition may
+be; and, in any case, since he is himself without a tradition, he is ill
+equipped to deal with the traditions of any other people. It was no
+love for their language, which he doesn’t, beyond the most
+inescapable necessities, speak; nor was it any love for their
+history, his grasp of French history being yet more feeble than his
+understanding of his own. It was no love for the monuments,
+cathedrals, palaces, shrines, for which, again, nothing in his
+experience prepares him, and to which, when he is not totally
+indi erent, he brings only the hurried bewilderment of the tourist.
+It was not even any particular admiration, or sympathy for the
+French, or, at least, none strong enough to bear the strain of actual
+contact. He may, at home, have admired their movies, in which
+case, confronting the reality, he tends to feel a little taken in.
+Those images created by Marcel Carné, for example, prove
+themselves treacherous precisely because they are so exact. The
+sordid French hotel room, so admirably detailed by the camera,
+speaking, in its quaintness, and distance, so beautifully of
+romance, undergoes a sea-change, becomes a room positively
+hostile to romance, once it is oneself, and not Jean Gabin, who
+lives there. This is the di erence, simply, between what one desires
+and what the reality insists on—which di erence we will not
+pursue except to observe that, since the reasons which brought the
+student here are so romantic, and incoherent, he has come, in
+e ect, to a city which exists only in his mind. He cushions himself,
+so it would seem, against the shock of reality, by refusing for a
+very long time to recognize Paris at all, but clinging instead to its
+image. This is the reason, perhaps, that Paris for so long fails to
+make any mark on him; and may also be why, when the tension
+between the real and the imagined can no longer be supported, so
+many people undergo a species of breakdown, or take the rst
+boat home.
+For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone
+loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire
+
+d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his
+nose at the Puritans—the city, in brief, where all become drunken
+on the ne old air of freedom. This legend, in the fashion of
+legends, has this much to support it, that it is not at all di cult to
+see how it got started. It is limited, as legends are limited, by being
+—literally—unlivable, and by referring to the past. It is perhaps
+not amazing, therefore, that this legend appears to have virtually
+nothing to do with the life of Paris itself, with the lives, that is, of
+the natives, to whom the city, no less than the legend, belong. The
+charm of this legend proves itself capable of withstanding the most
+improbable excesses of the French bureaucracy, the weirdest
+vagaries of the concierge, the fantastic rents paid for uncomfortable
+apartments, the discomfort itself, and, even, the great confusion
+and despair which is re ected in French politics—and in French
+faces. More, the legend operates to place all of the inconveniences
+endured by the foreigner, to say nothing of the downright misery
+which is the lot of many of the natives, in the gentle glow of the
+picturesque, and the absurd; so that, nally, it is perfectly possible
+to be enamored of Paris while remaining totally indi erent, or
+even hostile to the French. And this is made possible by the one
+person in Paris whom the legend seems least to a ect, who is not
+living it at all, that is, the Parisian himself. He, with his
+impenetrable politesse, and with techniques unspeakably more
+direct, keeps the traveler at an unmistakable arm’s length. Unlucky
+indeed, as well as rare, the traveler who thirsts to know the lives of
+the people—the people don’t want him in their lives. Neither does
+the Parisian exhibit the faintest personal interest, or curiosity,
+concerning the life, or habits, of any stranger. So long as he keeps
+within the law, which, after all, most people have su cient
+ingenuity to do, he may stand on his head, for all the Parisian
+cares. It is this arrogant indi erence on the part of the Parisian,
+with its unpredictable e ects on the traveler, which makes so
+splendid the Paris air, to say nothing whatever of the exhilarating
+e ect it has on the Paris scene.
+
+The American student lives here, then, in a kind of social limbo.
+He is allowed, and he gratefully embraces irresponsibility; and, at
+the same time, since he is an American, he is invested with power,
+whether or not he likes it, however he may choose to con rm or
+deny it. Though the students of any nation, in Paris, are allowed
+irresponsibility, few seem to need it as desperately as Americans
+seem to need it; and none, naturally, move in the same aura of
+power, which sets up in the general breast a perceptible anxiety,
+and wonder, and a perceptible resentment. This is the “catch,” for
+the American, in the Paris freedom: that he becomes here a kind of
+revenant to Europe, the future of which continent, it may be, is in
+his hands. The problems proceeding from the distinction he thus
+nds thrust upon him might not, for a sensibility less de nitively
+lonely, frame so painful a dilemma: but the American wishes to be
+liked as a person, an implied distinction which makes perfect sense
+to him, and none whatever to the European. What the American
+means is that he does not want to be confused with the Marshall
+Plan, Hollywood, the Yankee dollar, television, or Senator
+McCarthy. What the European, in a thoroughly exasperating
+innocence, assumes is that the American cannot, of course, be
+divorced from the so diverse phenomena which make up his
+country, and that he is willing, and able, to clarify the American
+conundrum. If the American cannot do this, his despairing aspect
+seems to say, who, under heaven, can? This moment, which
+instinctive ingenuity delays as long as possible, nevertheless
+arrives, and punctuates the Paris honeymoon. It is the moment, so
+to speak, when one leaves the Paris of legend and nds oneself in
+the real and di cult Paris of the present. At this moment Paris
+ceases to be a city dedicated to la vie bohème, and becomes one of
+the cities of Europe. At this point, too, it may be suggested, the
+legend of Paris has done its deadly work, which is, perhaps, so to
+stun the traveler with freedom that he begins to long for the prison
+of home—home then becoming the place where questions are not
+asked.
+
+It is at this point, precisely, that many and many a student packs
+his bags for home. The transformation which can be e ected, in
+less than a year, in the attitude and aspirations of the youth who
+has divorced himself from the crudities of main street in order to be
+married with European nesse is, to say the very least, astounding.
+His brief period of enchantment having ended, he cannot wait, it
+seems, to look again on his native land—the virtues of which, if
+not less crude, have also become, abruptly, simple, and vital. With
+the air of a man who has but barely escaped tumbling headlong
+into the bottomless pit, he tells you that he can scarcely wait to
+leave this city, which has been revealed to the eye of his maturity
+as old, dirty, crumbling, and dead. The people who were, when he
+arrived at Le Havre, the heirs of the world’s richest culture, the
+possessors of the world’s largest esprit, are really decadent,
+penurious, self-seeking, and false, with no trace of American
+spontaneity, and lacking in the least gratitude for American
+favors. Only America is alive, only Americans are doing anything
+worth mentioning in the arts, or in any other eld of human
+activity: to America, only, the future belongs. Whereas, but only
+yesterday, to confess a fondness for anything American was to be
+suspected of the most indefensible jingoism, to suggest today that
+Europe is not all black is to place oneself under the suspicion of
+harboring treasonable longings. The violence of his embrace of
+things American is embarrassing, not only because one is not quite
+prepared to follow his admirable example, but also because it is
+impossible not to suspect that his present acceptance of his country
+is no less romantic, and unreal, than his earlier rejection. It is as
+easy, after all, and as meaningless, to embrace uncritically the
+cultural sterility of main street as it is to decry it. Both extremes
+avoid the question of whether or not main street is really sterile,
+avoid, in fact—which is the principal convenience of extremes—
+any questions about main street at all. What one vainly listens for
+in this cacophony of a rmation is any echo, however faint of
+individual maturity. It is really quite impossible to be a rmative
+about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to
+remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of
+
+the imagination, made one’s own. This so suddenly a rmative
+student is but changing the fashion of his innocence, nothing being
+more improbable than that he is now prepared, as he insists, to
+embrace his Responsibilities—the very word, in the face of his
+monumental aversion to experience, seems to shrink to the
+dimensions of a new, and rather sinister, frivolity.
+The student, homeward bound, has only chosen, however, to ee
+down the widest road. Of those who remain here, the majority
+have taken roads more devious, and incomparably better hidden—
+so well hidden that they themselves are lost.
+
+One very often nds in this category that student whose
+adaptation to French life seems to have been most perfect, and
+whose studies—of French art, or the drama, the language, or the
+history—give him the greatest right to be here. This student has put
+aside chewing gum forever, he eschews the T-shirt, and the crew
+cut, he can only with di culty be prevailed upon to see an
+American movie, and it is so patent that he is actually studying that
+his appearance at the café tables is never taken as evidence of
+frivolity, but only as proof of his admirable passion to study the
+customs of the country. One assumes that he is living as the French
+live—which assumption, however, is immediately challenged by
+the suspicion that no American can live as the French live, even if
+one could nd an American who wanted to. This student lives,
+nevertheless, with a French family, with whom he speaks French,
+and takes his meals; and he knows, as some students do not, that
+the Place de la Bastille no longer holds the prison. He has read, or
+is reading, all of Racine, Proust, Gide, Sartre, and authors more
+obscure—in the original, naturally. He regularly visits the
+museums, and he considers Arletty to be the most beautiful woman
+and the nest actress in the world. But the world, it seems, has
+become the French world: he is unwilling to recognize any other.
+This so severely cramps the American conversational style, that
+one looks on this student with awe, and some shame—he is so
+spectacularly getting out of his European experience everything it
+
+has to give. He has certainly made contact with the French, and
+isn’t wasting his time in Paris talking to people he might perfectly
+well have met in America. His friends are French, in the classroom,
+in the bistro, on the boulevard, and, of course, at home—it is only
+that one is sometimes driven to wonder what on earth they nd to
+talk about. This wonder is considerably increased when, in the rare
+conversations he condescends to have in English, one discovers
+that, certain picturesque details aside, he seems to know no more
+about life in Paris than everybody knew at home. His friends have,
+it appears, leaped unscathed from the nineteenth into the
+twentieth century, entirely undismayed by any of the reverses
+su ered by their country. This makes them a remarkable band
+indeed, but it is in vain that one attempts to discover anything
+more about them—their conversation being limited, one gathers, to
+remarks about French wine, witticisms concerning l’amour, French
+history, and the glories of Paris. The remarkably limited range of
+their minds is matched only by their perplexing de nition of
+friendship, a de nition which does not seem to include any
+suggestion of communication, still less of intimacy. Since, in short,
+the relationship of this perfectly adapted student to the people he
+now so strenuously adores is based simply on his unwillingness to
+allow them any of the human attributes with which his countrymen
+so confounded him at home, and since his vaunted grasp of their
+history reveals itself as the merest academic platitude, involving
+his imagination not at all, the extent of his immersion in French
+life impresses one nally as the height of arti ciality, and, even, of
+presumption. The most curious thing about the passion with which
+he has embraced the Continent is that it seems to be nothing more
+or less than a means of safeguarding his American simplicity. He
+has placed himself in a kind of strongbox of custom, and refuses to
+see anything in Paris which can’t be seen through a golden haze.
+He is thus protected against reality, or experience, or change, and
+has succeeded in placing beyond the reach of corruption values he
+prefers not to examine. Even his multitudinous French friends help
+him to do this, for it is impossible, after all, to be friends with a
+mob: they are simply a cloud of faces, bearing witness to romance.
+
+Between these two extremes, the student who embraces Home, and
+the student who embraces The Continent—both embraces, as we
+have tried to indicate, being singularly devoid of contact, to say
+nothing of love—there are far more gradations than can be
+suggested here. The American in Europe is everywhere confronted
+with the question of his identity, and this may be taken as the key
+to all the contradictions one encounters when attempting to discuss
+him. Certainly, for the student colony one nds no other common
+denominator—this is all, really, that they have in common, and
+they are distinguished from each other by the ways in which they
+come to terms, or fail to come to terms with their confusion. This
+prodigious question, at home so little recognized, seems, germ-like,
+to be vivi ed in the European air, and to grow disproportionately,
+displacing previous assurances, and producing tensions and
+bewilderments entirely unlooked for. It is not, moreover, a
+question which limits itself to those who are, so to speak, in tra c
+with ideas. It confronts everyone, nding everyone unprepared; it
+is a question with implications not easily escaped, and the attempt
+to escape can precipitate disaster. Our perfectly adapted student,
+for example, should his strongbox of custom break, may nd
+himself hurled into that coterie of gold-bricks who form such a
+spectacular element of the Paris scene that they are often what the
+Parisian has in the foreground of his mind when he wonderingly
+mutters, C’est vraiment les Américains. The great majority of this
+group, having attempted, on more or less personal levels, to lose
+or disguise their antecedents, are reduced to a kind of rubble of
+compulsion. Having cast o all previous disciplines, they have also
+lost the shape which these disciplines made for them and have not
+succeeded in nding any other. Their rejection of the limitations of
+American society has not set them free to function in any other
+society, and their illusions, therefore, remain intact: they have yet
+to be corrupted by the notion that society is never anything less
+than a perfect labyrinth of limitations. They are charmed by the
+re ection that Paris is more than two thousand years old, but it
+escapes them that the Parisian has been in the making just about
+that long, and that one does not, therefore, become Parisian by
+
+virtue of a Paris address. This little band of bohemians, as grimly
+singleminded as any evangelical sect, illustrate, by the very
+ferocity with which they disavow American attitudes, one of the
+most American of attributes, the inability to believe that time is
+real. It is this inability which makes them so romantic about the
+nature of society, and it is this inability which has led them into a
+total confusion about the nature of experience. Society, it would
+seem, is a imsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for
+all the other people, and experience is nothing more than
+sensation—so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one
+the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bravely set out
+to nd, their own personalities, which, having been deprived of all
+nourishment, soon cease, in e ect, to exist; and they arrive,
+nally, at a dangerous disrespect for the personalities of others.
+Though they persist in believing that their present shapelessness is
+freedom, it is observable that this present freedom is unable to
+endure either silence or privacy, and demands, for its ultimate
+expression, a rootless wandering among the cafés. Saint Germain
+des Près, the heart of the American colony, so far from having
+absorbed the American student, has been itself transformed, on
+spring, summer, and fall nights, into a replica, very nearly, of
+Times Square.
+But if this were all one found in the American student colony,
+one would hardly have the heart to discuss it. If the American
+found in Europe only confusion, it would obviously be in nitely
+wiser for him to remain at home. Hidden, however, in the heart of
+the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly
+seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the
+world. This, which has so grandiose and general a ring, is, in fact,
+most personal—the American confusion seeming to be based on
+the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to
+consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced
+him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than
+our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation
+of entire peoples from their forebears. What is overwhelmingly
+
+clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has
+created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and
+individual past. It is, indeed, this past which has thrust upon us our
+present, so troubling role. It is the past lived on the American
+continent, as against that other past, irrecoverable now on the
+shores of Europe, which must sustain us in the present. The truth
+about that past is not that it is too brief, or too super cial, but only
+that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have
+never demanded from it what it has to give. It is this demand
+which the American student in Paris is forced, at length, to make,
+for he has otherwise no identity, no reason for being here, nothing
+to sustain him here. From the vantage point of Europe he discovers
+his own country. And this is a discovery which not only brings to
+an end the alienation of the American from himself, but which also
+makes clear to him, for the rst time, the extent of his involvement
+in the life of Europe.
+
+Equal in Paris
+On the 19th of December, in 1949, when I had been living in Paris
+for a little over a year, I was arrested as a receiver of stolen goods
+and spent eight days in prison. My arrest came about through an
+American tourist whom I had met twice in New York, who had
+been given my name and address and told to look me up. I was
+then living on the top oor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue
+du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous
+establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth,
+in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying
+chambermaids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long long
+dead. The place was run by an ancient Frenchman dressed in an
+elegant black suit which was green with age, who cannot properly
+be described as bewildered or even as being in a state of shock,
+since he had really stopped breathing around 1910. There he sat at
+his desk in the weirdly lit, fantastically furnished lobby, day in and
+day out, greeting each one of his extremely impoverished and
+louche lodgers with a stately inclination of the head that he had no
+doubt been taught in some impossibly remote time was the proper
+way for a propriétaire to greet his guests. If it had not been for his
+daughter, an extremely hardheaded tricoteuse—the inclination of
+her head was chilling and abrupt, like the downbeat of an ax—the
+hotel would certainly have gone bankrupt long before. It was said
+that this old man had not gone farther than the door of his hotel
+for thirty years, which was not at all di cult to believe. He looked
+as though the daylight would have killed him.
+I did not, of course, spend much of my time in this palace. The
+moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity
+of French cafés. This made it rather di cult to look me up, for as
+soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took notebook and fountain
+pen o to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather
+
+a lot of co ee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol,
+but did not get much writing done. But one night, in one of the
+cafés of St. Germain des Près, I was discovered by this New Yorker
+and only because we found ourselves in Paris we immediately
+established the illusion that we had been fast friends back in the
+good old U.S.A. This illusion proved itself too thin to support an
+evening’s drinking, but by that time it was too late. I had
+committed myself to getting him a room in my hotel the next day,
+for he was living in one of the nest of hotels near the Gare St.
+Lazare, where, he said, the propriétaire was a thief, his wife a
+repressed nymphomaniac, the chambermaids “pigs,” and the rent a
+crime. Americans are always talking this way about the French and
+so it did not occur to me that he meant what he said or that he
+would take into his own hands the means of avenging himself on
+the French Republic. It did not occur to me, either, that the means
+which he did take could possibly have brought about such dire
+results, results which were not less dire for being also comic-opera.
+It came as the last of a series of disasters which had perhaps
+been made inevitable by the fact that I had come to Paris
+originally with a little over forty dollars in my pockets, nothing in
+the bank, and no grasp whatever of the French language. It
+developed, shortly, that I had no grasp of the French character
+either. I considered the French an ancient, intelligent, and cultured
+race, which indeed they are. I did not know, however, that ancient
+glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present
+fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the
+role of the intelligence in human a airs; and that no people come
+into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for
+it. This price they cannot, of course, assess, but it is revealed in
+their personalities and in their institutions. The very word
+“institutions,” from my side of the ocean, where, it seemed to me,
+we su ered so cruelly from the lack of them, had a pleasant ring,
+as of safety and order and common sense; one had to come into
+contact with these institutions in order to understand that they
+were also outmoded, exasperating, completely impersonal, and
+
+very often cruel. Similarly, the personality which had seemed from
+a distance to be so large and free had to be dealt with before one
+could see that, if it was large, it was also in exible and, for the
+foreigner, full of strange, high, dusty rooms which could not be
+inhabited. One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien
+culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community
+basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something
+neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being
+nothing more or less than the recorded and visible e ects on a
+body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced
+to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of
+these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle
+of their great men with them has left them richer.
+When my American friend left his hotel to move to mine, he took
+with him, out of pique, a bedsheet belonging to the hotel and put it
+in his suitcase. When he arrived at my hotel I borrowed the sheet,
+since my own were lthy and the chambermaid showed no sign of
+bringing me any clean ones, and put it on my bed. The sheets
+belonging to my hotel I put out in the hall, congratulating myself
+on having thus forced on the attention of the Grand Hôtel du Bac
+the unpleasant state of its linen. Thereafter, since, as it turned out,
+we kept very di erent hours—I got up at noon, when, as I
+gathered by meeting him on the stairs one day, he was only just
+getting in—my new-found friend and I saw very little of each
+other.
+On the evening of the 19th I was sitting thinking melancholy
+thoughts about Christmas and staring at the walls of my room. I
+imagine that I had sold something or that someone had sent me a
+Christmas present, for I remember that I had a little money. In
+those days in Paris, though I oated, so to speak, on a sea of
+acquaintances, I knew almost no one. Many people were
+eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact that they had more
+money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the
+humiliating role of a free-loader; and other people were eliminated
+by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly
+
+insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food,
+humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure.
+It couldn’t, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great
+Adventure; there was a real question in my mind as to which
+would end soonest, the Great Adventure or me. This meant,
+however, that there were many evenings when I sat in my room,
+knowing that I couldn’t work there, and not knowing what to do,
+or whom to see. On this particular evening I went down and
+knocked on the American’s door.
+There were two Frenchmen standing in the room, who
+immediately introduced themselves to me as policemen; which did
+not worry me. I had got used to policemen in Paris bobbing up at
+the most improbable times and places, asking to see one’s carte
+d’identité. These policemen, however, showed very little interest in
+my papers. They were looking for something else. I could not
+imagine what this would be and, since I knew I certainly didn’t
+have it, I scarcely followed the conversation they were having with
+my friend. I gathered that they were looking for some kind of
+gangster and since I wasn’t a gangster and knew that gangsterism
+was not, insofar as he had one, my friend’s style, I was sure that
+the two policemen would presently bow and say Merci, messieurs,
+and leave. For by this time, I remember very clearly, I was dying
+to have a drink and go to dinner.
+I did not have a drink or go to dinner for many days after this,
+and when I did my outraged stomach promptly heaved everything
+up again. For now one of the policemen began to exhibit the most
+vivid interest in me and asked, very politely, if he might see my
+room. To which we mounted, making, I remember, the most
+civilized small talk on the way and even continuing it for some
+moments after we were in the room in which there was certainly
+nothing to be seen but the familiar poverty and disorder of that
+precarious group of people of whatever age, race, country, calling,
+or intention which Paris recognizes as les étudiants and sometimes,
+more ironically and precisely, as les nonconformistes. Then he
+moved to my bed, and in a terrible ash, not quite an instant
+
+before he lifted the bedspread, I understood what he was looking
+for. We looked at the sheet, on which I read, for the rst time,
+lettered in the most brilliant scarlet I have ever seen, the name of
+the hotel from which it had been stolen. It was the rst time the
+word stolen entered my mind. I had certainly seen the hotel
+monogram the day I put the sheet on the bed. It had simply meant
+nothing to me. In New York I had seen hotel monograms on
+everything from silver to soap and towels. Taking things from New
+York hotels was practically a custom, though, I suddenly realized, I
+had never known anyone to take a sheet. Sadly, and without a
+word to me, the inspector took the sheet from the bed, folded it
+under his arm, and we started back downstairs. I understood that I
+was under arrest.
+And so we passed through the lobby, four of us, two of us very
+clearly criminal, under the eyes of the old man and his daughter,
+neither of whom said a word, into the streets where a light rain
+was falling. And I asked, in French, “But is this very serious?”
+For I was thinking, it is, after all, only a sheet, not even new.
+“No,” said one of them. “It’s not serious.”
+“It’s nothing at all,” said the other.
+I took this to mean that we would receive a reprimand at the
+police station and be allowed to go to dinner. Later on I concluded
+that they were not being hypocritical or even trying to comfort us.
+They meant exactly what they said. It was only that they spoke
+another language.
+In Paris everything is very slow. Also, when dealing with the
+bureaucracy, the man you are talking to is never the man you have
+to see. The man you have to see has just gone o to Belgium, or is
+busy with his family, or has just discovered that he is a cuckold; he
+will be in next Tuesday at three o’clock, or sometime in the course
+of the afternoon, or possibly tomorrow, or, possibly, in the next
+ve minutes. But if he is coming in the next ve minutes he will be
+far too busy to be able to see you today. So that I suppose I was
+not really astonished to learn at the commissariat that nothing
+
+could possibly be done about us before The Man arrived in the
+morning. But no, we could not go o and have dinner and come
+back in the morning. Of course he knew that we would come back
+—that was not the question. Indeed, there was no question: we
+would simply have to stay there for the night. We were placed in a
+cell which rather resembled a chicken coop. It was now about
+seven in the evening and I relinquished the thought of dinner and
+began to think of lunch.
+I discouraged the chatter of my New York friend and this left me
+alone with my thoughts. I was beginning to be frightened and I
+bent all my energies, therefore, to keeping my panic under control.
+I began to realize that I was in a country I knew nothing about, in
+the hands of a people I did not understand at all. In a similar
+situation in New York I would have had some idea of what to do
+because I would have had some idea of what to expect. I am not
+speaking now of legality which, like most of the poor, I had never
+for an instant trusted, but of the temperament of the people with
+whom I had to deal. I had become very accomplished in New York
+at guessing and, therefore, to a limited extent manipulating to my
+advantage the reactions of the white world. But this was not New
+York. None of my old weapons could serve me here. I did not know
+what they saw when they looked at me. I knew very well what
+Americans saw when they looked at me and this allowed me to
+play endless and sinister variations on the role which they had
+assigned me; since I knew that it was, for them, of the utmost
+importance that they never be confronted with what, in their own
+personalities, made this role so necessary and gratifying to them, I
+knew that they could never call my hand or, indeed, a ord to
+know what I was doing; so that I moved into every crucial
+situation with the deadly and rather desperate advantages of
+bitterly accumulated perception, of pride and contempt. This is an
+awful sword and shield to carry through the world, and the
+discovery that, in the game I was playing, I did myself a violence
+of which the world, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have been
+capable, was what had driven me out of New York. It was a
+
+strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover
+that my weapons would never again serve me as they had.
+It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I
+found myself were no better or worse than their American
+counterparts. Certainly their uniforms frightened me quite as
+much, and their impersonality, and the threat, always very keenly
+felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissariat
+as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen,
+for example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut
+vendors. The only di erence here was that I did not understand
+these people, did not know what techniques their cruelty took, did
+not know enough about their personalities to see danger coming,
+to ward it o , did not know on what ground to meet it. That
+evening in the commissariat I was not a despised black man. They
+would simply have laughed at me if I had behaved like one. For
+them, I was an American. And here it was they who had the
+advantage, for that word, Américain, gave them some idea, far
+from inaccurate, of what to expect from me. In order to
+corroborate none of their ironical expectations I said nothing and
+did nothing—which was not the way any Frenchman, white or
+black, would have reacted. The question thrusting up from the
+bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who. And this question,
+since a what can get by with skill but a who demands resources,
+was my rst real intimation of what humility must mean.
+In the morning it was still raining. Between nine and ten o’clock
+a black Citroën took us o to the Ile de la Cité, to the great, gray
+Préfecture. I realize now that the questions I put to the various
+policemen who escorted us were always answered in such a way as
+to corroborate what I wished to hear. This was not out of
+politeness, but simply out of indi erence—or, possibly, an ironical
+pity—since each of the policemen knew very well that nothing
+would speed or halt the machine in which I had become entangled.
+They knew I did not know this and there was certainly no point in
+their telling me. In one way or another I would certainly come out
+at the other side—for they also knew that being found with a
+
+stolen bedsheet in one’s possession was not a crime punishable by
+the guillotine. (They had the advantage over me there, too, for
+there were certainly moments later on when I was not so sure.) If I
+did not come out at the other side—well, that was just too bad. So,
+to my question, put while we were in the Citroën—“Will it be over
+today?”—I received a “Oui, bien sûr.” He was not lying. As it
+turned out, the procès-verbal was over that day. Trying to be
+realistic, I dismissed, in the Citroën, all thoughts of lunch and
+pushed my mind ahead to dinner.
+At the Préfecture we were rst placed in a tiny cell, in which it
+was almost impossible either to sit or to lie down. After a couple of
+hours of this we were taken down to an o ce, where, for the rst
+time, I encountered the owner of the bedsheet and where the
+procès-verbal took place. This was simply an interrogation, quite
+chillingly clipped and e cient (so that there was, shortly, no doubt
+in one’s own mind that one should be treated as a criminal), which
+was recorded by a secretary. When it was over, this report was
+given to us to sign. One had, of course, no choice but to sign it,
+even though my mastery of written French was very far from
+certain. We were being held, according to the law in France,
+incommunicado, and all my angry demands to be allowed to speak
+to my embassy or to see a lawyer met with a stony “Oui, oui. Plus
+tard.” The procès-verbal over, we were taken back to the cell, before
+which, shortly, passed the owner of the bedsheet. He said he hoped
+we had slept well, gave a vindictive wink, and disappeared.
+By this time there was only one thing clear: that we had no way
+of controlling the sequence of events and could not possibly guess
+what this sequence would be. It seemed to me, since what I
+regarded as the high point—the procès-verbal—had been passed and
+since the hotel-keeper was once again in possession of his sheet,
+that we might reasonably expect to be released from police custody
+in a matter of hours. We had been detained now for what would
+soon be twenty-four hours, during which time I had learned only
+that the o cial charge against me was receleur. My mental
+shifting, between lunch and dinner, to say nothing of the physical
+
+lack of either of these delights, was beginning to make me dizzy.
+The steady chatter of my friend from New York, who was
+determined to keep my spirits up, made me feel murderous; I was
+praying that some power would release us from this freezing pile
+of stone before the impulse became the act. And I was beginning to
+wonder what was happening in that beautiful city, Paris, which
+lived outside these walls. I wondered how long it would take
+before anyone casually asked, “But where’s Jimmy? He hasn’t been
+around”—and realized, knowing the people I knew, that it would
+take several days.
+Quite late in the afternoon we were taken from our cells;
+handcu ed, each to a separate o cer; led through a maze of steps
+and corridors to the top of the building;
+ngerprinted;
+photographed. As in movies I had seen, I was placed against a
+wall, facing an old-fashioned camera, behind which stood one of
+the most completely cruel and indi erent faces I had ever seen,
+while someone next to me and, therefore, just outside my line of
+vision, read o in a voice from which all human feeling, even
+feeling of the most base description, had long since ed, what must
+be called my public characteristics—which, at that time and in that
+place, seemed anything but that. He might have been roaring to
+the hostile world secrets which I could barely, in the privacy of
+midnight, utter to myself. But he was only reading o my height,
+my features, my approximate weight, my color—that color which,
+in the United States, had often, odd as it may sound, been my
+salvation—the color of my hair, my age, my nationality. A light
+then ashed, the photographer and I staring at each other as
+though there was murder in our hearts, and then it was over.
+Handcu ed again, I was led downstairs to the bottom of the
+building, into a great enclosed shed in which had been gathered
+the very scrapings o the Paris streets. Old, old men, so ruined and
+old that life in them seemed really to prove the miracle of the
+quickening power of the Holy Ghost—for clearly their life was no
+longer their a air, it was no longer even their burden, they were
+simply the clay which had once been touched. And men not so old,
+
+with faces the color of lead and the consistency of oatmeal, eyes
+that made me think of stale café-au-lait spiked with arsenic, bodies
+which could take in food and water—any food and water—and
+pass it out, but which could not do anything more, except possibly,
+at midnight, along the riverbank where rats scurried, rape. And
+young men, harder and crueler than the Paris stones, older by far
+than I, their chronological senior by some ve to seven years. And
+North Africans, old and young, who seemed the only living people
+in this place because they yet retained the grace to be bewildered.
+But they were not bewildered by being in this shed: they were
+simply bewildered because they were no longer in North Africa.
+There was a great hole in the center of this shed, which was the
+common toilet. Near it, though it was impossible to get very far
+from it, stood an old man with white hair, eating a piece of
+camembert. It was at this point, probably, that thought, for me,
+stopped, that physiology, if one may say so, took over. I found
+myself incapable of saying a word, not because I was afraid I
+would cry but because I was afraid I would vomit. And I did not
+think any longer of the city of Paris but my mind ew back to that
+home from which I had ed. I was sure that I would never see it
+any more. And it must have seemed to me that my ight from
+home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it
+had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in
+my life have imagined—lower, far, than anything I had seen in
+that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved, the escape from
+which had soon become the greatest direction of my life. After we
+had been here an hour or so a functionary came and opened the
+door and called out our names. And I was sure that this was my
+release. But I was handcu ed again and led out of the Préfecture
+into the streets—it was dark now, it was still raining—and before
+the steps of the Préfecture stood the great police wagon, doors
+facing me, wide open. The handcu s were taken o , I entered the
+wagon, which was peculiarly constructed. It was divided by a
+narrow aisle, and on each side of the aisle was a series of narrow
+doors. These doors opened on a narrow cubicle, beyond which was
+a door which opened onto another narrow cubicle: three or four
+
+cubicles, each private, with a locking door. I was placed in one of
+them; I remember there was a small vent just above my head
+which let in a little light. The door of my cubicle was locked from
+the outside. I had no idea where this wagon was taking me and, as
+it began to move, I began to cry. I suppose I cried all the way to
+prison, the prison called Fresnes, which is twelve kilometers
+outside of Paris.
+For reasons I have no way at all of understanding, prisoners
+whose last initial is A, B, or C are always sent to Fresnes;
+everybody else is sent to a prison called, rather cynically it seems
+to me, La Santé. I will, obviously, never be allowed to enter La
+Santé, but I was told by people who certainly seemed to know that
+it was in nitely more unbearable than Fresnes. This arouses in me,
+until today, a positive storm of curiosity concerning what I
+promptly began to think of as The Other Prison. My colleague in
+crime, occurring lower in the alphabet, had been sent there and I
+confess that the minute he was gone I missed him. I missed him
+because he was not French and because he was the only person in
+the world who knew that the story I told was true.
+For, once locked in, divested of shoelaces, belt, watch, money,
+papers, nail le, in a freezing cell in which both the window and
+the toilet were broken, with six other adventures, the story I told of
+l’a aire du drap de lit elicited only the wildest amusement or the
+most suspicious disbelief. Among the people who shared my cell
+the rst three days no one, it is true, had been arrested for
+anything much more serious—or, at least, not serious in my eyes. I
+remember that there was a boy who had stolen a knitted sweater
+from a monoprix, who would probably, it was agreed, receive a sixmonth sentence. There was an older man there who had been
+arrested for some kind of petty larceny. There were two North
+Africans, vivid, brutish, and beautiful, who alternated between
+gaiety and fury, not at the fact of their arrest but at the state of the
+cell. None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their
+arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as
+simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world. For,
+
+though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking
+upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that
+they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more
+nearly right about it. The gap between us, which only a gesture I
+made could have bridged, grew steadily, during thirty-six hours,
+wider. I could not make any gesture simply because they
+frightened me. I was unable to accept my imprisonment as a fact,
+even as a temporary fact. I could not, even for a moment, accept
+my present companions as my companions. And they, of course,
+felt this and put it down, with perfect justice, to the fact that I was
+an American.
+There was nothing to do all day long. It appeared that we would
+one day come to trial but no one knew when. We were awakened
+at seven-thirty by a rapping on what I believe is called the Judas,
+that small opening in the door of the cell which allows the guards
+to survey the prisoners. At this rapping we rose from the oor—we
+slept on straw pallets and each of us was covered with one thin
+blanket—and moved to the door of the cell. We peered through the
+opening into the center of the prison, which was, as I remember,
+three tiers high, all gray stone and gunmetal steel, precisely that
+prison I had seen in movies, except that, in the movies, I had not
+known that it was cold in prison. I had not known that when one’s
+shoelaces and belt have been removed one is, in the strangest way,
+demoralized. The necessity of shu ing and the necessity of holding
+up one’s trousers with one hand turn one into a rag doll. And the
+movies fail, of course, to give one any idea of what prison food is
+like. Along the corridor, at seven-thirty, came three men, each
+pushing before him a great garbage can, mounted on wheels. In
+the garbage can of the rst was the bread—this was passed to one
+through the small opening in the door. In the can of the second
+was the co ee. In the can of the third was what was always called
+la soupe, a pallid paste of potatoes which had certainly been
+bubbling on the back of the prison stove long before that rst, so
+momentous revolution. Naturally, it was cold by this time and,
+starving as I was, I could not eat it. I drank the co ee—which was
+
+not co ee—because it was hot, and spent the rest of the day,
+huddled in my blanket, munching on the bread. It was not the
+French bread one bought in bakeries. In the evening the same
+procession returned. At ten-thirty the lights went out. I had a
+recurring dream, each night, a nightmare which always involved
+my mother’s fried chicken. At the moment I was about to eat it
+came the rapping at the door. Silence is really all I remember of
+those rst three days, silence and the color gray.
+I am not sure now whether it was on the third or the fourth day
+that I was taken to trial for the rst time. The days had nothing,
+obviously, to distinguish them from one another. I remember that I
+was very much aware that Christmas Day was approaching and I
+wondered if I was really going to spend Christmas Day in prison.
+And I remember that the rst trial came the day before Christmas
+Eve.
+On the morning of the rst trial I was awakened by hearing my
+name called. I was told, hanging in a kind of void between my
+mother’s fried chicken and the cold prison oor, “Vous préparez.
+Vous êtes extrait”—which simply terri ed me, since I did not know
+what interpretation to put on the word “extrait,” and since my
+cellmates had been amusing themselves with me by telling terrible
+stories about the ine ciency of French prisons, an ine ciency so
+extreme that it had often happened that someone who was
+supposed to be taken out and tried found himself on the wrong line
+and was guillotined instead. The best way of putting my reaction
+to this is to say that, though I knew they were teasing me, it was
+simply not possible for me to totally disbelieve them. As far as I
+was concerned, once in the hands of the law in France, anything
+could happen. I shu ed along with the others who were extrait to
+the center of the prison, trying, rather, to linger in the o ce,
+which seemed the only warm spot in the whole world, and found
+myself again in that dreadful wagon, and was carried again to the
+Ile de la Cité, this time to the Palais de Justice. The entire day,
+except for ten minutes, was spent in one of the cells, rst waiting
+to be tried, then waiting to be taken back to prison.
+
+For I was not tried that day. By and by I was handcu ed and led
+through the halls, upstairs to the courtroom where I found my New
+York friend. We were placed together, both stage-whisperingly
+certain that this was the end of our ordeal. Nevertheless, while I
+waited for our case to be called, my eyes searched the courtroom,
+looking for a face I knew, hoping, anyway, that there was
+someone there who knew me, who would carry to someone outside
+the news that I was in trouble. But there was no one I knew there
+and I had had time to realize that there was probably only one
+man in Paris who could help me, an American patent attorney for
+whom I had worked as an o ce boy. He could have helped me
+because he had a quite solid position and some prestige and would
+have testi ed that, while working for him, I had handled large
+sums of money regularly, which made it rather unlikely that I
+would stoop to tra cking in bedsheets. However, he was
+somewhere in Paris, probably at this very moment enjoying a
+snack and a glass of wine and as far as the possibility of reaching
+him was concerned, he might as well have been on Mars. I tried to
+watch the proceedings and to make my mind a blank. But the
+proceedings were not reassuring. The boy, for example, who had
+stolen the sweater did receive a six-month sentence. It seemed to
+me that all the sentences meted out that day were excessive;
+though, again, it seemed that all the people who were sentenced
+that day had made, or clearly were going to make, crime their
+career. This seemed to be the opinion of the judge, who scarcely
+looked at the prisoners or listened to them; it seemed to be the
+opinion of the prisoners, who scarcely bothered to speak in their
+own behalf; it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers, state
+lawyers for the most part, who were defending them. The great
+impulse of the courtroom seemed to be to put these people where
+they could not be seen—and not because they were o ended at the
+crimes, unless, indeed, they were o ended that the crimes were so
+petty, but because they did not wish to know that their society
+could be counted on to produce, probably in greater and greater
+numbers, a whole body of people for whom crime was the only
+possible career. Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a
+
+society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to
+alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the
+hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-welladvertised right path. And the fact, perhaps, that the French are
+the earth’s least sentimental people and must also be numbered
+among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest,
+youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of
+rehabilitation is scarcely real to them. I confess that this attitude
+on their part raises in me sentiments of exasperation, admiration,
+and despair, revealing as it does, in both the best and the worst
+sense, their renowned and spectacular hard-headedness.
+Finally our case was called and we rose. We gave our names. At
+the point that it developed that we were American the proceedings
+ceased, a hurried consultation took place between the judge and
+what I took to be several lawyers. Someone called out for an
+interpreter. The arresting o cer had forgotten to mention our
+nationalities and there was, therefore, no interpreter in the court.
+Even if our French had been better than it was we would not have
+been allowed to stand trial without an interpreter. Before I clearly
+understood what was happening, I was handcu ed again and led
+out of the courtroom. The trial had been set back for the 27th of
+December.
+I have sometimes wondered if I would ever have got out of
+prison if it had not been for the older man who had been arrested
+for the mysterious petty larceny. He was acquitted that day and
+when he returned to the cell—for he could not be released until
+morning—he found me sitting numbly on the oor, having just
+been prevented, by the sight of a man, all blood, being carried
+back to his cell on a stretcher, from seizing the bars and screaming
+until they let me out. The sight of the man on the stretcher proved,
+however, that screaming would not do much for me. The pettylarceny man went around asking if he could do anything in the
+world outside for those he was leaving behind. When he came to
+me I, at rst, responded, “No, nothing”—for I suppose I had by
+now retreated into the attitude, the earliest I remember, that of my
+
+father, which was simply (since I had lost his God) that nothing
+could help me. And I suppose I will remember with gratitude until I
+die the fact that the man now insisted: “Mais, êtes-vous sûr?” Then
+it swept over me that he was going outside and he instantly
+became my rst contact since the Lord alone knew how long with
+the outside world. At the same time, I remember, I did not really
+believe that he would help me. There was no reason why he
+should. But I gave him the phone number of my attorney friend
+and my own name.
+So, in the middle of the next day, Christmas Eve, I shu ed
+downstairs again, to meet my visitor. He looked extremely well fed
+and sane and clean. He told me I had nothing to worry about any
+more. Only not even he could do anything to make the mill of
+justice grind any faster. He would, however, send me a lawyer of
+his acquaintance who would defend me on the 27th, and he would
+himself, along with several other people, appear as a character
+witness. He gave me a package of Lucky Strikes (which the turnkey
+took from me on the way upstairs) and said that, though it was
+doubtful that there would be any celebration in the prison, he
+would see to it that I got a ne Christmas dinner when I got out.
+And this, somehow, seemed very funny. I remember being
+astonished at the discovery that I was actually laughing. I was, too,
+I imagine, also rather disappointed that my hair had not turned
+white, that my face was clearly not going to bear any marks of
+tragedy, disappointed at bottom, no doubt, to realize, facing him
+in that room, that far worse things had happened to most people
+and that, indeed, to paraphrase my mother, if this was the worst
+thing that ever happened to me I could consider myself among the
+luckiest people ever to be born. He injected—my visitor—into my
+solitary nightmare common sense, the world, and the hint of
+blacker things to come.
+The next day, Christmas, unable to endure my cell, and feeling
+that, after all, the day demanded a gesture, I asked to be allowed
+to go to Mass, hoping to hear some music. But I found myself, for a
+freezing hour and a half, locked in exactly the same kind of cubicle
+
+as in the wagon which had rst brought me to prison, peering
+through a slot placed at the level of the eye at an old Frenchman,
+hatted, overcoated, mu ed, and gloved, preaching in this
+language which I did not understand, to this row of wooden boxes,
+the story of Jesus Christ’s love for men.
+The next day, the 26th, I spent learning a peculiar kind of game,
+played with match-sticks, with my cellmates. For, since I no longer
+felt that I would stay in this cell forever, I was beginning to be
+able to make peace with it for a time. On the 27th I went again to
+trial and, as had been predicted, the case against us was dismissed.
+The story of the drap de lit, nally told, caused great merriment in
+the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were
+“great.” I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was
+meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had
+often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately
+elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider
+themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom
+the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my
+native land that I had resolved to nd a place where I would never
+hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way,
+my life, in my own eyes, began during that rst year in Paris,
+when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and
+never can be stilled.
+
+Stranger in the Village
+From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this
+tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I
+would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean
+that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and
+also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of
+the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an
+American—that there could be people anywhere who had never
+seen a Negro.
+It is a fact that cannot be explained on the basis of the
+inaccessibility of the village. The village is very high, but it is only
+four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne. It is true
+that it is virtually unknown. Few people making plans for a
+holiday would elect to come here. On the other hand, the villagers
+are able, presumably, to come and go as they please—which they
+do: to another town at the foot of the mountain, with a population
+of approximately ve thousand, the nearest place to see a movie
+or go to the bank. In the village there is no movie house, no bank,
+no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station
+wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention
+which the woman next door to me here had never seen. There are
+about six hundred people living here, all Catholic—I conclude this
+from the fact that the Catholic church is open all year round,
+whereas the Protestant chapel, set o on a hill a little removed
+from the village, is open only in the summertime when the tourists
+arrive. There are four or ve hotels, all closed now, and four or
+ve bistros, of which, however, only two do any business during
+the winter. These two do not do a great deal, for life in the village
+seems to end around nine or ten o’clock. There are a few stores,
+butcher, baker, épicerie, a hardware store, and a money-changer—
+who cannot change travelers’ checks, but must send them down to
+
+the bank, an operation which takes two or three days. There is
+something called the Ballet Haus, closed in the winter and used for
+God knows what, certainly not ballet, during the summer. There
+seems to be only one schoolhouse in the village, and this for the
+quite young children; I suppose this to mean that their older
+brothers and sisters at some point descend from these mountains in
+order to complete their education—possibly, again, to the town
+just below. The landscape is absolutely forbidding, mountains
+towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can
+reach. In this white wilderness, men and women and children
+move all day, carrying washing, wood, buckets of milk or water,
+sometimes skiing on Sunday afternoons. All week long boys and
+young men are to be seen shoveling snow o the rooftops, or
+dragging wood down from the forest in sleds.
+The village’s only real attraction, which explains the tourist
+season, is the hot spring water. A disquietingly high proportion of
+these tourists are cripples, or semicripples, who come year after
+year—from other parts of Switzerland, usually—to take the waters.
+This lends the village, at the height of the season, a rather
+terrifying air of sanctity, as though it were a lesser Lourdes. There
+is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in
+the spectacle of a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty
+he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to
+recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on
+deathbeds; and wherever I passed, the rst summer I was here,
+among the native villagers or among the lame, a wind passed with
+me—of astonishment, curiosity, amusement, and outrage. That
+rst summer I stayed two weeks and never intended to return. But
+I did return in the winter, to work; the village o ers, obviously, no
+distractions whatever and has the further advantage of being
+extremely cheap. Now it is winter again, a year later, and I am
+here again. Everyone in the village knows my name, though they
+scarcely ever use it, knows that I come from America—though, this,
+apparently, they will never really believe: black men come from
+Africa—and everyone knows that I am the friend of the son of a
+
+woman who was born here, and that I am staying in their chalet.
+But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the rst day I
+arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the
+streets.
+It must be admitted that in the beginning I was far too shocked
+to have any real reaction. In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted by
+trying to be pleasant—it being a great part of the American
+Negro’s education (long before he goes to school) that he must
+make people “like” him. This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you
+routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the
+situation for which it was designed, which is to say that it did not
+work at all. No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight
+and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted. My smile
+was simply another unheard-of phenomenon which allowed them
+to see my teeth—they did not, really, see my smile and I began to
+think that, should I take to snarling, no one would notice any
+di erence. All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which
+had caused me, in America, a very di erent and almost forgotten
+pain were nothing less than miraculous—or infernal—in the eyes
+of the village people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar,
+that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was
+jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make
+myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more than ve minutes
+some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put
+his ngers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric
+shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did
+not rub o . In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was
+the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no
+element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion
+that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.
+I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now;
+it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each
+time that I walk out of the chalet. The children who shout Neger!
+have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They
+are brimming with good humor and the more daring swell with
+
+pride when I stop to speak with them. Just the same, there are
+days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play
+with them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I
+muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen,
+when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother
+was a nigger. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it
+may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are
+trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
+There is a custom in the village—I am told it is repeated in many
+villages—of “buying” African natives for the purpose of converting
+them to Christianity. There stands in the church all year round a
+small box with a slot for money, decorated with a black gurine,
+and into this box the villagers drop their francs. During the
+carnaval which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces
+blackened—out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine
+like ice—and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond
+heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money
+for the missionaries in Africa. Between the box in the church and
+the blackened children, the village “bought” last year six or eight
+African natives. This was reported to me with pride by the wife of
+one of the bistro owners and I was careful to express astonishment
+and pleasure at the solicitude shown by the village for the souls of
+black folk. The bistro owner’s wife beamed with a pleasure far
+more genuine than my own and seemed to feel that I might now
+breathe more easily concerning the souls of at least six of my
+kinsmen.
+I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the
+price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would
+pay, and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own
+conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world
+(which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a
+Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they
+themselves no longer believed. I thought of white men arriving for
+the rst time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a
+stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace
+
+touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But
+there is a great di erence between being the rst white man to be
+seen by Africans and being the rst black man to be seen by
+whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he
+arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in
+relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without
+a thought of conquest, nd myself among a people whose culture
+controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have
+cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who
+yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with
+which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into
+my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced
+their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today
+can only poison mine.
+And this is so despite everything I may do to feel di erently,
+despite my friendly conversations with the bistro owner’s wife,
+despite their three-year-old son who has at last become my friend,
+despite the saluts and bonsoirs which I exchange with people as I
+walk, despite the fact that I know that no individual can be taken
+to task for what history is doing, or has done. I say that the culture
+of these people controls me—but they can scarcely be held
+responsible for European culture. America comes out of Europe,
+but these people have never seen America, nor have most of them
+seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain.
+Yet they move with an authority which I shall never have; and
+they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village
+but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything
+they have—however unconsciously—inherited.
+For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and
+incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have
+been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point
+of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have
+made the modern world, in e ect, even if they do not know it. The
+most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to
+Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci,
+
+Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something
+to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s
+Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their
+hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few
+centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa,
+watching the conquerors arrive.
+The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also
+absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little
+understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one
+of the things that makes history. Rage can only with di culty, and
+never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence
+and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. This is
+a fact which ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk, having
+never felt this rage and being unable to imagine it, quite fail to
+understand. Also, rage cannot be hidden, it can only be
+dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and
+strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt. There are, no doubt,
+as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as
+there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever
+to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare—rage,
+dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his rst
+realization of the power of white men. What is crucial here is that,
+since white men represent in the black man’s world so heavy a
+weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from
+being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white
+men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white
+man of the jewel of his naïveté, or else to make it cost him dear.
+The black man insists, by whatever means he nds at his
+disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity
+and recognize him as a human being. This is a very charged and
+di cult moment, for there is a great deal of will power involved in
+the white man’s naïveté. Most people are not naturally re ective
+any more than they are naturally malicious, and the white man
+prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because
+it is easier for him thus to preserve his simplicity and avoid being
+
+called to account for crimes committed by his forefathers, or his
+neighbors. He is inescapably aware, nevertheless, that he is in a
+better position in the world than black men are, nor can he quite
+put to death the suspicion that he is hated by black men therefore.
+He does not wish to be hated, neither does he wish to change
+places, and at this point in his uneasiness he can scarcely avoid
+having recourse to those legends which white men have created
+about black men, the most usual e ect of which is that the white
+man nds himself enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language
+which describes hell, as well as the attributes which lead one to
+hell, as being as black as night.
+
+Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the
+root function of language is to control the universe by describing
+it. It is of quite considerable signi cance that black men remain, in
+the imagination, and in overwhelming numbers in fact, beyond the
+disciplines of salvation; and this despite the fact that the West has
+been “buying” African natives for centuries. There is, I should
+hazard, an instantaneous necessity to be divorced from this so
+visibly unsaved stranger, in whose heart, moreover, one cannot
+guess what dreams of vengeance are being nourished; and, at the
+same time, there are few things on earth more attractive than the
+idea of the unspeakable liberty which is allowed the unredeemed.
+When, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make
+himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what
+kind of human being it is. What one’s imagination makes of other
+people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one’s own personality
+and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means
+of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black
+man is enabled to know who the white man is.
+I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in this
+village today as I was the rst summer I arrived, but this is not
+quite true. The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair
+than they did then, and wonder rather more about me. And the
+fact that their wonder now exists on another level is re ected in
+their attitudes and in their eyes. There are the children who make
+
+those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures
+of friendship in the unpredictable fashion of children; other
+children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream
+in genuine anguish as I approach. Some of the older women never
+pass without a friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems
+that they will be able to engage me in conversation; other women
+look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk. Some of
+the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski—partly,
+I gather, because they cannot imagine what I would look like on
+skis—and want to know if I am married, and ask questions about
+my métier. But some of the men have accused le sale nègre—behind
+my back—of stealing wood and there is already in the eyes of
+some of them that peculiar, intent, paranoiac malevolence which
+one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when,
+out walking with their Sunday girl, they see a Negro male
+approach.
+There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and
+the streets of the city in which I was born, between the children
+who shout Neger! today and those who shouted Nigger! yesterday—
+the abyss is experience, the American experience. The syllable
+hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a
+stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same
+syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence
+has occasioned in the American soul.
+For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day,
+and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely
+Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great
+unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and
+seeing black men for the rst time. The shock this spectacle
+a orded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they
+decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is
+true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World
+of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact—and the
+necessity—of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea,
+and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly American
+
+bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have
+had toward all slaves.
+But between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama
+which begins for Americans over three hundred years ago at
+Jamestown, there are at least two di erences to be observed. The
+American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thing, as slaves
+in past epochs had supposed and often done, that he would ever be
+able to wrest the power from his master’s hands. This was a
+supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such
+vast changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it
+only begins, in unprecedented fashion, and with dreadful
+implications, to be resurrected today. But even had this supposition
+persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could
+not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that
+this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet
+remains related to his past, has some means—if only in memory—
+of revering and sustaining the forms of his former life, is able, in
+short, to maintain his identity.
+This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is
+unique among the black men of the world in that his past was
+taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what
+on earth the rst slave found to say to the rst dark child he bore. I
+am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to
+African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far
+will nd his journey through time abruptly arrested by the
+signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for
+his ancestor. At the time—to say nothing of the circumstances—of
+the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the
+American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he
+would ever take power from his master’s hands. There was no
+reason to suppose that his situation would ever change, nor was
+there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been
+di erent. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier,
+to nd a “motive for living under American culture or die.” The
+identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation,
+
+and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most
+intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters.
+For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that
+the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a
+human being, became a burning one for several generations of
+Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of
+those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the
+venom of the epithet Nigger! is derived. It is an argument which
+Europe has never had, and hence Europe quite sincerely fails to
+understand how or why the argument arose in the rst place, why
+its e ects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable,
+why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe’s black
+possessions remained—and do remain—in Europe’s colonies, at
+which remove they represented no threat whatever to European
+identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European
+conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly
+abstract: in e ect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for
+Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable
+part of the general social fabric and no American could escape
+having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to
+make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these
+abstractions reveals the tremendous e ects the presence of the
+Negro has had on the American character.
+When one considers the history of the Negro in America it is of
+the greatest importance to recognize that the moral beliefs of a
+person, or a people, are never really as tenuous as life—which is
+not moral—very often causes them to appear; these create for
+them a frame of reference and a necessary hope, the hope being
+that when life has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above
+themselves and to triumph over life. Life would scarcely be
+bearable if this hope did not exist. Again, even when the worst has
+been said, to betray a belief is not by any means to have put
+oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same
+thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no
+moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize
+
+that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous—
+dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the
+action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that
+confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s
+beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one
+can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. The ideas on which
+American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem
+to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of
+Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American
+continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the
+necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to
+include black men.
+This was, literally, a hard necessity. It was impossible, for one
+thing, for Americans to abandon their beliefs, not only because
+these beliefs alone seemed able to justify the sacri ces they had
+endured and the blood that they had spilled, but also because these
+beliefs a orded them their only bulwark against a moral chaos as
+absolute as the physical chaos of the continent it was their destiny
+to conquer. But in the situation in which Americans found
+themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not
+one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of
+the West, the idea of white supremacy.
+Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and
+the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they
+did not invent it; and it has escaped the world’s notice that those
+very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a certain,
+unprecedented uneasiness over the idea’s life and power, if not,
+indeed, the idea’s validity. The idea of white supremacy rests
+simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization
+(the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all
+previous civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own) and
+are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was
+impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of
+themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white
+men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his
+
+human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the
+overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations
+so fantastic that they approached the pathological.
+At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the
+American white man to nd a way of living with the Negro in
+order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this
+problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch
+law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and
+concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to nd a
+way around it, or (most usually) to nd a way of doing both these
+things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and
+dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that
+“the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white
+men.”
+In this long battle, a battle by no means
+nished, the
+unforeseeable e ects of which will be felt by many future
+generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his
+identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an
+identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America
+endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and
+totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the
+battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to
+the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the
+Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the
+Americans who love him—the Americans who became less than
+themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the
+fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is
+perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to
+white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than
+the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His
+survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to
+turn his peculiar status in the Western world to his own advantage
+and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It
+remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will
+give him sustenance, and a voice.
+
+The cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the
+people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important
+to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it
+cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the
+spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after
+all, longer than I have known him, and in a di erent way, and I
+am terri ed by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the
+crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the
+obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and
+seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I
+doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a
+cathedral because they have never been identi ed with the devil.
+But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me
+in the West before I can hope to change the myth.
+Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of
+the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white
+men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of
+recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in
+which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors
+Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect
+has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as
+unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I
+do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the
+American vision of the world—which allows so little reality,
+generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life,
+which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and
+white—owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to
+maintain between themselves and black men a human separation
+which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne
+in on us—very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very
+much against our will—that this vision of the world is dangerously
+inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral highmindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of
+reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their
+own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state
+
+of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a
+monster.
+The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out
+on the American continent has not only created a new black man,
+it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead
+Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where
+white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I
+am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One
+of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that
+no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of
+black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications,
+it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is
+not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For
+even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the
+perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow,
+perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which
+may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today.
+This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
+
+Introduction
+The machete of memory can cut swiftly or slowly.
+It’s August 4, 2019. Pop and I are watching news of the latest shooting
+rampage. A white supremacist slaughtered twenty people in El Paso
+yesterday. Most of the victims were people who looked like us, people
+whose last names end in z. This shooting and the one in Dayton days before
+have the country aghast. The El Paso shooter’s declared motive—
+preventing “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—has friends talking or posting
+on social media about the possibility we may have to take up arms to
+defend ourselves. No stranger to guns, Pop has other concerns.
+“Those fucking gangs are ruining El Salvador,” he says suddenly, as if
+out of sync with the more urgent news in the Spanish-speaking United
+States. A few minutes earlier, the newscast that reported on the El Paso
+massacre also reported on the relentless killing in the tiny country of titanic
+sorrows that bore him.
+Pop has never met a member of MS-13, the most notorious of these
+gangs. Over the course of several decades, I’ve met dozens, and even
+befriended members of a gang that the president of the United States
+compares to Al-Qaeda and calls “animals” who, he says, have “literally
+taken over towns and cities of the United States.”1 I watch the news and the
+snake in my stomach twists and tightens my gut before the eternal return of
+two figures whose outsize contributions to the cataclysmic cycles of
+Salvadoran violence go back to the early nineties but remain largely
+forgotten: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and two-time US
+attorney general William Barr.2
+
+I nod, as if silently agreeing with Pop’s gangs-as-cause-of-every-problem
+thesis. The snake in my gut lets me know there’s no room to deal with the
+shooting and Giuliani and Barr and Pop all at once.
+“Yeah. You’re right, Pop.”
+The news from El Paso and my friends’ terrified social media responses
+tighten my shoulders and neck, my body reminding me of those times
+someone has tried to hurt or kill me. It brings back a memory of sitting at
+Pop’s dining room table last April. I was helping him pay some overdue
+bills, while he watched Animal Planet. During a commercial break, Pop
+stood suddenly and hobbled back to his bedroom. The soft steady skss-skssskss of his fluffy gray orthopedic slipper rubbing against the faded linoleum
+sounded faster than his usual pace.
+A minute later, another, faster-paced skss-skss-skss signaled he was
+navigating his way through the kitchen toward the living room. As he
+neared the table, he stopped and stood next to me.
+I looked up and smiled at him. He had a strangely familiar look on his
+tense, unshaven face. His eyes like daggers, looking at me with a wrath I
+hadn’t seen since my adolescent years, when our anger was at its mutual
+worst.
+I raised my eyes in disbelief when I saw his hand wrapped tight around
+the dusty, varnished black handle of a machete. Without warning Pop
+swung his machete toward me, screaming, “You drogadicto son of a bitch!
+Stop trying to steal my money!”
+I glanced at the ninety-six-year-old hands clutching the machete’s handle.
+The flags of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador
+on the old souvenir were about to come down on my head. I jumped to
+Pop’s side and grabbed the machete before he could finish the act.
+Pop stood dazed, and frustrated, and alone. I rushed out of the dining
+room to hide the machete downstairs in a safe corner of the garage. He
+rarely went into the garage, since he stopped driving two years ago at age
+ninety-four. From down below, I heard my cousin Ana’s hurried footsteps
+rushing from her room through the kitchen and into the dining room. I
+remained downstairs a few minutes to let my cousin chill Pop out.
+In the cool silence of the garage, a couple of five-by-three-foot cardboard
+boxes sit side by side in the shadows beneath the stairs. The boxes bear
+musty old clothes, cheap new blouses, radios, calculators, TVs and other
+ancient electronics, and outdated toys, remnants of my family’s contraband
+
+empire, once a source of income—and serious family conflict and inner
+conflict of my own.
+Minutes later, the mellifluous guitars and layered three-part harmonies of
+“Golondrina Viajera,” a bittersweet bolero by Trio Los Condes followed by
+the soulful, dreamy sounds of Jose Feliciano singing “La Barca,” another
+nostalgic Pop favorite, signaled Pop’s latest storm had subsided. It was safe
+to come back upstairs.
+Music, we were told some years ago, would help calm Pop’s dementia.
+Doctors predict his process of mental fragmentation will only accelerate
+over time.
+The machete cuts slowly.
+Now we’re watching Alex Trebek start Jeopardy! Months after Pop’s
+outburst, we no longer have machetes in the house, a decision that runs
+contrary to the traditions of Salvadorans in the US. Many of the two to three
+million Salvadorans living here3 since the bloody civil war of the eighties
+and early nineties have souvenir machetes in their homes. Machetes
+adorned the waists of countless men back when most Salvadorans lived in
+the countryside. Revolvers replaced them in the age of the urban majority.
+The image of skinny, droopy immigrant kids strutting into Liborio
+Market in LA’s Pico Union–Westlake district to buy the machetes in the
+nineties lingers. They were among the first mareros I saw. Only later did I
+realize that the machetes those gang members bought gave local media,
+Hollywood, and the LAPD—and eventually the Pentagon and US
+presidents—the exotic ethos they needed to turn the skinny kids into a
+tattoo-faced scourge, “the most violent gang in the world.”
+Those of us in the Pico Union area knew why those early mareros carried
+rocks and baseball bats and bought machetes: the poor immigrant youth
+needed to defend themselves from larger gangs but couldn’t afford the AK47s and other weapons used by the older, richer, more sophisticated Crips,
+Bloods, or Mexican Mafia. Those gangs possessed another, more powerful
+weapon the mareros also lacked: US citizenship.
+The story of the maras and their real violence remains hidden, buried in
+half-truths and myth in a labyrinth of intersecting underworlds—criminal
+and political, revolutionary and reactionary, psychological and cultural.
+Many Salvadorans are mired in simplistic explanations. Even before his
+dementia set in, Pop, for example, agreed with the one of every three
+
+Salvadorans4 who told pollsters they support a Kurtzian solution to the gang
+problem: “Exterminate all the brutes!”5
+The machete makes us hack at ourselves.
+No matter how much I try, Pop won’t ever understand the subterranean
+connections I’ve spent my adult life excavating and documenting in the
+hopes of finding fragments of our heart lost in the darkness. So I resist his
+ancient provocations around things we simply won’t agree on. The framed
+photo of Mom on the mantel—the one in which she’s wearing her favorite
+polka dot blue dress and the pearl necklace he gave her—beckons us to
+overcome the great paradox of Salvadoran life: to speak of the darkness is
+impossible, but to not speak of the darkness is also impossible. Mom’s spirit
+offers a simpler, more effective solution to the paradox: recordar—literally
+“to pass through the heart again.” The two-by-one-foot color photo rests on
+the mantel, inciting us daily to remember, despite the fear of the dark.
+“Death is and always will be a part of life, mijito.” Mom said this often.
+Mom, our great lover of life, was the same woman who wore a wax
+Halloween bracelet with skulls on it in order, she said, “to remind myself
+we’re all mortal.”
+Mom’s love resembled that of many a working Salvadoran mother:
+rebellious with a ferocious passion couched in a preternatural ability to
+curse; the strength to take on the role of sole disciplinarian during my
+father’s emotional absence; and a warm, bubbly disrespect for personal and
+other boundaries. Prior to Mom’s death in 2013, the spot on the mantel
+where her portrait rests was reserved for the old souvenir steel machete.
+Beneath the portrait is the brown mahogany box containing half of her
+remains. Mom left instructions for us to place her ashes at locations
+marking the two cardinal points on her spiritual map of the American
+continent: her hometown of San Vicente and her home in San Francisco’s
+foggy outer Mission neighborhood. For all that he loved his partner of sixty
+years, Pop made me fight to get him to respect Mom’s wish to be cremated,
+arguing in his great grief that “cremation violates our traditions.” Several
+heated discussions later, my siblings and I eventually won him over.
+Mom never let borders—physical, linguistic, cultural, political borders—
+dismember her family. For most of his life, Pop did.
+No mementos, no letters, no pictures of Pop’s family and life in
+Ahuachapán ever graced my parents’ home, except for a painting an artist
+in the Mission District made from a photo of his mother, Mamá Tey.
+
+Throughout my life, our family has been divided by the border between
+memory and forgetting.
+The machete chops up our families.
+Similar borders exist within the country we live in, the United States,
+including borders put up by the media Pop and I watched, the media I
+belong to. The journalist in me watches news of the “Central American
+child refugee crisis” with deep skepticism, a skepticism that often morphs
+into utter disbelief. The half-truths and absolute lies in stories about the
+crisis that even liberal media engages in disturbed me. In the summer of
+2018, I decided to take action and convinced the Columbia Journalism
+Review (CJR) to let a couple of volunteers and me analyze the quality of the
+media coverage of the refugee child separation crisis of earlier that year.
+That year the refugee crisis, MS-13, and caravans generated hundreds of
+stories and dominated the US news cycle for several weeks.6 Most media
+outlets reported the child separation issue as if it was separate from both the
+caravan and gang stories.
+The machete simplifies with the speed of the silicon revolution erasing
+the memory of us from the Mission, the historic neighborhood where we
+were once the majority.
+Our CJR research7 identified some of the roots of the distortion, including
+one that surprised even me: all the stories in all the main media outlets of
+the United States erased Central American experts from the refugee crisis
+story. All of them. There were no US-born or -based Central American
+lawyers, no Central American scholars, no Central American NGO leaders,
+no Central American journalists in any of the coverage on any channel.
+The Central American voices that were included in the news stories about
+the refugee crisis looked more like the stereotypes we’ve come to expect:
+two-dimensional images of refugee mothers’ pain and sound bites of
+refugee child suffering. One major magazine literally cut and pasted a
+picture of a crying child8 who was not separated from her mother and placed
+it next to a picture of the president, beneath a headline of a cover story
+about child separation.
+Video of Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, a teenage Guatemalan
+migrant who died in a South Texas immigrant prison, confirms the
+journalistic and moral crises—and real-life consequences—of erasure.
+Surveillance footage shows Carlos’s last moments. He was diagnosed with
+a flu that caused his temperature to reach 103 degrees. His weakness caused
+
+him to slip from the toilet in his last minutes of life. He fell to the ground,
+his head surrounded by a pool of blood. After a news organization released
+the footage without their permission, Carlos’s parents released the
+following statement: “It’s been really painful for our family to lose
+Carlos . . . but having all these people watching him die on the internet is
+something we couldn’t have imagined in a movie or a nightmare.”9
+The machete dismembers our humanity from our stories.
+Left out of the English-language versions of the refugee crisis and gang
+stories are the Salvadoran culture, politics, and history that underlie them—
+described by the great poet Claribel Alegría and others in sublime and even
+mystical terms. Also left out is any notion of a Salvadoran political culture
+in which one out of every three Salvadorans adopted “radicalized” politics
+against the fascist military dictatorship during the civil war.10 Though it
+might prove useful in the post-COVID-19 world, our ability to organize and
+fight under dire political circumstances doesn’t fit the victim narratives that
+non-Salvadorans ascribe to us. Locking Salvadorans into the violent-orviolated binary is the storytelling tradition that turned an oft-quoted phrase
+from Joan Didion into the definitive English-language statement about us.
+In the almost forty years since Didion wrote her book Salvador, most
+English-language writing about Salvadorans and El Salvador remains a
+variation on her theme: “Terror is the given of the place.”
+Where most see the refugee crisis as “new,” I see the longue durée of
+history and memory. Where many see the story beginning at the border, I
+see the time-space continuum of violence, migration, and forgetting that
+extends far beyond and below the US-Mexico border. Where others see
+mine as a Central American story, I see it as a story about the United States.
+Just six years after the Vietnam War ended, my family and all other
+Salvadorans started living with the profound consequences of the Reagan
+administration’s decision to draw a line in the sand, as it spent billions to
+bolster the universally condemned Salvadoran government and military in
+their war against the guerrilleros of the Farabundo Martí National
+Liberation Front (FMLN). The FMLN was the Salvadoran embodiment of
+what Reagan referred to as the “evil empire” of communism. By the end of
+the war, seventy-five to eighty thousand people had been killed in a country
+of just over five million that’s the size of Massachusetts. Most of the
+innocents were slaughtered by their own government, according to the
+United Nations and international human rights groups. I’m the son of
+
+Salvadorans, so the ongoing humanitarian crisis of violence, perpetual war,
+and mass migration is, before anything else, personal.
+The machete severs any understanding that epic history is a stitching
+together of intimate histories.
+This is why I decided, in 2015, to embark on my own life adventure: a
+journey along the 2,500-mile chain of mass graves, forgotten dead, and
+devalued life that begins in wartime El Salvador and travels deep into the
+remote tropical forests, where gangs and governments have killed,
+dismembered, and buried their victims for decades. I’ve interviewed
+countless refugees who’ve braved the migrant trail where cartels and
+security forces have been digging mass graves for their victims since the
+wars in Central America ended in the 1990s. And I’ve traversed the
+southwestern border states to watch as the pox came to my house, the
+United States, where I visited mass graves dug by local Texas officials to
+bury migrant children and mothers and fathers whose remains were put in
+burlap bags and milk crates after they died during the migration wave of
+2014. Leaked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memos show
+that the US government builds child and mom refugee prisons in remote
+South Texas for silent reasons of state11: in order to make it difficult for
+media and immigration advocates to report on and advocate for those
+fleeing failed policies in the Southern Hemisphere, many of which the
+United States had a direct hand in creating. The institutional denial of the
+destruction of Central American child refugee innocence puts up borders to
+protect and sustain the myth of American innocence shared by
+conservatives and liberals alike.
+Different circumstances in each country yield the same result: the
+remains of Salvadoran children and adults buried without investigation into
+their deaths, unstoried, and without remembrance, regardless of who is
+president in Mexico, the United States, or El Salvador, the country where
+the first history department at a public university was established just
+eighteen years ago, in 2001. The migrant journey is nothing if not a
+testament to the true constitution of countries.
+We’re all dismembered from above by that ultimate machete of memory:
+borders.
+My own childhood “American” innocence was protected by my family.
+Pop cordoned off key parts of his own story, leaving me to sort through and
+try to make sense of the half-truths and outright myths of my family’s
+
+history. My lack of access to these lost fragments of memory, my ignorance
+of this history, almost got me killed.
+I myself have been a party to silent dismemberment from above,
+remaining quiet about painful—and inspiring—secrets I held in the
+shadows for decades. Separated from my self, my experience, my history, I
+was dismembered, to the point of wanting to do myself in. I remembered
+this during visits to children caged in immigrant prisons where their soft
+voices uttered that hardest of realities, “Quiero morirme.” Psychologists
+treating them told me that one of the primary ways they treat these children
+involves creating conditions for them to reconstitute the fragments of
+themselves into stories they can share, to stir the memory and imagination
+of that part of themselves that’s still resilient and powerful, something we
+will all need to survive and move forward in this fragmented world of
+perpetual crisis.
+What I am about to share is my best effort at reconstituting the layered
+and discontinuous fragments of my forgotten, macheted self.
+Mine is the story of the re-membering that saved my life. Mine is the
+story of unforgetting.
+
+Prologue
+Los Angeles, California
+May 1992
+
+Staccato pops of rotor blades on the helicopters above us twisted and
+tangled my innards. LAPD’s helicopters didn’t seem to bother Leland the
+way they did me. His surroundings had him too busy to notice either the
+copters or my gritted teeth. Leland stood silently mesmerized by the
+panorama of ruin surrounding his lime green Buick LeSabre: blackened
+cars, burned-out swap meets, fast-food restaurants, and crowded apartment
+buildings, hollowed out as if Molotoved by revolucionario students back in
+wartime El Salvador.
+We were on the northeast corner of MacArthur Park, the spiritual and
+criminal center of the Pico Union–Westlake neighborhood of LA, a densely
+populated immigrant community that, during the week of April 29 to May
+4, 1992—just days before—had become one of the sites of the most
+destructive riots in US history.1 After a court acquitted four LAPD officers
+who had been videotaped beating Rodney King, years of rage over racial
+inequality and police brutality bubbling below the surface burst onto the
+streets of LA.
+Wherever he turned, Leland Chen, representative of a big corporation
+visiting our nonprofit, the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN),
+to consider giving us a major donation, stood transfixed, his eyes darting
+back and forth across the blackened landscape. The slick, impenetrable wall
+created by his round designer glasses, pinstripe suit, and expensive
+
+feathered haircut had been breached by the scale of the destruction all
+around us, giving way to a vulnerability that tethered him to me. He stayed
+physically close to me and asked a lot of questions about our surroundings,
+as if on a deadly safari. I worried that the shock would distract him from
+considering giving CARECEN seed funding to start a youth program.
+Leland looked westward, toward the tall buildings on Wilshire
+Boulevard, where the moguls, movie stars, and mighty politicians who had
+once called the Art Deco neighborhood home had vanished long ago. One
+block east of us were the CARECEN offices, located on the same palmlined street where Raymond Chandler turned his Lost Generation
+disillusionment into noir, hard-boiled detective novels and films about LA’s
+shadow world. Highest among the towers of faded fame and fortune is the
+historic twelve-story Wilshire Royale apartment building with a gigantic
+US flag on top, billowing above the mile-and-a-half radius of destruction
+wrought by the red-orange flames of the riots.
+“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. The smell of burned wood and plastic
+filled my nostrils as we walked toward the southeast corner of the park. “I
+didn’t even know there was rioting here. It looks like a war zone.”
+No. It doesn’t, Tito, my adolescent, rebellious, crazy side fired back
+silently, my stomach hardening and teeth clenching as if I was preparing to
+get punched or kicked. War looks like war. Nothing else.
+Leland’s reaction to the riots felt predictable. His response was similar to
+those I’d heard during post-riot bus tours guided by CARECEN staff—
+urban safaris to view the damage that included all manner of visitors, from
+heads of major philanthropic foundations to Fortune 500 executives,
+international scholars, national religious leaders, and members of Congress.
+All parroted the war analogy. CARECEN staff had met many dignitaries,
+including the young Arkansas governor challenging George H. W. Bush for
+the presidency, Bill Clinton.
+I was jaded. Cansadisimo. I’d had enough of all this Virgil-leadingDante-through-hell shit. Leland had it within his power to help us create
+jobs and education programs for at-risk kids in our crowded corner in the
+City of Angels, some of whom had taken a torch to it. So I dug deep for
+some patience.
+“Who put up those barriers?” he asked, looking back at one of the many
+thick, brown steel poles stretching across entire streets throughout parts of
+
+the neighborhood with big signs that said NARCOTICS ENFORCEMENT ZONE,
+RESIDENTS ONLY.
+“They’re the borders LAPD put up to try and isolate the gangs,” I said.
+“LAPD’s CRASH anti-gang units use the barriers to play members of one
+gang off against those of another. They also use false arrests, falsifying
+evidence, and other stuff.”
+“Which gangs?”
+“Salvadoran gangs,” I responded tersely.
+“Do the barriers work?”
+“They do nothing to reduce crime but are quite successful in helping
+escalate violence by reinforcing mental barriers between members of rival
+gangs.”
+“No!”
+“Yes. It’s like they made young homies forget they were friends and, in
+some cases, family, before the riots.”
+Leland said nothing, but his eyes were wide. We walked half a block
+farther south, down to the corner of Seventh and Alvarado. Standing on the
+north side of the corner were the evangelicos. Today the Gloria-a-Dioses of
+the Bible-thumping brothers with the bullhorn drowned out the Spanishspeaking tongues of the miqueros, thickset guys wearing dress shirts, jeans,
+and dress shoes, spewing out promises of the legal identity contained in the
+shiny, laminated micas. Other, gruffer, tattooed men, wearing thick chains,
+tank tops, and jeans, waited for passersby before saying in raspier tones,
+“Roca, roca. Roca-roca-roca.”
+“What are they selling?” Leland asked.
+“Crack cocaine.”
+I didn’t tell him Pico Union was the main hub of the crack trade north of
+South Central LA. Nor did I let him know that the park’s southeastern
+corner was one of the deadliest in the country.
+“OK, let’s keep walking, Leland.”
+In front of us was the fountain at the center of the lake, the beautiful
+center of the cyclone that had just hit the Pico Union–Westlake district.
+Leland looked westward again, at the constant movement of people filling
+the park—immigrant mothers pushing baby carriages, Mayan men and
+women wearing flowery traditional clothing and selling candy, kids on
+bikes.
+“Ground Zero is over there, near Ninth.”
+
+“Ground Zero?”
+“Yes,” I said. “Ground Zero, the place they say the first mara was born:
+the 7-Eleven Locos.”2
+“You mean MS-13?”
+“Yes. But they didn’t call themselves that till later. They started off as a
+bunch of long-haired stoner kids in tight jeans, smoking pot and hanging in
+front of a 7-Eleven on Westmoreland.”
+“Why there?”
+“Don’t know. These skinny kids came together out of immigrant
+loneliness and their love of Ronnie James Dio and Metallica,” I said. “Their
+hardcore violence is a relatively recent development. Even today, most gang
+members aren’t killers.”
+“But weren’t the gangs the ones behind all the rioting in Pico Union?”
+Leland asked, parroting talking points repeated by Bush attorney general
+William Barr after the riots.
+“They were involved—but so were thousands of others, including white
+folks.”
+Leland looked perplexed. But then he said, “Wow! That’s gorgeous!” as
+he gazed at the sunny sparkle of the downtown skyline mirrored on and
+moved by the lake’s ripples.
+Just a few weeks ago, on Sunday, January 19, 1992, between five and ten
+thousand* Salvadorans had gathered around the lake to celebrate one of the
+most important moments of our lives: the end of the Salvadoran Civil War.3
+The end of the Cold War reinforced the efforts of the Salvadoran
+government to crush the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National
+Liberation Front (FMLN), which had been fighting for twelve years to end
+the extreme endemic poverty in El Salvador and the mass murders
+committed by the US-backed fascist military dictatorship. One of the
+bloodiest, most barbaric wars on the continent had ended. More than one of
+every three Salvadorans who responded to a 1996 survey said a family
+member had been killed during the war.4 All of us had friends and family
+members among them. That day, longtime enemies shook hands and
+hugged next to children born and bred entirely in times of war. Even gang
+members who considered themselves rivals temporarily put aside their
+differences in the spirit of peace.
+Leland looked down at the water beneath him, his nonresponse to my
+comments indicating his apparent disinterest in hearing about the war and
+
+our efforts to start overcoming its effects.
+I, too, looked at the tiny black dots on the surface of the dark, algae-green
+lake. Leland and I were still taking in the sights around the lake and nonstop
+activity of the park when somebody walked up behind us, grabbed me, and
+said, “Hands up. It’s La Migra!”
+I turned around. There, greeting me with the biggest, brightest smile
+beneath the ashen skies above MacArthur Park, was José, the first MS-13
+member I’d come to know personally. I smiled back at him. Leland didn’t.
+He was too busy looking the kid over, his gaze gliding quickly past the
+young man’s thick, carefully coiffed, semi-pompadour hairstyle, his
+heavyset build, and gigantic smile. Instead, Leland eyed the sixteen-yearold’s T-shirt, khakis, and winos—canvas shoes—before focusing his gaze
+on his biggest concern: the big, beautiful MS tattooed in calligraphy on
+José’s forearm. Leland looked like he was about to shit his pants. He
+glanced back at me again for reassurance.
+“José and his mom are our clients,” I said in an especially comforting
+tone, the guide letting the safari spectator know the lion won’t bite him.
+“Lots of gang members have family that are our clients. The gangs have
+declared CARECEN off-limits.”
+His look—a combination of dumbfoundedness and fear—told me he still
+didn’t get it.
+“That means we’re safe,” I said.
+“Q-vo, homes,” José quickly greeted him, intuiting the need to chill my
+tourist guest out. “Nice to meet you.”
+“Hello, José,” Leland responded, before extending his hand with a
+hesitation that made the young MS member and me look at each other.
+“Nice to meet you, too.” That awkward silence and the tension of José and
+me fighting to keep straight faces filled the space between us.
+“Puta, Lovato!” José said in the playful way that Pop, Mom, Mamá Tey,
+and most other Salvadorans regularly use the word for prostitute as an
+exclamation. “When you guys gonna get my mom and me our papeles? We
+been waitin’ for a while.”
+José and his mom were among the thousands of undocumented families
+who came to CARECEN seeking legal help after the Reagan and Bush
+administrations rejected 97 percent of all Salvadoran political asylum
+claims, one of the only ways for them to gain legal status. Their kids often
+
+found solace and community—and protection from the bigger black and
+Mexican gangs—in the maras. José’s father wasn’t in the picture.
+When I was first getting to know him, José had told me about his odyssey
+as an “unaccompanied minor.” As a seven-year-old he’d fled his poor, wartorn neighborhood in San Salvador and crossed the border, one of thousands
+of children forced by the conflict to undertake the great migration journey
+in hopes of survival and relative “stability,” if such a thing even existed.
+“He’s a good kid,” I said, “when he’s not being a smartass.”
+José smiled.
+“The cops are getting out of hand, Lovato.”
+“How’s that?”
+“The family of a vato I know said he had all these bruises and scars from
+a beating the chota gave him during the riots. They said they tortured him
+and then gave him over to the INS”—the Immigration and Naturalization
+Service. José’s words had a familiar ring. CARECEN had documented
+many similar cases of abuse during the riots. “Fuck the chota, homes. Fuck
+them.”
+A distaste for the infamous cops of Rampart station bonded José and me,
+as did one of the great loves of our lives: lowrider oldies.
+“Dang, vato,” José said as he scanned the park, his friendly gaze landing
+on the evangelical preachers who had started singing. “Those religious
+tunes make me wanna puke. I’d rather be listenin’ to some firme rolitas
+with my jaina”—some cool songs with my girlfriend.
+“Órale,” the resentful former evangelico in me responded. We were
+connecting in Caló, a once secret insider lingo first developed by the Roma
+people,5 especially those involved in illicit activities in the ghettos of
+sixteenth-century Spain, some of whom migrated to the New World. Like
+the Roma and the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, José’s
+generation and my generation of gang and non-gang California Latino
+youth used Caló for friendship, for secrets, for love, and for war.
+“Hey, Lovato,” he said to me in an aside, as Leland wandered away in
+curiosity—or fear. “Shit’s getting heavy. I need to talk wit’ you, ’ey.” His
+tone conveyed an urgency that caught my attention. Before we could
+continue, however, José saw some of his homies across the park and left to
+join them, saying as he did, “Ay te watcho, Lo-Vato.”
+His abrupt departure left a lot of unanswered questions, but I couldn’t do
+much about it. I had to give Leland the rest of the tour.
+
+“What’s wrong, Roberto?” Leland asked me, clearly afraid he was in
+danger.
+“Nothing. It’s just that, after years of relative peace between them, the
+maras are increasing their drive-bys, escalating violence for reasons we’re
+not entirely clear about.”
+“Really?”
+“Yeah. We suspect LAPD’s Rampart division has a hand in it. I’m
+worried for kids like José. That’s all.”
+“Oh. OK.”
+“So, Leland,” I began, hoping that meeting José had left him sympathetic
+to our cause. “We’re hoping your support for our youth program can help us
+try to do something to help decrease the violence.” With the money,
+CARECEN would work to draw José and other youths away from gang life
+by providing jobs, job training, community service, and other opportunities
+to young people in the neighborhood.
+“We’ve already made commitments to groups in South Central LA, and
+I’m just not sure we can swing it, Roberto,” he responded.
+Damn it. Here I am doing the urban safari tour, answering all his fucking
+questions, everything short of begging, only to have his punk ass reject us.
+Shit.
+I drove back toward the ABC coffee shop, a spot on Bonnie Brae, where
+I liked to conduct business over Korean food, tacos, and pupusas. I prepared
+to try one last time to persuade him, before he left the gates of our little hell
+for the blue skies beyond LAX. We parked Leland’s rented LeSabre across
+from the CARECEN office, a gorgeous, black-and-white Eastlake Victorian
+at 668 South Bonnie Brae. Leland and I started walking southward, toward
+ABC. All around us, on streets crossing Wilshire, were more rows of
+hulking brick SRO residences packed with Mexican and Salvadoran
+migrants.
+Shortly after we ordered, Leland stood and said, “I’ll be right back. I
+have to make a phone call.” He rushed out to the public phone stand near
+the southeast corner of Bonnie Brae and Seventh. Across the street from the
+phone booth, several young men in tank tops and jeans were hanging out in
+front of a big wall covered with MS-13 calligraphy and other graffiti.
+I was lost in daydreams of visiting sunny beaches in postwar El Salvador
+when the all-too-familiar staccato sound rang out on Bonnie Brae: bambam-bam!
+
+Somebody was firing what sounded like one of Pop’s .38s. The shots
+continued, followed by the sound of shattering glass. Screams of mothers
+rang out across the street. More clips from a pistol of an unknown caliber
+followed. Bam, bam, bam-bam-bam! The sound of car tires skidding
+followed the dark, heavy rain of more glass shattering.
+“Holy shit!” someone beside me screamed as he hid beneath his table.
+“They’re shooting! They’re shooting!”
+An imaginary bullet whistling into my head or chest kept me on the
+ground, ducking for cover. Around me, ABC’s workers and customers did
+the same.
+Peeking out through the ABC window, I saw people fleeing in all
+directions. Then I remembered Leland. Fuck.
+As the shots continued, I crept to the front of the restaurant, staying low
+to the ground, to see where Leland had landed. I spotted the young guys in
+tank tops chasing a car with their revolvers, but couldn’t see Leland. At that
+moment, the Salvadoreño part of me—the part that has been in similar
+situations during the civil war—took over. My breathing slowed. I inhaled
+deeply, eyes wide open, as if taking in everything around me. The
+automatic, safety-seeking pilot of a young adult life of risks acknowledged
+the fear and took over my body, focused my mind. I breathed in again, as
+my sense of responsibility moved me to find Leland.
+I crawled outside and spotted him ducking behind the phone booth. He
+looked like he wanted to scream as bullets whistled and burst just across the
+street from him. I crawled across the sidewalk to the phone booth and
+ducked next to him. I grabbed Leland’s arm and we both crawled back into
+the restaurant.
+A long Pico Union minute later, the shooting stopped. Minutes after that,
+several cars from the Rampart police station drove up. The drive-by
+incident had ended with no blood, no casualties.
+Unfortunately, a few weeks later, we got word of another drive-by
+shooting, one that left the blood of two victims on the sidewalk. One of
+those victims was José.
+The end of the war months before had convinced us all that time and
+history and God all moved forward along the straight line of progress. We’d
+believed that, depending on our ideological bent, either providence or the
+proletariat was ushering in an era of peace unknown to generations of
+Salvadorans. The mara violence that escalated following the LA riots of
+
+April 1992 reminded us that time is cyclical, and that violence moves in
+spirals as the innocent choose between becoming the violent or the violated
+—or both.
+
+Part I
+
+1
+
+Karnes City, Texas
+2015
+
+“I’m ready to show you the picture I’m drawing,” an ebullient David
+declares. His mother, Elena, gently asks him to take the crayons and go
+draw in the play area so the adults can talk. My friend Úrsula and I are
+sitting with Elena at a white plastic picnic table. Watching us on their
+monitors, somewhere behind the windowless, dull mustard walls of the
+meeting room, are the tattooed Tejanas, former fracking-industry employees
+hired by the prison corporation to run this immigrant “detention” facility.
+Before he walks away, six-year-old David spots me eyeing his drawing: an
+egg-shaped cockpit, two propeller blades, landing skids, and a searchlight
+illuminating stick-bodied people on the ground below.
+An invitation to speak at the UT Austin conference on refugee youth and
+gangs turned out to be more than I bargained for. I hadn’t planned to face
+real refugees who’d escaped the maras of Central America only to end up at
+the prison in Karnes. Karnes is one of many South Texan agricultural
+towns, deadened from deep below by fracking, now turned prison town
+after the oil boom economy busted. Like dozens of other facilities the US
+government built in remote regions throughout the country—converted
+prisons and similarly unsanitary makeshift concrete concentration camps,
+complete with cages—the Karnes prison now houses mothers and their
+children following the most recent mass exodus from Central America, in
+July 2014.1 It’s a place the US government takes young noncitizen souls to
+be forgotten.
+
+But Elena and other mothers and their children have different plans.
+They’re clandestinely preparing to wage war against oblivion.
+“What the women and children jailed here want more than anything,”
+Úrsula declares, as she looks into one of the security cameras, “is to go to
+misa.”
+“Church? That’s what they want most? To go to church?”
+“Yes,” an emphatic and somewhat incredulous Úrsula snaps. “Church.”
+The tightness in her forehead, jaw, and lips signal urgency—probable
+signs of an epic struggle to stop her tongue from firing off an “¡Idiota!”
+“Elena is a leader in the church,” Úrsula says in an irritated singsong
+Salvadoran tone.
+“Ahh,” I say in a voice that hopefully indicates that I finally get their
+coded misa messages.
+On the drive down from Austin with her scholar husband, Felipe, Úrsula
+explained that, with the help of her organization, the Human Rights
+Alliance, Elena and the other mothers are organizing protests using the code
+word misa. At an agreed-upon date next month, several of the women and
+children will secretly release a statement announcing a hunger strike. Úrsula
+and her organization will circulate the statement to the media and facilitate
+phone interviews with inmates. Other mothers and children will create signs
+and protest when the media arrives.
+Elena’s power, her organizing other inmates in coded language en voz
+bajita, springs from the same cultural, historical wells of repression and
+rebellion lost in most news reports. For Salvadorans and other Central
+Americans, the “refugee crisis” and “gang problem” in those reports are
+hardly new.
+The sight of the imprisoned curly-haired kiddie Caravaggio’s drawing
+stirs the light and dark of my imagination. David reminds me of my former
+partner Angela’s son, Gio. I helped Angela raise Gio starting when he was
+about David’s age. When Angela and I separated a few months ago, I lost
+the closest thing I’ve known to having a family of my own. Looking at
+David, I’m fragmented again, divided between the need to speak out and a
+desire to remain silent about such painful Salvadoran things in an attempt to
+move on. Once again, I’m unsure of my life’s direction.
+“We saw the helicopters flying when we were crossing the border,” Elena
+says.
+
+David’s crayon helicopter scene has a familiarity accumulated over
+decades of seeing such drawings from Salvadoran kids like him: scriggly
+drawings of bombed adobe houses drawn by children in the orphan camps
+that housed thousands of displaced people in Chalatenango and other war
+zones of the late eighties; drawings by unaccompanied minors arriving in
+Los Angeles in the early nineties. Some of those refugee kids in LA drew
+helicopters with similar black crayon streaks shooting out of them onto
+houses and people in what looked like a crayon rural El Salvador, the
+country where, during the war, the business and military elites used Boy
+Scout troops as prep schools for death squads. Others drew pictures of
+being chased by the black-and-white cars—LAPD’s infamous Rampart
+division. A few of these refugee kids have gone on to become members of
+MS-13 and other maras.
+Elena’s distracted, gazing at her boy as he draws without ceasing. “David
+got anxious and depressed, after being here for seven months,” she says.
+“He constantly asks me, ‘Mommy, when are we going to leave?’” She
+pauses to catch her breath, before turning back to Úrsula.
+Soon Elena and Úrsula are speaking in the misa code about the upcoming
+hunger strike again. Elena shifts in her seat. With limited time, she’s caught
+between plotting actions and her baby boy’s well-being. She returns to him.
+“I tell the guards about his anxiety,” she continues, “and they just say
+‘Stop lying’ or ‘Have him drink water and he’ll feel better.’” Beneath
+Elena’s cool is the same sense of confinement caused by gangs back home,
+in neighborhoods with colorful, crumbling walls bearing three fateful words
+that can mark the border between life and death in El Salvador: VER, OÍR Y
+CALLAR—a daily reminder of the mara grip obliging residents “to see, hear,
+and shut up”—or die. This sense of confinement migrated with her and her
+family on the Bestia, the deadly freight train that she and David climbed
+aboard, risking dismemberment and death as they sat atop the freight cars
+that cross a Mexican landscape dotted with gangs and drug cartels, to
+Karnes. Here, the sense of confinement worsens. The catastrophic
+combination of internment and accumulated fear has driven some moms to
+slit their wrists2 and boys to hang themselves.3 Psychologists have told me
+that the brains of younger kids like David are shrinking from being
+confined like this for more than six weeks.
+Elena’s wearing a flowered blue top, the kind my mom, sister, and every
+Salvadoran woman has worn happily for all recorded time. She seems about
+
+forty with a distinguished look, and her greenish brown eyes are
+overflowing with desperation. The fold beneath them speaks of many
+sleepless nights. Still, their warmth is undiminished, as is her inner strength.
+“Where are you from?” Elena asks, seemingly somewhat mistrustful of
+the stranger at the table, me.
+“I was born in San Francisco, but my mother is from San Vicente, and
+my father is from Ahuachapán.”
+“I’m from Ahuachapán!” she exclaims. Some of the hesitant muscles in
+her face loosen in the sweet relief of recognition.
+“Ahuachapán is gorgeous,” I say, while also imagining the walls in Pop’s
+hometown tagged everywhere with VER, OÍR Y CALLAR. This phrase also kind
+of described my father’s official policy toward his birthplace: silencio. Pop
+didn’t like to talk about Don Miguel Rodríguez, his father—my grandfather
+—and the rest of his family in Ahuachapán, the storied and violent coffee
+heartland of El Salvador. Puro silencio. That silence meant my siblings and
+I were not to ask about Pop’s father or his family in Ahuachapán. Nunca.
+“They’re torturing us, trying to keep us quiet in here,” Elena says,
+shifting the conversation to high gear, her eyes bubbling. “We really, really
+need to go to misa.”
+Elena’s plight concerns me; David’s terrifies me.
+“Will you help us, Roberto?” Elena asks.
+A smiling David returns to the table. He can no longer wait to tell his
+story and hurries over to share his latest masterpiece, featuring turquoise
+clouds, a big white moon, blue houses with purple roofs, and a group of
+brown, stick-figure men, women, and children, many with their feet
+pointing sideways,* walking under a bright yellow crayon streak. He’s
+painted something on a piece of paper. He’s also drawn something else on
+his caramel-colored palm.
+“Here,” he says with a bright face beaming over the paper, “is how I hope
+we can live here.” His audience smiles.
+“And here on my hand is what it is like back home,” he says of the
+drawing made with markers. He looks unsure as he reveals the picture of a
+skull with sharp teeth on his left palm: it’s the logo of Los Revolucionarios,
+the 18th Street mara that killed his uncle and threatened to kill his mother
+and David before they fled north.
+“They shot him through his teeth,” David says. “I could see his brains
+through his teeth.”
+
+We all look away from David, as his mother gently nudges him to return
+to his play area. Elena cries. Úrsula cries. I cry, the old well of tears
+breached. We try to regain our composure.
+“I do the best I can to protect him,” Elena says in an exhausted tone.
+“So, what do you think, Lovato?” Úrsula asks me, her urgency even more
+palpable. “Can you do the story about the misa?”
+The truth is, I’m not feeling the journalist-as-vehicle-of-hope thing at the
+moment. There are other avenues of hope.
+“I’m not sure I can tell the story that needs to be told.”
+“What?” Úrsula asks. “You’re one of the best people to tell this story,
+Lovato. Come on!”
+“Thank you for las flores,” I respond in a Salvadoran acknowledgment of
+her compliment, “but I may not be in Texas to tell the story.” I quickly add,
+“But I promise to help find the people who will, though.”
+As we prepare to return to the conference in Austin, I look at David
+again. His little hands look a lot like Gio’s when he was about seven. My
+chest bursts open. I want to hug, love, and care for the imprisoned boy in
+the future he deserves.
+“I’ll be looking for you en misa,” I tell them.
+I’m not entirely sure I can do anything to help them in the short term
+besides point other journalists to the story. But at a deeper level, I’m trying
+to communicate that I understand that at the root of the faith to which their
+code refers is the Salvadoreño concept of conspiración, one of my favorite
+words. For the former guerrilleros of the FMLN, conspirar was used more
+closely to the way early Christians used it when secretly communing in the
+clammy catacombs of the Roman Empire: coming “together” (con in Lati)
+in a sacred act—“to breathe” (spirare, the origin of the words spirit, inspire,
+and aspire), to create community in the shared, godly breath that contains
+the spirit.
+Time and space fragment and distort. My neck, jaw, and shoulders
+tighten. These colorful drawings have become the portal to underworlds I’m
+starting to realize I must explore, some for the first time. I leave the prison
+committed to looking into things I’ve avoided but always carry with me in
+body and in heart. Touched by the terror and tenderness that alter destinies,
+I’m prepared to (again) face the deadly jagged edges of El Salvador—and
+myself.
+
+* * *
+I’m on an airplane heading to El Salvador. After returning to San Francisco
+from Austin, I’d decided to return to my parents’ homeland, determined to
+understand not just what makes El Salvador so violent, but also what turns
+kids into violent, even murderous gang members. Before I left, Úrsula sent
+me some of the links to stories about the hunger strike, which have
+succeeded in getting attention. They also revealed that leaked memos from
+officials at Karnes claimed the mothers and children were engaging in
+“insurrection” because they’d held colorful posters that said, LIBERTAD!
+To get my preliminary bearings before leaving, I called Alex Sánchez, an
+early member of MS-13 who, around 2000, had helped me understand the
+origins and ways of the gangs. I knew he could connect me to key people
+who would help me do so further in El Salvador. Alex grew up without his
+parents, who’d left the country to work in Los Angeles, the city with the
+highest concentration of Salvadorans in the US. Alex fled the violence of
+his country—the long-standing military dictatorship and the impending
+civil war—in 1979.
+Alex and other Salvadoran immigrant youth met at Millikan Junior High
+in Sherman Oaks, where LA bused many Central American and Mexican
+youth. Discrimination from Mexican and black gangs soon followed. Then
+came the day he looked out the window of his family’s apartment and saw
+the Salvadoran boys who were holding their own against the bullying.
+“There were about twenty-five of these motherfuckers standing on the
+corner, calling themselves ‘vos’—informal Salvadoran for ‘you’—standing
+all cool with their long hair, boom boxes playing Iron Maiden, Ronnie
+James Dio, Judas Priest,” Alex told me. “They were also calling themselves
+‘mara,’ which I had never heard used like that.” Since the 1950s, young and
+old Salvadorans of all stripes had used the word mara to refer to groups of
+friends. Those early gang members of the seventies were on the verge of
+altering its meaning, along with international perceptions of Salvadorans.
+His meeting with a few members of MSS, the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners—
+the first Salvadoran clika, founded at a 7-Eleven in Koreatown—impressed
+him. Soon after, Alex joined. They jumped him into the gang in 1985,
+beating him for thirteen seconds, thirteen being a “kind of evil number.”
+I headed to El Salvador thinking about that word, mara. Wondering how
+a word used by the Pentagon and other world powers to describe violent
+
+gangs used to be a Salvadoran way to refer to friends, loved ones, and
+family.
+
+“Maras”: The Short, Tragic, and
+Completely Made-Up Tale of the
+Marabunta
+“It’s just a matter of systematically wiping them out.”
+—Dr. Jim Conrad in Legion of Fire: Killer Ants!
+
+The word mara has a strange and mysterious past, a past that will forever
+intertwine the Salvadoran legacy with army ants.1 The unlikely but true
+story of how groups of pot-smoking Salvadoran teenage boys were named
+for a terrorizing horde of army ants begins in the Golden Age of
+Hollywood.
+In 1954 Paramount Pictures distributed a film called The Naked Jungle, a
+combination romantic epic, disaster movie, and science-fiction drama,
+featuring a young Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker. In it, Parker plays a
+mail-order bride who visits Heston on his cocoa plantation, farmed by
+indigenous workers (most of whom were played by white actors). Heston
+and Parker’s love story unfolds on the plantation in the wake of impending
+doom—the marabuntas, billions of flesh-eating ants said to be “a relentless,
+perfectly coordinated army,” that are preparing to descend upon the
+plantation. The fictitious marabunta is a species of army ant that forages for
+food in a large swarm. Similarly, the idea that these ants could strip an ox to
+
+the bones in a few minutes and devour the crops, livestock, and hundreds of
+workers of an entire plantation in a day was an exaggeration born in the
+mind of Carl Stephenson, the German writer of the classic short story on
+which the film was based, called “Leiningen Versus the Ants” when it was
+published in translation in Esquire in 1938. Director Byron Haskin, who
+made up the idea of ants called “marabunta,” made the assault dramatically
+convincing despite a limited special-effects budget, but it takes a real ant
+swarm about twelve hours to dispose of a frog.
+To promote the movie in Latin America, producers changed its name to
+Cuando ruge la marabunta (When the Marabunta Roars), with posters
+featuring Heston and Parker facing each other as if they’re about to kiss.
+Beneath the couple lurks a giant black army of ants alongside groups of
+indigenous people, who look like they’re dancing in the invading horde.
+The word mara began its long Salvadoran journey on March 3, 1955, at
+6:30 p.m. at Cine Apolo, where the movie premiered, in the heart of the
+Salvadoran capital. Salvadoran scholar Vogel Vladimir Castillo theorizes
+that moviegoers in El Salvador and Guatemala heard the term marabunta,
+adopted it to refer to a group of friends, and eventually shortened it to
+mara.*
+By the late seventies and early eighties, small cliques of heavy metal–
+listening Salvadoran stoners in the Pico Union–Westlake district of Los
+Angeles were calling themselves maras. When these maras started using
+machetes to defend themselves against the better-armed Crips, Bloods,
+Mexican Mafia, and other LA gangs, the US English- and Spanish-language
+media started using the term as well.
+In 2006, National Geographic called the maras the “World’s Most
+Dangerous Gang.”2 Other media, law enforcement, Pentagon leaders, and
+even US presidents jumped on the bandwagon and continue to describe
+Salvadoran gangs specifically as the most violent and most dangerous
+despite the absence of any statistical, journalistic, or scholarly evidence to
+support these claims.
+
+2
+
+San Francisco
+1973
+
+At age ten, I didn’t share Mom and Pop’s pride about being from the place
+with the blue-and-white flag adorning the machete on the mantel of the
+living room. Salvadorans didn’t even make sense in English, a fact brought
+home to me every time Mom and I walked past a Salvadoran restaurant near
+Twentieth and Mission, the main street our neighborhood in San Francisco
+is named for. The sign said it was a SALVADORIAN restaurant.
+“Mom, why do they spell the name of the country like that?”
+“I don’t know, mijo. Different people like to do things differently, I
+guess.”
+We were coming home from buying supplies for a spring party. We kept
+walking until reaching Twenty-Fourth and Mission, the center of the
+neighborhood. There, across the street from the gigantic hole they dug for
+the new BART train station that was coming, another, bigger sign on a
+nearby restaurant: EL SALVADORAN. As we approached Twenty-Fifth Street,
+where we’d turn left to get home to our apartment, we ran into the most
+irksome but funniest restaurant sign, the one that said SALVADORANEAN. I
+resigned myself to the painful fact: Salvadorans were a people with no clear
+identity on Mission Street, in the English language, or in the United States.
+Stuff like this was why I sought refuge in simply calling myself American.
+Being American helped me avoid these Salvadoran complications—or so I
+thought.
+
+My family lived at 2911A Folsom, between Twenty-Fifth and TwentySixth, down the street from the Army Street Projects, three ten-story dirty,
+graffitied white towers full of friends and music, parties and pain. At any
+one time, up to twelve of us—parents, brothers, sister, cousins, tenants, and
+friends of the family—lived in our four-bedroom apartment, which included
+a converted kitchen and closet as bedrooms.
+Besides the smell of cigarettes and Jovan Musk Oil, Revlon Charlie, and
+other cheap cologne and perfume, the dominant smell of the party in our
+apartment was that of the salsa, Mom’s special mix of spices—pepitoria
+(dried pumpkin seeds), ajonjolí (sesame seeds), chile pasilla, sticks of
+canela (cinnamon), bay leaves, and others—passed down by her ancestors
+over hundreds of years. Set on a hot fire, then ground and blended into a
+sauce and mixed with grilled tomatoes, red onion, carrot, and bell peppers,
+the salsa glazed the thirty-pound bird that Mom and my grandmother,
+Mamá Tey, were using to make the turkey sandwich delight known as panes
+con chumpe. Salsa was the smell and taste of family joy.
+The Mexican and Salvadoran maids Mom worked with at the St. Francis
+Hotel and the Cuban, Mexican, and Salvadoran janitors Pop worked with at
+United Airlines all crowded alongside cousins and other family and friends
+eating panes con chumpe and washing them down with alcohol. Pop’s
+music helped the guests metamorphose into party animals, dancing to
+mambos by Pérez Prado, salsa-ing to the Afro-Cuban sounds of Sonora
+Matancera and Celia Cruz, or singing together the classic Mexican
+rancheras by Vicente Fernández and, my favorite, Lucha Villa.
+As the romantic acoustic-guitar bolero “Sabor a mí” played, Mom looked
+at Pop with that dreamy, slightly buzzed expression she’d give him
+sometimes. A former Salvadoran beauty queen, Mom had a commanding
+presence not just because of her appearance: an always-ready smile,
+smooth, rosy skin, and the caring but determined “I don’t give a shit who
+you are” look in her dark brown eyes. People loved and respected Mom
+because of her throaty voice, a voice that came from the gut. I could hear
+that voice in the family story of how she forced Pop to stop a lifetime of
+heavy drinking shortly after I was born in 1963. Mom, the story goes,
+grabbed Pop during one of his drunken episodes. Pop’s mother, Mamá Tey,
+watched as Mom pushed him to the floor, her intensity forcing him to listen
+to her repeat, “We just had another kid and can’t afford your drinking, Mon.
+We can’t.”
+
+Pop’s short Salvadoran friend from United Airlines, Ramón Pineda, who
+was sitting in the spring party drinking while listening to “Sabor a mí,” also
+knew Mom’s voice. In fact, he feared it—and Mom—ever since she’d
+coached his wife Ana to use a bat to defend herself from his abuses. Pop
+never touched Mom, who could often be heard declaring, “No son of a bitch
+will ever lay a hand on me without paying a heavy price.”
+“Well,” Mom asked Pop, “what’re you waiting for, Mon?”
+They danced. Mom wore a tight turquoise green dress and heels. I didn’t
+like how her hair looked like a roller coaster, curled up at her shoulders for
+the party, but everybody always talked about how gorgeous she looked. Pop
+looked “pimp”—that’s how guys in the projects described men who dressed
+in leather coats, polyester shirts, and the see-through silk socks with
+pinstripes that we called “pimp stripe sox,” like Superfly or Shaft. Pop was
+always styling at the parties, his wavy, curly black hair, big forehead, big
+nose, and thin mustache that we thought made him look like Javier Solís,
+the Mexican singer whose love songs and rancheras he and Mom loved. I
+thought he looked more like the bubbly, debonair British actor David
+Niven.
+After they danced, Pop played “La Bala,” a traditional Salvadoran
+cumbia in which the singer asks the dancers to do fun things like lift one leg
+or rub their bellies or give the person you’re dancing with a kiss. Omar
+(Om), my mom’s son, the oldest of us kids, started dancing. My sister from
+my dad, Ana Irma (Mima), who was Om’s age, joined in, as did Ramón Jr.
+(Mem), who, at seventeen, rolled way deep in the salsa and soul dance
+world. Everybody danced, including me.
+I looked back over at Pop spinning 33s on the hulky Panasonic cabinet
+record console with the built-in speakers. I wanted him to give me his
+special look, that smiling, devilishly handsome look of approval I craved
+but never got enough of. Pop glanced at me, then away as he started talking
+in his animated way to friends.
+Pop’s talk always felt alive, especially at the parties. He made up his own
+words and had nicknames for everyone. My brother Mem was Niwita
+because he cried a lot; my cousin Elva was Choma, which Pop said was “an
+indio* word.” At these parties, Pop used a lot of these vowel-rich “indio”
+words, which sounded like little word songs: “You’re encachimbada
+[angry],” or “You ready for another talaguashtazo [drink]?” or “Don’t be a
+fufurufo [stuck-up person],” and many others. One of my favorites was
+
+guishte, which I learned after he saw the green-glass mosaic I made in
+school from shards of broken 7UP bottles. “Wow,” he said, “look at what
+Chiriqua”—a name he coined for me from Chiricahua, the name of the
+Native American tribe of the southern Great Plains, the US Southwest, and
+Northern Mexico—“made with all that guishte from the street.” He
+pronounced the word as if whistling. Guishte sounded like a cascade of
+glass swishing. It felt like wholeness and togetherness to a nine-year-old
+who sometimes felt like a broken 7UP bottle.
+Pop’s words at United, where he was something called a shop steward,
+were why the white union guys came to Mom and Pop’s party wearing their
+blue windbreakers with the AFL-CIO logo. Whenever those guys came by,
+they would eventually talk about “going on strike.” As an elected shop
+steward and later a committee man, Pop represented the interests of 250
+utility, ramp-service, and other workers to the group most accursed in
+family dinner conversation: United management. His words carried music
+and fury and lots of funny, qualities he learned from his mom, Mamá Tey.
+Mamá Tey’s portrait was placed in the center of the big wall in our living
+room alongside that of Mamá Clothi, my grandmother on mom’s side. We
+had a picture of Mom’s dad, too, but none of Pop’s father, Don Miguel, or
+Don Miguel’s family in El Salvador. I didn’t know anything about them and
+wondered why I didn’t. I wondered what Don Miguel and his family looked
+like, what they acted like, and if I looked and acted like them. I felt cheated.
+This wanting to have a better sense of family history made me value and
+love Mamá Tey all the more.
+During the party, Mamá Tey played cards in the kitchen on a velvety
+white table cover used expressly for that purpose. I went and sat on her lap
+as she lorded over the game with her sweeter but sharper version of Pop’s
+humor and charm. I started strumming the thick, gorgeous slabs of skin and
+fat that hung from her arms like I was beating eggs, as I had since I could
+remember. I often did this while she sewed on her electric Singer with the
+pedal she let me push.
+“So,” she said, “looks like you’re having fun there, ey, mijito? Got
+yourself your own little guitar with my arms there, eh?”
+“Yes, Abuelita,” I answered, happy to be at the table with her. “I love
+playing your arms.”
+“Well,” she said, “I tell you what we’re gonna do.”
+
+Oh, boy! I thought to myself. Her tone usually meant I was about to get
+some Salvadoran milk chocolates, money, or another killer grandmotherly
+treat. She grabbed me from her lap and stood me up next to the table. I
+stood smiling, wondering what she was going to say.
+“OK, mi muchachito,” she said while raising her eyes and smiling. “So,
+why don’t you put your hands through your zipper, grab your little balls,
+and beat them like you’re making atole [a hot indigenous drink made with
+corn and corn flour] or something with them—but leave my fucking arms
+alone! I love you, but you’re not going to be playing my arms to pieces
+anymore, got it?”
+Everybody burst out laughing. Me, too. I sat back on Mamá Tey’s lap and
+watched the card game while strumming her arms again. She smiled.
+The week after that first spring party, I sat with Pop on the stoop of our
+apartment while he waited for Bob, the man who drove from the Fillmore
+District to pick him up for work every day at five for what they called the
+“graveyard shift.” That four-to-five-p.m. hour on the stoop after school,
+before Pop headed to work, where he’d be until late at night, was an
+important time for us to bond and talk.
+Pop had on his blue United Airlines hat and white coveralls with the
+United logo next to his heart. The air around the apartment still had that
+breezy spring after-party feel. I decided to ask him about his father, my
+grandfather, Don Miguel.
+“What happened between Mamá Tey and Don Miguel?”
+I expected Pop to answer as the sunny, poetic person everybody saw at
+the party.
+“Were they a couple like you and Mom, Pop?” I asked him in Spanish,
+our preferred language of intimacy.
+Pop paused before his face muscles tightened and jaw crunched in that
+way that signaled I’d angered him. “You know what?”
+“What, Pop?”
+“I need you to understand this, ’cause the sooner you do, the better we’re
+going to get along,” he declared in a tone that sounded as commanding as it
+did tense. He used this tone when he was pissed and most often used it with
+me because, unlike my siblings, I had a fury inside me that often exploded.
+“We’re not going to talk about that, you got it? Nunca. Never.”
+That was it. Puro silencio. We were never ever to ask that question.
+Nunca.
+
+“Okay, Pop,” I answered and went back in the apartment.
+I rushed back to my room dejected, unable to fathom how or why he’d
+responded like that. His silence burned like betrayal, as though Pop’s love,
+his special names, his funny ways, were all bullshit.
+I also remembered that a couple of his other oft-repeated phrases
+—“Hands of steel, silk gloves” and “Saints are made by being beaten”—
+meant the opposite of togetherness.
+Pop’s temper, his reaction, and his secretiveness combined to give me a
+great pain, a mysterious pain that, at nine years old, I couldn’t locate and
+lacked a name for, except all of me: “Robert,” the name I used because my
+documents all removed the “o” my parents always used. Robert, the
+American.
+Pop’s secretiveness extended to his neighborhood business, which he
+often conducted a block down from our apartment, across the street from
+the Army Street Projects on Twenty-Sixth and Folsom, at Khalil’s. The
+liquor store owned by and named after Pop’s Palestinian friend, Khalil, was
+one of several places whose mere mention made my jaw and teeth tense. I’d
+once overheard Pop tell Mom, “Khalil es un mafioso serio, un gran
+mafioso. All the Palestinos follow him. He owns hotels, laundromats, and
+gets truckloads of stolen stuff delivered to his corner store pretty regularly.”
+Pop also told Mom his friend built his empire with stolen goods he’d
+warehouse in the basement and back of his liquor store. Pop wanted to be
+like Khalil. I had very different idea of who I wanted Pop to be: a
+Salvadoran version of Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch, the ideal
+American family in 1973. Because my sister, Mima, had a different mother
+and my brother Omar had a different father, the mixed marriage of the
+Bradys felt like an ideal sewing together of the pieces of different families.
+Reality had other ideas. Instead, I took the fragments of my pain and
+became my own nine-year-old version of Columbo, the disheveled,
+seemingly disorganized TV detective. I decided to become Columbo to find
+out about Pop’s father, his secret business deals, and his conexiones. I
+hoped desperately that by being Columbo I could put a moral border
+between me and Pop’s criminal dealings.
+It was Khalil who introduced Pop to his conexiones, Mo, El Chino, and
+Kevin and Mary, a couple from New York who Pop said were “the classiest
+thieves in San Francisco”—people who could steal the biggest jewels, the
+fanciest Wilkes Bashford suits, the most expensive dresses. They stole to
+
+feed their $350-a-week heroin habit. His conexiones were a reason I feared
+for Pop’s life. I once heard him describe to Mom how some guys tried to
+kidnap him in the parking lot of Mitchell’s Ice Cream and were about to kill
+him when the cops drove into the lot.
+Pop eventually established his headquarters for what became his center
+of operations: Hunt’s Donuts, the coffee shop on the corner of Twentieth
+and Mission. My longtime friend Charlie Hernández called Pop a fence, a
+word I hated because it made it impossible to hide my familial connection
+to criminality. Hunt’s became another hell for me. As were the big ugly
+cardboard boxes he used to store and ship cameras, jewelry, clothes,
+calculators, toys, and other contraband he bought and sold at Hunt’s. Those
+boxes weighed my life down, probably because they also contained the
+thing that most made me feel like I belonged to a criminal family, guns.
+Pop sold the guns mainly to doctors, engineers, military guys, and others
+in El Salvador who could afford them. Like everything else, except food
+and firecrackers, guns were more expensive in the motherland. Pop bought
+.357 Magnums, .38s, and $300 Uzis from either his conexiones or from Mr.
+Valli, the guy in fancy suits who worked at Roos Atkins Department Store.
+Mr. Valli sold Pop his favorite gun, the .44 Magnum, “the most powerful
+handgun in the world,” made famous in the Clint Eastwood movies me and
+Pop memorized lines from. Inside the gigantic boxes that Mom, Mamá Tey,
+and he sent to El Salvador on United, he’d include a bunch of guns. Where
+and how Pop learned how to do this kind of cross-border maneuver was an
+unsolved mystery my inner Detective Columbo would have to investigate.
+Loving Pop meant learning to love—or at least accept—his
+secretiveness, his intersecting cross-border circuits, and the gravity they
+brought into our lives. Loving myself meant diving in but then learning to
+levitate into and out of the darkness, a levitation that no one helped me
+master more than Mom.
+* * *
+“Guess where we’re going?” Mom asked one day, collapsing onto the beatup red and yellow sofa bed in our living room. The sofa was her refuge
+from another long day of cleaning rich people’s rooms at the St. Francis
+Hotel before starting to cook dinner for me, my siblings, and cousins.
+“We’re going to Paris!” I’d wanted to go to the place where they’d filmed
+
+The Red Balloon ever since I’d watched the magnificent French movie in
+class. The story of a child who encounters a balloon with its own
+personality, befriending it as they walk, skip, and run through the rough,
+working-class neighborhood of Belleville-Ménilmontant, spoke to me. The
+poetic power of the red balloon gave me hope.
+Mom knew Pop’s cardboard boxes, his conexiones, and other stuff made
+me long for my own escape balloon—so much so that I pestered my parents
+to let me fly to Paris. I wanted desperately to go on a kid’s pilgrimage to see
+the land of balloons and levitating children.
+A perk of Mom and Pop’s jobs were discounted hotel prices and free
+airline tickets to fly anywhere in the world. By the time I turned ten, I had
+already traveled far beyond the Mission. I got to see the world at an early
+age, with what Shakespeare called “rich eyes and poor hands.”
+My bookish demeanor and the fact that I traveled a lot for a workingclass kid led some to call me Mr. Peabody, the smart, time-traveling cartoon
+dog with glasses like mine from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. As the kid
+who stole sci-fi books from the Mission Library with Freddie Weinstein, I
+liked being called Mr. Peabody. I felt like it spoke to my own ability to
+break up space and time—and the gravity of Mission life—with the help of
+Mom and Pop’s travel discounts.
+Not long before we left for Paris, still floating on the clouds of our
+imminent departure, I crossed the street one day to buy a popsicle at
+Henry’s liquor store, across the street from our apartment, when I saw a
+lady in a yellow dress walking quickly down the street. A man came
+running behind her. When he caught up to her, they started yelling.
+They screamed back and forth at each other for a while, until the guy
+said, “Fuck you, bitch!” and pulled something out of his waistband. The
+woman screamed, “Noooooo!” just before he started hacking at her
+stomach. To my nine-year-old ears, the knife jabs sounded like a potato
+peeler slicing her skin: scht-scht-scht. The woman cried out, “Noooooo!
+Help me!” as blood poured onto her hands and spilled onto the sidewalk
+like running red water.
+Her screams alarmed others nearby, and some rushed into their homes as
+if to escape while others yelled for the police. The man ran off. The woman
+staggered off to lean against a garage door, bleeding, before falling to the
+ground, where she lay twitching, like our dog Timber had after being
+poisoned by an angry neighbor. I rushed home to tell Mom.
+
+Mom sat me on the sofa and hugged and kissed me, rubbing my stomach
+as if I was the one who’d been stabbed. After that I would always walk
+cautiously past Henry’s, long after the blood spilled on Twenty-Fifth Street
+that day had dried. The potato-peeler sound of the knife, the image of the
+woman twisting, her screams—all of them things played over and over in
+my mind.
+Weeks later Mom held me by the hand as we approached the catacombs
+of Paris, the city of the dead created beneath the streets during the French
+Revolution by the overcrowding of the bones and bodies above. The sunny
+summer air and luminescence of Paris dissipated, giving way to the cool
+shadows covering our skin as Mom and I descended into the dark. Her
+quirky side—the mysterious part of Mom that loved to go against the grain
+of the normal—had led us to the clammy Paris below: over two hundred
+miles of tunnels, crevices, and chambers housing the skulls and bones of
+more than six million souls. Bones and skulls formed elaborate patterns that
+looked like the guishte mosaics I made in school. The only warmth was
+from our clasped hands and our breath. Together, we conspired in the
+catacombs, breathing in that cold, dead, beautifully intimate air between us,
+and the skulls and bones of some of the many millions of those forgotten in
+the Great Belows of history.
+
+3
+
+Ahuachapán, El Salvador
+1931
+
+My father, Ramón Alfredo Lovato—“Ramóncito”—lived in Ahuachapán
+Province near rich relatives who had more than enough power to help the
+barefoot nine-year-old reach his dream of getting an education, but they
+refused to use it. Despite the fact the local hospital’s founder, Don Sixto
+Padilla, had fathered his grandmother, Mamá Fina Lovato, Ramón Alfredo
+Lovato never saw the inside of the fabulous hospital.1 Instead Ramóncito
+was born far on the margins of Ahuachapán city, his status etched invisibly
+onto him by the thick, handwritten, capitalized letters of the word
+ILEGÍTIMO, which barely fit within the box meant for his father’s name on
+his birth certificate. Below it Mamá Fina, who was tasked by her daughter
+Tey with registering the boy, signed her name on his birth certificate with a
+large and squiggly X.
+“Ramóncito came into the world thanks to a comadrona we paid five
+pesos. He was born at home,” Mamá Tey, whose birth name was Maria
+Esther Lovato, often remarked.
+Ramón Alfredo Lovato was born in 1922. Like Ramóncito, Mamá Tey
+and Mamá Fina had both also been born out of wedlock—all ilegítimos,
+bastard children bearing the surnames of their mothers in a country where
+many, perhaps most, children lived in households headed by single
+mothers.2 For Ramóncito and millions of other Salvadorans, “family” meant
+being raised by strong, heroic single mothers. Similarly, ideas about who
+exactly the “children” the nation lionized in the Salvadoran national anthem
+
+were reduced indigenous people to second-class citizenship, while AfroSalvadorans were eventually expelled from El Salvador under race laws
+influenced by the eugenic theories circulating worldwide.
+Mamá Tey’s father, the highly educated politician3 and physician Dr.
+Dionisio Aráuz, had his own dream, the dream of a modern patria, made
+possible by the magic seeds that were transforming tiny El Salvador and
+bringing it into the world economy: café. The former president of the
+National Assembly, who had inherited his own coffee fortune, possessed the
+godlike power to bring change into existence with his words. A single
+decree by Don Dionisio dismantled the remaining ejidos—collectively
+owned lands occupied for millennia by indigenous communities—to create
+new Ladino towns complete with massive, privately owned haciendas,
+massive plantations established on stolen indigenous land by the Spaniards
+and their descendants. Always nearby, hacienda police guarded their rich
+inhabitants against the indios. Don Dionisio signed into being roads,
+railroad routes, and prisons to house the growing population of angry,
+landless indios denounced regularly in the pages of El Diario de
+Ahuachapán. His written and verbal agreements forged international
+treaties committing numerous nations to extraditing other seditious
+elements—revolucionarios, comunistas, and anarquistas conspiring against
+the progress and prosperity of la patria.
+Medium-to-large landowners and coffee exporters like Don Dionisio
+made an average of $100,000 to $500,000 a year4 and educated their hijos
+legítimos at the same elite schools in England, Switzerland, and France
+where they had been educated. This inherited wealth, education, and access
+made possible the large, white Italianate mansions, such as the one
+occupied by the family of Don Miguel Rodríguez, Ramóncito’s father. The
+Rodríguezes made their fortune from numerous haciendas where they grew
+café in their hometown of Concepción de Ataco, just nine miles from the
+shack that Ramóncito shared with Mamá Tey and Mamá Fina in
+Ahuachapán city.
+Though she was fathered by one wealthy man and bore the child of
+another, Mamá Tey herself was very poor. Tey made clothes for a living,
+mostly in their adobe-and-tin shack in Barrio Santa Cruz, a neighborhood
+designated for the second-poorest rung of Ahuachapán’s many gradations of
+poor—a rung above only the indigenous communities. Indigenous people
+
+were expected to see, hear, and shut up about lives that became more
+difficult with each cyclical drop in the price of café.
+All Ramóncito knew about his biological father growing up was that Don
+Miguel belonged to one of the rich coffee families, the ones who owned the
+green mountains with their foggy white beards, and all the land around
+Ataco. Mamá Tey hardly ever spoke about “that man.” When Don Miguel’s
+name did come up, she stayed in silencio. Puro silencio.
+Ramóncito once walked up to Tey while she was sewing and asked her,
+“Aren’t you and Don Miguel married, Mamá?” All she did was give him
+that stare that meant he should never ever ask that question again. Nunca.
+Don Miguel was a tall man who was educated as an engineer but who
+found his vocation in drinking. Ramóncito had learned the man was his
+father when his mother pointed him out in town. The boy sometimes saw
+his father in the city, where Don Miguel would shop, do business, drink,
+and hang out with other men and, especially, women. Some of these women
+he impregnated with children who would also be born out of wedlock.
+During his father’s visits to Ahuachapán, Ramóncito noticed that Don
+Miguel’s honey-brown eyes and skin matched his and those of some of the
+indigenous people who worked in cafetales where Ramóncito and his
+friends played and hunted squirrels and zopilotes, black vultures, with
+slingshots made of tree branches. Ramóncito’s father always wore a
+confident, angry look. That look, especially his crazed eyes, became
+especially intense when Don Miguel decided to solve his problems the way
+lots of rich people liked to solve their problems: with guns. Don Miguel had
+lots of guns, and so did his Spaniard father and his father’s Spaniard father,
+Mamá Tey would tell Ramóncito. Rich people in Ahuachapán learned to
+kill from an early age. They were vaqueros, riding horses, shooting
+whomever they felt wronged by, in just the way Ramóncito read about in
+cheap, pocket-size cowboy novelas.
+Don Miguel hardly ever spoke to his son. When Ramóncito stood or
+walked near his father to get his attention, Don Miguel just shot Ramóncito
+with that look that fired through him with a high-caliber “I don’t care.” The
+look left a deadness inside his son.
+Ramóncito was acknowledged by his paternal grandmother, Mamá
+Juanita. Mamá Juanita, a former servant, had borne Don Miguel and eleven
+other children to a rich, landowning Spaniard who, like many rich men of
+the era, had sex with their servants, most often without their consent. Born
+
+of a mixed-Ladino father and a Náhuat mother, who raised her alone,
+Juanita eventually managed to escape the ravages—cursings, beatings,
+rapes, poverty—of indigenous female life in El Salvador by forcing the
+Spaniard into a deathbed recognition of her kids as legítimos. When the
+Spaniard died, Juanita became the matriarch of her family, overseeing the
+futures of her children.
+Juanita also did what she could for her grandchildren, including the
+unrecognized ones, like Ramóncito. Mamá Juanita and her daughters
+facilitated Ramóncito’s frequent travel to their mansion in wealthy Ataco.
+Ramóncito also traveled considerably to the capital, San Salvador. Mamá
+Tey traveled there regularly to visit both her husband and Ramón’s
+stepfather, Chico—when she wasn’t mad at him—and to ply her sewing
+trade in Mesón San Luís, the lively, noisy shantytown in central San
+Salvador that stimulated Ramóncito in ways the rural Ahuachapán didn’t.
+The mesones—long rows and rows of colored tin rooms that shared wash
+areas and communal bathrooms—became one of the primary sources of
+housing for El Salvador’s burgeoning population of urban poor.
+At age nine, Ramóncito had not yet adopted the silence that many poor
+indigenous and Ladino kids of the era learned at an early age. His travels
+exposed him to different environments, and as a result, he had learned how
+to talk to all kinds of different people: rich and poor, country and city,
+white, indigenous, and Ladino. Ramóncito picked up words quickly. He
+liked to make adults laugh, repeating stuff he’d overheard, like “No le pido
+pan al hambre, ni calor al frío” (I don’t ask hunger for bread, nor heat of the
+cold), and “No le debo nada al sol por haberme calentado” (I don’t owe the
+sun anything for heating me up). One city phrase Ramóncito loved was
+hijuesesentamilputas, son of sixty thousand bitches, which rang out
+regularly in the clammy air of Mamá Tey and Chico’s adobe-and-tin shack
+in the mesón in San Salvador.
+Ramóncito’s way with words got him his first job at nine years old. He
+was visiting Papa Chico at his shack in the mesón with Mamá Tey. While in
+San Salvador, Mamá Tey worked as a costurera for the prostitutes who lived
+and worked throughout the mesón, many of whom spent lots of time with
+the guys with the guns and the green uniforms from the military cuartel
+nearby. Ramóncito knew the putas as friends of his family before he even
+realized what putas were, or why he and generations of Salvadorans that
+followed would be called hijuesesentamilputas as punishment or insult.
+
+All the prostitutes, many of whom were his friends’ moms, had funnysounding names, like La Loca Elsa, Crazy Elsa, who would sing like a
+madwoman; Dolores del Río, La Loca’s tall, handsome friend and
+roommate; La Greta Garbo, who looked like some famous actress; La
+Venerable Rana, the Venerable Frog, whose fame had something to do with
+her throat; La Chivo Peche, the Skinny Goat, a dark pretty woman who had
+hair on her chin; and Anita Villeda, an indigenous woman who never said
+much, except when she spoke with Tey.
+One hot summer day in 1931, Chela, a puta with big powerful arms and
+gigantic breasts and a booming, raspy deep voice, came to knock on the tin
+door of Mamá Tey and Chico’s shack. Mamá Tey answered.
+“Hola,” said Chela to a somewhat surprised Mamá Tey. Tey maintained
+friendly terms with and sewed dresses and other things for Chela and many
+of the prostitutes, but they rarely came by in the evening, during their
+working hours.
+“Is Ramóncito here?” Chela asked.
+“Uh, yes. He’s here, but what do you want with him?”
+“Oh, don’t worry,” responded Chela with a smile. “We have a job for
+him.”
+“A job?”
+Chela told her that she and her colleagues wanted to employ Ramóncito
+to “tend to” their waiting clients while she and the other ladies were busy
+with other men. The women wanted to task Ramóncito with bringing the
+clients drinks and entertaining them.
+“He’s such a smart and funny boy,” Chela said. “We thought it’d be great
+to have him work for us.” Tey knew Chela and the other women would care
+for her boy, who had already acculturated and had friendships with their
+children.
+When asked, Ramóncito, a precocious boy, jumped at the opportunity. He
+understood that this might help pay for his education. So, he dove into the
+work with a feverish energy, serving drinks, watching and entertaining the
+men with the green uniforms and other clients between six o’clock and his
+bedtime at nine.
+Ramóncito’s job helped him learn about the laws of economics, as he
+watched different women charge their clients different amounts. La Loca
+Elsa charged clients two colones. Dark-skinned Lupita la India charged one
+peso, while Dolores del Río charged up to five because people said her
+
+white skin and rosy cheeks made her look like a doll. Ramóncito’s eyes
+bulged at the sight of the one hundred colones La Greta Garbo got for
+simply letting an important man look at her body.
+That man was Rafael Meza Ayau, the owner of a company operating near
+the mesón, La Constancia, that sold the famous Pilsener beer. The company
+was also the first to distribute and sell Coca-Cola and other American soft
+drinks in El Salvador. Many of the prostitutes in the Mesón San Luís were
+higher class than the ones over on Calle Celis, the street named after
+Santiago José Celis, a guy from Ahuachapán credited with founding El
+Salvador. Prostitutes on Calle Celis charged their clients fifty cents.
+Altogether, the women of El Mesón San Luís paid Ramóncito one or two
+colones per week, his first earnings, from which he saved whatever he
+didn’t give to his mom. He received money, local recognition, affection, and
+the promise of an education—all thanks to his words. Yet as his enthusiasm
+for words grew, so too would a great and unusual silence grow in the
+otherwise talkative boy, whose hatred of the word ilegítimo also grew in
+silencio. Ramóncito’s silencio would join that of millions of other
+Salvadorans to create a culture of silence that would have devastating
+effects on future generations of Salvadorans in and beyond El Salvador.
+
+Part II
+
+4
+
+Ciudad Merliot, El Salvador
+2015
+
+I’m rocking in a wicker chair, astonished by news the forensic lab officials
+I interviewed shared this morning: my parents’ beloved homeland will soon
+become “the most violent country on earth.”1 This tiniest of countries in the
+hemisphere—with a population of just over six million—has registered
+3,332 homicides2 between January and May 2015, up from 2,191 between
+January and July in 2014.
+My visit to the mother and children refugee prison in Karnes caused my
+adult experiences to combine with kid ones, which is why I’m back in El
+Salvador. The last time I visited the country was 2013, the year we buried
+half of my mother’s ashes in her hometown of San Vicente, where my
+goddaughter and I barely escaped gun-wielding gang members who chased
+us—in the cemetery. I’m here to fulfill promises made silently in the mother
+and children prison, trying to unlock the mysteries of the double helix of
+death that condemns El Salvador and innocent kids like David to become
+refugees, child soldiers, and even the gang killers driving the violence here.
+My decision to do something about Karnes by telling parts of our collective
+story with my own individual one also bears the mark of Alex Sánchez.
+“Find Raúl Mijango,” Alex told me when I called him in LA following
+my Karnes visit. “Mijango is the man—an ex-guerrillero who helped
+broker the truce.” The truce was a historic but controversial agreement
+between MS-13 and its rival mara, 18th Street, that cut El Salvador’s
+homicide rate in half between 2012 and 2013, when it ended.3 My quest to
+
+understand violence in El Salvador will start with my journey to find Raúl
+Mijango.
+Accompanying me on this journey is my driver, Isaias, a smiley, bulky
+block of a funny ex-military guy–turned–taxi driver. He’s dropped me off at
+my cousin María Elena’s, my home base for my summer in El Salvador.
+María Elena lives in a gated community in Ciudad Merliot, located just
+across El Pedregal Street, one of San Salvador’s northern borders, which
+marks the neighborhood as “safe.” Two 12 gauge escopeta–bearing serenos
+guard the middle-class neighborhood.
+Outside the gates sits the late morning humidity of another hellish June
+day in El Salvador. Inside, things are cooler beneath the wooden fan of the
+open-air living room. A chilled glass of deep purple agua de jamaica helps.
+It’s almost time for the traditional lunch break, when everybody shuts
+everything down. No siesta for me, though.
+I spent the morning visiting a forensic lab to interview specialists, before
+calling friends to make inquiries about Mijango and possible connections to
+him. While waiting to hear back from my sources, I decide to use the
+afternoon to visit Giovanni Miranda, a deportee whom my research
+assistant, Flor, introduced me to several days before. Something about
+Giovanni—perhaps his Chicano English or maybe his homie friendliness—
+reminds me of guys I grew up with in the Mission District. I wanted to go
+back and find out what other parts of my past Giovanni echoed.
+“How did your meetings go?” María Elena asks in a curious, concerned
+tone, while pouring herself some jamaica.
+“OK. How are you?”
+“I’m fine. By the way, your father called,” she tells me. Unsurprising.
+Pop calls almost daily anytime I visit la patria. I’ve always thought Pop’s
+constant calling habit was rooted in the many fears of someone who grew
+up during a Great Depression that made Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath look
+like a winefest. Lately, though, it seems like Pop’s calls carry more urgency,
+like they have a touch of Mom’s ghost worrying about me. Regardless, the
+worry is worlds better than the anger Pop had toward me—and I toward
+him—for so long.
+I bid María Elena farewell and start walking a block down, to Chiltiupán,
+the main thoroughfare in the area. Further down the hilly part of Chiltiupán,
+the sounds of car engines and mufflers start saturating the streets even more
+than usual. As I approach Giovanni’s tiny shop with its black stucco
+
+exterior, a banged-up pearl white Lexus cruiser swings into the old garage
+and anchors without the flutter of its broken turn signals, and is suddenly at
+rest. The fender panel and door on the right side of the relatively new
+vehicle need replacement.
+“Hey, what’s up, homie!” Giovanni says, visibly glad to see me again.
+I’m glad to see him, too. His cutoff, faded, and painted black Metallica Tshirt make the tattoos on his arms stand out. Gangs and police in El
+Salvador stop, harass, and kill people for sporting tattoos here—whether or
+not the bearer of the tattoos is involved with gangs. As a result, “Jesucristo”
+and “La Virgen” have become symbols of death in El Salvador.
+The horrific violence here exists thanks in no small part to mano dura
+(firm hand)—the brutal policing-on-steroids that came to El Salvador in
+1993 when the Bush administration’s Justice Department provided aid and
+police training4 to the Salvadoran government. Based on the “broken
+windows” policing methods used by former New York mayor Rudy
+Giuliani, mano dura emphasizes going harder on petty crimes, as well as
+profiling and harassment based on appearance, thus increasing incarceration
+and distrust of the police.5
+The “iron fist” measures—defining broad categories of youth and activity
+as criminal, expanding police powers, deploying the military to handle citylevel matters, and diminishing the rights of alleged criminals—are popular
+with voters because they make them feel like the government is taking
+serious action. These methods include targeting people like Giovanni for
+simply having tattoos. Rather than treating the problems—poverty and
+marginalization—at their roots, time and again, the Salvadoran government
+instead expands the number of violent actors by empowering violence by its
+own agents, regardless of which political party is in power. This ends up
+increasing, rather than diminishing, violence and gang influence.6 In
+unleashing the repressive powers of the state anew, mano dura has also
+enabled an old and catastrophic government practice: use of military and
+police death squads to do extrajudicial killings under cover of uniforms.
+Reductions in crime bought at the expense of a continued official disrespect
+for human life.
+Up close, Giovanni’s thick mustache, twinkling eyes, long eyelashes, and
+smile make him look like the great Mexican singer-actor Pedro Infante.
+Standing there in the tiny garage, the smell of car paint transports me to my
+teen years, when my homies, Los Originales, and I first discovered, drove,
+
+and sometimes even destroyed cars, a few of which were stolen and a
+couple of which we crashed, as we said, “for the fuck of it.” It’s obvious
+why I’m here: being in the garage takes me back to some of the best times
+of my life, a happy respite from the toxicity of the formaldehyde and other
+chemicals of death I inhaled earlier at the forensic lab. The chemicals of car
+paint smell more of life, California car life.
+“Forgot to ask you, Bro. Where you from?” I ask him in English.
+“I was born here, but I grew up in Dallas.” His nervous smile is also
+familiar—the twitchy smile of self-doubt of so many of us who grow up
+bicultural.
+He serves up some coffee, breaks a piece of semita bread, and delivers it
+with a delicate touch that’s at odds with the crunched-up car fenders,
+banged-up bodies, and bulky equipment surrounding us. Out of the room to
+the left side of the garage steps a woman holding a newborn.
+“This is my wife, Sofia,” Giovanni says. Sofia, a striking raven-haired
+twenty-something, nods and smiles shyly.
+“And this is Simón.” Giovanni’s pride at his son radiates throughout the
+tiny shaded room.
+Sofia takes Simón back to the ten-by-twelve room that is their living
+room, bedroom, baby room, kitchen, and dining room. Giovanni follows
+with me behind him. Inside, their bed and a crib take up most of the space,
+along with a small dresser, where a mini camping oven sits. Above the bed,
+paintings of a blue-eyed Christ and of the Virgin dominate the only clear
+wall space. Clothes are stacked neatly alongside foodstuffs, cleaning
+materials, detergents, and other household items on the floor. Some small
+talk over coffee and semita leads the conversation back to his and my
+shared love.
+“I saw this chop-top ’59 Merc when I was twelve and it was over for
+me,” he says, the Tejano in him now beyond obvious in the ers and wuzes
+that he twirls with a Southern touch. “I knew that I wanted to paint cars
+when I grew up.”
+“My friend Max used to have a ’59 Merc, but he didn’t chop it,” I tell
+him. “I used to cruise in a cherry-ass ’63 Mercury Meteor I bought from an
+elderly lady.” Tito, the crazy young vato in me who, after a violent run-in
+with Pop, worked in a body shop for a minute, has entered the conversation.
+My body adopts a gangster lean, sitting as though my left hand’s on top of
+the steering wheel, while looking out the driver’s window and leaning on
+
+my right elbow with the coolest possible look: jaw clenched, eyes dreamy,
+head slightly bobbing to whatever music (preferably oldies) is blaring on
+the speakers.
+“Fuckin’-A,” Giovanni says in a smooth voice.
+I’m about twenty years older than Giovanni, but we still have much in
+common. Our shared language includes a mix of English, Spanish, and
+Caló. Our Salvadoran version of Caló includes words like valeverguista,
+which refers to that same crazy, Jedi resistance spirit that has driven
+Salvadorans—guerrillas, refugees, and our parents—to take on impossible
+odds for centuries. Even though Pop and Mom could tap into that rebellious
+spirit themselves, they hated my Tito crazy bat-shit side—shit that almost
+got me killed, even before the war.
+Giovanni’s mix of California words like vato, another word for homeboy,
+and Salvadoran words like cerote (shit) and hijueputa (sonofabitch) has a
+homie-ness to it. One difference, however, is that he has no recollection of
+when, before the nineties, the word mara was used to refer exclusively to
+“friends,” not “gangs,” as it is now. I do. The gangs started using the word
+primarily to refer to each other as friends, before cutting their long rockero
+hair and adopting the more violent LA-style gang culture. Like the Force in
+Star Wars, the word loco has two sides, one light and one dark.
+Looking at a pile of car batteries stacked up in a corner, I tell him about
+Los Originales and the way we gradually scaled up our stealing repertoire.
+We started with car stereos and speakers, moving up to batteries and then
+hydros (the hydraulic jack systems that lift the entire car) from trucks,
+finally graduating to stealing entire cars. I share with Giovanni how, for a
+minute, I harbored dreams of building my own empire of stolen cars and car
+parts, like Pop and Mamá Tey’s cross-border network of stolen contraband.
+Giovanni shares his own stories of stealing car parts.
+I notice that next to the entrance of their home is another door with a big
+steel lock on it.
+“What’s in there?”
+“That’s a smaller room that I rent. Right now, it’s empty.”
+“Why?”
+“Vato stopped payin’ his rent. He seemed pretty decent and mostly kept
+to himself, but eventually he didn’t come up with the feria [money] for the
+rent. After two months, I put a lock on the door and told him I wouldn’t
+open it until he paid up.”
+
+“What did he do?”
+“He came back and got all bitchy on me, sayin’, ‘What’s this?’ and
+threatening me like, ‘You better lemme in or you’ll pay me for this.’ He
+said that shit in front of my wife and kid and then ran off before I was
+gonna beat his ass.
+“You want another brew?” he asks me.
+Sofia is sitting on their bed with Simón.
+“How’s my pride and joy?” he coos.
+He plays with Simón for a minute, grabs the beers from the tiny
+refrigerator, and we step back out to the garage. We drink as he describes
+how Simón is the culmination of his own story, which began in 1973, just a
+few years before the beginning of El Salvador’s civil war. He tells me how,
+before becoming a Tejano, his earliest memories were of moving, both
+because of migration and for his love of cars.
+“I remember the loud vans and the helicopters flying over us,” he says,
+describing the migration odyssey to the United States, undertaken by so
+many Salvadorans.
+“I fell in love with cars at Pershing High,” he says.
+He describes how he pursued his passion through high school, working
+for several body shops. As he speaks, the soothing syncopated vocals and
+mellow bass line of Long Beach, California–based War’s lowrider classic,
+“All Day Music,” plays on his speakers.
+“Things were pretty suave,” he says, “until March 2009.” That’s when,
+he recalls, “things just started getting worse and worse.
+“My mom called me that day to fix her car. I was on my way over to her
+place in my Toyota truck and had an accident. I didn’t have papers and my
+driver’s license was suspended when la migra got me. I was in jail for a
+while, before the judge decided to deport me in 2012.
+“I arrived in shackles to Comalapa Airport,” he tells me as he stares out
+the garage entrance toward the San Salvador volcano and greenery around
+it. Shit, I’m screwed, I thought.
+“I got here and said, ‘What the fuck?’ I hardly spoke the language, I
+didn’t know anybody and didn’t have a dime on me. All [the Salvadoran
+immigration authorities] did was take my shackles off, had me check in at
+the airport, and that was it. I didn’t know where to go. Thank God one of
+the guys who got deported with me invited me to stay with him in La
+Unión, way on the other side of the country. So I went.
+
+“Then I got back to [San Salvador] and found an uncle,” he says. It was
+while living in his uncle’s tin-roofed shack that Giovanni first “realized how
+much of a problem the maras are” in El Salvador. “And people stared at me
+like I was in the maras because of my tattoos! I’ve never been in any
+fuckin’ gang.
+“There were people being killed left and right, and the cops would stop
+me all the time because of my tattoos. I realized there were a bunch of
+places I can’t go, either because of the gangs or because of the cops. I’ve
+been pulled over by the cops at least two hundred thirty times since I’ve
+been here, telling me stuff like, ‘We see your tattoos, we know you’re in a
+gang, and don’t think that smiling little face of yours is going to save you.’ I
+was screwed.”
+Faced with these enormous challenges, Giovanni found solace and work
+in his life’s passion, cars. “I started to get some side gigs with a guy here on
+Chiltiupán,” he says. “He paid me the minimum wage, two hundred fiftysix dollars per month. After a few months, I realized I could make way
+more money on my own and started saving up and opened this shop down
+the block.”
+As of January of this year, he tells me, his body shop on Chiltiupán, with
+two tiny makeshift rooms attached to it, houses his dreams of work, family,
+and a better life, as he makes more than enough to pay his rent of five
+hundred dollars a month. The sweet, gasoline-like smell of the paint
+tattooing the cars combines with his Salvadoran story of resilience and our
+second beer to start me on a good buzz.
+We start talking about our love for lowrider oldies again, and Giovanni
+rushes over to change the CD player to play the song we both agree is one
+of the greatest lowrider oldies of all time, William DeVaughn’s “Be
+Thankful for What You Got.”
+“Man,” I tell him, my beer buzz in full bloom, “I used to gangster lean in
+whatever I could drive, my father’s LTD, my brother’s beat-up Toyota, or
+the Monte Carlo or Merc I had. Didn’t matter. I just wanted to feel gangster
+as fuck.” The part of me that grew up admiring The Godfather, Pop’s
+favorite movie, and the part of Giovanni that grew up watching Scarface are
+communing.
+Before I know it, it’s ten p.m. My phone shows that María Elena has
+called a couple of times. She’s probably worried about me. It’s time to go.
+
+I leave Giovanni cruising on memories, on hopes. Giovanni’s love of
+family and cars, his indefatigable spirit, symbolize the heart Salvadorans
+need to persist in the darkness.
+I walk up Chiltiupán, dizzy with relaxation, humming “Be Thankful for
+What You Got” in my head. I play the song on YouTube when I get back.
+“Have you been drinking?” María Elena asks. Mom’s spirit is
+manifesting in her namesake. “Where did you go?”
+“Walking around the neighborhood,” I say.
+“Are you nuts? You need to be careful. You can’t just walk around here
+like that, especially when you’ve been drinking.”
+The part of me that wants to give María Elena a sharp response is
+tempered by the fact that I’m still floating on the thought that Giovanni and
+other Salvadorans are nothing if not a people in the constant motion of
+overcoming.
+A few days later, I return briefly to see Giovanni, largely to just be
+around his cool energy in the paint-perfumed body shop. “Man, with my
+baby, this new place, I’m reborn,” he tells me, beaming again in the
+shadowed confines of his body shop. “I’m motivated even more to do
+whatever I need to do to move ahead.”
+The next day, I return to trying to find Mijango, who is proving more
+elusive than I’d imagined. After several days spent futilely rushing around
+the city, looking for Mijango with Isaias, I decide to visit Giovanni again. I
+need some of his breezy, adventurous, old-school homie spirits to help buoy
+my own. Just walking down the street anticipating the smell of imaginary
+car paint increases my energy. Lowrider oldies start playing in my head.
+Images of home fill my mind. But when I arrive, the black gate of his
+garage door is closed. There’s none of the colorful car-centric life I’ve been
+imagining, only a neighbor in an air-conditioning shop down the street,
+sitting somberly at his door. I walk up to the man to ask if he’s seen
+Giovanni.
+The man doesn’t look me in the eyes. Instead he looks down the street
+toward Giovanni’s garage and says. “Está muerto.”
+Fuck. My breath shortens. A little more prodding reveals that, a couple of
+days after I last saw him, two mareros snuck into the shop in the afternoon.
+Giovanni and Sofia were in their bedroom playing with Simón at the time.
+The tattooed gangsters rushed into the crowded blue room, where Giovanni
+
+was holding Simón. They pumped six shots into him at close range.
+Miraculously, none of the bullets hit Simón, but Giovanni was killed.
+The police have no leads and have given no indication that they will
+pursue a deeper investigation, a typical response in a country where more
+than 95 percent of all crimes remain uninvestigated and unsolved.7
+Giovanni’s wife and family believe the renter they threw out did what so
+many Salvadorans do to resolve conflicts: hired mareros, sicarios, to kill
+him.
+The image of Simón being baptized into Salvadoran society, covered in
+his father’s blood, abides. Tattooed gangsters killed a cool tattooed guy with
+whom I shared a gangster lean, continuing the legacy of gang violence that
+began a decade after I sported my own gangster lean. My resolve to
+understand the violence burns hotter with anger. Brighter, too. But given
+what I know based on my own intimate history with El Salvador and its
+many forms of gangs, my anger is fiercest at the most destructive gangsters
+in the country’s history—the ones in suits, big businessmen with a long
+history of being protected by even more violent gangsters in military
+uniforms.
+
+5
+
+San Salvador
+1975
+
+“Check,” I told Alonso, a university friend of my favorite cousin, Adilio.
+Between Alonso and me was a plastic chess set. We were in the sparsely
+decorated living room of Adilio’s friend Tito’s house. For some unknown
+reason, they called him Tito Caca—Tito Shit. I always giggled at his name,
+even though friends back in San Francisco also called me Tito—short for
+Robertito—in addition to Robert and Robs, names rooted in the fact that
+hospital administrators had hacked off the o of the name my parents gave
+me on my birth certificate. My Tito would go on to become the part of me
+that got angry and did crazy things.
+While Alonso studied his predicament on the chess board, Mercedes, a
+fellow universitaria wearing a mini-falda with a green top and heels, read
+what looked like a homemade magazine or pamphlet. Two other young
+teenagers with shoulder-length hair and porkchop sideburns were there, too.
+One was listening to Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and
+other rock pesado on a plastic box that played 45s; another sat on Tito’s
+family’s musty living room couch reading some newspapers and pamphlets.
+Adilio, his friends, and all the neighborhood kids referred to themselves as
+la mara, the local word for “group of friends.” I felt both inside and outside
+of their mara because I was American. My American identity felt like the
+only good thing I could hold on to at that time. Lacking context, my
+Salvadoran background and my family felt full of confusion, chaos, crime,
+and shame, but being American gave me a sense of solidity that many of us
+
+absorbed from TV shows like The Brady Bunch and Captain America.
+When I was in El Salvador, being American made me feel as though I
+floated above the molten political chaos brewing beneath the childhood fun.
+Tito Caca lived less than a block from the barranco, the ravine, where
+some of the neighborhood women who lived in the tin shacks nearby
+washed clothes and dried them on the rocks. We could smell the dirty gully
+as the women’s kids, some of them naked, played nearby.
+I was eleven years old and in San Salvador at the tail end of my summer
+vacation, staying with Pop, who had come to see his cousin, Tía Esperanza,
+and her family. He was also in El Salvador to conduct the contraband
+business I hated. Mom was in El Salvador too, but she spent most of her
+time in San Vicente, the more picturesque, semirural town where she grew
+up in poverty beneath the grandeur of the Chichontepec volcano.
+“Puta, you got me, cipote,” Alonso lamented from behind the big round
+glasses that, along with his aquiline nose, Keith Partridge feathered haircut,
+and intense stare, made him look like a darker, Salvadoran John Lennon.
+Alonso moved a pawn in precisely the way I wanted him to.
+“Checkmate!” I exclaimed, loud enough to distract the other guys and
+Mercedes from the music and papers. Adilio beamed with pride. Alonso
+commented on what a good game it was, got up abruptly, and almost ran
+over to the sofa. Conversation resumed.
+“That son of a bitch Molina says the military fired at the students only
+after the students attacked them,” one guy told the other. “Molina found his
+excuse to militarizar the university and fill it with his goons.”
+I didn’t know what this university stuff was all about, but their angry talk
+about the military made no sense. I grew up loving GI Joe, watching war
+movies, and crying at the sight of Marines holding the red, white, and blue
+during the national anthem at SF Giants baseball games featuring Willie
+Mays.
+“What’s wrong with the military?” I asked.
+“You know what, Robertito,” Alonso says, using the diminutive version
+of my name. “You should stick with your chess and other little boy’s games,
+niño yanqui.”
+Taken aback by Alonso’s sudden shift of tone, I fired back, “Niño
+yanqui? Why the fuck are you calling me niño yanqui?” My chest
+tightened, like he was trying to deny me the one thing that gave me a good
+feeling about being me in El Salvador: America.
+
+“Adilio,” Alonso said, looking toward my cousin, “take your primito
+gringo home, teach him why his country is the biggest piece of shit in the
+world.”
+“What do you know about my country, asshole!” I yelled, as Adilio
+started gently pushing me out the door. “You’re just sore because I beat you
+in chess!”
+“What’s wrong with that guy, Adilio?” I asked him as we walked down B
+street, to Tía Esperanza’s house.
+“Don’t mind them,” he said. “There’s a lot of bad shit going on here now
+and they’re really upset about it.”
+“Yeah, well those guys have never been to the United States. They don’t
+know anything about my country, and should mind their own fucking
+business. Don’t take me there anymore.”
+For the first time in El Salvador, my American side had become a
+liability. Prior to the chess clash, my American identity had been a sort of
+superpower around kids my age. Adults, too. I knew American Top 40
+songs long before radio deejays in El Salvador said they were spinning the
+“latest songs” from America. Everybody wanted my Levi’s and Converse
+tennis shoes, my ability to speak English. They admired my thick, curly
+head of hair that had them calling me “Mikol Yackson.” And my American
+dólares helped, too.
+It was 1975 and my spoiled-kid attitude toward El Salvador—my distaste
+for the culture, my pride at being the center of poorer kids’ attention and the
+feeling of American superiority it instilled—was just beginning to soften. I
+was starting to get over things like how sick in the stomach I sometimes
+got, the bugs, bats, and buzzards all over the place, and how much I hated
+the food: less-crunchy, weird-tasting Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, thick milk,
+and those pupusas, which tasted good but whose very name sounded like
+shit. I also started getting really interested in Lorena, the tall girl I’d happen
+to see walking home from school every day as I sat on the concrete bench
+under the almond tree in front of Tía Esperanza’s house at precisely the
+hour she arrived.
+On top of that, Tía Esperanza, Mom, and her relatives had started
+conspiring to show me cool Salvadoran things they knew I’d like: hiking up
+the Chichontepec volcano, going to the beach and, especially, popping
+firecrackers, lots of firecrackers, including big bombs we didn’t have in the
+US. The previous vacation I’d come to Tía Esperanza’s and found that my
+
+Christmas gift was a one-by-two-foot bomb, a giant firecracker wrapped in
+festive paper waiting for me.
+Mom and Tía Esperanza embodied the fact that love was the given of the
+place. So did all the kids—cousins who were ever ready to play with me
+and take me places and teach me things, shoeless street kids like Rolando,
+whose warmth, smarts, and loyalty would eventually make him a friend for
+life.
+On our visits, Mom and Pop always brought people in the Colonia El
+Bosque and San Vicente neighborhoods some love from California: all the
+stuff in the giant cardboard boxes—sometimes as many as nineteen—full of
+contraband sold to people who came from all over the country to buy it. In
+California Pop would cut deals with Khalil and the raspy-voiced guys at
+Hunt’s Donuts. Then, he, Mom, and Mamá Tey would ship the boxes on the
+passenger planes that we flew on into Ilopango Airport. When we arrived,
+the boxes were put in hangars, where they had to be retrieved and taken
+through customs.
+Pop got stuff through customs using his magical words—well, words and
+money—and magic boxes of cigarettes. We took many trips thanks to Pop’s
+airline discount. We’d get off the plane and a Wilkes Bashford–suited Pop
+would smile and shake hands with all the military guys he’d call mi
+distinguido, mi estimado, and other words that made Pop sound like he was
+some dignitary. Waiting for us at the airport every time was Sargento
+Melara, the low-level military guy whose little mustache and predictable
+smile made him look like a dark Charlie Chaplin—or a Salvadoran Hitler.
+Melara was the first of the many men at the Ilopango airport—and later at
+the customs warehouse—to receive the magic Marlboro boxes. Sargento
+Melara’s box usually had a $100 bill inserted in it, while the other guys—
+the immigration officials, the customs guys, and the military guys who
+looked like bosses—got magic boxes with $50.
+Mom’s boxes went to her mother’s house in San Vicente. Her boxes
+always felt better, more moral, because they were mostly filled with
+harmless stuff she gave away to family and friends—old clothes, cheap
+toys, diapers, baby lotion, Avon products, toothpaste, soap, detergents, and
+all kinds of other household items. Pop’s cardboard boxes filled with
+contraband and guns were another story. Whenever I complained about
+their dealings or got angry at Pop over the boxes, Mom would remind me,
+“That ‘stolen stuff’ is paying for your education and upbringing.”
+
+I didn’t know it as a kid, but it was Tía Esperanza who first suggested to
+Mamá Tey that my family bring black market goods to El Salvador. Both
+women grew up in the profound, Depression-era poverty of the mesones
+and sought creative ways for their families to escape it. This was the most
+effective. Before Pop started working for United Airlines and used his new
+position to expand and modernize the operation, Mamá Tey would take the
+goods by boat, the cheapest way to transport stuff from San Francisco to El
+Salvador. The same gentle, fleshy hands that lovingly sewed me and my
+siblings’ clothes and cooked us pupusas de chicharron also held the .38 that
+Pop taught her to use at her house on Twentieth, near Valencia, in the same
+yard we played in. After being robbed twice on two separate journeys,
+Mamá Tey had grown tired of it and asked Pop to teach her how to use one
+of his guns. She eventually ended up firing it at crooks on two occasions
+during her long boat journeys.
+When my cousin Adilio and I arrived from a day trip that summer of
+1975, Rolando, my best friend in all of El Salvador at the time, was sitting
+on the concrete bench beneath the almond tree in front of Tía Esperanza’s
+house. Tía Esperanza, my dad’s cousin, was in her living room. She’d
+grown up with Pop when he lived in the mesón and was about a year older
+than him. They used to go to the Sociedad de Obreros, El Casino Juvenil,
+and other halls where they danced to the music of Luis Alcaraz, Sonora
+Matancera, Benny Goodman, and others.
+“Mr. Robert,” she said in her funny accent. Her head and body tilted
+sideward in a strange way, like she was about to start dancing. “How gwar
+yu? And yu, Mr. Rolan? How gwar yu?”
+Tía Esperanza had been putting my family up on our visits as far back as
+I could remember. She’d grown up barefoot in a mesón like Pop. Also like
+Pop, she was funny and fun to be around. She’d married Pop’s cousin, a guy
+who then left her to raise their three sons alone. As a single mom, she
+hustled, selling goods from the US, loaning money, and doing other things
+that allowed her to save enough to buy a small piece of land on Colonia El
+Bosque and build a home there. Tía Esperanza had known Pop since the
+years of dancing and drinking before Pop left for Mexico in 1949. The fruit
+of so many years of friendship, poverty, and fun was Tía Esperanza and
+Pop’s loyalty to each other. She seemed to have a silent pact with him to
+keep me distracted while Pop did his business—and from his puteando with
+women.
+
+Tía Esperanza was watching the news, which was full of military guys
+and blue-and-white flags. One of the generals with a thick mustache and a
+booty chin kept talking about terroristas.
+“Look, boys,” she said. “There’s Presidente Molina!” Tía Esperanza
+leapt out of her chair, grabbed us, and started tooting military music as she
+marched us around the living room, as if she were Captain Kangaroo
+leading a bunch of kids.
+“Here’s El Señor Presidente!” she proclaimed, popping out her eyes and
+pursing her lips in an imitation of the gorilla-esque General Armando
+Molina. Molina was another in the long line of military men who followed
+the guy called El General that Tía Esperanza, Pop, and Mamá Tey would
+sometimes talk about.
+“That serote assassin is pretty evil,” she sighed. “He massacred all those
+students last month.” This was the violent stuff that had upset Alonso and
+his friends. “Molina’s not very smart, though.”
+We laughed.
+“You know who’s smart?” she asked en voz bajita—in a low, quiet voice
+—as she looked out to the house of the motorcycle military guy next door.
+“Who?”
+“Los muchachos.”
+“Who?”
+“The rebeldes, the young men and women opposing Molina and the other
+fascistas. They move in the shadows without that hijueputa and his military
+finding out. That takes huevos and smarts.”
+Her curse words tickled Rolando and me, as she continued to sing the
+praises of los muchachos. This muchachos term—which literally referred to
+all young men like me throughout the Spanish-speaking world—provoked
+my curiosity.
+“You know who’s one of the muchachos?” she asked in a much lower
+voice.
+“Who?”
+“Adilio’s friend Alonso, that’s who.”
+“You mean that creep I beat in chess?” I fired back rhetorically. “I hate
+that guy!” My temper flared. “You know what he told me, Tía?”
+“What?”
+“Something really evil, something I’ll never forget.”
+“And what’s that, son?”
+
+“He said to me, ‘Your country, the United States of America, is the
+biggest piece of shit on earth!’ I told him ‘You don’t know anything about
+America! Shut up!’ And I left.”
+Tía Esperanza paused, as if searching for the right words.
+“You know, Robertillo,” she said, her voice abruptly shifting to a more
+serious tone. “Los Uniden is your home. Yes. But you know it’s not perfect,
+right?”
+“Yeah.”
+“Good. ’Cuz I’d hate for you to grow up with illusions. You’re born in
+America, but remember, Robertillo: you’re also Salvadoreño—and we’re all
+Americanos here, too, Latinoamericanos.”
+I listened to her halfheartedly, unable to get my mind off that asshole
+Alonso.
+The next day Tía Esperanza, Pop, Adilio, and some of Tía Esperanza’s
+smaller grandkids packed up into a van, and we went to Panchimalco, one
+of the last Salvadoran towns with indigenous communities. After driving
+for about forty-five minutes, we finally arrived at our first stop, La Puerta
+del Diablo, the Devil’s Door. As we climbed in elevation, clear blue skies
+had given way to clouds that gave a misty, mystical air to the lush green
+mountains.
+“Roberto, come and see the view,” Pop said to me from near the edge,
+near the protective rail, in the reassuring, fatherly tone I craved so much.
+“It’s spectacular!” Even ten feet from the edge, vertigo spun my stomach
+and head, giving me pause. But I decided to go anyway, just to be close to
+Pop.
+“Look down there,” Pop said, gazing into the gigantic crevasse below.
+“That’s el abismo.”
+“Why do they call it La Puerta del Diablo?” I asked, after recovering my
+composure.
+“The legend is that La Puerta del Diablo was created when a big
+mountain split in two after the devil fled with the daughter of a nearby
+landowner, some rich guy named Renderos,” Adilio declared in the
+collegiate tone he’d adopted since starting at the university.
+This Puerta del Diablo myth mingled with the stories already swirling in
+my mind about Los Planes and Panchimalco, which Rolando and some of
+the other mara gathered on Calle B had told me when I told them where we
+were headed.
+
+“La Puerta del Diablo is a place where military escuadrones de la muerte
+take people to shoot them or hack them to pieces,” Rolando had said. “They
+then shove them over the edge or bury them in mass graves outside of
+Panchimalco.” He’d sounded as though he was sharing a ghost story. That
+phrase—escuadrones de la muerte—hung an ominous dark cloud over the
+Devil’s Door.1 The border separating a child’s fascination with ghouls,
+myths, and demons from the dark truth of life disappeared here.
+From La Puerta del Diablo we drove down the mountains toward
+Panchimalco, which you could see from the planes. Its white church and all
+the redbrick rooftops made it look a little like some idyllic Italian mountain
+town.
+Pop loved coming to Panchimalco. The Sunday we visited, the
+townspeople were getting ready to go to church in the afternoon. Older
+indigenous women—with wrinkles, tan skin, flowered shirts, and cotton
+dresses like my maternal grandmother, Mamá Clothi—marched in
+processions. Alongside them were girls whose intense looks and playful
+smiles reminded me of Lorena, the pretty girl who lived across the street
+from Tía Esperanza. They wore hooped earrings with their traditional
+dresses. Everybody carried flowers, lots of flowers; pink and green and red
+and white and orange. Visiting Panchimalco made me associate indigenous
+people with beautiful colors.
+Pop had mentioned that his grandmothers were indigenous and I’d once
+heard Pop say that most of the indios had been masacrados, the same word
+Adilio’s student friends used to refer to what the military did. Beyond that,
+there was a giant silencio. Still, I hoped that being part indigenous could
+help give me a better sense of who Pop’s family was—who I was.
+Watching some indigenous kids playing, I decided to ask. “Hey, Pop,
+didn’t you once say your abuelas were india?”
+“Yes,” he answered.
+My chest swelled with pride. I knew it. Behind all that silencio, we were
+connected to this indigenous community.
+“So, then, your father was part indio and we’re part indio too, right,
+Pop?”
+“My father is one hundred percent hijueputa,” Pop responded.
+We saw indigenous people. They looked back at us. We looked like some
+of them. Even so, throughout my childhood, my family had most often
+referred to our ancestors as Españoles. And despite our heritage, the only
+
+time we interacted with indigenous people was when we visited tourist
+places like Chalchuapa or Panchimalco. Worse, Pop and others used slurs
+like “cara de indio” (face of an Indian) for “ugly” and “indio patas rajadas”
+(Indian cracked feet, i.e., barefoot) for “backward and dumb.” But the
+reasons for the lack of interaction remained in silencio—Pop’s silencio, as
+well as El Salvador’s.
+
+6
+
+Ahuachapán, El Salvador
+1931
+
+“Aaaayyyy!” screamed a voice. “Aaaayyyy! Aaaaayyyyyy!” The
+harrowing noise coming from the coffee fields could be heard far beyond
+the trees, grass, and greenery near the plantation where Ramóncito, his best
+friend Ricardo, and other boys were playing escondelero (hide-and-seek)
+and ladrón librado (cops and robbers), all the way to the hulking, medievallooking white cuartel, the city’s largest structure, which housed hundreds of
+soldiers, strategically located on a hill overlooking the center of
+Ahuachapán and surrounding neighborhoods, like Barrio Santa Cruz.
+“Hear that?” said one of the boys, pulling out of his ladrón librado police
+role momentarily. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”
+The boys sped across the field to the coffee plantation. From a distance,
+the group of indigenous men and other people gathered anxiously near the
+honey-processing plant looked serious. Ramóncito and the boys moved
+closer.
+They reached the gathering and saw the source of the commotion: an
+indigenous worker writhing in anguish on the ground. Eager to know what
+had happened, Ramóncito and his band of barefoot compadres navigated
+through the indigenous men, their bosses, and the men in baggy pants with
+guns on their belts, the guardias who protected the plantation.
+“What happened?” Ramóncito asked.
+“Can’t you see? He fell into a vat of hot honey,” barked one of the
+guardias.
+
+Ramóncito stared at the red gashes of melting skin on the man—it looked
+like someone had smashed rotten red coffee beans on him and then spread
+them across his entire body. The pasty, reddish-yellow burns horrified
+Ramóncito and the boys, especially when the injured man kept screaming
+“Aaaaayyyyyy!” Some of the injured man’s coworkers and bosses ran
+around trying to figure out what to do. Most of the other men watched in
+silencio. Days later, their coworker died, overcome by a treatable ailment—
+gangrene—for which indigenous people didn’t get treatment in the hospital
+they couldn’t access.
+Ramóncito rushed home to tell Mamá Tey and Mamá Fina what had
+happened. Ricardo ran home to tell his older brother, Alfonso Luna. Later
+that day, Ramóncito went to Ricardo and Alfonso’s home, an upper-middleclass two-story house down the street from the shack where he lived with
+Mamá Tey and Mamá Fina.
+“Damn those terratenientes!” fumed Alfonso Luna to his abuelita while
+Ricardo and Ramóncito started playing chibolas (marbles). “The life of the
+indio and the worker is worth nothing to these people.”
+As Alfonso spoke, Ramóncito noticed that his big, intense brown eyes
+held sadness and anger—very different from the funny, friendly look they
+had when he played with them. This was a different young man from the
+one who called the eight-year-old Ramóncito “Monchito,” another name he
+loved. The young UES student was handsome in a rich person’s way; his
+thick wavy slicked black hair, thick eyebrows, and pouty lips made him
+look to Ramóncito like a heavier-set version of a movie star he saw in the
+papers, Rudolph Valentino.
+“You need to calmarte, Alfonso,” Ramóncito heard the elderly woman
+admonish her beloved grandson. “You never know who’s listening,
+especially now.” Doña Indalicia went on to talk about “bad signs” that
+meant awful things in El Salvador like they did when indigenous lands were
+first expropriated in the late nineteenth century.1 She also spoke about ejidos
+(plots of communal land) being “taken away” from indigenous families
+who lived on them in the 1880s. But the university student’s fierce look said
+that anger had already closed his ears. He was only nineteen and
+hardheaded, as his grandmother said.
+While the adults talked, Ramóncito, whose greatest passion was reading,
+flipped through the Red Star, the student paper that Alfonso worked on at
+the UES in the capital. He didn’t understand most of what he read, but had a
+
+sense that Alfonso and the Red Star were against the president, a man
+named Araujo, the one his family in Ataco cursed about, too.
+Ramóncito loved that Alfonso talked a lot about educación, the thing the
+boy dreamed could make his life better. Talk of educación for the
+indigenous people and a universidad popular for workers elated him. So did
+his older university-student friend telling him to “make sure nothing stops
+you from getting your educación, Monchito.”
+After he finished looking through the paper, Ramóncito went back to
+playing marbles with Ricardo. Alfonso bought Ramóncito and the other
+poor kids the marbles as well as capiruchos (tops). He also provided
+Ramóncito with the leather, clothes hangers, and rubber bands to make
+slingshots, which the boy, who couldn’t even afford underwear, would
+never have been able to afford otherwise. When they weren’t shooting their
+slingshots at each other and at other boys and girls—and adults—in the
+barrio, Ricardo and Ramóncito shot at squirrels, birds, lizards, and other
+animals.
+For Ramóncito, hunting zopilotes wasn’t just a game, but a way to help
+out his grandmother, Mamá Fina. He and Ricardo fired rocks, either
+knocking the ugly vulture from the tree or shooting it in a nearby ravine,
+before dragging the bloodied black bird home to Mamá Fina with great
+excitement. Fina rubbed the blood of the zopilote on her legs to cure her
+eczema, one of many indigenous remedies used by people who couldn’t
+afford to go to the hospital Mamá Fina’s father, Don Sixto, had helped
+build. Ramóncito also brought Mamá Fina hulking, live sapos sabaneros,
+whose croaking made him laugh as he watched her rub the belly of the
+rubbery beasts on her legs, too.
+Indigenous remedies were not things some people, especially rich people,
+liked, including Ramóncito’s padre, Don Miguel Rodríguez. While Alfonso
+talked about the indio remedies in an admiring and respectful way,
+Ramóncito heard Don Miguel speak about them in opposite terms, the same
+terms he used to refer to the indios themselves, like “indio patas rajadas,” or
+“indios cerotes,” Indian shits.
+Though the man hardly acknowledged Ramóncito, Don Miguel’s mother,
+Mamá Juanita, brought Ramóncito to visit the family’s coffee-rich
+plantation to ride horses and play among her aunts and uncles and the
+indigenous workers whose names he barely knew. My family owns eighty
+cows and has lots of servants, Ramóncito would tell himself proudly, as if
+
+his grandfather Don Salvador’s stately mansion and massive estate were
+his.
+Ramóncito knew Mamá Juanita was a Náhuat Indian, a rich Náhuat
+Indian. Like the other indigenous people on the plantation, she had big,
+grape-shaped eyes and full lips. Ramóncito noticed the quiet ways his
+grandmother exercised her authority—with looks, by pointing with her
+mouth (a Náhuat means of communication used by many Salvadorans), or
+in private conversations with her kids and workers.
+But despite her power, she, too, lacked what Ramóncito most craved:
+education.
+“I can teach you how to read numbers, Mamá Juanita,” the boy told his
+grandmother, proud of what he’d learned in the first grade and picked up on
+his own.
+Ramóncito admired his father in part because he had that education like
+Alfonso. Don Miguel had studied agronomy at university in Guatemala.
+The boy wondered how he could get the money for his own education.
+With Mamá Juanita’s encouragement and promises of protection,
+Ramóncito got the courage one August day to ask his father to help him
+with his dream.
+His father was in the mansion’s garden when Ramóncito walked up
+nervously and said, “Don Miguel.”
+“Yes? What do you want?” Don Miguel asked with that confident look
+that Ramóncito noticed he and other rich people had.
+“Don Miguel,” Ramóncito blurted out, “I want to get an education. I
+want to learn.”
+“I see,” Miguel said. “Why do you want to get an education,
+Ramóncito?”
+“I know it will be good for me to learn. I’ll be able to help my mother
+and grandmother.”
+Don Miguel thought about the boy’s request, stopping as if to weigh
+options. Finally, he looked at Ramóncito and said, “OK. We’re going to
+send you to a private school.”
+Ramóncito let loose an unusually big smile and nearly danced into the
+heavens at the news. He would’ve been satisfied getting his father’s help to
+pay for the paper, pencils, uniform, and other things he needed for public
+school, but getting the tuition to a private school—that was beyond what he
+had dreamed!
+
+When he returned home to Ahuachapán, Ramóncito burst with joy as he
+shared the good news with Mamá Tey and Mamá Fina. They celebrated
+with a dinner of arroz y frijoles and a special treat: chengas, the big tortillas
+the boy loved to eat with manteca y sal. The future looked better, for a
+moment at least.
+In school, Ramóncito excelled, especially in language arts. No longer
+traveling between Ahuachapán and San Salvador when Mamá Tey went to
+be with Chico, Ramóncito stayed with Mamá Fina full-time and settled into
+being like all the other boys and girls going to school. His dream had been
+realized. Those were among the most memorable moments in the boy’s life,
+until the school director approached him a few weeks into the term.
+“Ramóncito,” said the director, “I have some news for you.”
+“Yes, Maestro?”
+“Your father didn’t pay the first installment for your schooling.”
+The boy stood quietly in his uniform, which he cherished, deflated.
+“Can you go and tell Tey to pay just a month’s tuition? I promise we will
+find a way to pardon the rest of the payment through August.”
+“I don’t know, sir. I’ll try.”
+Ramóncito came home worried. His dream had started to smell like the
+coffee around the hacienda that had started rotting when growing tensions
+between workers and cafetaleros slowed production. But he didn’t lose
+hope.
+On hearing the news, Tey’s face lost its usual sunny look. With the
+bubbly, nervous sadness of someone delivering news about the death of a
+relative, Tey approached Ramóncito.
+“Mijo, we simply don’t have the money to pay anything to the school.”
+“Why not, Mamá?” the boy pleaded, his eyes starting to brim with tears
+—and anger.
+“I’m sorry, son. I’m truly sorry,” she told him, her eyes welling up, too.
+Ramóncito looked at his mother and said nothing, pausing.
+The moment of happiness was over. The boy knew he had not yet found a
+way out of the abyss where most children in El Salvador lived.
+“My father is a shit of a man,” said the boy in the intonations he’d
+learned from his rich aunts and uncles, before running out to cry on the dirt
+path outside Mamá Tey’s shack.
+Several months passed and Ramóncito returned to his wanderings; his
+young life continued to be fragmented between homes, between families,
+
+and between the light life of the elite and the dark demimonde of
+ilegitimidad.
+And then things got worse for Ramóncito and everyone else in El
+Salvador: two days before Ramóncito’s ninth birthday, on August 27, 1931,
+the headlines throughout the country announced a precipitous collapse in
+the world price of coffee.2 The price of the dark brown beans picked by the
+workers dropped from seventy-five to fifteen centavos for each tarea of
+coffee picked plus two tortillas and a handful of beans.
+The plunging price of coffee also meant a lowered value on human life,
+especially indigenous and ilegítimo life. Conflict was on the horizon. With
+each passing month that the price of coffee dropped, exploiting, abusing,
+and killing poor coffee workers became easier, as the desperation in the
+Salvadoran countryside grew. The increasingly explosive situation also
+made coffee cheaper for the primary consumers of the bloodiest beans in
+history: the Americanos.
+
+Part III
+
+7
+
+Ilopango, El Salvador
+2015
+
+“I trained with the Americanos when they first came in the eighties,”
+Isaias tells me. My driver and I are descending a steep, grassy hill in
+Ilopango, a small lakeside city east of San Salvador, to the gang-prevention
+event taking place below. Isaias’s big accordion smile and animated eyes
+signal pride. However, I’m too excited about finally meeting Raúl Mijango
+to engage with Isaias.
+During the drive from the city to Ilopango, Isaias and I talked about news
+reports that the Pentagon had begun preparations to deploy 280
+camouflaged US troops to help fight gangs in Central America,1 including
+El Salvador, through “security cooperation training exercises.” We were on
+our way to meet some of those gang members the Pentagon sent trainers to
+help the Salvadoran military combat. President Salvador Sánchez Cerén
+signed the agreement for El Salvador. During the civil war of the 1980s and
+early ’90s, Cerén was firmly on the other side of things, serving as a
+commander in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
+Named for Farabundo Martí, the great revolutionary leader of the early
+1930s, the FMLN was a guerrilla army that sought to overthrow the USbacked Salvadoran government headed by the Christian Democrats in the
+’80s and in the late ’80s and ’90s by ARENA (Alianza Republicana
+Nacionalista), the conservative, right-wing party founded by Roberto
+D’Aubuisson, a party whose slogan was “El Salvador will be the tomb of
+the reds.” During the war, D’Aubuisson, a former major trained at the US
+
+military’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, is widely
+believed to have led the escuadrones de la muerte, armed paramilitary units
+of off-duty soldiers, police, and other security forces that carried out
+extrajudicial killings, torture, and forced disappearances. The escuadrones
+were the Salvadoran military’s equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death
+squads charged with ethnic cleansing and other mass killings. D’Aubuisson
+once told three European journalists, “You Germans were very intelligent.
+You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism,
+and you began to kill them.”2
+In the sixties and seventies, five separate politico-military organizations,
+each with its own political orientation and program, started fighting poverty
+and the massive repression by El Salvador’s military dictatorships before
+eventually coming together to form the umbrella organization of FMLN in
+1980. After the war, the FMLN sought change—and power—through
+elections, and became a political party that won the presidency in 2009 and
+then again in 2014, when Cerén was elected. Like Cerén, Mijango is a
+former FMLN comandante, but from a different faction within the
+organization.
+The fact that Cerén, who himself had been pursued by the death squads,
+had agreed to these exercises with the US military was as dangerous as it
+was disgusting. The mighty Pentagon’s Southern Command was preparing
+to escalate the fight against small kids, teens, and other gang members. War
+was in the air, even at an event organized to promote peace among gang
+members.
+An old friend from the war era who does gang-prevention work with atrisk youth told me about the event—the inauguration of a nursery and
+gardening project for current and former members of Mara Salvatrucha
+(MS), the dominant gang in the area, an event organized by Mijango,
+Catholic leaders, nongovernmental organizations, and other allies. Will and
+Luis, two members of MS I met hanging out at the reception desk on the
+top of the hill, look visibly tense, wary of all the blue-uniformed chota,
+National Civil Police officers, who clutch their M16s as they patrol the
+forest and hills around the barn where the meeting’s taking place. Will and
+Luis’s reaction is understandable given that they live outside of Ilopango in
+what was, until recently, an extremely violent area, hotly contested by rival
+gangs.
+
+“I have to watch out for them as much or more than I do 18th Street,”
+Will, a baby-faced seventeen-year-old, tells me; 18th Street is another mara
+and his clika’s main enemy. Both gangs join the military, the police, and
+other security forces in escalating the violence and killing. “[The police]
+picked me up, beat me, and left me in 18th Street territory to be killed,” he
+says. While many talk about how LA gang culture has migrated to El
+Salvador, few remember that LAPD-style policing has, too.
+Will has dark skin, a thick nose, and a shy smile. His baggy pants and
+baseball cap give him a very LA look. He’s also wearing cheap tennis
+shoes, a loose white tee, and a long short-sleeved shirt—he’s
+indistinguishable from the poor, young, newbie gang members I remember
+from MacArthur Park and Pico Union, where the gangs were born.
+Will’s twenty-seven-year-old friend and MS veterano, Luis, also carries
+an attitude reminiscent of youth gangs in LA’s MacArthur Park in the
+nineties. But there’s no smile on his face. Luis’s dour look is that of a
+hardened gang member, one whose inability to smile often means he’s
+beaten, hurt, and killed enough people to be way beyond the point of no
+return.
+Luis strikes a skeptical gangster lean and says he’s here in the barn to
+“check out what this is about.” He and Will peek out the window of the
+barn toward a nearby greenhouse that Interpeace, the organization that
+sponsors Mijango’s work, uses as part of the jobs component of his gangalternative program.
+“Working in the garden makes me feel good,” Will confides with the shy
+smile. “I have a wife and a four-month-old son, and I’m trying to get
+straight so I can support them.” Will’s wife and son are among over five
+hundred thousand Salvadorans—an eighth of the country’s population3—
+who depend on gang-affiliated family members for income and other
+support. “It’s hard because of pressures inside and outside, from the other
+gangs, and especially the cops.”
+Will’s much more open than Luis to talking about what led him to a gang
+(being poor, having a fucked-up stepfather, needing camaraderie). The older
+marero’s face looks like he has VER, OÍR Y CALLAR graffitied across it. I look
+at Luis to see if the possibility of working in the greenhouse or in the
+nearby fields as part of the gang-prevention program organized by Raúl
+Mijango and his allies has any appeal.
+
+“It looks like something worth checking out, but I’m not going to join
+yet. I have some issues to deal with,” Luis says, before admitting that he’s
+killed 18th Street members and is likely to continue doing so. “And,” he
+quickly adds with raised eyebrows and a sudden smile, “maybe some
+police.”
+He starts for the door of the barn. Will abruptly says adiós and rushes
+after his friend. Left in the barn alone, I imagine that Luis will likely end up
+dead. But I’m not sure about Will. He wants to stop crossing that thin line
+between love and hate in a country that is once again about to be inundated
+with increased US military presence, which has produced so much violence
+historically. The larger question is whether El Salvador will ever support
+young mareros like Will who are thinking about getting out of la vida loca.
+That’s one of the things I want to speak with Mijango about.
+Alex Sánchez told me Mijango could help me get a better sense about
+what turns salvageable kids like Will into stone-cold killers like Luis. I get
+ready to leave the barn, wishing Alex was here to share his perspective.
+Alex doesn’t just know the origins of MS-13 in Pico Union and LA on a
+personal level and have an inside view on the complexities of gang life
+that’s largely missing from sensationalized news stories; he’s also seen the
+violence in El Salvador firsthand. Growing up near Ilopango, Alex saw the
+severed heads of government victims in the late seventies. After migrating
+to Los Angeles, where he became an MS-13 gang member, he was deported
+back to El Salvador. Once again he encountered severed heads, this time
+those of gang members killed by Sombra Negra, new escuadrones de la
+muerte linked to police here in the early nineties. Alex can connect the
+severed heads that dot the timeline of wartime and postwar Salvadoran
+history.
+I walk from the barn back to the formal inauguration ceremony, which is
+in progress in the field beyond. Nearby, plastic picnic tables are surrounded
+by gang members filling out job applications. At the front is a makeshift
+stage set up against a wall of a small municipal building with a banner that
+says MUNICIPAL FARM and the name of the city’s mayor, Salvador Ruano,
+which is painted and plastered everywhere. All around us are those cops
+with the M16s that are most often aimed at MS-13 or 18th Street members.
+On the stage, which faces a forest, there’s a large table surrounded by flags
+(El Salvador’s, Ilopango’s, and others). Sitting at the table are several
+speakers: leaders of NGOs, nuns, priests, and several tattooed young men,
+
+gang members. Directly in front of the stage is a large white cloth tent
+buzzing with the hopes and aspirations of more than two hundred
+Ilopanguenses. At the center of the crowd is its leader, Raúl Mijango.
+In 2012, Mijango and a motley crew of allies—Catholic church leaders,
+gang members, and leaders of nongovernmental organizations—started
+promoting peace following the tregua. Because the unpopularity of the
+murderous gangs made them the third rail in Salvadoran politics, the
+negotiations were conducted in secret with the covert support of the FMLNled government and the more public support of the Organization of
+American States.4 The process initially yielded fruit: the gang truce cut
+homicides in half. Then the truce’s demise in 2013 eventually led to the
+record-breaking homicide levels in El Salvador. The leaders gathered
+around the large table are here in Ilopango to preserve what they can of the
+peace in the face of the force they perceive as the biggest threat to their
+efforts.
+“I say with love and with respect to the United States government, take
+responsibility!” Ilopango mayor Salvador Ruano is standing, mic in hand,
+speaking to an imaginary United States—no embassy officials accepted the
+invitation to attend. “You brought the gangs from the United States when
+you deported them,” he says. “So we now ask you to give your support
+directly to local communities, despite our differences—because
+Salvadorans need peace.”
+The gathering is surreal. ARENA guys like Ruano, whose small eyes and
+tight suit make him look like a puffy character from a Botero painting, were
+el enemigo in the 1980s and ’90s—right-wing, ARENA-party fascists and
+members of other US-backed governments who were responsible for the
+lion’s share of mass murder by government forces during the war. Now
+Ruano is calling the US out for opposing the gang truce. In the US
+opposition to the truce, I hear echoes of the LAPD’s opposition to truces in
+early-nineties LA. Opposing gang truces appears to be another US export,
+along with perpetual military aid from the Pentagon.
+These strange postwar alliances and the secrecy behind the truce are but a
+couple of the things that make me skeptical about both Mijango, the FMLN
+government’s motives, and the gang-truce process. During the war, it was
+clear and obvious to many that the “death squad government of El
+Salvador” was the bad guy opposed by the FMLN, whose struggle enjoyed
+worldwide solidarity, including from hundreds of thousands in the US. Now
+
+that the FMLN has become the institution it was once fighting against, it’s
+harder to discern who’s in the wrong.
+“There will be no concertación,” Mijango says, as he stands and picks up
+where Ruano left off, “if one important actor continues to block peace
+efforts. The United States is having an unhealthy influence on the current
+government.”
+Regardless of what one thinks of his secretive tactics and the in-your-face
+politics considered controversial by some, Mijango deserves respect, if only
+because of his unique ability to navigate the chaos and confusion of postwar
+Salvadoran politics. During the FMLN’s more high-minded era, Mijango
+trained special-forces units. He can read the tea leaves of security policies
+like few others.
+“We’ve seen this before, these repeating interventionist schemes of the
+United States,” Mijango says, “militarizing public security to expand its
+power.” After Mijango finishes his speech, I corner him; we speak briefly
+about his program and agree to meet the next day.
+Using his connection to El Salvador’s security minister, David Munguía
+Payés, Mijango brokered the deal between MS-13 and 18th Street from
+within the walls of the high-security prison in Zacatecoluca, better known
+as Zacatraz. Joining him as mediator of the process was Monsignor Fabio
+Colindres, a Catholic bishop. Mijango’s most questionable step in the
+process was conducting the negotiations between gangs in secret, though
+with the clandestine support of the government, outside of open institutional
+channels. No major politician or political party wanted to risk the wrath of
+Salvadoran voters tired of the country’s perpetual violence, which they
+blamed largely on the gangs.
+His extralegal approach to the truce left many thorny questions. Should
+the negotiations have been undertaken in secret in a country where
+institutionalized secrets have already caused so much bloodshed? What do
+the gangs, government, and other parties have to hide? And regardless of
+the secretive way the negotiations took place, the main question dogging
+any such process remained: Should the FMLN government have negotiated
+with murderers and other violent criminals? The truce died due to many
+factors, including a lack of media scrutiny that inspired skepticism of its
+validity, as well as smaller gangs’ refusal to participate. El Salvador’s
+labyrinth of intersecting interests also did its part to kill the truce: ARENA
+and other right-wing politicians joined the US embassy in attacking the
+
+agreement, claiming its true goal was to buy the gangs time to grow their
+power. Another important factor in the truce’s failure was that a large
+segment of the Salvadoran populace was simply opposed to negotiating
+with gangs. Eventually Cerén and the government rejected the truce and,
+instead, escalated the US-backed mano dura anti-gang policies by
+reintroducing El Salvador’s dreaded rapid-response military battalions into
+the postwar scenario. Cerén’s rejection was hypocritical to critics who
+remembered that he was a part of the FMLN’s negotiating team during the
+1992 peace accords. Among other measures designed to put the country on
+the path to sustainable peace, the accords of 1992 had abolished these same
+rapid-response units containing the escuadrones de la muerte.
+The next day, Isaias picks me up at my cousin’s at 7:30 a.m. with his
+usual military precision to drive me to Mijango’s office. He drops me in
+front of the black iron gate of the office of Interpeace, an international
+violence-prevention organization sponsoring Mijango’s work, in central San
+Salvador, then leaves. I go into the lobby to wait for Mijango. Fifteen
+minutes later, he enters wearing a red guayabera and a big smile that
+accompanies his apologies for starting late. He begins right where he left
+off the conversation with me the previous day.
+“You know what worsens the violence?” he asks rhetorically. “The lack
+of justice in [the US and Salvadoran governments] that allows the gangs
+and others to work in an environment where the rule of law doesn’t exist.”
+“How so?”
+“For seventeen years, as the gang problem started developing in El
+Salvador, the state’s only response was repression,” he says, smirking in
+disgust. “With the help of the US Department of Justice, all they came up
+with was mano dura.”
+Ten years later, the idea that former US attorney general William Barr
+sent US Justice Department trainers and aid to El Salvador5 to institute
+policing models based on Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” policing is
+still disturbing when we consider studies that show that such policies have
+led to increased homicide rates and gang power.6 So is a more recent fact:
+that Giuliani visited El Salvador earlier this year as a highly paid consultant
+to the National Association of Private Enterprise, the main association of
+Salvadoran big business, and encouraged the same failed mano dura
+approach to violence reduction, saying, “The biggest problem in New York
+
+was the mafia and then drug traffickers, but here it’s two major gangs, and
+these two gangs need to be annihilated.”7
+“They started with mano dura, then created super mano dura, ridiculo de
+mano dura, mano requete dura, mano de hierro, and all that shit. Nothing
+worked. All it did was escalate the violence.” Mijango’s mocking mano
+dura echoes how I feel about two of Pop’s favorite sayings, “Hands of steel,
+silk gloves” and “Saints are made by being beaten”—BS, stuff that only
+pushed the adolescent me to escalate to greater rebellion.
+“We will convert those generating the violence into part of the solution,”
+he says, “but nobody here wants to talk peace. Not even my excompañeros.” In their efforts to secure votes for elections, both the FMLN
+and ARENA parties negotiated secretly with the gangs to win the support of
+their hundreds of thousands of followers. The political parties also wanted
+the gangs to increase or minimize violence in areas that were beneficial to
+their respective candidates.
+“I’m fed up with political party politics. So many years struggling,
+developing a sense of brotherhood and bonds of deep solidarity with your
+compañeros. So much that you would have given your life for, for your
+compañeros, as many did.
+“Now my main political enemies are my same compañeros,” he says.
+“I’m not good for this. It used to be clear who my enemy is. I prefer to
+leave for another way of life, not keep fighting with the same compañeros.”
+The vertigo returns—like I’m Alice in Wonderland or Neo in the first
+Matrix movie, stretching my head and body as I tumble down the rabbit
+hole into a world in which all the rules have changed.
+“I’m ashamed,” says Mijango. “This situation with the FMLN and the
+gangs is as much of an emotional problem as it is a political one.”
+Whoa. The decades of this dude’s experience of war and postwar gang
+violence led this heavy-duty Salvadoran political animal to include
+“emotional” issues alongside big-ticket causes like history, economic
+issues, and US policy as part of the gang-and-violence equation.
+I sit pondering his statement, confused about the violence here, when a
+young man in a clean white button-down shirt walks in. Mijango gets up
+immediately and leaves the office saying, “I’ll be right back, but you two
+should talk.”
+“I’m Roberto.”
+“I’m Santiago.”
+
+“Do you work with Raúl?”
+“In a way, you could say, yes.”
+His response tells me he’s the brilliant young marero who Mijango told
+me acts as a kind of gang diplomat, a guy who speaks publicly for both
+gangs—to political parties, to the media, to the Church and other
+institutional sectors. He’s one of the only people who speaks for tens of
+thousands of gang members in El Salvador.8 Santiago is part of an
+unprecedented political commission that MS-13 and 18th Street established
+to negotiate and speak on behalf of their interests.
+“Are you involved . . .” I say before he cuts me off.
+“I have to go, but we can speak later, if you wish.”
+“Yes. Definitely,” I respond, and we exchange phone numbers.
+The search for Mijango has morphed into a journey to meet and speak
+with Santiago, who, by virtue of his unique, high position in the mara
+universe, probably has important things to say, things that will help me in
+my quest to understand what led him and his peers to rebel and join gangs. I
+also suspect that I’ll run into those things that turned a bookish Mr. Peabody
+into a familiar rebel from my past: Tito.
+
+8
+
+San Salvador
+1976
+
+“Hola, joven,” the ever execrable Don EB said as he sashayed into Tía
+Esperanza’s house, past the bench next to the almond tree I was sitting
+under. It was 1976. I was thirteen years old and back in El Salvador for
+winter vacation, which for Pop meant a month of his cardboard boxes,
+business activities, and other bullshit, including what he engaged in with
+Don EB. I didn’t say shit. Not even a nod for that cerote hijuesuputamadre
+as he walked by.
+As he did at least a couple of times a week, Enrique Barrientos drove up
+in his slime green Citroën to Tía Esperanza’s to take Pop on one of their
+getaways that evening. Pop’s secret dealings—selling contraband, and
+especially going puteando with Don EB—weren’t things I could ever get
+used to, or wanted to. Rich, arrogant, and secretive, Don EB represented all
+the worst things about El Salvador, the opposite of the Brady Bunch
+American values that I, in my bookish, Mr. Peabody innocence, still clung
+to.
+Pop’s nighttime getaways went on while Mom visited her family in San
+Vicente, which meant most of the time we were in El Salvador. Things were
+slower, more rural at Mamá Clothi’s, where we did more outdoor stuff, like
+climb the Chichontepec volcano, listen to and sing old Beatles songs on the
+little plastic record-player box, chase dragonflies, and play in my
+grandmother’s garden, where she fed me nances, jocotes, coyolitos, and my
+favorite, anonas, the fruit that I cracked open to find big brown seeds
+
+wrapped in meaty pink paradise. Mamá Clothi also had me tie up chickens
+and turkeys, hang them upside down against the trunk of a nance or other
+tree in her lush backyard, and then cut off their heads.
+Mom preferred life in her town to that of the big city. I also liked the
+simplicity of Mom’s family, where I had clear roots. Mamá Clothi’s house
+and the family plot in the cemetery beside a giant ceiba tree had pictures of
+her father, mother, and other relatives, including her husband, even though
+my grandfather was a womanizing drunk leather tanner called El Garitón
+(sentinel tower). I couldn’t say the same for Pop’s family, except for Mamá
+Tey.
+As he walked up to knock on the door, the Pierre Cardin cologne Pop
+gave Don EB overwhelmed the sweet smell of the almond trees. Inside Tía
+Esperanza’s, Pop did his usual routine, putting on his Ralph Lauren cologne
+and a nice Lacoste shirt, getting stuff from his handbag, before hopping into
+Don EB’s slimemobile. The things he took out of the handbag looked like
+women’s perfumes, bras, and other goods. Pop’s whoring, his doublecrossing Mom, and my powerlessness to do anything about it made me
+want to smash Don EB in the face. My stomach and chest and jaw hurt
+from the rage I had toward him. This scene with Don EB looped and looped
+in my head, the memory of it wrenching my gut for years after. I had finally
+reached the limits of my silence. What was different this time was my great
+impatience with the shadiness of it all.
+As Pop and Don EB left, I paced around the front of Tía Esperanza’s
+house trying to figure out what to do. Finally I decided to do something
+different: act like Detective Columbo and go around the house interrogating
+my family about Pop’s outings.
+“Don’t fret about it, son. Go out and see your friends,” Tía Esperanza
+said.
+I sought out my cousin Adilio, who was in his room listening to some
+music on low.
+“Come on,” he responded, “let’s go get some Pop’s Ice Cream, no?”
+I stormed out.
+“Why do you want to break your head with that shit?” Oscar, Adilio’s
+eldest brother, asked when I went to his apartment. “That’s what men do.
+Be a man.”
+I left his house and cried next to the almond tree in the yard of Tía
+Esperanza’s complex. These answers just weren’t satisfying to me. I had to
+
+do something so that I didn’t feel like I’d made up the whole situation or
+like I was living a lie. So I did the unimaginable: I went into Pop’s bags to
+find evidence of his infidelities, if only to prove to myself that everybody
+else was lying or covering up for him.
+Pop had a little handbag he always kept squirreled away under lock and
+key, only miraculously I found it outside the cabinet, on the floor. I rifled
+through all the stuff and found the proof I needed: boxes of Trojan rubbers.
+I knew it. Pop is out fucking around on Mom. Fuck this shit. My father, my
+mother, my family, this country: it was all a big fat lie. The lie made my
+belly and head burst with acid. I couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the rubbers and
+started blowing them up with the hot breath of my anger. Blown up in the
+middle of his bedroom, all the clear rubbers looked like they were balloons
+in Panchimalco.
+I sat in the living room and waited for Pop to come home, caught
+between wanting to get on a plane, crying, and feeling like cursing at him
+with fire. The door opened and I knew to be ready for Pop to blow up at me.
+Everybody else had already cleared out of the room, as if they all knew
+what was about to happen. Pop rushed into his room.
+“Hijuesesentamilputas, what the fuck have you done?”
+I said nothing. Motherfucker. Callin’ me the son of sixty thousand whores
+when you’re the one out cheating on Mom with whores.
+“Hijuesesentamilputas,” he repeated as he walked back into the living
+room and started taking off his belt. As he whipped me, my mind swirled
+with rage. The whip on my ass, legs, and back hurt in that way that would
+radiate shame long after the redness on my skin disappeared. The lashes
+brought a furious heat, which stirred up a nameless deadening numbness.
+Minutes later, after the numbness subsided, an unusual sensation appeared:
+I felt strangely alive. A new part of me, a new me, had broken a long-held
+silence and stood up to Pop, despite the predictable lashing.
+Pop stormed out into the street, leaving me curled up in the fetal position
+and crying on the cot I slept on. Despite the new feelings, the old shame
+was still in me, too. I wanted to fly home to San Francisco and be with
+Mom, Mem, Om, and Mima, even though they wouldn’t want to talk about
+Pop’s shit either.
+As he tended to do when he saw me sad or angry, Adilio crept into the
+room to see if he could cheer me up.
+
+“Hey, Chiriqua, let’s go get some gaseosas and drink them on the corner
+with la mara.”
+I didn’t respond. Pop’s beating had me in no mood to see friends or
+anyone else. I just wanted to lie on the bed, furious and ashamed at what
+had happened.
+“All right,” he said, his tone accompanied by a breath and tilt of his head
+that signaled the time for something new had come. “I want to show you
+something I’ve been waiting to show you when you were old enough.”
+“Come on,” he said en voz bajita, before coaxing me out back to the
+almond tree near the barbed-wire and glass wall they shared with Don
+Medardo, the guy everybody gossiped was in an escuadrón de la muerte.
+“You sit there,” Adilio whispered to me in an unusually curt and serious
+tone. He went to a small shed in the back of the yard and came back with a
+shovel. Scoping around to make sure nobody was nearby, Adilio quickly
+dug a hole near the almond tree. I imagined we were searching for a pirate’s
+booty. Adilio dug fast, nonstop, until he found the treasure: a plastic
+shopping bag.
+“Quick. Let’s go to my room,” he said quietly, as we rushed farther back
+in the yard, where Tía Esperanza had built a couple of small, concrete-block
+apartments, the units her sons and their families lived in. Adilio was
+nineteen and didn’t have his own family like his two older brothers, Memo
+and Oscar, but he did have a little room in the back. We sat on his bed. One
+by one, he took each item out of the plastic bag with great care, like he was
+some priest at St. Anthony’s taking the Eucharist from the communion cup
+in one of those ceremonies I could only play spectator in, as the only
+member of my Catholic family who never had a first holy communion.
+First came papers, stuff with scribbling on it, then a pamphlet, and then
+black Maxell cassette tapes that looked like the contraband ones Pop
+brought to El Salvador to sell or give as presents. Adilio displayed all the
+contents of the shopping bag on his bed, which was covered in one of those
+colorful woven indigenous blankets my mom brought to cover our beds
+with back home. His pride hovered over the things on the bed and filled the
+entire room.
+“Check this out,” he said, holding the white pamphlet. Its pages were
+soiled from heavy use. The pamphlet had about sixteen or so pages. The
+front side had a curious logo: two machine guns pointing in opposite
+directions. In between the machine guns were the words Fuerzas Populares
+
+de Liberación Farabundo Martí and even bigger letters spelling FPL and the
+name of the pamphlet, El Rebelde.
+“Farabundo Martí? Who’s that?” I asked him in a louder tone than his.
+“Shhhhhh,” he said. “Somebody’s gonna hear us, idiota.”
+“OK, OK!”
+“Farabundo Martí was a great revolucionario who fought El General in
+the thirties or something,” he said. He seemed to assume I knew about this
+El General guy. “Farabundo inspired the compas of today.”
+“Compas?” I asked.
+“That means compañeros, one of the names los muchachos—the
+revolucionarios—call themselves.”
+“That’s what Rolando, César, and Lorena call their classmates.”
+“Yes,” Adilio said, his impatience clear. Joking Adilio, the guy who made
+fun of my Spanish, brillo por su ausencia, conspicuous by his absence.
+“That word has many meanings, including classmate, friend, lover, and
+revolucionario.”
+“Cool!”
+“OK. Now shut up and listen to this: ‘Read El Rebelde with your
+compañeros of the greatest confidence, making sure to take all the security
+measures. Remember: el enemigo is cruel, criminal, and merciless, and the
+rules of secretive work are a valuable way to combat them, to hit him
+without his knowing where the hits are coming from.’”
+Hit el enemigo without him knowing. Hmm . . . That sounded like how I
+should’ve dealt with Don EB—and maybe Pop.
+“Wow!” I exclaimed, curious and slightly scared. “What’s this about?”
+“My friends at the university gave them to me—but you can’t tell
+anybody, understand?” Adilio said, sounding unusually manly and selfimportant.
+I sat quietly, my thirteen-year-old eyes taking in this secretive, almost
+religious air that filled his little box of a room.
+“Understand?”
+“OK. I won’t. Doesn’t the government have all those military guys and
+guns and airplanes and everything?”
+“Yes, they do have all that,” Adilio said. “But the guerrilleros have the
+spirit to fight—and the heart of the people.”
+“Are you one of the muchachos, a guerrillero?”
+“No. But some of my friends are. I just help them pass information.”
+
+Wow, I thought. This is serious stuff from my cousin, normally the
+funniest guy on the block. But Adilio’s political secrets made sense coming
+from the son of Tía Esperanza, the woman who used to make us laugh
+while puckering up her lips and marching like President Molina, the
+military guy she called fascista.
+“What about all those military people who live around here? Won’t they
+arrest or hurt you if they find out you have this?”
+“Yes, they’d hang me by the balls and make me eat them before killing
+me. And now you know. So, you better keep quiet or they’re going to get
+your little huevitos and make you eat them!”
+“I won’t say anything. I promise.”
+The recently shattered illusion of having a normal family made making a
+familial promise feel weird. But I made it knowing I would, in fact, keep it.
+I desperately needed to build trust with someone while I was in this foreign
+place I hated at that moment, El Salvador.
+“What’s on the tape?”
+“Música de protesta. Nueva canción. Revolutionary music. Music by
+people you’ve never heard of—Mercedes Sosa, Silvio Rodríguez, Cutumay
+Camones, and Yolocamba I Ta. Here, check it out.” Adilio took one of the
+black Maxell tapes labeled MÚSICA DE PROTESTA and started playing it. The
+first song was called “Poema de Amor,” a simple song featuring a guitar, an
+indigenous drum, and a funny, valeverguista voice singing verses based on
+a poem by some guy who used to live near Tía Esperanza’s named Roque
+Dalton. This one line in the song really hit me:
+guanacos hijos puta
+
+The way the singers referred to Salvadorans (guanacos) as “hijos de puta”
+had a pride that surprised and reverberated in me in unexpected ways.
+“Listening to this song makes you a real Salvadoreño,” he told me,
+looking straight at me, as if somehow knowing how desperately my
+fragmented thirteen-year-old heart wanted to be part of something whole.
+The poem-song about the different qualities (some quite tongue-in-cheek)
+that made one Salvadoran—working hard, migrating, going to prison,
+building the Panama Canal, drinking, whoring, and smoking pot—sounded
+like Dalton’s love poem for his people.
+“Well? What do you think?” he asked me.
+
+Most of the words were outside the scope of my limited Spanish. The
+fear of all the neighbors who were also military men didn’t help either, but
+Adilio’s powerful, strange pride, his mix of rage and reverie in sharing it,
+for a brief moment, transformed my own rage into a meditation on what it
+might mean for me, a curly-haired Mr. Peabody gringo, to call himself
+Salvadoreño.
+Then he read me a poem, “Todos,” also by that Roque Dalton guy. It
+sounded like a lullaby Mom used to sing me, only this was a revolutionary
+lullaby that woke me up instead of putting me to sleep. I didn’t understand
+most of that poem either, but one line really had an impact on me:
+Todos nacimos medio muertos en 1932.
+We were all born half dead in 1932.
+I finally had found words for that nameless feeling that had been with me
+as far back as I could remember: half dead.
+
+In the years that followed that visit to El Salvador in 1976, I was
+determined to reject Pop and all the family pressure to be as straight and
+studious and good as they expected. I killed Mr. Peabody and asked people
+to call me Tito. Tito was more unpredictable—and prone to recklessness. I
+racked up report cards with sixty days absent, started drinking Olde English
+800 malt liquor and other cheap alcohol and smoking cigarettes and pot,
+stopped lugging books in a leather briefcase that had a picture of Atlacatl, a
+legendary Indian warrior, on it. I also started hanging out with guys who
+shared my newfound lack of interest in school.
+My new friends and I started calling ourselves Los Originales, a name we
+used tongue in cheek. We were young, high, and full of anger—with a
+healthy disrespect for rules. We didn’t sport jackets with cholo gang
+calligraphy, but we wore clothes that looked cholo: wino shoes, fake
+Pendleton plaid flannel shirts, tees, Ben Davis jeans, Dickies, and baggy
+pants that we sewed pleats onto if they didn’t have them. We bonded while
+listening to soul music and oldies, fighting, occasionally robbing people,
+stealing cars, dealing and smoking pot, and eventually driving lowriders—
+or cars we wished were lowriders.
+Los Originales replaced my family during the years I spent pissed at Pop
+for all his lies, beatings, and mafia dealings. What I didn’t know then was
+that Pop’s behaviors were rooted in the silences of his childhood in
+Ahuachapán.
+
+9
+
+Ahuachapán, El Salvador
+Late 1931
+
+In the months after his father destroyed his dream of getting an education,
+Ramóncito backslid. He returned to spending his time playing barefoot with
+Ricardo and other friends on the dusty cobblestone streets of Barrio Santa
+Cruz. His young life was once again fragmented by shuttling between San
+Salvador and Ahuachapán, with the occasional trip to Ataco, the home of
+his father—a constant reminder of the ilegitimidad that had destroyed his
+dreams.
+Nine-year-old Ramóncito and the boys of Barrio Santa Cruz didn’t have
+a deep understanding of the rebellion and political tensions growing all
+around them as they were trading identities as cops and robbers in their
+game of ladrón librado.
+“Look, Ramón,” Ricardo called out to him from behind the wall of the
+house where he was hiding. “It’s your father.”
+The side street of the growing city in western El Salvador was fairly
+empty that humid afternoon when the boys were playing. Mostly only a few
+women and their children were out. Ramóncito fixated on his father. Don
+Miguel was blocking the punches of a drunk man in tattered clothes. The
+boy said nothing, simultaneously terrorized and mesmerized by the sight of
+his father, who was also visibly drunk struggling with the man. He hardly
+knew his father, but still took his side. Don Miguel wobbled forward while
+the man in the tattered clothes waddled backward, nearly falling on the dirt
+
+street. Then his father pushed the man down all the way, reached into his
+waistband, and pulled out his revolver.
+Bam. Bam. Bam.
+Don Miguel stood over the body. The terrified boy looked at the bleeding
+man. Blood poured out of his chest and stomach, like thicker, redder fresco
+de jamaica. Drops of the man’s blood had splattered onto his father’s nice
+shirt. Don Miguel turned his head and gazed at his son. His blank honeyeyed stare scared Ramóncito. The boy’s little belly tightened. But his mind
+also started turning. This up close and personal view of his father’s godlike
+power contained the seeds of fascination. Although his father had reneged
+on his promise to pay for his schooling for unknown reasons, Ramóncito
+also looked up to his father, in the strange way men with guns inspire boys
+to want them.
+Something shook him in ways he did not and could not understand. The
+boy’s sense of what it meant to be a man was still fluid, moving between his
+father, a man he both hated and wanted to love, and Alfonso Luna, the
+nineteen-year-old brother of his friend Ricardo, whose warm attention,
+small gifts, and other gestures of kindness Ramóncito loved. Ramóncito ran
+home to tell Mamá Tey and Mamá Fina what he’d seen. The women
+comforted him with love, food, and permission to play. They preferred
+distracting him to trying to explain the incident. They knew all too well the
+violence—beatings, rapes, and even murders—of Ahuachapáneco men.
+Days after he saw his father shoot the man from the bar, Ramóncito went
+to Ricardo Luna’s house to play. There he saw Alfonso. Sometimes Alfonso
+played with them. Lately, though, Alfonso didn’t have as much time to play
+when he visited from San Salvador. He had other things on his mind.
+Although Ramóncito and his little cheros didn’t understand the larger forces
+at play on the fields redolent with rotting coffee on the plantations, others
+like Alfonso did.
+Alfonso was with his brother and Ramóncito the day men carried home
+the bullet-riddled body of his friend, Toño Seoanes, the son of Don Cheque
+Seoanes, the owner of the lot Mamá Tey’s shack was built on. The men
+brought Toño into the house next to Tey’s shack. Toño soon died. He’d been
+shot for allegedly sleeping with the wife of a member of the Hill family in
+Santa Ana. The Hills were one of the famed Fourteen Families (in reality,
+more like a hundred), the oligarchy that ruled El Salvador after the
+indigenous ejidos were dismantled in 1878.1 Don Miguel and the rest of the
+
+Rodríguezes were on the second tier, made up of about a thousand of the
+next-richest families. These few rich families held almost all of El
+Salvador’s wealth, which was deposited predominantly in the banks of the
+countries where they sent their children to school—in Europe and
+increasingly the United States.2
+“Damn those greedy, violent hijosdeputa!” Ramóncito heard Alfonso
+screaming from the Seoaneses’ house next door. “They have to pay, or life
+here will only continue to get worse for us all.”
+Witnessing a second murder gave Ramóncito more tightness in his
+stomach. The murder had also clearly affected the young universitario,
+Alfonso, who sought to do something about it. He found what he was
+looking for in the quietly charismatic and highly influential lawyer Agustín
+Farabundo Martí. Martí led the radical human rights organization Socorro
+Rojo Internacional (SRI).
+Ramóncito heard but hardly understood Alfonso’s effusive talk about the
+legendary Martí. Martí’s considerable political experience—being jailed six
+times, fighting in the war against US intervention in Nicaragua waged by
+Augusto César Sandino, exile to Mexico, imprisonment in an immigrant
+detention facility in San Pedro, California3—was unparalleled among the
+large and growing forces of El Salvador’s leftists. So, too, was his
+engagement with the international political thought of the time as founder
+of the Central American Communist Party and a member of the Liga AntiImperialista de Las Americas, a Latin American variant on the antiimperialist organization that included Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Diego
+Rivera, and Albert Einstein.4 Less known, but as or more important than
+Martí to the mass movement growing in western El Salvador, was Feliciano
+Ama, indigenous cacique of thousands of Izalco peoples.
+During the visits to Ataco facilitated by Mamá Juanita, Ramóncito also
+heard his father and his rich family (though not Mamá Juanita) curse at and
+complain about revolucionarios like Alfonso and Martí, and especially the
+indigenous groups, organizing themselves on the plantations and mounting
+increasingly militant protests in the cities. The tensions and the organizing
+power of both the communists and the indigenous community filled the
+streets of cities and towns with tens of thousands of protesters fighting for
+higher wages, better working conditions, and an end to coercive and violent
+strikebreaking practices. Hunger strikes, marches, labor strikes, attacks on
+security forces, and other militant activity were heating up the country.
+
+The coffee barons sought quick, hard responses to the crisis growing
+before them. They believed the liberal Araujo government was soft on the
+dreaded indios. Elites found their solution in Maximiliano Hernández
+Martínez, El Salvador’s vice president. Martínez’s vision for El Salvador
+aligned with the fascist way of thinking, which was growing in the country
+and throughout the world alongside anti-communism and anti-imperialism.
+An ambitious military man, Martínez staged a coup on December 2, 1931,
+and was installed as president.
+Initially, Alfonso Luna and his fellow University of El Salvador Marxist
+student leader, Mario Zapata, believed that the Martínez coup presented an
+opportunity to advance the cause of social justice, but increasingly violent
+confrontations between workers and government proved them wrong. After
+the municipal and state elections in the fall of 1931 were marred by fraud
+and violence, the Salvadoran left decided to increase the pressure on the
+oligarchs and on Martínez. Ramóncito saw the results in the streets that
+December: even more massive and intensified strikes organized by
+thousands of workers in Ahuachapán that mirrored those going on
+throughout the country. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Don Miguel and El
+Salvador’s cafetaleros were raising money to significantly increase the size
+and weaponry of the Guardia Nacional.5 Peace did not appear to be an
+option many saw in December 1931.
+Hoping for a political opening and way forward, Alfonso Luna and other
+leftist leaders organized a delegation to meet with Martínez on January 8,
+1932. Martínez’s refusal to meet with them (he had a “toothache”6) became
+one of several factors that led the leftists to exercise their last great hope:
+the revolucionario option. So began what would become an important
+political tradition in El Salvador and Latin America, conspirando, going
+underground to design plans for insurrection. A date was set: January 20,
+1932. Martí, Luna, Zapata, the indigenous majority organized
+independently through cofradias (brotherhoods), and other conspirators
+were preparing for a full-scale revolution, the first of many communistinfluenced insurrections in twentieth-century Latin America.7 Things were
+about to get bloody for everyone, but the indigenous people, who had
+carried the weight of El Salvador on their backs ever since colonization,
+would bear the greatest burden in a country whose legacy had already long
+been stained by their shed blood.
+
+Part IV
+
+10
+
+Panchimalco, La Libertad, El Salvador
+2015
+
+My driver, Isaias, and I are standing in front of a police station, debating
+whether or not we want to walk down the cobblestone street leading to the
+center of the old indigenous town of Panchimalco, where the municipal
+cemetery is located. M16s at the ready, five police officers stand alongside
+us, garrisoned behind a four-foot wall of sandbags protecting their station,
+an old house. Its crumbling blue-and-white stucco walls bear the marks of
+local maras: holes and cracks from homemade bombs. Fortunately, the
+explosives thus far have all landed on the already crumbling sidewalk,
+where they were detonated by the ever busy bomb squad.
+More officers and a phalanx of giant orange cones form another
+defensive wall limiting car and foot traffic along the cracked cobblestone of
+the Calle Principal, the town’s main street. The crooked street, running
+through the center of town, ends at the cemetery. The edge of the
+Panchimalco municipal cemetery drops into one of the many crevasses
+dotting the gorgeous green landscape.
+“Be careful,” one of the officers tells us, looking out toward the
+cemetery. “The monstruos are angry.” Like the locals, my loyalties are torn
+between murderous gang members and cops I’ve not learned to trust. My
+only trusted companion at the moment is Isaias. His slightly hunched back
+and muscular upper body give him ninja-turtle shoulders that are at odds
+with his indestructible smile. He surveys the complicated situation, poised
+to take action at any minute.
+
+The situation isn’t just complicated, it’s complicadisimo. Tired, weary,
+and underpaid, the men and women of the Policía Nacional Civil (PNC)
+await the arrival of a convoy of white trucks and SUVs—and the start of
+another dangerous mission. The convoy is carrying a dozen more M16wielding PNC officers in military gear accompanying a team from the
+Instituto de Medicina Legal or IML, El Salvador’s forensic medicine unit,
+the organization charged with identifying the dead and figuring out what
+killed them. The police officers’ purpose is to escort the IML team on the
+hour-plus hike through the local rivers, forest, and towns “filled with
+heavily armed gang members.”1 Isaias and I will be accompanying them.
+Our primary destination is the forested volcanic hills near Rosario de Mora,
+one of several areas in El Salvador where gangs go to kill, dismember, and
+bury their victims, and where the IML team will conduct an exhumation.
+The media has listed Panchimalco as one of “the most violent
+municipalities in El Salvador.”2
+My mission is simple: to write a story for the Boston Globe about the
+growing number of mass and individual graves the fighting between gangs
+and government has produced in El Salvador. The total lack of context in
+US reporting about the “new” crisis of refugee kids and their moms sickens
+me. Many of us have been watching the deadly double helix of extreme
+violence and migration spiral out of control for more than twenty-five
+years.
+About a city block from the police station, well within the effective range
+of one of the AK-47s preferred by gang members, more than fifty members
+of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang and their families march in a
+procession. They’re marching to the cemetery for a burial. Five of their
+homies were killed nearby in a gun battle just two days before.
+The gang’s anger is palpable. They and other locals say that the five men
+were exterminados3—killed in extrajudicial murders by the escuadrones de
+la muerte, paramilitary death squads left over from the twelve-year civil
+war and enlisted by the government to kill gang members under cover of
+uniform or pretense of confrontation. PNC officers on motorcycles ride
+around the police station. Other PNC patrol the area around the graveyard
+—but from a distance.
+Both pro-and anti-gang websites post gory pictures of the five gangsters
+lying dead, some with plates of food splattered around them, all with guns
+positioned suspiciously neatly next to them. One commentator, Roberto
+
+Valencia, a prominent journalist with the award-winning El Faro news site,
+tweeted the gory pictures with the caption, “Now, [the police] don’t even try
+to set up the scene so that it looks like a battle. They even post pictures,
+since no one investigates.” Despite the obvious doctoring of the crime
+scene, most of the comments about the photos posted on Facebook and
+social media sites support the military, police, and even the death squads,
+echoing the opinion of a man on one of the anti-gang websites who posted,
+“Hopefully, those sons of bitches are burning in hell for their crimes.”
+This year has already seen more than 150 such “enfrentamientos.”4 The
+overwhelming majority of these engagements result in the death of one or
+more gang members. Police and soldiers rarely die.
+“Está jocote [It’s scary],” Isaias says in colloquial Salvadoran, signaling
+that we’re weighing a risk.
+“Yes, it is.”
+The end of the gang truce negotiated by Mijango in 2014 and the new
+rise of escuadrones have led the gangs to start targeting police and military
+personnel in more systematic ways that they hadn’t employed previously—
+adding tension not known since the war. Normal activities, such as traveling
+to rural areas, stir fears that violence may be lurking nearby.
+While we wait outside the police station for the convoy, Perla, the
+bookish PNC officer manning the front desk, lets us know it won’t arrive
+for another two hours, so I decide Isaias and I should go to the gang burial
+at the cemetery. Never one to decline an invitation to danger, Isaias smiles
+and says with a military rigidity, “Ready when you are, boss.” But then he
+rethinks his stance. “Are you sure you want to go in there, mi coronel?” he
+asks, using the army lingo that peppers his language. He knows that even
+the cemeteries of Panchimalco are contested and not-so-hallowed ground.
+Sometimes, police patrolling nearby have even had to cordon off cemetery
+crime scenes5 where victims were killed while visiting the graves of their
+loved ones, so that the sites could be studied by IML investigators. His
+question stirs memories of gangs chasing my goddaughter and me out of the
+San Vicente cemetery while we were saying goodbye to my mom.
+In the Panchimalco cemetery, which sits on the side of a steep, grassy
+hill, are a series of colorful tombs and monuments leading toward the edge
+of the crevasse. There, in the distance, is the group of gang mourners. I look
+at one young man of no more than fourteen crying as an older man holds
+him. They’re simultaneously scared, angry, and heartbroken, and they’re
+
+likely getting ready to retaliate against the police after the burial ritual. At
+the moment, they seem more human than monstruos, but when they turn to
+retaliation, their anger is the stuff Salvadoran nightmares are made of.
+The remains of the five young men will find eternal unrest near the grave
+of the man their mara allegedly killed: Pablo Cándido Vega Ramírez,6 a
+presidential guard gunned down last April in front of his family. After the
+murder, many police marched angrily in the streets, crying, mourning—and
+ready to retaliate.
+As Isaias and I walk back to the taxi, I’m struck by the gang members’
+colossal contradiction—giving their own dead the dignity of burial while
+simultaneously bearing responsibility for the thousands buried in the mass
+graves that dot the Salvadoran landscape.7 More than a few of these grave
+sites lie atop the still-unexcavated individual and mass graves where the
+escuadrones de la muerte buried their victims. The Rosario de Mora region
+shares this tradition of murder and mass burial committed by gangs and
+governments alike.
+Isaias and I drive back to the police station to wait for the convoy. There,
+Isaias makes friends, deploying security-guy talk on the officers standing
+guard behind the sandbags. “Violence around here is evolving. Things are
+getting worse,” says one agent on his way to relieve his colleagues
+patrolling the cemetery. “They used to kill one person among them. Now
+there are massacres. And they’re using different weapons: M16s, AK-47s,
+grenades, and other armaments for war.”
+I take a seat in front of the reception, which is being manned by Perla,
+who offers me some coffee. Agent Perla is a tall, well-built man of about
+thirty-five. He wears glasses and cannot for the life of himself find a smile.
+We chat about the weather and his previous work as a schoolteacher.
+“I loved working with children,” he says, “but teachers earn even less
+than police do. So, I joined the PNC.
+“They’re inhuman,” Perla says, looking down the street in the direction
+of the cemetery. The look of disdain never leaves his face. “I speak from
+experience. I’ve been moved around to Sonsonate, to the town of Armenia
+and other areas, and know what I’m saying about these cerotazos.” He
+shifts in his chair, preparing to go deeper into his story. “In Azacualpa,
+Sonsonate, I saw how a woman and her two kids got treated. The woman
+was raped in front of her kids. After they raped her, one of the kids had his
+head taken off in front of the mom. The other boy was also left dead.”
+
+Perla paused, as if to swallow something stuck in his throat.
+“Do you know what I had to do?”
+“What?”
+“I had to pick up the severed head of that child. Do you know what that
+feels like?” He pauses. I have nothing to say.
+“To be frank, that was not my first time picking up a head. The first time
+feels really horrible, it causes a certain kind of experience. At that moment
+you can no longer be indifferent. You learn to deal with those kinds of
+situations and see beyond the horror of it.”
+Shaken, I try to regain my composure and ask him how he thinks the
+gangs should be dealt with.
+“There’s a lot of protection for those people. Many never go to prison,”
+he tells me, his harsh tone signaling rising anger. “Meanwhile, I’m in a
+judicial process for what I did after they shot at us. Fifteen-, sixteen-, and
+seventeen-year-olds with guns were free after five days because they were
+minors. They put me in jail.”
+I asked Perla what exactly he’d done. Perla’s silence spoke for him.
+“They are inhuman. They rape and kill men and women. If they gave me
+another chance I’d quebrar* these bastards again,” Perla tells me. “I would
+do it again without hesitation.” Many of his colleagues, he tells me, have
+also taken the law into their own hands. The killings of dozens of gang
+members in escuadrón de la muerte–style executions have reached the point
+where even the US State Department,8 which has supported Salvadoran
+governments since the 1930s, has joined the United Nations and human
+rights organizations in putting extrajudicial killings at the top of their
+concerns in their human rights reports of recent years.
+The IML trucks arrive at last. We’re about to enter an especially deadly
+area of one of El Salvador’s most violent regions. This means any effort to
+morally sort the “good guys” from the “bad guys” will be set aside for the
+moment. The prospect of immediate violence in front of me distracts from
+the violence buried below. This same collective inability to look down into
+the abyss of our violent history makes it easy for governments and gangs to
+manipulate the populace into becoming cops, death-squad operatives, and
+violent gang youth—all of whom wreak havoc in El Salvador, and with
+help from my violent birthplace, the United States.
+
+11
+
+San Francisco, California
+1979
+
+Lalo and I hung out all morning and afternoon that sunny Saturday. The
+thick, stainless-steel chain Lalo used as a belt rattled as we walked to the
+store up the street from his family’s apartment on Twenty-Third and
+Guerrero.
+“Fuck that shit, man,” Lalo said, lisping on the th in that.
+I sported a tank top and a regular leather strip, not a chain, for a belt. My
+sixteen-year-old body was buffed, as my brothers, especially Ramón, got
+tired of confirming in response to my daily question, “Hey, Mem, do I look
+more buffed?” after doing curls, bench presses, and other lifts.
+“Do you mean more buffed than when you asked yesterday or only since
+you asked a few hours ago?”
+Whatever Mem said, I was pretty buffed.
+As Lalo and I reached the sidewalk in front of the store, a big chololooking dude in a Pendleton shirt, baggies, and wino shoes bumped into me.
+“Watch your ass, Ese!” the big cholo shouted.
+I wasn’t sure how to respond. Some part of me wanted to avoid fighting.
+The buffed part of me weighed in on the side of punching. But before I
+could act, the cholo dude pushed me. I fell on the sidewalk, breathing in to
+ready myself to either get hit or start firing back on him. As he prepared to
+start whaling on me, I got up and tackled him. Barely conscious of what
+transpired, I gave him a right hook to the face with even more fury than I’d
+ever given the punching bag in the gym at Mission High. I kept punching
+
+until his mouth, his nose, and the back of his head were bloody. I got up and
+continued into the store, proud of what my buffed power had done. Decking
+a big cholo gang dude with such ease was cool. I felt like fuckin’ Rocky
+beating Apollo Creed.
+“Little bitch. Not so bad after all,” I grumbled to Lalo as I approached the
+tall fridge with the drinks. As I decided on root beer, Lalo’s voice called out
+from the front of the store: “Tito, watch out! He’s coming at you again!”
+The big cholo dude approached me slowly, his head cocked to the side,
+like he was sizing me up, and moved around me like a boxer in a ring
+preparing to fire me up. I quickly gave him a side kick I learned at Carlos
+Navarro’s kenpo karate studio on Mission Street. The kick landed on his
+chest. I kept kicking him—in the chest, stomach, and head—back to the
+door until he was outside again and fell to the ground, nearly unconscious.
+My internal voice was bragging, Check out what I did to that fucker! but
+outwardly I didn’t let on that it was a big deal. I went back into the store,
+where Lalo and I finished our purchases, then went back to Lalo’s house.
+Lalo’s parents had baptized him Edgar, a name he detested. He chose
+Lalo as his placazo, his chosen clik name. Mine was Tito, the name my
+brothers called me. The others had placazos like Scrapo and Casper. The
+only one of us who didn’t have one was my best friend, Hiram. Nobody
+knew why. We were all insecure, coming together in our not very hardcore,
+not very serious as a clik, and not very originally named Los Originales. All
+of us, except Hiram, had major issues with our fathers.
+When I returned to our crowded Folsom Street apartment from Lalo’s,
+Mom let me know my orders: “Your father wants you to go to Hunt’s with
+him.”
+“Fuck him, Mom,” I fired back. “He wants me to go to Hunt’s while he
+buys and sells his bullshit.”
+“You need to calm yourself. That temper of yours es el demonio and will
+only get you into trouble.”
+“Demonio? You call yourself Catholic? You help him with that bullshit,
+don’t you, Mom? Come on!”
+“That ‘bullshit’ helped pay for you and your brothers’ and sister’s
+education,” she reminded me, as she often did. “And you know that it was
+your abuelita who started buying stuff in San Francisco and then sending
+boxes of goods on boats to El Salvador, right?”
+“Yeah,” I responded reluctantly, “I know.”
+
+Mom knew how much I loved her and Mamá Tey. All of us did. I’d heard
+the stories of long trips from the port of San Francisco to the port of
+Acajutla, not far from Ahuachapán. Mamá Tey had been the first in our
+family to establish herself in the United States.
+“You should go hang out with your Mamá Tey,” Mom told me, knowing
+my abuelita’s good-natured picardía (mischief) would lighten me up. So I
+went to Mamá Tey’s place on Twentieth and Valencia. She greeted me with
+her big shiny smile, her silver front teeth reminding me of the Jaws
+character in the James Bond movies.
+“Hola, mi muchachito!” Because of who she was, I let her get away with
+the diminutive of the word muchacho.
+“Hola, abuelita.”
+She kissed and hugged me before leading me up to her living room with
+the olive green rug. Her parakeets were singing in their cages, and the light
+on her electric Singer with the plastic treadle was on. The three people who
+rent rooms from her were out.
+“You know, abuelita, my fucking father pisses me off. He gets pissed off
+at me because I don’t go to that stupid Hunt’s Donuts with him.”
+“I know, I know,” she said. “Would you like me to make you some
+pupusas?”
+“Yes,” I said, having finally grown to love them.
+“One day you’ll understand that your father’s been through a lot. That he
+had to sacrifice, as we all did, to get here and raise you all here,” she said
+while mixing the masa, loroco buds, and other ingredients she always had
+ready at a moment’s notice.
+“Yeah, I know, but why does he have to drag me into his shit, abuelita?”
+“It’s his way of getting close to you, mijo. The time at Hunt’s is the only
+time he gets to be himself.”
+“What, a crook?”
+“Who is or isn’t a crook?” she asked. “Depends on who’s saying it.
+Someone could call me a crook, but you know what?”
+“What?”
+“Fuck them and their mierdas. We’re all pieces of broken glass, stained
+with blood and struggling to put ourselves back together,” she said in that
+sudden poetic way she’d bequeathed to Pop, along with an understanding of
+how to conduct cross-border business in stolen goods and a silence around
+their former life in El Salvador.
+
+Around eight I left Mamá Tey’s to go find my homies to do our usual:
+drinking, smoking, and snorting in St. Peter’s parking lot. We also stole cars
+and committed other crimes, which put me in a bind when I railed against
+Pop’s shady shit, making me something of a hypocrite.
+After hanging out with Los Originales at St. Peter’s, I came home drunk
+and high that night to find Pop waiting for me. He was standing outside my
+room. I stumbled as I tried to sneak in quietly through the window, as was
+my habit whenever I came home wasted.
+“Está borracho,” Pop said in recognition of my inebriated state.
+“Estoy borracho—y qué?” I said, using the familiar cholo phrase
+meaning “and what of it?” A clear and unprecedented act of defiance in a
+household where Pop lorded over my laid-back brothers and sister like an
+old-school Salvadoran patriarch.
+The shock in Pop’s eyes surprised me. So did the hint of fear. I’d never
+seen him look scared. Alongside my own fear at my defiance, I felt
+something unexpected: my own power, my inner rebelde.
+Pop yanked me down the hallway, around the corner, and into his room.
+My stomach tightened, preparing for him to slap me—or worse—and
+administer the more lasting punishment: curses of “Hijuesesentamilputas!”
+or “Güevón!” (Lazy), and other standards in Pop’s repertoire of humiliation.
+In his room, he stood me next to his bed while he went behind the door of
+his room and pulled out a stick he kept in his room for burglars. He stepped
+closer to me in the slow, deliberate way he knew created dread, and drew
+back to start hitting me with the stick. He was screaming something, but I
+barely heard him because I was leaving my body. But before I completely
+disassociated, something pulled me back, and suddenly I was charged with
+electricity.
+Before the stick landed on me, I grabbed it from him. In my crazed state,
+I paused to gaze at the stick, stopping time to stare at its wood and contours.
+And then I broke it in two.
+Fuck, what are you doing? Pop’s punishing you for fucking up. Don’t do
+this, a part of me thought.
+But I continued to do the previously unimaginable: I grabbed Pop by his
+thin shoulders and pushed him onto his bed in what was both an angry
+display of power and a way to prevent him from beating me and me from
+retaliating in kind. Despite all his limits, he loved me.
+
+Through my tears, I saw Pop’s look of shame and confusion. For a
+moment, his eyes looked like those of a child. I could suddenly see how
+vulnerable he really was behind all the machismo, and my sadness started
+overcoming my rage.
+Unfortunately, Pop’s rage was starting its second run. He reached behind
+the bed and his hand emerged clutching his .357 Magnum. He pointed it at
+me.
+“You’re never going to touch me again—or I will kill you,
+hijuesesentamilputas!” he yelled.
+I pulled down my shirt to show my heart and said with heavy drunken
+irony, “Go ahead, shoot me, your dear beloved son.”
+Before things could escalate further, Mom rushed in crying, “Noooo!
+Noooo! Stop, both of you. Stop. Please! You’re killing me!”
+Mom separating us added a new low to an already devastating moment.
+Pop crumpled. Her look at him was as fierce as I’d ever seen. I started
+crying as well. Pop simply looked away.
+After, Pop and I stopped talking. We no longer hung out at Hunt’s or
+anywhere else, and I sought out new ways to rebel against him and my
+Salvadoran family, enlisting a new ally against his hypocrisy: Jesucristo.
+San Francisco, California
+1984
+
+“Brothers and sisters,” Joel started, “let us kneel before God and pray that
+His will be done.”
+I too was kneeling in the back, watching the fifty faithful in front of me
+crowded into the storefront church at the corner of Twenty-First and
+Valencia get on their knees as Pastor Joel led them in prayer. For a moment
+I was distracted by the proximity to Mamá Tey’s house on Twentieth. Her
+death a few months earlier had left me deeply shaken.
+Mamá Tey anchored Pop and all of us with her humor and love, and
+especially by the example she set living as a mad valeverguista, one of
+those crazy beautiful Salvadorans whose propensity to joke or take great
+risks is rooted in truly not giving a fuck as long as the cause is just. I lost
+someone who had always advised me to be better and to lighten up on her
+son, my father. She’d always reminded me how rough he’d had it growing
+
+up, though never specifying how, exactly, beyond alluding to the deep
+poverty they lived in during the Salvadoran Great Depression in the
+twenties and thirties.
+I hadn’t just lost my most important ancestor. I’d lost my connection to
+all my ancestors on Pop’s side. Mamá Tey might have been vague about our
+family history at times, but Pop was utterly silent about it. Feeling half
+dead, knowing only half my family history, and growing increasingly angry
+at the world, the loss of my Mamá Tey anchor left me vulnerable to the
+growing number of influences filling the streets of San Francisco’s Mission
+District, including those of the evangelical storm hovering over the entire
+country and hemisphere in the 1980s.
+“Lord, we pray for Your intercession to help bring souls to understand the
+urgent need to elect the one man you and we know is the only one who
+prioritizes the things of God over the things of man!”
+“¡Amen!”
+“The only one who lives in the world but is not of this world, Lord.”
+“¡Amen! ¡Gloria a Dios!”
+“The one candidate that is right on abortion, Lord.”
+“¡Hallelujah!”
+“So, Lord, we bend our knees because we know the one and only God
+will bring His people deliverance and elect the only candidate any true
+Christian should vote for this election, Lord: Ronald Wilson Reagan!”
+“¡Amen!” I yelled from the side of the plastic foldup chairs I’d moved
+toward. As deacon, one of my responsibilities involved arranging the chairs
+before and after misa at the Open Door Alliance Church.
+It was 1984, and I was a born-again believer saved by the blood and
+sacrifice of Lord Jesus Christ. I’d joined the church earlier that year, thanks
+to the new wave of ministries targeting “at-risk youth” and my growing
+conviction that I needed to escape the life I was leading. Mamá Tey’s death
+had furthered this conviction. So had the suicide of my Mission High friend
+Danny, who had hanged himself, and the death of another high school
+friend, Luís Orea, a dealer who had been shot in the face during a coke deal
+gone bad and had to be buried in a closed casket.
+I’d been fighting a lot, doing more drugs, and drinking heavily. In the
+early ’80s, guns increasingly replaced fists and knives as the way to settle
+things. More and more, I was realizing that violence doesn’t just happen. It
+turns you into the frog in boiling water who doesn’t realize it’s dying until
+
+it’s too late. It creeps up on you in small ways until it overtakes your life.
+After losing Luís and Danny, I feared the creeping violence. I feared being
+taken out by some thug—or by the thug growing in me. So I followed the
+path of my Puerto Rican friend Hiram, who’d left Los Originales for a
+born-again Christian life a couple of years earlier. But I also sought
+redemption—redemption for the shame of being poor, of feeling
+directionless, of being an angry, violent person who hurt people, including
+his own family.
+My decision to go hard for God led me to quickly enter church
+leadership, becoming a deacon. The song lyrics about “fire on the blood”
+and “Onward Christian Soldiers” fueled my first experience of being a
+militant. I greeted people at the door, collected tithes, and folded up the
+chairs, in addition to rejecting premarital sex and giving the church my own
+tithe, 15 percent of my income from working in an electronics warehouse. I
+was also learning new ways to rebel against my family, using my
+knowledge of God’s Word to preach at them, calling on them to abandon
+the path of underworld iniquity for one laid out by God. In retaliation, Mom
+would say, even years after I left the church, “I don’t even want to see you
+preaching ni en pintura. You are such a pain in the ass.” Except for my
+longtime friends Armando and Gloria, most of my unsaved friends
+abandoned me as they expressed similar and less respectful versions of
+Mom’s message.
+“Forget the communist ideology of the Lost!” I screamed at the
+Salvadorans protesting on Twenty-Fourth Street against the relentless
+bombing of civilians in El Salvador.
+The war that formally began in 1980 had begun filling my house with
+cousins and friends who were undocumented refugees.* Their stories of the
+war filled our apartment—stories of friends of the family killed by death
+squads, stories of women in the family who became guerrilleras, and the
+story of my cousin Ana, forced to leave her three-year-old son behind for
+the life of a maid. Ana wouldn’t see her child again until he’d grown a
+mustache. The war first hit me through those stories and people—and then
+the Berkeley effect hit.
+While in the church, I attended a community college and got grades that
+allowed me to transfer to UC Berkeley. Once at Berkeley, my Marx,
+Nietzsche, and Freud class did much to pummel my faith. So did learning
+about the resistance: thousands of Americans who joined the Lincoln
+
+Brigades to the fight fascism in Francoist Spain. I read Hemingway’s
+description of the anti-fascist fighters in For Whom the Bell Tolls with awe,
+struck deeply by his comparison of the anti-fascists’ political fervor to the
+feeling they had hoped to have—but did not—while taking communion.
+Hearing Berkeley poets like June Jordan sing the praises and lines of
+Salvadoran poets like Claribel Alegria and Roque Dalton further solidified
+the Salvadoran roots growing in me. My more conservative professors also
+played an important role in my political development, either preaching the
+right-wing values of philosopher John Searle or pissing me off by ridiculing
+my report on Roque Dalton, as poet Leonard Nathan did in front of our
+poetry class. I started envisioning a life for myself beyond that which had
+been prescribed by my parents—marriage, a well-paying job, stability. I
+wanted to be part of something larger than myself. I started wondering who
+were the fascist bad guys of our time and how I could fight them.
+My new path wasn’t an easy one. As I began to educate myself about
+these present-day fascists, I found myself pulled down into the dark history
+of El Salvador. I felt as though I’d fallen into not just one abyss, but several,
+including the dark and silent history of what had happened in El Salvador in
+the infamous year 1932.
+
+12
+
+San Francisco, California
+1939
+
+“It’s Fiesta Time in Coffee Land,” proclaimed the brochure promoting
+Hills Bros. Coffee in 1939 at the World’s Fair. Across it were colorful
+pictures of light-skinned indigenous women of western El Salvador wearing
+rainbow-colored guipiles—embroidered cotton blouses—and refajos—
+colorful skirts—and carrying straw baskets bearing coffee beans.
+Hills Bros. Coffee asked its customers and potential partners reading the
+brochure an important question:
+But have you ever wondered, as you sip a cup of fine coffee in your home, how much
+time and effort were spent to make that delicious beverage available for you?
+
+A short film played as well. In it, a caption paid homage to the true king
+of coffee:
+The United States alone consumes nearly a billion and a half pounds or about 45 billion
+cups annually and is the world’s largest user of coffee.
+
+The caption was followed by footage of barefoot boys carrying coffee
+seeds in their hats and sowing the seeds in rows. Eighteen months later, a
+caption read, these seeds would become young coffee trees that would be
+transplanted to the plantations.
+The film closed at the Hills Bros. plant in San Francisco, declaring:
+Bad coffee beans are discarded and destroyed for better beans.
+
+Ahuachapán, El Salvador
+1932
+
+El Salvador stood at the precipice. The failure of negotiations between
+Alfonso Luna’s group and El General Martínez’s emissary left the
+indigenous groups and communists only one choice: revolución o muerte.
+Following the decision to pursue the insurrection strategy, the rebels
+planned an attack for January 22, 1932—ten days after the failure of the
+talks with Martínez—and armed themselves with whatever they could:
+machetes, rocks, Mausers (submachine guns), and pistols to attack the
+Salvadoran military.
+However, the comunistas and indigenous rebels were not a wellorganized force; they were poorly armed with no standard communication
+system. Adding to the tension of the moment was the ominous eruption of
+the Volcán de Izalco, a rarity that literally put a dark cloud over western El
+Salvador. The first casualties of the disorganization were the key rebel
+leaders, almost all of whom were captured and jailed by January 16, almost
+a week before the planned attack. Three days later, Farabundo Martí and
+Mario Zapata were captured and jailed. The military also captured Alfonso
+Luna, who, like his peers, was caught with compromising documents
+indicating a leadership role in the insurrection. Just over a week later,
+Feliciano Ama, the most important leader of thousands of indigenous
+people, was captured and publicly hanged by the military.
+Still, the plans for the attack went forward. In Ahuachapán on January
+22, the Náhuat Indians and other rebels in the Ejército Rojo—the Red Army
+—converged on the center of the city. Their initial attacks targeted
+government offices, haciendas, and other centers of power. Their most
+strategic target in the region was also the single most reviled symbol of
+oppressive government: the cuartel. The hulking fortress housed the
+Destacamento Militar Número Seis, the Sixth Military Detachment, and its
+machine guns.
+Rebels in the first unit to attack were mowed down by machine-gun fire
+from within the cuartel. After regrouping, the rebels mounted another
+attack, only to be gunned down again. Desperate to secure the cuartel, they
+tried and failed again before retreating in defeat.
+Three days after the rebellion began, most of the insurrection had already
+been put down. What’s more, El Brujo, as many called Martínez, and El
+
+Salvador’s Ladino elite were preparing a curse for indigenous people and
+future generations of poor Salvadorans, who would bear the cross of the
+extreme violence to come. Martínez acted swiftly, using the rebellion as an
+excuse to appease the coffee barons who supported him and settle accounts
+with the indios and comunistas who had defied him.
+The chaos had an especially virulent influence on the cafetaleros and
+other elites living in the mansions and plantations of Ahuachapán, Ataco,
+and other western towns. As early as December, El Salvador’s rich coffee
+growers had begun preparing for the conflict, organizing shopkeepers and
+local artisans into the Guardia Cívica. These units would seize control of a
+region when the military pulled out after the initial bloodletting.
+Newspapers owned by the elites called the rebels “a horde of infuriated
+savages, with demonic instincts.”1 These same newspapers conflated
+indigenous people with the communists completely, echoing government
+slogans that called them indio-comunistas. One paper claimed, “There is
+not one Indian who is not affiliated with the communist movement.”
+Ladino sentiments reached a fever pitch and called for “cures,” declaring:
+We want this plague exterminated by the roots, for if it is not, it will sprout forth with
+new spirit, now expert and less foolish, because in new attempts they will pitch
+themselves against the lives of all and slit our throats. We need the strong hand of
+government [to act], without asking anyone’s consent.2
+
+Immediately following the rebellion, the Guardia Nacional and Guardia
+Cívica began their work: a town-by-town, hamlet-by-hamlet, and, in some
+cases, house-by-house search for indigenous people and comunistas. Within
+a few days of the start of these massacres, General José Tomás Calderón,
+one of Martínez’s top military officials, said his troops had “liquidated”
+4,800 indigenous people and comunistas.3 But Calderón’s tally (which he
+later lowered, following international criticism of the violence) was
+preliminary at best. As the Guardia Nacional took the offensive and hunted
+down the rebels, they fled to the countryside. The Guardia followed,
+detaining any campesinos and indigenous people they came across, lining
+them up and shooting indiscriminately. Witnesses later described the
+slaughter, saying, “They killed all males from twelve on up.”4
+The semiautomatic rat-tat-tat of Mauser machine guns with large
+ammunition belts could be heard cutting through flesh and bone, mingled
+with the screams of the victims. In Izalco and other areas, witnesses
+
+reported that Náhuat Indians were lined up fifty at a time to be gunned
+down, the process being repeated ceaselessly for several days at a time.5
+Troops also raped countless women and girls.
+During the second phase of the killing, the Guardia Cívica, the armed
+paramilitary civilian organization funded by the cafetaleros, ranchers, and
+other elites, entered the fray. This Guardia escalated and focused the
+bloodshed on its primary target: indigenous people. This second phase
+turned the massacres into genocide. Near one ranch in Nahuizalco, for
+example, the Guardia Cívica went door to door, dragging out indigenous
+men, women, and children, tying them up and grouping them together. By
+the end of the operation, the armed civilians had rounded up eight hundred
+indigenous people and concentrated them in a field. Then, a witness heard,
+“Pe pe pe . . . the sound of the machine gun. The officials ordered the
+soldiers to break into a shed to look for tools for digging. It was around five
+in the afternoon and already by six they had finished [burying the bodies].”6
+Overall, some five hundred to one thousand unarmed people in Nahuizalco
+were executed.7
+Not just the scale of the killing expanded. As the Guardia Cívica phase
+expanded, so too did the involvement of different sectors throughout
+western El Salvador, including elements of the Church. Reports of Church
+officials supporting the repression and aiding in the identification of
+“communists” were not uncommon. In Santa Tecla, a witness described
+how a priest there “would ask us if we were involved with communism. I
+said no. But the others who admitted it, he put a little cross next to their
+name. They were shot.”8
+In the town of Izalco, military leaders ordered their troops to round up
+men, women, and children and walk them into the local church. Officers
+then ordered their troops to take aim and shoot the more than two hundred
+people crammed inside.
+The department of Ahuachapán was especially bloody. Legendary
+communist leader Miguel Mármol later recounted testimony he heard from
+a local who was forced by an army detachment to drive a truck that had a
+machine gun mounted in the cab. “In the back was a squad of soldiers with
+automatic arms,” Mármol said. “They went out on patrol . . . and any group
+of peasants that they encountered on their way, whether they were just
+talking or walking, without any prior warning, from a distance of thirty
+meters or more, they’d unload their machine guns and smaller arms on
+
+them. Afterward, the captain who was in command, with a .45 in his hand,
+forced our peasant comrade to continue driving the truck, running over
+them, including the dying who were writhing in pain on the ground,
+screaming.”9
+In cities and in nearby towns, the smell of rotting coffee mixed with the
+smell of rotting flesh as bodies and body parts lay strewn across the streets.
+Passersby saw dogs and pigs tearing at the flesh and bones of the dead. A
+major genocide took place in a matter of weeks in the tiny country. Driving
+scavengers into a frenzy as well were the shallow mass graves spreading
+throughout the region. Some victims were even forced to dig their own
+graves.
+The strongest smells came from the depths of the mass graves where fifty
+or more people lay dead. The smell and threat of potential health problems
+moved the Martínez government to issue warnings to regional and local
+officials. A February 15 letter from D. C. Escalante, Martínez’s director of
+public health, told governors and mayors to “take necessary sanitary
+measures in the face of reports of growing numbers of unburied bodies and
+mass graves . . . It is necessary to make the dimensions [of the mass graves]
+uniform for reasons of health. The accumulation of no more than fifty
+corpses in a single grave allows for better decomposition and less
+absorption into the soil. Even better would be isolated graves, in which no
+more than eight to ten corpses would be placed. The information is
+particularly important for the municipalities of Juayua, Nahuizalco, and
+Izalco.”10
+Those who survived the massacres carried the experience with them for
+the rest of their lives, often in silence. Ramóncito Esquina was nine at the
+time of La Matanza (the Slaughter). He was among the few who went on to
+speak about what he witnessed: “Around here the dead were scattered all
+over—well now they have all turned to earth. The corpses were everywhere
+in San Juan, Tajcuilulah, Pushtan, Casamulco. In Nahuizalco, well, there
+you can’t imagine how it was: they opened ditches in the cemeteries along
+the sides of and at the entrance where you walk in. Everywhere they made
+big holes. They dropped the bodies after they shot them, and heaved them
+as if they were bales of sugar cane.”11
+Because the records of La Matanza were burned, hidden, and otherwise
+erased, it’s impossible to know the number of people massacred, but
+estimates range from ten thousand12 to thirty thousand.13 Years after the
+
+genocide, William Krehm, a journalist with Time magazine, interviewed
+Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, and said that El General “insisted that
+the army had killed only two thousand peasants.” Anders Sandberg, a
+computational scientist at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute
+who studies the history of violence in the modern era, has said, “The
+intensity measure I used was: [people] killed per day, in which case El
+Salvador stands out. . . . I calculated it by using the total death toll, dividing
+by the length of the war. So while there might have been parts of, say,
+World War II, that actually killed more people in a day, I think it is right to
+say that [El Salvador’s 1932 Matanza] was the or one of the most violent
+episodes of the modern era.”14
+
+Part V
+
+13
+
+Panchimalco & Rosario de Mora, El Salvador
+2015
+
+The IML forensics convoy finally arrives. Isaias and I are happy to be
+leaving Panchimalco and all of its tension between the gang in the cemetery
+and the officers at the police station. However, without warning, the convoy
+—two white IML utility vehicles followed by six policía trucks—speeds
+down the hill leading out of central Panchimalco. Isaias is using the police
+station bathroom when the IML folks who invited me here leave without us.
+We hit the road leading to the campsite at Rosario de Mora. From there,
+it’s an hour or more hike to reach the grave site identified by the witness.
+Our late departure puts the possibility I’ll even get there at all at risk.
+“Shit, boss,” says the ever smiling Isaias. “Why didn’t they wait for
+you?”
+“Who knows? But let’s speed the fuck outta here and catch up,” I
+respond with a testiness that implies “your bathroom visit held us up.”
+Just a few minutes outside the city limits, things start getting greener—
+and scarier. Areas like this are the reason the IML personnel have six trucks
+of masked, M16-bearing PNC with them. The end of the truce in 2014 has
+turned every day into open season on people in El Salvador, especially
+cops. Somewhere amid the greenery, there are Humvees and other armored
+vehicles with machine guns, cannons, and heavy explosives patrolling the
+area. The greenery also helps the gangs hide the training camps where their
+child and adult soldiers perfect their killing techniques.
+
+“They left at least seven minutes ahead of us, and their trucks can go a lot
+faster than I can in my taxi,” Isaias says, as if I didn’t know. “Are you sure
+you still want to try to catch them? This situation is the color of ants.” A
+Salvadoran way of a saying we are in deep shit.
+I don’t say anything. I’m nervous and kinda pissed we’ve been left
+behind because Isaias took too much time to take a dump.
+“This even scares me,” he says, as if to reassure me, but with that
+nervous smile that appears whenever we’ve been in difficult situations, like
+earlier at the Panchimalco cemetery. I can tell it means he actually wants to
+take the risk. Dude’s also intense. I do a quick risk assessment. We don’t
+have M16s, but Isaias is packing an Uzi under his seat and there’s a
+revolver in the glove compartment. And he has the balls and enough fucking
+crazy for both us. I think we can catch the convoy safely. I don’t tell him to
+turn around. Isaias floors the gas.
+We pass what looks like an abandoned hamlet. Empty homes with bulletriddled adobe walls. As we get on a rocky road to climb up another hill
+leading to the grave site, accompanying these cops feels weird. They’re not
+the murderous right-wing police I encountered before and during the war.
+These are FMLN cops, but some of them are also murderous, as agent
+Perla, the cop from the Panchimalco police station, made clear. We speed
+through the abandoned hamlet, and as we pass through its southern edge,
+our luck changes. The idea that the former guerrilleros who fought the
+police and other security forces are now the police and security forces
+themselves causes my head to spin. Some of these cops may be killers like
+agent Perla or part of the paramilitary execution squads conducting
+extrajudicial killings of gang members, even as the escuadrones de la
+muerte once pursued their FMLN leaders.
+“Look, boss. There they are!”
+In front of us sit the white utility vehicles and trucks of the convoy. For
+whatever reason, they’ve stopped. As we draw nearer, the vehicles in the
+caravan start moving again.
+Thirty-five minutes later, the caravan reaches Margarita, a town near the
+site of the mass grave I’m here to see. No phone signal here—this place
+isn’t even on the map. There are few houses, some of which are abandoned,
+others covered with what appear to be bullet holes.
+The IML team unpacks its equipment and prepares for the hike down a
+steep hill and through a forest that served as a killing field during the civil
+
+war. There, buried throughout miles of fertile earth is a horrific example of
+what forensic scientists call a “commingled” site: a place where the dead
+and decomposing bodies of hundreds of gangsters, police officers, soldiers,
+and civilians lie together. Most of the mass graves dug during the war also
+remain unexcavated, their victims’ deaths still uninvestigated thirty years
+later.
+Isaias looks to me for guidance. I let him know he can leave and return to
+pick me up later, or wait for me here at the camp.
+“I’ll be here waiting for you in the camp, mi coronel.”
+In the forest, rows of redolent pine trees and green subtropical shrubbery
+filled with squirrels, birds, and other animals give the walk a bucolic air. I
+trudge through the mud sweaty from the summer heat. I’m out of shape and
+getting tired quickly. My nerves about hiking in such a dangerous place
+don’t help, either.
+I try to divert some of the nervousness filling my body into conversing
+with Quijano, the lead forensic analyst on the project.
+“During the war, there were people left beheaded in the streets, people
+executed, people taken out of their homes, shot, and then dumped in a
+ravine,” Quijano says.
+Fuck this. This conversation will offer my anxiety no relief. I exit it
+pronto.
+Salvador, one of the cops I’m walking beside, seems eager to share
+something with me. “You’re from the United States?” he asks. “My father
+lives in the US, in Los Angeles. Not sure what part.”
+“I lived in Los Angeles for a long time,” I say, before slipping and falling
+into the shallow stream we’re crossing.
+“Fuck!”
+Salvador gives me a hand and pulls me up.
+My phone no longer works after falling into the water. In moments of
+stress, Pop’s voice runs wild in me. I hear his voice in my head: “You’ve
+wasted your life with all this politics shit. You should have made a lot of
+money, had a family, and lived well, instead of doing stupid things they
+don’t pay you for.”
+Salvador picks up the conversation where he left off. “My father bought
+some DVDs about the war at Metrocentro. They’re really good because
+they trace the war from the beginning. You see important stuff.”
+
+“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve seen some of them. We need to understand what’s
+happening here now, especially the story of the kids who came from LA,
+the gangs. I’m interested in the conflicts and injuries that turn them to
+violence, including those caused by the war.”
+The relaxed look on Salvador’s face gives way to a snarl. “There’s no
+reason to attribute trauma to them,” he says abruptly. “It’s about libertinaje.
+Libertinaje, this disorder, is the reason for developing this gang violencía
+pandilleril.”
+I decide to back down. Dude’s here risking his life to protect the IML
+personnel—and me—and I’m not about to start an argument with him.
+“How dangerous is it out here?” I ask, trying to shift the conversation and
+sincerely wanting to know how much I should be shitting in my pants.
+“We’re in lo mero feo, the ugliest of the ugly places.”
+“Really?” Fuck.
+“Yes, they ambush people in broad daylight. They operate more easily
+here in the rural areas. In this sector lots of people have been killed.”
+“Whereabouts?”
+“Azacualpa, Caserito, Amayito, the San Isidro zone, and the different
+barrios and caserios. It’s dangerous there. So is Troncones. Here, too. The
+whole rural area around here is dangerous. There are more homicides in
+rural areas than in Panchimalco city because libertinaje allows the gangs to
+mobilize.”
+The hint of a smile and the squint of his eyes wake me up to the fact that
+he’s taking the already tense situation and ratcheting shit up even more just
+to mess with me. It’s clear he wants to get back at me for showing
+sympathy for gang members earlier when I referred to them as kids.
+“I bet there are up to fifteen to twenty armed subjects roaming around
+right now,” he continues. “They’re surely pissed off over the deaths of those
+five pandilleros that were killed. Those guys were killed precisely because
+they were going to do a matanza.” A massacre. Matanza is the solution to
+matanza.
+We arrive at the Rosario de Mora site near a grove of oak trees. Some of
+the trees bear the signs of the country’s atomization: the numbers XIII and
+XVIII—symbolizing the rival MS-13 and 18th Street maras—carved into
+them, along with the crossed-out versions of these Roman numerals, which
+signifies that the territory we’re standing on is contested. The site is located
+toward the top of a steep hill, an area where one of the officers tells me
+
+there are “probably fifty or more people buried.”1 Half of the site has
+already been excavated—a fully dressed skeleton wearing a red basketball
+shirt and black pants is partially visible in one corner.
+The preliminary work on the site was done before we arrived by Israel
+Ticas, a self-taught criminalist retained by the office of Luís Martínez, the
+slimy, slick-talking Salvadoran attorney general. I read a lot about Ticas
+before coming here. His lack of formal training and unorthodox methods
+make him a controversial figure in the forensics community in El Salvador.
+Sources at Tutela Legal and other human rights organizations involved with
+exhuming mass graves offered me biting criticisms of Ticas, saying he’s a
+media hound who botches sites and refuses to be a team player.2 Their
+description was reinforced by the fact that he and the IML team barely
+exchanged greetings when we arrived.
+I walk over to Ticas. It seems like he’s getting ready to leave and that my
+time with him will be quite limited. The problem is, I am bubbling with
+questions for this especially strange and striking Salvadoran.
+We exchange pleasantries before I ask him what he thinks about the
+concerns raised by his critics—including Miguel Fortin, IML’s outspoken
+conservative and flamboyant director—who have expressed “serious
+doubts” about the former computer engineer’s qualifications as a
+criminalist. He smiles as if saying, “Whatever,” then looks confidently
+toward the site where he did the preliminary work.
+I ask Ticas about the division between IML and the attorney general’s
+office. “There is no division,” he says. “It doesn’t affect our work. You saw.
+I did my part.” He gestures to the grave site. “[IML] may see it like that, but
+I don’t. We’re a multidisciplinary team.”
+I size him up. Ticas is about five seven, with a medium build and dark
+skin. His small eyes have a hint of nervousness. Yet, this is the guy who’s
+been filmed eating inside grave sites while excavating, celebrating his
+birthday next to bodies in grave pits, holding and speaking to the severed
+heads of little girls as if they’re alive, and making crude sexist and
+homophobic jokes with the dead. On the other hand, few people in El
+Salvador have the ability to do the things he does: finding grave sites from
+smell or by looking at plants and roots, and reconstructing bodies
+dismembered beyond recognition.
+In addition to exhuming individual bodies, Ticas also uses unorthodox
+methods to map the relentless expansion of El Salvador’s labyrinth of mass
+
+graves. His research has helped him and others understand that the gangs
+have altered their modus operandi, especially in terms of finding more
+sophisticated ways to hide bodies. In the past few years, he’s found thirty
+bodies in a tunnel, fifteen bodies in a septic tank, an entire cemetery
+beneath a mechanics shop, twenty bodies buried in a hundred-foot-deep
+well, and dozens of bodies in caves and the backyards of houses.
+Previously, mass graves were limited to dump sites—big holes in the
+ground located in suburban and rural areas.
+Ticas and others suspect that the purported decrease in homicides during
+the truce was a farce, that while the gangs reduced their public killings,
+instead they made people disappear. He believes this accounts for many of
+the more recent victims his team has dug up. However, despite right-wing
+media support for their claims, neither Ticas, Fortin, nor anyone else has
+been able to offer anything more than anecdotal evidence to back this
+theory.
+“Freddy Krueger and Jason are nothing next to what we’re living with in
+this country. This is terror.”
+What motivates him, he says, are the victims—giving them and their
+families some sense of the identity lost in the dismemberments,
+disappearances, and “commingled” anonymity of these graves. “The ones
+who need me are the dead, their families. What I do may be macabre for
+others. Not me. For me, it’s natural. That’s what death is: a work of art.”
+He’s kinda weird, but from what I’ve gathered, dude has looked into the
+abyss like few here, except for the killers filling these graves.
+The IML team finishes unpacking equipment. Quijano and Beatriz Ortiz
+Mejía, a young forensic anthropologist, enter the hole created by Ticas’s
+team to finish uncovering a skeleton.
+“He was dismembered,” Quijano reports. “They cut him up. Let’s
+measure.”
+Quijano and Mejía lift what remains of the skeleton and place it in one of
+the cardboard boxes with the IML logo. The moment of truth arrives: will
+they be able to discover the body’s identity?
+“Here’s a document,” he says triumphantly. “See. It’s a carnet [license].
+Lend me a little spoon, Sarandita.” He reads what’s legible on the dirtcovered cedula [ID card]: “Sihuatenango, Panchimalco, departamento, El
+Salvador . . . Assistant to mechanic.” He reads his name and birthdate and
+shakes his head slightly. “Eighteen years old.”
+
+Quijano and Mejía put on gloves and masks to prevent them from
+contaminating the site and the bodies. They start the delicate work of
+scraping the site to reveal all the bones buried in it. Quijano photographs
+the site and starts removing the bones, beginning with the eighteen-year-old
+victim’s skull. They record each bone, then put it in one of the cardboard
+boxes, stamped on the sides with the scales of justice, the logo of El
+Salvador’s Supreme Court. They will take the bones and other artifacts back
+to the IML laboratory to further analyze them.
+As I pack up my camera and other things, I look at the grave site and
+recall the words of a Tutela Legal lawyer: “In these zones there are
+thousands of graves.”3 The Margarita site is just one of the hundreds of dots
+on the map of El Salvador.
+We hike back to the parking area. Isaias walks up to me as I enter the lot
+where the IML caravan is parked and says, “Hey, boss, let’s book it out of
+here now.” He looks in the direction of his car parked on the hill.
+“I don’t want to leave without saying good-bye,” I insist.
+“Boss, believe me, we need to go now,” he says, looking over at the lot
+again.
+“I told you, I won’t leave without saying good-bye.” I’m committed to
+thanking the brave men who protected us, as well as those who led the ritual
+of forensic recovery that I’m starting to believe is a critical way to start the
+process of individual, familial, and national healing.
+“Boss, please.”
+I ignore Isaias and walk farther into the lot, flustered by his attitude and
+unusual pestering tone.
+In the lot, the IML team quickly loads their equipment and rushes to their
+car before speeding off without saying good-bye. But Ticas and the officers
+are kicking back in the lot. A woman wearing a vest with the big FGR of
+the attorney general’s office is standing nearby talking on the phone. One of
+the officers speaking with Ticas in the lot walks up to the woman in the
+FGR vest and says, “This is a big problem because we told him not to come
+to the site.” I realize she’s referring to me. This is bullshit. No such
+conversation took place. The IML chief approved my visit more than a
+week ago, but he’s long gone.
+“Who approved your visit here?” she asks as she approaches me.
+“Miguel Fortin, the head of the IML,” I shoot back.
+
+“Well, you don’t have our permission and we’re responsible for this site,
+not them.” Both the AG’s office and the IML have pulled this silencing
+technique with countless documentarians, journalists, and media
+organizations, including those that have come to do splashy reports on
+Ticas.
+“What? I’m a journalist with a news organization.” My tone is getting
+tenser. “I got the necessary permission and now you’re saying I went on this
+adventure for nada and without permission?”
+“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I’m also saying that you’ll have to erase all
+the pictures, all the recording, and any video you took at the site.”
+The lawyer from the attorney general’s office signals to the commander
+of the police who escorted us. Suddenly, I’m surrounded by guns held by
+the same cops who were just protecting me. I look at Salvador, who looks
+away from me and down at the ground. My blood is boiling, partly from the
+audacity of the lie, partly because this bullshit is coming from the once
+heroic FMLN.
+“Hell no!” I tell her. “I won’t erase my material. And you can’t make
+me.”
+The woman looks at the cops, who walk up to me, hands on their
+revolvers and rifles.
+“You do this and I guarantee you that I will make you famous in ways
+you will regret, lady.”
+“We don’t care, sir. So please erase the pictures or we will proceed to do
+so.”
+“Fuck you. You do it.”
+“OK, then. I’m going to have to ask that our technician review your
+camera and erase your pictures. I know you were documenting with
+pictures and in writing.” She orders the police officers to search through my
+film and devices while I stand and watch.
+At this point, a smirking Ticas adds one last stab, saying, “When you
+want to have access you have to call the attorney general’s office.”
+I’m shocked. I realize what his whispers with the cop meant: this quirky
+fucking guy I was trying hard to like and understand sold me out to the
+lawyer from the attorney general’s office in order to have them erase my
+pictures. But why? Competition with the IML? Not wanting any more
+pictures of bodies and skeletons in major US media like the Boston Globe?
+
+Because he didn’t like my asking about his credentials and disputes with the
+IML?
+The betrayal of the FMLN and la patria stirs the old pit of anger at El
+Salvador and my family caused by my padre. Like absent or abusive
+fathers, the political parties, governments, and countries we grew up with,
+and even loved, often end up hurting and forsaking us. The only path to
+sanity is unforgetting.
+Picture by picture, the FMLN cop proceeds to erase all the photographs
+taken in the forest, destroying everything captured on my long, difficult
+journey. I’m experiencing the Salvadoran state’s need to silence the
+slaughter that has made it one of the most consistently violent patrias since
+the nineteenth century. This is not the FMLN I once admired, the FMLN
+with the militants whose clandestino ways taught me to love the humidity
+of their secrets.
+
+14
+
+San Francisco, California
+1989
+
+“Compañeros,” said Edwin, the director of CARECEN, the Central
+American Refugee Center, “today we have the honor of a visit from Ms. G.
+As many of you know, Ms. G is a representative of the FMLN.”
+Edwin radiated enthusiasm. Some of CARECEN’s leaders, like Edwin,
+moved easily in the networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
+that provide legal and social services and advocacy for refugees and in the
+more radical, pro-FMLN organizations.1 As a nonprofit refugee-service
+organization, CARECEN occupied a lower position2 in the political
+hierarchy of the US–El Salvador sanctuary-and-solidarity movement than
+the FMLN guerrilla organization.
+After I’d left the church and graduated from Berkeley, I’d spent several
+months hitchhiking and riding buses to and around El Salvador and
+Nicaragua. When I returned to San Francisco, CARECEN’s services and
+legal advocacy on behalf of refugees inspired me to work with them. I had
+my doubts about the radical thing, but the refugees’ organizing capacity
+impressed me deeply.
+The galaxy of NGOs established throughout the US by left-leaning
+Salvadoran refugees with the ability to turn poetry into politics was
+unparalleled in its organizing power. Salvadoran exiles and refugees
+deployed their incredible stories of war, tragedy, and overcoming to inspire
+hundreds of thousands of North Americans to join their struggle against the
+fascist military dictatorship of El Salvador and its main backer, the US
+
+government. Together, the Salvadorans and norteamericano solidarios
+provided political and material aid for the FMLN and the network of social
+movements that comprised the Salvadoran revolution—creating one of the
+most powerful social movements of the eighties3 in the US. Among the first
+Salvadorans to launch the US sanctuary and solidarity movement, in the
+seventies, were those in San Francisco, including the compañeros and
+compañeras working out of a converted Lutheran elementary school on
+South Van Ness, five blocks from my family’s apartment on Folsom.
+Edwin’s gregarious good nature and his pride at introducing G made the
+former classroom glow. The Central American solidarity movement’s
+equivalent of a celebrity had just walked humbly into our office. As one of
+the few people and even fewer women who represented the FMLN in
+public, G was the voice of the Salvadoran revolution. The noticeable
+furrowing of her thick, Frida Kahlo–esque eyebrows appeared to signal the
+star’s discomfort with the small spectacle created by Edwin’s ebullience.
+Edwin led G through the various raggedy donated cubicles housing the
+many services—health, legal, dental, food—that CARECEN offered
+refugees. As they passed the social services cubicles, Edwin introduced G
+to Leonardo, one of our many volunteers. Leonardo said “hola” and not
+much else. I thought perhaps he was frozen because he was a former
+military guy, and had admitted to lawyers working on his political asylum
+case that he’d participated in the escuadrones de la muerte. Grateful that
+CARECEN helped him secure asylum, Leonardo had undergone a major
+transformation, joining us in organizing and protesting against what we
+called the “death-squad government of El Salvador.”
+Edwin and G eventually reached the cubicle where I was standing. He
+introduced her and said G had recently moved to work out of an office in
+San Francisco, her home base for what she called the diplomatic work:
+meetings with political, church, solidarity, and other organizations, going to
+Congress, building support for the revolution with wealthy donors and
+actors, musicians, and other entertainment figures, including Johnny Cash,
+Joan Baez, Oliver Stone, Kris Kristofferson, Jane Fonda, Jackson Browne,
+and Bonnie Raitt.
+“This is Roberto, who works with EMPLEO, our worker cooperative.”
+Looking around until he made sure some of the other male compas could
+hear him, Edwin added, “He was born here in the Mission District of
+Salvadoran parents—but he’s not a traditional gringo.”
+
+Several people, including the white solidarios working in the office,
+laughed. I didn’t. I was furious. It was frustrating that I was labeled as not
+entirely Salvadoran to other Salvadorans, but it was extra infuriating to
+have that line of distinction drawn in front of the white solidarios, who
+joined the compas in laughing at my bicultural background. These
+situations made me feel like I was “ni chichi, ni limonada,” neither one
+thing nor the other.
+At twenty-six, four years after leaving the right-wing Open Door
+Alliance Church on Valencia, I’d come here looking to connect with the
+Salvadoran side that had once made me feel a sense of shame. But working
+in the minefield of male compa humor—which included being asked with
+heavy sarcasm during the Salvadoran national anthem, “Hey, Lovato, which
+flag will you salute?”—had turned the hyphen in Salvadoran-American into
+my own personal San Andreas fault line of insecurity, one that shook me
+regularly.
+Nonetheless, I bit my tongue at Edwin’s comment.
+“I see nothing funny in this,” G said with a tone and look of authority
+that quickly shut down the Salvadoran smartasses and their white chorus.
+Her perceptiveness had me scoping out this fierce twenty-nine-year-old
+woman who openly represented the guerrillas named for Farabundo Martí,
+the guy my cousin Adilio whispered to me about years before. At five four,
+G had a solid build that suited her serious demeanor. She wore her hair
+short, which went well with her pretty brown eyes and gave her a slightly
+debonair look.
+Unfazed, G quickly extended her hand to me and then lit me up with a
+coquettish smile. It was easy to see why the compas baptized her with the
+noms de guerre they gave her: Clara, clear, and Lucia, light. Translucence
+turned out to be a turn-on.
+G was slow to speak and had paused a lot when speaking, like she was
+weighing each word to make sure I was present and understood what she
+was saying. For someone with such an important position, G had a humble
+Salvadoran air that was also reassuring. My own deep hidden shyness saw
+its reflection.
+My work with CARECEN had taught me that Salvadorans either loved
+the FMLN or hated them because of the deep fear and anti-communism
+instilled in them by the dictatorships, as it was in my parents from
+
+childhood. My brothers, Omar and Mem, my sister, Mima, and Mom, all
+supported me, regardless. Pop said nada.
+The possibility that Pop hated my newfound work after I graduated from
+Berkeley made me happy. He didn’t like stories I heard about our distant
+cousins from Ataco. These cousins, most of whom were from the rich
+cafetalero family on Pop’s Ahuachapán side, had joined the FMLN. They
+were guerrilleras, a word that sounded badass.
+As attractive as G seemed, though, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with her
+radical politics. I was politically liberal, involved in the movement because
+I wanted to do something to create change. The humanitarian sanctuary
+aspect of CARECEN’s work, helping refugees in San Francisco, felt safe
+and was what had drawn me in, as opposed to the more radical solidarity
+part tasked with taking over consulates, closing the Golden Gate Bridge,
+and other intrepid actions targeting the Salvadoran and US governments. I
+was curious about the more radical pro-FMLN flank of the movement but
+not ready to commit to it. G made me nervous because she seemed to exhort
+action on these issues with a presence that was so natural, so light, and yet
+so powerful that I wasn’t sure how to deal.
+After touring the rest of the CARECEN complex with Edwin, G
+suddenly stuck her head into the EMPLEO office. Her entourage was gone.
+“Can I come in?” she asked with a polite smile.
+“Sure!” I said, startled and nervous.
+Up close and alone, she was less imposing and disarmingly nice. We
+made some small talk for a while about what we did in the EMPLEO office,
+when she subtly changed the subject.
+“You grew up here?”
+“Yes,” I said. “Born and raised.”
+“What a lovely place to grow up,” she said. “Very different from the
+countryside where I grew up.”
+Parts of her speech had hints of the rural accent of my maternal
+grandmother, Mamá Clothi, whose picture hung in our living room. G
+struck an imposing figure. Her Chalateca qualities quickly put me at ease:
+the deliberate, weighted speech; her word choices, like the unusual, vowelrich chirilin instead of pequeño to denote smallness; the way she looked
+directly in my eyes; and her immediately apparent toughness that came
+from the physical and political rockiness of rural El Salvador.
+
+She seemed genuinely interested in my being a “grindio,” an Indian
+gringo, the stupid term the compañeros around the CARECEN complex had
+come up with for me. Not one for small talk, she flashed another dimension
+of her personality that intrigued me: being muy directa.
+“I’m new here and would love to see the Mission—through your eyes,”
+she said, before glancing down the hall.
+Uh oh.
+“OK, yeah. Let’s do it,” I said. We exchanged cards and agreed to talk
+again soon.
+
+G and I met on the corner of Twenty-Fourth and Mission, the unofficial
+center of the neighborhood, as symbolized by the BART station that had
+started gentrification there in 1973, which had been continued with ferocity
+with the growth of Silicon Valley. She showed up without the sport coat and
+slacks she wore for work, wearing a bright summery dress instead. The
+diplomat of the political-military organization had given way to the civilian.
+A beautiful civilian.
+Playing the role of tour guide on the moonlit summer night, I took G to
+the most important sights of the Mission: my folks’ apartment on TwentyFifth and Folsom; Lucky Alley, where Hiram Vázquez and I first smoked
+cigarettes and pot and found our first porn magazine back when we were
+preteens; and Balmy Alley, the street with all the murals, where me and Los
+Originales had once abandoned an ugly orange stolen Chevy Nova after I
+crashed it into a wall in the Potrero Hill neighborhood.
+She asked questions throughout, as if the Mission were some kind of
+exotic land and I were one of its diplomats. But I could also see the
+emissary in her giving way to the campesina girl who enjoyed moments
+free of wartime pressures that she’d been dealing with for the last decade. It
+felt like part of my appeal was that I was of Salvadoran descent, but
+innocent to war, even though I hardly felt innocent.
+Eventually, we found ourselves on the corner of Twenty-First and
+Valencia. I felt an immediate, urgent need to bolt. Unresolved parts of me,
+of my past, were threatening to enter our conversation before I was ready.
+I’d wanted to show G my cool veneer before exposing my less attractive
+parts. Suddenly our walk started to feel scary, like we were moving too fast.
+But I resisted the urge to flee because I enjoyed G’s easy, safe manner, her
+
+questions about me, and the way she talked about her life and even life
+generally.
+“This is the Open Door Alliance, my old church,” I said nervously.
+Looking back at us were the big blue eyes of Jesus, whose classic portrait
+sat next to a bunch of Bibles in the big windows of the storefront. The
+image of me, the prostrating deacon, praying for the reelection of Reagan at
+the front of the church filled me with fear as I waited for G’s reaction.
+“Roberto!” she said with unusual enthusiasm. “It’s beautiful that you
+found faith, with all you’d been through. I’m also a Christian.”
+Huh?
+I tried to keep whatever was left of my cool exterior even as my insides
+were screaming What the fuck?
+“Really? How’s that?”
+“In Chalate,” she said, referring to Chalatenango, one of the most warravaged states in El Salvador, “I was a member of a Christian base
+community.”
+“Really?”
+“Yes, we read and acted like the Bible was really written about and for
+the poor that Jesus served, as if Jesus’s message was a message of
+liberation.” She gazed at the baby Jesus in the window.
+Holy shit. She’s not kidding. She looked up to Jesus as a hero, too.
+“That’s fucking cool!” I exclaimed. My heart pounded harder. “So,
+you’re from Chalate?”
+“Yes, my entire family.”
+“My abuelita, Mamá Clothi, was from there. She lived to be one hundred
+and three. They live a long time out there.”
+“Some do.”
+I didn’t say anything. My insensitivity about the war dead brought things
+from the heavenly heights back down to dirty Valencia Street.
+“Where’s your father from?” she asked.
+“Ahuachapán.”
+“Ahuachapán?”
+“Yes.”
+“Wow. There’s a lot of deep history there.”
+“Yeah,” I said, a fresh source of insecurity rising in me: the emptiness
+and shame I felt because I didn’t know anything about Pop’s father and
+Ahuachapán family.
+
+“I’m going to Chalate to check out the refugee communities CARECEN
+works with down there,” I said, desperate to shift the conversation.
+“That’s great. I was going to become a nun when I lived there, but then
+the escuadrones de la muerte started killing members of the base
+community—and then they killed many members of my family,” she said in
+that soft voice. If G was trying to connect with me, she was doing so in the
+most unexpected way.
+“I had a choice,” she continued. “I could either escape before they came
+for me or go to the mountains and fight. I went to the mountains and joined
+the compañeros.”
+Her forthrightness, her example as a principled political actor, and even
+her Christian background inspired trust in me, something I wasn’t used to.
+Whatever her politics, she was obviously a sincere and committed person.
+My street-tough Mission District homeboy’s pride bowed before this
+beautiful, sensitive, smart, courageous woman. She wanted to know about
+me, which felt like an honor. On top of that, G had insight into Salvadoran
+things, which I so desperately craved.
+“So, tell me about your family,” she said.
+“Well, I was born to a mother who adores me and a father who’s never
+been around for me emotionally.”
+“Er, OK. So why is that so different?”
+“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
+“My father wasn’t there for me either. Most Salvadoran men aren’t.”
+I hadn’t heard that before about Salvadoran men. It shook me—in a good
+way—but I was also overwhelmed. It felt like we were speeding into this
+conversation too quickly.
+“Really?” I asked rhetorically, wanting to move the conversation along.
+G smiled.
+“Let’s call it an evening, shall we?” Her timing was exquisite, like she
+could feel the flow of my insecurities and sensed what I needed at the
+moment.
+Over the next few weeks we spent many evenings strolling toward
+anything in the Mission that seemed marvelously beautiful, which, in G’s
+company, meant everything.
+
+15
+
+Las Aradas, Chalatenango, El Salvador
+1990
+
+My first mass grave wasn’t what I’d anticipated. Before meeting G, I’d
+committed to going to Chalatenango for a few weeks on behalf of
+CARECEN despite the ongoing civil war. My mission was to observe the
+work of our sister organization, CRIPDES, led by a group of fierce women,
+that had worked with displaced and repopulated communities since 1984.
+On a more personal level, Chalatenango was my maternal grandmother’s
+birthplace. There I hoped to connect the dots between the crisis of violence
+all around me and my internal crisis fueled by the unknown past. Touching
+ground at Chalatenango gave me a physical connection to pasts that had
+been denied to me.
+One day I decided to visit a part of the region’s past that people were still
+talking about ten years later: a mass grave at the Sumpul. After driving
+from the town of Guarjila, our descent from the grassy, rocky hills and the
+valleys around them felt pretty mellow, other than the mud that made it feel
+like you were walking en jabón, on soap, as Salvadorans say when
+describing either actual slipperiness or being in a precarious position. The
+nearby murmurs of a river soothed me, as did the shade of a ceiba, the “tree
+of life,” venerated by the Náhuat and Mayan peoples of the region. The
+ceiba acted as a cosmic transmitter—its branches were said to reach high
+into the sky and its roots deep into the underworld.
+The grave was in the river. “There it is,” my guide, Quique, told me. He
+pointed at the bright, clear waters of the Sumpul beside us. “You’d never
+
+know what happened here nine years ago.”
+Quique, a Chalateco with a nervous laugh, made a rather odd Virgil,
+leading me down to the river of death. He ended most of his sentences with
+“beah,” local slang for “verdad,” “truth,” which gave his speech a homey
+ring. I’d met Quique through friends at CRIPDES, which was providing aid
+to the refugees still returning to their communities.
+In El Salvador the war had an impact on everyone. Several leaders of
+CRIPDES had been captured, raped, tortured, and killed by Salvadoran
+security forces. Quique and thousands of other refugees were forced to flee
+to Honduras in the late 1960s due to political conflict and extreme violence
+in the region. They resided in Honduras for several years, until the
+government there forced them to return to Chalatenango in the late
+seventies and early eighties.1
+“We came back from Honduras and other parts of Chalate and
+established ourselves here in Las Aradas,” Quique said. “Before, during,
+and after our return, the military was hungry for us. They were chasing,
+capturing, and killing people. We lived in fear, always ready to flee. They
+thought everybody in our communities were FMLN. The night before [the
+massacre], they were positioned around the river, as if they were blocking it
+and getting ready to attack.
+“That morning many of us fled. Some tried to cross the river río abajo,
+risking drowning because the water swelled. It was deep and dangerous.
+“As we fled, the military and paramilitaries approached. Many women
+and children tried to escape by going across the river to Honduras. Without
+warning, the Hondurans [military] started shooting at them or chasing them
+back across the river into the hands of the [Salvadoran] military and
+paramilitaries. They were screaming, ‘Please don’t kill us, please don’t kill
+us!’”
+The soldiers kept the refugees in the river for a few minutes, doing
+nothing. Then the soldiers and paramilitaries took the first group of fifty
+onto land and marched them next to the Sumpul River.
+“You could hear the screams. The military started shooting fifty to sixty
+people at a time,” Quique continued. “And then another fifty and then
+another. They executed over two hundred people at the edge of the river
+like that.” Buzzing over the violent scene were several helicopters supplied
+by the Reagan administration. “The helicopters fired down on the people
+
+drowning in the river and those running away. They also killed men,
+women and children who were injured.”
+He paused. “It was horrible.”
+Other witnesses later described how soldiers cut open the bellies of
+pregnant women, tossed fetuses and infants into the air, and bayoneted
+them.2 They also recalled the blood: in the water, on the ground, splattered
+across trees. After the massacre, the Salvadoran military cordoned off the
+area, leaving any survivors to die alongside the corpses already rotting
+around the Sumpul.3
+Vietnam-veteran trainers from the School of the Americas (SOA), Fort
+Leavenworth in Kansas, and other military facilities had taught the
+Salvadoran military in the US. Other trainers were deployed to El Salvador
+by the Carter administration.4 Reagan significantly expanded this US
+military presence. The Salvadoran military men who received the training
+returned from the United States to Chalatenango and other parts of El
+Salvador with expertise in “draining the water” and other counterinsurgency
+techniques. Some of their methods were documented in their training
+manuals, but the more horrific ones were not, instead left coded in deadly
+euphemism.5 As former Guatemalan president and SOA graduate José
+Efraín Ríos Montt put it, “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If
+you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”6 The Sumpul River
+communities were the water. Ríos Montt was eventually convicted of
+genocide but was not sentenced due to his poor health.
+Despite the efforts of Salvadoran officials and the US envoy to El
+Salvador, Elliott Abrams, to spin the news and deny the massacre, the truth
+leaked through the blockade. The Sumpul massacre of May 1980 was the
+worst in Salvadoran history since La Matanza in 1932. More than six
+hundred men, women, and children were killed.7 The foundations for a new
+regime of oblivion had been put in place.
+Strafing and bombing from nearby helicopters and the sound of
+semiautomatic gunshot fire reminded us that the war was ongoing. The idea
+of towns where kids pray with their parents at night while semiautomatics
+rage devastated me. I stepped aside to cry while Quique faced the river.
+After I returned to his side, he noticed my silence. “It impacts you, leaves
+you without breath, beah?”
+“Yes,” I said.
+
+“They still haven’t dug up all the other mass graves and they probably
+won’t, beah?”
+“No, they probably won’t.”
+Almost a decade after it happened, the Sumpul massacre, the first major
+massacre of civilians by the Salvadoran government during the war, had not
+been officially investigated. Likewise forgotten was the El Mozote
+massacre, where the Atlacatl Battalion had slaughtered a town of nearly one
+thousand evangelical campesinos in December 1981. And the Sixth
+Military Detachment’s December 1981 massacre at El Junquillo, a town
+almost entirely made up of the elderly, women, and children. And El
+Calabozo, where more than two hundred were also massacred by the
+Atlacatl Battalion in August 1982. And the February 1983 massacre at Las
+Hojas, the town in Sonsonate where the Jaguar Battalion and escuadrones
+de la muerte butchered sixty families, mostly comprised of indigenous
+children, the elderly, and women, including pregnant women. And dozens
+more mass murders.8
+“Beah, that when you see or hear about these things they are not
+forgotten, beah?”
+“No,” I said. “I’ll never forget this river.”
+Many refer to “Chalatenango heroico” because of the Chalateco fighting
+spirit—the rugged spirit of the campesinos, who’ve survived decades of
+oppression and mass murder, and the spirit of the guerrilleros, whose will to
+fight was legendary. My visit to the killing fields of Chalatenango gave me
+a different sense of what it meant to be Salvadoreño. In philosophy classes
+at Berkeley, I had learned the Greek word aletheia, unforgetting, which the
+Greeks also equated with uncovering truth. Now I realized that learning
+both Salvadoran history and the history of my family was essential to
+understanding my story. Our future depends on remembering that we are a
+fierce, resilient people forged in a crucible of poverty and staggering
+violence, including Mom and, as I would learn, especially Pop.
+
+I returned to my folks’ house in San Francisco from El Salvador seeing
+them and their life choices in a completely new way. At this point in my
+life, most of the time I simply avoided Pop. But my trip made me want to
+brave the years of the silence between us, so I decided to approach him as
+he was packing one of his boxes in preparation for another of the frequent
+short trips he made to El Salvador to supplement the family income.
+
+“Hola,” he said in a voice filled with hesitation, as if waiting for me to
+either start preaching or get pissed off.
+“What are you taking this time, Pop?” I asked. Pop looked older, frailer
+than I remembered, as he packed and taped the cardboard boxes. He had
+turned sixty-eight last August, a fact I noticed in his wrinkled face and
+thinning arms.
+“Stuff,” he said, still in that hesitant voice. “You know, joyas, clothes,
+calculadoras, toys for the children. Stuff like that.”
+“That’s cool, Pop,” I said, clearly not actually interested but wholly
+sincere in my desire to connect with my padre.
+Pop’s boxes seemed smaller than they once had. In addition to the
+shadiness I’d always ascribed to them—and to my folks—previously, the
+boxes had done good, as well, helping family, friends, and the poor in San
+Salvador and San Vicente. For the first time I could see my desire to break
+martial law by bringing boxes of aid to the refugee populations in
+Chalatenango as rooted in the aid my parents had been sending throughout
+my life. I was starting to understand my family in a more complicated way,
+one that accommodated both its lightness and its darkness.
+“OK, Pop. I’ll see you later.”
+“Adiós.”
+This brief interaction marked a big turning point for us, the start of our
+reconciliation, though in a Salvadoran machismo way of bonding without
+using too many words. My return to San Francisco not only marked a major
+change in my relationship to Pop, but also in my personal aspirations: I was
+no longer content doing aid work from the remove of San Francisco.
+Hearing Salvadoran war stories from friends in San Francisco had been one
+thing, but experiencing those stories firsthand had added more adult and
+political dimensions to my sense of urgency about, and responsibility to, the
+situation. But I also knew that if I went back to El Salvador, I would
+probably have to forget the Salvadoreña whose story and example had also
+inspired this change, G.
+
+The day after I got back to San Francisco, I called G. We got together that
+same day and went for a drive around the Mission in my junky silver
+Honda. For the next several weeks, we enjoyed each other’s company. I
+gave G chocolate, poetry, and courted her in a way that clearly showed I
+wanted to be more than friends, but I stopped short from making more
+
+serious moves. I had made up my mind to return to El Salvador and work
+directly for CRIPDES. Also, G was a powerful person in the Salvadoran
+circles we ran in, and I didn’t want to mess with her or her serious work
+either (really just my twenty-something mind projecting my own fears for
+myself onto her). We were both based in San Francisco in a very small but
+tight-knit Salvadoran political community, and this made the distance
+between the personal and the political very small as well. I wasn’t sure
+things would work out between us, given my decision to leave the city.
+Finally I didn’t want to get into any relationship until I had something clear
+to commit with. I was scared of love because I felt unlovable. I wasn’t
+ready.
+All this came to a head one day when we were parked in the lot of the
+Randall Junior Museum, home to one of the least-known but most beautiful
+views of the sparkling lights of downtown San Francisco and the
+shimmering bay. In the distance, we could see the beautiful spiraling marble
+tower of the otherwise decrepit Mission High, where my brother Omar and
+I had gone to school. I pointed it out to G.
+“What a gorgeous building.”
+“Santana went to school there, too. My father knows his dad from all his
+shady dealings at Hunt’s Donuts,” I said.
+“Wow. That’s a big deal.” I had the sense G was exercising patience with
+some of my Mission pride stories and didn’t actually find them all that
+impressive. She was about three years older than I was and far more
+serious, even for her age. I chalked it up to the war, which also gave her a
+vulnerability that came through when she put down her FMLN-diplomat
+guard. Still, she could stay with a conversation and didn’t ever belittle me,
+and would even say things that made the mundane or the sad parts of my
+life sound OK.
+“Yeah, he [Santana’s dad] got mariachi to play at my party when I
+graduated from Berkeley.”
+“¡Puuuta! ¡Qué vergón!” (“Fuuuck. How cool!”)
+“Yeah,” I continued. “Santana managed to channel the different
+movements coursing through the Mission in the sixties and seventies—
+black power, brown power, sexual liberation, hippie and psychedelic
+culture, Latin American liberation struggles.”
+“The compas have loved Santana since the seventies. I do, too.”
+
+“Really? I’ve always felt like I have this sort of fire-breathing,
+psychedelic purple dragon of rage inside me against my father. Santana’s
+song ‘Mother’s Daughter’ really captures what it feels like to me.”
+I did it. I admitted it. For the first time—with anyone. The abuse I’d been
+silent about since childhood had come out at last.
+I waited for her response. Why the fuck am I diggin’ deeper into her if
+I’m getting ready to leave? Don’t play games, pendejo.
+“I can hear that in the music.” She smiled. “I know this rage you
+describe.”
+“Really?”
+“Yes. I know it as abuse. Without realizing it, our own families help
+create these monsters, putting them in our bodies,” she said in her powerful,
+soft voice. “The state helps create this monster in our families and then calls
+on it when it needs us to destroy ourselves. So in this sense, Santana is also
+revolutionary music. Many of the compañeros en la guerrilla grew up
+listening to rock, including Santana’s, for that reason.”
+I stayed quiet, breathing in the power of her words for a moment before
+asking, “OK, so how is Santana revolutionary?”
+“Being a revolutionary isn’t just about guns and protest. Before anything,
+you have to have un espíritu romántico, and Santana’s music has that
+espíritu. Lots of it.”
+Fuck Woodstock Santana, I thought, this Salvadoran Santana feels even
+more mind-blowing.
+“Makes me wanna hear some live music,” I said, sensing the perfect
+moment to broach one of her interests that bothered me: her love of opera. I
+didn’t understand how someone as cool and revolutionary as G could like
+that bourgeois, rich people’s music. “Speaking of—I’ve been wondering
+why you like opera so much.”
+“I started listening to opera whenever I was sad as a child. It made me
+feel better than going up into a tree or hiking into the mountains to cry.
+And, ohhh, that line ‘Love is a rebellious bird / That none can tame.’
+“Ahhhh!” she exclaimed with unusual abandon. “I love it.”
+“So what’s your favorite opera song?” I asked, suddenly wanting to hear
+more.
+“‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana,” she responded without hesitation.
+I’d heard her tell a friend the song was her música de combate, the music
+she went to in times of personal and political combat.
+
+“I listened to it as a child,” she continued, “but it took on another
+meaning after I stopped studying to be a nun and the war started. Whenever
+we would march in protest against the government policies and death-squad
+killings, they would often kill many protesters.” She paused, breathing
+deeply to control her fury and prevent her tears from pushing over the edge.
+“And then, to make things worse, they would play music, opera music.
+They played . . .”
+“Carmina Burana!” I interjected.
+“Yes,” she said. “The government radio played it to mock us. So it
+became the music we use to remember our martyrs, our música de combate.
+Yes, you have to avoid romanticismo, base romanticism, which is
+dangerous, but we must, by all means possible, have the espíritu romántico,
+including through opera. How else can we do such intrepid things without
+being románticos in this sense?”
+At Berkeley, professor June Jordan not only wrote unapologetically
+political poetry, but she’d also taught us the work of Claribel Alegría,
+Roque Dalton, and other Salvadoran poet warriors, who provided
+generations the spiritual sustenance needed to face the apocalyptic violence
+there. June Jordan showed us that our love of people and our political
+beliefs were inseparable. The personal was, in fact, the political—a truth G
+so beautifully embodied. After a minute or two, my mind returned from its
+lofty romantic musing.
+There waiting for me back on the ground was G and the hard truth that I
+was leaving for El Salvador soon and still hadn’t told her. As much as I
+wanted to spend more time with G, I burned to go back to El Salvador. Yes,
+experiences in Chalatenango had moved me, but also my involvement with
+G and the Salvadoran revolutionaries called out to me in operatic ways to
+take on the ongoing struggle against fascism, continuing the work of the
+poet warriors and revolutionaries I’d read at Berkeley—anti-fascists like
+Orwell, the Lincoln Brigades, Paul Robeson, Hemingway, and warrior poets
+like Muriel Rukeyser and Gioconda Belli. The opportunity to be a part of
+such a movement made me feel alive.
+“Look, G,” I began, “I think the world of you. In the little time since we
+met, you’ve become a pretty great . . . friend.”
+“Uh-huh.”
+“Yeah, you’re a great person, a person I have a lot of respect for and am
+learning a lot from.”
+
+“Yes.”
+“But I made a decision: I’m going to El Salvador and not sure when I’m
+coming back.”
+“I see. So you don’t have any idea when you’ll be back?”
+“No, I don’t.”
+She paused, then she started crying. After a couple of minutes of tears,
+the resolute G returned.
+“I won’t forget you, Tito,” she said. “Please don’t forget me.”
+Fuck. She’s not making this easy by making it so easy. Unsure what to do,
+I remained silent and simply said to myself, Adiós, G, but when I got home,
+I cried.
+
+16
+
+San Salvador
+1939
+
+Marcos Elizondo, Ramón’s boss at Muebles Alonso, one of the best
+furniture makers in the country, told him to prepare the big order he’d been
+working on. It was going to a special address: Casa Presidencial, also
+known as La Casona, the Big House of the nation.
+Seventeen-year-old Ramón was now living and working as a furniture
+maker and delivery person in San Salvador. A few years earlier, Mamá Tey
+had packed their things and moved Ramóncito and her mother, Mamá Fina,
+from Ahuachapán to live full-time with her boyfriend Chico in Mesón San
+Luís. Mesón San Luís was situated on land that had once been part of the
+stately homes of Salvadoran elites. These abandoned elite mansions began
+as temporary homes for squatters and eventually the land was parceled into
+housing for the poor. This need for housing had come about due to the
+industrialization of the country, one of the reasons for a mass migration
+from rural to urban areas. La Matanza had also played a role, as families
+fled to the city to escape the mass killings of indigenous people in western
+El Salvador.
+Mamá Tey knew that moving away from Barrio Santa Cruz in
+Ahuachapán would come at a high price for Ramón—being uprooted and
+cut off from a slower, more rural life. He also left behind many friends,
+though so many boys and young men, Alfonso Luna included, had been
+killed by the Guardia Cívica and the soldiers, themselves boys barely big
+enough to carry the Mauser metralletas they used to commit adult atrocities.
+
+Tey wanted to cast all this violence and tragedy into el olvido, and keep her
+children far away from that deep hole. But Ramón made friends throughout
+the mesón and used his wits to secure himself and several of his friends jobs
+at Muebles Alonso.
+However, leaving Ahuachapán for good didn’t solve all of Mamá Tey’s
+worries for her eldest son. Ramóncito had started drinking at only twelve
+years old. By the time he was seventeen, Ramón was constantly drowning
+himself in guaro, El Salvador’s cane moonshine, its cheapest alcoholic
+drink. Seeing Ramón come home borracho from a night of drinking,
+dancing, and puteando didn’t fit the life Tey had imagined for her eldest.
+To deliver the big order for the Casa Presidencial, scrawny Ramón
+brought Chacaz, the most muscular—and meanest—of his friends, and
+another young man from the mesón. Under Ramón’s supervision, the two
+men carried the bulky load of furniture through the doors of the immaculate
+white building. Inside the house were sparkling clean brown floors, big
+French chandeliers, and cascading curtains, like nothing the three teens had
+ever seen before. Straining under the weight of the heavy oak, the young
+men were directed by a military officer up a winding marble staircase and
+into a large, stately bedroom.
+As soon as they entered the elegant room, the three young men received a
+massive shock. There, next to a canopied mahogany bed, stood a
+commanding presence, El General.
+“Welcome, jóvenes,” El General said. This was the same man who had,
+just seven years earlier, established himself as military dictator and began
+by perpetrating the worst massacre in the history of the Americas, then
+destroying the official records documenting it.1
+“Thank you for delivering the furniture. I’ve been waiting for it.”
+“You’re welcome,” said Ramón, whose sudden nervousness had made his
+stomach as hard as the furniture they were delivering.
+“Who made these designs?”
+“Me.”
+“How old are you, hijo?”
+“Seventeen years old, señor.”
+“Don’t call me ‘señor,’” said the man in a gentle but commanding
+manner. “Call me general. I’m General Martínez, presidente de la
+republica.”
+
+“Yes, sir, General,” Ramón responded on cue, his body rising up to
+attention like he was a puppet or a military subordinate. Even Chacaz, who
+respected few people and never backed down to anyone or anything, looked
+nervous and small before Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.
+“Thank you, jóvenes. Now be on your way.”
+Ramón and Chacaz rushed back to the mesón to tell all who had ears that
+they’d just met el jefe maximo of the entire country.
+The story echoed even louder after El General gave one of his radio
+addresses to the country a few weeks later.
+“Many say that the youth of our generation is lost,” said El General in his
+solemn radio voice, “but I recently met some young men who are an
+example of what young men should be. They represent nothing less than the
+future of the country. These young men embody the virtues that will make
+our patria great.”
+“He was talking about us!” Ramón said. He was listening to the address
+from the beat-up building on Avenida Independencia that housed Muebles
+Alonso. Listening beside him were the guys Ramón had helped get jobs, his
+crew: Cara de Luna—Moon Face—the sander; El Chino Manuel, the
+varnisher; and Chacaz. They sat there proudly, not persuaded by Ramón
+about El General’s speech.
+“Yeah, he liked the furniture, Ramón,” said Cara de Luna, one of the
+smarter of the bunch, who read newspapers, “but, no jodas [fooling]. We’re
+not the ‘examples to the country’ he was talking about. He made that
+speech over a week after you guys delivered his furniture. He was probably
+talking about young military officers who are pissed off at him for changing
+the Constitution so he could keep being presidente.”
+Others agreed, but for less political reasons. They knew El General
+wasn’t talking about them. Yeah, the furniture they made was something to
+be proud of. Yeah, they worked hard for close to no colones by day. But at
+night, Ramón’s furniture crew plus eleven other guys from the mesón
+became something quite the opposite of the exemplary young men Martínez
+waxed presidential about to the nation. After work, they were La Pandilla
+de La Avenida, the Independencia Avenue Gang—fifteen boys, ages
+thirteen to seventeen, who had been organized by Ramón to rob, extort, and
+fight.
+
+Part VI
+
+17
+
+San Salvador
+2015
+
+“Hey, keep your phone nearby,” I remind Isaias. “I’m expecting an
+important call and may have to leave quickly. So don’t stray too far, OK?”
+I’m waiting on a call from Santiago, the gang leader I met at Mijango’s.
+Besides my reporting, Santiago is one of the main reasons I’ve stayed in El
+Salvador. Mijango told me he was “brilliant” and a top gang leader, one of
+the few people designated by gang leadership to speak on behalf of the two
+largest gangs, MS-13 and 18th Street. Santiago will provide an insider’s
+view of gang violence, a view that, with exceptions like the reporting of El
+Faro, is often lacking in reports on El Salvador. In the meantime, I’d
+decided to visit the forensic lab to gather material for my freelance stories.
+A heavily guarded gate in front of a sloping concrete path leads to the
+Instituto de Medicina Legal (IML), the giant—and sole—forensic lab in El
+Salvador, the place where all the country’s documented and undocumented
+dead come to be analyzed and counted before being returned to their loved
+ones—or buried in anonymous graves. The line to get in is seventy people
+deep. Many are here in search of family—sons, daughters, fathers, mothers,
+wives, husbands—lost in the limbo described by the term desaparecido, the
+disappeared.
+Trace elements haunt me as I wait. The memory of M16-bearing FMLN
+cops forcing me to erase my pictures the prior week. The jarring realization
+that this Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front is not G’s FMLN. The
+current FMLN’s cover-ups and enabling of the modern escuadrones de la
+
+muerte run in direct opposition to the FMLN of the 1980s and ’90s, when
+so many men, women, and youth died in the fight against both the
+escuadrones and the fascist military dictatorship that deployed them, along
+with big business leaders. I don’t recognize this FMLN—and don’t want to
+recognize it.
+FMLN government officials and gang leaders live in a garden of
+impunity thanks to an amnesty law originally intended to protect right-wing
+ARENA party members who had committed atrocities during the civil war.
+ARENA president Alfredo Cristiani signed the law into effect in 1993,1 five
+days after the United Nations Truth Commission produced a report
+estimating that seventy-five to eighty thousand Salvadorans had been killed
+during the war, attributing “almost eighty-five percent of cases to agents of
+the State, paramilitary groups allied to them, and the death squads.”2 Fewer
+than 5 percent of the war’s atrocities were attributed to the FMLN. This sort
+of erasure of responsibility for countless crimes against humanity is not
+unprecedented in Salvadoran history. In 1932 General Martínez had signed
+his own amnesty law, granting “unconditional amnesty to those
+functionaries, authorities, employees, agents of the state and any other
+civilian or military person that appear responsible for infractions of the
+law.”3 Forgetting begets forgetting begets ongoing mass murder.
+I’ve interviewed mara leaders as they watch news reports featuring
+legislators known to have perpetrated war crimes. The marareros tell me,
+“Shit, they got away with it. So can we.”4
+Besides the landscape covered with the individual and mass graves from
+the war, there’s no greater physical monument to the extent of El Salvador’s
+violence than the IML. One of the most important means of exploring these
+seemingly disparate parts of the expansive Salvadoran underworld that is
+killing so many kids—physically and spiritually—is to become a student of
+death. The best and brightest forensic scientists work here at the IML
+offices. It was here that Quijano and his team brought the boxes with the
+remains of case #2465, the dead teenager found during our visit to the
+Margarita grave site.
+As we wait in line, a stout woman under a red, yellow, white, and blue
+plastic umbrella is selling nuts, cans of pop, bottled water, and baconwrapped hot dogs, crackling on a mobile skillet. The smell of hot dogs
+perfumes the air. I ask the vendor if she remembers the 2010 IML workers
+strike protesting the firing of five hundred workers. Bodies literally piled up
+
+waiting to be analyzed. The smell of rotting flesh, witnesses said, reached
+far beyond the steel gates and walls of the IML.
+“Oh yeah,” she says, her round face quickly crumpling into a momentary
+grimace. “That disgusting smell. I’ll never forget that fucking smell of la
+muerte. All the bodies rotting, without any attention. Many of us
+complained about the possible health hazards before the government
+eventually acted.”
+The IML medical anthropology lab looks nothing like the glossy,
+colorful, hi-tech labs of Bones or CSI. The drab white walls are covered
+with drawings of technical specifications of skeletons. Hanging beside them
+are three framed professional drawings in colored pencil featuring
+muscular, scantily clad superheroes, all three standing or lying next to large
+mounds of skulls. A gift from a grateful comic book artist.
+An agile Saul Quijada swishes the towelette he brought out of the
+bathroom into the garbage bin like he’s Steph Curry, the superstar of my
+hometown basketball team, the Golden State Warriors. Quijada extends his
+freshly washed hand.
+Quijada is both a member of the forensic anthropology team and an
+auxiliary trainer for the renowned Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team,
+which did pioneering work uncovering mass graves from that country’s
+dirty war. Dressed in a blue polo shirt, the stocky, mustachioed Quijada
+looks more like a handsome wrestler than a scientist who’s licensed in
+traumatology, the science of injuries and what causes them. The skill in the
+anthropology lab lies in what forensic scientists call “making the bones
+speak.” Men like Quijada have this unique ability to quickly recognize the
+source of damage to tissue, skin, and bones, from various weapons—
+knives, machetes, explosives, shrapnel, high-caliber weapons, mortars,
+mines, and more. Quijada and his medical anthropology team work with the
+Argentine forensic team to identify remains of migrants who die during
+their northward odyssey to the United States.
+“What killings do you focus on?” I ask.
+“We see the whole process,” he says, “from urban and rural areas where
+killings in El Salvador force migration, to the deaths that take place during
+the migration through Mexico to the United States.” Quijada and other
+forensicists at the IML study the bones and crime scenes of the gang and
+other killings in El Salvador, which have left thousands dead and forced
+thousands more to migrate, going back as far as the unresolved mass
+
+murders during the war in the eighties. They’ve also created a team in the
+Federal District of Mexico City to use DNA from the remains of migrants
+to identify them. The IML works with forensic specialists in Arizona,
+Texas, and other locations on the migrant trail, to investigate the horrific
+desert dehydration deaths and the drownings of migrants in the Río Grande
+and other rivers crossing the migration journey. There is an increasing
+number of bodies of parents and small children being found on the US part
+of the trail.
+Together with their peers in Mexico and the US, Quijada and the IML are
+reconstructing epic migration stories so they can be told to the larger world.
+Throughout the twenty-five hundred miles of migrant trail, Quijada says,
+“there are traces of people and of armaments. Many of these armaments are
+still circulating—and so are most of the killers.” I’m reminded of my visits
+to northern Mexico, where I encountered the sort of semiautomatic machine
+gun–wielding cartel sicarios, who capture, enslave, and kill Central
+American migrants.
+We walk over to one of the tables, which bears the nearly complete
+skeleton of #1975, an eighteen-year-old male killed in San Salvador last
+July. Other skeletons in the room date back much further, to still-unresolved
+mass murders and crimes of the war in the 1980s. The head of #1975
+appears to have been severed from his shoulders. “You can see here,”
+Quijada says, pointing at the vertebrae, “where the man was hit with a
+machete.”
+Quijada’s talk of making the bones “speak” echoes thought surrounding
+the birth of forensics in China, which I encountered while researching the
+history of forensics in preparation for my trip. In 1247, Sung Tz’u, a lawyer
+charged by the rulers of the Southern Sung Dynasty with investigating
+murders in the kingdom, produced the first book on forensic science, with a
+magnificent title, The Washing Away of Wrongs.5 The title reminds me of the
+Greek concept I learned and loved at Berkeley, aletheia. In granting
+amnesty to its war criminals, El Salvador has sanctioned the forgetting of
+the atrocities committed against its people by its own government.
+Quijada’s reconstruction of memory from these bones is one of the greatest
+correctives to this forgetting of wrongs.
+Quijada glides over to another table to examine a skeleton. This one’s
+much browner than the others, a sign it is older and in a more advanced
+state of decomposition. The tag on the body says El Mozote, two words that
+
+carry colossal weight in El Salvador. El Mozote, a town in Morazán
+Province, is the site of the worst single massacre in modern Latin American
+history (as opposed to the multiple massacre sites and duration of La
+Matanza of 1932). The attack on El Mozote came at the order of Colonel
+Domingo Monterrosa, leader of the elite US-trained Atlacatl military rapidresponse unit. His US advisers allegedly accompanied Monterrosa as he
+ordered an attack against El Mozote.6 According to award-winning
+journalist and UC Berkeley professor Mark Danner, “A number of highly
+placed Salvadorans, including one prominent politician of the time who had
+many friends among senior officers, claim that two American advisers were
+actually observing the [El Mozote] operation from the base camp at
+Osicala. On its face, the charge is not entirely implausible—American
+advisers had been known to violate the prohibition against accompanying
+their charges into the field—but it is impossible to confirm.”7
+Monterrosa and his troops mistook nearly one thousand campesinos,
+evangelical community members, for FMLN guerrilla–sympathizing
+civilians and slaughtered them in December 1981,8 shortly after the
+massacre of six hundred at El Sumpul River in Chalatenango. Decades after
+the El Mozote massacre, investigations by forensic specialists have revealed
+that many of the victims were women and elderly people. Of those killed,
+553 were minors, 477 of whom were under twelve. The majority of the
+children were six years old or younger.9 Of the twelve culpable officers
+cited in the El Mozote massacre section of the UN Truth Commission
+report, ten, including Monterrosa, were graduates of the School of the
+Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.
+“You can see how deteriorated the bones are in this one,” Quijada says,
+pointing at the brown skeleton, which is missing ribs, an arm, a leg, and
+other bones. He points at the skull, which is also missing pieces.
+“How did the bones get like this?”
+“We’re rebuilding the cranium piece by piece because it was in pieces,
+chopped up with a machete. The pieces were like a jigsaw puzzle.”
+El Mozote has become the biggest test of whether President Cristiani’s
+1993 amnesty grant will continue to block prosecution of any crimes
+against humanity in El Salvador. If and when the current calls for
+accountability by human rights, legal, and nongovernmental organizations
+around the world are heeded, any possibility for justice requires that the
+
+science be exacting, able to tell the story of the incident with as much
+precision as possible.
+“All of it,” Quijada says, his face somber, “the ages of the victims, the
+volume of the people massacred, the bones of babies, still impacts me
+twenty-two years after we started working on it. Anyone who says they can
+forget this is either inhuman or lying.”
+We walk over to another skeleton. This one looks newer. Other skeletons
+rest next to it, along with boxes of bones.
+“Who’s that?”
+“Individuals killed more recently. Some of them were twelve-year-olds.
+We’re also seeing more violence against women,” he says. The gang
+victims and their killers filling El Salvador’s mass graves are, in fact,
+getting younger. “Around 2000, the average age of victims was thirty to
+thirty-five, and then twenty to thirty,” says Quijada. “From 2010 to present,
+we started seeing ages decrease, from seventeen-year-olds to fifteen-yearolds.”
+I focus on my breath to try to regain composure and think back to my
+readings about forensics and the Locard principle. Conceptualized by
+Edmond Locard, the son of a French anarchist poet and founder of the Lyon
+Police Technical Laboratory, one of the first Western forensic labs, in 1910,
+the Locard principle is premised on the idea that all contact leaves a trace,
+and not just the contact involved in the criminal act, on its location. It says
+that every crime scene leaves material, and therefore, measurable evidence
+—dirt, DNA, gunpowder, blood—on any who interact with it. By the same
+token, the principle also posits that each of us leaves unique traces of
+ourselves—hair, DNA, spit, shoe imprints—at the crime scene in return. I
+meditate on how, under the Locard principle, the grave sites I’ve visited
+both in wartime El Salvador and on this trip, the mass graves dug by cartels
+in Mexico, and those dug by untrained justices of the peace in Texas have
+all left a part of themselves in me and I in them.
+Quijada draws his head closer to the reconstructed skull from El Mozote,
+as if to speak to it. A clean line runs from the skull’s forehead to the back of
+the head, marking the spot where the skull was cleaved. It’s hard not to
+contrast Quijada’s living head with the skull in front of it.
+Quijada points at other marks on the skull. “They were caused by armas
+blancas,” he says, “machetes, hatchets, or piochas [pickaxes], instruments
+
+used for agricultural work. This reflects a pattern we also see among gangs
+today. It is, in part, because of our cultural origins.”
+Quijada leads me through a door next to the framed forensic superhero
+drawings. We’re entering the “bone room,” a large, temperature-controlled
+room, its walls covered in rows of shelves. A couple of shelves are lined
+with stacks of skulls: white skulls, browner skulls, skulls with bullet-size
+holes, skulls with missing parts, skulls with machete and piocha marks.
+Dozens of other shelves in the large room are stacked with boxes. Each of
+the boxes is stamped with the logo of the Salvadoran Supreme Court. Inside
+are the boiled, scraped, and cleaned remains of some of the many thousands
+of victims found in graves and at crime scenes throughout the country—and
+beyond.
+The remains of El Mozote victims killed in 1981 lie in boxes across the
+aisle from the boxes of bones with the remains of gang victims found in
+July 2015. Next to them are the bones of migrant men, women, and children
+who have died in the deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and increasingly Texas—
+those left behind and then returned from the great journey to El Norte.
+Hundreds of thousands of bones lie waiting to speak.
+“One of the most destructive things a person can experience,” says
+Quijada, standing amid the shelves of skulls, “is luto prolongado, prolonged
+mourning, not knowing where your family is for years. People spend five to
+seven years—in many cases thirty years—without knowing where their
+family is.
+“Mothers come here every day asking questions: ‘What are they doing to
+my son? Where did they leave him? Is he eating?’
+“Not knowing allows them to maintain a certain hope that their children
+are still alive, but at the same time they are tortured, permanently
+wondering where they are.”
+I ask him if he’s read Roque Dalton’s poem about Salvadorans being
+“half dead,” a rhetorical question, since the poem is considered a national
+anthem. He responds with a story.
+“There was a woman I first met in 2009,” he says. “At first, she would
+come almost every week, asking ‘Do you have any news of my son?’ After
+a couple of years, in 2011, she started coming monthly, always asking the
+same question, ‘Do you have any news of my son?’ Then, for some reason,
+she started coming again almost weekly and then back to monthly until
+August 2012.
+
+“In 2013, we were conducting an exhumation in a dangerous part of
+Lourdes, and who do you think was there? The lady. She asked the police if
+she could talk to me about whether that grave had her son in it. There are
+thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters,
+husbands and wives, carrying the cross that woman has.
+“Our half-dead condition as Salvadorans,” he continues, “comes because
+of our open wounds, wounds that keep us in luto prolongado. This situation
+causes us to lose our identity, keeping us fragmented. We’re losing our
+family nucleus and this contributes to the violence, keeps boys without
+fathers or mothers, who are forced to leave to other countries, or kids stay
+with their grandparents who can’t completely care for them.
+“In addition to supporting justice,” Quijada says, “our job is to
+reconstruct.”
+I’m also wondering where the boxes with the bones from 1932 are.
+I go to see Dr. Miguel Fortin, the head of the IML. Fortin oversees the
+budget, personnel, and deployment of resources for the agency. As much as
+anyone, he can enlighten me as to how much El Salvador is willing to
+officially unforget—how many resources they’re willing to deploy to
+reconstruct memory long denied. He’s busy and has little time to talk. I
+make brief small talk before I ask him about the state of the bones from La
+Matanza.
+“There’s no study, no forensic research of what happened in ’32,” he
+replies.
+“Why not?”
+“El Salvador is an amnesiac country, historically speaking,” he says.
+“Neither ARENA nor the FMLN wants to really look at what happened in
+1932. The political will is not there, and until it is, we will continue like
+zombies without any history to guide us.”
+A 2007 poll conducted by the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica
+confirmed Fortin’s amnesiac theory of Salvadoran identity: over 75 percent
+of Salvadorans polled said they had no knowledge of La Matanza.10 Both
+the amnesty law and the erasure of almost all records of La Matanza have
+institutionalized this oblivion.
+“Nineteen thirty-two is totally related with what’s happening today,”
+Fortin adds. “Pretending to explain what’s happening with violence in El
+Salvador and the migrant children today es una torpeza muy grande [is a a
+great blunder].”
+
+I leave the IML clear about one thing: putting together the fragments of
+Salvadoran death and its effects will require not just political will, but the
+will of the people to sew them back together, politically and personally.
+
+A Náhuat Story of the Underworld
+Izalco, El Salvador
+
+This is the story of a young Náhuat man who embarks on a journey to the
+underworld.1
+
+The story begins with the creation of the Izalco volcano, the center of the
+Náhuat civilization in the region. A large, leafy tree catches fire, and from
+that fire a volcanic mountain is born. Locals wonder whether the volcano
+has a passageway into it.
+The young man in the story feels called to journey into the underworld
+after an elder, the Man of the Mountain, tells him, pointing at a nearby
+forest, “Go through here to get on the path. There a man will meet you. You
+will ask him, ‘Where are you coming from?’ And he will say, ‘From
+Izalco.’ And he will ask you if you have a letter, and you will say, ‘I have it
+here.’”
+Beneath his human exterior, the Man of the Underworld is a serpent, a
+creature able to navigate the hotter recesses of the underworld where human
+and dead alike toil, as well as the aquatic wonderworld further below. The
+Man of the Underworld tells his young visitor to close his eyes. Closing his
+eyes grants the young man access to the complex realms of the Great
+Below.
+When the young man opens his eyes again, he sees an underworld, where
+the dead and the living who have been brought by the dead to work with
+and for them toil away under conditions of forced labor. This labor is in the
+
+service of some of the dead, who are said to live in conditions the living
+would envy.
+The most difficult work of the underworld is not unlike that of the world
+above: chopping the wood of the great Tree Within—the tree connecting the
+lower and upper worlds—and hauling the wood to load on a mule who
+takes this “blood” to feed the volcano whose fire energizes the cacao and
+other foods the Náhuats depend on. Though insufferable, this work is
+crucial to maintaining the equilibrium of the world, essential to living and
+dead alike.
+The young man sees the bones and body parts of dismembered people
+who inhabit the underworld. The bones, he notices, exude their own lifegiving force. Fragments of humans also serve as a source of latent energy
+that literally feeds the living and the dead, some of whom eat bone and
+flesh. Even the grimmest, deadest parts of the underworld are not entirely
+dead and provide sustenance to the world above.
+After spending time in the higher reaches of the underworld, the young
+man is transported by an underworld snake to another, lower, aquatic
+underworld. This underworld is a Náhuat utopia, a place inhabited by many
+elders, whose daily needs are all met.
+The young man then enters the serpent and is spit back up to the upper
+world. On his way home, he encounters the same old man who showed him
+how to get to the underworld. This time the old man tells the young man
+that he will receive great rewards if he shares the story of what he saw
+below.
+After his return, the young man’s words take on a more magical meaning,
+a meaning that breaks with existing logic and norms, as the young man
+proceeds to share his cosmic story. . . .*
+
+18
+
+Guarjila–Corral de Piedra, Chalatenango
+1990
+
+“What religion do you belong to, Roberto?” asked Berta, the youngest of
+the four women I shared the CRIPDES fundraising office with. We were
+driving along the three miles of rocky roads leading from Guarjila to Corral
+de Piedra on our way to document an incident. After being forced by the
+Salvadoran military and escuadrones de la muerte to flee to Honduras over
+eight years earlier, the five hundred or so campesinos living in Corral de
+Piedra settled in the region just months earlier, in October 1989.
+“It’s complicated,” I responded, wanting to talk about something else.
+“Do you have a girlfriend?”
+“That’s complicated, too,” I responded, somewhat testily, “but no, I
+don’t.” I missed G. I missed being recognized and accepted for me, the
+confused, fragmented, fucked-up Salvadoran-Mission dude I felt like.
+Visiting small Chalatenango towns like Guarjila and Corral de Piedra,
+perched high in the mountains, came with risks and rewards. The rocky
+mountains were a stunning sight; their isolation, a curse. Days before,
+children and elderly residents in the towns of Guarjila, Las Vueltas, and Los
+Ranchos had been wounded by strafing from US-made helicopters manned
+by the Salvadoran military. Strafing from the copters and Cessna A-37
+Dragonfly jets was a constant of life here, as was the bombing in the
+mountains of this isolated place, whose perpetually traumatized people the
+global media had largely forgotten.
+
+“You say things are ‘complicated’ for you, Roberto,” Berta said. “Your
+family is from El Salvador. So, what do you call yourself, since you were
+born in the United States?”
+“American. That I can tell you ’cause my passport says I am,” I said with
+the assurance of the guy in a popular H&R Block commercial.
+“Have you forgotten you’re Salvadoran too?”
+“No. But I’m here trying to forget things,” I said, referencing G.
+Since before the Sumpul massacre in 1980, the Salvadoran military and
+death squads had run “counterinsurgency” programs that starved, shot up,
+and bombed entire communities they perceived as supporting the FMLN.
+Our mission at CRIPDES was to break blockades stopping food, medical,
+and other supplies from getting through to these communities. We worked
+alongside internacionalistas who’d been moved to physically aid these
+communities after hearing the stories of refugees in the US. A special
+weapon in breaking the blockades was caravans of buses driven from San
+Salvador to Chalatenango, bringing supplies, communications, and political
+support to internally displaced refugees from Usulután, Mom’s home state
+of San Vicente, La Libertad, and especially Chalatenango as they
+repatriated.
+The fundraising office Berta and I worked in focused on raising support
+from sister cities—hundreds of municipalities in the US, Latin America,
+and Europe committed to providing material and political aid to Salvadoran
+towns. Berta and I were on a fact-finding mission to Corral de Piedra,
+where there had been a recent attack by the Salvadoran military. The fortyfive-minute drive on muddy, rocky roads quickly became a guided tour
+through the ravages of war: the bombed-out adobe homes of long-dead
+villages, walls pocked with bullet holes even in those that still housed the
+living, entire towns abandoned, barefoot children stopping their ladrón
+librado or escondelero games at the sound of a vehicle or, especially, the
+helicopters and jets above. Our work on the second floor of CRIPDES’s
+main office, near the US embassy in San Salvador, included helping these
+communities by documenting stories of struggle and survival from these
+sorts of places and weaving them into funding proposals requesting
+international support.
+As we approached Corral de Piedra, we saw the outlines of brick-andadobe houses and, behind them, the mountains where the war raged more
+regularly.
+
+“Look!” Berta said. “Some of the houses have huge holes in them.”
+We drove toward one of the crumbling houses with a pyramid-shaped
+hole in it the size of a small truck. Inside the house were the remains of a
+small home where sixteen people—five adults and eleven children—had
+sought cover from bombing during an attack a few weeks before. Now
+straw and plastic red and blue bowls lay scattered on the floor, alongside
+pieces of a tin roof; beside that, a table that had been smashed by falling
+bricks. We got out of the car and walked toward the house. María, a woman
+who lived in an adobe rancho just outside the town, was waiting outside for
+us with her husband, an older man who said nada except, “Buenas.” Also
+accompanying them was her newborn son and her twelve-year-old, who
+was on crutches. His leg was missing from the thigh down.
+María broke a slight and nervous smile as she greeted us, but her face
+held a deep sorrow that she could not hide as she invited us into her former
+home. Inside the brick house were the rooms where four families, including
+lots of barefoot children, often slept on the floor. Others crowded into the
+main room that served as a combination bedroom, dining room, and living
+room. A large unvarnished wood table still sat in the center of the room. As
+we walked in, the first thing I noticed was that parts of the roof were gone,
+as was the wall in the back of the main room. The missing wall allowed us
+to see into their makeshift yard. Four little crosses—green, red, blue, and
+yellow—were stuck into the ground, facing the remaining piece of adobe
+wall. Machine-gun fire kept up a steady rat-tat-tat in the not-so-distant
+mountains.
+“We were hiding in the house,” said María, “when we heard the boom! of
+the rocket that hit the wall, where my other children were playing.” She
+paused to inhale. Her eyelids trembled. “The rocket landed directly on my
+smallest child,” she said. The child was about a year and a half. Neighbors
+later said that all that remained of the smallest child was her skin, grafted
+onto the adobe. All that remained of another child, an eleven-year-old, were
+a leg attached to a small rib by remaining skin and pieces of flesh and hair
+spread out on floor.
+“One of my other children was playing nearby and was also killed.
+Franciscito lost his leg,” she added. “I lost everything.”
+News stories and reports by the Human Rights Watch confirmed that the
+homes and residents of Corral de Piedra had been hit by rockets fired from
+a Salvadoran Air Force helicopter.1 Five people were killed, eleven
+
+wounded. Four of the five killed were children under the age of ten; eleven
+of the wounded were children between four months and twelve years of
+age.
+Our interview with María, her husband, and a couple of other witnesses
+complete, Berta signaled for us to leave. Before departing, I pretended to
+need to gather more information from the area near the small crosses; I
+actually went to bawl. Looking at the crosses placed near the bombed-out
+adobe wall, thinking about the children—living as well as dead—and the
+falling bombs dropped on them, my jaw trembled in fury and tears streamed
+from my eyes. I’d visited similar sites, but none with so many child
+casualties. At that moment, I made a commitment to fight more furiously,
+and not just against the government of El Salvador. My new fight was also
+against the government that, since just after El General and La Matanza, put
+El Salvador on the path to becoming one of the longest-standing military
+dictatorships in the Americas.2 The same government that had trained,
+armed, and politically defended the Salvadoran dictatorship through more
+than nine years of barbarity and oblivion: my own government, the one that
+had issued my passport. Any semblance of the chess-playing child who had
+ardently defended America from critics, like my cousin Adilio’s university
+friends, died in that moment. I couldn’t fathom the fact that my tax dollars
+as a US citizen were used to perpetrate such abominations against children.
+I simply couldn’t.
+Growing in me for some time had been the realization that being half
+dead was not limited solely to being Salvadoran. Since childhood, I’d
+assumed that my American identity protected me from the chaos and pain I
+associated, in my ignorance, only with being Salvadoran. As a result, the
+awkward, sometimes awful sense of what it meant to call myself American
+intensified to the point of bursting the bubble of illusion to give me an
+insight: that far from protecting me from being half dead, being American
+actually also had a numbing, painful zombie-like quality about it, because
+being American meant I belonged to the country that has overtly and
+covertly supported the governments, militaries, and death squads most
+responsible for our half death.
+Lyrics from a nueva canción G had gathered the storm in me. The song,
+“Días y flores,” by Silvio Rodríguez, rang loudly in my head. It talked
+about the rage growing from what began as a bucolic love scene in the
+forest. The idyllic acoustic guitar part ended as the singer began listing the
+
+different kinds of anger he felt after an unnamed incident. The first line
+spoke of the “imperio asesino de niños,” the “child-killing empire.” The
+song’s denunciation of the United States of America, the empire that took
+the name of the continent as its own, demanded a response, as did the
+tragedy María and her family shared with me. The second line of the song
+provided an answer: “La rabia es mi vocación.” Rage is my vocation.
+Rage had been and continued to be my vocation, but at that moment, its
+target underwent a major shift. It was no longer my family, El Salvador, my
+padre—or myself. The bombs and the helicopter that dropped them were
+made in America, the patria of my birth. America deserved my rage, and so
+I arrived at a difficult but necessary conclusion: I would stop using the word
+American to describe myself—or anyone else. I would use the word only in
+quotations or with an accented e to refer to the continent of América.
+Fuck the America without the accent.
+Shortly after, we quickly said good-bye and left. I was returning to
+Guarjila a new man. For a moment, the desire to speak with G about what
+I’d been going through took hold of my chest and stomach. I’d started
+learning that, for Salvadoreños, our great capacity for love was inextricably
+intertwined with our experience of great tragedy.
+
+Days after our return from Corral de Piedra, I couldn’t get the image of
+María’s children out of my mind, especially Franciscito and the newborn. I
+needed to be in the company of others, so I accepted an invitation from the
+family I was staying with to join them for Sunday Mass.
+I arrived at the church gathering in the center of the hamlet. At the front
+of the open-air church’s makeshift altar stood Jon Cortina, a tall lanky
+Spanish priest. His gaunt, Don Quixote look beneath his glasses and big
+bushy eyebrows fit my sense of what a volunteer solidario in a war zone
+should look like. Cortina also possessed a mix of intelligence, bravery, and
+the burning conviction that Salvadorans call valeverguista. Cortina’s
+“preferential option for the poor”—the liberation-theology call to join the
+poorest in their struggles—had led him to minister to them here in one of
+the major sites of conflict during the war. His interpretation of aletheia—
+truth—in the Bible was the polar opposite of the interpretation foisted on
+me by the right-wing evangelical church I’d left behind in San Francisco.
+Cortina’s aletheia wedded the pursuit of the truth to unforgetting.
+
+“Welcome, brothers and sisters! Welcome!” intoned Cortina, who quickly
+found himself hugged by the CRIPDES leaders and a sea of campesinos.
+“As painful as remembering can be, we cannot forget what we have seen
+with our eyes, heard with our ears, and felt in our hearts!” Next to Cortina
+were a collection of lay ministers and musicians in cowboy and baseball
+hats, playing religious songs I was trying to ignore. The recovering rightwing evangelical in me didn’t stomach religious music easily.
+People either stood or sat on the ground as the Mass began and Cortina
+began preaching. His message: “They targeted our children!” The crowd’s
+silence gave way to sniffles and light shrieks of anguish. I joined in this
+ritual of crying, transported beyond the limits of my body.
+After a brief sermon, Cortina walked back to the center to speak. The
+entire congregation stood as one of the laity, a man in a sombrero, started
+calling out the names of those killed in Corral de Piedra, following each
+with the exclamation “Presente!”
+Isabel Estela López. Presente!
+Anabel Beatriz López. Presente!
+Dolores Serrano. Presente!
+Blanca Lidia Guardado. Presente!
+
+The crowd was fired up as the musicians started playing “Sombrero
+azul,” a song written after the Sumpul massacre for the Salvadoran people
+by the renowned Venezuelan poet-warrior-musician Ali Primera. The song
+engaged the audience by having them raise their left fists and yell, “Dále!”
+(Hit it!)
+The open-air ritual and the song with its references to the Sumpul, the
+way it raised up Salvadoran dignity, its call and response, its combative
+spirit—all left the tuning fork of my being vibrating for days and weeks
+after. It reminded me what it was to have faith, to be part of a church and of
+a community comprised of the poorest, longest-suffering, and yet most
+courageous and combative people I’d ever met: my own Salvadoran people.
+I joined the army of the half dead, proudly singing “Sombrero azul,”
+screaming at the top of my lungs, “Dále Salvadoreño!” I was a born-again
+congregant reborn.
+The mix of grief and passion combined with another powerful current
+flowing in me: the desire to hear G—to speak with her, kiss her, unite with
+
+her. But it didn’t seem like it was to be, because I couldn’t see returning to
+San Francisco or the United States as an option in my immediate future.
+Instead, dead to my “American” self, I began the journey to find an
+identity that would accommodate what had become my new highest ideal:
+revolución en América.
+
+19
+
+San Salvador, El Salvador
+1939
+
+Ramón loved the sound of Mamá Tey’s sewing machine, with its treadle of
+latticed wrought iron, each revolución of its wheel a rhythmic reminder of
+life going on despite its challenges. He loved the way his mother used the
+machine to resurrect scraps of cloth into outfits that gave new life to the
+mesón residents. Since before they moved to San Salvador, the fabrics—
+denim, silk, cotton, and more—had formed piles of rainbows coloring the
+otherwise gray lamina shack Ramón had shared with Mamá Tey, Chico,
+Mamá Fina, and his two younger siblings. Sewing was one of the few
+avenues for employment and social mobility available to Salvadoran
+women. In fact, in 1930, Prudencia Ayala, a single mother, writer, and
+seamstress, had used her Singer to launch the candidacy that made her the
+first female candidate for president in all of Latina America.1 (Because
+women still lacked the right to vote, her candidacy was challenged in court
+and nullified.)
+After fleeing the conflict and extreme poverty of western El Salvador,
+Tey and her family moved to the capital, where they shared Mesón San Luís
+with twenty-three other families, all squeezed into shacks that each family
+rented for fifteen colones per month. Tey’s shack consisted of two small
+rooms with petates (mats) spread on the dirt floor for beds.
+Tey worried that living in the big city might further fragment and distort
+her kids’ sense of themselves, especially that of her seventeen-year-old,
+Ramón. His using the earnings from his job to buy fifteen-centavo shots of
+
+guaro from the mesón bar concerned her. So did other habits that already
+showed he was forming an identity that was not healthy or safe. She
+monitored his life carefully and struggled to contain the growing spiral.
+Tey sustained her family by making clothes for residents, including Doña
+Teresa. Doña Teresa and her husband, Joaquín Zapata, undertook a daily
+ritual that never failed to entertain Ramón. Every morning Doña Teresa
+would spread rose petals along the cracked concrete path to the mesón’s
+communal showers. Zapata would then march out of his shack like the
+Roman emperor Caracalla parading toward the baths. Upon arrival,
+Emperor Zapata would declare to Ramón and any of the other “prole”
+onlookers: “I need the perfume of the flowers to sanitize this area—from all
+of you.” Ramón and some of the other subjects responded enthusiastically,
+showering him with pebbles, empty cans, and laughter. With all his
+eccentricities, Zapata embodied the drive of meson dwellers to distinguish
+themselves as individuals within the anonymous mass of uprooted humanity
+residing there.
+The rise of the mesón saw a parallel growth of urban prostitution. Ramón
+and many of the other young men from the Pandilla de la Avenida had their
+first sexual experiences with a prostitute, and many were sons of prostitutes.
+As a result of the increase in the number of prostitutes in the mesones, the
+young pandilleros were part of the urban generation popularizing the word
+puta as an integral part of the colloquial Salvadoran vocabulary, turning the
+term into one of the primary labels hiding the humanity of thousands of
+women, women like Anita Villeda.
+“We know where you were the other night, Raúl!” Ramón cried out.
+Raúl was one of the pandilleros. He’d come out of his shack with his
+arms extended from his shoulder blades. His fellow pandilleros noticed the
+odd way he was holding his arms. They also noticed he was avoiding them.
+Sitting with Chacaz and others in the public area, Ramón started laughing.
+The other pandilleros looked on as Ramón started singing a song about
+swallows, a song made popular throughout the world by legendary
+Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel, “Golondrinas”:
+Golondrinas de un solo Verano
+(Swallows of only a single summer.)
+Con ansias constantes de cielos lejanos.
+(With a constant desire for distant skies.)
+
+“Don’t lie. You were with Anita Villeda,” another pandillero exclaimed.
+Suddenly, all the young pandilleros started laughing.
+Anita, a friend of Mamá Tey’s, wasn’t a puta de lista, one of the more
+than two thousand prostitutes who were registered with the government.
+The putas de lista were subjected to regular checkups on the orders of El
+General, who used his alleged concern about “hygiene” in conjunction with
+more openly repressive measures—such as jailing prostitutes and giving
+them especially harsh and violent penalties for stealing and other crimes—
+all taken under cover of “law and order” and a concern for “cleaning up”
+society.Anita was a puta de cinco pesos, a five-peso prostitute, and was
+afflicted with lymphogranuloma venereum, a venereal disease with
+symptoms that include enormously enlarged groin and underarm lymph
+nodes, forcing the afflicted to walk around with their arms spread wide like
+the swallow described in the Gardel hit.
+Like Ramón, Anita Villeda also loved Tey’s ability to make scraps of
+fabric come to life. As one of the poorer women working in one of the most
+marginal lines of work in one of the poorest parts of El Salvador—a country
+in the throes of the hemisphere’s worst of the Great Depression—Anita
+appreciated the storied, toothless, and funny seamstress’s finas atenciones,
+the delicate warmth with which Tey listened to, advised, and cared for her.
+Anita and other prostitutes bore the brunt of daily hardship in El Salvador
+in the 1930s: malaria, infectious parasites, and other, sometimes mortal,
+afflictions. The bodies and faces of some of the putas also had bruises and
+scars from injuries inflicted by the police, military, or the mesón men who
+retained their services. Outside the mesón, like Eve with her apple, Anita
+and the other prostitutes were blamed as the source of the “immoral vices of
+the uncultured classes” and were denounced in the pulpits, newspapers, and
+salons of San Salvador.2
+On top of everything else, Anita Villeda bore an extra liability—dark
+skin, and with it the burden of being indigenous at a time when it was
+mortally dangerous. Anita had migrated from Nahuizalco to San Salvador,
+where she had stopped speaking Náhuatl and exchanged her traditional
+indigenous clothing for less dangerous clothes in post-Matanza El Salvador.
+“Come, come here, girl,” Tey called to Anita one day, like a queen
+calling her subjects to court. “Let me look at you. What do you want?”
+“I’d like a beautiful dress, one that will make me look like a princess.”
+
+“OK. Let’s have a look at what miracles you want me to perform,” Tey
+joked.
+Tey possessed a preternatural mathematical ability to determine the
+measurements of her clients on sight, as she did with Anita now. Then Tey
+went to her machine and, pushing the pedal slowly, began her work.
+Tey had learned to sew as a girl. Throughout the boom and bust of the
+early twentieth century, Tey slowed the time of the fast-paced city with her
+most cherished possession: her Singer sewing machine. The pin attached to
+the pedal pushed and pulled the treadle wheel, which squeaked every few
+revolutions, the squeaks a reminder of her own revoluciones.
+Tey had a way with people. Her manner and work gave her a deep
+understanding of the lives of the prostitutes and others of the working poor
+—the many abuses they suffered, the daily workings of their kids and
+family relations, and their attitudes toward their bodies. Tey used this
+information to tailor her creations to those who visited her shop.
+“I got the golondrina from some asshole,” Anita told Tey, “and then I
+passed it on to Raúl. Now Ramón and the other guys are making fun of us.”
+Pushing the pedal as if in deep meditation, Tey responded, “You might
+want to find another way to make money, Anitilla.”
+“But what would I do? This is what I know.”
+Tey again took her time before responding, “You can work for me.”
+“What?”
+“Yes. I will teach you how to sew, and you can help me.”
+Anita stood in shock. She paused for a moment and then looked at Tey’s
+smile with two missing front teeth and agreed.
+“Are you sure?” she asked Tey.
+“Yes! I’ve taught lots of ladies here. Let’s do it.”
+Several other women would join Anita in working for Tey over the years.
+In addition to teaching putas her trade and having the women work for her,
+Tey also used her mathematical skills to save up some money, and was
+eventually able to lend money at flexible interest rates. Like Anita, many of
+her clients went home not just with a new dress, but with something more
+valuable: a different story, a different mythology about themselves than
+those contained in terms like india, puta, hijueputa, and pandillero. In her
+time with Tey at her Singer, Anita once again became the young country
+girl who’d played in the redolent almond groves, the little girl who dreamed
+
+of being a Pipil princesa, who had been forgotten behind the puta label and
+all that “civilized” society heaped upon her kind.
+Unfortunately, Tey’s magical threads could not release her son Ramón
+from the silence and anger welling up in him like a dormant volcán that
+would soon explode.
+
+Tey’s concerns for her eldest grew in proportion to Ramón’s own sumbas
+(binges), which had the seventeen-year-old drinking two, three, four times a
+week with the other pandilleros. The days Ramón came home disheveled
+and drunk were the easier days, compared to those when he came home
+bloodied or didn’t come home at all. She stopped confronting him with her
+concerns because she wanted to avoid the arguments that Ramón’s growing
+anger guaranteed.
+Tey was especially concerned about her once talkative son’s silence at
+home, and his drunken nighttime outings that seemed like an attempt to
+ignore or forget whatever lay behind his silence. Tey knew it had to do with
+the life they left behind in Ahuachapán, a life she herself wanted to forget.
+And so it remained, buried in silence within her and in her eldest. The
+silences were broken only by conflict.
+One night, watching Ramón stumble into the house reeking of guaro, Tey
+reached her limit, temporarily losing her legendary ability to slow time and
+calculate.
+“Where are you coming from?” Tey asked. “You’re drunk, probably out
+with those young assholes, doing no good.”
+“Leave me alone,” Ramón said.
+“I’ve heard you’re out stealing, robbing, and puteando all the time after
+work and I’ve had enough.”
+“Mind your own business, Mamá.”
+“Mind my own business?”
+“Yes, mind your own business.”
+“Shit, the balls of this little son of a bitch. My business has been and
+remains making sure you, your brother, and sister grow up to be decent,
+productive people. My business. Shit, that’s all I need.”
+“To hell with that, Mamá. I don’t believe in decent people. You work
+with putas, I worked with the putas, we live surrounded by putas. I see their
+clients and I know what ‘decent people’ do in their offices and nice homes
+—and with the putas. So keep it to yourself.”
+
+“Don’t talk to me like that, malcriado [spoiled brat].”
+“I’ll talk as I please. I’ll talk about things you won’t talk about, like how
+I was fathered by a man you let make me ilegítimo.”
+Ramón had done the least acceptable thing he could, short of hitting his
+mother: breaking the silencio around this forbidden subject.
+“Hijuesesentamilputas! I’ll show you to respect your mother!”
+Tey stopped pedaling at the Singer, grabbed one of her clothes hangers,
+rushed up to Ramón, and started beating him.
+“I’m going to show you how to beat your kids,” she said while hitting
+him.
+“Ouch! Owwww! You broke my fucking finger. Look!”
+Tey stopped and saw her firstborn’s finger twisted out of shape. She
+hadn’t meant to take things so far, and already regretted it. Ramón ran out
+of the house to find friends and keep drinking. Tey calmed herself by going
+back to her Singer to think on what had happened and calculate how to keep
+her family from fragmenting further, as so many others in the mesón had.
+For his part, Ramón got drunk with his friends in the pandilla, recovering
+the next day to think about whether he wanted to keep living with his
+mother in the mesón.
+The answer to both of their problems came in the form of another
+prostitute, Carmen Regalado. Like Anita Villeda, Carmen had started
+learning the sewing trade as a way out of the life of prostitution. Carmen
+had a son, José, a fourteen-year-old, and shared Tey’s concerns about
+raising a boy in the mesón.
+“I hear you, Tey,” Carmen told her. “José’s already starting to smoke.
+He’s getting rebellious. He’s at that age where he doesn’t want anything
+except money from me. Makes me pull my hair out every day.”
+“Ramón is involved with a group of kids I don’t like.”
+“Yeah, one of those kids is José!”
+Tey walked her through one of the more advanced techniques: creating a
+decorative braid and sewing it onto blouses and dresses.
+“You know, Tey,” Carmen continued, “I don’t know how much longer
+I’m gonna live here. The situation—the shit poverty, the violence, and the
+abuse here are too much. I think I might take José and leave the country.”
+“Where would you go?”
+“California.”
+“California?”
+
+“Yes. I have a cousin who went to San Francisco and she sends letters
+telling us how great it is.”
+Carmen Regalado’s inkling toward San Francisco followed a historical
+path laid first during the Gold Rush in northern California. The first male
+Salvadorans who started going to San Francisco during the first gold rush
+sailed on ships from Valparaiso, Chile, that stopped in the port of Acajutla.
+The men posed as Peruvian and Chilean miners already on board the ships.
+Some of the Salvadoran women also decided to seek new lives in the north,
+boarding (and sometimes stowing away) on the ships traveling to
+California,3 where more than a few became prostitutes who worked the
+docks along the Barbary Coast. Later, in the late nineteenth and early
+twentieth centuries, ships started sailing from El Salvador to California
+bearing El Salvador’s own gold rush: coffee, financed by Hills Bros.,
+Folgers, and other American coffee companies headquartered in the City by
+the Bay.
+The wheel of Tey’s Singer sped up.
+Ramón had his own plans. He’d heard about all the people finding a new
+life in California, but he’d also heard stories of what in the late thirties was
+called “the promised land” for Salvadoreños: Mexico.
+Once he and Tey had made up, as they always did, Ramón let her know
+about his plans to go to Mexico. He thought going to Mexico would also be
+a good way to help the family. Tey understood his logic and felt relieved
+that her son was going to make his way in the world and get away from all
+the lacra (parasites) in the mesón, but also worried that she wouldn’t be
+around to watch over him. She feared that the deadly mix of alcoholism,
+anger, and violence that stemmed from the silence afflicting Ramón would
+lead him back into the life of a pandillero.
+
+Part VII
+
+20
+
+San Salvador
+2015
+
+A thin pandillero kid in a loose white T-shirt stops Isaias and me as we
+walk up to the neighborhood to meet Santiago. The houses have cracked,
+colorful pastel walls. They’re built alongside champas (shacks) with
+browning walls of lámina (sheet metal). The streets are cracked, unpaved,
+and dusty, and parts of the neighborhood are overrun with weeds. The
+electricity and water only sometimes work. Elders here say this marginal
+community northwest of central San Salvador has the feel of the mesones.
+“Esperen,” the kid says. Wait. His pimples make me think he’s about
+thirteen. “Para donde van?” (Where are you going?) he asks nervously.
+“We’re here to see Santiago,” I tell the kid at the entry to the
+neighborhood. Isaias scouts the place out.
+There’s the outline of a revolver beneath the boy’s tee. There are no
+police or military in sight. The boy is a poste, a lookout for the 18th Street
+Sureños, one of the gangs brought by deportees back from LA that have
+displaced the informal local pandilla structures that long dominated the
+violence in these neighborhoods. Now, the maras have almost complete
+control over large swaths of the city center and other parts of San Salvador.
+After running into Santiago at Mijango’s, I spent weeks working through
+intermediaries to arrange a proper interview, which has finally been
+scheduled for today. Santiago is one of the only people who speaks to the
+outside world on behalf of the estimated seventy thousand members of the
+clikas and maras, including MS-13 and 18th Street. Ever since his role in
+
+the historic gang truce, Santiago has acted as a kind of gang diplomat. He
+was also part of the gang political commission that secretly recorded and
+later released videos of negotiations with members of both the right-wing
+ARENA and left-wing FMLN parties, after the truce. The videos show
+government ministers and ARENA and FMLN party officials offering gang
+leaders things like millions in microcredits, money to renew identification
+cards, and other benefits in exchange for support from the gangs for the
+electoral bids of both parties.
+Santiago’s intermediaries have made me promise to not share his
+location, his actual name, or any other compromising details of the
+clandestine meeting. Unlike most of his peers in gang leadership, especially
+the ones involved in negotiating the truce, Santiago has evaded capture,
+prison, and death.
+Homicide rates currently surpass those of the war in the eighties. Gangs,
+the military, the police, other security forces, and death squads have killed a
+total of 635 people in the last month alone. The death-squad killings in
+Panchimalco and nearby areas are still charging the humid air this Monday.
+“OK,” the skinny poste kid says, “you can come in.” He never cracks
+even a hint of a smile. I remind myself that this twelve- or thirteen-year-old
+deserves to find a way out of this life of violence.
+In the small but oddly well-kept backyard of the house, an older man—or
+at least a man older than your average teen gangster—sits at a table beside a
+tree. He stands and extends his hand.
+Santiago appears to be about thirty-five. He looks nothing like the
+stereotypical tattoo-faced image of an old-school mara member. He’s
+shaven and clean-cut, with no visible tattoos. It’s hot, but Santiago covers
+his wiry build with a clean, white short-sleeved shirt. He looks me over
+with the calculated gaze of a strategist, and I don’t need to remind myself
+that he is cosa seria: this dude is serious shit.
+“Welcome,” he says, with a gold-toothed smile and an unexpected
+breeziness. “Sit down,” he says, pointing to the small table. On it sit three
+cell phones, a pack of Marlboros, a lighter, and a book. There’s something
+about Marlboros that Salvadorans love. Santiago doesn’t appear to have one
+of the ever present guns one encounters with low-level gang members, but
+one can, no doubt, appear with a single signal.
+“Would you like some coffee or water?” he asks, as if he’s a manager at a
+government office or bank. One of his underlings, whose T-shirt and baggy
+
+shorts make him look more like a traditional marero, fetches some coffee.
+It’s kind of funny to see this stalky marero in the role of secretary.
+“What do you think of Monseñor Romero’s beatification?” I ask. My
+question references recent celebrations of the Catholic Church’s
+beatification of El Salvador’s patron saint of peace, Monsignor Óscar
+Arnulfo Romero. Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was giving
+Mass when he was shot through the heart by a death-squad assassin at the
+beginning of the country’s twelve-year civil war. Caught off guard, Santiago
+bows his head in respect for the slain archbishop.
+“He died fighting for the rights of the poor, the unprotected.” His Spanish
+is as proper as it is animated. Again, he bows his head. “He was a saint.
+Roberto D’Aubuisson’s structures were never really ended.” D’Aubuisson
+was the founder of both the death squads and the right-wing ARENA party
+in the eighties. “People like D’Aubuisson made Romero out to be criminal,
+a bad guy. Un monstruo. He was criminalized, he was persecuted, and he
+was exterminated by the government.” He pauses before adding, “like we
+are now.”
+Noting what must be a skeptical look on my face, Santiago continues,
+“We respect Romero and decided to call a truce during the [beatification]
+celebrations.”
+The idea that an extremely violent gang member actually identifies with
+Romero—the moral center of the Salvadoran universe and a man of peace
+—is baffling.
+I shift the conversation and ask him about FMLN President Cerén’s
+decisions the year before, first to end the gang truce, and then to deploy
+seven thousand regular army soldiers and three battalions of the specialforces rapid-response units to fight gangs.
+The tension in Santiago’s face is visible. “Those grupos de exterminio
+killed friends from my barrio,” he says, his welcoming tone gone to make
+way for the raspier voice one expects from a killer of his stature.
+“What happened?”
+“They just did a massacre in Usulután this past weekend. Paid killers,
+people with a salary to kill. I can tell you about the killings of both MS and
+18th Street members by extermination squads because we [the gang
+leaders] constantly share information about violations of human rights, like
+the massacres they blame us for when it’s actually the authorities. We know
+of many cases in which the ‘shootouts’ that the police report are actually
+
+extrajudicial killings.” He’s describing those “enfrentamientos” I’d heard so
+much about.
+The way he shows his gold tooth as his tongue hisses the x in exterminio
+makes me nervous.
+“What do you think about Rodrigo Ávila?” Ávila is a legislator who,
+with the help of the US Justice Department, helped create the mano dura
+policies launched by the fascist ARENA party more than a decade ago.1 I
+had interviewed Ávila at the legislature days earlier.
+Santiago smiles ironically, then snarls, “What do I think about this new
+mano dura? I would ask the president to remember that he used to be
+hunted by those same rapid-response battalions, when he was a comandante
+guerrillero.”
+I try to lighten the mood. “I remember talking to a guy involved in the
+negotiation of the peace accords in ’92,” I say, referring to the negotiations
+that ended the civil war. Santiago just looks and listens, but the tension
+emanating from him is palpable. “You’ll never guess what music he said
+helped bring about the historic peace.”
+Santiago appears to be listening, but also looks perplexed. He says
+nothing. I keep going, “Yeah, a guy who was there told me that when
+negotiations were stuck, the military and guerrilla commanders were sitting
+in a lobby, trying to break the ice and find common ground, when one of the
+comandantes guerrilleros asks, ‘Hey, what music do you guys like?’
+“After a couple of minutes, the only music they pretty much agreed was
+great was—are you ready? . . . Kenny G! That broke the ice and they went
+on to negotiate the end of the civil war.” I pause to see what, if any, effect
+my story has. Nada.
+“Now, that same government that was pursued by escuadrones is also
+using them, calling them ‘batallones de limpieza,’” he fires back. “What
+community are they ‘cleansing’? And what is the media saying? They’re
+not saying, ‘shootouts between police and gangs.’ They’re ‘cleansing’ us.”
+“I agree, Santiago. The way the media is reporting the situation is an
+embarrassment to me as a journalist. That’s why I’m here. To give you a
+chance to speak for yourself.”
+He sits in silence for a moment, seemingly pondering what I’ve said. Our
+small agreement about big media may help improve the dynamics of our
+conversation.
+
+“They’re talking about how police ‘eliminate’ gang members,” he says.
+“Why are they using this language? Look up the etymology of ‘eliminar’ in
+the dictionary of the Academia Real Española [the ultimate authority on the
+Spanish language]. It means to ‘expel’ or ‘throw out.’ Why are the
+government and media using that language? Because they’re preparing
+something. Someone is injecting something into the mind of the population
+so that they’re not alarmed when what they’re planning happens.”
+“And what do you think they’re preparing?”
+“More violence and killing.”
+Santiago’s political sophistication isn’t surprising. Many gang members
+share this sophistication. Their local and national operations—building
+communications and other networks, arming themselves, defending
+territory, managing finances, negotiating political space—demand
+organizational and political acumen. What’s shocking to me is his
+sophistication about language. Dude reads the fucking Academia Real
+Española? Damn!
+On the table, I notice the book again, a translation of one of the Hunger
+Games novels. I feel on edge, and my mouth is suddenly dry. His reaction
+to the ARENA and the FMLN questions caught me off guard. On top of
+that, I need to establish some rapport to be able to get him to respond to my
+harder questions, like why the gangs recruit and depend on kids. “I saw the
+first movie,” I say, still trying to steer the conversation to calmer waters. “I
+liked it.”
+Santiago’s eyebrows rise. So do the corners of his mouth to reveal his
+smile. Yes. The gold teeth are back! “I saw the movies, but prefer the
+books,” he says. “You get a deeper sense of Katniss from the books.”
+“You like reading, eh?” The need to navigate the conversation to the
+delicate issue of the children he and the maras depend on for their work
+without causing him to shut down completely is stressing me out. I know
+the meeting will likely end soon.
+“All during my childhood, I grew up without electricity,” he says in his
+velvety vos voice that’s so Salvadoreño. “My kids won’t live like that.”
+Santiago is a father of two who, like all gang members interviewed for
+my news stories, lives a great contradiction: he does all he can to protect his
+children from violence, while living a life in which violence—including
+violence against children and performed by children—provides him with
+camaraderie, extortion money, territorial control, and other forms of power.
+
+“My main escape was books. I read them by candlelight,” he says.
+“When I got older, a gang elder told me ‘Read, even if it’s a piece-of-shit
+book, read.’ So I buy and read lots of books.”
+The love of reading reminds me of another kid, one who, before
+becoming a pandillero, dreamed of using reading and education to escape
+the cycle of poverty in the mesones: Pop, the poor kid whose love of words
+led him to read voraciously, despite never getting more than a second grade
+education. It also reminds me of my childhood persona, Mr. Peabody, the
+guy who loved books so much, he and Freddie Weinstein began their lives
+of crime by stealing the entire set of the Danny Dunn adventure series from
+the Mission Library.
+“What do you like to read?” I ask.
+“I really like science fiction and fantasy, like this book,” he says, looking
+at The Hunger Games. “I also like the classics.”
+“Classics? Which ones?” I’m fascinated that this top gang leader has
+made the time to school himself. The situation reminds me of the sensation
+I had on discovering that guerrillero leaders and soldiers fighting in the
+mountains or conspiring in urban commando units loved words so much,
+they made the time in between battles to read and write poetry and even
+novels—in fact, one of the five groups of the FMLN was founded by poets.
+How the love of words survives the hatred and noise of war and extreme
+violence still astonishes me.
+“The Iliad impacted me because it was romantic and novelesque. I like
+the tragedies.”
+“Shakespeare?”
+“Absolutely. Hamlet. Romeo y Julieta. I love them.”
+Knowing that Santiago, a major actor in El Salvador’s current tragedy,
+loves the works of Homer and Shakespeare makes my head spin. He could
+order a murder with a single word. How these wondrous, life-affirming
+words occupy the same internal space as the intent to kill I’ll never know.
+“I’ve also read Open Veins of Latin America, One Day of Life, and One
+Hundred Years of Solitude,” he says. The pride in his soft, mellifluous voice
+borders on bravado. “The elder told me, ‘You should educate yourself. Read
+what interests you and what doesn’t interest you.’ So, I even read crap like
+the Trojan Horse series, where US agents travel back to the time of Christ.”
+Even before the meeting, the story of Christian Poveda, a journalist who
+befriended a gang that eventually shot him to death, had me worried about
+
+my safety. But now the lingering fear of having the back of my fucking
+head blown off if I say the wrong thing momentarily disappears. This highlevel leader of one of the baddest, darkest mass-murder machines in the
+world is showing me that in this way we’re the same, that he too sought and
+found solace in books, in the written word—and by candlelight, no less!
+Fuck. Poetic es poco.
+It occurs to me just then that he placed the book on the table on purpose,
+as a conversation starter, like an art book in one of those tanned, middleclass white lady’s homes. It almost feels comforting. Wake up, pendejo. Of
+course he put the fuckin’ book there as a prop, as a conversation starter.
+He’s trying to influence my story—and succeeding! Dude’s a hunted gang
+leader. He doesn’t get out to the book club much these days. He’s smart and
+craves conversation as you did—and still do.
+I’m getting a sense we’re drawing to a close. Time to talk about the
+“norms”—the blood rites—that experts say militaries, gangs, and other
+violent organizations deploy to coerce their members to kill and die for
+them.
+“You say your friends were exterminados by escuadrones?” I ask.
+“That’s right. Slaughtered like animals.”
+“Some say there’s a war going on between the government and you.
+What would you say?”
+“Yes,” he says, his voice still calm. “They keep killing gang members. As
+I said, we share information and know security forces blame us for many of
+their killings.”
+“Have you been persecuted?”
+“Are you kidding? Many times.”
+“How many people have you killed?”
+Silence.
+I quickly change tactics: “Besides the extermination squads, what do you
+think causes all this violence?”
+Santiago’s body relaxes some. His arms move back to the side of his
+chair. He cocks his head back, raises his eyebrows as if in thought, and then
+presses his body forward, confiding.
+“Well, there’s trauma,” he says, his mechanical yet singsong falsetto
+surprising me. He continues: “The trauma of the disintegration of the
+family. The trauma of the father who gets drunk because he doesn’t have a
+job. The trauma of that father beating the mother. The trauma of the child
+
+who sees his mother being beaten. The trauma of the mother who gets with
+another guy. The trauma of the mother who prefers the boyfriend over the
+son. The trauma of the boyfriend who beats the son. The trauma of the son
+who leaves home. The trauma of the son who joins a gang. The trauma of
+the mother who keeps reproaching the son every day. And on and on.
+“So, yes,” Santiago concludes, flashing his gold teeth. “There’s lots of
+trauma.”
+I’m looking at Santiago’s deep dark brown eyes and see our shared and
+fragmented past. Both half dead. Like it or not, we Salvadorans are all, in
+some sense, the children of El General and La Matanza.
+Time to strike with my big question.
+“I notice that many of the mareros I see patrolling your streets are young,
+some as young as eleven and twelve.”
+“Yes, some of our members are young, y?” He’s asked in a cadence that
+implies the phrase “Y qué?”—and what of it?—in Caló. That he’s used
+Caló for emphasis—and knew I’d understand it—tells me he understands
+the workings of my Californian-Salvadoran influences as much as I
+understand the history of his Salvadoran-US ones. My young vato self, Tito,
+gets the message: Don’t go there, motherfucker.
+Inside me, Tito’s voice is waiting to tell me I’ve failed again: Fuck. I
+wasted all the time it took to get this interview. I’m no further to getting at
+what’s underneath the child-destroying violence.
+Santiago breaks the long silence. “Young mareros aren’t born. They’re
+made by a fucked-up society.”
+“So you’re the victims in all this?”
+“Of course not,” he quickly responds, adopting a somewhat more
+defensive body posture, hands crossed across his stomach.
+“No?”
+“We know we are the worst of the worst, the most evil there is. It’s no
+secret to us. In a country like El Salvador, a country with a long history of
+violence, a country in which the main parties in power have done—and
+continue to do—many of the things we’re doing now, doing these terrible
+things is not new,” he says. “We’re just making it worse.”
+As I prepare to leave, I search Santiago’s eyes. A futile search for lost
+innocence. I wonder about the effect on his innocence—and on the
+innocence of all of us Salvadorans—from our ongoing legacy of
+generations of killers who have died silently without acknowledging their
+
+crimes. I think about those criminals not affiliated with the gang, including
+the legitimized, uniformed criminals of the state, who commit their crimes
+against the gangs, mass-murdering with impunity—the same cops and
+soldiers whose violence drove me to do things I never imagined I’d do back
+in the nineties, setting me on an irreversible course.
+
+21
+
+San Salvador
+1991
+
+“How do you want to be called?” Chamba asked me.
+We needed to devise a pseudonimo for my fake cedula (ID card).
+“How about Ernesto Alvarenga?” He came up with this suggestion when
+I told him my mom’s family name, and I initially agreed but then changed
+my mind.
+“No. Call me Roberto Lovato.”
+Even though my parents had named me Roberto at birth, my passport,
+birth certificate, and other official paperwork said my name was Robert.
+This fake Salvadoran cedula would, in one way, be more genuine than my
+real US government documents, despite propagating a different lie: that I
+was an economist born in Mom’s hometown of San Vicente. I was officially
+Roberto—at last.
+After he made the cedula, Chamba gave me basic training in how to
+develop my identity, an integral part of how the comandos practiced el
+conspire. “You need to come up with a leyenda [legend] and stay with it,”
+he said.
+“A leyenda? What’s that?”
+“It’s the story you create about yourself and your activities. It has to be
+simple and consistent, so that you remember it and don’t deviate. Like, ‘I’m
+an economist from San Vicente. I work at X, am married, etc.’”
+“Ah, OK. So it’s my story about this other identity?”
+“Yes. That and the actions you take.”
+
+“OK,” I said, excited and scared. The danger wasn’t so different from
+many of the risks I had taken as a member of Los Originales, like stealing
+cars, dealing drugs, and robbing people. Only now the stakes were higher.
+Dodging San Francisco’s police was one thing; avoiding—and helping
+mount attacks against—El Salvador’s mass-murdering military, police, and
+death squads was something else altogether. But I also had an almost
+religious, poet-warrior sensibility powering me in ways I’d never known:
+the certitude that I was undertaking these new risks in the name of a higher
+cause.
+Known as El Ingeniero, Chamba coordinated logística for the Resistencia
+Nacional, one of the five politico-military organizations within the FMLN.*
+He explained that he would set up meetings with the leaders of different
+FMLN comando urbano units at different locations throughout the city. At
+these meetings, the comandos urbanos explained their needs verbally to
+avoid leaving a paper trail. However, if entirely necessary, Chamba did use
+written instructions—a description of the plan, maps, a list of items to
+retrieve, budgets, and other details needed—for mounting attacks on
+bridges, military installations, the air force base in Ilopango, and other
+targets of war.
+Things in the country were tense. Backed by the US government, the
+Salvadoran government was ramping up attacks on international solidarity
+groups and other foreigners who were supporting the unions, church
+groups, and nongovernmental organizations like CRIPDES. The attacks
+came in retaliation to the big ofensiva of November 1989, when the FMLN
+waged a major military offensive on the capital. The ofensiva was designed
+to show the government that it could not defeat them militarily and that
+negotiation was the only way forward. The real audience for the ofensiva,
+though, was the US government, for it was clear they were the ones pulling
+the strings of El Salvador’s puppet government.
+My decision to work with the comandos came gradually but accelerated
+after frequent trips to Chalatenango with CRIPDES. Different parts of me
+converged on the revolucionario option. And, of course, the romance of
+having gotten to know a great revolucionaria like G.
+The wholesale mass slaughter of toddlers and teens made fighting the
+fascist military dictatorship a just and necessary cause.
+A friend visiting from San Francisco gave me Chamba’s info so I could
+connect with him directly.
+
+Chamba sported a thick mustache and had animated eyes that gave him
+the look of Gomez Addams, the darkly comic father of The Addams Family
+television show. This look magnified his storytelling, as when he described
+what was to be my first meeting. “He’s one of the most wanted men in San
+Salvador, a real legendario,” he said, his eyes popping with enthusiasm.
+I loved the idea of meeting a tall, dark, handsome, brown badass, an Errol
+Flynn as Robin Hood ready to welcome me to some Sherwood Forest
+outside San Salvador so I could join his merry band of bandits in blowing
+up bridges, sabotaging telephone lines, and other acts of rebellion against
+the fascist military dictatorship. Tito’s anger found company and a cause.
+Finding out the meeting with this Errol Flynn character would take place
+at a Mister Donut coffee shop in the Metrocentro Mall felt funny, in no
+small part because the idea of the coffee shop as a portal into the
+revolutionary underground mirrored Pop’s own illegal undertakings in the
+basement of Hunt’s Donuts. But the Mister Donut meeting also marked the
+rapid beginning of the end of my fantasy. No forest. No band of happy
+cherubic bandits. No romance. Just the plastic white benches, white tables,
+and white walls of a place where I had sometimes eaten jelly donuts with
+friends years before. All my romanticismo gave way to a scary realism.
+Once I sat down on one of the plastic benches in Mister Donut, “normal”
+things became something else. The lack of a smell and the plastic
+wonderland vibe of the place gave a surreal aura to a scary situation. Errol
+Flynn was going to tell me a list of equipment—cameras, binoculars, video
+equipment—they needed to launch attacks. I was to use my contacts in the
+US and in El Salvador to secure and deliver the materials. Meeting in such
+an open space made me feel very vulnerable. I did not yet understand that
+counterintuitive steps like meeting in public were, in fact, safety measures
+—though in truth a guerrillero was vulnerable anywhere anytime in El
+Salvador.
+Waiting to meet Errol Flynn, I started to recognize that shit was getting
+real—I was actually on my first mission as part of the FMLN guerrillero
+army. I looked around to see if I could identify which of the patrons were in
+Errol Flynn’s detail: the men and women in suits and ties and dresses whose
+briefcases, backpacks, and purses contained revolvers and other weapons to
+provide us with cover, according to Chamba. These guardaespaldas
+(bodyguards) were tasked with vigilantly scoping out the crowd for security
+
+forces. If security forces did present themselves, it was a guaranteed
+bloodbath.
+Looking outside the windows at the crowds of people, I could see the
+obvious reason for meeting in such public places: we looked like a few fish
+in a vast urban sea of them. It was reassuring to be in such a banal place but
+also terrifying to know that heavily armed military or guardias could
+emerge from the crowd of shoppers at any moment.
+The fantasy evaporated completely when I finally saw my Errol Flynn, a
+thick-necked salchicha (sausage) of a fuckin’ Salvadoran guy who, with his
+cowboy boots, stood around five four, at most.
+“Hola,” he said. “Roberto, right?”
+“Yes. Hi.”
+“Good to see you again.” He smiled.
+“Yes. It’s been some time.” I smiled back uncomfortably, looking over to
+where the members of his security detail were sitting.
+Up close, I could see how intense this dude was. His eyes had a
+discerning power about them that contrasted with his soft voice.
+“How’s your family?” Errol Flynn asked.
+“Well. Thank you. Growing, you know.” I didn’t really know what to say.
+I looked him over in an attempt to distract myself from my nerves. Errol’s
+tight Lacoste shirt barely fit his muscular shoulders and arms. He looked
+like those military guys who, in their desperation to own a name brand
+before Pop’s stock ran out, bought size small knockoffs from him when
+what they actually needed was a medium. Suddenly Pop’s voice crept into
+my head, saying, “You’re stupid, risking your life for nothing.” I fought
+against the voice of my fear by focusing my attention back on Errol.
+“How’s your family?” I asked Errol.
+“Well, anxious to start the party. Our Ingeniero friend tells me you and
+your family will be lending us a hand.” Errol looked chill, “cucumber head”
+cool, as the great Californian comedians Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong
+(aka Cheech and Chong) would say. I, on the other hand, was practically
+shitting my pants.
+“Yes, María and I will be there. Definitely.”
+“So, I brought you that list of party favors we talked about.”
+“I’ll see what I can do.”
+Errol handed me the coded list of things he and his comandos needed.
+Prior to the meeting, Chamba had told me that he would manage delivery.
+
+“Great,” Errol said. “We’ll deliver the goods on time. I hope you can, too.
+The party will be fun, lots of fun. Say hello to El Ingeniero.” I never saw or
+heard about Errol again.
+Prior to my meeting, Chamba had reminded me to think things through
+carefully, always making sure to “take the appropriate security measures.”
+In the weeks that followed, as my guerrillero work continued, my mind
+raced with questions, fears, and excitement, even as I tried to keep all the
+rules and responsibilities of my role straight. First I had to be clear about
+the security measures I needed to take. These included altering my routines,
+coding my messages, not talking with anyone about my business, and doing
+things in the least expected way, such as taking different routes to
+destinations.
+Sometimes, Chamba and I would meet at El Camino Real, one of the
+swankiest hotels in the country, dressed as businessmen. I always wore a
+Pierre Cardin suit, a black-market suit I’d commandeered from the ones
+Pop had left at Tía Esperanza’s. We’d also meet other commando units at
+restaurants, other five-star hotels, the downtown McDonald’s, and other
+public locations, along with clandestine safe houses.
+There was a constant and urgent need for equipment, and I was
+consumed with thinking about how I could secure the needed materiel,
+much of which was cheaper in the US. After deliberating for some time, I
+finally landed on the last man el enemigo—or I—could imagine aiding and
+abetting the FMLN’s comandos urbanos: Pop. My whole life, Pop had
+eschewed involvement in Salvadoran politics and, for some mysterious
+reason, discouraged me from getting involved, despite he and Mom being
+very engaged union members in the US, with Mom even taking me to my
+first protest at age ten.
+A big, eye-closing belly laugh burst out of me at the absurdity of
+recruiting Pop. The image of him organizing all these crooks—poor, drugaddled vatos from the Folsom Street projects, Hunt’s Donuts, and the rest of
+the Mission—to strike out against imperialismo, forming bases estratégicas
+del Frente, made me crack up. The laughter lasted for a few minutes before
+I began to cry.
+At first the tears seemed like tears at the hilarity of it all, but they
+contained something else: a fantasy that perhaps the redemptive power of
+revolutionary thought and action that had helped save me might also help
+save Pop. I knew he would never buy into my fantasy, but the thought gave
+
+me a path to feeling more whole—to feeling good about Pop, about my
+family, about being Salvadoreño, and about my full self. My Salvadoreño
+journey from being half dead to more fully alive had begun.
+The next day, I called Pop.
+“What?” he asked. “You need what?”
+I explained what I needed in cryptic terms, but Pop quickly understood
+that I was doing something perilous in a country whose danger he had lots
+of experience navigating. Pop may or may not have had an idea of what I
+was actually up to, but he actually seemed enthusiastic about helping his
+boy with whatever he needed—or so he communicated indirectly. The
+rapprochement that had begun when I returned from Chalatenango several
+months ago had grown and was now bearing revolutionary fruit.
+“OK, I think I know where to get those cositas,” he said, using the
+diminutive form of the word for “things” to indicate that he understood.
+Pop responded quickly and efficiently to the request for goods, bringing
+the stuff to Tía Esperanza’s himself for me to pick up when I could. I had
+just returned from a visit to Chalatenango and showed up at Tía’s
+unannounced. I was sporting a beard, and my clothes were muddied from
+being in the refugee camps, where I’d been dancing around campfires to
+Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, and more obviously revolutionary
+music with the other CRIPDES members, guerrilleras, and guerrilleros.
+Pop, Tía Esperanza, Adilio, and the rest of the family gave me a wide-eyedwhat-the-fuck look of shock. After a pause, Tía Esperanza and Adilio
+smiled, as if looking at how the radical seed they’d planted in the gringo
+soil had borne Salvadoreño fruit. Pop had a look that was at once nervous
+and perplexed.
+I got my own shock months later, as I was lying in my apartment in San
+Salvador, sipping some cola champagne, one of the piss-gold soft drinks
+every Latin American country has. I was reflecting on how much things had
+changed for me since leaving San Francisco the year before, when the
+phone rang, an unusual occurrence, given that I lived in a place few except
+the compas at CRIPDES knew about.
+“Bueno, may I help you?”
+“Hola, Beto!” The silky sweet voice sounded familiar, but before my
+heart leaped, I paused.
+“G?” I asked.
+“Yes!”
+
+“Where are you?”
+“San Salvador.”
+“What?”
+“Yes. I’m here.”
+“You’re here?” I said, my voice reaching higher octaves of disbelief.
+“Yes.”
+I remained silent for a moment, stunned at the fact that this woman who
+publicly represented the FMLN had somehow managed to get into the
+country. The Salvadoran government had her and other publicly identified
+members of the FMLN on their lists of people to detain on sight at any
+airport or border crossing. G could be killed if they caught her here.
+“What are you doing here?” I asked.
+“I’m here on some important business and need to speak with you,” she
+said in her trademark no-nonsense tone.
+“Sure. When and where do you wanna meet?”
+“Let’s meet where the light shines,” she said, which was code for the
+Antorchas, an open-air restaurant frequented by the compas. The restaurant
+had torches placed all around its edges. I wanted to know about this special
+mission almost as much as I simply wanted to see her.
+I showered, put on some nice clothes, and armed myself with my secret
+weapon: Jovan Musk Oil, my preferred cologne. I showed up a little late to
+find a smiling G already there. A white-haired guitarist was playing “Ella,”
+a lovely bolero from Mom and Pop’s era, in front of a couple at a table
+nearby. G was looking ever the summer beauty in a black flowered dress
+that hung on her tight body wonderfully. The Salvadoran sun made her
+round face look especially radiant.
+Being G, she rocketed us through the niceties then started in with the
+reason she’d come. The smell of flat iron beef grilling beneath the thatched
+palm roof and the fancy blue tropical drinks with little wooden umbrellas in
+them gave the restaurant on busy Boulevard de Los Heroes a suave,
+intimate beach vibe made stronger by all the antorchas.
+“So, T,” she started, “I’m here with some important news.”
+“How did you get into the country?”
+“The compañeros got me some glasses, a wig, and a fake passport, and I
+came in through the Guatemala border,” she said en voz bajita.
+“Wow, that’s pretty gutsy.” Noting her need to talk about the mission, I
+asked, “So what brings you here?”
+
+“Well, to be honest, you left me in limbo, T.”
+“Huh? In limbo? What do you mean?” What the fuck is she bringin’ this
+up for?
+“Before you left,” she said, “when we were getting to know each other in
+San Francisco, you said we were ‘more than friends.’ You gave me
+chocolates, you wrote poetry, and gave me other signs that led me to believe
+that what you said was true.”
+“Uh, well that’s kinda true, I guess, but . . .”
+“Yet, on the other hand, you left things ambiguous,” she interjected, “like
+you weren’t sure what we were after such beautiful moments we spent
+together.”
+“OK, yes,” I said, still waiting for the larger mission to reveal itself.
+“You know me, Beto. You know that I like to be clear,” said G, sounding
+like the focused diplomat and explosives expert she was.
+“Yes. You do.”
+“You know that I can’t stand ambiguity.”
+“No, you can’t.”
+“So, I will just tell you: Tito, I’m in love with you and need to know how
+you feel about me. I’ve been living with this ambiguity since last year and
+want you to be clear with me. I can’t keep living like this.”
+Uh-oh. That’s what she fucking came here for? Me? Fuck.
+Subversive in war turned out to also mean subversive in love. My
+immediate thought: G came to undermine my game plan of macking on lots
+of women in wartime El Salvador. But I also recognized our shared desire. I
+kept looking at her in disbelief, and the rush of memories came back to me
+—walking near my old church, talking about opera, feeling like she actually
+liked me for me, despite feeling like a fucked-up kid in the Mission. Fuck.
+So I did the obvious thing any red-blooded revolucionario Salvadoran
+macho would do in such a potentially explosive situation.
+“Excuse me for a second. I have to go to the bathroom. I’ll be right
+back.”
+“Eh, OK?” G said in a tone that said, “What the fuck?”
+On my way to the bathroom, I walked up to the old guitarist dude playing
+music in the restaurant and whispered in his ear. Then I went to the
+bathroom, combed my curly hair, and washed my face before I came out
+blasting like I was Michael Corleone entering gangster life at the Bronx
+Italian restaurant. I stroll back to the table.
+
+“So you want an answer?” I asked, standing before her with the guitarist
+behind me. “Here’s your answer.”
+The guitarist started playing “Sabor a mí.” I’d first learned the lyrics of
+the classic bolero–turned–lowrider oldie about the lover’s taste when Pop
+used to play it for Mom. Now I put his Orphic powers to use myself. I
+started serenading G.
+The song ended. I smiled and said, “There’s your answer.”
+She smiled back and got up to put her face close to mine. We paused to
+inhale each other’s breaths, and then our lips finally touched.
+We decided to go to a cheap motel used by prostitutes working near Tía
+Esperanza’s house on Cinco de Noviembre Street. Early the next morning,
+before dawn, as we floated out of the motel high on new love, we were
+greeted by the sight of soldiers who were about a block and a half away and
+coming our way.
+We turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction, hoping that a
+taxi or some other vehicle might come in our direction, but there were no
+cars in sight. An eternity passed before we saw the lights of a vehicle
+approaching, surely our last opportunity to escape torture and likely death.
+As the car approached, I prayed, Please let this be a taxi, please! Finally
+the car came close enough that we could tell it was, in fact, a taxi. We
+rushed to it, hopped inside, and sped away, back in the opposite direction
+from the soldiers.
+Determined not to let fascist military blues defeat our happiness, G and I
+decided to go on another date. We picked a lunchtime stroll near the
+CRIPDES office, along Boulevard de Los Heroes, San Salvador’s main
+thoroughfare. In the seventies, Rolando and my other friends and I used to
+come to Boulevard de Los Heroes to ride bumper cars at the arcade where
+rich boys and their parents stared at us, trying to figure out why the boy in
+rich kid’s clothes—football shirts, Levi’s, and Converse—was with the kids
+in raggedy clothes and shoes. These were the same friends I tried to teach
+the words of B. J. Thomas’s “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” the
+beautiful, breezy song I loved from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
+Now, G and I walked down that same boulevard, holding hands, enjoying a
+dreamy break from all the war shit.
+A new van with polarized windows pulled over ahead of us. I didn’t
+recognize it. Instinctively G put her hand on my arm in a gesture of caution.
+We stopped walking.
+
+“Hey, Roberto!” a man’s voice called out as the van door slid open.
+“Hey,” I responded. I took a step toward the van, thinking maybe it
+belonged to one of Adilio’s richer friends.
+G quickly grabbed me by the shirt. “Do you know who that is?” she
+asked.
+“No, but they said my name.” I couldn’t imagine any sinister dudes doing
+anything in broad daylight, on the busiest street in the country, no less.
+But G could. “OK, T,” she said in a calculating voice, “at the count of
+uno-dos-tres we’re gonna run.”
+Uno-dos-tres, and with as much speed as we could muster, G and I ran
+down side streets searching for some cover. We waited behind a parked car
+on a side street for a while and then hopped the fence into the backyard of a
+home, and then another, and another until we reached an abandoned yard
+with heavy brush to hide in. We stayed kneeling there, holding hands for
+what seemed like hours, until we felt safe enough to walk outside again.
+So began our engagement: stitching together the fragments of our lives,
+doing our best to feel safe in love and in war as we carried forth the
+lawbreaking tradition passed on by the poetic outlaws who preceded us.
+
+22
+
+Mexico City
+1941
+
+Two years after leaving San Salvador for Mexico—the promised land for
+Salvadorans in the 1930s and early ’40s—Ramón found himself sleeping in
+a palace. Unfortunately, however, his metal cot with leather slats was as
+uncomfortable as any of the floors, cots, or beds he grew up sleeping on in
+the mesón. Ramón was in Lecumberri prison, called El Palacio Negro, in
+the cell along the corridor he shared with other men who, like him, were
+accused of murder.
+Days earlier, the Mexican police had woken him in the middle of the
+night, handcuffed him, and dragged him to the police station to interrogate
+him about the murder of one of his clients, a Mr. Manning. Manning, the
+owner of the dry-cleaning shop that subcontracted services from Ramón’s
+employer, Tintorería Insurgentes cleaners, had been found dead, his head
+bashed in by a big metal pipe.
+“You have the wrong man!” Ramón maintained in the smoky
+interrogation room where the cops tried to force a confession from him for
+fourteen consecutive hours.
+“You’re right,” one of the cops answered brusquely. “You’re not the guy.
+Because your name isn’t even Ramón López. It’s Ramón Lovato, asshole—
+and you killed Manning.”
+They were right about the first part, and Ramón knew he was in deep
+trouble as a result. He’d come to Mexico as an indocumentado, changing
+his name to Ramón López with the help of his patron, Visitación Antonio
+
+Pacheco, a former Salvadoran coronel exiled to Mexico by El General
+Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Pacheco, who had changed his own
+name to Victor Antonio Pacheco, was a friend of Tey’s husband, Chico.
+Ramón worried that Mexico was like El Salvador, a place where for any of
+a number of reasons—mistaken identity, vengeance, personal whims,
+jealous husbands—you could be jailed interminably, tortured, or even
+killed.
+Ramón spent a week in his cell, pondering how he’d ended up sleeping in
+prison with rapists, crooks, and murderers like Jacques Mornard, the man
+convicted and sentenced to twenty years for the murder of Leon Trotsky the
+year before (Mornard’s true identity as the Soviet spy Ramón Mercader
+would only be exposed decades later). Finally, the lawyer whom Pacheco
+had secured for him came to the prison with an update: Salvador, a guy who
+ironed clothes for Manning, had confessed to the murder after police found
+his bloodied shoes. The lawyer then gave Ramón the bad news: “Since
+you’re here illegally, you’re going to be deported.”
+Thankfully, his patron, Pacheco, knew that Mexico really was the
+promised land—for those who had money. Pacheco gave 150 pesos to
+Mexico’s director general of population, who oversaw immigration, and
+another 150 pesos to the director of the Minerva Polytechnic Institute.
+Overnight, his nineteen-year-old Salvadoran employee had papers
+certifying that he was a legal resident of Mexico and was one of the
+institute’s top students.
+Ramón went on to hold numerous jobs in Mexico, enjoying good money
+and lots of women, fathering a son, and having many other adventures that
+he dreamed of writing about in a book he intended to call Mexico de Mis
+Memorias, if he ever wrote it. But even as he was living the good life in
+Mexico, at the same time, another part of his story—his childhood in El
+Salvador—had been disappeared, by his escapades and also by drinking the
+tequila and rum that replaced the cheap guaro of his past.
+El Salvador did not figure in either the memories he chose to dwell on or
+his future plans. Nor did his father, Don Miguel Rodríguez, or his family in
+Ahuachapán. However, after ten years in Mexico, Ramón did miss his other
+family: his stepfather, Chico; his siblings, Jorge and Aida; and, most of all,
+his mother, Mamá Tey. In order to see them, Ramón would have to migrate
+farther north, to the United States.
+
+Carmen Regalado and other prostitutes in Mesón San Luís had persuaded
+Tey to move to the other great land of opportunity, California. Tey had
+immigrated to San Francisco in 1949, thanks in no small part to her Singer.
+The iron sewing machine helped her to save enough money to immigrate
+and rent an apartment in the Mission District. She also saved enough to buy
+a newer sewing machine, an electric one, which allowed Tey to bring in a
+greater income still. With this money, Tey began to weave her family’s
+transcontinental web between San Francisco and El Salvador, buying and
+selling contraband.
+Once established, Tey got word to Ramón in Mexico, inviting him to
+rejoin his family. In 1951, at age twenty-nine, Ramón crossed the chain-link
+border separating Matamoros and Brownsville. His first memorable
+interaction with an Americano came upon boarding a Greyhound to
+California, being told in English and then in Spanish that he should “sit in
+the back—with the other coloreds.”
+Ramón brought little more with him to San Francisco than a bad drinking
+habit and his skills of persuasion. His tongue was the instrument he used to
+not only secure work but also lyrically lure friends and family to work with
+him. First he got work at the piers with his cousin, El Catocho, unloading
+bombs and the bodies of soldiers from the ships returning from the Korean
+War. Then he moved to the Southern Pacific railroad station on Townsend,
+where the white guys in the union began their meetings by saying, “Ladies
+and gentlemen—and you colored folks, too.” One of those white guys was a
+brakeman like Ramón, but wasn’t as racist as the other guys and had his
+own poetic tongue thing going. His name was Jack Kerouac.
+Ramón’s jobs helped him sustain a drinking habit of a fifth or more of
+tequila, Scotch, or Wild Turkey per day. He was a womanizer always
+looking for a fiesta. It was a lifestyle that resembled Don Miguel’s,
+ironically enough. Then he reconnected with the woman who would alter
+the course of his life, María Elena Alvarenga.
+The two had originally met in the late forties, at a department store
+Ramón visited during a trip to San Salvador. He was attracted to her, but
+she had never paid the mustachioed, roguishly handsome man any attention.
+She was a beauty queen and had more than enough suitors. They lost touch
+until 1955, when he was visiting the home of one of Tey’s friends, a friend
+who also happened to be the aunt charged with María’s care.
+
+For María something had changed. Ramón’s qualities—his roguish
+humor (saying things like, “Don’t get too close to me or you’ll be the
+mother of my kids”), his adventurous spirit, and the animated, poetic way
+he spoke—had become attractive to her. He had never stopped being
+attracted to the fierce, beautiful Nena. The two started dating. Three weeks
+later, they were married. Within months, she was pregnant with Ramón Jr.,
+their firstborn. Soon after, they made arrangements for María’s son, Omar,
+to migrate to San Francisco from San Vicente. Ramón’s daughter in San
+Salvador, Ana Irma, soon followed suit.
+The Lovatos were known for helping their compatriots and other
+immigrants. Over a hundred immigrants made their way from El Salvador
+to San Francisco with the help of Ramón’s family. Many of them stayed in
+the Lovatos’ crowded apartments on Army, where Ramón and his family
+lived with Tey, as well as their historic home on Folsom, while getting their
+feet on the ground in the United States.
+The Lovatos were also known for their parties, where Ramón’s drinking
+was always on display. That is, until 1963, when María took action, forcing
+him to quit because they were on the verge of having another child, Roberto
+Lovato.
+
+Part VIII
+
+23
+
+San Salvador, El Salvador
+2015
+
+I wake on the cot that I’ve been sleeping on at María Elena’s ever since
+Pop arrived and started occupying my former bed. The most audible sound
+in the room we’re sharing is the wheezing and snorts of Pop’s asthmatic,
+ninety-two-year-old lungs palpitating as he sleeps. Something in the snoring
+—his childlike vulnerability, the memories of Mom tending to him during
+his near-death asthma attacks, the nightmares of the previous century that
+still shake his frame—makes me want to hug him.
+My days here are numbered. But I’m not leaving El Salvador without
+using my remaining time to investigate other parts of the past—my past,
+this time. Especially the other colossal question mark in my family history:
+Pop’s father, Don Miguel Rodríguez.
+When I asked him a few days ago about coming with me to Ahuachapán,
+Pop’s face shriveled up. “Ni que me paguen,” he said. “There’s nada there
+for me.” Behind the nothingness of his nada I can hear the nihilism that
+drove Pop to drink. I know I need to respect the feelings of the man branded
+ilegítimo from birth by Don Miguel Rodríguez—and the nation—so I let it
+lie. I’ll be going to Ahuachapán alone today.
+The abominable chirp on my cousin María Elena’s cheap Nokia cell rings
+at 7:30 a.m. sharp, as always.
+“Buenas días, mi coronel!” says Isaias’s friendly, croaky voice on the
+phone.
+
+I brush my teeth, grab my backpack from the sofa, and burst out of the
+steel front door to meet him.
+Isaias is standing proudly next to his rusty taxi-yellow Toyota parked
+beneath the shaded spot under the rubber tree in María Elena’s front yard.
+He’s smiling and making small talk with el sereno, whose shotgun bumps
+up against the bell curve of his beer belly, regardless of how he moves.
+I greet him. “Buenos días, joven.” I’m only about three years older than
+Isaias, but he looks a lot younger. Unlike his beer-bellied fellow former
+soldier, el sereno, Isaias keeps his frame tight and fit. The muscles bristling
+from his neck, arms, and chest in a fitted yellow sport shirt give his face a
+golden aura. His large brown eyes that open wide when he’s animated,
+which is often, also make him look younger. His own take on his looks that
+he once told me: “Yeah, people tell me I have an Indian face. All I need are
+the feathers.”
+Sometimes Isaias’s humor strays into the racist territory that is still rife in
+Salvadoran society, but otherwise adds a welcome dose of levity in the
+violent landscapes we’ve traversed together. During this time, our
+camaraderie has developed to a point where I generally trust him on a
+personal level. But not with my FMLN past. I’ve told only a few close
+friends and family about that.
+After almost twenty-five years of clandestinity, secrets, and fear,
+thousands of us in the United States and El Salvador continue to keep our
+former militancy buried. In my postwar identity as a scholar, activist, and
+journalist, I’ve feared that my far from liberal politics would affect my
+livelihood. Remembering the role of the CIA in assassinating compañeros
+and supporting the Salvadoran military and escuadrones gives me ongoing
+concern for my physical safety. Having been arrested on false charges
+during a protest in San Francisco with arrest reports signed by the FBI and
+having been pursued and harassed by escuadrones de la muerte during my
+early postwar years at CARECEN in LA, I still don’t feel safe. In fact,
+senators Joe Biden, John Kerry, and others went on to document the ways
+US government agencies and their right-wing Salvadoran henchmen
+surveilled, threatened, and tried to infiltrate our sanctuary and solidarity
+organizations during the war. All these concerns weigh heavily on me any
+time I feel the desire to publicly unforget the revolutionary part of me.
+Isaias’s bright eyes are a clean white around the iris, clearer than most.
+Always. A sign that he’s not a boozer, unlike Jorge “El Chele” (the light-
+
+skinned one), another driver María Elena set me up with years before I met
+Isaias. El Chele’s eyes were always ablaze with the red streaks of
+sleeplessness, stress, and heavy drinking with prostitutes.
+“Off to Mister Donut and then more interviews?” Isaias asks.
+“We’ll go to Mister Donut, but no interviews.”
+“Why not?”
+“I have other kinds of work I need to do.”
+Several weeks after meeting with Santiago, I’d finished most of the
+research for my news stories. In the process, I ingested enough violence,
+trauma, and duplicity in present-day El Salvador to stir the wells of my own
+terror to the point where they can no longer be ignored. I’m not going to
+leave without investigating my family’s past.
+So I tell Isaias we’ll be taking several road trips over the next few days.
+Our first stop will be the University of El Salvador, where the country’s
+preeminent historian of Ahuachapán has agreed to speak with me.
+Tomorrow, we’ll drive to Nahuizalco, one of the last remaining indigenous
+towns in the country. From there, we’ll head to Ahuachapán and Ataco,
+Don Miguel’s hometown. But first, breakfast at the Mister Donut on
+Chiltiupán, a couple of blocks down from María Elena’s and a few blocks
+up from poor Giovanni’s garage, where someone else has already set up
+another body shop.
+We’re off in his rusty, creaky Toyota, my Rocinante. As the car rattles
+over the rocks and rubble of María Elena’s street, Isaias listens to the daily
+news, as is his ritual. “The suicide bombing killed at least ten people and
+wounded more than sixty,” the radio announcer drones in the driest, most
+un-Salvadoran Spanish imaginable—the polar opposite of the syncopated
+singsong of Salvadoran sportscasters, lotería managers, or Isaias.
+“Things are really violent there,” Isaias says, in his high-pitched voice,
+referring to this latest news from Kabul.
+“El Salvador is actually more violent than either Afghanistan or Iraq right
+now,” I say. “Only Syria is more violent than El Salvador.”
+“Shit,” he says, but not in response to anything I’ve just said. “Those
+terroristas have huevos. Like the guerrilleros terroristas during the war.”
+His references to the war halt the conversation. I’m not sure what to say.
+Even though I left the FMLN over twenty-three years ago, and even though
+I detest the current FMLN government’s murderous mano dura strategy to
+combat gangs, Isaias’s comment about them being “terroristas” pushes at an
+
+insecurity deep in my gut, one that wants—that needs—to preserve my
+memory of the FMLN fighters of the 1980s and ’90s as heroes.
+“So, you think it takes balls to blow yourself up like that?” I ask Isaias,
+steering the conversation to safer shores.
+“Definitely. The ejercito trained us hard in how to kill,” he says, “but
+nobody could train me to kill myself like that.”
+I make a mental note of concern about this military stuff I’ve never
+delved into with him as we arrive at our destination. The escopeta-wielding
+guard in the Mister Donut parking lot greets us with a smile. We park, order
+our food, and sit down at one of the dozens of plastic booths. Just like when
+we met with the comandos urbanos during the war over two decades before,
+there’s no smell in Mister Donut. We’re in a time warp; the sterile,
+Americano-style banality of the restaurant once again in stark contrast to
+the fraught Salvadoran situation I’m bringing to it.
+“You know, boss,” Isaias says, “your job is to tell stories about violence
+here, right?”
+“Yes.”
+“Well, I have my own stories,” he says.
+Isaias is quite a funny storyteller. He’ll tell you tales of comedy and
+tragedy with the same toothy, nervous smile, which stretches across his face
+and beams outward. He wears it whether we’re braving clandestine gang
+hideouts or dealing with crooked cops, giving the appearance he’s getting
+off on the thrill and danger.
+My visit to the IML and the bone room is still fresh in my mind, as are
+the smells of the dead. So I ask Isaias if he has any stories about smells.
+“Smells?” he asks. His nostrils widen, his brow furrows, and his lips
+tighten to the side. He thinks about it for a few seconds, before a light bulb
+pulls the muscles of his friendly face upward.
+Before he begins, we start digging into the Salvadoran breakfast plato
+típico—avocado, Salvadoran sour cream, tortilla, and casamiento, the
+“wedding” of rice and black beans mixed together. As plastic and franchise
+and gringo as Mister Donut is, their plato típico is pretty good.
+“So, during the war,” Isaias begins, “mi general, René Emilio Ponce,
+ordered mi coronel, Mendez Rodríguez, to put together a rescue mission.”
+The name Ponce pushes a big gulp of casamiento down my throat. Ponce
+was the general and former minister of defense mentioned in the UN Truth
+Commission report for having issued orders to kill six Jesuit priests and
+
+their housekeepers in 1989. A School of the Americas graduate, Ponce had
+been implicated in other crimes against humanity as well.
+“A rescue mission?” I ask.
+“Yes, they assigned us to go rescue the remains of five soldiers killed
+near Conacaste,” he says. “They were left there by those culeros [“queers”]
+in the Bracamonte Battalion.”
+“Really?” I ask.
+“Yes. Mi coronel Mendez says to me, ‘Diablito, I want you to lead a
+force of three men for the mission, while others fight it out with the
+guerrillas.’”
+“‘Diablito?’ They called you ‘Little Devil’?”
+“Yes.”
+“Why?”
+“Because of how I look, how dark I am,” he explains, flashing an
+unusually sly smile in response.
+“So, getting to what you asked me about, the stuff about smell,” he says,
+“it reminds me of the time we went to an area near Conacaste, an area that
+saw heavy fighting with the guerrilleros.
+“The dead guys there were only partially buried. The area around them
+was minado. Mined. So other guys were fighting the guerrilleros while we
+went to the area where the bodies were.”
+“Why?”
+“We never leave our boys behind. We made it through the mines and got
+to our destination. The first thing that hit us was the smell. But we didn’t
+have time to waste with all the fighting, and we got the ponchos to carry the
+bodies in. The remains had been there over six days and smelled like hell
+itself. When we started picking them up, we yanked the meat right off them,
+like when you have a fried fish and the skin and meat fall right off.”
+He pauses to take a couple of forkfuls of Mister Donut’s casamiento.
+“Bitter es poco. Holy fuck, what a smell! Puta! The heat made them
+decompose and stink.”
+I stop eating, feeling bad for Isaias and the other soldiers, paid a piece of
+shit, risking their lives daily to do such horrific work in war’s gutters. His
+story also brings to mind the sickening smell of the stacks of bodies and
+bones I had seen during a visit to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s
+Office—body parts of women, children, and men who died in the Arizona
+
+desert while immigrating to the US. Victims of the ongoing war on
+immigrants.
+“So, wait.” I pause. “What part of the units were you, that they sent you
+to lead missions like that one? Those aren’t just any units.”
+“Yes, I was in the special forces.”
+Prior to this moment, my superficial assessment of Isaias’s friendliness
+and general demeanor had led me to believe he was just a regular
+infantryman: a grunt, who went in, saw a little too much war, and got out as
+quickly as possible. But special forces? Fuck. They were the hardest of the
+hard. I couldn’t believe I’d never asked him about this experience before.
+This is starting to feel worse than when I discovered that Atlacatl, the
+indigenous warrior I loved to see on my childhood briefcase, not only never
+existed, but that Salvadorans baptized banks and mass-murdering military
+battalions with the name of the made-up indigenous leader.
+“So, wait. You were in the special forces during the war?”
+“Yes,” he responds, his ever present smile still lighting up his round face.
+“I was in the Belloso Battalion.”
+“The Belloso Battalion?” I ask, my stomach swirling as if I were a child
+expecting punishment. They used to call the Belloso Battalion the Gringo
+Battalion because it trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Belloso
+committed countless massacres, extrajudicial killings, torture, and other
+crimes against humanity.
+Isaias’s face clouds. His mouth twists into a suspect shape and his large
+bright eyes look almost unhinged. The Diablito nickname becomes more
+sinister. He’s the same person; it’s my stomach, my mind, that are altering
+the reality before me, twisting it as if peyote is forcing me to see all the dark
+realities of Isaias’s past on his face.
+“What battalion did you belong to?” I ask, still in disbelief, hoping for
+another answer.
+“I was part of Sección Dos,” he says with a proud smile.
+Oh my fucking God. This loyal, funny, kind man who’s been driving me
+around, protecting me, who’s introduced me to his family, was a member of
+Sección-fucking-Dos, the escuadrones of one of the most murderous
+battalions of the war? How didn’t I pick this up? How? I better chill.
+I, too, have secrets. I can’t let on how much this shit disturbs me. I collect
+myself and decide to get on with the visits and deal with this information
+later. The interviews and research will get my mind off this revelation. I met
+
+this guy’s wife and kid. I saw that he loves them. And on top of all that, he’s
+always been good to me, looked out for me, for my safety. I’ll figure out
+what to do with him, but first I have to continue down this road to discover
+my grandfather’s story and the secrets it holds for my family, and for me.
+
+24
+
+Los Angeles, California
+1992
+
+G and I were on our blue velvet sofa watching a Face the Nation segment
+about the LA riots on the cheap television we’d bought for our still pretty
+empty Echo Park apartment we’d moved into late the previous year. That
+evening’s featured guest was President George H. W. Bush’s attorney
+general, William Barr. Barr started talking about “the significant
+involvement of gang members at the inception of the violence.”1 We
+understood his statement for what it was: a cynical use of the riots to justify
+a major shift in US law enforcement, a shift that would have profound
+implications for Salvadorans in the Pico Union neighborhood where I
+worked.
+Yes, I ended up in LA, of all places. G had altered my life game plan with
+her visit to El Salvador the year before. I’d moved back to San Francisco to
+be with her, when she’d flipped the script again, telling me that she had to
+move to LA for her work with the FMLN. The compas helped connect me
+to CARECEN Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization whose services were
+in high demand, with more than fifty thousand served in a single year. Our
+mostly Salvadoran and Guatemalan clients lined up for several blocks to
+receive legal help and other services.
+My decision to return to the US was also informed by a sense that the
+FMLN had enough revolucionarios in its ranks in El Salvador. Further, I’d
+seen firsthand the life-and-death consequences that US solidarity had on the
+campesinos of Chalatenango, and I felt I could be of best service to the
+
+cause through doing international solidarity work in the US. I’d also
+returned to California because I wanted to be closer to my family, including
+Pop. Pop’s logistical support of my comando urbano work, along with my
+greater understanding of El Salvador’s history of violence, had brought us
+closer together. For personal and political reasons, my struggle was back
+home in the belly of the beast.
+As we watched Face the Nation, G and I knew Attorney General Barr
+was using the complexity and chaos of post-riot LA as an opportunity to
+push his new priority for federal law enforcement: fighting gangs. Weeks
+after his appointment to the Bush administration, the new attorney general
+had targeted the gangs with the largest reallocation of FBI resources in
+history, moving three hundred agents from counterintelligence work against
+potential foreign enemies to instead target the gangs, including the
+Salvadoran maras.2 Before making his decision to prioritize gangs, Barr
+consulted with California governor Pete Wilson, who was preparing to
+launch Proposition 187, which denied government aid and services to
+undocumented immigrants, the de facto start of the contemporary antiimmigration movement in the United States.
+We knew he was lying because, unlike Barr, we were actually on the
+streets and in the communities during the riots, driving all around South LA
+and Pico Union, two of the major riot centers. Dressed as evangelicals, a
+tactic that G had learned during the war, which had allowed her to move
+around undetected, G and I put a Bible on the dashboard of our Chevy
+Bronco and managed to get through National Guard and police checkpoints
+in the militarized City of Angels. With the flames close enough for us to
+feel their heat, we heard and saw thousands of people stealing and
+surviving, doing things both noble and ignoble. The arson and other violent
+activities spread through many communities and were committed by many
+different actors, some of whom were members of gangs, but most of whom
+were not.
+Barr laying responsibility for a billion dollars of destruction on the gangs
+was a glimpse of the future of law enforcement, gangs, and immigration—
+and the lies of the powerful who continue to justify crime in the name of
+fighting it.
+Following Barr’s Face the Nation appearance, the staff of CARECEN
+voiced its concerns about the new focus on gangs to the local and federal
+officials sent to our offices to gather information on the causes and effects
+
+of the riots.3 As one of the larger community-based organizations in the riotaffected areas, CARECEN saw many journalists, nonprofit leaders, and
+corporate leaders come through our office, as well.
+During each of these visits, CARECEN lawyers gave a brief presentation
+laying out our many concerns about government abuses—questionable
+arrests, beatings, shootings, deportations, and the illegal detention in LAPD
+jails of thousands of immigrants and other Latinos.4 The lawyers’
+presentations were often followed by testimonies of clients and community
+members.
+Federal and local officials listened intently to the endless lists of
+complaints and concerns about abuses committed by numerous agencies,
+including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol,
+and other security forces. But the majority of our complaints focused on the
+LAPD, specifically on its Rampart Division, responsible for policing the
+Pico Union–Westlake area surrounding MacArthur Park.
+Our meetings with these officials usually ended with more than a few of
+us CARECEN workers grimacing and looking askance at them. More often
+than not, the officials gave stock answers in response to our questions about
+US government agents beating, abusing, and jailing migrants following the
+riots, and about targeting Central American organizations with surveillance,
+infiltration, and other covert actions throughout the 1980s. A US Senate
+committee concluded that fifty-two of the FBI’s fifty-nine offices had been
+targeting CARECEN’s sister organization, the Committee in Solidarity with
+the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and other solidarity organizations5
+with the help of right-wing Salvadoran operatives. There had also been
+break-ins into our CARECEN office in LA, which were never resolved or
+fully investigated. The senators deemed the spying, break-ins, and other
+activities “a serious failure in FBI management, resulting in the
+investigation of domestic political activities that should not have come
+under governmental scrutiny.”6 At CARECEN we all believed that the FBI
+had known that the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez death-squad
+organization was targeting CARECEN in LA and had done nothing about
+it.7
+Los Angeles, California
+1993
+
+By 1993, the CARECEN staff was clear about one thing: in the eyes of the
+LAPD and William Barr, most Salvadorans were either gang members or
+gang supporters. An obsession with gangs had taken hold in the chambers
+of the national and local governments. For example a 1992 report by the LA
+district attorney’s office claimed that “there are 125,000–130,000 gang
+members on file in the combined databases for Los Angeles County”8—a
+statistic questioned by CARECEN and other organizations. Lots of people
+without gang affiliations were being identified by law enforcement as gang
+members. One anonymous senior Immigration and Naturalization Service
+officer told the LA Times, “They [the LAPD Rampart CRASH units] were
+targeting a whole race of people. . . . That’s not a gang anymore, that’s a
+culture.”9
+CARECEN staff and community witnessed firsthand how the confluence
+of these interests created a perfect storm of new repressive violence in the
+US: counterinsurgency policing. This new style of policing began on the
+advisement of military personnel, such as Colonel Max G. Manwaring, a
+professor of military strategy at the US Army War College and a former
+Pentagon strategist, who was sent to El Salvador during the civil war to
+document the effectiveness of US counterinsurgency training and military
+aid there.10 Twenty-seven years later, as MS-13 and other gangs in Los
+Angeles and many US cities became a focus of government policy,
+Manwaring started making recommendations to increase the effectiveness
+of local police forces in their “war on gangs.”11 Counterinsurgency trainers
+and strategists like Manwaring helped militarize US police forces in the
+offensive against gangs. This proliferation was first seen on the streets of
+Los Angeles, in the LAPD’s deployments of SWAT units, anti-gang units
+like CRASH, and the saturating of poor neighborhoods with cops wearing
+the puffed-up, Robocop gear now worn by police everywhere.12
+Following former attorney general William Barr’s federal response to the
+LA riots, Manwaring was one of several US military officials who started
+seeing gangs as an inner city insurgency in need of a more militarized
+response. In 2007 he wrote an article for the U.S. Army War College
+Strategic Studies Institute that stated:
+A new kind of war is being waged in Central America—and elsewhere around the
+world—today. The main protagonists are what have come to be called first, second, and
+third generation street gangs. . . . What makes all this into a new kind of war is that . . .
+
+commercial motives [drugs and other gang-related enterprises] are known to have been
+developed into political agendas by more sophisticated gangs.13
+
+Today, while the media popularizes the terrors of gang war, it ignores the
+fact that counterinsurgency policing is a multi-billion-dollar industry for the
+arms dealers and military contractors that provide the tanks, semiautomatic
+weapons, and other equipment now supplied to local police forces
+throughout the United States.14 Just as law enforcement blurred the lines
+between youth and gangs, and Salvadorans and maras, so, too, had the
+counterinsurgency movement blurred the lines between police and military.
+
+The stunning green fields of Elysian Park gave G and me the space we
+needed to take a break from the hallucinatory August heat blurring the
+streets of post-riot LA. The park’s rows and rows of gigantic Canary Island
+date palms and the coolness of the grass against our skin helped us
+temporarily forget we were in this arid place.
+Sitting there, for the first time in my life, I had a desire for another, more
+personal peace.
+“Let’s have a kid,” I said to G.
+“Why not adopt, when there are so many orphans and other kids in need
+of a home?” she responded instantly.
+G had a point. During the war, G and I had visited many orphanages in
+Chalatenango. The camps were overcrowded with hundreds of children
+whose parents had been killed or disappeared by the Salvadoran military
+and the escuadrones. Increasing numbers of these kids had migrated north
+in the early nineties, assuming another anonymous Salvadoran label:
+“unaccompanied minors.”
+One late October afternoon in 1993, I decided to take a run in Elysian. I
+jogged down from the top of Douglas Street and into the park. I started my
+descent down the hill toward a spot where lowriders and Chicano and
+Central American families often congregated. As I neared the bottom of the
+hill, I stopped in my tracks at the sight below: hundreds, maybe even a
+thousand, of Latino gang members were gathered—a tattooed carpet of
+hardened vatos covering one of my favorite refuges from the city.
+Many of them looked like hardcore veteranos, but I saw lots of young
+bucks, too. Not knowing anyone and dressed in athletic gear, I decided it
+probably wasn’t a good idea for me to get closer than the running path. I sat
+
+down on the grass to take in the startling image of all of these gang vatos
+gathered on that big grassy field of palms.
+A few days later, I checked in with friends in the know about current
+gang happenings to see if they had heard anything about the meeting.
+According to them it had been called by a gentleman named Blinky
+Rodríguez, a former gang member–turned–businessman, joined by church
+leaders. But any evangelical ethos of the meeting was merely superficial. At
+another, deeper level, there was a historic truce among tens of thousands of
+members of Latino gangs in LA, being called for by the imprisoned leaders
+of La Eme (Spanish for M), the Mexican Mafia. In its early days, as Mara
+Salvatrucha started interfacing with the larger, more influential Mexican
+gangs, it eventually came under the protection and influence of La Eme,
+which added a 13 to the name, to signify M, the thirteenth letter of the
+alphabet.
+Despite police efforts to break it, the truce would hold for almost a year,15
+and, however reluctantly, the LAPD eventually had to recognize that it did
+significantly reduce homicides and violence among Latino gangs
+throughout East LA, the San Fernando Valley, and Pico Union. The even
+larger truce between the Crips and Bloods would hold for much longer,
+despite law enforcement’s overt and covert efforts to break it.
+My friends told me that members of a Hoover Street set were skeptical
+about going to the gathering unarmed that day. Persuading and leading the
+group of fifteen, mostly Salvadoran MS-13 members, was Alex Sánchez,
+the man who was to become my friend and whose trials and tribulations
+would come to exemplify the interconnectedness among Rampart, the
+LAPD, and El Salvador.
+
+By the time of the LA truce meeting in 1993, Alex was already heavily
+involved in standard gang activity: robbery, street fighting, and car theft.
+Months later, two events occurred that would fundamentally change his life
+forever: the birth of his son, Alexito, and the deportation orders that would
+prevent Alex from raising him. Alex became one of more than four
+thousand young Salvadorans who were deported following a wave of
+arrests throughout the US between 1993 and 1997.16 The wave of
+government anti-immigrant policies that began with California’s
+Proposition 187 had gone national with these mass deportations of Central
+American and Mexican immigrants. Ironically, these deportations are what
+
+brought these gangs to Central America in the first place. I’ll never forget
+the feeling of walking from a four-hundred-year-old church in San Vicente,
+down the cobblestone street leading to my grandmother Mamá Clothi’s
+house, where she’d lived for seventy years, and seeing the graffito on the
+cracked pink wall of her neighbor’s house HOOVER TINY LOCOS, the name of
+an 18th Street clik that originated blocks from CARECEN in Los Angeles.
+In the fateful year of 1993, suddenly back in the homeland he’d left as a
+child in 1979, Alex found himself surrounded by “people nobody gave a
+fuck about,” isolated young males and some female deportees who joined
+together to reconstitute the maras they thought they’d left back in Los
+Angeles. They were joined by some impoverished Salvadoran youth, for
+whom the maras’ LA gang culture—their tattoos, hand signs, clothes,
+rituals, speech habits, etc.—held a postwar rebel-without-a-cause appeal.
+Shortly after his arrival, Alex, too, decided that gang affiliation once again
+was the best way to protect himself and so started hanging out with MS-13
+members.
+In El Salvador, Alex observed that the government was not prepared to
+deal with the gang culture starting to take root. He saw how the US Justice
+Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance
+Program (ICITAP) brought New York’s Giuliani-era “broken windows”
+program to the training of Salvadoran police, which eventually became the
+foundation for the Salvadoran government’s mano dura. Alex also
+witnessed how this “hard hand” counterinsurgency policing strategy was
+being supported by other, noninstitutional anti-gang practices. “I remember
+seeing the bodies hanging from the poles in my neighborhood,” Alex would
+later tell me, “and I just said, ‘What the fuck?’” Alex’s clothes, style,
+speech, and tattoos would catch the attention of the authorities, who would
+stop and frisk or detain him whenever they saw him on the street. More than
+once he avoided capture by the escuadrones de la muerte.
+Between the push of the attacks and the pull of his newborn son, Alex
+decided to try to get back into the US illegally in 1996. That year, he had a
+Monseñor Romero–like transformation: “I need to change my life. I need to
+get out of this gang life,” he told himself.
+Alex’s migration was successful, and once back in LA, the memory of
+the gang truce meeting in Elysian Park stirred his imagination about how to
+deal with the difficult survival questions he would face as an ex–gang
+member, such as how his former homies would react, and how society at
+
+large would treat him as an ex-con. It was at this point that Alex met
+Magdaleno Rose-Ávila, the founder of Homies Unidos, a gang alternative
+program for at-risk youth in El Salvador. Alex was so impressed with the
+program that he decided to found Homies Unidos Los Angeles alongside
+Silvia Beltrán, my former assistant at CARECEN. Much of the work
+focused on providing alternate life choices to gang members by offering
+things like career development opportunities, arts training, and tattoo
+removal.
+The program caught the attention of the gang leaders, many of whom
+resented anti-gang work as a threat to their authority. Alex and Homies
+Unidos also found themselves in the sights of another organization that
+would have a profound impact on both El Salvador and the United States:
+Rampart’s anti-gang CRASH units. This directly affected Alex, as he had
+run afoul of a CRASH officer.
+Launched originally in the 1970s, the LAPD’s specialized anti-gang units
+focused on investigating gang activities and membership. They came to be
+known as Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH, a
+name that earned its share of criticism, though even more disconcerting was
+the kind of paramilitary, counterinsurgency policing that the LAPD
+innovated and helped export to other police departments.
+Salvadorans recognized what the LAPD was doing: turning its police into
+soldiers, who could act with wartime impunity. The emphasis was no longer
+on learning to investigate crimes and protect citizens. Instead, one police
+officer described his training thus: “We’ve had special-forces folks who
+have come right out of the jungles of Central and South America. These
+guys get into the real shit. All branches of military service are involved in
+providing training to law enforcement . . . we’ve had teams of Navy Seals
+and Army Rangers come here and teach us everything. We just have to use
+our judgment and exclude the information like, ‘at this point we bring in the
+mortars and blow the place up.’”17
+Inside the LAPD, Pico Union’s Rampart CRASH officers developed an
+esprit de corps known as the Rampart way—breaking the rules and playing
+dirty if they thought the situation demanded it, without fear of
+consequences. Outside the secretive confines of the Rampart station located
+at 2710 West Temple Street, Pico Union’s Central Americans became
+Rampart’s primary targets, whether or not they were affiliated with the
+gangs.
+
+One such encounter with Rampart became the community’s own Rodney
+King incident. In 1996, 18th Street gang member Javier Ovando was shot in
+the back by Rampart officers.18 Many in the community questioned the
+circumstances surrounding the shooting; there were allegations of planted
+evidence and a doctored crime scene. The Ovando case went nowhere,
+however, until the astonishing testimony of Rampart officer Rafael Pérez in
+1999.19 Caught in possession of six pounds of cocaine stolen from
+Rampart’s evidence room, Officer Pérez sought a deal with prosecutors and
+ended up making astounding revelations: he and dozens of other Rampart
+CRASH officers and their supervisors engaged in the very criminal activity
+they were sworn to fight. In more than four thousand pages of sworn
+testimony, Pérez detailed the activities—robbing banks, planting evidence,
+joining gangs, organizing hit squads, torturing people, arresting people on
+false charges, dropping off naked gang members in the territory of rival
+gangs, exposing gang members–turned–informants to their fellow gang
+members, and awarding plaques to those who wounded or killed gang
+members and others. Rampart officers had been criminals for years.
+Ovando’s was just the first of many documented cases of Rampart CRASH
+officers abusing their power, killing or wounding unarmed gang members,
+or planting guns and drugs on them.
+CRASH officers were also caught trying to silence those who could
+implicate them in their crimes, including Alex Sánchez. In late 1999,
+fourteen-year-old José Rodríguez was accused of murder and attempted
+murder. Alex was a key witness in José’s defense, as he could corroborate
+José’s alibi: José had been in a Homies Unidos art and poetry workshop
+when the murder took place. In order to prevent Alex from testifying, in
+January 2000, Rampart CRASH officer Jesús Amezcua arrested Alex and
+handed him over to Immigration to be deported for a second time.
+Alex, Homies Unidos, and the young people they mentored had
+experienced intense harassment from Amezcua and other members of the
+CRASH unit long before José’s arrest. Amezcua, a former Marine, would
+sneak up on participants in the Homies Unidos programs and bully them.
+He and other CRASH officers would corner the youths, saying things like,
+“What do you think, just because you’re in that program, things are gonna
+be different?”
+CRASH harassed many Homies members, but their main target was
+Alex, who by 1999 had become a highly visible peacemaker. On January
+
+21, 2000, Officer Amezcua picked Alex up for an old immigration
+violation. Because the LAPD’s own regulations prohibited LAPD officers
+from handling immigration issues, Alex’s arrest and delivery to the
+Immigration and Naturalization Service by Amezcua was in direct violation
+of the law. As a result, Free Alex Sanchez! became a national rallying cry to
+end the “blue wall of silence” that was protecting government agents in
+their illegal counterinsurgency war.
+The silences allowing these violations of the law were coming to an end
+in Los Angeles in 2000. So, too, were the silences in my own life coming to
+an end.
+
+25
+
+San Salvador
+2015
+
+Still reeling from Isaias’s divulgement, I excuse myself from the table and
+walk to the bathroom, then outside to take a breather. Standing nearby is
+Mister Donut’s security guy. Taking a breather from Isaias’s revelations of
+his military past while standing next to a guy bearing a 12-gauge escopeta
+isn’t ideal, but it’s what I have.
+How in the holy hell did I not see who Isaias was? How?
+Once I feel like I can keep a cool face again, I head back inside.
+“Bueno, mi coronel!” he says. “Ready for the operativo?” The whole
+military lingo shtick feels like a razor pressing into my stomach in ways it
+didn’t just minutes ago.
+“Yeah. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Let’s go.”
+We drive on Boulevard de Los Proceres, past the big stone statue heads
+of El Salvador’s founding fathers placed along it leading to the University
+of El Salvador. There I’m meeting Professor José Raymundo Calderón
+Morán, a historian whose six-hundred-plus-page book on Ahuachapán
+makes him El Salvador’s leading authority on Pop’s hometown and the
+surrounding region. Isaias pulls his car into the lot, and I tell him I’ll call
+him after my meeting. The weight of the Mister Donut casamiento still sits
+in my throat.
+I arrive at the crumbling walls of the building that houses the history
+department. Behind me, a giant banner stretched across the rubber tree–
+lined walkway proclaims student SOLIDARIDAD, an expression of the spirit—
+
+and political praxis—that has been passed down through generations of
+radical University of El Salvador students, whose ranks include Farabundo
+Martí, Lil Milagro Ramírez, and Roque Dalton. Students are currently
+boycotting classes in protest of budget cuts that have eliminated the jobs of
+several adjunct faculty members.
+“You’ll excuse me if I seem pressed for time,” Morán says as he enters
+his office, “but I’m sure you saw that things are, as always, buzzing with
+action.”
+“Yes, I heard about the student protests. The eternal return of la lucha”—
+the struggle.
+“Ah, so you know something of our political culture?”
+“Of course.”
+“Your parents are from Ahuachapán?”
+“Just my father. My mother is from San Vicente.”
+“So, what brings you here?”
+“I’m trying to learn more about my father’s family. Your book has
+pictures of his relatives and other people he knew. I want to know more.”
+“Like who?”
+“Like Don Sixto Padilla,” I said, referring to the tuxedoed, monocled
+eminencia of a doctor who founded Ahuachapán’s hospital in 1883. It’s
+strange to look at a picture of Padilla, whose large forehead and round face
+make him look like Pop and my brother Mem. To think that, prior to the
+hospital’s opening, the ilustre doctor I’d read about had fathered and then
+abandoned Mamá Fina, Pop’s maternal grandmother, leaving her ilegítima
+in crushing poverty.
+Morán’s tired, cool demeanor gives way to that of a bright-eyed history
+geek animated by history walking off the page to greet him.
+“So, Don Sixto was your father’s father?”
+“He was my father’s great-grandfather, the father of my greatgrandmother, Mamá Fina. But he didn’t recognize Mamá Fina. He left her
+ilegítima.”
+“Ilegítima?” he asks. “Oh yes, that is all too common throughout
+Salvadoran history. They called indigenous ilegítimos ‘evil’ and many other
+names to take away their humanity—before killing them. It’s incredible that
+Don Sixto was your great-great-grandfather. He was a very important figure
+in the history of Ahuachapán.”
+
+“Yeah, he’s interesting,” I said, “but the person who really interests me is
+my father’s father, my grandfather.”
+“What was his name?”
+“Don Miguel Rodríguez.”
+“Don Miguel Rodríguez?”
+“Yes.”
+Morán looked constipated, like he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to
+share what he knew.
+“Whatever you have to share, please do so,” I say. “I didn’t travel
+thousands of miles to stop because it might get ugly.”
+“OK, well, here we go,” he says. He looks away and pauses, as if trying
+to gather the right words. “I knew your father’s family. Without a doubt,
+Miguel Rodríguez and members of the Rodríguez family participated in La
+Matanza.”
+Morán pauses again, to gauge my reaction. Tears well up, but I hold them
+back because I don’t know Morán. But I’ve also inherited Pop’s hatred of
+his father, and while I’m a bit taken aback, I’m not actually surprised.
+Anyway, I have little room in me left for more shock following Isaias’s
+revelations.
+I do, however, feel a deep sadness, especially in my stomach and in my
+head, for Pop. I understand how utterly abandoned Ramóncito, that little
+boy who would become my father, must’ve felt. I can more clearly see the
+invisible codes hidden behind our macho bullshit. I could see why Pop’s
+emotional absence made me a stranger to myself. Pop’s perpetual play, his
+musical Orpheus-like ability to make anybody smile or laugh, echoed the
+loss of his dream, a dream I had thought was just about education but was
+really about living a happy, safe, and stable life. Though my own loneliness
+has tugged at me my entire life as well, I still can’t imagine the depths of
+Pop’s.
+“Are you OK?” Morán asks. My sorrow must show in my face. I nod
+though, and Morán goes on: “He was part of and probably helped organize
+the Guardia Civil, the organized civilian groups who went door to door
+searching for Indians, dragging them out of their homes and exterminating
+them by the hundreds. Mostly men and boys were hacked to death with
+machetes or shot, many in front of their families. Many were executed by
+firing squads, too. Most of them were buried in mass graves.”
+
+The truth is that, although I’m sad, part of me is glad as well. This
+revelation is bringing greater clarity to Pop’s story. Here is some
+explanation for our half deadness.
+
+Part IX
+
+26
+
+Northridge, California
+2000
+
+“OK, who’s ready to discuss the news stories for today’s assignment?”
+The faces of several of the college students in my Salvadoran Experience
+class dropped. Weekly assignments for the class—which spanned the
+founding of the nation state of El Salvador in the nineteenth century to La
+Matanza and the 1930s and present-day Salvadoran life in both Los Angeles
+and El Salvador—included scanning the local, national, and international
+media for stories about El Salvador and Salvadorans in the US.
+After leaving CARECEN and eventually separating from G after several
+years, I was now teaching at the California State University, Northridge
+(CSUN) campus, in the Central American Studies (CAS) program, where I
+also served as the program’s coordinator. In fall of 1997, Siris Barrios and
+several other, mostly female, student leaders of the Central American
+United Students Association (CAUSA) staged protests and hunger strikes,
+along with other advocacy, which played a definitive role in the
+establishment of our academic minor at Northridge. Support from the
+students and faculty of the Chicano Studies department also played a
+critical role. Eventually, the minor became a department—the first
+academic minor of its kind in the United States,1 which gave the program a
+sort of electricity and excitement. Many had no clue about why or how their
+families had migrated north.
+“I did the assignment, Profe,” began Marisa, an emphatic junior from
+South Central, a major hub of Salvadoran life. “But all I found were articles
+
+about the maras—maras killing each other, maras arrested for a drive-by,
+mareros arrested, maras targeted by LAPD. Maras, maras, and more maras.
+That’s all I found.
+“Look!” she exclaimed as she pulled out copies of the stories, most of
+which included images of gang members with heavily tattooed faces. The
+rest of the students in our class stared at Marisa’s printouts with rapt
+attention. “They’re all about mareros. Here and in El Salvador, it’s like
+they’re saying we’re all mareros.” Marisa was right: LAPD CRASH and
+Rampart’s view of Salvadorans had become the world’s view of us.
+Several other students brought up similar examples and complaints. It
+looked like the beginning of a heated discussion, a trademark of most of the
+courses making up the minor.
+“OK, we don’t like what’s reported,” I said. “So what’s left out?”
+“Our whole lives,” said Elizabeth, one of my top students. “Anything that
+makes us look human. That’s all.”
+“You don’t even hear the voices of actual mareros,” said Flor, a
+Guatemalan student with tattooed arms who’d grown up in Pico Union.
+“Not all gang members are killers, and many of them have families and
+come from families they care about. The stories don’t talk about them as
+human beings.”
+Like Marisa, the majority of the students were Salvadorans from poor
+and working-class immigrant families. Many were the first in their families
+to go to college. Some had been born in El Salvador or Guatemala or other
+Central American countries, others in LA. In one way or another, all were
+the children of the Central American wars of the eighties. None had ever
+been in a classroom where their reality as Salvadorans in the United States
+was a subject of serious intellectual pursuit.
+It was the year 2000, twenty years after Salvadorans had arrived en
+masse in the US, fleeing the war by the hundreds of thousands, and our
+voice was still missing in the telling of our own story. With the exception of
+a few Salvadoran writers publishing with independent presses, Joan Didion
+and other white US writers were the only tellers of Salvadoran stories in the
+English language. In fact the best-known English-language book about El
+Salvador is Salvador, written by Didion after spending a total of two weeks
+there—most of it in the air-conditioned company of US embassy officials.
+Her statement, “Terror is the given of the place,” is arguably the best-known
+description of El Salvador in the English language.
+
+“‘Terror?’” said Elizabeth. “I was born there. I remember the war and,
+yeah, I remember seeing dead bodies and things that cause terror, Lovato,
+but I also remember eating jocotes, always having lots of family around,
+and playing escondelero in the cool shade at the foot of the volcán ’til late. I
+remember a lot more than ‘terror.’ And who paid for that terror? This
+country. That’s who.”
+Marisa and my other students were not the first to feel the burning need
+for a more complex identity than the “war victim,” “refugee,” and “violent
+gang member” stereotypes they had been assigned by English-language
+media and literature. But they were the first generation of Salvadorans to
+take action around criminal justice and gang issues that previous
+generations of Salvadorans in the US either knew little about or eschewed
+for fear of the familial and political repercussions.
+
+In 2000 CSUN faculty and I took Mónica Novoa, Siris Barrios, and other
+student leaders to community events where Salvadoran peace activists
+talked about the ongoing case involving Alex Sánchez and Rampart.
+Mónica, already a force of nature and a natural leader who seemed to have
+inherited the Salvadoran organizing gene, brought Alex’s story back to
+campus and fired up the imaginations of students and faculty alike. Mónica
+and other students and faculty in the CAS program joined the national Free
+Alex Sánchez! campaign, which helped free Alex in September 2000.
+Later that year, Mónica and the other CAUSA students brought Alex to
+campus to speak to students.
+During his visit, the former MS-13 member helped explain some of the
+repercussions of counterinsurgency policing. “Gang and suspected gang
+members targeted by CRASH were often pressured into copping plea
+deals,” Alex told them, “in many cases admitting to crimes they didn’t
+commit. Who the fuck’s a judge or jury gonna believe,” Alex asked, “a cop
+or a gang member?”
+Most of my students and most Salvadorans I knew—myself included—
+sided with Alex, not the cops. In defending Alex Sánchez, we were
+defending ourselves.
+
+27
+
+San Francisco, California
+2000
+
+“Damn it,” Pop said. “I wish someone would exterminate those sons of
+bitches. They’re ruining the country.” He repeated this sentiment often,
+especially when he was watching Spanish-language broadcasts featuring
+reports from El Salvador about gang violence—the near-constant dominant
+news story about his homeland.
+Pop was watching TV while sitting on the black leather sofa beneath the
+portraits of Mamá Tey and Mamá Clothi hanging on the beige walls of the
+living room. I was visiting San Francisco from LA. Pop’s logistical support
+for my work with the commandos during the war had brought us closer.
+Ever since, G and Mom had worked like ants to build on the truce, helping
+to keep the delicate peace that had now held for over eight years.
+I had my own thoughts about Pop’s final solution to the gang problem,
+but tempering my desire to fire back was my growing interest in learning
+what he knew about La Matanza, a topic I had started taking a greater
+interest in, thanks to the Central American Studies program where I taught.
+Most of the books I’d read on the topic mentioned Ahuachapán, Pop’s
+hometown. By my math, Pop would’ve been nine in January 1932, when
+the massacres began, old enough to remember something. In the course of
+my research, I’d started to wonder what impact the colossal event had on
+the continued violence in El Salvador. Helping the students in my
+Salvadoran Experience class take the difficult but necessary dive into the
+
+history of war, violence, and overcoming that had shaped their families was
+inspiring me to look into the ways these forces had shaped mine.
+Both of my parents’ stories interested me more than Univision news, but
+because his history was the most forbidden fruit in our home, Pop’s story
+interested my inner Detective Columbo the most, especially the stuff he
+remained silent about: his father, Don Miguel, what he remembered about
+1930s El Salvador, and why he didn’t like to talk about these things. Like
+an archeologist searching for ancient buried treasure, I had brought a map
+of El Salvador. I’d also brought some of my books on Salvadoran history.
+With the resolve of a former revolucionario, I was determined to do el todo
+por el todo (go all out) to try and smash the cuartel protecting the
+unspeakable things in my father’s past, which I suspected haunted me on
+some level as well.
+Mom brought out Pop’s dinner, a ham and cheese sandwich with hot
+atole, to the living room table toward the end of Jeopardy! Alex Trebek told
+the contestants they were about to enter Final Jeopardy. Taking advantage
+of the commercial break that followed Trebek’s announcement, I
+approached the table where Pop sat regally despite being eighty-eight years
+old.
+“Hey, Pop,” I said, sitting down beside him. “I’m really enjoying
+teaching the students at Northridge.”
+“That’s great,” he said in a tone that signaled he could give a flying shit.
+Then, the inevitable and, for Pop, most important question: “Are they
+paying you for this or are you still working for el cura?” He asked, referring
+to my previous jobs at nonprofits, which for him meant working for free,
+like a priest.
+“No, Pop,” I responded, holding back a rush of anger. “I’m working at a
+university and get a check every two weeks. It doesn’t pay much, but I
+really love teaching and researching.”
+“Is that right?” he asked—a half-assed response.
+“Yes. The program at the university is the first of its kind in the United
+States,” I said. “Univision reported on it.”
+Mentioning Univision was strategic. My appearances on the national
+broadcasts of the Spanish-language network during my CARECEN days
+had given Pop major bragging rights with his friends as they gathered
+around at Hunt’s Donuts, solving the world’s problems in between buying
+and selling stolen goods.
+
+The white and black hairs of his brows stood up at attention. “This
+university stuff was on Univision?” he asked.
+“Yeah, Pop. We finally got formal approval to start our Central American
+Studies program a few weeks ago,” I said. “Now we’re doing the research
+to create a strong curriculum.”
+“That’s great,” Pop said. “Is there a chance you’ll get a permanent job?”
+“Nothing’s permanent, Pop. Anyone who knows history knows that,
+right?” I was appealing to Pop’s insatiable will to learn that had led him to
+read newspapers daily, devour World War II books, and make sweeping
+comments about history.
+“That’s right, son. Nothing’s permanent. Everything changes. I can tell
+you from all my friends who’ve died over the years.” Pop rarely mentioned
+death; I felt emboldened.
+“So, check this out, Pop,” I began, laying the map on the table.
+“Look there,” he said. “There’s Ahuachapán.”
+“Yeah. I’ve been reading a lot about the history of Ahuachapán in books
+like this one. It’s got some cool pictures and maps and stuff.”
+“Oh, yes. There’s San Vicente, your mother’s hometown,” he said, before
+calling out, “Nena, your son is researching that homely hometown of
+yours.”
+“Call it what you want, but I love my pueblo.” Mom was an eternal
+optimist, lightness coming out of every fiber of her being.
+“Yeah, Pop. Here’s Ahuachapán.”
+“Yes, that town.”
+“Says here in this book that La Matanza took place there, Pop,” I said,
+my stomach and bones tensing up for either another disappointment or a
+breakthrough.
+“La Matanza? What’s that?” he asked, with a real look of puzzlement on
+his face, the sounds of Pat Sajak and Vanna White filling the room.
+The commercial break advertising laxatives summed up my situation.
+Then, before I could answer, his eyebrows rose, his mouth opened wide,
+and he started to nod. “You’re talking about 1932,” he said, with the
+confident, intelligent, David Nivenesque air I always loved about him,
+“when they killed the comunistas and the indios.”
+“Yes!” I said loudly, my mix of excitement and fear competing with the
+blaring television. “Yes, Pop, that’s what I’m talking about.”
+
+“You know, in 1932 I was nine years old on my way to turning ten,” he
+said. “I remember everything.”
+I couldn’t believe he was actually going to speak about such a significant
+part of Salvadoran history that I’d never realized he’d experienced.
+“We had some friends, Adrian Rodas, his brother Virgilio, and La Chica
+López, a big beautiful india who was good with a gun and rode a big white
+horse. She was friends with my mother and my abuela, Mamá Juanita, and
+was involved with Adrian. Adrian and Virgilio were two men who had
+balls, so much balls they didn’t fit in their pants. They could ride a horse
+backward, shoot with two guns, and killed guardias before ’32. La Chica
+was good with a gun, too. They were somehow involved with the indios,
+but they weren’t comunistas. Adrian and La Chica told my mother and
+Mamá Fina, ‘It’s probably a good idea for you to leave to Ataco or San
+Salvador.’ There were rumores, and my mother and Fina were talking about
+leaving, but we didn’t leave in time.”
+“Wow, Pop. So, what happened?”
+“In the early morning we heard tatatatat!” he said. “Mamá Fina told my
+mother to send me to Mamá Juanita’s house, but it was too late. I was
+scared hearing the shots. My mother looked out, saw what was happening,
+and told me and Mamá Fina, ‘Don’t be scared. We’ll get through this. Just
+go back to the bed. I’m going to see what’s going on.’
+“I was worried about my mother going out. You could hear it sound like
+this,” he rapped on the door with his hand to imitate gunshots. “We thought
+they were knocking on our door. But it was the machine guns. Soldiers were
+on the corner shooting at about two hundred men who were in the barranco,
+about a block from our house. My friend Joaquin’s father, Coronel Chacón,
+and some troops came out of the cuartel and started a massacre right there.
+It was a matazón of people.
+“One of the men escaping the matazón tried to come into our house. He
+hid in the oven, a big adobe oven my mother and Mamá Fina made bread
+in. Mamá Fina told him, ‘I’ll give you five pesos. Leave and God bless
+you.’ He took the money and started running out the back. He was hopping
+over a fence when the bullet hit him. He died. The military came and
+searched our house. The first place they searched was the adobe oven. My
+mother eventually came back and told us what was happening.”
+Pop caught his breath. Until that moment, he’d shown no signs of
+difficulty talking about stuff he’d been silent about for so long.
+
+“Later that morning, a friend said, ‘Hey, let’s go see what happened at the
+cuartel,’” he continued. “We walked toward it and got close enough to see
+the cuartel. We climbed a tree. There were men with machine guns standing
+above men with shovels digging holes. After they dug the hole, you could
+hear the tatatatatat of the machine guns. We saw the military guys give the
+prisoners shovels. They made the comunistas dig their own graves to bury
+themselves in. They shot many.”
+The weight of this silenced memory pressed my stomach.
+“There was a band, a group of soldier musicians playing music. One of
+them started reading a manifesto: ‘We invite the people to come out at two
+in the afternoon to see the execution of a group of rebels.’ Many people
+went. Some went out of curiosity; others went out of fear, like they were
+forced. In the cuartel, there were a bunch of men and boys lined up to be
+killed.
+“We thought they were going to march them to the cemetery,” Pop said,
+“but instead they went to the patio of the cuartel, a tremendous big place. It
+was beautiful there. They took them there and shot them by the dozens.
+Papapapapap. Puta, sííííí. They invited people to come and see what the
+Socorro Rojo Internacional was. They made mass graves, not just in the
+cemetery, but in the cuartel.”
+Not noticing much emotion in the telling, I asked, “Pop, how did seeing
+this make you feel?”
+“I started feeling scared after seeing all these dead people,” he said. “At
+night, I felt afraid of seeing the dead and the ones that were almost dead
+before they came to give them the tiro de gracia. Later on, I spoke with
+other kids about it. After that, I never spoke about this again, not since
+childhood. I saw not just one but hundreds of dead in those days.”
+“Why didn’t you say anything, Pop?”
+“I had no occasion to speak about it. I never belonged to a political party
+and wasn’t partisan. At night, me surraba [shit in my pants] in the darkness.
+When I was alone, I went to Mamá Fina’s cot to sleep with her.”
+Pop paused to breathe and started trembling like when he was angry.
+Then he began shaking more violently. At that moment, my eighty-eightyear-old father became the nine-year-old boy who’d witnessed one of the
+worst massacres in the history of the Americas. He looked so vulnerable.
+Mucus started dripping from his nose. Tears followed.
+
+After a few moments he tried to gather his composure. “This makes me
+very sad, son. Can we stop now?”
+“Of course, Pop.”
+A moment of silence. Pop looked around the living room, as if he’d lost
+his glasses or something, then came the sounds of his big nose honking
+from crying. Unbeknownst to me, my heart had always been broken
+because of the heartbreak I inherited from Pop. I started crying, too, and
+hugged him as he remained silent, unable to look directly at me.
+Mom came into the room; she had surely been listening. She looked
+concerned for him but also happy to see us bonding.
+“It’s OK, Nena,” he told her. “It’s OK.”
+In that moment I was full of pride, giving myself credit for breaking
+through Pop’s silence. Many children of Holocaust survivors have been
+driven to bring their parents’ hidden stories to light. Psychologist Dina
+Wardi calls them “memorial candles.”1 Lighting up this story hidden in the
+shadows of our family history, I felt like the Salvadoran equivalent.
+Minutes later, I gained a different perspective. Looking at Pop gather a
+smile as he struggled to raise his frail physique from the sofa to walk to the
+bathroom, the revolucionario in me realized that Pop had been doing the
+same emotional heavy lifting I’d thought only Mom did. Entering the final
+phase of his life, Pop felt ready to talk about his own silent darknesses. I
+was simply the listener he found to help him do so.
+
+Certain things Mamá Tey had told me about Pop’s hard life made sense
+now. I understood why, for example, twelve-year-old Ramóncito had started
+decades of heavy drinking.
+I also became even more aware of the tender force of Mom’s lightness—
+how Mom and Mamá Tey’s love had saved Pop from himself and helped
+me save myself. They connected me to a lost part of my history and helped
+me understand the importance of extended family—all my cousins and
+aunts, whose pictures hung on the walls of our Folsom Street apartment.
+My father’s tragic past—in many ways the unconscious root of my anger—
+had helped form me into Tito, the crazy dude who, without knowing the
+emotional atom bomb he’d inherited from his family, had joined Los
+Originales and the comandos urbanos of the FMLN guerrillas. The bornagain Christian phase of my youth probably had something to do with
+trying to redeem myself from my terrible inheritance, too.
+
+My inner and outer peace with Pop fundamentally altered my sense of
+my family, my country, and myself. I’d never before experienced this level
+of compassion, nor the profound ways a compassionate perspective of the
+past could alter one’s view of people and of nations. Suddenly I experienced
+Pop, my family, and Salvadorans and El Salvador generally in a much more
+tender way. But to find emotional equilibrium I also had to turn this
+perspective inward and find compassion for the spoiled, misguided little
+gringo boy who was so angry and confused about being Salvadoran. This
+newfound love of myself helped me map the layers of emotions—fear,
+anger, hopelessness—working below my conscious awareness to create my
+inner conflicts. Through all of this I’d found my way. I’d come to realize
+that if we do the necessary work of unforgetting, our buried love can
+blossom.
+
+28
+
+Ahuachapán
+2015
+
+As always, Isaias shows up at 7:30 a.m. Today’s drive will take us west to
+El Salvador’s coffee-growing regions—to Ahuachapán and Ataco.
+I’m not chatting with him the way I usually do. I need to find the time to
+process whatever the fuck my relationship with him means to me in the
+wake of his revelation. I’m at a loss as to what, if anything, I should do,
+except perhaps learn some more about how he’s become who he is.
+Because today’s trip is of a more personal nature, I let him know our plan
+for the day: looking for more clues about Don Miguel and my father’s side
+of the family. In the process, I’ll be interviewing a couple of people who,
+along with Pop, are among the few witnesses of La Matanza still alive
+today. Along the way, we’ll be passing through Nahuizalco, one of the last
+remaining indigenous communities in El Salvador and one of the towns that
+saw the worst of La Matanza. In Nahuizalco we’ll be meeting my friend
+Reynaldo Patriz, a leader of the indigenous community there. Reynaldo
+helped me find Matanza survivors still living in Nahuizalco and will be
+conducting interviews alongside me.
+“My friend Reynaldo was involved in the social movements during and
+after the war,” I tell Isaias as we begin our long drive west out of San
+Salvador. “So please don’t bring up the military or the war, OK? He lost
+family and friends, and it’s very touchy.”
+What I don’t tell Isaias is that Reynaldo is also a former member of the
+FPL, one of the FMLN’s five politico-military organizations during the war.
+
+No need to rock our rusty Rocinante with more potential for drama than it
+already carries. I’ve also forewarned Reynaldo that Isaias was in the
+military and asked him not to talk about the military, either.
+“Yes, mi coronel,” Isaias says. He smiles as we make our way to Ruta
+Ocho, baptized by local boosters as the Ruta de las Flores because of the
+spectacular flowers and trees that line the highway for more than fifty
+miles. The route courses through the heart of land long made fertile by a
+mix of volcanic ash and minerals. Now the decomposed bodies of
+thousands of indigenous people also fertilize this land.
+“You know, boss,” he says, tilting his head back as he takes a deep breath
+signaling he wants to talk, “I was thinking about those questions you asked
+me about the special forces.”
+“Yes.”
+“So, I brought you some pictures I wanted to show you. Check them out.
+They’re in the glove compartment.”
+I open the glove compartment, lift the car registration papers and the .38
+he has on top, and pull out a plastic sandwich bag containing photographs.
+Inside are five pictures. From the faded colors of the pictures I guess they
+were taken sometime in the mid to late eighties.
+“They’re from my training,” he says with a hint of pride in his smile. “It
+took a lot for us to graduate.”
+The picture on top is of a younger, thinner, shirtless Isaias standing
+beside another guy. They’re standing on a grassy field, wearing bandanas
+and fatigues, their faces painted green, and holding M16 rifles. In the
+background is a smiling, unidentified child in a red shirt photobombing.
+Behind them sits a big white building with windows framed by barbed wire.
+“That was our graduation,” he says.
+Another picture shows him fully suited in military fatigues as if gearing
+for battle, seated in the back of an army truck. “That’s us going to combat.”
+I look up to see where we are on Ruta Ocho and see we’re near Lourdes
+Colón.
+“See, there, boss,” he says, pointing toward the city on our right. “That’s
+where we had dinner at my house. You remember?”
+“Yes.”
+The image of Isaias playing soccer in the dusty street in front of his
+house with Saulito, his six-year-old, comes to mind. As we ate the
+casamiento and chicharrones (cracklings) his wife, Haydee, had cooked,
+
+Isaias talked about how soccer, family outings, and the occasional whipping
+were the trifecta of parental discipline necessary to raise his boy in a gangcontrolled neighborhood like Lourdes Colón. The former kid soccer player
+in me smiled, even as my own inner beaten child cringed.
+“That one we took when we were with the trainers,” he says, pointing
+down toward the next photograph in my hands. “Los Americanos.”
+I look at the photograph. In it Isaias is crouching next to a tree. He’s
+stripped down to his green army underwear. He’s wearing a bandanna and
+his face is painted as he looks directly into the camera. In a semicircle
+around Isaias are seven of his fellow soldiers, other special-forces trainees
+—all with painted faces and bandannas and all stripped down to their
+underwear. Isaias and another guy next to him are holding big gray tin cups.
+Above them, a bleeding corpse is hanging from a tree. I realize it’s a dog
+whose skin has been peeled off, leaving only a dark strip on the reddened
+snout showing it once had black fur. Its throat has been slit and its blood is
+dripping into one of the cups. Isaias is looking straight at the camera. For
+once he’s not smiling. His arms and lips are covered in blood.
+“The trainers watched as our commanders told us, ‘Number 3, you will
+not graduate unless you drink the dog’s blood,’” Isaias says. He has on the
+same nervous smile he wore when we were in dangerous gang country. “So,
+we had no choice. The colonel told us, ‘I will tear up your diploma if you
+don’t.’”
+I’ve read the death-squad manuals prepared by US trainers and heard the
+stories of escuadrón activities. I’d gotten to know death-squad operatives,
+like a guy named Leonardo, who had turned away from the escuadrones and
+started volunteering with CARECEN, back when I first met G in San
+Francisco. This still feels horrifically surreal. I study the picture and listen
+with the same morbid fascination that sells horror movies and newspapers.
+But my interest is also anthropological, a study in the ritual of
+dehumanization and murder that has been destroying Salvadoran life for
+centuries.
+“‘Number 3!’ the trainer would call at me,” Isaias continues, “‘it’s your
+turn to hang the first dog.’ So I breathed in and went at it. I put the knife
+here in the neck and cut the vein.” He points to the spot on his own neck.
+“‘Diablito, I want you to make sure you don’t lose a drop of blood. No
+waste. Not one drop!’ the trainer said. Son of a bitch, it was disgusting, but
+after getting the blood, I put the cup up to my mouth and quickly
+
+swallowed. It tasted salty, the blood of that animal, salty like you can’t
+imagine. Ours is sweet by comparison. It was like drinking seawater. It’s
+even worse as it coagulates.” Almost thirty years after his special-forces
+training, his body still trembles in disgust.
+“It becomes like gelatin. I was lucky, since it was still fresh,” he says.
+“Some guys had to drink it dry en un pocillo (a cup). Afterward, they
+ordered us to cut the dog up, cook the meat, and make soup from the
+intestines and bones.”
+I swallow and try to calm my nausea with deep breaths. Vomit bubbles up
+my throat. I ask Isaias to pull over so we can get something to drink. We
+stop at a fresco stand. The greenery all around us soothes me until I regain
+enough calm to hear the voice inside me that says, You wanted to
+understand what turns kids into killers? Here’s your chance.
+The desire to avoid any more gory details collides with the need to
+understand why he did it. Still, I can’t quite make myself ask this question
+outright for fear of shaming him into silence. Instead I ask, “Why do you
+think they made you do that?”
+“It was part of our special-forces commando training that lasted three
+months,” he says. “I think they put us through it for different reasons.”
+“Like what?���
+“To give us the will we needed to kill. Also for survival—to train us to
+search and find food wherever we could, what to do if we were captured by
+guerrillas. They pulverize you until you submit.”
+“How many of you participated?”
+“The course started with forty soldiers. We finished with twenty-five.
+Others deserted.”
+Those “pulverize” and “submit” parts he’s talking about are important
+aspects of the reeducation provided to Salvadoran and other soldiers by
+trainers at the School of the Americas (SOA) in Georgia, at Fort Bragg in
+North Carolina, and at other Pentagon facilities.1 Isaias was trained in El
+Salvador by Salvadoran officers who had been trained at the SOA and were
+supervised by US officers sent to the country as part of the Pentagon’s aid
+program. Like any other boot-camp or police academy, the rigorous
+physical and mental training of the Salvadoran military is designed to turn a
+person unaccustomed to killing into a person disposed to kill for a higher
+purpose defined by his or her controllers. The forging of this new identity is
+accomplished in two ways, one overt, the other covert.
+
+The overt training described in the course catalogs of these facilities is
+designed to transform grunts like Isaias into “professional soldiers”—
+soldiers steeped in and guided by the doctrine of a “just war.”2 On the
+surface, the “just war” curriculum Isaias and other soldiers studied looks
+innocuous, with courses in human rights, special and civil military
+operations, and resource management. Beneath the surface, however, the
+curriculum has a darker purpose. In the words of Lesley Gill, a scholar who
+studies the military training taught at the School of the Americas:
+The just-war thesis is a tactical anodyne that obscures the horrors of war through its
+emphasis on the responsible use of violence by military professionals. . . . Images of the
+professional soldier engaged in the good fight enhanced the virility and heroism of men
+who sacrifice their personal safety to fight a malicious enemy for the greater benefit of
+the nation. They also permitted officers to distance themselves from their humble
+origins and to dissociate from the real terror of actual violence, which was passed off to
+front-line soldiers from ethnic and racial minorities of supposedly inferior intellect.3
+
+The Salvadoran government has been notoriously secretive about its
+actions during the civil war, even denying official records to the UN Truth
+Commission created in 1992. Likewise, SOA records have largely been
+kept from public eyes. However, US Army and CIA intelligence manuals
+declassified in the last decade make clear that the overt training at the SOA
+and similar facilities also served as the foundation for covert training.4 The
+manuals are written in bureaucratic military lingo designed not only to
+ensure plausible deniability, but also to dehumanize victims and make
+violence sound unemotional and routine. After indoctrination, “a just war”
+becomes “just war.” In many of these documents, “neutralization” is as
+close to an outright reference to murder as the authors ever come, as in this
+routine passage from one of seven training manuals (commonly called the
+torture manuals) declassified in 1996 and used between 1987 and 1991 for
+training courses in Latin America and at the SOA. It’s about
+“recommending CI [counterintelligence] targets for neutralizing. The CI
+targets can include personalities, installations, organizations, documents and
+materials. A CI target is someone or something that could be included in the
+above categories and could be hostile or not.”5
+In 2004 the National Security Archive declassified a CIA interrogation
+manual from the 1980s that was used in El Salvador and at the SOA during
+the civil war.6 The document includes the teaching of torture techniques,
+coded under the term coercive and listed under the “scope of instruction”
+
+for the training. The manual states, “There are three major principles
+involved in the successful application of coercive techniques [which
+include] methods of inducing physical weaknesses: prolonged constraint;
+prolonged exertion; extremes of heat, cold or moisture; and deprivation of
+food or sleep.” It also includes descriptions of sensory-deprivation
+techniques and states that “pain which [the subject] feels he is inflicting
+upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance. For example, if he is
+required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting
+on a stool for long periods of time.”
+Rituals like Isaias’s dog-killing “survival” exercise act as a kind of bridge
+between the high moral standard implied by a just-war doctrine and the
+dark recesses of inhumanity hidden behind this veil of heroism. When the
+teachings are fully internalized, “heroes” can “neutralize” the “enemy,”
+whether “hostile or not,” and torture a “target” with no qualms of normal
+empathy or conscience.
+Several minutes go by as I try to process what Isaias just revealed. I look
+at him and note how at odds his caramel skin and other indigenous features
+are with his military buzz cut. I recall the words of my friend José Raúl
+Cortez Vázquez, an indigenous leader from Izalco who was also a
+commander in the FPL during the war. When I asked José Raúl what he
+thought about the gang crisis and how to solve it, he said, “The gang
+problem is fundamentally a problem that begins with the breakup of the
+family. From the moment the indigenous people’s land, identity, and way of
+life were destroyed, the family in El Salvador was fragmented, and it
+remains that way today.”
+
+I’m nervous as we near Nahuizalco. Things could get ugly if Reynaldo
+starts talking about the frente and bad-mouthing the military in front of
+Isaias. As part of a team of researchers affiliated with the Museo de la
+Palabra y la Imagen who documented, tracked down, and interviewed the
+few remaining Matanza survivors in western El Salvador, Reynaldo is one
+of the few Salvadorans who possesses critical knowledge about this dark
+stain on the country’s modern history. He himself is indigenous; thus his
+perspective has additional weight.
+We arrive at our meeting place, Nahuizalco Park, an idyllic park whose
+market is a center of economic development in the community, a place
+where tourism is combined with agriculture. Reynaldo’s standing at the
+
+outer edge of the busy park, smiling as he appears to joke with some other
+men gathered around. We pull up beside him and greet him. Reynaldo gets
+in the car. I introduce him to Isaias, and we’re off to our first stop, Ataco,
+the home of Don Miguel and the rest of Pop’s paternal family. The contrast
+between the two men in the car with me extends beyond their politics to
+their looks. Isaias is shorter and far darker than Reynaldo and has no facial
+hair, in the style of many military men, unlike Reynaldo who sports a
+mustache. And, yet, by his own reckoning, Isaias has no sense of his family
+history, much less that of the indigenous culture that gave him his looks.
+As we start driving out of town and back to the Ruta de La Flores, I
+notice that the colorful walls of the city bear MS-13 graffiti.
+“Are there a lot of gangs here?” I ask.
+“Oh, yes,” Reynaldo says. “Nahuizalco has lots of gangs.”
+“Including indigenous youth?”
+“Yes, some of our youth are in the gangs. I know some gang members
+from back in my neighborhood in El Carrizal. The silencio helps the gangs
+recruit new members, just as it helps them make money.”
+“What silence?” I ask.
+“During war in the eighties, there was a lot of silence in Nahuizalco.”
+“Like what?” I press on, without considering the danger of bringing the
+topic up in front of Isaias.
+“Members of the Detachment No. 6 [the Sixth Military Detachment,
+based in Sonsonate] came and found whoever was on their lists or whoever
+they suspected of being comunista and killed them. Whoever was on the list
+was dragged out, tortured, and taken to the place where they killed people.
+Forty-two people killed. Then on the thirteenth of July [1980], a bomb
+exploded in El Carrizal at four a.m.”
+I look at Isaias. No smile. His big eyes aren’t sparkling. I wonder if they
+sent him and his special-forces crew on missions like the massacre
+Reynaldo just described.
+“On the thirteenth of July, there was a total zozobra,” Reynaldo
+continues, not noticing Isaias’s tension. “Panic took hold of everything. The
+military imposed that silence because they didn’t want people to come out
+to claim their dead, to give Christian sepultura to them. But many were
+courageous and went out to get the bodies and buried them in the common
+cemetery of Nahuizalco.” He adds, “It was different from what happened in
+1932.”
+
+“What do you mean?” I ask.
+“Before the war, my parents took me and my brothers to the places in El
+Carrizal where the secret burial sites were: Bamburral, El Potrerito, and
+Caserío Los Sánchez—all clandestine burial sites from 1932. My father
+would point to the part of the field where there was only grass and say, ‘See
+there. That’s where your uncles are buried.’
+“Today, this silence is costing us greatly. There’s nothing that explains to
+the young people our history and why they feel the pain that they carry. But
+there is a breaking of the silence. We have celebrated ceremonies in January
+honoring the dead of La Matanza. We’re teaching our kids their history,
+which previous generations never learned, and we’re still consulting the
+spirits of the abuelos.”
+I recall my 2009 visit to a school in Izalco where Juliana Ama, the greatgreat-grandniece of Feliciano Ama, the storied indigenous rebel leader
+killed in 1932, was teaching indigenous children Náhuat—a block from
+what may be the largest mass grave in the country. Indigenous people there
+are also organizing commemorations of La Matanza.
+We drive to meet María Isabel Menéndez, the woman who, along with
+Pop, is one of the last living witnesses to La Matanza. Menéndez lives on
+the outskirts of Ahuachapán with her daughter in yet another neighborhood
+where walls sport VER, OÍR Y CALLAR and other gang graffiti. Inside her small
+house, a tired mongrel dog and some indifferent cats sleep on the cool,
+painted concrete floor. Reynaldo introduces us and starts talking in an oddly
+formal way about how crude and hard life is in El Salvador and how
+important it is to move forward by knowing the past. Menéndez seems
+bewildered and is reluctant to speak. Her daughter and granddaughter stand
+in the background monitoring the situation.
+“I’ve forgotten a lot,” she says. “I was small, about six or maybe eight. I
+remember the noise of all the trucks, the soldiers going to get the men in all
+the houses and take people away.”
+It’s hard to tell whether she’s worried about the Matanza of the past or
+the mara violence of the present. I’m worried about what we might trigger
+in this woman. I try to signal by nodding my head toward the door that we
+should get going.
+“Do you remember anything else?” Reynaldo asks, oblivious to my
+signal.
+
+“I was too small to understand what happened,” she says. “Also, my
+father was dying in the hospital in the middle of all that, and we were with
+him. The only other thing I remember was that the soldiers came to the
+hospital to search for my father because my mother and father were indios.
+The only reason they didn’t take him was because he was already dying. He
+died in the middle of all that from health problems that had nothing to do
+with the conflict. They didn’t allow us to pray for him for nine days because
+it was prohibited for anyone to gather.”
+Menéndez stops talking, clearly gripped with too much fear, and we need
+to respect that. We bid her farewell.
+Our next stop is Don Juan Montano’s shack on the outskirts of
+Ahuachapán. Don Juan’s semirural neighborhood is surrounded by maize,
+izote flowers, and gigantic carpets of green that give the land a beatific
+look, contrasting starkly with the tin shack he lives in with his
+granddaughter. His granddaughter comes out to greet us and the elderly
+man hobbles behind her, flashing his gums in a big smile. He immediately
+starts talking to us, but I can’t understand anything he’s saying—he’s
+mumbling and talks fast. He has dementia. I have to focus intensely to
+capture even a few of the words out of what seems like a mix of
+conversation, poetry, and the speaking in tongues I used to hear in
+Pentecostal churches. His disjointed soliloquy continues for several
+minutes, before his granddaughter signals he needs to rest.
+I think about Pop, who is just a couple of years younger than Don Juan.
+He, too, has dementia. I should remember this mix of gibberish and
+fragmented memory as he starts his own journey into forgetting.
+“He’s completely given to the religion. I’m sorry.”
+“Please don’t worry about it,” I say. “It’s all true in some way, and that’s
+helpful.”
+Reynaldo and I return to the car to begin the drive back to Nahuizalco
+along the Ruta de Las Flores.
+“I’m sorry too, Roberto,” Reynaldo says. “That’s how it is with the
+ancianos. Some will talk. Others remain silent. Some like Papa Juan have
+dementia, and it mixes up their memories.”
+In Nahuizalco I say my good-byes and thank-yous to Reynaldo, then
+Isaias and I start back to San Salvador. As we drive, I gaze over at Isaias,
+the embodiment of the ruthlessness of amnesia. I consider the impossibility
+of trying to lead a normal life while living immersed in perpetual,
+
+normalized violence. It seems inevitable that this situation gives way to
+what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” and the state
+of us Salvadorans living half dead.
+“How long do you think it’ll take us to get home?” I ask.
+“About forty-five minutes or so, depending on traffic.” A long silence
+between us begins.
+When we arrive at Tía Esperanza’s, I pay Isaias. As I get out of the car,
+he says with his big smile, “Thank you, mi coronel. Call me when you
+come back!”
+But I will never call Isaias again.
+
+29
+
+Los Angeles, California
+2019
+
+“Who’d’ve thought that of all people, you, the kid who used to tell me, ‘I
+hate God,’ would be organizing a fucking revival?” I ask Alex Sánchez.
+“I know,” he says. “Maybe I oughta put my little Testigo suit on again
+and start preaching.”
+We’re both cracking up beneath the gigantic white tent that does, in fact,
+have the animo of a religious revival. A boisterous crowd of about five
+hundred kids and teenagers who’ve arrived from Central America in recent
+years—most as unaccompanied minors—are crowded into the tent set up on
+the USC campus just south of Pico Union. It’s the fourth annual Central
+American Youth Leadership Conference organized by Alex and Homies
+Unidos.
+“Don’t remind me about that ‘ojo por ojo, diente por diente’ shit. Their
+God was the one that pushed me into MS!”
+We laugh. His past self as a Jehovah’s Witness before he joined MS-13 is
+speaking to my former evangelico deacon wearing the green sharkskin suit
+of my unsaved life.
+“Believe it or not,” I say, “the fucking evangelicos had me on my knees
+praying for Ronald Reagan.”
+“What? You’re kidding,” he says. Like most, Alex doesn’t know about
+the religious zealotry in my past.
+“Yeah. They had me goin’ to church three to four times a week. I even
+gave fifteen percent of my income. The tithe.”
+
+“Fuck, loco, that’s crazy,” he says in the cadence of the SalvadoranCalifornian Caló we share. “But you know what?” he continues. “We
+actually need something that powerful—spiritual and emotional stuff—to
+help people leave the crazy life.”
+I nod in agreement, remembering how the discipline and militancy of my
+life as a born-again believer helped me leave a darker path behind. Those
+who train purveyors of violence, from gang sicarios to the military and
+escuadroneros of El Salvador, are well aware of the need to inspire an
+almost religious zealotry in their recruits. We need the good fight to be
+fought with an equal fervor—and if it’s religion that inspires that for some,
+so be it.
+“Who’d’ve thought our Salvadoran shit would become some big
+national-security shit?” he asks.
+“We’ve been dealing with national security and counterinsurgency since
+most of us can remember,” I say. “We just didn’t know it when we were
+kids.”
+Alex has invited Haydee Sánchez, a respected leader of the Náhuat
+community in El Salvador, to speak. She begins the event by saluting the
+four directions and letting the young people know why this pre-Columbian
+ritual is critical to the continued survival of her people.
+“It’s important to be in touch with the warmth of the earth,” Sánchez
+says. “It’s important for you to understand who you are, where you come
+from. Don’t lose the opportunity to organize yourselves,” she continues,
+“for you are the future of this country as well as of the places where your
+parents, abuelos, and families still live. We still have the opportunity to live
+in harmony with Mother Earth. Don’t waste it.”
+I decide to circulate around the tent to speak with the kids in the crowd.
+Their tales are not just stories, but epics. Honduran girls cross hellish desert
+and rural and urban landscapes of war and violence. Salvadoran and
+Guatemalan boys hike through Mexican states like Tamaulipas, where
+cartels and government officials have killed and buried hundreds of
+migrants in mass graves. Salvadoran boys barely escape the vise grip of
+violence so extreme it should belong only to noir novels—murderous gangs
+and death squads that creep in the night and snatch loved ones. Mayan girls
+and boys ride the steel back of a fire-breathing dragon called La Bestia,
+which hacks off arms, legs, and heads of uncareful migrants during the
+train’s long trip to the North. Young women and girls undertake journeys
+
+filled with monsters who rape, mangle, and enslave 90 percent of female
+travelers, often along with their children. Some of the young people
+survived their odysseys only to be greeted with imprisonment in facilities
+like the one I visited in Karnes, Texas.
+Left of the stage is Juan, a friend I met in a clandestine house during the
+civil war in San Salvador, only to run into him again during my CARECEN
+days in LA in the nineties. He’s the valeverguista, crazy-in-a-good-way
+former FPL commando who would always casually say things like, “Hey
+man, let’s go run some guns to the mountains in Chalatenango.” He smiles
+from a distance. Juan’s son’s lawyer gave me pictures of Juan’s son, which I
+have in my computer, because I’m an expert witness in Ricardo’s asylum
+case. The pictures of Ricardo, a former MS-13 member, show him standing
+as he displays his muscular physique riddled with scars from bullets, with
+circles around the entry points. Juan’s smile at me suggests the case is going
+well.
+I walk toward the commotion surrounding some deejays and rappers. On
+my way toward the music, I see Erick Moreno. I’ve known Erick since the
+early nineties, when he lived near MacArthur Park. He was one of the first
+to participate in CARECEN’s Nueva Generación youth program that Leland
+Chen ultimately gave us a half million dollars to fund after he was almost
+killed following the riots. At the time, Erick was living on the edge,
+surrounded by armed tagger graffiti artists and hardened gangsters. Erick
+never knew his dad, a former guerrillero who was disappeared during the
+war and never seen again. He once told me he saw me as a father figure.
+After he left the program, Erick started working with art-oriented nonprofits
+in East LA and downtown. Forty-two-years old now, Erick’s surrounded by
+kids he’s teaching how to create murals.
+I reach the back of the tent to stand in the crowd of young people
+listening to rappers sing in English, Spanish, and Maya Quiché. Nodding
+his head next to me is Josué David Sabillon, an eighteen-year-old Honduran
+who stays at Casa Libertad, a home for migrant youth in the Pico Union
+neighborhood. Josué arrived in San Francisco only eight months ago. His
+intense look matches his “he’s been through it” description I heard from a
+member of the Homies Unidos staff. At first glance a low-hanging baseball
+cap hides James Dean qualities—pouty lips, a soulful intensity—that
+animate his face when you’re up close.
+
+I ask him if we can talk. He agrees, though he doesn’t lose that skeptical
+gangster lean I know well.
+“What’s the earring about? You religious?” I ask, pointing to the cross
+earring he’s wearing.
+“I believe in God and go to church, but I wear the earring for style—
+because I like it.”
+I tell him a little bit about my own experience with religion and the
+church. His stance loosens a bit.
+“You still in the church?” he asks.
+“Nah,” I say. “I love the word of God, but I’m not feelin’ what the
+churches do with God anymore.”
+“God has looked out for me, helped me get out of a lot of situations.”
+“Like what?”
+“I started doing drugs when I was twelve years old,” he says. “I started
+smoking tobacco and then marijuana. Things got worse when we
+discovered Resistol.”
+He’s referring to Fuller’s Resistol, the shoe glue that, since the seventies,
+has been a drug of the poor, resulting in the term resistoleros in Honduras
+and other parts of Central America. Resistoleros carry on a tradition dating
+back to the shoe-glue sniffers Pop knew in Mesón San Luís in the 1930s
+during the Depression.
+“God helped me get through that,” Josué continues, “and with the gangs
+that wanted to kill me and threatened me three times before I left.” He
+pauses, then unprompted begins to describe the long journey to the US he
+began nine months ago.
+“I had to take a taxi to Guatemala,” he says. “And when I got to Mexico,
+I had to cross all these immigration and military checkpoints. They picked
+up a lot of people. And then we got on La Bestia, a real aventura. Two guys,
+a sixty-year-old and a younger guy who I think was twenty-three, fell off
+the train. The younger guy laid on the ground screaming in pain, but the
+image of the older guy I’ll never forget. He fell under the train. It cut him in
+half.”
+He pauses again before saying, “God helped me through that and through
+so much more, including something that happened before I left.”
+“What?” I ask.
+“One time, on a dark night in a town in Tabasco,” he says, “I was there
+waiting for the Bestia to leave and was hungry. So I went to look for food. I
+
+saw a guy hanging from a tree. He was naked and he was bleeding all over.
+I thought he was dead. But then the guy starts moving, wiggling on the tree
+and screaming. He was alive. I wanted to help him, but I thought the guys
+who killed him were nearby. Then the guys who hung him on it returned.
+They had two boxes of Gillettes. They used the Gillettes to slice his skin
+and cut him to pieces, piece by piece with the Gillettes. They used two
+whole boxes. I felt helpless because I couldn’t do anything. I’ll never forget
+that as long as I live.”
+He remains quiet for a long moment, before swallowing and saying with
+a breath of power and pride, “Through it all, God looked out for me. He
+helped me get closer to my goal of helping my family and getting a house
+one day.”
+I ask Josué if he has family in LA.
+“Yeah, I have some uncles,” he says. “Some of them helped me a lot,
+orienting me, giving me money and guidance. But others aren’t helpful.”
+“Why not?”
+“Those uncles are in the vida loca I’m trying to stay out of, doing drugs,
+hanging out in El Parque MacArthur with the gangs. They love their
+craziness. We all have our craziness that we love, but I need to stay away
+from that one, even though Casa Libertad is near the parque and some of
+the guys living there invite me to join them in that stuff, but I don’t.”
+“What helps you stay out?”
+“I belong to another mara.”
+“Another mara?”
+“Yes, my only mara is running with God.”
+Walking away from Josué I can’t help but think of a recent sound bite
+from an official in the Trump administration who said, “I’ve been to
+detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are socalled minors, seventeen or under. I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at
+their eyes—and I’ve said, ‘That is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s
+unequivocal.’”1
+I walk back toward the stage at the front of the tent and see Blanca
+Noemi Mejía Alvarado, a high-school student. Blanca is from Cantón El
+Pezote, a hamlet located about an hour south of Ahuachapán, on the more
+verdant side of the Izalco volcano. Like Josué, she came to the US riding La
+Bestia, with her brother, Juan.
+
+“Besides my grandparents,” she tells me, “what I most miss back home is
+the garden in the back of the house. My life was mostly just school and
+going to the molino (gristmill) to crush corn and bring it back to make
+tortillas. My grandparents were scared something would happen to me since
+there were boys with guns near school. Around the house they were killing
+people, whole families in the area.”
+She pauses to wipe some tears from her eyes and catch her breath. Before
+I can ask her if she wants to stop talking, she continues, her face
+brightening as she remembers.
+“I lived enclosed,” she says, “but I was surrounded by trees—orange
+trees, jocote trees, mango trees, anona trees, nance trees, caimito trees.”
+She pauses again, lost in her memories.
+“Ahhh, eating juicy mangos in the garden . . . The smell of wet dirt. It is
+a rare smell, but so delicious when the land absorbs the scent of the rain . . .
+rico.” She shakes her head, beaming. “The garden gave me peace. I felt
+relaxed climbing the mango and jocote trees, sweeping, or washing clothes
+in the pila. It didn’t matter what I did, as long as I was in the garden. I was
+in a prison that was paradise.”
+I ask her for more of her favorite moments.
+“I loved to sit and look at the volcán in the distance. I miss the view of
+the maizales [cornfields] around the volcán. I miss my grandparents. I felt
+freer than I do here, because there’s violence here, too. And there’s also
+police and immigration that will chase you here.
+“Nature protected me there,” she says. “Here, there aren’t so many places
+like that. It sounds funny, but I did feel more protected there.”
+I listen to Blanca and feel entranced, wanting to return to the moments
+when my abuelita Mamá Clothi would take me into her garden. It edifies
+me to see and hear all these young Central American hearts and minds as
+we of the older generations—former gangsters, ex-guerrilleros, indigenous
+leaders, journalists, nonprofit leaders—share our epic stories that were
+denied to us. I can hear the unforgetting working its magic on the animated
+youth who are getting ready to face their brave new future. If “terror is the
+given of the place,” so, too, is love. I feel relief that things are moving
+forward in the right direction as I leave Blanca and the tent to satisfy a
+strange desire to go home and watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune with
+Pop.
+
+Epilogue
+Pop watches the orange-red glow of the lava spewing out of the Hawaiian
+volcano on the National Geographic special I’m streaming on his television.
+His eyes light up.
+“They say the volcanes of El Salvador exploded like that.”
+“Yeah?” I say.
+“Yes, they explode every century and cause lots of destruction.”
+“Pop, did you know that in the sixth century the Ilopango volcán had an
+eruption so powerful it blocked the sun for almost two years, causing a
+major freeze across the northern part of the planet?”
+“Really? Holy shit.”
+“Yeah, really. They say the lava spread eighteen miles and killed
+something like forty to eighty thousand people just in the area of El
+Salvador alone. It wiped out all of the Mayan and other indigenous
+populations nearby.”
+“Incredible,” he says. “Apocalíptico.”
+My inner etymologist considers his word choice and the way I use this
+same word when thinking about my own story, though not in the way Pop
+or most people use it. My story is apocalyptic in the original sense of the
+term in Greek—apokaluptō (ἀποκαλύπτω): to uncover, lay open what has
+been veiled or covered up.
+In 2011, I read a book by theologian Anathea Portier-Young called
+Apocalypse against Empire.1 The book posited that one purpose of early
+Jewish apocalyptic literature—such as The Book of Daniel, The Apocalypse
+
+of Weeks, and The Book of Dreams—was to counteract the effects of the
+state terror of the Seleucid Empire, which murdered tens of thousands of
+Jews in a very short period. In Portier-Young’s words and those of early
+apocalyptic literature, I saw reflected the fragments of Salvadoran lives
+scattered across time and space that I was trying to map. In the book,
+Portier-Young brilliantly intertwines modern trauma research with the
+cultural implications of mass violence enacted on entire populations of
+people. She writes:
+[Psychiatrist and trauma researcher, Judith] Herman has argued that trauma has the
+effect of stopping time, trapping its victims in a scene of terror that intrudes again and
+again into the present. Past and future recede, such that victims of trauma may become
+disconnected from their history and unable to formulate hope. . . . For psychiatrist
+Mardi Horowitz, because such trauma can challenge one’s sense of identity and order in
+the world, the fragmented, iconic memory repeats—and continues to traumatize—until
+it is placed within a new ordering schema that allows the survivor to “understand.”2
+The historical apocalypses studied in this volume intervene into this traumatic rupture
+in time, reconnecting past, present, and future so that their audiences can reclaim their
+history and self and move forward again in hope.
+
+Days after first reading Portier-Young’s powerful take on apocalyptic
+trauma, her words were still resonating so profoundly that I felt driven to
+reach out to her. She was kind enough to speak with me, but when I called
+her, she wondered why I, a journalist, was interested in her theological
+work.
+“I am not entirely sure,” I said, “but it has something to do with being
+Salvadoran.”
+“Well, you might be interested to know that, in trying to understand
+trauma and other effects of state terror, as well as the spirit of resistance to
+that terror, I studied the experiences of state terror in two Latin American
+countries—Argentina during the Dirty War and wartime El Salvador.”3
+I thanked her and hung up, before starting to cry because of the fact I
+would never forget: that, as Salvadorans, we know as much about
+apocalypse as anyone.
+* * *
+I’m sitting at my favorite table at Café La Bohème on Twenty-Fourth near
+Mission with my laptop in front of me, attempting to stitch together the
+disparate pieces of my origins as I write this book. The varnished oak
+
+tabletop sits on the base of an antique sewing machine, its 12″-by-10″ iron
+treadle, and the iron gears it powers, still in place. Even though there’s no
+longer a sewing machine above, the pedal moves the metal beast lying
+below most customers’ awareness. Its black, latticed elegance and noisy
+rotations remind me of bouncing on the lap of Mamá Tey, the Salvadoran
+seamstress whose maquina de cocer fueled her family’s three-thousand-mile
+journey to San Francisco.
+Pushing the pedal slowly, I start typing. The pin attached to the pedal of
+the sewing machinery below pushes and pulls the treadle wheel. To the
+annoyance of the techie sitting next to me, it squeaks every few revolutions,
+but still, the wheel turns. Up-and-down, up-and-down, up-and-down, the 1–
+2–3–4, 1–2–3–4 motion of my foot working the treadle hypnotizes me.
+Next to the wheel, in the center of the space below the table, sits the
+machine’s wrought-iron logo—slightly rusty silver and faded black laurels
+garnishing the Art Deco letters spelling THE SINGER MANUFACTURING CO.
+Coming here is a ritual of mine. Something about coming to the
+neighborhood of my birth to write atop an old Singer sewing machine in a
+café named for the romantic opera La Bohème makes it easier to do the
+personal forensic work of recovering the fragments of my childhood and
+adolescent memories, especially the ones that are often more painful to
+conjure. I look out the window and up the street, toward Horace Mann, my
+old junior high school, and I remember the shame, confusion, and molten
+anger I felt as a kid.
+I always had a sense somewhere deep within me that Pop’s secrets—his
+family history and upbringing—had something to do with his emotional
+absence and his violent temperament, even as it inspired his magic and
+charisma. Yet I’d lacked the history and therefore the context to understand
+him. Like the many Salvadoran skeletons lying scattered and unstoried all
+over the southwestern part of the North American continent, Pop’s
+memories, which might’ve assuaged my own nihilistic rage by helping me
+understand and address its source, were lost for decades.
+Today the plight of the many mara kids I’ve met fits the “shit travels
+downward” theory of violence that I developed when I started going to
+Berkeley—a theory I came up with thanks, in no small part, to Pop. This
+downward momentum is created by the silence of both victims and
+perpetrators of violence, keeping us stuck in those moments, enabling the
+same cycles to play out time and time again.
+
+My search for my own unknown past is one reason I was so enthralled by
+the IML, the forensic lab in El Salvador, a vault of so many untold violent
+stories. Watching their rituals of forensic recovery led me to believe that
+unforgetting is a critical way to start the process of individual, familial, and
+national healing. The power to reconstruct the bones of a person and return
+them to the family haunted by the disappearance of their loved one enables
+a critical step toward healing. It’s the knowing—that their loved one is
+dead, and how he or she died—that allows these families to conduct burial
+rites and mourn. Without this unforgetting, they can have no closure and are
+held in a terrible limbo. The same applies to reconstructing the bones of our
+personal and national memories, including the memory of what it is to be
+American, the identity that has caused so much devastation to those of us
+who identify as Salvadoran. Being “American” has taught me that the
+difficult future before us demands we set aside the myths and infantile
+stories we tell ourselves in this country; being Salvadoreño has taught me
+about the still-urgent need to create the epic, revolutionary sensibility we
+will need to survive the epic history that awaits us in the best of
+circumstances.
+Learning that Pop, my fucking father, is one of the last remaining
+witnesses of one of the most violent episodes in modern history softened
+me, not only toward Pop, but toward myself and all Salvadorans. Pop, the
+man I once considered a coward, I now respect immensely. It took him
+almost seventy years, but Pop braved the thousand darknesses of his past to
+share the most secret and excruciating part of his—and our—story with me.
+Today I am moved by my newfound compassion toward Pop to protect
+him from horrors that at ninety-eight he has earned a reprieve from. The
+recent news I keep from him includes reports that the mass imprisonment of
+Central American children fleeing violence has helped turn the United
+States into the world’s leading jailer of children,4 children like David, whom
+I met in the child-and-mom prison in Karnes. This news also includes
+reports that WHINSEC—the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
+Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas—has started
+training Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and the
+Border Patrol to fight migrant kids and moms as though they actually are
+the invading army seen in the hallucinations of the powerful. The
+immigration agencies are training for “urban warfare.”
+
+Such reports show how the cross-border circuits of counterinsurgency
+policing conceived, practiced, and exported by local and federal
+government agencies in the United States still keep the eternal cycles of
+violence spinning. Reading similar reports decades ago is how I first came
+to understand that the violence in the country of my birth, the United States,
+is also a violence of apocalyptic proportions. Salvadoran violence is, in no
+small part, an expression of forgotten American violence. I have tried to
+sew together the fragments of my life to illustrate how oblivion itself is
+violence. Forensic labs like the IML have “re-membered” the dismembered.
+Mamá Tey sewed scraps into clothes for the forgotten prostitutes of the
+mesón. People like them seek what I’ve sought by stitching together my
+words here: unforgetting.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+O
+
+n the night of the 2016 presidential election, I spent a long time
+deciding what to wear. I’d be staying home to watch the returns with
+my partner, but the Comey letter had come out in mid-October and I
+was convinced Trump was going to win. I’d always admired the
+women on the Titanic who reportedly drowned wearing their finest
+clothing and furs and jewels and the violinists who kept playing even
+as the ship sank. I wore a burgundy velvet dress with sheer lace back
+paneling, a ribbon in my hair, red lipstick, and a leopard-print faux
+fur coat over my shoulders. I poured myself a goblet of wine. I
+understood that night would be my end, but I would not be ushered
+to an internment camp in sweatpants. The returns hadn’t finished
+coming in when my father, who is undocumented, called me to tell
+me it was the end times. I threw myself into bed without washing off
+my makeup, without brushing my teeth. I had a four a.m. wake-up
+call.
+A few hours later, I took a bunch of trains to New Jersey to meet
+an oceanographer I was profiling for a New York magazine. We took
+a boat into the Hudson and sped by the feet of the Statue of Liberty.
+“Fuck,” I said. “This will appear sentimental.” Still, I asked him to
+take my picture in front of it, and I smiled at the camera, the strong
+winds blowing my hair in my face.
+It seemed safe, somehow, to be there, at Lady Liberty’s feet. I got
+off the boat and, on my phone, emailed an agent I’d been friendly
+
+with since I was a kid and told him I was ready to write the book. The
+book. And he said okay.
+The book. When I was a senior at Harvard, I wrote an anonymous
+essay for The Daily Beast about what they wanted to call “my dirty
+little secret”—that I was undocumented. It got me some attention—it
+was a different time—and agents wrote asking me if I wanted to write
+a memoir. A news program asked to film me while I fucking packed
+up my dorm, to show, I guess, that I was leaving Harvard without
+any plans, without even the promise of a career, which was the crux
+of my essay.
+This was before DACA.
+I was angry. A memoir? I was twenty-one. I wasn’t fucking Barbra
+Streisand. I had been writing professionally since I was fifteen, but
+only about music—I wanted to be the guy in High Fidelity—and I
+didn’t want my first book to be a rueful tale about being a sickly
+Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didn’t have a Social Security
+number, which is what the agents all wanted. The guy who eventually
+ended up becoming my agent respected that, did not find an
+interchangeable immigrant to publish a sad book, read everything I
+would write over the next seven years, and we kept in touch. I was
+the first person who wrote him on the morning of November 9, 2016.
+That morning, I received a bunch of emails from people who were
+really freaked out about Trump winning and the emails essentially
+were offers to hide me in their second houses in Vermont or the
+woods somewhere, or stay in their basements. “Shit,” I told my
+partner. “They’re trying to Anne Frank me.” By this point, I had been
+pursuing a PhD at Yale because I needed the health insurance and
+had read lots of books about migrants and I hated a good number of
+the texts. I couldn’t see my family in them, because I saw my parents
+as more than laborers, as more than sufferers or dreamers. I thought
+I could write something better, something that rang true. And I
+thought that I was the best person to do it. I was just crazy enough.
+Because if you’re going to write a book about undocumented
+immigrants in America, the story, the full story, you have to be a
+
+little bit crazy. And you certainly can’t be enamored by America, not
+still. That disqualifies you.
+This book is not a traditional nonfiction book. Names of persons
+have all been changed. Names of places have all been changed.
+Physical descriptions have all been changed. Or have they? I took
+notes by hand during interviews; after the legal review, I destroyed
+the notes. I chose not to use a recorder because I did not want to
+intimidate my subjects. Children of immigrants whose parents do
+not speak English learn how to interpret very young, and I honored
+that rite of passage and skill by translating the interviews on the
+spot. I approached translating the way a literary translator would
+approach translating a poem, not the way someone would approach
+translating a business letter. I hate the way journalists translate the
+words of Spanish speakers in their stories. They transliterate, and
+make us sound dumb, like we all have a first-grade vocabulary. I
+found my subjects to be warm, funny, dry, evasive, philosophical,
+weird, annoying, etc., and I tried to convey that tone in the
+translations.
+When you are an undocumented immigrant with undocumented
+family, writing about undocumented immigrants—and I can only
+speak for myself and my ghosts—it feels unethical to put on the drag
+of a journalist. It is also painful to focus on the art, but impossible to
+process the world as anything but art. The slightest gust of the wind
+bruises—Trump’s voice, Stephen Miller’s face, the red hat, but also
+before that, the deli counter, the construction corner, the hotel room,
+the dishwashing station, the dollar store, the late-night English
+classes at the local community college—and it’s a pain I am sure is
+felt by the eleven million undocumented, so I write as if it were. I
+attempt to write from a place of shared trauma, shared memories,
+shared pain. This is a snapshot in time, a high-energy imaging of
+trauma brain.
+This book is a work of creative nonfiction, rooted in careful
+reporting, translated as poetry, shared by chosen family, and
+sometimes hard to read. Maybe you won’t like it. I didn’t write it for
+you to like it. And I did not set out to write anything inspirational,
+
+which is why there are no stories of DREAMers. They are
+commendable young people, and I truly owe them my life, but they
+occupy outsize attention in our politics. I wanted to tell the stories of
+people who work as day laborers, housekeepers, construction
+workers, dog walkers, deliverymen, people who don’t inspire
+hashtags or T-shirts, but I wanted to learn about them as the weirdos
+we all are outside of our jobs.
+This book is for everybody who wants to step away from the
+buzzwords in immigration, the talking heads, the kids in graduation
+caps and gowns, and read about the people underground. Not
+heroes. Randoms. People. Characters.
+This book is for young immigrants and children of immigrants. I
+want them to read this book and feel what I imagine young people
+must have felt when they heard Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
+for the first time in Seattle in 1991. I grew up a Jehovah’s Witness,
+and I remember what I felt listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for
+the first time.
+I went into the bathroom and chopped off my hair with my mom’s
+fabric scissors and then messaged a boy who was not a Jehovah’s
+Witness (not allowed) and told him to meet me at the Virgin
+Megastore in Times Square to give me my first kiss. This book will
+give you permission to let go. This book will give you permission to
+be free. This book will move you to be punk, when you need to be
+punk; y hermanxs, it’s time to fuck some shit up.
+Karla Cornejo Villavicenio
+
+CHAPTER 1
+
+Staten Island
+AUGUST 1, 2019
+
+I
+
+f you ask my mother where she’s from, she’s 100 percent going to
+say she’s from the Kingdom of God, because she does not like to say
+that she’s from Ecuador, Ecuador being one of the few South
+American countries that has not especially outdone itself on the
+international stage—magical realism basically skipped over it, as did
+the military dictatorship craze of the 1970s and 1980s, plus there are
+no world-famous Ecuadorians to speak of other than the fool who
+housed Julian Assange at the embassy in London (the president) and
+Christina Aguilera’s father, who was a domestic abuser. If you ask my
+father where he is from, he will definitely say Ecuador because he is
+sentimental about the country for reasons he’s working out in
+therapy. But if you push them, I mean really push them, they’re both
+going to say they’re from New York. If you ask them if they feel
+American because you’re a little narc who wants to prove your blood
+runs red, white, and blue, they’re going to say No, we feel like New
+Yorkers. We really do, too. My family has lived in Brooklyn and
+Queens a combined ninety-seven years. My dad drove a cab back
+when East New York was still gang country, and he had to fold his
+
+body into a little origami swan and hide under his steering wheel
+during cross fires in the middle of the day while he ate a jumbo slice
+of pizza. Times have changed but my parents haven’t. My dad sees
+struggling bodegas and he says they’re fronts. For what? Money
+laundering. For whom? The mob. My mother wants my brother and
+me to wear pastels all year round to avoid being seen as taking sides
+in the little tiff between the Bloods and the Crips.
+My parents are New Yorkers to the core. Despite how close we are,
+we’ve talked very little about their first days in New York or about
+their decision to choose New York, or even the United States, as a
+destination. It’s not that I haven’t asked my parents why they came
+to the United States. It’s that the answer isn’t as morally satisfying as
+most people’s answers are—a decapitated family member, famine—
+and I never press them for more details because I don’t want to apply
+pressure on a bruise.
+The story as far as I know it goes something like this: My parents
+had just gotten married in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, and their small
+autobody business was not doing well. Then my dad got into a car
+crash where he broke his jaw, and they had to borrow money from
+my father’s family, who are bad, greedy people. The idea of coming to
+America to work for a year to make just enough money to pay off the
+debt came up and it seemed like a good idea. My father’s family
+asked to keep me, eighteen months old at the time, as collateral. And
+that’s what my parents did. That’s about as much as I know.
+You may be wondering why my parents agreed to leave me as an
+economic assurance, but the truth is I have not had this conversation
+with them. I’ve never thought about it enough to ask. The whole
+truth is that if I was a young mother—if I was me as a young mother,
+unparented, ambitious, at my sexual prime—I think I would be
+thrilled to leave my child for “exactly a year,” as they said it would be,
+which is what the plan was. I never had to forgive my mom.
+My dad? My dadmydadmydad was my earliest memory. He was
+dressed in a powder-blue sweater. He was walking into a big
+airplane. I looked out from a window and my dad was walking away
+
+and, in my hand, I carried a Ziploc bag full of coins. I don’t know. It’s
+been almost thirty years. It doesn’t matter anymore.
+My parents didn’t come back after a year. They didn’t stay in
+America because they were making so much money that they became
+greedy. They were barely making ends meet. Years passed. When I
+was four years old, going to school in Ecuador, teachers began to
+comment on how gifted I was. My parents knew Ecuador was not the
+place for a gifted girl—the gender politics were too fucked up—and
+they wanted me to have all the educational opportunities they hadn’t
+had. So that’s when they brought me to New York to enroll me in
+Catholic school, but no matter how hard they both worked to make
+tuition, they fell short. Then one day—I think I was in the fourth
+grade—the school bursar called me into his office and explained that
+there was an elderly billionairess who lived in upstate New York who
+had heard about me and was impressed. He told her my family was
+poor and might have to pull me from the school. (Okay, so in this
+scenario the tragedy would have been that I’d have to go to the local
+public school, which was not a great school, but just so we’re on the
+same page, I support public schools and I would have been fine.) So
+she came up with a proposition. She’d pay for most of my tuition if I
+kept up my grades and wrote her letters.
+That was the first time in my life I’d have a benefactor, but it
+would not be my last. When I was at Harvard, a very successful Wall
+Street man who knew me from an educational NGO we both
+belonged to—he as a supporter, me as a supported—learned I was
+undocumented and could not legally hold a work-study job, so every
+semester he wrote me a modest check. In the notes section he
+cheekily wrote “beer money”—the joke being that I wouldn’t really
+drink until I was twenty-one—but every semester I used it for books,
+winter coats for those fucking Boston winters, money I couldn’t ask
+my parents for because they didn’t have any to give. I wrote him
+regular emails about my life at Harvard and my budding success as a
+published writer. He was always appropriate and boundaried. I had
+read obsessively about artists since I was a kid and considered myself
+an artist since I was a kid so I didn’t feel weird about older, wealthy
+
+white people giving me money in exchange for grades or writing. It
+was patronage. They were Gertrude Stein and I was a young
+Hemingway. I was Van Gogh, crazy and broken. I truly did not have
+any racial anxieties about this, thank god. That kind of thing could
+really fuck a kid up.
+—
+I’m a New York City kid, but although the first five years of my time
+in America were spent in Brooklyn, if we’re going to be real, I’m from
+Queens. Queens is the most diverse borough in the city. This might
+sound like a romanticized ghetto painting, but when I walk through
+my neighborhood, a Polish child with a toy gun will shoot at my head
+and say the same undecipherable word over and over; a Puerto Rican
+kid will rap along to a song on his phone and turn it up as loud as
+necessary to make out the lyrics, even rapping along to some Nwords; some Egyptian teenagers will refuse to move out of my way as
+I’m simply trying to cross the street; and some Mexican guys will
+invite me to join a pyramid scheme. But none of us will try to take
+any rights away from one another. We don’t have potlucks, but we
+live in peace. We go to the same street fairs.
+The other boroughs are less diverse, but I found that the same
+thing is basically true. Except for one borough that I was always
+curious about—Staten Island, New York’s richest, whitest, most
+suburban borough. It is almost 80 percent white. By way of
+comparison, Brooklyn and Queens are just less than half white, the
+Bronx is 45 percent white, and even Manhattan is only 65 percent
+white. Staten Island is geographically isolated—you can’t take the
+subway there from the city—and, I don’t know, man, there isn’t a lot
+of shared goodwill between islanders and city residents. It’s not like
+we’re unaware. They’ve literally tried to secede from New York City
+and form their own city or join New Jersey. In June 1989, the New
+York State legislature gave Staten Island residents the right to decide
+on secession, and in November 1993, 65 percent of voters voted yes.
+Governor Mario Cuomo insisted that the referendum be approved by
+
+the state legislature, where it was defeated, but the desire continued
+to bubble just beneath the surface for years, so even after the world
+was rocked by Brexit, you had local island politicians posting on
+social media about how inspiring an event it was. Staten Island is the
+city’s most conservative borough, pretty reliably Republican, the only
+borough in New York City to go for Donald Trump in the 2016
+presidential election. It’s also the borough where Eric Garner was
+killed in a choke hold at the hands of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo.
+A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo for murder.
+I learned about all of this later. But the first time Staten Island
+really entered my consciousness was when there were news reports
+about hate crimes against Latinx people when I was a kid. This was
+the only context in which Staten Island was mentioned on Spanish
+nightly news—Mexican immigrants as victims of hate crimes at the
+hands of young black men, a cruel reminder of the rift between our
+communities. There was fifty-two-year-old Alejandro Galindo, who
+was walking his bicycle home from his dishwashing job and was
+attacked by four men who didn’t take anything. There was eighteenyear-old Christian Vázquez, who was attacked by five men as he was
+coming home from his job as a busboy. They beat him and took
+jewelry and a measly ten dollars from him as they yelled antiMexican slurs. There was twenty-six-year-old Rodolfo Olmedo,
+jumped by four men on his way back from a club. They beat him with
+a baseball bat, a metal chain, and wooden planks. “We believe at this
+time that they selected this victim either in whole or in substantial
+part because he was a Mexican,” Richmond County district attorney
+Daniel Donovan said.
+I headed to Staten Island to report on the lives of undocumented
+day laborers in early 2017—it was close to where I lived in New
+Haven, and I was terrified about Trump having just assumed office. I
+was scared for all immigrants and felt guilty about myself as a socalled DREAMer. I was on DACA and I was afraid there’d be a raid. I
+was afraid that in any situation where there were large groups of
+undocumented people congregated, there could be a raid. My first
+trip there, I took a taxi from the Newark train station, about a thirty-
+
+minute drive, to the neighborhood of Silver View, home to one of the
+oldest day laborer corners in New York City. I got carsick, so I closed
+my eyes and filled the time with a mental rosary chain of short
+prayers to god, out of whose favor I had fallen years ago. I rested my
+head on the window and asked him to protect my family first, and if
+he had some goodwill left over, I prayed that there wouldn’t be a raid
+on the warehouse where I was going that night.
+Before visiting Staten Island, I’d never met a day laborer. To me, a
+city girl who knew undocumented men mostly as restaurant workers,
+day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of
+brown men huddled at the crack of dawn on street corners next to
+truck rental lots and hardware superstores and lumberyards.
+Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the
+sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff—working brown
+men and women on one side and academically achieving young
+brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic
+dreamers. Day laborers weren’t real to me, and what I had heard
+about them wasn’t good. The New York Times described their work
+as “idling on street corners.” They haven’t had the best PR.
+So who are they? There are varied estimates of the number of day
+laborers in New York City, from a little under six thousand to more
+than ten thousand. A 2006 survey of day laborers, who are mostly
+men, reports that 75 percent of respondents identified as
+undocumented, two-thirds supported their families with this line of
+work, 60 percent said day laboring was their first job in the United
+States, and 85 percent were looking for more permanent jobs. They
+represent a wide range of skills, from muscle to flooring to woodwork
+to welding to painting to cement work to brickwork to carpentry to
+insulation to stucco to electrical work to just about everything else in
+the construction universe.
+The typical place they find work is the street corner, where a
+delicate choreography takes place. One guy told me the exchange
+goes something like this: A man pulls up in a truck and says, I need
+X done. If a person has that skill, he’ll ask for a quote—how many
+hours, in what location, how much per hour. Sometimes while you
+
+are negotiating, two other workers willing to do the job for less
+jump into the truck and the employer shrugs and drives away.
+Sometimes a group piles onto the sides of the truck, and the
+employer gets spooked. They don’t know us. It’s the group that
+scares them. If they’re scared, they might hastily pick one or two
+guys, or they might drive away. An average of sixty workers gathers
+on each of the known street corners in Silver View every day. On a
+quiet day there might be three workers, on a busy day a hundred.
+They mostly get paid in cash, and the employers are free to do with
+and to them whatever they want.
+The day laborers I meet are professionals, talking about the
+importance of negotiating rates and building networks through good
+work and recommendations. They call their employers patrones, a
+Spanish word that means “bosses” but with a colonial aftertaste,
+often do not get protective equipment, meal breaks, or even
+bathroom breaks. They have all experienced racist abuse and wage
+theft at the hand of their employers, are all owed thousands of
+dollars by white men who made them work for days, promised
+payment, then simply disappeared. Some days laborers are dropped
+off at remote locations to do work, then left there without a ride
+back, unpaid and helpless. The fact that The New York Times
+described them as “idling” infuriates me. What an offensive way to
+describe labor that requires standing in hellish heat or cold or rain
+from dawn until nightfall, negotiating in a language not your own,
+competing with your own friends for the same job, then performing
+it to perfection without the certainty of pay. Workers absorb
+exceptional emotional and physical stress every day and, because
+they are undocumented, they’re on their own, with no workplace
+protections, no regulations, and no collective bargaining.
+This is where the worker centers come in. Worker centers were
+established to formalize this very informal sector of day laboring.
+There are now more than sixty-three worker centers across the
+country. Colectiva Por Fin is a storefront nonprofit on Staten Island
+that since 1997 has provided practical advocacy, representation, and
+training for day laborers and the immigrant community on the island
+
+at large. It sits on Silver View Road along with Nuestra Calle, another
+worker center, right near the busy street corners where day laborers
+generally congregate, and they make a world of difference for the
+men. First, they are indoors, so the men don’t have to stand outside
+for hours on end in extreme weather. The centers provide restrooms,
+water, coffee, phone chargers, and dispatchers. Dispatchers serve as
+bilingual intermediaries between workers and employers, cementing
+transactions and preventing abuses or irregularities. It’s a stressful
+job.
+Santiago, a dispatcher at Colectiva Por Fin, is a U.S. citizen born
+to Mexican parents. Workers collectively set the rates for particular
+jobs annually or semiannually, and Santiago’s job is to make sure
+those rates are honored and workers aren’t drawn into potentially
+abusive arrangements. “Some employers think that exploiting them
+might be easy because they are undocumented,” he tells me. Santiago
+is just twenty-five years old.
+I’m attending a monthly meeting at Colectiva Por Fin on my first
+night on Staten Island. The room is small but as more men come in,
+it seems to double and triple in size. On the wall, migrants are
+celebrated through art that strikes me as deeply annoying, mostly the
+word “migrant” reconfigured as butterflies. I fucking hate thinking of
+migrants as butterflies. Butterflies can’t fuck a bitch up. Tonight,
+about fifty men end up gathering in the room, plus a couple of
+women, including a young, white female pastor who works for
+Project Hospitality, the parent nonprofit. The executive director of
+Colectiva Por Fin is here, an Argentine man named Simón Torres. He
+is new and the men are still making up their minds about him. There
+are two African American day laborers at the meeting and an older
+white man with a shock of white hair and mustache. His name is
+Charles and he is here as an organizer from AmeriCorps. Because of
+these three people, the meeting is conducted bilingually by Santiago,
+effectively cutting the meeting shorter while making it feel longer at
+the same time. Out of the fifty Latinx workers, perhaps only a few are
+able to ascertain the fidelity of Santiago’s translation.
+
+The men here tonight are workers. For many years when I have
+heard nice people try to be respectful about describing
+undocumented people, I’ve heard them call us “undocumented
+workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about
+being just an undocumented person standing with your hands
+clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us
+something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s
+acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re
+crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of
+us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer
+puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my
+god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.
+And here they are now, the workers. Some are very young, just
+past their teens, and some are quite old, around seventy. They are all
+wearing dirty work boots, but carefully kept. You know how jeans
+come pre-ripped? That’s how their boots look. Dirty from work,
+pristine from care. The workers are very brown, brown from their
+moms, browned from the sun. They are short. But they are built.
+They look like they can walk on burning coal, build a house, and
+open a bottle of beer with their wedding rings.
+When I scan the room, I see men lighter and darker than my
+father, some older, most younger—they speak harsher, softer,
+mumbling, or sung, but I see my father’s face in their every one, and
+I know that this astigmatism will always be with me; the light will
+always fall this way. I think about the 2010 Arizona immigration law
+known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe
+Neighborhoods Act, a.k.a. Arizona SB 1070, a.k.a. the “papers please”
+law. It gave law enforcement officials the power to approach anybody
+they suspected of being in the country illegally and ask for proof of
+legal documentation. That meant they could stop anyone they
+thought looked undocumented. Immigrant rights advocates furiously
+protested the law, challenging officials on how exactly they defined
+an “undocumented look.” But Vincent, my best friend from college,
+and I, two undocumented kids, whispered to each other that even if
+the authorities “couldn’t,” we could pretty much almost always tell.
+
+The backpack my father carried on his commute to and from work,
+the one that held his earnings in cash, was a red flag. His black
+rubber orthopedic-looking shoes and his dark-blue jeans,
+immigrant-blue, an immigrant rinse. I offered to buy him new
+clothes but he said, Para que? Vincent offered to buy his dad a
+change of clothes for when he traveled home from his construction
+job but his dad said, Para que? too.
+Santiago is an accomplished and artful translator. He works
+quickly and in real time and transmits tone impeccably. Charles from
+AmeriCorps gives a long-winded speech inviting the men to an
+upcoming church dinner. He keeps mentioning the president’s name.
+In his translation, Santiago omits every mention of Trump. Charles
+says the dinner will feature American fare—“You’re going to get to try
+American food; I promise you’ll love it.” That sentence too
+disappears in our young dispatcher’s hands. Charles ends his speech
+by saying, “If things get worse, and I really, really don’t think they
+will, Americans will come out and protect you.” Santiago doesn’t
+translate any of that either. He’s pretty fucking good.
+I ask Santiago where he learned to translate so well and he tells
+me that like many children of immigrants, he grew up interpreting
+for his parents at everything from PTA meetings to doctors’
+appointments. “It made me feel important,” he says. “I was
+representing my parents.” I tell Santiago I did the same thing, that
+we all did. I ask him why he omitted all mentions of Trump in the
+speech. “I didn’t want to mention that guy,” he says. “I wanted to
+make them feel safe.”
+I ask why he completely omitted Charles’s promise to protect
+them if things got bad.
+“The reality is��it’s not just Trump. Staten Island is a very
+conservative island. Charles might think it’s not getting worse, but he
+is not going to be affected, unless they stop federal funding of his
+organization, and then he could lose his job. But the whole
+immigrant community has everything to lose.”
+But what about the guarantee that Americans would come to our
+rescue? I ask.
+
+“Unless these Americans are lawyers or federal judges, I don’t see
+how that’s true,” Santiago says.
+—
+A year and a half later, I’ve been to Staten Island so many times, I’ve
+lost count. I’ve grown attached to these men and look for any excuse
+to go back to learn more about the world the day laborers have
+created in the most anti-immigrant hood in the city. I’ve stood with
+them on street corners and sat with them in the worker centers, I’ve
+had coffee with them at Dunkin’ Donuts, ate lunches with them at
+Ecuadorian restaurants they insist on paying for, delivered dinners
+for them to share in the worker center office, I’ve accompanied them
+to testify in City Hall, attended their Christmas party where none of
+them asked me to dance, went to their soccer matches, and spoke to
+them on the phone late at night. We texted Merry Christmas and
+Happy New Year to one another one minute after midnight. I
+blocked one of them on my phone because his intense loneliness was
+dark and desperate and it scared me. Come a blizzard in Connecticut,
+where I live now, and I think of how thin the lining is in their jackets;
+when the season changes and the pavement gets so hot that I don’t
+walk my dog for longer than a few minutes out of concern for his soft
+padded feet, I think of how hot jet-black hair gets under the sun, like
+my brother’s, like my father’s, like mine. When I see acrylic blankets
+I think of them alone in their rented single rooms, and when my
+father visits me in my big apartment with all the natural light and big
+fiddle-leaf trees, I see them in his missing teeth and swollen hands.
+When my father lost his restaurant job of fifteen years, I asked one of
+my contacts from Colectiva if she knew of any jobs, and she said that
+he could go to the worker center at 7:00 A.M. to begin working as a
+day laborer. Imagine that. Day one as a day laborer, at age fifty-three.
+—
+Julián is fifty-two years old but looks much, much older. When I first
+meet him, he is sitting alone in the corner of the worker center
+
+wearing headphones as men wait for their assignments. His beanie is
+pulled over his eyebrows, covering the tops of his ears, actually
+almost half of his ears—he has small ears. Everyone else is talking
+and laughing. I ask him what he’s listening to and he says, “Christian
+music to uplift the spirits.” I persuade him to give me his number,
+but it takes a few conversations for him to open up. It’s clear he has
+spent a lot of time alone with his thoughts. Many of the day laborers
+don’t have family living with them on Staten Island and are lonely, so
+talking with me at the end of a long day from the tiny corners of their
+rooms is something they seem to like. With Julián, once he is ready,
+our conversations are like the opposite of bloodletting, the darker,
+thicker stuff coming out first, and then we work our way toward a
+light exchange about the weather before we hang up.
+Julián didn’t know a word of English when he came to the United
+States. His first meal in America was a bag of potato chips and a fiftycent bottle of water. Remember those? He had nothing. He started
+work as a dishwasher at a restaurant two days later. His bosses were
+despots. They screamed at him, they swore. They had a rule that no
+outside food was allowed in the kitchen, but the only food the
+workers were allowed from the kitchen were eggs and potatoes. The
+cook was Latinx, like them, and he snuck them meat—cuts of chicken
+and steak—when the bosses turned their backs. “Pinche pendejo,”
+the cook said.
+The hours were long and pay was terrible, so he decided to give
+day laboring a try. On his first day, he was terrified. “I was scared to
+work because I did not know English,” he says. “The employers
+yelled at me because I didn’t. I would stand on the street corner with
+my friends, but because I was so scared, I sent them to do jobs that I
+was hired to do. I was scared that I could not speak English, and that
+in turn made me scared I could not do the job. But then I went to
+school.”
+When immigrants who did not go to school in this country—or at
+all—talk about their experiences at “school,” they usually mean the
+local library or community college, where they take English classes.
+Every immigrant I know has embarked on involved attempts to learn
+
+English beyond just immersion. City University of New York officials
+recall a nighttime security guard at Brooklyn College telling them he
+saw immigrants line up before 4:00 A.M. for a 9:00 A.M. open
+registration for ESL classes. The nativist claim that immigrants do
+not want to learn English makes me hysterical. Years ago, on a bus in
+Queens, an older woman bitterly spit out in my direction as I passed
+by, “I wish these people would just learn English.” I had not been
+speaking—at all, in any language. I was holding a book, in English. In
+fact, I was home for the summer after my freshman year at Harvard,
+where I would win a writing award named after an eighteenthcentury American transcendentalist—we both just happened to write
+in English. But it was summertime, and I wore short, thin, slutty
+things, so I was tan, a deeper brown than usual; my hair was so black
+it was almost navy. I think every immigrant in this country knows
+that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and
+to some people, you will still not speak English.
+I ask Julián what he’d like readers to know about him, and he
+immediately says, “Tell them I crossed the desert four times to see
+my children.” The border was more porous at the time, and his
+children were in Mexico, so he headed home during the New York
+winter. He still needed a coyote for the crossing. At night in the
+desert it got so cold, he thought his skin would shatter like hard
+candy. During the day it was so hot, he thought demons had
+possessed him. He carried with him four gallons of water and a
+backpack with food. He wore construction boots, and his feet were
+covered in blisters. Once, he stayed behind with some people who’d
+gotten sick and the coyote just left them. “The coyotes are always
+drugged and drunk because they’re afraid to do what they do sober,”
+Julián explains. They survived by eating cans of peppers and
+drinking puddles. Two of them died. They threw up something green,
+then collapsed. He tried to help the living, but also didn’t want to join
+the dead, so he did what he had to do.
+Like most marriages divided by a border, his ended in separation.
+He sent money to his kids in Mexico, but he was lonely in New York
+and he dreamed of having a new bouncing little brown baby, ideally a
+
+girl, and he wanted to raise her bilingual. That was the main thing he
+fantasized about at night, as he lay in the dark waiting for his
+exhausted body and his racing heart to catch up to each other so he
+could sleep: He dreamed of having a baby who would have a first
+word in Spanish—papi—and a first word in English—mommy. He’d
+give the baby an American name and learn to pronounce it the right
+way. Maybe “Lincoln,” which was hard because your tongue had to
+be so sneaky in the middle of the word. He’d take Lincoln to all the
+Disney movies and at first he’d be able to follow just enough of the
+plot to not fall asleep, but eventually he’d get the jokes. He’d go to
+parent-teacher conferences and not rely on his kid to translate. No,
+he’d wear a suit and a tie and ask the tough questions himself, so the
+little imp couldn’t hide her naughtiness. “I think it would be beautiful
+to speak in English to your child,” he says.
+As time went on, it became clear he wasn’t going to have this
+baby, and he got lonelier and lonelier. “You come here thinking of
+your kids, but the process changes you. You’re transformed, and
+sometimes you can’t get out of that place. Some people never knew
+their fathers. They have traumas from childhood, from the crossing,
+and they don’t know how to handle those problems but they can buy
+a Corona.” Soon, he started spending all of his time in bars, leaving
+them at dawn and going straight to work after. He’d send money
+home and spend the rest on alcohol. He was consumed by guilt.
+Then one night in January, he drank too much while he had the
+flu, and the combination of whiskey and a fever led to hallucinations,
+including one of being hunted down by police dogs. Julián tried to
+shake off the hallucinations but he couldn’t. So he started screaming.
+Nobody came to his rescue because he was alone. He woke himself
+with his own screams, and upon waking he told god that if he let him
+have a peaceful sleep, he’d stop drinking.
+“I don’t know if it was a miracle, but since then I haven’t wanted
+to go to bars anymore. I just want to work. What distracts me is
+work. What makes me happy is working. When I’m not working, I
+freak out.”
+If you left America, what would you miss? I ask him.
+
+“I’d miss the money,” Julián says.
+Me too, I say.
+We both laugh.
+—
+Joaquín also crossed the desert four times. His first time crossing
+began at nightfall. Five or six men covered in guns pick up the
+crossers in an old yellow truck, then drive them to a line in the sand
+where the narcos are waiting. You know they’re narcos because
+they’re wearing chains and their eyes are dead. You need a password
+to cross. The coyotes whisper the password, and the migrants get off
+the truck. They are dumped onto another truck. Only one coyote can
+go with them. Were you scared? I ask. “Are you kidding? I was
+terrified,” Joaquín says. “They’re narcos.”
+They drive to a mountain. They dump the truck. Time to climb the
+mountain, putas. Joaquín isn’t a thin man, but he’ll be fine. He’ll be
+fine! He exercises. I mean he wakes up every morning and does
+stretches while he does his morning prayers. Reach to the sky, now
+touch your toes, side to side. The mountain is steep, and it is hot, and
+his backpack is heavy. He climbs for about an hour imagining he is a
+guest on Sábado Gigante recounting his tale of rescuing a girl who
+fell into a well. Then his backpack straps break. Right at the seams—
+irreparable. His backpack, enormous, carries all his cans of food and
+water gallons, plus an extra layer of clothing for the freezing desert
+nights. Before he even thinks them, words rush into his mouth. They
+flood in there and all he has to do is vomit them. “Friends, I’m
+staying here.” He’s calling it. He’s done. He hadn’t even realized he’s
+exhausted, but he allows himself to admit it. All he wanted was an
+out. In his mind he is going to sit down on the mountain and take a
+nap; finish the provisions in his backpack; have a feast of canned
+beans, saltines, and water; and then, after he’s run out, sit there in
+the sun—it won’t take very long to start dying. Eventually the animals
+will notice and they’ll eat him and he’ll let them. He’ll put up some
+struggle, it’s human nature. Hopefully he’ll be so dehydrated by then
+
+that he won’t even notice the tears in his flesh—it’ll feel like paper
+cuts on a really bad sunburn, and to the bobcats he’ll be jerky. “When
+you choose to die, you really have to decide to die,” Joaquín tells me.
+But then, these two young guys—to this day he doesn’t know their
+names—these guys step forward and get all up in his face like they’re
+going to punch him. He takes a few steps back. They get in his space
+again. One of them thrusts forward, furious, and yanks Joaquín’s
+backpack from him. “This is why you wanna die, ’mano?” Then the
+other one walks behind Joaquín and begins to push him by his
+shoulders. Up the mountain. Up the incline. Cursing under their
+breath. Joaquín chastises himself the whole time. These kids don’t
+want me dead so now I can’t die. What do you do when your out was
+to die and now you can’t die because you’re living for total strangers?
+There was another mountain after the first one. And on the second
+mountain he grabbed back his backpack and walked right behind the
+coyotes. “And by the time we climbed down, I had gathered so much
+strength,” he says. “I think about those kids all the time. I think
+about them every day. Every time there is a raid, I think about them.”
+He knew they went to Las Vegas, but they could be anywhere now.
+They could be deported. They could be dead.
+Joaquín’s first steady job in New York was at a “boat company,”
+which I took to mean a ferry service. He was on a boat on the Hudson
+River on September 11, 2001, when he saw the planes crash into the
+towers, and without even knowing what had happened, his boss
+rounded up the workers and told everyone to get ready to head into
+the city to help. By the time they arrived, the second tower had fallen
+and there was debris and dust everywhere. He couldn’t even see
+where he was walking. The boats transported workers in and out of
+Ground Zero for two weeks, dressed in the yellow suits and masks
+generally used for oil spills; the workers and the boats were hosed
+down at night with a power wash. He feels proud of the work he did
+there. “They gave people who entered that zone an ID, and I
+remember the day we were supposed to hand that ID back. I couldn’t
+return it. I just couldn’t. I kept it as a memory that I worked at
+Ground Zero.”
+
+Then one day, out of the blue, the boat company owner gathered
+all of the Mexican workers. “I’m sorry but I can’t work with you
+anymore. Immigration can find me, and they will fine me,” he said.
+Then he made them sign some forms likely liberating the employers
+from any responsibility from suddenly firing them. Joaquín didn’t
+read them before signing the documents. Neither did the other guys.
+“That’s what I regret. I didn’t take a photograph of those forms or
+make a copy of them. We didn’t even read the letter.” That was
+before Colectiva Por Fin, and their Know Your Rights training for day
+laborers. He insists he would never let someone do that to him again.
+“They have really opened my eyes to the rights of workers. I’m more
+awake than I was before and I wouldn’t sign something again without
+reading it,” he says.
+After he was fired from the boat company, Joaquín arrived at the
+corner. He was now a day laborer.
+—
+Hurricane Sandy hit the night of October 29, 2014, at the precise
+moment the Atlantic Ocean and New York Harbor both reached full
+tide. High tide on that night meant the water levels along the
+southern coast were already elevated about five feet higher than
+usual. Furthermore, it was not only a high tide but a spring tide,
+meaning the moon was full and the tide, which operates along a
+cycle, was at its highest monthly point, about half a foot higher than
+the highest point of the high tide you would see during a normal
+storm. Once it picked up its full force, Sandy came through the East
+Coast a thousand miles wide, making it three times the size of
+Hurricane Katrina. It was a spectacle of wind and the ocean’s fickle,
+maniacal force, and New York’s man-made dunes and bulkheads
+only dulled the hurricane’s mighty impact.
+The Hurricane Katrina cleanup set the model for Hurricane
+Sandy. After Katrina, about half of the reconstruction crews in New
+Orleans were Latinx, and more than half of those were
+undocumented. They worked the most dangerous jobs for the lowest
+
+wages. They picked up dead bodies without gloves and masks. They
+waded waist-deep in toxic waters. During this same period, New
+Orleans mayor Ray Nagin asked a room of business leaders, “How do
+I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?”
+There would be no way.
+The first and biggest contractor to come on the scene after Sandy
+hit was AshBritt Environmental, now famous for having squandered
+$500 million in government contracts after Katrina, while charging
+44 percent more than local contractors and paying subcontractors
+only $10 of every $23 it received per cubic yard, out of which the
+workers received their paltry wages. The company left behind two
+EPA-designated superfund sites.
+But Sandy brought death before the contractors came. Most of the
+initial deaths were due to drowning. There were forty drowning
+deaths, and half happened in people’s homes. Much of Staten Island
+ignored orders to evacuate because evacuation orders had also been
+issued for Hurricane Irene the year prior and then the storm swerved
+around Staten Island and landed upstate, leaving the boroughs
+intact. When the orders came this time, half of Staten Island was
+designated as Evacuation Zone A, meaning that half was especially
+vulnerable to flooding, and city officials targeted that area with
+phone calls, televised reminders, and door-to-door calls for
+evacuation. The community says National Guard members also went
+door-to-door in neighborhoods in the storm’s path, but activists tell
+me that immigrants felt unsafe when they saw uniformed people
+knocking on doors at all hours, especially if they lacked papers.
+The storm caused $62 billion in damages in the United States,
+killed 125 people, and left 7.5 million people without power. The city
+had not prepared for that kind of devastation and was slow to
+provide aid. Day laborers were among the first people on the ground
+to help. “In times of crisis, day laborers are often the first
+responders,” one labor organizer told me.
+Pedro Ituralde is a forty-one-year-old Chilean man who was the
+longtime executive director of Colectiva Por Fin and now leads
+Nuestra Calle. He had just come back from a trip to Chile when the
+
+storm hit. He sprang into action, organizing volunteer brigades of
+day laborers so that four or five brigades were on the ground at all
+times. They cleaned flooded basements, removed fallen branches and
+trees, repaired fences, waded in dirty waters up to their knees to
+remove furniture from houses, removed drywall, picked up debris,
+whatever needed to get done.
+Every single day laborer I meet loves, trusts, and speaks adoringly
+of Pedro. He is an institution in immigrant Staten Island, something
+of a godfather figure despite his youth and the fact that he is openly
+gay, and this in the all-male Latinx day laborer community. I ask him
+how he maneuvers that. “I ask them if they’ve ever been
+discriminated against, and they all say yes,” Pedro says. “So I tell
+them the LGBTQ community is discriminated against just like they
+are, and it is their job as people who have been hurt by prejudice to
+not hurt anyone else. And they all get it.” It is the only sliver of
+personal information about himself that Pedro is willing to share in
+our three years of constant communication, visits, phone calls,
+emails, texts, and bribes in the form of midday cappuccinos and flans
+delivered to his office. He does not want the focus on himself.
+Pedro was inspired to organize the storm volunteer brigades after
+hearing stories from Latinx New Yorkers who went to governmentrun restoration centers and were turned away by guards who told
+them, “You don’t belong here,” or, “You’re not from here. I know
+you’re lying.” Occupy Sandy, a group made up of former Occupy Wall
+Street activists, donated supplies to the worker center—sleeping
+bags, batteries, toilet paper, and flashlights, as did Mexican pop
+superstar Thalía, who lives in New York and in a message of support
+called the day laborers “my brothers.” The men stuffed the supplies
+into bright yellow drawstring bags with Colectiva Por Fin’s logo on it.
+This was a team-building move proposed by Pedro, who is also
+known to make his team members do trust falls. The yellow bags
+became famous across the beachfront communities on Staten Island.
+Pedro tells me he heard a woman call into a local radio show to
+complain about the government’s lack of response, saying the only
+people who had their shit together were the day laborers. “We helped
+
+two hundred and forty families,” he says. “And that was the
+government’s job.”
+Along the beach, Colectiva Por Fin set up a tent where they ran
+daily Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
+trainings and offered vests and masks for laborers who needed
+replacements. The experience built goodwill in the community. The
+local precinct’s police chief began coming to the Colectiva Por Fin
+offices to meet the men, and Pedro brought some day laborers to
+community council meetings. When community members said that
+they ruined the neighborhood by urinating in public or hollering at
+women, the men responded, “That may be one person. Look at me,
+look at us. Day laborers as a whole do not behave that way.”
+The first jobs after the storm hit were removal of garbage and
+debris, knocking down damaged walls or other large structures, and
+the removal of mold. Unlike most volunteers, day laborers had the
+skill set to do extensive renovation projects, including specialized
+work like painting, electrical wiring, and landscaping. Beyond
+helping those in need, the workers were networking, giving their
+neighbors a sampling of their skills in hopes of encouraging future
+working relationships, but many people just took the free labor and
+never contacted them again. Some home owners even failed to
+provide essential tools for cleanup, such as masks, or even mops and
+garbage bags, and volunteer workers had to bring their own.
+Joaquín was one of the volunteers during Hurricane Sandy. At
+first, recovery days were workdays like any other. He woke up,
+bought a buttered roll and coffee with milk and sugar from the
+bodega (he only drinks his coffee black on weekends, the morning
+after he drinks beer), and went to work. He worked seven days a
+week. He is a big man, so first he helped residents get everything
+onto the street, anything that had been touched by salt water, mostly
+furniture. He went into a lot of basements, a little scared each time
+that he was going to walk into live electrical wiring since they were
+often pitch-black. After long days on the street, he went back to the
+single room he rents, where he took a long bath with Epsom salts, ate
+a mug of oatmeal with milk and sugar, watched TV, then went to
+
+sleep. He sometimes caught the end of a variety show, but mostly it
+was just the Spanish news. Joaquín fell asleep to news of the
+hurricane’s damage. He didn’t think of himself as a protagonist in
+the story of Sandy—he still doesn’t—but he tells me his clearest
+memory of the hurricane aftermath is meeting two elderly Asian
+women so frail they could not carry anything and had nowhere to
+sleep. He gave them inflatable beds. It is one of the most prized
+memories of his life.
+Julián volunteered, too. He fondly remembers traveling all across
+Staten Island and sometimes to New Jersey to go knocking door-todoor to see who needed help. He admits he felt sad that after the
+recovery efforts were well under way, the island forgot about the day
+laborers. He sometimes feels used, but he doesn’t resent his
+neighbors and doesn’t regret the time he spent helping them. “I was
+scared, there was disaster as far as the eye could see, I had friends
+who didn’t make it, people got sick, but we helped each other out. We
+felt like we were part of the community. We finally felt like we
+belonged,” he says.
+—
+One morning, outside a worker center, some day laborers came to
+me to talk about why I was there. To write about them in a way
+they’d never been written about before! I say. They had an ask.
+Could I please tell the real story about them? Not the one we’re used
+to seeing in the papers, about them pissing in bottles and catcalling
+women. The real one. Yes, yes, I promise. I always promise things
+before I know whether or not I can deliver.
+—
+Some many months later I stumbled upon the story of Ubaldo Cruz
+Martinez. Ubaldo was an alcoholic and many of the day laborers I
+talked to knew him or knew of him but didn’t really want to talk
+about him. They were so careful about their reputations and he was a
+homeless alcoholic who drowned in a basement during Hurricane
+
+Sandy because he was probably drunk. Did they feel sorry for him?
+Yes. Were they embarrassed by him? Probably.
+Ubaldo was found floating in dirty water, and his body was
+repatriated to his hometown of San Jerónimo Xayacatlán. The bell at
+the church rang at one o’clock in the morning to mark the return of
+one of their own. People in the town gossiped that it was a shame he
+had died with no friends and with nobody to cry over his grave.
+Before the hour of this death, on October 31, Ubaldo leaned
+against a cement building for balance and he saw a small crescent of
+fur on the gravel, the rain already beating down. He walked to it, and
+discovered a small skinny squirrel, making a copper wiry sound, a
+wound on its abdomen. A stray, a stray like him. It was beginning to
+rain at a blunt slant, a lancing rain. He picked up the squirrel and
+walked into the basement where he was squatting. He made himself
+a Nescafé to sober up. The squirrel was cold to the touch so he put
+her in a shoe box and padded the box with his socks that he warmed
+in the oven. He had some condensed milk in the cupboard that he
+warmed in the microwave. He didn’t have a dropper, so he fed it to
+her through a straw, sucking up the milk with his mouth, then
+putting his finger on the top of the straw, putting the straw into the
+squirrel’s mouth, between her bunny teeth, to release the milk drop
+by drop. He knew he was not leaving this basement tonight. He
+couldn’t get himself anywhere. No one would want him. They’d given
+up on him long ago. He had kids in Mexico. They’d be orphans. His
+heart raced. His hands became moist. Stroking the squirrel kept him
+calm as the basement filled with water. He put on his Ochoa jersey
+and a thin gold chain, and he decided to wait for what would come.
+He stroked the squirrel until the water got up to his shoulders and he
+treaded water. He held onto the shoe box above his head. No
+creature should have to die alone.
+—
+Did this happen?
+Are we in gangs?
+
+Do we steal Social Security numbers?
+Do we traffic our own children across the border?
+Is this book nonfiction?
+Can we imagine that he was capable of kindness, even as he was
+drinking? That he was capable of courage, even as he was wounded?
+What if this is how, in the face of so much sacrilege and slander,
+we reclaim our dead?
+
+CHAPTER 2
+
+Ground Zero
+
+O
+
+n the morning of September 11, 2001, after the North Tower of
+the World Trade Center fell, killing some fourteen hundred people,
+firefighters rushed to the site with blueprints and floor plans,
+marking locations where they believed elevators and stairwells would
+have collapsed with the people they carried. They were looking for
+survivors. Global positioning technology plotted patterns formed by
+the spots where bodies, or parts of bodies, were found. But days went
+by and only eleven people were found in the rubble, and it soon
+became clear that the mapping technology would be used to locate
+the dead.
+The fires at Ground Zero were mean and hard to extinguish; they
+burned long and deep, flaring when exposed to oxygen and fueled by
+tons of highly conductive papers and furniture soaked in jet fuel.
+Thermal heat maps from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey
+showed swaths of rubble burning at temperatures above 1,292°F,
+hotter than the burning point of aluminum. By December 3, 2001,
+New Scientist dubbed it “the longest-burning structural fire in
+history.” Officials continued to call Ground Zero a “rescue
+operation”—implying it was still possible to find survivors, but they
+couldn’t keep hope alive and at the same time submerge all sixteen
+
+acres with water and flame retardant—until the hundredth day of the
+fire, when the last flame was extinguished.
+Rescue workers called the sixteen acres of debris on Ground Zero
+“the Pile.” The powdered debris in the Pile contained more than 150
+compounds and elements including plaster, talc, synthetic foam,
+glass, paint chips, charred wood, slag wool, two hundred thousand
+pounds of lead from fifty thousand computers, gold and mercury
+from five hundred thousand fluorescent lights, two thousand tons of
+asbestos, and ninety-one thousand liters of jet fuel. The nearly three
+thousand human beings who died made up such a minuscule part of
+the debris that the odds of finding identifiable remains were less
+than one in a quadrillion. It was a site of desolation set on fire.
+The first responders were firemen and EMT workers.
+The second responders were undocumented immigrants.
+Lucero Gómez is a social worker who runs informal group therapy
+sessions with mostly undocumented, all-Latinx former Ground Zero
+cleanup workers. Lucero tells me that almost immediately after 9/11,
+undocumented immigrants started getting phone calls “from a very
+underground kind of network of people who are undocumented and
+need work. They called at night. They said, ‘Tomorrow there is work,
+come work.’ ” The city hired contractors—Americans, Anglo, white.
+The contractors hired subcontractors, many of them bilingual Latinx
+people with the golden ticket of American citizenship who could
+present themselves as friendly faces to other immigrants—“We look
+like you! We speak like you!”—and would make the eventual abuses
+unexpected. Vans drove from Queens out to Long Island, through
+Nassau and Suffolk Counties, up and down the immigrant enclaves,
+looking for day laborers to bring to Ground Zero. The workers were
+mostly Eastern European and Latin American. Many of the women
+knew the area well, having cleaned offices and apartments in Lower
+Manhattan for years. They knew they’d be called to dust. There was
+so much dust.
+In 2001, Milton Vallejo had been working nights as a security
+guard at the World Trade Center. Milton is tall and gentle. On the
+morning of September 11, the day shift guards, friends of his, came in
+
+to take over and he joked around with them for a bit, then headed to
+the subway. He was underground when the news hit. He couldn’t
+breathe. He raced home. He watched the news. He prayed to god. He
+had to help. It was his duty. Plus, work was work. The next day, he
+made his way back to the World Trade Center, now called Ground
+Zero. He found long lines of people waiting to enter the site. He
+wondered if he’d be asked to present his papers—the terrorists had
+been foreigners—and got out of line. An official of some kind—from
+where, he doesn’t remember—overseeing the line walked over and
+asked him why he left the line. Milton fumbled. The truth is, I’m not
+here legally, he said. Get back in line, she said. When it was his turn,
+she had him sign his name on a blank sheet of paper and compared
+his signature to the signature on his Colombian passport. “They
+made all of us sign on blank paper, then compared the signature to
+any ID we had. Then they let us in,” he says. At first, observers
+applauded them as they watched them work. They took pictures.
+Then as the site began to crowd with cleanup workers, it was clear
+that most of them were Latinx. Some of the people observing them
+now started yelling, “Leave! Leave! Leave!”
+“It looked like a Western, just like a desert,” Milton says.
+“Everything was dust and water and there was no light anywhere.”
+Milton was assigned to clean basements, where he waded waist-deep
+through dirty water and chemicals. He tied plastic grocery bags
+around his ankles. The dust was the hardest to clean because it
+blinded him and stuck to his wet clothing. He wasn’t given goggles.
+The subcontractors gave him air masks, but they were flimsy and
+broke easily. After a few days of work, Milton started spitting out
+mucus. Something scratched at the back of his throat, so he had to
+keep clearing it—something wet and dry at the same time. After one
+week, he got his first paycheck from the subcontractor: sixty dollars a
+day for working a twelve-hour shift; some days were longer than
+twelve hours. When he tried cashing the check, it bounced.
+I first met Milton at one of Lucero’s group sessions in 2011. That
+day, the meeting was dedicated to a discussion of the September 11th
+Victim Compensation Fund and the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and
+
+Compensation Act, a law that promised to provide medical treatment
+to 9/11 cleanup workers.
+The people at Lucero’s sessions had all become sick. They carry
+hospital ID cards issued by Mount Sinai and Bellevue, where they are
+treated. Many of them have developed cancer. They have rhinitis,
+gastritis, arthritis, severe acid reflux, asthma, high blood pressure,
+and back pain. They have PTSD, anxiety, depression, and paranoia.
+Their psychological symptoms are triggered by the smell of barbecue,
+by darkness, by any news coverage of natural disasters. The group
+helps them in some ways, but Lucero is just one person and cannot
+do it alone. Meetings are irregular.
+When I return to visit the group again in early 2017, all anyone
+can talk about is deportation. A woman named Lourdes with two
+long braids reminds the group to be careful. She tells them to carry
+around their prescription bottles with them as well as their hospital
+ID cards to present to ICE officers should they be approached. She
+says ICE once entered her home but they left her alone once she was
+able to prove that she was receiving treatment at a local hospital’s
+World Trade Center worker program. But that was one nice ICE
+officer, she says. Any of them could be deported at any time.
+Lucero doesn’t have much control over the group, which is rowdy.
+Everyone talks over one another and they sometimes answer their
+phones, screaming into them, while they’re still in their seats. One
+man, Enrique, is quiet for most of the meeting. He tells me that
+nothing happened to him that day, that he was spared. He is wearing
+a light windbreaker that he leaves open, and he repeatedly brings one
+side of the jacket close to his face to take a sip from a straw. A bottle,
+in a brown paper bag, is in the inside pocket.
+Enrique says he doesn’t feel the effects of the cleanup, but it isn’t
+true. He has flashbacks to Ground Zero all the time. A few weeks ago,
+he was working on top of a six-foot ladder in Brooklyn and had a
+flashback to being surrounded by dank water, in the dark, next to
+fallen lights, shattered glass, and ash, the strong smell of mildew and
+chemicals soaking fabrics and furniture. He fell off the ladder and
+
+broke his arm. “I become suddenly frightened by absolutely nothing,
+like a cat,” he says.
+Enrique was hired to work at Ground Zero by a company named
+Good Shine Cleaning, owned by a married Colombian American
+couple. American citizens. “The lines for cleaning jobs were
+hundreds of people long and companies just picked everyone up and
+put us in trucks,” he remembers. “The Americans who own the
+contracting companies are all white. They hire Hispanic people to
+work as subcontractors and they’re the ones who deal directly with
+laborers. When the American contractors come to the work sites, the
+subcontractors treat them like gods,” he says. “They make us stop
+talking if we were talking, and we have to turn off the music if we
+were listening to music. We even stop working out of respect for
+them. They arrive in fancy cars and expensive clothes, and when they
+come in, they don’t talk to us. They don’t even look at us. They only
+talk to the Hispanic subcontractor.” Contractors have mastered a
+plantation model in their line of work, exploiting whatever sense of
+community that might exist among Latinx people. The workers think
+there are people along the chain of command who are watching out
+for them, but melanin and accents are ineffective binding substances.
+I know the members of the therapy group struggle with mental
+illness, and when I ask, gently, what meds they’re on or what their
+panic attacks are like, they tell me but seem a little embarrassed. In
+our community, there is an ingrained idea that if you are sick, it’s a
+weakness, a symptom of our internalized bootstraps mythology. “You
+don’t have to pretend with me,” I say. We end up confiding in each
+other.
+Milton attends the 9/11 group therapy meetings regularly, and
+when he sees me again, after so many years, he bows slightly, kisses
+my hand, and says, “Señorita Karla, you’ve returned.” He is on
+medication now, and it has helped, but at the beginning of his
+treatment, things were bad. “I tried to take my life,” he says. A
+psychologist who worked with some of the 9/11 survivors talked him
+down from overdosing on pills over the phone, reassuring him that
+
+he was loved. Milton also sees a psychiatrist who once talked him
+down from throwing himself onto the train tracks.
+Milton speaks in an overly formal way with the affect of a dictator.
+This makes me think of my father, another amateur Fidel—and I
+think about meeting my father for what felt like the first time, all
+those years ago, when I was five. One of the first things he did was
+take me to the zoo. It was both random and perfect, a reminder that
+we were still here, animals ourselves, on earth.
+I ask Milton if he’d like to go to the Queens Zoo. He says yes.
+The Queens Zoo does not have a lion, which is the mascot of
+Milton’s favorite soccer team. Milton used to play professionally in
+Colombia, and then he played in a league of immigrant men every
+week in the park for years, before he was diagnosed with asthma
+after 9/11 and had to stop. Although he has mixed feelings about
+observing animals that are “trapped,” Milton takes lots of pictures at
+the zoo. He has never been to one before, and I wish I had taken him
+to the Bronx Zoo, which is bigger and better in every way. The only
+animals here are coyotes, elk, owls, pumas, lynx, bald eagles, cranes,
+alligators (seasonal), bison, antelope, peccaries, thick-billed parrots,
+and Andean bears. It is cold and windy, not a great day to spend time
+outdoors, and Milton is wearing a cream coat over a white puff vest,
+white sneakers, and a checkered gray scarf. I’m wearing a puff coat
+too, and sometimes when we pass our reflections on the glass panes
+of animal exhibits, I wonder whether a stranger passing us would
+think I am his daughter.
+We go by the graveyard of extinct animals. It is what it sounds like
+—tombstones on the ground with pictures of extinct species and their
+year of extinction. There is a golden toad (1989), a dodo bird (1681),
+a Tasmanian tiger (1936), and pig-footed bandicoot (1901). Do you
+know what that is? When they were alive, they looked like tiny sandcolored mice with bunny ears, and stood with a kangaroo’s stance—
+really cute. Milton feels genuinely sad that these animals are gone
+and tells me he hates the American culture of hunting. “Hunting for
+pleasure is putting an end to creation. God creates for a reason,” he
+says.
+
+Does god allow death for a reason? I ask him. Milton does not
+know.
+The chief tragedy in Milton’s life is the loss of his friend Rafael
+Hernández, a Mexican volunteer firefighter who also served as a 9/11
+first responder. Milton met Rafael at a resting station for relief
+workers, where he saw him in a blue helmet. “It looked like he was
+wearing a costume,” he says. He asked Rafael if he spoke Spanish.
+“Uh, I’m Mexican,” Rafael replied. They became friends.
+Rafael had been a firefighter in Mexico and showed his Mexican
+firefighter badge to the first responders, and they geared him up.
+They didn’t care that he was foreign. They needed all the help they
+could get. As everyone else was running out of the buildings, Rafael
+ran up the North Tower. He encountered a pregnant woman whose
+water broke. She begged him not to leave her, and he didn’t. He
+reportedly carried her down twenty-eight flights of stairs. Not long
+after they made it out, the tower fell.
+Rafael didn’t leave Ground Zero for months, working day after
+day. Eventually his lungs got so fucked up he had to be hooked up to
+a respirator to sleep. He died in 2011, the ten-year anniversary of
+9/11. Milton shows me a shrink-wrapped CD a folksinger friend had
+made in honor of the anniversary. The back of the CD shows a fading
+image of the two towers with the faces of Milton and Rafael above
+them. Rafael was declared to have died of “natural causes,” which
+officials later explained actually meant “alcoholism and obesity,” but
+Latinx leaders in New York have refused to accept that
+pronouncement. His body was repatriated to Mexico and his organs
+kept in New York for further investigation. In a Fox News Latino
+television interview taped before his death, Rafael is incorrectly
+introduced as “Juan Hernandez: Hero in His Adopted Homeland.”
+The camera zooms in on his heavily inked upper arm, tattooed with a
+huge bald eagle, an American flag, the downtown Manhattan skyline,
+the Twin Towers, and his initials: “R. H. Mex.”
+Their friendship was so famous that some gossips in Queens say
+they were gay, Milton tells me. He misses Rafael. He was the only
+person who could really understand what it was like to be there. As a
+
+way of coping, Milton has written a memoir called Sueño, pesadilla,
+paraíso (“Dream, Nightmare, Paradise”). He explains the title: “My
+dream was never money. I had a great job in Colombia. My ex-wife
+and I fled the war. Before Pablo Escobar was extradited, he ordered
+bombs to be planted everywhere as an act of revenge, and I narrowly
+escaped two bombs—a car bomb and a bomb at a local mall. So my
+dream was to find a peaceful life. My nightmare was 9/11, and also
+going from working in an office to being mistreated in a factory—to
+being treated like an uneducated person. My paradise is having
+found god, and paradise will be returning to Colombia when I am
+old.” After he told Rafael he was writing a book, his friend used to say
+he wanted to weld together their living room walls, his in Mexico and
+Milton’s in Colombia, so they could share a wall and write their
+books together as old men.
+Milton believes that he has been chosen by god to be a messenger
+for the Ground Zero undocumented workers, maybe for our people
+in general. He looks so damn earnest when he says this—not in the
+pathetic way that makes me want to kill myself, in the self-assured
+way that makes me feel like I’m back in my mother’s uterus—that I
+almost believe him. When I mention this to my friends, they think
+it’s fanaticism, but I don’t. I believe him.
+—
+The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later,
+during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation
+in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no
+matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter
+how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much
+lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if
+you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and
+scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an
+immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we
+became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration
+landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate
+
+crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure
+Communities program would require local police to share
+information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers
+began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State,
+as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented
+immigrants.
+I think about this often; that was the night my dad started dying.
+In this memory, my father comes home from work and I greet him in
+the doorway to give him a kiss hello and ask for his blessing. Do you
+know this custom? I’ve only seen Ecuadorians do it. You go up to
+your elders and say “Bendición,” and they kiss you or do the sign of
+the cross on your forehead and chest and say “Bendición.” It’s how
+you say hello or goodbye, like your de facto state is a state of
+cursedness and your elders can un-curse you, but only for a little
+while, so you have to keep asking. So I stand in the doorway in my
+bare feet and say “Hello, Father. Blessing please.” He walks slowly
+and comes toward my body at a strange angle a child could only
+interpret as a terrible fall. He collapses onto me to cry into my neck.
+I’m little, but he does. Collapse, I mean. My father the dictator,
+heaving full-throated sobs. He hands me a letter. The letter says, in
+English, that Governor George Pataki had suspended driver’s
+licenses for undocumented immigrants as part of a national security
+measure. My father had just lost his job as a taxi driver. He had also
+lost his state ID. Over the next two decades, he’d lose many more
+things, but let’s put a little blue thumbtack on this memory map, the
+first place in hell we visited.
+It was hard to see my father fall because he was the most powerful
+person I knew. He had kept me alive. He was a difficult man and he
+had recognized me as a difficult child. I was polite and craved
+approval from authority figures, but I was also dark and precocious.
+Not precocious in the we-live-in-Tribeca-and-my-kid-is-a-born-artist
+kind of way. More like my immigrant-third-grader-is-readingHemingway-but-is-secretly-drinking-Listerine-and-toothpaste-untilshe-throws-up-because-she-wants-it-to-kill-her kind of way. My
+father read parenting books about how to raise troubled children, but
+
+those children were never straight-A students who were soft-spoken
+and loved teachers. It confused him, and the dissonance made him
+angry at me. When I was off from school, for any kind of break, my
+father would plan out my day in half-hour increments, scheduling
+everything from bath time to TV shows to coloring time to math
+drills to time to play with dolls, and even bathroom breaks. He called
+it my schedule and he handwrote it on graph paper in different
+colored inks and taped it to my desk. My mother stayed home at the
+time, and she enforced the schedule. If I became too emotional, I was
+sent to take a cold shower. If my mood became low, he made me go
+running or roller-skating. He’d give me research projects about
+animals or important politicians and entire passages from the Bible
+to memorize. He’d set aside magazine or newspaper articles for me
+to translate in perfect handwriting into blank notebooks. He could
+not review the fidelity of the translation but he judged my
+penmanship. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had
+not been kept away from my own thoughts for so many years. I
+believe god sent my father. Maybe that’s why I believe god could
+have sent Milton, too.
+Paloma is an older member of Lucero’s support group. She talks
+like a mumble rapper, low and guttural and with a deliberate lack of
+enunciation. She can laugh and cry within seconds. Paloma is
+recovering from cancer, lives alone, and is severely traumatized. She
+says she is so afraid of ICE activity that she literally runs in and out
+of doctors’ appointments so they don’t catch her. Like, runs. She has
+installed surveillance cameras outside her apartment in case agents
+come to her door. “They don’t want us in this country,” she says. “We
+have to be careful.”
+One Sunday I meet Paloma at the ten o’clock mass at Sacred
+Heart of Jesus Church in Queens but she does not want me to sit
+with her. “You can meet me outside after,” she says. The church is
+filled with a couple hundred families. I take a seat in the back.
+The Catholic Church is, above all things, reliable across centuries.
+I can see this same mass taking place at the height of the Cold War,
+maybe even during the Inquisition. The priest has white skin and
+
+white hair, while the hundreds in the pews are brown-skinned people
+with black, black hair. He hates one bishop. He loves another bishop.
+They’re not even American bishops. He sometimes makes side
+comments under his breath that I assume he assumes the
+congregants won’t catch (“Margaret Thatcher, a British woman who
+looked like a man”) during a short rant against communism. He
+advises the congregants against practicing witchcraft or seeking
+traditional healing when they return to their home countries “on
+vacation,” and leads them in prayer, asking god “that the church be
+enriched by mercy and charity” before passing the collection plate.
+It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, and I’d forgotten the back
+rows are reserved for people who go in and out, mothers with young
+babies. (“This is the scandalous symphony we’ve been listening to all
+morning,” the priest mutters harshly when he hears the cries of a
+baby with Down syndrome being held by a young woman standing in
+the aisle.) Today’s reading is from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
+There is talk about abominations. I look up at the ceiling.
+I meet Paloma outside, by a white marble statue of Jesus Christ
+yanking open his flowing robes, revealing his sacred heart. The
+sacred heart of Jesus is depicted as the literal coronary organ—
+pierced, aflame, surrounded by thorns, and wounded. It signifies the
+power of his love for us. I’ve seen it tattooed on gangsters and I love
+it.
+We walk several blocks to La Hacienda, a Colombian restaurant
+that I remember loving as a child. On the way there, Paloma
+repeatedly walks into traffic. She doesn’t look both ways, she doesn’t
+even look one way, she just lunges in front of honking SUVs. I don’t
+say anything but link my arm through hers to guide her, at times
+pulling her back so she’s not hit by a car. Her vision is fine. I wonder
+if it’s a death wish, Freud something something, but then I notice
+that I can’t see more than a few feet ahead of me. Women roast corn
+and kebabs on makeshift grills on every corner, and cumbia blasts
+from record stores that still sell CDs. My senses feel rushed. It’s a
+short walk to the restaurant, but Paloma gets short of breath and
+
+struggles to talk on account of her ruined lungs. I get out of breath,
+too.
+At the restaurant, she orders raspberry juice in milk and I order a
+Corona. Whenever I steer the conversation to 9/11, she begins to cry.
+My parents scolded and taunted me whenever I cried as a child—they
+found it weak and threatening—and so I don’t like to see people cry.
+It embarrasses and angers me. I change the topic every time her eyes
+water. Paloma had cleaned properties in Lower Manhattan that
+included international banks and—the irony—the former
+Immigration and Naturalization Service building. (INS became ICE
+in 2003.) On the morning of 9/11, she was working on the fortieth
+floor of a government building when a fire erupted in the elevator—
+the buildings around the World Trade Center were also damaged by
+the blasts—and the workers had to flee down the stairs. She left a
+shoe behind. The building was still smoking when they returned to
+clean. “We even ate on top of the dust,” she says. “Yes, we were
+heroes, but the dangers of the job were hidden from us so that we
+could work. If they had put up a sign at the site listing what we could
+come to face, we wouldn’t have gone in.”
+Paloma has a string of illnesses that are common to all of the
+cleanup workers—sleep apnea, PTSD, depression, anxiety,
+gastrointestinal issues. She also has breast cancer. She can’t work
+because her bones hurt, and she often gets fevers, chills, and vertigo.
+She is waiting for the Zadroga Act to send her a compensation check,
+which some friends have already received, friends who don’t even
+have cancer.
+Paloma fled Colombia for the usual reasons—economic
+depression, bankruptcy in the family, the need to support her ailing
+mother. But she also had another reason. “The truth is I am an
+escape artist,” she says. Paloma grew up with an abusive stepfather.
+Once, after he beat her, she swore she would run away as soon as she
+had the chance. This was the 1970s in small-town Colombia, and she
+was a sixteen-year-old girl. Her only way to escape was to get
+married, so that’s what she did—she married the first guy who asked.
+She was seventeen. “I did it to escape,” she says. She immediately got
+
+pregnant, and would come to have three daughters. She didn’t love
+being a mom but she did her best. She got increasingly restless as the
+years went by. It all began to change when her fifteen-year-old
+daughter Lucy got pregnant and her boyfriend didn’t want to marry
+her. (“Am I supposed to marry her just to make you happy?” the boy
+yelled at Paloma. So she punched him in the face.) Lucy bounced
+back quickly after childbirth and began leaving the baby with Paloma
+all the time so she could go out with her boyfriend or go to parties.
+Paloma didn’t love being a grandma, and she didn’t love being a fulltime babysitter. “I didn’t want to live that life. I got tired of it. I’m not
+the type of woman who just puts up with shit,” she tells me. “I wasn’t
+born to be just a mother, just a grandmother, just a wife. So I
+escaped.” She left her grandchild, her three daughters (including one
+who was just seven years old), and her husband, and she came to the
+United States alone.
+Paloma tells me that her brother drowned himself, one of her
+cousins hanged himself, and another one threw himself off a tall
+building in Bogotá. She wonders: If she had stayed in Colombia,
+would she have followed suit? She acknowledges this thought with
+contempt. “What they did was cowardly,” she says. “My entire family
+is weak. I’m not weak like them. I’d rather be miserable here than
+end up in a cemetery in Colombia. I’m here, and I may be crying, but
+at least I’m not dead.” I ask Paloma if she would choose to have
+children if she had a second shot at life, and she thinks for a long
+time, wrapping her head around the fact that it could be a choice.
+“No,” she says finally. She has spent years apologizing to her
+daughters, but they resent her for the abandonment and it’s a wound
+that doesn’t heal. It’s what would await her in Colombia if she went
+back. More open wounds. After she finishes her juice, she leans close
+to me and tells me about Cruz.
+Cruz is a little older than she is. Cuban. When he was young, he
+was bad, served his time, but he’s clean now. They met when he was
+working delivering furniture and delivered a refrigerator to her
+home. He told her he liked her—a straight shooter, which she
+admired—and he gave her his phone number. Six months passed,
+
+and she called him one evening. “I was bored,” she says, giggling.
+They went out for cappuccinos and talked all night. He wasn’t scared
+by her baggage, by the depression and panic attacks, and she
+comforted him because he had been recently widowed. Cruz wants to
+marry Paloma, but she won’t divorce her husband in Colombia, even
+though soon after she left, he began dating the children’s teenage
+nanny, because when he dies she is entitled to part of his pension.
+She and the nanny will split it. I love this woman.
+Paloma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010. Her doctors
+believe the cancer is linked to her elevated exposure to toxins during
+the post-9/11 cleanup work. The news made Paloma feel bitter,
+hopeless, and punished by god. Surely he was punishing her for
+abandoning her children. What kind of mother would do that? She
+threw herself into church, into prayer. She spends a lot of time online
+watching Christian movies and reading Christian blogs. “I’m more
+than a believer,” she says. “I’m a fanatic. I see Jesus Christ right in
+front of me, as real as I see you.”
+At first, Cruz would accompany her to her doctors’ appointments.
+After her surgery, he hid in the hospital room so he wouldn’t be
+kicked out after visiting hours and could spend the night with her.
+But she was getting ready to die. She took all her savings, including a
+little compensation money she had received from the September 11th
+Victim Compensation Fund, and traveled to Panama alone. The first
+vacation of her life. Then she went back to Colombia, why else but to
+die, to die in her homeland surrounded by family, which seemed
+appropriate, even if she knew they wouldn’t give her a hero’s
+welcome, and they didn’t. Then, at a routine doctor’s appointment in
+Colombia, the doctor told her that she was cancer-free. “I said, I’m
+out of here!” she says, and she peaced out just like that. She came
+back to the United States by a means I am not going to disclose. She
+arrived in Las Vegas, and Cruz rented a truck from New York, driving
+for days to pick her up and bring her back to the city. On their road
+trip, they’d drive for seven-hour stretches, then stop at the closest
+town to explore. “It was a special trip,” she says. “One of the most
+special moments of my life. Can you believe he did that?” At a
+
+routine appointment in New York, the doctor told her he had bad
+news. The cancer was back, and it was aggressive. After several
+rounds of chemotherapy, Paloma is too weak to work and her savings
+are depleted.
+I ask for the check, and Paloma asks that both our leftovers—roast
+chicken, rice and beans, sweet plantain—be packed to go. I ask her if
+we can pass by a Colombian bakery so I can buy her some baked
+goods. “Sweetie, I would say yes, but I’m on a diet,” she says. Her
+doctor told her she’s a little on the heavy side for her height. She
+plans to lose twenty-five pounds. Tonight she will eat our leftovers.
+Tomorrow she will eat only apples. She walks me to my train stop,
+again veering into traffic unless I hold tightly on to her arm, the fog
+thick and close to the ground so we can’t see ahead of us and we can’t
+see our feet. When I hug her, I slip a twenty-dollar bill into her hand.
+“For a special treat,” I tell her. “I’m on a diet, Karlita, but god bless
+you,” she says.
+Like Paloma, some of the members of Lucero’s group have already
+received a few thousand dollars here and there through the
+September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a program set aside by
+the federal government for proven victims of the attacks and their
+living relatives. The man in charge of evaluating applications for the
+fund was Kenneth R. Feinberg, a lawyer who had successfully settled
+the Agent Orange lawsuits on behalf of the U.S. government. He had
+unlimited funds but a clear end date. In 2003, the fund stopped
+accepting applications, a time when many individuals were only
+beginning to exhibit symptoms. Workers who did not make the
+deadline fell back on unsubsidized treatment in city hospitals or
+workers’ compensation payments. Treatment options were slim for
+undocumented immigrants.
+Over the phone, Feinberg tells me he thought that the 9/11 Fund
+was “an extraordinary example of inclusiveness.”
+“At the urging of Attorney General John Ashcroft, we
+promulgated that no immigrant in the country illegally would be
+harmed, we translated the application and rules into four languages
+including Spanish, Korean, maybe French. We made sure that all
+
+immigrants were given the opportunity for free legal counsel. We
+held town hall meetings in the Bronx where we explained to
+surviving immigrants that the death of their husbands would in no
+way prevent them from filing.” He laughs. “I can’t think of a federal
+program more inclusive and respectful of diversity.”
+But in order for victims to be recognized by the Victim
+Compensation Fund, they had to show paperwork proving they
+worked at Ground Zero or lost someone that day. The undocumented
+often work in clever ways to leave no paper trail. There is no telling
+how many were killed because restaurant owners and managers have
+refused to come forward with the names of missing people for fear
+that they will be fined for employing undocumented laborers.
+Deliverymen lost their brothers that day. Some men worked the
+“graveyard shift”—between midnight and 8:00 A.M.—and were
+finishing up their last deliveries and going home when the planes
+struck. Advocacy organizations like Asociación Tepeyac worked
+tirelessly to field calls from families who had not heard from a loved
+one, and later to help the men and women who cleaned up Ground
+Zero. Dr. Charles Hirsch, New York City’s chief medical examiner,
+became “the gatekeeper to the official list” of WTC victims. The final
+list contained 2,749 names of deaths that had been ruled homicides.
+These 2,749 names would be inscribed on the memorial. The chief
+medical examiner’s office said that there were no more missing
+people. Said Julie Bolcer, director of public affairs, “The list accounts
+for everyone known or reported to have been there. There are no
+unknowns.” A few weeks after the towers fell, the city gave families
+who reported disappearances an urn containing Ground Zero ashes.
+The Mexican consulate held its own memorial service, reading the
+names we know and praying for the names we don’t.
+After my father lost his job as a taxi driver, he found a job as a
+deliveryman at a restaurant down in the Financial District.
+Deliverymen in that area call themselves “delivery boys.” Throughout
+my teens, I always corrected my father when he said this because I
+assumed the guys had heard it from some white supremacist boss
+who was trying to emasculate them and they accepted it as a neutral
+
+term. It made me furious. “There’s a history to white people calling
+men of color boys,” I would tell him.
+In the mornings, my father would deliver breakfast to offices in
+the Financial District. A raisin bagel with cream cheese and coffee
+with hazelnut creamer. A blueberry muffin and black coffee; two
+cranberry scones and three coffees, two cream, one sugar. A single
+croissant, and a single coffee, sent back because it was brought with
+white sugar and not Splenda. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches.
+Oatmeal with brown sugar. Yogurt parfaits. Orange juice and a
+banana. A chamomile tea. A granola bar and a chocolate milk. There
+was no delivery minimum, so my father delivered it all. Because the
+deliveries were so small, sometimes he didn’t get a tip. Sometimes he
+was told to keep the change—a quarter. Sometimes he was tipped in
+pennies. He had to say, “Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am.”
+Sometimes he was given a twenty-dollar tip for a five-dollar
+breakfast. He always told us about those tips. They were usually from
+Puerto Rican executive assistants who talked to him in Spanish and
+asked to see photos of me, so good and studious, bangs cut right
+above my eyebrows. My father complimented their nails and asked to
+see photos of their babies.
+Sometimes the deliverymen carried catering orders. Those would
+sometimes involve two deliverymen, but that wasn’t ideal because
+they had to split the tip. You never wanted to split the tip. The
+delivery orders were large, but you can carry a lot with two hands if
+you really try. The breakfast catering orders were usually an
+assortment of scones, croissants, muffins, and bagels. You couldn’t
+eat one yourself, though. The boss always knew if you ate one. If you
+needed a water, you had to go up to the cash register and buy the
+water. There was no discount. Sometimes the older men needed a
+Red Bull, but the boss put up security cameras in the kitchen area so
+he could tell if you had a Red Bull. He wouldn’t even charge you for it
+if you had one. He’d just fire you. Do you think I need you? I don’t
+even need to put an ad in the newspaper for this job. There are
+twenty Mexicans who’d line up for your job—you think I’m going to
+spot you a Red Bull?
+
+My father is an aesthete. Everyone wanted him for the catering
+orders because he’d do beautiful designs with the scones and the
+muffins. Like topiary shit. He sometimes had to write labels on heavy
+stock printer paper and he’d use his fanciest script; he taught himself
+calligraphy, like he taught himself everything, and everyone would
+go, Wow, you’re so talented! They always made him write the words
+on cakes. Beautiful fucking handwriting. He’d come home glowing if
+they complimented his handwriting. (My cursive was beautiful for a
+long time until I started taking lithium and then my hand shook bad.
+My dad was so sad.)
+My father didn’t use a bike; he made all his deliveries on foot. He
+speed-walked while carrying many heavy bags of food to offices on
+Wall Street. The plastic handles of the bags would twist and cut into
+his fingers, and he eventually developed large calluses on both his
+hands. His polyester pants rubbed up against his calves so much that
+he eventually lost all the hair on his legs. They’re smooth as a baby’s
+bottom, even now. He went through many pairs of inexpensive black
+rubber shoes. My mother massaged his feet at night. My dad’s feet
+are small and fat, like mine, so you can’t tell when they’re swollen.
+After a few years, my dad’s feet would hurt so much that he walked
+like he was on hot coals, sometimes leaning on me to move from the
+couch to the bed. “Ay ay ay ay,” he’d say as he limped, like a
+mariachi. Most of my dad’s co-workers were Mexican, and he learned
+how to cook Mexican food from them and he learned Mexican swear
+words, which my mom hated. Some of them were young, teenagers,
+and my dad would scold them and tell them to go back to school. He
+made his first gay friend at that restaurant. They called him Che,
+because he was Argentine.
+When I was in high school, my dad began to share stories he’d
+heard about undocumented restaurant workers who’d died on 9/11. I
+decided to interview my dad’s co-workers for the first piece I had
+ever pitched, for The Tribeca Trib. They were the only other
+undocumented people I knew. I had just watched All the President’s
+Men and wanted to break a story.
+
+My father picked whom I could talk to, and he chaperoned the
+interviews. He bought me a yellow flip notebook because I was
+pretending to be a journalist and he knew that would make me feel
+important. He also bought me a tape recorder from Kmart. I never
+actually managed to talk to anyone who directly knew an
+undocumented restaurant worker who died on 9/11, but everyone
+had heard the stories.
+The undocumented immigrants who died on 9/11 worked in
+restaurants, in housekeeping, in security. They were also
+deliverymen. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum now stands where the
+Twin Towers once stood. They have an exhibit that gutted me when I
+saw it. It’s a bicycle, presumed to have belonged to a deliveryman, a
+bike that was left tied to a pole near the Twin Towers. Visitors to the
+site had left acrylic flowers—red, white, and blue roses and
+carnations. They also left a rosary on the bicycle. It became a
+makeshift memorial. There was a note on the street next to the bike.
+EN MEMORIA DE LOS DELIVERY BOYS QUE MURIERON. SEPT 11 2001. “In
+memory of the delivery boys who died.” Delivery boys. That’s how I
+know it was the delivery boys who put up that sign, who left those
+acrylic flowers, men like my dad.
+I wonder what the bike owner brought to the Twin Towers that
+day. It was September, a mild day, so maybe an iced coffee. Black.
+Probably a scone. Maybe a $4.50 breakfast. A 15 percent tip would be
+sixty-seven cents. A 20 percent tip would be ninety cents. A generous
+person might tip a dollar. My father would travel anywhere for a
+dollar. My father would chase a dollar down the road, a dollar
+blowing in the winds of a hurricane, even when there was an equal
+likelihood of getting swept up by the wind. My dad would always take
+the chance. A dollar is a dollar.
+There was Antonio Meléndez, and Antonio Javier Álvarez, and
+Leobardo López Pascual, and Juan Ortega-Campos, and Martín
+Morales Zempoaltécatl, and Arturo Alba Moreno, and José Manuel
+Contreras Fernández, and Germán Castillo García, and José Guevara
+González, and Alicia Acevedo Carranza, and Víctor Antonio Martínez
+
+Pastrana, and Juan Romero Orozco, and Enrique Octavio and Santos
+Anaya, and Margarito Casillas, and Norberto Hernández.
+There was also Fernando Jimenez Molinar, who worked at a pizza
+shop nearby, delivering pies and washing dishes. He was nineteen
+years old. (My brother is nineteen years old. Jesus Christ, the hair
+above my brother’s lip, he’s so proud of it that he doesn’t shave. He
+writes spoken-word poetry and keeps a dream journal. I bought it for
+him; it has Batman on the cover. He collects comic books.) Fernando
+had two roommates, undocumented like him, and they called his
+mom when he didn’t come home on the night of 9/11. A local
+Mexican organization looked everywhere for him. He was gone. The
+Twin Towers fell shortly before 10:00 A.M. Who wanted a pizza
+delivered that early? Probably a finance bro coked up after a long
+night lying with numbers. Maybe he was high on Adderall. Hadn’t
+eaten in twenty-four hours and was finally hungry, but only for pizza.
+Probably a little older than Fernando, maybe twenty-two or twentythree. Harvard grad. Bro, is that my pizza?
+Fernando’s mom didn’t want him to come to America. He went
+anyway. He grew out his hair into a ponytail and grew a beard. That’s
+what the newspapers say. But he was nineteen, and I know nineteen.
+Nice beard. His sneakers were clean, white, like a fool’s. My father
+always told his teenage co-workers not to get white sneakers, and
+they always did anyway. Slaves to fashion. Earbuds in his ears.
+Metallica. Mexicans and their Metallica. It’s not racist when I say it.
+It was bright and sunny that day. His life ahead of him. The day
+ahead of him. His mom still young. He could still change her life. He
+could still tell his father off. The pizza delivery would net him five
+dollars. That’s a calling card. He could call his mom, but the entire
+card would be spent on her sending him blessings. He wanted to buy
+her a house. A garden where she could grow her own flowers; she
+loved marigolds, not bodega flowers like rainbow-colored carnations
+—marigolds. The house would have one room for her, and an office
+where she could read her Bible. The edges of the pages were colored
+gold. He would get his mom a dog so she wouldn’t be lonely. She
+liked frilly things, so maybe she’d like a poodle, but he wanted to get
+
+her a German shepherd, something to protect her, bark if anyone but
+him approached the house. So many people had hurt his mother, but
+not again. Not under his watch. His mother, his saint. Sometimes
+he’d swing by hair salons and steal the lady magazines and send
+them to her. Sometimes when he called she’d describe the dresses
+she loved from the magazines over the phone, and he resolved to buy
+them. She loved silk. His mother never knew silk. He’d make her
+know silk. He’d make her know death. He’d make her know silence.
+He’d make her know the death mask of a man disappeared,
+incinerated, and gone. Fernando Jimenez Molinar? Was he ever
+alive?
+Did you know that before dialing Mexico you have to dial 011?
+There are so many numbers to dial to get to your mother. 1 2 3 4 5 6
+7 8 9 0. You learn those numbers young. The jet-fuel smell thick in
+the air, the flame and smoke surrounding you, you can only get to
+011 and that’s enough to make you foreign, to make you other, to
+make you Mexican. You take out your wallet and put an ID between
+your teeth so they can find you when it all collapses. Your flesh may
+burn but your teeth will remain and the ID will be there. It’s a fake
+ID. Nobody will ever know you died. Nobody will ever know you
+lived.
+
+CHAPTER 3
+
+Miami
+
+T
+
+he city of Hialeah in Miami-Dade County is the last bit of U.S.
+soil on which Amelia Earhart stood before embarking on her doomed
+solo flight in 1937, disappearing in the Pacific Ocean somewhere near
+Howland Island. I’m about to go to Hialeah on a reporting trip, so I
+text this factoid to my mother. At fifty-three, she is in the middle of a
+feminist awakening and is usually eager to talk about feminist heroes
+to compare herself to—unlike my father, who compares me to those
+women instead. A few days later, she texts me a picture of a tiny pilot
+costume for a dog, saying she is at a white people’s pet boutique and
+she is about to buy my dog, Frankie, a leather jacket and matching
+pilot cap. Oh my god, I say.
+I never write about my mother. Why do you never write about
+me? my mother asks, a copy of The New York Times on her lap open
+to a two-page spread about my father. Of course I write about you, I
+say. You don’t, she says. I don’t, it’s true I don’t. The obvious answer
+to that is that I have daddy issues. (“Stop saying that,” my partner
+says. “It doesn’t mean what you think it means.”) My father was the
+one who worked outside the house for twenty-five years, so he was
+the one facing grueling labor conditions and racist abuse on the front
+lines in America. I thought my mother was protected somehow
+because she was in the home.
+
+And when she stepped out into the wild to work outside the home
+three years ago, she went to work for these white people who didn’t
+abuse her so I was like, okay, we’re okay. Working outside the home
+changed her, she became this whole new woman, emancipated and
+bold, and it caused problems at home. You always take your father’s
+side, she said, adiós. She was always hanging up on me. I am not
+taking my father’s side! I’m being objective! I scream into the phone,
+but she’s gone. She drinks organic kombucha, once mailed me a
+leather leash because she thought Frankie looked “homeless,” and
+has zero tolerance for my father’s temper, the third member of their
+marriage.
+I sometimes fantasize about my parents divorcing. It’d devastate
+my brother but that’s why I pay for his therapy. I’d be relieved. I’ve
+looked for houses in Havana where my dad wants to “retire” and I
+can maybe afford that, if I sell a book and TV show every few years,
+and keep my kidneys healthy and available. I imagine my mom
+would live with my brother, who will remain a Jehovah’s Witness,
+like our parents, and marry someone young and nice and equally
+interested in having two biological children. My brother sure does
+love my mother, in a whole, pure, white-woman-at-a-farmer’smarket kind of way, but that’s because my mom didn’t leave him in
+Ecuador before he could speak, so there aren’t many things unsaid
+between them.
+I’ve always been super casual when people ask me about my
+parents having left me in Ecuador. That’s a bravado I’d like to keep
+on the official record but something else intrudes. I love my mom.
+She’s a hard worker. She’s a feminist. She’s kind to you if you’re 1)
+my partner or 2) a formerly abused dog. But we haven’t talked about
+her leaving me in Ecuador when I was a year and a half old.
+Sometimes I do adorable things like take pictures of myself chugging
+vodka bottles or pretending to down the contents of a pill bottle and
+send them to her with the caption “because you abandoned me” but,
+lately, in response to those jokes, she’s begun to suggest it was my
+dad’s fault. When I meet a toddler, I’m like, damn, I was a baby
+baby. When I am away from my partner and dog for a few days for
+
+work, and it’s hard, I wonder how they were able to do it for five
+years.
+I don’t blame either of them for it. I never have. What I’m
+describing to you is dirt extracted from a very tight pore. I don’t feel
+anything about being left on the day-to-day but I am told by mental
+health experts that it has affected me. And I fought that conclusion. I
+denied it. I wanted to be a genius. I wanted my mental illnesses to be
+purely biological. I wanted to have been born wild and crazy and
+weird and brilliant, writing math equations in chalk on a window.
+Instead, therapist after therapist told me I had attachment issues and
+that my mental illnesses were related to my childhood. I left those
+therapists. Ghosted them.
+But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded
+me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents
+pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its
+carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the
+U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented
+person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I
+didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself
+to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to
+be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the
+clothes on your body. I’ve learned to develop no relationship to
+anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or
+ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood. Sometimes to prove
+my ability to let go, I’ll write something long and delete it, or go on
+my phone and delete all the photos I have of happy memories. I’ve
+never loved a material object. When my parents took me home after
+my Harvard graduation, we took the Chinatown bus, and we each
+took one suitcase. If it didn’t fit, we threw it out. We threw out
+everything that wasn’t clothes.
+The U.S. government’s crimes against immigrants are beyond the
+pale and the whole world knows. At protests I’ve been to outside of
+courthouses and ICE offices, I’ve seen white people carry signs
+plastered with images of the drowned bodies of Oscar Alberto
+Martinez Ramirez and his toddler, Angie Valeria, on the banks of the
+
+Rio Grande. But when I was growing up, and throughout the Obama
+administration, these same crimes were happening, if on a different
+scale, and I’m not sure the same people cared. I felt crazy for
+thinking we were under attack, watching my neighbors disappear
+and then going to school and watching the nightly news and
+watching award shows and seeing no mention. I felt crazy watching
+the white supremacist state slowly kill my father and break my family
+apart. I would frantically tell everyone that there was no such thing
+as the American Dream but then some all-star immigrants around
+me who had done things “the right way” preached a different story
+and Americans ate that up. It all made me feel crazy. I also am crazy.
+Pero why? My diagnoses are borderline personality disorder, major
+depression, anxiety, and OCD. (I love diagnoses. Gives you the ability
+to read about yourself.) Researchers have shown that the flooding of
+stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your
+parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the
+brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical
+changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like
+a tree without branches.
+So I just think about all the children who have been separated
+from their parents, and there’s a lot of us, past and present, and
+some under more traumatic circumstances than others—like those
+who are in internment camps right now—and I just imagine us as an
+army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our
+brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in
+there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will
+take care of us?
+—
+I went to Miami in 2017, shortly after the House of Representatives
+voted 217 to 213 to replace the Affordable Care Act with a new piece
+of legislation that listed cesarean sections, rape, and depression as
+preexisting conditions. Experts estimated it would strip healthcare
+from twenty-three million Americans over the next decade. Miami
+
+could hardly afford the blow. Miami-Dade has the state’s largest
+number of employed yet uninsured adults, as well as record-setting
+rates of heart disease, diabetes, and HIV infection.
+Undocumented immigrants in Florida who do not have insurance
+have experiences that are not dissimilar from those of other
+uninsured people, but the key difference is that it is impossible for
+undocumented immigrants to purchase insurance, even if they can
+afford it. One of the bogeymen of the right, in this country or any
+Western country, is the image of the sick immigrant—the supposed
+strain on the healthcare system, the burden on emergency rooms and
+taxpayers. I cannot overstate how little interest I have in changing
+the minds of people who might believe this—I’d honestly rather
+swallow a razor blade than be expected to change the mind of a
+xenophobe. But I’m curious about the bogeyman so I thought to
+explore it.
+What I discovered was a story about illness and healing in migrant
+communities through the lens of women—caretakers and rebels.
+These women were also coincidentally like my mother, immigrant
+women married to immigrant men, mothers to immigrant and
+citizen children, looking back on decades of the American Dream and
+taking stock.
+During my first trip, they were kind, nurturing, supportive, and so
+proud of me. We kept in touch all year. I’m ashamed to say it, but I
+sometimes fantasized about one of them being my mom. You’re so
+beautiful and so smart! they’d text me with a flurry of heart emojis,
+and I’d compare that to my mother sending me pictures of herself in
+mink hats and vintage dresses, saying I needed to lose thirty pounds
+before her death so I could inherit her clothing. But when I visited
+the ladies in Miami a second time, a year later, they sounded more
+like my mom. They confided in me the same things she has confided
+in me. They were restless. They wanted more for their lives, and I
+couldn’t help them.
+—
+
+Julieta and I meet at the corner of a construction site. The air is thick
+with dust, and against the grim heat and among the empty storefront
+windows stands a small coral building with a roof painted gold. A
+placard outside advertises Macondo, the local pharmacy.
+Julieta is thirty-nine years old and Nicaraguan, a big woman with
+the cheerful, paranoid manner of a debutante with a secret. The
+morning we see each other, she has her hair in a messy knot and is
+on her way to the beauty salon to get ready for her goddaughter’s
+quinceañera. She doesn’t talk about her children unless you
+specifically ask, and even then she offers the most succinct of
+answers. Her eldest daughter is twenty-two years old and a recipient
+of DACA. Her eleven-year-old daughter is an American citizen.
+Within the first few minutes of the first time we talked, a couple of
+weeks before my trip, she told me about having procured a cheap
+prescription for a yeast infection. On the phone, she was boisterous.
+In person, she is more subdued but warm. On her neck hangs a chain
+with a solid gold and ruby pendant of a salamander in honor of Luna,
+her pet salamander of seventeen years whom she saved from a pet
+store within days of arriving in the United States. Luna died a few
+months ago, and Julieta rests her hand on the pendant when she
+talks.
+Julieta gives me instructions before we go in. We need to be
+careful because Macondo is one of a handful of pharmacies in Miami
+where uninsured immigrants can purchase prescription medication
+at inexpensive prices and without a prescription, and the people who
+run it wouldn’t take kindly to questions from a stranger. These
+pharmacies run the clandestine operation from the back. “They know
+my face, I know their faces. They sell to me because of my accent.
+Whenever I need a medication that requires a prescription, I can get
+it there, though not very serious ones. They are very strict about
+some,” Julieta explains. She tells me of a Dominican pharmacy
+elsewhere in Miami that sells a drug that helps addicts cope with
+withdrawal without a prescription. “They know they’re doing
+something they shouldn’t be doing, but they understand the human
+necessity,” she says. “I have gone to them with my face swollen
+
+because of molar pain and they gave me something for the pain. I can
+go to Walgreens and they won’t give me something even if I’m dying
+in front of them.”
+The pharmacy is run by a woman around sixty years old, who
+wears her hair down and blow-dried straight and puts on thick eye
+makeup behind her wire-rimmed glasses—impractical choices. “They
+call her a doctor but she doesn’t do consultations,” says Julieta. I am
+not allowed to ask her questions.
+The pharmacy sells homeopathic ointments and creams. They also
+sell cleaning supplies, Central American folk dresses, pants sets in
+tiny sizes for children, and off-brand makeup. There are glassenclosed shelves under lock and key, prudishly guarding condoms,
+yeast-infection treatments, and pregnancy tests. Julieta approaches a
+young woman who assists the doctor and who has “trained” at the
+pharmacy for many years. Julieta asks me for a symptom to relay to
+the young woman, and I describe a toothache, which I had in earnest
+the day before. I describe swollen gums where my wisdom teeth had
+been extracted, which the Internet tells me is a phantom pain. I ask
+Julieta if one might be able to purchase pain medication, and she
+asks for hospital-grade Tylenol. The young woman gives Julieta five
+pills in a small white envelope. We walk outside and stand on the
+street corner where we met, squinting in the sun and shielding our
+faces from the dust. She tells me that if I had walked into the
+pharmacy on my own, they would not have given me anything
+because of my accent. “Do you mean an Ecuadorian accent?” I ask
+leadingly. (My Spanish is telenovela Spanish: fluent, formal,
+regionally vague.) “Well, just your accent, they would have known
+not to trust you because of your accent,” she says.
+I ask Julieta if she ever resorts to alternative medicine in the
+absence of access to doctors, and she dismisses folk medicine as
+something that Cubans and Haitians do. “They have ridiculous
+beliefs with respect to medicine, and you’re not going to leave them
+without them doing a prayer on you,” she says. Instead, she describes
+another form of alternative medicine. “I have migraines and I have a
+Cuban neighbor who loves me. She was born here, and she’s insured.
+
+She goes to her doctor and pretends she has migraines, she says that
+the light bothers her, that she throws up, and he gives her
+medication. She shares. A lot of people count on other people. My
+sister is a citizen and she gives her blood pressure medicine to a
+woman who is undocumented.”
+Julieta swears by hospital-grade Tylenol because she, too,
+sometimes gets intense pain in her molar. She goes to a Honduran
+man who was a dentist in his home country but cannot legally
+practice in the United States; instead he goes to private homes to fill
+cavities. “He does a very good job,” she says. I have only a couple of
+dozen memories of my early childhood, and one is of my father
+writhing on the floor with tooth pain. My mother and I just stood
+back and watched, sometimes bending over to pat his arm, until the
+pain stopped—it took about a day. Either he would die from the pain
+or the pain would stop, and that time it stopped.
+All my life, I have accompanied my parents to the doctor. I am
+their interpreter and advocate. They have gone to the emergency
+room only once, being pretty good about preventive healthcare and
+making regular appointments at the local community health center
+that sees low-income people on a sliding scale. For years, the chief
+doctor there was an Indian man who didn’t speak great English and
+didn’t speak great Spanish but who spoke with patients of all
+nationalities and languages without an interpreter anyway. He didn’t
+like me and I didn’t like him. When my mom was in her forties she
+found a lump in her breast, and he explained to me why ordering
+mammograms for women in their forties was a waste of resources,
+especially when the patient was uninsured and insurance couldn’t
+pay for it, if you looked at the number of lives that early detection of
+breast cancer saved. I don’t think doctors are supposed to worry
+about the bottom line, I tell him. Didn’t you take an oath? I am
+maybe eighteen. Aren’t you smart, he says. That’s her! She goes to
+Harvard, my mom says. That’s right, motherfucker. I go to school in
+Boston. Well, not Boston. Cambridge. Just a little school in
+Cambridge. One day I’ll make so much money that I’ll pay for my
+mom’s mammograms in cash, in crisp one-dollar bills, like a
+
+muhfucking kingpin. I’ll buy this clinic and turn it into a museum
+for myself, in honor of me. I can hang up your children’s diplomas
+for a special exhibition on children of doctors who go to state school,
+you cheap-ass motherfucker. I will ruin you.
+“She has history of breast cancer in her family” is what I actually
+said.
+A lie.
+“I’d appreciate it if you ordered one.”
+—
+I have had the good fortune, mere dumb luck, to always have had
+access to decent healthcare—New York City provides low-cost
+insurance to minors in low-income families, and then I went on to
+universities that provide insurance to their students—and I view it
+with the awe and gratitude that only someone who has seen
+healthcare rationed could appreciate. When I was a child and I was
+sick, I went to the doctor. When my parents got sick, I saw them
+breathe in the vapor from a boiling pot of chamomile to moisten
+their inflamed bronchi, not the most effective way of treating
+bronchitis. But you just said your parents had access to the local
+community clinic, you say? Sure, for preventive healthcare. Blood
+pressure, weight management, the common cold. My mother has low
+hemoglobin levels. You can’t get care for that on a sliding scale. In a
+New York Times article from 2015 titled “Wary of Mainstream
+Medicine, Immigrants Seek Remedies from Home,” the author
+writes wide-eyed about the use of medicinal herbs among
+immigrants in New York who buy them at folk shops called
+botanicas.
+But I don’t find this reliance on folk medicine charmingly
+idiosyncratic. Celebrating the treatment of illness with herbs
+purchased at the same place where love potions are sold is curious to
+me, especially through the gaze of an outsider. Many people I know,
+educated, well-off people, love alternative medicine. Whether the
+effect is real or placebo is not the pressing issue here, so much as the
+
+matter of choice and access. Those with resources might drink
+alternative tea treatments but will ultimately have the choice to have
+their cancer treated with chemotherapy and not herbs, an option
+undocumented immigrants do not have.
+But if you’re going to try to treat an illness with herbs or prayer,
+you’re probably going to have to frequent a botanica. Botanicas are
+named for the herbs sold inside shops that also stock oils, soaps,
+sprays, washes, statues, rosaries, amulets, books, and animal skulls.
+They’re everywhere in immigrant neighborhoods. I wasn’t allowed to
+go inside them as a kid because they were associated with dark
+magic. That’s because for most of my childhood we were Catholic,
+and then Jehovah’s Witness, while the belief systems that support
+the botanicas are vodou and Santería, two misunderstood religions
+that date back centuries. Santería and vodou were born when the
+Spaniards and French forced conquered peoples to convert to
+Catholicism but the people found a way to continue practicing their
+religions by combining them with Catholic iconography and rituals.
+It is difficult to know how many botanicas there are in the United
+States because they are commonly registered as religious or herbal
+stores (or pet shops, because they sell small animals) and are thus
+not subject to the regulations that would apply to therapeutic
+establishments—including the need to register with the government,
+but that doesn’t stop some Latinx people from using them for
+medical treatment.
+In Miami, a woman named Esme—whom I met through Julieta—
+tells me she sometimes uses botanica herbs to treat illnesses, and I
+ask her to show me around some local botanicas. Esme is forty-nine
+years old and has lived in the United States for fourteen years. She
+has a dusting of freckles on her nose, with skin and hair the color of
+dull copper. Esme finds everything funny and her laughter is
+contagious. We meet at an overly air-conditioned Starbucks, where
+she orders a hot chocolate. “I’m a defender of alternative medicines,”
+she says. But she erupts into laughter every time she mentions the
+herbs she used to treat a recent bout of pneumonia because she
+couldn’t see a doctor. “I don’t know what cured me, but I got better.”
+
+Her husband, Johnny, picks us up in his car. Unless you live in
+cities where immigrants can legally drive or in cities with excellent
+systems of public transportation, to be undocumented means you
+drive without a license in order to simply go about your day, which
+means always running the risk of being pulled over, charged, and
+deported. I am a little afraid when I get in the car because we could
+be stopped for literally anything, but I relax when I learn her
+husband is a permanent resident. We drive to the Great One
+Corporation, a large storefront with a garish seascape mural covering
+two walls. A mermaid that looks like Cher advertises that they are
+also florists. They do sell a lot of ceramics, but the only pets I can see
+are the small canaries in cages for sale along the entire length of a
+wall. “Oh, here’s some linden blossom,” Esme says as she points to a
+splintery yellow flower. “It’s for nerves but it never works for me.”
+There are baskets containing uva ursi, which looks a bit like holly,
+and yerba Buena. A tall porcelain figure of a black orisha named
+Obatala, the chief orisha and creator of human bodies, stands on a
+glass shelf. He is black, with a long, flowing gray beard, and wears a
+white turban and cloak. Underneath Obatala is a stash of brazilwood,
+said to cure diabetes, anemia, high blood pressure, and UTIs, and to
+be generally helpful in purifying blood. Nearby are piles of
+screwdrivers and hammers. Botanica Olocum is also a hardware
+store.
+I approach two women behind the counter and ask them what
+they’d recommend for depression. They are both middle-aged. One
+of them has bleached hair. They look at each other and have an
+exchange under their breaths, then point to a stand containing books
+and pamphlets. I buy a small illustrated book printed on pulpy
+newsprint called Cure Yourself of Alcoholism Through Natural
+Medicine. It is part of a series inspired by the works of Dr. Edward
+Bach, the British doctor and homeopath whose eponymous flower
+remedies are foundational to homeopathic practice. (I remember a
+small glass vial of brand-name Bach white chestnut that I was gifted
+a couple of years ago by my in-laws. “Take two drops when thoughts
+and worries go round and round in your head,” the bottle said. It was
+
+27 percent alcohol, and after seeing a fat opossum cross the street
+one summer night when I was sitting on the porch I drank half the
+bottle. It was like taking a shot of tequila. I felt better.)
+After Esme is done pointing out the useful herbs, we head back to
+the car. She and her husband hand me a gift: a small waxed-paper
+envelope containing a dream catcher and five energy stones. “These
+stones are not Santería,” her husband explains to me. “This is what
+yogis do. The earth is vibrating and the stones have a different kind
+of vibration so they absorb different energies. The pharmaceutical
+company Bayer sent people to the Amazon to find indigenous cures
+for things and that’s where they got their formulas. Of course, the
+problem with medicine now is that it doesn’t cure illness. The doctor
+prescribes pills that won’t cure you, just keep you a slave to other
+pills. They want patients to keep being patients. Medicine wants you
+to be a client.” Her husband goes on and on and on as we drive to our
+next destination, and Esme doesn’t say anything, just laughs softly,
+which she does as easily as she breathes. A little bit like Marilyn
+Monroe: a dark, girlish, worldly laugh. We arrive at a small
+pharmacy next to a fried-chicken joint. Another clandestine
+operation. Esme’s husband approaches a man behind the counter
+and says that I am a friend. I ask for medications that I am either on
+or have at some point been on so the feds can’t accuse me of looking
+for drugs later. First, I ask for Latuda, an antipsychotic. “Nope,” he
+says. “That’s an expensive one.” Okay. Risperdal. “What dosage?” It’s
+been a while, so it’s all muscle memory here. Three milligrams? He
+brings out a bottle of brand-name Risperdal, which has $3 written on
+it in marker. Maybe I can go back on Seroquel, I tell him.
+“What dosage?”
+Six hundred milligrams. He goes to the back for a few minutes
+and comes back with a white bottle of brand-name Seroquel with
+$5.50 written on it in marker. I thank him for showing me my
+options and promise to come back later.
+Seroquel and Risperdal are powerful antipsychotics. They’re
+tough drugs. Mean. The side effects can include akathisia (a feeling
+of bodily restlessness), sedation, and increased levels of the
+
+luteotropic hormone prolactin, a pregnancy hormone that causes
+mammals to produce milk, even if they’re not pregnant, even if
+they’re not female. In the long term, this can cause osteoporosis.
+There can be periods of nausea so bad you’ll be prescribed
+antinausea meds used for patients on chemotherapy. They can be
+lifesaving drugs, but require careful monitoring and any changes
+should be incremental. I’m scared at the thought of people taking
+these meds without supervision. Both carry black-box warnings, the
+strictest possible FDA warning that can appear on a drug’s
+packaging. There’s a potential increase in suicidal thinking in youth,
+and elderly patients with dementia have exhibited higher rates of
+mortality, usually due to cardiac arrest or infection. The people who
+would resort to purchasing antipsychotics without a prescription at a
+pharmacy like this are not necessarily people who do not trust
+doctors due to cultural reasons. It’s a different kind of people who
+would find themselves at a place like this—people who feel lucky to
+have found a shot at a miracle, even if the miracle risks deeper
+trouble than they can imagine.
+Later that night, I take a cab to a lush, remote neighborhood
+outside Miami to attend a ceremony to initiate new priests and
+priestesses into vodou. I was invited by a local Haitian priestess
+named Roseline, a friend of a friend of someone I cold-called. I am
+generally unfriendly toward institutionalized religion, but vodou is a
+religion that was born out of anticolonial resistance—slaves in Haiti
+developed a spirit religion based on African, Native American, and
+Catholic beliefs, a true syncretism. Though French colonizers openly
+opposed it, slaves kept nurturing the belief system, creating a space
+where they could be free and where they could communicate with
+god through spirit intermediaries—so I have an open mind. At least,
+until I remember the caged canaries in the botanicas from earlier
+that day and become anxious about the possibility of witnessing an
+animal sacrifice. I suggest to Roseline that I am cowardly about
+“animal things.” I say this delicately because I don’t want to seem
+dismissive of their ritual, but I am also having a hard time shaking
+
+my Western sensibilities. She obliges me by not responding. I regret
+asking about the animals.
+During my first visit to Miami, there were rumors that the current
+administration will be rescinding TPS (temporary protected status)
+for Haitians, the program that allowed victims of the 2010
+earthquake in Haiti to stay in the United States temporarily with a
+protected status, meaning they could live and work legally. The wait
+period before TPS expires is a crazy-making purgatory. I came to
+Miami just as many Haitians were contemplating what it might feel
+like to become undocumented and deportable overnight. People were
+scared. And scared people are vulnerable.
+I arrive at the ceremony, which is held in a private home. I am so
+embarrassed about the animal question that I immediately try to
+compensate. I hug everybody. There are folding chairs fitted with
+white sheets and guests are wearing all-white everything. I’m
+wearing a black dress like a fool. I stand to the side and admire the
+artwork on the walls. There is a painting showing a group of topless
+women dancing near a large pig as a man approaches it with a sword.
+Someone dressed in all white hands me a Corona and asks me to put
+my notebook away. I approach a young man who seems about my
+age. He’s leaning, and I like boys who lean. Jacob is tall and really
+cute and very warm and is actually so, so young. I learn that he is a
+priest already, that the spirit chose him when he was young, and in
+fact everybody at the ceremony either is, or is about to become, a
+houngan (priest) or mambo (priestess). “When people hear about
+vodou, they hear about negative stuff,” he says, “but there are
+different branches. There is healing, there are treatments, there is
+protection. There is also bad stuff, but I focus on the good.” He tells
+me about a friend who couldn’t walk but after a vodou treatment is
+up and working. That sounds good to me, so I ask about cancer. “I
+was told there is a cure” is all he says. He knows a lot about herbs, so
+I ask where they’re grown. “We grow them ourselves,” he says.
+“Down here, in Florida, you can find plants on the side of the road. I
+also go to an old lady in Little Haiti to get herbs. She’s a friend.” He
+gives me specifics, which other people I speak to are reluctant to do—
+
+papaya leaf to keep your insides young, cerasee to clean out your
+system (“for example if you’re on probation and can’t be on drugs,
+this keeps the drugs out of the system”), sapo tea for diabetes, and
+vervain for low iron levels.
+He walks me over to a dapper older man named Henri, who raves
+about vodou’s medical efficacy. “They’re the best antibiotics I know,”
+Henri says. “There are herbs that can cure AIDS, high blood
+pressure, diabetes, swelling, blood clots, skin cancer—they just clean
+out your system,” he says. He tells me I can find them at a botanica
+in Hialeah and he has friends who can grow them for free. “There is a
+leaf in the Amazon that cures cancer,” he says. “Only Africans and
+Haitians know the cures.” I ask how a cure for cancer could possibly
+be kept only among a small group of people. He doesn’t know.
+During the ceremony, a man dressed as a warrior holding a
+machete comes up to me and spits a liquid at me, which he says will
+bring success to everything I do. I overhear two people saying they
+don’t trust me because I’m showing them too many pictures of my
+dog. There is a lot of alcohol at the ceremony—they bring out a
+strong blue drink, and I am told to drink it, and I do. I bond with
+some young mambos and houngans at the ceremony. I take down
+phone numbers. I’m fully aware of my surroundings, and I interview
+people about their experiences with vodou, but when my parents call
+me, they tell me my speech is slurred. I don’t remember calling a taxi
+back to the hotel, but that’s how I got home. In my room, I put on
+pajamas, take off my makeup, and go through my elaborate skin-care
+routine. It’s weird. If I was drunk, I wouldn’t even have brushed my
+teeth. When I wake up the next day, I am not hungover. But I do feel
+odd, kind of floating.
+—
+A year passes: I gain seventy pounds, eluding medical explanation.
+Miami is ravaged by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. ICE stops
+Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains to ask travelers for proof of
+citizenship. The #MeToo movement erupts. We buy special glasses
+
+for the first solar eclipse since 1918. (I stare directly into the sun
+because I’m drawn to self-harm.) White nationalists and neo-Nazis
+terrorize Charlottesville, Virginia, with motherfucking tiki torches
+and run a car into a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer,
+killing her. Trump says there were “some very fine people on both
+sides.” My father starts disappearing on weekends, supposedly to go
+watch volleyball games at a local park, and my mom is too tired to
+deal, until he doesn’t come home one weekend, and she and my
+brother call asking me to intervene.
+My mother my mother my mother. My mother is a result of her
+mother’s rape. Her mother abandoned her with her mother, who
+beat my mother with a vengeance and gave her permanent eye
+damage. When she was twelve she moved in with her very wealthy
+aunt and uncle and their three kids in the capital, away from the poor
+rural town where she was living with her grandmother. She adapted
+very well to the life of a rich adoptee. She was class president four
+years in a row and first in her class. She hung out with the popular
+girls. She loved her friend Fernanda, who wore blue jeans ripped at
+the knee, which revealed just a sliver of the perfect tan year-round.
+When my mother’s biological father approached her at her high
+school graduation in Ecuador to say he was proud of her and ask that
+she take his last name, she told him to fuck off and kept her mother’s
+maiden name. She idolized Hillary Clinton from the moment she laid
+eyes on her, which was shortly after a young Bill Clinton shook hands
+with my mother at a campaign stop in Brooklyn. When Hillary wore
+headbands, my mother wore headbands. When Hillary forgave her
+husband, my mother forgave my dad, too. When I was in the second
+grade, I got an 85 on a math test, and I hid the test from my parents.
+When my father found it, he took me on a car ride and explained that
+as a cabdriver he made a hundred dollars on good days and
+sometimes regardless of how hard he worked he would make fifteen
+dollars on a bad day, and it didn’t make him any less of a person. My
+mother took me aside and asked me who the first man on the moon
+was. Neil Armstrong, I told her. Now name the second man on the
+
+moon. I don’t know, I said. Nobody does, she said. If you’re not
+number one, you’re nothing.
+My parents’ apartment is railroad style, which means there are no
+doors. We have always had to shed our “outside clothes” because
+“outside clothes” are contaminated. My mother made us shower after
+being outside. When I was a child, and other children entered our
+home, she had them put on long socks and covered the couch with a
+cut-open trash bag before they could sit on it. She has taste outside
+her means. She’ll starve for a week if it means she can buy herself a
+Chanel eye shadow. She likes to be photographed in front of tall
+buildings so she can emphasize her slim figure. She drinks her coffee
+with oat milk, no sugar. My father accuses her of secretly hating her
+coffee that dark but sticking to it because it makes her seem white.
+Never let a man tell you what you like or what you don’t like, she told
+me on the phone the other day when I asked her for life advice.
+I interviewed her for this book. She listed all of her life’s regrets. I
+itemize them because she itemized them for me:
+Marrying young.
+Having a kid young.
+Leaving me in Ecuador.
+Not finishing college.
+Not working out of the house when she was raising me.
+Not having a career.
+“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’ve been such a good mom. I wouldn’t be
+where I am without you. You made me.”
+“I understand I’ve been a good mother, but I want to know what
+it’d be like to be a successful woman on a personal level, not on the
+level of a mother,” she responds.
+—
+
+Since we met, Esme has become a surrogate for motherly warmth.
+We text regularly. I am genuinely happy to see her again when I visit
+Miami a year later. I ask Esme to meet me at her favorite restaurant,
+an Italian place in a fashionable shopping district in downtown
+Miami. Everyone there is Cuban. Esme orders squash ravioli and a
+glass of orange juice. We talk about the new activist group she
+cofounded and presides over as vice president, a local group of
+mostly housekeepers called Mujeres en Solidaridad. They hold knowyour-rights workshops and teach domestic workers about genderbased violence.
+She talks to me about the disappeared. All Latin Americans know
+about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a
+dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in
+Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians
+and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them.
+Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In
+Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared
+about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went
+about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in
+Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the
+Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and
+marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every
+Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared
+children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers
+are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.
+Esme is undocumented and Uruguayan. She grew up during the
+dictatorship of Gregorio Álvarez. Some women in Mujeres en
+Solidaridad are Argentine, and they feel that in their adopted country
+of America, undocumented immigrants are being disappeared into
+the silence when they go into their routine check-ins at the U.S.
+Citizenship and Immigration Services offices in nearby Miramar. The
+immigrants are treated like livestock, they don’t allow them to use
+the bathroom or sit on the floor during days-long waits, and they
+often just ship them to detention centers, never to be seen again. So
+Esme and some other ladies formed a subgroup called You Are Not
+
+Alone, and they stand across the street from the Miramar USCIS
+offices and invite immigrants in line to approach them for coffee,
+water, doughnuts, ponchos, and phone chargers. Esme saw a woman
+give birth waiting in line in hundred-degree weather. We see you,
+and you won’t get away with this! the women yell at officers.
+Esme’s father was a revolutionary under the Álvarez dictatorship.
+At eight o’clock in the evening, when the country went dark for
+curfew, people came over to her house to plot by candlelight against
+the dictatorship. She still feels panic when she hears helicopters
+overhead, remembering being shoved under tables or pushed into
+shallow canals when they heard choppers. “Of course, the only thing
+that matched my father’s revolutionary spirit was his violent temper,
+which was worse when he drank,” she says. “His beatings were
+barbaric. I’ve been a survivor ever since I was a baby. I was born
+premature and I was born a girl. He wanted a boy.”
+His beatings would leave her nearly bedridden. The last time he
+laid a finger on her was when she was nineteen years old. She
+grabbed a knife and confronted him with it. “That’s when I realized I
+was capable of anything,” she says. She had boyfriends who abused
+her psychologically and sexually, but she didn’t recognize it as
+domestic violence until she began volunteering at shelters for
+women. “When I began leading workshops about abusive
+relationships, I was like oh my god.” She’s never told her husband
+about her experiences with sexual assault because she’s afraid of
+what he’ll say. “You know men,” she tells me. “He’ll ask me what I
+was wearing or something. I don’t trust him not to say that. So
+there’s no catharsis in the home.”
+I tell her my parents are having a moment.
+“You know what?” she says. “I don’t have the spirit of a
+homemaker. I wasn’t born for the kitchen. I hate household chores.
+When I was little, I used to tell my mother, I wasn’t born for this, I
+was born to be a musician. And she’d tell me, Even violinists have to
+cut potatoes, and she’d send me to the kitchen. I loved to study. I
+loved to travel. I’m ambitious. I’m fascinated by the world. But I had
+an accident at the factory where I worked and after that I stayed at
+
+home while my husband worked, and when that’s your dynamic, you
+have to earn your keep. Food has to be on the table. Laundry has to
+be done. Your mouth has to be shut. I always rebel, but then there’s
+the guilt. Rebelling has its price.”
+We order dessert. She orders a tiramisu and shows me pictures of
+her recent trip to New York in support of a boycott and protest by
+female agricultural workers in Florida. Esme participated in a hunger
+strike—okay, it was more of a fast—and she’s still on a high from the
+adrenaline. She couldn’t fly there, because she doesn’t have a state
+ID, so she took a chartered bus, with other undocumented women
+like her. She was scared every minute of the twenty hours she was on
+the bus that ICE was going to stop them. When she finally got out of
+the bus and was able to breathe in the freezing New York air, she felt
+alive again. She seems almost hysterical as she tells me this.
+She leans into me. “The truth is that to me the immigration
+advocacy is almost secondary,” she confides. “We’ve helped shy
+women who clean other people’s homes and pick up after their
+husbands to leave their homes and deliver press conferences, do TV
+interviews, have meetings with congresspeople. We had a gala, and I
+said, ‘Ladies, you don’t have to go smelling like Clorox. Be
+glamorous!’ And they did. You should have seen us, with our hair
+done and our gowns, rubbing elbows with lawyers and doctors and
+politicians. We get women out of the home and give them a reason to
+exist.”
+I wonder what it would take for my mom to feel alive again, to
+have a reason to exist. She only gets dressed up to go to the Kingdom
+Hall and I usually tease her like, “Mom, Jesus thinks you look great,
+that’s enough highlighter,” but I know she’s actually dressing up for
+church because she has nowhere else to go other than work and it
+makes me feel guilty.
+—
+That night, I travel to Miramar to see a mambo named Naomie
+whom Jacob recommended. She is his spiritual sister, and she says
+
+she can give me a cleansing treatment to protect me against ICE—for
+a price. This sounds to me like a notario, someone who claims they
+can fix people’s immigration papers for a steep price but is not
+licensed to practice law. They are vultures in the immigrant
+community.
+Miramar is about a half hour away from the hotel where I am
+staying. The hotel is inside Dolphin Mall, one of Miami-Dade’s
+largest malls, which is packed with outlet stores and Cuban men
+manning As Seen on TV kiosks who try to guess your country of
+origin (“Mami, you look Peruvian, are you Peruvian?”) and offer to
+straighten your hair with a mini ceramic flat iron. I take a stroll
+through the mall every day, and every day I see people taking
+paraplegic family members out for a window-shopping excursion
+and paletas, and against the backdrop of loud club beats it makes me
+sad. I’m just this sad bitch.
+In the cab, I get a text from Jacob telling me to bring a bottle of
+Tito’s and a pack of Newport cigarettes. He says he’s coming too. Oh,
+cool, what are you getting done? I ask. “Who’s going to translate for
+you and how are you going to understand what the spirit is going to
+say to you?” he says. Naomie’s apartment complex is checkered with
+lush grass; ducks happily peek their heads out of bushes and newts
+and geckos scurry up and down walls. She doesn’t live far from the
+USCIS check-in facility that Esme told me about, the site of the
+abuses against immigrants. The cleanse costs $277.77.
+I meet Jacob outside Naomie’s apartment. He makes me feel safe.
+He has a strong, grounding presence and he smells like cigarettes.
+Naomie interviews me before the rite. She asks me what afflicts me.
+Oh man. I tell her that I write about immigration and worry I can’t
+protect the people I write about. I would like to protect them, or at
+least not have nightmares about ICE. That’s true and feels like a safe
+thing to share, although I don’t go into detail. As a rule, I try to not
+tell strangers my nightmares unless I’m being paid by the word.
+I’m not sure what to think. I’m curious about vodou because of its
+anticolonial roots but I also believe an immigration cleanse is
+bullshit because nobody can protect anybody from ICE, and this
+
+cleanse is expensive and the Haitians who would ask for an
+immigration cleanse in Miami right now are probably scared shitless
+about losing TPS. Is Naomie a notario? Maybe. But maybe one with
+powers.
+Naomie writes down some notes on a square of white paper. This
+will be my plea to the spirit she will invoke. She is barefoot and her
+toenails are painted bright yellow. The apartment is very hot, and my
+mascara melts and gathers on my bottom eyelashes. There are two
+chairs facing each other. Naomie sits in one; I sit in the other. A large
+piece of red silk is laid out on the floor, along with white candles, a
+set of tcha-tcha rattles (kind of like maracas wrapped in colorful
+beads), the notepaper with my plea to the spirit, and various huge
+bottles of alcohol. A gallon jug of Tito’s Vodka stuffed with hot
+peppers. A bottle of perfume. The requested pack of Newports.
+Naomie powders her face with a chalk-white powder. Jacob is seated
+beside Naomie and begins chanting in Creole and French, and
+Naomie closes her eyes. The air gets still and then she collapses and
+begins to shake. Her eyes roll to the back of her head. Then she sits
+upright again, and she opens her eyes and it’s like she’s this new
+person. That’s because, Jacob says, she has been inhabited by a male
+spirit. She slouches on her chair, leaning back with swagger and her
+legs apart, and lights a cigarette. (That’s another thing about vodou.
+Men are often inhabited by female spirits and women by male spirits.
+Vodou spirits are said to protect and nurture queer people, unlike
+Christian denominations that persecute members of the LGBTQ
+community in Haiti.) Her eyes are black black black, and her
+powdered white face has taken on the form of a mask. She speaks to
+me through Jacob, who translates between English and Creole.
+The spirit’s name is Emmanuel. He is one of Naomie’s ancestors.
+He takes a swig of his favorite drink and offers some to Jacob. Jacob
+takes a swig, then coughs a lot. I drink a tiny little bit. It tastes like
+gasoline smells. Naomie makes me wash my hands in perfume, then
+moves the chair aside, and I kneel on the red silk sheet as she blows
+smoke all over me—when the smoke is blown in my face, I exhale
+instead of inhaling, I’m not getting dizzy—and rubs perfume on my
+
+neck and back. They light the piece of paper with my plea on fire and
+combine the ashes with the spirit’s favorite drink. They ask me to
+take one swig from the bottle in every cardinal direction, and I tell
+Jacob to tell Emmanuel that I didn’t have lunch and too much
+alcohol would make me throw up. They put the drink in a water
+bottle and say to drink it when I get home after I put some food in
+my stomach. The spirit asks me if I am worried about anybody in
+particular. I tell him yes, many people in particular. After a few backand-forths, Jacob says Emmanuel has offered to turn me into a
+protective shield, and that he will offer me guidance via dreams, déjà
+vu, the way the wind blows, the flutter of my heart, and hunches.
+The vodou spirit wants to know if I’m satisfied. He wants to know
+how I’m willing to show that I’m satisfied, how much his offered
+protection against ICE means to me. I take this to mean the mambo
+wants me to put a price on how much this cleansing meant to me by
+paying more than the $277.77. I tell them I only brought $280 in
+cash, but that I was a writer and thus, my words being currency—the
+worst pickup line in the world—I offer to recite for the spirit,
+Emmanuel, a poem. I know some Emily Dickinson poems by heart, I
+tell him. They’re love poems but they’re not about a boy, they’re
+about Death, I tell him. Jacob takes a long time to explain this to the
+spirit, and Emmanuel, chalk-white and boozy, makes a face, aghast,
+then another face—disgusted. He does not want me to recite a poem.
+I know they were just asking me for more money. Notario shit. A few
+months later, Jacob texts me out of the blue. He needs me to loan
+him some money. He doesn’t explain why, and when I tell him I
+don’t even lend money to family, he stops responding.
+—
+Salome Allende is a friend of Esme’s, a fellow member of the
+domestic worker advocacy group Mujeres en Solidaridad. She is
+forty-eight years old and Argentine. Her husband died of brain
+cancer in 2012 after being turned away by every local hospital they
+
+approached because he was uninsured. Overnight, she became the
+family’s sole breadwinner.
+When we speak on the phone a few weeks before my first visit,
+Salome cries, puts her hand on the mouthpiece to try to block the
+sound of it, and tells me she wants to show me the notebook her dead
+husband kept during his last weeks alive to keep track of his
+treatments. After we hang up, I text her U.S. Census data showing
+that children of immigrants have higher rates of college and
+postgraduate education graduation than other groups, and she says
+my texts make her feel good. She has four children, one of whom has
+DACA. I am a one-trick pony, unable to comfort with anything other
+than grades.
+Salome is tall, with straight dark-brown hair and the intense
+feminine air I associate with perfumed talcum powder. She has been
+in the United States for seventeen years, working mostly as a
+housekeeper for hotels and apartments. She has four pugs: fourteenyear-old Tobin and her three puppies, Megan, Alex, and Ashlyn,
+named for members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. “I
+like to lie down on the couch and let them climb all over me,” she
+says. She sleeps curled on her side with Tobin at her chest, Megan on
+the backs of her knees, and Alex on her back. Ashlyn has been
+staying with her daughter.
+Salome was fifteen and sheltered when she met Harrison, a lone
+Argentine. He was a year older. His parents were not around, which
+led him to a fierce and early independence. Salome describes her
+own parents as authoritarians who had two expectations of her: go to
+school and return home to take care of her younger siblings, which
+meant no boyfriends or even friends. But Harrison drew her in.
+“Meeting him was like a soap opera,” she says. After the two dated
+secretly for a year, Harrison tried to talk to her parents but they
+wouldn’t listen. So she ran away with him and they got married. “In
+retrospect, they just wanted me to study, like any parents would. I
+thought it was love at the time, but it was an escape,” she says. “My
+own kids don’t know that story,” she adds, sounding surprised by her
+own words. “They always ask me how we met and I tell them their
+
+dad was taking a stroll when he passed me standing in a doorway. I
+just don’t want them to do the same thing.”
+They had four kids who became their whole lives. On weekends,
+they’d go to the beach or to the park to play soccer. They threw
+parties at home and danced with one another. “Everything that we
+didn’t have ourselves growing up, we gave to our children,” she says.
+In Miami, Harrison worked in construction near a chemical plant.
+After two years at the job, he got sick. “At first, we thought it was a
+cough, and we didn’t want to waste money, so we didn’t go to the
+doctor. He’d just take aspirin.” When he finally went, doctors said he
+would need chemotherapy immediately. The hospital asked about
+legal status. When the family said he didn’t have papers, the hospital
+turned him away. So did cancer treatment centers. “I said, ‘Am I
+supposed to take my husband home and wait for him to die?’ ” she
+says. Did they seem sorry? “They were cold. Totally cold.”
+Salome’s friend recommended a woman from Miami Beach who
+described herself as a naturalist. They had nothing to lose. Joanne
+was tall and blond and said she had cured stage-four cancer patients
+with her treatments. She began making changes to Harrison’s diet,
+instructing them to eat organic and buy exotic fruits they had to
+drive all over Miami to find. “When you want to hold on to someone,
+when it’s time for them to go but you don’t want to believe it, you go
+and find the exotic fruits,” explains Salome. One morning, we drive
+to a Latin American diner in Little Havana and order Colombian
+breakfast platters of fried eggs, black beans, cream, and arepas. The
+coffee is light and sweet. Bodega coffee. Un café regular is the same
+anywhere. Salome takes a marble-speckled notebook out of her purse
+and pushes it to me. It is a record of the naturalist’s treatment, some
+in Harrison’s large shaky handwriting, in Spanish, and some in their
+daughter Olivia’s handwriting, girlish and in English. She was sixteen
+at the time.
+All the tea you can drink. Miracle oatmeal. Stopped vomiting
+and soothed stomachache. Girlish, bubbly handwriting.
+Chew the juices as if they were solid food for 15 minutes before
+bed. I imagine Harrison pretending to chew liquid for fifteen
+
+minutes, his jaw muscles tightening, the fluids dribbling through his
+lips, feeling like an idiot, showing his family he was putting up a
+fight, maybe believing it himself.
+I am doing everything I can to stay alive.
+Harrison’s brain tumors affected his memory so he often forgot he
+had cancer. Salome had to break the news to him over and over, until
+she stopped. When the pain overwhelmed him, they took him to the
+hospital, because the ER can’t reject anyone. The doctors gave him
+morphine and then sent him home. By this point they were paying
+out of pocket. Shortly before he died, his heart filled up with water
+and the hospital recommended open-heart surgery. Post-operation,
+his children took turns taking care of him because Salome was now
+working long days as a housekeeper.
+“Why operate on his heart if he had at most six months to live?”
+she asks. “Medicine is a total mafia.”
+Harrison died in 2012. The cancer had spread to his throat and
+lungs. His blood was infected. He was forty-six years old.
+Salome knows the naturalist’s treatment didn’t cure him, but she
+thinks it gave him a better quality of life during his final three
+months. “We put faith in the natural,” Salome says. “We had to.
+Some people choose between the medical and the natural, but we
+didn’t have the funds for the medical. We could not even go to the
+hospital for his convulsions. So we chose the natural.” She lives alone
+now and does her best to keep busy. “When my husband died, I was
+low. I was in this country alone with four kids and little work. I
+thought about going back to Argentina. But I said, you know what,
+I’m not the first this has happened to and I’m not the last.” Every
+conversation with Salome ends the same way—with the metaphor of
+the sacrificial lamb. “Quite literally, my husband gave his life for his
+children so they could have a future,” she says. “My son promised
+him over his grave that he was going to study and get his degree, and
+now he’s working a part-time job and studying.”
+By the time I go to Miami the second time, she has obtained a
+green card through her citizen son. I notice her confidence
+immediately. I ask her if she feels differently. “Since getting my green
+
+card, I’m honestly more defiant. If a cop were to stop me, I’d ask,
+Why are you stopping me? If there is a car accident, I have
+insurance now, so I say, Call the cops if you want. Once, I got into a
+car accident back when I was undocumented, and my son had to
+rush over with four hundred dollars in cash so the other driver
+wouldn’t involve the police. I just have more confidence and better
+self-esteem now.”
+One night, we drive to a small Cuban bar in Little Havana that
+bills itself as home of the world’s most famous mojito. They serve it
+smoking and with a cane sugar straw. A band of Caribbean men in
+fedoras sing salsa by Rubén Blades and Héctor Lavoe. Salome orders
+a lime-green margarita with a tiny pink umbrella. I ask her how she’s
+doing, aside from the newfound security of her green card. “Well, I’m
+doing things I should have done at age twenty or twenty-five. I
+moved out of my dad’s house at age sixteen and then moved into my
+husband’s. But I have my own place now. What I didn’t live then, I
+live now,” she says. She tells me about her children, and cries a little
+because they miss their father. “Anyway, let’s go party,” she says. I
+think she’s joking, that she’s taking me back to my hotel, but she’s
+actually taking me to drive around Wynwood, a former warehouse
+district that’s become Miami’s hottest nightlife spot. We drive
+around the whole neighborhood multiple times, in circles, and she
+gasps and murmurs under her breath about how much she loves
+graffiti art, which covers the façades of all the nightclubs. She’s in
+ecstasy. At some point, I start stifling yawns because it’s almost
+midnight, and she scolds me for having surrendered to the life of an
+old woman when I am so young. She points out girls in high heels
+and tiny dresses in long lines by the bouncers. “Oh my god, they look
+amazing,” she says. She says she wants us to come back the
+following night, this time with Esme and a woman named Isadora,
+the current president of Mujeres en Solidaridad.
+Salome picks me up early the next evening. First stop, her dance
+studio. She wants me to meet Uriel, the instructor. He’s Cuban and
+there is an enormous portrait of him, bulging out of a tuxedo,
+showing off a gaudy gold watch and a hand tattoo, on the door of the
+
+studio. At the top of the stairs is a cluster of middle-aged women in
+leggings, flip-flops, and tank tops with the same logo, the image of
+pinups in bikinis, and they all greet Salome with a kiss on each
+cheek. “Half of us are older women,” Salome says. “We’re all women
+who have never done this before. I certainly didn’t do this when my
+husband was alive. Uriel tells us to leave our demons at the door, and
+that’s right where you’ll find mine. Dance class has become my
+church, my therapy.” I don’t meet Uriel, who is busy teaching simple
+salsa moves to a line of women, but I do meet his wife, who walks
+slowly on account of her recent liposuction. (On Mondays, everyone
+in the class wears tank tops with the logo of her cosmetic surgeon’s
+practice.) Uriel crossed the U.S.–Mexico border a couple of years ago
+and he was granted political asylum because he’s Cuban.
+Do you know about the “wet foot, dry foot policy”? Miami’s
+politics and demographics were forever changed by it. In 1995, Bill
+Clinton introduced a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966,
+the pillar of this new version being the wet foot, dry foot policy,
+which ordered that the American Coast Guard not intercept Cubans
+in the water midway between Cuba and the United States, but should
+anyone successfully arrive on solid land, they could remain in the
+United States and have expedited routes to permanent resident
+status and citizenship. This policy applied to entries on soil too.
+Sometimes Cuban émigrés took flights to Central America, then
+made their way to the U.S.–Mexican border. If they were detained in
+the crossing, they could show their Cuban passports and would then
+be separated from the Mexicans and Central Americans to be
+processed for asylum, which didn’t add to the general goodwill
+among other Latin American immigrants. Barack Obama ended the
+policy on January 12, 2017. “We were lucky,” Uriel’s wife tells me.
+“But we’re immigrants too. We’re all immigrants,” she adds.
+We’re on our way to pick up Esme in Hialeah when Salome tells
+me she and her husband were married twice. They were divorced for
+two years. “Marriages that come here split up unless the women
+don’t work,” she tells me. “And I worked, so it caused some
+problems. We split up, we divorced, we had separate apartments; I
+
+was really getting used to my life as a single woman. Then he calmed
+down, and said he missed me, and would serenade me with his
+guitar. We started living together again, and I was okay with that
+arrangement, but he wanted to get married again so we could be
+together forever.”
+We pick up Esme, who can’t contain her excitement when she gets
+in the car. We’re now on our way to pick up Isadora. It’s 9:00 P.M.
+Esme gets a call from her husband and son. “I’m with the girls. I left
+food on the stove for you,” she whispers.
+Isadora lives an hour away. Now it’s ten o’clock. Isadora gets in
+and excitedly tells us she wants to drive by some mansions that
+“belong to these sheikhs.” She is wearing a fuchsia top, silver hoop
+earrings so big they touch her shoulders, and hair teased up like
+Dolly’s. They marvel at the mansions, and Isadora says she takes
+long strolls in expensive neighborhoods whenever she feels
+depressed. “Oh god, not me,” says Esme. “I look at mansions and get
+stressed just seeing them because I think I’ll have to clean them.”
+Salome doesn’t like using the GPS and only Isadora knows this area,
+so I have no idea where they’re taking me. At some point, amid the
+chisme, it becomes clear we’re taking a long trip out of town to a
+casino. I tell them I have a five o’clock flight the following morning,
+and so they downgrade their ambitions for the night; Isadora gives
+us turn-by-turn directions to a nearby Fort Lauderdale tiki bar across
+from the beach.
+Isadora is interested in the punch bowl. I say it’s literally a
+fishbowl of rum and she gets a devilish look in her eye. While
+browsing the menu, as small talk, she tells me she was an
+international affairs lawyer in Bolivia, specializing in Russian
+relations. She lived in Russia for six years and is fluent in Russian.
+Now she has been here sixteen years and is a housekeeper. “It’s fine!”
+she says. “I knew what I was getting into.” Isadora and Salome want
+to try gator. “COCODRILO?” they ask. They cover their mouths and
+stifle screams. We decide to get mojitos that come in commemorative
+glasses. “That’s nice of them, but I was going to take the glass home
+anyway,” Esme says.
+
+Let’s talk shop. People think cleaning houses is easy, but it’s a
+dangerous job. None of them have been personally assaulted, but
+they all know women who have been groped or raped on the job, who
+have had their wages stolen, who have been psychologically abused
+and then forced into silence by employers who threatened to call ICE
+on them. One housekeeper put the wrong PIN in the security system
+to get into a house, the cops came, they alerted immigration, and she
+was deported. Housekeepers are exposed to so many temperature
+fluctuations between rooms, between jobs, between industrial
+freezers and industrial ovens, that some of them have facial
+paralysis. To clean an oven, you need to turn it on, and the chemicals
+smoke up. You try not to breathe in those fumes, but they sometimes
+get inside the paper masks anyway. Housekeepers suffer from
+migraines, from rashes. Salome tells the story of working for an
+elderly couple for fifteen years. After the wife dies, the husband
+remarries a woman with the early stages of dementia. She loses a
+ring her mother gave her, not even gold, costume jewelry, and she
+accuses Salome of having taken it. Salome comes to the house to help
+her look for it, and finds it undisturbed on the piano. “You planted it
+there!” the woman screams. “You stole it, and you put it back!” Her
+husband looks down on the floor, not doubting Salome but not
+wanting to upset his wife. Salome quits on the spot. “I’ve never been
+so humiliated in my life,” she says. “Like I’d throw away my
+livelihood for a piece of costume jewelry.”
+I ask the women how often they have nightmares. This has
+become one of my favorite questions to ask.
+How many years have you spent in this country?
+How often do you have nightmares?
+Every night, they say. Esme dreams about concentration camps
+nightly, about having to hide people in her home, people who can’t
+make a sound. There was a time when she was so anxious that she
+could not fall asleep, so she would have a glass of wine, then another,
+then another, and before she knew it a whole bottle would be gone.
+
+“My dad was an alcoholic, so I shut that down,” she says. I tell them
+about my nightmares, about my mental issues, and say how grateful
+I am for my medication. “Couldn’t you just decide to not be a victim
+to those things?” Esme asks me. “Couldn’t you promise yourself you
+won’t succumb to your demons? I did that,” she says. “I’ve trained
+myself not to give in. The only thing that I can’t get rid of is that I
+take four showers a day, and I won’t touch food that belongs to
+certain categories I’ve created, but that’s all.”
+“That…sounds like OCD,” I say.
+“If they give us papers, psychiatrists will get rich because we’re all
+crazy,” Isadora says. We all laugh.
+“Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the bar radio.
+“I love this song,” Esme says. “I call it ‘Sweet Home Hialeah.’ ” She
+starts to sing at the top of her lungs. She may be tipsy. Some of the
+other patrons at the bar, white people, look at us, and it makes me
+nervous, and it makes me sad that it makes me nervous. I imagine
+one of them taking out an AK-47 and shooting us down, then walking
+over to our bodies, then shooting us in our heads, execution style, as
+we continue to sing the pretty redneck song, marveling at the
+mansions surrounding us, trying not to think of cleaning them, and
+then, as I feel those white stares on us, I pour a drink on my head.
+The girls cheer and I let out a bloodcurdling scream. My first ever.
+
+CHAPTER 4
+
+Flint
+
+I
+
+first visited Flint in 2017, a year after it made national headlines
+for having lead in its water and two months after a court charged five
+high-profile officials, including the director of the Michigan
+Department of Health and Human Services, Nick Lyon, and the chief
+medical executive for the department, Eden V. Wells, with
+involuntary manslaughter for their role in misleading the public
+about water safety. I wanted to see what it looks like when the state
+poisons its own people.
+Long before the water crisis, Flint had found itself in dire straits.
+Throughout the 1990s, General Motors, which once employed half of
+Flint, closed almost all of its factories in the city. By 2014, half of the
+population had left—autoworkers, their families, and the people who
+survived on feeding, clothing, and entertaining the autoworkers and
+their families. The people in Flint now are the people who did not
+leave, because they could not or did not want to. Fewer than one
+hundred thousand people live in the city today, down from its height
+of two hundred thousand in the 1960s. In 2016, 45 percent of Flint
+residents lived below the poverty line, the highest rate in the country
+for cities with more than sixty-five thousand residents.
+As the city got smaller and blacker and browner and poorer,
+public services crumbled. Firefighters and police have been cut, and
+
+arson is rampant. Garbage collection has been privatized. One out of
+nine houses in Flint is vacant. City residents have to pay astronomic
+water-bill prices to pay for services the city is providing, even though
+the water is still bad. For many families, backed-up bills run into the
+hundreds of dollars. Some churches try to help by writing checks.
+The undocumented community in Flint has been affected by the
+water crisis in disturbingly specific ways. Flyers announcing toxic
+levels of lead in the Flint waterways were published entirely in
+English, and when canvassers went door-to-door to tell residents to
+stop drinking tap water, undocumented people did not open their
+doors out of fear that the people knocking were immigration
+authorities. (There had reportedly been a raid at a grocery store the
+week before the news broke.) When President Obama declared a
+state of emergency, the National Guard was deployed to Flint,
+making undocumented people even less likely to open the door, since
+this time the canvassers were in uniform. Some undocumented Flint
+residents learned of the lead in their water only when family
+members from Mexico called them on the phone to ask about it. They
+had seen reports of the poisoned water on Univision.
+Laura Mugavero, leader of a local community organization that
+serves immigrants, picks me up from my hotel and we drive
+downtown to a homey hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant. Laura
+has ’80s-era curly hair dyed a coppery brown. Lady mags generally
+say that women must pick eyes or lips to emphasize but she has
+picked both—very dark eye shadow, very red lipstick. We order
+drinks. She sends back the salsa because it is too mild. The owner of
+the restaurant, whose husband knows Laura from her work in the
+community, comes over personally to say the restaurant is popular
+among white people and they are the reason the salsa is too mild. She
+then apologizes and brings over two hotter, spicier options.
+Laura was born in Mexico to a migrant worker father and a
+mother who eventually achieved legal status through the 1986
+amnesty. She was nine years old when she crossed the border with
+her parents and her baby sister. She holds back tears as she
+remembers watching her mother fall into the Rio Grande before
+
+finding sturdier ground and making it across. They eventually made
+their way to Flint, where her father was hired by a GM auto plant on
+the spot. It was 1994, just a few years before GM closed its final car
+plants.
+The city is different now. After dinner, we drive around East Flint,
+the Latinx part of town, and she points out where her childhood
+home would be if it hadn’t been demolished, and where her schools
+had been, all of them now shut down. There used to be four high
+schools in the area, but two closed down. Even with the population
+flight, the remaining two schools are overcrowded. Here was the
+carcass of a grandfather clock factory. Here was where Buick City
+once stood, 235 acres of factory grounds now surrounded by a chainlink fence and barbed wire, and overrun by pink weeds. Here was the
+old General Motors Institute of Technology, where they sent
+engineers, its name hardly visible on the stone. They had tried to
+turn the Chevy plant into a park, but instead it just sits there, weeds
+and vodka bottles. Empty plastic water bottles have become so
+abundant that people shove them into the spaces in their wire
+fencing, so yards and lots look like modern art exhibits. Houses,
+apartments, and trailers are boarded up with graffiti and children’s
+rocking horses sit dirty and spooky on the lawn.
+—
+I make plans to attend Sunday mass with Margarita Davila at a
+church that proudly bills itself as the only one in the area that offers
+Spanish services. Margarita is a sixty-eight-year-old Mexican
+American immigration activist with small rimless glasses and short,
+curly blond hair. She picks me up from my hotel in her red pickup
+truck, a jewel-encrusted rosary hanging from the mirror. St. Aloysius
+is located right outside Flint proper and the faithful have to make the
+drive. Today they will be celebrating First Communion for the kids.
+On our way we pick up Cesar, a Venezuelan man in the middle of
+a political asylum petition who has no car. The week before, he had
+attempted to take the city bus, but public transportation is not
+
+reliable here, and he showed up at 11:00 A.M. for an eight o’clock
+mass. He tells me he was an optometrist back home. Once he is alone
+with me, he touches my arm and whispers, “We are not all Mexican
+immigrants.” He writes down his name and number and slips it to
+me.
+Today’s worshippers form a line at the entrance of St. Aloysius
+Church, and each of us dips two fingers into the holy water as we
+walk in, then we make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, lips,
+and chests. Parents are taking pictures of their kids dressed like little
+brides and groomsmen, all in white for First Communion.
+When you walk through Flint the most striking aspect of the
+streetscape, second only to boarded-up houses, is the sheer number
+of bars and churches. I ask Margarita if Flint residents are especially
+religious, and she says they just need the services the churches
+provide because the state is so absent. Despite the horror of it all, she
+says the water crisis has made more services available to them. “They
+finally realized we were here,” she says.
+A few undocumented church members gather to meet me in the
+church auditorium after services, and we sit down at a table for
+doughnuts and black coffee in Styrofoam cups. They sit with their
+hands folded in front of them, their posture boot-camp perfect.
+Margarita had made a post on the church’s Facebook page
+announcing my visit, and it’s not exactly how I’d have described
+myself (self-made cult escapee) but how other people like to describe
+me (Yale PhD student) and that shit is distancing. They know what
+I’m here to ask them and they are ready to talk.
+They spread their arms wide to show me how the auditorium was
+filled with donated cases of water when the story first hit the news.
+“As far as the eye can see,” a woman tells me. “I always said the
+reason we were getting help was that we were in the news, but they’d
+see as time passed. I knew it was all going to disappear.” The
+auditorium is now empty.
+“I’m grateful to have water at all because many people in this
+world don’t have water,” says a woman named Lilliana. Before we
+talk about the poisoned water, they begin by discussing blessings.
+
+Lilliana begins with her blessings—I later learn Lilliana is fighting
+cancer—and only after I’ve revealed my own blessings am I allowed
+to carry on with questions. “Well, first there were the rumors,” she
+says. “We suspected something was very wrong.” The water was the
+color of rust and tasted like actual shit but when residents called city
+officials, they were told they were crazy. Then General Motors
+stopped using Flint-sourced water at one of their remaining truck
+plants because they feared the water would corrode the parts. Junior,
+Lilliana’s son, says GM employees told their own families about the
+water but word did not get out. Junior has papers. One of his jobs is
+to go door-to-door installing filtration systems and teaching people
+how to use them. He knows that some people in the Latinx
+community are undocumented, so he tends to ask his co-workers to
+stay in the car while he goes alone and deals with the paperwork. He
+motions on an imaginary iPad the scrolling and skipping he has to do
+for people without Social Security numbers. They tell him they don’t
+trust him because he’s with the water company—with the city. “But I
+tell them, what? Soy raza. I’m just like you. I’ve got you.”
+“There is a huge problem with trust in the community,” says
+Margarita. “The state can say the water is made out of gold, and
+people still wouldn’t drink it.”
+Lilliana’s daughter, Karen, says that all of her children’s blood
+tests for lead came back with the same level. Then her test came back
+with the exact same level, as did her mother’s, her father’s, then
+everybody else’s. Everyone’s was identical. Karen asked around in
+the community, and her neighbors reported the same level as well.
+The tests were run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the
+Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “When I saw that
+the tests were being run from the state, I said, how could I possibly
+trust you?”
+“Even if the level was true, it’s inaccurate because what they don’t
+tell you is that when lead enters your body, it doesn’t just stay in your
+blood, it goes into your bones, it digs really deep, and tests don’t
+detect that,” says Lilliana. Research has found that exposure to lead
+in childhood can have devastating long-term effects like high blood
+
+pressure, kidney damage, and intellectual disabilities including
+challenges with speech, language comprehension, memory, finemotor skills, and behavioral self-control. Because children of color
+are much more likely to be exposed to lead at a young age, it is
+devastating to think about what will happen to an entire generation
+of Flint children. What promises can you make to a child about the
+world of possibility ahead of them when the state has poisoned their
+bloodstreams and bones such that their behavioral self-control and
+language comprehension are impaired? How many graves has the
+government of Michigan set aside for the casualties of the water
+crisis that will end with a gunshot in fifteen years’ time? We all know
+how cops respond to kids of color with intellectual disabilities or
+mental illness.
+Having to use bottled water makes everything about running a
+household more difficult. Lilliana goes through four or five cases of
+water a day. The youngest grandchildren cry and tell her she is mean
+because she gives them quick lukewarm showers and has prohibited
+baths. “If you use hot water, the hot water opens your pores and the
+lead gets absorbed through your skin,” she says. “Many people say
+that your skin doesn’t absorb lead, that you only absorb it through
+your stomach, but that’s just not true. Hot water opens your pores
+and it gets way down deep in there. So lukewarm and cold-water
+showers it is.”
+Lilliana left Mexico for the United States twenty years ago and is
+my mother’s age. She used to work in housekeeping until she got
+sick, and now she stays at home taking care of her five
+grandchildren. She does not know whether her breast cancer, newly
+diagnosed as of two months ago, after years of clean self-exams and
+annual mammograms, has any correlation to the leaden water, but
+she is an optimist and a master of avoidance, so she does not want to
+talk about the possibility.
+“After moving to Michigan, like many immigrants, I kept saying,
+Next year I’ll leave, next year I’ll leave, next year I’ll leave, and I
+never left. It’s all a lie. I don’t love Flint, but I do love Michigan. I
+love the greenery. I love nature. And there are so many birds in
+
+Michigan. My husband gets upset with me because I get up out of
+bed at dawn every morning to go watch the birds wake up. I like
+rising with the birds. I like to hear them sing.” I ask Lilliana if she
+owns pet birds. There is a long pause. “I don’t own birds. I set them
+free.
+“You see, my husband got me some small birds as a present but I
+don’t like them in cages so I went outside one day and I released
+them. I had two blue birds and one green bird. I wanted my birds to
+be wild so I never even named them. They kept returning to my yard.
+I used to talk to them about how their day was going. I asked them
+when they were hungry. They were very attentive.”
+It was her son who told her she had cancer. There’s nothing
+strange about children of immigrants serving as interpreters for their
+parents at doctors’ appointments, but on this day the doctor spoke to
+her son for a long time and she knew from the look on their faces
+that something was wrong. Then the doctor hugged her and said, Lo
+siento. The Spanish word for “cancer” is “cancer,” but he left it to her
+son to tell her the news. She went home to be alone, she wanted to be
+alone, but who could be alone in a house teeming with family. “I
+didn’t want to tell anyone. I said to myself, I’ll treat it and it’ll be fine.
+I’ll get out of this. I have always moved forward and removed every
+obstacle in my path.” She learned everything about the disease and
+asked all the right questions. But then the doctors told her to go back
+to Mexico because the radiation would be too expensive here and she
+wouldn’t be able to pay out of pocket. Junior asked her if she wanted
+to go back. She said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
+Lilliana starts chemotherapy shortly after our first meeting.
+Margarita found her a doctor who will treat her at a reduced fee, and
+even after I leave Flint, Margarita still sends me periodic updates
+about Lilliana. She takes Lilliana to the hospital one day and then
+texts me to say her nausea is so bad, she is thinking of stopping
+treatment. I text Lilliana photographs of beautiful birds to cheer her
+up: the hyacinth macaw, a black-billed bluebird with yellow-black
+eyes, a wood duck and a cute yellow duckling, an Atlantic puffin with
+its stupid face, the golden pheasant and its hillbilly yellow ’do, the
+
+red macaw, classic Amazonian prince. I keep texting birds but don’t
+hear back.
+Later I dream that the hawks started coming after she loses her
+hair from the chemo. Outside her house, the usual yard birds gather,
+drawn by the feeders filled with seed Lilliana placed out there and
+the big mature trees surrounding her home. The first time it happens
+she sees a raptor snatch a mourning dove and fly off with it. It makes
+her sick and she goes back inside. Then she sees it happen again.
+This time it is a cardinal and the raptor goes up to her roof to take
+plunder in its organs. Lilliana keeps going outside every day for
+stretches of time because it helps with her nausea and that’s when
+she starts seeing hawks flying overhead. They are different sizes.
+They don’t look like they could carry dogs and cats like her neighbors
+were saying, but they do look like they could kill. Soon they begin
+circling above where she stands to watch them from her yard, and
+when she stands beneath them, with some fear, to observe their
+majesty, she becomes certain that her limbs are tied to their wings
+with string, like a puppeteer’s, and that she can control their
+movement. They are migratory birds. Perhaps they had gotten lost,
+and she needed to guide them to warmth, she thought. They’d die if
+she did not precipitate their movement with her movement, with the
+movement of flight. She needed to leave this house, this sickness. She
+feels ill in her heart because she could not leave the house, so the
+raptors form nests in the large mature trees surrounding the house
+and they’ve been there all this while, flying above her in whatever
+way she moves that day, to hunt or to take shits on her husband
+when he comes home at night.
+—
+You have already met Theodoro, but he was quiet before, so you did
+not notice him. He was one of the immigrants I met with in the
+church auditorium after mass. I had tried to make a lot of eye contact
+with him when he spoke because as soon as someone interrupted
+him, he shut down and looked pained. Theodoro is a lonely, ancient
+
+man, but he says he is fifty-six. He is a tree. His mouth is curved
+downward, wrinkles set deep like bark grooves, and he looks even
+older when he smiles. We talk on the phone late at night, after he’s
+home from work, and our conversations feel like dark, hardened sap.
+Theodoro came to the United States on August 20, 1998. He
+remembers the exact date. That was two years after his fifteen-yearold son first came north to go work at a top Chinese restaurant in
+Michigan that he heard, through friends, was hiring. First Theodoro
+worked at a cucumber plant, then in restaurants as a dishwasher and
+a cook, then in various factories: making Volkswagens, weapons,
+dishwashers, plastics, and soap.
+But his favorite place to work was at a chocolate and sweets
+factory in Detroit, where he spent ten years. He started out cleaning
+bathrooms, but the couple who owned the factory saw that he was a
+good worker and said, Theodoro, leave that alone. You can go work
+in the granola station now, so he put on a blue lab coat and became
+a sweets man.
+“My years at the chocolate factory were the most beautiful time of
+my life,” Theodoro tells me. He learned how to make caramelcovered popcorn, pecan pies, cherry-center bonbons, little chocolate
+turtles with nuts inside. The aromas, of course, were incredible, but
+what he loved most were the machines. “At the start of the assembly
+line, I mixed in honey with the peanuts, then saw them go into the
+chocolate machine where chocolate cascaded down like a curtain but
+also up like a geyser; it showered chocolate from both directions, if
+you can imagine that. Now, at this point the chocolate was very hot,
+and it went into a cooling tunnel. There were times when I worked
+the night shift to make chocolate overnight, and the factory was quiet
+and cold, a few people making sweets for the world. I was very good
+at my job and I helped everyone around me, even though my
+supervisor said, That’s not your job. But I wanted us to work as a
+team, so if I had a second, and my co-workers were slowing down, I
+ignored him. The last year I was there, they got these really old ovens
+that toasted the granola for a really long time and out it came,
+toasted and brown, smelling like heaven, and you had ten people
+
+working on eighty trays at a time. There were metal detectors in the
+cooling station, to make sure the batch was clean. It smelled like
+paradise. When I talk about it, it sounds impossible, but I saw it
+happen.”
+Then the company was sold to an owner from Ohio who was going
+to hire only American citizens. Theodoro’s bosses broke the news to
+him on New Year’s Day 2012. “I had been working for just about two
+hours and they sent for me. Theodoro, they said, we can’t keep you
+here. This company isn’t ours anymore.” They gave him a certificate
+saying he was one of the best employees they’d ever had, and they
+hoped that when he showed it to future employers he wouldn’t have
+to wash bathrooms anymore.
+“Did they say that to you?” I ask.
+“They really did,” he says.
+He lives alone in a house he purchased in 2009—cash. I ask him
+how it feels to be alone. “Sometimes I think of sad things, but I need
+to be in a good mood, so I put myself in a good mood,” he says.
+“Why do you have to be in a good mood?” I ask him.
+“So I don’t feel lonely.”
+He lives with his two pit bulls, Gracie and Bella. Gracie is a twoyear-old blond pup and Bella is her six-year-old mom. He calls them
+both “the puppies.” After rescuing them, he swung by a local
+mechanic to buy a large wooden doghouse to put in his yard. The
+dogs play outside for hours every day, get muddy, then need to be
+bathed. Gracie prefers to be bathed in very hot water, and when he is
+soaping her up, she is so comfortable that she’ll fall asleep in the tub
+and has to be carried out in a towel, her limbs heavy, a truly spoiled
+creature.
+I picture Theodoro hanging a tire from a tree in his backyard,
+where he sits with Gracie and Bella on his lap and he swings with
+them, at first his feet barely off the ground, then higher and faster
+until he feels that if he falls, they will fall with him, and if one of them
+falls, he will fall with them, one body in motion just as they move
+alone in their house, alone in their yard, alone in all of Michigan,
+
+with not a soul in the world who loves them more than they love one
+another.
+I ask Theodoro whether he gives Gracie and Bella tap water.
+“No. I always give them water from the little water bottles they
+donate to us here in Flint,” he says. He gives from his rations.
+Theodoro did not hear about the lead in the water until it made
+the international news. “When you’re undocumented, you’re the last
+to know,” he says. He went to distribution centers but they asked
+Theodoro for a state ID. He does not have a state ID, which
+undocumented immigrants are currently barred from having in
+Michigan, so he kept going to other sites until he could get water
+without an ID—he needed the water for his dogs. Men in uniform
+helped him put cases of bottled water in his car trunk, and he tells
+me this with a tone of admiration; he fears the National Guard but is
+also in awe of them.
+I am lonely, too. I only feel peace with my puppy mill dog. When I
+got him, it was the week of Trump’s inauguration and I was watching
+videos of black labs and German shepherds helping veterans with
+PTSD, jumping up at their faces when they were crying, shielding
+their bodies with their own, and I just cried into a pillow, wanting to
+be protected. I was super suicidal, and one night my partner was just
+like, you’ve never even been around a puppy. So we went into a pet
+shop just to play with a dog—look, we tried rescues, they denied us
+because we didn’t have a yard—to distract me for long enough to stop
+me from slitting my wrists, and they brought out Frank. He’s a
+Boston Terrier. A brown one. A really fucked-up-looking one. His eye
+was busted. He couldn’t walk. My partner held him and deposited
+him into my lap and he fell asleep immediately, and when I got up
+because my leg fell asleep he bit at my pant leg and demanded I go
+back down on the floor, and I looked up at her and said, well, we
+can’t leave him here. I hadn’t gotten my book advance yet, so we took
+him out on layaway. Fucking shady shit. We took him home, and put
+him in his crate, and in the middle of the night I had a panic attack
+and we brought him out and put him on my chest and for the first
+time in my life I felt safe. He smelled like an unsullied childhood. He
+
+smelled like a baby without a childhood. He smelled like god had
+made an exception for me. So long as I kept myself alive to keep him
+alive, we’d be all right.
+So when Theodoro tells me he gives his own rations of filtered
+water to the dogs, I feel like dying, but the kind of death that rebirths
+you into something less painful, like a tree, a tree like him. I ask him
+to text me pictures of his pit bulls and he sends them to me. They’re
+plump. Their coats are shiny. Why do you give them your own water,
+I ask him. Well, they can’t really speak, but if they could speak, they’d
+have a lot to say, he tells me.
+—
+I come back to Flint almost a year later, after Governor Rick Snyder
+announces that the state of Michigan will stop providing free water
+to Flint residents because lead levels have not exceeded federal limits
+in two years, even though they’ve replaced only sixty-two hundred
+pipes affected by lead and have about twelve thousand to go. In
+addition to the high water bills they have to pay to the city that
+poisoned them, they will now have to buy their own clean water.
+Margarita is thrilled that I have returned and hosts me at her
+home, where she has invited several immigrant women from Flint
+over for lunch to talk to me. For the special occasion, she has made
+tortillas from scratch, rice, and ground beef with potatoes. But the
+women never show for various reasons, some of them
+unconvincingly disguising their discomfort with the idea of talking to
+a stranger from New York, so instead, I meet Margarita’s husband,
+Kenny, a tough guy with a tough-guy demeanor, who keeps telling
+her to slow down and take it easy. She’s full of ideas for the
+community and she helps everyone, he says. Kenny did some time in
+prison, ten years, made some bad decisions. He hates cops. Calls
+them pigs. Kenny tells me the plot of Serpico, an Al Pacino movie
+about corruption among police; so, at some point Pacino’s character
+gets shot in the face during a drug sting, and Kenny says it’s based on
+a true story.
+
+“Baby, it’s not based on a true story,” Margarita says.
+“Hell yeah, it’s based on a true story,” Kenny says.
+“You think everything is based on a true story,” Margarita says.
+“A lot of movies are based on true stories,” Kenny says.
+In Kenny’s own story, the one about his life, it was a Latinx cop
+who infiltrated his friend group, got close to him, and pushed him to
+do certain things that resulted in his arrest—by the same Latinx cop.
+At the court hearing, Kenny’s mother scolded the cop. “You’re a
+traitor to your own people,” she said. “It’s my job,” he told her. “I was
+just following orders.”
+—
+The next day, Margarita introduces me to her friend Salma Pinzón.
+We meet at the Sloan Museum in the Flint Cultural Center, which is
+a museum dedicated to the history of Flint, with a particular focus on
+the rise and fall of the automobile industry. She’s been there many
+times. It’s my first. The water fountains in the museum have signs
+above them that say PLEASE DO NOT USE WATER FOUNTAIN. HELP YOURSELF
+TO THE COMPLIMENTARY WATER COOLER. The exhibits include miniatures
+of town buildings, collections of guns and pistols, union jackets, a
+mural dedicated to a United Auto Workers Labor Day Picnic, and an
+expansive re-creation, with life-size mannequins, of the Flint SitDown Strike, where the mothers and wives of the striking
+autoworkers broke windows in the factories to allow their men to
+breathe after they were teargassed by police. There are assembly-line
+station games where you are timed to perform assembly-line tasks; a
+loud bell sounds if you fail. Salma is good at that game.
+Salma Pinzón has a date in immigration court. I ask her if she has
+her outfit planned. She doesn’t. But I’ve had her outfit planned since
+she told me she has a court date.
+Her hero is the late Mexican American singer Jenni Rivera (1969–
+2012), a charismatic, voluptuous terror of a woman whose song “Sin
+Capitán” is Salma’s favorite. Some lyrics: My boat doesn’t need a
+captain / because I’ve conquered the storm alone.
+
+“I think I’m just like her,” Salma says.
+The dress I have in mind for her to wear to immigration court is
+something Jenni had worn for the Latin Grammys in 2010. A gown.
+Royal purple with bell sleeves, with a deep V-cut, tight at the chest,
+bodice, and hips, then ruffled out accordion-style, with the smallest
+layers at the front. Yellow marigolds embroidered on the dress, and a
+marigold yellow shawl to wear around her shoulders. Salma’s hair is
+long, waist-length, black everywhere but the crown, where it is white,
+but she has two months to begin bleaching it. She will be blond for
+the court date. Not a flattering, buttery warm blond, no—cold, ice
+blond. It won’t look great but it’ll be striking, and I’d rather she look
+striking than pretty.
+Salma has a son with autism, Felipe, who is twenty-three years old
+now. He was eligible for DACA but she didn’t sign him up out of fear
+that his information was going to be used against him. He doesn’t
+speak Spanish, and she lives in fear that he’ll be deported. What
+would he do in Mexico? “People over there would be cruel with kids
+like him,” she says.
+Salma has a date at immigration court because an ICE officer
+followed her around looking for a reason to arrest her. She said she
+protested and it was fruitless.
+He took her to a detention center. She was detained for a month,
+alongside women with theft and drug charges, all of whom
+complained that they thought she had been unfairly detained. She
+didn’t have a lawyer then and she doesn’t have a lawyer now. No one
+has wanted to take on her case. She’s making phone calls. She begins
+to cry and admits she doesn’t have much hope but doesn’t know what
+will happen to her son.
+“I don’t know what’s going to happen at my court date. I don’t
+know what god wants.” But I know what god wants. God wants to see
+her in the motherfucking gown, unrepentant, with no captain.
+—
+
+Ivy was born in Mexico to a father who is an American citizen and a
+mother who is Mexican. After their divorce, her father won the
+custody battle so she came to Texas to live with him when she was
+eleven, and moved to Flint after he bought a house there on eBay in
+2009. She is a single mom. She had a baby, Lidia, when she was
+twenty-one. During her pregnancy, which was during the water
+crisis, doctors responded to any health concerns she had by telling
+her to drink more water. “I would tell them I had fever and vomiting
+and they kept saying I needed to drink more water, everything was
+me needing to lay off the Coke and drink more water; it was a
+constant dismissal. But I didn’t have money for anything other than
+tap water so that’s what I drank.”
+I meet Ivy and her baby at a break during a Latino Leaders
+meeting one morning. It’s a group of mostly Mexican American
+members of the Flint community with personal business cards and
+fantastic border accents who want to make the city more hospitable
+for Latinx and especially immigrant members. The meeting is
+conducted in English. Ivy takes notes during the meeting, and raises
+her hand to say something brilliant. The others nod and take notes.
+Her father shushes the baby in the other room. At eleven o’clock,
+they call a break for assemble-your-own taco bowls. Ivy comes over
+to me and writes down her number, angrily, in my notebook. She is
+pissed. She wants to talk. She is also young, really young, and has a
+full-moon face and long, straight black hair that she wears with a
+center part. I try to engage with the baby. I tell the one-year-old baby
+that it is good she is bilingual.
+Ivy remembers, in vivid detail, the day she realized the water was
+dirty. “I remember taking a shower one day, and when I ran my hand
+over my skin there was a sticky layer all over my body that hadn’t
+washed off. It was like jelly. I felt dirty. My neighbor brought a water
+jug to our house wanting to know if our water was like hers. It was
+yellow with some brown film in it. Yet we got letters from the city
+saying it was fine, that they were taking care of it. So what can you
+do?”
+
+Ivy developed hives and rashes, for which she was prescribed
+steroids while she was pregnant. The doctors never performed any
+tests to determine the origin of the skin irritations. Then her baby
+girl was born. Over time, Ivy noticed the baby did not react to her or
+to motion, crying constantly and piercingly as if she was in
+tremendous fear, and when she took her to the doctor, he told her
+they’d just have to wait and see. “They did the exam and said we were
+going to have to give it a couple of months. A waiting game.”
+The doctor waited four months before determining the baby was
+blind from the lead poisoning.
+“Her first seizure was when she was three months old. I always
+put her in her own bed at night, but for some reason, on this one
+particular night I brought her over to sleep with me, and all of a
+sudden I saw her shaking violently in a terrifying way. I picked her
+up, screaming, and ran her to my father. I have never felt such regret
+or guilt. They say breastfeeding is the safest, best thing you can do
+for your child, but it was after the fact that they said that if you have
+lead in your body and you breastfeed, you pass it on. When I heard
+that, my heart just dropped. I don’t know if it happened when she
+was in my womb or after. If she has any delays or any problems
+down the line, I couldn’t begin to apologize to her enough. I feel so
+much guilt.”
+Ivy’s baby has regained her vision, but nobody knows what the
+long-term effects of the water poisoning will be in her little body. The
+wait is torturous for Ivy. It is torturous for her mom. It is torturous
+for the community. It is not torturous for the government. They want
+us all dead, Latinxs, black people, they want us dead, and sometimes
+they’ll slip something into our bloodstreams to kill us slowly and
+sometimes they’ll shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot
+shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and
+shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and
+shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and
+shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and
+shoot and shoot shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot
+shoot and shoot until their bloodlust is satisfied and it’s all the same,
+
+our pastors will say god has a plan for us and our parents will plead
+with the Lord until the end to give them an answer.
+I am not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed to get involved
+the way I have gotten involved. Journalists, to the best of my
+knowledge, do not try to change the outcome of their stories as
+crudely as I do. I send water. I fight with immigration lawyers. I raise
+money. I make arrangements with supernatural spirits to stop
+deportations. I try to solve shit the way an immigrant’s kids try to
+solve shit for their parent because these people are all my parents, I
+am their child, if I wasn’t their child—and I was their child—I should
+be patented and mass-produced and distributed to undocumented
+immigrants at Walmarts. I am a professional immigrant’s daughter.
+My job was simple, to tell this story: The government wanted the
+people of Flint dead, or did not care if they died, which is the same
+thing, and set in motion a plan for them to be killed slowly through
+negligence at the highest levels. What I saw in Flint was a microcosm
+of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere,
+making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and
+inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport. What I saw in Flint
+was what I had seen everywhere else, what I had felt in my own
+poisoned blood and bones. Being killed softly, silently, and with
+impunity.
+—
+The whitest thing I have ever done in my life was not repeatedly
+trying to get bangs after seeing pictures of Zooey Deschanel. The
+whitest thing I’ve done in my life was trying to save Flint youth while
+I was visiting there. At various points when I was in Flint, I did a
+cowardly thing, which was to try to suggest a trip in which some of
+the kids would come to New York with me, because I wanted to open
+a Pandora’s box for them, the view of the city at night. The skyline!
+The fucking skyline! I asked the teens if they’d seen New York (they
+hadn’t), and then asked them if they’d like to see New York (they
+didn’t know), and holy fuck I hadn’t anticipated that. In my mind,
+
+the kids would want to get out. They’d have big Broadway dreams.
+They’d have questions, they’d want answers, we’d talk gypsy cabs
+and SAT scores and Plan B both in life and in birth control. But what
+happened instead is that the teens conscientiously ignored me the
+entire time I was there—they had no intention of talking to me—so
+I’d eavesdrop on their conversations, and I’d overhear them talking
+about how they wanted to be waitresses at some local bar because
+they heard you could earn mad tips that way, and I fucking DIED,
+because I grew up on my dad’s tips and knew what kind of life that
+gave you, and I wanted to save them from that. I’d drunk the social
+mobility Kool-Aid from college prep programs run by white people
+when I was in high school and didn’t know how to reconcile all that
+with what I was seeing in Flint. I had created for myself a world in
+which I could only feel reprieve from panic if my parents were either
+dead or at peace, preferably both, and if they were to be just at peace,
+that would be expensive, and I had to work toward that, and I knew
+to the gram just how much blood they had shed for me over the past
+thirty years and I had to repay it in gold. And I didn’t understand
+these kids who didn’t think the same way. I felt like it was our one
+fucking job—they were alien to me. I didn’t know how to talk to
+them. So I didn’t.
+When Margarita and I drove around the city, I asked her if she
+had any kids in mind whom I could help write college entrance
+essays and she said no and I insisted and she said no, she couldn’t
+think of any, and I said, Oh, okay, cool cool cool.
+On the third day of my first visit in Flint, I texted my friend Max
+who has a pill problem and I told him I was thinking of drinking the
+water and he definitively told me not to and I said, I know I know
+but I feel so guilty, and maybe I’d feel less guilty if I just drank the
+fucking water. Then I felt like I sounded like a white girl trying to
+slum it, so that made me feel disgusted with myself, so now I felt like
+cutting my arm with the room service knife but that seemed even
+whiter, so I didn’t do anything at all, I just went to my hotel, where
+they gave us free water bottles for everything, even for brushing our
+teeth, and where there was a machine on the first floor for guests to
+
+refill their reusable water bottles and the TV on the first floor was
+always on Fox News even though the manager was black and he
+always smiled at me in the mornings when I went to get coffee, not
+knowing I was a bad girl in a good city, in a country that wanted both
+of us dead.
+
+CHAPTER 5
+
+Cleveland
+
+S
+
+trictly as a matter of taste, I do not like children. Small animals
+are adorable in the way my biology programs me to find large-eyed,
+small-skulled mammals adorable, and they can grow up into
+formidable or admirable creatures—cubs become bears, calves
+become elephants, fledglings become eagles. Babies lack language,
+which makes me bored and impatient, then turn into children, whose
+saccharine vocal emissions grate my nerves, and then turn into adult
+humans, the most monstrous of all animals. But kids do not do the
+kinds of things adults are capable of that earn them some goodwill
+with me—like breed the French bulldog, perform open-heart surgery,
+tell good jokes. In general, kids don’t mind me, because I leave them
+alone. I respect them. How do you do, I say. Terrible, they say. We’re
+good.
+But then, when I see a video online of three small boys, all
+American citizens, saying goodbye to their father at Cleveland
+Hopkins International Airport as he is being deported, my heart
+stops. They remind me of my brother. Meaning: They are boys, they
+are skinny and brown, they have heads of thick, jet-black hair for
+which there does not exist a single good haircut. I am ten years older
+than my brother, a mentor but not quite a mother figure, more like
+Gandalf to the hobbits, and this video awakens in me a lion’s heart of
+
+desire to protect. I contact their lawyer. I want to help these children,
+I say. I want to become their role model. Do they like dogs? I write
+the boys a letter through their lawyer. “The first generation of
+immigrants comes to this country to work hard, and they often suffer
+and are treated badly. Do you know why they do it? For their
+children. That’s us. It’s up to us to honor our parents’ sacrifices by
+doing better than they did, by having better lives than what we saw
+growing up. I’m here to tell you that the best way to do that is
+through an education,” I write. I’m brainwashed.
+A couple of months later, I travel to Willard, Ohio, to meet them.
+Willard is the most rural place I have ever been to, and on the long
+drive there I pass through vast stretches of farmland where my cheap
+cell phone loses service completely. Willard is known for its rich,
+fertile soil—people call it “the muck”—and its agricultural industry is
+booming, which means that temporary workers from Mexico come in
+seasonally to help plant, weed, and harvest. Before I visited Willard,
+there was a huge battle over a welcome-home party that the chamber
+of commerce was throwing the migrant workers. A Vietnam War vet
+threw a tantrum in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper,
+writing, “Myself and a lot of other Vietnam veterans and also Korean
+veterans are still waiting on our welcome-home party. Where does
+the Willard City Chamber of Commerce think that it is right to give
+the migrant workers a welcome back party?” At a city meeting
+dedicated to planning the party, a woman stormed out of the room
+with her husband, saying, “I’m a compassionate person. I believe
+people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me
+angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.” The city
+has a population of approximately six thousand people, 94 percent of
+whom are white. This is where the boys live.
+I come armed with the cutest pictures of my dog back when he
+was a puppy because I assume all children like puppies. When I
+arrive, I find out three of the four children are scared of dogs. (There
+are three boys and an even smaller child, a girl.) And clowns. I could
+not have arrived at a better time. They want to discuss their fear of
+clowns.
+
+They have been having nightmares of clowns. They have been
+watching horror movies because they are spending a lot of
+unsupervised time at home because their mother is working long
+hours to support them now that their household has only a single
+income. They tell me about a YouTube video they watched where a
+drone flying over a field shows a clown with a machete ready to kill
+children. Andres is fourteen, Omar is eleven, Elias is ten, and Greta
+is six. “You don’t understand, they kill you with machetes,” says
+Omar. In English, MACH-eh-teh is pronounced mah-SHEH-tee, I
+say. “They kill you with ma-SHEH-tees,” they say.
+The video is called Hunting Killer Clowns with Drone! We Found
+One! (Not Clickbait!) and it is made by two preteen boys who fly a
+drone over a field, out of which jumps a tall person in white face
+paint and a toy machete. The boys are not good actors, the machete
+does not look real, and it is not believable in the slightest. Jesus
+Christ, I think. These are children.
+Javier Quintanilla, their dad, had lived in the United States for
+sixteen years. He was stopped for driving without a license in 2008,
+and local police alerted ICE. After a deportation order was issued in
+2011, he was granted a stay to remain in the country, and he dutifully
+checked in with immigration authorities every six months until
+March of 2017, when an immigration agent met him at his
+appointment and told him to get ready to be deported.
+In the weeks leading up to his deportation, Javier and the kids
+went door-to-door around Willard asking their neighbors to sign a
+petition asking for his stay. (Courts sometimes consider community
+support in deciding whether someone gets a stay, and it helps
+mobilize support for the case.) Not everyone was nice to them. It was
+fruitless. When the day came, Javier did not even pack a bag, just a
+folder of his immigration documents. He thought something or
+someone was going to intervene at the last moment. “We went to the
+airport but we had hope until the very end,” his wife, Patricia, says.
+When they said goodbye, Javier told her he loved her and made her
+promise she’d take good care of the children. He, in turn, promised
+he would come back. When Patricia and the kids returned home, the
+
+house still smelled like him. His sneakers were lying on the floor, his
+dirty clothes were in the hamper, his toothbrush was in the
+bathroom, not yet dry from that morning. His razor sat in the
+shower. It would soon begin to rust. He was everywhere and he was
+gone.
+Both sides have adhered to the promise to talk on the phone every
+day, but Javier is different now. The trauma of being separated from
+his family and being forcefully removed like a criminal has worn at
+his mental health. It started even before he left. As the date of his
+deportation approached, he became short-tempered and silent. His
+ankle monitor had only an eight-hour charge, so he had to charge it
+while he was at work, which was humiliating. Patricia often tripped
+over the ankle monitor charger. “He’s a changed man,” she says. “He
+wants to express himself and tell us that he misses us, but for some
+reason he can’t. He says, I can’t see you, I don’t know what you’re
+doing, and it frustrates him. He’s impatient, he’s mad all the time,
+he’s moody all the time.”
+Peter Maximillian, the family’s immigration lawyer, has made an
+impression on the children, who are hungry for male protection. He
+dresses well and has his own office, which the children think is
+incredible. He is the most powerful person they know. Andres is
+especially besotted. Peter comes down from Cleveland on a Saturday
+to take the children to lunch with me. They want to go to Applebee’s,
+which is forty-five minutes away, and Patricia asks me to please
+make sure they don’t smother Peter, which I quickly see they are
+keen on doing. We end up going to Wendy’s instead, because it’s only
+about five minutes away. Andres says he wants them to make an
+exception of their minimum age requirement—sixteen—so he can
+work there. He is fourteen. “I’m the man of the house now,” he says
+in the back seat of the car, and Greta punches him. When Javier left,
+so did the only member of the family who drove. Now they are stuck
+in rural Ohio without a car. Andres walks three miles to the grocery
+store and returns carrying heavy bags. He was going to join the
+wrestling team but now has to come home right after school to take
+care of his younger siblings. He watches them while their mother is
+
+at work. Patricia sometimes takes an English class after work, and
+comes home in the evening. She is always tired, and when she gets
+home, she cleans, cooks, and sits on the couch, running her fingers
+through Greta’s hair while she draws, her eyes fixed on a point in the
+middle of the room, barely blinking.
+About a week after returning to Connecticut, I am in the shower
+and get a call from the boys. Omar is doing his science homework
+and wants to get an A on it. He says he has a question: Do trees die
+during the winter?
+I begin to improvise, summoning forth everything I know about
+winter, about plants, about death, about Holden Caulfield asking the
+exact same question about ducks in Central Park, about how old the
+kids will have to be before I can explain to them what allusions are,
+about how I still think knowing what allusions are can save them. My
+partner whispers: Look. It. Up.
+How do trees survive in winter? Omar asks me. It seems like they
+should die. How can they live without the sun? I wrap a towel around
+myself and run to my computer. “Trees go through a process similar
+to hibernation called dormancy, and that is what keeps them alive
+during the winter,” I read from the screen. Do you know what
+dormancy means? It comes from the Spanish word dormir, “to
+sleep,” I lie. Isn’t that cool? I ask. They sleep right through the
+winter, and when they wake up, it is spring again.
+Javier used to work at a factory packing cookies. He would often
+bring home small cheddar crackers in the shape of goldfish. Those
+were their favorite. Andres is not his biological child. Patricia had
+him young, when she was eighteen. Andres was a year old when she
+got together with Javier, who cared for him like they shared blood.
+She always thought there was something special about the way Javier
+took care of Andres. “He’s just given him more than the others.
+Everything Andres has wanted he has always received.” Because they
+were always family, and because they thought the adoption process
+would be overly complicated and expensive, they kept putting off a
+formal adoption. But as the boys got older and began asking why
+they did not all share the same last name, it became clear that Javier
+
+would adopt Andres. So a couple of years ago, they went in front of a
+judge, who told Patricia she liked to ask the same question to
+everyone who went in front of her with an adoption request. “Tell me
+one thing that’s going to make me sign this order.”
+“He doesn’t know another father,” Patricia responded. “Javier
+used to work the night shift so he was always with the boys during
+the day and he took care of Andres from the time he was a baby. He
+bathed him, he always changed his diaper.” “I’ve heard enough,”
+Patricia remembers the judge saying. The family celebrated that
+night. Every evening, before Javier began his shift, they would all sit
+together after dinner to drink coffee, talk, and watch the evening
+news. They were news junkies and kept each other close. “Even if it
+was to put gas in the car, all six of us went.”
+Patricia is small, with heart-shaped purple lips and black hair
+pulled back into an elegant knot. When I met her, she was wearing
+purple acrylic nails on one hand and short nails filed in a round
+shape on the other. She wears glasses with clear rectangular lenses
+and modest, nondescript clothing in dark colors. She speaks to me
+warmly in a conspiratorial whisper, especially in the presence of
+Peter, the lawyer, who does not speak Spanish. She giggles as she
+observes the boys crowding over where he is sitting, showing him
+funny videos on their phone. Look at them. He’s going to walk out!
+He’s going to explode! He can’t put up with them! I wonder how she
+was with Javier, with her sidekick laugh and expressive almondshaped eyes. I wonder what secrets they kept together, what inside
+jokes made them laugh, before they were separated and it all turned
+sour.
+Omar is skinny, with a top lip that looks carved in amethyst. His
+mom tells me he is a solitary soul, and while the entire family crowds
+the living room during my visit, he is not there. He’s up in his room a
+lot. When we go out to Wendy’s, he picks a two-person table across
+from us and sits alone. I call him over to sit next to me. He asks how
+old I am and I tell him to guess. He guesses nineteen—a hopeful
+guess because he has a crush on me. I tell him I am old enough to be
+his mother, and he blushes.
+
+“Omar does not cry,” Patricia tells me. “He has not cried once. He
+is stoic and strong, but he is the one who asks after his father the
+most.” Classmates have been taunting him at school. “I hope your
+mom gets sent back to Mexico too,” they tell him. I ask him how he is
+sleeping, and he says that he tells himself his dad will be gone for
+only a few weeks. “Last night, I did not sleep at all because I missed
+my dad.” So he tucked himself into his mother’s bed. I have brought
+him a copy of the first book in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, on
+my brother’s recommendation. A lucky guess. Turns out Omar loves
+the series and has taken the books out of his local library. He’s never
+owned a copy of his own. Omar asks me to sign the book because
+although I am not its author, I am an author, and he thinks that’s
+pretty cool. I autograph it.
+In the pictures of the scene at the airport, moments before Javier
+was deported, the only one photographed crying is Elias. He is ten
+years old. Elias says he misses going to the mall with his dad, where
+he would spoil him and buy him treats, and he misses how his dad
+would make funny voices to make him laugh, like the impression he
+made of the old-timey children’s character El Chavo, a grown actor
+assuming the voice of a child. “Sometimes I dream the world is going
+to crack open and I am going to fall inside,” he says. While I am
+talking to his mother, Elias goes upstairs to bring down his report
+card to show me. Some Bs and Cs in the humanities but a perfect 100
+in math. He says his favorite way of passing the time is by doing
+multiplication exercises with decimals in his head. After I return to
+Connecticut, Elias texts me formal greetings and terrible pictures of
+himself with the camera lens pointing up. One early morning he
+sends me a picture of Greta all dressed up, wearing a long white tulle
+skirt and a denim vest with a doily collar. She is wearing a tight
+ponytail and doing ballerina poses. He sends them at 7:24 in the
+morning. I wonder if he just thought his sister looked pretty but had
+no one to share it with. Good morning Karla. How are you today?
+Greta is a terror. She laughs hysterically—she cackles—at her own
+jokes, and she ranks her brothers in order of how much she hates
+them, which is actually the order of how much she loves them, and
+
+punches the winner, usually Andres. She spends the entire time
+drawing and hangs up the drawings on the wall herself, then puts her
+hand under her chin like an art critic and makes exclamations about
+the drawing. She steals her brothers’ cell phone to send text
+messages to Patricia about how much she loves her, even when she is
+sitting on the same couch or in the adjacent room. Sometimes she
+sends me a long, multiline string of emojis that she signs Greta. I
+brought her a tiny pink plush purse carrying a plush puppy. If god is
+fair, he will allow her to grow up into a woman with the resources to
+spoil a stupid toy breed like a Cavapoo that she’ll carry around in a
+purse. Patricia tells me Greta stopped eating after her father left, and
+lost a lot of weight. When I visit, she barely touches her food.
+Stories in the news often end at the deportation, at the airport
+scene. But each deportation means a shattered family, a marriage
+ending, a custody battle, children who overnight go from being
+raised by two parents to one parent with a single income, children
+who become orphans in foster care. One study found that family
+income dropped around 70 percent after a deportation. Another
+study found that American-citizen children born to immigrant
+parents who were detained or deported suffered greater rates of
+PTSD than their peers. I know Javier wants the children to move to
+Mexico to be with him, and it is a source of fights with Patricia. “I
+think it’s selfish to take the children to Mexico,” she says. “This is
+their country. The whole point was to allow them to receive an
+education here.” A coffee plantation awaits them in Mexico. But even
+if they stay in Ohio, things look bleak.
+The boys are worried about winter coming for the first time
+without their father in the house. They have no car. They are in the
+middle of rural Ohio. Everything is so far away. Andres, who will
+start high school next fall, walks a few miles down to the local public
+library to do his homework when he needs a computer, but with
+winter coming, it gets dark early. I have a fundraiser among my
+friends and collect enough money to buy the family a used MacBook
+and a year’s worth of Internet. That’s a thing I do sometimes—hold
+fundraisers among people I know for migrants I love who are in
+
+need. It’s the same people who donate every time, older white
+hippies and children of immigrants, not my former Harvard
+classmates who post pictures of themselves at rooftop happy hours
+every day, the kids who work at Silicon Valley start-ups, the ones
+who have precious weddings with hashtags and babies they want to
+make sure you know the sex of. At night, at around 8:00 P.M., when I
+decide that I want the day to be over and close all the blinds because
+it’s time to usher in unconsciousness, in the delicious few seconds
+before sleep befalls me, I imagine them being fatally impaled by a
+stop sign on a trip abroad.
+Anyway, I write down a list of rules for the boys. I write them a
+card. I set up the password to their computer. It is studyhard. I tell
+them that school got me out, that it can get them out. Out. Out of
+what? The ghetto? I grew up poorer than I remember. But I grew up
+with two parents. I grew up with nightmares but they are living
+through nightmares.
+I am almost six hundred miles away. I’d never seen a tractor
+before I visited them, and they’ve never seen New York. There are no
+clowns in fields with machetes in America. There are white moms
+who threw stones at the little girls in Little Rock and there are white
+moms who wish Andres and Omar and Elias and Greta’s mom will be
+deported too. There are no clowns in fields with machetes, but there
+are ICE officers who pose as nice people trying to buy a piñata off the
+Internet, meet you in a parking lot, and detain you. If we get good
+grades, will you take us to New York City? Is Connecticut near
+Cleveland? What’s the best college in the whole country? I’m going
+to go to Harvard. I’ll become an immigration lawyer, like Peter, so
+nobody’s dad will ever be taken away again.
+—
+I start my days sitting on the floor of my shower, naked, the water as
+hot as I can bear it blasting onto my head. I find relief only in the
+water. For the past ten days, I’ve had a migraine that follows me like
+a shadow. One hundred and forty-two hours of incessant pain, an
+
+eight on the ten-point scale. My doctor has suggested codeine, which
+I refused, because once I took too much Percocet after a tooth
+extraction and threw up for twenty-four hours straight. I have a CT
+scan, an MRI, I go to the neurologist—the readings are all
+inconclusive. I’m told it’s a migraine with an unknown cause. Have
+you tried yoga? they say.
+“Stress headache,” says Leonel Chávez when I visit him one
+morning. Leonel is a forty-five-year-old Ecuadorian man holed up in
+a Methodist church off the Yale campus in defiance of ICE, which
+considers him a fugitive. He is in sanctuary. In 2007, a wrong turn
+during a family trip landed him in Canada and ICE took notice of
+him. A judge ordered his removal in 2009, but he managed to keep
+his head down and stay under the radar. In 2016, he was given a stay
+on the removal order as long as he checked in every six months. But
+under the current administration, the authorities have all but
+stopped granting stays, so in July 2017 he was ordered to leave
+within the month. Just like Javier. The day of his scheduled
+deportation, he claimed sanctuary in the church, a space that
+Immigration and Customs officers do not enter. He has been living in
+the church for over three months.
+“Probably,” I say. “But what can I do?”
+He shoots me a look. “There’s always something to be done,” he
+says defiantly. “For example, me. I control my thoughts. I just move
+them away from what’s causing me stress and onto something else.
+I’ve been doing that this entire time.”
+The migraine thing is new. I’ll visit Leonel on a Monday, then
+wake up with a headache on a Tuesday and have to lie in the dark for
+the next two days, sometimes going to Urgent Care for a migraine
+cocktail through an IV. My arm starts looking like I use. Then I visit
+him again. The migraines will not stop. I will just have to start taking
+daily medication to prevent them and emergency medication at their
+onset. They will become a part of me, and Leonel will become a part
+of me, and the sanctuary movement will speak to me and my
+traumas in the way nothing ever has before.
+
+—
+Leonel arrived in Connecticut twenty years ago on a Sunday
+afternoon at two o’clock. A family friend’s rotisserie-chicken
+restaurant was hiring a dishwasher. Dishwashing is a popular job for
+the newly arrived. It doesn’t pay great, the hours are long, and it’s
+boring and grueling, but Leonel was thrilled to see a job opportunity
+materialize so quickly after arriving. He took a shower and began his
+first work shift in America three hours after setting foot in the state.
+That’s Leonel. Leonel is also handsome, like a cowboy. No, not like a
+cowboy. Like a bad boy with a toothpick in his mouth. Actually, no,
+forgive me, he is precisely the Ecuadorian version of Brad Pitt in
+Inglourious Basterds. A fine Nazi-killing small man.
+Leonel has lived in the United States ever since and has firmly laid
+down roots. He left the restaurant industry and became an indemand construction worker, which netted him a healthy income.
+His wife is named Sofía, and they have a daughter and a son in their
+twenties, both on DACA, who live with him in the house, as well as a
+twelve-year-old daughter, Diana, who was born in Connecticut and is
+an American citizen. She speaks to her parents in English. The older
+kids are busy with their jobs, but Diana visits her father in the church
+nearly every day after soccer practice. Diana is always hanging her
+body off her father lovingly, like a sloth on a tree. She loves dogs and
+has this really brilliant plan to travel to Ecuador to rescue street dogs
+and bring them to the United States to sell for profit, marked up for
+the Third World je ne sais quoi. I’m waiting until she turns eighteen
+to introduce her to venture capitalists. Sofía is consistently one of the
+most powerful speakers at rallies, vigils, and press conferences. She
+speaks off the cuff and brings everyone to tears. I am a little afraid of
+her because when she hugs me and looks at me, I feel like telling her
+I hurt too much.
+As his time in sanctuary stretched from days to weeks to months,
+Leonel began to grow dark. “I am in a fight with myself all the time,”
+he says. “I’m getting depressed more and more, I feel a desire to run
+out and leave this all behind. I ask the Lord that He not abandon me.
+
+On days I know I’m going to be alone, I don’t want to wake up or
+even eat.”
+He has lost weight, and his hair, which he cut about two months
+into sanctuary, has grown back, curly and thick. He wears soft fabrics
+that fall loosely around his ankle monitor. Big sweatpants or shorts.
+He does not cry. “When I feel I am about to explode like a volcano,
+I’ll watch sad movies or listen to sad songs, so then I cry to let it all
+out. But I’m crying about the movie or the song. I don’t cry about
+this. They’ll never have the pleasure of seeing me cry,” he tells me. To
+occupy his mind, he built the church a modest but exquisite lectern
+with wood so thin it looks like paper, and a burgeoning cross in its
+center.
+Welcoming an undocumented immigrant with a deportation order
+into a church has to be done carefully so it cannot be misconstrued
+as harboring a fugitive. As a first step, the church makes clear to ICE
+that they are acting within their capacity as a sanctuary space in
+accordance with their beliefs as followers of Jesus Christ. They send
+a fax to ICE headquarters announcing that the immigrant is there
+once he or she arrives so nobody can claim they are “hiding” them.
+All parties are aware of the immigrant’s whereabouts. They’re
+wearing ankle monitors given to them by the Florida private
+company GEO Group. Sanctuary works because ICE has a policy
+against forcing their way into places of worship. Violating that policy
+requires special permission from ICE headquarters, but so far that
+hasn’t happened, and one immigration lawyer told me he thinks that
+if it did happen, “all hell would break loose.” It would certainly be
+bad PR. The image of armed men in uniform forcing their way inside
+a church door being physically blocked by priests, rabbis, or imams is
+dramatic to think about, and although it hasn’t happened, it feels
+imminent. The activists and religious leaders involved in the
+sanctuary movement think it’s enough of a possibility that they have
+a plan for it. If ICE tries to force their way in, members of the
+congregation would rush to the church and try to block the door with
+their bodies.
+
+In the United States, the tradition of immigrants claiming
+sanctuary in churches dates back to the 1980s, when a network of
+churches took in nearly five hundred thousand refugees fleeing the
+death squads in Central America. An underground railroad of sorts
+moved people through Mexico to more than five hundred places of
+worship across the country. After sending in undercover informants
+to infiltrate the movement, the federal government charged two
+Roman Catholic priests, a nun, and a Protestant minister with
+conspiracy to smuggle aliens, and they faced jail time of up to
+twenty-five years. They got probation instead.
+But the tradition of sanctuary is even more ancient than that. In
+the Old Testament, Mosaic law determines that some cities should be
+set aside as “cities of refuge,” where an individual who accidentally
+killed someone could be protected from prosecution. Saint Paul
+taught that any stranger who asked for help could be an angel
+undercover, and medieval churches would establish a range outside
+their walls within which refugees could not be arrested. There was an
+ancient Greek belief that someone turning away a supplicant ran the
+risk of turning away Zeus himself.
+Leonel decided to go into sanctuary at the last minute. The first
+church the family approached denied them sanctuary because they
+wanted an assurance that the stay would be short, and Leonel and
+Sofía couldn’t make that guarantee. “It was like your house is
+burning down and someone asks you for a month’s rent first before
+lending you a hand,” Leonel says. So they contacted Latinos Fighting
+for Justice, the local Latinx rights organization, which in turn
+reached out to Pastor Lisa at the Vineyard Church who welcomed
+Leonel, convinced that Jesus Christ would have done the same.
+Leonel’s room is upstairs; it used to be the pastor’s office. His bed
+is in the corner, a twin bed low to the ground with thin, flat pillows
+and a crocheted brown blanket. The clock on the wall has been stuck
+at 12:22 for the past three months. It’s like Vegas in this room: no
+windows anywhere and only a single broken clock. Small acrylic
+paintings of naturescapes line the walls, and I see Leonel has
+arranged an assortment of greeting cards on top of his air
+
+conditioner. There are shelves filled with cookies, chips, teas, and
+instant coffee. A small table and chairs in the middle of the room.
+One night family and local activists crowd into the room, sitting on
+the floor and on chairs and on his bed, and I ask Leonel what time he
+goes to sleep. “When the people leave,” he says.
+During one of my visits, I pull up a chair while Leonel is in the
+middle of telling his family about the South African photographer
+Kevin Carter and the picture he took of a large vulture approaching
+an emaciated toddler during the Sudanese famine. He scared the
+bird away but did not touch the child. It won the Pulitzer Prize in
+1994. A few months later, Carter committed suicide. “That photo cost
+him his life,” says Leonel. This anecdote comes up naturally during a
+discussion of starving children, which is part of a larger discussion of
+how fortunate we are in relation to the people all over the world who
+really do suffer. It’s not hard to see why Leonel is intrigued by Kevin
+Carter. He doesn’t understand how someone could visit a tragedy but
+not actively work to alleviate the suffering they witnessed. He doesn’t
+understand how people could choose to watch a good man waste
+away in god’s own house while the seasons continue their course and
+the church empties out of family each night, leaving him alone, with
+his thoughts, in the darkness. I don’t say anything.
+A lot happens while Leonel is in sanctuary—school shootings,
+daily bombshells in the special-counsel investigation of the president
+and his campaign—but I generally do not bring up the news with
+Leonel. I do not bring up the weather, even though that’s the
+simplest way to start a conversation with another human being,
+remarking how cold or hot it is, how much it’s raining. I shed my
+outer clothing as soon as I’m in the church to try to hide the
+changing seasons from him. I try to wear basically the same thing. I
+do not want to cause him pain by reminding him of the outside
+world. I always contact him ahead of time to plan my visits, and text
+him if I am running even five minutes late. I notice that other visitors
+—old ladies from the church, Yale kids—drop by unannounced, as if
+he were a man with nothing but time to spare. We make hours go by
+with small talk. I feel grief at the knowledge he’s in there. I feel as if
+
+someone is being killed and I am being forced to watch it, blinders
+on, and the bullet travels in slow motion, but I cannot stop it.
+Before I tell you what happens next, I should share with you a
+little story about something I did when I was around fifteen years
+old. My father was working as a deliveryman, and the owner of the
+restaurant hired a new manager to oversee the deliverymen—all
+immigrants, nearly all Mexican. The guy was Puerto Rican—an
+American citizen—and became immediately abusive, calling the
+delivery guys wetbacks and spics, threatening to call ICE on them,
+yelling at them, getting up in their faces. My father fell into a bit of a
+depression. I had just watched All the President’s Men for the tenth
+time, and what I did was I made myself a pot of tea, put on my best
+posh accent, dialed *69 to block my number, and called the
+restaurant. I asked to speak to the owner. I said I was a beat reporter
+for a big city newspaper, and I had just received a tip from a
+customer about overhearing racist abuse in the kitchen and did he
+have a comment. The owner said he’d handle it and asked me not to
+write the story. I don’t know, man, I said, it’s a pretty good story. In
+the end, the manager was fired, and the cloud over my father lifted.
+My father was furious when I told him what I did, but not for a
+minute in the fourteen years since have I felt that what I did was
+unethical, nor have I felt guilty for having a man fired. I’d do it again
+but my accent would be better.
+So I got into a fight with Leonel’s lawyer. I was working on a
+newspaper story on Leonel and he had been telling me for a long
+time that his lawyer had been treating him—communicating with
+him or not, mostly not—in ways I understood to be negligent and so
+I called him up and asked him a list of Bob Woodwardy questions
+that any discerning person would have understood meant I was
+asking around the issue of negligence, and he asked me to meet him
+at the church the following night at eight o’clock on the dot, like a
+playground bully, and yelled at me in front of Leonel and Sofía, told
+them they could not trust me, because he did not trust me, and they
+looked down at the floor because what could they say?—their lives
+were in his hands. So I was quiet for their sake, and also I am not a
+
+confrontational person—I am shy and I cry easily—and I went home
+and I cried and cried. But a few weeks later I sent him an expensive
+bottle of scotch to appease him because I needed to still have access
+to him, because access to him meant I could help Leonel. Our
+meeting forced him to go to the church for the first time in god
+knows how long, which is what Latinos Fighting for Justice had been
+trying to get him to do, and while he was there, they talked to him
+about a new strategy, which he agreed to pursue. One of the
+organizers called me that night to ask if I was okay and to say that
+never mind all that, the strategy had worked (oh yes, the strategy!).
+On Thanksgiving Day, out of nowhere, Leonel was released. He was
+out! He called me and I tried not to cry, because it wasn’t about me, a
+known pussy, and our conversation was awkward. Are you stretching
+your legs, Leonel? Soon after, on Facebook, I saw a picture of him
+stepping outside the church for the first time while Sofía cried by his
+side and I am lucky I was already married and will not have kids so I
+do not have to lie about what the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen
+is.
+A few weeks later, my partner and I drive to Leonel and Sofía’s
+home. He opens the door with his hair still wet from the shower. I
+tell him he looks great. “All that has changed is the location. I’m still
+a prisoner,” he says, and points to his ankle bracelet. It’s still on. A
+decision from the immigration courts can take hours or it can take
+months, maybe years. We admire his house, our first time seeing it.
+Then they get to the point—there is a new man who has just taken up
+sanctuary in a nearby church. His name is Francisco Valderrama. He
+is Ecuadorian too.
+—
+Most people with deportation orders do not go into sanctuary. Right
+now, there are only forty-two individuals in the United States living
+in churches in defiance of their deportation orders. It takes a
+particular kind of person to go into sanctuary. They’re extraordinary.
+
+From the undocumented people I have loved, I have learned that
+all of us share something a bit peculiar, fantastical, and
+controversial, which is this: We operate in this world like we are a
+little bit above the law. This does not mean we are not law-abiding.
+We have to be extremely careful not to have any run-ins with the law
+—because even a traffic ticket can lead to deportation. We pay taxes
+too. In 1996, the IRS even made a special provision for us to be able
+to pay taxes without Social Security numbers—that’s the ITIN
+number, which you’ll see advertised everywhere in immigrant
+neighborhoods.
+But as an undocumented immigrant, everything we do is
+technically against the law. We’re illegal. Many of us are indigenous
+in part or whole and do not believe borders should exist at all. I
+personally subscribe to Dr. King’s definition of an “unjust law” as
+being “out of harmony with the moral law.” And the higher moral law
+here is that people have a human right to move, to change location, if
+they experience hunger, poverty, violence, or lack of opportunity,
+especially if that climate in their home countries is created by the
+United States, as is the case with most third world countries from
+which people migrate. Ain’t that ’bout a bitch?
+Francisco Valderrama and Leonel Chávez have very specific
+profiles. They have young children and lives they love and do not
+want to give up. Still in their prime, they haven’t been defeated by
+decades of racist abuse and manual labor yet; they walked into the
+church with their heads high. They’re individuals of strong faith who
+do not lose hope easily. But they’re also roguish. They’re wild.
+They’re stubborn. They’re frontiersmen. They know how to make just
+about anything appear out of thin air, they have lovely homes they
+created from nothing but sheer will and obstinance, and when they
+were in trouble, they managed to find communities to rally around
+them. Francisco is a completely fluent English speaker whose leather
+couch and flat-screen TV are the result of him outsmarting big-box
+stores in perfectly legal but kind of eyebrow-raising ways. Now
+Francisco’s home is an abandoned menagerie, a wildlife sanctuary
+cobwebbed by an apocalypse. His senior dog is alone most of the day,
+
+confused by why his dad disappeared one day. The two parakeets,
+Blue and Birdy, sing all day with nobody to hear their racket. A
+goldfish named Fishy swims in the dark.
+Francisco’s wife, Flor, is soft-spoken and shy and laughs easily,
+which hints to a private life their daughters have told us about in
+which she is “extra” and “crazy.” Their three American-born
+children, Brianna, age sixteen, Franny, age thirteen, and Johnny, age
+five, are also pretty extra. The girls are just like Francisco: stubborn
+and overflowing with a restless energy. Franny wants to become a
+famous actress “to prove white people wrong” and Brianna is a
+STEM whiz who wants to become a nurse. Johnny, controversially,
+wants to be a cop. The children visit their father at the church every
+day after school, and every night when Johnny has to leave the
+church, to return to his fatherless home, he cries and that makes
+Francisco cry too.
+I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that at first, I was
+resistant to meeting a new person in sanctuary because my
+relationship with Leonel had made me sick, and the next thing I
+knew, my partner and I were going over to the church for dinner with
+the family every week. Then more than once a week. Francisco and
+Flor would cook some delicious folk Ecuadorian dish to cure my
+newfound homesickness and it would feel like going to bed with a hot
+water bottle. I would sometimes even get warm and sleepy eating
+sopa de bola, a soup with green plantains stuffed with meat, or
+encebollado, a warm tuna and yucca soup that my partner ate a sixth
+of politely. We’d play a game with the family, like Pictionary or
+charades, while all wearing face masks, the skin-care kind, and it was
+easy. It was never tense, there were no memories I had to work to
+suppress, meaning it was like suddenly having the most loving and
+least complicated family in the world, except that this family was in
+hell. When I had my wisdom tooth removed, my partner had to go to
+work, so she dropped me off at the church to recover and I lay on the
+couch in the church basement, tucked in with blankets by Francisco,
+him sitting respectfully at the corner of the couch holding up an iPad
+for me to watch a documentary about the Inca Empire. Flor made me
+
+her special hen soup with a hen she had killed specially for me. My
+real family became extremely jealous. “They’re taking advantage of
+you,” my mother would text me, livid that I had spent yet another
+quiet evening with them, laughing and embracing, instead of talking
+to her. I told her to not talk to me about them again.
+—
+One night, we’re having dinner with the Valderramas at the church
+and a religious group that Leonel and Sofía belong to stops by
+unannounced. Since leaving sanctuary, Leonel and Sofía have
+developed an unshakable concern for Francisco and his family. You
+can see it pains Leonel to visit, but the guilt of turning his back hurts
+more. They’re about twenty people deep, and they bring guitars.
+They form a circle. Someone grabs my arm and brings me into the
+prayer circle. I sit between Leonel and Francisco. The first hour of
+the prayer session consists of the group of faithful men and women
+on their knees beating their chests and crying out to god for
+forgiveness. I look at them intently. Some of them seem for real but
+overall it’s super performative. I do not pray to god for forgiveness,
+because I believe I have nothing to apologize for and he might have
+to explain a couple of things to me, so I just sit there, moping, angry,
+but still trying to radiate positive vibes because I’m not going to be
+the person who is ruining faithful migrants’ experience of
+community. I respect the role of god in the lives of people who suffer
+but basically only in the lives of people who suffer.
+One of the loudest chest beaters brings the two sanctuary couples
+to the center of the group. “We will pray for the families,” she says,
+and then takes me by the hand too. “Oh, I’m not family,” I say, but
+she shakes her head and says, “It doesn’t matter. Jesus loves you.” So
+we stand in the center of a prayer circle twenty people deep, and they
+say, Close your eyes and hold hands. I’m still in between Leonel and
+Francisco, so I hold on to their hands, tight. The two couples close
+their eyes and bow their heads. Prayer begins. As soon as the song
+starts, Francisco and Flor collapse into each other’s arms. Tears fall
+
+onto Flor’s baby-blue shirt. Leonel and I are not crying. We are still
+holding hands, fingers tightly interlaced, and we lock eyes. He guides
+my body so we wrap Francisco, Flor, and Sofía in our arms and
+squeeze.
+When the prayer circle is done, I go back to my seat. I take
+advantage of a pause in the next round of prayers and walk out
+quietly. I go sit with Franny and Brianna in Francisco’s room. When
+he sees me again, Leonel teases me. “Was the exorcism really hard on
+you, little atheist?”
+—
+Francisco’s case moves slowly through the backlogged immigration
+courts. The months began to pass, quickly, slowly, marked only by
+legal dead ends and more prayer circles. My partner and I begin to
+play a larger and larger role in Franny and Brianna’s lives. They
+begin to call us “moms.” When we say we are going to pick them up
+for dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, their favorite restaurant, basically
+all Connecticut teenagers’ favorite restaurant, at six o’clock and it is
+6:01, we receive a text message from Brianna: “It is 6:01.” The girls
+decide that our friendship anniversary is on Brianna’s birthday,
+which is February 23. That night, we took them to see Black Panther
+because I thought it would be inspiring for them as young women of
+color. I’m a didact. Franny texted throughout the whole thing and I
+was very upset! Within a few months, they were sleeping over. When
+February 23 rolled around for a second time, with their father still
+praying for a miracle, we decorated T-shirts with our friendship
+anniversary and hearts in glitter glue. There were times that Franny
+asked to come over to our apartment to do homework, so we picked
+her up from school, at enough of a distance from the entrance that
+we didn’t embarrass her in front of the other tweens wearing spotless
+Air Force Ones, sat her at my desk, and pulled up a chair next to her
+to unsuccessfully remind her to bring down the X as she went
+through each step in an equation. We made sure she used the
+website that listed all answers for her textbook just to check her
+
+answers, not to cheat, and she relished the discipline. She enjoyed
+dangling provocations in front of us. I’ll cheat! I won’t hand this in!
+I’ll talk back to my teacher! She was going to either do or not do
+those things anyway, but she liked it when we pleaded with her, gave
+her lectures on the importance of grades, and insisted on talking to
+her principal when she was treated unfairly by a teacher. Once,
+Franny said she didn’t want to go to college and I said, “Oh hell yes
+you are,” and told her I was going to take a needle and thread and
+sew her ear to mine so she would have to go wherever I went and I
+would go to college. She thought that was “crazy” and made me “a
+weirdo” but she enthusiastically repeated my words to her father,
+pleased I cared enough about her to put my ear through so much.
+We were making dinner in the church basement one evening
+when Johnny suddenly asked his sister Brianna why their dad wasn’t
+allowed to go home. He had long outgrown the original explanation,
+which was that his dad worked at the church, a special job with no
+time off. Brianna said there was an evil man who wasn’t letting him
+leave. Johnny then turned to me and asked why the dinosaurs died.
+Johnny is obsessed with dinosaurs. He is as much an expert as a fiveyear-old can be. He knew why. But he wanted to hear me say it. So I
+told him that a meteor hit Earth and the dust blocked the sun and
+there was no food for the dinosaurs so the dinosaurs starved. “Yes,”
+Johnny said empathically. The extinction of the dinosaurs is the only
+tragedy Johnny knows. He doesn’t know about Hiroshima. He
+doesn’t know about the Holocaust. He doesn’t know about the Trail
+of Tears. He just knows his father can’t come home and he knows the
+dinosaurs died.
+—
+When Francisco received news—not for the first time nor for the last
+—that his request for a stay was denied by local immigration
+authorities, faith leaders from around Connecticut set up an all-night
+prayer vigil outside the ICE offices in Hartford to plead with ICE to
+use its discretion to give Francisco a stay. They set up a table with
+
+pictures of Francisco with his children and tiny votive candles
+surrounding the frames. The pictures were from their life before—of
+the family at the park, fruit-picking, dressed for parties. Brianna
+stared at the pictures for a long time. “They made it look like Dad
+died,” she whispered. Then she threw herself into the arms of my
+partner and sobbed. “When will this end?” she asked as she heaved.
+She could barely get out the words. When we all piled into the car
+and headed back to New Haven, the girls asked us to play sad music.
+An enormous yellow full moon followed our car through Hartford
+and the girls stood up in the back seat to film it through the sunroof,
+the wind almost toppling their skinny frames, hoping it was a good
+omen, but it disappeared once we arrived in New Haven.
+“Keep Francisco home!” Johnny would chant at every protest we
+held in honor of Francisco. This whole thing has confused Johnny.
+“Francisco” has come to mean the man in the church, and that man
+is scared and in danger. As adults, we can all remember the moments
+when we realized our parents were not infallible, that they were
+mortal, that they were vulnerable people. But for Johnny, it is
+happening within a narrative that escapes his comprehension. So he
+disassociates. He has begun talking about a man named “Francisco”
+who is his father and about a man named “Daddy” who is also his
+father. When we go out for pizza, he wants us to bring back a slice of
+pizza for “Francisco.” Francisco is someone who can go hungry if
+food is not brought to him. (Johnny saves snacks from his school
+lunch to bring to his father.) On our way to the aquarium one
+morning, we stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and Johnny asked for a
+doughnut with pink frosting and sprinkles. When I passed it to him,
+he packed up the doughnut in a paper bag real tight, rolled it up, and
+said, “I am saving this for Francisco.” My partner and I insisted he
+eat it, but he refused. His sisters turned very serious and sad, as if
+they had seen this behavior before.
+I lied and said Francisco gets stomachaches from eating sugar.
+Only then did he eat it and he ate the doughnut happily, hungrily.
+Franny slips into some dissociative moments too. Sometimes
+she’ll speak in the present tense about past events that haven’t been
+
+true for a year and a half. One evening, Francisco was discussing how
+he used to wake up very early to go to work at the factory where he
+worked for fifteen years and Franny said, “What do you mean,
+Daddy? You still wake up at five A.M. every morning to make it to
+work.” Francisco gently reminded her he didn’t. She’s having sleep
+problems. She feels exhausted but cannot reconcile sleep, often until
+four in the morning, her mind running with thoughts of her father.
+—
+The girls were over for a sleepover one night when one of them asked
+if we planned on buying a house of our own someday, because they’d
+need their own rooms. We were like, sure someday I mean yeah
+that’s not realistic right now but like sure. We became their
+emergency contacts at school. I did their makeup for formals and
+class pictures. They asked my partner to pick them up from places
+sometimes, no questions asked, and she did. We had our own little
+Christmas, the four of us, with their first-ever stockings filled with
+practical presents they were sweet to be excited about, because it
+wasn’t the new Jordans they wanted. When we went to the movies,
+the four of us would cram into the photo booth, the girls’ bony butts
+sitting on us, and Franny cut out a frame and put it in the back of her
+phone case. In the winter, we ice-skated in Boston Commons at
+nightfall as it snowed and in the dead heat of summer we took them
+to Red Lobster, where I threw up in the parking lot after dinner as
+they comforted me. Once, the girls asked me why I don’t have a New
+York accent. “Do you know what internalized racism is?” I asked
+them. They didn’t. I told them. I felt loved. I loved them back. We
+weren’t parents but we were something.
+I don’t want kids of my own. I do not want to be a mother. I have
+always known this. I have never played with baby dolls. I have never
+wanted to hold a newborn. I don’t want to have to sacrifice anything
+for a child, I already have too many people to take care of, and I don’t
+want my child to have hazy memories of me in a silk robe with a
+whiskey ginger ale at 11:00 A.M. acting queerly around bath time,
+
+around water—was I…trying to drown them? Oh, honey. But my
+relationship to these kids was different. When we showed up for
+school functions, I was either assumed to be their young mother or
+introduced as their mom, by them, with Brianna and Franny
+grinning wickedly, and I felt like a double agent. But there I was,
+counting dollar bills to buy Franny’s school’s bumper sticker to put
+on our car next to a sticker of soccer-gay-sex-icon Tobin Heath,
+wasn’t I? Where’s the lie?!
+When I meet kids who suffer, I want to teach them everything I
+know about the world, which isn’t a lot, and basically amounts to: Go
+to Harvard. Make hella money. Read contracts before you sign them.
+Bring two tiny bottles of Kahlúa and a tiny bottle of mouthwash
+when you have to go with your parents to their biopsy results. I
+follow my own advice while trying to hold off on the suicidal ideation
+while trying to be as socially fucking mobile as socially fucking
+possible and then these kids fucking find me, and what do I do, but
+invite them into my heart and tell them, babes, go to school, climb
+the ranks, kill the salutatorian, make it look like an accident, and in
+your valedictory address, remind your school that cops are pigs, and
+ICE are Nazis, and you are John at the foot of the cross, Jesus’s most
+loved apostle, maybe his lover, and you’re in the holy word, escape to
+my home for some chamomile tea and RuPaul, there will always be
+room for you, I love you and forever will.
+
+CHAPTER 6
+
+New Haven
+
+I
+
+t was about an hour before midnight in New York in August and
+the heat had calmed down just enough to try sleeping. We didn’t
+have working air-conditioning units and our third-floor apartment,
+built on top of a former garment factory, had a roof with short walls
+adjacent to our windows, so—this was before the gentrifier snitches
+got us in trouble with the landlord—we would drag out our twin-size
+mattresses through the windows and lay them down on the floor of
+our roof. The night was still hot but there was a breeze. My mom and
+dad squeezed onto one mattress and my little brother and I onto the
+other and I wish I could say we looked up at the stars but there were
+no stars, per New York’s famous light pollution, but there was the
+moon, and there were the pop pop pops in the background that were
+either the sound of kids playing with fireworks or the sound of a cop
+shooting one of us in the back, the odd ice-cream truck playing
+“Turkey in the Straw” or “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” which none of
+us immigrant kids had ever heard before, a car blasting salsa, a
+woman screaming in drunken ecstasy or else in alarm. The night
+seemed eternal. My parents were still in their thirties and they were
+still in love, and I had just watched Beyoncé perform “Crazy in Love”
+for the first time on TV and I felt electrified. I made my parents
+promise me they’d never get old. They did, they promised.
+
+My father is in the middle of a prostate cancer scare right now.
+There is not much to say about it other than he does not want to get a
+biopsy, against the doctors’ advice. The reason he does not want to
+get the biopsy is because he wants to die. It’s two more weeks until
+we go in to get the results of his next prostate exam and the doctors
+will probably once again recommend a biopsy and my father will
+definitely refuse and that will be the moment I have been preparing
+for my entire life. Everything that I have done or that has happened
+to me since I took that New York–bound flight twenty-four years ago
+has been preparing me for this moment—learning English, getting
+bangs, placing second in the Emancipation Proclamation oratory
+contest, gaining weight, losing weight, getting the sick puppy from
+the pet shop, all of that happened to prepare me to this point—my
+parents are sick, uninsured, and aging out of work in a fucking racist
+country.
+The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is
+that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your
+own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and
+die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them. That’s what
+makes caring for our elderly different from Americans caring for
+their elderly. For one thing, most available jobs for undocumented
+immigrants are jobs Americans will not do, which takes healthy
+young migrants and makes them age terribly. At a certain point,
+manual labor is no longer possible. Aging undocumented people
+have no safety net. Even though half of undocumented people pay
+into Social Security, none are eligible for the benefits. They are
+unable to purchase health insurance. They probably don’t own their
+own homes. They don’t have 401(k)s or retirement plans of any kind.
+Meager savings, if any. Elderly people in general are susceptible to
+unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of them, and the
+undocumented community draws even more vultures. According to
+the Migration Policy Institute, around 10 percent of undocumented
+people are over fifty-five years old. This country takes their youth,
+their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show
+for it.
+
+My father is a salad maker now, feeding Manhattan’s executive
+class. I’ve never watched him make a salad but I’m sure he’s
+exquisite at it. (He did teach me about how to chop a salad in the
+most efficient way possible, which is to stand as if on a surfboard and
+take turns balancing your weight on either foot. The rhythm leads to
+faster chopping.) He has always been the best at his job, no matter
+the job. He worked as a taxi driver for his first twelve years in
+America, a time before MapQuest, let alone Uber, and he has the
+entire city memorized, every axis on the grid, all five boroughs and
+parts of Jersey. Since then, he has worked in restaurants. Now he is
+usually the oldest person in the kitchen. Out of respect, the younger
+guys all call him Don.
+Recently, he started a new job, recommended to him by an
+acquaintance who lured him with the assurance of better hours,
+better treatment, a better environment. My dad is very gullible. He
+spent three days at this new restaurant where, for spare change, they
+had him work all day, and then in the final hour of the day, he was
+given just that hour to clean an industrial kitchen, an industrial fryer,
+a refrigerator, a stove, an oven, and a sink, wash the dishes and the
+dishwasher, take out the trash, sweep and mop the floors, and clean
+the garbage chute. His body was wrecked at the end of each day. “I’m
+too old for this,” he said. So he quit. His old job wouldn’t take him
+back. Desperate, he began each morning by showing up at a Latinx
+job agency, which would send him out to “audition” at a different
+restaurant day after day, week after week, to no avail.
+My dad told me all of this over dinner one night at a hotel
+restaurant in Midtown Manhattan where I’d invited him to meet me
+after what I thought was the end of his shift, and it was, but it was
+the end of a trial shift at a different restaurant than the one I had in
+mind. This whole thing, all of it, the entire fucking thing, had been
+kept from me for over a month, per my father’s orders, because in my
+family it is believed I am sometimes fragile, stemming back from an
+incident when I was twenty-one and my father had to come to New
+Haven in the middle of the night to pick me up from the cold tile of
+my apartment’s bathroom floor, beer bottles and a razor around me,
+
+and take me back home to New York. My father had initially refused
+to enter the restaurant because he believed he wasn’t dressed nicely
+enough for it, but I convinced him my money was good there, and I
+introduced him to the server as my father in a bit of a flamboyant
+way, not enough to embarrass my dad, just to make a point that this
+was a motherfucking thing for me and I expected this to be a
+respected thing among the three of us, and I urged my dad to get the
+steak and ordered wine for us both and translated a conversation
+between the server and my father about a wine recommendation to
+go with his meal, which I usually think is so bourgeois, and I also
+joined him when he swirled the wine in his glass and smelled it,
+which I also usually think is the worst, and I quietly slipped myself a
+Klonopin while he was cutting his steak, confessing to all of this job
+trouble, in a pained, casual way, and then as he kept on talking, boy
+was there so much I didn’t know, I slipped myself a second Klonopin
+with our second glass of wine, and when he left, I went up to my
+room and put on the terry-cloth hotel robe and shut off the lights and
+passed out feeling nothing, certainly not feeling fragile. I felt like
+Indio Juan Diego seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe in her glory, the
+miracle he wanted and needed at once. I felt god had gifted me
+blackness and death and I said, Thank you Jehovah God. Thank you.
+Is this a blackout? I’m free of their tears. Is this freedom?
+Once his secret was in the open, my dad started texting me blurry
+cell phone pictures from the job agency. I told myself I needed a
+reminder of why I needed to be successful, so successful, statistical
+anomaly successful, so I have them saved on my phone to
+emotionally blackmail myself with. He took the photos when he was
+sitting in the waiting room of the job agency waiting for his name to
+be called. The first picture is of a man maybe in his late seventies,
+wearing a green button-down, khaki pants, and aviator sunglasses.
+His lips are downcast. My dad said he was applying to be a
+dishwasher. The second picture is of a man maybe in his late forties
+who is wearing a black baseball cap, a gray sweater, and maroon
+pants. My dad said he’d had a stroke—his right arm was paralyzed
+and he had a limp in his right leg. He was also applying to be a
+
+dishwasher. Apparently, he was a fucking fantastic dishwasher, how,
+I don’t know. When he sent the pictures, my dad also texted me:
+Further proof that we’re not a burden.
+Who says you’re a burden?
+It’s hard to see men like that not get jobs. We’re invisible
+because of the circumstances that force us to be here at the
+agency…old age…illness…the fucking papers. Do you
+understand. A million thoughts rush to my head. It’s too much
+to think about.
+“I hope they have children who can take care of them,” I respond.
+What I mean to say is: I hope they have a child like me. I hope
+everyone has a child like me. If I reach every child of immigrants at
+an early age, I can make sure every child becomes me. And if they
+don’t, I can be everyone’s child.
+—
+Octavio Márquez is a sixty-six-year-old Guatemalan day laborer with
+a faint white stubble. I saw him in a video online describing being
+robbed of his wages by an employer. At some point in the video he
+says Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants,
+which I cannot dispute. I email a message of concern to the
+immigrant worker center advocating for Octavio, and receive a reply
+inviting me to meet him at the blue boxcar in Brooklyn where the
+worker center is located. I visit one morning as the workers are
+making coffee and eggs. Before I go in, I stop by a Walgreens and
+pick out a nice card for Octavio. I stuff it with four hundred dollars. I
+don’t know how much money he was robbed of, but it’s what my dad
+earns in a week so I do it.
+
+Let’s talk about money for a second. I’ve established I grew up
+poor. Let me guide you through the present day. For my family,
+poverty is like walking in a hurricane. I buy my parents umbrella
+after umbrella; each provides some relief, then breaks—cheap fixes,
+all of them. The rain has paused for now. In Spanish we call that
+pause escampó. The rain has escampado. It will resume. Right now, I
+have some discretionary income. But it will not last forever. The guilt
+I feel having made it out—for now, until my own umbrella breaks—is
+like having been poisoned. I feel constantly disgusting, dirty,
+hungover, toxic unless I’m hemorrhaging money in this very specific
+way that I find cleansing.
+So what happens is, let’s say I go out to dinner. If I’m having an
+anxious day, I will send my parents take-out dinner. If I see a brown
+person in the kitchen at the restaurant, I will think that every kitchen
+in America probably has a Mexican in it and it will make me feel
+proud but sad—RIP Anthony Bourdain, a homie who got it—and
+then if my server is brown, if they are either in my opinion too young
+or too old or seem too tired for the job, I will leave a crazy tip—for
+what I am, which is a freelancer. Now. I do not have the kind of
+money to be leaving people crazy tips. But I remember every person
+who ever left my dad a really good tip when we lived off his tips, I
+remember every one, you don’t understand, I have been thinking of
+those nice Puerto Rican executive assistants for the past fifteen
+years, it was always the Latina executive assistants, very rarely the
+white people in power, and I remember how he felt for the rest of the
+evening when he came home. It was like having my dad back from
+the dead. He would dance to no music and he’d make jokes, and he’d
+come out of his shower looking like a teenager. I know what a good
+tip feels like for a poor family. Every good tip feels like Simon
+helping Jesus carry the cross.
+When I am introduced to Octavio I hand him the heavy envelope
+but it’s awkward. I don’t know him. I don’t tell him there’s money in
+there, but why am I, a total fucking stranger, giving him a greeting
+card? He keeps forgetting it everywhere so I’m finally like, Octavio,
+there’s money in there! He does not open the envelope but puts it
+
+away and we’re both like, Fuck what now? Are we friends or
+something?
+We go to lunch. He’s small and appears to be made out of paper.
+We walk a long time to get to the restaurant and we have the same
+stride. When we arrive, he’s disappointed to hear they’ve changed
+management and he doesn’t know the owner anymore. He was trying
+to impress me. He orders stewed ribs and chamomile tea. Octavio
+tells me that much of the discrimination older immigrants
+experience is at the hand of younger immigrants. That they will stand
+within earshot of the older guys and loudly wonder what they’re still
+doing here, or outright say they’re too old for the work. But Octavio
+knows his worth. When an employer picks him to do a job, they
+always call him back. He says he is friends with a seventy-two-yearold man who makes decorative wooden floors better than anyone
+else in the game and younger guys can’t match his skill.
+I ask how he feels on a daily basis as an older man without family
+here and Octavio says that he feels depressed and anxious. “What
+kills us is loneliness. I feel lonely even in a room full of people. I feel
+destabilizing anxiety and pain. Doctors say I don’t have anything, but
+I know I’m sick.” I ask Octavio whether his friends have similar
+problems, and he says they do but their symptoms manifest in
+different ways. “I think some men who grow old in this country get
+lost here. They are unfaithful to their wives or turn to alcohol or
+drugs as a way to blow off steam, to forget their pain. I’d say that out
+of every hundred older immigrants, ten succumb to depression,
+anxiety, or worse.”
+I think about the work of Roberto Gonzales, a Harvard scholar
+who has conducted longitudinal studies on the effects of
+undocumented life on young people. As a result of all the stressors of
+migrant life, he found his subjects suffered chronic headaches,
+toothaches, ulcers, sleep problems, and eating issues. Which is funny
+to find in research because I’m twenty-nine and I have this ulcer my
+doctors can’t seem to soothe or diagnose the cause of. It feels like I
+have an open wound right beneath my breasts in the center of my
+abdomen and I can feel it spasm and bleed and it never goes away.
+
+Sometimes I have to go to Urgent Care, and I drink concoctions and
+take pills and drink teas and I just keep bleeding, and it hurts the
+most when, after a long day of reading about people forming human
+chains to block ICE officers from arresting a man and his child, I sit
+down to write about my parents.
+Now, imagine that thirty, forty, fifty years in. Of course Octavio is
+sick. We’re all fucking sick. It is a public health crisis and it’s hard to
+know how to talk about it without feeding into the right-wing
+propaganda machine that already paints immigrants as charges to
+the healthcare system and carriers of disease. The trick to doing it is
+asking Americans to pity us while reassuring them with a myth as old
+as the country’s justifications for slavery—that is, reassuring
+Americans with the myth that people of color are long-suffering
+marvels, built to do harder work, built to last longer and handle
+more, reminding them what America already believes in its soul,
+which is that we are “impervious to pain,” as scholar Robin Bernstein
+has put it. We can only tell them we’re sick if we remind them that
+sick or not, we are able to still be high-functioning machines.
+“I don’t feel at home in this country,” Octavio says. “Even
+immigrants in extreme poverty find a way to send their deceased
+loved ones back home to be buried. They won’t be alive to feel
+happiness again, but they will feel at peace, finally a place to rest. All
+the dead want is a place to rest.” He says this may be his last year
+before going back to Guatemala. He came here to make enough
+money to send his kids to school back home, and he did it. One is a
+mechanic, another is studying law, and the third is an aesthetician—
+Octavio financed her salon. “Everyone who kills themselves through
+their work is doing this for their children,” he says. “If you don’t have
+kids, why would you kill yourself like this?” For my family the
+question is, once your kids are grown and doing okay, what happens
+when you keep killing yourself like this?
+—
+
+I meet Mercedes Soto through Pedro Ituralde, the head of Nuestra
+Calle, the Staten Island day laborer center, who describes her to me
+as the best housekeeper he has ever known, which is pretty high
+fucking praise. She is fifty-six years old but looks a lot older. She has
+long black hair shot with gray and a round, kind face. I tell her I’m
+writing about older immigrants and she gasps dramatically,
+envisioning a world in which she grows old in the United States and
+takes to living under a bridge. She walks me through the scenario she
+has envisioned while cracking herself up. “People are going to see me
+and gossip,” she says. “I can’t let them do that. They will whisper
+among themselves, Have you seen Mercedes? She lives under the
+bridge now, in a box. She’s fallen so far from her days of glory! A
+ghost of who she used to be! And then they will avoid saying hi to me
+because I live under the bridge now. No, ma’am, I’m not going to give
+them that satisfaction.”
+She tells me that I remind her of her granddaughter, small and
+fragile. So when she invites me to her home on Staten Island one
+afternoon to teach me how to cook small corn cakes called arepas, I
+immediately say yes. I’ve never had a grandmother and she seems
+fun.
+Mercedes and her husband rent a small room in a house that she
+shares with four young Ecuadorian men on the second floor and a
+young Salvadoran man across the hall from them on the first floor.
+Mercedes and her husband are, by decades, the oldest people in the
+house. She is the only woman. The house is spotless, and her room is
+neatly packed to the brim with belongings. Today, Mercedes is
+wearing dark-blue Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and a mock-turtleneck
+sweater, and her hair is in a long braid down her back. She invited
+her best friend, Monica, to cook with us. She is also fifty-six. (“And
+she has papers,” Mercedes says immediately.) They met at an English
+class and have been close ever since. Monica has henna-dyed black
+hair and black eyeliner tattooed on her lids. She suggests I am
+wearing too much makeup.
+The women do not let me cook. Latina women never let me cook. I
+used to have this self-mythology about my upbringing, which is that
+
+my parents never taught me to cook because they didn’t want to
+teach me skills that would make me a good housewife—my mother’s
+biggest fear—since whenever I asked to help them in the kitchen,
+they sent me to go read a book. So I was like, I had feminist parents!
+But now I realize that the literal truths about myself that are
+immediately manifest to others—I am clumsy, distracted, have no
+attention to detail, am messy, fall often, hurt myself easily—made me
+clearly useless in the kitchen and they just didn’t want me around to
+interfere. When I have tried cooking for various older Latinas, they
+always take over immediately, not because they’re feminist
+vigilantes, but because they’re perfectionists and they are good at
+what they do and why would they let me make a mess of things? To
+indulge me?
+Monica assembles a growing pile of arepas next to her. To make
+them, you mix white corn flour, warm water, butter, salt, and cheese
+in a bowl. You set it aside to cool, then take out the sticky dough and
+knead it. Monica uses a drinking glass to press perfect circles into the
+dough. Mercedes has made Mexican champorrado, a thick hot
+chocolate with oatmeal and molasses. It is already simmering when I
+arrive.
+Mercedes and her husband, Jacinto, plan on “retiring” in a couple
+of years. That means they’ll stop working in the United States and
+move back to Mexico, probably to work in some much more relaxed
+capacity there. He is a gardener and, at sixty-two years old, finds
+himself going head-to-head with younger men. His lower back kills
+him and he gets overheated easily. He refused to go to the doctor for
+a long time—I’m fine, leave me alone!—but Mercedes put her foot
+down, issued an ultimatum, and he went to the community health
+clinic, which charges twenty dollars for a visit. “I can’t love you more
+than you love yourself,” she told him. “Grown children will not take
+care of you when you’re older—especially boys, and we have boys.”
+Monica agrees that being a mother to adult sons with their own
+families to take care of makes her feel vulnerable. Jacinto comes to
+the kitchen to eat and drink with us. He is shy and laughs quietly at
+his wife’s jokes but speaks up when we begin to talk about adult
+
+children. “I don’t want to have to extend my hand to them to ask for
+food,” he says firmly. Plus, the children can be demanding, expecting
+too much of their parents. One day, Mercedes’s son raised his voice
+at her on the phone because he needed her and didn’t know where
+she was. “The day I live in your house and you spoon-feed me, I’ll
+listen to you, but until then, I’ll do as my heart desires,” she told him.
+The following night, I take a taxi to a church on Staten Island
+where Nuestra Calle is having a Christmas party. Mercedes is being
+honored for helping out in the community. The tables are covered in
+red plastic cloths and sprinkled with snowflake glitter confetti. I sit
+with Monica and Jacinto. Their phones ping with automated Biblescripture text messages in a huge font that they have to hold far from
+their faces in order to read. We eat plates of baked ziti as we watch
+teenagers in plush antlers dance with each other. There is a live
+band, a group of men in pink blazers with accordions. There’s a
+toddler in a tiny matching blazer and tiny matching accordion
+pretending to play along. Mercedes and Jacinto show me a picture of
+their religious marriage ceremony, which took place recently, fortytwo years after their civil one. She looks like a teen bride, wearing a
+white princess dress and a tiara. I walk from table to table,
+complimenting all the women’s makeup and asking if anyone wants
+to talk about aging, which you know, I’m no Ronan Farrow. One
+woman stops me to say she wants her story told. Altagracia is nearly
+fifty years old and is recovering from surgery to remove a cyst in her
+uterus that she had unsuccessfully tried to self-treat with herbs from
+a naturalist. She wants to tell me that she was conned by a woman in
+Mexico who said she could expedite her green-card petition and soon
+began extorting her for ever-increasing fees with the threat of being
+turned in to ICE if she did not comply. Altagracia paid her a total of
+twelve thousand dollars.
+Because of her poor health, Altagracia has death on her mind and
+is thinking about going back to Mexico. “There was a raid on a 7Eleven near my house just last week. And the other day on the bus, a
+white woman went on a racist rant against me while I was just
+standing there. All of the racism here makes me want to go back to
+
+my country when I die. I’m not wanted here, and I do not want to live
+in eternity in a place where I’m not wanted.” In the meantime, she
+says, her plan for aging involves her two children. She tells me a
+story about a woman she sometimes sees when she goes out to
+collect recycling for cash. The woman is seventy years old and
+collects recycling for a living. She was widowed when she was very
+young and never remarried, never had children. Now, Altagracia
+says, the woman is all alone and left to die in a foreign country
+without anyone to take care of her. She says the lesson is that it is
+important to have children who can take care of us when we grow
+old.
+“You can’t guarantee how your kids are going to turn out. There
+are good children and there are bad children, so in my opinion,
+people should have two kids. One of them ought to turn out well. I
+have two kids, and after my surgery, there was always one of them
+around to take care of me when the other one was busy.” An heir and
+a spare. I ask her if the pressure of that might be hard on the
+children.
+“Perhaps,” she says. “But that’s the tradition.”
+—
+Early the next morning, I visit Nuestra Calle. There are just five older
+men sitting inside, out of the cold. One of the men recognizes me
+from the party and says with a large grin, “I remember you. You tried
+to interview me, but I didn’t want to talk to you.” I concede that that
+was me, and try again. He leans back in his chair and sucks his teeth,
+thinking awhile. “No,” he concludes. I sit down to drink my coffee
+and we make small talk, until we’re kicked out by a woman who
+wants to sweep the space.
+Outside, I lean against the façade. The men gather around me in a
+semicircle. The man to my right, in his sixties, wearing a red New
+York Yankees baseball cap and a brown hoodie, too light for the cold,
+starts talking bitterly about the life of a migrant. He says he has
+completely given up, and that’s what he says, but here he is, isn’t he,
+
+at 7:00 A.M. on a freezing morning, clocking in like the rest of us. The
+other men quickly interrupt him, tenderly, in hushed tones. They
+urge him to get help. I shut up and listen. A picture begins to form.
+He is homeless and addicted to alcohol. The men try to tell him that
+he has to stare down a childhood trauma in order to get better, rather
+than escaping from his pain with drink. They tell him he is the
+smartest man they know, the most eloquent, and they don’t want to
+see this end badly. It’s an intervention.
+It seems spur of the moment, brought on by the opportunity to
+speak about the suffering of migration in the third person, almost
+pedagogically. He gets mad at them, but they’re very loving toward
+him. When he walks away, they tell me they are the lucky ones, that
+old day laborers often end up sick, sad, and alone, too embarrassed
+and lonely to go to the worker centers, instead picking up work in
+remote corners. “But I wouldn’t advise you to go to those places
+alone,” the man who turned down the interview says. “If you want to
+go there, we’ll go with you.”
+—
+I am ten years older than my brother. I have always imagined us as
+being part of an “heir and spare” sort of situation, which I know
+about because my mother is obsessed with the European royal
+families—she thinks I look like Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco the
+way my father thinks I have the spirit of Greta Thunberg. I…don’t.
+My brother has always been so levelheaded, so sweet, and patient,
+and—I say this with absolute awe and relief—has never shown signs
+of mental illness, so my parents were grateful for him, grateful that
+he was healthy and fine, grateful that he was spared. He’s not crazy,
+sure. But he was also born in Brooklyn. Which means he’s an
+American citizen.
+Whereas it was my responsibility to be the face of the family, the
+hunter, the gatherer, my brother just had to find it in him to do his
+homework. He was Prince Harry. He just had to…not be
+photographed in a Nazi costume. But he also had a bigger
+
+responsibility than I had, that I could not have because I was my
+parents’ undocumented child. He just had to turn twenty-one.
+Every mixed-status family in the United States knows the drill. An
+undocumented parent can be sponsored by their American-citizen
+child when the child turns twenty-one. (This does not work for
+siblings or other family members.) My parents never talked about it
+around my brother, though surely it made them hopeful, but I
+thought about it all the time. I took to lovingly calling him my little
+anchor baby, after the disparaging term Republicans used for the
+American-born children of undocumented immigrants who
+supposedly “anchored” them to the United States. I reclaimed the
+term. On his birthday, I always took him out to dinner, and as he ate
+his sushi happily and cluelessly, I’d think, You beautiful aging casket
+of wine. Better by the day.
+This all changed recently, when reports began circulating that ICE
+was arresting undocumented parents and spouses of American
+citizens when they petitioned for green cards. Immigration lawyers
+began advising children, husbands, and wives against petitioning for
+them at all.
+Ricardo Reyes, a twenty-one-year-old recent Yale graduate, is one
+of those kids. He is an American citizen. He has the face and
+demeanor of an adorable bludgeoned baby seal. His parents worked
+in the garment industry in Los Angeles for decades before moving to
+the Pacific Northwest to make a living picking apples. “Since I was in
+elementary school, I would hear my mom talk about naturalization,”
+he told me. He was their oldest child, so he’d reach the finish line
+first. He and several of his friends at Yale, also the children of
+immigrants, were turning twenty-one within a few months of each
+other and they were counting down the days, talking excitedly after
+class about who would turn twenty-one first. Then on the morning of
+his birthday, his lawyer told him it would be too risky to file an
+application. One of his classmates had seen her dad detained during
+their green card interview, and he was deported despite a national
+outcry.
+
+After digesting the news, Ricardo’s mother announced that when
+her body can no longer withstand picking apples she’d like to go back
+to Mexico. His father has been here since he was nineteen years old,
+so it’s hard for him to imagine returning to Mexico, but Ricardo
+thinks he’ll probably end up going back too. Ricardo is devastated
+that he wasn’t able to adjust their legal status but finds comfort in
+the fact that he can provide for their retirement if they go back to
+Mexico. He is a middle school teacher now, back in L.A. “Any money
+I make will not be for me. I just need an apartment. The rest will be
+for my parents.” I take him out to drinks and am like, how about
+chemical engineering, baby? But he wants to be a teacher and I
+admire that purity even if I have no high hopes for its financial
+output.
+But Ricardo is young, and for now his parents can still work. He
+does not yet know what this life will do to him. I’m looking to
+interview children of immigrants partly to get a blueprint for myself
+because I’m lost and I am scared, so I set off to find somebody a little
+older, someone who has been doing this for a while, and in my
+research I stumble upon thirty-six-year-old Mira Fernández. Mira is
+a Latina journalist who writes for the local Spanish paper who counts
+my dad as one of her readers. She grew up in New York, the daughter
+of undocumented immigrants. Her dad was a day laborer, and she
+lived with her parents—and paycheck to paycheck—until she was an
+adult. She remembers that, one month, after paying her bills and
+rent, she had no money left over to buy sanitary napkins, so she
+bought a roll of toilet paper that she made last her whole period. It
+was humiliating. “I decided that would never happen again. I wanted
+to save up so I could retire one day, and I was going to provide for
+my parents’ emotional health and quality of life,” she tells me. She
+did not want to be able to provide only for their basic needs. She
+wanted them to live with dignity. So she began to work toward that.
+Then, after decades as a day laborer, her father started to show
+signs of depression. His years had consisted of going to work, coming
+home to sleep, going to work, coming home to sleep, and back again,
+with nothing in his life to give it meaning or pleasure. He got older.
+
+He became overcome by stress and anxiety. He stopped talking. This
+is when Mira started noticing the miniature cars. They were the size
+of Hot Wheels cars, but they were built with intricate detail, like
+built-to-scale models. Her dad soon began amassing dozens, tens of
+dozens of tiny cars. He was skilled in woodwork, so after work or on
+weekends, during any free time he had, he would work on an
+elaborate wooden display for the cars. He’d clean them lovingly with
+small cotton rounds. He painted any scratches they had, and he
+rearranged them constantly. It’s the only way he passed the time
+when he was home. I ask Mira if this made her sad. She is quiet for a
+long time, then says, “You know, he filled up this space in his heart
+with those little cars, so I’m just glad he found a way to feel better.”
+After many years of trying, Mira’s parents, now much older, could
+not do manual labor in the United States anymore and went back to
+Mexico. Mira fully supports them, sending money twice a month. I
+ask her what percentage of her paycheck goes to her parents, and she
+says it is something she does so naturally and so much, she’s never
+even thought to calculate that.
+“Look, they’re better off there,” she says. “They were tired of their
+lives here. Their emotional health is more stable there, they have
+their own home, they have activities, they have friends. Here, they
+worked constantly just to make ends meet, just to pay rent on time.
+They could not retire here, but with some financial help on my part,
+their lives over there are more peaceful.” She admits it is financially
+complicated for her, but her parents always express their gratitude
+and they never ask for money outright. “I’d feel guilty not doing it,
+but I’m very happy to be able to do it, and I’m very happy to help
+them,” she says.
+—
+Her brother doesn’t contribute. He says he has his own family to take
+care of. Mira theorizes that Latin American culture is so imbued with
+patriarchal values that paint women as natural caregivers and
+nurturers that women feel a greater responsibility toward aging
+
+parents, and women who are not able to balance or reject those
+values feel an inescapable burden.
+I used to say that I would slip antifreeze into my brother’s coffee
+(it has a sweet taste, and he likes how I prepare his coffee, dulce and
+light enough that it should match my skin tone) if he did not help me
+take care of our parents as they aged. Once, he was maybe twelve
+years old and his report card was pretty bad. His report cards were
+pretty bad from his first ever one in kindergarten until he was in
+community college, so this was not a surprise—we all have our
+strengths and academics was not his. But it was a fucking nightmare
+for a family so focused on social mobility—and I was pissed. I called
+him on the phone and screamed at the top of my lungs that as an
+American citizen, he was wasting his opportunities, and that if he
+ended up working at a Best Buy and not going to college, I would
+never speak to him again in my life. “You hear that? I have no
+problem cutting you off. Don’t you try me. You won’t be a burden to
+me. I will never fucking talk to you again.” I recently apologized to
+him for being so cruel and he just laughed and said he didn’t take me
+seriously because I was just like Dad.
+—
+When my father could drive—before he started dying—he would take
+me to the Land of Make Believe or Splish Splash or some other
+tristate-area water park every summer. He did it because
+commercials for water parks were featured prominently on local
+television and they depicted children acting carefree and wild and I
+was not carefree or wild and it weighed on him, so he insisted I try. I
+did not know how to swim. He tried to teach me but I was terrified of
+the water. My father is prone to anger and so he is not a good
+teacher. When he made me practice long division at home and I got
+answers wrong, he’d rip up the pages I worked on about an inch from
+my face while telling me I was stupid. He took that approach to
+swimming lessons, and after a few minutes, he’d usually just storm
+off and my mother would tell me to ignore him. Through adulthood,
+
+my friends treated my not knowing how to swim like my not knowing
+how to ride a bicycle or not being able to leave the country—just, like,
+a quirky thing about me.
+My fear of water and inability to swim did not stop my father from
+taking me to water parks. It made him more dogged in pursuit of the
+activity. It’s all he wanted to do in the summers. My mother packed
+sandwiches and snacks because concession food was too expensive,
+and off we went. The only ride I could tolerate was the Lazy River
+because all I had to do was float on an inner tube, but my father liked
+for us to go on the rides with long, dark tubes that twisted into crazy
+loops at high speed and then spat you out into a pool. Those rides
+had long lines, and the entire way up I would have a pit in my
+stomach and I pleaded with him not to make me go. He insisted it
+would be fun, the whole point was my having fun. He’d go first, then
+wait at the bottom. At the top of the ride, when I was standing
+barefoot on a warm wooden landing and there was a dark tunnel in
+front of me filled with a fast current of water rushing into the pitch
+black, the people who worked at the ride would repeatedly ask me if
+I was okay going down. But I didn’t want to face my father if I gave
+up, so I lay down in the tube, crossed my arms, counted to three, and
+pushed myself down. Years later, my psychiatrist would tell me that
+my anxiety and adrenaline run on the same “train tracks,” so I often
+get them confused. If I experienced an adrenaline rush in the dark
+tubes, or if I experienced a panic attack while I was in them, I cannot
+say. I remember it as a sharp intake of breath, down to the cold of my
+soul. And I remember the next moment of awareness, which is being
+spit into a pool, and sinking.
+I sank. I always sank. I knew I could stand, but my body was
+leaden and I fell at the wrong angle. And my father always reached
+down and brought me to air, my long black hair stuck to my face. I
+was never underwater long enough to come up gasping for air, but I
+can still feel the taste of chlorine in my lungs. I miss the taste of
+chlorinated pool water. And I miss this dynamic, of my father putting
+me in a manufactured scene of crisis in which I would feel helpless
+but at the same time be perfectly safe. I felt like I was going to die,
+
+but I would not die. A person who cannot swim and who panics in
+water is in danger in a pool, and my father knew that, and he made it
+so that he could save me every time. It was never a big production
+when he did it, he’d just pick me up by the armpits and say, “Wasn’t
+that fun?” I think the lesson was: He was my father, and he was god.
+As long as I would panic and sink, and he could save me, he would
+always have that place.
+I never learned to swim. The farthest I had ever ventured into the
+ocean was to my knees, screaming the whole while. But by last
+summer, right before I turned twenty-nine and he turned fifty-four,
+our roles had so profoundly reversed and his self-esteem was so
+devastatingly low that I wondered if I could give that back to him,
+this ability to save me. Like the water-park drownings, this invitation
+was also perfectly manufactured: I invited him to come spend an
+afternoon at the beach in the middle of July precisely with the
+purpose of teaching me how to swim. It would take, max, three hours
+and I would take, just, one Klonopin.
+The beach we went to is called Lighthouse Point. It’s on the Long
+Island Sound, not far from New Haven. The Long Island Sound is
+technically an estuary, which is where salt water from the ocean and
+fresh water from rivers mix. Sixteen different very New Englandy
+rivers empty out into the Atlantic Ocean at this spot. Emma Lazarus
+wrote a forgettable poem about it with not a huddling mass in sight.
+It is described in The Great Gatsby as “the most domesticated body
+of salt water in the Western hemisphere.” When I was in college, I
+got the coordinates of East Egg and West Egg, fictional places on
+Long Island, tattooed by my left breast because they symbolized my
+desire for what I cannot have. But now, I just like this beach because
+there are always black and brown families fishing or building sand
+castles there, proudly being alive, and there is just something about
+the ocean air perfuming dark bodies refusing to die that makes me
+want to live another day too.
+To begin, my father poured cold water over my body with his
+hands like a priest baptizing an infant. It was freezing. His arms were
+very white. My father had not been to the beach in seven years. He
+
+told me the first step was being able to stand in deep water, which he
+likened to standing on a packed subway when you don’t have a pole
+to hold and cannot lean against a door. Your legs have to be apart
+just so, and you use your arms to stabilize yourself. He asked me to
+shift my weight from foot to foot as if I was on a bumpy subway ride,
+I guess kind of like he stands when he chops lettuce. He grabbed my
+hand and we went deeper into the ocean until the water was up to my
+chest, the deepest I had ever gone. “Next, you float,” he told me. He
+grabbed my hands and asked me to go on my stomach, extend my
+legs as far as they would go, and kick. He assured me he would not
+let go. I told him I weighed 140 pounds, which is not true, laadeedaa,
+but he said it didn’t matter, and to prove that to me, he asked me to
+grab him by the hands and he told me I would be able to support his
+entire weight in the water. “The water will help you carry my weight,”
+he said.
+I did. I mean the water did. When it was my turn, I asked him to
+swear to not let me go. I’d usually ask him to swear on his mother,
+because I know that’s what he holds most holy, but I think she’s
+demonic so I don’t like bringing her up. Instead, I asked why I should
+believe him. As an adult, he has told me that because he is a good
+father, he has lied to me my whole life, and he is proud of lying to
+me, and he will lie to me until he dies, so his word means nothing
+from him. I held on to his hands so tightly I am sure I bruised them.
+He did not let go.
+But I did not float. My body is not buoyant. “Your body is
+determined to sink,” my father announced as he tried to hold me up
+by the stomach. My legs do not extend in the water, so I cannot kick;
+they gravitate toward my father’s body like a magnet and I sink. I
+sink, but not down. My legs sink laterally, toward his body, so I end
+up vertical. He relaxed his body and showed me how easy it was to
+float on his back—Mire!—totally flat, but in my resting state, my
+body in water wants to be upright, on my feet. Both of us realized at
+the same time that this was a true thing about me, and we tried to
+change it until finally our limbs gave out and we returned to shore. I
+was not able to restore the natural order of things.
+
+Back on sand, I asked him if, before, on the roof that summer, he
+had lied when he promised to stay young forever.
+Yes, he said.
+If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you
+said.
+I know. But I won’t.
+My mom was on a beach blanket, her back to the sun, trying to
+darken the skin around a scar. She didn’t turn around to look at my
+dad and he didn’t look at her. Now that I think of it, they didn’t speak
+to each other at all that day except for when they awkwardly waded
+into the water together and stood some space apart, looking like two
+dead fish in the ocean together, stagnant but afloat. And that’s how
+they planned to stay, dead, stagnant, and afloat, even after we
+discovered that my dad wasn’t going to watch volleyball on weekends
+after all, even after I confronted him and he admitted it but blamed
+my mom. I separated them. He left home one night while my mom
+and brother were at church and I reminded him to write my brother
+a loving text because that night would be hard for him.
+There is research about migrant families, but children do not see
+it as prophecies foretold. I should have known better. I had spoken to
+a lot of people telling me the same things. And now here it was
+happening to my family, my soccer team, the world’s best. Shortly
+before I asked him to leave, my father had told my brother: “I am
+tired of living just for you and your sister. It is my turn to be happy
+now.” And he handled it the wrong way, totaled some people’s lives
+in his wake, but he was right. It was his turn to be happy. And now
+my mom is free to figure out what makes her happy, after thirty-one
+years. Thirty of those years have been spent here in America, being
+undocumented together. She goes to yoga now. The other day, she
+had a hot dog.
+I asked almost everyone I interviewed for this book about regrets,
+but they didn’t tell me many. That’s not what they remember of their
+time here. That’s not what we’ll remember when we have to leave, by
+choice, force, or casket. The look in a mother’s eyes at her baby’s first
+word in English, my father’s heaving sobs when I handed him my
+
+diploma in Latin from the best fucking school in the world, Leonel’s
+first steps of freedom outside the church in the autumn cold after
+four months in hiding, the Mexican chefs behind every great
+restaurant in New York, the Upper East Side babies who love their
+Haitian nannies so much it makes their moms jealous, a day
+laborer’s first cold shower in America after wearing off the soles of
+his feet in the desert, the two young men who pushed Joaquín up the
+mountain when he wanted to die, Jesus Christ himself on the cross—
+Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these
+brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.
+
+Peril
+
+Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always,
+fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers
+free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative
+instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not
+stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media.
+Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even
+slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public.
+Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another,
+deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets,
+playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a
+coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch
+the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.
+That is their peril.
+Ours is of another sort.
+How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are
+deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril
+must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should
+remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s
+work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we
+extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.
+We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers
+from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored
+writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the
+warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the
+corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted,
+unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the
+sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The
+
+alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and
+vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the
+historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the
+steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.
+The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature
+itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us
+are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural
+and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but stateapproved art.
+I have been told that there are two human responses to the
+perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply
+the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—a new
+species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping,
+charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-ofnames geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists,
+either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order,
+violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the
+most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the
+wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure;
+incarceration in holding camps, prisons; or death, singly or in war.
+There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard
+about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and
+dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.
+Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw
+power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses,
+writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be
+nurtured, protected. And it is right that such protection be initiated
+by other writers. And it is imperative not only to save the besieged
+writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to
+contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten
+novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by
+the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground,
+essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed,
+unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As
+though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.
+
+Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel,
+that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights,
+or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and
+turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
+A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its
+necessity.
+
+The Dead of September 11
+Some have God’s words; others have songs of comfort for the
+bereaved. If I can pluck up courage here, I would like to speak
+directly to the dead—the September dead. Those children of
+ancestors born in every continent on the planet: Asia, Europe, Africa,
+the Americas; born of ancestors who wore kilts, obis, saris, geles,
+wide straw hats, yarmulkes, goatskin, wooden shoes, feathers, and
+cloths to cover their hair. But I would not say a word until I could set
+aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed
+and ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I
+would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil—
+wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of a
+sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to
+stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of
+hyperbole, of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness;
+ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others
+of its kind.
+Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth
+full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. Because the dead
+are free, absolute; they cannot be seduced by blitz.
+To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false
+intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a
+camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time
+that I have nothing to say—no words stronger than the steel that
+pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the
+ancient atoms you have become.
+And I have nothing to give either—except this gesture, this thread
+thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my
+
+arms and as your soul got shot of its box of flesh to understand, as
+you have done, the wit of eternity: its gift of unhinged release tearing
+through the darkness of its knell.
+
+The Foreigner’s Home
+
+E
+
+XCLUDING THE HEIGHT of the slave trade in the
+nineteenth century, the mass movement of peoples in the latter half
+of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is
+greater now than it has ever been. It is a movement of workers,
+intellectuals, refugees, armies crossing oceans, continents,
+immigrants through custom offices and hidden routes, speaking
+multiple languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution,
+exile, violence, and poverty. There is little doubt that the
+redistribution (voluntary or involuntary) of people all over the globe
+tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the
+street. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited
+to monitoring the dispossessed. While much of this exodus can be
+described as the journey of the colonized to the seat of the colonizers
+(slaves, as it were, abandoning the plantation for the planters’
+home), and while more of it is the flight of war refugees, the
+relocation and transplantation of the management and diplomatic
+class to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh
+military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts
+to control the constant flow of people.
+The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the
+borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where one’s
+concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the
+alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by
+(1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy
+relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly
+disintegrating sense of belonging.
+
+Let me begin with globalization. In our current understanding,
+globalization is not a version of the nineteenth-century “Britannia
+rules” format—although postcolonial upheavals reflect and are
+reminiscent of the domination one nation had over most others. The
+term does not have the “workers of the world unite” agenda of the
+old internationalism, although that was the very word
+—“internationalism”—that the president of the AFL-CIO used at the
+executive council of union presidents. Nor is the globalism the
+postwar appetite for “one world,” the rhetoric that stirred and
+bedeviled the fifties and launched the United Nations. Nor is it the
+“universalism” of the sixties and seventies—either as a plea for world
+peace or an insistence on cultural hegemony. “Empire,”
+“internationalism,” “one world,” “universal”—all seem less like
+categories of historical trends than yearnings. Yearnings to corral the
+earth into some semblance of unity and some measure of control, to
+conceive of the planet’s human destiny as flowing from one
+constellation of nations’ ideology. Globalism has the same desires
+and yearnings as its predecessors. It too understands itself as
+historically progressive, enhancing, destined, unifying, utopian.
+Narrowly defined, it is meant to mean instant movement of capital
+and the rapid distribution of data and products operating within a
+politically neutral environment shaped by multinational corporate
+demands. Its larger connotations, however, are less innocent,
+encompassing as they do not only the demonization of embargoed
+states or the trivialization cum negotiation with warlords, but also
+the collapse of nation-states under the weight of transnational
+economies, capital, and labor; the preeminence of Western culture
+and economy; the Americanization of the developed and developing
+world through the penetration of U.S. culture into others as well as
+the marketing of third-world cultures to the West as fashion, film
+settings, and cuisine.
+Globalization, hailed with the same vigor as was manifest destiny,
+internationalism, etc., has reached a level of majesty in our
+imagination. For all its claims of fostering freedom, globalism’s
+dispensations are royal, for it can bestow much. In matters of reach
+
+(across frontiers); in terms of mass (of populations affected and
+engaged); and in terms of riches (limitless fields to mine for
+resources and services to offer). Yet as much as globalism is adored
+as near messianic, it is also reviled as an evil courting a dangerous
+dystopia. Its disregard of borders, national infrastructures, local
+bureaucracies, internet censors, tariffs, laws, and languages; its
+disregard of margins and the marginal people who live there; its
+formidable, engulfing properties accelerating erasure, a flattening
+out of difference, of specificity for marketing purposes. An
+abhorrence of diversity. We imagine indistinguishability, the
+elimination of minority languages, minority cultures in its wake. We
+speculate with horror on what could be the irrevocable, enfeebling
+alteration of major languages, major cultures in its sweep. Even if
+those dreaded consequences are not made completely manifest, they
+nevertheless cancel out globalism’s assurances of better life by
+issuing dire warnings of premature cultural death.
+Other dangers globalism poses are the distortion of the public and
+the destruction of the private. We glean what is public primarily, but
+not exclusively, from media. We are asked to abandon much of what
+was once private to the data-collecting requirements of
+governmental, political, market, and now security needs. Part of the
+anxiety about the porous divide between public and private domains
+certainly stems from reckless applications of the terms. There is the
+privatization of prisons, which is the private corporate control of a
+public facility. There is the privatization of public schools. There is
+also private life—claims to which can be given up freely on talk
+shows, or negotiated in the courts by celebrities, “public” figures, and
+privacy rights cases. There is private space (atriums, gardens, etc.)
+open to the public. And public space (parks, playgrounds, and
+beaches in certain neighborhoods) limited to private use. There is the
+looking-glass phenomenon of the “play” of the public in our private,
+interior lives. Interiors of our houses look like store displays (along
+with shelf after shelf of “collections”) and store displays are arranged
+as house interiors; young people’s behavior is said to be an echo of
+what the screen offers; the screen is said to echo, represent, youthful
+
+interests and behavior—not create them. Since the space in which
+both civic and private life is lived has become so indistinguishable
+from inner and outer, from inside/outside, these two realms have
+been compressed into a ubiquitous blur, a rattling of our concept of
+home.
+It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our
+uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly
+fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance?
+Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race?
+And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply
+lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What
+convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with
+foreignness?
+I have chosen to comment on a novel written in the fifties by a
+Ghanaian author as a means of addressing this dilemma—the
+inside/outside blur that can enshrine frontiers, and borders real,
+metaphorical, and psychological, as we wrestle with definitions of
+nationalism, citizenship, race, ideology, and the so-called clash of
+cultures in our search to belong.
+African and African American writers are not alone in coming to
+terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular
+history of confronting them. Of not being at home in one’s
+homeland; of being exiled in the place one belongs.
+Before I discuss this novel, I want to describe what preceded my
+reading of African literature and compelled my excursion into what
+troubles contemporary definitions of the foreign.
+Velvet-lined offering plates were passed down the pews on Sunday.
+The last one was the smallest and the one most likely to be empty. Its
+position and size signaled the dutiful but limited expectations that
+characterized most everything in the thirties. The coins, never bills,
+sprinkled there were mostly from children encouraged to give up
+their pennies and nickels for the charitable work so necessary for the
+redemption of Africa. Although the sound of the name, “Africa,” was
+beautiful it was riven by the complicated emotions with which it was
+associated. Unlike starving China, Africa was both ours and theirs;
+
+intimately connected to us and profoundly foreign. A huge needy
+homeland to which we were said to belong but that none of us had
+seen or cared to see, inhabited by people with whom we maintained a
+delicate relationship of mutual ignorance and disdain, and with
+whom we shared a mythology of passive, traumatized otherness
+cultivated by textbooks, film, cartoons, and the hostile name-calling
+children learn to love.
+Later, when I began to read fiction set in Africa, I found that, with
+no exceptions that I knew of, each narrative elaborated on and
+enhanced the very mythology that accompanied those velvet plates
+floating between the pews. For Joyce Cary, Elspeth Huxley, H. Rider
+Haggard, Africa was precisely what the missionary collection
+implied: a dark continent in desperate need of light. The light of
+Christianity, of civilization, of development. The light of charity
+switched on by simple goodheartedness. It was an idea of Africa
+fraught with the assumptions of a complex intimacy coupled with an
+acknowledgment of unmediated estrangement. This conundrum of
+foreign ownership alienating the local population, of the
+dispossession of native speakers from their home, the exile of
+indigenous peoples within their home contributed a surreal glow to
+these narratives, enticing the writers to project a metaphysically void
+Africa ripe for invention. With one or two exceptions, literary Africa
+was an inexhaustible playground for tourists and foreigners. In the
+work of Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, Ernest
+Hemingway, whether imbued with or struggling against conventional
+Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the
+continent to be as empty as that collection plate—a vessel waiting for
+whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there.
+As grist for Western mills, accommodatingly mute, conveniently
+blank, Africa could be made to support a wide variety of literary
+and/or ideological requirements. It could stand back as scenery for
+any exploit or leap forward and obsess itself with the woes of any
+foreigner; it could contort itself into frightening malignant shapes
+upon which Westerners could contemplate evil; or it could kneel and
+accept elementary lessons from its betters. For those who made that
+
+literal or imaginative voyage, contact with Africa offered thrilling
+opportunities to experience life in its primitive, formative, inchoate
+state, the consequence of which experience was self-enlightenment—
+a wisdom that confirmed the benefits of European proprietorship
+free of the responsibility of gathering overly much actual intelligence
+about the African culture that stimulated the enlightenment. So
+bighearted was this literary Africa, only a little geography, lots of
+climate, a few customs and anecdotes sufficed as the canvas upon
+which a portrait of a wiser or sadder or fully reconciled self could be
+painted. In Western novels published up to and throughout the
+fifties, Africa was itself Camus’s l’étranger, offering the occasion for
+knowledge but keeping its own unknowableness intact. Like
+Marlow’s “white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over, mapped
+since his boyhood with “rivers and lakes and names, [it] had ceased
+to be a blank space of delightful mystery….It had become a place of
+darkness.” What little could be known was enigmatic, repugnant, or
+hopelessly contradictory. Imaginary Africa was a cornucopia of
+imponderables that like the monstrous Grendel in Beowulf resisted
+explanation. Thus, a plethora of incompatible metaphors can be
+gleaned from the literature. As the original locus of the human race,
+Africa is ancient, yet, being under colonial control, it is also infantile.
+A kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding all
+midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa is
+simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational
+and wise.
+In that racially charged literary context, coming upon Camara
+Laye’s Le Regard du Roi, known in English as The Radiance of the
+King, was shocking. Suddenly the clichéd journey into storybook
+African darkness either to bring light or find it is reimagined. The
+novel not only summons a sophisticated, wholly African imagistic
+vocabulary from which to launch a discursive negotiation with the
+West, it exploits the images of homelessness that the conqueror
+imposes on the native population: the disorder of Joyce Cary’s
+Mister Johnson; the obsession with smells in Elspeth Huxley’s The
+Flame Trees of Thika; the European fixation on the meaning of
+
+nakedness as in H. Rider Haggard, or Joseph Conrad, or virtually all
+travel writing.
+Camara Laye’s narrative is, briefly, this: Clarence, a European, has
+come to Africa for reasons he cannot articulate. There, he has
+gambled, lost, and heavily in debt to his white compatriots, is hiding
+among the indigenous population in a dirty inn. Already evicted from
+the colonists’ hotel, about to be evicted by the African innkeeper,
+Clarence decides the solution to his pennilessness is to be taken into
+the service of the king. He is prevented by a solid crowd of villagers
+from approaching the king, and his mission is greeted with scorn. He
+meets a pair of mischief-loving teenagers and a cunning beggar who
+agree to help him. Under their guidance he travels south, where the
+king is expected to appear next. By way of his journey, not wholly
+unlike a pilgrim’s progress, the author is able to trace and parody the
+parallel sensibilities of Europe and Africa.
+The literary tropes of Africa are exact replicas of perceptions of
+foreignness: (1) threatening, (2) depraved, (3) incomprehensible.
+And it is fascinating to observe Camara Laye’s adroit handling of
+those perceptions.
+1. Threatening. Clarence, his protagonist, is stupefied with fear. In
+spite of noting that the “forests [are] devoted to the wine industry”;
+that the landscape is “cultivated”; that the people living there give
+him a “cordial welcome,” he sees only inaccessibility, “common
+hostility.” The order and clarity of the landscape are at odds with the
+menacing jungle in his head.
+2. Depraved. It is Clarence who descends into depravity, enacting
+the full horror of what Westerners imagine as “going native”: the
+“unclean and cloying weakness” that imperils masculinity. Clarence’s
+blatant enjoyment of and feminine submission to continuous
+cohabitation reflect his own appetites and his own willful ignorance.
+As mulatto children crowd the village, Clarence, the only white in the
+region, continues to wonder where they came from. He refuses to
+believe the obvious—that he has been sold as stud for the harem.
+3. Incomprehensible. Camara Laye’s Africa is not dark; it is
+suffused with light: the watery green light of the forest; the ruby-red
+
+tints of the houses and soil; the sky’s “unbearable…azure brilliance”;
+even the scales of the fish women “glimmered like robes of dying
+moonlight.” Understanding the motives, the sensibilities of the
+Africans—both wicked and benign—require only a suspension of
+belief in an unbreachable difference between humans.
+Unpacking the hobbled idioms of the foreigner usurping one’s
+home, of delegitimizing the native, of reversing claims of belonging,
+the novel allows us to experience a white man emigrating to Africa,
+alone, without a job, without authority, without resources or even a
+family name. But he has one asset that always works, can only work,
+in third-world countries. He is white, he says, and therefore suited in
+some ineffable way to be advisor to the king whom he has never seen,
+in a country he does not know, among people he neither understands
+nor wishes to. What begins as a quest for a position of authority, for
+escape from the contempt of his own countrymen becomes a searing
+process of reeducation. What counts as intelligence among these
+Africans is not prejudice, but nuance and the ability and willingness
+to see, to surmise. The European’s refusal to meditate cogently on
+any event except the ones that concern his comfort or survival dooms
+him. When insight finally seeps through, he feels annihilated by it.
+This fictional investigation allows us to see the deracing of a
+Westerner experiencing Africa without European support,
+protection, or command. Allows us to rediscover or imagine anew
+what it feels like to be marginal, ignored, superfluous; to have one’s
+name never uttered; to be stripped of history or representation; to be
+sold or exploited labor for the benefit of a presiding family, a shrewd
+entrepreneur, a local regime.
+It is a disturbing encounter that may help us deal with the
+destabilizing pressures of the transglobal tread of peoples. Pressure
+that can make us cling or discredit other cultures, other languages;
+make us rank evil according to the fashion of the day; make us
+legislate, expel, conform, purge, and pledge allegiance to ghosts and
+fantasy. Most of all this pressure can make us deny the foreigner in
+ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of
+humanity.
+
+After many trials, enlightenment slowly surfaces in Camara Laye’s
+Westerner: Clarence gets his wish to meet the king. But by then he
+and his purpose have altered. Against the advice of the local people,
+Clarence crawls naked to the throne. When he finally sees the king,
+who is a mere boy laden with gold, the “terrifying void that is within
+[him],” the void that he has been protecting from disclosure, opens
+to receive the royal gaze. It is this openness, this crumbling of
+cultural armor maintained out of fear, this act of unprecedented
+courage that is the beginning of Clarence’s salvation, his bliss and his
+freedom. Wrapped in the boy king’s embrace, feeling the beat of his
+young heart, Clarence hears him murmur these exquisite words of
+authentic belonging, words welcoming him to the human race: “Did
+you not know that I was waiting for you?”
+
+Racism and Fascism
+
+L
+
+ET US BE REMINDED that before there is a final solution,
+there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move
+toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another,
+then another. Something, perhaps, like this:
+1. Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
+2. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting
+the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse.
+Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that
+enemy.
+3. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are
+willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is
+profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
+4. Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that
+challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and
+deification.
+5. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with
+this constructed enemy.
+6. Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and
+can sanitize the dispossession process.
+7. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums;
+recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial
+superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
+8. Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize
+the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its
+males and absolutely its children.
+
+9. Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized
+entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few
+minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudosuccess; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little
+style, a little consequence.
+10. Maintain, at all costs, silence.
+In 1995 racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but
+neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything
+new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own
+health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost
+the will to fight.
+The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are
+not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another
+wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied
+history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination
+agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white
+supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left,
+far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by
+these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is
+that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any
+developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks
+ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.
+It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to
+purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is
+recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to
+private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profitmaking ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between
+governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into
+taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the
+public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of
+our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our
+generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so
+that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their
+health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in
+
+effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is
+willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a
+jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs,
+fruit, gold).
+When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured,
+our ideas “marketplaced,” our rights sold, our intelligence
+sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the
+theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is
+complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a
+consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves
+except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
+
+Home
+
+L
+
+AST YEAR a colleague of mine asked me where I had gone to
+school when a child. I told her, Lorain, Ohio. Then she questioned
+me: Were your schools desegregated then? I said, What? They were
+never segregated in the thirties and forties—so why would they be
+desegregated. Besides, we had one high school and four junior high
+schools. Then I recalled that she herself was around forty years old
+when that term “desegregated” was alive everywhere. Obviously I
+was in a time warp and obviously the early diverse population of the
+town I grew up in was not the way of the country. Before I left Lorain
+for Washington, D.C., then Texas, then Ithaca, then New York City, I
+thought every place was more or less like it, except in size. Nothing
+could be further from the truth. In any case her questions made me
+think anew about this area of Ohio and my recollections of home.
+This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived
+here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is memory and
+companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally
+important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal
+home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say
+“home”?
+It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first
+century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a
+shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural
+integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our
+perception of the ways in which governance and culture compel the
+exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex
+questions of dispossession, recovery, and the reinforcement of siege
+mentalities. How do individuals resist or become complicit in the
+
+process of alienizing others’ demonization—a process that can infect
+the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s
+xenophobia? By welcoming immigrants, or importing slaves into
+their midst for economic reasons and relegating their children to a
+modern version of the “undead.” Or by reducing an entire native
+population, some with a history hundreds, even thousands of years
+long, into despised foreigners in their own country. Or by the
+privileged indifference of a government watching an almost biblical
+flood destroy a city because its citizens were surplus black or poor
+people without transportation, water, food, help and left to their own
+devices to swim, slog, or die in fetid water, attics, hospitals, jails,
+boulevards, and holding pens. Such are the consequences of
+persistent demonization; such is the harvest of shame.
+Clearly, the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and
+across borders is not new. Forced or eager exodus into strange
+territory (psychological or geographical) is indelible in the history of
+every quadrant of the known world, from the trek of Africans into
+China and Australia; to military interventions by Romans, Ottomans,
+Europeans; to merchant forays fulfilling the desires of a plethora of
+regimes, monarchies, and republics. From Venice to Virginia, from
+Liverpool to Hong Kong. All these and more have transferred the
+riches and art they found into other realms. And all these left that
+foreign soil stained with their blood and/or transplanted into the
+veins of the conquered. While in their wake the languages of
+conquered and conqueror swell with condemnation of the other.
+The reconfiguration of political and economic alliances and the
+almost instant reparsing of nation-states encourage and repel the
+relocation of large numbers of peoples. Excluding the height of the
+slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has
+ever been. It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals,
+refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies all crossing oceans and
+continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with
+multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of
+military intervention, political persecution, exile, violence, poverty,
+death, and shame. There is little doubt that the voluntary or
+
+involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda
+of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political
+maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring
+the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and
+diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the
+deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in
+legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of
+people. This slide of people has freighted the concept of citizenship
+and altered our perceptions of space—public and private. The strain
+has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of
+national identity. In press descriptions, place of origin has become
+more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as “a
+German citizen of such and such origin” or “a British citizen of such
+and such origin.” All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of
+multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The
+relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and
+expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to
+clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that
+leads us to the perception of an implicit and heightened threat within
+“difference.” We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider;
+personal discomfort with one’s own sense of belonging (Am I the
+foreigner in my own home?); of unwanted intimacy instead of safe
+distance. It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times
+is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they
+once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some
+quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or
+imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution. Walls,
+ammunition—they do work. For a while. But they are major failures
+over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave
+sites haunt the entire history of civilization.
+Consider another consequence of the blatant, violent uses to which
+foreignness is put—ethnic cleansing. We would be not merely remiss
+but irrelevant if we did not address the doom currently faced by
+millions of people reduced to animal, insect, or polluted status by
+nations with unmitigated, unrepentant power to decide who is a
+
+stranger and whether they live or die at, or far from, home. I
+mentioned earlier that the expulsion and slaughter of “enemies” are
+as old as history. But there is something new and soul destroying
+about this last and current century. At no other period have we
+witnessed such a myriad of aggression against people designated as
+“not us.” Now, as you have seen over the last two years, the central
+political question was, Who or what is an American?
+From what I gather from those who have studied the history of
+genocide—its definition and application—there seems to be a
+pattern. Nation-states, governments seeking legitimacy and identity,
+seem able and determined to shape themselves by the destruction of
+a collective “other.” When European nations were in thrall to royal
+consolidation, they were able to act out this slaughter in other
+countries—African, South American, Asian. Australia and the United
+States, self-declared republics, required the annihilation of all
+indigenous peoples if not the usurpation of their land to create their
+new, democratic state. The fall of communism created a bouquet of
+new or reinvented nations who measured their statehood by
+“cleansing” communities. Whether the targets were of different
+religions, races, cultures—whatever—reasons were found first to
+demonize then to expel or murder them. For an assumed safety,
+hegemony, or pure land grabs, foreigners were constructed as the
+sum total of the putative nation’s ills. If these scholars are right, we
+will see more and more illogical waves of war—designed for the grasp
+of control by the leaders of such states. Laws cannot stop them, nor
+can any god. Interventions merely provoke.
+
+Wartalk
+
+I
+
+N TRYING to come to terms with the benefits and challenges of
+globalism, it has become necessary to recognize that the term suffers
+from its own history. It is not imperialism, internationalism, or even
+universalism. Certainly a major distinction between globalism and its
+predecessors is how much it is marked by speed: the rapid
+reconfiguration of political and economic alliances, and the almost
+instant reparsing of nation-states. Both of these remappings
+encourage and repel the relocation of large numbers of peoples.
+Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of
+peoples is greater now than it has ever been. It involves the
+distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants,
+and armies crossing oceans, continents, through custom offices and
+via hidden routes, speaking multiple languages of commerce, or
+political intervention, of persecution, exile, violence, and defiling
+poverty. There is little doubt that the voluntary or involuntary
+displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state,
+the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political maneuvers
+to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the
+dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic
+classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh
+military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts
+to exert authority over the constant flow of people.
+This slide of people across the globe has altered and freighted the
+concept of citizenship. The strain has been marked by a plethora of
+hyphenated designations of national identity in the United States, by
+press descriptions where origin is of more significance than
+citizenship. People are described as “German citizen of ‘fill-in-the-
+
+blank’ origin” or “British citizen of ‘blank’ origin,” all this while a new
+cosmopolitanism, a kind of cultural citizenship, is simultaneously
+being hailed. The relocation of peoples that globalism ignites has
+disrupted and sullied the idea of home and has expanded the focus of
+identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of
+foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the
+perception of an implicit threat within “difference.” The interests of
+global markets, however, can absorb all these questions, thrive in
+fact on a multiplicity of differences, the finer, the more exceptional
+the better, since each “difference” is a more specific, identifiable
+consumer cluster. This market can reconstitute itself endlessly to any
+broadened definition of citizenship, to ever-narrowing, proliferating
+identities, as well as to the disruptions of planetary war. But unease
+creeps into the conversation about this beneficial morphing ability
+when the flip side of citizenship is addressed. The chameleon-like
+characteristic of global economy provokes the defense of the local
+and raises newer questions of foreignness—a foreignness that
+suggests intimacy rather than distance (Is he my neighbor?) and a
+deep personal discomfort with our own sense of belonging (Is he us?
+Am I the foreigner?). These questions complicate the concept of
+belonging, of home, and are telling in the alarm apparent in many
+quarters regarding official, prohibited, unpoliced, protected, and
+subversive languages.
+There is some gasping at what North Africans may have done or
+are capable of doing to French; of what Turkish people have made of
+German; of the refusal of some Catalan speakers to read or even
+speak Spanish. The insistence on Celtic in schools; the academic
+study of Ojibwe; the poetic evolution of Newyorican. Even some
+feeble (and I think misguided) efforts to organize something called
+Ebonics.
+The more globalism trumps language differences—by ignoring,
+soliciting, or engulfing them—the more passionate these protections
+and usurpations become. For one’s language—the one we dream in—
+is home.
+
+I believe it is in the humanities, and specifically the branch of
+literature, where such antagonisms become rich fields of creativity
+and thus ameliorate the climate between cultures and itinerant
+people. Writers are key to this process for any number of reasons,
+principal among which is the writer’s gift for teasing language,
+eliciting from its vernacular, its porous lexicon, and the hieroglyphics
+of the electronic screen greater meaning, more intimacy, and, not
+incidentally, more beauty. This work is not new for writers but the
+challenges are, as all languages, major and dominant, minor and
+protected, are reeling from the impositions of globalism.
+Yet globalism’s impact on language is not always deleterious. It
+can also create odd and accidental circumstances in which profound
+creativity erupts out of necessity. Let me suggest one case in point,
+where severe changes in public discourse have already taken place as
+communication floods virtually every terrain. The language of war
+has historically been noble, summoning the elevating quality of
+warrior discourse: the eloquence of grief for the dead; courage and
+the honor of vengeance. That heroic language, rendered by Homer,
+Shakespeare, in sagas and by statesmen, is rivaled for beauty and
+force only by religious language, with which it frequently merges. In
+this parade of inspiring wartalk, from BC to the twentieth century,
+there have been disruptions. One moment of distrust and disdain for
+such language occurred immediately after World War I when writers
+like Ernest Hemingway and Wilfred Owen, among others,
+questioned the paucity of terms such as “honor,” “glory,” “bravery,”
+“courage” to describe the reality of war, the obscenity of those terms
+being associated with the carnage of 1914–1918.
+As Hemingway wrote: “I was always embarrassed by the words
+sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had
+heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot….
+[A]nd I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious
+had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if
+nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many
+words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of
+places had dignity.”
+
+But the events of 1938 quieted those interventions and once more
+the language of war rose to the occasion of World War II. The
+glamour-coated images we carry of Roosevelt, Churchill, and other
+statesmen are due in part to their rousing speeches and are
+testimony to the strength of militant oratory. Yet something
+interesting happened after World War II. In the late fifties and
+sixties, wars continued, of course—hot and cold, north and south, big
+and small—more and more cataclysmic, more and more
+heartbreaking because so unnecessary; so wildly punitive on
+innocent civilians one could only drop to one’s knees in sorrow. Yet
+the language that accompanied these recent wars became oddly
+diminished. The dwindling persuasiveness of combat discourse may
+have been due to the low requirements of commercial media: their
+abhorrence of complex sentences and less-known metaphors, the
+dominance of the visual over linguistic communication. Or perhaps it
+was due to the fact that all of these wars were the seething mute
+children of preceding ones. Whatever the cause, warrior discourse
+has become childlike. Puny. Vaguely prepubescent. Underneath the
+speeches, bulletins, punditry, essays lies the clear whine of the
+playground: “He hit me. I did not. Did too.” “That’s mine. Is not. Is
+too.” “I hate you. I hate you.”
+This decline, it seems to me, this echo of passionate juvenilia
+affects the highest level of contemporary warrior discourse and
+sounds like that of the comic book or action film. “I strike for
+freedom!” “We must save the world!” “Houston, we have a problem.”
+An inane, enfeebled screed has emerged to address brain-cracking
+political and economic problems. What is fascinating is that such
+language sank to its most plodding at precisely the time another
+language was evolving: the language of nonviolence, of peaceful
+resistance, of negotiation. The language of Gandhi, of Martin Luther
+King Jr., of Nelson Mandela, of Václav Havel. Compelling language,
+robust, rousing, subtle, elevating, intelligent, complex. As war’s
+consequences became more and more dire, wartalk has become less
+and less credible, more infantile in its panic. A change that became
+obvious just at the moment when the language of resolution, of
+
+diplomacy was developing its own idiom—a moral idiom worthy of
+human intelligence, shedding the cloud of weakness, of
+appeasement, that historically has hovered above it.
+I do not believe the shift is coincidental. I believe it represents a
+fundamental change in the concept of war—a not-so-secret
+conviction among various and sundry populations, both oppressed
+and privileged, that war is, finally, out of date; that it is truly the
+most inefficient method of achieving one’s (long-term) aims. No
+matter the paid parades, the forced applause, the instigated riots, the
+organized protests (pro or con), self- or state censoring, the
+propaganda; no matter the huge opportunities for profit and gain; no
+matter the history of the injustice—at bottom it is impossible to
+escape the suspicion that the more sophisticated the weapons of war,
+the more antiquated the idea of war. The more transparent the power
+grab, the holier the justification, the more arrogant the claims, the
+more barbaric, the more discredited the language of war has become.
+Leaders who find war the sole and inevitable solution to
+disagreement, displacement, aggression, injustice, abasing poverty
+seem not only helplessly retrograde, but intellectually deficient,
+precisely like the empurpled comic-book language in which they
+express themselves.
+I understand that my comments may appear disjunctive on this
+date in 2002 when legislatures, revolutionaries, and the inflamed do
+not “declare” war, but simply wage it. But I am convinced that the
+language that has the most force, requires the most acumen, talent,
+grace, genius, and, yes, beauty, can never be, will never again be
+found in paeans to the glory of war, or erotic rallying cries to battle.
+The power of this alternate language does not arise from the
+tiresome, wasteful art of war, but rather from the demanding,
+brilliant art of peace.
+
+The War on Error
+
+I
+
+ACCEPTED this invitation to speak at Amnesty International
+with instant glee. I didn’t have a second thought about the
+opportunity to address an extraordinary community of active
+humanitarians whose work I so profoundly respect. The honor
+pleased and challenged me and I believed it would be relatively
+effortless to find something of consequence to say to you. Months
+later, however, I began to have grave reservations about my early and
+unthinking enthusiasm. Benumbed with news of ignited chaos, death
+tolls, manufactured starvation, wars of choice against disarmed
+countries, I became virtually speechless; startled into mute disbelief;
+disabled by what I understood to be the equanimity of congresses
+and inert parliaments going about their business of business. The
+irrelevance cum sensationalism of mainstream media, its strange
+quietude on vital issues, its publicity posing as journalism did their
+job and mangled my own hapless, helpless unspeakable thoughts.
+Although an obvious theme for this occasion occurred to me: a
+rehearsal of salutations and compliments to AI, I realized at last that
+the time for compliments has passed—although I am amazed by the
+breadth and depth of AI’s resiliency. I came to believe that this is no
+time for self-congratulation—although there is room for it; room to
+recall and marvel at the record AI has garnered, its impact on the
+lives of the forgotten, and its success in tarnishing the glitz of the
+mighty.
+Unaligned, nobly interventionist, unbrooked by nations and
+political parties, private interests or public exhaustion, Amnesty
+International declares states, walls, borders irrelevant to its
+humanitarian goals, detrimental to its tasks, by summoning
+
+responsibility and refusing to accept a myopic government’s own
+narrative of its behavior.
+I can share the seethe of millions, but it won’t do. Rage has limited
+uses and serious flaws. It cuts off reason and displaces constructive
+action with mindless theater. Besides, absorbing the lies, untruths,
+both transparent and nuanced, of governments, their hypocrisy so
+polished it does not even care if it is revealed, can lead to a wearied
+and raveled mind.
+We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private
+profit drives public policy. Where the body of civil liberties, won cell
+by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead withers in the
+searing heat of “all war, all the time,” and, where facing eternal war,
+respect for, even interest in, humanitarian solutions can dwindle.
+Even as the conviction that “the security of every other nation in the
+world be subordinate to the comfort of the United States” is, finally,
+being challenged, civil rights and humanitarian solutions are being
+steadily crushed by the imperatives of that conviction.
+Let me describe a little of what is happening in my country.
+Death-penalty advocates are more and more entrenched even as
+thousands of planned executions in Texas are forced into being
+reviewed because of blatant errors committed in DNA laboratories.
+A so-called Clear Skies Act, designed to replace the Clean Air Act,
+has exactly the opposite effect. Corporations, mining companies,
+factories can now ignore or delay every environmental safeguard put
+in place by the previous administration and turn “death by
+breathing” into gold.
+Constitutional rights are facing impoverishment and annihilation
+as the biggest, most undertold story in the United States is the
+looming disenfranchisement of the electorate. Under the “Help
+America Vote” Act of 2002, the new electronic voting machines are
+said to be unable to do what ATMs and grocery clerks do: provide a
+paper receipt documenting the voter’s choice; this while any astute
+hacker can gain access, the largest manufacturer of these new
+machines is able to calculate (perhaps control) the results in its home
+office.
+
+Withdrawal from treaties, preemption, dismantlement, mass
+arrests minus charges or legal representation; judges instructed by
+the Justice Department to impose maximum terms; whistle-blowers
+fired; Draconian censorship—these actions are taking place in an
+atmosphere of aggression, panic, greed, and malice reminiscent of
+the oppressive political architecture we believed we had demolished.
+But all this you already know. The history of your activities is the
+documentation of and intervention into such travesties.
+It seems to me that among the several wars being waged around
+the planet, one is paramount and surpasses in urgency all the others.
+That is the War Against Error.
+“War Against Error” is a phrase originated to describe the
+fifteenth- and sixteenth-century efforts on the part of institutional
+religions to correct those whose beliefs were different. In a time
+when and place where state religion is the norm, apostasy is literally
+treason. Our modern world has “inherited a fully fledged apparatus
+of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justified killing in the
+name of God.” Saint Thomas Aquinas himself wrote that apostates
+were “to be severed from the world by death.” The point, in that
+medieval war, was not the inherent evil of the dis- or unbelieving, but
+his or her refusal to acknowledge his or her mistake. The lesson to be
+learned was: acceptance or death. A hard education in a difficult
+school, the doors to which are still ajar. Freely, reverently it is pried
+open by unbelievers as well as the faithful, by politicians as well as
+Enron, Halliburton, and WorldCom.
+Now that this medieval school has reopened, the old curricula are
+revised. Rushing to teach the lessons, administrations spin out of
+control, skipping between the cheating scholar’s expedience and the
+dullard’s violence; between courses on empire’s fundamentalism and
+seminars on theocratic domination. And nations and pseudo-states
+assert powers that would make Caligula smile as they educate their
+pupils in purging, cleansing, slaughtering. Graduation parties are
+held where exploitation, assuming the seductive costume of
+globalism, dances with any willing partner. In its pursuit
+corporations plop themselves down in every corner of the globe
+
+selling “democracy” as though it were a brand of toothpaste, the
+patent to which they alone control.
+I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately
+heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and
+metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights
+organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and
+encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and
+intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the
+dispossessed.
+If we have progressed psychologically, scientifically, intellectually,
+emotionally no further than 1492, when Spain cleansed itself of Jews,
+to 2004, when Sudan blocks food and remains content to watch the
+slow starvation of its people; no further than 1572, when France saw
+ten thousand slaughtered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to 2001,
+when thousands were blown into filament in New York City; no
+further than 1692, when Salem burned its own daughters and wives
+and mothers, to 2004, when whole cities are choked with sex tourists
+feeding off the bodies of young girls and boys. Then, in spite of our
+shiny new communication toys, our gorgeous photos of Saturn, our
+sophisticated organ transplants, we are studying the same old
+curricula that waste the lives they cannot destroy. We turn to
+sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, “causes”
+that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through which
+barbarians stroll; anxieties about language falling into the mouths of
+others, about authority shifting into the hands of strangers. The
+desire, the mantra, the motto of this ancient educational system is,
+Civilization in neutral, then grinding to a halt. And anyone who
+thinks otherwise is naïve because there is real danger in the world. Of
+course there is. That is precisely why a correction is in order—new
+curricula, containing some powerful visionary thinking about how
+the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can
+operate in a context increasingly dangerous to their health.
+No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no
+heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more
+
+humanity. Otherwise we stand meekly behind Eris, hold Nemesis’s
+cloak, and genuflect at the feet of Thanatos.
+Enjoining the work of AI is more critical today than ever before
+because the world is more desperate; because governing bodies more
+hampered, more indifferent, more distracted, more inept, more
+depleted of creative strategies and resources; because media are
+increasingly cheerful pawns on the exchange market, courtiers for
+corporations who have no national interests or loyalties and are
+committed to no public service.
+What strings these social perversions together, for me, is profound
+error—not only the errors in questionable but unquestioned data, in
+distorted “official” releases, in censorship and the manipulation of
+the press, but also and especially faults deeply embedded in the
+imagination. A prime example is the inability or unwillingness to
+imagine future’s future. The inability or unwillingness to
+contemplate a future that is neither afterlife nor the tenure of
+grandchildren. Time itself seems not to have a future that equals the
+length or breadth or sweep or even the fascination of its past. Infinity
+is now, apparently, the domain of the past. And the future becomes
+discoverable space, outer space, which is in fact the discovery of past
+time. Billions of years of it. Random outbreaks of armageddonism
+and persistent apocalyptic yearnings suggest that the future is
+already over.
+Oddly enough it is in the West—where advance, progress, and
+change have been signatory features—where confidence in an
+enduring future is at its slightest. Since 1945, “world without end”
+has been subject to serious debate. Even our definitions of the
+present
+have
+prefixes
+pointing
+backward:
+postmodern,
+poststructuralist, postcolonial, post–Cold War. Our contemporary
+prophets look back behind themselves after what has gone on before.
+There are good reasons for this rush into the past for all our
+answers to contemporary problems. First there is the happiness that
+its exploration, its revision, its deconstruction afford. One reason has
+to do with the secularization of culture, another to do with the
+theocratization of culture. In the former there will be no Messiah and
+
+afterlife is understood to be medically absurd. In the latter, the only
+existence that matters is the one following death. In both, sustaining
+human existence on this planet for another half a billion years is
+beyond our powers of imagination. We are cautioned against the
+luxury of such meditation, partly because it is the unknown, mostly
+because it may defer and displace contemporary issues—like
+missionaries who were accused of diverting their convert’s attention
+from poverty during life to rewards following death.
+I don’t want to give the impression that all current discourse is
+unrelievedly oriented to the past and indifferent to the future. The
+social and natural sciences are full of promises and warnings that
+will affect us over very long stretches of time. Scientific applications
+are poised to erase hunger, annihilate pain, extend individual life
+spans by producing illness-resistant people and disease-resistant
+plants. Communication technology is making sure that virtually
+everyone on earth can “interact” with one another and be
+entertained, maybe even educated, while doing so. We are warned
+about global change in terrain and weather that radically alters
+human environment; we are warned of the consequences of
+maldistributed resources on human survival and warned of the
+impact of overdistributed humans on natural resources. We invest in
+the promises and sometimes act intelligently on the warnings. But
+the promises trouble us with ethical dilemmas and a horror of
+playing God blindly, while the warnings have left us less and less
+sure of how and which and why. The prophecies that win our
+attention are those with bank accounts large enough or photo ops
+sensational enough to force debate and outline corrective action, so
+we can decide which war or political debacle or environmental crisis
+is intolerable enough; which disease, which natural disaster, which
+institution, which plant, which animal, bird, or fish needs our
+attention most. These are obviously serious concerns. What is
+noteworthy among the promises and warnings is that, other than
+products and a little bit more personal time owing to improved
+health, and more resources in the form of leisure and money to
+consume these products and services, the future has nothing to
+
+recommend itself. We are being seduced into accepting truncated,
+short-term, CEO versions of the world’s wholly human race.
+The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day
+dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and
+expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the
+human project as a manliness contest where women and children are
+the most dispensable collateral.
+If scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for
+an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a
+few of our families against the catastrophic others; if religious
+language is discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular
+language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely
+an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom
+but “upgrade,” where might we look for humanity’s own future? Isn’t
+it reasonable to assume that, projecting earthly human life into the
+far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to
+love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen
+suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from
+timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination,
+mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to
+imagine work in a world worthy of life?
+For a future that perhaps only the young will be able fully, purely
+to imagine, this new War Against Error has no guarantee of victory.
+Sentient life is original and very hard. A student of mine (probably
+twenty years old) recently gave me a piece of art. Printed, cut, and
+pasted within it were these lines:
+No one told me it was like this.
+It’s only matter shot through with pure imagination.
+[So] rise up little souls—join the doomed army toward
+the meaning of change.
+Fight…fight…wage the unwinnable.
+He seems ready. And so are we. Yes?
+
+Thank you.
+
+A Race in Mind
+The Press in Deed
+
+T
+
+HE VASTNESS and omnipresence of the press can easily
+overshadow our mutual dependence: that which exists between the
+professionals in the press and its outsiders. There are not, to my
+knowledge, any other entities quite like a “free” press, and while I
+have surrounded the word “free” in quotation marks here, the
+presence or absence of that sign of ambivalence is also something
+that has been the subject of years of deliberation in the press itself. It
+could not even be a topic in a system in which such deliberations
+were closed.
+But I have not come here to waste your time by flattering you, to
+paint in even brighter colors your portrait as both the pomp and the
+circumstance of democratic freedom, but to comment on what I
+know you understand to be serious problems in the way the press
+functions as mediator between the experience of life in the world and
+its narrative and visual representation.
+The harshest critics call the press-media a “closed circuit world of
+spectacle that has no goal other than its spectacular self.” Relying
+like a politician only on vested interests to critique and defend its
+activities, the press encourages its own journalists to explain and
+deplore press culpability; these critics are appalled by the sight of
+journalists behaving like independent experts within the spectacle
+they have created and have an interest in sustaining, pretending to
+speak for a public so remote from their lives only polls can allude to
+its nature, defending itself from criticism with incoherent but
+
+effective lines of defense such as “We are better than we used to be,”
+“This story just won’t go away,” “We do both sides of an issue.”
+I can’t accept so sweeping a condemnation, yet the claustrophobia
+one feels in the sheltering arms of the press often seems permanent
+and conspiratorial. Notwithstanding the promise of more choices
+and more channels—targeted and consumer-designed magazines,
+barely limited numbers of cable channels—the fear of being
+suffocated by eternal and eternally replenished ephemera is real; so
+is the fear of the complete inability of a public to engage in public
+discourse. This latter fear—the closing off of public debate—is
+palpable because there is no way to answer the systemic distortions
+of the press in a timely, effective fashion and because the definition
+of “public” is already so radically changed. Homelessness and crime
+have been recharacterized and redeployed so that “public space” is
+increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the lawabiding and the employed, or rather to those who appear to be.
+Homelessness has been recharacterized as streetlessness. Not the
+poor deprived of homes, but the homed being deprived of their
+streets. And crime is construed as principally black. Neither one of
+these constructions is new. But as each affects public space, each
+affects public discourse.
+It is clear to anyone interested that when the term “public” has
+been appropriated as space regulated for one portion of society only,
+when the “poor” have no political party to represent their interests,
+then the concept of public service—which is your business, the
+business of a “free” press—gets altered as well. And has been. The
+public interest of minorities, farmers, labor, women, and so on have,
+in frequently routine political language, become “special interests.”
+“We, the people” have become “They, the people.”
+I am introducing the terms “public,” “crime,” “homelessness,”
+“unemployment” (meaning poverty) early in these remarks because
+they segue into my observations on race. Although there are other
+matters of equal concern to editors, the handling of race seems to me
+symptomatic of the general wariness, ire, and intellectual fatigue the
+press continues to cause among so wide a spectrum of the country.
+
+I’d like to begin by posing two questions. First, why is race identity
+important in print and broadcast news at all? And second, if it is
+necessary, why is it so often obscured and distorted at the very
+moment it is enunciated?
+Originally race identification was urged, even insisted upon, by
+African Americans to make sure our presence and our point of view
+were represented. That urging assumed that we had a point of view
+unlike the mainstream one and, certainly, had experience of life in
+the States different from the legendary one presented in the press.
+That regardless of its difference or its concurrence, the African
+American point of view should not be buried underneath
+mainstream views and taken for granted. That seemed all well and
+good in theory, but in practice something quite other took place, an
+“othering” that took two forms: (1) the encoding of race in order to
+perpetuate some very old stereotypes even while the stereotypes
+were being disassembled in the popular mind, and (2) the insistence
+upon underscoring racial difference at precisely those moments
+when it really made no difference. For example, last June a New
+York Times reporter struggled heroically with the twin demand to be
+accurate and to theatricalize race in an article on immigration in
+Florida. The piece was headlined “As Hispanic Presence Grows, So
+Does Black Anger.” What could “black” possibly mean in that
+formulation other than the commonly accepted code word for poor
+or working poor or economically marginal? We could assume that
+the Hispanics are also poor, without jobs, homes, and so on, but that
+would be a mistake because the Hispanics in question are Cubans
+fleeing Castro for a city heavily populated with middle-class Cubans
+and so, unlike Haitians, have a welcome mat of social services spread
+out before them. But whoever they are, they are certainly competing
+for jobs and housing with any and all. The question becomes, Why
+are blacks singled out? Why are they not called Miamians or “local.”
+(“As Hispanic Presence Grows, So Does Local Anger”?) Except when
+they are soldiers, blacks are never American citizens. Why? Because
+in media-talk we are not local, or general citizens—we are those
+whose financial security is fragile; those whose reactions are volatile
+
+(“anger”—not concern). If the reader knows the code, this headline’s
+use of the term “local” (economically fragile American citizens) could
+very well be Miami’s white working poor. But that is dismissed at
+once by the knowing, because the already encoded black-versusanything-else connotation is what we have been led and taught to
+believe is the real, the vital, the incendiary story. There is no
+printable word for “poor” that does not connote “race.” Thus, under
+the guise of representing the interests of black citizenry, the
+conventional stereotypical oppositions are maintained and useful
+information is sacrificed in the process.
+It turns out to be a very difficult piece of work for this reporter.
+Consider the necessary contortions language is put through to
+describe the impact of recent immigration of Miami’s Spanishspeaking population on its English-speaking one—which is or ought
+to be the real point of the story. These are the labels that appear:
+“Cubans of both colors”: “non-Hispanic whites”; “non-Hispanic
+blacks”; “native-born English speaking blacks”; “Hispanic whites”;
+“Haitian and other Caribbean blacks.” What are “non-Hispanic
+blacks”? Africans? No. Who are “Haitian and other Caribbean
+blacks”? Cubans? No. Think how clear the article would have been if
+nationality and language had been the mark of difference. It would
+tell us that American citizens were nervous about the wave of
+immigrants who spoke little English and were after their jobs. But
+clarity took second place to skin color and race took pride of place
+over language. The result: the obfuscation of everything but racial
+identity. “Patterns of Immigration Followed by White Flight.”
+Middle-class blacks out of the loop here.
+Even when within the race, where differences of national origin
+are information, as in the Crown Heights melee, where the
+population is predominately Caribbeans who have no history of
+American black and American Jewish relations, that distinction was
+subsumed into generalized blackness.
+So confusing are the consequences of race stress that it led a CNN
+reporter to wonder with deep concern if someone who spoke Haitian
+
+could be found to help a Haitian pilot who had skyjacked a plane to
+Miami. French never occurred to him.
+Now I would like to follow those questions with one other. Since it
+seems important in some way to represent blacks, we need to ask
+ourselves what we are represented as, and why. How can the press be
+challenged to represent any point of view—white, black, neither,
+both—that does not evoke a pseudo-world of commodified happiness
+and unified agreement on what or who is the enemy? The “enemy”
+seems to be either a diffuse, discursive vaguely black criminal or the
+angry helpless poor (who are also black).
+In discussing the way blacks are represented—notwithstanding the
+successful examples of the elimination of race bias and some
+extraordinarily fine reporting of race matters (Hunter-Gault, on the
+Zulu Nation)—and the highly volatile effects that racially biased
+representation has on the public, it may be of some interest to locate
+its sources, because although historical, race bias is not absolute,
+inevitable, or immutable. It has a beginning, a life, a history in
+scholarship, and it can have an end. It is often enough pointed out
+that the popularization of racism, its nationalization, as it were, was
+accomplished not by the press (complicit though nineteenth-century
+newspapers may have been) but in theater, in entertainment.
+Minstrelsy. These traveling shows reached all classes and regions, all
+cities, towns, and farms. Its obvious function was entertainment, but
+its less obvious one was masking and unmasking social problems.
+The point to remember is that minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do
+with the way black people really were; it was a purely white
+construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy
+were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form
+worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in
+blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal,
+unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it
+was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was
+sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all
+of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden
+from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a
+
+black who was understood to be already outside the law and
+therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted
+freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue.
+For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more than it
+revealed. It hid the truth about black humanity, views, intelligence,
+and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by
+transferring that conflict to a black population. Without going into
+the growth, transformation, and demise of minstrelsy (a demise that
+was simply an enhancement in and a transfer to another site—film,
+for example), suffice it to say that its strategy is still useful and its
+residue everywhere. The spectacle of a black and signifying
+difference, taught to an illiterate white public (via minstrelsy)
+became entrenched in a literate public via the press. It was a way of
+transforming organic ignorance into manufactured error, so the
+political representation of the interests of the white poor is and
+remains unnecessary. Those interests need not be given serious
+consideration—just rhetorical alliance. My point is that African
+Americans are still being employed in that way: to disappear the
+white poor and unify all classes and regions, erasing the real lines of
+conflict.
+The justifications for enslavement became accepted wisdom and a
+whole race of people became criminalized. This criminalization is as
+old as the republic and stems from, among other things, the outsidethe-law status imposed on slaves—and the dishonor that
+accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the
+assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color. People who
+say this is not so, that there is a disproportionate percentage of crime
+committed by blacks, miss something: the unconscionable, immoral,
+and dangerous treatment of blacks by the justice system and the
+press. It is unconscionable because it is racist disinformation.
+Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase “white on
+white crime,” you cannot use the phrase “black on black crime.” It
+has no meaning and no use other than exoticizing blacks, separating
+the violence blacks do to one another into some nineteenth-century
+anthropological racism where the “dark continent” was understood
+
+to be violent, blank, unpeopled (the people were likened to nature),
+an easily available site of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where whites
+went for self-realization, self-discovery, and loot. Is that white on
+white crime in Northern Ireland? Bosnia? World War II? (Dan
+Rather in Somalia.) In this mythic construct it should not be a shock,
+as it was to me, that the only allegedly raped victim whose face was
+ever shown in the newspaper and on television to my knowledge was
+an underage black girl. I have never seen another one. Why? Because
+there is no honor or privacy due black women when they claim or
+protest sexual misbehavior, as recent Senate deliberations regarding
+Clarence Thomas will support.
+This treatment is immoral because it proceeds from corruption—
+the corruption of accuracy, information, and even truth in the
+interests of sensation and sales. And it is dangerous because it has
+nothing to do with the real world of whites or blacks. It has
+everything to do with mystifying the world—rendering it
+incomprehensible and assuring the insolubility of its real problems,
+such as reducing the attraction to and the means of executing crime;
+such as employing and educating “they, the people”; such as
+domestic disarmament; such as the health of our communities.
+When the mystification of everyday life is complete, there is
+nothing new or contemporary in the news. It will be, in spite of its
+up-to-the-minuteness, as archaic, moribund, and unreal as a quill
+pen, lagging behind the future in order to enshrine deprivation—
+making the absence of commodities (poverty) the only despair worth
+discussing. If poverty and criminality can be off-loaded to blacks,
+then the illusion of satisfaction and the thrill of the hunt might keep
+the public still and obedient. But for how long? How long can news
+function as a palliative for despair and counter space for products? It
+is so frustrating and sad to open a newspaper and find the news
+literally at the edges, like the embroidered hem of the real subject—
+advertisement.
+The media spectacle must not continue to direct its attention to the
+manufacture of consent, rather than debate with more than two
+sides, to the reinforcement of untruths, and a review of what else
+
+there is to buy. Otherwise it will be not out of commerce, but already
+out of business. When the spectacle becomes “public” in the
+narrowest sense of the word—meaning available to purchase—the
+world can buy you, but it can’t afford you.
+Now I have been talking to you as though you were a single
+organism that took shape and grew by some immutable natural law
+outside human decision-making. When in fact, you are people,
+human individuals with a stake in being so. You have publicspiritedness and dreams of a secure democracy, as well as prejudices
+that seep through and shape the tools at your disposal. Boards of
+directors, owners, and editorial managers are made up of people
+trying to get profitable, stay profitable, and increase profitability.
+That must be tough. But if your industry becomes socially irrelevant,
+it will be impossible.
+I suspect that a nonracist, nonsexist, educating press is as
+profitable as one that is not. I suspect that clarification of difficult
+issues is just as entertaining as obscuring and reducing them is. But
+it will take more than an effort of the will to make such a press
+profitable; it will take imagination, invention, and a strong sense of
+responsibility and accountability. Without you, by ourselves we can
+just pull raw data off of our computers; shape it ourselves, talk to one
+another, question one another, argue, get it wrong, get it right.
+Reinvent public space, in other words, and the public dialogue that
+can take place within it. The generations of students that I teach (and
+my own sons, for that matter) do it all the time.
+But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin
+boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—
+there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot
+do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy;
+help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one,
+between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life.
+Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twentyfirst century.
+
+Moral Inhabitants
+
+I
+
+N The Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times
+to 1957 right after “rice” and just before “tar” and “turpentine” are
+the humans. The rice is measured by pounds; the pitch, tar, and
+turpentine by the barrel weight. There was no way to measure by
+pound, tonnage, or barrel weight the humans. Head count served the
+purpose of measuring. This reference book is full of fascinating
+information, not the least of which is Series Z 281–303, which
+documents, in chronological order and by point of destination, the
+import and export of humans in the United States from 1619 to 1773.
+Every effort seems to have been made to assure the accuracy of the
+tables. Below the neat columns of figures, footnotes seem to
+apologize for the occasional lapses from complete information. “We
+are sorry,” the Bureau of the Census seems to be saying, “that better
+records were not kept or available to us. The country was just getting
+itself together, you understand, and things were less than efficient.”
+One senses reasonableness and gentlemanly assertion everywhere
+in these pages. But it is reasonableness without the least hope of
+success, for the language itself cracks under the weight of its own
+implications. Footnote 3, for example, under “Slaves” clarifies the
+ambiguity of its reference with the following words: “Source also
+shows 72 Indian slaves imported; 231 slaves died and 103 drawn
+back for exportation.” “Died”…“drawn back”—strange, violent words
+that could never be used to describe rice, or tar, or turpentine.
+Footnote 5, by far the coolest in its civilized accuracy, is as follows:
+“Number of Negroes shipped, not those actually arrived.” There was
+a difference, apparently, between the number shipped and the
+number that arrived. The mind gallops to the first unanswered
+
+question: How many? How many were shipped? How many did not
+arrive? Then the mind slides toward the next question—the vital one
+that withers all others: Who? Who was absent at the final head
+count? Was there a seventeen-year-old girl there with a tree-shaped
+scar on her knee? And what was her name?
+I do not know why it is so difficult to imagine and therefore to
+realize a genuinely humane society—whether the solutions lie in
+natural sciences, the social sciences, theology or philosophy or even
+belles lettres. But the fact is that the Historical Statistics of the
+United States is pretty much like what the contours of academic
+scholarship are now and have always been: the equating of human
+beings with commodity, lumping them together in alphabetical order
+—when even the language used to describe these acts bends and
+breaks under that heavy and alien responsibility. The gentle souls,
+those dedicated civil servants of the Census Bureau do not create
+facts, they simply record them. But their work, I believe, reflects the
+flaw that obstructs the imaginative and humane scholarship and the
+realization of a humane society. Such scholarship would be one in
+which the thrust is toward the creation of members of a society who
+can make humane decisions. And who do. It is a scholarship that
+refuses to continue to produce generation after generation of
+students who are trained to make distinctions between the deserving
+poor and the undeserving poor but not between rice and human
+beings. To make distinctions between an expendable life and an
+indispensable one, but not between slaves and turpentine. Trained to
+determine who shall flourish and who shall wither, but not between
+the weight of a barrel and the sanctity of a human head.
+That is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread
+of rice bursting from a gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of
+turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old
+girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee—and a name. History is
+percentiles, the thoughts of great men, and the description of eras.
+Does the girl know that the reason that she died in the sea or in a
+twenty-foot slop pit on a ship named Jesus is because that was her
+era? Or that some great men thought up her destiny for her as part of
+
+a percentage of national growth, or expansion, or manifest destiny,
+or colonialization of a new world? It is awkward to differ from a great
+man, but Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history.
+History is the slave of kings.
+The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is
+sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism.
+Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The
+source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the “other,” to
+imagine her or him. It is an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the
+imagination, and reveals an ignorance of gothic proportions as well
+as a truly laughable lack of curiosity. Of course historians cannot deal
+with rice grain by grain; they have to deal with it in bulk. But
+dependence on that discipline should not be so heavy that it leads us
+to do likewise in human relationships. One of the major signs of
+intelligence, after all, is the ability to make distinctions, small
+distinctions. We judge an intellect by the ease with which it can tell
+the difference between one molecule and another, one cell and
+another, between a 1957 Bordeaux and a 1968, between mauve and
+orchid, between the words “wrest” and “pry,” between clabber and
+buttermilk, between Chanel No. 5 and Chanel No. 19. It would seem,
+then, that to continue to see any race of people as one single
+personality is an ignorance so vast, a perception so blunted, an
+imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference
+among them can penetrate. Except the large differences: who shall
+flourish and who shall wither, who deserves state assistance and who
+does not. Which may explain why we are left with pretty much the
+same mental equipment in 1977 that we had in 1776. An intelligence
+so crippled that it could, as a white professor did in 1905, ask W. E.
+B. Du Bois “whether colored people shed tears” is also crippled
+enough to study the “genetic” influences on intelligence of a race so
+mixed that any experimental data similarly performed on mice
+would fall apart at the outset.
+If education is about anything other than being able to earn more
+money (and it may not be about any other thing), that other thing is
+intelligent problem-solving and humans relating to one another in
+
+mutually constructive ways. But educational institutions and some of
+our most distinguished scholars have considered the cooperation
+among human beings and mutually constructive goals to be fourthand fifth-rate concerns where they were concerns at all. The history
+of the country is all the proof one needs that it is so.
+Now no one can fault the conqueror for writing history the way he
+sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering
+their patterns according to his point of view. But we can fault him for
+not owning up to what his point of view is. It might prove a useful
+exercise, in this regard, to look at some of the things our conquerors
+(our forefathers), our men of vision and power in America have
+actually said.
+Andrew Jackson, December 3, 1833:
+“Indians have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral
+habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any
+favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of
+another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes
+of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must
+necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long
+disappear.”
+Theodore Roosevelt (to Owen Wister) 1901:
+“I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass the
+[blacks] are altogether inferior to the whites.
+“I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western
+view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good
+Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten
+are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the
+tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the
+average Indian.”
+General Ulysses S. Grant:
+(to) General Webster
+
+La Grange, Tenn.
+November 10, 1862
+“Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to
+be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point.
+They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an
+intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
+Holly Springs, Miss.
+December 8, 1862
+General Order
+“On account of the scarcity of provisions all cotton speculators,
+Jews, and other vagrants having no honest means of support,
+except trading upon the misery of the country…”
+Sam Houston, U.S. Senate, 1848:
+“The Anglo-Saxon [must] pervade the whole southern extremity of
+this vast continent….(The) Mexicans are no better than the Indians
+and I see no reason why we should not take their land.”
+Freeman’s Journal, March 4, 1848:
+“Our object is to show, once more, that Protestantism is effete,
+powerless, dying out though disturbed only by its proper
+gangrenes, and conscious that its last moment is come when it is
+fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth.”
+Richard Pike, Boston, 1854:
+“Catholicism is, and it ever has been, a bigoted, a persecuting, and
+a superstitious religion. There is no crime in the calendar of
+infamy of which it has not been guilty. There is no sin against
+humanity which it has not committed. There is no blasphemy
+against God which it has not sanctioned. It is a power which has
+never scrupled to break its faith solemnly plighted, wherever its
+interests seem to require it; which has no conscience; which
+spurns the control of public opinion; and which obtrudes its head
+
+among the nations of Christendom, dripping with the cruelties of
+millions of murders, and haggard with the debaucheries of a
+thousand years, always ambitious, always sanguinary, and always
+false.”
+New York Tribune, 1854
+“The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all
+conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations;
+lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a
+prostitute of the barest order.”
+General William Sherman:
+“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even
+to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing else
+will reach the root of this case. The more we can kill this year, the
+less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these
+Indians, the more convinced I am that they will all have to be
+killed or be maintained as a species of pauper.”
+Benjamin Franklin, 1751:
+“Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America,
+where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and
+Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?”
+William Byrd, Diary, Virginia, 1710–1712:
+2/8/09: Jenny and Eugene were whipped.
+4/17/09: Anaka was whipped.
+5/13/09: Mrs. Byrd was whipped.
+3/23/09: Moll was whipped.
+6/10/09: Eugene [a child] was whipped for running away and had
+the bit put on him.
+9/3/09: I beat Jenny.
+9/16/09: Jenny was whipped.
+
+9/19/09: I beat Anama.
+11/30/09: Eugene and Jenny were whipped.
+12/16/09: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing yesterday.
+(In April I was occupied in my official capacity in assisting the
+investigation of slaves “arraigned for high treason”—two were
+hanged.)
+7/1/10: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit on her
+mouth.
+7/8/10: The Negro woman was found, and tied, but ran away again
+in the night.
+7/15/10: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned
+with a hot iron.
+8/22/10: I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny and beat her too
+much, for which I was sorry.
+8/31/10: Eugene and Jenny were beaten.
+10/8/10: I whipped three slave women.
+11/6/10: The Negro woman ran away again.
+Its editors describe him as “Virginia’s most polished and
+ornamental gentleman…a kindly master [who] inveighed in some of
+his letters against brutes who mistreat their slaves.”
+Such is language, the vision, the memory bequeathed to us in this
+society. They said other things, and they did other things—some of
+which were good. But they also said, and more importantly felt, that.
+Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A
+reasonable man adjusts to his environment. And unreasonable man
+does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man.
+I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of “I”
+and choose the open spaces of “we.”
+With such a past we cannot be optimistic about the possibility of a
+humane society, in which humane decision-making is the prime goal
+of educators, ever becoming imagined and therefore realized. We
+cannot be optimistic, but we can be clear. We can identify the enemy.
+We can begin by asking ourselves what is right rather than what is
+
+expedient. Know the difference between fever and the disease.
+Between racism and greed. We can be clear and we can be careful.
+Careful to avoid the imprisonment of the mind, the spirit, and the
+will of ourselves and those among whom we live. We can be careful
+of tolerating second-rate goals and secondhand ideas.
+We are humans. Humans who must have discovered by now what
+every three-year-old can see: “how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this
+whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions.” We are
+humans, not rice, and therefore “we have not yet encountered any
+god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
+There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying
+mantises.” We are the moral inhabitants of the globe. To deny this,
+regardless of our feeble attempts to live up to it, is to lie in prison. Of
+course there is cruelty. Cruelty is a mystery. But if we see the world
+as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the
+mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the
+skull….Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded…there
+seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a
+thing as harmony…all wholly free and available to us.
+
+The Price of Wealth, the Cost of Care
+
+I
+
+WANT to talk about a subject that influences and, in many
+cases, distresses us all. A subject that is a companion to each
+graduate just as it is on all campuses as well as communities all over
+the country, indeed the world. A subject that is an appropriate theme
+of a speech delivered to students during these provocative times of
+uncertainty.
+That subject is money.
+Whether we have the obligation to protect and stabilize what we
+already have and, perhaps, to increase it, or whether we have the task
+of reducing our debt in order to simply live a productive, fairly
+comfortable life, or whether our goal is to earn as much as possible—
+whatever our situation, money is the not-so-secret mistress of all our
+lives. And like all mistresses, you certainly know, if she has not
+already seduced you, she is nevertheless on your mind. None of us
+can read a newspaper, watch a television show, or follow political
+debates without being inundated with the subject of wealth.
+Immigration discourse, health care implementation, Social Security,
+employment opportunities—virtually all personal problems and
+government policies twist and coil around money. Nations, regimes,
+media, legislation all are soaked in and overwhelmed by the wealth
+narrative concerning its availability, its movement, its
+disappearance. How its absence and mismanagement topples
+nations at worst, distorts and manipulates them, or how wealth
+keeps nations safe. Austerity or stimulus? War or peace? An idle life
+or a productive one?
+The subjects studied here—art, science, history, economics,
+medicine, law—are by and large constricted by or liberated by money
+
+in spite of the fact that the purpose of each of these areas of
+scholarship is not money at all but knowledge and its benefit to the
+good life. Artists want to reveal and display truth while pretending to
+rise above money; scientists want to discover how the world works
+but are limited or supported by financial resources, as are historians
+and economists, who need funds for their projects and research;
+medicine seeks to save life or at least make it livable but cannot do so
+without somebody else’s wealth.
+All that is obvious, but in case we forget, I believe it is helpful to
+rehearse something of the price of wealth, its history. The origins of
+its accumulation are bloody and profoundly cruel, involving as it
+always and invariably does war. Virtually no empire became one
+without mind-warping violence. The Spanish empire saved itself
+from collapse and irrelevance by the theft of gold from South
+America necessitating massacres and enslavement. The Roman
+empire became one and remained one for centuries by the conquest
+of land, its treasure, and the labor of slaves. More war and aggression
+were used to rape Africa of its resources, which, in turn, sustained
+and empowered a plethora of nations. Rubber, for example, was
+extracted by a country literally privately owned by Leopold, king of
+Belgium (thus its once-agreed-upon name—the Belgian Congo).
+Sugar, tea, spices, water, oil, opium, territory, food, ore all sustained
+the power of nations like the United Kingdom, like the Dutch, like
+ours. Here in America the slaughter of millions of bison in order to
+replace them with cattle required the massacre of Native Americans.
+Here a new agricultural nation moved quickly into the industrial
+period via the importation of slaves. Chinese empires destroyed
+legions of monks to acquire the gold and silver they used to decorate
+temples and representations of gods. All of this robbery was
+accomplished by war, which, by the way, is itself a wealth-making
+industry regardless of victory or defeat.
+The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation,
+death, and despair.
+But alongside that price, something interesting and definitive
+began to happen in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
+
+centuries. “Noblesse oblige,” which soothed the nobility by
+suggesting that generosity was not only honorable but in their
+interests and allied perhaps with their religious beliefs, morphed into
+a conviction that wealth could not be its own excuse for being. There
+was some moral impediment to the Midas effect, to the Gatsby gene,
+some shame attached to the idea of being more by having more, of
+vanity projects posing as genuine commitments to the elevation of
+public life.
+These alterations were made more felicitous in the United States
+by the tax code and, in some cases, worker strikes and organizations.
+Instead of building transcontinental railroads with Chinese labor
+slaves, instead of producing sugar for rum with the constant
+importation of more slaves (a turnover made necessary by the quick
+deaths of so many of them), instead we figured out how to have
+electricity, roads, public hospitals, universities, et al., without searing
+brutality.
+Citizens began to realize the costs of caring was money well spent.
+Foundations, government support, individual largesse, service
+organizations grew exponentially to improve the lives of citizens. As
+you well know from the creation of this university, gifts to build
+institutions, care for the indigent, house art and books for the public
+are only a few of the projects in which the costs of caring are happily
+assumed. The consequences of these costs are varied, of course—
+some were weak, some were nefarious—but it became unthinkable
+that no elementary services existed. Inviting compassion into the
+bloodstream of an institution’s agenda or a scholar’s purpose is more
+than productive, more than civilizing, more than ethical, more than
+humane; it’s humanizing.
+This powerful commitment to caring, whatever the cost, is now
+threatened by a force almost as cruel as the origins of wealth: that
+force is the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and
+across borders. This current movement is greater now than it has
+ever been and it costs a lot—to defend against it, to accommodate it,
+to contain it, protect it, control and service it. It involves the trek of
+workers, intellectuals, agencies, refugees, traders, immigrants,
+
+diplomats, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through
+custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives
+spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention,
+political persecution, rescue, exile, violence, poverty, death, and
+shame. There is no doubt that the voluntary or involuntary
+displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state,
+the boardrooms, the communities, and the streets. Political
+maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring
+the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and
+diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the
+deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in
+legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of
+peoples. This slide has freighted the concept of citizenship and
+altered our perceptions of space: public and private, walls and
+frontiers. It may be that the defining characteristic of our times is
+that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they
+once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some
+quarters to be areas of threat and have actually become places of
+chaos.
+All of this is going on at the same time that technology has
+narrowed the distances among peoples and countries. Technology
+has made it possible to see others, talk to, support, or agitate others
+anywhere in the world. Yet the fear of dispossession, the loss of
+citizenship remains. We see it in the plethora of hyphenated
+designations of national identity. In press descriptions and
+documents birthplace has become more telling than citizenship and
+persons are identified as “a German of Turkish origin” or a “British
+citizen of African origin” and being identified as Muslim (at least in
+the West) takes precedent over country of origin. At the same time a
+revered cosmopolitanism, a multilayered cultural citizenship, is
+simultaneously hailed as sophisticated, superior. There is clearly a
+heightened threat of “difference.” We see it in the defense of the local
+against the outsider, of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.
+When the unhoused remain suspect aliens, when the frightened
+and destitute huddle in beleaguered, garbage-strewn tent cities on
+
+land not their own, when “identity” becomes the very essence of the
+self, then recurring strategies of political construction are demanded.
+When incompetence and irrationality run roughshod over decency
+and continue to endanger “lesser” lives, we can anticipate a steep rise
+in the cost of caring. A cost to be borne if we value civilization.
+The ethics of affluence insist upon civic obligations and when we
+assume that obligation we reveal not our solitary goodwill but our
+dependence on others. You, all of us, struggle to turn data into
+information into knowledge and, we hope, into wisdom. In that
+process we owe everything to others. We owe others our language,
+our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our
+relationships with family and colleagues, our ability to defy social
+conventions as well as support those conventions. All of this we
+learned from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on
+others—some of us depend on others for life itself. And it is because
+of the latter that I choose to share this generous lecture honorarium
+with Doctors Without Borders—winners of a Nobel Prize for the
+risks, the direct medical aid, and the determination to serve in the
+most dangerous places on earth and among the most shattered
+people.
+Your opportunity here and beyond this campus is huge,
+demanding, and vital. You are singularly able more than previous
+generations; not because you are smarter (although you may be) or
+because you have tools your predecessors lacked, but because you
+have time. Time is on your side, as is a chance to fashion an amazing
+future. Relish it. Use it. Revel in it.
+I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not
+irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price,
+beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it
+should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even
+the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here.
+And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any
+other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its
+various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to
+care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.
+
+The Habit of Art
+
+A
+
+RTTABLE HAS complimented itself by choosing this year’s
+winner. As prestigious as the award itself is, its gleam is located in its
+choices. Your selection of Toby Lewis is another of its compliments
+to itself as well as to her commitment to so many avenues of creative
+art and her special devotion to the visual arts.
+It is in this latter, visual arts, that I am most impressed. Her
+collection at the headquarters of Progressive Insurance: there I saw
+for myself the fruits of her passionate hard work. How, by placing
+diverse, powerful, beautiful, provocative, thoughtful visual art in the
+workplace, where the employees encountered it at every turn, all day
+and responded to it with deep criticism or desperate affection, she
+encouraged them to begin to create for themselves their own art in
+their own work spaces. The intimacy she and Peter Lewis insisted
+upon made me understand what they understood: that art is not
+mere entertainment or decoration, that it has meaning, and that we
+both want and need to fathom that meaning—not fear, dismiss, or
+construct superficial responses told to us by authorities. It was a
+manifestation of what I believe is true and verifiable: the impulse to
+do and revere art is an ancient need—whether on cave walls, one’s
+own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to
+articulate who we are and what we mean.
+Art and access is a much-written-about, much-sermonized-upon
+subject. Artists and supporters alike see an abyss between elitist and
+popular understandings of “high” and “found” art and try to span or
+fathom it. The tools for making art matter to ever larger, ever more
+diverse populations are many: more and more creative uses of
+funding, free performances, individual grants, and so on. The
+
+perception that the chasm remains may be the fruit of an imaginary
+landscape made real by the restrictions of available resources or by
+fiat. It is an unconscionable, almost immoral perception.
+I want to describe to you an event a young gifted writer reported:
+During the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs,
+known as the Tonton Macoutes, roamed about the island killing
+dissenters, and ordinary and innocent people, at their leisure. Not
+content with the slaughter of one person for whatever reason, they
+instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was allowed to
+retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a
+brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to
+bury the dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and
+killed. The bodies lay where they fell until a government garbage
+truck arrived to dispose of the corpses—emphasizing that
+relationship between a disposed-of human and trash. You can
+imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on
+the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a
+neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night
+they repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a
+gang member, the killer only saw some harmless people engaged in
+some harmless theatrics. But the play they were performing was
+Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal
+consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.
+Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is fierce.
+There is one other anecdote I want to share with you. At a
+conference in Strasbourg, I spoke to a woman writer from a North
+African country. She knew my work; I did not know hers. We chatted
+amiably, when suddenly she leaned in closer and whispered, “You
+have to help us. You have to.” I was taken aback. “Help who? Help
+what?” I asked her. “They are shooting us down in the street,” she
+said. “Women who write. They are murdering us.” Why? Women
+practicing modern art was a threat to the regime.
+What these anecdotes represent is the healing and the danger art
+provides whether classical or contemporary.
+
+Furthermore, these awful stories are meant to impress upon you
+that what Toby Lewis has spent a lifetime doing, what you are
+celebrating today, is no small thing.
+I want to say a few words about the necessity of organizations such
+as this one. We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where
+private profit drives public policy, where the body of civil liberties,
+won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead, withers in
+the searing heat of all war all the time, and where respect for and
+even passionate interest in great art can dwindle, can shrink to a
+price list. It is possible to wonder if we have progressed
+psychologically, intellectually, emotionally no further than 1492,
+when Spain cleaned itself of Jews, to 2004, when Sudan blocks food
+and medicine and remains content to watch the slow starvation of its
+people. No further than 1572, when France saw ten thousand
+slaughtered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to 2001, when thousands
+were blown into filament in New York City. No further than 1692,
+when Salem burned its own daughters and wives and mothers, to
+2007, when whole cities are chock-full of sex tourists feeding off the
+bodies of young boys and girls. It is possible to wonder whether, in
+spite of technical and scientific progress, we have turned to sorcery:
+summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, “causes” that
+deflects and soothes anxieties about gates through which barbarians
+stroll; about language falling into the mouths of others; about
+authority shifting into the hands of strangers. Civilization in
+paralyzing violence, then grinding to a halt. Don’t misunderstand
+me. There is real danger in the world. And that is precisely why a
+correction is in order—new curricula containing some meaningful
+visionary thinking about the life of the moral mind and a free and
+flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to
+its health. But if scientific language is about longer individual life in
+exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic
+protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if
+secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of
+knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade,” where might we look for
+humanity’s own future? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that projecting
+
+earthly human life into the future may not be the disaster movie we
+are constantly invited to enjoy, but a reconfiguration of what we are
+here for? To lessen suffering, to know the truth and tell it, to raise the
+bar of humane expectation. Perhaps we should stand one remove
+from timeliness and join the artist who encourages reflection, stokes
+the imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting her/his own
+life on the line (in Haiti or North Africa) to do the work of a world
+worthy of life.
+This in short has been the mission of ArtTable.
+One of my students gave me a painting—a collage, sort of, printed,
+cut, and pasted. Within it were these lines:
+No one told me it was like this.
+It’s only matter shot through with pure imagination.
+[So] rise up little souls—join the doomed army toward
+the meaning of change.
+Fight…fight…wage the unwinnable.
+
+The Individual Artist
+
+I
+
+T OUGHT to be relatively easy to describe the plight of the
+individual artist, the importance of such a resource to the country,
+and to describe the nature of the commitment made to that
+component in the goals of the National Endowment for the Arts. But
+it really isn’t all that easy because the phrase itself—“individual
+artist”—provokes all sorts of romantic images, pictures and notions
+of a beleaguered, solitary individual struggling against Philistines,
+willy-nilly, who somehow breaks through the walls of ignorance and
+prejudice to acclaim acceptance perhaps, by a critical few in his or
+her lifetime—and/or posthumous fame, if not eminence, at a time
+when it does the artist no good. And that picture is one we love to
+fondle, but it is a kind of Procrustean bed, an intellectual trap,
+because it’s such an attractive portrait that it encourages what ought
+to be eliminated. We seem somehow to cut off the limbs of the
+individual artist to fit our short bed, and we ascribe to him or her
+penury and sacrifice and the notion of posthumous award. We love
+so much the idea of the struggling artist that we enfranchise not the
+artist, but the struggle. In fact, we insist on it. Our notions of quality
+sometimes require it. It is true, and I think we all agree, that quality
+equals/means/suggests that which is rare and difficult to achieve.
+But sometimes, the word “rare” translates into “appreciated only by
+the very few,” and sometimes the phrase “difficult to achieve” means
+“had to suffer in order to do it.”
+I think there is some ambivalence in our perception about
+individual quality and individual artists. On the one hand, we can
+identify it because it is rare and limited in its appeal to a few. We
+know how difficult it is to execute excellence in art (although I am
+
+convinced that for the true genius the things that look difficult to us
+are easy and effortless for him). But while we recognize quality by its
+rareness, on the other hand we consistently moan about the absence
+of quality from the hearts and minds of the masses. We talk about a
+crisis in literacy; we are upset and disquieted about pop art; we talk
+about airport sculpture; we are unnerved, and legitimately so, about
+the sensational play as opposed to the sensitive one. Each of us has a
+group of phrases that identify for us the mediocre in an art form.
+I sometimes wonder if we really and truly mean it. Do we really
+mean that the world is the poorer because too few appreciate the
+finer things? Suppose we did live in a world in which people chatted
+about Descartes and Kant and Lichtenstein in McDonald’s. Suppose
+Twelfth Night was on the best-seller list. Would we be happy? Or
+would we decide that since everybody appreciated it, maybe it wasn’t
+any good? Or maybe if the artist himself had not begged for his life—
+begged and struggled through poverty, perhaps on into death—
+perhaps his art wasn’t any good. There seems to have been an
+enormous amount of comfort taken in some quarters (in print and in
+conversation) that when thousands and thousands of people stood in
+line to see the Picasso show, only 4 or 5 percent of the people who
+saw it really knew what they were seeing.
+First novels shouldn’t be successes—they are supposed to be read
+by a few. They are not supposed to be profitable—they must be
+limited. If a first novel “makes it,” then there is some suspicion about
+its quality. A minority artist in this game and in this climate of
+ambivalence is required either to abandon his minorityhood and join
+the prevailing criteria, or he has to defend and defend and defend ad
+nauseam his right to hear and love a different drummer. That’s part
+of the romanticism that clings to the idea of the individual artist—the
+artist as beggar. It keeps him begging, and when he is successful, he
+should feel guilty—even apologetic.
+There is danger inherent in being an artist, always—the danger of
+failure, the danger of being misunderstood. But there are some
+dangers now that are not inherent; some new dangers are being
+imposed. Be patient with me for a moment while I describe one that
+
+is of particular interest to me in the field of literature. There is a most
+exciting feud and public battle going on at Cambridge University at
+the moment—a fight between the traditional critics and the
+postmodernists, or the structuralists. It is a pyrotechnic delight in
+issues of The Times Literary Supplement, and scholarly debates are
+continuing in full force. I will not go into the details of the nature of
+the fight, but in oversimplified terms, there is a core group of
+traditional critics who believe that “literature and life” practical
+criticism is the way in which to teach people how to read the great
+works of literature, and then there is a newer, younger group,
+sometimes called “pluralists” by the British, that attacks and ignores
+traditional British criticism. This newer group is accused of being
+obscure and difficult and limiting in their perception of criticism.
+What’s interesting about the feud to me is that in it the writer has
+no place at all. Structuralists and proponents of semiotics and
+proponents of deconstruction perceive the written work as a
+phenomenon—but not central to the act of criticism or “reading.” It’s
+interesting that this fight goes on in literature studies, as opposed to
+theology and philosophy and other areas in which it belongs, but I
+think there is a reason for that. In the contemporary world of art and
+scholarship, literature is, I think, the only discipline in which the
+scholars do not produce what they criticize. The chemists, the social
+scientists, the historians, the philosophers—all of those people
+produce what they teach, they produce what they question, they
+produce what they change. In literary criticism, the critic now
+produces the criticism that he teaches; he produces the discipline,
+and the subject of the discipline—which is the text—is peripheral to
+the discussion. Perhaps it is true, as someone suggested, that English
+teachers have always envied the mathematicians—all those little
+formulas they put on the wall—and that they now would like to have
+a group of formulae they could also put on the blackboard. But where
+the criticism is itself the art form—that doesn’t mean it isn’t an art
+form—but when it denigrates the sources, there is a genuine threat to
+the preeminence of the creative artists. And that is significant, and it
+is filtering down to the artists themselves, some of whom are totally
+
+isolated from the critics in a way they never were before. There was a
+time in fourteenth-century Germany, in eleventh-century Italy, when
+the great translators were the poets, when the great critics were the
+writers; they did both. Now it is separate; the creative artist goes one
+route and the critic goes another.
+Because the individual artist does not manage or control, at least
+in literature, what is taught—not even what is produced and what is
+decided to be taught—the endowment plays an incomparable role in
+his life. With an agency like the endowment there is a place and a
+means for creative artists to come together and make decisions about
+what ought to be nurtured, and what ought to be of value, and what
+ought to be supported. He may not have that right in universities; he
+certainly has not that right in publishing institutions; he probably
+does not have it in the media that exist and surround him. But he
+does have it in a confederacy and a brotherhood and a sisterhood—in
+the structure as provided by the panels and the programs of the
+National Endowment for the Arts. The endowment assuages the guilt
+of a gifted person who has the “misfortune” to do something
+extraordinarily well the first time. The endowment says out loud and
+in cash, “Your needs can be met. Your early work may be worth
+attention, even though it is early, even though you have not hit your
+stride, even though this may not be the ‘breakthrough’ work.” The
+endowment says, “We will give you some help now. Your problems of
+audience, your problems of distribution, your problems of rent and
+time and space and data are not fixed stars; they are not immutable.
+They can be solved—and if not totally solved, they can be
+ameliorated.”
+The endowment, through its panels and its programs, says, out
+loud and in cash, that your ethnic aesthetics are not to be questioned
+by people who don’t know anything about them. It says your cultural
+differences are not to be denigrated, especially by people outside the
+culture. It says your working-class background will not keep you
+from the full expression of your art. For, among other reasons, this is
+a country founded by laborers and farmers and small businessmen
+
+and convicts and clerks and pirates—so we know about your
+working-class background because we are your background.
+Half of all of the funding categories have a place for the express aid
+and guidance for support of this beleaguered, guilt-ridden, frustrated
+species—the individual artist whom we have perhaps inadvertently
+relegated to the necessity of pain and struggle.
+The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s
+what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work, and she is
+frequently in conflict with the status quo. But the artist can’t help
+that; if she is to have any integrity at all in her art, she can’t help it.
+The endowment does not penalize her for the controversy her art
+may engender because it is, or ought to be, axiomatic with the
+endowment that the last things we wish to encourage are safe art and
+safe artists. So the endowment takes risks—takes them itself and
+thereby underlies and legitimatizes the necessity for risk, the
+necessity for innovation and criticism. And it is in that climate that
+individual artists develop.
+I remember a time, years ago, when I sat on a literature panel; the
+big problem was trying to get the writers to apply. They didn’t want
+it; they thought they were going to be censored; they thought the
+government was meddling in their books; they thought they couldn’t
+say certain things. There was a taint attached to the acceptance of the
+fellowship grants and the direct grants, and only with persistence
+were the panels able to overcome it. With persistence, the panels of
+the endowment have become Brother Theo to little Vinnie van Gogh.
+They have become a friend to little Jimmy Joyce. They are a platform
+for that outrageous, shocking, controversial George Bernard Shaw.
+But, in addition, we are food, we are rent and we are medical care for
+that arrogant and feisty Zora Neale Hurston—who didn’t have any of
+that at the end. We have a chance to be the audience in the
+performance hall for Scott Joplin—who didn’t have it at the end.
+What we do is no small thing; it is the first of the four or, I guess, five
+legs upon which the endowment stands. And any kick to that leg, any
+break in it, is insupportable because the endowment cannot stand
+without it.
+
+Now for a very personal note. I do not want to go into my old age
+without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age
+without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not
+having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot
+face is living without my art. Like many of you here, with your own
+particular backgrounds, I come from a group of people who have
+always refused to live that way. In the fields we would not live
+without it. In chains we would not live without it—and we lived
+historically in the country without everything, but not without our
+music, not without our art. And we produced giants. We, the
+National Council on the Arts, the endowment, are the bastions; we
+will make it possible to keep individuals and artists alive and
+flourishing in this country.
+
+Arts Advocacy
+
+W
+
+HENEVER ANYONE begins to think about arts advocacy,
+a complex obstacle presents itself at once: artists have a very bad
+habit of being resilient, and it is that resilience that deceives us into
+believing that the best of it sort of gets done anyhow—and the “great”
+of that “best” sort of lasts anyhow. The public and even academic
+perception is that nothing, neither social nor personal devastation,
+stops the march and production of powerful and beautiful artworks.
+Chaucer wrote in the middle of the plague.
+James Joyce and Edvard Munch carried on with a blind eye and a
+weak one respectively.
+French writers excelled in and defined an age writing in the forties
+under Nazi occupation.
+The greatest of composers was able to continue while deaf.
+Artists have fought madness, ill-health, penury, and humiliating
+exile—political, cultural, religious—in order to do their work.
+Accustomed to their grief, their single-minded capacity for it and
+their astonishing perseverance in spite of it, we sometimes forget
+that what they do is in spite of distress—not because of it.
+Last year I spoke to an extremely gifted and well-established artist
+who told me he vetoed a living for a fellow artist because he thought
+having so much money would undermine the recipient—hurt his
+work—and that the applicant was “too good to receive such a
+financial windfall.” To me the shock of that revelation is that, in
+some quarters, it is not shocking at all. For even when there is
+attention turned to an artist’s plight in the form of a modest living,
+there is at the same time a problem of perception: What constitutes a
+
+hospitable environment and what principles inform whether we
+provide or deny it?
+It brings us, as always, to the question of how haphazard should
+art support be. Should it take its text from the hazard of being an
+artist and become itself erratic, risky? Should it examine artists’ lives,
+note the pain in so much of them, and imitate that pain by
+enfranchising it—even producing it, as in the anecdote above, for the
+good of the artist? Should grief and penury be built into art
+patronage, so the marketable wares created under those limiting
+circumstances are folded into the equation of the work’s value in the
+marketplace in years and eras to come?*
+When all attention is withdrawn from artists, they have always
+been mad enough to do it anyway, so what’s the fuss? Can’t they
+depend on enlightened philanthropy when available—and look
+elsewhere when it isn’t? Or can’t they depend on the marketplace—
+which is to say design the art itself for the marketplace—and hope
+the target will not move before their work is completed? Or can’t they
+rely on government support and trust to chance or the law of
+averages that their work will prove at least equal to the dollar value
+of the support?
+Such are a few of the questions art advocacy raises. But they are
+critical questions, made more critical by economic decay if not
+catastrophe and political cunning. And they are questions begging
+for answers, strategies in state art organizations, educational
+institutions, museums, foundations, community and neighborhood
+groups, and so on. What all of us know, you and I, is that the
+situation is more than dire—it is dangerous.
+All of the art of all of the past can be destroyed in a few minutes by
+oafish politics and/or war games. It is also true that a good deal of
+the art of the future can be aborted by carelessness, whimsy, and
+disdain among art providers and consumers. National prerequisites
+can sweep clean or waver; crystallize or flow. There have been times
+when support for new and emerging art was at floodtide, matching
+the support for traditional institutions; other times such support, as
+now, is in drought. The uncertainty can devastate whole generations
+
+of artists and deprive a nation irrevocably. There already are such
+nations. It will take real intelligence and foresight not to become one
+of them. One of the nations that rests on the passion of the artists
+long dead—appropriating that passion, that engagement as their
+own, and meanwhile daring contemporary artists to work their own
+way. Or one of the nations that can be defined by the number of its
+artists who have fled the country. If one judges a civilization, as I
+believe it should be judged, not by the high-mindedness with which
+it regards art but by the seriousness with which art regards the
+civilization, then it is high time we begin to address anew and with
+vigor certain problems that continue to signify alarm.
+The public perception of the artist is frequently so at variance with
+the art world’s perception, they can hardly speak to each other. But
+the effort to do so, to have unpatronizing exchanges between arts
+professionals and the public, between artists and audiences cannot
+be overemphasized. It is also possible and necessary to encourage
+dialogues in which the artist is not a supplicant and the art supporter
+is not an enforcer. It is possible to have a forum in which the citizen,
+the student feels he or she is welcome for more than the ticket
+purchased or the applause. It is important to include, even to work
+the student-citizen into these projects; to insist upon discussion of
+the problems that seem to be gripping the art world in general and
+that are plaguing all of us—providers, grantors, artists, teachers,
+organizers.
+* Or should as much attention be given to why as to how much and how long?
+
+Sarah Lawrence Commencement
+Address
+
+I
+
+AM extremely pleased to have this opportunity to speak to so
+very special a gathering. To pay compliments to a community of
+teacher-scholars, teacher-administrators, parents, board members,
+and students in an extraordinary institution. I commend you. These
+last few years could not have been easy. To the parents and relatives
+of the graduates I extend my congratulations. That your son or
+daughter or relative has been graduated is cause for a splendid
+celebration. Quietly or with fireworks, relish it today, for in just a
+little while you will again feel the anxiety of her or his next step—
+some further penetration into the adult world you are yourselves
+familiar with, and, being familiar with that world, you certainly feel
+some apprehension. I cannot reassure you but I can remind you that
+youth is indelicate—managing generation after generation not only
+to survive and replace us, but to triumph over us.
+But to you, the graduates, I would like to do more than commend
+and congratulate. I would like to provoke. By the reputation of your
+faculty and the alumni of this college, I would guess that your
+education here has not been idle or irrelevant; it has been serious. I
+would like what I say to approach the seriousness of your tenure
+here.
+So what shall I say to the Sarah Lawrence Class of ’88? The last
+time I did this, I believe, was 1984—a year fraught with symbolism
+and the tension Mr. Owell had projected onto it. I honestly don’t
+know what might be of value to any graduating class four years after
+1984.
+
+Obviously I must make some reference to the future—how
+sparkling it can be…provided it exists; if only the possibility of
+actually “killing” time was not a real one, real because, if we want it
+that way, we can arrange things so that there will be no one left to
+imagine or remember that human invention: time. Its absence (the
+absence of time) has been thinkable during the whole of your lives. I
+would talk about the future if only it were a rolled carpet you had
+only to kick to see it unfurl limitlessly before your feet.
+Surely there must be some talk of responsibility. I am addressing,
+after all, bright, industrious, accomplished people who are about to
+shoulder the very considerable weight of educated adulthood. So
+there should be some mention of responsibility: the need for and the
+risk of assuming the burden of one’s own life and, in the course of
+that, assuming the care of the life of another (a child, a friend, a
+mate, a parent, an acquaintance, even, perhaps, a stranger).
+And shouldn’t I also touch upon goodness? Ethical choices? I
+ought to, since goodness is not only better and good for you, but it is
+also more interesting, more complicated, more demanding, less
+predictable, more adventuresome than its opposite. Evil really is
+boring. Sensational, perhaps, but not interesting. A low-level activity
+that needs masses or singularity or screams or screeching headlines
+to even get attention for itself, while goodness needs nothing.
+And how can I leave out happiness? How could I omit the secret
+ingredients, the combination of which will invite, if not guarantee it?
+A little clarity, a bit of daring, some luck, and a great deal of selfregard. Then life is bountiful and one becomes both loved and
+lovable.
+The future, responsibility, goodness—I’d love talking about all
+that, but not the last one: happiness. It makes me uncomfortable.
+Uneasy. I am not interested in your happiness. I am not sure it’s all
+it’s cracked up to be. I know, of course, that its pursuit (if not its
+achievement) is a legal one amended into the Constitution. I know
+that whole industries are designed to help you identify, attain, and
+feel it. One more article of clothing, the ultimate telephone, the bestappointed boat, an instantly timeless camera taking hundreds of
+
+shots of nothing to outlast the ages, the fastest diet, the perfect ice
+cream with all the pleasure of sugar and cream and none of their
+dangers. I know, also, happiness has been the real, if covert, target of
+your labors here, your choices of companions, of the profession,
+perhaps, that you will enter. And I do want you to have it; you clearly
+deserve it. Everyone does. And I hope it continues, or comes,
+effortlessly, quickly, always. Still, I am not interested in it. Not yours,
+nor mine nor anybody’s. I don’t think we can afford it anymore. I
+don’t think it delivers the goods. Most important, it gets in the way of
+everything worth doing. There was a time, for most of the history of
+the human race, in fact, when to contemplate and strive for
+happiness was critical, necessarily compelling. But I am convinced
+that focusing on it now has gotten quite out of hand. It has become a
+bankrupt idea, the vocabulary of which is frightening: money, things,
+protection, control, speed, and more.
+I’d like to substitute something else for its search. Something
+urgent, something neither the world nor you can continue without. I
+assume you have been trained to think—to have an intelligent
+encounter with problem-solving. It’s certainly what you will be
+expected to do. But I want to talk about the step before that. The
+preamble to problem-solving. I want to talk about the activity you
+were always warned against as being wasteful, impractical, hopeless.
+I want to talk about dreaming. Not the activity of the sleeping brain,
+but rather the activity of a wakened, alert one. Not idle wishful
+speculation, but engaged, directed daytime vision. Entrance into
+another’s space, someone else’s situation, sphere. Projection, if you
+like. By dreaming the self permits intimacy with the Other without
+the risk of being the Other. And this intimacy that comes from
+pointed imagining should precede our decision-making, our causemongering, our action. We are in a mess, you know; we have to get
+out, and only the archaic definition of the word “dreaming” will save
+us: “to envision; a series of images of unusual vividness, clarity,
+order, and significance.” Unusual, clarity, order, significance,
+vividness. Undertaking that kind of dreaming we avoid complicating
+what is simple or simplifying what is complicated, soiling instead of
+
+solving, ruining what should be revered. We avoid substituting
+slogans like “national will” for national intelligence and perception.
+National will? What kind? Informed? Uninformed? Obstinate South
+African national will? Nineteen forty Germany’s national will?
+Hanging on to destructive theses simply because one developed them
+half a century ago? These are comic book solutions to biblical
+problems in nuclear times. We must do all we can to imagine the
+Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life
+demand of us.
+Dream the world as it ought to be, imagine what it would feel like
+not to be living in a world loaded with zero-life weapons manned by
+people willing to loose them, develop them, or store them for money,
+or power, or data, but never for your life and never for mine. What
+would it be like to live in a world where the solution of serious,
+learned people to practically every big problem was not to kill
+somebody? Narcotics trade? Whom shall we kill—or lock up?
+Disease? Whom shall we let die—or lock up? Self-rule by a
+neighboring (or even distant) country? Whom shall we slaughter?
+Famine? What is an acceptable death rate? Unemployment?
+Homelessness? What is the tolerable starvation rate? Too many
+babies by all the wrong mothers? Too many people living too long?
+Even our goodwill is couched in killing. We are asked to give millions
+of dollars to “Feed the Children”—until they are fourteen, that is, at
+which point we are forced to pay billions to blow their brains out if
+they make demands in their own interests but not ours. Are their
+deaths not timely enough for us? They will all die anyway—as we will.
+All the babies, all the elderly, all the fettered and unenfranchised, the
+ill, the idle—just like us. Maybe after, before, or even because of us,
+but we will all be together by and by.
+If that is the consequence of our sophisticated thinking, our expert
+problem-solving, then we need to step back and refine the process
+that precedes it: experimental, intimate, ranging daylight vision that
+is not ashamed to dream, to visualize the Other.
+Imagine, envision what it would be like to know that your comfort,
+your fun, your safety are not based on the deprivation of another. It’s
+
+possible. But not if we are committed to outmoded paradigms, to
+moribund thinking that has not been preceded or dappled by
+dreaming. It is possible, and now it is necessary. Necessary because if
+you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you, and the manner of their
+eating is as varied as it is fierce. They will eat your houses, your
+neighborhoods, your cities; sleep in your lobbies, your lanes, your
+gardens, your intersections. They will eat your revenue because there
+will never be enough prisons, and wards, and hospitals, and welfare
+hotels to accommodate them. And in their search for your kind of
+happiness, they will eat your children, render them stunned and
+terrified, desperate for the sleeping life narcotics can offer. We may
+already have lost the creative intelligence of two-thirds of a new
+generation to this poisoned, violent sleep—a torpor so brutal they
+cannot wake from it for fear they will remember it; a sleep of such
+numbed recklessness it turns our own wakefulness to dread.
+It is possible to live without defending property or surrendering it,
+but we will never live that way unless our thinking is shot through
+with dreams. And it is necessary now because if you don’t educate
+the unschooled with the very best you have, don’t give them the help,
+the courtesy, the respect you had in becoming educated, then they
+will educate themselves, and the things they will teach and the things
+they will learn will destabilize all that you know. And by education I
+do not mean hobbling the mind, but liberating it; by education I do
+not mean passing on monologues, but engaging in dialogues.
+Listening, assuming sometimes that I have a history, a language, a
+view, an idea, a specificity. Assuming that what I know may be
+useful, may enhance what you know, may extend or complete it. My
+memory is as necessary to yours as your memory is to mine. Before
+we look for a “usable past” we ought to know all of the past. Before
+we start “reclaiming a legacy” we ought to know exactly what that
+legacy is—all of it and where it came from. In the business of
+education there are no minorities, only minor thinking. For if
+education requires tuition but no meaning, if it is to be about nothing
+other than careers, if it is to be about nothing other than defining
+and husbanding beauty or isolating goods and making sure
+
+enrichment is the privilege of the few, then it can be stopped in the
+sixth grade, or the sixth century, when it had been mastered. The rest
+is reinforcement. The function of twentieth-century education must
+be to produce humane human beings. To refuse to continue to
+produce generation after generation of people trained to make
+expedient decisions rather than humane ones.
+Oh, what would it be like without putrefying hatred we have been
+told and taught was inevitable among humans? Inevitable? Natural?
+After five million years? After four thousand years we haven’t
+imagined anything better than that? Which one of us was born that
+way? Which one of us prefers it that way? Hating, grabbing,
+despising? Racism is a scholarly pursuit and it always has been. It is
+not gravity or ocean tides. It is the invention of our minor thinkers,
+our minor leaders, minor scholars, and our major entrepreneurs. It
+can be uninvented, deconstructed, and its annihilation begins with
+visualizing its absence, losing it, and if it can’t be lost at once or by
+saying so, then by behaving as if, in fact, our free life depended on it,
+because it does. If I spend my life despising you because of your race,
+or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating
+me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your
+energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you
+live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits
+to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of
+your hatred; you are mine.
+Well, now, you may be asking yourself: What is all this? I can’t
+save the world. What about my life? I didn’t ask to come here. I
+didn’t ask to be born. Didn’t you? I put it to you that you did. You not
+only asked to be born, you insisted on your life. That is why you are
+here. No other reason. It was too easy not to be. Now that you are
+here, you have to do something you respect, don’t you? Your parents
+did not dream you up—you did. I am simply urging you to continue
+the dream you started. For dreaming is not irresponsible; it is firstorder human business. It is not entertainment; it is work. When
+Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream,” he was not playing; he
+was serious. When he imagined it, envisioned it, created it in his own
+
+mind it began to be, and we must dream it too to give it the heft and
+stretch and longevity it deserves. Don’t let anybody, anybody
+convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It
+must be the way it ought to be. Full employment is possible. Positing
+a workforce of 20 to 30 percent of the population of the future is
+yearning greed, not inevitable economics.
+All public schools can be hospitable, welcoming, safe learning
+environments. No one, teachers or students, prefers mindlessness,
+and in some places such environments have already been built.
+Appetites for self-murder can be eradicated. No addict or suicide
+wants to be one.
+Enemies, races, and nations can live together. Even I in the last
+forty years have seen deadly national enemies become warm,
+mutually supporting friends, and four national friends become
+enemies. And it doesn’t take forty years to witness it. Anybody over
+eight years old has witnessed the expedient, commercial, almost
+whimsical nature of national friendships. I have seen resources
+committed to the disenfranchised, the discredited, the unlucky, and
+before we could reap the harvest of those resources, before
+legislation put in place could work (twenty years?) it was
+disassembled. Like stopping the union in 1796 because there were
+problems. Building a bridge halfway and saying we can’t get there
+from here.
+That determined commitment must be redreamed, rethought,
+reactivated—by me and by you. Otherwise, as nationalism and
+racisms solidify, as coasts and villages become and remain the
+sources of turmoil and dispute, as eagles and doves alike hover over
+the remaining sources of raw wealth on this earth, as guns and gold
+and cocaine topple grain, technology, and medicine to win first place
+in world trade, we will end up with a world not worth sharing or
+dreaming about.
+We are already life-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we
+know there are no others. We are the moral inhabitants of the galaxy.
+Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the
+womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in
+
+which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives.
+Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of
+trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts,
+your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and
+who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the
+very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are
+not heartless. And you have time.
+
+The Slavebody and the Blackbody
+
+I
+
+N 1988, the same year James Cameron opened America’s Black
+Holocaust Museum here in Milwaukee, I responded to an
+interviewer’s question. Having published a novel investigating the
+lives of a family born into bondage, I was being asked about the need
+for, the purpose in articulating that unspeakable part of American
+history. The need for remembering the men, the women, the children
+who survived or did not survive the three-hundred-odd years of
+international commerce in which their bodies, their minds, their
+talents, their children, their labor were exchanged for money—
+money they could lay no claim to. Since the argument for shunning
+bad memories or sublimating them was so strong and, in some
+quarters, understood not only to be progressive but healthy, why
+would I want to disturb the scars, the keloids, that civil war, civic
+battle, and time itself had covered? The slavebody was dead, wasn’t
+it? The blackbody was alive, wasn’t it? Not just walking, and talking,
+and working, and reproducing itself, but flourishing, enjoying the
+benefits of full citizenship and the fruits of its own labor. The
+question seemed to suggest that, whatever the level of
+accomplishment, little good could come from writing a book that
+peeled away the layers of scar tissue that the blackbody had grown in
+order to obscure, if not annihilate, the slavebody underneath.
+My answer was personal. It came from a kind of exhaustion that
+followed the completion of my novel. An irritability. A sorrow.
+“There is no place,” I said, “where you or I can go, to think about or
+not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the
+absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made
+the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable
+
+memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby.
+There is no three-hundred-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the
+road. There is not even a tree scored with an initial that I can visit or
+you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence
+or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi.”
+“Somebody told me,” I continued, “that there is a gentleman in
+Washington who makes his living by taking busloads of people
+around to see the monuments of the city. He has complained because
+there is never anything there about black people that he can show. I
+can’t explain to you why I think it’s important, but I really do. I think
+it would refresh. Not only that, not only for black people. It could
+suggest the moral clarity among white people when they were at their
+best, when they risked something, when they didn’t have to risk and
+could have chosen to be silent; there’s no monument for that either.”
+Except in the names of institutions that pay homage to a white
+person’s care, or generosity: Spingarn, General Howard, Spelman,
+etc. “I don’t have any model in mind,” I said, “or any person, or even
+any art form. I just have the hunger for a permanent place. It doesn’t
+have to be a huge, monumental face cut into a mountain. It can be
+small, some place where you can put your feet up. It can be a tree. It
+doesn’t have to be a statue of liberty.”
+As you can tell I was feeling quite bereft when I made those
+comments.
+When I use the term “slavebody” to distinguish it from
+“blackbody,” I mean to underscore the fact that slavery and racism
+are two separate phenomena. The origins of slavery are not
+necessarily (or even ordinarily) racist. Selling, owning people is an
+old commerce. There are probably no people in this auditorium
+among whose ancestors or within whose tribe there were no slaves. If
+you are Christian, among your people were slaves; if you are Jewish,
+among your people were slaves; if you are Muslim, among your
+people were the enslaved. If your ancestors are European they lived
+under the serfdom of eastern Europe, the tenancy of feudalism in
+England, in Viking Europe, Visigothic Spain, or fifteenth- or
+sixteenth-century Venice, Genoa, and Florence. The majority
+
+population of ancient Rome and ancient Greece—all were
+deliberately constructed slave societies. Medieval Ghana; Songhai
+Mali; the Dahomey and Ashanti kingdoms. Slavery was critical to the
+world of Islam and systematic in the Orient, including a thousand
+years in Korea alone. We are all implicated in the institution. The
+colonists of the New World, patterning their economies on those
+earlier and contemporary societies that were dependent on free or
+forced labor, tried to enslave indigenous populations and would have
+imported any foreign group available, capable, and survivable.
+Available because highly organized African kingdoms could provide
+laborers to Europeans; capable because they were clever, strong, and
+adaptable; survivable because they were creative, spiritual, and
+intensely interested in their children—foreigners from Africa fit the
+bill.
+Not only the origins but the consequences of slavery are not always
+racist. What is “peculiar” about New World slavery is not its
+existence but its conversion into the tenacity of racism. The dishonor
+associated with having been enslaved does not inevitably doom one’s
+heirs to vilification, demonization, or crucifixion. What sustains
+these latter is racism. Much of what made New World slavery
+exceptional was the highly identifiable racial signs of its population
+in which skin color, primarily but not exclusively, interfered with the
+ability of subsequent generations to merge into the nonslave
+population. For them there was virtually no chance to hide, disguise,
+or elude former slave status, for a marked visibility enforced the
+division between former slave and nonslave (although history defies
+the distinction) and supported racial hierarchy. The ease, therefore,
+of moving from the dishonor associated with the slavebody to the
+contempt in which the freed blackbody was held became almost
+seamless because the intervening years of the Enlightenment saw a
+marriage of aesthetics and science and a move toward transcendent
+whiteness. In this racism the slavebody disappears but the blackbody
+remains and is morphed into a synonym for poor people, a synonym
+for criminalism and a flash point for public policy. For there is no
+discourse in economics, in education, in housing, in religion, in
+
+health care, in entertainment, in the criminal justice system, in
+welfare, in labor policy—in almost any of the national debates that
+continue to baffle us—in which the blackbody is not the elephant in
+the room; the ghost in the machine; the subject, if not the topic, of
+the negotiations.
+This museum’s projects have enormous powers. First is the power
+of memorializing. The impulse to memorialize certain events, people,
+and populations comes at certain times. When what has happened is
+finally understood or is a forthright assertion of civic or personal
+pride, tombs and palaces are built, flowers heaped, statues rise,
+archives, hospitals, parks, and museums are constructed. Time being
+such an important factor in this process, most of the participants in
+the events being remembered never see them. But the growth of this
+country in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,
+resting heavily on the availability of free labor, is complicated and
+exceptional. Exceptional because of its length and its chattel nature;
+complex because of its intricate relationship to the cultural,
+economic, and intellectual development of the nation. That is what
+must be remembered. There is another power this project has: of
+making us aware of the ever flexible, always adaptable, persistently
+slippery forms of modern racism in which the slavebody is
+reconstructed and reenters the blackbody as an American form of
+ethnic cleansing in which a monstrously large number of black men
+and women are carefully swept into prisons, where they become once
+again free labor; once again corralled for profit. Make no mistake,
+the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than
+it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income
+and especially about providing corporations with a captured
+population available for unpaid labor.
+The third power of the museum’s project, perhaps its most
+important, certainly its most gratifying, is the gaze it has cast on the
+ameliorating, triumphant aspects of the history of the republic—in
+black and white. This is what I sense: in spite of all the commercial
+and political strategies to separate, divide, and distort us, young
+people seem to be truly tired of racism’s control over their lives. The
+
+art community is exhausted by and rebellious toward its limitations.
+Low-income people who discover how entangled and held down they
+are in its divisive economic grasp loathe it. Scholars unintimidated
+by its cling are disassembling it. We are becoming more industrious
+in substituting accuracy, other perspectives, other narratives in place
+of phantom histories, polluted politics, and media manipulation.
+I am pleased that my appearance coincides with the exhibition of
+African American artists whose eyes encountered at every level the
+stereotyping and visual debasement prevalent elsewhere. Through
+their art, their taste, their genius we see African American subjects as
+individuals, as cherished, as understood. Viewing this display of their
+force, their life-giving properties, their humanity, their joy, their will
+ought to be enough to forestall the reach of racism’s tentacles. Ought
+to be enough to protect us from its uninformed, uneducated,
+relentlessly toxic touch. Just as the commitment of this community
+ought to be enough. Don’t you think? Thank you.
+
+Harlem on My Mind
+Contesting Memory—Meditation on Museums, Culture, and
+Integration
+
+T
+
+ODAY’S DEBATE on the place, power, and purpose of
+museums as reservoirs of cultural memory and/or a source of
+community integration is vital. Such debates are endemic to
+museums. The history of the Louvre itself bears witness to radical
+attacks and passionate rescue, yet it survives as a revered model and
+indispensable example of the universal survey museum. As Neil
+Harris writes, “The size, wealth, internal arrangements, and
+architecture of museums, as well as the inherent decontextualization
+of museum exhibits, had attracted hostility in the nineteenth century
+and certainly in the early twentieth century. The gargantuan temples
+of the early twentieth century were labeled by some critics ‘dignified
+disasters’; their organization of exhibits…a ‘Minotaur’s labyrinth,’…
+museum policies were condemned as socially aloof and indifferent.
+Some educators fumed about museum failures to acknowledge
+contemporary needs and interests, while others condemned largescale collecting as the poisoned fruit of capitalism.” Furthermore, he
+notes, “museums have been labeled racist, revisionist, hegemonic,
+elitist, politically correct, mercenary, greedy, and self-serving.” Why,
+then, one wonders, are museums experiencing what can only be
+called a “boom,” as larger constituencies are solicited, as revenues
+increase along with the sale of goods and services that “blockbuster”
+shows produce, as patrons and funding sources compete with one
+another for standing and generosity to museums? Transitions are
+taking place, not least of which is recognition that the “foreigner is
+
+already home.” And the mission of today’s museums takes into
+account their claims.
+Curators, artists, directors, art critics, and historians recognize the
+urgency of these deliberations anew. Their articles fill journals;
+boards of traditional museums reconsider structure and content;
+recent arrivals in the landscape of museums shape their acquisitions
+to accommodate the demands of new or underrepresented
+audiences.
+The provenance of one such demand for representation in the
+United States provides a map that dramatizes both the
+vulnerabilities and opportunities under discussion.
+As the New York scene in the sixties roiled with fresh visions
+within the art world (abstract expressionism, pop art), the
+Metropolitan Museum in New York welcomed its new director,
+Thomas P. F. Hoving. A medieval scholar become city parks
+commissioner, he was excited about introducing new projects into an
+institution some believed had become moribund. One of his projects
+was an exhibit designed to reflect the culture of Harlem—an African
+American neighborhood in New York City famous for its writers,
+poets, painters, musicians, and nightclub life. The exhibition,
+announced in 1968 and called Harlem on My Mind, opened at the
+Metropolitan Museum in January 1969 as a fifteen-gallery portrayal
+of Harlem history, identity, and cultural tradition consisting of
+photographs, murals, slides, films, documentary recordings, music,
+and memorabilia. Encouraged and directed by Allon Schoener, the
+visual arts director of the New York State Council on the Arts,
+Hoving mounted what they both described as a “total ethnic
+environmental show” covering Harlem from 1900 to 1968. Using the
+then-radical exhibition techniques including photographs on the
+ceiling and as murals, soundscapes and television, the show
+paralleled an earlier one in which Schoener was involved: The Lower
+East Side: Portal to American Life at the Jewish Museum—a paean
+to immigration in America. Great as the enthusiasm for the Harlem
+show was in many quarters and funding sources, there were
+rumblings of discontent before the show opened: there were
+
+accusations of marginalizing the counsel and the advice of
+Harlemites; of blacks being used as “window dressing.” But the
+denouement was louder with more virulent outrage not only from
+the black community, but from a wide range of groups including
+some of the directors of and donors to the Metropolitan.
+Conservative art critics such as Hilton Kramer held that such shows
+had no place in an art museum. “In mounting the Harlem on My
+Mind exhibition,” he wrote, “Mr. Hoving has for the first time
+politicized the Metropolitan, and has thereby cast doubt on its future
+integrity as an institution consecrated above all to the task of
+preserving our artistic heritage from the fickle encroachments of
+history.” Jewish, Irish, and Hispanic groups found Candice Van
+Ellison’s introduction to the catalog patently racist vilification, since
+in it she wrote, as follows, “Psychologically, blacks may find that
+anti-Jewish sentiments place them, for once, within a majority. Thus,
+our contempt for the Jew makes us feel more completely American
+in sharing a national prejudice.” Patently racist vilification. Hoving
+himself was reviled for his apparent condescension to his black
+servants (his “sunny maid,” his black “dour” chauffeur) and his
+remark that peer relationships between the races were “ludicrous.”
+Schoener, too, for his assertions that “Harlem is [black culture’s]
+capital. White mores and values are not universal.” From Hoving’s
+populist intentions there arose strong class conflicts. Certainly the
+controversy was heightened by the turbulence of the sixties, yet the
+implications of what went wrong with Hoving’s multimedia show are
+resonant today. From insult to cultural injury, artists, politicians,
+scholars, journalists identified quite serious objections to the
+intellectual and aesthetic premises of the exhibit. Among these
+complaints were: no African American representation on the
+selection committee; near total reliance on photography, principally
+the work of James VanDerZee, and deliberate exclusion of painters
+and sculptors; the museum’s promise of a “separate” show never
+materialized; the theme was more entertainment than art—another
+example of white voyeurism with a camera set up in Harlem at 125th
+Street for a closed-circuit viewing, rather like a zoo, for patrons at the
+museum. The dismissal of such artists as Norman Lewis, Jacob
+
+Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Cliff Joseph, Elizabeth Catlett,
+Raymond Saunders, and many others, both established and
+emerging, prompted a protest group, forced Roy DeCarava to
+withdraw his work and Romare Bearden to leave the committee.
+Without the full participation of these artists, the focus misled
+viewers toward sentimentalized and caricatured representations of
+black life as criminal, impoverished, exclusively sensual. Further
+insult was perceived in the choice of an African American high school
+student, rather than a knowledgeable scholar or artist, to handle the
+catalog’s introduction. Even the show’s title, selected by Schoener,
+inflamed already raw sensibilities. Borrowed from Irving Berlin’s
+song, it followed the same pattern Schoener followed: a white man
+writing knowingly, authoritatively about Harlem culture, the lyrics
+describing a black showgirl (and perhaps mistress) in Paris missing
+the “low-down”—that is, licentious—life among urban blacks. “I’ve a
+longing to be low-down / And my parlez-vous will not ring true /
+With Harlem on my mind.” Minus local working artists, without
+board representation, without even an art scholar to introduce the
+catalog, with no reference to Harlem’s prosperous civic life, what the
+community believed was the real importance, meaning, and variety
+of its cultural life was completely, arrogantly dismissed. It appeared
+to many that Harlem on My Mind was fundamentally an
+ethnographic exhibition presented in an art museum—one of the
+leading universal survey museums. Thus it angered those who
+thought ethnographic displays did not belong there and frustrated
+those who wanted work by African Americans to be there. The crux
+of these charges and frustrations seemed to be that the Metropolitan
+Museum had treated black culture as “foreign,” as the work product
+of strangers whose home it first appropriated then selectively
+celebrated. A kind of petri dish for the curious.
+The consequences, however, of the Harlem on My Mind show did
+create opportunity. Among disgruntled “minorities,” the citizens of
+Harlem and African American artists were not alone. Their
+experience of being silenced by an exhibition ostensibly about them
+is duplicated in many places, and the hierarchy of cultures is being
+
+intently questioned and refuted. Communities are no longer content
+to remain passive recipients of museum activities. The Studio
+Museum in Harlem, with its concentration on African American art,
+is one of the success stories directly related to the fallout of the
+controversy. The proliferation of ethnic museums in New York and
+elsewhere is another. Furthermore, less than a year after the show
+closed, the black artists who formed the Black Emergency Cultural
+Coalition and protested against Harlem (Norman Lewis, Romare
+Bearden, Raymond Saunders, Vivian Browne, and Cliff Joseph,
+among others) met with officials at the Whitney Museum of
+American Art to begin negotiations over its policies of discrimination
+against black artists. In 1971 the coalition called for a boycott of the
+Whitney’s exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America
+because black participation in its organization was limited. Fifteen of
+the seventy-five artists chosen by curator Robert M. Doty scheduled
+to participate withdrew, and, true to form, critical response to those
+who remained in the exhibition centered on black political reaction,
+with little discussion of the art itself.
+New York’s Guggenheim Museum’s 1996 survey Abstraction in the
+20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline included no artists of
+color. Nearly twenty-eight years after Harlem on My Mind, a major
+American art museum excluded African American painters and
+sculptors from a major exhibition, and in doing so once again raised
+questions of race, politics, and aesthetics. But the thrust of the
+criticism had shifted. The art museum was still being asked, What is
+the domain of black visual art—figuration, abstraction?, while the
+artists themselves and some critics were asking whether racially
+defined art was limiting and whether the question was a problem
+itself, especially when critical response to the exhibition of black
+visual artists centered on politics with little discussion of the art
+itself. What was the art museum’s aesthetic evaluation of visual art
+created by blacks? Cliff Joseph hazarded an approach in an
+interview: “I would not say that there is black art per se….There is,
+however, a black experience in art; I think every culture has its own
+experience which the artists of the culture brings to his work.”
+
+Many of today’s young black artists agree with Mr. Joseph and see
+racially defined art as stifling if not condescending; as a problem
+itself. An increasing number of them insist their work be evaluated
+on the basis of aesthetics only, wondering if their art was not
+classified under the rubric of black culture would it read as African
+American? If the artists were not presented according to their race,
+would their work be mined for racial or political content? These
+questions and others have given rise to the term “postblack” among
+the newer artists—a term that both signals racial identity and refutes
+its established borders.
+The narrative and consequences of the Harlem on My Mind show
+are at the heart of this current debate on the mission of museums as
+it relates to the foreigner’s home. And much of the news is good. If
+the Guggenheim failed to recognize American abstract painters and
+sculptors of color, other opportunities have not been wasted. Kellie
+Jones’s recent show at the Studio Museum in Harlem,
+Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–
+1980, is a strong response to the Guggenheim’s omission from its
+abstract survey show. Since Harlem closed in 1969, new generations
+of curators, scholars, art historians are deepening and broadening
+the idea of the visual art museum and the material and cultural
+museum. In 1968 the ethnographic replaced the artistic at the
+Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition; ethnography and art were largely
+separate. But in the 1990s the development of these areas of study—
+art and ethnology—began to converge, and fields such as world art
+history seem to have gained increasing attention, as well as
+controversy. Fred Wilson’s 1992 show, Mining the Museum, at the
+Contemporary museum in Baltimore included works from the
+Maryland Historical Society. Wilson plumbed these works for new
+information about black American life from the figuration and
+portraiture in the work of white artists in early American history and
+reframed the works to tell that story. It became increasingly apparent
+that museological decisions and curatorial ones are as much
+ideologically determined as they are aesthetically determined, and
+that such decisions are made in the context of power. Yves Le Fur
+
+argues intelligently, in my view, that the twenty-first-century art
+museum cannot remain a cultural site “where nonWestern art is
+judged according to the standards of modern art.”
+European “high art” and the foreigner’s “material or craft work” is
+bridged by archaeology (the unearthing of both craft and art from
+dead cultures and ferried to museums in Europe) and is being
+reassembled, recontextualized among scholars who accept the
+position that exhibitions claiming to be authentic representations of
+peoples and their cultures—that attempt to define what is essentially
+African or European—are hegemonic practices that reproduce the
+values and privileges of the center.
+Happily, the dialogue is ongoing: in the history of art production;
+on issues of culturally specific aesthetics; about the invisibility of the
+foreigner in established institutions and the curricula of art
+departments; the expansion of “homes” for the art of non-Western
+people; discrete collections of modern art in rural, less metropolitan
+sites.
+Museums and galleries are an artist’s home; his and her place in
+art history, in cultural history, where national identities are shaped
+and reimagined. Increasingly, the focus of these art places is on the
+relationship among what is outside the museum as well as what is
+inside. Increasingly the erstwhile “stranger” enriches all of our
+homes.
+
+Women, Race, and Memory
+
+I
+
+N 1868 a forty-five-year-old woman asked the United States
+Senate for three years’ back pay. She had been hired during the Civil
+War to do three kinds of work: as nurse, cook, and “commander of
+several men.” It took thirty years for the men in the nation’s Capitol
+to make up their minds on a matter in which money, sex, race, and
+class were so hopelessly entangled. One hundred and fifteen years
+have passed since this woman’s original request, and the
+combination of explicit issues in her claim is still a witches’ brew of
+confusion, anger, fear, ignorance, and malice. At the heart of her
+nineteenth-century battle for veteran’s pay is the burning question of
+twentieth-century feminism: How can a woman be viewed and
+respected as a human being without becoming a male-like or maledominated citizen?
+For a variety of complex reasons, the final answer is not in yet, but
+it is impossible not to come to the dreary conclusion that chief
+among these reasons is our (women’s) own conscious and
+unconscious complicity with the forces that have kept sexism the
+oldest class oppression in the world. This casual or deliberate treason
+is like a bone lodged in the throat of every woman who tries to
+articulate the present condition of women, and, until expelled, it is a
+bone that will continue to choke, and may soon silence, what could
+have been the first successful, bloodless revolution in America.
+The self-sabotage rife among women is no secret, but what may be
+unclear is why we insist on chains. Because sexism is not confined to
+men, psychology, schooling, and theology are frequently scoured to
+explain this subversion—to locate its origin in the oppressor. But the
+most effective and reliable saboteur is she who needs no orders.
+
+American women fall into one of three general categories:
+feminists, anti-feminists, and nonaligned humanists. Each of these
+admittedly ill-defined groups generates some hostility for at least one
+other, and each contains subgroups intent on evangelical work
+among the others.
+Avowed feminists, their consciousnesses sufficiently raised to be
+active workers for women’s rights, have been around for a long time.
+Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women’s
+liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation. The
+mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes;
+the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement yielded Woman’s
+Liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men
+(no white men so distinguished themselves), but both abandoned
+black civil rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem
+as an inevitable and necessary development—an opportunity to
+concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took
+place it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of
+splinter groups and self-sabotage.
+Among modern feminists this first split quickly gave way to a
+second from which two main groups emerged: socialist feminists,
+who blame capitalism for the virulence of sexual oppression, and
+radical feminists, who blame men. The outrage of both socialist and
+radical feminism is directed toward the cause of sexism, yet in
+pursuit of the enemy, much of the emotional violence spills over to
+the victims. Regardless of how they define the enemy (men or the
+“system”) both camps recognize the need to neutralize the hostility of
+women toward one another—sisters, mothers, and daughters,
+women friends and employees. They see betrayal among women as a
+residue of minority self-contempt and the competitiveness of the
+marriage market. Nevertheless, the result of a raised consciousness
+in the company of a repressed one is frequently an explosive
+internecine conflict. There is stark terror in Andrea Dworkin’s
+account of her attempts to talk to right-to-life women in Houston.
+There is real arsenic in Simone de Beauvoir’s recollection of her
+rivalry with her mother. Even among advanced feminists sabotage is
+
+a serious threat. A nice little feminist collective bookstore in
+California (called Woman’s Place) ended up in court when the
+separatists locked the integrationists out.
+The anti-feminists, who have the greatest support of men, are
+presumed by feminists to be endlessly gestating and lactating; happy
+for any system, political, economic, or cultural, that manages men
+and keeps them if not responsible, then certainly at bay. Blaming
+feminists’ communism, and atheism, anti-feminists are convinced
+that the male role as providers and fathers is the apex of civilized
+society. It does not trouble them that finding a role for men, other
+than fathers or husbands, is still a serious problem for anthropology.
+That while “nature” easily defines a woman’s role, “society” must
+provide a definition of male roles. Trying to figure out what—other
+than fathering and providing for children—men are for leads the
+researcher into an investigation of “civilization” and male-dominated
+positions within it. Since fatherhood is not fulfilling enough for men,
+they see themselves as doers, leaders, and inventors, and it does not
+take a major intellect to see that women, free of home and child care,
+may be expected to do, lead, and invent as well. Contemplating such
+a radical change in expectations can range from uneasiness to terror.
+Anti-feminists are not categorically opposed to male-like activities
+for women, but they regard them as either secondary freedoms or
+not freedoms at all, but rather as heavy requirements that will
+deprive them of a hard-won protectionism. Thus their disgust with
+ERA, abortion on demand, and a host of other feminist goals.
+The agnostics, or nonaligned humanists, are probably the largest
+of all three groups and, although courted by feminists and antifeminists alike to swell their numbers, they have earned the
+contempt and mistrust of both. Feminists regard them as scabs and
+opportunists, benefiting from feminist work while contributing
+nothing to it—even scorning it. They are the women in academia who
+accept their tenured positions as part of the fruit of feminist labor,
+who identify themselves as representing womanpower, but who are
+quick to disassociate themselves from “merely” feminist scholarship
+(“I teach Milton”). Anti-feminists see them as cowards and profiteers
+
+benefiting from protectionism when it suits them but flagrantly
+chucking it when it does not. They are the dissatisfied wives making
+feminist claims about house and child care and sexual freedom
+without parallel claims of responsibility. All of their energy is
+channeled into the competitive ethos of physical beauty. They
+decorate and market themselves in precisely the manner of a 1950
+pinup; mutter about the hopelessness of men, but regard themselves
+and other women as incomplete without a male liaison. Nonaligned
+women are embarrassed by the extravagant or aggressive behavior of
+radical feminists and dismiss them as unattractive, male-minded
+Amazons. Equally contemptible to them are the anti-feminists,
+whose oratory amuses them and whom they see as ignorant,
+religious fanatics, or simply slavish. The “reasonable” neutrality of
+the nonaligned humanist is viewed as quisling by the converts of the
+right or left.
+Among these three groups, the field for battle is wide and loaded
+with weaponry. Sad as these divisions are, they exist because of
+genuine concerns—serious unresolved questions about biology and
+bigotry.
+The biological bind, whether blessing or curse, is real. Whatever
+the disposition of women today (radical, anti-, or nonaligned) they
+are forced relentlessly into selling or trading on their vaginas or their
+wombs. As “involuntary” mothers, trading on the womb means
+demanding protection as a class for the product that organ can
+manufacture—children. For “voluntary” mothers, the womb becomes
+the nexus for demanding the right to terminate its activity. As
+mistresses, prostitutes, housebound wives, and pornographic
+“actresses,” women are involved in the dollar value of their vaginas
+and must come to terms with accepting that value as the way the
+world is and ought to be, or the way it is but ought not to be. Because
+a woman’s livelihood has always been connected to her sexuality,
+whether maiden, mistress, wife, or prostitute, fidelity is women’s
+work—not men’s. “Relating to men in bed and in marriage is the
+conventional passport to normal femininity.” And it is incumbent
+upon the woman to advertise her faithfulness and maintain his. It is
+
+this burden of fidelity, coupled with the economics of sexuality, that
+puts heterosexual women in direct conflict with lesbians.
+Homosexual, or women-identified women, struggling to eliminate
+males and their domination from their personal and sexual lives, are
+convinced that lesbianism is the only way to achieve the full potential
+of women. Many look forward to a world that they envision as
+completely genderless, although it is not immediately clear where
+future lesbians will come from without some contact with men or, at
+the least, their bottled sperm. For the moment their position requires
+sharing with male scientists the lively optimism that fuck-free
+childbirth methods have encouraged. Yet female homosexuals are
+not alone in these dreams of a peaceable genderless kingdom, as the
+growing number of women writing science fiction is proof of. So
+problematic is the gender barricade, many feminist writers have
+turned to science fiction in order to invent a transcendent universe—
+free of the limitations of biology.
+The second concern that generates divisiveness among women is
+the tenacity of male bigotry and its grave effect on the lives of all
+women regardless of what camp they belong to. Men still determine
+the scientific, political, and labor goals of this society. Scientific
+manipulation in areas of reproduction has turned out to be a very
+mixed blessing. It was a woman, Margaret Sanger, who had the idea
+and raised the money for a man, Dr. Pincus, to develop a “simple,
+cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums,
+jungles, and among the most ignorant people.” The specificity of the
+assignment was important and decisive, proving that the suspicions
+of minority women about all birth control campaigns are wellfounded. Notwithstanding the original intention, “the pill” has been
+identified as the principal liberating factor for women of all colors
+since 1960. Yet the dramatic decline in infant births and mortality
+from pregnancy is outweighed by the staggering increase in
+reproductive death due to birth-control devices. The contraceptive
+that stops birth also kills women, but because the class and race
+implications in birth-control campaigns are systemic, there is no
+guarantee that the danger will decrease even if women do finally
+
+control fertility among themselves and their sisters in the jungle. The
+picture of wave upon wave of nonwhite babies growing into vocal
+hungry adulthood is routinely evoked by feminists trying to persuade
+others to their point of view.
+In spite of some progressive legislation and increasing numbers of
+women in politics, and in spite of the percentage of registered
+women voters, no one questions the fact that politics is by men and
+for men. No one even bothers to wonder why so many women in
+politics are conservative. The eagerness for political heroines is so
+keen that apologies for reactionary women leaders can be safely left
+to the left. But these apologies do not hide the fury between left-wing
+women and their right-wing sisters. Witness any issue-oriented
+platform, such as those involving school desegregation, abortion
+rights, prayer in schools, and so on.
+The control men exert on the labor market is exacting—more so
+now because house-free women are clearly superfluous to laissezfaire or corporate capitalism. There is too little work and too much
+skill. Too little work and too many workers. Teens, minorities,
+women, recently retired people, farmers, factory workers, and the
+work-trained disabled are the reserve workforce available for
+constantly changing labor needs. And built into this supply-demand
+system is a violent job-career struggle that seethes in offices and
+factories everywhere. Because of their dependency, women are the
+most disposable of laborers.
+Biology and bigotry are the historical enemies—the ones women
+have long understood as the target if sexism is to be uprooted. What
+is newer and perhaps more sinister is the growth of the female
+saboteur, who seems to be crippling the movement as a whole: the
+internecine conflicts, cul-de-sacs, and mini-causes that have
+shredded the movement, steered it away from the serious political
+revolution of its origins, and trivialized it almost beyond recognition.
+Why have right-to-life and abortion-on-demand issues made women
+their own antagonists? Why do prostitutes regard women fighting
+pornography as uselessly obstructionist? Why are black and other
+minority women so quick to freeze out white feminist leadership?
+
+Why are women, for all our public talk of solidarity, firing our
+assistants because and when they are pregnant, voting against the
+appointment of women deans and chairpersons, relating to maids as
+though they were property, turning over buses on other mothers’
+black children? While these skirmishes continue, the movement
+comes dangerously close to an implosion of women-hating-women at
+worst, or a defeated disarray of cul-de-sac and mini-causes at best—
+all demonstrating the basest of male expectations: that any
+organization of women would end in a hair-pulling contest, as
+entertaining and irrelevant as those lady mud wrestlers.
+How can a dignified, responsible women’s liberation revive itself
+and proceed without shaming itself into women’s lamentation?
+Perhaps if we listen closely to the ferocity, the eloquence, the pleas
+devoted to the cause of women, we will hear another message—one
+that informs the lament: that masculinity or male likeness is, after
+all, a superior idea. That all the way from radical feminists who
+believe men are less suited for masculinity than anybody, to “total”
+women, who believe men are simply better, the concept of
+masculinity still connotes adventure, integrity, intellect, freedom,
+and, most of all, power. “Man is the measure of man” is an easily
+dismissed observation in a modern context, but masculinity is very
+much the measure of adulthood (personhood). Proof is everywhere.
+It shapes the wishes of women who believe they are born to please
+men as well as those who want to have what males claim for
+themselves. It ignites the drive of women who wish to be thought of
+as competent, brilliant, tough, thorough, just, and reasonable.
+Rigorous intellect, commonly thought of as a male preserve, has
+never been confined to men—but it has always been regarded as a
+masculine trait. Relinquishing reproductive control to God is, in fact,
+relinquishing it to men. Demanding reproductive control is to usurp
+male sovereignty and acquire what masculinity takes for granted—
+dominion.
+Rather than limit the definition of feminine to one chromosome,
+rather than change the definition to elevate the other chromosome,
+why not expand the definition to absorb both? We have both. Not
+
+wanting or needing children should not mean we must abandon a
+predilection for nurturing. Why not employ it to give feminism a new
+meaning—one that distinguishes it from woman-worship and from
+man-awe? The truth is that males are not a superior gender; nor are
+females a superior gender. Masculinity, however, as a concept, is
+envied by both sexes. The problem, therefore, is this: the tacit
+agreement that masculinity is preferable is also a tacit acceptance of
+male supremacy, whether the “males” are men, male-minded
+women, or male-dominated women, and male supremacy cannot
+exist without its genitalia. Each sexist culture has its own sociogenital formation, and in the United States the formation is racism
+and the hierarchy of class. When both are severed, male supremacy
+collapses and the sea of contention among women will dry up.
+Pretending that racist elements in male supremacy are secondary
+to sexism is to avoid, once again, the opportunity to eradicate sexism
+completely. Just as it was avoided by nineteenth-century
+abolitionists, so it has been ignored in twentieth-century feminism.
+The persistent refusal to confront it not only supports male
+supremacy, it creates battle lines with forty million women on one
+side and sixty million on the other.
+Accepting male-defined, male-blessed class hierarchy is also to
+strangle the movement and keep us locked in a fruitless war in which
+each of us is a female saboteur.
+Complicity in the subjugation of race and class accounts for much
+of the self-sabotage women are prey to, for it is straight out of that
+subjugation that certain female-destroying myths have come. One is
+the myth of the malevolent matriarch, a myth so prevalent that
+Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s conclusions about matriarchy as a cause
+of pathology among blacks is echoed in the literature of black men
+and women as well as white. This, in spite of the fact that only 16
+percent of all households report males as the sole providers
+(governments insist a household have a “head” and are alarmed
+when it is not a man). Nothing in black life supports the thesis of
+black men as “feminized” by their women and everything points to
+white male suppression as the emasculating force. Yet this distortion
+
+is thriving like health. Italians, Jews, Hispanics, WASPs—all have
+had their social problems explained in part by their success or failure
+in taming a threatening matriarch.
+Another female-destroying myth is the classlessness of laissezfaire capitalism and socialism. In advanced capitalism women have
+no economic autonomy and are dependent on the “uncertain maledetermined fortunes as wives, mothers, and housekeepers.” In
+Marxist societies, where classes are identified according to their
+relation to production, the family unit with its internal stratification
+(man equals head) defies any attempt to describe adequately the
+production of the “unwaged”—that is, the housewife.
+Class stratification sharpens and politicizes the fight for goods and
+status. Along with all the other conflicts it generates, class inequality
+exacerbates the differences between black and white women, poor
+and rich women, old and young women, single welfare mothers and
+single employed mothers. It pits women against one another in maleinvented differences of opinion—differences that determine who
+shall work, who shall be well educated, who controls the womb
+and/or the vagina; who goes to jail; who lives where.
+The willingness of innocent, ignorant, or self-regarding women to
+dismiss the implications of class prejudice, and to play roles that act
+in concert with the male-defined interests of the state, produces and
+perpetuates reactionary politics—a slow and subtle form of
+sororicide.
+There is no one to save us from that—no one except ourselves. So
+in the debris of what once looked like a vital liberation movement,
+one searches for signs of life. Three beacons wink in the wasteland.
+The dogged and often thankless work being done by fewer and fewer
+feminists to change oppressive laws; the starving self-help centers
+and mutual-aid networks; and, healthiest of all, the dazzling
+accomplishment of women’s art and scholarship. Nothing, it seems
+to me, is more exhilarating, and more dramatically to the point, than
+what is happening among the artists and scholars. The pejorative,
+limiting intention of the labels is still around (women playwrights,
+women photographers, etc., are obligatory annual roundups in
+
+various media) but not for long. It may be the first hint of a possible
+victory in being viewed and respected as human beings without being
+male-like or male dominated. Where self-sabotage is harder to
+maintain; where the worship of masculinity as a concept dies; where
+intelligent compassion for women unlike ourselves can surface;
+where racism and class inequity do not help the vision or the
+research; where, in fact, the work itself, the very process of doing it,
+makes sororicide as well as fratricide repulsive.
+Thirty years after Miss Harriet Tubman—black, female, mother,
+daughter, nurse, cook, wife, and “commander of several men”—asked
+a roomful of sexist, bigoted, class-conscious white men for her back
+pay they granted it. I have not chosen to begin and end this piece
+with her plea because it makes a poignant anecdote, but because the
+key to feminine oppression is most clearly seen in the response to her
+stand—a response that gathered together the full force of the special
+brand of American racism and sexism.
+And don’t think she didn’t know it. They gave her twenty dollars a
+month for life. She was seventy-five years old then, and they
+probably did not expect the pension to have to last very long.
+Stubborn as a woman, she lived thirteen more years.
+
+Literature and Public Life
+
+T
+
+O RETURN to the site of one’s graduate school life, one is
+always in danger of repeating one’s original status in the place where
+inquiry occurs, problems surface, and help is needed to sort out all
+the difficulties so a clear and persuasive argument can be advanced. I
+feel like that now, lo, these many years later: perhaps a committee is
+sitting somewhere ready to interrogate me following their listening
+to this paper. It is a useful bit of recollection because I want to use
+this occasion and this provocative site to examine (or float) a few
+thoughts I have had no chance to articulate, except in my fiction. And
+to identify how those thoughts are made manifest in my work.
+The problem I want to address this evening is, as I see it, the loss
+of public life, which is exacerbated by the degradation of private life.
+And I am proposing literature as an amelioration to this crisis in
+ways even literature could not have imagined.
+During the eighties and nineties, technology and the regime of the
+electronically visual world have altered perception of the public and
+our experience of one another. (The current Age of the Spectacle
+promised intimacy and universalization in a global village setting.
+But it has delivered frightful confusion about private and public
+existence.) Following the demise of the much maligned sixties and
+seventies, during which there was an actual, contested, fought over,
+fought for, and fought against public (and publicly expressed) life, it
+seems unlikely that there will ever be a decade like that: where issues
+of conscience, morality, law, and ethics were liberationist rather than
+oppressive. And it is interesting to note that it is a decade that, unlike
+any previous one, is embarrassed by itself. That kind of public life
+(the Civil Rights movement, etc.) is not experienced as media
+
+phenomena made possible by “the enormous weight of advertising
+and media fantasy [which suppresses] the realities of division and
+exploitation; [disguises] the disconnexion of private and public
+existence.” The consequence may be apathy, disgust, resignation, or
+a kind of inner vacuum (numbness), “a dream world of artificial
+stimuli and televised experience,” where, as F. Jameson observed,
+“never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical
+preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning
+of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless.” That was 1971 when
+those comments were made and they are inapplicable to some degree
+now, when product ethics and media ethics have greater force than
+social ethics or justice.
+We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to
+mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways.
+Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap,
+but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive.
+The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are
+we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to
+discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of
+visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a
+stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of
+the real.
+The news promises to inform us. Yet “the promiscuity of the
+nightly news—the jostling together of tornadoes in Pennsylvania,
+gunmen in Bosnia, striking teachers in Manchester…infant heart
+surgery in California—is dictated by the time constraints of the
+medium.” But the jumble of events is presented to the viewer as if it
+were a representation of the promiscuity of the external world, which
+we find, as a result, incoherent.
+“Millions of people look to the screen for signs of their collective
+identity as a national society and as citizens of the world. The media
+now play the decisive role in constituting the ‘imagined community’
+of nation and globe.” In this fashion “the news is validated as a
+system of authority, as a national institution with a privileged role as
+purveyor of the nation’s identity and taker of its pulse.”
+
+Recent events, however, suggest something has gone wrong. The
+formula, the authority, the paradigm, the goals of the spectacle may
+not be working. The erstwhile “church of modern authority,”
+television once routinely presented news as sacred spectacle: the
+funeral of John F. Kennedy, the wedding of Prince Charles,
+presidential inaugurations, the death of Diana—all implying that
+what was on view was of grave national and international
+significance. But in the merging of news (which is not news unless
+pictorial) with spectacle at the service of profit-making
+entertainment, certain electronic narratives originally constructed as
+official or national stories revealed not the promised national
+identity but the fault lines within. War becomes a timed and shaped
+“story” where the electronic question becomes the political one:
+When will we get out? When will the troops come home? When will
+the despot be dead? In other national narratives—the Clarence
+Thomas hearing, the O.J. trial, the Whitewater investigation, the
+impeachment hearings—time and narrative shape as well as plot are
+all subject to televised programming needs. It is fascinating to recall
+that virtually all of these recent stories are highly inflected by race
+and/or sex and the power wielded or withheld by either one.
+These national spectacles did not hide divisions as they wished,
+but exacerbated them. We cannot count on the spectacle to heal and
+distract completely. It is more likely to damage, alter, or distort time,
+language, the moral imagination, concepts of liberty, access to
+knowledge, as our consciousnesses are being reduced to selfcommodification. We become “ads” for ourselves under the pressure
+of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private
+dichotomy. The question becomes how and where can we experience
+the public in time, in language, as affect, and in context in order to
+participate fully in our own personal, singular, even invented life in
+relation to the life of the various communities to which we claim or
+wish to belong.
+What is the source of this flattened perception of private and
+public? Part of the confusion may simply be the reckless use of the
+terms: there is private life and there is the privatization of prisons,
+
+health care, and so-called public schools. The first use emanates
+from constitutional guarantees as well as a personal claim. The
+second is a corporate investment publicly traded.
+The first (personal claim to privacy) can be abandoned (on a talk
+show, for instance) or lost in the courts (by celebrities and “public”
+figures), but in any case such connotations of privacy are under
+surveillance at all times. The second (the privatization of formally
+public institutions) can be thwarted in the courts also, but are
+presented to us and represented to us as for the “public” good
+(encouraging competition and so forth, which ought to lower prices
+and increase quality for consumers). Public interest is often
+redefined as “special” interests.
+The slippage in these definitions so erases the boundaries between
+an individual and his imagined community, we are not surprised or
+agitated by the fact that public life is now rendered as visual
+phenomena of a chosen narrative that exploits and sensationalizes
+sex, race, and family threats for the national resonance and
+marketability they provide. This chaotic collapse of private and
+public—the constantly surveyed private life—and the public sphere
+over which we have no control encourages retreat into the narcissism
+of difference, a surrender to the shallow delights of entertainment.
+Or participation in a wholly illusory community shaped by fear and
+unquenchable desire.
+It seems to me that given these already realized subversions and
+the possibility of more, literature offers a special kind of
+amelioration. The history of claims for the study of literature circles
+around three major benefits: (1) literature’s character-building,
+moral-strengthening capacities, (2) its suitability for high-minded,
+politics-free leisure activity, (3) its role in “cultivating powers of
+imagination that are essential to citizenship.” While being educated
+to citizenship is superior to being educated to consumership,
+citizenship as a goal has troublesome nationalistic associations. “The
+problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination…
+but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home,
+you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is
+
+wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be master in your own
+house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be
+in the house.” Whether the character-building properties of
+literature, its rigorous politics-free intellectualism, or its utility in
+producing good and caring citizens—whether any of those claims still
+resonate among readers (and I am not sure that the case for
+literature has changed much since Emerson’s “American Scholar” or
+F. R. Leavis’s pronouncements), there is nevertheless a level of
+urgency in the study and production of literature hitherto
+unimaginable that has manifested itself: fictional literature may be
+(and I believe it is) the last and only route to remembrance, the only
+staunch in the wasteful draining away of conscience and memory.
+Fictional literature can be an alternative language that can contradict
+and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically
+visual, the seduction of “virtual.” The study of fiction may also be the
+mechanism of repair in the disconnect between public and private.
+Literature has features that make it possible to experience the
+public without coercion and without submission. Literature refuses
+and disrupts passive or controlled consumption of the spectacle
+designed to nationalize identity in order to sell us products.
+Literature allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves
+as multidimensional persons. And in so doing is far more necessary
+than it has ever been. As art it deals with the human consequences of
+the other disciplines: history, law, science, economics, labor studies,
+medicine. As narrative its form is the principal method by which
+knowledge is appropriated and translated. As a simultaneous
+apprehension of human character in time, in context, in space, in
+metaphorical and expressive language, it organizes the disorienting
+influence of an excess of realities: heightened, virtual, mega, hyper,
+cyber, contingent, porous, and nostalgic. Finally, it can project an
+alleviated future.
+These theoretical moves (about the novel’s peculiar affinity for
+experiencing a receding public life) become explicit moves in the last
+three books I have written. Beloved, Jazz, Paradise—each has a
+structural anomaly in common. A postnarrative, extratext, outside-
+
+the-book coda that comments not on the plot or story, but on the
+experience of the plot; not on the meaning of the story, but on the
+experience of gathering meaning from the story. These coda play an
+advocacy role, insisting on the consequences of having read the book,
+intervening in the established intimacy between reader and page,
+and forcing, if successful, a meditation, debate, argument that needs
+others for its fullest exploration. In short, social acts complete the
+reading experience.
+Beloved ends narratively with Sethe’s question about her
+individuality. The extranarrative activity is the reestablishment of the
+haunting—larger now than what it was assumed to be and what it
+was limited to in the beginning: a frustrated child, a justifiably
+malevolent creature of will. Much larger than its own problem of
+annihilation, it, the figure of Beloved summoned in the book’s
+“afterlife,” is now the responsibility of those who have shared,
+participated in, witnessed the story. A private responsibility
+disguising public or community obligations: “This is not a story to
+pass on.” “They can touch it if they like.” “They forgot her.”
+“Loneliness that can be rocked [individual]” “Loneliness that roams
+[public].”
+In Jazz the beyond-the-book gestures are stronger: the characters
+themselves escape the prognosis of the book, are different from and
+more complicated than the book ever imagined. Thus the final
+paragraphs constitute not merely a plea for the compassionate
+understanding of a misleading, self-involved narrative, but for an
+exquisite, shared, highly eroticized private relationship between
+reader and page. These paragraphs also activate the complicity by
+calling attention strenuously, aggressively to the act of reading as
+having public consequences and even public responsibility. From
+“Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now,” one can infer
+something is to be done, something is to be reimagined, altered, and
+that something is literally in the reader’s hands.
+In Paradise, again the novel ends (or closes) with activity almost
+irrelevant to the narrative. “Almost” because it does allow some
+speculation as to what in fact happened to the women in the
+
+Convent. But mostly to complete the play on gospel with the
+“visitations” and “sightings” of the New Testament and finally to
+refigure paradise’s imaginary. And paradise is everything but a
+solitary existence—is, in every projection, a community with a shared
+public life.
+The novel, I believe, allows, encourages ways to experience the
+public—in time, with affect, in a communal space, with other people
+(characters), and in language that insists on individual participation.
+It also tries to illuminate and recover the relationship between
+literature and public life.
+
+The Nobel Lecture in Literature
+
+“O
+
+NCE UPON A TIME there was an old woman. Blind but
+wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing
+restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the
+lore of several cultures.
+“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”
+In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black,
+American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her
+reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among
+her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is
+paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her
+neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of
+rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
+One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to
+be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the
+fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house
+and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her
+difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound
+disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them
+says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is
+living or dead.”
+She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I
+am holding living or dead?”
+Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors,
+let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color,
+gender, or homeland. She only knows their motive.
+The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble
+holding their laughter.
+
+Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know,”
+she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or
+alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your
+hands.”
+Her answer can be taken to mean: If it is dead, you have either
+found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it.
+Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is
+your responsibility.
+For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors
+are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of
+mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its
+aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of
+power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.
+Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird in the
+hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so
+now, thinking as I have been, about the work I do that has brought
+me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the
+woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language
+she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even
+withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she
+thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over
+which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with
+consequences. So the question the children put to her, “Is it living or
+dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to
+death, erasure, certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort
+of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is
+dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead
+language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding
+language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language,
+censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no
+desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own
+narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However,
+moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect,
+stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to
+interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other
+
+thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language
+smitheried to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of
+armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight
+departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental.
+Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots,
+summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
+She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness,
+disuse, and absence of esteem, indifference or killed by fiat, not only
+she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.
+In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets
+instead to iterate the void of speechlessness, of disabled and
+disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as
+a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or
+expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice
+of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and
+power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no
+access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to
+those who obey, or in order to force obedience.
+The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the
+tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery
+properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does
+more than represent violence, it is violence; does more than
+represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge. Whether it is
+obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media;
+whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the
+commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign
+language of law without ethics, or language designed for the
+estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary
+cheek—it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language
+that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under
+crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly
+toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language,
+racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing
+languages of mastery and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or
+encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
+
+The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary or
+insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue, no
+counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is
+and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming;
+slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices,
+playgrounds, bedrooms, and boulevards; stirring, memorializing
+language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be
+more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture,
+assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language
+designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pâté-producing
+geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be
+more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics
+and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute;
+language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into
+assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language
+crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and
+hopelessness.
+Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly
+associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such
+language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all—if the bird is
+already dead.
+She has thought about what could have been the intellectual
+history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced
+into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and
+representations of dominance required—lethal discourses of
+exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the
+excluded.
+The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the
+collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight
+of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture.
+That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and
+heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And
+what kind? Perhaps the achievement of paradise was premature, a
+little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other
+languages, other views, other narratives. Had they, the heaven they
+
+imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated,
+demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as postlife.
+She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression
+that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality
+of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined, and
+possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is
+sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs
+toward the place where meaning may lie. When a president of the
+United States thought about the graveyard his country had become
+and said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say
+here, but it can never forget what they did here.” His simple words
+are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they
+refused to encapsulate the reality of six hundred thousand dead men
+in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the
+“final word,” the precise “summing up,” acknowledging their “poor
+power to add or detract,” his words signal deference to the
+uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves
+her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and
+for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery,
+genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do
+so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
+Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify;
+whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice
+word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward
+knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature
+banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical;
+erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the
+thought of a self-ravaged tongue?
+Word work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it
+makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—
+the way in which we are like no other life.
+We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That
+may be the measure of our lives.
+“Once upon a time…,” visitors ask an old woman a question. Who
+are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter?
+
+What did they hear in those final words: “It is in your hands”? A
+sentence that gestures toward possibility or one that drops a latch?
+Perhaps what the children heard was “It’s not my problem. I am
+old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I
+cannot help you. The future of language is yours.”
+They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose
+the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken
+seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to
+violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for
+them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including
+the one they have asked: “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”
+Perhaps the question meant: “Could someone tell us what is life?
+What is death?” No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward
+question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the
+old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe
+either, who can? But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good
+opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without
+commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into
+the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.
+Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence
+is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has
+spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with
+language invented on the spot.
+“Is there no speech,” they ask her, “no words you can give us that
+help us break through your dossier of failures? Through the
+education you have just given us that is no education at all because
+we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to
+what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between
+generosity and wisdom?
+“We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you
+and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something
+you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you
+remember being young, when language was magic without meaning?
+When what you could say could not mean? When the invisible was
+
+what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for
+answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?
+“Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and
+heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing
+in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is
+artful, but its artiness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you.
+Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-fortelevision script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.
+“Why didn’t you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay
+the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so
+despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were
+baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We
+have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What
+could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become,
+where, as a poet said, ‘nothing needs to be exposed since it is already
+barefaced.’ Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your
+old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we
+are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the
+fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we
+stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?
+“You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is
+there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of
+vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along
+to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one.
+Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us
+your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical,
+creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame
+you if your reach exceeds your grasp, if love so ignites your words
+they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with
+the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places
+where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly—once
+and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our
+sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world
+has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what
+to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that
+
+unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can
+speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see
+without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of
+things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
+“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to
+be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in
+this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at
+the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
+“Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter,
+placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they
+sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling
+snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that
+the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their
+sex, they thought of heat, then suns. Lifting their faces, as though it
+was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They
+stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving
+them humming in the dark. The horse’s void steams into the snow
+beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt is the envy of the freezing
+slaves.
+“The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They
+climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but
+now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from
+mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat, and
+something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One
+helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look
+back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is
+warmed.”
+It’s quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman
+breaks into the silence.
+“Finally,” she says. “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that
+is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How
+lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.”
+
+Cinderella’s Stepsisters
+
+L
+
+ET ME BEGIN by taking you back a little. Back before the
+days at college. To nursery school, probably, to a once-upon-a-time
+when you first heard, or read, or, I suspect, even saw “Cinderella.”
+Because it is Cinderella that I want to talk about; because it is
+Cinderella who causes me a feeling of urgency. What is unsettling
+about that fairy tale is that it is essentially the story of a household—a
+world, if you please—of women gathered together and held together
+in order to abuse another woman. There is, of course, a rather vague
+absent father and a nick-of time prince with a foot fetish. But neither
+has much personality. And there are the surrogate “mothers,” of
+course (god- and step-), who contribute both to Cinderella’s grief and
+to her release and happiness. But it is the stepsisters who interest
+me. How crippling it must have been for those young girls to grow up
+with a mother, to watch and imitate that mother, enslaving another
+girl.
+I am curious about their fortunes after the story ends. For contrary
+to recent adaptations, the stepsisters were not ugly, clumsy, stupid
+girls with outsize feet. The Grimm collection describes them as
+“beautiful and fair in appearance.” When we are introduced to them
+they are beautiful, elegant women of status, and clearly women of
+power. Having watched and participated in the violent domination of
+another woman, will they be any less cruel when it comes their turn
+to enslave other children, or even when they are required to take care
+of their own mother?
+It is not a wholly medieval problem. It is quite a contemporary
+one: feminine power when directed at other women has historically
+been wielded in what has been described as a “masculine” manner.
+
+Soon you will be in a position to do the very same thing. Whatever
+your background (rich or poor) whatever the history of education in
+your family (five generations or one) you have taken advantage of
+what has been available to you at Barnard and you will therefore
+have both the economic and social status of the stepsisters and you
+will have their power.
+I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the
+oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are
+women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay
+their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and
+another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands.
+Women who stop the promotion of other women in careers are
+women, and another woman must come to the victims’ aid. Social
+and welfare workers who humiliate their clients may be women, and
+other women colleagues have to deflect their anger.
+I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another:
+professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am
+alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am
+alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of
+professional women’s worlds. You are the women who will take your
+place in the world where you can decide who shall flourish and who
+shall wither; you will make distinctions between the deserving poor
+and the undeserving poor; where you can yourself determine which
+life is expendable and which is indispensable. Since you will have the
+power to do it, you may also be persuaded that you have the right to
+do it. As educated women the distinction between the two is firstorder business.
+I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing
+sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of
+freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You
+are moving toward self-fulfillment, and the consequences of that
+fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as
+important as you are and that just-as-important thing may be
+Cinderella—or your stepsister.
+
+In your rainbow journey toward the realization of personal goals,
+don’t make choices based only on your security and your safety.
+Nothing is safe. That is not to say that anything ever was, or that
+anything worth achieving ever should be. Things of value seldom are.
+It is not safe to have a child. It is not safe to challenge the status quo.
+It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do
+old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop
+you.
+But in pursuing your highest ambitions, don’t let your personal
+safety diminish the safety of your stepsister. In wielding the power
+that is deservedly yours, don’t permit it to enslave your stepsisters.
+Let your might and your power emanate from that place in you that
+is nurturing and caring.
+Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a
+personal affair. It is not only about “us”; it is also about me and you.
+Just the two of us.
+
+The Future of Time
+Literature and Diminished Expectations
+
+T
+
+IME, IT SEEMS, has no future. That is, time no longer seems
+to be an endless stream through which the human species moves
+with confidence in its own increasing consequence and value. It
+certainly seems not to have a future that equals the length or breadth
+or sweep or even the fascination of its past. Apparently, infinity is
+now, the domain of the past. In spite of frenzied anticipation of
+imminent entry into the next millennium, the quality of human
+habitation within its full span occupies very little space in public
+exchange. Twenty or forty years into the twenty-first century appears
+to be all there is of the “real time” available to our imagination. Time
+is, of course, a human concept, yet in the late twentieth century
+(unlike in earlier ones) it seems to have no future that can
+accommodate the species that organizes, employs, and meditates on
+it. The course of time seems to be narrowing to a vanishing point
+beyond which humanity neither exists nor wants to. It is singular,
+this diminished, already withered desire for a future. Although
+random outbreaks of armageddonism and a persistent trace of
+apocalyptic yearnings have disrupted a history that was believed to
+be a trajectory, it is the past that has been getting longer and longer.
+From an earth thought in the seventeenth century to have begun
+around 4000 BC; to an eighteenth-century notion of an earth
+168,000 years old; to a “limitless” earthly past by the nineteenth
+century; to Charles Darwin’s speculation that one area of land was
+300 million years old, we see no reason not to accept Henri
+Bergson’s image of a “past which gnaws into the future and which
+swells as it advances.”
+
+Oddly enough it is in the modern West—where advance, progress,
+and change have been signatory features—where confidence in an
+enduring future is at its slightest.
+Pharaohs packed their tombs for time without end. The faithful
+were once content to spend a century perfecting a cathedral. But
+now, at least since 1945, the comfortable assurance of a “world
+without end” is subject to debate and, as we approach the year 2000,
+there is clearly no year 4000 or 5000 or 20,000 that hovers in or
+near our consciousness.
+What is infinite, it appears, what is always imaginable, always
+subject to analysis, adventure, and creation is past time. Even our
+definitions of the period we are living in have prefixes pointing
+backward: postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, post–Cold
+War. Our contemporary prophecies look back, behind themselves,
+post, after, what has gone on before. It is true, of course, that all
+knowledge requires a grasp of its precedents. Still it is remarkable
+how often imaginative forays into the far and distant future have
+been solely and simply opportunities to reimagine or alter the
+present as past. And this looking back, though enabled by
+technology’s future, offers no solace whatsoever for humanity’s
+future. Surrounding the platform from which the backward glance is
+cast is a dire, repulsive landscape.
+Perhaps it is the disruptive intervention of telecommunication
+technology, which so alters our sense of time, that encourages a
+longing for days gone by when the tempo was less discontinuous,
+closer to our own heartbeat. When time was anything but money.
+Perhaps centuries of imperialist appropriations of the future of other
+countries and continents have exhausted faith in our own. Perhaps
+the visions of the future that H. G. Wells saw—a stagnant body of
+never rippled water—have overwhelmed us and precipitated a flight
+into an eternity that has already taken place.
+There are good reasons for this rush into the past and the
+happiness its exploration, its revision, its deconstruction affords.
+One reason has to do with the secularization of culture. Where there
+will be no Messiah, where afterlife is understood to be medically
+
+absurd, where the concept of an “indestructible soul” is not only
+unbelievable but increasingly unintelligible in intellectual and
+literate realms, where passionate, deeply held religious belief is
+associated with ignorance at best, violent intolerance at its worst, in
+times as suspicious of eternal life as these are, when “life in history
+supplants life in eternity,” the eye, in the absence of resurrected or
+reincarnated life, becomes trained on the biological span of a single
+human being. Without “eternal life,” which casts humans in all time
+to come—forever—the future becomes discoverable space, outer
+space, which is, in fact, the discovery of more past time. The
+discovery of billions of years gone by. Billions of years—ago. And it is
+ago that unravels before us like a skein, the origins of which remain
+unfathomable.
+Another reason for this preference for an unlimited past is
+certainly fifty years of life in the nuclear age in which the end of time
+(that is human habitation within it) was and may still be a very real
+prospect. There seemed no point in imagining the future of a species
+there was little reason to believe would survive. Thus an obsession
+for time already spent became more than attractive; it became
+psychologically necessary. And the terrible futurelessness that
+accompanied the Cold War has not altered so much (in the wake of
+various disarmaments and freezes and nonproliferation treaties) as
+gone underground. We are tentative about articulating a long earthly
+future; we are cautioned against the luxury of its meditation as a
+harmful deferral and displacement of contemporary issues. Fearful,
+perhaps, of being likened to missionaries who were accused of
+diverting their converts’ attention from poverty during life to
+rewards following death, we accept a severely diminished future.
+I don’t want to give the impression that all current discourse is
+unrelievedly oriented to the past and indifferent to the future. The
+social and natural sciences are full of promises and warnings that
+will affect us over very long stretches of future time. Scientific
+applications are poised to erase hunger, annihilate pain, extend
+individual life spans by producing illness-resistant people and
+disease-resistant plants. Communication technology is already
+
+making sure that virtually everyone on earth can “interact” with one
+another and be entertained, maybe even educated, while doing so.
+We are warned about global changes in terrain and weather that can
+alter radically human environments; we are warned of the
+consequences of maldistributed resources on human survival and
+warned of the impact of overdistributed humans on natural
+resources. We invest heavily in these promises and sometimes act
+intelligently and compassionately on the warnings. But the promises
+trouble us with ethical dilemmas and a horror of playing God blindly,
+while the warnings have left us less and less sure of how and which
+and why. The prophecies that win our attention are those with bank
+accounts large enough or photo ops sensational enough to force the
+debates and outline corrective action, so we can decide which war or
+political debacle or environmental crisis is intolerable enough; which
+disease, which natural disaster, which institution, which plant, which
+mammal, bird, or fish needs our attention most. These are obviously
+serious concerns. What is noteworthy among the promises and
+warnings is that other than products and a little bit more personal
+time in the form of improved health, and more resources in the form
+of leisure and money to consume these products and services, the
+future has nothing to recommend itself.
+What will we think during these longer, healthier lives? How
+efficient were we in deciding whose genes were chosen to benefit
+from these “advances” and whose were deemed unworthy? No
+wonder the next twenty or forty years is all anyone wants to
+contemplate. To weigh the future of future thoughts requires some
+powerfully visionary thinking about how the life of the mind can
+operate in a moral context increasingly dangerous to its health. It
+will require thinking about the generations to come as life forms at
+least as important as cathedral-like forests and glistening seals. It
+will require thinking about generations to come as more than a
+century or so of one’s own family line, group stability, gender, sex,
+race, religion. Thinking about how we might respond if certain that
+our own line would last two thousand, twelve thousand more earthly
+years. It will require thinking about the quality of human life, not
+
+just its length. The quality of intelligent life, not just its strategizing
+abilities. The obligations of moral life, not just its ad hoc capacity for
+pity.
+It is abundantly clear that in the political realm the future is
+already catastrophe. Political discourse enunciates the future it
+references as something we can leave to or assure “our” children or—
+in a giant leap of faith—“our” grandchildren. It is the pronoun, I
+suggest, that ought to trouble us. We are not being asked to rally for
+the children, but for ours. “Our children” stretches our concern for
+two or five generations. “The children” gestures toward time to come
+of greater, broader, brighter possibilities—precisely what politics
+veils from view. Instead, political language is dominated by
+glorifications of some past decade, summoning strength from the
+pasted-on glamour of the twenties—a decade rife with war and the
+mutilation of third-world countries; from attaching simplicity and
+rural calm to the thirties—a decade of economic depression,
+worldwide strikes, and want so universal it hardly bears coherent
+thought; from the righteous forties when the “good war” was won
+and millions upon millions of innocents died wondering, perhaps
+what that word, “good,” could possibly mean. The fifties, a favorite,
+has acquired a gloss of voluntary orderliness, of ethnic harmony,
+although it was a decade of outrageous political and ethnic
+persecution. And here one realizes that the dexterity of political
+language is stunning, stunning and shameless. It enshrines the fifties
+as a model decade peopled by model patriots while at the same time
+abandoning the patriots who lived through them to reduced, inferior,
+or expensive health care; to gutted pensions; to choosing suicide or
+homelessness.
+What will we think during these longer, healthier lives? How
+successful we were in convincing our children that it doesn’t matter
+that their comfort was wrested and withheld from other children?
+How adept we were in getting the elderly to agree to indignity and
+poverty as their reward for good citizenship?
+In the realm of cultural analyses, not only is there no notion of an
+extended future, history itself is over. Modern versions of Oswald
+
+Spengler’s Decline of the West are erupting all over the land. Minus,
+however, his conviction that the modern world contained an
+unsurpassable “will to the Future.” The “landslide” began in 1973
+according to Eric Hobsbawm. And that postsixties date is more or
+less the agreed-upon marker for the beginning of the end. Killing the
+sixties, turning that decade into an aberration, an exotic malady ripe
+with excess, drugs, and disobedience, is designed to bury its central
+features—emancipation, generosity, acute political awareness, and a
+sense of a shared and mutually responsible society. We are being
+persuaded that all current problems are the fault of the sixties. Thus
+contemporary American culture is marketed as being in such
+disrepair it needs all our energy to maintain its feeble life-support
+system.
+Seen through the selectively sifted grains of past time, the future
+thins out, is dumbed down, limited to the duration of a thirty-year
+Treasury bond. So we turn inward, clutching at a primer-book dream
+of family—strong, ideal, protective. Small but blessed by law, and
+shored up by nineteenth-century “great expectations.” We turn to
+sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, pseudo-enemies, demons,
+false “causes” that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through
+which barbarians saunter; anxieties about language falling into the
+mouths of others. About authority shifting into the hands of
+strangers. Civilization in neutral, then grinding to a pitiful, impotent
+halt. The loudest voices are urging those already living in dread of
+the future to speak of culture in military terms—as a cause for and
+expression of war. We are being asked to reduce the creativity and
+complexity of our ordinary lives to cultural slaughter; we are being
+bullied into understanding the vital exchange of passionately held
+views as a collapse of intelligence and civility; we are being asked to
+regard public education with hysteria and dismantle rather than
+protect it; we are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term,
+CEO versions of our wholly human future. Our everyday lives may be
+laced with tragedy, glazed with frustration and want, but they are
+also capable of fierce resistance to the dehumanization and
+
+trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media
+depend upon.
+We are worried, for example, into catalepsy or mania by violence—
+our own and our neighbors’ disposition toward it. Whether that
+worry is exacerbated by violent images designed to entertain, or by
+scapegoating analyses of its presence, or by the fatal smile of a
+telegenic preacher, or by weapons manufacturers disguised as
+occupants of innocent duck blinds or bucolic hunting lodges, we are
+nevertheless becoming as imprisoned as the felons who feed the
+booming prison industry by the proliferation of a perfect product:
+guns. I say perfect because from the point of view of the weapons
+industry the marketing is for protection, virility, but the product’s
+real value, whether it is a single bullet, a thousand tons of dynamite,
+or a fleet of missiles, is that it annihilates itself immediately and
+creates, thereby, the instant need for more. That it also annihilates
+life is actually a by-product.
+What will we think during these longer, more comfortable lives?
+How we allowed resignation and testosteronic rationales to purloin
+the future and sentence us to the dead end that endorsed,
+glamorized, legitimated, commodified violence leads to? How we
+took our cue to solving social inequities from computer games,
+winning points or votes for how many of the vulnerable and unlucky
+we eliminated? Winning seats in government riding on the blood lust
+of capital punishment? Winning funding and attention by revamping
+1910 sociology to credit “innate” violence and so make imprisonment
+possible at birth? No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030
+—when we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that
+follow us.
+If scientific language is about a longer individual life in exchange
+for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of
+a few families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is
+discredited as contempt for the nonreligious; if secular language
+bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse
+for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is simply “upgrade,”
+where else might we look for hope in time’s own future?
+
+I am not interested here in signs of progress, an idea whose time
+has come and gone—gone with the blasted future of the monolithic
+communist state; gone also with the fallen mask of capitalism as free,
+unlimited, and progressive; gone with the deliberate pauperization of
+peoples that capitalism requires; gone also with the credibility of
+phallocentric “nationalisms.” But gone already by the time Germany
+fired its first death chamber. Already gone by the time South Africa
+legalized apartheid and gunned down its children in dust too thin to
+absorb their blood. Gone, gone in the histories of so many nations
+mapping their geography with lines drawn through their neighbors’
+mass graves; fertilizing their lawns and meadows with the nutrients
+of their citizens’ skeletons; supporting their architecture on the
+spines of women and children. No, it isn’t progress that interests me.
+I am interested in the future of time.
+Because art is temporal and because of my own interests, my
+glance turns easily to literature in general and narrative fiction in
+particular. I know that literature no longer holds a key place among
+valued systems of knowledge; that it has been shoved to the edge of
+social debate; is of minimal or purely cosmetic use in scientific,
+economic discourse. But it is precisely there, at the heart of that
+form, where the serious ethical debates and probings are being
+conducted. What does narrative tell us about this crisis in diminished
+expectations?
+I could look for an Edith Wharton shouting “Take your life”—that
+is, Take on your life! For a Henry James appalled (in The Sense of the
+Past) by an ancient castle that encloses and devours its owner. For a
+William Faulkner envisioning a postnuclear human voice, however
+puny. For a Ralph Ellison posing a question in the present tense
+signaling a sly and smiling promise of a newly sighted (visible)
+future. For a James Baldwin’s intense honesty coupled with an
+abiding faith that the price of the ticket had been paid in full and the
+ride begun. Those voices have been followed, perhaps supplanted, by
+another kind of response to our human condition. Modern searches
+into the past have produced extraordinary conceptual and structural
+innovations.
+
+The excitement of anticipating a future, once a fairly consistent
+preoccupation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature,
+has recently been reproduced in an amazing book by Umberto Eco—
+The Island of the Day Before. And its title makes my point. The
+genius of the novel’s narrative structure is having the protagonist
+located in the seventeenth century in order to mesmerize us with
+future possibilities. We are made to take desperate pleasure in
+learning what we already know to have taken place long ago. And
+this extraordinary novel is, as the author tells us, “a palimpsest of a
+rediscovered manuscript.” Through its construction and its reading
+we move forward into an already documented history. When the
+power and brilliance of many late-twentieth-century writers focus on
+our condition, they often find a rehearsal of the past to yield the most
+insightful examination of the present, and the images they leave with
+us are instructive.
+Peter Høeg, whose first novel nailed us relentlessly in the present,
+turns, in The History of Danish Dreams, to a kind of time travel
+(associated with though not similar to Eco’s) in which regression
+becomes progression.
+“If I persist,” Høeg writes at the end of this novel, “in writing the
+history of my family, then it is out of necessity. Those laws and
+regulations and systems and patterns that my family and every other
+family in Denmark have violated and conformed to and nudged and
+writhed under for two hundred years are now in fact in a state of
+foaming dissolution….Ahead lies the future, which I refuse to view as
+Carl Laurids did: down a gun barrel; or as Anna did: through a
+magnifying glass. I want to meet it face-to-face, and yet I am certain
+that if nothing is done, then there will be no future to face up to,
+since although most things in life are uncertain, the impending
+disaster and decline look like a safe bet. Which is why I feel like
+calling for help…and so I have called out to the past….
+“Now and again the thought strikes me that perhaps I have never
+really seen other people’s expectations, that I have only ever seen my
+own, and the loneliest thought in the world is the thought that what
+we have glimpsed is nothing other than ourselves. But now it is too
+
+late to think like that and something must be done, and before we
+can do anything we will have to form a picture of the twentieth
+century.”
+Forming a picture of the twentieth century then—not the twentyfirst—is, in this novel, the future’s project.
+William Gass, in a masterful work, The Tunnel, sustains a brilliant
+meditation on the recent past forever marked by Nazi Germany. In it
+his narrator/protagonist, having completed a “safe” morally
+ambivalent history of German fascism, a work titled Guilt and
+Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, finds himself unable to write the
+book’s preface. The paralysis is so long and so inflexible, he turns to
+the exploration of his own past life and its complicitous relationship
+to the historical subject of his scholarship—“a fascism of the heart.”
+Gass ends the novel in heartbreaking images of loss. “Suppose,” he
+writes,
+that instead of bringing forth flowers the bulb retreated to some
+former time just before it burgeoned, that pollen blew back into
+the breeze which bore it toward its pistil; suppose the tables
+were turned on death, it was bullied to begin things, and bear its
+children backward, so that the first breath didn’t swell the lung
+but stepped on it instead, as with a heavy foot upon a pedal; that
+there was…a rebellion in the ranks, and life picked the past to be
+in rather than another round of empty clicks called present
+time….I made…a try. I abandoned Poetry for History in my
+Youth.
+What a journey, though, to crawl in earth first, then in filth
+swim; to pass through your own plumbing, meet the worms
+within. And realize it. That you were. Under all the world. When
+I was a kid I lied like a sewer system. I told my sometime chums
+I went there. To the realm of shades. And said I saw vast halls,
+the many chambers of endless caves, magic pools guarded by
+Merlins dressed in mole fur and cobweb, chests overflowing with
+doubtless dime-store-jewelry, rooms of doubloons, and,
+suddenly, through an opening jagged as a rip in rotten cloth, a
+
+new sun shining, meadows filled with healthy flowers, crayoncolored streams, oh, the acres of Edens inside ourselves….
+Meanwhile carry on without complaining. No arm with
+armband raised on high. No more booming bands, no searchlit
+skies. Or shall I, like the rivers, rise? Ah. Well. Is rising wise?
+Revolver like the Führer near an ear. Or lay my mind down by
+sorrow’s side.
+This is no predictable apocalyptic reflex, surfacing out of the
+century’s mist like a Loch Ness hallucination. This is a mourning, a
+requiem, a folding away of time’s own future.
+What becomes most compelling, therefore, are the places and
+voices where the journey into the cellar of time is a rescue of sorts, an
+excavation for the purposes of building, discovering, envisioning a
+future. I am not, of course, encouraging and anointing happy endings
+—forced or truly felt—or anointing bleak ones intended as correctives
+or warnings. I mean to call attention to whether the hand that holds
+the book’s metaphors is an open palm or a fist.
+In The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara opens this brilliant novel
+with a startling question: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to
+be well?” Are you sure you want to be well? What flows from that
+very serious inquiry is a healing that requires a frightened modernday Demeter to fathom and sound every minute of her and her
+community’s depths, to rethink and relive the past—simply to answer
+that question. The success of her excavation is described in these
+terms:
+“What had driven Velma into the oven…was nothing compared to
+what awaited her, was to come….Of course she would fight it, Velma
+was a fighter. Of course she would reject what could not be explained
+in terms of words, notes, numbers or those other systems whose
+roots had been driven far underground….Velma’s next trial might
+lead to an act far more devastating than striking out at the body or
+swallowing gas….
+“The patient turning smoothly on the stool, head thrown back
+about to shout, to laugh, to sing. No need of Minnie’s hands now.
+
+That is clear. Velma’s glow aglow and two yards wide of clear and
+unstreaked white and yellow. Her eyes scanning the air surrounding
+Minnie, then examining her own hands, fingers stretched and
+radiant. No need of Minnie’s hands now so the healer withdraws
+them, drops them in her lap just as Velma, rising on steady legs,
+throws off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon.”
+The title of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh,
+suggests the narrative will end on a deathbed or in a graveyard. In
+fact it does. The storyteller/protagonist, Moraes Zogoiby, leads us on
+an exhilarating journey in order to nail his papers on the wall. Papers
+that are the result of his “daily, silent singing for [his daily] life.”
+Telling, writing, recording four generations of family and national
+history. A history of devastating loves, transcendent hatreds; of
+ambition without limit and sloth without redemption; loyalties
+beyond understanding and deceptions beyond imagination. When
+every step, every pause of this imaginary is finally surrendered to our
+view, this is the close:
+The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and spiky and
+as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass’s
+yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by
+a thick brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have
+long. My breaths are numbered, like the years of the ancient
+world, in reverse, and the countdown to zero is well advanced. I
+have used the last of my strength to make this pilgrimage….
+At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my
+fingertip reads them for me. R I P. Very well: I will rest, and
+hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting for their
+moment of return….Somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty
+in a glass coffin awaits a prince’s kiss. See: here is my flask. I’ll
+drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay
+me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these
+letters R I P, and close my eyes, according to our family’s old
+practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to
+awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.
+
+The rest, the peace is twice enunciated, but so is the hope. For
+renewal, joy, and, most importantly, “a better time.”
+In 1991 Ben Okri ended his novel The Famished Road with a
+dream so deeply felt it is prioritized over the entire narrative:
+The air in the room was calm. There were no turbulences. His
+[father’s] presence protected our nightspace. There were no
+forms invading our air, pressing down on our roof, walking
+through the objects. The air was clear and wide. In my sleep I
+found open spaces where I floated without fear….The sweetness
+dissolved my fears. I was not afraid of Time.
+And then it was another morning….
+A dream can be the highest point of a life.
+In 1993, continuing the story of this sighted child, Okri concludes
+Songs of Enchantment with a more pronounced gesture toward the
+future: “Maybe one day we will see the mountains ahead of
+us….Maybe one day we will see the seven mountains of our
+mysterious destiny. Maybe one day we will see that beyond our chaos
+there could always be a new sunlight, and serenity.”
+The symbolisms of the mountains he is referring to make up the
+opening of the book:
+We didn’t see the seven mountains ahead of us. We didn’t see
+how they are always ahead. Always calling us, always reminding
+us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realized,
+joys to be rediscovered, promises made before birth to be
+fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.
+We didn’t notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished,
+that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have
+to redream our lives, and that life can always be used to create
+more light.
+
+The expectation in these lines is palpable, insistent on the
+possibility of “one great action lived out all the way to the sea,
+chang[ing] the history of the world.”
+Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead flails and slashes
+through thousands of years of New World history, from centuries
+before the conquistadors made their appearances on these shores to
+the current day. The novel rests on a timelessness that is not only
+past, but a future timelessness as well—time truly without end. The
+final image of this narrative is the snake spirit “pointing toward the
+South in the direction from which the people will come.” The future
+tense of the verb is attached to a direction that is, unlike the
+directions of most of the comings we approve of, the south. And it is
+impossible to ignore the fact that it is precisely “the south” where
+walls, fences, armed guards, and foaming hysteria are, at this very
+moment, gathering.
+Cocoons from which healed women burst, dreams that take the
+terror from time, tombstone hopes for a better time, a time beyond
+chaos where the seven mountains of destiny lie, snake gods
+anticipating the people who will come from the south—these closing
+images following treks into the past lead one to hazard the
+conclusion that some writers disagree with prevailing notions of
+futurelessness. That they very much indeed not only have but insist
+on a future. That for them, for us, history is beginning again.
+I am not ferreting out signs of tentative hope, obstinate optimism
+in contemporary fiction; I believe I am detecting an informed vision
+based on harrowing experience that nevertheless gestures toward a
+redemptive future. And I notice the milieu from which this vision
+rises. It is race inflected, gendered, colonialized, displaced, hunted.
+There is an interesting trace here of divergent imaginaries,
+between the sadness of no more time, of the poignancy of inverted
+time—time that has only a past—of time itself living on “borrowed
+time,” between that imaginary and the other one that has growing
+expectations of time with a relentless future. One looks to history for
+the feel of time or its purgative effects; one looks through art for its
+signs of renewal.
+
+Literature, sensitive as a tuning fork, is an unblinking witness to
+the light and shade of the world we live in.
+Beyond the world of literature, however, is another world; the
+world of commentary that has a quite other view of things. A Janus
+head that has masked its forward face and is at pains to assure us
+that the future is hardly worth the time. Perhaps it is the reality of a
+future as durable and far-reaching as the past, a future that will be
+shaped by those who have been pressed to the margins, by those who
+have been dismissed as irrelevant surplus, by those who have been
+cloaked with the demon’s cape; perhaps it is the contemplation of
+that future that has occasioned the tremble of latter-day prophets
+afraid that the current disequilibria is a stirring, not an erasure. That
+not only is history not dead, but that it is about to take its first
+unfettered breath. Not soon, perhaps not in thirty years or fifty,
+because such a breath, such a massive intake, will take time. But it
+will be there. If that is so, then we should heed the meditations of
+literature. William Gass is correct. There are “acres of Edens inside
+ourselves.” Time does have a future. Longer than its past and
+infinitely more hospitable—to the human race.
+
+INTERLUDE
+
+Black Matter(s)
+
+Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
+Pursuing the recollections of several people for projects he is
+engaged in, Martin Luther King III recently asked me for my
+thoughts on his father. And one of his questions was predictable,
+designed to elicit some subjective response. He said, “If you were
+having a conversation with my father, what would you like to ask
+him?” And for some wholly unaccountable reason, my heart skipped
+and I fairly keened into the telephone. “Oh, I hope he is not
+disappointed. Do you think he’s disappointed? There must be
+something here to please him.” Well, I calmed my voice to disguise
+what was becoming obvious to me, that what I really meant was, “I
+hope he is not disappointed in me.”
+I went on to frame a question that I would like to put to him, and I
+set aside my thoughts about the current state of affairs for the
+dispossessed: some wins, but some big-time losses; some vaulting
+leaps, but much slow sinking into muddy despair.
+But all the while, I was wondering, Would he be disappointed in
+me? And it was odd, because I never met Reverend King. My
+memory of him is print-bound, electronic, through the narratives of
+other people. Yet I felt this personal responsibility to him. He did
+that to people. I realized later that I was responding to something
+other, and more durable, than the complex personhood of King. Not
+to the preacher he was or the scholar he was or the vulnerable
+human being, not to the political strategist, the orator, the brilliant,
+risk-taking activist. But I was responding to his mission. His, as he
+coined it, audacious faith. His expectation of transforming,
+appending, cosmic elegy into a psalm of brotherhood.
+
+His confidence that we were finer than we thought, that there were
+moral grounds we would not abandon, lines of civil behavior we
+simply would not cross. That there were things we would gladly give
+up for the public good, that a comfortable life, resting on the
+shoulders of other people’s misery, was an abomination this country,
+especially, among all nations, found offensive.
+I know the world is better, finer, because he lived in it. My anxiety
+was personal. Was I any better? Finer? Because I have lived in a
+world that is imaginary. Would he be disappointed in me? The
+answer isn’t important. But the question really is, and that is the
+legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He made the act of assuming
+personal responsibility for alleviating social harm ordinary, habitual,
+and irresistible. My tribute to him is the profound gratitude I feel for
+the gift that his life truly was.
+
+Race Matters
+
+E
+
+ARLY ON in my life as a writer, I looked for but never
+actually found a sovereignty, an authority like that available to me in
+fiction writing, but at no other site. In that activity alone did I feel
+completely coherent and totally unfettered. There, in the process of
+writing, was the illusion, the deception of control, of nestling up ever
+closer to meaning. There was (and still is) the delight of redemption,
+the seduction of origineity. But I have known for a good portion of
+the past twenty-nine years that those delights, those seductions are
+rather more than less deliberate inventions necessary both to do the
+work and to legislate its mystery. But it became increasingly clear
+how language was both liberating and imprisoning. Whatever the
+forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always in
+earshot, was race.
+I have never lived, nor have any of you, in a world in which race
+did not matter. Such a world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is
+frequently imagined or described as dreamscape, Edenesque,
+utopian so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. From
+Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful language, to Doris Lessing’s fourgated city, from Saint Augustine to Jean Toomer’s “American,” the
+race-free world has been posited as ideal, millennial, a condition
+possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or situated in a
+protected preserve, rather like a wilderness park.
+But, for the purposes of this talk and because of certain projects I
+am engaged in, I prefer to think of a world in which race does not
+matter—not as a theme park, or a failed and always failing dream,
+nor as the father’s house of many rooms. I am thinking of it as home.
+For three reasons.
+
+First, making a radical distinction between the metaphor of house
+and the metaphor of home helps me clarify my thinking on racial
+construction. Second, it moves the concept of unmattering race away
+from yearning and desire; away from an impossible future or an
+irretrievable and probably nonexistent past to a manageable, doable
+human activity. Third because eliminating the potency of racial
+constructs in language is the work I can do. I can’t wait for the
+ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work.
+Also matters of race and matters of home are priorities in my work
+and both have in one way or another initiated my search for
+sovereignty as well as my abandonment of that search once I
+recognized its disguise.
+As an already and always raced writer, I knew at once, from the
+very beginning, that I could not, would not reproduce the master’s
+voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father.
+Nor would I substitute his voice with that of his fawning mistress or
+his worthy opponent, for both of those positions (mistress or
+opponent) seemed to confine me to his terrain, in his arena,
+accepting the house rules in the dominance game. If I have to live in
+a racial house, it was important at the least to rebuild it so that it was
+not a windowless prison into which I was forced, a thick-walled,
+impenetrable container from which no sound could be heard, but
+rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of
+windows and doors. Or at the most, it became imperative for me to
+transform this house completely. I was tempted to convert it into a
+palace where racism didn’t hurt so much; to crouch in one of its
+many rooms where coexistence offered the delusion of agency. At
+some point I tried to use the race house as a scaffolding from which
+to launch a movable feast that could operate, be celebrated on any
+number of chosen sites. That was the authority, the glossy comfort,
+the redemptive quality, the freedom writing at first seemed to
+promise. Yet in that freedom, as in all freedoms (especially stolen
+ones), lay danger. Could I redecorate, redesign, even reconceive the
+racial house without forfeiting a home of my own? Would this forged,
+willed freedom demand an equally forged homelessness? Would it
+
+condemn me to eternal bouts of nostalgia for the home I have never
+had and would never know? Or would it require intolerable
+circumspection, a self-censoring bond to the original locus of racial
+architecture? In short, wasn’t I (wouldn’t I always be) tethered to a
+death-dealing ideology even (and especially) when I honed all my
+intelligence toward subverting it?
+These questions, which have engaged so many, have troubled all of
+my work. How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist
+house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race
+while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of
+language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although
+my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I
+think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and
+politically unresolved. Frankly, I look to readers for literary and
+extraliterary analyses for much of what can be better understood. I
+believe, however, that my literary excursions, and my use of a
+house/home antagonism, are related to the matters under discussion
+during the course of the next two days, because so much of what
+seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy,
+authenticity, community, belonging—is, in fact, about home. An
+intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home;
+forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the
+dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative
+responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of
+homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism,
+diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions,
+assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body,
+the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the
+terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters.
+There was a moment of some significance to me that followed the
+publication of Beloved and was a part of my reflection on the process
+of doing it. It is a moment that telescopes part of the territory to be
+mapped during this conference. This moment concerns the
+complexity inherent in creating narrative language both racially
+referential and figuratively logical.
+
+Someone saw the last sentence of Beloved as it was originally
+written. In fact it was the penultimate sentence if one thinks of the
+last word—the resurrection of the title, the character, and the
+epigraph—as the very last sentence. In any case the phrase “Certainly
+no clamor for a kiss,” which appears in the printed book, is not the
+one with which I had originally closed the book, and this friend was
+startled by the change. I told him that my editor had suggested an
+alteration at that point, although he in no way offered a description
+of what the change might be. The friend railed at my editor for the
+audacity of suggesting a change, and at me, too, for considering, let
+alone admitting one. I then went to some pains to explain to him why
+I made the change but became entangled in what the original phrase
+had meant, or, rather, what the original last word of the phrase had
+meant to me. How long it took to arrive at it, how I thought it was the
+perfect final word; that it connected everything together from the
+epigraph and the difficult plot to the struggles of the characters
+through the process of re-membering the body and its parts, remembering the family, the neighborhood…and our national history.
+And that this last word reflected this re-membering, revealed its
+necessity, and provided the bridge I wanted from the beginning of
+the book to its end, as well as to the beginning of the book that was to
+follow. As I went on with the importance of this original last word,
+my friend became angrier and angrier. Nevertheless, I said, I thought
+there was something to be considered in the editor’s objection—
+which was simply that, not a command. He wondered if a better
+word could be found to end the book because the one I had chosen
+was too dramatic, too theatrical. At first I disagreed with the editor
+about that. It was a very simple common word, but in the context of
+the previous sentences he believed it stood out like a sore thumb.
+That may even have been his phrase.
+So I resisted it for a long time. A long time considering that we
+were in galley. Or rather late stages of manuscript, I guess. At any
+rate, I went away and thought about it. Thought about it every day in
+terms of whether to leave it the way I had originally written it or
+whether to change it. I decided, finally, to let the decision rest on
+
+whether I could indeed find a better word. One that produced the
+same meaning.
+I didn’t find any satisfactory replacement for weeks. And I was
+eager to find something because the point that gripped me was that
+even if the word I had chosen originally was the absolute right one,
+something was wrong if it stood out that way and did not complete
+the meaning of the text, but dislodged it. So it wasn’t a question of
+simply substituting one word for another that meant the same thing
+—a synonym—or of trying to decide whether my original word was
+apt. I might have to rewrite a good deal in order to assure myself that
+my original last word worked.
+I decided that it didn’t. I decided that there was another word that
+could do the same thing with less mystification. That word was
+“kiss.”
+Well, the discussion with my friend made me realize that I’m still
+unhappy about it, because “kiss” works at a level a bit too shallow.
+“Kiss” works at a level that searches for and locates a quality or
+element of the novel that was not, and is not, its primary feature. The
+primary feature is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The
+feature was necessity, something that precedes love, follows love,
+informs love, shapes love, and to which love is subservient. In this
+case the necessity was for a kind of connection, an acknowledgment,
+a paying out of homage still due.
+I was inclined to believe that there were poorly lit passages leading
+up to that original word if indeed it was so very misunderstood and
+so strongly and wrongly unsettling. I have been reading some
+analyses of revisions of texts out of copyright and thinking about the
+ways in which books get not only reread but also rewritten not only
+in one’s own language with the ambivalence of the writer and the
+back-and-forth between editor and writer, but also what happens in
+translation. The liberties taken that enhance; the liberties taken that
+diminish. And for me the alarm. There is always the threat of not
+being taken seriously, of having the work reduced to a primer, of
+having the politics of language, the politics of another language
+imposed on the writer’s own politics.
+
+My effort to manipulate American English was not to take
+standard English and use vernacular to decorate or to paint over it,
+but to carve away its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance,
+paralysis, and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions
+were not only available but were inevitable. That is what I thought
+my original last word accomplished, then I became convinced that it
+did not, and now am sorry I made the change. The trouble it takes to
+find just one word and know that it is that note and no other that
+would do is an extraordinary battle. To have found it and lost it is in
+retrospect infuriating. On the one hand, what could it matter? Can a
+book really fall apart because of one word, even if it’s in a critical
+position? Probably not. On the other hand, maybe so, if the writing
+of it tries for racial specificity and figurative coherence. In this
+instance, I settled for the latter. I gave up a word that was racially
+resonant and figuratively logical for one that was only the latter,
+because my original last word was so clearly disjunctive, a sore
+thumb, a jarring note combining as it did two functions linguistically
+incompatible except when signaling racial exoticism.
+Actually I think my editor was right. The original word was the
+“wrong” word. But I also know that my friend was right: the “wrong”
+word, in this case, was the only word. As you can see, my assertion of
+agency outside the raced house turned into a genuflection in its
+familiar (more comfortable) yard.
+That experience of regret highlights for me the need to rethink the
+subtle yet pervasive attachments we may all have to the architecture
+of race. The need to think about what it means and what it takes to
+live in a redesigned racial house and to defiantly, if erroneously, call
+it diversity or multiculturalism—to call it home. To think about how
+invested some of the best theoretical work may be in clinging to its
+simulacra. To think about what new dangers present themselves
+when escape or chosen exile from that house is achieved.
+I risk charges here of escapism and of encouraging futile efforts to
+transcend race or pernicious ones to trivialize it, and it would worry
+me a great deal if my remarks and the project I am working on were
+to be so completely misunderstood. What I am determined to do is to
+
+take what is articulated as the elusive future and domesticate it; to
+concretize what is, outside of science fiction, rendered in political
+language and thought as permanently unrealizable dream. My
+confrontation is piecemeal and very slow, of course, because unlike
+the successful advancement of an argument, narration requires the
+complicity of a reader in discovery. And there are no pictures to ease
+the difficulty.
+In various novels the adventure for me has been explorations of
+seemingly impenetrable, race-inflected, race-clotted topics. From the
+first book, where I was interested in racism as a cause, consequence,
+and manifestation of individual and social psychosis; to the next one,
+in which I was preoccupied with the culture of gender, the invention
+of identity, both of which acquired astonishing meaning when placed
+in a racial context. On to Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, where I
+was interested in the impact of race on the romance of community
+and individuality; in Beloved the revelatory possibilities of historical
+narration when the body-mind, subject-object, past-present
+oppositions, viewed through the lens of race, collapse and become
+seamless. In Jazz I tried to locate modernity as a response to the race
+house, in an effort to blow up its all-encompassing shelter, its allknowingness, and its assumptions of control. And currently to first
+enunciate and then destabilize the racial gaze altogether in Paradise.
+In Jazz the dynamite fuse was lit under narrative voice. The voice
+that could begin with claims of knowledge, inside knowledge, and
+indisputable authority—“I know that woman…”—and end with the
+blissful epiphany of its humanity and its own needs.
+In my current project I want to see whether or not race-specific,
+race-free language is both possible and meaningful in narration. And
+I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus; a place
+where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place “already
+made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never
+needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn
+leaves but not rain. Where moonlight can be counted on if the sky is
+clear and stars no matter what. And below, just yonder, a river called
+Treason to rely on.” I want to imagine not the threat of freedom, or
+
+its tentative, gasping fragility, but the concrete thrill of
+borderlessness—a kind of out-of-doors safety where “a sleepless
+woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her
+shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it
+she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no
+fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her
+because whatever it was that made the sound, it wasn’t something
+creeping up on her. Nothing for ninety miles around thought she was
+prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, think of food
+preparations, war, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and think
+of nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way.
+And if a light shone from a house up a ways and the cry of a colicky
+baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house and call
+out softly to the woman inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of
+them might take turns massaging the infant stomach, rocking, or
+trying to get a little soda water down. When the baby quieted they
+could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so as not to
+wake anybody else.
+“The woman could decide to go back to her own house then,
+refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might keep her direction and
+walk further down the road….On out, beyond the limits of town,
+because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.”
+The overweening event of the modern world is not its technology;
+it is the mass movement of populations. Beginning with the largest
+forcible transfer of people in the history of the world: slavery. The
+consequences of which transfer have determined all the wars
+following it as well as the current ones being waged on every
+continent. The contemporary world’s work has become policing,
+forming policy regarding, and trying to administrate the perpetual
+movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citizenship
+—is marked by exile, refugees, guest arbiter, immigrants, migrations,
+the displaced, the fleeing, and the under siege. Hunger for home is
+entombed among the central metaphors in the discourse on
+globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the breakup of nations,
+and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these dreams of home are
+
+frequently as raced themselves as the originating racial house that
+has defined them. When they are not raced, they are, as I suggested
+earlier, landscape, never inscape; utopia, never home.
+I applaud and am indebted to scholars here and elsewhere who are
+clearing (theoretical) space where racial constructs are being forced
+to reveal their struts and bolts; their technology and their carapace,
+so that political action, intellectual thought, and cultural production
+can be generated.
+The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and
+have already described, defined, and named the possibility of
+imagining race without dominance, without hierarchy as
+“barbarism”; as destroying the four-gated city; as the end of history—
+all of which can be read as garbage, rubbish, an already damaged
+experience, a valueless future. If, once again, the political
+consequence of theoretical work is already named catastrophe, it is
+more urgent than ever to develop nonmessianic language to refigure
+the raced community, to decipher the deracing of the world. More
+urgent than ever to develop an epistemology that is neither
+intellectual slumming nor self-serving reification. You are marking
+out space for critical work that neither bleeds the race house for the
+gains it provides in authenticity and insiderism nor abandons it to its
+signifying gestureism. If the world-as-home that we are working for
+is already described in the race house as waste, the work this
+scholarship draws our attention to is not just interesting—it may save
+our lives.
+These campuses where we mostly work and frequently assemble
+will not remain alien terrain within whose fixed borders we travel
+from one kind of race-inflected community to another as
+interpreters, native guides; or campuses resigned to the status of
+segregated castles from whose balustrades we view—even invite—the
+homeless; or markets where we permit ourselves to be auctioned,
+bought, silenced, and vastly compromised depending on the whim of
+the master and the going rate.
+The distrust that race studies receive from the authenticating offcampus community is legitimate only when the scholars themselves
+
+have not imaged their own homes; have not unapologetically realized
+and recognized that the valuable work they do can be done in no
+other place; have not envisioned academic life as neither straddling
+opposing worlds nor as a flight from any. W. E. B. Du Bois’s
+observation is a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure. Beyond the
+outside/inside double consciousness, this new space postulates the
+inwardness of the outside; imagines safety without walls where we
+can conceive of a third, if you will pardon the expression, world,
+“already made for me, both snug and wide open, with a doorway
+never needing to be closed.”
+Home.
+
+Black Matter(s)
+
+I
+
+HAVE BEEN thinking for some time now about the validity or
+vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted
+among literary historians and critics and circulated as “knowledge.”
+This “knowledge” holds that traditional, canonical American
+literature is free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African
+Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which
+shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of
+the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the
+origin and development of that culture’s literature. Moreover, it
+assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate
+from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and
+unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less
+tacit agreement among literary scholars that because American
+literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius,
+and power, those views, genius, and power are removed from and
+without relationship to the presence of black people in the United
+States—a population that antedated every American writer of renown
+and was perhaps the most furtively radical, impinging force on the
+country’s literature.
+The contemplation of this black presence is central to any
+understanding of our national literature and should not be relegated
+to the margins of the literary imagination. It may be that American
+literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity because of and in
+reference to this unsettled and unsettling population. I have begun to
+wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American
+literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social
+
+engagement and historical isolation—are not acute and ambiguous
+moral problematics, but in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing
+Africanistic presence. The coded language and purposeful restriction
+by which the newly formed nation dealt with the racial
+disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart are maintained in its
+literature, even through the twentieth century. A real or fabricated
+Africanistic presence has been crucial to writers’ sense of their
+Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored
+omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and
+the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this
+presence.
+My curiosity has developed into a still-informal study of what I am
+calling American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in
+which a nonwhite, Africanistic presence was constructed in the
+United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence
+served. I am using “Africanism” as a term for the denotative and
+connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well
+as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings
+that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes. It is important to
+recognize the lack of restraint attached to the uses of this trope. As a
+disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in
+the Eurocentric tradition favored by American education, both a way
+of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license,
+and repression, the formation and the exercise of power, and ethics
+and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and
+reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes
+it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and
+engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It
+provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and
+fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of
+freedom.
+What Africanism became and how it functioned in the literary
+imagination are of paramount interest because it may be possible to
+discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature and
+even the source of literary “whiteness.” What is it for? What parts do
+
+the invention and development of “whiteness” play in the
+construction of what is described as an “American”? If this inquiry of
+mine ever comes to maturity, it may provide me access to a coherent
+reading of American literature, a reading that is not completely
+available to me now—not least, I suspect, because of the studied
+indifference of literary criticism to these matters.
+One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large
+and compelling subject is that in matters of race, silence and evasion
+have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered
+another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded and
+made unavailable for open debate. The situation is aggravated by the
+anxiety that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated
+by the fact that ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, liberal,
+even generous habit. To notice is to recognize an already discredited
+difference; to maintain its invisibility through silence is to allow the
+black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.
+Following this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing
+and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and
+scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but
+neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that
+has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded
+American authors and blocked access to the remarkable insights
+some of their works contain.
+Another reason for this ornamental vacuum in literary discourse is
+the pattern of thinking about racialism asymmetrically, in terms of
+its consequences on its victims alone. A good deal of time and
+intelligence have been invested in exposing racialism and its horrific
+effects on its objects. The result has been constant, if erratic, efforts
+to legislate preventive regulations. There have also been powerful
+and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin of racialism itself,
+contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable and permanent part
+of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries in
+any way. It is precisely because of them that any progress has been
+accomplished in matters of racial discourse. But I do want to see that
+well-established study joined by another, equally important: the
+
+effect of racialism on those who perpetuate it. It seems to me both
+poignant and striking how the effect of racialism on the subject has
+been avoided and unanalyzed. The scholarship that looks into the
+mind, the imagination, and the behavior of slaves is valuable; equally
+so is a serious intellectual examination of what racial ideology did
+and does to the mind, the imagination, and the behavior of the
+master.
+National literatures, like writers, get along as best they can and
+with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and
+inscribing what is really on the national mind. For the most part,
+literature of the United States has taken as its concern the
+architecture of a new white man. If I am disenchanted with the
+indifference of literary criticism toward examining the nature of that
+concern, I do have a last resort: the writers themselves.
+Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic,
+most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to
+imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, and to mystify
+the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. The languages
+she or he uses (imagistic, structural, narrative) and the social and
+historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and
+direct revelations of that power and its limitations. So it is to them,
+the creators of American literature, that I look for some clarification
+about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States.
+How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine
+an Africanistic Other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary
+strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? In short, what
+happens? What does the inclusion of Africans and African Americans
+do to and for the text? As a reader, I had always assumed that
+nothing “happens.” That Africans and their descendants are there in
+no sense that matters; that when they are there, they are decorative,
+displays of the facile writer’s technical expertise. I assumed that since
+the author was not Africanistic, the appearance of Africanistic
+characters, narrative, or idiom in his or her work could never be
+about anything other than the “normal,” unracialized, illusory white
+world that provides the backdrop for the work. Certainly no
+
+American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black
+people, any more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom
+to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I realized the
+obvious: that the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication
+of an Africanistic persona was reflexive; it was an extraordinary
+meditation on the self, a powerful exploration of the fears and
+desires that reside in the writerly consciousness (as well as in
+others), an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity,
+of shame, of magnanimity.
+Reading these texts as a writer allowed me deeper access to them.
+It was as though I had been looking at a fishbowl, seeing the glide
+and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white
+careening back from the gills, the castles at the bottom, surrounded
+by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green, the barely disturbed
+water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to
+the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl itself, the structure
+transparently, invisibly, permitting the ordered life it contained to
+exist in the larger world. In other words, I began to rely on my
+knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives, on my
+sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of
+their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the
+linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the
+surprise that is the inevitable, necessary concomitant of the act of
+creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways
+Americans chose to talk about themselves through and within a
+sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked
+representation of an Africanistic presence.
+��
+Young America distinguished itself by pressing with full awareness
+toward a future, a freedom, a kind of human dignity believed to be
+unprecedented in the world. A whole tradition of “universal”
+yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled phrase “the American
+Dream.” While the immigrants’ dream deserves the exhaustive
+
+scrutiny it has received in the scholarly disciplines and the arts, it is
+just as important to know what these people were rushing from as it
+is to know what they were hastening to. If the New World fed
+dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for
+them? And how might that reality caress and grip the shaping of a
+new one?
+The flight from the Old World to the New is generally understood
+to be a flight from oppression and limitation to freedom and
+possibility. In fact, for some the escape was a flight from license—
+from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and
+undisciplined. For those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones,
+however, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. The Old
+World offered these emigrants only poverty, prison, social ostracism,
+and not infrequently death. There was, of course, another group of
+immigrants who came for the adventures possible in founding a
+colony for rather than against one or another mother country or
+fatherland. And of course there were the merchants, who came for
+the cash.
+To all these people, the attraction was of the “clean slate” variety, a
+once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again, but to be
+born again in new clothes, as it were: the new setting would provide
+new raiments of self. The New World offered the vision of a limitless
+future that gleamed more brightly against the constraint,
+dissatisfaction, and turmoil being left behind. A promise genuinely
+promising. With luck and endurance one could discover freedom,
+find a way to make God’s law manifest in Man, or end up rich as a
+prince. The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning
+for God’s law is born of the detestation of man’s license and
+corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and
+debt.
+There was much more to make the trip worth the risk. The habit of
+genuflection would be replaced by the thrill of command. Power—
+control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt
+before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution. One could
+move from discipline and punishment to disciplining and punishing;
+
+from being socially ostracized to becoming an arbiter of social rank.
+One could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a
+kind of historylessness—a blank page waiting to be inscribed. Much
+was to be written there: noble impulses were made into law and
+appropriated for a national tradition, but so were base ones, learned
+and elaborated in the rejected and rejecting homeland.
+The body of literature produced by the young nation is one place it
+inscribed these fears, forces, and hopes. It is difficult to read the
+literature of young America without being struck by how antithetical
+it is to our modern conception of “the American Dream,” how
+pronounced is the absence of that term’s elusive mixture of hope,
+realism, materialism, and promise. Coming from a people who made
+much of their “newness”—their potential, their freedom, their
+innocence—it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened,
+and how haunted the early, founding literature truly is.
+We have words and labels for this haunting—“gothic,” “romantic,”
+“sermonic,” “Puritan”—whose sources are, of course, to be found in
+the literature of the world from which they fled. But the strong
+affinity between the nineteenth-century American psyche and gothic
+romance has, rightly, been much remarked upon. It is not surprising
+that a young country, repelled by Europe’s moral and social disorder
+and swooning in a fit of desire and rejection, would devote its talents
+to reproducing in its own literature the typology of diabolism from
+which its citizens and their fathers had fled. After all, one way to
+benefit from the lessons of earlier mistakes and past misfortunes was
+to record them—an inoculation against their repetition, as it were.
+Romance was the form in which this uniquely American
+prophylaxis was played out. Long after it had faded in Europe,
+romance remained the cherished expression of young America. What
+was there in American romanticism that made it so attractive to
+Americans as a battle plain upon which to fight, to engage, to
+imagine their demons?
+It has been suggested that romance is an evasion of history, and
+thus perhaps attractive to a people trying to evade the recent past.
+But I am more persuaded by arguments that find in it the head-on
+
+encounter with very real, very pressing historical forces and the
+contradictions inherent in them, as these come to be experienced by
+writers. Romance, an exploration of anxiety imported from the
+shadows of European culture, made possible the embrace—
+sometimes safe, other times risky—of some quite specific,
+understandably human, American fears: the fear of being outcast, of
+failing, of powerlessness; of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled
+and crouched for attack; of the absence of so-called civilization; of
+loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the
+terror of human freedom—the thing they coveted most of all.
+Romance offered writers not less but more; not a narrow historical
+canvas but a wide one; not escape but enlargement. It offered
+platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative
+entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror—whose
+most significant, overweening ingredient was darkness, with all the
+connotative value it contained.
+—
+There is no romance free of what Melville called “the power of
+blackness,” especially not in a country in which there was a resident
+population, already black, upon which the imagination could
+articulate the fears, the dilemmas, the divisions that obsessed it
+historically, morally, metaphysically, and socially. This slave
+population seemed to volunteer as objects for meditation on the lure
+and elusiveness of human freedom, on the outcast’s terror and his
+dread of failure, of powerlessness, Nature without limits, inborn
+loneliness, internal aggression, evil, sin, greed…; in other words, on
+human freedom in all terms except those of human potential and the
+rights of man.
+And yet the rights of man, an organizing principle upon which the
+nation was founded, was inevitably, and especially, yoked to
+Africanism. Its history and origin are permanently allied with
+another seductive concept—the hierarchy of race. As Orlando
+Patterson has noted, we should not be surprised that the
+
+Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised
+if it could not. The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum.
+Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like
+slavery.
+In that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found
+not only the not-free but also the projection of the not-me. The result
+was a playground for the imagination. And what rose up out of
+collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external
+exploitation was an Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness,
+otherness, alarm, and desire—that is uniquely American. (There also
+exists a European Africanism with its counterpart in its own colonial
+literature.)
+What I wish to examine is how the image of reigned-in, bound,
+suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American
+literature as an Africanistic persona. I want to show how the duties of
+that persona—duties of mirroring and embodying and exorcism—are
+demanded and displayed throughout much of the national literature
+and help provide its distinguishing characteristics.
+Earlier I said that cultural identities are formed and informed by a
+nation’s literature, and that what seemed to be on the “mind” of the
+literature of the United States was the self conscious but highly
+problematic construction of the American as a new white man.
+Emerson’s call for that new man, “The American Scholar,” indicates
+the deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for
+establishing difference. But the writers who responded to this call,
+accepting or rejecting it, did not look solely to Europe to establish a
+reference for difference. There was a very theatrical difference
+underfoot. Writers were able to celebrate or deplore an identity—
+already existing or rapidly taking form—that was elaborated through
+racial difference. That difference provided a huge trove of signs,
+symbols, and agencies for organizing, separating, and consolidating
+identity along valuable lines of interest.
+Bernard Bailyn has provided us with an extraordinary
+investigation of European settlers in the act of becoming Americans.
+Particularly relevant is a description in his Voyagers to the West. I
+
+want to quote a rather long passage from that book because it helps
+to clarify and underscore the salient aspects of this American
+character that I have been describing:
+William Dunbar, seen through his letters and diary, appears to
+be more fictional than real….He…was a man in his early twenties
+who appeared suddenly in the Mississippi wilderness to stake
+out a claim to a large parcel of land, then disappeared to the
+Caribbean, to return leading a battalion of “wild” slaves with
+whose labor alone he built an estate where before there had been
+nothing but trees and uncultivated soil….He was…complex…
+and…part of a violent biracial world whose tensions could lead
+in strange directions. For this wilderness planter was a scientist,
+who would later correspond with Jefferson on science and
+exploration, a Mississippi planter whose contributions to the
+American
+Philosophical
+Society…included
+linguistics,
+archaeology, hydrostatics, astronomy, and climatology, and
+whose geographical explorations were reported in widely known
+publications….An exotic figure in the plantation world of early
+Mississippi…he…imported into that raw, half-savage world the
+niceties of European culture: not chandeliers and costly rugs,
+but books, surveyor’s equipment of the finest kind, and the latest
+instruments of science.
+Dunbar…was educated first by tutors at home, then at the
+university in Aberdeen, where his interest in mathematics,
+astronomy, and belles-lettres took mature shape. What
+happened to him after his return home and later in London,
+where he circulated with young intellectuals, what propelled, or
+led, him out of the metropolis on the first leg of his long voyage
+west is not known. But whatever his motivation may have been,
+in April 1771, aged only twenty-two, Dunbar appeared in
+Philadelphia….
+Ever eager for gentility, this well-educated product of the
+Scottish enlightenment and of London’s sophistication—this
+bookish young littérateur and scientist who, only five years
+
+earlier, had been corresponding about scientific problems—
+about “Dean Swifts beatitudes,” about the “virtuous and happy
+life,” and about the Lord’s commandment that mankind should
+“love one another”—was strangely insensitive to the suffering of
+those who served him. In July 1776 he recorded not the
+independence of the American colonies from Britain, but the
+suppression of an alleged conspiracy for freedom by slaves on
+his own plantation….
+Dunbar, the young erudit, the Scottish scientist and man of
+letters, was no sadist. His plantation regime was, by the
+standards of the time, mild; he clothed and fed his slaves
+decently, and frequently relented in his more severe
+punishments. But 4,000 miles from the sources of culture, alone
+on the far periphery of British civilization where physical
+survival was a daily struggle, where ruthless exploitation was a
+way of life, and where disorder, violence, and human
+degradation were commonplace, he had triumphed by successful
+adaptation. Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer
+sensibilities dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling
+within himself a sense of authority and autonomy he had not
+known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over
+the lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a
+borderland gentleman, a man of property in a raw, half-savage
+world.
+May I call your attention to some elements of this portrait, some
+pairings and interdependencies that are marked in this narrative of
+William Dunbar? First, the historical connection between the
+Enlightenment and the institution of slavery—the rights of man and
+his enslavement. Second, the relationship of Dunbar’s education and
+his New World enterprise. His education was exceptionally
+cultivated and included the latest thoughts on theology and science—
+in an effort perhaps to make them mutually accountable, to make
+each support the other. He is a product not only of “the Scottish
+enlightenment” but also of “London’s sophistication.” He read Swift,
+
+discussed the Christian commandment to “love one another,” and is
+described as “strangely” insensitive to the suffering of his slaves. On
+July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt the slave
+rebellion on his plantation: “Judge my surprise. Of what avail is
+kindness & good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.”
+“Constantly bewildered,” Bailyn goes on, “by his slaves’ behavior…
+[Dunbar] recovered two runaways and ‘condemned them to receive
+500 lashes each at five dif[feren]t times, and to carry a chain & log
+fixt to the ancle.’ ” I take this to be a succinct portrait of the process
+by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted. It is
+a formation that has at least four desirable consequences, all of
+which are referred to in Bailyn’s summation of Dunbar’s character
+and located in how Dunbar feels “within himself.” Let me repeat:
+“feeling…a sense of authority and autonomy he had not known
+before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the lives of
+others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a
+man of property in a raw, half-savage world.” A power, a sense of
+freedom he had not known before. But what had he “known before”?
+Fine education, London sophistication, theological and scientific
+thought. None of these, one gathers, could provide him with the
+authority and autonomy Mississippi planter life did. His “sense” is a
+“force” that “flows”: not a willed domination, a thought-out,
+calculated choice, but rather a kind of natural resource, already
+present, a Niagara Falls waiting to spill over as soon as he is in a
+position to possess “absolute control over the lives of others.” And
+once he has moved into that position, he is resurrected as a new man,
+a distinctive man, a different man. Whatever his social status in
+London, in the New World he is a gentleman. More gentle; more
+man. Because the site of his transformation is within rawness. He is
+backgrounded by savagery.
+Autonomy, newness, difference, authority, absolute power: these
+are the major themes and concerns of American literature, and each
+one is made possible, shaped, and activated by a complex awareness
+and use of a constituted Africanism that, deployed as rawness and
+
+savagery, provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration
+of that quintessential American identity.
+Autonomy—freedom—translates into the much championed and
+revered “individualism”; newness translates into “innocence”;
+distinctiveness becomes difference and strategies for maintaining it;
+authority becomes a romantic, conquering “heroism” and “virility”
+and raises the problematics of wielding absolute power over the lives
+of others. These four are made possible, finally, by the fifth: absolute
+power called forth and acted out against, upon, and within a natural
+and mental landscape conceived of as a “raw, half-savage world.”
+Why “raw and half-savage”? Because it is peopled by a nonwhite
+indigenous population? Perhaps. But certainly because there is
+readily at hand a bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable black
+population by which Dunbar and all white men are enabled to
+measure these privileging and privileged differences.
+Eventually individualism will lead to a prototype of Americans as
+solitary, alienated malcontents. What, one wants to ask, are
+Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently
+innocent of? Different from? And over whom is absolute power held,
+from whom withheld, to whom distributed?
+Answers to these questions lie in the potent and ego-reinforcing
+presence of an Africanistic population. The new white male can now
+persuade himself that savagery is “out there”: that the lashes ordered
+(five hundred, applied five times: twenty-five hundred in total) are
+not one’s own savagery; that repeated and dangerous breaks for
+freedom are “puzzling” confirmations of black irrationality; that the
+combination of Dean Swift’s beatitudes and a life of regularized
+violence is civilized; that, if sensibilities are dulled enough, the
+rawness remains external.
+These contradictions cut and slash their way through the pages of
+American literature. How could they not have? As Dominick LaCapra
+reminds us, “ ‘Classic’ novels, are not only worked over…by common
+contextual forces (such as ideologies) but also rework and at least
+partially work through those forces in critical and at times potentially
+transformative fashion.”
+
+The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American
+writers journey is in very large measure shaped and determined by
+the presence of the racial Other. Statements to the contrary insisting
+upon the meaninglessness of race to American identity are
+themselves full of meaning. The world does not become raceless or
+will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing
+racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring
+rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the
+prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens, in that violent, selfserving act of erasure, to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of
+the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The
+literature itself suggests otherwise.
+Explicit or implicit, the Africanistic presence informs in
+significant, compelling, and inescapable ways the texture and shape
+of American literature. It is a dark and abiding presence that serves
+the literary imagination as both a visible and an invisible meditating
+force. So that even, and especially, when American texts are not
+“about” Africanistic presences, or characters, or narrative, or idiom,
+their shadows hover there, implied, signified, as boundaries. It is no
+accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much
+immigrant literature) understood their “Americanness” as an
+opposition to the resident population. Race, in fact, now functions as
+a metaphor so necessary to the construction of “Americanness” that
+it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racialisms whose
+dynamics we are more used to deciphering.
+As a means of transacting the whole process of Americanization
+while burying its particular racial ingredients, this Africanistic
+presence may be something the United States cannot do without. For
+in this part of the twentieth century, the word “American” contains
+its association with race deep within. This is not true of “Canadian”
+or “English.” To identify someone as South African is to say very
+little; we need the adjective “white” or “black” or “colored” to make
+our meaning clear. In the United States it is quite the reverse.
+“American” means “white,” and Africanistic people struggle to make
+the terms applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphens.
+
+Americans did not have an immanent nobility from which to wrest
+and against which to define an identity of national virtue while
+continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury. The American
+nation negotiated both its disdain and its envy in the same way
+Dunbar did: through a self-reflexive contemplation of fabricated,
+mythological Africanism. For Dunbar, and for American writers
+generally, this Africanistic Other became the means of thinking
+about the body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; became the
+occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of
+restraint, the contemplation of freedom, of aggression; for the
+exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the
+social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the
+ramifications of power.
+Reading and charting the emergence of an Africanistic persona in
+the development of a national literature is both a fascinating project
+and an urgent one, if the history and criticism of our literature are to
+become coherent. Emerson’s plea for intellectual independence was
+like the offer of an empty plate that writers could fill with
+nourishment from an indigenous kitchen. The language was, of
+course, to be English, but the content of the language, its subject, was
+to be deliberately, insistently un-English and anti-European, insofar
+as it rhetorically repudiated an adoration of the Old World and
+defined the past as corrupt and indefensible.
+In the scholarship on the formation of an American character and
+the production of a national literature, a number of items have been
+cataloged. A major item to be added to the list must be an
+Africanistic presence—decidedly not-American, decidedly Other.
+The necessity for establishing difference stemmed not only from
+the Old World but from a difference within the New. What was
+distinctive in the New was, first of all, its claim to freedom and,
+second, the presence of the unfree at the heart of the democratic
+experiment—the critical absence of democracy, its echo, its shadow,
+its silence, and its silent force in the political and intellectual activity
+of some not-Americans. The distinguishing features of the notAmericans were their slave status, their social status—and their
+
+color. It is conceivable that the first would have self-destructed in a
+variety of ways had it not been for the last. These slaves, unlike many
+others in the world’s history, were visible to a fault. And they had
+inherited, among other things, a long history of the “meaning” of
+color. It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive
+color; it was that this color “meant” something. This “meaning” had
+been named and deployed by scholars from at least the moment, in
+the eighteenth century, when other and sometimes the same scholars
+investigated both the natural history and the inalienable rights of
+man—that is to say, human freedom.
+One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes, or one ear, the
+significance of that difference from the small but conquering
+European invaders would also have been found to have “meaning.”
+In any case, the subjective nature of ascribing value and meaning to
+color cannot be questioned this late in the twentieth century. The
+point for this discussion is the alliance of “visually rendered ideas
+with linguistic utterances.” And this leads into the social and political
+nature of received knowledge as it is revealed in American literature.
+Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, creates linguistic
+images and cultural practices. Responding to culture—clarifying,
+explicating, valorizing, translating, transforming, critiquing—is what
+artists everywhere do, and this is especially true of writers involved
+in the development of a literature at the founding of a new nation.
+Whatever their personal and formally “political” responses to the
+“problem” inherent in the contradiction of a free republic deeply
+committed to a slave population, nineteenth-century writers were
+mindful of the presence of these blacks. More importantly, they
+addressed, in more or less passionate ways, their views on that
+difficult presence.
+Awareness of this slave population did not confine itself to the
+personal encounters writers may have had. The publication of slave
+narratives was a nineteenth-century publication boom. The
+discussion of slavery and freedom filled the press, as well as the
+campaigns and policies of political parties and elected government.
+One would have to have been isolated indeed to be unaware of the
+
+most explosive issue in the nation. How could one speak of profit,
+economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the
+formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education,
+transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, quarters,
+the military—practically anything a country concerns itself with—
+without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the
+heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants?
+It was not possible. And it did not happen. What did happen,
+frequently, was an effort to talk about these things with a vocabulary
+designed to disguise the subject. This did not always succeed, and in
+the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the
+consequence was a master narrative that spoke for the African and
+his descendants, or of him. The legislator’s narrative could not
+coexist with a response from the Africanistic persona.
+Whatever popularity the slave narratives had—and they inspired
+abolitionists and converted anti-abolitionists—the slaves’ own
+narrative, while freeing the narrator in many ways, did not destroy
+the master narrative. That latter narrative could accommodate many
+shifts, could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact.
+Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of
+the silences were broken and some maintained by authors who lived
+with and within the policing narrative. I am interested in the
+strategies for maintaining the silence and for breaking it. How did
+the founding writers of young America engage, imagine, employ, and
+create an Africanistic presence and persona? In what ways do these
+strategies explicate American literature? How does excavating these
+pathways lead to fresher and more profound analyses of what they
+contain and how they contain it?
+—
+Let me take one example: a major American novel that is both an
+example and a critique of romance as a genre. If we supplement our
+reading of Huckleberry Finn, expand it, move beyond its clutch of
+sentimental nostrums about lighting out to the territory, river gods,
+
+and the fundamental innocence of Americanness; if we incorporate
+into our reading the novel’s combative critique of antebellum
+America, thus shedding much light on the problems created by
+traditional readings too shy to linger over the implications of the
+Africanistic presence at its center, it seems to be another, somehow
+fuller novel. We understand that at a certain level, the critique of
+class and race is there, although disguised or enhanced through a
+combination of humor, adventure, and the naïve.
+Twain’s readers are free to dismiss the novel’s combative,
+contestatory qualities and focus on its celebration of savvy
+innocence, while voicing polite embarrassment at the symptomatic
+racial attitude it espouses. Early criticism, those reappraisals in the
+fifties that led to the canonization of Huckleberry Finn as a great
+novel, missed or dismissed the social quarrel because the work
+appears to have fully assimilated the ideological assumptions of its
+society and culture; because it is narrated in the voice and controlled
+by the gaze of a child without status (an outsider, marginal, and
+already “othered” by the middle-class society he loathes and seems
+never to envy); and because the novel masks itself in the comic, the
+parody, and exaggeration of the tall tale.
+In this young but street-smart innocent, Huck, who is virginally
+uncorrupted by bourgeois yearnings, fury, and helplessness, Mark
+Twain inscribes the critique of slavery and the pretensions of the
+would-be middle class, the resistance to the loss of Eden, and the
+difficulty of becoming that oxymoron, “a social individual.” The
+agency for Huck’s struggle, however, is the nigger Jim, and it is
+absolutely necessary that the term “nigger” be inextricable from
+Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is. Or, more
+precisely, is not. The major controversies about the greatness or
+near-greatness of Huckleberry Finn as an American (or even
+“world”) novel exist as controversies because they forgo a close
+examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of
+Huck’s growth and Jim’s serviceability within it, and even of Twain’s
+inability to continue, to explore the journey into free territory.
+
+The critical controversy focuses on the collapse of the so-called
+fatal ending of the novel. It has been suggested that the ending is a
+brilliant finesse that returns Tom Sawyer to center stage where he
+should be. That it is a brilliant play on the dangers and limitations of
+romance. That the ending is a valuable learning experience for Jim
+and for Huck for which we and they should be grateful. That it is a
+sad and confused ending to a book that the author, after a long
+blocked period, did not know what to do with and so changed back to
+a child’s story out of disgust. What is not stressed is that there is no
+way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral
+human being in America without Jim, and therefore that to let Jim
+go free, to let him not miss the mouth of the Ohio River and passage
+into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the
+book.
+Neither Huck nor Twain can tolerate in imaginative terms Jim
+freed. To do so would blast the predilection from its mooring. Thus
+the “fatal” ending becomes an elaborate deferment of a necessary
+and necessarily unfree Africanistic character’s escape, because
+freedom has no meaning to Huck or the text without the specter of
+enslavement, the anodyne to individualism, the yardstick of absolute
+power over the life of another: the signed, marked, informing, and
+mutating presence of a black slave. The novel addresses at every
+point in its structural edifice, and lingers over it in every fissure, the
+slave’s body and personality: the way it spoke, what passion, legal or
+illicit, it was prey to, what pain it could endure, what limits, if any,
+there were to its suffering, what possibilities there were for
+forgiveness, for compassion, for love.
+Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of
+love and compassion the black man has for his white masters, and
+his assumptions that the whites are indeed what they say they are—
+superior and adult. This representation of Jim as the visible Other
+can be read as white yearning for forgiveness and love, but the
+yearning is made possible only when it is understood that the black
+man has recognized his inferiority (not as a slave but as a black) and
+despised it; that, as Jim is made to, he has permitted his persecutors
+
+to torment and humiliate him, and responds to the torment and
+humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation Huck and Tom
+subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening—and it
+comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father,
+and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended
+by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written
+because it would not have been possible for two children to play so
+painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class,
+education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a
+moral adult. Jim’s slave status makes the “play and deferment”
+possible, and also actualizes, in its style and mode of narration, the
+significance of slavery to the achievement (in actual terms) of
+freedom. Jim seems unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate,
+dependent, inarticulate (except for the “talks” he and Huck have,
+long sweet talks we are not privy to. What did you talk about,
+Huck?). What should solicit our attention is not what Jim seems, but
+what Twain, Huck, and especially Tom need from him. Huckleberry
+Finn may indeed be “great,” because in its structure, in what hell it
+puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it
+simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.
+—
+My suggestion that Africanism has come to have a metaphysical
+necessity should in no way be understood to imply that it has lost its
+ideological one. There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from
+rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority
+and the ranking of differences. There is still much national solace in
+continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism to be gained by
+hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. And
+there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy
+reminiscences of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon
+which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as
+freedom’s polar opposite. “Individualism” is foregrounded and
+believed in when its background is stereotyped, enforced
+dependency. “Freedom” (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with
+
+a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply
+cheek by jowl with the bound and the unfree, the economically
+oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced. The ideological
+dependence on racialism is intact.
+Surely, it will be said, white Americans have considered questions
+of morality and ethics, the supremacy of mind and the vulnerability
+of body, the blessings and liabilities of progress and modernity,
+without reference to the situation of its black population. Where, it
+will be asked, does one find the record that such a referent was part
+of these deliberations?
+My answer to this question is another one: In what public
+discourse can the reference to black people be said not to exist? It is
+there in every moment of the nation’s mightiest struggles. The
+presence of black people not only lies behind the framing of the
+Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied
+citizens, women, and the illiterate. In the construction of a free and
+public school system, in the balancing of representation in legislative
+bodies, in jurisprudence and the legal definitions of justice. In
+theological discourse, in the memoranda of banking houses, in the
+concept of manifest destiny and the narrative that accompanies the
+initiation of every immigrant into the community of American
+citizenship.
+The literature of the United States, like its history, illustrates and
+represents the transformations of biological, ideological, and
+metaphysical concepts of racial differences. But literature has an
+additional concern and subject matter: the private imagination
+interacting with the external world it inhabits. Literature
+redistributes and mutates in figurative language the social
+conventions of Africanism. In minstrelsy, a layer of blackness applied
+to a white face released it from law. Just as entertainers, through
+blackface, could render permissible topics that would otherwise have
+been taboo, so American writers have been able to employ an
+imagined Africanistic persona to articulate and imaginatively act out
+the forbidden in American culture.
+
+Encoded or implicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to
+an Africanistic presence complicate the texts, sometimes
+contradicting them entirely. They can serve as allegorical fodder for
+the contemplation of Eden, expulsion, and the availability of grace.
+They provide paradox, ambiguity; they reveal omissions, repetitions,
+disruptions, polarities, reifications, violence. In other words, they
+give the texts a deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized
+one commonly presented to us. It would be a pity if criticism of this
+literature continued to shellac these texts, immobilizing their
+complexities and power beneath its tight, reflecting surface. It would
+be a pity if the criticism remained too polite or too fearful to notice a
+disrupting darkness before its eyes.
+
+Unspeakable Things Unspoken
+The Afro-American Presence in American Literature
+
+I
+I planned to call this paper “Canon Fodder,” because the terms put
+me in mind of a kind of trained muscular response that appears to be
+on display in some areas of the recent canon debate. Also I liked the
+clash and swirl of those two words. At first they reminded me of that
+host of young men—black or “ethnics” or poor or working class—who
+left high school for the war in Vietnam and were perceived by war
+resisters as “fodder.” Indeed many of those who went, as well as
+those who returned, were treated as one of that word’s definitions:
+“coarse food for livestock,” or, in the context of my thoughts about
+the subject of this paper, a more applicable definition: “people
+considered as readily available and of little value.” Rude feed to feed
+the war machine. There was also the play of cannon and canon. The
+etymology of the first includes tube, cane, or cane-like, reed. Of the
+second, sources include rod becoming body of law, body of rules,
+measuring rod. When the two words faced each other, the image
+became the shape of the cannon wielded on (or by) the body of law.
+The boom of power announcing an “officially recognized set of texts.”
+Cannon defending canon, you might say. And without any
+etymological connection I heard father in fodder, and sensed father
+in both cannon and canon, ending up with “father food.” And what
+does this father eat? Readily available people/texts of little value. But
+I changed my mind (so many have used the phrase) and hope to
+make clear the appropriateness of the title I settled on.
+My purpose here is to observe the panoply of this most recent and
+most anxious series of questions concerning what should or does
+
+constitute a literary canon in order to suggest ways of addressing the
+Afro-American presence in American literature that require neither
+slaughter nor reification—views that may spring the whole literature
+of an entire nation from the solitude into which it has been locked.
+There is something called American literature that, according to
+conventional wisdom, is certainly not Chicano literature, or AfroAmerican literature, or Asian American, or Native American, or…It is
+somehow separate from them and they from it, and in spite of the
+efforts of recent literary histories, restructured curricula and
+anthologies, this separate confinement, be it breached or endorsed,
+is the subject of a large part of these debates. Although the terms
+used, like the vocabulary of earlier canon debates, refer to literary
+and/or humanistic value, aesthetic criteria, value-free or socially
+anchored readings, the contemporary battle plain is most often
+understood to be the claims of others against the white male origins
+and definitions of those values; whether those definitions reflect an
+eternal, universal, and transcending paradigm or whether they
+constitute a disguise for a temporal, political, and culturally specific
+program.
+Part of the history of this particular debate is located in the
+successful assault that the feminist scholarship of men and women
+(black and white) made and continues to make on traditional literary
+discourse. The male part of the white male equation is already deeply
+engaged, and no one believes the body of literature and its criticism
+will ever again be what it was in 1965: the protected preserve of the
+thoughts and works and analytical strategies of white men.
+It is, however, the “white” part of the question that this paper
+focuses on, and it is to my great relief that such terms as “white” and
+“race” can enter serious discussion of literature. Although still a swift
+and swiftly obeyed call to arms, their use is no longer forbidden.1 It
+may appear churlish to doubt the sincerity, or question the
+proclaimed well-intentioned selflessness of a nine-hundred-year-old
+academy struggling through decades of chaos to “maintain
+standards.” Yet of what use is it to go on about “quality” being the
+only criterion for greatness knowing that the definition of quality is
+
+itself the subject of much rage and is seldom universally agreed upon
+by everyone at all times? Is it to appropriate the term for reasons of
+state; to be in the position to distribute greatness or withhold it? Or
+to actively pursue the ways and places in which quality surfaces and
+stuns us into silence or into language worthy enough to describe it?
+What is possible is to try to recognize, identify, and applaud the fight
+for and triumph of quality when it is revealed to us and to let go the
+notion that only the dominant culture or gender can make those
+judgments, identify that quality, or produce it.
+Those who claim the superiority of Western culture are entitled to
+that claim only when Western civilization is measured thoroughly
+against other civilizations and not found wanting, and when Western
+civilization owns up to its own sources in the cultures that preceded
+it.
+A large part of the satisfaction I have always received from reading
+Greek tragedy, for example, is in its similarity to Afro-American
+communal structures (the function of song and chorus, the heroic
+struggle between the claims of community and individual hubris)
+and African religion and philosophy. In other words, that is part of
+the reason it has quality for me—I feel intellectually at home there.
+But that could hardly be so for those unfamiliar with my “home,” and
+hardly a requisite for the pleasure they take. The point is, the form
+(Greek tragedy) makes available these varieties of provocative love
+because it is masterly—not because the civilization that is its referent
+was flawless or superior to all others.
+One has the feeling that nights are becoming sleepless in some
+quarters, and it seems to me obvious that the recoil of traditional
+“humanists” and some postmodern theorists to this particular aspect
+of the debate, the “race” aspect, is as severe as it is because the claims
+for attention come from that segment of scholarly and artistic labor
+in which the mention of “race” is either inevitable or elaborately,
+painstakingly masked, and if all of the ramifications that the term
+demands are taken seriously, the bases of Western civilization will
+require rethinking. Thus, in spite of its implicit and explicit
+acknowledgment, “race” is still a virtually unspeakable thing, as can
+
+be seen in the apologies, notes of “special use,” and circumscribed
+definitions that accompany it2—not least of which is my own
+deference in surrounding it with quotation marks. Suddenly (for our
+purposes, suddenly) “race” does not exist. For three hundred years
+black Americans insisted that “race” was no usefully distinguishing
+factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries
+every academic discipline, including theology, history, and natural
+science, insisted “race” was the determining factor in human
+development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a
+culturally formed race, and that it had specific and revered
+difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as “race,”
+biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual
+exchange cannot accommodate it.3 In trying to understand the
+relationship between “race” and culture, I am tempted to throw my
+hands up. It always seemed to me that the people who invented the
+hierarchy of “race” when it was convenient for them ought not to be
+the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes
+for it to exist. But there is culture, and both gender and “race” inform
+and are informed by it. Afro-American culture exists, and though it is
+clear (and becoming clearer) how it has responded to Western
+culture, the instances where and means by which it has shaped
+Western culture are poorly recognized or understood.
+I want to address ways in which the presence of Afro-American
+literature and the awareness of its culture both resuscitate the study
+of literature in the United States and raise that study’s standards. In
+pursuit of that goal, it will suit my purposes to contextualize the
+route canon debates have taken in Western literary criticism.
+I do not believe this current anxiety can be attributed solely to the
+routine, even cyclical arguments within literary communities
+reflecting unpredictable yet inevitable shifts in taste, relevance, or
+perception. Shifts in which an enthusiasm for and official
+endorsement of William Dean Howells, for example, withered; or in
+which the legalization of Mark Twain in critical court rose and fell
+like the fathoming of a sounding line (for which he may or may not
+have named himself); or even the slow, delayed, but steady swell of
+
+attention and devotion on which Emily Dickinson soared to what is
+now, surely, a permanent crest of respect. No. Those were
+discoveries, reappraisals of individual artists. Serious but not
+destabilizing. Such accommodations were simple because the
+questions they posed were simple: Are there one hundred sterling
+examples of high literary art in American literature and no more?
+One hundred and six? If one or two fall into disrepute, is there space,
+then, for one or two others in the vestibule, waiting like girls for bells
+chimed by future husbands who alone can promise them security,
+legitimacy—and in whose hands alone rests the gift of critical
+longevity? Interesting questions, but, as I say, not endangering.
+Nor is this detectable academic sleeplessness the consequence of a
+much more radical shift, such as the mid-nineteenth-century one
+heralding the authenticity of American literature itself. Or an even
+earlier upheaval—receding now into the distant past—in which
+theology and thereby Latin was displaced for the equally rigorous
+study of the classics and Greek to be followed by what was
+considered a strangely arrogant and upstart proposal: that English
+literature was a suitable course of study for an aristocratic education
+and not simply morally instructive fodder designed for the working
+classes. (The Chaucer Society was founded in 1848, four hundred
+years after Chaucer died.) No. This exchange seems unusual
+somehow, keener. It has a more strenuously argued (and felt)
+defense and a more vigorously insistent attack. And both defenses
+and attacks have spilled out of the academy into the popular press.
+Why? Resistance to displacement within or expansion of a canon is
+not, after all, surprising or unwarranted. That’s what canonization is
+for. (And the question of whether there should be a canon or not
+seems disingenuous to me—there always is one whether there should
+be or not—for it is in the interests of the professional critical
+community to have one.) Certainly a sharp alertness as to why a
+work is or is not worthy of study is the legitimate occupation of the
+critic, the pedagogue, and the artist. What is astonishing in the
+contemporary debate is not the resistance to displacement of works
+or to the expansion of genre within it, but the virulent passion that
+
+accompanies this resistance and, more importantly, the quality of its
+defense weaponry. The guns are very big; the trigger fingers quick.
+But I am convinced the mechanism of the defenders of the flame is
+faulty. Not only may the hands of the gunslinging cowboy-scholars
+be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of
+the conflagration (the sacred texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the
+battle. This canon fodder may kill the canon. And I, at least, do not
+intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James
+or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, etc., etc., etc. There must be
+some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them.
+When Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, identified the
+historical territory of the novel by saying, “The novel is Europe’s
+creation” and that “the only context for grasping a novel’s worth is
+the history of the European novel,” the New Yorker reviewer
+stiffened. Kundera’s “personal ‘idea of the novel,’ ” he wrote, “is so
+profoundly Eurocentric that it’s likely to seem exotic, even perverse,
+to American readers….‘The Art of the Novel’ gives off the occasional
+(but pungent) whiff of cultural arrogance, and we may feel that
+Kundera’s discourse…reveals an aspect of his character that we’d
+rather not have known about….In order to become the artist he now
+is, the Czech novelist had to discover himself a second time, as a
+European. But what if that second, grander possibility hadn’t been
+there to be discovered? What if Broch, Kafka, Musil—all that reading
+—had never been a part of his education, or had entered it only as
+exotic, alien presences? Kundera’s polemical fervor in ‘The Art of the
+Novel’ annoys us, as American readers, because we feel defensive,
+excluded from the transcendent ‘idea of the novel’ that for him seems
+simply to have been there for the taking. (If only he had cited, in his
+redeeming version of the novel’s history, a few more heroes from the
+New World’s culture.) Our novelists don’t discover cultural values
+within themselves; they invent them.”4
+Kundera’s views, obliterating American writers (with the exception
+of William Faulkner) from his own canon, are relegated to a
+“smugness” that Terrence Rafferty disassociates from Kundera’s
+imaginative work and applies to the “sublime confidence” of his
+
+critical prose. The confidence of an exile who has the sentimental
+education of, and the choice to become, a European.
+I was refreshed by Rafferty’s comments. With the substitution of
+certain phrases, his observations and the justifiable umbrage he
+takes can be appropriated entirely by Afro-American writers
+regarding their own exclusion from the “transcendent ‘idea of the
+novel.’ ” For the present turbulence seems not to be about the
+flexibility of a canon, its range among and between Western
+countries, but about its miscegenation. The word is informative here
+and I do mean its use. A powerful ingredient in this debate concerns
+the incursion of third-world or so-called minority literature into a
+Eurocentric stronghold. When the topic of third-world culture is
+raised, unlike the topic of Scandinavian culture, for example, a
+possible threat to and implicit criticism of the reigning equilibrium is
+seen to be raised as well. From the seventeenth century to the
+twentieth, the arguments resisting that incursion have marched in
+predictable sequence: (1) there is no Afro-American (or third-world)
+art, (2) it exists but is inferior, (3) it exists and is superior when it
+measures up to the “universal” criteria of Western art, (4) it is not so
+much “art” as ore—rich ore—that requires a Western or Eurocentric
+smith to refine it from its “natural” state into an aesthetically
+complex form.
+A few comments on a larger, older, but no less telling academic
+struggle—an extremely successful one—may be helpful here. It is
+telling because it sheds light on certain aspects of this current debate
+and may locate its sources. I made reference above to the radical
+upheaval in canon building that took place at the inauguration of
+classical studies and Greek. This canonical rerouting from
+scholasticism to humanism was not merely radical, it must have been
+(may I say it?) savage. And it took some seventy years to accomplish.
+Seventy years to eliminate Egypt as the cradle of civilization and its
+model and replace it with Greece. The triumph of that process was
+that Greece lost its own origins and became itself original. A number
+of scholars in various disciplines (history, anthropology,
+ethnobotany, etc.) have put forward their research into cross-cultural
+
+and intercultural transmissions with varying degrees of success in
+the reception of their work. I am reminded of the curious publishing
+history of Ivan Van Sertima’s work They Came Before Columbus,
+which researches the African presence in ancient America. I am
+reminded of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and especially the work of
+Martin Bernal, a linguist trained in Chinese history, who has defined
+himself as an interloper in the field of classical civilization but who
+has offered, in Black Athena, a stunning investigation of the field.
+According to Bernal, there are two “models” of Greek history: one
+views Greece as Aryan or European (the Aryan Model); the other
+sees it as Levantine—absorbed by Egyptian and Semitic culture (the
+Ancient Model). “If I am right,” writes Professor Bernal, “in urging
+the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised
+Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental
+bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration
+of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or
+philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major
+‘internal’ deficiencies or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was
+overthrown for external reasons. For eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece,
+which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its
+pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native
+Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the
+Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something
+more acceptable.”5
+It is difficult not to be persuaded by the weight of documentation
+Martin Bernal brings to his task and his rather dazzling analytical
+insights. What struck me in his analysis were the process of the
+fabrication of Ancient Greece and the motives for the fabrication.
+The latter (motive) involved the concept of purity, of progress. The
+former (process) required misreading, predetermined selectivity of
+authentic sources, and—silence. From the Christian theological
+appropriation of Israel (the Levant), to the early nineteenth-century
+work of the prodigious Karl Müller, work that effectively dismissed
+the Greeks’ own record of their influences and origins as their
+
+“Egyptomania,” their tendency to be “wonderstruck” by Egyptian
+culture, a tendency “manifested in the ‘delusion’ that Egyptians and
+other non-European ‘barbarians’ had possessed superior cultures,
+from which the Greeks had borrowed massively,”6 on through the
+Romantic response to the Enlightenment, and the decline into
+disfavor of the Phoenicians, “the essential force behind the rejection
+of the tradition of massive Phoenician influence on early Greece was
+the rise of racial—as opposed to religious—anti-Semitism. This was
+because the Phoenicians were correctly perceived to have been
+culturally very close to the Jews.”7
+I have quoted at perhaps too great a length from Bernal’s text
+because motive, so seldom an element brought to bear on the history
+of history, is located, delineated, and confronted in Bernal’s research
+and has helped my own thinking about the process and motives of
+scholarly attention to and an appraisal of Afro-American presence in
+the literature of the United States.
+Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national
+defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of
+criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of
+language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art,
+the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the
+interests are vested.
+In such a melee as this one—a provocative, healthy, explosive
+melee—extraordinarily profound work is being done. Some of the
+controversy, however, has degenerated into ad hominem and
+unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious
+and silly arguments about politics (the destabilizing forces are
+dismissed as merely political; the status quo sees itself as not—as
+though the term “apolitical” were only its prefix and not the most
+obviously political stance imaginable since one of the functions of
+political ideology is to pass itself off as immutable, natural, and
+“innocent”), and covert expressions of critical inquiry designed to
+neutralize and disguise the political interests of the discourse. Yet
+much of the research and analysis has rendered speakable what was
+formerly unspoken and has made humanistic studies, once again, the
+
+place where one has to go to find out what’s going on. Cultures,
+whether silenced or monologistic, whether repressed or repressing,
+seek meaning in the language and images available to them.
+Silences are being broken, lost things have been found, and at least
+two generations of scholars are disentangling received knowledge
+from the apparatus of control, most notably those who are engaged
+in investigations of French and British colonialist literature,
+American slave narratives, and the delineation of the Afro-American
+literary tradition.
+Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been “discovered”
+actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from
+silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and
+contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable merely to
+imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining
+ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s “aspects of nature,” nor
+Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subjects of our own narrative,
+witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way
+coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come
+in contact. We are not, in fact, “Other.” We are choices. And to read
+imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine
+centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these
+centers with the “raceless” one with which we are, all of us, most
+familiar.
+
+II
+Recent approaches to the reading of Afro-American literature have
+come some distance; have addressed those arguments, mentioned
+earlier (which are not arguments, but attitudes), that have, since the
+seventeenth century, effectively silenced the autonomy of that
+literature. As for the charge that “there is no Afro-American art,”
+contemporary critical analysis of the literature and the recent surge
+of reprints and rediscoveries have buried it, and are pressing on to
+expand the traditional canon to include classic Afro-American works
+
+where generically and chronologically appropriate, and to devise
+strategies for reading and thinking about these texts.
+As to the second silencing charge, “Afro-American art exists, but is
+inferior,” again, close readings and careful research into the culture
+out of which the art is born have addressed and still address the
+labels that once passed for stringent analysis but can no more: that it
+is imitative, excessive, sensational, mimetic (merely), and
+unintellectual, though very often “moving,” “passionate,”
+“naturalistic,” “realistic,” or sociologically “revealing.” These labels
+may be construed as compliments or pejoratives and if valid, and
+shown as such, so much the better. More often than not, however,
+they are the lazy, easy, brand-name applications when the hard work
+of analysis is deemed too hard, or when the critic does not have
+access to the scope the work demands. Strategies designed to counter
+this lazy labeling include the application of recent literary theories to
+Afro-American literature so that noncanonical texts can be
+incorporated into existing and forming critical discourse.
+The third charge, that “Afro-American art exists, but is superior
+only when it measures up to the ‘universal’ criteria of Western art,”
+produces the most seductive form of analysis, for both writer and
+critic, because comparisons are a major form of knowledge and
+flattery. The risks, nevertheless, are twofold: (1) the gathering of a
+culture’s difference into the skirts of the queen is a neutralization
+designed and constituted to elevate and maintain hegemony, (2)
+circumscribing and limiting the literature to a mere reaction to or
+denial of the queen, judging the work solely in terms of its referents
+to Eurocentric criteria, or its sociological accuracy, political
+correctness, or its pretense of having no politics at all, cripple the
+literature and infantilize the serious work of imaginative writing.
+This response-oriented concept of Afro-American literature contains
+the seeds of the next (fourth) charge: that when Afro-American art is
+worthy, it is because it is “raw” and “rich,” like ore, and like ore needs
+refining by Western intelligences. Finding or imposing Western
+influences in/on Afro-American literature has value, but when its
+
+sole purpose is to place value only where that influence is located it is
+pernicious.
+My unease stems from the possible, probable consequences these
+approaches may have upon the work itself. They can lead to an
+incipient orphanization of the work in order to issue its adoption
+papers. They can confine the discourse to the advocacy of
+diversification within the canon and/or a kind of benign coexistence
+near or within reach of the already sacred texts. Either of these two
+positions can quickly become another kind of silencing if permitted
+to ignore the indigenous created qualities of the writing. So many
+questions surface and irritate. What have these critiques made of the
+work’s own canvas? Its paint, its frame, its framelessness, its spaces?
+Another list of approved subjects? Of approved treatments? More
+self-censoring, more exclusion of the specificity of the culture, the
+gender, the language? Is there perhaps an alternative utility in these
+studies? To advance power or locate its fissures? To oppose elitist
+interests in order to enthrone egalitarian effacement? Or is it merely
+to rank and grade the readable product as distinct from the writeable
+production? Can this criticism reveal ways in which the author
+combats and confronts received prejudices and even creates other
+terms in which to rethink one’s attachment to or intolerance of the
+material of these works? What is important in all of this is that the
+critic not be engaged in laying claim on behalf of the text to his or her
+own dominance and power. Nor to exchange his or her professional
+anxieties for the imagined turbulence of the text. As has been said
+before, “the text should become a problem of passion, not a pretext
+for it.”
+There are at least three focuses that seem to me to be neither
+reactionary nor simple pluralism, nor the even simpler methods by
+which the study of Afro-American literature remains the helpful
+doorman into the halls of sociology. Each of them, however, requires
+wakefulness.
+One is the development of a theory of literature that truly
+accommodates Afro-American literature: one that is based on its
+
+culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to
+negotiate the world it inhabits.
+Another is the examination and reinterpretation of the American
+canon, the founding nineteenth-century works, for the “unspeakable
+things unspoken”; for the ways in which the presence of AfroAmericans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the
+meaning of so much American literature. A search, in other words,
+for the ghost in the machine.
+A third is the examination of contemporary and/or noncanonical
+literature for this presence, regardless of its category as mainstream,
+minority, or what you will. I am always amazed by the resonances,
+the structural gear-shifts, and the uses to which Afro-American
+narratives, persona, and idiom are put in contemporary “white”
+literature. And in Afro-American literature itself the question of
+difference, of essence, is critical. What makes a work “black”? The
+most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial)
+distinction, the one most fraught, is its language—its unpoliced,
+seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive,
+masked, and unmasking language. Such a penetration will entail the
+most careful study, one in which the impact of Afro-American
+presence on modernity becomes clear and is no longer a well-kept
+secret.
+I would like to touch, for just a moment, on focuses two and three.
+We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily “notthere”; that a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum. In addition,
+certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call
+attention to themselves, arrest us with intentionality and purpose,
+like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away
+from them. Looking at the scope of American literature, I can’t help
+thinking that the question should never have been “Why am I, an
+Afro-American, absent from it?” It is not a particularly interesting
+query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is “What
+intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to
+erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect
+has that performance had on the work?” What are the strategies of
+
+escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion? I am not recommending
+an inquiry into the obvious impulse that overtakes a soldier sitting in
+a World War I trench to think of salmon fishing. That kind of pointed
+“turning from,” deliberate escapism, or transcendence may be
+lifesaving in a circumstance of immediate duress. The exploration I
+am suggesting is, how does one sit in the audience observing,
+watching the performance of Young America, in 1915 say, and
+reconstruct the play, its director, its plot, and its cast in such a
+manner that its very point never surfaces? Not why. How? Ten years
+after Tocqueville’s prediction in 1840 that “ ‘finding no stuff for the
+ideal in what is real and true, poets’ would flee to imaginary
+regions,”8 in 1850 at the height of slavery and burgeoning
+abolitionism, American writers chose romance. Where, I wonder, in
+these romances is the shadow of the presence from which the text
+has fled? Where does it heighten, where does it dislocate, where does
+it necessitate novelistic invention; what does it release; what does it
+hobble?
+The device (or arsenal) that serves the purpose of flight can be
+Romanticism versus verisimilitude; New Criticism versus shabbily
+disguised and questionably sanctioned “moral uplift”; the “complex
+series of evasions” that is sometimes believed to be the essence of
+modernism; the perception of the “evolution of art”; the cultivation
+of irony, parody; the nostalgia for “literary language”; the rhetorically
+unconstrained textuality versus socially anchored textuality, and the
+undoing of textuality altogether. These critical strategies can (but
+need not) be put into service to reconstruct the historical world to
+suit specific cultural and political purposes. Many of these strategies
+have produced powerfully creative work. Whatever uses to which
+romanticism is put, however suspicious its origins, it has produced
+an incontestably wonderful body of work. In other instances these
+strategies have succeeded in paralyzing both the work and its
+criticism. In still others they have led to a virtual infantilization of
+the writer’s intellect, his sensibility, his craft. They have reduced the
+meditations on theory into a “power struggle among sects” reading
+
+unauthored and unauthorable material, rather than reading with the
+author the text that both construct.
+In other words, the critical process has made wonderful work of
+some wonderful work, and recently the means of access to the old
+debates have altered. The problem now is putting the question. Is the
+nineteenth-century flight from blackness, for example, successful in
+mainstream
+American
+literature?
+Beautiful?
+Artistically
+problematic? Is the text sabotaged by its own proclamations of
+“universality”? Are there ghosts in the machine? Active but
+unsummoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine
+and can also make it work? These kinds of questions have been
+consistently put by critics of colonial literature vis-à-vis Africa and
+India and other third-world countries. American literature would
+benefit from similar critiques. I am made melancholy when I
+consider that the act of defending the Eurocentric Western posture
+in literature as not only “universal” but also “race-free” may have
+resulted in lobotomizing that literature, and in diminishing both the
+art and the artist. Like the surgical removal of legs so that the body
+can remain enthroned, immobile, static—under house arrest, so to
+speak. It may be, of course, that contemporary writers deliberately
+exclude from their conscious writerly world the subjective appraisal
+of groups perceived as “Other,” and white male writers frequently
+abjure and deny the excitement of framing or locating their literature
+in the political world. Nineteenth-century writers, however, would
+never have given it a thought. Mainstream writers in young America
+understood their competition to be national, cultural, but only in
+relationship to the Old World, certainly not vis-à-vis an ancient race
+(whether Native American or African) that was stripped of
+articulateness and intellectual thought, rendered, in D. H.
+Lawrence’s term, “uncreate.” For these early American writers, how
+could there be competition with nations or peoples who were
+presumed unable to handle or uninterested in handling the written
+word? One could write about them, but there was never the danger of
+their “writing back.” Just as one could speak to them without fear of
+their “talking back.” One could even observe them, hold them in
+
+prolonged gaze, without encountering the risk of being observed,
+viewed, or judged in return. And if, on occasion, they were
+themselves viewed and judged, it was out of a political necessity and,
+for the purposes of art, could not matter. Or so thought young
+America. It could never have occurred to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848
+that I, for example, might read “The Gold-Bug” and watch his efforts
+to render my grandfather’s speech to something as close to braying
+as possible, an effort so intense you can see the perspiration—and the
+stupidity—when Jupiter says, “I knows,” and Mr. Poe spells the verb
+“nose.”*
+Yet in spite or because of this monologism there is a great,
+ornamental, prescribed absence in early American literature and, I
+submit, it is instructive. It only seems that the canon of American
+literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” “white.” In fact it is studiously
+so. In fact these absences of vital presences in young American
+literature may be the insistent fruit of the scholarship rather than the
+text. Perhaps some of these writers, although under current house
+arrest, have much more to say than has been realized. Perhaps some
+were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as
+they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic
+modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by never questioning
+the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise the writer,
+diminish the text, and render the bulk of the literature aesthetically
+and historically incoherent—an exorbitant price for cultural (white
+male) purity, and, I believe, a spendthrift one. The reexamination of
+founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable
+unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings,
+deeper and other power, deeper and other significances.
+One such writer, in particular, it has been almost impossible to
+keep under lock and key is Herman Melville.
+Among several astute scholars, Michael Rogin has done one of the
+most exhaustive studies of how deeply Melville’s social thought is
+woven into his writing. He calls our attention to the connection
+Melville made between American slavery and American freedom,
+how heightened the one rendered the other. And he has provided
+
+evidence of the impact on the work of Melville’s family, milieu, and,
+most importantly, the raging, all-encompassing conflict of the time:
+slavery. He has reminded us that it was Melville’s father-in-law,
+Judge Shaw, who had, as judge, decided the case that made the
+Fugitive Slave Law law, and that “other evidence in Moby-Dick also
+suggests the impact of Shaw’s ruling on the climax of Melville’s tale.
+Melville conceived the final confrontation between Ahab and the
+white whale sometime in the first half of 1851. He may well have
+written his last chapters only after returning from a trip to New York
+in June. (Judge Shaw’s decision was handed down in April 1851.)
+When New York antislavery leaders William Seward and John van
+Buren wrote public letters protesting the Sims ruling, the New York
+Herald responded. Its attack on ‘The Anti-Slavery Agitators’ began,
+‘Did you ever see a whale? Did you ever see a mighty whale
+struggling?’ ”9
+Rogin also traces the chronology of the whale from its “birth in a
+state of nature” to its final end as commodity.10 Central to his
+argument is that Melville in Moby-Dick was being allegorically and
+insistently political in his choice of the whale. But within his
+chronology, one singular whale transcends all others, goes beyond
+nature, adventure, politics, and commodity to an abstraction. What
+is this abstraction? This “wicked idea”? Interpretation has been
+varied. It has been viewed as an allegory of the state in which Ahab is
+Calhoun, or Daniel Webster; an allegory of capitalism and
+corruption, God and man, the individual and fate, and most
+commonly, the single allegorical meaning of the white whale is
+understood to be brute, indifferent Nature, and Ahab the madman
+who challenges that Nature.
+But let us consider, again, the principal actor, Ahab, created by an
+author who calls himself Typee, signed himself Tawney, identified
+himself as Ishmael, and who had written several books before MobyDick criticizing missionary forays into various paradises.
+Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship’s voyage, its
+point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it. His intention,
+revenge, “an audacious, immitigable and supernatural revenge,”
+
+develops stature—maturity—when we realize that he is not a man
+mourning his lost leg or a scar on his face. However intense and
+dislocating his fever and recovery had been after his encounter with
+the white whale, however satisfactorily “male” this vengeance is read,
+the vanity of it is almost adolescent. But if the whale is more than
+blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine aggression, if it
+is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we can consider the
+possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition of the moment
+in America when whiteness became ideology. And if the white whale
+is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal
+dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a
+human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the
+victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed
+to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis—strangely of no interest
+to psychiatry. Ahab, then, is navigating between an idea of
+civilization that he renounces and an idea of savagery he must
+annihilate, because the two cannot coexist. The former is based on
+the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is that the idea of
+savagery is not the missionary one: it is white racial ideology that is
+savage and if, indeed, a white, nineteenth-century American male
+took on not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions or
+their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he
+would be very alone, very desperate, and very doomed. Madness
+would be the only appropriate description of such audacity, and “he
+heaves me,” the most succinct and appropriate description of that
+obsession.
+I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was
+engaged in some simple and simpleminded black/white didacticism,
+or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What I am
+suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and
+metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented
+idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own
+country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness
+as ideology.
+
+On the Pequod the multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat is at
+work to produce a commodity, but it is diverted and converted from
+that labor to Ahab’s more significant intellectual quest. We leave
+whale as commerce and confront whale as metaphor. With that
+interpretation in place, two of the most famous chapters of the book
+become luminous in a completely new way. One is chapter 9, “The
+Sermon.” In Father Mapple’s thrilling rendition of Jonah’s trials,
+emphasis is given to the purpose of Jonah’s salvation. He is saved
+from the fish’s belly for one single purpose, “To preach the Truth to
+the face of Falsehood! That was it!” Only then the reward
+—“Delight”—which strongly calls to mind Ahab’s lonely necessity.
+Delight is to him…who against the proud gods and commodores
+of this earth, ever stand forth his own inexorable self….Delight is
+to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this
+base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is
+to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and
+destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of
+Senators and Judges. Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who
+acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a
+patriot to heaven (italics mine).
+No one, I think, has denied that the sermon is designed to be
+prophetic, but it seems unremarked what the nature of the sin is—the
+sin that must be destroyed, regardless. Nature? A sin? The terms do
+not apply. Capitalism? Perhaps. Capitalism fed greed lent itself
+inexorably to corruption, but probably was not in and of itself sinful
+to Melville. Sin suggests a moral outrage within the bounds of New
+World man to repair. The concept of racial superiority would fit
+seamlessly. It is difficult to read those words (“destroys all sin,”
+“patriot to heaven”) and not hear in them the description of a
+different Ahab. Not an adolescent male in adult clothing, a maniacal
+egocentric, or the “exotic plant” that V. L. Parrington thought
+Melville was. Not even a morally fine liberal voice adjusting,
+balancing, compromising with racial institutions. But another Ahab:
+
+the only white male American heroic enough to try to slay the
+monster that was devouring the world as he knew it.
+Another chapter that seems freshly lit by this reading is chapter
+42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville points to the do-or-die
+significance of his effort to say something unsayable in this chapter.
+“I almost despair,” he writes, “of putting it in a comprehensive form.
+It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.
+But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim,
+random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
+naught” (italics mine). The language of this chapter ranges between
+benevolent, beautiful images of whiteness and whiteness as sinister
+and shocking. After dissecting the ineffable, he concludes:
+“Therefore…symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by
+whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized
+significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.” I stress
+“idealized significance” to emphasize and make clear (if such clarity
+needs stating) that Melville is not exploring white people, but
+whiteness idealized. Then, after informing the reader of his “hope to
+light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we
+seek,” he tries to nail it. To provide the key to the “hidden cause.” His
+struggle to do so is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. But in
+nonfigurative language, he identifies the imaginative tools needed to
+solve the problem: “Subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without
+imagination no man can follow another into these halls.” And his
+final observation reverberates with personal trauma. “This visible
+[colored] world seems formed in love, the invisible [white] spheres
+were formed in fright.” The necessity for whiteness as privileged
+“natural” state, the invention of it, was indeed formed in fright.
+“Slavery,” writes Rogin, “confirmed Melville’s isolation, decisively
+established in Moby-Dick, from the dominant consciousness of his
+time.” I differ on this point and submit that Melville’s hostility to and
+repugnance for slavery would have found company. There were
+many white Americans of his acquaintance who felt repelled by
+slavery, wrote journalism about it, spoke about it, legislated on it,
+and were active in abolishing it. His attitude to slavery alone would
+
+not have condemned him to the almost autistic separation visited
+upon him. And if he felt convinced that blacks were worthy of being
+treated like whites, or that capitalism was dangerous—he had
+company or could have found it. But to question the very notion of
+white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as
+privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to
+meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that
+superiority, to “pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and
+Judges,” to drag the “judge himself to the bar”—that was dangerous,
+solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now. To be “only a
+patriot to heaven” is no mean aspiration in young America for a
+writer—or the captain of a whaling ship.
+A complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text is Moby-Dick, and
+among its several meanings it seems to me this “unspeakable” one
+has remained the “hidden cause,” the “Truth to the face of
+Falsehood.” To this day no novelist has so wrestled with his subject.
+To this day literary analyses of canonical texts have shied away from
+that perspective: the informing and determining Afro-American
+presence in traditional American literature. The chapters I have
+made reference to are only a fraction of the instances where the text
+surrenders such insights, and points a helpful finger toward the ways
+in which the ghost drives the machine.
+Melville is not the only author whose works double their
+fascination and their power when scoured for this presence and the
+writerly strategies taken to address or deny it. Edgar Allan Poe will
+sustain such a reading. So will Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark
+Twain, and in the twentieth century, Willa Cather, Ernest
+Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and
+William Faulkner, to name a few. Canonical American literature is
+begging for such attention.
+It seems to me a more than fruitful project to produce some cogent
+analysis showing instances where early American literature identifies
+itself, risks itself, to assert its antithesis to blackness. How its
+linguistic gestures prove the intimate relationship to what is being
+nulled by implying a full descriptive apparatus (identity) to a
+
+presence-that-is-assumed-not-to-exist.
+Afro-American
+critical
+inquiry can do this work.
+I mentioned earlier that finding or imposing Western influences
+in/on Afro-American literature had value provided the valued
+process does not become self-anointing. There is an adjacent project
+to be undertaken—the third focus in my list: the examination of
+contemporary literature (both the sacred and the profane) for the
+impact Afro-American presence has had on the structure of the work,
+the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise in which it is engaged.
+Like focus two, this critical process must also eschew the pernicious
+goal of equating the fact of that presence with the achievement of the
+work. A work does not get better because it is responsive to another
+culture, nor does it become automatically flawed because of that
+responsiveness. The point is to clarify, not to enlist. And it does not
+“go without saying” that a work written by an Afro-American is
+automatically subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence.
+There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of AfroAmerican literature. In others there is the duel with blackness, and in
+some cases, as they say, “You’d never know.”
+
+III
+It is on this area, the impact of Afro-American culture on
+contemporary American literature, that I now wish to comment. I
+have already said that works by Afro-Americans can respond to this
+presence (just as nonblack works do) in a number of ways. The
+question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that
+modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words,
+other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a
+black writer? Other than my own ethnicity—what is going on in my
+work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a
+cultural specificity that is Afro-American?
+Please forgive the use of my own work in these observations. I use
+it not because it provides the best example, but because I know it
+best, know what I did and why, and know how central these queries
+
+are to me. Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But
+first of all it is an effort of the will to discover.
+Let me suggest some of the ways in which I activate language and
+ways in which that language activates me. I will limit this perusal by
+calling attention only to the first sentences of the books I’ve written,
+and hope that in exploring the choices I made, prior points are
+illuminated.
+The Bluest Eye begins, “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds
+in the fall of 1941.” That sentence, like the ones that open each
+succeeding book, is simple, uncomplicated. Of all the sentences that
+begin all the books, only two of them have dependent clauses; the
+other three are simple sentences and two are stripped down to
+virtually subject, verb, modifier. Nothing fancy here. No words need
+looking up; they are ordinary, everyday words. Yet I hoped the
+simplicity was not simpleminded, but devious, even loaded. And that
+the process of selecting each word, for itself and its relationship to
+the others in the sentence, along with the rejection of others for their
+echoes, for what is determined and what is not determined, what is
+almost there and what must be gleaned, would not theatricalize
+itself, would not erect a proscenium—at least not a noticeable one. So
+important to me was this unstaging, that in this first novel I
+summarized the whole of the book on the first page. (In the first
+edition, it was printed in its entirety on the jacket.)
+The opening phrase of this sentence, “Quiet as it’s kept,” had
+several attractions for me. First, it was a familiar phrase, familiar to
+me as a child listening to adults; to black women conversing with one
+another; telling a story, an anecdote, gossip about someone or some
+event within the circle, the family, the neighborhood. The words are
+conspiratorial. “Shh, don’t tell anyone else” and “No one is allowed to
+know this.” It is a secret between us and a secret that is being kept
+from us. The conspiracy is both held and withheld, exposed and
+sustained. In some sense it was precisely what the act of writing the
+book was: the public exposure of a private confidence. In order fully
+to comprehend the duality of that position, one needs to think of the
+immediate political climate in which the writing took place, 1965–
+
+1969, during great social upheaval in the life of black people. The
+publication (as opposed to the writing) involved the exposure; the
+writing was the disclosure of secrets, secrets “we” shared and those
+withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside the
+community.
+“Quiet as it’s kept” is also a figure of speech that is written, in this
+instance, but clearly chosen for how speakerly it is, how it speaks and
+bespeaks a particular world and its ambience. Further, in addition to
+its “back fence” connotation, its suggestion of illicit gossip, of
+thrilling revelation, there is also, in the “whisper,” the assumption
+(on the part of the reader) that the teller is on the inside, knows
+something others do not, and is going to be generous with this
+privileged information. The intimacy I was aiming for, the intimacy
+between the reader and the page, could start up immediately because
+the secret is being shared, at best, and eavesdropped upon, at the
+least. Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy seemed crucial to me
+then, writing my first novel. I did not want the reader to have time to
+wonder, “What do I have to do, to give up, in order to read this?
+What defense do I need, what distance maintain?” Because I know
+(and the reader does not—he or she has to wait for the second
+sentence) that this is a terrible story about things one would rather
+not know anything about.
+What, then, is the Big Secret about to be shared? The thing we
+(reader and I) are “in” on? A botanical aberration. Pollution,
+perhaps. A skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things: a September,
+an autumn, a fall without marigolds. Bright common, strong and
+sturdy marigolds. When? In 1941, and since that is a momentous
+year (the beginning of World War II for the United States), the “fall”
+of 1941, just before the declaration of war, has a “closet” innuendo. In
+the temperate zone where there is a season known as “fall” during
+which one expects marigolds to be at their peak, in the months
+before the beginning of U.S. participation in World War II,
+something grim is about to be divulged. The next sentence will make
+it clear that the sayer, the one who knows, is a child speaking,
+mimicking the adult black women on the porch or in the backyard.
+
+The opening phrase is an effort to be grown-up about this shocking
+information. The point of view of a child alters the priority an adult
+would assign the information. “We thought…it was because Pecola
+was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow”
+foregrounds the flowers, backgrounds illicit, traumatic,
+incomprehensible sex coming to its dreaded fruition. This
+foregrounding of “trivial” information and backgrounding of
+shocking knowledge secures the point of view but gives the reader
+pause about whether the voice of children can be trusted at all or is
+more trustworthy than an adult’s. The reader is thereby protected
+from a confrontation too soon with the painful details, while
+simultaneously provoked into a desire to know them. The novelty, I
+thought, would be in having this story of female violation revealed
+from the vantage point of the victims or could-be victims of rape—
+the persons no one inquired of (certainly not in 1965): the girls
+themselves. And since the victim does not have the vocabulary to
+understand the violence or its context, gullible, vulnerable
+girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults they pretended to be
+in the beginning, would have to do that for her, and would have to fill
+those silences with their own reflective lives. Thus, the opening
+provides the stroke that announces something more than a secret
+shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing
+spoken at last. And they draw the connection between a minor
+destabilization in seasonal flora with the insignificant destruction of
+a black girl. Of course “minor” and “insignificant” represent the
+outside world’s view—for the girls both phenomena are earthshaking
+depositories of information they spend that whole year of childhood
+(and afterwards) trying to fathom, and cannot. If they have any
+success, it will be in transferring the problem of fathoming to the
+presumably adult reader, to the inner circle of listeners. At the least
+they have distributed the weight of these problematical questions to
+a larger constituency, and justified the public exposure of a privacy.
+If the conspiracy that the opening words announce is entered into by
+the reader, then the book can be seen to open with its close: a
+speculation on the disruption of “nature,” as being a social disruption
+
+with tragic individual consequences in which the reader, as part of
+the population of the text, is implicated.
+However, a problem, unsolved, lies in the central chamber of the
+novel. The shattered world I built (to complement what is happening
+to Pecola), its pieces held together by seasons in childtime and
+commenting at every turn on the incompatible and barren whitefamily primer, does not in its present form handle effectively the
+silence at its center. The void that is Pecola’s “unbeing.” It should
+have had a shape—like the emptiness left by a boom or a cry. It
+required a sophistication unavailable to me, and some deft
+manipulation of the voices around her. She is not seen by herself
+until she hallucinates a self. And the fact of her hallucination
+becomes a point of outside-the-book conversation, but does not work
+in the reading process.
+Also, although I was pressing for a female expressiveness (a
+challenge that resurfaced in Sula), it eluded me for the most part,
+and I had to content myself with female personae because I was not
+able to secure throughout the work the feminine subtext that is
+present in the opening sentence (the women gossiping, eager and
+aghast in “Quiet as it’s kept”). The shambles this struggle became is
+most evident in the section on Pauline Breedlove where I resorted to
+two voices, hers and the urging narrator’s, both of which are
+extremely unsatisfactory to me. It is interesting to me now that
+where I thought I would have the most difficulty subverting the
+language to a feminine mode, I had the least: connecting Cholly’s
+“rape” by the white men to his own of his daughter. This most
+masculine act of aggression becomes feminized in my language,
+“passive,” and, I think, more accurately repellent when deprived of
+the male “glamor of shame” rape is (or once was) routinely given.
+The points I have tried to illustrate are that my choices of language
+(speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on
+codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate
+coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory
+fabric), as well as my (failed) attempt to shape a silence while
+breaking it are attempts (many unsatisfactory) to transfigure the
+
+complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a language
+worthy of the culture.
+In Sula, it’s necessary to concentrate on two first sentences
+because what survives in print is not the one I had intended to be the
+first. Originally the book opened with “Except for World War II
+nothing ever interfered with National Suicide Day.” With some
+encouragement, I recognized that it was a false beginning. “In
+medias res” with a vengeance, because there was no res to be in the
+middle of—no implied world in which to locate the specificity and the
+resonances in the sentence. More to the point, I knew I was writing a
+second novel, and that it too would be about people in a black
+community not just foregrounded but totally dominant, and that it
+was about black women—also foregrounded and dominant. In 1988,
+certainly, I would not need (or feel the need for) the sentence—the
+short section—that now opens Sula. The threshold between the
+reader and the black-topic text need not be the safe, welcoming lobby
+I persuaded myself it needed at that time. My preference was the
+demolition of the lobby altogether. As can be seen from The Bluest
+Eye, and in every other book I have written, only Sula has this
+“entrance.” The others refuse the “presentation”; refuse the seductive
+safe harbor, the line of demarcation between the sacred and the
+obscene, public and private, them and us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to
+the diminished expectations of the reader, or his or her alarm
+heightened by the emotional luggage one carries into the black-topic
+text. (I should remind you that Sula was begun in 1969, while my
+first book was in proof, in a period of extraordinary political activity.)
+Since I had become convinced that the effectiveness of the original
+beginning was only in my head, the job at hand became how to
+construct an alternate beginning that would not force the work to
+genuflect and would complement the outlaw quality in it. The
+problem presented itself this way: to fashion a door. Instead of
+having the text open wide the moment the cover is opened (or, as in
+The Bluest Eye, to have the book stand exposed before the cover is
+even touched, much less opened, by placing the complete “plot” on
+the first page—and finally on the jacket of the first edition), here I
+
+was to posit a door, turn its knob, and beckon for some four or five
+pages. I had determined not to mention any characters in those
+pages, there would be no people in the lobby—but I did, rather
+heavy-handedly in my view, end the welcome aboard with the
+mention of Shadrack and Sula. It was a craven (to me, still)
+surrender to a worn-out technique of novel writing: the overt
+announcement to the reader whom to pay attention to. Yet the bulk
+of the opening I finally wrote is about the community, a view of it,
+and the view is not from within (this is a door, after all) but from the
+point of view of a stranger—the “valley man” who might happen to be
+there on some errand, but who obviously does not live there and to
+and for whom all this is mightily strange, even exotic. You can see
+why I despise much of this beginning. Yet I tried to place in the
+opening sentence the signature terms of loss: “There used to be a
+neighborhood here; not anymore.” That may not be the world’s worst
+sentence, but it doesn’t “play,” as they say in the theater.
+My new first sentence became “In that place, where they tore the
+nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for
+the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.”
+Instead of my original plan, here I am introducing an outside-thecircle reader into the circle. I am translating the anonymous into the
+specific, a “place” into a “neighborhood,” and letting a stranger in
+through whose eyes it can be viewed. In between “place” and
+“neighborhood” I now have to squeeze the specificity and the
+difference; the nostalgia, the history, and the nostalgia for the
+history; the violence done to it and the consequences of that violence.
+(It took three months, those four pages, a whole summer of nights.)
+The nostalgia is sounded by “once”; the history and a longing for it is
+implied in the connotation of “neighborhood.” The violence lurks in
+having something torn out by its roots—it will not, cannot grow
+again. Its consequences are that what has been destroyed is
+considered weeds, refuse necessarily removed in urban
+“development” by the unspecified but no less known “they” who do
+not, cannot, afford to differentiate what is displaced, and would not
+care that this is “refuse” of a certain kind. Both plants have darkness
+
+in them: “black” and “night.” One is unusual (nightshade) and has
+two darkness words: “night” and “shade.” The other (blackberry) is
+common. A familiar plant and an exotic one. A harmless one and a
+dangerous one. One produces a nourishing berry; one delivers toxic
+ones. But they both thrived there together, in that place when it was
+a neighborhood. Both are gone now, and the description that follows
+is of the other specific things, in this black community, destroyed in
+the wake of the golf course. “Golf course” conveys what it is not, in
+this context: not houses, or factories, or even a public park, and
+certainly not residents. It is a manicured place where the likelihood
+of the former residents showing up is almost nil.
+I want to get back to those berries for a moment (to explain,
+perhaps, the length of time it took for the language of that section to
+arrive). I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black,
+metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly
+not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World black and
+New World woman extracting choice from choicelessness,
+responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring,
+disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed,
+unpolicing, uncontained, and uncontainable. And dangerously
+female. In her final conversation with Nel she refers to herself as a
+special kind of black person woman, one with choices. Like a
+redwood, she says. (With all due respect to the dream landscape of
+Freud, trees have always seemed feminine to me.) In any case, my
+perception of Sula’s double-dose of chosen blackness and biological
+blackness is in the presence of those two words of darkness in
+“nightshade” as well as in the uncommon quality of the vine itself.
+One variety is called “enchanter,” and the other “bittersweet” because
+the berries taste bitter at first and then sweet. Also nightshade was
+thought to counteract witchcraft. All of this seemed a wonderful
+constellation of signs for Sula. And “blackberry patches” seemed
+equally appropriate for Nel: nourishing, never needing to be tended
+or cultivated, once rooted and bearing. Reliably sweet but thornbound. Her process of becoming, heralded by the explosive
+dissolving of her fragilely-held-together ball of string and fur (when
+
+the thorns of her self-protection are removed by Eva), puts her back
+in touch with the complex, contradictory, evasive, independent,
+liquid modernity Sula insisted upon. A modernity that overturns
+prewar definitions, ushers in the Jazz Age (an age defined by AfroAmerican art and culture), and requires new kinds of intelligences to
+define oneself.
+The stage-setting of the first four pages is embarrassing to me now,
+but the pains I have taken to explain it may be helpful in identifying
+the strategies one can be forced to resort to in trying to accommodate
+the mere fact of writing about, for, and out of black culture while
+accommodating and responding to mainstream “white” culture. The
+“valley man’s” guidance into the territory was my compromise.
+Perhaps it “worked,” but it was not the work I wanted to do.
+Had I begun with Shadrack, I would have ignored the smiling
+welcome and put the reader into immediate confrontation with his
+wound and his scar. The difference my preferred (original) beginning
+would have made would be calling greater attention to the traumatic
+displacement this most wasteful capitalist war had on black people in
+particular, and throwing into relief the creative, if outlawed,
+determination to survive it whole. Sula as (feminine) solubility and
+Shadrack’s (male) fixative are two extreme ways of dealing with
+displacement—a prevalent theme in the narrative of black people. In
+the final opening I replicated the demiurge of discriminatory,
+prosecutorial racial oppression in the loss to commercial “progress”
+of the village, but the references to the community’s stability and
+creativeness (music, dancing, craft, religion, irony, wit all referred to
+in the “valley man’s” presence) refract and subsume their pain while
+they are in the thick of it. It is a softer embrace than Shadrack’s
+organized, public madness—his disruptive remembering presence,
+which helps (for a while) to cement the community, until Sula
+challenges them.
+“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly
+from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.”
+This declarative sentence is designed to mock a journalistic style;
+with a minor alteration it could be the opening of an item in a small-
+
+town newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event of minimal
+local interest, yet I wanted it to contain (as does the scene that takes
+place when the agent fulfills his promise) the information that Song
+of Solomon both centers on and radiates from.
+The name of the insurance company is real, a well-known blackowned company dependent on black clients, and in its corporate
+name are “life” and “mutual,” “agent” being the necessary ingredient
+of what enables the relationship between them. The sentence also
+moves from North Carolina to Lake Superior—geographical
+locations, but with a sly implication that the move from North
+Carolina (the South) to Lake Superior (the North) might not actually
+involve progress to some “superior state”—which, of course, it does
+not. The two other significant words are “fly,” upon which the novel
+centers, and “Mercy,” the name of the place from which he is to fly.
+Both constitute the heartbeat of the narrative. Where is the
+insurance man flying to? The other side of Lake Superior is Canada,
+of course, the historic terminus of the escape route for black people
+looking for asylum. “Mercy,” the other significant term, is the grace
+note; the earnest though, with one exception, unspoken wish of the
+narrative’s population. Some grant it; some never find it; one, at
+least, makes it the text and cry of her extemporaneous sermon upon
+the death of her granddaughter. It touches, turns, and returns to
+Guitar at the end of the book—he who is least deserving of it—and
+moves him to make it his own final gift. It is what one wishes for
+Hagar; what is unavailable to and unsought by Macon Dead, senior;
+what his wife learns to demand from him, and what can never come
+from the white world as is signified by the inversion of the name of
+the hospital from Mercy to “No Mercy.” It is only available from
+within. The center of the narrative is flight; the springboard is mercy.
+But the sentence turns, as all sentences do, on the verb: promised.
+The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten his act.
+He promises, as though a contract is being executed—faithfully—
+between himself and others. Promises broken, or kept; the difficulty
+of ferreting out loyalties and ties that bind or bruise wend their way
+throughout the action and the shifting relationships. So the agent’s
+
+flight, like that of the Solomon in the title, although toward asylum
+(Canada, or freedom, or home, or the company of the welcoming
+dead), and although it carries the possibility of failure and the
+certainty of danger, is toward change, an alternative way, a cessation
+of things-as-they-are. It should not be understood as a simple
+desperate act, the end of a fruitless life, a life without gesture,
+without examination, but as obedience to a deeper contract with his
+people. It is his commitment to them, regardless of whether, in all its
+details, they understand it. There is, however, in their response to his
+action, a tenderness, some contrition, and mounting respect (“They
+didn’t know he had it in him”) and an awareness that the gesture
+enclosed rather than repudiated themselves. The note he leaves asks
+for forgiveness. It is tacked on his door as a mild invitation to
+whomever might pass by, but it is not an advertisement. It is an
+almost Christian declaration of love as well as humility of one who
+was not able to do more.
+There are several other flights in the work and they are
+motivationally different. Solomon’s the most magical, the most
+theatrical, and, for Milkman, the most satisfying. It is also the most
+problematic—to those he left behind. Milkman’s flight binds these
+two elements of loyalty (Mr. Smith’s) and abandon and self-interest
+(Solomon’s) into a third thing: a merging of fealty and risk that
+suggests the “agency” for “mutual” “life,” which he offers at the end
+and which is echoed in the hills behind him, and is the marriage of
+surrender and domination, acceptance and rule, commitment to a
+group through ultimate isolation. Guitar recognizes this marriage
+and recalls enough of how lost he himself is to put his weapon down.
+The journalistic style at the beginning, its rhythm of a familiar,
+hand-me-down dignity is pulled along by an accretion of detail
+displayed in a meandering unremarkableness. Simple words,
+uncomplex sentence structures, persistent understatement, highly
+aural syntax—but the ordinariness of the language, its colloquial,
+vernacular, humorous, and, upon occasion, parabolic quality
+sabotage expectations and masks judgments when it can no longer
+defer them. The composition of red, white, and blue in the opening
+
+scene provides the national canvas/flag upon which the narrative
+works and against which the lives of these black people must be seen,
+but which must not overwhelm the enterprise the novel is engaged
+in. It is a composition of color that heralds Milkman’s birth, protects
+his youth, hides its purpose and through which he must burst
+(through blue Buicks, red tulips in his waking dream, and his sisters’
+white stockings, ribbons, and gloves) before discovering that the gold
+of his search is really Pilate’s yellow orange and the glittering metal
+of the box in her ear.
+These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they
+were planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances.
+That is planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall
+the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected
+or misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the
+questions the community asks, and both reader and “voice” stand
+among the crowd, within it, with privileged intimacy and contact, but
+without any more privileged information than the crowd has. That
+egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel’s population, the
+narrator’s voice) on the same footing reflected for me the force of
+flight and mercy, and the precious, imaginative, yet realistic gaze of
+black people who (at one time, anyway) did not anoint what or whom
+it mythologized. The “song” itself contains this unblinking evaluation
+of the miraculous and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an
+unblinking gaze that is lurking in the tender but amused choralcommunity response to the agent’s flight. Sotto (but not completely)
+is my own giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the
+journey to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western
+fable, they are in deep trouble, but the African myth is also
+contaminated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self-born Pilate is
+unimpressed by Solomon’s flight and knocks Milkman down when,
+made new by his appropriation of his own family’s fable, he returns
+to educate her with it. Upon hearing all he has to say, her only
+interest is filial. “Papa?…I’ve been carryin’ Papa?” And her longing to
+hear the song, finally, is a longing for balm to die by, not a
+submissive obedience to history—anybody’s.
+
+The opening sentence of Tar Baby, “He believed he was safe,” is
+the second version of itself. The first, “He thought he was safe,” was
+discarded because “thought” did not contain the doubt I wanted to
+plant in the reader’s mind about whether or not he really was—safe.
+“Thought” came to me at once because it was the verb my parents
+and grandparents used when describing what they had dreamed the
+night before. Not “I dreamt” or “It seemed” or even “I saw or did”
+this or that—but “I thought.” It gave the dream narrative distance (a
+dream is not “real”) and power (the control implied in “thinking”
+rather than “dreaming”). But to use “thought” seemed to undercut
+the faith of the character and the distrust I wanted to suggest to the
+reader. “Believe” was chosen to do the work properly. And the person
+who does the believing is, in a way, about to enter a dream world,
+and convinces himself, eventually, that he is in control of it. He
+believed; was convinced. And although the word suggests his
+conviction, it does not reassure the reader. If I had wanted the reader
+to trust this person’s point of view I would have written “He was
+safe.” Or, “Finally, he was safe.” The unease about this view of safety
+is important because safety itself is the desire of each person in the
+novel. Locating it, creating it, losing it.
+You may recall that I was interested in working out the mystery of
+a piece of lore, a folktale, which is also about safety and danger and
+the skills needed to secure the one and recognize and avoid the other.
+I was not, of course, interested in retelling the tale; I suppose that is
+an idea to pursue, but it is certainly not interesting enough to engage
+me for four years. I have said, elsewhere, that the exploration of the
+Tar Baby tale was like stroking a pet to see what the anatomy was
+like but not to disturb or distort its mystery. Folklore may have
+begun as allegory for natural or social phenomena; it may have been
+employed as a retreat from contemporary issues in art; but folklore
+can also contain myths that reactivate themselves endlessly through
+providers—the people who repeat, reshape, reconstitute, and
+reinterpret them. The Tar Baby tale seemed to me to be about masks.
+Not masks as covering what is to be hidden, but how masks come to
+life, take life over, exercise the tensions between themselves and
+
+what they cover. For Son, the most effective mask is none. For the
+others the construction is careful and delicately borne, but the masks
+they make have a life of their own and collide with those they come
+in contact with. The texture of the novel seemed to want leanness,
+architecture that was worn and ancient like a piece of mask
+sculpture: exaggerated, breathing, just athwart the representational
+life it displaced. Thus, the first and last sentences had to match, as
+the exterior planes match the interior, concave ones inside the mask.
+Therefore “He believed he was safe” would be the twin of “Licketysplit. Lickety-split. Lickety-lickety-lickety-split.” This close is (1) the
+last sentence of the folktale, (2) the action of the character, (3) the
+indeterminate ending that follows from the untrustworthy
+beginning, (4) the complimentary meter of its twin sister (u u / u u /
+with u u u / u u u /), and (5) the wide and marvelous space between
+the contradiction of those two images: from a dream of safety to the
+sound of running feet. The whole mediated world in between. This
+masked and unmasked; enchanted, disenchanted; wounded and
+wounding world is played out on and by the varieties of
+interpretation (Western and Afro-American) the Tar Baby myth has
+been (and continues to be) subjected to. Winging one’s way through
+the vise and expulsion of history becomes possible in creative
+encounters with that history. Nothing, in those encounters, is safe, or
+should be. Safety is the fetus of power as well as protection from it, as
+the uses to which masks and myths are put in Afro-American culture
+remind us.
+“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
+In beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out
+numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate
+from the street or even the city; to name it the way “Sweet Home”
+was named; the way plantations were named, but not with nouns or
+“proper” names—with numbers instead because numbers have no
+adjectives, no posture of coziness or grandeur or the haughty
+yearning of arrivistes and estate builders for the parallel
+beautifications of the nation they left behind, laying claim to instant
+history and legend. Numbers here constitute an address, a thrilling
+
+enough prospect for slaves who had owned nothing, least of all an
+address. And although the numbers, unlike words, can have no
+modifiers, I give these an adjective—“spiteful” (there are two other
+modifiers of 124). The address is therefore personalized, but
+personalized by its own activity, not the pasted on desire for
+personality.
+Also there is something about numerals that makes them spoken,
+heard, in this context, because one expects words to read in a book,
+not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the novel, sometimes
+cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an inner-ear sound or
+a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a musical
+emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can.
+Thus the second sentence is not one: it is a phrase that properly,
+grammatically, belongs as a dependent clause with the first. Had I
+done that, however (“124 was spiteful, full of a baby’s venom,” or
+“124 was full of a baby’s venom”), I could not have had the accent on
+“full” (/ u u / u / u pause u u u u / u).
+Whatever the risks of confronting the reader with what must be
+immediately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative
+authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I
+determined to take. Because the in medias res opening that I am so
+committed to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should
+appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked,
+thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the
+first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between
+the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves
+were from one place to another, from any place to another, without
+preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance—a
+gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which
+this snatching—this kidnapping—propels one changes from spiteful
+to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have
+changed. A few words have to be read before it is clear that “124”
+refers to a house (in most of the early drafts, “The women in the
+house knew it” was simply “The women knew it”; “house” was not
+mentioned for seventeen lines), and a few more have to be read to
+
+discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite. By then it
+is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control, but is not
+beyond understanding since it is not beyond accommodation by both
+the “women” and the “children.” The fully realized presence of the
+haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of
+hand. One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the
+nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled
+diet of the incredible political world.
+The subliminal, the underground life of a novel is the area most
+likely to link arms with the reader and facilitate making it one’s own.
+Because one must, to get from the first sentence to the next, and the
+next and the next. The friendly observation post I was content to
+build and man in Sula (with the stranger in the midst), or the downhome journalism of Song of Solomon, or the calculated mistrust of
+the point of view in Tar Baby would not serve here. Here I wanted
+the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are;
+suddenly, without comfort or succor from the “author,” with only
+imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey. The
+painterly language of Song of Solomon was not useful to me in
+Beloved. There is practically no color whatsoever in its pages, and
+when there is, it is so stark and remarked upon, it is virtually raw.
+Color seen for the first time, without its history. No built architecture
+as in Tar Baby; no play with Western chronology as in Sula; no
+exchange between book life and “real” life discourse with printed text
+units rubbing up against seasonal black childtime units as in The
+Bluest Eye. No compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture,
+no paint, no time, especially no time because memory, prehistoric
+memory, has no time. There is just a little music, each other, and the
+urgency of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the
+work of language is to get out of the way.
+I hope you understand that in this explication of how I practice
+language is a search for and deliberate posture of vulnerability to
+those aspects of Afro-American culture that can inform and position
+my work. I sometimes know when the work works, when nommo has
+effectively summoned, by reading and listening to those who have
+
+entered the text. I learn nothing from those who resist it, except, of
+course, the sometimes fascinating display of their struggle. My
+expectations of and my gratitude to the critics who enter, are great.
+To those who talk about how as well as what; who identify the
+workings as well as the work; for whom the study of Afro-American
+literature is neither a crash course in neighborliness and tolerance,
+nor an infant to be carried, instructed, or chastised or even whipped
+like a child, but the serious study of art forms that have much work
+to do, and which are already legitimatized by their own cultural
+sources and predecessors—in or out of the canon—I owe much.
+For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty, a
+hundred, or more years his or her work may be relished for its beauty
+or its insight or its power, or it may be condemned for its
+vacuousness and pretension—and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred
+years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her
+intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed at
+for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power—and
+junked. It’s possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or that
+both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned, when
+one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.
+
+NOTES
+1. See “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of
+Chicago Press, 1986).
+2. Among many examples, They Came Before Columbus, The African Presence in
+Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima (New York: Random House, 1976), xvi–xvii.
+3. Tzvetan Todorov, “ ‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture,” translated by Loulou Mack, in Gates,
+“Race,” Writing, and Difference, 370–80.
+4. Terrence Rafferty, “Articles of Faith,” New Yorker, May 16, 1988, 110–18.
+5. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1,
+The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
+Press, 1987), 2.
+6. Ibid., 310.
+7. Ibid., 337.
+
+8. See Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman
+Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 15.
+9. Ibid., 107 and 142.
+10. Ibid., 112.
+* Author’s note: Older America is not always distinguishable from its infancy. We may
+pardon Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 but it should have occurred to Kenneth Lynn in 1986 that
+some young Native American might read his Hemingway biography and see herself
+described as a “squaw” by this respected scholar, and that some young men might shudder
+reading the words “buck” and “half-breed” so casually included in his scholarly
+speculations.
+
+Academic Whispers
+
+A
+
+T SOME TIME in the late eighties, I began to feel an
+uneasiness about what seemed to me a whispered conversation
+taking place within the study of African American literature, between
+students and masters of its scholarship; it appeared to be a private
+agreement about the true purpose of the discourse. My unease about
+this sotto dialogue was exacerbated by another blatant one that
+attacked and suborned the legitimacy of African American literature
+as a field of study. Both dialogues—the covert one and the blatant
+one—drove the debates on canon formation.
+Back in the eighties I was not eager to think through my anxiety
+about the shape the debate was taking—the politics of identity versus
+the politics of identitylessness, sometimes known as “universality”—
+because I was not willing to be distracted into that old and sad
+routine that African American artists and scholars so often believe
+themselves forced to undertake: the routine of defending, forever
+defending, their right to exist. It was such a tedious battle, so
+unoriginal, so enervating it left no time and no strength for the real
+work of artists and scholars, which is to refine its own creation and
+go about their own business. I did not want to watch the billow of
+another toreador’s red cape designed to provoke and thereby trick a
+force from knowing its own power. I chose rather to focus on how to
+create nonracist, yet race-specific literature within an already raceinflected language for readers who have been forced to deal with the
+assumptions of racial hierarchy. I chose to write as though there was
+nothing to prove or disprove, as though an unraced world already
+existed. Not to transcend race, or to aspire to some fraudulent
+“universalism”—a code word that had come to mean “nonblack”—but
+
+to claim the liberty of my own imagination. For I have never lived,
+nor has anyone, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a
+world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or
+described as dreamscape, Edenesque, utopian—so remote are the
+possibilities of its achievement. In hopeful language it has been
+posited as ideal, a condition possible only if accompanied by the
+Messiah or located in a protected preserve, rather like a wilderness
+park, or in the forests of Faulkner’s imagination, where hunting
+prowess trumps race and class. As an already and always raced
+writer I knew that I would not, could not, reproduce the master’s
+voice along with its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white
+father. I wanted to figure out how to manipulate, mutate, and control
+imagistic, metaphoric language (and its syntax) in order to produce
+something that could be called literature that is free of the
+imaginative restraints that the racially inflected language at my
+disposal imposes on me. I don’t mean, of course, simply the
+avoidance of racial slurs, name-calling, or stereotyping. I mean first
+to recognize these linguistic strategies, then either to employ or
+deploy them to achieve a counter effect; to deactivate their lazy,
+unearned power, to summon other oppositional powers, and liberate
+what I am able to invent, record, describe, and transform from the
+straitjacket a racialized society can and does buckle us into. I insisted
+on writing outside the white gaze, not against it but in a space where
+I could postulate the humanity writers were always being asked to
+enunciate. Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial
+dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that
+supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging
+work a writer could take on. As I mentioned earlier, imagining a
+world minus racial dominance or hierarchy appears in literature as
+an impossible Eden or unreachable utopia, but it has also been
+described as “barbarism,” as “the end of history,” “futureless,” or
+doomed to a future of rubbish and declared an already damaged,
+valueless experience. In other words catastrophe. A naïve, corrupt
+Jonestown culminating in ignorance, murder, insanity.
+
+Perhaps I was nursing an incipient paranoia, the origin of which I
+traced to the unusually large number of inquiries to speak to
+university populations on the issue of racism, and even to address
+campuses on which some specific and especially craven racial
+incidents had taken place. I was not simply annoyed by the
+assumptions of these requests, I was angered to be asked to clarify an
+area (one of many) about which I know nothing. Of course, I have
+been a victim of such treatment, but why, I wondered, would
+anybody ask the victim to explain his torturer? Isn’t such insight best
+sought from those familiar with its rationale? (Does a rape victim
+know best how to calm a rapist?) It seemed to me the problem of
+racism ought to be addressed first by those who know its ins and outs
+from the privileged seat of its origin. Being asked to spend my time
+that way (to heal and to be sick) may have disturbed me unduly, but
+it connected somehow to my perception that the study of African
+American literature had become, in several quarters (if high school
+and certain college curricula, syllabi, anthologies, prefaces,
+headnotes, afterwords, and forewords were an indication) an
+exercise in the achievement of neighborliness or tolerance through
+the study of its special kind of pathology, in which the survivor is
+assumed to be both patient and physician. And this was where the
+whispered discourse took place.
+With the best intentions in the world, the encounter between
+African American art and students of literature had developed these
+subtexts (The Bluest Eye, read in elementary schools, was a case in
+point, as was its banning). And it was easy to see how two messages
+—African American art as explications of pathology; African
+American art as restorative balms to rashes of racism—had been
+formulated and why. First, the history of black people in the United
+States has been a brutal one, and its consequences still shake and
+inform contemporary life. Examining and acknowledging that
+brutality can and does lend itself to the interpretation of black
+presence in that history as our pathology and only ours; it can and
+did lead to the notion that, as a people, we are a problem (the “negro
+problem” that every black writer from Richard Wright to Ralph
+
+Ellison to James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston had to comment on
+—not to mention the verification of literacy that Phillis Wheatley and
+the authors of slave narratives were required to provide) and it was
+our job to solve ourselves.
+Countering that interpretation of African American studies as
+vaccination against incipient white racism is another one: African
+American studies as a field naturally immune from racism. That
+black life was a cornucopia of treasures, contributions, and
+constructive indigenous mechanisms beneficial to its community and
+that these social mechanisms operated as an innocent alternative to
+the race-bound society surrounding it. It is an interpretation that
+captures the sense that most African Americans have, that their real
+life, their nurturing life, their interior life is someplace else—outside
+its deforming history. And that obstacle-ridden as that life may be, it
+was clearly one they would choose, if the choice were presented to
+them. That while many (perhaps even most) African Americans
+valued the perceived privilege and license of white Americans, very
+few wanted to trade places if it meant becoming them.
+Yet articulating this valued and revered difference seldom failed to
+come across as anything but self-serving, defensive patterns of
+denial: the “prideful” rhetoric typical of the weakened. Taking the
+position that history is not the determining factor, that stability,
+beauty, creativity, brilliance are the real characteristics of black life,
+seemed to weight (and in some circumstances, sully) the study of
+black culture with an ennobling program, an agenda, that broke its
+back in its attempt to enforce it.
+These postures: (1) African American culture as examination and
+diagnoses of the patient, (2) African American culture as inoculation
+against intolerance, and (3) African American culture as an insistent
+celebration and recognition of cultural health and beauty (which
+could, by association or osmosis, heal others) clashed, and in the
+debris that resulted the literature itself was often buried. It appeared
+to me, as a writer participating in and inhabiting the world of that
+literature, that the work itself had become another kind of houseboy,
+
+opening doors for guests to enter a party to which it had not been
+invited.
+Well, that was what was on my mind in the late eighties. Yet I
+determined not to be distracted from creative work into defense
+work and remained silent on the employment of my work as social
+healer. But there was still another problem. I understood and indeed
+preferred the role of writer committed to the work and not its
+explication. I believed anything and everything I had to say on the
+subject of African American literature was in the books I had written.
+Participating in their critique was antithetical to what I wanted my
+work to do, which was to arrive without tags, labels, or final
+meanings identified by me and pinned to its lapel. I wanted it owned
+by whomever wanted to take possession of it. Requests by diligent,
+earnest scholars for a conversation or interview to accompany their
+research seemed inappropriate, somehow, a kind of journalistic glue
+to hold together conclusions already drawn from primary and
+secondary sources. In addition, nobody was really interested in my
+thoughts about my books. They were, naturally and correctly, more
+interested in their own thoughts about them. I was just there in the
+conversation to provide confirmation or, in some cases, to be wrong,
+to be unable to understand what I had actually written. It was a long
+time, I confess, before I took these interviews seriously, because I
+associated them, unfairly, with journalism, not scholarship.
+Finally I found myself forced to step up to the problem. My intense
+interest in the development of African American literary criticism
+and pedagogy and my refusal to participate in that criticism except as
+amicus curiae were incompatible once I understood that at the heart
+of my problem was a question at the heart of my work: that
+informing all of these kinds of approaches to the study of African
+American culture (pathology, tolerance, celebrated difference, erased
+difference; the writer as his or her best explicator, worse explicator,
+or friend of the court—or in my case an idle mixture) was the
+question, What constitutes African American literature? Is it the
+writing of Americans who “happen” to be Afro? Has it rather some
+cultural characteristics that surface, inform, and would surface and
+
+inform even if the literature had been shaped in Mexico City,
+London, Istanbul? Is there a difference? And if so, is the difference
+different from all other differences?
+It does not “go without saying” that a work written by an African
+American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing black presence.
+There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of African
+American literature. In some there is an antagonistic duel with
+blackness. And in other cases, as they say, you’d never know. If I
+were to participate in the critical discourse, I would need to clarify
+the question of what, other than melanin and subject matter, made
+me an African American writer. I didn’t expect to arrive at some
+quintessential moment when the search was ended, even if that were
+possible. But I did want to be counted among those for whom the
+quest was seriously taken and seriously pursued. Thus I entered the
+debate not as an artist only nor as an academic only, but as both. I
+believed that dual position could help expand and deepen the
+arguments about the validity, necessity, and direction of African
+American scholarship. Already there was significant work
+recontextualizing such studies, repositioning their impact in
+humanistic disciplines. But my interest turned from examining what
+black intellectuals and artists were up to, to something else. I was
+unhappy with the possibility of resegregation in African American
+studies—of driving the scholarship into protected turf where its
+uniqueness, its exceptionalism, its radical or even traditional
+characteristics could be interrogated, but where its powerful
+singularity could render it sui generis: a thing apart, in a class by
+itself. My thoughts were that African American studies could, but
+need not, confine itself to itself because the project was like the socalled race problem itself. It was not a neighborhood thriving or
+struggling at the edge of town, at the edge of campuses, at the outer
+rim of intellectual thought, nor was it an exotic, anthropologically
+interesting minority pulsing at the extremities of the body politic. It
+was and is at the heart of the heart of the nation. No policy decision
+could be understood without the black topic at its center, even or
+especially when unmentioned. Not housing, not education, the
+
+military, economy, voting, citizenship, prisons, loan practices, health
+care—name it, the real subject was what to do with black people,
+which became a substitute term for poor people. Very few disciplines
+escape the impact of racial constructs. Law, science, theology,
+medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, anthropology, history were all
+implicated. Furthermore, was there any public discourse in which a
+reference to black people did not exist? As I wrote in Playing in the
+Dark, “It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles.”
+From the framing of the Constitution, to the Electoral College, “the
+battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the
+illiterate…is there in the construction of a free and public school
+system; the balancing of representation in legislative bodies;
+jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice; it is there in…the
+memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and
+the driving narrative of the Americanization of every immigrant who
+came ashore.” I was convinced there was no race card—there was
+simply a deck, each one operating on a terrain much wider than
+previously thought, echoing its influence in the national culture. The
+consequences of this inquiry was a series of twelve lectures, three of
+which became the book Playing in the Dark. In it I tried to articulate
+the breadth of the project and its complexity. African American
+studies could interrogate a large area of the cultural production,
+West and East, and in the process enliven and expand a wide variety
+of disciplines. That is, after all, the goal of education: access to more
+knowledge. There may come a time when we—students, faculty,
+administrators, artists, and parents—will have to fight hard for
+education, fight hard for uncorrupted science (not the ideological or
+racist science); for sound social history, apolitical anthropology (not
+strategies of control); for the integrity of art (not its celebrity).
+There may indeed come a time when universities may have to fight
+for the privilege of intellectual freedom.
+
+Gertrude Stein and the Difference
+She Makes
+
+I
+
+HAVE READ somewhere that there are two responses to chaos:
+naming and violence. The naming is accomplished effortlessly when
+there is a so-called unnamed, or stripped-of-names population or
+geography available for the process. Otherwise one has to be content
+with forcible renaming. Violence is understood as an inevitable
+response to chaos—the untamed, the wild, the savage—as well as a
+beneficial one. When one conquers a land the execution of the
+conquest, indeed its point, is to control it by reshaping, moving,
+cutting it down or through. And that is understood to be the
+obligation of industrial and/or cultural progress. This latter
+encounter with chaos, unfortunately, is not limited to land, borders,
+natural resources. In order to effect the industrial progress it is also
+necessary to do violence to the people who inhabit the land—for they
+will resist and render themselves anarchic, part of the chaos, and in
+certain cases the control has included introducing new and
+destructive forms of hierarchy, when successful, and attempts at
+genocide when not.
+There is a third response to chaos, which I have not read about,
+which is stillness. Stillness is what lies in awe, in meditation; stillness
+also lies in passivity and dumbfoundedness. It may be that the early
+Americans contemplated all three: naming, violence, and stillness.
+Certainly this latter surfaces (or seems to) in Emerson, Thoreau, and
+the observer quality of Hawthorne. It is traceable in the Puritan
+ethos as well. But unlike the indigenous population of America, and
+unlike the bulk of the populations brought to America from Africa,
+the American stillness was braced with, even mitigated by,
+
+pragmatism. There was always an aspect of preparing for heirs, a
+distant future unresponsive to the past, and the virtue of wealth as
+God’s bounty—which it was a sin not to accumulate. This highly
+materialistic “stillness” as practiced by the clerical/religious
+immigrants was in marked contrast to the “take only what you need
+and leave the land as you found it” philosophy of preindustrial
+societies. One of the more interesting matters in the Christian
+formation of public and private responsibility is the negotiation
+between thrift and awe; religious solace and natural exploitation;
+physical repression and spiritual bounty; the sacred and the profane.
+That negotiation persists in the tension among these three responses
+to chaos: naming, violence, and stillness. Although the majority of
+settlers in America were by no means the panicked religionists or the
+kind but gloomy Plymouth Rock crowd of national reverence,
+convenient commodification, and nostalgic delusion. I believe some
+16 percent were, but that leaves 84 percent “other,” as they say on
+censorship forms. Yet even among that 16 percent it did not take long
+for that already ambivalent idea and complicitous stillness to
+dissipate in the wake of industrialization. With the abundant supply
+of free labor in the form of slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and
+term debtors, and of cheap labor in the form of poor immigrants
+fleeing from indebtedness, starvation, and death. Even as Twain
+privileged rural and village life, language, and humor, even as he
+endowed the Mississippi and the lanes and roads of nineteenthcentury America with pastoral yearning, he invested in profit-making
+schemes himself, disastrously as it turned out, and clearly urged and
+enjoyed the search for gold and the cleverness of money-making
+schemes in his characters. And it was our retiring, transcendentalist
+scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote of the California gold rush
+that “it did not matter what immoral means were used: the function
+of the gold rush was to hasten the settlement and civilizing of the
+West.” The underscoring of civilizing is mine.
+Melville, of course, was preoccupied with the counterclaims of a
+blossoming capitalism as it mirrored or impaled itself upon the force
+of nature. And along with much else, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, White-
+
+Jacket, and “Benito Cereno” address the impact of economic
+pressure on the “innocent,” the naïf laborer, and his “captain.” All
+within the context of that two-thirds of the globe that represents
+chaos: the sea, and which seems to illustrate most clearly all three
+responses: naming (charting, mapping, describing), violence
+(conquest, whaling, slave ship, the naval fleet, etc.), and stillness
+(soul searching, idle watches aboard ships that produce the most
+self-reflective passages). Poe responded to chaos with violence and
+naming. Violence in his attraction to the damned, the dying, the
+murderer’s mind. Naming in his insistent “scientific” footnotes,
+editorializing, indexing of historical and geographical data. But there
+was an additional element available to these writers, indeed to all
+Americans, for the contemplation of chaos. Nature, the “virgin”
+West, space, the proximity of death—all these mattered. Yet it was
+the availability of a domestic chaos, an invented disorder, a
+presumed uncivilized, savage, eternal and timeless “Other” that gives
+American history its peculiar and special formulation. This “Other,”
+as we have suggested, was the Africanistic presence. American
+colonialists and their heirs could and did respond to this serviceable,
+controllable “chaos” by naming, violence, and, very late in the day,
+tentatively, carefully, hesitantly, a measure of pragmatic stillness.
+Again it is to the literature, the writers that we turn for evidence and
+figurations of this meditation on dominance. There one sees stillness
+(in Melville, for example) in the refusal to name in order to
+contemplate the mystery, the message of chaos’s own inscription. In
+the refusal to do violence to, the refusal to conquer, to exploit. But to
+confront, to enter, to discover, as it were, of what this presence was
+or could be made.
+It is in this context that I wish to read Gertrude Stein: her
+dedicated investigation of the interior life of this Other, and the
+problems of nonintervention that it presented and fell victim to. The
+“modernism” of which Stein is generally understood to be precursor
+has many forms: if we consider modernism to have as its single most
+consistent characteristic the merging of forms, the raveling away of
+borders, of frontierlessness, the mixing of media, the blending of
+
+genres, the redefinition of gender, of traditional roles, the
+appropriation of various and formerly separate disciplines in the
+service of new or conventional ones, the combination of historical
+periods and styles in art—then we can trace the particular ways in
+which American literature made that journey. In America, the first
+mark and fearful sign of merging, of mixing and the dissolution of
+what was held to be “natural” borders, was racial merging. It was the
+best represented, most alarming, most legislated against, and most
+desired foray into forbidden, unknown, dangerous territory, for it
+represented the slide into darkness, the outlawed and illicit; the
+provocative, shocking break with the familiar.
+In terms of literary embraces of modernism, as is also true of the
+visual-arts move toward modernism, the imaginative terrain upon
+which this journey took place was and is in a very large measure the
+presence of the racial “Other.” Explicit or implicit, this presence
+informs in significant, compelling, and inescapable ways the shape of
+American literature. Ready to hand for the literary imagination it
+constituted both a visible and invisible mediating force. So that even,
+and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanistic
+presences, the shadow hovers there, in implication, in sign, in line of
+demarcation. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant
+populations understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the
+resident black population—and still do. In fact race has become so
+metaphorical, and as a metaphor so much more necessary to
+Americanness, it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed
+racialism we are familiar with. As a metaphor, this Africanistic
+presence may be something the United States can do without. For in
+this part of the twentieth century, if Americans are to be different, if
+they are to be Americans in some way that Canadians are not, that
+Latin Americans are not, that Britons are not, then they must be
+white Americans, and that distinction depends on a constantly
+reliable darkness. Deep within the word “American” is its association
+with race. (One notes that to identify someone as a South African is
+to say very little; we need the adjective “white” South African or
+“black” South African. In the States it is quite the opposite:
+
+“American” means white, and Africanistic peoples struggle to make
+the term applicable to themselves with hyphens and ethnicity.) The
+Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which
+to wrest its identity while coveting its license. They seemed to have
+merged both the wrench and the envy in their self-conscious and
+self-reflexive contemplation of mythological Africanism.
+For the intellectual and imaginative adventure of writers who have
+come to signify “modern” in literature, this convenient Africanist
+Other was body, mind, chaos, kindness and love, the absence of
+restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom,
+the problem of aggression, the exploration of ethics and morality, the
+obligations of the social contract, the cross of religion, and the
+ramifications of power. The authors, American, who escape this
+influence are the ones who left the country—but not all of them.
+Some astute critical observers believe that individualism American
+style precluded the possibility of, any room for, an “Other” and that,
+in the case of sexism, it was an erasure of the other as significant, as
+a nonperson. I wonder whether it is quite the contrary; that
+individualism emanates from the positioning of a safely bound self,
+out there. That there could be no inside, no stable, durable,
+individual self without the careful plotting and fabrication of an
+extrinsic gender, and likewise, an extrinsic, external shadow. Both
+are connected, but only at the outer limits of the self, the body. That
+this was true of white males should be clear. And since the definition
+of an American is a white male who is different, and a good or
+successful American is a white male who is different and powerful,
+what makes the whole contraption work is blackness, femaleness,
+disfamiliarizing strategies, and oppression. Bernard Bailyn provides
+the most succinct and fascinating portrait of this classic selfperpetuating and self-defining process. Among the immigrants and
+settlers he traces in his extraordinary book Voyagers to the West is a
+well-documented personage named William Dunbar.
+The striking conclusion of this cameo is that there are four
+desirable consequences to the successful formation of this particular
+American: autonomy, authority, newness and difference, and
+
+absolute power. These benefits translate, in the nineteenth and
+twentieth century, into individualism, difference, and the wielding of
+power. Unsurprisingly, they are also the major characteristics of
+American literature. Newness and difference; individualist;
+heroically powerful. These terms translate, at least until World War
+II, as follows. Nineteenth-century “newness” becomes twentiethcentury “innocence.” “Difference” becomes the hallmark of the
+modern. “Individualism,” the cult of the Lone Ranger, is fused with a
+solitary, alienated malcontent (who is nevertheless still innocent)—
+and of course there is the interesting digression, which we won’t
+enter into here, of Tonto. My puzzlement used to be why is the Lone
+Ranger called “lone” if he is always with Tonto? Now, I see that given
+the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to
+be understood as “alone” precisely because of Tonto. Without him he
+would be, I suppose, simply “Ranger.” The heroically powerful gives
+way, after the war, to the problems of using and abusing power. Each
+of these characteristics, I think, is informed by a complex awareness
+and employment of a constituted Africanism as the trained ground
+and stadia for its identity. What, one wonders, are Americans always
+being insistently of? What is the relationship of the modern to the
+actively creative presence of African Americans? (It has been pointed
+out to me, that whenever the film industry wishes to and does
+manifest some brand-new technology or scope it employs
+Africanistic characters, narrative, or idiom. The first full-scale
+speaking film was The Jazz Singer; the first box-office hit was Birth
+of a Nation; the first situation comedy on television was Amos ’n’
+Andy; and, although this does not quite fit, but it almost does, the
+first documentary was Nanook of the North. And there is probably
+no contest from any quarter that the informing scores of “modern”
+filmmakers have been what we call in the States “black music.”) Back
+to the matter at hand, the final question is what is the individual
+alienated from, if not his “white” self in an abiding but somehow
+fraudulently maintained articulated pluralism? The final question
+focuses on the holding, withholding, and distributing of power.
+
+I mentioned Gertrude Stein as a paradigm or precursor of
+modernism. Now I would like to look at one of her most admired
+works to illustrate what I take to be a fascinating display of literary
+Americanism, to try to establish its connection to her innovations,
+her newness, her representations of individuality, her perceptions of
+sexual power, and the privileges emanating from class and race.
+The three lives Gertrude Stein renders in her novel of that name
+are decidedly unequal. Not only in treatment, as I hope to
+demonstrate, but also in various other ways. Of the three women that
+constitute this work (a work of three stories put together to make a
+novel or novella), one covers seventy-one pages, another requires
+forty pages, and another, the central and middle narrative, takes up
+twice the length of one and almost four times the space of the other.
+This unequal distribution of space, each of which focuses on one
+woman, is marked by a further differing inequality. The first part is
+called “The Good Anna,” the last part is called “The Gentle Lena.”
+Only the central, centered, and longest part has no adjective; it is
+called “Melanctha.” Simply. As you will remember, Melanctha is a
+black woman (or as Miss Stein identifies her, a Negro). Sandwiched
+in between the two others, she appears framed, bounded by the
+others as though to foreground and underscore her difference while
+keeping it firmly under control. Before I get into the remarkable
+differences between Melanctha and the two women who stand to her
+right and to her left, I should perhaps identify the similarities—for
+there are some, although they seem to throw further into relief
+Melanctha’s difference, and the difference Stein makes of her. All
+three women constituting this text are servants; all die in the end; all
+are mistreated in some fashion by men or the consequences of maledominated society. All are at the line between abject poverty and
+deserving poverty. And although all were born in some country, the
+similarities end precisely at this point. The two white women have a
+nationality: German, first, and then, as immigrants, they can assume
+the category German American if they choose. Only Melanctha was
+born in the United States, and only Melanctha is given no national
+identification. She is a Negro, and therefore even in 1909, forty years
+
+after the proclamation freed all slaves, without a land, without a
+citizenship designation. She is never described as an American and
+certainly never labeled one by the narrator.
+For Miss Stein, Melanctha is a special kind of Negro. An acceptable
+one, for she has light skin, and the point has power when we note
+that her section opens with the comparison between Melanctha and
+her very close friend, Rose, who is described repeatedly (insistently)
+as very black: “sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie grumbled and
+fussed and howled and made herself to be an abomination and like a
+simple beast.” Within this collection of adjectives are all of the
+fetishes, forms of metonymic reduction, collapse of persons into
+animals to foreclose dialogue and identification and economical
+stereotyping that is pervasive in the implications, if not the explicit
+language, of most pre-1980 fictional descriptions of Africanistic
+characters. “Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen,
+stupid, childlike, good looking negress.” “Rose Johnson was a real
+black negress but she had been brought up quite like their own child
+by white folks” (italics mine). We note at once that it is not necessary
+for Stein to describe or identify these white folks, to say whether they
+were good, or well educated, or poor, or stupid, or mean. It is enough
+apparently that they were white, the assumption being that whatever
+kind of white people they were, they were that, and therefore the
+instruction given to Rose would place her in a privileged position, a
+fact that Rose herself not only acknowledges but is grateful for.
+Melanctha, on the other hand, being light skinned, is described as
+“patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring.” She is also a “graceful,
+pale yellow, intelligent negress” who has “not been raised like Rose
+by white folks but then she had been half made with real white
+blood” (italics mine). The point is redundantly clear. While Rose can
+claim the good fortune of being reared by white people, Melanctha
+has the higher claim, the blood claim. There is some carelessness
+here, for we are later made to understand that Melanctha’s father
+was “very black” and “brutal” and her mother was a “sweet appearing
+and dignified and pleasant, pale yellow, colored woman.” This does
+not suggest the “half-white” label. Although Stein calls Melanctha a
+
+“subtle, intelligent, attractive, half white girl,” according to the racial
+genetics of the day, a half-white person would have to have one white
+parent. I think this latter possibility would offer too much complexity
+for the author; she would have had to explain how the white parent
+(in this case the mother, since the father is pointedly black)
+happened to get together with the black parent, and it is perhaps
+sufficient that Melanctha’s white lover is later on examined as pivotal
+to her destruction without having to go into the ramifications of
+another mixed-blood relationship.
+I am not repeating these routine racial lapses and linguistic
+shortcuts aimlessly, but to stress the fact that the recourse Stein has
+to them, in order to draw certain conclusions, is so necessary either
+she is willing to make glaring errors in the finer points of racialism
+and to risk losing the reader’s trust or she loses control of her
+wayward and insubordinate text. For example: Rose Johnson is
+repeatedly called childlike and immoral. But she is the only one of
+Melanctha’s friends who sustains adult responsibility—a marriage, a
+house, some generosity. Stein asserts Rose’s stupidity, but fails to
+dramatize it. We find no evidence whatsoever of her being stupid.
+And in spite of Melanctha’s revered white blood, she spends most of
+her time in the streets, along the docks, and railroad yards. One has
+to question the logic of this blood fetish: perhaps it is her “white”
+blood rather than her black that encourages this immorality that
+Stein does not remark upon.
+Equally interesting is the role of African American men in
+Melanctha’s story. That is, the place of fathers, husbands, friends of
+fathers, as well as the beau in Melanctha’s life. To Stein’s credit,
+there is equal distribution of virtue and malice among the white and
+black men; to her discredit, she relies heavily on national
+stereotyping for them all: Irish prejudices, German ones, and, as is
+clear from the obsessive blood fetish mentioned earlier, conventional
+ones. Such pseudoscience ought to be surprising from one who
+attended medical school for a couple of years. In any case, she
+abandons all responsibility for particularizing her Africanistic
+characters by “explaining” and “justifying” their behavior with the
+
+easy tools of metonymic reduction that skin color provides, and the
+economy of stereotype that is companion to it. Again, however, this
+strategy forces Stein into contradictions so profound, the trust of the
+reader dissipates altogether. For example, Melanctha’s father is
+repeatedly described as “brutal and rough” to his daughter, and we
+are told that he is first a visitor to the household on an irregular
+basis, and then absents himself from them and the novel altogether.
+The evidence presented to us for his brutality and roughness is that
+he is “black” and “virile.” When we look to see what this black, virile,
+brutal, and rough man is capable of we see that he protects his
+daughter from what he believed were advances made to her from a
+male friend and gets into a fight because of this protection. It is
+perhaps this contradiction that conveniently expels him from the
+text. Had he stayed, Melanctha would have had a fierce
+protector/savior and not gotten into such deep trouble with men.
+Most notably, however, are not the routine techniques of making
+the Africanist characters different as blacks, but what I believe is the
+reason for their inclusion in the first place, for the Melanctha section
+services Stein in a very specific way. The Africanism of that section
+becomes a means by which Stein can step safely into forbidden
+territory, articulate the illegal, the anarchic, ruminate upon the
+relations among women with and without men. Of all three of the
+women in the novel, only with Melanctha are sexual education and
+sexual relations central to the narrative and the fate of the
+characters. It may not have been thinkable, even for Gertrude Stein,
+to discuss, in 1909, explicit knowledge of carnal activities with white
+women—even if they were of a lower class. If we compare the
+sensuality/sexuality of Anna and Lena, we see that their lives are
+different from Melanctha’s; they are chaste; their marriages
+arranged; their submission to the demands of patriarchy complete. It
+seems clear that, like other American writers, especially those we
+associate with modernism, Stein felt free to experiment with
+sexuality in narrative, felt the subject palatable if the object upon
+which these experiments are carried out is Africanistic. Like the
+French doctor who was able to develop the paradigm for his
+
+gynecological instruments after sustained experiments with his black
+servant woman, Gertrude Stein is comfortable advancing her
+“newness,” safe in her choice of forbidden territory because she is
+operating on a body that appears to be offered up to her without
+protest, without restraint. Wholly available for the articulation of the
+illegal, the illicit, the dangerous, the new. Like the white entertainers
+who were able to garner huge audiences when, in blackface, they
+spoke through the Africanistic persona (as), they could say the
+unspeakable, the forthrightly sexual, the subversively political.
+What are some of these new and illicit topics?
+There are at least three: (1) the intricate bonding of women not for
+protection but for the resources of knowledge they provide; (2) the
+triangular formation of sexuality, freedom, and knowledge as
+principle to a modern woman; and (3) the dependency of the
+construction of an American on an Africanistic presence. There is a
+genuine, even desperate love between Melanctha and Jane and
+Melanctha and Rose (in spite of the difference in their skin color).
+The sufferance and wisdom Melanctha receives from these friends is
+far superior to the things she learns from her men friends, the black
+doctors, or black gamblers. All of the women in Three Lives come to
+a sad end, but it appears that only one, Melanctha, learns anything
+useful, and perhaps modern, about the world before her demise. It
+may be that in this respect, Stein’s signal contribution to literature in
+her encounter with an Africanistic presence is to give this encounter
+the complexity and the modernity it had otherwise been denied by
+mainstream writers of that time. Although Stein’s assumptions about
+white and black blood are traditionally racist, she provides an
+interesting variation on the theme by having Melanctha treasure the
+quality (if it can be called such) of blackness from her “unendurable”
+father; having the “very black” Rose advise Melanctha and persuade
+her not to commit suicide and be drawn as a “regularly” married
+woman with apparently very high standards of morality—denied by
+Stein’s insistence that Rose “had the simple, promiscuous unmorality
+of the black people.”
+
+Key to Stein’s exploration, however, is the question of the
+relationship of freedom for women to sexuality and knowledge. In
+this quest, we see again the difference she makes. Three Lives moves
+from the contemplation of an asexual spinster’s life—the Good Anna
+—in its struggle for control and meaning, to and through the
+exploration of a quest for sexual knowledge (which Stein calls
+“wisdom”) in the person and body of Melanctha, an Africanistic
+woman; to the presumably culminating female experience of
+marriage and birth—the Gentle Lena. That Stein chose a black
+woman for the examination of the erotic suggests and theatricalizes
+the uses of Africanism to represent and serve as license to address
+illicit sexuality.
+Although Stein has her tongue in her own cheek for much of the
+text, has firm opinions that she puts in the mouths of others, and is
+forthrightly comic, even parodic in some passages, we are eager to
+follow her fairly radical look into the true lives of these women, but
+in only one of them (Melanctha) does the sexual repression of the
+other two not only disappear, but its repudiation becomes the central
+theme of Melanctha’s and Stein’s enterprise. The black woman alone
+provides access to a meditation on sexual knowledge, and it is of
+utmost importance that the author calls Melanctha’s flirtations, her
+wanderings alone down to the docks and railroad depots to look at
+men, her promiscuity—all this she calls an eagerness for wisdom.
+The “very black” Rose is labeled promiscuous, but the half-white
+Melanctha is searching for knowledge. This difference in labels for
+presumably identical behavior is distancing and functions as a covert
+manner of giving dignity to one kind of inquisitiveness and
+discrediting another simply by marking a difference in the color of
+the inquirer’s skin. Further differences are notable when the
+comparison is between the white servants and the black women.
+Neither Anna nor Lena is curious about sex. Good Anna never
+entertains the possibility of marriage or a love. Her “romance” is
+with her first close friend, Mrs. Lehntman. Gentle Lena is so
+terrified, dull, and uninquisitive, Stein does not have to speculate on
+the legal sexual intercourse that takes place between Lena and her
+
+husband, Herman. She simply delivers four children, dying with the
+last and leaving her husband quiet, content, and himself a nurturer.
+Only Melanctha has courage, feels the attractive power of her black
+father, and the weakness of her pale yellow mother, senses that her
+identification with her passive mother will give her no respect; she is
+free to roam the streets, stand on corners, visit the scene of black
+men at work on the railroad, at the docks; to compete with them in
+fearlessness, trade barbs with them, tease and escape from them—
+and to talk back to them. It is Melanctha’s authoritative voice that
+examines, articulates, and questions erotic heterosexual love, which
+combats the middle class’s ideal of domestic/romantic union, and
+which boldly enters the field of male-female encounters as a warrior
+—a militant. It is interesting to me that in her probe of the value of
+carnal knowledge, Stein looks not toward the very black Rose, the
+one she ascribes unmorality and promiscuity to, but to the halfwhite, college-educated Melanctha. It is as though, fearless as she
+was, Stein could not bear to investigate these very intimate matters
+on the body of a very black woman—the risk of such an imaginative
+association seems to have been too much for her. One feels her
+disdain of Rose, but her admiration of Jane’s loose behavior, like
+Melanctha’s, is ambivalent and rendered in clearly elevated and
+cynical language. Jane Harden is identified as a “roughened woman.
+She had power and she liked to use it, she had much white blood and
+that made her see clear….Her white blood was strong in her and she
+had grit and endurance and a vital courage.” There is no mistaking
+Stein’s codified values and opinions regarding race. She is identifying
+her own self with the white blood that makes for clarity and strength
+and vital courage, but is working its sexual expression out on the notwhite blood that courses through these bodies in apparently two
+separate veins. The ludicrousness of these claims of what white blood
+is capable of in its generic transfer of power, intelligence, and so on
+is, of course, emphasized by the fact that in the same breath, if not
+paragraph, we witness the behavior of completely white people,
+people with all-white blood who are passive, stupid, and so on. If we
+were going to succumb to the idiocy of scientific racialism, the logic
+of the opposite would be unspeakable: that in Three Lives it is the
+
+black blood that provides the “vital courage” and “endurance.” There
+is tension and some readerly distrust of these hierarchies and claims,
+because of the contradictions that accompany them. Africanistic
+women, for example, are suffused with loose immorality, but Mrs. L.,
+the friend and major force in Lena’s tiny world, spends her
+professional life midwifing and likes especially to deliver girls in
+trouble; she even seems to be involved in abortions with her wicked
+doctor lover at one point. Why these white girls in trouble are not
+also guilty of amorality and looseness as are their dark sisters is part
+of the question these matters pose. That series of episodes is glazed
+over by pointing to the generosity of Mrs. L. and her skill. There is no
+lingering over the unmorality of her patients; they are not assumed
+to have a “promiscuous” nature because of their skin color, or even, it
+seems, to have been seeking the wisdom of the world down at the
+docks.
+The last point to which I wish to direct attention is the one with
+which I began: that much of this business of imagining Africanistic
+people has to do with the careful, consistent construction of an
+American who gets his or her distinction in asserting and developing
+whiteness as a precondition to Americanness.
+Three Lives centers on two immigrant women and one black
+woman who is never given a nationality, although she is the only
+natural-born citizen among the three. When a minor character in the
+Good Anna section visits Germany, her mother’s birthplace, and
+becomes embarrassed by Anna’s peasant manners, her remark is
+that her cousin is “no better than a nigger.” Miss Stein, fascinated
+with her project The Making of Americans has indeed delivered up
+to us a model case in literature: (1) build barriers in language and
+body, (2) establish difference in blood, skin, and human emotions,
+(3) place them in opposition to immigrants, and (4) voilà! The true
+American arises!
+Sandwiched between a pair of immigrants—her aggression and
+power contained by the palms of chaste but restraining white women
+—Melanctha is bold but discredited; free to explore but bound by her
+color and confined by the white women on her left and her right, her
+
+foreground and her background, her beginning and her end, who
+precede her and follow her. The format and its interior workings say
+what is meant. All of the ingredients that have an impact on
+Americanness are on display in these women: labor, class, relations
+with the Old World, forging an un-European new culture, defining
+freedom, avoiding bondage, seeking opportunity and power,
+situating the uses of oppression. These considerations are
+inextricable from any deliberation on how Americans selected, chose,
+constructed a national identity. In the process of choosing, the
+unselected, the unchosen, the detritus is as significant as the
+cumulative, built American. Among the explorations vital to the
+definition, one of the strongest is the rumination of Africanistic
+character as a laboratory experiment for confronting emotional,
+historical, and moral problems as well as intellectual entanglements
+with the serious questions of power, privilege, freedom, and equity.
+Is it not just possible that the union, the coalescence of what America
+is and was made of, is incomplete without the place of Africanism in
+the formulation of this so-called new people, and what implications
+such a formulation had for the claims of democracy and
+egalitarianism as far as women and blacks were concerned? Is not
+the contradiction inherent in these two warring propositions—white
+democracy and black repression—also reflected in the literature so
+deeply that it marks and distinguishes its very heart?
+Just as these two immigrants are literally joined like Siamese twins
+to Melanctha, so are Americans joined to and defined by this
+Africanistic presence at its spine.
+
+Hard, True, and Lasting
+
+“M
+
+ANY STRANGERS TRAVERSE our land these days.
+They look on our lives with horror and quickly make means to pass
+on to the paradises of the north. Those who are pressed by
+circumstances and forced to tarry a while, grumble and complain
+endlessly. It is just good for them that we are inbred with habits of
+courtesy, hospitality, and kindness. It is good that they do not know
+the passion we feel for this parched earth. We tolerate strangers
+because the things we love cannot be touched by them.” That’s a
+paragraph from a short story called “The Green Tree” by Bessie
+Head, and I print all of it for you just to get to that one sentence: We
+tolerate strangers because the things we love cannot be touched by
+them. It suggests to me an attitude and a position that might be
+necessary for any artist and writer who finds himself not only in an
+alien culture, but vulnerable to it, and in some ways threatened by it.
+There is nothing new or special about this condition of
+separateness—it is generally the first impression that an artist or a
+writer feels when he is compelled to write. And it may be even out of
+that feeling of separateness that he writes at all. The questions that
+all writers put are questions of value: identifying the values they feel
+worthy of preservation; or identifying the values they believe
+detrimental to some freer, or finer, or, at the least, steadier life.
+Early national literatures all over the world concentrated on
+describing and, by implication, supporting the cultures that the
+writer found himself in. (The sagas, the lieder, the myths when they
+were recorded were precisely that.) Just as the early literature of
+expatriates, immigrants, or people in some form of diaspora
+concentrated on, and, frequently, condemned the new or alien
+
+culture the writers found themselves in. And the most assimilationist
+of them all brought something from his own culture to that
+assimilation. It is still rare to find massive flowerings of Joseph
+Conrads and Pushkins in national literature anthologies.
+More recent literatures by both natives to and aliens in a culture
+are equally preoccupied with the problem. Indeed “alienation”
+became the password, the general catchall word for practically all
+post–World War II literature in the Western world. The writers view
+their own culture as alien: middle-class writers betrayed their own
+class and aspired toward the leisure-class values or the values of
+classes beneath them; working-class writers deplored the limitations
+of their own class; upper-class writers found inspiration among the
+poor, the “noble,” the innocent, the untutored peasant; postwar
+writers separated themselves from everybody except veterans and
+war victims. Of course there were and are writers who felt something
+quite the opposite: that things were pretty much all right the way
+they were and their suspicion of feeling alien came not from too little
+change, but too much, and too soon, which is to say before they were
+ready for it.
+That the world is an exquisitely unpleasant place is a familiar ode
+to writers. And it is usually just at the point of reconciliation to the
+world, just at the moment when it becomes probably a comfortable
+enough place, after all that the writer is confronted with the Last
+Great Isolation—the one that minces every other alienation he has
+known: and that is the premonition of his own death. Under the
+shadow of that wing, even the most hostile of alien cultures is
+preferable.
+But both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native
+of this country and as an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer,
+and I’d like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense
+of separateness from the culture that pervades the country I live in.
+The remarks I have to make are applicable to probably every group
+that has ever existed. And I paraphrase Miss Head to say that I can
+tolerate the overweening culture that is not mine because the things I
+love cannot be touched by it. It sounds hostile, I know, and
+
+unsharing, I know; and ungenerous and defensive. I know that. But I
+am nevertheless convinced that clarity about who one is and what
+one’s work is, is inextricably bound up with one’s place in a tribe—or
+a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the
+clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary
+for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture. I am
+not suggesting a collection of warring cultures, just clear ones, for it
+is out of the clarity of one’s own culture that life within another, near
+another, in juxtaposition to another is healthily possible. Without it,
+a writer lives on whatever pinnacle he achieves in loneliness and
+whatever road he walks on is finally a cul-de-sac. It is vital, therefore,
+to know what “the things we love” are, in order to care for and to
+husband them.
+I have always myself felt most alive, most alert, and most sterling
+among my own people. All of my creative energy comes from there.
+My stimulation for any artistic effort at all originates there. The
+compulsion to write, even to be, begins with my consciousness of,
+experience with, and even my awe of black people and the quality of
+our lives as lived (not as perceived). And all of my instincts tell me
+that both as a writer and as a person any total surrender to another
+culture would destroy me. And the danger is not always from
+indifference; it is also from acceptance. It is sometimes called the
+fear of absorption, the horror of cultural embrace. But at the heart of
+the horror for me is what I know about what the history of the
+culture that pervades this country has been.
+My instincts combine therefore with my intelligence to inform me
+that there are many aspects of that culture that are not trustworthy
+and are not supportive.
+Every and each attempt I have made to write has centered on that
+assumption and this question: What is there of value in black culture
+to lose and how can it be preserved and made useful? I am not very
+good at the writing of tracts, so I frequently identify the things I love
+and find of value by showing them in danger; things in my novels are
+threatened and sometimes destroyed. It is my way of directing
+attention at sensitized readers in such a way that they will yearn for,
+
+miss, and, I hope, learn to care for certain aspects of that life that are
+worth the preservation.
+Now in order for me to try even to identify those things, I need to
+know a lot or try to find out a lot about the civilization within the
+civilization in which I grew up. I mean the black civilization that
+functioned within the white one. And the questions I must put to it
+are: What was the hierarchy in my civilization? Who were the
+arbiters of custom? What were the laws? Who were the outlaws—not
+the legal outlaws, but the community outlaws? Where did we go for
+solace and for advice? Who were the betrayers of that culture? Who
+did we respect and why? What was our morality? What was success?
+Who survived? And why? And under what circumstances? What is
+deviant behavior? Not deviant behavior as defined by white people,
+but what is deviant behavior as defined by black people?
+I have been for years, and it will probably be a fascination that
+lasts all my life, continually fascinated by the fact that no bestial
+treatment of human beings ever produces beasts. White marauders
+can force Native American Indians to walk from one part of the
+country to another and watch them drop like flies and cattle, but they
+did not end up as cattle; Jewish people could be thrown into ovens
+like living carcasses but Jews were not bestialized by it; black people
+could be enslaved for generation after generation and recorded in
+statistics along with lists of rice, tar, and turpentine cargo, but they
+did not turn out to be cargo. Each one of those groups civilized the
+very horror that oppressed it. It doesn’t work, and I don’t think it
+can. It never works; what preoccupies me is why. Why was the
+quality of my great-grandmother’s life so much better than the
+circumstances of her life? How was it possible without the feminist
+movement, without a black arts movement, without any movement,
+how was it possible that the sheer integrity and quality of her life
+were so superior to its circumstances? I know that she was not
+atypical among the women of her day. She was as average a black
+woman as there ever was. And no amount of quisling scholarship, no
+amount of psychological tyranny, no number of black colonizers,
+who in their quest for jobs and national prominence join hands with
+
+those who would rape us culturally, none of them will ever convince
+me otherwise. Because I knew her—and I knew the people she knew.
+In my own writing, in order to reveal what seems to me the hard
+and the true and the lasting things, I am drawn to describing people
+under duress, not in easy circumstances, but backed up into a corner,
+people called upon to fish or cut bait. You say you are my friend?
+Let’s see. You say you are a revolutionary? Let me see how it looks
+when I push you all the way out. You say you love me? Let’s see.
+What happens if you follow your course all the way through? What
+are the things you will give up? And, under duress, I know who they
+are, of what they are made, and which of their qualities is the last to
+go, and which of their qualities never go. It gives a melancholy cast to
+my work. I know. And it leads me to exceptional rather than routine
+characters. I know. And it leaves me wide open for criticism about
+bizarre characters and nonpositive images. I know. But I am afraid I
+will have to leave the “positive” images to the comic-strip artists and
+the “normal” black characters to some future Doris Day, because I
+believe it is silly, not to say irresponsible, to concern myself with
+lipstick and Band-Aid when there is a plague in the land. The socalled everyday life of black people is certainly lovely to live, but
+whoever is living it must know that each day of his “everyday” black
+life is a triumph of matter over mind and sentiment over common
+sense. And if he doesn’t know that, then he doesn’t know anything at
+all. As the young African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, “The
+present is a dangerous place to live.” Superficial literary cosmetics
+will not save us from that danger. As a matter of fact, literature will
+not save us at all. All it can do is point out the need perhaps for
+defense, but it is not itself that defense. What it can do is participate
+in the process of identifying what is of value, and once that surfaces,
+once black tradition can be extricated from black fashion, once black
+writing stops posturing and catering to the voyeurs of black life, once
+it stops doing an American version of airport art, then an even
+harder job presents itself.
+Because it is relatively easy to recognize values in isolation. The
+problem gets complicated when those values are in conflict with
+
+other values. For then you have to figure out how to protect the very
+best of the group sensibilities; how to protect the noblest impulses.
+What are the nurturing structures worth keeping in the community?
+What are the culturgens that provide emotional safety, the customs
+that allow freedom without excessive risk or certain destruction, that
+allow courage minus recklessness, generosity without waste, support
+without domination, and in times of deep, deep trouble (as in some
+of the black countries abroad) a resource for survival that may very
+well include sustained and calculated ferocity.
+Black writers who are committed to the renewal and refreshment
+of values can be identified by their taste, by their judgments, by their
+intellect, and by their work. They do not use black life as exotic
+ornament for pedestrian nonblack stories. The essence of black life is
+the substance, not the decoration, of their work. Their work turns on
+a moral axis that has been forged among black people. They do not
+impose alien moralities about broken homes, and house-bound
+fathers, and petite power, and what is or is not gainful employment
+on their characters.
+They do not regard black language as dropping g’s or as an
+exercise in questionable phonetics and inconsistent orthography.
+They know that it is much more complicated than that.
+And they waste no time explaining, explaining, explaining away
+everything they feel and think and do—to the other culture. They are
+challenged by and concerned with the enlightenment of their own,
+even when the enlightenment includes painful information.
+They do not view the habits and customs of their people with the
+eye of a charged-up ethnologist examining curios.
+The writers who are also scholars in so-called black studies are
+unimpressed with standard cries of “lowering standards” when any
+change in curricula is recommended. They know their job doesn’t
+have anything to do with maintaining standards. It has to do with
+reshaping the content of those standards in order to improve them
+and raise them.
+Those black writers who are critics are not busy painting Bertolt
+Brecht black and relabeling his thoughts (which were perfectly
+
+suitable to his own cultural needs) as some sort of “new” black
+criticism. Any critical apparatus or critical system that is
+inappropriate to and foolish when applied to black music or nonWestern black art is fraudulent when applied to black literature.
+Once, when I first began to write, I didn’t know a lot about how to
+dramatize and I was forced sometimes to use exposition as a way of
+saying something I could not properly show. And in the first book,
+The Bluest Eye, I wrote a passage at the end that is as close as I have
+ever gotten to sustained didacticism. It is a wholly unsatisfactory
+passage to me, and I had certainly hoped to read it to you in context,
+but I haven’t got a copy of the book with me. But in the last two pages
+of The Bluest Eye, is, in essence, what I believe to be the dangers
+when one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when
+one assumes that you can use another’s deficiency for one’s own
+generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person’s
+misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams. When all
+of those things are done and completed, then the surrender and the
+betrayal of one’s culture is also complete.
+
+PART II
+
+God’s Language
+
+James Baldwin Eulogy
+Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and much too much to
+feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation—it always did—and
+invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here, I thought I
+knew you. Now I discover that, in your company, it is myself I know.
+That is the astonishing gift of your art and your friendship: you gave
+us ourselves to think about, to cherish. We are like Hall Montana
+watching “with a new wonder” his brother sing, knowing the song he
+sang is us, “he is—us.”
+I never heard a single command from you, yet the demands you
+made on me, the challenges you issued to me were nevertheless
+unmistakable if unenforced: that I work and think at the top of my
+form; that I stand on moral ground but know that ground must be
+shored up by mercy; that “the world is before [me] and [I] need not
+take it or leave it as it was when [I] came in.”
+Well, the season was always Christmas with you there, and like one
+aspect of that scenario, you did not neglect to bring at least three
+gifts. You gave me a language to dwell in—a gift so perfect, it seems
+my own invention. I have been thinking your spoken and written
+thoughts so long, I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the
+world through your eyes so long, I believed that clear, clear view was
+my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling
+and how to articulate it. So I have pored (again) through the 6,895
+pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you
+for the credit.
+No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did.
+You made American English honest—genuinely international. You
+exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern,
+
+dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false
+comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place
+of deviousness was clarity; in place of soft, plump lies was a lean,
+targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what
+you called “exasperating egocentricity,” you gave us undecorated
+truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance.
+You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, “robbed it
+of the jewel of its naïveté,” and ungated it for black people, so that in
+your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to
+accommodate our complicated passion. Not our vanities, but our
+intricate, difficult, demanding beauty; our tragic, insistent
+knowledge; our lived reality; our sleek classical imagination. All the
+while refusing “to be defined by a language that has never been able
+to recognize [us].” In your hands language was handsome again. In
+your hands we saw how it was meant to be—neither bloodless nor
+bloody, and yet alive.
+It infuriated some people. Those who saw the paucity of their own
+imagination in the two-way mirror you held up to them attacked the
+mirror, tried to reduce it to fragments that they could then rank and
+grade; tried to dismiss the shards where your image and theirs
+remained—locked but ready to soar. You are an artist, after all, and
+an artist is forbidden a career in this place; an artist is permitted only
+the commercial “hit.” But for thousands and thousands of those who
+embrace your text, and who gave themselves permission to hear your
+language, by that very gesture they ennobled themselves, became
+unshrouded—civilized.
+The second gift was your courage, which you let us share. The
+courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and
+transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole
+world; courage to understand that experience in ways that made it a
+personal revelation for each of us. It was you who gave us the
+courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because
+you had discovered that “this world [meaning history] is white no
+longer, and it will never be white again.” Yours was the courage to
+live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges. To see and
+
+say what it was; to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand
+in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence
+married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to
+know that those who despised us “need the moral authority of their
+former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know
+anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the
+world who really care anything about them.” When that unassailable
+combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passion was on
+display, it guided us through treacherous landscape, as it did when
+you wrote these words—words every rebel, every dissident,
+revolutionary, every practicing artist from Cape Town to Poland,
+from Waycross to Dublin, memorized: “A person does not lightly
+elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home
+among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And
+there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred,
+is moving because it is so blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to
+their captivity and insist on their own destruction.”
+The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was
+your tenderness. A tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last,
+but last it did and envelop me it did. In the midst of anger it tapped
+me, lightly, like the child in Tish’s womb: “Something almost as hard
+to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a
+spider’s web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my
+heart….The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of
+water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that
+instant, that what can get worse can get better….In the meantime—
+forever—it is entirely up to me.” Yours was a tenderness, a
+vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything, and, like
+the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to
+deliver. I suppose that is why I was always a bit better behaved
+around you, smarter, more capable, wanting to be worth the love you
+lavished, and wanting to be steady enough to witness the pain you
+had witnessed and were tough enough to bear while it broke your
+heart; wanting to be generous enough to join your smile with one of
+my own, and reckless enough to jump on in that laugh you laughed.
+
+Because our joy and our laughter were not only all right; they were
+necessary.
+You knew, didn’t you? How I needed your language and the mind
+that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame
+wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that
+came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you,
+how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This
+is a jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and
+paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”
+And we do, Jimmy. You crowned us.
+
+The Site of Memory
+
+M
+
+Y INCLUSION in a series of talks on autobiography and
+memoir is not entirely a misalliance. Although it’s probably true that
+a fiction writer thinks of his or her work as alien in that company,
+what I have to say may suggest why I’m not completely out of place
+here. For one thing, I might throw into relief the differences between
+self-recollection (memoir) and fiction, and also some of the
+similarities—the places where those two crafts embrace and where
+that embrace is symbiotic.
+But the authenticity of my presence here lies in the fact that a very
+large part of my own literary heritage is the autobiography. In this
+country the print origins of black literature (as distinguished from
+the oral origins) were slave narratives. These book-length narratives
+(autobiographies, recollections, memoirs), of which well over a
+hundred were published, are familiar texts to historians and students
+of black history. They range from the adventure-packed life of
+Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
+Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1769)
+to the quiet desperation of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:
+Written by Herself (1861), in which Harriet Jacobs (“Linda Brent”)
+records hiding for seven years in a room too small to stand up in;
+from the political savvy of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life
+of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
+(1845) to the subtlety and modesty of Henry Bibb, whose voice, in
+Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American
+Slave, Written by Himself (1849), is surrounded by (“loaded with” is
+a better phrase) documents attesting to its authenticity. Bibb is
+careful to note that his formal schooling (three weeks) was short, but
+
+that he was “educated in the school of adversity, whips, and chains.”
+Born in Kentucky, he put aside his plans to escape in order to marry.
+But when he learned that he was the father of a slave and watched
+the degradation of his wife and child, he reactivated those plans.
+Whatever the style and circumstances of these narratives, they
+were written to say principally two things. (1) “This is my historical
+life—my singular, special example that is personal, but that also
+represents the race.” (2) “I write this text to persuade other people—
+you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human
+beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of
+slavery.” With these two missions in mind, the narratives were
+clearly pointed.
+In Equiano’s account, the purpose is quite up-front. Born in 1745
+near the Niger River and captured at the age of ten, he survived the
+Middle Passage, American plantation slavery, wars in Canada and
+the Mediterranean; learned navigation and clerking from a Quaker
+named Robert King; and bought his freedom at twenty-one. He lived
+as a free servant, traveling widely and living most of his later life in
+England. Here he is speaking to the British without equivocation: “I
+hope to have the satisfaction of seeing the renovation of liberty and
+justice, resting on the British government….I hope and expect the
+attention of gentlemen in power….May the time come—at least the
+speculation to me is pleasing—when the sable people shall gratefully
+commemorate the auspicious aera of extensive freedom.” With
+typically eighteenth-century reticence he records his singular and
+representative life for one purpose: to change things. In fact, he and
+his coauthors did change things. Their works gave fuel to the fires
+that abolitionists were setting everywhere.
+More difficult was getting the fair appraisal of literary critics. The
+writings of church martyrs and confessors are and were read for the
+eloquence of their message as well as their experience of redemption,
+but the American slaves’ autobiographical narratives were frequently
+scorned as “biased,” “inflammatory,” and “improbable.” These
+attacks are particularly difficult to understand in view of the fact that
+it was extremely important, as you can imagine, for the writers of
+
+these narratives to appear as objective as possible—not to offend the
+reader by being too angry, or by showing too much outrage, or by
+calling the reader names. As recently as 1966, Paul Edwards, who
+edited and abridged Equiano’s story, praises the narrative for its
+refusal to be “inflammatory.”
+“As a rule,” Edwards writes, “he [Equiano] puts no emotional
+pressure on the reader other than that which the situation itself
+contains—his language does not strain after our sympathy, but
+expects it to be given naturally and at the proper time. This quiet
+avoidance of emotional display produces many of the best passages
+in the book.” Similarly, an 1836 review of Charles Bell’s “Life and
+Adventures of a Fugitive Slave,” which appeared in the Quarterly
+Anti-Slavery Magazine, praised Bell’s account for its objectivity.
+“We rejoice in the book the more, because it is not a partizan
+work….It broaches no theory in regard to [slavery], nor proposes any
+mode of time of emancipation.”
+As determined as these black writers were to persuade the reader
+of the evil of slavery, they also complimented him by assuming his
+nobility of heart and his high-mindedness. They tried to summon up
+his finer nature in order to encourage him to employ it. They knew
+that their readers were the people who could make a difference in
+terminating slavery. Their stories—of brutality, adversity, and
+deliverance—had great popularity in spite of critical hostility in many
+quarters and patronizing sympathy in others. There was a time when
+the hunger for “slave stories” was difficult to quiet, as sales figures
+show. Douglass’s Narrative sold five thousand copies in four
+months; by 1847 it had sold eleven thousand copies. Equiano’s book
+had thirty-six editions between 1789 and 1850. Moses Roper’s book
+had ten editions from 1837 to 1856; William Wells Brown’s was
+reprinted four times in its first year. Solomon Northup’s book sold
+twenty-seven thousand copies before two years had passed. A book
+by Josiah Henson (argued by some to be the model for the Tom of
+Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) had a prepublication
+sale of five thousand.
+
+In addition to using their own lives to expose the horrors of
+slavery, they had a companion motive for their efforts. The
+prohibition against teaching a slave to read and write (which in many
+southern states carried severe punishment) and against a slave’s
+learning to read and write had to be scuttled at all costs. These
+writers knew that literacy was power. Voting, after all, was
+inextricably connected to the ability to read; literacy was a way of
+assuming and proving the “humanity” that the Constitution denied
+them. That is why the narratives carry the subtitle “written by
+himself,” or “herself,” and include introductions and prefaces by
+white sympathizers to authenticate them. Other narratives, “edited
+by” such well-known antislavery figures as Lydia Maria Child and
+John Greenleaf Whittier, contain prefaces to assure the reader how
+little editing was needed. A literate slave was supposed to be a
+contradiction in terms.
+One has to remember that the climate in which they wrote
+reflected not only the Age of Enlightenment but its twin, born at the
+same time, the Age of Scientific Racism. David Hume, Immanuel
+Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, to mention only a few, had documented
+their conclusions that blacks were incapable of intelligence.
+Frederick Douglass knew otherwise, and he wrote refutations of what
+Jefferson said in Notes on the State of Virginia: “Never yet could I
+find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain
+narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or
+sculpture.” A sentence that I have always thought ought to be
+engraved at the door to the Michael C. Rockefeller wing of the Met.
+Hegel, in 1813, had said that Africans had no “history” and couldn’t
+write in modern languages. Kant disregarded a perceptive
+observation by a black man by saying, “This fellow was quite black
+from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”
+Yet no slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or
+more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement. The milieu, however,
+dictated the purpose and the style. The narratives are instructive,
+moral, and obviously representative. Some of them are patterned
+after the sentimental novel that was in vogue at the time. But
+
+whatever the level of eloquence or the form, popular taste
+discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the
+more sordid details of their experience. Whenever there was an
+unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something
+“excessive,” one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary
+conventions of the day. “I was left in a state of distraction not to be
+described” (Equiano). “But let us now leave the rough usage of the
+field…and turn our attention to the less repulsive slave life as it
+existed in the home of my childhood” (Douglass). “I am not about to
+harrow the feelings of my readers by a terrific representation of the
+untold horrors of that fearful system of oppression….It is not my
+purpose to descend deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the
+hell of slavery” (Henry Box Brown).
+Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase
+such as, “But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to
+relate.” In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who
+were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things,
+and they “forgot” many other things. There was a careful selection of
+the instances that they would record and a careful rendering of those
+that they chose to describe. Lydia Maria Child identified the problem
+in her introduction to “Linda Brent’s” tale of sexual abuse: “I am well
+aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these
+pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and muchinjured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects,
+and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally
+been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its
+monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of
+presenting them with the veil withdrawn.”
+But most importantly—at least for me—there was no mention of
+their interior life.
+For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not
+much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is
+black and a woman—the exercise is very different. My job becomes
+how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.”
+The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who
+
+belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were
+seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its
+topic.
+Moving that veil aside requires, therefore, certain things. First of
+all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the
+recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write,
+in how I begin, and in what I find to be significant. Zora Neale
+Hurston said, “Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories
+within that came out of the material that went to make me.” These
+“memories within” are the subsoil of my work. But memories and
+recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life
+of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.
+If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and
+meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I
+suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly
+serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which
+my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu—the absence of
+the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the
+slaves themselves told—is precisely the problem in the discourse that
+proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what
+drives me and is the part of this talk that both distinguishes my
+fiction from autobiographical strategies and that also embraces
+certain autobiographical strategies. It’s a kind of literary
+archaeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of
+guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind
+and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes
+it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the
+image—on the remains—in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind
+of a truth. By “image,” of course, I don’t mean “symbol”; I simply
+mean “picture” and the feelings that accompany the picture.
+Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the
+product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to
+dispense with “what really happened,” or where it really happened,
+or when it really happened, and nothing in it needs to be publicly
+verifiable, although much in it can be verified. By contrast, the
+
+scholarship of the biographer and the literary critic seems to us only
+trustworthy when the events of fiction can be traced to some publicly
+verifiable fact. It’s the research of the “Oh, yes, this is where he or she
+got it from” school, which gets its own credibility from excavating the
+credibility of the sources of the imagination, not the nature of the
+imagination.
+The work that I do frequently falls, in the minds of most people,
+into that realm of fiction called fantastic, or mythic, or magical, or
+unbelievable. I’m not comfortable with these labels. I consider that
+my single gravest responsibility (in spite of that magic) is not to lie.
+When I hear someone say, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” I think
+that old chestnut is truer than we know, because it doesn’t say that
+truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s
+odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but the
+important thing is that it’s random—and fiction is not random.
+Therefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference
+between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth.
+Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.
+So if I’m looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of
+people who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have
+it); if I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left—to
+part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to implement the stories
+that I heard—then the approach that’s most productive and most
+trustworthy for me is the recollection that moves from the image to
+the text. Not from the text to the image.
+Simone de Beauvoir, in A Very Easy Death, says, “I don’t know
+why I was so shocked by my mother’s death.” When she heard her
+mother’s name being called at the funeral by the priest, she says,
+“Emotion seized [me] by the throat….‘Françoise de Beauvoir’; the
+words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to
+marriage, to widowhood, to the grave; Françoise de Beauvoir—that
+retiring woman, so rarely named—became an important person.”
+The book becomes an exploration both into her own grief and into
+the images in which the grief lay buried.
+
+Unlike Mme. de Beauvoir, Frederick Douglass asks the reader’s
+patience for spending about half a page on the death of his
+grandmother—easily the most profound loss he had suffered—and he
+apologizes by saying, in effect, “It really was very important to me. I
+hope you aren’t bored by my indulgence.” He makes no attempt to
+explore that death, its images or its meaning. His narrative is as close
+to factual as he can make it, which leaves no room for subjective
+speculation. James Baldwin, on the other hand, in Notes of a Native
+Son, says, in recording his father’s life and his own relationship to his
+father, “All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were
+meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty
+bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for
+me.” And then his text fills those bottles. Like Simone de Beauvoir,
+he moves from the event to the image that it left. My route is the
+reverse: the image comes first and tells me what the “memory” is
+about.
+I can’t tell you how I felt when my father died. But I was able to
+write Song of Solomon and imagine, not him, not his specific interior
+life, but the world that he inhabited and the private or interior life of
+the people in it. And I can’t tell you how I felt reading to my
+grandmother while she was turning over and over in her bed
+(because she was dying, and she was not comfortable), but I could try
+to reconstruct the world that she lived in. And I have suspected,
+more often than not, that I know more than she did, that I know
+more than my grandfather and my great-grandmother did, but I also
+know that I’m no wiser than they were. And whenever I have tried
+earnestly to diminish their vision and prove to myself that I know
+more, and when I have tried to speculate on their interior life and
+match it up with my own, I have been overwhelmed every time by the
+richness of theirs compared to my own. Like Frederick Douglass
+talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his
+father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these
+people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own
+interior life. Which is why the images that float around them—the
+remains, so to speak, at the archaeological site—surface first, and
+
+they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them
+as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an
+interior life that was not written, and to the revelation of a kind of
+truth.
+So the nature of my research begins with something as ineffable
+and as flexible as a dimly recalled figure, the corner of a room, a
+voice. I began to write my second book, which was called Sula,
+because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way
+in which I heard her name pronounced. Her name was Hannah, and
+I think she was a friend of my mother’s. I don’t remember seeing her
+very much, but what I do remember is the color around her—a kind
+of violet, a suffusion of something violet—and her eyes, which
+appeared to be half closed. But what I remember most is how the
+women said her name: how they said “Hannah Peace” and smiled to
+themselves, and there was some secret about her that they knew,
+which they didn’t talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seemed
+loaded in the way in which they said her name. And I suspected that
+she was a little bit of an outlaw but that they approved in some way.
+And then, thinking about their relationship to her and the way in
+which they talked about her, the way in which they articulated her
+name, made me think about friendship between women. What is it
+that they forgive each other for? And what is it that is unforgivable in
+the world of women? I don’t want to know any more about Miss
+Hannah Peace, and I’m not going to ask my mother who she really
+was and what did she do and what were you laughing about and why
+were you smiling? Because my experience when I do this with my
+mother is so crushing: she will give you the most pedestrian
+information you ever heard, and I would like to keep all of my
+remains and my images intact in their mystery when I begin. Later I
+will get to the facts. That way I can explore two worlds—the actual
+and the possible.
+What I want to do this evening is to track an image from picture to
+meaning to text—a journey that appears in the novel that I’m writing
+now, which is called Beloved.
+
+I’m trying to write a particular kind of scene, and I see corn on the
+cob. To “see” corn on the cob doesn’t mean that it suddenly hovers; it
+only means that it keeps coming back. And in trying to figure out
+“What is all this corn doing?” I discover what it is doing.
+I see the house where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio. My parents had a
+garden some distance away from our house, and they didn’t welcome
+me and my sister there, when we were young, because we were not
+able to distinguish between the things that they wanted to grow and
+the things that they didn’t, so we were not able to hoe, or weed, until
+much later.
+I see them walking, together, away from me. I’m looking at their
+backs and what they’re carrying in their arms: their tools, and maybe
+a peck basket. Sometimes when they walk away from me they hold
+hands, and they go to this other place in the garden. They have to
+cross some railroad tracks to get there.
+I also am aware that my mother and father sleep at odd hours
+because my father works many jobs and works at night. And these
+naps are times of pleasure for me and my sister because nobody’s
+giving us chores, or telling us what to do, or nagging us in any way.
+In addition to which, there is some feeling of pleasure in them that
+I’m only vaguely aware of. They’re very rested when they take these
+naps.
+And later on in the summer we have an opportunity to eat corn,
+which is the one plant that I can distinguish from the others, and
+which is the harvest that I like the best; the others are the food that
+no child likes—the collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables
+that I would give a great deal for now. But I do like the corn because
+it’s sweet, and because we all sit down to eat it, and it’s finger food,
+and it’s hot, and it’s even good cold, and there are neighbors in, and
+there are uncles in, and it’s easy, and it’s nice.
+The picture of the corn and the nimbus of emotion surrounding it
+became a powerful one in the manuscript I’m now completing.
+Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning
+each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how
+to render the texture that accompanies, reveals, or displays it to its
+
+best advantage. The process by which this is accomplished is
+endlessly fascinating to me. I have always thought that as an editor
+for twenty years I understood writers better than their most careful
+critics, because in examining the manuscript in each of its
+subsequent stages I knew the author’s process, how his or her mind
+worked, what was effortless, what took time, where the “solution” to
+a problem came from. The end result—the book—was all that the
+critic had to go on.
+Still, for me, that was the least important aspect of the work.
+Because, no matter how “fictional” the account of these writers, or
+how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is
+bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the
+Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable
+acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the
+word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering.
+Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory
+and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that:
+remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the
+banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our
+original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin
+remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is
+our “flooding.”
+Along with personal recollection, the matrix of the work I do is the
+wish to extend, fill in, and complement slave autobiographical
+narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by
+other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. Still,
+like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”
+Q. I would like to ask about your point of view as a novelist. Is it a
+vision, or are you taking the part of the particular characters?
+A. I try sometimes to have genuinely minor characters just walk
+through, like a walk-on actor. But I get easily distracted by them,
+because a novelist’s imagination goes like that: every little road
+looks to me like an adventure, and once you begin to claim it and
+describe it, it looks like more, and you invent more and more and
+
+more. I don’t mind doing that in my first draft, but afterward I
+have to cut back. I have seen myself get distracted, and people
+have loomed much larger than I had planned, and minor
+characters have seemed a little bit more interesting than they need
+to be for the purposes of the book. In that case I try to endow
+them: if there are little pieces of information that I want to reveal,
+I let them do some of the work. But I try not to get carried away; I
+try to restrain it, so that, finally, the texture is consistent and
+nothing is wasted; there are no words in the final text that are
+unnecessary, and no people who are not absolutely necessary.
+As for the point of view, there should be the illusion that it’s the
+characters’ point of view, when in fact it isn’t; it’s really the
+narrator who is there but who doesn’t make herself (in my case)
+known in that role. I like the feeling of a told story, where you hear
+a voice but you can’t identify it, and you think it’s your own voice.
+It’s a comfortable voice, and it’s a guiding voice, and it’s alarmed
+by the same things that the reader is alarmed by, and it doesn’t
+know what’s going to happen next either. So you have this sort of
+guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a
+sound, and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then
+this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue
+of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of
+various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out,
+provided that when I’m “out” the reader doesn’t see little fingers
+pointing to what’s in the text.
+What I really want is that intimacy in which the reader is under
+the impression that he isn’t really reading this; that he is
+participating in it as he goes along. It’s unfolding, and he’s always
+two beats ahead of the characters and right on target.
+Q. You have said that writing is a solitary activity. Do you go into
+steady seclusion when you’re writing, so that your feelings are sort
+of contained, or do you have to get away, and go out shopping
+and…?
+
+A. I do all of it. I’ve been at this book for three years. I go out
+shopping, and I stare, and I do whatever. It goes away. Sometimes
+it’s very intense and I walk—I mean, I write a sentence and I jump
+up and run outside or something; it sort of beats you up. And
+sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I write long hours every day. I get
+up at five thirty and just go do it, and if I don’t like it the next day,
+I throw it away. But I sit down and do it. By now I know how to get
+to that place where something is working. I didn’t always know; I
+thought every thought I had was interesting—because it was mine.
+Now I know better how to throw away things that are not useful. I
+can stand around and do other things and think about it at the
+same time. I don’t mind not writing every minute; I’m not so
+terrified.
+When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of
+beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that
+sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it
+isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be
+better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because
+I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will
+be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of
+those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for
+me to remember. I’m a little more sanguine about it now. Because
+the best part of it all, the absolutely most delicious part, is
+finishing it and then doing it over. That’s the thrill of a lifetime for
+me: if I can just get done with that first phase and then have
+infinite time to fix it and change it. I rewrite a lot, over and over
+again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I
+never touched it, and that takes a lot of time and a lot of sweat.
+Q. In Song of Solomon, what was the relationship between your
+memories and what you made up? Was it very tenuous?
+A. Yes, it was tenuous. For the first time I was writing a book in
+which the central stage was occupied by men, and that had
+something to do with my loss, or my perception of loss, of a man
+(my father) and the world that disappeared with him. (It didn’t,
+
+but I felt that it did.) So I was re-creating a time period that was
+his—not biographically his life or anything in it; I use whatever’s
+around. But it seemed to me that there was this big void after he
+died, and I filled it with a book that was about men because my
+two previous books had had women as the central characters. So in
+that sense it was about my memories and the need to invent. I had
+to do something. I was in such a rage because my father was dead.
+The connections between us were threads that I either mined for a
+lot of strength or they were purely invention. But I created a male
+world and inhabited it and it had this quest—a journey from
+stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a complete man. It was my way of
+exploring all that, of trying to figure out what he may have known.
+
+God’s Language
+
+P
+
+ART OF THIS ESSAY is a substitute for an entry or series of
+entries in a journal or notebook that I have never kept. The kind of
+writer’s journal, many of which I have read, which contains ideas for
+future work, sketches of scenes, observations and meditations. But
+especially the thoughts that undergird problems and solutions the
+writer encounters during a work in progress.
+I don’t keep such notebooks for a number of reasons, one of which
+is the leisure time unavailable to me, the other is the form my
+meditations take. Generally it is a response to some tangled,
+seemingly impenetrable dis-ease; an unquietness connected to a
+troubling image. (The images may be something seen in the material
+world or they might not be.) Other times I circle around an incident,
+a remark, or an impression that is peculiar enough to first provoke
+curiosity, then mysterious enough to keep recurring. With The Bluest
+Eye it was an exchange I had as a child with a friend that worried me
+on and off for years. In Sula it was a, to me, contradictory response
+my mother and her friends had to a woman in town. Another was a
+powerfully imagistic piece of male mythology inapplicable to women
+and dismissive of the consequences of the truth of that myth on
+women. In burrowing into those images or remarks or impressions
+questions surface: Suppose my childhood friend got what she prayed
+for? What were my mother’s friends appreciating while they were
+disapproving? What was the real trick of the Tar Baby? Why was
+Margaret Garner so completely without remorse and what effect
+would her remorselessness have on the neighborhood and her
+family? These questions, obvious, even idle, when gentled along or
+nudged led to more nuanced ones. All the time I am ruminating on
+
+these things I am not searching for a theme or a novelistic subject; I
+am just wondering. Most of this wondering is wandering, and
+disappears sooner or later. But occasionally, within or among these
+wanderings, a larger question poses itself. I don’t write it or my
+musings down because to do so would give them a gravity they may
+not deserve. I need to be or feel pursued by the question in order to
+be convinced that the further exploration is bookworthy. When that
+happens, at some point a scene or a bit of language arrives. It seems
+to me a waste of valuable time to sketch or record that when, if it is
+interesting enough to embellish, I could be tracking it by actually
+turning it directly into a fictional formulation. If I learn that I am
+wrong about its staying power or its fertility, I can always throw it
+away. So I get out the yellow legal pad and see what happens.
+With the fiction project I followed the same procedure: waiting to
+see if certain images I had would wax or wane, yield or implode. One
+of those images was of a group of ladies standing on the steps of an
+African Methodist Episcopal church, three rows of them, in earlytwentieth-century finery, posing as for a class or club photograph.
+They are exceptionally beautiful and they are earning a great deal of
+admiration, you can tell, from the eyes that watch them. Another
+image is also of women. Girls, rather. They are novices in habits
+running from the police who have come to arrest them. Both groups
+of women are associated with churches. The first group is an image—
+almost like a painting—that surfaced unsummoned; the second is a
+wholly unreliable piece of village gossip.
+Two hundred and some pages later I feel certain this is a wane. Not
+a wax, although I am also certain that the project is impossible.
+While each novel I have written, other than the first two, seemed
+equally undoable, it still astonishes me how, the more work one does,
+the more difficult it becomes, the more impossible the task. In this
+instance I am trying to re-create, in the setting of the black towns of
+the West, a narrative about paradise—the earthly achievement of—its
+possibility, its dimensions, its stability, even its desirability. The
+novel’s time frame, 1908 to 1976, and the history of its population,
+former and children of former slaves, require me to rely heavily on
+
+the characters’ reserves of faith, their concept of freedom, their
+perception of the divine, and their imaginative as well as
+organizational/administrative prowess. For like many, but not all,
+deliberately, carefully constructed nineteenth-century communities,
+a deeply held and wholly shared belief system was much more vital
+to the enterprise than was physical endurance, leadership, and
+opportunity. In fact, faith in a system of belief—religious belief—
+enabled endurance, forged leadership, and revealed opportunity to
+be seized. Although for freed men and women prosperity, ownership,
+safety, and self-determination were thinkable, hungered-for goals,
+desire alone could not, did not animate the treacherous journey they
+took into unknown territory to build cities. The history of African
+Americans that narrows or dismisses religion in both their collective
+and individual life, in their political and aesthetic activity, is more
+than incomplete—it may be fraudulent. Therefore, among the
+difficulties before me is the daunting one of showing not just how
+their civic and economic impulses respond to their religious
+principles, but how their everyday lives were inextricably bound with
+these principles. If the polls taken in 1994, which indicate that 96
+percent of African Americans believe in God, are correct I suspect the
+4 percent who do not so believe are a recent phenomenon—unheardof among slave and ex-slave populations. Assuming the religiosity of
+nineteenth-century African Americans is a given, then, and few texts,
+fiction or memorialist, have neglected this aspect. But this is 1996
+and the solution for fictional representation that takes this in
+account is not to layer religiosity onto an existing canvas of migration
+and the quest for citizenship, or to tip one’s hat to characters whose
+belief is unshakable. It is rather to construct a work in which
+religious belief is central to the narrative itself.
+Thus the first problem with paradise: how to render expressive
+religious language credibly and effectively in postmodern fiction
+without having to submit to a vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of
+late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the
+modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored, or to a loose,
+undiscriminating conviction of the innate divinity of all living things,
+
+or to the biblical/political scholasticism of the more entrenched and
+dictatorial wings of contemporary religious institutions—none of
+which, it seems to me, represents the everyday practice of
+nineteenth-century African Americans and their children, nor lends
+itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. The second problem then
+is part of the first: how to narrate persuasively profound and
+motivating faith in and to a highly secularized, contemporary,
+“scientific” world. In short, how to reimagine paradise. (The question
+that surfaces immediately—Why reimagine it at all, since the ablest
+geniuses have already and long ago provided unsurpassed and
+unsurpassable language to describe it?—is a question I will address
+in a moment.) Right now I want to outline what my problem is and
+then tell you why I have it.
+Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—
+which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar,
+common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry
+and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the
+routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of
+our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the
+scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with
+fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, /…with gay
+enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire
+fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of
+gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of
+Paradise…”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and
+plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; /
+Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—
+Hesperian fables true, /…of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or
+level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all
+hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / of cool recess, o’er which
+the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps /
+Luxuriant.”
+Such a beatific expanse, in this the last decade of the twentieth
+century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy,
+viewed and visited by guests and tourists, or it is regularly on display
+
+for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media.
+Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as
+ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of
+physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to
+see how they are understood in 1996.
+Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know,
+intensified, refined. Or what we have never known articulated.
+Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and
+jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
+Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources
+to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what
+has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature
+of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous,
+shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the
+dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought
+to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal
+state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.
+Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of
+food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a
+desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.
+Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling, feature
+of paradise because certain people, the unworthy, are not there.
+Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify
+the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up
+again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem
+possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people
+can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for
+the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the
+middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the
+unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets
+for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were
+private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term
+“public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise as exclusive terrain
+therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.
+
+Eternity, since it avoids the pain of dying again, and, in its
+rejection of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest
+appeal. And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life,
+and fitter life, remind us that the desire is for earthbound eternity,
+rather than eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is.
+Thus, paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to a heavenly one,
+has serious intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me
+or us forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.
+But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more
+attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s
+Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered
+pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than
+his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of
+linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes.
+There are many reasons why the images of the horrors of hell were
+meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be
+visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than
+the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times,
+with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a
+consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a
+loss of shame in contemporary life.
+One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies
+these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the
+numbness toward the decidedly anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is
+understood, justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its
+awe-fullness. It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why
+are we not so frightened by its possibilities that we turn in panic
+toward good? Is afterlife of any sort too simple for our complex,
+sophisticated modern intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise,
+evil needs costumes, constantly refurbished and replenished?
+Literary? Hell has always lent itself to glamour, headlines, a tuxedo,
+cunning, a gruesome mask or a seductive one. Maybe it needs blood,
+slime, roaring simply to get our attention, to tickle us, draw from us
+our wit, our imagination, our energy, our heights of performance.
+
+After which paradise is simply its absence, an edgeless and therefore
+unavailing lack full of an already perceived, already recognizable
+landscape: great trees for shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious
+metals, jewelry, animal husbandry. Outside fighting evil, waging war
+against the unworthy, there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do.
+A nonexclusionary, unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise,
+without dread, minus a nemesis, is no paradise at all.
+Under these circumstances, then, the literary problem is
+harnessing contemporary language to reveal not only the intellectual
+complexity of paradise, but language that seizes the imagination not
+as an amicus brief to a naïve or psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent
+life itself. If I am to do justice to, bear witness to the deeply religious
+population of this project and render their profoundly held moral
+system affective in these alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired
+times—where religion is understood to run the gamut from scorned,
+unintelligible fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to
+televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I
+have serious problems.
+Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of
+Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based
+religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and
+unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious
+language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate
+divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance,
+seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the apt rhetorical
+flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing traditional
+language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and proselytize a
+population indifferent or unresponsive to the language that moved
+our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a constituency whose
+discourse has been shaped by the language of media and commerce
+and whose expectation of correlating images to accompany and
+clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears reasonable to
+accommodate altering circumstances with alternate modes of
+discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such efforts, I suspect
+
+the “modernization” of God’s language has been rewarding—
+otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.
+Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a
+relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern
+language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the
+spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the
+denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its
+mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor
+substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it
+sacrifices ambiguity, depth, and moral authority, but also because its
+techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.
+I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons,
+powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums,
+or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest
+that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in
+its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But
+these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction.
+Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean
+most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from the
+King James Version of the Holy Bible. Two examples of fiction that
+deliberately and successfully merge modern and biblical language
+are Leon Forrest’s novels and Reynolds Price’s short narratives.
+The questions I put to myself are: Is it possible to write religioninflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly
+on biblical language? Is it possible to make the experience and
+journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as
+it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books
+to rely on?
+I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am
+alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its
+cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with
+nonmarket vocabulary (or its insistence on refueling itself with
+marketing vocabulary), its substitution of the terminology of popular
+psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal triumphalism, its
+morally opinionated dictatorial praxis, the unearned pleasure it takes
+
+in performability for its miracle rather than content; its low opinion
+of itself.
+How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic
+terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved,
+limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without
+summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke
+paradise in an age of theme parks?
+The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot.
+I have chosen in the meantime something else, some other strategy
+to concretize these informing, old-fashioned passions and conflicts.
+Not to use paeanistic, rapturous, large words, etc., but to reveal their
+consequences.
+Here I would like to do what I have always done when the
+questions becomes answerable only in the act of storytelling. Begin
+the story.
+“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their
+time.”
+
+Grendel and His Mother
+
+I
+
+AM HOPING that you will agree that the piece of literature I
+want to draw from is, as one of its translators says, “equal to our
+knowledge of reality in the present time.” And discover in the lines of
+association I am making with a medieval sensibility and a modern
+one a fertile ground on which we can appraise our contemporary
+world.
+I am going to tell you a story. First because narrative is probably
+the most effective way knowledge is structured and second because I
+am a storyteller. The practice of writing makes demands on me that
+nothing else does. The search for language, whether among other
+writers or in originating it, constitutes a mission. Delving into
+literature is neither escape nor a surefire route to comfort. It has
+been a constant, sometimes violent, always provocative engagement
+with the contemporary world, the issues of the society we live in. So
+you won’t be surprised that I take my text from ancient but by no
+means remote sources. The story is this. As I tell it you may be
+reminded of the events and rhetoric and actions of many current
+militarized struggles and violent upheavals.
+Once upon a time there lived a man-eating monster of
+unprecedented cruelty and unparalleled appetite, who ravaged
+generally at night and focused primarily on the people of one
+particular kingdom, but it was only because he chose to. Clearly he
+could slaughter whomever and wherever he decided to. His name
+was Grendel and he spent a dozen years dismembering, chewing, and
+swallowing the livestock, the thanes, the citizens of Scandinavia.
+The leader of the besieged country lived in a great mead hall with
+his queen, his family, friends, guards, counsels, and a grand army of
+
+heroes. Each night when the leader retired, guards and warriors were
+stationed to protect the hall and its inhabitants from destruction and
+to try, if at all possible, to slay their nighttime enemy. And each night
+Grendel picked them off as though they were ripe cherries on an
+eternally fruited tree. The kingdom was sunk in mourning and
+helplessness; riven with sorrow for the dead, with regret for the past,
+and in fear of the future. They were in the same situation as the
+Finns of one of their sagas: “hooped within the great wheel of
+necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek
+glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little nations are grouped
+around their lord, the greater nations spoil for war and menace the
+little ones, a lord dies, defenselessness ensues, the enemy strikes,
+vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for the living, bloodshed
+begets further bloodshed, the wheel turns, the generations tread and
+tread and tread.”
+But what seemed never to trouble or worry them was who was
+Grendel and why had he placed them on his menu? Nowhere in the
+story is that question put. The question does not surface for a simple
+reason: evil has no father. It is preternatural and exists without
+explanation. Grendel’s actions are dictated by his nature; the nature
+of an alien mind—an inhuman drift. He is the essence of the one who
+loathes you, wants you not just dead, but nourishingly so, so that
+your death provides gain to the slayer: food, land, wealth, water—
+whatever. Like genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, or
+individual assault for profit. But Grendel escapes these reasons: no
+one had attacked or offended him; no one had tried to invade his
+home or displace him from his territory; no one had stolen from him
+or visited any wrath upon him. Obviously he was neither defending
+himself nor seeking vengeance. In fact no one knew who he was. He
+was not angry with the Danes; he didn’t want to rule their land or
+plunder their resources or rape their women, so there could be no
+reasoning with him. No bribery, no negotiations, no begging, no
+trading could stop him. Humans, even at their most corrupt, selfish,
+and ignorant can be made available to reason, are educable,
+retrainable, and, most important, fathomable. Humans have words
+
+for madness, explanations for evil, and a system of payback for those
+who trespass or are judged outlaws. But Grendel was beyond
+comprehension, unfathomable. The ultimate monster: mindless
+without intelligible speech. In the illustrations that imagine him and
+the language that described him, Grendel is ugly: hairy, his body is
+folded in on itself, reeking, easy and most comfortable on all fours.
+But even without claws or rows of sharklike teeth, even if he had
+been beautiful, it would not have lessened the horror; his mere
+presence in the world was an affront to it.
+Eventually, of course, a brave and fit hero named Beowulf
+volunteers to rid the kingdom of this pestilence. He and his task
+force of warriors enter the land, announce their purpose, and are
+welcomed with enthusiasm. On the first night, following a
+celebration to rally the forces and draw their courage, the war is won
+—or so it seemed. When the monster appears, they suffer only one
+casualty before Beowulf rips off Grendel’s arm, sending him fatally
+bleeding, limping and moaning, slouching back home to his mother,
+where he dies.
+Yes, mother. I suggested earlier that evil has no father, but it
+should not come as a surprise that Grendel has a mother. In true
+folkloric, epic fashion, the bearer of evil, of destruction is female.
+Monsters, it seems, are born after all, and like her sisters—Eve,
+Pandora, Lot’s wife, Helen of Troy, and the female that sits at the
+gate of Milton’s hell, birthing vicious dogs who eat one another and
+are replaced by more and more litters from their mother’s womb—it
+turns out that Grendel’s mother is more repulsive, more
+“responsible” for evil than her son is. Interestingly enough, she has
+no name and cannot speak (I would like to follow these images, but
+at some other time). In any case, this silent, repulsive female is a
+mother, and unlike her child, does have a motive for murder—
+therefore she sets out immediately to avenge her son. She advances
+to the mead hall, interrupts the warriors reveling at their victory, and
+fills the pouch she carries with their mangled bodies. Her vengeance
+instigates a second, even more determined foray by Beowulf, this
+time on the monster’s territory and in his home. Beowulf swims
+
+through demon-laden waters, is captured, and, entering the mother’s
+lair, weaponless, is forced to use his bare hands. He fights mightily
+but unsuccessfully. Suddenly and fortunately, he grabs a sword that
+belongs to the mother. With her own weapon he cuts off her head,
+and then the head of Grendel’s corpse. A curious thing happens then:
+the victim’s blood melts the sword. The conventional reading is that
+the fiends’ blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf
+standing there with a mother’s head in one hand and a useless hilt in
+the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that
+perhaps violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right
+and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in
+exhaustion or shame.
+Beowulf is a classic epic of good vanquishing evil; of unimaginable
+brutality being overcome by physical force. Bravery, sacrifice, honor,
+pride, rewards both in reputations and wealth—all come full circle in
+this rousing medieval tale. In such heroic narratives, glory is not in
+the details; the forces of good and evil are obvious, blatant, the
+triumph of the former over the latter is earned, justified, and
+delicious. As Beowulf says, “It is always better / to avenge dear ones
+than to indulge in mourning. /…So arise, my lord, and let us
+immediately / set forth on the trail of this troll-dam. / I guarantee
+you she will not get away, / not to dens under ground nor upland
+groves / nor the ocean floor. She’ll have nowhere to flee to.”
+Contemporary society, however, is made uneasy by the concept of
+pure, unmotivated evil, by pious, unsullied virtue, and contemporary
+writers and scholars search for more.
+One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this
+heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John
+Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel. Told from the monster’s point
+of view, it is a tour de force and an intellectual and aesthetic
+enterprise that comes very close to being the sotto-voiced subject of
+much of today’s efforts to come to grips with the kind of permanent
+global war we now find ourselves engaged in. The novel poses the
+question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us
+to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly
+
+unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable. By assuming Grendel’s
+voice, his point of view, Gardner establishes at once that unlike the
+character in the poem, Grendel is not without thought, and is not a
+beast. In fact he is reflecting precisely on real true beasts the moment
+the reader is introduced to him. When the novel opens he is watching
+a ram, musing, “Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the
+ram’s, by the roots of horns.” And “Why can’t these creatures
+discover a little dignity?”
+Gardner’s version has the same plot, characters, etc., as the
+original, and relies on similar descriptions and conventions:
+referring to women, for example, only queens have names. If
+Grendel’s mother has a name it is as unspeakable as she is
+unspeaking. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of
+Beowulf emphasizes the movement of evil from out there to in here,
+from the margins of the world to inside the castle, and focuses on the
+artistic brilliance of the poem, the “beautiful contrivances of its
+language”; Gardner, however, tries to penetrate the interior life—
+emotional, cognizant—of incarnate evil and prioritizes the poet as
+one who organizes the world’s disorder, who pulls together disparate
+histories into meaning. We learn in Gardner’s novel that Grendel
+distinguishes himself from the ram that does not know or remember
+his past. We learn that Grendel, in the beginning, is consumed by
+hatred and is neither proud nor ashamed of it. That he is full of
+contempt for the survivors of his rampages. Watching the thanes
+bury their dead, he describes the scene as follows: “On the side of the
+hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the
+funeral pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left
+behind. Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are
+hammering, replacing the door…industrious and witless as worker
+ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few
+more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” This
+contempt extends to the world in general. “I understood that the
+world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on
+which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that,
+finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what
+
+pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is
+not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.”
+But the fundamental theme of the novel lies in Grendel’s
+possibilities—first, his encounter with shaped, studied, artistic
+language (as opposed to noise, groans, shouts, boasts) and, second,
+his dialogue with the dragon who sits atop the mountain of gold he
+has been guarding for centuries. Regarding the first, his encounter
+with the poet, who is called the Shaper, offers him the only
+possibility of transformation. Grendel knows the Shaper’s song is full
+of lies, illusion. He has watched carefully the battles of men and
+knows they are not the glory the Shaper turns them into. But he
+succumbs to the Shaper’s language nevertheless because of its power
+to transform, its power to elevate, to discourage base action. He
+defines the poet’s potency this way: “He reshapes the world….So his
+name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and
+turns dry sticks to gold.” It is because of this shaped, elevated,
+patterned language that Grendel is able to contemplate beauty,
+recognize love, feel pity, crave mercy, and experience shame. It is
+because of the Shaper’s imagination that he considers the equation of
+quality with meaning. In short he develops a desperate hunger for
+the life of a completely human being. “My heart,” he says, “was light
+with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own
+bloodthirsty ways.” Overwhelmed with these reflections on goodness
+and light, he goes to the mead hall weeping for mercy, aching for
+community to assuage his utter loneliness. “I staggered out into the
+open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out, ‘Mercy!
+Peace!’ The harper broke off, the people screamed….Drunken men
+rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, ‘Friend!
+Friend!’ They hacked at me, yipping like dogs.” So he reverts to the
+deep wilderness of his hatred. Yet he is still in turmoil, torn between
+“tears and a bellow of scorn.” He travels to the dragon for answers to
+his own cosmic questions: Why am I here? What is God? What is the
+world?
+At the end of a long and fascinating argument, loaded with the
+dragon’s cynicism, bitterness, and indifference, Grendel receives one
+
+word of advice from the dragon: “Get a pile of gold, and sit on it.”
+Between Grendel’s suspicion that noble language produces noble
+behavior (just as puny, empty language produces puny, empty
+behavior) and the dragon’s view of man’s stupidity, banality, and
+irrelevance, his own denial of “free will and intercession,” right there,
+exactly there, lies the plane on which civic and intellectual life rests,
+rocks, and rolls. Grendel’s dilemma is also ours. It is the nexus
+between the Shaper and the dragon; between Saint Augustine and
+Nietzsche, between art and science; between the Old Testament and
+the New, between swords and ploughshares. It is the space for as well
+as the act of thought; it is a magnetic space, pulling us away from
+reaction to thinking. Denying easy answers, and violence committed
+because, in crisis, it is the only thing one knows how to do.
+Absolute answers, like those Grendel wanted, cynically poised
+questions, like those the dragon offered, can dilute and misdirect the
+educational project. In this country, where competition is
+worshipped and crisis is the driving force of media-salted
+information, and where homogeneity and difference, diversity and
+conformity are understood to be the national ideal, we are being
+asked to both recoil from violence and to embrace it; to waver
+between winning at all costs and caring for our neighbor; between
+the fear of the strange and the comfort of the familiar; between the
+blood feud of the Scandinavians and the monster’s yearning for
+nurture and community. It was the pull of those opposites that
+trounced Grendel and that trouble and disable national, educational,
+and personal discourse.
+Crisis is a heightened, sometimes bloody, obviously dangerous,
+always tense confluence of events and views about those events.
+Volatility, theatricality, and threat swirl about in crisis. Crisis, like
+war, demands “final answers,” quick and definitive action—to douse
+flames, draw blood, soothe consciences.
+Sometimes the demand for quick and definitive action is so keen
+all energy is gathered to avoid the crisis of impending crisis. The
+effect of militarizing virtually every fluid situation and social problem
+has been encroaching inertia, if not established paralysis. It has also
+
+produced an increased appetite for ever more thrilling, intense
+presentations of crisis. (Note the plethora of televised entertainment
+devoted to ersatz, fake crises—survival in third-world countries
+among people for whom survival is an unremarkable condition of
+life.) This hunger is not different from numb insensitivity, is, in fact,
+a vivid expression of it. Once the taste for the blood images of
+conquest is introduced, it may not be easily slaked.
+I have elaborated upon this media version of crisis in order to
+distinguish it from conflict. Conflict is the clash of incompatible
+forces, the Shaper versus the dragon; a disharmony calling for
+adjustment, change, or compromise. Conflict recognizes legitimate
+oppositions, honest but different interpretations of data, contesting
+theories. These oppositions may be militarized, may have to be, but
+in the academy they should, must not be. In fact, they must be
+embraced if education is to occur. Conflict in the halls of the
+academy is unlike conflict in the malls, arcades, or on a battlefield. In
+academic halls versus arcade malls, conflict is not a screen game to
+play for its own sake, nor a social gaffe to avoid at all costs. It has a
+bad reputation only because we have been taught to associate it with
+winning and losing, with the desperate need to be right, to be alpha.
+With violence. Conflict is not another word for crisis or for war or for
+competition. Conflict is a condition of intellectual life, and, I believe,
+its pleasure. Firing up the mind to engage itself is precisely what the
+mind is for—it has no other purpose. Just as the body is always
+struggling to repair itself from its own abuse, to stay alive, so is the
+mind craving knowledge. When it is not busy trying to know, it is in
+disrepair.
+The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of
+symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can
+invent, imagine, and, most important, it can delve.
+I like to think that John Gardner’s view will hold: that language—
+informed, shaped, reasoned—will become the hand that stays crisis
+and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our
+lives and rippling our intellect. I know that democracy is worth
+fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent
+
+struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. You only
+have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey until the blood of
+Grendel’s mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor’s as
+well.
+
+The Writer Before the Page
+
+I
+
+ONCE KNEW a woman named Hannah Peace. I say “knew,” but
+nothing could be less accurate. I was perhaps four years old when she
+was in the town where I lived. I don’t know where (or even if) she is
+now or to whom she was related then. She was not even a visiting
+friend. And I couldn’t to this day describe her in a way that would
+make her known in a photograph, nor would I recognize her if she
+walked into this room. But I have a memory of her and it’s like this:
+the color of her skin—the matte quality of it. Something purple
+around her. Also eyes not completely open. There emanated from her
+an aloofness that seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I
+remember her name—or the way people pronounced it. Never
+Hannah or Miss Peace. Always Hannah Peace—and more. Something
+hidden—some awe perhaps, but certainly some forgiveness. When
+they pronounced her name, they (the women and the men) forgave
+her something.
+That’s not much, I know: half-closed eyes, an absence of hostility,
+skin powdered in lilac dust. But it was more than enough to evoke a
+character—in fact any more detail would have prevented (for me) the
+emergence of a fictional character at all. What is useful—definitive—
+is the galaxy of emotion that accompanied the woman as I pursued
+my memory of her, not the woman herself.
+In the example I have given of Hannah Peace it was the havingbeen-easily-forgiven that caught my attention, and that quality, that
+“easily forgivenness” that I believe I remembered in connection with
+a shadow of a woman my mother knew, is the theme of Sula. The
+women forgive each other—or learn to. Once that piece of the
+constellation became apparent, it dominated the other pieces. The
+
+next step was to discover what there is to be forgiven among women.
+Such things must now be raised and invented because I am going to
+tell about feminine forgiveness in story form. The things to be
+forgiven are grave errors and violent misdemeanors, but the point
+was less the thing to be forgiven than the nature and quality of
+forgiveness among women—which is to say friendship among
+women. What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the
+emotional value of the relationship. But Sula is not (simply) about
+friendship between women but between black women, a qualifying
+term the artistic responsibilities of which are what goes on before I
+ever approach the page. Before the act of writing, before the clean
+yellow legal pad or the white bond are the principles that inform the
+idea of writing. I will touch upon them in a moment.
+What I want my fiction to do is to urge the reader into active
+participation in the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text.
+And to refuse him makes it difficult for him (the reader) to confine
+himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data. When one looks at a
+very good painting, the experience of looking is deeper than the data
+accumulated in viewing it. The same, I think, is true in listening to
+good music. Just as the literary value of a painting or a musical
+composition is limited, so too is the literary value of literature
+limited. I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have
+written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in Greece
+before Christ, or religious narrative in 1000 AD, when literature was
+need and did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the
+writer’s imagination. How magnificent not to have to depend on the
+reader’s literary associations—his literary experience—which can be
+as much an impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a
+writer’s. It is important that what I write not be merely literary. I am
+most self-conscious about in my work being overcareful in making
+sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I avoid, too studiously
+perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary references, unless oblique
+and based on written folklore. The choice of a tale or of folklore in
+my work is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way
+that flags him or her and provides irony, sometimes humor.
+
+Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the
+mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others,
+enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a
+story about parents who abandoned their own children to a forest
+and a witch who made a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his
+racial and cultural ignorance and confusion, is flagged. Equally
+marked is Hagar’s bed being described as Goldilocks’s choice. Partly
+because of Hagar’s preoccupation with hair, and partly because, like
+Goldilocks, a housebreaker if ever there was one, she is greedy for
+things, unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and
+Hagar is emotionally selfish as well as confused.
+This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm
+if boring habit with me, not only because it leads to poses, not only
+because I refuse the credentials it bestows, but also because it is
+inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of that
+literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests me.
+(Emphasis on me.) Literary references in the hands of writers I love
+can be extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t
+want the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same
+plane an illiterate or preliterature reader would have to. I want to
+subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an
+unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary
+imagination.
+My beginnings as a novelist were very much focused on creating
+this discomfort and unease in order to insist that the reader rely on
+another body of knowledge. However weak those beginnings were in
+1965, they nevertheless pointed me toward the process that engages
+me in 1982: trusting memory and culling from it theme and
+structure. In The Bluest Eye the recollection of what I felt and saw
+upon hearing a child my own age say she prayed for blue eyes
+provided the first piece. I then tried to distinguish between a piece
+and a part (in the way that a piece of a human body is different from
+a part of a human body).
+As I began developing parts out of pieces, I found that I preferred
+them unconnected—to be related but not to touch—to circle, not line
+
+up, because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered,
+fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life. The
+novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another,
+like the galaxy accompanying memory. I fret the pieces and fragment
+aspect of memory because too often we want the whole thing. When
+we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the
+fragment we are remembering may be—very probably is—the most
+important piece in the dream. Chapter and part designations, as
+conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in
+writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the
+designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually
+identified at the last minute.)
+There may be play and arbitrariness in the way memory surfaces
+but none in the way the composition is organized, especially when I
+hope to re-create play and arbitrariness in the way narrative events
+unfold. The form becomes the exact interpretation of the idea the
+story is meant to express. Nothing more traditional than that—but
+the sources of the images are not the traditional novelistic or
+readerly ones. The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the
+corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the
+context in The Bluest Eye.
+Narrative is one of the ways in which knowledge is organized. I
+have always thought it was the most important way to transmit and
+receive knowledge. I am less certain of that now—but if the fact that
+the craving for narrative has never lessened it is any indication, the
+hunger for it is as keen as it was on Mount Sinai or Calvary or in the
+middle of the fens. (Even when novelists abandon or grow tired of it
+as an outmoded memetic form, historians, journalists, and
+performing artists take up the slack.) Still, narrative is not and never
+has been enough, just as the object drawn on a canvas or a cave wall
+is never simply mimetic.
+My compact with the reader is not to reveal an already established
+reality (literary or historical) that he or she and I agree upon
+beforehand. I don’t want to assume or exercise that kind of authority.
+I regard that as patronizing, although many people regard it as safe
+
+and reassuring. And because my métier is black, the artistic demands
+of black culture are such that I cannot patronize, control, or
+pontificate. In the third-world cosmology as I perceive it, reality is
+not already constituted by my literary predecessors in Western
+culture. If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality
+of the West, it must centralize and animate information discredited
+by the West—discredited not because it is not true or useful or even
+of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited
+people, information dismissed as “lore” or “gossip” or “magic” or
+“sentiment.”
+If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of AfroAmerican culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics
+of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group
+nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its
+relationship to audience performance, the critical voice that upholds
+tradition and communal values and that also provides occasion for
+an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions.
+Working with those rules, the text, if it is to take improvisation and
+audience participation into account, cannot be the authority—it
+should be the map. It should make a way for the reader (audience) to
+participate in the tale. The language, if it is to permit criticism of
+both rebellion and tradition, must be both indicator and mask, and
+the tension between the two kinds of language is its release and its
+power. If my work is to be functional to the group (to the village, as it
+were) then it must bear witness and identify danger as well as
+possible havens from danger; it must identify that which is useful
+from the past and that which ought to be discarded; it must make it
+possible to prepare for the present and live it out; and it must do that
+not by avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them;
+it should not even attempt to solve social problems but it should
+certainly try to clarify them.
+Before I try to illustrate some of these points by using Tar Baby as
+an example, let me hasten to say that there are eminent and
+powerful, intelligent, and gifted black writers who not only recognize
+Western literature as part of their own heritage but who have
+
+employed it to such an advantage that it illuminates both cultures. I
+neither object to nor am indifferent to their work or their views. I
+relish it, in precisely the way I relish a world of literature from other
+cultures. The question is not legitimacy or the “correctness” of a
+point of view, but the difference between my point of view and theirs.
+Nothing would be more hateful to me than a monolithic prescription
+for what black literature is or ought to be. I simply wanted to write
+literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black not because its
+characters were, or because I was, but because it took as its creative
+task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable
+principles of black art.
+TAR BABY
+Recollecting the told story.
+Refusing to read a modern or Westernized version of it.
+Selecting out the pieces that were disturbing or simply memorable:
+fear, tar, the rabbit’s outrage at a failing in traditional manners (the
+Tar Baby does not speak). Why the Tar Baby was formed, to what
+purpose, what was the farmer trying to protect, and why did he think
+the doll would be attractive to the rabbit (what did he know and what
+was his big mistake)? Why does the Tar Baby cooperate with the
+farmer, do the things the farmer wishes to protect, wish to be
+protected? What makes his job more important than the rabbit’s,
+why does the farmer believe that a briar patch is sufficient
+punishment, what does the briar patch represent to the rabbit, to the
+Tar Baby, and to the farmer?
+CREATION
+Putting the above pieces together in parts.
+Concentrating on tar as a part. What is it and where does it come
+from; its holy uses and its profane uses, consideration of which leads
+
+to a guiding motif: ahistorical earth and historical earth. How that
+theme is translated into the structure.
+1. Coming out of the sea (that which was there before earth) is both
+the beginning and the end of the book—in both of which Son
+emerges from the sea in a section that is not numbered as a
+chapter.
+2. The earth that came out of the sea and its conquest by modern
+man; that conquest as viewed by fishermen and clouds. The pain
+it caused to the conquered life forms.
+3. Movement from the earth into the household: its rooms, its
+quality of shelter. The activity for which the rooms were
+designed: eating, sleeping, bathing, leisure, etc.
+4. The houses disrupted precisely as the earth was disrupted. The
+chaos of the earth duplicated in the house designed for order.
+The disruption is caused by the man born out of the womb of the
+sea accompanied by ammonia odors of birth.
+5. The conflict that follows is between the ahistorical (the pristine)
+and the historical (or social) forces inherent in the uses of tar.
+6. The conflict is, further, between two kinds of chaos: civilized
+chaos and natural chaos.
+7. The revelation, then, is the revelation of secrets. Everybody with
+one or two exceptions has a secret: secrets of acts committed (as
+with Margaret and Son), and secrets of thoughts unspoken but
+driving nonetheless (as with Valerian and Jadine). And then the
+deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life,
+other life watches us.
+I apologize for using my own work as an illustration to those of you
+who may not be familiar with it. But had I chosen material from
+other writers, the possibility of its being unfamiliar would be equally
+as great.
+My inability to consider the world in terms other than verbal
+means that I am not able to not think about writing. It is the “world
+
+coherent” for me. So I am perplexed by the dread and apprehension
+with which some writers regard the process. I am also bored by the
+type and space devoted to the death of fiction when the funeral is
+lasting longer than the life of the art itself; we can be safe in our
+assumption that the corpse is immortal. The “goodbye” is at least 110
+years old.
+What the fiction-obituary critics are responding to is the peril
+literature is in. Peril that can be categorized in three parts:
+1. First is the suspicion (or fact—I am not sure which) that the best
+young minds are not being attracted to writing, that technology,
+postmodernist architecture, “new” music, film, etc., are much
+more demanding and exciting.
+2. Second is the conviction (in the academy at any rate) that fiction
+as narrative is obsolete because it is dictatorial, bourgeois, and
+self-congratulatory in its attempt to maintain the status quo.
+3. Third of the categories of peril is the growth requirement of
+publishers—the marketplace demands narrow the possibilities
+for new writers to find a publishing home.
+There are, of course, some other perhaps more immediate perils
+(global stability, poverty, hunger, love, death), so it really is not a
+good time to write. To which observation one can only say: So what?
+When has it ever been a good time? Plague-ridden Britain for
+Chaucer? World War II for Eudora Welty? World War I for Virginia
+Woolf? South African brutality for Nadine Gordimer? The 94 percent
+slave population for Plato?
+As writers, what we do is remember. And to remember this world
+is to create it. The writer’s responsibility (whatever her or his time) is
+to change the world—improve his/her own time. Or, less ambitious,
+to help make sense of it. Simply in order to discover that it does
+make sense. Not one sense. What is the point of 2 billion people
+making one sense.
+I am old enough to have seen the northern lights (1938?) and I
+remember that most shocking, most profound event in the sky over
+
+Lorain, Ohio. After that how could I be content with one simple
+color? Or a simple Hannah Peace?
+
+The Trouble with Paradise
+
+I
+
+WANT to begin my meditation on the trouble with paradise with
+some remarks on the environment in which I work and in which
+many writers also work. The construction of race and its hierarchy
+have a powerful impact on expressive language, just as figurative,
+interpretative language impacts powerfully on the construction of a
+racial society. The intimate exchange between the atmosphere of
+racism and the language that asserts, erases, manipulates, or
+transforms it is unavoidable among fiction writers, who must
+manage to hold an unblinking gaze into the realm of difference. We
+are always being compelled by and being pulled into an imaginary of
+lives we have never led, emotions we have never felt to which we
+have no experiential access, and toward persons never invited into
+our dreams. We imagine old people when we are young, write about
+the wealthy when we have nothing, genders that are not our own,
+people who exist nowhere except in our minds holding views we not
+only do not share but may even loathe. We write about nationalities
+with whom we have merely a superficial acquaintance. The
+willingness, the necessity, the excitement of moving about in
+unknown terrain constitute both the risk and the satisfaction of the
+work.
+Of the several realms of difference, the most stubborn to imagine
+convincingly is the racial difference. It is a stubbornness born of ages
+of political insistence and social apparatus. And while it has an
+almost unmitigated force in political and domestic life, the realm of
+racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it
+has no claim. It is truly a realm that is no realm at all. An allconsuming vacancy, the enunciatory difficulty of which does not
+
+diminish with the discovery that one is narrating that which is both
+constitutive and fraudulent, both common and strange. Strong
+critical language is available clarifying that discovery of the chasm
+that is none, as well as the apprehension which that discovery raises.
+But it is quite one thing to identify the apprehension and quite
+another to implement it, to narrate it, to dramatize its play. Fictional
+excursions into these realms are as endlessly intriguing to me as they
+are instructive in the manner in which the power of racial difference
+is rendered. These imaginative forays can be sophisticated, cunning,
+thrillingly successful, or fragile and uninformed. But none is
+accidental. For many writers it is not enough to indicate or represent
+difference, its fault line and its solidity. It is rather more to the point
+of their project to use it for metaphoric and structural purposes.
+Often enhancing or decorating racial difference becomes a strategy
+for genuflecting before one’s own race about which one feels unease.
+I am deeply and personally involved in figuring out how to
+manipulate, mutate, and control imagistic, metaphoric language in
+order to produce something that could be called race-specific racefree prose: literature that is free of the imaginative restraints that the
+racially inflected language at my disposal imposes on me. The
+Paradise project required me first to recognize and identify racially
+inflected language and strategies, then deploy them to achieve a
+counter effect, to deactivate their power, summon other opposing
+powers, and liberate what I am able to invent, record, describe, and
+transform from the straitjacket a racialized society can, and
+frequently does, buckle us into.
+It is important to remind ourselves that in addition to poetry and
+fictional prose, racial discourse permeates all of the scholarly
+disciplines: theology, history, the social sciences, literary criticism,
+the language of law, psychiatry, and the natural sciences. By this I
+mean more than the traces of racism that survive in the language as
+normal and inevitable, such as name-calling; skin privileges (the
+equation of black with evil and white with purity); the orthographic
+disrespect given the speech of African Americans; the pseudoscience
+developed to discredit them, etc., and I mean more than the
+
+unabashedly racist agendas that are promoted in some of the
+scholarship of these disciplines. I mean the untrammeled agency and
+license racial discourse provides intellectuals, while at the same time
+fructifying, closing off knowledge about the race upon which such
+discourse is dependent. One of the most malevolent characteristics of
+racist thought is that it seems never to produce new knowledge. It
+seems able merely to reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but
+static assertions. It has no referent in the material world. Like the
+concept of black blood, or white blood, or blue blood it is designed to
+create and employ a self-contained field, to construct artificial
+borders and to maintain them against all reason and against all
+evidence.
+The problem of writing in a language in which the codes of racial
+hierarchy and disdain are deeply embedded was exacerbated when I
+began Paradise. In that novel I was determined to focus the assault
+on the metaphorical, metonymic infrastructure upon which such
+language rests and luxuriates. I am aware of how whiteness matures
+and ascends the throne of universalism by maintaining its powers to
+describe and to enforce its descriptions. To challenge that view of
+universalism, to exorcize, alter, and defang the white/black
+confrontation and concentrate on the residue of that hostility seemed
+to me a daunting project and an artistically liberating one. The
+material had been for some time of keen interest to me: the all-black
+towns founded by African Americans in the nineteenth century
+provided a rich field for an exploration into race-specific/race-free
+language. I assumed the reader would be habituated to very few
+approaches to African American literature: (1) reading it as sociology
+—not art, (2) a reading that anticipated the pleasure or the crisis—the
+frisson of an encounter with the exotic or the sentimentally familiar
+with romantic, (3) a reading that was alert to, familiar with, and
+dependent upon racial codes. I wanted to transgress and render
+useless those assumptions.
+Paradise places an all-black community, one chosen by its
+inhabitants, next to a raceless one, also chosen by its inhabitants.
+The grounds for traditional black/white hostilities shift to the nature
+
+of exclusion, the origins of chauvinism, the sources of oppression,
+assault, and slaughter. The exclusively black community is all about
+its race: preserving it, developing powerful myths of origin, and
+maintaining its purity. In the Convent of women, other than the
+nuns, race is indeterminate. All racial codes are eliminated,
+deliberately withheld. I tried to give so full a description of the
+women that knowing their racial identity would become irrelevant.
+Uninterested in the black/white tension that one expects to be
+central in any fiction written by an African American author, the
+book provides itself with an expanded canvas. Unconstrained by the
+weary and wearying vocabulary of racial domination, outside the
+boundaries of an already defined debate, the novel seeks to
+unencumber itself from the limits that figurations of a racialized
+language impose on the imagination while simultaneously
+normalizing a particular race’s culture. For many American readers
+this was disturbing: some admitted to being preoccupied with
+finding out which was the white girl; others wondered initially and
+then abandoned the question; some never concerned themselves
+with the discovery either by reading them as all black or, the lucky
+ones, by reading them as all fully realized people. In American
+English eliminating racial markers is challenging. There are matters
+of physical description, of dialogue, of assumptions about
+background and social status, of cultural differences. The technical
+problems were lessened because the action took place in the
+seventies, when women wandered about on their own and when
+African American culture reached a kind of apogee of influence on
+American culture in general. Conflicts in the text are gender related;
+they are also generational. They are struggles over history: Who will
+tell and thereby control the story of the past? Who will shape the
+future? They are conflicts of value, of ethics. Of personal identity.
+What is manhood? Womanhood? And finally, most importantly,
+what is personhood?
+Raising these questions seemed to me most compelling when
+augmented by yearnings for freedom and safety; for plenitude, for
+rest, for beauty; by contemplations on the temporal and the eternal;
+
+by the search for one’s own space, for respect, for love, for bliss—in
+short, paradise. And that throws into relief the second trouble with
+Paradise: how to render expressive religious language credibly and
+effectively in postmodernist fiction without having to submit to a
+vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of late-twentieth-century
+environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of
+the goddess-body adored, or to the biblical/political scholasticism of
+the more entrenched and dictatorial wings of contemporary religious
+institutions—none of which, it seems to me, represents the everyday
+practice of nineteenth-century African Americans and their children,
+nor lends itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. How to express
+profound and motivating faith in and to a secularized, scientific
+world? How, in other words, to reimagine paradise?
+Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—
+which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar,
+common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry
+and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the
+routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of
+our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the
+scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with
+fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, /…with gay
+enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire
+fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of
+gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of
+Paradise”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and
+plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; /
+Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—
+Hesperian fables true, /…of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or
+level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all
+hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / Of cool recess, o’er which
+the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps /
+Luxuriant.”
+That scenario, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we
+recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and
+visited by guests and tourists, regularly on display for the rest of us
+
+in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined.
+Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as ordinary unexceptional
+desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—
+beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they stack
+up in 1995.
+Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know,
+intensified by what we have never known articulated. Beatific,
+benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What
+it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
+Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources
+to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what
+has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature
+of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous,
+shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the
+dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought
+to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal
+state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.
+Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of
+food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a
+desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.
+Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling feature
+of paradise because some, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries
+are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the
+legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again,
+like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or
+desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be
+accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the
+well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle
+class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and
+the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own
+good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to
+enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a
+site of contention. Paradise therefore has a very real attraction to
+modern society.
+
+Eternity, since it holds the pain of dying again, and, in its rejection
+of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest appeal.
+And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life, and fitter
+life, remind us of the desire for earthbound eternity, rather than
+eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is. Thus,
+paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to heaven, has serious
+intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me or us
+forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.
+But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more
+attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s
+Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered
+pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than
+his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of
+linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes.
+There are many reasons why the images of the horrors of hell were
+meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and
+seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be
+visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than
+the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times,
+with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a
+consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a
+loss of shame in contemporary life.
+One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies
+these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the
+numbness toward anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is understood,
+justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its awe-fullness.
+It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why are we not so
+frightened by its possibilities that we turn toward good? Is afterlife of
+any sort too simple for our complex, sophisticated modern
+intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise, evil needs costumes,
+constantly refurbished and replenished? Hell has always lent itself to
+glamour, headlines, a tuxedo, cunning, a gruesome mask or a
+seductive one. Maybe it needs blood, slime, roaring simply to get our
+attention, to tickle us, draw from us our wit, our imagination, our
+energy, our heights of performance. After which paradise is simply
+
+its absence, an edgeless and therefore unavailing lack full of an
+already perceived, already recognizable landscape: great trees for
+shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious metals, jewelry, animal
+husbandry. Outside fighting hell, waging war against the unworthy,
+there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do. A nonexclusionary,
+unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a
+nemesis, is no paradise at all.
+The literary problem is harnessing contemporary language to
+reveal not only the intellectual complexity of paradise, but language
+that seizes the imagination not as an amicus brief to a naïve or
+psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent life itself. If I am to do justice
+to, bear witness to the deeply religious population of this project and
+render their profoundly held moral system affective in these
+alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired times—where religion is
+understood to run the gamut from scorned, unintelligible
+fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to
+televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I
+have serious problems.
+Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of
+Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based
+religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and
+unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious
+language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate
+divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance,
+seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the occasional
+rhetorical flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing the
+traditional language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and
+proselytize a population indifferent or unresponsive to the language
+that moved our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a
+constituency whose discourse has been shaped by the language of
+media and commerce and whose expectation of correlating images to
+accompany and clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears
+reasonable to accommodate altering circumstances with alternate
+modes of discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such
+
+efforts, I suspect the “modernization” of God’s language has been
+rewarding—otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.
+Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a
+relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern
+language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the
+spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the
+denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its
+mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor
+substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it
+sacrifices ambiguity, depth, and moral authority, but also because its
+techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.
+I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons,
+powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums,
+or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest
+that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in
+its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But
+these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction.
+Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean
+most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from holy
+texts.
+Is it possible to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does
+not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language? Is it possible
+to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as
+linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who
+themselves had no collection of books to rely on?
+I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am
+alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its
+cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with
+nonmarket vocabulary (or “its insistence on refueling itself with
+marketing vocabulary”), its substitution of the terminology of
+popular psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal
+triumphalism, its morally bankrupt dictatorial praxis, the unearned
+congratulations it awards itself for performability rather than
+content; its low opinion of its mission.
+
+How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic
+terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved,
+limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without
+summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke
+paradise in an age of theme parks?
+The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot. I chose
+something else, some other means of freshening the inquiry. I chose
+not only to explore the idea of paradise, but to interrogate the narrow
+imagination that has conceived it.
+But that, I think, is another essay entirely.
+
+On Beloved
+
+I
+
+BEGAN thinking about Beloved in 1983. As it had been since the
+beginning of my writing years, I was drawn to it by my complicated
+relationship with history. A relationship that was wary, alert, but
+ready to be persuaded away from doubt. It was a caution based on
+my early years as a student, during which time I was keenly aware of
+erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to
+me—silences that I took for censure. History, it seemed, was about
+them. And if I or someone representative of myself ever were
+mentioned in fiction, it was usually something I wished I had
+skipped. Not just in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark
+Twain’s unconscionable humiliation of a grown man at the hands of
+children; there was no respite in those years even in the encyclopedia
+or in history texts. While I maintain a cool eye while reading
+historical texts, it is an eye no cooler than the one historians
+maintain, and ought to maintain when reading fiction. Yet in spite of
+my wariness, my skepticism, there is a dependence, solid and
+continuous, that I have on history, partly for the data available to me
+there, but mostly for precisely those gaps, those erasures, that
+censure. It is in the interstices of recorded history that I frequently
+find the “nothing” or the “not enough” or the “indistinct” or
+“incomplete” or “discredited” or “buried” information important to
+me. For example, in 1963, my first novel, The Bluest Eye, was a
+consequence of being overcome by the wholesale dismissal of a
+certain part of the population (to which I belonged) in history texts
+and literature. Of all the characters chosen for artistic examination,
+with empathy or contempt, vulnerable young black girls were
+profoundly absent. When they did appear, they were jokes or
+instances of pity—pity without understanding. No one it seemed
+
+missed their presence center stage and no one it seemed took them
+seriously except me. Now, I didn’t blame literature for that. Writers
+write what they like and what interests them. And even African
+American writers (mostly men, but not all) made clear that, except as
+background, prepubescent black girls were unable to hold their
+interest or stimulate their curiosity. Nevertheless, writers’ lack of
+curiosity was not the point. To me the enforced or chosen silence, the
+way history was written, controlled and shaped the national
+discourse.
+However much historical analysis has changed (and it has changed
+enormously) and broadened in the last forty years, the silences
+regarding certain populations (minorities) when finally articulated
+are still understood to be supplementary accounts of a marginal
+experience, a supplemental record, unassociated with the
+mainstream of history; an expanded footnote, as it were, that is
+interesting but hardly central to the nation’s past. Racial history, for
+example, remains very much parallel to main historical texts, but is
+seldom seen as either its warp or woof, and seldom threaded into the
+whole cloth. These ancillary and parallel texts are gaining wide
+readership while remaining the site of considerable controversy.
+(Debates about reading material swirled in many high schools.)
+Although the silences provoked virtually all of my work, inhabiting
+them with one’s own imagination is easy to note, not so easy to do. I
+have to find the hook, the image, the newspaper article that produces
+sustained musing, a “what if?” or “what must it have been like?”
+Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a
+newspaper clipping. The general question (remember, this was the
+early eighties) centered on how—other than equal rights, access, pay,
+etc.—does the women’s movement define the freedom being sought?
+One principal area of fierce debate was control of one’s own body—
+an argument that is as rife now as it was then. Many women were
+convinced that such rights extended to choosing to be a mother,
+suggesting that not being a mother was not a deficit and choosing
+motherlessness (for however long) could be added to a list of
+
+freedoms; that is, one could choose to live a life free of and from
+childbearing and no negative or value judgment need apply.
+Another aspect of the women’s movement involved strong
+encouragement of women to support other women. Not to have one’s
+relationship to another woman be subordinate to a relationship with
+a man. That is, the time spent with a female friend was not
+downtime. It was real time.
+The completion of the debate was more complicated than that
+(there was much class conflict roiling in it) but those were the issues
+surfacing with gusto. I addressed the second one (women being
+important friends) in Sula. But the first one—freedom as ownership
+of the body, childlessness chosen as a mark of freedom, engaged me
+deeply.
+And here again the silences of historical accounts and the
+marginalizing of minority peoples in the debate claimed my attention
+and proved a rich being to explore. From the point of view of slave
+women, for example. Suppose having children, being called a
+mother, was the supreme act of freedom—not its opposite? Suppose
+instead of being required to have children (because of gender, slave
+status, and profit) one chose to be responsible for them; to claim
+them as one’s own; to be, in other words, not a breeder, but a parent.
+Under U.S. slavery such a claim was not only socially unacceptable, it
+was illegal, anarchic. It was also an expression of intolerable female
+independence. It was freedom. And if the claim extended to
+infanticide (for whatever reason—noble or crazed) it could and did
+become politically explosive.
+These lines of thought came together when I recalled a newspaper
+article I had read around 1970, a description of an abolitionist cause
+célèbre focused on a slave woman named Margaret Garner who had
+indeed made such claims. The details of her life were riveting. But I
+selected and manipulated its parts to suit my own purposes. Still my
+reluctance to enter the period of slavery was disabling. The need to
+reexamine and imagine it was repellent. Plus, I believed nobody else
+would want to dig deeply into the interior lives of slaves, except to
+summon their nobility or victimhood, to be outraged or self-
+
+righteously gripped by pity. I was interested in neither. The act of
+writing is a kind of act of faith.
+Sometimes what is there—what is already written—is perfect and
+imitation is absurd and intolerable. But a perfect thing is not
+everything. Another thing, another different thing is required.
+Sometimes what is already there is simply not enough; other times it
+is indistinct, incomplete, even in error or buried. Sometimes, of
+course, there is nothing. And for a novelist that is the real
+excitement. Not what there is, but what there is not.
+A tall door rises up into this nothing; its hardware is heavy, secure.
+No bell invites your hand. So you stand there, perhaps, or move away
+and, later, sticking your hand in your pocket, you find a key that you
+know (or hope) fits the lock. Even before the tumblers fall back you
+know you will find what you hoped to find: a word or two that turns
+the “not enough” into more; the line or sentence that inserts itself
+into the nothing. With the right phrase, this sense becomes murky,
+becomes lit, differently lit. Through that door is a kind of freedom
+that can frighten governments, sustain others, and rid whole nations
+of confusion. More important, however, is that the writer who steps
+through that door with the language of his or her own intellect and
+imagination enters uncolonized territory, which she can claim as
+rightfully her own—for a while at least.
+The shared effort to avoid imagining slave life as lived from their
+own point of view became the subtheme, the structure of the work.
+Forgetting the past was the engine, and the characters (except for
+one) are intent on forgetting. The one exception being the one
+hungry for a past, desperate for being not just remembered, but dealt
+with, confronted. That character would be the only one in a position
+to accurately render judgment of her own murder: the dead child.
+Beloved. Thus, after following a number of trails trying to determine
+the structure, I decided that the single most uncontroversial thing
+one can say about the institution of slavery vis-à-vis contemporary
+time, is that it haunts us all. That in so many ways all our lives are
+entangled with the past—its manipulations and, fearful of its grasp,
+ignoring or dismissing or distorting it to suit ourselves, but always
+
+unable to erase it. When finally I understood the nature of a
+haunting—how it is both what we yearn for and what we fear, I was
+able to see the traces of a ghostly presence, the residue of a repressed
+past in certain concrete but also allusive detail. Footprints
+particularly. That disappear and return only to disappear again. The
+endings of my novels have to be clear in my mind before I begin. So I
+was able to describe this haunting even before I knew everything that
+would lead up to it.
+
+Chinua Achebe
+
+I
+
+TAKE great pleasure in having this opportunity to say some
+things in public that I have never said to the person who is the
+subject of these comments—Chinua Achebe. My debt to Mr. Achebe
+is the best kind. Large, minus repayment schedule, and interest-free.
+Let me describe it to you.
+In 1965 I began reading African literature, devouring it actually. It
+was a literature previously unavailable to me, but by then I had
+discovered a New York bookstore called Africa House, which offered
+among other things back issues of Transition, Black Orpheus, and
+works by a host of African writers from all over the continent. Amos
+Tutuola, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ezekiel Mphahlele, James Ngugi, Bessie
+Head, Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, Mongo Beti, Léopold Senghor,
+Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark:
+the jolt these writers gave me was explosive. The confirmation that
+African literature was not limited to Doris Lessing and Joseph
+Conrad was so stunning it led me to secure the aid of two academics
+who could help me anthologize this literature. At that time African
+literature was not a subject to be taught in American schools. Even in
+so-called world literature courses it had no reputation and no
+presence. But I was determined to funnel the delight, the
+significance, and the power of that literature into my work as an
+editor. The publication of Contemporary African Literature in 1972
+was the beginning of my love affair.
+But the more profound and more personal consequence was the
+impact Chinua Achebe’s novels had on my own beginnings as a
+writer. I had read his essay in Transition, on the struggle with
+definitions of African literature, and knew its ramifications for
+
+African American writers. In that essay, Achebe quoted James
+Baldwin’s comments on the subject of language choice and
+manipulation in defining national and cultural literatures and its
+resonance with marginalized writers. “My quarrel,” said Baldwin,
+“with the English language has been that the language reflected none
+of my experience….Perhaps…I had never attempted to use it, had
+only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to
+bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to
+challenge it, and me, to such a test.” But theorizing a definition is one
+thing. Executing a theory is another. Achebe’s “answer,” so to speak,
+was in his work. He (along with Camara Laye, Bessie Head, and
+others) constituted a complete education for me. Learning how to
+disassemble the gaze that I was wrestling with (the habitual but selfconscious writing toward a nonblack reader that threatened and
+coated much African American literature); discovering how to
+eliminate, to manipulate the Eurocentric eye in order to stretch and
+plumb my own imagination; I attribute these learned lessons to
+Chinua Achebe. In the pages of Things Fall Apart lay not the
+argument but the example; in the pages of No Longer at Ease,
+Anthills of the Savannah the assumption of the authenticity, the
+force, the valleys of beauty were abundant. Achebe’s work liberated
+my artistic intelligence as nothing else had ever done. I became fit to
+reenter and reinhabit my own milieu without the services of a native
+guide.
+So in fact that was not a debt in 1965. It was a gift.
+
+Introduction of Peter Sellars
+
+P
+
+ETER SELLARS WARNED me against any ideas I might be
+forming about this introduction. He strongly suggested two and only
+two sentences: “Thank you for coming.” And “Here’s Peter Sellars.”
+I defy him at my peril, but I appeal to what Peter might be stunned
+to learn is “a higher authority.”
+I happen to know Peter Sellars’s mother. Have met her several
+times in several countries. She is, in a word, lovely. And suspecting
+the difficult joy of rearing sons—whether in Pennsylvania, where
+Peter was born, or Denver, Colorado, where he directed Beethoven
+from the podium his father built for him, or Phillips Andover, or
+Harvard directing Coriolanus, collecting a Phi Beta Kappa key and
+an invitation to direct at the American Repertory Theater at the
+Loeb; or studying in Japan, China, and India; or being director of the
+Boston Shakespeare Company, the American National Theater, the
+Kennedy Center; or receiving a MacArthur award. I say—suspecting
+a mother’s difficult joy, I am certain she would take the same
+pleasure I do in hearing an introduction of one’s son a bit more
+expansive. So, out of affection for Mrs. Sellars, an English professor,
+I am going to bow to her authority and I hope her desire and add a
+few sentences to the two her son seriously recommended to me.
+We go to art sometimes for safety, for a haven of order, serenity;
+for recognizable, even traditional beauty; for anticipation with
+certainty that the art form will take us past our mundane selves into
+a deepness where we also reside.
+We go, sometimes, to art for danger; to be riveted by experiencing
+the strange, by understanding suddenly how uncanny the familiar
+really is. We go to be urged, shaken into reassessing thoughts we
+
+have taken for granted; to learn other ways of seeing, hearing. To be
+excited. Stirred. Disturbed.
+Fortunately for us, among contemporary artists, Peter Sellars is
+rare: he never asks us to make those choices; he does not require us
+to select the red/green, food/no food buttons of mice in a laboratory,
+the one of two oppositional kinds of pleasure or power or genius we
+want. His work has always displayed both safety and danger; both
+the haven of the recognizable and the unchartered terrain of the
+disfamiliarized.
+His almost pious devotion to the original score, the complete
+script, the uncommercial length (which pays a public the compliment
+of assuming its attention span—its memory bank—is longer than that
+of a housefly). In his fidelity, his respect for the work itself, we find
+safety, reassurance.
+His deeply held conviction that profound art—whatever its date of
+origin—is always contemporary permits us fresh access to that
+nostrum when he chips away the encrustations of time and use to
+expose its truth. Whether it is Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, Don
+Giovanni, Così fan Tutti; Handel’s Julius Caesar in Egypt; Kurt
+Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins; Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice;
+Wagner’s Ring; Gogol’s Inspector General—whatever. By collapsing
+these otherwise mutually exclusive approaches to art’s work—fidelity
+and resuscitation; safety and danger; thorough scholarship with
+outrageously innovative stagecraft; astonishingly incisive personal
+interpretation with an almost impertinent trust in actors’ instincts.
+Because of his ability to embrace both approaches, we are made
+aware of how irresistible art is. We are made aware of his reverence
+for its possibilities—to keep us sane or make us so. His absolute love
+of it. His total faith in it. And in us.
+Thank you for coming. Here’s Peter Sellars.
+
+Tribute to Romare Bearden
+
+I
+
+N ORDER to get to the crux of my views on the art of Romare
+Bearden, on the discourse of African American art in general, I have
+to go back a bit, for my own sake, if not yours, to put my remarks in
+context.
+Extraordinary things were happening in the sixties among African
+Americans. The realm of political change during that period has
+received, as it should, minute, even exhaustive attention. Yet in spite
+of some singular critiques of African American art at the moment of
+origin and some more expansive ones later on, the exploration of
+visual art as it relates to other genres in African American culture
+seems tentative. (I was not able to attend Saturday’s panel on
+Bearden and other arts and disciplines, so the comments that follow
+may very well be inoperative.) Where analysis of this cross-genre
+aspect does exist, it relies on terms like “inspiration,” “similarities,”
+“spirit,” “vibrancy,” “intensity,” “drama,” “liveliness,” shared cultural
+values. There are a number of reasons for this rather vague
+emotional vocabulary: artists are notoriously evasive about their
+creative process; it takes a certain amount of nerve, if not faith, for a
+scholar to assert connections, echoes across disciplines if she or he
+does not feel expert within them; aesthetic ramifications are very
+difficult to iterate.
+More importantly, the early attention of scholars on African
+American literary and other art was engaged in canon formation—
+taking its cue from the mainstream’s established format for the
+ranking of art production. The alternative canon that the new black
+critics urged had several goals (nationalism, revolutionary success,
+cultural hegemony), among which was an aesthetic put to the service
+
+of a strong political agenda and/or a cohesive cultural flowering.
+Aesthetics were understood to be a “corrective” to “polluted
+American mainstream”; a “sister” to the black power movement.
+Artists were encouraged and judged by the nation-building “uses” to
+which their work could be put. The groundswell of those who
+understood this to be the work of their work is legend—as any review
+of sixties poetry will reveal. And there is no question that matters of
+“authenticity”—of representing the lived life and concerns of black
+people—are still the sine qua non of virtually all African American art
+from rap music to film to novels to visual arts. How successfully,
+distorted or even triumphantly, this authenticity expresses itself is
+still much of the drive of criticism.
+Although the explosion of creative energy was overwhelming in the
+sixties, its criticism did not, perhaps could not, refuse to wrestle with
+the eternal and eternally irrelevant argument about how and whether
+the art of a black artist could be, should be considered “universal,”
+meaning “mainstream,” “race transcendent,” “agenda-free,” and so
+on. The heart of the argument implied that if what was produced was
+merely political it was not art; if it was merely beautiful it was not
+relevant. Thus the critiques focused on the accuracy of the sociology
+and/or the inspirational, “self-help” value of the work. Some work
+was championed as representative, authentic; other was deemed
+unacceptable if it was less than uplifting; other work was dismissed
+as crude protest or propaganda. Virtually every African American
+writer in the near and distant past—James Baldwin, Zora Neale
+Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Phillis
+Wheatley—has been called upon or felt called upon to explain what it
+meant to be a Negro or black artist. The sheer idiocy of that call has
+been enough to force artists (angrily, or with annoyance, I suspect) to
+respond to it. Romare Bearden was working long before the sixties
+and had traveled widely, studied carefully the ancient and the new.
+His homes included the South, the North, Europe, the Caribbean,
+country landscapes, porches, urban streets, clubs, churches. So it was
+with some delight that I read a comment by him on the subject of
+race or social factors in his work.
+
+“I am afraid,” he said, “despite my intentions, that in some
+instances commentators have tended to overemphasize what they
+believed to be the social elements in my work. But while my response
+to certain human elements is as obvious as it is inevitable, I am also
+pleased to note that upon reflection many persons have found that
+they were as much concerned with the aesthetic implications of my
+paintings as with, what may possibly be, my human compassion.”
+The operative words, for me, are “my response to certain human
+elements is as obvious as it is inevitable.” How, he is asking, can a
+human artist not be responsive to human things, which are by their
+nature social things? He takes for granted the humanity of his
+subject matter, and as has been said, this in itself is a radical act in a
+country with a history of purposefully and consistently
+dehumanizing the black population. Bearden is also pleased to refer
+to “aesthetic implications.” That is to say, there is information, truth,
+power, and beauty in his choice of color, form, in the structural and
+structured placement of images, in fragments built up from flat
+surfaces, rhythm implicit in repetition and in the medium itself—
+each move determining subsequent ones, enabling the look and fact
+of spontaneity, improvisation. This is the appropriate language
+employed to delineate his work, and to suggest its relationship to
+another genre—music. Which is very interesting since whatever the
+view of aesthetics in criticism, it has traditionally confined itself to
+explorations with an art form, not among them. It is odd, considering
+how affected artists are by other disciplines, that this approach,
+which so closely resembles traditional critique, maintains in spite of
+the insistence of the art itself on its wider sources and its far more
+interdisciplinary dialogue. The cross-fertilization among artists
+within a genre is a subject well examined. Less so are instances
+where the lines between genres are implicit.
+The influence and representation of African American music is a
+mainstay in commentary on Romare Bearden’s work as is the
+relationship between the plays and sensibility of August Wilson. The
+influence of and alignment with music is also a common observation
+in criticism of my own work—as well as my own acknowledgments
+
+on the subject. What I want to describe this evening are other ways
+in which artists of disparate disciplines fold into, energize, and
+transfer the aesthetics of one another.
+Let me linger for a moment on some aspects of my own process
+that are, indeed, responsive to the work of Romare Bearden. I must
+say I have been generous to myself in getting ideas from painters
+other than Bearden, although they are usually scenes or figurative
+arrangements on canvas. With Bearden I am struck by the tactile
+sensuality of his work, the purity of gesture, and especially the
+subtext of the aggressive, large-as-life humanity of his subject
+matter. This latter is no small thing when the urgency of
+destereotyping is so strong it can push one easily into sentimentality.
+The edge of the razor embedded in Bearden’s work prevents or ought
+to prevent easy, self-satisfying evaluations of his subject matter.
+Among the aspects of his work that appeal to me, that one is
+primary: lack of condescension.
+Another aspect of my own process involves the composition of the
+text. A layered exercise that I consistently undergo that has more
+elements in common with painting than literature.
+I need three kinds of information to complete, sometimes even
+start, a narrative. Once I’ve settled on an idea and the story through
+which to examine it, I need the structure, the sound, the palette. Not
+necessarily in that order. The sound of a text clearly involves the
+musical quality of the dialogue and the language chosen to
+contextualize it. Elsewhere I have written about my choices for the
+opening of Beloved, and I repeat those comments here: in reference
+to that opening—“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”—I was
+careful to illustrate the rhythm I thought necessary, and the quality
+of a spoken text: “There is something about numerals that makes
+them spoken, heard, in this context, because one expects words to
+read in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the
+novel, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an
+inner-ear sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text
+with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better
+than music can.” I go on to explain why the second sentence is not
+
+one—is instead a dependent clause given the status of a sentence just
+to mandate a stress on the world “full.” In an effort to understate the
+strangeness of an infant ghost so the reader will understand its
+presence as normal as the household does. The remarkable thing
+being its power (“full”) rather than its existence. In describing at
+such length the crucial nature of sound to my work, I hoped to focus
+attention not on a kind of forced poetry or lyricism, but rather on
+what meaning can be gleaned and communicated from sound, from
+the aural quality of the text. I only want to suggest that this is more
+than being influenced by blues or jazz. It is plumbing the music for
+the meaning that it contains. In other words, the “aesthetic
+implications” of which Romare Bearden spoke ought to include what
+is usually absent from aesthetic analysis. Most often the analysis is
+about how successful the technique is in summoning pleasure, a
+shocking or moving or satisfying emotional response.
+Seldom does it center on the information, the meaning the artist is
+communicating by his style, via his aesthetics. It can be said, has
+been said, that the collage techniques, employed by several
+modernist artists (Matisse, for example) were taken to new levels by
+Bearden and reflect the “fractured” life he depicts—an intervention
+into the flat surface that repudiates as it builds on the cubism of
+earlier periods. And that collage was representative of the modernist
+thrust of African American life as well as its insurgency. Both
+structure and improvisation inform this choice—the essence of
+African American music. The attraction to me in this technique is
+how abrupt stops and unexpected liquidity enhance the narrative in
+ways that a linear “beginning, middle, and end” cannot. Thus I
+recognize that my own abandonment of traditional time sequence
+(and then, and then) is an effort to capitalize on these modernist
+trends. And to say something about the layered life—not the
+fractured or fragmented life of black society, but the layered life of
+the mind, the imagination, and the way reality is actually perceived
+and experienced.
+The third, palette, or color, is one of the last and most crucial of my
+decisions in developing a text. I don’t use color to “prettify” or please,
+
+or provide atmospherics, but to imply and delineate the themes
+within the narrative. Color says something directly or
+metaphorically. The red, white, and blue strokes at the beginning of
+Song of Solomon should lie quietly in the mind of the reader as the
+American flag background the action is commenting on. The
+withholding of color in Beloved, its repudiation of any color at all
+until it has profound meaning to the character: Baby Suggs
+hankering for some; Sethe’s startle when she is able to let it come
+into view; the drama of one patch of orange in a quilt of bleak greys.
+These studied distributions of color or its absence, the careful
+placement of white for its various connotations (the white, rather
+bridal dress of the figure praying next to Sethe; the dresses of the
+church ladies at the pie table in Tar Baby), the repetition of a
+collection of colors chosen to direct the reader to specific and related
+scenes in Paradise, do not mimic the choices of a Romare Bearden,
+but are clearly aligned with the process.
+I am convinced that among the reasons Bearden must be widely
+viewed in galleries, should occupy the burgeoning attention of
+scholars to African American art, is only partly canon formation; is
+only minimally the quenching of nationalistic desire; is
+supplementally a tribute to his genius. The more significant reason in
+the exploration of the resonances, alignments, the connections, the
+intergenre sources of African American art is the resounding
+aesthetic dialogue among artists. Separating art forms,
+compartmentalizing them, is convenient for study, instruction, and
+institutions. But it is hardly representative of how artists actually
+work. The dialogue between Bearden and jazz music and musicians
+is an obvious beginning. The influence writers acknowledge is a
+further step. The borders established for the convenience of study
+are, I believe, not just porous, they are liquid. Locating instances of
+this liquidity is vital if African American art is to be understood for
+the complex work that it is and for the deep meaning it contains.
+Romare Bearden sat in an airplane seat once and told me he would
+send me something. He did. An extraordinary, completely stunning
+portrait of a character in one of my books. Not his Pilate of 1979, but
+
+the Pilate in Song of Solomon—part of a series, I gather. Imagine my
+surprise at what he saw. Things I had not seen or known when I
+invented her. What he made of her earring, her hat, and her bag of
+bones—far beyond my word-bound description, heavy with the life
+that both energized and muted her; solitary, daring anyone to
+deprive her of her symbols, her history, her purpose. I had seen her
+determination, her wisdom, and her seductive eccentricity, but not
+the ferocity he saw and rendered.
+Later on I acquired a watercolor of his, a row of Preservation Hall–
+type musicians standing before a riverboat, all in white with their
+traditional sashes of color. For the first time in a representation of
+black jazz musicians I saw stillness. Not the active, frenetic,
+unencumbered physical movement normally seen in renderings of
+musicians—but the quiet at the center. It was, in a word, sacred,
+contemplative. A glance into an otherwise obscured aspect of their
+art.
+That kind of insight is rare indeed. Displaying it, underscoring it,
+analyzing it is far more compelling than merely enjoying it. The
+legacy enjoins us all to think deeply about what Romare Bearden has
+given us, and what African American art is imploring us to discover.
+
+Faulkner and Women
+
+I
+
+’M AMBIVALENT about what I’m about to do. On the one hand,
+I want to do what every writer wants to do, which is to explain
+everything to the reader first so that, when you read it, there will be
+no problems. My other inclination is to run out here and read it, then
+run off so that there would be no necessity to frame it. I have read
+from this manuscript three or four times before, and each time I
+learned something in the process of reading it, which was never true
+with any other book that I wrote. And so when I was invited to come
+to Oxford and speak to this conference about some aspect of
+“Faulkner and Women,” I declined, saying that I really couldn’t
+concentrate enough to collect remarks on “Faulkner and Women”
+because I was deeply involved in writing a book myself and I didn’t
+want any distractions whatsoever. And then very nicely the
+conference directors invited me to read from this manuscript that
+had me so obsessed, so that I could both attend the conference and
+associate myself in some real way with the Center for the Study of
+Southern Culture and also visit Mississippi and “spend the night,” as
+they say. So, on the one hand, I apologize for reading something that
+is not finished but is in process, but this was a way to satisfy my
+eagerness to visit the campus of the University of Mississippi, and I
+hope there will be some satisfaction rippling through the audience
+once I have finished. My other hesitation is simply because some of
+what I read may not appear in print, as a developing manuscript is
+constantly changing. Before reading to a group gathered to discuss
+“Faulkner and Women,” I would also like to add that in 1956 I spent
+a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the
+subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell. Such an exhaustive
+treatment of an author makes it impossible for a writer to go back to
+
+that author for some time afterward until the energy has dissipated
+itself in some other form. But I have to say, even before I begin to
+read, that there was for me not only an academic interest in
+Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as
+a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an
+enormous effect.
+The title of the book is Beloved, and this is the way it begins:
+[The author read from her work-in-progress and then answered
+questions from the audience.]
+MORRISON: I am interested in answering questions from those of
+you who may have them. And if you’ll stand up and let me identify
+you before you ask a question, I’ll do the best I can.
+QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, you mentioned that you wrote a thesis
+on Faulkner. What effect did Faulkner have on your literary career?
+MORRISON: Well, I’m not sure that he had any effect on my work.
+I am typical, I think, of all writers who are convinced that they are
+wholly original and that if they recognized an influence they would
+abandon it as quickly as possible. But as a reader in the fifties and
+later, of course (I said 1956 because that’s when I was working on a
+thesis that had to do with him), I was concentrating on Faulkner. I
+don’t think that my response was any different from any other
+student at that time, inasmuch as there was in Faulkner this power
+and courage—the courage of a writer, a special kind of courage. My
+reasons, I think, for being interested and deeply moved by all his
+subjects had something to do with my desire to find out something
+about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was
+not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but
+sometimes history refuses to do. I suppose history can humanize
+the past also, but it frequently refuses to do so for perfectly
+logically good reasons. But there was an articulate investigation of
+an era that one or two authors provided and Faulkner was
+certainly at the apex of that investigation. And there was
+something else about Faulkner that I can only call “gaze.” He had a
+
+gaze that was different. It appeared, at that time, to be similar to a
+look, even a sort of staring, a refusal-to-look-away approach in his
+writing that I found admirable. At that time, in the fifties or the
+sixties, it never crossed my mind to write books. But then I did it,
+and I was very surprised myself that I was doing it, and I knew that
+I was doing it for some reasons that are not writerly ones. I don’t
+really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner’s. In
+an extraordinary kind of memorable way there are literary
+watersheds in one’s life. In mine, there are four or five, and I hope
+they are all ones that meet everybody’s criteria of who should be
+read, but some of them don’t. Some books are just awful in terms
+of technique but nevertheless they are terrific: they are too good to
+be correct. With Faulkner there was always something to surface.
+Besides, he could infuriate you in such wonderful ways. It wasn’t
+just complete delight—there was also that other quality that is just
+as important as devotion: outrage. The point is that with Faulkner
+one was never indifferent.
+QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, would you talk a little bit about the
+creation of your character Sula?
+MORRISON: She came as many characters do—all of them don’t—
+rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including
+her name. I felt this enormous intimacy. I mean, I knew exactly
+who she was, but I had trouble trying to make her. I mean, I felt
+troubled trying to make her into the kind of person that would
+upset everybody, the kind of person that sets your teeth on edge,
+and yet not to make her so repulsive that you could not find her
+attractive at the same time—a nature that was seductive but offputting. And playing back and forth with that was difficult for me
+because I wanted to describe the qualities of certain personalities
+that can be exploited by conventional people. The outlaw and the
+adventuress, not in the sense of somebody going out to find a
+fortune, but in the way a woman is an adventuress, which has to do
+with her imagination. And people such as those are always
+memorable and generally attractive. But she’s troublesome. And,
+
+by the time I finished the book, Sula, I missed her. I know the
+feeling of missing characters who are in fact, by that time, much
+more real than real people.
+QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, you said earlier that reading a work in
+progress is helpful to you as a writer. Could you explain how
+reading helps you?
+MORRISON: This whole business of reading my own manuscript
+for information is quite new for me. As I write I don’t imagine a
+reader or listener, ever. I am the reader and the listener myself,
+and I think I am an excellent reader. I read very well. I mean I
+really know what’s going on. The problem in the beginning was to
+be as good a writer as I was a reader. But I have to assume that I
+not only write books, I read them. And I don’t mean I look to see
+what I have written; I mean I can maintain the distance between
+myself the writer and what is on the page. Some people have it,
+and some people have to learn it. And some people don’t have it;
+you can tell because if they had read their work, they never would
+have written it that way. The process is revision. It’s a long sort of
+reading process, and I have to assume that I am also this very
+critical, very fastidious, and not-easily-taken-in reader who is
+smart enough to participate in the text a lot. I don’t like to read
+books when all the work is done and there’s no place for me there.
+So the effort is to write so that there is something that’s going on
+between myself and myself—myself as writer and myself as reader.
+Now, in some instances, I feel content in doing certain kinds of
+books without reading them to an audience. But there are others
+where I have felt—this one in particular because it’s different—that
+what I, as a reader, am feeling is not enough, and I needed a wider
+slice, so to speak, because the possibilities are infinite. I’m not
+interested in anybody’s help in writing technique—not that. I’m
+just talking about shades of meaning, not the score but the
+emphasis here and there. It’s that kind of thing that I want to
+discover, whether or not my ear on this book is as reliable as I have
+always believed it to be with the others. Therefore, I agree quickly
+
+to reading portions of this manuscript. Every other book I wrote I
+didn’t even negotiate a contract until it was almost finished
+because I didn’t want the feeling that it belonged to somebody else.
+For this book I negotiated a contract at a very early stage. So, I
+think, probably some of the business of reading is a sort of
+repossession from the publisher. It has to be mine, and I have to
+be willing to not do it or burn it, or do it, as the case might be. But
+I do assume that I am the reader, and, in the past, when I was in
+doubt, if I had some problems, the people I would call on to help
+me to verify some phrase or some word or something would be the
+people in the book. I mean I would just conjure them up and ask
+them, you know, about one thing or another. And they are usually
+very cooperative if they are fully realized and if you know their
+name. And if you don’t know their names, they don’t talk much.
+QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, could you discuss the use of myth and
+folklore in your fiction?
+MORRISON: This is not going to sound right, but I have to say it
+anyway. There is infinitely more past than there is future. Maybe
+not in chronological time, but in terms of data there certainly is. So
+in each step back there is another world, and another world. The
+past is infinite. I don’t know if the future is, but I know the past is.
+The legends—so many of them—are not just about the past. They
+also indicate how to function in contemporary times and they hint
+about the future. So that for me they were not ever simple, never
+simple. I try to incorporate those mythic characteristics that for me
+are very strong characteristics of black art everywhere, whether it
+was in music or stories or paintings or what have you. It just
+seemed to me that those characteristics ought to be incorporated
+into black literature if it was to remain that. It wasn’t enough just
+to write about black people, because anybody can do that. But it
+was important to me as a writer to try to make the work
+irrevocably black. It required me to use the folklore as points of
+departure—as, for example in this book, Beloved, which started
+with a story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who had been caught
+
+with her children shortly after she escaped from a farm. And rather
+than subject them to what was an unlivable and unbearable life,
+she killed them or tried to. She didn’t succeed, and abolitionists
+made a great deal out of her case. That story, with some other
+things, had been nagging me for a long, long time. Can you
+imagine a slave woman who does not own her children? Who cares
+enough to kill them? Can you imagine the daring and also the
+recriminations and the self-punishment and the sabotage, selfsabotage, in which one loves so much that you cannot bear to have
+the thing you love sullied? It is better for it to die than to be
+sullied. Because that is you. That’s the best part of you, and that
+was the best part of her. So it was such a serious matter that she
+would rather they not exist. And she was the one to make that
+reclamation. That’s a very small part of what this is about, but
+that’s what was in my brainpan—as they say—when I got started.
+So that in this instance, I began with historical fact and
+incorporated it into myth instead of the other way around.
+QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, earlier you said you had no intention of
+becoming a writer when you started to write. Could you explain
+what you meant by this?
+MORRISON: I was in a place where I didn’t belong, and I wasn’t
+going to be there very long so I didn’t want to make it any nicer
+than it was. And I didn’t want to meet anybody, and I didn’t like
+anybody and they didn’t like me either; and that was fine with me;
+and I was lonely. I was miserable. My children were small, and so I
+wrote this story. I had written a little story before, in the time I
+could spare to work it up in the evening. (You know children go to
+bed, if you train them, at seven. Wake up at four but go to bed at
+seven.) And so after I put them to bed, I would write, and I liked it.
+I liked thinking about it. I liked making that kind of order out of
+something that was disorderly in my mind. And also I sensed that
+there was an enormous indifference to these people, to me, to you,
+to black girls. It was as if these people had no life, no existence in
+anybody’s mind at all except peripherally. And when I got into it, it
+
+just seemed like writing was absolutely the most important thing
+in the world. I took forever to write that first book: almost five
+years for just a little book. Because I liked doing it so much, I
+would just do a little bit, you know, and think about that. I was a
+textbook editor at that time. I was not even trying to be a writer,
+and I didn’t let anybody know that I was writing this book because
+I thought they would fire me, which they would have. Maybe not
+right away, but they didn’t want me to do that. They felt betrayed
+anyway. If you’re an editor, what you’re supposed to do is acquire
+books, not produce them. There is a light adversarial relationship
+between publishers and authors that I think probably works
+effectively. But that’s why I was very quiet about writing. I don’t
+know what made me write it. I think I just wanted to finish the
+story so that I could have a good time reading it. But the process
+was what made me think that I should do it again, and I knew that
+that was the way I wanted to live. I felt very coherent when I was
+writing that book. But I still didn’t call myself a writer. And it was
+only with my third book, Song of Solomon, that I finally said—not
+at my own initiative I’m embarrassed to tell you but at somebody
+else’s initiative—“This is what I do.” I had written three books. It
+was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe
+this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was
+an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I
+never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the
+things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and
+truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very
+difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself
+permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending
+books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers
+whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long
+process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or
+something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all
+right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says
+it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it’s okay.
+Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the
+okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written
+
+the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through
+passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And
+you print it out: WRITE.
+
+The Source of Self-Regard
+
+I
+
+WANT TO TALK about two books in a way in which I
+understand a kind of progression to have taken place in my work, to
+talk a little bit about Beloved and a little bit about a new novel, and
+to suggest to you some of the obstacles that I created for myself in
+developing these books, and perhaps to talk, and illustrate by very
+short examples in the books, ways in which I approached the work.
+I was told by somebody at a very, very large state university, “You
+know that you,” meaning me, “are taught in twenty-three separate
+classes on this campus.” Not twenty-three separate groups of
+students, but twenty-three different subject-matter classes. And I
+was very flattered by that, and very interested in that, but a little bit
+overwhelmed, because I thought, well, outside of, say, African
+American literature or women’s studies, or who knows, maybe even
+English departments and places like that, how could there be twentythree? Well, some of them were legal studies, and some of them were
+courses in history, and some of them courses in politics, some of
+them were in psychiatry, in all sorts of things. And aside from some
+obvious things that I could claim about Beloved, it did seem to me
+that it had become a kind of an all-purpose, highly serviceable source
+for some discourse in various disciplines and various genres and
+various fields.
+And I thought, well then, there is not only perhaps a hunger for the
+information, maybe the book is a kind of substitute and a more
+intimate version of history, and in that way becomes serviceable in a
+way in which, perhaps, other novels that I have written have never
+become. Song of Solomon is not read that way, Sula’s not read that
+way, but Beloved is read that way and perhaps that’s why it was
+
+distributed so widely on a campus that could accommodate many,
+many disciplines and genres and approaches. So my feeling was that
+it was kind of intimate but perhaps also kind of a shortcut to history.
+So I want to talk about how history is handled, or I had to handle it,
+in the writing of Beloved. And then segue from the impact of history
+on this fictional form, for me, into the culture of a later period, the
+twenties, and how that influenced my construction of the new book,
+Jazz.
+In trying to think through how one deals with something as
+formidable and as well researched as history, and how one can
+convert it, or ignore it, or break its bounds or what have you in order
+to develop the novel, I was talking a couple of years ago to an
+audience in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that audience was made up of
+librarians and people from the community and students and many
+teachers, high school teachers and private school teachers, and
+during the question-and-answer period following my reading and
+talk, one of the teachers asked me a question. She wanted to know
+whether as the author of Beloved, I could give her any information
+on how to teach that novel when, as she said, there were no
+CliffsNotes available. Well, I was a little astonished by her question. I
+mean, I would not have been astonished if a student had asked me,
+but I was a little astonished because she did, and so I said, “Well, I
+don’t really know how to teach Beloved, and I certainly don’t know
+how to tell you how to teach it, but since you say there are no
+CliffsNotes, maybe one of the ways to teach it is to have your
+students make some.” And she sort of smiled and looked as though I
+had not treated her question seriously, but it was the best I could do
+under the circumstances.
+But what’s interesting is that later, six or seven months later, I got
+a large package from her, and in that package were three issues or
+editions, I guess you could call them, of CliffsNotes. And what she
+had done is taken my answer to heart and given her honors students
+the assignment of producing CliffsNotes for the novel. She divided
+them into three teams, and each team produced a booklet with a
+cover and preface and acknowledgments and table of contents and
+
+then that long, so-called analysis that you see in CliffsNotes. And
+each one had received a prize—one through three—and the students
+sent me their pictures of their team, holding their names up. And
+they wrote letters.
+Clearly, in order to do that, they had to read the book very
+carefully, they had to do secondary source readings, they had to
+make literary references and cross-references and so on. So it turned
+out, I’m sure, to be a very interesting project. I read their letters very
+carefully, and most of them were complimentary, but you know the
+nice thing about high school students is that they are not obliged to
+be complimentary, and particularly after they have done all that
+work they feel very authoritative and they don’t have to compliment
+you at all. And so they asked me questions that they had not been
+able to answer sufficiently to satisfy themselves. I am leading up to
+what I found to be one of the principal complaints they had. The
+consistent one, the one that if you took all the complaints and rolled
+them into one, that they were really expressing, was that they were
+either alarmed or offended by explicit sexuality in Beloved and the
+candor with which some of those scenes were described, and they
+didn’t understand the necessity for the use of that kind of candor. On
+the one hand, it was reassuring to find students still shockable in
+terms of sexuality being described, so I felt pretty good about that,
+but on the other hand it was very disturbing to me because nobody
+was offended or confused or unable to understand the context in
+which the story is set, which is slavery. The sexuality troubled them.
+But the violence and the criminality and the license in that
+institution did not alarm or offend them.
+I thought this pointed to one of the problems of writing novels that
+have a historical basis: that is, you don’t question the history. Or
+really analyze it or confront it in some manner that is at odds with
+the historian or even the novelist’s version of it. One sort of takes it,
+swallows it, agrees with it. Nothing is aslant. Although in fact, the
+reason I had written the book was to enter into that historical period
+from some point of view that was entirely different from standard
+history, not in terms of data or information but in terms of what it
+
+was able to elicit from the reader. It seemed that everything came
+under review in the text by these very clever students, except the
+major assumptions of the text. So either I did it very well, or I did it
+very badly.
+But in truth, the problem lay in the nature of the beast itself—in
+the nature of trying to marry a certain kind of terribly familiar but at
+the same time estranging history. The question being, how to elicit
+critical thinking and draw out some honest art form from the silences
+and the distortions and the evasions that are in the history as
+received, as well as the articulation and engagement of a history that
+is so fraught with emotion and so fraught and covered with a
+profound distaste and repugnance. Because I would assume that
+everybody would either understand it, rationalize it, defend it, or be
+repelled by that history. So my job as a novelist was to try to make it
+palatable and at the same time disenfranchise the history, in a sense.
+The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with, or
+rather the effort to disentangle the grip of history while remaining in
+its palm, so to speak. Especially this particular piece of history and
+this particular novel.
+For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in
+all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or
+streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s
+experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to
+information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the
+other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is,
+knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the
+others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally
+what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful
+progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this
+project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history
+can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is
+really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that
+knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how
+effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how
+
+quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom
+without any data, is just a hunch.
+In writing Beloved, all of that became extremely acute. Because I
+resisted the data at my disposal and felt that I was quite fully
+informed. I didn’t have to know small things, I could invent them
+easily—I’d read all the same books you have about slavery, the
+historical books, the Slavery to Freedom and Roll, Jordan, Roll and
+Slavery and Social Death and the Aptheker collections of
+documents, etc. I’d read Gutman’s Black Family in Slavery and
+Freedom, but particularly I had read the autobiographies of the
+slaves themselves and therefore had firsthand information from
+people who were there. You add that to my own intuition, and you
+can see the shape of my confidence and the trap that it would lead
+me into, which would be confusing data with information and
+knowledge with hunches and so on. I thought I knew a great deal
+about it. And that arrogance was the first obstacle.
+What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and
+not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized
+information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself as a substitute. If
+imagination could be depended on for that, then there was the
+possibility of knowledge. Wisdom, of course, I would leave alone, and
+rely on the readers to produce that.
+So here I am appropriating a historical life—Margaret Garner’s life
+—from a newspaper article, which is sort of reliable, halfway
+unreliable, not doing any further research on her, but doing a lot of
+research around her. What things were like from 1865 to 1877 within
+Reconstruction and so on in that part of the country, so that all of the
+details would be there. But also realizing that part of the imaginative
+process in dealing with history was that in the article this preacher
+who was interviewing her and telling her story with a great deal of
+shock refused to make any judgments about her. He withheld
+judgment. And this was sort of the way everybody was, although they
+all wrote these powerful editorials that were anti–Fugitive Slave Law
+and so on, there was this sort of refusal to judge. And that little scrap
+of information seemed key to me—the inability to judge what this
+
+woman had done. The withdrawal from judgment, the refusal, not to
+know, but to conclude. And there seemed just a little kernel of
+something in that.
+Why not judge her? Everybody else had. It was clearly terrible.
+That was a judgment. It was obviously unconscionable. It was
+harrowing, what she had done. It was monstrous. But the interesting
+thing was, harrowing as it was, monstrous as it was, outrageous and
+inhuman as it was, it was not illegal. It was everything but that. The
+law did not recognize the relationship, so there was no legal language
+to hold it. Margaret Garner wasn’t tried for murder; she was tried for
+what the law could accommodate, what the law could judge, what the
+law deemed “outlaw,” which was the theft of property.
+The question for me then became, well, if the law is unwilling to
+judge, and her mother-in-law can’t judge, who can? Who is in a
+position to condemn her, absolutely, for the thing the courts would
+not even admit susceptible to litigation? The accusing finger would
+have to have a lot of weight if it were to be a finger that Margaret
+Garner pays some attention to. And that would only be, of course,
+her daughter, the one she managed to kill—successfully, if that term
+is applicable—before they stopped her. While I wasn’t anxious or
+eager to get into those waters, I thought, well, if she could do it, then
+I could sort of imagine it, or think about it, and see what would
+happen when the dead daughter was introduced into the text. And of
+course what it did do was it destabilized everything, reformulated its
+own history, and then changed language entirely.
+The other problem—that is, in addition to the history, the actual
+outline or plot of Margaret Garner’s life, and my alteration of it to
+suit my own purposes—in trying to do this, is the problem of slavery.
+It would have been wonderful for me if she had done this some other
+time, like ten years ago, and then I could deal with it, but it happened
+in slavery. So the question is how does one handle it? How do you
+inhabit it without surrendering to it? Without making it the major
+focus of the novel, rather than the slaves themselves. The problem is
+how to take the imaginative power, the artistic control away from the
+institution of slavery and place it where it belongs—in the hands of
+
+the individuals who knew it, certainly as well as anybody, and that
+would be the slaves. And at the same time, not to dismiss it or
+denigrate its horror. Because the problem is always pornography. It’s
+very easy to write about something like that and find yourself in the
+position of a voyeur, where actually the violence, the grotesqueries
+and the pain and the suffering, becomes its own excuse for reading.
+And there’s a kind of relish in the observation of the suffering of
+another. I didn’t want to go into that area, and it was difficult to find
+out—difficult and important to find out where those lines were,
+where you stop and how you can effect a kind of visceral and
+intellectual response without playing into the hands of the institution
+and making it its own excuse for being. I didn’t want to chew on that
+evil and give it an authority that it didn’t deserve, give it a glamour
+that it didn’t really have; I wanted to return the agency into the
+hands of the slaves, who had always been fairly anonymous, or flat, it
+seemed to me, in much, although not all, of the literature.
+Now of course here’s three to four hundred years to peruse, and it
+is indeed a humbling experience. You find that the sheer
+documentation—the history—is too long. It’s too big, it’s too awful,
+too researched, too ancient, too recent, too defended, it’s too
+rationalized, it’s too apologized for, it’s too resisted, it’s too known,
+and it’s too unknown, and it’s too passionate, and it’s too elusive.
+And, in order to explain other kinds of oppression, such as women’s
+oppression, it was also very much appropriated.
+So I’m dealing in an area that I know is already overdone and
+underdone—attractive in an unhealthy sense, and repulsive and
+hidden and repressed in another. What I needed then, to deal with
+what I thought was unmanageable, was some little piece, some
+concrete thing, some image that came from the world of that which
+was concrete. Something that was domestic, something that you
+could sort of hook the book on to, that would say everything you
+wanted to say in very human and personal terms. And for me that
+image, that concrete thing became the bit.
+I had read references to this thing people put in their mouths.
+Slave narratives were very much like nineteenth-century novels,
+
+there were certain things they didn’t talk about too much, and also
+because they were writing for white people whom they wanted to
+persuade to be abolitionists or to do abolitionist-type work, did not
+dwell on, didn’t spend a lot of time telling those people how terrible
+all this was. They didn’t want to call anybody any names, they needed
+their money, so they sort of created an upbeat story: I was born, it
+was terrible, I got out, and other people are still there and you should
+help them get out. They didn’t stay and talk a great deal; there was a
+lot of hinting and a lot of reference but nothing explicit that you
+could see. So sometimes you might read that Equiano goes into a
+kitchen in New England and he sees a woman cooking, and she has
+this thing in her mouth and he says, “What is that?” And somebody
+says, “Oh, that’s a brake,” b-r-a-k-e, and he said, “I have never seen
+anything so awful in my life,” and he leaves and doesn’t talk about it
+anymore. And then I had seen many references, such as some
+entries, very selective entries, from William Byrd, in Virginia, in the
+early part of the eighteenth century, 1709, 1712—and his editors
+describe him, quote, as “Virginia’s most polished and ornamental
+gentleman, a kindly master, who inveighed in some of his letters
+against brutes who mistreated their slaves.”
+February the eighth: Jenny and Eugene were whipped. April:
+Anna was whipped. May: Mrs. Byrd whips the nurse. May: Ma
+was whipped. June: Eugene [who was a little child] was
+whipped for running away and had the bit put on him.
+September: I beat Jenny. September: Jenny was whipped.
+September: I beat Anna. November: Eugene and Jenny were
+whipped. December: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing.
+Then the next year in July: The Negro woman ran away again
+with the bit on her mouth. July again: The Negro woman was
+found, and tied, but ran away again in the night. Five days
+later: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned
+with a hot iron. Next month: I had a severe quarrel with little
+Jenny and beat her too much, for which I was sorry. Same
+
+month: Eugene and Jenny were beaten. October: I whipped
+three slave women. November: The Negro woman ran away.
+And there are three or four more pages of that. And it is true that
+taken into consideration with other kinds of behavior, this was not
+all that bad. But the two references to the bit, none of which he
+explains or describes, were similar to many others I had read. I had a
+lot of trouble trying to find descriptions of this contraption, pictures,
+what did it look like, what did it do, and so on. And it was very, very
+difficult, though I did end up being very lucky, in a way—I found
+some pictures.
+But I felt, ultimately, that it wasn’t something that really needed to
+be described. If I had described it exactly the way it was, and found
+language to say exactly what those things looked like, it would have
+defeated my purpose. It was enough to know that you couldn’t order
+them from a large warehouse, that you had to make them yourself. It
+was enough to know that they—these handmade things—were not
+restrictive in the sense that they were not like docks, which made it
+so you couldn’t work. You were supposed to go on and continue to
+work. It was important that it was not only used for slaves, it was
+also used a lot for white women, who sometimes, I suppose, needed,
+or someone felt that they needed, the same sort of thing, because the
+bit is just something that goes in your mouth and it hurts, I suppose,
+it’s inconvenient, but you know what it does? It makes you shut up.
+You can’t move your tongue. And for women, we know, that would be
+a torture instrument that would be primary.
+Not describing it technically, physically, became more important
+because I wanted it to remain indescribable but not unknown. So the
+point became to render not what it looked like, but what it felt like
+and what it meant, personally. Now that was the parallel of my
+attitude toward the history, toward the institution of slavery, that is,
+I didn’t want to describe what it looked like, but what it felt like and
+what it meant. So I eliminated all the data from the inquisition
+records that I read—São Paulo and Harper’s Weekly and Equiano
+and slave owners’ diaries—and tried to form language that would
+
+help me and, I hope, the reader, to know it. Just know it. Nowhere in
+Beloved is this contraption described. But this is what I ended up
+with when I tried to make it completely known or convey a sense of
+how it felt and what it meant.
+At this point, in this short little passage, Sethe has found out that
+probably her husband never left that farm, Sweet Home, and that he
+probably saw what happened to her, because Paul D thinks so. And
+she’s angry when she hears it, because she wants to know of Paul D,
+why didn’t he, if he saw her husband collapsed in this way, why
+didn’t he help him, and why didn’t he say something to him, why did
+he just walk away without saying anything, and he said he couldn’t
+because he had this thing in his mouth. And eventually she asks him
+to tell her not about what she’s feeling about her husband, her exhusband, but what that must have been like for him.
+He wants to tell me, she thought. He wants me to ask him about
+what it was like for him—about how offended the tongue is, held
+down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She
+already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place
+before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness
+that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back.
+Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners
+of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the
+wildness out of the eye.
+Sethe looked up into Paul D’s eyes to see if there was any trace
+left in them.
+“People I saw as a child,” she said, “who’d had the bit always
+looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it
+couldn’t have worked, because it put a wildness where before
+there wasn’t any. When I look at you, I don’t see it. There ain’t
+no wildness in your eye nowhere.”
+“There’s a way to put it there and there’s a way to take it out. I
+know em both and I haven’t figured out yet which is worse.” He
+sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight
+
+his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart
+down.
+“You want to tell me about it?” she asked him.
+“I don’t know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang
+it sometimes, but I never told a soul.”
+“Go ahead. I can hear it.”
+“Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain’t sure I can say it.
+Say it right, I mean, because it wasn’t the bit—that wasn’t it.”
+“What then?” Sethe asked.
+“The roosters,” he said. “Walking past the roosters looking at
+them look at me.”
+Sethe smiled. “In that pine?”
+“Yeah.” Paul D smiled with her. “Must have been five of them
+perched up there, and at least fifty hens.”
+“Mister, too?”
+“Not right off. But I hadn’t took twenty steps before I seen
+him. He come down off the fence post there and sat on the tub.”
+“He loved that tub,” said Sethe, thinking, No, there is no
+stopping now.
+“Didn’t he? Like a throne. Was me took him out the shell, you
+know. He’d a died if it hadn’t been for me. The hen had walked
+on off with all the hatched peeps trailing behind her. There was
+this one egg left. Looked like a blank, but then I saw it move so I
+tapped it open and here come Mister, bad feet and all. I watched
+that son a bitch grow up and whup everything in the yard.”
+“He always was hateful,” Sethe said.
+“Yeah, he was hateful all right. Bloody too, and evil. Crooked
+feet flapping. Comb as big as my hand and some kind of red. He
+sat right there on the tub looking at me. I swear he smiled. My
+head was full of what I’d seen of Halle a while back. I wasn’t
+even thinking about the bit. Just Halle and before him Sixo, but
+when I saw Mister I knew it was me too. Not just them, me too.
+One crazy, one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron
+
+with my hands crossed behind me. The last of the Sweet Home
+men.
+“Mister, he looked so…free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher.
+Son a bitch couldn’t even get out the shell by hisself but he was
+still king and I was…” Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand
+with his right. He held it that way long enough for it and the
+world to quiet down and let him go on.
+“Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t
+allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d
+be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever
+be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was
+something else and that something was less than a chicken
+sitting in the sun on a tub.”
+Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed.
+Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the
+beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring,
+stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push
+them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep
+the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest
+where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not
+pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she
+got a whiff of its contents it would shame him. And it would hurt
+her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb
+beating in him.
+When I moved away from that project, which I thought was sort of
+incomplete, I began to think about another important point in
+American life that was also an extremely important point in African
+American life that I wanted to write about, but this time my problem
+was not how to deal with the history, but rather how to deal with the
+culture. There wasn’t a great deal of history that had been written
+about the twenties, the period I call jazz, or we call jazz. There’d been
+lots and lots of books, lots and lots of movies, lots and lots of images,
+lots and lots of everything, but there was still this huge, powerful,
+amorphous kind of understanding of what that culture was.
+
+If I say the word “jazz,” I’m sure something comes to mind,
+something very concrete or maybe something that’s unspecific,
+maybe just the music, a certain kind of music. And if I pursue that
+image of jazz music, you know, a sample might surface or a musician
+or arrangement or a song or something, or maybe just clubs, radio,
+whatever comes to mind. And places where that particular kind of
+music we call jazz is played. Or maybe just your own like of it or your
+dislike of it or your indifference to that particular music. But
+whatever you’re thinking about that music, in the background of the
+word “jazz” is the recollection, if not the main feature of your
+memory, or your association, that jazz is music black people play, or
+originated, or shaped. But that it’s not exclusively played or even
+enjoyed by them, now, or for even a long, long time. And also the fact
+that the appreciation of jazz is one of the few places where a certain
+kind of race transcendence or race-transcendent embrace is possible.
+Which doesn’t mean there was no exploitation, but even the
+exploitation was possible only because of the interest in it, and the
+passion for it, and the embrace that did take place interracially, so to
+speak.
+The dictionary definitions of “jazz” list usually three or four entries
+relating to the music—where it originated in New Orleans around the
+beginning of the twentieth century, and then they usually go on to
+characterize the music in very interesting words. “Compulsive,” for
+example, is used a lot. “Intricate.” “Freely improvised.” And then
+they sometimes chart the course of jazz from diatonism to
+grammaticism to atonality, and then they go on to list some other
+entries in which jazz is not music, it’s a kind of dance done to such
+music and having some of the characteristics of the music. But it’s
+distinguished by violent bodily gestures and motions. And then
+following those definitions are slang definitions, including
+“vigorous,” “liveliness,” “spirited,” and “insincerity,” “exaggeration,”
+or “pretentiousness.” All that jazz. Don’t give me all that jazz. You
+know, something you don’t have to pay any attention to because it’s
+overstatement. But something that is jazzy is highly energetic and
+wildly active.
+
+I don’t think anybody really needs those dictionary definitions to
+clarify because one of the attractions of the term is its loose
+association of energy and sensuality. And freedom. And release. And
+intricacy. All that. All of it backgrounded by a recognizable music
+black people originated and shaped. I don’t myself usually think of
+music first. But of the many images that might surface, one would be
+a sort of recent history period, the twenties, the period known as the
+Jazz Age. And attached to that term may be the sound of the music as
+it affected or backgrounded an era or generation of people whom we
+associate with that period. “Jazz Age” elicits more detailed imagery—
+Prohibition, a change in fashion that was alarming and sort of
+exciting in some places, short hair and skirts in which women could
+actually walk and work and move. And dance. But it also suggested a
+kind of recklessness and license and sexuality.
+But if you bend the Jazz Age the way I’ve just described it to suit
+more literary interests, then we make the association with writers
+who reached their maturity or started out and did something
+wonderful or had some influence or fame during the twenties and
+early thirties, and we begin to think of that wonderful poetry and
+drama and the novels of a whole group of post–World War I
+American artists: Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and
+Stein and Pound, and well, you know that list and it’s a familiar one,
+but familiar too is the whole constellation of things and people, the
+tone, the music, and the history that the word “jazz” evokes, and all
+of it is understood to be uniquely American. It’s a uniquely American
+posture. And it suggests an American modernism that lingered on
+and on and on until there was something after modernism, and then
+of course something after that, and then something after that.
+It is an American cultural phenomenon, and as such, it’s more
+than any of the definitions or connotations that I have mentioned.
+It’s really a concept. And it’s interesting to me as a writer because it’s
+so full of contradictions. It’s American, indisputably American, and
+ethnically marginal. It’s black and free. It’s intricate and wild. It’s
+spontaneous and practiced. It’s exaggerated and simple. It’s
+constantly invented, always brand-new, but somehow familiar and
+
+known. Wherever you go in the world, if you say, “Jazz,” people say,
+“Oh yes, yes. I remember.” Or “I understand.” Or “I know.” And I
+don’t know if they’re thinking about Josephine Baker or what, but it’s
+“Oh yes, yes. Jazz. I know.” It’s immediately understood and all
+explanations become redundant.
+Now these contradictions have been very much on my mind
+because I was trying to think through some other concepts that had
+to do with this very, very important transition, I think, and
+transformation in the history of African Americans and very much a
+transformation in the history of this country. So my attempt then
+was to take not the history but the culture of jazz, which is much
+more ineffable and vaporous, and I wanted to demystify and
+revalorize the jazz idea. And to do that from a viewpoint that
+precedes its appropriation—you know, when it becomes anybody’s
+and everybody’s—and that reculturizes and deculturizes this idea.
+It is a part, this view, looking at that period in black life, of a rather
+sustained investigation I began with Beloved, which was that I’m
+really looking at self-regard in both racial and gendered terms, and
+how that self-regard evolves or is distorted or flourishes or collapses,
+and under what circumstances. In Beloved, I was interested in what
+contributed most significantly to a slave woman’s self-regard. What
+was her self-esteem? What value did she place on herself? And I
+became convinced, and research supported my hunch, my intuition,
+that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to be and to remain
+exactly what the institution said she was not, that was important to
+her. Moving into Reconstruction and beyond it, as difficult as it was
+to function as a mother with control over the destiny of one’s
+children, it still became then, certainly, a legal responsibility after
+slavery. So this is where the sources of self-regard came for Margaret
+Garner or Sethe. And it is exaggerated because it’s that important
+and that alien and that strange and that vital. But when Sethe asks,
+“Me? Me?” at the end of Beloved, it’s a real movement toward a
+recognition of self-regard.
+But the answer to her question seemed to me to come or be
+available a generation or two later, when the possibility of personal
+
+freedom, and interior, imaginative freedom—not political or
+economic freedom, those were still distant, although there had been
+some changes—could be engaged. So it seemed to me that while the
+history, the data of traditional historians, both documented and
+denied this change in black life and in the culture, the information
+available to me in the cultural signs suggested there were alterations
+in the formulations and the sources of self-regard. Music, its lyrics,
+its performers held the first signs, for me, of this change in the
+culture. Movement, migration from rural areas to urban ones, held
+other kinds of information. The literature, the language, the custom,
+the posture, all of this was what I would look at.
+It seemed to me that the twenties, with its sort of nascent and
+overwhelming jazz idiom, was as distinct as it was because, precisely,
+of this change. That period, the Jazz Age, was a period when black
+people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene. And
+this agency—unremarked in economic and political terms—informs
+my project. And all the terms I cited earlier—“defiance,” “violence,”
+“sensuality,”
+“freedom,”
+“intricacy,”
+“invention,”
+and
+“improvisation”—were intimated in the major figuration of that
+term. Subjective, demanding, deeply personal love relationships. The
+one place African Americans could command and surrender by
+choice. Where they did not marry who was chosen for them, or who
+lived down the road, or who was next door. Where they could effect
+the widest possible choice—by deciding to fall in love. Claiming
+another as the beloved. Not because of filial blood relationships or
+proximity, but precisely because it was ad hoc and accidental and
+fated but not predictable.
+And this assertiveness, this creative agency, seemed to be most
+clear in the music, the style, the language of this—that postReconstruction era that represented both transition and
+transformation. You know, like life lived in flour sacking or plain,
+dull cotton gives you a hunger, a desperation for color and patterns
+and powerful, primary colors, in the same way that hundreds of years
+of being mated off or ordered whom to marry, of needing permission
+to join with another, of having to take these extraordinary, drastic
+
+measures to keep a family together and to behave like a family, and
+all of this under the greatest stress, with so little evidence that
+anything would ever change. You could get slaves to do anything at
+all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep
+their children. They’d do anything. Every impulse, every gesture,
+everything they did was to maintain their families.
+Well, under those historical pressures, the desire for choice in
+partners, the desire for romantic love, operate as a place, a space,
+away, for individual reclamation of the self. That is a part, maybe the
+largest part, certainly an important part, of the reconstruction of
+identity. Part of the “me” so tentatively articulated in Beloved. That’s
+what she needs to discover. It will account for the satisfaction in the
+blues lyric and the blues phrase whether or not, and mostly not, the
+relationship flourishes. They’re usually, you know, somebody’s gone
+and not coming back or some terrible thing has happened and you’ll
+never see this person again. Whether or not the affection is returned,
+whether or not the loved one reciprocated the ardor, the lover, the
+singer, has achieved something, accomplished something in the act
+of being in love. It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without
+acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that
+frequently belies the wail of disappointed love.
+It may be through that agency, and the even more powerful
+assertiveness of what we call “jazz,” which uses those gestures, that
+compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which
+imagination fosters real possibilities: you can’t imagine it, you can’t
+have it. And a third thing grows, where despair may have been, or
+even where the past lay whole and wouldn’t let go. And it is this third
+thing that jazz creates and that creates itself in these spaces and
+intersections of race and gender that interest me and that informed
+and propel the writing of this book called Jazz. I want to read just a
+page or two, which is kind of an illustration of that gesture of choice
+and love:
+It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the
+covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is
+
+the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for
+something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath
+tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival
+dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The
+pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them,
+they would be gone from there and who else would see that
+ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody
+passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor
+would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of
+them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose
+together and kept together, nevermind one leg was propped on a
+1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm
+asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and
+every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They
+are under the covers because they don’t have to look at
+themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to
+undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined
+by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they
+never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.
+But there’s another part, not so secret. The part that touches
+fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The
+part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley;
+and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of
+the movie house into the sunlight.
+I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in
+secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to
+be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That
+I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to
+you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and
+show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you
+let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I
+have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your
+eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and
+hearing you answer—that’s the kick.
+
+But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been
+waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the
+reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me.
+You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look.
+Look where your hands are. Now.
+
+Rememory
+
+I
+
+SUSPECT my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is
+more anxious than it is for most fiction writers—not because I write
+(or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the
+fact that I write in a wholly racialized society that can and does
+hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality,
+minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and
+literary heritages, pressures to take a position—all these surface
+when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an
+intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions
+inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write
+about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?
+I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as
+responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture
+specific and “race-free.” All of which presented itself to me as a
+project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European
+writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “racefree” or “race transcendent.” Whether it is or not is another question
+—the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for
+granted that it is because Others are “raced”—whites are not. Or so
+the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all
+“raced.” Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own
+fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work,
+and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to
+altogether and write about World War II or domestic strife without
+referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only,
+most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I
+could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict
+
+and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the
+center of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject
+would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for
+new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions
+and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality
+in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write
+about.
+First was my effort to substitute and rely on memory rather than
+history because I knew I could not, should not, trust recorded history
+to give me the insight into the cultural specificity I wanted. Second, I
+determined to diminish, exclude, even freeze any (overt) debt to
+Western literary history. Neither effort has been entirely successful,
+nor should I be congratulated if it had been. Yet it seemed to me
+extremely important to try. You will understand how reckless it
+would have been for me to rely on Conrad or Twain or Melville or
+Stowe or Whitman or Henry James or James Fenimore Cooper, or
+Saul Bellow for that matter, or Flannery O’Connor or Ernest
+Hemingway for insights into my own culture. It would have been
+equally dim-witted, as well as devastating, for me to rely on Kenneth
+Stampp or Lewis Mumford, or Herbert Gutman, or Eugene Genovese
+or Moynihan, or Emerson, or Jefferson or any of those sages in the
+history of the United States for research that would enlighten me on
+these matters. There was and is another source that I have at my
+disposal, however: my own literary heritage of slave narratives.
+For imaginative entrance into that territory I urged memory to
+metamorphose itself into the kind of metaphorical and imagistic
+associations I described at the beginning of this talk with Hannah
+Peace.
+But writing is not simply recollecting or reminiscing or even
+epiphany. It is doing; creating a narrative infused (in my case) with
+legitimate and authentic characteristics of the culture.
+Mindful of and rebellious toward the cultural and racial
+expectations and impositions my fiction would encourage, it was
+important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, already established
+reality (literary or historical) that the reader and I agree upon
+
+beforehand. I could not, without engaging in another kind of cultural
+totalizing process, assume or exercise that kind of authority.
+It was in Beloved, however, that all of these matters coalesced for
+me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory
+versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and
+remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the
+family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the
+pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the
+device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know
+became the structure of the text. Nobody in the book can bear too
+long to dwell on the past; nobody can avoid it. There is no reliable
+literary or journalistic or scholarly history available to them, to help
+them, because they are living in a society and a system in which the
+conquerors write the narrative of their lives. They are spoken of and
+written about—objects of history, not subjects within it. Therefore
+not only is the major preoccupation of the central characters that of
+reconstituting and recollecting a usable past (Sethe to know what
+happened to her and to not know in order to justify her violent
+action; Paul D to stand still and remember what has helped to
+construct his self; Denver to demystify her own birth and enter the
+contemporary world that she is reluctant to engage) but also the
+narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of
+remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie
+within the process.
+[Read]
+The final pages in which memory is insistent yet becomes the
+mutation of fact into fiction then folklore and then into nothing.
+The novel I worked on following the completion of Beloved
+presented a different set of circumstances in this regard. Some of the
+circumstances surrounding the writing of Song of Solomon included
+access I believed the contemplation of my father made available to
+me. This project is dependent on the grabbing hold of another parent
+—my mother. It takes place in 1926, which is the time of my mother’s
+girlhood. That is, her memory of that time as told to me is both a veil
+secreting certain parts and a rend her narrative tore into it. I believe
+
+this short section is to me the essence of memory turned to nostalgia
+and regret and moving forward finally toward a very thin, but not so
+frail, possibility of hope for the present.
+
+Memory, Creation, and Fiction
+It is not enough for a work of art to have ordered planes and lines. If a stone
+is tossed at a group of children, they hasten to scatter. A regrouping, an
+action, has been accomplished. This is composition. This regrouping,
+presented by means of color, lines, and planes is an artistic and painterly
+motif.
+—EDVARD MUNCH
+
+I
+
+LIKE that quotation, as I do many of the remarks painters make
+about their work, because it clarifies for me an aspect of creation that
+engages me as a writer. It suggests how that interior part of the
+growth of a writer (the part that is both separate and
+indistinguishable from craft) is connected not only to some purely
+local and localized sets of stimuli but also to memory: the painter can
+copy or reinterpret the stone—its lines, planes, or curves—but the
+stone that causes something to happen among children he must
+remember, because it is done and gone. As he sits before his
+sketchbook he remembers how the scene looked, but most
+importantly he remembers the specific milieu that accompanies the
+scene.
+Along with the stone and the scattered children is an entire galaxy
+of feeling and impression—the motion and content of which may
+seem arbitrary, even incoherent, at first.
+Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take
+seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often extremely hard to
+seek out both the stimulus and its galaxy and to recognize their value
+when they arrive. Memory is for me always fresh, in spite of the fact
+that the object being remembered is done and past.
+
+Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed
+creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is
+research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it
+appeared in that particular way.
+I once knew a woman named Hannah Peace. I say “knew,” but
+nothing could be less accurate. I was perhaps four years old when she
+was in the town where I lived. I don’t know where (or even if) she is
+now, or to whom she was related then. She was not even a visiting
+friend. I couldn’t describe her in a way that would make her known
+in a photograph, nor would I recognize her if she walked into this
+room. But I have a memory of her and it’s like this: the color of her
+skin—the matte quality of it. Something purple around her. Also eyes
+not completely open. There emanated from her an aloofness that
+seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I remember her name
+—or the way people pronounced it. Never Hannah or Miss Peace.
+Always Hannah Peace—and more. Something hidden—some awe
+perhaps, but certainly some forgiveness. When they pronounced her
+name, they (the women and the men) forgave her something.
+That’s not much, I know: half-closed eyes, an absence of hostility,
+skin powdered in lilac dust. But it was more than enough to evoke a
+character—in fact any more detail would have prevented (for me) the
+emergence of a fictional character at all. What is useful—definitive—
+is the galaxy of emotion that accompanied the woman as I pursued
+my memory of her; not the woman herself. (I am still startled by the
+ability—even the desire—to “use” acquaintances or friends or
+enemies as fictional characters. There is no yeast for me in a real-life
+person, or else there is so much it is not useful—it is done bread,
+already baked.)
+The pieces (and only the pieces) are what begin the creative
+process for me. And the process by which the recollections of these
+pieces coalesce into a part (and knowing the difference between a
+piece and a part) is creation. Memory, then, no matter how small the
+piece remembered, demands my respect, my attention, and my trust.
+I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does
+function as a creative writer’s ruse) for two reasons. One, because it
+
+ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust
+the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the
+truth of my own cultural sources. It also prevents my preoccupations
+from descending into sociology. Since the discussion of black
+literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and almost never
+art criticism, it is important for me to shed those considerations from
+my work at the outset.
+In the example I have given of Hannah Peace it was the havingbeen-easily-forgiven that caught my attention, not growing up black,
+and that quality, that “easily forgivenness” that I believe I remember
+in connection with a shadow of a woman my mother knew, is the
+theme of Sula. The women forgive each other—or learn to. Once that
+piece of the galaxy became apparent, it dominated the other pieces.
+The next step was to discover what there is to be forgiven among
+women. Such things must now be raised and invented because I am
+going to tell about feminine forgiveness in story form. The things to
+be forgiven are grave errors and violent misdemeanors, but the point
+is less the thing to be forgiven than the nature and quality of
+forgiveness among women—which is to say friendship among
+women. What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the
+emotional value of the relationship. But Sula is not simply about
+friendship among women, but among black women, a qualifying
+term the artistic responsibilities of which I will touch upon in a
+moment.
+I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the
+nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text, which makes it
+difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant
+acceptance of data. When one looks at a very good painting, the
+experience of looking is deeper than the data accumulated in viewing
+it. The same, I think, is true in listening to good music. Just as the
+literary value of a painting or a musical composition is limited, so too
+is the literary value of literature limited. I sometimes think how
+glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenthcentury England, or poetry in ancient Greece, or religious narrative
+in the Middle Ages, when literature was need and did not have a
+
+critical history to constrain or diminish the writer’s imagination.
+How magnificent not to have to depend on the reader’s literary
+associations—his literary experience—which can be as much an
+impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a writer’s. It is
+important that what I write not be merely literary. I am most selfconscious about making sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I
+avoid, too studiously perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary
+references, unless oblique and based on written folklore. The choice
+of a tale or of folklore in my work is tailored to the character’s
+thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or her and provides irony,
+sometimes humor.
+Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the
+mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others,
+enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a
+story about parents who abandon their children to a forest and a
+witch who makes a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his
+racial and cultural ignorance, is flagged. Equally marked is Hagar’s
+bed, described as Goldilocks’s choice, partly because of Hagar’s
+preoccupations with hair, and partly because, like Goldilocks, a
+housebreaker if ever there was one, she is greedy for things,
+unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and Hagar is
+emotionally selfish as well as confused.
+This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm
+if boring habit with me, not only because they lead to poses, not only
+because I refuse the credentials they bestow, but also because they
+are inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of
+that literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests
+me. Literary references in the hands of writers I love can be
+extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t want
+the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same plane
+an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his
+traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one:
+that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.
+My beginnings as a novelist were very much focused on creating
+this discomfort and unease in order to insist that the reader rely on
+
+another body of knowledge. However weak those beginnings were in
+1965, they nevertheless pointed me toward the process that engages
+me in 1984: trusting memory and culling from it theme and
+structure. In The Bluest Eye the recollection of what I felt and saw
+upon hearing a child my own age say she prayed for blue eyes
+provided the first piece. I then tried to distinguish between a piece
+and a part—in the sense that a piece of a human body is different
+from a part of a human body.
+As I began developing parts out of pieces, I found that I preferred
+them unconnected—to be related but not to touch, to circle, not line
+up—because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered,
+fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life. The
+novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another,
+like the galaxy accompanying memory. I fret the pieces and
+fragments of memory because too often we want the whole thing.
+When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although
+the fragment we are remembering may be, and very probably is, the
+most important piece in the dream. Chapter and part designations,
+as conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in
+writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the
+designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually
+identified at the last minute.)
+There may be play and arbitrariness in the way memory surfaces
+but none in the way the composition is organized, especially when I
+hope to re-create play and arbitrariness in the way narrative events
+unfold. The form becomes the exact interpretation of the idea the
+story is meant to express. There is nothing more traditional than that
+—but the sources of the images are not the traditional novelistic or
+readerly ones. The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the
+corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the
+context of The Bluest Eye.
+Narrative is one of the ways in which knowledge is organized. I
+have always thought it was the most important way to transmit and
+receive knowledge. I am less certain of that now—but the craving for
+narrative has never lessened, and the hunger for it is as keen as it
+
+was on Mount Sinai or Calvary or in the middle of the fens. Even
+when novelists abandon or grow tired of it as an outmoded mimetic
+form, historians, journalists, and performing artists take up the
+slack. Still, narrative is not and never has been enough, just as the
+object drawn on a canvas or a cave wall is never simply mimetic.
+My compact with the reader is not to reveal an already established
+reality (literary or historical) that he or she and I agree upon
+beforehand. I don’t want to assume or exercise that kind of authority.
+I regard that as patronizing, although many people regard it as safe
+and reassuring. And because my métier is black, the artistic demands
+of black culture are such that I cannot patronize, control, or
+pontificate. In the third-world cosmology as I perceive it, reality is
+not already constituted by my literary predecessors in Western
+culture.
+If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the
+West, it must centralize and animate information discredited by the
+West—discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some
+racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people,
+information dismissed as “lore” or “gossip” or “magic” or
+“sentiment.”
+If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of AfroAmerican culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics
+of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group
+nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its
+relationship to audience performance, the critical voice that upholds
+tradition and communal values and that also provides occasion for
+an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions.
+Working with those rules, the text, if it is to take improvisation and
+audience participation into account, cannot be the authority—it
+should be the map. It should make a way for the reader (audience) to
+participate in the tale. The language, if it is to permit criticism of
+both rebellion and tradition, must be both indicator and mask, and
+the tension between the two kinds of language is its release and its
+power. If my work is to be functional to the group (to the village, as it
+were) then it must bear witness and identify that which is useful
+
+from the past and that which ought to be discarded; it must make it
+possible to prepare for the present and live it out; and it must do that
+not by avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them;
+it should not even attempt to solve social problems but it should
+certainly try to clarify them.
+Before I try to illustrate some of these points by using Tar Baby as
+an example, let me hasten to say that there are eminent and
+powerful, intelligent, and gifted black writers who not only recognize
+Western literature as part of their own heritage but who have
+employed it to such an advantage that it illuminates both cultures. I
+neither object to nor am indifferent to their work or their views. I
+relish it, in precisely the way I relish a world of literature from other
+cultures. The question is not legitimacy or the “correctness” of a
+point of view, but the difference between my point of view and theirs.
+Nothing would be more hateful to me than a monolithic prescription
+for what black literature is or ought to be. I simply wanted to write
+literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black not because its
+characters were, or because I was, but because it took as its creative
+task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable
+principles of black art.
+In the writing of Tar Baby, memory meant recollecting the told
+story. I refused to read a modern or Westernized version of the told
+story, selecting out instead the pieces that were disturbing or simply
+memorable: fear, tar, the rabbit’s outrage at a failing in traditional
+manners (the tar baby does not speak). Why was the tar baby
+formed, to what purpose, what was the farmer trying to protect, and
+why did he think the doll would be attractive to the rabbit—what did
+he know and what was his big mistake? Why does the tar baby
+cooperate with the farmer, and do the things the farmer wishes to
+protect? What makes his job more important than the rabbit’s, why
+does he believe that a briar patch is sufficient punishment, what does
+the briar patch represent to the rabbit, to the tar baby, and to the
+farmer?
+“Creation” meant putting the above pieces together in parts, first
+of all concentrating on tar as a part. What is it and where does it
+
+come from? What are its holy uses and its profane uses—
+consideration of which led to a guiding motif: ahistorical earth and
+historical earth. That theme was translated into the structure in these
+steps:
+1. Coming out of the sea (that which was there before earth) is both
+the beginning and the end of the book—in both of which Son
+emerges from the sea in a section that is not numbered as a
+chapter.
+2. The earth that came out of the sea, its conquest by modern man,
+and the pain caused to the conquered life forms, as they are
+viewed by fishermen and clouds.
+3. Movement from the earth into the household: its rooms, its
+quality of shelter. The activity for which the rooms were
+designed: eating, sleeping, bathing, leisure, etc.
+4. The house disrupted precisely as the earth was disrupted. The
+chaos of the earth duplicated in the house designed for order.
+The disruption caused by the man born out of the womb of the
+sea accompanied by ammonia odors of birth.
+5. The conflict that follows between the ahistorical (the pristine)
+and the historical (or social) forces inherent in the uses of tar.
+6. The conflict, further, between two kinds of chaos: civilized chaos
+and natural chaos.
+7. The revelation, then, is the revelation of secrets. Everybody with
+one or two exceptions has a secret: secrets of acts committed (as
+with Margaret and Son), and secrets of thoughts unspoken but
+driving nonetheless (as with Valerian and Jadine). And then the
+deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life,
+other life watches us.
+
+Goodbye to All That
+Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell
+
+S
+
+OME YEARS AGO, when I was invited to be interviewed on a
+television show, I asked whether it was possible for our conversation
+to avoid any questions or topics about race. I suspected that if such
+voluntary exclusion were in place, then other equally interesting
+subjects might surface and produce a rare media encounter—one free
+of the cant one is inevitably forced to resort to in such a venue, on
+such a subject. I thought the experiment would be a first for me and
+elicit my views on what constitutes my writing life; or the
+relationship between teaching and writing, between editing and
+teaching, how the pleasure and despair of being a mother influenced
+my work—loosened or limited it; my views on the problems of
+transcription and oral data in slave narratives, the compelling blend
+of vernacular, standard, street, and lyric language for an American
+writer, the importance of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jean Toomer
+to me; how poverty, once a romanticized, sentimentalized figuration
+in American literature, has returned to its nineteenth-century
+predecessor as a metaphor for illness, crime, and sin; of my work on
+the letters of abolitionists James McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith.
+All of these are topics, or shreds of topics, that have had something
+to do with my thinking, writing life. The interviewer agreed, but
+when we met, a few minutes before the show, he changed his mind,
+saying that the race aspect was far too interesting to abandon. I am
+not at all sure that the sort of chat I wanted would have had any
+appeal whatsoever to anybody else. Probably not. The interviewer’s
+judgment was accurate if predictable: racial difference is a very big
+seller. The point I am making, however, is that neither he nor his
+
+audience was interested in any aspects of me other than my raced
+ones. Disappointed and irked, I dragged out my kit of the media’s
+version of racial dialogue: great-great-granddaughter of Africans,
+great-great-granddaughter of slaves; great-granddaughter of
+sharecroppers; granddaughter of migrants; beneficiary of the
+American Dream—I ended up sleepwalking through a wan, rambling,
+profoundly uninteresting dialogue.
+I had such a yearning for an environment in which I could speak
+and write without every sentence being understood as mere protest
+or understood as mere advocacy. Now, in no way should this desire
+be misinterpreted as an endorsement of deracination, or the
+fashionable term, “race transcendence,” nor as an example of the
+dwindling impact of racial politics. Even a glance at the U.S. 2000
+census data, where more refined racial identifications are also more
+pronounced; even a light curiosity about recommendations for
+death-penalty moratoriums; a vague awareness of the bruising
+disenfranchisement of African Americans in the last presidential
+election; the record numbers of discrimination and racial profiling
+cases—none of these vectors of racial policy would lead one to the
+conclusion that racial politics is benign. I don’t foresee, or want, a
+color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was
+the time for that. It’s too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not
+only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or
+a bountiful harvest of possibilities.
+From the beginning, I claimed a territory by insisting on being
+identified as a black woman writer exclusively interested in facets of
+African American culture. I made these unambiguous assertions to
+impose on all readers the visibility in and the necessity of African
+American culture to my work precisely in order to encourage a wider
+critical vocabulary than the one in which I was educated. I wanted
+this vocabulary to stretch to the margins for the wealth that lay there
+and thus, not abandon, but reconfigure what occupied the center. It
+seemed to me a way of enriching the dialogue between and among
+cultures. I wanted to make impossible the role of temporary or
+honorary white writer; to frustrate the label of the inconsequentially
+
+black writer. The “just happen to be black” writer. My project was to
+discover what the black topic did and could do to language practices.
+I sought language that could exist on at least two levels: the clearly
+raced identity right alongside the unraced one that had to function
+within an already coded racial discourse. But I was never very good
+at manifestos, so my attempts proved to be a tightrope, a balancing
+that confused some readers, delighted others, disappointed some,
+but provoked enough of them to let me know the work was not
+always in vain. It led me to try strategies, employ structures and
+techniques emanating from African American culture cheek by jowl
+with, and responsive to, other ones.
+This effort to balance the demands of cultural specificity with
+those of artistic range is a condition, rather than a problem, for me. A
+challenge rather than a worry. A refuge rather than a refugee camp.
+Home territory, not foreign land. Inhabiting and manipulating that
+sphere has excited me like no other. Of course African American
+writers have contemplated, written about, struggled with, and have
+taken positions on this politics or art, race and/or aesthetics debate
+since Phillis Wheatley suggested that slavery did her a favor. Jean
+Toomer tried to escape its shackle altogether by inventing an
+American race. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James
+Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, African American scholars,
+and a host of post–civil rights writers have weighed in on the subject.
+And it is or has been, since the nineteenth century, a keenly argued
+concern of every immigrant group of writers in the United States.
+From Henry James to Chang-rae Lee; from William Faulkner to
+Maxine Hong Kingston; from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Frank
+McCourt; from Herman Melville to Paula Marshall. Still it is hard for
+me to believe that the necessity of responding to a perceived
+“outsider” status has been demanded so loudly and so insistently of
+any group more than African American artists. To me the implied,
+even voiced question, “Are you a black writer or an American
+writer?” not only means “Are you subverting art to politics?” It also
+means “Are you a black writer or a universal writer?” suggesting that
+the two are clearly incompatible. Race awareness apparently can
+
+never be sundered from politics. It is the result of a shotgun wedding
+originally enforced by whites, while African American artists (in the
+public and academic domains) are faulted and flailed for dealing
+with the consequences of this marriage. Forced to shout endlessly to
+white criticism, “These are not my racial politics—they are yours.”
+These battles against such a mind-set are exhausting and are
+especially debilitating since those who launched the fray have only to
+observe it, not participate in it. Have only to misunderstand the
+demands of cultural specificity as identity politics or assaults on the
+canon, or special pleading, or some other threatening gesture. And
+the people most invested in the argument are usually those who have
+already reaped its benefits.
+I suppose I approached the politics versus art, race versus
+aesthetics debate initially the way an alchemist would: looking for
+that combination of ingredients that turns dross into gold. But there
+is no such formula. So my project became to make the historically
+raced world inextricable from the artistic view that beholds it, and in
+so doing encourage readings that dissect both. Which is to say I
+claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt
+journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a
+rhetorical history an imagistic one; to read the world, misread it;
+write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do
+what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of
+disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of
+aesthetics and ethics.
+I am impressed by the fruitfulness and importance of scholarly
+and literary challenges that search for more ways in which to both
+sign and defang race, acknowledge its import and limit its corrosive
+effect on language. That is, work that avoids the unnatural schism
+between the political realm in which race matters and the artistic one
+in which it is presumed not to.
+Scholarship that abandons the enforcing properties of the false
+debate and welcomes the challenges in the liberating ones hidden at
+its center is becoming sensitive to the fact that things have changed.
+Language that requires the mutual exclusion of x and y, or the
+
+dominance of x over y, is slowly losing its magic, its force. But it is
+literature that rehearses and enacts this change in ways far in
+advance of and more probingly than the critical language that follows
+it. Perhaps it is because of my own farewell to all that art versus
+politics, culture against aesthetics quarrel that I find literary partings
+(moments of racial goodbyes) so promising a site in which to
+examine the sea change expressive language of racial encounter has
+undergone, a sea change yielding opportunities for richer and more
+nuanced explorations. Over time the rites of farewell between the
+races as represented in some selected examples in American
+literature have moved dramatically from blatant assumptions of
+racial hierarchy to less overt ones to coded representation to
+nuanced decodings of those assumptions; from control to dismissal
+to anxiety to a kind of informed ease. Now, I insist on not being
+misunderstood here—implying that neutralizing race is the work of
+literature, its job, so to speak. It is not. Nevertheless the shape of
+racial discourse can be located there. A shape that plays about and
+moves through literature and therefore in our imaginations when we
+read it. Although even this brief inquiry could and ought to be
+widened, I will limit my observations to women writers because
+intimacy and alienation and severance between women is more often
+free of the sexual competition implicit among male writers
+addressing the same subject, and anxieties about sexual dominance
+can blur as well as exacerbate the racial equation (as Shakespeare
+and Hollywood both knew). Saying goodbye is a moment readymade for literary histrionics, for deep emotional revelations seething
+with meaning. I am interested in the farewell between black and
+white strangers who have, or might have, shared something
+significant; or who represent the end of something larger than
+themselves, where the separation symbolizes loss or renewal, for
+example. There are the partings between black and white women
+whose histories are permanently entangled. Many, if not most, of
+these are surrogate relationships: surrogate mothers in the nannychild domain; surrogate mothers, aunts, and other relatives in the
+servant-mistress category; surrogate sisters in which the friendships
+become surrogate, illegal, precisely because the dynamics of power
+
+between employer and employee are inescapably raced; and
+sometimes, though rarely, there is the farewell between black and
+white adult women in which the equity is not race based. Alice
+Walker’s Meridian is an early example.
+Let me begin with a farewell scene in a fine and prolific writer who
+is not American, but who was herself a foreigner far from home and
+who was in a position to form opinions on racial relationships from
+close quarters, Isak Dinesen. There is a haunting scene in Out of
+Africa that exhibits standard racial discourse as well as the
+presumptions of the foreigner’s home. The scene in which the author
+is leaving a place, Kenya, that has been her home for much of her
+adult life. The necessity of moving out of Africa and its melancholy
+surface in each moment of leave-taking.
+A passage toward the end reads as follows:
+Now the old women were sorry that I was leaving them. From
+this last time, I keep the picture of a Kikuyu woman, nameless to
+me, for I did not know her well, she belonged, I think, to
+Kathegu’s village, and was the wife or widow of one of his many
+sons. She came towards me on a path on the plain, carrying on
+her back a load of the long thin poles which the Kikuyu use for
+constructing the roofs of their huts,—with them this is women’s
+work. These poles may be fifteen feet long; when the women
+carry them they tie them together at the ends, and the tall
+conical burdens give to the people underneath them, as you see
+them traveling over the land, the silhouette of a prehistoric
+animal, or a Giraffe. The sticks which this woman was carrying
+were all black and charred, sooted by the smoke of the hut
+during many years; that meant that she had been pulling down
+her house and was trailing her building materials, such as they
+were, to new grounds. When we met she stood dead still, barring
+the path to me, staring at me in the exact manner of a Giraffe in
+a herd, that you will meet on the open plain, and which lives and
+feels and thinks in a manner unknowable to us. After a moment
+she broke out weeping, tears streaming over her face, like a cow
+
+that makes water on the plain before you. Not a word did she or
+I myself speak, and, after a few minutes, she ceded the way to
+me, and we parted, and walked on in opposite directions. I
+thought that after all she had some materials with which to
+begin her new house, and I imagined how she would set to work,
+and tie her sticks together, and make herself a roof.
+Lots of other Kenyans wept and deplored Dinesen’s exit: because
+of their affection for her, or perhaps the loss of paid employment and
+protection, the despair of having to find other shelter. But the above
+recollection bedevils me for other reasons. What does the phrase
+“barring the path to me” mean? Not barring the path, or barring me
+in the path, but barring the path to me. Is the path only to and for
+Dinesen? Is the woman out of place? The syntax is curious.
+Additionally there is the sustained speculation about the woman’s
+errand—carrying wood to build, rebuild, or repair her roof. To make
+a home for herself in a land that is her home, but in which she (the
+Kikuyu woman) is made to feel the outsider. While the true
+foreigner, the author, is leaving a false home about which she has
+some misgivings. The description of Dinesen’s African woman is
+instructive. The sticks on her head make Dinesen think of a
+“prehistoric animal.” Furthermore, the quiet woman is staring at her
+with what emotions we cannot yet know because she is relegated to
+the animal kingdom, where emotions and thoughts and life itself
+cannot be known by us. The woman is like a giraffe in a herd,
+speechless, unknowable, and when she evinces some powerful
+emotion such as sorrow, or rage, or disgust, or loneliness, or even joy
+we cannot know it because her tears are like a cow voiding its urine
+in public. It is a picture, says Dinesen, that she keeps with her, this
+nameless unknown woman. Surely a surrogate, a symbol, of Kenya
+and what she thinks of the world she is leaving behind. In these
+passages, beautiful “aesthetic” language serves to undermine the
+terms: the native, the foreigner, home, homelessness in a wash of
+preemptive images that legitimate and obscure their racist
+
+assumptions while providing protective cover from a possibly more
+damaging insight.
+If we leave 1930s Africa and move to 1940s America to another
+writer with claim to some intimate relations to blacks, there is
+further instruction.
+In a classic tale of American womanhood, Gone with the Wind, the
+black woman/white woman connection is the one we have learned
+from Harriet Beecher Stowe and others: a ubiquitous mammy whose
+devotion and nursing skills are as fierce as they are loyal. These
+surrogate mothers are more serviceable than real mothers not only
+because of their constancy, but also because, unlike biological
+mothers, you can command them and dismiss them without serious
+penalty. Notwithstanding their presence in the text, there will always
+come a time when these surrogates leave—they either exit the
+narrative itself because they are no longer relevant to it, or they leave
+the life of their mistress because their value as teachers is reduced
+when the cared-for matures, or when circumstances have changed:
+moving away, insubordination, or death. Of interest to me is how this
+severance is played out. Is protective language summoned to make
+the black woman’s disappearance palatable? Is there a dependence
+on a metaphoric equation with the unfeeling, unthinking animal
+world? Are there deep or awkward silences to accompany her
+dismissal? Are there tears or a stubborn insistence upon permanent
+attachment?
+In spite of the very real difference in the level of literary
+accomplishment, Mitchell’s mammy is like Dinesen’s Kikuyu in
+important ways. Similes chosen to bring each into view are from the
+animal kingdom; both black women are speechless with grief when
+departure is imminent; the severance in both instances is seen as
+trauma, a devastating deprivation to the black woman and in
+Mitchell, to the white woman as well. The “not one word spoken” by
+the Kenyan woman becomes the garbled babble of a black woman
+(who in sixty years of dialogue with her mistress had never learned to
+pronounce the word “white”) and a quiet begrudging while her young
+mistress weeps.
+
+These early and classic relationships between women of different
+races, frequently maternal, friendly, loving, are echoed in Willa
+Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl in a mesmerizing deathbed
+scene with another surrogate, a woman named Jezebel with whom
+the mistress had a close and mutually satisfying friendship. The
+dialogue is revelatory.
+“You must eat to keep up your strength.”
+“Don’t want nothin’, Missy.”
+“Can’t you think of anything that would taste good to you?
+Now think a minute, and tell me. Isn’t there something?”
+The old woman gave a sly chuckle; one paper eyelid winked,
+and her eyes gave out a flash of grim humour. “No’m, I cain’t
+think of nothin’ I could relish, lessen maybe it was a li’l
+pickaninny’s hand.”
+She turned back again to the bed, took up Jezebel’s cold grey
+claw, and patted it. “Good-bye til another time, Auntie. Now you
+must turn over and have a nap.”
+Evocative as this scene is, rampant with pleasant memories and a
+shared view of the world, its serenity explodes with flashes of the
+serviceable but sinister language of racial antagonism. The hint of
+cannibalism (understood to be “natural” to Africans) and not the
+patting of a hand, the patting of “a cold grey claw.”
+But something else begins to take place in fiction: changes that are
+usually attributed to social climate; the signs of the times. In any
+case, speech permissible in the nineteenth and early twentieth
+century is crude in the late twentieth. But that may not be the whole
+story. Surely the entrance of post–Harlem Renaissance minority
+voices into the political and literary landscape has had a share in this
+alteration. Perhaps a readership and a critical community that is
+intolerant of the easy dismissal of others. In any case there are fewer
+instances of unreflective dismissals; deeper probes into these
+relationships; more exacting observations of these exits and
+
+disruptions in the relationships. In 1946 Carson McCullers published
+The Member of the Wedding.” Before that The Heart Is a Lonely
+Hunter.
+In both novels black women exit the life of the protagonist. The
+scene between Berenice and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding
+is one of struggle for control in which we witness the jealousy of the
+surrogate mother at the flight of the child. Then there is Harper Lee’s
+To Kill a Mockingbird, where it is clear Lee is working away from
+certain assumptions of unknowableness. Although Calpurnia has
+self-revealing conversations only with other blacks and children—
+never white adults—the grapple for language to deal with these
+complicated matters is apparent. There are no leave-taking moments
+in the novel, nor in Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical work that has
+several recollections of her servant, Caroline Ducky. Yet the point is
+sustained by the reach of these authors for a seriousness not shown
+in earlier writers. There seems to be a blossoming suspicion among
+these white women writers that complex thought, ambiguity, nuance
+are actually possible in their black characters, and that their speech
+does not require the strange, creative spellings that no other
+character’s speech needs.
+Lucille Clifton opens her own lovely memoir, Generations, in 1976,
+with a conversation between strangers of each race—a conversation
+that rings with the sayable and the unsaid.
+But two years before that Diane Johnson fills in those gaps that lie
+about in Clifton’s memoir and in other works. Her 1974 The Shadow
+Knows digs deeply into these relationships. The narrator has two
+domestics critical to her life: one disruptive, vengeful, grotesque;
+another benevolent, supportive, cheerful. The reflective quality of the
+prose is worth quoting.
+“But I’m trying to confess that I don’t think I experience Osella as a
+human, not really.” “And she had seemed dead on arrival, delivered
+lonely and bereaved and far from home to our zoo, like some
+insignificant common animal barely noticeable to the keeper, me,
+who was more preoccupied with the misery of the delicate gazelle—
+me.” Here the animal characteristics are equally distributed and the
+
+more lyric “gazelle” is delivered with irony. Later she muses, “I notice
+that whenever I describe Osella or think of her, it is in metaphors of
+things not people, or of fat animals. It is as if I did not consider her
+human, this fellow woman with whom I shared my children and my
+home and many hours….There was nothing in her that wouldn’t sit
+down sisterly and share a recipe but there was something in me.”
+This is no casual, lazy (Margaret Mitchell) language: Osella is
+impossibly if understandably lunatic. While the death of Ev, who
+follows Osella, is a subject of the narrator’s deep personal mourning.
+Language ricochets in these race-inflected farewell scenes. In
+Beloved also there is a leave-taking between a white girl and a black
+one. The scene moves toward the parting that must take place
+between them, yes, but the scene is also meant to enact a goodbye to
+the impediments of race right in the middle of highly racialized
+dialogue. Each one begins by speaking in the language of the period.
+The power relationships are manifest in the casually racist remarks
+of Amy and the deceitful acquiescence of Sethe. Following their joint
+venture in the birth of Denver, they speak, finally, not of farewell, but
+of memory; how to fix the memory of one in the mind of the other—
+or, as with Sethe, how to immortalize the encounter beyond her own
+temporal life. While the action is separation, the parting of ways, the
+language is meant to displace it, is meant to invite meditation on its
+necessity. Washing up on the bank of the Ohio River is our knowing
+that if both women had been of the same race (both white or both
+black) they could have, might have, would have stayed together and
+shared their fortune. Neither one felt she belonged anywhere. Both
+are traveling through unknown, strange territory looking for a home.
+So the language is designed to imply the solitude of their farewell is
+somehow shaming.
+In the later decades of the twentieth century the dissolution of the
+restrictions imposed by race consciousness on expressive language
+begins to erode, as in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.
+Instead of suppressing, ignoring the possibilities in these
+relationships, instead of the comfort of stereotype and the safety of
+an indolent imagination, one begins to hear not Dinesen’s silence or
+
+Mitchell’s gabble, but verbal fencing; not the unmitigated devotion or
+disobedience of servants, but the wrestle over the meaning of home;
+the probing of subtle jealousies, complicated forms of resistance,
+hatred, love, anger; the learned and earned exchange of mutual
+perception.
+I think I know why African American women writers ignored the
+temptation to widen the racial divide rather than understand it. I am
+not sure why white women writers felt compelled to do likewise. It
+could not have been a simple choice between aestheticizing politics
+or politicizing aesthetics. Nor could it have been a juvenile yearning
+to deserve the terms “humanitarian” and “universal.” Those terms,
+so tainted with the erasure of race, are no longer adequate. I leave it
+to others to name the equipoise that now resides in literature,
+especially of/by women, if not in the public discourse that seeks to
+comprehend it.
+There already exists the material from which a new paradigm for
+reading and writing about literature can arise. Writers have already
+said farewell to the old one. To the racial anchor that weighed down
+the language and its imaginative possibilities. How novel it would be
+if, in this case, life imitated art. If I could have had that television
+interview reflecting my life’s real work. If, in fact, I was not a (raced)
+foreigner but a home girl, who already belonged to the human race.
+
+Invisible Ink
+Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading
+
+I
+
+ONCE WROTE an article for a popular magazine that had a
+small irregular “arts” section. They wanted something laudatory
+about the value or perhaps just the pleasure of reading. This last
+noun, “pleasure,” annoyed me because it is routinely associated with
+emotion: delight accompanied by suspense. Reading is fundamental
+—emphasis on the “fun.” At the least, of course, it is understood, in
+popular discourse, to be uplifting, instructive; at its best encouraging
+deep thought.
+Thoughts about the practice of reading engaged me early on as a
+writer/imaginer as well as an absorbent reader.
+I began reading when I was three years old, but it was always
+difficult for me. Not difficult as in hard to do, but difficult in the
+sense of having a hard time looking for meaning in and beyond the
+words. The first grade primer sentence “Run, Jip, run” led me to the
+question, Why is he running? Is that a command? If so, where to? Is
+the dog being chased? Or is it chasing someone? Later on when I
+tackled “Hansel and Gretel” more serious questions flooded. As they
+did with nursery rhymes and games: “ring around the rosie, pocket
+full of posies.” It was some time before I understood that the rhyme,
+the game was about death during the bubonic plague.
+So I chose for this magazine an attempt to distinguish reading as a
+skill and reading as an art.
+This is some of what I wrote:
+“Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of
+moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards—the color of
+
+silver—and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been
+brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in
+his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to
+enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The
+straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were
+awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it,
+had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just
+flung to his servant.”
+In those opening sentences by Flannery O’Connor, she chose to
+direct her readers to Mr. Head’s fantasy, his hopes. The ticking on a
+pillow, minus a pillow slip, is like brocade, rich, elaborate. Moonlight
+turns a wooden floor to silver and “casts a dignifying light”
+everywhere. His chair is “stiff and attentive” and seems to await an
+order from him. Even his trousers hanging on the chair’s back had “a
+noble air,” like the garment some great man has flung to his servant.
+So, Mr. Head has strong, perhaps unmanageable dreams of majesty,
+of controlling servants to do his bidding, of rightful authority. Even
+the moon in his shaving mirror pauses “as if it were waiting for his
+permission to enter.” We don’t really have to wait (a few sentences
+on) to see his alarm clock sitting on an overturned bucket or to
+wonder why his shaving mirror is five feet away from his bed, to
+know a great deal about him—his pretension, his insecurity, his
+pathetic yearnings—and to anticipate his behavior as the story
+unfolds.
+In my essay, I was trying to identify characteristics of flawless
+writing that made it possible to read fiction again and again, to step
+into its world confident that attentiveness will always yield wonder.
+How to make the work work while it makes me do the same.
+I thought my illustration was fine as far as it went, but what I could
+not clearly articulate was the way in which a reader participates in
+the text—not how she interprets it, but how she helps to write it.
+(Very like singing: there are the lyrics, the score, and then the
+performance—which is the individual’s contribution to the piece.)
+Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden
+until the right reader discovers it. By “right” reader, I am suggesting
+
+that certain books are obviously not for every reader. It’s possible to
+admire but not become emotionally or intellectually involved in
+Proust. Even a reader who loves the book may not be the best or
+right lover. The reader who is “made for” the book is the one attuned
+to the invisible ink.
+The usual dyad in literary criticism is the stable text versus the
+actualized reader. The reader and his readings can change, but the
+text does not. It is stable. As the text cannot change, it follows that a
+successful relationship between text and reader can only come about
+through changes in the reader’s projections. It seems to me that the
+question becomes whether those dormant projections are products
+of the reader or the writer. What I want to suggest is that may not
+always be so. While the responsibility of interpretation is understood
+to be transferred to the reader, the text is not always a quiet patient
+the reader brings to life. I want to introduce a third party into the
+equation—the author.
+Some writers of fiction design their texts to disturb—not merely
+with suspenseful plots, provocative themes, interesting characters, or
+even mayhem. They design their fiction to disturb, rattle, and engage
+the entire environment of the reading experience.
+Withdrawing metaphor and simile is just as important as choosing
+them. Leading sentences can be written to contain buried
+information that completes, invades, or manipulates the reading.
+The unwritten is as significant as the written. And the gaps that are
+deliberate, and deliberately seductive, when filled by the “right”
+reader, produce the text in its entirety and attest to its living life.
+Think of “Benito Cereno” in this regard, where the author chooses
+the narrator’s point of view to deliberately manipulate the reading
+experience.
+There are certain assumptions about categories that are regularly
+employed to arouse this disturbance. I would like to see a book
+written where the gender of the narrator is unspecified,
+unmentioned. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of
+certainties—all deployed by the writer to elicit certain responses and,
+perhaps, to defy others.
+
+Race, as the O’Connor, Coetzee, and Melville examples show,
+contains and produces more certainties. I have written elsewhere
+about the metaphorical uses to which racial codes are put—
+sometimes to clarify, sometimes to solidify assumptions readers may
+hold. Virginia Woolf with her gaps, Faulkner with his delays both
+control the reader and lead her to operate within the text. But is it
+true that the text does not formulate expectations or their
+modification. Or that such formulation is the province of the reader,
+enabling the text to be translated and transferred to his own mind?
+I admit to this deliberate deployment in almost all of my own
+books. Overt demands that the reader not just participate in the
+narrative, but specifically to help write it. Sometimes with a question.
+Who dies at the end of Song of Solomon and does it matter?
+Sometimes with a calculated withholding of gender. Who is the
+opening speaker in Love? Is it a woman or a man who says “Women
+spread their legs wide open and I hum”? Or in Jazz is it a man or
+woman who declares “I love this city”? For the not right reader such
+strategies are annoying, like a withholding of butter from toast. For
+others it is a gate partially open and begging for entrance.
+I am not alone in focusing on race as a non-signifier. John Coetzee
+has done this rather expertly in Life & Times of Michael K. In that
+book we make instant assumptions based on the facts that the place
+is South Africa, the character is a poor laborer and sometimes
+itinerant; that people tend to shy away from him. But he has a severe
+harelip that may be the reason for his bad luck. Nowhere in the book
+is Michael’s race mentioned. As readers we make the assumption or
+we don’t. What if we read the invisible ink in the book and found it to
+be otherwise—as the trials of a poor white South African (of which
+there are legion)?
+Clearly, the opening sentence of Paradise is a blatant example of
+invisible ink. “They shot the white girl first, and took their time with
+the rest.”
+How much will the reader’s imagination be occupied with sorting
+out who is the white girl? When will the reader believe she has
+spotted her? When will it be clear that while having that information
+
+is vital to the town vigilantes, does it really matter to the reader? If
+so, whatever the choice made it is the reader I force into helping to
+write the book; it is the reader whom I summon in invisible ink,
+destabilizing the text and reorienting the reader.
+From “Are you afraid?” the opening sentence of A Mercy, calming
+the reader, swearing to do no harm, to the penultimate chapter’s
+“Are you afraid? You should be.”
+Writing the reading involves seduction—luring the reader into
+environments outside the pages. Disqualifying the notion of a stable
+text for one that is dependent on an active and activated reader who
+is writing the reading—in invisible ink.
+Let me close with some words from a book that I believe is a
+further example.
+“They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.”
+
+Foreword
+Walter Rodney Completes Marx
+Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
+
+Colonization with all its interlinked economic, political, cultural and even
+psychic dimensions, has been central to the making of capitalist modernity.
+It was the new colonies in the West that fuelled Atlantic slave trade with the
+African body as commodity, and slavery, with the African body providing
+unpaid labor for the colonial plantations, and racism, with all its
+dehumanization of the African body and mind. Negation of the African
+humanity.
+All these fueled the development of Europe and the West. The major
+cities of Europe were built by riches from slave trade, slavery and
+colonialism. Three of the major nuclear powers today – the USA, Britain
+and France – were also major players in enslavement and colonization.
+Western Modernity is rooted in the looting of a continent.
+But one of the most frequently propagated colonial mythologies is that
+of Europe and the West having developed Africa. All the major thinkers of
+the European enlightenment from Hume to Kant and Hegel advanced the
+same thesis also embodied in Missionary and Explorer narratives about the
+continent. The myth continues today with the West seen as donor to Africa.
+It was Walter Rodney who best articulated a refutation of that
+mythology in his now universally acclaimed classic: How Europe
+Underdeveloped Africa. This and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth are
+really the basic material for helping make sense of the contradictions which
+still haunt Africa and all the formerly colonized of Asia and South America.
+The African post-colonial elite is very protective of their phony identities;
+
+Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone. But they are never protective of
+the resources of the conntinent. Ninety per cent of these resources,
+including diamonds, gold, oil, copper, cobalt, uranium are still owned by
+Western corporations. Africa, the biggest continent in the world, continues
+to be the main donor to Europe and the West.
+See the contradiction. Europe gave Africa the resources of their accents,
+the basis of those phony identities. Africa gave Europe access to the
+resources of the continent. Accents for Access: that is really the story of
+Africa’s underdevelopment by Europe, well captured and analyzed by
+Walter Rodney.
+Rodney was able to do this because of his Marxian approaches to
+history which enabled him to see clearly the intertwinment of economics,
+politics, culture and values, which, under capitalism rests on the primary
+contradiction between labor and capital. But he was able to add the racial
+and colonial dimension to this. Race, gender and colonialism were integral
+to development of capitalism to its current stage of global imperialism.
+Colonization is colonizer and colonized. So decolonization at the
+economic, political, cultural and psychic levels has to involve both the
+colonizer and the colonized. Even our methodologies need to be
+decolonized from their Eurocentric basis. Marxist class analysis needs the
+dimensions of race and colony and gender to complete it.
+These essays, Decolonial Marxism, will be an important companion to
+our continued learning from the same Pan-African mind that showed us
+clearly how Europe under-developed the continent. With the dimesnions of
+race and colony added to class analysis, Rodney completes Marx.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+I
+Marxist Theory
+and Mass Action
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+1
+A Brief Tribute to Amilcar Cabral
+In Amilcar Cabral, Africa had a giant who bridged the gap between theory
+and practice, and hence represented the embodiment of revolutionary
+praxis. Cabral was a theoretician of the highest calibre – but only because
+he was involved in changing the ugly realities of colonized African society.
+He supervised a People’s War of Liberation with great distinction – but only
+because of the soundness of his scientific worldview and his capacity to
+apply it penetratingly to the social relations of Guinea-Bissau.
+The few pages which Cabral devoted to an analysis of the African
+societies of Guinea-Bissau are of extraordinary perceptiveness and
+authenticity. This is understandable, since the accuracy of the interpretation
+was literally a matter of life and death. The massive task of political
+mobilization that the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and
+Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde –
+PAIGC) so strikingly achieved was based on a correct appreciation of such
+niceties as the relations between youth and elders among the Balanta
+people; or ties between a quasi-feudal Fula lord and his aliens, or the role of
+the itinerant Manding trader within the colonial economy. Based on this
+political mobilization, the military conflict has in turn been decidedly
+resolved in favour of the PAIGC in most parts of Guinea-Bissau.
+It is the element of commitment which sets Cabral apart from the
+common run of intellectuals who boast of being ‘neutral’ and ‘un-biased’,
+thereby passively accepting the perpetuation of the colonial status quo. At
+the same time, Cabral’s work as a revolutionary African intellectual also
+contrasts sharply with the purpose of the early European anthropologists
+who openly oriented their study towards the maintenance of colonial rule,
+by writing ‘intelligence reports’ for the occupying power. Cabral was
+serving as an intelligence officer of the army of liberation, when he
+
+unravelled the intricacies of segmentary lineage groups and the stratified
+social formations which exist in Guinea-Bissau. The fact that the
+Portuguese colonial regime has virtually fallen apart in contrast to the
+surging growth in the area of liberated Guinea is the ultimate proof of the
+reactionary nature of the colonial relationship and the progressive character
+of the intellectual work carried out by Cabral and his colleagues.
+Paradoxical as it may seem, Cabral (leader of a nationalist movement)
+was constantly playing down the importance of mere nationalism. He did so
+through perceiving the difference between a political outlook limited to
+nationalism and one which encompassed a revolutionary transformation of
+the people’s lives along Socialist lines. It is this revolutionary
+transformation that was the supreme objective in Cabral’s eyes. This he
+stressed on the innumerable occasions when he stood before the villagers of
+Guinea-Bissau. He put it to them that:
+Independence is not just a simple matter of expelling the Portuguese, of having a flag and a
+national anthem. The people must be secure in the knowledge that no one is going to steal
+their labour, that the wealth of the country is not going into somebody else’s pocket. Even
+today the Guinean people stand naked and are still afraid of the river, the rain and the forest.
+We tell the Guinean people that by their work the river will be tamed, and the rain will be put
+to good use.
+
+Here was the straightforward language meant to fortify against further
+manifestations of neo-colonialism, the growth of a national bourgeoisie, and
+the perpetuation of ignorance and fear among the masses.
+Cabral saw that the nationalist struggle chronologically preceded the
+Socialist revolution, but that it was imperative to prepare for the subsequent
+Socialist revolution from the onset of the national phase. Armed struggle
+was the unavoidable path to the liberation of Guinea. Yet, politics has
+remained in command throughout. The PAIGC has constantly involved
+itself in the cadre formation, mass mobilization and the creation of
+democratic Socialist structures and attitudes. All of these programmes
+benefited from the long-term vision of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the PAIGC
+since its inception in September 1956.
+For those of us who aspire towards a deeper appreciation of historical
+dialectics, Cabral’s analyses are models for study; one doubts whether even
+the sceptic can remain unimpressed by the strength and flexibility of his
+arguments concerning the role of respective strata and classes within the
+Guinean revolution. Cabral broke away from a rigid categorization of this
+
+or that class as ‘reactionary’ or ‘revolutionary’. Instead, he was concerned
+with the dual revolutionary/reactionary potential of most of the elements
+involved in the nationalist struggle. He examined the specifics of Guinean
+society and pinpointed the methods by which revolutionary potential could
+be realized under the guidance of the PAIGC.
+Franz Fanon, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for
+popularizing the notion of the revolutionary nature of the African peasantry.
+Speaking at the Franz Fanon Centre in Milan, Cabral found it necessary to
+caution that while the peasantry had the greatest objective interest in the
+struggle, the peasantry was not a revolutionary force – rather it constituted
+the principal physical force available to the armed struggle.
+The contradiction between himself and Fanon is more apparent than
+real. What Cabral is warning against is the facile conclusion drawn by some
+that the peasants will be spontaneously revolutionary. Bitter experience has
+shown that this is not true even for the industrial working class, in spite of
+the highly socialized nature of industrial production. Cabral was in effect
+renewing the battle against the concept of revolutionary spontaneity and
+restating the case for painstaking mobilization by the most conscious
+elements. Then, and only then, would the peasantry become a revolutionary
+force.
+Great political leaders derive their stature from their relationship to a
+given social class, usually when that class is on the ascendant. In this
+instance, Cabral’s greatness is tied into the forward movement of the
+labouring population of the Guinea-Bissau, Africa and the Third World. Not
+only is he a product and spokesman for that movement, but he has been an
+active agent in moulding the force of change in an anti-imperialist direction.
+Indeed, one can say that Amilcar Cabral still remains an active agent
+working against imperialism, both through the legacy of his thought and in
+the structures he left behind. It would be idle and dangerous to deny that the
+enemy still has the capacity to sow divisions and cause confusion within the
+Guinean liberation movement. Cabral’s own assassination is testimony to
+this effect. But at a certain point, a movement becomes irreversible, and all
+the efforts of the enemy smack of desperation and insanity, as we have seen
+in the last days before the Vietnamese people achieved their historic victory
+over US imperialism. Victory in Guinea Bissau, for the popular forces, in
+Angola and in Mozambique, is the only justification that Cabral would
+require, and on all fronts that victory is in the making.
+
+2
+Masses in Action
+Over the past decade, Guyana has been stirred into a state of constant selfexamination. The results, however, have been meagre and disappointing,
+largely because the discussion has been confined to the period after 1953,
+and to the personalities, failures and recriminations of that era.1 There is a
+tacit assumption that only in 1953 did mass involvement in Guyanese
+political affairs begin, national political leaders arise, and racial suspicion
+and strife find expression. Guyanese history began a long time ago. Even
+the beginning of the twentieth century is an arbitrary and not entirely
+satisfactory point at which to take up the story of the Guyanese masses; but
+it does allow some scope for at least an interim examination of the
+Guyanese past in terms which are relevant to the working class.
+By the end of the nineteenth century the net result of nearly three
+centuries of varied activity by external forces on the Guyana mainland was
+the creation of a small society limited to the coastlands, to the production of
+sugar and to all that went with sugar in terms of class stratification and
+foreign exploitation. Today, the fundamentals of the situation remain
+unaltered, with sugar accounting for more than 40 per cent of national
+revenues. Yet the old colonial system had its critics; the most serious of all
+possible critics – the working masses. It is the contention here that both the
+marginal modification of an entirely sugar-bound society and the hostility
+evoked by that society are to be traced to the years after 1900, and in
+particular to the period of the First World War.
+
+Bauxite
+
+In the economic sphere the principal supplement to sugar in Guyana today
+is bauxite. At the outbreak of the First World War a number of mining
+concessions were issued when geological evidence indicated that extensive
+deposits of bauxite were likely to be encountered in Guyana. The largest
+concession was held by the Demerara Bauxite Company, which was
+registered locally in 1916, backed by American and Canadian financial
+interests. The Demerara Bauxite Company built the town of Mackenzie
+before the end of the war; and early in November 1919 there was a
+Chronicle report that the company had just exported 1,500 tons of bauxite –
+its fourth shipment.2
+All Guyanese welcomed the discovery of bauxite, but there was a
+revealing debate about the role of American capital, when it was
+ascertained that the Northern Alumina Company of Toronto, of which the
+Demerara Bauxite Company was a subsidiary, was merely a facade for US
+capitalists. Primarily, the question was posed in terms of British imperial
+interests versus those of the United States; and in fact the British
+government suspended the granting of mineral concessions in Guyana
+during the latter stages of the war, with the hope that British capital would
+give a better account of itself after the struggle in Europe had ended. But
+there was also the underlying assumption in the Guyanese press that local
+interests could well have been jeopardized by US capital, and local
+entrepreneurs demanded the opportunity to be allowed to raise capital and
+take the initiative in the bauxite industry. As it turned out, the North
+American financiers and industrialists had the field to themselves. The
+Demerara Bauxite Company quickly joined forces with and took partial
+control of Sprostons, the most important engineering and shipping firm in
+Guyana at that time; and together they came to dominate the Demerara river
+and with it a significant section of the economy.
+
+Growth of US Imperialism in Latin America
+Stimulated by wartime conditions, trade between Guyana and the United
+States was on the increase, and imports from the US were rapidly
+outstripping imports from Britain. Guyana was but a small part of a process
+of development taking place in the whole Latin American and Caribbean
+
+area. In Jamaica, the US had gone further towards capturing the local
+market than in any other British West Indian territory; while in Surinam it
+was also US capital which had started the bauxite industry. This new US
+offensive was a further stage in the decline of European influence in the
+southern Americas, a process which started with the Haitian revolution.
+The nineteenth century had already shown that European decline meant
+replacement by US domination. This situation was being seriously
+discussed in the Caribbean and Latin America at the end of the First World
+War. The Argosy gave prominence to a discourse by an Argentine
+intellectual on the dangers that were imminent because of US imperialism.
+All the British West Indian islands were particularly concerned that the
+British were planning to relinquish their Caribbean possessions to the
+United States. The answer to this new threat, they felt, was a federation;
+though curiously enough, this too was envisaged in broad hemispheric
+terms to include Canada. Subsequently, the hopes of federation were
+dashed, while the fears that the British would relinquish their possessions to
+the US were fully justified in every respect except that of international law.
+Simultaneously with bauxite, the more glamorous attraction of
+diamonds was presented. By 1922 the diamond industry was flourishing,
+accounted in value for one quarter of the exports of Guyana. Since gold had
+been discovered in 1882, with rubber and balata providing further
+incentives, and with bauxite and diamonds in the offing too, it is not
+surprising that the ‘bush’ acquired a new meaning for Guyanese and the
+habit of looking inland was probably enhanced by the partial breakdown of
+the traditional relations with Europe, which the war effected. During the
+war, people keenly debated the feasibility of such schemes as a road to link
+up with the main Pan-American highway, and a railway deep into the
+hinterland, while an economic survey of the Rupununi region was
+proposed.
+The parallel with Guyana of 1966 is striking. The interior can be seen to
+represent in the consciousness of the Guyanese an escape from the insular
+and colonial relations of the narrow coastal strip and, incidentally, it is clear
+that the masses are taking the initiative in the matter. This consciousness,
+for obvious geographical reasons, is absent from the islands of the
+Caribbean, but it is not unique so far as the mainland territories are
+concerned. A modern historian sees the most characteristic element of Latin
+American history as being its ‘El Dorado Spirit’;3 and that spirit was
+
+perfectly exemplified by the Guyanese ‘Pork-Knocker’, as well as being
+shared by those who remained behind.
+Precious little emerged out of the hope that the interior offered Guyana
+a brighter future. All that came of the scheme of communication with the
+hinterland was the Rupununi cattle tract, which was opened in 1917. The
+gold rush of the 1880s had declined considerably in the early years of the
+twentieth century. Mushroom companies had collapsed as yields proved
+unremunerative, and the diamond industry was to follow a similar pattern.
+Both minerals continued to produce regular revenue, but the scale of
+operations was small. At a glance, it seems that the Guyanese had
+overestimated their resources; but it was those who believed that the
+country had only minor alluvial deposits of gold and diamonds – but no
+supplies at great depth – who were living in a world of fancy. The woeful
+ignorance and apathy of the colonial regime militated against the rational
+utilization of Guyana’s resources.
+
+Indentured Immigration
+The conception of change which the Guyanese workers entertained during
+the war was by no means restricted to the exploration of the interior. On a
+number of vital fronts, they were prepared to wage a struggle against the
+forces of oppression. One of their most crucial battles was for an end to
+indentured immigration, and subsequently for the prevention of exploitation
+of the same ilk.
+There were veiled indications in the Guyanese press that when McNeil
+and Chiman Lal, the two commissioners from India, visited Guyana in 1916
+to investigate the indenture system, they were carefully guided to their
+sources of information; and there were strong assertions on the part of the
+Indian and Negro workers that they had struggled uncompromisingly
+against the system of indenture. The commissioners’ report was not
+decisively condemnatory, but in any event 18 April 1917 saw the arrival of
+the last ship bringing indentured immigrants from India. By the time that
+the last indentured contracts were served, all sectors of the society became
+nominally free.
+
+Indenture, unlike slavery, was constantly producing free citizens in large
+numbers, some of whom were repatriated at the expiry of their contract.
+Indeed, the rate of repatriation was quite high. In the twenty years between
+1891 and 1911 a total of 36,016 Indian immigrants returned home,
+compared with the 65,764 who arrived during the same period. Many of the
+Indians who remained in Guyana, like the freed Negroes, moved away from
+the sugar estates and attempted to set themselves up as an independent
+peasantry. In 1890, 30 per cent of the East Indians earned their living
+outside of the sugar estates; while by 1911 less than half of those labourers
+brought to Guyana in the interest of the sugar industry were still to be found
+on the sugar estates. The population of Guyana in December 1917 was
+314,000, out of whom 137,000 were Indians, and only 62,000 of them were
+labouring on the sugar estates.
+
+Rice
+Rice provided the basis for the East Indian withdrawal from the sugar
+plantations. Some African slaves and their descendants had planted rice in
+Guyana and elsewhere, but it was not a crop that was widespread in West
+Africa, in contrast to India, from where the indentured immigrants brought
+techniques of irrigated rice farming. As early as 1905, Guyanese rice
+imports began to drop, and shortly afterwards the local rice industry was not
+only taking care of the domestic consumption but was also exporting.
+Under wartime conditions, the rice industry was able to set its sights clearly
+on exports, because it was easy to capture the West Indian market which
+was starved of food imports. In Guyana itself there were food shortages,
+making it necessary for an embargo to be placed on the export of rice in
+1917. However, in March 1919, permits were once more issued for the
+export of rice to the West Indian islands, so that the rice industry emerged
+from the crucible of the war as Guyana’s second agricultural activity.
+Naturally enough the East Indian peasants wanted land. The planter and
+government attitude towards the settlement of indentured immigrants on
+small holdings was not initially favourable, but both in Trinidad and
+Guyana they were prepared to grant small amounts of land if this would
+keep labour from returning to India. Besides, the land had to be properly
+
+drained and irrigated for rice farming, and the crop needed to be financed
+and marketed. All these problems have only been successfully tackled in
+the last few years, so that for decades the rice farmers waged a constant
+struggle against drought and flood, and against the voraciousness of the
+Georgetown merchants who advanced credits and then bought the paddy or
+rice at ridiculously low prices. Yet, for all this, the East Indian peasant, like
+the ex-slaves who had managed to set up free villages in Guyana, had to
+some extent escaped the toils of the plantation system, and it is probably
+significant that, according to Chandra Jayawardena, ‘the Indians of the ricegrowing villages consider the Indian plantation labourers to be disorderly
+and immoral’.4 Throughout the Caribbean, the heritage of sugar is one of
+degradation.
+
+Indian ‘Middle Class’
+While the mass of the East Indian population was either labouring on the
+sugar estates or in the rice fields, there were also small numbers of
+merchants and professional men of the race already prominent by 1917,
+precisely because indenture had long been producing free citizens. Clearly
+such individuals had already acquired interests quite different from the East
+Indian workers and peasants. It was an East Indian landowner and rice
+miller, Gayadeen, who was a principal opponent to the scheme of setting up
+a cooperative rice mill, when this was proposed late in 1918. His intention
+was that the peasants should be entirely dependent on him, and he issued a
+thinly veiled threat to increase the rent of the ground and the houses of the
+East Indian peasants over whom he held the whip hand. Veeraswamy, a
+Georgetown lawyer, was accused of hypocritical posturing when he called
+upon the East Indian workers of Guyana to fight for king and country, while
+allowing himself to be persuaded that he was too valuable an asset to
+Guyana to risk enlistment. However, it was the small East Indian section of
+the ‘middle class’ to whom the indentured and ex-indentured immigrants
+looked for guidance and leadership, and in turn the lawyers and merchants
+sought to articulate the interests of the East Indian community as a whole.5
+For instance, when there was a serious disagreement on a sugar estate, the
+
+labourers would trek to Georgetown and seek the assistance of prominent
+individuals like Luckhoo and Veeraswamy.
+
+Racial Consciousness
+It appears that by the 1890s the East Indians had begun to consolidate some
+sort of community life. By 1917 there were forty-six mosques and fortythree temples, while only two temples had been seen by a royal commission
+in 1870.6 The end of indenture, though not as decisive as the end of slavery,
+produced a new wave of communal feeling among the East Indians of
+Guyana, one of the products of which was the British Guiana East Indian
+Association. The idea was put into practice on the initiative of Mr Mudhoo
+Lall Bhose, and the other signatories of the first circular calling for the
+formation of the association were J. Viapree, Rampersaud Sawh, E. Kawall,
+J.D. Rohee, M. Ishmael, A.S. Ruhoman and Peter Ruhoman. On 13
+February 1919 the association came into being with Mr J. Luckhoo as the
+first president.7 The aims and objects of the British Guiana East Indian
+Association were the social, intellectual and moral improvement of its
+members by means of debates, lectures, writing of essays, and the provision
+of library and recreational facilities. After some disagreement, it was
+decided that the Association should also indulge in political activities. The
+Association also published Indian Opinion as its official organ,
+championing the cause of the East Indians in Guyana. In addition, there was
+a keen interest in the affairs of the Indian subcontinent. The editorial of an
+early issue of Indian Opinion published in May 1919 dealt with the recent
+disturbances in India and the affairs of the Indian National Congress.
+There was a simultaneous resurgence of Negro racial consciousness. It
+was also linked to the end of indenture, since discussions of the role and
+status of the East Indians in Guyana inevitably involved comparisons with
+the Negroes. But even more decisive was the impact of the American Negro
+struggle.
+The government twice attempted to pass legislation (in 1918 and 1919)
+against the importation of American Negro literature, which was widely
+read among the Guyanese Negro masses. The end of the war saw the
+attempts of the Pan-African movement to lobby the Peace Conference in
+
+France. Meetings were held in various places, notably in the town halls of
+Georgetown and New Amsterdam, to discuss the question of sending a
+delegate to Versailles. Letters to the press, lectures and sermons on the
+problems of the Negro were all common, drawing frequently on examples
+from the US.
+By 1923, the Negro masses had formed organizations such as the
+Georgetown branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
+(Marcus Garvey’s), the African Communities League and the Negro
+Progress Convention. The relatively small Portuguese community also
+sought to organize itself around the Portuguese Benevolent Society. There
+was much talk among them of their ‘Portuguese patrimony’, of the need to
+preserve the Portuguese language in Guyana, and of the desirability of a
+Portuguese political party.
+
+The Class Struggle
+Co-existing with the emphasis on racial identity was a powerful upsurge of
+class consciousness. The Rev. M.A. Cossou, speaking at McKenzie in
+February 1919, remarked that ‘if, as President Wilson has said, the world
+must be safe for democracy, the relations between capital and labour must
+be of the best’. Three months later, the preamble to a resolution of workers
+in Georgetown proceeded as follows: ‘That this meeting of the working
+classes in the City of Georgetown and delegates from various associations
+of the working classes in the electorate of the counties of Demerara,
+Essequibo, Berbice and the Town of New Amsterdam, expresses … etc.’
+These were typical expressions of the awareness of the fundamental class
+contradictions in the society.
+
+Rising Prices
+During the war, prices had rocketed. A commission appointed to prepare a
+report on the salaries of civil servants found that on average the cost of
+living had increased 150 per cent by 1918. What improvement would the
+end of the war bring? This was the principal question posed by Guyanese as
+
+the conflict in Europe neared an end. In December 1918, shortly after the
+Armistice of the previous November, Rev. R.T. Frank, a great champion of
+the workers, warned them not to expect too much. In particular, he was
+gloomy but realistic in his assessment that the cost of living would not fall.
+He urged the formation of labour unions, and it was precisely the high
+prices of goods during and after the war that forced the workers to organize
+themselves.
+
+Dockers’ Agitation
+As early as 1905, H.N. Critchlow, then eighteen years old and a dock
+labourer, conceived with some other waterfront workers the idea of going
+on strike for higher wages. It was put into practice that very year,
+precipitating widespread rioting which was answered by the guns of the
+police. When another attempt at strike action was made the following year,
+Critchlow, as the spokesman of the dock workers, was brought before the
+city magistrate on a charge of ‘preventing a labourer named Abraham
+Richie from earning an honest living’. The charge was dropped but so was
+the scheme for striking. It was not until 1916 that a new move was made.
+The hours of work for waterfront labourers at that time were 6.30 a.m. to
+6.00 p.m., with an interval of one hour for breakfast. The dockers
+determined that the hours should be reduced and that the wages of 64 cents
+per day should be increased to 84 cents. With the help of J. Sydney
+McArthur, a Georgetown barrister, and Nelson Cannon, a member of the
+Court of Policy, they prepared a petition to the government. When this
+failed, militant strike action gained the workers their demands.
+The first success of the waterfront workers in 1916 was an empty one,
+since prices continued to spiral, and in September 1918, they returned to the
+attack. Led once more by Critchlow, they demanded increases for both
+casual and full-time workers, a different system of payment and a reduction
+of hours. The dockers bargained astutely, drawing up a detailed cost of
+living index showing the increases in the prices of foodstuffs and other
+essentials. Working a full six-day week of sixty-nine hours, regular
+employees could earn a maximum of only four dollars and eighty cents per
+week, which was manifestly inadequate when placed against the cost of
+
+living index. The Chamber of Commerce, which handled the negotiations
+for Bookers and other Water Street firms, claimed that they were not
+responsible for the rise in the prices of basic foodstuffs, and they were at
+first prepared to grant an increase of no more than one shilling per week.
+The dockers were adamant and won their point. In a final letter conceding
+victory to the workers, the Chamber of Commerce added ominously that
+‘the Council hopes that this will place a period on recurring demands’.
+The length of the dockers’ working day then stood at nine hours. The
+‘Eight-Hour Day’ became the next rallying cry of these workers, and claims
+for this were pressed on the Chamber of Commerce early in December
+1918. The Chamber had already hinted that they intended to call a halt to
+any further improvements in the lot of the dockers; and they now expressed
+‘extreme regret and surprise that the labourers, within six weeks of a
+generous and liberal concession of all the terms demanded in their petition
+dated 16th September, 1918, should again approach the Chamber for further
+concessions’. The merchants claimed that since the beginning of the war,
+the scale of payment had risen by nearly 100 per cent, and, to knock off one
+hour from the nine-hour day would mean in effect another increase of 10
+per cent. The Chamber’s continued rejection of the dockers’ claim for the
+eight-hour day was categorical, leaving no room for bargaining. Thus, in
+January 1919, militant strike action was decided upon, leading directly to
+the formation of the British Guiana Labour Union.
+
+The British Guiana Labour Union (BGLU)
+The BGLU celebrates its anniversary on 11 January, but the organization
+which was in existence on 11 January 1919 seems to have been no more
+than a ‘Porters Union’, an unofficial entity called into being by the
+waterfront strike. It was on 6 April that a meeting was held at the Unique
+Friendly Society in Regent Street at which Critchlow proposed a resolution
+for the establishment of a labour union, and this was carried. Two
+representatives of Bookers were also invited, and from them came the
+suggestion for the formation of an Industrial Council for settling disputes
+between the dockers and the Water Street employers. The three-man council
+
+met shortly afterwards and recommended the eight-hour day and certain
+wage increases.
+Out of the agitation of the dockers arose an organization which
+transcended their own struggle. As one correspondent to the Argosy pointed
+out, the tense post-war labour situation in the world at large which was
+regularly treated in the Guyanese press could not help but influence the
+Guyanese proletariat. It was a testimony to the revolutionary mood of
+labour throughout the land that requests started pouring in for membership
+of the BGLU from various parts of the country.
+In April a meeting at Victoria (East Coast Demerara) decided in favour
+of a labour union branch for the area. The following month the workers of
+Bagotville (West Coast Demerara) followed suit; these were typical
+examples of the movement that led to the rapid establishment of a
+countrywide workers organization. All sectors of labour were involved,
+including tradesmen. The first president, M. Hosanah, was a tailor; and
+there were even jibes that residents of the Alms House or Old People’s
+Home were allowed to join the union. This came about because the union
+was also a Friendly and Burial Society, thus grafting itself on to one of the
+oldest forms of social organization that the masses of Guyana had
+experienced.
+The BGLU had a wide base of direct industrial action. The latter portion
+of 1919 and most of 1920 witnessed a succession of disputes and strikes
+involving, among others, the railways, the electric company, the sawmills,
+sugar estates, the Argosy and the docks. The pressure of this agitation,
+carried on by manual workers, was sufficient to gain advantages even for
+the Water Street clerks, though it was not surprising that these white-collar
+workers never showed real loyalty to the workers’ movement.
+The first annual general meeting in 1920 was something of a fiasco, and
+the union nearly disintegrated. Membership fell from a peak of 13,000 to a
+few hundred, but the union continued to function as a pressure group. By
+1923, the delegates to the general conference could look back on a few
+years of solid achievement. One union campaign had led to the passage
+early in 1922 of a Rent Restriction Bill. There was a rumour in January
+1923 that the Rent Act was about to be repealed, and the workers prepared
+to resume the fight if necessary. This was one of several ways in which the
+workers indicated that they would use the union to undertake tasks other
+than wage negotiations.
+
+One resolution of the 1923 conference aimed at the establishment of a
+voluntary organization to provide advice which would prevent the masses
+from indulging in petty litigation in cases which could be settled out of
+court. Another principal concern was with unemployment, against which a
+petition was organized. Perhaps the most ambitious of the moves taken by
+the BGLU was its attempt to convene the first ever West Indian Conference
+in 1920. Unfortunately, only the Trinidad Working Men’s Association was
+able to send delegates – the remaining territories expressing willingness but
+inability to attend. The chance to develop a common West Indian
+perspective for the labour movement was therefore lost, though workers’
+struggles in Trinidad were closely watched in Guyana.
+
+Rural Revolution
+It is necessary to stress that the awakening among the Guyanese masses was
+countrywide, and not simply confined to the activities of the urban workers
+in Georgetown. The BGLU took an interest in plantation labourers also,
+though its activities on the plantations were severely limited by the
+managers’ opposition to their labourers joining the union. East Indian
+labourers for the most part continued to use Crosby8 and the Immigration
+Department to voice their problems, asking prominent Indian lawyers to
+intercede on their behalf. This was by no means a passive arrangement.
+Both the Crosby and the Indian lawyers had to meet huge deputations who
+arrived in Georgetown from the particular plantation or area where the
+grievances were felt.
+Often the whole plantation staff left en masse as happened in 1917 and
+again in 1924 with labour from Ruimveldt. On the latter occasion there was
+an encouraging unity between rural and urban effort. Four thousand Indians
+and Negroes started to march on Georgetown with flags, sticks and their
+tools – some to meet Critchlow at the BGLU office and others to the
+Immigration Department to complain about irregular wages.
+Apart from the formation of the labour union, the initiative on the issues
+concerning the wellbeing of the masses came from the rural peasantry. The
+chairman of the Victoria Institute remarked in April 1919 that ‘Georgetown
+looks to the East Coast to decide its political matters’, and the facts did bear
+
+out this situation. The weapons which the rural proletariat and peasantry
+fashioned for their struggle included credit banks and agricultural societies,
+while the village councils and the village chairmen’s conferences provided
+forums for the expression of the will of the rural masses and their
+determination to confront the planter class. In February 1919, the attorney
+general accused A.A. Thorne, a workers’ representative in the Combined
+Court, of wanting to see a set of Bolsheviks in some village led by the
+village chairman. In reply the chairman of the West Bank Agricultural
+Society noted that ‘the Attorney General has brought in the ominous
+Russian term … The question was one of capital and labour. Labour was
+represented by the Farmers’ Conference and the Village Chairman’s
+Conference.’
+
+Cane Farming
+One of the most significant trends during the war era was the development
+of a system of cane growing on a peasant farming basis. In 1897 a royal
+commission had recommended grants-in-aid to cane farmers. Very little was
+done by the government to implement the report, but farmers and sugar
+planters worked out private arrangements on some estates. The farmers
+faced considerable difficulties, such as the transportation of their cane to the
+factories and its unloading, but they organized themselves to overcome
+these problems and to win higher rewards from the sugar estates that
+purchased their product. In March 1919 the Cane Farming Movement
+proposed legislation to regularize the relationship between the small cane
+farmer and the estate that bought and milled his cane. They pointed to
+Trinidad where there was a small amount of legislation passed on the
+subject in 1902, though what the Guyanese farmers would have preferred
+was an extensive code such as that which was in existence in Queensland,
+Australia.
+
+Co-operative Credit Banks
+
+Alongside the cane farming system there sprung up the Co-operative Credit
+Bank movement, since loans over the period from sowing to crop time were
+essential. In fact, credit facilities played an ever-greater role in the young
+rice industry. A number of Co-operative Credit Banks were established
+early in the century, but they became really important as the cane farming
+movement intensified, as the rice industry grew, and when the popularly
+influenced Local Government Board took over the scheme in 1916. At the
+end of 1915, only three banks were registered; by the end of 1916 they had
+increased to 18; and by 1918 there were 26 Co-operative Credit Banks in
+existence. The numbers of shareholders increased from 220 in 1915 to
+5,815 in 1918; and in the same period the working capital had risen from
+611 dollars to 28,020 dollars.
+The operations of the Ann’s Grove-Clonbrook Co-operative Credit
+Bank can be taken as a typical example. During the year 1918 it issued
+loans to 156 shareholders amounting to 2,508 dollars. These extended over
+periods of from one to twelve months and involved sums of from five to
+twenty dollars. Clients were chiefly paddy growers, along with provision
+and cane farmers, hucksters, coconut-oil makers and small businesses.
+Their efforts were obviously small, since there were narrow limits to what
+could be wrung from the colonial regime.
+
+The Reaction of the Plantocracy
+Every one of the tendencies so far pinpointed represented a direct or
+potential threat to the old colonial system. The opening up of the interior,
+the end of Indian indenture, the rise of cane farming and the organization of
+the proletariat were all seen by the plantocracy as undermining the structure
+of the sugar society.
+In the 1890s, when the gold fields were opened, the sugar planters
+found great difficulty in maintaining a steady supply of labour at the wages
+they offered and this was the situation which gave rise to the royal
+commission in 1896. But the recommendation of the commission that
+Crown Lands should be opened up to peasants was anathema to the
+planters. According to J. Eleasar, a Georgetown solicitor, ‘the Crown Lands
+were locked up and kept from the people’s reach for many, many years
+
+because it was thought by the planters that anything done to settle the
+people on the land would tend to take away labour from the sugar estates.’
+That was common knowledge among the masses. By the end of the war the
+planters were more anxious than ever, because bauxite, balata, rice, gold,
+diamonds, cane farming and irrigation schemes offered alternative
+employment to Guyanese workers formerly bound to the sugar estates. The
+planters therefore embarked on a counter-revolutionary offensive.
+After the 1896 commission, the proprietors of Vryheid’s Lust (Berbice
+river) encouraged the cultivation of canes on their estates by farmers, the
+lands being given free of rent. This practice was adopted by a number of
+other estates. In December 1918 the cane farmers were suddenly told that
+they would have to pay nine and twelve dollars per acre. No notice was
+given, neither was there any increase offered to the farmers for their canes.
+La Bonne Mere was the only estate which did not pursue this reactionary
+policy. In vain did the farmers propose alternative schemes for the
+continuation of the cultivation of estate lands. What the planters wanted
+was an excuse to introduce legislation for further immigration, the only
+method which they knew to maintain the hierarchal plantation system. They
+took land out of production which the cane farmers were eager to work; and
+within a short period, in Berbice alone, the estates of Adelphi, Canefield,
+Bath, La Retraite, Highbury, Goldstone Hall and Everton were closed –
+ostensibly because of a shortage of labour, when in fact there were many
+people willing to work if only the starvation wages were increased.
+
+The Colonization Scheme
+Early in 1919, the chairman of the Planters’ Association approached the
+attorney general claiming that there had been a reduction of 6,000 acres in
+the cane industry, and that there was a prospect of greater reduction if
+planters did not get new supplies of labour. Out of this request was born the
+Colonization Bill, which aimed at introducing into Guyana another influx of
+cheap labour, preferably from India.
+The planters introduced the measure at a time when wartime Defence of
+the Colony Regulations were still in force. Thorne complained that ‘it was
+manifestly unfair that when the labourers who were interested in the matter
+
+were told they were not to deal with the matter as a result of the times in
+which they lived, that on the other hand the capitalists could meet together
+and formulate a scheme’. However, the workers refused to be gagged. They
+recognized the Colonization Scheme for what it was – an attempt to
+undercut local labour and keep them in a position of subjection. They
+campaigned vigorously against the proposal when it came before the
+Combined Court, and warned the elected representatives that they should
+express popular opposition to the bill. A Chronicle editorial countered by
+saying that ��the elective members would be very foolish to be terrorised by
+agitators, who warn them not to vote for these proposals at the peril of their
+seats.’ It hinted darkly that such action would supply the strongest
+arguments for the creation of Crown Colony Government. Such threats did
+not stop the workers all over the country from making their position plain.
+Every one of the anti-colonization meetings held all over the country was a
+success, while the pro-colonization faction found that their meetings were
+invariably fiascos.
+Although the Combined Court did send a mission to England and India,
+nothing came of the Colonization Scheme. Nevertheless, it was the most
+important issue of public debate in Guyana at the end of the First World
+War, and it showed decisively how keenly the masses were assessing their
+colonial situation and how determined they were to put an end to it. In the
+mood they were in, nothing escaped the vigilance of the masses. When the
+government introduced legislation to ban the import of Negro American
+literature, the workers fought this on two occasions; when a reactionary
+Jury Bill was brought forward, the workers again fought bitterly, though
+without success; and on yet another occasion, popular opposition nipped in
+the bud a proposal of the governor’s that a vagrancy law should be passed
+to coerce labourers to work on public works at ridiculous wages.
+
+The Constitution
+A reminder of the type of political system existing in Guyana is necessary
+at this juncture. In 1891, the Court of Policy, which was until then a purely
+nominated body, was reformed to allow the election of fourteen members
+along with the eight members nominated by the governor, who together sat
+
+in the Combined Court. There were also two elected financial
+representatives, though the power over finance was constantly in dispute,
+because it introduced a clash with the executive authority of the governor.
+In any event, it took some time before the governing body reflected the
+change in the Constitution, the nature of that change being to give some
+representation to the coloured and Portuguese ‘middle class’.
+Given the very narrow and restricted franchise, it is obvious that the
+new representatives in the Combined Court after 1891 were not elected by
+the workers, and did not represent the workers. But some benefits were
+derived by having in the centre of local political power a group of
+individuals who were opposed to the planter class and to many aspects of
+the old colonial system. For instance, as Raymond Smith noted, it is
+probably significant that the rice industry started at a time when the sugar
+industry was depressed, and when the new ‘middle class’ were coming into
+power after the constitutional reforms of 1891. Besides, the ‘middle class’
+themselves were not satisfied. They clamoured for more control over the
+affairs of the country, especially in the financial sphere; and as so often
+happens, they encouraged the workers to shout along with them to make as
+great a noise as possible.
+The year 1916 appears to have been decisive. A Recall Movement was
+launched against the then governor, Egerton, who had become unpopular
+with the Georgetown merchants because he interfered with their
+unwholesome speculation in rice exports. However, the ‘middle class’
+played to a public gallery which had its own reason for abhorring the
+colonial system and its representative, the governor. The workers, too,
+began to take up the cry for a more democratic Constitution and for a
+political programme for their own betterment. As one correspondent of the
+Chronicle wrote in October 1918, ‘It is a common thought among the
+poorer peoples of this colony that places under British rule do not make
+rapid progress … Until the policy of the country gets into the hands of the
+people through their representatives, it is bound to make slow progress.’
+By the end of the war, the electorate was faced with a ‘Progressive
+Party’, which was not an organizational unit, but an alliance of politicians,
+that had emerged out of the Recall Movement with the intention of
+capturing all fourteen of the seats which were to be filled by election.
+Again, they identified themselves with the masses, and this itself was to
+provide grounds for disillusionment when they were successfully elected.
+
+Political Influence of the Masses
+The influence which the workers wielded under the limited franchise of the
+pre-adult suffrage era is usually underestimated. The physical unrest of the
+masses was a factor which had always to be taken into account. During the
+first three decades of this century, disturbances and riots erupted with great
+frequency. Known as ‘bread riots’, one could not ask for more blatant
+examples of people asking for bread and being given bullets. The breathless
+haste with which the colonial regime read the Riot Act was a testimony to
+their deep-rooted fear of mass action that they had inherited from the sugar
+planters and slave owners.
+Quite apart from the threat of violence, the workers made an impact
+through public meetings. Georgetown workers met under the auspices of
+the BGLU to discuss the relative merits of Percy Wight and P.N. Cannon,
+concluding that the latter was an enemy of the working class; workers in
+New Amsterdam met and demanded that Eustace Woolford should return to
+the constituency and give an account of his stewardship in the Combined
+Court, and especially to explain his ambivalence on the Colonization Bill
+which the workers had denounced; while peasant farmers of the East Coast
+Demerara met at Victoria Village, condemned the government in power,
+and agreed to form a ‘Political Association’, embracing members from
+Anne’s Grove and Bachelor’s Adventure. All this was in the period after the
+Recall Movement and the formation of the ‘Progressive Party’, and it may
+appear futile because the workers had no vote.
+Yet the popular clamour had its effect on those who held the vote and
+those who appeared as representatives of the people. By 1923, for example,
+Cannon had lost the Georgetown mayoralty, and while he himself retained a
+seat in the Combined Court the candidates whom he supported were all
+unsuccessful. Proof of the impact of popular agitation against the
+Colonization Bill came when the government itself decided to hold a
+number of public meetings to win support for the measure. The workers
+simply invaded those meetings, held in 1919, and passed resolutions of their
+own calling for improvements in sanitation, drainage and irrigation and
+wages before they would consent to a further influx of immigrant.
+
+The Suspension of the Constitution in 1928
+Everyone felt that the Constitution of 1891 had outlived its usefulness. The
+‘middle class’ wanted more power, especially over the finances and the
+executive; while the planter class, having already ceded some of their
+authority to the ‘middle class’, and seeing the spectre of mass power if
+more liberal reforms were granted, were willing to let the British crown
+take direct responsibility for the colony of British Guiana. Dissatisfaction
+with constitutional forms was in fact general in the British West Indies after
+the war, and resulted in the appointment of a royal commission, which
+visited the area and reported in 1922. The Wood Commission, as it was
+called, rejected the demands of the Guyanese planter class to take a step
+backward, but neither did it allow the presence of elected members on the
+executive as the ‘Progressive Party’ requested. No important changes were
+made, so the elections of 1926 were held under the Constitution of 1891.
+A.R. Webber, one of Guyana’s few historians, and an individual who
+was himself personally involved in the politics of the period, wrote that the
+elections of October 1926 were ‘fought with unexampled ferocity’, and that
+‘the declaration at the polls showed a sweeping victory for the Popular
+Party; and a complete and devastating rout of their opponents, who were
+well possessed of this world’s goods’.9 But practically every seat was
+judicially challenged, and eventually five members of the Court of Policy
+were unseated on legal technicalities. No doubt the Colonial Office was
+being informed of these developments, as well as receiving advice from the
+planter group to put an end to the Constitution which gave power to the
+upstart ‘middle class’ and encouraged the workers to dabble in politics.
+As mentioned before, as early as 1919, there were dark hints that if the
+elected members allowed themselves to be influenced by popular agitators
+this would ‘supply the strongest arguments for the creation of a Crown
+Colony government’. Again in 1925, this idea was publicly voiced by the
+governor of British Guiana when he returned to England; and in 1927 it was
+decided to put it into practice.
+No one quite knew what was the purpose of the commissioners who
+visited Guyana in 1927 – at least not until the following year when it
+became clear that they had been seeking excuses to suspend the
+Constitution. At any rate, the Constitution of 1891 was so radically changed
+
+that the effect was to remove all power from the elected representatives. It
+is clear that even the small measure of representation under the Constitution
+of 1891 was seen by the colonial regime as a threat. Thus in 1928, not for
+the first time nor for the last, a constitutional coup d’état was effected to
+break local resistance to the British imperial system.
+
+Race and Class
+In so far as reflection on the period under discussion is understandably
+influenced by the present conjuncture of circumstances in Guyana, it is
+obvious that the question of the inter-relation between race and class
+consciousness is of the utmost importance. In the decade after 1955, these
+two factors proved antagonistic, and consequently the anti-colonialist
+struggle of the Guyanese masses received a serious setback. However,
+between 1900 and 1928 the situation was entirely different. Then, it was the
+awareness among both Indians and Negroes of the peculiar disadvantages
+under which their own race laboured that precipitated an attack on the
+colonial society.
+Racial consciousness was mobilized when a group felt it laboured under
+special disadvantages. Indian Opinion launched an attack on the
+government for keeping the East Indian masses in a state of illiteracy. It
+pointed out that of 20,000 children of East Indian parentage of school-going
+age, only 6,000 were attending school. This was branded as ‘a neglect not
+only inexcusable, but culpable’. On an issue such as this communal anger
+was jointly directed against the colonial regime, because the Negro masses
+were at that very moment waging a struggle to lay the foundations of a
+more democratic educational system, rejecting the ‘Payment by Results’
+and other limitations which were in vogue since the Elementary Education
+Ordinance of 1876. Incidentally, the struggle of the teachers not only on
+their own behalf, but for a system of education which would benefit their
+pupils and the country, is undoubtedly one of the most magnificent in the
+annals of the history of the Guyanese working class.
+Apart from the demands for more education, there was also some
+consideration given to the curricula, and one of the suggestions of the East
+Indian community was that Indian languages should be taught. One striking
+
+feature of the debate on the issue by the Teachers’ Association was the
+position taken by R. French, who argued that unless they took steps to teach
+the Indian languages, the latter would disappear, as the African languages of
+the slaves had disappeared, and the community would be the poorer. This,
+and many other views on related topics, indicated that the racial groups in
+Guyana were seriously addressing themselves to an examination of where
+they stood, of what they possessed of value, and of what changes were
+desirable. At every juncture, they were unmasking the colonial society as
+the enemy.
+When in 1917 the East Indians succeeded in having marriage
+ceremonies by Moulvis and Pandits recognized, they had gained a victory
+over the white-Christian-capitalist conception of the society,10 and it was
+against this that the Negro masses too were directing their fire. They joined
+in the refrain of the Negroes of the United States that blacks had fought side
+by side with whites during the war, and now they should be given new
+opportunities. It is extremely significant that the colonial administration
+saw the associations such as the Negro Progress Convention not as racist
+groups but as class formations. The literature from the United States was
+anathema because it was being widely read by ‘the poorer classes of
+society’; and it was suggested that the local branch of Garvey’s movement
+should be banned because it was ‘Bolshevik’.
+The Rev. Frank wrote in January 1919 of the Negro masses of Guyana:
+‘the possibilities wrapped up in them and the powers within them are
+immense.’ This applied equally to the East Indian masses; but for the
+release of the energies of all concerned, there was necessarily a process of
+self-realization, which was taking place in a framework of racial groupings
+rather than in the context of ‘nation’. That process of communal selfrealization did not inevitably bring the races into conflict, nor retard the
+formation of organizations along class lines, nor weaken the struggle
+against colonialism.
+What occurred in the period after 1955 was that communal awareness
+was for various reasons turned inwards to exacerbate racial contradictions
+among the Guyanese workers and peasants. I say ‘exacerbate’ because
+racial conflict in Guyana was an inevitable concomitant of the fact that
+indentured labour (East Indian, Chinese and Portuguese) was conceived
+specifically to break the back of Negro opposition to the planter class.
+Throughout the decades after Indian immigration began in 1838, there were
+
+differences over wages between racial groups on the sugar estates, brought
+about by the deliberate policy of the planters of playing one group off
+against another. No doubt, racial conflict fed racialism, and vice versa; and
+indeed, there are a host of other such interconnections that one could make.
+What is certain is that simple and definitive explanations must give way to a
+more sober analysis of the complexities of the development of the
+Guyanese mass movement – of the relationship between racial
+consciousness and racial prejudice, between economic competition and
+racial conflict, between communal identification and class objectives.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+3
+Marxism and African Liberation
+First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate.
+When one is asked to speak on the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this
+particular time, one is being asked to involve oneself in an historical debate
+– an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the black
+population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year, and from
+my own observations, it is being waged in a large number of places across
+this country.
+Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the
+Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a
+class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position.
+Thus, it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the
+ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our
+discussion.
+It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are
+being debated in this country today, just as they’re being debated in Africa,
+in Asia, in Latin America and in many parts of the metropolitan world in
+Western Europe and in Japan. Because the widespread nature of the debate
+and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalistimperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not just drop from
+the sky. There is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to
+engage others in a meaningless debate.
+Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different
+participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis
+in capitalism and imperialism today; and as the crisis deepens, people find it
+more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought that rationalize
+the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions,
+
+and quite clearly, Marxism, Scientific Socialism poses itself as one of the
+most obvious of the available options.
+The question is not new to Africa or to the black people as a whole –
+that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have raised before the
+question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to
+Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own
+society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians. Its relevance to Latin
+America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have long debated
+the relevance of Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the
+nineteenth century? If so, was it still relevant to the twentieth century? One
+can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of society or to the
+society’s law or culture as a whole.
+These are all issues that have been debated before and we should have
+some sense of history when we approach this question today, because with
+that sense of history we can ask: why is it that the question of the relevance
+of Marxism to society always crops up? And, in a very brief answer, I
+would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is,
+first of all, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are
+dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality.
+At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.
+More than that, the second condition is that people ask the question
+because of their own bourgeois framework. One starts out located within
+the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that
+supports capitalism and which we will call a bourgeois framework of
+perception. And because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to
+raise the question about the relevance of Marxism.
+After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question
+of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the
+other foot!
+But initially, it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there
+is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common
+cause in questioning the relevance, the logic, and so on, of Marxist thought.
+And therefore, in a sense, when we ask that question, we are unfortunately
+also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still
+embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework of bourgeois
+thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy
+and uncertainty – what is the relevance of Marxism?
+
+It is particularly true in our part of the world – that is, the Englishspeaking part of the world – because the Anglo-American tradition is one of
+intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism; a hostility
+that manifests itself in a peculiar way. It manifests itself by trying to
+dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on
+the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same.
+French, German and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective,
+understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they
+understand the body of thought that is called Marxism and they take a
+position vis-à-vis that body of thought.
+In the English tradition, which was also handed down to this part of the
+world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa, it is fashionable to
+disavow any knowledge of Marxism. It is fashionable to glory in one’s
+ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one
+responds – but why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.
+So, one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn’t read it
+because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one’s ignorance
+of the position.
+It is rather difficult to seriously address the question of the relevance of
+Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should
+attempt to enter into this full body of thought, because it is a tremendous
+body of literature and analysis, and from the outside as it were, it is
+extremely difficult.
+Indeed, I would say it is pointless, strictly from the outside, without ever
+having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask what is its
+relevance? It is almost an unanswerable question; and I think in all modesty,
+that for those of us who came from a certain background (and we all come
+from that background), one of the first things we have to do is establish a
+basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and as we
+become familiar with them we can then be in a better position to evaluate
+Marxism’s relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.
+I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in
+this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant; or, let
+me put it another way, whether the variants of time and place make a
+difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense we would
+almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated,
+Western Europe. We don’t have the time to deal with that in detail. But we
+
+can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an
+applicability to Western Europe, or had in the nineteenth century, to what
+extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its
+validity extend across time?
+These are the two variables of time and place. They can be translated to
+mean historical circumstances: time; and culture: place – and what social
+and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us, to make it
+more precise, black people – no doubt well-meaning black people – ask the
+question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the
+culture of Western Europe in the nineteenth century is, today, in the third
+quarter of the twentieth century, still valid for another part of the world –
+namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or black people in this country; whether it
+is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation
+which I wish to present for discussion.
+
+The Methodology of Marxism
+I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought,
+Scientific Socialist thought, would exist at different levels, at different
+times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of
+conceptions that people should grasp.
+The first is to look at Marxism, as a methodology, because a
+methodology would, virtually by definition, be independent of time and
+place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place.
+You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would
+be independent of time and place.
+And essentially, to engage in a rather truncated presentation of
+Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the
+context of limited time I would suggest that, one of the real bases of
+Marxist thought is that it starts from a perspective of man’s relationship to
+the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically,
+consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes
+of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words; and
+rooted itself in the material conditions and in the social relations in society.
+
+This is the difference with which I will start. A methodology that begins
+its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations that
+arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which
+flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature;
+nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour; and
+man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology that in turn creates
+other social changes.
+So, this is the crux of the Scientific Socialist perception. A methodology
+that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on
+the assumption, which I think is a valid assumption, that production is not
+merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a
+special kind of being with a certain consciousness.
+It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself
+from the rest of the primates and the rest of life.
+What does Marxism pose itself against? It poses itself against a number
+of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and
+concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx’s own evolution, it is well
+known that he started by looking first at Hegel – a very plausible and
+perceptive analyst of the nineteenth century who was guilty, in Marx’s own
+estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed
+ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the ‘material’ world as virtually
+deriving from those ideas.
+In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn’t go into Hegel. I would go
+further than Hegel for a classic exposition of the idealist worldview. I take it
+from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated: ‘In the
+beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was
+God.’ That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every
+other thing from there: the Word was God!
+But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people’s
+activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop
+social relations out of production, and that we shouldn’t be mystified with
+words. Oh, naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with
+the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force and one that
+even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.
+Now, Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply
+it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places
+and at different times; but he concentrated his attention on Western Europe.
+
+If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels, you
+will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about
+feudalism; but, by and large, they concentrated on capitalism. They hardly
+even talk about socialism.
+Marx’s great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing
+society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of
+the world? The vast majority of their literature concerns this question.
+But, as I said when I referred to pre-capitalist society, especially
+feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally
+Marx mentions the Asiatic mode of production. Occasionally he came
+across to look at the data concerning the United States. So, he had
+something of a geographical span and a long time span.
+It was so minimal, however, in comparison with the bulk of his work
+that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx’s method and his
+conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing – that Marxism
+is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe but is itself
+an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the nineteenth
+century, and cannot transcend those boundaries, when clearly Marx was
+doing the job he had to do. He was looking at his own society, he was doing
+it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering
+bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution.
+I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and
+place. It is implicit in Marx, and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian
+development – using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx
+himself. After Marx’s death you will get the evolution or the development
+of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognizing that the
+methodology can be applied, must be applied to different times to different
+places.
+Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at
+Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of
+his principal contributions. The first major thesis of the young Lenin was
+The Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own
+society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and
+historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia,
+which was evolving differently, and apply them to his own society. This he
+did.
+
+He had at the same time to consider the time dimension that in the
+nineteenth century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called
+the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism,
+and by the later nineteenth century this had given way to monopoly
+capitalism. It has given way to imperialism. So, Lenin had to deal with that
+method by applying it to a new dimension in time; so he wrote about
+capitalism in its imperialist stage.
+So those are the two variants operating: first, the ideology; and second,
+the methodology of it being applied to different societies at different times
+(we’ll stick to the methodology for the time being). Having made the point
+for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a number of people: Mao Zedong, for
+instance, applying it to Chinese society, which was a different society from
+Russian society; understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society,
+relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound
+way than any previous writer because that was the nature of Chinese
+society, and Mao had addressed himself to that.
+And finally for our purposes, the most important example: the example
+of Amilcar Cabral, because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of
+his most important essays – the one titled ‘The Weapon of Theory’, if I
+recall correctly – began by making clear that the best he could do was to
+return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible
+for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying,
+‘I am going to look for classes’, for example. He said, ‘if I say this I will be
+denying that my people have any history because I do not perceive classes
+for a long period in the genesis of my own people.’
+Then he referred back to Marx and Engels’s classic statement that ‘the
+history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle’, to which
+Engels had appended a note saying that by ‘all history’, we mean ‘all
+previously recorded history’. It so happens that the history of the people of
+Guinea-Bissau hasn’t been recorded, and Cabral says, ‘I want to record that
+history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the concept
+which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that
+society.’
+Marx uses the method, and he discerned the evolution of classes and of
+the phenomenon of classes itself as being a major determinant, the major
+determinant in Western European history at a particular point in time.
+Cabral says we will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern
+
+ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process
+of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of
+Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved. So, without much of a
+fanfare he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African
+society.
+If, and when, in the history of Guinea-Bissau, the aspect of class
+appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such
+time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to
+look at Guinean people in the process of production, at the various modes
+of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose
+historically and the direction in which the society was tending.
+In many respects, when we ask the question today about the relevance
+of Marxism to black people, we have already reached a minority position,
+as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as
+though Marxism is a European phenomenon and black people responding to
+it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter
+into the discussion.
+They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and
+that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of
+the world that are not European.
+That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people;
+that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to
+successful struggle and to the defeat of imperialism. That it is already the
+ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward,
+quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent, industrial power.
+That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin
+American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the
+Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology that was used by Cabral,
+that was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the African continent
+itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new
+society.
+It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon; and the onus
+will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon, which was
+already universalized itself, is somehow inapplicable to some black people.
+The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason,
+perhaps genetic, why the genes of black people reject this ideological
+position.
+
+When we investigate and try to centralize or keep central the concept of
+relevance, we must ask ourselves questions about the present. What kind of
+society, do we live in today? What kind of societies do black people live in
+today in different parts of the world? And while, of course, we as black
+people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa have
+our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that
+we are all in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of
+production.
+The society about which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth,
+dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism, which was
+the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts
+of the world. It created slave society in the Americas.
+Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able
+to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production that
+derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a
+metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of
+peripheries, colonies and semi-colonies.
+So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist
+system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of
+Marxism.
+Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me
+that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe
+it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand, and to hopefully adopt
+and adapt a critique of that capitalist system because that is essentially what
+Marx’s writing is about. He was critiquing that capitalist system. He did so
+more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand
+the world in which we live, which is the world dominated by capitalism,
+then we must understand the centre of that system, the motor within that
+system, the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist
+mode of production. So that is yet another factor.
+
+Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology
+My second consideration after methodology is to look at Marxism as a
+revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology.
+
+In class societies, all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies
+derive from and support some particular class. So, for all practical purposes
+we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant
+in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve
+the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist
+system.
+Now, I would suggest, historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the
+set of ideas we call Scientific Socialism arose within capitalist society to
+speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest
+of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the
+oppressed, of the culturally alienated; and we must understand that of the
+two major sets of ideas before us, idealism and materialism, bourgeois
+philosophy and Marxist philosophy, that each of the two is representative of
+a particular class.
+I don’t have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation
+of socialism, but briefly, in the nineteenth century it was in the rise of
+capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of
+socialist ideas. Out of the diverse and unsystematized socialist ideas, Marx
+was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory – Scientific Socialism.
+It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it
+was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society.
+Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to
+conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations
+which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production.
+A Scientific Socialist position is and remains revolutionary, because it
+aims, consciously aims, at undermining that system of production and the
+political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.
+From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen, who have
+attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is
+true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who
+would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy and who
+treat it in a very eclectic fashion, as though one is free to draw from
+Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalent, without
+looking at the class base and without looking at whether an ideology is
+supportive of the status quo or not.
+Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and Scientific
+Socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system
+
+of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in
+the sky, they do not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete
+relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of
+production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of
+production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive
+from a different class interest and their aim is to overthrow that system of
+production.
+
+Africa and Scientific Socialism
+There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World
+people, have virtually a vested interest in Scientific Socialism, because it
+offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that
+tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the
+capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.
+What I will attempt to deal with as best I can, are certain questions
+arising from individuals who might say yes to most of what I’ve said and
+then will ask the question, ‘Is there no other alternative? Is there no other
+ideological system which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but is anticapitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of
+African people wherever they are?’
+These questions are worth looking into because there are black people
+asking these questions, and we have to try and resolve them. My own
+formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African
+or black people who have attempted to devise systems which they consider
+to be non-capitalist and non-socialist, systems they consider valid
+alternatives to Scientific Socialism for the emancipation of African people.
+In this regard, we have a number of pan-Africanists, a number of
+African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who
+have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life and
+made a distinction between Scientific Socialism and pan-Africanism. He
+said this is the road we will follow: pan-Africanism. We do not want to
+follow that road which is capitalist, we do not want to go down the socialist
+road; we will derive for ourselves something that is pan-African.
+
+In a sense, Nkrumah followed up on this; and although at one time he
+called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying
+that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism, at the same
+time. So, he was trying to straddle two worlds simultaneously – the world
+which says in the beginning was matter, and the world which says in the
+beginning there was the word.
+And inevitably he fell between these two. It’s impossible to straddle
+these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must
+grant the honesty of many people who have attempted to do this impossible
+task and follow them to find out why they failed.
+They failed because their conception of what was a variant different
+from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably
+turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought.
+And this was the problem, that bourgeois thought, and indeed socialist
+thought, when we get down to it, can have a variety of developments or
+roads and aspects or paths. With bourgeois thought, because of its
+whimsical nature, and because of the way in which it prompts eccentrics,
+you can have any road, because, after all, when you are not going any place,
+you can choose any road!
+So, it was possible for these individuals to make what I consider to be a
+genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought and yet
+find, in the final analysis, that they had merely embraced another
+manifestation of that which they themselves had suggested they were
+confronting at the outset.
+There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of
+the examples are Africans who I think were blatantly dishonest from the
+beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism
+claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters; tricksters who
+are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don’t think
+they’re out to develop socialism. I don’t think they’re out to develop
+anything that addresses itself to the interest of the African people. But,
+nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no
+longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of
+socialism.
+And, therefore, I shan’t in fact go on to African socialism. What I’ll do
+is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being
+honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a
+
+number of years during the fifties and, right up to when he was overthrown
+– that would cover at least ten years – in which he was searching for an
+ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he
+talked about pan-Africanism; he went to Consciencism and then
+Nkrumahism, and there was everything other than a straight understanding
+of socialism.1
+What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what
+matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African
+and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What
+were the practical consequences of this attempt to dissociate himself from
+an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah
+steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class
+contradictions in Ghana, that these class contradictions were fundamental.
+For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy
+which took some socialist premises but which he refused to pursue to their
+logical conclusion – that one either had a capitalist system based upon the
+private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the
+product of people’s labour, or one had an alternative system which was
+completely different; and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing
+these two to create anything that was new and viable.
+A most-significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was
+overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and
+before he died, he wrote a small text titled Class Struggle in Africa. It is not
+the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it
+is there that Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the
+misleading consequences, of an ideology which espoused an African cause,
+but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand, an historical
+necessity to separate itself from Scientific Socialism. It indicated quite
+clearly the disastrous consequences of that position.
+Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the
+petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it
+was a terrible mistake. Yes, there are classes in Africa. Yes, the petty
+bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and
+peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interest of the petty bourgeoisie is the
+same or at least is tied in with the class interest of international monopoly
+capital; and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African
+continent and a struggle against imperialism.
+
+And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, at bringing
+victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa,
+we will have to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognizes and
+challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.
+It is a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah
+comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, an African
+nationalist who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that
+somehow he must dissociate himself in one way or another from Scientific
+Socialism because it originated outside of the boundaries of his own
+society, and he was afraid of its cultural implications.
+This is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact,
+to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction
+between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary
+distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of
+bourgeois thought.
+People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use
+facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it
+originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating
+to electricity, but they say, ‘Marx and Engels, that’s European!’ Was Edison
+a racist? But they ask the question, ‘Was Marx a racist?’ They genuinely
+believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact,
+they are obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural
+sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation
+of the social reality can similarly derive a certain, historical law and hence
+scientific law of society that can be applied irrespective of its origin or its
+originators.
+Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to
+end – that any ideology, when applied, must be applied with sensitivity. It
+must be applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given
+society.
+Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a
+cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans, or let us go back to Asians – when
+the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts.
+They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of
+Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven,
+and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting.
+
+It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to
+scrutinize it and see how it was applicable to their society. First and
+foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of
+Chinese historical and social development.
+I have already cited Cabral in another context, and he reappears in this
+context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of
+class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau; looking at the potential
+of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of
+course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation
+of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history.
+And this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who
+considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with
+so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which
+is to take it as a finished product rather than an ongoing social product
+which has to be adapted to their own society.
+One finds that in looking at Marxist theory, at its relevance to race,
+looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we
+come up with a very important paradox: that the nationalist, in the strict
+sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely
+at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of
+giving the people of Africa or the peoples of the Caribbean any
+participation in liberal democracy.
+The petty bourgeois cannot fulfil these historical tasks for national
+liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two.
+Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique
+very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development, for
+conscientization, as they say in Latin America; and the nationalist struggle
+was won because it came under the rubric of Scientific Socialist
+perspective.
+As Cabral said: ‘There may be revolutions which have had a
+revolutionary theory and which have failed. But there has certainly been no
+revolution which has succeeded without a revolutionary theory.’
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+4
+Marxism as a Third World Ideology
+This is an appropriate time at which to participate in a further discussion on
+the question of Marxism, because the amount of interest and the amount of
+practical attention which has been given to that ideology has increased
+enormously.
+In the process of this increase there has also been, inevitably, a tendency
+towards factionalism – a tendency towards wanting to adopt, logically
+enough, a position which the adherents of Marxism or Scientific Socialism
+consider to be the most theoretical and ultimately practical interpretation of
+what Marxism is. For my own part, I will at the outset, for the sake of
+convenience, avoid entering into any discussion which will adjudicate
+between rival claimants to the title of Marxism. It is not for me at this
+moment – I do not think it will advance our analysis in the time allocated if
+we were to launch into trying to determine who is actually Marxist–Leninist
+between so-called Stalinists and so-called Trotskyites, between one side or
+the other in the Sino-Soviet dispute, between the old Left and the new Left.
+That is to say, as a matter of convenience, I will avoid the complications
+inherent in those very often polemical distinctions. However, more than
+that, I believe that on principle one can argue that there is a common
+understanding – or a body of common theoretical understanding – among
+all of those who are avowedly Marxist, and that there is an area which is
+smaller, but nevertheless significant, of common practice – common anticapitalist and anti-imperialist practice – among these rival groups. And this
+is part of my justification for avoiding that contention. Besides, at a later
+point in the analysis, I will go on to suggest that, on principle, the
+introduction of Marxist factionalism into Third World political discussions
+in an a priori fashion is usually destructive, and at best is pointless.
+
+So let us attempt – however difficult that may appear to some people
+who are engaged in Marxist discussion – to take Marxism as though it were
+homogeneous or as though we do not have a multitude of contenders for the
+title of Marxism as it were, and focus our attention on the Third World. The
+Third World, that part of the globe which has been engaged in capitalist
+relations for centuries, but which has been engaged in capitalist relations in
+its own peculiar way, qualitatively different from the way in which the
+metropolitan countries of North America and Europe have been engaged in
+the capitalist system of relationships. And because of the qualitatively
+different manner in which the Third World has participated in the
+international capitalist economy, there are peculiar factors that are described
+as backwardness or underdevelopment, or what have you. This is a portion
+of the world without capitalists – without significant indigenous capitalists,
+without a significant indigenous proletariat, very often having pre-capitalist
+social formations still existing in various stages of disintegration.
+Our enquiry really amounts to trying to determine the relevance of
+Marxism to that part of the world; and more particularly, understanding the
+relevance of a Marxist interpretation to strategies designed to transform or
+speed up the transformation of these parts of the world which are lightly,
+very often lightly, termed the Third World. So, in trying to answer the
+question ‘How is Marxism relevant to the Third World?’ my insistence is
+that we understand that Africa, Asia and Latin America, when referred to as
+the Third World, do not constitute a socio-economic system which is
+distinct from the capitalist centres of the world. If we make that distinction,
+I believe we will fall into all kinds of traps when we attempt to apply the
+analysis of Marxism or any other kind of ideology to the Third World. We
+must see the countries of Africa, most of Asia outside of China, Korea and
+Vietnam, and virtually all of Latin America outside of Cuba, as still
+functioning as integral parts of the capitalist world. It is merely that they
+complement the capitalist centres. And this, after all, is not the thesis that
+need necessarily be exemplified at great length today in 1975; because, a
+large number of non-Marxian scholars have also come to accept this
+complementarity – this dialectical relationship between what is often called
+the centre and the periphery or the metropolitan heartlands and the colonial
+or semi-colonial or neo-colonial areas of the world. Looking at this question
+over several decades, we find that different answers have predominated at
+different times.
+
+The earliest answers – answers suggested by the colonial powers
+themselves – were quite simple. They said to Third World peoples:
+Marxism–Leninism or Scientific Socialism or Communism has absolutely
+no relevance to your needs and interests. Indeed, this ideology would be
+completely inimical to your needs and interests. The colonial powers, their
+spokesmen and ideologies simply said, in effect, that Marxism was not
+good for the natives; that this was not a vision of the world which should be
+incorporated into the way in which colonial peoples saw themselves, saw
+their societies, and saw the world outside. And this was consistent with
+their position of power. Colonialism sought to ensure that colonized peoples
+should not wage effective nationalist struggles. They were opposed in the
+early years, even to the expression of nationalism. So, it follows that they
+were all the more bitter, all the more concerned to oppose that brand of
+nationalism which was enlivened by Marxist thought which went beyond
+saying that we are determined to have independence, but that we are also
+determined to build a new society which is completely different from the
+capitalist society we have inherited.
+And it is generally true that while colonialists were hostile towards
+Marxists inside of their own countries, they were doubly hostile to Marxism
+and to Marxists who might appear in India, in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin
+America and the Caribbean. Quite obviously, it has not been an easy history
+for Marxist thought inside of the Western countries – in Britain, France, in
+North America. Up until today, Western Marxists are discriminated against
+in institutions such as these. But the bourgeois metropolitan system has
+certain capacity to accommodate. It sometimes, in fact, goes out of its way
+to incorporate some individuals who are outside of the so-called
+mainstream, and it will therefore give and take within the limits of its own
+maintenance and it will allow some Marxist thought to exist. But the Third
+World practice for many years, and I think it still remains true, is to
+resolutely oppose, on the part of the same powers, the development of
+Marxist thought. It seems to me, then, that the bourgeoisie themselves
+recognize their vulnerability in the Third World; they recognize that Marxist
+thought has a double potency, if you like, in the Third World countries.
+This attempt on the part of imperialism and the colonial powers to keep
+Marxism out of the Third World understanding, was not entirely successful.
+There have always been instances of African, Asian, Latin American and
+Caribbean Marxists operating in their own societies, operating at an
+
+international level – sometimes quite successfully. But, by and large, we
+must accept that throughout the colonial period – extending right through
+the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s – Marxism was an insignificant ideology, lacking
+both the individuals to articulate Marxist ideas in journals, and the political
+parties to represent the Marxist–Leninist position.
+The colonialists were relatively successful in maintaining the exclusion
+of Marxist thought. More importantly, they created a generation of Third
+World scholars who were immersed in bourgeois theory and who peddled
+all of the understandings which they gained from bourgeois theory. And this
+usually meant, for instance, that they were automatically anti-Marxist;
+without even thinking about it, they were anti-Marxist. They had an idealist
+vision of the world and they assumed that what they had was a
+universalistic vision. They saw the capitalist system and they thought that
+the capitalist system always was, is and always will be. They saw the
+human being functioning within the constraints of capitalist society, and
+they said ‘there is man’; and they began to talk about human nature and the
+like, and they did not and cannot perceive that they are speaking about
+human nature only in a particular social system.
+All of these understandings were encrusted in the Third World vision of
+itself. And that applies irrespective of whether we were trained in these
+institutions abroad, or whether we were trained in the surrogate institutions
+such as the University of the West Indies or the University of Ghana or
+Makerere. Because, one can be brought into line with the bourgeois
+worldview either by being brought to the metropole itself, or alternatively
+the bourgeois institutions can be transferred to the metropole to do the job
+locally, as a sort of forerunner of the international branch plant economy of
+the multinational corporations.
+However, that was an era that I think is disappearing; it is not past. One
+has to see the trends; one has to see that, today, it is not a simple argument
+between bourgeois ideology and Marxist ideology. That simple dichotomy
+between good and bad – the forces of evil and the forces of Christianity, and
+so on; that kind of argument is no longer very acceptable. A number of
+factors have intervened. For one thing, when it used to be told to a Ghanian
+or to a Jamaican that Communism is evil and Marxism–Leninism has no
+value, it was part of a package in which the bourgeoisie asserted that
+Marxism–Leninism cannot work. You see, quite apart from the moral,
+philosophical or ideological arguments, there was this appeal to the so-
+
+called practical. It said: Even if we grant the theoretical validity of this
+system we can prove to you that it is not efficient, that it does not work; that
+capitalism is efficient and that socialism does not give people food; that
+there is starvation in Russia and no clothes; and that the Chinese are eating
+grass. You see, those were years ago in the early period of the development
+of the revolutionary systems in the world.
+But as the Russian Revolution passed those initial years of extreme
+economic difficulty – the difficulties which they had inherited from Czarist
+regime, and as the Chinese Revolution grew from strength to strength –
+again transcending the period of absolute impoverishment of the masses
+that was characteristic of feudalism and imperialism in China, it was and is
+no longer possible to seriously propose to any Third World country that
+socialism does not work – that it is not a practical system, as it were. So the
+argument must shift; it must in some way come to terms with the
+ideological dimensions. I believe the argument has shifted and I would like
+to focus on that shift because it is the contemporary dimension of the
+discussion of Marxism in the Third World.
+This new discussion – the new shift – means that in the first place,
+Marxism is not posed directly against bourgeois ideology. There is an
+attempt to avoid this direct confrontation. Marxism in the Third World –
+I’ve seen this in Africa, it’s happening in the Caribbean, it happens in Asia
+– is counterposed against some other version or vision of the world.
+Africans or West Indians will be told: ‘We understand that Marxism has
+some validity, but we do not think that Marxism is relevant for us. We have
+to look for our own solutions’ – which is one of the more important ways of
+countering the Marxist world-view. And as you can see, it obviously has a
+greater initial plausibility than the old distinction between Marxism and
+bourgeois ideology – between socialism and capitalism.
+A second variant on the same theme that is often interconnected, is that
+one can be told that there is some strength in Marxism and in socialism on
+the one hand, and there is some strength in capitalism and capitalist theory
+on the other hand; and that one of our tasks is to borrow intelligently from
+the two systems. So, here again, you find that Marxism is not posited as
+something that one runs away from absolutely as an ogre that is painted in
+certain colours that are very frightening. It is approached rather obliquely,
+and one is told to choose some elements from either of the two systems.
+
+I believe that these are both sleights of hand and are ideological devices
+intended to weaken the development of a scientific understanding of the
+world; and I shall try to indicate where I feel the logical weakness lies in
+both approaches.
+
+A Peculiar View of the Third World
+Let us first examine the approach which suggests that what we need in the
+Third World is something peculiar. If one is in Ghana, one will think about
+Ghanaian culture. In Africa, as a whole, there is a need for African
+socialism, it would be said. In India, in Sri Lanka: let us look for something
+that relates to our own culture. These are powerful arguments because they
+address real emotions; they address the colonial in his conception of
+himself. The colonial, after all, had been challenged as a being; his very
+identity had been challenged. He had been exposed to cultural imperialism,
+in addition to the political and economic exploitation. And, therefore, it
+rings a certain bell and elicits sympathy when one says we must avoid all
+foreign domination of thought, and we must ensure that that which we
+create is ours, that we cannot reject capitalism or bourgeois theory and take
+in its place socialism or Marxist theory, because that is a new form of
+imposition. And I think that there are a few Africans, a few Asians, who
+would put forward this kind of argument very ably, and I myself have tried
+to put it forward without any caricature whatsoever. I think that this is the
+argument as it would be put forward at its best; and I still feel that, at its
+best, it is false. For several reasons.
+First of all, when these individuals are speaking, they are automatically
+making the assumption that Scientific Socialist ideology or Marxism–
+Leninism is limited in time and space – culturally limited. That is the
+assumption to the argument; because on that assumption one can say
+Marxism was generated within Western Europe in the nineteenth century.
+Therefore, if it has any relevance – putting aside that question – its
+relevance is circumscribed by those factors. It may be relevant to the
+Europeans, it may have been relevant in the nineteenth century, or perhaps
+it is still relevant to Europeans in this century; but it is not relevant to us.
+That is to say an African, a Third World person, is speaking: it is not
+
+relevant to us because it is theirs; it is an alien, cultural thing. Later on, we
+might have to discuss the extent to which Marxism, like any ideology, must
+of necessity incorporate elements of the culture which produces and fosters
+and propagates it. But, in this position, the fundamental ideological
+assumption is a bourgeois assumption.
+It’s a metaphysical assumption which makes a separation between the
+application of scientific principles to the society as distinct from the
+application of scientific principles to the real world – to the natural world.
+Because the very individuals who would so cogently, and convincingly
+perhaps, make this kind of argument are individuals who have no qualms
+about standing before you and using this microphone. They have no qualms
+of standing before you and using the electricity, the harnessing of the
+electric energy; and, of course, they may be speaking in an African or Asian
+or Caribbean country. But they do not make a fanciful argument which
+suggests that things which originate in the natural world – the harnessing of
+principles of understanding the motion of the natural world – should be
+rejected a priori in the Third World because they were initially discovered
+in the First World or Second or whatever kind of ranking you are applying.
+And, without recognizing it, they are subscribing to a certain dichotomy
+which is their bourgeois philosophical worldview – that dichotomy which is
+perfectly prepared to discover (to seek out at any rate and then discover) the
+principles of motion in the natural world. The capitalists do that because it
+aids in production; it is an integral part of the capitalist system that they
+should maximize production; that they should maximize the efficiency of
+technology. So they will not mystify (certainly they will not consciously
+and deliberately mystify) the pursuit of scientific knowledge with regard to
+the real world.
+But then by the same token, the bourgeois class – the capitalist class –
+has an interest in specifically mystifying the application of scientific
+principles to society; because the same application of scientific principles to
+society would suggest that we must understand the changes – the transitions
+by which capitalism itself came into being, and by which the particular
+class in power will be removed from power. It would be a study in their
+own liquidation, if you like, and one perhaps could not reasonably expect
+the bourgeoisie to promote the study of their own liquidation.
+And so, we find that there is always that contradiction in bourgeois
+thought between the application of scientific principles to society and to the
+
+natural world – which is a very artificial distinction. And those who, as I
+said earlier, are making the argument about cultural validity and cultural
+uniqueness and peculiarity, are clearly falling victim to this distinction. The
+moment that we can break beyond that understanding, we can see even
+further the limitations of a position that tries to see Marxism as culturally
+distinct and as having no relevance to the Third World.
+One of these limitations is that it is necessary first to misunderstand
+deliberately, to misread Marx in order to conduct their own polemics. They
+will say, for instance: Marx does not deal with the kinds of society which
+we have, Marx and Engels were writing about European society which had
+classes and we don’t have the same classes; we don’t have any proletarian
+workers. And they may be right. In some countries of Africa there is hardly
+any proletariat to speak of. Countries of Latin America and Asia perhaps
+have larger numbers; but, in any event, they are right in saying that the
+particular class configuration or even the absence of classes in a Third
+World country does not conform to the model of analysis that Marx might
+have organized for Western Europe, and which, of course, is relevant to
+North America.
+In so doing, however, they overlook that which Marx himself had said,
+because Marx hadn’t claimed that he was organizing a philosophical
+worldview and that he had created categories for Western Europe which
+were applicable in and of themselves to the Third World – applicable
+without any new intellectual or analytical effort. Indeed, Marx had to
+chastise those individuals (some of them calling themselves Marxists) who
+would like to have applied his understanding of Western Europe in a very
+uncritical way to the development of Eastern Europe; and he had to warn
+them that Marxism was not a general historical philosophical understanding
+of the whole world at all times, in every place. He made it very clear that
+that which he and Engels had been dealing with was a systematic and
+detailed formulation of the development of capitalism within Western
+Europe; and that they had attempted to describe and understand the specific
+features of capitalism specific to Western Europe. So that the universality
+which both he and Engels claimed, was not the universality that applied to
+Western Europe. The ‘universality’ is the universality of contradiction; the
+universality which can be determined by utilizing the historical materialist
+method with relationship to any given society. So that when those
+individuals say that Marxism claims that all societies must pass through the
+
+same processes, and that the important thing is the presence of the given
+working class in a particular way, and that therefore we must of necessity
+bypass this because our society is unlike that which Marx describes – I
+think those individuals have fundamentally failed to come to grips with
+what he was saying. And I don’t think it is merely accidental; I think that
+there is an element of distortion which is deliberate. And that in itself is a
+serious reflection on their arguments, because, if you have to engage in
+deliberate distortion of the opposition’s arguments before you can come to
+terms with the argument, it suggests that you yourself are coming from a
+very weak position.
+Besides, yet another limitation of the attempt to force Marxism into
+these narrow boundaries of time and place arises out of the fact that these
+individuals fail to recognize and accept Marxism as a growing ideology.
+That is to say, just like with any body of science, it is not static; it takes in
+new ideas, it has new discoveries, it responds to the variations as scientific
+enquiry continues. That is why one can speak about Marxism–Leninism.
+The very fact that we couple Lenin’s name to Marx’s name in a very
+fundamental way, is a reflection of Lenin’s contribution at a different time –
+his ability to say: Yes, we are looking at capitalism, but we are not looking
+at the same capitalism which Marx had looked at in the earlier part of the
+nineteenth century; instead, we are looking at capitalism in its imperialist
+epoch, and this is a qualitatively different thing. So, in that process, Lenin
+contributed to the growth of Marxist ideology.
+Moreover, the same applies to the contributions by Mao; and the same
+would apply to the contributions by Che Guevara, or to the contributions by
+Amilcar Cabral. Contributions which recognize that Marxism is itself a
+growing body of scientific knowledge, that one has an ontology, one has an
+epistemology, and that from there one must move towards dealing with the
+particularities that occur in any given place at any given time. And this
+would certainly move Marxism far beyond these mundane, restricted limits
+which have been forced upon it by some theoreticians.
+In the practical day-to-day struggles of the Third World, irrespective of
+whether people accept some of these arguments – and you may think that
+they are esoteric and that the day-to-day struggle does necessarily take
+account of these arguments – Marxism continues to grow as a Third World
+ideology in spite of the attempts to present it as something alien to the Third
+World. And it continues to grow as an independent ideology seeking clear
+
+alternatives to capitalism, in spite of the attempts to divert this process by
+focusing on a compromise between capitalism and socialism.
+That compromise is something I shan’t discuss at any length because,
+again, the moment that one takes the care to understand Marxist ideology, it
+becomes immediately obvious that one cannot have a foot in both camps; it
+is not possible to talk about the coexistence indefinitely of a socialist and
+capitalist system. There may be, at a certain point of transition, the
+incorporation of elements which are capitalist in a socialist system or vice
+versa. But if that is so, then we will have to examine the tendency; we will
+have to examine which of the contradictory features is manifesting itself
+ultimately to become the dominant system. But it isn’t possible for someone
+such as Leopold Senghor1 to say: In Senegal we will have a little bit of
+capitalism, and a little bit of socialism, and then a little bit of Senegalism;
+but this is in effect what he says. He says: We’re going to have three sectors
+of our economy. We will have the foreigners owning something, then we
+will have a section that is publicly owned, and then we will have some joint
+ownership; and this is put forward as a socialist alternative or an alternative
+to Marxism; and very consciously Senegal puts this forward as an
+alternative to Marxism.
+Yet one of the many fallacies in this position is that Senegal began as a
+capitalist country. It is located within the international imperialist order. The
+Senegalese people were not making any choice about whether they wanted
+to be either capitalist or socialist; they were in fact capitalist. The only
+choice they can make is whether they want to continue to be located within
+the capitalist system or whether they want to escape from it. So it is a false
+duality to imagine that they are outside of either system, and that they are
+choosing from both to create a third alternative. And any steps which fail to
+remove it from the capitalist system are steps which, in effect, support the
+capitalist system.
+
+The Rise of Marxism in the Third World
+Quite apart from examining it at the level of the theoretical implications,
+one is struck by the sizeable increase in Marxism – or, to put it more
+effectively, the increase in the adherence to Marxism, the increase in the
+
+discussion of Marxism, the increase in the awareness of Marxism, in the
+Third World. All of these strategies pursued by Africans and Latin
+Americans and Asians – to stem the tide of Marxism – haven’t really been
+effective. Because, while it may be difficult for anyone to say, for instance,
+that in Asia, in 1965, there were ten thousand Marxists and now there are
+twenty thousand (that sort of exact quantitative description we know may
+not be possible), I am certain that there would be no observers or analysts of
+the scene who would deny the increase in Marxism, and in adherence to
+Marxism. And this increase can be measured in a number of indirect ways.
+It can be measured, for instance, by seeing the number of scholars who
+are using the formal tools of Marxist analysis – anthropologists and
+economists, political scientists, historians from Africa, Asia and Latin
+America – who, five or ten years ago would never have been found on the
+scene are today not in a majority, but they are conspicuous in each field.
+Very often conspicuous by their excellence, because they are engaging in
+hard original work which challenges bourgeois assumptions and manages to
+assert itself on the basis of its own internal logic and consistency. So that a
+glance at the journals – from the point of view of those of us in the
+academic community – will indicate to you the growing number of Marxists
+who are practising in every discipline in Third World countries. And this is
+not because they were encouraged; one can be very sure of that. This is
+itself a dialectical development, a development over and against the trend of
+their formulation, because they were formed mentally in bourgeois
+philosophy, as I said earlier.
+A second measure is to look outside of the universities or beyond the
+level of university academics, at the number of student groups, the number
+of worker groups or independent intellectual groups that are avowedly
+Marxist. Not just that – one may say that they are using some Marxist
+terminology or that they are disguising their Marxist content. Nowadays, in
+the Third World, there are a large number of groups which come forward
+and say: We are Marxists. Now again I’m trying to avoid, for the moment,
+the discussion as to whether they come forward and say they are Maoists or
+they come forward and say they are something else, but they come forward
+and say that they are Marxist; that much is certain. And that is a very
+important change that is part of our contemporary scene; because, in most
+parts of the Third World, it is still hazardous to identify oneself as a
+Marxist. And therefore, the fact that it is happening more and more is an
+
+indication of a tremendous growth, and a willingness and a capacity to
+challenge the domination of bourgeois thought.
+Alongside these groups – very often as part of the activity of the groups
+– we have the proliferation of journals which carry Marxist slogans, which
+carry Marxist analysis. These are things that can be discovered through a
+random sample, just looking through the Third World, especially if one has
+the opportunity to see the literature that comes out at what we call the
+grassroots level. Literature that is not necessarily put in the same glossy
+format as Time or Fortune magazines, but literature that comes through the
+hard sweat and labour of people turning a Gestetner, very often by hand, not
+even electrically, and producing things that may not be the most attractive
+to look at, but which carry out the task of Marxist reconsideration of
+society.
+Marxism is growing in the Third World, and I don’t think that this is
+merely because of some theoretical subtlety on the part of the Marxists
+themselves – if indeed this has any part to play. Rather, it appears to me to
+derive from the practical experience of the Third World over the last decade
+and a half – the practical experience gained since countries in Africa and
+Asia in particular achieved their so-called independence, their nominal
+constitutional independence. Ever since independence, these countries have
+had certain experiences; they have set out for instance to develop
+themselves, whatever that means to anybody else. But they very often had a
+conscious vision of developing, of advancing, and in so doing, or in
+attempting to do so, they utilize the well-known bourgeois theoretical
+assumptions about how one develops, they utilize bourgeois advisors to set
+up their four- and five-year development plans; they utilize bourgeois
+international experts to tell them how to take off. And the result is there for
+everyone to see. It is a failure of bourgeois thought to deliver the goods, if
+you like.
+That is one of the most important considerations in explaining why the
+alternative philosophical view is gaining ground; because when the
+bourgeois theorists had before them the new field of independent African
+countries, then it could be said that they must be given a chance to prove
+whether they are right or wrong about capitalism being a road of
+development for everyone. But after ten or fifteen years, in some cases – in
+Asian countries much longer than that – it is no longer possible to say that
+bourgeois theory has any possibilities of growth for the Third World
+
+countries. Even the liberals, even neo-classical economists themselves, are
+turning towards Marxist-inspired visions and understandings of what is
+dependency and what is underdevelopment, and what are the ways out of
+these states of dependency and underdevelopment, so it is the practice
+which accounts, in no small measure, for the advance of Marxism in the
+Third World.
+
+Class Struggle in the Third World
+There is also the recognition that the Third World cannot stand outside of
+the rest of international society. It certainly cannot be considered in
+isolation from the rest of the capitalist world, nor for that matter, can it
+isolate itself from those parts of the world which have made socialist
+revolutions. This recognition came very clearly, or most clearly, and it came
+at the earlier period in South East Asia – a tremendous development of the
+Vietnamese struggle.
+It came also in Latin America, because the Latin Americans had been
+independent for a long time and, after this political independence, they have
+had a long experience of neo-colonialism. An experience which forced
+them to recognize that there was no way in which they could understand the
+movement of Latin American society without understanding the
+interpenetration of foreign – mainly American – capital, monopoly capital
+into the Latin American environment. So that they began to build into their
+understanding of their society an understanding of the larger society. And if
+they had to understand the larger society, they automatically had to go back
+to understanding capitalism and to seeing why it was or why it is that
+capitalism enslaves not only its working class but indeed more so, the
+working class and the dispossessed peoples of the Third World.
+One of the interesting choices which has been made by most Third
+World political spokesmen – choices at the ideological level – is a choice
+based on their unwillingness to recognize that class can be relevant in their
+own context. There was some factual basis for that unwillingness. Many
+Third World countries began their period of political independence with the
+internal class struggle at a very low level, because the internal classes had
+been subordinated to external capital, and the operation of internal class
+
+struggle had been subordinated to the operation of the nationalist struggle of
+all classes against the external monopoly capitalists. But, as the years
+advanced since independence, in each Third World country, the evidence
+began to grow of the decisive role of internal class struggles – of the growth
+of indigenous classes playing decisive roles in the motion of the internal
+societies. And this has also been a potent factor in forcing Third World
+peoples to come to grips with an analysis which has room for understanding
+the world in terms of class struggle.
+An example which is always very clear and very illustrative, is the
+example of Ghana and the development of the thought of Kwame Nkrumah.
+Nkhruma had always had some Marxist overtones before he got into power
+and when he got into power. There was a time when he used to describe
+himself as a Marxist and a Christian; there was a time when he used to
+describe himself as a Consciencist; he spoke of himself as a pan-Africanist.
+He attempted to incorporate some Marxist insights, but not as a total
+methodology, not as something that underlay his whole political philosophy
+and his political practice, largely because he insisted that there were no
+classes in Ghana. And then he was overthrown and he went to Guinea and
+he was given aid by his friend Sekou Toure; and in his last days he
+produced a considerable body of writing. And in this writing he proclaimed:
+I used to say that there were no classes; but when I was overthrown by the
+Ghanaian petty bourgeois class, I discovered that there were classes. If you
+read Nkrumah’s Class Struggles in Africa, that is basically what he is
+saying. He very clearly, in his own way, delimits the classes in Africa and
+accepts that the petty bourgeoisie functions as a class in its own right, with
+interests hostile to the African working class and peasantry; and he is
+therefore able to reformulate his vision of Ghana and of Africa, or he did so
+before he died.
+Nkhruma, of course, was one of the foremost nationalists; he stood on
+the vanguard of nationalist struggle. But that block to his full understanding
+came because he could not or would not – I think it is a combination of the
+two – perceive the development of classes inside of Ghana.
+Today, the obvious growth of indigenous classes throughout Asia, the
+Caribbean, Latin America and the rest of the Third World is a clear pointer
+to the need to grasp a strategy which recognizes, or which is based upon a
+recognition of the existence of class struggle as a motive force in history;
+and here again Marxism comes in for additional attention on the part of
+
+Third World scholars. Of course, to say that Marxism is relevant does not
+necessarily say that the body of Marxist thought which exists is adequate to
+an understanding of the Third World predicament.
+These are two different questions, in different order of logic; and I think
+they have been confused by a number of people. Marxism as an operative
+methodology in political philosophy, as the ideology which sprang from the
+working class in Europe, has developed its own. We can measure physically
+the body of literature which has been produced by Marxists; and that
+literature has been preoccupied with Western Europe, with North America
+and with the developed countries, because most of the Marxists came from
+those countries. And even Third World Marxists in the early days, were
+concerned with metropolitan society.
+So, there is a body of Marxist literature which is inadequate to the needs
+of the Third World because it just does not deal, for the most part, with the
+problems of the Third World. So that when one says that Marxism is
+relevant to the Third World, it means that the Marxist scholar – whether he
+be Third World, of Third World origin or not – who attempts to deal with
+Marxism in the Third World must be operating at the most advanced and
+creative level. He is not merely transferring known truths from another part
+of the world to the African or Asian situations; he has to engage in the very
+difficult task of building from the bottom, an actual body of Marxist
+enquiry and Marxist analysis of the societies in question. And this is where
+one has to emphasize – and to emphasize and to emphasize once again –
+that Marxism can only be of value if whatever it takes to be the universal is
+applied to the particular; and it is in the very particularity of the exercise
+that one will demonstrate that the universal is actually universal and that it
+is applicable.
+In the United States for instance, there has been – and no doubt there
+has been a spillover of the same discussion in Canada – very lengthy,
+sometimes very violent discussion among black brothers and sisters about
+the relevance of Marxism. It basically comes from the understanding of
+whether this Marxism has any validity to black people in their special
+predicament as an ethnic group. And the arguments against its applicability
+are rather similar to the arguments which an African or a West Indian might
+use – the sort of arguments I have outlined above. In other words, those
+who are opposed would say that: Marxism is about class, and our problem
+is a racial or ethnic problem. Marxism originated with the same Western
+
+society which dominates us and we must reject all forms of white cultural
+domination, Marxism included.
+However, there continues to be the growth of a serious interest in
+Marxism on the part of Afro-Americans – the black population in the
+United States. And their task, quite clearly, consists in bringing the tools of
+Marxism to bear upon the specific history of the United States. In that
+specific history, a number of contradictions arose; and if the contradiction
+between races happens to be a fundamental contradiction, then that is the
+contradiction which will attract their attention. They will have to come up
+with the formulations which deal with the specifics of their own social
+situation. Failure to do so does in fact strengthen the arguments of those
+who try to suggest that Marxism is irrelevant. Because, if you proceed into
+a situation, whether it be an analysis of Afro-America or an analysis of
+Pakistan, and you do not attempt to develop with respect to those specific
+situations, but rather merely to transfer a body of knowledge in a fixed
+static form from another part of the world, then you will be accused of
+being irrelevant. You will be accused of cultural hegemony; you will be
+accused of trying to force the indigenous interpretation into your own
+external imperialist-oriented model.
+
+The Burden of Third World Marxists
+That is why I think that the responsibility which Third World Marxists carry
+is an extremely heavy responsibility. In Western Europe, in North America,
+it is possible to plug into an existing body of thought. Any discussion about
+Marxism in these parts can immediately find some source of established
+Marxist orthodoxy, they can find the unorthodoxies; they can in fact
+adjudicate between all kinds of rival versions to Marxism, in its application
+to their own society. It doesn’t mean that the Western Marxist does not
+function to revitalize and to review the Marxist vision of his own society,
+but he has something to review. The Third World scholar is more often than
+not starting from the very beginning, having nothing to review, having
+nothing else but sometimes inadequate empirical data – empirical data
+which has to be collated and picked up from bourgeois sources. And
+because they have to be lifted out of a bourgeois context, you often find
+
+yourself in a very difficult position; because it is not entirely impossible to
+separate the data from the conceptualizations which might have lain behind
+the enquiries, and which therefore influenced the particular type of data
+which was collected. So, the Third World Marxists will find themselves
+starting from scratch. But it is a task that has to be carried out because, to
+do otherwise, is precisely to fall into the hands of those who want a sort of
+cultural exceptionalism, who will say that Marxism is not for us because it
+is inimical or antithetical to our own culture and our own history.
+The record so far is very clear that capitalism has been on the retreat;
+that Marxism–Leninism started out undoubtedly as something within
+Europe and is today of course embraced by 800 million Chinese – which
+itself always makes me wonder why it is that people still say that Marxism
+is a white ideology. One would have thought if the ideology is to be
+coloured by the colour of the majority of its adherents, then Marxism is to
+be called a yellow ideology. And if it is a yellow ideology or is capable of
+being yellow, and if it is capable of being brown in the case of some Asian
+countries, of being black in the case of Cabral’s Guinea or of Mozambique
+under Frelimo, then immediately one sees that there are very many breaches
+that are made in this wall which was being built, or which certain people
+attempt to build around Marxism to keep it from the world’s least
+developed peoples.
+My own contribution is merely to bring this to the attention of Third
+World scholars – for the most part, Third World students; because in an
+institution such as this, one will of course come into contact with Marxist
+ideology. But inevitably, Marxist ideology will be the submerged ideology;
+the dominant ideology is going to be the ideology of the ruling class. As I
+had cause to tell my students many years ago at the University of Dar es
+Salaam, when someone asked how they should know which is a bourgeois
+ideology, which textbook they should take up, which one will have a
+bourgeois view and which will have the capitalist view, I told them that they
+could go into the library and close their eyes and stick out their hand and
+the chances are they would have got a bourgeois book. So that they could
+proceed on that assumption; they don’t have to select, just close your eyes,
+feel around, grab any number of books, and you’re dealing with a bourgeois
+worldview.
+Now, at the same time, there are possibilities; there are possibilities
+which perhaps, when we live in the metropoles, we do not appreciate them
+
+until we go back to the Third World countries from which we came. The
+possibilities lie in the contradictions of this society and the fact that Marxist
+thought, irrespective of all these things, is in fact present; and that literature
+is available, and that facilities for enquiry are available. And one could urge
+therefore that, even within the realms of institutions that are designed to
+carry out a particular ideological function, it is possible to conduct a sort of
+guerrilla intellectual war by which one will have access not to that which
+was designed specifically for one, but access which hinges upon the
+dialectical transition beyond that which was intended for one.
+There are many things which I believe the Third World scholar can
+grasp, in spite of the quite conscious attempt on the part of all of our
+institutions – including those in the Third World – to reformulate us and to
+continue to programme us as bourgeois thinkers.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+5
+Labour as a Conceptual Framework
+for Pan-African Studies
+At the most fundamental level, the pan-African historian has to be engaged
+in the study of either the African continent or the African peoples abroad. It
+is not at all necessary that he has to be concerned with the links between the
+two. Nevertheless, there are a number of ways in which the connection can
+be and has been approached. The two most outstanding would seem to be
+(a) the choice of a subject that in itself spans Africa and Africans in the
+New World, such as the slave trade and the pan-African movement; and (b)
+the search for the African roots of particular New World cultural
+phenomena, notably religion and music. The proposed use of ‘Labour’ as a
+conceptual framework for pan-African studies is in addition to and not a
+replacement of the already established modes of approach.
+The ways in which people organize their labour and the tools with
+which they work provide an entree to the study of all history from the time
+that early man was capable of fashioning a crude pebble tool in Eastern
+Africa. Furthermore, labour is the basis for other global approaches to
+human history which present their analysis in terms of class and other social
+formations. This universality has certain advantages, since African history
+must be evaluated not as a discrete and isolated entity, but as a part of
+human development. Useful conceptual approaches should therefore
+facilitate comparisons with other areas of the world. The contention here is
+that there have been certain peculiarities in the way that Africans have
+worked or have been forced to work, and those labour patterns over the past
+few centuries have largely determined the relations between Africans and
+non-Africans. It is within the present stage of world development that one
+finds the initial justification for supposing that the labour concept can be of
+
+major utility in pan-African history, because no overview of the world
+today can fail to deal with the contrasts between the rich and the poor
+nations – between what are essentially the white and non-white peoples of
+our planet – and underpinning those contrasts are differences in the type of
+labour performed and the technology of work. What appears in popular
+jargon as ‘the difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots”’ is
+virtually identical with what economists term ‘the international division of
+labour’.
+Just as bourgeois intellectuals take the relationship between capital and
+labour as a ‘given’ and almost as a ‘natural’ factor, so they tend to treat the
+international division of labour in a static fashion, depriving it of its broad
+historical dimensions. As a result, it is argued that the international trade
+network (which is so disadvantageous to the underdeveloped countries) is
+based on different comparative cost advantages in production. It is said that
+the differences are attributable to different resource endowments, and that
+world trade enhances the specialization of production in all participating
+countries. This argument incorporates certain obvious absurdities. Which
+continent is richer than Africa in natural resources? And yet Africa is the
+least specialized, except in lines of production that require the least skill,
+are least remunerative and most vulnerable within the international
+capitalist system. African peoples everywhere, both within the continent
+and abroad fall within the category of the poor, the underdeveloped and the
+under-specialized. The explanation for this must be seen in historical
+perspective, and it involves a close look at the way Africans have worked
+prior and subsequent to involvement within Europe and the Americas.
+There have indeed been a great deal of scattered studies on African
+labour, which are illuminating even though they are not necessarily
+informed by an awareness that similar tendencies were operating wherever
+Africans worked, and that they were slowly building into an international
+pattern. What follows below is a mere sketch of the possibilities that might
+be opened up by looking at the vista of the pan-African past with the labour
+concept consciously and consistently being utilized as the framework for
+enquiry. Five broad divisions suggest themselves by way of periodization:
+1) Africa before the white man
+2) Africans under white slave owners abroad
+
+3) Africa in the epoch of the internationalization of trade (fifteenth to midnineteenth century)
+4) Africans in post-slavery America
+5) The foreign exploitation of African labour within the continent (late
+nineteenth century to the present).
+
+1. Africa before the White Man
+The number of issues to be considered in this category are numerous. Many
+are brought together within the debate about ‘feudalism’ in Africa which
+was once keenly conducted among historians of Africa, and has now
+virtually petered out as far as English-speaking scholars are concerned.
+However, within Francophone circles, there is still a stimulating discussion
+about whether there was a distinctive African mode of production. These
+issues involve comparisons not only with Europe but also with Asia. Since
+it was Europe which subsequently came into contact with Africa, it is well
+to understand the features in African and European society that determined
+their respective roles of subordination and domination. Naturally, the nature
+of African work reflected the environment and social interests, and African
+skills were developed in directions different from those of Europe. For
+example, West Africa in the fifteenth century boasted skills in brass casting
+and plastic arts, advanced techniques in canoe-building and river travel, and
+notions of agriculture relevant to tropical forests, savannahs and swamps.
+Europe, on the other hand, had superiority to some extent in arms
+technology and to an overwhelming extent in shipbuilding, navigation,
+administration and accounting.
+Crudely speaking, it could be said that by the fifteenth century,
+European labour and technology was more advanced than its African
+counterpart and hence the European capacity to exploit Africa through
+trade. But there is scope for a more comprehensive analysis which would
+pinpoint the precise areas of social dissimilarities vis-à-vis Africa and
+Europe. It was over a period of time that the dissimilarities transformed
+themselves into advantages and disadvantages. For instance, Africa lacked a
+technological dynamic leading towards mass production. When mass
+production became the norm in Europe and a decisive factor in world trade,
+
+then African handicraft skill turned out to be a disadvantage. This did not
+come into effect until the nineteenth century, when Europe came to define
+what was developed and what was not, with their own technology and way
+of life held up as the standard of excellence, for ‘those who can define are
+the masters’ and vice versa. In order to start the reconstruction of panAfricanism with a clean slate, it would be helpful to understand in what
+direction African labour had been developing at the time that we were our
+own masters.
+
+2. Africans under White Slave-owners Abroad
+An interesting sidelight of the slave trade which has never been brought
+into view is the extent to which many agricultural, mining and craft skills
+were transported to the New World. The early slave trade to the Spanish in
+the New World sought labour to engage in mining and cattle raising in the
+Greater Antilles and on the Spanish Main. Several of the peoples of the
+Senegambia who were victims of this phase of the slave trade were
+experienced as pastoralists and familiar with open-pit mining of gold and
+iron ore. Crops such as cotton, indigo and rice were produced in the
+American colonies and the Caribbean by Africans who were already
+growing those same crops in their own societies. It could hardly be a mere
+coincidence that rice production was successfully launched in the Brazilian
+state of Maranhão in the mid-eighteenth century just at the moment when
+African labour was being brought in from the traditional rice-farming sector
+of Upper Guinea.
+Nevertheless, as has been argued by several scholars, the slave regime
+was hostile to the formation of new or sophisticated skills within the
+Western tradition. Slave labour was meant to be the cheapest possible, and
+it consequently had to be unskilled – carrying out the simplest tasks with
+the crudest of tools. Otherwise, there would have been specialization and
+division of labour far beyond the managerial capacity of the overseers and
+whips. Slavery never evolved beyond backward agriculture, so
+industrialization was out of the question. Meanwhile, in Europe the
+bourgeoisie were forced constantly to renovate their means of production,
+which meant enhancing the skills of their own white workers. The slave
+
+sojourn in the Americas, in the Indian Ocean and in Europe by Africans
+gave the first clear indication of the development of a broad gap in labour
+performance and technology between the white and the black races.
+
+3. Africa in the Epoch of the
+Internationalization of Trade
+Beginning with the Congo, Europeans showed themselves unwilling to
+accede to African requests for the importation of new techniques from
+Europe, although the Congolese requested masons, doctors, apothecaries
+and teachers. This refusal was repeated when Dahomey and Asante made
+similar requests in the eighteenth century. Europe was consciously blocking
+the spread of technology which is a central feature in the emergence of a
+more scientific mode of production, both in Europe and later in Japan.
+Africans received cheap consumer goods, while Europe secured gold for
+expanding its monetary economy and labour to create value and open up a
+whole brave new world in the Americas.
+The impact of the slave trade on the African labouring population is
+obviously a topic that would of necessity be examined if one is interested in
+how African labour has fared historically. The only comment offered here is
+by way of rejection of a recent trend in studies assessing the slave trade.
+The approach begins by suggestion (with justification) that figures of slaves
+exported have been greatly exaggerated in the past. There follows the
+conclusion that the slave trade was therefore far less significant within
+African history than it was previously made out to have been. The
+conclusion is a non sequitur, since the impact must be measured for specific
+places at particular times. At the end of the seventeenth century, the ports of
+what is now Dahomey1 were loading 30,000 victims per year, and this was
+sustained for decades. The hinterland of the Bight of Biafra had its turn at
+the end of the eighteenth century; while a heavy flow came from Lake
+Nyasa in the decades before 1850. These are three of many instances, and to
+find a point of comparison in European history it would be necessary to
+look at what transpired during the Thirty Years War in Germany, and during
+the two World Wars in Europe. Besides, in Europe such wars contributed to
+the development of a particular type of society; so that after all the
+
+casualties and all the disruption, opportunities were provided for building
+bigger things by combining capital, science and skilled labour in ever more
+daring ways. What did the slave trade build in Africa? Nothing but a bridge
+leading to the next phase of exploitation where the present international
+division of labour came into its own.
+
+4. Africans in Post-slavery America
+Africans in the New World fared little better after slavery in terms of
+making their labour more scientific and appropriating more benefits to
+themselves. In the West Indies and the United States, many ex-slaves were
+frustrated in their attempts to set up an independent peasantry, and instead
+they became rural proletariat or quasi-serfs under the name of
+sharecroppers. There was diversification of black labour into trades and
+petty commerce, but nothing which could upset the basic pattern of
+American society where capital came either from whites at home or abroad
+and where the dominant technology was in the hands of the whites. For the
+vast majority of New World blacks, phrases such as ‘the reserve army of
+labour’, ‘labour reservoir’ and ‘last hired first fired’ adequately sum up the
+position. The reference to the black community in the US as an internal
+colony has many justifications, not least of which is the remarkable fact that
+black labour within industrial America has virtually the same relation to
+whites in terms of skills as does continental African labour with regards to
+Europe and white America.
+Since emancipation, the necessity of obtaining modern scientific labour
+skills was always appreciated, at different levels of perception, by sectors of
+the black population in the Americas. There was an awareness that real
+equality with whites would follow only after the acquisition of a technique
+that was equal to that of the oppressors, and this explains the tremendous
+drive towards education within the first generation of legally free black
+people. Of course, since whites retained political power, there were a
+thousand ways in which they could thwart the achievement of that
+objective, and those who broke through the education cordon simply made
+a contribution to established white technology. The few exceptions to this
+rule were individuals who sought to aid black political liberation and to
+
+build up a tradition of independent black activity on both sides of the
+Atlantic.
+
+5. The Foreign Exploitation of African
+Labour within the Continent
+Having tired of exploiting African labour abroad in the chattel form, the
+international capitalist system with Western Europe at its epicentre
+transferred its interest to African labour on the continent, setting up the
+political apparatus of colonialism at the same time that European scholars
+(including non-Marxists) attest to the tremendous role played by capital in
+imperialist expansion. In industrial society, the concept of capital
+automatically calls to mind that of labour; but it is worth noting that on the
+African continent in the colonialist era, labour was held back by the
+colonialists using several means in addition to the provision of fixed capital
+and wages. The colonial period is the best documented in African history
+both from the viewpoint of written records and the accessibility of orally
+preserved records. Studies to date on forced labour, labour migrations,
+peasant cash-crop production, the proletarianization of labour in South
+Africa, and so forth, have tremendous scope to be expanded to cover the
+whole continent. Those areas of history are so close to the present that their
+significance in influencing conditions in Africa as they are today is virtually
+self-evident. Within the field of contemporary history, it becomes even
+more vital to forge a mature social science approach which attempts to
+grapple with political economy in its historical perspective. Analytically,
+the labour factory has the advantage of being valid for several academic
+disciplines, and it can therefore be pivotal in arriving at an overview of the
+‘state of the nation’ in Africa and in particular parts of the continent.
+
+Conclusion
+By re-emphasizing that the above is a mere outline of possibilities, certain
+criticisms concerning omissions can be avoided. However, there is one
+particular limitation that is perhaps inherent in the approach: namely that it
+
+tends to treat African history using external and largely European frames of
+reference. For instance, ‘Africa before the white man’ might suggest that
+the coming of the whites at a particular point in time marked an entirely
+new phase in the continent’s history. Needless to say, areas of Africa have
+continued with their own dynamic virtually up to the present and one has to
+be careful in distinguishing where the European presence was merely one
+factor among many and where it was the sole or dominant factor. Besides
+that, there is the danger attendant upon any interpretation based on isolating
+one variable – the conclusions could be lopsided if a great deal of attention
+is not paid to the interrelations between that variable and the numerous
+others which are always involved in any historical reconstruction.
+Occasionally, some historians deny that the writing of history is an
+exercise in contemporary politics. Yet many among those would subscribe
+to the now-hackneyed adage that ‘every generation rewrites its own history
+according to its own lights’, which is another way of saying that the base of
+operation is always the contemporary socio-political scene. In any event,
+pan-African historians have largely taken it upon themselves to make it
+explicitly clear that history and the writing of history must be used as a
+means of liberation of our people. This does not necessarily mean that the
+historian qua historian is in the front line of the struggle, or that he has
+ready solutions, but at least he should be called upon to investigate areas
+relevant to an understanding of the present predicament of black peoples
+around the world. Looking at our labour history should provide some
+further insights into the differentiation in labour skills and technology
+which is now so characteristic of black/white relations, and it has the added
+advantage of underscoring the sameness of historical experience of a people
+scattered in different parts of the world.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+6
+The Angolan Question
+I would like to come to the situation in the United States and to look at the
+types of responses, and to look at what I consider to be some fairly
+horrendous mistakes which were made by certain forces in this country, the
+United States, in their approach to the Angolan question.
+Again, I will dismiss at least one element. We can dismiss those who are
+attempting to hire black mercenaries for the FNLA (National Liberation
+Front of Angola) and UNITA (the National Union for the Total
+Independence of Angola). When this individual (Roy Innis, who took over
+the Congress of Racial Equality in 1968) purports to be organizing black
+mercenaries to go and fight in Africa, and then we know that mercenaries
+cost, whether they are black or white – and we know that this particular
+black functionary cannot afford to pay anybody – we know that these black
+mercenaries would have been paid by imperialism, to go and fight in
+Angola.
+However, I think we can dismiss that as an aberrant phenomenon – as
+the expression of a particularly reactionary and unresponsive force within
+the black American political environment. So, we should really concentrate
+attention on those elements that are serious. With serious people, one
+engages in serious debate. And I think there were a large number of serious
+people throughout the Afro-American community who supported UNITA
+when they should have been lending uncompromising support to the MPLA
+(People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) at that particular
+historical juncture.
+It was immediately obvious that there was a startling coincidence – a
+startling convergence – between the positions of certain individuals who
+call themselves progressive, revolutionaries, and who in fact regarded
+themselves as the essence of revolution – yet their positions converged with
+
+that of US imperialism. And this amazing historical convergence needs to
+be understood.
+I assume that there are elements within the audience who took that
+position, and I’m not going to engage in any abuse of those elements. I am
+simply going to say I believe the position was historically completely
+incorrect. I will indicate how I believe that error took place.
+The first thing is UNITA gained a certain popularity in this country in
+the very late sixties and the early seventies, particularly in the period of the
+rise of the African liberation movement, and the like. I was following the
+process, so I know that they were becoming more exposed and more
+popular in this country. And that they used certain, very opportunist
+political tactics and techniques. They simply appealed to the growing black
+consciousness by saying, ‘Inside of Angola we stand for the elevation of the
+black man to a position of dignity and rule, and the MPLA stands for the
+elevation of whites and mulattoes over the indigenous African people.’ That
+was the standard line in the late sixties and early seventies.
+And they would then say, ‘Look at the MPLA. It has so-and-so, who is
+in its executive, who is a white, who is a Portuguese. It has so many
+mulattoes who are on the Central Committee, it has so-and-so who is
+married to a white woman, President Neto, and so on and so forth.’
+And in the context of the US, I think that those are very telling points.
+In the context of the black struggle in this country, when brothers and
+sisters were going through that terrible period of self-identification, trying
+to extract themselves out of the dominant white culture, I think that those
+points made a great deal of impact. Particularly because the MPLA was not
+really seeking to influence the Afro-American population. Or much of the
+American population.
+So that is one reason why the UNITA gained in popularity. And when
+we examine that very carefully, we must of course admit that to declare
+blackness is a very easy thing to do. I mean the same character who was
+mobilizing black mercenaries was also in the forefront of declaring his
+blackness – and he would call himself Garveyite, and so on and so forth.
+To declare for blackness is one of the easier things to do. Once one
+recognizes the opportunities inherent in that situation.
+But surely we need to go further than that. We need to examine, first,
+whether the reality in Angola was the reality as portrayed by UNITA. We
+
+need to go further and ask whether the historical experience of Angola
+could be so easily assimilated into the historical experience of black people
+in the US that Afro-Americans should run to make a judgement on Angola
+on the basis of some knowledge they had that so-and-so was married to a
+white. Or that so-and-so was a mulatto.
+Because the central understanding that we must reach is that any
+situation must be examined on its own historical merits. What is called
+‘race’ in the US is not the same thing as what might be called race in
+Angola. In fact, in this country, those who are all called black, or used to be
+called Negro – if they went to Angola, they would be distinguished, many,
+as mulattoes. If we want to understand Angola and the complex of the
+relationships between social strata and race, and so forth, we must then
+understand Angola. We cannot sit in Washington or in Detroit and imagine
+that what we are seeing around the block is Angolan society.
+And this seems to me to be one of the mistakes which the brothers made
+when they tried to transform a very simplistic understanding of black–white
+relationships in the judgement of whether they would support the MPLA or
+support UNITA.
+One is reminded here of some of the things which Fanon wrote in
+regard to Africa, when he was talking about the pitfalls of national
+consciousness. He was talking about the pitfalls of African national
+consciousness. Now we can apply that to the pitfalls of black national
+consciousness. Which is to say that national consciousness is clearly a
+liberating force, but at a certain point it can provide blinkers. It can turn into
+blinkers and constitute a barrier for further understanding of the real world.
+The second and more widespread factor, and one that ultimately proved
+to be most decisive for many black progressives, was the notion that
+UNITA was a Maoist movement. And these left forces who opposed the
+MPLA were moving from the starting point of supporting Marxism–
+Leninism, Mao Zedong thought.
+In their own words, they have a vision and an analysis of contemporary
+society wherein they identify as the principal contradiction between the two
+superpowers. They argue further that the more dangerous force is Soviet
+socialist imperialism, because it’s more covert, it’s more subtle, and because
+it ultimately can be more powerful, since capitalist imperialism is on the
+wane. And therefore, in a situation in which the Soviets are involved, one
+has to take a stand on the opposite side.
+
+Now, what is my disagreement with that position? I shall not go into all
+my disagreements, because I do not want any sort of global confrontation. I
+am not in favour of trying to resolve all the problems of the world at the
+same time, in a single stroke. So that I’m not going to attempt to deal with
+that postulation about the principal contradiction and its implication.
+What we are going to ask is how does that relate to Angola with its
+specific characteristics. If someone holds that belief as a sincere
+revolutionary tenet, when that person approaches Angola, how is it that
+such a belief ends by placing such forces on the side of those who have for
+500 years oppressed the African people?
+What explanation does such a person give to the Angolans who have
+been engaged since 1960 in armed struggle against the Portuguese, against
+NATO, who at the end of that struggle found they were faced with the
+South Africans and with an escalation of US support to the so-called
+liberation movement which had been harassing the genuine freedom
+fighters for many years?
+So that from a dialectical perspective and a scientific perspective we
+struggle and work to discover the correct line. It is only from a theological
+perspective that one knows the correct line because of revealed truth. And it
+seems to me that the limitations of that position were very clearly revealed
+in the Angolan situation. I have not seen a single analysis from forces
+claiming that they had the ‘correct’ line, which meant opposing the Soviets
+– not a single analysis of what was going on inside of Angola. It was purely
+external. And I do not believe we can proceed on that basis.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+II
+Development and
+Underdevelopment
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+7
+The Historical Roots of African
+Underdevelopment
+Tomas Szentes, in his survey of Interpretations of Economic Development,
+observed that, in contrast to bourgeois theories, Marxist writing ‘explains
+the phenomenon of economic underdevelopment, the perspectives of
+eliminating it and the concrete questions on further development, always in
+relation to history, within the framework of historical interrelations, by
+concentrating on the main driving forces of social and economic
+development, and by analyzing phenomena and their causes as dialectical
+interdependencies’. He then goes on to draw attention to the fact that ‘it is
+particularly and naturally the national theoreticians of the underdeveloped
+countries themselves, who stress the international aspects of economic
+underdevelopment, and the latter’s relations with colonialism, even if
+without any sign of Marxist mentality.’ It is no accident that the Tanzanian,
+Justinian Rweyemamu, puts forward the view that the poverty of
+‘developing’ countries is to be largely traced to the historical relationships
+of the metropolitan countries and the former colonial countries. The West
+Indian, Norman Givan, in a study of ‘Multinational Corporations and
+Dependent Underdevelopment in Mineral Export Economies’, also urges
+that the origins of institutional dependence must be sought in the historical
+evolution of the economies for centuries before. Both are products of and
+spokesmen for colonized portions of the globe, reacting against the
+metropolitan bias of standard bourgeois approaches to the problem of
+development.
+Unfortunately, historical dimensions to the analysis of the African
+economy are lacking, because enquiry into the African past, as conducted
+by historians, has seldom concerned itself with seeking explanations for the
+
+present international division of labour and all that goes with it. My
+examination here does not pretend to be exhaustive, but hopefully it will
+shed some light on the coming into being of the structural features
+associated with development and underdevelopment, as instanced in the
+economies of Western Europe and Africa. Because the economic history of
+Europe is better known, more emphasis will be placed on African
+underdevelopment; and for similar reasons, the colonial period will be
+neglected relative to the centuries commonly referred to as ‘pre-colonial’.
+The first significant thing about the internationalization of trade in the late
+fifteenth century was that Europeans took the initiative and went to other
+parts of the world. No Chinese junks reached Europe, and if any African
+canoes reached the Americas (as is sometimes maintained) they did not
+establish two-way links. This meant that what was called international trade
+was nothing but the extension overseas of European interests. Insofar as
+there was a strategy to international trade and the production that supported
+it, that strategy was firmly in European hands, and specifically in the hands
+of the maritime nations from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. They
+owned and directed the great majority of the world’s ocean-going vessels,
+and they controlled the financing of trade between four continents. Africans
+had little clue as to the tri-continental linkages between Africa, Europe and
+the Americas; nor did the inhabitants of the Moluccas have any notion of
+the European markets into which their species were directed by European
+ships. Europe had a monopoly of economic intelligence of the international
+exchange system seen as a whole, for Western Europe was the only sector
+capable of viewing the system as a whole.
+Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannon to gain control
+of all the world’s waterways. For instance, force was necessary in the case
+of the Sino-Japanese trade and with regards to the Arabs in East Africa.
+Once European hegemony was achieved, it gave them the power to allocate
+roles to every other part of the world, so that the various inputs
+intermingled with the benefits of Western Europe. Even the whites in the
+Americas were for three centuries on the periphery of a system whose
+centre of power was in Western Europe. Initially, the Portuguese, Spanish
+and Dutch had the most far-flung interests. When the Iberians were still in
+command of a major sector of world trade in the first half of the
+seventeenth century, they engaged in buying cotton clothes in India to
+
+exchange for slaves in Africa to mine gold in America. Part of the gold in
+the Americas would then be used to purchase spices and silks from the Far
+East. The concept of metropole and colony did not require European
+settlement. In Africa (and Asia) it was sufficient that local economies were
+in some way drawn into the web of international commerce.
+It is interesting to note that what is called ‘international law’ also
+reflected the early division of the trading world into metropoles and
+dependencies. The law recognized by different states as governing the high
+seas was understandably European and not Indonesian or African. On the
+Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean, the African more likely than not was an
+object rather than subject or master of the law. Slavers in a Dutch slave ship
+were legally protected against piracy, because they were Dutch property.
+The law of the metropoles became the law of international relations. This is
+yet another reflection of the commercial hegemony established by Europe
+at the onset of the epoch of international trade.
+Africa had little say in the determination of the import and export
+content of its commerce with Europeans. Europe’s exports were an
+extension of domestic production of and demand for a wide range of
+articles, such as Dutch linen, Spanish iron, English pewter, Portuguese
+wines, French brandy, Venetian glass beads, German muskets, and so forth.
+Europeans were also able to unload on the African continent goods which
+had become unsalable in Europe. Thus, items like old sheets, cast-off
+uniforms, technologically outdated firearms, and a whole range of pacotille
+found guaranteed markets in Africa. Africans slowly became aware of the
+possibility of demanding and obtaining better imported goods, and pressure
+was exerted on the captains of ships, but the interplay between African
+buyer and European supplier was extremely circumscribed. Europeans were
+most concerned about regional variants like the demand for copper in
+Eastern Nigeria and iron on the Upper Guinea Coast. They also took into
+account shifting tastes within any given region; but the overall range of
+trade goods which left Hamburg, Copenhagen and Liverpool was
+determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production and
+consumption within Europe itself.
+The effectiveness of Europe’s power to make decisions within the
+international trading system was best seen in the way that it selected what
+Africa would export. A complete list of African export commodities since
+the fifteenth century would include things such as civet perfume, ambergris,
+
+indigo, monkeys and feathers: but, of course, those were mere curiosities.
+The economically significant commodities were very few and were chosen
+by Europeans in accordance with European needs.
+The ships of the Portuguese discoverers gave the search for gold the
+highest priority; partly on the basis of well-known information that West
+African gold reached Europe across the Sahara, and partly on the basis of
+speculation. The Portuguese were successful in abstaining gold in parts of
+West Africa and in eastern Central Africa; and it was the ‘Gold Coast’
+which attracted the greatest attention from Europeans in the sixteenth and
+seventeenth centuries. The number of forts built there was testimony to this,
+and the nations involved included the Scandinavians and the German
+principality of Brandenburg, as well as other colonial stalwarts such as the
+British, Dutch and Portuguese. However, since gold was limited to very
+small areas of Africa as far as Europeans were aware, the principal export
+was human beings.
+Only in a very few places at given times was there the export of another
+commodity of equal or greater importance. For instance, in Senegal there
+was gum, in Sierra Leone camwood, and in Mozambique ivory.
+Why Europeans were anxious to acquire gold would appear to require
+no explanation, but, apart from the universal fascination with the yellow
+metal, one must take into account that it was a direct response to a pressing
+need in Europe: namely, the need for gold coins within the growing
+capitalist money economy. Camwood was also called into existence as a
+West African export because of the expanding capitalism in Europe. It was
+mainly utilized for its yield of red dye, and it ceased to be of value in the
+nineteenth century when European technological advance created
+substitutes. Ivory from Africa passed into European industry (as distinct
+from artwork) during and after the sixteenth century, once the lathe had
+made precision-cutting possible. Its export to Europe continued well into
+the colonial period, until plastic substitutes undermined important sectors
+such as billiard and bowling ball manufacture. It is in the light of its own
+needs and technology that Europe has always made the decisions
+concerning what Africa should export and concerning the beginning and
+decline of each export commodity. The most crucial of these decisions for
+‘pre-colonial’ African trade was Europe’s allocation to Africa of the role of
+supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of the
+world.
+
+It is a valid question to ask why Africans accepted the terms of what they
+should export, and particularly with regard to the sale of human beings. One
+suggestion which was at one time widely accepted and unchallenged was
+that African society already had slaves which were simply handed over to
+European buyers. The institution of slavery has co-existed with and formed
+part of communal, feudal and capitalist societies; but its widest incidence
+occurred when communalism was extensively broken down, which was not
+the case in Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The most likely
+explanation is that captives were made in war, and it is reasonable to
+assume that such fresh captives (as distinct from those who had earned a
+place in their captors’ society and family structure) would have been
+considered readily expendable to European buyers.
+One has also to take into account the offer of European commodities as
+a pole of attraction. Paradoxically enough, the influence of European goods
+can scarcely be attributed to their quality. On the contrary, things such as
+cheap European fabrics were inferior to African products and this was
+recognized by buyers. However, they were brought to Africa in large
+quantities, so availability was the crucial factor. No doubt, the novelty of
+European commodities also led to their being accepted in exchange for gold
+or human beings. Estaban Montejo, an African who ran away from a Cuban
+slave plantation in the nineteenth century, recalled that his people were
+wooed into slavery by the colour red. Diverting as his recollection may
+appear, it should not be dismissed lightly. He wrote as follows:
+It was the scarlet which did for the Africans; both the kings and the rest surrendered without
+a struggle. When the kings saw that whites – I think the Portuguese were the first – were
+taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs, and the blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran
+down to the ships like sheep and there they were captured. The Negro has always liked
+scarlet. It was the fault of this colour that they put them in chains and sent them to America.
+
+In the Congo, the slave trade did not get under way without grave
+doubts and opposition from Africans who had established contact with the
+Europeans. The king of the state of Kongo clearly defied the nature of his
+expectations from Europe. He asked for masons, priests, clerks, physicians,
+and the like; but instead he was overwhelmed by slave ships sent by his
+Catholic brothers in Portugal, and a vicious trade was opened up by
+exploiting contradictions within the loosely structured Kongo kingdom. It
+might be objected that the Kongo king who took this stand against slavery
+had been converted to Christianity and was speaking as a Catholic. But
+
+there was little in Catholicism either in Portugal or among the missionaries
+in Kongo which would have raised any sanguine hopes that the Christian
+religion was in any way a barrier to the enslavement of Africans. With the
+date of the Kongo episode being at the beginning of the sixteenth century it
+can legitimately be interpreted as rare surviving evidence of an important
+aspect of the initial confrontation between Europeans and Africans at the
+onset of the internationalization of trade and the onset of the Atlantic slave
+trade in particular. An African ruler had conceived of possibilities of
+mutually beneficial interchange between his people and a European state,
+but the latter imposed an export specialization in human cargo.
+Once Africa and Europe became interlocked on the latter’s terms, it was
+beyond the capacity of any given African state or society to change the
+status quo, because Europeans reacted by force and other means to maintain
+their position. This was exemplified in Angola, where the Portuguese
+employed an unusual number of their own troops and tried to wrest political
+power from Africans – with a resolution that was not customary in the
+epoch before colonial rule. The Angolan state of Matamba on the river
+Kwango was founded around 1630 as a direct reaction against the
+Portuguese. With Queen Nzinga at its head, Matamba tried to coordinate
+resistance against the Portuguese in Angola, especially in the 1640s when
+the Dutch offensive against the Portuguese provided a European ally.
+Portugal gained the upper hand in 1648, but Matamba remained hostile, and
+participation in the slave trade was largely in abeyance as far as that state
+was concerned for a quarter of a century. But, slaving having become a
+major activity of the region, Matamba could not forever stand aside. So
+long as it opposed trade with the Portuguese, it was an object of hostility
+from neighbouring African states which had a modus vivendi with
+Europeans and slave trading. When Queen Nzinga resumed business with
+the Portuguese in 1656, it was undoubtedly a major victory for the latter.
+Her change of name to Dona Ana de Sousa was a very nominal concession
+to Christianity, but it symbolized a major decision-making role of the
+Portuguese within the Angolan economy.
+A smaller but more specific example of African resistance to continued
+European imposition of trade in slaves comes from the Baga people in what
+is now the Republic of Guinea. The Baga lived in mini-states, and in circa
+1720 one of their leaders attempted to secure an alliance to stop the slave
+traffic. He was apparently defeated by local European resident traders,
+
+mulattoes and other slave-trading Africans. It is not difficult to understand
+why Europeans would have taken immediate steps to see that Tomba and
+his Baga followers did not opt out of the role allocated to them by Europe.
+A parallel which presents itself is the manner in which Europeans got
+together to wage the ‘Opium War’ against China in order to ensure that the
+Chinese would continue to import the addictive drug that was so profitable
+for Western capital.
+Of course, it is only as a last resort that the capitalist metropoles need to use
+armed force to ensure the pursuit of favourable policies in the periphery.
+Normally, economic weapons are sufficient. Within the same context of
+opposition to the slave trade, Dahomey1 found itself being brought to terms
+by being deprived of European imports – some of which had become
+necessities by the time that Dahomey had its altercation with European
+slave traders in the 1970s. The episode is worth careful scrutiny because the
+conventional interpretations portray Dahomey as nothing but a bloody
+slave-trading state, and make absolutely no mention of the determined
+opposition to the trade that was carried out by Dahomey’s greatest king,
+Agadja Trudo.
+The fundamental pillar of the Dahomean conception of the state was
+that all Dahomeans were inalienable. The king required of his subjects
+complete obedience, and they asked in turn for unqualified protection.
+Adadja Trudo appreciated that European demand for slaves and the pursuit
+of slaving in and around Dahomey was incompatible with Dahomey’s
+development. Between 1724 and 1726, he looted and burnt European forts
+and slave barracoons; and he reduced the trade from the ‘Slave Coast’ to a
+mere trickle, by blocking the paths leading to sources of supply in the
+interior. European slave dealers were very bitter, and they tried to sponsor
+some African collaborators against Agadja Trudo. They failed to unseat him
+or crush the Dahomean state, but in turn Agadja failed to persuade them to
+develop new lines of economic activity, such as local plantation agriculture;
+and, being anxious to acquire firearms and cowries through the Europeans,
+he had to acquiesce in the resumption of slave trading in 1730.
+In 1730, Dahomean slaving was placed under royal control and was far
+more restricted than previously. Yet, the failure of this determined effort
+illustrated that a single African state at the time could not emancipate itself
+from European hegemony. The small size of the polities and the numerous
+
+political divisions made it so much easier for Europe to make the decisions
+about Africa’s role in world production and trade.
+Because the nature of African exports was determined from outside the
+continent, questions such as the level of output and prices were also decided
+outside Africa. Time and time again, trade in slaves responded to various
+external stimuli. At first, the labour was needed in Iberia and in the Atlantic
+islands such as Sāo Tomé, Cape Verde and the Canaries; then came this
+period when the Greater Antilles and the Spanish American mainland
+needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and
+then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be
+met. The records show direct correlations between levels of exports from
+Africa and European demand for slave labour in this or that part of the
+American plantation economy. When the Dutch took Pernambuco in 1634,
+the directors of the Dutch West India Company immediately informed their
+agents on the ‘Gold Coast’ that they were to take the necessary steps to
+pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta – thereby
+creating the infamous ‘Slave Coast’. When the British islands of the
+Caribbean took to growing sugarcane, the Gambia was one of the first
+places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be
+instanced right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces Eastern Africa
+also, since European markets in the Indian Ocean islands became important
+in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since American demand
+caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope.
+Even medium and short-run fluctuations in the volume of African trade
+were usually reflections of European conditions. The incessant European
+wars of the mercantilist epoch were particularly decisive in this respect.
+There was a drastic fall in French shipping to Africa during the Seven Years
+War (1748– 55); while both British and French shipping was absent from
+regular trade during the American War of Independence and the years of
+Anglo-French struggle that followed. The African ‘producer’ of a
+commodity such as captives was quite helpless in the face of these
+European practices. During the American War of Independence, Futa
+Djallon and the neighbouring countries in Sierra Leone became full of
+captives, who had of necessity to be incorporated into a local system of
+production because they were kept hanging around for a long time with no
+ships in sight.
+
+It might seem to be labouring the obvious to emphasize that a
+fundamental characteristic of centuries of Afro-European trade was that its
+dimensions were determined outside of Africa. But, it is equally obvious
+that local conditions were bound in some ways to affect output, price and
+the European choice of particular parts of the continent at particular times.
+Thus, the local conditions around (say) the Bight of Biafra or Lake Nyasar
+would certainly have influenced the rate of extraction of captives at any
+given time. The emphasis on the overall global determinants is necessary in
+order to situate the mechanics of trade within Africa and their proper
+international perspective, and in so doing one can immediately perceive the
+striking similarity between the early commerce and the subsequent colonial
+and neo-colonial trades.
+The kind of benefits which Europe derived from its control of world
+commerce are well known, although it is curious that the recognition of
+Africa’s major contribution to European development is usually made in
+works devoted specifically to that subject; while European scholars of
+Europe often treat the European economy as if it were entirely autonomous.
+European economists of the nineteenth century certainly had no illusions
+about the interconnections between their national economies and the world
+at large. J.S. Mill went so far as to assert that as far as England was
+concerned, ‘the trade of the West Indies is hardly to be considered as
+external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’
+Marx can be cited in the same context, not as heretic or as the ultimate
+authority, but merely because of the frankness of his comments. It was
+Marx who wrote that ‘the discovery of gold and silver in America, the
+extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
+populations … the turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the
+hunting of black skins signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist
+production.’
+Central and South American gold and silver played a crucial role in
+meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist money economy,
+while African gold was also significant in this respect. African gold helped
+the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good
+Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the
+seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial
+capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the
+English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the ‘guinea’.
+
+Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for the most
+part of the nineteenth, the exploitation of Africa and African labour
+continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in
+Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth
+extended over such vital sectors as shopping, insurance, the association of
+capital, capitalist agriculture and the capital goods industry. Sometimes, the
+efforts were modest and localized. Thus, the St Malo fishing industry was
+stimulated by the opening up of markets in the French slave plantations;
+while the Portuguese fishing industry also gained new buoyancy. Then there
+were more spectacular developments like the growth of seaport towns
+connected with Atlantic trade – notably Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes,
+Bordeaux and Seville. Behind those ports there often emerged the
+manufacturing centres that gave rise to the notion of the ‘industrial
+revolution’. As Mantoux put it, ‘the growth of Lancashire, of all English
+countries the one most deserving to be called the cradle of the factory
+system, depended first of all on the development of Liverpool and her
+trade.’
+The connections between capitalism and slavery as far as England is
+concerned are adequately documented by Eric Williams. A similar picture
+would emerge from any detailed study of French capitalism and slavery,
+given the fact that during the eighteenth century the West Indies accounted
+for 20 per cent of France’s external trade – much more than the whole of
+Africa in the present century. Of course, benefits were not always directly
+proportional to the amount of involvement of a given European state in the
+Atlantic trade – for instance, the enormous profits of the Portuguese
+economy went into the hands of the more developed Western European
+capitalist nations who supplied Portugal with capital, ships and trade goods.
+Germany was included in this category, along with England, the Dutch
+Provinces and France.
+Commerce deriving from Africa helped a great deal to strengthen
+transnational links within the Western European economy, bearing in mind
+that American produce was the consequence of African labour. Brazilian
+dyewoods, for example, were re-exported from Portugal into the
+Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Baltic, and passed into the continental
+cloth industry of the seventeenth century. Sugar from the Caribbean was reexported from England and France to other parts of Europe to such an
+
+extent that Hamburg was the biggest sugar-refining centre in Europe in the
+first half of the eighteenth century. Germany supplied manufacturers to
+Scandinavia, Holland, England, France and Portugal, for resale in Africa.
+England, France and Holland (in spite of competing mercantilist systems)
+found it necessary to exchange various classes of goods to better deal with
+Africans for gold, slaves and ivory. The financiers and merchants of Genoa
+were the powers behind the markets of Lisbon and Seville; while Dutch
+bankers played a similar role with respect to Scandinavia and England.
+Western Europe, after all, was more than just an arbitrary geographical
+connotation. It was that part of Europe in which by the fifteenth century
+embryo capitalist relations already posed a challenge to feudalism, marking
+a further departure from the natural, self-sufficient autarchic economies of
+previous modes of production. When the Western European nations moved
+overseas, it was the product of an internal dynamic, which was not
+navigated or even deflected by new trades with Africa, Asia and the
+Americas. Enclosures continued in the English countryside, and agriculture
+in Western Europe generally continued its slow rate of evolution, serving to
+support a larger population and to provide a more effective basis for the
+wool and linen industries in particular. The rate of transformation in
+technology and in the socio-economic organization of industry was more
+rapid. African trade hindered none of these things. On the contrary, it
+speeded up several aspects, including the integration of Western Europe –
+as noted above. That is why the African connection contributed not merely
+to economic growth (which relates only to quantitative dimensions) but also
+to real development in a structural sense. Conversely, it can be
+demonstrated that the contacts with Europe had no organic relationship to
+what Africa was doing previously nor did they permit the reemergence of
+any rational continental or regional ties within Africa itself. Trade within
+Europe meant historical disruption and disintegration, and those things
+proved crucial to Africa’s underdevelopment.
+Africa’s external trade was very limited up to the fifteenth century.
+Apart from northern Africa (the Horn included), it was only East Africa that
+had foreign trade relations. The Portuguese sought with some success to
+replace the Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and to the
+rest of Asia. It was the Portuguese who came to carry most of the ivory
+which was marketed in India; while Indian clothes and beads were sold in
+East and West Africa by the Portuguese and the Dutch. The same applied to
+
+cowry shells from the East Indies. A new trade route between Africa and
+the Americas was an extension neither of the indigenous American
+economy nor of the African economy. Its total rationale lay in Europe. In
+effect, therefore, Europe took the first steps towards transforming Africa,
+Asia and America into economic satellites. It was at the very outset of
+international trade that there was established that radical pattern with
+Europe at the centre and very few independent connections between the
+non-European territories.
+Inside Africa itself, the period of trade which preceded the
+establishment of colonial rule was also determined by the state of affairs
+where there were ties between colony and metropole but none between
+colony and colony. It will shortly be illustrated that trade with Europe
+arrested the development of numerous small African economies. Lack of
+economic integration in Africa is mainly a result of that fact, because social
+formations in given geographical areas were not permitted to extend their
+production and economic boundaries so as to generate trade with each other
+comparable in importance to that between each area and Europe. There is
+no doubt that the potential for independent economic development was
+present in a large number of localities, based on local resources and skills.
+As those local economies multiplied and grew closer together, they were
+bound to create regional and continental markets as in Europe and parts of
+Asia that had gone further along the same evolutionary path. In addition to
+blocking the possibilities of continued evolution, European trade also set in
+motion a process of active disintegration. Certain inter-territorial links
+established on the continent were broken down because of European trade.
+Several examples arose on the West African coast down to Angola, because
+in those parts European trade was most voluminous, and the surviving
+written record is also more extensive.
+When the Portuguese arrived in the region of modern Ghana in the
+1470s, they had few commodities to offer local inhabitants in exchange for
+the coveted gold. However, they were able to trans-ship from Dahomey
+supplies of cotton cloths, beads and female slaves which were saleable on
+the ‘Gold Coast’. The indications are that the Portuguese were responding
+to a given demand in the ‘Gold Coast’, so that a previous trade must have
+been in existence between the two regions. The Akan were gold producers,
+and the people of Benin were specialist craftsmen who had a surplus of
+cloth and beads which they manufactured themselves. As an expansionist
+
+state, Dahomey also had access to prisoners of war; while the Akan seemed
+concerned with building their own population and labour force, so they
+acquired female captives from Dahomey and rapidly integrated them as
+wives. When the Portuguese intervened in this exchange, it was
+subordinated to the overall interests of European trade. As soon as Portugal
+and other European nations had sufficient goods so as not to be dependent
+on the re-export of certain commodities from Dahomey, then all that
+remained were the links between the ‘Gold Coast’ and Europe on the one
+hand, and between Dahomey and Europe on the other. That represented the
+destruction of whatever potential existed for creating a regional market with
+its own internal logic.
+Probably, Dahomey products reached the ‘Gold Coast’ by percolating
+through what is now Benin and Togo, using as far as possible the creeks
+behind the coast. Therefore, it would have been more convenient when
+Europeans established a direct link across the open sea. The superiority of
+Europeans at sea was of the greatest strategic value, along with their
+organizational ability. This was illustrated in several places, beginning with
+the Upper Guinea Coast and the Cape Verde islands, where Portuguese
+settlers broke into the pattern of local trade ever since the 1460s. They
+intervened in the transfers of raw cotton and indigo dye from one African
+community to another, and the Cape Verdean settlers went a step further in
+establishing a flourishing cotton-growing and cotton-manufacturing
+industry. They used labour and techniques from the mainland and exported
+the finished product along the length of the coast down to El Mina.
+The Portuguese also took over the trade in local cowries in Kongo, the
+trade in salt along the Angolan coast, and the trade in high-quality palm
+cloth between Loango and southern Angola. In some instances, they
+achieved dominance not just because of their ships and commercial skills
+but also by the use of force – providing they were operating on the littoral
+and could bring their cannon into play. The disruption of transactions
+between the ‘Gold Coast’ and the ‘Ivory Coast’ followed that pattern. A
+strong coastal canoe trade existed between these two regions, with people
+of Cape Lahou sailing past Cape Three Points to sell their cloth as far east
+as Accra. The Portuguese set up a fort at Axim near Cape Three Points, to
+service gold trade with the hinterland; and one of its incidental functions
+was to restrict the east–west coastal African trade. They prohibited Axim
+residents from going to Cape Lahou, and they stopped canoes from the
+
+‘Ivory Coast’ from travelling east beyond Axim. The purpose was
+obviously to make both areas discrete economic entities exclusively tied to
+Europe.
+The Portuguese were not successful in destroying this African
+commerce, and the Dutch inherited the problem when they took over Axim
+in 1673. The servants of the Dutch West India company which was
+operating on the Gold Coast hovered between two alternatives. If possible,
+they wanted a complete cessation of the African trade; and when that was
+not achieved, they tried to force the people of the ‘Ivory Coast’ to buy a
+certain amount of Dutch goods in addition to the local products they
+received on the ‘Gold Coast’. The Dutch stipulated that each Axim
+canoeman going to Cape Lahou should carry Dutch goods worth at least
+four ounces of gold. In effect, that converted a purely inter-African
+exchange into a European/African trade.
+What was doubly detrimental to African attempts to integrate their own
+economies was the fact that when Europeans became middlemen in local
+trade networks, they did so mainly to facilitate the extraction of captives,
+and thereby subordinated the whole economy to the slave trade. In Upper
+Guinea, the Portuguese and their mulatto descendants in the Cape Verde
+islands and on the coast engaged in a large variety of trade permutations –
+involving cotton, dyes, kola nuts and European products. The purpose of it
+all was to fill the holds of slave-ships calling at Gambia, Cacheu, Bissau,
+the Bay of Sierra Leone, and so on. In Congo/Angola, the same picture
+emerges. The salt, nzimbu shells and palm cloth that came into Portuguese
+hands made up for their shortage of trade goods and served to purchase
+captives on different parts of the coast and deep in the interior. This element
+of subordination and dependence is crucial to an understanding of African
+under-development today, and its roots lie far back in the era of
+international trade. It is also worth noting that there is a type of pseudointegration which is compatible with dependence. In contemporary times, it
+takes the form of Free Trade areas in the ‘Third World’, which are made to
+order for the penetration of multinational corporations; while from the
+fifteenth century onwards this pseudo-integration took the form of the
+interlocking of African economics over long distances from the coast, so as
+to allow the passage of human captives and ivory from a given point inland
+to a given port on the Atlantic or Indian ocean.
+
+The West African gold trade was not destroyed but it became directly
+dependent on European buyers, by being diverted from the northward
+routes across the Sahara. Within the savannah belt of the ‘Western Sudan’,
+the trans-Saharan gold trade had nourished one of the most highly
+developed political zones in all Africa from the fifth century onwards. But it
+was more convenient for Europe to obtain its gold on the West Coast than
+through North African intermediaries, and one is left to speculate on what
+might have occurred in the ‘Western Sudan’ if there had been a steady
+increase in the gold trade over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+Nevertheless, there is something to be said in favour of African trade with
+Europe in this particular commodity: gold production involves mining and
+an ordered system of distribution within Africa. Akan country and parts of
+Zimbabwe and Mozambique sustained flourishing socio-political systems
+up to the nineteenth century, largely because of gold production. It was the
+trade in slaves that completely undermined the situation in West, East and
+Central Africa, for the procurement of captives was based on warfare,
+banditry and social distortions.
+A considerable body of writing is now coming into existence on the
+topic of the consequence of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa; and much of
+it purports to show that earlier views of the completely negative impact of
+the trade are ill-founded. Indeed, some individuals are preoccupying
+themselves with highlighting the many beneficial effects of the slave trade
+on Africa. The white-washing trend is another facet of the distortions
+produced when capitalism tries to provide itself with moral justification.
+Apologists rely on such flimsy arguments as ‘Africans benefited by getting
+European goods’ and ‘new food crops were introduced’ – as though Europe
+had to be enslaved before it got to enjoy the potato from the Native
+American Indian. This genre of scholarship stresses the fact that certain
+African kingdoms grew stronger during the centuries of slaving, and it
+assumes that the connection was a positive one. The truth is that some areas
+continued to develop and they did so in spite of slave trading; although all
+who participated were warped to a greater or lesser extent, and all were
+reduced to a state of dependence.
+Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its
+consequences for Africa, but the overall picture of destructiveness is clear,
+and that destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the
+
+recruitment of captives in Africa (as distinct from their sale at coastal
+ports).
+One of the uncertainties concerns the basic question of how many
+Africans were exported. This has long been an object of speculation, with
+estimates ranging from a few millions to 100 million. A study by Philip
+Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, has suggested the figure of
+about ten million Africans landed alive in the Americas, the Atlantic islands
+and Europe. That figure may well be low, in spite of the author’s assertions
+to the contrary, because so many of the import figures in the Americas were
+given out by individuals who were deliberately minimizing numbers in
+order to defraud revenue collection, and the volume of ‘contraband’ arrivals
+is difficult to measure. However, if this low figure was accepted as a basis
+for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions
+that could legitimately be drawn would confound those attempting to make
+light of the experience. As Curtin was aware, ‘the cost of the slave trade in
+human life was many times the number of slaves landed in the Americas.
+For every slave landed alive, other people died in warfare, along the bush
+pats leading to the coast, awaiting shipment, or in the crowded and
+insanitary conditions of the middle passage.’
+On any base figure of Africans who landed alive in the Americas, one
+would have to make an increment to cover mortality in trans-shipment,
+which averaged in the vicinity of 15 to 20 per cent. There were also other
+deaths between time of capture and time of embarkation. Most important of
+all, given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives, it is
+necessary to estimate the number of people killed or maimed in order to
+appreciate the extent of the millions who were taken alive. The resultant
+figure (a considerable multiple of 10 million) would represent the number
+from the population and labour force of Africa because of the establishment
+of slave production by Europeans in the Americas. It is a loss that would
+have to be evaluated in the light of age and sex selection and other features.
+Slave traders preferred their victims between fifteen and thirty-five years of
+age, with a ratio of two men to one woman. They often accepted younger
+children but rarely any older person. They shipped the most healthy
+wherever possible, and even took pains to choose those who had had
+smallpox and were thereby immunized.
+Absence of data about the size of Africa’s population in the fifteenth
+century makes it impossible to carry out any scientific assessment of the
+
+results of the population outflow. But, nothing suggests that there was any
+increase in the continent’s population over the centuries of slaving, although
+that was the trend in other parts of the world. Lack of increase or even
+slight increases would have represented a ‘deficit’ in terms of a population
+projection, since fewer babies were born that would otherwise have been
+the case if millions of childbearing age had not been eliminated. Finally, on
+this particular topic, it is essential to recognize that the Atlantic slave trade
+on the Indian Ocean has been called ‘The East African slave trade’ and ‘the
+Arab slave trade’ for so long that it obscures the extent to which it was the
+European slave trade. When the slave trade from East Africa was at its
+height in the late eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, the
+destination of captives was the plantation societies of Mauritius, Reunion
+and Seychelles as well as the New World, via the Cape of Good Hope.
+Besides, Africans labouring as slaves from Zanzibar to Persia in the
+sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were all ultimately serving the European
+capitalist system which had become all pervasive. The Sultan of Zanzibar
+did not eat from cloves himself.
+An emphasis on population loss as such is highly relevant to the
+question of socio-economic development. In recent times, since imperial
+agencies have decided on a Malthusian line for the ‘Third World’, it is
+being forgotten that population growth played a major role in European
+development in providing labour, markets and the pressures which led to
+further advance. The Japanese population growth had similar positive
+effects; while in other parts of Asia which remained pre-capitalist, the size
+of the population led to a much more intensive exploration of the land than
+has ever been the case in what is still a sparsely peopled African continent.
+Even in the absence of statistics, it seems that West Africa was always a
+more densely populated section of the continent than either Central or East
+Africa; and it was there that the brunt of the slaving fell, warping the
+development of some of the most advanced areas in all Africa, such as
+Yorubaland, Igboland and Akan country.
+African economic activities were affected both directly by population
+loss and indirectly by other features of slave trading – notably the violence
+and insecurity that it engendered. Before the eighteenth century, the
+Portuguese and Dutch actually discouraged slaving on the ‘Gold Coast’, for
+they recognized that it would be incompatible with the gold trade. However,
+by the end of the seventeenth century, gold had been discovered in Brazil,
+
+and the importance of gold supplies from Africa was lessened. Within the
+total Atlantic pattern, African slaves became more important than gold, and
+Brazilian gold was offered for African captives at Whydah and Accra. At
+that point, slaving began undermining the ‘Gold Coast’ economy, and made
+large inroads into the gold trade. Slave-raiding and kidnapping made it
+unsafe to mine and to travel; and in any event the resort to warfare for
+captives proved more profitable than gold mining. One contemporary
+European observer noted that ‘as one fortunate marauding makes a native
+rich in a day, they therefore exert themselves rather in war, robbery and
+plunder than in their old business of digging and collecting gold.’
+What was so clearly evidenced in the above example must have been
+true for all other branches of economic activity, and especially for
+agriculture. Occasionally in certain localities, food production was
+stimulated to provide supplies for slave ships, but the overall consequence
+of slaving on agricultural activities in Western and Central Africa were
+negative. Europeans on the scene did not commit to that effort, and where
+such comments are not available the inference is nonetheless inescapable.
+Labour was drawn off from agriculture and for those remaining, conditions
+were unsettled. Dahomey, which in the sixteenth century was renowned for
+exporting food to parts of what is now Togo, was suffering through famines
+in the nineteenth century. An enlightening parallel is the way migrant
+labour and cash crops affected the food economy of colonial Africa and
+made famine endemic in some districts.
+Just as the slave trade and overseas trade in general had multiplier
+effects on European development, so it had multiplier effects on African
+underdevelopment. Where there was integration across national boundaries
+in Europe, there was disintegration in Africa. The creation of growing
+points in the European economy and the establishment of backward and
+forward linkages were all out of the question in Africa, because foreign
+trade was not a logical extension of internal production and exchange. On
+the contrary, a great deal of time and energy went into activities like slaving
+and elephant hunting, which were not designed to permit an expansion of
+Africa’s ability to produce foodstuffs and other essentials of human
+consumption.
+Special attention needs to be paid to ivory exports, because they are more
+important than the sport of captives as far as most East African societies
+
+were concerned and because it is necessary to determine the extent to which
+the ivory trade had consequences comparable to the slave trade. There was
+definitely a qualitative difference between the two. The ivory trade led to
+professionalization just like the slave trade, but bands of elephant hunters
+(found for example among the Cokwo, Baganda, Nyamwezi and Bambara)
+were positive additions to the social structure while bands of professional
+raiders and man-stealers were threats to established society. Andrew
+Roberts’s study of the evidence relating to Nyamwezi ivory trade has shown
+that this long-distance trade sparked off other beneficial developments, such
+as increased trading goods, food and salt. There were other African exports
+such as gum, rubber, camwood and wax which also had certain beneficial
+effects on socio-economic patterns when they were traded, showing clearly
+that slaving was in a category by itself. Many of the other commodities
+were accommodated within the colonial trade of the late nineteenth century,
+indicating that their export was comparable with the exploitation of African
+labour within Africa – an objective with which slave trading obviously
+came into sharp conflict.
+On the other hand, ivory was an asset that was rapidly exhausted in any
+given region, and the struggle to secure new supplies sometimes brought
+violence almost indistinguishable from that produced by slaving. Besides,
+the most decisive limitation of the ivory trade was the fact that it was not an
+outgrowth of local product, and it caused restructuring dependent upon an
+overseas market. The Nyamwezi were trading articles of African
+manufacture among Africans long before the export of trade opened up. In a
+sense, regional trade provided the ‘capital’ for the long-distance ivory trade,
+but from then on any expansion of local manufacturing was incidental to,
+rather than the goal of, local economies caught up in the international
+trading network, and the expansion was very limited. This kind of
+conceptualization is completely lacking in reconstructions of African
+history. In a sizable volume of essays devoted to ‘trade in Central and
+Eastern Africa before 1900’, there is nowhere expressed any awareness that
+the professionalization of trade per se is no great thing, and that it meant not
+development but the subordination of local economies in the case of
+Africa’s relations with Europe. Andrew Roberts ends his study of
+Nyamwezi trade as follows:
+It would seem, then, that we are obliged yet again to conclude that only rule by
+representatives of superior technology could provide the conditions for sustained advance
+
+from the subsistence economy. This was, indeed, partly due to the very manner in which the
+region had become already linked to, and in a sense dependent on, the economies of the
+industrialized world.
+
+The writer of those lines should be given credit for at least a hesitant
+acknowledgement of the notion of ‘dependence’, which is so central to an
+understanding of underdevelopment. For the rest, the statement is timid and
+confusing.
+Why is it that representatives of superior technology were required to
+carry Africans out of the subsistence economy, and they were not necessary
+to perform similar functions for Europeans and most Asians? It was
+precisely the external links which precluded the possibility of independent
+self-sustaining advice, and that was true of the Nyamwezi ivory trade as it
+was of the Kazembe trade in captives. Besides, at all times one must keep in
+mind the dialectical opposite of the trade in Africa: namely, production in
+Europe or in the Americas under European control. The few socially
+desirable by-products of elephant hunting within Africa were chickenfeed
+in comparison with the profits, technology and skills associated with the
+product in Europe. The ivory marts of Minping Lane were the centres
+where real profits on ivory trade were made. The tusks then augmented in
+value when they were turned into billiard balls and piano keys in London,
+and when they went to Sheffield to be transformed into knife handles and to
+Dieppe and Geislingen to be made into hundreds of different artifacts by
+marine processes. Europe was strengthened by these and numerous other
+foreign-fed industries to carry Africa out of their own developing capitalist
+economy in the most disadvantaged situation possible.
+European technology was not as superior to that in other parts of the world
+in the fifteenth century as is often assumed. Their supremacy in that aspect
+at the present time is itself more a consequence than the cause of their
+hegemony over the rest of the world. In the fifteenth century, Europe merely
+had the edge over humanity elsewhere in the scientific understanding of the
+universe, the making of tools and the rational organization of work. One of
+the major shortcomings of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries was a shortage of commodities for exchange, as has already been
+illustrated. They were forced to make use of Asian and (to a lesser extent)
+African consumer goods, which were often of superior quality. Yet, as is
+also implicit in earlier sections of this analysis, European superiority in
+
+certain sectors proved decisive. African and Polynesian canoes were of high
+standard, but the relevant sphere of operations was the ocean, where
+European ships could take command. West Africans had developed metalcasting to a fine artistic perfection in many parts of Nigeria, but when it
+came to the meeting with Europe, beautiful bronzes were far less relevant
+than the crudest of cannon. African wooden utensils were sometimes works
+of great sensitivity, but Europe produced pots and pans that had many
+functional advantages. Literacy, numeracy, organizational experience and
+the capacity to produce on an ever-expanding scale (even under the
+domestic system) were also very meaningful advantages on the European
+side of the scale.
+Once Africa was drawn into the orbit of Western Europe, the latter’s
+technological development was speeded up, as already noted in the case of
+several other aspects of their economy. For example, the evolution of
+European shipbuilding from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was a
+logical consequence of their monopoly of sea commerce after the fifteenth
+century. During the same period, the North Africans were bottled up in the
+Mediterranean, and although it was from there that Europe borrowed a great
+deal of nautical instrumentation, the North Africans made no further
+worthwhile advances. Where the initial European advantage was not
+sufficient to assume supremacy, they deliberately undermined other
+people’s efforts. The Indian navy, for instance, suffered from the rigid
+enforcement of the English Navigation Laws. Yet, the expenses involved in
+building new and better European ships were met by the profits of overseas
+trade such as with India and Africa. The Dutch were pioneers in improving
+upon the caravels which took the Spanish and Portuguese out across the
+Atlantic, and the succession of Dutch trading companies operating in Asia,
+Africa and America were the ones responsible for experimentation. By the
+eighteenth century, the British were using Dutch know-how as a basis for
+surpassing the Dutch themselves, and the Atlantic was their laboratory. It
+used to be said that the slave trade was a training ground for British seamen.
+It is probably more significant to note that the Atlantic trade was the
+stimulator of consistent advances in naval technology.
+We know a fair amount about the evolution of science in Europe prior to
+overseas expansion, and it is possible to evaluate the catalytic contribution
+of the non-European world in the epoch of mercantilism. The technological
+revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe sprung from
+
+the interplay of numerous variables rooted entirely in the European
+experience, but they all have to be placed in the context of capitalist
+development; and it is no mere coincidence that the crucial engineering
+inventions of the late eighteenth century followed after the profits from
+external trade had been internalized by Western European capitalism. We
+know far less about the evolution of African technology, but commerce
+with Europe could have had no positive effect in this sphere.
+In the first place, craft skills would have suffered from the plague of
+slaving in the areas directly affected. Much has been made of the
+destructive aspect of the Ngoni incursion northwards into East Africa. In
+the Lake Nyasa/Lake Tanganyika corridor, warfare and raiding virtually
+obliterated cloth and hoe-making. Slave recruitment was warfare and
+pillage on a grand scale, and must have had analogous effects for the vast
+areas concerned. Of greater importance, however, were the indirect
+consequences of trade as such, including the impact of imports and the
+European subversion of local trade.
+The relationship of African technology to cloth manufacture is worthy
+of note, given the strategic role that textiles have played in economic
+development in Western Europe, Japan and the US. From the fifteenth to
+the nineteenth century, the demand for cloth in Africa was constantly
+expanding. All areas experienced a shift from car nudity through animal
+skins and bark cloth to cotton. Indian and European textiles helped meet
+this expanding demand, while areas like Senegambia, Ivory Coast, Benin,
+Yorubaland and Loango were exporters to other parts of Africa (through
+European intermediaries for the most part). But the volume of European
+production was so constantly increasing, along with the skill, so that Dutch
+and English manufacturers in the eighteenth century copied fashionable
+Indian and African patterns. Since they had established a stranglehold on
+local distribution, the products they brought had to be accepted even though
+they were inferior to the originals. By the late nineteenth century, European
+textiles were being imported in sufficient quantities to swamp local
+production and to make regions such as Senegambia into exporters of raw
+cotton and importers of finished cotton cloths. Wherever remnants of the
+industry survived, production was in the same technological mould of
+earlier centuries, because the narrow looms were never permitted to respond
+to the kind of demand which would have forced a breakthrough.
+
+With regard to textiles as well as iron, European imports were
+presumably viewed by Africans as supplementary to their own production
+of those items so long as there was a sufficient market. One would expect
+that if the foreign commodity became a threat to local manufacture, the
+affected African would make a stand. An example to this effect was the salt
+industry of Sierra Leone, which was protected by local African edict
+excluding salt as an import in the eighteenth century. The reasoning was
+sound, because in the early nineteenth century, British ships sailing to
+Nigeria carried cheap salt – to the detriment of local production.
+Yet the industry and skills which actually existed and were destroyed
+were probably of less consequence than the loss of the development
+opportunity. This cannot be calculated, but it must not be ignored.
+The editors of the aforementioned volume on East and Central African
+trade illustrate the disruption of industry and skills in Congo/Angola
+through the intervention of the Portuguese and their mulatto and black
+servants (pombeiros) in African commerce. They recognize that the
+demands of the Atlantic trade ‘ended by subverting the whole commercial
+structure with its attendant local industries’ but in the same breath they
+contend that ‘the opening of the overseas market does not seem to have
+altered in any radical way the role which commerce played in the economy
+of the area’. Here again, the basic weakness is a failure to distinguish
+between an independent economy in evolution and one that is being
+transformed into a satellite. In the former, commercial activity is entirely
+the consequence of the level of the development of the productive forces,
+whereas in the latter it is mainly a reflection of external needs. For slaving
+regions like Congo/Angola in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it
+means that the role of commercial activity was no longer simply the
+distribution of local products, nor was it the export of those products, nor
+was it the export compatible with the old. That is what cut off the possibility
+of evolution along previous lines, even though the worst effects were
+deferred for a considerable period until Europe itself was powerful enough
+to take complete control through such means as the sending of commodities
+to replace those that had formerly been locally made.
+Any trade in Africa which was an extension of European production
+was largely irrelevant to the technological advance within Africa. When
+Britain was the world’s leading economic power, it used to be referred to as
+a nation of shopkeepers. Most of the goods in their ships were produced by
+
+themselves. Africans from Senegal to the Cunene and from the Limpopo to
+the Tana busied themselves selling godos that they had not produced. They
+were agents for distributing European imports and for organizing the export
+of a few staples which were not in demand within the continent. The AfroPortuguese middlemen of Upper Guinea, the Akan market women, the Aro
+traders of the Bight of Biafra, the pombeiros of Angola, the Yao traders of
+Mozambique, the Swahili and Nyamwezi of East Africa were not
+performing a function which is essentially the same as that being carried out
+today by members of the disproportionality large service sector. Their
+contribution to technological development was nil because they were on the
+fringes of production.
+Commerce with Europe was not propitious to independent technological
+invention on the African side, nor did it create any consistent demand for
+the import of European technology, except for firearms. Europeans
+responded to that with the cheapest of muskets. What they deliberately
+ignored were the exceptional African requests that Europe should place
+certain skills and techniques at the disposal of Africa. This was an element
+in the Kongo situation, already alluded to. When Agadja Trudo sought to
+stop the slave trade, he also made an appeal to European craftsmen, and he
+sent an ambassador to London for that purpose. One European who stayed
+at the court of Dahomey in the late 1720s told his countrymen that ‘if any
+tailor, carpenter, smith or any other sort of white man that is free be willing
+to come here, he will find very good encouragement.’
+At about the same time that Agadja Trudo was seeking new skills from
+Europe, the Asantehene, Opuku Ware (1720–50), was also thinking along
+those lines. He asked Europeans to set up factories and distilleries in Ashtai
+country and got no response. Those requests were coming from the areas of
+Africa that were sufficiently developed to have been able to incorporate
+new production techniques without any great dysfunctions. This was also
+true of Ethiopia. A Portuguese embassy reached the Ethiopian court in
+1520. Having examined Portuguese swords, muskets, clothes, books and
+other objects, the Emperor Lebna Dengel felt the need to introduce
+European technical knowledge into Ethiopia. Correspondence exists
+between Emperor and European dignitaries such as Diego de Albuquerque
+(Portuguese Viceroy in India), Kings Manuel I and John III of Portugal, and
+Pope Leo X, in which requests were made for European assistance to
+
+Ethiopian industry. Until late in the nineteenth century, Ethiopian petitions
+to that effect were being repeated with scant success.
+One of the most profound facets of the cultural arrogance of European
+colonialists in Africa was their boastfulness about technological
+accomplishments and their contemptuous attitude towards what they
+considered as African non-achievements in that sphere. ‘They (Africans)
+had no plough, no wheel, and no means of transportation except human
+head porterage and dugout canoes on rivers and lakes. These people had
+built nothing, nothing of any kind in material more durable than mud, poles,
+and hatch!’ The above words of a British colonial governor are relatively
+mild specimens of the technological superiority syndrome. Such statements
+sprung from and strengthened the racist assumption that African people
+were incapable of the discovery and application of scientific laws. Yet, the
+evidence suggests that it was the connection between Europe and Africa
+which aided the technological maturation of the former, while inducing a
+period of technological marking time and even regression in Africa.
+Furthermore, the issue of inventiveness is subordinate to the diffusion of
+techniques. Europeans did not invent the wheel – it spread from China.
+Both because of the structure of international trade and because of the
+conscious decisions of European states, Africa was robbed of the
+opportunity to benefit from the scientific heritage of man.
+In the centuries before colonial rule, Europe’s scientific and technical
+capacity increased by progressions, while Africa appeared to have been
+almost static. What was a slight edge when the Portuguese rounded Cape
+Bojador in 1444 was a huge gap by the time that European robber statesmen
+sat down at Berlin 440 years later.
+The growing technological gap between Western Europe and Africa was
+consistent with the trend of capitalism to polarize wealth and power on the
+one hand, and poverty and dependence on the other. In a present imperialist
+epoch, super-profits from the dependencies have to some extent improved
+the standards of living of the metropolitan workers but in the earlier period
+internal exploitation strengthened external exploitation, and vice versa. At
+the national level within Western Europe, the unevenness of development
+had already been noted. This was sharply in evidence by the nineteenth
+century, with areas such as Portugal, Spain and Ireland playing colonial
+roles with respect to Britain, France and Germany. Inside of national
+economies, the polarization also expressed itself in the elimination of small
+
+producers and the rise of monopolies. The monopolies, therefore, were at
+the pinnacle of a system that knew nothing but profit-making and
+domination as its guiding principles. The monopolies set the tone for
+international political economy in the late nineteenth century. They
+intervened directly in Central and Eastern Europe through massive
+investments; and on a slightly smaller scale Western European monopolies
+sought financial and economic opportunities in Asia and Latin America.
+They were joined in this imperialist partition of the world by North
+American capital – the US having been transformed from an outpost of
+Europe into one of the command centres of capitalism.
+Africa by then was somewhat in the doldrums as far as Europe was
+concerned. Its great period accumulating primary capital for European
+development was over. Nevertheless, Europe still had a place for Africa
+within the new imperialist scheme of things. A few areas of the continent
+became crucial for European investment: namely, Algeria, Egypt, South
+Africa and Congo. Elsewhere, smaller European entrepreneurs were
+permitted to operate, although ultimately they too were tied to the big
+banking and industrial concerns which controlled the Western European
+economy, and they were under the umbrella of nation states that bargained
+consciously and unconsciously as agents of monopoly capital. Thus, the
+clash of Anglo-French financial interests in Egypt and the potential for
+investment in Congo were keys which opened the doors to the ‘Scramble
+for Africa’ – that is, to the transformation of the continent into political
+colonies to protect economic spheres.
+Apart from the Suez Canal and the South African and Congolese mines,
+the investment in the African continent in the late nineteenth century and
+subsequently was primarily to facilitate the production of agricultural
+staples to be utilized by the new industries of Europe. The expansion of
+soap-making, the rise of a wider market for cooking fats, and the need for
+lubricants in railway and engineering works led to the exploitation of the
+palm oil resources of West Africa; while the German machine industry
+could produce plants for crushing palm-kernels to provide stock-feed for
+capitalist agriculture. The extension of demand for cooking oils and fats
+also affected groundnuts – the opportunity being exploited by the financiers
+and industrialists of Marseilles. The Lancashire cotton industry, after its
+long partnership with the American slave South, was in the late nineteenth
+
+century anxious to promote the growing of cotton in Egypt and the Sudan
+and in East and West Africa. The invention of the pneumatic tube, the
+arrival of the motorcar, and the increase in the rubber-wheeled transport of
+all sorts taxed the rubber-producing capacities of the Dutch East Indies,
+Malaya, Brazil and Africa. Such examples could be multiplied. They all
+demonstrate that Europe’s needs by the late nineteenth century were
+themselves a product of the immense quickening of economic life over the
+previous four centuries, and one of the factors in that quickening was the
+unequal association with Africa.
+Equally significant is the fact that Europe derived the power to exploit
+Africa in new ways. Trade in slaves, ivory and gold was conducted from the
+coasts. There, European ships could dominate the scene, and, when
+necessary, forts could be built. Before the nineteenth century, Europe was
+incapable of penetrating the African continent, because the balance of force
+at their disposal was inadequate. But the same technological changes which
+created the need to penetrate Africa, also created the power to conquer
+Africa. The firearms of the imperialist epoch marked a qualitative leap
+forward. Breech-loading rifles and machine guns were a far cry from the
+smooth-bore muzzle loaders and flintlocks of the previous era. It is no
+wonder that Europeans had no hesitation in selling Africans antediluvian
+models of firearms. Hillaire Belloc spoke on behalf of his fellow Europeans
+when he said that ‘what matters is that we have the Maxim [machine gun]
+and they have not.’
+Curiously, Europeans often derived the moral justification for
+imperialism and colonialism from features of the international trade as
+conducted up to the eve of colonial rule in Africa. The British were the
+major exponents of the view that the desire to colonize was largely based on
+their good intentions in wanting to put up a stop to the slave trade. True
+enough, they were by then as opposed to the slave trade as they were once
+in favour of it. Technological changes had dialectically transformed the
+seventeenth century necessity for slaves into the nineteenth century
+necessity to clear the remnants of slaving from Africa so as to organize the
+local exploitation of land and labour. Leopold in the Congo also used the
+anti-slavery pretext to introduce into Congo itself forced labour and
+‘slavery-like practices’; while at a deeper level all Europeans had derived
+notions of racial and cultural superiority between the fifteenth and
+
+nineteenth centuries so that even the Portuguese presumed that they were
+historically destined to ‘civilize the natives’.
+Africans fought alien political rule and had to be subdued by superior
+force. But a sizable minority did not insist that their trade connections with
+Europe should remain unbroken, for that was a measure of the extent to
+which they were already dependent on Europe. The most dramatic
+illustration of that dependence was the tenacity with which some Africans
+fought the termination of slave trading. For most European capitalist states,
+the enslavement of Africans had served its purpose by the middle of the
+nineteenth century, but for those Africans who dealt in captives the abrupt
+termination of the trade at any given point was a crisis of the greatest
+magnitude. In many areas, major social changes had taken place to gear the
+region to the service of the slave-trade – one of the most significant being
+the rise of ‘domestic slavery’ and various forms of class and caste
+subjugation. African rulers and traders who found their social existence
+threatened by the earliest legal edicts such as Britain’s Abolition of the
+Slave Trade Act in 1807 found ways of making contact with Europeans
+who still wanted salves. Where other commodities were suggested,
+tremendous effort went into organizing those alternatives: ivory, rubber,
+palm oil, groundnuts, cotton, and so on.
+The transition to forms of production that used African labour inside
+Africa resulted in the rise of economic and social institutions that ensured
+the partition of a large number of Africans in the money economy, and also
+ensured that the value created would be siphoned off to capitalist Europe.
+That gave rise to the particular forms of structural dependence which we
+know today – visibly seen in the bank branches, the import/export agencies,
+the manufacturing subsidiaries, the mining companies, the pattern of road
+and railway networks, and so on. Needless to say, it is the intensive study of
+the colonial period which will answer most of the questions about
+underdevelopment as we know it today, but the extent to which the situation
+was being set up for centuries before is often underestimated.
+Anthropologists were the worst offenders in this regard, with their
+ahistorical prediction for describing everything that they found in colonial
+Africa as ‘traditional’. But historians are also guilty of making a distinction
+between colonial and ‘pre-colonial’ Africa, in such a way as to cloud the
+fact that there was continuity from one phase to the other.
+
+The notion that the first four centuries of Afro-European trade represent
+the roots of African underdevelopment is doubly attractive because there
+was an actual carry-over of some of the mechanisms that connect the two
+spheres of metropole and dependency. At the metropolitan end, there were
+the insurance companies and the shipping companies; while in Africa itself
+there had arisen certain social formations that were immediately available
+to operate within the colonial enclave economies from the 1880s onwards.
+Those are the African traders already mentioned as the forerunners of the
+modern service sector. Some were highly placed within African society;
+many were new men of previously low status; while many others were
+literally products of foreign trades, being the children of Europeans and
+Arabs. The mulatto element was very pronounced in Western Africa, and it
+continued to be prominent in the early colonial period and for much later. In
+what was called the French Sudan, to take one specific example, all
+economic activity spread inland from the four communes on the Senegalese
+coast, inhabited by blacks and mulattoes having long connections with
+Atlantic trade. So long as it is not based on settlement, a colonial system
+requires compradors. Throughout most of Africa, those compradors at the
+start of the colonial period were already performing that function in the
+dependent trade economy.
+Besides, the Africans conducting trade on behalf of Europeans were
+inevitably influenced by European thought and values. The quest for
+European education did not begin in colonial Africa. It started when coastal
+rulers and traders recognized the need to penetrate more deeply into the
+way of life of the white men who came from across the sea. The mulatto
+sons of white traders and the sons of African rulers were the ones who went
+furthest along this line. At one level, it was strictly functional. The Sierra
+Leone chief in the eightenth century explained that he wished ‘to learn book
+to be rogue as good as white man’. At another level, it meant imbibing
+those values which led to further African subjugation. The Rev. Thomas
+Thompson was the first European educator on the ‘Gold Coast’, and he
+wrote in 1772 a pamphlet entitled The African Trade for Negro Slaves
+Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of
+Revealed Religion. The returned Africans who played such a crucial role in
+Sierra Leone and throughout West Africa in the period of the establishment
+of colonial rule were also in varying degrees products of Western culture
+and education – strikingly embodying potentialities of both enlightenment
+
+and mental confusion springing from deculturalization. Unfortunately, the
+latter trend was no more operative, and with the coming of colonial rule
+they became conscious and naive agents of foreign domination. The cultural
+nexus, therefore, provides further reason for seeking the roots of African
+underdevelopment and dependence in the early centuries of Afro-European
+trade.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+8
+Problems of Third World Development
+On reflecting on the problem of Third World development, I recall an
+incident many months ago when the Republic of Guinea was invaded by the
+Portuguese. As soon as the Chinese heard about the invasion, the Xinhua
+News Agency put out a report denouncing American imperialism.
+America’s name had not as yet been called by Guineans, but the Chinese
+from objective analysis decided that if the Portuguese were invading
+Guinea, it had something to do with American imperialism. And in like
+vein, I would suggest that if we are talking about the problems of
+development in the Third World, the major problem is the United States of
+America, because it crowns the whole structure of world imperialism. I will
+leave this as an assertion, because to go into a justification would consume
+time. However, I would like to illustrate in some ways the connections
+between imperialism and underdevelopment.
+In the United Nations, a certain euphemism is in use. They speak about
+the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ market economies. These two
+collectively constitute the imperialist world: the developed market economy
+being the United States, the Western European countries and Japan; and the
+curious category of the developing market economy includes the rest of
+what we commonly refer to as the Third World, the economies of which are
+hooked into the metropolitan structures of North America, Western Europe
+and Japan. Some of the mechanisms for exploiting the so-called developing
+countries have been known for a long time. For instance, unequal trade has
+been a common subject of discussion, and in recent times it has received
+more careful analysis, so that we know rather more than we used to about
+exactly how the captains of trade contributed to the exploitation of the
+underdeveloped world. This is not a position that is merely adopted by
+Marxists or radical nationalists; it is a position which is commonly asserted
+
+even by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
+(UNCTAD).
+A second well-known mechanism of exploitation within the structure of
+imperialism is the transfer of profits from under-developed areas towards
+the metropoles. My only comment on this is to note that what is called
+‘profits’ is in fact ‘capital’. For too long most of us, including people who
+would call themselves leftists, have created an idiom of ‘capital export’
+from the colonies and semi-colonies; and the very idiom obscures part of
+the reality, indeed, perhaps the whole reality. I am of the opinion that we
+cannot refer to the export of capital from the metropoles to the
+underdeveloped sector of the world except in a limited sense. Historically,
+the movement of capital has always been on balance from the external or
+peripheral sectors of the imperialist economy to its epicentres. This began
+with the trade in slaves, while later it took the form of grossly unequal trade
+between Europe and the rest of the world. The most that can be said about
+European capital export is that Europe has been the centre for the
+redistribution and reallocation of capital that is produced throughout the
+world. Capital produced in, say, the Caribbean or in North America in the
+epoch of slavery, was shifted to Europe, and – at a later date – was
+redistributed from Western Europe to Eastern Europe; or capital that was
+obtained by forcing the Chinese to smoke opium was redistributed into the
+Indian sector of the British imperialist economy; and so on and so forth.
+But, strictly speaking, there never has been any export of capital from the
+developed areas in the sense of capital being engendered and originating in
+the metropolitan sectors for export overseas. So, my point about profit is
+that when we look at its mechanism closely, we find that it is always a
+means of transferring to the metropolitan economy capital produced out of
+the material and human resources of the Third World.
+Unequal trade and capital flows away from the underdeveloped
+countries are two of the principal mechanisms of imperialism. There are
+others that are proving to be significant in their own ways, which tend to be
+left out of the literature, and which are very operative when we come to
+think in terms of changing the status quo. One of these, for instance, is the
+blockage of technology. This takes a number of forms: it could mean actual
+technological retardation or arrest in the underdeveloped countries; or it
+could mean simply the blockage of the movement of technology from the
+metropolitan to the colonial economy. The best examples of the actual
+
+destruction and retardation of technology would come from Asia – notably
+China and India – and to a lesser extent from Africa. Examples of the
+failure to allow the transfer of whatever technology has developed in
+Europe itself to the Third World can be taken at random. Particularly in the
+more recent epoch, we have had in Africa striking instances of the refusal
+of the metropolitan capitalist/imperialist countries to allow the transfer of
+technology in certain critical areas which would pose a threat to their own
+exploitation and domination. In Africa today, one of the biggest and bestknown projects is that of the Tanzania–Zambian railway. The whole history
+of this railway is one in which metropolitan countries set out to interfere
+with the movement of this particular aspect of technology to a part of the
+Third World, and they failed because in this instance the People’s Republic
+of China was available as an alternative source. The corollary to the
+blockage of skills and technology is that of the international division of
+labor under imperialism has always ensured the development of world
+technology within certain specific sectors, namely the metropolis, and more
+recently in particular parts of the metropoles, allowing the United States to
+assume hegemony in most fields. This is an important phenomenon when
+we come to examine the contemporary evolution of imperialism, because
+the changes in technology which were possible in the last decade have
+made it possible for the imperialist countries to begin to adopt radically new
+strategies in terms of international division of labour and in terms of the
+kinds of political controls which they exercise over the Third World.
+Yet another general feature to which attention should be drawn is the
+way in which imperialism has restructured the world economy so that
+within the Third World there is no cohesion with respect to production and
+exchange. As one moves from colony or semi-colony to another colony or
+semi-colony, one finds the breaking of the ties which formerly integrated
+one with the other – that is to say, the breaking of the trade ties which
+integrated the productive resources. One finds within each colony also the
+same disjunction, the same disaggregation of the consistent parts of a
+colonized economy. Instead, the linkages are with the metropolitan
+economy, and are determined exclusively by the latter in its own interest –
+an interest which proves incompatible with the independence and any real
+development of the Third World.
+
+Moving on from the essentially economic concerns, I wish to highlight the
+political facet of imperialism. A number of writers on Latin America and to
+a lesser extent on Africa have paid considerable attention to the creation in
+the Third World of certain strata, or certain classes, which reflect the
+interest of the metropoles and which allow the requisite kinds of penetration
+and exploitation. This political control takes a number of forms: there is the
+classical colonial form, there is the utilization of white settlers, and most
+important in the recent period, there has emerged in Africa and Asia an
+indigenous strata who conduct locally the activity required to support the
+international economy. These are people who – in Fanon’s words – perform
+the function of transmission lines for international monopoly capital.
+The foregoing represents a very brief portrayal of the mechanisms of
+imperialism. I am not attempting to go into any serious theoretical
+justification of why imperialism is the big problem of Third World
+development, because – hopefully – we understand that. So perhaps we
+could proceed to look rather more closely at the movement of contemporary
+Third World history, in order to better appreciate the problems and possible
+antidote to underdevelopment. In the last decade, we have been in a sense in
+a counter-revolutionary epoch, in spite of many of the festivities that have
+taken place celebrating the so-called independence in various parts of
+Africa and Asia, and in spite of certain foci of liberation. We can say that a
+general movement of history in the Third World has been counter to any
+direction that one may term independence. This I will illustrate using a
+number of criteria. First of all, one can apply the Western bourgeois
+measurements of growth rates, although these are very limited and skewed.
+One finds that the growth of the Third World economy has failed to keep up
+with those norms which have been established by groups such as the
+Pearson Commission. Most Third World countries do not get that ratio of
+growth in bourgeois economic terms which is supposed to represent their
+march forward. Very, very few have achieved the percentages – 6 or 8 per
+cent growth rate – which are set by the bourgeois economists as
+prerequisites for development. Second, and more important, is the fact that
+those criteria, where they are satisfied, do not lead to anything that the
+people of the country would call development. Hence the rise of the term
+‘growth without development’, which has already become current in the
+writings on West Africa.
+
+It has been seen that by using the criteria of GNP (gross national
+product) and per capita income, one finds a certain amount of growth
+undoubtedly taking place, but when this is examined in any serious detail, it
+is proved to be entirely misleading. As long as the local economy is part of
+the imperialist world economy, there is still the export of surplus – that is,
+the actual export of capital – and the redistribution of wealth within these
+so-called developing Third World countries is such that the vast majority of
+the people can and do experience an actual lowering of their living
+standards while the GNP and per capita income are supposedly rising. A
+few economists looking at the problems of economic development are
+beginning to apply the simplest of yardsticks by returning to factors such as
+housing, food and clothing – the principal elements of man’s existence and
+the things that human beings have been striving for from the very onset of
+their attempts to deal with the material environment. In Jamaica, for
+example, it has been found that the units of housing for the vast majority of
+the people have been decreasing; more people are suffering from protein
+deficiency than was true of an earlier period; and more people are going
+about without shoes or without proper clothing than has been true earlier.
+All this in spite of significant increases in GDP (gross domestic product). In
+Africa one can readily cite Ivory Coast and Kenya in this respect, for such
+growth as shown by the statistical indices in these parts of Africa is not
+matched by any increases in the wellbeing of the mass of the population.
+The most animus factor undermining attempts to achieve independence
+and development in the Third World has been the rise of new forms of
+exploitation and domination within the global capitalist economy. One of
+them is tourism. It has a nasty history in the Caribbean, particularly in
+Cuba, but in more recent times it is becoming very extensive. By 1969,
+tourism was one of the biggest economic factors in Tanzania of all places.
+Someone observed that, just as in Latin America there used to be ‘Banana
+Republics’, so international imperialism was threatening to transform
+Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into the ‘Wildlife Republics’. Every effort
+was made to attract tourists to look at the animals, and the animals assumed
+priorities higher than human beings. Incidentally, it is not at all true that it is
+the indigenous people who are responsible for such diminution in the
+wildlife population as has occurred in recent years, because groups like the
+Maasai have always coexisted with the lions and wild game. And in recent
+times, the problem of game conservation is of far lesser magnitude than that
+
+of human development and that of the survival and creativity of peoples of
+the region. Certainly, tourism in all its aspects is proving to be one of the
+new areas of expansion of the imperialism economy. It is a new way of
+confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies,
+being seen in its most arrant and vicious forms in the Caribbean territories.
+Several islands in the Caribbean have been transformed into backwaters of
+the world economy; they are no longer central to the development of the
+world economy, because they have lost the priority that they had a long
+time ago when Sugar was king. It is a relatively simple task to transform
+them into cesspools, which is what the tourism economy is all about.
+A more significant aspect of the new trend of domination is that which
+economists are calling the ‘branch-plant economy’. It made its impact felt
+first in Latin America and then in Asia, and it is slowly beginning to touch
+on the African continent. This is a very subtle development, the negative
+effects of which remain unperceived for some time, because many people
+have been preoccupied with looking at the old forms of the international
+division of labor, whereby the underdeveloped countries were allocated
+roles connected either with agriculture or with the production of raw
+materials in the extractive mineral industry. It was felt by leaders like
+Nkrumah when he came to power in Ghana that the answer was to create
+industry in Africa. The dichotomy was simply industry versus agriculture or
+processing versus the export of unprocessed goods. Now imperialism has
+been able to circumvent the criticism that it reduces the Third World merely
+to primary production. The international bourgeoisie and their agents have
+been able to start ‘industrialization’ of a sort within Third World countries.
+Looking at the development plans of every African nation, one finds that a
+beer factory will usually figure number one or number two on the list.
+Building a beer factory is considered as the first step towards
+industrialization. Quite apart from the fact that I don’t know of beer as
+having developed any nation, one has to realize the fallacy on which the
+claims are based. The underlying notion is that industrialization per se is the
+answer to underdevelopment. Therefore, the logic of that argument is that if
+the country ceases to import beer and instead develops an import substitute
+by making the beer locally, then a step has been made in the direction of
+development. This resort to import substitution has characterized a lot of
+the development plans of the Third World outside of the really progressive
+areas, and what in fact it means is that the capitalist structures in the
+
+metropoles have reached the stage where the export of consumer goods is
+no longer really critical, but the export of certain capital in goods is much
+more crucial. The capital goods sector has experienced tremendous growth
+in the period of colonial exploitation and the period of semi-colonial
+exploitation, and there is now an objective necessity for the metropoles to
+export these capital goods; namely the plants that manufacture the beer,
+cigarettes or even textiles. Of course, the metropole seeks to incorporate
+their productive enterprises within the total structure of monopoly capital,
+which takes the form of the multinational corporation. The multinational
+corporation perceives the advantage of extending its operations into various
+other parts of the globe. Today it is not considered opportune merely to
+produce in the United States and Germany and to sell abroad. More markets
+can be explored by actually setting up the ‘branch plants’ in Brazil, in
+Singapore, in Ivory Coast, and so forth.
+The movement of contemporary Third World political development
+throughout Africa and throughout Asia also shows tremendous
+deterioration. Latin America is exceptional only because it had its formal
+independence ever since the early nineteenth century, and Latin America
+has gone through the kinds of trauma which Africa and parts of Asia are
+only now beginning to experience. The dictators and the coups in Latin
+America were the butt of jokes even in the colonial world. In the West
+Indies, we used to say that if there was no coup in Latin America on a
+particular day, it would be announced on the radio as an item of significance
+– ‘no coup anywhere in Latin America today’. In Latin America, countries
+have perhaps settled down to a pattern of more stable dictatorships, but they
+certainly have not in most places begun to tackle the problem of political
+stability in terms of the development of their own people. In any event,
+what I have to say relates more to Asia and Africa, and I will pick my
+examples mainly from Africa and from the Caribbean. In these instances,
+constitutional independence took place during the last decade.
+Subsequently, we have witnessed the realization of political dependency
+and economic dependency in much sharper forms, and of course the two
+cannot be separated. It is an allusion to put forward the notion of political
+independence without economic independence because politics is about
+making choices, and it seems to be incredible that someone should say, ‘We
+have no control over our economy but we can make political choices.’
+
+What happened after constitutional independence was of course the rise
+of new forms of political manipulation on the part of imperialism.
+Deterioration of this independence has been taking place because of a
+number of factors. First, under the control of imperialism, Third World
+countries have a sort of political vacuum nationally that arises from the fact
+that power does not reside locally. The national government of the petty
+bourgeoisie has little control over production and is endowed with a very
+feeble political base. They of course have police and military forces which
+are intended to serve as means of coercion of the population, but nothing
+else. An appreciation of these facts is fundamental to an understanding of
+the trends towards militarism, because if a political regime is so bankrupt
+that it is entirely dependent upon the military, if it has to resort to
+authoritarianism, then who is more authoritarian than the army? So, the
+army frequently decides to take over the role of governing, rather than
+merely being the police force of the civilians in power. We also find that the
+petty bourgeoisie in the Third World countries are not as capable as the
+bourgeoisie in the metropoles when it comes to playing a certain kind of
+political game. They are not capable of granting to their own population
+participation in bourgeois democracy, because the colonial situation is
+antithetical to any form of democracy – even to bourgeois democracy. The
+American bourgeoisie – to use this example – is powerful enough to realize
+that it can afford certain forms of bourgeois democracy, unless the stage is
+reached where the system is so eroded that they must take to fascist
+alternatives. But, normally, the bourgeoisie will of necessity engage the
+large middle-class sector and a large segment of the working population in
+parliamentarianism, free speech, and the like. In the Third World, this is
+seldom possible. The petty bourgeoisie who reside in Accra and in Kingston
+and in Singapore cannot afford to have any formal exercise of democracy.
+They do not have the power. They do not have the economic base. They are
+entirely dependent on two things: first, their external support; and second,
+whatever local police forces they can muster. Increasingly, the political
+situation in these Third World countries becomes more openly authoritarian.
+A striking example has been the regime of Forbes Burham in Guyana. He
+began some years ago by trying to convince some folk that he was about
+nationalism and even about socialism. To a large extent, he succeeded in the
+mystification, but after just a few years, the mask has been removed, and it
+is now apparent that Guyana has the makings of a kind of Haitian situation,
+
+given the trend towards the creation of a Ton-Ton Macoute, aiming at
+political intimidation and assassinations. This and other indications in most
+of Africa and Asia suggest that neo-colonialism is not merely a state but –
+like all historical forms – it has its own motion, and both politically and
+economically the motion is in a negative direction.
+I would like to try and explore some of the difficulties facing politically
+progressive groups within Third World territories – groups who analyse the
+situation and problems of development and who ask themselves the classic
+question, ‘What is to be done?’ How do they function, or how have they
+been functioning, and what kinds of projections can be made for the near
+and distant future? Using the crude distinction between the political and
+economic facets of the problem, I will suggest that the real issue at the
+moment – and for the foreseeable future – is not an economic issue but a
+political one.
+It has already been affirmed that the fundamental nature of the
+development problem in the Third World is the relationship with the
+metropolitan economies and the nature of dependency, lack of internal
+integration, absence of technology, and so on, which are all essentially or
+primarily economic phenomena. Nevertheless, we should distinguish
+between what may be fundamental – which I think is economic – and what
+has a priority. The latter refers to the question of timing and that is where
+politics takes precedence. It will be necessary to look briefly at some of the
+economic problems, but the emphasis here will be on the political ones.
+Progressives residing within Third World countries virtually without
+exception now pose the problem of economic development in terms of
+‘disengagement’. How do you break with the dominant imperialist system?
+This question marks a change from a lot of the preoccupations of a decade
+or five years ago, because it has become clear to a minority at any rate that
+some kinds of proposed solutions are not solutions at all, but rather an
+intensification of the problem. That is to say, solutions by way of aid, by
+way of further foreign entanglements, by way of so-called local capitalist
+development are not really solutions. An awareness of their insidious nature
+springs from a correct historical appraisal of the form of involvement
+between, on the one hand, Africa, Asia and Latin America, and, on the
+other hand, the European and North American economies plus Japan.
+Historically, this involvement has been the determinant of the Third World
+
+countries; and therefore, it becomes odd to suggest that further
+involvement, that an intensification of the involvement, would provide a
+solution. The solution lies in disengaging and disentangling from the
+historical bonds. In other words, if the answer is not in further engagement,
+if it is not in aid, if it is not in increasing one’s traditional exports, if it is not
+merely in import substitution, then it must lie in terms of rebuilding one’s
+economy so that it becomes a logical integrated whole. It must lie in terms
+of creating linkages between Third World economies, starting from a
+continental base within Latin America and within Africa. It must lie in
+rebuilding or regenerating, or starting afresh if necessary, the technological
+development of the Third World which has been arrested or which has been
+side-stepped in one way or another. These are undoubtedly tremendous
+tasks. Certain kinds of solutions are already being indicated but the main
+thing is to identify the direction in which one has to investigate. As long as
+so many poor economists have been looking at aid theories and at forms of
+playing around with devaluing or revaluing currencies or other techniques
+which all have as their basis a preoccupation with sustaining links with the
+imperialist economy, then for so long we have not been looking at the real
+problems and we have not been turning up any valid solutions.
+However, before any progressive within the Third World can get down
+to working out the economic minutiae, they have to deal with the political
+problems. Indeed, the tendency on the part of progressive groups within
+these Third World countries to evade the issue of getting at the political
+preconditions to economic development is itself a problem of
+underdevelopment. In my own days as an undergraduate at the University
+of the West Indies, several of us did sit down and try to work out a schema
+concerning what the new political economy would look like. There was no
+dearth of talk about what society should look like. Many socialists in
+Africa, Asia and Latin America have been dealing with that issue for a long
+time, but it is only a very tiny minority who have been concerned with
+trying to analyse the movement of history as it is subsequently to determine
+what action was needed to obtain political leverage. In other words, the
+question of power was being avoided, and without that one is only talking
+about blueprints which is essentially an occupation for idle bourgeois
+philosophers.
+With respect to tackling the problem of power, there is required more
+detailed social analysis than merely saying that we have, on the one hand,
+
+the enemy who are the metropolitan capitalist, and, on the other hand, the
+exploited Third World. We have to make a closer analysis of the types of
+society which have been created within the Third World, to enquire as to
+what are the potential openings for a struggle to change the situation.
+Nationalist movements almost by definition tended to obscure and paper
+over the kinds of internal contradictions that existed in their societies, and
+when they achieved constitutional independence it very often came as a
+shock to realize that the internal contradictions were playing a much more
+crucial and determining role than had previously been allocated to them.
+Only a small number of progressives in the Third World are exempted from
+this stricture. The majority failed to make a clear analysis of the society
+which would allow them to locate within their own society the forces of
+change and the forces of reaction. The probable reason is that the social
+strata existing in Third World countries manifest a variety of forms that
+were not necessarily encountered in the metropoles. So the Third World
+intellectuals who may have taken a progressive orientation forming from a
+Marxist framework still found themselves unable to understand their own
+society, to the extent that they failed to distinguish between the tools that
+they acquired from abroad and the conclusions that they were introducing
+from abroad. This is a very common misconception. Having adopted
+Marxism or Scientific Socialism as a framework of analysis, one may or
+may not apply it creatively to one’s own environment. Besides, Third World
+intellectuals are very fascinated by models, models that were historically
+applicable to societies outside of their own. The principal model was Russia
+at one time, while later it became China. There are very few who have had
+the courage – because it does take a lot of courage and a lot of energy – to
+deal with their own situations and to come up with the relevant answers.
+One of the Third World social groups readily identified as having its
+own peculiarities is the petty bourgeoisie. There is a national bourgeoisie in
+India and Brazil, and in parts of Latin America; but it is not a general
+phenomenon within the Third World. By and large, the personnel who
+control the reins of power undoubtedly adhere to the norms and values of
+the bourgeoisie in the metropoles. But they do not control any capital
+formations. At best, they own two or three houses, and they own one
+Mercedes-Benz plus a Volkswagen, and so forth. But these are not
+capitalists. We must formulate a position that allows us to see the
+dependency of this class, its roots in the international bourgeoisie and the
+
+peculiarities which develop from that. I myself prefer to portray them as a
+stratum within the international capitalist class, a stratum serving that
+international capitalist class; and in each situation one has to examine their
+particular characteristics, including their behaviour patterns. In Africa and
+the West Indies, the petty bourgeoisie display characteristics such as selfhate, because they are usually black men who have a certain white
+orientation. They have what is correctly identified as imitativeness and lack
+of creativity, which were not characteristic of the European bourgeoisie in
+its heyday. The European bourgeoisie was an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie.
+In the Caribbean or in Africa the only entrepreneurship that the petty
+bourgeoisie are capable of is buying a truck or investing in real estate. They
+have neither the capital nor the kind of aggressiveness which is required to
+engage in capital enterprise. The point at issue is that progressives within
+Third World countries have to confront the problems of development almost
+exclusively in relationship to local particularisms. What are the forces
+existing in the society and how does one begin to organize to confront the
+recognized enemy? How does one begin to reach the masses, who are
+essentially peasant masses, with a very small minority of workers in the
+traditional (industrial) sense of the word? I would like to reflect briefly on
+these questions with regard to one part of East Africa, one where I am
+fortunate to possess first-hand or very reliable second-hand information:
+Uganda.
+Uganda is an intriguing case. In Uganda, under Milton Obote,
+progressive groups were in existence and had to make a decision on how to
+participate in actualizing Uganda’s development. Looking at their national
+society, they saw a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly evident in
+the Third World: namely, a government that could not easily be classified as
+being either fish or fowl – a government that was making certain rhetorical
+statements about socialism, about ‘moving to the left’ – a government that
+within the context of African liberation was anti-apartheid, anti-Smith
+regime, anti-imperialist in its rhetoric – and therefore a government that one
+could not place in the same anti-communist and pro-Western bracket as that
+of Malawi’s Hastings Banda or that led by Felix Houphouët-Boigny in the
+Ivory Coast. And yet at the same time when these Ugandan progressives
+looked at Ugandan society they knew that it was no different from the
+society in Ivory Coast or very little different from the society of Malawi.
+There was the same continuation of the exploitation of the peasantry in the
+
+Ugandan countryside and the same rapid increase in wealth – in terms of
+consumer goods and land – of a small elite. It was an elite that to some
+extent had a base in the ‘traditional’, quasi-feudal structures, along with a
+new elite of intellectuals, the government officials, the new party officials,
+and so on. In effect, Ugandan militants recognized that neo-colonialism was
+running rampant within Ugandan society. Any ambivalence on their part
+derided from the ambiguity caused by Obote’s preempting of certain
+socialist terminology, thus making it difficult for socialists to come out and
+completely denounce him. So, the socialists in Uganda began to work out a
+strategy for their particular situation.
+It was a strategy for immediate political action and it was tantamount to
+a strategy of development. They recognized that first they needed to
+establish an organization of their own. This is a real problem in Third World
+countries, especially where the government is playing games. How does
+one establish an organization of one’s own? It appears that there were
+groups in Uganda who were concentrating on resolving that problem. At the
+same time, they had to decide that they must participate to a certain extent
+within the politics of Uganda and within the politics of the ruling party,
+Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC). Some of these individuals were
+in fact prepared to run in the elections scheduled by Obote – he had
+scheduled a very fancy election where a single candidate was to appear in
+about four constituencies simultaneously. The election never materialized
+because of the coup. But some of these individuals were prepared to
+participate in those elections. Eventually of course, the coup interrupted
+this, and Ugandan progressives were then faced with the situation where a
+government that was more clearly rightist, a government that was more
+clearly neo-colonialist, had come to power.
+Some Ugandan militants had predicted the military coup – a testimony
+to their insights into their own society – and yet their response to the new
+clique was far from uncompromising. Several among them produced
+rationalizations which permitted them to associate with a regime that was
+more blatantly opposed to the interests of the ‘common man’ in Uganda
+than was the case under Obote. Kobode, who was appointed foreign
+minister, was previously one of the shining lights of the Uganda Left, and
+apparently still retains pretensions to socialism. Only a tiny fragment
+denounced the coup and began to take steps which qualify to be called
+revolutionary, and which kept in sight the objective of people’s power. Why
+
+did this ineptness, disintegration and collaboration arise on the part of
+groups who claimed to perceive the essential lines of solution to their own
+development problems? It does suggest a lack of serious analytical
+framework, although many of those involved claim to be Marxist. Besides
+that, however, lack of self-confidence and a degree of opportunism also
+enter the picture. The new situation posed by the Idi Amin takeover1 would
+have required the boldness to break completely with the state machinery
+and to operate entirely outside of the boundaries of petty bourgeois politics.
+Instead, several of the progressives came up with the lame alternative of
+‘working within the system’, and fobbed off many revolutionary Ugandan
+youth by saying that Amin was amenable to the advice from the ‘Leftists’.
+The paradox of progressives seeking to give advice to reactionary
+governments is not new. There is a long history of this in Latin America,
+because Latin America has had many progressive economists and other
+social scientists who spent a lot of time advising the curious governments
+that arise in that part of the world. The paradox reveals that from the
+viewpoint of groups grappling with the problem of development in the
+Third World, the roots of the problem are political, being inextricably
+linked with the question of political power.
+The Ugandans would seem to have accepted this under Obote and then
+to have reneged on their responsibility in this regard subsequent to the coup.
+Nevertheless, one does not have to be pessimistic about the outcome. What
+is happening in Uganda and other arenas is that contradictions keep
+multiplying day by day. The creation of a militaristic or police state itself
+polarizes the forces and causes people to react against the regime, if only
+for the sake of survival. If, on the other hand, the regime is flirting with
+anti-imperialist and socialist ideas without any commitment, then it requires
+only a few years before the rhetoric is exhausted and the period of
+reckoning begins. Inevitably, behind the facade of pseudo-progressive
+assertions, corruption increases and police brutality also. I am not at all
+pessimistic about the long-term prospects for liberation and development in
+the Third World. The propping up of regimes by imperialism is a short-term
+solution. Objective conditions in the Third World are worsening, as I
+suggested earlier. The living conditions of the vast majority of people are
+deteriorating. That is what will maintain the initiative towards change and
+propel the Third World out of the counter-revolutionary phase which arose
+after formal independence. Besides there is the factor of racism which is all
+
+pervasive throughout the Third World, which is particularly strong where
+black people live in Africa and the Caribbean. It is a unifying factor.
+Imperialism has used racism in its own interest, but it turns out to be a
+double-edged blade, and the very unity that is engendered among black
+people – the unity of common conditions and common exploitation and
+oppression – is being turned around as a weapon to be used against
+imperialism.
+To conclude, perhaps the most important reason for confidence and for
+revolutionary optimism – with respect to both the political problem which is
+immediate and the long-term economic problem – is that the peoples of the
+Third World have not been dehumanized, in spite of everything: in spite of
+slavery, in spite of colonialism. The historical record will show that it is the
+peoples of the metropoles who have gone through the most dehumanization.
+That’s the way it is. Slavery has dehumanized slave masters more than it
+has dehumanized slaves. Colonialism has dehumanized the colonialist more
+than it has dehumanized the colonial people. The working class in the
+metropoles is more confused, more alienated and less in control of their
+own destiny than the peasants in the African countryside and the workers
+on plantations in the Third World countries. The latter do not have any
+crumbs or fruits that have been thrown at them to increase their confusion.
+Nor have they been living within a society which assails them on all sides
+with a variety of myths that cloud exploitation under the banner of God and
+country, and so on. Ultimately, it seems to me that freedom will come from
+those who are the most oppressed. Slaves rather than slave masters are the
+repositories of freedom; liberation will come from those who are not yet
+liberated, and human dignity will be reasserted by those who are not yet
+dehumanized.
+
+Q&A
+Question: Would you consider the more important problems of imperialism
+to be the ones created by neo-colonialism or those belonging to the old
+capitalist experience of imperialism?
+
+Answer: The old imperialism is falling apart, one has to be more sensitive
+about the new changes. There are very powerful existing areas of old
+imperialism as in South Africa, but there the issues are clearly defined.
+Whatever the strength of the white minority regimes and of Portuguese
+colonialism backed by NATO and by foreign monopoly capital, the stage is
+set and armed struggles are already unleashed in those areas. I think it is
+easier to mobilize politically where colonialism is open and blatant in the
+old-fashioned form.
+The new colonialism is sometimes so difficult to decipher that one
+might think that one is doing something progressive when in fact one is
+really being co-opted by the system. Take nationalization as an example.
+There was a time, back in the early fifties, when people who nationalized
+were automatically regarded as progressive nationalists and socialists, and
+imperialism moved against them to squash them immediately. But now
+nationalization has become a technique that can just as well be used by the
+enemy, as by progressive Africans, Asians or Latin Americans.
+Nationalizing a plant within the context of the international division of
+labour and the international allocation of resources could well mean that
+production is no more independent than if it had remained in the hands of
+foreign enterprises. A joint venture in which the government takes over 51
+per cent of the shares may superficially suggest control, while in practice
+the 51 per cent comprises the problems of labour management and their 49
+per cent comprises the profits. There are all kinds of new techniques that
+are being devised by international capital. After all, mosquitos today are
+able to cope with the DDT insecticide. Similarly, imperialism has a certain
+flexibility, and I think the new forms and adjustments are maybe more
+difficult to combat because they are subtle, and there is a time lag before it
+can be appreciated that imperialism can also turn retreat into success.
+Question: Could you analyse the Tanzanian situation?
+Answer: Tanzania is one of the few instances where I think that a nationalist
+government, which inherited power at independence, does provide a
+framework within which a struggle can be conducted. Both things have to
+be recognized: first, that this nationalist government does provide a
+legitimate framework for onward development; and second, that a struggle
+is nevertheless necessary. One then has to determine what exactly is the
+
+struggle? Who is struggling against whom? What is the alignment of
+forces? There is a very useful analysis by a young Tanzanian which is
+entitled Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle. It is a silent class struggle
+because it does not take the form of armed struggle. Instead, it takes the
+form of a great deal of manoeuvring within the structure between on the one
+hand the bureaucracy and the reactionary elements of the petty bourgeoisie,
+and on the other hand a much smaller group committed to socialism, who
+are attempting very slowly and with a great deal of difficulty to try and
+establish some links with the vast majority of the people. Meanwhile, the
+workers themselves have to find ways and means of confronting the petty
+bourgeoisie. Within this structure, within the idiom of socialism, a struggle
+is going on all the time. Many individuals who are justifiably happy about
+what is going on in Tanzania sometimes romanticize the situation, because
+they do not know how difficult the struggle is and they do not realize that it
+is a struggle that has produced not only gains for the working people but
+also many setbacks from day to day.
+Question: What role is being played by the nationalized sector and by the
+trade unions in Tanzania?
+Answer: Nationalization is a step in a forward direction. The next issue
+becomes the method of running these enterprises. Nationalized industry is a
+fairly small sector, because Tanzania is not an industrialized country, but
+what goes on within it is significant in ideological and political terms, apart
+from the economic implications. A bureaucracy has been developing. This
+is not unique; it happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in China, it
+happened in Cuba. The bureaucracy has emerged as a social formation
+crucial to socialist development – or lack thereof – even where the property
+base of an exploiting class has been liquidated. So that is a very real
+problem in the nationalized sector. How does one deal with it?
+In Tanzania, there has been talk about workers’ control in the factories.
+It has never reached the point of workers’ control in practice, but there has
+been over the past year a very healthy self-assertion by the workers. This
+has not taken place through the trade union, which is virtually defunct.
+Workers in their own factories have been reasserting themselves in
+Tanzania, particularly since the Tami Guidelines, which Tanzanians refer to
+as the Mwongozo. There has been a spate of worker manifestations which
+
+have taken these guidelines as their credo, because the guidelines say that
+the country has to create new styles of work, new kinds of relationships
+between the party, the government, the officials and the bureaucrats, and the
+workers and peasants; and this is getting at the root of the problem of the
+rise of a new bureaucracy and its relationship politically and socially to the
+rest of the population. Workers in their factories, using Mwongozo as a sort
+of article of faith, have been attacking the bureaucracy, have been attacking
+the managers and the officials who have been placed over them. Strikes and
+work stoppages therefore often mirror, in a small way, the ongoing struggle
+between the people who are directly at the production line and those who
+are supposedly making policy in the society. That is one facet of this silent
+class struggle.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+9
+Slavery and Underdevelopment
+In evaluating the two connected concepts of slavery and underdevelopment,
+the principal emphasis must necessarily be on underdevelopment. Slavery –
+as institution, as epoch, as mode of production – acquires its significance in
+this formulation from an awareness of the implications of inequality and
+dependence in the modern world. Failure to grasp the multiple
+manifestations of underdevelopment as a contemporary phenomenon
+inevitably leads to an obscuring of the historical issues. Multinational
+corporations, management contracts, blockages of technology transfers and
+the rise of new dependent class structures in the so-called Third World
+provide the logical starting point for historical enquiry. No doubt it is for
+this reason that within the field of African studies the most effective
+analyses of the development process have been authored by economists,
+cultural anthropologists and political scientists, while historians remained
+locked within time capsules. It is against the background of the
+considerable advance in theoretical and scientific work on
+underdevelopment that one might resume in a new way the already longestablished debate on the role of slavery.
+The notion of underdevelopment has emerged out of a series of debates.
+There have been varying empirical observations from territory to territory
+and varying emphases on the constituents of underdevelopment.1 Yet, all
+approaches to underdevelopment as a historical process have discerned the
+presence of given tendencies towards inequality, backwardness and
+dependence. These tendencies are operative at most times, although they
+might ultimately be transcended. It is, for instance, observable that
+inequality and dependence are self-reinforcing; but a decisive and obvious
+exception is provided by the transition from a peripheral role in colonial
+North America to the hegemonic position of the US within the
+
+capitalist/imperialist world. Today, the discussion continues – focusing on
+potentialities in Brazil, in India, and in other ‘semi-industrialized’ or
+‘intermediary’ economies. In terms of modern monopoly capital, it is
+preferable to identify the forms of surplus realization and accumulation
+without prejudice to the possibility that ‘underdevelopment’ can give way
+to ‘dependent development’ in certain sectors of the periphery. These
+modifications in the approach to underdevelopment hardly apply to the
+period of slavery, since it predates monopoly capitalism. As a premise of
+this chapter, underdevelopment will be held to be an integral part of the
+development of capitalism on a world scale.2 This is not necessarily selfevident, but the arguments to this effect have been made at such length
+elsewhere that they have to be taken as a given in this context.
+The expanded reproduction of capital and the creation of a worldsystem involved the realization of surplus and its extraction from all regions
+within the ambit of capital. This meant not merely the extension of
+economic activity from one continent to another but also the juxtaposition
+of several different social formations and modes of production, articulated
+in such a way as to secure the dominance of capitalist relations as well as
+the transfer of value to the capitalist class in the core areas.3 The search for
+greater precision in determining when capitalism became the dominant
+mode in Europe is beyond the present exercise and so too is an estimation
+of the impact of New World slavery on the emergence of capitalism in
+Europe. However, these questions do have relevance to the distinction
+between ‘commercial capital’ and ‘industrial capital’ and to that between
+commodity production by wage labour and commodity production by
+means other than wage labour. These latter issues are directly pertinent to
+the role of slavery in the history of underdevelopment in Africa and the
+Americas.
+The slavery which existed in the Americas between the sixteenth and
+the nineteenth centuries coexisted with other modes of production in
+Europe, Africa and America. These were articulated to constitute a system
+with a capacity for further physical expansion and one which achieved inter
+alia the following:
+1) the accumulation of capital;
+2) new forms of combining and organizing capital;
+3) qualitative leaps in the production of technology;
+
+4) the development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and
+5) a strengthening of the state and other basic social institutions.
+Any exploration of the links between slavery and underdevelopment should
+seek to assess the contribution of slavery to the lop-sidedness of the above
+points. More than that, one needs to be more confident that the contribution
+by slavery was essential and unique at decisive junctures.
+No scholars have expressed doubt as to the enormous significance of
+European overseas expansion and of Atlantic trade in particular. The
+stumbling blocks are to be found beyond these innocuous phrases when
+attempting to assign weight to slavery and the slave trade.
+Africa still receives short shrift in conventional texts on the subject of
+Atlantic trade.4 Yet, whenever the subject has been explored, it emerges that
+Africa was historically indispensable to the leading class forces in Europe.
+The feudal landed classes who participated in overseas expansion would
+have been unable to renew themselves (in the form of quasi-feudal
+plantations and land grants) and the nascent capitalist class needed the New
+World to redress the social balance in the Old. They did so by integrating
+the Americas into a network of financial and market relations dominated by
+themselves in the metropolitan centres. Africa also helped to extend the
+market for cheap European manufactures and to strengthen the techniques
+of guaranteeing capital and credit; but, of course, Africa’s key role was as
+supplier of labour for which there were no alternatives at the time.
+Africa was structurally marginal to the emergent world system of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In strict terms, one could not in fact say
+that African societies had become integrated into the world economy.
+Wallerstein argues persuasively as follows:
+But why Africans as the new slaves? Because Europe needed a source of labor from a
+reasonably well-populated region that was accessible and relatively near the region of usage.
+But it had to be from a region which was outside its world-economy so that Europe could
+feel unconcerned about the economic consequences for the breeding region of wide-scale
+removal of manpower as slaves.5
+
+Only rarely did Africa supply values and labour directly to Europe; and
+for the most part its linkages were via the American continent. In the apt
+terms of Samir Amin, Africa functioned as a periphery of the American
+periphery.6 As a periphery of a periphery, Africa was raided rather than
+
+cultivated. The politico-commercial nexus was rather fragile. European
+forts changed hands among the different nation states and sometimes fell
+under the sway of the local African rulers. The more vulnerable slave
+barracoons were in effect tolerated by African authorities; while both the
+European and African trading factors on the coast had to be allocated
+considerable amounts of commercial credit on mere trust. But the paradox
+of structural marginality and immense historical significance also applied
+with regard to the impact of the slave trade on Africa itself. Large parts of
+the continent supplied labour at a cost to itself which must be measured in
+terms of production and physical and social reproduction.
+Unfortunately, there has been no appreciable accumulation of new data
+to clarify the question of the slave trade within African societies. Available
+statistical information was compiled and tabulated as a ‘Slave Trade
+Census’ by Philip Curtin. This was hailed in some quarters as indicating
+that prior estimates were grossly exaggerated and that consequently one
+must scale down considerably conceptions of the destructive effect of
+slaving on African society. The Curtin figures were of course oriented
+towards the Americas; and he indicated that they could not be held to be
+definitive for Africa.7 Give or take their own imperfections, figures for
+Africans landed alive in the Americas or even embarked on slave ships
+offered no more than a framework in which further extrapolations are
+required to approximate numbers lost to African societies and to relate
+quantity to quality. This would have called for further regional and general
+studies to examine the mechanisms of slave procurement and the indirect
+consequences in the demographic, social, economic and political spheres.
+One is still left with the necessity to speculate, partly because of the
+insufficiency of studies and partly because certain data may well be
+irrecoverable.
+Surmising or theorizing about the relationship of slaving to African
+development may be done plausibly by inferring from general principles or
+perversely by hiding behind the supposed lack of proof. Thus, Inikori
+contends that a much higher population loss must be inferred from
+projections having to do with the removal of Africans in their reproductive
+prime. He contends further that the diseconomies in the utilization of a
+basic factor of production (labour) meant that even a neo-classical
+theoretical approach should logically deduce that the slave trade applied a
+brake on African growth and development.8 John Fage, on the other hand,
+
+emphasizes that there is no evidence to suggest that the operations of
+slaving caused marked devastation and loss of life; while with respect to the
+labour factor, he hypothesizes that
+it is even conceivable that it may have been more profitable for some parts of this area [of
+West Africa] to have exported the equivalent of its natural growth of population rather than
+to have kept it at home.9
+
+No indication is provided by Fage as to the relationship between labour and
+development or that between population densities and the social and natural
+environment.
+I have argued elsewhere at some length with respect to the
+underdeveloping tendencies of the slave trade in Upper Guinea and in
+Africa as a whole.10 Slavery in the Americas was of course ultimately
+responsible for whatever consequences flowed from the Atlantic slave trade
+in Africa; but what needs to be recognized is that slave exportation from
+Africa was not a system of production comparable to slavery in the New
+World or anywhere else in prior epochs. For Africa, the critical activity
+centred around the mechanisms for the reduction of human beings into
+captives and chattel. These mechanisms reduced or destroyed production, as
+has graphically been illustrated by the effects of slave procurement on the
+gold mining industry of the Gold Coast in the eighteenth century.11 One
+frequently encounters African sayings that people, subjects or hands make
+for strength. With relatively low population densities and little laboursaving technology, it followed that labour rather than land was the scarce
+factor of reduction – to use the neo-classical formulation. In Marxist terms,
+the removal of human beings constituted the removal of the most important
+of the productive forces.
+Sections of the current scholarly literature continue to affirm that what
+took place in Africa was ‘trade’ and that this trade ipso facto contained
+developmental potential.12 John Fage argues that ‘in the first place, the
+European slave traders were traders, who bought their slaves from coastal
+African merchants’.13 More recently, A.G. Hopkins has elaborated on this
+theme.14 By insisting that the exchange of human beings for commodities
+on the coast comprised trade, the analysis directs attention away from the
+mode of acquiring captives.15
+
+It also saves the way for the assumption that trade always benefits both
+parties – that is to say, the concept of comparative advantage is accepted
+without question. Yet, all recent work on development on a world scale (of
+varying ideological perspectives) confirms that ‘unequal trade’ is
+entrenched as between developed and underdeveloped countries; and hence
+the near-universal appeal for a New International Economic Order. With
+regard to slavery, trade and market theories which have no power to explain
+the present are invoked to explain the past.
+The search for comparative advantage deriving to Africa from the trade
+in slaves gives rise to arguments which are both trivial and contrived. For
+instance, Hopkins places great store on the African production of food for
+provisioning slave ships, as though the quantum would have been greater or
+the process more dynamic than in the case of food production to feed the
+same Africans for the duration of their lives in Africa. Under colonial rule,
+the underdeveloping tendencies persisted for as long as African production
+was designed primarily for an external market, while the withdrawal of
+manpower as migrant labour has been abundantly illustrated as serving to
+enhance backwardness and dependence in which labour is recruited.16 One
+of the principal differences between slave trading and colonialism is that the
+latter introduced the hegemony of capital within African societies. Slavery
+began the destruction of the coherence of African social formations without
+offering any alternatives. Colonialism actively pursued the destruction
+while counterposing a new coherence of capitalist structures in which
+eleven social formations and modes were reconstituted to confirm capitalist
+market relations and ultimately wage relations. Slavery began the
+incorporation of Africa into the periphery of the world-system without any
+notable intrusion of capitalist forms inside Africa itself.
+The terms ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ are only rough approximations as
+descriptions of parts of the world economy at any given time. It is
+acknowledged that there were always gradations of centrality and
+importance, so that the American periphery of the slavery era falls into a
+category different from that of the African periphery. In the Americas,
+slavery undoubtedly constituted one of the modes of appropriation integral
+to the capitalist system; and for this reason, the discussion of slavery and
+underdevelopment should concentrate on the American sector. The exercise
+can usefully be prefaced by an indication of the essential and recurring
+features of (capitalist) underdevelopment expressed as laws of motion of
+
+the societies concerned. Clive Thomas offers invaluable insights when he
+identifies underdevelopment and dependence as basically involving:
+1. the lack of an organic link between domestic resources and domestic
+demand; and
+2. the divergence between domestic demand and the needs of the broad
+majority of the population.17
+At this point I will focus on the example of Guyana with the intention of
+providing some specificity within the context of the broader study of transAtlantic slavery. The available literature on West Indian slave plantations
+has usually found little difficulty in fitting Guyana into the main
+generalizations covering the region. In Guyana, as elsewhere, sugar seemed
+inevitably to go hand in hand with slavery. For all practical purposes, the
+strip of coastland which circumscribed the slave plantations of Guyana in
+the eighteenth century was another small island where the master–slave
+relationship was almost exclusive. Production in Guyana was subject to the
+same colonial and market constraints as were characteristic of the West
+Indian islands.
+Yet, Guyana did have its peculiarities. It was not a small island in which
+continuous sugar growing had exhausted the cultivable soils before or soon
+after slavery ended; nor was it debt-ridden and burdened by multiple
+mortgages by the turn of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the soils
+were not easily exhaustible and there was no question about the economic
+viability of the slave-based sugar industry on the eve of emancipation. The
+relatively large plantation units were well capitalized and, with the aid of
+compensation payments, the industry survived the first major market crisis
+of the equalization of UK sugar duties in 1846. Above all, Guyana had a
+substantial hinterland which set it off from the West Indian islands. There is
+every reason to investigate why a large continental area remained a colonial
+enclave during and after slavery.
+Guyana had large areas of living space which were not occupied by
+slave plantations. In these thinly populated areas, the prior communal
+modes of the Amerindians persisted – albeit deformed under the pressure of
+European conquest and colonization. Slave plantations were established on
+the littoral from which the indigenous Amerindian population had been
+cleared. But the frontier was static and there was no expansion of capitalist
+
+relations or transplanted peoples into the hinterland. Among the
+characteristics of Guyanese underdevelopment one notes the incomplete
+inventory and exploitation of hinterland resources and the limited nature of
+new settlements. These features were marked during the heyday of slavery
+and are to be attributed to the political economy of slavery.
+Slavery required secure conditions for the reproduction of slave labour
+after that labour had been introduced. The problem of runaways varied in
+acuteness depending mainly on the environment. The forested areas of
+Guyana offered conditions no less favourable to runaways than did
+Suriname and Brazil. In the period of Dutch ascendancy, intermingling
+between Amerindians and Africans produced the mixed ‘Boviander’
+communities which were highly rebellious and constituted poles of
+attraction for runaways. This was the experience of the seventeenth century
+when small slave plantations were established on the middle and upper
+reaches of the Guyanese rivers. After the Dutch resolved upon coastal
+agriculture in the mid-eighteenth century, the Guyanese economy turned
+away from the hinterland. Even the necessary activity of slaves ‘aback’,
+such as cutting palm leaves for thatch, was considered dangerous since it
+facilitated escape.18 The enslavement of distant Amerindian ethnicities and
+the importation of Africans on a large scale were compatible with the
+maintenance of friendly relations between European slave owners and the
+neighbouring Amerindian communities. Indeed, the latter were then
+prevailed upon to undertake certain police functions in apprehending and
+returning escaped slaves. The choice of the coastlands for the development
+of slave plantations was premised upon ecological factors; but, having been
+made, this choice was reinforced by the demand of the slave system for
+security – to the prejudice of interior development.
+Slavery arrived full-blown on the Guyanese coast, attracting both Dutch
+and English capital and settlers already in the Caribbean. There was no
+question of replacing independent small producers by slaves and the rise of
+such cultivators was inconceivable once the slave plantation held sway. The
+plantation system continually sought to exercise monopoly over land and
+labour, a feature which was perceptible only after slavery ended. Although
+Guyanese history is badly under-researched, it has recently been served by
+two scholarly texts which address themselves to the plantations after
+slavery. Both confirm the perverse role of the plantation owners in seeking
+to hold on to all cultivable land and in providing disincentives to any
+
+alternative economic ventures which would reduce planter dominance over
+the labour market.19 Even a casual examination of the slavery era shows
+that these tendencies were most pronounced and that it was the slave-based
+plantation which was the principal stumbling block to hinterland
+development and to the balanced development of the economy.
+The dependent slave economy failed to utilize resources which were
+readily at hand within the domestic environment, while relying on the
+import of goods which could have derived from these same resources. The
+buildings of the coast were made from wood, but for the most part that
+wood was not cut from the forests of Guyana. The same could be said for
+the furniture within the houses. It was not until the 1850s that the export of
+greenheart was established and several more decades passed before there
+was a local timber industry seeking to fulfill local demands. As late as
+1902, the administration was unable to answer a query from the Colonial
+Office as to the existence of particular woods. On that occasion, the
+governor observed: ‘It is clearly unsatisfactory that we should be without
+complete and suitable specimens of all the woods of this Colony.’20
+The spectacle of importing North American white pine into a forested
+colony was startling enough; but the policy towards the gold industry is
+more striking still. In spite of the El Dorado legend and the tremendous
+stimulus provided by the search for gold in the Americas, the gold industry
+in Guyana was pursued with a remarkable lack of vigour. African slaves
+and Bovianders had mined gold under the direction of the Dutch in the mideighteenth century. After the move to the coastal plantations, Dutch planters
+were apparently so fearful of any competition to their plantation labour
+supplies that they closed gold mining operations completely. Nothing was
+revived until exploration resumed in 1864; and in the 1880s Guyanese were
+still rediscovering that the territory had alluvial gold. At that point, the
+planter class was reluctant to release public funds to advance the gold
+industry. Their command over public policy and the public treasury was
+unchallenged during the epoch of slavery, and this ensured that slavery had
+profound effects in vitiating the links between production and resource base
+in the Guyanese situation.
+Underdevelopment is a form of development – dependent and
+asymmetrical, but development nonetheless within the socio-historical
+context of the capitalist world system. The slave plantations of Guyana
+
+transformed the coastlands from thinly inhabited marshland to productive
+plantation zones. This was a development of resources hitherto underdeveloped by the sparse settlements of communally organized Amerindians
+who were farming, fishing and hunting. While contributing to the
+burgeoning growth of the capitalist cores, slave plantations imposed
+constraints on extending capitalist relations within Guyana itself.
+Discussion on the precise relationship of slavery to capitalism has advanced
+beyond the polarization of slavery as either capitalist or non-capitalist. It is
+self-evident that slavery stood in the way of the commoditization of labour
+and yet the internal hierarchical structure of the slave plantation was
+significantly influenced by capitalist forms in Europe. At all times, slavery
+remained independent on the markets, financial infrastructure and
+technology of the world capitalist centres.
+Hindess and Hirst seek to abstract the essence of slavery in the
+Americas as follows:
+It is a mode of production subordinated to the capitalist mode of production within the
+international division of labour and the world market created by capitalism. The conditions
+of reproduction of the Slave Mode of Production under these circumstances depend upon the
+capitalist system; upon world demand for the commodities it produces, competing regions
+and methods of production, alternative sources of investment, etc.21
+
+Paula Beiguelman simply and effectively defines modern (New World)
+slavery as ‘capitalist slavery’;22 while Clive Thomas emphasizes another
+crucial dimension when he designates it as a ‘colonial slave mode of
+production’, given the fact that colonialism became ‘the mediatory structure
+through which the influences of emerging capitalism in Europe were
+transmitted’.23 There is a wide area of agreement that slavery was an
+essential component of peripheral capitalism and that as such it could not
+develop enough internal momentum to ensure that its surpluses were used
+for the development of capitalism in a territory such as Guyana.
+For sugar, there was only one market, which lay more often than not in
+a single metropolitan centre. The nature of surplus realization imposed a
+relentless dependency on the planter class vis-à-vis the metropoles.
+Dependency is a colonial characteristic; but it must be noted that slavery in
+the colonies was bound to be heavily dependent because the slave economy
+stood no chance of creating an internal market. The tied market was also the
+source of capital and credit. Commercial and financial institutions were
+
+never autonomous within Guyana. Technology, too, was externally derived
+and there was little room for innovation or even adaptation of the type
+which could be termed developmental. Improvements to factory technology
+were very slow in coming to Guyana, while field husbandry remained
+wedded to the utilization of heavy inputs of cheap labour. In his unique
+study of Cuban sugar technology, Manuel Moreno Fraginals makes it clear
+that the major force in inducing growth in eighteenth-century Cuba was
+more manpower and slavery – in contrast to metropolitan capitalism –
+which lacked the dynamic to constantly revolutionize production
+methods.24
+These remarks are also applicable to Guyana. There was a proliferation
+of artisan skills on the Guyanese slave plantations and there were slaves
+who mastered the boiling of the sugar; but, of course, they were not
+exposed to scientific principles or experimentation. Besides, sugar
+technology was industry-specific and confirmed the mono-cultural
+dimension of the economy. The slave planters pursued policies which made
+it impossible for other branches of economic activity to be established and
+they were able to create barriers to the free entry of capital into agriculture,
+industry and distribution.
+The legal essence of slavery – ownership and legal coercion – and its
+political expression in a narrow planter-controlled state both contributed to
+holding back development in Guyana. The local state institutions under
+planter management were weak in their relation to the external world but
+they were powerful instruments in the hands of the masters for use against
+the slaves. The plantocracy was given free rein in its domestic policies.
+Without a domestic market and forms of petty commodity production,
+intermediary strata were extremely weak and closely tied to the planter
+class. Obviously, slavery stood in the way of the emergence of a wageearning proletariat, but in addition it also inhibited the growth of other
+classes and strata associated with the maturation of capitalism in the
+metropoles.
+Initially, reference was made to the necessity to premise the evaluation
+of slavery on contemporary underdevelopment. It is, however, just as
+important to pursue the historical enquiry into the post-slavery decades of
+the nineteenth century, where continuity and change gave meaning to
+previous trends.
+
+For nearly 100 years, sugar planters bitterly resisted the creation of a
+free labour market as implied by emancipation. They succeeded (with
+metropolitan backing) in importing indentured labour from various sources
+and in having that labour force heavily subsidized from state revenues.
+Briefly in 1848 and then systematically from 1846, the planters organized
+large-scale state-aided immigration from India. Until the last indentureship
+terminated in 1921, planters maintained a strategic section of the labour
+force on fixed wages and contracts outside the labour market. Their efforts
+were directed against the emergence of a proletariat which could make
+industrial and social demands on the owners of capital. Inevitably, the free
+section of the labour force found its initiatives frustrated by the immense
+control which planters wielded over indentured workers and hence the ease
+with which those workers were deployed to break the unity of workingclass struggle. Interestingly enough, planter resistance against the
+commoditization of labour was spearheaded in the late nineteenth century
+by plantation companies which were an integral part of the new monopoly
+forms of the imperialist era.
+The post-slavery plantations also showed a determination to retain a
+monopoly over land and to keep agricultural land in particular from coming
+onto the market. The conditions of tenure of the ‘frontlands’ of the coastal
+strip were such that each estate had an automatic option on the ‘backlands’
+of potential polder husbandry. Until these options were taken up, the land
+belonged to the Crown, as did the forests and savannahs of the interior.
+Planters moved quickly to raise the price at which Crown land could be sold
+to a prohibitive level and to restrict the terms under which it could be
+leased. These measures blocked non-plantation capitalist development of
+the land and they militated severely against the emergence of a peasantry.
+Nevertheless, it is equally important to recognize that the planter
+monopoly over land and labour was breached in the nineteenth century and
+that growth and development registered in the post-slavery epoch were due
+precisely to the small ways in which that monopoly had been successfully
+challenged. Ex-slaves immediately assumed the role of a modern proletariat
+in presenting their own terms for wages and conditions of work. They did
+not make a great deal of headway in the face of state-aided indentured
+immigration, but their wage level was usually slightly higher than that of
+indentured bondsmen whose rate of one shilling per day remained
+unchanged from 1838 to 1921. African exslaves moved into a variety of
+
+occupations in the villages and towns and to some extent in the hinterland
+also. Their first objective was not to escape from estate employment, but
+they at least supplemented estate earnings by functioning part-time as
+artisans and in petty commodity self-employment of one sort or another.
+Ex-indentured Indians, Chinese and Madeirans took similar routes. One
+infers from all this the extraordinary importance of legal coercion in the
+slavery epoch. Recent research has firmly concluded that it was the
+plantation structure that was the key element in underdevelopment in
+Guyana.25 This should be modified, and the emphasis shifted to the slave
+mode of production – colonial and capitalist – with which the plantation
+was first associated. The plantation remained a factor inducing
+backwardness mainly to the extent that legal extra-economic extraction of
+surplus did continue after slavery; but the new situation lacked the
+comprehensiveness of slavery and was slowly undermined by wage labour.
+Former slaves and ex-indentured workers were able to express their
+own demands for goods and services. Their demand created an internal
+market for land and houses as well as for food, clothing and other consumer
+items. The immediate post-slavery activities of Africans in Guyana have
+long been a subject of scholarly attention, but misapprehensions still
+prevail. In general, the first postemancipation decade is presented as the era
+in which ex-slaves fled the plantations and set themselves up as peasants in
+the villages.26 This simplifies and virtually inverts a reality in which
+Africans were still primarily sugar workers but had withdrawn their
+residence from estate housing and were making strident demands to support
+their conception of a tolerable standard of living – demands which included
+higher wages, education and access to cultivable land for those who wished
+to become full-time or part-time agricultural producers for local
+consumption. Distribution and other service sectors expanded because of
+these post-slavery trends, and intermediary classes began to make their
+presence felt.
+However slow hinterland development may have been in the nineteenth
+century, it was only possible because of the energy released by
+emancipation. As wage earners and as petty entrepreneurs, former
+plantation workers were responsible for the growth of the timber and
+mining industries. When the middle strata acquired a small economic base
+outside the direct control of the plantation, they also started to challenge the
+political hegemony which restricted their further growth. A new
+
+Constitution in 1891 was the consequence of protracted ‘populist’ agitation
+on the part of all strata outside the planter class. Legislators were thereafter
+elected on a slightly widened franchise, and they were persuaded to remove
+some of the stumbling blocks towards the acquisition of Crown land,
+towards the establishment of a peasant-based rice industry and towards the
+development of a gold and diamond mining industry. Once more, the role of
+the state serves to emphasize the historical significance of the political
+exclusiveness which necessarily went along with slavery in Guyana and
+wherever slavery was not merely one institution but the basis of peripheral
+capitalism in any given territory.
+Because New World slavery was a colonial phenomenon, it is
+sometimes difficult to separate the specific consequences of slavery from
+those which accrued from colonialism. The evidence on Guyana seems to
+support the conclusion that underdeveloping tendencies can uniquely be
+identified with slavery. First, when they relate to the central fact that labour
+was not a commodity and to the absence of efforts to achieve this – in
+contrast to primitive accumulation when indigenous pre-capitalist societies
+were colonized in Africa and Asia. And second, when the tendencies stem
+from the monopoly over land and labour in the hands of slave owners, who
+placed restraints on the development of other forms of private property.
+This again falls short of being a common feature of colonialism per se. The
+colonial state – in the history of capitalism – guaranteed slavery or migrant
+labour or peasant production, depending upon the mode of labour
+appropriation which evolved. But the colonial slave state was more
+monolithic than others because there were no competing class interests
+which had to be reconciled at the level of the state and because
+uncompromising authoritarianism was necessary to reproduce the
+relationship between master and slave.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+III
+Their Pedagogy and Ours
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+10
+The British Colonialist School of
+African Historiography and the
+Question of African Independence
+Views on African independence can be divided into three major categories,
+as follows:
+1. The colonial rulers, out of goodwill, granted independence, for which
+Africans had previously been given the necessary training.
+2. The African people, through mass nationalist parties, wrested political
+independence from the colonizers through struggle.
+3. With malice and deep strategy, the colonial powers themselves
+promoted the handover of the trappings of sovereignty, so that African
+independence meant false decolonization.
+In terms of intrinsic merit, the second and third categories above are of
+much greater importance than the first, because they reveal more about the
+historic processes which they set out to explain and they contribute more to
+an understanding of ‘the present as history’. One embarks on a critique of
+the colonial-goodwill training school mainly because the view is
+widespread and still in the ascendant in certain quarters. Besides,
+chronologically speaking, it was the earliest view; and the others cannot be
+fully comprehended without contemplating their relationship to the
+colonialist position.
+Two principal protagonists have been selected here to represent British
+colonial writing on this subject: namely, Sir Alan Burns and Lady Margery
+Perham. In the opening sentence of his book, Colonial Civil Servant, Sir
+Alan Burns announced, ‘I was practically born into the Colonial Civil
+
+Service. My grandfather and my father were both members of that Service.’
+As a former governor of Gold Coast and Nigeria, and as a high-ranking
+official in the Colonial Office itself, Sir Alan Burns is an unimpeachable
+spokesman for British colonialism.
+Lady Margery Perham is well known as a friend of the Colonial Office.
+She was for many years the most active ‘Africanist’ at Oxford, offering
+courses to Colonial Office civil servants, as well as training the present
+generation of colonist-minded fellows at Oxford who write on African
+history.
+Independence and nationalism came to Africa as European imports, so
+they tell us. African peoples previously lacked all common elements of
+nationalism, except common territory; and the requisite ingredients were
+provided by the presence of the colonizing powers. According to Margery
+Perham, African nations now owe to Europe the form of their existence as
+nation states. In effect, the argument suggests that both formal and informal
+education given by the British brought to Africa the ideas of freedom and
+democracy and the conception of the nation state. Margery Perham notes
+that schools in British colonies taught ‘the assertion of liberties from Magna
+Carta to the Reform Act of 1832 and beyond’.1
+Nationalism is a sense of common identity that arises as human groups
+seek to resolve the basic contradiction between man and nature. It is a
+definition of the in-group, as against all competitors in the struggle for
+scarce resources. Nation states grew up in Europe, Asia and Africa. What
+was Ethiopia other than a nation state? And what about Egypt long before
+colonial rule? Several African states destroyed by colonialism were as large
+as and often larger than the succeeding territories arbitrarily defined by
+Europeans. Even if, for the sake of argument, one were to deny that states
+like those of the Zulu, the Baganda, the Asante and the Mandinga under
+Samori Touré were not nations, it would be impossible to deny that they
+were ‘nationalities’ at an advanced stage of evolution towards nationhood
+per se. They were at least comparable to Ireland and Ukraine in the
+nineteenth century; and they had more people sharing a common culture
+than many microstates in Europe, Africa and Latin America at the present
+time.
+What European colonialism provided was a new context for nationalism
+in Africa, after having destroyed the old. The boundaries drawn at Berlin
+became in most instances the borders of the new African nations of our
+
+time, because reaction against colonial administrations dictated the form of
+African nationalism. There is a vast difference between form and substance.
+Another extravagant assertion of the colonial-goodwill-training school
+is that Africans were taught ‘freedom’, or (more modestly) ‘the democratic
+freedoms’. Sir Alan Burns states categorically that ‘the Sudan, under
+Anglo-Egyptian condominium, owes everything – including independence
+– to British tutelage.’2 Do the concepts of freedom and independence really
+involve tuition and learning? It has aptly been pointed out that throughout
+history, there is no evidence of any individuals or groups being against the
+idea of freedom, though there are countless numbers who have been against
+the freedom of others. Claiming freedom on behalf of the people of
+Tanganyika at the United Nations in 1956, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere spoke
+of freedom in terms of ‘a natural call, a call of the spirit, ringing in the
+hearts of all men, and of all times, educated or uneducated, to rebel against
+foreign domination’. He was then making a reference to the great Haji Maji
+wars by the people of southern Tanganyika against the Germans; and the
+thesis can be amply illustrated by the wide-ranging African resistance to the
+imposition of colonial rule in the last two decades of the nineteenth century
+and the first decade of the twentieth.
+With respect to ‘democratic freedom’, one can say that the issue is much
+narrower than that of relaxing to ‘freedom’. Liberal or bourgeois
+democratic freedoms are a specific set of civil rights which emerged at a
+particular period in the history of capitalist Europe. Leaving aside the
+question of how far those rights were implemented in practice in Europe
+itself, it is certainly true that African leaders articulated African demands
+for freedom in the terminology of bourgeois democracy. Here again, what is
+at issue is the form of the demands. And, even at that superficial level, one
+must be careful to notice the sleight of hand by which the dialectical
+opposite of a particular position is presented as conscious policy. The
+British taught those who emerged as nationalist leaders with the purpose of
+facilitating exploitation, not so that they would advance the cause of
+African freedom. British colonialism in Africa produced Nkrumah, Kaunda
+and even Banda (of anti-federation fame) in spite of and not because of
+British colonialist intentions.
+At one point in her analysis of African and Indian nationalism, Margery
+Perham comments on the ideas of nationalist leaders as follows: ‘Like other
+weapons turned against the West, they have been purloined from the West.
+
+And the ideal of democratic freedom and an almost indefinable sense of
+moral obligation towards the weak, have been learned very largely from
+Britain herself.’
+That statement is redolent with bourgeois and colonialist assumptions,
+confusion and deceit. In the first place, the bourgeois notion of private
+property is extended to political and moral standards and the ideal of
+democracy. They have been taken out of patents for those aspects of the
+universal striving of man, and the Africans have come by them only
+through theft – that is, ‘purloined’. But, in the very next breath, the Lady
+says that the ideas were ‘learned’, thereby reintroducing the duality of
+teaching/learning and the implication that it was a conscious handing over
+on Britain’s part.
+Indirect rule is a topic much favoured by British colonialist historians.
+Sir Alan Burns calls indirect rule ‘local government’ and claims that
+‘indirect rule is an excellent school in which the difficult art of selfgovernment can be learned’. Whatever indirect rule was, it was not training
+in self-government, because power and responsibility was always in the
+hands of the colonizers. Indeed, it marked the termination of the exercise of
+political power by the African people or by strata of the African population
+on behalf of others. In its northern Nigerian form and other variations,
+indirect rule was a tool of convenience for governing Africa cheaply and
+with the minimum of effort. It is quite incredible that it should be
+interpreted as one of Britain’s gifts of backward Africa, and as offering the
+training that would lead to independence.
+It might appear more plausible to suggest that the legislatures which
+were set up in the colonies offered training for independence. Legislative
+councils allowed for a few nominated Africans, and later on for a few
+elected African representatives. Undoubtedly, the few learned about
+Westminster procedure and about when bills went into committee, when
+they had their second reading, and so on. But, that is hardly enough grounds
+for concluding that the legislative councils were the ‘educational prototype
+of centralized parliamentary government’, to use the words of Margery
+Perham. Up until the time that internal self-government was constitutionally
+made possible, all other legislative experiments wore variations on the
+theme of metropolitan domination via the governor of the colony. The basic
+question is whether Africans were participating in the exercise of power and
+responsibility, to which the answer is ‘no’.
+
+All colonial constitutions stressed the ‘reserve’, ‘paramount’ or
+‘overriding’ powers of the governor, thus guaranteeing that African
+members would be frustrated, in the few instances where honest and
+courageous African nationalists were permitted to enter.
+In its extreme form, the colonial-goodwill-training thesis amounts to the
+assertion that colonialism from the outset was consciously liquidating itself.
+Sir Alan Burns implies this by observing that in the very process of
+colonizing Africa, Britain was ‘bringing under its protection backward
+peoples and leading them towards civilisation’. With reference to Nigeria,
+he wrote that ‘we are in Nigeria merely as trustees for the people, and it is
+our business to train them as rapidly as possible for self-government.’
+A writer who claims that British education in the colonies was
+education for freedom and that indirect rule was practice in the art of selfgovernment, should also maintain that Britain was planning decolonization
+virtually from the word ‘go’. In that regard, Burns maintains consistency, at
+the price of holding the laughable view that the British conquered only so as
+to plan decolonization. Margery Perham is more cautious and less
+consistent. When it comes to timing the moment when imperial Britain
+decided on the policy on self-government as a possibility, she moves much
+closer to the end of the colonial period.
+If admittance of Africans to the legislative councils was part of the
+preparation for self-government and independence, then the timing of
+Britain’s goodwill-training programme should at least date from the 1920s.
+However, Perham concedes that colonial administration hardly got under
+way properly until the 1930s, and it was not until after the Second World
+War that Britain began to timetable independence. ‘The war had subtly
+changed Britain’s attitude, though the authorities hardly knew it until faced
+with the decision’, she writes. So now we know that there was a change
+post-1944, that there could not therefore have been a previous policy to
+contemplate independence, and that even after 1944 this change does not
+become effective until the colonial authorities were faced by ‘the decision’:
+namely, what to do with the great African and Asian humanity which said
+‘enough’ to colonial overlordship.
+In parts of her work, Perham unreservedly admits that ‘anti-colonialism
+and anti-imperialism represents the latest phase in the reaction of the rest of
+the world against the long domination of the West.’ She concedes the basic
+desire for freedom on the part of all peoples, and actually uses the term
+
+‘regaining of independence’ with reference to the movement for African
+sovereignty in the late fifties. A reading of several texts from this British
+colonial historiographical school shows the same ambivalence and
+inconsistency. On the one hand, there are the vague and far-reaching claims
+to British uniqueness in preparing Africans for independence or selfgovernment from a very early date. On the other hand, when more specific
+statements are made, they never mention a date earlier than the post-war
+epoch as the point when conscious policy came into being; and (on a lower
+key) they admit that the initiative for change came from the colonized
+peoples.
+Sir Arthur Creech-Jones, as secretary of state for the colonies in 1948,
+put forward the first public policy statement to the effect that the central
+purpose of British colonial policy was to guide the colonial territories to
+responsible self-government within the Commonwealth. That statement is
+often cited by the British colonialist school of historiography under
+discussion, and Perham places considerable emphasis on the role of the
+Labour Party in that respect. With the experience of India, Ceylon and
+Burma behind them, British policymakers had apparently anticipated the
+goal of eventual African self-government within the Commonwealth and
+the rapid and full constitutional independence which actually came to
+Africa. It is the contention here that the nature and degree of independence
+and the timing of that eventually as conceived by some British
+policymakers in 1948 were all significantly different from what did occur in
+the years to follow.
+The most dramatic testimony that Africans rather than the British were
+the ones who set the main patterns of constitutional change in the 1960s is
+provided by the remarks of colonial officials right up to the eve of those
+changes – remarks showing blissful unawareness that the end of
+colonialism was in sight. Burns addressed a seminar of colonial officials at
+Oxford in 1947, in the capacity of governor of the Gold Coast. He began as
+follows:
+I have been asked to speak to you this morning on the future of the Colonial Service as I
+think it must develop if it is to meet the growing demands that will be made on it during the
+next twenty or thirty years … There have even been suggestions that our Empire is coming
+to an end, that our colonies are now anxious and ready to stand by themselves, and there will
+shortly be no more need for a Colonial Civil Service. I don’t believe it.
+
+Virtually all the statements that Britain was actively contemplating
+granting African self-government from the latter part of the 1940s are made
+with hindsight by the writer faced with the reality of independent Ghana
+and other comparable changes. For instance, Sir Charles Jeffries explained
+in 1960 that ‘the writing was on the wall’ in the Gold Coast in 1947, but he
+confessed that he did not see it, and he justified his own lack of perception
+as being part of a general phenomenon. He notes that Martin Wight, an
+‘expert’ on colonial constitutions, had written in 1947 that the Gold Coast
+Constitution of 1946 would last for decades! So, while Wight, Jeffries,
+Burns and Creech-Jones were contemplating self-government perhaps at the
+end of this century, the people of the Gold Coast came out on the streets in
+1948 and upset those plans. The same picture can be obtained for other
+colonial territories which later played very dynamic roles in the
+independence struggle. Sir Hugh Foot said of Nigeria: ‘In 1945 many
+people thought that the most Nigeria could hope for was a continuation of
+paternal administration, a few decades of marking time, at most a slow and
+steady development of the policy of indirect rule.’
+With hardly any exceptions, the British colonial historians would join
+Perham in acknowledging that the nationalist movements developed with
+‘unexpected speed and power’. This is explained away by the colonialgoodwill training school as something that did not contradict the substance
+of British plans but was ‘merely a matter of timing’. However, that is a very
+frail rationalization, because the rate of change was so drastically affected
+by the efforts of the colonized that in effect the guide was being led. It
+would be naive and anti-historical to overlook the role of the colonizers in
+the last years of colonialism.
+Governors like Arden-Clarke, Renison, Turnbull and Hugh Foot
+presided over the dissolution of the British Empire with unquestioned skill;
+but it is certainly questionable whether they led or guided towards
+independence, as distinct from compromising with a reality that had outrun
+expectations.
+A great deal usually hinges on the example of the rise of Ghana out of
+this Gold Coast colony. It is there that one can pinpoint the earliest plans
+and reactions of British colonialism faced with African nationalism. Events
+in Ghana up to 1957 cannot be measured in exactly the same way as events
+leading to the independence of Lesotho in 1966 or even to that of Uganda in
+1962 or Sierra Leone in 1961, because the later stages of the process gave
+
+the colonizers much more time to readjust and resume the initiative. The
+detailed history of the Gold Coast from 1947 to 1957 is one of British backpeddling on the specific issue of constitutional independence. It was rioting
+by working elements that led to the Coussey Commission; ‘SelfGovernment Now’ meant a great deal more than eventual self-government;
+and the leap from self-government to independence was also, from the
+British viewpoint, a major concession. The sequence of events is
+incompatible with the notion that the process reflected the central purpose
+of British colonial policy.
+British colonialist historians consistently propose the most disinterested
+of motives as lying behind British colonialism in Africa. In their
+interpretations of British decolonization, they merely assert the factor of
+goodwill, and never contemplate the possibility of self-interest. Thus,
+Margery Perham writes:
+Nowhere, except in the regions of white settlement, did Britain even attempt to refuse the
+demand once her government was convinced of its strength. The problem was essentially
+one of timing. With her stands of efficiency and her sense of obligation to minority groups,
+British governments wanted to see the transfer of power carried out by gradual and orderly
+stages.
+
+A reconsideration of the supposedly philanthropic reasons for colonizing
+Africa would automatically weaken the credibility of this line of argument,
+and whatever little remains would disappear in the face of British
+manoeuvers during that period when Africans were pushing for
+independence. Why were so many African nationalism leaders jailed? What
+about the attempts to interfere with the character of the regimes that would
+rule the independent African states? Without going into the details, one can
+cite Zanzibar as a blatant example of the way in which the British tried to
+manipulate the granting of independence so as to frustrate the will of the
+African majority and leave local power in the hands of a trusted Arab elite.
+British colonialists withdrew only when faced with a challenge, they beat a
+strategic retreat in the light of their own interests, seeking to preserve as
+much as was possible. That was entirely natural, and is to be expected in
+any such political situation. It needs to be argued only because certain high
+priests have suggested otherwise.
+British colonialist writers on the period of decolonization in Africa
+invariably refer to the notions of ‘mandate’, ‘trusteeship’, ‘welfare’ and
+‘development’ as being integral to the purpose of colonial rule. Some of the
+
+actors in the colonizing drama had made such claims from the outset –
+notably, Livingston, in his emphasis on Christianity and commerce, and
+Lord Lugard, in his thesis on Dual Mandate. However, it was not until after
+the last war that policy statements consistently included the welfare of
+Africans as one of the motivations of colonial rule, coinciding with the
+establishment of Colonial Development and Welfare (C.D. & W.). Sir Alan
+Burns adds this concern of the British for African economic independence
+to the list of other noble motives. In 1957, he asserted that:
+The avowed British Policy is today, as it has been for many decades, to lead all dependent
+territories up to self-government, and in the meantime to teach the peoples of the countries
+concerned the difficult art of governing themselves, and to improve the economic condition
+of each territory so that it may be able to face the future unaided.
+
+The C.D. & W. fund is generally projected by writers of this school as
+Britain’s contribution to the socio-economic welfare of the colonies and to
+their economic self-sufficiency. But C.D. & W. loans were not intended to
+make the colonies more independent, nor did they accidentally achieve that
+end. The loans were meant to develop certain social services and
+infrastructure in the colonies, so as to maximize their potential within the
+imperial context. The French were doing the same with their fund, and so
+both operations were following the line of thought advanced most cogently
+by the colonial minister, Albert Sarrault, in 1914 – the policy of mise en
+valeur or economic maximization of the potentiality of the colonies in the
+interests of the metropoles. Britain and France made no bones about the fact
+that the colonies were required to bail the metropoles out of the desperate
+post-war economic situation. To a considerable extent, the colonies did
+serve that purpose. Discerning Africans saw the whole C.D. & W. scheme
+as a fraud, having nothing to do with African development and a great deal
+to do with the welfare of Europe; but, in any event, none of its British
+planners ever asserted more than the aim to develop both the colonies and
+British in terms of their continued association. Economic development for
+political independence was never raised as an issue.
+Undoubtedly, no nationalist movements in Africa so far as advanced to
+constitution and juridical independence entirely through armed struggle –
+not even Algeria. Apart from Algeria and perhaps Kenya, it cannot be said
+that violence was the dominant element within any one colony. Yet, in spite
+of all that, it is misleading to characterize the independence movements as
+non-violent. The emphasis on non-violence overlooks the fact that the
+
+concept of violence in any operational sense includes also the threat of
+violence and the example of violence; and, within the colonialist camp,
+additional confusion is deliberately generated to obscure the fact that
+colonialism was violence in a form hardly less distilled than slavery.
+Colonialism was violently imposed on Africa, and it was violently
+maintained. Land-grabbing was violence, forced labour was violence, tax
+collection was violence. Certain juridical fictions emanating from the
+colonizing power placed only the briefest of lion-clothes to cover the
+nakedness of violent colonial oppression. If the colonized exposed the legal
+fictions of ‘law and order’, then there was the Riot Act and the colonial
+police. If the local forces were inadequate, then a troop-carrying gunboat
+was forthcoming. In spite of all that, there was a pattern of violence in the
+colonies, stemming from worker and peasant actions such as strikes and
+boycotts. There were enough of those in the inter-war years and in the postwar epoch to make the colonialist extremely apprehensive.
+Nationalists and anti-colonialists inside and outside the African
+continent naturally draw attention to the evidence of that African resistance
+against European exploitation which took the form of strikes and violent
+demonstrations. However, colonialist historians, and especially those with
+administrative backgrounds, were well aware of the same phenomena.
+Burns dedicated a chapter in his Colonial Civil Servant to ‘Wars and Riots’.
+He noted the seriousness of the Egba Rebellion in western Nigeria in 1918
+and of the Aba women’s riots in eastern Nigeria in 1929. He admitted that
+the ‘Gold Coast has a bad reputation for wars and civil disturbances, some
+of which were against the alien government’. He was acting-governor of
+Nigeria in 1942 when the trade unions mobilized against the government;
+and he went on the air to broadcast a typical governor’s appeal for
+‘reasonableness’ and ‘loyalty’ while promising that he must do his ‘duty’ if
+anyone dared to go on strike. The increasing intensity of such strikes and
+confrontations after the war must have necessarily entered into British
+calculations as to how long unadulterated colonialism could last.
+The winning of constitutional independence in any given African
+territory has to be correlated with winning of independence everywhere else
+on the continent and in Asia, so as to determine to what extent the so-called
+peaceful handover of power was really peaceful and was due to the
+goodness of the colonizers, and to what extent it was an option forced on
+them by examples of violence in particular colonies and by the threat of
+
+violence implicit in any nationalist movement which had shaped the people
+into a single resolute force. It is, for example, palpably obvious that the
+French learned from defeats in Vietnam that they should quit the whole of
+Indochina ‘peacefully’, rather than perish at other Dien Bien-Phus. The
+French repeated their high-handed actions in Africa and found that the
+national war of liberation threatened to reduce the French 100-franc note to
+a piece of worthless paper, and had already bequeathed the National
+Assembly in Paris with a succession of jack-in-the-box premiers. There was
+clearly a connection with the unsuccessful French wars of repression in
+Algeria and the hate with which they tried to establish acceptable African
+governments in West Africa.
+As for the British, Malaya haunted them in Asia and the example of
+Kenya gave them diarrhoea in Africa. True, they did suppress the Mau Mau
+land and freedom army, but at what cost! Imperialism is not imperialism if
+it costs more to suppress the exploited than the imperialists receive in
+surplus. The British knew that it was wise to proceed with African
+independence rather than court more Mau Mau. Even in far-off British
+Guiana, the popular movement of the 1950s could exert some leverage on
+the British by threatening them with Mau Mau.
+India is often given as the classic example of non-violent transfer of
+power from the imperial power to the indigenous nationalist forces. But it
+should be remembered that India had a powerful current of mutinous
+soldiers and other political traditions opposed to the non-violence of
+Gandhi. The British retreated as much from the threat of millions of Indians
+lying peacefully on the roads and railways as from the possibility that they
+might get up and strike back, given the example of those nationalists who
+were attacking British life and property before and during the Second World
+War. Some insight into that situation and its relevance to Africa is provided
+by W.R. Crocker in his book Self-Government for the Colonies, written in
+1949.
+Crocker was a colonial official in Africa, and shared many of the
+general assumptions of his professional group. Yet, his emphasis is quite
+different from Burns’s, under whom Crocker worked for some time. His
+book was an attempt to explain to his countrymen the force of nationalism
+as he saw it in the colonies. The question that he posed was ‘suppress or
+appease?’, and he followed that up by asking whether suppression by the
+British stood any chance of success. His own answer was that:
+
+The lesson from India is that nationalist agitation can be carried to such a length as to result
+in a breakdown of government, or what is so near to a breakdown that law and order and
+essential social measures can no longer be properly executed.
+
+Crocker also made reference to the cost and difficulty of putting down
+the early armed African movements for independence in Algeria in the
+1920s and in Madagascar in 1946, as well as the people’s war in Indochina.
+Besides, the international situation had changed, and he warned that
+Western Europe lacked the power and will to suppress. Therefore, it was
+essential to ‘appease’, and he explained:
+By appease I mean that the existence and the reality of the nationalist movement must be
+taken very seriously and that efforts must be bent to controlling it, guiding it, and competing
+with it, up until the moment when power can be transferred with a reasonable prospect of
+inflicting no undue sufferings upon the docile majority, or up until the moment when the
+retain of power is no longer practicable.
+
+Apart from the gratuitous solicitude for the welfare of the ‘docile’
+colonized, the above statement really gets down to the nitty-gritty. Crocker
+goes into a few more details where he warns that to oppose the agitators is
+to make them more popular, and that to hold back too long in granting
+African demands for independence would be dangerous. In one sense,
+Crocker was a liberal among reactionaries; while in another sense, he was
+no more progressive – save that his line was a frank exposure of what the
+colonialists were doing, while others were trying to say that the hyena was
+only a goat. For what Margery Perham tries to hide under the rubric of
+‘transfer of power’ is what he exposes in his definition of ‘appease’. He
+showed an awareness that constitutional independence in India and Burma
+had not weakened the ties between those territories and Britain. The
+problem was how and when to step down, so as to secure the best of the
+situation. As he explains it:
+The conundrum of when to the transfer authority, and how to in any given territory, will
+require the highest political qualities … But English history is in many ways a history of
+political genius … If the British are true to their genius, the British colonial problem can be
+solved.
+
+The limitations of this British colonialist school of historians are
+manifold. Most of them flow logically from the bourgeois worldview. There
+is no piece of this writing which is free of references to the Soviet Union
+and Communism. Explicitly and implicitly, there is the recognition that
+their interpretation of what happened in Africa is part of the struggle to
+
+determine whether capitalism or socialism shall triumph. Indeed, an
+interesting side-alley into which many of these writers divert is a discussion
+of the ‘colonial’ and ‘nationality’ question of the Soviet Union, with a view
+to demonstrating that Russian exploitation of non-Russians existed inside
+the Soviet Union, and with a view to warning Africans about the Soviet
+wolf.
+Needless to say, the British colonialist school has a metropolitan and
+racial bias. It comes out most clearly in their references to pre-colonial
+Africa, but it is also present in their analysis of decolonization in a
+patronizing form. This is implicit in many statements already quoted in this
+discussion and is generally well enough known that the issue need not be
+flogged in this context.
+In highlighting the dominant features of this type of scholarship,
+attention should be drawn to the fact that it springs from the British political
+ruling elite, who are bourgeois but more than just bourgeois. Throughout
+British history, there has been a unique interpretation of classes and class
+values at the level of the political elite. The English bourgeois partly pushed
+aside but partly absorbed the feudal nobility, whose deportment and norms
+were adopted. Writers who fall into the colonial-goodwill-training school
+were nearly all colonial civil servants at one time or another and were very
+much part of the political ruling class. One of the distinguishing marks of
+this scholarship is the use of the royal ‘we’ – clearly referring not even to
+the British people as a whole but to the policymakers. They scarcely bother
+to mention the economic exploitation of the colonies, which metropolitan
+rule was intended to protect; and one suspects that they were often ignorant
+of or indifferent to the economic reality of colonialism. Be that as it may,
+this school of interpretation is concerned above all to justify itself as a good
+ruling class – both in a practical and moral sense.
+In the final analysis, the value of the work under discussion is virtually
+nil. Because of its narrow focus on constitutional decolonization, it
+completely fails to mention other forms of integration between the colonies
+and the metropole in the economic sphere. Because of its concentration on
+British activity, it tells us nothing about African participation and the
+African role. There are a few hints that they perceived the class fissures
+within the nationalist movements; and, whatever their class perspective, it
+would have been valuable to get the views of the British rulers on this
+matter. However, such issues are simply defined out of the picture.
+
+On the specific issue of constitutional decolonization projected as
+British activity, the colonial-goodwill-training school tells us nothing about
+the pull and shove of the critical years when the question of African
+Independence was indeed a political game. British colonialist writers cannot
+say anything meaningful about the process because they have conspired
+beforehand to affirm that it was nothing but sweet reasonableness on the
+part of Britain. With that sort of approach the result is a ‘scholarship’
+devoid of even the saving grace of ‘facts’ unearthed by bourgeois
+empiricism. It reveals nothing. At every turn, there is a bland expression
+about trusteeship, mandate, guidance, partnership, transfer – like soothing
+music for the milch-cows.
+As indicated from the outset, the obligation to deal critically with the
+school of British colonialist historians is imposed by the wide vogue which
+it enjoys. It is probably still the majority position among European scholars
+in the metropole, and there is a significant neo-colonialist school whose
+work involves a revamping and refurbishing of the old interpretations, after
+jettisoning a few of the more objectionable and unsaleable points. Besides,
+a historical view is not the property of historians. It is the expression of
+class, national, racial and other presuppositions, and it returns to strengthen
+the said presuppositions. The vast majority of Englishmen will never give a
+thought to African history, but, whenever they react to an issue involving
+Africa or Africans, their judgement is shot through by the colonialist
+historical interpretation.
+Supposedly in the new spirit of independence, African research
+historians have taken to compiling texts for schools, sometimes in
+collaboration with whites who are very much tied to the old colonial
+structures. Thus, Joseph Anane of Nigeria got together with Godfrey Brown
+to edit West Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and they
+handed over a chapter on ‘Colonial Rule in West Africa’ to W.E.F. Ward, a
+former educational officer on the staff of the British Colonial Office.
+Understandably, Ward spoke on behalf of his own country and class, and
+restarted the colonial-goodwill-training myth:
+When I joined the British Colonial Service in 1924 the fashionable slogan was ‘trusteeship’:
+I was told that West Africa was not yet ready for self-government, but that it would be one
+day. Meanwhile Britain was in the position of a trustee, and I must look on my work as
+directed to helping Africa to take the government into its own hands … We were expected to
+work ourselves out of a job, though it cannot be claimed that all of us realised it, or that all
+of those who did not realise it approved of the idea.
+
+The last sentence is a characteristic piece of double talk; while the ‘we’
+simply means that the oppressor continues to write history for the
+oppressed.
+In East Africa, the volume by Gideon Wese and Derek Wilson, East
+Africa Through a Thousand Years, is in some ways a counterpart of the
+Anane and Brown volume – Wese being a Kenyan and Wilson an English
+history master at a white settler-oriented Nairobi school. This time,
+however, it is just not inviting a particular British colonialist, but the
+advancement of a coherent colonialist view of decolonization, made more
+dangerous because it will infiltrate under the name of an African historian.
+East Africa Through a Thousand Years completely accepts the frame of
+reference of British colonialist historians, whereby constitutional matters
+were the focus of the decolonization process. It presents to African school
+certificate pupils the notion that ‘the path to independence’ in Tanganyika
+began in 1945, when two African members were admitted to the legislative
+council. Wese and Wilson credit Burns and Perham when they assert that:
+The major concern of the British government was that each new state should be ready for
+independence, i.e. that it should be a stable government, acceptable to its people, under wise
+and capable leadership.
+
+Must another generation of African youth be asked to write and believe in
+such European fairy tales?
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+11
+Education in Colonial Africa
+The separation of knowledge has been entrenched within the structures of
+bourgeois universities in such a way that scholars in the humanities and
+social sciences can only pay lip-service to the concept of multidisciplinary
+approaches. It would appear that education as a subject or department is
+particularly alienated and cut off from other disciplines. Certainly, on the
+development issue, the little that is written hardly ever integrates the aspect
+of education. At the same time, educationists who write about ‘educational
+development’ are unwilling or unable to relate this to the movement of the
+society as a whole. The inclusion of the topic in this series of seminars
+attests to its fundamental importance to the political, economic and cultural
+changes taking place in Africa over the past eight or nine decades.
+A ‘balance sheet’ approach to the colonial period in Africa invariably
+fastens on to the building of schools as a decisive element in favour of
+colonial benevolence. No attempt is made to explain how this benefited or
+developed Africa and the Africans, but the argument carries great force
+because of the universalized assumption that Western education per se is
+good. Africans came to believe it and the vast majority still do believe it.
+After all, someone with a school education on the continent is distinctly
+better off than someone who has not gone to the kind of school set up by
+Europeans. It is also obvious that the leadership of the political parties that
+strove for independence was drawn mainly from the educated elite. In this
+sense, European education of the colonized may appear to have been a
+crucial factor in political development. Yet, there is perhaps no subject on
+which conscious Africans can be so roused as that of colonial education.
+The path to political awareness in Africa more often than not leads to a
+denunciation of missionaries, colonial schools, Shakespeare and cultural
+imperialism. When prodded, any African educated under the colonial
+
+system can point to numerous incongruities from individual experience of
+the curricula, teachers and procedures of the schools he or she attended.
+Indeed, within the same individuals there is often the ambivalence of pride
+in scholastic achievement on the one hand and self-flagellation on the other,
+because they had acquiesced to the racist colonialist educational
+programme.
+Education in Africa was not approached systematically by the colonial
+powers until the 1920s.1 By that time, colonial administrations had been set
+up throughout the continent and a range of economic activities were placed
+in motion with the aim of providing surplus for the metropoles.
+A small fraction of that surplus was redeployed to ensure that Africans
+would fill certain jobs in the lowest echelons of the economic and
+administrative sectors. Primary schooling was all that was essential for
+these positions as messengers, clerks, police constables, and so forth; but it
+was also necessary to train African teachers and a handful of Africans who
+were sufficiently initiated into the European way of life to pass the
+experience on to their brothers and to act within church, state and private
+firms as middlemen between the European hierarchy and the African
+masses. Hence, the growth of a modicum of secondary schooling, teacher
+training and eventually the rare experience of university education.
+Functionally, colonial education was developing the ‘modern’ sector in
+Africa – mining, cash-crop agriculture and trade with Europe. In effect, that
+meant the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of the African
+economy. It must not be forgotten that Africa had its own Indigenous
+system of education to the European impact.2 This system did not simply
+disappear, but it suffered the same contraction and diminution of vitality as
+did the ‘traditional’ economy. The disappearance of craft skill is nothing
+else but the disappearance of the education that had previously caused those
+skills to flourish. Indigenous African education lost its leading role in the
+society just as the traditional economy was displaced by the money
+economy. Those who entered the money economy saw European education
+as the element which might lead to upward mobility. Thus, the son of an
+agriculturalist was no longer apprenticed to him on the land but was sent off
+(wherever possible) to a school which would fit him for a part in the money
+economy – preferably in the administrative services where prestige was
+highest.
+
+Education, even at the most revolutionary periods, highlights continuity
+in those aspects of the society which are cherished by the masses or by the
+dominant class. Education at its best seeks to bring out the potential of
+individuals to serve their own society and master their own environment.
+Colonial education interrupted the patterns of education which performed
+these functions and substituted instead learning associated with the
+advancement of an alien society and which usually had little to do with
+increasing African mastery of their own environment. Curriculum
+development in Africa over the past decade has everywhere had to face up
+to the problem of irrelevance in the colonial school system. The examples
+which cropped up throughout the school day were alien and irrelevant to the
+African child. Rather than building upon what existed, colonial schooling
+destroyed what existed, which made it easier in the long run to subscribe to
+the great lie that no education was previously available. One is concerned
+here with an African’s basic awareness of his environment. Before the
+European or in a context of freedom from European education, a cattlekeeping people observed their animals with such attention that European
+languages have no words to describe the seventy or eighty varieties of cattle
+that, say, a Zulu or a Fulani felt it necessary to distinguish.3 In a similar
+vein, it was noted that African children in the forests would normally know
+the names of dozens of trees at an early age and would confound the
+European visitor who could not tell one leaf from another.4 The point here
+is that a European-educated African was just such a stranger and ignoramus
+in his own land.5 It is this break in the continuity of the historical movement
+in Africa that I am consistently referring to as ‘underdevelopment’ in an
+active sense, and it embraces economic, political and cultural fields.
+Presumably, if African education had been replaced by something of
+greater value to the African people, it would still have been possible to
+claim that Africa benefited and developed. Indeed, it could be argued that
+they had jumped to a higher stage which would have been long in coming if
+the process of uninterrupted evolution had gone on. However, the new
+education was severely lacking in many ways. To begin with, it was
+education for a tiny minority, replacing a system of education for all that
+had previously existed. The quantitative limitations of colonial education
+need to be stressed both as a corrective to the colonialist claim that they
+brought education to Africa and as a means of understanding that the
+present situation in Africa is profoundly influenced by the fact that the
+
+school system inherited from colonialism cannot possibly cater to the
+majority of the population.6 Masses of figures could be brought to show
+how few were the Africans who were allowed schooling by the colonial
+powers. A large proportion of the few were primary school dropouts while
+an insignificant minority made it to secondary school. After all, it has to be
+noted that Africa today still has appalling figures of illiteracy and
+inadequate schooling in spite of the fact that the independent governments
+have often done more in ten years than the colonists did in seventy-five.
+That is what a truly African education policy will not merely have to extend
+the colonial school system, but it will also have to break with the basic
+rationale that has guided it so far: of training a minority to aid in the work
+of administration.
+Producing Africans to aid in the task of colonial administration was of
+course not simply a matter of functional skills but also of ideology. Always
+learning is presented within a given ideological framework. Europeans
+could not do otherwise but instruct Africans within the bourgeois
+framework which was brought from Europe. However, winning over
+Africans was not left to chance. Policymakers for colonial education
+deliberately and carefully worked out the kinds of programmes designed to
+create the ‘loyal’ African servant. The French referred to them as ‘cadres’
+and emphasized that they should not merely serve as clerks, translators and
+the like but as active agents of French cultural imperialism among the
+African masses.7 Occasionally, a far-seeing colonialist thought in terms of
+training Africans who would continue to run the continent in the interests of
+Europe after Europeans had relinquished direct political control. But for the
+most part the educated elite was viewed as being permanently available for
+aiding their white masters, since scarcely any colonialist contemplated the
+end of European rule in Africa within this century.
+One extremely interesting example of the way the colonial powers saw
+education as buttressing colonial rule ideologically and practically lies in
+the treatment of African rulers and their sons. African rulers had been
+deprived of power in the process of imposing European rule, but they still
+retained varying degrees of authority in the eyes of their own people; and
+all colonial powers used what they called ‘chiefs’ as agents within their
+administrative systems. To the French, this was so important that they made
+it mandatory for chiefs to send their sons to school, in order that this
+stratum within African society should develop the same perspectives as
+
+educated Africans from different backgrounds. The French were being
+perfectly logical in expecting that all who aided them in the work of
+administering African territory on behalf of France should have an
+ideological perspective determined by the French themselves. The English,
+too, at some points felt the education of their ‘indirect rule’ chiefs to be a
+priority; and schools for African rulers were opened at Bo in Sierra Leone
+and Tabora in Tanganyika. Although the experiment of special schools was
+not carried very far, it did translate that the sons of the ‘traditional’ rulers
+allied to the British did rise to the top of the educational ladder. In the Gold
+Coast colony and Nigeria, clashes between the educated elite and the
+‘illiterate’ chiefs used to be common in the 1930s, but they disappeared in
+the post-war epoch as education and other factors cemented the privileged
+into a class whose interests were more readily reconcilable with those of the
+colonialists than they were with the interests of the African masses.8
+When the German and English ruling classes of the nineteenth century
+decided to give more education to their workers, they did so out of the
+realization that they were enhancing the value of labour. Similarly,
+European policy-makers for African colonies perceived that education was
+one aspect of the maximization of the continent’s resources – the policy of
+the mise en valeur as French colonial minister, Albert Sarrault, put it.
+Inevitably in such a case the oppressor tries to re-create the oppressed in the
+image which is most suitable for persisting with the relationship of
+domination and subordination. In the case of Africans, the education system
+was doubly dangerous because it also fostered white racism and destroyed
+the African sense of identity to the point of self-hate. The kind of studies
+done on the impact of white education on the blacks of the US and the sort
+of conclusions taught by Fanon of the ‘white masks’ of the black West
+Indians are all highly relevant to the educational situation of colonial
+Africa. The system produced individuals like the Senegalese Blaise Diange,
+who vigorously proclaimed that he was the most ‘French’ and would
+always be French. Those who were most qualified were understandably the
+most alienated. The highly trained black lawyers of West Africa performed
+the role of black Englishmen so fastidiously as to outdo the models they
+were imitating. The picture they present is both droll and tragic. Colonial
+education in this respect was a tragi-comedy.
+Some colonists recognized how distorted and destructive were the
+images produced by colonial education in Africa. One high-ranking French
+
+official was distressed to hear that black Africans were made to recite that
+‘the Gauls, our ancestors, had blue eyes’.9 Others expressed dissatisfaction
+with educational standards in the more conventional sense, because the
+colonial education given to Africans was hopelessly inferior by the criteria
+of contemporary Europe, and it became relatively more backward as the
+colonial period advanced. The widening gap between the African and
+European sectors of the world imperialist economy was matched by a
+widening gap between the standards and achievements of the Europeantype education available in both sectors.
+While teaching methods were evolving in Europe, those in Africa
+remained fixed in a Victorian mould. While some freedom was being
+created in the atmosphere of a European classroom, the authoritarianism of
+colonialism reinforced the authoritarianism of backward scholasticism.
+Racism added to this mess, so that even the African head teacher ran the
+risk of being publicly disciplined within his school by some twitter of a
+white school inspector. Europeans were quite aware that they were giving
+Africans an inferior education by European standards, quite apart from the
+contradictions that sprung from offering a European-oriented schooling to
+African children. Wherever there were white settlers, their children went to
+schools whose curricula and standards were more or less equivalent to the
+best metropolitan schools of the time, so as to allow such white children to
+return and fit into their home society when they so decided. This
+discrimination was most marked where settler societies had come into
+existence, notably in Algeria, Kenya, South Africa and the Rhodesias.10 But
+everywhere on the continent the education offered to Africans was
+quantitatively and qualitatively as inferior as it could be and still remains
+consistent with the European objective of training Africans who would be
+effective auxiliaries in the work of colonization.
+Perhaps the most striking aspect of the backwardness of colonial
+education in Africa was its adherence to a so-called literary model
+producing ‘white collar’ types at its highest points. This model persisted in
+spite of the reorientation towards science which was taking place in the
+metropoles themselves. But of course, once one understands that Africa had
+a fixed role to provide unskilled labour for the international capitalist
+system, it is not surprising that scientific and technical education was never
+a marked feature of colonial education. Such a development would have
+contradicted the very purposes of colonial rule. Only in a place like the
+
+Congo did industrial activity force education into a technological channel
+so as to provide semi-skilled labour. The same potential existed throughout
+Southern Africa, but it was denied by the avowedly racist policies designed
+to keep Africans from rising into the skilled and semi-skilled employment
+grades of the mining economy.
+Africans as well as Europeans made requests for reform and
+radicalization of the colonial educational system. There were demands for
+more school places for girls, for more technical colleges and for curricula
+that were generally more relevant to the ecology and to the African people.
+None of these demands could get very far, because the parameters of the
+educational system were set by the phenomenon of colonialism as such.
+Capitalism in Europe had hardly done much to liberate the woman and in a
+colonial context it actually undermined the position of the African woman.
+To recommend more education for girls was to fail to take account of the
+fact that the constricted money economy had no employment opportunities
+for women. A demand for more technical colleges was usually met by the
+answer that there was not enough finance in the coffers of the colonial
+administration. Of course, there was a vast difference in the amount of
+surplus expatriated to Europe and the amount of money raised by taxing
+Africans to meet the daily expenses of subordinating the said Africans.
+Colonialists were naturally loath to forgo any of the surplus unless it went
+into the infrastructure for future profits and for maintaining the system as it
+was. Technical education was ruled out because it actually ran counter to
+the international division of labour that was part of colonialism. And the
+same was true of high-level agricultural education. It must not be imagined
+that Africa’s role was agricultural and Europe’s industrial, scientific
+agriculture was also monopolized by Europe. Therefore, the superficially
+attractive idea of agricultural education for Africans was put into effect by
+colonialists in a degenerate racist form, which had as its rationale the
+training of Africans to take their ‘national’ place as manual workers on the
+land.
+A complete catalogue of the evils of the colonial educational process in
+Africa would be long indeed. It was no less decisive than the economic
+factor in bringing about the under-development of Africa. Indeed, in
+examining the concept of dependency as a crucial aspect of
+underdevelopment, one cannot fail to realize the major contribution of the
+educational system in producing the individuals with all the syndromes of
+
+psychological dependence and with the Iifestyles that derive from serving
+as European puppets in Africa. Yet, it is equally vital to understand the
+contradictions that were set in train because of the colonial school system.
+Those contradictions arose in spite of the intentions of the colonial masters,
+and they have already served in undermining the foreign domination of
+Africa.
+Education elicited a very positive response from large numbers of
+Africans. A great deal of force in one form or another was employed in
+getting the money economy in motion; and education was one of the very
+few positive inducements that motivated people both to join the money
+economy and to increase their participation in ways such as extended
+acreage of cash crops. Colonized Africans not only pressured the colonial
+governments to build more schools, but they themselves made tremendous
+efforts, including thirty-mile walks to the school, local financing of schools
+and teachers, and community programmes for educating students in Africa
+and even abroad.
+To some extent, these efforts aided the colonial enterprise. More
+Africans were thereby having access to European-type education without
+the colonialist having to release as much of their profits as they might
+otherwise have had to do. However, the African drive for more education
+defeated the purposes of the colonialists in a number of ways. The principal
+consequence is that particularly in British colonies there were more
+Africans with primary education than the colonialists really required for
+their own tasks. The colonial regimes were unable to provide such
+individuals either with secondary schooling or with the jobs that fitted the
+expectations created by the years of schooling. It is clear that in many
+colonies the crisis of the primary school leavers was a serious factor lending
+dynamism to the African independence movement.11
+The African search for ‘modern’ education also had a marked
+mobilizational and organizational effect. The act of getting together to
+finance a school was a political act. The sponsorship of a scholarship
+scheme tied to palm oiI or to cotton cultivation was also a political response
+on the part of the oppressed. The form of welfare organizations which
+catered to educational objectives during the 1930s and 1940s was later
+subsumed by the mass political parties. As Africans broke beyond the
+bounds of colonial educational opportunities, individuals as well as
+collective opposition to colonial rule was engendered. At the individual
+
+level, it has been noted how significant were the roles played in
+independence struggles by West Africans educated in the United States.
+Those individuals were part of the process of seeking out Western education
+wherever it could be found. Coming from places like Nigeria, their normal
+outlets for limited higher education was in Britain; but they sought new
+frontiers in the United States when they found no openings in Britain.12
+Africans who never received higher education or any education at all were
+part of the movement to change certain vicious racist trends of the colonial
+educational system in which they placed hope for their children. In French
+West Africa, the major issue over which there was popular protest was the
+French attempt to create ‘Bush Schools’ that were supposedly more
+relevant to African needs but were fundamentally aimed at creating an
+inferior educational environment for ‘the natives’. The struggle against
+these schools was a victorious one, and it formed part of the national
+independence struggles in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa
+in the post-war era. The same is true of the African movement against
+agricultural education in British East and Central Africa.
+The powerful African independent Church movement had a somewhat
+less powerful counterpart in the independent schools that sprung up on
+African initiative. In Kenya, they had a Christian background; in North
+Africa, they had a Muslim background; while elsewhere, as in the Sudan,
+no particular religious preference was expressed. In all these situations,
+however, the independent spirit went far beyond the classrooms, and the
+colonial powers were themselves quick to see the generally ‘subversive’
+implications of Africans controlling their education in this way. In any
+event, contradictions arose within what the colonists would have considered
+as the most advanced institutions espousing European value systems. With
+very few exceptions, the leaders of African independence movements were
+products of an educational programme that was aimed at keeping them as
+colonial subjects. The opposition to the colonial intellectual formation took
+place at two levels. A few individuals actually rejected the entire value
+system of capitalism, individualism, racism and exploitation. These were
+the few who uncompromisingly continued to strike out against imperialism
+after gaining the tokens of constitutional independence. The second level of
+protest was generated by the contradiction between the value system and
+the personal aspirations of educated Africans. They had been taught about
+freedom, liberty and a career open to the talents, and instead found that
+
+colonial rule offered the educated elite none of these things. Taken together
+with all the other contractions of colonial society, the antagonism between
+the colonizers and the African educated elite was a notable contribution to
+the emergence of national political parties, and to the gaining of
+constitutional independence as a step on Africa’s march towards
+reconquering the political power lost through the imposition of Europe’s
+colonial rule.
+Everywhere on the African continent, education originating with the
+colonialists was meant to ensure mental and physical enslavement. To a
+large extent it did carry out this function. But every aspect of Africa’s
+subjugation also contained the seeds of revolution since capitalism in its
+colonial guise could not satisfy even the minimal aspirations of the African
+people. The more cash crop farming there was the more likely it became
+that there would be peasant revolts. The larger the wage-earning sector, the
+more likely it was that there would be the revolt of organized labour.
+Dissatisfaction with education and with the opportunities for education was
+at the forefront of colonial grievances and it helped to weld together the
+vast majority of the population to address themselves to the principal
+contradiction between themselves as the colonized and the Europeans as
+colonizers. No other facet of the African experience so clearly illustrates the
+dialectic of oppression and resistance. Historical underdevelopment is a key
+aspect of the story, while the rebirth of freedom is the other.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+12
+Education in Africa and
+Contemporary Tanzania
+I. Education in Africa
+In discussing education in Africa, we should first contrast the independent
+educational system as it existed before the arrival of Europeans with the
+colonial education system established after 1885, which is the conventional
+date for the beginning of African colonization. The differences between the
+two are critical to any real evaluation of contemporary education in Africa.
+Communal and universal vs
+particular and elitist societies
+Education in independent pre-colonial Africa was universal. Everyone
+received either a formal or informal education designed to give him or her a
+role within the society. Mothers passed on values to their children and the
+elders acted as models of behaviour for the youth. That was informal
+education. It went on all the time and could not be stopped.
+Formal education in independent Africa occurred throughout teaching
+one’s skills to apprentices. For example, if a man were a hunter, a miner or
+a cloth-maker, he would educate his children or other family members or
+other persons in the society, in order to preserve his particular craft. In
+addition to vocational skills, social values were specifically transmitted to
+the young at puberty during the rites of initiation. Many societies also had
+formal training schools for those preparing for the equivalent of the
+
+priesthood. So this, very briefly, was the African educational system. It
+provided education for everybody. It had a role for everybody.1
+Colonial education, or European education in colonial Africa, stood in
+contrast to the above. It was doled out to a minority. Colonial education was
+elitist, because it was based upon elitist philosophical and ideological
+assumptions derived from European class society, as distinct from African
+society which was communal and relatively unstratified. In a stratified
+sociological system, education serves the interest of the dominant class,
+caste, race or geographical unit, irrespective of pretensions to the country.
+Such an education is for the few, whether they be the actual children of the
+ruling class, or children of the exploited and oppressed classes who are coopted into the services of that system.
+When the European education system was transported to Africa, it
+became even more limited and elitist, because the purpose of the colonizers
+within Africa was to select only a very small number of Africans to aid in
+the work of colonization. The point was made very clearly by the
+colonizers: ‘Why do we want to educate the blacks? Because we are
+running the country, but we cannot do it all on our own. We need some
+African messengers and translators. We need African clerks in the railways,
+the civil service and the trading companies. We need teachers to train those
+messengers and clerks.’ That is why it became necessary for the colonialists
+to establish some form of school education in Africa.
+The African vs the European personality
+Another set of distinctions exist between indigenous African education and
+colonial education. African education was designed to develop what I call
+the ‘African personality’, a term which has been used by Kwame Nkrumah,
+Sekou Touré and a number of other prominent African spokesmen. It often
+carries vague mystical overtones, but what I have in mind is simply that a
+society, both consciously and unconsciously, develops individuals to sustain
+its mores and values. In unfettered African society, Africans were part of
+the extended family. They developed a consciousness of their relationship
+to their kin, their land and their ancestors. All these factors made up the
+‘African personality’.
+
+Any educational system, so long as it is independent, develops people
+for purposes which the society internally and independently chooses for
+itself, notwithstanding the fact that a particular sector may be more
+influential than another in exercising that choice.2 In the colonial system, it
+was not the people themselves, not the colonized, who set the terms and
+goals of their education. The colonizer did so. When he educated a few
+Africans, he did so not to develop them within their African context, as
+Africans, but rather to alienate them from their society from which they
+came. His purpose was to create or recreate them in his own image, to
+mutilate and transform the very sense of their African identity.
+A dramatic illustration of this is found in French West Africa, where
+African school children were told to recite, ‘The Gauls, our ancestors, had
+blue eyes.’ When a French school child says this, it is a means of
+identifying himself with his past, and this is normal in any educational
+system. But when a colonized Senegalese or Dahomean is told that the
+Gauls, his ancestors, had blue eyes, and he knows he has black eyes and a
+black skin, he experiences a tremendous sense of alienation.3 His sense of
+who he is, his sense of being an African, is in danger of collapsing. He
+becomes instead a black European, which was, in fact, the purpose of
+French as well as British, Belgian and Portuguese colonial education. It was
+designed to alienate the few who received it from the mass of the people as
+a whole, not to reinforce the connection between those educated in the
+formal system and the rest of the population.
+Interdependence vs individualism
+A third set of contrasts is related to the communal nature of African
+education which stressed the interdependence of individuals within the
+society. Work and social effort had to be collective if they were to be
+meaningful. This collective emphasis sprang from the structure of the
+society, which was non-stratified or relatively undifferentiated. Suth class
+contradictions that did exist were, by and large, non-antagonistic class
+contradictions, except in a few areas where feudal or quasi-feudal social
+forms had come into being.
+An antagonistic contradiction penetrates to the basic means of
+production. When the existence of members of one class depends upon
+
+exploiting members of another class, race or nation, then their interests are
+antagonistic. In African societies, there were non-antagonistic
+contradictions based on the division of labour. Such, for instance, was the
+opposition between pastoralists and cultivators, between whom there was at
+the same time a considerable degree of interdependence. Also, there was a
+division of labour in which some individuals became priests, while others
+wielded political authority. When the division of the social product is
+relatively egalitarian, a major contradiction does not arise between the
+priest and ruler, on the one hand, and the rest of the subjects on the other.4
+In the African situation, it was possible to teach that labour is a
+collective activity, since this was in accordance with social reality. Colonial
+education, deriving from bourgeois values, portrayed labour and even social
+existence to be competitive. Not only was this idea extolled within the
+classroom, but in the arena of real life such progress as was possible within
+colonial society was granted to Africans because of their personal
+achievements, thus further separating the individual from the mass of his
+fellows.
+The colonial educational system was competitive in the metropoles, but
+it was more so in Africa, because only a tiny handful – far less than in
+Europe or North America – became, as it were, the chosen few. A tiny
+handful went to school, and it was made clear to them that: ‘Here it is! Here
+is your avenue to progress. You have to compete with others to get there.
+And once you make it within the system, you will establish yourself as a
+superior individual, not as some small part of a collective.’ Ideological
+values were buttressed by material changes which further differentiated
+African society.
+For example, where land used to be the property of the whole
+community, it became commercialized. Under colonialism, land was bought
+and sold in Africa, a concept almost unknown previously. Once it was
+bought and sold, a few individuals got the land. And others had to do
+without. They became sellers of labour to those who owned land. The
+individualist approach struck at the roots of the land tenure tradition, and
+the educational system reinforced that individualism as well derived its
+rationale from it.
+Orientation to, or away from, the ‘life environment’
+
+A final set of contrasts suggests that the original African education was
+carrying forward what may be called the principle of praxis – the unity of
+theory and practice. One was learning about life. The individual was
+instructed about the life of the community in order to fulfil his own role
+within the community and simultaneously understand and complement the
+roles of others. African education was specifically oriented towards the
+practice of day-to-day life. It must be reiterated that educational systems are
+both formal and informal. We should not hold to the idea that education
+takes place only if there is a classroom – and only if people remain outside
+of the process of production for months or years. That is the narrow
+Western conception of education that evolved out of feudalistic and
+capitalist times. But Africans were educated differently.
+Consider, as an example, the African pastoralists. When Masai youth,
+aged five or six, deal with cattle, they are at school. By the time they reach
+the age of ten they can distinguish dozens of species of cattle – their shape,
+the color of their skins, their particular markings, the shape of their horns,
+and so on. The Masai can even identify the species of ticks that come and
+rest on their cattle. They have gone to school with their cattle because it is
+essential for their survival and the survival of their community that they
+should know about cattle, for that is how the community makes its living.
+Therefore, whether they get that education by formal or informal means, it
+is at all points linked to the question of practice, of doing, as distinct from a
+purely abstract appreciation.
+Colonial education in Africa was hostile to the principle of praxis,
+partly because of unconscious and ill-considered European premises about
+education. Consider a subject as basic as geography. A European
+schoolteacher in a tropical schoolroom in Africa or in the West Indies
+would teach about spring, summer, autumn and winter, which relatively few
+Africans or West Indians would ever have seen.
+Brought from Europe, the educators too often taught the same things
+they would have taught in Europe. But more than that, they insisted that
+education in Africa be essentially ‘white-collar’ education. They promoted
+what they considered to be the values of Christianity, and values connected
+with doing certain types of low-level bureaucratic work. It was a nonspecific, non-technical education, unrelated to the actual physical
+environment of Africa.
+
+In Europe, a scientific and technological bias had been imparted to
+education in the late nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth
+century, because such a bias was necessary to the development of capitalist
+society in Europe. However, because Africa had been allocated the role of
+primary producer within the imperialist international division of labour, it
+was not only unnecessary, but undesirable and antithetical to the interests of
+capitalism that African education should take a scientific and technological
+direction. The colonizers did not want Africans to do anything more than
+supply labour in its cheapest and crudest forms. When, for example, rural
+Africans in South Africa did manage to get skilled or semi-skilled jobs, the
+whole racist society galvanized itself to hold back African development,
+because an African was considered even more of a threat if he had an
+education and a skill. He was then either not given a job or given it at a
+wage as much as ten times less than that which a European received.
+The African schoolchild who did receive a colonial education very often
+was removed physically to a primary or secondary boarding school. Many
+Africans who experienced this kind of education found that they could no
+longer relate to their own home communities, or that they had tremendous
+difficulty in doing so.5
+The church too was responsible for outdated forms of African
+education. By the nineteenth century, churches in Europe had ceased to play
+the hegemonistic role in education which they had played in previous
+centuries. Europeans had come to an awareness that the church should be
+separated from the state and from civil education, because the metaphysical
+approach of Christianity was hostile to the full elaboration of European
+knowledge, especially in science. For the most part, Europeans very calmly
+separated the church from their school system.
+But, at the same time that the Europeans were separating the church
+from their educational system, they were bringing the church into Africa.
+They found it useful, one presumes, to create irrelevant and mystifying
+approaches to knowledge, because all they wanted the African to learn was
+the fear of God. The missionaries said this very clearly: ‘We want to teach
+them the fear of God.’
+
+II. Education in Tanzania
+
+Qualitative gains
+Against the background of colonial and pre-colonial education in Africa, it
+may be helpful to take the narrower example of Tanzania today to pinpoint
+some of the things that Tanzania has achieved, and some of the things that it
+has tried to achieve, in the educational sphere.
+The legacy of colonial rule was an extremely high rate of illiteracy
+throughout the continent. The number of children going to school very
+seldom went above one out of ten, and in some cases it was less than that.6
+In the United States one talks about high school dropouts and college
+dropouts, but in Africa one talks about primary-school dropouts. Fifty per
+cent of the children in Africa had to contend with an enormous quantitative
+problem in the area of education. Heretofore, colonial education had only
+been made available to a very small percentage of the African population.
+But the government planners of the new African educational systems were
+charged with providing a formal school education for everybody. They had
+to start thinking in terms of universalizing education, pushed by the demand
+of the working classes.
+In my opinion most African countries which attained independence with
+a few secondary schools and with almost non-existent facilities for
+technical and university education, have done more in ten years of
+independence than the colonialist did in seventy-five years of colonial rule,
+as far as expanding the physical educational facilities are concerned. I have
+many reservations about some independent African governments, but it is
+simply an indication of how shabby the colonial regimes were, that in
+seventy-five years they did not manage to give to Africans, quantitatively,
+even the primary education which governments in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda,
+Kenya, Tanzania and elsewhere are giving to their people today. Very
+seldom does the new education arrive, however, at anything near universal
+school education. Not even in Tanzania.
+The Tanzanian government projected the year 1980 as the date when it
+hoped to arrive at universal primary education. This wait is justified by
+policymakers in terms of a lack of finances. Education is a huge financial
+investment which does not bring immediate returns. It is a long-term
+investment. Many governments spend 25 per cent, perhaps thirty per cent of
+their budget on education, and of course this is not as productive an
+
+investment as a farm or a factory, which will conceivably show returns in
+one to five years.
+In spite of this, many young Tanzanians have not been very happy about
+the idea of accepting incomplete primary education for a number of years.
+Their imagination has been caught by the kind of experiment which went
+on in Cuba and which provided the Cuban people with universal literacy.
+While coming nowhere close to the Cuban ‘Year of Education’ strategy,
+Tanzania has stepped up its adult education programme. President Julius
+Nyere argued that because so many of the present adult population had been
+denied the opportunity of education during the colonial period, adult
+literacy campaigns should become a matter of the highest priority, and
+Tanzania has had one of the more successful adult education programmes in
+Africa. Altogether, it cannot be denied that ten years of independence has
+shown a tremendous development, in purely quantitative terms, in the
+number of children going to school, and in the number of people in the
+society who received a formal education of the same schoolroom type as
+had been established under colonial rule. That is the first achievement.7
+The elimination of racism
+Another early achievement in post-colonial Tanzania was the elimination of
+the racist structure of colonial education, which reflected the racism of the
+colonial and capitalist world. There were white settlers in Tanzania,
+although their Kenyan counterparts were more numerous and more
+notorious. These white settlers received, by far, the largest proportion of the
+educational budget. Arabs and Asians received the next largest slice, and
+finally, the majority, the people of the land, the Africans themselves,
+received the scrapings. This racist school structure was promptly attacked
+and destroyed.
+Teacher training
+The idea of teacher training had to be seriously reconsidered, because part
+of the process of African alienation resulted from the physical presence of
+white teachers in African schools who, whether or not they consciously
+subscribed to all the goals of colonial rule, reflected the biases and
+
+individualism of the metropoles and the racism inherent throughout the
+capitalist world.
+Since Tanzania had been one of the more ‘backward’ colonies, few
+Africans were trained to be teachers at the time of independence. Its leaders
+wanted to expand their school system, but the teachers who were already
+entrenched there were primarily white expatriates and Asians who did not
+always opt for national status. The university opened its first college of arts,
+social sciences and natural sciences in 1965, and it was used virtually as a
+teacher-training institution. A programme was devised by which an
+undergraduate could emerge at the end of his studies as a teacher in two
+subjects. Normally within the British system, one earns a Bachelor’s degree
+before proceeding to study for a year, or two years, to acquire teaching
+certification considered appropriate for secondary school teachers. Tanzania
+had to break with that practice and integrate teacher training within the
+undergraduate programme. About 80 per cent of all the early graduates
+went straight from the university into the secondary schools to meet the
+priority of ‘Tanzanization’.
+A small example of the consequences of ‘Tanzanization’ can be seen in
+the return to traditional dance (ngoma) within the school system at both
+primary and secondary levels. Music and dance have always been dominant
+African art forms, and they were relevant to culture in ways that were far
+more fundamental than mere recreation. Not only has ngomo been revived
+in the schools but the traditional forms have been given a new content, a
+new thrust. The words the students sing and the scenes they act out in
+ngoma might today be related to Ujamaa, the collective, for example. Or
+they may even be concerned with the question of defence against the
+Portuguese. So there is a merger of new political content with old African
+form.
+The National Service programme
+Beyond the quantitative changes and the more obvious transformations of
+the school structure, one confronts much more complicated questions.
+Tanzania has had to struggle to retrieve its education from a colonial to a
+distinctly African path. At the same time, these African values had to be set
+in the forward-looking context of socialist reconstruction. A key problem is
+
+that colonialism (like any other social system) has means of selfperpetuation. ‘Africanization’ per se could not break the continuity of
+colonial education, given that African teachers had been taught by
+Europeans within a European value framework. In effect, the African
+teacher was often a ‘programmed’ European: making Fanon’s phrase ‘Black
+Skins, White Masks’ even more apt than it initially appears, since the mask
+in indigenous African practice symbolized a complete change of identity on
+the part of the wearer. Higher institutions of learning in Africa were
+particularly prone to emphasize colonial continuity, often under the guise of
+maintaining ‘international standards’. Any African teacher who had access
+to higher education, either before or after independence, was likely to be as
+elitist as the European who had preceded him; alienated from his African
+roots, and as individualist as though he had been socialized in Britain or the
+US.
+The National Service was perceived as a device to induce change of a
+practical and normative kind in Tanzania. It was instituted as a means of
+bringing a number of youth into more active participation in the life of their
+community. One of its principal aspects was the provision of the rudiments
+of military training for self-defence. Colonialism disarmed the African
+people, except for those who served the master in the colonial army. One of
+the first things which the National Service did was to revive the normal
+practice whereby the youth are entrusted with the physical defence of the
+society. At the same time, the National Service revived the principle that
+education should provide real skills, practical skills, as distinct from ‘whilecollar’ education. So, the National Service offered agricultural and craft
+skills regarded as relevant to the question of economic development. Its
+first recruits were youth with primary and lower secondary education.
+The National Service also rested on the premise that young people
+should be educated to serve rather than to command peasants and workers.
+University graduates represented the pinnacle of the old elitism. They had
+to learn to reintegrate themselves with the rest of the population. Therefore,
+in 1966, the National Service Act was extended to cover secondary and
+university students previously exempt from its provisions. Tanzanian
+university students completing their training that year were required to enter
+National Service. Like everybody else, they were to live in a National
+Service camp for six months and were to be trained by instructors who
+often had only primary school education. At the camp, servicemen received
+
+an allowance. For a subsequent eighteen months they were to make a
+contribution of 60 per cent of their salary to the national budget. University
+students promptly demonstrated to signify their non-acceptance of these
+terms. This was confrontation of the people versus the elite; and being an
+elite without power, university students were disciplined to perform
+National Service in order to complete their education. Now secondary
+school graduates proceed immediately to National Service camps for some
+months before joining the university.
+The National Service programme succeeded to a limited extent. After
+setting out on the difficult task of re-fashioning people’s values, it has, not
+surprisingly, ended up with a degree of formalism. In other words, students
+will go to the National Service and they will do what they are told. But they
+will not necessarily accept the idea that they are there to serve the people
+and merge with the community of producers. No one in Tanzania would be
+so naive as to say that the National Service works perfectly, or to suggest
+that months of work on nation-building projects will create a new sense of
+identity for servicemen. One of the excruciating problems is that the
+National Service is shot through with hierarchization and commandism,
+which is antithetical to its own goal of maximum participation along
+socialist and democratic lines. While given a highly political task to
+perform, its direction at various levels is manifestly ‘apolitical’, which
+means in effect petty bourgeois. A political education wing was
+incorporated in the National Service at an early date, but it appears to have
+been swamped rather than to have expanded in a manner that would allow
+the institution to be considered a cadre-forming one. For the moment, the
+most positive thing that can be said about the National Service is that
+structures have been set up and that meaningful goals have been defined
+which go far beyond the structures and goals of the colonial educational
+system.8
+A national language
+Tanzania has been fortunate in being one of the few African countries with
+an authentic national language. There are dozens of linguistic units in
+Tanzania, but, with few exceptions, everybody can communicate in Swahili.
+Most observers have commented on this phenomenon as evidence of
+
+Tanzania’s national and territorial integrity. In addition, the existence of
+Swahili as a lingua franca has implications with regard to transcending both
+stratification and external orientation. English, which was the teaching
+medium in the colonial secondary schools, was one of the mechanisms of
+alienation. The continued use of English and French in post-colonial Africa
+helps keep the African petty bourgeois attached to their masters. With the
+introduction of Swahili as a language of national education, those who
+entered the secondary schools were offered the opportunity of defining their
+visions of the world in a language which grew out of their own
+environment. There also emerged the possibility of using an idiom which
+could bind together the peasantry and the upper classes, in contrast to the
+European language, the use of which previously divided them.
+English is still the language of instruction at the university and in the
+higher reaches of the secondary schools because it takes time to make the
+transition to Swahili. Textbooks have to be developed and new concepts
+have to be incorporated into the language. Some foot-dragging in the
+practical implementation of the national language policy is evident. It is
+probably due, in part, to the lack of self-confidence of most of the petty
+bourgeoisie and their wish to continue the English language identification
+with the metropolis. However, debate in local circles has produced a
+consensus that Swahili can – and must – take precedence at all levels of
+communication – including the university.
+Education for self-reliance
+In the wake of the famous Arusha Declaration of 1967, Mwalimu9 Nyerere
+made public a major policy document on education, entitled Education for
+Self-Reliance.10 It should be borne in mind that the subtitle of the Arusha
+Declaration was ‘TANU’s Policy of Socialism and Self-Reliance’.11 The
+emphasis on self-reliance thereafter became the principal theoretical
+premise for educational reconstruction. Education for Self-Reliance starts
+with an awareness that the colonized were educated to be dependent upon
+the colonizers: an education for dependence. In contrast, the goal for
+Tanzanians in the conceptualized socialist, self-reliant Tanzania was that
+they should be dependent on their own efforts, their own skills, their own
+creativity. Education under colonialism was mainly supported by the state
+
+or church. That is to say, Africans paid taxes and generated surplus out of
+which the colonial administration or the church allocated funds for
+education. Those who went through the formal educational systems were
+removed from production and kept as specifically privileged persons for the
+duration of their secondary education. Patterns such as these were
+challenged in Education for Self-Reliance.
+The colonial education system was a pyramid, starting off with a narrow
+base of primary education, becoming extremely narrow at the secondary
+level and tapering off sharply at the point of higher education. Education
+for Self-Reliance insisted that a national educational system could not have
+as its goal the well-being of a few at the top. A change of priorities was
+required so that the edifice could be built around the well-being of the
+majority. Under the colonial system, primary school was not an end in
+itself, for it meant nothing to emerge after six years of primary school. The
+primary school graduate was considered by the colonialist a potentially
+better labourer or cultivator. But the African who was to help in
+administration needed to proceed further. Given the ‘white-collar’
+orientation of colonial society, Africans also accepted that the purpose of
+education could only be achieved by climbing the pyramid.
+The new approach in Tanzania was based on the contention that it is
+absurd to spend millions of shillings on an educational system whose end
+product is a handful of trained people – especially since the only thing they
+can do is administer the country rather than spearhead production. If only a
+handful still continued to reach the top of the educational pyramid in
+independent Tanzania, that would constitute a secondary achievement. The
+major focus was to be on primary education, because only in this sphere
+could the policymakers conceive of giving everybody an education in the
+near future. All primary school graduates had to be fitted for service in the
+society, rather than as misfits with no meaningful jobs – as happened in
+colonial Africa and as happens in neo-colonial Africa.
+The goal of a self-reliant education led to a re-evaluation of the age at
+which children should start school. Generally, the starting age is six years,
+and at twelve the child is finished with primary schooling. The logic behind
+the TANU decision to start school at a later age was that a primary school
+graduate of twelve years or less is neither physically nor mentally equipped
+to assume the role of producer in the society. Consequently, in 1963, the
+starting age was pushed upwards to seven years and the school leaving age
+
+to fourteen years. Interestingly enough, in pre-colonial African society, a
+child became an adult at the time of puberty; the initiatory ‘rites of passage’
+meant that a girl became a woman, and a boy, a man. The European
+conception of a teenager – someone who is unproductive for four or five
+years – was totally unheard of.
+The policy of education for self-reliance placed a lot of emphasis on
+agricultural work, because the vast majority of people in the country earn
+their living from subsistence. The colonial educational approach was
+designed to downgrade and degrade manual work, particularly as it related
+to agriculture. That is why the educated African elite despised (and still
+despises) the peasants. When the colonialist did introduce agricultural
+education, as happened in several areas, it did not allow for improvisation
+or innovation. It was agricultural instruction of the crudest form, based on
+the premise that hoeing the land through the expenditure of sheer physical
+energy was the natural lot of Africans. Education for self-reliance, on the
+other hand, asserts the dignity of African labour, and aims at strengthening
+the connections between theory and practice, so that schoolchildren can be
+involved creatively with their environment. Labour in the field was not to
+be a punishment, as it was in the colonial era, but an exercise in the
+scientific utilization of natural resources.
+In this framework, school farms have become very important to the
+development of the Education for Self-Reliance movement in Tanzania. The
+farm is useful in that it can provide revenue for the school. But that, I think,
+is a secondary purpose. Much more relevant are the attitudes connected
+with agricultural labour, the possibilities of innovation, and the experience
+of study and work. Within a self-reliant educational environment, the whole
+school community of teachers and students act as a democratic entity. The
+student and their teacher are supposed to set priorities – determining what is
+to be planted and what is not, how it is to be done, how it is to be marketed,
+and to what use funds will be put. The school, like an Ujamaa community,
+is to be an exercise in self-government, whereas colonialism was the
+negation of that self-government.
+Some observers have belittled the significance of self-reliant education
+by pointing out that this idea and many others are not at all new, having
+been mooted and experimented upon during the colonial period.12 What
+they fail to recognize is the limiting and distinguishing factor of the colonial
+political economy and the fact that the same policies can assume radically
+
+different meanings within a new social order. It would have been unrealistic
+to the point of infantilism to expect even the most honest of colonial
+agricultural-educational programmes to convince Africans of the merits of
+agriculture, when the colonial value structure, deriving from the mode of
+production, pointed to the success of those who abandoned direct
+participation in agriculture and engaged instead in more ‘civilized’ pursuits.
+These observers fail to address themselves to fundamental issues, such as
+who wields power and in whose interests. The policy of education for selfreliance opens up revolutionary possibilities because it is the decision of
+people in their own interests. To suggest that the colonialists had the same
+vision of African well-being is an exercise in apologetics – and not a subtle
+one at that.
+Other commentators have lined up for or against Education for SelfReliance in terms of their assessment of its class content and significance
+for socialism. Thus, the pan-Africanist Marxist, Mzee C.L.R. James13
+waves ecstatically about the document. He affirms that ‘the simplicity with
+which Dr. Nyere states what his government proposes to do disguises the
+fact that not in Plato or in Aristotle, Rousseau or Karl Marx will you find
+such radical, such revolutionary departures from the established educational
+order.’14 Mzee C.L.R. James is as much influenced by what is within the
+document as by the creation of Ujamaa socialism, which he regards as a
+revolutionary response to the objective conditions of Tanzania and Africa.
+On the other hand, a negative assessment has been offered by an American
+educationist, Philip Foster, which is filled with bourgeois assumptions. He
+expresses a firm commitment to class society in Africa, on the grounds that
+there are ‘conflict objectives of equality and efficiency’. He is convinced
+that future progress in Tanzania and Africa must mean further class
+stratification. His real quarrel with Education for Self-Reliance is that not
+only does it hark back to traditional African communalism, but it also
+points forward to a new socialism, starting with the countryside.15
+Of course, five years after the promulgation of the policy, the more
+rewarding activity is not to contemplate it as theory, but rather to focus on
+its implementation to date. The Brazilian educationist, Paulo Freiere, when
+asked to comment on education for self-reliance in Tanzania replied that it
+looked liberating on paper, but that the answer would only be found in
+praxis, because ‘the question is not is it but do it.’16 Studies on the practical
+
+meaning of self-reliance programmes in Tanzanian schools are in their
+infancy, but even a casual awareness of the Tanzanian contemporary scene
+suggests that education for self-reliance has not been working according to
+plan – far from it. Inevitably, with such a complex manner, people grasp the
+formal and superficial aspects first. Many schoolteachers think that
+education for self-reliance means having a farm. They decide to have a
+farm, and ‘self-reliance’ is placed on a timetable just like physics,
+mathematics or history. At a given time, the students go out, they work and
+they come back in, but no serious attempts are made to integrate the
+different aspects of the curriculum so that it points in a given direction.
+Teachers may seldom make any attempts to involve students in determining
+what constitutes self-reliant activity in their respective regions. They still
+use the authoritarian, bureaucratic approach, although they might boast of
+self-reliance in their schools. In this connection, their class allegiances and
+ideological outlook are factors of great importance.
+Education and liberation
+Ultimately, the success of the schoolroom revolution is itself dependent on
+the development of structures and patterns within the society as a whole.
+Tanzanian education is trying to create new norms, but at the same time the
+total society must be moving in a given direction. These two things are
+mutually supportive. In Tanzania, serious attempts have been made to create
+new structures and establish new norms in many aspects of the political
+economy. They all have a bearing on the attempted revolution in education.
+During the early 1960s, students scoffed when they were told to limit their
+aspirations for the future and regard themselves as servants of the people.
+They asked, ‘How can these politicians, driving in their Mercedes-Benzes,
+accumulating real estate, joining capitalist companies, tell us to be
+socialist?’ When university students demonstrated against the National
+Service in 1966, one of the things they said was that if they were to have a
+60 per cent cut in their salaries for the time spent in National Service, then
+something should be done about the cabinet ministers, principal secretaries
+and other top civil servants. Although President Nyerere disciplined them
+and sent them home for a year, it is significant that this student revolt
+sparked the Arusha Declaration. Nyerere agreed that the political leadership
+
+should discipline itself. He cut his salary by 20 per cent, and other cabinet
+ministers followed suit. For those who did not initiate this sacrifice
+voluntarily, a law was passed reducing the salaries of top civil servants.
+Much of the Arusha Declaration was in fact devoted to outlining a code of
+behaviour for the top echelons of the society – outside of the private
+business sector. That leadership code was something of a self-denying
+ordinance, which has since been used as a yardstick to measure observance
+or non-observance of socialist ethics in the lifestyles of the nation’s
+politico-bureaucratic leadership.
+The TANU leadership code achieved some correlation with values in
+the educational system. One cannot have a constant contradiction between
+practice in the political and educational arenas. Children will follow certain
+models, and the most important models actualized within the society cannot
+be flagrantly out of step with those idealized in the classroom. Similarly, as
+far as agriculture is concerned, a lot of small-scale capitalist ventures were
+encouraged in Tanzania in the early 1960s; but, in the most recent period,
+collective Ujamaa agriculture has been given the greater sanction. It makes
+sense to have notions of Ujamaa given structural form in an agricultural
+community at the same time that they are being extolled in school.
+Furthermore, when children leave the school where they have been taught
+the value of communal and collective efforts, they have before them the
+possibility of joining an Ujamaa village and thereby becoming a permanent
+part of the movement for the construction of socialism, as shaped and
+conditioned by their history and environment. How far this possibility is
+realized and how effective the Ujamaa villages are themselves, are of
+course questions which immediately arise and demand an answer.
+The transformation of the colonial education system in Tanzania and
+Africa as a whole is part of a much broader front of combat against
+imperialism and neo-colonialism, internally and externally. Although it is a
+critically important aspect, educational transformation alone will never lead
+to the total liberation of society. Indeed, it is dialectically impossible for
+profound change to take place in the old educational system within
+antecedent and concomitant transformations of all aspects of the political
+economy. The prognosis for change in Tanzania and African education
+processes is therefore the same as the evaluation of the prospects of
+socialist revolution and total liberation from colonialism and neocolonialism. In the long run, this evaluation must be based on the multifold
+
+contradictions of imperialism, which are tearing it apart and which have
+transformed it into a moribund part of the world order. In the short run, the
+dynamic of change within Africa is determined mainly by the configuration
+of emergent class society and by the rate at which the mass of direct
+producers acquire the consciousness of and capacity to act in their own
+interests – with the support of intellectuals drawn from all strata. For these
+reasons, our discussion of education must rest suspended, since an
+examination of the above short- and long-run trends is beyond the modest
+scope of this analysis.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+IV
+Building Socialism
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+13
+Tanzanian Ujamaa and
+Scientific Socialism
+This chapter attempts to identify Tanzanian Ujamaa with Scientific
+Socialism in certain ideological essentials. It is an exercise in theory,
+bearing in mind that historically the theory of socialism preceded the
+establishment of socialism as a system in any part of the globe. Scientific
+Socialism (or Marxism, if you like) is an explicit worldview which
+contemplates every conceivable phenomenon from protein to literature, in
+terms of a methodology applicable to nature and society. Therefore, the
+comparison with Tanzanian Ujamaa is not completely analogous, since the
+latter is neither explicit nor all-embracing. However, the same kind of
+reservation could probably be expressed for any ideological variant other
+than Scientific Socialism. One must, in most cases, seek ideology in human
+actions, combined to greater or lesser extent with statements of principle or
+policy. The Tanzanian political process has produced over the last decade
+several noteworthy declarations of principle and sufficient actions which
+give meaning to the said declarations. The word ‘Ujamaa’ has already been
+popularized in two contexts: first, as referring to the extended family of
+African communalism; and second, with reference to the creation of
+agricultural collectives known as Ujamaa villages. The relation between the
+two is that the Ujamaa villages seek to recapture the principles of joint
+production, egalitarian distribution and the universal obligation to work
+which were found within African communalism. In the present discussion
+the world Ujamaa incorporates both of these meanings, and includes also
+the implications of several policy documents and public plans.
+A necessary piece of ground-clearing must be performed by advancing
+the negative proposition that Tanzanian Ujamaa is not ‘African Socialism’.
+
+Such a disclaimer may appear curious and even presumptuous in view of
+the fact that in 1962 Mwalimu Nyerere referred to Ujamaa as ‘the basis of
+African Socialism’. But, there are several reasons for keeping the two
+concepts widely apart. When ‘African Socialism’ was in vogue early in the
+1960s, it comprised a variety of interpretations ranging from a wish to see a
+socialist society in Africa to a desire to maintain the status quo of neocolonialism. Since then, the term has come to be identified with its most
+consistent and least revolutionary ideologue, Leopold Senghor, and with the
+late Tom Mboya. As such, ‘African Socialism’ is generally taken to mean a
+set of relations which leave capitalism and imperialism unchallenged. It is
+therefore essential to disassociate the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist
+stance in Tanzania from a caption that has been pre-empted by nonrevolutionary African leaders. Furthermore, when Ujamaa was presented as
+an option shortly after the independence of Tanganyika, it was (knowingly)
+defined as an abstract set of values without reference to the social forms
+necessary for their realization.1 Much has now been done in the way of
+policy decisions to indicate and build the relevant social structures, thereby
+further differentiating Ujamaa from its erstwhile counterparts of ‘African
+Socialism’ in so far as the latter never advanced from the ideal to the real.
+Above all, one must take note of the progressive evolution of Tanzanian
+theory and practice over the period of nearly a decade, as a positive
+response to national, African and international developments.2
+Conversely, to associate Ujamaa with the category of ‘Scientific
+Socialism’ seems to be flying in the face of assertions to the contrary by
+Tanzanian policymakers. Scientific Socialism is held to be synonymous
+with Marxism, Communism and the like, which have been held at arm’s
+length by Tanzanians who propound Ujamaa. The contradiction is more
+apparent than real. In part, it disappears when one takes into account the
+above-mentioned factor of significant politico-ideological advance from the
+Arusha Declaration to Mwongozo. In addition, and more decisively, the
+difference is largely based on a caricature of Scientific Socialism
+(Marxism), which proposes that socialism must come through proletarian
+revolution within an already developed capitalist state. Such a definition
+would automatically exclude Tanzanian Ujamaa, which looks towards the
+socialist organization of peasants and seeks to revive and perpetuate the
+collective principle of production and the equalitarian nature of distribution
+which characterized communalism. As carried out both by some self-
+
+professed Marxists and by bourgeois analysts, the transformation of
+Marxism into a barren, dogmatic, mechanistic and uni-dimensional theory
+has understandably led many creative individuals to reject what purports to
+be Scientific Socialism. To reopen the issue, one must go back to first
+principles and rescue the essence of Scientific Socialism.
+Socialism emerged as an ideology within capitalist society. All of its
+exponents saw the viciousness of capitalism and agreed on the need for
+replacing the prevailing production for private profit with a system which
+met the needs of all. However, they did not agree on either the precise
+content of socialist society or the means by which it was to be instituted. It
+is in these areas that the necessity arose for distinguishing between
+unrealistic socialist hopes and a more rigorous analysis that could claim to
+meet the canons of scientific method and which by its correctness
+guaranteed meaningful action for the realization of socialism. For Marx,
+‘Scientific Socialism’ is quite simply socialism that is scientific.
+Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier and other pioneer socialists of the early
+nineteenth century were dubbed ‘utopian’ by Marx and Engels for a variety
+of reasons, notably because they failed to appreciate that human social
+development proceeded through certain stages and because their model
+socialist societies did not take cognizance of the reality of class struggle.3
+On the other hand, the rubric ‘Scientific Socialism’ still attaches to the
+mode of perception which predicts the emergence of socialism as a product
+of the dialectic movement of all previous history and as a consequence of
+the triumph of the working class. Utopian socialism, or at least utopian
+elements in socialist thought, have persisted and reappeared from time to
+time. ‘African Socialism’ is utopian in its refusal to come to grips with the
+class relations in which Africans are enmeshed and in its romanticized
+ignorance of the stages of African historical development. It is the
+contention of the author that, in contrast, Tanzanian Ujamaa is correct in its
+perception of the principal motion of its own society.
+The assertion that ‘there are no classes in Africa’ is often used to justify
+capitalist investment in the continent, and in recent times it has come under
+criticism from progressive African thinkers.4 First, it must be noted that the
+international character of capitalist production in the era of imperialism has
+placed the propertied class in the metropoles while the greater portion of
+their working force resides in the colonial or semi-colonial areas. Second,
+the colonial sectors show varying degrees of stratification and class
+
+formation as a consequence of their integration in the international capitalist
+economy. Both of these features are recognized in the Tanzanian policy
+documents which elaborate on the theory of Ujamaa: TANU’s5 Arusha
+Declaration and Mwalimu Nyerere’s Socialism and Rural Development
+being the most relevant.
+The Arusha Declaration had little to say about the development of
+socialism in the countryside beyond expressing the opinion that concern for
+the peasant farmer must be a priority. However, this document set the stage
+for the policy of constructing Ujamaa villages by expropriating the foreign
+capitalist class who until then were owners of the major means of
+production within Tanzania. It stated unequivocally that the major means of
+production are under the control and ownership of the peasants and the
+workers themselves through their government and their cooperatives.
+Nationalization and the acquisition of part ownership of several companies
+were steps in the direction of severing the links between the local working
+classes and the international bourgeoisie. The Arusha Declaration also
+stated that socialism was incompatible with the presence of capitalist
+elements, in contrast with ‘African Socialism’, which has as one of its
+major tenets the advocacy of coexistence of private and public ownership.
+Utopian socialists promoted models in which capitalists cooperated with
+their workers in the new society. They sometimes assigned a major
+initiatory role to the bankers. Senghor’s proposal was to socialize
+agriculture, to establish public utilities as a mixed sector and to leave banks,
+commerce and industry to capitalist enterprise.6 The sum total of these
+arrangements would be ‘African Socialism’. In so far as contemporary
+theory and practice of Ujamaa in Tanzania does allow for private enterprise,
+this is well understood to be transitional, an entirely different concept from
+that of the permanent coexistence of capitalist and supposedly socialist
+relations within the same society, and one that has been implemented in
+every socialist revolution from 1917 onwards.
+Both feudalists and capitalists are cited by the Arusha Declaration as
+enemies of socialism. The former had their place in the scheme of things in
+Africa before the coming of the Europeans, while the latter came into being
+as part of the process by which metropolitan capitalist society was
+remodelling colonial society (wittingly and unwittingly) along lines of
+stratification and exploitation. The Indian businessmen in East Africa were
+the closest representation of a locally resident bourgeoisie, and it is no
+
+accident that they were the most affected by the measures of expropriation
+behind the nationalization of foreign-owned property – that is, by the
+Acquisition of Buildings Act, 1971. Thus, both ideological statements and
+government policy pinpointed that within Tanzania there were capitalists
+and feudalists standing in opposition to the workers and peasants. The
+Arusha Declaration does, in the same breath, make a rather unsatisfactory
+distinction between urban and rural Tanzania as representing exploiters and
+exploited, respectively.7 It is in Socialism and Rural Development that
+stratification in the countryside is also acknowledged and a realistic
+assessment is made of African communal society, as it was and as it is
+becoming.
+Having extolled the virtues of ‘traditional’ African living in Africa,
+Socialism and Rural Development proceeds to identify both its inadequacies
+and the fact that communalism as a way of life and a value system has been
+constantly eroded under the pressure of African involvement in capitalism.
+Because of cash-crop farming in particular ‘the old traditions of living
+together, working together and sharing the proceeds, have often been
+abandoned’. In place of the old Ujamaa patterns, there was a growing gap
+between those who owned and hired labour and the landless who offered
+their labour for hire in order to survive. In this context, Mwalimu Nyerere
+predicted that, unchecked, such a development raised the spectre of most of
+the peasantry becoming a ‘rural proletariat’ working for the minority landed
+class.8 This observation attests to the fact that the theory underlying the
+modern version of Tanzanian Ujamaa identifies contradictory forces within
+the nation as well as the direction for change that must result from the
+interplay of such forces. Marx and Engels attacked ‘Proudhonism’ because,
+among other things, Proudhon saw socialism as being based on independent
+petty producers of the artisan class.9 But changes in technology by the midnineteenth century had convincingly demonstrated that the artisans were
+doomed to extinction by machine production and the universalization of
+capitalist relations. Of course, the peasant is also a petty producer and has
+actually been eliminated in large parts of Western Europe. The question as
+to whether there is a possibility of using peasant production as the basis for
+a socialist state has been raised in many debates, and its resolution depends
+upon the local and international political economy of the time. Before
+tackling this issue in the specific context of Tanzania, it is enlightening to
+
+pursue briefly the debate on ‘Peasant Socialism’ as it was conducted in the
+rather similar context of late nineteenth-century Russia.
+Like contemporary Tanzania, nineteenth-century Russia was an
+exploited semi-colonial sector of the international imperialist economy.
+Unlike Tanzania, Russia had experienced fully matured feudal relations and
+was becoming capitalist and industrialized from its own internal dynamic,
+quite apart from the intrusion of Western European capitalism.
+Nevertheless, there had persisted under feudalism and embryo capitalism
+certain communal forms of organization among the peasantry – namely, the
+obshchina or mir (village communes) and artel (artisans’ cooperatives).
+Russians of a socialist or anti-capitalist bias contemplated a socialist society
+that was qualitatively different from that envisaged by their counterparts in
+industrialized Western Europe. They argued that Russia could avoid the
+maturing of capitalist relations within its national boundaries and move
+directly to a brand of socialism where the dominant social class was not the
+industrial proletariat but rural peasants, living a life that was not far
+removed from the communalism that preceded enserfment and capitalism.10
+Obviously, there is a great deal in Tanzanian Ujamaa that is analogous to
+the preoccupations of the Russians in question, who are known to posterity
+as Populists.
+In the 1870s and early 1880s, late in their veteran careers, Marx and
+Engels were asked to comment on the possibility of Russia avoiding
+capitalism. In a letter to K. Kablukova, a Populist, Engels viewed
+favourably the opportunity presented in Russia ‘to be able to appeal to the
+people’s thousand-year-old natural urge to associate, before this urge is
+wholly extinguished’. Marx expressed the opinion that the rural community
+was the mainspring of Russia’s social regeneration, but that in order that it
+might function as such, one would first have to eliminate the deleterious
+influences which then assailed it from every quarter.11 The vital condition
+for the successful building of socialism in Russia on the old communal base
+was speed to forestall further inroads on surviving collectiveness. In
+addition, it was essential that revolution in Russia be preceded by or
+immediately followed by the outbreak of a workers’ revolution in an
+industrialized part of Europe. This point is made in the introduction to the
+first Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto published in 1877 and
+again at some length in Engels’ statement On Social Relations in Russia
+(1882). Some years later, Engels reaffirmed the contention as follows:
+
+I would say that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to
+develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless – that higher form
+was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model. That higher form
+being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequences of the capitalist form
+of production and of the social dualistic antagonisms created by it, it could not be developed
+directly out of the agrarian commune, unless in imitation of an example already in existence
+somewhere else.12
+
+As seen in the above extract, Marx and Engels dealt with the stages of
+human social development in a much more flexible manner than they are
+usually given credit for. They are, of course, insisting that the movement
+from communalism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism is a movement
+from lower to higher forms, with implications for the volume and efficiency
+of production and the satisfying of human needs. But they are not implying
+a single mechanical line of historical progression, and they actually deny
+this in the course of the discussion. In a comradely letter to Vera Zasulich in
+1881, Marx explained that his description of the historical inevitability of
+the foundation of the capitalist system was expressly limited to the
+countries of Western Europe.13 Four years earlier, he had made the same
+point with rather greater asperity in reply to a detractor, Mikhailovsky, who
+insisted on misreading Marx. Firstly, Marx reminded his readers that the
+chapter on primitive accumulation in Das Kapital does not pretend to do
+more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order
+of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. He
+then proceeded to show that the given historical sketch of Western Europe
+might be applicable to Russia if Russia continued to move in the same
+capitalist direction as Western European countries; for in that case Russia
+could not succeed without first transforming a sizeable number of peasants
+into proletarians. However, Marx vigorously disavowed any intention of
+using his model of Western Europe to provide a historical-philosophical
+theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the
+historical circumstances in which it finds itself.14
+Although Marx completely disowned the proposition that a people must
+move to socialism via capitalism, it is understandable that bourgeois
+academics ignore this and interpret Marx to mean exactly what he said he
+did not mean.15 But even self-styled Marxists have also made it appear that
+Scientific Socialism can be arrived at only on the basis of an advanced
+proletariat within a given country and hence only after capitalism has held
+
+in sway that country for a lengthy epoch, in precisely the same manner as
+Western Europe.
+As far as Russia was concerned, the discussion by Populists and
+Marxists about avoiding capitalism turned out to be one about a nonrealizable hypothesis. Marx and Engels feared that the process of
+stratification in the countryside would continue unchecked. Information
+reaching them from the late 1870s suggested that Russian communal forms
+were becoming shells which only hid the new exploitative relations of
+capitalist society. Towards the end of his life, Engels regretfully concluded
+that the obshchina should be treated as a dream of the past. A fine chance
+had been missed, but reality had to be faced, for capitalism was being built
+in Russia on the labour of landless peasantry turned proletariat.16 A few
+years later, when Lenin made his in-depth analysis of The Development of
+Capitalism in Russia, he convincingly demonstrated that the capitalist
+process was far too advanced to think in terms of by-passing that stage. In
+other words, the creation of a rural proletariat and of landlord farmers
+which Socialism and Rural Development was interested in avoiding in
+Tanzania had already occurred in Russia by the turn of the present century
+among the peasants themselves – in addition to the continued existence of
+feudal and bourgeois landowners.17
+Even after it became clear that internal and external factors were
+hastening the final decomposition of Russian communal forms, some
+theorists still clung to the idea that Russia could build socialism on the
+model of an old commune. Only at this point were they eschewed by
+Scientific Socialists as propagating Populist Utopianism. For instance, in
+1890 Engels declared that the Populist, Danielson, was beyond hope, in
+spite of prolonged ideological exchange and correspondence to clarify the
+conditions under which Russian communalism could be revived.18 For
+purposes of an analogy with Tanzania and Africa, what is crucial is that the
+founders of Scientific Socialism seriously and enthusiastically contemplated
+a variant of socialism very much akin to Ujamaa, and they indicated the
+conditions under which it might be realized. The most important
+requirements were: first, that the ‘traditional’ forms should exist in real life
+and have some social vitality; and second, that international conditions
+should be favourable owing to a socialist breakthrough in some part of the
+world. For Africa, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of these conditions needs
+to be examined.
+
+An effort has already been made to underscore the idea that for Marx
+different paths to socialism did exist, precisely because of varied experience
+of movement from one social phase to another. It is of some value to the
+history of philosophy to keep the record straight on this issue; although one
+is primarily concerned not with establishing Marx’s correctness but rather
+with confirming the truth of the observation that the movement of different
+peoples through history has had significant variations. This could be
+illustrated within Europe with regard to the contrast between Eastern and
+Western Europe. As far as Asia is concerned the social stage parallel to that
+of feudalism in Europe bore sufficient peculiarities to be categorized
+separately as ‘the Asian Mode of Production’.19 Most relevant to the
+African continent is the debate on a possible ‘African Mode of
+Production’.20 With the exception of parts of the Middle East and Egypt,
+neither Asia nor Africa had slavery as a distinct social system, and African
+societies had very little servitude outside of the context of capture for
+export. From African communalism, the evolution was in a feudal or quasifeudal direction, and communal forms persisted even in the most stratified
+societies. Ruling elites in empires as large as those of the western Sahara
+still maintained their authority through the heads of communities rather
+than through contractual relations with individual peasants.
+It is in the pre-European era that Senghor seeks his model of pristine
+‘Socialism’ in Africa. But, to begin with, communalism was not socialism.
+Collective production was narrowly restricted on an ethnic, clan and
+geographical basis, and the egalitarian principle of distribution was limited
+by the low level of production so that societies came nowhere close to
+fulfilling the needs of all their citizens – hence Marx’s description of this
+stage as ‘Primitive Communism’.21 Socialism is inconceivable prior to the
+emancipation of man from such elementary forces as drought, flood and
+disease. Besides, in determining whether African communalism has any
+relevance in the present time, one must identify it as still persisting – that is,
+the thousand-year-old urge to associate must not have been extinguished. In
+many parts of Africa, communal forms lost their primacy centuries ago with
+the emergence of feudal and quasi-feudal forms of exploiting labour,
+including household servitude. Large parts of Africa were integrated within
+the capitalist economy since the fifteenth century because of the European
+quest for slave labour. Finally, there was the period of colonial rule which
+introduced capitalist exploitation of labour in every part of the continent. It
+
+certainly is not enough for Senghor to sound a warning of possible class
+formation in the present period, when it is obvious that Senegal has already
+passed through a lengthy and intense historical experience incompatible
+with the maintenance of communal forms or the practice of egalitarianism.
+Admittedly, in ‘Ujamaa – the Basis of African Socialism’ Mwalimu
+Nyerere sounded a note rather similar to that of the standard version of
+‘African Socialism’, when he asserted that ‘We, in Africa, have no more
+need of being “converted” to socialism than we have to being “taught”
+democracy.’ However, taking the continent as a whole, Tanzania is
+exceptional in that even at the end of the colonial period the communal
+forms were still recognizable. This is a consequence of its people having
+been relatively little involved in the capitalist money economy of mining,
+settler plantations and cash-crop production. The low degree of internal
+stratification at the time of constitutional independence was reflected in
+national cohesion and the solidarity of a single mass party. Between 1961
+and 1967 there was increasing differentiation, so that Socialism and Rural
+Development dealt with the core of the problem by determining that
+socialism could only be built in Tanzania by halting stratification and the
+creation of a rural proletariat. This was the first of the conditions that Marx
+and Engels laid down when discussing how socialism might have been built
+on the basis of the Russian commune.
+The possibility of regenerating traditional communalism also depends
+upon factors outside of the national political economy. This model for
+Ujamaa is as much in the present as in the past. If certain socialist values
+can be recovered from communalism, then equally there is the possibility of
+importing (and modifying) values and concrete attributes of socialism in
+any part of the globe. When Mwalimu Nyerere referred to the weakness of
+traditional African communalism, he mentioned technological
+inadequacy.22 This factor should be given greater emphasis because it was
+technological inadequacy that meant scarcity and led to stratification and
+the internal evolution of classes in parts of Africa before contact with
+Europe. It was also technological weakness that led to loss of independence
+when Africa was confronted by European societies. Movement to a higher
+stage means massive strengthening of productive and defence capacity. But,
+with true political independence, any African society can resume its
+interrupted socio-economic and technological development at a higher level
+by utilizing the fund of scientific knowledge now available to mankind.
+
+Some of this knowledge is already in the hands of the first socialist states;
+and even if it is still the property of capitalists, it can be expropriated.
+In effect, the skipping of stages involved in the jump from
+communalism to socialism is only possible in a given society because
+elsewhere the intervening stages have existed or are still existing, and
+because, as Engels postulated, modern industrial socialism has broken the
+stranglehold which capitalism previously maintained on the world at large.
+The first condition opens up the technological possibility of building
+socialism, while the second provides a model and profoundly influences the
+international political situation. Amilcar Cabral put his finger on these
+points and explains lucidly that ‘the possibility of such a jump in the
+historical process arises mainly, in the economic field, from the power of
+the means available to man at the time for dominating nature, and, in the
+political field, from the new event which has radically changed the face of
+the world and the development of history, the creation of socialist states.’23
+Potekhin, the well-known Soviet specialist on Africa, a few years ago
+expressed his agreement with those versions of ‘African Socialism’ which
+aimed essentially at building socialism in Africa and using African paths to
+socialism. In his opinion, colonized Africa could move directly and
+uniquely to socialism largely because of the Soviet Union. The latter was
+available as a source of help and a power transforming the global political
+balance in such a way as to restrain the large capitalist nations in their
+exploitation and oppression of small would-be socialist states.24 The
+unstinted aid supposedly available from the Soviet Union would be
+regarded as illusory by most progressive Africans who are learning that
+self-reliance is definitely a superior alternative to any ‘Big Brother’.
+However, it is true that the socialist sector of the world (divisions
+notwithstanding) offers a set of models, a set of alternative partners for
+trade and a more accessible source of technical aid. Tanzanian external
+political and economic relations have already gone a long way towards
+maximizing the advantage created by the existence of socialism in various
+parts of the world. It is one of the key ways of seizing what Marx
+considered a golden opportunity for moving to socialism on the basis of
+communalism and without having to experience the full development of
+classes characteristic of capitalism. It can further be argued that a colony or
+semi-colony within the imperialist framework can never develop to full
+capitalist maturity. Africa has experienced almost as many years of
+
+capitalist development as Europe, but in our case the unfolding of
+capitalism has meant historical arrest and backwardness. The accompanying
+stratification never approximated the dynamic of capitalism in the
+metropoles. Thus, one could never expect capitalism to perform in Africa
+the historically progressive role it played in Western Europe. This is yet
+another fact of a more refined theory concerning the states of human social
+advance. Such a theory must cease assuming that development is selfcontained for any given group or society, and this line of reasoning also
+reinforces the conclusion that for Africa a different path to socialism is not
+only possible but is unavoidable.25 An ideology such as Ujamaa is
+scientific in so far as logically and scientifically it charts this new path.
+The fact that the path of Ujamaa in broad outline is so reminiscent of
+one perceived by Marx is a salutary coincidence in so far as this particular
+discussion is concerned. Since so much of Marx’s time was spent applying
+his scientific method to a critique of capitalism in Western Europe, any
+debate outside that geographical area cannot be tied merely to what Marx
+said, as though Scientific Socialism were entirely comprised within the
+pages of Marx’s writings. ‘Marxism’ when considered as synonymous with
+Scientific Socialism means the application of scientific method (of which
+Marx was a founder) to the study of any given situation. This is a task of
+such complexity that Marx and Engels often issued warnings that the
+chances of incorrect conclusions were high.26 However, the argument that
+Ujamaa is consistent with Scientific Socialism is made easier to
+substantiate because of Marx’s conclusions with regard to an obviously
+analogous situation. The Marxist who considers the stress on ‘traditional’
+African communalism as theoretically incompatible with a Scientific
+Socialist approach must bear the onus of proving that Marx’s brief
+application of his own theory was unscientific in the Russian case. At the
+same time, the non-Marxist seeking to isolate Ujamaa from what he
+imagines to be Scientific Socialism must at least be brought up short in light
+of evidence that Marx himself explicitly countenanced the possibility of a
+development towards socialism that integrated peasant collectives from the
+communal epoch.
+After Marx’s time, new (Scientific) Socialist ideas have been elaborated
+out of revolutionary experience. Their accuracy and relevance have been
+tested by nothing less than the experience of building socialism in
+economically backward countries in the teeth of imperialist opposition.
+
+Ujamaa has not yet been fully tested in this sense and there are a wide
+range of ‘social engineering’ problems which have still to be tackled in the
+creation of new structures, new values and ultimately a new socialist man.
+If agriculture in Africa were already somehow mystically socialist, then
+there would not have arisen all the travail of physical transposition and
+social readjustment that is actually going on in Tanzania. Resettlement and
+collectivization proves how many aspects of the prevailing system were at
+odds with modern socialism: notably, the isolated production units, lowlevel technology, stratification and narrow vertical divisions. ‘African
+Socialists’ formulated ‘socialist agriculture’ as an existing reality rather
+than a goal to be achieved by rescuing communal elements; so, it follows
+that they had no socialist programme. Under Senghor, nothing has been
+done to relieve the exploitation of peasants producing cash crops and to
+remove rural exploitation; while in Kenya the only practical change in the
+agricultural sector as envisaged by Tom Mboya was the introduction of
+advanced agricultural machinery for the individual capitalist farmer.27 Even
+the more progressive African political and ideological leadership long
+neglected the countryside, and opted for a one-sided industrialization
+strategy. Tanzanian Ujamaa is a unique contribution to the African socialist
+revolution and to socialist theory as a whole because of its solid
+connections with the observable data in the Tanzanian countryside. This is
+the characteristic which causes ‘Leninism’ or ‘Maoism’ to be considered as
+having enriched the Scientific Socialism of which Marx and Engels were
+the founders.
+Undoubtedly, a much greater gap emerges when one compares
+implementation of Tanzanian Ujamaa with the implementation of Scientific
+Socialism in the particular countries where this has been attempted. Here is
+where the disavowal of Scientific Socialism makes a real difference because
+it encourages an attitude of mind that masks contradictions and even throws
+overboard theory as such behind the guise of being ‘practical’. It can be
+argued that measures taken to implement socialism in Tanzania run the risk
+of being defeated for lack of a rigorous theory that comprehends the
+antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions of the world scene. The
+issue of nationalization is a case in point.28 However, this does not mean
+that Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism are on two divergent paths. One
+should distinguish between an awareness of the fundamental movement of
+society and history, on the one hand, and adjustments to that movement in
+
+terms of struggle and construction, on the other hand. The latter is always
+very problematic but the first is more fundamental, requiring an
+understanding of which classes are on the ascendant and which social
+systems are moribund. Tanzanian Ujamaa can claim to be correctly focused
+in this regard. This being so, there is no insuperable barrier to the
+development of scientific strategies and tactics.
+The above argument may be considered further in relation to the rural
+sector. It cannot be said that the construction of Ujamaa villages has
+followed a scientific line of identifying points of weakness and strength as
+advocated by Engels and Lenin and as practised by Mao Zedong and Kim Il
+Sung. But the theory and policy of Ujamaa has logically determined that
+the key role in Socialist construction has to be played by the Tanzanian
+peasants. This is in accord with the present stage of the development of
+productive forces within Tanzania and with the present international
+conjuncture, and such an insight gives Ujamaa its chances of success and
+ample scope for evolution, which it would have lacked if the theory had
+backed the wrong class or the disintegrating capitalist social system. The
+actual building of Ujamaa villages is a task requiring definite expertise.
+From a sociological viewpoint, practical implementation must take into
+account both the varying socio-economic formations found in Tanzania as
+well as the phenomenon of stratification.29 Any sociologist might deal with
+some of the problems of collectivization but ultimately it is only a Scientific
+Socialist approach that can guarantee success. By way of illustration one
+could turn to Vietnam, where bourgeois social scientists lent their skills to
+the US government in the creation of ‘strategic hamlets’.30 Their technical
+expertise ran counter to the movement of the society and the hamlets were
+dashed aside by the conscious and organized peasants of Vietnam. At the
+same time, collectivized agriculture in the liberated parts of the country has
+been moving forward steadily.
+One searching test of the scientific nature of any version of socialism is
+its reflection of the interests of the most exploited and oppressed classes.
+Marx regarded Utopians as having advanced towards a more defensible
+position to the extent that individuals like Owen and Fourier grasped the
+fact that socialism was the ideology of the working class and that it must
+therefore uncompromisingly serve this class.31 Significantly too, the later
+Social Democratic deviation from scientific and revolutionary socialism
+reflected bourgeoisification of intellectuals and worker leaders in the epoch
+
+of imperialism. By way of rounding out a working understanding of
+Scientific Socialism, it should be made clear that socialist theory must voice
+the interests of the most exploited of the producers – this being perfectly
+possible alongside the phenomenon of class desertion by individuals from
+propertied or privileged strata, and alongside the assumption of leadership
+roles by these individuals. In Africa (as in Europe, Asia and the Americas)
+it is from within the ranks of an educated elite that leadership is drawn for
+movements claiming to be socialist. But there is a vast difference in the
+fundamental class loyalties of those espousing ‘African Socialism’ as
+compared to Tanzanian advocates of Ujamaa; a difference between a
+parodied mischievous use of the term ‘socialism’ and the de facto
+elaboration of the theory to which a Marxist could readily subscribe in
+terms of its potential for realizing a socialist society along scientific lines.
+Fanon called for the self-liquidation of the African petty bourgeoisie
+and their regeneration as a revolutionary intelligentsia, but of course this is
+far from being the case within the continent as a whole. ‘African Socialism’
+is the inflection which the African petty bourgeoisie have given to
+bourgeois ideology in an attempt to camouflage from the masses the
+deepening capitalist exploitation of the neo-colonial era. In sharp contrast,
+Tanzanian Ujamaa has begun to make the decisive break with capitalism.
+The evidence lies in the Arusha Declaration, in the Mwongozo, in the TanZam railway, in the nationalization of certain buildings and in virtually
+every act of Tanzanian foreign policy. Tanzania Ujamaa, limited as it is in
+actual achievement, can substantiate the claim to be the ideology of the
+majority of Tanzanian producers in the countryside and the towns.
+In the final analysis, simple honesty is a vital ingredient in Scientific
+Socialism – honesty in the cause of man, the workers and dedication to his
+emancipation. Subjective as this may initially appear, it is very much part of
+the scientifically determinable process of social change, because
+consciousness is a principal factor in this process. This is precisely why
+Marxist theory is not mechanistic. Wherever it makes a projection into the
+future, the calculation includes human will and consciousness as a variable,
+because knowledge, self-awareness and organized activity by the exploited
+are all tied together. Tanzanian Ujamaa has broken with the crude
+manipulative dishonesty of ‘African Socialism’. For instance, Tanzanian
+political leadership does ask for the ‘traditional’ communal virtue of hard
+work, but not in a context where local exploitation and class formation is
+
+allowed to proceed unchecked and is indeed promoted by the very theorists
+of ‘socialism’. Therefore, Ujamaa can appeal to and deepen the
+consciousness of peasants and workers which imparts greater momentum to
+the people’s struggle to build socialism.
+From the viewpoint of social theory, it is not satisfactory that writings
+propounding Ujamaa never indicate awareness of the universality of
+communal forms. Examples broadly similar to African communal
+organization can be drawn not only from Russia before enserfment, but
+from every part of Europe and Australasia at one time or another. One of
+the first tasks of the scientist is to place things in the same category.
+Reluctance to do so in this case is probably due to the hankering after
+uniqueness among progressive Africans – something which occasionally
+leads into blind alleys, but which on the whole is essential for the liberation
+of the colonized.
+The insistence on an African identity is a worthwhile corrective not only
+to bourgeois cultural imperialism but also to dogmatic expositions by selfstyled Marxists or Scientific Socialists. Identification with the particularity
+of experience in Africa is as essential as appreciating the universality of
+scientific method. When the doctrine of Ujamaa postulates an African path
+to socialism it affirms the validity of Scientific Socialism, in spite of the
+lack of any declaration to this effect by Tanzanian leadership and in spite of
+deliberate efforts to distort both Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism so as to
+present them as fundamentally contradictory.
+Serious political considerations make it necessary to undertake this kind
+of abstract enquiry from the viewpoint of one committed to the African
+Revolution. When the task of evaluating African social thought and practice
+is left to bourgeois theoreticians, they find it convenient to place all
+ideological strands into one amorphous mystifying whole, which includes
+utterances by Tubman as well as Nkrumah, by Mboya as well as Sekou
+Touré, by Senghor as well as Nyerere. Indeed, some go so far as to assert
+that ‘in substance Nyerere and the Senegalese are closer than he is to Sekou
+Touré or Nkrumah’.32 At the same time, progressive European friends often
+display a penchant for armchair Marxist perfection, so that for them
+Nyerere and Senghor are indeed in the same bag, because the former has
+not come forward to declare for Marxism.33 The superficial and confused
+nature of such a conclusion is a consequence of the authors not being
+involved in making revolution, for whoever is involved in the actuality of
+
+revolutionary transformation will not fail to perceive the differences
+between form and substance. The substance of Ujamaa is its stand against
+capitalism, against imperialism, against racism and against exploitation of
+all kinds; and (to put it affirmatively) its stand for the emancipation of the
+working population of Africa and for the remodelling of the society along
+lines of socialist equality and socialist democracy.
+Curiously enough, progressive Europeans are the ones who display the
+hegemonic tendencies characteristic of the imperialist metropoles, in so far
+as they have no time for insights that seem in any way to depart from
+models originating in Western Europe. The former imperialist masters,
+knowing the force of African nationalism which ousted them from the
+politico-constitutional sphere, do not ignore the search for an African
+identity, but rather take care to foster its most negative aspects; namely, the
+alienation from revolutionary features of European thought. To remedy both
+defects, theory for the African Revolution must spring from those who have
+had the historical experience of and socialization under slavery,
+colonialism, de-culturalization, racism and super-exploitation which has
+been the peculiar lot of Africans. Within that context, it will then rapidly
+become clear who is supporting an anti-people line, such as ‘African
+Socialism’, and who is advocating genuine liberation as envisaged by
+Tanzanian Ujamaa.
+A more rigorous assessment of current ideologies in Africa is also a
+political necessity on account of the possible dialogue between Scientific
+Socialists and nationalists. The former are a mere handful, and in most
+African countries today can scarcely hope to cooperate with the existing
+regimes. To do so would be to repudiate socialist principles, as well as to
+risk senseless liquidation at the hands of the ‘African Socialists’, ‘Arab
+Socialists’ and other denominations who are more concerned with fighting
+religious wars against ‘Communism’ than with emancipating the African
+people. But, the contention here is that Tanzanian Ujamaa offers a radically
+different framework for political action on the part of the self-conscious
+Marxist. Whatever verbal affinities Ujamaa has with anti-Marxist doctrines,
+it has placed the common struggle against capitalism and imperialism on a
+much higher plane. Scientific Socialism has been attacked time and time
+again. Whenever the attack is based on overt or covert hostility to the
+working masses, it has been accompanied by a policy of alliance with the
+bourgeoisie against the most resolute worker elements. The history of
+
+Fabianism, Social Democracy and the like illustrates this clearly, and helps
+further to distinguish Tanzanian Ujamaa as being compatible with the
+precepts of Scientific Socialism and with the construction of a genuine
+socialist society.
+Presumably, it could be documented that Tanzanian Ujamaa as it now
+stands is the product of a series of ‘pragmatic’ adjustments to difficult
+situations, comprising things such as the crisis of school leavers, the coup in
+Uganda and the problem of foreign exchange.34 However, the inference of
+most of the foregoing arguments is that the response has been suggestive of
+a commitment to the masses. If this were not so, why then have other
+African regimes reacted differently to the same stimuli and pressures as
+have manifested in Tanzania? The progressive strengthening of a
+revolutionary stand in Tanzania (to which attention was drawn at the outset)
+is a factor of the greatest significance. It suggests movement on the road to
+socialism, both in practical terms and as an aspect of ideological
+development. Of course, there is a major difference between historical
+tendency and accomplished fact, but consciousness and political behaviour
+form part of the bridge between the two. This is not to be overlooked by
+anyone attempting the rigorous task of applying scientific method to social
+reality with the view of aiding the birth of African and International
+Socialism. Theory that is non-Marxist must be evaluated in terms of
+whether or not it is substantively anti-worker or anti-scientific. Invariably,
+socialist revolutions have their roots not only in Scientific Socialism as a
+body of thought but also in the formulas independently and correctly
+arrived at by precursors who did not use Scientific Socialism as their point
+of departure.35
+African nationalists are certainly involved in the African revolution in
+the two types of front represented in Mozambique and Tanzania
+respectively: namely, the fighting front and that of ‘peaceful’
+transformation. Leaders of these two related struggles will at some point
+have to come to terms with a consistent theory for ‘appreciating’ their
+situation and taking action. Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba – that is,
+every successful socialist revolution has borne out the truth of Engels’s
+observation that Scientific Socialism is the fundamental condition of all
+reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics. The mobilization of the
+producers, the defence of revolutionary gains and the advance of the
+struggle against modern monopoly capitalism are not tasks that can be
+
+accomplished by good intentions alone. Masses of people have to enter into
+an epistemology and a methodology different from those to which they
+have been accustomed. In China, they call it ‘Mao Zedong thought’ – a
+blend of specific insights and pre-existing theory. There is nothing
+inherently improbable in Tanzanian Ujamaa continuing to advance to reach
+that position. But, in the light of the claim that certain intellectuals have
+become so enamoured of Tanzania as to relinquish their critical function, let
+it be clear that this is no paean of praise. It is an assessment of a possibility
+that can be realized only through an ideological and political struggle to
+transcend the alienation from that part of the heritage of man which is
+called ‘Scientific Socialism’.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+14
+Class Contradictions in Tanzania
+Samir Amin, who is today one of the leading Marxist theoreticians on the
+African continent, wrote an article in 1964 entitled ‘Class Struggle in
+Africa’, and it was anonymous. This was very significant, demonstrating
+that at that time it was not even safe for someone to write an article on class
+struggle in Africa. Those were the days when Leopold Senghor and others
+were parading their theses which gathered or attracted worldwide attention
+– theses to the effect that there were no classes in Africa. Today, eleven
+years later, changes have taken place both on the level of popular perception
+as well as in the academic sphere concerning the question of class and its
+relevance to an understanding of the analysis of Africa at the present and in
+the recent past – and indeed, using the broader scientific framework, in the
+more distant past.
+Even at the very outset when the debate was raised in the early sixties, it
+was not true that there were no classes in African society. What was
+probably true is that the main manifestations of class contradiction within
+Africa then was still in the form of the extension of the class contradictions
+of the dominant capitalist metropolitan society. So that for all practical
+purposes, it was the capitalist class of Europe or Euro-America which was
+the exploiting class of the African continent, and any intermediaries
+between them were relatively unimportant and did not manifest real
+political presence. Consequently, when Marxists attempted to look at the
+interval evolution of class problems, they were seen to be or held to be not
+just alien but irrelevant concepts into the discussions of African society.
+Today, it has become sufficiently generalized that one does not need to be
+defensive about adopting this particular posture. For Tanzania, it is striking
+because here is probably one of the territories where class formation is least
+developed on the African continent, and yet it would excite no controversy
+
+at first sight to raise the questions of class contradictions in Tanzania. This
+indicates how well entrenched the position has become on the African
+continent today.
+
+The Concept of Class
+I will begin by trying to explain the concept of class formation before I look
+at class contradictions, because I think that the classes in Africa are
+embryonic; that is, they are still very much in process of formation. Perhaps
+one could say that no class is ever completed. In any society classes are
+continually undergoing change. But there are periods when it is more
+difficult to utilize the tool of class because the individual’s social groups
+that comprise the class are themselves moving towards an awareness of
+themselves, and do not necessarily have the organizational apparatus to
+express themselves as a class. By way of comparison, one may think of the
+eighteenth century in France. In writing about that period, Marx had to
+make the point that the bourgeoisie was not in existence at the time of the
+French Revolution – however much it may be called the bourgeois
+revolution. Elements which went into the making of the bourgeoisie were
+certainly present in eighteenth-century France, and over the period of the
+late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that class matured into the
+form which it came to take in the middle of the nineteenth century. The
+same applies to Africa. But here one must be careful; one must be able to
+understand that strands and strata are coming together to produce what
+could definitely be called classes.
+
+The Process of Class Formation
+While this process clearly began in the colonial period, for Tanzania my
+argument will be that class formation post-1960 has been as important, if
+not more important, than class formation before 1960 – or before 1961, if
+you want to take the exact date of independence. It is a very recent
+phenomenon, and it has been accelerated by the process of national
+independence. The low profile of classes in Tanzania before independence
+
+accounts, to my mind, for a number of the unique features of political and
+social development in that country. One of these features is political unity.
+Political unity can only be explained in part at any rate as a function of
+the non-emergence of strong sectors of the petty bourgeoisie in preindependence colonial Tanzania. By looking at the historical experience of
+a number of other places – for instance Ghana, the earliest and still in many
+ways the best studied of the African states moving towards nationhood – we
+find that there had been a considerable proliferation of embryonic petty
+bourgeois elements of different types. Some had their matrix in the old
+traditional society: they had been chiefs, or sons of chiefs, or they had been
+incorporated into the structure of the British so called native-authority rule;
+they had developed a base in the land and of course, in primary cash-crop
+production of cocoa; they had professional classes that date back to the late
+nineteenth century in West Africa; they had a certain number of indigenous
+traders including the very important market women, and so on; they had
+fractions of a petty bourgeoisie in Ghana. I think that the development of
+these factions was such that the British were able to manipulate elements
+and create intraclass contradictions long before the bourgeoisie, the petty
+bourgeoisie, had really matured. Already at this very embryonic stage, it
+was struggling within itself, and again that is not historically new. Sectors
+of classes, mercantile as opposed to industrial sectors, or of the capitalist
+class have always had their internal contradictions. And those
+contradictions became politically important because of the deliberate
+policies of colonial powers. Britain, in this case, tried to withdraw from
+Ghana – as from Nigeria, as from the Sudan and Uganda – in such a way
+that the state machinery was left in the hands of different elements of the
+petty bourgeoisie.
+In Tanzania, because the class – or perhaps we should say it was still a
+stratum, or several strata at that time – was not well developed, the attempt
+to play one section off against another was not very successful. Attempts to
+get what we may call conservative African nationalists to organize a
+political party to oppose TANU1 had far less success than similar attempts
+in Ghana to oppose the CPP.2 The first consequence of this low profile was
+the move towards national unity; and even after independence, again taking
+as a point of reference what has occurred in a number of other territories –
+notably Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda – we find that the petty bourgeoisie
+politicizes ethnic differences in its search for state hegemony. Ethnic
+
+differences exist and, of course, they exist on the African continent. They
+are not necessarily political differences, however. They don’t necessarily
+cause people to kill each other. They become so-called ‘tribalism’ when
+they are politicized in a particular framework. And in post-independence
+Africa they have been politicized largely by sections of the so-called
+African elite. (I refer to them as the African petty bourgeoisie, in the search
+for bases for their own maintenance in power.)
+In Tanzania again we see that this is rather unique. Occasionally one
+hears in internal discussions in Tanzania some reference to so-called ethnic
+or tribal loyalties, but it has never reared its head within the state as a
+determinant of the direction of political change. Clearly this is not a
+function of the absence of ethnic groups, because Tanzania has as many or
+more ethnic groups as other areas. Nor is it the function of dominant ethnic
+groups, because if we broke Tanzania down, we could pick out two or three
+very dominant ethnic groups. The pattern in Tanzania is not all that
+dissimilar from, say, the pattern in what is now Zaire, where ethnic politics
+have become important. So the lack of politicization is mainly not due to
+ethnic differences but due to the rather weak development of the petty
+bourgeoisie as a class. They didn’t have the chance to get involved in
+jockeying among each other, utilizing their own ethnic bases for that
+purpose.
+A third point, and perhaps the most important point concerning the
+process of class formation in Tanzania, is that the weakness of the petty
+bourgeoisie allowed the specific development which we see in Tanzania,
+which is the development towards what is called Ujamaa, or Tanzanian
+socialism. It seems to me we must try to explain historically why it is that
+this particular African country made that option. It’s not merely a choice, a
+political choice, which any African state could have made. I think we
+should look for the conditions which made it possible for Tanzania in 1967
+to declare so-called socialism, to announce the Arusha Declaration. I would
+suggest the weakness of the particular class who stood initially to lose from
+such a declaration is the prominent reason.
+In other parts of Africa where the petty bourgeoisie or some of its
+elements were already sufficiently entrenched, it would have been difficult
+to envisage an Arusha Declaration being made, and these elements simply
+retreating to their shells and offering no opposition.
+
+I was fortunate to have been in Tanzania at that particular time; in
+seeing members of the leadership of TANU then, in 1967, one got a distinct
+impression of the discomfort on their part. Many elements, people that you
+could look up as individuals – ministers, members of the hierarchy and the
+civil service – were applauding the Arusha Declaration very painfully. One
+could see that it did not exactly fall in line with their conception of where
+the country should have been going. And one must therefore say that in a
+certain sense they were coerced, or at least constrained, to move in that
+direction. And one could see the constraint: the constraint was a class
+struggle, it was between themselves and the mass of the people. The mass
+of the people, workers and peasantry, came out in such tremendous force
+behind the document that I don’t think that the small, fragile petty
+bourgeoisie could ever have had the confidence, or that anyone in that class
+could get up and say, ‘We stand opposed to this option.’ It would almost
+have been equivalent to committing suicide. They had no power base to
+confront the mass of the population at that time. Consequently, we will see
+of course that they retreated and devised a number of stratagems to avoid a
+head-on confrontation, but a refusal of that position was just not possible,
+given the balance of class forces in 1967.
+The same thing occurred in 1971 when TANU produced another
+important document, the TANU guidelines or Mwongozo, as it is called. In
+many ways this is an even harder hitting document than the Arusha
+Declaration. One could perceive that in a sense the wording of the
+document, the elaboration of the document, was due to only a small number
+of individuals within the hierarchy of the party who took a particular
+position. But the others were not prepared to come out openly against it,
+again for the same reasons. It was too obvious that the vast majority of
+Tanzanian people stood in that framework, and that anyone who wanted to
+oppose it had to do so surreptitiously. Opposition had to be done in devious
+under-handed ways and not by coming forward and saying ‘we are against
+the policy of socialism and self-reliance’, or ‘we are against the policy of
+worker control’, or ‘we are against an anti-imperialist line’. Except for a
+small handful, everyone felt constrained to at least mouth the slogans. There
+was a tiny handful who, after the Arusha Declaration, said, ‘Well, it’s time
+for us to cut and run; we prefer property to socialist jargon and we will
+leave.’ But quite a number decided that the best strategy was to say what
+
+they felt needed to be said, and then to try to vitiate it, try to trivialize and
+denude the concepts of their real meaning.
+Of course, I’m talking about a relative situation – Tanzania relative to
+the rest of Africa, not relative to the rest of the world. To the rest of the
+world, it is obvious that class formation in Africa has not produced the
+same sharp differentiation it has historically in other parts of the world. But
+relative even to the rest of Africa, in a significant number of African
+territories there has arisen a small landed class, a landed petty bourgeoisie, a
+kulak class to use the familiar Russian term. In Tanzania, analysts who have
+been looking around the countryside have also discerned what they call an
+emergent kulak class, but I think very often they are straining at the
+evidence. One kulak doesn’t make a kulak class. What one could discern in
+Tanzania is that when you take the size of the country and the development
+of cash-crop farming in certain isolated pockets of the country, you could
+go into a given community and you could find one or two kulaks, but it
+cannot be said that they began to operate in a way comparable to Ghana, or
+the Ivory Coast, or Western Nigeria or Senegal. This was because
+quantitatively and qualitatively it was a different phenomenon. There was
+no real kulak class in Tanzania, no landed class comparable to either
+Uganda or Kenya in the East African countries. Of course, there were no
+industrialists; very few African countries had industrialists. But there were
+in a number of African countries a few African capitalists, timber traders or
+people having timber concessions, merchants of course, other than
+industrialists – the merchant class in West Africa or Central Africa, for
+example. But in Tanzania, as in the rest of East Africa, the presence of the
+Asians as the comprador class, as the merchant bourgeoisie, has meant that
+very few Africans entered that pattern of trade, or acquired wealth through
+trade. And there were even very few professionals, less than in West Africa,
+and certainly less than in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Kenya had less for
+different reasons, partly because of the white settler economy which had
+allowed very few African professionals.
+What we find, therefore, is that the petty bourgeoisie in Tanzania was
+small. And not only was it small, but it also had a second important
+characteristic: it was limited to certain sectors of production or sectors of
+social activity, particularly the civil service, and as an extension of that, the
+other coercive apparatus – the police and the army. This is where African
+petty bourgeoisie found itself. I think this is as important to understanding
+
+the subsequent evolution as is the fact that it was a small petty bourgeoisie.
+It was small but its character was also circumscribed and limited to
+particular sectors. It was not mercantile. It was not involved professionally
+to any great degree. It did not have land. It was concentrated in effect in the
+area of the state, either the civil service or the police–army apparatus. I
+believe that this established a certain determination, a certain predilection,
+for state or status solutions to their particular problems – a predilection that
+was not present in either Uganda or in Kenya, to use the East African
+neighbouring territories as a way of comparing and contrasting the
+Tanzanian development. In Kenya there is still a definite commitment to the
+landed bourgeoisie or the landed petty bourgeoisie, and the same applies to
+Uganda. In Tanzania, the emergent elites never had any real commitment to
+the land in the form of private ownership. Therefore, in a real sense, it
+wasn’t too surprising that they began to pursue policies which immediately
+returned the land or confirmed that the ownership of the land should be in
+the hands of the population. Had there already been a substantial
+development of anything approaching latifundia, then it would not have
+been an option that could so simply have been put into effect, but because
+of the lack of development of a private landed class, it seems to me there
+was no barrier towards a development in this direction.
+
+The Structure of the Working Class
+Let us take a brief look at the working class before returning to the petty
+bourgeoisie, who are really going to be the focus of the analysis. In
+Tanzania (as in so many of the African countries) the working class was
+small. It was a transient working class with a high proportion of migrant
+labour, although there has been a fair degree of stabilization of migrant
+labour in the post-war years. But the working class remained essentially
+rural, the larger proportion being on the sites of plantations, largely
+unskilled either in the same rural occupation or in other spheres such as the
+docks where they remained unorganized. The Tanzanian working class
+never achieved a significant measure of independent organization. And it is
+independent organization which ultimately makes a class. The workers of
+Tanzania engaged briefly in the struggle for their own organization in the
+late 1950s and early 1960s in the period between colonialism and
+
+independence. The trade unions that had evolved by 1961–62 were still
+continuing the same trajectory as they had in the anti-colonial struggle; that
+is, a trajectory designed to ensure that workers were represented and that
+workers built an independent organ of expression. But by 1964 this was
+completely halted by an attempted army mutiny in which some of the trade
+union leaders were involved. The government acted to virtually put an end
+to independent trade union organization – independent meaning
+independent of the state, independent of the leading party. This was in
+contrast to Kenya for instance, where there is a lesser degree of trade union
+independence in any real organizational sense.
+Consequently, the working class has also been competing for power
+through the dominant party, TANU, and through the state. If the workers
+had retained an independent trade union organization, it is conceivable that
+we would have seen them as the instrument of their own struggle. But that
+organization post 1964 was incorporated into the governmental party
+machinery. Consequently, to whatever extent there is worker power in
+Tanzania, it is expressed through the party, TANU, or through the state
+which is, in some sense, the instrument of the ruling party. And, therefore,
+we have both the petty bourgeoisie and the workers concentrating their
+energies on the same social organization, on the same mechanism – the
+political party and the state becomes the arena in which the contradictions
+between the workers and the petty bourgeoisie still resolve themselves. That
+is what I would like to look at. How does the state serve? In whose hands
+does it rest? What derives from state policy?
+
+The Workers, the Petty Bourgeoisie and the State
+The Arusha Declaration is a starting point of modern Tanzania
+development. This was a response to internal crisis, a response to the
+stagnation of the neo-colonial economy in Tanzania, and it really marked
+the failure of the hopes of the petty bourgeoisie that international capital
+would have entered their situation to strengthen the class in a particular
+kind of way. The petty bourgeoisie had assumed that after independence, if
+they took the attitude of welcoming foreign capital and welcoming foreign
+aid, international foreign capital would be forthcoming. This was really the
+
+assumption: they imagined that there was some process of growth within
+the neo-colonial picture, within the post-colonial imperialist framework,
+which would allow them to develop as a class. But this was not in fact
+forthcoming. Any study of the period for Tanzania and for a number of
+other African countries shows very clearly the unfulfilled hopes of foreign
+investment and aid. Unfulfilled in many senses, particularly because (in
+many instances) it just did not come. Even when it came, it did not
+necessarily come when and where the government expected it to come. And
+when it was available, it was available with a number of other
+complications, political and economic, which the government of Tanzania
+found hard to accept. Therefore, by the mid-1960s, the Tanzanian economy
+was definitely stagnant in the face of declining world prices for major
+products (like sisal and cotton). The option it seems to me was taken by the
+petty bourgeoisie under pressure from the working masses in the sense that
+the stagnation and decline of real standards were bound to raise their own
+current from the working people. That pressure had to be responded to, and
+the response came in the form of the Arusha Declaration. This declaration
+was positive in the sense that it went along with popular aspirations and
+popular hopes that the producers would be able to control the product of
+their own labour and to control the shaping of the society to cut down the
+alienations which stem from the primary alienation of the product of a
+man’s labour. It was positive, but at the same time the petty bourgeoisie
+were able to work out the strategy in which they would use this new
+intervention as a means of entrenching their control over the state.
+Whatever the objective of the exercise of transformation, one thing was
+certain: the petty bourgeoisie intended to maintain their hegemony over the
+state apparatus. Indeed after 1967 they used the new policies as a means of
+reproducing themselves as a class. In a way this was almost axiomatic;
+since they were essentially a bureaucratic formation, the moment that they
+nationalized and began to engage in some forms of control over economic
+production, the bourgeoisie expanded itself, or extended itself into those
+sectors of economic operations. They built huge complexes like the
+National Development Corporation (NDC) and the State Trading
+Corporation (STC), which became known in Tanzania as, in effect,
+extensions of the state, extensions of the old civil service. The people who
+benefited most from this were the young petty bourgeoisie.
+
+In Kenya there was a different line because the Kenyans always had one
+advantage from their class perspective: Kenya was and still is a subimperialist centre in East Africa. It is the point of entry for foreign capital
+into the whole of the East African community, not just into Kenya alone.
+Consequently, the opportunities for ‘pickings’, if you like, were always
+higher in Kenya. The presence of the multinational corporations, partially
+determined by the presence of settlers in the colonial period, meant that
+Kenyans could actually think in terms of becoming directors of various
+multinational corporations. For Tanzanians, it was not feasible on
+ideological grounds. Besides, there were very practical reasons why the
+petty bourgeoisie could not hope for very much in this direction. Tanzania
+was not that type of economy. The rate of expansion of multinational capital
+in Tanzania before 1967 was relatively small. Consequently, it was through
+the state intervention that they could increase the possibilities of holding
+jobs equivalent to directorship. They wouldn’t be directors of a foreign
+company; they would be directors of branches of the NDC or STC, or they
+would be managers of particular plants. In effect they were extending
+themselves as a class.
+At the same time the African petty bourgeoisie in Tanzania, as in the
+rest of East Africa, had an old opponent: the Asian commercial comprador
+element. This group had been foisted on the African people in many
+respects; they had been deliberately promoted by the British government as
+a layer between foreign capital and Africans. They were allowed access to
+credit; most of them based their operations on the ninety-day credit system.
+They were in effect sponsored by the banks and the large import-export
+houses – the same banks which refused to give credit to Africans. The
+British government and the colonial states had sanctioned this by issuing
+credit restriction ordinances which made it impossible for Africans to
+advance as middlemen. So, the experience of the so-called Asians, that is
+those from the Indian subcontinent, was linked with British policies in East
+Africa. As so often happens, the comprador or the middleman often attracts
+the ire of different indigenous classes much more so than the metropolitan
+ruling class. In Tanzania and in Uganda there were what were called Asian
+riots or anti-Asian riots in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. For some people they
+may be classified as racial riots; but they were not racial riots, they were
+manifestations of class struggle, since you find the same kind of thing in
+Jamaica where you would find anti-Chinese riots simply because the
+
+Chinese happen to be the middlemen in that particular context. The
+ordinary peasants in the countryside, the working people in the sisal estates
+and in the towns found that their immediate enemy was the so-called duka
+walla – the Indian who controlled the duka, or the shop – because that
+Indian bought their product, he cheated them in weighing their product, he
+cheated them in reselling to them what he imported from abroad. Although
+this was petty in relation to the fundamental exploitation of the market
+which was being established in Mining Lane in London, the peasant and the
+worker had to react to his immediate enemy. And so there has been a
+considerable anti-Indian sentiment which is class-based. The African petty
+bourgeoisie too, as he began to move forward and to have certain
+aspirations for advancement felt that the Indian was the first obstacle. He
+couldn’t see Barclays Bank as the immediate enemy, because that was too
+distant, too powerful, and in his own horizons he didn’t really aspire to
+become a competitor to Barclays Bank, but he could aspire to become a
+competitor to an Asian merchant or an Asian professional or an Asian civil
+servant. So, for the petty bourgeoisie too, the Asians were very often the
+immediate enemy. In the post–Arusha Declaration period in Tanzania, the
+Asians as a comprador class have begun to disintegrate. This is true in East
+Africa as a whole.
+In Uganda the people are of course aware of the dramatic turn of events
+after Amin came to power. People may be less aware of what’s going on in
+Kenya, but in Kenya there’s also been a constant pressure and harassment
+of the Asian petty bourgeoisie by a would-be African commercial petty
+bourgeoisie. In Tanzania it did not take the same form. It did not take the
+form of individual Africans seeking to take over Asian shops. What has
+happened is that the state has encroached upon areas in which the Asian
+petty bourgeoisie were dominant, and since the African petty bourgeoisie
+controls that state it means the expansion of the bureaucratic class or the
+bureaucratic sector of the petty bourgeoisie as against the commercial petty
+bourgeoisie. The State Trading Corporation, for instance, took over a large
+number of the functions initially carried out by a host of private importers
+among whom Asians were predominant. Buying and selling abroad was
+initially taken over. Then slowly the STC has also attempted to establish
+itself with certain retail outlets. It has also meant that questions as to what is
+to be purchased, in what quantities, at what prices, and how it is to be sold
+are questions now being determined by the state, by the African
+
+bureaucratic bourgeoisie, and not by the Indian merchant class – except in
+so far as they can react defensively and try to break out by certain
+stratagems which they do indeed adopt. But, by and large, initiative in these
+regards has passed into the hands of the African petty bourgeoisie, the
+bureaucratic African petty bourgeoisie.
+The impact of the Arusha Declaration and the move towards social and
+state controls over production and distribution has been to sharpen that
+contradiction between the commercial petty bourgeoisie, which was a
+particular ethnic grouping, and the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie. It has
+been resolved in their favour in the sense that the Asians, for the most part,
+seem to have decided that there is no further stake in East Africa; their main
+concern has been to try to liquidate their capital, to try to get it out of the
+country, which they have done in an infinite variety of ways. In Tanzania it
+is extremely difficult to get money out of the country. Usually what
+happens, however, is that whenever there is a new edict concerning foreign
+exchange control, it has come at least a year if not two years after the
+Asians have been using that loophole. Therefore, the amounts of money
+already sent to London and to Canada and the US are quite fantastic. At the
+same time, the Asians do interact by attempting to form liaisons with
+members of the African petty bourgeoisie, utilizing the straightforward cash
+nexus just to bribe them into an acceptance of the Asian position. So they
+are a declining class, but they can at the same time exercise influence based
+on the fact that they do have some liquid funds, and this is used to increase
+the amount of bribery and corruption that is present in the system.
+Nevertheless, I would say that one could conclude at this point – even
+before the Asians are completely finished as a class – that there is no longer
+any future for them in the old roles which they had in East Africa and
+Tanzania. In Tanzania this has been done through the instrumentality of the
+state, in Uganda through the instrumentality of the army and other private
+African entrepreneurs, and in Kenya through the instrumentality of private
+entrepreneurs. Most important to the people of Tanzania have been those
+contradictions manifested between the petty bourgeoisie and what I will call
+the producer class – the peasantry of the countryside, excluding the very
+few kulak owners. There is also a contradiction between the petty
+bourgeoisie and the workers of the towns and the countryside. This
+contradiction – which is a much sharper contradiction, a much more
+antagonistic contradiction than the earlier one between the commercial
+
+element and the bureau element – manifests itself at all levels in a variety of
+ways.
+Ideology and class contradictions
+In the education sphere, for instance, and having taught in the country I
+hope I am sensitive to what went on in that area, I would say that the class
+struggle was reflected in ideological terms and conducted in very sharp
+ideological terms in Tanzania, more so than in any other African countries
+with which I am familiar, with the possible exception of Ethiopia. There it
+was conducted in a rather different way, primarily by Ethiopian students as
+a part of a whole underground. In Tanzania it was conducted out in the
+open, inside the education institutions, particularly within the university – a
+young university which had been established like so many of the Third
+World universities as just another factory being put into the Third World by
+the metropolitan countries. It was established in 1961 as a typical institution
+of bourgeois learning and functioned in that way, in terms of its curricula,
+its staffing, its programmes, its structure, and everything else in the mid1960s when it was formed. But because of the move towards socialism –
+even at the level of rhetoric since much of it wasn’t put into practice – the
+move towards socialism itself had behind it the power of producing classes
+in Tanzania, and this could not be kept out of the development of the
+University of Dar es Salaam. Therefore, one found there a tremendous
+conflict taking place between bourgeois knowledge and scientific analysis,
+which derived from looking at the actual practice of the producer classes in
+Tanzania and in the world at large at this particular point in time. Some of
+the questions were of theory; they had to address themselves to the whole
+plethora of bourgeois knowledge and understand its methodology, its
+perceptions, to understand the struggle between idealism and materialism. I
+presume it would not be necessary for me to go into that kind of detail.
+Those of us who took part in this in one way or another related to the
+students and related to the population outside of the university, so that it
+was a genuine reflection of changes taking place in the society as a whole.
+There were, of course, broad debates about the organization of the
+university, about how one organizes academic disciplines, and so on. But
+there were also a number of debates that were very pertinent to the
+
+immediate policy choices of the Tanzanian government. The question of
+development, for example, was not evolved as an academic debate per se. It
+evolved from a perception of real choices in the policy sphere: what was to
+be done at the particular point in time in specific areas of economic,
+political and social development. It arose out of the formation of the
+solutions to the so-called problem of underdevelopment. People began to
+question the kinds of theoretical framework and paradigms that bolstered
+particular kinds of solutions. If the solutions proved to be false in practice,
+their theoretical justifications were exposed to much more critical analysis,
+and ultimately to an onslaught in that institution from which they have not
+recovered. So the debate was linked to the ongoing struggle within
+Tanzania.
+From time to time, students themselves would take the initiative. This
+was extremely useful because the students were not only students of the
+university but they were at the same time members of the TANU Youth
+League. Therefore, it was ensured that this was a struggle that was at all
+times relevant to the immediate needs of Tanzanians.
+That is one level. Within the university and within all other educational
+institutions, such as the secondary schools, the same kind of struggle went
+on to try to clarify theory and to recognize that the ideas which existed in
+that society were not simply free-floating ideas. They had historical roots.
+They had social class origins, and one had to pin down these social origins
+if some progress were to be made in clarifying these ideas.
+Economic policy and class contradictions
+More immediate – and more critical, from a political viewpoint – were the
+contradictions taking place at the level of economic policy that were also
+partly tied up in some ways with the contradictions in the educational
+system. But major debates were also taking place on specific aspects of
+policy – for instance, tourism. There was a whole year at least in which the
+question of whether Tanzania should promote tourism or not was an issue of
+national importance that people were battling back and forth on this option.
+In some ways you may look at it and imagine: ‘Tourism, are you for it or
+are you against it?’ This is a free decision. We express a position, we
+analyse the situation, we subject the data to some scrutiny and we come up
+
+with a position for or against. But it is not as simple as that. When one
+looks carefully at the way in which the debate was conducted – who stood
+for the tourism option, who opposed it – one sees there were class roots in
+taking up a position for tourism or against it. Fanon, in his usual manner,
+remarked quite a long time ago in 1960–61, that tourism is a very important
+vehicle: a way in which the petty bourgeoisie organizes relaxation for the
+metropolitan bourgeoisie and uses that opportunity also to reinforce their
+class ties. It was very clear in Tanzania that, in spite of the protestations for
+socialism, this tremendous need to push tourism and to rationalize what
+after all, in purely economic terms, is one of the most meaningless so-called
+industries, was linked with the necessity – this perceived need on the part of
+the Tanzanian bourgeoisie to keep in touch with their metropolitan masters.
+In effect it wasn’t particularly different from what was going on in Kenya;
+Kenya just did it openly and pursued their tourism in the name of
+capitalism. Tanzania was trying to do their tourism in the name of
+socialism. In fact, it is already in shambles, but the need was to rationalize
+this position, which was a class position, and the petty bourgeoisie
+conceptualized development along certain lines. They had a vision of what
+needed to be consumed, of what needed to be built, of the kinds of societies
+that derive from bourgeois metropolitan society. The hotels, the airports, the
+transit facilities: these were things which fitted the class perspective of the
+petty bourgeoisie in Tanzania.
+On the other side were members of the same class, naturally enough,
+engaged in a debate which required articulation in certain ways. Essentially
+this involved young Tanzanians who were of the same social class origins,
+but who were responding to different class loyalties and who were
+expressing different class loyalties. They were saying that our workers and
+our peasants are not concerned with those who want to come and watch the
+lions and gazelles and to watch the Masai and so on, and call themselves
+tourists: that this will not do anything for the mass of our population. On the
+contrary, it will inhibit a development of serious economic options which
+could lead to real integrated development. It will introduce and reinforce
+cultural backwardness and cultural penetration and place our people
+continually in the position of servitors of Euro-America. This was an
+argument that was lost in the first instance by the anti-tourism elements. It
+was won by those who wanted to promote international tourism; but in the
+year that followed, tourism has been proved to be simply economically
+
+unprofitable – quite apart from everything else. It was pointed out that
+deploying such a large proportion of finances into this sector was bound to
+be disastrous and it has already proved to be that way. A huge modern
+automated airport was built between Kilimanjaro and Arusha where the
+game reserves are located only ten minutes flight from Nairobi. This was
+completely unjustifiable in any terms, but it was claimed that an airport
+would enable more visitors to come to watch the animals. When the visitors
+did not come to watch the animals and this huge airport lay empty, the same
+petty bourgeoisie began to suggest that possibly they might do some market
+gardening around this airport. They might therefore export fresh vegetables
+and make some profit. The order of priority was not just due to lack of
+vision but due to a particular straightjacketing in which this class found
+itself. So they thought first of tourism, and only subsequently when the
+tourism was in shambles did they begin to think about production; even
+then, of course, the production will have to be tied to the existing
+infrastructure, which is a meaningless infrastructure because it is pointless
+to engage in production simply for export to Europe. But that is another
+question.
+The same clash of views came out, not always as clearly as the tourism
+debate, with regards to questions concerning irrigation, choice of crops, and
+the general conduct of agricultural policy. The tourism debate was very
+sharply focused, and people took sides. It may not be clear with regard to
+other aspects of economic policy such as cash crops, general crop selection,
+and whether or not the country should engage in irrigation, and other
+questions. But looking at it even at least with hindsight, one can perceive
+that there was a tendency on the part of the petty bourgeoisie to treat
+agriculture mainly as an intensification of that which had gone before.
+There was no conception of a break. To take sisal or cotton as examples,
+when the prices declined the tendency was to imagine that one could grow
+more. Certainly for cotton and sisal specific areas had to be abandoned,
+because they were not profitable. There was no new conceptualization of
+breaking with the international division of labour in which they as a class
+had emerged. Consequently, we find today significant sectors of Africa are
+suffering from famine. In suffering from this famine, each one, depending
+upon their religious affiliations, will appeal to Allah or God or the ancestors
+of whoever it is – or the rain gods, who are supposedly responsible for there
+being no rain. So it becomes a mixture of natural phenomena and the
+
+solution is a metaphysical or religious intervention. Of course, famine is
+neither natural nor metaphysical. It is a social phenomenon. Drought and
+famine are not just ‘natural’. I don’t know in what sense one can just
+describe them as ‘natural’, when the society has the capacity technically
+and organizationally to plan, first, to eliminate or at least reduce the
+incidence of drought and famine, and second, to reduce the consequences of
+drought and famine. So we see that these societies had continued their
+colonial policies of failing to deal with the critical question of food first,
+and being preoccupied with what they call ‘foreign exchange’, they have
+been growing coffee, cotton and sisal, and what have you.
+That must be put as part of the historical explanation of why the famine
+and drought are so widespread throughout Africa at the present time. It is a
+reflection of the incapacity of neo-colonial societies to even feed
+themselves or to protect their populations from the vicissitudes that lie
+outside the immediate control of each individual, but do not lie outside the
+control of the society as a whole, if that society is geared towards resolving
+the problem. So these are aspects of bourgeois thought, of petty bourgeois
+policy, and the fact that they were pursued when there were at least some
+individuals in the society arguing to the contrary is an indication that they
+were pursued in spite of the contradictions or by way of contradictions.
+They were not simply steamrollered; it was not that the whole society was
+blissfully unaware of other alternatives. Alternatives were discussed and the
+petty bourgeoisie chose their own road, which in most cases have led to
+disaster.
+To conclude briefly on the point about the Tanzania economic policy,
+there still is an ongoing debate about factors such as economic advisors,
+about the questions of economic agreements, so called ‘managerial
+agreements’ by which nationalized or partially nationalized companies are
+placed in the hands of foreign management consultants. That debate about
+consultants and experts and advisors still goes on. In part it was attacked
+from a nationalist perspective. Some Tanzanians said, ‘well, we need to
+nationalize or Africanize, so we can’t have all these sensitive positions.’
+But nationalization has not been enough. In fact, the nationalists
+themselves, the petty bourgeois nationalists, stopped short at a particular
+point, because of a lack of confidence in themselves. To understand the
+petty bourgeoisie again go back to Fanon and look at the pitfalls of the
+national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth. He captured that very
+
+well: the lack of confidence in a class that is an outgrowth of another
+historical experience that never controlled anything in its own right. It
+didn’t control production. It didn’t control property. It is derived from the
+colonial system. It hasn’t the confidence to challenge that system
+fundamentally. It is culturally dependent as well as economically and
+politically dependent. Consequently, they find it very difficult to break with
+this conception of foreign advisors, foreign management, and so on; and
+having no confidence to break with these concepts, they therefore
+rationalize it by saying, ‘Well, McKinsey isn’t really advising us how to be
+socialists. McKinsey is merely giving us the technological expertise. We
+will account for the political inputs.’ The capitalist firm comes in and goes
+through all our records and the Harvard advisory team and all those various
+paraphernalia of bourgeois individuals still trample around in and out of
+Dar es Salaam and the countryside. This is rationalized by saying, ‘We are
+taking from them a technical expertise and this is all. We will account for
+the political inputs.’ One of the most fundamental bourgeois fallacies is that
+you can separate technology from ideology, that you can separate the
+mechanics of a process from the fundamental direction in which you are
+going, from the class content of the kinds of advice that you get about
+organizational structures, and so on.
+Production of class contradictions
+For Tanzania, outside the economic sphere, the most decisive contradictions
+– the ones on which the real earthy manifestations of the class struggle are
+based – have come directly out of production, either in the countryside or in
+the towns. In the countryside, there have been contradictions arising out of
+the policy of Ujamaa and its implementation: in the towns these are seen in
+the clash between bureaucratic management and the workers at the point of
+production. The policy of Ujamaa itself has a great deal to commend it. It is
+not merely a form of social organization and of economic production; it is
+meant to be a social whole, a cultural whole. It is meant to be an
+environment in which the rural producers resume control over their own
+lives by participating in running their day-to-day lives, and by making
+choices about fundamental things in their day-to-day lives. It intended to
+put a halt, as Nyerere made clear, to the incipient penetration of the money
+
+economy and the class formation in the countryside. It was intended to put a
+halt to the rise of any kulak elements, and to the accompanying rise of a
+landless proletariat. What has in effect occurred is that only a very few of
+the functions of this operation have been successfully concluded. In large
+measure there have been concluded a certain regrouping of forces,
+particularly in areas of the country that had been sparsely settled or where
+the pattern of spatial distribution of population and economic activity was
+such as to warrant a grouping of forces. This regrouping took place, for
+instance, in central Tanzania where there is a low density of population, and
+in western Tanzania where the homesteads were also scattered. This is
+useful because it allows people to come together where one can provide
+them – or the government can provide them – with medical services,
+schools and a number of other things. It means that a government
+proclaiming itself to be socialist has had to carry out an historical task,
+which in other societies had been carried out in a previous epoch.
+Capitalism, and feudalism for that matter, had helped in the grouping of
+populations; certainly capitalism very ruthlessly enclosed land and brought
+farms together. It also concentrated populations in urban centres.
+In Tanzania, this programme of grouping rural populations has had
+some serious setbacks in recent years. Evidence of this came late in 1973
+and 1974 when the programme for creating Ujamaa villages seemed to
+have become bogged down. It had not reached the quantitative dimensions
+that had previously been planned, because a number of areas apparently had
+not moved into the villages as they were expected to. On some examination
+it does not appear as though there were serious political inputs into getting
+these individuals to move. To ask people to move, to ask them to make a
+new life, to participate in a whole new form of production would obviously
+require a considerable politicization. This was the premise upon which
+regrouping was based in China – mutual-aid teams through the brigades
+right up to the communes. It was a political process first and foremost, but
+to the bureaucrats they could only reduce it to a bureaucratic process, not
+one of entering in and with the mass of the population to effect
+transformation, but one in which they see it as a question of logistics and
+figures and maps with little pins stuck in to show where the Ujamaa
+villages are and what is growing where. They can conceptualize a problem
+which says, ‘we need to move X number of people from this point to
+another and we need so many lorries, so you get the lorries, you go to the
+
+area, you get the police to come with you, and you break up people’s
+villages, and tell them it will be much better you for. Possibly it will work
+out; possibly those people will decide it is better for them.’ But the world
+has had a great deal of practice of certain individuals telling other
+individuals what is good for them and telling them they will kill them for
+their own good if necessary. We see the end product of that in South East
+Asia today. Certainly from a socialist perspective, it is always dangerous
+that bureaucratization should parade in the name of socialism. It happened
+of course under Stalin, and it did put a certain blight upon socialism for
+quite a long time. Therefore, one does look with some concern at this same
+manifestation.
+The high incidence of bureaucratic activity, of bureaucratic decisionmaking within the context of the Ujamaa villages, created a real
+contradiction because those peasants are fully aware of what is going on.
+Inside the villages, once they are formed, there is a struggle over controlling
+the day-to-day policy. The peasants don’t give up. They are quite tenacious.
+They have a way of bringing their perspectives to bear on the problems
+also. So it is not one-sided, but because the petty bourgeoisie are more in
+control of the state apparatus, it becomes rather difficult for the peasantry to
+win significant victories at this time.
+And then, finally, there are the workers themselves: a small class,
+judged in comparison with Europe, an insignificant class. A very tiny
+percentage of the total producing force can be regarded in any way as a
+proletariat. But, as so often happens in this type of economy, the proletariat
+is strategically situated. It is situated in the capital town and other urban
+areas and in sensitive sectors of production and therefore what it says and
+does simply cannot be ignored. It strikes me that the contradictions between
+workers and the bureaucrats have really come out in a very sharp form as
+the working class itself has advanced in its own clarity, partially as a result
+of the same policies which have been pursued by the government. You see
+the ambivalence of policies: the elements within the petty bourgeoisie have
+allowed for the elaboration of a certain theory of certain ideas within the
+Tanzanian environment, which have further strengthened the Tanzanian
+working class. And the Tanzanian working class makes demands on the
+system in very enlightened terms. Not merely demands concerning
+increased wages (those have been made and they are necessary to defend
+living standards of the population), but going beyond that, workers have in
+
+the last several years in Tanzania been making a number of very advanced
+demands concerning their role in the productive process and in the control
+of the productive process.
+Once the factories were nationalized, once an institution fell under the
+National Development Corporation and was either government-owned or
+partially government-owned, the petty bourgeoisie imagined that was the
+end of the process. It was now a Tanzanian enterprise and, as a Tanzanian
+enterprise run by Tanzanian managers, it was enough for the workers to fall
+in line and behave more or less as they had behaved previously. But this did
+not turn out to be the case. Workers began to raise demands that the
+nationalization of those industries meant that they had to be run by
+Tanzanians in a new kind of way consonant with the interests, the selfimages, and so on, of the Tanzanian working people. One of the
+consequences of this was that the party agreed to issue the party guidelines
+of Mwongozo, which in effect addressed itself to the whole problem of
+bureaucratic management. The party was saying, ‘Well, bureaucrats cannot
+behave in the same fashion as the colonialists or the imperialists used to’, or
+they said that the nationalization implies a whole new way of organizing
+production and change, a qualitative change in the relationship between the
+workers and the management during the period immediately following the
+proclamation of Mwongozo in 1971. But an interesting thing which
+occurred after the acceptance of the guidelines was that the petty
+bourgeoisie themselves recognized that this was too dangerous a weapon.
+The workers used to move around with a very small version of the
+guidelines, a document printed up into a very tiny booklet, which could be
+stuffed into any pocket. Workers had a habit of moving around with the
+Mwongozo and taking it out – as we understand the Chinese consult their
+little red book3 – and opening it to the appropriate page, and confronting
+bureaucrats and saying, ‘Well, look, according to paragraph 14 so and so;
+this is what it says and now what you are saying there and doing is quite
+different from what is going on here.’ And then they would move on to
+paragraph 15 and so on, and this was becoming very dangerous. Workers
+were presuming to educate the educated. In other words, it was threatening
+to become a revolution.
+Interestingly enough, when this class contradiction manifested itself, the
+petty bourgeoisie began to withdraw from the issue of Mwongozo. They
+began to say, ‘Well, each one in his own institution would come up with an
+
+exception why Mwongozo didn’t apply there.’ The doctors started to say,
+‘Well, look at this hospital. We are the doctors. After us come nurses and
+cleaners and so on. I mean this hospital has to be run by doctors. We have
+the expertise. You can’t have Mwongozo and self-management and things
+like that in a hospital. People will die.’ What they need to do, of course, is
+to go and look at the Chinese experience, to look at a book such as that by
+Joshua Horn, Away with All Pests, and they will understand that in a truly
+democratic society the hospitals are run by all, including the patients
+themselves. But they felt they were making a valid case for exceptions. The
+youngsters in schools began to flash Mwongozo and argue against the
+missionary-type education – the pattern of hierarchy and the
+authoritarianism that prevailed in a large number of boarding schools in
+Tanzania – and of course the headmasters and the schoolteachers said,
+‘Well, you are too young to know about Mwongozo. Mwongozo was written
+for adults, not for children. As children you are under our care.’ And so
+they seized all copies of Mwongozo which might be circulating among the
+student population.
+Then in the banking institutions the bankers and the chief bankers
+would say, ‘This is a lot of money we have here. We can’t be joking with
+this financial question. These workers don’t understand accounts. They
+don’t understand questions like: “What is the current rate of the Tanzanian
+shilling as compared with dollars?” So how can we have Mwongozo
+operating in our institution?’ So, in a variety of ways, one saw the petty
+bourgeoisie retracting from the position into which they had been forced
+initially on the question of the Mwongozo, and one found the workers
+advancing by raising the level of their demands, so that they constantly
+talked about various issues on the basis of principles. They constantly
+talked about incorrect behaviour in the factories. They talked about
+favouritism, firing in accordance with the kinds of ethnic loyalties of the
+manager. They exposed any ways of victimizing or exploiting the women in
+the factories, sexually or otherwise. Things of this sort began to increase
+considerably in 1971 and 1972, reaching a high point when in one factory, a
+rubber factory, the workers decided to lock out the management and run the
+factory themselves for a certain period of time (not a very long period of
+time; actually until the police came). The workers ran the factory because of
+the things that had been raised against the workers when they went on
+strike: that because they were striking now that Tanzania has national
+
+property, any strike was therefore against the national interest, and not the
+interest of capital as used to be the case before the factories were
+nationalized. So the workers in that factory were answering that argument.
+They were saying, ‘We are not going on strike. We are not putting an end to
+production in the country. We will increase production when we are running
+the factory.’ So they were posing a more fundamental question: the question
+of who controls production; who is the boss in so-called socialist society.
+But for the time being, of course, the petty bourgeoisie is still essentially in
+control of the state, and it could not allow the working class to exercise this
+type of initiative, so those workers had to be rounded up and scattered.
+
+Conclusion
+Many times when I speak about Tanzania, I find that I fall into the difficulty
+of trying to justify it against reactionaries and to clarify the realities against
+those who are romanticizing such realities. Each one is a different kind of
+operation. There are enemies of Tanzania who do not like the socialist
+content, so for them whatever is going on wherever it fails, that is so much
+the better. Against such an assault one has to be careful to be critical of the
+reality, and the transition, but to be critical of it from the viewpoint of its
+failure to live up to certain types of expectations, and the fact that the
+contradictions have not yet resulted in the positive benefits for the working
+masses. And then, on the other hand, when one is talking with the
+romanticizers – those people who essentially have a sympathy with what is
+going on in Tanzania, but have not been exposed to it in day-to-day reality –
+then it is necessary to understand or to point out that social contradictions
+do not cease because a government issued a document.
+The Arusha Declaration is very nice. Another document is issued which
+says that socialism is for self-realization or education for self-reliance and
+Mwongozo. All these are very positive – certainly better than neighbouring
+territories like Kenya and Uganda which either have no document or have
+some policy statements that are really absurd. But that is not an answer to
+reality or a substitute for reality. The position was a position in part won by
+progressive elements and by the pressure of the workers and the peasants,
+but it can only be worked out in practice depending upon the balance of
+
+class forces. And at the present time, the petty bourgeoisie, although small
+in number, is in control of the state. It is reproducing itself. It still retains
+certain kinds of links with the international monopoly capitalist world.
+It would be difficult at this time to make a prognosis about the
+immediate resolution of the contradictions outlined above – whether
+progressive tendencies or more reactionary tendencies will win out. I have a
+certain confidence – perhaps a confidence tinged with hope – that the trend
+will in fact lead, even in the short run, towards the resolution of these
+contradictions in favour of the progressive elements among the working
+peoples. Clearly, I can not be quite certain. But that is not as important as
+the long-run trends. Over the long run, there is no doubt about it: I think
+that the masses of the population are being brought into a politics of
+participation and that they have in these first five years, starting in 1970,
+entered into struggles in a way that is much more meaningful than for most
+other neo-colonial African territories. Therefore, whatever happens in the
+short run, one can see the towns, serving their best interests in terms of the
+access to power, because these historical changes will not take place by
+themselves.
+History is, of course, made by people. Marx and his followers clearly
+understood this. There is a tendency on the part of bourgeois detractors to
+suggest that somehow a Marxist formulation is talking about things and
+about abstractions, and reification, whereas in fact we are talking about
+people in society, and certainly history is made by people depending upon
+their particular level of consciousness. In this sense, the contradictions are
+sharpening the consciousness of the most exploited and oppressed classes,
+heightening their consciousness – and this must be in the long run a very
+positive fact.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+15
+Transition
+The term ‘transition’ has already appeared in scholarly works dealing with
+contemporary countries in the process of development. It has been
+attributed precise – although sometimes conflicting – meanings within this
+growing body of scholarship, concerning both the concept of collateral
+ideas such as the transfer of technology, the economics of transition, the
+dynamics of cultural change and the state’s own role in development. Each
+one of these facets would obviously demand the keenest of attention and
+their examination can take place effectively only through comparative study
+of different objective situations. The present analysis sets itself a more
+modest task: namely to explore the parameters of the concept of transition
+as it might plausibly appear from a general perspective. Transition and
+development are already part of a popular vocabulary. One needs to bridge
+the gap between academic specializations and the wider informed
+community, which is committed to seeking both the understanding and the
+positive action inherent in the notion of transition in this era and in this part
+of the world.
+Neither the rate of change nor the duration of change are immediately
+established with the use of the word transition. Mankind was in transition
+over hundreds of millennia while using stone tools. The neolithic portion of
+the Stone Age itself lasted for several thousands of years; but it is possible
+to affirm that the beginning of agriculture in that period constitutes the most
+important ‘revolution’ in the history of human society. To speak of
+transition from one mode of production to another allows for somewhat
+greater precision: yet one is still confronted with timescales of several
+centuries which mark the passages from antiquity to feudalism and from
+feudalism to capitalism. In the history of Guyana, the end of chattel slavery
+in 1838 provides an opportunity to treat the first post-emancipation decade
+
+as an experience with free labour; and yet it was not until 1921 that direct
+legal coercion of labour gave way to more conventional relations between
+wage labour and capital. One can therefore argue that the transition from
+slave labour to free labour in Guyana lasted from 1838 to 1921. (The last
+indentured labourers arrived from India in 1917; all indentures expired in
+1921.)
+In each of the contexts above, the term transition is legitimately
+employed, and yet there is the disconcerting possibility that approached in
+this way all history may be characterized as transition from one stage to
+another. To avoid tautology and trivialization, it is clearly essential to assign
+a narrow timespan to the concept as it relates to contemporary social
+change. Further, limiting the duration of transformation implies an
+accelerated rate of change.
+Whatever the context, the state of transition can only be established by
+inference. It is a link between two historical epochs, and it incorporates
+elements of both the old and the new. By definition, the state of transition
+lacks unique, classical or sharply outlined features. All of this is being
+conceded in the present analysis, without prejudice to the premise that it is
+meaningful to utilize the term with regard to modem developing societies
+(each of which possesses its own specificity) only if transition is a brief
+interlocking rather than an amorphous and protracted phase. Transition,
+then, constitutes a transitory phase between two epochs.
+The moment of transition is determined by contradictions in the
+preceding era. The presumption is that the contradictions have reached a
+point of maturity and their resolution necessarily implies a qualitatively
+different situation. It is for this reason that transition is a brief period of
+intensified activity when new social forms triumph over the old in a context
+of sharp struggle. Transition is analogous to the older Marxist philosophical
+term ‘leap,’ as the point at which evolution and quantitative change gives
+face to revolution and qualitative change. Thereafter, the evolutionary rate
+of change once again applies. Contemporary transition implies a leap or
+(better still) a series of leaps, in material production, social relations and
+consciousness all taking place within a circumscribed period of time and
+acting in a self-reinforcing manner.
+It is the contention here that Marxism provides the single consistent
+worldview for a resolution of the problems of transition. Long-term and
+relentless social forces have made transitional monopolies the characteristic
+
+and dominant form of capitalism. Transnational capital (which is of course
+imperialist) has socialized the means of production far beyond the point
+identified by Lenin in the early part of the twentieth century.
+Simultaneously, transitional capital has concentrated the control of surplus
+into fewer and fewer (private) hands, and it has set up an international
+division of labour that is inherently unstable and crisis-ridden. Meanwhile,
+proletarian and peasant alliances have affected socialist revolutions in
+several countries. However incomplete and distorted these socialist
+revolutions may be, the countries concerned have made the leap from
+theory to practice as far as socialism is concerned, and they are enmeshed in
+a set of social contradictions different from those prevailing in the
+capitalist/imperialist world. Within the underdeveloped sections of the
+capitalist world, certain social forces operate in a manner that sustains
+capitalist/ imperialist production relations, while others favour the
+resumption of material production at a higher level under the aegis of the
+working class guided by socialist ideology. The latter option provides the
+setting for that moment of historical change that will usher in a new society.
+In this connection, transition in the contemporary Third World should be
+unambiguously identified as ‘the transition to socialism’.
+In practice, the transition to socialism has always been attempted under
+inherited conditions of material and social backwardness and powerful
+external constraints. Socialist revolutions have been initiated with poor
+technology, they have been conducted where the proletariat has barely
+crystallized, they have carried the load of transforming pre-capitalist social
+formations, and they have been faced with the alliance between local
+propertied classes and the bourgeoisie of the epicentres of imperialism. This
+was true of the Soviet Union and China; it holds true in greater measure for
+Cuba, Vietnam, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Mozambique and any other excolony where internal contradictions place socialism on the agenda, both as
+the ultimate goal and as the means of transformation.
+The anti-colonial movement as a whole (most of which was nonsocialist) must be given credit for reopening the discussion on development
+and transition – a discussion which first appeared in explicit fashion with
+the emergence of the Soviet Union after the First World War. Interestingly
+enough, the heightened consciousness of change in the post-colonial world
+gave rise to an African journal with the name Transition, which was once
+extremely popular among the intelligentsia on that continent. The
+
+reoccurrence of the title in Guyana is more than just coincidence. It attests
+to similarity of objective and subjective conditions, for the rapid dissolution
+of aspects of the old order of colonialism forces consideration of the
+possibilities of qualitatively changed societies. Throughout the 1960s and
+1970s, the debate on social transformation has been extended to virtually
+every part of the globe, but it has not necessarily been made more
+penetrating. On the contrary, transition and development have been given
+the vaguest of definitions, and the urgency of revolution has been muted
+until indistinguishable from the timelessness of evolution. In part, these
+tendencies have to do with lack of clarity in defining the stage of advanced
+imperialism that has come to prevail; while above all they stem from
+bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interpretations of the historical stages
+which lie ahead.
+All classes and strata within the anti-colonial nationalist movements
+identified alien domination as a negative feature within the world society
+which was in the process of dissolution. Nationalist class alliances have
+virtually demolished the old political superstructure of global imperialism.
+Beyond this point, there can be no unanimity at the national level. The
+presence of conflicting classes in Third World countries means that there
+can be no agreement on identifying capitalism and imperialism as the
+sustaining elements of the Old World Order. Vested interests therefore
+inevitably deny that transition and development necessitate the demise of
+capitalism and imperialism. It is the contention here that exploitative classes
+propose pseudo-solutions to the problems of development. There is no real
+problematic of transition outside the framework of the transition to
+socialism. A working-class solution offers a revolutionized society; all other
+proposals modify or extend to greater or lesser degree the system of
+production and reproduction based on the commoditization of labour power
+and the alienation of surplus labour.
+The post-colonial world is too differentiated to be reduced to any single
+neo-colonial stereotype. Nevertheless, at one end of the spectrum, there is
+the classic neo-colonialism of states which have barely altered their
+politico-military dependence on the former colonizing powers and which
+have strengthened their ties with international capitalism on the
+conventional basis of private ownership of the means of production. In such
+instances – for example Malaysia, Zaire, Trinidad and Tobago – the
+departure of the colonial administrations has been followed by rapid
+
+reconstitution of the local bourgeois and petty bourgeois into transnational
+capitalist production. Technology transfers, moderate shifts in the
+international division of labour and the increasing hegemony of the US and
+Japan are some of the novel features of the classical neo-colonial tendency;
+but of course the result is the intensification of something which is centuries
+old: namely, capitalist accumulation on a global scale. For the rest of this
+analysis, attention will be focused only on those conditions and strategies
+which at least offer the appearance that they mark the beginning of a new
+social era.
+In several Third World countries, the idea of a ‘mixed economy’ has
+been presented in a very attractive format. A private sector, a state-owned
+sector and a sector of joint ventures would ensure the best of both worlds
+and would itself constitute a new entity defined as socialism of a special
+type – see the works of Leopold Senghor, for instance. The fact that these
+ideas have been most ardently propounded by the ruling class in countries
+such as Senegal and Singapore is far from reassuring, given that these two
+states function integrally and comfortably within the imperialist framework.
+Whether the political leadership of Senegal or Singapore had any intention
+of building socialism is highly debatable; but, conscious intention apart, the
+transition to socialism could not have been affected by a few piddling
+measures of government participation in an economy that remained firmly
+located within the international capitalist system. The ‘mixed economy’ is
+at best a logical fallacy when it is not a deliberate smokescreen for
+bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interests. Transition must necessarily
+have mixed features of capitalist relics and embryonic socialism, but the
+latter would exist in a position of dominance. Transformation would
+therefore involve the inexorable displacement of the last legacies of
+capitalism.
+A number of Third World countries have declared themselves adherents
+or discoverers of one species of socialism or another. Where there is a
+verbal commitment to the transition to socialism, it requires greater
+scrupulousness to see whether what is proposed is indeed transition.
+Tanzania’s Ujamaa socialism is one of the more revealing experiences. The
+socialist Arusha Declaration was announced some twelve years ago, in
+1967; the implementation has been carried out by a government which
+commands respect in the Third World, and a significant body of literature
+has accumulated on Ujamaa socialism. One of the most recent and carefully
+
+documented studies of the Ujamaa village collectives in Tanzania casts
+serious doubt on whether the process of socialist transition has yet been
+initiated within the countryside. The principal reasons for this adverse
+judgement are as follows:
+• the low level of production and productivity of the agricultural cooperatives (that is, Ujamaa farms);
+• the stagnation and regression of the co-operative sector in attracting
+labour;
+• the failure of the co-ops to provide a basis for improved agricultural
+technology; and
+• the bureaucratization rather than democratization of decision-making
+in the villages.
+The researchers Mapolu and Philipson located the fundamental problem
+not within the villages themselves but in the political framework, which is
+not firmly based on those classes with the greatest objective interest in
+transformation: that is, the peasantry and working class. The questions of
+productive forces, social organization, ideology, state and class were all
+touched upon in an attempt to explain why socialist development/transition
+had failed to get under way in the Tanzanian instance. The premises of the
+assessment were made explicit:
+Since the development of the productive forces specifically includes the development of the
+general abilities of the producers themselves, co-operation should enable progressive ideas
+to take root more firmly in all aspects of peasant life; and through co-operative selfmanagement and decision-making, give the direct producers more control over the state
+apparatus at the local level, thus enhancing their participation in running the economy at a
+national level.
+Co-operation … takes on its class characteristics from the general strategy of
+development in which it is inserted, which is in turn an expression of the interests of the
+ruling class (or alliance of classes) in each particular social formation.
+The low level of production and the rate of progress in rural Tanzania cannot be
+explained outside an analysis of the existing social structure and of the manner in which the
+economy is linked to the international capitalist economy. Hence the fact that this particular
+policy has not proved to be a substantial basis upon which improvement in rural production
+could be generated arises from the failure of the policy to address itself to the fundamental
+problems of social structure and economic integration. In essence, therefore, the issue is
+really political: to be able to sufficiently mobilise and organise the masses in a manner which
+would extricate the economy from its domination and exploitation by international
+capitalism, requires a class base and an ideological perspective which hardly a single African
+government can be credited with at present.
+
+The cogent formulation above allows us to advance the understanding
+of transition, with particular reference to its political facets. The necessity
+for social change in the Third World arises out of a conjuncture of
+contradictions in the system of capitalist/imperialist production. But the
+appreciation of this necessity and its historical implementation requires the
+political organization of those social classes with an objective interest in the
+overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a society freed from the
+exploitation of labour. The leap from evolution within capitalism to
+evolution within socialism is no mere spontaneous process. It involves
+changing levels of consciousness, building working-class organization and
+self-discipline, and above all the revolutionizing of the state and hence the
+character of all subsequent social and political intervention.
+The struggle for national independence often nurtured euphoric hopes
+that in the post-independence period national development would virtually
+take care of itself. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things else
+will be added thereunto’ was a famous dictum of Kwame Nkrumah’s. It
+presupposed that the contradictions which undermined colonialism, and
+which therefore forced imperialism to alter its political form, would also
+force an alteration of its social, cultural and economic substance. However,
+imperialism has proved itself far more powerful and resilient in the
+periphery than had been suggested in interpretations of ‘moribund
+capitalism’. The local petty bourgeois, comprador classes became more and
+more marginalized after independence. Such a context was hardly
+propitious for initiating transition; and the Third World states aimed at
+modifying the international division of labour so as to promote the
+indigenous bourgeoisie. An examination of the development plans of the
+great majority of independent African and Caribbean states discloses almost
+identical provisions for nurturing domestic private capital; and the growth
+of indigenous capital has been registered in all Third World countries,
+alongside of the pauperization of workers, peasants and lumpenproletariat.
+The emergence of the indigenous bourgeoisie may create tensions with
+respect to the established multinational capitalists; yet the new class in the
+periphery contributes to the reproduction of capital and of capitalist social
+relations on a global scale. The coming into being of such a class has been
+welcomed by institutions such as the World Bank, and one has grave
+difficulties in identifying the strategy of indigenous capitalist growth with
+any variant of socialism whatsoever.
+
+Non-Marxian versions of socialism often deny the existence of classes
+or at any rate deny the central dynamic imparted to society by antagonistic
+class contradictions. Even seemingly anti-imperialist leadership – as in
+Ghana and Tanzania – has espoused this position. Meanwhile, the reality
+has been that the petty bourgeoisie has consolidated itself as a class. A
+programme of development which denies the independent existence of the
+working class and the peasantry is unable to mobilize these classes in their
+own interests or to make them the leading classes within the state.
+Conversely, the same denial of class formation enables the petty
+bourgeoisie and the comprador bourgeoisie to take state control – first
+surreptitiously and then brazenly – on the abscess of their greater sense of
+organization during the nationalist phase of anti-colonial struggle.
+The options which the petty bourgeoisie and allied strata may pursue in
+relation to international capital vary from joint ventures to the
+nationalization of foreign and domestic capital. Obviously, there is a
+difference between the uninhibited private enterprise in Trinidad or
+Morocco and the attempted state ownership in Guyana and Algeria.
+However, it is quite remarkable how the instances of state intervention have
+failed to produce any substantial improvements in living patterns as far as
+the mass of direct producers are concerned. Even more remarkable is the
+tendency towards instant reversal of such progressive objectives as might
+have been secured by the nationalist mass base at an earlier period. A
+progressive foreign policy, for instance, has been known to change into its
+opposite virtually overnight. Transition is movement in a given direction –
+it is not a shuttle service. Yet, ownership of the means of production has
+been transferred from private hands to the state and then back again to
+private hands – in Indonesia, in Egypt, in Ghana. One could say that,
+objectively, the period of state ownership merely served to guarantee that
+some section of the indigenous population would be better prepared to
+undertake the role of small and medium-sized private capitalists in the era
+of the multinational giants.
+There is one particularly troubling question in evaluating those
+‘progressive’ countries that differ in some respects from the classic neocolonial states. Have they begun to chart a new course which is antiimperialist and non-capitalist or is it that they represent socio-political
+formations which capitalism can accommodate and welcome? Advanced
+sectors of French capitalism are quite reconciled to the Algerian
+
+‘experiment’; the World Bank finds it useful to associate with the Tanzanian
+petty bourgeoisie; North American mining capital has given the stamp of
+approval to the Guinean regime; and with respect to Guyana, the American
+state ignores the application of its own recently designed ‘human rights’
+criteria. The implication is that imperialism has not yet been stretched to the
+limit of its potential. It will accommodate states that have taken steps
+against foreign private property in response to internal and external forces,
+provided the new juridical property relations affect neither the long-term
+contribution of the country to global capitalist accumulation and provided
+the state continues to guarantee class differentiation. The crucial variable is
+the composition of the state. Any given Third World country is at least
+arguably transitional when the classes and strata which were pre-eminent in
+the colonial period begin to lose their control over the means of production
+and the state. To put it another way, the movement towards socialism
+demands a prior constitution of the working class into the state so that the
+state would increasingly reflect the role of the working class in production.
+States with different class bases may concur with respect to some
+policies of national development. Changes in the international economy, for
+instance, are being advocated by all Third World nations. The accumulating
+petty bourgeoisie concurs with realists among the leading bourgeois
+spokesmen, who admit that the old international order cannot survive with
+the same form and content; hence the calls for a new international economic
+order and for the initiating of a so-called North/South dialogue. In effect,
+the strains of imperialism in its present stage demand partial change if there
+is to be a new lease of life. Marxists and working-class intellectuals have
+long called for revamping the international economic order. They can claim
+to have been more resolute and consistent in working for such changes, and
+have realistically pressed for the best of the short-term arrangements even
+within the strictures set up by agreements such as the Lomé Convention.1
+However, working-class objectives are more far reaching than those
+adjustments that give breathing space to accumulating classes on the
+periphery of capitalism. After all, it is from the perspective of alienated
+labour in the Third World that the operations of the old international order
+are most intolerable. It is only a working-class state that will revolutionize
+social reproduction within its own boundaries and simultaneously
+contribute to the final dismantling of global imperialism.
+
+By implication, the leap towards socialism is inseparable from the
+conscious intentions of working-class leadership made manifest through the
+state. All historical leaps have not been consciously directed. On the
+contrary, passages from one mode of production to another previous to
+socialism have been the result of forces that were improperly understood
+even by the main classes in the drama. The bourgeois class could hardly
+have been said to have directed the early formation of capitalist society.
+Socialism is unique because of the highly developed consciousness of the
+two combatant classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Social relations
+in Third World countries today cannot be changed independently of men’s
+will. Conscious decisions have to be taken to change the forces of
+production (including the size, skill and composition of the working class),
+the relations of production and the mediation of those relations by the state.
+Of course, ‘conscious intentions’ mean much more than mere statements or
+ideological declamations. Verbal adherence to Marxism in CongoBrazzaville, Guinea, Somalia and Ethiopia has accompanied social
+developments indistinguishable from those in states where there has been
+an explicit rejection of the theory of class contradictions: that is to say,
+Marxist intellectuals have been silenced, workers’ representatives have
+been eliminated and the working class as a whole excluded from democratic
+participation in social reconstruction. For transition to have validity, it must
+include the widespread promotion of socialist education without caricature,
+and it must rest firmly on workers’ democracy.
+The contradictions within the imperialist system and between
+imperialism and socialism provide the objective basis for the passage to
+socialism in dependent capitalist countries. This has to be reiterated and
+then qualified by the equally important variable of action by classconscious elements. Transition therefore equates with guided
+transformation; it means social policy directed by the working class in its
+own interest. Broad and challenging possibilities are opened up by the
+notion of workers’ democracy, which has relevance both at the point of
+production and within the several levels and branches of the state. It should
+also be clear that such transition would allocate meaningful roles to strata
+which are closely or potentially allied to the working class: above all, the
+peasantry as well as independent craftsmen, shopkeepers, the lower salariat,
+students, technocrats and other intellectuals. The scope of the present
+discourse does not permit elaboration of the complex interrelated problems
+
+that have to be resolved once the process of transition is under way. In the
+final analysis, comprehensive answers will be forthcoming through social
+practice and attempted transformation.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+16
+Decolonization
+When dealing with such a broad topic in a short time, one automatically
+runs the risk of being extremely superficial. Consequently, I will
+concentrate my attention on one particular hypothesis, attempting to draw
+certain correlations between colonialism and neo-colonialism, and will
+illustrate the hypothesis with reference primarily to Southern Africa.
+If we look at the UN Committee on Decolonization, we find that the
+committee is concerned at the present time with countries such as the
+Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, the French and the
+Cameroon Islands and the French territories of the Afars and the Issas of
+Africa.1 They are concerned, in other words, with the remnants of formal
+colonialism. That is what decolonization means in that particular context, to
+terminate the formal, colonial rule of Africa.
+Many Africans and non-Africans would perhaps say that the subject is
+passé, for certainly that subject is less important and less pressing than the
+question of what one does with those states that are nominally independent
+on the African continent. In other words, for many people living in the
+African continent, the issue is not nearly or perhaps not principally freedom
+from formal colonial rule, but the enlargement of freedom within the states
+which are juridically independent. And that means, of course, confronting
+the neo-colonial providence that has been established in the wake of
+colonialism.
+My proposition is that those African states which are yet to win their
+independence – which are yet to be decolonized in the manner in which the
+UN Committee on Decolonization approaches the subject – are carrying
+through their struggle for independence at a time when other Africans and
+other peoples elsewhere are carrying through a struggle against neo-
+
+colonialism. And this overlap, this interpenetration of the existence of
+colonialism with the existence of neo-colonialism clearly affects the
+character of decolonization in a number of ways.
+It affects the character of the decolonization of those states which are
+still formally non-independent, which are still formally colonies, and it
+affects the character of decolonization in those areas which are normally
+colonies. It is this particular interrelationship of contemporary Africa that I
+would like to examine briefly.
+My starting point would be the so-called territories of Portuguese Africa
+in the 1960s, now the independent countries of Mozambique, Angola and
+Guinea-Bissau. But in the late 1960s and the early 1970s the independence
+movements were developing in all three of these territories one of the
+characteristics discernable in the writings of leaders such as Amilcar Cabral
+in Guinea-Bissau before his assassination, Samora Machel in Mozambique
+and Agostinho Neto in Angola. One of the characteristics was a concern
+with looking at those states in Africa which were already nominally
+independent. But the programme for decolonization or liberation of Angola,
+Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, respectively, was, in part, dependent upon
+a pattern already set by independent African countries. There was a
+yardstick. Angola could look to Zaire, Mozambique could look to Zambia,
+Guinea-Bissau could look to Guinea and it could look to Senegal and ask
+itself what was happening in these supposedly independent African
+countries and whether the pattern of change represented the type of goals,
+the type of society that they in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique
+should be struggling for. There was a pattern; there was a blueprint. There
+was an actual objective, historical situation with which they could compare,
+which did not exist, of course, in the earlier period of decolonization.
+Then, my argument is that what was programmed in Angola and in
+Guinea-Bissau was, in fact, determined by the prior access to independence
+by a number of other African countries, and the illustration of what
+independence could mean in an African country. You may easily test this
+for yourself in the writings of the aforementioned political leaders. They
+would say time and again our struggle is not merely to replace the
+Portuguese; our struggle is not merely to stain the structures of exploitation
+and replace white maintainers or white supervisors of that structure with
+black maintainers of the same structure. They would continually indicate
+that it is more than the need to raise a glass and celebrate a national anthem
+
+that the people of Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were
+struggling for, and it seems to me that it is a very important dimension of
+the evolution of thought and action and organization within the liberated
+territories of what used to be Portuguese Africa.
+Of course, there are people engaged in armed struggle who are making,
+very often, the maximum sacrifice of life, making the sacrifice of limbs,
+making the sacrifice of being uprooted from their homes. Such people had
+to be more careful in defining goals that would be considered the goals of
+decolonization. In a previous era, it was permissible and understandable
+that people merely said we are struggling for independence, which means
+freedom from the white man’s rule. It was permissible, but at a later stage,
+when this freedom was supposedly achieved in a number of African
+countries, then the material conditions of life did not radically alter. And
+then the cultural conditions were not radically transformed. And then the
+social structure, the political structure was merely transformed only insofar
+as it allowed a new possessing class to take control. Then, people in other
+parts of Africa began to wonder whether this was the kind of state and
+society for which they were making these tremendous sacrifices. And by
+and large their answer was no. No one in Angola and Mozambique and
+Guinea-Bissau could be mobilized to sustain that tremendous people’s war
+on the basis of simply saying we want to be like the other African states
+which have gained their independence.
+And the deepening of the appreciation that undoubtedly took place in
+Portuguese Africa was in part dictated by the logic of the armed struggle,
+but it was also partially influenced by what decolonization supposedly
+meant in these other parts of Africa. I believe in Zimbabwe the situation is
+bound to be the same thing; that if for the sake of argument in 1964 when
+Smith unilaterally declared independence on behalf of the white settlers of
+Rhodesia, if, at that date, the British had had the power and will to organize
+the transition and the handover to black rule, they would have given the
+government over to Zanu and Zapu. They would have given the
+government over to the masses in Matabeleland and Harare. And the pattern
+which would have emerged in Zimbabwe from 1964 until now could not
+have been radically different from the pattern that has evolved in Zambia
+from independence until the present date because the leadership is from the
+same social structure; the leadership did not indicate that it had any other
+ideological presence other than that which others had in Zambia. And the
+
+vast majority of the population – the peasantry, the workers, the transient
+workers and permanent workers in the farms and mines – were not yet
+involved as participants in that movement for national independence. And
+therefore, to my mind, in 1964 a transition to independence which we may
+call decolonization, would have meant something radically different from
+what decolonization means today in the era of neo-colonialism? The
+existence of neo-colonialism is there as a guide which transforms the
+character of the demands and the expectations of those involved as far as
+decolonization is concerned.
+Today in Zimbabwe the masses of the population have already been
+involved in part in carrying through a political struggle which had to be
+sustained while it was illegal, and in carrying through a political struggle
+that has a very significant armed component, having been raised to the level
+of an armed people’s war; it means that there are so many dimensions
+which have been enlarged, including primarily the political dimension and
+the dimension of popular participation. So, for Zimbabwe to be decolonized
+today, it requires, of course, the removal of Smith as it would have required
+in 1964, but it requires more than that. It requires that the Zimbabwean
+people should make certain kinds of choices about the options which are
+being presented by the leadership – and if, as seems to be the case, most of
+the leadership which survives the original, earlier era, has lost touch with
+the sensibilities and the demands of the Zimbabwean people in this process
+of learning, then that leadership automatically becomes outdated. And there
+will have to be new leadership, new structures, new demands which reflect
+the contemporary period. So this is the change that is being wrought, in
+part, by the interpretation of the stages of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
+More than that, to the peoples of Zimbabwe we can add Namibia and
+the Republic of South Africa, who are all colonized in the old, traditional
+sense, and are also in a position to witness certain changes taking place on
+the African continent which indicate that, after all, the political rule
+characteristic of colonialism was only one facet – and at that, a rather
+superficial element within the pattern of imperialism – and that colonial rule
+as a political phenomenon was, of course, reflective of much deeper forces
+of penetration into the African continent – forces which actually intervened
+in transforming the mode of production within Africa and in transforming
+the social relations within Africa, forces which went beyond the mere
+political boundaries as established by the British, the French, the Belgians,
+
+Italians, and so on. And today I believe these forces can be seen more
+clearly because the facade of political rule has been removed in many
+territories, and the reality of economic exploitation exposed for all to see.
+One can see, for example, that not only with the end of colonialism has
+there been a clear rise of the forces such as the multinational corporations
+acting now as the new links, as the new forms for guaranteeing the export
+of surplus; but one can see that there has always been an underlying,
+economic partition and a continuing economic repartition which has gone
+on during the colonial period and is even more marked today. And this
+again, I believe, gives some new dimensions to what decolonization must
+mean because decolonization in the early epoch meant dealing with the
+political power which had formal control over one’s political system. The
+British at Westminster controlled the territory, then decolonization meant
+going to the British and demanding that such political rule be withdrawn.
+But decolonization today means going to these economic command
+centres of the capitalist world-system and recognizing that one has to break
+the particular character of the connections that exist with those command
+centres, and therefore enter the United States of America. The US has never
+been a colonial power on the African continent, but always lying somewhat
+in the shadow, lying somewhat in the background behind French, British
+and Belgian colonialism. American capital has emerged in various parts of
+Africa but particularly in the southern section from Zaire southwards to the
+Cape behind the cover provided by the Portuguese, the Belgians, the British
+in Rhodesia and the South African government in Namibia and the
+Republic of South Africa.
+There was a continual process of economic repartition in so far as the
+United States was constantly gaining at the expense of other colonial
+powers, in their share of the African trade, in this share of the investment in
+Africa and of the profits which were being repatriated from Africa. This
+process was highlighted by the development of the Anglo-American
+corporation in the inter-war years and in the full galaxy of multinational
+corporations in the post-war years. The United States has clearly come in a
+crooked position where it is now hegemonic within this economic partition
+of Southern Africa. It has quite clearly taken over from the Portuguese;
+quite a while ago it took over the leadership from the Belgians and the
+French in the old Congo, the Republic of Zaire, and it has for long time
+been bolstering and supporting the British in the Republic of South Africa,
+
+and has clearly taken the lead from the British in South African
+investments. So that economic repartition is a very significant element
+because the peoples of Southern Africa today in speaking about
+decolonization have not merely to look to their colonial power or the white
+settler minority which is resident; it has to look beyond that and ask what
+forces sustain the particular mode of production, what sources sustain the
+mine labour and the farm labour, what forces sustain the particular ways in
+which Southern Africa is integrated into the capitalist world-system. And
+the principal forces which sustain this happen to reside within the most
+developed capitalist sectors of this economy, the multinational or
+transnational sector.
+The entry of the United States into the diplomatic realm and the
+political manoeuvrings around Zimbabwe and around Angola and the
+Republic of South Africa is ample testimony to the fact that the United
+States has been forced to assume this hegemony, taking over the political
+role of policing Southern Africa from the British who are no longer capable
+of so doing.
+It seems to me then if we’re going to enlarge the meaning of
+decolonization, one of the most useful ways of doing so is precisely to lay
+side by side these two modalities of colonialism and neo-colonialism and
+recognize that in the process of carrying through a struggle for
+decolonization in the formal territories, one is automatically guided by the
+transition taking place in the continent as a whole – which includes, of
+course, those areas that are supposed to be independent. I would go further;
+it works the other way. The reverse is also true, that in a territory which is
+supposedly independent, looking at the total configuration inside of
+Southern Africa where the Africans of Southern Africa are fighting against
+apartheid, seemingly against apartheid alone, where the people of
+Zimbabwe are fighting for independence. Those in the rest of Africa can
+well ask themselves what are the principal contradictions manifested on our
+continent today, and they will know those contradictions go far beyond the
+old formulations of mere political rule. Someone looking at the
+configuration in Southern Africa from territories such as Tanzania, Kenya,
+Uganda and Nigeria and the like, such an individual must be able to
+recognize that the confrontation and the contradictions are much broader,
+much deeper than the confrontation which they themselves in the
+
+independent African states might have considered to be the most important
+during the 1960s.
+One takes a look at the economic structures to recognize that there is no
+way to speak about decolonization without talking about the recovery of the
+national resources, for instance. Yet, the question of recovering the national
+resources has really only been posed in the period subsequent to political
+independence, and it still remains a legitimate concern for decolonization.
+So, we have to be careful with the use of language here, or we will wrap
+ourselves in some knots. We now, therefore, have to recognize the
+continuum of change and recognize that political independence was merely
+a moment, and perhaps not necessarily a very important moment in a
+totality of transformation which we might call decolonization, and that the
+territory which has achieved political independence, if not necessarily
+perhaps to lose the terminology of the colony, at the very least we must
+retain the title of neo-colonial until we can see more fundamental changes
+taking place. And if those changes are going to take place at the level of the
+economic structure, there are those of us who would argue that they must
+automatically take place also within the class structures because economies
+of formally colonial or neo-colonial territories must be sustained by some
+social mechanisms. They don’t operate in a vacuum. There are specific
+social classes which represent, first of all, the links between external capital
+and the indigenous labour, and there are local classes that are emerging
+which are consolidating their own strength vis-à-vis other sectors of the
+African people, usually by consolidating around the state apparatus and
+securing a large portion of the goods and services that are being produced
+within the economy. And, therefore again because of the conjunction of
+stages, one is forced to ask more profound questions than a nationalist or a
+decolonizer might have asked a decade ago. One has to give a social
+content, an ideological content to the programme for decolonization.
+Whereas decolonization was, some years ago understood as Africanization,
+one now has to talk about socialism as an integral part – not a later stage –
+of the very process of decolonization itself. Without speaking about
+reorganizing the class relations within Africa, one is not in fact addressing
+oneself to cutting the reproduction of capitalism as it has reproduced itself
+in Africa over the last five decades or more.
+It seems then that when Cabral, who was writing within the period of
+struggle when he had not yet got rid of formal colonial rule, said, ‘we
+
+regard it as indispensable, as an indispensable prerequisite for national
+independence that we should have recovery of our national resources’, he
+had reached a level of analysis which is only now being reached by many
+Africans within independent Africa who had postponed the question of the
+recovery of economic resources as though it were not relevant to the phase
+of decolonization. But to someone like Amilcar Cabral, and to Samora
+Machel and to Agostinho Neto, and hopefully we would see to some of the
+Zimbabwe nationalists such as Mugabe, the question of recovery of the
+national resources is one of the items that has to be placed on the agenda in
+the present phase of the achievement of political independence. They have
+to organize political movements which are in themselves more
+participatory, more representative of the mass of the common people in
+their own territories, and therefore at the moment of the conquest of state
+power these systems will incorporate an element of participation that will
+allow the mass of these mobilized cadres to operate in a situation where at
+least there will be layers of grassroots leadership prepared with both
+political education as well as the arms which may be necessary to combat
+the deformation that takes place under neo-colonial domination.
+To be concrete, let’s look at the example of FRELIMO.2 This was a
+system which did not initially conquer the state power of the Portuguese.
+Rather it began to create and initiate systems of political participation and
+political organization and civilian administration in the liberated areas
+which at least represent a counter to the alienation which one would find
+when you inherit the state structure that was left by the colonialists, so that I
+can assure that when one inherits the state structure of colonialism, one
+merely becomes a tool of that colonialism. It is not that such a structure can
+become the tool of independent Africans, but rather the structure becomes
+the determinant and the African rulers become mere participants in the
+same type of capitalist and authoritarian structure. And it seems to me that
+in those parts of Africa which are still struggling for independence, they
+have the opportunity – given these lessons from so-called independent
+Africa, from neo-colonial Africa – to deal with issues which have not at all
+been posed in the earlier phase.
+And I conclude with a look at the independent states which are aiding
+the liberation movements of Southern Africa. One rough yardstick that
+indicates the level or extent to which an African state has been decolonized
+in any profound way is the extent to which that African state is capable of
+
+entering into meaningful relations with the liberation movements. That is to
+say, outside of Southern Africa it is not an accident that the most
+conservative, the most reactionary states are the ones which have
+consistently failed to give any meaningful support to the liberation
+movements. They all start from the premise of national liberation. Yet, they
+are incapable of and unwilling to give support to the liberation movements.
+They are the ones who always drag their feet with regard to contributions to
+the OAU Liberation Committee.3 They are the ones that always put
+obstacles in the way of any of the more progressive sectors of the liberation
+movements. They are the ones, who around Angola, prevaricated and
+delayed and manipulated to try and avoid the recognition of the MPLA,4
+and instead, to introduce the government which incorporated UNITA5 and
+the FNLA6 as spokesman of the imperialism interest so that one can use this
+almost as a touchtone, the formal independent African state. What attitude
+does it take towards the independent states that are struggling for formal
+colonialism? To them, if Southern Africa were to become independent in
+exactly the same way as Zambia or Kenya is independent, then that is good
+enough.
+I spoke, for example, with a representative of the OAU Liberation
+Committee who said at the time – when it was clear that the Portuguese
+were about to be defeated – that as far as they were concerned in
+Mozambique, the task of the Liberation Committee was at an end. They
+couldn’t care less to whom the Portuguese gave independence because the
+Portuguese were manoeuvring to try and give independence to some other
+organizations in Mozambique, in Guinea-Bissau and in Angola too. And
+this official was saying that it was okay with him. He said, ‘we are not
+concerned with who is going to rule and how they are going to rule. We are
+only concerned with freedom; that is decolonization.’ Such officials and
+such elements of the African ruling class in independent African countries
+would prefer to see an independence that is merely nominal, because the
+Mozambique that FRELIMO is striving for is something more than merely
+nominal independence and threatens not just the Republic of South Africa
+but threatens the elites of independent Zambia too. And it threatens Malawi
+by virtue of the fact that there are some sorts of social confirmations taking
+place in this state but not in their own.
+
+Let us sharpen our awareness of what is to be done in Southern Africa,
+as well as what is to be done in independent Africa, by recognizing that the
+definition of decolonization is itself undergoing transformation – that it is
+becoming richer and deeper because of people’s struggles, because of the
+life experience of Africans in various parts of the continent; and by
+recognizing that, in effect, decolonization is going to be inseparable from a
+total strategy for liberation that encompasses a control of the material
+resources, which encompasses a restructuring of the society so that those
+who produce have the principal say in how their wealth is going to be
+distributed. These essentials would have to be taken into account when we
+consider decolonization in any part of the African continent, and indeed
+outside, although that is not our concern at the present time.
+
+This eBook is licensed to Ryan Deason, iatemoreearth@gmail.com on 08/02/2022
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+At the outset, before anything else is written, we need openly to
+acknowledge how difficult it has been for us to come to terms with the
+undeniable fact that Walter Rodney, our brother, friend and comrade, is
+dead. On June 13, 1980, the author of this unparalleled work of historical
+analysis became the best-known victim of a systematic campaign of
+assasination and other forms of ruthless repression carried out by the
+governing authorities of his native land, Guyana.
+The end was predictable, for Walter had determined that the only path to
+true human development and liberation for the majority of the people of his
+country was through the transformation of their own lives in a struggle to
+replace and reshape the neo-colonialist government that dominated their
+society and prescribed their existence. However, Forbes Burnham, the
+President of Guyana, had made it clear on many occasions that, in this
+struggle for the minds and hearts of the people, he knew no limits in the
+determination to “exterminate the forces of opposition.” In the opinion of
+many, there is no doubt that the bomb that tore away the life of Walter
+Rodney was the result of Burnham’s deadly pledge.
+Hard as his death is to accept and absorb, we must begin here, not
+primarily for purposes of sentiment or political invective, but because no
+new introduction to How Europe Underveloped Africa is possible without a
+serious and direct encounter with Walter Rodney, the revolutionary scholar,
+the scholar-revolutionary, the man of great integrity and hope. For, more so
+than most books of its genre, this work is clearly imbued with the spirit, the
+intellect and the commitment of its author—both the man who produced the
+audacious and wide-ranging study before he was thirty, and the man who
+moved with an unswerving integrity to live out its implications in his
+relatively brief years.
+
+With Rodney the life and the work were one, and the life drives us back
+to recall the essential themes of the work. In spite of its title, this is not
+simply a work about European oppressors and African victims, serving
+primarily as a weapon to flay the exploiters and beat them at their own
+intellectual games. (Of course, it has done yeoman service in that limited
+role.) Rather, there is much more to this masterly survey, and at its deepest
+levels it offers no easy comfort to any of us.
+At one point, early in the book, Rodney summarizes its basic message:
+The question as to who, and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment can be
+answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears
+major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by
+making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has
+to deal with those who manipulated the system and those who are either agents or unwitting
+accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively
+extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa. In recent times,
+they were joined, and to some extent replaced, by the capitalists from the United States; and for
+many years now even the workers of those metropolitan countries have benefited from the
+exploitaiton and underdevelopment of Africa. (27–28)
+
+All this Walter supported with a profuse and creative set of precise
+examples from many sources, periods and places. Yet, he was not satisfied
+to pour well-documented blows upon the oppressors—though he was a
+master at this activity. Nor did it suffice to remind many of us who live in
+the United States that our blackness provides no exemption from our
+willing participation in the benefits of our country’s exploitation of Africa.
+Rather, his summary of the book’s central themes concluded with words
+that moved beyond accusation or guilt. He said,
+None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from
+the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there African accomplices inside the imperialist system,
+but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow.
+(28)
+
+Unlike many of us who read and write such words, Walter took them
+seriously. He knew that they were meant for him, for the children of Africa
+in the Caribbean and the United States of America; for Indians, Asians and
+many other sufferers at the hands of European-fueled underdevelopment.
+Indeed, he knew they were meant, too, for all those Europeans and
+Americans who claimed solidarity with the Third World struggle for
+development and liberation.
+
+Rodney envisioned and worked on the assumption that the new
+development of Africans and other dependent peoples of the “periphery”
+would require what he called “a radical break with the international
+capitalist system,” a courageous challenge to the failing “center” of the
+current world order. Of course, he also knew that any such break or serious
+contestation would participate in and precipitate profound revolutionary
+changes at the center itself. Thus, from his perspective, what was ultimately
+at stake, what was absolutely necessary was a fundamental transformation
+in the ordering of the political, cultural and economic forces that have
+dominated the world for almost half a millenium.
+This was an awesome vision, especially since Walter dared to say and
+believe that such a stupendous transformation must be initiated by Africans
+and other dwellers in the nether regions of exploitation and subordination.
+Nevertheless, he did not flinch from the implications of his own analysis.
+Instead, he continued—especially by his example—to encourage all of us to
+move toward a radically transformed vision of ourselves and of our
+capacities for changing our lives and our objective conditions. Quietly,
+insistently, he urged us to claim our full responsibility for engaging in the
+struggle for a new world order.
+No one could ignore Walters work, nor question his call, for he set the
+example by assuming his own part of the awesome responsibility. That is
+why he was in Guyana in June 1980. That is why he had been there since
+1974, developing the leadership of what was called the Working People’s
+Alliance (WPA), struggling to support his family, somehow finding time to
+carry on research and writing on the history of the working people of his
+country and other parts of the Caribbean. That is why he was murdered.
+In the midst of our sorrow and indignation none of us who knew Walter
+could honestly say that we were surprised by the news of his death. For his
+life carried a certain consistency and integrity that could not be ignored or
+denied. Indeed, in his relatively brief time certain patterns were established
+early. Born on March 13, 1942, Rodney grew up in Georgetown, the capital
+of what was then British Guiana. From the outset, he was part of a family
+that took transformational politics with great seriousness. His parents,
+especially his father, were deeply involved in the development of the
+Peoples Progressive Party (PPP). A multi-racial party, it was at the time the
+only mass political organization in the Caribbean that was opening the
+
+common people to the world of Marxist/Socialist thought, as well as raising
+the possibilities of alternative futures that might go beyond the mere
+establishment of independence within the British Commonwealth.
+So, even before he entered his teens, Walter was already engaged in
+leafletting, attending party meetings and absorbing the thousands of hours
+of political discussions that went on in his home. Then, when he entered
+Queens College, the highly regarded secondary school in Georgetown, the
+young political activist also became one of the “scholarship boys” so
+familiar to West Indian life at the time. Bright, energetic and articulate, he
+excelled in academics and sports (he broke his school record for the high
+jump), and when he won the coveted Guyana scholarship to the University
+College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, the traditional path to
+academic prestige and distinction was open to him.
+In 1963, Rodney graduated with first class honors in history from UCWI,
+and was awarded a scholarship to the University of London where he
+entered the School of Oriental and African Studies to work on his doctorate
+in African History. Walter’s political instincts and early nurturing would not
+allow him to settle into the safety of conventional academic life. Instead, the
+years in London (1963–1966) were among the most important of his
+continuing political and intellectual development. He immediately became
+part of a study group of younger West Indians who met regularly under the
+guidance of the man who was then the exemplar of the revolutionary
+intellectual, C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist scholar, best known for
+his history of the Haitian revolution, Black Jacobins.
+The experience with James and the study group was a crucial supplement
+to Rodney’s earlier exposure to the day-to-day life of radical Caribbean
+politics, and it was also an important source of grounding in intellectual
+reality as he moved through the sometimes surreal world of the academic
+community. By the time he left London for Tanzania in 1966, Rodney was
+prepared to write history from what he later described as “a revolutionary,
+socialist and people-centered perspective.��� (Within the boundaries of an
+academic thesis, his excellent dissertation: “A History of the Upper Guinea
+Coast, 1545–1800,” addressed itself to the subject from that perspective.)*
+During the 1966–67 academic year, Walter taught history at the
+University College in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In 1968, he returned to
+
+Jamaica to take a post in History at his alma mater and to develop what he
+planned to be a major program in African and Caribbean studies. More
+importantly, he wanted to test his convictions about the need for
+revolutionary intellectuals to remain grounded in the ongoing life of the
+people. Walter met with initial success in both of these endeavors, but it was
+precisely this success, especially in his work among the common people of
+the Jamaican streets, hills and gullies, that led to a drastic foreshortening of
+his stay in that country. In less than a year Rodney had come in touch with
+and helped articulate the profound discontent and unrest that filled the lives
+of the ordinary people of Jamaica, as well as many of the university
+students. As they began seriously to talk and listen together—to ground
+with one another—about the ways to organize for change, as they heard and
+pondered the implications of the powerful calls for Black Power rising in
+this country, it was obvious that a deep and unpredictable ferment was at
+work, and the conservative Jamaican government readily identified Walter
+as an undesirable foreign element. Thus, in October, 1968, while attending a
+Black Writer’s Conference in Montreal, Walter Rodney was officially
+expelled from Jamaica. The government action led to several days of protest
+in Kingston, but Rodney was kept out.
+It was this political activity, combined with his powerful participation in
+the Montreal conference, that first brought the twenty-six-year old
+Caribbean historian to the attention of many of us in the United States.
+Then, following the Jamaican government’s action, Walter’s fellow
+members of the C. L. R. James study group and other Caribbean activists
+based in London, pressed Walter for the opportunity to publish some of the
+lectures that he had delivered in Jamaica. With that purpose in mind they
+formed the Bogle-L’Ouverture Publishing House, and in 1969 brought out
+Walter’s first widely-read book, Groundings With My Brothers.* Walter
+returned to Dar es Salaam, teaching again at the University (1969–1972),
+while Groundings was making a profound impression on many people in
+this country, especially among those of us who were involved in the
+struggle for hegemony over the definitions of the black (and white)
+experience in the United States, a struggle temporarily crystallized in the
+Black Studies movement.
+
+Not surprisingly, it was at one of the many conferences spawned by that
+movement that Walter Rodney was first introduced to a major audience of
+Afro-Americans. In May, 1970, he participated in the second annual
+gathering of the African Heritage Studies Association at Howard
+University. While one of the contributors to this introduction (Robert Hill)
+had already met and worked with Walter at the University of the West
+Indies, the Howard conference provided the first opportunity for the other
+two of us.
+Like many persons at the conference, my first impression of this slightly
+built, soft-spoken, dark-skinned brother from Guyana was his capacity to
+speak without notes—and largely without rhetorical flourish—for more
+than an hour, and yet have his highly informative material so carefully and
+cogently organized that it would have been possible to take it directly from
+a transcript and publish it. Eventually, we discovered that this tremendous
+intellectual discipline (and political instinct) was matched by a disciplined
+force of spirit, a mastery of—but not slavery to—dialectical materialism,
+and an unflinching commitment to collective work on behalf of the
+wretched of the earth. All this was insulated from self-righteousness by a
+dry and ready sense of humor. In other words, it was clear to us that Walter
+Rodney was a moral, political and intellectual force to be reckoned with,
+one of Africa’s most beautiful children.
+From the point of our first encounter, we knew that we had met a brother,
+teacher and comrade. At the time of the Howard conference, Robert Hill,
+Bill Strickland and I were working with others in the development of the
+Institute of the Black World (IBW), an Atlanta-based center for research,
+publication and advocacy. Immediately, we began to explore with Walter
+some of the ways in which he might share with us in this experiment in
+collective intellectual work. As a result, in a series of visits he spent quiet,
+unhurried time among us. In our homes we also shared the company of his
+wife, Pat, and their lively children, Shaka, Knini and Asha.
+As our ties were being developed and cemented, the first edition of How
+Europe Underdeveloped Africa was jointly published by Bogle-L’Ouverture
+and the Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972. For all of those who could
+obtain copies of the work, it was like a mighty, uplifting gust of fresh air.
+Without romanticising pre-colonial Africa, Walter had placed it in the
+context of human development across the globe, traced its real historical
+
+relationships to the colonizing forces of Europe and suggested the path for
+Africa’s movement toward a new life for its people and a new role in the reshaping of the world.
+The book immediately struck an exciting and responsive chord among
+many in this country. Among politically-oriented black people it played
+something of the same formative role as Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the
+Earth almost a decade before. Indeed, both men were dealing with the
+ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism; both were calling for a break
+with the exploiting, ravaging system in order to move forward and create a
+new order. Both were living examples of the transformation they demanded.
+Like Fanon’s seminal work, Rodney’s also began from an
+African/Caribbean perspective, but we in the United States of America
+immediately recognized the global connection. Although Walter ended his
+primary historical analysis with the close of the 1950s, he nevertheless
+offered a brief, cogent and powerful treatment of the contemporary role of
+the United States in the exploitation of Africa, implicitly warning us against
+our own active or passive participation in that damaging work. But there
+were also connections perhaps even more directly related to the AfroAmerican struggles in the early 1970s, especially in his treatment of
+colonial and neo-colonial education and its effects on the African mind and
+spirit. For instance, Walter wrote, “In the final analysis, perhaps the most
+important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist
+individualism. . . . In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal
+value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the
+worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility.” (254–
+255)
+We Afro-Americans immediately recognized that condition. Indeed, one
+of the central themes of the movement for Black Studies and Black Power
+had been the call for social solidarity among black people and resistance to
+the destructive individualism of the mainstream American way of life. For
+we were painfully aware of the rising alienation among our young people as
+they moved ever more fully into the cultural flow of mass American society
+with its powerful networks of formal and informal mis-education. Thus, it
+was natural that those of us at the Institute of the Black World (IBW)
+invited Walter Rodney to participate with us in two projects directly related
+to those concerns. The first was as a contributor to a book-length
+
+monograph, Education and Black Struggle, that we organized and edited for
+Harvard Educational Review in 1974. His paper was on “Education in
+Africa and Contemporary Tanzania.”
+The second project was of a different nature. Early in 1974 Walter had
+received an appointment as professor and chairman of History at the
+University of Guyana. The appointment was considered a clear victory for
+Walter and his supporters, a vindication of his vision. We invited him to
+spend part of the summer in Atlanta with us before his return to Guyana. He
+spent more than a month at IBW, primarily in the development and
+leadership of a Summer Research Symposium. Colleagues from other parts
+of the nation and from the Caribbean joined us in the venture as we
+experimented with models for an educational program that would provide
+broader scope and new alternatives for young black people in colleges and
+universities across the country.* At the same time, in an act of vision and
+courage, the Howard University Press was publishing the first American
+edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
+The extended time that Walter spent at IBW that summer was critical to
+us all. It helped to crystallize much of our thinking about the role of black
+intellectuals in our own society, and the role that IBW might play in that
+development. Concurrently, it provided Walter with an opportunity to
+explore more deeply the implications of the unique black-American
+experience. Moreover, it brought us all into community with an exciting
+group of students and co-workers, and we looked forward to the many ways
+in which we could continue to work together with Walter in his new post at
+the University of Guyana.
+However, even before Walter left Atlanta, we had begun to receive
+signals that all was not well with the university appointment. By the time he
+arrived home the official word was given. At the last moment, in an
+unprecedented move, the appointment had been cancelled, apparently the
+result of pressure from the highest levels of government. From that point
+on, Walter Rodney, revolutionary-scholar, began once more to dig deeply
+into the soil of his native land. In spite of invitations and appeals from many
+places, he steadfastly refused to leave Guyana on any permanent basis.
+He had set himself two major tasks, both consistent with his definition of
+his role as a black intellectual who was committed to the liberation and
+
+development of his people. Both required his presence in Guyana. The first
+was to develop a major, multi-volume work on the history of the working
+people of his country. The second task (and this was all-encompassing) was
+to immerse himself in the contemporary life of those same people and
+search with them to find a way to resist the power of a government that had
+clearly betrayed their hopes and their trust, a government that now stood in
+the way of their development. In other words, Walter was still trying to deal
+with the neo-colonial implications of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,
+dauntlessly carrying the search for solutions to the center of his own life
+and the life of his nation. All the while, especially since Pat, his wife, had
+also been denied an opportunity to work at her profession of social welfare,
+Walter had to find ways to feed, clothe and house his family.
+Even though it was hard for some of us to imagine how he did it in spite
+of a situation of constantly heightening tension and danger, Walter managed
+to find time and energy to spend long hours in the Guyana National
+Archives and in the Caribbean Research Library at the University in
+Georgetown. In addition to a number of monographs, the ultimate fruit of
+that disciplined and sacrificial work will appear when the Johns Hopkins
+University Press publishes Walter’s History of the Guyanese Working
+People, 1881–1905. He also published during this period of intensified
+struggle an important text, Guyanese Sugar Plantations in the Late
+Nineteenth Century.
+Meanwhile, he continued to organize. Before 1974 was over Walter had
+helped to centralize the Working Peoples Alliance. This became his political
+base in the relentless struggle to build a force that would bring about the
+revolutionary transformation of the Guyanese society.
+With the help of many persons in the United States and other parts of the
+world, Walter found opportunities to lecture and teach in an attempt to keep
+in touch with his comrades outside of Guyana and to earn the funds his
+family needed. (James Turner, Director of the Africana Studies and
+Research Center at Cornell and Immanuel Wallerstein of the State
+University of New York at Binghamton, were especially helpful to those of
+us who were trying to organize these activities.)
+Whenever Walter travelled abroad, especially as the government’s
+repression increased, many friends urged him to leave Guyana and bring
+himself and his family to some place of relative safety. Walter’s response to
+
+us generally had two parts. First was his sense of the responsibility he had
+to his comrades and the people of Guyana. He said that he was working
+among them to encourage them in a fearless struggle for the transformation
+of themselves and their society, and that he could not leave simply because
+he happened to have ready access to the means of escape. Second, Rodney
+said he felt he had been singularly privileged in the broad set of contacts he
+had been able to establish in the course of his work and travels throughout
+the Third World. For him, this privilege carried with it a responsibility to
+continue to share with his people the content and spirit of that international
+network of women and men involved in liberation struggles. Thus, without
+any trace of a desire for martyrdom, but with a clear recognition of the
+situation he faced, Walter’s response was always the same: “It is imperative
+that I stay here.”
+Toward the end, all these dangers, hopes and tensions were concentrated
+in the events of one last, year-long outpouring of life and death. In June,
+1979, the WPA formally announced that it had transformed itself into a
+political party, one that would work untiringly for the overthrow of the
+strong-hold that Burnham’s Peoples National Congress had established in
+the country. In the following month, a government building in Georgetown
+was set afire and Walter and four other WPA members were among the
+eight persons arrested and charged with arson.* Because it was a
+government bulding, the charge was very serious. But it was also clear to
+many observers that the action was entirely set up as part of the measures
+for breaking the force of Rodney’s small but influential organization. On the
+day of the arraignment, Father Bernard Danke, a priest who was a reporter
+for the Catholic Standard, was fatally stabbed in the back as he stood
+observing a pro-WPA demonstration outside the court building. From that
+point on, a repressive situation deteriorated into what might be called a long
+night of official terrorism, including bombings, police beatings and
+escalating threats of “extermination” by Burnham against Walter and other
+leaders of the opposition WPA.
+By the end of February 1980, two of Walter’s close associates in the
+WPA, Ohene Koama and Edward Lublin, had been killed by the police,
+others shot and beaten; still others jailed, their houses raided, ransacked and
+bombed. By then, some of the leading members of the WPA were actually
+
+being held as political prisoners in Guyana, for their government refused
+them permission to leave the country. However, Rodney managed to get out
+in May 1980, accepting an invitation from the Patriotic Front to attend the
+independence ceremonies in Zimbabwe. Then Walter returned to Guyana,
+continuing to work in the Archives, to organize among the people. He had
+ominously told some of us in this country that we might not see him again.
+On June 2, the trial for arson began, witnesssed by concerned observers
+from the Caribbean, the United States and England. Within a few days it
+was clear that the government had no case and could not prosecute Rodney
+and his co-workers. As a result, on June 6, at the request of the government,
+the trial was adjourned until August 20.
+One week after the adjournment, on Friday evening, June 13, Walter was
+sitting in his brother’s car, waiting for Donald Rodney at the driver’s seat.
+They had stopped at the house of a man who we now know had infiltrated
+the ranks of the WPA. Donald Rodney went in to pick up what the man said
+was a walkie-talkie that Walter wanted. As they stood in the infiltrator’s
+yard around 7:30 p.m., he told Rodney to drive off and wait for a test signal
+at 8:00. Donald returned to the car and drove away. When the signal came,
+it turned out to be the explosion that ended Walter Rodney’s life.
+A few weeks before his death, Rodney had been persistently interviewed
+about the dangers that he faced and his plans for defending himself against
+them. He said,
+As to my own safety and the safety of a number of other persons within the WPA, we will
+try to guarantee our safety by the level of political mobilization and political action inside and
+outside of the country. Ultimately, it is this rather than any kind of physical defense which will
+guarantee our safety. None of us are unmindful of the threat that is constantly posed. We don’t
+regard ourselves as adventurers, as martyrs or potential martyrs, but we think there is a job
+which needs to be done and at a certain point in time we have to do what has to be done.
+
+Again, Walter’s courageous sense of commitment and integrity evokes
+sharp memories of Fanon. He too sacrified his life for the liberation of his
+people and died before he was forty. He too called the children of Africa
+and all those damned by Europe to seize the initiative and change our ways.
+He too asked us to resist all temptations to live out our lives as permanent
+victims, angry accusers or fawning imitators of Europe. It was he who said,
+Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended. . . . Look at them today
+swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. . . . we must find something different. We
+
+today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed
+by the desire to catch up with Europe we have taken the liberty at this point of changing
+“Europe” to Europe/America—we think Fanon would permit that.
+The Third World faces Europe/America like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to
+resolve the problems to which Europe/America has not been able to find the answers.
+So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe/America by creating states, institutions, and
+societies which draw their inspiration from her.
+. . . If we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different
+level than that which Europe/America has shown it, then we must invent and we must make
+discoveries.
+If we wish to live up to our people’s expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than
+in Europe/America. For Europe/America, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must
+turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and we must try to set afoot a new man.
+(Wretched of the Earth. 252–255)
+
+From Walter’s perspective, that was the “job that needs to be done,” the
+challenge that he and his comrades had determined to take on;
+experimenting, inventing, risking, trying to work out new forms of
+organization, new modes of struggle, new visions and concepts to guide and
+undergird them, starting on their own home ground. For Walter Rodney, the
+WPA was one element of the job and his research and writing was another.
+He saw no contradiction between them. All elements of the task were held
+firmly together by the righteous integrity of his life, the disciplined power
+of his visions and his undying love for the people and their possibilities.
+Thus, he went about doing the job that needed to be done. But, as it was
+said of Malcolm X, so it could be said of Walter: “He became much more
+than there was time for him to be.”
+Now we are starkly aware of the fact that the time he no longer has is
+really ours, that the job he took on is in our hands, to continue, to redefine,
+wherever we are, whoever we are. The call that he tried to answer is here
+for us all: “if we want humanity to advance a step further . . . we must
+invent and we must make discoveries . . . we must turn over a new leaf, we
+must work out new concepts, and we must try to set afoot a new
+[humanity].” (255, Wretched of the Earth)
+Walter’s Legacy
+It is our courageous, creative attempts to respond to such a magnificent
+summons that we begin to break the chains of our underdevelopment and
+shake the foundations of all human exploitation. And is it not clear by now
+
+that the process of exploitation leads to an underdeveloped humanity both at
+the “center” and at the “periphery”? Do we not see that the
+underdevelopment of the center, in the homeland of the exploiters, is simply
+covered over with material possessions and deadly weaponry, but that the
+nakedness and human retardation are nevertheless there? So who among us
+does not need to break the coils of the past, to transcend and recreate our
+history?
+Perhaps it is only as we take up the challenge of Walter and Fanon that
+we will be prepared to give up all the deadly games of the last half-millenia,
+seeking out new means of defense, new forms of struggle, new pathways
+toward revolution, new visions of what truly humane society demands of
+us. Only as we begin to entertain such thoughts, consider such inventions,
+will we be prepared to carefully examine again and then move beyond the
+marvelous limits of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, pressing on—in
+the spirit of Rodney and Fanon—to ask a new question: how shall we redevelop the world?
+Beginning with ourselves, beginning where we are, what must we tear
+down, what must we build up, what foundations must we lay? Who shall we
+work with, what visions can we create, what hopes shall possess us? How
+shall we organize? How shall we be related to those who raise the same
+questions in South Africa, in El Salvadore, in Guyana? How shall we
+communicate with others the urgency of our time? How shall we envision
+and work for the revolutionary transformation of our own country? What
+are the inventions, the discoveries, the new concepts that will help us move
+toward the revolution we need in this land?
+Neither rhetoric nor coercion will serve us now. We must decide whether
+we shall remain crippled and underdeveloped, or move to participate in our
+own healing by taking on the challenge to re-develop ourselves, our people,
+our endangered nation and the earth. No one can force us toward this. By
+conventional measurements, there are no guarantees of success—as the
+blood of our martyrs and heroes, known and less known, like Walter
+Rodney and Frantz Fanon, Ruby Doris and Fanny Lou, Malcolm and
+Martin, fully testify.
+But there is a world waiting for us; indeed, many worlds await us. One is
+the world of our children, not yet born, or just beginning, but wanting to
+live, to grow, to become their best possible selves. This will not happen
+
+unless, as Walter suggests, the center is transformed and fundamentally
+changed. That will not happen unless we are transformed, re-developed and
+renewed. The future of our children depends upon these rigorous
+transformations.
+The Afro-American Challenge
+Then there is another more difficult world that awaits us: the world of
+the sons and daughters of Europe/America who have begun to discover
+their own underdevelopment, who recognize the warping and desensitizing
+of their spirits. Without rehearsing all the old political arguments about
+coalitions and alliances, neither forgetting the past nor being bound by it,
+we must find some way to respond to them and to allow them to come in
+touch with us. This is no passing luxury, in the old “race relations” style.
+Rather, we now realize that the children of the oppressed and the children of
+the oppressors are involved in a dialectical relationship that is deeper than
+most of us choose to recognize, and that there is no fundamental
+redevelopment for one without the other. This is a heavy burden, but it
+represents a great possibility as well. In this country, with our peculiar
+history, it is also an undeniable reality.
+So, it is by the way of these difficult issues that we return to Walter and
+his great work. Now, what seems demanded of us as we re-visit How
+Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is that we read it this time in the light of
+Walter Rodney’s life and death; this time in the consciousness of the
+dangerous, explosive American center; this time in the company of our
+children; this time in the presence of Fanon’s insistent call to us all.
+Then we shall likely see more clearly than ever before that Europe’s
+underdevelopment of Africa, and other worlds, required Europe’s ravaging
+of itself and everyone—and everything—that came under its sway. So the
+wounded are all around us and within us. Now, opening ourselves to all
+those who recognize the brutal dialectics of underdevelopment, who
+acknowledge the cohesive powers of our common needs, our common
+dangers and our common possibilities, we can begin to stand in a newly
+grounded solidarity and reach out toward each other, facing the harsh but
+beautiful fact that we must either re-develop ourselves and our world or be
+pushed together into some terrible, explosive closing of the light.
+
+Of course, if we choose to go the way of our essential community, we
+cannot go far by responding primarily to the urgency of fear (for that would
+repeat history rather than transform it—and that would be unfaithful to a
+courageous brother like Walter). Instead, we must be drawn by the fact that
+there is much to attract us. For instance, one of the hopeful elements on the
+other side of the patterns of domination/subordination of the past 500 years
+has been the drawing of humankind into networks of communication and
+interrelatedness that hold great possibilities for the establishment of new
+communities beyond the traditional, national barriers. Reshaped and redirected, the mechanisms of exploitation may actually place some vital
+means of re-development within our grasp.
+Now it is in our hands—to overcome our history, to break the shackles of
+the past, to re-develop ourselves, our people, our nation and our world—to
+find humane, creative and fearless ways of dealing with those who presently
+oppose such development. These are audacious visions, and truly awesome
+responsibilities. But we must go forward. Indeed, it seems clear to us that
+even without any guarantees of success, we must move in the flow of
+humankind’s best, most creative imagination, in the direction of our most
+profoundly renewing dreams.
+Anything less is inadequate for the perilous times. Anything less would
+be unworthy of the memory of our brother, the needs of our children, or the
+magnificent, untapped capacities of our own best selves.
+March 1981
+VINCENT HARDING
+ROBERT HILL
+WILLIAM STRICKLAND
+
+*
+
+The dissertation was published by Clarendon Press in 1970, and recently reprinted in paperback
+by Monthly Review Press.
+*
+The new press was named after Paul Bogle, the leader of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in
+Jamaica and Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian leader. Among those most actively involved in the
+endeavor were Andrew Salkey, Jessica and Eric Huntley, Richard Small, John LaRose, Selma James,
+Earl Greenwood and Chris Le Maitre. Not long after Rodney’s assassination, Bogle-L’Ouverture
+Book Store was renamed the Walter Rodnev Book Store.
+
+*
+
+Among the colleagues who participated in the Summer Research Symposium (SRS) were C. L.
+R. James, St. Clair Drake, Katherine Dunham, George Beckford, Edward Braithwaite, Lerone
+Bennett, Mary Berry, Tran Van Dinh, Mack Jones and Frank Smith.
+*
+Known as the “Referendum Five,” they included Walter Rodney, Rupert Roopnarine, Maurice
+Omawale, Kwame Apata and Karen De Souza. All five were denied trial by jury.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I
+Some Questions on Development
+• What Is Development? • What Is Underdevelopment?
+
+IN CONTRAST WITH THE SURGING GROWTH OF THE COUNTRIES IN THE socialist camp and the development
+taking place, albeit much more slowly, in the majority of the capitalist countries, is the unquestionable
+fact that a large proportion of the so-called underdeveloped countries are in total stagnation, and that in
+some of them the rate of economic growth is lower than that of population increase.
+These characteristics are not fortuitous; they correspond strictly to the nature of the capitalist system
+in full expansion, which transfers to the dependent countries the most abusive and barefaced forms of
+exploitation. It must be clearly understood that the only way to solve the questions now besetting
+mankind is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist
+countries, with all the consequences that this implies.
+—CHÉ GUEVARA, 1964
+
+What Is Development?
+Development in human society is a many-sided process. At the level of the
+individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, selfdiscipline, responsibility, and material well-being. Some of these are virtually
+moral categories and are difficult to evaluate—depending as they do on the age in
+which one lives, one’s class origins, and one’s personal code of what is wrong.
+However, what is indisputable is that the achievement of any of those aspects of
+personal development is very much tied in with the state of the society as a whole.
+From earliest times, man found it convenient and necessary to come together in
+groups to hunt and for the sake of survival. The relations which develop within
+any given social group are crucial to an understanding of the society as a whole.
+Freedom, responsibility, skill, have real meaning only in terms of the relations of
+men in society.
+Of course, each social group comes into contact with others. The relations
+between individuals in any two societies are regulated by the form of the two
+societies. Their respective political structures are important because the ruling
+elements within each group are the ones that begin to have dialogue, trade, or
+fight, as the case may be. At the level of social groups, therefore, development
+implies an increasing capacity to regulate both internal and external relationships.
+Much of human history has been a fight for survival against natural hazards and
+against real and imagined human enemies. Development in the past has always
+meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social group and
+indeed to infringe upon the freedom of others—something that often came about
+irrespective of the will of the persons within the societies involved.
+Men are not the only beings that operate in groups, but the human species
+embarked upon a unique line of development because man had the capacity to
+make and use tools. The very act of making tools was a stimulus to increasing
+rationality rather than the consequence of a fully matured intellect. In historical
+
+terms, man the worker was every bit as important as man the thinker, because the
+work with tools liberated men from sheer physical necessity, so that he could
+impose himself upon other more powerful species and upon nature itself. The tools
+with which men work and the manner in which they organize their labor are both
+important indices of social development.
+More often than not, the term “development” is used in an exclusive economic
+sense—the justification being that the type of economy is itself an index of other
+social features. What then is economic development? A society develops
+economically as its members increase jointly their capacity for dealing with the
+environment. This capacity for dealing with the environment is dependent on the
+extent to which they understand the laws of nature (science), on the extent to
+which they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology),
+and on the manner in which work is organized. Taking a long-term view, it can be
+said that there has been constant economic development within human society
+since the origins of man, because man has multiplied enormously his capacity to
+win a living from nature. The magnitude of man’s achievement is best understood
+by reflecting on the early history of human society and noting the following:
+firstly, the progress from crude stone tools to the use of metals; secondly, the
+changeover from hunting and gathering wild fruit to the domestication of animals
+and the growing of food crops; and thirdly, the improvement in organization of
+work from being an individualistic activity towards being an activity which
+assumes a social character through the participation of many.
+Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their ability
+to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of nature. Every
+continent independently participated in the early epochs of the extension of man’s
+control over his environment—which means in effect that every continent can
+point to a period of economic development. Africa, being the original home of
+man, was obviously a major participant in the processes in which human groups
+displayed an ever increasing capacity to extract a living from the natural
+environment. Indeed, in the early period, Africa was the focus of the physical
+development of man as such, as distinct from other living beings.
+Development was universal because the conditions leading to economic
+expansion were universal. Everywhere, man was faced with the task of survival by
+meeting fundamental material needs; and better tools were a consequence of the
+interplay between human beings and nature as part of the struggle for survival. Of
+course, human history is not a record of advances and nothing else. There were
+periods in every part of the world when there were temporary setbacks and actual
+reduction of the capacity to produce basic necessities and other services for the
+population. But the overall tendency was towards increased production, and at
+
+given points of time the increase in the quantity of goods was associated with a
+change in the quality or character of society. This will be shown later with
+reference to Africa, but to indicate the universal application of the principle of
+quantitative/qualitative change an example will be drawn from China.
+Early man in China lived at the mercy of nature, and slowly discovered such
+basic things as the fact that fire can be man-made and that seeds of some grasses
+could be planted in the soil to meet food requirements. Those discoveries helped
+inhabitants of China to have simple farming communities using stone tools and
+producing enough for bare subsistence. That was achieved several thousand years
+before the birth of Christ or the flight of the Prophet Mohammed. The goods
+produced at that stage were divided more or less equally among the members of
+society, who lived and worked in families. By the time of the T’ang dynasty of the
+seventh century A.D., China had expanded its economic capacity not only to grow
+more food but also to manufacture a wide variety of items such as silks, porcelain,
+ships, and scientific devices. This, of course, represented a quantitative increase in
+the goods produced, and it was interrelated with qualitative changes in Chinese
+society. By the later date, there was a political state, where before there were only
+self-governing units. Instead of every family and every individual performing the
+tasks of agriculturalists, house-builders, tailors, there had arisen specialization of
+function. Most of the population still tilled the land, but there were skilled artisans
+who made silk and porcelain, bureaucrats who administered the state, and
+Buddhist and Confucian religious philosophers who specialized in trying to
+explain those things that lay outside of immediate understanding.
+Specialization and division of labor led to more production as well as inequality
+in distribution. A small section of Chinese society came to take a disproportionate
+share of the proceeds of human labor, and that was the section which did least to
+actually generate wealth by working in agriculture or industry. They could afford
+to do so because grave inequalities had emerged in the ownership of the basic
+means of production, which was the land. Family land became smaller as far as
+most peasants were concerned, and a minority took over the greater portion of the
+land. Those changes in land tenure were part and parcel of development in its
+broadest sense. That is why development cannot be seen purely as an economic
+affair, but rather as an overall social process which is dependent upon the outcome
+of man’s efforts to deal with his natural environment.
+Through careful study, it is possible to comprehend some of the very
+complicated links between the changes in the economic base and changes in the
+rest of the superstructure of the society—including the sphere of ideology and
+social beliefs. The changeover from communalism in Asia and Europe led for
+instance to codes of behavior peculiar to feudalism. The conduct of the European
+
+knights in armor had much in common with that of the Japanese Samurai, or
+warriors. They developed notions of so-called chivalry—conduct becoming a
+gentleman knight on horseback; while in contrast the peasant had to learn extreme
+humility, deference, and obsequiousness—symbolized by doffing his cap and
+standing bareheaded before his superiors. In Africa, too, it was to be found that the
+rise of the state and superior classes led to the practice whereby common subjects
+prostrated themselves in the presence of the monarchs and aristocrats. When that
+point had been reached, it became clear that the rough equality of the family had
+given way to a new state of society.
+In the natural sciences, it is well known that in many instances quantitative
+change becomes qualitative after a certain period. The common example is the
+way that water can absorb heat (a quantitative process) until at 100° C. it changes
+to steam (a qualitative change of form). Similarly, in human society it has always
+been the case that the expansion of the economy leads eventually to a change in
+the form of social relations. Karl Marx, writing in the nineteenth century, was the
+first writer to appreciate this, and he distinguished within European history several
+stages of development. The first major stage following after simple bands of
+hunters was Communalism, where property was collectively owned, work was
+done in common, and goods were shared equally. The second was Slavery, caused
+by the extension of domineering elements within the family and by some groups
+being physically overwhelmed by others. Slaves did a variety of tasks, but their
+main job was to produce food. The next stage was Feudalism, where agriculture
+remained the principal means of making a livelihood, but the land which was
+necessary for that purpose was in the hands of the few, and they took the lion’s
+share of the wealth. The workers on the land (now called serfs) were no longer the
+personal property of the masters, but were tied to the land of a particular manor or
+estate. When the manor changed hands, the serfs had to remain there and provide
+goods for the landlord—just keeping enough to feed themselves. Just as the child
+of a slave was a slave, so the children of serfs were also serfs. Then came
+Capitalism, under which the greatest wealth in the society was produced not in
+agriculture but by machines—in factories and in mines. Like the preceding phase
+of feudalism, capitalism was characterized by the concentration in a few hands of
+ownership of the means of producing wealth and by unequal distribution of the
+products of human labor. The few who dominated were the bourgeoisie who had
+originated in the merchants and craftsmen of the feudal epoch, and who rose to be
+industrialists and financiers. Meanwhile, the serfs were declared legally free to
+leave the land and go in search of employment in capitalist enterprises. Their labor
+thereby became a commodity—something to be bought and sold.
+
+It was predicted that there would be a further stage—that of Socialism—in
+which the principle of economic equality would be restored, as in communalism.
+In the present century, the phase of socialism has indeed emerged in some
+countries. Economically, each succeeding stage represented development in the
+strict sense that there was increased capacity to control the material environment
+and thereby to create more goods and services for the community. The greater
+quantity of goods and services were based on greater skills and human
+inventiveness. Man was liberated in the sense of having more opportunities to
+display and develop his talents. Whether man uplifted himself in a moral sense is
+open to dispute. The advance in production increased the range of powers which
+sections of society had over other sections, and it multiplied the violence which
+was part of the competition for survival and growth among social groups. It is not
+at all clear that a soldier serving capitalism in the last World War was less
+“primitive” in the elemental sense of the word than a soldier serving in one of
+Japan’s feudal armies in the sixteenth century, or for that matter than a hunter
+living in the first phase of human organization in the forests of Brazil.
+Nevertheless, we do know that in those three respective epochs—hunting band,
+feudalism, capitalism—the quality of life improved. It became less hazardous and
+less uncertain, and members of society potentially had greater choice over their
+destinies. All of that is involved when the word “development” is used.
+In the history of those societies which have passed through several modes of
+production, the opportunity is presented of seeing how quantitative changes give
+rise ultimately to an entirely different society. The key feature is that at given
+junctures the social relations in the society were no longer effective in promoting
+advance. Indeed, they began to act as brakes on the productive forces and
+therefore had to be discarded. Take for instance the epoch of slavery in Europe.
+However morally indefensible slavery may have been, it did serve for a while to
+open up the mines and agricultural plantations in large parts of Europe and notably
+within the Roman Empire. But then those peasants who remained free had their
+labor depressed and underutilized because of the presence of slaves. The slaves
+were not disposed to work at any tasks requiring skills, so the technological
+evolution of society threatened to come to a halt. Furthermore, the slaves were
+restless, and slave revolts were expensive to put down. The landowners, seeing
+their estates going to ruin, decided that it would be best to grant the legal freedom
+for which slaves were clamoring, and to keep exploiting the labor of these free
+serfs by insuring that they had no lands to plow other than those of the landlords.
+Thereby, a new set of social relations—that of landlord and serf—replaced the old
+relations of slavemaster and slave.
+
+In some instances, the changeover to a new mode was accompanied by
+violence at a critical point. This occurred when the ruling classes involved were
+being threatened with removal by the process of change. The feudal landlords
+remained in power for centuries during which the merchant and manufacturing
+interests grew wealthy and sought to achieve political power and social preeminence. When classes are so well defined, their consciousness is at a high level.
+Both the landlord class and the capitalists recognized what was at stake. The
+former fought to hold on to the social relations which no longer corresponded to
+the new technology of machine production and the organization of work by means
+of purchasing labor power. The capitalists flung themselves into revolutions in
+Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to break the old relations of
+production.
+The notions of revolution and class consciousness must be borne in mind when
+it comes to examining the situation of the modern worker and peasant classes in
+Africa. However, for the greater part of Africa’s history, the existing classes have
+been incompletely crystallized and the changes have been gradual rather than
+revolutionary. What is probably of more relevance for early African development
+is the principle that development over the world’s territories has always been
+uneven.
+While all societies have experienced development, it is equally true that the rate
+of development differed from continent to continent, and within each continent
+different parts increased their command over nature at different rates. Inside
+Africa, Egyptians were capable of producing wealth in abundance twenty-five
+centuries ago, because of mastery of many scientific natural laws and their
+invention of technology to irrigate, grow food, and extract minerals from the
+subsoil. At that time, hunting with bows and even wooden clubs was what people
+depended on for survival in most parts of the African continent—and in various
+other places such as the British Isles.
+One of the most difficult questions to answer is exactly why different peoples
+developed at different rates when left on their own. Part of the answer lies in the
+environment in which human groups evolved and part of it lies in the
+“superstructure” of human society. That is to say, as human beings battled with the
+material environment, they created forms of social relations, forms of government,
+patterns of behavior, and systems of belief which together constituted the
+superstructure—which was never the same in any two societies. Each element in
+the superstructure interacted with other elements in the superstructure as well as
+with the material base. For instance, the political and religious patterns affected
+each other and were often intertwined. The religious belief that a certain forest was
+sacred was the kind of element in the superstructure that affected economic
+
+activity, since that forest would not be cleared for cultivation. While in the final
+analysis the breakthrough to a new stage of human development is dependent
+upon man’s technical capacity to deal with the environment, it is also to be borne
+in mind that peculiarities in the superstructure of any given society have a marked
+impact on the rate of development.
+Many observers have been puzzled by the fact that China never became
+capitalist. It entered the feudal phase of development virtually 1,000 years before
+the birth of Christ; it had developed many aspects of technology; and it had many
+craftsmen and artisans. Yet the mode of production was never transformed to one
+where machines were the main means of producing wealth and where the owners
+of capital would be the dominant class. The explanation is very complex, but in
+general terms the main differences between feudal Europe and feudal China lay in
+the superstructure—i.e., in the body of beliefs, motivations, and socio-political
+institutions which derived from the material base but in turn affected it. In China,
+religious, educational, and bureaucratic qualifications were of utmost importance,
+and government was in the hands of state officials rather than being run by the
+landlords on their own feudal estates. Besides, there were greater egalitarian
+tendencies in Chinese land distribution than in European land distribution, and the
+Chinese state owned a great deal of land. The consequence was that the
+landowners had greater powers as bureaucrats than as men of property, and they
+used that to keep social relations in the same mold. It would have been impossible
+for them to have done that indefinitely, but they slowed down the movement of
+history. In Europe, the elements of change were not stifled by the weight of a state
+bureaucracy.
+As soon as the first capitalists appeared in European society, an incentive was
+created for further development through the attitude of this class. Never before in
+any human society had a group of people seen themselves consciously functioning
+in order to make the maximum profit out of production. To fulfill their objective of
+acquiring more and more capital, capitalists took a greater interest in the laws of
+science which could be harnessed in the form of machinery to work and make
+profit on their behalf. At the political level, capitalism was also responsible for
+most of the features which today are referred to as Western Democracy. In
+abolishing feudalism, the capitalists insisted on parliaments, constitutions,
+freedom of the press. These too can be considered as development. However, the
+peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole
+world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profits from the
+human labor that always lies behind the machines. That contradicts other facets of
+development, especially viewed from the standpoint of those who suffered and
+still suffer to make capitalist achievements possible. This latter group are the
+
+majority of mankind. To advance, they must overthrow capitalism; and that is why
+at the moment capitalism stands in the path of further human social development.
+To put it another way, the social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded,
+just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time.
+There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of
+significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but
+today the quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that
+their material and social needs should be fulfilled. The capitalist or bourgeois class
+is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and
+technology—again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive.
+Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as
+underutilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of
+unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of “market”—
+which is concerned with people’s ability to pay rather than their need for
+commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities such as a vicious white
+racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of
+incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest
+capitalist economies, such as that of the United States of America. Above all,
+capitalism has intensified its own political contradictions in trying to subjugate
+nations and continents outside of Europe, so that workers and peasants in every
+part of the globe have become self-conscious and are determined to take their
+destiny into their own hands. Such a determination is also an integral part of the
+process of development.
+It can be offered as a generalization that all phases of development are
+temporary or transient and are destined sooner or later to give way to something
+else. It is particularly important to stress this with reference to capitalism because
+the capitalist epoch is not quite over and those who live at a particular point in
+time often fail to see that their way of life is in the process of transformation and
+elimination. Indeed, it is one of the functions of those bourgeois writers who
+justify capitalism to try and pretend that capitalism is here to stay. A glance at the
+remarkable advance of socialism over the last fifty-odd years will show that the
+apologists for capitalism are spokesmen of a social system that is rapidly expiring.
+The fact that capitalism today is still around alongside socialism should warn us
+that the modes of production cannot simply be viewed as a question of successive
+stages. Uneven development has always insured that societies have come into
+contact when they were at different levels—for example, one that was communal
+and one that was capitalist.
+When two societies of different sorts come into prolonged and effective
+contact, the rate and character of change taking place in both is seriously affected
+
+to the extent that entirely new patterns are created. Two general rules can be
+observed to apply in such cases. First, the weaker of the two societies (i.e., the one
+with less economic capacity) is bound to be adversely affected—and the bigger the
+gap between the two societies concerned the more detrimental are the
+consequences. For example, when European capitalism came into contact with the
+indigenous hunting societies of America and the Caribbean, the latter were
+virtually exterminated. Second, assuming that the weaker society does survive,
+then ultimately it can resume its own independent development only if it proceeds
+to a level higher than that of the economy which had previously dominated it. The
+concrete instances of the operation of this second rule are found in the experience
+of the Soviet Union, China, and Korea.
+China and Korea were both at a stage approximating feudalism when they were
+colonized by the capitalist powers of Europe and Japan. Russia was never legally
+colonized, but while in the feudal stage and before its own indigenous capitalism
+could get very far, the Russian economy was subjugated by the more mature
+capitalism of Western Europe. In all three cases, it took a socialist revolution to
+break the domination of capitalism, and only the rapid tempo of socialist
+development could make amends for the period of subjugation when growth was
+misdirected and retarded. Indeed, as far as the two biggest socialist states are
+concerned (the Soviet Union and China), socialist development has already
+catapulted them beyond states such as Britain and France, which have been
+following the capitalist path for centuries.
+Up to the end of the 1950s (the point at which this study terminates), Russia,
+China, Korea, and certain nations in Eastern Europe were the only countries which
+had decisively broken with capitalism and imperialism. Imperialism is itself a
+phase of capitalist development in which Western European capitalist countries,
+the U.S.A., and Japan established political, economic, military, and cultural
+hegemony over other parts of the world which were initially at a lower level and
+therefore could not resist domination. Imperialism was in effect the extended
+capitalist system, which for many years embraced the whole world—one part
+being the exploiters and the other the exploited, one part being dominated and the
+other acting as overlords, one part making policy and the other being dependent.
+Socialism has advanced on imperialism’s weakest flanks—in the sector that is
+exploited, oppressed, and reduced to dependency. In Asia and Eastern Europe,
+socialism released the nationalist energies of colonized peoples; it turned the goal
+of production away from the money market and towards the satisfaction of human
+needs; it has eradicated bottlenecks such as permanent unemployment and periodic
+crises; and it has realized some of the promise implicit in Western or bourgeois
+
+democracy by providing the equality of economic condition which is necessary
+before one can make use of political equality and equality before the law.
+Socialism has reinstated the economic equality of communalism, but
+communalism fell apart because of low economic productivity and scarcity.
+Socialism aims at and has significantly achieved the creation of plenty, so that the
+principle of egalitarian distribution becomes consistent with the satisfaction of the
+wants of all members of society.
+One of the most crucial factors leading to more rapid and consistent expansion
+of economic capacity under socialism has been the implementation of planned
+development. Most of the historical processes so far described relate to
+involuntary and unplanned development. No one planned that at a given stage
+human beings should cease using stone axes and use iron implements instead; and
+(to come to more recent times) while individual capitalist firms plan their own
+expansion, their system is not geared to overall planning of the economy and the
+society. The capitalist state intervened only fitfully and partially to supervise
+capitalist development. The socialist state has as its prime function the control of
+the economy on behalf of the working classes. The latter—i.e., workers and
+peasants—have now become the most dynamic force in world history and human
+development.
+To conclude this brief introduction to the extremely complex problem of social
+development, it is useful to recognize how inadequate are the explanations of that
+phenomenon which are provided by bourgeois scholars. They very seldom try to
+grapple with the issue in its totality, but rather concentrate attention narrowly on
+“economic development.” As defined by the average bourgeois economist,
+development becomes simply a matter of the combination of given “factors of
+production”: namely, land, population, capital, technology, specialization, and
+large-scale production. Those factors are indeed relevant, as is implied in the
+analysis so far; but omissions from the list of what bourgeois scholars think
+relevant are really overwhelming. No mention is made of the exploitation of the
+majority which underlay all development prior to socialism. No mention is made
+of the social relations of production or of classes. No mention is made of the way
+that the factors and relations of production combine to form a distinctive system or
+mode of production, varying from one historical epoch to another. No mention is
+made of imperialism as a logical phase of capitalism.
+In contrast, any approach which tries to base itself on socialist and
+revolutionary principles must certainly introduce into the discussion at the earliest
+possible point the concepts of class, imperialism, and socialism, as well as the role
+of the workers and oppressed peoples. Each new concept bristles with its own
+complications, and it is not to be imagined that the mere resort to certain
+
+terminology is the answer to anything. However, one has at least to recognize the
+full human, historical, and social dimensions of development, before it is feasible
+to consider “underdevelopment” or the strategies for escaping from
+underdevelopment.
+What Is Underdevelopment?
+Having discussed development, it is easier to comprehend the concept of
+underdevelopment. Obviously, underdevelopment is not absence of development,
+because every people have developed in one way or another and to a greater or
+lesser extent. Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels
+of development. It is very much tied to the fact that human social development has
+been uneven and from a strictly economic viewpoint some human groups have
+advanced further by producing more and becoming more wealthy.
+The moment that one group appears to be wealthier than others, some inquiry is
+bound to take place as to the reason for the difference. After Britain had begun to
+move ahead of the rest of Europe in the eighteenth century, the famous British
+economist Adam Smith felt it necessary to look into the causes behind the “Wealth
+of Nations.” At the same time, many Russians were very concerned about the fact
+that their country was “backward” in comparison with England, France, and
+Germany in the eighteenth century and subsequently in the nineteenth century.
+Today, our main preoccupation is with the differences in wealth between, on the
+one hand Europe and North America, and on the other hand Africa, Asia, and
+Latin America. In comparison with the first, the second group can be said to be
+backward or underdeveloped. At all times, therefore, one of the ideas behind
+underdevelopment is a comparative one. It is possible to compare the economic
+conditions at two different periods for the same country and determine whether or
+not it had developed; and (more importantly) it is possible to compare the
+economics of any two countries at any given period in time.
+A second and even more indispensable component of modern
+underdevelopment is that it expresses a particular relationship of exploitation:
+namely, the exploitation of one country by another. All of the countries named as
+“underdeveloped” in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment
+with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist, and
+colonialist exploitation. African and Asian societies were developing
+independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist
+powers. When that happened, exploitation increased and the export of surplus
+ensued, depriving the societies of the benefit of their natural resources and labor.
+That is an integral part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense.
+
+In some quarters, it has often been thought wise to substitute the term
+“developing” for “underdeveloped.” One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid
+any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be
+interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any
+other respect. Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than
+comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would
+be the U.S.A., which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while
+internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.
+However, on the economic level, it is best to remain with the word
+“underdeveloped” rather than “developing,” because the latter creates the
+impression that all the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are escaping
+from a state of economic backwardness relative to the industrial nations of the
+world, and that they are emancipating themselves from the relationship of
+exploitation. That is certainly not true, and many underdeveloped countries in
+Africa and elsewhere are becoming more underdeveloped in comparison with the
+world’s great powers, because their exploitation by the metropoles is being
+intensified in new ways.
+Economic comparisons can be made by looking at statistical tables or indices of
+what goods and services are produced and used in the societies under discussion.
+Professional economists speak of the national income of countries and the national
+income per capita. These phrases have already become part of the layman’s
+language, by way of the newspapers, and no detailed explanation will be offered
+here. It is enough to note that the national income is a measurement of the total
+wealth of the country, while the per capita income is a figure obtained by dividing
+the national income by the number of inhabitants in order to get an idea of the
+“average” wealth of each inhabitant. This “average” can be misleading where
+there are great extremes of wealth. A young Ugandan put it in a very personal
+form when he said that the per capita income of his country camouflaged the
+fantastic difference between what was earned by his poor peasant father and what
+was earned by the biggest local capitalist, Madhvani. In considering the question
+of development away from the state of underdevelopment, it is of supreme
+importance to realize that such a process demands the removal of the gross
+inequalities of land distribution, property holding, and income, which are
+camouflaged behind national income figures. At one stage in history, advance was
+made at the cost of entrenching privileged groups. In our times, development has
+to mean advance which liquidates present privileged groups with their
+corresponding unprivileged groups. Nevertheless, the per capita income is a useful
+statistic for comparing one country with another; and the developed countries all
+
+have per capita incomes several times higher than any one of the recently
+independent African nations.
+The following table gives a clear picture of the gap between Africa and certain
+nations measured in per capita incomes. It is the gap that allows one group to be
+called “developed” and another “underdeveloped.” (The information was obtained
+from United Nations statistical publications, and applies to the year 1968 unless
+otherwise stated.)
+The gap that can be seen from the evidence is not only great, but it is also
+increasing. Many people have come to realize that the developed countries are
+growing richer quite rapidly, while underdeveloped countries for the most part
+show stagnancy or slow rates of growth. In each country, a figure can be
+calculated to represent the rate at which the economy grows. The growth rate is
+highest in socialist countries, followed by the big capitalist countries, and with the
+colonies and ex-colonies trailing far behind. The proportion of international trade
+which is in the hands of the underdeveloped countries is declining. That
+proportion was roughly 30 per cent in 1938 and went down to less than 20 per cent
+in the 1960s. This is an important indicator because trade is both a reflection of the
+quantity of goods produced and a way of obtaining goods not locally produced.
+Countries
+Canada
+U.S.A.
+France
+United Kingdom
+AFRICA as a whole
+Congo
+Ghana
+Kenya
+Malawi
+Morocco
+South Africa
+Tanzania
+U.A.R.
+Zambia
+
+Per Capita Income in U.S. Dollar
+2,247
+3,578
+1,738 (1967)
+1,560 (1967)
+140 (1965)
+52
+198
+107
+52
+185
+543
+62
+156
+225
+
+Developed economies have certain characteristics which contrast with
+underdeveloped ones. The developed countries are all industrialized. That is to
+say, the greater part of their working population is engaged in industry rather than
+
+agriculture, and most of their wealth comes out of mines, factories, and other
+industries. They have a high output of labor per man in industry because of their
+advanced technology and skills. This is well known, but it is also striking that the
+developed countries have a much more advanced agriculture than the rest of the
+world. Their agriculture has already become an industry, and the agricultural part
+of the economy produces more even though it is small. The countries of Africa,
+Asia, and Latin America are called agricultural countries because they rely on
+agriculture and have little or no industry; but their agriculture is unscientific and
+the yields are far less than those of the developed countries. In several of the
+largest underdeveloped nations, there was stagnation and fall in agricultural output
+in and after 1966. In Africa, the output of food per person has been falling in
+recent years. Because the developed countries have a stronger industrial and
+agricultural economy than the rest of the world, they produce far more goods than
+the poor nations—in the category of necessities as well as luxuries. It is possible to
+draw up statistical tables showing the production of grain, milk, steel, electric
+power, paper, and a wide range of other goods; and showing at the same time how
+much of each commodity is made available to each citizen (on the average). Once
+again, the figures are highly favorable to a few privileged countries in the world.
+The amount of steel used in a country is an excellent indicator of the level of
+industrialization. At one extreme, one finds that the U.S.A. consumes 685
+kilograms of steel per person, Sweden 623, and East Germany 437. At the other
+extreme, one finds that Zambia consumes 10 kilograms, East Africa 8, and
+Ethiopia 2. When the same kind of calculation is made for sugar, a sample of the
+results shows Australia with 57 kilograms and North America and the Soviet
+Union with 45 to 50 on the average. Africa, however, consumes only 10 kilograms
+of sugar per person per year, and this is better than Asia with 7.
+An even more gloomy set of statistics relates to basic food requirements. Each
+individual needs a certain quantity of food per day, measured in calories. The
+desirable amount is 3,000 calories per day; but no African country comes
+anywhere near that figure. Algerians consume on average only 1,870 calories per
+day, while Ivory Coast can consider itself very well off within an African context
+with 2,290 calories as the national average. Furthermore, one also has to judge the
+protein content of the food; and many parts of Africa suffer from “protein
+famine”—which means that even when calories are available from starchy foods,
+little protein is to be found. Persons in developed capitalist and socialist countries
+consume twice as much protein food as those in underdeveloped countries. Such
+differences help to make it clear which countries are developed and which are
+underdeveloped.
+
+The social services provided by a country are of importance equal to that of its
+material production in bringing about human well-being and happiness. It is
+universally accepted that the state has the responsibility to establish schools and
+hospitals, but whether these are provided by the government or by private
+agencies, their numbers can be established in relation to the size of the population.
+The extent to which basic goods and social services are available in a country can
+also be measured indirectly by looking at the life expectancy, the frequency of
+deaths among children, the amount of malnutrition, the occurrence of diseases
+which could be prevented by inoculation and public health services, and the
+proportion of illiterates. In all these respects, the comparison between the
+developed and underdeveloped countries shows huge and even frightening
+differences. For every 1,000 children who are born alive in Cameroon, 100 never
+live to see their first birthday, and out of every 1,000 African children born alive in
+rural Sierra Leone, 160 die before reaching one year. Yet the comparable figures
+for the United Kingdom and Holland are only 12 and 18 respectively. Besides,
+many more African children die before they reach the age of five. Lack of doctors
+is a major drawback. In Italy, there is one doctor for every 580 Italians, and in
+Czechoslovakia, there is one doctor for every 510 citizens. In Niger, one doctor
+must do for 56,140 persons; in Tunisia, one doctor for every 8,320 Tunisians; and
+in Chad, one doctor for 73,460 persons.
+It takes a large number of skilled people to make an industrial economy
+function; while the countries of Africa have a woefully insufficient number of
+highly qualified personnel. The figures on doctors just given confirm this, and the
+same problem exists with engineers, technicians, agriculturalists, and even
+administrators and lawyers in some places. Middle-level skills in fields such as
+welding are also lacking. To make matters worse, there is at present a “brain
+drain” from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe. This is to say,
+professionals, technicians, high-level administrators, and skilled workers emigrate
+from their homes, and the small number of skilled people available to the
+underdeveloped world is further depleted by the lure of better pay and
+opportunities in the developed world.
+This lopsided nature of the present international economy is strikingly brought
+home by the fact that the underdeveloped countries must in turn recruit foreign
+experts at fantastic cost.
+Most of the data presented so far can be described as “quantitative.” It gives us
+measurements of the quantity of goods and services produced in various
+economies. In addition, certain qualitative assessments have to be made
+concerning the way that a given economy is put together. For economic
+development it is not enough to produce more goods and services. The country has
+
+to produce more of those goods and services which in turn will give rise
+spontaneously to future growth in the economy. For example, the food-producing
+sector must be flourishing so that workers would be healthy, and agriculture on the
+whole must be efficient so that the profits (or savings) from agriculture would
+stimulate industry. Heavy industry, such as the steel industry and the production of
+electrical power, must be present so that one is capable of making machinery for
+other types of industry and for agriculture. Lack of heavy industry, inadequate
+production of food, unscientific agriculture—those are all characteristics of the
+underdeveloped economies.
+It is typical of underdeveloped economies that they do not (or are not allowed
+to) concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth
+and raise production to a new level altogether, and there are very few ties between
+one sector and another so that (say) agriculture and industry could react
+beneficially on each other.
+Furthermore, whatever savings are made within the economy are mainly sent
+abroad or are frittered away in consumption rather than being redirected to
+productive purposes. Much of the national income which remains within the
+country goes to pay individuals who are not directly involved in producing wealth
+but only in rendering auxiliary services—civil servants, merchants, soldiers,
+entertainers. What aggravates the situation is that more people are employed in
+those jobs than are really necessary to give efficient service; and to crown it all,
+these people do not reinvest in agriculture or industry. They squander the wealth
+created by the peasants and workers by purchasing cars, whisky, and perfume.
+It has been noted with irony that the principal “industry” of many
+underdeveloped countries is administration. Not long ago, 60 per cent of the
+internal revenue of Dahomey went into paying salaries of civil servants and
+government leaders. The salaries given to the elected politicians are higher than
+those given to a British Member of Parliament, and the number of
+parliamentarians in the underdeveloped African countries is also relatively high. In
+Gabon, there is one parliamentary representative for every six thousand
+inhabitants, compared to one French parliamentary representative for every
+hundred thousand Frenchmen. Many more figures of that sort indicate that in
+describing a typical underdeveloped economy it is essential to point out the high
+disproportion of the locally distributed wealth that goes into the pockets of a
+privileged few.
+Members of the privileged groups inside Africa always defend themselves by
+saying that they pay the taxes which keep the government going. At face value this
+statement sounds reasonable, but on close examination it is really the most absurd
+argument and shows total ignorance of how the economy functions. Taxes do not
+
+produce national wealth and development. Wealth has to be produced out of nature
+—from tilling the land or mining metals or felling trees or turning raw materials
+into finished products for human consumption. These things are done by the vast
+majority of the population who are peasants and workers.
+There would be no incomes to tax if the laboring population did not work.
+The incomes given to civil servants, professionals, merchants, come from the
+store of wealth produced by the community. Quite apart from the injustices in the
+distribution of wealth, one has to dismiss the argument that “the taxpayers’”
+money is what develops a country. In pursuing the goal of development, one must
+start with the producers and move on from there to see whether the products of
+their labor are being rationally utilized to bring greater independence and wellbeing to the nation.
+By paying attention to the wealth created by human labor out of nature, one can
+immediately appreciate that very few underdeveloped countries are lacking in the
+natural resources which could go into making a better life, and in those cases it is
+usually possible for two or three territories to combine together for their mutual
+benefit. In fact, it can be shown that the underdeveloped countries are the ones
+with the greatest wealth of natural resources and yet the poorest in terms of goods
+and services presently provided by and for their citizens.
+The United Nations Survey of Economic Conditions in Africa up to 1964 had
+this to say about the continent’s natural resources:
+Africa is well endowed with mineral and primary energy resources. With an estimated 9 per cent of the
+world’s population the region accounts for approximately 28 per cent of the total value of world mineral
+production and 6 per cent of its crude petroleum output. In recent years, its share of the latter is
+increasing. Of sixteen important metallic and non-metallic minerals the share of Africa in ten varies
+from 22 to 95 per cent of the world production.
+
+Actually, African potential is shown to be greater every day with new discoveries
+of mineral wealth. On the agricultural side, African soil is not as rich as the picture
+of tropical forests might lead one to believe; but there are other climatic
+advantages so that with proper irrigation crops can be grown all the year round in
+most parts of the continent.
+The situation is that Africa has not yet come anywhere close to making the
+most of its natural wealth, and most of the wealth now being produced is not being
+retained within Africa for the benefit of Africans. Zambia and Congo produce vast
+quantities of copper, but that is for the benefit of Europe, North America, and
+Japan. Even the goods and services which are produced inside of Africa and which
+remain in Africa nevertheless fall into the hands of non-Africans. Thus, South
+Africa boasts of having the highest per capita income in Africa; but as an
+indication of how this is shared out, one should note that while the apartheid
+
+regime assures that only 24 white babies die out of every 1,000 live births, they
+are quite happy to allow 128 African babies to die out of every 1,000 live births.
+In order to understand present economic conditions in Africa, one needs to know
+why it is that Africa has realized so little of its natural potential, and one also
+needs to know why so much of its present wealth goes to non-Africans who reside
+for the most part outside of the continent.
+In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are
+naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil
+and sub-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from
+the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it
+sound as though there is something “God given” about the situation. One
+bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative
+statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By
+his own admission, the gap between the developed and the underdeveloped
+countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However,
+the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor
+does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed
+capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead, he
+puts forward a biblical explanation! He says:
+It is all told in the Bible:
+For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not
+shall be taken away even that which he hath. (St. Matthew, xxv, 29)
+The story of the “hath nots” is the story of the modern underdeveloped countries.
+
+Presumably, the only comment which one can make on that is “Amen.”
+The interpretation that underdevelopment is somehow ordained by God is
+emphasized because of the racist trend in European scholarship. It is in line with
+racist prejudice to say openly or to imply that their countries are more developed
+because their people are innately superior, and that the responsibility for the
+economic backwardness of Africa lies in the generic backwardness of the race of
+black Africans. An even bigger problem is that the people of Africa and other
+parts of the colonized world have gone through a cultural and psychological crisis
+and have accepted, at least partially, the European version of things. That means
+that the African himself has doubts about his capacity to transform and develop his
+natural environment. With such doubts, he even challenges those of his brothers
+who say that Africa can and will develop through the efforts of its own people. If
+we can determine when underdevelopment came about, it would dismiss the
+lingering suspicion that it is racially or otherwise predetermined and that we can
+do little about it.
+
+When the “experts” from capitalist countries do not give a racist explanation,
+they nevertheless confuse the issue by giving as causes of underdevelopment the
+things which really are consequences. For example, they would argue that Africa
+is in a state of backwardness as a result of lacking skilled personnel to develop. It
+is true that because of lack of engineers Africa cannot on its own build more roads,
+bridges, and hydroelectric stations. But that is not a cause of underdevelopment,
+except in the sense that causes and effects come together and reinforce each other.
+The fact of the matter is that the most profound reasons for the economic
+backwardness of a given African nation are not to be found inside that nation. All
+that we can find inside are the symptoms of underdevelopment and the secondary
+factors that make for poverty.
+Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either
+from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the
+answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies
+in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and
+in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.
+Man has always exploited his natural environment in order to make a living. At
+a certain point in time, there also arose the exploitation of man by man, in that a
+few people grew rich and lived well through the labor of others. Then a stage was
+reached by which people in one community called a nation exploited the natural
+resources and the labor of another nation and its people. Since underdevelopment
+deals with the comparative economics of nations, it is the last kind of exploitation
+that is of greatest interest here—i.e., the exploitation of nation by nation. One of
+the common means by which one nation exploits another and one that is relevant
+to Africa’s external relations is exploitation through trade. When the terms of trade
+are set by one country in a manner entirely advantageous to itself, then the trade is
+usually detrimental to the trading partner. To be specific, one can take the export
+of agricultural produce from Africa and the import of manufactured goods into
+Africa from Europe, North America, and Japan. The big nations establish the price
+of the agricultural products and subject these prices to frequent reductions. At the
+same time the price of manufactured goods is also set by them, along with the
+freight rates necessary for trade in the ships of those nations. The minerals of
+Africa also fall into the same category as agricultural produce as far as pricing is
+concerned. The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading
+partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.
+More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of
+production in one country by the citizens of another. When citizens of Europe own
+the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African
+continent. Under colonialism the ownership was complete and backed by military
+
+domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still
+present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed. So
+long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means
+of transportation, newspapers, power stations, then for so long will the wealth of
+Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements. In other words, in the
+absence of direct political control, foreign investment insures that the natural
+resources and the labor of Africa produce economic value which is lost to the
+continent.
+Foreign investment often takes the form of loans to African governments.
+Naturally, these loans have to be repaid; and in the 1960s the rate of repayment
+(amortization) on official loans in underdeveloped countries rose from $400
+million per year to about $700 million per year, and it is constantly on the
+increase. Besides, there is interest to be paid on these loans as well as profits
+which come from the direct investment in the economy. These two sources
+accounted for the fact that over $500 million flowed outwards from the
+underdeveloped countries in 1965. The information on these matters is seldom
+complete, for the obvious reason that those making the profit are trying to keep
+things quiet, so the figures given above are likely to be underestimates. They are
+meant to give some idea of the extent to which the wealth of Africa is being
+drained off by those who invest in, and thereby own, a large part of the means of
+production of wealth in Africa. Furthermore, in more recent times the forms of
+investment have become more subtle and more dangerous. They include so-called
+aid and the management of local African companies by international capitalist
+experts.
+Africa trades mainly with the countries of Western Europe, North America, and
+Japan. Africa is also diversifying its trade by dealing with socialist countries, and
+if that trade proves disadvantageous to the African economy, then the developed
+socialist countries will also have joined the ranks of the exploiters of Africa.
+However, it is very essential at this stage to draw a clear distinction between the
+capitalist countries and the socialist ones, because socialist countries have never at
+any time owned any part of the African continent nor do they invest in African
+economies in such a way as to expatriate profits from Africa. Therefore, socialist
+countries are not involved in the robbery of Africa.
+Most of the people who write about underdevelopment and who are read in the
+continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are spokesmen for the capitalist or
+bourgeois world. They seek to justify capitalist exploitation both inside and
+outside their own countries. One of the things which they do to confuse the issue
+is to place all underdeveloped countries in one camp and all developed countries
+in another camp irrespective of different social systems; so that the terms capitalist
+
+and socialist never enter the discussion. Instead, one is faced with a simple
+division between the industrialized nations and those that are not industrialized. It
+is true that both the United States and the Soviet Union are industrialized and it is
+true that when one looks at the statistics, countries such as France, Norway,
+Czechoslovakia, and Rumania are much closer together than any one of them is to
+an African country. But it is absolutely necessary to determine whether the
+standard of living in a given industrialized country is a product of its own internal
+resources or whether it stems from exploiting other countries. The United States
+has a small proportion of the world’s population and exploitable natural wealth but
+it enjoys a huge percentage of the wealth which comes from exploiting the labor
+and natural resources of the whole world.
+The erroneous views about underdevelopment and the oversimplified
+distinction between rich and poor nations are opposed by socialist scholars both
+inside and outside the socialist countries. Those erroneous views are also being
+exposed by economists in underdeveloped countries who are discovering that the
+explanations offered by bourgeois scholars are explanations which suit the
+interests of those countries which exploit the rest of the world through trade and
+investment. One French socialist writer, Pierre Jalée, proposes that to obtain a
+proper perspective of relations between developed countries and underdeveloped
+ones, two categories should be set up, namely, imperialist and socialist. The
+socialist camp includes all countries big and small which have decided to break
+away from international capitalism. The imperialist camp contains not only the
+capitalist giants like the U.S.A., France, West Germany, and Japan but also the
+weak nations in which those industrial nations have investments. Therefore, the
+imperialist camp can be subdivided into exploiting and exploited countries. For
+the most part, the nations of Africa fall into the group of exploited countries inside
+the capitalist/imperialist system. Roughly one-third of the world’s peoples are
+already living under some form of socialism. The other two-thirds constitute the
+capitalist/imperialist camp, with the majority being in the exploited section.
+It is interesting to notice that in spite of their efforts to confuse the situation, the
+bourgeois writers often touch on the truth. For example, the United Nations (which
+is dominated by Western capitalist powers) would never stress the exploitation by
+capitalist nations, but their economic reviews refer on the one hand to “the
+centrally planned economies,” which means the socialist countries, and on the
+other hand they speak of “the market economies,” which means in effect the
+imperialist sector of the world. The latter is subdivided into “the developed market
+economies” and “the developing market economies,” disguising the fact that the
+market means capitalist market. This study is concerned with analyzing the
+
+relations between those countries which are together within the capitalist market
+system.
+The things which bring Africa into the capitalist market system are trade,
+colonial domination, and capitalist investment. Trade has existed for several
+centuries; colonial rule began in the late nineteenth century and has almost
+disappeared; and the investment in the African economy has been increasing
+steadily in the present century. Throughout the period that Africa has participated
+in the capitalist economy, two factors have brought about underdevelopment. In
+the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was
+grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions
+were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic
+potential—which is what development is all about. Those two processes represent
+the answer to the two questions raised above as to why Africa has realized so little
+of its potential and why so much of its present wealth goes outside of the
+continent.
+African economies are integrated into the very structure of the developed
+capitalist economies; and they are integrated in a manner that is unfavorable to
+Africa and insures that Africa is dependent on the big capitalist countries. Indeed,
+structural dependence is one of the characteristics of underdevelopment. Most
+progressive writers divide the capitalist/imperialist system into two parts. The first
+is the dominant or metropolitan section, and the countries in the second group are
+often called satellites because they are in the orbit of the metropolitan economies.
+The same idea is conveyed by simply saying that the underdeveloped countries are
+dependencies of the metropolitan capitalist economies.
+When a child or the young of any animal species ceases to be dependent upon
+its mother for food and protection, it can be said to have developed in the direction
+of maturity. Dependent nations can never be considered developed. It is true that
+modern conditions force all countries to be mutually interdependent in order to
+satisfy the needs of their citizens; but that is not incompatible with economic
+independence because economic independence does not mean isolation. It does,
+however, require a capacity to exercise choice in external relations, and above all
+it requires that a nation’s growth at some point must become self-reliant and selfsustaining. Such things are obviously in direct contradiction to the economic
+dependence of numerous countries on the metropoles of Western Europe, North
+America, and Japan.
+It is also true that metropoles are dependent on the wealth of the exploited
+portions of the world. This is a source of their strength and a potential weakness
+within the capitalist/imperialist system, since the peasants and workers of the
+dependencies are awakening to a realization that it is possible to cut the tentacles
+
+which imperialism has extended into their countries. However, there is a
+substantial difference between the dependence of the metropoles on the colonies
+and the subjugation of the colonies under a foreign capitalist yoke. The capitalist
+countries are technologically more advanced and are therefore the sector of the
+imperialist system which determined the direction of change. A striking example
+of this effect is the fact that synthetic fabrics manufactured in the capitalist
+metropoles have begun to replace fabrics made from raw material grown in the
+colonies. In other words, (within certain limits) it is the technologically advanced
+metropoles who can decide when to end their dependence on the colonies in a
+particular sphere. When that happens, it is the colony or neo-colony which goes
+begging cap in hand for a reprieve and a new quota. It is for this reason that a
+formerly colonized nation has no hope of developing until it breaks effectively
+with the vicious circle of dependence and exploitation which characterizes
+imperialism.
+At the social and cultural level, there are many features which aid in keeping
+underdeveloped countries integrated into the capitalist system and at the same time
+hanging on to the apron strings of the metropoles. The Christian church has
+always been a major instrument for cultural penetration and cultural dominance, in
+spite of the fact that in many instances Africans sought to set up independent
+churches. Equally important has been the role of education in producing Africans
+to service the capitalist system and to subscribe to its values. Recently, the
+imperialists have been using new universities in Africa to keep themselves
+entrenched at the highest academic level.
+Something as basic as language has come to serve as one of the mechanisms of
+integration and dependence. The French and English that are so widely used in
+Africa are more for the purpose of African communication with the exploiters than
+for African with African. Actually, it would be difficult to find a sphere which did
+not reflect the economic dependence and structural integration. At a glance,
+nothing could be less harmful and more entertaining than music, and yet this too is
+used as a weapon of cultural domination. The American imperialists go so far as to
+take the folk music, jazz, and soul music of oppressed black people and transform
+this into American propaganda over the Voice of America beamed at Africa.
+During the colonial period, the forms of political subordination in Africa were
+obvious. There were governors, colonial officials, and police. In politically
+independent African states, the metropolitan capitalists have to insure favorable
+political decisions by remote control. So they set up their political puppets in
+many parts of Africa, who shamelessly agree to compromise with the vicious
+apartheid regime of South Africa when their masters tell them to do so. The
+revolutionary writer, Frantz Fanon, has dealt scorchingly and at length with the
+
+question of the minority in Africa which serves as the transmission line between
+the metropolitan capitalists and the dependencies in Africa. The importance of this
+group cannot be underestimated. The presence of a group of African sell-outs is
+part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any diagnosis of underdevelopment in
+Africa will reveal not just low per capita income and protein deficiencies, but also
+the gentlemen who dance in Abidjan, Accra, and Kinshasa when music is played
+in Paris, London, and New York.
+Political instability is manifesting itself in Africa as a chronic symptom of the
+underdevelopment of political life within the imperialist context. Military coups
+have followed one after the other, usually meaning nothing to the mass of the
+people, and sometimes representing a reactionary reversal of the efforts at national
+liberation. This trend was well exemplified in Latin American history, so that its
+appearance in neo-colonial South Vietnam or in neo-colonial Africa is not at all
+surprising. If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries,
+then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until,
+and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an
+alternative to the system of sham political independence. All of those features are
+ramifications of underdevelopment and of the exploitation of the imperialist
+system. In most analyses of this question, they are either left out entirely or the
+whole concept of imperialism and neo-colonialism is dismissed as mere rhetoric—
+especially by “academics” who claim to be removed from “politics.” During the
+remainder of this study, a great deal of detail will be presented to indicate the grim
+reality behind the so-called slogans of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the like. For the present moment, the position to be adopted can
+be stated briefly in the following terms:
+The question as to who, and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment
+can be answered at two levels. First, the answer is that the operation of the
+imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by
+draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the
+resources of the continent. Second, one has to deal with those who manipulate the
+system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said
+system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended
+their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa.
+In recent times, they were joined, and to some extent replaced, by capitalists
+from the United States; and for many years now even the workers of those
+metropolitan countries have benefited from the exploitation and underdevelopment
+of Africa. None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate
+responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there
+
+African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a
+responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+There is a great deal of literature on “development” and “underdevelopment,”
+although less than one would expect in view of the importance of the subjects.
+Most of that which is available seeks to justify capitalism. Hence, there is a
+narrow concentration on “economic development,” and particularly on capitalist
+economies, rather than any analysis of human social development. That approach
+is challenged by Marxist writers in the metropoles and increasingly by scholars
+from the underdeveloped world.
+FREDERICK ENGELS, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1902.
+KARL MARX, Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy.
+KARL MARX, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, edited by E. J. Hobsbawm. New York: International
+Publishers, 1964.
+These three works are samples of writing by the founders of what is now called Marxism. Most of the
+publications of Marx and Engels have a relevance to the theme of development, with particular emphasis on
+feudal and capitalist times.
+RICHARD T. GILL, Economic Development: Past and Present. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
+RAGNAR NURKSE, Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries. Oxford University Press,
+1953.
+These are typical examples of bourgeois metropolitan views on development and underdevelopment—the
+first being a text for North American college students by a Canadian economist and the second being a
+frequently reprinted work of one of the most prominent bourgeois advocates of the “vicious circle of poverty”
+theory. Unfortunately, these are also examples of the kind of book which dominates the shelves of any
+university or public library in Africa. The reader is invited to test this generalization.
+J. D. BERNAL, Science in History. (4 vol.) Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972.
+JOSEPH NEEDHAM, Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge University Press, 1954.
+Both of these are lengthy, but they should be tackled. Science and technology derive from the effort to
+understand and control the natural environment. Familiarity with the history of science is essential to an
+awareness of the development of society. Needham’s book is cited here as a corrective to the fairly common
+view that science is something peculiarly European.
+CELSO FURTADO, Development and Underdevelopment. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1964.
+A. GUNDER FRANK, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press,
+1967.
+TAMÁS SZENTES, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Budapest: Center for Afro-Asian Research of
+the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1971.
+The first writer is from Brazil, a country with a long history of dependence on and exploitation by the
+metropoles of Europe and North America. Frank’s book reflects the thinking of many progressive Latin
+American intellectuals and it has now become well entrenched as a view of Marxists inside the metropoles.
+Szentes is a Hungarian economist systematically applying Marxist insights to the actual data and processes of
+the underdeveloped world and imperialism as a whole.
+SAMIR AMIN, The Class Struggle in Africa. Cambridge, Mass.: Africa Research Group, n.d.
+
+Samir Amin is a North African. He stands out with regard both to the volume of his productions and the
+quality of his insights. The text cited above is very general—covering in outline the period of the roots of
+development in ancient Africa right up to the present and the projected socialist future. It is likely that more of
+his work will be translated into English (French being his working language).
+
+CHAPTER
+
+II
+How Africa Developed before the Coming of the
+Europeans—Up to the Fifteenth Century
+• A General Overview • Some Concrete Examples • Conclusion
+
+BEFORE EVEN THE BRITISH CAME INTO RELATIONS WITH OUR PEOPLE, WE were a developed
+people, having our own institutions, having our own ideas of government.
+—J. E. CASELY-HAYFORD, 1922
+African (Gold Coast) Nationalist
+
+A General Overview
+It has been shown that, using comparative standards, Africa today is
+underdeveloped in relation to Western Europe and a few other parts of the
+world; and that the present position has been arrived at, not by the separate
+evolution of Africa on the one hand and Europe on the other, but through
+exploitation. As is well known, Africa has had prolonged and extensive
+contact with Europe, and one has to bear in mind that contact between
+different societies changes their respective rates of development. To set the
+record straight, four operations are required:
+(1) Reconstruction of the nature of development in Africa before the
+coming of Europeans.
+(2) Reconstruction of the nature of development which took place in
+Europe before expansion abroad.
+(3) Analysis of Africa’s contribution to Europe’s present “developed”
+state.
+(4) Analysis of Europe’s contribution to Africa’s present
+“underdeveloped” state.
+The second task has already been extensively carried out in European
+literature, and only passing references need be made; but the others are all
+deserving of further attention.
+The African continent reveals very fully the workings of the law of
+uneven development of societies. There are marked contrasts between the
+Ethiopian empire and the hunting groups of pygmies in the Congo forest or
+between the empires of the Western Sudan and the Khoisan hunter-gatherers
+of the Kalahari Desert. Indeed, there were striking contrasts within any
+given geographical area. The Ethiopian empire embraced literate feudal
+Amharic noblemen as well as simple Kaffa cultivators and Galla
+pastoralists. The empires of the Western Sudan had sophisticated, educated
+Mandinga townsmen, small communities of Bozo fishermen, and nomadic
+
+Fulani herdsmen. Even among clans and lineages that appear roughly
+similar, there were considerable differences. However, it is possible to
+distinguish between what was uniquely “African” and what was universal in
+the sense of being characteristic of all human societies at a given stage of
+development. It is also essential to recognize the process of dialectical
+evolution from lower to higher forms of social organization; and, in looking
+at the most advanced social formations, one would appreciate the potential
+of the continent as a whole and the direction of change.
+The moment that the topic of the pre-European African past is raised,
+many individuals are concerned for various reasons to know about the
+existence of African “civilizations.” Mainly, this stems from a desire to
+make comparisons with European “civilizations.” This is not the context in
+which to evaluate the so-called civilizations of Europe. It is enough to note
+the behavior of European capitalists from the epoch of slavery through
+colonialism, fascism, and genocidal wars in Asia and Africa. Such
+barbarism causes suspicion to attach to the use of the word “civilization” to
+describe Western Europe and North America. As far as Africa is concerned
+during the period of early development, it is preferable to speak in terms of
+“cultures” rather than civilizations.
+A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what
+they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in
+which they treated death and greeted the newborn. Obviously, unique
+features came into existence in virtually every locality with regard to all
+social details. In addition, the continent of Africa south of the great Sahara
+desert formed a broad community where resemblances were clearly
+discernible. For example, music and dance had key roles in
+“uncontaminated” African society. They were ever present at birth,
+initiation, marriage, death, as well as at times of recreation. Africa is the
+continent of drums and percussion. African peoples reached the pinnacle of
+achievement in that sphere.
+Because of the impact of colonialism and cultural imperialism (which
+will be discussed later), Europeans and Africans themselves in the colonial
+period lacked due regard for the unique features of African culture. Those
+features have a value of their own that cannot be eclipsed by European
+culture either in the comparable period before 1500 or in the subsequent
+centuries. They cannot be eclipsed because they are not really comparable
+
+phenomena. Who in this world is competent to judge whether an Austrian
+waltz is better than a Makonde Ngoma? Furthermore, even in those spheres
+of culture that are more readily comparable, such as “the fine arts,” it is
+known that African achievements of the pre-European period stand as
+contributions to man’s heritage of beautiful creations. The art of Egypt, the
+Sudan, and Ethiopia was known to the rest of the world at an early date.
+That of the rest of Africa is still being “discovered” and rediscovered by
+Europeans and present-day Africans. The verdict of art historians on the Ife
+and Benin bronzes is well known. Since they date from the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries, they are very relevant to any discussion of African
+development in the epoch before the contacts with Europe. Nor should they
+be regarded as unusual, except with regard to the material in which the
+sculptures were executed. The same skill and feeling obviously went into
+sculpture and art-work in non-durable materials, especially wood.
+African dance and art were almost invariably linked with a religious
+world-outlook in one way or another. As is well known, traditional African
+religious practices exist in great variety, and it should also be remembered
+that both Islam and Christianity found homes on the African continent
+almost from their very inception. The features of the traditional African
+religions help to set African cultures apart from those in other continents;
+but in this present context it is more important to note how much African
+religion had in common with religion elsewhere and how this can be used
+as an index to the level of development in Africa before European impact in
+the fifteenth century.
+Religion is an aspect of the superstructure of a society, deriving
+ultimately from the degree of control and understanding of the material
+world. However, when man thinks in religious terms, he starts from the
+ideal rather than with the material world (which is beyond his
+comprehension). This creates a non-scientific and metaphysical way of
+viewing the world, which often conflicts with the scientific materialist
+outlook and with the development of society. African ancestral religions
+were no better or worse than other religions as such. But by the end of
+feudalism, Europeans began to narrow the area of human life in which
+religion and the church played a part. Religion ceased to dominate politics,
+geography, medicine. To free those things from religious restraints, it had to
+be argued that religion had its own sphere and the things of this world had
+
+their own secular sphere. This secularization of life speeded up the
+development of capitalism and later socialism. In contrast, in the period
+before the coming of the whites, religion pervaded African life just as it
+pervaded life in other pre-feudal societies, such as those of the Maoris of
+Australia or the Afghans of Afghanistan or the Vikings of Scandinavia.
+Religion can play both a positive and a negative role as an aspect of the
+superstructure. In most instances in early Africa, religious beliefs were
+associated with the mobilization and discipline of large numbers of people
+to form states. In a few instances, religion also provided concepts in the
+struggle for social justice. The negative aspects usually arose out of the
+tendency of religion to persist unchanged for extremely long periods,
+especially when the technology of earning a living changes very slowly.
+This was the case in African societies, as in all other pre-capitalist societies.
+At the same time, the religious beliefs themselves react upon the mode of
+production, further slowing up progress in that respect. For instance, belief
+in prayer and in the intervention of ancestors and various gods could easily
+be a substitute for innovations designed to control the impact of weather
+and environment.
+The same kind of two-sided relationship also exists between the means
+of earning a living and the social patterns that arise in the process of work.
+In Africa, before the fifteenth century, the predominant principle of social
+relations was that of family and kinship associated with communalism.
+Every member of an African society had his position defined in terms of
+relatives on his mother’s side and on his father’s side. Some societies placed
+greater importance on matrilineal ties and others on patrilineal ties. Those
+things were crucial to the daily existence of a member of an African society,
+because land (the major means of production) was owned by groups such as
+the family or clan—the head of which were parents and those yet unborn. In
+theory, this pattern was explained by saying that the residents in any
+community were all direct descendants of the first person who settled the
+land. When a new group arrived, they often made a pretense that they too
+had ancestry dating back to the settling of the land or else they insured that
+members of the earliest kin groups continued to perform the ceremonies
+related to the land and water of the region.
+Similarly, the labor that worked the land was generally recruited on a
+family basis. A single family or household would till its own plots and it
+
+would also be available to share certain joint farming activities with other
+members of the extended family or clan. Annual hunts and river fishing
+were also organized by a whole extended family or village community. In a
+matrilineal society such as that of the Bemba (Zambia), the bridegroom
+spent a number of years working for the father of his bride; and many
+young men who had married daughters of the same household often formed
+work teams to help each other. In Dahomey, a young man did not go to live
+with his wife’s family, but the dokpwe, or work team, allowed a son to
+participate in carrying out a task of some magnitude for the father of his
+wife. In both of those examples, the right of the father-in-law to acquire
+labor and the obligations of the son-in-law to give labor were based on
+kinship. This can be contrasted with capitalism where money buys labor,
+and with feudalism where the serf provides labor in order to have access to
+a portion of land which belongs to the landlord.
+Having been produced on land that was family property and through
+family labor, the resultant crops and other goods were distributed on the
+basis of kinship ties. If a man’s crops were destroyed by some sudden
+calamity, relatives in his own village helped him. If the whole community
+was in distress, people moved to live with their kinsmen in another area
+where food was not scarce. In Akan country (Ghana), the clan system was
+highly organized, so that a man from Brong could visit Fante many
+hundreds of miles away and receive food and hospitality from a complete
+stranger who happened to be of his own clan.
+Numerous examples could be brought forward to show the dominance of
+the family principle in the communal phase of African development. It
+affected the two principal factors of production—land and labor—as well as
+the system of distributing goods. European anthropologists who have
+studied African societies have done so mainly from a very prejudiced and
+racist position, but their researchers can nevertheless provide abundant facts
+relating to family homesteads and compounds, to the extended family
+(including affinal members who join by association rather than by birth),
+and to lineages and clans which carried the principles of kinship alliances
+over large areas. However, while the exact details might have differed,
+similar social institutions were to be found among the Gauls of eleventhcentury France, among the Viet of Indochina at the same date, and virtually
+
+everywhere else in the world at one time or another—because
+communalism is one phase through which all human society passed.
+In all African societies during the early epoch, the individual at every
+stage of life had a series of duties and obligations to others in the society as
+well as a set of rights: namely, things that he or she could expect or demand
+from other individuals. Age was a most important factor determining the
+extent of rights and obligations. The oldest members of the society were
+highly respected and usually in authority; and the idea of seniority through
+age was reflected in the presence of age-grades and age-sets in a great many
+African societies. Circumcision meant initiation into the society and into
+adulthood. From that moment, a man was placed with others in his own
+age-group and a woman likewise. Usually, there were at least three agegrades, corresponding roughly to the young, the middle-aged, and the old.
+In large parts of Europe, when communalism broke down it gave way to
+widespread slavery as the new form in which labor was mobilized. This
+slavery continued throughout the European Middle Ages, with the Crusades
+between Christians and Moslems giving an added excuse for enslaving
+people. Slavery in turn gave way to serfdom, whereby the laborer was tied
+to the land and could no longer be sold and transported. Because it took
+many years for the transition from slavery to feudalism to take place in
+Europe, it was common to find that feudal society still retained numbers of
+slaves. Parts of China, Burma, and India also had considerable numbers of
+slaves as the society moved away from elementary communalism, but there
+was never any time-span when slavery was the dominant mode of
+production in Asia. In Africa, there were few slaves and certainly no epoch
+of slavery. Most of the slaves were in North African and other Moslem
+societies, and in those instances a man and his family could have the same
+slave status for generations, within the overall feudal structure of the
+society. Elsewhere in Africa, communal societies were introduced to the
+concept of owning alien human beings when they took captives in war. At
+first, those captives were in a very disadvantaged position, comparable to
+that of slaves, but very rapidly captives or their offspring became ordinary
+members of the society, because there was no scope for the perpetual
+exploitation of man by man in a context that was neither feudal nor
+capitalist.
+
+Both Marxists and non-Marxists alike (with different motivations) have
+pointed out that the sequence of modes of production noted in Europe were
+not reproduced in Africa. In Africa, after the communal stage there was no
+epoch of slavery arising out of internal evolution. Nor was there a mode of
+production which was the replica of European feudalism. Marx himself
+recognized that the stages of development in Asia had produced a form of
+society which could not easily be fitted into a European slot. That he called
+“the Asian mode of production.” Following along those lines, a number of
+Marxists have recently been discussing whether Africa was in the same
+category as Asia or whether Africa had its own “African mode of
+production.” The implications of the arguments are very progressive,
+because they are concerned with the concrete conditions of Africa rather
+than with preconceptions brought from Europe. But the scholars concerned
+seem to be bent on finding a single term to cover a variety of social
+formations which were existing in Africa from about the fifth century A.D.
+to the coming of colonialism. The assumption that will underlie this study is
+that most African societies before 1500 were in a transitional stage between
+the practice of agriculture (plus fishing and herding) in family communities
+and the practice of the same activities within states and societies
+comparable to feudalism.
+In a sense, all history is transition from one stage to another, but some
+historical situations along the line have more clearly distinguishable
+characteristics than others. Thus under communalism there were no classes,
+and there was equal access to land, and equality in distribution—at a low
+level of technology and production. Feudalism involved great inequality in
+distribution of land and social products. The landlord class and its
+bureaucracy controlled the state and used it as an instrument for oppressing
+peasants, serfs, slaves, and even craftsmen and merchants. The movement
+from communalism to feudalism in every continent took several centuries,
+and in some instances the interruption of internal evolution never allowed
+the process to mature. In Africa, there is no doubt that the societies which
+eventually reached feudalism were extremely few. So long as the feudal
+state was still in the making, elements that were communal coexisted with
+elements that were feudal and with some peculiarities due to African
+conditions. The transition was also characterized by a variety of social
+formations: There were pastoralists and cultivators, fishing societies and
+
+trading societies, raiders and nomads. They were all being progressively
+drawn into a relationship with the land, with each other, and with the state,
+through the expansion of productive forces and the network of distribution.
+In feudal societies, there were clashes between the landlord and peasant
+classes and later on between the landlord and merchant classes. Under
+capitalism, the principal class contradiction inside Europe was between the
+proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Those hostile class relations provided the
+motive force within the respective societies. African communal societies
+had differences such as age-grades and differences between ordinary
+members and religious leaders such as rainmakers. However, those were not
+exploitative or antagonistic relations. The concept of class as a motive force
+in social development had not yet come about; and in the communal phase
+one must look at the fundamental forces of production to understand the
+process of change.
+Using a number of methods and concepts, it is possible to reconstruct the
+most likely manner in which isolated family living was broken down and
+production increased. For instance, the rise of age-grades can be seen as
+responding to the need for greater solidarity, because age-grades included
+and cut across many families. Similarly, communal labor was entered into
+by cross sections of the community to make work more efficient. The
+dokpwe work group of Dahomey mentioned above had a wider application
+in serving the whole community to perform such heavy tasks as clearing
+land and housebuilding. With the offer of some food and beer or palm wine,
+a work team or “work bee” could be mobilized in a short time in most
+African communities, including those of the light-skinned Berbers of North
+Africa.
+Of course, while the organization of labor might have helped to produce
+more, the principal change in the productive forces was that which
+comprised new techniques—using the word in its broadest sense to include
+both tools and skills in dealing with the environment and new plant and
+animal species. The first prerequisite for mastery of the environment is
+knowledge of that environment. By the fifteenth century, Africans
+everywhere had arrived at a considerable understanding of the total ecology
+—of the soils, climate, animals, plants, and their multiple interrelationships.
+The practical application of this lay in the need to trap animals, to build
+
+houses, to make utensils, to find medicines, and above all to devise systems
+of agriculture.
+In the centuries before the contact with Europeans, the overwhelmingly
+dominant activity in Africa was agriculture. In all the settled agricultural
+communities, people observed the peculiarities of their own environment
+and tried to find techniques for dealing with it in a rational manner.
+Advanced methods were used in some areas, such as terracing, crop
+rotation, green manuring, mixed farming, and regulated swamp farming.
+The single most important technological change underlying African
+agricultural development was the introduction of iron tools, notably the ax
+and the hoe, replacing wooden and stone tools. It was on the basis of the
+iron tools that new skills were elaborated in agriculture as well as in other
+spheres of economic activity.
+The coming of iron, the rise of cereal growing, and the making of pottery
+were all closely related phenomena. In most parts of Africa, it was in the
+period after the birth of Christ that those things came about. The rate of
+change over a few centuries was quite impressive. Millet and rice had been
+domesticated from wild grasses just as yams were made to evolve from
+selected wild roots. Most African societies raised the cultivation of their
+own particular staple to a fine art. Even the widespread resort to shifting
+cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first
+European colonialists supposed. That simple form of agriculture was based
+on a correct evaluation of the soil potential, which was not as great as
+initially appears from the heavy vegetation; and when the colonialists
+started upsetting the thin topsoil the result was disastrous.
+The above remarks show that when an outsider comes into a new
+ecological system, even if he is more skilled he does not necessarily
+function as effectively as those who have familiarized themselves with the
+environment over centuries; and the newcomer is likely to look more
+ridiculous if he is too arrogant to realize that he has something to learn from
+the “natives.” However, it is not being suggested that African agriculture in
+the early period was superior to that of other continents. On the contrary,
+African standards of husbandry on the land and with livestock were not as
+high as those independently evolved in most parts of Asia and Europe. The
+weakness in Africa seemed to have been the lack of a professional interest
+in acquiring more scientific knowledge and in devising tools to lighten the
+
+load of labor as well as to transform hostile environments into areas suitable
+for human activity. As far as agriculture in Europe was concerned, this
+professionalism was undertaken by the class with a vested interest in the
+land—namely, the feudalist landowners and later the capitalist farmers.
+It has previously been stated that development is very much determined
+by the social relations of production (i.e., those which have to do with
+people’s functions in producing wealth). Where a few people owned the
+land and the majority were tenants, this injustice at a particular stage of
+history allowed the few to concentrate on improving their land. In contrast,
+under communalism every African was assured of sufficient land to meet
+his own needs by virtue of being a member of a family or community. For
+that reason, and because land was relatively abundant, there were few social
+pressures or incentives for technical changes to increase productivity.
+In Asia, where much of the land was communally owned, there were
+tremendous advances in some types of farming, especially irrigated
+farming. This was because the state in India, China, Ceylon, and other
+places intervened and engaged in irrigation and other hydraulic works on a
+large scale. This was also true of North Africa, which in most respects
+followed a pattern of evolution similar to that of Asia. The African land
+tenure pattern was closer to that of Asia than to that of Europe, but even the
+most politically developed African states did not play the role of initiators
+and supervisors of agricultural development. One reason may have been the
+lack of population pressure and hence the scattered nature of settlements.
+Another may have been state concentration on trading non-agricultural
+products to the exclusion of other things. Certainly, when African societies
+became linked up with other social systems outside the continent on the
+basis of trade, little attention was paid to agriculture.
+When it comes to the question of manufacturing in Africa before the
+time of the white man, it is also essential to recognize where achievements
+have been underestimated. African manufacturers have been
+contemptuously treated or overlooked by European writers, because the
+modern conception of the word brings to mind factories and machines.
+However, “manufactures” means literally “things made by hand,” and
+African manufacture in this sense had advanced appreciably. Most African
+societies fulfilled their own needs for a wide range of articles of domestic
+use, as well as for farming tools and weapons.
+
+One way of judging the level of economic development in Africa five
+centuries ago is through the quality of the products. Here a few examples
+will be given of articles which came to the notice of the outside world.
+Through North Africa, Europeans became familiar with a superior brand of
+red leather from Africa which was termed “Moroccan leather.” In fact, it
+was tanned and dyed by Hausa and Mandinga specialists in northern
+Nigeria and Mali. When direct contact was established between Europeans
+and Africans on the East and West coasts, many more impressive items
+were displayed. As soon as the Portuguese reached the old kingdom of
+Kongo, they sent back word on the superb local cloths made from bark and
+palm fiber—and having a finish comparable to velvet. The Baganda were
+also expert barkcloth makers. Yet, Africa had even better to offer in the
+form of cotton cloth, which was widely manufactured before the coming of
+the Europeans. Well into the present century, local cottons from the Guinea
+coast were stronger than Manchester cottons. Once European products
+reached Africa, Africans too were in a position to make comparisons
+between their commodities and those from outside. In Katanga and Zambia,
+the local copper continued to be preferred to the imported items, while the
+same held true for iron in a place like Sierra Leone.
+It was at the level of scale that African manufactures had not made a
+breakthrough. That is to say, the cotton looms were small, the iron smelters
+were small, the pottery was turned slowly by hand and not on a wheel. Yet
+some changes were taking place in this context. Under communalism, each
+household met its own needs by making its own clothes, pots, mats, and
+such. That was true of every continent. However, economic expansion from
+there on was associated with specialization and localization of industry—
+people’s needs being met by exchange. This trend was displayed in the
+principal African manufactures, and notably in the cloth industry. Cotton
+fiber had to be ginned (separated from the seed), then carded and spun into
+yarn, before being woven. Either the yarn or the woven cloth had to be
+dyed, and the making of the dye itself was a complex process. There was a
+time when all these stages would be performed by a single family or rather
+by the women in a single family, as in Yoruba-land. But economic
+development was reflected in the separation of dyeing from cloth-making,
+and the separation of spinning from weaving. Each separation marked
+greater specialization and quantitative and qualitative changes in output.
+
+European industry has been intensively studied, and it is generally
+recognized that in addition to new machinery a most decisive factor in the
+growth of industry was the changeover from domestic production to the
+factory system, with the guild marking an intermediary stage. The guild was
+an association of specialists, passing on their skills by training apprentices
+and working in buildings set aside for that purpose. Africa, too, had
+elements of the guild system. At Timbuktu, there were tailoring guilds,
+while in Benin guilds of a very restricted caste type controlled the famous
+brass and bronze industry. In Nupe (now northern Nigeria) the glass and
+bead industry operated on a guild basis. Each Nupe guild had a common
+workshop and a master. The master obtained contracts, financed the guild,
+and disposed of the product. Both his own relatives as well as strangers
+were free to enter the guild and learn the various specialized tasks within
+the glass industry. What this amounted to was simply that there was
+increasing specialization and division of labor.
+Traditional African economies are usually called “subsistence”
+economies. Often, small villages farmed, hunted, fished, and looked after
+themselves independently with little reference to the rest of the continent.
+Yet, at the same time, the vast majority of African communities fulfilled at
+least a few of their needs by trade. Africa was a continent of innumerable
+trade routes. Some extended for long distances, like the routes across the
+Sahara or the routes connected with Katanga copper. But in the main, it was
+trade between neighboring or not too far distant societies. Such trade was
+always a function of production. Various communities were producing
+surpluses of given commodities which could be exchanged for items which
+they lacked. In that way, the salt industry of one locality would be
+stimulated while the iron industry would be encouraged in another. In a
+coastal, lake, or river area, dried fish could become profitable, while yams
+and millet would be grown in abundance elsewhere to provide a basis for
+exchange. The trade so readily distinguishable in every part of the continent
+between the tenth and fifteenth centuries was an excellent indicator of
+economic expansion and other forms of development which accompanied
+increasing mastery over the environment.
+As part of the extension of trade, it was noticeable that barter was giving
+way to some forms of money exchange. Barter was generally practiced
+when the volume of trade was small and when only a few commodities
+
+were involved. However, as trade became more complicated, some items
+began to be used as the standards for measuring other goods. Those items
+could be kept as a form of wealth easily transformed into other commodities
+when the need arose. For example, salt, cloth, iron hoes, and cowry shells
+were popular forms of money in Africa—apart from gold and copper, which
+were much rarer and therefore restricted to measuring things of great value.
+In a few places, such as North Africa, Ethiopia, and the Kongo, the
+monetary systems were quite sophisticated, indicating that the economy was
+far removed from simple barter and subsistence.
+There were many other changes of a socio-political nature accompanying
+the expansion of the productive forces. Indeed, things such as agricultural
+practices, industry, trade, money, and political structures were inseparable—
+each interacting with the others. The most developed areas of Africa were
+those where all the elements converged, and the two sociopolitical features
+which were the outstanding indices to development were the increase of
+stratification and the consolidation of states.
+The principles of family and deferment to age were slowly breaking
+down throughout the centuries preceding the arrival of Europeans in their
+sailing ships. Changes in technology and in the division of labor made that
+inevitable. The introduction of iron, for example, gave economic and
+military strength to those who could make and acquire it. Better tools meant
+more food and a greater population, but the latter tended to outrun the
+supplies of material goods, and the possibilities of wealth opened up by the
+possession of iron were seized upon by a few to their own advantage.
+Skilled workers in iron, cloth, pottery, leather, or salt-making tended to pass
+on their skills in closed groups known as castes. That insured that the
+division of labor operated in their favor, because their position was
+privileged and strategic. Ironworkers were particularly favored in some
+African societies in which they either became the ruling groups or were
+very close to the top of the social hierarchy. The division of labor also
+carried over into non-material spheres, producing professional minstrels and
+historians. They too had certain special rights and privileges, notably the
+ability to criticize freely without fear of reprisal. In some circumstances,
+skilled castes were reduced to very low status. But that was rare, and in any
+case it does not contradict the general assertion that the tendency was for
+communalism to give rise to more and more stratification.
+
+Social stratification was the basis for the rise of classes and for social
+antagonisms. To some extent, this was a logical follow-up of the previous
+non-antagonistic differences in communal society. For instance, old men
+could use their control over land allocation, over bride-price, and over other
+traditional exchanges to try to establish themselves as a privileged
+economic stratum. Secret societies arose in the area that is now Liberia,
+Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and they permitted knowledge, power, and
+wealth to pass into the hands of the elders and ultimately to the elders of
+particular lineages.
+The contradiction between young men and their elders was not the type
+that caused violent revolution. But young men clearly had reasons for
+resenting their dependence on elders, especially when it came to such vital
+personal matters as the acquisition of wives. When disgruntled, they could
+either leave their communities and set up for themselves or they could
+challenge the principles within the society. In either case, the trend was that
+some individuals and families were more successful than others, and those
+families established themselves as permanent rulers. Then age ceased to
+matter as much because even a junior could succeed to his father, once the
+notion of royal blood or royal lineage was established.
+In the period of transition, while African society retained many features
+that were undisputably communal, it also accepted the principle that some
+families or clans or lineages were destined to rule and others were not. This
+was true not only of cultivators but of pastoralists as well. In fact, livestock
+became unevenly distributed much more readily than land; and those
+families with the largest herds became socially and politically dominant.
+An even more important aspect of the process of social stratification was
+that brought about by contact between different social formations.
+Fishermen had to relate to cultivators and the latter to pastoralists. There
+were even social formations such as bands of hunters and food-gatherers
+who had not yet entered the phase of communal cooperation. Often the
+relationship was peaceful. In many parts of the African continent, there
+arose what is known as “symbiosis” between groups earning their living in
+different ways—which really means that they agreed to exchange goods and
+coexist to their mutual advantage. However, there was also room for
+considerable conflict; and when one group imposed itself by force on
+
+another, the result was invariably the rise of social classes with the
+conquerors on top and the conquered at the bottom.
+The most common clashes between different social formations were
+those between pastoralists and cultivators. In some instances, the cultivators
+had the upper hand, as for instance in West Africa where cultivators like the
+Mandinga and Hausa were the overlords of the Rulani cattlemen right up to
+the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reverse situation was found in
+the Horn of Africa and most of East Africa. Another type of clash was that
+in which raiding peoples took power over agriculturalists, as happened in
+Angola and in and around the Sahara, where the Moors and Tuareg exacted
+tribute from and even enslaved more peaceful and sedentary peoples. The
+result in each case was that a relatively small faction held control of the
+land and (where relevant) cattle, mines, and long-distance trade. It meant
+also that the minority group could make demands on the labor of their
+subjects—not on the basis of kinship but because a relationship of
+domination and subordination existed.
+In truly communal societies, the leadership was based on religion and
+family ties. The senior members of the society shared the work with others
+and received more or less the same share of the total product. Certainly, no
+one starved while others stuffed themselves and threw away the excess.
+However, once African societies began to expand by internal evolution,
+conquest, or trade, the style of life of the ruling group became noticeably
+different. They consumed the most and the best that the society offered. Yet,
+they were least directly involved in the production of wealth by farming,
+cattle herding, or fishing. The ruling class and the kings in particular had
+the right to call upon the labor of the common man for certain projects and
+for a given number of days per year. This is known as corvée labor, from a
+similar procedure followed in feudal France. Such a system meant greater
+exploitation and at the same time greater development of productive
+resources.
+Social stratification as outlined above went hand in hand with the rise of
+the state. The notion of royal lineages and commoner clans could not have
+any meaning except in a political state with a concrete geographical
+existence. It is significant that the great dynasties of the world ruled over
+feudal states. To the European or European-trained ear, the names of the
+Tudors, Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs would already be
+
+familiar. Japan had its Kamakuras and its Tokugawas; China had its T’ang
+and its Ming; India had its Guptas and its Marathas; and so on. All of those
+were feudal dynasties existing in a period some centuries after the birth of
+Christ, but in addition there were dynasties which ruled in each of those
+countries before feudal land tenure and class relations had fully crystalized.
+It means that the transition to feudalism in Europe* and Asia saw the rise of
+ruling groups and the state as interdependent parts of the same process. In
+that respect, Africa was no different.
+From a political perspective, the period of transition from communalism
+to feudalism in Africa was one of state formation. At the beginning (and for
+many centuries), the state remained weak and immature. It acquired definite
+territorial boundaries, but inside those boundaries subjects lived in their
+own communities with scarcely any contact with the ruling class until the
+time came to pay an annual tax or tribute. Only when a group within the
+state refused to pay the tribute did the early African states mobilize their
+repressive machinery in the form of an army to demand what it considered
+as its rights from subjects. Slowly, various states acquired greater power
+over their many communities of citizens. They exacted corvée labor, they
+enlisted soldiers, and they appointed regular tax collectors and local
+administrators. The areas of Africa in which labor relations were breaking
+out of communal restrictions corresponded to areas in which sophisticated
+political states were emerging. The rise of states was itself a form of
+development, which increased the scale of African politics and merged
+small ethnic groups into wider identities suggestive of nations.
+In some ways, too much importance is attached to the growth of political
+states. It was in Europe that the nation-state reached an advanced stage, and
+Europeans tended to use the presence or absence of well-organized polities
+as a measure of “civilization.” That is not entirely justified, because in
+Africa there were small political units which had relatively advanced
+material and non-material cultures. For instance, neither the Ibo people of
+Nigeria nor the Kikuyu of Kenya ever produced large centralized
+governments in their traditional setting. But both had sophisticated systems
+of political rule based on clans and (in the case of the Ibo) on religious
+oracles and “Secret Societies.” Both of them were efficient agriculturalists
+
+and ironworkers, and the Ibo had been manufacturing brass and bronze
+items ever since the ninth century A.D., if not earlier.
+However, after making the above qualification, it can be conceded that
+on the whole the larger states in Africa had the most effective political
+structures and greater capacity for producing food, clothing, minerals, and
+other material artifacts. It can readily be understood that those societies
+which had ruling classes were concerned with acquiring luxury and prestige
+items. The privileged groups in control of the state were keen to stimulate
+manufactures as well as to acquire them through trade. They were the ones
+that mobilized labor to produce a greater surplus above subsistence needs,
+and in the process they encouraged specialization and the division of labor.
+Scholars often distinguish between groups in Africa which had states and
+those which were “stateless.” Sometimes, the word “stateless” is carelessly
+or even abusively used; but it does describe those peoples who had no
+machinery of government coercion and no concept of a political unit wider
+than the family or the village. After all, if there is no class stratification in a
+society, it follows that there is no state, because the state arose as an
+instrument to be used by a particular class to control the rest of society in its
+own interests. Generally speaking, one can consider the stateless societies
+as among the older forms of socio-political organization in Africa, while the
+large states represented an evolution away from communalism—sometimes
+to the point of feudalism.
+Again, it must be emphasized that a survey of the scene in Africa before
+the coming of Europeans would reveal considerable unevenness of
+development. There were social formations representing hunting bands,
+communalism, feudalism, and many positions intermediate between the last
+two. The remainder of this section will be devoted to a review of the
+principal features of several of the most developed societies and states of
+Africa in the last thousand years or so before Africa came into permanent
+contact with Europe. The areas to be considered are Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia,
+Morocco, the Western Sudan, the interlacustrine zone of East Africa, and
+Zimbabwe. Each serves as an example of what development meant in early
+Africa and what the direction of social movement was. To a greater or lesser
+extent, each was also a leading force on the continent in the sense of
+carrying neighbors along the same path, either by absorbing them or
+influencing them more indirectly.
+
+Some Concrete Examples
+Egypt
+It is logical to start with Egypt as the oldest culture in Africa which rose to
+eminence. The glories of Egypt under the Pharaohs are well known and do
+not need recounting. At one time, it used to be said or assumed that ancient
+Egypt was not “African”—a curious view which is no longer seriously
+propounded. However, for the present purposes, it is more relevant to refer
+to Egypt under Arab and Turkish rule from the seventh century onwards.
+During that latter period, the ruling class was foreign, and that meant that
+Egypt’s internal development was tied up with other countries, notably
+Arabia and Turkey. Colonized Egypt sent abroad great amounts of wealth in
+the form of food and revenue, and that was a very negative factor. But the
+tendency was for the ruling foreigners to break with their own imperial
+masters and to act simply as a ruling elite within Egypt, which became an
+independent feudal state.
+One of the first features of feudalism to arrive in Egypt was the military
+aspect. The Arab, Turk, and Circassian invaders were all militarily inclined.
+This was particularly true of the Mameluks who held power from the
+thirteenth century onwards. Political power in Egypt from the seventh
+century lay in the hands of a military oligarchy which delegated the actual
+government to bureaucrats, thereby creating a situation similar to that in
+places like China and Indochina. Even more fundamental was the fact that
+land tenure relations were undergoing change in such a way that a true
+feudal class came on the scene. All the conquerors made land grants to their
+followers and military captains. Initially, the land in Egypt was the property
+of the state to be rented out to cultivators. The state then had the right to
+reappropriate the land and allocate it once more, somewhat like the head of
+a village community acting as the guardian of the lands of related families.
+However, the ruling military elements also became a new class of
+landowners. By the fifteenth century, most of the land in Egypt was the
+property of the sultan and his military lords.
+If there was a small class which monopolized most of the land, it
+followed that there was a large class of landless. Peasant cultivators were
+soon converted into mere agricultural laborers, tied to the soil as tenants or
+
+vassals of the feudal landlords. These peasants with little or no land were
+known as the fellahin. In Europe, there are legends about the exploitation
+and suffering of the Russian serfs, or muzhik, under feudalism. In Egypt, the
+exploitation of the fellahin was carried out even more thoroughly. The
+feudalists had no interest in the fellahin beyond seeing that they produced
+revenue. Most of what the peasants produced was taken from them in the
+form of tax, and the tax collectors were asked to perform the miracle of
+taking from the peasants even that which they did not have! When their
+demands were not met, the peasants were brutalized.
+The antagonistic nature of the contradiction between the feudal warrior
+landlords and the fellahin was revealed by a number of peasant revolts,
+notably in the early part of the eighth century. In no continent was
+feudalism an epoch of romance for the laboring classes, but the elements of
+development were seen in the technology and the increase in productive
+capacity. Under the patronage of the Fatimid dynasty (969 A.D. to 1170 A.D.),
+science flourished and industry reached a new level in Egypt. Windmills
+and waterwheels were introduced from Persia in the tenth century. New
+industries were introduced—papermaking, sugar refining, porcelain, and the
+distillation of gasoline. The older industries of textiles, leather, and metal
+were improved upon. The succeeding dynasties of the Ayyubids and the
+Mameluks also achieved a great deal, especially in the building of canals,
+dams, bridges, and aqueducts, and in stimulating commerce with Europe.
+Egypt at that time was still able to teach Europe many things and was
+flexible enough to receive new techniques in return.
+Although feudalism was based on the land, it usually developed towns at
+the expense of the countryside. The high points of Egyptian feudal culture
+were associated with the towns. The Fatimids founded the city of Cairo,
+which became one of the most famous and most cultured in the world. At
+the same time, they established the Azhar University which exists today as
+one of the oldest in the world. The feudalists and the rich merchants were
+the ones who benefited most, but the craftsmen and other city dwellers of
+Cairo and Alexandria were able to participate to some extent in the leisured
+lives of the towns.
+Ethiopia
+
+Ethiopia, too, at the start of its history as a great power was ruled over by
+foreigners. The kingdom of Axum was one of the most important of the
+nuclei around which feudal Ethiopia eventually emerged, and Axum was
+founded near the Red Sea coast by a dynasty of Sabean origin from the
+other side of the Red Sea. But the kings of Axum were never agents of
+foreign powers, and they became completely Africanized. The founding of
+Axum goes back to the first century A.D. and its ruling class was
+Christianized within a few centuries. After that they moved inland and
+participated in the development of the Christian feudal Ethiopian state.
+The Ethiopian, Tigrean, and Amharic ruling class was a proud one,
+tracing its descent to Solomon. As a state which incorporated several other
+smaller states and kingdoms, it was an empire in the same sense as feudal
+Austria or Prussia. The emperor of Ethiopia was addressed as “Conquering
+Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of
+Kings.” In practice, however, the “Solomonic” line was not unbroken. Most
+of the consolidation of the inland Ethiopian plateau was carried out in the
+twelfth century by an intruding dynasty, the Zagwe, who made claims to
+descent from Moses. The Zagwe kings distinguished themselves by
+building several churches cut out of solid rock. The architectural
+achievements attest to the level of skill reached by Ethiopians as well as the
+capacity of the state to mobilize labor on a huge scale. Such tasks could not
+have been achieved by voluntary family labor but only through the labor of
+an exploited class.
+A great deal is known of the superstructure of the Ethiopian empire,
+especially its Christianity and its literate culture. History was written to
+glorify the king and the nobility, especially under the restored “Solomonic”
+dynasty which replaced the Zagwe in 1270 A.D. Fine illuminated books and
+manuscripts became a prominent element of Amharic culture. Equally fine
+garments and jewelry were produced for the ruling class and for the church.
+The top ecclesiastics were part of the nobility, and the institution of the
+monastery grew to great proportions in Ethiopia. The association of
+organized religion with the state was implicit in communal societies, where
+the distinction between politics, economics, religion, medicine, was
+scarcely drawn. Under feudalism everywhere, church and state were in
+close alliance. The Buddhists were pre-eminent in feudal Vietnam, Burma,
+Japan, and to a lesser extent in China. In India, a limited Buddhist influence
+
+was overwhelmed by that of the Hindus and Moslems; and of course in
+feudal Europe it was the Catholic church which played the role paralleled
+by the Orthodox church in Ethiopia.
+The wealth of Ethiopia rested on an agricultural base. The fertile uplands
+supported cereal growing and there was considerable livestock raising,
+including the rearing of horses. Craft skills were developed in a number of
+spheres, and foreign craftsmen were encouraged. For instance, early in the
+fifteenth century, Turkish artisans settled in the country and made coats of
+mail and weapons for the Ethiopian army. Coptics from Egypt were also
+introduced to help run the financial administration. No one denies that the
+word “feudal” can be applied to Ethiopia in those centuries, because there
+existed a clear-cut class contradiction between the landlords and the
+peasants. Those relations grew out of the communalism that had
+characterized Ethiopia, like other parts of Africa, much earlier.
+Feudal Ethiopia included lands that were communally owned by village
+and ethnic communities as well as lands belonging directly to the crown;
+but in addition large territories were conferred by the conquering Amharic
+dynasties on members of the royal family and on soldiers and priests. Those
+who received huge areas of land became Ras, or provincial princes, and
+they had judges appointed by the emperor attached to them. The peasants in
+their domain were reduced to tenants who could earn their living only by
+offering produce to the landlord and taxes to the state (also in produce). The
+landlords exempted themselves from tax—a typical situation in feudal
+societies, and one which fed the fires of revolution in Europe when the
+bourgeois class grew powerful enough to challenge the fact that the
+feudalists were using political power to tax everyone but themselves.
+Ethiopia, of course, never reached that stage of transition to capitalism.
+What is clear is that the transition to feudalism had been made.
+Nubia
+Nubia was another Christian region in Africa, but one which is not so
+famous as Ethiopia. In the sixth century A.D., Christianity was introduced
+into the middle Nile in the districts once ruled by the famous state of Kush,
+or Meroë. In the period before the birth of Christ, Kush was a rival to Egypt
+in splendor, and it ruled Egypt for a number of years. Its decline in the
+
+fourth century A.D. was completed by attacks from the then expanding
+Axum. The three small Nubian states which arose some time afterwards
+were to some extent the heirs of Kush, although after their conversion to
+Christianity it was this religion which dominated Nubian culture.
+The Nubian states (which had consolidated to two by about the eighth
+century) achieved most from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, in spite of
+great pressures from Arab and Islamic enemies; and they did not finally
+succumb until the fourteenth century. Scholarly interest in Nubia has
+focused on the ruins of large red-brick churches and monasteries which had
+murals and frescoes of fine quality. Several conclusions can be drawn from
+the material evidence. In the first place, a great deal of labor was required to
+build those churches along with the stone fortifications which often
+surrounded them. As with the pyramids of Egypt or the feudal castles of
+Europe, the common builders were intensely exploited and probably
+coerced. Secondly, skilled labor was involved in the making of the bricks
+and in the architecture. The paintings indicate that the skills surpassed mere
+manual dexterity, and the same artistic merit is noticeable in fragments of
+painted pottery recovered from Nubia.
+It has already been indicated that the churches and monasteries played a
+major role in Ethiopia, and this is worth elaborating on with respect to
+Nubia. The monastery was a major unit of production. Numerous peasant
+huts were clustered around each monastery, which functioned very much as
+did the manor of a feudal lord. The wealth that accumulated inside the
+churches was alienated from the peasants, while the finest aspects of the
+non-material culture, such as books, were accessible only to a small
+minority. Not only were the peasants illiterate, but in many cases they were
+non-Christians or only nominally Christian—judging from the better known
+Ethiopian example of the same date. When the Christian ruling class of
+Nubia was eliminated by the Moslems, very little of the achievements of the
+old state remained in the fabric of the people’s daily lives. Such reversals in
+the historical process are not uncommon throughout human experience.
+Ultimately, the dialectic of development asserts itself, but some ebbing and
+flowing is inevitable. The Nubian states were not in existence in the
+fifteenth century, but they constitute a legitimate example of the
+potentialities of African development.
+
+One can go further and discern that Kush was still contributing to
+African development long after the kingdom had declined and given way to
+Christian Nubia. It is clear that Kush was a center from which many
+positive cultural elements diffused to the rest of Africa. Brasswork of
+striking similarity to that of Meroe was reproduced in West Africa, and the
+technique by which West Africans cast their brass is generally held to have
+originated in Egypt and to have been passed on by way of Kush. Above all,
+Kush was one of the earliest and most vigorous centers of iron mining and
+smelting in Africa, and it was certainly one of the sources from which this
+crucial aspect of technology passed to the rest of the continent. That is why
+the middle Nile was a leading force in the social, economic, and political
+development of Africa as a whole.
+The Maghreb
+Islam was the great “revealed” religion which played the major role in the
+period of the feudal development of the Maghreb—the lands at the western
+extremity of the Islamic empires that stretched across Africa, Asia, and
+Europe within years of the Prophet Mohammed’s death in the seventh
+century of the Christian era. The Arab empire-building under the banner of
+Islam is a classic example of the role of religion in that respect. Ibn
+Khaldun, a great fourteenth-century North African historian, was of the
+opinion that Islam was the most important force allowing the Arabs to
+transcend the narrow boundaries of small family communities which were
+constantly struggling among each other. He wrote:
+Arab pride, touchiness and intense jealousy of power render it impossible for them to agree.
+Only when their nature has been permeated by a religious impulse are they transformed, so that
+the tendency to anarchy is replaced by a spirit of mutual defense. Consider the moment when
+religion dominated their policy and led them to observe a religious law designed to promote the
+moral and material interests of civilization. Under a series of successors to the Prophet
+[Mohammed], how vast their empire became and how strongly was it established.
+
+The above remarks by Ibn Khaldun cover only one aspect of Arab
+imperial expansion, but it was certainly a crucial one, and attested to the
+essential role of ideology in the developmental process. That has to be
+considered in relation to and in addition to the material circumstances.
+Furthermore, in judging the material conditions at any given time which
+might form the basis for further expansion of production and further growth
+
+of the society’s power, it is also necessary to consider the historical legacy.
+Like Islamic Egypt and Christian Nubia, the Maghreb of the Islamic
+dynasties inherited a rich historical and cultural tradition. It was the seat of
+the famous society of Carthage which flourished between 1200 B.C. and 200
+B.C., and which was a blend of foreign influences from the eastern
+Mediterranean with the Berber peoples of the Maghreb. The region had
+subsequently been an important section of the Roman and Byzantine
+empires; and before becoming Moslem the Maghreb had actually
+distinguished itself as a center of non-conformist Christianity which went
+under the name of Donatism.
+The striking achievements of Moslem Maghreb were spread over the
+naval, military, commercial, and cultural spheres. Its navies controlled the
+western Mediterranean and its armies took over most of Portugal and Spain.
+When the Moslem advance into Europe was turned back in the year 732
+A.D., North African armies were already deep into France. In the eleventh
+century, the armies of the Almoravid dynasty gathered strength from deep
+within Senegal and Mauritania and launched themselves across the Strait of
+Gibraltar to reinforce Islam in Spain, which was being threatened by
+Christian kings. For over a century, the Almoravid rule in North Africa and
+Iberia was characterized by commercial wealth and a resplendent literary
+and architectural record. After being ejected from Spain in the 1230s the
+Maghreb Moslems, or Moors as they were called, continued to maintain a
+dynamic society on African soil. As one index to the standard of social life,
+it has been pointed out that public baths were common in the cities of
+Maghreb at a time when in Oxford the doctrine was still being propounded
+that the washing of the body was a dangerous act.
+One of the most instructive aspects of the history of the Maghreb is the
+interaction of social formations to produce the state. A major problem that
+had to be resolved was that of integrating the isolated Berber groups into
+larger political communities. There were also contradictions between
+sedentary groups and nomadic pastoral sectors of the populations.
+The Berbers were mainly pastoralists organized in patriarchal clans, and
+in groups of clans, and in groups of clans connected by a democratic
+council of all adult males. Grazing land was under communal ownership,
+and maintaining irrigation was also a collective responsibility for the
+agriculturalists. Yet, cooperation within kin-groups contrasted with hostility
+
+between those who had no immediate blood ties, and it was only in the face
+of the Arab invaders that the Berbers united—using a non-conformist
+Kharijite Islam as their ideology. The Kharijite revolt of 739 A.D. is
+considered in one sense as being nationalistic and in another sense a revolt
+of the exploited classes against the Arab military, bureaucratic, and
+theocratic elite, who professed the orthodox Sunni Islam. That revolt of the
+Berber masses laid the basis for Moroccan nationalism, and three centuries
+later the Almohad dynasty (1147–1270) brought political unity to the whole
+of Maghreb as a product of the synthesis of Berber and Arab achievements
+in the sphere of state-building.
+Unfortunately, the Maghreb nation did not last; and instead the region
+was bequeathed the nuclei of three nation states—Morocco, Algeria, and
+Tunisia. Within each of the three areas, divisive tendencies were very strong
+in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For instance, in Tunisia the ruling
+Hafsid dynasty was constantly involved in crushing local rebellions and
+defending the integrity of the state. It has been noted already that the
+political state in Africa and elsewhere was a consequence of development
+of the productive forces, but the state in turn also conditioned the rate at
+which the economy advanced, because the two were dialectically
+interrelated. Therefore, the failure of the Maghreb to build a nation-state
+and the difficulties of consolidating state power even within the three
+divisions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were factors holding back the
+further development of the region. Moreover, political division weakened
+the Maghreb vis-à-vis foreign enemies, and Europe was soon to take
+advantage of those internal weaknesses, by launching attacks from the year
+1415 onwards.
+The experience of the Maghreb can be drawn upon to illustrate the
+lengthy nature of transition from the one mode of production to another and
+the fact that two different ways of organizing society could coexist side by
+side over centuries. Throughout the period under discussion, a great deal of
+land in that part of Africa retained its communal ownership and family
+labor. Meanwhile, considerable socio-economic stratification had taken
+place and antagonistic classes had emerged. At the very bottom of the
+ladder were the slaves, or harratine, who were most often black Africans
+from south of the Sahara. Then came the akhamme, or landless peasants,
+who worked the proprietors’ land and gave the latter four-fifths of whatever
+
+was produced. Special mention should be made of the position of women,
+who were not a class by themselves but who suffered from deprivations at
+the hands of their own menfolk and of the male-controlled ruling class.
+Therefore, the women in the akhamme class were in a very depressed
+condition. At the top of the society were the big landowners, who wielded
+political power along with other devotees of the Moslem religion.
+None of the African societies discussed so far can be said to have thrown
+up capitalist forms to the point where the accumulation of capital became
+the principal motive force. However, they all had flourishing commercial
+sectors, moneylenders, and strong handicraft industries which were the
+features which ultimately gave birth to modern capitalism through evolution
+and revolution. The Maghreb merchants were quite wealthy. They gained
+from the energies of the cultivators, cattlemen, and shepherds; they
+indirectly or directly mobilized the labor in the mines of copper, lead,
+antimony, and iron; and they appropriated surplus from the skills of the
+craftsmen making textiles, carpets, leather, pottery, and articles of brass and
+iron. The merchants were a class of accumulators, and their dynamism
+made itself felt not only in the Maghreb but also in the Sahara and across
+the Sahara in West Africa. In that way, the development of the Maghreb
+acted as a factor in the development of what was called the Western Sudan.
+The Western Sudan
+To the Arabs, the whole of Africa south of the Sahara was the Bilad as
+Sudan—the Land of the Blacks. The name survives today only in the
+Republic of Sudan on the Nile, but references to the Western Sudan in early
+times concern the zone presently occupied by Senegal, Mali, Upper Volta,
+and Niger, plus parts of Mauritania, Guinea, and Nigeria. The Western
+Sudanic empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai have become by-words in the
+struggle to illustrate the achievements of the African past. That is the area to
+which African nationalists and progressive whites point when they want to
+prove that Africans too were capable of political, administrative, and
+military greatness in the epoch before the white men. However, a people’s
+demands at any given time change the kinds of questions to which
+historians are expected to provide answers. Today the masses of Africa seek
+“development” and total emancipation. The issues that need resolution with
+
+regard to Western Sudanic history are those which illumine the principles
+underlying the impressive development of certain states in the heart of
+Africa.
+The origins of the empire of Ghana go back to the fifth century A.D., but
+it reached its peak between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Mali had its
+prime in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Songhai in the two
+subsequent centuries. The three were not in exactly the same location; and
+the ethnic origin of the three ruling classes was different; but they should be
+regarded as “successor states,” following essentially the same line of
+evolution and growth. They have been called trading states so often that it is
+almost forgotten that the principal activity of the population was agriculture.
+It was a zone in which several species of millet were domesticated, along
+with a species of rice, several other food plants, and at least one type of
+cotton. It was a zone which saw the relatively early introduction of iron in
+the millennium before the birth of Christ, and iron tools exercised their
+attendant benefits on agriculture. The open savannah country of the Western
+Sudan also favored livestock. Some groups such as the Fulani were
+exclusively pastoralist, but livestock was to be found in varying degrees
+throughout the huge region. Cattle were the most significant domesticated
+animals, followed by goats. The rearing of horses, mules, and donkeys was
+also carried on, which was made possible by wide tsetse-free areas. To add
+further variety, the great Niger River allowed for the rise of specialist
+fishermen.
+Population, the indispensable factor of production, could only have
+reached the density which it did because of increasing food supplies; while
+handicraft industry and trade sprang primarily from the products of
+agriculture. Cotton cultivation led to the making of cotton cloth with such a
+variety of specialization that there was internal trade in particular cotton
+cloths, such as the unbleached fabric of Futa Djalon and the blue cloth of
+Jenne. Pastoralism provided a variety of products for manufacture, notably
+cattle hides and goatskins which went into the making of sandals, leather
+jackets for military use, leather pouches for amulets, and so on. Horses
+served as a means of transport to the ruling class and made a major
+contribution to warfare and the size of the state. For the purpose of
+interbreeding, some horses were imported from North Africa where the
+Arab bloodstock was of the finest quality. For pack transport, the donkey
+
+was of course better fitted; and the Mossi kingdom of Upper Volta for a
+long time specialized in breeding those pack animals which were associated
+with long distance trade within the vast region. On the edge of the Sahara,
+the camel took over—another “technological” asset introduced from the
+north.
+Mining was a sphere in which production was important. Some of the
+royal clans in the Western Sudan, such as that of the Kante, were specialist
+blacksmiths. In a period of expansion by warfare, the control over iron
+supplies and over iron-working skills was obviously decisive. Besides, the
+two most important articles of long distance trade were salt and gold, both
+obtained principally by mining. Neither the salt supplies nor the gold
+supplies were originally within the domains of Ghana, but it took steps to
+integrate them either by trade or by territorial expansion. Ghana struck
+north into the Sahara, and towards the very end of the tenth century it
+captured the town of Awdaghast from the Berbers—a town useful for the
+control of the incoming salt mined in the middle of the desert. Similarly
+Mali and Songhai sought to secure control of Taghaza, which was the
+largest single center of salt mining. Songhai took the prize of Taghaza from
+the desert Berbers and held it for many years in the face of opposition from
+Morocco. Another crucial but seldom stressed element in the pattern of
+production was the ownership of copper mines in the Sahara by both Mali
+and Songhai.
+To the south of Ghana lay the important sources of gold on the Upper
+Senegal and its tributary the Falémé. It is said that Ghana obtained its gold
+by “silent” or “dumb” barter which was described as follows:
+The merchants beat great drums to summon the local natives, who were naked and lived in
+holes in the ground. From these holes, which were doubtless the pits from which they dug the
+gold, they refused to emerge in the presence of the foreign merchants. The latter, therefore,
+used to arrange their trade goods in piles on the river bank and retire out of sight. The local
+natives then came and placed a heap of gold beside each pile and withdrew. If the merchants
+were satisfied they took the gold and retreated, beating their drums to signify that the market
+was over.
+
+The writer of the above lines (E. W. Bovill), a supposed European
+authority on the Western Sudan, then goes on to say that silent trade or
+dumb barter was a feature of the Western Sudan’s gold trade throughout all
+the centuries until modern times. Actually, the only thing dumb about the
+
+trade is what he writes about it. The story of dumb barter for gold in West
+Africa is repeated in several accounts, starting with ancient Greek scripts. It
+is clearly a rough approximation of the first attempts at exchange of a
+people coming into contact with strangers, and it was not a permanent
+procedure. During the rule of Ghana, the people of the two principal goldfields of Bambuk and Boure were drawn into regular trade relations with
+the Western Sudan. Ghana probably, and Mali certainly, exercised political
+rule over the two regions, where the mining and distribution of gold became
+a very complicated process. During the centuries of Mali’s greatness,
+extensive mining of gold began in the forest of modern Ghana to supply the
+trans-Saharan gold trade. The existing social systems expanded and strong
+states emerged to deal with the sale of gold. The merchants who came from
+the great cities of the Western Sudan had to buy the gold by weight, using a
+small accurate measurement known as the benda.
+When the Portuguese arrived at the river Gambia and got a glimpse at
+how gold was traded on the upper reaches of the river, they marveled at the
+dexterity shown by the Mandinga merchants. The latter carried very finely
+balanced scales, inlaid with silver and suspended from cords of twisted silk.
+The gold dust and nuggets were weighted with brass weights. The expertise
+of the Mandinga in measuring gold and in other forms of commerce was
+largely due to the fact that within that ethnic group there was a core of
+professional traders, commonly referred to as the Dioulas. They were not
+very wealthy, but were distinguished by their willingness to travel
+thousands of miles from one end of the Western Sudan to another. They also
+reached the coast or very near to the coast of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia,
+Ivory Coast, and Ghana. The Dioulas handled a long list of African
+products—salt from the Atlantic coast and the Sahara; kola nuts from the
+forests of Liberia and Ivory Coast; gold from Akan country in modern
+Ghana; leather from Hausaland; dried fish from the coast; cotton cloth from
+many districts and especially from the central area of the Western Sudan;
+iron from Futa Djalon in modern Guinea; shea butter from the upper
+Gambia; and a host of other local articles. In addition, the trade of the
+Western Sudan involved the circulation of goods originating in North
+Africa, notably fabrics from Egypt and the Maghreb and coral beads from
+Ceuta on the Mediterranean coast. Therefore, the pattern of Western
+
+Sudanic and trans-Saharan commerce was integrating the resources of a
+wide area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean.
+Long-distance trade across the Sahara had special characteristics. Some
+scholars have spoken of the camel as the ship of the Sahara, and the towns
+which the camel caravans entered on either side of the desert were called
+“ports.” In practice, the trans-Saharan trade was as great an achievement as
+crossing an ocean. Much more than local trade, it stimulated the famous
+cities of the region such as Walata, Timbuktu, Gao, and Jenne; and it
+brought in the literate Islamic culture. Long-distance trade strengthened
+state power, which meant in effect the power of the lineages who
+transformed themselves into a permanent aristocracy. However, it is a gross
+oversimplification of cause and effect to say that it was the trans-Saharan
+trade which built the Western Sudanic empires. Ghana, Mali, and Songhai
+grew out of their environment, and out of the efforts of their own
+populations; and it was only after they had a certain status that their ruling
+classes could express an interest in long-distance trade and could provide
+the security to permit that trade to flourish.
+It is significant that the Western Sudan never provided any significant
+capital for the trans-Saharan trade. The capital came from the merchants of
+Fez, Tlemcen, and other cities of the Maghreb; and they sent their agents to
+reside in the Western Sudan. To some extent, it was a colonial relationship
+because the exchange was unequal in North Africa’s favor. However, the
+gold trade was at least capable of stimulating the development of the
+productive forces within West Africa, while the accompanying trade in
+slaves had no such benefits. Ghana, Mali, and Songhai all exported small
+numbers of slaves, and the empire of Kanem-Bornu gave slave exports a
+much higher priority because it controlled no gold supplies. Kanem-Bornu
+used its power to raid for captives to the south as far as Adamawa in
+modern Cameroon. The negative implications of such policies were to be
+fully brought out in later centuries, when the steady trickle of slaves from a
+few parts of West Africa across the Sahara was joined by the massive flow
+of the continent’s peoples towards destinations named by Europeans.
+Though falling considerably short of the feudal stage, state formation
+was more advanced in the Western Sudan than in most other parts of Africa
+in the period 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. Apart from Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and
+Kanem-Bornu, there were outstanding kingdoms in Hausaland, in Mossi, in
+
+Senegal, in the Futa Djalon mountains of Guinea, and in the basin of the
+Benue tributary of the river Niger. The Western Sudanic techniques of
+political organization and administration spread out to many neighboring
+regions, and influenced the rise of innumerable small states scattered
+throughout the coastal region from the river Senegal to the Cameroon
+mountains. Some specific Sudanic features were discernible in many
+kingdoms, notably the position of the “Queen Mother” in the political
+structure.
+The strengths and weaknesses of the Western Sudanic states attest to the
+point which they had reached on the long road away from communalism—
+with respect to social relations and to the level of production. The state held
+together several clashing social formations and ethnic groups. In the case of
+Kanem-Bornu, pastoralists and cultivators were even able to integrate the
+camel nomads of the desert. Elsewhere, the Tuareg nomads were kept at
+bay, so that cultivators and other sedentary peoples could live their lives in
+peace. Men, domestic beasts, and goods were free to move for thousands of
+miles in security. However, the state had not yet broken down the barriers
+between different social formations. The state existed as an institution
+which collected tribute from the various communities and restrained them
+from clashing. In periods of weakness, the superstructure of the state almost
+disappeared and left free scope for divisive political and social tendencies.
+Each successive great state was a further experiment to deal with the
+problem of unity, sometimes on a conscious level and more often as an
+unconscious by-product of the struggle for survival.
+Under feudalism, the ruling class in the state for the first time tore away
+the social institutions which prevented the first embryo states from
+exercising direct action on each subject. That is to say, feudalism brought
+about a series of direct obligatory ties between the landed rulers and the
+landless subjects. In the Western Sudan, that clear-cut class division had not
+come into existence. By the time of Mali’s pre-eminence in the thirteenth
+and fourteenth centuries, a small amount of local slavery had come into
+existence, and by the end of the fifteenth century there were both chattel
+slaves and “domestic slaves” comparable to feudal serfs. For instance, in
+Senegal, the Portuguese traders found that there were elements in the
+population who worked most days for their masters and a few days per
+month for themselves—a budding feudalist tendency. Nevertheless, most of
+
+the population still had ample access to land through their kin, and in
+political terms that meant that the authority of the ruling class was exercised
+over heads of families and clans rather than over each subject.
+Although communal egalitarianism was on its way out, communal
+relations still persisted and had by the fifteenth century become a brake on
+the development of the Western Sudan. Such surplus as was being produced
+by the society over and above subsistence needs came out of tribute from
+the collective communities rather than directly from the producer to the
+exploiting class. That gave an incentive for maintaining the old social
+structures, although they were incapable of increasing labor mobilization
+and specialization to a much greater degree. It was unlikely that there would
+be a violent social revolution. Under those circumstances, major advances
+of technology were required to spark off further changes. The degree of
+economic integration had to be enhanced by greater productivity in various
+areas—allowing for more trade, more specialization in the division of labor,
+and the possibility of surplus accumulation. But wheeled vehicles and the
+plow stopped in North Africa, and so too did large-scale irrigation. Indeed,
+through the critical absence of large-scale irrigation, the productive base in
+the Western Sudan actually decreased, for the Sahara was advancing. Ghana
+had stood on fertile agricultural land, but both Mali and Songhai had their
+centers farther south, because the former northern terrain of Ghana was
+claimed by the Sahara through desiccation. Techniques necessary for the
+control of this hostile environment and for the increase of agricultural and
+manufacturing capacity had either to evolve locally or to be brought in from
+outside. In the next phase of African history after the coming of the white
+men, both of those alternatives were virtually ruled out in West Africa.
+The Interlacustrine Zone
+The high level of social evolution in the Western Sudan has been the cause
+of lengthy debates as to whether the region had achieved feudalism of the
+European variety, or whether it should be classed together with the great
+Asian empires, or whether it created a new and unique category of its own.
+On the eastern side of the continent, development in the same period was
+definitely slower. For one thing, the people of East Africa acquired iron
+tools at a much later date than their brothers in the north and west; and,
+
+secondly, the range of their technology and skills was narrower. However,
+by the fourteenth century, state formation was well under way, and the
+principles of development revealed in the process are worth considering. An
+area of special interest is that of the great lakes of Africa and particularly
+the zone around the group of lakes which the British thought fit to rename
+in honor of various members of the British ruling family—Victoria, Albert,
+Edward, George. In that interlacustrine zone, several famous states
+eventually emerged, one of the earliest and largest being that of BunyoroKitara.
+Bunyoro-Kitara comprised in whole or in part the regions which today
+are called Bunyoro, Ankole, Toro, Karagwe, and Buganda—all of which
+fall in Uganda, except Karagwe which is in Tanzania. Historical traditions
+have been orally preserved by these various peoples who at one time fell
+within the boundaries of Bunyoro-Kitara; and the traditions concentrate on
+the ruling dynasty, which is known as the Bachwezi. The Bachwezi were
+supposedly an immigrant pastoralist group. They introduced long-horned
+humped cattle, which later became the major species in the interlacustrine
+zone. Possession of these cattle undoubtedly aided them to become a ruling
+aristocracy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They became a social
+stratum above the clans which previously existed, and which had narrow
+territorial bases. The period of Bachwezi pre-eminence is also associated
+with ironworking, the manufacture of barkcloth, the technique of sinking
+well shafts through rocks, and (most striking of all) the construction of
+extensive earthwork systems, used apparently both for defense and for
+enclosing large herds of cattle. The largest of the earthworks was at Bigo,
+with ditches extending over six and a half miles.
+The division of labor between pastoralists and cultivators and the nature
+of their contacts intensified the process of caste formation and class
+stratification in the interlacustrine area. The pastoralist Bahima had imposed
+their rule over the cultivators, or Bairu. Social classes grew out of a
+situation of changing labor relations. The earthworks of Bigo and elsewhere
+were not built by voluntary family labor, and some form of coercion must
+also have been used to get the cultivators to produce a surplus for their new
+lords. For instance, the Bachwezi are said to have established a system by
+which young men were conscripted into the king’s service and were
+maintained by Bairu who occupied and cultivated land assigned for the
+
+support of the army. They also introduced slave artisans and administrators.
+When administrative officials were appointed at a local level to rule on
+behalf of the aristocrats, that was a first step toward setting up feudal fiefs
+as in Ethiopia; for while the question of land grants had not yet entered the
+picture, it must be borne in mind that inequality in the distribution of cattle
+meant in fact unequal access to the means of production.
+Much uncertainty surrounds the precise identification of the Bachwezi. It
+is possible that they were not immigrants. Nevertheless, it is generally held
+that they were light-complexioned pastoralists coming from the north.
+Assuming that this was so, it is essential to stress that whatever was
+achieved in the interlacustrine region in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries was a product of the evolution of African society as a whole and
+not a transplant from outside. In order to place those East African events
+within the context of universal human achievement, a parallel can be drawn
+with India. Centuries before the birth of Christ, Northern India was also the
+recipient of light-complexioned pastoral immigrants known as Aryans.
+There was a time when everything in Indian culture was attributed to the
+Aryans; but then careful scrutiny revealed that the basis of Indian society
+and culture had been laid by the earlier population known as the Dravidians.
+Therefore, it is now considered far more sensible to see the achievements of
+North India as a product of synthesis or combination of Aryan and
+Dravidian. Similarly in East Africa, one needs to seek the elements of
+synthesis between the new and the old and that in effect was the path of
+development in the interlacustrine zone in the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries.
+As has just been noted, the Bachwezi are associated with techniques
+such as ironworking and barkcloth manufacture. It is not at all clearly
+established that they introduced such techniques for the first time, and it is
+much more probable that they presided over the elaboration of such skills.
+Certainly, iron-using societies were known in East Africa several centuries
+before the Bachwezi period. At Engaruka, just south of the present KenyaTanzania border, there are to be found the ruins of a small but impressive
+iron-age society, which flourished sometime before the end of the first
+millennium A.D. (i.e., before 1000 A.D.). Engaruka was a concentrated
+agricultural settlement engaging in terracing, irrigation, and the construction
+of walls by the technique known as dry stone building, whereby no lime
+
+was required to hold the stones together. In the interlacustrine area itself,
+there had emerged a banana-based agriculture, which was capable of
+supporting a large sedentary population. That was the sort of precondition
+for moving from communal isolation to statehood.
+It is significant that orally preserved traditions imply the existence of
+kingdoms in Bunyoro and Karagwe before the Bachwezi. State formation
+was already in an embryo stage when the outsiders arrived, and the
+likelihood is that they did not remain outsiders for long. Unlike the Aryans
+in India, the Bachwezi did not even impose their own language, but adopted
+the Bantu speech of the local inhabitants. That reflects the dominance of
+local rather than foreign elements in the synthesis. In any event, the cultural
+product was African, and was part of the pattern of development through
+localized evolution combined with the interplay of social formations on a
+continent-wide scale.
+Among the contributions supposedly made by the Bachwezi to the
+interlacustrine kingdoms was the introduction of religion based on the
+phases of the moon. In all of the situations examined so far, religion played
+a significant role in promoting the building of the state, leading away from
+the simple organization of the family community. Christianity and Islam
+have been most frequently associated with large-scale building both inside
+and outside of Africa. That is to be explained not so much by the actual
+religious beliefs, but because membership in a powerful universal church
+gave the ruling class of a young state many advantages. A Christian or
+Moslem prince had access to a literate culture and a wider world. He dealt
+with traders and craftsmen professing that religion; he used administrators
+and churchmen who were literate; and he could travel to parts of the world
+such as Mecca. Above all, the universal religions replaced “traditional”
+African ancestral religions in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, the Maghreb, and
+progressively in the Western Sudan because Christianity and Islam were not
+rooted in any given family community and therefore could be used to
+mobilize the many communities that were merging into the state. However,
+religious beliefs which had been accepted by a single clan or ethnic group
+could be elevated in the same form or in a slightly altered form to become
+the religion of the whole state. This was the situation in the interlacustrine
+zone, and indeed in most other parts of Africa outside the regions already
+described.
+
+Zimbabwe
+In Zimbabwe, one of the great constructions in brick (dated around the
+fourteenth century) is commonly referred to as a “temple” and is felt to
+have served religious purposes. Even from the scanty evidence, it is clear
+that the religious aspect of social development was of the greatest
+importance in serving to cement ties between individuals in that emergent
+African society. For instance, the ruling class in the fifteenth century empire
+of Mutapa in Zimbabwe were pastoralists and their religious ritual included
+objects that were symbolic of cattle, as was found in the interlacustrine
+kingdoms such as Bunyoro and Karagwe. One can guess that the rituals also
+symbolized the dominance of the cattle owners, just as they also paid
+respect to pre-existing ideas of the cultivators in order to effect a stable
+synthesis. The details of the picture are not available in the present stage of
+knowledge, but what is required is that any discussion of African religion
+must seek to present it in a mobile evolutionary manner and to relate it to
+changing socio-economic forms and institutions. That task being beyond the
+confines of the present study, it is proposed to examine Zimbabwe as yet
+another region where the productive base and the political superstructure
+can be ascertained to have developed appreciably in the last few centuries
+before Africa was drawn into contact with Europe.
+Within the southernmost section of the continent, the area in which
+striking achievements were registered by the fifteenth century was that
+between the rivers Zambezi and Limpopo, covering the territories that were
+later to be called Mozambique and Rhodesia. Iron-using and state-building
+peoples were active there from early in the first millennium A.D., and
+eventually there emerged in the fifteenth century the empire which
+Europeans called Monomotapa. The term “Zimbabwe” is being used here to
+designate the Zambesi-Limpopo cultures in the few centuries preceding the
+European arrival, because it was from the eleventh to the fourteenth century
+that there flourished the societies, whose most characteristic feature was the
+building of large stone palaces, known collectively as Zimbabwe.
+Much has been written about the buildings which distinguish the
+Zimbabwe culture. They are a direct response to the environment of granite
+rocks, being built upon granite hills and of flaked granite. The most famous
+site of surviving stone ruins is that of Great Zimbabwe, north of the river
+
+Sabi. One of the principal structures at Great Zimbabwe was some 300 feet
+long and 220 feet broad, with the walls being 30 feet high and 20 feet thick.
+The technique of laying the bricks one on the other without lime to act as a
+cement was the same style noted in the description of Engaruka in northern
+Tanzania. It was in fact a peculiar aspect of material culture in Africa, being
+widely found in Ethiopia and the Sudan. The style of the encircling brick
+walls at Great Zimbabwe and other sites was also characteristically African
+in that it was an elaboration of the mud enclosures, or kraals, of many
+Bantu-speaking people.
+One European archaeologist is reported to have said that there was as
+much labor expended in Zimbabwe as on the pyramids in Egypt. That is
+surely an overstatement, for the pyramids were raised through an incredible
+amount of slave labor, which could not possibly have been at the disposal of
+the rulers in Zimbabwe. However, it is definitely necessary to reflect on the
+amount of labor which would have been required to construct the buildings
+within the Zimbabwe region up until the fifteenth century. The workers may
+well have been from particular ethnic groups who were subjugated by other
+ethnic groups, but in the process of subjugation they were acquiring the
+character of a social class whose labor was being exploited. Nor was it
+sheer manual labor. Skill, creativity, and artistry went into the construction
+of the walls, especially with regard to the decorations, the inner recesses,
+and the doors.
+When Cecil Rhodes sent in his agents to rob and steal in Zimbabwe, they
+and other Europeans marveled at the surviving ruins of the Zimbabwe
+culture, and automatically assumed that it had been built by white people.
+Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements with a
+sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly
+logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the
+universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons. The sense
+of reality can only be restored by making it clear that the architecture rested
+on a foundation of advanced agriculture and mining, which had come into
+existence over centuries of evolution.
+Zimbabwe was a zone of mixed farming, with cattle being very
+important, since the area is free from tsetse flies. Irrigation and terracing
+reached considerable proportions. There was no single dam or aqueduct
+comparable to those in Asia or ancient Rome, but countless small streams
+
+were diverted and made to flow around hills, in a manner that indicated an
+awareness of the scientific principles governing the motion of water. In
+effect, the people of Zimbabwe had produced “hydrologists” through their
+understanding of the material environment. On the mining side, it is equally
+striking that the African peoples in the zone in question had produced
+prospectors and “geologists” who had a clear idea of where to look for gold
+and copper in the subsoil. When the European colonialists arrived in the
+nineteenth century, they found that virtually all the gold-bearing and
+copper-bearing strata had been mined previously by Africans—though of
+course not on the same scale as Europeans were to achieve with drilling
+equipment. Among the Zimbabwe people, there also arose craftsmen who
+worked the gold into ornaments with tremendous skill and lightness of
+touch.
+The presence of gold in particular was a stimulus to external trade, and
+in turn it was external demand which did most to accelerate mining. In the
+first millennium A.D., there was a gold-using aristocracy at Ingombe Ilede
+just north of the Zambezi. Presumably, they got their supplies from gold
+mines farther south. However, gold is required in large quantities only in a
+society which produces a very large economic surplus and can afford to
+transform part of that surplus into gold for prestige purposes (as in India) or
+into coinage and money to promote capitalism (as in Western Europe). The
+pre-feudal African societies did not have such a surplus, nor the social
+relations which made it necessary for gold to circulate a great deal
+internally. Hence, it was the presence of Arab traders as far south as Sofala
+in the Mozambique channel which spurred Zimbabwe to mine more gold
+for export just about the same time in the eleventh century when stonebuilding was beginning. The implication is that a number of factors
+coincided: namely, the intensification of class stratification, of state
+consolidation, of production and building techniques, and of trade.
+Several different ethnic groups contributed to Zimbabwe society. The
+earliest populations of the region were the “Bushmen” and Khoisan type of
+hunters who today are found only in small numbers in Southern Africa.
+They were incorporated into the physical stock of newcomers from farther
+north speaking Bantu languages, and in fact they made their contribution to
+the Bantu languages of the area. Among the Bantu speakers, there were also
+several different groups coming into their own at different times. The
+
+material evidence which has been revealed by archaeologists shows various
+pottery styles, contrasting burial positions, and different bone structures
+among skeletons. Other material artifacts show that over the centuries many
+societies occupied the region of Zimbabwe. Much of the interpenetration of
+one group by another was done peacefully, although at the same time, the
+very existence of the fortified hilltops and stone defenses shows that the
+largest states were engaged in military struggles for survival and preeminence. Furthermore, some ethnic groups must have been permanently
+relegated to inferior status, so as to provide the labor for agriculture,
+building, and mining. Other clans specialized in pastoralism, warfare, and
+the control of religious apparatus such as divination and rainmaking.
+It is believed that the inhabitants of Zimbabwe in the eleventh to the
+fourteenth centuries were Sotho-speaking; but by the time the Portuguese
+arrived a Shona-speaking dynasty had taken control of most of the region.
+That was the Rozwi clan, which set up the state of Mutapa, between the
+Zambezi and the Limpopo. The ruler was known as the Mwene Mutapa,
+which apparently meant “the great Lord of Mutapa” to his own followers,
+but was held to mean “the great pillager” by peoples whom he conquered
+and wielded together into a single empire. The first individual to hold the
+title Mwene Mutapa ruled from about 1415 to 1450, but the dynasty had
+already been growing prominent before that date. The capital was at first
+sited at Great Zimbabwe, and later moved north. What was important was
+that the Mwene Mutapa appointed governors to rule over various localities
+outside the capital, in a manner comparable to that of the Western Sudanic
+empires or the interlacustrine Bachwezi states.
+The Rozwi lords of Mutapa did most to encourage production for export
+trade, notably in gold, ivory, and copper. Arab merchants came to reside in
+the kingdom and the Zimbabwe region became involved in the network of
+Indian Ocean commerce, which linked them with India, Indonesia, and
+China. One of the principal achievements of the Rozwi lords of Mutapa was
+to organize a single system of production and trade. They exacted tribute
+from the various communities in their kingdoms, which was both a sign of
+sovereignty and a form of trade, because the movement of goods was
+stimulated. There is no doubt that the foreign trade strengthened the Mutapa
+state; but above all it strengthened the ruling strata which had a monopoly
+over that aspect of economic activity. In comparison with other African
+
+elites at that time, the Rozwi of Zimbabwe still had a long way to go. They
+were not in the same category as the Amharic nobility of Ethiopia or the
+Arab-Berber feudal lords of the Maghreb. They did imbibe a few influences
+from outside, but they did not travel, as did the rulers of Mali and Songhai,
+who made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Their dress was still mainly animal
+skins, and such cloths as they utilized were recent imports from the Arab
+traders rather than the product of the evolution of their own skills in that
+field. In that respect, Zimbabwe also trailed behind other early African
+states such as Oyo in Yorubaland, Benin in the same area, and the
+fourteenth-century empire of Kongo (which Europeans referred to as the
+greatest state in West Africa at the time of their arrival).
+It has been considered necessary for the purposes of illustration to
+consider some (though by no means all) of the outstanding areas of
+development in Africa before the coming of the Europeans. Nor should it be
+forgotten that there were innumerable village communities emerging to
+become states that were small in size, but were sometimes sharply stratified
+internally and displayed an impressive level of material advance. Those
+described above should be sufficient to establish that Africa in the fifteenth
+century was not just a jumble of different “tribes.” There was a pattern and
+there was historical movement. Societies such as feudal Ethiopia and Egypt
+were at the furthest point of the process of evolutionary development.
+Zimbabwe and the Bachwezi states were also clearly on the ascendant away
+from communalism, but at a lower level than the feudal states and a few
+others that were not yet feudal such as those in the Western Sudan.
+Conclusion
+In introducing the concept of development, attention was drawn to the fact
+that the slow, imperceptible expansion in social productive capacity
+ultimately amounted to a qualitative difference, with the arrival at the new
+stage sometimes being announced by social violence. It can be said that
+most African societies had not reached a new stage that was markedly
+different from communalism, and hence the use in this study of the cautious
+term “transitional.” It can also be noted that nowhere had there been any
+internal social revolutions. The latter have taken place in European and
+world history only where class consciousness led to the massive
+
+intervention of people’s wills within the otherwise involuntary socioeconomic process. Such observations help to situate African development
+up to the fifteenth century at a level that was below mature, class-ridden
+feudalism.
+It should also be reiterated that slavery as a mode of production was not
+present in any African society, although some slaves were to be found
+where the decomposition of communal equality had gone furthest. This is
+an outstanding feature illustrating the autonomy of the African path within
+the broader framework of universal advance. One of the paradoxes in
+studying this early period of African history is that it cannot be fully
+comprehended without first deepening our knowledge of the world at large,
+and yet the true picture of the complexities of the development of man and
+society can only be drawn after intensive study of the long-neglected
+African continent. There is no escaping the use of comparisons as an aid to
+clarity; and indeed the parallels have been narrowly restricted to Europe
+even though they could also be provided by examples from Asian history.
+Therein lies the cultural imperialism which makes it easier for the
+European-educated African to recall names like the (French) Capetians and
+the (Prussian) Hohenzollerns rather than the Vietnamese dynasties of Id and
+Tran, for the latter are either unknown to him, or would be considered
+unimportant if known, or might even be judged too difficult to pronounce!
+Several historians of Africa have pointed out that after surveying the
+developed areas of the continent in the fifteenth century and those within
+Europe at the same date, the difference between the two was in no way to
+Africa’s discredit. Indeed, the first Europeans to reach West and East Africa
+by sea were the ones who indicated that in most respects African
+development was comparable to that which they knew. To take but one
+example, when the Dutch visited the city of Benin they described it thus:
+The town seems to be very great. When you enter into it, you go into a great broad street, not
+paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes street in Amsterdam.
+...
+The king’s palace is a collection of buildings which occupy as much space as the town of
+Harlem, and which is enclosed with walls. There are numerous apartments for the Prince’s
+ministers and fine galleries, most of which are as big as those on the Exchange at Amsterdam.
+They are supported by wooden pillars encased with copper, where their victories are depicted,
+and which are carefully kept very clean.
+
+The town is composed of thirty main streets, very straight and 120 feet wide, apart from an
+infinity of small intersecting streets. The houses are close to one another, arranged in good
+order. These people are in no way inferior to the Dutch as regards cleanliness; they wash and
+scrub their houses so well that they are polished and shining like a looking-glass.
+
+Yet, it would be self-delusion to imagine that all things were exactly
+equal in Benin and in Holland. European society was already more
+aggressive, more expansionist, and more dynamic in producing new forms.
+The dynamism within Europe was contained within the merchant and
+manufacturing class. In the galleries of the exchange at Amsterdam sat
+Dutch burghers—the ancestors of the modern bourgeoisie of industry and
+finance. This class in fifteenth-century Europe was able to push the feudal
+landowners forward or aside. They began to discard conservatism and to
+create the intellectual climate in which change was seen as desirable. A
+spirit of innovation arose in technology, and transformation of the mode of
+production was quickened. When Europe and Africa established close
+relations through trade, there was therefore already a slight edge in Europe’s
+favor—an edge representing the difference between a fledgling capitalist
+society and one that was still emerging from communalism.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+Studies on early African history are lacking for many reasons, the most
+obvious being that African history was for a long time considered by the
+colonialists as having so little value that it was not worth reconstructing.
+Another decisive factor is that studies of Africa were mainly carried out by
+European bourgeois anthropologists, whose philosophical outlook on
+“primitive societies” caused them to separate African society from its
+historical context. There was a concentration on micro-units and no
+reference to overall patterns. The new African scholarship has been under
+way for too short a time to have provided any significant breakthrough. The
+few books cited below are part of the new approach.
+BASIL DAVIDSON, Africa in History. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
+HENRI LABOURET, Africa before the White Man. New York: Walker and Co., 1962.
+MARGARET SHINNIE, Ancient African Kingdoms. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.
+K. M. PANIKKAR, The Serpent and the Crescent. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963.
+The above group of books are assessments by non-Africans from a sympathetic perspective and
+with sufficient value for them to be respected and widely used inside Africa. K. M. Panikkar is an
+unusual example of an Asian scholar with a professional interest in the African continent.
+
+J. AJAYI and I. ESPIE (editors), A Thousand Years of West African History. New York: Humanities
+Press, 1969.
+B. A. OGOT and J. A. KIERAN (editors), Zamani, a Survey of East African History. New York:
+Humanities Press, 1968.
+African historians have begun to provide syntheses of the continent’s history by putting together
+relevant collections—usually on some section of the continent, as in the two examples above.
+Unfortunately, the quality varies from one selection to another, and African writers have not as yet
+provided any coherent overview of the regions with which they are supposedly dealing.
+G. J. AFOLABI OJO, Yoruba Culture, a Geographical Analysis. London: University of London Press,
+1967.
+B. M. FAGAN, Southern Africa during the Iron Age. New York: Praeger, 1965.
+What these two dissimilar books have in common is an awareness of the material environment.
+Afolabi Ojo is a Nigerian geographer and B. M. Fagan is an English archaeologist.
+
+*
+
+In Europe, communalism gave way to slavery, and therefore dynasties and strong states were
+present on the eve of the slavery epoch.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+III
+Africa’s Contribution to European Capitalist
+Development—The Pre-Colonial Period
+• How Europe Became the Dominant Section of a World-Wide Trade
+System • Africa’s Contribution to the Economy and Beliefs of Early
+Capitalist Europe
+
+BRITISH TRADE IS A MAGNIFICENT SUPERSTRUCTURE OF AMERICAN COMmerce and naval power
+on an African foundation.
+—MALACHI POSTLETHWAYT, The African Trade, the Great Pillar and Support of the British
+Plantation Trade in North America, 1745.
+If you were to lose each year more than 200 million livres that you now get from your
+colonies: if you had not the exclusive trade with your colonies to feed your manufactures, to
+maintain your navy, to keep your agriculture going, to repay for your imports, to provide for
+your luxury needs, to advantageously balance your trade with Europe and Asia, then I say it
+clearly, the kingdom would be irretrievably lost.
+—BISHOP MAURY (of France): Argument against France’s ending the slave trade and giving
+freedom to its slave colonies. Presented in the French National Assembly, 1791.
+
+How Europe Became the Dominant Section of a World-Wide Trade
+System
+Because of the superficiality of many of the approaches to
+“underdevelopment,” and because of resulting misconceptions, it is
+necessary to re-emphasize that development and underdevelopment are not
+only comparative terms, but that they also have a dialectical relationship
+one to the other: that is to say, the two help produce each other by
+interaction. Western Europe and Africa had a relationship which insured the
+transfer of wealth from Africa to Europe. The transfer was possible only
+after trade became truly international; and that takes one back to the late
+fifteenth century when Africa and Europe were drawn into common
+relations for the first time—along with Asia and the Americas. The
+developed and underdeveloped parts of the present capitalist section of the
+world have been in continuous contact for four and a half centuries. The
+contention here is that over that period Africa helped to develop Western
+Europe in the same proportion as Western Europe helped to underdevelop
+Africa.
+The first significant thing about the internationalization of trade in the
+fifteenth century was that Europeans took the initiative and went to other
+parts of the world. No Chinese boats reached Europe, and if any African
+canoes reached the Americas (as is sometimes maintained) they did not
+establish two-way links. What was called international trade was nothing
+but the extension overseas of European interests. The strategy behind
+
+international trade and the production that supported it was firmly in
+European hands, and specifically in the hands of the sea-going nations from
+the North Sea to the Mediterranean. They owned and directed the great
+majority of the world’s sea-going vessels, and they controlled the financing
+of the trade between four continents. Africans had little clue as to the tricontinental links between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Europe had a
+monopoly of knowledge about the international exchange system seen as a
+whole, for Western Europe was the only sector capable of viewing the
+system as a whole.
+Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannon to gain control
+of all the world’s waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and
+the Atlantic coast of North Africa. From 1415, when the Portuguese
+captured Ceuta, near Gibraltar, they maintained the offensive against the
+Maghreb. Within the next sixty years, they seized ports such as Arzila, ElKsar-es-Seghir, and Tangier, and fortified them. By the second half of the
+fifteenth century, the Portuguese controlled the Atlantic coast of Morocco
+and used its economic and strategic advantages to prepare for further
+navigations which eventually carried their ships round the Cape of Good
+Hope in 1495. After reaching the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese sought with
+some success to replace Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to
+India and the rest of Asia. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
+Portuguese carried most of the East African ivory which was marketed in
+India; while Indian cloth and beads were sold in East and West Africa by
+the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. The same applied to cowry
+shells from the East Indies. Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took
+the first steps towards transforming the several parts of Africa and Asia into
+economic satellites.
+When the Portuguese and the Spanish were still in command of a major
+sector of world trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, they
+engaged in buying cotton cloth in India to exchange for slaves in Africa to
+mine gold in Central and South America. Part of the gold in the Americas
+would then be used to purchase spices and silks from the Far East. The
+concept of metropole and dependency automatically came into existence
+when parts of Africa were caught up in the web of international commerce.
+On the one hand, there were the European countries who decided on the
+role to be played by the African economy; and on the other hand, Africa
+
+formed an extension to the European capitalist market. As far as foreign
+trade was concerned, Africa was dependent on what Europeans were
+prepared to buy and sell.
+Europe exported to Africa goods which were already being produced and
+used in Europe itself—Dutch linen, Spanish iron, English pewter,
+Portuguese wines, French brandy, Venetian glass beads, German muskets.
+Europeans were also able to unload on the African continent goods which
+had become unsalable in Europe. Thus, items like old sheets, cast-off
+uniforms, technologically outdated firearms, and lots of odds and ends
+found guaranteed markets in Africa. Africans slowly became aware of the
+possibility of demanding and obtaining better imported goods, and pressure
+was exerted on the captains of European ships; but the overall range of
+trade goods which left the European ports of Hamburg, Copenhagen, and
+Liverpool was determined almost exclusively by the pattern of production
+and consumption within Europe.
+From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions
+within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is
+the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of
+nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did
+not participate in its making, and in many instances, African people were
+simply the victims, for the law recognized them only as transportable
+merchandise. If the African slave was thrown overboard at sea, the only
+legal problem that arose was whether or not the slave ship could claim
+compensation from the insurers! Above all, European decision-making
+power was exercised in selecting what Africa should export—in accordance
+with European needs.
+The ships of the Portuguese gave the search for gold the highest priority,
+partly on the basis of well-known information that West African gold
+reached Europe across the Sahara and partly on the basis of guesswork. The
+Portuguese were successful in obtaining gold in parts of West Africa and in
+eastern Central Africa; and it was the Gold Coast which attracted the
+greatest attention from Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries. The number of forts built there was proof to that effect, and the
+nations involved included the Scandinavians and the Prussians (Germans)
+apart from other colonial stalwarts like the British, Dutch, and Portuguese.
+
+Europeans were anxious to acquire gold in Africa because there was a
+pressing need for gold coin within the growing capitalist money economy.
+Since gold was limited to very small areas of Africa, as far as Europeans
+were then aware, the principal export was human beings. Only in a very few
+places at given times was the export of another commodity of equal or
+greater importance. For instance, in the Senegal there was gum, in Sierra
+Leone camwood, and in Mozambique ivory. However, even after taking
+those things into account, one can say that Europe allocated to Africa the
+role of supplier of human captives to be used as slaves in various parts of
+the world.
+When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous
+potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could
+not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies. The indigenous
+Indian population could not withstand new European diseases such as
+smallpox, nor could they bear the organized toil of slave plantations and
+slave mines, having barely emerged from the hunting stage. That is why in
+islands like Cuba and Hispaniola, the local Indian population was virtually
+wiped out by the white invaders. At the same time, Europe itself had a very
+small population and could not afford to release the labor required to tap the
+wealth of the Americas. Therefore, they turned to the nearest continent,
+Africa, which incidentally had a population accustomed to settled
+agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres. Those were the objective
+conditions lying behind the start of the European slave trade, and those are
+the reasons why the capitalist class in Europe used their control of
+international trade to insure that Africa specialized in exporting captives.
+Obviously, if Europe could tell Africans what to export, that was an
+expression of European power. However, it would be a mistake to believe
+that it was an overwhelming military power. Europeans found it impossible
+to conquer Africans during the early centuries of trade, except in isolated
+spots on the coast. European power resided in their system of production
+which was at a somewhat higher level than Africa’s at that time. European
+society was leaving feudalism and was moving towards capitalism; African
+society was then entering a phase comparable to feudalism.
+The fact that Europe was the first part of the world to move from
+feudalism towards capitalism gave Europeans a headstart over humanity
+elsewhere in the scientific understanding of the universe, the making of
+
+tools, and the efficient organization of labor. European technical superiority
+did not apply to all aspects of production, but the advantage which they
+possessed in a few key areas proved decisive. For example, African canoes
+on the river Nile and the Senegal coast were of a high standard, but the
+relevant sphere of operations was the ocean, where European ships could
+take command. West Africans had developed metal casting to a fine artistic
+perfection in many parts of Nigeria, but when it came to the meeting with
+Europe, beautiful bronzes were far less relevant than the crudest cannon.
+African wooden utensils were sometimes works of great beauty, but Europe
+produced pots and pans that had many practical advantages. Literacy,
+organizational experience, and the capacity to produce on an ever
+expanding scale also counted in the European favor.
+European manufactures in the early years of trade with Africa were often
+of poor quality, but they were of new varieties and were found attractive.
+Estaban Montejo, an African who ran away from a Cuban slave plantation
+in the nineteenth century, recalled that his people were enticed into slavery
+by the color red. He said:
+It was the scarlet which did for the Africans; both the kings and the rest surrendered without a
+struggle. When the kings saw that the whites were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if
+they were waving, they told the blacks, “Go on then, go and get a scarlet handkerchief” and the
+blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran down to the ships like sheep and there they were
+captured.
+
+That version by one of the victims of slavery is very poetic. What it means
+is that some African rulers found European goods sufficiently desirable to
+hand over captives which they had taken in warfare. Soon, war began to be
+fought between one community and another for the sole purpose of getting
+prisoners for sale to Europeans, and even inside a given community a ruler
+might be tempted to exploit his own subjects and capture them for sale. A
+chain reaction was started by European demand for slaves (and only slaves)
+and by their offer of consumer goods—this process being connected with
+divisions within African society.
+It is often said for the colonial period that vertical political divisions in
+Africa made conquest easy. This is even truer of the way that Africa
+succumbed to the slave trade. National unification was a product of mature
+feudalism and of capitalism. Inside Europe, there were far fewer political
+divisions than in Africa where communalism meant political fragmentation
+
+with the family as the nucleus, and there were only a few states that had real
+territorial solidity. Furthermore, when one European nation challenged
+another to obtain captives from an African ruler, Europe benefited from
+whichever of the two nations won the conflict. Any European trader could
+arrive on the coast of West Africa and exploit the political differences which
+he found there. For example, in the small territory that the Portuguese later
+claimed as Guinea-Bissau, there were more than a dozen ethnic groups. It
+was so easy to set one off against another that Europeans called it a “slave
+trader’s paradise.”
+Although class divisions were not pronounced in African society, they
+too contributed to the ease with which Europe imposed itself commercially
+on large parts of the African continent. The rulers had a certain status and
+authority, and when bamboozled by European goods they began to use that
+position to raid outside their societies as well as to exploit internally by
+victimizing some of their own subjects. In the simplest of societies where
+there were no kings, it proved impossible for Europeans to strike up the
+alliance which was necessary to carry on a trade in captives on the coast. In
+those societies with ruling groups, the association with Europeans was
+easily established; and afterwards Europe hardened the existing internal
+class divisions and created new ones.
+In effect, particular aspects of African society became weaknesses when
+Europeans arrived as representatives of a different phase of development.
+And yet the subjugation of the African economy through slave trade was a
+slow process at the outset, and in some instances African opposition or
+disinterest had to be overcome. In the Congo, the slave trade did not get
+under way without grave doubts and opposition from the king of the state of
+Kongo at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He asked for masons,
+priests, clerks, physicians; but instead he was overwhelmed by slave ships
+sent from Portugal, and a vicious trade was opened up by playing off one
+part of the Kongo kingdom against another. The king of the Kongo had
+conceived of possibilities of mutually beneficial interchange between his
+people and the European state, but the latter forced him to specialize in the
+export of human cargo. It is also interesting to note that while the Oba
+(king) of Benin was willing to sell a few female captives, it took a great
+deal of persuasion and pressure from Europeans to get him to sell male
+
+African prisoners of war, who would otherwise have been brought into the
+ranks of Benin society.
+Once trade in slaves had been started in any given part of Africa, it soon
+became clear that it was beyond the capacity of any single African state to
+change the situation. In Angola, the Portuguese employed an unusual
+number of their own troops and tried to seize political power from Africans.
+The Angolan state of Matamba on the river Kwango was founded around
+1630 as a direct reaction against the Portuguese. With Queen Nzinga at its
+head, Matamba tried to coordinate resistance against the Portuguese in
+Angola. However, Portugal gained the upper hand in 1648, and this left
+Matamba isolated. Matamba could not forever stand aside. So long as it
+opposed trade with the Portuguese, it was an object of hostility from
+neighboring African states which had compromised with Europeans and
+slave trading. So in 1656, Queen Nzinga resumed business with the
+Portuguese—a major concession to the decision-making role of Europeans
+within the Angolan economy.
+Another example of African resistance during the course of the slave
+trade comes from the Baga people in what is now the Republic of Guinea.
+The Baga lived in small states, and in about 1720 one of their leaders
+(Tomba by name) aimed at securing an alliance to stop the slave traffic. He
+was defeated by local European resident-traders, mulattos, and other slave
+trading Africans. It is not difficult to understand why Europeans should
+have taken immediate steps to see that Tomba and his Baga followers did
+not opt out of the role allocated to them by Europe. A parallel which
+presents itself is the manner in which Europeans got together to wage the
+“Opium War” against China in the nineteenth century to insure that Western
+capitalists would make profit while the Chinese were turned into dope
+addicts.
+Of course, it is only as a last resort that the capitalist metropoles need to
+use armed force to insure the pursuit of favorable policies in the dependent
+areas. Normally, economic weapons are sufficient. In the 1720s, Dahomey
+opposed European slave traders, and was deprived of European imports—
+some of which had become necessary by that time. Agaja Trudo,
+Dahomey’s greatest king, appreciated that European demand for slaves and
+the pursuit of slaving in and around Dahomey was in conflict with
+Dahomey’s development. Between 1724 and 1726, he looted and burned
+
+European forts and slave camps; and he reduced the trade from the “Slave
+Coast” to a mere trickle, by blocking the paths leading to sources of supply
+in the interior. European slave dealers were very bitter, and they tried to
+sponsor some African collaborators against Agaja Trudo. They failed to
+unseat him or to crush the Dahomean state, but in turn Agaja failed to
+persuade them to develop new lines of economic activity, such as local
+plantation agriculture; and, being anxious to acquire firearms and cowries
+through the Europeans, he had to agree to the resumption of slave trading in
+1730.
+After 1730, Dahomean slaving was placed under royal control and was
+much more restricted than previously. Yet, the failure of this determined
+effort demonstrated that a single African state at that time could not
+emancipate itself from European control. The small size of African states
+and the numerous political divisions made it so much easier for Europe to
+make the decisions as to Africa’s role in world production and trade.
+Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans
+know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the
+trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with
+the slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the
+major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One European
+author of a book on the slave trade (appropriately entitled Sins of Our
+Fathers) explained how many other white people urged him to state that the
+trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely
+turned up to buy the captives—as though without European demand there
+would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such
+as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly
+approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a
+world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery
+and the Atlantic slave trade it motion.
+The trade in human beings from Africa was a response to externa
+factors. At first, the labor was needed in Portugal, Spain, and in Atlantic
+islands such as São Tomé, Cape Verde, and the Canaries; then came the
+period when the Greater Antilles and the Spanish-American mainland
+needed replacements for the Indians who were victims of genocide; and
+then the demands of Caribbean and mainland plantation societies had to be
+met. The records show direct connections between levels of exports from
+
+Africa and European demand for slave labor in some part of the American
+plantation economy. When the Dutch took Pernambuco in Brazil in 1634,
+the director of the Dutch West Indian Company immediately informed their
+agents on the Gold Coast that they were to take the necessary steps to
+pursue the trade in slaves on the adjacent coast east of the Volta—thus
+creating for that area the infamous name of the “Slave Coast.” When the
+British West Indian islands took to growing sugar cane, Gambia was one of
+the first places to respond. Examples of this kind of external control can be
+cited right up to the end of the trade, and this embraces Eastern Africa also,
+since European markets in the Indian Ocean islands became important in
+the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and since demand in places like
+Brazil caused Mozambicans to be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope.
+Africa’s Contribution to the Economy and Beliefs of Early Capitalist
+Europe
+The kinds of benefits which Europe derived from its control of world
+commerce are fairly well known, although it is curious that the recognition
+of Africa’s major contribution to European development is usually made in
+works devoted specifically to that subject; while European scholars of
+Europe often treat the European economy as if it were entirely independent.
+European economists of the nineteenth century certainly had no illusions
+about the interconnections between their national economies and the world
+at large. J. S. Mill, as spokesman for British capitalism, said that as far as
+England was concerned, “the trade of the West Indies is hardly to be
+considered as external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town
+and country.” By the phrase “trade of the West Indies” Mill meant the
+commerce between Africa, England, and the West Indies, because without
+African labor the West Indies were valueless. Karl Marx also commented
+on the way that European capitalists tied Africa, the West Indies, and Latin
+America into the capitalist system; and (being the most bitter critic of
+capitalism) Marx went on to point out that what was good for Europeans
+was obtained at the expense of untold suffering by Africans and American
+Indians. Marx noted that “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the
+extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
+
+population, the turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting
+of black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”
+Some attempts have been made to quantify the actual monetary profits
+made by Europeans from engaging in the slave trade. The actual dimensions
+are not easy to fix, but the profits were fabulous. John Hawkins made three
+trips to West Africa in the 1560s, and stole Africans whom he sold to the
+Spanish in America. On returning to England after the first trip, his profit
+was so handsome that Queen Elizabeth I became interested in directly
+participating in his next venture; and she provided for that purpose a ship
+named the Jesus. Hawkins left with the Jesus to steal some more Africans,
+and he returned to England with such dividends that Queen Elizabeth made
+him a knight. Hawkins chose as his coat of arms the representation of an
+African in chains.
+Of course, there were inevitably voyages that failed, slave ships that
+were lost at sea. Sometimes trade in Africa did well, while at other times it
+was the profit in the Americas that was really substantial. When all the ups
+and downs are ironed out, the level of profit had to be enough to justify
+continued participation in that particular form of trade for centuries. A few
+bourgeois scholars have tried to suggest that the trade in slaves did not have
+worthwhile monetary returns. They would have us believe that the same
+entrepreneurs whom they praise in other contexts as the heroes of capitalist
+development were so dumb with regard to slavery and slave trade that for
+centuries they absorbed themselves in a non-profit venture! This kind of
+argument is worth noting more as an example of the distortions of which
+white bourgeois scholarship is capable than as something requiring serious
+consideration. Besides, quite apart from capital accumulation, Europe’s
+trade with Africa gave numerous stimuli to Europe’s growth.
+Central and South American gold and silver—mined by Africans—
+played a crucial role in meeting the need for coin in the expanding capitalist
+money economy of Western Europe, while African gold helped the
+Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope
+and into Asia from the fifteenth century on. African gold was also the main
+source for the mintage of Dutch gold coin in the seventeenth century,
+helping Amsterdam to become the financial capital of Europe in that period;
+and further it was no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold
+coin in 1663, they called it the “guinea.” The Encyclopaedia Britannica
+
+explains that the guinea was “a gold coin at one time current in the United
+Kingdom. It was first coined in 1663, in the reign of Charles II, from gold
+imported from the Guinea Coast of West Africa by a company of merchants
+trading under charter from the British crown—hence the name.”
+Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for most of the
+nineteenth century, the exploitation of Africa and African labor continued to
+be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in Western
+Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended
+over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, the formation of companies,
+capitalist agriculture, technology, and the manufacture of machinery. The
+effects were so wide-ranging that many are seldom brought to the notice of
+the reading public. For instance, the French Saint-Malo fishing industry was
+revived by the opening up of markets in the French slave plantations; while
+the Portuguese in Europe depended heavily on dyes like indigo, camwood,
+Brazil wood, and cochineal brought from Africa and the Americas. Gum
+from Africa also played a part in the textile industry, which is
+acknowledged as having been one of the most powerful engines of growth
+within the European economy. Then there was the export of ivory from
+Africa, enriching many merchants in London’s Mincing Lane, and
+providing the raw material for industries in England, France, Germany,
+Switzerland, and North America—producing items ranging from knife
+handles to piano keys.
+Africa’s being drawn into the orbit of Western Europe speeded up the
+latter’s technological development. For example, the evolution of European
+shipbuilding from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century was a
+logical consequence of their monopoly of sea commerce in that period.
+During that time, the North Africans were bottled up in the Mediterranean,
+and although it was from them that Europeans initially borrowed a great
+deal of nautical instrumentation, the North Africans made no further
+worthwhile advances. Where the original European advantage was not
+sufficient to assure supremacy, they deliberately undermined other people’s
+efforts. The Indian navy, for instance, suffered from the rigid enforcement
+of the English Navigation Laws. Yet, the expenses involved in building new
+and better European ships were met from the profits of overseas trade with
+India and Africa. The Dutch were pioneers in improving upon the caravels
+which took the Spanish and Portuguese out across the Atlantic, and the
+
+successive Dutch trading companies operating in Asia, Africa, and America
+were the ones responsible for experimentation. By the eighteenth century,
+the British were using Dutch know-how as a basis for surpassing the Dutch
+themselves, and the Atlantic was their laboratory. It used to be said that the
+slave trade was a training ground for British seamen. It is probably more
+significant to note that the Atlantic trade was the stimulator of consistent
+advances in naval technology.
+The most spectacular feature in Europe which was connected with
+African trade was the rise of seaport towns—notably, Bristol, Liverpool,
+Nantes, Bordeaux, and Seville. Directly or indirectly connected to those
+ports, there often emerged the manufacturing centers which gave rise to the
+Industrial Revolution. In England, it was the county of Lancashire which
+was the first center of the Industrial Revolution, and the economic advance
+in Lancashire depended first of all on the growth of the port of Liverpool
+through slave trading.
+The connections between slavery and capitalism in the growth of
+England is adequately documented by Eric Williams in his well-known
+book Capitalism and Slavery. Williams gives a clear picture of the
+numerous benefits which England derived from trading and exploiting
+slaves, and he identified by name several of the personalities and capitalist
+firms who were the beneficiaries. Outstanding examples are provided in the
+persons of David and Alexander Barclay, who were engaging in slave trade
+in 1756 and who later used the loot to set up Barclays Bank. There was a
+similar progression in the case of Lloyds—from being a small London
+coffee house to being one of the world’s largest banking and insurance
+houses, after dipping into profits from slave trade and slavery. Then there
+was James Watt, expressing eternal gratitude to the West Indian slave
+owners who directly financed his famous steam engine, and took it from the
+drawing board to the factory.
+A similar picture would emerge from any detailed study of French
+capitalism and slavery, given the fact that during the eighteenth century the
+West Indies accounted for 20 per cent of France’s external trade—much
+more than the whole of Africa in the present century. Of course, benefits
+were not always directly proportionate to the amount of involvement of a
+given European state in the Atlantic trade. The enormous profits of
+Portuguese overseas enterprise passed rapidly out of the Portuguese
+
+economy into the hands of the more developed Western European capitalist
+nations who supplied Portugal with capital, ships, and trade goods.
+Germany was included in this category, along with England, Holland, and
+France.
+Commerce deriving from Africa helped a great deal to strengthen
+transnational links within the Western European economy, bearing in mind
+that American produce was the consequence of African labor. Brazilian
+dye-woods, for example, were re-exported from Portugal into the
+Mediterranean, the North Sea, and the Baltic, and passed into the
+continental cloth industry of the seventeenth century. Sugar from the
+Caribbean was re-exported from England and France to other parts of
+Europe to such an extent that Hamburg in Germany was the biggest sugarrefining center in Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century.
+Germany supplied manufactures to Scandinavia, Holland, England, France,
+and Portugal for resale in Africa. England, France, and Holland found it
+necessary to exchange various classes of goods the better to deal with
+Africans for gold, slaves, and ivory. The financiers and merchants of Genoa
+were the powers behind the markets of Lisbon and Seville; while Dutch
+bankers played a similar role with respect to Scandinavia and England.
+Western Europe was that part of Europe in which by the fifteenth century
+the trend was most visible that feudalism was giving way to capitalism. (In
+Eastern Europe, feudalism was still strong in the nineteenth century.) The
+peasants were being driven off the land in England, and agriculture was
+becoming technologically more advanced—producing food and fibers to
+support a larger population and to provide a more effective basis for the
+woolen and linen industries in particular. The technological base of
+industry, as well as its social and economic organization, was being
+transformed. African trade speeded up several aspects, including the
+integration of Western Europe, as noted above. That is why the African
+connection contributed not merely to economic growth (which relates to
+quantitative dimensions) but also to real development in the sense of
+increased capacity for further growth and independence.
+In speaking of the European slave trade, mention must be made of the
+U.S.A., not only because its dominant population was European but also
+because Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to
+North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a
+
+powerful form of capitalism—after eliminating the indigenous inhabitants
+and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans. Like other parts of the New
+World, the American colonies of the British crown were used as means of
+accumulating primary capital for re-export to Europe. But the Northern
+colonies also had direct access to benefits from slavery in the American
+South and in the British and French West Indies. As in Europe, the profits
+made from slavery and slave trade went firstly to commercial ports and
+industrial areas, which meant mainly the northeastern seaboard district
+known as New England and the state of New York. The Pan-Africanist, W.
+E. B. Du Bois, in a study of the American slave trade, quoted a report of
+1862 as follows:
+The number of persons engaged in the slave trade and the amount of capital embarked in it
+exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late (1862) the
+principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and
+Boston are only second to her in that distribution.
+
+American economic development up to mid-nineteenth century rested
+squarely on foreign commerce, of which slavery was a pivot. In the 1830s,
+slave-grown cotton accounted for about half the value of all exports from
+the United States of America. Furthermore, in the case of the American
+colonies of the eighteenth century, it can again be observed that Africa
+contributed in a variety of ways—one thing leading to another. For instance,
+in New England, trade with Africa, Europe, and the West Indies in slaves
+and slave-grown products supplied cargo for their merchant marine,
+stimulated the growth of their shipbuilding industry, built up their towns
+and their cities, and enabled them to utilize their forests, fisheries, and soil
+more effectively. Finally, it was the carrying trade between the West Indian
+slave colonies and Europe which lay behind the emancipation of the
+American colonies from British rule, and it was no accident that the
+struggle for American independence started in the leading New England
+town of Boston. In the nineteenth century, the connection with Africa
+continued to play an indirect role in American political growth. In the first
+place, profits from the slave activities went into the coffers of political
+parties, and even more important the African stimulation and black labor
+played a vital role in extending European control over the present territory
+of the United States—notably in the South, but including also the “Wild
+West,” where black cowboys were active.
+
+Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for
+industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools
+which held back the capitalist development of agriculture and industry. That
+explains the fact that the northern portions of the U.S.A. gained far more
+industrial benefits from slavery than the South, which actually had slave
+institutions on its soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the
+American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery
+within the boundaries of the U.S.A. so that the country as a whole could
+advance to a higher level of capitalism.
+In effect, one can say that within the U.S.A. the slave relations in the
+South had by the second half of the nineteenth century come into conflict
+with the further expansion of the productive base inside the U.S.A. as a
+whole, and a violent clash ensued before the capitalist relations of legally
+free labor became generalized. Europe maintained slavery in places that
+were physically remote from European society; and therefore inside Europe
+itself, capitalist relations were elaborated without being adversely affected
+by slavery in the Americas. However, even in Europe there came a moment
+when the leading capitalist states found that the trade in slaves and the use
+of slave labor in the Americas was no longer in the interest of their further
+development. Britain made this decision early in the nineteenth century, to
+be followed later by France.
+Since capitalism, like any other mode of production, is a total system
+which involves an ideological aspect, it is also necessary to focus on the
+effects of the ties with Africa on the development of ideas within the
+superstructure of European capitalist society. In that sphere, the most
+striking feature is undoubtedly the rise of racism as a widespread and
+deeply rooted element in European thought. The role of slavery in
+promoting racist prejudice and ideology has been carefully studied in
+certain situations, especially in the U.S.A. The simple fact is that no people
+can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of
+superiority, and when the color and other physical traits of those peoples
+were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist
+form. Within Africa itself, the same can be said for the situation in the Cape
+Province of South Africa where white men have been establishing military
+and social superiority over non-whites since 1650.
+
+It would be much too sweeping a statement to say that all racial and
+color prejudice in Europe derived from the enslavement of Africans and the
+exploitation of non-white peoples in the early centuries of international
+trade. There was also anti-Semitism at an even earlier date inside Europe
+and there is always an element of suspicion and incomprehension when
+peoples of different cultures come together. However, it can be affirmed
+without reservations that the white racism which came to pervade the world
+was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production. Nor was it merely
+a question of how the individual white person treated a black person. The
+racism of Europe was a set of generalizations and assumptions, which had
+no scientific basis, but were rationalized in every sphere from theology to
+biology.
+Occasionally, it is mistakenly held that Europeans enslaved Africans for
+racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for
+economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited. Indeed, it
+would have been impossible to open up the New World and to use it as a
+constant generator of wealth, had it not been for African labor. There were
+no other alternatives: the American (Indian) population was virtually wiped
+out and Europe’s population was too small for settlement overseas at that
+time. Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans
+at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in
+racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to
+guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds
+accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression
+for economic reasons.
+C. L. R. James, noted Pan-Africanist and Marxist, once remarked that:
+The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in
+terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only
+less grave than to make it fundamental.
+
+It can further be argued that by the nineteenth century white racism had
+become so institutionalized in the capitalist world (and notably in the
+U.S.A.) that it sometimes ranked above the maximization of profit as a
+motive for oppressing black people.
+In the short run, European racism seemed to have done Europeans no
+harm, and they used those erroneous ideas to justify their further
+
+domination of non-European peoples in the colonial epoch. But the
+international proliferation of bigoted and unscientific racist ideas was bound
+to have its negative consequences in the long run. When Europeans put
+millions of their brothers (Jews) into ovens under the Nazis, the chickens
+were coming home to roost. Such behavior inside of “democratic” Europe
+was not as strange as it is sometimes made out to be. There was always a
+contradiction between the elaboration of democratic ideas inside Europe
+and the elaboration of authoritarian and thuggish practices by Europeans
+with respect to Africans. When the French Revolution was made in the
+name of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” it did not extend to black Africans
+who were enslaved by France in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.
+Indeed, France fought against the efforts of those people to emancipate
+themselves, and the leaders of their bourgeois revolution said plainly that
+they did not make it on behalf of black humanity.
+It is not even true to say that capitalism developed democracy at home in
+Europe and not abroad. At home, it was responsible for a talk or certain
+rhetoric of freedom, but it was never extended from the bourgeoisie to the
+oppressed workers; and the treatment of Africans must surely have made
+such hypocrisy a habit of European life, especially within the ruling class.
+How else can one explain the fact that the Christian church participated
+fully in the maintenance of slavery and still talked about saving souls! The
+hypocrisy reached its highest levels inside the U.S.A. The first martyr in the
+American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the
+eighteenth century was an African descendant, Crispus Attucks; and both
+slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet,
+the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of
+Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some
+liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in
+Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the
+enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and
+brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended
+itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+
+The subject of Africa’s contribution to European development reveals
+several of the factors which limit a writer’s representation of reality.
+Language and nationality, for instance, are effective barriers to
+communication. Works in English seldom take account of the effect brought
+about in France, Holland, or Portugal by participation in slaving and other
+forms of commerce which exploited Africa in the pre-colonial period. The
+ideological gulf is responsible for the fact that most bourgeois scholars
+write about phenomena such as the Industrial Revolution in England
+without once mentioning the European slave trade as a factor in primary
+accumulation of capital. Marx himself had laid great emphasis on sources of
+overseas capital accumulation. But even Marxists (as prominent as Maurice
+Dobb and E. J. Hobsbawm) for many years concentrated on examining the
+evolution of capitalism out of feudalism inside Europe, with only marginal
+reference to the massive exploitation of Africans, Asians, and American
+Indians.
+ERIC WILLIAMS, Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
+OLIVER COX, Capitalism as a System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964.
+Cox, an African American, makes the basic point that capitalism has from very early times been
+an international system. Eric Williams, a West Indian, is very precise and very detailed in illustrating
+the connection between British capitalism and the enslavement of Africans.
+W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave-Trade to the United States of America—
+1638–1870. New York: Social Science Press, 1954.
+RICHARD PARES, Yankees and Creoles: the Trade between North America and the West Indies before
+the American Revolution. London: Longmans Green, 1956.
+Both of these provide data on the contribution of African labor to the development of capitalism in
+the U.S.A. in the epoch of slavery.
+LEO HUBERMAN, Man’s Worldly Goods: The Story of the Wealth of Nations. New York and London:
+Harper Bros., 1936.
+F. CLAIREMONTE, Economic Liberalism and Underdevelopment.
+Huberman’s book is an excellent overall treatment of the development of capitalism out of
+feudalism in Europe. It includes a section in which the role of slavery is highlighted. Clairemonte’s
+study accords recognition to the role played by the subcontinent of India in building Europe.
+PHILIP D. CURTIN, The Image of Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
+WINTHROP JORDAN, White Over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro. Chapel Hill:
+Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, 1968.
+These two texts are relevant to the question of the rise of white racism, although neither of the two
+makes sufficiently explicit the connection between racism and capitalism.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+IV
+Europe and the Roots of African Underdevelopment
+—To 1885
+• The European Slave Trade as a Basic Factor in African Underdevelopment
+• Technical Stagnation and Distortion of the African Economy in the PreColonial Epoch • Continuing Politico-Military Developments in Africa—
+1500 to 1885 • The Coming of Imperialism and Colonialism
+
+THE RELATION BETWEEN THE DEGREE OF DESTITUTION OF PEOPLES OF Africa and the length and
+nature of the exploitation they had to endure is evident. Africa remains marked by the crimes
+of the slave-traders: up to now, her potentialities are restricted by under-population.
+—AHMED SEKOU TOURE,
+Republic of Guinea, 1962
+
+The European Slave
+Underdevelopment
+
+Trade
+
+as
+
+a
+
+Basic
+
+Factor
+
+in
+
+African
+
+To discuss trade between Africans and Europeans in the four centuries
+before colonial rule is virtually to discuss slave trade. Strictly speaking, the
+African only became a slave when he reached a society where he worked as
+a slave. Before that, he was first a free man and then a captive.
+Nevertheless, it is acceptable to speak of the trade in slaves when referring
+to the shipment of captives from Africa to various other parts of the world
+where they were to live and work as the property of Europeans. The title of
+this section is deliberately chosen to call attention to the fact that the
+shipments were all by Europeans to markets controlled by Europeans, and
+this was in the interest of European capitalism and nothing else. In East
+Africa and the Sudan, many Africans were taken by Arabs and were sold to
+Arab buyers. This is known (in European books) as the “Arab Slave Trade.”
+Therefore, let it be clear that when Europeans shipped Africans to European
+buyers it was the “European Slave Trade” from Africa.
+Undoubtedly, with few exceptions such as Hawkins, European buyers
+purchased African captives on the coasts of Africa and the transaction
+between themselves and Africans was a form of trade. It is also true that
+very often a captive was sold and resold as he made his way from the
+interior to the port of embarkation—and that too was a form of trade.
+However, on the whole, the process by which captives were obtained on
+African soil was not trade at all. It was through warfare, trickery, banditry,
+and kidnaping. When one tries to measure the effect of European slave
+trading on the African continent, it is essential to realize that one is
+measuring the effect of social violence rather than trade in any normal sense
+of the word.
+Many things remain uncertain about the slave trade and its consequences
+for Africa, but the general picture of destructiveness is clear, and that
+
+destructiveness can be shown to be the logical consequence of the manner
+of recruitment of captives in Africa. One of the uncertainties concerns the
+basic question of how many Africans were imported. This has long been an
+object of speculation, with estimates ranging from a few millions to over
+one hundred million. A recent study has suggested a figure of about ten
+million Africans landed alive in the Americas, the Atlantic islands, and
+Europe. Because it is a low figure, it is already being used by European
+scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of
+brutality in Europe and abroad. In order to whitewash the European slave
+trade, they find it convenient to start by minimizing the numbers concerned.
+The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is
+narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there
+were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling
+slaves (and withholding data). Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million
+was accepted as a basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a
+whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound
+those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans
+from 1445 to 1870.
+On any basic figure of Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would
+have to make several extensions—starting with a calculation to cover
+mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or “Middle Passage,” as
+it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths
+incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15 to 20 per cent. There were also
+numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of
+embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of
+miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the
+principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some
+estimate as to the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the
+millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be
+many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure
+which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the
+population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave
+production by Europeans.
+The massive loss to the African labor force was made more critical
+because it was composed of able-bodied young men and young women.
+Slave buyers preferred their victims between the ages of fifteen and thirty-
+
+five, and preferably in the early twenties; the sex ratio being about two men
+to one woman. Europeans often accepted younger African children, but
+rarely any older person. They shipped the most healthy wherever possible,
+taking the trouble to get those who had already survived an attack of
+smallpox, and who were therefore immune from further attacks of that
+disease, which was then one of the world’s great killer diseases.
+Absence of data about the size of Africa’s population in the fifteenth
+century makes it difficult to carry out any scientific assessment of the
+results of the population outflow. But, nothing suggests that there was any
+increase in the continent’s population over the centuries of slaving, although
+that was the trend in other parts of the world. Obviously, fewer babies were
+born than would otherwise have been the case if millions of child-bearing
+ages were not eliminated. Besides, it is essential to recognize that the slave
+trade across the Atlantic Ocean was not the only connection which
+Europeans had with slaving in Africa. The slave trade on the Indian Ocean
+has been called the “East African Slave Trade” and the “Arab Slave Trade”
+for so long that it hides the extent to which it was also a European slave
+trade. When the slave trade from East Africa was at its height in the
+eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, the destination of
+most captives was the European-owned plantation economies of Mauritius,
+Réunion, and Seychelles—as well as the Americas, via the Cape of Good
+Hope. Besides, Africans laboring as slaves in certain Arab countries in the
+eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were all ultimately serving the
+European capitalist system which set up a demand for slave-grown
+products, such as the cloves grown in Zanzibar under the supervision of
+Arab masters.
+No one has been able to come up with a figure representing total losses
+to the African population sustained through the extraction of slave labor
+from all areas to all destinations over the many centuries that slave trade
+existed. However, on every other continent from the fifteenth century
+onwards, the population showed constant and sometimes spectacular natural
+increase; while it is striking that the same did not apply to Africa. One
+European scholar gave the following estimates of world population (in
+millions) according to continents:
+
+None of the above figures is really precise, but they do indicate a consensus
+among researchers on population that the huge African continent has an
+abnormal record of stagnation in this respect, and there is no causative
+factor other than the trade in slaves to which attention can be drawn.
+An emphasis on population loss as such is highly relevant to the question
+of socio-economic development. Population growth played a major role in
+European development in providing labor, markets, and the pressures which
+led to further advance. Japanese population growth had similar positive
+effects; and in other parts of Asia which remained pre-capitalist, the size of
+the population led to a much more intensive exploitation of the land than
+has ever been the case in what is still a sparsely peopled African continent.
+So long as the population density was low, then human beings viewed as
+units of labor were far more important than other factors of production such
+as land. From one end of the continent to the other, it is easy to find
+examples showing that African people were conscious that population was
+in their circumstances the most important factor of production. Among the
+Bemba, for instance, numbers of subjects were held to be more important
+than land. Among the Shambala of Tanzania, the same feeling was
+expressed in the saying “A king is people.” Among the Balanta of GuineaBissau, the family’s strength is represented by the number of hands there
+are to cultivate the land. Certainly, many African rulers acquiesced in the
+European slave trade for what they considered to be reasons of self-interest,
+but on no scale of rationality could the outflow of population be measured
+as being anything but disastrous for African societies.
+African economic activity was affected both directly and indirectly by
+population loss. For instance, when the inhabitants of a given area were
+reduced below a certain number in an environment where the tsetse fly was
+present, the remaining few had to abandon the area. In effect, enslavement
+was causing these people to lose their battle to tame and harness nature—a
+battle which is at the basis of development. Violence almost meant
+insecurity. The opportunity presented by European slave dealers became the
+
+major (though not the only) stimulus for a great deal of social violence
+between different African communities and within any given community. It
+took the form more of raiding and kidnaping than of regular warfare, and
+that fact increased the element of fear and uncertainty.
+Both openly and by implication, all the European powers in the
+nineteenth century indicated their awareness of the fact that the activities
+connected with producing captives were inconsistent with other economic
+pursuits. That was the time when Britain in particular wanted Africans to
+collect palm produce and rubber and to grow agricultural crops for export in
+place of slaves; and it was clear that slave raiding was violently conflicting
+with that objective in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa. Long before
+that date, Europeans accepted that fact when their self-interest was
+involved. For example, in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese and
+Dutch actually discouraged slave trade on the Gold Coast, for they
+recognized that it would be incompatible with gold trade. However, by the
+end of that century, gold had been discovered in Brazil, and the importance
+of gold supplies from Africa was lessened. Within the total Atlantic pattern,
+African slaves became more important than gold, and Brazilian gold was
+offered for African captives at Whydah (Dahomey) and Accra. At that
+point, slaving began undermining the Gold Coast economy and destroying
+the gold trade. Slave raiding and kidnaping made it unsafe to mine and to
+travel with gold; and raiding for captives proved more profitable than gold
+mining. One European on the scene noted that “as one fortunate marauding
+makes a native rich in a day, they therefore exert themselves rather in war,
+robbery and plunder than in their old business of digging and collecting
+gold.”
+The above changeover from gold mining to slave raiding took place
+within a period of a few years between 1700 and 1710, when the Gold
+Coast came to supply about five thousand to six thousand captives per year.
+By the end of the eighteenth century, a much smaller number of captives
+were exported from the Gold Coast, but the damage had already been done.
+It is worth noting that Europeans sought out different parts of West and
+Central Africa at different times to play the role of major suppliers of slaves
+to the Americas. This meant that virtually every section of the long western
+coastline between the Senegal and Cunene rivers had at least a few years’
+experience of intensive trade in slaves—with all its consequences. Besides,
+
+in the history of eastern Nigeria, the Congo, northern Angola, and
+Dahomey, there were periods extending over decades when exports
+remained at an average of many thousands per year. Most of those areas
+were also relatively highly developed within the African context. They were
+leading forces inside Africa, whose energies would otherwise have gone
+towards their own self-improvement and the betterment of the continent as
+a whole.
+The changeover to warlike activities and kidnaping must have affected
+all branches of economic activity, and agriculture in particular.
+Occasionally, in certain localities food production was increased to provide
+supplies for slave ships, but the overall consequences of slaving on
+agricultural activities in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa were negative.
+Labor was drawn off from agriculture and conditions became unsettled.
+Dahomey, which in the sixteenth century was known for exporting food to
+parts of what is now Togo, was suffering from famines in the nineteenth
+century. The present generation of Africans will readily recall that in the
+colonial period when able-bodied men left their homes as migrant laborers,
+that upset the farming routine in the home districts and often caused
+famines. Slave trading after all meant migration of labor in a manner one
+hundred times more brutal and disruptive.
+To achieve economic development, one essential condition is to make
+the maximum use of the country’s labor and natural resources. Usually, that
+demands peaceful conditions, but there have been times in history when
+social groups have grown stronger by raiding their neighbors for women,
+cattle, and goods, because they then used the “booty” from the raids for the
+benefit of their own community. Slaving in Africa did not even have that
+redeeming value. Captives were shipped outside instead of being utilized
+within any given African community for creating wealth from nature. It was
+only as an accidental by-product that in some areas Africans who recruited
+captives for Europeans realized that they were better off keeping some
+captives for themselves. In any case, slaving prevented the remaining
+population from effectively engaging in agriculture and industry, and it
+employed professional slave-hunters and warriors to destroy rather than
+build. Quite apart from the moral aspect and the immense suffering that it
+caused, the European slave trade was economically totally irrational from
+the viewpoint of African development.
+
+For certain purposes, it is necessary to be more specific and to speak of
+the trade in slaves not in general continent-wide terms but rather with
+reference to the varying impact on several regions. The relative intensity of
+slave-raiding in different areas is fairly well known. Some South African
+peoples were enslaved by the Boers and some North African Moslems by
+Christian Europeans, but those were minor episodes. The zones most
+notorious for human exports were, firstly, West Africa from Senegal to
+Angola along a belt extending about two hundred miles inland and,
+secondly, that part of East-Central Africa which today covers Tanzania,
+Mozambique, Malawi, northern Zambia, and eastern Congo. Furthermore,
+within each of those broad areas, finer distinctions can be drawn.
+It might therefore appear that slave trade did not adversely affect the
+development of some parts of Africa, simply because exports were nonexistent or at a low level. However, the contention that European slave trade
+was an underdeveloping factor for the continent as a whole must be upheld,
+because it does not follow that an African district which did not trade with
+Europe was entirely free from whatever influences were exerted by Europe.
+European trade goods percolated into the deepest interior, and (more
+significantly) the orientation of large areas of the continent towards human
+exports meant that other positive interactions were thereby ruled out.
+The above proposition may be more fully grasped by making some
+comparisons. In any given economy, the various components reflect the
+well-being of others. Therefore, when there is depression in one sector, that
+depression invariably transfers itself to others to some extent. Similarly,
+when there is buoyancy in one sector, then others benefit. Turning to
+biological sciences, it will be found that students of ecology recognize that
+a single change, such as the disappearance of a snail species, could trigger
+off negative or positive reactions in spheres that superficially appear
+unconnected. Parts of Africa left “free” by export trends in captives must
+have been affected by the tremendous dislocation—in ways that are not
+easy to comprehend, because it is so much a question of what might have
+happended.
+Hypothetical questions such as “What might have happened if . . . ?”
+sometimes lead to absurd speculations. But it is entirely legitimate and very
+necessary to ask “What might have happened in Barotseland (southern
+Zambia) if there were not generalized slave trading across the whole belt of
+
+central Africa which lay immediately north of Barotseland?” “What would
+have happened in Buganda if the Katangese were concentrating on selling
+copper to the Baganda instead of captives to Europeans?”
+During the colonial epoch, the British forced Africans to sing,
+Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves
+Britons never never never shall be slaves.
+
+The British themselves started singing the tune in the early eighteenth
+century, at the height of using Africans as slaves. “What would have been
+Britain’s level of development had millions of them been put to work as
+slaves outside of their homelands over a period of four centuries?”
+Furthermore, assuming that those wonderful fellows could never never
+never have been slaves, one could speculate further on the probable effects
+on their development had continental Europe been enslaved. Had that been
+the case, its nearest neighbors would have been removed from the ambit of
+fruitful trade with Britain. After all, trade between the British Isles and
+places like the Baltic and the Mediterranean is unanimously considered by
+scholars to have been the earliest stimulus to the English economy in the
+late feudal and early capitalist period, even before the era of overseas
+expansion.
+One tactic that is now being employed by certain European (including
+American) scholars is to say that, the European slave trade was undoubtedly
+a moral evil, but it was economically good for Africa. Here attention will be
+drawn only very briefly to a few of those arguments to indicate how
+ridiculous they can be. One that receives much emphasis is that African
+rulers and other persons obtained European commodities in exchange for
+their captives, and this was how Africans gained “wealth.” This suggestion
+fails to take into account the fact that several European imports were
+competing with and strangling African products; it fails to take into account
+the fact that none of the long list of European articles were of the type
+which entered into the productive process, but were rather items to be
+rapidly consumed or stowed away uselessly; and it incredibly overlooks the
+fact that the majority of the imports were of the worst quality even as
+consumer goods—cheap gin, cheap gunpowder, pots and kettles full of
+holes, beads, and other assorted rubbish.
+
+Following from the above, it is suggested that certain African kingdoms
+grew strong economically and politically as a consequence of the trade with
+Europeans. The greatest of the West African kingdoms, such as Oyo, Benin,
+Dahomey, and Asante are cited as examples. Oyo and Benin were great
+long before making contact with Europeans, and while both Dahomey and
+Asante grew stronger during the period of the European slave trade, the
+roots of their achievements went back to much earlier years. Furthermore—
+and this is a major fallacy in the argument of the slave-trade apologists—the
+fact that a given African state grew politically more powerful at the same
+time as it engaged in selling captives to Europeans is not automatically to
+be attributed to the credit of the trade in slaves. A cholera epidemic may kill
+thousands in a country and yet the population increases. The increase
+obviously came about in spite of and not because of the cholera. This simple
+logic escapes those who speak about the European slave trade benefiting
+Africa. The destructive tendency of slave trading can be clearly established;
+and, wherever a state seemingly progressed in the epoch of slave trading,
+the conclusion is simply that it did so in spite of the adverse effects of a
+process that was more damaging than cholera. This is the picture that
+emerges from a detailed study of Dahomey, for instance, and in the final
+analysis although Dahomey did its best to expand politically and militarily
+while still tied to slave trade, that form of economic activity seriously
+undermined its economic base and left it much worse off.
+A few of the arguments about the economic benefits of the European
+slave trade for Africa amount to nothing more than saying that exporting
+millions of captives was a way of avoiding starvation in Africa! To attempt
+to reply to that would be painful and time-wasting. But, perhaps a slightly
+more subtle version of the same argument requires a reply: namely, the
+argument that Africa gained because in the process of slave trading new
+food crops were acquired from the American continent and these became
+staples in Africa. The crops in question are maize and cassava, which
+became staples in Africa late in the nineteenth century and in the present
+century. But the spread of food crops is one of the most common
+phenomena in human history. Most crops originated in only one of the
+continents, and then social contact caused their transfer to other parts of the
+world. Trading in slaves has no special bearing on whether crops spread—
+the simplest forms of trade would have achieved the same result. Today, the
+
+Italians have (hard) wheat foods like spaghetti and macaroni as their staple,
+while most Europeans use the potato. The Italians took the idea of the
+spaghetti-type foods from the Chinese noodle after Marco Polo returned
+from travels there, while Europe adopted the potato from American Indians.
+In neither case were Europeans enslaved before they could receive a benefit
+that was the logical heritage of all mankind, but Africans are to be told that
+the European slave trade developed us by bringing us maize and cassava.
+All of the above points are taken from books and articles published
+recently, as the fruit of research in major British and American universities.
+They are probably not the commonest views even among European
+bourgeois scholars, but they are representative of a growing trend that
+seems likely to become the new accepted orthodoxy in metropolitan
+capitalist countries; and this significantly coincides with Europe’s struggle
+against the further decolonization of Africa economically and mentally. In
+one sense, it is preferable to ignore such rubbish and isolate our youth from
+its insults; but unfortunately one of the aspects of current African
+underdevelopment is that the capitalist publishers and bourgeois scholars
+dominate the scene and help mold opinions the world over. It is for that
+reason that writing of the type which justifies the trade in slaves has to be
+exposed as racist bourgeois propaganda, having no connection with reality
+or logic. It is a question not merely of history but of present-day liberation
+struggle in Africa.
+Technical Stagnation and Distortion of the African Economy in the PreColonial Epoch
+It has already been indicated that in the fifteenth century European
+technology was not totally superior to that of other parts of the world. There
+were certain specific features which were highly advantageous to Europe—
+such as shipping and (to a lesser extent) guns. Europeans trading to Africa
+had to make use of Asian and African consumer goods, showing that their
+system of production was not absolutely superior. It is particularly striking
+that in the early centuries of trade, Europeans relied heavily on Indian
+cloths for resale in Africa, and they also purchased cloths on several parts of
+the West African coast for resale elsewhere. Morocco, Mauritania,
+Senegambia, Ivory Coast, Benin, Yorubaland, and Loango were all
+
+exporters to other parts of Africa—through European middlemen. Yet, by
+the time that Africa entered the colonial era, it was concentrating almost
+entirely on the export of raw cotton and the import of manufactured cotton
+cloth. This remarkable reversal is tied to technological advance in Europe
+and to stagnation of technology in Africa owing to the very trade with
+Europe.
+Cloth manufacture in the world went through a stage of handlooms and
+small-scale craft production. Up to the sixteenth century, that was the
+general pattern in Africa, Asia, and Europe: with Asian cloth-makers being
+the most skilled in the world. India is the classic example where the British
+used every means at their disposal to kill the cloth industry, so that British
+cloth could be marketed everywhere, including inside India itself. In Africa,
+the situation was not so clear-cut, nor did it require so much conscious
+effort by Europeans to destroy African cloth manufacture, but the trend was
+the same. Europe benefited technologically from its external trade contacts,
+while Africa either failed to benefit or actually lost. Vital inventions and
+innovations appeared in England in the late eighteenth century, after profits
+from external trade had been reinvested. Indeed, the new machinery
+represented the investment of primary capital accumulated from trading and
+from slavery. African and Indian trade strengthened British industry, which
+in turn crushed whatever industry existed in what is now called the
+“underdeveloped” countries.
+African demand for cloth was increasing rapidly in the fifteenth,
+sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, so that there was a market for all cloth
+produced locally as well as room for imports from Europe and Asia. But,
+directed by an acquisitive capitalist class, European industry increased its
+capacity to produce on a large scale by harnessing the energy of wind,
+water, and coal. European cloth industry was able to copy fashionable
+Indian and African patterns, and eventually to replace them. Partly by
+establishing a stranglehold on the distribution of cloth around the shores of
+Africa, and partly by swamping African products by importing cloth in
+bulk, European traders eventually succeeded in putting an end to the
+expansion of African cloth manufacture.
+There are many varied social factors which combine to determine when a
+society makes a breakthrough from small-scale craft technology to
+equipment designed to harness nature so that labor becomes more effective.
+
+One of the major factors is the existence of a demand for more products
+than can be made by hand, so that technology is asked to respond to a
+definite social need—such as that for clothes. When European cloth became
+dominant on the African market, it meant that African producers were cut
+off from the increasing demand. The craft producers either abandoned their
+tasks in the face of cheap available European cloth, or they continued on the
+same small hand-worked instruments to create styles and pieces for
+localized markets. Therefore, there was what can be called “technological
+arrest” or stagnation, and in some instances actual regression, since people
+forgot even the simple techniques of their forefathers. The abandonment of
+traditional iron smelting in most parts of Africa is probably the most
+important instance of technological regression.
+Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that
+an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further
+progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we
+measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by
+standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be
+borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to
+go on to a further stage. When a person was forced to leave school after
+only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that
+he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had
+the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What
+Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of
+development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance.
+One of the features associated with technological advance is a spirit of
+scientific inquiry closely related to the process of production. This leads to
+inventiveness and innovation. During the period of capitalist development
+in Europe, this was very much the case, and historians lay great emphasis
+on the spirit of inventiveness of the English in the eighteenth century.
+Socialist societies do not leave inventions merely to chance or good luck—
+they actively cultivate tendencies for innovation. For instance, in the
+German Democratic Republic, the youth established a “Young Innovators’
+Fair” in 1958, calling upon the intellectual creativity of socialist youth, so
+that within ten years over two thousand new inventions were presented at
+that fair. The connection between Africa and Europe from the fifteenth
+
+century onwards served to block this spirit of technological innovation both
+directly and indirectly.
+The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of
+youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom
+inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave
+capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with
+improvements in production. Besides, even the busiest African in West,
+Central, or East Africa was concerned more with trade than with
+production, because of the nature of the contacts with Europe; and that
+situation was not conducive to the introduction of technological advances.
+The most dynamic groups over a great area of Africa became associated
+with foreign trade—notably, the Afro-Portuguese middlemen of Upper
+Guinea, the Akan market women, the Aro traders of Mozambique, and the
+Swahili and Wanyamwezi of East Africa. The trade which they carried on
+was in export items like captives and ivory which did not require the
+invention of machinery. Apart from that, they were agents for distributing
+European imports.
+When Britain was the world’s leading economic power, it used to be
+referred to as a nation of shopkeepers: but most of the goods in their shops
+were produced by themselves, and it was while grappling with the problems
+posed by production that their engineers came up with so many inventions.
+In Africa, the trading groups could make no contribution to technological
+improvement because their role and preoccupation took their minds and
+energies away from production.
+Apart from inventiveness, we must also consider the borrowing of
+technology. When a society for whatever reason finds itself technologically
+trailing behind others, it catches up not so much by independent inventions
+but by borrowing. Indeed, very few of man’s major scientific discoveries
+have been separately discovered in different places by different people.
+Once a principle or a tool is known, it spreads or diffuses to other peoples.
+Why then did European technology fail to make its way into Africa during
+the many centuries of contact between the two continents? The basic reason
+is that the very nature of Afro-European trade was highly unfavorable to the
+movement of positive ideas and techniques from the European capitalist
+system to the African pre-capitalist (communal, feudal, and pre-feudal)
+system of production.
+
+The only non-European society that borrowed effectively from Europe
+and became capitalist is that of Japan. Japan was already a highly developed
+feudal society progressing towards its own capitalist forms in the nineteenth
+century. Its people were neither enslaved nor colonized by Europe, and its
+foreign trade relations were quite advantageous. For instance, Japanese
+textile manufacturers had the stimulus of their own growing internal market
+and some abroad in Asia and Europe. Under those circumstances, the young
+Japanese capitalist class (including many former feudalist landowners)
+borrowed technology from Europe and successfully domesticated it before
+the end of the nineteenth century. The use of this example from outside
+Africa is meant to emphasize that for Africa to have received European
+technology the demand would have had to come from inside Africa—and
+most probably from a class or group who saw profit in the new technology.
+There had to be both willingness on the part of Europeans to transfer
+technology and African socio-economic structures capable of making use of
+that technology and internalizing it.
+Hunting for elephants or captives did not usually induce in Africa a
+demand for any technology other than firearms. The lines of economic
+activity attached to foreign trade were either destructive, as slavery was, or
+at best purely extractive, like ivory hunting and cutting camwood trees.
+Therefore, there was no reason for wanting to call upon European skills.
+The African economies would have had little room for such skills unless
+negative types of exports were completely stopped. A remarkable fact that
+is seldom brought to light is that several African rulers in different parts of
+the continent saw the situation clearly, and sought European technology for
+internal development, which was meant to replace the trade in slaves.
+Europeans deliberately ignored those African requests that Europe
+should place certain skills and techniques at their disposal. This was an
+element in the Kongo situation of the early sixteenth century, which has
+already been mentioned. It happened in Ethiopia also, though in Ethiopia no
+trade in captives was established with Europeans. A Portuguese embassy
+reached the Ethiopian court in 1520. Having examined Portuguese swords,
+muskets, clothes, books, and other objects, the emperor Lebna Dengel felt
+the need to introduce European technical knowledge into Ethiopia.
+Correspondence exists between the emperor and European rulers, such as
+kings Manuel I and John III of Portugal, and Pope Leo X, in which requests
+
+were made for European assistance to Ethiopian industry. Until late in the
+nineteenth century, Ethiopian petitions to that effect were being repeated
+with little or no success.
+In the first half of the eighteenth century, there were two further
+examples of African rulers appreciating European technology, and stating
+their preference for skills and not slave ships. When Agaja Trudo of
+Dahomey sought to stop the trade in captives, he made an appeal to
+European craftsmen, and he sent an ambassador to London for that purpose.
+One European who stayed at the court of Dahomey in the late 1720s told his
+countrymen that “if any tailor, carpenter, smith or any other sort of white
+man that is free be willing to come here, he will find very good
+encouragement.” The Asantehene Opoku Ware (1720–50) also asked
+Europeans to set up factories and distilleries in Asante, but he got no
+response.
+Bearing in mind the history of Japan, it should be noted that the first
+requests for technical assistance came from the Ethiopian and Kongo
+empires, which in the sixteenth century were at a level undoubtedly
+comparable to that of most European feudal states, with the important
+exception that they had not produced the seeds of capitalism. During the
+eighteenth century the great African states of Dahomey and Asante became
+prominent. They had passed out of the communal stage and had a somewhat feudal class stratification along with specialization in many activities
+such as the working of gold, iron, and cloth. Asante society under Opoku
+Ware had already shown a capacity for seeking out innovations, by going to
+the trouble of taking imported silk and unraveling it so as to combine the
+silk threads with cotton to make the famous kente cloth. In other words,
+there would have been no difficulty in such African societies mastering
+European technical skills and bridging the rather narrow gap which existed
+between them and Europe at that time.
+Well into the nineteenth century, Europe displayed the same indifference
+to requests for practical assistance from Africa, although by that period both
+African rulers and European capitalists were talking about replacing slave
+trade. In the early nineteenth century, one king of Calabar (in eastern
+Nigeria) wrote the British asking for a sugar refinery; while around 1804
+King Adandozan of Dahomey was bold enough to ask for a firearms
+factory! By that date, many parts of West Africa were going to war with
+
+European firearms and gunpowder. There grew up a saying in Dahomey
+that “He who makes the powder wins the war,” which was a far-sighted
+recognition that Africans were bound to fall before the superiority of
+Europeans in the field of arms technology. Of course, Europeans were also
+fully aware that their arms technology was decisive, and there was not the
+slightest chance that they would have agreed to teach Africans to make
+firearms and ammunition.
+The circumstances of African trade with Europe were unfavorable to
+creating a consistent African demand for technology relevant to
+development; and when that demand was raised it was ignored or rejected
+by the capitalists. After all, it would not have been in the interests of
+capitalism to develop Africa. In more recent times, Western capitalists had
+refused to build the Volta River Dam for Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah,
+until they realized that the Czechoslovakians would do the job; they refused
+to build the Aswan Dam for Egypt, and the Soviet Union had to come to the
+rescue; and in a similar situation they placed obstacles in the way of the
+building of a railway from Tanzania to Zambia, and it was the socialist state
+of China that stepped in to express solidarity with African peasants and
+workers in a practical way. Placing the whole question in historical
+perspective allows us to see that capitalism has always discouraged
+technological evolution in Africa, and blocks Africa’s access to its own
+technology. As will be seen in a subsequent section, capitalism introduced
+into Africa only such limited aspects of its material culture as were essential
+to more efficient exploitation, but the general tendency has been for
+capitalism to underdevelop Africa in technology.
+The European slave trade and overseas trade in general had what are
+known as “multiplier effects” on Europe’s development in a very positive
+sense. This means that the benefits of foreign contacts extended to many
+areas of European life not directly connected with foreign trade, and the
+whole society was better equipped for its own internal development. The
+opposite was true of Africa not only in the crucial sphere of technology but
+also with regard to the size and purpose of each economy in Africa. Under
+the normal processes of evolution, an economy grows steadily larger so that
+after a while two neighboring economies merge into one. That was
+precisely how national economies were created in the states of Western
+Europe through the gradual combination of what were once separate
+
+provincial economies. Trade with Africa actually helped Europe to weld
+together more closely the different national economies, but in Africa there
+was disruption and disintegration at the local level. At the same time, each
+local economy ceased to be directed exclusively or even primarily towards
+the satisfaction of the wants of its inhabitants; and (whether or not the
+particular Africans recognized it) their economic effort served external
+interests and made them dependent on those external forces based in
+Western Europe. In this way, the African economy taken as a whole was
+diverted away from its previous line of development and became distorted.
+It has now become common knowledge that one of the principal reasons
+why genuine industrialization cannot easily be realized in Africa today is
+that the market for manufactured goods in any single African country is too
+small, and there is no integration of the markets across large areas of Africa.
+The kind of relationship which Africa has had with Europe from the very
+beginning has worked in a direction opposite to integration of local
+economies. Certain interterritorial links established on the continent were
+broken down after the fifteenth century because of European trade. Several
+examples arose on the West African coast down to Angola, because in those
+parts European trade was most voluminous, and the surviving written
+record is also more extensive.
+When the Portuguese arrived in the region of modern Ghana in the
+1470s, they had few commodities to offer the inhabitants in exchange for
+the gold coveted by Europe. However, they were able to transship from
+Benin in Nigeria supplies of cotton cloths, beads, and female slaves, which
+were salable on the Gold Coast. The Portuguese were responding to a given
+demand on the Gold Coast so that a previous trade must have been in
+existence between the people of Benin and those of the Gold Coast,
+particularly the Akan. The Akan were gold producers, and the people of
+Benin were specialist craftsmen who had a surplus of cloth and beads which
+they manufactured themselves. As an expansionist state with a large army,
+Benin also had access to prisoners of war; while the Akan seemed
+concerned with building their own population and labor force, so the latter
+acquired female captives from Benin and rapidly integrated them as wives.
+When the Portuguese intervened in this exchange, it was subordinated to the
+interests of European trade. As soon as Portugal and other European nations
+had sufficient goods so as not to be dependent on the re-export of certain
+
+commodities from Benin, then all that remained were the links between the
+Gold Coast and Europe on the one hand and between Benin and Europe on
+the other.
+Probably, Benin products had reached the Gold Coast by way of the
+creeks behind the coast of what is now Dahomey and Togo. Therefore, it
+would have been more convenient when Europeans established a direct link
+across the open sea. As pointed out earlier, the superiority of Europeans at
+sea was of the greatest strategic value, along with their organizational
+ability. This was illustrated in several places, beginning with the Maghreb
+and Mauritania. After the Portuguese took control of the Atlantic coast of
+Northwest Africa, they were able to secure horses, woolen goods, and
+beads, which they shipped farther south to West Africa for gold and slaves;
+up to the early sixteenth century, the most important article brought by the
+Portuguese for trade in Senegambia was the horse. In exchange for one
+horse they received as many as fifteen captives. North African woolens and
+beads were also utilized by the Portuguese in buying gold on the river
+Gambia and as far south as Sierra Leone.
+It needs to be recalled that the Western Sudan had links with the West
+African coast and with North Africa. Long before the European arrival,
+horses were moving from North Africa to be interbred with local West
+African stock. Long before the European arrival, the Arabs and
+Mauritanians traveled to the river Senegal and farther south to meet the
+Mandinga Djola traders and hand over to them products such as beads made
+in Ceuta and cloth spun from the wool of North African sheep. With the
+advantage of rapidity of transport by sea as opposed to overland across the
+desert, the Portuguese were in effect breaking up the economic integration
+of the region. As with the Benin-Akan example, the point to note is that
+after the Portuguese became middlemen they had the opportunity of
+developing a new trade pattern by which both Northwest Africa and West
+Africa looked to Europe and forgot about each other.
+A similar situation came into existence on the Upper Guinea coast, and
+this time the European exploitation was aided by the presence of white
+settlers in the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese and the Cape Verde
+settlers broke into the pattern of local Upper Guinea trade as early as the
+1470s. They intervened in transfers of raw cotton and indigo dye from one
+African community to another, and the Cape Verdean settlers established a
+
+flourishing cotton-growing and cotton-manufacturing industry. They used
+labor and techniques from the mainland, and exported the finished products
+along the length of the coast down to Accra.
+The Portuguese also took over the trade in cowries in the Kongo and its
+offshore islands, the trade in salt along the Angolan coast, and the trade in
+high-quality palm cloth between northern and southern Angola. In some
+instances, they achieved dominance not just because of their ships and
+commercial skills but also by the use of force—provided they were
+operating on the coast and could bring their cannon into use. In East Africa,
+for instance, the Portuguese used violence to capture trade from the Arabs
+and Swahili. The disruption of African commerce between the Ivory Coast
+and the Gold Coast followed that pattern. A strong coastal canoe trade
+existed between these two regions, with the people of Cape Lahou (modern
+Ivory Coast) sailing past Cape Three Points to sell their cloth as far east as
+Accra. The Portuguese set up a fort at Axim near Cape Three Points to
+service gold trade with the hinterland; and one of its functions was to chop
+the east-west coastal African trade. They banned Axim residents from going
+to Cape Lahou, and they stopped canoes from Ivory Coast from traveling
+east beyond Axim. The purpose was obviously to make both areas separate
+economic entities exclusively tied to Europe.
+The above-mentioned African commerce proved to have deep roots. The
+Dutch found it still going on when they took over Axim in 1637. The
+servants of the Dutch West India Company which was operating on the
+Gold Coast wanted to put a complete stop to the African trade; and when
+that was not achieved they tried to force the people of the Ivory Coast to
+buy a certain amount of Dutch goods. The Dutch ruled that each Axim
+canoe-man going to Cape Lahou should carry Dutch goods worth at least
+four ounces of gold. The purpose was to convert a purely inter-African
+exchange into a European-African trade.
+What was doubly detrimental to African attempts to integrate their own
+economies was the fact that when Europeans became middlemen in local
+trade networks, they did so mainly to facilitate the extraction of captives,
+and thereby subordinated the whole economy to the European slave trade.
+In Upper Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, the Portuguese and their
+mulatto descendants engaged in a large variety of exchanges involving
+cotton, dyes, kola nuts, and European products. The purpose of it all was to
+
+fill the holds of slave ships. In Congo and Angola, the same picture
+emerges. The salt, cowry shells, and palm cloth that came in Portuguese
+hands made up for their shortage of trade goods and served to purchase
+captives on different parts of the coast and deep in the interior.
+The element of subordination and dependence is crucial to an
+understanding of African underdevelopment today, and its roots lie far back
+in the era of international trade. It is also worth noting that there is a type of
+false or pseudo integration which is a camouflage for dependence. In
+contemporary times, it takes the form of free-trade areas in the formerly
+colonized sections of the world. Those free-trade areas are made to order
+for the penetration of multinational corporations. From the fifteenth century
+onwards, pseudo integration appeared in the form of the interlocking of
+African economies over long distances from the coast, so as to allow the
+passage of human captives and ivory from a given point inland to a given
+port on the Atlantic or Indian Ocean. For example, captives were moved
+from Congo through what is now Zambia and Malawi to Mozambique,
+where Portuguese, Arab, or French buyers took them over. That was not
+genuine integration of the economies of the African territories concerned.
+Such trade merely represented the extent of foreign penetration, thereby
+stifling local trades.
+The West African gold trade was not destroyed, but it became directly
+dependent on European buyers by being diverted from the northward routes
+across the Sahara. Within the savannah belt of the Western Sudan, the transSaharan gold trade had nourished one of the most highly developed political
+zones in all Africa from the fifth century onwards. But it was more
+convenient for Europe to obtain its gold on the West Coast than through
+North African intermediaries, and one is left to speculate on what might
+have occurred in the Western Sudan if there had been a steady increase in
+the gold trade over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless,
+there is something to be said in favor of African trade with Europe in this
+particular commodity. Gold production involved mining and an orderly
+system of distribution within Africa. Akan country and parts of Zimbabwe
+and Mozambique sustained flourishing socio-political systems up to the
+nineteenth century, largely because of gold production.
+Certain benefits also derived from the export of ivory. The search for
+ivory became the most important activity in several East African societies at
+
+one time or another, sometimes in combination with the trade in captives.
+The Wanyamwezi of Tanzania were East Africa’s best known traders—
+acquiring their reputation through carrying goods for hundreds of miles
+between Lake Tanganyika and the Indian Ocean. When the Wanyamwezi
+gave their attention to the export of ivory, this sparked off other beneficial
+developments, such as increased trading in hoes, food, and salt between
+themselves and their neighbors.
+Yet, ivory was an asset that was rapidly exhausted in any given region,
+and the struggle to secure new supplies could lead to violence comparable
+to that which accompanied the search for human captives. Besides, the most
+decisive limitation of ivory trade was the fact that it did not grow logically
+from local needs and local production. Large quantities of ivory were not
+required by any society inside Africa, and no African society turned to
+elephant hunting and ivory collection on a big scale until the demand came
+from Europe or Asia. Any African society which took ivory exports
+seriously then had to restructure its economy so as to make ivory trade
+successful. That in turn led to excessive and undesirable dependence on the
+overseas market and an external economy. There could be growth in the
+volume of commerce and the rise of some positive side effects, but there
+was decrease in the capacity to achieve economic independence and selfsustaining social progress. Besides, at all times one must keep in mind the
+dialectical opposite of the trade in Africa: namely, production in Europe or
+in America under European control. The few socially desirable by-products
+of elephant hunting within Africa were chicken feed in comparison with the
+profits, technology, and skills associated with the product in Europe. In that
+way, the gap between Africa and Europe was constantly widening; and it is
+on the basis of that gap that we arrive at development and
+underdevelopment.
+Continuing Politico-Military Developments in Africa—1500 to 1885
+Modern African nationalist historians correctly stress that Africa had a
+meaningful past long before the coming of Europeans. They also stress that
+Africans made their own history long after coming into contact with
+Europe, and indeed right up to the period of colonization. That Africancentered approach to the continent’s past is quite compatible with one
+
+which equally emphasizes the transformatory role of external forces, such
+as overseas trade in slaves, gold, ivory. The reconciliation of the two
+approaches is facilitated by bearing in mind the following three factors:
+(1) The external (and mainly European) impact up to 1885 was very
+uneven in geographical terms, with the coasts being obviously more
+exposed.
+(2) Commerce with Europeans affected different aspects of African life
+in varying degrees, with the political, military, and ideological
+apparatus being virtually untouched.
+(3) Dynamic features of independent African evolution and
+development (as illustrated in Chapter 2) continued to operate after
+1500.
+It has already been argued that it would be misleading to try to
+compartmentalize Africa into areas that were affected by slave trading and
+those which were not, for the continent as a whole had to bear the costs.
+However, for present purposes, it is enough to make the crude distinction
+between those parts of Africa which were directly caught up in Europeangenerated activities and those parts which to all appearances continued in
+the traditional manner.
+Developments continued in certain areas such as south Central Africa,
+because the population there was free to pursue a path dictated by the
+interplay between African people and the African environment in the
+particular localities. Besides, there were achievements even in those
+societies under the heaviest bombardment of slaving. Slave trading led to
+the commercial domination of Africa by Europe, within the context of
+international trade. In very few instances did Europeans manage to displace
+African political authorities in the various social systems. So African states
+in close contact with Europe in the pre-colonial era nevertheless had scope
+for political maneuver, and their evolution could and did continue.
+Military conquest of Africa awaited the years of the imperialist
+Scramble. In pre-colonial centuries of contact with Europe, African armies
+were in existence, with all the socio-political implications which attach to
+an armed sector in society. Equally important was the fact that direct
+imports from Europe in the cultural and ideological spheres were virtually
+nil. Christianity tried sporadically and ambivalently to make an impact on
+some parts of the continent. But most of the few missionaries in places like
+
+the Congo, Angola, and Upper Guinea concentrated on blessing Africans as
+they were about to be launched across the Atlantic into slavery. As it was,
+Christianity continued only in Ethiopia, where it had indigenous roots.
+Elsewhere, there flourished Islam and other religions which had nothing to
+do with European trade. As before, religion continued to act as an element
+of the superstructure, which was crucial in the development of the state.
+So long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized
+to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its
+own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control
+over their own destinies, in spite of constraints such as those imposed as the
+African continent slipped into orbit as a satellite of capitalist Europe. After
+all, although historical development is inseparable from material conditions
+and the state of technology, it is also partially controlled by a people’s
+consciousness at various stages. That is part of the interdependence of base
+and superstructure alluded to at the outset.
+Revolution is the most dramatic appearance of a conscious people or
+class on the stage of history; but, to greater or lesser extent, the ruling class
+in any society is always engaged in the developmental process as conscious
+instruments of change or conservatism. Attention in this section will be
+focused on the political sphere and its power companion, the military. In
+those areas, Africans were able to excel even in the face of slave trading.
+Politico-military development in Africa from 1500 to 1885 meant that
+African social collectives had become more capable of defending the
+interests of their members, as opposed to the interests of people outside the
+given community. It also meant that the individual in a politically mature
+and militarily strong state would be free from external threat of physical
+removal. He would have more opportunities to apply his own skill in fields
+as diversified as minstrelsy and bronze-working, under the protection of the
+state. He could also use his creativity and inventiveness to refine the
+religion of his people, or to work out a more manageable constitution, or to
+contribute to new techniques of war, or to advance agriculture and trade. Of
+course, it is also true that the benefits of all such contributions went mainly
+to a small section of African society, both within and without the zone of
+slaving; for, as communalism receded, the principle of egalitarian
+distribution was disregarded. These various points can be illustrated by
+
+concrete historical examples drawn from all over the continent during the
+pre-colonial period in question.
+The Yoruba
+In a previous discussion, the Yoruba state of Oyo was merely listed as one
+of the outstanding representatives of African development up to the eve of
+European arrival in the fifteenth century. The remarkable fourteenth- and
+fifteenth-century artistic achievements of Oyo, of its parent state of Ife, and
+of the related state of Benin have been well studied, because of the
+preservation of ivory, terracotta, and bronze sculptures. It is clear that the
+earliest bronzes were the best and that there was a deterioration in execution
+and sensitivity from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century.
+However, politically, states such as Oyo and Benin did continue to prosper
+for a very long time after the arrival of Europeans on the West African
+coast. Since Oyo and the Yoruba people were within an intensive area of
+slave trading, their fate between 1500 and 1885 is of considerable
+significance.
+The kingdom of Oyo kept fairly clear of any involvement with slave
+trading until the late eighteenth century. Instead, its people concentrated on
+local production and trade, and on the consolidation and expansion of the
+trade. Indeed, although the nucleus of the Oyo kingdom had already been
+established in the fifteenth century, it was during the next three centuries
+that it expanded to take control of most of what was later termed Western
+Nigeria, large zones north of the river Niger and the whole of what is now
+Dahomey. In effect, it was an empire, ruled over by an Alafin in
+conjunction with an aristocracy. It was in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
+eighteenth centuries that the subtle constitutional mechanisms which
+regulated relations between the Alafin and his principal subjects and
+between the capital and the provinces were crystalized.
+In so far as Oyo had an interest in the coast, it was as an outlet more for
+cloth than for slaves. Being some distance inland, the Yoruba of Oyo
+concentrated on relations with the hinterland, thereby connecting with the
+Western Sudanic trading zone. It was from the north that Oyo got the horses
+which made its armies feared and respected. Oyo is a prime example of that
+African development which had its roots deep in the past, in the
+
+contradictions between man and environment. Its people continued to
+develop on the basis of forces which they did not consciously manipulate,
+as well as through the deliberate utilization of political techniques.
+Early in the nineteenth century, Oyo and Yorubaland in general began to
+export captives in considerable numbers. They were obtained partly by
+military campaigns outside Yorubaland, but also through local slave
+procuring. Local slave procuring involved kidnaping, armed raids,
+uncertainty, and disunity. Those features, together with internal
+constitutional tensions and an external threat from the Islamic north,
+brought about the downfall of the Oyo empire by about 1830. The famous
+Yoruba ancestral home of Ife was also despoiled and its citizens turned into
+refugees, because of quarrels among the Yoruba over kidnaping for sale into
+slavery.
+But it was testimony to the level of development in that part of Africa
+that within a few years the inhabitants were able to reconstruct new political
+states: notably those of New Oyo, Ibadan, Ajaye, Abeokuta, and Ijebu—
+each centered on a town, and with enough land for successful agriculture.
+Until the British arrived to kindly impose “order” in Nigeria, the Yoruba
+people kept experimenting with various political forms, with heavy
+emphasis on the military, and keeping to the religion of their fore-fathers.
+Being conscious of territorial boundaries, the inhabitants and rulers of
+any given state invariably become involved in clashes with neighboring
+states. The state in the feudal epoch in Europe and Asia was particularly
+concerned with its military capacity. The ruling class comprised in whole or
+in part the professional fighting forces of the state. One rationalization by
+which they justified their enjoyment of the major portion of the surplus of
+society was that they offered armed protection to the ordinary peasant or
+serf. This generalization was as true of nineteenth-century Yorubaland as it
+was of Prussia and Japan. Without a doubt, Africans in that region were
+proceeding along the line of development leading to social organization
+comparable to feudalism in Europe, Asia, and such parts of Africa as
+Ethiopia and the Maghreb, which had been at that stage some centuries
+earlier.
+In the Oyo empire, the civil power was dominant, and the military
+generals were servants of the king. Subsequently, however, the military took
+over effective political power. For instance, the Ajaye state was founded by
+
+Kurunmi, said to have been the greatest Yoruba general of those troubled
+times following the fall of Oyo. Kurunmi established a personal military
+ascendancy in Ajaye. Ibadan was slightly different, in that there it was a
+group of military officers who collectively formed the political elite. Efforts
+to put civilians back in power were half-hearted and unsuccessful. After all,
+the town itself grew out of a military encampment.
+The city-state of Abeokuta perhaps made the most consistent effort to
+make the military an arm of the civil state. But, what mattered most was the
+defense of the townships within the fortified walls of Abeokuta. Abeokuta’s
+fortified walls became famous as the place where many a rival army met
+disaster; and, under those circumstances, the Ologun, or war-chiefs, were
+the social and political powers.
+While the militarization of politics was going on in Yorubaland, changes
+were taking place in the structure of the society, which brought about
+sharper class stratification. Numerous captives were taken in war, most of
+whom were sold to Europeans, so that Yorubaland became notorious as a
+slave-supplying region right up to the 1860s. But many war prisoners were
+retained locally, in conditions approximating either to slavery or to serfdom,
+depending on whether or not they were first-generation captives.
+Sometimes, refugees fleeing from destroyed towns also had no option other
+than to become clients or serfs of other free Yoruba. Such refugees were
+made to give service to their new overlords by farming the land, in return
+for armed protection. However, serfs were also used as soldiers, which
+means that they had access to the means of production (the land) only
+through meeting an obligation in military labor. That is a measure of the
+extent to which the principle of kinship had been weakened, and it indicates
+that, in contrast to the typical communal village, states such as those in
+nineteenth-century Yorubaland allocated roles and rewards to their citizens
+on the basis of reciprocal obligations characteristic of feudalism.
+During the period under discussion, the division of labor among the
+Yoruba was extended with the rise of professional soldiers, or “war-boys,”
+as they were called. The professional soldiers, who were sons of aristocrats,
+left farming disdainfully to prisoners and serfs—the large number of whom
+insured agricultural plenty. Other branches of economic activity also
+flourished, notably the making of cloth and palm oil and the trade in various
+products. These things were true, in spite of the fact that by that time some
+
+labor was being lost both in the form of slaves exported and in the form of
+labor power devoted to capturing people for export. European visitors to
+Yorubaland in the middle of the nineteenth century could still admire the
+level of its material culture, along with the highly colorful and impressive
+aspects of its non-material culture such as the annual “Yam Festivals” and
+the ritual of the religious cults of Shango, Ogboni, and others.
+One item of European technology that was anxiously sought by Africans
+and that was fairly easily obtainable from Europeans was the firearm. From
+the 1820s onwards, the Yoruba acquired European firearms in large
+numbers, and integrated them into the pattern of trade, politics, and military
+strategy. On the eve of colonial rule, Yoruba generals were reaching out for
+breech-loading rifles and even rockets; but Europe stepped in too quickly
+for that move to get very far. Through a series of actions which started as
+early as 1860 in Lagos (and which included missionary infiltration as well
+as armed invasion) the British managed to bring that part of Africa under
+colonial rule.
+Economic development is a matter of an increasing capacity to produce,
+and it is tied up with patterns of land tenure and class relations. These basic
+facts were well brought out both positively and negatively in Yoruba
+history, in the decades before independence was lost. So long as agricultural
+production was not disrupted, then for so long any given Yoruba state
+remained in a strong position. Ibadan was once the greatest military power
+in Yorubaland, selling captives as well as retaining many for use as laborers
+for its own benefit. But Ibadan’s farming areas were hit by war, and
+Ibadan’s rulers also started removing prisoners farming the land and selling
+them instead to Europeans. That became necessary because Ibadan needed
+firearms, and those could be obtained only by selling slaves. It was at that
+point that the undermining effect of the presence of European slave buyers
+on the coast became really paramount.
+By selling its own captives and serfs, Ibadan was undermining its own
+socio-economic base. If the prisoners were to develop into a true serf class,
+then those prisoners would have had to be guaranteed the right to remain
+fixed on the soil and protected from sale. This was one of the reasons why
+slavery as a mode of production in Europe had to give way to serfdom and
+feudalism; and, under normal circumstances, Yoruba society did rapidly
+guarantee the irremovability of those captives who were integrated into the
+
+local production pattern. But, forces unleashed by the European presence as
+slave buyers were too great to be withstood, and any hope of solving the
+problem disappeared with the loss of political power under colonialism.
+Too often, historians lay undue emphasis on the failure of nineteenthcentury Yoruba states to unite and produce an entity as large as the former
+empire of Oyo. But, firstly, the size of a political unit is not the most
+important criterion for evaluating the achievement of its peoples. And,
+secondly, a given people can disintegrate politically and later integrate even
+more effectively. The Yoruba states of Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ajaye, had
+populations of up to 100,000 citizens—as large as most of the city-states,
+principalities, and palatinates of feudal Germany. That is a comparison
+which is worth bringing to light, and it is one that struck European
+observers who happened to visit Yorubaland in the middle years of the
+nineteenth century.
+Germany has long had a common culture and language, and there was a
+form of political unity under the Holy Roman Empire from the twelfth to
+the fifteenth century. However, after the Reformation and the breakup of the
+Holy Roman Empire, the German people were divided into as many
+separate political entities as there are days in the year, some of them being
+hardly bigger than a public park. Yet, the internal class relations and
+productive forces continued to develop throughout Germany, and ultimately
+by 1870 unity was again achieved, with feudalism giving way to a powerful
+capitalist nation-state. Similarly, the Yoruba were a widely spread cultural
+entity with a single language. After the fall of the Oyo empire, the
+developmental processes were slowed down by both internal and external
+factors, but they were not stopped. It took the arrival of European
+colonialism to do that.
+Within the sphere of West and Central African slaving, state-building
+continued with varying degrees of success. For instance, the Akan state
+system grew up in a manner as impressive as that of the Oyo empire.
+Fortunately for the Akan, slave exports reached alarming proportions only
+during the first half of the eighteenth century. By that time, a state such as
+As ante had sunk roots deep enough to withstand the adverse effects of
+slaving. It continued to be incorporated with the heartlands of the Western
+Sudan, and by the 1870s when the British tried to dictate to Asante, these
+famous African people did not give up without heroic armed struggle.
+
+Asante’s connection with the export of slaves in the eighteenth century
+led its rulers to concentrate on expansionism of the type which would bring
+in captives through wars, raids, tribute, and as articles of trade from regions
+where they had been made prisoner. Besides, since the fifteenth century,
+Akan country was building up rather than exporting its human resources.
+Captives were incorporated locally into the society; and on the eve of
+colonialism a substantial proportion of Asante society was made up of
+Odonko-ba—the descendants of one-time captives, who were the laboring
+population on the land. Development had come not through exporting and
+losing labor but by increasing and maximizing it.
+Dahomey
+Asante’s eastern neighbor beyond the Volta River was Dahomey. Since
+Dahomey was more deeply involved in the European slave trade and for a
+much longer period, its experiences shall be cited at a greater length.
+Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dahomey had a
+stagnant if not declining population, and an economy that had virtually no
+props other than slave exports. What Dahomey succeeded in doing in spite
+of all that is a tribute to the achievements of man inside the African
+continent. It should be made clear that the groundwork for the sociopolitical
+development of the Aja or Fon people of Dahomey was laid down in the
+period preceding the influence of Europe on West Africa. By the fifteenth
+century, the Aja states of Allada and Whydah were already in existence,
+having a loose connection with the Yoruba of Ife. Dahomey was an offshoot
+from Allada in the sixteenth century, and by the early eighteenth century it
+expanded to incorporate both Allada and Whydah.
+The kings of Allada and Whydah had made the mistake of either failing
+to protect their own citizens from enslavement or of actually conniving at
+their enslavement. Dahomey never followed such a policy, which was
+directly antagonistic to the very maintenance of the state. Instead, Dahomey
+eventually became the classic raiding state of West Africa, after failing to
+get Europeans to accept any products other than human beings. To achieve
+that, Dahomey had first to build up a tightly organized military state, whose
+monarch came much closer to an authoritarian or despot than did the Alafin
+of Oyo or the Asantehene of Asante. Secondly, Dahomey invested a great
+
+deal of time and ingenuity on its army, so as to protect its own citizens and
+wage war abroad.
+Within European history, the state of Sparta stood out as one that was
+completely dedicated to the art of war. Europeans in Africa in the
+eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invariably referred to Dahomey as a
+black Sparta. Throughout the eighteenth century, the cavalry of Oyo was
+more than a match for Dahomey’s foot soldiers, and Dahomey remained a
+tribute-paying portion of the Oyo empire. But with the fall of Oyo,
+Dahomey became the supreme military state in that region, and indeed
+wreaked vengeance on its former Yoruba overlords. Warfare was necessary
+for securing slaves outside of Dahomey and for obtaining firearms. It was in
+fact essential for survival.
+Dahomey’s profound preoccupation with militaristic activities can be
+illustrated in many ways. Their value system rewarded the brave and the
+victorious, while ruthlessly despising and even liquidating the cowardly and
+the unsuccessful on the battlefield. The two chief ministers of the king were
+the commanders of the “Left” and “Right” armies, and other military
+officers held political appointments. Then, too, the artistic media constantly
+harped upon the theme of war. Beautiful mosaics and paintings appeared on
+the walls of the palaces of Abomey—all dealing with military victories.
+Historical accounts, as rendered by professional reciters, reflected the same
+bias; and the cloth workers busied themselves making emblems, “colors,”
+and umbrellas for the generals and the regiments.
+Two unique innovations set Dahomey off from its African neighbors and
+even gives it a special claim within the context of feudal or semi-feudal
+military organization. Firstly, Dahomey encouraged young boys to become
+apprentices of war. By the age of eleven or twelve, a boy would be attached
+to a veteran soldier—helping to carry his supplies and observing battle. The
+second innovation (and the one that was more widely commented upon)
+was Dahomey’s utilization of its female population within the army.
+Apparently, the wives in the royal palace started off as a ceremonial guard
+in the eighteenth century, and then progressed to become an integral part of
+Dahomey’s fighting machine, on terms of complete equality of hardship and
+reward. Dahomey’s population in the nineteenth century was probably no
+more than two hundred thousand; and the state consistently managed to
+send twelve to fifteen thousand actives on its annual campaigns. Of those, it
+
+was estimated in 1845 that some five thousand were women—the so-called
+Amazons of Dahomey, who were feared for their ferocity in battle.
+In the long run, the trade in slaves cast a blight on Dahomey. Slaving
+campaigns were costly and not always rewarding in terms of captives.
+European buyers failed to turn up during certain years, depending on
+European conditions (e.g., during the American War of Independence, the
+French Revolution, and the subsequent revolutionary wars, there was a lull
+in Dahomean slave exports, because far fewer European ships could be
+spared for the trade in slaves). Without selling captives to get firearms to
+carry on more warfare for slaves, Dahomey felt its glory and military honor
+was slipping. Resort to human sacrifice was one attempt to compensate for
+the diminishing reputation of the state and its monarch, as was the case with
+the Oba of Benin in the nineteenth century.
+Even so, the story of the reputed savagery of Dahomey was exaggerated
+incredibly. The Dahomean state created such refinements as a population
+census; it conducted diplomacy far and wide, with all the niceties and the
+protocol that one usually hears of only in connection with “civilized”
+European states; and it built up a system of espionage and intelligence as an
+essential ingredient in its own security. Above all, attention should be
+focused at least briefly on the role of the artist in Dahomean society. Much
+of African art springs from elaboration of things functional, such as pottery
+and cloth. However, both religion and the state power also stimulated art.
+For instance, the brasses and bronzes of Ife were executed on behalf of the
+religious cults and were associated with the Oni of Ife and the royal family.
+Indeed, it is a most widespread phenomenon that the feudal ruling class
+gave its protection to artists, along with sustenance and recognition. This
+was true in Mandarin China with pottery-makers and theatre artists; it was
+true of sixteenth-century Italy of the Renaissance; and it was true of
+Dahomey from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
+No one now knows which Dahomean is to be credited with any given
+artistic achievement of the independent pre-colonial period. However, in
+that time, particular individuals were being given the opportunity for selfdiscovery and self-development and of serving the society as a whole. Their
+task was to give pleasure and to capture the hopes and ambitions of the
+people in palace wall-paintings, in wrought-iron sculptures, in the stamped
+patterns of handwoven cloths designed for royalty, in the intricately carved
+
+heads of the safe-conduct staffs of the king’s ambassadors, and in the lively
+tales of how the founder of the Dahomean kingdom came out of the belly of
+a leopard. It was art that centered around royalty and noble families, but it
+was also a national product and a point of identification for the people as a
+whole. Subsequently, such artistic skills either disappeared or became
+debased to serve the curiosity of philistine colonialists.
+It is still held in some quarters that Dahomey’s development in certain
+spheres must be credited to slave trading. To demonstrate conclusively that
+African political and military development through to the nineteenth
+century was an extension of groundwork already laid in an earlier epoch, it
+is best to turn to zones where foreign influence was non-existent. The interlacustrine zone of East Africa is one such.
+The Eastern Interlacustrine States
+In an earlier discussion, attention was directed to Bunyoro-Kitara as the
+most advanced socio-political formation in East Africa up to the fifteenth
+century. Its ruling dynasty, the Bachwezi, declined for reasons that are not
+clear, and they were overwhelmed by new immigrants from the north.
+While there is some doubt as to whether the Bachwezi had an Ethiopian
+origin, it is clearly established that the sixteenth-century immigrants were
+Luo peoples from a section of the Nile that flows through the Sudan.
+Following upon Luo migrations, a new line known as the Babito dynasty
+was placed in power over Bunyoro proper. Other branches of the same
+dynasty were enthroned in several places, sometimes breaking off from the
+main line. As late as the nineteenth century, a separate Babito kingdom was
+carved out in Toro. Meanwhile, the Bachwezi or Bahima had staged a
+comeback in regions to the south, in the form of a clan known as the
+Bahinda. The Bahinda were one of the pastoralist clans of the old BunyoroKitara state, and in the period from the sixteenth century onwards their
+stronghold was in Ankole and Karagwe.
+Obviously, the new Babito ruling class immediately sought to take
+control of the land, but in accordance with settled African customs, they
+later tried to project themselves as the original owners of the land, rather
+than usurpers. In Busoga, where there were several small Babito kings, a
+
+researcher reported the following dialogue about land between a member of
+a royal clan and a commoner:
+Royal clan member—We found this place empty and made something of it. You fellows
+later came round begging for land, so we were generous and gave you some. Naturally you’re
+now our slaves.
+Commoner—Oho! What a lie! We were here long before you. You took your power by
+trickery. You princes have always been scoundrels!
+
+At no stage in the independent history of these interlacustrine states did
+land become purely a personal possession, to be monopolized by a given
+class, as in the classic European feudal model. Scholars frequently demand
+this feature before they concede that feudalism has arrived; but they fail to
+take into account the reality of the fact that distribution and usufruct (or
+produce) of the land may be in the hands of a few, and they fail to realize
+that where cattle were a dominant form of wealth, then private ownership of
+herds was also part of a process by which producers were separated from
+the means of production. To be specific, those who owned the herds were
+usually the Bahinda or other Bahima or the new Babito families, while
+those who tended them were clients and virtually serfs of the owners. As far
+as land was concerned, the peasant who farmed it paid a heavy tax in crops
+to the clan heads and ruling authorities to allow the latter to live without
+resort to agricultural work.
+It is necessary to recall that in the process of independent evolution on
+all continents, the increase in productive capacity was accompanied by
+increasing inequality at all stages except socialism. To say that the
+interlacustrine zone continued developing uninterruptedly up to the eve of
+colonialism is to highlight the expanded productive capacity of the states
+and at the same time to recognize frankly that it was the result of increased
+exploitation not only of natural resources but also of the labor of the
+majority. The latter were disenfranchised and oppressed to get them to toil
+in the interests of a few who lived in palaces.
+The interlacustrine kingdoms fell mainly in what is now Uganda,
+Rwanda, and Burundi. Only in the northeast of Tanzania are there
+representatives of the interlacustrine complex of states. Northeast Tanzania
+was the most developed portion of the country in the pre-colonial epoch,
+because the rest of mainland Tanzania comprised numerous small kingdoms
+that had not decisively left behind the communal stage. But northeast
+
+Tanzania was also the corner of the country in which problems arose when a
+new ideology of egalitarianism was being preached after the end of the
+colonial era, because there was already a regime of inequality in the
+distribution of land and produce and in the rights granted to individuals. In
+fact, in any meaningful political sense, the area was feudal.
+There is some disagreement as to the origins of the important
+interlacustrine state of Buganda. Some traditions give it the same Luo origin
+as Bunyoro, while others tend to hold that it was a Bachwezi survival. Its
+social structure certainly paralleled that of Babito Bunyoro closely.
+Contrary to the situation in Ankole, in Buganda the Bahima did not have the
+reins of political power. They were only associated with the cattle-owning
+ruling class, very often in the junior capacity of herdsmen. In any event,
+Buganda’s history was one of gradual expansion and consolidation at the
+expense of Bunyoro and other neighbors. By the eighteenth century, it had
+become the dominant power in the whole region.
+The Baganda state had a sound agricultural base, with bananas as a
+staple and with cattle products being available. Their craftsmen
+manufactured barkcloth for export, and local production of iron and pots
+was supplemented by imports from neighboring African communities.
+Their lack of salt was a big stimulus to the extending of their trade network
+to obtain necessary supplies; and, as was true of the Western Sudan, such an
+extension of the network of commerce was in effect integrating the
+productive resources of a large area. Carl Peters, the advance agent of
+German colonialism in East Africa, remarked that “in estimating the
+political and commercial affairs of East Africa too little stress is laid on this
+internal trade among the tribes. The barter trade of Buganda defies all direct
+calculation.” In Buganda’s case, the absence of slave trading must have
+been important in expanding internal production and trade, and therefore
+providing a sound base for the political superstructure.
+The kings of Buganda set up a small permanent armed force, which
+served as a bodyguard; and the rest of the national army was raised when
+necessary. The political administration was centralized under the Kabaka,
+and district rulers were appointed by the Kabaka and his council, rather than
+left to be provided by the clans on a hereditary family basis. Great ingenuity
+went into devising plans for administering this large kingdom through a
+network of local officials. Perhaps the best tributes to the political
+
+sophistication of Buganda came from the British, when they found Buganda
+and other East African feudalities in the nineteenth century. They were the
+best tributes because they were reluctantly extracted from white racists and
+culturally arrogant colonialists, who did not want to admit that Africans
+were capable of anything.
+Actually, Europeans were so impressed with what they saw in the interlacustrine zone that they invented the thesis that those political states could
+not possibly have been the work of Africans and must have been built at an
+earlier date by white “Hamites” from Ethiopia. This myth seemed to get
+some support from the fact that the Bachwezi were said to have been lightskinned. However, in the first place, had the Bachwezi come from Ethiopia
+they would have been black or brown Africans. And secondly, as noted
+earlier, the cultures of East Africa were syntheses of local developments,
+plus African contributions from outside the specific localities. They were
+certainly not foreign imports.
+Assuming that the Bachwezi or Bahima were from Ethiopia, then they
+lost their language and became Bantu-speaking like their subjects. The
+same thing happened to the Babito dynasty of Luo extraction, indicating
+that they had been absorbed by the local culture. Furthermore, the Babito
+and the Bahima/Bahinda also forged close connections from the sixteenth to
+the nineteenth centuries. In effect, out of different ethnic groups, castes, and
+classes, a number of “nationalities” were emerging. The “nationality” group
+is held to be that social formation which immediately precedes the nationstate, and the definition applies to the peoples of Buganda, Bunyoro,
+Ankole, Karagwe, and Toro, as well as to those in Rwanda and Burundi.
+Rwanda
+The westernmost portion of the interlacustrine zone comprised the
+kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. The two countries which today bear
+those names are centered around the old kingdoms. The experiences of
+Rwanda will be cited here.
+Like the old Bunyoro-Kitara kingdom and like its northeastern neighbor
+state in Ankole, Rwanda was split into two major social groups. Though the
+great majority of the population were cultivators known as the Bahutu,
+political power was in the hands of Batutsi pastoralists, comprising about 10
+
+per cent of the population. An even smaller minority were the Batwa (about
+1 per cent), who were at a very low level of pre-agricultural social
+organization.
+The relative physiques of the three social segments in Rwanda offer an
+interesting commentary on the development of human beings as a species.
+The Batutsi are one of the tallest human groups in the world; the Bahutu are
+short and stocky; and the Batwa are pygmies. The differences can be
+explained largely in terms of social occupation and diet. The Batwa were
+not living in settled agricultural communities; instead, they wandered
+around in small bands, hunting and digging roots, thereby failing to assure
+themselves of plentiful or rich food. At the other extreme, the Batutsi
+pastoralists were subsisting on a constantly accessible and rich diet of milk
+and meat. The Bahutu were more socially advanced than the Batwa; they
+ate more, and more regularly, than the latter because Bahutu agriculture
+meant that they did not live entirely on the whims of nature, following
+scarce game like the Batwa. However, the quality of their food fell short of
+the protein-rich Batutsi diet. Thus, the development of man as physical
+being is also linked in a broad sense to the expansion of productive capacity
+and the distribution of food.
+In any event, it was their political and military achievements rather than
+their height which distinguished the Batutsi from a historical viewpoint.
+Their contribution to the kingdom of Rwanda goes back to the fourteenth
+century, to a period contemporaneous with the Bachwezi. There were
+indeed striking parallels and actual links between Rwanda and Ankole and
+between Karagwe and Burundi. But unlike Bunyoro-Kitara, Rwanda in the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was far from being a single political
+entity. There were several small chiefdoms, and it was the expansion of a
+central Rwanda Tutsi clan which gradually created a small compact state in
+the seventeenth century. Later still, that central Rwanda state extended its
+frontiers; and it was still doing so when the colonialists arrived. For
+instance, rulers in Mpororo (Ankole) were already paying tribute to
+Rwanda, which was growing at Ankole’s expense.
+At the head of the Rwanda kingdom was the Mwami. As with so many
+other African rulers, his powers were sanctioned by religious beliefs and his
+person surrounded by religious ritual. Feudal kings in Europe often tried to
+get their subjects to believe that royal authority emanated from God and that
+
+the king therefore ruled by “divine right.” Subjects of African kings like
+those of the Mwami of Rwanda often accepted something quite close to that
+proposition. Of course, in addition, the authority of the king had to be based
+on real power, and the Mwami of Rwanda did not overlook that fact.
+Rujugira was a famous Mwami of the eighteenth century, and the last of
+the independent line was Rwaabugiri (known also as Kigeri IV), who died
+in 1895. Gahindiro is another whose praises were sung by the court
+musicians and historians. Each of them was associated with one or more
+contributions to refining and elaborating the power structure of the state,
+which meant that they each embodied certain historical, class, and national
+forces.
+The Mwami Rujugira in the eighteenth century took the step of placing
+his frontier zones under the exclusive authority of a military commander,
+and stationing strong contingents of soldiers there. The move was
+significant because in any young and growing state the most uncertain areas
+are those on the frontiers, known as the “marches provinces” in European
+feudal terminology. Rujugira was in effect placing the marches provinces
+under military law, and he also put permanent military camps at strategic
+places.
+Early in the nineteenth century, Mwami Gahindiro overhauled the civil
+administration. In each province, there was created both a land chief and a
+cattle chief—one being responsible for farm rents and the other for cattle
+dues. Besides, there were smaller district authorities or “hill chiefs” within
+all the provinces, all members of the Batutsi aristocracy. Whether by
+accident or design, it turned out that administrators responsible for different
+areas and different matters were jealous of each other, and that kept them
+from uniting to conspire against the Mwami. The “hill chiefs” were for a
+long time hereditary within given Batutsi clans or lineages; but under
+Rwaabugiri they became appointive—another move which strengthened
+central government. Meanwhile, the civil servants and councilors
+(collectively known as Biru) were given grants of land which were free
+from the intervention of the land and cattle chiefs, thereby cementing the
+loyalty of the Biru to the throne.
+The system of social relations which emerged in Rwanda was more
+completely hierarchical and feudal than in most other parts of Africa.
+Hierarchy and socio-legal interdependence of classes and individuals were
+
+features found in the army, in the civil administration, and in the social
+fabric itself. The key to everything else was the control over cattle, through
+an institution known as ubuhake. This meant that the poor (in cattle) and
+those of low status (by birth) could approach anyone with more cattle and
+more respected status, and offer his physical labor services in return for
+cattle and protection. The cattle were never given as outright property, but
+only the usufruct was handed over to a client. Therefore, the client could
+have the use of the cattle for so long as he reciprocated by handing over
+milk and meat to his overlord, and for so long as he remained loyal. Of
+course, the peasant on the land also had to perform labor services and
+provide tribute in the form of food.
+The Batutsi aristocracy fulfilled their function of offering “protection”
+partly by making representations at the Mwami’s court or by defending
+their dependents in legal cases. Above all, however, the protection came
+through specialization in the military art. Ever since the fifteenth century,
+there had been compulsory military service for certain Batutsi lineages.
+Sons of the Batutsi aristocracy became royal pages, receiving all their
+educational training within a military context. Each new Mwami made a
+fresh recruitment to add to existing forces. Some Bahutu were associated
+with particular regiments to provide supplies, and the Batwa were also
+incorporated as specialist archers (with poisoned arrows).
+Of course, the protection which the Batutsi gave the Bahutu was a myth,
+in the sense that what they were guarding was their exploitation of the
+Bahutu. They defended them from external enemies, so that the population
+became dense and plentiful. They conserved the Bahutu, so that the latter
+could exercise their highly developed agronomical knowledge to produce
+surplus. Furthermore, the top stratum of Batutsi were the cattle owners, and
+they left their cattle to the lesser Batutsi to tend, thereby exploiting the labor
+and profound empirical knowledge which the common cattle herders
+possessed. As in Europe and Asia, such was the socio-economic base which
+supported a life of leisure and intrigue among the Batutsi aristocracy.
+There was little intermarriage between Batutsi and Bahutu, and hence
+they are regarded as castes. The Batwa, too, can be similarly categorized;
+but since the castes were hierarchically placed one over the other, it was
+also a situation of class, and there was upward and downward mobility from
+one class to another to a certain extent. At the same time, Batutsi, Bahutu,
+
+and Batwa together evolved as the Rwanda nation, having common
+interests to defend against even the Batutsi, Bahutu, and Batwa who
+comprised the kingdom of Burundi. The people of Rwanda were not unique
+in developing a state and a sense of national consciousness, while at the
+same time experiencing the rise of more sharply differentiated classes and
+castes in society. The important thing is that they were free to develop
+relatively unaffected by alien influence, and certainly free from direct
+ravages of slave trading.
+Ama-Zulu
+The same freedom from slave trading was operational in South Africa, for
+West African exports of captives began in Angola and East African exports
+came from Mozambique and zones farther north. The area south of the
+Limpopo was one that had some of the simpler social formations in Africa
+up to the fifteenth century. The eastern side was sparsely peopled up to a
+late date by the Khoi Khoi herdsmen, who were slowly edged out by Bantu
+speakers. When European ships touched on the Natal coast in the sixteenth
+century, it was still a region of widely scattered homesteads; but in the years
+to come the population became denser and important politico-military
+development took place.
+Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the African past would have
+heard the name of Shaka, the Zulu leader who most embodied the social and
+political changes which took place in the eastern portion of South Africa.
+One biographer (a European) had this to say of Shaka:
+Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Charlemagne . . . such men as these have arisen
+periodically throughout the history of the world to blaze a trail of glory that has raised them
+high above the common level. Such a man was Shaka, perhaps the greatest of them all.
+
+The above praise-song appeared on the back cover of the biography in
+question; and, since capitalist publishers treat books just like boxes of soap
+powder, one has admittedly to be suspicious of any advertisement designed
+to sell the book. Nevertheless, all commentators on Shaka (both African and
+European) frequently compare him favorably with the “Great Men” of
+European history. It is therefore appropriate to examine Ama-Zulu society
+up to the nineteenth century with a view to understanding the role of the
+leader in relationship to the development of society as a whole.
+
+Shaka was born about the year 1787, and the impressive achievements
+attributed to him in his forty-year life span can only be briefly enumerated
+here. By 1816, he was head of a small Ama-Ngoni clan, the Ama-Zulu.
+Within a few years, he had reorganized it militarily—both in terms of
+weapons and the tactics and strategy of war—so that the Ama-Zulu clan
+became a feared fighting force. Through warfare and political maneuvering,
+he united and commanded the Ama-Ngoni who had previously been divided
+into dozens of independent or semi-independent clans. At one point, it
+seemed as though Shaka was about to unite under one rule the whole of the
+region that is now Natal, Lesotho, and Swaziland. That task was not
+accomplished when he met his death in 1828, nor were his successors able
+to maintain Shaka’s sway. But the territory belonging to the Ama-Zulu
+nation in the late nineteenth century was a hundred times greater than the
+100 square miles of the original patrimony of the Ama-Zulu clan as
+inherited by Shaka in 1816. It was a diminished and less powerful AmaZulu that was still capable in 1876 of inflicting upon the British one of the
+most crushing defeats in their history of overseas adventuring—at the battle
+of Isandhlwana.
+Shaka grew up at a time when the questions of unity and of effective
+armies were being posed seriously for the first time among the Ama-Ngoni.
+Previously, the clans (which generally coincided with chiefdoms) displayed
+a tendency to segment or break into smaller and smaller units. As the eldest
+son of a clan head grew to adulthood, he went off to settle his own kraal;
+and a new junior clan was born, for his father’s clan remained senior and its
+headship passed to the eldest son of the “great wife.” That pattern of
+segmentation was possible so long as population density was low and land
+was plentiful for farming and grazing. Under those circumstances, there was
+little competition for resources or political power; and wars were hardly any
+more dangerous than a game of football in Latin America. Usually a clan
+had traditional rivalry with another given clan. They knew each other well,
+and their champions fought in a spirit of festivity. One or two might have
+been killed, but then everyone went home until the rematch.
+Early in the nineteenth century, the casual tempo of Ama-Zulu life and
+politics had changed considerably. A greater population meant less and less
+room for junior members to “hive off” on their own. It meant less grazing
+land for cattle, and disputes over cattle and land. As the Ama-Zulu began to
+
+fight more frequently, so they began to feel the necessity to fight more
+effectively. At the same time, senior clan heads began to recognize the need
+for a political structure to insure unity, the maximization of resources and
+the minimization of internecine conflict.
+Shaka addressed himself to both the military and the political problems
+of Zululand, which he saw as two sides of the same coin. He thought that
+the centralizing political nucleus should achieve military superiority and
+demonstrate it to other sectors. That would generally lead to peaceful
+acceptance of the greater political state, or else the dissidents would be
+thoroughly crushed.
+The era of conflict and warfare in Zululand in the early nineteenth
+century brought troops face to face much more often, but the pattern of
+military encounter still remained that of the long-distance hurling of light
+umkhonto, or spears. For close fighting, a weapon grasped in the hands is
+much more damaging—as feudal armies discovered in Europe and Asia and
+therefore resorted to sword and pike. Shaka, while serving as a young
+soldier, came up with the solution of devising a heavy short assegai, which
+was used purely for stabbing rather than throwing. In addition, he discarded
+the loose sandals so as to achieve more speed in closing with the enemy and
+more dexterity at close quarters. Through experience, Shaka and his fellow
+youths then discovered the specific techniques of using their shields and
+assegais to best effect.
+Of course, warfare comprises not just the encounter of individual
+soldiers, but (more importantly) a pattern of tactics and strategy in
+relationship to the opposing forces taken as a whole. This aspect of war also
+attracted Shaka’s attention, and his outstanding innovation came in the form
+of izimpi (regiments) deployed so as to allow for a reserve behind the
+fighting vanguard and for two wings or “horns” capable of encircling the
+enemy’s flanks. Finally (and most importantly), an army has to be trained,
+disciplined, and organized so that it is a meaningful unit in peace and in
+war. Shaka created new regiments to include men up to forty years of age.
+He kept his izimpi on constant exercises and “fatigues,” so that the
+individual soldier was fit and proficient, while the army as a whole
+synchronized in accordance with the wishes of its commanders.
+The Zulu army was more than a fighting force. It was an educational
+institution for the young, and an instrument for building loyalties that cut
+
+across clans and could be considered as national. Promotion came through
+merit, and not through clan or regional origin. The enforced use of the Zulu
+branch of the family of Ngoni languages also worked in the direction of
+national consciousness. Over an area of twelve thousand square miles,
+citizens came to call themselves Ama-Zulu, and to relegate their clan names
+to second place. Over a much larger area still, Zulu influence was
+profoundly felt. Policies such as curbing the excesses of witchcraft diviners
+(izanusi) and the fact that Zululand became free of internal struggles led to
+an influx of population from outside its boundaries—a positive contribution
+to the resources of the Zulu state.
+European travelers who have left written accounts of Zululand in
+Shaka’s time were impressed by the cleanliness (as they were in Benin in
+the fifteenth century) and they were equally struck by the social order,
+absence of theft, sense of security (just as were the Arabs who traveled in
+the Western Sudan during its period of imperial greatness). In actual fact,
+both the cleanliness and the security of life and property were part of Zulu
+life from long before, and under Shaka what was impressive was the scale
+on which these things extended, owing to the protective umbrella of the
+state. The people being impressed were Europeans; and European evidence
+is the best evidence in that it can scarcely be said to have been pro-African
+propaganda. One white visitor who saw a march-past of fifteen of Shaka’s
+regiments wrote that “it was a most exciting scene, surprising to us, who
+could not have imagined that a nation termed ‘savages’ could be so
+disciplined and kept in order.”
+A great deal more could be added concerning Ama-Zulu political
+institutions and its army. But what is relevant here is to understand why a
+Shaka was possible in Africa in the nineteenth century, before the coming
+of colonial rule.
+Had Shaka been a slave to some cotton planter in Mississippi or some
+sugar planter in Jamaica, he might have had an ear or a hand chopped off
+for being a “recalcitrant nigger,” or at best he might have distinguished
+himself in leading a slave revolt. For the only great men among the unfree
+and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor. On a
+slave plantation, Shaka would not have built a Zulu army and a Zulu state—
+that much is certain. Nor could any African build anything during the
+colonial period, however much a genius he may have been. As it was,
+
+Shaka was a herdsman and a warrior. As a youth, he tended cattle on the
+open plains—free to develop his own potential and apply it to his
+environment.
+Shaka was able to invest his talents and creative energies in a worthwhile
+endeavor of construction. He was not concerned with fighting for or against
+slave traders; he was not concerned with the problem of how to resell goods
+made in Sweden and France. He was concerned with how to develop the
+Zulu area within the limits imposed by his people’s resources.
+It must be recognized that things such as military techniques were
+responses to real needs, that the work of the individual originates in and is
+backed by the action of society as a whole, and that whatever was achieved
+by any one leader must have been bounded by historical circumstances and
+the level of development, which determine the extent to which an individual
+can first discover, then augment, and then display his potential.
+To substantiate the above points, it can be noted that Shaka was
+challenged to create the heavy stabbing assegai when he realized that the
+throwing spear broke when used as a stabbing weapon. More important
+still, what Shaka came up with depended upon the collective effort of the
+Ama-Zulu. Shaka could ask that a better assegai be forged, because the
+Ama-Ngoni had been working iron for a long time, and specialist blacksmiths had arisen within certain clans. It was a tribute to the organizational
+and agricultural capacity of the society as a whole that it could feed and
+maintain a standing army of thirty thousand men, re-equip them with iron
+weapons, and issue each soldier with the full-length Zulu shield made from
+cattle hide.
+Because the scientific basis and experimental preconditions were lacking
+in Zulu society, Shaka could not have devised a firearm—no matter how
+much genius he possessed. But, he could get his people to forge better
+weapons, as explained above; and he found them receptive to better
+selective breeding practices when he set up special royal herds, because the
+people already had a vast fund of empirical knowledge about cattle and a
+love of the cattle-herding profession.
+In the politico-military sphere, Shaka was following in the footsteps of
+his original protector, Dingizwayo, and to some extent in the footsteps of
+Zwide, who was a rival to both Dingizwayo and Shaka. Dingizwayo opened
+up trade with the Portuguese at Delagoa Bay in 1797 (mainly in ivory), and
+
+he stimulated arts and crafts. His most distinguished innovation was in the
+army, when he instituted a system of recruiting regiments according to agegrades. Previously, each locality tended to dominate within a given
+regiment; and, in any event, people were accustomed to fighting side by
+side with members of their own kraal, locality, and clan. However, when all
+men in a given age-grade were brought into the same regiment, this
+emphasized a greater national feeling and also increased Dingizwayo’s
+power vis-à-vis the smaller clan heads.
+Dingizwayo was head of the important Ama-Mthethwa clan, and he
+succeeded in establishing his paramountcy in what later became the
+southern portion of Zululand. In the north, Zwide of the Ama-Ndwandwe
+was also engaging in political consolidation. Shaka served in one of the
+junior age-grade regiments of Dingizwayo, and remained faithful to the
+latter’s centralizing power, until Dingizwayo met his death at the hands of
+Zwide in 1818. Thereafter, Shaka took up many of the military and political
+techniques of Dingizwayo and greatly improved them. That is development.
+It is a matter of building upon what is inherited and advancing slowly,
+provided that no one comes to “civilize” you.
+The regions of Yorubaland, Dahomey, the interlacustrine kingdoms, and
+Zululand, which have so far been discussed, are examples of leading forces
+in the political development which was taking place in Africa right up to the
+eve of colonization. They were not the only leading forces, and even where
+the states were territorially much smaller, there were observable advances in
+political organization.
+Areas of Africa that were most advanced by the fifteenth century
+generally maintained their standards, with few exceptions such as Kongo. In
+North Africa and Ethiopia, for example, feudal structures remained intact,
+though there was a noticeable lack of continued growth. In the Western
+Sudan, the Hausa states were heirs to the political and commercial tradition
+of the great empires after the fall of Songhai in the seventeenth century; and
+early in the nineteenth century there arose the Islamic Caliphate of Sokoto
+with its center in Hausaland. The Sokoto empire was one of the largest
+political units ever established on the African continent, and it suffered
+from many internal schisms through lack of adequate mechanisms for
+integrating so vast a territory. Experiments to deal with the problem of unity
+
+were continued in the Western Sudan, with Islam as the hoped-for unifying
+factor. An Islamic theocratic state was established across the Niger bend by
+Ahmadu Ahmadu in the middle of the nineteenth century, while another
+was created by Al Haj Omar on the upper Niger. Most outstanding of all
+was the Mandinga state carved out under the leadership of Samori Toure by
+the 1880s. Samori Toure was not scholarly like the renowned Uthman dan
+Fodio and Al Haj Omar, who before him had been creators of Islamic
+states; but Samori Toure was a military genius and a political innovator,
+who went further than the others in setting up a political administration
+where a sense of loyalty could prevail over the above clans, localities, and
+ethnic groups.
+Zimbabwe, too, progressed, with only slight interference from
+Europeans. Locally, the center of power shifted from Mutapa to
+Changamire; and eventually in the nineteenth century Nguni groups (fleeing
+from the power of the Zulu) overran Zimbabwe. So long as the Nguni were
+warrior bands on the march, they obviously proved destructive; but by the
+middle of the nineteenth century the Nguni had already spread their own
+state-building techniques to Mozambique and to what is now Southern
+Rhodesia, and had joined with the local population to establish new and
+larger kingdoms—infused with a sense of nationality, as was the case in
+Zululand.
+Meanwhile, across vast areas of Central Africa, striking political change
+was also taking place. Up to the fifteenth century, the level of social
+organization was low in the area between Kongo and Zimbabwe. Precisely
+in that area, there arose the group of states known as the Luba-Lunda
+complex. Their political structures rather than their territorial size made
+them significant; and their achievements were registered in the face of
+constantly encroaching slaving activities.
+On the large island of Madagascar, the several small states of an earlier
+epoch had by the late eighteenth century given way to the powerful feudal
+Merina kingdom. More often than not, Madagascar is ignored in general
+assessments of the African continent, although (both in the physical and the
+cultural sense) Africa is writ large on the Malagasy people. They, too,
+suffered from loss of population through slave exports; but the Merina
+kingdom did better than most slaving states, because more intensive
+cultivation of high-yielding swamp rice and the breeding of cattle offset the
+
+loss of labor. This situation should serve as a reminder that development
+accompanied by slave trading must not be superficially and illogically
+attributed to the export of the population and the dislocation attendant upon
+slave raiding. The bases of the political development of the Merina
+kingdom and of all others (whether or not engaged in slaving) lay in their
+own environment—in the material resources, human resources, technology,
+and social relations. So long as any African society could at least maintain
+its inherited advantages springing from many centuries of evolutionary
+change, then for so long could the superstructure continue to expand and
+give further opportunities to whole groups of people, to classes, and to
+individuals.
+At the beginning of this section, attention was drawn to the necessity for
+reconciling a recognition of African development up to 1885 with an
+awareness of the losses simultaneously incurred by the continent in that
+epoch, due to the nature of the contact with capitalist Europe. That issue
+must also be explicitly alluded to at this point. It is clearly ridiculous to
+assert that contacts with Europe built or benefited Africa in the pre-colonial
+period. Nor does it represent reality to suggest (as President Leopold
+Senghor once did) that the slave trade swept Africa like a bush fire, leaving
+nothing standing. The truth is that a developing Africa went into slave
+trading and European commercial relations as into a gale-force wind, which
+shipwrecked a few societies, set many others off course, and generally
+slowed down the rate of advance. However, (pursuing the metaphor further)
+it must be noted that African captains were still making decisions before
+1885, though already forces were at work which caused European
+capitalists to insist on, and succeed in taking over, command.
+The Coming of Imperialism and Colonialism
+In the centuries before colonial rule, Europe increased its economic
+capacity by leaps and bounds, while Africa appeared to have been almost
+static. Africa in the late nineteenth century could still be described as part
+communal and part feudal, although Western Europe had moved completely
+from feudalism to capitalism. To elucidate the main thesis of this study, it is
+necessary to follow not only the development of Europe and the
+
+underdevelopment of Africa, but also to understand how those two
+combined in a single system—that of capitalist imperialism.
+The European economy was producing far more goods by making use of
+their own resources and labor, as well as the resources and labor of the rest
+of the world. There were many qualitative changes in the European
+economy, which accompanied and made possible the increase in the
+quantity of goods. For example, machines and factories rather than land
+provided the main source of wealth; and labor had long since ceased to be
+organized on a restricted family basis. The peasantry had been brutally
+destroyed and the labor of men, women, and children was ruthlessly
+exploited. Those were the great social evils of the capitalist system, which
+must not be forgotten; but, on the issue of comparative economics, the
+relevant fact is that what was a slight difference when the Portuguese sailed
+to West Africa in 1444 was a huge gap by the time that European robber
+statesmen sat down in Berlin 440 years later to decide who should steal
+which parts of Africa. It was that gap which provided both the necessity and
+the opportunity for Europe to move into the imperialist epoch, and to
+colonize and further underdevelop Africa.
+The growing technological and economic gap between Western Europe
+and Africa was part of the trend within capitalism to concentrate or polarize
+wealth and poverty at two opposite extremes.
+Inside Western Europe itself, some nations grew rich at the expense of
+others. Britain, France, and Germany were the most prosperous nations.
+Poverty prevailed in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and southern Italy. Inside the
+British, French, and German economies, the polarization of wealth was
+between the capitalists on the one hand and the workers and a few peasants
+on the other. The big capitalists got bigger and the little ones were
+eliminated. In many important fields, such as iron and steel manufacture,
+textiles, and particularly banking, it was noticeable that two or three firms
+monopolized most of the business. The banks were also in a commanding
+position within the economy as a whole, providing capital to the big
+monopoly industrial firms.
+European monopoly firms operated by constantly fighting to gain control
+over raw materials, markets, and means of communications. They also
+fought to be the first to invest in new profitable undertakings related to their
+line of business—whether it be inside or outside their countries. Indeed,
+
+after the scope for expansion became limited inside their national
+economies, their main attention was turned to those countries whose
+economies were less developed and who would therefore offer little or no
+opposition to the penetration of foreign capitalism. That penetration of
+foreign capitalism on a world-wide scale from the late nineteenth century
+onwards is what we call “imperialism.”
+Imperialism meant capitalist expansion. It meant that European (and
+North American and Japanese) capitalists were forced by the internal logic
+of their competitive system to seek abroad in less developed countries
+opportunities to control raw material supplies, to find markets, and to find
+profitable fields of investment. The centuries of trade with Africa
+contributed greatly to that state of affairs where European capitalists were
+faced with the necessity to expand in a big way outside their national
+economies.
+There were certain areas of Africa in which European investment was
+meant to get immediate superprofits. The mines of South Africa, the loans
+to North African governments, and the building of the Suez Canal also
+insured the greater profitability of European investment in and trade with
+India. However, Africa’s greatest value to Europe at the beginning of the
+imperialist era was as a source of raw materials such as palm products,
+groundnuts, cotton, and rubber. The need for those materials arose out of
+Europe’s expanded economic capacity, its new and larger machines, and its
+increasing wage-earning population in towns. All of those things had
+developed over the previous four centuries; and again it needs to be
+repeated that one of the important factors in that process was the unequal
+trade with Africa.
+Imperialism is essentially an economic phenomenon, and it does not
+necessarily lead to direct political control or colonization. However, Africa
+was the victim of colonization. In the period of the notorious “Scramble for
+Africa,” Europeans made a grab for whatever they thought spelled profits in
+Africa, and they even consciously acquired many areas not for immediate
+exploitation but with an eye to the future. Each European nation that had
+these short-term and long-term economic interests ran up its own flag in
+different parts of Africa and established colonial rule. The gap that had
+arisen during the period of pre-colonial trade gave Europe the power to
+impose political domination on Africa.
+
+Pre-colonial trade in slaves, ivory, gold, and other things was conducted
+from the coasts of Africa. On the coasts, European ships could dominate the
+scene, and if necessary forts could be built. Before the nineteenth century,
+Europe was incapable of penetrating the African continent, because the
+balance of force at their disposal was inadequate. But the same
+technological changes which created the need to penetrate Africa also
+created the power to conquer Africa. The firearms of the imperialist epoch
+marked a qualitative leap forward. Breech-loading rifles and machine guns
+were a far cry from the smooth-bored muzzle loaders and flintlocks of the
+previous era. European imperialists in Africa boasted that what counted was
+the fact that they had the Maxim machine gun and Africans did not.
+Curiously, Europeans often derived the moral justification for
+imperialism and colonialism from features of the international trade as
+conducted up to the eve of colonial rule in Africa. The British were the
+chief spokesmen for the view that the desire to colonize was largely based
+on their good intentions in wanting to put a stop to the slave trade. True
+enough, the British in the nineteenth century were as opposed to slave
+trading as they were once in favor of it. Many changes inside Britain had
+transformed the seventeenth-century necessity for slaves into the
+nineteenth-century necessity to clear the remnants of slaving from Africa so
+as to organize the local exploitation of land and labor. Therefore, slaving
+was rejected in so far as it had become a fetter on further capitalist
+development; and it was particularly true of East Africa, where Arab
+slaving persisted until late in the nineteenth century. The British took
+special self-righteous delight in putting an end to Arab slave trading, and in
+deposing rulers on the grounds that they were slave traders. However, in
+those very years, the British were crushing political leaders in Nigeria, like
+Jaja and Nana, who had by then ceased the export of slaves, and were
+concentrating instead on products like palm oil and rubber. Similarly, the
+Germans in East Africa made a pretense of being most opposed to rulers
+like Bushiri who were engaged in slave trading, but the Germans were
+equally hostile to African rulers with little interest in slaving. The common
+factor underlying the overthrow of African rulers in East, West, Central,
+North, and South Africa was that they stood in the way of Europe’s imperial
+needs. It was the only factor that mattered, with anti-slaving sentiments
+being at best superfluous and at worst calculated hypocrisy.
+
+King Leopold II of Belgium also used the anti-slavery excuse to
+introduce into Congo forced labor and modern slavery. Besides, all
+Europeans had derived ideas of racial and cultural superiority between the
+fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, while engaged in genocide and the
+enslavement of non-white peoples. Even Portugal, an impoverished and
+backward European nation in the imperialist era, could still presume that it
+had a destiny to civilize the natives in Africa!
+There is a curious interpretation of the Scramble and African partition
+which virtually amounts to saying that colonialism came about because of
+Africa’s needs rather than those of Europe. Africa, they say, required
+European colonization if it were to advance beyond the stage it had reached
+in the late nineteenth century. Clearly, they do not appreciate that such a line
+of reasoning was suggesting that Africa would develop if it were given
+bigger doses of the European concoction that had already started its
+underdevelopment—that it would develop if it lost the last remnants of its
+freedom of choice, which had clearly been seriously undermined by the precolonial trade—that it would develop if its economy became more
+integrated with Europe’s on terms that were entirely dictated by Europe.
+Those implications and their fallacies would be plain to anyone who tries to
+understand the development process before making pronouncements on any
+particular epoch of human development in Africa.
+Throughout the fourteenth century, African rulers were displaying great
+initiative in pursuit of the broadest forms of cultural contact with Europe. In
+the case of West Africa, that meant seeking substitutes for trade in slaves.
+Dahomey, one of the most embroiled in slave trading, was among those
+states that used many of the last years of its independence to find a healthy
+basis for cultural exchange with Europeans.
+In 1850, the reigning Dahomean king, Gezo, proclaimed an edict
+whereby all young oil palms were to be freed from parasites surrounding
+them, and severe penalties were to be imposed for cutting palm trees. Gezo,
+who ruled from 1818 to 1857, was a reformer, and he made sincere efforts
+to meet criticisms of his policies by groups such as missionaries and antislavery campaigners; but it soon became clear that Europeans were not bent
+on seeing Dahomey re-emerge as a strong state, but were rather creating
+excuses and the subjective conditions to justify their proposed colonization
+of the people of Dahomey. Under those circumstances, the last Dahomean
+
+monarch, Glele, fell back on his capital at Abomey, and pursued the policies
+which he considered most consistent with the dignity and independence of
+Dahomey. Glele raided Abeokuta, which contained converts who were
+already “British protected persons”; he told the French to get the hell out of
+Porto-Novo; and he generally resisted until defeated militarily by the
+French in 1889.
+African groups who had little or nothing to do with slave exports also
+intensified their efforts to integrate into a wider world in the nineteenth
+century. Gungunhana, the Nguni ruler of Gaza in Mozambique, asked for a
+Swiss missionary doctor and maintained him at his court for several years
+until the Portuguese conquered his kingdom in 1895. After the Portuguese
+imposed colonial rule, it was a long time before Africans saw another
+doctor!
+It is particularly instructive to turn to the example of Egypt under
+Mohammed Ali, who ruled from 1805 to 1849. Capitalist Europe had left
+feudal North Africa behind over the course of the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries. Mohammed Ali was aware of that, and consciously
+aimed at catching up with Europe. He instituted a series of reforms, the
+most important of which were of an economic nature. Egypt grew and
+manufactured its own cotton, and it made glass, paper, and other industrial
+goods. Egypt was not to be used as a dumping ground for European goods
+which would undermine local industry, so that protective tariff walls were
+set up around Egypt’s “infant industries.” That did not mean that Egypt
+became isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, Mohammed Ali
+borrowed experts from Europe, and he increased Egypt’s foreign trade.
+The ideals of Mohammed Ali could be related in the idiom of modern
+social science as being the creation of a viable, self-propelling economy to
+provide the basis for national independence. Such ideals were diametrically
+opposed to the needs of European capitalism. British and French
+industrialists wanted to see Egypt not as a textile manufacturer but as a
+producer of raw cotton for export, and an importer of European
+manufactures. European financiers wanted Egypt to be a source of
+investment, and in the second half of the eighteenth century they turned the
+sultan of Egypt into an international beggar, who mortgaged the whole of
+Egypt to international monopoly financiers. Finally, European statesmen
+wanted Egyptian soil to serve as a base for exploiting India and Arabia.
+
+Therefore, the Suez Canal was dug out of Egyptian soil by Egyptians, but it
+was owned by Britain and France, who then extended political domination
+over Egypt and Sudan.
+Education is undeniably one of the facets of European life which had
+grown most appreciably during the capitalist epoch. Through education and
+extensive use of the written word, Europeans were in a position to pass on
+to the others the scientific principles of the material world which they had
+discovered, as well as a body of varied philosophical reflections on man and
+society. Africans were quick to appreciate advantages deriving from a
+literate education. In Madagascar, the Merina kingdom did a great deal to
+sponsor reading and writing. They used their own language and an Arabic
+script, and they welcomed the aid of European missionaries. That conscious
+borrowing from all relevant sources was only possible when they had the
+freedom to choose. Colonization, far from springing from Malagasy needs,
+actually erected a barrier to the attainment of the “modernization” initiated
+by the Merina kings in the 1860s and 1870s. A similar example can be
+found in the history of Tunisia before the ax of partition fell.
+In many parts of the world, capitalism in its imperialist form accepted
+that some measure of political sovereignty should be left in the hands of the
+local population. This was so in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and to a
+more limited extent in China. However, European capitalists came to the
+decision that Africa should be directly colonized. There is evidence to
+suggest that such a course of action was not entirely planned. Britain and
+France up to the 1850s and 1860s would have preferred to divide Africa
+into informal “spheres of influence.” That means that there would have
+been a gentlemen’s agreement that (say) Nigeria would be exploited by the
+British merchants while Senegal would be exploited by Frenchmen. At the
+same time both Englishmen and Frenchmen would trade in a minor way in
+each other’s informal empire. But, firstly, there was disagreement over who
+should suck which pieces of Africa (especially since Germany wanted to
+join the grabbing); and, secondly, the moment that one European power
+declared an area of Africa as a protectorate or a colony, it put up tariffs
+against European traders of other nationalities, and in turn forced their
+rivals to have colonies and discriminatory tariffs. One thing led to another,
+and soon six European capitalist nations were falling over each other to
+establish direct political rule over particular sections of Africa. Make no
+
+mistake about it, gentlemen like Carl Peters, Livingstone, Stanley, Harry
+Johnston, De Brazza, General Gordon, and their masters in Europe were
+literally scrambling for Africa. They barely avoided a major military
+conflagration.
+In addition to the factors that caused the chain reaction of the Scramble
+as described above, Europeans were also racially motivated to seek political
+domination over Africa. The nineteenth century was one in which white
+racism was most violently and openly expressed in capitalist societies, with
+the U.S.A. as a focal point, and with Britain taking the lead among the
+Western European capitalist nations. Britain accepted granting dominion
+status to its old colonies of white settlers in Canada, Australia, and New
+Zealand; but it withdrew self-government from the West Indies when the
+white planters were ousted from the legislative assemblies by black (or
+brown) people. As far as Africa is concerned, Englishmen violently
+opposed black self-government such as the Fante Confederation on the
+Gold Coast in the 1860s. They also tried to erode the authority of black
+Creoles in Sierra Leone. In 1874, when Fourah Bay College sought and
+obtained affiliation with Durham University, the Times newspaper declared
+that Durham should next affiliate with the London Zoo! Pervasive and
+vicious racism was present in imperialism as a variant independent of the
+economic rationality that initially gave birth to racism. It was economics
+that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the
+continent’s raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the
+decision that the form of control should be direct colonial rule.
+Africans everywhere fought against alien political rule, and had to be
+subdued by superior force. But a sizable minority did insist that their trade
+connections with Europe should remain unbroken, for that was a measure of
+the extent to which they were already dependent on Europe. The most
+dramatic illustration of that dependence was the determination with which
+some Africans fought the end of the European slave trade.
+For most European capitalist states, the enslavement of Africans had
+served its purpose by the middle of the nineteenth century; but for those
+Africans who dealt in captives the abrupt termination of the trade at any
+given point was a crisis of the greatest magnitude. In many areas, major
+social changes had taken place to bring the particular regions effectively
+into the service of the European slave trade—one of the most significant
+
+being the rise of “domestic slavery” and various forms of class and caste
+subjugation. African rulers and traders who found their social existence
+threatened by the earliest legal edicts such as the 1807 British act against
+the trade in slaves found ways of making contact with Europeans who still
+wanted slaves.
+In sub-Saharan Africa and especially in West Africa, the export of slaves
+declined most rapidly where Europeans were prepared to buy other
+commodities. As soon as inhabitants of any region found that they had a
+product which Europeans were accepting in place of the former slave trade,
+those inhabitants put tremendous effort into organizing the alternatives:
+namely, ivory, rubber, palm products, groundnuts. Once more, those efforts
+demonstrated the determination of a small but decisive proportion of
+Africans. It was a determination based on the desire to obtain European
+trade goods, many of which had ceased to be mere curiosities or luxuries,
+and were regarded instead as necessities.
+The first four centuries of Afro-European trade in a very real sense
+represent the roots of African underdevelopment. Colonialism flourished
+rapidly from a European viewpoint, because several of its features were
+already rooted in Africa in the preceding period. One of the most decisive
+features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as
+economic, political, and cultural agents of the European colonialists. Those
+agents, or “compradors,” were already serving European interests in the
+pre-colonial period. The impact of trade with Europe had reduced many
+African rulers to the status of middlemen for European trade; it had raised
+ordinary Africans to that same middleman commercial role; and it had
+created a new trading group of mixed blood—the children of European or
+Arab fathers. Those types can all be referred to as “compradors,” and they
+played a key role in extending European activity from the coast into the
+hinterland, as soon as Europeans thought of taking over political power.
+One outstanding example of the above is the way that the French
+colonialists used Africans and mulattos on the Senegalese coast as agents
+for the spread of French control for thousands of miles into areas now
+covered by Senegal, Mali, Chad, Upper Volta, and Niger. Those particular
+blacks and mulattos were living in the trading ports of Gorée, Dakar, St.
+Louis, and Rufisque; and they had had long-standing links with Atlantic
+trade.
+
+Africans conducting trade on behalf of Europeans were not merely
+commercial agents, but also cultural agents, since inevitably they were
+heavily influenced by European thought and values. The search for
+European education began in Africa before the colonial period. Coastal
+rulers and traders recognized the necessity to penetrate more deeply into the
+way of life of the white man who came across the sea. The mulatto sons of
+white traders and the sons of African rulers were the ones who made the
+greatest effort to learn the white man’s ways. This helped them to conduct
+business more efficiently. One Sierra Leone ruler in the eighteenth century
+explained that he wished “to learn book to be rogue as good as white man”;
+and there were many others who saw the practical advantages of literacy.
+However, the educational process also meant imbibing values which led to
+further African subjugation. One West African educated in this early period
+wrote a Ph.D. thesis in Latin justifying slavery. That was not surprising. The
+Reverend Thomas Thompson was the first European educator on the Gold
+Coast, and he wrote in 1778 a pamphlet entitled, The African Trade for
+Negro Slaves Shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and
+the Laws of Revealed Religion.
+One of the most striking features of nineteenth-century West African
+history is the manner in which Africans returned from slavery under
+European masters and helped in the establishment of colonial rule. This was
+especially true of Africans who returned from the West Indies and North
+America to Sierra Leone or who were released from slave ships and landed
+in Sierra Leone. To a lesser extent, it also applied to Africans who were
+once in Brazil. Such individuals had assimilated capitalist values, and like
+most European missionaries, promoted the kinds of activity that went along
+with colonial rule. In a rather different context, it can be argued that the
+Arabs of Zanzibar and the East African coast were also transformed into
+agents of European colonialism. At first, they resisted because European
+colonialism affected their own expansionist ambitions on the East African
+mainland, but they soon came to an arrangement which gave Europeans the
+ultimate powers. The Europeans reduced the small Arab clique into political
+and economic instruments of imperialism.
+European superiority over the Arabs in East and North Africa and in the
+Middle East demonstrates conclusively that modern imperialism is
+inseparable from capitalism, and underlines the role of slavery in the
+
+context of capitalism. The Arabs had acquired Africans as slaves for
+centuries, but they were exploited in a feudal context. African slaves in
+Arab hands became domestics, soldiers, and agricultural serfs. Whatever
+surplus they produced was not for reinvestment and multiplication of
+capital, as in the West Indian or North American slave systems but for
+consumption by the feudal elite. Indeed, slaves were often maintained more
+for social prestige than for economic benefit.
+The major exceptions to that rule were nineteenth-century Zanzibar and
+Egypt under Mohammed Ali. In both those instances, African labor was
+being exploited to produce profit on a plantation basis; and this may also
+have applied to date-palm production in Arabia. But, Europe had already
+been exploiting African labor to maximize surplus for three centuries
+previously, and the contribution which the plantation system made to the
+European capitalist development was so great that Western Europe in the
+nineteenth century had engulfed the lesser exploitation of Zanzibar and
+Arabia, and it secured a firm grasp on Egypt’s economy after the death of
+Mohammed Ali in 1849. In other words, the cloves, cotton, and dates
+produced in Zanzibar, Egypt, and Arabia, respectively, previous to
+colonization were already going to strengthen European trade and
+production. Eventually, it was no problem for the capitalist slave traders of
+Europe to extend political domination over the feudalist Arab slave traders
+and to use the latter as agents of colonialism in East Africa.
+Returning to the question of indigenous African agents of European
+colonial rule in Africa, it should be recognized that Europeans recruited
+Africans to serve in the armies that actually conquered Africa in the bloody
+period from the 1880s through the First World War started by Europeans in
+1914. It is a widespread characteristic of colonialism to find agents of
+repression from among the colonial victims themselves. Yet, without the
+previous centuries of trade between Africa and Europe, it would have been
+impossible for Europeans to have so easily recruited the askaris, porters,
+and others, who made their colonial conquest possible.
+African residents of the Senegalese ports already referred to were the
+ones who were put in French army uniform and fought to establish French
+rule in the interior and other parts of the coast such as Dahomey. When the
+British defeated Asante in 1874, they had in their forces African troops
+from the coastal towns around the Gold Coast forts. Those Africans had
+
+been in contact with Europeans for so long that from the seventeenth
+century they identified themselves as “Dutch,” “Danish,” or “English,”
+depending upon whose fort gave them employment. They had fought battles
+for one European nation against another, and by the late nineteenth century
+it was an easy matter to get them to fight against fellow Africans on behalf
+of the conquering colonial power of Britain.
+In the Portuguese territories, the origins of the black colonial police and
+army also went back into the “pre-colonial” trade period. Around the forts
+of Luanda and Benguela in Angola and Lourenco Marques and Beira in
+Mozambique, there grew up communities of Africans, mulattos, and even
+Indians who helped “pacify” large areas for the Portuguese after the Berlin
+Conference. Traders in Mozambique and in the rest of East, West, and
+Central Africa who had experience with Europeans previous to colonialism
+were the ones to provide porters to carry the heavy machine guns, cannons,
+and the support equipment; they were the ones who provided the would-be
+European colonialist with the information and military intelligence that
+facilitated conquest; and they were the interpreters who were the voice of
+the Europeans on African soil.
+Of course, it is true that many Africans who had little or nothing to do
+with pre-colonial trade also allied themselves with European newcomers. In
+that respect, the gap in levels of political organization between Europe and
+Africa was very crucial. The development of political unity in the form of
+large states was proceeding steadily in Africa. But even so, at the time of
+the Berlin Conference, Africa was still a continent of a large number of
+socio-political groupings who had not arrived at a common purpose.
+Therefore, it was easy for the European intruder to play the classic game of
+divide and conquer. In that way, certain Africans became unwitting allies of
+Europe.
+Many African rulers sought a European “alliance” to deal with their own
+African neighbor, with whom they were in conflict. Few of those rulers
+appreciated the implications of their actions. They could not know that
+Europeans had come to stay permanently; they could not know that
+Europeans were out to conquer not some but all Africans. This partial and
+inadequate view of the world was itself a testimony of African
+underdevelopment relative to Europe, which in the nineteenth century was
+self-confidently seeking dominion in every part of the globe.
+
+Political divisions in Africa were no evidence of innate inferiority or
+backwardness. That was the state in which the continent then found itself—
+a point along a long road that others had traversed and along which Africa
+was moving. Commercial impact of Europe slowed down the process of
+political amalgamation and expansion, in contrast to the way trade with
+Africa strengthened Europe’s nation-states. When European capitalism took
+the form of imperialism and started to subjugate Africa politically, the
+normal political conflicts of the pre-capitalist African situation were
+transformed into weakness which allowed the Europeans to set up their
+colonial domination.
+Altogether, it is very clear that to understand the coming of colonialism
+into Africa, one has to consider the previous historical evolution of both
+Africa and Europe and in particular one has to consider ways in which their
+trade contacts influenced the two continents mutually, so that what was
+called “pre-colonial” trade proved to be a preparatory stage for the era of
+colonial rule.
+It is widely accepted that Africa was colonized because of its weakness.
+The concept of weakness should be understood to embrace military
+weakness and inadequate economic capacity, as well as certain political
+weaknesses: namely, the incompleteness of the establishment of nationstates, which left the continent divided, and the low level of consciousness
+concerning the world at large, which had already been transformed into a
+single system by the expansion of capitalist relations.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+The section of this chapter dealing with African society is a continuation of
+Chapter 2; and general books cited there are also relevant to this context.
+More African writers are involved in this recent pre-colonial period, which
+is of course one aspect of a national struggle. There are also more and better
+monographs on given areas and subjects. But, the coming of imperialism
+has not yet been seriously pursued from an African viewpoint, and there is a
+marked absence of theory linking together the numerous facts that are now
+well established about events taking place in Africa between 1500 and
+1885.
+
+J. B. WEBSTER and A. A. BOAHEN, History of West Africa; the Revolutionary Years—1815 to
+Independence. New York: Praeger, 1967.
+BASIL DAVIDSON with J. E. MHINA, History of East and Central Africa to the Late Nineteenth
+Century. New York: Doubleday Anchor Book A 677.
+These two should be added to the list of general texts which provide regional surveys over a long
+period of time. They have the advantage of being coherent interpretations and not just collected
+essays.
+WALTER RODNEY, West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Nairobi: Published for the Historical
+Association of Tanzania by the East African Publishing House, 1969.
+E. ALPERS, The East African Slave Trade.
+I. A. AKINJOGBIN, Dahomey and Its Neighbours. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
+The first two are short accounts of the impact of slave exports on the African regions concerned.
+The third is a detailed account by a Nigerian scholar of Dahomey’s involvement with Europeans.
+JACOB U. EGHAREVBA, A Short History of Benin. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1968.
+B. A. OGOT, History of the Southern Luo. Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1967.
+ISARIA KIMAMBO, A Political History of the Pare of Tanzania. New York: International Publications,
+1971.
+JAN VANSINA, Kingdoms of the Savanna. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.
+The first three are good examples of scholarship by Africans concerning historical developments
+starting before contact with Europe. They are characterized by the use of African oral traditions as a
+basis for interpretation. The fourth (by a European) was a pioneering work which drew heavily on
+oral traditions in reconstructing Central African history.
+J. ADE AJAYI, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1845–1891. New York: International Publications,
+1971.
+E. A. AYANDELE, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria. New York: Humanities Press, 1967.
+One aspect of the imperialist epoch that has been probed by African historians (and many nonAfricans) is that of the Christian missionaries, as evidenced by the above works.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+V
+Africa’s Contribution to the Capitalist Development
+of Europe—The Colonial Period
+• Expatriation of African Surplus under Colonialism • The Strengthening of
+the Technological and Military Aspects of Capitalism
+
+THE COLONIES HAVE BEEN CREATED FOR THE METROPOLE BY THE METROpole.
+—FRENCH SAYING
+Sales operations in the United States and management of the fourteen (Unilever) plants are
+directed from Lever House on New York’s fashionable Park Avenue. You look at this tall,
+striking, glass-and-steel structure and you wonder how many hours of underpaid black labour
+and how many thousands of tons of underpriced palm oil and peanuts and cocoa it cost to build
+it.
+—W. ALEHEUS HUNTON
+
+Expatriation of African Surplus under Colonialism
+Capital and African Wage Labor
+Colonial Africa fell within that part of the international capitalist economy
+from which surplus was drawn to feed the metropolitan sector. As seen
+earlier, exploitation of land and labor is essential for human social advance,
+but only on the assumption that the product is made available within the
+area where the exploitation takes place. Colonialism was not merely a
+system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate
+the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that
+amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor
+out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the
+same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped.
+By any standards, labor was cheap in Africa, and the amount of surplus
+extracted from the African laborer was great. The employer under
+colonialism paid an extremely small wage—a wage usually insufficient to
+keep the worker physically alive—and, therefore, he had to grow food to
+survive. This applied in particular to farm labor of the plantation type, to
+work in mines, and to certain forms of urban employment. At the time of
+the imposition of European colonial rule, Africans were able to gain a
+livelihood from the land. Many retained some contact with the land in the
+years ahead, and they worked away from their shambas in order to pay
+taxes or because they were forced to do so. After feudalism in Europe had
+ended, the worker had absolutely no means of sustenance other than
+through the sale of his labor to capitalists. Therefore, to some extent the
+employer was responsible for insuring the physical survival of the worker
+
+by giving him a “living wage.” In Africa, this was not the case. Europeans
+offered the lowest possible wages and relied on legislation backed by force
+to do the rest.
+There were several reasons why the African worker was more crudely
+exploited than his European counterpart in the present century. Firstly, the
+alien colonial state had a monopoly of political power, after crushing all
+opposition by superior armed force. Secondly, the African working class
+was small, very dispersed, and very unstable owing to migratory practices.
+Thirdly, while capitalism was willing to exploit all workers everywhere,
+European capitalists in Africa had additional racial justifications for dealing
+unjustly with the African worker. The racist theory that the black man was
+inferior led to the conclusion that he deserved lower wages; and
+interestingly enough, the light-skinned Arab and Berber populations of
+North Africa were treated as “blacks” by the white racist French. The
+combination of the above factors in turn made it extremely difficult for
+African workers to organize themselves. It is only the organization and
+resoluteness of the working class which protects it from the natural
+tendency of the capitalist to exploit to the utmost. That is why in all colonial
+territories, when African workers realized the necessity for trade union
+solidarity, numerous obstacles were placed in their paths by the colonial
+regimes.
+Wages paid to workers in Europe and North America were much higher
+than wages paid to African workers in comparable categories. The Nigerian
+coal miner at Enugu earned one shilling per day for working underground
+and nine pence per day for jobs on the surface. Such a miserable wage
+would be beyond the comprehension of a Scottish or German coal miner,
+who could virtually earn in an hour what the Enugu miner was paid for a
+six-day week. The same disparity existed with port workers. The records of
+the large American shipping company, Farrell Lines, show that in 1955, of
+the total amount spent on loading and discharging cargo moving between
+Africa and America, five-sixths went to American workers and one-sixth to
+Africans. Yet, it was the same amount of cargo loaded and unloaded at both
+ends. The wages paid to the American stevedore and the European coal
+miners were still such as to insure that the capitalists made a profit. The
+point here is merely to illustrate how much greater was the rate of
+exploitation of African workers.
+
+When discrepancies such as the above were pointed out during the
+colonial period and subsequently, those who justified colonialism were
+quick to reply that the standard and cost of living was higher in capitalist
+countries. The fact is that the higher standard was made possible by the
+exploitation of colonies, and there was no justification for keeping African
+living standards so depressed in an age where better was possible and in a
+situation where a higher standard was possible because of the work output
+of Africans themselves. The kind of living standard supportable by African
+labor within the continent is readily illustrated by the salaries and the lifestyle of the whites inside Africa.
+Colonial governments discriminated against the employment of Africans
+in senior categories; and, whenever it happened that a white and a black
+filled the same post, the white man was sure to be paid considerably more.
+This was true at all levels, ranging from civil service posts to mine workers.
+African salaried workers in the British colonies of Gold Coast and Nigeria
+were better off than their brothers in many other parts of the continent, but
+they were restricted to the “junior staff” level in the civil service. In the
+period before the last world war, European civil servants in the Gold Coast
+received an average of 40 pounds per month, with quarters and other
+privileges. Africans got an average salary of 4 pounds. There were instances
+where one European in an establishment earned as much as his twenty-five
+African assistants put together. Outside the civil service, Africans obtained
+work in building projects, in mines, and as domestics—all low-paying jobs.
+It was exploitation without responsibility and without redress. In 1934,
+forty-one Africans were killed in a gold mine disaster in the Gold Coast,
+and the capitalist company offered only 3 pounds to the dependents of each
+of these men as compensation.
+Where European settlers were found in considerable numbers, the wage
+differential was readily perceived. In North Africa, the wages of Moroccans
+and Algerians were from 16 percent to 25 percent those of Europeans. In
+East Africa, the position was much worse, notably in Kenya and
+Tanganyika. A comparison with white settler earnings and standards brings
+out by sharp contrast how incredibly low African wages were. While Lord
+Delamere controlled 100,000 acres of Kenya’s land, the Kenyan had to
+carry a kipande pass in his own country to beg for a wage of 15 or 20
+shillings per month. The absolute limit of brutal exploitation was found in
+
+the southern parts of the continent; and in Southern Rhodesia, for example,
+agricultural laborers rarely received more than 15 shillings per month.
+Workers in mines got a little more if they were semi-skilled, but they also
+had more intolerable working conditions. Unskilled laborers in the mines of
+Northern Rhodesia often got as little as 7 shillings per month. A truck driver
+on the famous copper belt was in a semi-skilled grade. In one mine,
+Europeans performed that job for 30 pounds per month, while in another,
+Africans did it for 3 pounds per month.
+In all colonial territories, wages were reduced during the period of crisis
+which shook the capitalist world during the 1930s, and they were not
+restored or increased until after the last capitalist world war. In Southern
+Rhodesia in 1949, Africans employed in municipal areas were awarded
+minimum wages from 35 to 75 shillings per month. That was a considerable
+improvement over previous years, but white workers (on the job for 8 hours
+per day compared to the Africans’ 10 or 14 hours) received a minimum
+wage of 20 shillings per day plus free quarters and other benefits.
+The Rhodesians offered a miniature version of South Africa’s apartheid
+system, which oppressed the largest industrial working class on the
+continent. In the Union of South Africa, African laborers worked deep
+underground, under inhuman conditions which would not have been
+tolerated by miners in Europe. Consequently, black South African workers
+recovered gold from deposits which elsewhere would be regarded as noncommercial. And yet it is the white section of the working class which
+received whatever benefits were available in terms of wages and salaries.
+Officials have admitted that the mining companies could pay whites higher
+than miners in any other part of the world because of the superprofits made
+by paying black workers a mere pittance.*
+In the final analysis, the shareholders of the mining companies were the
+ones who benefited most of all. They remained in Europe and North
+America and collected fabulous dividends every year from the gold,
+diamonds, manganese, uranium, etc., which were brought out of the South
+African subsoil by African labor. For years, the capitalist press itself praised
+Southern Africa as an investment outlet returning superprofits on capital
+invested. From the very beginning of the Scramble for Africa, huge fortunes
+were made from gold and diamonds in Southern Africa by people like Cecil
+
+Rhodes. In the present century, both the investment and the outflow of
+surplus have increased. Investment was mainly concentrated in mining and
+finance where the profits were greatest. In the mid-1950s, British
+investments in South Africa were estimated at 860 million pounds and
+yielded a stable profit of 15 percent, or 129 million pounds every year. Most
+mining companies had returns well above that average. De Beers
+Consolidated Mines made a profit that was both phenomenal and
+consistently high—between $26 million and $29 million throughout the
+1950s.
+The complex of Southern African mining concerns operated not just in
+South Africa itself, but also in South-West Africa, Angola, Mozambique,
+Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and the Congo. Congo was
+consistently a source of immense wealth for Europe, because from the time
+of colonization until 1906, King Leopold II of Belgium made at least $20
+million from rubber and ivory. The period of mineral exploitation started
+quite early, and then gained momentum after political control passed from
+King Leopold to the Belgium state in 1908. Total foreign capital inflow into
+the Congo between 1887 and 1953 was estimated by the Belgians to have
+been 5,700 million pounds. The value of the outflow in the same period was
+said to have been 4,300 million pounds, exclusive of profits retained within
+the Congo. As was true everywhere else on the continent, the expatriation
+of surplus from Congo increased as the colonial period wore on. In the five
+years preceding independence the net outflow of capital from Congo to
+Belgium reached massive proportions. Most of the expatriation of surplus
+was handled by a major European finance monopoly, the Société Générale.
+The Société Générale had as its most important subsidiary the Union
+Minière de Haiite-Katanga, which has monopolized Congolese copper
+production since 1889 (when it was known as the Compagnie de Katanga):
+Union Minière has been known to make a profit of 27 million pounds in a
+single year.
+It is no wonder that of the total wealth produced in Congo in any given
+year during the colonial period, more than one-third went out in the form of
+profits for big business and salaries for their expatriate staffs. But the
+comparable figure for Northern Rhodesia under the British was one-half. In
+Katanga, Union Minière at least had a reputation for leaving some of the
+profits behind in the form of things like housing and maternity services for
+
+African workers. The Rhodesian Copper Belt Companies expatriated profits
+without compunction.
+It should not be forgotten that outside Southern Africa there were also
+significant mining operations during the colonial period. In North Africa,
+foreign capital exploited natural resources of phosphates, oil, lead, zinc,
+manganese, and iron ore. In Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, there were
+important workings of gold, diamonds, iron ore, and bauxite. To all that
+should be added the tin of Nigeria, the gold and manganese of Ghana, the
+gold and diamonds of Tanganyika, and the copper of Uganda and Congo
+Brazzaville. In each case, an understanding of the situation must begin with
+an inquiry into the degree of exploitation of African resources and labor,
+and then must proceed to follow the surplus to its destination outside Africa
+—into the bank accounts of the capitalists who control the majority shares
+in the huge multinational mining combines.
+The African working class produced a less spectacular surplus for export
+with regard to companies engaged in agriculture. Agricultural plantations
+were widespread in North, East, and South Africa; and they also appeared
+in West Africa to a lesser extent. Their profits depended on the incredibly
+low wages and harsh working conditions imposed on African agricultural
+laborers and on the fact that they invested very little capital in obtaining the
+land, which was robbed wholesale from Africans by colonial powers and
+then sold to whites at nominal prices. For instance, after the Kenya
+highlands had been declared “Crown Land,” the British handed over to
+Lord Delamere 100,000 acres of the best land at a cost of a penny per acre.
+Lord Francis Scott purchased 350,000 acres, the East African Estates Ltd.
+got another 350,000 acres, and the East African Syndicate took 100,000
+acres adjoining Lord Delamere’s estate—all at giveaway prices. Needless to
+say, such plantations made huge profits, even if the rate was lower than in a
+South African gold mine or an Angolan diamond mine.
+During the colonial era, Liberia was supposedly independent; but to all
+intents and purposes, it was a colony of the U.S.A. In 1926, the Firestone
+Rubber Company of the U.S.A. was able to acquire one million acres of
+forest land in Liberia at a cost of 6 cents per acre and 1 percent of the value
+of the exported rubber. Because of the demand for and the strategic
+importance of rubber, Firestone’s profits from Liberia’s land and labor
+carried them to 25th position among the giant companies of the U.S.A.
+
+European Trading Companies versus the African Peasant
+So far, this section has been dealing with that part of the surplus produced
+by African wage earners in mines and plantations. But the African working
+class under colonialism was extremely small and the vast majority of
+Africans engaged in the colonial money economy were independent
+peasants. How then can it be said that these self-employed peasants were
+contributing to the expatriation of African surplus? Apologists for
+colonialism argue that it was a positive benefit for such farmers to have
+been given the opportunity to create surplus by growing or collecting
+produce such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil. It is essential that this
+misrepresentation be clarified.
+A peasant growing a cash crop or collecting produce had his labor
+exploited by a long chain of individuals, starting with local businessmen.
+Sometimes, those local businessmen were Europeans. Very rarely were they
+Africans, and more usually they were a minority group brought in from
+outside and serving as intermediaries between the white colonialists and the
+exploited African peasant. In West Africa, the Lebanese and Syrians played
+this role; while in East Africa the Indians rose to this position. Arabs were
+also in the middleman category in Zanzibar and a few other places on the
+East African coast.
+Cash-crop peasants never had any capital of their own. They existed
+from one crop to another, depending on good harvests and good prices. Any
+bad harvest or fall of prices caused the peasants to borrow in order to find
+money to pay taxes and buy certain necessities. As security, they mortgaged
+their future crops to moneylenders in the middleman category. Nonpayment of debts could and did lead to their farms’ being taken away by the
+moneylenders. The rate of interest on the loans was always fantastically
+high, amounting to what is known as “usury.” In East Africa, things were so
+bad that even the British colonial government had to step in and enact a
+“Native Credit Ordinance” to protect Africans from Asian businessmen.
+However, in spite of some minor clashes between the colonialists and the
+middlemen, the two were part and parcel of the same apparatus of
+exploitation. On the whole, the Lebanese and Indians did the smaller jobs
+which Europeans could not be bothered with. They owned things such as
+cotton gins which separated the seed from the lint; while of course
+
+Europeans concentrated on the cotton mills in Europe. The middlemen also
+went out to the villages, while Europeans liked to stay in towns. In the
+villages, the Indians and Lebanese took over virtually all buying and
+selling, channeling most of the profits back to Europeans in the towns and
+those overseas.
+The share of profits which went to middlemen was insignificant in
+comparison to those profits reaped by big European business interests and
+by the European governments themselves. The capitalist institution which
+came into most direct contact with African peasants was the colonial
+trading company: that is to say, a company specializing in moving goods to
+and from the colonies. The most notorious were the French concerns,
+Compagnie Française d’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) and Société
+Commerciale Ouest Africaine (SCOA), and the British-controlled United
+Africa Company (UAC). These were responsible for expatriating a great
+proportion of Africa’s wealth produced by peasant toil.
+Several of the colonial trading companies already had African blood on
+their hands from participation in the slave trade. Thus, after French
+merchants in Bordeaux made fortunes from the European slave trade, they
+transferred that capital to the trade in groundnuts from Senegal and Gambia
+in the middle of the nineteenth century. The firms concerned continued to
+operate in the colonial period, although they changed hands and there were
+a lot of mergers. In Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali, the names of Maurel &
+Prom, Maurel Brothers, Buhan & Teyssere, Delmas & Clastre, were all well
+known. Several of them were eventually incorporated into SCOA, which
+was dominated by a consortium of French and Swiss financiers. A parallel
+process in the French port of Marseilles led to the transfer of slave-trade
+capital into direct trade between Africa and France. After the end of the
+First World War, most of the small Marseilles firms were absorbed into the
+massive CFAO, which imported into French West Africa whatever
+European goods the market would take, and exported in turn the agricultural
+produce that was largely the consequence of peasant labor. CFAO also had
+British and Dutch capital, and its activities extended into Liberia and into
+British and Belgian colonies. It is said that SCOA and CFAO made a profit
+of up to 90 percent in good years and 25 percent in bad years.
+In Britain, the notorious slave trading port of Liverpool was the first to
+switch to palm oil early in the nineteenth century when the trade in slaves
+
+became difficult or impossible. This meant that Liverpool firms were no
+longer exploiting Africa by removing its labor physically to another part of
+the world. Instead, they were exploiting the labor and raw materials of
+Africa inside Africa. Throughout the nineteenth century and right into the
+colonial era, Liverpool concentrated largely on importing African peasant
+produce. Backed by the industrial districts of Manchester and Cheshire, this
+British port was in control of a great proportion of Britain’s and Europe’s
+trade with Africa in the colonial period—just as it had done in the slave
+trade period. Glasgow also had a keen interest in the colonial trade, and so
+did the merchants and big business interests of London. By 1929, London
+replaced Liverpool as the chief port dealing with African import and export.
+As indicated, the UAC was the British company which was best known
+among the commercial concerns. It was a subsidiary of the giant AngloDutch monopoly, Unilever; and its agencies were found in all the British
+colonies of West Africa and on a smaller scale in East Africa. Unilever also
+controlled the Compagnie du Niger Français, the Compagnie Française de
+la Côte d’Ivoire, SCKN in Chad, NOSOCO in Senegal, NSCA in
+Portuguese Guinea, and John Walken & Co. Ltd. in Dahomey. Certain other
+British and French firms were not found in every colony, but they did well
+in the particular area in which they were entrenched. For example, there
+was John Holt in Nigeria.
+In East Africa, the import-export business tended to have smaller firms
+than in West Africa, but even so there were five or six which were much
+larger than the rest and appropriated the largest amounts. One of the oldest
+was Smith Mackenzie, which was an offshoot of the Scottish company of
+Mackinnon and Mackenzie which had spearheaded British colonization in
+East Africa and which also had interests in India. Other notable commercial
+firms were those of A. Baumann, Wiggles worth and Company, Dalgetty,
+Leslie & Anderson, Ralli Bros., Michael Cotts, Jos. Hansen, the African
+Mercantile and Twentsche Overseas Trading Co. Some of them
+amalgamated before colonial rule was over, and they all had several other
+subsidiaries, as well as themselves being related to bigger companies in the
+métropoles. The UAC also had a slice of the East African import trade,
+having brought up the firm of Gailey and Roberts which was started by
+white settlers in 1904.
+
+The pattern of appropriation of surplus in East Africa was easy to follow,
+in that there was centralization of the extractive mechanisms in Nairobi and
+the port of Mombasa. All the big firms operated from Nairobi, with
+important offices in Mombasa to deal with warehousing, shipping, insuring.
+Uganda and Tanganyika were then brought into the picture via their capital
+cities of Kampala and Dar es Salaam, where the big firms had branches. Up
+to the start of the last war, the volume of trade from East Africa was fairly
+small, but it jumped rapidly after that. For instance, the value of Kenya
+imports rose from 4 million pounds in 1938 to 34 million in 1950 and to 70
+million in 1960. The value of exports was of course rising at the same time,
+and the commercial firms were among the principal beneficiaries of the
+growth in foreign trade.
+Trading companies made huge fortunes on relatively small investments
+in those parts of Africa where peasant cash-crop farming was widespread.
+The companies did not have to spend a penny to grow the agricultural raw
+materials. The African peasant went in for cash-crop farming for many
+reasons. A minority eagerly took up the opportunity to continue to acquire
+European goods, which they had become accustomed to during the precolonial period. Many others in every section of the continent took to
+earning cash because they had to pay various taxes in money or because
+they were forced to work. Good examples of Africans literally being forced
+to grow cash crops by gun and whip were to be found in Tanganyika under
+German rule, in Portuguese colonies, and in French Equatorial Africa and
+the French Sudan in the 1930s.* In any event, there were very few cases
+where the peasant was wholly dependent on the cash for his actual
+sustenance. The trading companies took full advantage of that fact.
+Knowing that an African peasant and his family would keep alive by their
+own food shambas, the companies had no obligation to pay prices sufficient
+for the maintenance of a peasant and his family. In a way, the companies
+were simply receiving tribute from a conquered people, without even the
+necessity to trouble themselves as to how the tributary goods were
+produced.
+Trading companies also had their own means of transport inside Africa,
+such as motor vessels and trucks. But, usually they transferred the burden of
+transport costs on to the peasant via the Lebanese or Indian middlemen.
+
+Those capitalist companies held the African farmer in a double squeeze, by
+controlling the price paid for the crop and by controlling the price of
+imported goods such as tools, clothing, and bicycles to which peasants
+aspired. For example, prices of palm products were severely reduced by the
+UAC and other trading companies in Nigeria in 1929, while the cost of
+living was rising owing to increased charges for imported goods. In 1924,
+the price for palm oil had been 14 shillings per gallon. This fell to 7 in 1928
+and to slightly over one shilling in the following year. Although the trading
+companies received less for every ton of palm oil during the depression
+years, their profit margin increased—showing how brazenly surplus was
+being pounded out of the peasant. In the midst of the depression the UAC
+was showing a handsome profit. The profits in 1934 were 6,302,875 pounds
+and a dividend of 15 per cent was paid on ordinary shares.
+In every part of colonial Africa, the depression years followed the same
+pattern. In Sukumaland (Tanganyika) the price of cotton dropped in 1930
+from 50 cents to 10 cents per pound. The French colonies were hit a little
+later, because the depression did not make its impact on the French
+monetary zone until after 1931. Then, prices of Senegalese groundnuts were
+cut by more than half. Coffee and cocoa dropped even further, since they
+were relative luxuries to the European buyer. Again, it can be noted that
+French firms such as CFAO and SCOA faced lower prices when they sold
+the raw materials in Europe, but they never absorbed any losses. Instead,
+African peasants and workers bore the pressure, even if it meant forced
+labor. African peasants in French territories were forced to join so-called
+cooperative societies which made them grow certain crops like cotton and
+made them accept whatever price was offered.
+Hardly had the depression ended when Europe was at war. The Western
+powers dragged in the African people to fight for freedom! The trading
+firms stepped up the rate of plunder in the name of God and country. On the
+Gold Coast, they paid 10 pounds per ton for cocoa beans as compared to 50
+pounds before the war. At the same time, the price of imported goods
+doubled or trebled. Many necessities passed beyond the reach of the
+ordinary man. On the Gold Coast, a piece of cotton print which had sold
+before the war for 12½ shillings was 90 shillings in 1945. In Nigeria, a yard
+of khaki which was 3 shillings in prewar days went up to 16; a bundle of
+iron sheets formerly costing 30 went up to 100.
+
+Urban workers were hardest hit by rising prices, since they had to
+purchase everyday necessities with money, and part of their food was
+imported. Worker dissatisfaction highlighted this exploitative postwar
+situation. There were several strikes, and in the Gold Coast, the boycott of
+imported goods in 1948 is famous as the prelude to self-government under
+Nkrumah. However, peasants were also restless under low prices and
+expensive imports. In Uganda, the cotton-growing peasants could stand
+things no longer by 1947. They could not get their hands on the big British
+import-export firms, but they could at least deal with the Indian and African
+middlemen. So they marched against the Indian-owned cotton gins and
+demonstrated outside the palace of the Kabaka—the hereditary ruler who
+often functioned as a British agent in Uganda.
+To insure that at all times the profit margin was kept as high as possible,
+the trading firms found it convenient to form “pools.” The pools fixed the
+price to be paid to the African cultivator, and kept the price down to the
+minimum. In addition, the trading companies spread into several other
+aspects of the economic life of the colonies, in such a way as to introduce
+several straws for the sucking out of surplus. In Morocco, to give one
+example, the Compagnie Générale du Maroc owned large estates, livestock
+farms, timber workings, mines, fisheries, railways, ports, and power
+stations. The giants like CFAO and UAC also had their fingers in
+everything. CFAO’s interests ranged from groundnut plantations to shares
+in the Fabre & Frassinet shipping line. The people of Ghana and Nigeria
+met the UAC everywhere they turned. It controlled wholesale and retail
+trade, owned butter factories, sawmills, soap factories, singlet factories,
+cold storage plants, engineering and motor repair shops, tugs, coastal boats.
+Some of those businesses directly exploited African wage labor, while in
+one way or another all operations skimmed the cream produced by peasant
+efforts in the cash-crop sector.
+Sometimes, the firms which purchased agricultural products in Africa
+were the same concerns which manufactured goods based on those
+agricultural raw materials. For instance, Cadbury and Fry, the two foremost
+English manufacturers of cocoa and chocolate, were buyers on the West
+African coast, while in East Africa the tea manufacturing concern of Brooke
+Bond both grew and exported tea. Many of the Marseilles, Bordeaux, and
+Liverpool trading companies were also engaged in manufacturing items
+
+such as soap and margarine in their home territories. This applied fully to
+the UAC, while the powerful Lesieur group processing oils and fats in
+France had commercial buyers in Africa. However, it is possible to separate
+the trading operations from the industrial ones. The latter represented the
+final stage in the long process of exploiting the labor of African peasants—
+in some ways the most damaging stage.
+Peasants worked for large numbers of hours to produce a given cash
+crop, and the price of the product was the price of those long hours of labor.
+Since primary produce from Africa has always received low prices, it
+follows that the buyer and user of the raw material was engaging in massive
+exploitation of the peasants.
+The above generalization can be illustrated with reference to cotton,
+which is one of the most widely encountered cash crops in Africa. The
+Ugandan farmer grew cotton which ultimately made its way into an English
+factory in Lancashire or a British-owned factory in India. The Lancashire
+factory owner paid his workers as little as possible, but his exploitation of
+their labor was limited by several factors. His exploitation of the labor of
+the Ugandan peasant was unlimited because of his power in the colonial
+state, which insured that Ugandans worked long hours for very little.
+Besides, the price of the finished cotton shirt was so high that when reimported into Uganda, cotton in the form of a shirt was beyond the
+purchasing power of the peasant who grew the cotton.
+The differences between the prices of African exports of raw materials
+and their importation of manufactured goods constituted a form of unequal
+exchange. Throughout the colonial period, this inequality in exchange got
+worse. Economists refer to the process as one of deteriorating terms of
+trade. In 1939, with the same quality of primary goods colonies could buy
+only 60 percent of manufactured goods which they bought in the decade
+1870–80 before colonial rule. By 1960, the amount of European
+manufactured goods purchasable by the same quantity of African raw
+materials had fallen still further. There was no objective economic law
+which determined that primary produce should be worth so little. Indeed,
+the developed countries sold certain raw materials like timber and wheat at
+much higher prices than a colony could command. The explanation is that
+the unequal exchange was forced upon Africa by the political and military
+supremacy of the colonizers, just as in the sphere of international relations
+
+unequal treaties were forced upon small states in the dependencies, like
+those in Latin America.
+The unequal nature of the trade between the metropole and the colonies
+was emphasised by the concept of the “protected market,” which meant
+even an inefficient metropolitan producer could find a guaranteed market in
+the colony where his class had political control. Furthermore, as in the
+preceding era of pre-colonial trade, European manufacturers built up useful
+sidelines of goods which would have been substandard in their own
+markets, especially in textiles. The European farmer also gained in the same
+way by selling cheap butter, while the Scandinavian fisherman came into
+his own through the export of salted cod. Africa was not a large market for
+European products, compared to other continents, but both buying-prices
+and selling-prices were set by European capitalists. That certainly allowed
+their manufacturers and traders more easy access to the surplus of wealth
+produced in Africa than they would have had if Africans were in a position
+to raise the price of their own exports.
+Shipping and Banking Services
+Channels for the exploitation of surplus were not exhausted by the trading
+companies and the industrial concerns. The shipping companies constituted
+an exploitative channel that cannot be overlooked. The largest shipping
+companies were those under the flags of the colonizing nations, especially
+the British. The shippers were virtually a law unto themselves, being very
+favorably regarded by their home governments as earners of superprofits, as
+stimulators of industry and trade, as carriers of mail, and as contributors to
+the navy when war came. African peasants had absolutely no control over
+the freight rates which were charged, and actually paid more than citizens in
+other lands. The rate for flour from Liverpool to West Africa was 35
+shillings per ton as compared with only 7½ shillings from Liverpool to New
+York (a roughly equivalent distance). Freight rates normally varied with the
+volume of cargo carried, but the rate for cocoa was established at 50
+shillings per ton when amounts exported were small at the beginning of this
+century, and the same high figure remained when exports increased. Coffee
+carried from Kenya to New York in the 1950s earned the shippers 280
+shillings per ton ($40 at the rate of exchange then). Theoretically, it was the
+
+merchant who paid the shipper the freight charges, but in practical terms it
+meant that peasant production was bearing all the costs, since the merchants
+paid out of profits made by buying cheaply from the peasants. Alternatively,
+white settler planters paid the costs as in Kenya, and then regained their
+profits through exploitation of rural wage labor.
+Shipping companies retained a high profit margin by a practice similar to
+the “pools” of the commercial firms. They established what were known as
+“Conference Lines” which allowed two or more shippers to share the
+freight loads between themselves on the most favorable basis possible.
+Their returns on investment were so high and their greed so uncontrollable
+that even the merchants of the colonizing powers protested. From 1929 to
+1931, the UAC (backed by Unilever) engaged in an economic war with the
+West African Lines Conference—comprising the British shipping firm of
+Elder Dempster, the Holland West Africa Line, and the German West Africa
+Line. In that instance, the trading monopoly won a victory over the shipping
+monopoly; but it was a fight between two elephants, and the grass was
+trampled all the more. At the end of it all, the African peasant was the
+greatest loser, because both traders and shippers adjusted their differences
+by lowering prices of primary products as paid to Africans.
+In the background of the colonial scene hovered the banks, insurance
+companies, maritime underwriters, and other financial houses. One can say
+“in the background” because the peasant never dealt directly with such
+institutions, and was generally ignorant of their exploiting functions. The
+peasant or worker had no access to bank loans because he had no
+“securities” or “collateral.” Banks and finance houses dealt only with other
+capitalists who could prove to the bankers that whatever happened the bank
+would recover its money and make a profit. In the epoch of imperialism, the
+bankers became the aristocrats of the capitalist world, so in another sense
+they were very much in the foreground. The amount of surplus produced by
+African workers and peasants and passing into the hands of metropolitan
+bankers is quite phenomenal. They registered a return on capital higher
+even than the mining companies, and each new direct investment that they
+made spelled further alienation of the fruits of African labor. Furthermore,
+all investment in the colonies meant in effect the involvement of the big
+finance monopolies, since the smallest trading company was ultimately
+linked to a big banker. The returns on colonial investment were consistently
+
+higher than those in investments in the metro-poles, so the financiers stood
+to benefit from sponsoring colonial enterprise.
+In the earliest years of colonialism, the banks of Africa were small and
+relatively independent. This applied to the Banque de Senegal, started as
+early as 1853, and to the Bank of British West Africa which began as an
+offshoot of the shipping firm of Elder Dempster. However, the great
+banking houses of Europe, which had carried on remote control of
+developments ever since the 1880s, soon moved in directly on the colonial
+banking scene when the volume of capitalist transactions made this
+worthwhile. The Banque de Senegal merged into the Banque de L’Afrique
+Occidentale (BAO) in 1901, acquiring links with the powerful Bank of
+Indochina, which in turn was a special creation of several powerful
+metropolitan French bankers. In 1924, the Banque Commerciale de
+I’Afrique (BCA) emerged in the French territories, linked with the Credit
+Lyonnais and the BNCI in France. By that time the Bank of British West
+Africa had its finance backed by Lloyds Bank, Westminster Bank, the
+Standard Bank, and the National Provincial Bank—all in England. The
+other great English banking firm, Barclays, moved directly into Africa. It
+purchased the Colonial Bank and set it up as Barclays DCO (i.e., Dominion
+and Colonial).
+The Bank of British West Africa (which became the Bank of West Africa
+in 1957) and Barclays held between them the lion’s share of the banking
+business of British West Africa, just as French West and Equatorial Africa
+were shared out between the BAO and the BCA. There was also a union of
+French and British banking capital in West Africa in 1949 with the
+formation of the British and French West Africa Bank. French and Belgian
+exploitation also overlapped in the financial sphere, since the Société
+Générale had both Belgian and French capital. It supported banks in French
+Africa and the Congo. Other weaker colonial powers were served by the
+international banks such as Barclays, and also used their colonial territories
+as grazing ground for their own national banks. In Libya, the Banco di
+Roma and the Banco di Napoli operated; while in Portuguese territories the
+most familiar name was that of the Banco Ultramarino.
+In Southern Africa, the outstanding banking firm was the Standard Bank
+of South Africa Ltd., started in 1862 in the Cape Colony by the heads of
+business houses having close connections with London. Its headquarters
+
+were placed in London, and it made a fortune out of financing gold and
+diamond strikes, and through handling the loot of Cecil Rhodes and De
+Beers. By 1895, the Standard Bank spread into Bechuanaland, Rhodesia,
+and Mozambique; and it was the second British bank to be established in
+British East Africa. The actual scale of profits was quite formidable. In a
+book officially sponsored by the Standard Bank, the writer modestly
+concluded as follows:
+Little attention has been paid in the text of this book to the financial outcome of the Standard
+Bank’s activities, yet their profitability was an inevitable outcome of survival and was
+therefore bound to be a primary objective from first to last.
+
+In 1960, the Standard Bank produced a net profit of 1,181,000 pounds
+and paid a 14 per cent dividend to its shareholders. Most of the latter were
+in Europe or else were whites in South Africa, while the profit was
+produced mainly by the black people of South and East Africa.
+Furthermore, these European banks transferred the reserves of their African
+branches to the London head office to be invested in the London money
+market. This was the way in which they most rapidly expatriated African
+surplus to the metropoles.
+The first bank to be set up in East Africa in the 1890s was an offshoot of
+a British bank operating in India. It later came to be called the National &
+Grindlays. In neighboring Tanganyika the Germans established the German
+East African Bank in 1905, but after the First World War the British had a
+near monopoly of East African banking. Altogether nine foreign banks were
+in existence in East Africa during the colonial period, out of which the big
+three were National & Grindlays, the Standard Bank, and Barclays.
+East Africa provides an interesting example of how effectively foreign
+banks served to dispossess Africa of its wealth. Most of the banking and
+other financial services were rendered to white settlers whose conception of
+“home” was always Britain. Consequently, when the white settlers felt
+threatened towards the end of the colonial period, they rushed to send their
+money home to Britain. For example, when the decision to concede selfgovernment to Kenya was taken by the British in 1960, a sum amounting to
+over 5½ million dollars was immediately transferred to “safety” in London
+by whites in Tanganyika. That sum, like all other remittances by colonial
+banks, represented the exploitation of African land resources and labor.
+
+The Colonial Administration as Economic Exploiter
+In addition to private companies, the colonial state also engaged directly in
+the economic exploitation and impoverishment of Africa. The equivalent of
+the colonial office in each colonizing country worked hand in hand with
+their governors in Africa to carry out a number of functions, the principal
+ones being as follows:
+(1) To protect national interests against competition from other
+capitalists.
+(2) To arbitrate the conflicts between their own capitalists.
+(3) To guarantee optimum conditions under which private companies
+could exploit Africans.
+The last-mentioned objective was the most crucial. That is why colonial
+governments were repeatedly speaking about “the maintenance of law and
+order,” by which they meant the maintenance of conditions most favorable
+to the expansion of capitalism and the plunder of Africa. This led the
+colonial governments to impose taxes.
+One of the main purposes of the colonial taxation system was to provide
+requisite funds for administering the colony as a field of exploitation.
+European colonizers insured that Africans paid for the upkeep of the
+governors and police who oppressed them and served as watchdogs for
+private capitalists. Indeed, taxes and customs duties were levied in the
+nineteenth century with the aim of allowing the colonial powers to recover
+the costs of the armed forces which they dispatched to conquer Africa. In
+effect, therefore, the colonial governments never put a penny into the
+colonies. All expenses were met by exploiting the labor and natural
+resources of the continent; and for all practical purposes the expense of
+maintaining the colonial government machinery was a form of alienation of
+the products of African labor. The French colonies were especially
+victimized in this respect. Particularly since 1921, the local revenue raised
+from taxation had to meet all expenses as well as build up a reserve.
+Having set up the police, army, civil service, and judiciary on African
+soil, the colonizing powers were then in a position to intervene much more
+directly in the economic life of the people than had been the case
+previously. One major problem in Africa from a capitalist viewpoint was
+how to induce Africans to become laborers or cash-crop farmers. In some
+
+areas, such as West Africa, Africans had become so attached to European
+manufactures during the early period of trade that, on their own initiative,
+they were prepared to go to great lengths to participate in the colonial
+money economy. But that was not the universal response. In many
+instances, Africans did not consider the monetary incentives great enough
+to justify changing their way of life so as to become laborer^ or cash-crop
+farmers. In such cases, the colonial state intervened to use law, taxation, and
+outright force to make Africans pursue a line favorable to capitalist profits.
+When colonial governments seized African lands, they achieved two
+things simultaneously. They satisfied their own citizens (who wanted
+mining concessions or farming land) and they created the conditions
+whereby landless Africans had to work not just to pay taxes but also to
+survive. In settler areas such as Kenya and Rhodesia the colonial
+government also prevented Africans from growing cash crops so that their
+labor would be available directly for the whites. One of the Kenya white
+settlers, Colonel Grogan, put it bluntly when he said of the Kikuyu: “We
+have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. Compulsory labor is the
+corollary of our occupation of the country.”
+In those parts of the continent where land was still in African hands,
+colonial governments forced Africans to produce cash crops no matter how
+low the prices were. The favorite technique was taxation. Money taxes were
+introduced on numerous items—cattle, land, houses, and the people
+themselves. Money to pay taxes was got by growing cash crops or working
+on European farms or in their mines. An interesting example of what
+colonialism was all about was provided in French Equatorial Africa, where
+French officials banned the Mandja people (now in Congo Brazzaville)
+from hunting, so that they would engage solely in cotton cultivation. The
+French enforced the ban although there was little livestock in the area and
+hunting was the main source of meat in the people’s diet.
+Finally, when all else failed, colonial powers resorted widely to the
+physical coercion of labor—backed up of course by legal sanctions, since
+anything which the colonial government chose to do was “legal.” The laws
+and by-laws by which peasants in British East Africa were required to
+maintain minimum acreages of cash crops like cotton and groundnuts were
+in effect forms of coercion by the colonial state, although they are not
+normally considered under the heading of “forced labor.”
+
+The simplest form of forced labor was that which colonial governments
+exacted to carry out “public works.” Labor for a given number of days per
+year had to be given free for these “public works”—building castles for
+governors, prisons for Africans, barracks for troops, and bungalows for
+colonial officials. A great deal of this forced labor went into the
+construction of roads, railways, and ports to provide the infrastructure for
+private capitalist investment and to facilitate the export of cash crops.
+Taking only one example from the British colony of Sierra Leone, one finds
+that the railway which started at the end of the nineteenth century required
+forced labor from thousands of peasants driven from the villages. The hard
+work and appalling conditions led to the death of a large number of those
+engaged in work on the railway. In the British territories, this kind of forced
+labor (including juvenile labor) was widespread enough to call forth in 1923
+a “Native Authority Ordinance” restricting the use of compulsory labor for
+porterage, railway and road building. More often than not, means were
+found of circumventing this legislation. An international Forced Labor
+Convention was signed by all colonial powers in 1930, but again it was
+flouted in practice.
+The French government had a cunning way of getting free labor by first
+demanding that African males should enlist as French soldiers and then
+using them as unpaid laborers. This and other forced labor legislation
+known as “prestation” was extensively applied in vast areas of French
+Sudan and French Equatorial Africa. Because cash crops were not well
+established in those areas, the main method of extracting surplus was by
+taking the population and making it work in plantation or cash-crop regions
+nearer the coast. Present-day Upper Volta, Chad, and Congo Brazzaville
+were huge suppliers of forced labor under colonialism. The French got
+Africans to start building the Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire railway in 1921,
+and it was not completed until 1933. Every year of its construction, some
+ten thousand people were driven to the site—sometimes from more than a
+thousand kilometers away. At least 25 per cent of the labor force died
+annually from starvation and disease, the worst period being from 1922 to
+1929.
+Quite apart from the fact that the “public works” were of direct value to
+the capitalists, the colonial government also aided private capitalists by
+providing them with labor recruited by force. This was particularly true in
+
+the early years of colonialism, but continued in varying degrees up to the
+Second World War, and even to the end of colonialism in some places. In
+British territories, the practice was revived during the economic depression
+of 1929–33 and during the subsequent war. In Kenya and Tanganyika,
+forced labor was reintroduced to keep settler plantations functioning during
+the war. In Nigeria, it was the tin companies which benefited from the
+forced-labor legislation, allowing them to get away with paying workers 5
+pence per day plus rations. For most of the colonial period, the French
+government performed the same kind of service for the big timber
+companies who had great concessions of territory in Gabon and Ivory
+Coast.
+The Portuguese and Belgian colonial regimes were the most brazen in
+directly rounding up Africans to go and work for private capitalists under
+conditions equivalent to slavery. In Congo, brutal and extensive forced
+labor started under King Leopold II in the last century. So many Congolese
+were killed and maimed by Leopold’s officials and police that this earned
+European disapproval even in the midst of the general pattern of colonial
+outrages. When Leopold handed over the “Congo Free State” to the Belgian
+government in 1908, he had already made a huge fortune; and the Belgian
+government hardly relaxed the intensity of exploitation in Congo.
+The Portuguese have the worst record of engaging in slavery-like
+practices, and they too have been repeatedly condemned by international
+public opinion. One peculiar characteristic of Portuguese colonialism was
+the provision of forced labor not only for its own citizens but also for
+capitalists outside the boundaries of Portuguese colonies. Angolans and
+Mozam-bicans were exported to the South African mines to work for
+subsistence, while the capitalists in South Africa paid the Portuguese
+government a certain sum for each laborer supplied. (The export of Africans
+to South Africa is still continuing.)
+In the above example, the Portuguese colonialists were cooperating with
+capitalists of other nationalities to maximize the exploitation of African
+labor. Throughout the colonial period, there were instances of such
+cooperation, as well as competition between metropolitan powers.
+Generally speaking, a European power was expected to intervene when the
+profits of its national bourgeoisie were threatened by the activities of other
+nations. After all, the whole purpose of establishing colonial governments
+
+in Africa was to provide protection to national monopoly economic
+interests. Thus, the Belgian government legislated to insure that freight to
+and from the Congo would be mainly carried by Belgian shipping lines; and
+the French government placed high taxes on groundnuts brought into
+France by foreign ships, which was another way of insuring that groundnuts
+from French Africa would be exported in French ships. In a sense, this
+meant that Africans were losing their surplus through one straw rather than
+another. But it also meant that the sum total of exploitation was also greater,
+because if competition among Europeans were allowed, it would have
+brought down the cost of services and raised the price paid for agricultural
+products.
+Africans suffered most from exclusive trade with the “mother country”
+in cases where the “mother country” was backward. African peasants in
+Portuguese colonies got lower prices for their crops and paid more for
+imported items. Yet, Britain, the biggest of the colonialists in Africa, was
+also faced with competition from the more vigorous capitalists of Germany,
+the U.S.A., and Japan. British merchants and industrialists lobbied their
+government to erect barriers against competition. For example, Japanese
+cloth exports to British East Africa rose from 25 million yards in 1927 to 63
+million yards in 1933; and this led Walter Runciman, president of the
+British Board of Trade, to get Parliament to impose heavy tariffs on
+Japanese goods entering British colonies in Africa. This meant that Africans
+had to pay higher prices for a staple import, since British cloth was more
+expensive. From the viewpoint of the African peasant, that amounted to
+further alienation of the fruits of his labor.
+A perfect illustration of the identity of interests between the colonial
+governments and their bourgeois citizens was provided by the conduct of
+Produce Marketing Boards in Africa. The origins of the Boards go back to
+the Gold Coast “cocoa hold-up” of 1937. For several months, cocoa farmers
+refused to sell their crop unless the price was raised. One apparently
+favorable result of the “hold-up” was that the British government agreed to
+set up a Marketing Board to purchase cocoa from the peasants in place of
+the big business interests like the UAC and Cadbury which had up until
+then been the buyers. A West African Cocoa Control Board was set up in
+1938, but the British government used this as a bush to hide the private
+capitalists and to allow them to continue making their exorbitant profits.
+
+In theory, a Marketing Board was suppose to pay the peasant a
+reasonable price for his crop. The Board sold the crop overseas and kept a
+surplus for the improvement of agriculture and for paying the peasants a
+stable price if world market prices declined. In practice, the Boards paid
+peasants a low fixed rate during many years when world prices were rising.
+None of the benefits went to Africans, but rather to the British government
+itself and to the private companies, which were used as intermediaries in the
+buying and selling of the produce. Big companies like the UAC and John
+Holt were given quotas to fulfill on behalf of the Boards. As agents of the
+government, they were no longer exposed to direct attack, and their profits
+were secure.
+The idea of the Marketing Boards gained support from top British policy
+makers because the war came just at that time, and the British government
+was anxious to take steps to secure certain colonial products in the
+necessary quantities and at the right times, given the limited number of
+ships available for commercial purposes during war. They were also
+anxious to save private capitalists who were adversely affected by events
+connected with the war. For example, East African sisal became of vital
+importance to Britain and her war allies after the Japanese cut off supplies
+of similar hard fibers from the Philippines and Dutch East Indies. Actually,
+even before fighting broke out, sisal was bought in bulk by the British
+government to help the non-African plantation owners in East Africa who
+had lost markets in Germany and other parts of Europe. Similarly, oil seeds
+(such as palm produce and groundnuts) were bought by a Board from
+September 1939, in preparation for shortages of butter and marine oils.
+With regard to all peasant cash crops, the Produce Marketing Boards
+made purchases at figures that were way below world market prices. For
+instance, the West African Produce Board paid Nigerians a bit under 17
+pounds for a ton of palm oil in 1946 and sold that through the Ministry of
+Food for 95 pounds, which was nearer the world market price. Groundnuts
+which received 15 pounds per ton when bought by the Boards were later
+sold in Britain at 110 pounds per ton. Furthermore, export duties were
+levied on the Boards’ sales by the colonial administrators, and that was an
+indirect tax on the peasants. The situation reached a point where many
+peasants tried to escape from under the Boards. In Sierra Leone in 1952, the
+price for coffee was so low that growers smuggled their crop into nearby
+
+French territories. At about the same time, Nigerian peasants were running
+away from palm oil into rubber collection or timber felling which did not
+come under the jurisdiction of the Produce Boards.
+If one accepts that the government is always the servant of a particular
+class, it is perfectly understandable that the colonial governments should
+have been in collusion with capitalists to siphon off surplus from Africa to
+Europe. But even if one does not start from that (Marxist) premise, it would
+be impossible to ignore the evidence of how the colonial administrators
+worked as committees on behalf of the big capitalists. The governors in the
+colonies had to listen to the local representatives of the companies and to
+their principals. Indeed, there were company representatives who wielded
+influence in several colonies at the same time. Before the First World War,
+the single most important individual in the whole of British West Africa
+was Sir Alfred Jones—chairman of Elder Dempster Lines, chairman of the
+Bank of West Africa, president of the British Cotton-Growing Association.
+In French West Africa in the late 1940s, the French governor showed
+himself very anxious to please one Marc Rucart, a man with major interests
+in several of the French trading companies. Such examples could be cited
+for each colony throughout its history although in some of them the
+influence of the white settlers was greater than that of individual
+metropolitan businessmen.
+Company shareholders in Europe not only lobbied Parliament but
+actually controlled the administration itself. The chairman of the Cocoa
+Board within the Ministry of Food was none other than John Cadbury, a
+director of Cadbury Brothers, who were participants in the buying “pool”
+which exploited West African cocoa farmers. Former employees of
+Unilever held key positions in the Oils and Fats Division of the Ministry of
+Food, and continued to receive checks from Unilever! The Oils and Fats
+Division handed over the allocation of buying quotas for the Produce
+Boards to the Association of West African Merchants, which was
+dominated by Unilever’s subsidiary, the UAC.
+It is no wonder that the Ministry of Food sent a prominent Lebanese
+businessman a directive that he had to sign an agreement drawn up by the
+UAC. It is no wonder that the companies had government aid in keeping
+prices down in Africa and in securing forced labor where necessary. It is no
+
+wonder that Unilever then sold soap, margarine, and such commodities at
+profitable prices within a market assured by the British government.
+Of course, the metropolitan governments also insured that a certain
+proportion of the colonial surplus went directly into the coffers of the state.
+They all had some forms of direct investment in capitalist enterprises. The
+Belgian government was an investor in mining, and so too was the
+Portuguese government through its part-ownership of the Angolan Diamond
+Company. The French government was always willing to associate itself
+with the financial sector. When colonial banks were in trouble, they could
+count on rescue from the French government, and, indeed, a proportion of
+their shares passed into the hands of the French government. The British
+colonial government was perhaps the least anxious to become directly
+involved in everyday business enterprises, but it did run the Eastern
+Nigerian coal mines—apart from railways.
+Marketing Boards helped the colonizing power to get its hands on some
+immediate cash. One finds that the Cocoa Board sold to the British Ministry
+of Food at very low prices; and the Ministry in turn sold to British
+manufacturers, making a profit that was as high as 11 million pounds in
+some years. More important still, the Board sold to the U.S.A., which was
+the largest market and one where prices were very high. None of the profits
+went back to the African farmer, but instead represented British foreign
+exchange in American dollars.
+From 1943, Britain and the U.S.A. engaged in what was known as
+“reverse lend-lease.” This meant that wartime United States loans to Britain
+were repaid partly by raw materials shipped from British colonies to the
+U.S.A. Tin and rubber from Malaya were very important in that context,
+while Africa supplied a wide range of products, both mineral and
+agricultural. Cocoa was third as a dollar earner after tin and rubber. In 1947,
+West African cocoa brought over 100 million dollars to the British dollar
+balance. Besides, having a virtual monopoly of the production of diamonds,
+(South) Africa was also able to sell to the U.S.A. and earn dollars for
+Britain. In 1946, Harry F. Oppenheimer told his fellow directors of the De
+Beers Consolidated Mines that “sales of gem diamonds during the war
+secured about 300 million American dollars for Great Britain.”
+It was on this very issue of currency that the colonial government did the
+most manipulations to insure that Africa’s wealth was stashed away in the
+
+coffers of the metropolitan state. In the British colonial sphere, coins and
+notes were first issued through private banks. Then this function was taken
+over by the West African Currency Board and the East African Currency
+Board, established in 1912 and 1919 respectively. The currency issued by
+those Boards in the colonies had to be backed by “sterling reserves,” which
+was money earned by Africa. The manner in which the system worked was
+as follows. When a colony earned foreign exchange (mainly) through
+exports, these earnings were held in Britain in pounds sterling. An
+equivalent amount of local East or West African currency was issued for
+circulation in the respective colonies, while the sterling was invested in
+British government stock, thereby earning even more profit for Britain. The
+commercial banks worked hand in hand with the metropolitan government
+and the Currency Boards to make the system work. Together they
+established an intricate financial network which served the common end of
+enriching Europe at Africa’s expense.
+The contribution to sterling reserves by any colony was a gift to the
+British treasury, for which the colony received little interest. By the end of
+the 1950s, the sterling reserves of a small colony like Sierra Leone had
+reached 60 million pounds; while in 1955 the British government was
+holding 210 million derived from the sale of cocoa and minerals from Gold
+Coast. Egypt and the Sudan were also heavy contributors to Britain.
+Africa’s total contribution to Britain’s sterling balances in 1945 was 446
+million pounds, which went up to 1,446 million by 1955—more than half
+the total gold and dollar reserves of Britain and the Commonwealth, which
+then stood at 2,120 million. Men like Arthur Creech-Jones and Oliver
+Lyttleton, major figures in British colonial policy-making, admitted that in
+the early 1950s Britain was living on the dollar earnings of the colonies.
+The British government was surpassed by its Belgian counterpart in
+exacting tribute from its colonies, especially during and after the last war.
+After Belgium was overrun by the Germans, a government-in-exile was set
+up in Lxmdon. The Colonial Secretary of that exiled regime, Mr. Godding,
+admitted:
+During the war, the Congo was able to finance all the expenditure of the Belgian government in
+London, including the diplomatic service as well as the cost of our armed forces in Europe and
+Africa, a total of some 40 million pounds. In fact, thanks to the resources of the Congo, the
+
+Belgian government in London had not to borrow a shilling or a dollar, and the Belgian gold
+reserve could be left intact.
+
+Since the war, surplus of earnings by the Congo in currencies other than the
+Belgian franc have all accrued to the National Bank of Belgium. Therefore,
+quite apart from all that the private capitalists looted from Congo, the
+Belgian government was also a direct beneficiary to the tune of millions of
+francs per annum.
+To discuss French colonialism in this context would be largely to repeat
+remarks made with reference to the British and Belgians. Guinea was
+supposedly a “poor” colony, but in 1952 it earned France one billion (old)
+francs, or about 5.6 million dollars in foreign exchange, based on the sale of
+bauxite, coffee, and bananas. French financial techniques were slightly
+different from those of other colonial powers. France tended to use the
+commercial banks more, rather than set up separate currency boards. France
+also squeezed more out of Africans by imposing levies for military
+purposes. The French government dressed Africans in French army
+uniforms and used them to fight other Africans, to fight other colonized
+peoples like the Vietnamese, and to fight in European wars. The colonial
+budgets had to bear the cost of sending these African “French” soldiers to
+die, but if they returned alive they had to be paid pensions out of African
+funds.
+To sum up briefly, colonialism meant a great intensification of
+exploitation within Africa—to a level much higher than that previously in
+existence under communalism or feudal-type African societies.
+Simultaneously, it meant the export of that surplus in massive proportions,
+for that was the central purpose of colonialism.
+The Strengthening of the Technological and Military Aspects of
+Capitalism
+A Preliminary Examination of the Non-monetary Benefits of Colonialism to
+Europe
+There are still some bourgeois propagandists who assert that colonialism
+was not a paying concern for Europeans, just as there are those who say that
+the slave trade was not profitable to Europeans. It is not worthwhile to
+
+engage in a direct refutation of such a viewpoint, since it consumes time
+which could otherwise be more usefully employed. The foregoing section
+was a statement on the level of actual monetary profits made by colonialist
+powers out of Africa. But, Africa’s contribution to European capitalism was
+far greater than mere monetary returns. The colonial system permitted the
+rapid development of technology and skills within the metropolitan sectors
+of imperialism. It also allowed for the elaboration of the modern
+organizational techniques of the capitalist firm and of imperialism as a
+whole. Indeed, colonialism gave capitalism an added lease of life and
+prolonged its existence in Western Europe, which had been the cradle of
+capitalism.
+At the beginning of the colonial period, science and technology as
+applied to production already had a firm base inside Europe—a situation
+which was itself connected to overseas trade, as previously explained.
+Europe then was entering the age of electricity, of advanced ferrous and
+non-ferrous metallurgy, and of the proliferation of manufactured chemicals.
+All of these were carried to great heights during the colonial period.
+Electrical devices were raised to the qualitatively new level of electronics,
+incorporating miniaturization of equipment, fantastic progress in
+telecommunications, and the creation of computers. Chemical industries
+were producing a wide range of synthetic substitutes for raw materials, and
+a whole new branch of petrochemicals had come into existence. The
+combination of metals by metallurgical innovations meant that products
+could be offered to meet far-reaching demands of heat resistance, lightness,
+tensile strength. At the end of colonialism (say 1960), Europe was on the
+verge of another epoch—that of nuclear power.
+It is common knowledge that the gap between the output of the
+metropoles and that of the colonies increased by at least fifteen to twenty
+times during the epoch of colonialism. More than anything else, it was the
+advance of scientific technique in the metropoles which was the cause of
+the great gulf between African and Western European levels of productivity
+by the end of the colonial period. Therefore, it is essential to understand the
+role of colonialism itself in bringing about the scientific progress in the
+metropoles, and its application to industry.
+It would be extremely simple-minded to say that colonialism in Africa or
+anywhere else caused Europe to develop its science and technology. The
+
+tendency towards technological innovation and renovation was inherent in
+capitalism itself, because of the drive for profits. However, it would be
+entirely accurate to say that the colonization of Africa and other parts of the
+world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made
+possible the technological transformation of the base of European
+capitalism. Without that link, European capitalism would not have been
+producing goods and services at the level attained in 1960. In other words,
+our very yardsticks for measuring developed and underdeveloped nations
+would have been different.
+Profits from African colonialism mingled with profits from every other
+source to finance scientific research. This was true in the general sense that
+the affluence of capitalist society in the present century allowed more
+money and leisure for research. It is also true because the development of
+capitalism in the imperialist epoch continued the division of labor inside the
+capitalist metropoles to the point where scientific research was a branch of
+the division of labor, and indeed one of its most important branches.
+European society moved away from scientific research as an ad hoc,
+personal, and even whimsical affair to a situation where research was given
+priority by governments, armies, and private capitalists. It was funded and
+guided. Careful scrutiny reveals that the source of funding and the direction
+in which research was guided were heavily influenced by the colonial
+situation. Firstly, it should be recalled that profits made by Europe from
+Africa represented investible surpluses. The profit was not merely an end in
+itself. Thus, the East and West African Currency Boards invested in the
+British government stock, while the commercial banks and insurance
+companies invested in government bonds, mortgages, and industrial shares.
+These investment funds acquired from the colonies spread to many sectors
+in the metropoles and benefited industries that had nothing to do with
+processing of colonial products.
+However, it is easier to trace the impact of colonial exploitation on
+industries directly connected with colonial imports. Such industries had to
+improvise that kind of machinery which most effectively utilized colonial
+raw materials. That led for example to machinery for crushing palm kernels
+and to a process for utilizing the less delicately flavored coffee by turning it
+into a soluble powder, namely “instant coffee.” Merchants and industrialists
+also considered ways in which colonial raw materials could be modified to
+
+meet specifications of European factories in quality and quantity. An
+example of this type would be the care taken by the Dutch in Java and by
+the Americans in Liberia to breed and graft new varieties of rubber plants
+yielding more and being more resistant to disease. Ultimately, the search for
+better-quality raw materials merged with the search for sources of raw
+material which would make European capitalism less dependent on colonial
+areas—and that led to synthetics.
+In the sphere of shipping, it can readily be appreciated that certain
+technological modifications and innovations would be connected with the
+fact that such a high proportion of shipping was used to tie together
+colonies and metropoles. Ships had to be refrigerated to carry perishable
+goods; they had to make special holds for bulky or liquid cargoes such as
+palm oil; and the transport of petroleum from the Middle East, North
+Africa, and other parts of the world led to oil tankers as a special class of
+ships. The design of ships and the nature of their cargoes in turn affected the
+kind of port installations in the metropoles.
+Where connections were remote or even apparently non-existent, it can
+still be claimed that colonialism was a factor in the European technological
+revolution. As science blossomed in the present century, its
+interconnections became numerous and complex. It is impossible to trace
+the origin of every idea and every invention, but it is well understood by
+serious historians of science that the growth of the body of scientific
+knowledge and its application to everyday life is dependent upon a large
+number of forces operating within the society as a whole, and not just upon
+the ideas within given branches of science. With the rise of imperialism,
+one of the most potent forces within metropolitan capitalist societies was
+precisely that emanating from colonial or semi-colonial areas.
+The above considerations apply fully to any discussion of the military
+aspects of imperialism, the protection of empire being one of the crucial
+stimulants added to the science of armaments in a society that was already
+militaristically inclined ever since the feudal era. The new colonial
+dimension to European military preoccupation was particularly noticeable
+in the sharp naval rivalry among Britain, Germany, France, and Japan
+before and during the First World War. That rivalry over colonies and for
+spheres of capitalist investment produced new types of armed naval vessels,
+such as destroyers and submarines. By the end of the Second World War,
+
+military research had become the most highly organized branch of scientific
+research, and one that was subsidized by the capitalist states from the
+profits of international exploitation.
+During the inter-war years, Africa’s foremost contribution to the
+evolution of organizational techniques in Europe was to the strengthening
+of monopoly capital. Before the war of 1914, the Pan-Africanists Duse
+Mohammed Ali and W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that monopoly capital
+was the leading element in imperialist expansion. The most thorough and
+the best-known analysis of this phenomenon was made by the Russian
+revolutionary leader, Lenin. Lenin was virtually prophetic, because as the
+colonial age advanced it became more and more obvious that those who
+stood to benefit most were the monopoly concerns, and especially those
+involved in finance.
+Africa (plus Asia and Latin America) contributed to the elaboration of
+the strategies by which competition among small companies gave way to
+domination by a small handful of firms in various economic activities. It
+was on the India trade routes that shipping companies first started the
+“Conference Lines” in 1875. This monopoly practice spread rapidly to the
+South African trade and reached a high pitch in West Africa in the early
+years of this century. On the commercial side, it was in West Africa that
+both the French and the English derived considerable experience in pooling
+and market-sharing; apart from the fact that little companies were steadily
+being gobbled up by bigger ones from the beginning to the end of
+colonialism.
+It was in Southern Africa that there emerged the most carefully planned
+structures of interlocking directorates, holding companies, and giant
+corporations which were multinational both in their capital subscriptions
+and through the fact that their economic activities were dispersed in many
+lands. Individual entrepreneurs like Oppenheimer made huge fortunes from
+the Southern African soil, but Southern Africa was never really in the era of
+individual and family businesses, characteristic of Europe and America up
+to the early part of this century. The big mining companies were impersonal
+professional things. They were organized in terms of personnel, production,
+marketing, advertising, and they could undertake long-term commitments.
+At all times, inner productive forces gave capitalism its drive towards
+expansion and domination. It was the system which expanded. But in
+
+addition, one can see in Africa and in Southern Africa in particular the rise
+of a capitalist superstructure manned by individuals capable of consciously
+planning the exploitation of resources right into the next century, and
+aiming at racist domination of the black people of Africa until the end of
+time.
+Ever since the fifteenth century, Europe was in strategic command of
+world trade and of the legal and organizational aspects of the movement of
+goods between continents. Europe’s power increased with imperialism,
+because imperialism meant investments, and investments (with or without
+colonial rule) gave European capitalists control over production within each
+continent. The amount of benefits to capitalism increased accordingly, since
+Europe could determine the quantity and quality of different raw material
+inputs which would need to be brought together in the interests of
+capitalism as a whole, and of the bourgeois class in particular. For instance,
+sugar production in the West Indies was joined in the colonial period by
+cocoa production within Africa, so that both merged into the chocolate
+industry of Europe and North America. In the metallurgical field, iron ore
+from Sweden, Brazil, or Sierra Leone could be turned into different types of
+steel with the addition of manganese from the Gold Coast or chrome from
+Southern Rhodesia. Such examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely
+to cover the whole range of capitalist production in the colonial period.
+As John Stuart Mill said, the trade between England and the West Indies
+in the eighteenth century was like the trade between town and country. In
+the present century, the links are even closer and it is more marked that the
+town (Europe) is living off the countryside (Africa, Asia, and Latin
+America). When it said that colonies should exist for the metropoles by
+producing raw materials and buying manufactured goods, the underlying
+theory was to introduce an international division of labor covering working
+people everywhere. That is to say, up to that point each society had
+allocated to its own members particular functions in production—some
+hunted, some made clothes, some built houses. But with colonialism, the
+capitalists determined what types of labor the workers should carry on in
+the world at large. Africans were to dig minerals out of the subsoil, grow
+agricultural crops, collect natural products, and perform a number of other
+odds and ends such as bicycle repairing. Inside Europe, North America, and
+
+Japan, workers would refine the minerals and the raw materials and make
+the bicycles.
+The international division of labor brought about by imperialism and
+colonialism insured that there would be the maximum increase in the level
+of skills in the capitalist nations. It took mainly physical strength to dig the
+minerals from and to farm the African soil, but the extraction of the metals
+from the ores and the subsequent manufacture of finished goods in Europe
+promoted more and more technology and skills there as time went on. Take
+the iron and steel industry as an example. Modern steel manufacture derives
+from the Siemens open-hearth system and the Bessemer process, which
+were both already in existence in the second half of the last century. They
+both underwent major modifications, transforming steel manufacture from
+intermittent operations to something requiring huge continuous electrical
+furnaces. In more recent years, skilled workmen have been replaced by
+automation and computerization, but altogether the gains in technology and
+skills were immense, as compared with the years before imperialism got
+under way.
+Iron ore was not one of Africa’s major exports in the colonial days and it
+may therefore appear to be an irrelevant example. However, iron was very
+significant in the economy of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and North Africa. It
+can be used to illustrate the trend by which the international division of
+labor allowed technology and skills to grow in the metropoles. Furthermore,
+it must be recalled that Africa was an important source of the minerals that
+went into making steel alloys, notably manganese and chrome. Manganese
+was essential in the Bessemer process. It was mined in several places in
+Africa, with the Nouta mine on the Gold Coast having the largest single
+manganese deposit in the world. American companies owned the Gold
+Coast and North African mines and used the product in the steel industry of
+the U.S.A. Chrome from South Africa and Southern Rhodesia also played a
+similar role in steel metallurgy, being essential for the manufacture of
+stainless steel.
+Columbite was another of the African minerals valuable for the creation
+of steel alloys. Being highly heat-resistant, one of its principal uses was in
+making steel for jet engines. First of all, it was the rapid development of
+European industry and technology which caused columbite to assume value.
+It had been a discarded by-product of tin mining in Nigeria up to 1952.
+
+Then, once it was utilized, it gave further stimulus to European technology
+in the very sophisticated sphere of airplane engines.
+Obviously, according to the international division of labor prevailing
+under colonialism, it was the American, Canadian, British, and French
+workers who had access to the skills involved in working with columbite,
+rather than the Nigerian worker who dug the ore out of the ground. For
+certain reasons, columbite fell off sharply in demand after a few years, but
+during that time it had contributed towards making the European
+metallurgist even more proficient and experienced. In that way, it was
+helping to promote self-sustained growth and to produce the gap which is
+evident in any comparison of the developed and underdeveloped countries.
+Copper, too, fell neatly into the category under discussion. Unskilled
+production by Africans was required to get the ore for export, followed by
+refinement in a European capitalist plant. Copper was Africa’s chief mineral
+export. Being an excellent conductor of electricity, it became an
+indispensable part of the capitalist electrical industry. It is an essential
+component of generators, motors, electric locomotives, telephones,
+telegraphs, light and power lines, motor cars, buildings, ammunition, radios,
+refrigerators, and a host of other things. A technological era tends to be
+defined by the principal source of power. Today, we speak of a Nuclear
+Age, since the potential of nuclear power is shown to be immense. The
+Industrial Revolution in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteeth
+centuries was the Age of Steam. In a parallel manner, the colonial epoch
+was the Age of Electricity. Therefore, the vital copper exports from Congo,
+Northern Rhodesia, and other parts of Africa were contributing to the
+leading sector of European technology. From that strategic position, its
+multiplier effects were innumerable and were of incalculable benefit to
+capitalist development.
+In the context of a discussion of raw materials, special reference must
+again be made to the military. African minerals played a decisive role both
+with regard to conventional weapons and with regard to the breakthrough to
+atomic and nuclear weapons. It was from the Belgian Congo during the
+Second World War that the U.S.A. began getting the uranium that was a
+prerequisite to the making of the first atomic bomb. In any case, by the end
+of the colonial period, industry and the war machine in the colonizing
+nations had become so interwined and inseparable that any contribution to
+
+one was a contribution to the other. Therefore, Africa’s massive
+contribution to what initially appears as peaceful pursuits such as the
+making of copper wire and steel alloys ultimately took the shape of
+explosive devices, aircraft carriers, and so on.
+It was only after European firearms reached a certain stage of
+effectiveness in the nineteenth century that it became possible for whites to
+colonize and dominate the whole world. Similarly, the invention of a
+massive array of new instruments of destruction in the metropoles was both
+a psychological and a practical disincentive to colonized peoples seeking to
+regain power and independence. It will readily be recalled that a basic prop
+to colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was the “gunboat policy,” which was
+resorted to every time that the local police and armed forces seemed
+incapable of maintaining the metropolitan law and the colonial order of
+affairs. From the viewpoint of the colonized, the strengthening of the
+military apparatus of the European powers through colonial exploitation
+was doubly detrimental. Not only did it increase the overall technological
+gap between metropole and colony, but it immeasurably widened the gap in
+the most sensitive area, which had to do with concepts such as power and
+independence.
+The international division of labor of the colonial period also insured that
+there would be growth of employment opportunities in Europe, apart from
+the millions of white settlers and expatriates who earned a livelihood in and
+from Africa. Agricultural raw materials were processed in such a way as to
+form by-products, constituting industries in their own right. The number of
+jobs created in Europe and North America by the import of mineral ores
+from Africa, Asia, and Latin America can be seen from the massive
+employment roll of institutions such as steel works, automobile factories,
+alumina and aluminum plants, copper wire firms. Furthermore, those in turn
+stimulated the building industry, the transport industry, the munitions
+industry, and so on. The mining that went on in Africa left holes in the
+ground, and the pattern of agricultural production left African soils
+impoverished; but, in Europe, agricultural and mineral imports built a
+massive industrial complex.
+In the earliest phases of human organization, production was scattered
+and atomized. That is to say, families preserved a separate identity while
+working for their upkeep. Over time, production became more social and
+
+interrelated in character. The making of a pair of shoes in a mature feudal
+trading economy involved the cattle rearer, a tanner of the leather, and a
+shoemaker—instead of one peasant killing an animal and making himself a
+pair of shoes, as under self-sufficient communalism. The extent to which a
+society achieves this social interdependence in making commodities is an
+index of its development, through specialization and coordination.
+Undoubtedly, European capitalism achieved more and more a social
+character in its production. It integrated the whole world; and with colonial
+experience as an important stimulus, it integrated very closely every aspect
+of its own economy—from agriculture to banking. But distribution was not
+social in character. The fruits of human labor went to a given minority class,
+which was of the white race and resident in Europe and North America.
+This is the crux of the dialectical process of development and
+underdevelopment, as it evolved over the colonial period.
+The Example of Unilever as a Major Beneficiary of African Exploitation
+Just as it was necessary to follow African surplus through the channels of
+exploitation such as banks and mining companies, so the non-monetary
+contribution which Africa made to European capitalism can also be
+accurately traced by following the careers of the said companies. We offer
+below a brief outline of the relevant features of the development of a single
+firm—that of Unilever—in relationship to its exploitation of African
+resources and people.
+In 1885, while Africa was being carved up at the conference table, one
+William H. Lever started making soap on the Merseyside near Liverpool in
+England. He called his soap “Sunlight” and in the swamps where his factory
+stood, the township of Port Sunlight grew up. Within ten years, the firm of
+Lever was selling 40,000 tons of soap per year in England alone and was
+building an export business and factories in other parts of Europe, America,
+and the British colonies. Then came Lifebuoy, Lux, Vim, and within
+another ten years, Lever was selling 60,000 tons of soap in Britain, and in
+addition had factories producing and selling in Canada, the U.S.A., South
+Africa, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium. However, soap did not grow in
+any of those countries. The basic item in its manufacture was stearin,
+obtained from oils and fats. Apart from animal tallow and whale oil, the
+
+desirable raw materials all came from the tropics: namely, palm oil, palmkernel oil, groundnut oil, and copra. West Africa happened to be the world’s
+great palm produce zone and was also a major grower of groundnuts.
+In 1887, the Austrian firm of Schicht, which was later to be incorporated
+in the Unilever combine, built the first palm-kernel crushing mill in Austria,
+supplied with raw materials by a Liverpool firm of oil merchants. That was
+not simply coincidence, but part of the logic of imperialism and the opening
+up of Africa as the raw material reservoir for Europe. As early as 1902,
+Lever sent out his own “explorers” to Africa, and they came to the decision
+that the Congo would be the most likely place to get palm produce, because
+the Belgian government was willing to offer huge concessions of land with
+innumerable palm trees. Lever obtained the necessary concessions in Congo
+and brought in machinery to extract oil from palm kernels.
+But the main palm-oil experts came from areas on the coast to the north
+of the Congo. Therefore, in 1910, Lever purchased W. B. Mclver, a small
+Liverpool firm in Nigeria. That was followed by acquisitions of two small
+companies in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Indeed, Lever (at that time called
+Lever Bros.) got a foothold in every colony in West Africa. The first major
+breakthrough occurred when Lever bought the Niger Company in 1920 for
+8 million pounds. Then, in 1929, the African and Eastern, the last big rival
+trading concern, was brought into partnership; and the result of the merger
+was called the United Africa Company (UAC).
+During the 1914–18 war, Lever had begun making margarine, which
+required the same raw materials as soap; namely, oils and fats. The
+subsequent years were ones in which such enterprises in Europe were
+constantly getting bigger through takeovers and mergers. The big names in
+soap and margarine manufacture on the European continent were two Dutch
+firms, Jurgens and Van der Bergh, and the Austrian firms of Schicht and
+Centra. The Dutch companies first achieved a dominant position; and then
+in 1929 there was a grand merger between their combine and Lever’s, who
+in the meantime had been busy buying off virtually all other competitors.
+The 1929 merger created Unilever as a single monopoly, divided for the
+sake of convenience into Unilever Ltd. (registered in Britain) and Unilever
+N.V. (registered in Holland).
+For its massive input of oils and fats, Unilever depended largely on its
+UAC subsidiary which was formed that very year. The UAC itself never
+
+stopped growing. In 1933, it took over the important trading firm of G. B.
+Ollivant, and in 1936, it bought the Swiss Trading Company on the Gold
+Coast. By that time, it was not relying simply on wild palms in the Congo,
+but had organized plantations. The Lever factories in the U.S.A. drew their
+oil supplies mainly from the Congo, and in 1925 (even before Unilever and
+the UAC emerged as such) the Lever works in Boston showed a profit of
+250,000 pounds.
+Unilever flourished in war and in peace. Only in Eastern Europe did the
+advent of socialism lead to the loss of factories through nationalization. By
+the end of the colonial period, Unilever was a world force, selling
+traditional soaps, detergents, margarine, lard, ghee, cooking oil, canned
+foods, candles, glycerin, oil cake, and toilet preparations such as toothpaste.
+From where did this giant octopus suck most of its sustenance? Let the
+answer be provided by the Information Division of Unilever House,
+London.
+Most striking of all in the post-war development of Unilever, had been the progress of the
+United Africa Company. In the worst of the depression, the management of Unilever had never
+ceased to put money into UAC, justifying their action more by general faith in the future of
+Africa than by particular consideration of UAC’s immediate prospects. Their reward has come
+with the post-war prosperity of the primary producer, which has made Africa a market for all
+kinds of goods, from frozen peas to motor cars. Unilever’s centre of gravity lies in Europe, but
+far and away its largest member (the UAC) is almost wholly dependent for its livelihood
+(represented by a turnover of 300 million pounds) on the well-being of West Africa.
+
+In some instances, Lever’s African enterprises made losses in the strict
+cost-accounting sense. It took years before the Congo plantations paid for
+themselves and made a profit. It also took some time before the purchase of
+the Niger Company in 1920 was financially justified; while the SCKN in
+Chad never showed worthwhile monetary profits. But, even in the worst
+financial years, the subsidiaries comprising the UAC were invaluable
+assets, in that they allowed the manufacturing side of Unilever to have
+control over a guaranteed source of essential raw materials. Of course, the
+UAC itself also provided handsome monetary dividends, but it is the
+purpose here to draw attention not to the financial gains of UAC and
+Unilever but to the way that the exploitation of Africa led to multiple
+technical and organizational developments in Europe.
+Both the soap industry and the margarine industry had their own
+scientific and technical problems which had to be solved. Scientific advance
+
+is most generally a response to real need. Oils for margarine and for
+cooking purposes had to be deodorized; substitutes had to be sought for
+natural lard; and, when margarine was faced with competition from cheap
+butter, the necessity arose to find means of producing new high-grade
+margarine with added vitamins. In 1916, two Lever experts published in a
+British scientific journal the results of tests showing the growth of animals
+fed with vitamin concentrates inside margarine. They kept in touch with
+Cambridge University scientists who pursued the problem, and by 1927 the
+vitamin-rich margarine was ready for human consumption.
+With regard to soap (and to a lesser extent margarine), it was essential to
+devise a process for hardening oils into fats—notably whale oil, but also
+vegetable oils. This process, referred to as “hydrogenation,” attracted the
+attention of scientists in the early years of this century. They were paid and
+urged on by rival soap companies, including Lever and the other European
+firms which later merged to form Unilever.
+One of the most striking illustrations of the technological ramifications
+of the processing of colonial raw materials is in the field of detergents. Soap
+itself is a detergent or “washing agent,” but ordinary soaps suffer from
+several limitations, such as the tendency to decompose in hard water and in
+acids. Those limitations could only be overcome by “soapless detergents,”
+without the kind of fatty base of previous soaps. When Germany was cut off
+from colonial supplies of oils and fats in the first imperialist war, German
+scientists were spurred on to the first experiments in producing detergents
+out of coal tar. Later on in the 1930s, chemical companies began making
+similar detergents on a larger scale, especially in the U.S.A. Two of the
+firms which immediately stepped into detergent research were Unilever and
+Procter & Gamble, a soap combine with its headquarters in Cincinnati.
+It may at first appear strange that though detergents were competitors to
+ordinary soap, they were nevertheless promoted by soap firms. However, it
+is the practice of monopoly concerns to move into new fields which
+supplement or even replace their old business. That is necessary to avoid
+their entire capital from being tied up in products that go out of fashion. The
+soap firms could not leave detergents to chemical firms, or else their own
+hard soap, soap flakes, and soap powders would have suffered, and they
+would not have been the ones with the new brands on the markets. So great
+effort was put into the chemistry of detergents by Unilever, retaining to a
+
+considerable extent the vegetable oils, but modifying them chemically. That
+kind of research was not left to chance or to private individuals. By 1960,
+Unilever had four main laboratories—two in England, one in Holland, and
+one in the U.S.A. These four, together with other smaller research units,
+employed over three thousand people, of whom about one-third were
+qualified scientists and technologists.
+The multiplier effects radiating from Unilever and its colonial
+exploitation can be traced with some accuracy. When palm kernels were
+crushed, the residue formed a cake which was excellent for livestock. One
+byproduct of the soap industry was glycerin, which was utilized in the
+making of explosives. Europeans killed themselves with some of the
+explosives, but some went into peaceful purposes, such as mining,
+quarrying, and construction. Several other products were linked to soap
+through the common base in oils and fats—notably cosmetics, shampoos,
+perfumes, shaving creams, toothpaste, and dyes. As one writer put it, those
+by-products “served to broaden the commercial base on which Unilever
+rested, while making further use of the fund of knowledge already
+possessed by the oils and fats technologist.” Besides, these operations were
+creating hundreds of thousands of additional jobs for European workers.
+The manufacturing of soap and margarine required raw material inputs
+other than oils and fats. Soap-making consumed large quantities of caustic
+soda, so that in 1911 Lever bought land in Cheshire suitable for the
+manufacture of that alkali. Capitalist giants nourished by colonialism and
+imperialism could afford to do things in a big way. When Lever needed
+abrasives, the company bought a limestone mine in Bohemia; and when
+Unilever wanted to assure themselves of supplies of wrapping paper, they
+bought a paper mill.
+Transport was another key problem which stimulated growth at the
+European end. Within a month of buying the Niger Company in 1920,
+Lever was engaged in a project for constructing facilities on the Mersey to
+receive ocean-going ships bringing cargoes from West Africa. The UAC
+was a pioneer in getting ships constructed to carry palm oil in bulk tanks,
+and Van der Bergh considered buying a shipyard to build ships for his
+company some years before the merger. This did not materialize, but
+Unilever did acquire several ships of their own, including vessels fresh from
+the shipyards and made to their specifications.
+
+Another linkage of the Unilever industries was that with retail
+distribution. Their products had to be sold to the housewife, and the Dutch
+firms that went into Unilever decided that they should own grocery stores to
+guarantee sales. By 1922, Jurgens had control of a chain of grocery stores in
+England, appropriately named the “Home and Colonial.” Van der Bergh (at
+the time a rival) was not to be left behind, so he secured majority shares in
+the chain store owned by Lipton of Lipton’s Tea fame. All of these shops
+passed to Unilever. The grocery store business soon ceased being
+considered merely as an outlet for soap and margarine, and became an end
+in itself.
+Sometimes, the multiplier effects do not seem connected. On the surface,
+there was no apparent reason why Lever should set up a huge retail chain
+called Mac Fisheries to sell fish! There is little in common between soap,
+sausages, and ice cream—but Lever bought Walls as a sausage firm and
+later Walls opened an ice cream manufacturing plant. The underlying
+connection is that capital seeks domination. It grows and spreads and seeks
+to get hold of everything in sight. The exploitation of Africa gave European
+monopoly capital full opportunities to indulge in its tendencies for
+expansion and domination.
+Before leaving Unilever, it should be noted in conclusion how a
+company such as that pointed the way towards change in the capitalist
+system. The device of the dual structure of Unilever Ltd. and Unilever N.V.
+was an innovation first utilized when Schicht and Centra of Central Europe
+merged with the Dutch margarine firms of Jurgens and Van der Bergh, and
+it was designed to cut down taxation. Unilever comprised two holding
+companies with the same governing boards and with arrangements to
+transfer and equalize profits. It was a professional company from its
+inception. All of the firms involved in the merger had years of experience in
+organizing staff, production plants, and marketing procedures. Schicht was
+one of the earliest to work out a system of cost accounting and financial
+control. Lever had himself been a pioneer of mass advertising in Europe
+and in the competitive field of the U.S.A. The firm of Unilever inherited
+and perfected the techniques of mass production and advertising so as to
+achieve mass consumption.
+The significance of the organizational changes are best seen on a longterm basis, by comparing Unilever’s sophisticated international
+
+organization with the chartered companies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries which had difficulties managing accounts. The efficient
+accounting and business methods which are supposed to characterize
+capitalist firms did not drop from the sky. They are the result of historical
+evolution, and in that evolution the exploitation of Africa played a key role
+—from the era of the chartered companies right through the colonial period.
+Contributions of Colonialism to Individual Colonizing Powers
+Analysis of the non-monetary benefits of colonialism to the colonizers can
+of course be carried out most readily within the framework of relations
+between each colony and its “mother country,” apart from the framework of
+the individual firm, which has just been discussed in some detail. Using the
+conventional approach of European metropole in relationship to its own
+colonies, one finds a wide range of positive effects, although the benefits
+varied in extent from colony to colony. Portugal was the lowliest of the
+colonizing powers in Africa, and its was nothing in Europe without its
+colonies: so much so that it came to insist that Angola, Mozambique, and
+Guinea were integral parts of Portugal, just like any province of the
+European country named Portugal. France sometimes propounded the same
+doctrine by which Algeria, Martinique, and Vietnam were all supposedly
+“overseas France.”
+Neither Britain nor Belgium put forward any theories of a greater Britain
+or overseas Belgium; but in practice they were as determined as other
+colonial powers to insure that sustenance should flow from colony to
+metropole without hindrance. Few areas of the national life of those
+Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic
+exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960,
+wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public
+buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.”
+In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed
+to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the British
+Museum; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of
+African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things
+which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as
+developed and “civilized.”
+
+Sustenance given by colonies to the colonizers was most obvious and
+very decisive in the case of contributions by soldiers from among the
+colonized. Without colonial troops, there would have been no “British
+forces” fighting on the Asian front in the 1939–45 war, because the ranks of
+the British forces were filled with Indians and other colonials, including
+Africans and West Indians. It is a general characteristic of colonialism that
+the metropole utilized the manpower of the colonies. The Romans had used
+soldiers of one conquered nationality to conquer other nationalities, as well
+as to defend Rome against enemies. Britain applied this to Africa from the
+early nineteenth century, when the West Indian Regiment was sent across
+the Atlantic to protect British interests in the West African coast. The West
+Indian Regiment had black men in the ranks, Irish (colonials) as NCOs, and
+Englishmen as officers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the West
+Indian Regiment also included lots of Sierra Leoneans.
+The most important force in the conquest of West African colonies by
+the British was the West African Frontier Force—the soldiers being
+Africans and the officers English. In 1894, it was joined by the West
+African Regiment, formed to help suppress the so-called Hut Tax War in
+Sierra Leone, which was the expression of widespread resistance against the
+imposition of colonial rule. In East and Central Africa, the King’s African
+Rifles was the unit which tapped African fighting power on behalf of
+Britain. The African regiments supplemented the metropolitan military
+apparatus in several ways. Firstly, they were used as emergency forces to
+put down nationalist uprisings in the various colonies. Secondly, they were
+used to fight other Europeans inside Africa, notably during the First and
+Second World Wars. And thirdly, they were carried to European battlefields or to theatres of war outside Africa.
+African roles in European military operations were vividly displayed by
+the East African campaign during the First World War, when Britain and
+Germany fought for possession of East Africa. At the beginning of the war,
+the Germans had in Tanganyika a regular force of 216 Europeans and 2,540
+African askari. During the war, 3,000 Europeans and 11,000 askari were
+enrolled. On the British side, the main force was the K.A.R., comprising
+mainly East Africans and soldiers from Nyasaland. The battalions of the
+K.A.R. had by November 1918 over 35,000 men, of whom nine out of ten
+were Africans.
+
+Quite early in the East African campaign, the British brought in an
+expeditionary force of Punjabis and Sikhs, as well as regiments of West
+Africans. Some Sudanese and West Indians were also there. At first, a few
+white settlers joined the war, because they thought it was a picnic; but
+within a year the white residents of British East Africa were showing
+extreme reluctance to join local fighting forces. In effect, therefore,
+Africans were fighting Africans to see which European power should rule
+over them. The Germans and the British had only to provide the officers.
+According to the history books, the “British” won the campaign in East
+Africa.
+France was the colonial power that secured the greatest number of
+soldiers from Africa. In 1912, conscription of African soldiers into the
+French army was pursued on a large scale. During the 1914–18 war,
+200,000 soldiers were recruited in French West Africa, through the use of
+methods reminiscent of slave hunting. These “French” soldiers served
+against the Germans in Togo and Cameroon, as well as in Europe itself. On
+the European battlefields, an estimated 25,000 “French” Africans lost their
+lives, and many more returned mutilated, for they were used as cannon
+fodder in the European capitalist war.
+France was so impressed by the military advantages to be gained from
+colonial rule that when a part of Cameroon was mandated to France by the
+League of Nations, France insisted on the privilege of using Cameroon
+African troops for purposes unconnected with the defense of Cameroon.
+Naturally, France also made the maximum use of African troops in the last
+world war. Indeed, Africans saved France after the initial losses when
+France and most of French Africa fell under the Germans and the fascist
+(Vichy) French. In French Equatorial Africa, it was a black man, Felix
+Eboue, who proved loyal to the forces led by General de Gaulle, and who
+mobilized manpower against the French and German fascists. Africa
+provided the base and much of the manpower for launching the
+counterattack which helped General de Gaulle and the Free French to return
+to power in France.
+French use of African troops did not end with the last war. West Africans
+were sent to Madagascar in 1948, and put down nationalist forces in a most
+bloody manner. African troops were also employed to fight the people of
+
+Indochina up to 1954; and, later still, black African troops and Senegalese
+in particular were used against the Algerian liberation movement.
+No comprehensive studies have as yet been devoted to the role of
+Africans in the armies of the colonial powers in a variety of contexts.
+However, the indications are that such studies would reveal a pattern very
+similar to that discovered by historians who have looked at the role of black
+soldiers in the white-controlled armies of the U.S.A.; namely, that there was
+tremendous discrimination against black fighting men, even though black
+soldiers made great and unacknowledged contributions to important
+victories won by the white-officered armies of the U.S.A. and the colonial
+powers. Hints regarding discrimination are to be seen from regulations such
+as that barring African soldiers in the West African Regiment from wearing
+shoes and from the fact that there were actually race riots in the European
+campaigns, just as black troops fighting for the U.S.A. continued to riot
+right up to the Vietnam campaign.
+A number of Africans served as colonial soldiers with pride, because
+they mistakenly hoped that the army would be an avenue for displaying the
+courage and dignity of Africans, and, perhaps, in the process, even earning
+the freedom of the continent, by making Europeans pleased and grateful.
+That hope was without foundation from the outset, because the colonialists
+were viciously using African soldiers as pawns to preserve colonialism and
+capitalism in general. A very striking instance of the above fact was
+provided when John Chilembwe led an African nationalist uprising in
+Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1915. Nyasaland was then a British colony, and
+although the British were fighting the Germans in East Africa at that time,
+they immediately dispatched a column of the K.A.R. to contend against
+Chilembwe. Furthermore, before the K.A.R. arrived, it was a German
+lieutenant who organized the resistance of Nyasa white settlers against
+Chilembwe’s bid for freedom. In the light of that evidence, one writer
+commented:
+While their countrymen in Europe fought the bloodiest war ever known, in Africa Europeans
+were instinctively white men first—and German and British second, [for] John Chilembwe was
+part of something that in the end would swamp all their colonial dreams.
+
+The African continent and the African people were used by the
+colonialists in some curious ways to advance their military strengths and
+
+techniques. By chance, North Africa and the Sahara became available as a
+laboratory for the evolution of techniques of armored warfare in the period
+when Rommel and Montgomery battled for superiority. And, by design,
+Ethiopians were used as guinea pigs, upon whom the Italian fascists
+experimented with poison gas. This followed their brazen invasion in 1935
+of that small portion of Africa which still clung to some form of political
+independence. At that time, the Italians argued that it was absolutely
+essential that the fruits of colonialism be opened to Italy if it were to take
+“its place in the sun.” Significantly enough, both Britain and France had
+already seen so much of the sun and products of Africa that they found it
+difficult to refute Italy’s claims.
+Britain and France ruled over the greater part of colonial Africa and they
+also had the largest empires in other parts of the world. The whole existence
+and development of capitalism in Britain and France between 1885 and
+1960 was bound up with colonization, and Africa played a major role.
+African colonies meant surplus appropriated on a grand scale; they led to
+innovations and forward leaps in technology and the organization of
+capitalist enterprise; and they buttressed the capitalist system at home and
+abroad with fighting men. Sometimes, it appeared that these two principal
+colonial powers reaped so many colonial benefits that they suffered from
+“too much of a good thing.”
+Certainly, in Britain’s case, it can be argued that colonialism allowed
+British industry to lead a soft life, and that, in some decisive spheres of
+production and marketing, Britain grew lazy. Industrial plants installed in
+the nineteenth century were not renovated or replaced, and little dynamism
+was put into selling new lines of goods. In contrast, when deprived of
+colonies after 1918, Germany was forced to live off its own resources and
+ingenuity. Nevertheless, while that is an interesting detail of the whole
+colonial picture, it must be borne in mind that colonialism was one aspect of
+imperialism. Colonialism was based on alien political rule and was
+restricted to some parts of the world. Imperialism, however, underlay all
+colonies, extended all over the world (except where replaced by socialist
+revolutions), and it allowed the participation of all capitalist nations.
+Therefore, lack of colonies on the part of any capitalist nation was not a
+barrier to enjoying the fruits of exploiting the colonial and semi-colonial
+world, which was the backyard of metropolitan capitalism.
+
+Colonialism as a Prop to Metropolitan Economies and Capitalism as a
+System
+The composition of Unilever should serve as a warning that colonialism
+was not simply a matter of ties between a given colony and its mother
+country, but between colonies on the one hand and metropoles on the other.
+The German capital in Unilever joined the British in exploiting Africa and
+the Dutch in exploiting the East Indies. The rewards spread through the
+capitalist system in such a way that even those capitalist nations who were
+not colonial powers were also beneficiaries of the spoils. Unilever factories
+established in Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S.A. were
+participants in the expropriation of Africa’s surplus and in using that surplus
+for their own development.
+Germany always had a stake in colonial Africa, even after 1918 when the
+other capitalist powers deprived Germany of its colonies. German shipping
+revived in the 1920s and played an active role in East, West, and South
+Africa. German financial houses also had contacts with Africa, the most
+direct being the Twentsche Bank in East Africa. Dutch shipping companies
+were involved with the German and British in the West African Conference
+Line, while the Scandinavian shippers were noted for the hiring out of
+“tramp” ships which freighted cargo between Africa and Europe outside of
+the scheduled lines. The old East African Trading Company was supported
+by Danish capital. The Swiss had no colonies in Africa, but they had
+substantial capital in SCOA, they played a key role in imperialist banking,
+and they kept out of the wars fought by other capitalists so that they could
+still continue to trade with both sides and thereby acquire colonial produce.
+Then there was Japan—a capitalist/imperialist power with colonies in Asia
+and with a keen interest in trade with Africa. Japanese capitalists tried to
+undersell their European counterparts, but the trade they conducted with
+Africa was still unequal and disadvantageous to the Africans.
+To fully understand the colonial period, it is necessary to think in terms
+of the economic partition of Africa. Unlike the political partition of the
+nineteenth century, the economic partition had no fixed or visible
+boundaries. It consisted of the proportions in which capitalist powers
+divided up among themselves the monetary and non-monetary gains from
+colonial Africa. For instance, Portugal had two large political colonies in
+
+Southern Africa, but economically Mozambique and Angola were divided
+among several capitalist powers, which were invited by the Portuguese
+government, because Portuguese capitalists were too weak to handle those
+vast territories.
+Congo and South Africa had their own special arrangements of
+economic partition, both of them being valuable territories. At first, Congo
+was designated the “Congo Free State” under King Leopold II of Belgium.
+That meant that it was to have been a free trade zone and an area open to
+investment by capitalists of all nationalities. In practice, Leopold used
+administrative devices to monopolize the wealth of the Congo, and that was
+one of the principal reasons the international capitalist community moved
+against Leopold in 1908. When Belgium took over the administration of the
+Congo, it also insured that most of the surplus and other benefits should
+accrue to Belgium. However, non-Belgian capitalist interests were able to
+penetrate through investment in mining; and, as the colonial period
+advanced, the British, French, and Americans cut bigger pieces of the
+Congo cake.
+For a long while, South Africa was the most important raw material
+reservoir for the whole of imperialism. Britain was the European power
+which had already been entrenched in South Africa for many years when
+gold and diamonds were discovered in the nineteenth century, on the eve of
+the Scramble. Britain had to come to terms with the Boer settlers, whose
+livelihood then came primarily from the land, and whose main interest was
+to see to the exploitation and domination of the African population and
+other groups of non-white immigrants. Therefore, the economic and
+political partition of Africa gave Britain the lion’s share of the mineral
+wealth, while the Boers retained the political power necessary to
+institutionalize white racism. As capitalists of other nationalities entered
+into relations with South Africa through investment and trade, those
+capitalists agreed to strengthen, and did, the racist/fascist social relations of
+South Africa.
+Economic partition and repartition of Africa was going on all the time,
+because the proportions of the spoils that went to different capitalist
+countries kept changing. Special mention must be made of the U.S.A.,
+because its share of the benefits from Africa was constantly increasing
+throughout the colonial period.
+
+As time went on, the U.S.A. got an ever bigger slice of the unequal trade
+between the metropoles and colonial Africa. The share of the U.S.A. in
+Africa’s trade rose from just over 28 million dollars in 1913 to 150 million
+dollars in 1932 and to 1,200 million dollars in 1948, at which figure it
+represented nearly 15 per cent of Africa’s foreign trade. The share of the
+U.S.A. in West Africa’s trade rose from 38 million dollars in 1938 to 163
+million dollars in 1946 and to 517 million dollars by 1954.
+However, it was South Africa which was America’s best trading partner
+in Africa, supplying her with gold, diamonds, manganese, and other
+minerals and buying heavy machinery in turn. Apart from direct U.S.A.South African trade, most of South Africa’s gold was resold in London to
+American buyers, just as most Gold Coast and Nigerian cocoa was resold to
+the U.S.A.
+Intercontinental trade brought out the need for shipping services and
+America did not leave those in the hands of capitalists of other nations.
+James Farrell, President of the United States Steel Export Company,
+acquired a shipping line to Africa because of his “belief in the future of the
+Dark Continent.” Officials of the UAC had said exactly the same thing, and
+it is obvious that, like them, Farrell meant the bright future of metropolitan
+capitalism in exploiting Africa. It is always best when these individuals
+speak for themselves. Vice-Admiral Cochrane of the United States Navy
+was a great admirer of Farrell shipping lines. In 1959, he wrote an
+introduction to a study of Farrell’s operations in Africa, in which he said:
+We read of stiff international competition to assure the supply of strategic materials for our
+current industrial-military economy. Farrell Lines is making American maritime history. It is
+demonstrating clearly and emphatically that ships wearing the flag of a nation do in fact
+stimulate the commerce of that nation . . . demonstrating the value of American-flag ocean
+commerce to the health and wealth of the United States.
+
+United States capitalists did not confine themselves to mere trade with
+Africa, but they also acquired considerable assets within the colonies. It is
+common knowledge that Liberia was an American colony in everything but
+name. The U.S.A. supposedly aided the Liberian government with loans,
+but used the opportunity to take over Liberian customs revenue, to plunder
+thousands of square miles of Liberian land, and generally to dictate to the
+weak government of Liberia. The main investment in Liberia was
+undertaken by Firestone Rubber Company. Firestone made such huge
+
+profits from Liberian rubber that it was the subject of a book sponsored by
+American capitalists to show how well American business flourished
+overseas. Between 1940 and 1965, Firestone took 160 million dollars’
+worth of rubber out of Liberia; while in return the Liberian government
+received 8 million dollars. In earlier years, the percentage of the value that
+went to the Liberian government was much smaller, but, at the best of
+times, the average net profit made by Firestone was three times the Liberian
+revenue.
+And yet the non-monetary benefits to the United States capitalist
+economy were worth far more than the money returns. Vice-Admiral
+Cochrane, in the quotation above, went to the heart of the matter when he
+mentioned strategic raw materials for the functioning of the industrial and
+military machine of the American imperialists. Firestone acquired its
+Liberian plantations precisely because Britain and Holland had been raising
+the price of the rubber which came from their Asian colonies of Malaya and
+the Dutch East Indies, respectively. In Liberia, the United States rubber
+industry obtained a source that was reliable in peace and war—one that was
+cheap and entirely under American control. One of rubber’s most
+immediate connections was with the automobile industry, and so it is not
+surprising that Harvey Firestone was a great friend and business colleague
+of Henry Ford. Liberian rubber turned the town of Akron, Ohio, into a
+powerful rubber tire manufacturing center, and the tires then went over to
+the even bigger automobile works of Ford in Detroit.
+American investment in Africa during the last fifteen years of
+colonialism was in some ways at the expense of the actual colonizing
+powers and yet ultimately it was in the interest of Western European
+capitalism. This paradox is explained by noting that the U.S.A. had become
+the world’s leading capitalist/imperialist power by the outbreak of the
+Second World War. It possessed the colonies of Puerto Rico and the
+Philippines, but much more important were its imperialistic investments
+throughout Latin America and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa.
+America’s foreign investments in the 1930s drew slightly ahead of those of
+Britain, which were a long way ahead of the imperialist outlay of France,
+Germany, and Japan. The 1939–45 war tremendously accelerated the
+changeover in America’s favor.
+
+Europe suffered staggering losses, but no battles were fought on
+American soil, and so its productive capacity expanded. Therefore, after
+1945, American capital moved into Africa, Asia, and Europe itself with new
+aggressiveness and confidence, due to the fact that other capitalist
+competitors were still lying on the ground. In 1949, both British and French
+bankers had no choice but to invite American financiers into the African
+continent, for the French and British had insufficient capital of their own.
+The United States-controlled International Bank for Reconstruction and
+Development became an important vehicle for American influence in
+Africa and one of the tools for the economic repartition of the continent.
+Research by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah revealed that direct private
+investment by Americans in Africa increased between 1945 and 1958 from
+110 million dollars to 789 million dollars, most of its drawn from profits.
+Official estimates of profits made by United States companies from 1946 to
+1959 in Africa are put at 1,234 million dollars. In considering the question
+of economic partition, what is relevant is the rate of growth of United States
+investments and profits compared to those of Britain, France, Belgium. For
+instance, the American investment in 1951 was 313 million dollars, which
+was nearly three times what it was five years earlier, and in the subsequent
+five years the investment went up two and a half times. Meanwhile, British
+and French investment increased much more slowly.
+However, while the U.S.A. was edging out the other colonialists, they all
+stood to gain from the advances made within the North American capitalist
+economy in terms of science, technology, organization, and military power.
+As pointed out earlier, when an African colony contributed to the European
+metallurgical industries or to its electrical industry, that contribution passed
+into other aspects of the society, because the sectors concerned were playing
+leading roles within the capitalist economy. Similarly, the U.S.A. was a
+geographical area that was in the forefront of capitalist development. For
+instance, its technological know-how passed into Western European hands
+by way of a series of legal devices such as patents.
+Furthermore, because the U.S.A. was by then the world’s leading
+capitalist state, it also had to assume active responsibility for maintaining
+the capitalist imperialist structure in all its economic, political, and military
+aspects. After the war, the U.S.A. moved into Western Europe and Japan
+both to establish its own stranglehold and at the same time to give a blood
+
+transfusion to capitalism in those areas. A lot of the blood was definitely
+African. It is not just that America made (relatively) small profits out of
+Africa in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, but
+above all it must be recalled that North America was that part of the
+European capitalist system which had been the most direct beneficiary of
+the massacre of the American Indians and the enslavement of Africans. The
+continued exploitation of African peoples within its own boundaries and in
+the Caribbean and Latin America must also be cited as evidence against
+American monster imperialism. The U.S.A. was a worthy successor to
+Britain as the leading force and policeman of the imperialist/colonialist
+world from 1945 onwards.
+Under the Marshall Plan, by which United States capitalism aided
+Western European capitalism after the last war, it was announced that
+American experts were exploring Africa from end to end for agricultural
+and mineral wealth—especially the latter. Marshall Plan money (through
+the Economic Commission for Africa) went to firms like the Mines de
+Zellidja, which mined lead and zinc in North Africa; and, at the same time,
+the money allowed Americans to buy controlling shares in the company.
+Thus in 1954, Morgan of the U.S.A. shared with Rothschilds of Europe
+most of the net profit of 1,250 million old francs (8.16 million dollars)
+made by the Mines de Zellidja in that year. Similarly, the Belgian
+government received substantial aid from the U.S.A. to implement a tenyear economic program in Congo from 1950 to 1959; and, as the price of
+the aid, United States monopolies established control over some companies
+in Congo. The U.S.A. took second place after Belgium in Congo’s foreign
+trade, and United States capitalists had to be granted a range of privileges.
+So the paradox continued, whereby United States capitalists intruded and
+elbowed out French, British, and Belgian capitalists in colonial Africa,
+while providing the funds without which the Western European nations
+could not have revived and could not have increased their exploitation of
+Africa—which is what they did in the period of 1945–60.
+Over the last few decades of colonialism, colonial possessions served
+capitalism as a safety valve in times of crisis. The first major occasion when
+this was displayed was during the great economic depression of 1929–34.
+During that period, forced labor was increased in Africa and the prices paid
+to Africans for their crops were reduced. Workers were paid less and
+
+imported goods cost a great deal more. That was a time when workers in the
+metropolitan countries also suffered terribly; but the colonialists did the best
+they could to transfer the burdens of the depression away from Europe and
+on to the colonies.
+The great economic depression did not affect the Soviet Union, where
+socialism caused great development; but the slump spread from one end of
+the capitalist system to the other. It was a product of the irrationality of the
+capitalist mode of production. The search for profits caused production to
+run ahead of people’s capacity to purchase, and ultimately both production
+and employment had to be drastically reduced. Africans had nothing to do
+with the inherent shortcomings of capitalism; but, when Europeans were in
+a mess, they had no scruples about intensifying the exploitation of Africa.
+The economic depression was not a situation from which Britain could
+benefit at the expense of Sweden or where Belgium could gain at the
+expense of the U.S.A. They were all drowning, and that was why the
+benefits of the colonies saved not only the colonizing powers but all
+capitalist nations.
+The second major occasion on which the colonies had to bail out the
+metropoles was during the last world war. As noted earlier, the African
+people were required to make huge sacrifices and to supply vital raw
+materials at little cost to the metropoles. Africa’s military importance was
+also decisive. Not only did Africans fight and die on various battlefields of
+the war, but the continent held a key strategic position. In November 1942,
+a third front was opened in Africa (following the European and Asian
+fronts), and that front was the means to final victory.
+Accidents of geography meant that Africa controlled communications in
+the Mediterranean and in the South Atlantic, and it commanded the two
+western entrances into the Indian Ocean. As one military analyst put it,
+“The side that held Africa was on the way to final victory.” With the aid of
+African fighting men and resources, the major colonial powers maintained
+control of the continent in the face of attacks by the Italians, who had only
+Libya, Somaliland, and (briefly) Ethiopia. The Germans of course by then
+had no colonies in Africa, and they had to use what was offered by the
+Italians and fascist Vichy Frenchmen.
+Unlike the First World War, the Second World War was not simply one
+between capitalist powers. The aggressor states of Italy, Germany, and
+
+Japan were fascist. The governments of Portugal, Spain, and South Africa
+also subscribed to that ideology, although for opportunist reasons both the
+Portuguese and the South African Boers found it more convenient to be
+allied with Britain, France, the U.S.A., and the other bourgeois
+democracies.
+Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist
+tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it
+safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism
+immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by
+capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against
+African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of
+South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois
+democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law,
+parliaments; and it also extolls authoritarianism and the reactionary union of
+the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic church
+—in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed church.
+Like its progenitor, capitalism, fascism is totally opposed to socialism.
+Fascist Germany and Italy attacked both the other capitalist states and the
+Soviet Union, which was still the only socialist state in the world by 1939.
+The defeat of fascism was therefore a victory for socialism, and at the same
+time it preserved the other capitalist nations from having to take the
+historically retrograde step of fascism.
+When the last world war ended, Africa’s further role was to help Europe
+reconstruct. In that crisis, the U.S.A. played a major part, as has just been
+mentioned; but the colonizing nations also had direct recourse to their
+colonies, in spite of shortage of capital. It is noteworthy that European
+capitalism from the late 1940s onwards recognized Africa’s potential as a
+savior of their own war-torn economies, and they openly made statements
+to that effect.
+It was in 1946 that the Ministry of Colonies in the French cabinet was
+renamed the Ministry of Overseas France and that colonized Africans were
+euphemistically called “overseas Frenchmen.” About that time, a statement
+from the French Ministry of Education frankly admitted that:
+France would be only a little state of Europe without the seventy-five million overseas
+Frenchmen whose young force has revealed itself to the world in such a remarkable manner
+[referring to Africa’s role in the war].
+
+Shortly afterwards, when France prepared its Four Year Plan for 1949–52,
+statements such as the following were to be encountered:
+Morocco will take an active part in the recovery of France by supplying manganese, cobalt and
+lead ore, canned goods and agricultural produce.
+
+At the end of the last war, both Britain and France set up agencies for the
+“development” of their colonies. In the British sphere, this was known as
+the Colonial Development and Welfare (CD&W), while the French fund
+was known as FIDES. Their principal function was to provide loans, the
+purpose of which was to help the colonies to help the metropoles. In other
+words, the crisis of postwar reconstruction required that even greater effort
+should be made to maximize the resources of colonies.
+It was no ordinary postwar crisis which Western Europe faced in the
+1940s and 1950s. The bourgeoisie had to rebuild capitalist states at a time
+when socialism had already proved itself in the Soviet Union, and in a
+period when the Red Army of the Soviets had aided groups of socialists to
+come to power in Eastern Europe. This was the greatest challenge ever to be
+faced by the bourgeoisie because (unlike fascism) socialism threatened the
+basic capitalist principle of private ownership of the means of production.
+Furthermore, socialist principles were making their presence felt even in
+remote corners of the colonies, and the capitalists realized the necessity for
+cutting the colonies off from socialist thought, as well as using colonial
+resources to stave off what they termed “the threat of communism.”
+In the capitalist struggle to keep off the challenge of socialism as a
+competing mode of production and way of life, Africa played at least two
+key roles—one being to provide bases for the capitalist militarists, and the
+other being to provide a wide range of raw materials essential for modern
+armament industries. The most vital of these raw materials were uranium
+and other radioactive substances for atomic and later nuclear weapons,
+including the hydrogen bomb. Almost rivaling uranium in importance were
+certain rare minerals (like lithium from Rhodesia) needed for the special
+steels that went into new aircraft rockets, tanks, guns, and bombs.
+Colonial powers already had small military establishments in each
+colony, and right up to the end of the colonial era, it was considered
+necessary to strengthen those. For instance, in the 1955 French budget there
+was a special vote of six billion francs (16.8 million dollars) for the
+
+improvement of military installations in the colonies, and notably for
+strategic bases in Dakar and Djibouti. Some time previously, the Belgians
+had completed a huge air base near Kamina in the Congo.
+Adding to the regular bases in long-established colonies, the imperialist
+powers were able to set up military installations in African territories which
+fell into their hands during the war. In this context, the U.S.A. was
+particularly important, because it was already the principal buttress of the
+capitalist defense system in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty
+Organization (NATO). Thus, after helping to recapture North Africa from
+the fascists, the United States was able to build major air-force bases in
+Morocco and Libya. In Italian Eritrea, the Americans stepped in with
+modern radar stations; and Ethiopia conceded military bases.
+Though nominally independent, Liberia had little option but to accept a
+massive military presence of Americans, as a logical consequence of
+America’s economic exploitation and domination of Liberia. When the
+U.S.A. agreed to build a port at Monrovia in 1943, they also obtained the
+concession that the U.S.A. was to have “the right to establish, use, maintain
+and control such naval, air and military facilities and installations at the site
+of the port, and in the general vicinity thereof, as may be desired for the
+protection of the strategic interests of the U.S.A. in the South Atlantic.”
+Throughout the war, Liberia’s Robertsfield airfield had been of considerable
+value to the U.S.A. and later on it continued to have a military utility. To tie
+matters up further, the U.S.A. entered into what it called a military
+assistance pact with Liberia in 1951.
+Needless to say, in the 1950s when most Africans were still colonial
+subjects, they had absolutely no control over the utilization of their soil for
+militaristic ends. Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a
+sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union.
+There could easily have developed a nuclear war without African peoples
+having any knowledge of the matter. The colonial powers actually held
+military conferences in African cities like Dakar and Nairobi in the early
+1950s, inviting the whites of South Africa and Rhodesia and the
+government of the U.S.A. Time and time again, the evidence points to this
+cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and
+therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation.
+
+Apart from saving capitalism in times of crisis, the dependencies had
+always been prolonging the life of capitalism by taking the edge off the
+internal contradictions and conflicts which were a part of the capitalist
+system. The principal contradiction within capitalism from the outset was
+that between the capitalists and the workers. To keep their system going, the
+capitalists had constantly to step up the rate of exploitation of their workers.
+At the same time, European workers were gaining increasing mastery over
+the means of production in the factories and mines, and they were learning
+to work collectively in big enterprises and within their own trade union
+structures. If the bourgeoisie continued to deprive them of the major part of
+the fruits of their own labor and to oppress them socially and politically,
+then those two classes were set on a collision path. Ever since the midnineteenth century, Marx had predicted class collision would come in the
+form of revolution in which workers would emerge victorious. The
+capitalists were terribly afraid of that possibility, knowing full well that they
+themselves had seized power from the feudal landlord class by means of
+revolution. However, imperialism introduced a new factor into this situation
+—one that deferred the confrontation between workers and capitalists in the
+metropoles.
+Only in Russia was there a workers’ revolution, and Russia was on the
+fringe of Europe rather than being one of its metropolitan capitalist centers.
+That very fact highlighted how much capitalism in places like Britain,
+France, and Germany had been stabilized by exploiting the colonies and
+other semi-colonies such as Latin America, where states were independent
+in name only.
+Surplus from Africa was partly used to offer a few more benefits to
+European workers and served as a bribe to make the latter less
+revolutionary. The bribe came in the form of increased wages, better
+working conditions, and expanded social services. The benefits of
+colonialism were diffused throughout European society in many ways. Most
+capitalist enterprises offered consumer goods which were mass produced at
+low prices, and therefore the European housewife got some relief. For
+instance, instant coffee brought that beverage within the reach of the
+ordinary worker. Meanwhile, the capitalist still made his fortune by insuring
+that the Ivory Coast or Colombian grower got no price increase. In that way,
+
+colonialism was serving all classes and sectors of Western Europe and other
+capitalist metropoles.
+European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits
+which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table. The class in
+power controls the dissemination of information. The capitalists
+misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where
+they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep,
+European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the
+capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves
+with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counterbalanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and
+allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to
+exercise any independent judgment on the great issues of war and peace,
+and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also
+themselves.
+Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the
+end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination,
+and racism—mainly exercised outside Europe. It is highly significant that
+many settlers and colonial officials displayed a leaning towards fascism.
+Apartheid in South Africa is nothing but fascism. It was gaining roots from
+the early period of white colonization in the seventeenth century, and
+particularly after the mining industry brought South Africa fully into the
+capitalist orbit in the nineteenth century. Another example of the fascist
+potential of colonialism was seen when France was overrun by Nazi
+Germany in 1940. The French fascists collaborated with Hitler to establish
+what was called the Vichy regime in France, and the French white settlers in
+Africa supported the Vichy regime. A more striking instance to the same
+effect was the fascist ideology developed by the white settlers in Algeria,
+who not only opposed independence for Algeria under Algerian rule, but
+they also strove to bring down the more progressive or liberal governments
+of metropolitan France.
+Inside Europe itself, some specific and highly revealing connections can
+be found between colonialist behavior and the destruction of the few
+contributions made by capitalism to human development. For instance,
+when Colonel Von Lettow returned from leading the German forces in East
+Africa in World War I, he was promoted to a general in the German army,
+
+and Von Lettow was in command of the massacre of German communists in
+Hamburg in 1918. That was a decisive turning point in German history, for
+once the most progressive workers had been crushed, the path was clear for
+the fascist deformation of the future. In brutally suppressing the Maji Maji
+War in Tanganyika and in attempting genocide against the Herero people of
+Namibia (South-West Africa), the German ruling class were getting the
+experience which they later applied against the Jews and against German
+workers and progressives.
+When the fascist dictatorship was inaugurated in Portugal in 1926, it
+drew inspiration from Portugal’s colonial past. After Salazar became the
+dictator in 1932, he stated that his “New State” in Portugal would be based
+on the labor of the “inferior peoples,” meaning of course Africans. In
+addition, Portuguese peasants and workers had to submit to police terror,
+poverty, and dehumanization, so they paid (and are still paying) a high price
+for fascism at home and colonialism abroad.
+Colonialism strengthened the Western European ruling class and
+capitalism as a whole. Particularly in its later phases, it was evidently giving
+a new lease of life to a mode of production that was otherwise dying. From
+every viewpoint other than that of the minority class of capitalists,
+colonialism was a monstrous institution holding back the liberation of man.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+Here again, few scholars have treated capitalism and imperialism as an
+integral system involving the transfer of surplus and other benefits from
+colonies to metropoles. And, where there is an awareness of the unity of the
+system, no detailed analysis necessarily follows. In effect, one is faced with
+the limitations of a metropolitan viewpoint. Thus, European or white
+American Marxists who expose the rapacious nature of modern capitalism
+within their own countries have not generally integrated this with the
+exploitation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—except for the very recent
+neo-colonial period.
+GEORGE PADMORE, Africa: How Britain Rules Africa. London: Wishart Books Ltd., 1936.
+KWAME NKRUMAH, Africa Must Unite. New York: International Publishers, 1970.
+_______ Neo-colonialism, the Highest Stage of Imperialism.
+W. A. HUNTON, Decision in Africa. New York: International Publishers, 1957.
+
+The most vociferous remarks about Africa’s contribution to Europe have been made by politically
+involved Pan-African intellectuals, such as these three.
+GROVER CLARK, The Balance Sheets of Colonialism. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.
+D. K. FIELDHOUSE, The Colonial Empires. New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.
+These two texts proclaim that colonialism was not essentially economic, and that the colonizers
+did not gain. The second book is recent, and the view is still very much alive.
+U.S.S.R. Institute of History, A History of Africa 1918–1967.
+PIERRE JALÉE, The Pillage of the Third World. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
+These (Marxist) texts specifically about Africa and the exploited sector of the capitalist world do
+make the point that the metropoles were extracting huge colonial surpluses.
+
+*
+
+As is well known, those conditions still operate. However, this chapter presents matters in the
+past tense to picture the colonial epoch.
+*
+These facts came most dramatically to the attention of the outside world when Africans resorted
+to violence. For example, forced cultivation of cotton was a major grievance behind the outbreak of
+Maji Maji wars in Tanganyika and behind the nationalist revolt in Angola as late as 1960.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+VI
+Colonialism as a System For Underdeveloping Africa
+• The Supposed Benefits of Colonialism to Africa • Negative Character of
+the Social, Political, and Economic Consequences • Education for
+Underdevelopment • Development by Contradiction
+
+THE BLACK MAN CERTAINLY HAS TO PAY DEAR FOR CARRYING THE WHITE man’s burden.
+—GEORGE PADMORE
+(West Indian) Pan-Africanist, 1936
+In the colonial society, education is such that it serves the colonialist. . . . In a regime of
+slavery, education was but one institution for forming slaves.
+—Statement of FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front)
+Department of Education and Culture, 1968
+
+The Supposed Benefits of Colonialism to Africa
+Socio-Economic Services
+Faced with the evidence of European exploitation of Africa, many
+bourgeois writers would concede at least partially that colonialism was a
+system which functioned well in the interests of the metropoles. However,
+they would then urge that another issue to be resolved is how much
+Europeans did for Africans, and that it is necessary to draw up a balance
+sheet of colonialism. On that balance sheet, they place both the credits and
+the debits, and quite often conclude that the good outweighed the bad. That
+particular conclusion can quite easily be challenged, but attention should
+also be drawn to the fact that the process of reasoning is itself misleading.
+The reasoning has some sentimental persuasiveness. It appeals to the
+common sentiment that “after all there must be two sides to a thing.” The
+argument suggests that, on the one hand, there was exploitation and
+oppression, but, on the other hand, colonial governments did much for the
+benefit of Africans and they developed Africa. It is our contention that this
+is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand—it was a one-armed
+bandit.
+What did colonial governments do in the interest of Africans?
+Supposedly, they built railroads, schools, hospitals, and the like. The sum
+total of these services was amazingly small.
+For the first three decades of colonialism, hardly anything was done that
+could remotely be termed a service to the African people. It was in fact only
+after the last war that social services were built as a matter of policy. How
+little they amounted to does not really need illustrating. After all, the
+
+statistics which show that Africa today is underdeveloped are the statistics
+representing the state of affairs at the end of colonialism. For that matter,
+the figures at the end of the first decade of African independence in spheres
+such as health, housing, and education are often several times higher than
+the figures inherited by the newly independent governments. It would be an
+act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the paltry social amenities provided
+during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the
+conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.
+Capitalism did bring social services to European workers—firstly, as a
+by-product of providing such services for the bourgeoisie and the middle
+class, and later as a deliberate act of policy. Nothing remotely comparable
+occurred in Africa. In 1934, long before the coming of the welfare state to
+Britain, expenditure for social services in the British Isles amounted to 6
+pounds 15 shillings per person. In Ghana, the figure was 7 shillings 4 pence
+per person, and that was high by colonial standards. In Nigeria and Nyasaland, it was less than 1 shilling 9 pence per head. None of the other
+colonizing powers were doing any better, and some much worse.
+The Portuguese stand out because they boasted the most and did the
+least. Portugal boasted that Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique have been
+their possessions for five hundred years, during which time a “civilizing
+mission” has been going on. At the end of five hundred years of shouldering
+the white man’s burden of civilizing “African natives,” the Portuguese had
+not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life
+expectancy in eastern Angola was less than thirty years. As for GuineaBissau, some insight into the situation there is provided by the admission of
+the Portuguese themselves that Guinea-Bissau was more neglected than
+Angola and Mozambique!
+Furthermore, the limited social services within Africa during colonial
+times were distributed in a manner that reflected the pattern of domination
+and exploitation. First of all, white settlers and expatriates wanted the
+standards of the bourgeoisie or professional classes of the metropoles. They
+were all the more determined to have luxuries in Africa, because so many of
+them came from poverty in Europe and could not expect good services in
+their own homelands. In colonies like Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa, it
+is well known that whites created an infrastructure to afford themselves
+leisured and enjoyable lives. It means, therefore, that the total amenities
+
+provided in any of those colonies is no guide to what Africans got out of
+colonialism.
+In Algeria, the figure for infant mortality was 39 per 1,000 live births
+among white settlers; but it jumped to 170 per 1,000 live births in the case
+of Algerians living in the towns. In practical terms, that meant that the
+medical, maternity, and sanitation services were all geared towards the wellbeing of the settlers. Similarly, in South Africa, all social statistics have to
+be broken down into at least two groups—white and black—if they are to
+be interpreted correctly. In British East Africa there were three groups:
+firstly, the Europeans, who got the most; then, the Indians, who took most
+of what was left; and thirdly, the Africans, who came last in their own
+country.
+In predominantly black countries, it was also true that the bulk of the
+social services went to whites. The southern part of Nigeria was one of the
+colonial areas that was supposed to have received the most from a
+benevolent mother country. Ibadan, one of the most heavily populated cities
+in Africa, had only about 50 Europeans before the last war. For those
+chosen few, the British colonial government maintained a segregated
+hospital service of 11 beds in well-furnished surroundings. There were 34
+beds for the half-million blacks. The situation was repeated in other areas,
+so that altogether the 4,000 Europeans in the country in the 1930s had 12
+modern hospitals, while the African population of at least 40 million had 52
+hospitals.
+The viciousness of the colonial system with respect to the provision of
+social services was most dramatically brought out in the case of economic
+activities which made huge profits, and notably in the mining industry.
+Mining takes serious toll of the health of workers, and it was only recently
+in the metropoles that miners have had access to the kind of medical and
+insurance services which could safeguard their lives and health. In colonial
+Africa, the exploitation of miners was entirely without responsibility. In
+1930, scurvy and other epidemics broke out in the Lupa gold-fields of
+Tanganyika. Hundreds of workers died. One should not wonder that they
+had no facilities which would have saved some lives, because in the first
+place they were not being paid enough to eat properly.
+South Africa’s large working class African population was in a sad state.
+The Tuberculosis Commission of 1912 reported that in the shanty towns,
+
+Scarcely a single family exists in which at least one member is not suffering or dying from
+tuberculosis. Hospital services are so inadequate that incurable tuberculosis and other cases are
+simply sent home to die—and spread the infection. In some areas, a single doctor has to attend
+to the needs of 40,000 people. The natives must pay for medical treatment. There is no
+provision for pauper patients. About 65% of the native children die before reaching two years.
+
+That was as early as 1912, when the basis of the South African gold and
+diamond empire was already laid. After this, the shanty towns increased, the
+slum conditions grew worse, and the government committed itself to
+pursuing the odious policy of apartheid, which meant separation of the races
+so as better to exploit the African people.
+Many Africans trekked to towns, because (bad as they were) they offered
+a little more than the countryside. Modern sanitation, electricity, piped
+water, paved roads, medical services, and schools were as foreign at the end
+of the colonal period as they were in the beginning—as far as most of rural
+Africa was concerned. Yet, it was the countryside that grew the cash crops
+and provided the labor that kept the system going. The peasants there knew
+very little of the supposed “credits” on the colonial balance sheet.
+Because even the scanty social services were meant only to facilitate
+exploitation, they were not given to any Africans whose labor was not
+directly producing surplus for export to the metropoles. That is to say, none
+of the wealth of exploited Africans could be deployed for the assistance of
+their brothers outside the money economy.
+Multiple examples exist to substantiate the above proposition. The most
+“wealthy” colonies received greater social services under colonialism. Thus,
+The Rand in South Africa and Katanga in Congo had to provide for their
+relatively large working class. For many years, they approached the whole
+matter indifferently, but in the final analysis, enlightened self-interest made
+the colonialists realize that more could be gained out of the African worker
+who maintained basic health and who had some degree of literacy in
+industrial contexts. This was the same line of reasoning which had
+previously led the capitalist class in Europe to be somewhat freer in
+allowing part of the workers’ production to go back to keeping the worker
+alive and well.
+In the cash-crop producing countries of Africa, a similar situation existed
+whereby the tendency was for socio-economic services to decrease in
+colonies or areas which produced few goods to be shipped abroad. That
+
+accounts for the fact that Africans in Gold Coast, Uganda, and Nigeria
+could be considered as having been “better off” than those in Dahomey,
+Tanganyika, and Chad.
+Within individual countries, considerable regional variations existed,
+depending on the degree to which different parts of a country were
+integrated into the capitalist money economy. Thus, the northern part of
+Kenya or the south of Sudan had little to offer the colonialists, and such a
+zone was simply ignored by the colonizing power with regard to roads,
+schools, hospitals, and so on. Often, at the level of the district of a given
+colony, there would be discrimination in providing social amenities, on the
+basis of contribution to exportable surplus. For instance, plantations and
+companies might build hospitals for their workers, because some minimum
+maintenance of the workers’ health was an economic investment. Usually,
+such a hospital was exclusively for workers of that particular capitalist
+concern, and those Africans living in the vicinity under subsistence
+conditions outside the money economy were ignored altogether.
+The Arusha Declaration powerfully and simply expressed one of the
+deepest truths of the colonial experience in Africa when it stated: “We have
+been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal, and we
+have been disregarded a great deal.”
+The combination of being oppressed, being exploited, and being
+disregarded is best illustrated by the pattern of the economic infrastructure
+of African colonies: notably, their roads and railways. These had a clear
+geographical distribution according to the extent to which particular regions
+needed to be opened up to import-export activities. Where exports were not
+available, roads and railways had no place. The only slight exception is that
+certain roads and railways were built to move troops and make conquest
+and oppression easier.
+Means of communication were not constructed in the colonial period so
+that Africans could visit their friends. More important still, they were not
+laid down to facilitate internal trade in African commodities. There were no
+roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in
+a manner that made sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development.
+All roads and railways led down to the sea. They were built to extract gold
+or manganese or coffee or cotton. They were built to make business
+possible for the timber companies, trading companies, and agricultural
+
+concession firms, and for white settlers. Any catering to African interests
+was purely coincidental. Yet in Africa, labor, rather than capital, took the
+lion’s share in getting things done. With the minimum investment of capital,
+the colonial powers could mobilize thousands upon thousands of workers.
+Salaries were paid to the police officers and officials, and labor came into
+existence because of the colonial laws, the threat of force, and the use of
+force. Take, for instance, the building of railways. In Europe and America,
+railway building required huge inputs of capital. Great wage bills were
+incurred during construction, and added bonus payments were made to
+workers to get the job done as quickly as possible. In most parts of Africa,
+the Europeans who wanted to see a railroad built offered lashes as the
+ordinary wage and more lashes for extra effort.
+Reference was earlier made to the great cost in African life of the
+(French) Congo railroad from Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire. Most of the
+intolerable conditions are explained by the non-availability of capital in the
+form of equipment. Therefore, sheer manpower had to take the place of
+earth-moving machinery, cranes, and so on. A comparable situation was
+provided by the construction of the Embakasi airport of Nairobi. Because it
+was built during the colonial era (starting in 1953) and with United States
+loans, it is customary to credit the imperialists for its existence. But it would
+be much more accurate to say that the people of Kenya built it with their
+own hands under European supervision.
+Embakasi, which initially covered seven square miles and had four
+runways, was described as “the world’s first handmade international
+airport.” Mau Mau suspects numbering several thousand were to be found
+there “laboring under armed guard at a million-ton excavation job, filling in
+craters, laying a half million tons of stone with nothing but shovels, stone
+hammers and their bare hands.”
+The financial institutions of colonial Africa were even more
+scandalously neglectful of indigenous African interests than was the case
+with the European-oriented communications system. The banks did very
+little lending locally. In British East Africa, credit to Africans was
+specifically discouraged by the Credit to Natives (Restriction) Ordinance of
+1931. Insurance companies catered almost exclusively to the interests of
+white settlers and capitalist firms. The policy of colonial reserves in
+metropolitan currencies can also be cited as a “service” inimical to
+
+Africans. The Currency Boards and central banks which performed such
+services denied Africa access to its own funds created by exports. Instead,
+the colonial reserves in Britain, France, and Belgium represented African
+loans to and capital investment in Europe.
+It is necessary to re-evaluate the much glorified notion of “European
+capital” as having been invested in colonial Africa and Asia. The money
+available for investment in the capitalist system was itself the consequence
+of the previous robbery of workers and peasants in Europe and the world at
+large. In Africa’s case, the capital that was invested in nineteenth-century
+commerce was part of the capital that had been derived from the trade in
+slaves. The Portuguese government was the first in Europe to ship captives
+from Africa and the last to let go of slave trading. Much of the profit slipped
+out of Portuguese hands, and went instead to Britain and Germany; but the
+Portuguese slave trade nevertheless helped the Portuguese themselves to
+finance later colonial ventures, such as joint capitalist participation in
+agricultural and mining companies in Angola and Mozambique.
+As indicated earlier, many of the entrepreneurs from the big European
+port towns who turned to importing African agricultural produce into
+Europe were formerly carrying on the trade in slaves. The same can be said
+of many New England firms in the United States. Some of the biggest
+“names” in the colonial epoch were capitalist concerns whose original
+capital came from the trade in slaves or from slavery itself. Lloyds, the
+great insurance underwriting and banking house, falls into this category,
+having been nourished by profits from the slave territories of the West
+Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the ubiquitous
+Barclays Bank had its antecedents in slave trading. Worms et Compagnie is
+a French example of the same phenomenon. Back in the eighteenth century,
+Worms had strong links with the French slave trade, and it grew to become
+one of the most powerful financial houses dealing with the French empire in
+Africa and Asia, with particular concentration on Madagascar and the
+Indian Ocean.
+The example of Unilever and the UAC which was highlighted in the
+previous chapter also reinforces the point that Africa was being exploited
+by capital produced out of African labor. When Lever Brothers took over
+the Niger Company in 1929, they became heirs to one of the most notorious
+exploiters of nineteenth-century Africa. The Niger Company was a
+
+chartered company with full governmental and police powers during the
+years 1885 to 1897. In that period, the company exploited Nigerians
+ruthlessly. Furthermore, the Niger Company was itself a monopoly that had
+bought up smaller firms tracing their capital directly to slave trading.
+Similarly, when the UAC was born out of the merger with the Eastern and
+African Trading Company, it was associated with some more capital that
+grew from a family tree rooted in the European slave trade. The capital at
+the disposal of the big French trading firms CFAO and SCOA can also be
+traced in the same way.
+The process of capital accumulation and reproduction in East Africa
+lacks the continuity of West Africa. Firstly, Arabs as well as Europeans
+were participants in the slave trade from East Africa. Secondly, the
+Germans intervened in 1885, although they had not been previously
+involved; while the French (who had led the European slave trade in East
+Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) concentrated on
+colonizing the Indian Ocean islands rather than the East African mainland.
+Thirdly, German colonialism did not last beyond the 1914–18 war. Even so,
+on the British side, the capital and profits of the colonizing East Africa
+Company reappeared in the trading firm of Smith Mackenzie.
+The capital that was invested in colonial Africa in later years was a
+continuation of the nineteenth century, along with new influxes from the
+métropoles. If one inquired closely into the origins of the supposedly new
+sources, quite a few would have been connected very closely to previous
+exploitation of non-European peoples. However, it is not necessary to prove
+that every firm trading in Africa had a firsthand or secondhand connection
+with the European slave trade and with earlier exploitation of the continent.
+It is enough to remember that Europe’s greatest source of primary capital
+accumulation was overseas, and that the profits from African ventures
+continually outran the capital invested in the colonies.
+A conservative bourgeois writer on colonial Africa made the following
+remarks about the South African gold and diamond industries:
+Apart from the original capital subscribed [in the diamond industry], all capital expenditure
+was provided for out of profits. The industry also yielded large profits to the international firms
+which dealt in diamonds. These had a peculiar importance, because a considerable portion of
+the wealth accumulated by diamond firms was later used in the development of the [gold
+industry] of the Rand.
+
+Similarly, in Angola the Diamang diamond company was an investment
+that quickly paid for itself, and was then producing capital. The combined
+profits of that company for the years 1954 and 1955 alone came to the total
+of invested capital plus 40 per cent. The excess over investment and
+maintenance costs was of course expatriated to Portugal, Belgium, and the
+U.S.A., where the shareholders of Diamang were resident; and Angola was
+thereby investing in those countries.
+In this sense, the colonies were the generators of the capital rather than
+the countries into which foreign capital was plowed.
+Capital was constantly in motion from métropole to some part of the
+dependencies, from colonies to other colonies (via the métropoles), from
+one métropole to another, and from colony to métropole. But because of the
+superprofits created by non-European peoples ever since slavery, the net
+flow was from colony to métropole. What was called “profits” in one year
+came back as “capital” the next. Even progressive writers have created a
+wrong impression by speaking about capital “exports” from Europe to
+Africa and about the role of “foreign” capital. What was foreign about the
+capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.
+Apologists for colonialism are quick to say that the money for schools,
+hospitals, and such services in Africa was provided by the British, French,
+or Belgian taxpayer, as the case may have been. It defies logic to admit that
+profits from a given colony in a given year totaled several million dollars
+and to affirm nevertheless that the few thousand dollars allocated to social
+services in that colony was the money of European tax-payers! The true
+situation can accurately be presented in the following terms: African
+workers and peasants produced for European capitalism goods and services
+of a certain value. A small proportion of the fruits of their efforts was
+retained by them in the form of wages, cash payments, and extremely
+limited social services, such as were essential to the maintenance of
+colonialism. The rest went to the various beneficiaries of the colonial
+system.
+There can be little dispute over the credibility of the data which are
+available to amply demonstrate that colonialism for the most part aimed at
+developing the métropoles, and only allowed certain crumbs to the colonies
+as incidental by-products of exploitation. British colonial records are full of
+reports of Royal Commissions investigating this and that; the reports (upon
+
+which action was seldom taken) provided the best evidence of the appalling
+indifference of the colonial regimes to the needs of Africans. In the 1930s,
+there were riots throughout the West Indies because of the insupportable
+suffering of the African descendants who were left stranded in those parts
+after slavery. The Royal Commission investigating the grievances found
+them so shocking that the full findings were not published during the war,
+lest they reveal that colonialism was hardly any better than the fascism
+against which Britain was fighting. It was out of that investigation that the
+idea of establishing Colonial Development and Welfare (CD&W) was
+advanced. An act to that effect was passed in 1940, although it was not until
+1944 that funds became available for CD&W loans to colonial
+administrations.
+The French also had their counterpart to CD&W in the form of FIDES,
+set up in 1946. From the earliest days of colonial expansion, there were two
+kinds of explanations of motives coming out of the métropoles. One was
+very frank, and appealed to the various Chambers of Commerce in
+European towns. It said simply that Europeans were in the colonial game
+because it was damned profitable, and that was that. However, there were
+other elements who thought it necessary to peddle a line about the welfare
+of the “uncivilized natives.” This was a continuation of earlier justifications
+of slavery on the ground that it carried the heathen Africans to Christian
+lands. As colonialism came under heavy criticism during the last decades,
+more deliberate efforts were made to whitewash it. Both CD&W and
+FIDES were part of the public relations propaganda of colonialism, striving
+to mask and deny its viciousness.
+Above all, both FIDES and CD&W were born of postwar conditions in
+Europe, at the time when Western European capitalist nations were
+desperately falling back on colonies to save them vis-à-vis socialism and
+even from the competition of the U.S.A. Mr. Bevin, a noted labor leader
+turned traitor to his class and spokesman for British capitalism, made the
+observation that “the other two world Powers, the United States and Soviet
+Russia, have tremendous resources. If Western Europe is to achieve its
+balance of payments and to get a world equilibrium, it is essential that
+[African] resources should be developed, and made available.” Any close
+study of the operations of CD&W and FIDES reveals clearly that they had
+
+nothing to do with African development but a great deal to do with the
+welfare of capitalist Europe.
+The so-called development funds for Africa went almost exclusively into
+the building of economic infrastructures and into the provision of certain
+social services. Of the CD&W grants between 1946 and 1956, less than 1
+per cent was allocated to industries. In the case of FIDES from 1949 to
+1953, the corresponding figure was less than 0.5 per cent. Agriculture fared
+very little better, although that was of course the principal activity in which
+Africans were engaged. The colonial administration of Nigeria set up a Ten
+Year Plan, with hopes of borrowing heavily from CD&W funds. In that
+plan, the sum of 1.824 million pounds was voted for agriculture out of a
+total of 53 million pounds. Most of that agricultural grant was to be
+consumed by constructing an agricultural school and for providing salaries
+for British “experts.”
+Other British colonies drew up Ten Year Plans, which had the same
+deficiencies as the Nigerian one, and indeed they were all apologies for the
+true economic plans, being nothing else but a series of disjointed projects
+drawn up by different government departments as extensions to their then
+existing activities. Thus, the plans could not be expected to break any new
+ground; and they completely ignored developmental features such as
+stimulating internal and intra-African trade.
+The high proportion of the “development” funds went into the colonies
+in the form of loans for ports, railways, electric power plants, water works,
+engineering workshops, warehouses, which were necessary for more
+efficient exploitation in the long run. In the short run, such construction
+works provided outlets for European steel, concrete, electrical machinery,
+and railroad rolling stock. One-fifth of FIDES funds were spent on
+prestigious public works in Dakar, which suited French industry and
+employed large numbers of expatriates. Even the schools built under FIDES
+funds were of unnecessary high cost per unit, because they had to be of the
+requisite standard to provide job outlets for white expatriates. Incidentally,
+loans were “tied” in such a way that the money had to be spent on buying
+materials manufactured in the relevant metropole.
+The “development” funds were raised on the European money market by
+the governments concerned, and in effect the national metropolitan
+governments were providing their own bankers and financiers with
+
+guaranteed profitable outlets for their capital. In 1956, the French
+government started a scheme which was a blatant form of promoting their
+own private capitalists while paying lip service to African development and
+welfare. The scheme involved the creation of an institution called SDOM
+(Financial Societies for the Development of Overseas Territories). SDOM
+was nothing but an association of private capitalists interested primarily in
+the oil of North Africa, and having large government subventions to achieve
+their goals.
+There were many telltale signs which unmasked the CD&W hoax in the
+eyes of careful and concerned observers. The Colonial Secretary set up a
+council to help him in allocation of grants, and it was dominated by really
+powerful members of the British bourgeoisie, including directors of
+Barclays Bank. Since the CD&W funds were inadequate even for the
+hopeless Ten Year Plans of the colonies, the British government then
+encouraged the colonial administrations to borrow the rest of their finances
+on the open money market. That was another way of insuring that African
+labor and resources dispatched surplus to greedy European moneychangers.
+Barclays Bank was one of the first to seize the opportunity of lending to
+colonial regimes to supplement the CD&W grants. That bank set up a
+special Overseas Development Corporation to “assist” Africa, the chairman
+of the bank assuring all that “the development of the colonial empire and
+the well-being of its inhabitants is a matter that concerns every citizen of
+[Britain].” That was the language of public relations, which fitted in very
+well with the sordid hypocrisy practiced by white men ever since they
+started killing and enslaving in the name of civilization and Christianity.
+As part of the hypocrisy of colonialism, it became fashionable to speak
+of how Europe brought Africa into the twentieth century. This assertion has
+implications in the socio-economic and political spheres, and it can be
+shown to be false not in some but in all respects.
+So often it is said that colonialism modernized Africa by introducing the
+dynamic features of capitalism, such as private property in land, private
+ownership of the other means of production, and money relations. Here it is
+essential to distinguish between capitalist elements and capitalism as a total
+social system. Colonialism introduced some elements of capitalism into
+Africa. In general terms, where communalism came into contact with the
+money economy, the latter imposed itself. Cash-crop farming and wage
+
+labor led away from the extended family as the basis of production and
+distribution.
+One South African saying put forward that “the white man has no kin,
+his kin is money.” That is a profound revelation of the difference between
+capitalist and pre-capitalist societies; and when capitalism came into contact
+with the still largely communal African societies, it introduced money
+relations at the expense of kinship ties. However, colonialism did not trans
+form Africa into a capitalist society comparable to the metropoles. Had it
+done that, one might have complained of the brutalities and inequalities of
+capitalism, but it could not then have been said that colonialism failed to
+advance Africa along the path of human historical development.
+Capitalism as a system within the metropoles or epicenters had two
+dominant classes: firstly, the capitalists or bourgeoisie who owned the
+factories and banks (the major means for producing and distributing
+wealth); and secondly, the workers or proletariat who worked in the
+factories of the said bourgeoisie. Colonialism did not create a capitalowning and factory-owning class among Africans or even inside Africa; nor
+did it create an urbanized proletariat of any significance (particularly
+outside South Africa). In other words, capitalism in the form of colonialism
+failed to perform in Africa the tasks which it had performed in Europe in
+changing social relations and liberating the forces of production.
+It is fairly obvious that capitalists do not set out to create other
+capitalists, who would be rivals. On the contrary, the tendency of capitalism
+in Europe from the very beginning was one of competition, elimination, and
+monopoly. Therefore, when the imperialist stage was reached, the
+metropolitan capitalists had no intention of allowing rivals to arise in the
+dependencies. However, in spite of what the metropoles wanted, some local
+capitalists did emerge in Asia and Latin America. Africa is a significant
+exception in the sense that, compared with other colonized peoples, far
+fewer Africans had access even to the middle rungs of the bourgeois ladder
+in terms of capital for investment.
+Part of the explanation for the lack of African capitalists in Africa lies in
+the arrival of minority groups who had no local family ties which could
+stand in the way of the ruthless primary accumulation which capitalism
+requires. Lebanese, Syrian, Greek, and Indian businessmen rose from the
+ranks of petty traders to become minor and sometimes substantial
+
+capitalists. Names like Raccah and Leventis were well known in West
+Africa, just as names like Madhvani and Visram became well known as
+capitalists in East Africa.
+There were clashes between the middlemen and the European
+colonialists, but the latter much preferred to encourage the minorities rather
+than see Africans build themselves up. For instance, in West Africa the
+businessmen from Sierra Leone were discouraged both in their own colony
+and in other British possessions where they chose to settle. In East Africa,
+there was hope among Ugandans in particular that they might acquire
+cotton gins and perform some capitalist functions connected with cotton
+growing and other activities. However, when in 1920 a Development
+Commission was appointed to promote commerce and industry, it favored
+firstly Europeans and then Indians. Africans were prohibited by legislation
+from owning gins.
+Taking Africa as a whole, the few African businessmen who were
+allowed to emerge were at the bottom of the ladder and cannot be
+considered as “capitalists” in the true sense. They did not own sufficient
+capital to invest in large-scale farming, trading, mining, or industry. They
+were dependent both on European-owned capital and on the local capital of
+minority groups.
+That European capitalism should have failed to create African capitalists
+is perhaps not so striking as its inability to create a working class and to
+diffuse industrial skills throughout Africa. By its very nature, colonialism
+was prejudiced against the establishment of industries in Africa, outside of
+agriculture and the extractive spheres of mining and timber felling.
+Whenever internal forces seemed to push in the direction of African
+industrialization, they were deliberately blocked by the colonial
+governments acting on behalf of the metropolitan industrialists. Groundnutoil mills were set up in Senegal in 1927 and began exports to France. They
+were soon placed under restrictions because of protests of oil-millers in
+France. Similarly in Nigeria, the oil mills set up by Lebanese were
+discouraged. The oil was still sent to Europe as a raw material for industry,
+but European industrialists did not then welcome even the simple stage of
+processing groundnuts into oil on African soil.
+Many irrational contradictions arose throughout colonial Africa as a
+result of the non-industrialization policy: Sudanese and Ugandans grew
+
+cotton but imported manufactured cotton goods, Ivory Coast grew cocoa
+and imported tinned cocoa and chocolate.
+The tiny working class of colonial Africa covered jobs such as
+agricultural labor and domestic service. Most of it was unskilled, in contrast
+to the accumulating skills of capitalism proper. When it came to projects
+requiring technical expertise, Europeans did the supervision—standing
+around in their helmets and white shorts. Of course, in 1885 Africans did
+not have the technical know-how which had evolved in Europe during the
+eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That difference was itself partly due to
+the kind of relations between Africa and Europe in the pre-colonial period.
+What is more significant, however, is the incredibly small number of
+Africans who were able to acquire “modern” skills during the colonial
+period. In a few places, such as South Africa and the Rhodesias, this was
+due to specific racial discrimination in employment, so as to keep the best
+jobs for whites. Yet, even in the absence of whites, lack of skills among
+Africans was an integral part of the capitalist impact on the continent.
+It has already been illustrated how the presence of industry in Europe
+fostered and multiplied scientific techniques. The reverse side of the coin
+was presented in Africa: no industry meant no generation of skills. Even in
+the mining industry, it was arranged that the most valuable labor should be
+done outside Africa. It is sometimes forgotten that it is labor which adds
+value to commodities through the transformation of natural products. For
+instance, although gem diamonds have a value far above their practical
+usefulness, the value is not simply a question of their being rare. Work had
+to be done to locate the diamonds. That is the skilled task of a geologist,
+and the geologists were of course Europeans. Work had to be done to dig
+the diamonds out, which involves mainly physical labor. Only in that phase
+were Africans from South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Tanganyika, and Sierra
+Leone brought into the picture. Subsequently, work had to be done in
+cutting and polishing the diamonds. A small portion of this was performed
+by whites in South Africa, and most of it by whites in Brussels and London.
+It was on the desk of the skilled cutter that the rough diamond became a
+gem and soared in value. No Africans were allowed to come near that kind
+of technique in the colonial period.
+Much of the dynamism of capitalism lay in the way that growth created
+more opportunities for further growth. Major industries had by-products,
+
+they stimulated local raw-material usage, they expanded transport and the
+building industry—as was seen in the case of Unilever. In the words of the
+professional economists, those were the beneficial “backward and forward
+linkages.” Given that the industries using African raw materials were
+located outside Africa, then there could be no beneficial backward and
+forward linkages inside Africa. After the Second World War, Guinea began
+to export bauxite. In the hands of French and American capitalists, the
+bauxite became aluminum. In the métropoles, it went into the making of
+refactory material, electrical conductors, cigarette foil, kitchen utensils,
+glass, jewel bearings, abrasives, light-weight structures, and aircraft.
+Guinean bauxite stimulated European shipping and North American
+hydroelectric power. In Guinea, the colonial bauxite mining left holes in the
+ground.
+With regard to gold, the financial implications in Europe were enormous,
+and African gold played its part in the development of the monetary system
+and of industry and agriculture in the métropoles. But, like bauxite and
+other minerals, gold is an exhaustible resource. Once it is taken out of a
+country’s soil, that is an absolute loss that cannot be replaced. That simple
+fact is often obscured so long as production continues, as in South Africa;
+but it is dramatically brought to attention when the minerals have actually
+disappeared during the colonial epoch. For instance, in the south of
+Tanganyika, the British mined gold as fast as they could from 1933 onwards
+at a place called Chunya. By 1953, they had gobbled it all up and exported
+it abroad. By the end of the colonial period, Chunya was one of the most
+backward spots in the whole of Tanganyika, which was itself known as the
+poor Cinderella of East Africa. If that was modernization, and given the
+price paid in exploitation and oppression, then Africans would have been
+better off in the bush.
+Industrialization does not only mean factories. Agriculture itself has
+been industrialized in capitalist and socialist countries by the intensive
+application of scientific principles to irrigation, fertilizers, tools, crop
+selection, stock breeding. The most decisive failure of colonialism in Africa
+was its failure to change the technology of agricultural production. The
+most convincing evidence as to the superficiality of the talk about
+colonialism having “modernized” Africa is the fact that the vast majority of
+Africans went into colonialism with a hoe and came out with a hoe. Some
+
+capitalist plantations introduced agricultural machinery, and the odd tractor
+found its way into the hands of African farmers; but the hoe remained the
+over-whelmingly dominant agricultural implement. Capitalism could
+revolutionize agriculture in Europe, but it could not do the same for Africa.
+In some districts, capitalism brought about technological backwardness
+in agriculture. On the reserves of Southern Africa, far too many Africans
+were crowded onto inadequate land, and were forced to engage in intensive
+farming, using techniques that were suitable only to shifting cultivation. In
+practice, that was a form of technical retrogression, because the land
+yielded less and less and became destroyed in the process. Wherever
+Africans were hampered in their use of their ancestral lands on a wideranging shifting basis, the same negative effect was to be found. Besides,
+some of the new cash crops like groundnuts and cotton were very
+demanding on the soil. In countries like Senegal, Niger, and Chad, which
+were already on the edge of the desert, the steady cultivation led to soil
+impoverishment and encroachment of the desert.
+White racist notions are so deep-rooted within capitalist society that the
+failure of African agriculture to advance was put down to the inherent
+inferiority of the African. It would be much truer to say that it was due to
+the white intruders, although the basic explanation is to be found not in the
+personal ill-will of the colonialists or in their racial origin, but rather in the
+organized viciousness of the capitalist/colonialist system.
+Failure to improve agricultural tools and methods on behalf of African
+peasants was not a matter of a bad decision by colonial policy-makers. It
+was an inescapable feature of colonialism as a whole, based on the
+understanding that the international division of labor aimed at skills in the
+metropoles and low-level manpower in the dependencies. It was also a
+result of the considerable use of force (including taxation) in African labor
+relations. People can be forced to perform simple manual labor, but very
+little else. This was proven when Africans were used as slaves in the West
+Indies and America. Slaves damaged tools and carried out sabotage, which
+could only be controlled by extra supervision and by keeping tools and
+productive processes very elementary. Slave labor was unsuitable for
+carrying out industrial activity, so that in the U.S.A. the North went to war
+in 1861 to end slavery in the South, so as to spread true capitalist relations
+throughout the land. Following the same line of argument, it becomes clear
+
+why the various forms of forced agricultural labor in Africa had to be kept
+quite simple, and that in turn meant small earnings.
+Capitalists under colonialism did not pay enough for an African to
+maintain himself and family. This can readily be realized by reflecting on
+the amounts of money earned by African peasants from cash crops. The sale
+of produce by an African cash-crop farmer rarely brought in 10 pounds per
+year and often it was less than half that amount. Out of that, a peasant had
+to pay for tools, seeds, and transport and he had to repay the loan to the
+middleman before he could call the remainder his own. Peasants producing
+coffee and cocoa and collecting palm produce tended to earn more than
+those dealing with cotton and groundnuts, but even the ordinary Akwapim
+cocoa farmer or Chagga coffee farmer never handled money in quantities
+sufficient to feed, clothe, and shelter his family. Instead, subsistence
+farming of yams or bananas continued as a supplement. That was how the
+peasant managed to eat, and the few shillings earned went to pay taxes and
+to buy the increasing number of things which could not be obtained without
+money in the middlemen’s shops—salt, cloth, paraffin. If he was extremely
+lucky, he would have access to zinc sheets, bicycles, radios, and sewing
+machines, and would be able to pay school fees. It must be made quite clear
+that those in the last category were extremely few.
+One reason why the African peasant got so little for his agricultural
+crops was that his labor was unskilled. That was not the whole explanation,
+but it is true that a product such as cotton jumped in value during the time it
+went through the sophisticated processes of manufacture in Europe. Karl
+Marx, in clarifying how capitalists appropriated part of the surplus of each
+worker, used the example of cotton. He explained that the value of the
+manufactured cotton included the value of the labor that went into growing
+the raw cotton, plus part of the value of the labor that made the spindles,
+plus the labor that went into the actual manufacture. From an African
+viewpoint, the first conclusion to be drawn is that the peasant working on
+African soil was being exploited by the industrialist who used African raw
+material in Europe or America. Secondly, it is necessary to realize that the
+African contribution of unskilled labor was valued far less than the
+European contribution of skilled labor.
+It has been observed that one hour of work of a cotton peasant in Chad
+was equivalent to less than one centimeter of cotton cloth, and he needed to
+
+work fifty days to earn what was needed to buy three meters of the cloth
+made from his own cotton in France. Yet, the French textile worker (using
+modern spindles) ran off three meters of cloth in a matter of minutes!
+Assuming that the Frenchman was not closer to God (who made the whole
+world in only six days and rested on the seventh), then there must be factors
+in the capitalist colonialist system which permitted the great disparity in the
+relative value of labor in Chad and France. In the first place, the Chad
+peasant was defrauded through trade so that he sold cheap and bought dear,
+and therefore received a minute proportion of the value that he created with
+his labor. This was possible not because of mysterious “market forces” as
+bourgeois economists would like us to believe, but because of political
+power being vested entirely in the hands of the colonialists. It was a
+consequence of monopolistic domination, both economically and
+politically. Secondly, the quantity of time spent by the Chad peasant was
+longer because colonialism did not permit him to acquire the tools to
+shorten the hours required to produce a given quantity of raw cotton.
+To a certain extent, it would have been in the interests of the colonial
+powers to have had better agricultural techniques in Africa, leading to
+increased volume and quality of production. All colonial regimes sponsored
+some scientific research into tropical agriculture. However, the research was
+almost entirely devoted to cash crops, it was limited in scope, and it was
+more easily adaptable by plantations than by African peasants who had no
+capital. The pitiable amount devoted to agricultural improvement in Africa
+during the colonial period contrasts sharply with the increasingly huge sums
+that were devoted to research in Europe over the same period—with
+enormous benefits to both industry and agriculture in the metropoles.
+Side by side with the ill-founded claims about socio-economic
+modernization went the claims by colonial apologists that European rule
+brought political uplift and emancipation. One of the long-standing
+arguments in this connection is that Africa was in chaos in the nineteenth
+century, and that “tribes” like the Ngoni and the Yao and Samori’s sofas
+were killing left, right, and center. Consequently, Africa was saved by
+Livingstone and Stanley. For the most part, such wild statements have no
+place in the works of the present generation of European scholars of Africa,
+since they are known to have no resemblance to reality. However, some
+writers still preach that “the Bantu could be saved from the wasting
+
+struggles and from their general economic and technical backwardness only
+by the imposition of stable [European] government.”
+Another supposed credit of the colonialists is that they developed
+nationalism in Africa. That is a superficial and mischievous claim, which
+entirely ignores the numerous states in Africa on the eve of colonization,
+and the direction of their evolution. Nationalism is a certain form of unity
+which grows out of historical experience. It is a sense of oneness that
+emerges from social groups trying to control their environment and to
+defend their gains against competing groups. The nation-state also imposes
+order and maintains stability within its own boundaries, usually on behalf of
+a given class. All of those characteristics were present in nineteenth-century
+African states, some of which were much larger than the colonies arbitrarily
+defined by Europeans.
+It is true that the present African nationalism took the particular form of
+adopting the boundaries carved by the imperialists. That was an inevitable
+consequence of the fact that the struggle to regain African independence
+was conditioned by the administrative framework of the given colonies. But
+it would show crass ignorance of the African past to say that colonialism
+modernized Africa politically through nation-states, especially when the
+implication is that such a level of political organization and stability would
+otherwise have been impossible.
+One colonialist proposition that has at least an air of plausibility is that
+capitalism and colonial rule meant greater individual freedom for many
+Africans. Young men earning wages or individuals farming for cash became
+independent of the corporate demands of their families. It is debatable to
+what extent that was a worthwhile phenomenon, but it could be said to be
+somewhat comparable to the way in which capitalism freed the individual
+in Europe from the restrictions of feudal society and from such bonds as
+those imposed by morally self-righteous people. Nevertheless, when any
+given African did break from what were proving to be onerous extended
+family obligations, what freedom did he acquire? His choice of alternatives
+was narrowly dictated by the colonialists, and he was only “free” to
+participate in the money economy and in the European-oriented cultural
+sector at the very lowest and uncreative levels.
+There is a more sympathetic school of historians of Africa who contend
+that to see colonialism as completely negative is to underrate the initiative
+
+of Africans. Africans, they say, moved boldly into the labor market, into
+cash-crop farming, into commerce in some instances, into the educational
+field, and into the churches. Yet, those were simply responses (albeit
+vigorous ones) to the options laid open by the colonialists. True historical
+initiative by a whole people or by individuals requires that they have the
+power to decide on the direction in which they want to move. That latter
+aspect had to await the decade of the 1960s.
+Within any social system, the oppressed find some room to maneuver
+through their own initiative. For instance, under the slave regime of
+America and the West Indies, Africans found ways and means of gaining
+small advantages. They would flatter and “con” the slavemasters, who were
+so arrogant and bigoted that they were readily fooled. Similarly, under
+colonialism many Africans played the game to secure what they could.
+Africans in positions like interpreters, police, and court officials often had
+their way over the ruling Europeans. However, that should not be mistaken
+for power or political participation or the exercise of individual freedom.
+Under slavery, power lay in the hands of the slavemasters: under
+colonialism, power lay in the hands of the colonialists. The loss of power
+for the various African states meant a reduction in the freedom of every
+individual.
+Colonialism was a negation of freedom from the viewpoint of the
+colonized. Even in quantitative terms it could not possibly bring modern
+political liberation to Africans comparable to the little that had been
+achieved by capitalism as an improvement of feudalism. In its political
+aspects, capitalism in the metropoles included constitutions, parliaments,
+freedom of the press. All of those things were limited in their application to
+the European working class, but they had existed in some form or fashion in
+the metropoles ever since the American War of Independence and the
+French Revolution. But Jules Ferry, a former French colonial minister,
+explained that the French Revolution was not fought on behalf of the blacks
+of Africa. Bourgeois liberty, equality, and fraternity was not for colonial
+subjects. Africans had to make do with bayonets, riot acts, and gunboats.
+Negative Character
+Consequences
+
+of
+
+the
+
+Social,
+
+Political,
+
+and
+
+Economic
+
+The argument so far has been aimed at showing that benefits from
+colonialism were small and they were not gifts from the colonialists, but
+rather fruits of African labor and resources for the most part. Indeed, what
+was called “the development of Africa” by the colonialists was a cynical
+shorthand expression for “the intensification of colonial exploitation in
+Africa to develop capitalist Europe.” The analysis has gone beyond that to
+demonstrate that numerous false claims are made purporting to show that
+Europe developed Africa in the sense of bringing about social order,
+nationalism, and economic modernization. However, all of that would still
+not permit the conclusion that colonialism had a negative impact on
+Africa’s development. In offering the view that colonialism was negative,
+the aim is to draw attention to the way that previous African development
+was blunted, halted, and turned back. In place of that interruption and
+blockade, nothing of compensatory value was introduced.
+The colonization of Africa lasted for just over seventy years in most
+parts of the continent. That is an extremely short period within the context
+of universal historical development. Yet, it was precisely in those years that
+in other parts of the world the rate of change was greater than ever before.
+As has been illustrated, capitalist countries revolutionized their technology
+to enter the nuclear age. Meanwhile, socialism was inaugurated, lifting
+semi-feudal semi-capitalist Russia to a level of sustained economic growth
+higher than that ever experienced in a capitalist country. Socialism did the
+same for China and North Korea—guaranteeing the well-being and
+independence of the state as well as reorganizing the internal social
+arrangements in a far more just manner than ever before. It is against those
+decisive changes that events in Africa have to be measured. To mark time or
+even to move slowly while others leap ahead is virtually equivalent to going
+backward. Certainly, in relative terms, Africa’s position vis-à-vis its
+colonizers became more disadvantageous in the political, economic, and
+military spheres.
+The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism and its negative
+consequences for Africa spring mainly from the fact that Africa lost power.
+Power is the ultimate determinant in human society, being basic to the
+relations within any group and between groups. It implies the ability to
+defend one’s interests and if necessary to impose one’s will by any means
+available. In relations between peoples, the question of power determines
+
+maneuverability in bargaining, the extent to which one people respect the
+interests of another, and eventually the extent to which a people survive as a
+physical and cultural entity. When one society finds itself forced to
+relinquish power entirely to another society, that in itself is a form of
+underdevelopment.
+During the centuries of pre-colonial trade, some control over social,
+political, and economic life was retained in Africa, in spite of the
+disadvantageous commerce with Europeans. That little control over internal
+matters disappeared under colonialism. Colonialism went much further than
+trade. It meant a tendency towards direct appropriation by Europeans of the
+social institutions within Africa. Africans ceased to set indigenous cultural
+goals and standards, and lost full command of training young members of
+the society. Those were undoubtedly major steps backward.
+The Tunisian, Albert Memmi, puts forward the following proposition:
+The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the
+community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision
+contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.
+
+Sweeping as that statement may initially appear, it is entirely true. The
+removal from history follows logically from the loss of power which
+colonialism represented. The power to act independently is the guarantee to
+participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be
+removed from history, except in the most passive sense. A striking
+illustration of the fact that colonial Africa was a passive object is seen in its
+attraction for white anthropologists, who came to study “primitive society.”
+Colonialism determined that Africans were no more makers of history than
+were beetles—objects to be looked at under a microscope and examined for
+unusual features.
+The negative impact of colonialism in political terms was quite dramatic.
+Overnight, African political states lost their power, independence, and
+meaning—irrespective of whether they were big empires or small polities.
+Certain traditional rulers were kept in office, and the formal structure of
+some kingdoms was partially retained, but the substance of political life was
+quite different. Political power had passed into the hands of foreign
+overlords. Of course, numerous African states in previous centuries had
+
+passed through the cycle of growth and decline. But colonial rule was
+different. So long as it lasted, not a single African state could flourish.
+To be specific, it must be noted that colonialism crushed by force the
+surviving feudal states of North Africa; that the French wiped out the large
+Moslem states of the Western Sudan, as well as Dahomey and kingdoms in
+Madagascar; that the British eliminated Egypt, the Mahdist Sudan, Asante,
+Benin, the Yoruba kingdoms, Swaziland, Matabeleland, the Lozi, and the
+East African lake kingdoms as great states. It should further be noted that a
+multiplicity of smaller and growing states were removed from the face of
+Africa by the Belgians, Portuguese, British, French, Germans, Spaniards,
+and Italians. Finally, those that appeared to survive were nothing but puppet
+creations. For instance, the Sultan of Morocco retained nominal existence
+under colonial rule which started in 1912; and the same applied to the Bey
+of Tunis; but Morocco and Tunisia were just as much under the power of
+French colonial administrators as neighboring Algeria, where the feudal
+rulers were removed altogether.
+Sometimes, the African rulers who were chosen to serve as agents of
+foreign colonial rule were quite obviously nothing but puppets. The French
+and the Portuguese were in the habit of choosing their own African
+“chiefs”; the British went to Iboland and invented “warrant chiefs”; and all
+the colonial powers found it convenient to create “superior” or “paramount”
+rulers. Very often, the local population hated and despised such colonial
+stooges. There were traditional rulers such as the Sultan of Sokoto, the
+Kabaka of Buganda, and the Asantehene of Asante, who retained a great
+deal of prestige in the eyes of Africans, but they had no power to act outside
+the narrow boundaries laid down by colonialism, lest they find themselves
+in the Seychelles Islands as “guests of His Majesty’s Government.”
+One can go so far as to say that colonial rule meant the effective
+eradication of African political power throughout the continent, since
+Liberia and Ethiopia could no longer function as independent states within
+the context of continent-wide colonialism. Liberia in particular had to bow
+before foreign political, economic, and military pressures in a way that no
+genuinely independent state could have accepted; and although Ethiopia
+held firm until 1936, most European capitalist nations were not inclined to
+treat Ethiopia as a sovereign state, primarily because it was African, and
+Africans were supposed to be colonial subjects.
+
+The pattern of arrest of African political development has some features
+which can only be appreciated after careful scrutiny and the taking away of
+the blinkers which the colonizers put on the eyes of their subjects. An
+interesting case in point is that of women’s role in society. Until today,
+capitalist society has failed to resolve the inequality between man and
+woman, which was entrenched in all modes of production prior to
+socialism. The colonialists in Africa occasionally paid lip service to
+women’s education and emancipation, but objectively there was
+deterioration in the status of women owing to colonial rule.
+A realistic assessment of the role of women in independent pre-colonial
+Africa shows two contrasting but combined tendencies. In the first place,
+women were exploited by men through polygamous arrangements designed
+to capture the labor power of women. As always, exploitation was
+accompanied by oppression; and there is evidence to the effect that women
+were sometimes treated like beasts of burden, as for instance in Moslem
+African societies. Nevertheless, there was a countertendency to insure the
+dignity of women to greater or lesser degree in all African societies.
+Mother-right was a prevalent feature of African societies, and particular
+women held a variety of privileges based on the fact that they were the keys
+to inheritance.
+More important still, some women had real power in the political sense,
+exercised either through religion or directly within the politicoconstitutional apparatus. In Mozambique, the widow of an Nguni king
+became the priestess in charge of the shrine set up in the burial place of her
+deceased husband, and the reigning king had to consult her on all important
+matters. In a few instances, women were actually heads of state. Among the
+Lovedu of Transvaal, the key figure was the Rain-Queen, combining
+political and religious functions. The most frequently encountered role of
+importance played by women was that of “Queen Mother” or “Queen
+Sister.” In practice, that post was filled by a female of royal blood, who
+might be mother, sister, or aunt of the reigning king in places such as Mali,
+Asante, and Buganda. Her influence was considerable, and there were
+occasions when the “Queen Mother” was the real power and the male king
+a mere puppet.
+What happened to African women under colonialism is that the social,
+religious, constitutional, and political privileges and rights disappeared,
+
+while the economic exploitation continued and was often intensified. It was
+intensified because the division of labor according to sex was frequently
+disrupted. Traditionally, African men did the heavy labor of felling trees,
+clearing land, building houses, apart from conducting warfare and hunting.
+When they were required to leave their farms to seek employment, women
+remained behind burdened with every task necessary for the survival of
+themselves, the children, and even the men as far as foodstuffs were
+concerned. Moreover, since men entered the money sector more easily and
+in greater numbers than women, women’s work became greatly inferior to
+that of men within the new value system of colonialism: men’s work was
+“modern” and women’s was “traditional” and “backward.” Therefore, the
+deterioration in the status of African women was bound up with the
+consequent loss of the right to set indigenous standards of what work had
+merit and what did not.
+One of the most important manifestations of historical arrest and
+stagnation in colonial Africa is that which commonly goes under the title of
+“tribalism.” That term, in its common journalistic setting, is understood to
+mean that Africans have a basic loyalty to tribe rather than nation and that
+each tribe still retains a fundamental hostility towards its neighboring tribes.
+The examples favored by the capitalist press and bourgeois scholarship are
+those of Congo and Nigeria. Their accounts suggest that Europeans tried to
+make a nation out of the Congolese and Nigerian peoples, but they failed,
+because the various tribes had their age-long hatreds; and, as soon as the
+colonial power went, the natives returned to killing each other. To this
+phenomenon, Europeans often attach the word “atavism,” to carry the
+notion that Africans were returning to their primitive savagery. Even a
+cursory survey of the African past shows that such assertions are the exact
+opposite of the truth.
+It is necessary to discuss briefly what comprises a tribe—a term that has
+been avoided in this analysis, partly because it usually carries derogatory
+connotations and partly because of its vagueness and the loose ways in
+which it is employed in the literature on Africa. Following the principle of
+family living, Africans were organized in groups which had common
+ancestors. Theoretically, the tribe was the largest group of people claiming
+descent from a common ancestor at some time in the remote past.
+Generally, such a group could therefore be said to be of the same ethnic
+
+stock, and their language would have a great deal in common. Beyond that,
+members of a tribe were seldom all members of the same political unit and
+very seldom indeed did they all share a common social purpose in terms of
+activities such as trade and warfare. Instead, African states were sometimes
+based entirely on part of the members of a given ethnic group or (more
+usually) on an amalgamation of members of different ethnic communities.
+All of the large states of nineteenth-century Africa were multi-ethnic,
+and their expansion was continually making anything like “tribal” loyalty a
+thing of the past, by substituting in its place national and class ties.
+However, in all parts of the world, that substitution of national and class ties
+for purely ethnic ones is a lengthy historical process; and, invariably there
+remains for long periods certain regional pockets of individuals who have
+their own narrow, regional loyalties, springing from ties of kinship,
+language, and culture. In Asia, the feudal states of Vietnam and Burma both
+achieved a considerable degree of national homogeneity over the centuries
+before colonial rule. But there were pockets of “tribes” or “minorities” who
+remained outside the effective sphere of the nation-state and the national
+economy and culture.
+In the first place, colonialism blocked the further evolution of national
+solidarity, because it destroyed the particular Asian or African states which
+were the principal agents for achieving the liquidation of fragmented
+loyalties. In the second place, because ethnic and regional loyalties which
+go under the name of “tribalism” could not be effectively resolved by the
+colonial state, they tended to fester and grow in unhealthy forms. Indeed,
+the colonial powers sometimes saw the value of stimulating the internal
+tribal jealousies so as to keep the colonized from dealing with their
+principal contradiction with the European overlords—i.e., the classic
+technique of divide and rule. Certainly, the Belgians consciously fostered
+that; and the racist whites in South Africa had by the 1950s worked out a
+careful plan to “develop” the oppressed African population as Zulu, as
+Xhosa, and as Sotho so that the march towards broader African national and
+class solidarities could be stopped and turned back.
+The civil war in Nigeria is generally regarded as having been a tribal
+affair. To accept such a contention would mean extending the definition of
+tribe to cover Shell Oil and Gulf Oil! But, quite apart from that, it must be
+pointed out that nowhere in the history of pre-colonial independent Nigeria
+
+can anyone point to the massacre of Ibos by Hausas or any incident which
+suggests that people up to the nineteenth century were fighting each other
+because of ethnic origin. Of course there were wars, but they had a rational
+basis in trade rivalry, religious contentions, and the clashes of political
+expansion. What came to be called tribalism at the beginning of the new
+epoch of political independence in Nigeria was itself a product of the way
+that people were brought together under colonialism so as to be exploited. It
+was a product of administrative devices, of entrenched regional separations,
+of differential access by particular ethnic groups into the colonial economy
+and culture.
+Both Uganda and Kenya in East Africa are also situations in which a
+supposedly tribal factor continued to be pre-eminent. There is no doubt that
+the existence of the Buganda kingdom within independent Uganda posed
+certain problems. But, even after misapplying the definition of a tribe to the
+Baganda, it still remains true that the Buganda problem was a colonial
+problem. It was created by the presence of the missionaries and the British,
+by the British (Mailo) land settlement in Uganda in 1900, and by the use
+which Britian made of the Baganda ruling class as “sub-imperialists” within
+the colony of Uganda.
+In Kenya, the pattern of colonialism was different from that in Uganda,
+because of the presence of white settlers. No African group was allowed
+any power in the capacity of NCOs for the Colonial Office, since the white
+settlers themselves filled the role. The white settlers took the best land and
+then tried to create a new world with African labor. However, the African
+community which lay outside the immediate white settler sector was
+regulated along tribal lines. One of the numerous Royal Commissions of
+British colonialism published a report on Kenya in 1934. A contemporary
+Kenyan historian commented on the report as follows:
+The Commission’s recommendations, which were accepted by the British government, implied
+that Kenya was to be partitioned into two racial blocks, African and European. And in the
+African sector, all economic, social and political developments were to be conducted on tribal
+lines. Racialism thus became institutionalised.
+
+Human activity within small groups connected only by kinship relations
+(such as the tribe) is a very transient phase through which all continents
+passed in the phase of communalism. When it ceased to be transient and
+became institutionalized in Africa, that was because colonialism interrupted
+
+African development. That is what is implied in Memmi’s reference to
+Africans being removed from history. Revolutionary African thinkers such
+as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral expressed the same sentiments
+somewhat differently when they spoke of colonialism having made Africans
+into objects of history. Colonized Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel
+slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European interests
+and which were damaging to the African continent and its peoples. In
+continuation, some further socio-economic implications of that situation
+will be examined.
+Pre-colonial trade had started the trend of the disintegration of African
+economies and their technological impoverishment. Colonial rule speeded
+up that trend. The story is often told that in order to make a telephone call
+from Accra in the British colony of the Gold Coast to Abidjan in the
+adjacent French colony of Ivory Coast it was necessary to be connected first
+with an operator in London and then with an operator in Paris who could
+offer a line to Abidjan. That was one reflection of the fact that the Gold
+Coast economy was integrated into the British economy, and the Ivory
+Coast economy was integrated into the French economy, while the
+neighboring African colonies had little or no effective economic relations.
+The following conclusion reached by the United Nations Economic
+Commission for Africa in 1959 goes directly to the point.
+The most outstanding characteristic of the transportation systems of Africa is the comparative
+isolation in which they have developed within the confines of individual countries and
+territories. This is reflected in the lack of links between countries and territories within the
+same geographical sub-region.
+
+Some African trade did persist across colonial boundaries. For instance,
+the centuries’ old trade in kola nuts and gold from the forests of West Africa
+to North Africa never completely ceased. Besides, new forms of African
+trade developed, notably with regard to supplying foodstuffs to towns or
+cash-crop areas where there was insufficiency of food. That kind of trade
+could be entirely within a colony or it could cross colonial boundaries.
+However, the sum total of energy that went into expansion of inter-African
+trade was extremely small in comparison with trade that was exportoriented. Since this inter-African trade did not bring benefits to Europeans,
+it was not encouraged by them, and up to the latter part of the colonial
+period only 10 per cent of Africa’s trade was internal.
+
+It is also worth noting that Africa was denied the opportunity of
+developing healthy trade links with parts of the world other than Europe and
+North America. Some trade persisted across the Indian Ocean, but on the
+whole it is fair to say that the roads in Africa led to the seaports and the sea
+lanes led to Western Europe and North America. That kind of lop-sidedness
+is today part of the pattern of underdevelopment and dependence.
+The damaging impact of capitalism on African technology is even more
+clearly measurable in the colonial period than in the earlier centuries. In
+spite of the slave trade and of the import of European goods, most African
+handicraft industries still had vitality at the start of the colonial period. They
+had undergone no technological advance and they had not expanded, but
+they had survived. The mass production of the more recent phase of
+capitalism virtually obliterated African industries such as cloth, salt, soap,
+iron, and even pottery-making.
+In North Africa, handicraft industries had made the greatest advances
+before colonialism, in spheres ranging from brasswork to woolens. As in
+the towns of feudal Europe, craft workshops flourished in Algerian towns
+like Oran, Constantine, Algiers, and Tlemcen. But French colonialism
+destroyed the handicraft industries and threw thousands out of work. The
+same thing had happened in Europe itself when new machines had thrown
+artisans out of employment in places like Lancashire and Lyons, but in that
+instance the new machines became the basis of the prevailing mode of
+production, and formerly independent artisans returned to factories as
+proletarians to master different skills and expand the productive capacity of
+their society. In Africa it was simply destruction without redress. By the
+time political independence was achieved, surviving craftsmanship had
+been turned towards attracting tourists rather than meeting the real needs of
+African people.
+Besides, as was true of the European slave trade, the destruction of
+technology under colonialism must be related to the barriers raised in the
+path of African initiative. The vast majority of Africans drawn into the
+colonial money economy were simply providing manual labor, which
+stimulated perspiration rather than scientific initiative. Africans connected
+to the trading sector were sometimes successful in a limited way. The
+resourcefulness of West African market women is well known, but it was
+put to petty purposes. The problem posed to capitalists and workers in
+
+Europe while making insecticide from African pyrethrum was one requiring
+that resourcefulness be expressed in a technical direction. But the problem
+posed to an African market woman by the necessity to make a penny more
+profit on every tin of imported sardines was resolved sometimes by a little
+more vigor, sometimes by a touch of dishonesty, and sometimes by resort to
+“juju.”
+Colonialism induced the African ironworker to abandon the process of
+extracting iron from the soil and to concentrate instead on working scraps of
+metal imported from Europe. The only compensation for that interruption
+would have been the provision of modern techniques in the extraction and
+processing of iron. However, those techniques were debarred from Africa,
+on the basis of the international division of labor under imperialism. As was
+seen earlier, the non-industrialization of Africa was not left to chance. It
+was deliberately enforced by stopping the transference to Africa of
+machinery and skills which would have given competition to European
+industry in that epoch.
+In the period of African development preceding colonialism, some areas
+moved faster than others and provided the nuclei for growth on a wide
+regional basis. Northern Nigeria was one of those; and it virtually went to
+sleep during the colonial period. The British cut it off from the rest of the
+Moslem world and fossilized the social relations, so that the serfs could not
+achieve any change at the expense of the ruling aristocracy.
+On every continent and within nation-states, some features of growth
+were always more outstanding than others, and thereby offered a lead to the
+rest of the society. The towns played that role in late feudal European
+society, while the electrical industry was an example of a similar impetus
+for development in metropolitan capitalist society in the first decades of this
+century. Colonialism provided Africa with no real growth points. For
+instance, a colonial town in Africa was essentially a center of administration
+rather than industry. Towns did attract large numbers of Africans, but only
+to offer them a very unstable life based on unskilled and irregular
+employment. European towns had slums, but the squalor of towns in
+underdeveloped countries is a special phenomenon. It was a consequence of
+the inability of those towns to play the role of expanding the productive
+base. Fortunately, Africa was never as badly off in this respect as Asia and
+Latin America.
+
+Instead of speeding up growth, colonial activities such as mining and
+cash-crop farming speeded up the decay of “traditional” African life. In
+many parts of the continent, vital aspects of culture were adversely affected,
+nothing better was substituted, and only a lifeless shell was left. The
+capitalist forces behind colonialism were interested in little more than the
+exploitation of labor. Even areas that were not directly involved in the
+money economy exploited labor. In extracting that labor, they tampered
+with the factor that was the very buttress of the society, for African
+“traditional” life when deprived of its customary labor force and patterns of
+work was no longer “traditional.”
+During the colonial era, many thinly populated villages appeared in
+Central and Southern Africa, comprising women, children, and old men.
+They practiced subsistence agriculture which was not productive enough,
+and colonialists contrasted them with cash-crop areas, which in comparison
+were flourishing. However, it was precisely the impact of colonialism
+which left so many villages deserted and starving, because the able-bodied
+males had gone off to labor elsewhere. Any district deprived of its effective
+laboring population could not be expected to develop.
+There were several spots within different colonies which were
+sufficiently far removed from towns and colonial administration that they
+neither grew cash crops nor supplied labor. In southern Sudan, for instance,
+there were populations who continued to live a life not dissimilar to that
+which they had followed in previous centuries. Yet, even for such
+traditional African societies the scope for development no longer existed.
+They were isolated by the hold which the colonialists had on the rest of the
+continent. They could not interact with other parts of Africa. They were
+subject to increasing encroachment by the money economy and were more
+and more to be regarded as historical relics. The classic example of this type
+of obstructed historical development is to be found in the U.S.A., where the
+indigenous population of Indians who survived slaughter by the whites were
+placed in reservations and condemned to stagnation. Indian reservations in
+North America are living museums to be visited by white tourists who
+purchase curios.
+In South Africa and Rhodesia, the policy of establishing “native
+reserves” was openly followed. Inside a reserve, the major means of
+production was the land. But the quantity and fertility of the land allocated
+
+was entirely inadequate to support the numbers of Africans who were
+driven in. The reserves were reservoirs of cheap labor, and dumping
+grounds for those who could not be accommodated within the money
+economy of the racist southern section of Africa. Further north, there were
+no areas named as “reserves” except in colonial Kenya and to a very limited
+extent in Tanganyika. But the money economy was constantly transforming
+the traditional sector into one which was just as deprived as any reserve.
+The money economy of colonialism was a growing sector. That is not to
+be denied. However, it has already been indicated how limited that growth
+was, viewed over the continent as a whole. The growth in the so-called
+modern sector exercised adverse effects on the non-monetary sector. What
+remains is to emphasize that the character of growth in Africa under
+colonialism was such that it did not constitute development—i.e., it did not
+enlarge the capacity of the society to deal with the natural environment, to
+adjudicate relations between members of the society, and to protect the
+population from external forces. Such a statement is already implicitly
+borne out in the inability of capitalism to stimulate skilled labor in colonial
+Africa. A system which must stand in the way of the accumulation of skills
+does not develop anything or anybody. It is implicit, too, in the manner in
+which Africa was cut into economic compartments having no relation one
+to another, so that, even though the volume of commercial activity within
+each compartmentalized colony may have increased, there was no
+development comparable to that which linked together the various states of
+the U.S.A.
+In recent times, economists have been recognizing in colonial and postcolonial Africa a pattern that has been termed “growth without
+development.” That phrase has now appeared as the title of books on
+Liberia and Ivory Coast. It means that goods and services of a certain type
+are on the increase. There may be more rubber and coffee exported, there
+may be more cars imported with the proceeds, and there may be more
+gasoline stations built to service the cars. But the profit goes abroad, and the
+economy becomes more and more a dependency of the metropoles. In no
+African colony was there economic integration, or any provision for making
+the economy self-sustained and geared to its own local goals. Therefore,
+there was growth of the so-called enclave import-export sector, but the only
+things which developed were dependency and underdevelopment.
+
+A further revelation of growth without development under colonialism
+was the overdependence on one or two exports. The term “monoculture” is
+used to describe those colonial economies which were centered around a
+single crop. Liberia (in the agricultural sector) was a monoculture
+dependent on rubber, Gold Coast on cocoa, Dahomey and southeast Nigeria
+on palm produce, Sudan on cotton, Tanganyika on sisal, and Uganda on
+cotton. In Senegal and Gambia, groundnuts accounted for 85 to 90 per cent
+of money earnings. In effect, two African colonies were told to grow
+nothing but peanuts!
+Every farming people have a staple food, plus a variety of other
+supplements. Historians, agronomists, and botanists have all contributed to
+showing the great variety of such foods within the pre-colonial African
+economy. There were numerous crops which were domesticated within the
+African continent, there were several wild food species (notably fruits), and
+Africans had shown no conservatism in adopting useful food plants of
+Asian or American origin. Diversified agriculture was within the African
+tradition. Monoculture was a colonialist invention.
+Those who justify the colonial division of labor suggest that it was
+“natural” and respected the relative capacities for specialization of the
+metropoles and colonies. Europe, North America, and Japan were capable
+of specializing in industry and Africa in agriculture. Therefore, it was to the
+“comparative advantage” of one part of the world to manufacture machines
+while another part engaged in simple hoe-culture of the soil. That kind of
+arrogant partition of the world was not new. In the fifteenth century, the
+feudal monarchies of Portugal and Spain wanted the whole world for
+themselves, and they got the Pope to draw a line around the globe, making
+the allocations. But Britain, Holland, and France suggested that they were
+not at all convinced that Adam had left a will which gave the earth to
+Portugal and Spain. In like manner, it can be questioned whether there is
+any testament which stated that the river Gambia should inherit groundnut
+growing while the river Clyde (of Scotland) should become a home of
+shipbuilding.
+There was nothing “natural” about monoculture. It was a consequence of
+imperialist requirements and machinations, extending into areas that were
+politically independent in name. Monoculture was a characteristic of
+regions falling under imperialist domination. Certain countries in Latin
+
+America such as Costa Rica and Guatemala were forced by United States
+capitalist firms to concentrate so heavily on growing bananas that they were
+contemptuously known as “banana republics.” In Africa, this concentration
+on one or two cash crops for sale abroad had many harmful effects.
+Sometimes, cash crops were grown to the exclusion of staple foods—thus
+causing famines. For instance, in Gambia rice farming was popular before
+the colonial era, but so much of the best land was transferred to groundnuts
+that rice had to be imported on a large scale to try to counter the fact that
+famine was becoming endemic. In Asante, concentration on cocoa raised
+fears of famine in a region previously famous for yams and other foodstuff.
+Yet the threat of famine was a small disadvantage compared to the
+extreme vulnerability and insecurity of monoculture. When the crop was
+affected by internal factors such as disease, that amounted to an
+overwhelming disaster, as in the case of Gold Coast cocoa when it was hit
+by swollen-shoot disease in the 1940s. Besides, at all times, the price
+fluctuations (which were externally controlled) left the African producer
+helpless in the face of capitalist maneuvers.
+From a capitalist viewpoint, monocultures commended themselves most
+because they made colonial economies entirely dependent on the
+metropolitan buyers of their produce. At the end of the European slave
+trade, only a minority of Africans were sufficiently committed to capitalist
+exchange and sufficiently dependent upon European imports to wish to
+continue the relationship with Europe at all costs. Colonialism increased the
+dependence of Africa on Europe in terms of the numbers of persons brought
+into the money economy and in terms of the number of aspects of socioeconomic life in Africa which derived their existence from the connection
+with the metropole. The ridiculous situation arose by which European
+trading firms, mining companies, shipping lines, banks, insurance houses,
+and plantations all exploited Africa and at the same time caused Africans to
+feel that without those capitalist services no money or European goods
+would be forthcoming, and therefore Africa was in debt to its exploiters!
+The factor of dependency made its impact felt in every aspect of the life
+of the colonies, and it can be regarded as the crowning vice among the
+negative social, political, and economic consequences of colonialism in
+Africa, being primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the colonial
+relationship into the epoch that is called neo-colonialism.
+
+Finally, attention must be drawn to one of the most important
+consequences of colonialism on African development, and that is the
+stunting effect on Africans as a physical species. Colonialism created
+conditions which led not just to periodic famine but to chronic
+undernourishment, malnutrition, and deterioration in the physique of the
+African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant, it is only
+because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that
+malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time
+immemorial. A black child with a transparent rib cage, huge head, bloated
+stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favorite
+poster of the large British charitable operation known as Oxfam. The poster
+represented a case of kwashiorkor—extreme malignant malnutrition. Oxfam
+called upon the people of Europe to save starving African and Asian
+children from kwashiorkor and such ills. Oxfam never bothered their
+consciences by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the
+starvation, suffering, and misery of the child in the first place.
+There is an excellent study of the phenomenon of hunger on a world
+scale by a Brazilian scientist, Josue de Castro. It incorporates considerable
+data on the food and health conditions among Africans in their independent
+pre-colonial state or in societies untouched by capitalist pressures; and it
+then makes comparisons with colonial conditions. The study convincingly
+indicates that African diet was previously more varied, being based on a
+more diversified agriculture than was possible under colonialism. In terms
+of specific nutritional deficiencies, those Africans who suffered most under
+colonialism were those who were brought most fully into the colonial
+economy: namely, the urban workers.
+For the sake of the doubters, several of De Castro’s observations are
+listed below (occasionally supplemented by other data).
+(1) Investigators who have studied the nutritional conditions of
+“primitive” Africans in tropical Africa are unanimous in stating that
+they show no clinical signs of dietary deficiency. One of the most
+striking indications of the superiority of indigenous African diet is
+the magnificent condition of the teeth. One researcher among six
+ethnic groups in Kenya could not find a single case of tooth decay,
+not a single deformation of dental arch. But when those same people
+
+were transplanted and put on the “civilized” diet available under
+colonialism, their teeth began to decay at once.
+(2) In Egypt, the peasants, or fellahin, had always suffered from
+periodic famines, but under colonialism this deteriorated to become
+chronic hunger. It was the intervention of the British which upset the
+balance of the peasants’ diet; and comparison with early accounts
+shows that there was once a much greater variety of legumes and
+fruits.
+(3) The kwashiorkor (of the Oxfam posters) is itself noticeable
+wherever the African’s contact with the European was prolonged. A
+Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire found a noticeable
+absence of animal fat and protein in the Gambia. The absence of
+proteins of good quality is one of the principal contributors to
+kwashiorkor; and once again comparison with what Europeans saw
+in the Gambia ever since the fifteenth century would indicate that a
+change had come about after the coming of the whites. The Gambia
+not only grew a variety of food in the early period, but it was stockraising country where meat was consumed in considerable quantity.
+Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cattle hides
+were sold by the thousands to European buyers every year, and the
+local population ate the meat. How then could they have suffered
+from an absence of animal fat!
+(4) Studies in Equatorial Africa have revealed frequent signs of dietary
+deficiencies caused by the absence of fresh foods among Africans
+entering the service of the colonizers. These include beriberi,
+rickets, and scurvy. Rickets is a typical temperate climate disease, to
+which lack of sun contributes. But after colonialism had so
+destroyed the pattern of judicious food consumption in tropical
+Africa, even the sun was not enough to keep children’s bones
+straight. As for scurvy, that is so closely identified with the English
+sailor that he was nicknamed “Limey,” from eating limes to prevent
+scurvy while lacking access to fresh food on long sea voyages.
+However, a scurvy epidemic broke out in the middle of Tanganyika
+in the colonial epoch—among workers in the goldfields, whose
+wages and conditions of work did not permit them to get fresh citrus
+and other nourishment.
+
+(5) In South Africa, white settlement and capitalism transformed
+African diet from meat and cereal to dependence on mealy-meal
+(maize). Pellagra, or “rough skin,” was unknown in South Africa
+until about 1914. Subsequently, it became a scourge among
+Africans, because it derives from absence of milk and meat.
+(6) An official report on Basutoland (now Lesotho) had this to say:
+“According to residents of long standing, the physique and health of
+the Basuto today is not what it used to be. Malnutrition is seen in
+every village, dispensary, school and recruiting office. Mild scurvy
+and subscorbic conditions are not infrequent; pellagra is becoming
+more and more frequent and lower resistance to disease increasingly
+apparent. It is becoming generally accepted, too, that the occurrence
+of leprosy is associated with faulty diet.”
+To clinch the argument that colonialism had a deleterious effect on the
+African as a physical (and hence mental) entity, it is useful to point to those
+African peoples who until today have managed to maintain their own
+pattern of existence in so far as food is concerned. The pastoral Masai,
+Galla, Ankoli, Batutsi, and Somali are all in that category. Their physique is
+generally so superb, their resistance and endurance so great, that they have
+become the objects of scientific research to discover why they do so much
+better than the “well-fed” capitalists who are collapsing from heart disease.
+In the light of the prevailing balance-sheet concept of what colonial rule
+was about, it still remains to take note of European innovations in Africa
+such as modern medicine, clinical surgery, and immunization. It would be
+absurd to deny that these were objectively positive features, however
+limited they were quantitatively. However, they have to be weighed against
+the numerous setbacks received by Africa in all spheres due to colonialism
+as well as against the contributions Africa made to Europe. European
+science met the needs of its own society, and particularly those of the
+bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie did not suffer from hunger and starvation.
+Bourgeois science therefore did not consider those things as needs which
+had to be met and overcome—not even among their own workers and least
+of all on behalf of Africans. This is just a specific application of the general
+principle that the exploitation of Africa was being used to create a greater
+gap between Africa and capitalist Europe. The exploitation and the
+comparative disadvantage are the ingredients of underdevelopment.
+
+Education for Underdevelopment
+Education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives
+of its members and the maintenance of the social structure. Under certain
+circumstances, education also promotes social change. The greater portion
+of that education is informal, being acquired by the young from the example
+and behavior of elders in the society. Under normal circumstances,
+education grows out of the environment; the learning process being directly
+related to the pattern of work in the society. Among the Bemba of what was
+then Northern Rhodesia, children by the age of six could name fifty to sixty
+species of tree plants without hesitation, but they knew very little about
+ornamental flowers. The explanation is simply that knowledge of the trees
+was a necessity in an environment of “cut and burn” agriculture and in a
+situation where numerous household needs were met by tree products.
+Flowers, however, were irrelevant to survival.
+Indeed, the most crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its
+relevance to Africans, in sharp contrast with what was later introduced. The
+following features of indigenous African education can be considered
+outstanding: its close links with social life, both in a material and spiritual
+sense; its collective nature; its many-sidedness; and its progressive
+development in conformity with the successive stages of physical,
+emotional, and mental development of the child. There was no separation of
+education and productive activity or any division between manual and
+intellectual education. Altogether, through mainly informal means, precolonial African education matched the realities of pre-colonial African
+society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into that society.
+Some aspects of African education were formal: that is to say. there was
+a specific program and a conscious division between teachers and pupils.
+Formal education in pre-colonial Africa was also directly connected with
+the purposes of society, just like informal education. The programs of
+teaching were restricted to certain periods in the life of every individual,
+notably the period of initiation or “coming of age.” Many African societies
+had circumcision ceremonies for males or for both sexes, and for some time
+before the ceremonies a teaching program was arranged. The length of time
+involved could vary from a few weeks to several years. A famous example
+of the latter was the initiation school held by the Poro brotherhood in Sierra
+
+Leone. Formal education was also available at later stages in life, such as on
+the occasion of passing from one age-grade to another or of joining a new
+brotherhood. Specialized functions such as hunting, organizing religious
+ritual, and the practice of medicine definitely involved formal education
+within the family or clan. Such educational practices all dated back to
+communal times in Africa, but they persisted in the more developed African
+feudal and pre-feudal societies, and they were to be found on the eve of
+colonialism.
+As the mode of production moved towards feudalism in Africa, new
+features also emerged within the educational pattern. There was, for
+instance, more formal specialization, because the proportion of formal to
+informal education increases with technological advance. Apart from
+hunting and religion, the division of labor made it necessary to create guilds
+for passing down the techniques of ironworking, leather-making, cloth
+manufacture, pottery molding, professional trading, and so on. The
+emphasis on military force also led to formal education in that sphere, as in
+the case of Dahomey, Rwanda, and Zulu cited earlier. A state structure with
+a well-defined ruling class always encouraged the use of history as a means
+of glorifying the class in power. So in the Yoruba state of Ketu in the
+nineteenth century there existed a school of history, where a master drilled
+into the memories of his pupils a long list of the kings of Ketu and their
+achievements. Of course, reliance on memory alone placed severe limits on
+education of that type, and that is why education was much more advanced
+in those African countries where the use of writing had come into being.
+Along the Nile, in North Africa, in Ethiopia, in the Western Sudan, and
+along the East African coast, a minority of Africans became literate,
+producing a situation comparable to that of Asia and Europe before the
+latter part of the nineteenth century. As in other parts of the world, literacy
+in Africa was connected with religion, so that in Islamic countries it was a
+Koranic education and in Christian Ethiopia the education was designed to
+train priests and monks. Moslem education was particularly extensive at the
+primary level, and it was also available at the secondary and university
+levels. In Egypt there was the Al-Azhar University, in Morocco the
+University of Fez, and in Mali the University of Timbuktu—all testimony to
+the standard of education achieved in Africa before the colonial intrusion.
+
+The colonizers did not introduce education into Africa: they introduced a
+new set of formal educational institutions which partly supplemented and
+partly replaced those which were there before. The colonial system also
+stimulated values and practices which amounted to new informal education.
+The main purpose of the colonial school system was to train Africans to
+help man the local administration at the lowest ranks and to staff the private
+capitalist firms owned by Europeans. In effect, that meant selecting a few
+Africans to participate in the domination and exploitation of the continent
+as a whole. It was not an educational system that grew out of the African
+environment or one that was designed to promote the most rational use of
+material and social resources. It was not an educational system designed to
+give young people confidence and pride as members of African societies,
+but one which sought to instill a sense of deference towards all that was
+European and capitalist. Education in Europe was dominated by the
+capitalist class. The same class bias was automatically transferred to Africa;
+and to make matters worse the racism and cultural boastfulness harbored by
+capitalism were also included in the package of colonial education. Colonial
+schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of
+mental confusion, and the development of underdevelopment.
+A European-type school system hardly operated during the first forty
+years or so of colonialism. In that period, missionaries gave schooling for
+their own Christianizing purposes, and it was in the 1920s that the
+colonizing powers carried out a series of investigations into educational
+possibilities in Africa. Thereafter, colonial education became systematic and
+measurable, though it approached its maximum dimensions only in the
+post-Second World War era.
+Colonial education was a series of limitations inside other limitations.
+The first practical limitation was politicio-financial, which means that
+political policy, rather than the actual availability of money, guided
+financial expenditure. The metropolitan governments and their African
+administrations claimed that there was not enough money for education. As
+late as 1958, the British Colonial Office said of Northern Rhodesia:
+Until more money becomes available for the building of schools, no rapid progress can be
+expected and the practical prospects of providing full primary education for all children
+therefore remains fairly remote.
+
+It is amazing that Northern Rhodesia with its immense copper wealth did
+not have enough money to educate Africans! One cannot be certain whether
+the colonialists were trying to deceive others or whether they had succeeded
+in fooling themselves; but probably most of the confused white settlers in
+the Rhodesias fell into the latter category, for they consistently argued that
+Africans did not pay as much tax per head as Europeans and therefore
+Africans could not expect to get education and other services out of taxes
+paid by white settlers. This is the fundamental failure to perceive that a
+country’s wealth comes not from taxes but from production. African soil
+and African labor in Northern Rhodesia produced vast wealth, but African
+children under colonialism had little access to that wealth for their
+schooling.
+As noted earlier, most of Africa’s surplus was exported; and, out of the
+small portion which remained behind as government revenue, the
+percentage channeled into education was tiny. In every colony, the budget
+for education was incredibly small, compared to amounts being spent in
+capitalist Europe itself. In 1935, of the total revenue collected from taxing
+Africans in French West Africa, only 4.03 per cent was utilized on
+education. In the British colony of Nigeria, it was only 3.4 per cent. In
+Kenya, as late as 1946 only 2.26 per cent of the revenue was spent on
+African education. By 1960, those percentages had gone up two, three, or
+four times; but, being so small to begin with, they still remained
+insignificant.
+Since such small sums were spent, it followed that another basic
+limitation was quantitative, in the sense that very few Africans made it into
+schools. In the whole of French Equatorial Africa (Chad, Central African
+Republic, Gabon, and Congo Brazzaville), there were only 22,000 pupils
+enrolled in 1938—and that represented quite a jump over figures for the
+preceding five years. In 1938, the French provided education for 77,000
+pupils in French West Africa, with a population of at least 15 million. A
+very illuminating fact that should be noted is that in 1945 there were more
+than 80,000 students attending independent Islamic schools in French West
+Africa—a number not far short of those attending French-built schools by
+that date. In other words, it was only in the final stages of colonialism that
+the ruling European power began to provide Africans in the former Islamic
+
+states of West Africa with educational institutions having an enrollment
+greater than that of the previous formal education.
+Occasionally, in West and North Africa, the French government gave
+some financial support to the Koranic primary schools and to the medresas,
+or Islamic secondary schools. On the whole, however, the pre-colonial
+African school system was simply ignored and it tended to decline. In
+Algeria, the Arab Islamic institutions of learning suffered severely during
+the French wars of conquest, while others were deliberately suppressed
+when the French gained the upper hand. Throughout French North Africa,
+the old established Islamic universities suffered because colonialism
+deprived them of the economic base which previously gave them support.
+As with so many other aspects of African life, what the colonialists put in
+must be weighed against what they halted and what they destroyed in both
+real and potential terms.
+British colonies tended to do on average somewhat better than French
+ones with regard to educational activities, largely because of missionary
+initiatives rather than the British government itself. Ghana, Nigeria, and
+Uganda were fairly well off as far as colonial education went. Of course,
+that was in a purely relative sense, and the absolute numbers involved were
+never large. Sierra Leone was better off educationally than French West
+Africa because the seven out of every hundred children going to school in
+Sierra Leone before the last war compared favorably with five out of every
+hundred in French West Africa. As far as the British are concerned, their
+slightly superior record in some colonies is also offset by the very poor
+educational facilities offered to Africans in Kenya, Tanganyika, the Central
+African territories, and South Africa itself, which was for a long time a
+British responsibility.
+One limitation of the educational system of colonial Africa which is
+obscured by statistical averages is the great variation in opportunity
+between different regions in the same colony. In many colonies, only
+Africans living in or near the principal towns had educational opportunities.
+For instance, in Madagascar the capital town of Tananarive had the most
+substantial school facilities; in Gambia literacy was high for Bathurst town
+but low outside; and in Uganda the urbanized region of Buganda practically
+monopolized education. Generally speaking, the unevenness in educational
+levels reflected the unevenness of economic exploitation and the different
+
+rates at which different parts of a colony entered the money economy. Thus,
+in Gold Coast, the Northern Territories were neglected educationally,
+because they did not offer the colonialists any products for export. In Sudan
+it was the huge southern region which was in a similar position. Inside
+Tanganyika, a map showing the major cotton and coffee areas virtually
+coincides with a map showing areas in which colonial education was
+available. It means that those whom the colonialists could not readily
+exploit were not offered even the crumbs of education.
+The closer one scrutinizes the educational contribution of colonialism
+even in purely quantitative terms the more it shrinks into insignificance. It
+must be noted, for instance, that there was an extremely high rate of
+“dropouts.” A large percentage of those enrolled never finished school. In
+big capitalist countries like the U.S.A., there are many dropouts at the
+college and university level; in colonial Africa, the dropouts were occurring
+at the primary level, at a rate as high as 50 per cent. For every student who
+completed primary school, one fell by the wayside. The dropouts were from
+primary schools because there was hardly any other type of school—this
+absence of secondary, technical, and university education being yet another
+of the stumbling blocks.
+Africans were being educated inside colonial schools to become junior
+clerks and messengers. Too much learning would have been both
+superfluous and dangerous for clerks and messengers. Therefore, secondary
+education was rare and other forms of higher education were virtually
+nonexistent throughout most of the colonial epoch. That which was
+provided went mainly to non-Africans. As late as 1959, Uganda spent about
+11 pounds per African pupil, 38 pounds per Indian, and 186 pounds on each
+European child—the difference being due largely to the availability of
+secondary education for the children of the capitalists and the middlemen.
+In Kenya, the discrimination was worse and the number of European
+children involved was high. In 1960, more than 11,000 European children
+were attending school in Kenya, and 3,000 of those were receiving
+secondary education. The settler colony of Algeria displayed similar
+characteristics. Only 20 per cent of the secondary pupils in 1954 were
+denoted as “Moslems,” which meant in effect “Algerian” as distinct from
+European. Other minorities also did better than the indigenous population.
+For instance, the Jews in North Africa and especially in Tunisia played the
+
+middlemen roles, and their children were all educated right up to secondary
+standards.
+African countries without a big white settler population also had racist
+educational structures with regard to opportunities at all levels and
+especially opportunities for higher education. In Senegal in 1946, the high
+school had 723 pupils, of whom 174 were Africans. Later on, a university
+was set up in Dakar (to serve the whole of French West Africa); and yet in
+the 1950s, on the eve of independence, more than half of the university
+students were French.
+The Portuguese have not been discussed so far, because there is scarcely
+any education to be discussed in their colonial territories. For many years,
+the statistical data were never made available, and when published towards
+the end of the colonial period the figures were often inflated. What is
+undeniable is that the African child growing up in Portuguese colonial
+territories stood one chance out of a hundred of getting instruction beyond
+grade 2 or grade 3. The secondary schools that came into existence were for
+Europeans and Indians, the latter drawn mainly from Goa. The colonial
+powers with small territories in Africa were Spain and Italy. Like Portugal,
+they were also backward from a European capitalist viewpoint, and they
+provided their colonial subjects with a tiny amount of primary education
+and no secondary education.
+Belgium was in a somewhat special category as far as colonial education
+was concerned. Although small, Belgium was a relatively developed and
+industrialized country, and it ruled one of the richest areas of Africa:
+namely, the Congo. By colonial standards, the people of Congo and
+Rwanda-Urundi had fair access to primary education, but schooling beyond
+that was almost impossible to obtain. This was the consequence of a
+deliberate policy pursued by the Belgian government and the Catholic
+church. The African “native” was to be gradually civilized. To give him
+secondary education was like asking a young child to chew meat when he
+should be eating porridge. Furthermore, the Belgians were so interested in
+the welfare of the African masses that they argued that no highly educated
+African would be able to serve his own people! Consequently, it was only in
+1948 that a Belgian commission recommended the establishment of
+secondary schools for Africans in the colonies. It is not at all surprising that,
+
+at the time of regaining political independence, the Congo had only 16
+graduates out of a population of more than 13 million.
+Educators often refer to “the educational pyramid,” comprising primary
+education as the base and going upwards through secondary, teachertraining, higher technical, and university facilities—the last named being so
+small that it could be represented as the point at the top of the pyramid.
+Throughout Africa, the primary base was narrow and yet the pyramid
+sloped shallowly because so few of the primary students could continue
+beyond that level. Only in certain British colonies was the pyramid really
+completed by significant higher and university education. West Africa had
+Achimota and Yaba Colleges, apart from Fourah Bay which was at
+university level. Ibadan and the University of Ghana also came into
+existence some years before the end of the colonial regime. In the Sudan,
+there was Gordon College, which evolved into the University of Khartoum,
+and in East Africa there was Makerere University.
+The following data for the year 1958 could be used to illustrate the
+educational pyramid in Southern Rhodesia, where African education was
+not well favored. Total kindergarten enrollment was 227,000. In the primary
+schools 77,000 entered grade 1, and 10,000 made it to grade 6. Secondary
+education began with 3,000 pupils, of whom only 13 made it to grade 12. In
+that year, there were no African graduates from the recently established
+University College in Salisbury, but by 1960 there were three.
+The final word on the quantity of education provided by Europe to
+Africa can be said in the form of the statistics at the beginning of the rule of
+the new African states. Some scholars have worked out a statistical index
+on education whereby educational facilities are evaluated in numbers from
+0 to 100, moving from the poorest to the most advanced. On that index,
+most African countries are below 10. The developed exploiter countries and
+the socialist states are usually above 80. A UNESCO publication on
+education in black independent Africa said:
+Of this population (of around 170 million), a little more than 25 million are of school age and
+of these nearly 13 million have no opportunity of going to school—and of the “privileged” 12
+million less than half complete their primary education. Only three out of every 100 children
+see the inside of a secondary school while not even two of every thousand have a chance of
+receiving some sort of higher education in Africa itself. The overall estimated illiteracy rate of
+80 to 85 per cent is nearly twice that of the average world figure.
+
+The imperialist whites use the above evidence to snigger at Africans for
+being “illiterate natives” and they would argue that illiteracy is part of “the
+vicious circle of poverty.” Yet, the same people boast proudly that they have
+educated Africa. It is difficult to see how they can have it both ways. If
+independent Africa is still without the benefits of modern education (as it
+is), then seventy-five years of colonial exploitation undoubtedly have
+something to do with the state of affairs; and the absurdity is so much the
+greater when one contemplates how much Africa produced in that period
+and how much of that went to develop all aspects of European capitalist
+society, including their educational institutions. Cecil Rhodes could afford
+to leave a legacy of lavish scholarships to white students for study at
+Oxford University, having made a fortune from exploiting Africa and
+Africans.
+Those Africans who had access to education were faced with certain
+qualitative problems. The quality was poor by prevailing European
+standards. The books, the methods of teaching, and the discipline were all
+brought to Africa in the nineteenth century; and, on the whole, colonial
+schools remained sublimely indifferent to the twentieth century. New ideas
+that were incorporated in the capitalist metropoles never reached the
+colonies. In particular, the fantastic changes in science did not reach African
+classrooms, for there were few schools where science subjects were taught.
+Similarly, the evolution of higher technical education did not have any
+counterpart in colonial Africa.
+There were numerous absurdities in the transplantation of a version of
+European education into Africa. When the Bemba children mentioned
+above went to school, they had no program of instruction relating to the
+plant life with which they would otherwise have familiarized themselves.
+Instead, they were taught about flowers—and about European roses at that.
+Dr. Kofi Busia some years ago made the following admission:
+At the end of my first year at secondary school (Mfantsipim, Cape Coast, Ghana), I went home
+to Wenchi for the Christmas vacation. I had not been home for four years, and on that visit, I
+became painfully aware of my isolation. I understood our community far less than the boys of
+my own age who had never been to school. Over the years, as I went through college and
+university, I felt increasingly that the education I received taught me more and more about
+Europe and less and less about my own society.
+
+Eventually, Busia knew so little about African society that he proposed that
+independent Africans should “dialogue” with the fascist/racist white
+minority that maintains apartheid in South Africa.
+Some of the contradictions between the content of colonial education
+and the reality of Africa were really incongruous. On a hot afternoon in
+some tropical African school, a class of black shining faces would listen to
+their geography lesson on the seasons of the year—spring, summer, autumn,
+and winter. They would learn about the Alps and the river Rhine but
+nothing about the Atlas Mountains of North Africa or the river Zambezi. If
+those students were in a British colony, they would dutifully write that “we
+defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588”—at a time when Hawkins was
+stealing Africans and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for so doing. If
+they were in a French colony, they would learn that “the Gauls, our
+ancestors, had blue eyes,” and they would be convinced that “Napoleon was
+our greatest general”—the same Napoleon who reinstituted slavery in the
+Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and was only prevented from doing the
+same in Haiti because his forces were defeated by an even greater strategist
+and tactician, the African Toussaint L’Ouverture.
+To some extent Europeans thoughtlessly applied their own curricula
+without reference to African conditions; but very often they deliberately did
+so with intent to confuse and mystify. As late as 1949, a Principal Education
+Officer in Tanganyika carefully outlined that the Africans of that colony
+should be bombarded in primary school with propaganda about the British
+royal family. “The theme of the [British] king as father should be stressed
+throughout the syllabus and mentioned in every lesson,” he said. He further
+urged that African children should be shown numerous pictures of the
+English princesses and their ponies at Sandringham and Windsor Castle.
+Whatever little was discussed about the African past in colonial schools
+was about European activities in Africa. That trend is now sufficiently
+reversed to allow the present generation of African pupils to smile at the
+thought that Europeans “discovered” Mount Kenya or the river Niger. But
+in the colonial period, the paradox was that whoever had an opportunity to
+be educationally misguided could count himself lucky, because that
+misguidance was a means of personal advance within the structure created
+by European capitalists in and for Africa.
+
+The French, Portuguese, and Belgians made it clear that education at any
+level was designed “to civilize the African native,” and of course only a
+civilized native could hope to gain worthwhile employment and recognition
+from the colonialists. According to the French, an African, after receiving
+French education, stood a chance of becoming an assimilée—one who
+could be assimilated or incorporated into the superior French culture. The
+Portuguese used the word assimilado, which means exactly the same; and
+Portuguese colonial law distinguished sharply between a native and an
+assimilado. The latter was sometimes called a civilisado because of being
+able to read and write Portuguese. That sort of African was rewarded with
+certain privileges. One great irony was that in Portugal up to 1960, nearly
+half the population was illiterate, and therefore if they had been put to the
+same test, they would have been judged uncivilized! Meanwhile, the
+Belgians were parading around with the same system. They called their
+“educated Bantu” in Congo the évolués (“those who have evolved” from
+savagery to civilization, thanks to the Belgians).
+Somehow, the British avoided hard and fast legal distinctions between
+the educated and uneducated African, but they encouraged cultural
+imitation all the same. Governor Cameron of Tanganyika in the 1920s was
+known as a “progressive” governor. But when he was attacked for trying to
+preserve the African personality in the educational system, he denied the
+charge and declared that his intention was that the African should cease to
+think as an African and instead should become “a fair-minded Englishman.”
+Students who came out of Livingstonia or Blantyre Mission in Malawi were
+known as black Scotsmen, because of the effort of Scottish missionaries. In
+Sierra Leone, the white cultural influence went back to the eighteenth
+century, and Sierra Leone Creoles stood out even from the rest of
+miseducated black people. The Creoles were not satisfied with an English
+Christian name or even with one European surname: they had to choose two
+European surnames and connect them with a hyphen. Of course, in practical
+terms, the education with all its warped values meant that the educated
+handful went as far as colonialism would allow Africans to go in the civil
+service or in the employ of private capitalist firms.
+During the colonial epoch and afterwards, criticism was justly leveled at
+the colonial educational system for failing to produce more secondary
+school pupils and more university graduates. And yet, it can be said that
+
+among those who had the most education were to be found the most
+alienated Africans on the continent. Those were the ones who evolved and
+were assimilated. At each further stage of education, they were battered by
+and succumbed to the values of the white capitalist system; and, after being
+given salaries, they could then afford to sustain a style of life imported from
+outside. Access to knives and forks, three-piece suits, and pianos then
+further transformed their mentality. There is a famous West Indian
+calypsonian who in satirizing his colonial school days, remarked that had he
+been a bright student he would have learned more and turned out to be a
+fool. Unfortunately, the colonial school system educated far too many fools
+and clowns, fascinated by the ideas and way of life of the European
+capitalist class. Some reached a point of total estrangement from African
+conditions and the African way of life, and like Blaise Diagne of Senegal
+they chirped happily that they were and would always be “European.”
+There is no getting away from the conclusion reached by the African
+educationalist Abdou Moumini that “colonial education corrupted the
+thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal
+complexes.” It followed that those who were Europeanized were to that
+extent de-Africanized, as a consequence of the colonial education and the
+general atmosphere of colonial life. Many examples are cited in present-day
+Africa of the insulting treatment of aspects of African culture in the colonial
+period, based on cultural imperialism and white racism. What is seldom
+commented upon is the fact that many Africans were the victims of fascism
+at the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish, at the hands of the Italians and
+the Vichy French regime for a brief period in the late 1930s and the early
+1940s, and at the hands of the British and Boers in South Africa throughout
+this century. The fascist colonial powers were retarded capitalist states,
+where the government police machinery united with the Catholic church
+and the capitalists to suppress Portuguese and Spanish workers and peasants
+and to keep them ignorant. Understandably, the fascist colonialists wanted
+to do the same to African working people, and in addition they vented their
+racism on Africans, just as Hitler had done on the Jews.
+Like most colonial administrations, that of the Italians in Libya
+disregarded the culture of the Africans. However, after the fascist Mussolini
+came to power, the disregard gave way to active hostility, especially in
+relation to the Arabic language and the Moslem religion. The Portuguese
+
+and Spanish had always shown contempt for African language and religion.
+Schools of kindergarten and primary level for Africans in Portuguese
+colonies were nothing but agencies for the spread of the Portuguese
+language. Most schools were controlled by the Catholic church, as a
+reflection of the unity of church and state in fascist Portugal. In the littleknown Spanish colony of Guinea (Rio Muni), the small amount of
+education given to Africans was based on eliminating the use of local
+languages by the pupils and on instilling in their hearts “the holy fear of
+God.” Schools in colonial Africa were usually blessed with the names of
+saints or bestowed with the names of rulers, explorers, and governors from
+the colonizing power. In Spanish Guinea, that practice was followed,
+resulting in the fact that Rio Muni children had to pass by the José Antonio
+school—the equivalent of saying the Adolf Hitler school if the region were
+German, for the school was named in honor of José Antonio, the founder of
+the Spanish fascist party.
+Another aspect of the colonial educational and cultural patterns which
+needs investigation is the manner in which European racism and contempt
+was expressed not only by hostility to African culture but by paternalism
+and by praise of negative and static social features. There were many
+colonialists who wished to preserve in perpetuity everything that was
+African, if it appeared quaint or intriguing to them. Such persons merely
+succeeded in cutting African life off from the potentially beneficial aspects
+of the international world. An excellent example is the kind of work done in
+Gabon by Albert Schweitzer, who was in charge of a dirty unhygienic
+hospital with dogs, cats, goats, and chickens running around, under the
+guise of fitting into the African culture and environment.
+As late as 1959, a friend and colleague of Albert Schweitzer defended
+his unsterile hospital in the following terms:
+Now to the domestic animals at the Hospital. People have been shocked by the informality
+with which animals and people mix, and although it is perhaps not always defensible on
+hygienic grounds, the mixture adds considerably to the charm of the place.
+
+The writer was a dental surgeon from New York, who would obviously
+have had a fit if a goat or chicken had wandered into his New York surgery.
+He knew full well that at Schweitzer’s hospital “the goats, dogs and cats
+visit hospital wards teeming with microbial life of the most horrifying
+
+varieties,” but he defended their habitation with Africans because that was
+part of the culture and charm that had to be preserved!
+In the educational sphere, the Belgians carried out a language policy
+which might appeal to contemporary nationalists, for they insisted that
+primary education should be in one of the five main African languages of
+the territory. However, in practice, they used that apparently progressive
+decision to seal off one Congolese ethnic group from another and to cut the
+educated off from a wider world of knowledge, because the missionaries
+translated into the local languages only that which they thought desirable.
+The policy of mock respect for African culture reached its highest
+expression in South Africa in the notorious Bantu Education Act of 1953,
+which sought to promote the differences between Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa,
+Venda, and so on—differences which were part of an early stage of
+development and which would have been transcended if there were no
+European intervention or if under white rule specific steps were not taken to
+maintain the anachronistic “tribal” entities.
+Not all colonial educators and administrators were consciously taking up
+the position that the African should be educated the better to be enslaved.
+On the contrary, most of them thought that they were doing Africans a great
+favor; and there were a few who were enlightened enough to realize that
+there was scope for devising a school program which was less divorced
+from African reality. In 1928, even the French education minister was
+shocked to learn that Africans were taught that the Gauls, their ancestors,
+had blue eyes. From the 1920s, both Britain and France produced colonial
+educators and education commissions which urged greater relevance of
+teaching programs in Africa. They also put forward suggestions such as the
+use of local languages in primary schools, more education for girls, and an
+end to the white-collar orientation of schooling. However, the seemingly
+progressive nature of those recommendations could not change the fact that
+colonial education was an instrument to serve the European capitalist class
+in its exploitation of Africa. Whatever colonial educators thought or did
+could not change that basic fact.
+To recommend that African girls should go to school is more than just an
+educational policy. It has tremendous social implications, and it
+presupposes that the society will usefully employ the educated woman.
+Metropolitan capitalist society itself had failed to liberate women, to offer
+
+them equal educational opportunities, or to provide them with responsible
+jobs at equal rates of pay with men. That being the case, it was wishful
+thinking to imagine that the colonial educational system would take any
+serious interest in African women, especially since the colonialists would
+have had to transform the consciousness on that matter which was
+characteristic of feudal and pre-feudal societies. Nowhere did the cash-crop
+economy or the export of basic ores make provision for educated women.
+As in the capitalist metropoles it was assumed that the civil service was for
+men. Therefore, the extremely limited employment sector in the colonies
+had nothing to offer educated women, and modern education remained a
+luxury with which few African women came into contact.
+Another progressive suggestion made by some colonial educationists
+was for more agricultural and technical schooling. But, genuine technical
+education was ruled out, because the fundamental purpose of the colonial
+economy did not permit the development of industry and skills within
+Africa. Only in rare cases, such as in the Congo, was there an objective
+necessity for technically trained Africans. In the later stages of colonial rule
+in Congo, mineral exploitation had developed to such a point that there was
+practical need for extensive rudimentary technical skills among African
+workers. A few Katangese and other Congolese also received technical
+training of a secondary equivalent. Significantly enough, in such cases, the
+private companies took the initiative, since their profits were at stake, and
+the technical schools were extensions of their production processes.
+However, for the most part, whatever skilled jobs needed to be done within
+the restricted field of mining and industry in Africa were met by the
+importation of Europeans.
+Agriculture was not carried on as a scientific industry, as in Scandinavia
+or New Zealand, where whites were farming on an intensive capitalist basis.
+As noted earlier, the production of cash crops in Africa was stimulated by
+the minimum expenditure on the part of Europeans and with no infusion of
+new technology. Therefore, when educational advisers suggested
+agricultural education relevant to African needs, this meant no addition to
+African knowledge. In many colonial schools, agriculture became an
+apology for a subject. It was part of the drudgery of the institution. The
+teachers received no agricultural education, and, therefore, they could not
+teach anything scientific. Children acquired nothing but distaste for the
+
+heavy labor of shamba work, and in fact it was used as a form of
+punishment.
+Early educational commissions also accorded high priority to religious
+and moral flavoring of instruction—something that was disappearing in
+Europe itself. The role of the Christian church in the educational process
+obviously needs special attention. The Christian missionaries were as much
+part of the colonizing forces as were the explorers, traders, and soldiers.
+There may be room for arguing whether in a given colony the missionaries
+brought the other colonialist forces or vice versa, but there is no doubting
+the fact that missionaries were agents of colonialism in the practical sense,
+whether or not they saw themselves in that light. The imperialist adventurer
+Sir Henry Johnston disliked missionaries, but he conceded in praise of them
+that “each mission station is an exercise in colonisation.”
+In Europe, the church had long held a monopoly over schooling from
+feudal times right into the capitalist era. By the late nineteenth century, that
+situation was changing in Europe; but, as far as the European colonizers
+were concerned, the church was free to handle the colonial educational
+system in Africa. The strengths and weaknesses of that schooling were very
+much to be attributed to the church.
+Both inside and outside church and school, the personnel of the church
+were instrumental in setting values during the colonial epoch. They taught
+an ethic of human relations that in itself could appeal to the finer instincts of
+Africans, just as it had previously stirred other Europeans. Of course, there
+was a huge gap between European conduct and the Christian principles with
+which they were associated; and, on the part of the Africans, it was also true
+that motives for accepting Christianity often had nothing to do with the
+content of the religion. Indeed, the church as a source of education was
+probably more attractive to many converts than the church as a dispenser of
+religion.
+Whatever the church taught in any capacity may be considered as a
+contribution to formal and informal education in colonial Africa, and its
+teachings must be placed within a social context. The church’s role was
+primarily to preserve the social relations of colonialism, as an extension of
+the role it played in preserving the social relations of capitalism in Europe.
+Therefore, the Christian church stressed humility, docility, and acceptance.
+Ever since the days of slavery in the West Indies, the church had been
+
+brought in on condition that it should not excite the African slaves with
+doctrines of equality before God. In those days, they taught slaves to sing
+that all things were bright and beautiful, and that the slavemaster in his
+castle was to be accepted as God’s work just like the slave living in a
+miserable hovel and working twenty hours per day under the whip.
+Similarly, in colonial Africa, churches could be relied upon to preach
+turning the other cheek in the face of exploitation, and they drove home the
+message that everything would be right in the next world. Only the Dutch
+Reformed church of South Africa was openly racist, but all others were
+racist in so far as their European personnel were no different from other
+whites who had imbibed racism and cultural imperialism as a consequence
+of the previous centuries of contact between Europeans and the rest of the
+world.
+In serving colonialism, the church often took up the role of arbiter of
+what was culturally correct. African ancestral beliefs were equated with the
+devil (who was black anyway), and it took a very long time before some
+European churchmen accepted prevailing African beliefs as constituting
+religion rather than mere witchcraft and magic. However, in its hostility
+towards African cultural and religious manifestations, the Christian church
+did perform certain progressive tasks. Practices such as killing twins and
+trial by ordeal were frowned upon by the European missionaries, and those
+were reflections of superstitious ideas rooted in an early stage of African
+development, when something like the birth of twins could not be
+scientifically explained, and, therefore, gave rise to religious fear.
+It is to be noted that in West Africa long before the colonial Scramble,
+many outcasts in society and persons who suffered from religious and social
+prejudices were the first converts of the Christian church. What was
+supported by one section of the population was opposed by another, and in
+the present century the cultural imperialism of the church excited great
+opposition. Prevailing African customs such as polygamy were attacked
+without reference to their socio-economic function. On the question of
+monogamy the Christian missionaries were introducing not a religious
+principle but rather a facet of European capitalist society. For their
+propaganda to have been successful, European activity had to work a
+transformation in the extended family patterns of African societies. That
+was very slow in occurring, and, in the meanwhile, many Africans accepted
+
+the religious aspects while rejecting the cultural appendages and the
+European missionaries themselves.
+Much has been written about the trend in colonial Africa known as the
+Independent church movement. It was a trend in which thousands of
+African Christians participated by breaking away from European churches
+(especially Protestant churches), and setting up their own places of worship
+under Christian African leadership. The motives were varied. Some
+Independent churches were highly nationalistic, like that established by
+John Chilembwe, who led an armed nationalist uprising in Nyasaland
+(Malawi) in 1917. Others developed as a response of those Africans
+aspiring to be priests or pastors to the discrimination practiced against them
+by white missionaries. One constant factor was disgust with the way that
+Europeans forced Africans to identify as Europeans. Revolting against that
+concept, one Zulu Independent church put the question to the local
+population: “Are you a Jew or a Zulu? Were you there when they crucified
+their Lord?” Nevertheless, many Africans came to accept the dehumanizing
+principle of alienation from self. African identification with Europeans (be
+they Gentile or Jew) was a pillar of the informal education of the colonial
+epoch.
+In the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial
+education was that of capitalist individualism. Like many aspects of the
+superstructure of beliefs in a society, it had both its negative and positive
+sides, viewed historically. The European bourgeoisie were progressive
+when they defended the individual from the excessive control of the father
+in the family and against the collective regulations of the church and feudal
+society. However, the capitalist system then went on to champion and
+protect the rights of the individual property owners against the rights of the
+mass of exploited workers and peasants. When capitalism had its impact on
+Africa in the colonial period, the idea of individualism was already in its
+reactionary phase. It was no longer serving to liberate the majority but
+rather to enslave the majority for the benefit of a few.
+When individualism was applied to land, it meant that the notions of
+private ownership and the transfer of land through sale became prevalent in
+some parts of the continent. Much more widespread was the new
+understanding that individual labor should benefit the person concerned and
+not some wider collective, such as the clan or ethnic group. Thus, the
+
+practice of collective labor and egalitarian social distribution gave way to
+accumulative tendencies. Superficially, it appeared that individualism
+brought progress. Some individuals owned large coffee, cocoa, or cotton
+shambas, and others rose to some prominence in the colonial administration
+through education. As individuals, they had improved their lot, and they
+became models of achievement within the society. Any model of
+achievement is an educational model, which directs the thoughts and
+actions of young and old in the society. The model of personal achievement
+under colonialism was really a model for the falling apart and the
+underdevelopment of African society taken as a whole.
+It is a common myth within capitalist thought that the individual through
+drive and hard work can become a capitalist. In the U.S.A., it is usual to
+refer to an individual like John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as someone who rose
+“from rags to riches.” To complete the moral of the Rockefeller success
+story, it would be necessary to fill in the details on all the millions of people
+who had to be exploited in order for one man to become a multimillionaire.
+The acquisition of wealth is not due to hard work alone, or the Africans
+working as slaves in America and the West Indies would have been the
+wealthiest group in the world. The individualism of the capitalist must be
+seen against the hard and unrewarded work of the masses.
+The idea of individualism was more destructive in colonial Africa than it
+was in metropolitan capitalist society. In the latter, it could be said that the
+rise of the bourgeois class indirectly benefited the working classes, through
+promoting technology and raising the standard of living. But, in Africa,
+colonialism did not bring those benefits—it merely intensified the rate of
+exploitation of African labor and continued to export the surplus. In Europe,
+individualism led to entrepreneurship and adventurism of the type which
+spearheaded Europe’s conquest of the rest of the world. In Africa, both the
+formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism
+destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated
+individualism without social responsibility. That delayed the political
+process through which the society tried to regain its independence. Up to
+this point, it has consistently been held that development is rooted in the
+material environment, in the techniques of production, and in the social
+relations deriving from people’s work. There are what are known as
+“conspiracy theories of history” by which the happenings of whole epochs
+
+are presented as being the secret scheming of one group or another. Such an
+approach is not to be recommended in the study of Africa’s relations with
+Europe. However, with regard to colonial educational policy, one comes
+closest to finding the elements of conscious planning by a group of
+Europeans to control the destiny of millions of Africans over a considerable
+period of time extending into the future. The planning of colonial education
+for the subjugation of Africa was most fully displayed by the French,
+because French politicians and administrators had the habit of openly
+expressing their thoughts on Africa. Therefore, the words of the French
+colonialists themselves will be cited here to illustrate how the colonial
+educational system did not leave vital political matters to chance, but was
+consciously carrying out policies hostile to the regaining of freedom by
+African peoples.
+Ever since the period of the imperialist Scramble for Africa, French
+leaders realized that it was imperative to start some schools in the parts of
+Africa claimed by France, so that French language and culture might be
+accepted by some Africans, who would then identify with France rather
+than Britain or Portugal or some other European rival. This was particularly
+true in disputed frontier zones. Eugène Etienne, a French minister at the
+start of the colonial era, stated that the extension of the French language
+was necessary as “a measure of national defense.” As early as 1884, there
+was set up the Alliance Française as an instrument of educational and
+cultural imperialism, recognized and supported by the French government.
+The reports of the Alliance Française show clearly that they thought of
+themselves as an arm of French imperialism, fighting so that France could
+entrench itself. For example, the Alliance Française wrote of French
+schools in Upper Guinea in the late nineteenth century:
+They have to combat the redoubtable influence of the English schools of Sierra Leone in this
+region. The struggle between the two languages becomes more intense as one moves to the
+south, invaded by English natives and by their Methodist pastors.
+
+As seen earlier in the case of Portugal and Spain, the spread of the
+language of the European colonizing power was considered of major
+importance. Belgium on the other hand encouraged local languages as a
+means of division and retardation. Only in Tanganyika, under German rule,
+was there a positive reaction to the potentialities of Swahili as a teaching
+
+language, so that there was a further impetus to that language, which had
+already spread by trade, political relations, and personal contacts.
+Apart from language, the pillar of cultural imperialism in most colonies
+was religion. The church never played as important a role in French
+colonies as it did in other parts of Africa colonized by predominantly
+Catholic countries, and the Protestant churches in British colonies also had
+a much more vital role than the church in French Africa. The explanation is
+that the French bourgeois revolution of the eighteenth century was more
+thoroughly anti-clerical than any other bourgeois revolution, and the
+Catholic church was completely separated from government in France by
+1905, after many years of poor relations. Nevertheless, when the French
+saw that mission schools were helping England to entrench itself in Africa,
+the French government asked the aid of their own Catholic church to secure
+national interests.
+From the viewpoint of the colonizers, once the frontiers of a colony were
+firmly decided, the major problem remained that of securing African
+compliance in carrying out policies favorable to the métropoles. There was
+always the possible use of force for that purpose, but naked force was best
+kept in reserve, rather than utilized for everyday affairs. Only education
+could lay the basis for a smooth-functioning colonial administration. In the
+first place, there was the elementary language problem of Europeans
+communicating with Africans. Most of the time, Europeans used translators
+to pass on orders, but it was known that African translators seized the
+opportunity to promote themselves and to modify or even sabotage orders.
+There was a saying in French colonial Africa that “translation is equal to
+treason,” and the only way to avoid that was to teach the mass of the people
+French.
+Then there was the practical aspect of educating Africans to be better
+workers, just as in Europe the workers received education so that they
+would be more efficient and produce extra surplus for the capitalists. In
+colonial Africa, the European bourgeoisie realized that some education
+would maximize the value of labor. Albert Sarraut, a French Colonial
+Minister, stressed in 1914 what he termed “the economic utility of
+educating the [African] masses.” Several years earlier the French had made
+a specific statement to the same effect on Madagascar. An ordinance of
+1899 indicated that the purpose of schooling was
+
+... to make the young Malagasy faithful and obedient subjects of France and to offer an
+education which would be industrial, agricultural and commercial, so as to ensure that the
+settlers and various public services of the colony can meet their personnel requirements.
+
+In practice, it was not necessary to educate the masses because only a
+minority of the African population entered the colonial economy in such a
+way that their performance could be enhanced by education. Indeed, the
+French concentrated on selecting a small minority, who would be
+thoroughly subjected to French cultural imperialism, and who would aid
+France in administering its vast African colonial possessions. William
+Ponty, an early Governor-General of French West Africa, spoke in terms of
+forming “an elite of young people destined to aid our own efforts.” In 1919,
+Henry Simon (then Colonial Minister) outlined a program for secondary
+education in Africa with a view to “making the best indigenous elements
+into complete Frenchmen.”
+The best expressions of the political implications of French colonial
+educational policy came in the 1930s; and, by that time, some action was
+also matching the words. Brevié, the Governor-General of French West
+Africa in 1930, urged the extension of the higher levels of primary
+schooling for Africans “to help us in our work of colonization.” Brevie was
+encouraged by the fact that by then there had appeared “a native elite, of
+whose zeal for a thorough and exclusive French culture signs are already
+visible.” So with the support of the Inspector-General of education, that
+governor went on to outline plans for African students to attend secondary
+school, so as to become colonial cadres. Any socio-political system needs
+its cadres. That was the role played by the youngest age-grades in Shaka’s
+armies and it was the role played by the Komsomol or Young Communists
+in the Soviet Union. Being a cadre involved not just training for a practical
+job but also political orientation to serve as a leading element in the system.
+The French and other colonialists understood this very well. This is how
+Brevié expressed it:
+It is in no wise merely a matter of turning out batches of apprentices, clerks and officials
+according to the fluctuating needs of the moment. The role of these native cadres is much
+wider.
+
+Only in North Africa, with its heavy white settler population, did the
+French find it unnecessary to encourage a local elite to run affairs under the
+direction of the metropolis and the governor; although even in Algeria there
+
+emerged a number of subjects called the Beni Oui Oui—literally the “Yes,
+Yes men,” who always assented to carrying out French instructions in
+opposition to the interests of most of their brothers. Another far-sighted
+aspect of French political policy in the education sphere is the manner in
+which they forced the sons of chiefs to acquire education. It was a
+deliberate attempt to capture the loyalty of those persons who had
+previously held political power in independent Africa, and it was an attempt
+at continuity with the pre-colonial phase. As the French themselves put it,
+by educating the sons of traditional rulers, “a bond is thus established
+between the native cadres formed by us and those that the native
+community recognizes.”
+In 1935, a team of British educationalists visited French Africa, and they
+admitted with a mixture of jealousy and admiration that France had
+succeeded in creating an elite of Africans in the image of Frenchmen—an
+elite that was helping to perpetuate French colonial rule. To greater or lesser
+extent, all colonial powers produced similar cadres to manage and buttress
+their colonial empires in Africa and elsewhere.
+After the Second World War, it became obvious that colonial rule could
+not forever be maintained in the same form in Africa; Asia already having
+broken loose and Africa being restless. When the awareness that the end
+was in sight became generalized, the metropolitan powers turned to their
+colonial cadres and handed to them the reins of policy in politically
+independent Africa. It should be emphasized that the choice that Africa
+should be free was not made by the colonial powers but by the people of
+Africa. Nevertheless, the changeover from colonialism to what is known as
+neo-colonialism did have the element of conspiracy in it. In 1960, the then
+British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, made the oft-quoted statement
+that “a wind of change was blowing across Africa.” That was the bourgeois
+way of expressing what Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai was soon to assert:
+namely, that “Africa was ripe for Revolution.” In order to delay or hijack
+the African revolution, the colonizing powers turned to a group which they
+had already created for a different purpose—the elite of colonially educated
+Africans, from among whom were selected wherever possible those who
+were most suitable for elevation to political leadership, and the
+administration and military apparatus were left in the hands of similar
+trustworthy cadres.
+
+There were a few farsighted Europeans who all along saw that the
+colonial educational system would serve them if and when political
+independence was regained in Africa. For instance, Pierre Foncin, a founder
+of the Alliance Française, stated at the beginning of this century that “it is
+necessary to attach the colonies to the metropole by a very solid
+psychological bond, against the day when their progressive emancipation
+ends in a form of federation as is probable—that they be and they remain
+French in language, thought and spirit.” Yet, it was the British who firsh
+appreciated that they should bow to the inevitable and grant African
+independence. While the French introduced a few African representatives
+into their own Parliament in France so as to try and keep African territories
+tied to France, the British began to prepare to hand over to certain selected
+Africans.
+In the metropolitan capitalist countries, there were (and still are) elite
+schools which provided the bulk of the political and other leadership. The
+English public schools of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Winchester are well
+known as training grounds of the British ruling class, and by many
+authorities they are considered more important that the universities to which
+the students of such secondary schools invariably go. In France at the
+secondary level, it was, and still is, usual to find that students emerging
+from places like the Lycée Louis le Grand and the École Normal Superieure
+Rue d’Ulm are the future cabinet ministers and top executives of that
+country. In the U.S.A., in spite of the myth that everyone can reach the top,
+a high proportion of the ruling class went to exclusive schools like the
+private boys’ schools of Groton, St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and Philips Exeter.
+Under African conditions, anyone who went to school in the colonial
+period virtually entered the elite, because the numbers enjoying that
+privilege even at the primary level were so small. In addition, within each
+colony there tended to be at least one secondary school or higher institute
+which played the role of furnishing the politico-administrative personnel of
+Africa in the era of political independence. The names of cabinet ministers
+and permanent secretaries of individual African countries can be found on
+the school rolls of Gordon College (Sudan), Alliance High School (Kenya),
+King’s College Budo (Uganda), Tabora Secondary School (Tanzania),
+Livingstonia (Malawi), William Ponty (Senegal), Sierra Leone Grammar
+School, Mfantsipim (Ghana), the Lycée Gallieni (Madagascar), and a few
+
+others. Besides, there were Makerere, Fourah Bay, and Achimota, as long
+standing university or near-university institutions.
+In retrospect, it is now very clear that one of the most significant aspects
+of the colonial educational system was that provided by the armed forces
+and police. Colonial armies such as the King’s African Rifles, the French
+Free Army, and the Congolese Force Publique produced sergeants who later
+became the majors and generals of independent Africa, and in several
+instances the heads of states. Policemen also achieved similar rapid
+promotion, although their political position has been rather weaker than the
+military proper. Like their civilian counterparts, the future police and
+military elite were at one time trained to be simply low-level assistants to
+the colonial overlords; but once independence was in sight they were
+judged by the colonizers to have the requisite qualities of colonial cadres—
+fit to be part of the ruling class of neo-colonial Africa. In a few instances,
+the colonial powers towards the latter part of the colonial period rushed to
+train a few Africans at the metropolitan higher institutions of scientific
+violence, notably Sandhurst Military Academy and Hendon Police School
+in Britain and St. Cyr Military Academy in France. Those few who were
+selected for such training became the cream of the military elite,
+corresponding to those African civilians who went to university either in
+Africa or abroad.
+Most of what emerged from the colonial educational system was not
+unique. Educational systems are designed to function as props to a given
+society, and the educated in the young age groups automatically carry over
+their values when their turn comes to make decisions in the society. In
+Africa, the colonialists were training low-level administrators, teachers,
+NCOs, railroad booking clerks, for the preservation of colonial relations;
+and it is not surprising that such individuals would carry over colonial
+values into the period after independence was regained. The colonialists
+meanwhile took action wherever possible to insure that persons most
+favorable to their position continued to man African administrations and
+assumed new political and state police powers. Such a presentation of
+events would be termed one-sided by many Europeans and Africans, too. In
+a sense, that is true, and the one-sidedness is deliberate. It is a presentation
+of what the colonial educational system achieved in terms of what it set
+itself to achieve. The other side of the matter is not the good with which
+
+colonial educators can be credited, but rather the good that emerged in spite
+of the efforts and intentions of the colonizers and because of the struggles of
+African people.
+Development by Contradiction
+The only positive development in colonialism was when it ended. It is the
+purpose of this section to sketch briefly how that development came about,
+with particular reference to the role of the educated sector.
+In contrast to a subjective interpretation of what was good about
+colonialism on the one hand and what was bad on the other hand, there is
+the approach which follows closely the aims and achievements of the
+colonizers and the counter aims and achievements of the African people.
+Sometimes, Africans were restricted merely to manipulating colonial
+institutions as best they could; but, in addition, certain fundamental
+contradictions arose within colonial society, and they could only be
+resolved by Africans’ regaining their sovereignty as a people.
+Analysis based on the perception of contradictions is characteristic of
+Marxism. Thus, Soviet historians approach the disintegration of colonialism
+within the following framework:
+Colonialism fettered the development of the enslaved peoples. To facilitate colonial
+exploitation, the imperialists deliberately hampered economic and cultural progress in the
+colonies, preserved and restored obsolete forms of social relations, and fomented discord
+between nationalities and tribes. However, the drive for super profits dictated development of
+the extractive industry, plantations and capitalist farms, and the building of ports, railways and
+roads in the colonies. In consequence, social changes took place in the colonies, irrespective of
+the will of the colonialists. New social forces emerged—an industrial and agricultural
+proletariat, a national bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.
+
+Among the different segments of the African population within the socalled modern sector produced by capitalist activity, the cash-crop peasantry
+was the largest. African cash-crop farmers had profound grievances against
+the colonialist, centering on the low price for African products and
+sometimes on land alienation. Agricultural wage earners and urban workers
+had definitely lost their land, and were resisting wage slavery. They did so
+by organizing as the European proletariat had been doing since its
+formation; and, by virtue of compact organization, African workers made
+their presence felt much more strongly than their limited numbers might
+
+otherwise have warranted. In the end, the numerical preponderance of
+peasants and of those who had one foot in the “subsistence” sector was
+registered in the mass parties. But, while peasants depended upon sporadic
+revolts and boycotts to express their grievances, wage earners were engaged
+in a more continuous process of bargaining, petitioning, striking.
+The smallest of the social groupings was that of the educated elite or
+intelligentsia. As noted earlier, the number of Africans receiving education
+in the colonial period was so small that anyone who went to school was
+privileged and belonged to an elite. There were only a few lawyers and
+doctors, concentrated mainly in North and West Africa. Generally speaking,
+the intelligentsia were students, clerks, and teachers. The group of the
+educated also overlapped with that of organized labor leadership, with the
+traditional African ruling stratum, with ex-servicemen and police, and with
+traders and independent craftsmen.
+Altogether, the educated played a role in African independence struggles
+far out of proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves
+and were called upon to articulate the interests of all Africans. They were
+also required to provide the political organization that would combine all
+the contradictions of colonialism and focus on the main contradiction,
+which was that between the colony and the metropole.
+The contradiction between the educated and the colonialists was not the
+most profound. Ultimately, it was possible for the colonizers to withdraw
+and to satisfy the aspirations of most of the African intelligentsia, without in
+any way relieving the peasant and worker majority, who were the most
+exploited and the most oppressed. However, while the differences lasted
+between the colonizers and the African educated, they were decisive.
+It has already been argued at some length that colonial education reached
+a limited number of Africans, that it was restricted to elementary levels, and
+that its pedagogical and ideological content was such as to serve the
+interests of Europe rather than Africa. Even so, the numbers enrolled would
+have been much smaller, were it not for efforts on the part of Africans
+themselves. The secondary school opportunities would have been narrower,
+and the ideological content would have been more negative, if the activities
+of the African masses were not in constant contradiction to the aims of
+European colonizers. Above all, education for continued enslavement never
+quite fulfilled its purpose; and, instead, different levels of contradiction
+
+arose—leading to independence, and in some cases heralding a new
+socialist epoch by the end of colonialism.
+If there is anything glorious about the history of African colonial
+education, it lies not in the crumbs which were dropped by European
+exploiters, but in the tremendous vigor displayed by Africans in mastering
+the principles of the system that had mastered them. In most colonies, there
+was an initial period of indifference towards school education, but once it
+was understood that schooling represented one of the few avenues of
+advance within colonial society, it became a question of Africans clamoring
+and pushing the colonialists much further than they intended to go.
+When Africans took great pains to enter the cash-crop economy, that
+generally suited European capitalist ends. But, African initiatives in the
+sphere of education were producing results antagonistic to at least some of
+the purposes of colonial exploitation.
+Education in French colonial Africa has been referred to several times
+from the viewpoint of French policy. French administrators also commented
+on African efforts to go beyond the limited number of cadres that the
+French had in mind, and whom the French were prepared to subsidize out of
+African taxes. In 1930, the Governor-General of French West Africa
+reported:
+Each new school that is opened is immediately filled to overflowing. Everywhere, natives in
+their multitude are clamoring to be educated. Here, a Chief wants a school of his own, so he
+builds it; or again, some village or other may offer to bear the cost of fitting out a school. At
+certain places on the Ivory Coast, the villagers pay the teachers out of their own pockets. Our
+pupils often come from distances of 20 to 50 kilometers.
+
+African enthusiasm in seeking more and higher education was not
+confined to any part of the continent; although in some parts it was
+manifested at an earlier date and more intensely. For instance, the Gold
+Coast and Sierra Leone had a tradition of European education going back to
+the seventeenth century. Therefore, it was not at all surprising that in 1824
+the Times Educational Supplement commented that there was a universal
+demand for better and more education on the Gold Coast. It was the Gold
+Coast which produced J. E. K. Aggrey, that distinguished African educator
+and nationalist; and he fired the imagination of Africans well beyond the
+Gold Coast, in so far as formal education was concerned.
+
+There was a definite correlation between the degree of colonial
+exploitation and the amount of social services provided. That applied to
+education in particular, so that urban, mining, and cash-crop areas had a
+virtual monopoly of schools. That was partly due to the capitalist policy of
+enhancing the labor power of workers, but it was also the consequence of
+efforts made by Africans inside the cash economy. They made demands on
+the colonial administration, and they also went through a great deal of
+sacrifice and self-denial to get more school places. Thus, one finds that Ibos
+who were earning income from palm oil deployed a significant proportion
+of their small earnings into building schools, usually in association with the
+church. Incidentally, it should be noted here that what were called church or
+mission schools were often entirely financed by Africans. They paid church
+dues, they made donations for the church harvest, they sometimes
+contributed to a special education fund, and they often paid school fees.
+That pattern was widespread in Iboland, and it was not uncommon in other
+parts of colonial Africa. The existence of schools should be traced through
+the church back to palm oil and the people’s labor. Indeed, it must not be
+forgotten that missionaries, administrators, white settlers—the whole lot—
+were living off African labor and resources.
+In the cash-crop areas of British Africa, it also became the practice to try
+and use the agricultural produce boards and similar institutions to finance
+education. After all, the agricultural boards were supposed to have been
+established in the interest of peasant producers. They concentrated on
+exporting surplus in the form of dollar reserves for Britain; but, towards the
+end of colonial rule in the self-government epoch, it was too much of a
+scandal to avoid giving Africans some small part of the benefits of their
+labor, and so the produce boards were prevailed upon to make some funds
+available for education. For example, in 1953 the Uganda Legislative
+Council voted to spend about 11 million pounds from the Cotton Price
+Stabilization Fund on welfare schemes, with agricultural education
+receiving a big slice.
+Among those Africans who did somewhat better than their brothers
+financially, some philanthropy was expressed in terms of helping African
+children go to school. The historical records of African education under
+colonial rule reveal certain tidbits, such as the fact that the first secondary
+school was established in Somalia in 1949 not by the colonial
+
+administration or on the initiative of the church but by a Somali trader. Of
+course, it is still expected in Africa that anyone who is already educated and
+is earning a salary should in turn help to educate at least one more member
+of his extended family. That is precisely because his extended family and
+his village community often made sacrifices to allow him to be educated in
+the first place. That was as true in Mauritania as it was in the reserves of
+South Africa, and no African would have any difficulty in supplying his
+own examples to that effect.
+There are now available a number of biographies of Africans who gained
+prominence in the colonial period, usually in the movement for the
+regaining of African independence. It invariably emerges from reading such
+biographies how much of a struggle it was to be educated in colonial times.
+The same conclusion can be reached through reading the modern African
+novel, because the novelist (while writing what is called fiction) is
+concerned with capturing reality. Apologists for colonialism talk as though
+education were a big meal handed down to Africans on a platter. It was not.
+The educational crumbs dropped were so small that individuals scrambled
+for them; they saved incredibly from small earnings and sent their children
+to school; and African children walked miles to and from school, and
+thought nothing of it.
+But, apart from physical and financial sacrifices, Africans in some
+colonies had to wage a political battle to have the principle of African
+education accepted. The colonies in question were those with white settler
+populations.
+In Kenya, white settlers made it clear that as far as they were concerned,
+an uneducated African was better than an educated one, and that one with
+the rudiments of education was at least preferable to one with more than a
+few years of schooling. The Beecher report on education in Kenya
+(produced in 1949) was heavily influenced by white settlers, and it stated
+frankly:
+Illiterates with the right attitude to manual employment are preferable to products of the
+schools who are not readily disposed to enter manual employment.
+
+Because the white settlers were close to the center of political power in
+the colonial system, they were able to apply their principles to education in
+Kenya; and very little education went to Africans. In effect, that meant an
+
+exception to the rule that more social facilities followed heightened
+exploitation; but, the Kikuyu (who were the most exploited in Kenya) did
+not accept the situation passively. One line of approach was to bombard the
+colonial government with demands, even though Africans were in a far less
+favorable position to do so than white settlers. The demands were partially
+successful. The Beecher report grudgingly conceded a few schools to
+Africans at the primary and secondary level, by suggesting places for 40 per
+cent of African children at junior primary, 10 per cent at senior primary or
+intermediate, and 1 per cent at secondary level. But, by 1960, the number of
+primary schools was double what the whites considered should have been
+achieved by that date, and the number of secondary institutions was three
+times what the white settlers had succeeded in recommending.
+Besides, where the government was reluctant to build schools or to
+subsidize missionaries to do so with African taxes, there was an even
+greater incentive to handle educational matters directly. In Kenya, there was
+a spate of what came to be called Independent schools, comparable to the
+Independent churches, and, in fact, springing from Independent churches
+for the most part. The Independent schools in Kenya formed two major
+associations: namely, the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and the
+Kikuyu Karinga Education Association, formed in 1929.
+In practice, just as the European Christian missions used schools to
+attract converts, so the Independent churches attached great importance to
+schooling. John Chilembwe made striking efforts in that respect, aided by
+brothers recruited from among African descendants in the U.S.A.
+The Moslem religion was also a stimulator of educational advance
+during the colonial period. In North Africa, Moslems often found it
+necessary to channel their efforts into schools other than those built by the
+colonialists. The Society of Reformist Ulema in Algeria started a large
+primary school program in 1936. By 1955, its primary schools catered to
+45,000 Algerian children; and, from 1947, the Society also ran a large
+secondary school. Similarly, in Tunisia, popular initiative financed modern
+Koranic primary schools, providing places for 35,000 children—equivalent
+to one out of four going to primary school.
+In Morocco, the Moslem schools that were established by popular effort
+possessed the unusual feature of aiming at women’s emancipation by
+having a high percentage of girls—far higher than government schools. The
+
+French colonial administration deliberately kept mention of such schools
+out of their official reports, and they tried to keep their existence hidden
+from visitors.
+Another striking example of African self-help with regard to education
+was the project sponsored by the Graduates’ General Congress in Sudan.
+Founded by students, merchants, and civil servants in 1937, the Graduates’
+Congress embarked on a program of school building. Within four years, a
+hundred schools were opened with the help of voluntary contributions. A
+smaller but equally exciting experiment was that of the Bugabo United
+Schoolboys Association, founded by two schoolboys in Mwanza,
+Tanganyika, in 1947. It was aimed at adult education and in a short time
+attracted over a thousand people of all ages. The organizers set up a camp
+where they housed and fed those who turned up, while imparting to them
+the rudiments of literacy.
+When Kikuyu peasants or Ga market women or Kabyle shepherds saved
+to build schools and educate their children, that was not entirely in
+accordance with the objective of the colonialists, who wanted cash-crop
+payments and other money in circulation to return as profits to the
+metropoles through the purchase of consumer goods. In such small ways,
+therefore, Africans were establishing an order of priorities different from
+that of the colonialists. This intensified in the later years of colonialism,
+when education came to be seen as having political significance in the era
+of self-government.
+Having received higher education in colonial Africa in the post-Second
+World War era, a French African could reach as far as the French Assembly
+in Paris, while an English colonial subject might reach the local Legislative
+Assembly as an elected or nominated member. Those openings were
+absolutely devoid of power, and they were opportunities that only the
+merest handful could achieve; but they were stimulants, nonetheless, giving
+Africans the notion that considerable vertical mobility would accompany
+education. In French Equatorial Africa in the late 1940s, it was the African
+Governor, Felix Eboue, who spearheaded the demands for more education
+for Africans, and he was successful to some extent in forcing the hand of
+his masters in the French Overseas Ministry. In that same period and
+subsequently, it was also African effort in the Legislative Councils that kept
+the question of education to the fore. The British had handpicked a few
+
+educated Africans and some “chiefs” to advise the Governor in the
+Legislative Assembly. Generally, they were decorative like the plumes of
+the Governor’s helmet; but, on the issue of education, no African could
+possibly avoid at least voicing some dissatisfaction with the poor state of
+affairs.
+Ultimately, from a purely quantitative viewpoint, Africans pushed the
+colonialists and the British in particular to grant more education than was
+allowed for within the colonial system, and that was an important and
+explosive contradiction that helped Africans regain political independence.
+It has been observed that British colonies tended to create an educated
+sector that was larger than that which the colonial economy could absorb.
+The explanation for that lies in the efforts of African people, although it is
+true that the French were more rigorous in rejecting African demands, and
+keeping to their schedule of training only a cadre elite to serve French
+interests. As it was, in a colony such as Gold Coast, African efforts to
+achieve education undoubtedly went beyond the numbers required to
+service the economy. Gold Coast was one of the first colonies to experience
+the “crisis of primary school leavers” or the “secondary school bottleneck.”
+That is to say, among those leaving primary schools, many were frustrated
+because they could not find places in secondary schools, nor could they find
+jobs in keeping with the values they had obtained in school and in keeping
+with the internal stratification of African society caused by capitalism.
+It is sometimes said that Kwame Nkrumah organized the illiterates in the
+Convention People’s Party. That was a charge contemptuously made by
+other conservative educated Ghanaians, who thought that Nkrumah was
+going too far too fast. In reality, the shock troops in Nkrumah’s youth
+brigade were not illiterate. They had been to primary school, and could read
+the manifestos and the literature of the African nationalist revolution. But,
+they were extremely disaffected because (among other things) they were
+relative latecomers on the educational scene in Gold Coast, and there was
+no room in the restricted African establishment of the cocoa monoculture.
+Colonial powers aimed at giving a certain amount of education to keep
+colonialism functioning; Africans by various means required more
+education at the lower level than their “allowance,” and this was one of the
+factors which brought about deep crisis, and forced the British to consider
+the idea of withdrawing their colonial apparatus from Gold Coast. The
+
+timetable for independence was also speeded up against the will of the
+British. As is well known, the regaining of independence in Ghana was not
+just a local affair, but one that was highly significant for Africa as a whole;
+and it therefore highlights the importance of at least one of the educational
+contradictions in bringing about political independence in Africa.
+The Gold Coast colony was not the only one in which there appeared the
+problem of bottleneck, because of the shallowness of the educational
+pyramid. In the area that was once the colonial Federation of the Rhodesias
+and Nyasaland, educators in the 1950s were commenting on the primary
+school leavers crisis. They claimed to have had a surplus of sixth-grade
+leavers. A set of colonies that was educating an insignificant number of
+African school children had a surplus of primary school leavers! All it
+meant was that colonialism was so bankrupt and had so underdeveloped
+Africa that it had no use for more than a handful of educated. Furthermore,
+the colonialists had assured every struggling African that, if he endured
+missionary education, he would be given a white-collar job and a passport
+to civilization; but, on leaving school, African youth found the promises to
+be false. One sixth-grade leaver in the Central African Federation wrote the
+following letter to a magazine in 1960:
+After I had passed Standard 6, I spent the whole year at home because I could not get a place
+anywhere to further my education. At the beginning of this year I went to look for work but
+failed to get it again, from January until now. If I had known that my education would have
+been useless, I would have told my father not to waste his money in educating me from the
+beginning to Standard 6.
+
+It would be fairly reasonable to assume that the writer of that letter opposed
+the white settler Central African Federation. Whether or not he consciously
+rationalized the matter, he was bound to act as a product of the deep
+contradictory forces within colonialism—forces which had produced the
+discrepancy between promise and fulfillment, in terms of his own personal
+life.
+Occasionally, the frustrated school leavers might vent their sentiments in
+a non-constructive manner. For instance, the problem of the bottleneck in
+education and employment arose in Ivory Coast by 1958; and, in a context
+of confused African leadership, the youth of Ivory Coast decided that their
+enemy was the group of Dahomeans and Senegalese who were employed in
+Ivory Coast. However, on the whole, the situation of frustration aided
+
+Africans to perceive more clearly that the enemy was the colonial power,
+and it therefore added another platform to the movement for regaining
+African independence.
+Africans clashed with the colonial structure not just over the quantity of
+education, but also over the quality. One of the key topics for disagreement
+was colonial agricultural education, to which reference has already been
+made. The colonialists seemed surprised that a continent of agriculturalists
+should reject education which was supposedly intended to raise the level of
+their agriculture. Indeed, some Africans came out against agricultural
+education and other reforms to “Africanize” curricula, for what appears to
+have been selfish elitist reasons. For instance, one Guinean demanded that
+there should not be a single change from the teaching program as used in
+metropolitan France. “We want a metropolitan curriculum and the same
+diplomas as in France, for we are as French as the French of the
+metropoles,” he declared. In Tanganyika, during German days, there were
+also protests against changing the formal and literary educational program,
+as it had been introduced body and soul from Europe. A prominent
+Tanganyikan African, Martin Kayamba, asserted that “those who think that
+literary education is unsuitable for Africans ignore the fact of its importance
+and indispensability to any sort of education, and therefore deny the
+Africans the very means of progress.”
+Statements such as the above have to be seen in their correct context to
+understand that the African response was perfectly justified. The colonialist
+value system assigned a low value to manual activity and a high value to
+white-collar bureaucratic work. Even more important, the colonial economy
+offered discriminating compensation to those who had literary or “bookish”
+education, as opposed to those with manual skills. It was extremely difficult
+to convince any sane African that education which would send him to dig
+the soil to get 100 shillings at the end of the year was more appropriate than
+education which qualified him to work in the civil service for 100 shillings
+per month. When Europeans preached that brand of wisdom, Africans were
+suspicious.
+Africans were very suspicious about taxes in the colonial era. They never
+wanted to be counted, nor did they want their chickens to be counted,
+because bitter experience had shown them that that was how the colonialists
+assessed taxes. Similarly, on educational issues, there was no confidence in
+
+colonial plans to provide different versions of education, because such plans
+almost invariably meant an even more inferior education, and one that was
+more blatantly intended to be education for underdevelopment. The most
+extreme example of a colonial education system designed to train Africans
+to fill their “natural” role of manual laborers was that in South Africa, after
+the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. However, the earlier
+attempts by the British and French to set up what they called “farm schools”
+or “initiation schools” were along the same lines as have since been
+ruthlessly pursued by the racists in South Africa. The non-literary education
+had the superficial appearance of being more relevant to Africa, but it was
+really inferior education for a people who were supposedly inferior in order
+to make them accept their own exploitation and oppression. As Abdou
+Moumini put it, “colonial education was ‘cut-rate’ education.” It offered by
+European standards low-quality substitutes to suit what was described as the
+limited intellectual capacity of Africans. In French colonial Africa, the
+diplomas were seldom equal to those in the metropoles at comparable
+levels, and in British East Africa one official asked educators to bear in
+mind the gap between themselves and the “grubby savages” whom Britain
+was attempting to civilize. It is in this context that agricultural education in
+particular revealed itself as an exercise in deception.
+Consequently, the struggle against agricultural or rural schools was one
+of the most bitter struggles waged by African nationalists, and helped
+heighten consciousness at all levels of African society, with regard to the
+fundamentally exploitative and racist nature of colonialism. In French West
+Africa, for example, the farm schools were determinedly opposed after the
+last war, and the French colonial government had to abolish them. In
+Tanganyika and Nyasa, the confrontation between the colonialists and the
+African people was much bigger, because opposition to agricultural
+education was associated with opposition to colonial agricultural
+innovations (such as terracing) which were forced upon people without
+consultation and without taking into account the varying conditions in
+different localities.
+In East Africa the British made a few determined efforts to introduce
+what they considered as relevant agricultural education. One pilot scheme
+was at Nyakato in Tanganyika, which involved transforming a secondary
+school into an agricultural school in 1930. It lasted for nine years with
+
+tutors recruited from Britain and South Africa, but in the end the attempt
+failed because of protest by students and the population of the region.
+Although the school claimed to be offering new agricultural skills, it was
+readily recognized that it was part of a program defining the “correct
+attitudes” and “natural place” which Europeans thought fit for the natives.
+In the 1940s, as Africans sought to change features of the educational
+system, they naturally had to demand a voice in councils that formulated
+educational policy. That was in itself a revolutionary demand, because
+colonial people are supposed to be ruled, not to participate in decisionmaking. Besides, on the issue of educational policy-making, Africans not
+only alarmed the administrators, but they trod on the corns of the
+missionaries, who generally felt that they inherited education at the partition
+of Africa. All of those clashes were pointing in the direction of freedom for
+colonial peoples, because in the background there was always the question
+of political power.
+It would be erroneous to suggest that educated Africans foresightedly
+moved with the intention of regaining African independence. There would
+have been very few indeed who, as early as 1939, would have joined Chief
+Essien of Calabar in asserting:
+Without education it will be impossible for us to get to our destination, which is Nigeria’s
+economic independence and Nigeria’s political independence.
+
+However, education (both formal and informal) was a powerful force which
+transformed the situation in postwar Africa in such a way as to bring
+political independence to most of colonized Africa within two decades.
+There were also a few Europeans who foresaw what were called the
+“dangers” of giving Africans a modern education: namely, the possibility of
+its leading towards freedom. Certainly, Europeans were not at all happy
+with any schools which were of the European type, but which were not
+under direct colonialist control. For example, the Independent schools of
+Kenya were disliked by white settlers in that colony and by other Europeans
+outside Kenya. One Catholic mission report from nearby Tanganyika in
+1933 warned against allowing Tanganyika Africans to set up schools
+controlled by themselves. It noted that: “Independent schools are causing
+difficulties in Kenya. Such schools may easily become hotbeds of sedition.”
+
+When the Mau Mau war for land and liberation broke out in Kenya, one
+of the first things the British government did was to close the 149 schools of
+the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association, 21 schools of the Kikuyu
+Karinga Education Association, and 14 other Independent schools. They
+were considered “training grounds for rebellion”—a term which essentially
+captures the fear expressed in the Catholic mission report just cited.
+Europeans knew well enough that if they did not control the minds of
+Africans, they would soon cease to control the people physically and
+politically.
+Similarly, in North Africa, the French colonial power and the white
+colons, or settlers, did not take kindly to the self-help schools of the
+colonized Algerians and Tunisians. The purpose of the schools set up by the
+Society of Reformist Ulema in Algeria was that they should be modern and
+scientific, but at the same time present learning in the context of Arab and
+Algerian culture. Pupils at the Ulema schools began their lessons by singing
+together: “Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country, Islam is my
+religion.” It was no wonder, therefore, that the colonialists victimized pupils
+and parents, and took repressive measures on the grounds that those schools
+were also hotbeds of sedition.
+The missionaries asked for control of schools, because that was one of
+their drawing cards for the church itself and because they considered
+themselves as experts on the side of cultural imperialism (which they called
+“civilizing”). However, there were other Europeans both within and without
+the colonies who were absolutely opposed to schools—be they Christian,
+Independent, government, or Islamic. Starting from a racist position, they
+asserted that offering education to Africans was like throwing pearls before
+swine. Some of the most violent expressions of racism were directed against
+educated Africans. Starting from the time of individuals like Lord Lugard
+and through to the days of the last colonial administrators like Sir Alan
+Burns, many colonialists demonstrated hostility to educated Africans.
+Educated Africans made colonialists extremely uneasy, because they did not
+conform to the image which Europeans liked to harbor of the “unspoiled
+African savage.”
+But, if one goes to the heart of the matter, it can be discerned that the
+white racists did not seriously believe that Africans could not master
+knowledge then in the possession of Europeans. On the contrary, the
+
+evidence of educated Africans was before their eyes; and the white settlers
+especially feared that, given an opportunity, far too many Africans would
+master white bourgeois knowledge too thoroughly. Such Africans would,
+therefore, refuse to work as agricultural laborers for 12 shillings per month;
+they would compete with Europeans in semi-skilled categories; and above
+all they would want to govern themselves.
+In the records of colonialism, it is not uncommon to encounter the
+following type of remark: “What need is there to educate the natives? You
+will give them the weapons to destroy you!”
+In one sense, those Europeans were simply dreamers, because giving
+education to Africans was not an option which could have been avoided; it
+was an objective necessity to keep colonialism functioning. P. E. Mitchell,
+who later became Governor of Uganda, remarked in 1928 that “regret it as
+he may, no Director of Education can resist the demand for clerks,
+carpenters, shoemakers and so on—trained in European methods to meet
+European needs. These men are not being trained to fit into any place in the
+life of their own people, but to meet the economic needs of a foreign race.”
+At the same time, the available education was also a consequence of the
+irrepressible actions of the African people, who hoped to move forward
+within the alien system. So, those Europeans who were absolutely opposed
+to giving education to Africans did not understand the contradictions of
+their own colonial society. But in another sense they were defending the
+interests of colonialism. Firstly, however much the colonialists tried, they
+could not succeed in shaping the minds of all Africans whom they educated
+in schools. The exceptions were the ones who were going to prove most
+dangerous to colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. And secondly, the
+most timid and the most brainwashed of educated Africans harbored some
+form of disagreement with the colonialists; and, in the pursuit of their own
+group or individual interests, the educated elite helped to expose and
+undermine the structure of colonial rule.
+Keeping the above distinction in mind, one can consider both those
+contradictions which arose between the colonizers and the African educated
+as a whole, and those which arose between the colonizers and particular
+individuals among the African educated.
+As already noted, insufficient educational facilities and inadequate jobs
+were the complaints raised by the lower echelons of those who were
+
+educated in Africa during the colonial period. Those who went to secondary
+school or institutions of higher learning found little access to remunerative
+and responsible posts, because they were destined to fill the lower ranks of
+the civil and business administration. After working for twenty years, an
+African in the civil service would have been extremely lucky to have
+become “head clerk,” or in the police to have become a sergeant. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, any European doing the same job as an
+African got higher pay; and whites who were less qualified and experienced
+were placed above Africans, who did the jobs their superiors were paid to
+do. In the colonial civil service to be a European was enough. It did not
+matter whether the white person was ignorant and stupid, he would be
+assured of drawing a fat salary and enjoying wide privileges. The GuineaBissau leader, Amilcar Cabral, gave an example of that type.
+I was an agronomist working under a European who everybody knew was one of the biggest
+idiots in Guinea; I could have taught him his job with my eyes shut but he was the boss; this is
+something which counts a lot, this is the confrontation which really matters.
+
+Questions such as salaries, promotions, leave, allowances, were ones
+which were of paramount interest to most African civil servant associations
+and Welfare or “Improvement” Associations. There should be no illusions
+concerning the factor of self-interest. But, their complaints were justified in
+terms of the discrepancy between their living standards and those of white
+expatriates or settlers, as well as in terms of the ideology of the very
+bourgeoisie who had colonized Africa. The educational process had
+equipped a few Africans with a grasp of the international community and of
+bourgeois democracy, and there was a most unsatisfactory credibility gap
+between the ideals of bourgeois democracy and the existence of colonialism
+as a system which negated freedom. Inevitably, the educated started
+gravitating in the direction of claims for national independence, just as
+educated Indians had done much earlier on the Indian subcontinent.
+According to official Spanish sources, it is said that the school system in
+Spanish Guinea achieved all that the colonizers expected of it. It produced
+the required Africans who loved Spaniards more than the Spaniards loved
+themselves, but it produced no opponents of the colonial regime. It is
+difficult to believe the truth of such an assertion; and the Spanish took good
+care that no one from outside got wind of what things were like in the small
+
+Spanish colonies in Africa. However, if it were true that the colonial
+educational system in Spanish Guinea created only whitewashed Africans
+according to plan, then that would represent an outstanding exception to the
+general rule. Wherever adequate evidence is available, it shows that the
+cultural imperialism of colonial education was successful in large measure,
+but was never entirely successful. It produced according to plan many
+“loyal Kikuyu,” “Capicornists,” “Anglophiles,” “Francophiles”; but it also
+produced in spite of itself those Africans whom the colonialists called
+upstarts, malcontents, agitators, communists, terrorists.
+From the viewpoint of the colonialists, trouble often started with African
+students before they had completed studies. The Sudan, for example, has a
+history of nationalist student protests; and Madagascar was outstanding in
+that respect. From the early years of this century, a politicized student
+movement was growing in Madagascar, in spite of specific steps taken by
+two French governors. By 1816, Malagasy students had organized the Vy
+Vato society, seeking to kick out the French. When the Vy Vato was
+discovered, students were brutally suppressed. However, as so often
+happens, students gained inspiration from the martyrdom of their fellows,
+and they resurfaced at a later date on the nationalist scene.
+Students who were taken to universities in the metropoles were the most
+favored and the most pampered of the Africans selected by the white
+colonial overlords to become Europeanized; and yet they were among the
+first to argue vocally and logically that the liberty, equality, and fraternity
+about which they were taught should apply to Africa. African students in
+France in the postwar years were placed carefully within the ranks of the
+then conservative French national student body, but they soon rebelled and
+formed the Federation of Students of Black Africa (FEANF), which became
+affiliated to the communist International Union of Students. In Britain,
+African students formed a variety of ethnic and nationalist organizations,
+and participated in the Pan-African movement. After all, most of them were
+sent there to study the British Constitution and Constitutional Law, and (for
+what it is worth) the word “freedom” appears in those contexts rather often!
+The fascists who ruled Africans at some points during the colonial epoch
+tried to avoid bourgeois democratic ideals altogether. For example, while
+the Italian fascists were in charge of Somalia between 1922 and 1941, they
+took away from history textbooks all reference to Mazzini and Garibaldi,
+
+two key leaders of the democratic wing of the Italian nationalist movement
+of the nineteenth century. Yet, the clerks and NCOs who received that
+education nevertheless went into the Somali Youth League and fought for
+independence at the head of popular forces.
+The fact of the matter is that it was not really necessary to get the idea of
+freedom from a European book. What the educated African extracted from
+European schooling was a particular formulation of the concept of political
+freedom. But, it did not take much to elicit a response from their own
+instinctive tendency for freedom; and, as has just been noted in the Somali
+instance, that universal tendency to seek freedom manifested itself among
+Africans even when the most careful steps were taken to extinguish it.
+There was no sector of colonial life in which educated Africans appeared
+and remained wholly loyal to the colonialists. Teachers were supposed to
+have been steeped in the culture of domination, so as to pass it on to other
+Africans; but, in the end, many of them stood in the vanguard of the
+national independence movements. African priests and pastors were
+supposed to have been the loyal servants of God and his European
+lieutenants, but the church gave birth in Nyasaland to John Chilembwe, as
+early as the First World War. Shortly afterwards, in Congo, when Simon
+Kimbangu started his Independent church, he actually threatened the
+colonialists that he would introduce Bolshevism!
+It is particularly interesting to notice that the colonialists could not be
+sure of the loyalty of their African troops. It has already been argued that
+the army and police were educational and socializing institutions to
+perpetuate colonialist and capitalist power and values. How successfully
+they served that function can be seen in the number of veterans of Burma
+and Indochina who returned to the continent to carry out loyally the policies
+of Britain and France, respectively. Colonel Bokassa of the Central African
+Republic and Colonel Lamizana of Upper Volta provide two outstanding
+examples, both of them having graduated from fighting the Vietnamese to a
+point where they are prepared to dialogue with the fascist apartheid state of
+South Africa. However, returned soldiers also played a very positive role in
+the national independence struggles after both wars. And, occasionally,
+towards the end of colonial rule, African troops and police mutinied, as in
+Nyasaland in 1959.
+
+African trade unionists also went to “school” under colonialism. To
+begin with, the organization and activity of the small wage-earning sector in
+Africa bothered the colonialists a great deal. Their initial desire was to
+crush worker dissent, and (when that appeared unlikely to succeed) to coopt
+it and guide it along “acceptable” channels.
+The British Trade Union Council sponsored a number of African trade
+unions, and tried to get them to accept a rigid separation between industrial
+matters (such as wages and working hours) and political matters. But, the
+TUC was in that context acting on behalf of the British bourgeoisie, and
+they did not succeed in holding back the working class in Africa. African
+workers were able to appreciate that there was no difference between the
+private employers and the colonial administration. Indeed, the colonial
+administration was itself one of the biggest employers, against whom
+workers had many charges. Consequently, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was
+common to have strikes that were specifically connected with the struggle
+for independence, notably in Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sudan.
+The contradiction between French workers and African workers in
+French colonies emerged in a very acute form. The French trade union
+movement (and notably the Communist Union, the CGT) insisted that
+Africans should not have separate unions, but should be members of French
+labor unions—just like any other French workers. That arrangement gave
+support to the juridical political fiction that places like Dahomey and
+Comoro Islands were not colonies, but merely the overseas section of
+France. Sekou Toure of Guinea was one of the first to break with the
+patronage of French trade unions and to establish an independent African
+trade union. In so doing, Sekou Toure made it clear that the principal
+contradiction of the colonial situation was that between colonized peoples
+on the one hand and the colonizing nation on the other. So long as African
+workers remain colonized, they had to think of themselves firstly as African
+workers, rather than members of an international proletariat. That
+interpretation, which was entirely in accordance with reality, led to the trade
+union movement taking on a highly politicized and nationalist role in
+French West Africa. It was an achievement which defeated the chauvinism
+of white French workers as well as the class interests of the French
+bourgeoisie.
+
+The attitude of the white metropolitan working class towards their
+African counterparts was influenced by the prevailing racist values of
+capitalist society. Indeed, the racist factor heightened the principal
+contradiction between the colonizers and the colonized. Discriminatory
+racist methods and measures were found in every colony—with varying
+degrees of openness or hypocrisy. Sometimes, white racism was vicious and
+at other times it was paternalist. Nor did it necessarily reflect Europe’s
+desire to exploit Africans economically. In Southern Rhodesia, racial
+discrimination was very much tied up with the white settlers’ maintaining
+their jobs and the stolen land; but when some semi-literate white inspector
+insulted an educated Sierra Leonean, that may be referred to as
+“gratuitous.” Racism in such a context actually jeopardized economic
+exploitation, and it was merely the manifestation of prejudices that had
+grown over the centuries.
+The racial contradiction extended far beyond the shores of Africa,
+because of the historical antecedence of the slave trade. It is not in the least
+surprising that Pan-African ideas should have been most forcefully
+expressed by West Indians like Garvey and Padmore and North Americans
+like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alpheus Hunton. Those individuals had all been
+educated within the international capitalist structure of exploitation on the
+basis of class and race. Having realized that their inferior status in the
+societies of America was conditioned by the fact of being black and the
+weakness of Africa, the Pan-Africanists were forced to deal with the central
+problem of Europe’s exploitation and oppression of the African continent.
+Needless to say, the metropolitan powers could never have foreseen that
+their humiliation of millions of Africans in the New World would ultimately
+rebound and help Africa to emancipate itself.
+The process by which Africa produced thirty-odd sovereign states was
+an extremely complex one, characterized by an interplay of forces and
+calculations on the part of various groups of Africans, on the part of the
+colonial powers, and on the part of interest groups inside the metropolis.
+African independence was affected by international events such as the
+Second World War, the rise of the Soviet Union, the independence of India
+and China, the people’s liberation movement in Indochina, and the Bandung
+Conference. On the African continent itself, the “domino theory” operated,
+so that the re-emergence of Egypt under Nasser, the early independence of
+
+Ghana, Sudan, and Guinea, and the nationalist wars in Kenya and Algeria
+all helped to knock down the colonies which remained standing. However,
+it must be stressed that the move for the regaining of independence was
+initiated by the African people; and, to whatever extent that objective was
+realized, the motor force of the people must be taken into account.
+In a conference held by the French in Brazzaville in 1948 (and chaired
+by General de Gaulle), it was explicitly stated that “the establishment, even
+in the distant future, of self-government in the colonies is to be avoided.”
+As is well known, the French eventually considered the idea of conceding
+independence to African peoples after being taught a salutary lesson by the
+Algerian people. Moreover, when Guinea chose independence in 1958
+rather than accept being permanently a footstool for France, the French
+administrators literally went crazy and behaved like wild pigs before sailing
+from Guinea. They just could not cope with the idea of African
+independence.
+Apart from the Portuguese, the Belgians were the colonialists who were
+the most reluctant in withdrawing in the face of African nationalism. In
+1955, a Belgian professor suggested independence for the Congo in thirty
+years, and he was regarded as a radical! Of course, Congo turned out to be
+one of the places where imperialism was successful in hijacking the African
+revolution. But, the order of events must still be considered. Firstly, it was
+the intensity of the Congolese and African demands that made
+independence thinkable, as far as the Belgians were concerned; and,
+secondly, it was precisely the strength and potential of the nationalist
+movement under Lumumba which forced the imperialists to resort to
+murder and invasion.
+The British make much of the fact that they conceded the idea of selfgovernment immediately after the last war; but self-government was a long
+cry from independence, and the notion of training people for independence
+was nothing but a political gimmick. Lady Margery Perham, a true voice of
+patronizing colonialism, admitted that the Colonial Office’s timetable for
+independence had to be scrapped in the face of the mobilized African
+people. For that matter, even African leaders never hoped to achieve
+national sovereignty as rapidly as they did, until the mass parties began to
+roll like boulders down a hillside.
+
+The fact that this analysis has been focused on the role of the educated
+Africans in the independence movements is not intended to detract from the
+vital activity of the broad African masses, including the sacrifice of life and
+limb. In brief, it is enough to say that the African people as a collective had
+upset the plans of the colonialist, and had surged forward to freedom. Such
+a position may seem to be a mere revival of a certain rosy and romantic
+view of African independence which was popular in the early 1960s, but, on
+the contrary, it is fully cognizant of the shabby reality of neo-colonial
+Africa. It needs to be affirmed (from a revolutionary, socialist, and peoplecentered perspective) that even “flag independence” represented a positive
+development out of colonialism.
+Securing the attributes of sovereignty is but one stage in the process of
+regaining African independence. By 1885, when Africa was politically and
+juridically partitioned, the peoples and polities had already lost a great deal
+of freedom. In its relations with the external world, Africa had lost a
+considerable amount of control over its own economy, ever since the
+fifteenth century. However, the loss of political sovereignty at the time of
+the Scramble was decisive. By the same reasoning, it is clear that the
+regaining of political sovereignty by the 1960s constitutes an inescapable
+first step in regaining maximum freedom to choose and to develop in all
+spheres.
+Furthermore, the period of nationalist revolution gave rise to certain
+minority ideological trends, which represent the roots of future African
+development. Most African leaders of the intelligentsia and even of the
+labor movement were frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of
+their bourgeois masters. Houphouet-Boigny was at one time called a
+“communist” by the French colonizers! He defended himself vigorously
+against the false charge in 1948:
+We have good relations with the [French] Communist Party, that is true. But it is obvious that
+that does not mean that we ourselves are communists. Can it be said that I, Houphouet-Boigny
+—a traditional chief, a doctor of medicine, a big property owner, a catholic—can it be said that
+I am a communist?
+
+Houphouet-Boigny’s reasoning applied to so many more African leaders of
+the independence epoch. The exceptions were those who either completely
+rejected the world-view of capitalism or at least stuck honestly to those
+idealistic tenets of bourgeois ideology such as individual freedom—and,
+
+through experience, they could come to realize that the ideals remained
+myths in a society based on the exploitation of man by man. Clearly, all
+leaders of the non-conformist type had developed in direct contradiction to
+the aims of formal and informal colonial education; and their differences
+with the colonizers were too profound to have been resolved merely by
+“flag independence.”
+African independence was greeted with pomp, ceremony, and a
+resurgence of traditional African music and dance. “A new day has
+dawned,” “we are on the threshold of a new era,” “we have now entered
+into the political kingdom”—those were the phrases of the day, and they
+were repeated until they became clichés. But, all the to-ing and fro-ing from
+Contonou to Paris and from London to Lusaka and all the lowering and
+raising of flags cannot be said to have been devoid of meaning. Withdrawal
+of the directly controlled military and juridical apparatus of the colonizers
+was essential before any new alternatives could be posed with regard to
+political organization, social structure, economic development.
+The above issues were raised most seriously by the minority of African
+leaders who had individually embarked on a non-capitalist path of
+development in their mode of thought; and the problems were considered
+within the context of inequalities and contradictions not just between Africa
+and Europe but also inside Africa, as a reflection of four centuries of
+slavery and one century of colonialism. As far as the mass of peasants and
+workers were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared
+the way towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and
+imperialism. Even in territories such as Cameroon, where the imperialists
+brutally crushed peasants and workers and installed their own tried and
+tested puppet, advance had been made insofar as the masses had already
+participated in trying to determine their own destiny. That is the element of
+conscious activity that signifies the ability to make history, by grappling
+with the heritage of objective material conditions and social relations.
+Brief Guide to Reading
+Colonial rule generated a great deal of written material which can serve as
+one of the bases for historical reconstruction. Even the non-specialist in
+African history would be well advised to look at some original sources,
+
+such as the data compiled by Lord Hailey. Approached with care, several of
+the anthropological texts also yield information and insights with regard to
+detailed changes in African social structures.
+Above all, however, the generations who suffered under colonialism are
+still living repositories of the continent’s history. The collective knowledge
+of the African people derived from experience is the most authentic basis of
+the history of the colonial period. Unfortunately, much of the experience is
+not yet written down, but glimpses can be got from biographies of
+prominent Africans such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Oginga
+Odinga, and Kenneth Kaunda, as well as from the political writings of these
+and other leaders—notably Mwalimu Nyerere and Sekou Toure. The books
+by Padmore and Hunton mentioned in the literature for Chapter 5 are even
+more relevant in this context.
+JACK WODDIS, Africa, the Roots of Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishant, 1960.
+_______ Africa, the Lion Awakes.
+GANN, L. H., and DUIGNAN, PETER, The Burden of Empire. New York: Praeger, 1967.
+The first author and his works are well known for supporting the African anti-colonial stand. The
+second example is a colonialist interpretation which offers a contrast.
+SLOAN and KITCHEN, The Educated African.
+ABDOU MOUMINI, Education in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1968.
+For data, the first book is useful. From the viewpoint of analysis, Moumini’s book is superb.
+FRANTZ FANON, Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
+_______ The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
+_______ Towards the African Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
+These studies are unique in revealing the psychological aspects of enslavement and colonization
+as far as Africans are concerned, whether in the Americas or on the African continent. Fanon does
+not have any equal in analyzing the last stages of African colonialism and the advent of neocolonialism.
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+by A. M. BABU
+
+Are there short cuts to economic development for the underdevelopment
+economies? This question has occupied the attention of many interested
+parties during the last decade. These include university lecturers,
+international economists, the United Nations and its agencies, the O.A.U.,
+planning agencies, economic ministers. Many international conferences
+under various sponsorship have been held during the decade and volumes of
+resolutions, guidelines, learning documents, and theses have been
+published. The end result has been negative. The developing countries
+continue to remain underdeveloped, only getting worse in relation to the
+developed countries.
+By and large the question still remains unanswered. Are we going to
+repeat the same exercise all over again during this decade? From the look of
+it, it appears that we are. Already the UN has launched the Second
+Economic Decade with the same zeal and fanfare as they did with the first.
+The same appeal has gone out to the developed countries to be charitable
+and contribute “one per cent of their national income” for helping the
+developing countries, as if the population of the world can continue to
+condone poverty so that the rich can be charitable! If past experience is
+anything to go by, the seventies will experience the same disappointments
+which climaxed the end of the sixties.
+What, we may ask, has gone wrong? Is it something inherent in the very
+nature of underdevelopment that makes development such an impossible
+task? Among the many prescriptions that have been offered—e.g., cultural,
+social, psychological, even economic—none has produced any encouraging
+results. In fact nearly all of them have had negative results, and made bad
+
+situations worse. Are we to continue with the same experiments at the
+expense of the people, who, let’s face it, have borne the whole burden of
+these experiments throughout the last decade? This is the question to which
+all the developing countries, especially those in Africa, must address
+themselves. And the sooner the better, because there is very little time left
+before our economies become permanently distorted and probably too
+damaged for any meaningful reconstruction in the future.
+Dr. Walter Rodney, in this very instructive book, provides a very
+refreshing opening for discussions which may well lead to finding the right
+solution. He is raising the most basic and fundamental questions regarding
+the nature of underdevelopment and economic backwardness. Unlike many
+works of this nature, which to all intents and purposes have approached the
+problem with a sort of metaphysical outlook (garbed, it is true, in scientific
+terminology), Dr. Rodney follows the method of historical materialism,
+which in effect says: “To know the present we must look into the past and to
+know the future we must look into the past and the present.” This is a
+scientific approach. We can at least be sure that the conclusions will not be
+marred by subjective distortions.
+It is clear, especially after reading Rodney’s exposition, that throughout
+the last decade we have been posing the wrong questions regarding
+economic backwardness. We did not “look into the past to know the
+present.” We were told, and accepted, that our poverty was caused by our
+poverty in the now famous theory of the “vicious circle of poverty” and we
+went around in circles seeking ways and means of breaking that circle. Had
+we asked the fundamental questions which Dr. Rodney raises in this work
+we would not have exposed our economies to the ruthless plunder brought
+about by “foreign investments” which the exponents of the vicious circle
+theory urged us to do. For, it is clear, foreign investment is the cause, and
+not a solution, to our economic backwardness.
+Are we not underdeveloped now because we have been colonized in the
+past? There is no other explanation to the fact that practically the whole of
+the underdeveloped world has been colonized either directly or indirectly by
+the Western powers. And what is colonialism if it is not a system of
+“foreign investments” by the metropolitan powers? If it has contributed to
+our underdevelopment in the past, is it not likely to contribute to our
+underdevelopment now, even if the political reins are in our hands? Put in
+
+this way the question of underdevelopment is immediately rendered more
+intelligible, even to the uninitiated. And this is how Dr. Rodney is directing
+us to pose our questions.
+The inevitable conclusion is that foreign investment does not only help
+to undermine our economies by extracting enormous profits, but it does
+more serious damage to the economies by distorting them into lopsidedness,
+and if the process is not arrested in time, the distortion could be permanent.
+As long as we continue, as we have done for centuries, to produce for the
+so-called world market which was founded on the hard rock of slavery and
+colonialism, our economies will remain colonial. Any development will be
+entirely incidental, leaving the vast majority of the population wholly
+uninvolved in the economic activity. The more we invest in export branches
+in order to capture the “world market” the more we divert away from
+investing for people’s development and, consequently, the less effective our
+development effort.
+And since this type of investment does not contribute much towards the
+development of a material and technical base internally, our economies are
+rendered always responsive only to what the Western world is prepared to
+buy and sell, and hardly responsive to our internal development needs. That
+is why, although most of our development plans make elaborate resource
+allocations for “rural projects,” invariably most of these resources find their
+way back to the urban projects and consequently accentuate the urban-rural
+disparities. Slums, unemployment, social maladjustment, and, finally,
+political instability are our most outstanding characteristics.
+Almost without exception, all the ex-colonial countries have ignored the
+cardinal development demand; namely, that, to be really effective, the
+development process must begin by transforming the economy from its
+colonial, externally responsive structure, to one which is internally
+responsive. Where we went wrong is when we followed blindly the
+assumptions handed down to us by our exploiters. These assumptions can
+be stated briefly as follows: Growth in underdeveloped countries is
+hampered by inadequate growth in exports and inadequate financial
+resources and is made worse by “population explosion” in these countries.
+And the solution is prescribed as follows: Step up exports, increase aid and
+loans from the developed countries, and arrest growth in population.
+
+Throughout the last decade our efforts have been to follow religiously
+the above prescription, and even if our own experience continues to
+disprove it, we still adhere to it even more fanatically! The greatest need
+appears to be a process of mental de-colonization, since neither common
+sense nor sound economics, not even our own experience, is with us in this.
+Experiences of other countries that have chosen a different path, a path
+of economic reconstruction, is most instructive here. Take North Korea or
+Albania. Both these countries were underdeveloped as late as the fifties.
+The reason they have been able to register most outstanding economic
+progress is that they have decided to opt out of production for the so-called
+world market and have diverted their resources toward the development of a
+material and technological base internally.
+The Pearson Commission’s Report—Partners in Development—has
+been hailed, even by the developing countries, as ushering in a new era, a
+sort of turning point, in international cooperation for development. Even if
+its recommendations were to be adopted and implemented in toto it is
+doubtful if it would make any impact on the ever widening gap between the
+developed and the developing countries. This is because it has avoided
+tackling the most fundamental question, namely, “Can development take
+place when our production strategy is influenced by the demands of the
+world market which is determined almost exclusively by the pattern of
+production and consumption within capitalist Europe and America?” In
+other words, in distorting our economies to fit in with the demands of the
+world market, the demands of which are not always compatible with the
+demands of our own development, are we not, in the process, depriving our
+economies of the capacity for a self-sustaining growth which is a
+precondition to development?
+By posing the question in this style, it is possible to see through the
+smokescreen of international do-gooders and begin to understand the real
+cause of our underdevelopment. It is, of course, too much to expect Pearson
+or people of his liberal inclination to pose the question in this way, since
+their training and outlook consider this way of putting the question to be
+almost morally sinful and economically subversive.
+However, as leaders of the developing countries, we are obliged to adopt
+this style of posing the question since we have taken upon ourselves the
+responsibility for steering a development course whose success or failure
+
+will affect, one way or another, the well-being of hundreds of million of the
+people who comprise more than two-thirds of the human race. For too long
+we have left their fate to be determined by the kind of production which is
+not based on the satisfaction of their wants but rather on serving external
+interests as expressed by the accepted laws of supply and demand of the socalled world market. We have twisted their education in such a way that the
+“skills” we direct them to develop are geared towards serving the same ends
+of the world market rather than towards development of an internal material
+base, with the result that technologically, and in relation to the developed
+world, we move backward rather than forward. We have tamely accepted
+the so-called international division of labor on behalf of our masses, and in
+doing so we have condemned them to specialize in primary commodities
+whose production is conducive neither to the development of technological
+skills nor to the invention of advanced machinery, both of which are the
+preconditions to real economic development.
+The significance of Dr. Rodney’s book is that it is addressed, quite
+appropriately, to the masses and not to the leaders and one hopes that it will
+be instrumental in arousing some mass action by the people. In the absence
+of committed leadership, many African countries have fallen prey to
+military exploitation, to the extent that today the generals constitute the
+majority at the African summit. This is as it should be, because when the
+political leadership loses the sense of internal direction, when, in
+bewilderment, it gives up its efforts to find solutions to people’s problems
+and begins to accumulate wealth for its own individual use, political
+leadership tends to get increasingly “commandist” in its state operations.
+Logic and rationale become subversive. And when politicians become
+commandists, they too become redundant, because who is better fitted to
+giving command than the army?
+With very few exceptions it is sad to have to admit that Africa is ill
+served by the current conglomeration of what passes for leaders throughout
+the continent. When Asia and Latin America produce giants, like Mao, Ho,
+Ché, who inspire and excite the imagination not only of their compatriots
+within their borders, but of the rest of the world, including the developed
+world, Africa has produced only one Nyerere and maintained him in power,
+while we have murdered Lumumba and have locked up or exiled leaders
+like Ben Bella and Nkrumah in response to the wishes of the imperialists—
+
+our donors, our moneylenders, our patrons, our masters, our trading
+partners.
+With all due respect, it is difficult to imagine, apart from one or two
+honorable exceptions, any of the present leaders who is capable of standing
+up for the genuine rights of his people, knowing that these rights are of
+necessity directly opposed to the interests of imperialism. And yet such a
+stand is necessary if we are to really fulfill our obligation as leaders;
+otherwise, we have no right to impose our leadership on the people. While
+most of the leaders on the continent have no sense of urgency in solving the
+problems of people’s misery, since they don’t bear the brunt of their misery,
+the masses, who do, cannot wait. That is why one hopes that Dr. Rodney’s
+book will be read by as many people as possible because it has come at a
+time when it is most needed, for action.
+After reading the harrowing account of the brutalities of slavery, of
+subjugation, of deprivation and humiliation, when whole civilizations were
+crushed in order to serve the imperialist interests of the West; when settled
+societies were disintegrated by force of imperialist arms so that the
+plantation owners of the “new world” could get their uprooted, and
+therefore permanent, labor force to build what is now the most advanced
+capitalist economy, it becomes absolutely clear that the only way out of our
+current impasse is through a revolutionary path—a complete break with the
+system which is responsible for all our past and present misery.
+Our future course must be guided dialectically. If by looking into the past
+we have known the present, to know the future we must look into the past
+and the present. Our action must be related to our concrete experience and
+we must not give way to metaphysical hopes and wishes—hoping and
+wishing that the monster who has been after us throughout our history will
+some day change into a lamb; he won’t. As Engels puts it: “Freedom does
+not consist in the dream of independence from natural laws, but in the
+knowledge of these laws . . . freedom of the will, therefore, means nothing
+but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject.” We
+know the subject only too well, and he is a monster. Do we have the
+capacity to make a decision—now that Dr. Rodney has provided us with the
+knowledge of the subject? The people must answer.
+
+How It Feels to Be Colored Me
+by Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)
+I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am
+the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian
+chief.
+I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little
+Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I
+knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty
+horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town
+knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners
+were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid.
+The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much
+pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
+The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for
+me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only
+did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them
+in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this:
+"Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually automobile or the horse paused at this,
+and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them,
+as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see
+me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first
+"welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take
+notice.
+During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town
+and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance
+the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which
+seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they
+didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me,
+but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-everybody's Zora.
+But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I
+left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at
+Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of
+Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my
+heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.
+But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking
+behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who
+hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but
+about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the
+
+strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too
+busy sharpening my oyster knife.
+Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to
+register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and
+the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a
+potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before
+said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.
+Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure
+and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater
+chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that
+for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting
+to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to
+weep.
+The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair
+beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of
+keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
+I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before
+the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
+For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand
+white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself.
+When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
+Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is
+just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World
+Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we
+have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have,
+this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to
+business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This
+orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive
+fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen-follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai
+above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle
+way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like
+a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the
+piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to
+the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in
+his seat, smoking calmly.
+"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
+
+Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what
+I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen
+between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
+At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down
+Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street
+Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule
+Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic
+manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the
+eternal feminine with its string of beads.
+I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment
+of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
+Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.
+How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.
+But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in
+company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a
+jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of
+broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old
+shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things
+too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag.
+On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they
+be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the
+content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how
+the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
+(1928)
+
+
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